Guest Post — Why Are UK Libraries Signing a Springer-Nature Deal They Don’t Seem to Like?

Libraries continue to sign Transformative Agreements while becoming increasingly convinced that they do not represent the desired transformation. Peter Barr explains why this happens.

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Spring(ish) Walks for Christine and Khalee

You may not have realized it but Thursday, March 30 was a big day. What was so big about it? It was the first day since last Fall that I could wear sneakers on my daily walk with Khalee. And it was one of the first days I could just wear regular pants on my… Continue reading Spring(ish) Walks for Christine and Khalee

Spring(ish) Walks for Christine and Khalee

You may not have realized it but Thursday, March 30 was a big day. What was so big about it? It was the first day since last Fall that I could wear sneakers on my daily walk with Khalee. And it was one of the first days I could just wear regular pants on my… Continue reading Spring(ish) Walks for Christine and Khalee

A spring bouquet

In my latest newsletter: a bouquet of thoughts about spring.

This Yellowstone hot spring’s rhythmic thump makes it a geo-thermometer

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New ska punk supergroup comprised of infamous anti-vaxxers sadly not called The Covidiots

About a year ago, Dicky Barrett — then lead singer of the legendary ska band, the mighty mighty Bosstones — coproduced an anti-vax musical anthem with professional anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr. Several days later, the Bosstones abruptly announced that the band was finally, officially done for. — Read the rest

The Goddess Complex

In January 2020, in a remote, arid corner of southwestern Rajasthan, I was squeezed in the back seat of a Toyota SUV with my five-year-old son and Prachi and Prince Ranawat, a sister and brother, ages 23 and 18, from a dot of a town called Parsad. On a motorcycle, their father, Gajeraj Ranawat, followed. The driver propelled us along a parched roadway overgrown with candelabra cactus and bougainvillea, its pink and white flowers covered with dust. Sprays of yellow oleander spilled onto our path, and the screeches of langur monkeys echoed in the distance.

The family was leading me to a temple complex that once sheltered the so-called Tanesar sculptures, a set of 12 or more stone figures dating to the sixth century. Naturalistic, slender, luminously jadelike, and around two feet high, most of the sculptures depict mother goddesses (matrikas), with some holding a small child. Attendant male deities were also part of the set. According to art historians, the Tanesar figures were sculpted by an itinerant artisan guild as a form of patronage to local rulers. The sculptures were associated with fertility, but they were also linked with terrifying aspects of the all-encompassing mother goddess Devi in her manifestations as Kali and others—dangerous, destructive yoginis whose power eclipsed that of all the male Hindu gods combined. Over time, fearful villagers buried the sculptures in a field, hoping to contain their energy. But later, when the sculptures were feared no more, they were dug up and dragged to a small shrine to Shiva. There they were given pride of place in an enclosure to the side of the structure. At some point in their history, the figures became focal points for tantric prayer, with worshippers seeking a disintegration of the physical self to meld into universal consciousness.

For many years, the Tanesar sculptures remained an integral part of local religious life—unknown to anyone else. But around 1957, a prominent archaeologist in Rajasthan discovered the figures and then published an article about them in an Indian art history journal, making an inner circle of Indian and Western art historians aware of their existence. What followed was a story all too familiar in the world of art and antiquities: sometime around 1961, most of the Tanesar sculptures were stolen. From what I’ve been able to piece together, they were smuggled across the countryside, down to what was then Bombay, across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic—to Liverpool and then New York. The American art dealer Doris Wiener, who ran a gallery on Madison Avenue, had a hand in the export of several of them. Another landed at the British Museum through a separate channel.

Very soon, the mid-century art world became enchanted with the sculptures. Art dealers, collectors, and museum directors eyed their potential worth. In 1967 and after, Wiener sold six or more sculptures from the set, for the equivalent of $80,000 each in today’s dollars, to curators and collectors who had more than an inkling of the dubious circumstances of the objects’ traffic. She sold one to Blanchette and John D. Rockefeller III and another to the Cleveland Museum of Art. The others passed from hand to hand before arriving at the world’s most revered collections of South Asian art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Mother Goddess (Matrika), previously on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was seized in August 2022 by the office of the Manhattan DA. (Courtesy of the author)

On August 30, 2022, the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, issued a search warrant for one of the sculptures, called Mother Goddess (Matrika). At the time, it stood on a pedestal in the coolly lit gallery 236 of the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing at the Met. The sculpture was seized, part of a sweeping sting targeting works acquired by Wiener as long as 60 years ago. Over the past decade, more than 4,500 allegedly trafficked antiquities have been confiscated by the office of the Manhattan DA. Instrumental in this work has been Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine colonel who led a government investigation into the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003. Of those antiquities recovered by the Manhattan DA, nearly half have been returned to 24 countries of origin, with India receiving the largest share.

So many sculptures seized and sent home, each with its own story. It can be hard to see why any one of those stories matters in the particular. The repatriated artifacts are not as well known as the Benin Bronzes, for example, plundered from West Africa by British colonists, or the Parthenon marbles, removed by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s and now on display at the British Museum. They are not symbols of empire, nor are they the spoils of war. Rather, they are emblems of something more banal and arguably more pernicious—the practice of mid-century antiquities looting that took place on such a scale that it infected nearly every gallery of Asian art in the West.

The way forward is neither clear nor simple. In the fall of 2022, Mother Goddess (Matrika) lay in a crate in the Manhattan DA’s overstuffed storage facility while the search continued for each of the Tanesar sculptures sold through Wiener’s gallery in the late 1960s. Mother Goddess (Matrika) and at least four more deities from the set remain in legal limbo as lawyers for the Met and other American museums raise questions about who owned the sculptures at the time they were acquired by Wiener, and whether they really did belong to the temple at the time of their theft.

One of the Tanesar figures, the sculpture purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art, is still on display there. Others remain, for the moment, in the custody of LACMA and the Allen Museum at Oberlin College. Beyond the purview of the U.S. legal apparatus, the Tanesar goddess at the British Museum currently resides among the dutifully cataloged collection of nearly eight million objects not on view because of space limitations.

The sculptures may languish in this liminal state—crated, underground, or imprisoned in storage—but then, the liminal is where the Tanesar goddesses have existed for many years.

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In 2020, I was a Fulbright scholar living in the city of Ahmedabad. I’d been researching the story of the Tanesar sculptures, having chosen the case because it involved one of the few thefts where published photographs linked looted artifacts housed in Western museums to a specific origin site. I was drawn to the beatific, yet unfussy artworks—though it was only later, as I traveled across three continents to see seven of the sculptures in person, that I fell in love with them.

In art history texts, the village of Tanesar was said to lie in the steep hillsides between the cities of Dungarpur and Udaipur, along the border of southern Rajasthan and Gujarat state. No map showed a place called Tanesar or, as it sometimes appeared in museum catalogs, Tanesara Mahadeva. News articles were of little help. A few articles in the Indian press and a 2007 piece in The New Yorker mentioned Tanesar, but only as a footnote in a seemingly unrelated story—that of the smuggler Vaman Ghiya and his arrest. As far as I could tell, no journalist or academic researcher had visited the site since the middle of the last century.

The place to start was Dungarpur. On the taxi ride from Ahmedabad, my son and I encountered a landscape where algae-rich stripes of sedimentary stone—black, charcoal, green, and blue—shone in the roadcuts. The stone industry continues to thrive in this part of northwestern India, the source of building materials, sculptures, and architectural decorations. Quarry shops sold the blue-green schist known locally as pareva, and trucks rumbled by, carrying cubes of marblelike stone.

The next morning, at a hotel in Dungarpur, the concierge told me that his in-laws happened to worship at the temple I was looking for. He put me in touch with his brother-in-law Gajeraj Ranawat. Serendipitously, I received a text that same morning from my friend Abhi Sangani, an art historian in Ahmedabad, who’d gotten a tip from his cigarette vendor with the approximate location of the temple.

This is how we ended up in the back seat of that Toyota SUV. And it was during that journey with the Ranawat family that I finally understood why finding the temple site had been so difficult. As I traced the turns of the road on my phone’s maps app, the coordinates for a temple came into view. I zoomed in. Taneeshwar Madahav Tample, the map read in English, a clumsy transliteration of the Hindi phrase beneath it: Taneshwar Mahadev Mandir. The photograph linked to the map showed the temple entryway, with its name in Devanagari script visible in blue lettering—Taneshwar Mahadev. Having studied Sanskrit and yoga philosophy, I knew that Taneshwar (or, given the conventions of Hindi and Sanskrit, Tanesvar, Tanesvara, or Taneshwara) means “Shiva” and that the phrase Taneshwar Mahadev translates to “the lord Shiva, Shiva who is the greatest god.”

Therein lay the answer to the first mystery of this tale: Tanesar was a temple, not a village. Imagine if someone had named New York City “Beth El” because of the synagogue on East 86th Street. No wonder journalists never reported firsthand from the Taneshwar Mahadev temple. If they’d been looking, they would have been searching for a village that did not exist. It’s quite possible, of course, that no other outsider had ever tried to find “Tanesar” village. After all, asking exactly how a smuggled object reached an esteemed gallery in a Western museum was not common practice until recently.

Now, after parking off the jagged road, we passed a row of stalls selling items for worship—coconuts, incense, matches, squares of metal foil, rectangles of red nylon mesh trimmed with gold thread—and followed a grand stairway up to a temple plaza. Revelers in brightly colored saris danced in a circle while men played drums and long-necked, stringed gourds. Incense and oils released a sticky, noisome odor. Smoke filled the air, and langur monkeys leapt between temple structures, with the Shisha mountain rising behind them. A priest in a white tunic and flowing dhoti pants chanted in Sanskrit and led the worshippers in a fire ceremony meant to bring auspicious energies from the planets.

Ratna Chandra Agrawala devoted his life to the study of Indian art and artifacts. In the 1950s, he came across the Tanesar matrikas during an exploration of southwestern Rajasthan. (From Ratna-Chandrika: Panorama of Oriental Studies)

As several villagers gathered around us, my son went off to play, jumping from the retaining walls separating the plaza and the stalls and poking a stick into a warm spring that trickled down from the mountainside to the plaza. Then, with Prachi Ranawat translating, the villagers began telling me about the statues’ theft. Everyone, it seemed, knew a version of the story, which had been passed down from parents and grandparents. According to one account, a temple guard awoke one morning to discover that most of the sculptures had been spirited away in the deep of night. Alternatively, a white car arrived in the dark and took the sculptures away. Or a madman came and stole the sculptures. Or a man known to villagers by the nickname Kadva Baba came and spoke to the priest in private; money was exchanged, and shortly afterward, the sculptures were taken away. The oral history of the temple may have recorded many possible scenarios, but certain facts remained constant. Temple lootings were common in the area at the time. And although villagers often reported the thefts, police rarely recovered the loot.

I heard a great deal that day about how important the sculptures were to local life. “If someone didn’t have a child,” one person said, “they worshipped the goddesses so they could have one. If someone was suffering from a disease, they also worshipped the goddesses.” Another offered that worshipping the goddesses could bring a male child. The temple itself had been the site of a famous miracle, others said, a legend I heard about in greater detail on one of my later visits. A priest would tell me a version of the famous story of Surabhi, a cow that would wander off from its home every day and come home dry. Surabhi’s owner, angry that someone was apparently stealing his milk, secretly followed the cow to the temple, where he watched as its teats released a flood of milk onto the ground. This it had been doing every day, he learned. Later, a statue materialized on that very spot, an emanation of Lord Shiva. “That was how everyone knew that the temple was magical,” the priest explained. And in the same storytelling voice, he said, “Thirty-five years ago, a goddess statue was stolen from here. Now, the government is going to send her back.”

One thing was certain: the temple community would settle for no compensation, monetary or otherwise, in lieu of the sculptures’ return.

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In the middle of the 20th century, Ratna Chandra Agrawala was the foremost archaeologist in the state of Rajasthan. He was the author of more than 400 essays and articles, many punctilious in their detail. His life’s work as a scholar and as director of museums and archaeology for the state led him to register art objects, preserve many of them in two regional government museums that he founded and managed, and argue for their importance in Indian and international arts journals. There was nothing shoddy about his work.

Born in 1926, Agrawala trained as an archaeologist in pre-independence India. In 1946, he worked on the dig that uncovered parts of the Indus Valley site of Harappa, in what is now Pakistan. Art historians who knew Agrawala during the following decades remember his utter devotion to Indian art history and his palpable joy when asked to discuss this subject, still underappreciated in the 1960s and ’70s. In one photograph, Agrawala appears in the garb of India’s educated elite of the era, wearing a Nehru jacket and thick-framed glasses and sporting a trim, narrow mustache. His thinness accentuates an intent expression in his eyes, in which I imagine—perhaps because I’ve researched his background—a hint of both pain and triumph.

Around 1957, during what Agrawala described as “exploratory tours in the regions of Udaipur and Dungarpur,” he encountered the Tanesar sculptures. For Agrawala, the artworks possessed a pleasing dissonance, with their classical proportions, indigenous features, and the sparest of religious accoutrements. They immediately won his adoration. In 1959, he described what he had found in the Indian journal Lalit Kala. In 1961, Agrawala published a second article in Lalit Kala discussing the sculptures’ art historical importance. Included were photographs of 10 of the sculptures snapped outdoors near the temple. Leaning on rocks, the gods and goddesses resemble crime victims. They are encrusted with dirt and an unguent mix of substances related to worship, which likely included milk, ghee, vermilion, and ash. Agrawala stated that the sculptures were currently being used for worship (“under worship” was the phrase he used). He went on to lament that the sculptures “remain completely besmeared with red lead and oil. It is therefore not possible to clean them for study.”

A third article appeared in the French journal Arts Asiatiques in 1965. Here, Agrawala published photos of an additional sculpture and more fully described the artworks and their material, the luminous blue-green schist. One of the pieces, he wrote, “presents a lady with her head bent in a graceful pose. This is unique in Indian Art. She puts on the typical sārī and the scarf is appearing on her right arm. The facial expression here is extremely elegant and so also is the case with round ear-lobes, single beaded necklace, broad face, robust breasts, etc.” He declared the sculpture to be “a piece of superb workmanship,” adding, as an aside, “the hair decoration is equally charming therein.”

The 1959 article identified the temple as Tanesara-Mahādeva and its location as being near the village of “Parsada,” a Sanskritized version of Parsad. Agrawala didn’t mention Parsada in his 1961 article, though he did cite his first article in the footnotes. But by the time the sculptures had arrived in the West, it was the 1961 article, not the original publication, that was the standard source on the subject, the primary bibliographic reference for authors of museum catalogs. This is how Parsada got dropped from the record, replaced by the fictional Tanesar.

But why didn’t Western museums track down Agrawala’s primary source material? One day, I arrayed before myself, in chronological order, each bibliographic reference to the Tanesar artworks from 1959 through the 1980s, hoping to understand how this scholarly laziness had occurred. The first mention of the sculptures in an American publication appeared in a 1971 issue of the Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin of Oberlin College. That issue was devoted to an exhibition of works belonging to a prominent collector and Oberlin alum, Paul F. Walter. Among the artworks that Walter had recently donated to the Allen Museum was Deva, a Tanesar sculpture featuring a lithe young man with a serene, transported expression, carved from the blue schist.

One of the essays in the Bulletin, written by the art historian Pratapaditya Pal, curator of Indian art at LACMA, described five sculptures from the Tanesar set that Wiener had acquired and then sold to prominent American curators and collectors. This included images of an additional sculpture, bringing the total number documented in photographs to 12. The essay, a tour de force in interpretive writing, marked the sculptures’ entrée, like debutantes, into a larger art historical conversation beyond the limited audience of India’s rarefied Lalit Kala.

Pal’s elegiac descriptions explored theories regarding the identities of the gods and goddesses, their art historical connection to other artworks from nearby sites and distant centers of artmaking during the fourth- to-sixth-century Gupta Empire, and the trope of the mother in South Asian art. “Each of the pieces magically seems to have captured, as in a candid snapshot, a fleeting moment of joy and playfulness,” he wrote. The matrika in the Cleveland Museum of Art “appears to be smiling as she tries to restrain her child. This sense of radiant motherhood is more explicitly expressed in these matrikas from Tanesara than in any other Indian sculptures.” Deva had “the physical properties of a human being,” and its face evoked “supra-human serenity and compassion.”

The Taneshwar Mahadev temple complex, where the sculptures had been housed. Local residents tell several versions of the story of how the figures were stolen. (Courtesy of the author)

The problem was, for all the flourishes of Pal’s lushly detailed and celebratory narrative style, the essay was also riddled with mistakes. It incorrectly identified the “Tanesara-Mahadeva” temple as a village (with a footnote erroneously ascribing that detail to Agrawala’s 1961 article). The name of the famous regional rock was changed from pareva to pavena. And the name of a sister site that Agrawala had also explored morphed within the article from Kalyanpura to Kotyarka. These mistakes and others subsequently appeared in later works of scholarship.

It seemed odd that the editors didn’t catch these lapses. But when I read the introduction to that issue of the Bulletin, I realized that a general romantic sensibility had prevailed over the mundane requirements of scholarly fidelity. “To Western ears,” wrote Richard Spear, the Allen Museum director, “Bhagavata Purana, Ramayana and Ragamala are strange sounds, as remote as Malwa, Hyderabad and Jaipur.” “Tanesar” was not a place where people lived and worshipped but a fanciful, fairy-tale locale. Further embroidering this theme of exotic-domestic interplay, Spear described Walter, the collector and donor, as someone who was “as likely to be met in the studio of a young artist in lower Manhattan or a London auction of Whistler etchings as in the Doris Wiener Gallery of Indian Art.” The relationships between dealer, collector, and museum curator were cozy enough to completely subsume any question of how the artworks were attained.

The fairy-tale atmosphere also created an illusion of buyer innocence. It was all too common in mid-century America to deflect blame from those who acquired artworks that had been purloined by shady dealers. A charade of not knowing the specifics of any origin site insulated those at the top of the antiquities trafficking chain—the Rockefellers, respected collectors, and museum curators who had purchased or accepted the sculptures as donations. Even today, this false ignorance prevails, in spite of its illogic. “If you didn’t legitimately acquire the property in the first place, you can’t pass on title,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Bogdanos told me. “A stolen object never reacquires goodness. Once stolen, always stolen.”

Clockwise from top left: Tanesar matrikas in the collections of Oberlin College,the National Museum in New Delhi, the British Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Courtesy of the author)

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By drawing attention to the Tanesar artworks, Ratna Chandra Agrawala—no matter how noble his motives—ended up contributing to their theft. He was part of a nationalistic movement, just a decade after Indian independence, to increase global recognition for indigenous statuary. This mission was shared by the editors of the Bombay-based journal Marg, which in 1959 cited Agrawala among the Western and Indian art historians and archaeologists who inspired the “intelligentsia” and “men and women of culture” to appreciate “the remarkable tradition of carving which has miraculously survived in Rajasthan.” The editors also “earnestly appeal[ed] to the archaeologists” to “accord proper display” and facilitate “direct contact with the unknown masterpieces.” Agrawala did this, in part, by relocating two of the Tanesar sculptures to his government museum in Udaipur.

Today, these remain in the Indian government’s custody, displayed in underwhelming circumstances that would surely rankle Agrawala’s ghost. One is easy to miss, in a busy section of hallway at the National Museum in New Delhi, crowded between a potted plant and an exit sign. The day I visited, crowds of chattering secondary students in government school uniforms raced past, oblivious of the goddess. The other matrika, more dispiritingly, resides at an Udaipur government gallery, in a desolate room that is often closed to the public. When I finally managed to get in, the lights didn’t work, and chipmunks were scampering along the rafters. The matrika stood behind a case so rarely dusted that I could barely read the identifying label through the glass. But when I was able to make it out, I saw that the label had been swapped with that of a nearby sculpture from a different site. If Agrawala might have frowned at this sad scene, he also may have worn a small smile, knowing that the sculptures had been kept safe from looters all these years. Here the matrikas rested, ready for future generations—perhaps even those scores of secondary students in New Delhi—to embrace the appreciation of Indian art that he and his cohort had worked so hard to instill during the 1950s and ’60s.

Agrawala, at the time, surely knew that the nationalist push for art appreciation was indirectly encouraging the activities of looters, and the 1960s would indeed witness a frenzied black market targeting the newly recognized statuary. “There was a sense that if you got it into a museum, at least you were protecting it from some of the thieves,” said Padma Kaimal, Batza Family Chair in Art History at Colgate University and author of Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis, about a set of sculptures exported from southern India in the late 1920s. “The atmosphere was Wild West, help yourself. It was really difficult to protect the art.” Agrawala, she speculated, probably “saw these amazing pieces, really admired them, and knew how vulnerable they were.”

By the time my son and I were traveling in India in 2020, evidence of that rapacious mid-century market, of pillage, was everywhere. Whether touring little-known ruins or UNESCO World Heritage sites, my son got in the habit of playing a fun scavenger hunt game. He ran from niche to niche pointing out places where sublime figures of gods and goddesses were no longer extant. “Missing!” he declared to the local day-trippers. They were nonplussed. It had been decades, after all, since India had suffered a wholesale theft of its heritage.

Starting in the late 1950s, police began to find dust-covered, sumptuous artworks on the dirt floors of godowns. This Indo-Portuguese borrowing from the 16th-century spice trade refers to warehouses and the objects bound for export within. The objects discovered in a Gujarati cache in 1959 lay “in pitiable disarray,” one art historian reported. In 1968, police confiscated seven museum-quality stone sculptures from a godown in Bombay. Officials were able to arrest a driver and his accomplice, but the vandals jumped bail. After spending several months trying to locate the sculptures’ origins, authorities gave up and released them to the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay. The museum’s announcement of the acquisition reported on a larger scene in which certain areas of the country were “dacoit-infested” ( dacoits are armed bandits), with outlaws “acting in cooperation with some art dealers.”

In December 1969, Robert McCormick Adams Jr., an archaeologist who went on to become Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, published a letter to the editor in The New York Times. The letter responded to an early draft of UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Signed by an additional six archaeologists, the letter noted a lack of “effective measures to curb the trade … by the museums and art galleries that are among its principal beneficiaries.” The letter also pointed out that federal laws (which provide tax exemptions for museums) “in fact sanction looting.”

Those museums began to receive sleeves in the mail from museum directors in India containing photos of hot artworks and requests to keep an eye out. One arrived at the Cleveland Museum of Art from the archaeological curator of the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, by certified air mail. The curator, B. V. Shetti, wrote, “I am enclosing herewith 14 black and white photographs out of the 23 [Indus Valley] seals which were stolen from our Museum on 27th February, 1970. … Kindly keep us informed if you happen to know anything in this matter.”

Sherman E. Lee, chief curator of Oriental art and director at the Cleveland Museum of Art at the time, had just then acquired two nearly identical, unprovenanced seals from William H. Wolff, who once discussed with The New York Times his “clandestine” and “illegal” export of antiquities from Asia. After determining that the Cleveland seals were not from Bombay, Lee wrote a letter to Shetti:

We have examined the photographs and lists and hasten to report that we are not aware of any of these objects being on the market at the present time. You may rest assured that if they do appear in any way, we will immediately inform you.

May I add that it would be most helpful for museums with significant Oriental collections in this country if you and the other professionals in India would keep us informed of thefts of works of art. We are as anxious as you are to prevent this activity and to restore the works to the proper owners. The more information we get, the better we can cooperate.

By the time he sent this letter, Lee had already purchased one Tanesar mother from Wiener, knowing full well the likelihood it had been “stolen” or “illegally acquired.” I learned this by studying correspondence, located in the archives of the Cleveland Museum of Art, between Lee, Wiener, and others.

This museum has taken a leadership role in investigating questionable acquisitions in its collection and exploring how present-day curators can right the transgressions committed by those who came before. The museum’s curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, Sonya Rhie Mace, devoted two years to research into the provenance of a 10th-century stone sculpture of the god Hanuman that resulted in its transfer to the Kingdom of Cambodia in 2015. More recently, Mace worked closely with the National Museum of Cambodia to curate a multimedia presentation featuring a larger-than-life stone sculpture of Krishna that had survived only in fragments.

“There needs to be a well-considered conversation about what can happen in the future, because so much happened in the past that cannot be changed,” Mace told me. “How do we understand a troubled past so it doesn’t happen again? I tried to do this with the Krishna exhibition, to show how complex and ambivalent the history of a single object can be. For the works that are in our care, let’s look at them one by one, tell their stories, and try to reach out to countries of origin. We need an open approach to talking about what’s best for the sculptures.”

In the months before the Manhattan DA’s office began its investigation, Oberlin College’s Asian art curator, Kevin Greenwood, and museum director, Andria Derstine, consented to meet with me concerning my research into the Tanesar sculptures. (Derstine later declined to speak, once the investigation commenced.) Other institutions have been less forthcoming. Officials at LACMA and the Met ignored or rejected my multiple attempts to discuss the Tanesar sculptures in their collections. The Met, moreover, left up erroneous website content concerning the sculptures even after I brought up published sources that could have helped correct the mistakes.

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By 1967, at least six of the original Tanesar artworks had traveled across two oceans and reached Wiener’s New York gallery. Wiener sometimes called them “black stone matrikas.” In March 1968, she wrote to Lee, “Mr. & Mrs. Rockefeller came to see the Matrika stones, and will be in touch with me or you, regarding their choice. At that time, as per our conversation, we will send the other to you.”

Doris Wiener died in 2011. In 2016, she was posthumously named in a Manhattan criminal court complaint for conspiracy to “buy, smuggle, launder, and sell millions of dollars’ worth of antiquities stolen from Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, India, Pakistan, and Thailand.” The complaint stated that she and her daughter, Nancy Wiener, along with others, had “trafficked in illegal antiquities for decades.” In 2021, Nancy Wiener accepted a plea bargain in exchange for providing information about smuggling networks engaged by herself and her mother. This information, in turn, contributed to the DA’s investigation of the Tanesar sculptures that led to the seizure of Mother Goddess (Matrika) at the Met in the fall of 2022.

The complaint and plea bargain named two smuggling rings operating in India supported by the Wiener family business and run by dealers named Om Sharma and Sharod Singh. And although the DA’s office would not confirm the name, a known middleman had to have connected the dacoits who looted the Tanesar temple in the early 1960s to Doris Wiener.

Less a focus of the DA’s complaint were the fluid social ties connecting the Wiener family with the world of museum directors and benefactors. “I have recently returned from an extended trip to India,” Wiener wrote chummily to Lee in May 1967. “My activities there, besides listening to tremendous amounts of gossip and shop-talk, was to acquire a fine collection of Indian miniature paintings and a very fine Persian manuscript which just arrived. I would be pleased to see you again when you come to New York.”

Over time, Wiener’s gallery moved to Fifth Avenue, in a building facing the steps of the Met. A business-meets-pleasure lack of boundaries characterized the industry. “As usual, the dealer knows more than the curator,” Lee wrote to the collector Robert H. Ellsworth in 1966.

Lee had become aware of the Tanesar sculptures’ existence as early as November 1961. That’s when Ratna Chandra Agrawala mailed Lee a dossier containing a dozen of his own recent articles that more than likely included the two in Lalit Kala discussing the sculptures. “It is hoped,” Agrawala wrote, “that [the papers] will be of some interest to you. … I shall also look forward to your visit to Rajasthan in the near future.” Whether or not the 1959 and 1961 articles were included in the batch, Lee had the 1961 article in his possession while discussing with Wiener the sale of one or more of the sculptures.

In September 1967, Lee wrote to a consultant, Vinod P. Dwivedi, at the National Museum of Delhi about a conflict. He was seriously considering the purchase of a Tanesar matrika on offer from Wiener:

One thing in particular has come up which I must ask you about and rely upon your confidence and discretion. I do not wish to be involved in any way in the acquisition of any material which has been ‘illegally acquired.’ Please note, I don’t say ‘illegally exported,’ but ‘illegally acquired.’

In the No. 10 issue of Lalite Kala, October, 1961, pages 31-33, there is an article by R. C. Agrawala which includes illustrations of nine sculptures from Tavesara, described as ‘Under Worship.’

I am informed that these pieces are now in the United States, in the hands of a dealer. Has there been any report or information about these pieces being stolen or in any other way illegally acquired? Did the village sell the pieces?

Dwivedi, after speaking to Agrawala, responded that there was no report of a theft from “Tavesara” but that “the villagers never sell any image under worship.”

In May 1968, when the sale was close to final, Lee finally asked Wiener about the matter directly: The “only question is whether the piece was originally sold from the village or whether it was stolen. What kind of guarantee of title can you provide … ?”

By 1970, Lee had acquired the Tanesar sculpture for his museum’s collection, paying $10,500. (It’s possible that more sculptures were offered and considered.) Soon after, the Cleveland museum mailed an 8-by-10 glossy of the acquisition to Oberlin College for publication in its Bulletin. That Lee knew the sculpture’s origin story is evident from the photo, which bears the label “from Tamesara-Mahdeva,  (ca. 30 miles from Vdaipur).”

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How did Wiener succeed in placing the sculptures with curators and collectors at the highest echelon of American society? Most of the collectors had close connections to Pratapaditya Pal, author of the 1971 article in the Allen Museum Bulletin. Born in East Bengal and raised in Calcutta, Pal is now 87. His scholarly works are extensive, and he has served as curator of South Asian art at some of the finest museums in America—in Chicago and Boston, as well as Los Angeles. He also knew everyone in the art world, and he did much of his work in an age of schmoozing and long lunches at French restaurants.

The matrika at the British Museum was retrieved from storage, allowing the author to feel its “extraordinary leadlike heft.” (Courtesy of the author)

In his writings, Pal mentions his friendships with not only Wiener but also Paul Walter and Nasli Heeramaneck, then a respected collector in New York. Heeramaneck owned three Tanesar sculptures at one time or another. Another close friend, and one of Pal’s advisees, was Christian Humann, a prolific collector who passed away in 1981. The first blockbuster touring exhibit of Asian statuary—“Sensuous Immortals,” curated by Pal—was made up of Humann’s bronze and stone artworks. Among the treasures of the show was Mother Goddess (Matrika)—the Tanesar goddess seized from the Met last year. “Sensuous Immortals” traveled to five North American cities between 1977 and 1979, often crossing paths with another blockbuster touring museum exhibition, one that defied all previous expectations for art world profitability and bore the taint of theft—the “Treasures of Tutankhamun.” The American museum as an institution had entered a new era of commercialism. If precisely naming the origin site of a set of highly valued artworks would have cast doubt on good title, and therefore undercut profitability, it’s no wonder that such a detail would have been left off, that certain errors in a journal article would go uncorrected. In art world circles, the imprimatur of having once been displayed in “Sensuous Immortals” often stands in for an object’s respectability. And yet, Mother Goddess (Matrika) is not the only sculpture from the show, or from Humann’s “Pan-Asian collection,” to have been tainted by questions of provenance. Another is the 10th-century stone Hanuman transferred to Cambodia from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015. Yet a third is the 11th-century Celestial Woman Beneath a Mango Tree, which was on view at the Denver Art Museum from 1965 until 2019. This figure was matched to photos taken at a temple in central Rajasthan in 1960 and published on the website Plundered Past. After being confronted with the information, the Denver museum quietly returned the sculpture to India—without any public mention of the transfer. A fourth is the bronze Hanuman Conversing from the 11th century, currently on view at the Met. Just this past December, researchers in Puducherry, India, linked it to a theft sometime around 1960, using photographs archived at the city’s French Institute.

Connecting an object to its original site is important for two reasons. Doing so preserves the integrity of its art historical record, and illuminates and evaluates the legality and morality of its removal. Neither of these concerns seems to have preoccupied Pal. “Fortunately,” Pal wrote in 2021 in a fond reminiscence of “Sensuous Immortals,” “in the 1970s, there were no ‘provenance issues’ that would become such a headache for museum professionals and collectors by the last decade of the century.”

This, however, is another fairy tale. “Sensuous Immortals,” after all, concluded just one year before the publication of Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, the British journalist and historian Peter Hopkirk’s exposé on the pillaging of Central Asian Buddhist art by explorers working for colonial powers at the turn of the 20th century. He describes a case in which the British-Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein, exploring Buddhist sites in the Taklamakan Desert in the early 1900s, “used a saw, carefully inserted behind the frescoes,” and had paintings “cut into pieces, later to be carefully reunited after their long and arduous journey home by camel, pony, yak or other means.” The bulk of this cache is now in storage at the British Museum. Hopkirk asked his readers to judge for themselves “the morality of depriving a people permanently of their heritage.”

Two years after the publication of Hopkirk’s book, in 1982, the art historian Joanna Gottfried Williams declined to include Indian sculptures held in American museums or collections for her landmark history The Art of Gupta India: Empire and Province. Although her argument centered on the need for art historical context, her comments bore the whiff of condemnation. She fingered a text by Pal specifically for its “deliberate inclusion of works without the unimpeachable credentials of those recorded in situ in India.”

This hybrid figure currently resides at the Taneshwar temple—the sculpture’s torso is ancient, but its head dates to a later period. (Courtesy of the author)

Not long ago, I reached Pal on the phone, though he did not have much to say about the Tanesar artworks beyond what he has previously written. “If this is another question of repatriation and all this, I don’t have time to discuss it right now,” he said, suggesting that I write to him about the matter. He did, however, say that in his view, the sales of the artworks should be considered in the context of the ratification date of the UNESCO convention to curtail international black marketeering in antiquities. “If works were acquired before 1970,” he told me, “as far as I’m concerned, those sales are perfectly kosher.” He didn’t want to speak about the larger subject of the Tanesar sculptures’ export, which is a shame, because the story he could tell about the world of 20th-century collecting and museums would be illuminating, to say the least.

Today, the shortsightedness of the past is often invoked to contextualize the open secret of museum-bound loot in the 1960s and ’70s. Nancy Wiener, in her 2021 plea bargain, described “a market where buying and selling antiquities with vague or even no provenance was the norm. Obfuscation and silence were accepted responses to questions concerning the source from which an object had been obtained. In short, it was a conspiracy of the willing.” Wiener’s passive language nicely insulates museum directors from participation in that conspiracy.

This world of make-believe and false facts, where the notion that no one would notice or care if the name of a town was wrong, reminded me of the condescending practice of sculpture replacement. This is a trick used by temple looters. They steal a valuable devotional sculpture and then deposit a cheap fake or a newer, less valuable object in its place. Then, worshippers have something to propitiate, and the looters—and others—get rich.

At the Taneshwar temple on my first visit, villagers showed me a statue that some worshippers believed to be a replacement. Its body was covered in red mesh fabric bordered with gold. Foil, ash, and vermilion stained its exposed limbs and face. Only the head was visible. On a later visit, though, I saw that the sculpture’s torso was indeed ancient. The newer head had been balanced, off kilter, on top of the body. This goddess was a beautiful Frankenstein. Embodying old and new, the figure had become an object of worship on its own terms.

There was a strange, raw power in this indigenous, living artwork. I’d felt something similar in my pilgrimage across three continents—North America, Europe, and Asia—to lay eyes on or even touch as many sculptures from the set as possible. I was able to feel the extraordinary leadlike heft of the goddess at the British Museum. After I submitted a research request, an attendant retrieved this matrika from storage, bringing her to me in a wooden cart labeled oriental. At the Allen Museum at Oberlin, after a similar research request, the curator brought Deva out of storage and rotated him on a lazy Susan–style pedestal. We watched, enraptured, as the beautiful blue-green stone caught the light in different ways while the figure spun. And at the Met and in Cleveland, I saw the sculptures under precisely arranged decorator’s bulbs, which showed off their sublime, otherworldly features, but also their maternal air of knowledge and contentment.

The day I saw the old-new goddess, I was similarly moved. I stood in the alcove and imagined how this place might vibrate should the spirits of the original Taneshwar goddesses join this modern, vernacular goddess. Sublime art celebrates and simulates the richness and density of life, and all of these goddesses have done just that. The past was unrecoverable, but perhaps something more powerful would soon come to be. I wondered what it would be like to feel the energies of the goddesses coalesce in one place as they hadn’t in more than 60 years. I envisioned a land where gods and goddesses were returned home in spite of the mammoth forces of commerce, prestige, and power. I wondered if my fantasy might one day become real.

The post The Goddess Complex appeared first on The American Scholar.

The Pain Principle

Before arriving in Pamplona, in the Basque region of northern Spain, I had imagined the San Fermín festival as Ernest Hemingway describes it in The Sun Also Rises—as a picturesque Spanish town’s quaint celebration of its annual bullfight. In the novel, Jake Barnes introduces us to tavern keepers, local aficionados, and bullfighters, taking endless pleasure in revealing the intimate details of what was, in the 1920s, a little-known regional tradition. I understood, of course, that in the decades since, the festival has evolved into a wildly popular tourist attraction, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw this past summer, when more than a million people from all over the world descended on Pamplona for the fiesta, the running of the bulls, and the corrida (the bullfight). The narrow cobblestone streets were packed. Almost everyone was dressed in the traditional garb of San Fermín festivalgoers: white shirt and red bandana. Moving with the crowd on the third afternoon of the fiesta, I felt like I was inside an unhinged version of Where’s Waldo. A marching band plowed its way past me, the tuba player spinning with his unwieldy instrument. The restaurants sold overpriced pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), and the storefronts hawked T-shirts and plush bull toys, some of them stuck with miniature spears. In the Plaza de Toros, somebody had placed a red fedora and a string of Mardi Gras beads on the statue of Hemingway.

When I bought my ticket to the corrida from a round-faced Basque scalper, I had my hesitations. For the first 22 years of my life, I had been a staunch vegetarian. When I was 12, my father (who was not a vegetarian) gave me a copy of Animal Liberation, the seminal work by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, and for a time, the book was my bible. More recently, I’ve started eating meat occasionally, opting for cuts that are, I make sure to learn, “responsibly raised” by local farmers. I told myself that I was attending the bullfight as a journalist—I’d chosen not to wear the white shirt and red bandana—but I was far from sure I’d be able to stomach sitting in a cheering crowd while a bull was tortured to death.

The corrida began with the matadors and their teams paying their respects to the crowd and the presiding dignitaries. The fighters dressed in colorful traditional costumes, looking a bit like rhinestone cowboys, in their slim-fitting suits that sparkled glamorously in the afternoon sun. The head matador, or torero, was the most extravagantly dressed, his green suit laced with gold. My seat was about halfway down the stands, in the shady half of the arena, where the serious aficionados tend to sit. On the other side, in the unrelenting sun, the peñas—local social clubs—were already going wild, singing, waving flags, sharing wine, and now and then whipping pastries at one another.

Without more fanfare, the first bull charged out through a trap door. He was much larger and stronger than any bull you’ve seen in a roadside pasture. I had expected him to behave aggressively from the moment of his entrance, but this was not the case. At first, he seemed mostly confused, running from one side of the arena to the other, testing the boundaries of the enclosure. I would later learn that before they are brought to the corrida, the animals are kept together in large pastures away from human beings. Until this moment, the bull had probably never seen more than a few people. Now, here were 20,000. The noise was deafening.

After a few moments, four mounted men—the picadors—cantered into the arena. The bull started toward one of the horses at a jog. He lowered his head as he neared the horse, its rider using a long spear to stab him in his prominent neck muscles. The bull still managed to make contact with the horse’s flank, which was protected with quilted armor. The crowd booed the picador ferociously, apparently for his failure to keep the bull away from his mount. In the early 20th century, before armor was required, more horses than bulls died in the arena. Today, they often suffer broken ribs, bruised organs, and internal bleeding, injuries that sometimes prove fatal.

By this point, less than two minutes into the fight, I found myself in a strange state, both disgusted and transfixed. Blood covered both of the bull’s flanks. The picadors were soon replaced by banderilleros, men holding the short, colorfully decorated lances known as banderillas. They ran straight and fast at the bull, who also began to charge, and with acrobatic flourish sank the barbed tips of the lances beneath the animal’s skin, so that the lances hung against his flank and neck. After these wounds were inflicted, the bull held his head much lower than he had when he first entered the arena. This is the object of a corrida. In order for the torero to kill the bull without running too great a risk of being gored, the animal must not be holding his head high.

I now found myself unpleasantly jittery—probably due to an overload of adrenaline as well as concern for both the bull and the men. Still, I couldn’t look away. The banderilleros retreated, and the torero entered the arena. He unfurled a red cape, behind which he held a long, thin blade. For a few moments, the bull watched the cloth and the man, seeming at once furious and perplexed. The crowd went quiet, and you could hear the heaviness of the bull’s breathing, made loud by the saliva and blood in his mouth and nose. Then, he charged, lowering his horns at the cape and the man hidden behind it, the decorated lances thwacking against his ribs. At the last possible moment, the torero stood tall and spun, allowing the tips of the horns to pass just under his arm as he swept the cape over the animal’s head.

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In 1975, Peter Singer predicted that a new push for animal rights was on its way. The civil rights movement had fought for basic rights for Black people in the United States. More recently, women and LGBT people had begun to fight for equal treatment under the law. Singer thought that the energy of these movements might soon grow to include other oppressed beings—namely, exploited animals.

In Animal Liberation, Singer argues that racism and sexism and what he calls “speciesism” all rely on arbitrary distinctions. In most Western nations, a person who raises dogs mouth-to-tail in small enclosures would be quickly condemned and would probably face prosecution. And yet, Singer points out, industrial pig farmers do exactly this with equally intelligent, sensitive animals, and they often receive government subsidies for their trouble. Similarly arbitrary distinctions were essential to a slaveholding society, he goes on, and remain so in a society with entrenched systemic racism. It’s important to note that Singer doesn’t assert that slavery and animal captivity are moral equivalents. Instead, he argues that one can help us understand the other. We are biased against certain animals because it is convenient, profitable, or pleasurable for us to exploit them, just as it was convenient, profitable, and pleasurable for plantation owners to exploit the human beings they held in bondage. He contends that in a few short decades, when the next generation (or the next) looks back on our treatment of animals, the practice may well be viewed in much the same way that we now view slavery—as despicable and inexcusable, an expression of extreme cruelty and selfishness.

Singer was wrong about at least one thing. No broad shift in our understanding of animal rights has taken place since the publication of Animal Liberation. There have been some small-scale developments. Vegetarianism and veganism are more common and more socially acceptable than ever before. More people are speaking out in support of at-risk “charismatic megafauna”— creatures like elephants and manatees. There is a growing awareness of the beef industry’s contribution to climate change. But in most ways, things are worse than ever for captive animals. Worldwide, we kill about three times more pigs in industrial slaughterhouses than we did in the 1970s. In the United States, animal welfare laws lag behind those of European countries, including Spain. Species everywhere are suffering from habitat destruction.

If Singer’s arguments held any sway in the culture at large, the recent outcries against entrenched racism, sexual harassment, and homophobia might well have led to another outcry—one against the abysmal treatment of industrially raised farm animals. Instead, fast-food chains that profit enormously from the suffering of animals make shows of embracing social justice, filling their TV ads with diverse casts, pledges of support to various causes, and rainbow banners—all in hopes of turning a bigger profit. Organizations such as PETA are disparaged by members of all political stripes. The “radical actions” of animal rights protesters are rarely covered or even acknowledged by the mainstream media. In academia, the arguments and papers of “animal studies” scholars are so extreme and filled with jargon that they seem to be begging for irrelevance.

How did things end up this way? During a time when so many people seem willing to speak out against injustice, why has the cause of animals remained so decidedly on the fringes?

There are a few obvious answers to this question. For one thing, an ever-growing number of problems today make claims on our attention. Can one be faulted for using one’s limited time and energy to speak out against racial injustice or climate change instead of animal rights? And then there’s the intractable difficulty of habit and convenience. In his essay “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace admits defeat in “working out any sort of personal ethical system in which [eating animals] is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.” And yet, he eats them anyway. Most of us do things every day without moral justification. Sure, Animal Liberation contains a well-reasoned moral argument. When has that ever changed anyone’s mind?

And yet, the day before the bullfight, I’d been to an event that suggested that the “movement” is suffering from deeper problems.

In the center of Pamplona’s Plaza Consistorial, journalists crowded around Yasmina Martín, one of the organizers of the annual protest against the San Fermín bullfights. In answer to the salvo of questions about her organization, AnimaNaturalis, Martín calmly delivered just what you’d expect. She said that the corrida is a form of torture. That bulls have a developed central nervous system. That they feel pain as intensely as any human. That traditions don’t have to be violent in order to be meaningful.

In short order, a few hundred curious onlookers had joined the journalists. Pamplona’s city hall made for a stately background, adorned with Baroque columns and steel railings and statues of Heracles and Themis, the Greek goddess of justice. A man in a dark button-up stepped past the microphones and started arguing a point with Martín. I caught the word tradicion, just as several dozen people in extravagant dinosaur costumes appeared from behind the building, singing and chanting and waving signs, many of which read, “Bullfights are prehistoric.”

The protesters swarmed through the narrow streets toward the Plaza de Toros and the bullfighting arena. They continued chanting, moving clumsily in their bulky costumes. Diners sitting in front of pintxos restaurants turned to see what the commotion was about, and then went back to their meals. The dinosaurs swarmed onward. La tauromaquia es prehistórica, they chanted.

The protest disbanded about half an hour later, and I found myself disheartened. It wasn’t just the few people in attendance relative to the crowd that had arrived in Pamplona for the festivities. After all, the “Sin Tauromaquia” march is one of the most covered animal rights protests in the world, and dozens of news outlets were there. But I couldn’t help feeling that the T. rex suits were silly, that the protesters had taken a serious issue and unintentionally made it ridiculous. Their slogans were hackneyed, their arguments predictable and uninspiring. The afternoon seemed to me emblematic of the absolute staleness of animal rights activism. And so, my question remained: Where did things go wrong?

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When the bull finally fell into a slick of his own blood, the hilt of the torero’s blade buried between his shoulders, the crowd began swaying back and forth and belting out the mariachi number “El Rey”: Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar (cry and cry, cry and cry).

Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon returns over and over to the idea of emotion in bullfighting. Bullfighting isn’t a sport, Hemingway insists. It’s a tragedy reminiscent of Greek theater. The point of it all is to stir up emotion—sometimes intense emotion—in the audience through, above all, an honest performance. That is, a performance in which the torero takes real risks with the bull, and does so with skill rather than cheap tricks or false bravado. Without having seen the real thing, I’d never have believed that bullfighting might meaningfully be compared to sculpture or theater, as Hemingway does. Now, I almost do.

Even so, I remain certain that the corrida is a form of animal torture. Despite arguments to the contrary, recent studies have shown that bulls suffer extreme physiological and psychological pain during the course of a fight—Yasmina Martín was right, of course. This confirms what must have always been apparent to anyone who knows anything about animals or the signs they give under duress. You can see the bull’s pain in the way he breathes heavily when he stands still after the banderillas are stuck under his skin, and by the way he hesitates slightly after slipping to his knees as he follows the torero’s cape in too sharp a turn. By the end of the fight, the bull is so exhausted and punctured that the matador has to goad him into even a cursory charge, jerking the cape almost under his nose. If adrenaline took the bull through the first minutes of the fight, it is now gone, and he is no doubt feeling his every wound.

And so, it’s difficult for me to admit the truth: when the crowd began singing, I felt intensely alive. I’m still at a loss to say where exactly that feeling came from, but the sensation somewhat resembled that morbid fascination inspired by a particularly gripping horror movie. Spaniards who enjoy the bullfights are fond of pointing out that Americans like to keep their violence toward animals hidden safely away, behind the bland walls of industrial slaughterhouses. They’re not wrong. The corrida was also an electrifying blow to my cultural sensibilities. I was disgusted and enthralled both by the violence and by the audience’s willingness to celebrate it with such gusto. And in the midst of my disgust, I wondered if there might be something worthy and hearty about the Spaniards’ comfort with death. Perhaps, I felt, they knew a thing or two about mortality that I’d missed during the course of my relatively sheltered life.

There was something else, too. As the bull stumbled, still upright but with his aorta punctured by the tip of the sword, the torero held his right hand out to the animal, as if ushering him from life to death. He seemed to be saying, We are all waiting for the end. Throughout the fight, I’d felt (alongside all those other feelings) a loitering sense of my own health and wholeness—the fact of being free from excruciating pain. When the torero made that gesture to the bull, this feeling intensified until it was almost pleasurable. That’s the only way I can describe it. My awareness of my own aliveness was sharpened by my proximity to the opposite—pain and death.

The Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona is no longer the quaint local spectacle that it was in Hemingway’s time. (Eric Nathan/Alamy)

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When Martín spoke to the reporters about a bull’s nervous system and the bovine capacity for both mental suffering and physical pain, she was drawing on the work of my childhood hero, Singer, who puts these neurological functions at the center of his philosophy. Rather than erecting arbitrary lines between those species we feel comfortable exploiting and those we do not, Singer wants us to remember our own vested interest in avoiding sensations of pain, and to extend that consideration to members of other species.

This argument is part of a long tradition of animal rights activism. In ancient Greece, the philosopher and scientist Theophrastus railed against his teacher Aristotle’s callousness toward animals. Men and animals, he wrote, “do not differ, above all in sensations.” In 19th-century Britain, an Irish lawyer named Colonel Richard Martin prosecuted a street salesman for beating his donkey by bringing the animal to court as the sole witness, showing the judges her injuries and asking them to imagine sustaining similar ones. A few decades prior, the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham had written, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” In the late 19th century, the feminist and doctor Anna Kingford argued vehemently against the practice of vivisection. “Pain is pain,” she wrote, “and injustice is injustice, whoever the victim.” Today, academics interested in “animal studies” tend to have complicated feelings about Singer. They critique his unbending allegiance to utilitarianism and his failure, in their view, to properly interrogate his own biases as a white man. But, as far as I know, nobody has meaningfully questioned his argument that the shared capacity for suffering is the best basis for changing the way we relate to animals.

The pain argument has long defined the animal rights movement, and continues to do so. And yet, during the bullfight, witnessing an animal in obvious pain, I felt something much more complicated than revulsion. Why didn’t the corrida inspire straightforward outrage at the suffering on show, even in somebody like myself, who (like many others) is disposed toward sympathy—if not always perfect compassion—for the plight of captive animals? This question, it seems to me, is closely related to the question of why the animal rights movement has not yet lived up to its potential.

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The philosopher Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain puts forward an alternative understanding of pain, one that helps explain why sympathy and revulsion weren’t the only emotions I felt at the bullfight. The book isn’t all that well known outside academia, but it has helped reshape the way many scholars and historians understand torture—not only how torture affects victims, but also how it changes perpetrators and witnesses. It’s an impressionistic work, far from scientific, and at times frustratingly opaque. It mixes history and literature and philosophy, along with a healthy dash of Scarry’s boisterous imagination. And yet for all that, it is perhaps richer and more evocative than anything else written on the subject of suffering.

In 1986, Singer reviewed The Body in Pain in The New York Review of Books. “The book is cavalier in its disregard for the hard work of providing either factual evidence or serious philosophical argument for what it says,” he wrote. He objected to Scarry’s application of terms such as materialism and her freewheeling account of the history of torture. One senses in Singer’s quibbles and dismissals that his disagreement with Scarry ran deeper than he was admitting. If this was innovative work, he concluded, with uncharacteristic harshness, “I will do without innovation every time.”

I think Singer must have felt Scarry prodding at one of the central assumptions of Animal Liberation: that the shared capacity for pain might be the basis for a revised relationship between humans and animals. Among other things, she contends that pain tends to separate—rather than unite—those who experience it from those who don’t. “For the person whose pain it is,” she writes, “it is ‘effortlessly’ grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer’s body, what is ‘effortless’ is not grasping it.” Said somewhat more plainly: a bystander never actually feels a sufferer’s pain, no matter how earnest the attempt to do so. If you have been in proximity to someone in extreme pain, you know how disconcerting the experience can be—the pain, all-consuming within the sufferer’s body, is nothing within your own. You might begin to feel hopelessly alienated from the sufferer, despite any physical closeness. Scarry says that torture exaggerates this dynamic. Cries for help, she writes, which ought to occasion attention and assistance, can almost serve to discredit the pain.

This line of argument helps explain why undercover videos of animal abuse in feedlots and slaughterhouses—released by organizations such as PETA—haven’t exactly proved to be effective propaganda. The feelings these sights inspire in their audiences are complex. As I walked out of the bullring, the guard at the gate expressed surprise that I was leaving so soon. “It’s not for me,” I told him. But that wasn’t quite true. I wanted my feelings about the fight to be straightforward, and I felt a bit guilty that they weren’t—guilty that part of me had even enjoyed the experience. It would have been easier to forget the whole thing, just as I find it easier not to think too hard about a PETA-produced video of an industrial hog slaughterhouse that I saw years ago.

Scarry has more to say on these fronts. Pain not only distances sufferers from those around them, it also distances sufferers from themselves. That is, when people are in extreme pain, they become less like themselves. Our preferences and peculiarities, habits of speech and gesture, even our most deeply held beliefs are likely to be forgotten, or even permanently obliterated, in the face of torture. That’s part of why torture is used by authoritarian regimes (and a few democratic ones, too). It’s not first and foremost a means of collecting information that would otherwise remain inaccessible. More important is its power to break the strength and idealism necessary for resistance.

Since animals feel pain, we might consider the probability that they also suffer some version of the process that Scarry describes. For example, wouldn’t the preferences that make a pig a pig (the desire to root or the ability to use more than 20 distinct vocalizations to communicate with members of its species) be degraded by suffering? The bull I saw that afternoon in the arena, ready to charge anything that moved, was not quite representative of its species. Bullfight aficionados talk about the picadors’ lances “focusing” the animal. Before this first pain is inflicted, the bull is often more intent on finding a way to escape the arena than on charging the toreros. As the fight goes on, the increasing damage to the bull’s body seems to resign him to his fate. Thinking back to the first corrida he attended, Hemingway writes that the bull became “an altogether different animal when the banderillas went in, and I resented the loss of the free wild quality he brought with him into the ring.”

The bull behaves as many cornered, Injured animals (IIing human beings) will behave, albeit with significantly more strength and gusto. He attacks his tormentors relentlessly. His apparent willingness to participate in the fight then becomes a means by which the audience justifies his torture. Look, he wants to fight. This process resembles one of the insidious mechanisms of institutions such as slavery. The more certain people are made to suffer, the easier it is to dehumanize them, to view them as stupid, unworthy of serious moral consideration, even deserving of exploitative treatment—as willing participants in their own subjugation.

The very thing that Singer believes will bring the masses over to his side can therefore have the opposite effect. When people read about or watch animals in pain, they witness these beings in a reduced state, a state that does not accurately represent the creatures’ normal habits and abilities. Most people who see a PETA-sponsored video will feel guilt of some kind. But they may also be left with a lingering sense that the animals they have seen aren’t worthy of much more than cursory moral consideration.

None of this is to say that it is impossible (or even all that rare) for humans to meaningfully identify with nonhuman creatures. Rather, it means that we don’t do it readily when we encounter them incapacitated by suffering. In this sense, the animal rights movement took a wrong turn with Theophrastus, the first to articulate the pain theory. Singer writes powerfully of the parallels among racism and sexism and “speciesism.” But—fixated on pain as the basis of his call to action—he fails to remember that the civil rights movement did not gain momentum because white people pitied the suffering of Black people. Rather, the voices of Black artists, musicians, thinkers, and protesters became too powerful to ignore. The same was true of the gay pride and the women’s liberation movements. History suggests that human beings are likelier to treat other humans with dignity when forced to consider their potential, rather than simply their suffering.

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A few years ago, my wife and I were in the kitchen of our farmhouse in rural Virginia when an interview with the naturalist E. O. Wilson came on the radio show Science Friday. Every summer, we’d battled ants that lived under the stove and in the coping behind the counter, mostly by wiping them away with a sponge whenever they crossed the counter too boldly. So we both perked up when Wilson said that people often ask him what they should do about ants in their house. His practiced response? Watch your step, he says, give the ants a dab of whipped cream, and try to look at them as creatures from another planet. By the time Wilson was done talking, I was pretty sure that I’d be letting the ants make their forays without reaching for the sponge (though I’ve yet to go the whipped cream route). And yet, all he’d done was offer a series of observations about ants: that they communicate and coordinate with one another through chemical secretions; that some species of ants domesticate aphids to harvest their sugary secretions; that the total weight of all ants on Earth probably equals the weight of all human beings.

Of course, not everyone is going to put away the boric acid traps after learning something new about an insect often considered a pest. But what about Craig Foster’s documentary film My Octopus Teacher ? If you have friends who have seen it, ask them if they still eat octopus, and you might be surprised by how many couldn’t anymore, or didn’t want to. I’m in this camp. The movie produced in me an unexpectedly—to borrow a phrase from Hemingway—intense degree of emotion. When the octopus emerges from her lair after the long labor of regrowing her arm, and when she wrangles with and then escapes the tiger shark, I experienced a sense of victory that rivaled the momentary aliveness I felt at the bullfight. And when she passed away at the end of the film, I felt I’d learned more about mortality than I had from reading Death in the Afternoon. For the first time in many years, I found myself tearing up in front of a screen.

The animal rights movement could be a movement founded on animal potential, and the powerful emotion that stories and facts about animals can inspire in human beings. The difficult work is already being done by scientists, videographers, and naturalists, who every day are discovering and documenting new ways that animals process and interact with the world. Increasingly, philosophers and journalists are also part of this puzzle. David M. Peña-Guzmán’s recent book on animal dreaming is exemplary, linking the philosophic puzzle of consciousness—and the question of whether animals have it—with new evidence of their capacity to dream. For example, he reexamines data from a 2000 study, published in the journal Science, that analyzed the neural activity of sleeping zebra finches. Research on birdsong, Peña-Guzmán writes,

has historically focused on what these animals do while awake to imitate and memorize their song, but [biologists Amish] Dave and [Daniel] Margoliash wondered whether sleep might also play a role in song acquisition. Could sleep help juvenile finches internalize the acoustic patterns they hear from their family members and commit them to long-term memory? Could these birds learn their song at least in part by rehearsing it in their minds while asleep?

Dave and Margoliash concluded that although zebra finches do rehearse songs while dreaming, they do so without effectively experiencing the sounds. Peña-Guzmán argues that this conclusion says more about the scientists’ implicit biases than about the actual behavior of the birds. He points to evidence that the researchers overlooked, suggesting that the finches could well “hear” songs that exist only in their sleeping minds. “They [hear] it silently,” he writes, “much like we hear the clamoring soundscapes of our own dreams—the voice of a lover, the rustling in the trees, the sound of a church bell in the distance.” For Peña-Guzmán, dreaming becomes a point of connection between humans and animals, a shared potential that closes the gap between species.

It’s important that the abysmal conditions in industrial farms and slaughterhouses continue to be well publicized. We can’t simply wish away the pain that is the day-to-day reality of too many animals. But because of human beings’ complex relationship with suffering, this information should be generously balanced by concrete evidence of animal potential. Rather than parading around in dinosaur costumes or harassing customers at neighborhood butcher shops, organizations such as PETA and AnimaNaturalis might devote a hefty portion of their resources to broadcasting and promoting the newest research on the behavioral and mental capabilities of animals. They also might work to encourage people to form relationships with a greater variety of animal species in sanctuaries and other places where humans can safely view wild animals. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people go to Florida’s springs to interact with the manatees. They come away with a sense of the animals’ calm majesty. Some rank the experience as one of the most memorable of their lives. As a consequence, there has been, to date, overwhelming public support for projects aimed at rehabilitating the state’s coastal seagrass, the disappearance of which due to water pollution is causing an unprecedented decline in manatee populations. This kind of collective energy (though it may ultimately prove no match for human-caused ecological degradation) is at least a start, and it might serve as a model for other at-risk species. Rights organizations could also connect people with farms where animals that provide humans with nonmeat products are treated with dignity and lead fulfilling lives. People need to see animals at their best before they will care about saving them from the worst.

Instead of treating animals as things to be pitied, we should follow E. O. Wilson’s lead and try to think of them as if they came from another planet. Animals can show us new and radical ways of understanding and interacting with the world, if we give them the space to do so. When we advocate for their dignity and well-being, the question should not be, “Are they ever subject to pain?” but rather, “Do they have the space and habitat and social contact necessary to live up to their potential?”

Something I noticed during the corrida: few people brought their children to the fight. But the day before the festival, an enormous line had formed outside a lot where several local breeders were displaying their prized bulls. Parents pushed strollers and held their kids’ hands as they waited to see the animals. Inside a corral, many of the bulls stood with steers. I heard a boy ask his father about them, and the man explained that the steers were there to keep the bulls calm during transport to an unfamiliar place. It occurred to me then that the relationship between humans and other species isn’t going to change overnight. After all, we were gawking at a bull that would soon be killed in the arena. And yet, there also seemed something hopeful in the moment—emissaries of the next generation admiring the calm of an immensely strong and sensitive animal. l

The post The Pain Principle appeared first on The American Scholar.

I’ll Be Seeing You

She stands where she was instructed to wait, a bouquet of iris wrapped in butcher paper in one arm, tape recorder bulking up her backpack, as he comes (surely this is the man who had answered her letters) down the overgrown cow path.

Three cows mooching along, heads lowered, as he weaves around them to get past. On his neat, smallish head, a stiff straw boater. Is there a ribbon? Faded black grosgrain, yes.

But her nerves! Butterflies beating within—the two letters between them having been their only link until this moment, and she in no way a professional, never mind the tape recorder. He threads his way past the lethargic cows, she waiting by the sagging wooden bench that serves as the bus stop. He might have stepped out of an Edwardian country weekend novel, in his boater and cream linen suit. Trim dark mustache. Everything about him trim, as his two letters had been precise, briskly instructive.

Did I say this is England? Somewhere in the New Forest. A train from Waterloo, transferring at Salisbury into a lumbering bus to—that place is lost. She had waited, wherever that was, for another conveyance, a kind of jitney (his instructions had been exact—only the one stop Sundays, do not move from the spot, trust it will arrive). She was finally deposited at this place, as his letter had said. But it seems—what with the cows, the overgrown path, the end-of-the-line look of the place—like no place at all.

Yet he has appeared as promised, calling her name in a voice she will come to treasure for its amused fussiness, its covert kindness, a question mark lifting at the end—Patricia? Patricia?

Me, yes.

But there is no remembering so much of this. The fiction writing of the recording mind has stripped away many details (what I wore—dress? slacks?), while time has giantized others (iris, tape recorder).

In any case, the tidy man was only meant to be a bridge figure, his purpose to lead me to the mysterious LM, as I’d learned to call her from the memoir she had written. But even she was not the point of all my effort.

She too was a link, though a precious one, the only living connection to the ghost I stalked. Katherine Mansfield. The romantic renegade writer, older by five years at her death at 34 in January 1923 than I was/am on this June day in 1975.

My first “trip abroad” (a phrase then still common, oddly antique now). The journey from home in St. Paul had been made for this encounter, to interview Mansfield’s best friend, possibly a one-time lover, it was said—would the girl burdened with flowers and tape recorder nerve up to inquire about that ?

LM was the ancient leftover not only of their relationship, but of their world. She, Leslie Moore, had been coaxed into writing a memoir—Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM—by the man wearing the stiff boater. And now she had agreed to let “a young American” who had read her book meet its author for an interview.

I had a commission from Ms. magazine (all the feminist rage back then) to do a piece on this friendship. I held pridefully to that commission: this might be my first trip to Europe (to anywhere), but I was no tourist. I was all business.

The interview had been arranged by the man in the linen suit—Peter Day, he said smartly as he approached, the name as tidy as himself. He pivoted immediately and began retracing his steps up the flinty cow path. Come along, he called back to me, come along. That bracing Brit carry-on voice. And I, eager to heel, trooped close behind with my gear.

---

What a measured, ceremonial dance it was, then, to make connections with strangers before the frantic blur of the Internet, the mosh pit of email and social media. Hi (or even Hey) Patricia! people I have never met chummily greet me online today. Gone, the crisp Dear Miss Hampl of yore, that salutation reading now like an endearment, not a formal address.

My friends in those years were taken up with Virginia Woolf, whose letters and diaries were beginning to appear. But my crush was Mansfield, where the pickings were considerably slimmer. I had my much-marked copy of A Room of One’s Own, but I didn’t quite trust Woolf. She might be a genius, but my Midwestern insecurity was miffed by her snobbery. But then, there is no hauteur stiffer than that of a thin-skinned provincial.

Woolf’s diary report after first meeting Katherine (as I already thought of her, chummy myself all those years ago) ignited this mistrust. She wrote that she (and her husband, Leonard) could only wish that [one’s] first impression of K. M. was not that she stinks like a … civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap.

Then, reversing field, she allows, However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship. … We discussed Henry James, and K. M. was illuminating I thought.

Too late! Woolf’s reversal seemed to annoy me more than her initial repugnance—a touchiness, no doubt, on behalf of a fellow provincial, a New Zealand colonial–Midwestern flyover sisterhood.

Mansfield wrote her own post-meeting take on Woolf: I do like her tremendously. … I felt then for the first time the strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind … she seemed to me to be one of those Dostoievsky women whose “innocence” has been hurt.

A keen, almost psychic reading, impersonal, not as judgmental as Woolf’s, and all the more penetrating for that.

After reading LM’s memoir, I devoured a book by a Mansfield scholar (maybe the Mansfield scholar), Sylvia Berkman, who had also written the foreword to LM’s memoir. The bio note below Berkman’s author photo says she taught at Wellesley. But wait, I have the book before me now: there is no author photo. Pixie memory at work again: I seem to have snapped one inwardly because when she comes to mind, there she is—string of pearls, steady hooded gaze. Her book, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study, was published in 1951, so a dated book in 1975. But so what? All Mansfield intel was a news flash to me. Her introduction to LM’s memoir was her bona fide. She must actually know LM.

I would give a lot to see the letter I wrote to Sylvia Berkman, sent no doubt to her publisher (Yale University Press). Did I trumpet the Ms. magazine commission? Maybe not. But wait again. Did I actually have a commission from Ms.? I know I had written a letter to the editors asking if they would be interested in a piece about the friendship between Mansfield and LM. Did I get a response? Never mind, I considered myself  “on assignment,” even if no one else did.

Most likely, I was canny enough to gauge that an ardent amateur, young enough to be taken for an enterprising student, would fare better at getting an address for LM.

Berkman did not disappoint. In less than a week, in came a blue envelope, unfaded in memory. Within, a single sheet. That is lost, of course. But I was confirmed in my shrewd choice of presenting myself as an acolyte, not a magazine writer on the job. I remember, I think accurately, one part of her brief reply: I will trust you with Leslie’s address. You sound like a nice person.

I suppose I sent a thank-you note.

I wrote to Leslie Moore. And again within a week, a response, though not from LM. This one came on letterhead from Michael Joseph Ltd., London, signed Peter Day, Senior Editor. Miss Moore would see me. I should send my travel dates. June, wasn’t it? He gave me two possible Sundays in June, Sunday being the only possibility. He would be at the bus stop to meet me.

One more exchange between us, me with the Sunday date, him with the precise instructions leading me from Waterloo station to the cow path. It would not have occurred to me—or to him—to exchange telephone numbers. After our transatlantic airmails, trust alone linked us. This Peter Day, Senior Editor, would show up, and I, nice person from St. Paul, Minnesota, would somehow make my way to the assigned spot.

This decorous volley was how it was done in 1975.

---

First lunch, Peter Day said as I trailed behind him. Then he would wash up, and I would go with Leslie (as he called her) into the sitting room and have my interview. She’s stone deaf, he said. I would have to bellow. And almost completely blind. Oh dear.

Once off the cow path, we walked a long way, through a meadow, a lot of green. Then suddenly, as if conjured, a thatched cottage rose up, a magical toadstool house sprouting in the deep green of wherever we had arrived. A casement window had been thrown open. In its frame an elderly female figure sat in profile. She did not turn, did not move. She gazed ahead into the room, not out the window. A stately head, formal, the nose prominent, as if in a sustained act of sniffing the air. The hair a flattened floss of white. It was a head resigned from beauty, beyond questions of attraction, held fast in selfless dignity.

Impossible to know if she had ever been a beauty—or not. For some reason, I flashed on the portrait of Whistler’s mother. Not because this parchment-skin woman had the same features, but because she bore a similar hieratic calm. It was not just an old face. It was a face in waiting—as if waiting were the real point of life. Waiting for the next thing that was now the final thing.

As we came closer and this profiled figure made no move, a shot of social embarrassment amounting to shame pierced me—I had no business staring at this unguarded being who surely had no idea she was on display in the window, no right to poke around in her memories. Her face held the impersonal calm of a death mask.

The improbable thatched cottage (I’d seen only one in fairy-tale books from childhood) no doubt added to the spooky sensation of intruding on this almost unreal stranger framed in the casement. Still, she did not move. She took no notice of anything, certainly not of our approach. Yet her attention seemed fixed.

Peter Day banged his way into the house, calling out—Leslie, Leslie, here we are! I’ve brought back the American girl. It was the same theatrical voice telling me to Come along, come along as he led the way up the cow path. A commanding voice, but comic, self-satirizing, masking that closeted kindliness I had sensed right away. Did I realize from the start how unfailingly generous he would be, would always be?

The table was already set in the woody room, the room with the open casement window. A square table of dark oak, polished to a dull sheen, linen placemats and crisp napkins that I admired (serviettes, dearie—napkins are what you call diapers, Peter Day briskly correcting, no condescension, just copy editing, part of the job). He pottered around in the kitchen, barking out cheery remarks to Miss Moore, as I decided to call her—somehow I couldn’t call her LM to her face, and to say Leslie was unthinkable.

I have no recollection of being introduced to her. I was relieved of my iris, which reappeared in a stone pitcher, though perhaps never actually seen by LM in her virtual blindness. Gone as well what we said, what we ate, though a soup plate has appeared, and Peter Day is holding a big-bellied ladle. The kitchen, offstage, eventually was the source of coffee and a cake out of a white bakery box. Peter (as by now he had instructed me to call him, waving away my Mr. Day) had brought “the pudding,” he said, from an excellent shop near his flat in London. I was baffled. Pudding? This was cake. Was there to be some kind of custard after the cake? Or with it? Don’t ask.

I was preoccupied with worries about the tape recorder—would it work? Worse, would my elderly prey be put on alert and refuse to divulge any of the delicious “material” I hoped for? Peter shooed me into the adjoining room, smaller, darker, but cozy. I set up the recorder on a low table, and spoke softly into it as to a trusted confidante, played it back—yes, works! Then Peter guided LM into the room. She was taller than I expected, now that she was up, out of her Whistler’s mother pose.

Patricia is going to ask you about Katherine, Leslie. She has come all the way from America to speak to you about Katherine. A brief encouraging nod to me, and back he went to the kitchen to clean up.

Alone at last. But in fact, I desperately wanted Peter to return, his bright voice, his easy command of this giving-nothing statuesque figure. I remembered to bellow: Would it be all right to record our conversation?

Why? It was the first word she spoke to me. Before I could find an answer, Peter boomed from the kitchen, Just answer her questions, Leslie. The mask of a face scowled slightly, settled back.

Where do you live? Asked peevishly. She was interviewing me, apparently.

St. Paul, Minnesota.

No jot of recognition. I was from nowhere.

I expressed my admiration for her memoir.

Peter brought it together, she said, dismissing authorship. I moved on to my love of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, especially the New Zealand ones “At the Bay” and “Prelude.” The Letters and the Journal meant a great deal to me too, I offered.

No response.

It was alarming to be hollering this ardent testimony, as if to a large audience in a great hall.

Then, remembering Ms. magazine, I launched into business, bawling, What did you and Katherine Mansfield think of the early feminist movement?

A brief caesura, then her low growl. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t think about it.

So much for any possible tweezing out of romantic disclosures. A dread silence fell between us, or maybe had been there all along.

I heard myself asking idiotically, frantically, Well, I mean, what did you talk about?

Her swift, furious reply: The flowers, what was coming up that day. About dinner, what we would have for dinner.

Peter stomped in, a dish towel in his hands. Leslie, stop that right now! Be nice. This girl has come all the way from America to speak to you. A satisfied look on the weathered, chalky face. She had the attention of the one who mattered.

Surely there was more to the interview in the dark room, the two of us seated on either side of the softly whirring cassette recorder on the coffee table, I crouched low, she regal, aloof. For how long? I cannot report. Even the cassette tape disappeared at some point. It’s all gone, except the misery. It was gone even as I sat there, a nice person all the way from Minnesota, a person who didn’t even know what a pudding was.

---

Peter and I were to take the same train back to London. I was glad of the companionship, even though he’d been witness to my humiliation. The train from Salisbury was crowded. He sat across from me, slumped in his seat, long legs stuck out, the straw boater pulled down: taking a nap. I sat up straight, dry-eyed in my gloom, glad the boater protected me from his gaze.

I was returning to my dirt-cheap Bloomsbury B&B that smelled of kippers, kippers I would be served in the lower-level breakfast room the next morning, along with a slick sausage, two eggs, the whites cruelly fried, as if electrocuted, sizzled brown. Potatoes, gluey in some kind of motor oil. Yet more weirdly, a puddle of rust-colored beans leaking into it all. Cold toast scraped with hard, resistant butter. A mug of tea so black and sludgy, no amount of milk could tame the tannin. My stomach roiled all day.

I had to eat this meal, the Cheerios and skim milk of my native place a world away. The breakfast came with the cost of the room, the second B of the B&B, and I could only afford one other meal a day. I had to tank up every morning, the gassy petroleum belches of the big red buses coming in the lower-level windows open to the street, the reek of exhaust joining the kippers and egginess, creating a tincture more repellent than any civet cat.

The misery of the LM fiasco was morphing, as I sat in the train, into this fret about the upcoming breakfast. Not only did the gorge rise in anticipation of the kippers. Worse, I was afraid of the B&B owner, who stood guard over the crowded tables. This older woman (everyone was older then, just as now, everyone is younger), with her steel hair in a tight bun, expected me not only to clean my plate but to enjoy it. To be grateful, even. She was proud that her house offered a full English breakfast. Not like some with their “continental” breakfasts, mind you.

It was the beginning of my understanding that I was not actually a nice person, but an aggrieved people-pleaser, a concept whose label I had not yet learned. I had no weight in social interactions. Inwardly, I was wringing my hands at every encounter. I could not pry disclosures from LM, too fearful to finesse her crabbiness, not sly enough to charm her into confiding in me. Apparently, I was prepared to be nauseated every day rather than disappoint the breakfast room matron with her cellblock visage.

I glanced up. Peter was looking at me, the straw boater pushed back. He was smiling, an amused smile. What had I revealed of myself, staring off, unguarded in my various miseries? Whatever I had radiated of my unhappiness, he had made a decision.

How would you like to come to a literary dinner at my flat Tuesday evening? Just a few other writers. Come early, I’ll show you around. Shepherd’s Bush.

---

A few other writers? As in, including you. Yes, please.

I arrived a half hour before the other “literary” guests. God help me, with yet another bunch of iris. Well, my father was a florist. At least no tape recorder.

The flat was crowded with chintz-covered chairs, several of which had been pulled up to a table set for dinner in the living room (sitting room, dearie—the copy-editing voice). On the shelves not only books but also an astonishing array of ceramic pitchers and cachepots, figurines (dogs, horses), and assorted pieces of beflowered china sets. Every Saturday morning early to Portobello Road, Peter said. I’ll take you. So many treasures.

I was told to leave my jacket on the wooden coat tree in the entry. There, perched at a jaunty angle on the knob at the top, was the straw boater. Old friend.

The other guests—just two—were women perhaps 10 years older than me. A curator at a museum on her way to becoming an influential art critic, the other with a second novel coming out in the next season’s list. We settled in with drinks, Peter, aproned and busy about the meal, coming and going. I was asked about my work. Peter called from the kitchen, She has interviewed Leslie, and is working on a piece about Katherine for Ms. magazine. And a book of poems soon, yes?

I was accounted for. I too was literary.

Peter retailed LM’s bad behavior. Suddenly it was all amusing, the other two women hooting. Not a shame, but a story. Leslie was impossible, completely impossible. The way she can be. The two women laughed again and agreed. I laughed along with them, easily disloyal to my heartache. Everyone agreed LM was impossible, knowing her from earlier stories Peter had told. It turned out he went down to the thatched cottage almost every Sunday to be sure LM was all right. A faithful proto-son.

During dinner, the conversation turned to class distinctions, how accents and certain locutions in Britain revealed all and permanently classified each person. I, for instance, am … And Ann is … To this, Ann, the higher-born woman, gave a self-deprecating aristo wave of the hand. More laughter.

The mysterious pudding was revealed as a tangle of upper class–lower class gamesmanship. Pudding was—or had been—the lower-class word, supplanted by the more haute dessert. But when the lower classes began to adopt dessert in an effort to rise, at least linguistically, the toffs (another new word) had cruelly changed the rules, reverting to pudding like the old boys they were. It was all based on public school folkways. (More secret lingo, public school meaning a private school). Pudding, once lowborn, had risen, if its original speakers had not.

It was explained that, as an American, I was out of the running of all this. You could be anything.

Trying to join the game, I offered that I was middle class, maybe lower middle class, Midwestern. No, no—that didn’t compute at all, made no mark. I was an American. Full stop. Sorted. Slotted.

What about me? Peter asked, evidently charmed. Where do I fit?

Oh Peter, but you’re unclassifiable. Your accent is pure homosexual. It completely cuts through all distinctions.

This struck them all as hysterical. Much shrieking. My own smile was wan—I was startled by the frank word. I had understood Peter was “different,” as we said deferentially about some of the floral designers at my father’s shop. They were, like Peter, somehow uniquely gifted. To be respected. But you didn’t say it, certainly not to their face. In fact, not at all. There was, along with the respect for their otherness, a faint aura of disability that it was only polite to ignore. The word gay (or, more provocatively, queer) was not yet heard in St. Paul, and not apparently in London among these literary savants. Peter was delighted, but I felt strangely protective of him—who proved in no need of protection.

I date a slow-dawning liberation from this moment, this glee in teasing a beloved pal who adored the teasing. He, a homosexual, and I, an American, were free of it all. Whatever “it all” was.

Oh class, dearie, he said later, when I stayed to help with the dishes. It’s all about class here. He and I didn’t figure in it, he said, and that was freedom.

---

There was no profile for Ms. magazine—obviously. In Peter’s sitting room at the literary dinner, my failure with LM was a hoot. But alas, it was only a tale to dine out on. There was no magazine “piece.” The girl with the bunch of iris and the bulky tape recorder brought back only unusable broken bits. And a full measure of embarrassment—I had failed.

Home I went a week later, with a small faience pitcher in milky pink and brown from Portobello Road (Peter nodding approval) that I wrapped carefully in a bright spangly scarf, also found for a song the Saturday we went early to the market. Peter frowned at the scarf, but sighed. There were treasures to be found. He was showing me—history was in objects, if you had a sharp eye. And then there was disposable junk. I was taking home an example of each. I was keen for the bright scarf and thought, but didn’t say, that I would pass along to my mother the fussy little pitcher.

I had scored a wonderfully cheap roundtrip ticket with an ingenious itinerary, from Gatwick to Winnipeg, where I would make a connection home on Northwest Airlines to Minneapolis–St. Paul. I had $1.35 in my jacket pocket as I boarded the plane. No pounds sterling, just this American money. My thin sheaf of traveler’s checks was gone. I was not in possession of a credit card.

No worries, I would be fed on the plane, and then I’d be on the connecting flight home. Clockwork. I don’t recall any anxiety about being virtually penniless and entirely alone half a world away. I wedged myself into my sardine-can middle seat, second-to-last row, surrounded by smokers hazing up the place, scent of the toilet wafting now and again. The way it was.

The London plane was late departing, very late. The connecting flight to Minneapolis, the last flight of the day, had left Winnipeg long before we landed. Everyone else seemed to melt away as we emerged from the plane. I was given a revised ticket for a flight the next morning, and I settled into a plastic seat behind a large pillar in the almost empty Winnipeg airport.

The American dollar was worth more, wasn’t it, than the Canadian? I could get something to eat or at least drink. But no, everything was closed. Everything. No vending machines even, though American money probably didn’t work in them anyway. But was I really hungry? Sort of, but once you fall asleep, you forget that, right?

An hour or so later, an older man in a uniform lumbered up to me. I had to leave the building, he said, not unkindly. The building was closing. Actually, it was already closed, he said, but he had just discovered me behind my pillar. He pointed to a van idling beyond the large window, the free transfer to a nearby hotel. Take that.

The hotel struck me as a comfortable place, not impersonal and motel-cold, gray carpeting with a twirling rose floral pattern. An old-fashioned reception desk curved around a whole corner of the lobby. A man about my father’s age stood behind it, attending to some papers, his glasses down his nose. He had the look of a seasoned high school teacher grading exams. He regarded me above the glasses as I passed by, a neutral look (good), and returned to his papers.

The hotel diner, behind glass swing doors, was open, though the only person inside was a middle-aged waitress behind the Formica counter, smoking a cigarette. I saw from the menu taped to the window that there was nothing I could afford except coffee. But who wanted coffee in the dark night of the soul?

I made my way to an upholstered banquette set around a large pillar. The safety of pillars. It was unfortunately within view of the man behind the reception counter. I determined not to look at him because not looking at him made me invisible.

But the eye has a mind of its own. I looked up. And there he was, the glasses still lowered, his gaze fixed on me. Then the hand up, finger curled, motioning me to come forward.

Where was I staying for the night?

I explained about the plane, and that if it was all right—the people-pleasing ingratiation rolling off me—I thought I would just sit in the lobby. It occurred to me then that I had no plan for getting back to the airport. I didn’t mention this, intent only on securing my place for the night on the banquette by the pillar.

He didn’t seem to be looking at me anymore or attending to how I answered. That was a little concerning. I tried to be winning, radiating harmlessness and rectitude. But he was having none of it, busy writing something on a small piece of paper. Then something else. He reached under the counter—could he have pushed a button to alert security? I was a vagrant, after all. Well, maybe the police would take me back to the airport. Also, I’d heard of backpackers being allowed to sleep in jail cells overnight. That would be an experience.

Have you had dinner?—the dark eyes now up and on my face, the frameless glasses little guard windows. Before I could answer, he was handing me the small paper—a ticket for the diner—and then another, this one for the airport van. (If anyone asks you in the morning, just say you’re a stewardess, though surely we both knew I was an unlikely flight attendant, streaming hippie hair, worn bell bottoms.) Then a key for a room on the third floor. Get some sleep. Be sure to lock the door. I would get a wake-up call early in the morning.

It was only as my mass of troubles disappeared in his kindness that I felt how frightened I’d been. I began to blubber a bit. What was the cost of the room and the meals? What was his name and the address here? I would send him a check, promise. I may even have held up my hand, Scout’s honor. Yes, I did that.

The eyes closed for a tired moment, the soft pallor of his indoor face, the sagging gray suit and the maroon tie. That won’t be necessary.

Sometime in the future, he said, dark expressionless eyes back on me, I might be in a position to help someone myself. He pointed to the diner, which was closing soon. The chit he had given me, he said, was good for something in the morning, as well.

At the diner door I turned, intending to smile, give him a friendly wave to show how grateful I was. But the glasses were down the nose, eyes turned again to his papers where, I had seen, there were no words, only rows of numbers.

---

Peter liked to say, as our correspondence over the years moved from typed letters on letterhead to cards and handwritten notes, and finally to the astonishing immediacy of email, that the only thing worse than someone who failed to answer a letter was a person (himself) who answered instantly, thus sending the shuttlecock of communication back into the other person’s court.

I gave as good as I got: we wrote and wrote to each other, serving and returning serve across the transatlantic net. Occasionally I visited London, and once—amazingly—he visited St. Paul after I married. I had the impression he was checking out this husband who seemed to pass muster, who knew a great deal about the poetry of John Donne and had the right sense of humor and an ability to be irreverent— even as they both had a strong Anglican gene, which I did not share, both of them loving the language of the Book of Common Prayer.

At some point, Peter became heavily involved with the English PEN Centre and took an active role in International PEN, which put him in touch with writers across the globe. Like all naturally generous people, he was a fabulous gossip. He gassed on about “names,” allowing himself to be outraged in particular by Susan Sontag, who in the late 1980s was essentially his PEN America counterpart—total phony, terrible person. I was all ears.

Peter continued to aid and abet my efforts. When I had a commission (a real one) to write a piece about Venice in winter, he put me in touch with a Dallas heiress he knew from her donations to PEN. She has a place on the Grand Canal—you can describe it. He had written to her, asking (requiring) her to befriend me. I got my invitation to the palatial residence and was given a detail useful for my travel piece: from her balcony overlooking the Canal, she watched to see when the people standing in the gondolas were outnumbered by those sitting: that meant more tourists than locals—time to go back to the ranch.

Peter reported, without much ado, that LM died in 1978. She made it to 90.

A new Mansfield biography by Claire Tomalin appeared in 1988, subtitled A Secret Life. It was the third major biography of this “minor” writer with her slim shelf of books, dead at 34, handicapped by illness since her early wild-thing 20s. She was seriously ill her entire writing career.

Tomalin’s biography was a revelation, outing Mansfield as a kind of sexual liberation martyr and clearing the mists about her illnesses—not simply tuberculosis (which did indeed kill her), but also gonorrhea, which she contracted after a pileup of what my mother would have called “bad choices.”

She had become pregnant soon after her arrival in London from Wellington, then madly married another man she knew casually to cover this indiscretion, and bolted from him within hours of the wedding, never apparently consummating the union, but now “a married woman”—and pregnant.

Her father was a prominent Wellington man—chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and eventually knighted. In a photograph in Tomalin’s biography, the mother is striking, even imperial, a wide velvet choker around her elegant neck, aloof face offering mild disdain. The look conveyed not snobbery but implacability.

Hearing from her London relatives the state of affairs, this eminence came steaming over from New Zealand and took the unruly daughter off to a spa in Germany. Having deposited her daughter in the care of others, the mother sailed back to Wellington, where she cut the daughter out of her will upon arrival. Katherine was alone when she miscarried the baby that had occasioned both her marriage and her mother’s alarm.

Katherine stayed in Germany alone, recovering, writing the stories that would form her first book, In a German Pension, published in 1911. She also got herself into the brief, infected liaison that led from gonorrhea to tuberculosis to her death.

Tomalin’s reconstruction of it all includes the misbegotten surgery that followed the discovery of her infection but that did not cure her, instead releasing the bacteria into her system, rendering her not only sterile but subject to increasing pain, which she took to calling her “rheumatiz.”

The shame was profound, bound up in a virtual omertà she kept about her condition. Nor did she really comprehend what had happened to her or how catastrophic it was.

In 1991, Tomalin returned to Mansfield as a subject, writing a play, The Winter Wife, that was produced in London. It was about the relationship between Mansfield and LM, a friendship that began in girlhood at their London boarding school and endured until Mansfield’s death in France, surely becoming more essential to Mansfield as she became a virtual invalid, needing care.

There was no lesbian love between them, as I had hoped to ferret out when I visited the New Forest cottage, but love there was. And dependence. The love was unconditional—LM’s. The dependence, sometimes the infuriated helplessness of an invalid, was Mansfield’s.

They shared a mystical belief in friendship that they both felt was as sacred as marriage. And given Mansfield’s disappointing marriage to the literary critic John Middleton Murry, who was only relieved to have someone else take over for him as caregiver, their friendship was profound for both of them, if more soulful on LM’s side.

Peter went to the play’s opening. An early scene, he reported, had the two women on a train headed to the south of France. LM spoke to the porter in comically cracked French as she tried to arrange things, ineptly, for the ailing Katherine. The audience, loving the slapstick, erupted in laughter. Peter was enraged—Leslie’s French was perfect, he wrote me. She spoke the language far better than Mansfield. How he knew this wasn’t clear.

He rose from his seat and called out as if he too were onstage, This is a lie, a complete lie! And stomped out of the theater, clambering over the people in his row, nicely disrupting opening night. He seemed, in the telling, quite pleased with his own performance.

I relayed this episode to a close English friend, a writer fierce about accuracy, committed to truth telling. I thought she would relish the tale. She was appalled. That just isn’t done.

Deep rooted in my loyalty, I only wished I’d been there to stalk out with Peter.

---

Things began to fall apart. Or Peter did. He’d been a brilliant editor, a reader with a pitch-perfect ear, able to pluck a gem from the flotsam and jetsam of the slush piles he went through at warp speed. With this spectacular talent, he was advanced from editor to publisher at a new firm. But being a great reader does not automatically make a winning publisher. Peter’s idea of the bottom line was a great final chapter.

He lost that job, perhaps without regret. Then came a series of “little” strokes. Money became something of a problem for a man who never paid attention to money. Even his “treasures” from Portobello Road were of the teacup variety, and that nice tweed jacket is from Oxfam, thank you very much.

A group of his (many) admirers got him on the list to be housed at Charterhouse, a distinctly English establishment, a kind of grand almshouse for aged single men (called the Brothers) who had performed service, often cultural, to the nation and were in need of housing, though still able to care for themselves. Peter became one of them, moving himself and his books and some of the Portobello treasures into a snug apartment, taking his meals in a grand hall with his fellow Brothers, swanning around the property in the dual spirit of baron and manorial retainer.

He invited my husband and me to visit. Tart instructions: we could stay two nights, no longer. Guests room in a separate wing. Meals with him. Tour of the grounds, the chapel, the works. He was in his element, manuscripts piled by his easy chair (he had become a reader for Little, Brown), chipper with the Brothers as we dined with them or passed them on the lovely grounds, an opera singer, a landscape gardener, a dancer—all “former” versions, as Peter was a former publisher. He had signed on to offer tours of the ancient site, dating from 1348, when it was used as a burial ground during the Black Plague. It served as a Carthusian monastery until the dissolution of the monasteries, when it became a house for wealthy noblemen. The first Elizabeth met the Privy Council there before her coronation.

Peter loved rolling out the history, occasionally embellishing it (in time this tendency relieved him of his tour guiding). He especially loved arriving at 1611 (Shakespeare still alive, the year of the first performance of The Tempest, Peter’s favorite), when Thomas Sutton bought the Charterhouse. Sutton established a foundation to provide a home for up to 80 Brothers, “either decrepit or old captaynes either at sea or at land, maimed or disabled soldiers, merchants fallen on hard times, those ruined by shipwreck or other calamity.” Peter’s people, though no dancers or opera singers in that early roll call.

In addition to all his friends from his publishing days, he claimed as family a young British diplomat I never met, a married man with small children, his virtual son who watched over all the practicalities of life for him. Peter was always on the prowl for comic gifts for the children. The diplomat was posted to Sri Lanka. To my surprise, about a year after our visit to the Charterhouse, I received a postcard from Colombo: Peter was spending several months there with the family—his family, as he put it.

Then, suddenly it seemed, the emails between us dwindled, became rare. Peter wrote that he could no longer manage the computer or even the typewriter. Apparently there were more “little brain episodes.” My husband was ill as well, heart and lungs. It seems impossible, but the trail we had trod all the years since 1975 in the New Forest went cold. Yes, I blame myself. But what is such guilt but self-promotion?

A year or so after my husband’s death, I suddenly thought—Peter! And was determined to get back in touch. But something—reality, no doubt—sent me first to Google. And there he was in the remembrances of those who, like me, had been beneficiaries of an insight that always led to kindness. And to loyalty, prudent or not—his naughty cri de coeur at the play whose opening night he managed to mar.

I didn’t even have anyone to write to, no condolence note to the adopted son diplomat whose name I didn’t know. My connection now, shockingly, seemed fragile, hardly worthy of grief. I was, after all, one of a number, at the end of a long line. I had lost the connection. Peter didn’t lose it—he had been too impaired at the end to keep it. I was the one who allowed the shuttlecock we had kept lofting across the distance of time and space to drop.

I wanted to tell someone how it had been all those years ago, not out of sentiment, not even out of loyalty, but as testament to the astonishment that age brings to the past—I was that person? I was? The past was coming back not as memory but as impossibility.

What I most wanted to revisit—to relive—was that night, after the “literary dinner,” when Peter told me that he and I, outside the confines of class, were free. We stood in the little foyer after finishing the dishes to say farewell. And I did feel free somehow, free to keep going on my hardly begun life, the “literary” life I was trying to snag in my grasping hands, no matter my failure in the thatched cottage.

I took my jacket off the peg of the wooden clothes tree. And there, still perched on top, was the straw boater.

I love that hat, I told Peter. What I meant was that I loved this life I was embarking on, this life he assured me I was free to pursue. And I loved him, him as he had first appeared, jigging down the cow path in the cream linen suit, the boater atop his small, neat head.

Try it on, he said.

But unlike his, my head was not small, not neat. The boater sat atop my mass of springy hair like one of those old-fashioned nurse’s caps, a kind of upside-down cupcake mold. Ridiculous. We were both laughing, looking at my absurdly hatted head in the wall mirror.

Ah, too bad, Peter said, suddenly sorry. His face, usually so animated, ready to be amused, was still, almost grave.

Too bad, he repeated. If it had fitted, I was going to give it to you. It was Katherine’s hat.

The post I’ll Be Seeing You appeared first on The American Scholar.

Doors of Perception

Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses by Ashley Ward; Basic Books, 320 pp., $30

As an ambitious young scientist at Cambridge University, Isaac Newton famously trained a glass prism on a narrow beam of sunlight to divvy the white light into its constituents, a dazzling rainbow of colors. There were no demarcations between one component color and the next, no clear way to count just how many basic hues were on view, but Newton was a systematizer with an appreciation for the number seven. After all, seven was synonymous with luck, and it showed up everywhere in Western culture: there were seven days in a week, seven notes in the musical scale, seven wonders of the world, seven virtues, and seven vices. Why not seven colors in the rainbow? And so, Newton specified as the primary ingredients of white light the septet captured by the old childhood mnemonic ROY G BIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Some insist that the list should lose the penultimate letter. “It has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color,” Isaac Asimov wrote. But even the electromagnetic spectrum cannot be decoupled from culture, precedent, and the imprimatur of one of history’s greatest geniuses. Roy’s surname remains intact, and many insist they can see the indigo band just fine.

As Ashley Ward elucidates in his jaunty, reader-friendly tour of the senses, the pathway from an external stimulus to our interpretation of that stimulus is long, loopy, and seeded with booby traps. Our senses are brilliant. Our senses contradict one another. Our senses are easily fooled. The old line, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?” is supposed to be funny, the pitch of a con artist. But eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin do lie and are lied to in turn.

Consider a few examples. When people watch a video of somebody mouthing the words “ba ba ba” while the accompanying soundtrack says “da da da,” viewers will swear they heard “ba ba ba.” Take two glasses of good white wine and secretly add a few drops of red food coloring to one of them, and serious oenophiles will ascribe to an undoctored glass conventional white winey virtues like “crisp,” “floral,” and “lemon” while finding in the dyed wine “intense” notes of “cherry” and “raspberry”—terms normally reserved for bold reds. Place your index and ring fingers on two coins that have just spent 15 minutes in the freezer and then let your middle finger slowly descend onto a room temperature coin, and all three fingers will conclude they are touching circles of ice. In 1965, when BBC programmers prankishly told television viewers they had figured out a way to transmit through the airwaves aromas like a “pleasant, country smell” or the odor of an onion being chopped, viewers called in to complain of hay fever or teary eyes.

Our reflexive faith in the prowess of our senses can have more serious consequences. In the courtroom, eyewitness testimony has proved disturbingly unreliable, with studies revealing that the wrong people are identified anywhere from 25 to 73 percent of the time. Yet the quirks and mistakes of our sensory systems reveal a fundamental truth about the nature of perception: from moment to moment, we are surrounded by such a vast amount of sensory information that we have no choice but to ignore most of it, and to take shortcuts and fill-in-the-blanks with the rest. “[H]ow does the brain manage to keep up with it all? The answer is that it doesn’t. It filters and winnows the information in its perpetual quest for what’s important,” Ward writes, in particular “novelty and change.” The feeling of your clothes lying smoothly against your skin is normal and thus safely disregarded; the feeling of a loose thread quivering against your leg is not normal and must be attended to, lest it prove to be not an unraveling seam but something with legs of its own.

In the case of the cold coin trick, it’s normal for the fingers of your hand to sense heat or cold as a unit, so if two fingers have already touched something cold, the brain preemptively decides the third digit will, too. “Signals from the outside world are interpreted and layered with biases, prior expectations and emotions,” Ward writes. “[T]he convincing perception of reality that we each enjoy is actually a complex but brilliant illusion.”

Ward, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Sydney, defines a sense as “a faculty that detects a specific stimulus by means of a receptor dedicated to that stimulus.” He presents the senses in a fairly standard sequence, from the primacy of vision, which “consumes more of the brain’s resources than all the rest of our senses combined,” through the other skull-based sensory systems of hearing, smell, and taste, and on to touch, our most distributed sense. He considers each sense physiologically, evolutionarily, historically, linguistically, emotionally. At times he drifts into the speculative realms of evolutionary psychology, emphasizing minor sex differences in sensory acuity and wondering why “we’re suckers for a pretty face.” Could it have something to do with facial symmetry as a signifier of good genes? Maybe. Or maybe it’s an incidental byproduct of our “sensory skew towards sight.”

The eye is a magnificent organ, starting with the black pupil in the middle, a kind of camera shutter named for the way it reflects to viewers a tiny image of themselves—pupilla is Latin for “little doll.” The pupils expand and contract in response to ambient light. They also dilate when we’re excited or aroused, which is why poker players wear sunglasses to hide how they feel about their cards. Through the joint efforts of the cornea, which sits atop the eye, and the lens, stationed just beneath the iris, incoming light is bent and focused onto the all-important retina, a delicate half-dollar-size disk of tissue at the back of each eye. In the retina, tens of millions of rod cells and three types of cone cells translate light into electrical signals fit for the brain. The rods are simple yes-no light detectors, while the cones put color in our world, each type tuned to a different segment of visible light and their signals mixed and matched to convey a sense of red, blue, yellow, green, maybe a million colors or more. As diurnal apes, we have far better color vision than most mammals, whose eyes remain better suited for the nightlife they adopted to sidestep the dinosaurs. But our color sense pales in comparison with that of birds, who have four cone types to our three, or the mantis shrimp, a carnivorous crustacean whose retinas, for reasons unknown, are stocked with at least a dozen varieties of cone receptors.

Other species claim astonishing auditory powers, too. The giant head of the sperm whale, for example, serves as an acoustic lens, a component of the echolocation system that allows the whale to detect and focus bounce-back signals and thus to map out every feature of its surroundings. Recent research suggests that plants, too, have the equivalent of ears. Pea plants will grow toward the sound of running water even in the absence of added moisture in the soil, while evening primroses can distinguish between the sound of a bee, its preferred pollinator, and that of other flying insects, and will sweeten its nectar only when cued by a buzz. Yet human hearing remains impressive. Compared with other species, Ward says, “we can detect a massive spectrum of sound,” and we’re geniuses at detecting and decoding sounds of 1 to 6 kHz, the frequencies associated with the human voice. The tiny ossicle bones in the middle ear, the pea-size spiraling cochlea of the inner ear, and the hair cells that transform pressure waves into electric signals, all are optimized to make the most of human conversation.

Even the evolutionarily ancient sense of touch, through which primordial cells mapped out their boundaries, advanced, and retreated, has been finessed to magnificence in the form of the human hand. The tips of our fingers hold a dense weave of specialized cells and corpuscles so sensitive, they can detect bumps and notches a micron wide—the size of a bacterium. There are receptors for pain, receptors for pressure, receptors for hot and cold. All nerve fibers considered, the skin at our fingertips is some 27 times more sensitive than the skin of our torso. “Nowhere on our bodies gets anywhere near the sensory richness of the hand,” Ward writes. And the more we put our fingers to use, the more attention the brain pays and the greater grows the neural real estate devoted to keeping track of our every move. In brain scans of professional violinists, the cortical representation of the left hand, which controls the notes played, is significantly larger than that of a nonmusician.

Similar changes are showing up in brain images of young people addicted to their cellphones. In this case, it’s not a matter of left hand or right. From the look of their scans, the kids are all thumbs.

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Milking the G.O.A.T.

Who is the G.O.A.T., the greatest of all time? Tennis fans and pundits alike will consider that question anew now that Roger Federer has retired and Serena Williams has decided to “evolve” away from the sport. Chances are, if you’re a tennis fan, you already have strong opinions on the matter. Perhaps you believe that Federer, who elevated the game to a quasi-mystical level (David Foster Wallace famously likened watching him play to a religious experience), and Williams, who transformed the sport in her own way, are indeed the G.O.A.T.s.

Maybe you harbor strong opinions about the G.O.A.T.s in other sports, too: Michael or LeBron, Tiger or Jack, Marta or Mia Hamm, Brady or Montana, Taurasi or Swoopes. How would LeBron James have fared in Michael Jordan’s bare-knuckle NBA? Would Tiger have vanquished Nicklaus’s rivals—Gary Player, Tom Watson—golfers who didn’t fade into oblivion on the Sunday of a major? Did Lionel Messi, in delivering World Cup glory to Argentina, rise above Maradona and Pelé? These debates can make for a nostalgic trip into the sporting past, giving talking heads an excuse for ratings-driven histrionics. Witness the latest TV sparring over the newly retired Tom Brady.

But I’d contend that we’ve grown overly infatuated with bestowing G.O.A.T. status on our sporting heroes, and that this obsession has become a hollow sideshow, a lot of empty sound bites, signifying (almost) nothing. Forget that in its annual tongue-in-cheek Banished Word List, Lake Superior State University just called out “G.O.A.T.” as the most egregious for its “overuse, misuse, and uselessness.” The point is, there’s no way to compare players from different eras without resorting to wild speculation, and in most cases, a recency bias plagues these discussions—it’s almost always a player from this generation who wears the crown. When did we become so obsessed with this reductionist ritual, this anointing of the chosen one?

By nearly every account, we can trace things back to Muhammad Ali, who had no qualms about telling the world where he stood in boxing’s pantheon of champions. More specifically, according to Patricia O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman, authors of the Grammarphobia blog, we can pinpoint the debut of the acronym to September 1992, when Ali’s fourth wife, Lonnie, used the term “G.O.A.T. Inc.” to license her husband’s intellectual property. Rap and hip-hop circles were quick to catch on. “G.O.A.T.” appears in De La Soul’s 1993 track “Lovely How I Let My Mind Float,” and it arguably entered the mainstream in 2000, when L. L. Cool J dropped his album G.O.A.T.

On the sporting front, the first online use of G.O.A.T. occurred in 1996 on an Orlando Magic forum, as reported by Merriam-Webster, which added the term to the dictionary in 2018. “Penny [Hardaway] is the GOAT” is what history records. With all due respect to Hardaway, the former Magic point guard, this is but evidence that the moniker was meaningless from the beginning. G.O.A.T. mania spiked in February 2017, according to Google Trends, undoubtedly inspired by Tom Brady and the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl comeback against the Atlanta Falcons. It continues to infect nearly every corner of the sporting world: even Simone Biles donned a leotard with a bejeweled image of a goat on its sleeve. And after Serena Williams gave birth to her first child, her husband designed four billboards near Palm Springs advertising his wife as the G.M.O.A.T.: the greatest momma of all time.

As for the pundits now elevating Serena and Roger to G.O.A.T.-dom, how many of them saw Steffi Graf or Martina Navratilova play on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, let alone Rod Laver or Björn Borg? Pull up old YouTube footage of Wimbledon and watch Laver serve and volley with his wood racquet, his game predicated on touch and angles and placement, and be reminded that he was practically playing a different sport: no polyester strings, no outrageous topspin or bulging biceps, no access to contemporary training methods or nutrition, nothing resembling the intense physicality of today’s game. Rather, his matches have a garden-party feel to them, as if a couple of club pros were battling for bragging rights, before retiring to the pub for a pint.

Laver dominated his era, winning two Grand Slams and 11 majors. This, even though he effectively lost five years of his career because, after turning professional, he was shut out from the majors, which permitted only amateur players until 1968. How can one compare eras, draw meaningful conclusions about how, say, a time-traveling Laver—his physique newly buff, his racquet graphite—would fare against Federer at Wimbledon? The truth, of course, is that each successive tennis generation built on the accomplishments of the previous one, a kind of evolutionary cycle that continues, to this day, to reveal unimagined levels of the game—witness the recent arrival of a 19-year-old Spaniard named Carlos Alcaraz, who, having become the youngest world number one in ATP history, embodies the future of the sport. After Laver came Borg’s reign of dominance, which forced John McEnroe to dig deep to break through; and then McEnroe inspired Ivan Lendl to get superhumanly fit and usher in the modern power game, a magical era in which baseliners and serve-and-volleyers still coexisted: Pete Sampras and Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg pushing forward at Wimbledon, Andre Agassi and Jim Courier and Mats Wilander hanging back.

One finds a similar progression in the women’s game: Navratilova elevating the sport with her powerful athleticism at net, the intensity of her rivalry with Chris Evert foreshadowing the one between Monica Seles and Graf. Never mind Graf’s forehand; it was the German’s mental fortitude, says Serena, that inspired her as she reshaped the game into what we know today. In remembering the players of eras past who had a profound and transformative effect on the sport, who helped remake it in their image, an abiding fact emerges: none of them won majors much past their early 30s. Borg retired at 26 with 11 slams; Laver and Sampras won their last at 31; Graf was 29, Navratilova 33. Compare that with the current era. Serena won her final major at 35, Federer at 36. Novak Djokovic (at 35) and Rafael Nadal (at 36) seem poised to add to their total. Much of the apparent statistical dominance exhibited by players today, therefore, is based on their longevity, which in turn is based on the advances made in fitness and nutrition—yet another reminder that it’s all but impossible to compare generations without resorting to fuzzy math and biases born of recency (or nostalgia).

Before the arrival of the acronym, “greatest of all time” was, according to a search of historical newspapers, applied to all manner of athletes in the prewar era, but unfailingly with an extra word thrown in: among the greatest of all time. A caveat. A qualifier. Which may offend someone with the sensibilities of baseball’s Ted Williams, who was never coy about his desire to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, but which otherwise seems to be enough of a rarefied designation to make the need for further classification seem, well, a bit Type A American. As for Muhammad Ali, much of his “greatest of all time” banter was shtick—part personal motivation, part psychological warfare, part business strategy: “I like to be the villain,” he once told the Irish journalist Cathal O’Shannon. The allure of G.O.A.T. is the pleasing clarity, the idea that one player is the undisputed best, the finest manifestation of sporting greatness, with a certain tribalism infecting the debates—you’re either team Federer or team Nadal, for instance. But of course, as in life, there’s no real clarity, no reassurance that your best years are still to come, or aren’t already behind you.

If you remain intent on ranking athletes, I will grant you this: the rubric should be framed around not who is the greatest of all time, but who is the greatest of a particular generation, which doesn’t much lend itself to the acronymic tidiness of G.O.A.T.—or the title of a rap album. But it’s a more reasonable lens through which to view the current debate over, say, Roger, Rafa, and Novak. Does Rafa’s claim hinge too much on his dominance on clay (14 French Opens)? Will Novak’s Covid vaccine stance, which caused him to miss two majors last year (but didn’t prevent him from winning this year’s Australian Open), hurt his numerical case? Did Roger get tight and choke away a couple finals, undermining his claim? Have at it.

But also remember that even this debate doesn’t adequately explain why the recent golden era of tennis mattered so much—not only to the fans but also to the players themselves. Here’s Federer, back in 2012, after winning Wimbledon, on the possibility that Nadal might one day surpass his slam total: “If he does beat my record, it almost doesn’t matter. Because I did things he can never do. He did things that I can never do. It’s the moments that live and the memories that are with me that are most important.”

In his final match, at the Laver Cup last fall, Federer lobbied to play not singles but doubles with Nadal, a symbolic gesture that emphasized how their rivalry, one that had pushed them both to extremes on the court they could never have achieved alone, had also created a lasting friendship. They held a match point before losing to Jack Sock and Francis Tiafoe, but the result in the end mattered little. In classic Federer style, he had orchestrated a celebration of the game itself. On hand were Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, Jim Courier, and Novak Djokovic. Nadal, meanwhile, appeared to shed as many tears as Federer himself when it was all over. Never mind our G.O.A.T. infatuation: this spectacle was a reminder of how each generation has built on the previous one, and how in this most individual of games, it is your opponent across the net who makes everything possible. Federer stepped into the spotlight one last time, and then retired into the shade, to wait for the next generation to assume the crown.

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The Sound of Wood and Steel

Some years ago, I found myself standing beside the famed luthier Dana Bourgeois while he prepared the top of a Brazilian rosewood dreadnought guitar that he was building in his Lewiston, Maine, shop. Bourgeois is one of the most respected contemporary acoustic guitar builders, with dealers all over the world, and the list of musicians who have played his instruments includes the likes of Doc Watson, Bryan Sutton, Luke Bryan, and Natalie Maines. I had read a good bit about Bourgeois before I met him, and I already owned and loved one of his guitars and wanted to learn what made them sound so special.

One of the things he’s known for is personally voicing the top of each instrument before it is joined to the back and the sides. To accomplish this task, he uses a method called tap tuning. To the underside of an acoustic guitar’s top he glues several narrow strips of wood called braces. The “luthier’s dilemma,” as Bourgeois puts it, is that if the top, which acts as a soundboard, is too thick or the braces are too strong, the instrument will not vibrate properly, and the guitar will lack resonance and sound dead. If, however, the top is too thin or the braces are too weak, the guitar, which is subjected to as much as 200 pounds of string tension, will literally pull itself to pieces.

While I watched, he held the braced side of the top—two joined pieces of Adirondack spruce—near his left ear. With his free hand, he started thumping the other side, his fingers moving from one spot to another, tapping it some 15 or 20 times. He stepped back over to his workbench, laid the top down, and began to shave minuscule curls of wood off the braces. Then he lifted it beside his ear and repeated the tuning process, after which he returned to the bench and shaved a bit more off the braces, then took a small sheet of sandpaper and sanded a bit of wood off the treble side of the top. Once again, he repeated the tapping process. Finally, he smiled and laid the top down on his workbench. “I think our friend here,” he said, pointing at the top, “is pretty much done.”

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I started playing guitar in early September 1965—I can date this beginning so precisely because the lessons were a present from my father when I turned nine at the end of August. The man who taught me was named Harry Trammell, and he worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi. If the name of the town sounds familiar, it is most likely because Indianola is also the hometown of the great blues guitarist B. B. King. In addition, countless other great bluesmen were born close by, among them Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Skip James, and John Lee Hooker. Though I had grown up being exposed to country music and bluegrass, I had not been impervious to “the British invasion,” which I knew had its roots in the Delta blues, and I was motivated to learn to play by my desire to start a rock band. I eventually did that, but only after playing between the ages of 10 and 12 in a country combo with Mr. Trammell himself and a local football coach.

Though it seems preposterous today, I’d wanted to play guitar in those days not just because I loved the sounds emanating from it but also because I’d bought into the notion that it might do for me what it had done for the great bluesmen: deliver me from a life in the cotton field. I had watched my tenant-farmer parents and grandparents work from dawn till dusk for very little, and I knew I did not want their lives. I first looked to the guitar as a means of escape, but fortunately I had enough sense to figure out by high school that true musicians had some skill that I lacked, so I turned to my other love—literature, specifically the novel—and found a voice and a life in words. Ironically, that life has afforded me enough income and enough leisure time to take music lessons from some first-rate guitarists and to own and play some first-rate instruments, including quite a few vintage Martins and Gibsons and a number of guitars built by Dana Bourgeois. Every one of them is different from all the others.

The first thing I do each day is pull one of the seven guitars I currently own out of its case. I place it on a stand in my study and play it off and on all day. My study is next to our bedroom, and I nearly always go to bed a couple of hours after my wife. I can’t play late at night without waking her, so I’m usually just sitting there reading. Even so, I leave the instrument out until the last moment. My wife once asked me why I don’t put it away sooner, and without having to think, I said, “I like its company.”

Personality attaches itself to acoustic guitars just as easily as it resists attachment to, say, coffee tables. Nearly all examples of both are made of wood. There the similarities cease. The coffee table, no matter how attractive or valuable, is in the end merely functional. You set your coffee cup on it, you stand your wine glass there, you lay the morning paper there. About the only time it might seem endowed with personality is when you bang your shin on it in the dark and call it a name casting doubt on its lineage. The guitar, meanwhile, has a voice and a personality of its own, which are the result of numerous factors, chief among them the woods out of which it was built and the craftmanship put into constructing it. The voice and temperament of the guitar are subject to radical changes depending on the environment in which it finds itself. If its surroundings are too humid, the top will swell, throwing it out of tune. If they are too arid, the top will shrink, which lowers the action and causes fret buzz and other problems, including cracks. An acoustic guitar will punish you for neglect. You have to respect it in order for it to respect you and grant you the use of its voice.

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“Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art”—an exhibition, currently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, that’s moving in late May to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville—frequently depicts the symbiotic relationship between the guitar and the player. Working musicians display a wide array of attitudes toward their instruments. Some think of them in the most personal terms, as they might a loved one. No other guitar but that guitar will do. The iconic folksinger Odetta might fall into this camp. Trained as an opera singer but convinced that her race would prove a constant stumbling block, she taught herself to play guitar and became one of the most prominent figures of the ’50s and ’60s folk revival. Bob Dylan, after hearing her for the first time, got rid of his electric guitar and bought a Gibson acoustic like hers. In Otto Hagel’s 1958 portrait, included in the show, she appears to regard the instrument with nothing less than reverence, clutching it to her heart and holding it close to her face while she plays, her gaze trained on the fingers of her left hand as they fret the strings. Odetta was a large, powerfully built woman, and looking at Hagel’s photograph, one gets the feeling that prying the guitar away from her would not be an easy task.

At the opposite extreme are musicians like Woody Guthrie, photographed in 1943 by Al Aumuller, shown wearing a flannel shirt and mariner’s cap, in his hands a Gibson L-00 with a message taped to the top: this machine kills fascists. It’s open to question whether Guthrie would have been able to tell you what specific model Gibson he was playing. He owned and played hundreds of guitars over the course of his career. Most of them were Martins, typically small bodied like Guthrie himself. Some he lost; others he reportedly gave away. Many fine musicians whom I’ve known are thoroughly unsentimental about the instruments they play, regarding them as tools, much as I might regard the keyboard on which I’m typing these words. Guthrie took things a step further, viewing the guitar in mechanistic terms, seeing it as a political weapon.

Two of the oil paintings in this immensely rewarding exhibition speak to me in an almost haunting manner: Charles White’s 1952 work Goodnight Irene and Robert Gwathmey’s Girl with Guitar from 1965. White, associated with the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Chicago, but his mother was born in Mississippi. The painting depicts a barefoot Black man playing acoustic guitar in what appears to be a cabin while a woman stands behind him, eyes closed, head resting on his broad shoulders. The song “Goodnight Irene,” originally recorded by the bluesman Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter in 1933, is likely to be recognized by almost everyone, and that familiarity, coupled with the images in the painting, will surely suggest the Delta blues to anyone acquainted with the blues tradition. But it’s worth noting that Lead Belly was from Louisiana and a very eclectic musician who played not only guitar but also violin, mandolin, and accordion, drawing from a variety of musical genres. In Gwathmey’s Girl with Guitar, we see a young Black woman alone on her porch with a guitar, her eyes shut tight, the long, slim fingers of her left hand forming a chord on the fretboard while her right hand is draped across the guitar body, dangling uselessly. She can put it to no good use because the guitar lacks both strings and a bridge. I was previously unfamiliar with Gwathmey’s work, but I have learned that he was considered a social realist, and it’s hard not to see a message in the painting: the woman has an instrument, she has the long fingers of Robert Johnson (and appears to be forming the same chord we see in the ubiquitous 1936 studio portrait of Johnson that has adorned so many records and CDs), but until she can afford to get the guitar outfitted with a bridge and strings, she has no voice.

These two images together took me back to a day in the spring of 1971 when I stood on the porch at my grandmother’s house, my shiny new Fender Coronado II suspended from my shoulders. The guitar was plugged into the small Sears amp I’d received the previous Christmas. By then I was leading my own rock band, and I was working on some blues riffs when a pickup truck pulled into the yard, turned around, and backed up to the porch. In the truck bed was a couch that my grandmother had just purchased from a furniture store in nearby Leland. Two Black men got out of the truck, the driver in his mid-40s, I would have guessed, the other man considerably younger. While I kept right on playing, my grandmother came out and held the door open, and the two men let down the tailgate, lifted the couch out, carried it up the steps and into the house. I noticed the older man glance at me as he went by.

When they came back out, he started toward the steps, then stopped and turned around. “Excuse me,” he said. “Sounds like you must’ve been listening to B. B.”

In 1971, racial passions were running high in the Mississippi Delta. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had determined in Brown v. Board of Education, back in 1954, that the “separate but equal” approach to public schooling was unconstitutional, Delta whites had by and large ignored the ruling until the federal courts finally forced the integration of the public schools, prompting a mass exodus of whites to segregation academies. I only mention this to explain why I was surprised that the delivery man had spoken to a white teenager who was a complete stranger. I was even more surprised when I heard myself say, “Yes, sir,” which I had been trained since the cradle not to do when speaking to a Black man.

“You know where B. B. got that lick you just played?” he asked.

I hoped my grandmother would remain inside, fussing with her new couch. “No, sir,” I said.

“Got it from T-Bone Walker. You ever listened to him?”

I hadn’t listened to him, though I’d read about him in the liner notes on rock albums where he was cited as an important influence. “No, sir,” I said.

“B. B.’s got a little different touch, plays it a little smoother. Want me to show you how T-Bone played it?”

I don’t know if I spoke at all. I just know I lifted the strap over my head and handed him the guitar. I tried to hand him my pick, too, but he said he didn’t need it. Rather than strap on the instrument, he knelt on one knee and balanced my Fender on the other. “B. B. plays it like this,” he said. Using his thumbnail, he ripped off the passage that for the past week or so I’d been mangling. It sounded just like it did when B. B. played it on his album Indianola Mississippi Seeds. “And then T-Bone,” he said, “he played it like this.” Nothing like the sound that burst from my little Sears amp had ever come out of it before or ever would again. It was raw, ghostly, unforgettable. I still hear it more than half a century later. “Without listening to T-Bone,” he said, rising and handing me back my guitar, “B. B. wouldn’t be B. B.” He smiled, revealing a couple of gaps between his teeth. “Maybe one day folks’ll say you’re you because you listened to B. B. That’s kinda how things work.”

As he turned to leave, I asked his name.

Again that smile. “I’m James Thomas,” he said, “but most folks just call me Son.”

During the next quarter of a century, until his death from a stroke in 1993, James “Son” Thomas, who made a living digging graves, would become famous for appearing in several films about the blues. He would perform and record all over the world. He was also a sculptor who used unfired clay that he’d dug out of the Yazoo River, and he saw his work displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. While there, he was introduced to an admirer named Nancy Reagan. According to his New York Times obituary, Son Thomas was fond of saying, “Black and white people have to stick together, because we’re all going to the same place: down in the clay.”

I have little doubt that Son Thomas, were he alive today, would find much to admire in “The Guitar in American Art,” in which one work after another so aptly conveys the charm, the mystery, and the transformative power of these instruments fashioned from the most ordinary materials. Until someone plays them, they’re nothing but wires and wood.

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Death in Drohobych

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint; W. W. Norton, 320 pp., $30 

I first heard of Bruno Schulz as a high school student in Ostróda in northern Poland, when the well-known literary critic, writer, and translator Artur Sandauer visited the literature club I belonged to. He spoke of writers I was familiar with and then, at the end, mentioned Schulz. Sandauer told us that Schulz had been born in Drohobych, now in Ukraine, and died there in 1942. Yet he failed to mention that both he and Schulz were Jewish—and with good reason. It was the spring of 1969, in the aftermath of a brutal anti-Semitic campaign, sponsored by the Communist Party, that ultimately led to the exodus from Poland of some 20,000 Jews. Sandauer, I learned later, had grown up in Sambor, a town close to Drohobych, and he and Schulz had been friends. Sandauer managed to flee from the ghetto and survived. Schulz, although in possession of forged Aryan papers from his Warsaw friends, lacked the resolve to use them and never made it out.

Schulz’s work met with disapproval after the war, shunned by Polish critics in thrall to socialist realism. After Stalin’s death, Sandauer helped revive interest in his friend by writing an introduction to Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), published together in the first postwar Polish edition in 1957. But it was writer and translator Jerzy Ficowski who uncovered many of Schulz’s lost letters, articles, and reviews, as well as his drawings and graphics. Those materials formed the basis of his 1967 book, Regions of the Great Heresy, the first reconstruction of Schulz’s life. Published in an English edition in 2003, in a translation by Theodosia Robertson, Ficowski’s book stood for decades as the only available biography of Schulz. Now, with the release of Benjamin Balint’s Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History, English speakers will gain access to an important new account that sheds light on many previously unknown aspects of Schulz’s life and posthumous existence.

Balint begins his narrative with a visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem, where he examines fragments of murals painted by Schulz. German documentary filmmakers Christian and Benjamin Geissler discovered the murals in February 2001, in a house in Drohobych that once belonged to SS officer Felix Landau, a ruthless killer who was in charge of Jewish labor. Landau also fancied himself an arts patron. After seeing Schulz’s drawings, he decided to grant him the status of “necessary Jew.” As Landau’s “slave,” Schulz painted murals in several SS buildings and was ordered to decorate with frescoes the walls of the children’s room in his “protector’s” villa. The murals depicted scenes from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Landau had given Schulz a special armband that was supposed to exempt him from Nazi roundups and keep him safe. It didn’t: Schulz was gunned down, along with about 200 other Jews, during an SS killing spree on November 19, 1942. Landau later bragged about the number of Jews he shot on that “Black Thursday.” Of the many differing explanations for Schulz’s murder, Balint presents five, starting with the best-known and most likely scenario: that Schulz was killed in reprisal for Landau’s shooting of a Jewish dentist who happened to be the slave of a rival Nazi officer.

After the war, Landau’s villa was divided into apartments. Schulz’s murals lay hidden under layers of paint in one resident’s pantry until the Geisslers found them. Balint carefully recounts the story of the murals’ discovery, their stealthy removal a few months later by the agents of Yad Vashem, and the international uproar that followed. Debate raged over whether the Israeli operation was a rescue or a theft. Yad Vashem asserted its “moral right” to Schulz’s work. The Polish government, together with the country’s literary community, emphasized that Schulz spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew, wrote in Polish, and thought of himself as part of the Polish literary tradition. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials insisted that the artwork belonged to the town of Drohobych. Balint’s evenhanded account of the dispute—which includes the bribery of local Ukrainian functionaries and the suspected involvement of upper echelons of Israeli officials in what Balint calls “a Holocaust heist”—reads like investigative journalism.

The discovery of the murals and their seizure made international headlines. For many people, it was the first time they’d heard the name Bruno Schulz, but the extent to which they were prompted to reach for a volume of his stories is anyone’s guess. Fame owing to a politically motivated controversy wasn’t the kind Schulz ever would have sought or desired. During his short life, he made several attempts at winning broader recognition for his work, but none panned out. One of his stories, “Die Heimkehr” (“Homecoming”), he wrote in German and sent to Thomas Mann, hoping it would help him find non-Polish readers. It didn’t. Schulz likewise traveled to Paris in 1938, taking with him a hundred of his drawings. Encouraged by his many friends, he hoped to make contacts in artistic circles and arrange an exhibition of his work. Having failed, he returned to Drohobych and wrote to a friend that the trip had helped “rid [himself] of certain delusions concerning an international career.”

Schulz’s haunting stories brought him international recognition only later, after they were translated into numerous languages. The first English translation of The Street of Crocodiles, by Celina Wieniewska, came out in London in 1963, but only in 1977—when, at the behest of guest editor Philip Roth, Penguin published that translation—did Schulz’s work reach wider readership and receive the critical attention it deserved. Many American writers, among them John Updike and Cynthia Ozick, wrote rave reviews of Schulz’s work. Over time, Schulz has acquired a cult following and continues to inspire not just other writers and visual artists but also filmmakers, theater directors, composers, and musicians. In 2019, his Collected Stories appeared in a new translation by Madeleine G. Levine.

 Schulz’s afterlife has indeed been long, and interest in the writer continues to grow. The search for his lost art and literary works is still unearthing new materials. In 2019, the Ukrainian researcher Lesya Khomych found a story titled “Undula,” which Schulz published in 1922 under the pseudonym of Marceli Weron, in an oil industry journal. The discovery corrects the misconception that Schulz’s first publication dates to 1934 and that his art preceded his literary output. It also strengthens the belief of those who haven’t given up hope that the lost manuscript of Schulz’s novel Messiah will one day be found. Schulz began working on it in 1934 and, before moving to the Drohobych ghetto, handed it off for safekeeping.

Bruno Schulz is a welcome addition to our fund of information about a remarkable European master. In it, Balint invites the reader to follow him through “a portal into the haunted life of this virtuoso of language and image.” Those who enter will leave with a better understanding of Schulz’s life and his literary and artistic legacy.

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Culture Shock

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock; Knopf, 320 pp., $32.50

In his essay “Of Cannibals” (c. 1580), Montaigne talks of meeting, in Rouen in 1562, three indigenous men from Tupinambá, Brazil. They had been brought to entertain King Charles IX, who at the time was just 12 years old. Traveling through Europe, these foreigners were viewed not only as outsiders but also as representatives of “barbaric” civilizations. Of all the things they had seen, the French locals wanted to know what they found most admirable. “In the first place,” Montaigne states,

they thought it very strange that so many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and well armed, who were about the king ( ’tis like they meant the Swiss of the guard), should submit to obey a child, and that they did not rather choose out one amongst themselves to command. Secondly (they have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of one another), that they had observed that there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.

What mesmerizes Montaigne is the judgment by the Tupinambá on economic injustice. How was it that on a continent so plentiful, a small number of people were obscenely rich while a considerable portion of the population lived in poverty? He concludes that “every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live.”

This extraordinary insight highlights the power that outsiders have, forcing us to see ourselves from an altogether different perspective. The spectacle of the Tupinambá men in the French court, as described by Montaigne, could be said to be an instance of “reverse colonization,” a phenomenon in which those who embarked in a colonial endeavor suddenly see themselves as colonized and must face their own limitations.

Caroline Dodds Pennock, a historian at the University of Sheffield, amasses a vast quantity of more or less similar examples in her new book, On Savage Shores. Her laudable objective is to follow the path of dozens among the tens of thousands of indigenous people who, in the aftermath of Columbus’s first voyage, journeyed to Europe in a variety of roles: as slaves, as kin to conquistadors and missionaries, as diplomats, as commodities, and as oddities performing any kind of cultural spectacle, mostly for the well-off. We have obsessed, and rightly so, about the destruction caused by Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, the English, the Dutch, and other Europeans in the Americas, following, in historical time, their countless misdeeds. The experience of indigenous newcomers who traveled eastward through the Atlantic, however, has been largely ignored.

This isn’t unexpected. In most cases, the path these visitors took was expunged: either their hosts failed to record, in detail, the extent of their impressions or the travelers themselves lacked the education, financial means, audience, or wherewithal to articulate their stories. Pennock’s sources, then, are necessarily obscure, partial, and embedded in all sorts of materials, from diaries and correspondence to regal and domestic chronicles and material culture. Yet the volume resists being a cabinet of curiosities, instead presenting itself as a manifesto against erasure.

The reader is handsomely rewarded with a plethora of accounts. Those providing them include Coastal Algonquin like Manteo and Wanchese, who translated for Walter Raleigh and codified an orthography of the Ossomocomuck Algonquian language in London, as well as a group of Totonacs taken by conquistadors Francisco de Montejo and Alonso Fernández Puertocarrero from Mexico to Spain in 1519, along with exotic items like jewels, shields, and metals. Others are Taínos from the Caribbean, Maya from the Yucatán Peninsula, and Inkans from the Andes. They are described as explorers, “pioneers, pathfinders for their people—and ambassadors to a foreign emperor.”

The quest isn’t only to follow, when possible, their European itineraries, internal and external: how they conceived of “home,” what they witnessed, where they ended up. Although a few traveled, alone or in small groups, on their own accord, most were taken involuntarily, in dehumanized fashion. With few exceptions, they didn’t know the local languages. Since their uprootedness often ended in tragedy, the leitmotifs of these narratives, not surprisingly, are loneliness, bafflement, and alienation. Yet these were treks of resilience, too, as people learned, in a short span of time, the skills—physical, social, legal, and rhetorical—required to survive.

Pennock is an efficient writer but unfortunately not an elegant one. Hers is an accusatory, vengeful voice that mostly seeks to ridicule Europeans for failing to understand the inhumanity they embraced. With few exceptions, the portrait she offers of pre-Columbian civilizations is idyllic, whereas Europeans are consistently seen as vicious. Yet the Aztec-Mexican empire was itself ruthlessly stratified, shaped as a ranked system that featured nobles ( pipiltin), commoners (macehualtin), and slaves ( tlacotin), aside from serfs and prisoners of wars. The Maya civilization, quite hierarchical as well, had already peaked by the time the Europeans arrived, its metropolises abandoned. The Totonacs in eastern Mexico partnered with the Spanish to assert their own political power. In other words, even as the Americas were imagined by Europeans as a preternatural landscape, the landscape was far from utopian (the Greek word utopia means “no place”). Inadvisably, Pennock, even after quoting Montaigne, resists Walter Benjamin’s dictum, in his essay “On the Concept of History” (1942), that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

To be sure, she builds her argument as if walking on eggshells. She frets at length about what to call her subjects, navigating a minefield of terminology: indio (Indian), indígena (indigenous), Native American, First Nations, and so on. This hypersensitivity paralyzes her. The corollary is that historians cannot, in the end, avoid appropriating what isn’t theirs. This, to me, turns political correctness into self-immolation. The truth is that historians have a precious impartiality that endows them with the capacity to reflect on human behavior. To waste it in guilt-ridden disquisitions is a shame.

What I mostly wanted from Pennock—herein my biggest qualm with On Savage Shores—was a more ambitious meditation on reverse colonization. Along with the fascinating sketches of indigenous travel to Europe, how did the Americas reshape Europe as a whole? The thesis offered is that given the low number of indigenous visitors overall from across the Atlantic, the effect is comparatively small, not to say anecdotal. Yet when seen in toto, it is substantial. Beyond these forgotten guests, other arrivals changed the continent’s course. For starters, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, pineapples, squashes, guavas, and chili peppers were introduced in the diet. Animals like muskrats, squirrels, and raccoons found new habitats abroad. The collective identity was transformed as religions adapted themselves, as is the case of Spanish Catholicism after it was exposed to different types of American polytheistic rituals.

And there’s language. While reading, I was reminded of a benchmark moment in the shaping of Spanish as a tongue. Also in 1492, Antonio de Nebrija, a Salamanca philologist, published an influential Spanish grammar. The word he used for boat was barco. A few years later, in a revised edition, he replaced it with canoa, from the Arawak Indian word kanawa. Just like this one, countless other words—Caliban, Shakespeare’s impetuous character in The Tempest, is, according to some, an anagram of the Spanish word canibal—infiltrated European languages, subverting them from the inside. This is also an indispensable part of how indigenous Americans “discovered” Europe.

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Mortal Music

Death is not only the ultimate dissolution of identity, as all the physical, psychological, and social ligatures that tether it in place are severed; death is also that in the face of which we make our identity. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T. S. Eliot put it in The Waste Land. Habits, interests, love, the hourly, the daily, and all the busyness of life. Above all, art.

It was the philosopher Bernard Williams who argued, in an essay on Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case—about a woman gifted, or rather cursed, with immortality—that life makes sense only in the face of its finitude. We are “lucky in having the chance to die,” Williams concluded. This does not require that death itself be desirable: death can destroy meaning while, at the same time, the prospect of mortality creates the very meaning that death destroys. That, at least, is one reading of Williams’s long and complex argument.

It is somehow appropriate that Williams’s discussion centers on an opera. This is not just because Janáček’s Makropulos Case is about a 16th-century court physician’s daughter who, having taken an elixir of life, is now 342 years old and, consequently, in “a state of boredom, indifference and coldness.” Music is expressive without being denotative. It is material and precise but at the same time metaphysically suggestive, the closest thing this side of revelation to a glimpse of the divine. It is in music that this paradox of Williams’s can be contained and engaged with; that which creates meaning also destroys it. Music helps us to deal with death, with its inevitability, its incomprehensibility, its necessity. In certain pieces of music, we face death within a sound world that is resolutely alive even as it is transitory, fleeting, and always decaying. Music has, in Shakespeare’s words, a dying fall.

Silence is the ultimate symbol of death in terms of sound, but “until we die,” as John Cage (composer of the notoriously silent 4’33” ) supposedly had it, “there will be sounds.” Utter soundlessness, true silence, is not available to the living subject.

Gestures toward silence, however, are part of our cultural encounter, while we remain alive, with the nothingness of death—with our own horror vacui (the fear of that sense of emptiness and loss that we feel in the face of others’ deaths) or the peace and calm that silence seems to offer.

This relative silence, this imagined silence, can be an evocation of things that are inexpressible. There is that organized and audible silence with which many societies mourn their dead: the silence at a funeral, the two-minute silence in memory of the war dead that has been observed in the United Kingdom since the end of the First World War. These silences encourage us to think of the departed, to memorialize them, but they also necessarily and inevitably ask us to think about our own mortality. They bind together the living and the dead in a contemplation of a common end.

Silence is essential to music, the rests as important as the notes. But beyond that, in classical music’s engagement with finality, with death, there are especially significant silences that gesture toward nothingness. I think especially of Winterreise, Schubert’s great cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano written in 1827 and 1828. This work was composed in the face of impending death. Schubert had likely contracted syphilis in 1822, and although his death in 1828 came unexpectedly, possibly from typhoid fever, he spent the last six years of his life under the shadow of an early demise, producing works in his last 18 months that speak to a sense of mortality. Winterreise is a journey into the snow, white blankness, a journey away from a failed love affair in which the journeyer looks deeply into himself and, plumbing the depths of loneliness and isolation, finds metaphysical despair. He learns a lesson that Samuel Beckett (who loved the cycle) took up in the 20th century. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—this is how Beckett’s novel The Unnamable ends.

In the 14th song in Winterreise, “Der greise Kopf,” the wanderer discovers that the frost has turned his hair white. The music in the piano expresses a sort of horror at this transformation, with a leap of an augmented fourth, that unholy interval that late medieval musicians christened the diabolus in musica. The wanderer reacts with an expression of grim satisfaction: he is one step closer to the end of his journey, the journey that we all take toward death. Then the frost melts, and our hero is a young man again—“How far it is still to the grave!” (Wie weit noch bis zur Bahre!  ) Schubert’s repetition of this statement at a lower pitch, barely harmonized, is followed by a pause that, when I perform the cycle, always seems to demand a longer than usual duration, an extended, unnatural, almost unmusical silence in which Schubert, the musicians, and the audience look into the abyss. And if we want to understand this biographically—which is to say, to understand it as the expression of a suffering human being, Franz Schubert, rather than a creator-genius—it is as if Schubert is repeating the phrase not to underline our distance from dissolution but so that we may grasp its inevitability and contemplate our own mortality. Silence points deathward here.

Schubert had a particular gift for what we might call deathly music even before his illness. One unfinished early song is called “Leichenfantasie” (“Corpse Fantasy”); another song, a miraculous setting of a poem by Goethe, “Wandrers Nachtlied II,” is a paradoxical evocation of stillness through a particular sort of quiet music:

Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
                      … Balde
Ruhest du auch.

Over every mountaintop is quiet,
In each and every treetop you can
hardly feel a breath.
The birds are silent in the woods …
Soon you too will be quiet

[translation mine]

The instrumental music that Schubert wrote in the last years of his life is not all drenched in contemplation of mortality—there’s a lot of dance music for piano, for example, an excellent distraction, surely, from morbid thoughts. But many of the late works, though anything but morbid, seem to speak to the listener as intimations and explorations of the evanescence of human life and the ever-present defining limit that is death. Here is the critic and philosopher George Steiner, in his book Real Presences, struggling to express these ideas, which are so hard to get a handle on:

What we can say, a saying both exceeding and falling short of responsible knowledge, is that there is music which conveys both the grave constancy, the finality of death and a certain refusal of that very finality. This dual motion, instinctual to humanity but scandalous to reason, is evident, it is made transparent to spiritual, intellectual and physical notice, in Schubert’s C-major Quintet. Listen to the slow movement.

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Phantoms

I’ve had tinnitus—a constant ringing in my ears—throughout all my knowing life, my inner ear conducting its own private symphonies in the bony amphitheater of my skull. I hear a constant hissing-swishing sound like water dissolving an antacid tablet, a noise that can progress to trilling, beeping, or shrieking as loud as microphone feedback, depending on tiredness or viruses or the whims of the ear gods. These sounds are not just annoying to listen to; they block out the real-world sounds around me. They have been so much a part of me that until I was a teenager, I presumed that everyone had such busy ears.

When I was five, an audiologist came to my school to carry out hearing tests. The beeps and squeaks from the audiometer sounded so like my own ear-clamor that I came to believe that the noises in my ears were in some way linked to this contraption, that wires or rods had been accidentally left in my ears and had burrowed their way inside my head. When I was six, I was scheduled for an operation to fit grommets in my ears, but my parents decided not to risk general anesthesia on such a small brain and canceled the surgery. Instead, I was made to blow balloons to open up my blocked ears: blowing, letting the air out, and blowing again. I’m not sure this achieved anything. I link my early bookishness to having poor hearing. Trying to keep up with other people’s spoken words could be tiring, but total immersion in a book was like being coated in polystyrene packaging. I could reread words I didn’t catch the first time and tune out rather than attempt to decipher the smudgy sounds around me. As a child, I wasn’t aware of what I couldn’t hear, so my tinnitus was only a problem for the person I was ignoring. A public health nurse who visited our home queried whether I was autistic; I was so engrossed in a book that I hadn’t responded to repeated shouts of my name.

When I talk loudly in places with lots of background noise, my words crackle and echo in my ears like a bad phone connection. In large group conversations, I struggle to keep up, never mind join in. It can be isolating to miss nuances and subtleties, nudges and whispers. Jokes fall flat unless they’re said loud enough. Under-the-breath comments are wasted on me. There are only so many times I can say, “What?” before the moment is lost. I dread conversations with the masked and the mumbling. Differences between p’s and b’s, s’s and f’s are indecipherable if the mouth isn’t visible.

Missing the first few words of any conversation means that I spend the rest of it trying to catch up, and the puzzle increases exponentially. I often assume what a server or retail assistant will say next because these conversations usually follow a set pattern, but when they veer off course, my guessed response can be daftly irrelevant. I pick out key words in a question to piece together meaning, and predict the probability of being asked certain questions in a certain order. It’s the same technique that I use for conversing in an unfamiliar foreign language. Years ago, when I lived in Japan, the first question from a Japanese person would often start with doko—“where”—so I would answer with the Japanese word for Ireland. The second question would start with itsu—“when”—so I would answer with the Japanese word for March, the month I had arrived there. This gave me a reputation for having more Japanese than I had, in the same way that most people don’t know how bad my hearing is because of my constant compensatory efforts. Before a recent hearing test, an audiologist reassured me during a brief conversation that my hearing seemed fine. After the test, she expressed her shock at how poor it actually was.

Tinnitus means I hear things that don’t exist. The sounds are real to me, they exist in my subjective reality, but they cannot be heard by others. I have never experienced auditory hallucinations in the form of voices, but my wordless noises feel so real, I can understand how someone might hear words and believe them to be an objective reality. In The Rag and Bone Shop (2021), Veronica O’Keane, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, describes how postpartum women experiencing psychosis

hear voices that are not audible to others, may smell odours—usually unpleasant—that are not coming from the outside world. … Such auditory [and] olfactory … hallucinations are referred to as psychotic symptoms. The first principle that we need to establish is that what are called symptoms are real sensory experiences. Hearing a sound, a human voice, is a subjective experience, whether the voice originates in the outside world or is generated in the brain by pathological neuronal firing. The experience of hearing the voice is similar in both cases: the origin of the sensation is a separate consideration.

There is a dignity to this approach that I like. It must be difficult enough to deal with the fact that your reality does not exist for other people, but to feel that it is relevant and that your experience is credible is reassuring. If only people experiencing chronic pain or chronic fatigue with no visible symptoms could get the same acknowledgment from the experts.

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My hearing is so poor at high frequencies that I can’t even hear when my children are whispering in my ear, never mind what it is they’re actually whispering. Soft voices at low levels are unavailable to me. And yet, after my first child was born, I began to interpret anything at a certain high pitch as the sound of my baby’s cries. The noises were real and external, but their source was not as I imagined. Seagulls shrieking, cats mewling, car brakes squealing, even the scraw of metal on metal can be heard as a baby if that’s where your brain is. For years, my physical response was to leap up and rush toward the noise, but I learned to tell my brain that it wasn’t a baby, in the same way I now automatically discount internal shrieks and hisses and beeps and know them as tinnitus. The problem with this conscious reinterpretation of what I hear is that occasionally there are real, external beeps and hisses that I assume are my own private noises.

In childhood, my eyesight was below par, but as with my hearing, I learned to compensate. When I was 12, a nurse visited the school to test the students’ eyesight. We were brought in groups to the staff room, where an eye chart had been placed at the end of a long table. I angled myself into last place so that I could listen to the full-sighted children before me reel off the letters. In this way, I was able to memorize the last few lines of the chart. I got away with it—but what did I get away with? I managed to avoid a prescription for the glasses I objected to. But this meant that the rest of my schooldays were spent peering at a blur of chalk shapes on the blackboard. I learned to guess at the meaning of a sentence from the few words I could squintily decipher, in the same way that I guessed at what words had been spoken from the few words I could catch.

I got so used to living in a blur that when I got laser eye surgery in my 30s, I was perplexed by the amount of detail that had presumably always been in my surroundings. The day after the procedure, I looked out the car window and saw, for the first time from such a distance, individual leaves on trees. I had only ever seen blurry lollipop tree shapes from a child’s drawings, and suddenly here was high-definition detail that had been right there all along. That night, I looked out the window and saw stars actually twinkling: so this was what the nursery rhyme had been on about!

Watching a film in the cinema was now an exercise in overstimulation. I found it hard to unfocus from the details and couldn’t keep up with chase scenes in action movies because I would home in on the wrong things. I used to be swept along by a vague rush of movement, but now I wanted to pause and examine the details. Perfect vision brought self-consciousness, however. Seeing imperfectly means you assume that others see what you see, which allows you to exist in a mythical, nonjudgmental world, unseen. Walking up a busy shopping street for the first time postsurgery, I was intimidated by how close the other people were and how much eye contact they made. I preferred to think that people saw as little of me as I did of them. The ground felt too close. It seemed to rise up to my knees, and I found myself taking exaggerated steps, as if I were walking up a flight of stairs. Being naked in the public baths and hot springs of Japan had been fine presurgery. Feeling so unseen was both comfortable and liberating, and because this was a time before phones had cameras, I wasn’t screen-seen either.

Similar to tinnitus, laser eye surgery added impediments to my vision by introducing things that existed only in my head. A too-bright halo now appeared around lights; looking in the general vicinity of a light meant I couldn’t see around it. If I tried to flag down a bus in the darkness, I struggled to see the number of the bus if it was near the newly haloed streetlights. Also, the surgery seemed to introduce dark maggot-size shapes in the periphery of my vision. Switching from near sight to far sight brought on a bout of the maggots, which were hard to ignore at first, but I learned to forget about them. If I’d had this surgery as a child, I probably would have explained the maggot shapes by assuming the scalpel had implanted them in my eyes.

All of this made me think of Morgellons disease, described by Leslie Jamison in her 2014 essay collection, The Empathy Exams. The Mayo Clinic website defines Morgellons disease as “a condition characterized by a belief that parasites or fibers are emerging from the skin.” How quietly devastating that it is the belief that constitutes the disease, rather than the physical skin condition. I have never gone to a doctor about my tinnitus or the maggoty shapes in my vision because I don’t want to be seen as a person whose subjective, unmeasurable complaints might be questioned as symptoms of a mental illness or an appeal for attention. I need to reserve my credibility for ailments that matter.

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When I thought I had recovered from my first bout of prevaccine Covid, I woke one morning to find my sniffers were defunct. For almost a month, I smelled and tasted absolutely nothing, not even my own breath. Then, as my olfactory neurons started pinging back to life like a phone hopping back onto Wi-Fi, neurons misfired and certain smells were swapped (apples for blood, for example, chocolate for metal, tea for flowery grass). One night, I caught a sudden terrible smell, and I ran upstairs not quite sure what I’d find or where I’d find it. I thought perhaps the toilet had overflowed or foul water was leaking from a pipe or drain. I couldn’t locate the source of the stench, an evil mixture of sewage, rotten egg, and stagnant floodwater that was without form or name. That was the start of the phantom smells, or phantosmia. Phantosmia was a sign of my olfactory neurons beginning to recover, but this imaginary vile smell was blocking my chances of experiencing real and potentially pleasant smells.

Around this time, I had an uneasy dream about a creaky old house with several stories of rotting, reeking floorboards. The stink in my nostrils persisted for hours after I woke—I couldn’t shake off the dream. It was the first smell-dream I can remember, where the smell was the main feature of the dream and carried over into my waking life.

A common feature of phantosmia is that sufferers (phantosmics?) are unable to identify the specific smell, or the smell may be one that they have not encountered before. This was true for me: I couldn’t put it into words, only that it was really dreadful, the worst combination of the worst smells I could imagine. I don’t think an adequate vocabulary exists for smells. Could there be another way besides language, which is ineffectual, to describe smells? Could you describe a smell with touch, for example, or with images?

My nose hasn’t yet fully recovered. Certain aromas have muted themselves, and some tastes are still off. My new, dulled sense of smell is like the padded silence of hearing loss that accompanies a bad cold or sinus infection, as if snow has packed tight around my head. I currently have 60 percent hearing loss at high frequencies, the frequencies at which my tinnitus operates, and what my ears lack in the perception of real sounds, they make up for in creating imaginary ones. A couple of bouts of Covid have intensified my tinnitus: the constant hiss and swish is tolerable, the fridge-motor hum is bearable, but the sudden unexpected switch of frequencies to a frantic wheeeeeeeeee is harsh. Some nights it feels like an ensemble of amateur tin whistle players is tuning up in my head.

Increased ear drama combined with decreased nose action can make me feel withdrawn from the world, in a bubble of my own with my own personal sounds and smells. This leads to overcompensating, looking for things that might be there and trying to ignore things that aren’t there but sound like they are. In my complete-smell-loss days, I couldn’t detect the smoke of a tea towel burning on the toaster and realized there was a fire in my kitchen only when I saw the flames. Since then, even though my nose has mostly recovered, I look closely at foggy or denser patches of air. The knowledge of my decreased awareness informs so much of my life: I know to obsessively check for cars when I cross the road because I’m used to bockety hearing, but I can forget and assume my smell is reliable. It takes work to engage with a world that is not fully available to you, and humility to acknowledge your reality is not the reality of others.

I see phantosmia as the olfactory equivalent of tinnitus, hearing things that don’t exist and not hearing things that do exist, smelling smells that are not real and not smelling smells that are real—to phantom up sounds and smells and either believe them to be real or know that they’re not real and yet still have to smell them and hear them and deal with them as some form of reality. I like that the word phantom is used in a medical context to describe these illusions or delusions. There are ghosts in my ears, spooks in my nose, tiny wraiths in my eyes. There is something Halloweenish about these things that don’t exist and yet are very real to me.

I have a notion that I read and wrote as a child, or that writing came to me, because of my deficient senses. I can’t know otherwise, but I don’t see how it couldn’t add to an inner life. When I set out to write this piece, I thought I would be able to delve into the implications of living with phantoms and explore how exactly this has affected my imagination, but it’s only in the writing that I realize I have no other way of being for comparison. I have a fantasy about taking a magic pill that would allow me to live other people’s experiences from the inside out, to feel their sensations and pain and view the world from their perspectives, to compare this experience with my own. I would like to know what perfect hearing is like, to be in complete tune with my environment, to smell what is actually there. But I cannot remember myself back into my pre–laser eye surgery days or pre-Covid sniffer days or imagine myself into full hearing. I can only know myself as I am now, slightly off-kilter with the rest of the world.

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Life at the Bottom

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond; Crown, 304 pp., $28

Americans have never been particularly good at seeing the poor. Whether your cable news channel is MSNBC or Fox, you will hear very little about poor people. The middle class tends to imagine poverty as a problem of developing nations, its worst forms in the distant past and reminiscent of a Dickens novel. The cultural impulse to make the poor “invisible” is undeniable, but the so-called invisible hand of the market, writes Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, does more than notice the poor; it preys on them. Despite common assumptions about opportunity, Desmond shows how Americans of means support a government that thwarts real solutions and perpetuates inequality while never really trying to eliminate poverty.

Desmond’s book is a jeremiad, a wake-up call about one sad, simple truth: the rich, and even the middle class, actually benefit by keeping a sizable part of the population (larger than Australia’s total, in fact) below the poverty line. To illustrate, he refers to a poignant scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which a tractor driver is hired to tear down a tenant farmer’s home. As the farmer threatens to shoot him, the driver protests that he’s not to blame, that someone else would invariably take his place. “[O]ne man’s poverty,” writes Desmond, “was another man’s profit.” In this dog-eat-dog existence, Desmond implies, the poor are pitted against each other.

Desmond’s argument is familiar, that educated elites are out of touch, wallowing in abstractions and making excuses in an effort to avoid accountability. When Americans categorize the poor as charity cases, as the “other,” they miss the crucial fact that poverty is about the unequal distribution of privileges, not simply wealth. In the 19th century, Americans recognized that the enormous fortunes of robber barons rested on the backs of grossly underpaid workers. The gig economy is nothing new. After the Civil War, industrial workers were independent contractors, held liable for their own injuries. The poverty trap that Desmond writes about has a long history that he does not incorporate into his argument as much as he might.

Desmond writes that his father was a minister, suggesting that a jeremiad suits him––even in a book that contains a treasure trove of facts. Many of the points he makes have been made before: poverty is increased by the loss of unions, corporate lobbyists undercut real reform of tax or wage laws, banks exploit the poor with overdraft fees, landlords gouge renters, and predatory companies bilk the poor for profits. Consumers reap advantages from cheap goods and services, too. While the rich get massive tax breaks, the middle class gets government assistance in the form of subsidized health and retirement benefits. Desmond tactfully reminds us that we “are all on the dole.”

Some forms of inequality could be easily fixed. As Desmond notes, in many countries citizens don’t file taxes: the government does it. It’s quick, it’s fair, and high-priced accountants aren’t there looking for loopholes. As we have learned from the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, lying about one’s taxes is often cost-effective. The IRS, Desmond writes, loses a “trillion a year in unpaid taxes.”

Desmond contends that the privatization of wealth explains why U.S. infrastructure is crumbling. Russia isn’t the only nation with oligarchs. As our American oligarchs “accumulate more money, they become less dependent on public goods” and, Desmond says, “less interested in supporting them.” Private schools, private hospitals, private jets, private islands, offshore accounts, and gated communities have created an exclusive parallel society where those with growing personal fortunes have no need for public institutions. The principal goal of oligarchs, we’re told, is to use all of their power to hoard wealth and privileges.

What are Desmond’s solutions? Drawing a comparison between antebellum antislavery agitation and today’s poverty, he calls for every American to become a “poverty abolitionist.” It is not enough to rely on Great Society programs, he maintains; these made poverty “less lethal” but did not make it “disappear.” Class desegregation—integrating affordable housing into every neighborhood—is one of the reforms he advocates.

The larger dilemma Desmond points to is something he calls “scarcity diversion,” by which elites stash away their money and land. By treating the practice as natural, they allot what little is left over to the poor. In the end, Americans on opposite ends of the political spectrum agree that the economy benefits the rich and harms the poor. The new millionaires club in Congress does the bidding of the rich, which means that worthwhile reform is highly unlikely to be realized anytime soon.

Desmond skirts a crucial part of the story: class isn’t merely about wealth and privilege, but class identity is reproduced in families. A most radical proposition for exposing class privilege was put forward by New Deal–era Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who contended that if 100,000 children were taken from poor families and another 100,000 from rich families, and they were given the same education, food, and housing, it would be impossible to tell the difference between them when they reached adulthood. His theoretical point was obvious: the family, more than any other institution, reproduces class identity. (The 21st-century equivalent would be a reality TV show in which the incoming class at Princeton finds itself living for four years on a Native American reservation.) Such a redistribution of wealth and privilege is something no American would ever tolerate, of course. And that’s the crux of the problem: privilege and a sense of entitlement begin at birth; parents are deeply invested in protecting their own.

If only laying out the facts as Desmond does would change the average reader’s mind. But it won’t. In the United States, poverty has generally been treated as a taboo, an inherited curse. The duty of caring for the poor is consigned to social workers, police, and religious institutions. Families are expected to help their own. Americans are tribal in more ways than partisan politics exposes: walls of rationalization are erected in our heads. It’s not privatization of wealth alone that is the barrier to reform; it’s a painfully long history in which people of promise, the “worthy,” are cleaved from the unworthy poor. By rhetorical means, the working poor are pitted against the unemployed; it turns out that those who do escape poverty are often less charitable to those stuck in the poverty ditch. Moving up the ladder can mean forgetting where one came from. The social dynamic is not just “bifurcated” into rich and poor but fractured along a series of class lines and often manipulated by pernicious and powerful ideologies.

That complexity is not effectively addressed in Desmond’s book. Rather, he sees “complexity” itself as a ruse used by elites to do nothing. And yes, he is partly correct. But getting at the root of the crisis of poverty means cutting through class fictions that persist at the community level as well as at the national level. Class is a material and a mental condition. For the rich, the educated, the professionals, and the rest of the “winners” in American society, class is so woven into identity that all are loath to part with it.

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Knowledge Before the Fall

It would be nice to be a doctor, I’ve sometimes thought. If you began to feel something go wrong, you could diagnose yourself. You’d know what you were in for. There’d be no surprises, and all pain and discomfort would be mitigated by an awareness of the path ahead, the forks you’d come to, and the choices to be made. I don’t think being a doctor would make your stomach hurt less, or your head or your leg not ache, or your heart not break. But surely, with a fund of knowledge about symptoms, causes, effects, and—yes—pain, you would be better prepared. If not to cure your troubles, then at least to face them. This, anyway, was my feeling as I awoke one morning to what promised to be another day of pain. It wasn’t crippling, but it was limiting, and with each day, more draining, more demoralizing. It had started with two weeks of intermittent back and hip discomfort, which wasn’t bad enough to see a doctor about. Then I stooped to retrieve a pencil, and what had been discomfort now became constant pain, and after another two weeks, I was ready to give up. “Okay, you’ve got me, I’m a wimp. You win. Now take the pain away.” But the pain did not go away, and I couldn’t even wonder why, because all I knew was that it hurt. Why was this happening to me?

The doctor was of no help. This kind of complaint often cleared up, she told me. Patience. Meanwhile, there were painkillers. She also pointed out that many people evince similar pain with their slow gaits, their bent backs, their gritted teeth and grimaces. Surely I had noticed them? Join the crowd, she seemed to be saying. I stared at her. I’m active and fit. I’m never sick, and I never take medicine. I don’t eat meat. I hardly drink, don’t smoke, have coffee only in the morning, and run 50 kilometers a week. Run, not trot. You don’t know me, I thought.

It was true, she didn’t. I live in Asturias, in northern Spain, and because I had recently moved, this was my first visit to her office. My medical history was on her computer, but she hadn’t read it and couldn’t know that what I was suffering was not simply the trial of advancing age. Such is the reality of the overburdened Spanish medical system. But thanks to that same system, the painkillers I was prescribed were practically free. It hadn’t cost me a penny to see a doctor.

Knowing how long the trouble would last or whether it would ever clear up—or if, on the contrary, I was likely to be forever impaired—might have made it all easier to bear. After a month, the pain did seem to lessen slightly, and after another week, I could manage without painkillers. I began to believe my doctor. I cheered up. Had I been a doctor myself, though, I would have faced the ordeal with more equanimity. The weather forecaster who knows where a system has come from and how long before it will move on will get just as wet in a downpour, but the drenching won’t seem an insult on top of a hardship, as it might to me, not having realized I was in the path of the storm.

So when one day, as I was walking slowly down a sloping street and saw an elderly couple coming even more slowly up it, I paid attention. They shuffled along, shoulder to shoulder, as if holding each other up. As I got closer, I saw that the man was bearing the weight of the woman, who was tilted against him, not so much leaning on him as tipping over onto him, her body listing like a boat that’s taken on water. They paused beside a bench, and she looked around, her gaze vacant and dazed. Pulling on her hands to turn her toward him while keeping close to give her body the support of his, the man got her aligned with the bench and then seated, all apparently without her help. She was small, but even so, maneuvering her into place must have been awkward. Perhaps she was just too tired to collaborate, but it seemed that she was not even aware of what was going on. No words passed between them, and he did not seek eye contact, nor did she look at him. What was I witnessing? Rather than a sinking ship to succor, or a large package to transport, she was in her constant closeness more like an appendage: a useless arm in a sling or a bandaged foot to drag along as you move—a part of him that had now become burdensome and extraneous.

As he got her seated, the man, probably her husband, eased down beside her. He was still holding her hands. I imagined him facing the problem of his wife’s condition alone, and I felt sorrier for him then I did for myself. I hope, I silently said to him as I continued past, that you are a doctor and know what ails your wife, and haven’t got the stress of uncertainty on top of everything else.

And yet, a store of knowledge about a thing does not necessarily prepare you to experience it. The vet to whom we took our dog many years ago listened calmly as we described what happened when Chimbo had a seizure. On the history of the dog we were sketchy, because we’d found him abandoned beside the road 10 days earlier. Within 48 hours, we said, he’d had his first seizure. Then more.

The dog was quiet but anxious. The vet scratched Chimbo’s ears in a friendly way, which seemed to be a message to him: “Yes, I know about you, and your worries are over.” He was a beautiful dog, a German shepherd, strong and svelte like Rin Tin Tin, except that Chimbo’s eyes showed not pride and confidence but worry and confusion. He did not seem comforted by the vet’s caresses. I was, though. I believed her, even if Chimbo did not.

The vet’s diagnosis was epilepsy, and she gave us some pills to help with the seizures. We had gone for a solution to the problem but also to be reassured that what he was going through wasn’t too much to suffer, that he would get better, and that everything would turn out okay. Maybe also so that someone who knew about these things would hear our story and say, “Oh my!”

We thanked her, paid her, then turned to leave. Chimbo, fearful of going first and fearful of being left behind, was glued to my leg; he squeezed beside me through the door into the waiting room. He was as nervous as he always was. The only moment in the day when he appeared to be free of fear was when I put his bowl in front of him. It was as if his fear were tied to hunger. But the instant he finished, he looked nervously around, fearing an attack, which is what his seizures were. Although he had been visibly nervous in the vet’s examination room and then in her waiting room, he was not more so there than anywhere else. Yet before we’d opened the door to the street, Chimbo started to pant, then twitch. His legs tensed, his eyes rolled back, and he fell to the floor in the full throes of a seizure, his head already knocking against the hard, cold tiles while his limbs jerked. I crouched beside him, put my hands under his head to cushion it from the hard floor, and looked up at the vet, who had followed us from the examination room. Her mouth was hanging open. “This is what he does,” I said. “This is what happens.”

“Dios mío, Dios mío,” she said, staring at the dog as he thrashed on the floor. Then she turned her horrified eyes on me. “It never lasts more than a minute,” I said.

It did, however, last longer than usual. And even after we started the medication, the seizures kept getting worse. Adjusting the dosage didn’t help. We didn’t know then that nothing would.

In the waiting room, Chimbo’s legs were still, with an occasional twitch, and his head was no longer banging. He opened his eyes.

The worst of those months with Chimbo—worse than the shock of the first out-of-the-blue seizure, worse than witnessing and trying to alleviate subsequent attacks, even worse than the decision to put him down after a summer of pills and more pills that did not stop the seizures, worse than when the vet said she didn’t know what to try next, when we accepted that there was no cure—the worst was every time Chimbo opened his eyes and looked around after a seizure, and cringed, as if expecting a new seizure to start right up. When he looked around, first dazed, then fearful, and then looked at me. What’s happening to me? his look said. What’s happening to me? Old people shuffling slowly along; a child wailing in a downpour while his parents impatiently shove him along, seeking shelter; even people strong and healthy who seem to think the aging body is for the already old—they often have something of the same dismay, the same question. What’s happening to me? But it’s not. It’s just happening.

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Look Back in Wonder

On a wet, gray afternoon in February 2007, the rain turning to snow as the light faded and the temperature dropped, my wife delivered our second child: a boy, like our first, and, like our first, a surprise. We’d learned of the pregnancy only a few weeks before we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where I was to begin teaching at a small liberal arts college. It had been a taxing fall and winter: Wisconsin was darker and colder than any place my wife or I had ever lived, we knew no one in our town, and early ultrasounds of the fetus had shown signs of a lethal genetic anomaly, requiring a series of expensive and invasive tests. The results, thankfully, had come back negative, but on New Year’s Eve, my wife started bleeding, and we rushed to the hospital, fearing premature labor. The obstetrician scheduled an induction for a week before our son’s due date. Despite the difficult road we’d traveled, the doctor assured us, the baby was healthy, and everything would be fine.

When the nurse handed him to us, wrapped in a blanket, rosy and warm, he did seem fine. But when she opened the blanket on the warming table to measure his temperature, weight, and length, she saw that his chest had turned gray, his lips a dull lavender. His five-minute Apgar score, which assesses vital signs, was lower than his one-minute. His skin was pale; his arms and legs had gone floppy, unresponsive to stimulus; and his breathing was shallow. My mother-in-law, a veteran pediatric nurse in a major children’s hospital, stood over her grandson with her lips pursed. She cooed gently to him and reassured the delivery nurses that they were doing a good job, but her face gave away her concern.

Chest x-rays revealed fluid in his lungs. Later tests would warn of an enlarged heart. The snow was falling harder, sticking to the windows and whiting out the cars in the parking lot. The labor and delivery nurses were growing anxious. My wife, who had worked as a medical social worker in the same children’s hospital as her mother, recognized the nurses’ anxiety for what it meant: the baby was too sick to stay in the regional hospital. That evening, a specialized nurse in a blue jumpsuit threaded an intubation tube between our son’s vocal cords, connected his lungs to a ventilator, and handed him off to two mustachioed paramedics, who loaded him into a portable incubator and wheeled him through the empty hospital corridors to an ambulance waiting outside. They drove him a half-hour south to a hospital with a NICU—a neonatal intensive care unit. My wife and I followed behind. The windshield wipers struggled to stay ahead of the blizzarding snow, and I lost sight of the ambulance halfway through what felt like an interminable journey. I drove in silence while my wife, one day postpartum, cradled her stomach and tried not to cry. I’d never been so scared in my life.

After 10 days, our son’s lungs had recovered enough for him to come home. The heart issue, too, had resolved as his lungs responded to the medication. The day of his discharge, the neonatologist posed for a picture with him before the nurses helped us secure his carrier into the back seat of our car. I was sure I’d feel calmer once we got him home—I’d been fantasizing about his homecoming since the night of his birth.

Instead, I had trouble sleeping. I lay in the dark and listened to his faint exhalations, worried that he would spontaneously stop breathing. As the days moved forward and winter melted into spring, the minute-by-minute ticktock playing in my mind of my son’s birth, decline, and hurried admission to the NICU began to collapse into a nebulous dread, one that subsumed even the initial happy memories of his arrival. I felt as if I were watching a city recede in my rearview mirror, all the buildings and parks and freeways merging into a hazy skyline in which the NICU remained the only recognizable structure.

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In a stroke of either dumb luck or divine providence, two weeks after our son’s discharge from the hospital, my wife accepted a position as a social worker at the NICU in St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton—a different hospital from the one where our son was treated, though it was similar in size, capacity, and level of care, and it served the same northeastern Wisconsin community. This meant that my wife essentially returned each day to the site of what had been our worst nightmare: the same assembly of ventilators, incubators, monitors, IV pumps, and bilirubin lights that had surrounded our infant son. The prospect of working in such an environment terrified me, but my wife welcomed it. She felt she better understood the agonized worry of the parents in the NICU now that she had endured the same worry herself, and she felt a special bond with the fragile newborns, some weighing barely more than a pound.

It was my wife’s responsibility as the unit’s sole social worker to ensure that babies would be discharged to safe home environments. She screened parents for postpartum depression and housing insecurity and helped them apply for Medicaid. Most of the babies in her unit—a Level III NICU—survived, which meant that their parents’ experiences largely echoed ours: a frightful beginning gradually giving way to a return to normal life. The most acute cases, those requiring surgical interventions, were transferred to Level IV NICUs in Madison or Milwaukee. Rarely, though, a baby would be born too early or too sick to save. On those nights—and the worst tragedies often seemed to occur in the dead of night—my wife would go the distance with the families, talking the parents through the decision to withdraw treatment, then staying in the room while they held their children for the first and final time. Each evening, when she arrived home from work, I plied her with questions. I wanted to know everything she’d seen, everything that had happened. I could envision these stories so clearly, as though they were happening not to strangers but to me.

In June, we attended the wedding of one of my wife’s coworkers, a neonatologist. After the ceremony, we accompanied other members of the NICU staff to a local brewpub. I happened to sit beside a nurse who had recently started working in the NICU at the Minnesota children’s hospital where a young couple had given birth a few weeks earlier to sextuplets. They’d been conceived with the help of the fertility drug Follistim, which had caused the mother’s ovaries to release multiple eggs in one ovulation cycle. The couple’s doctors had urged them to “reduce” the number of fetuses, but the parents, both deeply religious, had refused.

The sextuplets were born at 20 weeks of gestation, a full month shy of their third trimester and only halfway to full term. The heaviest of the six weighed a whopping 19 ounces, the smallest only 11. They were among the smallest human beings ever to be born alive, and by the time I sat beside the nurse that day, three of the babies had died. Two more would perish by the end of July, leaving only one survivor: a boy. The birth of the sextuplets, followed by the seemingly endless cascade of losses, had made national news. I watched the reports obsessively, recalling my own terrified days and nights in the NICU when I stood over my son, watching his chest retract and counting his breaths. Some in the media had likened the parents to fanatical crackpots who’d landed in a mess of their own making. But I couldn’t do that, not after what my wife and I had been through. That would have felt like a denial, or worse, a betrayal.

The thought of witnessing my son’s death, which had once seemed so near, could still make me cry. The idea of watching five children perish one by one was too much to comprehend. When I asked the nurse what it had been like, being in the NICU with the family, her eyes welled up. Along with the parents and the other members of the staff, she’d had no choice but to stare down into death’s abyss and fathom its depth. Our own abyss had been shallower, and we’d forestalled going over the edge—my son was now four months old, smiling and lifting his head when laid on his belly—but still, I felt I could relate. I’d yet to entertain the possibility of one day writing about the NICU, but at the brewpub that afternoon, I felt I needed to listen, to bear witness to the things the nurse had seen.

The nurse seemed eager to talk, as though she’d been waiting for someone to ask her about the sextuplets. I leaned on my elbow, nursed my beer, and hung on her every word.

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My wife had worked in the NICU for five years by the time I started working on a novel set in the unit. We’d attended holiday parties, retirement sendoffs, bowling nights, and summer cookouts, and several members of the staff—including the doctor whose wedding we’d attended—had become close friends. In all that time, I’d never stopped thinking about the family of the sextuplets. They’d started a website at the time of the pregnancy and occasionally posted updates. The baby who’d survived was nearly the same age as my own son. He had some mild cerebral palsy and retinopathy, both resulting from his extreme prematurity, but he seemed pretty healthy otherwise. In photographs, he could be seen playing and smiling beside his parents and two younger sisters. I couldn’t say whether they were happy, but they seemed to have charted a path forward. “People think that being in here is the end of the world,” a NICU nurse had told me as we’d stood together beside my son’s bed. “They don’t understand that there’s a place in the world for sick babies.”

The novel I’d begun borrowed a page from the sextuplets’ story, though the mother in my story becomes pregnant with four babies instead of six. Given the option to reduce the pregnancies, she demurs, and when she goes into labor after just 23 weeks, she and her husband find themselves plunged into the NICU’s arcane world of flashing alarms and hissing ventilators, roller-coastering through hope and loss until they can hardly tell one from the other. The parents’ story entwines a second narrative, of a long-time nurse struggling to care for her troubled teenage son, himself a former preemie. I wanted to take my characters—whom I imagined as fiercely loving and spurred by good intentions—past their breaking points, not to wallow in their misery but to see if I could bring them to a place of redemption. I also felt an obligation to testify, in the most honest terms possible, to the whipsawing intensities of the NICU, the messy lives of the medical staff, and the anguish of the mothers and fathers holding vigil beside their imperiled children.

To aid in my writing process, I compiled a reading list of every NICU-related book I could find. There weren’t many: a smattering of memoirs published over the course of two decades and practically no novels. Desperate to learn more, I contacted the volunteer coordinator at my wife’s hospital and offered to do any task, no matter how menial, so long as it was in the unit. I took a brief orientation class, pledged not to release any medical information relating to the babies or their parents, and was given a name badge and a blue vest to wear over my shirt.

For six months, I folded laundry, restocked supply carts, and answered phones. I sanitized equipment and got reacquainted with the noises and smells of the unit, albeit this time without the panic brought on by every blinking light and honking sound. Some weeks, there would be a frenetic rush of admissions, the doctors working around the clock for several days in a row, and a week or two later, the unit would empty and the staff would spend the morning gossiping at the nurse’s station. During the slower spells, I reorganized the medical supply closet and assembled brochures into admission packets, which my wife would give to incoming families.
When things really slowed down, I’d duck into a corner and scribble in my notebook.

I watched so many parents—from partnered couples to single moms, Volvo-driving yuppies to teenagers from impoverished farming towns—fidget beside their infants’ beds, feverishly bouncing their knees while they stared at the clock on the wall. Other parents tried to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, perhaps hoping that if they acted normally and practiced some magical thinking, they could will a happy outcome into existence. I started to see the NICU as occupying a kind of vortex within the larger hospital. The unit was adjacent to labor and delivery, the one hospital wing where people routinely went not in sickness but in health, expecting only good things to happen: that babies would tumble into the world, healthy and vernix-coated, attended by video cameras and balloons. The NICU, in contrast, lay behind a nondescript locked door that most visitors, patients, and even hospital employees breezed by, without bothering—or daring—to look inside. To have a baby rushed from the delivery room to such a place was to be yanked rudely away from the happy fantasy, like a fish plucked from a stream.
When I talked about the novel, even in broad terms, people often winced. Babies in peril—babies dying—were the stuff of tasteless jokes and sentimental charity commercials. More than one person told me that the book sounded, in a word, dark. Once, over dinner, a fellow writer and English professor began to cry after hearing about my research. When I told my agent I’d found very few books, and hardly any novels, set in the NICU, a fact I believed would be a mark in my favor, she replied, “Well, there could be a reason for that. Bleak stories are hard to sell.”

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For the record, I’m not by nature a dark person. I can’t handle violent thrillers, slasher flicks, or zombie movies, nor am I drawn to such commercialized literary genres as “misery lit” or “trauma porn,” which aim to titillate readers through gratuitous depictions of suffering and pain—and risk dehumanizing and exploiting the very people they depict. I envisioned my novel to be something deeper: not trauma porn, not just a sad story, but a tragedy.

Aristotle’s definition of a tragedy—“an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”—says as much about the genre’s formal specifications as its content. A tragedy must be organized around a reversal of fortune (  peripeteia in Greek) in which a persecuted hero is restored to nobility. Or, more commonly, the protagonist is brought low by his flawed choices and the stirrings of fate and chance. Although tragedies don’t have to end with the entire House of Denmark lying dead on the floor of Elsinore, pain and agony still reside at the core of the genre. It’s by witnessing the suffering of another human being (and we shouldn’t forget that for most of history, tragedies have been performed live and in person) that an audience moves toward anagnorisis, recognition, and from there to catharsis, the “purgation of pity and fear.”

Because pity and fear frequently travel together, they can be mistaken for synonyms. In truth, however, the emotions oppose each other. Fear is an emotion of inferiority: the perception that someone, be it a human or a god, can harm us and those we love. Pity stems from the belief that another’s suffering is somehow beneath us; we’re superior to them. Fear aggrandizes our enemies; pity aggrandizes us. It’s hard to pity those we fear, and hard to fear the pitiful, though that’s exactly tragedy’s aim: to elicit both emotions simultaneously and in equal amounts. Audience members are forced to see themselves reflected in the characters’ self-destructive mistakes. “Ah, that is he,” Aristotle writes, by which he means, He is me. Tragedies leave us drained, purged—catharized, Aristotle would say—but also humbled and a little wiser, at once tougher and a little softer, a little less gullible and a little more human. “You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies,” writes Howard Barker in Arguments for a Theatre. “After the musical, you’re anybody’s fool.”

Even more than fostering resilience, tragedy generates sympathy—a quality I find in short supply during these troubled, divisive times. Pop intellectuals such as Brené Brown have rendered sympathy the ugly stepsister of empathy: Brown describes empathy as “feeling with” and denigrates sympathy as “put[ting] a silver lining” around another’s pain. The Greek roots of “sympathy,” however, sym and pathos, more accurately denote “feeling with,” whereas empathy connotes an excess of emotion projected toward another (and in modern Greek, empátheia even means malice or malevolence). Empathy, moreover, did not enter the English language until the 20th century, whereas sympathy is far older, used by both David Hume and Adam Smith to describe the process by which a person may vicariously experience the emotions of another. In recent years, sympathy has also come to mean something like concern for the people with whom we already identify, reserved for the righteous and denied to the sinful. Yet according to George Eliot, sympathy requires the recognition of one’s personal limitations and the effort to reach beyond those limits—a “deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man,” she writes. The characters in her novels who stand the best chance of escaping isolation are those who, like Silas Marner, develop a “consciousness of dependence” on others. Rebecca Solnit echoes this sentiment precisely in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster:

A friend tells me, as I write, of someone we know who has joined a support group for his grim disease; these groups create communities of sufferers so that one feels neither alone nor marked out uniquely for suffering. The religious contemplation of suffering and work with the sick, the poor, and the dying likewise serve to develop compassion and subvert tendencies to self-pity and its twin, self-aggrandizement.

Unlike trauma porn, then, which invites gawking from a safe distance, tragedy asks us to see life close up. If trauma porn dehumanizes its subject, tragedy rehumanizes. Tragedy joins us together. It reminds us that we are our brothers’ keepers after all.

I came to understand this on a more personal level when, around the same time I began working on the NICU novel, I also started writing short, humorous essays about my sons, who were then seven and five and locked in an utterly toxic and codependent relationship—they fought like dogs yet couldn’t stand to be apart from each other. These essays were only a few pages long and usually centered on a single moment of awkwardness, like the time I tried to explain the history of Saint Nicholas to my older son, who promptly marched into his kindergarten class and announced that the real Santa Claus was dead. Or the time I threatened to wash out my younger son’s mouth with soap if he continued to swear at school and, in an ill-conceived attempt to demonstrate the punishment, ended up washing out my own mouth. Whenever I’d finish an essay, I’d read it to my family and friends, sometimes to an entire party of guests, and they’d howl with laughter. I’d never thought of myself as particularly funny, at least not on the page, and it felt good to hear people laugh.

Yet it was the harder stuff, my closely guarded experiences of pain and indignity, that resided closer to my heart. These formed the stories I told my closest friends, the ones who’d stick around the party after the other guests had left, who’d help with the dishes and trash and then follow me to the couch, where, in the orange glow of firelight, we’d enter the hour when tragedies were told. Revealing my dark secrets and listening while my friends offered up their own injuries and mistakes, I could feel us drawing closer together. For all their discomforts and agonies, their purgations of pity and fear, tragedies are ultimately love stories.

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Back in 2012, I’d been volunteering in the NICU for a few weeks when a baby was admitted to the unit. He’d been born at 21 weeks of gestation, even though his mother had been on bed rest in the hospital for close to a month. His trachea was so small that the doctors had a hard time intubating him and, at one point, paused to ask the mother if she wanted them to keep trying. He was the smallest, sickest baby in the unit, which also made him the smallest, sickest baby in the hospital, my city, and that entire corner of Wisconsin. On several occasions, the chief neonatologist urgently summoned the parents to the hospital because their son was on the verge of dying. The parents’ relationship frayed; even at the baby’s bedside, the tension was palpable. The nurses seemed invested in the marital drama until they weren’t. When the baby was transferred to the children’s hospital in Madison for surgery, the entire staff felt relieved.

Three years later, I tracked the mother down and asked if she’d meet me for coffee. I was at a low point in my writing; after years of research and drafting, I’d gotten lost in the weeds, and every time I sat down to work on the book, I felt a certain dread, doubting my motivations for writing it in the first place. Even if I managed to finish the damn thing, I wondered, who would ever want to read about such sorrows?

The mother and I arranged to meet at our local Starbucks on the Friday before Thanksgiving. The place was decked out with glittery snowflakes and miniature evergreen trees adorned with lights and ornaments. Her son came with her; he was three years old but looked closer to two: a wobbly toddler with a moon-size noggin. He had a horizontal scar in his neck from a tracheostomy that had once connected his lungs to a ventilator. He’d been dependent on the machine the first two years of his life. “When we left the NICU in Appleton, I was told to expect he’d be on a vent for the rest of his life,” his mom said to me. “The pulmonologist in Madison promised me he’d be breathing on his own by kindergarten. And look! He’s only three.”

“Impressive.”

“So many people told me to let him go,” she said. “Especially in the beginning. He’s my little fighter.”

As we sipped our lattes, she filled me in on her son’s progress. After leaving Appleton, he’d had nearly a dozen surgeries and spent many months in and out of the hospital, first in the NICU and then, once he’d passed a year, the pediatric ICU. He still needed a lot of therapy, and her insurance didn’t cover much of it. She and her son’s dad hadn’t been together for a while now. She tended bar at night while her son stayed with her parents. One day, she said, she’d like to go back to nursing school, but she was living paycheck to paycheck these days.

I said that must be hard. She shrugged, then nodded.

Her son sat on her lap with a book he didn’t seem much interested in. He squeaked and gurgled but didn’t say anything I could identify as an actual word. I offered to buy him a muffin, thinking that something bready and sweet might occupy his attention, but his mother declined. His years on the ventilator had disabled his ability to swallow and to talk, and though he could breathe without the help of a machine, he had to eat through a gastronomy tube in his abdomen. At three, he knew enough about food to know it went in the mouth, but even a small bite could become lodged in his throat and cause him to choke.

The Starbucks grew crowded, and the little guy became overstimulated. He began to squirm on his mom’s lap and cry. I could tell she was growing flustered, and I offered to call it a day, but she suggested we finish the conversation over tea, at her parents’ house nearby.

Once there, she carried her son inside and laid him in his bed. He’d required round-the-clock nursing care when he’d first come home from the hospital, so she and her son had lived with her parents for a while. They still kept a room for him with a crib and rocking chair, as well as a green oxygen canister the medical supply company had never bothered to collect once he’d come off the ventilator; it stood in the corner as a testament to how far he’d come in his short life. After peeking inside his room, I waited for her in the kitchen while she got him settled.

We sat across from each other at the round wooden table. I had my notebook open, though I hadn’t written very much. Steam curled up from our mugs of tea. The house was quiet. “What else do you want to know?” she asked.

I thought for a moment. “I want to know what it’s been like for you. All of this.” I gestured at the kitchen, though she knew what I meant. “You have a good attitude, but I’m sure it’s been rough.”

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. She stared at me for a long moment, as if measuring whether she could trust me. I wanted to look away, but I did not dare. Then, to my surprise, her eyes filled. She dabbed at the tears with the back of her hand. “No one knows,” she said. “No one knows what it’s like. How hard it is. Even my parents don’t totally get it. No one does.”

She looked at me as if maybe I got it. I hoped that after everything I’d seen, all the effort I’d put in, I did get it. She cried a little harder. She didn’t resent her son, she said, or regret the decisions she’d made to save his life. Nor did she regret her tumultuous relationship with her son’s dad, despite how things turned out. She only wished that the people in her life had a better sense of what it was like to hold a child so close to the edge of life and to wonder, each day, whether he would stay or go—and whether, in light of his pain, her grief, and the doctors’ confusing and discouraging advice, she was selfish to fight so hard to keep him. “I want to read your book when you’re done,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “If I ever finish it.”

“You will. You have to.”

“I’ll keep at it.”

“You’d better,” she said. “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”

I said goodbye and got back in my car. I had an appointment in Green Bay, so I headed north. Past the edge of our small city, the farmlands opened up. Plowed fields stretched all the way to the horizon. The November sky was heavy and gray-brown, the color of tea with too much milk, though in spots the sun broke through, spotlighting the tarry roofs and rolled hay bales. I watched the clouds turn orange and pink and made a promise that no matter what, I’d keep trying till I got the story right.

The post Look Back in Wonder appeared first on The American Scholar.

George’s Angels

Fifty-one years ago, to be exact. I met a blond angel at a health food store on the Upper West Side. The angel smiled at me. I smiled back. She was a dancer, a soloist at George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. She was startled when I recognized her stage name, Deborah Flomine. She was even more startled when I talked about my favorite dancers—Allegra Kent, Jacques d’Amboise, Eddie Villella, and Patricia McBride, all of whom she’d danced with at Lincoln Center and other venues around the world when the company went on tour.

You weren’t supposed to meet a stranger at a health food store who could examine one of Balanchine’s ballets with all the incandescence of an x-ray machine. I was Debbie’s dark angel, I suppose. I must have reminded her of Nureyev, with my high cheekbones. We fell in love. Eventually we moved in together, into an apartment house on West 67th Street originally built for artists—it had magnificent studio space with northern exposure. Our landlady offered us a reasonable rent because she liked having a “young couple” in her domain.

Unluckily, we lived on the same block as Balanchine, or Mr. B, as all his dancers and everyone else called him. He was famously possessive of his female dancers and didn’t like them to have boyfriends. Marriage might come next, and then a baby, and that could mark the end of Mr. B’s interest in that dancer’s career. A marriage might be forgiven, but a baby was most often a kiss of death.

And so, we were mortal enemies at first sight, Mr. B and I. He was never overtly impolite, though he would smile at Debbie and merely stare at me with his mournful eyes. His nose would twitch like a rabbit. I’d had the same nervous twitch as a child. I couldn’t even tell Mr. B how much I admired him and his ballets. Before I met Debbie, I’d had a girlfriend who was a balletomane. We went to the ballet as often as we could, depending on our pocketbooks and the program. My favorite pas de deux was “The Man I Love,” performed by Patricia McBride and Jacques d’Amboise in Balanchine’s homage to George Gershwin and the Jazz Age, Who Cares?  The splendor and sheer sexual joy in the fluid courtship of the couple’s fast and slow steps perfectly matched the syncopations in George Gershwin’s music. Words weren’t necessary. The dance steps were far more lyrical than the lyrics Ira Gershwin had written.

I felt that the passion the two dancers had delivered onstage belonged wholly to me. As Jennifer Homans writes in her monumental recent biography of Balanchine, Mr. B, the choreographer and his dancers struggled with the perpetual question: How “to live in the real world when the unreal world of the stage was so much more alive?” The dilemma was mine, as well.

As a novelist, I believed in the almost mystical magic of words, that the meaning of a sentence was derived from its music, and here was an art form that robbed me of my own delight. Balanchine’s ballets, the steps themselves, were more musical than anything I could ever write. I would have gladly watched Jacques and Patricia do “The Man I Love” every day for the rest of my life. Robert Sealy of Ballet Review seemed to agree. In March 1970, he wrote that the dancers, in their own angular, cat-wary way, provided us with “the memory-burning dance of a lifetime.”

I loved Eddie Villella’s leaps, Jacques d’Amboise’s poise, Patricia McBride’s elegance and versatility en pointe, but the dancer who moved me the most was Allegra Kent. She was a wild child, utterly unpredictable. Allegra had three babies, not one, and still she danced for Mr. B. I first saw her in Bugaku, which was a courtship dance inspired by seventh-century Japan. There’s no corps de ballet onstage during the iconic pas de deux, only two dancers: a nobleman and suitor-husband, played by Villella during the performances I attended, and his concubine-wife, played by Allegra, dressed in tights and a kind of white bikini under the kimono that she sheds. And their ritualized romance occurred right onstage. Their bodies twisted and contorted, and it seemed as if Allegra had vacated her own psyche, as if she had fled from us and was performing in a dream state; for a moment she had made the invisible visible, and we were peering at an angel rather than a dancer in Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Mr. B was a great believer in angels, who were plentiful in the Russian Orthodox Church in which he was raised, but much rarer in Manhattan. Indeed, Allegra was possessed, a demonic angel who wrapped herself around her suitor-husband with all the fervor of a sexy python.

And then there was Agon, perhaps Balanchine’s greatest work, set to a score by Igor Stravinsky. It’s a “leotard ballet,” in which the dancers perform in practice clothes on a barren stage, engulfed in a panorama of blue light. The word agon comes from the Greek—it means “contest” or “struggle.” The ballet consists of four men and eight women who dance with an almost inhuman, mathematical precision. They could be icons or angels in distress. No narrative or costumes surround them, nothing but blue light. In the ballet’s single pas de deux, Allegra danced doll-like with Arthur Mitchell, the first Black member of the company. Allegra seemed made of rubber as Mitchell manipulated her movements. We were in a landscape we’d never seen before, where motion itself made its own music. As Homans writes in Mr. B: “Agon was more than a dance ‘to’ Stravinsky’s music. [Balanchine’s] ballet was a musical composition unto itself—a composition that at times competed, agon-style, with Stravinsky’s own score, which was stronger and more complex with the dances than it was alone.”

Through Debbie, I got to know Allegra, a voracious reader who developed a fondness for my fiction. I interviewed her at the very end of 2022, nearly 40 years after she had retired from Balanchine’s company. She talked about working with Mr. B, how the choreography “flowed out of him. It just seemed to arrive. He was a true magician. … He put us into another realm. We entered that realm because of him.”

Balanchine loved to build his ballets around the female form. Male dancers, however graceful, were “second-class citizens,” according to Homans. In the years before I met Debbie at a health food counter, Balanchine was bewitched by Suzanne Farrell, another long-legged beauty with a demonic quality to her dancing. He was 41 years older than Farrell. He began mounting ballet after ballet for her. “Balanchine disappeared into Suzanne,” as Homans writes. In 1969, he divorced his fifth wife, “Tanny” Le Clercq, one of his finest dancers, who had contracted polio while the company was on tour. He’d choreographed Don Quixote (1965) for Farrell, playing the half-crazed Don to her Dulcinea. His performance was heartbreaking.

He wanted to marry Suzanne. But in 1969, she married Paul Mejia, one of Balanchine’s protégés. When Mr. B found out, he banned Mejia from the theater, and when Suzanne told Mr. B that she wouldn’t dance without Mejia, he stripped her of her roles. She fled to Europe with Mejia and joined another company. Balanchine was bereft. And seeing me on 67th Street with one of his soloists must have deepened his despair.

After Stravinsky died in 1971, Balanchine mounted a festival at Lincoln Center devoted to the composer. Stravinsky had been like a spiritual father to Balanchine, or an older brother perhaps. Mr. B hadn’t come from an aristocratic line, like Stravinsky or Vladimir Nabokov. He was raised in an impoverished household and was plucked into St. Petersburg’s imperial ballet school at the age of nine. He rarely saw his parents again. It was the grueling, military-like training he received in St. Petersburg that drove him to train young dancers at the School of American Ballet.

Balanchine claimed to have talked to Stravinsky every night while he mounted new ballets for the festival. Mr. B liked talking to the dead. Once, while the company was performing at the Salzburg Festival, Mr. B told his dancers, “Last night I spoke to Mozart.” “Then,” Allegra Kent recalls, “we started laughing. And then we started crying.” It was like an epiphany that they all felt and believed. The dance steps he created “flowed out of him like Mozart’s music.”

Thanks to Debbie, I attended every performance of the Stravinsky festival. The men whirling about and the women dancing en pointe were indeed a band of angels. “The pointe shoe has its own particular music,” Allegra told me. “It lifted ballet into another realm. Pointe shoes are the slippers of the imagination.”

I believed every word she said.

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