Published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 2007
 
 
T. S. Eliot once wrote that there were two ways good writers could court recognition – either by publishing so much they turned up everywhere or by publishing so little that each work, perfectly crafted, would become a literary event. Eliot himself took both courses, writing reams of critical prose (but collecting it selectively), and bringing out poems only at widely spaced intervals, each a marker in a carefully plotted career. Curiously, Eliot did not mention another approach which he would also try: polishing your mystique by not publishing at all. Turning to the stage, he wrote almost no new poetry in the decades after Four Quartets.

Some artists opt out at an early age – Rossini in opera, Forster in fiction – but the more ingenious way of not publishing is to create a buzz around work in progress. By offering tantalizing glimpses of ambitious projects, writers arouse expectations that the books themselves, if they do appear, can almost never satisfy. I recall the long wait for Joseph Heller’s second novel, the gossip that attended Truman Capote’s unwritten magnum opus, the anticipation Norman Mailer stoked around unfinished works, including his novel about ancient Egypt. Harold Brodkey’s reputation never quite recovered from the publication of his long-awaited novel, The Runaway Soul. Henry Roth, legendary for his writer’s block, surprised the world with an autobiographical novel some sixty years after Call It Sleep. But there was nothing quite like the awe surrounding Ralph Ellison’s heroic labors over a successor to Invisible Man – protracted for four decades, right up to his death in 1994 at the age of 81. An almost religious hush descended on interviewers when they questioned him about this work, as if the future of American letters depended on it. Unlike Capote, whose book existed largely in his mind, if at all, Ellison could whip out a tape measure and show the sheer bulk of the manuscript, more than 2,000 pages at one point. Some who heard him read aloud from the book were mesmerized; others were just as convinced it was a dud. I avoided the fragments he published in obscure literary journals for fear of tarnishing my imaginary sense of the book, but also out of disbelief that it actually existed.

It was during these years of incompletion that Ellison became one of the most famous writers in the world, in ever-increasing demand for lectures, panels, readings, and service on boards of every kind. It was one thing for him to serve as a judge of the National Book Awards, which he himself had won for Invisible Man in 1953, or Lyndon Johnson’s National Council on the Arts, which led to the creation of the arts and humanities endowments – the first serious federal support for the arts since the New Deal. It was quite another matter to join the board of the Rockefeller-created Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This may have appealed to his feeling for American history but it was also his entrée as a black man into some exclusive precincts of American society. The second half of his life – and the second half of Arnold Rampersad’s vigorous but tendentious new biography – is full of such activities, to the point that they almost certainly became ways of not writing, not finishing, not wrestling with his own demons.

Ellison’s travail over his second novel has usually been ascribed to the size of his ambition. Mingling allegory and allusion with autobiography in a vein rich with dark comedy, Invisible Man covered a large swathe of black and American life, including the aftermath of slavery, the folklore of the rural South, the educational mission of Booker T. Washington, the migration to Harlem, and the ferment of black nationalism and Marxism during the Depression. Its success raised the bar for Ellison. In 1965 a poll of writers, critics, and editors designated it as the most distinguished American novel since the war. A poll today would probably lead to the same consensus. His friend and protégé Stanley Crouch put it best: “The tragedy lies in the weight Ralph put on himself. . . . Ralph wasn’t wary enough of the dangers that come with the magnification of things by one’s imagination. Well, the greater the ambition, the greater the failure. The longer the book remained unfinished, the more excruciating the pain. And for a long time, sadly, he lived with a constant debilitating sense of having failed.” (551)

Arnold Rampersad, the biographer of iconic black role models like Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson, and Arthur Ashe, develops a different explanation. Though the fame of Ellison and his book was growing in the 1960s and 1970s, so were the attacks on him, especially by younger black writers and militants – and so was his comfort level in the white world. The radicalism of the Black Power movement was an updated version of the Garveyite nationalism he had lampooned brilliantly in his novel. As an integrationist, he had little use for their separatism. He despised the usual emphasis on blacks as victims, insisting on the creative adaptations of black culture even under slavery and the crucial role of blacks in the dialectic of American culture. Anticipating the new historiography of slavery, he wrote that “slavery was a most vicious system, and those who endured and survived it a tough people, but it was not . . . a state of absolute repression.” (CE, 284) In a famous exchange with Irving Howe, he wrote that “Howe seems to see segregation as an opaque steel jug with the Negroes inside waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork.” (SA, 123) His refusal to endorse this vision of entrapment and victimization also separated Ellison from the work of his mentor, Richard Wright. Instead he worked out a notion of democratic culture as the great solvent, embracing high and low, rural and urban, black and white. He admired scholars such as Constance Rourke, the author of American Humor (1931), who pioneered the serious study of vernacular culture. In his splendid essay “Living with Music,” he concludes that “in the United States when traditions are juxtaposed they tend, regardless of what we do to prevent it, irresistibly to merge. Thus, musically at least, each child in our town was an heir of all the ages.” (CE, 236)

The phrase “musically, at least” implies an important qualification. Though American music could not be imagined without the cross-fertilization of the races, the barriers to social integration were far greater – but not insuperable, as his own life demonstrated. Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913, not long after the territory became a state. His father died in an accident when Ralph was three, and he grew up in terrific poverty. To support two small boys, his mother worked intermittently as a chambermaid and depended on the kindness of an extended network of family and friends. Ellison’s early gifts were musical, not literary. Offered last-minute admission to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1933, he simply did not have the money to get there, and risked life and limb as a black man hoboing across the country, stealing rides on freight trains. But he made up his mind early on to penetrate white society, to go where he might not be wanted. Invited to his first concert, where he finds himself the only black, he knows people are staring at him but sees it as “an excellent chance to develop poise.” He wanted to be the exception, to seek out the best, which meant going places where few blacks were welcome. Much like aiming for excellence in some branch of art, this required “a very stern discipline.”

“Unlike many other blacks,” Rampersad writes of his early years in New York, “who refused to pay the psychological toll of trying to be friends with whites, [the Ellisons] sought to cement their place in the tiny part of white society that would receive them.” (231) Initially this centered on the world of New York’s Jews but the circle eventually grew much larger. To an unimaginable degree, he succeeded. The drama of the book is in the distance between where he started and what he became. Almost as if it were a personal myth, he lived out the crossover he saw as vital to the dynamic of American social life. But Rampersad insists on the price he paid – in suppressed feelings of rage and insecurity, and finally in the damage it did to his work.

As early as 1954-55, Rampersad begins dropping suggestions of Ellison’s “faltering record” and “eventual decline” as an artist, (313, 98) which he traces to his estrangement from black people, his lack of interest in specifically black literary expression, and, above all, his preference for white friends in elite institutions like the Century Association (the closest equivalent of a London gentlemen’s club) and American Academy of Arts and Letters (which saw itself as a counterpart of the French Academy). In this milieu he was invariably the token black, doing little to bring along others of his race. He took no part in the civil rights movement, arguing that a writer’s duty was to stay at his typewriter and perfect his craft. He rarely yielded an inch when challenged, though at least once he broke down sobbing in public when accused, as he often was, of being an Uncle Tom. He was prepared to tangle with young black interviewers, telling them that “though I lived in the Harlem YMCA, I did not come to New York to live in Harlem, even though I thought of Harlem as a very romantic place. . . . I was not exchanging Southern segregation for Northern segregation, but seeking a wider world of opportunity and, most of all, the excitement and impersonality of a great city. I wanted room in which to discover who I was.” He adds that “one of the first things I had to do was to enter places from which I was afraid I might be rejected. I had to confront my own fears of the unknown.” (CE, 739) A born loner, he relished living on upper Riverside Drive, in a twilight zone very close to Harlem (like the protagonist of Invisible Man) but even closer to the Academy, which is situated anomalously in a poor immigrant neighborhood. He grew prosperous but resisted any move downtown.

Ellison and his wife spent two years at the American Academy in Rome from 1955 to 1957 but he protested when Time magazine coupled him with Wright as expatriate writers. He insisted that black writers in Europe like Wright, Baldwin, and Chester Himes risked losing touch with their material. But Rampersad portrays him in effect as an expatriate in a white world of privilege. Comparing him to his friend Saul Bellow, who “was writing about the world he actually lived in, or he used that solid life as his runway for flights of the imagination,” Rampersad finds that “Ralph, with a growing distance between himself and the black social reality about him, was finding it hard to turn that reality into fiction.” (315) The final verdict in bleak: “His inability to create an art that held a clean mirror up to ‘Negro’ life as blacks actually led it, especially at or near his own social level, was disabling him as a writer. As a novelist, he had lost his way. And he had done so in proportion to his distancing himself from his fellow blacks.” (512-13)

Rampersad is both an able critic and an immensely diligent biographer. He makes good use of Ellison’s papers, especially unpublished letters, to reveal facets of his life and personality, including the inner workings of his marriage, that were completely unknown until now. Ellison himself, in many exemplary essays and interviews, made much of the difficulties of his early years – the death of his father, the struggles of his family to survive, the culture and especially the music that entranced him, the Tuskegee experience, his arrival in Harlem, the months of utter destitution he spent with his brother in Dayton, Ohio in 1937-38, immediately after the death of their mother. Rampersad adds many details about such matters but also about Ellison’s first marriage, about the crisis in his marriage to his second wife Fanny, when he had an affair in Rome with a married woman much younger and taunted her about it, though she had supported him in every way, and virtually effaced herself to do so. At the center of the book, he gives a riveting account of the Ellison’s efforts to complete Invisible Man and the tremendous acclaim that followed its appearance.

Nevertheless, it is clear that at some point Rampersad came to dislike Ellison, despite his respect for his work. With the help of astute comments from observers who knew him well, Rampersad lays bare a vulnerable yet unattractive side of Ellison’s character. Novelist Richard Stern describes him as a “confident, warm, and charming man” who was also “pocked with insecurity, anger, and bitterness” and chronically “countered these feelings with booze.” (383). His anonymous Rome lover, with little sense of his background, tells Rampersad that “he was very angry a great deal of the time” and “was constantly offended by things and incident no one else would notice.” (338) According to the black writer Jervis Anderson, who profiled him in the New Yorker and suffered his slights, he showed “a continuous effort to retain discipline and control over himself, to keep a lid on the volcanic parts of his personality.” (502) Rampersad returns again and again to his friendships with whites, his wariness with ordinary blacks (who may have reminded him of his early poverty), and his failure to help younger black writers who beat a path to his door. In short, he has written a balanced but subtly debunking biography that may darken Ellison’s reputation for years to come, like Lawrence Thompson’s more overtly hostile biography of Robert Frost. In a more intelligent way, it recycles the accusations of snobbery, contented tokenism, and a refusal of solidarity and political activism that Ellison fended off though much of his life. But it also channels them into a diagnosis of his work, even Invisible Man, where they scarcely belong.

Was Ellison really so estranged from blacks? Was his work really damaged by his warm friendships with Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Wilbur and their wives? To Rampersad, in an unusually tortured formulation, “the price he paid for easy association with like-minded whites was a measure of insecurity only heightened by the knowledge that to many blacks this delight was a form of racial betrayal.” (391) Thus the biographer introduces the notion of “racial betrayal” without taking responsibility for it. It’s clear enough that Ellison as a person could be haughty, self-protective, and ungenerous, but he also had a raunchy, down-home side that shows up in his letters to his closest black friend, Albert Murray. It comes through in his warm-blooded fiction, which bridges the chasm between folk motifs and experimental modernism. It goes to the heart of his essays, especially on jazz, which have become an influential part of his legacy, enshrined by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in his Jazz at Lincoln Center and by Ken Burns in his documentary history of jazz.

The charge that he was turned his back on his race founders on the shoals of these evocative pieces that celebrate the local roots of jazz, the competitive interplay between the soloist and the group, and the showmanship of performers like Louis Armstrong as clown and entertainer. The very cadence of these essays enacts his infinite affection for black culture and creativity in the wider context of American life. In a piece on Mahalia Jackson, he describes blues and jazz singing as

an art which depends upon the employment of the full expressive resources of the human voice – from the rough growls employed by blues singers, the intermediate sounds, half-cry, half-recitative, which are common to Eastern music, the shouts and hollers of American Negro folk cries, the rough-edged tones and broad vibratos, the high, shrill and grating tones which rasp one’s ears like the agonized flourishes of flamenco, to the gut tones which remind us of where the jazz trombone found its human source. It is an art which employs a broad rhythmic freedom and accents the lyric line to reinforce the emotional impact. It utilizes half-tones, glissandi, blue notes, humming and moaning. Or again, it calls upon the most lyrical, floating tones of which the voice is capable. (252)

This dazzling range of tones is what he sought and achieved in his own writing. He disliked bebop for being too cerebral and thought it expressed contempt for the audience. Like Mark Twain, one of his heroes, he plumbed the expressive register of vernacular culture. He saw the jazz musician and the blues singer as genuine artists expressing individuality through a mastery of technique. Accordingly, the jazz riff became the model for his writing, though he undoubtedly lost control of it in Juneteenth, the section of his second novel published in 1999. He connected jazz improvisation on received material with the polyphony of The Waste Land and the virtuosity of Ulysses, and he himself emulated the weave of allusion that joined Armstrong to Eliot, a linkage unheard of at the time but received wisdom today.

Since Rampersad makes excellent use of Ellison’s archive, I would have expected the latter half of his book to trace the stages of his work on his second novel, still largely unpublished, since it took up so much of his literary life. Instead, convinced that it is a dead loss, misconceived and out of touch, the biographer disposes of it in a few pages, dealing only with the published sections. He takes due note of each of Ellison’s essays, which show him at the top of his form, but spends too many pages on the distractions of club life, the Academy, and his many other public activities, as if they accounted for Ellison’s deeper failure. Yet paradoxically, this was the time Ellison ceased to be controversial and won almost universal acclaim, including an ardent following of younger black writers and intellectuals. With the exhaustion of Marxism, nationalism, and crude protest writing, they all became Ellisonians. As he turned into a plaster cast of himself, his cosmopolitan vision of American cultural interdependence, with its inescapable black contribution, carried the day, though it may have been an optimistic myth that reflected his own needs. Rampersad pays tribute to this humane vision while casting a shadow over the man who conceived it – in the teeth of his detractors’ hostility, his own insecurity, and the demands of a fierce, almost superhuman effort of self-discipline.

Published in the Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 2006
 
 
Apart from his collection of long stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), which was banned for obscenity in the State of New York, Edmund Wilson’s books were never widely read. But for upwards of half a century they had an incalculable impact on readers. Several generations of American intellectuals not only cared what he thought about literature and politics but used his career as a model. They admired his restless curiosity, omnivorous reading, sharp literary judgment, and grasp of culture as a living entity. They envied the unforced clarity of his style. He was hardly more than a decade older than the writers who founded Partisan Review in the mid-1930s, and his deep-dyed American background was different from their immigrant roots. Yet, as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin testified, they looked to him as their difficult-to-please mentor. Other sources of inspiration for the PR circle were distant figures, but Wilson actually married into the family when he took Mary McCarthy, their scarlet princess, as his third wife.

The same chemistry of warm admiration and crusty independence can be observed in his relations with writers and editors in the 1950s, especially Roger Straus and Jason Epstein, who encouraged him to collect his earlier journalism and reissued his books as upmarket paperbacks. Not long afterward, the more literate radicals of the 1960s rediscovered To the Finland Station (1940), his galvanizing history of revolutionary ideas and personalities, and were cheered by his critique of the cold war, which he saw as a byproduct of America’s imperial designs. In “The Metropolitan Critic,” published anonymously in these pages shortly before Wilson’s death in 1972, a young Clive James took the measure of his whole career, singling out literary chronicles like The Shores of Light (1952) as keystones of the critic’s trade, and paid tribute to the insight of his deceptively plain style. Finally, a generation of public intellectuals who emerged in the 1980s, including historian Sean Wilentz, cultural critics Andrew Delbanco and Louis Menand, political essayist Paul Berman, and art critic Jed Perl, were drawn to Wilson’s example as a counter to specialized academic work, with its restricted language and limited audience, particularly in the social sciences and literary theory.

As early as 1943, in one of his first autobiographical essays, “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed,” Wilson vented his ambivalence about young writers who vied for his approval, wanting “to thrust him into a throne and have him available as an object of veneration.” (CC, 109) Being canonized, he thought, would make him the object of attack and lock him down to work he had already done. (The attack, a sweeping and dismissive one, came a few years later in Stanley Edgar Hyman’s skewed book on modern criticism, The Armed Vision.) Wilson’s generation, including friends like Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, had begun dying off along with their elders in the modern movement. “Yeats, Freud, Trotsky, and Joyce have all gone in so short a time, it is almost like the death of one’s father,” he wrote in 1941. (277) His actual father, Edmund Wilson senior, had been a brilliant trial lawyer and prosecutor whom Woodrow Wilson considered appointing to the United States Supreme Court, but he was also a hypochondriac who spent his later years in a twilight of psychosomatic fears. The elder Wilson had a horror that his only son, with his rich assortment of interests, would not make his mark, and so urged him to “concentrate on something.” Wilson replied, persuasively, that “what I want to do is to try to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought.” (A Piece of My Mind, 227)

When his father died in 1923 he had already set about to accomplish this, not in the cloistered world of scholarship but in the cultural marketplace. He grew famous as a journalist covering popular culture from the Ziegfeld Follies, vaudeville, and burlesque to silent movies, and as an up-to-minute literary critic introducing his readers to difficult modern writers, such as Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. He also wrote poetry, plays, and fiction, including a novel set in Greenwich Village, I Thought of Daisy (1929), in which he tried, like his college friend Fitzgerald, to sum up the restless mood of the 1920s and the experience of his generation. Like so many first-rate critics, he wanted to be a writer, not a conduit of other people’s writing. But the terse, classical manner that served him so well in his essays fell flat in his fiction, where it seemed like evidence of emotional disengagement. Wilson had sometimes patronized Fitzgerald, who looked to him as his “intellectual conscience.” But rereading The Great Gatsby as he revised the proofs of his novel, Wilson grew depressed to realize “how much better Scott Fitzgerald’s prose and dramatic sense were than mine. If I’d only been able to give my book the vividness and excitement, and the technical accuracy, of his!” (Letters, 173)

Lewis M. Dabney’s definitive and unfailingly intelligent biography of Wilson, more than twenty years in the making, is especially good on the turning points in Wilson’s life – his experience as a soldier in Europe, which separated him from his narrow, privileged background; his eager embrace of sex and alcohol in the carnivalesque years of the 1920s; his conversion to left-wing politics after the stock-market crash, which confirmed his patrician distaste for America’s “business civilization”; his tempestuous marriage to McCarthy and withdrawal to Cape Cod; and his explorations of the American past, his own life, and other cultures – French Canadian, Iroquois, Haitian, Israeli, Zuni Pueblo – in his last decades. During those years he no longer felt connected to contemporary life as he encountered it in the pages of Life magazine, but felt stranded, like his father, in “a pocket of the past.” (PM, 239)

Dabney stresses the effects of Wilson’s Puritan background but also his serious effort to declass himself, partly through an allegiance to art and culture. He recoiled from Christianity but was drawn to Jews, ancient and modern, for their peculiar moral urgency. His mother was a collateral descendent of Cotton Mather, his paternal grandfather a learned Presbyterian minister, yet Wilson made the leap from Victorian gentility to 1920s bohemianism. He opened himself to fresh experiences, first in the army hospital corps in France, where he rubbed shoulders with people he could not have known at boarding school or Princeton. He plunged into popular culture, which was so remote from his classical education, into “dissipation” and sexual experimentation (reported in his journals with almost clinical precision), and then into politics and Depression journalism, focusing on the travail of ordinary Americans. His travels across America were followed in 1935 by a five-month trip to the Soviet Union, where, during a long hospital stay, he read Marx and Engels by day, Gibbon at night. He was exploring radical movements from the French to the Russian Revolutions and, after this failed him, began searching for a republican ideal of virtue and character in figures like Grant, Lincoln, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. If Wilson’s course of downward mobility at first resembled Orwell’s, by the end he sounded like Henry Adams, a sardonic observer formed for a different world, a disaffected link to an almost forgotten past.

Since Wilson’s father left him no money directly, and his mother tightly controlled the purse strings, he spent much of his adult life in genteel poverty. Along with his ferocious work ethic, this constant need for cash helped democratize his point of view. So did his passionate affair with a working-class woman, Frances Minihan, between 1927 and 1933. As described in his journals and his sexually explicit novella “The Princess With the Golden Hair,” it became the most tender experience of his life, the notable exception to his many destructive relationships with women of his own class. She was utterly devoted to him, tolerant of his affairs, and sexually uninhibited in a way that delighted him. She loved him unconditionally and marveled at his intelligence, but the social gap they tried to bridge kept them from marrying. Instead Wilson had a breakdown, at almost the same moment as the larger breakdown of American society.

Wilson’s personal crisis and the relative failure of his novel shook his confidence as a writer and made him fear that he would go the way of his father. His parents’ marriage was a union of opposites. His father grew neurotic, solitary, and reflective, spending his happiest hours amid the woods and streams of upstate New York; his mother was gay, social, anti-intellectual, and felt constantly thwarted by her husband’s self-absorption. As if in protest she suddenly went deaf on the way back from a trip to Europe, and she came to think that brilliant people, her husband and son among them, “always had something wrong with them,” a notion that may have contributed to the thesis of one of his best collections, The Wound and the Bow (1941). Largely written during his marriage to McCarthy, the book was anchored by two long biographical essays on Dickens and Kipling, both studies of the effect of childhood trauma on the writer’s creative life.

Wilson himself was an unhappy child, shy, bookish, and socially awkward. All his life he was a disaster as a lecturer or teacher. “He was an uncomfortable man, uncomfortable with himself,” according to his friend Isaiah Berlin. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who epitomized the sexual freedom of the Village, relieved him of his virginity in 1920, when he was 25, and he spent decades making up for lost time. Though never a theorist, he grew as hungry for new ideas as for new sexual encounters. His work became an adventure in crossing boundaries: between national literatures, between the classics and the moderns, between journalism and criticism, literature and history, writing and politics. His formation as a critic was Victorian. An early reading of Taine’s History of English Literature introduced him to the historical approach to literature in terms of time and place, narrative and portraiture. Beginning with his celebrated study of modern writers, Axel’s Castle (1931), he never wavered from this model, even when the new technical criticism made it unfashionable. The great 19th-century critics, including Taine, Michelet, Georg Brandes, and Matthew Arnold, oriented Wilson’s work towards history and biography, but his own mentors were crisp cynics like Shaw and Mencken, who favored witty broadsides over lengthy tomes and brought criticism closer to the common language. Concision became his watchword. From his teacher at Princeton, Christian Gauss, he learned the Coleridgean principle that “every word, every cadence, every detail, should perform a definite function in producing an intense effect.”(Classics and Commercials, 15) And he praised George Saintsbury and Ford Madox Ford “because they found out how to manage a fine and flexible English prose on the rhythms of informal speech rather than on those of literary convention.” (CC, 307-8)

As early as the late 1920s, Wilson worried that criticism was growing too abstract and academic. As literary editor of The New Republic, he groused to one his reviewers, R. P. Blackmur – already a formidable intellectual at 25 – he that “there has lately been such a reaction against the impressionistic criticism of the day before yesterday that there is a tendency entirely to eliminate any intimation of what the work under consideration looks, sounds, feels, or smells like.” (Letters, 170) The New Criticism, a discursive, pedagogical offshoot of modernism, did not yet exist, yet Wilson was already instructing it in the exigencies of literary journalism, insuring that scholastics would dismiss him as an “introductory critic” writing for the uninitiated.

But Wilson’s intellectual ambitions went far beyond book reviewing. He looked to “general ideas” to place each book in a larger context – social, biographical, comparative. Just as he’d turned to French Symbolism as a way of framing his approach to the writers in Axel’s Castle, he relied on a psychoanalytic template for The Wound and the Bow and a Marxist framework in his other major collection of essays, The Triple Thinkers (1938, 1948). By interweaving personalities and ideas, he lent drama to the development of Marxism in To the Finland Station. But he made use of these systems in the most undogmatic manner imaginable, never subsuming his feeling for art or forcing his response to the works themselves. Mining Dickens’s fragment of a memoir, especially his early experience in the blacking factory, and working his way through every one of the novels, he created the modern Dickens out of whole cloth, just as he rescued Kipling from being dismissed as a bluff imperialist. His Dickens was much darker, more haunted, his Kipling more damaged and divided than their contemporaries could have realized. All through his essay, Wilson blends Marx with Freud to make sense of Dickens’ class-consciousness:

His behavior toward Society, in the capitalized sense, was rebarbative to the verge of truculence; he refused to learn its patter and its manners; and his satire on the fashionable world comes to figure more and more prominently in his novels. Dickens is one of the very small group of British intellectuals to whom the opportunity has been offered to be taken up by the governing class and who have actually declined that honor. (WB, 43)

He goes on to show how Dickens, like his admirer Dostoevsky, gained from his “social maladjustment,” for it gave him a privileged vantage point outside or between the social classes. Elsewhere he sees how writers, including some of his Princeton contemporaries, lost their edge when they married rich women and settled back into a life of comfort. Writing in the throes of the Depression, Wilson cherishes his own independent position.

Dabney is a sure guide to every stage of his long career, but never more than in the early 1940s, when Wilson “entered upon several years without a regular job or salary, adrift in a nation at war, where intellectual life was on the back burner.” (277) He had broken with The New Republic over its support for America’s entry into the war; he thought of the owners as British agents. His marriage to McCarthy was tempestuous, perhaps violent on his part, and punctuated by her breakdowns and repeated efforts to leave him. His drinking led to volatile mood swings and towering rages that made him hard to live with, though it never interfered with his writing. They behaved like two prima donnas sharing the same stage or, as David Laskin describes them, “two tyrants under a single roof, always amazed that they had failed to cow or convince the other.” (280) His life was shifting from the city to the house he bought on Cape Cod and eventually to his ancestral stone house in upstate New York, where he would retreat each summer into an earlier world. He began writing for The New Yorker, longer and less timely pieces than those he had done for The New Republic, and watched his generation unravel. “Too many of my friends are insane or dead or Roman Catholic converts,” he wrote a few years later. (PM, 235) He edited Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel (The Last Tycoon) and his uncollected essays (The Crack-Up), which did much to restore Scott’s faded reputation. “So began the flood of retrospection,” says Dabney, “that included portraits of teachers, family, and close literary friends.”

And so began his work on Patriotic Gore (1962), his retrospective account of American writers in the decades after the Civil War. It proved to be an ambitious and idiosyncratic book, perhaps 200 pages too long and missing the narrative arc of To the Finland Station. Centered on figures like Grant and Holmes, the book was a testament to Wilson’s boundless curiosity and his engagement with the American past. Heedless of its subjects’ literary reputation, it was full of revealing things about neglected or forgotten writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, or Mary Chesnut, whom academics would discover only years later.

With the help of much unpublished material – including some 70,000 letters among Wilson’s papers at Yale – Dabney gives a balanced account of even the most contentious episodes of his life, including his marriage to McCarthy and his friendship and acrimonious quarrel with Vladimir Nabokov. They bonded and broke over Russian literature but the ill will went back to Wilson’s dislike of Lolita and perhaps his envy of the fame and wealth that book brought its author, whom Wilson had long sponsored. The immediate occasion was Wilson’s review of Nabokov’s altogether perverse edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but it led Wilson to overreach his own knowledge of Russian, as it led Nabokov, who had admired Wilson’s essays, to denounce his “old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism.” (406) Here Nabokov unwittingly put his finger on what was strongest about Wilson’s work. Though his mask as a critic was impersonal, judicial, he always reached for the human center of a book, and always, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out, in a personal way. While other critics wrote “just intelligent sentences,” Berlin told Dabney, “everything Wilson wrote was filled with some kind of personal content.” (6) Frank Kermode took note of his ability to proceed from “passionate identification with the work under discussion” to “detached appraisal” and “historical inference, which does not neglect the primary response.” (158)

Dabney is scrupulously fair about Wilson’s life and character but finds it difficult to say anything unkind about Wilson’s work. He defends even his 1947 assault on Kafka which, he points out, “has been said to mark the outer limits of his sensibility.” (The same could be said of his baffling rejection of Lolita.) Dabney suggests that he “was reacting against the Kafka cult” and that the hero’s helplessness “was remote from Wilson’s Protestant heritage and – though anticipated in Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ – not in the American grain.” (345-46) Wilson, though hardly restricted to the native grain, was put off by his sense of Kafka as “a man constitutionally lacking in vitality.” Along with Max Brod, Kafka’s loyal but obtuse friend, he wonders why Kafka was unable to escape the power of his parents. “Why should he have allowed his father so to crush and maim his abilities?” Wilson’s own fortitude, strengthened by Hebrew scripture, kept him working through long periods of illness and unhappiness. Yet only a few years earlier in The Wound and the Bow, he had shown how great writing could be bound up with neurosis, weakness, and early damage. That book included one of the best essays ever written about Hemingway, gauging the terror at the heart of his best work and its dissolution in the bluster and affirmations of his later writing. Wilson dismissed the “politicos” (read: Marxist critics) who accused Hemingway (as they accused Kafka) of “an indifference to society.”

His whole work is a criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivaled. (WB, 215)

This could not only be transferred to Kafka but read as a credo for Wilson’s own form of “human-interest criticism.” For him the critic, like the artist, is a sensitive barometer of the moral weather of society, best measured not by way of abstractions but in the atmosphere of feeling, the minute pressure of actual human relationships.

Published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 12 2006
 
 
More than other leading postwar novelists, Bernard Malamud’s star has faded in the twenty years since his death. Younger writers, smitten with a nostalgia he never felt, still try with indifferent luck to recapture his magical sense of the immigrant generation in its encounters with the new world. Some readers know him best though his least typical work, the baseball novel The Natural (1952), lushly adapted into a film by Robert Redford. Malamud was at his strongest in his short fiction, especially the stories collected in The Magic Barrel (1958), and in his second novel, The Assistant (1957), as terse and gripping as any of the stories. But beginning in the 1960s, his demanding notions of form and craft, like his moral outlook, were going out of fashion, as were the old-world characters and second-generation misfits who fired his imagination. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike managed to reinvent themselves from decade to decade, liberated by the cultural carnival that surrounded them, even when they condemned it. In the underrated academic novel A New Life (1961) and the black humor of Pictures of Fidelman (1969), Malamud too tried to loosen up but real spontaneity eluded him. He could not play the celebrity game; his conscience was exacting, his sense of privacy absolute. In interviews and occasional lectures he vehemently shielded his private life, though he sometimes exposed it in his fiction, with unfortunate results in his autobiographical novel Dubin’s Lives (1979).

His daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, a psychiatric social worker, was particularly close to her father – almost incestuously, she now thinks – and even wrote a book defending this insistence on privacy. But now, in a striking turnabout, she has come to feel that the lack of a biography or a sense of the man himself has helped dim his reputation. An authorized life by an English scholar, Philip Davis, is in the works, and she has anticipated it with this uneven but revealing memoir. Part of the problem with My Father Is a Book is that the author has not decided what kind of book it is, or whether her father’s life was much more than the sum of his writings. By including things that happened before she was born or after she left home, she conflates biography, memoir, and a psychological profile. To this she adds personal excursions into Malamud’s fiction, where she finds that “the underlying themes possess an uncanny, sometimes creepy familiarity: they are the spooks of the familial unspoken returning to haunt.” Rereading Dubin’s Lives, where the protagonist, a writer, is having an affair with a girl his daughter’s age while the daughter is seeing a man her father’s age, she recoils from “a way-too-intimate view of my father’s confused feelings.” (241)

It becomes evident quite early that she was at once too close to her father and too distant to understand him fully. To protect his vocation, which meant the world to him, Malamud was guarded, formal, and slightly aloof even with friends and family. From the start their lives were organized around his work. Through an apprenticeship of almost two decades, with few financial or literary prospects, Malamud nurtured an unshakable ambition to write. In 1945 he sent a letter to his future wife reminiscent of Kafka’s warnings to his own fiancée, Felice Bauer:

Though my heart wants you with a single purpose, I must repeat what marriage to me will mean for you. Though I love you and shall love you more, most of my strength will be devoted to realizing myself as an artist. I will need your help to overcome weaknesses in health, finances and steadfastness. You will be called on for all the love, patience, courage, understanding – and paradoxically – selflessness that you are capable of bestowing. (79)

Callow as this sounds, it was prophetic of the stresses and bonds of their long marriage, marked by initial money troubles, patriarchal privilege, a lasting commitment to family life, some serious discord and infidelity, and eventually poor health – all this subsumed by his fierce devotion to art. This was the picture Philip Roth sketched of Malamud and his wife Ann in The Ghost Writer, not very different from the one Malamud himself drew in Dubin’s Lives and several late stories. He concluded an autobiographical lecture in 1984 with the wish that he might have been two men, one chained to his desk, living for art, the other leading the untrammeled life that would light up the writing. He envied the fluency of writers who could do both; his own effects, he felt, could only be achieved through unremitting labor.

This work ethic, with its stress on discipline and self-denial, was part of Malamud’s heritage from his immigrant family. In her father’s background Smith also uncovered a legacy of poverty, mental illness, and premature heart disease. His mother’s breakdowns began with the birth of her children; he himself interrupted one of her suicide attempts, which led to her hospitalization, and eventually to her death in 1929 when he was fifteen. His younger brother Eugene began showing signs of mental distress as a soldier in second world war. He recovered briefly but by the end of 1940s he too was hospitalized. He died of a heart attack in his fifties, without really having lived. Malamud’s parents, including his stepmother, were barely literate in English. Their pinched lives remained in thrall to the grocery store that serves as a kind of prison in The Assistant. The surreal, phonetically spelled letters his father sent him read like Malamudian inventions, comic and poetic in flavor, except that they chronicle the disintegration of the family after Bernard left New York with his wife and young son in 1949 to teach composition at a state college in Oregon. “Neither his father nor his brother really survived his departure,” Smith writes. “He was the capable person among them.” (103). If writing was his “exit visa” (75) from the constricted world in which he grew up, a sense of guilt, along with an unrelenting need for order and control, was the price he paid for his flight.

As Malamud’s New York family fell apart, his family in Oregon unexpectedly thrived. He occupied a humble academic position, barred from teaching literature for lack of a Ph.D., and he went through culture shock at the “cheerful blandness” (126) of college life in the Northwest. But on the days he didn’t teach, he devoted himself to writing with an iron will that astonished his colleagues. Soon he completed The Natural and began selling his stories for the first time. In this idyllic setting his daughter was born and he became the ordinary pre de famille that his conscience and family history demanded. A New Life exploits the comic possibilities of this suburban normalcy at the same time it underlines his sense of alienation, even exile, in the American heartland, which redoubled his need to write his way out. Like Joyce writing about Dubliners in Trieste and Paris or Sherwood Anderson remembering Winesburg, Ohio, Oregon sharpened Malamud’s perspective on the ghetto Jews he half recalled and half imagined. In his twelve years there he wrote his best books.

Oregon was his daughter’s first home; her book comes alive as she recalls the Andy Hardy atmosphere of the family’s life there. When her father began teaching at progressive Bennington College in Vermont in 1961 it was her turn to feel uprooted. Soon afterwards her father, like so many Bennington faculty, began an affair with a student that the daughter still resents today, for it strained her parents’ marriage and displaced emotions otherwise directed towards her. She is troubled as she goes through Malamud’s warm correspondence with this woman, who began as his lover but became a close family friend. With marked reluctance and distress, Smith rereads Dubin’s Lives, his lightly fictionalized account of this affair. But instead of blaming her father, she indicts the “louche,” avant-garde atmosphere of the college, in which a mostly male faculty freely exploited the largely female student body, choosing new favorites from each incoming class.

Malamud took the public posture of a stern moralist, almost a Jewish sage, yet his work has a mischievous streak in line with Lambert Strether’s message at the end of The Ambassadors: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” His fiction is full of pale abstainers (like the rabbinical student in “The Magic Barrel”) whose defensive shell cracks under the temptations of the flesh. Such licence was out of bounds to immigrants like his parents whose lives were dominated by work and necessity. But the deprivations of his youth and his growing fame as a writer drove his sense of entitlement. He admired Hemingway and felt that an artist required adventure, even if it clashed with the rectitude of his self-image. At Bennington, it appears, he really became the two men he had longed to be, the ascetic devoted selflessly to art and the artist who takes his pleasure and enjoys his freedom. His daughter, still idealizing the father she adored as a girl, is hardly the ideal person to explore this paradox.

My Father Is a Book tells the story of a man who exited emotionally from his marriage yet wanted to preserve it, either for appearance sake, out of dependency, or because family so much mattered to him. Malamud felt he had a “thin family life” after his mother’s death. He charmed his way into the families of friends and grew up with a burden he tried to conceal, but also a quixotic determination to make his mark. His youthful pessimism drew him to Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold’s poetry, and T.S. Eliot. He wrote a master’s thesis at Columbia on Thomas Hardy and his early stories reflect this dour outlook, which the Holocaust did nothing to dispel. But as early as The Assistant and A New Life he granted his characters intimations of redemption and rebirth; disaster offers them the chance of spiritual regeneration.

Janna Malamud Smith tells her father’s story selectively, trying to put the best face on it. [She makes one touching love affair that led to a lifelong attachment stand in for other, more casual Bennington-style relationships. Her research into his early life feels haphazard, but the letters she quotes, though restrained, provide a window on his mind. Malamud’s clenched letter detailing his brother’s background and breakdown, written to inform his doctor, reads like one of R. D. Laing’s schizophrenic case histories. Smith’s book is less frank.] She gives a three-dimensional portrait of her father but obscures the living behind a veil of discretion. Her brother hardly figures here, though Malamud wrote harsh stories about father-son conflict, and she passes quickly over indications of her mother’s bitterness. It is hard to imagine that Malamud’s undramatic life and divided self will quicken interest in his work, but the book should fascinate those who already care about him. Even this partial portrait shows how autobiographical his fiction could be, why it prospered during his Oregon exile, then began losing its edge as success undid some of his inhibitions and made him a happier, less hungry man.

Published in the Times Literary Supplement, August 20-27, 2010
 
 
Serious journals, like individuals, appear to have a natural life span, an inevitable cycle of flourishing and decline. In the case of little magazines like Horizon, Scrutiny, or Partisan Review, when the founders pass on or the original idea outlives its moment, the journal either expires or becomes a pale imitation of itself. Commentary magazine is a notable exception. In its sixty-five years it has been through not one but two brain transplants, first under a new editor, then under the same editor but with a completely different set of writers. In each phase it occupied a different corner of the political spectrum, shifting from cold war liberalism to a moderate 1960s radicalism to fierce neoconservatism. Yet it has never lost its polemical edge, its intellectual outreach to general readers, or its sense of pursuing an urgent cultural mission, even as that mission has changed dramatically.

For Commentary’s first editor, Elliot Cohen, one goal was to create an exacting forum on Jewish and general subjects where writers and intellectuals could address a wider public. As in his earlier job as managing editor of the legendary Menorah Journal in the late 1920s, he sought to avoid the parochialism of the institutional Jewish community, with its defensive boosterism and distrust of the free play of ideas. At the Menorah Journal he had nurtured gravely talented young writers who would later form a nucleus of the New York intellectuals, such as Lionel Trilling, at the same time he stimulated their slender self-awareness as Jews. During the thirties some of the group, now radicalized by the Depression, would help float Partisan Review as a political and literary journal. In the immediate wake of the Holocaust, Commentary became the setting in which some of them reclaimed their buried Jewish identity without sacrificing their intellectual rigor or their disdain for the Jewish middle class and the Jewish establishment.

Cohen himself grew up as the son of a shopkeeper in Mobile, Alabama. After a brilliant career at Yale, where he was the youngest member of the class of 1917, he gave up taking a doctoral degree, since there was no future then for a Jew teaching English literature. All his life he was a blocked writer, dogged by excruciating scruples that forced him to develop ideas by commissioning articles and editing (or more often rewriting) other people’s prose. Like most New York intellectuals he was first drawn to Communism in the 1930s but then turned strongly against it. As William Phillips, the Partisan Review editor, put it, he “inhaled Communism and exhaled anti-Communism.” His increasingly “hard” anti-Communism became part of the DNA of Commentary at the same time – the 1940s and 1950s – that it began to play an important, sometimes destructive role in American life. The final part of his mission, the one stressed by Benjamin Balint in Running Commentary, his new history of the magazine, was the integration of Jews from the margins into the mainstream of American life. As Cohen put it in his opening issue, “Commentary is an act of faith in our possibilities in America.”

Before 1945 no group was more committed to modernist notions of alienation than Jewish intellectuals. Many of them were children of scarcely acculturated Yiddish-speaking immigrants. The poverty of the ghetto and the idealistic solidarity of working-class socialism had shaped their early lives. The Depression exacerbated their distrust of capitalism but also of America’s typically optimistic individualism, reflected in popular culture, much of it produced by Jews in Hollywood and show business. Before the war these young Jewish intellectuals were bit players on the cultural scene, bohemian outsiders; at this time Jews were still excluded from many professions, neighborhoods, and social clubs, their numbers limited by quotas in elite educational institutions. This mountain of prejudice and discrimination began to dissolve after 1945, partly out of guilt over the Holocaust but mainly because the prospering economy, hungry for talent and initiative from any quarter, became the proverbial tide lifting all boats. Cohen and Commentary were determined to help it along, to drive the final nail into the coffin of thirties Marxism and cultural alienation. “If the system has been this good to us,” Leslie Fiedler observed, “it can’t be as bad as we thought it was.”

Nowhere was this emergence more striking than among Jewish writers, once little more than a sidebar in American literature. Though melting-pot assimilation remained the social norm, a new ethnic pluralism emphasizing cultural roots came into fashion. With a heightened sense of the multiple threads in the larger American weave, both Jews and blacks, often in tandem, moved to center stage: Bellow and Ellison took aim at the Great American Novel, James Baldwin published reports from the racial barricades in Jewish-edited magazines, Bernard Malamud wrote parables about immigrant lives darker than anything since Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, and Philip Roth satirized the new prosperity and ostentation of suburban Jews in his early stories . This ethnic awakening charged up the literary side of Commentary. Another department called “From the American Scene” featured a more light-hearted anthropology of Jewish American life, dealing with subjects like the Jewish delicatessen. Besides Commentary itself, there were other markers of the reconciliation between America and its errant intellectuals, including the famous opening of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (“I am an American, Chicago-born”) and the landmark 1952 Partisan Review symposium called “Our Country and Our Culture.”

Some of the best known Jews of the modern era had been social critics, even revolutionaries, but Commentary, though it valued stringent criticism, was determined to show that Judaism and Americanism, ethnic loyalties and universal values, could be compatible. This accommodation to American life was the mainspring of the American Jewish Committee, which sponsored the magazine. It meant that the magazine (like the AJC itself) was initially cold toward Zionism, even after the Holocaust gave it an overwhelming new rationale. For them America was the true Zion of the Jews. But this celebratory cast of mind had a darker side, a hostility to dissent at a moment in the cold war when every shade of left-liberal opinion under siege. According to Norman Podhoretz, Cohen’s successor, “all articles were carefully inspected for traces of softness on Communism: a crime of the mind and character which might even give itself away in a single word.” In a notorious piece in 1952, the young Irving Kristol, a Commentary editor, accused liberals of voicing concern for civil liberties as a mask for a progressive agenda that was soft on Communism. Though he dismissed Senator McCarthy as a “vulgar demagogue,” Kristol insisted that “there is one thing the American people know about McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.” At a time of blacklists and purges in many fields, this was, at the very least, the wrong end of the stick.

A deeply troubled man in his last years, Cohen took his own life in 1959, and when Podhoretz succeeded him the following year, the obsession with Communism, which had long been a spent force in American life, was the driving motive he tried hardest to reverse. The cold war consensus had been breaking down all through the late 1950s, and Podhoretz was nothing if not attuned to the Zeitgeist. Enlisting liberals and anarchists like Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, and Philip Rahv along with younger radicals such as Staughton Lynd, Podhoretz turned the magazine away from its anti-Communist roots and toward measured criticism of every facet of American life, from race, welfare, and poverty to the escalating Vietnam War. His political break with his predecessor came to a head with a 1967 symposium on “Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited,” in which a generation of left-wing anti-Stalinists helped lay the whole enterprise to rest. “Communism today,” wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “is a boring, squalid creed, tired, fragmented and, save in very exceptional places and circumstances, wholly uninspiring. La guerre est finie.”

That same year Podhoretz published the first of his memoirs, the once-notorious, now largely forgotten Making It, mounting a broad defense of the new radicalism and a eulogy and critique of the New York intellectual tradition that had formed him. Born in 1930, raised in Brownsville, a poor section of Brooklyn, Podhoretz had been one of Trilling’s favorite students at Columbia. He had then studied with F. R. Leavis at Cambridge before returning, first to the Army, then to a job at Commentary. Podhoretz made his reputation as a critic with brilliant but pugnacious reviews that reflected a temperament as different from Trilling’s as could be imagined. This street-fighter’s mentality, which later did so much to poison the well, came through in the part of Making It that repelled nearly everyone, including Trilling: Podhoretz’s insistence that raw ambition, the quest for success and attention, was the “dirty little secret” behind the intellectual’s high-flown ideals. This was neither new nor shocking, but it was certainly reductive. He was engaged in the familiar modern device of striking through the mask, but for many he had unmasked only himself. Podhoretz did not invent the polemical memoir – lapsed Communists like Whittaker Chambers and the authors of The God that Failed had already done that – but to this day the book is a gift to those who see his whole career as an exercise in aggressive opportunism and grubby ambition.

Commentary in the 1960s was one of the best magazines every published in the United States. It caught a wave of radicalism and social criticism as Cohen’s Commentary had been buoyed by cold war liberalism and the postwar surge of ethnic and national pride. But where much of sixties radicalism was angry and rhetorical, Commentary typically delivered probing analysis rather than slogan and opinion. Its opposition to the Vietnam War, for example, was developed by realists with impeccable cold war credentials, such as Hans Morgenthau. The level of writing was remarkable, if impersonal – the sure sign of engaged editing. Podhoretz’s own book, Making It, as much a cultural history as a memoir, was just as cogent in its pragmatic radicalism and its critical appraisal of the cold war anti-Communism on which he had been weaned. Discussing the violations of civil liberties that were one of the results, he made amends for his own “brutal insensitivity” on this issue.

As personal history, it was a much better book than its harsh reception suggested – a reception that left the author permanently embittered. Despite its callow and tawdry moments, when he puffs up his own achievements and sounds like the Sammy Glick of the intellectual life, and despite its overwhelming concern with status, the book has a voice of its own – consistently intelligent, evocative, and fully alive. Rereading it recently for the first time in many years, I found large chunks of it still vivid in memory. Podhoretz’s account of his own upbringing, his experience at Columbia and Cambridge, and his literary education always rang true to me, especially since my life covered some of the same ground a decade later. His collective portrait of the Partisan Review intellectuals as the “Family” and his shrewd account of the origins and evolution of Commentary are simply taken over by Balint for his book, including the awkward terminology, which few others have adopted. Best of all, Making It is the only one of Podhoretz’s innumerable memoirs in which he does not shower himself with courageous independence and everyone else with opprobrium. Once he had turned Commentary to the right, he was quick to impute mean motives, especially cowardice, to former friends and mentors, including Trilling, Norman Mailer, and Phillips, who (he said) lacked the stomach to join his increasingly strident crusade against the political and cultural left. Self-inflating books like Breaking Ranks (1979) and Ex-Friends (1999) read more like position papers or vendettas than memoirs. In the latter book he manages at once to boast of his famous friends, including Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, the Trillings, and Mailer, to insist that he was always the first to break with them, and to wax nostalgic about their earlier intimacy and good times together.

What the older Podhoretz did to his friends was as nothing compared to what he did to the magazine, which he edited from until 1995 before turning it over to a trusted lieutenant, Neal Kozodoy, who, to everyone’s astonishment, passed it on to Podhoretz’s son John in 2009. Balint provides an impressive roster of writers who departed or were exiled as the magazine moved towards neoconservatism in the early 1970s: Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Ted Draper, Edward Hoagland, George Steiner, Daniel Bell, Herbert Gans, Dennis Wrong, William Pfaff, and many others, including notable fiction writers, such as Malamud. Eventually, even friends or longtime contributors like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Alter dropped away, alienated by an unremitting culture wars agenda that included vitriolic attacks on gays and feminists. They were replaced by veteran cold warriors like Irving Kristol and party-line writers supported by conservative think-tanks and foundations, which took over the funding of Commentary itself in 1990.

With rare exceptions, the magazine’s cultural coverage fell apart, including its once-stellar book reviews, since every book was vetted for its ideological tendency. As Balint puts it,

The magazine’s literary criticism in its neoconservative phase had become a form of ideological gate-keeping, a way of establishing the true canon. More than ever, Podhoretz and the Family began to see every product of the mind as something that reflected a political allegiance. They increasingly put literature through a political grinder. (150)

This sort of critical comment is rare in the first two hundred pages of Balint’s book, which chronicle the stages of Commentary’s history with a show of neutrality. This peculiar default of judgment in effect ratifies Podhoretz’s claims that Commentary’s later history was the heroic fulfilment of its earlier mission, especially with its intrepid resistance to the supposed hegemony of the left over American culture and politics and its pursuit of a politics of self-interest over the universalist traditions of Jewish liberalism.

Balint himself was an editor of Commentary from 2001 to 2004 and evidently approves of the magazine’s right-wing campaigns if not its ideological policing of the arts. His hands-off approach works well enough to sustain a readable narrative, and his expansive endnotes furnish a census of the themes and writers who filled Commentary’s pages over the years. Yet he remains unflappable in the face of outright provocations and excesses, as when Podhoretz blames the AIDS epidemic on “the suicidal impulse at work in homosexual promiscuity” on “men who bugger or are buggered by dozens or even hundreds of other men every year.” This is as much sympathy as Podhoretz can muster for lives snuffed out by the worst plague of modern times.

Balint’s bland chronicle of this and other bomb-throwing episodes too often reads like a silent endorsement. Earlier this year, Nathan Abrams brought out the second of two much more critical studies of the magazine’s history, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine, based on more extensive research in the archives, including Podhoretz’s papers in the Library of Congress. Balint concentrates on the sixty-five years of the magazine itself, treats it as “a single, multivolume work, a kind of American Talmud” that sheds light on a “larger story about how Jews over the last half-century embraced America and how they were changed by that embrace.” (213) But the magazine, especially in its latter days, represents too narrow a sliver of Jews or intellectuals to provide a vehicle for this larger story. Balint’s subtitle is especially misleading: “The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right.” It has indeed been contentious, which is why its story cannot rightly be told in a faux dispassionate manner, but only a minority of the Jewish left or the intellectuals took this track. Apart from Kristol, Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer, and, more moderately, Nathan Glazer, few other prestigious figures signed on. Bell and Kazin remained liberals, Howe morphed from a socialist to a social democrat, and so on. In journals like the New York Review of Books, Dissent, and the New Republic, other New York intellectuals took a different route. Too often Balint attributes attitudes to the “Family” that pertain only to its right-wing splinter. The later Commentary transformed a vigorous forum into the cheerleading paper of a sect. As the nation moved right it periodically exerted real political influence, but within the larger community its venomous and toxic attacks ultimately fell on deaf ears. Today it publishes articles like “What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?” and only true believers take it seriously.

In a strange about-face, Balint adds an epilogue saying as much, laying out every charge that can be leveled against Commentary in its present incarnation: that it is utterly predictable, no longer a “hot book”; that it has fallen into the mindless groupthink it often criticized on the left; that it “cloaked self-interest in the national interest”; that it craved power and influence when it abandoned literature for politics. Its writers could be seen as

overanxiously Americanized Jews, as hyperacculturated, overidentified, overzealous converts to America who proclaimed their love of country rather too loudly. . . .What they saw as successful assimilation, others saw as accommodationism. They curried favor, it was said. They truckled, they traded alienation for blind affirmation, they worshipped power and success, they strained too hard to prove their patriotism – in short, they were seen as the hofjuden, the “Court Jews,” of America. (213)

Balint doesn’t exactly endorse this indictment but serves it up as a surprising coda to his book. He could have added the magazine’s repeated failure to seduce its core constituency with its conservative agenda. For all their promotion of a “politics of interest” for American Jews, both Kristol and Podhoretz were frustrated by their seemingly unshakeable loyalty to a liberalism grounded in notions of progress, social justice, and universal moral values. In overwhelming numbers, prospering Jews continue to vote their anxieties and ideals, honed by centuries of discrimination, rather than their pocketbooks. This seemingly irrational liberalism was the subject of Podhoretz’s last book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, and even of his previous book on the Hebrew prophets. Kristol, more bluntly, derided “the politics of compassion” and once wrote an article “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews.”

The later Commentary’s one notable success has come in pushing for a more bellicose foreign policy – a confrontational posture toward the Soviet Union during Reagan’s first term (before both Reagan and the Russians reversed course), unquestioned support for the right wing in Israel under George W. Bush, a chorus of support for the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the unending “war on terror,” and the current face-off with radical Islam, especially Iran. This drumbeat for war, with its nostalgia for simple moral polarities of the cold war, has taken the magazine a long way from the liberal anti-Communism and the wry Jewish pride of Cohen’s original Commentary, let alone the more complex, more nuanced universe of Commentary in the 1960s.

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.

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.

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.

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.