The role of critics varies greatly according to the mission they imagine for themselves and the audience they address. Academic critics writing for their peers will take a different tack from public critics speaking to a general audience, large or small, or from writers themselves using criticism to carve out a space for their own work. Surprisingly, novelists and especially poets have proved to be among our best critics. Poet-critics from Johnson to Eliot form the main line of the English critical tradition, while the foundations for a coherent criticism of the novel were laid by Henry James. Yet American writers are better known for their prickly aversion to critics rather than their appreciation, even when critics built up the following for their work. My favorite example, one that set my blood boiling, was Saul Bellow’s likening of the critic to a deaf man tuning a piano. (Had he merely said “tone deaf” I wouldn’t have been so offended.) Then there are the old saws that continue to surface: “Those who can’t, criticize.” “No one ever grew up dreaming of becoming a critic.” All this implies that critics, with little imagination themselves, are hardly more than mechanical observers or failed writers, stewing in their inadequacy and taking out this resentment on their betters, the really creative spirits. As one wag put it, a critic is one who arrives late on the battlefield to kill off the survivors.

In fact, really good critics are writers, with their own style and literary personality, though their works feeds off other writing, as novelists and poets feed off the text of our common life. Both kinds of writers must somehow be faithful to their subjects yet find their own angle of vision. They have to tell the truth, a truth we’ll acknowledge, but, like Emily Dickinson, “tell it slant.” They distill art into meaning, they punish failure and lionize success, but like all writers they work by way of selection, even distortion. We remember critics for their temperament as much as their critical judgment: the pugilistic vigor of Hazlitt, the digressive idiosyncrasies of Ruskin, the clerical acerbity of Eliot, the transparent windowpane of Orwell, the poetic conjunctions of Benjamin, the Hegelian dynamics of Adorno. We can forgive a great deal in a critic who manifests a striking sensibility or a startling point of view, as we are seduced by writers who freshen our sense of the familiar world. Some critics survive on the strength of their prose alone; some by promoting new artists and movements; others by introducing seminal concepts (the objective correlative, the dissociation of sensibility); by demonstrating sheer intelligence or depth of learning; or by helping reorient the history and direction of an art form. As it happens, T. S. Eliot could qualify under any of these categories.

So let me lay down a few principles that are simply features of the kind of criticism I love to read and have tried to write.

–It was only in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to the New Criticism, that criticism itself began to play a major role in the academic study of literature, which previously was focused on textual scholarship and factual research. Because of the new emphasis on close reading, most academic criticism grew too long, too pedantic and detailed. The critic felt obliged to lay out every step of the reading, not simply the interpretive outcome, the take-away or upshot of disciplined attention. Such monographs too often became little more than stepping stones in the job market, rungs in the accreditation process. Earlier critics read just as closely but luxuriated in aphorism, intuition, and apodictic summation, writerly vices. They kicked away the analytic ladder that brought them to their destination. Most journalistic criticism, on the other hand, is too brief and superficial, too uninformed, almost weightlessly opinionated. Trapped by space limitations and deadlines, such pieces habitually default on context, ignoring much that undergirds the work and conditions its meaning. With the exception of longer, more intricate reviews in little magazines and intellectual journals, they reduce criticism to consumer guidance. They strike attitudes and ventilate feelings, largely unsupported by argument or evidence. If criticism must make its case as illuminating commentary on works of art, then the best vehicle for criticism is not the extended monograph or the hastily written review but the literary essay, personal, reflective, attuned to an ongoing conversation. This is why critical journals (like the avant-garde magazines of the 1920s and 1930s) and critical schools (the New York Intellectuals, the New Critics) were so important to twentieth-century criticism: they kept a conversation going, they responded to new movements in the arts with strong revaluations and critical methods that were responsive to difficult new writing.

–It follows that the criticism I enjoy is more affective than cerebral, more empirical than theoretical. The glory of the essay, since Montaigne, comes in the way it generalizes from the concrete, raising “perception to the point of principle and definition,” as Eliot put it. Much of recent criticism works the other way around, setting up a template of theory or method and shoehorning arbitrary examples into it. It has little truck with aesthetics, too readily dismissed as an ideology. In rare cases this theoretical approach shines a different light on an individual work or a larger issue; too often it is counter-intuitive, distorting literary works with it own ideological agenda, or simply missing the mark. Do we experience a shock of recognition when we read such a commentary? Does it open up a new path of understanding for us, or merely serve as a vehicle for our political or moral prejudices? Does the reading actually confront the power of the literary work or its agonizing failure to muster that power? Love and hate are crucial for critics, along with deep-seated ambivalence. They give evidence that the writer’s work has really touched us. They feed the flame of good critical prose and supply energy that empowers the critic to bring a bolt of clarity to the reader. This is why sharply formulated, deeply felt literary judgment, not simply analytic interpretation, is vital to the critic’s task. It tracks the movement of a genuine critical sensibility. Make-or-break evaluation gives evidence that the stakes are high, that the critic is engaged, the subject really matters. A critic needs an analytic mind but also something of a polemical style, for criticism is also a form of persuasion

–The work of criticism is a juggling act, a discourse without clear borders. The critic must play the role of what I once called a double agent, balancing text and context, a sensitive grasp of form along with a feeling for the social currents that help shape art. F. R. Leavis is usually seen as a formal critic, yet he insisted that “one cannot seriously be interested in literature and remain purely literary in interests.” In principle, nothing is alien to the critic: the writer’s biography, the history of ideas, the social history of the times, the tools of philology, the evolution of formal conventions, the parallels to the other arts, the insights gleaned from literary history but also from other disciplines. These blurred boundaries have been unconscionably abused in recent years as critics squander their authority by poaching on fields they know little about, pronouncing on subjects they know even less about. One result is that a stereotyped progressive mind-set, the well-meaning agendas of political correctness, becomes their received wisdom; open-minded scholars are unable to take their work seriously. Historians recoil from the anecdotal evidence of New Historicism, as social scientists resist ideological position-taking in social criticism. Research gives way to fashionable cant, currently some form of postmodernism and anti-essentialism, which caricatures the wisdom of the past, gives unquestioned sanction to all forms of relativism, and effectively assumes what needs to be proved.

–Despite the sins of critics borrowing from fields they haven’t mastered, I call myself a generalist, a public critic, which is simply another name for an intellectual, someone whose first love is the exchange of ideas. As an undergraduate at Columbia I learned to pillage literature for ideas, to quarry it crudely for important themes, but somehow I also imbibed a strong historical sense, what Philip Rahv called the sixth sense of the critic. Eliot noted that this historical awareness “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” This sense of the present became a watchword among the New York Intellectuals. Intrigued by the ambitious reach of their work, its crossing of conventional boundaries, I became sensitive to the politics of literature, of literature as an actual intervention in the world. But it was only as a graduate student at Yale, then in the last stages of the New Criticism, and at later at Cambridge, still under the influence of Leavis, that I learned more about how literary works were put together, how they were made of language and exploited formal conventions. This brought me back to my sophomore year of high school, when I first read A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Letter and was amazed at the sheer craftsmanship of the whole but also at the architecture of sentences and paragraphs. These books seemed ingeniously tooled, shaped to endure, yet their stories were also full of arresting details, resonant symbols, and a vivid recreation of earlier times and places. They gave me intimations of both literary form and the pressure of history that I understood only years later.

–Despite the importance of craft, works of art are not so much objects as experiences. Critics are not anatomists who murder to dissect but seismologists attuned to every rumble in the terrain of art and of their own inner lives. When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, he meant that life itself, the stream of felt experience, is what gives art meaning and value. Before 1900 no one would have questioned this. But in the twentieth century we grew so concerned about the mediations of art – the conventions of realism, the techniques of modernism, the movements that congregated into different schools – that we sometimes lost sight of art’s purpose and substance. Since art reshapes life into staged experiences, this further blurs the boundaries of criticism, creating an opening from aesthetic criticism to moral and social criticism. This was the trajectory of the great Victorian critics – Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin – though it was also resisted by the successors they influenced, including Pater and Wilde, who disliked moralizing yet themselves wrote in this sweeping prophetic strain. For me the arts offer invaluable clues to the inner configurations of a culture, its intimate depths of mind and feeling. The alienating effects of industrial society created the conditions for a social criticism grounded in aesthetics, for art pointed to a potential for human fulfilment that modern life had undermined. Twentieth-century critics like Orwell, Leavis, Wilson, and Trilling were heirs to this tradition, which has few successors today.

–Despite its ambitions as a critique of ideology, postmodern relativism lays down a path of acquiescence to commerce and power rather than effective resistance. It rejects moral judgment as a form of hierarchy and elitism, though criticism has always demanded a trained sensibility, capable of doing the necessary work of discrimination. Eliot described criticism, simply but memorably, as “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste,” but “correction” rings oddly in contemporary ears, for it suggests that the few who know more or feel deeply might offer instruction to the many, and might improve society in the process. Yet taste and discrimination remain the ultimate tests of the critic, without which there can be no clarifying insight or understanding. Instead we have today the democratization of criticism represented by customer reviews of books and films on the Internet. Critical judgment increasingly resembles what we find on websites where hotels and restaurants are usefully rated by people impelled to write in or sound off. Their judgments are unedited, and we know nothing about where they come from. We must turn critics ourselves to weigh their worth. Criticism becomes a form of polling, in which we look for enlightenment from the man in the street.

In this context, it becomes wildly anachronistic to hold on to the Victorian notion of the critic as social or moral guide, or to the modernist charge of the critic as mediator and expositor of difficult art, or even to the more general view of the critic as an informed intellectual, someone who thinks hard about art and society, who has developed the faculty of focused attention, along with the rhetorical skills and the cast of mind to craft those perceptions into argument. This remains the mainstream of the critical tradition, and it speaks to the passions that drew me irresistibly to art and critical writing in the first place. At bottom criticism is personal, agonistic, however thoughtful and measured its tone. It is Jacob wrestling with an angel, an existential encounter in which the full being of the critic confronts the full power of the work, which invites yet also resists critical translation.

This essay will appear in Something to Declare: A Collection of Critical Credos, edited by Jeffrey J. Williams and Heather Steffen, to be published later this year by Columbia University Press.

I couldn’t have disagreed more with the viewpoint of his influential book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, in which he highlighted every irrational feature of the culture of the 1960s, creating an unrecognizable portrait of the whole era as “an attack on reason itself.” But he was at least consistent in tracing this back to modernism itself, which he saw reductively not as a breakthrough in the arts but as a pernicious outbreak of apocalyptic nihilism. “What the new sensibility did,” he wrote, “was to carry the premises of modernism through to their logical conclusion.” Culture was not Bell’s strong suit. His treatment was coarse-grained and almost embarrassingly indebted to Lionel Trilling’s more nuanced dissent from modernism and his critique of the “adversary culture,” including his notion that the sixties represented a kind of acting-out of modernist ideas. Bell too saw the new culture as “an effort by a cultural mass to adopt and act out the life-style which hitherto had been the property of a small and talented elite.” But even in the 1950s, in an essay chastising but welcoming the new Dissent magazine, he argued that “the problem of radicalism today is to reconsider the relationship of culture to society.” This was in many ways prophetic. The long-range effects of the counterculture were far greater than the impact of the political left, apart from the conservative backlash that it provoked.

Bell’s own politics were nothing if not consistent. As many old friends slid towards Nixon and neoconservatism, he remained a solidly grounded Hubert Humphrey-style liberal – pragmatic, anti-utopian. He was a great believer in the power of temperament over political commitment. He was not at all surprised that some of the most rigid Stalinists of the 1930s became equally rigid anti-Communists. He observed the mellowing of Irving Howe with amazement, describing him as one of the few friends who had actually undergone a dramatic change of temperament. And in his last years he himself actually wrote for Dissent, a journal that seemed to him anachronistic in its radicalism when it first appeared. As a person Dan was a bottomless well of Jewish jokes and sayings. One of his favorites: “As the Yiddish proverb goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” He repeated this with the customary twinkle in his eye and chuckle in his voice.

He had the memory of an elephant. The course I took with him on Victorian culture, which he team-taught with Trilling and Steven Marcus, juxtaposed literary readings with social and political documents as a method of fathoming the “moral temper” of the era, a pregnant concept. With a boisterous laugh, he later loved to remind me of something I supposedly said in the seminar apropos of one of these documentary readings grounded in social fact: “I didn’t know this course was going to be about real estate.” I might have felt literary and superior enough to have said such a thing, though I had no recollection of it. But I suspected I could trust his memory better than my own.

On the other hand, some would argue that this worst of times is also the best of times. Thanks to the Internet, to online booksellers like Amazon, to the ubiquitous Google digitizing whole libraries, books have never been so readily available, including rare books, out-of-print books, and, thanks to the famous “long tail,” older titles once hard to find, since bookstores rarely stocked them. Loving the serendipity of browsing in bookstores, actually fingering the merchandise, we forget the frustrations of the fruitless search, the books we could not find. Browsing online we find it’s all there yet tantalizingly out of reach.

Without fetishizing the physical properties of the book, which after all do not reach back to the tablets on Sinai, we can acknowledge the difference between reading print, flipping pages, plunging ahead or backward, and reading on a computer or miniature electronic device. There is something of a generational divide here, but screen reading, while near-miraculous for retrieving hard-to-find information, is less than ideal for the focused attention of literary reading. As storage devices books indeed are cumbersome. We can be grateful for the amazing horizontal connectivity of the Internet without slighting how shallow those connections often are. It gives us the world at a glance but often no more than a glance.

In the case of book reviewing, or critical writing of any kind, cyberspace offers a few advantages, but to my mind they are outweighed by the drawbacks. There is that vast storehouse of material that can be retrieved, such as reviews, old and new; biographical information; profiles of writers, movie directors, artists, composers; but also, for reviewers, something genuinely new, a vast grey hinterland between publishing and not publishing. The Internet is an open grid for bloggers, commentators, cranks, obsessive enthusiasts who have made cults of individual writers, but not least of all for the fabled man in the street, the consumer now empowered to talk back, to emerge from anonymity, or take cover in anonymity, to make his or her peeves and passions known.

To put it simply, the professional reviewer, who has a literary identity, who had to meet some editor’s exacting standard, has effectively been replaced by the Amazon reviewer, the paying customer, at times ingenious, assiduous, and highly motivated, more often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated. What works for a website like Trip Advisor, which gives us unfiltered but welcome criticism of hotels and restaurants, most assuredly does not work for literary reviewing, which demands taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument. Barring this, we’re stuck with the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of reviewing. Raw opinion, no matter how deeply felt, is no substitute for argument and evidence. The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing.

But what about bloggers, you may ask. They may not be professionals but they certainly can be devoted and persistent. Blogging has a style of its own, most commonly diaristic, spontaneous. As with online reviewing in general, it has opened the culture to a vast spectrum of writing and opinion, most of which no one will ever read. I enjoy casual blogging myself as a relief from the formal essay, with its carefully honed prose. I plan to post these very remarks in a blog, and would be gratified if they found a few readers. But it’s striking that there are twenty successful political blogs for each effective literary blog. With all due respect to Critical Mass, the valuable website of the National Book Critics Circle, there’s not a single must-read literary blog I turn to on a regular basis. The ones that I do read are linked to print magazines like The New Yorker, The New Republic, or The Atlantic, or the ones actually modeled on print magazines, such as Slate and Salon or gateway sites like Arts & Letters Daily. But will the online extensions of print journals still thrive when the magazines themselves go under, as some surely will when they run out of millionaires nostalgic for the old print culture who are willing to subsidize them. What will happen to online journalism, especially investigative journalism, when it destroys the print journalism on which it feeds, or to aggregator sites when they find themselves aggregating only from other websites?

As writers of books and as reviewers ourselves, what do we expect from a book review? In the case of a movie review we’re usually content with learning what it’s about and deciding whether to see it. Because books are literature we hold book reviewing to a higher standard. We expect much more than plot summary or summary judgment. We expect it to be really written, exacting, to rise to the level of its subject, to display an understanding of the medium, a personal point of view. We would be outraged if new novels were rated with a certain number of stars, as movies commonly are. We demand incisive judgment, not mere consumer guidance. Book reviews should be a province of writing, not of marketing – or polling. Criticism is a refined art, not a popularity contest. We expect it to be done with style and intelligence.

The last thing we want to do is idealize the old middlebrow culture with its genteel book industry, its banal bookchat and boosterism, its highly stratified culture – a pyramid capped by a small cadre of little magazines and rigorous critics. But we may miss its respect for the written word, the life of the mind, the culture of the past. The Internet accelerated a democratization of culture which had long been under way, a shift toward visual media and popular music that consigned literature to the outer margins. The revolution initiated by the movie screen and the TV screen is being brought to high definition by the computer screen. Here critical writing has a small niche but will it acquire a real presence? Deployed with technical savvy, it can become a form of resistance, a rampart of personal vision within a relentlessly homogenized culture, ever in thrall to the fashions of the moment. Thanks to its open grid and easy access, the same technology that marginalizes literature and drowns out criticism leaves room for dissent, for the still, small voice that may yet find ways to be heard.

These remarks were prepared for panel on “The Next Decade in Book Culture,” with special emphasis in criticism and book reviewing, at the PEN World Voices Festival, April 27, 2011, cosponsored by the National Book Critics Circle.

In the public mind Jackson Pollock was a tough-guy American artist, a cowboy out of Cody, Wyoming, who stretched the limits of abstract art not with brush and easel but by dripping, pouring, or flinging paint at canvases tacked to the floor of his small barn on Long Island. This image of Pollock as an “action” painter, an existentialist in jeans, was less a commentary on his art than the offshoot of Hans Namuth’s celebrated films and photographs of Pollock painting: the choreography of a man in perpetual motion, communing with the canvas as if by instinct, immersed completely in the creative moment. Pollock’s alcoholism, his difficulty in dealing with fame, and finally his death in a near-suicidal car crash in 1956 completed the picture of a tormented masculine loner wrestling with his inner demons.

The last figure we expect to meet is Pollock the family problem, the messed-up sibling. Yet this is precisely the role he plays in this fascinating collective portrait of the painter, his four older brothers, and their parents and wives during the years of his painful apprenticeship. American Letters, 1927-1947 is an enlarged version of a book first published in 2009 in France, an intricate network of letters these family members wrote to each other, full of news and chatter, often merely dutiful, at times covertly desperate. Though Jackson Pollock’s name is on the title page, the book was no doubt conceived as a tribute to his brother Charles, whose career as a painter over six decades was overshadowed by Jackson’s. Carefully edited by Charles’s second wife, Sylvia Winter Pollock, the book is illustrated by his early drawings, which show him to be a competent but conventional social realist. Perhaps pressed by Jackson’s example, he was reborn as a softly lyrical abstract painter after 1945.

The eldest of the five brothers, whose parents’ chronic failures and frequent relocations preceded the Depression, Charles came from California to New York in 1926 to study art with Thomas Hart Benton. With Charles’s encouragement, brothers with similar ambitions soon followed, including eighteen-year-old Jackson in 1930 and Sanford (Sande) in 1934. They were quickly integrated into Benton’s family – a substitute for their own, even more so after the death of their father in 1933. With major mural commissions, especially at the New School in New York, Benton was then at the height of his fame as a populist and regionalist in the American grain. Jackson gradually replaced Charles as his favorite, despite the younger man’s lack of technical skill. Even as a troublesome high school student, kicked out as a “rotten rebel from Russia,” Jackson had vaguely wanted to become an artist and had a surprisingly clear grasp of the challenge before him. Drawn to the Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Gabriel Orozco, he found it difficult to do any realistic drawing, though he soon would imitate Benton’s fluid, swirling manner and Picasso’s signature images.

All through the 1930s he was troubled, searching, incommunicative. When drunk he could be violent and self-destructive, a burden and enigma to those around him, yet his helplessness and shy, sullen charm inspired others to take care of him. But this is a story less of one artist’s coming of age than of an exceptional family, starting with nothing, improvising to make its way in lean economic times. Since some of them were always at opposite ends of the country, or crisscrossing it in cheap jalopies, they were writing to each other simply to keep up. Along with details of their lives and (more sparingly) their feelings, the book is dotted with snapshots of Depression America. In April 1934 one brother in California, Marvin Jay, writes to Charles in New York:

We are eating regularly and shall continue to manage by some means.

Frank [another brother] has ten days labor with the power company, obtained by our district Councilman. One of us should get on with the PWA [Public Works Administration].

The County pays our rent, public utilities and some foods.

I bought a milk goat this week and will get some chickens and rabbits when I earn a few more dollars. With milk, eggs and meat from our backyard ranch we can mange until something can be done about this rotten situation.

This is not exactly destitution but it is strenuously poor, close to the edge, a marginal life dependent on public welfare and New Deal programs. Six weeks later, Charles and Jackson buy a Model T Ford for fifteen dollars and set out to visit their mother for the first time since their father’s death. (On returning to New York they would sell it for twice the cost.) Like so many other Americans they were taking to the road, not looking for work but to see how their fellow citizens were faring. Their elaborate itinerary, which took them through scenes of intense labor conflict such as Harlan County, Kentucky, and steel towns near Pittsburgh and Birmingham, indicates how politically engaged Charles had become. The ten letters he wrote to his first wife, Elizabeth, are really reports from the field to a keenly intelligent woman even more of an activist than he was. In the dry, hot landscape of Texas he is appalled by the grim condition of poverty-stricken blacks and Mexicans. “Even though this is beautiful country for these people [it] is indescribably barren and harsh.”

As the book progresses we watch Jackson’s brothers, all political innocents at first, become inexorably radicalized, only to fall into confusion at the lack of democracy in the Party, at Stalin’s purge trials and his anti-Trotsky campaign, and finally during the contorted aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin pact, which demanded adjustments no thoughtful person could manage. For the three who became artists, Charles, Sande, and Jackson, their hopes and fears as well as their politics centered on the unprecedented arts funding set in motion by the New Deal, especially the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program of the Works Progress Administration. As American Letters brings home, the WPA may not have produced seminal art but did a remarkable job of keeping penniless artists from starving – at a time when the art market and private patronage effectively did not exist. The FAP also covered the walls of innumerable public works erected by New Deal agencies. Jackson went on the mural project and Sande on the easel project almost as soon as they began in 1935. Though Jackson was terminated several times for behaving badly or not showing up, they essentially remained with it until the political right finally killed the program in 1943. By then, fortunately for Jackson, Peggy Guggenheim and her adventurous new gallery, Art of This Century, were waiting in the wings.

If Charles and Elizabeth are at the heart of the first half of the book, then the self-effacing Sande is the unassuming hero of its later pages. By the mid-1930s, the irascible Benton, disaffected with both the art scene and the political left, abandons New York and returns to the Midwest. Shocked that Benton has not taken him along as his assistant, Charles leaves town as well, first to Washington to take up a government job, then to Michigan to create a weekly paper for the United Auto Workers, serving as an editor and political cartoonist. The perpetual problem of Jack is left to Sande, newly arrived in the city, soon to be married to his childhood sweetheart.

Sande’s worries about Jack, his constant fear that they will be thrown off the Project, and his growing vexation with left-wing politics and right-wing witch hunts, including McCarthyite investigations and loyalty oaths, add a plaintive note to the enforced optimism of his letters. He conceals the seriousness of Jack’s erratic behavior and drinking problem from his mother and brothers and bemoans his inability to find a role beyond that of Jack’s “wet nurse.” He expresses guilt for not sending more support to their mother or bringing her to live with them, a matter on which the other brothers seem cavalier. (If Jack, her favorite, feels any such responsibility, it doesn’t come through.) “It is beyond me how I can be so damn negligible and still live with myself,” Sande writes to Charles. At first one imagines he means “negligent,” but it may also be that he feels “negligible,” a mere shadow of the larger figures who surround him.

As a painter Sande deems himself a failure. “I feel that I have been called upon and found wanting.” His kid brother is anything but a success but his iron determination, his sense of vocation, is unmistakable, the one constant in his life. It would be some time before Jack’s violent inner conflicts would find an effective outlet in his work. In a rare moment of candor Sande describes Jack’s mental illness to Charles in 1937, though he sees no choice but to go on. “I would be fearful of the results if he were left alone with no one to keep him in check.” In his warmhearted letters he is always gilding the lily. Jack has a breakdown and is hospitalized in 1938 but Sande only reveals this to Charles, not very accurately, in an anguished 1941 letter. He and his wife decamp for Connecticut when a young painter, Lee Krasner, arrives on the scene and moves in. There’s no way to know whether Sande’s fierce protectiveness saved Jack’s life or prolonged his turmoil and dependency. Lee proved even more selfless, giving up even her own painting for long periods, but she provided him with the kind of happiness and validation, outside the hothouse of the city, that helped him break through in his work. They were married in 1945.

Sande’s discretions and partial disclosures underline the limits of these letters, which can be read alongside the major Pollock biographies that fill in the gaps. Michael Leja’s astute introduction also sketches out much of what’s missing from the letters. Yet it would be hard to match the book as an account of this unusual family in its own varied voices, grounded in the larger struggles of the Depression, the shifting, sometimes dumbfounding politics of the Communist left, the travails of an indispensable government arts program, and the terrific dilemmas of one driven artist who would take, it seemed, forever to find his way. Jackson Pollock’s voice is the quietest here, whispery, almost inarticulate, yet so many of his family’s problems circle around his. His triumphs would come later but would never fully put his demons to rest.

For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was commonly described as the greatest film of all time. Even at the height of the Cold War, spectators would still be captured by its recreation of a spontaneous mutiny on one of the czar’s naval vessels. It provided not only a thrilling account of a collective uprising but a virtual textbook in how film editing could excite sympathy, fear, and revolutionary anger. The film’s purpose was no less propagandistic than Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi productions of the 1930s, especially Triumph of the Will, but its themes were humane: not exalting the irrational cult of a supreme leader but dramatizing the oppressive violence of Russia’s old regime; the basic, universal longing for human dignity; and a bright but brief springtime of freedom and solidarity. For Eisenstein, working at the dawn of the Stalinist era, that liberation seemed to have been realized, although we came to know how soon it would be cut off. In the light of history, we cannot look at Potemkin with innocent eyes, yet its hopes and illusions seem as timely as the latest uprisings in the Arab world.

The release of a new version by Kino Lorber, with the sequence of shots, the Russian intertitles, and the original score all restored, offers an occasion to reconsider not only the movie itself but the issue of politics and film, especially revolutionary politics. Eisenstein was essentially a formalist, but he believed that film, as a revolutionary medium, could forward political revolution as well, for its techniques could incite popular feeling and bring it to a high pitch. No one could have agreed with him more than, say, Joseph Goebbels. For most of us, on the other hand, film and revolution make for an incendiary mix. It seems axiomatic that a political film ought to be complex and thoughtful, not simply rousing. But the avant-garde of the 1920s, especially in France, Germany, and Russia, set out to smash the conventions of depth in traditional narrative. For the new art cinema, stories with realistic settings, unfolding moral themes, and highly individualized characters belonged to the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century. To Eisenstein it was collective action that counted, not personal heroism or individual responsibility. Casting nonprofessional actors for Potemkin, he was drawn to physical types whose appearance expressed their social role, not performers who could give full play to complex motives.

Eisenstein was a painterly director; later in his career he sketched out every shot in advance. No one who ever saw Potemkin is likely to forget its stark images, beginning with the geometrical patterns of the hammocks in which the sailors sleep; the maggoty meat that provokes them to rise up; the weasel-faced ship doctor who examines it with pince-nez and pronounces it fit to eat; the tarpaulin thrown over the rebellious men, dehumanizing them into a rustling mass to be gunned down. Above all there were the graphic shots cunningly edited to give maximum impact to the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps, images of helplessness, panic, or outrage so piercing they have become shorthand for cinema itself.

The dynamic rhythm of the Odessa sequence became justly famous. In the crowd along the shore celebrating the insurrection, peaceably enjoying their own taste of freedom, we see the faces that will serve as leitmotifs of the carnage: elderly middle-class women, a mother with her son, another with a baby pram, a legless man propelled on his arms. Charging into this mass of humanity come the marching troops of the czar, a phalanx of faceless men inexorably descending the stairs, firing as they move. As their victims flee down the steps, others turn upward in shock and disbelief, pleading with soldiers not to fire; each of them, in separate strokes, is blasted in turn. Most haunting is the rolling baby carriage as it begins its interminable descent, with a hair-raising suspense that Alfred Hitchcock must have envied. Eisenstein took liberties with history—there was no massacre on the Odessa Steps—and an even greater liberty with time and space. The stairway was actually not very long, but in the subjective time created by hypnotic editing the massacre seems to go on forever. No film ever did more to pillory the repressions of a despotic regime.

Here matters grow complicated. Was Eisenstein using his genius to attack one tyranny by putting this gift at the service of another? In his short life—he died at fifty in 1948—he himself would periodically run afoul of the Stalinist regime, which suppressed his last film, the sumptuous second part of Ivan the Terrible. In its own time Potemkin was considered so dangerous it was butchered or banned in many countries, one reason it needed to be restored. Thanks to Eisenstein’s daring experiments in montage, the film was more effective in bringing about a revolution in the formal syntax of cinema than in inciting political upheaval, yet even that technical legacy was strongly challenged. By the late 1930s, directors like Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and William Wyler, abetted by gifted cinematographers working with faster film stock, were substituting long takes and deep-focus photography for Eisenstein’s reliance on editing, freeing up the action within the frame. Potemkin’s most enduring influence was less on film technique or politics than on political cinema, especially films made in the turbulence of the 1960s. Those were the films I wanted to see again after revisiting Potemkin.

*  *  *

The film most often compared to Potemkin is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which reenacts the first phase of an uprising led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against French colonial dominance in the years between 1954 and 1957. Even more than Potemkin, which sometimes feels staged, it has the historical immediacy of a newsreel, complete with nonprofessional actors, documentary titles, and voiceovers intoning the proclamations of both sides. Like Eisenstein, Pontecorvo is superb at handling the mass movement of crowds. The Battle of Algiers is more about the shifting tides of collective feeling than about the characters’ own lives. But we come to recognize each of the FLN leaders as they plot strategy, execute heinous acts of terrorism against both soldiers and civilians, and gradually get picked off by the French, who respond by using torture to interrogate suspects, enabling them to decapitate the movement.

Political films are often so topical they date rapidly, but this investigation of terrorism, especially as the tactic of an Islamic insurgency, feels as if it were made yesterday. It was famously screened at the Pentagon in 2003 at the outset of the Iraq War as a primer in urban guerrilla warfare. Conversely, the Black Panthers had used it as a training film. Though the film has a reputation of cheerleading the uprising and was made with the support of the Algerian government, it gives a full airing to the dilemmas of the French and the rationale for their brutal counterinsurgency. In the most piercing sequence, we see three Muslim women westernizing their appearance, smuggling bombs through French checkpoints, and planting them among French civilians in cafés and at an Air France ticket office. Observing the scene through their eyes, we see close-ups of carefree young people, traveling businessmen, and a baby licking an ice cream cone, just seconds before they are blown up. Inevitably, this reminds us of the fearsome cost of terrorism in innocent lives. It transforms The Battle of Algiers from a gutwrenching documentary-style film to a masterpiece, astonishing in its immediacy yet surprisingly thoughtful and measured.

The film’s complications are enhanced by the arrival of the French Army as personified by Colonel Mathieu, based on General Jacques Massu, a decorated soldier who later led a military revolt against the Fourth Republic, which brought Charles de Gaulle to power. (The first volume of his memoirs was called The True Battle of Algiers.) Cold and calculating, the very epitome of the professional warrior, Mathieu brilliantly articulates a noholds-barred strategy that actually defeats the Muslim rebellion. The story ends as it began, with the last FLN leader cornered in his secret hideout, which the French have discovered through gruesome acts of torture. As a prologue we see their tortured informant, gaunt and terrified, looking like a hollowedout survivor of a concentration camp.

The French engage in retaliatory acts of terrorism against civilians, blowing up homes under cover of night. They smash a general strike and use it as an opportunity to clamp down violently on the Muslim quarter. When these methods, especially the torture, come to light, they shift public opinion in France, eroding the political will to continue the war. We learn at the end that the insurgency would flare again spontaneously after two years of calm, just as the FLN leaders had predicted. Two years afterward, de Gaulle would grant the Algerians independence, enraging many who brought him to power. Like the Vietnamese with their Tet Offensive a decade later, the Algerians had lost the battle but won the war.

The near-balance of sympathy in Pontecorvo’s film is all the more unexpected because, like Potemkin, it is essentially an official production, sponsored by the Algerian government, reenacted in the streets with hundreds of Algerians as extras, and based on a story by a surviving FLN leader who more or less plays himself. Another FLN figure, who dies under mysterious circumstances in a French prison, even says that it’s only after the revolution that the problems begin, a shrewd comment on revolutionary struggles that comes across as inspired hindsight yet also a cautionary reminder.

*  *  *

Most political films are essentially histories of the present, focused on the recent past as it inflames the politics of the moment. Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie (1966) takes place in 1965, but its arc reaches back almost thirty years to the outset of the Spanish Civil War. Yves Montand plays an exiled Spanish communist in France who also works underground to overthrow the Franco regime at home. As he is returning to France, the party leaders in exile have called a general strike, putting the Spanish authorities on high alert. Montand knows that militants are being rounded up, that the strike will prove futile and self-destructive. He remains a committed revolutionary but has grown tired, middleaged, for he has been confronting everyday realities, as the leadership has not. Dwelling in abstractions, they see Franco’s Spain as a country on the brink of revolution. For him, on the ground, life has become more complicated. “No one would like what I have to say about Spain,” he says.

Alain Resnais was not really a political filmmaker. He was concerned above all about memory and fantasy, as in his masterpiece Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963). But in 1966, as it turned out, France itself, not Spain, was only two years away from a huge uprising by students and workers, including a general strike. This might seem like an unfortunate juncture to make a movie about a worn-out revolutionary, depleted or disillusioned, a movie developing the theme that “the war is over.” But here Resnais and his screenwriter, Jorge Semprún—who based the story on his own experience in exile and in the Spanish underground—add a brilliant stroke that anticipates the coming conflict. In a scene more sharply focused, more politically savvy than anything in Godardian talkfests like La Chinoise, Montand stumbles on a cell of young radicals, impatient with old-line chieftains and their methods, who are bent on planting bombs rather than organizing strikes. To the aging exiles of the party’s Central Committee, Montand’s misgivings about ordering a general strike are “completely subjective”; he has “lost all political perspective.” For the young firebrands, caught up in their Leninist or Maoist rhetoric, the party’s “peaceful methods” are “objectively” bourgeois and reformist. Only acts of terror can ignite the coming upheaval. They are as disconnected from reality as the party’s leadership. He must remind them that quoting Lenin is not the same as acting politically: “Lenin is not a prayer wheel.”

La guerre est finie has touches of a thriller plot. There is little suspense or melodrama, but Montand’s whole life is a fabric of lies and inventions. Constantly on the alert against exposure, he makes himself up as he goes along. His Swedish mistress in Paris rarely sees him though she longs to join him, and when he is at risk she finally does. But La guerre est finie is far more reflective and, frankly, more intelligent than most political films. As a portrait of a professional revolutionary it evokes the contradictions between his protean calling and his reduced private life, his assumed identities and the “real” identity he barely preserves, his idealistic goals and his hard-earned skepticism.

*  *  *

Some of this mixture of courage and experience carries over into Montand’s role as a liberal parliamentary figure who is assassinated in Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), the last major political film of the 1960s, set in an unnamed country but dealing with the events leading up to the Greek military takeover in 1967. The script, again by Jorge Semprún, based on a novel by a Greek exile, centers on the murder of deputy Gregorios Lambrakis a few years earlier and the elaborate cover-up by the authorities, all haphazardly brought to light by a prying photojournalist on the trail of a story and a determined magistrate trusted by the authorities. The film could not be made in Greece thanks to the 1967 coup, so it was shot in Algeria in French, with government support, and a script linked to both The Battle of Algiers and La guerre est finie. Costa-Gavras, like Semprún, had long lived in France, and Z was the first of his gripping thrillers on contemporary political hot spots, from Greece and Czechoslovakia to Pinochet’s Chile and the Uruguay of the Tupamaro guerrillas.

Like many on the left in the 1960s, I was caught up with protests against the brutal Greek junta and even published a letter in the Times criticizing the imprisonment (and threatened execution) of Andreas Papandreou, an economist and heir to a political dynasty, who went into exile and later became Greece’s first socialist prime minister. When Z came out it seemed a miraculous combination of political art and popular entertainment, a trip for the mind as well as a blow to the gut. I was surprised to discover on seeing it again that, unlike The Battle of Algiers and La Guerre est finie, it has not aged well. Costa-Gavras is a deft, kinetic director with a gift for grabbing the audience by the throat, but his films, which go off like fireworks, are closer to agitprop than to art. Like his American disciple Oliver Stone, he relies too heavily on turning headlines into melodrama, which comes through clearly in later films like Missing and State of Siege, dealing with vicious regimes and CIA machinations in Latin America.

Much of the action in Z simply defies belief, even when closely based on events that actually occurred. Montand’s role is little more than a cameo, for he dies early and his assassination is staged so awkwardly that it looks, well, staged. His personality, his politics, and his troubled relations with his wife are barely sketched in; their marriage feels like a thin replay of Montand’s affair with Ingrid Thulin in La guerre est finie. The planning and the coverup, clumsily devised to make the killing look accidental, are probably the most effective features of the movie. But the officials implicated at every level, and even the assassins themselves, are like comically malevolent opera buffa figures, not so much evil as ridiculous.

The film improves in the second half as suspense gives way to clumsy comedy. The journalist, sneaking around with his camera, and the investigating magistrate, hiding behind his dark glasses, expose the plot almost inadvertently, out of an ornery persistence, as if stumbling into heroism. One of the witnesses, also targeted for elimination, is a stubborn simpleton who holds court in his hospital bed. When the plotters are interrogated they stand on their dignity with a ludicrous pomposity familiar from the mocking pages of Latin American fiction. In the end we realize that Z’s real kinship is not with meditative thrillers like La guerre est finie but with the absurdist political spectacles of the early 1960s like The Manchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps the Greek colonels’ regime was as outlandish as the far-fetched plots of those movies, so that only black humor could do justice to it. In any case, we had come a long way from the autocracy of the czar and the burning grievances that set off the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, which turned Eisenstein into the first serious political filmmaker.

*  *  *

Potemkin showed that political films can be exceptionally effective on the attack, deploying stories and images as a critical weapon. But its powerful celebration of a popular uprising pointed toward the dangerous simplifications of committed filmmaking. The Battle of Algiers, though its sympathies were clear, paid heed to the limits of sheer propaganda by insisting on the complexity of the Algerian War and the predicaments and motives of both sides. La guerre est finie took this further by allowing us more distance from the action, playing off the rhetoric of radical activism against the actual conditions of political action, including the fatigue of revolutionaries themselves, to say nothing of the masses they hope to arouse. Z, like La guerre, reveals the drawbacks of the standard documentary approach to politics, which prizes immediacy over subtlety, collective thinking over misgivings and doubts. These films also remind us of the pitfalls of historical reenactment, which can lead to the fatuities of the History Channel and the simplifications of pseudo-biography. These recreations offer nothing that genuine documentaries cannot do better.

Filmmakers will always be drawn to politics because of its inherent drama but also because the stakes are so high: the fate of whole societies, to say nothing of the most fundamental values, often hangs in the balance. But to make sense of this they need to resist the alluring conventions of thrillers, documentary imitations, and you-are-there newsreels, which offer a sure-fire channel to a popular audience. They would be wise to treat political issues not solely as advocates and agitators, exploiting the sensational, but as thoughtful witnesses, exciting or inciting the audience while also expanding its horizons.

Ogden Nash. The Best of Ogden Nash. Edited by Linell Nash Smith. Ivan R. Dee 2007. 465 pp. $28.95.

American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse. Edited by John Hollander. Library of America 2003. 194 pp. $20.00

The Norton Book of Light Verse. Edited by Russell Baker. W. W. Norton 1986. 447 pp. $17.95.

The Oxford Book of Comic Verse. Edited by John Gross. Oxford University Press 1994. 512 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Andrew Hudgins. Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children. Drawings by Barry Moser. Overlook Press 2009. 113 pp. $14.95.

Ben Milder. What’s So Funny About the Golden Years. Time Being Books 2008. 88 pp. $15.95 (paper).

Edward Lear. So Much Nonsense. Introduction by Quentin Blake. Bodleian Library 2007. Unpaginated. $25.00

In my wayward teens I took it for gospel that real poetry had to be rhymed and metrical. I even wrote a scattering of such poems, until a high school teacher, taking undue advantage of his authority, told me brutally how bad he thought they were. This put me off writing poetry but, luckily, not off reading it. In this constellation of formal poetry, light verse was the fun part, the slightly Victorian stuff I relished most, but I also loved the work of Ogden Nash, who took spectacular liberties. His lines, inflated by a breathless rush of prose, usually didn’t scan, and his rhymes often were clever or devious rather than inevitable. Perpetually at play, he made up words or bent words to fit the rhyme. He came on as a complainer, a man chronically out of sorts. With his customary tone of mild irritation, he seemed haplessly at sea in the modern world. The elastic, pell-mell form of his verse contributed to this sense that life somehow never matched one’s expectations. Bubbling over with details, he was always getting carried away, as if he had too much to say to confine himself to the words in the dictionary, the shape of a regular line, or any easily anticipated rhyme.

An Ogden Nash poem typically begins with a great title, often a long one, the prosier the better, such as “Hearts of Gold, or A Good Excuse Is Worse Than None.” This one opens with a paradox, pinpointing a source of exasperation with the social habits of his fellow man:

There are some people who are very resourceful
At being remorseful,
And who apparently feel that the best way to make friends
Is to do something terrible and then make amends.

The lines vary in length, and their rhythm defies the metronomic tick-tock that grounds the beat in most light verse. The tone is not the serious poet’s tone, not vatic, terse, or meditative, but that of the familiar essayist, of E. B. White and Thurber and Benchley—in short, the peevish accents of The New Yorker in its early incarnation as the upstart American cousin of Punch . Here is more about those annoying people:

They come to your party and make a great hit with your
       Victorian aunt and with her freely mingle,
And suddenly after another drink they start a lot of double
       entendre the entendre of which is unfortunately not
       double but single,
And if you say anything to them they take umbrage,
And later when you are emptying the ashtrays before going
       to bed you find them under the sofa where they have
       crept for a good night’s slumbrage,
Then the next day they are around intoning apologies
With all the grace and conviction of a high-paid choir
       intoning doxologies.

Reading lines like these, you may easily imagine why my fondness for Nash and for light verse took such a beating when I first came upon “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Donning his Prufrock mask, with its layers of irony, Eliot gives us an anguished version of the genteel social world in which Nash’s speaker, hardly distinguishable from the writer himself, feels quite at home, for all his pet peeves. Where Nash is irritated, but with an irritation that seems worked up for the occasion, Prufrock is a soul in hell yet also effete and spineless, unable to step outside the world that makes him so uncomfortable. Hemmed in by infinite scruples, a paralyzing discretion, Prufrock sees himself as “an easy tool, / Deferential, glad to be of use, / Polite, cautious, and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous– / Almost, at times, the Fool.” Compared to this cry of despair, full of self-mockery, the mood of Nash’s complaint feels complacent even in its sophistication.

But who ever asked me to make this comparison? Nash’s verse belongs not to the poetic revolutions of the twentieth century but to a forgotten era of vers de société, which had its heyday in America between the 1920s and the 1950s. Its most enduring legacy is the musical theater of the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and other Broadway wits. This kind of sociable verse improvised on nineteenth-century models from Byron to W. S. Gilbert even as it burlesqued the poetry of Romantic inwardness that looms behind Prufrock’s ambiguous anguish. Light verse, like witty musical theater, scarcely survived the horrors of midcentury—war, holocaust, and cold war—that gave new credence to the darker flights of the modern imagination, from Kafka to Eliot. Nor was its boisterous irreverence still welcome in popular culture, which was overwhelmed after the war by an enforced optimism laced with sugary sentiment.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the golden age of light verse coincided so closely with the peak years of the modernist poetry that dispatched it and made its insouciant wit seem shallow, its formal dexterity retrograde. Simply as attitude, Nash’s recoil from modern life is not so distant from Eliot’s, but his verbal resources are different. He could not have written, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” though he might have been in tune with the satiric bent of Eliot’s refrain, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Cultural pretension was always one of his targets even though, like Eliot, he was immensely cultivated. The New Yorker writer of Nash’s era was typically a philistine who mocked highbrows, priding himself on being in touch with ordinary life. But he (usually he) was also an avatar of style, displaying a sumptuous range of cultural reference and, above all, a keen interest in language itself as something to be lovingly protected yet fully exploited.

Linell Nash Smith’s superb collection of her father’s verse, The Best of Ogden Nash, is loosely organized by subject, not chronology. The themes, all mined by Nash for their oddest manifesations, include family, gender relations, food, travel, sports, and the almost infinite range of creatures who share our planet. One of the best sections, “What’s in a Word?,” highlights his vertiginous exploration of language itself. “This Is My Own, My Native Tongue,” for example, pokes fun at regional accents as illustrated by words written out phonetically, as if tortured on a rack:

And I have parked my caah in Cambridge, and elsewhere
       spoken with those who raise hawgs and worship strange
       gawds—but here I am, later in life’s autumn,
Suddenly confronted with somebody’s apawlogies and
       bawttom.
I tell you whawt,
Things were different when I was a tawdling tawt.

This might seem too trivial even for light verse, but no oddity of English usage is alien to Nash. His customary tone is conversational but his vocabulary is huge, full of rarities that make up a verbal bestiary worthy of Marianne Moore. Rhyme enables him to foreground these peculiarities. Incongruity and surprise are the keys to Nash’s rhyming. He links words that look different, mean something different, or come from different wordpools, even different languages. Among his papers, under the heading of “Rhymes and Sounds,” his daughter found the following: “Anatomy-anathema,” “Ennui-Can we?,” “Ganymede-Runnymede,” “Meyerbeer-Biedermeyer.” Such pairings could generate whole poems, for his fascination with language was bottomless. In “Let’s Not Play Lotto, Let’s Talk” he wrote a typically peevish lament for the dying art of conversation:

Take the causerie of the most effervescent coterie,
It sounds like something sworn to before a notary.
Where are yesterday’s epigrams, banter and badinage?
All you hear is who behaved scandalously at the club dance
       and how hard it is to get a new car into an old garage.
The maxim, the apothegm, yea, even the aphorism, die like
       echoes in the distance,
Overwhelmed by such provocative topics as clothes,
       beauticians, taxes and the scarcity of competent
       domestic assistants.

To rhyme “coterie” with “notary,” “badinage” with “old garage,” or “distance” with “assistants” puts Nash into a state of high enjoyment. So do other word unlikely word choices that suggest, thanks to their French and classical roots, the articulate grandeur of old times as they underscore the crushing banality of everyday life. He loves to contrast the exotic with the demotic, or to highlight differences of scale. Another poem, “The Germ,” begins in a mock-epic voice: “A mighty creature is the germ, / Though smaller than the pachyderm.” As Dana Gioia has observed, Nash’s rhymes are “not merely amusing but often revelatory.” He takes full advantage of the peculiarities of English pronunciation that so incensed language reformers like George Bernard Shaw.

The presence of French in Nash’s verse is at once a marker of cosmopolitan culture and a show of nativist resistance, only partly tongue-in-cheek, to anything remotely foreign. “Who’ll Buy My Lingual? or You Pronounce Pluie, Louie” is made up of couplets that rhyme an English word with a French, but only visually, and only if the French is grossly mispronounced—that is, pronounced as it appears to an untutored American eye:

I wander through a Paris shower,
Off to inspect a flat à louer.
The water pours as from a pitcher
On walls inscribed Défense d’afficher….
I ring, I do not wish to trespass,
For trespassing is naughty, n’est pas?

Another poem evokes the plight of a “Manhattan socialite” in the City of Light, one whose spoken French fails to pass muster among the surly natives:

At her socially impeccable school she had passed her college
       boards and had read Corneille and Molière,
But in Paris even her request for a glass of water was
       answered by a humiliating stare.

Nothing gives Nash more pleasure here than rhyming “Molière” with “stare.” Rhyming across language barriers is his modest contribution to cross-cultural dialogue, making up for the malentendu wickedly described in the poem itself. And rhyming with proper nouns, especially exotic ones, opens up all sorts of new possibilities. Standing guard over the language yet alert to every innovation or intrusion, Nash grinds his teeth over “foreign” elements in English itself. In one poem he tries to rhyme with a series of awkward abbreviations, verbal shortcuts inflicted upon English by the haste and velocity of modern life, such as “tpke” for “turnpike” and “whsle” for “wholesale.” As usual, half the humor is in the title, the punch line that precedes the poem: “Do You Plan to Speak Bantu? or Abbreviation Is the Thief of Sanity.” I can only imagine what Nash would have done with the electronic shorthand of Twitter and text messaging.

Rhyme—the sonorous kind that makes itself heard—is the active ingredient of most (but not all) light verse. Nash’s ingenious explorations of rhyme came at a moment when many serious poets had either given up rhyme and meter for free verse or (like Frost) downplayed them, reaching for a conversational voice and more prosaic diction. Appealing to what he called the “sound of sense,” Frost turned rhyme and meter into a kind of undersong, making them less obtrusive, less jingly. More typical of light verse, Dorothy Parker’s poems not only scan, as she boasted, but remain anchored in the poetic forms of the aesthetes and decadents of the 1890s. Pungently disenchanted, she inverts yet still channels their rueful romanticism, as epitomized by Ernest Dowson’s celebrated refrain, “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.” If Nash is a poet of exasperation, Parker’s verses turn on disappointed amatory fantasies, as in “Unfortunate Coincidence”:

By the time you swear you’re his,
       Shivering and sighing
And he vows his passion is
       Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
       One of you is lying.

In Parker’s poems a girlish longing for true love gives way to the sardonic recognitions of the morning after; her jokey punch lines invariably deflate these dreams, but her sarcasm is only a thin membrane over hope or despair. Her best-known poem, blandly labeled “Résumé,” is a crisp takedown yet also an expression of the suicidal impulses of the romantic artist, a creature with whom she does not otherwise identify:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Parker substitutes epigrammatic brevity for Nash’s prosaic expansiveness; the briefer the lines the stronger the rhymes. Alan Isler, known mainly as a novelist but also the author of a great deal of witty light verse, much of it unpublished, includes this scintillating précis of Paradise Lost in his 1996 academic novel Kraven Images:

Paradise:
Enter Vice,
Satan
Waitin’.
Eve falls;
Adam bawls,
Falls too.
What to do?
Stole fruit;
Ate loot.
Man bad,
God mad.
No hope?
How cope?
Christ is come,
Man’s chum;
Dies on Cross,
Pleases Boss,
Saves all:
Lucky fall!

There is a glaring paradox here. Light verse has usually been the work of exceptionally literate writers, yet its satirical bent can drive it perilously close to doggerel. Mocking and reductive almost by definition, it offers us a holiday from the urgency of literature, undercutting its seriousness while luxuriating in its forms. For scholars like Isler, light verse is the satyr play that rounds off the grave rituals of tragedy and epic. In this irreverent summation, the humor comes from the imbalance of scale with Paradise Lost as well as the diction and rhyme that level it down to a barroom anecdote: “Christ is come, / Man’s chum; / Dies on Cross, / Pleases Boss.” Parody at its best, according to Dwight Macdonald, is “a form of literary criticism”; it demands “a peculiar combination of sophistication and provinciality,” the hallmarks of the early New Yorker writers.

The affectionate lampoon of serious literature can be found not only in parody but in every form of light verse. Franklin P. Adams, one of the Algonquin wits of the Twenties and Thirties and the author of a much-admired newspaper column, “The Conning Tower,” produced a poem, “‘Lines Where Beauty Lingers,’” made up entirely of other poets’ first lines—what would now be called a mashup. At moments its incongruities even make sense:

Love in my bosom like a bee
Love still has something of the sea
I sat with one I love last night
She was a phantom of delight.

This is a send-up of poetic diction itself, as if it were one amusing common language, all of a piece, all aspiring to a long-outmoded idiom of beauty. William Cole, on the other hand, in his Uncoupled Couplets, pairs a poet’s famous line with one of his own. To Herrick’s “Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may” he adds, “But take your little pill each day.” He follows Swinburne’s “When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces” with “The rich take off for warmer places.” Mimicking a poem’s rhythm while exploding its sense, he makes a virtue of what Alexander Pope called “the art of sinking in poetry.” Both Adams and Cole can be sampled in John Hollander’s Library of America anthology American Wits, along with good selections from Nash and Parker and the best of their peers, including Phyllis McGinley and Don Marquis, the author of archy & mehitabel, a suite of delicious lower-case poems featuring a literary cockroach, who writes “from the under side,” and a preening, pretentious alley cat. I’d guess they influenced the knockabout tone and antic cast of characters of John Berryman’s Dream Songs.

Parody is the predictable fate of any writing with a distinct or mannered style. (That Wordsworth has been the most frequently parodied English writer testifies to his originality and lasting impact.) Parody at its best is the offspring of genuine love and a slightly oppressive familiarity. Any style can wear out its welcome, grow automatic, and slide over into stereotype. In his wonderful 1960 anthology Parodies, Macdonald includes a generous selection of unconscious self-parodies, with Wordsworth himself copiously represented. A literary style will look risible to a new generation no longer under its spell. Thus Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch” translates Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” into the hard-boiled lingo of film noir, while S. J. Perelman’s “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer” puts precisely these hard-boiled mannerisms into a kvetchy ethnic vernacular. By shearing off whatever the writing might be about, Perelman left the style itself hanging out to dry.

Parody is only a small, if important, subset of light verse. Reading through these volumes, I was surprised at how well “light” verse, at its margins, can accommodate serious subjects. John Gross, in his Oxford Book of Comic Verse, includes a jeering atheist manifesto by James Fenton called “God: A Poem,” which gives us an unusual glimpse of the afterlife:

A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round
Is all that you’ll get from th’Almighty,
Is all that you’ll get underground.

Oh he said: “If you lay off the crumpet
I’ll see you alright in the end.
Just hang on until the last trumpet.
Have faith in me, chum—I’m your friend.”

But if you remind him he’ll tell you:
“I’m sorry, I must have been pissed—
Though your name rings sort of a bell. You
Should have guessed that I do not exist.

I didn’t exist at Creation,
I didn’t exist at the Flood,
And I won’t be around for Salvation
To sort out the sheep from the cud…”

One might ask what this vision of a smirking God, who admits smugly that he doesn’t exist, is doing in an anthology of comic verse: “I’m a crude existential malpractice / And you are a diet of worms,” he tells the disappointed believer, buried in false promises. The comedy, of course, is in the wordplay, the repetitions, the slangy diction, and above all the hypnotic rhythm, which makes so much light verse “light” but here also points to the numb credulity of the believer, living under a spell.

An even more terrifying vision of death can be found in Andrew Hudgins’s Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children. It’s called “When Granddad Says, ‘Please Kill Me,’” and it deals with the right to die by insisting ironically that even the miserably, terminally ill have no such right. It begins:

He can’t control his bowels
and since the stroke he drools,
and sings those dirty army songs
about the family jewels.

After each pair of stanzas detailing Grandpa’s condition, there’s a refrain that begins:

When Granddad says, “Please kill me!”
You mustn’t help him die—
no matter how he begs and pleads
and tries to tell you why.

The rest of the poem is about the handiest ways to end someone’s life and how to help without really helping, the fine lines that must be drawn between mercy killing and assisted suicide:

You can hand Granddad the gun
when you’re a little bigger.
You can even click the safety off,
but you mustn’t pull the trigger.

But if you find a plastic bag
pulled down across his nose,
feel free to shut the bedroom door
and leave on tippy-toes.

Some will find this gruesome, others liberating in its dark comedy. What makes it work is the savage voice, the nursery-rhyme rhythm, and the fiction that it is addressed to children, albeit “very, very bad children,” instructing them about life, or rather the end of life.

In Ben Milder’s book What’s So Funny About the Golden Years we can almost hear the voice of Granddad himself, except that the author seems to be in robust health—robust, that is, for a ninetythree- year-old retired professor of Clinical Ophthalmology. Dr. Milder, the author of four previous collections of light verse, takes as his subject the ordinary discomforts of old age—memory loss, vision problems, disc pain, prostate trouble, hemorrhoids, sexual dysfunction—except that they divert rather than horrify him. In the robust poetic culture of the first half of the twentieth century, light verse had been a vehicle for talented amateurs as well as professional poets. Milder’s work is rooted in this lapsed popular tradition. Comic writers, immune to the high-flown thoughts and idealizing bent of their solemn brethren, are prone to reminding us of the limits imposed by our bodies. With gusto, Dr. Milder brings his medical expertise as well as personal experience to the table. Here are stanzas from “The Itch”:

In the daily press, it’s their intention
That none of them would ever mention
Hemorrhoids or their prevention.

One must maintain a bland exterior
While scratching, until one grows wearier,
Incessantly, at one’s posterior….

The site may well be inaccessible,
But the bounds of good taste are transgressible
When the urge to scratch is irrepressible….

So, I am lost in admiration
Of those who, without hesitation,
Risk their own ostracization,

By scratching in the right location,
With undisguised exhilaration,
To reach the seat of their frustration.

Milder’s poems are not as polished as those of his professional counterparts, but he experiments with many of the same thumping verse forms. They make illness comical, even somehow enjoyable, but only by avoiding anything really threatening—the ailments Milder writes about are undignified and annoying rather than potentially fatal. Though focusing on the indignities of old age, his poems are really the vigorous offshoots of a strong constitution, a contented temperament, and an unsinkable joie de vivre.

Very little light verse deals with matters as grave as those explored by Fenton and Hudgins or as embarrassingly physical as those evoked by Milder. At the other extreme, much of it gravitates towards nonsense, which was how the Victorian Edward Lear described his own poetry and drawings. Light verse is often not about anything, instead evincing an exhilaration with language itself, whether as a challenging game or a playful exploration of the resources of man as a language animal. This links it more closely with verses for children rather than with the free verse that holds sway in contemporary poetry. Light verse is musical and mnemonic in an old-fashioned way. Like children’s poetry, it is anchored as much in sound as in sense, if not more.

Though some light verse is garrulous, like Milder’s, or conversational, like Nash’s, it often works best in miniature. It’s the normal challenge of the light verse writer to work within a highly constraining form, one that lays down strict rules or parameters but offers a delightful payoff. Such compressed forms include the epigram, the mock-biographical clerihew, the venerable limerick, and the more recent double dactyl. Schooled in the classics, eighteenth-century English writers wrote brilliant epigrams. The whole style of Augustan writers like Pope is epigrammatic, but an epigram per se is typically an individual rhymed couplet, such as the brutal lines Pope had engraved on the collar of a dog he gave to the Prince of Wales:

I am His Highness’ dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

Coleridge even wrote an epigram about epigrams: “What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole; / Its body brevity, and wit its soul.” Catholic anti-modernists like Hilaire Belloc were especially gifted with epigrammatic wit:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”

(“On His Books”)

Here Belloc somehow combines religion, ambition, and witty wordplay into an epitaph for himself. It’s a form closely related to the epigram, as in his “Epitaph on the Politician”:

Here, richly, with ridiculous display,
The politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Both these examples are included in Russell Baker’s 1986 Norton Book of Light Verse, the most enjoyable anthology of its kind I’ve come across. However, Hollander’s estimable American Wits has easily the most brilliant introduction. Hollander describes the whole upper-middlebrow poetic culture that made light verse possible, and points to a tone of “exuberant irreverence” that modern writers substituted for the “geniality” of earlier light verse. In terms of form, Hollander draws attention to the epigrammatic quality of Parker’s short poems, such as “News Item”: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” The same could be said of Nash’s best-remembered lines, “Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker,” a very short poem that, like William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” is enhanced by its strategic enjambments. And here, delivering a neat pun, is Nash’s “Snap, Crackle, Pop”: “Breakfast foods grow odder and odder: / It’s a wise child that knows its own fodder.”

As brevity is the heart of the epigram, stringently prescriptive forms like the limerick and the double dactyl showcase the light verse writer as miniaturist. Edward Lear’s cleverly compacted “nonsense” limericks make me think of a man in a straitjacket conducting an orchestra, signaling the players by a nod of the head or a shrug of the shoulders. A broad selection has been reprinted by Oxford’s Bodleian Library in a ravishing volume called So Much Nonsense. Except for the proper noun at the end, Lear’s opening line is almost always the same; the short, rhyming third and fourth lines sometimes appear as a single line; and the final, rather flat line—flat in Lear’s limericks, at least—is only a very slight variation on the first, a mere raised eyebrow that gives the poem its subtle twist:

There was an Old Person of Hyde,
Who walked by the shore with his bride,
Till a Crab who came near, fill’d their bosoms with fear,
And they said, ‘Would we’d never left Hyde!’

There was an Old Person of Rimini,
Who said, ‘Gracious! Goodness! O Gimini!’
When they said, ‘Please be still!’ she ran down a hill,
And was never more heard of at Rimini.

There was a Young Lady of Corsica,
Who purchased a little brown saucy-cur;
Which she fed upon ham, and hot raspberry jam,
That expensive Young Lady of Corsica.

Far from being nonsensical, these poems are monuments to English eccentricity. Lear, like Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie, was one of those bachelor eccentrics, probably stunted in his emotional growth, who was able to keep in touch with something ineffably childlike in himself. Though he spent much of his life abroad, he undoubtedly found most foreigners (and foreign words) strange, and therefore threatening, though also delightful.

Each poem is illustrated by a line-drawing as explosively energetic as the poem is buttoned up. The Old Person of Hyde and his bonneted bride look hysterical as they face a crab about four times their size. The Old Person of Rimini seems almost to be skiing down a very steep slope. The much-elongated Young Lady of Corsica is leaning at an impossible angle to minister tenderly to her little black mutt. The alliance between light verse and draftsmanship is as strong as its link with poetry for children; Beerbohm’s caricatures were as deft as his parodies. As Lear’s limericks are all about the rhyme, his illustrations are all about the line. Both the poems and the drawings portray a timeless world that, despite its little social markers, has no context and no history. Their manner is fussy, their values quaint, but their spare technique is self-conscious, reflexive, and curiously modern. (Where Lear’s method is almost inhumanly rigorous, a legion of later limerick writers would be more flexible in their use of the form.)

If the rolling anapestic meter of limericks sounds comical in English, so does its opposite, the dactyl, and its sing-song effect is only heightened in the double dactyl, which begins with a nonsense line and is composed of two quatrains. The first must include a double-dactylic name (such as Hans Christian Anderson or Gustav von Aschenbach), while the second must contain a single double-dactylic word ranging from the ordinary (like heterosexual) to the recherché (Epipsychidion, Misericordia). In 1967 Hecht and Hollander gathered an initial harvest of these poems in Jiggery-Pokery. Like all such impacted forms, the double dactyl encourages a play of wit, but the result is often a polysyllabic tongue-twister. Here is Hecht’s reduction of Book V of Paradise Lost (Milton seems irresistible to comic writers):

Higgledy-piggledy
Archangel Raphael,
Speaking of Satan’s re-
Bellion from God,

“Chap was decidedly
Tergiversational,
Given to lewdness and
Rodomontade.”

This makes the double dactyl seem like sesquipedalian calisthenics for mandarin writers, form for form’s sake, though just the stuff to beef up the reader’s vocabulary. I have yet to read a double dactyl that has the weight of Belloc’s mock-epitaph for himself, something funny-serious, not merely funny. But its sound is as irresistible as its small, definite lexical challenge. It was Byron who, in Beppo and Don Juan, showed how feminine endings, ubiquitous in Italian, generally sound comic in English—an effect that has made them a permanent resource for light verse writers and serious comic poets. As long as the iambic foot remains the default unit for English meter, verse written in three-beat feet, using anapests or dactyls, and verse deploying feminine rhymes, dragging extra syllables with a dying fall, will always have a slightly subversive feeling.

Even Nash, who had his own rhythm, not as prosaic as it looked, sometimes aspired to the pure lilt of nonsense, with its touches of surrealism and derangement, its potential for music unbound from meaning. One of his best and most unusual poems, “The Private Dining Room,” begins:

Miss Rafferty wore taffeta,
Miss Cavendish wore lavender.
We ate pickerel and mackerel
And other lavish provender.

The rest of this longish poem offers nonstop musical variations on these lines and syllables. Dactylic words like “Rafferty,” “taffeta,” and “lavender” induce a kind of lexical bliss that issues in words invented solely to consort with them, as if to confirm Auden’s view that authentic poets are interested in coupling words rather than expounding subjects. Yet, “as the wine improved the provender,” these dizzying variations bend the language to mimic a state of inebriation, along with a loss of inhibition. “We boggled mackled pickerel, / And bumpers did we quaffeta.” The whirligig continues:

Miss Rafferty in taffeta
Grew definitely raffisher.
Miss Cavendish in lavender
Grew less and less stand-offisher.

This is Nash’s version of “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” It would be hard to say what makes the poem so exhilarating, beyond the feeling it conveys of a writer, mockingly superior in his way yet simply drunk on words, rhyming almost beyond the limits of the language. In doing so, he also brings back a silly and endearing social world, thirty years past, not by describing but by enacting it, sounding it out. This is light verse no longer on holiday but on the job.

By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt

Translated from the French by Euan Cameron

Alfred A. Knopf

New York, 2010, pp. 448

Published in Moment Magazine (Nov.-Dec 2010) 

Is it possible that one of the most talented Jewish writers of the twentieth century, a victim of the Holocaust no less, was also an anti-Semite? Could it be that such a writer was somehow in league with the forces that would single her out and eventually kill her, that she would share their demeaning images of Jews and lean on their personal support, even as her livelihood, her freedom, her very life hung in the balance? Critics have argued that this was precisely the case with Irene Némirovsky, whose background was Russian and Jewish but who published prolifically in France between the wars before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942.

Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. Her mother, the vain and selfish Anna, was from an affluent, cultivated Jewish family. Her father Leonid’s background was humble, but he made his fortune as an industrialist, an international deal-maker, and finally a banker. This fortune was large enough to support his wife’s appetite for luxury, including jewelry and furs, a French nanny for Irene, and annual visits to fashionable French watering holes like Nice and Biarritz. French became Irne’s first language, as France was the country of her dreams. As their wealth grew, the family moved to St. Petersburg when Irne was ten, then fled the country during the Russian revolution, first to Finland, then to Sweden and France when life in Russia became impossible for bankers.

In the Paris of the 1920s, Irene lived the high times of a flapper before settling down to study literature. She married another Russian Jew, Michel Epstein, a banker’s son, in 1926, and took up writing, for which she showed an early, fluent gift. Her first published works were satirical sketches but she also worked for four years on a serious novel, David Golder, that channeled a nightmare version of her family triangle. Set in the wealthy émigré world of Biarritz and Paris, it centered on a narcissistic, promiscuous mother; a father, the title character, who lives to make money; and their grasping daughter, the apple of her father’s eye, who turns out to be the daughter of one of her mother’s lovers. Though Golder eventually discovers this, he works himself to death to insure the girl an inheritance. Focusing on the mother’s vanity, the father’s materialism, and the daughter’s ingratitude, David Golder could serve as a melodrama for the Yiddish stage, yet its Dostoevskyan intensity makes it difficult to put down. When it came out in 1929 it made Némirovsky famous. The book was translated into several languages, adapted as a play, and turned into a successful film.

Némirovsky’s fame, if not her large sales, continued through the decade, but a shadow fell over her work. Some took note that the novel’s hook-nosed, money-grubbing characters, etched in the author’s disgust, read like anti-Semitic stereotypes. Others welcomed the book for the same reason. France between the wars, though it gave grudging shelter to poor and rich refugees from Eastern Europe, was also a hotbed of anti-Semitism, especially after the exposure and suicide of a con man named Stavisky – the Madoff of his day – in 1934. Even before this affair brought down the government, right-wing nationalists felt their country was being overrun by aliens, and they filled the pages of their newspapers and magazines with invective against Jews, especially the kinds of “foreign” Jews, poor and unassimilated, who populated the Marais quarter of Paris. The same journals and publishers were bringing out Némirovsky’s work; the same reactionary editors and writers became her closest literary friends. It seemed as though a talented Jew, an “exceptional” Jew, was confirming their worst prejudices against her own people.

Némirovsky’s own defense was that her work was personal, not political. Jews were her material, and “this was how I saw them.” Besides, she asked disingenuously, “why would a people refuse to be seen as they are, with their good qualities and faults?” The same hollow arguments ring even less true in the hands of her biographers, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, whose diligent but often tone-deaf work, awkwardly translated by Euan Cameron, is marred by special pleading on this issue. As Hitler came to power, with Jews as his designated victims, these chroniclers insist that she could not let this affect her work: “She was not going to fall into the trap of commiseration.” On “her own indifference to her Jewish roots,” which led to her conversion to Catholicism in 1939, they approvingly cite Virginia Woolf’s “freedom from unreal loyalties,” such as tribe, nation, or religion. Yet Némirovsky remained unswervingly loyal to France even as it isolated and abandoned her, rejecting her bid for citizenship well before the war. 

 Thanks to their assiduous research, Némirovsky’s biographers supply helpful contexts for understanding her work: her Russian and family background, her copious working notes for each book, the reactions of contemporaries to her work, and the shifting political tides that finally swamped her life. But they offer little literary sense of her books except to troll them for biographical detail. Their own writing too often aims for the lyrical and rhetorical, in a barely translatable French style, when it should be novelistic and direct. Above all they have a faulty sense of Jewish issues, as when they describe the three classic Yiddish writers as “Sforim, Peretz, and Aleichem,” as if these were their last names, or explain that “in receiving unction, Irène Némirovsky was displaying a Jewish awareness. For nothing was preventing her, after all, from remaining irreligious.” Elsewhere they describe her Jewish stereotypes as her way of exposing such stereotypes.

Némirovsky’s only loyalty to Jews was as subjects. They were, she insisted, her “guinea pigs,” the people whose lives she knew. Except for her devoted nanny, who eventually took her own life, her childhood was cold and she felt deprived of affection She quotes Oscar Wilde: “Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” In book after book she returns to the monstrous, self-absorbed mother, the distracted father, wheeling and dealing, and the bright, castaway daughter, starved for affection. She is obsessed by the “child who has not been loved, and who, later, never has enough love,” and she writes with feeling about “the little girl who loathes her mother.” The paradox of Némirovsky’s work is that she hated the rich Jews who surrounded her as she grew up and took her revenge on them in her fiction, yet she shared their prejudice against the poor Jews with whom they hated to be identified.

Her reliance on personal history comes to end with the war, and especially the German occupation that began in 1940. As Némirovsky discovers that neither her conversion, her literary fame, nor her right-wing friends can protect her family, she turns into a different kind of writer. Still too trusting, too fatalistic to flee occupied France, she takes refuge in a village in Burgundy and conceives a vast historical novel, modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, that would convey the intimate experience of the French defeat, the desperate and chaotic exodus from Paris, and the occupation itself, as observed within a town very much like the one where she was living. Working anxiously under ominous conditions, cut off from her income and suspecting that this would be a posthumous work, she managed to complete two of the five novellas that would have composed her Suite Française. But she was arrested by French police on July 13, 1942 and, within two days, shipped to Auschwitz, where she died, probably of typhus, a month later. Discovered by her daughter among her papers and published more than sixty years later, the book brought her far greater fame than David Golder, yet it also revived the old controversies about her work and her unsavory political associations.

In this last work Jews are hardly mentioned; instead it’s ordinary French and Germans, strange, suspicious bedfellows, who intrigue her. Némirovsky is writing history as it unfolds, rooted not in her own family but in the rural French society around her, with its ingrained folkways, class conflicts, and thwarted youthful passions. She had always been a gifted storyteller, poised between a cool irony that undercuts her characters’ self-deceptions and a detached empathy for their dreams and disappointments. Yet in some ways it is her story, for it depicts individual lives nearly helpless in the grip of large historical forces. In revealing passages she shows what it is like to live in the lion’s mouth, simply from day to day, “constantly in fear of death,” and described the urge to write stories, as if “something inside . . . was knocking on an invisible door.” In this remarkable work, addressed to posterity, a writer who had long traded in vivid caricatures, founded on personal grievance, taps into a clear spring of humanity that would not have embarrassed Tolstoy or Chekhov.

At a recent performance the audience seemed riveted by this spectacle. A man in a ramshackle office, rather bored, with time on his hands, reads aloud from a battered paperback, with some of his coworkers gradually chiming in as they take up roles in the book he is reading. With its antiquated computers, the office looks like a scene from the 1980s, yet, as the book kicks in, this venue shifts effortlessly to the settings in the novel – a commuter train from Long Island, Myrtle Wilson’s love nest, Gatsby’s garish parties. As he grows more engaged, the speaker morphs from a contemporary bond trader into Fitzgerald’s rueful and eloquent narrator, Nick Carraway, through whom all the shadowy turns of the story are filtered, along with its central figure, Gatsby himself.

Carraway conjures up Fitzgerald’s scenes and characters in a fashion that has little precedent in modern theater. Long-form adaptation has a lineage going back mainly to the 1980s, with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s marathon version of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, the landmark TV dramatization of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and Steppenwolf’s epic recreation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which held its own beside John Ford’s classic film version. Each of these productions was the watchword in fidelity, capturing and bringing to life virtually every page of a long fictional text.

Gatz is a different matter, as its title suggests, for The Great Gatsby fiercely resists translation into another medium. As a narrated work, with so much of its plot impressionistically recalled rather than enacted, it violates the first commandment of all writing programs – show, don’t tell – along with the Jamesian imperatives of the scenic art. We hear about the enigmatic Gatsby long before we actually see him, and key elements of his backstory – his courtship of Daisy, his apprenticeship to Dan Cody and assumption of a new identity, his Midwestern childhood – trickle out much later, each of them reaching further back into the past, not as flashbacks but as luminous summaries, an infinite regress of stories within stories. Even some of the “present” action, like Myrtle’s death and Gatsby’s murder, are imparted to us second hand, by report, like masticated rumor; here too, Carraway is said to be writing two years after the events he reports. This kind of narration can sometimes be found in movies, from the flashbacks of Citizen Kane and film noir to the voiceover, taken straight from the original book, in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, but almost it’s almost never seen on the stage. It demands a novel kind of theater, here supplied by the director John Collins and his wonderfully named company, the Elevator Repair Service, and especially by the indefatigable Scott Shepherd, who plays Nick Carraway and reads the text with a fluency and stamina that are almost indescribable.

Nothing is more central to the novel than Nick’s bittersweet ruminations. Everything that happens passes through his consciousness, and Gatz, to a remarkable extent, manages to put consciousness on the stage. One might compare his role to that of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, except that Nick, far from being an omniscient voice, is very much part of the action. But the challenge posed by Fitzgerald’s work is not simply in Carraway’s narration, with its mixed tones of scorn and admiration for Gatsby, his satiric contempt for those around him and awed wonder at the foolish grandiosity of his vision. The greatest difficulty lies is in the prose itself, which is often so impalpable and poetic that it matches Gatsby’s own soaring ambitions: “Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.” How do you transmit this except by reading it aloud, not too fervently but with empathetic feeling and yet a reserved detachment, a trace of ironic distance? It can’t be staged; it can only be evoked as a mysterious spectacle of human longing, a half-benighted dream of the absolute.

Fitzgerald’s descriptions of his characters and the places they live and work pose a similar problem, for Fitzgerald puts his own spin on every phrase. Of Gatsby’s old father, who stumbles onto the scene after his death, impressed by what his son became, we’re told that “his eyes leaked continuously with excitement.” Gatsby’s rented mansion is described as “that huge incoherent failure of a house.” These are not the descriptions we expect from realistic fiction but attitudes, metaphoric glosses. Gatz rises to this challenge simply by retaining Fitzgerald’s prose, every word of it, and leaving the visual detail to the imagination, as Fitzgerald himself largely does. Astonishingly, it works. After eight hours, not a single member of the audience had left the theater, weary as they may have been.

Embedded in this narration were plenty of scenes that worked well for the stage. When Gatsby and Daisy, Gatsby and the brutish Tom, Gatsby and Carraway directly confronted each other’s hopes and illusions, the company found ingenious ways of putting them across. Gatsby’s absurd parties, for example, were evoked by a stage littered with office paper. Tom Buchanan, a racist and nascent fascist, has never seemed so casually coarse, or Daisy so flighty and ambivalent, so trapped, or Gatsby so opaque, so high-minded yet self-deceived. But they were all framed by Nick’s (and Scott Shepherd’s) enfolding narration. In the end the audience was less mesmerized by these fragments of straightforward drama than caught up in the rapture of language that beats at the poetic heart of the novel. The stage and the page have rarely seemed so well matched.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives,” a point confounded by his own best work during the Depression decade. But in our time the great exception has been Philip Roth, who has creatively reinvented himself in every decade. As he entered his sixties in the 1990s, at a time when most writers would be slowing down, he produced half a dozen of his most ambitious books, from the affecting memoir Patrimony (1991) and the outrageously brilliant Sabbath’s Theater (1995) to the history-minded trilogy that began with American Pastoral (1997). In the past decade his career took yet another unexpected turn with half a dozen short novels from The Dying Animal (2001), which could stand as the title of the whole series, to the current Nemesis, his fifth novel in five years. These books are unfailingly dark and grim yet they pull you right in. The rolling periods of his long, sinuous sentences, the uncanny sense of actually being there – in a world of real people , or simply in the knotty mind of the protagonist – can be amazing.

A writer’s late books, beset by flagging energy and invention, rarely add major works to the literary legacy. But they can be fascinating as they revisit earlier themes with fresh lenses: a pitiless awareness of aging, an encroaching sense of mortality. Roth’s recent novels are obsessed with death but also focus on all that can lead up to it, illness of every kind, waning physical powers, impotence, as well as memory loss, loneliness, and depression. Sometimes these books are salted with anger at the young, simply for being young, having all that time ahead of them, but they also pulse with sexual attraction to the young, also for being young. Even the books set in the past, taking Roth back to the scenes from his own youth, push inexorably toward death. The hero of Indignation (2008), thrown out of college much like the one Roth attended, will die in Korea. Nemesis, which deals with a polio outbreak in Roth’s Newark in the summer of 1944, is saturated with death, the foreboding of death, and the bitter, pointless protest against it. Roth’s settling on polio as a subject is inspired – I can still recall the fears that haunted parents through the1940s and 1950s – yet his controlled and well-researched account of the epidemic raises troubling questions.

Roth’s protagonists have typically come in two stripes. There are the lecherous ones, narcissistic and offensive, who grab life by the horns, take as much as they can get, and deride those who are more timid or repressed, especially the family types hemmed in by conventional morality. (In The Dying Animal the main character, Kepesh, who has lived according to his libidinal lights, mocks his troubled 42-year-old son for actually caring what other people think of him.) For these self-absorbed characters “old age is a shipwreck” – as De Gaulle said of Marshal Pétain – and the very thought of death robs life of meaning.

But Roth’s books can have another kind of protagonist, fundamentally good or simply youthful and innocent, perhaps a devoted son (like the writer himself in Patrimony) or a conscientious father, the product of centuries of moral discipline (such as the Swede in American Pastoral). At his best Roth can combine these two strands. The wild comic energies of Portnoy’s Complaint, along with its psychological insight, are grounded not solely in Portnoy’s raging id but in all the trouble it brings him, its conflict with “strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses,” including a well-developed sense of guilt.

Bucky Cantor, the superb athlete, playground director, and waterfront counselor of Nemesis, is a younger version of that Good Man, Swede Levov, and he’ll be punished for his goodness – or will punish himself – even more harshly than the Swede, whose daughter, as a wild young sixties radical, becomes his worst nightmare. Essentially an orphan – his father was a thief, his mother died in childbirth – Bucky has been raised by a caring grandmother and a grandfather whose life is a lesson in duty, honor, and fearless masculinity. At twenty-three Bucky is engaged to a woman he loves, with whom he has idyllic sex. Only his bad eyesight has kept him out of the war, much to his chagrin, and he brings the firm conviction of battle to the war on the home front that he cannot win, a war against a mysterious virus, against fear itself.

Toward his youthful charges, threatened by the spread of the disease, Bucky is an a role model, even a hero, bringing physical grace and courage to everything he does. But when he feels that he may have brought the polio virus into their young lives, he turns his sense of duty on himself, first blaming God for bringing such misery into the world, then castigating himself for being its carrier. Later, when he himself falls ill, he simply opts out of his life, even after he manages a partial recovery. Deaf to the emotional pleas of his fiancée and the entreaties of her father, a doctor he warmly admires, Bucky insists that he can’t allow her to throw away her life on a “cripple,” even one she desperately loves. He feels he is “no longer man enough to be a husband and a father.” (258) Now deeply bitter, he sees this renunciation as “his last opportunity to be a man of integrity.” (262) Possessed by this high-minded motive, undone by his conscience, he tosses away his own life instead.

How credible is this? Would anyone really take such a high line, at his own expense? Despite its fatalistic title, which suggests divine retribution, Nemesis is a realistic novel, not a parable. Roth’s playful adventures with postmodern narrative in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock are long behind him. Like American Pastoral and the books that followed, Nemesis is an meticulous recreation of the times. Its portrayal of polio, of athletic competition and summer camping, of Newark itself in 1944, spins out a tissue of Updikean detail, minutely researched, with up-front acknowledgment of Roth’s sources. But like so many realistic writers going back to Hardy, Norris, and Dreiser, Roth also has a vision, a thematic grid he imposes on the action. He cannot resist putting his thumb on the scales to ensure that things will go badly for his characters, not in spite of their goodness but because they are good, and because our world is indifferent to good and evil alike. Roth draws deliberate parallels between the war abroad and the death of these children at home. For Bucky this means that God, if he exists, is cruel and life itself absurd. This stark outlook, so far from the comic turns of his early work, goes back to the existentialists who were in vogue when Roth was young but also much further back to the protesting and suffering hero of the Book of Job, on which Nemesis is a series of variations.

Despite the undoubted impact of this novel, this disturbing vision bends the story in an unlikely direction. When Bucky gives up on life and becomes a kind of recluse, it seems less the result of gnostic theology or an exacerbated ideal of manhood than of sheer depression. Many polio victims overcame physical disabilities to lead productive lives, not only FDR but writers like Wilfrid Sheed and Leonard Kriegel, who married, raised children, and also wrote prolifically. Kriegel, exactly Roth’s age, once an avid athlete like Bucky Cantor, was stricken with polio the same summer of 1944. He went on to grapple with his experience in a series of arresting memoirs and meditations on manhood including The Long Walk Home, Falling Into Life, On Men and Manhood, and Flying Solo. The narrator of Nemesis, one of Bucky’s young playground admirers, also surmounts polio to construct a life for himself. “You look like a contented man,” Bucky tells him, perhaps sardonically, when they meet again in 1971. But Roth invests little interest in this man except as a foil for Bucky and a vehicle for his story. He serves as Nick Carraway to Bucky’s Gatsby, but he’s not even identified until forty pages from the end, and Roth gives him no narrative voice distinct from his own.

If Roth were a different writer, then this narrator, someone who didn’t give up, might have been at the center of his polio story, not Bucky. But Roth’s dark mood of the past decade made this out of the question. As he does with the stricken boys, Roth rubs in the harsh contrast between vigorous, hopeful creature Bucky once was and the living wreck he became, as deformed in mind as in body. The novel ends with a recollection of one of his great athletic feats, a virtuoso demonstration of throwing the javelin, which Roth turns into an exercise in bittersweet irony, a terrible might-have-been.

Roth’s trademark has always been to take things to extremes, even to the breaking point. His voice, pitched like Kafka’s between humor and anguish, turned him into a man on fire. In Portnoy’s Complaint, The Anatomy Lesson, and Sabbath’s Theater this fierce energy gave his work tremendous power. But in other works such as American Pastoral, with its far-fetched depiction of demented young terrorists, the same vivid excess led him into blatant distortion. Roth’s output – this is his thirty-first book in fifty years – remains one of the wonders of the literary world. But there was no way a “contented man,” a husband and father who managed against fearsome odds to achieve an ordinary life, would ever fill the bill as the protagonist of a Philip Roth novel.

When Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker, swept the Academy Awards, it was a signal triumph for a plucky independent movie on a grave topical subject. Directed by a woman and made in Jordan without the usual cooperation from the Department of Defense, the movie was not released during awards rush at the end of the year but in the summer, ordinarily a time for mindless comedies and action films. Very much an action film itself, it reached out to a mass audience but did not find it, despite a sheaf of excellent reviews. In no way polemical, set in 2004 at a low point in the war, it was full of gripping life-and-death scenes that neither glorified the war as a scene of heroism nor condemned it for the political deception, wretched planning, and wanton loss of life that made those years so disastrous. Instead, like the best World War II movies, it focused on the tensions within a small group of men doing a dangerous but essential job.

Most popular films trying to engage weighty matters like war or politics inevitably personalize the conflicts but also resort to conventional thriller devices that trivialize the subject or dispose of it superficially. Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, built around a Tony Blair-like figure and his clueless aide, a ghost writer helping him with his memoirs, works beautifully for an hour and half, but then devolves into a far-fetched thriller hinging on the machinations of the CIA. Jim Sheridan’s Brothers, based on an earlier Danish film, recounts the absorbing story of a marine officer, presumed dead in Afghanistan, who returns home, haunted by something terrible he did as a captive there, only to find that his wastrel brother has gotten very close to his wife. Though sensitively directed and impressively acted by a first-rate cast, the movie is subverted by contrived turns of plot, a few lurid scenes, and the threadbare motif of the traumatized, emotionally unhinged war veteran.

One problem is that cataclysmic events like the September 11, 2001, attacks or the Iraq War received exhaustive media coverage. Journalistic yet fictionalized accounts have little to add, and audiences, already depressed by what actually happened, have little desire to revisit it. They stay away in droves.

Some war movies, along with many movies on political subjects, are simply thrillers from start to finish, with ample suspense but little purchase on reality. But The Hurt Locker, written by a reporter (Mark Boal) who was embedded with a unit dismantling explosive devices, brings the war home in a different way. Unfolding at a time when Iraq itself had become one large minefield for American forces, it opens with a breathtaking prologue showing a soldier killed while trying to disarm such a device. His replacement, played by Jeremy Renner, is a classic American figure, the loner, the cowboy, the war lover. Gifted with foolhardy courage and resourceful know-how, he gets an adrenaline rush from plunging into danger. He takes chances that frighten his fellow soldiers, including Anthony Mackie, a black man, equally courageous but cautious, sensible, a team man who plays by the rules and wants to stay alive. The tension between them makes for the heart of the movie.

With its brilliant use of mobile and handheld cameras and a vividly realistic soundtrack and detonations, The Hurt Locker feels like some ideal television coverage of one terrible war. The subjective camerawork conveys the agitation and fear endemic to urban warfare, with no front, where every scene, every civilian, must be scanned as a potential threat. Wherever possible the team uses wellprogrammed robots (think WALL-E) to disarm explosives, a form of mechanized warfare that gives the film a playful, Star Wars touch. But Renner’s wild man character, something of a rowdy loner, takes us back to the film’s epigraph from reporter Chris Hedges: “war is a drug.” This must also refer to the war as a whole, a “war of choice,” a piece of American hubris. Gifted at what he does, Renner is thwarted only by domestic life back home, where we see him stupefied by the hundred varieties of cereal on the supermarket shelf. In Iraq he is surrounded by stealth combatants whose ingenuity he admires, yet his passion for danger brings him alive, even as it terrifies everyone around him.

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The main lesson to be drawn from this riveting film is that only an oblique angle of vision, not a head-on encounter, can do justice to a large public conflict depleted by journalistic attention and political rhetoric. The same can be said of the other really fine Iraq War film of 2009, Oren Moverman’s The Messenger, a quieter movie that should have received some of the accolades lavished on The Hurt Locker. Set on the home front, it also deals with the tension between two soldiers, whose mission is not to deactivate bombs but to inform the next-of-kin of fatal casualties. This can lead to another kind of explosion: anger, grief, even violence. The senior officer, a barely recovered alcoholic played by Woody Harrelson, does this painful work by strict formula: an impersonal message, formal regrets from the secretary of defense, no grief counseling, no real contact, and especially no touching, no matter how emotional the scene becomes. His new partner, the messenger of the title, played with unfathomable depth by Ben Foster, has only partly recovered from injuries sustained from a bomb in Iraq, and he eventually balks at the detachment these rigid rules impose on him. “We walk into these people’s lives, we don’t know shit,” he says. “Fuck procedure. They’re human beings.” Dumped by his girlfriend while he was at war, plagued by guilt over the death of a fellow soldier he had tried to rescue, he is attracted to a woman (Samantha Morton) whom he has just informed of the death of her husband.

Unlike some of the other bereaved survivors, Morton has taken the news with exceptional dignity. The war, it turns out, had changed her husband, made him coarse and unfeeling, no longer the man she loved and married. But as far as the world can see, Foster seems to be taking advantage of her vulnerability. A damaged man, he needs a real person in his life, where Harrelson, the classic tough guy, needs only an easy lay for the night or weekend. Eventually, in the way of most buddy movies, the angry differences between the two men come to a head, and they spill their guts to each other.

The movie, like Sheridan’s Brothers, focuses less on the war than on the human connections sundered by war. Each of the half-dozen grim announcements the men undertake elicits a different reaction, ranging from fury or hysteria to passive, sorrowful acceptance. The army’s impersonal code proves unequal to the emotional strain of these tragic losses. Foster’s role is mostly a silent one; the camera spends much of the time exploring his brooding face and lanky, restless frame, tormented by feelings he can scarcely understand or express. Instead, he works out ferociously or punches a hole in the wall. Masculinity in The Hurt Locker is a form of acting out, playing John Wayne; in The Messenger it’s the obligation to seal things in, to keep emotions at bay. One movie, a noisy one, sees the war as dangerously intoxicating; the other tallies up the deficits that flow from it, above all the internal injuries. Neither is directly “about” the war, which is why they pursue its fallout so effectively. They find an unexpected opening that enables them to humanize an unbearable subject.

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Another indirect way of grasping the effects of social trauma, surprisingly, is comedy. We don’t yet have films that do justice to the Great Recession—such catastrophes take time to be assimilated—but the first good try may be Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, a film planned before the economic collapse. Based on a 2001 novel by Walter Kirn, it’s about a gun for hire, a man (George Clooney at his most insidiously charming) brought in by downsizing companies to fire people. Traveling constantly, building up his frequent flier miles as a lofty target, he lives happily in the sterile environment of airports, planes, and hotel rooms, at great remove from the messy actualities of people’s lives, especially those he sends packing. (The movie is dotted with scenes from up in the air, bird’s-eye views of the American landscape.) Like Woody Harrelson, he muffles the impact of his work with antiseptic formulas, scrupulously avoiding words like “fired” the way Harrelson shuns “died” or “killed.” But, as in the classic romantic comedies, he meets his match in a woman— two women, actually—one (Vera Farmiga) who also lives to travel, the other (Anna Kendrick) belonging to an efficient younger generation, who thinks people can be fired even more impersonally, by computer. Joining his firm, she effectively threatens to fire him, making his job redundant and bringing him back to Omaha, where he lives as the occasional visitor, in a home starker than any hotel room.

As in any romantic comedy (but with an economic twist), Clooney’s smug self-sufficiency must be brought to heel. He feels obliged to show Kendrick that her high-tech approach to terminating workers is too heartless: “There’s a dignity to the way we do it,” he says. But his hollow, formulaic sympathy for his victims shows up the whole enterprise. Meanwhile he begins to fall for Farmiga, who had seemed happy to remain his occasional lay, his narcissistic double: “Just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina,” she tells him as they’re getting to know each other. But she turns out to have a life of her own, with no room for serious romantic involvement, which leaves him adrift, as much alone as he boldly claimed he wanted to be. No happy endings here.

In most romantic comedy, love prevails over resistance and suspicion, but here the formula is set up to be exploded. Clooney’s neat prescriptions for eliminating redundant workers founder as well, undermined by the filmed responses of real people who had actually been fired, people in Detroit and St. Louis whom Reitman interviewed once the recession got under way. Clooney’s breezy charm gives the movie its brio, but these cameos of the unemployed, like the reactions of the bereaved in The Messenger, give this high concept fable its bite and aftertaste, its touch of authenticity. While future movies about the recession may focus more on documenting damaged or grimly marginal lives, this comedy proved surprisingly effective at tallying human losses even in a “jobless recovery.”

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Such an oblique approach works well not only for contemporary issues, which usually need time to marinate before being thoughtfully addressed, but also with overexposed historical subjects. One of them is the rise of fascism, which Bernardo Bertolucci (adapting an Alberto Moravia novel) handled in The Conformist by tracing the evolution of a fascist personality. In A Special Day, Ettore Scola took on an unlikely relationship between a beleaguered homosexual (Marcello Mastroianni) who has lost his job and an overworked housewife (Sophia Loren) whose family has gone off to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s 1938 visit to Italy. Two new entries, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (Win), relocate our perspective on fascism even further.

Both films begin in the years just before World War I, supposedly a time of innocence, before the mass horrors of the twentieth century; the very word Sarajevo intrudes into them like a tolling bell. The White Ribbon is the best yet of Haneke’s bleak studies of cruelty, corruption, and evil. An old man looks back from the 1970s to recall the mysterious doings when he was a schoolteacher in a small north German town: mischievous accidents, deaths, and suicides, children molested by adults or hazed and tortured by other children. The town is dominated by a rigid patriarchal system epitomized by a feudal baron, who is the local landlord, and his family; by a severe minister who keeps a disciplinary stranglehold over his children; and by a widowed doctor who abuses his fourteen-year-old daughter and spews contempt at his mistress, a homely midwife helping him raise his children. In the axis of the film, these domineering fathers spawn a band of quietly vicious children, a toxic younger generation that will eventually invest its collective will in Hitler. Their superficial innocence, like the picturesque surface of the town, is a mask for profound corruption. The only genuine innocence belongs to the powerless schoolteacher, thwarted when he tries to get to the bottom of all the violence, and to his young fiancée, a scapegoat when she is fired as the nanny of the baron’s children. He provides the eloquent but distant voiceover that pieces the story together many years later.

To call this the genesis of fascism, of course, is an overstatement, a historical conceit on Haneke’s part. But it would be hard to imagine a more powerfully realized portrait of village life before the war. The black-and-white cinematography and static camerawork, along with a meticulous recreation of the look of the times, creates a visual census on a par with the photographs of August Sander. Intimate close-ups are reserved for the teacher and his intended, as if only they were moved by genuine feeling; others are portrayed at a great remove, to show how rigidly circumscribed they are by their setting and the social roles they play. The children roam around mysteriously in bands and act stricken when adults interrogate them. We almost never see acts of violence, only its results; they are the town’s buried secrets. But verbal violence, masking itself in respectability, is there on the surface, stinging words that enforce a stagnant social order.

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This choked atmosphere is completely different from the superheated scene in Vincere, which centers on the young Benito Mussolini and the woman he marries and discards, along with their child, in his relentless rise to power. When he makes violent love to her we see the glint in his eyes, already fixed on wider conquests, as he gazes greedily over her shoulder. Then he races to the balcony, stark naked, to imagine a vast adoring crowd at his feet. Described this way it seems like the story of a crudely opportunistic man, drunk on adulation, who screws his mistress the way he’ll ruthlessly screw the whole nation. First a socialist, fiercely against war, critical of the power of the church, he eventually gets into bed with all the forces he once opposed, signing a concordat with the church and making war and empire the heart of his demagogic appeal. He lauds Futurist art for its glorification of war and looks back to the Roman Empire as his model. Bellocchio, born in 1939, splices in newsreels of Mussolini’s speeches that must reflect his generation’s puzzlement that Il Duce could seduce a nation with such clownish antics. The dictator’s rejected son—played by the same actor, Filippo Timi, who embodies the young Mussolini—even parodies his father’s public mannerisms in a wild display of mockery and attraction, for he longs to be recognized by him.

For better or worse, however, the film belongs to Mussolini’s cast-off lover, Ida Dalser, played with operatic grandeur by Giovanna Mezzogiorno. Her obsession with Mussolini gradually turns her into something like the mad heroines of the bel canto tradition. She is not mad except in her lifelong refusal to surrender her claim on him, but the regime shunts her off into asylums, foreshadowing the way later dictatorships would silence their dissidents. She writes endless letters to people in power, none of which reach their destination, and she destroys her own life by refusing to give up. Finally, both she and her son die in mysterious circumstances, supposedly of natural causes.

Dalser’s full story became known only in the last few years, in two books and a television documentary that inspired Bellocchio’s film. Besides the ever-present fascination with fascism, part of its appeal is contemporary. Mussolini came to power from journalism the way the current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, built his political career on his media empire, which deflects most effective opposition and shelters him from criticism. He too has been embarrassed by his sexual adventures. Though Bellocchio has told interviewers that he sees no nostalgia for Mussolini in Italy today, he implicitly suggests an analogy in the concentration of wealth, social influence, and political power in a single man.

The weakness of the film, despite overwhelming performances, is that it feels so airless to be locked in with Mussolini’s ranting and Dalser’s obsessions, which are purely personal, in no way political. This is the disadvantage of this kind of indirect treatment of urgent social or historical concerns: the unusual angle they provide can seem like no angle at all, only a projection of the filmmaker’s recurrent obsessions: Haneke’s preoccupation with the moral rot that festers beneath the social surface, Bellocchio’s fascination with how large personal emotions— such as Mussolini’s overweening ambition, his sense of himself as Italy’s savior—intersect with political life to influence the destiny of nations. But the alternative is the repetition of stale journalistic or historical clichés, which only a few rigorous directors (such as Roberto Rossellini) have managed to avoid in taking on such momentous social subjects.