The New

The New Criterion Vol. 27, No. 2

Criterion
October 2008
A monthly review
edited by Hilton Kramer & Roger Kimball
October 2008

Notes & Comments, 1

Prague: spring in winter by John O’Sullivan, 4
Hazlitt’s inordinate love by John Derbyshire, 10
Churchill—friends & rivals by Robert Messenger, 16
Auden’s cheery bishop by Jeremy Bernstein, 21
New poems by David Sergeant, Dick Allen
& Betsy Bonner, 28
Letter from Europe by Paul Hollander, 31; Theater by Brooke Allen, 35;
Art by Karen Wilkin, Christie Davies & James Panero, 39; Music by Jay
Nordlinger, 49; The media by James Bowman, 54; Books: David Hackett Fischer
Champlain’s dream reviewed by Walter McDougall, 59; James Wood How fiction
works reviewed by Paul Dean, 63; Ted Hughes Letters reviewed by Richard
Tillinghast, 65; Michael Burleigh Blood & rage reviewed by Andrew Stuttaford,
68; Rob Rieman Nobility of spirit reviewed by Joseph Bottum, 70; Michael
Robertson Worshipping Walt reviewed by Thomas M. Disch, 72; Mark Bauerlein
The dumbest generation reviewed by Liam Julian, 74; Daniel Mark Epstein The
Lincolns reviewed by Alexander Nazaryan, 76; Notebook by Ben Downing, 78

Volume 27, Number 2, $7.75 / £7.50

The New Criterion October 2008
Editors & Publishers Hilton Kramer & Roger Kimball
Executive Editor David Yezzi
Managing Editor James Panero
Associate Editor Andrew Cusack
O˝ce Manager Cricket Farnsworth
Assistant to the Publishers Callie Siskel
Assistant to the Editors Gabbe Grodin

Publisher 1982–1994 Samuel Lipman

Contributors to this issue

Brooke Allen’s latest book is Moral Minority:
Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Ivan R.
Dee).
Dick Allen’s seventh poetry collection, Present
Vanishing, is due this month from Sarabande
Books.
Jeremy Bernstein is the author, most recently,
of Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know
(Cambridge University Press).
Betsy Bonner is a teacher at the Pierrepont
School in Westport, CT.
Joseph Bottum is the editor of First Things.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the
Ethics and Public Policy Center in
Washington, D.C.
Christie Davies is the author of The Strange
Death of Moral Britain (Transaction).
Paul Dean is Head of English at Summer Fields
School, Oxford.
John Derbyshire’s most recent book is Unknown
Quantity (John Henry Press).
Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008) was the subject
of a memorial tribute in our September issue.
Ben Downing is the author of The Calligraphy
Shop (Zoo Press), a book of poems.
Paul Hollander’s most recent book is The End of
Commitment (Ivan R. Dee).
Liam Julian is a writer at the Thomas Fordham
Institute and a Hoover Institution research
fellow.
Walter McDougall, a Pultizer Prize-winning
historian, is the Alloy-Ansin Professor of
International Relations at the University of
Pennsylvania.
Robert Messenger is an editor at The Weekly
Standard.
Alexander Nazaryan is a teacher of English at
the Brooklyn Latin School.
Jay Nordlinger is a Senior Editor at National
Review.
John O’Sullivan is Executive Editor of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
David Sergeant is a bookseller, waiter, teacher,
and academic in Oxford, England.
Andrew Stuttaford is a contributing editor at
National Review Online.
Richard Tillinghast is the author of The New
Life, a book of poems (Copper Beech).
Karen Wilkin is on the faculty at the New York
Studio School.

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Notes & Comments:
October 2008
The Rosenbergs: case closed
The last time we checked, Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States was in
its twenty-fifth printing and had sold some
500,000 copies. It is probably more widely
used in American classrooms than any other
survey of the subject. This is a pity, for the
book should really be titled “An Anti-
American History of the United States.”
Although published long before the term
“political correctness” gained currency,
Howard Zinn’s opus is a perfect specimen
of political correctness on everything from
the depredations of supposedly genocidal
Europeans who forged the nation and de-
prived the noble, peace-loving Indians of
their happy hunting grounds to the Viet-
nam War as a prime example of American
imperialism and beyond.
Pick a topic, any topic, and you can be sure
that Zinn is there with the standard-issue,
o¸-the-rack left-wing cliché to explain it.
Take the execution of Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg in June 1953, for example. The
Rosenbergs had been convicted of espi-
onage, and not just your common or
garden-variety espionage. They (Julius in
particular) had funneled to the Soviets in-
formation critical to the construction of
atomic weapons. According to Zinn,
though, their conviction, and subsequent
execution, was chiefly an illustration of
right-wing, anti-Communist zealotry in the
United States—“a demonstration to the
people of the country . . . of what lay at the
end of the line for those the government
decided were traitors.” In a later essay, Zinn
asked whether the Rosenbergs had been ex-
ecuted “because they were guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt of passing atomic secrets
to the Soviet Union”—or was it because
“they were Communists” who had the mis-
fortune to advertise their beliefs at a mo-
ment when “anti-Communist hysteria” was
sweeping the country.
Z inn meant the questions to be rhetorical.
Of course it was a matter of anti-Communist
“hysteria.” But the true answer, we now
know, was the former.
W e say “now,” but in fact the Rosenbergs’
guilt has been established “beyond a
reasonable doubt” at least since Ronald
Radosh and Joyce Milton published The
Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth in 1983.
It has taken until now, however, for the
news to penetrate the carapace of leftist
denial. The Rosenbergs were spies for one
of the most brutal tyrannies in history. Their
treachery collaterally aided in blighting the
lives of those nameless millions who suf-
fered under the jackboot of Soviet Com-
munism. Yet the Left adamantly denied the
The New Criterion October 2008 1
 Notes & Comments
Rosenbergs’ guilt almost as vociferously as
they did Alger Hiss’s. But just as it has been
incontrovertibly demonstrated that Hiss
was guilty of espionage, so it is with the
Rosenbergs. Last month, Morton Sobell,
co-defendent with the Rosenbergs, finally
came clean at the age of 91. Sobell had been
sentenced to thirty years in prison for his
role in the case. He had always protested his
innocence. Now, fifty years on, he finally
acknowledged that he and Julius Rosenberg
were both Soviet agents.
A s Ronald Radosh wrote in The Los Angeles
Times, with Sobell’s stunning admission,
the end has arrived for the legions of the
American left wing that have argued relent-
lessly for more than half a century that the
Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile,
fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the
couple’s trial, the left has portrayed them as
martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters
whose chief crime was to express their con-
stitutionally protected political beliefs. In the
end, the left has argued, the two communists
were put to death not for spying but for their
unpopular opinions, at a time when the
Truman and Eisenhower administrations were
seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet
foreign policy during the Cold War.
That “narrative” (as our lit-crit profs say) is
now thoroughly discredited. It is, to speak
plainly, false. But will that fact penetrate
the collective epidermis of the Left? For
decades, the Left protested Alger Hiss’s in-
nocence. When that became embarrassingly
untenable, they switched tactics: he was in-
nocent though guilty. The response in the
Rosenberg case will likely take a page from
the Clintons: Let’s move on. All that was
long ago. Who cares about the Cold War
now anyway?
R adosh is good on this issue, too: “To
many Americans,” he notes, “Cold War
espionage cases like the Rosenberg and
2 The New Criterion October 2008
Alger Hiss cases that once riveted the
country seem irrelevant today, something
out of the distant past. But they’re not ir-
relevant. They’re a crucial part of the on-
going dispute between right and left in this
country.” The issue is not only the integrity
of historical truth—important though that
undoubtedly is. At stake is also the in-
veterate left-wing habit of confusing “ideal-
ism” and totalitarian hubris. It is a curious
fact that, at least since Rousseau, the Left,
intoxicated by the contemplation of its own
higher virtue, has consistently apologized
and made excuses for tyrannies fired by
utopian moralism while at the same time it
has castigated those political initiatives that
actually help improve the lives of the
downtrodden and dispossessed. It is almost
too good to be true, but it is true, that the
Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert,
today run a fund that dispenses grants to
the children of those they consider to be
“political prisoners.” Example? The con-
victed cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Radosh
tartly notes the irony: “if there was any
government that staged show trials for
political ends, it was the government for
which the Rosenbergs gave up their lives,
that of the former Soviet Union.” We
wonder whether Howard Zinn and his
ideological confrères can discern, even if
they fail to appreciate, the irony.
An inspired choice at the Met
Few events have been awaited with more
trepidation in the world of culture—we
were going to say “the art world,” but it
embraces much more than that—than the
appointment of the next director of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Philippe de
Montebello, who will leave the museum at
the end of December after a thirty-year
tenure, is not just a hard act to follow. Mr.
de Montebello has been a unique moral and
aesthetic force in a museum world besotted
by the meretricious glitter of a prepos-
terously overvalued and trash-addicted art

market. We have often expressed our ad-
miration of Mr. de Montebello’s steward-
ship at the Met, his expert negotiation of
those perilous waters where commerce,
snobbery, and aesthetic fraudulence swirl in
uneasy combustion with the imperatives of
aesthetic achievement. At the Met, he con-
ceded as little as practically possible to the
clamorings of the merely trendy. He none-
theless presided over an institution that was
as popular as it was admired. He showed
that the Arnoldian ideal of furthering the
cultural ambitions of a democratic society
could be best achieved not by pandering to
the lowest common denominator but by
pro¸ering the best that had been drawn and
painted to a wide public. Who would
succeed him?
That was the momentous question that has
haunted the art world ever since Mr. de
Montebello announced his retirement ear-
lier this year. We confess that we were not
sanguine. Whatever the merits of the can-
didates whose names one heard bruited
about as possible successors, none seemed
likely to possess Philippe de Montebello’s
combination of high principles, savoir faire,
and curatorial independence. The institu-
tional world of art administrators—like
many other institutional fraternities—was a
hothouse that bred intellectual conformity
and a business-as-usual mentality.
How refreshing, then, that the Met’s
board of trustees reached beyond the usual
pool of candidates to find the next leader of
the Met. No one, we would venture to say,
Notes & Comments
expected their choice to fall upon Thomas P.
Campbell. His name appeared on none of
those spurious “short lists” that were as-
siduously circulated by art-world gossip.
But the forty-six-year-old English-born
curator of European sculpture and decora-
tive arts, who trained at the Courtauld and
who has been at the Met since 1995, strikes
us as an inspired choice. Mr. Campbell has
had little administrative experience. He did
not, we understand, put his name forward
for de Montebello’s job when the impend-
ing vacancy was announced. Rather, the
board sought him out and asked whether he
might be interested in the position. But his
combination of scholarly accomplishment
—many readers will remember his mag-
nificent Renaissance tapestry exhibition a
few years back—and articulate commitment
to aesthetic excellence made the unlikely
candidate in retrospect the obvious one. We
suspect that the fact that he did not seek the
job was one of the things that, in combina-
tion with his demonstrated accomplish-
ments, recommended him to the Met’s
trustees. It would, after all, be di˝cult not
to impute some measure of hubris to any-
one who put himself forward to fill Philippe
de Montebello’s shoes.
In selecting Thomas Campbell, the
trustees of the Met have demonstrated an
independence of judgment that is as rare as
it is enviable. It is too early to say for sure,
but we suspect they may just have found
someone who, by concentrating on the
Met’s core aesthetic mission to preserve and
transmit the best of mankind’s artistic
heritage, will succeed in maintaining the
Met’s place as the premier museum of art in
America, if not the world.
The New Criterion October 2008 3
 Prague: spring in winter
by John O’Sullivan
U nder the glowering gaze of the National
Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square
stands a forty-year-old Russian tank. Its fuel
tanks are strapped vulnerably to its rear and
its gun aims at nothing in particular.
Tourists and students walk around and past
it with mild curiosity as if it were an exhibit
from the distant past like a stone spearhead
or a medieval pike. But behind the tank,
pasted to the Museum walls and staircase,
are placards with cartoons and gra˝ti of a
deliberately crude style that evokes only
yesterday. The names slapdashed down in
whitewash give us a more precise fix on
what is being recalled. “Dubček-Svoboda,”
they proclaim.
Forty years ago those names were a slo-
gan and even a chant. Old newsreels show
tanks identical to that outside the museum,
manned by nervous and disoriented sol-
diers, stationary in the midst of vast Czech
crowds who repeat the names of the leaders
of Czechoslovakia’s “reform Communism”
as a sort of revolutionary reproof. Troops
from four Warsaw Pact countries—East
Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the
Soviet Union itself—had entered Prague on
August 21, 1968 and taken up positions in
and around the city’s main monuments, in-
cluding where the tank stands today.
Sloping down from the Museum, on
the pedestrian middle section of Wenceslas
Square (which is not really a square but a
sort of boulevard) is an outdoor exhibition
of photographs mostly taken on the first full
4 The New Criterion October 2008
day of the 1968 invasion. These are the work
of the Paris Match photographer Franz
Goess, who had previously photographed
the Hungarian Revolution and the Six Day
War. There are a few pictures of Dubček at
political events throughout the Prague
Spring, and some photographs of ordinary
people debating with puzzled Soviet sol-
diers. Most photographs, however, are of
rough-hewn cartoons, slogans, and carica-
tures calling on the invaders to depart. Such
cartoons had appeared by the dozens, per-
haps hundreds, on windows and buildings
up and down the square on the first morn-
ing of the invasion. Soldiers were ordered
to remove them by nightfall. But while this
extraordinary exhibition of People’s Art was
still in session, Goess preserved it for pos-
terity.
“We don’t want borsch, we want freedom
and Dubček,” says one poster. Another
depicts a dove of peace pierced through the
heart by a Kalashnikov. A third shows a
boot stamping hard on an outline map of
Czechoslovakia. All of them are angry; few
are aggressive. The dominant theme is “Go
home, Ivan, to your families and let us live
in peace with ours.” Patriotism is there, but
it is a domesticated patriotism. There is no
hint of revanchism (not surprisingly per-
haps since the Czechs had gained from the
territorial changes of 1945). The style of art
is rough, unpolished, and with a touch of
the counterculture about it. Many cartoons
resemble the artwork of the “underground”

magazines then making their way in the
West. That may reflect the hurried circum-
stances of their production. Or perhaps the
influence of the West’s counterculture.
The invaders had crossed the Czechoslovak
borders that night in a fraternal intervention
to save Czech socialism from . . . well, what?
As the posters and cartoons repeatedly
imply, that is a question that requires some
unraveling.
The “Prague Spring” was an attempt to
liberalize communism from the top down
with the slogan “Socialism with a human
face.” Under the leadership of Alexander
Dubček and his fellow-reformers in the
politburo, measures were taken to decen-
tralize the economy, abolish censorship,
allow foreign travel, and permit greater
political freedom in general. Mindful of
what had happened in Hungary twelve
years earlier, however, Dubček pledged to
maintain a pro-Soviet foreign policy in
order to deter a Soviet crackdown. Nor did
the Czechs abolish “the leading role of the
party” or, less euphemistically, the com-
munist monopoly on power. The com-
promise then seemed just about viable.
In retrospect the Prague Spring looks like
a doomed transition. If it had been allowed
to run its course, it would either have
evolved (or collapsed) into a genuine
democracy or retreated into a hard com-
munist shell. After all, the former is what
happened to perestroika in the Soviet
Union and the latter to the early Chinese
experiments in reform. When socialism
with a human face as a system was stamped
on by the Soviet boot, it was saved as a
myth.
Then and later socialists and social dem-
ocrats thought that a valuable Third Way
between socialism and capitalism—the
gentle revolution of their perpetual imagin-
ings—had been brutally closed o¸. Con-
servatives were both more skeptical and less
surprised. They saw the Prague Spring as a
half-way house to freedom but one the
Soviets would have to dismantle anyway
lest the idea spread to their other colonies.
Prague: spring in winter by John O’Sullivan
Brezhnev, employing a Marxist version of
the same logic, saw it shrewdly as a drift to
counter-revolution—and acted accordingly.
How did the puzzled-looking soldiers in
the Russian tanks view it? We now have an
idea of that because some of those soldiers
have been reminiscing on the fortieth an-
niversary of 1968. Muhammed Salih is today
an Uzbek dissident and the author of
twenty books. In 1968 he was a soldier in a
reconnaissance battalion of the Red Army
that on August 21 crossed into Slovakia and
drove into Bratislava. His comrades had
been told that their mission was to save the
Czechs and Slovaks from the armed machi-
nations of the Western bourgeoisie. As he
frankly told Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib-
erty in an interview, however, their main
feeling about the forthcoming battle was
exhilaration. Their o˝cers and sergeants
would now have to treat them decently.
Apparently that happened to the extent
that they were allowed to trash the palace
where they were billeted in Bratislava. But
these adolescent pranks were soon over-
whelmed by more powerful experiences:
At one point someone in the crowd threw a
Molotov cocktail at our vehicle and one of us
opened fire in response. A girl was killed and
for quite a while afterwards her body was
paraded through the streets of Bratislava as an
example of the bloodlust of the Soviet soldier.
Such incidents are inevitable even in the
smallest of wars. The invasion was such a
war in part because the Czech Army had
been ordered to remain in barracks (by a
President Svoboda who played a slightly
ambiguous role in these events, protecting
his more radical colleagues but ensuring
lack of resistance to the Soviets). Bloodshed
was therefore light. In these circumstances,
the main response of ordinary Czechs
and Slovaks was to appeal to the fellow-
humanity of the young Soviet recruits by
arguing with them.
Czechs since then have occasionally la-
mented that, as in 1938 and 1948, they failed
to fight for their deliverance. This self-criti-
The New Criterion October 2008 5
 Prague: spring in winter by John O’Sullivan
cism (and worse) is unreasonable. Fighting
would have ensured more innocent deaths
without changing the outcome. But the
failure to fight has wounded the national
psyche in various subtle ways of which the
immediate self-contempt of the 1970s is
only one. It may also have led people
to over-emphasize anti-heroic and evasive
Schweik-like elements in the Czech charac-
ter as a sort of justification. And, indeed, the
pacific resistance to the invasion can provide
real justification. Salih again:
Long-legged girls in miniskirts gave us leaflets
that said we had been deceived by our com-
manders, that we were not liberators but oc-
cupiers. . . . They [urged] us not to take up
arms against unarmed people. They were
really unarmed.
And this disarmed us—young sentimental
soldiers who had come from afar, leaving our
families, just like they said in the leaflets.
Salih was impressed that an unarmed per-
son could stand against an armed one and
drew from this experience what he calls “the
freedom of an unarmed man.” He went on
to found the National Salvation Committee
which, despite its slightly putschist title, is
the umbrella organization of opposition
groups in Uzbekistan.
M any others learned the same lesson.
Seven Russian dissidents ventured into Red
Square that same time and unveiled a ban-
ner reading “For Your Freedom and Ours.”
It was an act of conscience and self-sacrifice
that led them into years of harassment and
repression. Dissident movements through-
out the Soviet bloc were inspired by the
velvet resistance of ordinary people to tanks
and guns. Initially, however, Czechs and
Slovaks seemed to forget the lesson they
had taught to others.
Gustav Husak’s hard-line regime suc-
ceeded Dubček and imposed a long winter
of “normalization” on the country. People
were asked to sign statements of support for
the Soviet invasion and, if they refused,
found themselves unemployed, unfit for
6 The New Criterion October 2008
further education, steered into jobs such as
stoking and cleaning. Dubček himself was
reduced to the status of a gardener by some
bureaucrat who never knew that gardening
is a famous recipe for a happy life. For a
while, these su¸ocating tactics worked. The
entire nation seemingly lapsed into a dis-
turbed sleep of self-contempt and slothful
bitterness. When I visited Prague in the
early 1970s, I was struck by the sourness,
depression, ine˝ciency, and dishonesty of
everyday life. After the goulash gaiety of
Budapest, it was like stepping into a home
for the depressed.
That depression began to lift with the
founding of Charter 77. One of its sig-
natories, Anna Sabatova, now head of the
Czech Helsinki Group, who spent three
years in prison for distributing leaflets,
points out that the Charter had several foun-
dations and a rather complicated history. Its
gradual success in establishing a space for
dissidence arose from the confluence of three
developments: the awakening memories of
1968, the fact that the Czechoslovakia had
signed international rights covenants (which
were thus part of Czech law), and growing
support in Europe, the U.S., and Canada for
human rights in foreign policy. Charter 77
was a unique organization, in part because it
was hardly an organization at all. It brought
together people of every ideological stripe
(except, obviously, for those communists
who supported the Husak regime) on a basis
of equality and mutual respect. Its rules
counseled the avoidance of both ideological
language and divisive positions outside the
narrow defense of civil and political liberties.
And it refrained from anything that smacked
of “opposition” activity.
Religion too played a role, though less so
than in Poland. Ms. Sabatova points out that,
insofar as there was a Charter 77 ideology
underlying its defense of civil rights, almost
all of its members were influenced by the
Christian stress of some founders on forgiv-
ing and overcoming hate. It was this restraint
that enabled a wide variety of ideological
actors to cooperate as well as giving the
movement appeal to the wider (and com-

promised) society. Rather like Polish Soli-
darity a few years later, though less spec-
tacularly, Charter 77 established itself as the
real moral authority of Czech and Slovak
society as the 1970s and 1980s wore on.
Why then do we associate Czech dissi-
dents far more with rock music than with
religion? Tom Stoppard’s recent play Rock
’n’ Roll makes this link a powerful one—and
not without good cause. As Sabatova points
out again, the Husak regime’s decision to
prosecute the Czech rock group Plastic
People of the Universe was the catalyst that
revived Czech dissidence. It demonstrated
even to those who disliked such music that
the ambition of the totalitarian state to
control life and thought was in principle
limitless and had to be resisted. But a
secondary e¸ect was that rock music became
thereafter something of a symbol of Czech
resistance. That had a further e¸ect: it
guaranteed Czech dissidents a wide sym-
pathetic audience in the West on the Left as
well as among traditional anti-communists.
Social democrats who were deaf to the ap-
peal of John Paul II and a religion-soaked
Solidarity had no inner qualms about sup-
porting the Plastic People of the Universe.
If rock music was undoubtedly one link
between Charter 77 and the Western coun-
terculture, it wasn’t the only one. The
Christian stress on forgiveness underlying
the charter overlapped heavily with the
Western Left’s Gandhian stress on “peace”
and disarmament. It could be present-
ed—not accurately but plausibly—as very
di¸erent and even hostile to Reagan’s Cold
War intransigence. (Indeed, that is exactly
how the Western “peace movement” of the
1980s did present it.) The emphasis on the
anti-heroic in the Czech self-image also at-
tracted pacifist Western identification. Even
the social style of the Czech dissidents
played its part. It was so relaxed, bohemian,
and seemingly unconservative that Wester-
ners were often amazed to discover that
Vaclav Havel admired Margaret Thatcher as
well as John Lennon.
But there were philosophical costs to this
ambiguity. When Norman Podhoretz visited
Prague: spring in winter by John O’Sullivan
Havel’s apartment, he was alarmed to see the
poster of John Lennon decorating the wall.
He argued that the countercultural Left was
an unreliable ally against Communism. Len-
non’s utopian, hedonist, and Dionysian
counterculture represented, he thought, a
very di¸erent revolution to the sober bour-
geois liberal democracy sought by Havel. It
was a potentially disabling confusion of
ideologies. Yet this confusion came to be en-
capsulated in the very idea of 1968.
A t the time very few people thought that
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and
the student manifestations against de Gaulle
in Paris were really di¸erent examples of the
same thing simply because they happened in
the same year. Among those who saw them
as entirely separate were the leaders of the
international student Left. Indeed, they saw
them as opposites. Tariq Ali, “Danny the
Red,” and other student leftist leaders met
in London that summer to great media in-
terest and some mockery. Private Eye ran on
its cover a photograph of the leaders in
front of Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery.
They are shown as singing “There’s No
Business Like Show Business” while the
bust of Marx throws out an aside: “Kindly
leave the stage.” But when a British jour-
nalist innocently asked if they were not
seeking the same “liberalization” as Dubček
in Prague, he was shouted down. Liberali-
zation was the last thing they were seeking.
What they wanted was socialism. Of course,
they wanted socialism without Soviet tanks,
namely the democratic socialism that Sol-
zhenitsyn would later deride as “boiling
ice.” But, whatever their positive ideas, they
had little sympathy with the reformist
methods or the rightwards direction of the
Prague Spring. As 1968 evolved from a year
into a myth, however, it blended almost all
the upheavals of then and later into a single
revolutionary upsurge of a vaguely radical
kind. Anti-Vietnam demos outside the Pen-
tagon, student attacks on the Paris police,
assaults on universities from Columbia to
the lse, sit-ins, teach-ins, and factory oc-
cupations, the classical invasion of South
The New Criterion October 2008 7
 Prague: spring in winter by John O’Sullivan
Vietnam by the North’s professional army
—all were alleged to be symptoms of a
world-wide discontent with capitalism
(plus, to please the sophisticated, bureauc-
racy) that would shortly usher in a new
world. It ought to have been impossible to
fit the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
into this radical framework. But somehow it
happened. Prague became another example
of how the revolution had been unkindly
snu¸ed out by bureaucracy. On programs
celebrating the fortieth anniversary of 1968,
Tariq Ali himself could be found regretting
wistfully that the only real prospect of es-
tablishing a popular democratic socialism in
Europe had been prevented by Soviet tanks
that summer. Because the fit was a poor
one, however, the Prague Spring played a
diminishing role in the heroic mythology of
1968 as time went on. And because the
Western counterculture had influenced
Czech opinion, this blend of mistaking and
forgetting 1968 has even spread to Prague
itself.
Earlier this year, in a session of the
Prague Writers’ Festival about 1968, a
largely American panel devoted itself almost
entirely to a discussion, soaked in self-con-
gratulatory guilt, of Vietnam and the U.S.
anti-war movement. It was left to the sole
Russian panelist to point out that at the
very time the Soviets were supplying the
North Vietnamese with the sinews of war
(and helping them to shoot down John
McCain), they were also sending tanks to
within yards of where the panel was sitting
that day. Some of the other panelists were
simply ba˛ed by this observation, but the
chairman—Tariq Ali, who seems to have
become the guru-to-go-to for 1968—
demanded to know if the Russian panelist
was for or against the Vietnam war. The
Russian replied mildly that he was simply
putting the U.S. role in Vietnam in the geo-
political context of 1968. This only ba˛ed
the Americans further. As it happens, how-
ever, the central and eastern Europeans of
1968 and later were strongly in favor of the
U.S. e¸ort in Vietnam—as liberal Americans
visiting Prague and Budapest in those days
8 The New Criterion October 2008
were distressed to find. They had a stronger
grip on geopolitical reality than American
liberals of those days—and than some
Czechs today.
When the Writers’ Festival was in session,
the Franz Goess exhibition had not been
erected. In the same space there was, how-
ever, an exhibition of sorts. A small tent
protected tables on which petitions against
the stationing of a U.S. missile defense sys-
tem in the Czech Republic were presented
for signature. This is a contemporary dis-
pute in Prague. The Czech government
strongly favors deployment of this defensive
system and has signed a deployment agree-
ment with the U.S. government.
Throughout the summer, though, the
opinion polls had suggested that about
two-thirds of the Czech people were op-
posed to deployment. No referendum was
required to endorse the agreement, but the
calculations of the conservative Czech gov-
ernment were that any parliamentary vote
would be close. A narrow victory was likely,
but a defeat possible. The petition displays
were therefore playing to a sympathetic
Czech audience.
At the same time they had an almost an-
tique feel to them, displaying as they did the
signs and slogans of the Western counter-
culture of 1968 and later. Even the argu-
ments were seemingly recycled. Roger
Scruton, speaking to a private meeting of
Czech conservatives involved in the missile
defense debate, described the underlying
local argument of missile defense opponents
as “Defense Equals Aggression”—much the
same logic that the peace movement in the
1980s used to obstruct the stationing of
Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western
Europe while remaining largely silent about
the Soviet ss20 missiles in the East. Twenty
years after the Velvet Revolution, such
neutralist inversions plainly appealed to
large section of the Czech public that had
forgotten geopolitical realities and em-
braced an outlook rooted in the Western
counterculture and a certain wounded na-
tional self-image.

A young contemporary dissident from
Belarus, Pavel Sevyarynets, drew a distinc-
tion in an rfe/rl talk between Paris and
Prague in 1968 that echoes Podhoretz’s un-
ease over the Lennon poster in Havel’s
apartment:
Freedom demanded in Paris was anarchic,
hippie-like, with an element of the sexual rev-
olution, a rebellion against morality, with a
denunciation of patriotism. It was a call for
freedom from order, rules, and in the end
from God.
The freedom demanded in Prague was
moral and patriotic; it was freedom from dic-
tatorship, violence, and militant atheism.
That second freedom inspired Czechs and
Slovaks in 1968 and 1977. As we have seen,
the Czech dissident movement initially had
a strong religious foundation. Also, since
1989, former dissidents in and out of o˝ce,
in particular Havel, have taken strong posi-
tions in defense of Western values, Atlantic
institutions, and dissidents needing help in
Cuba and other despotisms. The present
Czech government represents those con-
servative sections of Czech opinion that still
remain robustly Atlanticist and suspicious
of Russia. Over time, however, the coun-
tercultural strain in Czech political opinion,
with its hedonism and utopian visions of
universal and European peace had risen in
influence and even begun to predominate.
Today, Pavyarynet’s lyrical description of
Czech freedom sounds more like the Polish
freedom inspired and guided by John Paul
II. With the threat of Soviet aggression no
longer palpable, the Czechs had begun to
feel that their liberty could be enjoyed
without cost, without commitment, and
without defense.
Just two weeks before the fortieth anni-
versary of 1968, however, Russia sent in the
tanks again—this time into Georgia—and
Prague: spring in winter by John O’Sullivan
seized two provinces of the invaded
country. Within hours of this news, the at-
mosphere of Prague and of Czech politics
changed sharply. Franz Goess and the other
exhibitions suddenly became contemporary
warnings. The sour mood of countercul-
tural isolationism evaporated. It became the
conventional wisdom that the missile de-
fense agreement would survive parlia-
mentary debate. Czech politicians settled
down to the traditional task of working out
what alliances they would need in this new
world of geo-economic realpolitik. And
Czechs had the opportunity to reflect on the
lessons of someone else’s invasion—and of
their concept of freedom.
L ess than five minutes walk from the other
end of Wenceslas Square is a small Franciscan
friary. It is currently housing another exhibi-
tion of photographs of Russian occupiers.
This modest display, however, shows the sol-
diers preparing to leave Czechoslovakia in
1990 following the collapse of the Soviet em-
pire in Eastern Europe. The same kind of
young men away from home are depicted as
in the photographs from 1968. Like their ear-
lier comrades, some of them are clearly
homesick. They are not sorry to be leaving.
But in these photographs they are disconso-
late rather than puzzled. The accompanying
pictures of broken tanks and ruined barracks
give o¸ a sad whi¸ of defeat, failure, and
retreat.
After they have seen the Goess photo-
graphs, Czechs and Georgians should both
visit this exhibition. It would remind them
that the strongest hostile powers can be
humbled. But that requires a spirit of liberty
that is watchful and robust rather than
utopian and hedonist—unless, of course,
the hostile powers in question are obliging
enough to issue the kind of unmistakable
advance warning that Russia delivered over
Georgia.
The New Criterion October 2008 9
 Hazlitt’s philocaption:
a very child in love
by John Derbyshire
T he great fifteenth-century treatise on
witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer
of the Witches”) includes a lengthy discus-
sion of this question: “Is it a Catholic view
to maintain that witches can infect the
minds of men with an inordinate love of
strange women, and so inflame their hearts
that by no shame or punishment, by no
words or actions can they be forced to desist
from such love?”
Later, in a section given over to remedies
for various kinds of bewitchment, the hor-
rid art is named: “Philocaption, or inordinate
love of one person for another, can be
caused in three ways. Sometimes it is due
merely to a lack of control over the eyes;
sometimes to the temptation of devils;
sometimes to the spells of necromancers
and witches, with the help of devils.”
One does not need to believe in witchcraft
to acknowledge that philocaption as a psy-
chological catastrophe is all too real. It has, I
am sure, happened in all times and places, to
both sexes, but nineteenth-century English-
men seem to have been particularly suscep-
tible, or perhaps just particularly willing to
record the experience in their literary
productions. Some of the most sensitive and
intelligent Englishmen of that age were vic-
tims of philocaption, succumbing to the im-
agined charms of uncultivated, dramatically
unsuitable women.
The novelist George Gissing was ruined
by his passion for a common prostitute
named Nell. Gissing actually married this
10 The New Criterion October 2008
Nell, who of course made him thoroughly
miserable; then, when she died, either of
drink or venereal disease, Gissing promptly
fell for another girl he met in the street—
perhaps also a prostitute, we are not sure—
and proceeded to repeat the whole ghastly
blunder with her.
The poet Ernest Dowson (“I have forgot
much, Cynara! gone with the wind . . .”)
was at least spared the pain of marriage with
the philocaptrix. His Cynara was a waitress
in a cheap restaurant who, according to
Dowson’s friend Arthur Symons, “listened
to his verses, smiled charmingly, under her
mother’s eyes, on his two years’ courtship,
and at the end of two years married the
waiter instead. . . . Did it ever mean very
much to her to have made and to have
killed a poet?” I very much doubt it.
Somerset Maugham provided a char-
acteristically unsparing account of phil-
ocaption in his autobiographical novel Of
Human Bondage. Given that Maugham was
homosexual, you have to wonder about
the precise identity of “Mildred,” but the
overall experience he describes fits the
pattern.
The brightest star in this galaxy of philo-
captive misery is the essayist William Haz-
litt. Early in the morning of Wednesday,
August 16, 1820, on the second floor of a
lodging house in west-central London,
Hazlitt had his breakfast brought to him by
his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Walker. She

was nineteen; he, forty-two. Having deliv-
ered the breakfast tray, Sarah left. But:
The first time I ever saw you, as you went out
of the room, you turned full round at the
door, with that inimitable grace with which
you do every thing, and fixed your eyes full
upon me, as much as to say, “Is he caught?”
He certainly was. There followed two years
of dreadful infatuation—an exceptionally
severe case of philocaption.
Jon Cook, who is Professor of Literature
at the University of East Anglia (in Nor-
wich, England), has recently given us a
book about the business: Hazlitt in Love: A
Fatal Attachment.… This is a well-written and
neatly structured brief account, broadly
sympathetic to its subject, in so far as it is
possible to be sympathetic to the extremes
of self-deceptive folly.
Jon Cook is by no means the first writer
to take up the Hazlitt-Walker a¸air. The first
was Hazlitt himself. In May of 1823, a few
months after the end of the episode, Hazlitt
published Liber Amoris, a thinly fictionalized
narrative in the form of letters and brief
diary-style memoranda. “Taken as a whole,”
says Jon Cook, “the book is like an album
or a reliquary of a love a¸air.”
Liber Amoris carried no author’s name.
Hazlitt’s numerous literary enemies, how-
ever, took no time at all to smoke him out.
No great e¸ort was required to do so. Haz-
litt was not the type to hide his misery
under a bushel. His friend the playwright
and journalist Bryan Procter reports Hazlitt
telling him, while still under the philocap-
tive spell, and before Liber Amoris came out,
that:
I just saw J— going into Wills’ Co¸ee-house
yesterday morning; he spoke to me, I fol-
lowed him into the house; and whilst he
lunched, I told him the whole story. Then I
wandered into the Regent’s Park, where I met
one of M—’s sons. I walked with him some
–––––––––––
1 Hazlitt in Love: A Fatal Attachment, by Jon Cook;
Short Books, 288 pages, £12.99.
Hazlitt’s philocaption by John Derbyshire
time, and on his using some civil expression,
by God! Sir, I told him the whole story. Well,
Sir, then I went and called on Haydon, but he
was out. There was only his man, Salmon,
there; but by God! I could not help myself. It
all came out; the whole cursed story!
A. C. Grayling, Hazlitt’s most recent biog-
rapher, correctly describes the e¸ect of Liber
Amoris as “repulsive to any reader who does
not know the story of [Hazlitt’s] enchant-
ment and destruction, and unbearably poi-
gnant to anyone who does.”
Whether “destruction” overstates the case
is a matter of dispute. Meeting Hazlitt in
August 1824, two years after the Sarah
Walker a¸air ended and six years since her
previous sight of him, Mary Shelley was
shocked: “gaunt and thin, his hair scattered,
his cheek bones projecting . . . his smile
brought tears into my eyes, it was like a
sun-beam illuminating the most melancholy
ruins.”
Yet just that Spring Hazlitt had married a
wealthy widow, Isabella Bridgwater. He was
living in financial security at last, and writ-
ing prolifically. On the other other hand,
the marriage soon collapsed, Isabella taking
herself and her fortune o¸ to Switzerland in
the fall of 1827. We do not know the cause
of the failure—but that post-philocaptive
stress had nothing to do with it seems to me
improbable.
H azlitt has had at least six biographers,
but so far as I know Jon Cook’s is the first
nonfiction book to concentrate on the Haz-
litt-Walker a¸air (counting Liber Amoris as
fiction). Novelists have been less reticent.
Jonathan Bate’s novel The Cure for Love
(1998) put an ingenious modern spin on the
story, while Anne Haverty’s The Far Side of a
Kiss (2001) made a feminist tract of the af-
fair, with Sarah Walker as the victim—an
intellectual gal stifled by the conventions of
her time, drawn to Hazlitt for the oppor-
tunities he o¸ered her to enlarge her
cramped understanding.
In fact, so far as can be ascertained from
the dialogues recorded in Liber Amoris, and
The New Criterion October 2008 11
 Hazlitt’s philocaption by John Derbyshire
from accounts by Hazlitt’s friends, Sarah
Walker was an unremarkable young woman
of her class and time, certainly not intellec-
tual. She flirted with male residents at the
lodging-house in part from a girl’s natural
inclination to flirt, in part very likely be-
cause she was encouraged to do so by her
parents, to assist the family business.
Nor was she of striking appearance to
anyone not bewitched. That same Bryan
Procter recalled her in a memoir, from
which Jon Cook gives extracts:
“Her face was round and small, and her eyes
were motionless, glassy and without any
speculation (apparently) in them.” Something
in the way she moved impressed [Procter]:
“Her movements in walking were very re-
markable, for I never observed her make a
step. She went onwards in a sort of wavy,
sinuous manner, like the movements of a
snake.”
Intellectual? When the a¸air was over and
Liber Amoris on the verge of publication,
Hazlitt persuaded a male friend, whom we
know only as F, to test the girl by checking
into the lodging-house and making ad-
vances to her. The results were predictable.
Sarah teased F, flirted with him, and per-
mitted minor “liberties” to him, just as she
had to Hazlitt, but drew the line firmly at
any real sexual engagement. After receiving
F’s debriefing, Hazlitt asked him whether
he would like to have Sarah as his mistress
in a set-up funded by Hazlitt, if the matter
could be arranged. F declined, saying that
he preferred a woman who could read and
talk.
It is probable that Sarah’s own heart had
been captured by another lodger, John
Tomkins, who stayed at the house for a few
months in late 1821 and early 1822 (which is
to say, from about Month 14 to Month 20
of Hazlitt’s twenty-three-month trauma). It
was an accidental encounter with Sarah and
Tomkins out walking together on July 29,
1822, followed by a four-hour conversation
with Tomkins that evening, that finally
woke Hazlitt from his dream of love. Two
12 The New Criterion October 2008
years later, Sarah gave birth to a son. She
moved in with Tomkins shortly afterwards,
and lived with him more than twenty years,
though they never married.
William Hazlitt’s father was a Unitarian
minister whose unbending principles caused
him to refuse most of the opportunities for
a stable living that came his way. The family
actually spent the years 1783–1787—William
aged five to nine—in North America, whose
stern Congregationalism proved stony soil
for the “rational religion” Hazlitt, Sr. of-
fered them. The family’s landlady at one
point was Abigail Adams, wife of John and
mother of John Quincy. (She was not the
last famous person to house William. His
London landlord for the seven years just
prior to the Sarah Walker a¸air, 1813–1819,
was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.)
William’s only recorded recollection of the
family’s American adventure was of the taste
of barberries found under snow.
His father wanted William to enter the
Unitarian ministry. The boy lost his faith
early, though, and abandoned the idea. He
spent his later teen years reading everything
he could find in literature and philosophy,
and accumulating literary acquaintances:
William Godwin (Mary Shelley’s father),
then the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth.
At age twenty, Hazlitt happened upon an
exhibition of Italian old masters in London
and was, he tells us, “staggered” by them:
“From that time I lived in a world of pic-
tures.” He took painting lessons from his
older brother John, a successful portraitist,
and at age twenty-four had a painting ex-
hibited by the Royal Academy. All through
his twenties Hazlitt made a living of sorts
by painting, increasingly supplemented by
art criticism and hack writing.
Hazlitt married at thirty in 1808. His
bride was Sarah Stoddart, four years his
senior. Sarah was an intelligent and well-
read freethinker like himself, daughter of an
o˝cer in the Royal Navy. It was a marriage
of a¸ection and shared sympathies rather
than love. Sons were born at one, three, and
seven years into the marriage, but only the

second survived. By 1817 the Hazlitts were
living more apart than together, though
they always remained friends.
William had by this time become moder-
ately well-known as an essayist and pamph-
leteer of radical opinions. Hazlitt’s young
imagination had been fired by the French
Revolution, and he never lost that egali-
tarian ardor. He was an admirer of Napole-
on—England’s mortal enemy in a long
series of wars—and his last book was a
four-volume biography of the dictator.
Oddly, he was also an unwavering admirer
of Edmund Burke, about whom he wrote a
flattering essay: “I cannot help looking
upon him as the chief boast and ornament
of the English House of Commons . . .” etc.
Considering the two men’s contrary views
of the French Revolution, this is puzzling.
All Hazlitt’s praise was, though, for Burke’s
powers of mind, pen, and speech. Here, as
in the Sarah Walker a¸air, one comes away
with the strong impression that Hazlitt was
much more a form man than a content
man: “I live in a world of pictures.”
Hazlitt’s manner of life was precarious.
He was usually hard up, and was arrested
for debt at least twice. It was for non-pay-
ment of rent that Jeremy Bentham evicted
him in the winter of 1819–20. The last thing
Hazlitt ever wrote, from his death bed, was
a begging letter to a friend, asking for £10.
If not precisely bohemian in the sense that
Thackeray put into common English cur-
rency twenty years later, Hazlitt’s lifestyle
was certainly not sexually abstemious. He
was embarrassed one day when out walking
with a friend to be surrounded by a cheerful
flock of street women, to whom he was ob-
viously a familiar client.
And then that two-year infatuation with
his landlady’s lackluster daughter. Jon Cook
gives the essential details, but you really
have to brave Liber Amoris for the full hor-
ror of the thing.
Here is every stage in the progress of
amorous obsession, described with a frank-
ness that makes it all too familiar to anyone
who has endured philocaption. Here are the
Hazlitt’s philocaption by John Derbyshire
soaring hopes and plunging disappoint-
ments, the paralyzing anxiety, the moments
of incomparable sweetness. The sweetest of
those latter are public excursions with the
beloved, of which Hazlitt was vouchsafed
just one: a trip to the theater with Sarah and
her mother on January 24, 1822. The play—
you can’t make this stu¸ up—was Romeo
and Juliet. Sarah allowed Hazlitt to hold her
hand, a moment of perfect rapture for her
victim: “Oh! Could we but be always so—
do not mock me, for I am indeed a very
child in love.”
Above all, Liber Amoris shows the extra-
ordinary vividness, the intensity of the phil-
ocaptive experience—every slightest event,
every trivial exchange, every word, every
gesture, every date and time, luminous with
meaning and glowing bright for ever in
memory. The rest of the philocaptive’s life,
before and after, seems shadowy and insub-
stantial by contrast.
Here, too, perhaps hardest of all for
fellow-victims to read, is the occasional
awareness of one’s own folly and humilia-
tion. If philocaption struck only the dim-
witted and incurious, there would be little
to say about it. In Hazlitt it found a victim
already cursed with self-knowledge—one of
what he himself called “the reflective por-
tion of humanity”:
Who is there so low as me? Who is there be-
sides . . . so vile, so abhorrent to love, to whom
such an indignity could have happened? . . .
I am tossed about . . . by my passion, so as to
become ridiculous. I can now understand how
it is that mad people never remain in the same
place—they are moving on for ever, from them-
selves!
And of course, as Hazlitt perceived, seen
from the outside, the business was ridic-
ulous. It descended from the merely ridicu-
lous to the utterly farcical when he decided
to divorce his wife in order to be free to
marry the other—who had never had nor
voiced any willingness to marry him!
Divorce was very di˝cult in England at
the time, but much easier in Scotland,
The New Criterion October 2008 13
 Hazlitt’s philocaption by John Derbyshire
though there was a forty-day residency re-
quirement. Hazlitt persuaded his wife to go
to Scotland with him so that he could
divorce her. Sarah Hazlitt comes out of the
trip rather well. She kept a journal of it,
which Grayling describes as “disarming and
brave.” She occupied herself for the required
forty days with long walking tours, taking
in the Scottish scenery and the art collec-
tions at great country houses.
At one of these houses, Dalkeith Palace,
she unexpectedly encountered Hazlitt, who
was killing time in the same way. Husband
and wife gazed together at the allegorical
painting Truth Finding Fortune in the Sea,
then attributed to Luca Giordano, but now
believed to be Pietro Liberi’s. Hazlitt was
stunned by the principal nude in the paint-
ing, who (he said) was the image of his
other Sarah. He recorded this incident—or
rather, curiously mis-recorded it—in Liber
Amoris:
Do you know I saw a picture, the very pattern
of her, the other day at Dalkeith Palace (Hope
Finding Fortune in the Sea) . . . and the
resemblance drove me almost out of my
senses.
But the first word in that painting’s name is
not “hope,” it is “truth.” This cannot have
been a deliberate substitution for fictional-
izing purposes, or why did the author not
fictionalize “Dalkeith”? It is an interesting
slip. Perhaps Hazlitt had been reading Dr.
Johnson: “The natural flights of the human
mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but
from hope to hope.” They are assuredly not,
other than in very exceptional cases, from
truth to truth.
H azlitt was not indi¸erent to the meta-
physical interests we see reflected in the
literature and philosophy of his age—those
interests lampooned so mercilessly by Pea-
cock in Nightmare Abbey and painted so
darkly by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. His
first book was a work of moral philosophy:
Essay on the Principles of Human Action.
Given this interest, and his own self-aware-
14 The New Criterion October 2008
ness, the experience of philocaption must
have caused Hazlitt to wonder at the ease
with which intellect and will can be un-
horsed and disarmed.
In March of 1821—Month eight of his
twenty-three-month ordeal—Hazlitt pub-
lished an essay titled “On Personal Charac-
ter,” setting out a rather grimly determinis-
tic view of human life and human action.
No one ever changes his character from the
time he is two years old; nay, I might say, from
the time he is two hours old . . . the character,
the internal, original bias, remains always the
same, true to itself to the very last . . . . A
temper sullen or active, shy or bold, grave or
lively, selfish or romantic, . . . is manifest very
early; and imperceptibly but irresistibly
moulds our inclinations, habits, and pursuits
through life. The greater or less degree of
animal spirits . . . the disposition to be a¸ected
by objects near, or at a distance, or not at all,—
to be struck with novelty, or to brood over
deep-rooted impressions,—to indulge in
laughter or in tears, the leaven of passion or of
prudence that tempers this frail clay, is born
with us and never quits us. . . . The accession of
knowledge, the pressure of circumstances . . .
does little more than minister occasion to the
first predisposing bias.
So much for the shelves of self-improve-
ment manuals at your local bookstore. To
the degree that self-improvement is pos-
sible, Hazlitt implies, it is only walking
north on the deck of a south-bound ship.
Is this a true account of human nature? It
may well be. Earlier this year, I attended a
conference on the current state of the mind
sciences. Though none of the important
questions in those sciences is as yet disposi-
tively answered, the overall impression
given by the researchers who addressed us
was strongly Hazlittian. We act, and then
we make up stories to supply reasons to
ourselves and others. The commonplace
notion of human volition—perceive a
choice, choose, act—is only what neurosci-
ence researchers cheerfully call “folk voli-
tion.” It bears as little relation to the actual

brain processes involved in volition as the
crystal dome of ancient “folk astronomy”
does to the actual night sky.
Hazlitt’s philocaption could not, at any
rate, have come to him as a complete
surprise. He was chronically susceptible to
infatuations with women much below him-
self in class and intellect. His friend Peter
George Patmore tells us that he “never
knew [Hazlitt] out of love.” The Sarah
Walker obsession was thus only the most
serious flare-up of a condition to which
Hazlitt had always been susceptible.
His political disappointments paralleled
his personal ones, reinforcing the pessi-
mism. In a very perceptive commentary on
Hazlitt’s early 1823 essay “My First Ac-
quaintance with Poets,” Jon Cook notes that
the essayist’s first meetings with Coleridge
and Wordsworth in 1798 occurred in “a time
of hope.” Those political hopes did not sur-
vive the quarter-century to 1823, any more
than did Hazlitt’s personal hopes.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But
to be young was very heaven!” Hazlitt surely
agreed with Wordsworth’s famous lines on
the French revolutionary period. He was
even younger than Wordsworth (by eight
Hazlitt’s philocaption by John Derbyshire
years), and for an Englishman of instinctively
liberal, dissenting, egalitarian impulses,
the fading memory of that bliss through
the long, dreary Napoleonic wars (Truth
Drowning Hope in the Sea), the reactionary
administration of Lord Liverpool, and the
bu¸oonish monarchy of George IV cast
public a¸airs in a sad, dwindling light. Could
Hazlitt have foreseen the great reforms of the
1830s and the unifying good sense of Vic-
toria, the prospects might have cheered him
up, but he died in September 1830, aged 52,
from cancer of the stomach.
I n a startling digression in the middle of
that 1823 essay, Hazlitt, in Jon Cook’s
words, “looks back upon an existence that
had somehow failed to happen”:
So have I loitered my life away, reading books,
looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing,
thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I
have wanted only one thing to make me
happy; but wanting that, have wanted every-
thing!
Hazlitt in Love leaves no doubt what that
one thing was.
The New Criterion October 2008 15
 Churchill’s friends & rivals
by Robert Messenger
W inston Churchill had the temperament of
an artist, treating every issue as if it were
deeply personal and to be fought over as for
dear life. He was capable of the most ex-
traordinary feats, but he lacked that touch of
self-knowledge that lets one see—and makes
one worry about—how actions are inter-
preted. He claimed not to care for the
opinion of other men, but there’s a dif-
ference between not seeking it and seeming
to disdain it. Over many decades, his actions
struck his contemporaries as disdainful and
opportunistic, which gave him the reputa-
tion of a man seeking power at any cost.
If decades of scholarship have demon-
strated anything, it is Churchill’s utter good
faith. He didn’t actively conspire and often
let personal friendship get in the way of gain.
But he was able to persuade himself that
some new proposal was to be backed or at-
tacked as a matter of principle when it was
simply a personal preference. In 1917, the
Liberal grandee Viscount Esher in his dia-
ries perfectly characterized Churchill: “he
handles great subjects in rhythmical lan-
guage, and becomes quickly enslaved by his
own phrases. He deceives himself in the
belief that he takes broad views, when his
mind is fixed upon one comparatively small
aspect of the question.”
His temperament is the best explanation
for the most inexplicable thing about Chur-
chill: how utterly distinct were the periods
of his life and how widely divergent the
ideas he espoused. It was the life of a dozen
16 The New Criterion October 2008
men. His career was not a progression, but
a sequence of extraordinary star turns—
quite often on the stage of the age’s most
important events (Ireland, the Middle East,
India, two world wars, social reform). Each
gained him more enemies—never follow-
ers—on both sides of the political divide.
Churchill didn’t evolve so much as turn on a
dime. In the attempt to present the whole
man, any author must resort to elision to
make a coherent story. It leaves gaps for the
next author—and there are always next
authors in the Churchill field; last year saw
two books on Churchill and the Jews.
The latest in the “Churchill and . . .” vein
are Robert Lloyd George’s David and
Winston: How the Friendship between Chur-
chill and Lloyd George Changed the Course of
History… and Arthur Herman’s Gandhi &
Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an
Empire and Forged Our Age.  Each isolates
a deeply interesting facet of Churchill,
though in both cases the interest is more by
accident than intention.
Churchill went into parliament in 1900 as a
Conservative war hero and the scion of an
aristocratic line. Within four years he had
–––––––––––
1 David and Winston: How A Friendship Changed
History, by Robert Lloyd George; Overlook, 336
pages, $29.95.
2 Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed
an Empire and Forged Our Age, by Arthur Herman;
Bantam, 736 pages, $30.

changed parties (Conservative for Liberal),
within five he had ministerial o˝ce, and by
1908 he was one of the dominant figures in
a liberal cabinet bent on serious social
reform. When Churchill crossed the floor
from the Conservatives to the Liberals in
May 1904, he sat himself next to David
Lloyd George, the leading radical of the day
and the guiding force behind Churchill’s
decision. Lloyd George could o¸er the
young man what he wanted—preferment—
and got passionate support for his radical
agenda in return. Between them they drove
the government to begin building the
modern British welfare state.
The People’s Budget of 1909 moved the
great English Liberal party from its tradi-
tion of laissez-faire capitalism to a philoso-
phy of the redistribution of income. Taxes
were raised and created to take money from
the wealthy to support old-age pensions
and national unemployment insurance. A
proposed land tax seems to have been
designed almost solely to stir up aristocratic
opposition and force a partisan fight, which
Lloyd George and Churchill thought would
bind their liberal colleagues to the reforms.
The bill (with the land tax discarded in the
final version) only cleared the House of
Lords when the Prime Minister threatened
to create 500 new peers to see it through—
the threat that allowed the passage of the
Reform Bill of 1832. The People’s Budget
was similarly revolutionary. The former
Liberal Prime Minister Lord Rosebery
termed it: “the end of all, the negation of
faith, of family, of property, of Monarchy,
of Empire.” As 1832 was prologue to
England’s greatest age, so 1909 set the stage
for its abject decline.
There is a typically brilliant cartoon by
Max Beerbohm that shows Churchill talk-
ing to the Duke of Marlborough out front
of Blenheim, the largest private home in
England. Churchill is telling his cousin
“There, there! There is nothing in the
Budget which will prevent an honest work-
ing man from living in reasonable comfort
in his own little home.” And there’s the rub.
It is hard to square the popular image of
Churchill’s friends & rivals by Robert Messenger
Churchill—arch-Tory, defender of Empire
and tradition, military obsessed—with the
ardent reformer of these years, who was
steering England into the path of socialism
and associating with people like the Webbs.
It is worth quoting a well-known letter of
Churchill’s, to his wife, from May 30, 1909:
Do you know I would greatly like to have
some practice in the handling of large forces. I
have much confidence in my judgment on
things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I
seem to feel the truth more than in tactical
combinations. It is a vain and foolish thing to
say—but you will not laugh at it. I am sure I
have the root of the matter in me but never I
fear in this state of existence will it have a
chance of flowering—in bright red blossom.
It is an utterly absurd sentiment, of course.
Despite having witnessed battles like Spion
Kop, the self-confident Churchill shows no
inkling of modern warfare. He wrote just
after taking part in maneuvers with his
yeomanry regiment, and despite being one
of the most powerful men in Britain, driv-
ing a reforming government to novel ar-
rangements, he’s keyed up and longing for
battle. The letter indicates his conscious
sense that under no circumstances was war
impending. Here, for a few short years war
seemed impossible: It was the Indian
summer of nineteenth-century liberalism.
Churchill had found other outlets for his
deep longings for martial glory. He had
been swept up in the New Liberal philoso-
phy being espoused by J. A. Hobson, L. T.
Hobhouse, and T. H. Green and by the
powerful personality of David Lloyd
George, his friend, mentor, and surrogate
father. Lloyd George drew him over to
radicalism, and Churchill poured his all into
that battle.
C hurchill’s career as a social reformer came
to a sudden halt after the Agadir incident of
1911 and the realization that war with Ger-
many was not only possible but likely. The
Royal Navy wasn’t ready, and Churchill was
moved to the admiralty—thanks to Lloyd
The New Criterion October 2008 17
 Churchill’s friends & rivals by Robert Messenger
George’s backroom maneuvering—to in-
stigate major reform. Only two years
before, Lloyd George and Churchill had
fought together, political tooth and claw,
against the naval estimates and the need to
lay down the new battleships called Dread-
noughts. These were bitter fights and
Churchill fought them hard. Now he be-
came the spendthrift apostle of the Dread-
nought and modern gunnery. He saw no
hypocrisy or opportunism, but this new
faith he threw himself into lost him those
friends his old faith had gained him and
enflamed his enemies. That Britain was
ready for war when it came in 1914 can be
credited very much to Churchill’s energy
and fearlessness, but his e¸orts earned him
no thanks.
These years are the heart of Robert Lloyd
George’s book. The problem is that they are
not the subject, which is instead a friend-
ship that lasted many decades. Between
1904 and 1922, that friendship was one of
the catalysts of English politics and its story
is in many ways the story of the death of the
Liberal party. The decades that followed
present only the mildest interest. But
Robert Lloyd George has his subject and
sticks to it. In this book, moreover, you will
find neither reference to Hobhouse or
Hobson or Green nor any attempt to un-
derstand the intellectual ferment—though
you will learn of the Liberals’ fondness for
golf. For the author, a great-grandson of
David Lloyd George, it is enough to say
Churchill was led by the Welshman, who is
presented as a man of exceptional integrity,
a very Cincinnatus for England’s working
men. Robert Lloyd George never deals with
the uncomfortable facts of Lloyd George’s
Machiavellian drive for power, his woman-
izing, penchant for financial scandal, or the
fact that his memoirs contain only morsels
of whole truth.
What’s best about this book is that it
helps us to understand one of the least
remembered aspects of Churchill’s career:
his time as the coming man of the Liberal
party. This should be a book about Chur-
chill’s attraction to liberalism and to social
18 The New Criterion October 2008
reform and above all how he found it im-
possible to be a man of party. There’s a need
for such a book, but it’s here disguised
amongst a lot of extraneous biographical
material. (There’s also room for a Plutar-
chian study of these two “Fathers of Vic-
tory,” which would attempt to understand
what is success in politics, especially over a
long career.)
When the Great War began in 1914 many
politicians assumed that Churchill, with his
mastery of military matters, would become
prime minister. But the war was an utter
disaster for Churchill thanks to being pub-
licly blamed—not always without merit—
for events like the fall of Antwerp and Gal-
lipoli and labor unrest caused by the 12.5
percent bonus o¸ered to munitions workers
in 1917. Even the peace was problematic
when mistakes like intervention in the Rus-
sian Revolution further solidified Chur-
chill’s reputation as an adventurer. He lost
his seat in parliament and then two attempts
to get back in. Finally in 1924 he returned to
parliament in a safe Conservative seat,
having made peace with his old party. He
was surprisingly made Chancellor of the
Exchequer in the new government and held
the post for five, by Churchillian standards,
fairly calm years—though, in yet another
interpretative di˝culty, he oversaw drastic
cost cutting of the military which left it un-
prepared when Hitler and Nazism stirred in
Europe in the 1930s.
That Churchill was back at the center of
politics was no mean feat. The many disas-
ters he had been intimately involved in
would have felled any other politician. Yet
he was a member of a party that distrusted
him and one with which he had no real
sympathy. He was particularly put out by
the way the government forced the abdica-
tion of Edward VIII, believing that more
time and negotiation would have staved o¸
that unprecedented event. Churchill was
feeling old and out of place. In the wake of
the Conservatives’ drubbing in the 1929
elections and the crash of the New York
stock market, he declared, “What a disap-

pointment the twentieth century has been.”
He set himself to writing his charming
memoir, My Early Life, which took him
back to the days of Victorian imperial glory
and order. Things seemed better in remem-
brance, especially his stirred memories of
India.
But the colony had changed just as much
in the first three decades of the twentieth
century as the mother country. The Indians
had political parties, a national press, and a
growing desire for self-rule. A battle was
building and at the center of it was a Lon-
don-trained Gujarati lawyer named Mohan-
das K. Gandhi. He had created a potent
nationalist movement and despite innumer-
able fits and starts seemed always able to find
a way to advance Indian interests against
British rule. With a Labour government in
power, the British viceroy sought to end the
years of protest with the bold o¸er of
dominion status to India on October 31,
1929. While Gandhi brushed o¸ the o¸er
and pushed on for full independence—he
would shortly embark on his Salt March—it
began an immense struggle back in London.
Churchill was opposed, heart and soul, and
led a six-year campaign of apocalyptic
rhetoric against devolving any power. He
would ultimately lose—the Government of
India Act passed parliament easily in 1935—
and the costs were high to Churchill, turning
him into something of a political outcast. As
his dire predictions about India failed to
materialize, his warnings about Nazi Ger-
many and the need for rearmament fell as
though from Cassandra herself.
Arthur Herman has alighted on these
years and structured a book around the idea
that, as Gandhi led the struggle for inde-
pendence and Churchill opposed it, they
were rivals. His model seems to be John
Lukacs’ first-rate Duel (1990) about Hitler
and Churchill, but what makes that book so
interesting is the narrowness of the materi-
al. Lukacs presents a taut critical analysis of
just eighty days of World War II. Herman,
though, has chosen to give full lives of
Churchill and Gandhi—as well as a short
Churchill’s friends & rivals by Robert Messenger
history of India from the Mutiny to in-
dependence—and the result is a compli-
cated muddle, which loses its momentum
by zigzagging back and forth between two
disparate men and careers. Gandhi and
Churchill is moreover part of the kitchen-
sink school of history. The author has
worked hard to get up the subject and
throws in every bit of detail. I felt in the
early chapters like I was reading the Cli¸’s
Notes of Basham’s Wonder That Was India.
And the constant conflation leads to some
wonderful formulations. My favorite: “The
o˝cial London of aristocrats like the Chur-
chills and their friends Henry James and
John Singer Sargent was resolutely cosmo-
politan, materialistic, and self-consciously
modern.”
The bigger problem is that Gandhi and
Churchill were only superficially rivalrous.
What Gandhi was trying to do more than
make India independent was to make her a
spiritual beacon for the world: unified,
devout, and free of modern corruptions like
capitalism and industry. And Churchill
didn’t want to stop Gandhi or just prevent
home rule for Indians. His fight was to pre-
serve a certain idea of England, an idea that
required the opportunity and burden of
empire. Churchill’s knowledge of India was
scant, and remained so during six years of
political battle, because the only thing that
mattered was his conviction that empire was
essential for England.
Since the two men spent almost their
whole careers dealing with the politics of
the British Empire, they sometimes acted in
the same events and Herman has some fun
details to work with. They could have seen
each other at the Battle of Spion Kop
during the Boer War where Churchill was
reporting and Gandhi working as a volun-
teer stretcher barrier. They met once when
in 1906 Gandhi came to see Churchill, then
Undersecretary of State for the Colonies,
about Indian rights in South Africa. And
Churchill certainly made many ad hominem
attacks on Gandhi—it “was alarming to see
Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple
lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well
The New Criterion October 2008 19
 Churchill’s friends & rivals by Robert Messenger
known in the East, striding half-naked up
the steps of the Viceregal Palace.” But it is
mostly trivia. The connection is too remote
and forces Herman to cut back and forth—
often with lengthy interruptions to narrate
the latest passage in each life—to keep his
conceit going.
The perfect example is the 1919 Amritsar
massacre: the event that did the most to
sever the bonds of understanding between
the Indians and their colonial rulers. It
helped Gandhi unite and spread his move-
ment, and Churchill shared the outrage at
what had happened. The o˝cer responsible,
General Reginald Dyer, was ostensibly
under Churchill’s jurisdiction—he was Sec-
retary of War at the time. There were few
options for punishing him, and one was to
have him forcibly retired. It was Churchill’s
speech that won the parliamentary debate
that allowed this. It is a nice connection,
but thanks to the back-and-forth structure
of the book, Herman can’t take us from
describing the massacre and the investiga-
tions and how Gandhi used them to restore
his place in the nationalist movement to
Churchill’s role in punishing Dyer. He first
needs four-and-a-half pages to summarize
everything that happened to Churchill be-
tween February 1916—where we left him in
a previous chapter—and June 1920.
A rthur Herman would have done well to
reread his Plutarch before beginning. Parallel
lives must have explicit and implicit lessons.
In the case of Churchill and Gandhi, what’s
most interesting in comparing their lives is
how each of these extraordinary men viewed
20 The New Criterion October 2008
their success as failure. Gandhi led India to
independence, but the event held small joy
as the country divided and celebrated its
freedom with a horrific outbreak of sectarian
violence—which to this day simmers below
the surface. Churchill saved his country from
making peace with Hitler in 1940 and was a
second “Father of Victory,” but in 1945
everything that Churchill cared about in
England had passed away. The nation was
poor and broken and prepared to run from
its international commitments. Both of these
great men—so deservedly at the top of their
respective country’s list of greatest individu-
als—ended in disappointment.
Neither of these latest Churchill books is
particularly worthy, though on their true
topic I found much to think on. Both Chur-
chill and liberalism and Churchill and India
deserve serious analysis aimed at the general
interest reader. Churchill and India is a par-
ticularly deserving subject, as the country
played a large role in his intellectual make-up,
especially when you try to rationalize Chur-
chill the social reformer with Churchill the
imperialist—ultimately he seemed to view
the empire as a necessity to the economic
well-being of England’s working classes.
Still, as easy as it would be to mock the
market in Churchill books, there is merit in
the dual studies like Churchill and Zionism
and Churchill and the Admirals. I actually
look forward to the necessary “Churchill
and Ireland” and “Churchill and the Chur-
chills.” He was the twentieth century’s most
interesting man—a Sophoclean character
who seemed to have a role in every major
event of the first half of the century.
Auden’s cheery bishop
by Jeremy Bernstein
Rhyme-royal’s di˝cult enough to play.
But if no classics as in Chaucer’s day,
At least my modern pieces shall be cheery
Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory.
—W. H. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron”
Ah, my Lord of Birmingham, come in, sit on
the fire and anticipate the judgement of the
Universal Church.
—The Rt. Rev. Herbert Hensley Henson,
Bishop of Durham
I like the company of men of science: they are
not excessively intellectual in their hours of
leisure and they give good dinners.
—The Rt. Rev. E. W. Barnes, Bishop of Bir-
mingham…
In the fall of 1957, I began what turned out
to be a two-year membership at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton. This was
a banner time for physics. In 1956, the
Chinese-born American physicists T. D. Lee
and C. N. Yang noted in several papers that
what is called “parity symmetry”—the sym-
metry between left- and right-handed de-
scriptions, a cornerstone of physics up to
that point—had never been tested in the sort
of weak interactions that are responsible for
the instability of many elementary particles.
–––––––––––
1 The epigraphs from Henson and Barnes are taken
from Ahead of His Age: Bishop Barnes of Bir-
mingham, by John Barnes (Collins, 1979), as are
several others throughout this essay.
They proposed several experiments and,
when these were performed, they demon-
strated that, in these interactions, the sym-
metry was indeed violated. This was a sensa-
tional discovery and all of us were gripped by
its implications. In the fall of 1957, Lee and
Yang, who were both at the Institute, were
awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Soon
after my arrival, I studied the membership
roster. There were several physicists whose
work I had studied and admired, but I came
across a name that really surprised me—
Reinhold Niebuhr.
Niebuhr, whom I had never met, was a
hero of mine. During the ten years I was at
Harvard I had heard him preach and debate
several times. He was a great orator. His
language was simple but his ideas were
profound and complex. He was also an im-
posing figure and gave the impression that
you were directly in his gaze. When he
spoke of the dangers of neurotic preoc-
cupation with self, I was sure that he was
talking specifically to me. As it happened,
my father, who was a rabbi, had been on
several liberal commissions with Niebuhr,
so I thought that if the occasion presented
itself I would introduce myself to him. In
the event the occasion presented itself quite
quickly. We all took our lunches in the In-
stitute cafeteria and I noticed Niebuhr and
his wife eating alone. I passed by their table
and said hello. They invited me to sit down.
When Mrs. Niebuhr—Ursula—and I were
alone for a minute she told me that her
The New Criterion October 2008 21
 Auden’s cheery bishop by Jeremy Bernstein
husband had su¸ered a series of strokes,
which was one of the reasons he had sought
the relative tranquility of the Institute. She
said that he was feeling a little depressed
and that if I would drop by their apartment
from time to time it might help to cheer
him up. I took advantage of this invitation.
Niebuhr had sensed the excitement of the
physicists and wanted me to explain what
they were so excited about, which I did as
best I could.
On one visit I noticed a book by W. H.
Auden. I now forget which. Auden was
another of my heroes and, as it happened, he
was giving the Christian Gauss Seminars on
literary criticism at the University and I had
attended some of his lectures. I mentioned
this to the Niebuhrs, and they were both
surprised and delighted. I will never forget
how Ursula Niebuhr pronounced Auden’s
first name—Wystan. It sounded like “whis-
tle”—with a hiss on the “s.” I did not know at
the time that the Niebuhrs and Auden were
close friends. Although she and Auden had
been at Oxford at the same time—the late
1920s—they had only met in 1940. Niebuhr
had become a sort of spiritual advisor to
Auden who indeed dedicated his collection
Nones to them. I felt that I had conveyed a
useful piece of information to the Neibuhrs
and forgot about it.
Not long afterwards, however, I was
taking the “dinky”—the small train that con-
nects Princeton to Princeton Junction—
when on came Auden. You couldn’t miss
him. He had at the time a face that he him-
self described as “looking like a wedding-
cake left out in the rain.” The train was pretty
full. There was an empty seat next to me and
Auden took it. The ride was short, but I told
him that the Niebuhrs were in Princeton,
which he had not known. He seemed
pleased to learn this, and again I more or less
forgot about it. But some days later, in the
morning, I was called to the hall telephone in
our building. None of us had private phones
in our o˝ces since Robert Oppenheimer,
our director, had decided that these might
distract us from our work. Instead, the hall
phone distracted everyone from his work. It
22 The New Criterion October 2008
was a call from Oppenheimer’s secretary. She
said that I was expected for lunch and should
come at lunch time to Oppenheimer’s o˝ce.
I replied that there was surely some mistake
since there was no earthly reason why Op-
penheimer would want to have lunch with
me. She said there was no mistake and I was
expected. Even as I write this over a half cen-
tury later, I can still see the scene in Oppen-
heimer’s o˝ce. There was Oppenheimer,
impeccably dressed as usual, and his wife,
“Kitty.” There was Sir Llewellyn Woodward,
a noted British historian who had come
from Oxford to the Institute, and his wife.
There were the Niebuhrs, and Auden, and
myself, a very minor post-doctoral. What-
ever this was about, it reflected the fine
“Italian hand” of Ursula Niebuhr, who
wanted Oppenheimer and Auden to meet.
After a few introductions we all marched
into the cafeteria.
A special table had been prepared for us in
the center of the dining area. I am sure that
we were served and did not stand in the
cafeteria line. There was probably also wine.
I remember the very fishy looks that my col-
leagues who were at our usual tables gave
me. Freeman Dyson looked particularly
amused. I had no opportunity to explain. I
wish I could tell you that the conversation
was memorable. Oppenheimer who was sit-
ting across from Auden seemed rather ill at
ease. At one point he told Auden that he had
studied Sanskrit in Berkeley in the 1930s.
This did not make any impression and
Auden and Ursula Niebuhr then engaged in
a lively conversation which pretty much ig-
nored the rest of us. The Woodwards said
nothing. Niebuhr caught my eye, and from
the look on his face I would guess he was
thinking that this too shall pass. After lunch,
I took Auden to meet Dyson. They played
some word games on Dyson’s blackboard.
Then Auden left and I never saw him again.
I have thought about this extraordinary
occasion many times over the years, usually
with a sense of regret. If only I had it to do
again, I would have asked Auden which
“English bishops on the quantum theory”

he was referring to in his Byron poem.
What a conversation that might have turned
into. But, myself excepted, everyone who
was at that table is now gone. “English
bishops on the quantum theory”—how
many can there have been? Finally I decided
to try to find out. The first person I asked
was Dyson. His answer was immediate: the
Bishop of Birmingham, Ernest William
Barnes. This suggestion was reinforced by
the Auden scholars Edward Mendelson and
Arthur Kirsch. But I have to confess that
after Dyson said his name I did not have the
foggiest idea who Bishop Barnes was and
why he would have had anything to say
about the quantum theory. I am now going
to tell you what I have learned.
Barnes was born on the first of April,
1874—All Fools Day—in the town of
Altrincham in Chesire. His father Starkie
(John) Barnes was a schoolmaster and his
mother Jane—née Kerry—was the daughter
of the village shoemaker at Charlbury in
Oxfordshire. But in 1876 the family moved
to Birmingham. I would be fascinated to
know at what age and in what way Barnes
began to show special mathematical ability.
Mathematicians begin very young. To take
an example, Dyson once told me that when
he was still young enough to be “put down
for naps” he invented for himself the notion
of the convergent infinite series. He noticed
that if you added 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8, the
sum approached two. Where in this spec-
trum was Barnes? I do not know.
In 1886, Barnes entered the King Edward
VI Grammar School on a scholarship.
Secondary education then was neither free
nor compulsory. All of Barnes’s higher
education was done on scholarships. The
family could not have a¸orded the tuition.
At King Edward’s, Barnes had the good
fortune to come upon a truly great mathe-
matics teacher, Rawdon Levett, who recog-
nized Barnes’s ability and guided him into
learning things like non-Euclidean geom-
etry. Barnes was grateful to Levett for the
rest of his life. It was Levett who en-
couraged Barnes to apply for a fellowship to
Auden’s cheery bishop by Jeremy Bernstein
Trinity College in Cambridge, which he
won.
To graduate with honors from Cam-
bridge the student had to take the so-called
Tripos examination. The mathematics Tri-
pos consisted of hard problems that the
student had to complete in a certain time
limit. The student who did best was labeled
the Senior Wrangler. Where the term
“wrangler” came from in this context no
one seems to know. The student who did
worst was known as the “Wooden Spoon”
and was indeed given a spoon along with
third class honors. As one might imagine,
the list of Senior Wranglers from that
period is quite impressive. It includes such
people as the physicist Lord Rayleigh and
the astronomer Arthur Eddington. But
what one might not expect is that the list of
Second Wranglers is even more impressive.
It includes such people as James Clerk
Maxwell, the greatest physicist of the nine-
teenth century, and William Thomson—
Lord Kelvin—who was not far behind.
Thomson’s case is instructive. In one of his
courses, he had come in with a theorem and
its proof. The theorem was on the Tripos
and Kelvin had forgotten the proof. He
spent a good deal of his time reconstructing
it. The man who became the Senior
Wrangler had it memorized. One wonders
how Einstein would have done on the
Tripos.
In 1896, Barnes was Second Wrangler.
The Senior Wrangler was a New Zealand-
born physicist named Richard C. Maclaur-
in, hardly a household name although he
did become the president of mit. But two
years later Barnes won the Smith’s Prize for
his Ph.D thesis, an even greater honor
which led to a fellowship at Trinity. For
something like a decade Barnes did sig-
nificant work in pure mathematics. His
work in the theory of functions is still being
adumbrated. When I looked it up on the
web, I was interested to note that one of the
papers cited was written by Dyson. In 1909,
at the age of thirty-five, Barnes was elected
to a Fellowship in the Royal Society. Soon
after, he stopped doing creative mathe-
The New Criterion October 2008 23
 Auden’s cheery bishop by Jeremy Bernstein
matics. Dyson told me that G. H. Hardy,
one of the most distinguished of twentieth-
century mathematicians, had told him that
once Barnes had been elected to the Royal
Society he dropped mathematics like a “hot
brick.” It would certainly seem that way.
Perhaps Barnes had realized that he would
never be a mathematician in the class of
people like Hardy and above all Ramanu-
jan. Nobody was in the class of Srinivasa
Ramanujan. He had been discovered in 1913
by Hardy, who invited him to Cambridge.
He needed a formal tutor and the more
senior Barnes took on the responsibility.
Barnes was remembered as a very good lec-
turer with a deep interest in mathematical
education. Maybe it was not enough.
B arnes’s family religious tradition was
Baptist and Wesleyan, but the King Edward
School was strictly Church of Engand.
Barnes had no di˝culty adapting and his
parents did not object. In 1902 Barnes be-
came ordained as a deacon in the church,
and from that time on preached sermons in
various locales around Cambridge and else-
where. From the beginning his sermons had
a scientific content. Confronted with the
facts of evolution, for example, he could not
take the Bible as a literal cosmogony. These
sermons were referred to by others as
Barnes’s “gorilla” sermons. Another consis-
tent theme of Barnes’s sermons was paci-
fism. He was a confirmed pacifist from the
time of his youth and he never changed
through two world wars. At the time of the
First World War this got him in trouble
with his more conservative colleagues, but
nothing like the trouble that Bertrand Rus-
sell got into. Russell was then at Cambridge
and his vivid denunciations of the war
landed him in jail. Barnes was prepared to
give Russell a character reference even
though they were not close friends (and
Barnes did not much approve of Russell’s
life style).
In 1915, Barnes received an o¸er he could
not refuse. The Temple Church in London
was looking for a new “Master.” The church,
which was constructed by the Knights
24 The New Criterion October 2008
Templar in the twelfth century to serve their
spiritual needs, had in the twentieth a very
distinguished congregation. Barnes was
only forty-three—young to be a Master of
the Temple. It meant leaving Cambridge
and moving to London. There was also a
personal matter. Barnes had fallen in love
with Adelaide Ward, the only daughter of a
distinguished family. She had great hesita-
tions about marriage, but when Barnes told
her that unless she came to London with
him he would refuse the job she relented. It
was a very happy marriage.
Barnes remained at the Temple until 1924.
Then he received a letter from Prime Min-
ister Ramsay MacDonald informing him
that his name had been submitted to the
king for an appointment as the Lord Bishop
of Birmingham. The Church of England is
the state religion and such appointments
required royal approval, which Barnes got.
It automatically carried a membership in the
House of Lords. This enabled Barnes to
participate in the debate in parliament in
1927–28 about revising the Book of Com-
mon Prayer, which could only be done with
the consent of Parliament. Barnes opposed
the revisions and they were defeated by a
narrow margin.
When it came to church practice, Barnes
was known to be very strict about not al-
lowing any trace of Catholic ritual to enter
into Anglican practice. And on the matter of
transubstantiation he was dogmatic. In a
sermon he said, “I am quite prepared to
believe in transubstantiation when I can
find a person who will come to the chapel
of my house and tell me correctly whether a
piece of bread which I present to him has
undergone the change for which believers in
transubstantiation contend.” As one might
imagine, this sort of thing rendered Anglo-
Catholics, of which Auden’s mother was
one, livid. That Auden would make a
reference to Barnes—however concealed—
in his poem must tell us something about
his relationship to his mother. In fact this
was not Auden’s first mention of Barnes in
his poetry. That one is much more explicit
and curious.

In September of 1931 the British Associ-
ation for the Advancement of Science had
its centenary meeting. It was a stellar gath-
ering featuring such things as a lecture on
holism by General Jan Christaan Smuts. In
attendance were public scientists of the time
such as James Jeans. Jeans had been a first-
rate physicist but by the 1930s he was writ-
ing popular books with a Christian mystical
bent. Barnes, who was also there, must have
found this appealing. This meeting ap-
parently caught Auden’s attention. There
are echoes in his poem “The Orators,”
which was written soon after the meeting. It
is a remarkable and strange poem—partly in
prose and partly in rhyming verse. Towards
the end come the lines,
Their day is over, they shall decorate the Zoo,
With Professor Jeans and Bishop Barnes at 2d
a view,
Or be ducked in a gletcher, as they ought
to be,
With the Simonites, the Mosleyites and
the i.l.p.
“Their” refers to various people that Auden
knew. But what an odd association Jeans
and Barnes and the Simonites, Mosleyites,
and the Independent Labour Party.
The Gi¸ord lectures—well-known among
theologians and delivered every year at one
or another Scottish university thanks to a be-
quest of Adam Lord Gi¸ord who died in
1887—were intended to “promote and dif-
fuse the Study of Natural Theology in the
widest sense of the term . . . in other words,
the knowledge of God.” “Natural Theology”
meant theology consistent with the estab-
lished principle of science. Over the years the
Gi¸ord lecturers have been an extraordinary
group. The scientists included people like
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. There
were philosophers such as Henri Bergson
and Albert Schweitzer. Niebuhr gave the
1938–1940 series. Dyson told me that when
he gave the 1985 series in Aberdeen no one
was allowed to ask questions. Apparently
you were allowed to laugh. In his biography
Auden’s cheery bishop by Jeremy Bernstein
of his father, John Barnes notes that when his
father gave the 1927–29 series he provoked
laughter by filling the blackboard with equa-
tions from Einstein’s theory of general
relativity. I would imagine that it was ner-
vous laughter. The lecturers were expected to
produce short books from their lectures and
published them soon after. Barnes’s book,
Scientific Theory and Religion, his six-hun-
dred-and-eighty-five page magnum opus,
was not published until 1934. He spent every
moment of his spare time in the intervening
years preparing it.
The book covers all the natural sciences.
There is rather little about mathematics. Per-
haps Barnes did not think of it as a natural
science. From time to time he can’t resist a
dig. For example he writes, “I have, per-
sonally, little doubt that biological research
will in due course prove a human virgin birth
is possible.” He adds, “There are some who
may shrink from any such investigation of
the Virgin Birth as I have indicated. For my
own part I am convinced that we must aban-
don the practice of arguing in vacuo, as it
were, for such a mode of argument was the
typical advice of medieval scholasticism. On
the basis of observed facts of Nature, and by
arguments drawn from analogies as come
within the range of our observations, we
must approach all problems which present
themselves. I would add that reverence and
truth can always be combined, unless the ob-
ject of our reverence happens to be untrue.”
Pace Auden’s mother.
Barnes’s chapters on the theory of relativ-
ity are really excellent. I doubt that many
professional physicists could have written
better ones. I was particularly interested in
what he had to say about cosmology. The
modern era in cosmology began when
Einstein published a paper on the subject in
1917. This was a year after he had published
his masterpiece on general relativity and
gravitation. At the time the “cosmos” con-
sisted only of our own galaxy and Einstein’s
concern was that his theory predicted that
the gravitational attractions would make the
whole thing collapse. So in his 1917 paper he
added a kind of anti-gravitational term to his
The New Criterion October 2008 25
 Auden’s cheery bishop by Jeremy Bernstein
original equations to keep the universe
stationary. A few years later, however,
Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, a Rus-
sian completely unknown to Einstein, sent
him a copy of a paper he was going to pub-
lish showing that, depending on how the
matter was distributed in the cosmos, there
were solutions to Einstein’s original equa-
tions in which the universe expanded or
contracted. Einstein’s first reaction was to
claim that Friedman had made a mistake.
But it was Einstein who had made a mistake.
Then he claimed that Friedman’s solutions
were correct but irrelevant since the universe
was stationary. Here things stood until 1927.
A t this time a Belgian Catholic priest and
astronomer named Georges Henri Joseph
Édouard Lemaître published a paper in
which he rediscovered Friedman’s solutions.
But he made a crucial next step. If the
universe is expanding, according to these
equations, then every galaxy is receding from
every other galaxy at a speed that increases to
first approximation as the distance of separa-
tion increases. We can think of the galaxies as
being on the surface of a balloon that is
being blown up. All the dots on the surface
are receding from all the other dots. But
Lemaître argued that this had an observable
consequence. The spectral colors of the light
from these galaxies should be shifted to the
red—the Doppler shift—as the distance and
hence the speed of recession increases. In
1929, the American astronomer Edwin
Hubble published his observational results
that showed that this indeed is what is
happening. In his paper he says that he is
confirming the prediction of Lemaître.
Einstein gave up his objections. But ironi-
cally, it now looks as if the universe is ex-
panding too rapidly to be accounted for by
the Friedman equations and some “anti-
gravity” is needed.
Barnes discusses the Lemaître model in
detail. He concludes that there is something
wrong. The time scales don’t work out. If
the universe is some millions of years old
the observed distances would have to in-
crease too rapidly. But, in fact, cosmologists
26 The New Criterion October 2008
now think that the age of the universe is
about 13.7 billion years so that the time
scales do work out. Lemaître discusses
where it all came from. He envisions a
“cosmic egg” that exploded and voilà tout—
the first Big Bang model. But where in this
is God? Here is what Barnes writes,
Must we then postulate Divine intervention?
Are we to bring in God to create the first cur-
rent of Laplace’s nebula or to let o¸ the cos-
mic fire-work of Lemaître’s imagination? I
confess an unwillingness to bring God in this
way upon the scene. The circumstances which
thus seem to demand His presence are too
remote and too obscure to a¸ord me any true
satisfaction. Men have thought to find God at
the special creation of their own species, or
active when mind or life first appeared on
earth. They have made him God of the gaps in
human knowledge. To me the God of the
trigger is as little satisfying as the God of the
gaps. It is because throughout the physical
Universe I find thought and plan and power
that behind it I see God as the creator.
This does not di¸er a great deal from
Einstein’s “old one”—his God.
Barnes’s chapter on the quantum theory,
unlike the ones on relativity, seems a bit an-
tiquated to me. To give an example, after his
discovery of the atomic nucleus with his
young collaborators Hans Geiger and Ernest
Marsden, the New Zealand-born physicist
Ernest Rutherford proposed a model of
matter. The nucleus had a positive electric
charge to balance the negative charges of the
surrounding electrons to keep the atom
electrically neutral. These positive charges
were provided by the protons in the nucleus.
But there also had to be neutral objects of
about the same mass as the protons to make
the masses of the nuclei come out. Ruther-
ford made the natural assumption that these
neutral objects were electrons and protons
bound together. Indeed, when one of
Rutherford’s students, James Chadwick,
made a direct observation of these neutral
objects in 1932 he announced that this was
what he had discovered. Already there were

nay-sayers such as Wolfgang Pauli who said
that this must be wrong. But Chadwick dis-
missed them. He was wrong and, by 1934,
when Barnes published his book, there was
no doubt that these neutral objects—
“neutrons” as they were named—were ele-
mentary particles in their own right. Barnes
describes Chadwick’s experiment, but he
presents Rutherford’s old model as if it were
still valid. I find this very puzzling. It perhaps
reflects the fact that Barnes was not much in
contact with contemporary physicists. This
manifests itself in the rest of the chapter.
As far as I could see there is nothing
wrong in what he wrote. It is what he didn’t
write that struck me. He mentions almost
in passing the work of Erwin Schrödinger
but then does not exhibit his equation
which is the heart of the matter. The math-
ematics is much simpler than that of general
relativity which he goes into in considerable
detail. He also mentions in passing the
work of Paul Dirac but never mentions
Dirac’s 1928 discovery of the equation that
bears his name which brought relativity and
the quantum theory together and which
predicted the existence of anti-particles. The
first of these, the positron, was discovered
in 1932, two years before Barnes published
his book. He has a clear, brief discussion of
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which
Heisenberg presented in 1927. But there is
no hint of the debate between Einstein and
Bohr on the meaning of the theory which
began at about the same time.
It is a strange chapter. I kept wondering:
Did Auden read it? Was this his bishop’s
cheery writing on the quantum theory? Per-
haps Auden read one of the concluding
paragraphs.
Old traditions embedded in Christian thought
describe a time when “the earth was without
Auden’s cheery bishop by Jeremy Bernstein
form and void”: and probably most Christian
philosophers in the past believed in a process
of creation by God, in time and “out of
nothing.” We seem, in the analysis of matter to
which Einstein’s general relativity leads, to see
“in the beginning” a process by which form or
structure was given to the void of space-time.
As the many complex forms which then arose
assumed an ever greater complexity, the
material world took shape. It is natural to ask
whether, in such development, there was
creative activity, the emergence of something
new. I feel constrained to answer in the af-
firmative. Things were other and more diverse
at the end than at the beginning. Even though
the process of assuming greater complexity
may be exhibited by a mechanical sequence, it
may none the less conceal or embody genuine
creative activity. Did not such complexity in-
volve in its making a series of acts rightly to be
called creative, or at least a series of changes
which led to the creation of something that
did not previously exist?
In 1947, Barnes published a very controver-
sial book, The Rise of Christianity, in which
he expressed his rationalistic views fully. It
created a furor, with attempts, unsucessful,
to make him resign. He finally did in
February of 1953. He died in November of
that year.
I n 1940, the chocolate magnate Edward
Cadbury established a chair in theology at
the University of Birmingham. Niebuhr was
in the process of giving his Gi¸ord lectures,
and Barnes proposed him as the first occu-
pant of the chair. The suggestion was
turned down. But suppose it had not been.
Then the Niebuhrs would not have met
Auden, and I would not have met any of
them. The encounter that inspired me to
make this inquiry in the first place would
never have happened.
The New Criterion October 2008 27
 New poems
by David Sergeant, Dick Allen
& Betsy Bonner

First instinct

Every day after school I’d go straight out,

In all weathers, and get to work:
Squeezed into my oldest coat, stripping
The bark from the straight branch of sycamore

I’d found in the woods. God knows what I thought—

I was possessed—chipping away
With the chosen edge of stone,
Watching the black crackle of bark

Stutter back to show a ray of pith,

Wood-flesh, light-marrow,
Chiming heart. With sore, nicked fingers
I’d stroke the petal-smooth grain

Then get back to it. Words rose to meet

The rising treasure, the o¸ered, pulpy breath
Of pith—my branch of the family tree,
White as a skull, as cow’s milk, a sta¸

To lean on, something to conjure with.

—David Sergeant

28
Taking the bull by the horns

When he approaches, it’s best to meet him head on,

and grabbing the horns, force that mighty head
to bow low before you, putting all your upper body strength
into the struggle. If you’ve found the right grasp,
the one from above, the horns beneath your palms,
it will feel as if you’re gripping two huge vertical handles,
pushing on them hard, enclosing them in fists
instead of pulling them towards you to open the stubborn cupboard
or gate or missile silo doors. You might be lifted
a few feet into the air. You might be shaken
side to side, horribly. In the blurry distance
there could be screaming crowds, but more likely
just a fence and butterfly weed and more pasture,
a dilapidated barn with no one working beside it,
so your struggle will be solely your own,
your panting, your screaming, the bull’s bellowing
only heard and felt by you. The secret is to cling,
as the cliché goes, “for dear life” until
the creature is nearly exhausted, unable
to get up from his knees or belly or from his side,
to try and chase you to the edge of the known universe
as he did before, charging out of what now seems nowhere,
because he is of Earth and Death and your enemies’ wishes,
and misjudged your resolve and could not bring you down.

—Dick Allen

29
 Landscape with colossal kouros

Samos lay me down to sleep,

thirty brown-stained fish in a yawning cove.
Weary of waves, urchins and cigarette butts,
the abandoned lighthouse couldn’t care less

if we stay or go. Sirocco settles the matter

for a ferry caught in horseshoe harbor.
Hailstones pummel Hera’s temple;
wind plays shepherd huts like dropped stone flutes.

Stranded, I’m not sure whether to curse

or thank the Furies—punishers of perjurers—
for another night in the arms of a man
who cannot love me.

Sculptors of colossal kouroi inscribed

not only a name in the statue’s thigh,
but for whom he was made. Vainly, I scan
my lover’s body for a monogram.

—Betsy Bonner

30
Letter from Europe
Continental divide
by Paul Hollander
Increasingly, contemporary travel writing
divides into the kind which provides infor-
mation about sights and experiences ob-
served along the way and the so-called
“journey of self-discovery.” The latter tends
to comprise self-indulgent musings on the
impact of travel on the psyche and emo-
tional life of the traveler in search of trans-
formative experiences. Travel writing, like
so many other products of present-day cul-
tural life, has come to reflect the prevailing
preoccupation with the self. At the same
time it is indisputable that being removed
from one’s habitual physical and social en-
vironment is conducive to reflections on a
wide variety of subjects unrelated to the
direct and specific experiences the trip
yields.
My recent six-week trip to five European
countries was neither a fact-finding mission
nor a sentimental journey of self-discovery,
and only in small part a vacation. I went to
Portugal, Sweden, France, and Poland as a
speaker sponsored by the State Department.
In the fifth country, Italy, the lectures were
initiated and organized by various Italian
universities and an Italian Foundation. The
topics I o¸ered were anti-Americanism,
“contemporary political violence,” “Com-
munism and intellectuals,” and “the Western
moral responses to Nazism and Com-
munism.” Anti-Americanism was the most
popular topic followed by Communism and
intellectuals (the latter especially in Italy). I
gave twenty-four lectures mostly to student
audiences at universities in Lisbon, Porto,
Braga, Aviero (all in Portugal), Stockholm,
Paris, Lyon, Warsaw, Milan, Pisa, Siena, and
Perugia. I also spoke at research institutes,
foundations, and associations. I had conver-
sations with numerous academic and non-
academic intellectuals and journalists (who
interviewed me) as well as American and na-
tive employees of U.S. diplomatic missions in
each country, including two ambassadors,
one deputy head of mission and several cul-
tural attachés.
As on other visits to Europe, I was im-
pressed by the fact that—notwithstanding
the alleged imperatives of modernization,
the shared impact of technology, and the
homogenizing impact of popular culture
(much of it of American origin)—Europe
remains di¸erent. These di¸erences show
up most conspicuously in the survival of
vestiges of traditional attitudes and ways of
life and the aesthetic bounty they produced.
A European by birth, I left Hungary in 1956
at age twenty-four. The relationship between
Europe and the United States has had both
personal and professional relevance for me.
Is European anti-Americanism deep seated
and consequential or rather a minor blemish
on American-European relations? My audi-
ences, most of whom were students, dis-
played little anti-Americanism. This may
have several explanations: they could have
been polite and self-selected for their interest
and friendly attitude; the limitations of their
The New Criterion October 2008 31
 Letter from Europe
English might have restrained expressions of
their feelings and opinions. It is also possible
that I was not the appropriate person upon
whom to vent negative feelings about the
United States because I am not a “real”
American (i.e. one born and bred here and
speaking without a foreign accent) and be-
cause I made it clear that I had my own
reservations about certain features of Ameri-
can society, U.S. foreign policy, and our cur-
rent president. In each country I was amazed
by the number of people I met who had per-
sonal contacts with Americans and visited
the United States in various capacities.
Among the countries visited, France is
supposed to be the most anti-American and
Poland the least, but I had no personal ex-
perience to support either claim. At my talk
on anti-Americanism at the Sorbonne, the
large audience was responsive, friendly, and
curious. In Poland, I learned, there are
some anti-American sentiments because it is
not easy for Poles to get a visa to the U.S.
(while Americans don’t need any to Poland)
and, to a lesser extent, because of the con-
templated missile shield that would require
installations in Poland.
T his visit to Europe prompted more
gloomy reflections about mass tourism than
about anti-Americanism. Advances in trans-
portation, the high standards of living, and
more discretionary time have created irre-
versible conditions for mass tourism. The
sight of the huge sightseeing buses disgorg-
ing thousands of people—their sheer num-
bers often obliterating the sights to be
seen—distracts from whatever is on display:
museums, churches, castles, monuments, or
scenic viewpoints. At the same time tourist
sights cannot be rationed nor the number of
visitors screened and restricted on the basis
of their proven capacity for aesthetic ap-
preciation and reverence for cultural arti-
facts. We have similar problems in the
United States in the national parks during
the summer, when they are inundated and
overwhelmed by boisterous crowds, their
suvs, and litter.
The major tourist sights in Europe have
32 The New Criterion October 2008
in e¸ect been absorbed into mass culture,
even mass entertainment. Huge numbers of
tourists (hard to know what proportions
foreigners or natives) encamp at these
places. They are cultural status-seekers
looking distinctly unimpressed, sometimes
bored by what they see; the most impor-
tant, especially for the Japanese among
them, is to be photographed at these sites.
Similar attitudes may be found among
the natives, too. The famous Trevi Fountain
in Rome has become a spot where Italian
teenagers and young people “hang out” be-
side the foreign tourists. Hundreds are
squeezed into the small square surrounding
these fountains day and night chatting,
eating fast food, and creating large amounts
of trash that is picked up in the morning by
the cleaning crews of the city of Rome.
The same “hanging out” phenomenon is
apparent at the Piazza Navona, around the
leaning tower of Pisa, in the center of
Perugia, and Siena (and presumably
hundreds of other similar places I did not
see). These crowds seem profoundly indif-
ferent to such surroundings, which have
become relegated to places for socializing.
Of the remaining countries, I have been
to Portugal on three previous occasions as a
tourist and as such had no occasion for any
exchange of ideas. This time I met dozens
of academic and non-academic intellectuals
and journalists. Most striking was the num-
ber of these pleasant and polite individuals
who referred to themselves—seriously or
jokingly—as former Maoists or Marxist
radicals. The explanation may be found in
the revolutionary period of the early and
mid-1970s, when Portugal came close to a
Communist take-over and had a strong,
Stalinist Communist party as well as a leftist
military disenchanted with and radicalized
by long and fruitless colonial wars in Africa.
Remarkably enough, the Portuguese mud-
dled through, the leftists were defeated in
various elections, and no blood was shed.
Bits of information and impressions
gathered on this trip (and some subsequent
reading) led me to discern some similarities
between the Portuguese and Hungarian na-

tional character and history. Both small na-
tions, they have, with some justification,
seen themselves historically victimized by
their neighbors or other great powers; both
had trouble preserving their independence,
both had in the twentieth century long
periods of right-wing authoritarian govern-
ments, and both made striking material
progress in recent decades. Of course,
Hungary, a landlocked country, never had a
colonial empire.
In Poland, it was my first visit to Warsaw,
which was deliberately destroyed by Nazi
forces as retaliation for the 1944 Uprising.
The city was rebuilt mostly in the Soviet-
socialist style prevailing all over Eastern
Europe, except for the old city that was
reconstructed in an authentic way. The 1944
Uprising was encouraged by the Soviet
Union, whose troops were close to the city
(on the other side of the Vistula river). It
would have been easy for them to join
forces with the rebels. Instead, they stopped
their advance and waited until the German
troops crushed the Uprising (that lasted
over two months) and its pro-Western par-
ticipants. Stalin thus took advantage of the
Nazis’ readiness to destroy Polish social-
political forces which could have competed
with the Soviet-supported Polish Com-
munists in the establishment of the postwar
Polish government.
A Polish employee of the U.S. Embassy
told me that she and other Polish women
take shopping trips to New York because
even against the Polish zloty the dollar is so
weak that doing so is cost e¸ective. In
another conversation, I learned that while
abortion is illegal (given the uniformly
Catholic population) it is readily available
when in the doctor’s judgment a woman’s
mental or physical health requires it. The
unemployment rate was said to be 18 per-
cent; one million Poles work in Britain
in occupations ranging from doctor to
plumber and electrician.
In Sweden, just before my visit, a major
controversy erupted when the Organization
for Information on Communism proposed
Letter from Europe
to introduce into the school curricula infor-
mation about Communist systems and their
misdeeds along the lines of courses about
the Holocaust already taught. The proposal
inspired a public letter by 250 Swedish aca-
demics protesting the proposal on the
ground that such information implied or
posited moral equivalence between Nazism
and Communism. A leaflet produced by
this organization noted that according to a
2007 survey
90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15
and 20 never heard of the Gulag but 95 per-
cent knew of Auschwitz. 43 percent believed
that communist regimes claimed less then one
million lives during the entire twentieth cen-
tury. . . . The poll also found that 40 percent
of young Swedes believed that communism
had contributed to increased prosperity in the
world; 22 percent considered communism a
democratic form of government and 82 per-
cent did not regard Belarus as a dictatorship.
The government is interested in this pro-
gram but no decision has so far been made
about adopting it.
I n Italy, I heard a lot about the problems of
illegal immigration. Such stories came to
life at a small square in Pisa where I ob-
served six hefty, young African men com-
peting to o¸er help to find a parking place.
They were not municipal employees but
volunteers in search of a tip. They were also
selling cheap plastic objects of little useful-
ness, but they otherwise made no apparent
contribution to the Italian economy. Ac-
cording to my Italian companions they
were probably illegal immigrants. Their un-
controlled influx and presence contributed
to the recent electoral victory of Berlusconi,
who vowed to take action to control im-
migration. In the same election, the Com-
munists lost every seat they had (about 100)
in the parliament, getting less than 5 percent
of the vote. Another byproduct of immi-
gration was revealed by an Italian engineer
I spoke to on the plane, who told me that
seven of his thirty classmates married
The New Criterion October 2008 33
 Letter from Europe
Eastern European women. He was in the
process of divorcing his Italian wife and
implied that Eastern European women were
less uppity, easier to get along with. I also
learned from academics in Rome that Italy
had a total of 1.5 million Romanian im-
migrants (many of them gypsies) who were
highly unpopular, unlike the one million
Ukrainians who were hardworking and re-
spectable.
The survival of traditional ways of life
was brought home by the number of
Italians I met who lived where they were
born or nearby and by the spectacle of three
generation families in public places.
According to an Italian professor in
Perugia (who had a Ph.D. in political science
from U.C. Berkeley), Italian academic stan-
dards were declining and converging with
those in the United States. Another similar-
ity claimed by a young Italian lawyer was
that Italians are just as litigious as Ameri-
cans, willing to sue for five hundred euros.
Reminiscent of American campus commu-
nities, several small Italian towns in Umbria
and Tuscany had signs along the highway as-
suring the passing motorists that the town
was a nuclear-free zone.
Perugia has become of late infamous for
the murder of an American student at the
university; the case is still under investiga-
tion with some suspects arrested but not yet
tried. I learned that there is a good deal of
crime in the city, including drug tra˝cking,
and that the police used to be quite permis-
sive since most of these activities were asso-
ciated with the young.
Italy stimulates reflection about the rela-
tionship between anarchy and bureauc-
racy. Italian bureaucracy is legendary while
Italians, as the stereotype has it, are not
law-abiding, rule-oriented, or respectful of
authority. Presumably such traits have stim-
ulated the growth of bureaucratic institu-
34 The New Criterion October 2008
tions and practices. One of my Italian con-
tacts, a history professor at the University of
Pisa, visits Chicago as often as he can not
only on account of the apartment he and his
American wife own there, but in order to use
the libraries. In Italy, he said, it is very diffi-
cult and time-consuming to find and get a
book from a library.
Contrary to what most people would ex-
pect, Europe is in a number of ways more
technologically advanced than the United
States. Well-known among these advances
are the fast trains such as the tgv and the
excellent system of public transportation.
There is also the unpolluting diesel tech-
nology that yields fabulous fuel savings: I
rented a Renault Clio that averaged over 40
miles to the gallon (a year ago in Switzer-
land a VW Diesel Golf had similar mileage
notwithstanding the mountain driving).
There are also minor technological con-
veniences worth mentioning: in many hotel
bathrooms the available water temperatures
are displayed by the faucet and can be set; in
several European countries, you can choose
between using more or less water when
flushing the toilet; on Portuguese ex-
pressways, there are clocks giving the time
of the day; at Stockholm airport, a sign tells
you how many more minutes you have to
wait for the luggage to arrive at the
carousel.
Notwithstanding their di¸erences Europe
and the United States face similar problems
associated with modernity, immigration,
and Islamic terrorism. Far from finding
anti-Americanism, I was reminded that, in
terms of many of its most pressing issues,
Europe and the United States are very much
in the same boat. It is unclear whether
Europe’s great traditions and history (in-
cluding the experience of two World Wars
fought on its soil) have prepared it any bet-
ter to cope with these current di˝culties.
Theater
Joys of summer
by Brooke Allen
The musical Hair has a privileged place in
American culture. Its songs, particularly
classics like “Aquarius,” “Good Morning
Starshine,” and “Let the Sun Shine In,” are
deeply familiar, an inescapable part of the
soundtrack of American life in the second
half of the twentieth century. Lots of people
have seen Milos Forman’s 1979 filmed ver-
sion. How many, though, have seen the
musical itself? It opened at the Public
Theater in 1967, subsequently moving to
Broadway’s Biltmore Theater where it
played for four years; therefore only people
well launched in middle age, at the very
least, can have seen the original production;
regional, stock, and amateur productions
are few and far between. We know Hair
more as what we think it stands for—peace,
love, joy, free love—than for the darker
and more disturbing drama it actually
presents.
Seeing the full-scale revival at the Dela-
corte in Central Park, I was taken aback by
what a strong, expert, powerful show Hair
turns out to be. All its fine qualities have
been heightened by Diane Paulus’s staging,
and as a matter of fact this is the best
production I have ever seen at the Delacorte
in more than thirty years of attending
Shakespeare in the Park. Joseph Papp’s con-
ception of his summer festival as a demo-
cratic, anti-elitist institution has all too
often extended to anti-elitist casting, and
there is usually at least one stinkingly bad
performance in every show there. I’m
tempted to say that the 2006 Meryl Streep
Mother Courage hit rock bottom, but now
that I think of it I can recall a Richard II
from the 1980s that was even worse, with
Peter MacNicol playing the title role exactly
in the style of manic diet guru Richard
Simmons. And the Public’s commitment to
non-traditional casting, while laudable in
theory, is sometimes carried to ludicrous
extremes.
Paulus has not only infused Hair with
extremely high energy, which of course is
what the show is all about, but has cast it
brilliantly with young, beautiful, hugely
talented, and big-voiced performers who
belt out the almost continuous musical
numbers stunningly. (I would like to put in
a special word for Acme Sound Partners,
who have miked the show to perfection; the
volume is amped up, appropriately for a
rock show, but each lyric can be heard with
crystalline clarity.) Among this really supe-
rior cast the standouts are Will Swenson,
who delivers an electrifyingly energetic per-
formance as the charismatic Berger, self-
proclaimed leader of the Tribe (though he is
clearly too old to be in high school, as the
script would have us believe); the melan-
cholic and gentle Christopher J. Hanke as
Claude, doomed to die in Vietnam (having
seen the play during its two-week extension,
I missed seeing star-in-the-making Jonathan
Gro¸ of Spring Awakening fame in the role,
as he had other commitments to fulfill); and
two vocally gifted young women, Caren
The New Criterion October 2008 35
 Theater
Lyn Manuel as the flower-child Sheila and
Patina Renea Miller as Dionne.
Paulus and the surviving authors, James
Rado and Galt MacDermot, have resisted
the temptation to tinker with the script so
as to make the story (what little story there
is in this concert-style show) more per-
tinent, or “relevant” as the lingo goes, to
today’s situation—its relevance being per-
fectly obvious already. No, this is a history
play, set squarely in its own era without any
annoyingly knowing references to current
events. And the set designer Scott Pask and
the costume designer Michael McDonald
have captured the look of that era very well,
if my own memories can be trusted. The
costume designer Jane Greenwood once
told me that it is much easier to do a play
set in the distant past, for example a Molière
play, than one in the recent past, because no
one is alive who remembers what things
looked like in 1680 but lots of people
remember 1980. Rather fewer people will
remember 1967, but this certainly looked
like the real thing to me.
I n fact, the production succeeded so nicely
in recreating not only the sound and look
but the feel of that time and place that I
found myself for the next couple of days in a
strange frame of mind, thinking it all over
with a mixture of nostalgia and sadness. If
the hippies were guilty of hubris when they
imagined they could change the world, then
they have been amply punished, for today
we seem farther than ever from peace, love,
and understanding, and the generation that
came of age in the 1960s has done no more
to further these ideals than their forefathers
did—indeed they seem to have done worse
on every possible level. Even the hippies’
vaunted individualism quickly became yet
another form of social tyranny: as is usually
the case in human history, one set of con-
ventions got thrown out only for a new one
to take its place. Having been a junior high
school student during the hippies’ heyday in
the late 1960s, I can attest to the fact. Every
girl at my school who had the means flocked
to a Manhattan boutique called, ironically
36 The New Criterion October 2008
enough, The Di¸erent Drummer, to pur-
chase what was in e¸ect a hippie uniform.
And yet many of the hippies were beauti-
ful and idealistic, as this production reminds
us—a fact we are liable to forget when faced
with the scuzzy old relics who hang out
in little time warps like Woodstock and
Berkeley. Hair is about the waste of war,
yes, but it is also about the generous lush-
ness of youth, a fleeting instant of perfec-
tion that the naïve and inexperienced young
people themselves hardly know what to do
with. “Where Do I Go?” is the play’s most
moving ballad, describing not just Claude’s
confusion over his impending departure
for the Vietnamese jungles but all young
people’s uncertainty of what life is for and
what they should make of it. The Tribe
hanging out in Central Park is theatrically
reminiscent of the Lost Boys on Peter Pan’s
island, and Berger’s quip—“They’ll never
get me, I’m gonna stay high forever”—is
another version of Peter Pan’s “I don’t ever
want to be a man. I always want to be a
little boy and to have fun.” Berger did grow
up, of course; perhaps he is that gray-haired
hedge-fund manager over there in the fifth
row.
Hair’s producers have slated it for a
Broadway run this fall, a terrific idea. But it
will be hard for the production team to
recreate the sylvan enchantment they
achieved in Central Park; the way the Tribe
assembled mysteriously from the surround-
ing trees at the top of the show and the
music echoing through the dark night were
as magical as the fairies’ first appearance in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
If the mid-1960s marked the beginning of
one era, it also marked the end of another.
Nineteen-sixty-six saw Noël Coward’s last
play appear in the West End. Coward’s
work had fallen out of fashion, and his
previous play, Waiting in the Wings, a skill-
ful and sensitive piece about decrepit
actresses banished to an old age home, had
been unfairly panned by the critics.
Knowing that his declining health would
soon necessarily put an end to his acting

career, Coward went in search of a vehicle
to bring it to a dignified close. As his friend
Cole Lesley remembered it, “The dream
seemed sometimes unlikely to materialize:
e¸ective star parts for men in their mid-
sixties do not grow on trees, and moreover
both the part and the play would have to be
certain, as far as one can ever be certain, of
success. The idea of Noël appearing, pos-
sibly for the last time, in a failure was un-
thinkable.”
The obvious answer was for Coward to
write the vehicle himself, and he came up
with an evening of three short plays entitled
Suite in Three Keys. The longest and most
substantial of the pieces was A Song at
Twilight—and the most personal and pro-
vocative as well. It centers upon an aging
writer, famous and lauded, who has man-
aged to keep his homosexuality a secret
throughout his career but at great cost both
to his personal life and his work. This un-
pleasant character was clearly modeled on
Somerset Maugham, who had outraged
Coward by publishing a dishonest hetero-
sexual memoir in which he made vicious
and uncalled-for attacks on his long-suffer-
ing wife, the decorator Syrie Maugham. But
parallels with Coward’s own career could
not be avoided: he, too, had hidden his
sexuality for decades; he, like his protago-
nist Sir Hugo Latymer, had washed his
hands of a long-term lover who became a
“bad debt” by descending into boorish al-
coholism. It was brave of Coward to write
the role, and braver still to perform it, for
on the West End stage in 1966 such material
was still shocking and somewhat sensa-
tional.
Suite in Three Keys was well received in
London. The following year Hume Cro-
nyn, Jessica Tandy, and Anne Baxter per-
formed an abridged version, Noël Coward in
Two Keys (comprising only A Song at
Twilight and one of the two shorter plays,
Come Into the Garden, Maud) on Broadway,
where it had less success—possibly because
New York, shaken up by Hair and other
signs of the times, had moved forward more
quickly than Coward had. Since then it has
Theater
been seen only very occasionally, which is
too bad since it shows a serious, almost
didactic side of Coward that is not unat-
tractive. It makes us wonder what sort of
writer he might have developed into had he
lived thirty or forty years later, when the
sort of love he wrote about obliquely in
plays like Design for Living could finally
speak its name. This past August, audiences
were treated to a rare opportunity to see
Noël Coward in Two Keys at the Berkshire
Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Mass-
achussetts, directed by Vivien Matalon, who
mounted both the original London and
New York productions. (Matalon took on
the task of directing the Master with some
trepidation, asking him first whether he
wanted a director or a stage manager.)
T his time Matalon, with an ace design team
made up of R. Michael Miller (scenery),
David Murin (costumes), and Ken Bil-
lington (lighting), was given a free hand to
do things his way, and the result was an art-
fully staged evening with an out-of-time
feel, one foot in the modern era and one in
the 1930s. Both plays take place in the same
sitting room of a private suite in a grand
hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland (Coward, it
should be noted, came up with this idea
several years before Neil Simon did it in
Plaza Suite), and Miller’s scenic design is
executed more elegantly, and more realisti-
cally, than one usually expects to see in
summer theater. Matalon chose his actresses
well: in A Song at Twilight, Maureen Ander-
man was very funny as Carlotta, the sar-
donic elderly actress, an old flame of Sir
Hugo’s, who has come to dine with him
and rake up bits of his past he would rather
forget, while Mia Dillon, who has been a
solid presence in character roles on- and
o¸-Broadway for thirty years, was both
comic and moving as Sir Hugo’s unfor-
tunate German wife, the butt of all his bad
moods and cruel humor. Casey Biggs was
serviceable as Sir Hugo but did not exactly
provide a star turn, making me think long-
ingly of what Coward or Cronyn must have
done with the part. He was better as the
The New Criterion October 2008 37
 Theater
laconic, henpecked American husband in
Come Into the Garden, Maud (one reels at
the thought of Coward in that role, though
he himself seems to have been undaunted
by its challenges: “It’s so easy to play Amer-
icans. All you have to do is say ‘Hi, folks’
very loudly, and then do the rest in Eng-
lish”).
It is also a pleasure just to spend an eve-
ning at the Berkshire Theater Festival, with
its spacious old-fashioned structure, origi-
nally designed as the Stockbridge Casino by
Stanford White, and its cosy bar decorated
by countless posters and photographs of the
famous performers and productions that
have appeared there in the Festival’s eighty-
year history—the first btf production fea-
tured Eva Le Gallienne, and btf apprentices
have included Katharine Hepburn and
Humphrey Bogart.
A . R. Gurney’s Bu¸alo Gal has just received
its first production in New York, although it
appeared at Williamstown in the summer of
2000 and in Bu¸alo two years later. Why is
this? It’s true that it is not one of Gurney’s
very best plays, but everything he writes is
worth seeing, and one would think that he
has enough of a built-in audience to easily
sell out a short run. This seems to have been
the case; I went on the very last night of its
engagement at New York’s Primary Stages
and there were several enthusiasts literally
begging for tickets outside the door. Per-
haps inspired by their hit of last season,
Dividing the Estate—soon to transfer to
Broadway—written by the nonagenarian
Horton Foote, Primary Stages has tem-
porarily abandoned the always-uphill battle
for young audiences by plumping for a safe
season of plays by well-established oldsters:
Gurney, Lee Blessing, Donald Margulies,
and Tina Howe.
Bu¸alo Gal is a take on Chekhov’s Cherry
Orchard—but then, come to think of it, so
was Dividing the Estate. Gurney’s Madame
Ranevskaya is Amanda (Susan Sullivan), a
38 The New Criterion October 2008
lovely actress in late middle age who left
Bu¸alo as an ambitious teenager, achieved
fame in TV series and soap operas, and is
now coming back to her home town in an
e¸ort to revive her fading career with a
return to the stage in a classic role—that of
Madame Ranevskaya herself in The Cherry
Orchard.
Gurney observes the unities: the play’s
entire action occurs in the course of the first
day of rehearsals, on stage at the regional
theater where The Cherry Orchard is to be
performed. Amanda is greeted and deftly
handled by the director Jackie (Jennifer
Regan), the stage manager Roy (James
Waterston), the assistant stage manager
Debbie (Carmen M. Herlihy), and her co-
star James (Dathan B. Williams). They have
dealt with di˝cult performers before and
are well aware that Amanda’s grande dame
airs and impossible demands, made with
cloying sweetness, are attributable only to
her fears about being back on stage after so
many years—still, she is sorely trying.
Channeling Marion Seldes and Katharine
Hepburn at their most a¸ected while at the
same time gently indicating her character’s
vulnerabilities, Sullivan does such a good
job that we end up liking the infuriating
Amanda. Her nostalgia for Bu¸alo, how-
ever theatrically expressed, is real after all,
and so is her wish to be a “serious” actress
rather than a television goddess. Her affec-
tion for her old flame Dan (Mark Blum),
now a local dentist, is also genuine. But like
Jackie, we are always aware that her fan-
tasies about moving back to her hometown
are just that—fantasies. In the end, she is a
cold realist and will follow the money.
And in any case, her remembered Bu¸alo
is little more than a phantom. Those few of
the lovely old houses that are left are now
mostly charitable institutions, and Aman-
da’s own family domicile is up for sale.
Reminiscing with James, she remembers a
favorite spot from their childhood. “Is it
still there?” she asks; to which James sagely
responds, “Nothing’s still there.” How true.
Art
Morandi at the Met
by Karen Wilkin
Giorgio Morandi can be described, with
equal accuracy, as one of the most admired
and celebrated of twentieth-century Italian
painters or as one of the most misunder-
stood and underestimated. Responses to his
magically quiet, introspective paintings,
etchings, drawings, and watercolors seem to
occupy opposite ends of the aesthetic
spectrum. Initiates rank him among the
giants of modernist painting. Cognoscenti
of printmaking prize his etchings as high-
points of the tradition. Others dismiss him
as “that painter of bottles.” Since many of
Morandi’s most passionate fans are painters
and sculptors, for once the hackneyed phrase
“an artist’s artist” is absolutely accurate. He’s
a challenging painter in the truest, best—as
opposed to currently modish—sense of the
word. For some of his admirers, and I count
myself among them, an ability to appreciate
Morandi’s subtle excellences can serve as a
kind of litmus test for perception. If you
can’t see how good Morandi is, it’s possible
that your eye for painting is not to be
trusted. Or something like that.
Surprisingly, though, while Morandi is
represented in most major museum collec-
tions internationally, he is not automatically
included in discussions of the evolution of
twentieth-century art the way that other
members of his generation are. (Born in
1890, he died, a month short of his seventy-
fourth birthday, in 1964.) As a result, par-
ticularly in the United States, a notable
portion of the younger audience for art is
completely unfamiliar with him. In Europe,
quite the opposite: it has become increas-
ingly easy, during the more than four
decades since Morandi’s death, to see his
work in some depth. Substantial groupings
of his paintings are permanently on view in
several Italian museums, many of them
originally in private collections assembled
by Morandi’s contemporaries and friends,
often with his careful supervision. Since the
centennial of his birth in 1990, an impres-
sive number of ambitious exhibitions in
Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Spain,
and Italy have allowed European Morandi
lovers to indulge their enthusiasm with
some regularity, and since 1993, the Museo
Morandi, Bologna, has o¸ered an unparal-
leled, permanently installed overview of his
paintings, works on paper, and prints. In
the last decade or so, there have even been
significant Morandi exhibitions in Australia
and Japan. But on this side of the Atlantic,
the story is very di¸erent. The last major
Morandi exhibition in the United States
was seen in 1981 and 1982 in San Francisco,
Des Moines, and at the Guggenheim, in
New York. While many American museums
and some private collections boast fine ex-
amples of Morandi’s work, they are few in
number and rarely visible, so American
viewers have had to content themselves
with very occasional sightings in commer-
cial galleries.
This fall, until mid-December 2008, the
splendid survey “Giorgio Morandi, 1890–
The New Criterion October 2008 39
 Art
1964,” at the Metropolitan Museum, has
changed this situation dramatically.… Jointly
organized by the Met and mambo—Museo
d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (where it will be
seen early in 2009)—by Maria Cristina Ban-
dera and Renato Miracco, and installed in
the Lehman Wing, the show brings together
a fine selection of rarely seen paintings from
European public and private collections,
along with, at the end of the show, a group
of watercolors and a sampling of iconic
prints from all periods in Morandi’s career,
to remind us that he always described him-
self as “a professor of etching.” This well-
chosen retrospective not only provides an
informative panorama of Morandi’s work,
but has also triggered related exhibitions
elsewhere in New York. These include a sur-
vey of works on paper at the Istituto Italiano
di Cultura, also selected by Doctor Miracco,
etchings at Pace Gallery, and a small mono-
graphic show at Lucas Schoormans Gal-
lery; another major Morandi exhibition is
planned by the Phillips Collection, Wash-
ington, D.C., in 2009. Eagerly anticipated by
Morandi lovers, this group of shows at-
tracted a fair amount of advance publicity,
provoking a kind of excitement not usually
associated with serious, contemplative, per-
ceptual painting. Perhaps this constellation
of exhibitions will at last make American
audiences properly aware of this most
reticent of twentieth-century masters. As the
Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, says
in his introduction to the exhibition’s excel-
lent catalogue, “The time is ripe for a vaster
appreciation of Morandi’s rightful place in
the canon of modern art.”
I t’s possible that Morandi’s failure to cap-
ture the larger art world’s imagination, ex-
cept as “the painter of bottles,” is related to
his spectacularly unspectacular life. Anyone
who knows anything about his history is
aware that he lived on the same middle-class
–––––––––––
1 “Giorgio Morandi, 1890–1964” opened at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on Sep-
tember 16 and remains on view through December
14, 2008.
40 The New Criterion October 2008
street in Bologna, in the family apartment,
all of his life. Better informed fans know that
he taught etching at the Bologna Accademia
di Belle Arti for decades. Most would tell
you that he was a recluse, detached from the
world outside his studio, insulated from the
deplorable politics of Fascist Italy, wholly
devoted to his art. Like all such legends, this
one—cultivated by the artist himself—is
based on a considerable amount of truth. He
did spend his entire life on the Via Fondazza.
His studio was his bedroom. And his only
travel outside of Italy was to Switzerland, to
see some exhibitions. Yet Morandi’s story is
more complicated than the o˝cial myth
suggests; a recent biography by his former
student and teaching assistant, the American
painter Janet Abramowicz, for example,
implies that he was less apolitical than previ-
ously believed, although the knotty history
of Fascist support for vanguard art and
the contradictory relationship of apparent-
ly more liberal politics and conservative
aesthetics makes it di˝cult to judge the
revelations. Even a brief immersion in the
extensive Morandi literature reveals that he
has been claimed by competing camps as a
defender of the time-honored values of
traditional Italian art, as daring explorer of
uncharted territory, and as a good deal in
between. But it’s clear, too, to anyone who
has devoted much time to Morandi’s work,
that his connections to the art of the past, the
recent past, and his own era were far more
complex and significant than casual discus-
sions of his work usually allow.
The well-selected, illuminatingly installed
retrospective at the Metropolitan, along with
its comprehensive catalogue, with contribu-
tions by a range of Morandi scholars, should
do a lot to dispel some of the Morandi
myths. Right from the start, the show puts
paid to the notion that living in isolation in
Bologna, concentrating exclusively on his
table-top worlds, he was oblivious to any-
thing but his invented universe. Morandi
was, in fact, an enormously sophisticated art-
ist, highly trained and knowledgeable about
the art of the past and the present. His sur-
viving correspondence and a brief autobio-

graphical statement published in 1928 docu-
ment that as a young man he both traveled to
see works of art by the masters that interested
him and strove to educate himself about the
work of his radical contemporaries. In addi-
tion to his direct encounters with a variety
of works of art—at the Venice Biennale,
for example, or through early participation
in group exhibitions with progressive
colleagues—Morandi had ready access to re-
productions. His native Bologna was a uni-
versity town, where publications about new
ideas were readily available, and his surviving
library is testimony to his life-long curiosity
and open-mindedness. Throughout his life,
he was in contact with the leading literary
and critical intellectuals of the day, a kind of
closet vanguardist, preserving the tranquility
he said he required in order to work with his
orderly Via Fondazza life, but ranging widely
in his mind, weighing (and often rejecting)
possibilities against his own clear-sighted
personal vision.
The Metropolitan’s exhibition immediately
establishes Morandi’s modernist allegiance
from the start of his life as a painter. The
selection of paintings from 1913 to 1920
bears witness to his informed assimilation
of the lessons of Paul Cézanne, of Cubism,
and of Expressionism, all of it filtered
through his simultaneous appreciation of
the art of the past. In his 1928 biographical
note, Morandi wrote that most of what he
learned as a student at the Bologna Ac-
cademia proved to be useless. Initially at-
tracted to the self-conscious quest for the
new of the Futurists—he exhibited once
with the Giovani Futuristi (young futurists)
in Rome—he says he came to realize that
“only an understanding of the most vital
achievements in painting over the past
centuries could help me find my way.” The
artists of the past whom Morandi lists as
crucial to his own evolution are “Giotto and
Masaccio above all” and their “modern
counterparts Corot, Courbet, Fattori, and
Cézanne” whom he describes as “the most
legitimate heirs to the glorious Italian tra-
dition.” Even allowing for the fact that the
Art
piece was written for the Fascist review
L’Assalto and that a keen sense of self-
protection can be easily read between the
lines, the list is revealing. Yet conspicuously
missing is Chardin, who, like Cézanne,
haunts all of Morandi’s work, and two
Italian masters whose example seems equal-
ly clear, Caravaggio, whose work he studied
on a 1919 trip to Rome, and Piero della
Francesca, mentioned briefly in a later
statement. (Morandi’s connection to the
latter is discussed in an interesting catalogue
essay by the Piero scholar Neville Rowley.)
What is striking is that while Morandi
clearly saw himself as connected to the
Italian tradition, it was French modernism
that set him on his future path.
The earliest works in the retrospective
show Morandi exploring a variety of ap-
proaches, assembling the vocabulary that
we associate with the mature painter. The
prismatic forms and hatched strokes of his
Cézanne- and Cubist-inspired works give
way to unbroken forms and clear silhou-
ettes, but even in the most agitated early
paintings we recognize objects that will
remain among Morandi’s cast of characters
for the rest of his life: the curving back of a
clock case, a footed compote with curly
edges, a twisted bottle made of opaline
glass, a tall, tapering metal water pitcher.
And more. The subtly modulated palette
of unnameable grays, ochres, and creams
seems at once reminiscent of Cubism’s earth
tones and prescient of Morandi’s own later
self-imposed limitations.
Things clarify further as we move from
1918 to the early 1920s, in a modest group of
Morandi’s Metaphysical paintings, docu-
ments of his short-lived association with
Giorgio di Chirico, the former Futurist
Carlo Carrà, and others. These pellucid,
crisp images, with their otherworldly con-
frontations of objects at once familiar and
unreal, seem less grounded in actuality than
Morandi’s later works, but they make clear
his ability to extract the maximum drama
from the intervals between objects and their
relationship to the canvas on which they are
represented. The most exciting of these
The New Criterion October 2008 41
 Art
paintings is a 1919 self-portrait, long known
from an early reproduction but believed
lost; conservation of a still life of a cactus, in
preparation for this exhibition, revealed the
self-portrait under an old relining. Morandi
glares at us, fierce and uncompromising as a
figure in a trecento fresco but utterly mod-
ern, so much so that the bold definition and
geometric clarity of the head has provoked
comparisons with the work of artists as
diverse as Giotto and Henri Rousseau.
There are echos, too, of a celebrated and
ferocious youthful self-portrait by Cézanne.
It’s a thrill to see the “lost” Morandi in the
flesh, although its presence means that the
superb potted cactus on the other side, a
miracle of articulate modeling and contrast-
ing edges, is seen upside down.
A s we move through the exhibition, we
follow Morandi as he forges his own lan-
guage, sharpening his focus, determining
his own boundaries, or, as he put it in 1928,
realizing “the need to follow my own in-
stincts all the way, trusting to my own
strength and forgetting any stylistic pre-
occupations during my work”—all this
without abdicating innovation or varie-
ty. The contemplative, apparently single-
minded but endlessly inventive Morandi we
know begins to emerge through pairs and
trios of closely related paintings—land-
scapes, self-portraits, and still lifes—from
the 1920s to the 1940s, hung so that each
can declare itself individually but com-
parisons can easily be made. (Often the
groupings are parts of larger runs of
thematically connected works.) No matter
how similar the components of these paint-
ing, it becomes obvious that the di¸erences
between them outweigh the likenesses.
Morandi was always scrupulously attentive
to the specific. The objects that appear in his
paintings actually exist, mostly drawn from
the detritus of daily life. We recognize ca¸e
latte bowls, old lamp bases, a battered cop-
per saucepan, oils cans, seashells, bottles,
boxes, and, occasionally, less legible things
that seem to have been gleaned from the
garage or from plumbing supply stores. In a
42 The New Criterion October 2008
letter to his friend, the critic Giuseppe
Raimondi, Morandi described a picture
composed “of my usual things. You know
them. They are always the same. Why
should I change them? They work pretty
well. Don’t you think?” This assortment of
“usual things,” like the stock characters of
commedia dell’ arte, returns in various com-
binations to enact Morandi’s table-top
dramas. He is supposed to have painted
many of his objects to eliminate the distrac-
tion of labels and to neutralize their surface
qualities—a project aided by the thick,
homogenizing layer of dust that all studio
visitors commented on—but he reveled in
their profiles and essential forms.
Morandi was similarly tied to the specifics
of place. His landscapes are almost always
of the steep terrain near Grizzana, the
mountain town where he and his family
spent holidays, where he built a house, and
where he took refuge from the war. A series
of late paintings (none of which are in the
exhibition) records the courtyard of the
apartment house of the Via Fondazza. Yet,
as the exhibition makes plain, Morandi was
never literal or slavish in his response to
what is before him. Quite the contrary. For
all his attachment to the particular, he used
it not as an end in itself but as a stimulus for
his search for the essential, a quest for pure,
eloquent form that brings him to the verge
of abstraction. It is also clear that each time
Morandi returned to his “usual things” he
treated them di¸erently. Still lifes composed
of identical objects—plus or minus one or
two—are freshly reconceived with each
iteration. That small changes in the position
of individual objects provoke new tonal and
coloristic harmonies is, in fact, not unex-
pected. Spend some time with a group of
Morandi’s still lifes and it becomes evident
that his choice of value and hue, however
independent of anecdotal description or
literal depiction, is simultaneously tied to
the two-dimensional imperatives of the
composition and to an evocation of spatial
orientation in terms of those two-dimen-
sional imperatives. What is remarkable is
Morandi’s refusal to use the same size and

proportion of canvas for apparently “serial”
runs of paintings. Changes in the internal
relationships of his cast of characters
provoke changes in the support as acute as
the changes in the quality of light, the
palette, and the viewpoint. Something sim-
ilar obtains in Morandi’s landscapes. The
exhibition’s selection, spanning his entire
working life, ranges from moody evocations
of the gray light and subdued foliage colors
of Emilia-Romagna in spring and fall to
dazzling equivalents of the blinding sun-
light and heat-baked walls of mid-summer.
Yet again, in spite of this specificity, we
feel we are on the edge of abstraction. The
farmhouses, trees, and geometric fields that
reappear in Morandi’s landscapes, like the
objects that recur in his still lifes, function as
familiar, recognizable emblems of his world,
just as the Bibémus quarry and Montagne
Ste-Victoire do in Cézanne’s paintings, or
his compote, flowered pitcher, and ginger
jar. Yet at the same time, Morandi’s eco-
nomical distillation of his nominal subject
matter turns his allusions into signs of his
own presence, declarations of individuality
and emotion presented in wholly abstract,
formal terms, like Cézanne’s highly charged
touches of paint, Hans Hofmann’s geomet-
ric slabs of pigment, or even Mark Rothko’s
hovering rectangles. Especially in the paint-
ings of his last two decades, this sense of
presence is intensified by Morandi’s declar-
ative brushmarks, the urgent, assured re-
cords of the passage of his hand across the
surface of the canvas. These touches are
reminders of the flatness of the support and
the fiction of reference. There’s never any
attempt to make the direction of the mark
reinforce the form of the objects mustered
for the occasion but, rather, it’s used to turn
the way pigment is transferred to the canvas
into a celebration of what paint can (and
cannot) do. At the same time, these au-
thoritative marks contradict Morandi’s
apparent reticence and self-e¸acingness. In-
stead, they make visible his virtuosity, his
intelligence, and his role as artificer.
In the last sections of the Metropolitan’s
installation, a range of economical, radiant
Art
still lifes from the 1960s pulse between
reference and abstraction. The objects that
populate these works include some of our
old friends, pared down to their cores and
placed in the company of boxes, cylinders,
conical containers, and spheres whose iden-
tities we can only guess at, so subsumed are
they by considerations of color, tone, and
form. They remind us, too, that even in full
command of his powers, Morandi (like
Matisse even as a mature, acclaimed artist)
was still thinking about Cézanne and his
famous dictum to seek the sphere, the
cylinder, and the cone in nature. A group of
watercolors allows us to watch Morandi ex-
plore the shapes between objects, evoking
rather than representing his “usual things”
and sensitizing us to some of his last paint-
ings, in which a small cluster of unremark-
able objects are suggested largely by shad-
ows and the fierce but delicate brushmarks
around them. The “usual things” in these
astonishing works are unignorably present
yet they threaten to dissolve into pure
painting incident if our attention wavers for
a moment. “Nothing is more abstract than
reality,” Morandi famously stated in 1955.
Nothing indeed.
Exhibition note
“Wyndham Lewis Portraits”
National Portrait Gallery, London.
July 3–October 19, 2008
W yndham Lewis is best known as a mod-
ernist and as the leader of the Vorticists, but
the Vorticists’ swirling style of vigorous er-
ratic curves is not best suited to the art of
portraiture. There remains a prevailing prej-
udice that we should be able to recognize a
particular individual in his or her portrait
rather than see them sliding away into
featurelessness through the force of the
painter’s gravity. Accordingly Lewis devised
a technique which he called “Burying Euclid
deep in the living flesh.” It is doubtful
whether Euclid, who revered above all the
simplicity and regularity of the circle and the
The New Criterion October 2008 43
 Art
straight line, would have been impressed by
this evocation of his name in connection
with the irregular intersecting curves of this
leading Vorticist.
Lewis’s embedding of geometrical shapes
in his portraits, however, is what makes
them more interesting than and often far
superior to portraits by the Royal Acade-
micians of his time. Lewis reviled the RA
men as “chocolate box” and they retaliated
by turning down his iconic 1939 portrait of
T. S. Eliot. It was forced into exile and
hangs in the municipal art gallery in Dur-
ban, where presumably it will remain until a
local politician decides that its cultural
properties are not su˝ciently African or
even not Zulu enough. In the portrait,
Eliot’s neat, tense self has been captured by
a skilled assembly of tubes and angles,
though appropriately for Eliot the portrait
is as traditional as it is modernist. It is quite
di¸erent from the portrait in the same year
of Ezra Pound, who, crumpled, fluid, float-
ing, occupies the entire bottom right half of
the picture as he lounges below a window
looking out to sea. Yet Lewis’s method is
the same and so is his capacity for insight
into his subjects.
T he thoughtful but lively exhibition at
London’s National Portrait Gallery would
be worth visiting for these two works alone
but in this substantial exhibition there is
much more, including oil paintings, water-
colors, sketches in pencil, charcoal, and
crayon, and caricatures. Indeed it provides a
very good coverage of Lewis’s portraits
from his cubist self-portrait of 1911, to his
last oil painting, another portrait of T. S.
Eliot, this time for Magdalene College,
completed in 1949 not long before he went
blind. In 1956 the blind artist recollected his
achievements and remembered his portraits
as a “grand visual legacy.” He wished he had
done more of them and, after seeing the ex-
hibition, I am sure he was right.
Lewis’s writings, particularly his fiction,
often contained bitter, satirical word-por-
traits of his patrons, whose kindness he
resented. This rarely comes out in the por-
44 The New Criterion October 2008
traits he painted of them, though his
volatile shifts between friendship and en-
mity for an individual may account for this.
In his fiction he savaged the Schi¸s and the
Sitwells, Virginia Woolf and Nancy Cunard,
but his portraits of them are sympathetic.
There is a dignity in his pencil and water-
color portrait of Edith Sitwell (1921) that
you would not expect from Lewis as
author, who wrote of her poetry, albeit in a
thin disguise, that it was “All about arab
rocking horses of the true Banbury Cross
breed. Still making mud pies at 40!” In the
portrait, Edith Sitwell’s long neck pops
suddenly out of a sti¸, over-large rhombus
of a collar and her long right hand
dominates the center, but what you perceive
is a strong and distinctive personality. This
time he drew with care, rather than bit with
spite, the hand that nourished him; Sitwell,
a woman obsessed with her sense of her
own ugliness, saw her hands as her only
point of beauty. Yet in his oil painting Edith
Sitwell (1923–1935; the time gap was a result
of his leaving his studio suddenly and steal-
thily because he could not pay the rent ar-
rears) the sitter has no hands or at least
none that we can see. She is got up in bright
clothes and a closely enveloping hat, but the
focus is entirely on the very long, highly
stylized face. Lewis also treated Virginia
Woolf (in 1921) with sensitivity, even
though he dismissed her work as “highbrow
feminist fantasy.” A cynic might comment
that those who purchase portraits are un-
likely to pay for a pictorial assassination of
their character and works but may be wil-
ling to overlook a verbal attack disguised as
fiction. It still has to be said that those who
gave him commissions because they ap-
preciated his talent were remarkably
tolerant and forgiving of his prickly and of-
fensive behavior.
It is only in his 1934 pen-and-ink and
watercolor sketch of the extreme leftist,
though curiously also devout Anglican, Sir
Sta¸ord Cripps that the painter fully re-
leases his capacity for venom. The concave
twists that Lewis gives to Cripps’ face with
its small, severe mouth capture exactly the
 Art

high-minded sneer of a man devoted to
Marxism, pacifism, and food crankism,
whose favorite hobby was knitting. During
the coalition government of the Second
World War, Winston Churchill sent Cripps
to negotiate in turn with Stalin and with
Gandhi on the grounds that Cripps was a
combination of the two. Churchill famously
said of Sir Sta¸ord, “There, but for the
grace of God, goes God.” Looking at
Lewis’s portrait of Cripps, you can see why.
But then Cripps did not commission nor
pay for the sketch. It was one of a pair
Lewis did for the London Mercury in 1934.
The other was of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader
of the British Union of Fascists, a portrait
that is also in the exhibition but carefully
excluded from display in the guide for the
public, despite its undoubted merit.
Lewis, who had been a bombardier in the
British army in the First World War, spent
the whole of the Second in the United
States and Canada. Lewis’s had been born
in Canada and his father was American; by
now he was weakened by long illness and
soon was to begin to go blind. His only
memorable o˝cial American portrait is that
of Chancellor Samuel Capen of the Univer-
sity of Bu¸alo in 1939. Capen is his role; his
academic robes form a long red tube against
which he holds his large, square, flat,
severely black mortar board. To his side is a
cubist landscape seen through a window,
which serves to set o¸ Capen’s long, thin,
ascetic intellectual face.
L ewis was not, as Walter Sickert claimed,
the “greatest portraitist of this or any other
time,” but he was certainly one of the more
talented and interesting ones. His work has
given us a wonderful set of visual images of
those prominent in the literary world of the
inter-war period; indeed this is how their
appearances came to be recognized and
remembered. He could not have achieved
this mastery without having been a Vorticist
first.
—Christie Davies

We mourn the passing of

John Russell (1919–2008)
A valued contributor to The New Criterion

The New Criterion October 2008 45

 Gallery chronicle
by James Panero
F or thirty years, the director of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de
Montebello, has been a model of sobriety in
a decadent age. Other institutions have suc-
cumbed to the fashions of the moment, but
the Metropolitan has remained a museum
of art. Great art and excellent curators have
been championed over financial and egotis-
tical concerns. And while de Montebello’s
leadership has been rooted in the best tradi-
tions of conservatorship, it has also been vi-
sionary. The good works of his museum
radiate out into the culture at large. The
story in the galleries this month certainly
bears that out.
I don’t put much stock in the forwards to
museum catalogues, usually a boilerplate
of acknowledgments. But de Montebello’s
essay for the Met’s Giorgio Morandi retro-
spective, reviewed in this issue by Karen
Wilkin, is revealing. “Like his paintings,”
writes de Montebello, “small in scale and
intimate in content, Morandi never fit into
the declamatory, self-aggrandizing mode of
the most prominent twentieth-century
masters. He was a quiet, almost reclusive,
and deeply thoughtful man, content to ex-
plore his own artistic preoccupations with-
out concern for the expectations of the fast-
paced world of artistic fashion.”
These statements could have been a
manifesto for de Montebello’s leadership
over the last three decades—an attitude
that, outside of the Metropolitan, has given
license for the New York art world to
46 The New Criterion October 2008
look beyond the “fast-paced world of artis-
tic fashion” and to appreciate slower
rewards. “It is indeed unusual to see
twenty-seven of Giorgio Morandi’s etchings
in a New York gallery,” writes the painter
and curator Janet Abramowicz in her essay
this month for “The Etchings of Giorgio
Morandi” at Pace Master Prints.… How right
she is. I doubt that even a top-flight gallery
like Pace could have considered mounting a
sizable exhibition of Morandi’s intimate
etchings without the institutional legit-
imation provided by the Metropolitan
Museum.
Abramowicz studied printmaking with
Morandi at Bologna’s Accademia di Belle
Arti and went on to become his teaching
assistant. She has written the essay on
Morandi’s etchings for the Metropolitan
catalogue and acted as curator for the Pace
show, assembling work from six American
collections and from the Museum of
Modern Art. The result is an education in
Morandi’s development as an etcher, here
displayed chronologically in work ranging
from 1921 to 1961.
“Etching was an integral part of Giorgio
Morandi’s oeuvre,” Abramowicz notes in
her Metropolitan essay. “Rather than simply
being a complement to his painting,” certain
images, Morandi believed, “could be ex-
–––––––––––
1 “The Etchings of Giorgio Morandi” opened at Pace
Master Prints, New York, on September 18 and
remains on view through October 18, 2008.

pressed in this medium only.” Yet as
Abramowicz writes for Pace, “traditional
etching was the medium least conducive to
the tonalities Morandi sought in his oeuvre,
and it is a tribute to him that he mastered
one of the most trying of traditional tech-
niques.”
Morandi’s artistic development was very
much defined by his evolution as an etcher.
In 1912, as a student, Morandi dropped out
of the Accademia for a year in order to teach
himself the printmaking process. In doing
so he revealed his passion to be more tradi-
tional than even his academic minders—he
wanted to learn the hard-ground technique
of Rembrandt—but he also wanted to apply
etching to his modernist vision.
It took Morandi six years to feel comfort-
able with etching, a process that relies on a
volatile chemistry of acid baths to open up
or “bite” the furrows in the metal printing
plate carved out by the etching needle. You
might say it took Morandi a lifetime to test
etching’s potential, learning how to adapt a
lineal art, an art based on line, to reflect his
interest in tone. Il ponte sul Savena a Bologna
(Bridge on the Savena River at Bologna, 1912),
a landscape and the earliest work in the
show, already reveals Morandi’s reserved
sense of composition but not yet the as-
suredness of his etching needle. His marks
are a loose thicket of hatchings, his lines
doggedly tracing out the architecture of the
landscape—the curve of the road, the arch
of the bridge. The hatchwork of shadow
lines mingles and loses itself in the tonal
shading of the trees and rooflines. Compare
this to Natura morta con bottiglie e brocca
(Still Life with Bottles and Pitcher, 1915), a
futurist still life where the tonal areas al-
ready feel more assured and light-handed.
Rather than merely containing shadow
lines, the volumes here are defined by the
etching hatchwork.
Morandi’s breakthrough comes in 1921
with the tiny Pane e limone (Bread and
Lemon), just one-and-a-half by three inches,
which, for Abramowicz, calls to mind
Rembrandt’s Small Gray Landscape. Here the
Art
background and surrounding area get equal,
if not more, attention from the etcher’s
needle than does the subject matter itself.
The hatch marks have an all-over e¸ect.
Morandi defines his objects entirely through
their tone, using a texture of lines woven like
linen, reflecting the weave of the printed
paper, to darken the areas around and
beneath the lemon and bread. In Veduta della
Montagnola di Bologna (View of the Montag-
nola in Bologna, 1932), these textures become
more abstracted, largely uniform fields of
pattern—a dense but even hatchwork of
diagonal, vertical, and horizontal lines for a
field in shadow, a more open pattern for
areas in sun.
The remaining work in the Pace show
displays Morandi’s application of his all-
over hatching for his iconic still lifes of
bottles and other household objects. The
blissful regularity of his ordinary subject
matter is probably Morandi’s most radical
contribution to modernism and still his
most debated accomplishment. Through
repetition, Morandi was able to revisit the
same objects with an experimental eye,
changing his approach each time and turn-
ing his etching technique into a subject
matter of its own. His work becomes more
interesting the more he dissolves the plastic
shapes of his bottles and cans into the pat-
terns of the etching line. I prefer the wavy
Natura morta a grandi segni (Still Life with
Large Signs, 1931) to the more “realistic”
rendering of Grande natura morta circolare
con bottiglia e tre oggetti (Large Circular Still
Life with Bottle and Three Objects, 1946).
Of all the examples on view at Pace,
Grande natura morta scura (Large Dark Still
Life, 1934) stands out for its atmospheric
mood, a vision glimpsed in the spectral
light of night. The darkness of this work is
achieved through the compaction of thou-
sands of etching lines. It is remarkable to
consider the density of these lines and the
master’s needle carving out each one. Mark
for mark, you find more in a square inch of
Morandi’s printmaking than in a foot of
most modern multiples. You might say that
Morandi is the high-thread-count etcher of
The New Criterion October 2008 47
 Art
modernism. The luxuriance of his work
comes through in its feel rather than its
mere appearance. Consider moreover that
Morandi printed most of his etchings him-
self, sometimes in limited runs of only three
or four, and you realize that each of these
multiples is a rarified object in its own right,
as intimate as any of his oils on canvas.
I ntimacy is one aspect of Morandi’s art that
poses a unique challenge to curators. Before
there was “installation art,” there was simply
art’s installation, an awareness of how
stand-alone objects become informed by the
space around them. I can think of few other
examples of modern art that place such
a high demand on their hanging as
Morandi’s. Rather than reach out to us,
Morandi’s paintings and etchings pull us in.
It is true that Morandi’s work does not
clash against itself—there are no bold
colors, no conflicts of program—but his in-
troverted works can tug at one another
when arranged too close together. It is a
common mistake to assume that Morandi’s
intimacy demands proximity, when really
his work benefits from open space.
The Metropolitan’s installation of its
Morandi survey in the basement of the Leh-
man wing, a troublesome venue resembling
an airport hotel conference center, could not
be worse for appreciating Morandi’s par-
ticular touch. The Pace exhibition su¸ers in a
similar way. Here the work is packed
together in a small dark space, arranged
chronologically, clockwise around the room,
left to right. Such an exhibition sacrifices
pleasure for didacticism.
In terms of presentation, by far the most
successful Morandi exhibition this month is
now taking place at Lucas Schoormans in
Chelsea.  Gallery-goers may recall that in
2004 Schoormans mounted a small exhibi-
tion of Morandi oils that became the hit of
the season. This month the gallery follows
–––––––––––
2 “Giorgio Morandi: Paintings and Works on Paper”
opened at Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York,
on September 9 and remains on view through Oc-
tober 18, 2008.
48 The New Criterion October 2008
up with an equally impressive display. From
the open, light-filled space to the sky-
blue color of the walls, Schoormans has
mounted his exhibition with an eye for in-
timate detail that complements Morandi’s
own.
The gallery’s ground floor focuses on
Morandi’s compact oil still lifes from the
1940s and 1950s. His Natura morta (Still
Life), rendered in a buttery batter of paint,
here from 1953, nears perfection. I also like
how a moderately sized still life from 1948
gets to take up its own wall, a˝xed by two
simple screws. The minimal presentation
shows Morandi at his elegant best. He seems
thoroughly contemporary, rather than dusty
and reclusive.
Upstairs, Schoormans has assembled an
exhibition of works in pencil and, in fact,
several of the same etchings found at Pace.
You might wonder if there is anything
produced by Morandi not on public display
this month in New York—not exactly a ter-
rible situation to contemplate.
It is a delight to find these repetitions and
see the same work in di¸erent surround-
ings: just as at Pace, we find Ponte sul Savena
a Bologna, Natura morta con bottiglie e brocca,
and Natura morta a grandi segni, among
others, but here in more congenial sur-
roundings. I like how this presentation does
not set out to be all-inclusive. Instead it
aims merely to please. I also enjoyed seeing
Morandi’s etchings alongside a few of his
wispy pencils and watercolors on paper.
I suppose there is something for each side
of the brain in these two gallery shows—a
printmaking class at Pace, and a sentimental
education at Schoormans. They are both
worth visiting, and each benefits from the
other. Pace and Schoormans also vary as to
which of their limited prints is listed for
sale. It’s quite a month when we can find
two gallery shows of Morandi multiples at
once. For this, indirectly, we owe thanks to
the singular vision of Philippe de Mon-
tebello, a museum director who dares to
mount a major survey of this quiet modern
master.
Music
Salzburg chronicle
by Jay Nordlinger
Every year, the Salzburg Festival has a
“theme”—it doesn’t mean much to ordinary
festivalgoers, but it seems to mean some-
thing to Salzburg administration. And this
year, the theme was “. . . for love is strong
as death,” drawn from Song of Solomon.
The idea was to choose operas in which love
and death play prominent roles. That didn’t
exactly narrow it down, did it?
The operas for Summer ’08 included Don
Giovanni (Mozart), Rusalka (Dvořák), Blue-
beard’s Castle (Bartók), and Otello (Verdi).
Some of the productions were dreadful and
repulsive; some of them were fine, or better.
I will get to productions shortly—but since
stage directors are always trying to over-
shadow singers, conductors, and orchestra
players (not to mention composers and
librettists), let’s start with some performers.
And we will consider only those who did
very well, leaving others behind, perhaps to
lick their wounds.
Don Giovanni brought some excellent
Mozart singers—indeed, a couple of singers
who may prove historic. One of them was
Dorothea Röschmann, the soprano portray-
ing Donna Elvira. Sometimes, when I hear
her, the P-word comes to mind: perfect. And
that is not a word to treat lightly. Not far be-
hind her, if behind at all, is Matthew Polen-
zani, the tenor who portrayed Don Ottavio.
This is a lucky age for lyric tenors, and
Polenzani is prominent in the pack.
Salzburg also o¸ered The Magic Flute
(again, Mozart), in which another fabulous
Mozart tenor starred: Michael Schade. His
voice seems to be changing now, perhaps
less sweet and youthful than it was. That is
only natural. And this voice retains consid-
erable beauty while projecting strength.
Schade might be called a masculine Mozart
singer, while still plenty refined. In addition,
he’s a better actor than the “good enough
for opera” kind. The Pamina beside him
(for he was Tamino, of course) was Genia
Kühmeier, Salzburg’s own. That is, she’s a
local girl—and a first-class Mozartean.
I cite a single specific from the perform-
ance I heard. Toward the end of The Magic
Flute, Pamina sings, “Tamino mein! O
welch ein Glück!” And Tamino responds in
kind. From Kühmeier and Schade, this ex-
change was ravishing, while not the least
precious.
Rusalka was conducted by Franz Welser-
Möst, the music director of the Cleveland
Orchestra. And the Cleveland Orchestra was
there too, in fact—the first time it had been
in an opera pit in a long, long while. There
was some grumbling from the Vienna Phil-
harmonic about this—the vpo is Salzburg’s
resident band. Someone was heard to crack,
“We have more Czech grandmothers in our
orchestra than they do in theirs”—meaning,
there are more grandsons of Czechs in the
vpo than in the Cleveland Orchestra. The
gang from Ohio responded, “Don’t be so
sure about that”—and they were quite right.
(Besides, claims for nationality in music-
making are often bunk.)
The New Criterion October 2008 49
 Music
At any rate, the Clevelanders played very
well, with color, accuracy, and flair. Welser-
Möst kept a sure, fluid hand over all. And
there was a laudable soprano in Dvořák’s
title role: Camilla Nylund, a Finn. She dis-
played a glorious vocal freedom, especially
on high notes. And she obviously enjoys her
singing, an enjoyment the audience catches.
She had at her side Piotr Beczala, who sang
the Prince. A Polish tenor, he is another
one—another in the lyric pack with Schade
and Polenzani.
Bluebeard’s Castle has only two singers—
and they’d better be good. They were. She
(Judith) was Michelle DeYoung, the Ameri-
can mezzo; he (Bluebeard) was Falk Struck-
mann, the German bass-baritone. They were
technically secure, vocally inviting, interpre-
tively idiomatic, and convincing. There is not
a lot more to ask. And leading this a¸air in
the pit was Peter Eötvös, a Hungarian con-
ductor and composer, who clearly knew
what he was doing.
In the pit for Otello was Riccardo Muti—
and he, too, knew what he was doing. Even
his detractors have always given him his
Verdi. Otello was brash, tense, tender, excit-
ing, and all the other things we need it to be
(and Verdi needs it to be). Seldom has this
opera been so orchestral. The orchestra (the
vpo) was loud, and too loud. Singers were
rather slighted in these proceedings—and
there was at least one listener, namely me,
who cared not a whit. The Muti-vpo Otello
was thrilling.
But the singers weren’t nothing (for
Otello is an opera, after all, although it
sounded more like a dramatic symphony).
The soprano Marina Poplavskaya was Des-
demona, and a pleasing one—a Slavic one,
or a Russian one; but a pleasing one. And
here’s another lyric tenor who belongs to
the privileged pack: Stephen Costello, a
young American, who made a lasting im-
pression in the smallish role of Cassio.
O n the productions, I will not dwell
long—for they could take up all our space,
demanding to be reported and decried. Don
Giovanni, directed by Claus Guth, takes
50 The New Criterion October 2008
place in the woods. Giovanni and Leporello
appear to be camping (and, in opera, we’re
used to a di¸erent kind of camp). Donna
Anna is the sexual aggressor, of course—this
is typical in today’s productions, rendering
the libretto nonsensical. Suddenly, a bus
station (or something) appears in the
middle of the woods. Donna Elvira is
waiting in it with a valise. Later, Anna and
Don Ottavio drive around in a car (still in
the woods). As Ottavio sings, “Dalla sua
pace,” Giovanni and Anna make out (or
something) in the car.
Etc., etc. The point is, the production and
the opera don’t match. The director has
wrenched the opera away from the com-
poser and librettist. For example, Mozart
and Da Ponte tend to be subtle, sly; this
director tends to be crude, blatant. Really,
it’s enough to make you see red. Why
should Dorothea Röschmann—a great Mo-
zart soprano—have to waste her career
tramping around in some egotist’s woods in
high heels?
Rusalka was another travesty. Directed by
Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, it takes
place in what looks like a New Orleans bor-
dello, which is fine. There are several com-
mendable touches in this production. You
will not find a moon, however, when
Rusalka sings her “Song to the Moon”—
that’d be “too much like right,” as my old
southern friend would say. In Salzburg, you
don’t get a rainbow bridge at the end of Das
Rheingold (first installment of Wagner’s
Ring). Instead, you get a blank white wall.
A moon in Rusalka and a rainbow bridge in
Das Rheingold are what modernists call
“clichés.” To others, they are more like fun-
damentals.
But forget a moon, or its absence: The
main problem is that, again, the opera and
the production don’t match. The opera,
particularly its score, is enchanting, fantas-
tic. And the production is unrelievedly
ugly—ugly in every way: physically, men-
tally, spiritually. The Christian cross is a
sinister symbol, as it is in so many modern
productions (of various operas). For ex-
ample, there is an ugly one in the Prince’s

palace: bare, stark, and neon. As Rusalka
faces it, she is surrounded by a male mob,
and it appears that she is gang-raped.
Anyway, enough. It so happened that,
during Salzburg ’08, the conductor Lorin
Maazel (working elsewhere) gave an inter-
view. In it, he blasted Salzburg and its
productions: “weirdly provocative stagings
by arrogant directors who think that in-
novation means boring the audience using
public funds.” He added that “often these
directors are simply uneducated.” Tell ’em,
Lorin.
Bluebeard’s Castle was rather interesting.
The production of Johan Simons has
Bluebeard in a wheelchair and Judith as his
nurse. (At least she’s dressed that way.)
There are no doors—that would be like
having a moon in Rusalka or a rainbow
bridge in Das Rheingold. Judith dominates
Bluebeard, pushing him around (often lit-
erally). Is she a Nurse Ratched? Unlike in a
normal production, it is Bluebeard who
cowers, not Judith—until she gets it, in the
end, as she must. Many patrons and critics
objected to what Simons did, and they were
not in the least wrong. But I say: Bluebeard
is a largely psychological opera, anyway.
What happens onstage is almost incidental.
And Simons was neither uninteresting nor
ruinous nor a joke.
Otello was in the care of Stephen Lang-
ridge, director son of the English tenor
Philip Langridge. And his production is a
fairly rare bird: an intelligent modern pro-
duction. (You might say the same of
Simons’s Bluebeard, but Bartók’s opera is a
modern one anyway—despite having been
written almost a hundred years ago!) A fel-
low critic is always bugging me, “Jay, there’s
a middle ground between the ‘traditional’
and Euro-trash.” I respond, “Sure, but how
often do we see it?” And you see it in this
Otello.
Each season, the Salzburg Festival Society
stages public interviews of prominent mu-
sicians (which interviews are conducted by
your chronicler and correspondent). In ’08,
we had two maestros—Welser-Möst and
Music
Mariss Jansons—and three singers. Let’s
give the singers a little time in the spotlight
(since they’re unused to the spotlight, poor
babies). All three gave us a fascinating and
rich hour. But, owing to limited space, I
will relate just a morsel from each.
Michelle DeYoung was first up. She is a
frequent Fricka (in Wagner’s Ring cycle).
And I said to her, “Tell us about your girl
Fricka.” She smiled and nodded. “Is she as
bad as all that? She’s always painted as a
shrew, a prude, a killjoy.” DeYoung an-
swered, “Actually, she’s right. She is the only
who sees clearly. And she pleads with Wotan
to see clearly, too.” Just so.
With Matthew Polenzani, I was talking
about the late Pavarotti. “How did he sing
so lyrically,” I asked, “while producing all
that sound?” Polenzani shook his head and
said, “I don’t know. If I did, I’d do it, trust
me.” I then recalled to him my favorite bit
of golf commentary, all time—knowing he
would like it, because he is a devoted, al-
most daily, golfer. One year at the Masters,
Tom Weiskopf—a golf champion of the
day—was providing commentary in the
booth. Jack Nicklaus was on the tee. A
sportscaster said to Weiskopf, “What’s
going through Jack’s mind right now?”
Weiskopf answered, “I have no idea. If I
did, I might have won this tournament a
time or two.”
The soprano Barbara Bonney (another
golfer) has dealt with her share of dippy or
demented stage directors. In Strauss’s Ro-
senkavalier, one of them asked her to sing
the Presentation of the Rose with her back
to the audience. Bonney, incredulous, said,
“It’s hard enough to make yourself heard
when you’re facing the audience.” Some-
times, when it comes to stage direction, you
can only shake your head—and hope for a
saner era.
A longside the operas (and interviews),
there were many concerts and recitals. Shall
we have a sampling? Riccardo Muti led the
vpo—and the Vienna State Opera Chorus—
in Brahms’s Requiem. The vpo sound is vir-
tually built for Brahms: warm, generous,
The New Criterion October 2008 51
 Music
glowing, sometimes growling. And the Vi-
enna chorus is well suited, too. But Maestro
Muti, regrettably—on the morning I have in
mind—did not have his best outing. He did
some admirable things, to be sure. But too
often he was turgid, unnatural, or pedes-
trian.
There were two Polish pianists who gave
recitals—one a senior musician, one a new-
comer. The senior musician was Krystian
Zimerman, who played Bach and Beetho-
ven on his first half, and two countrymen
on his second. The Bach was the Partita in C
minor, and the Beethoven—staying in the
same key—was the “Pathétique” Sonata.
Very few people can sing on a piano like
Zimerman. And very few people have his
refinement and taste. He is guilty of some
errors, such as rushing in faster pieces or
sections. But his virtues greatly outweigh
them.
His first Polish piece was the Sonata No.
2 by Grazyna Bacewicz, who lived from
1909 to 1969. This lady was a violinist and a
pianist, as well as a composer (who studied
with Boulanger in Paris). The Sonata No. 2
is not a neglected masterpiece, I’m afraid.
But its slow movement—a Largo—is lovely.
Zimerman’s second Polish piece was early
Szymanowski: the Variations on a Polish
Folk Theme, Op. 10. This, too, is not a
masterpiece—but it has moments of genu-
ine inspiration, including a nifty funeral
march.
Zimerman capped his recital with an en-
core, Brahms’s Intermezzo in B minor. This
is a mysterious dream of a piece, which
Zimerman—with his cantabile, his sensitiv-
ity, and his imagination—seems born to
play.
The young Pole was Rafal Blechacz, born
in 1985—winner of the Chopin Competition
in 2005. They say he is a wunderkind, and
they are not wrong. Blechacz takes evident
delight in playing, and he makes you grin
along with him. He is slim, slight, hand-
some, boyish—with tousled hair. He often
tucks into a piece like a hungry tiger. He of-
fered a mixed program, the kind that in-
strumentalists play when they’re first start-
52 The New Criterion October 2008
ing out—too bad they discontinue the
practice (usually). He went through Bach,
Liszt, Debussy, and Chopin. He has fabu-
lous fingers, for sure. But what he some-
times lacks is just what Zimerman has—
even specializes in: cantabile. Will that come
in time? Perhaps. Just about the best
playing he did all night was in his final en-
core—Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor.
Young Blechacz reminded you why the
piece became popular in the first place.
Christine Schäfer sang a recital—a pro-
gram of German art songs, by Bach, Mah-
ler, and Wolf. This was a Schwarzkopfian
program. And Schäfer, in various respects, is
a Schwarzkopfian singer. She did not sing
perfectly on this evening. Why would I say
such a thing? Because she—believe it or
not—is capable of singing perfectly, as she
has shown us many times. She had some
poor intonation, some impurity, some
botches. Worse, she was sometimes indif-
ferent—unmoved and unmoving—in these
songs. But look: She is still Christine
Schäfer. And, as I remarked afterward, I’d
rather hear her on an o¸ night than I would
most others on their very best one.
The Cleveland Orchestra, in addition to
its services in Rusalka, played three concerts,
one of which had Mitsuko Uchida, the
pianist, as soloist. She played Bartók’s Con-
certo No. 3—his “Mozart concerto,” or
“neo-Classical concerto.” She did so tidily
and ably. And Franz Welser-Möst matched
her nicely. He had not been so fine in the
opening work of the concert: Dvořák’s
“New World” Symphony. It’s not so much
that the performance was bad as that it was
indi¸erent (to return to that word). Noth-
ing special. And you don’t travel to
Salzburg and play an ultra-familiar sym-
phony while doing nothing special. But the
Dvořák was made up for later, not just by
the Bartók, but—even more—by Berg’s
Three Pieces for Orchestra. These pieces
had all their mystery, wonder, and strange-
ness. We were truly breathing the air of dif-
ferent planets.
I can’t resist giving just one morsel from
the Welser-Möst interview. We were talking

about youth on the podium—the new
desire for, even madness for. People are
saying, “Give us a young conductor—no
more of these fogeys.” Welser-Möst quickly
labeled this “a sickness of our time.” And
that is perfectly stated.
Leading the Vienna Philharmonic in
another concert was another interviewee:
Mariss Jansons, that superb musician from
Latvia. This program began with Webern’s
In the Summer Wind, subtitled “Idyll for
Large Orchestra.” The piece represents We-
bern before he became Webern, so to speak.
It is dreamily Romantic, and the vpo played
it just that way. Seldom have you heard
such beautiful and ethereal string sounds.
The music seemed to float on air—and Jan-
sons shaped it unerringly. Then came a
soloist, Elı̄na Garanča, the young mezzo-
soprano and Jansons’s fellow Latvian. She
sang Les Nuits d’été, the cycle by Berlioz.
And she was smoky, sultry, sensuous—al-
together delicious. She especially enjoyed
those French words and syllables, as a singer
must.
The concert ended with the Second
Symphony of Brahms. I have said that the
vpo is built for Brahms, and it’s true. But
this performance was more than an aural
bath (which perhaps would have been
enough). Jansons made sure that the music
was clearly etched, as well as rich. This
was a performance—indeed, a concert—that
stayed with me for days after, which is rare,
I can tell you. I don’t know how much the
top ticket was—350 euros? Even if it was
that high, it was worth it.
Far be it from me to venture into theater
criticism—others are plenty capable of that.
But I did attend Vanessa Redgrave’s one-
woman show, The Year of Magical Thinking.
This is the play based on Joan Didion’s
memoir of loss. Redgrave is widely—well-
nigh universally—regarded as one of the
greatest actresses of our time. I had never
seen her onstage, and did not miss the op-
portunity. So, if she’s so great (which I trust
Music
she is)—why was she so stilted, awkward,
and self-conscious? Why could you never
forget—or why could I never forget—that
she was acting, even for one second? Why
could one never become absorbed in the
character or play? I felt like I was observing
a drama queen rather than an actress.
And, attempting an American accent, she
sounded like a person for whom English—
any kind of English—was a foreign lan-
guage. Perhaps I caught her on an unrepre-
sentative night. In any case, she is beautiful,
no doubt.
After the play, Redgrave and the Salzburg
Festival’s artistic director, Jürgen Flimm,
did a reading. What did they read? Why,
“Poems from Guantánamo”—i.e., verses
penned by terror detainees held by the
American government. Some people say
that Europe is finished. On some days, it’s
hard to disagree with them.
But you don’t have disturbing thoughts
in Salzburg for long—it is an amazingly
beautiful place whose amazing beauty
fadeth not. I asked Barbara Bonney, long a
Salzburg resident, whether she ever tires of
it. She said not a chance. And every year, I
discover byways and buildings and views
that had somehow escaped my notice, in
many previous visits. One of my favorite
moments this year occurred not in a concert
hall or opera house—but as I was walking
one morning, and heard the rehearsal of an
Agnus Dei from upper windows. Music
seemed all the more penetrating then!
And have I told you about Camp Bartók?
I don’t think so. This was a camp for kids
eleven to fifteen, taking place in the splen-
did Schloss Arenberg. The camp focused on
Bluebeard’s Castle—not exactly a children’s
opera, to put it mildly. Bluebeard is one of
the most ghastly and gruesome operas in
the entire catalogue. But no matter—to be a
camper at Camp Bartók, I’m given to un-
derstand, was to be a happy camper indeed.
And that describes most people lucky
enough to wander into the Salzburg
Festival.
The New Criterion October 2008 53
 The media
The choice of Sarah Palin
by James Bowman
I t may seem odd, at first, that the unbend-
ing, hard-line “pro-choice” attitude to abor-
tion adopted by so many feminists of a
generation now deprived by nature of their
reproductive rights came to its present posi-
tion of political importance just when it did.
For that was at the same moment in our cul-
tural history, the early 1970s, when the only
good reason for legalized abortion apart
from mere personal preference—namely, the
social stigma attaching to single mother-
hood—was on its way, very rapidly, out.
Who could imagine such a cruel, unen-
lightened approach to female sexuality today
as the one which was all but universal up
until the 1960s? And yet some very en-
lightened people in the media and the
Democratic party would have been happy
for an ad hoc re-scandalizing of illegitimacy
when it was revealed, the day after John
McCain’s electrifying announcement of
Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his choice
for the Republican vice-presidential nomi-
nation, that her seventeen-year-old daugh-
ter, Bristol, was pregnant.
Of course it wouldn’t do for them to call
this teenager a slut and a hussy, but they
were pretty sure that there must be some-
thing in her interesting condition which
would allow them to accuse her mother, a
conservative evangelical Christian, of hy-
pocrisy. Or something. Here, for example,
is the tortured line of reasoning followed
by Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic
to suggest a reason why one or both
54 The New Criterion October 2008
women should be hanging their heads in
shame:
Some commentators have detected moral
relativism in the untroubled, even edified con-
servative response to the obstetric develop-
ments in the McCain campaign; but I see
something even more sinister. I see the
teleological suspension of the ethical. You
remember the teleological suspension of the
ethical. It is the recognition that, whereas there
is morality in religion, religion is not the same
as morality, and may justify an exemption from
morality. I know of no religion in which this
handy power of extenuation is not used. The
telos, in the case of Bristol Palin, is life; and a
fine telos it is. The casuistry goes something like
this: since there are no unwanted babies, there
are no unwanted pregnancies. “It can some-
times result in the arrival of new life and a new
family,” [Michael] Gerson cheered. For “evan-
gelical Christianity (in most modern forms) is
not about the achievement of perfection.” If
evangelicals are so exquisitely conscious of our
creatureliness, why have they devoted so many
decades to reviling the imperfections of others?
If they are, as Gerson says, “about the accep-
tance of forgiveness,” why do they diabolize
di¸erence? The fecundity of Bristol Palin is a
windfall for Jesus, but the fecundity of black
girls is the doom of the republic. Spiritually
speaking, the forgiveness of oneself or of one’s
own is a smaller attainment than the forgive-
ness of the other or of all. My friends, the
politics of virtue is a vice.

I suppose that “Go and sin no more” would
also count as the teleological suspension of
the ethical, then. So, presumably, would
anything be that did not involve—what?
stoning the fornicatress? or at least stoning
her mother? What nonsense! It’s not often
that you see someone get quite so tangled
up in his own sneering as Mr. Wieseltier
does here. Once airborne on his rhetorical
flight of fancy, however, he could think of
no way to return to earth except by conced-
ing that Governor Palin is a woman of in-
tegrity while at the same time averring that
integrity is a positive disqualification for the
o˝ce she seeks. He prefers to be governed
“ruthlessly,” he claims—which is the sort
of thing people say when they can be
pretty sure that, whoever else is the object
of power’s ruthlessness, it won’t be
them.
All the same, he was also undoubtedly
right to say that “Sarah Palin was chosen
not for what she has done but for what she
is—for her value as an ideological illustra-
tion.” Not that, as he might have added but
didn’t, there is anything wrong with that,
since Barack Obama was chosen—admit-
tedly by many people rather than just
one—for exactly the same reason. So, for
that matter, were John McCain and Joe
Biden. This is how we do presidential (and
other sorts of) politics in our postmodern,
scandal- and celebrity-obsessed media cul-
ture. It’s a little late in the day to start trying
to make a scandal out of that, you might
think. Yet Maureen Dowd complained in
The New York Times that, “after devilishly
mocking Obama—and successfully getting
into his head—with ads about how he was
just a frothy celebrity, like Paris Hilton and
Britney Spears, it turns out all the McCain
camp wanted was an Obama of its own.
Now that they have the electric Palin,
they’ve stopped arguing that celebrity is
bad.” Well, duh! She might as well have said
that, now that their own celebrity has been
trumped, Miss Dowd and friends have
started arguing that celebrity is bad.
Thus the widely respected political com-
The media
mentator Lindsay Lohan wrote on her
MySpace blog: “Oh, and. . . Hint Hint Pali
Pal—Don’t pose for anymore [sic] tabloid
covers, [sic] you’re not a celebrity, [sic]
you’re running for o˝ce to represent our,
your, my country!” I find something
tremendously sad about that little bit of ad-
vice, especially since it comes from someone
who is so obviously a victim of her own
celebrity as Lindsay Lohan is. Perhaps, as
The Washington Post’s “Reliable Source”
column may have been hinting when it
picked up such a delicious quotation, Miss
Lohan was just jealous that she wasn’t in-
cluded in the McCain advertisement’s shot
at Paris and Britney, who have been on a lot
more “tabloid covers” than she has recently.
But I prefer to believe that she is as well
aware as the ad’s target audience was—or as
Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama, or I am—
that there is something shameful in the very
idea of celebrity and doubly shameful in the
idea of voting for a celebrity as president.
Or vice president either.
But even apart from the fact that a right-
wing celebrity is almost a contradiction in
terms—since celebrity is the heroism of
militant egalitarians—I don’t think Sarah
Palin qualifies, however many tabloid covers
she graces. Nor did legions of pro-choice
Democrats think it faintly scandalous to
find themselves aligned with the blue-noses
of yesteryear in their self-righteous cluck-
ing over “the obstetric developments in the
McCain campaign.” Unfortunately for
them, when the news of Bristol Palin’s little
“windfall for Jesus” broke, scandal-mongers
had already started spreading a rumor that
Governor Palin’s own newborn son, Trig,
was really her daughter’s, and the first
would-be scandal trod upon the heels of the
second. Within a day or two, few people
this side of the gay blogger and conspiracy
theorist Andrew Sullivan were disposed to
buy in to such a socially retrograde view of
the governor’s little family drama anyway,
and the scandal market swiftly collapsed—
though not before first creating the entirely
justified suspicion among large sections of
the public that the media had joined the
The New Criterion October 2008 55
 The media
most partisan sort of Democrats in seeking
out any means, fair or foul, to discredit so
attractive a candidate.
For the most part, the Left was forced to
move on to its factitious outrage at the
hopeful vice president’s relatively brief ex-
perience in high o˝ce—though this might
have been thought extremely shaky ground
for the backers of a hopeful president who
was a first-term senator with no executive
experience at all. But at least one person,
Carol Fowler, chairman of the Democratic
party of South Carolina, tried with rather
more wit than the Sullivanites to bring back
sex by noting Senator McCain had chosen a
running-mate “whose primary qualification
seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”
Of course, poor Ms. Fowler was forced to
apologize—and for the same reason any
Republican who had dared to complain of
how Hillary Clinton’s chief qualification for
the presidency was that she hasn’t divorced
Bill Clinton would have been forced to
apologize. Even the feminists, their noses
put very considerably out of joint by the
nomination of a conservative Republican to
a national ticket ahead of their gal Hillary,
would not stand for such a slight o¸ered to
a woman in power.
Y et, as is so often the case, the sayers of the
unsayable had a point. I happen not to agree
that not having an abortion was Governor
Palin’s primary qualification, but who
can doubt that it was a qualification—as
was her basketball-playing, beauty-queening,
moose-killing, and hockey-momming. A
man with her qualifications could have been
no more eligible for the Republican nomina-
tion for vice president than a middle-class
white man with Senator Obama’s qualifica-
tions could have been eligible for the Demo-
cratic nomination for president. But what, as
I have said, is the point in trying to make a
scandal out of that? On all sides, this is
proving to be even more of a symbolic elec-
tion than the last one, just as the last one was
more symbolic than the election before it. If
you’re in the business of symbolism—as,
willy-nilly, our politicians and their handlers
56 The New Criterion October 2008
are nowadays—you’d better get used to it
and stop being outraged that the electorate
isn’t paying attention to “the issues.” There
are no issues to pay attention to anyway,
since both candidates are—as the media now
force them to be—utopians who believe that
the job to which they aspire is to put all that’s
wrong with the world—thank you, George
W. Bush!—to rights again.
Anyway, as symbols go, not having an
abortion—particularly when that “choice”
also involves, as Sarah Palin’s did, choosing
to be the mother of a severely handicapped
child—is in my opinion not a bad one. I
guess I lack a little of Leon Wieseltier’s ad-
miration for ruthlessness in a leader. The
choice also draws a clear line between the
two presidential candidates as nothing else
does or could—not even President Bush,
who is no more beloved of Senator McCain
than he is of Senator Obama. The latter
himself recognized that the symbolists on
his own side were as sure to be galvanized
as those on the other and rushed onto the
airwaves a radio advertisement to the e¸ect
that “John McCain will make abortion il-
legal.” There was in this the disingenuous
pretense (a) that the president has the
power to abolish Supreme Court decisions,
and (b) that the relevant decision in this
case, Roe v. Wade, is the only thing prevent-
ing a return to back-street abortions. But
perhaps this is just the other side of the coin
to the extravagant promisings of the Obama
campaign, which at times really does seem
to believe in the power of the president to
do anything he chooses to alter the political
or social landscape.
If there’s one thing we can be sure that
John McCain—or anybody else—won’t do
and couldn’t do if he wanted to, even
though he may indeed want to, it’s to make
abortion illegal. Nothing would happen. Or
almost nothing. There might be a few
fetuses at the margins who are su¸ered to
live and who otherwise wouldn’t be as more
restrictions are placed on the availability of
abortion in the most conservative states, but
those will come with or without a McCain
presidency. In fact, given the inevitable fillip

to local Republicans of an Obama victory,
they are more likely to come without it than
with it. At no time in the foreseeable future
will a woman who is determined to have an
abortion be unable to obtain one in the
United States of America, and that is a
legacy not of the Burger court but of an
earlier sort of symbolism pioneered by the
feminists of the 1960s and 1970s who found
that the libertarian message of “choice” was
far more e¸ective with the electorate (and
the judiciary!) than the neo-Marxist one,
still preached by doctrinaire feminism, of
women’s “oppression” by men.
For abortion became legal not only at the
same time that illegitimacy and pre-marital
sex learned to hold their heads up high but
also at the same time that conscription was
ended and the armed forces were instructed
that henceforth they would have to be
manned—and, increasingly, womanned—
by volunteers. I think that the two develop-
ments are closely related. Child-bearing has
traditionally been thought of as a defining
act for women, just as military service has
been for men. This way of looking at the
world is built into all honor cultures we
know of, wherever we find them. They re-
gard men’s honor as flowing from bravery
in battle and women’s from chastity before
marriage and fertility (and fidelity) after it.
But America’s honor culture, like that of the
Western world generally, had been under
assault since the 1920s, and the catastrophic
defeat of a conscript army in Vietnam finally
finished it o¸. Roe v. Wade and the all-
volunteer (i.e., pro-choice) army—both
dating from 1973, the year of America’s
withdrawal of her last combat troops from
Vietnam—were therefore both symbolic
repudiations of those traditional expecta-
tions of womanhood and manhood.
As a culture we remain strongly attached to
this symbolism. So strongly indeed that,
thirty-five years later, there remains as little
prospect of a return to conscription as there
is of a return to criminalized abortion, al-
though every now and then the idea (of the
former, not the latter) is brought out and
The media
dusted o¸ again, as Time magazine did,
under the guise of “national service,” the
week after Governor Palin’s nomination. Yet
the rival symbolism of the discredited if
still-latent honor culture also retains a cer-
tain power. Though few among even the
most conservative would consider it a
shame not to have served in the armed
forces—as nearly everyone considered it to
be during World War II—even the most
progressive feel it incumbent on themselves
to honor those who have served. By the
same token, though few beyond the most
militant opponents of abortion would con-
sider it a shame to a woman who had had
one, all but the most militant pro-choicers
are unwilling to do¸ the cap to those who
have made Sarah Palin’s choice. You might
almost think that something in us was
genetically programed to respond to the old
ideas of manhood and womanhood.
This, I think, is what accounts for the
hysterical anti-Palin sentiment of so many
on the Left. “Her greatest hypocrisy,” wrote
Wendy Doniger of the University of Chica-
go Divinity School, “is in her pretense that
she is a woman.” Huh? What does that even
mean in regular people’s English? That she’s
pretending to be what she is? Or what she
isn’t? It sounds like Gloria Steinem’s saying
fifteen years ago of Senator Kay Bailey
Hutchinson, Republican of Texas, that she
was “a female impersonator.” The attempt at
paradox, I guess, is the ideologue’s cri de
coeur against the recrudescence of an or-
ganic notion of womanhood which she has
spent her life trying politically to define out
of existence. Mrs. Palin, that is, stands for a
form of female honor that the likes of the
Mizzes Doniger and Steinem loathe but
towards which they are otherwise powerless
to express their loathing.
In this she is like her running mate,
whose su¸erings in a Vietnamese prison
elicit the respect—sincere or otherwise—of
even the most adamant opponents of the
Vietnam War. Sound implausible? Just look
at non-Nobel prize-winning Gore Vidal, a
man who is always ready to provide a bed
and a hot meal to any vagrant paranoid fan-
The New Criterion October 2008 57
 The media
tasy that crosses his path, but who preferred
to question the existence of Lt. Cdr.
McCain’s long-ago su¸erings rather than
their honorableness. So the Obama cam-
paign was driven to the last—and also the
first—expedient of his left-wing allies in
recent years, which is gratuitously to accuse
one’s opponent of “lying.” Oh, that! It’s
hard to imagine that anyone could take him
seriously for proposing that a charge which
has become so commonplace in our de-
based political discourse amounts to run-
ning “a disgraceful, dishonorable cam-
paign.” Nowadays, that’s a routine cam-
paign. As others have discovered before, if
everything is disgraceful, then nothing is.
M oreover, if the accusation of lying, or
what could be represented as lying, were
truly dishonorable—as once it truly was
back in the days when men pretended to be
Forthcoming in The New Criterion:
Prokofiev abroad by John Simon
The lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II by Mark Steyn
A new “life” of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Denis Donoghue
Kingsley Amis & drink by Andrew Stuttaford
On being translated by John Derbyshire
William Maxwell in the loa by Eric Ormsby
Fiction chronicle by Stefan Beck
New poems by Daniel Brown, David Mason & Susan Kinsolving
58 The New Criterion October 2008
men and shot or stabbed or slashed or
fought each other with fists over it—it
would not be available for every Tom, Dick,
and Barack out of the class of political
aspirants to accuse each other of on the
slightest of provocations. In fact, dishonor
itself, at least as that term has traditionally
been understood, has been no disgrace for
decades now. Why all of a sudden should
Senator Obama, a man who was just about
reaching puberty in 1973, be concerning
himself about honor, of all things, unless he
recognized a danger to himself in the
McCain-Palin ticket’s two-fisted attempts to
strike a spark from the cold, dead ashes of
the now defunct honor culture? I can’t quite
see it myself. We are far too far gone in our
love of rhetoric without consequence,
politics without demands, and sex without
responsibility. But if he’s worried, I’m
happy.
Books
French & Indian peace
by Walter McDougall
I first encountered the mind of David
Hackett Fischer in 1970 while I was a grad-
uate student. Like many others I had fallen
in love with good narrative history only to
learn in my Ph.D program that the historical
profession rewards skepticism, revisionism,
and critical analysis over story-telling even
though sophisticated historiography denies
the possibility of objectivity. If historians’
secret embarrassment is their lack of epis-
temology, how then can they pretend to
judge each other or advance knowledge of
the past? One answer soon to be embraced
by a whole generation of academics was to
deny the reality of “so-called” facts alto-
gether, denounce historical interpretations
as the constructs of the hegemonic race,
class, and gender, then proceed to impose
favored discourses of their own.
I stuck with old-fashioned empirical, nar-
rative history even when it threatened to
hurt my career. I attribute that stubbornness
to my original love and respect for the past,
the erudition and integrity of my mentors,
and a book published just when I needed it
most. Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies: Toward
a Logic of Historical Thought argued that
whereas historians cannot claim to deduce
Truth with a capital-T, they can indeed ap-
prehend truths by exposing falsehoods
through rigorous, honest application of the
rules of logic and evidence. Fischer made
his case in disarming fashion by cleverly
naming and defining more than a hundred
logical fallacies to which even celebrated
historians were prone. I was somewhat in-
timidated by Fischer’s syllabus of errors: to
remember them all would induce perma-
nent writer’s block; to forget them would
invite serial solecisms. But Fischer’s com-
pelling defense of sound method sustained
my faith in the historian’s craft.
Fischer’s own faith (I am guessing)
stemmed from his father, a great educator
who ran Baltimore’s school system; his own
mentors at Princeton and Johns Hopkins,
especially Frederic Lane, Wilson Smith,
Charles Barker, and C. Vann Woodward;
and his colleagues and students at Brandeis,
where he has taught for forty years. But
Fischer’s confidence in the human ability to
tell truths about the past also rests on his
very humility about human nature in
general. That is, his appreciation that no
one narrative can do justice to the diversity
of human experience allows him to tease
out falsehoods and truths from the inter-
stices of competing narratives. Such humil-
ity is the antidote to professional pride.
Thus did Fischer confess after winning the
Pulitzer Prize that he used to think of him-
self as a professor and historian, but
nowadays just a teacher and storyteller.
Fischer’s championship of factual narra-
tive, or l’histoire événementielle, is all the more
impressive given his reputation was made by
an analytical treatise as great as anything
done by the Annales school of social history.
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in Ameri-
ca (1989) was an encyclopedic contrast of the
The New Criterion October 2008 59
 Books
four “cradle cultures” (Puritan, Quaker,
Cavalier, and Scots-Irish Borderman) that
shaped colonial American notions of every-
thing from child-rearing and barn-raising to
education and cooking to God and govern-
ment. In Historians’ Fallacies Fischer insisted
that “historical scholarship can usefully serve
to help us find out who we are.” In Albion’s
Seed he proved it.
The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the
Rhythm of History (1996) and Liberty and
Freedom (2005) were also thematic analyses
of momentous phenomena over la longue
durée. But over time Fischer has increasingly
marched to the rhythm he drummed back
in 1970: “Good historians tell true stories.
Great historians, from time to time, tell the
best true stories which their topics and
problems permit.” The stories Fischer has
told are among the best because of his ir-
resistible topics, including Paul Revere’s Ride
(1994), Bound Away: Virginia and the West-
ward Movement (2000), Washington’s Cross-
ing (2004), and now Champlain’s Dream
(2008).… This new book may seem a de-
parture in a career heretofore focused on
British America. But in truth it suggests a
good deal about New England by o¸ering
New France as a foil. The book’s occasion is
the quadricentennial of the founding of
Québec by Samuel de Champlain, but its
relevance is not time-bound at all.
T his encyclopedic (that word again) tome
contains 531 pages of text, plus 150 pages of
notes and bibliography, plus thirty-six
vignettes called “memories of Champlain”
that describe his shifting historical image
over the centuries, plus sixteen appendices
detailing the ships, boats, firearms, coinage,
weights and measures, commercial com-
panies, Indian tribes, and other contexts,
players, and props in his drama. But the man
and his times are captured with elegance in
the modest eleven-page introduction. It
begins by describing the only known like-
–––––––––––
1 Champlain’s Dream: The European Founding of
North America, by David Hackett Fischer; Simon &
Schuster, 848 pages, $40.
60 The New Criterion October 2008
ness of Champlain: a tiny self-portrait that
shows him firing an arquebus in support of
his Native American allies in a 1609 battle
against the Iroquois. The engraving suggests
a sturdy, nervy leader of men, but o¸ers no
other clues to his body, mind, or spirit. It
serves as a metaphor for all the primary
sources concerning Champlain: “He wrote
thousands of pages about what he did, but
only a few words about who he was.” The
introduction adumbrates his life as a mari-
ner, soldier, explorer, spy, diplomat, cartog-
rapher, ethnographer, promoter, courtier,
and colonizer. The paucity of evidence about
the man and riot of contradictory pen-
portraits bequeathed by others complicated
Fischer’s task of describing not just what he
did, but who he was. But at length his research
persuaded Fischer that Champlain was a
dreamer who dreamed of an empire embrac-
ing, on equal footing, Europeans and
Indians, farmers, merchants, and priests,
Catholics, Protestants, and sauvages. He was
not a pacifist like William Penn but rather a
weary soldier who imagined “a place where
people of di¸erent cultures could live
together in amity and concord. This became
his grand design for North America.”
Fischer’s trademark art is textured de-
scription of regional topographies, climates,
economies, cultures, and language, so he
must have had great fun exploring Cham-
plain’s hometown of Brouage and province
of Saintonge on the Bay of Biscay. The
region was known for its individualism,
prosperity based on fishing, commerce, and
salt, and a turbulent history Fischer de-
scribes as “the salty broth in which our hero
was cooked.” Mystery has swirled for cen-
turies about such vital statistics as Cham-
plain’s date of birth, parentage, and cradle
religion. But Fischer’s meticulous assay of
the nuggets of evidence suggests that
Champlain was born around 1570 and bap-
tized a Protestant, but illegitimately sired by
a nobleman, quite likely the future King
Henri IV. That would explain many anom-
alies including the royal access and favors
enjoyed by Champlain and his loyalty to the
Bourbon cause. When Henri sought to end

religious strife by tolerating Calvinism but
re-embracing Catholicism, Champlain duti-
fully did likewise. As the years passed the
explorer’s Catholic faith and devotion
steadily deepened, but so did his commit-
ment to tolerance.
Fischer fixes the context for that preco-
cious commitment through a simple com-
parison. Whereas our civil war lasted four
years and killed over 600,000 Americans,
the French civil wars after 1562 lasted almost
forty years and killed at least 2 million. No
wonder a whole generation swallowed its
pride to embrace a Christian Humanism
that looked back to the best of the Renais-
sance and prefigured the best of the
Enlightenment. It included a cohort of poli-
tiques seeking pragmatic institutions and
principles to restore peace and prosperity to
the kingdom and revive its fortunes in the
competition for power and pelf in Europe
and overseas. Henri IV fought for all that
and Champlain fought for Henri IV. When,
in 1598, the Peace of Vervins with Spain and
the tolerant Edict of Nantes ended the
foreign and civil strife, swashbuckling ad-
venturers from France’s Atlantic ports, sup-
ported in turn by the king, redirected their
energies to a project just then transfixing all
the rivals of imperial Spain: colonization of
North America.
Champlain’s first preparation was to sign
on with a Spanish fleet and make a recon-
naissance of the West Indies and Mexico.
He returned in 1601 to write a “brief dis-
course” that was in fact a book-length intel-
ligence debriefing. He also returned with
searing memories of the Spaniards’ cruelty
toward native Americans and religious
tyranny. Champlain began then to dream of
an American colony in which Europeans
and Indians might live in harmony.
Champlain’s second preparation was his
service as a royal geographer. He pored over
maps of America and accounts of prior
French failures to plant colonies on the St.
Lawrence River and Florida coast. The les-
sons he drew suggested the imperative need
for careful planning and exploration, clear
Books
lines of authority, Catholicism without
coercion or persecution, honest and equi-
table treatment of Indians, and constant at-
tention to the “home front” lest envious
courtiers, merchants, or foreign agents
undermine royal patronage. Accordingly,
Champlain canvassed constantly among of-
ficials, investors, and clergy in hopes of get-
ting the support needed to plant French
civilization in cold, inhospitable Canada.
Su˝ce it to say he sailed back and forth
across the Atlantic twenty-seven times in
thirty-seven years.
Champlain first explored the St. Law-
rence River in 1603 when he chose a place
called Kebec in Algonquian as the site for a
future town. But that future was predicated
on his delicate diplomacy in a great tabagie,
or tobacco feast, at the mouth of the
Saguenay River where he smoked pipes of
peace with more than a thousand Indians
from neighboring tribes. That marked the
beginning of one of the most durable
friendships between Europeans and native
Americans. Champlain recounted the jour-
ney in a book he titled Des Sauvages, which
Fischer explains did not mean primitive,
barbaric, brutal, or even inferior in the sev-
enteenth century. On the contrary, sauvage
or salvage was derived from the Latin silva
and simply meant forest-dweller. To be sure,
he rued the Indians’ habits of lying and
of torturing captives, which perpetuated
vengeful feuds given the absence of relig-
ious and legal constraints and limited
authority of the sagamores (chiefs). In short,
native Americans lived ni foi, ni loi, ni roi,
and their “savagery” was really just a surfeit
of natural liberty. But their essential hu-
manity, even nobility, was evident in dozens
of ways that never ceased to delight
Champlain and encourage him to believe
his dream was in no way utopian.
Alas, Champlain’s townsman, fellow
dreamer, and initial sponsor, le sieur de
Mons, lacked the deftness and luck their
grand dessein needed. Their first colony in
Acadia (the future Nova Scotia) ended
calamitously when nearly half the habitants
perished over the winter. Their search for a
The New Criterion October 2008 61
 Books
warmer site in Norumbega (the future
Maine and Massachusetts) then aborted
when Mons inadvertently bred anger and
distrust among local tribes. Settlers in Port-
Royal, a third initiative, were obliged to sail
home after Mons lost his backing at court.
That was how matters stood when Cham-
plain personally lobbied the king to restore
royal patronage for New France in light of
“the good quality and fertility of lands in
that country, and that the inhabitants
thereof are disposed to receive the knowl-
edge of God.” Champlain enlisted new in-
vestors, interested the Jesuits, and sailed
west again determined the next seed he
planted would sprout. On July 3, 1608, he
mounted the rocky promontory overlook-
ing a narrows in the St. Lawrence and de-
ployed his settlers to fell trees, saw logs, dig
cellars, and ferry supplies for the ville de
Québec. The long list of trials common in
start-up colonies followed apace: hunger,
isolation, mutiny, murder, corruption, be-
trayal, wars against the enemies of his allied
tribes, insecure patronage following the as-
sassination of Henri IV in 1610, even an
English capture of Québec in 1628. But
Champlain managed somehow to surmount
all the challenges, usually with prudence,
justice, shrewdness, and loyalty to his
dream.
How—and why—did he surmount chal-
lenges that are exhausting simply to read
about? What explains Champlain’s sheer
perseverance? The easy way out would have
been to reverse cause and e¸ect by conclud-
ing that Champlain’s deeds prove his life-
long devotion to (even obsession with) his
dream. But Fischer ruled out that dodge
long ago when he wrote in Historians’ Fal-
lacies, “a historian must distinguish between
an analysis of the becoming of an object and
an analysis of the object as it has become.”
So Fischer pored over the meager clues
about Champlain’s life and more abundant
data about his times until settling upon a
persuasive account for his becoming. The ac-
count is grounded in something on which
all authorities concur, whether approvingly
like the Jesuit missionary Paul le Jeune or
62 The New Criterion October 2008
disparagingly like the Protestant historian
Francis Parkman. That something was
Champlain’s intense Christian faith which
was forged in the crucible of the Wars
of Religion, but which transcended their
hatred and fear. Even Champlain’s measured
campaigns against the Iroquois, far from
provoking the “French and Indian wars” of
English parlance, in fact helped to establish
the long “French and Indian peace” in his
neck of the woods.
Champlain believed he was called to
spread the knowledge and love of God in
the New World. He cherished his own
growing knowledge and love of Creation,
as expressed in his rhapsodies over Cana-
da’s mighty forests and waters, enchanted
seasons, and beguiling Indians. Hence, the
struggles that seem insu¸erable to us were
divine dispensation to him. That is why
Champlain could write of his merchants
and investors, “I am not dependent on
them.” And that is why Fischer could sketch
Champlain’s soul through proper seven-
teenth-century definitions of words his
subject revered: foi, piété, loyauté, devoir,
humanité, renommée (renown in the sense of
worthiness), and prévoyance in the sense of
preparedness, sound judgment, magnanim-
ity, and unflagging focus on the larger pur-
pose and longer run. It was very di¸erent
from the Puritan soul of those English who,
after 1630, swarmed into “Norumbega”
anxious to prove through earthly success
their status as God’s elect. Champlain’s was
a specific sort of Catholic soul that im-
agined all human beings to be children of
God: fallen in sin, but endowed with reason
and immortal souls. Believing that, Cham-
plain did the thing needed for good rela-
tions with Indians that few other Europeans
would do: he spent lots and lots of time
with them without himself going native.
Still, didn’t it all come to naught? Follow-
ing Champlain’s death in Québec on
Christmas Day 1635, King Louis XIII and
Richelieu, then Louis XIV and Colbert, then
Louis XV and Choiseul lost the competition
for overseas empire by wasting resources on

wars in Europe while foolishly banning
Protestants from their colonies. In 1759 the
British captured Québec and in 1763 the
French ceded all their North American pos-
sessions. Yet, one of the last and most valu-
able contributions of Champlain’s Dream is
to alert us to its vibrant legacies. The
dream’s human legacy is evident in Fischer’s
customarily brilliant description of the
folkways of the Acadiens (Cadjins or Ca-
juns), Québecois, and Métis, the French
and Indian o¸spring whose descendants
may number twelve million today. The
dream’s material legacy is evident in
Québec, perhaps the most charming city-
scape in North America. The dream’s cul-
tural legacy is evident in the authentic
respect for diversity of which most Canadi-
ans are proud and most Americans uncom-
prehending.
In Historians’ Fallacies Fischer wrote that
history can help us “to learn about other
selves” than ourselves. His own stories have
done that for forty years, and if he takes
after his ninety-eight-year-old father (to
whom this volume is dedicated) we can
look forward to many more good and true
stories from him.
The art of reality
James Wood How Fiction Works.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
252 pages, $24
reviewed by Paul Dean
Admirers of James Wood’s essay collec-
tions The Broken Estate (1999) and The Irre-
sponsible Self (2004) will know that he has a
superb eye for detail and a pithy style, and
readers of his novel The Book Against God
(2003) will know that he can sustain our at-
tention through a narrative. How Fiction
Works o¸ers itself as a primer of technique
and also as an enquiry into the nature of
realism. The book is divided into numbered
sections, which proceed irrespective of the
chapters on character, dialogue, perspective
Books
and so on, and suggest that it has more of a
unity than is actually the case. Wood admits
that the division into chapters is slightly ar-
tificial, since all these matters tend to merge
into one another. As a result, although we
are frequently arrested by a virtuoso passage
of analysis, the book tends to become an
anthology of such passages rather than a
developing argument; we miss the grip and
bite of the earlier essays, as well as their
greater attention to rhythm and structure.
For Wood, modern fiction begins with
Flaubert. That is already a contentious
statement, for, plainly, modern English fic-
tion does not, but Wood moves from
English to American, to French, to Ger-
man, to Russian fiction indiscriminately,
and rarely recognizes the perils of using
translations. Fiction, apparently, is fic-
tion—it isn’t even always novels, since some
examples are drawn from plays and films. To
choose Flaubert as the starting-point is
to dismiss the crucial inheritance of the
English novel from medieval romance and
Elizabethan prose narrative. If we are al-
lowed to include other genres, I would be
prepared to say that Chaucer knew as much
about fiction as Flaubert. Flaubert’s great
innovation, in Wood’s view, was the
elaboration of free indirect style to the point
where the narrator/author distinction dis-
appears and we are reading apparently art-
less reportage which is in fact controlled by
a master stylist—above all, a master gram-
marian, whose habitual use of the imperfect
tense in L’Education sentimentale exploits
clashing “time signatures,” eliding the dif-
ference between moments of perception
and larger stretches of time. Wood remarks
that Proust admired this device; he did, but
he also described Flaubert as a writer
“whom I do not much like,” lacking in
humor or sensibility, and he lamented the
passiveness of the characters in L’Education
sentimentale. The latter point was also
forcefully made by Henry James in his two
essays on Flaubert (1893 and 1902); he
found Frédéric Moreau and Mme. Arnoux
inadequately realized for the burden of sig-
nificance they are called upon to carry.
The New Criterion October 2008 63
 Books
Wood’s own earlier essay on Flaubert in The
Broken Estate was a sharper, and in my
view more balanced, estimate of Flaubert’s
strengths and weaknesses.
Since novels “work” in reaction to previ-
ous novels as well as by internal mecha-
nisms, a chronological approach has its
uses, though I would agree one does not
want yet another cataloguing, pseudo-
Darwinian “History of the Novel.” Wood
shuttles back and forth between periods;
everything seems to happen in an eternal
present. A good example is the chapter
rather portentously entitled “A Brief His-
tory of Consciousness.” This takes us, in
thirty pages, from the Old Testament story
of David to Macbeth (1606) to Crime and
Punishment (1866), thence to Diderot’s Le
neveu de Rameau (1784), Stendhal’s Le Rouge
et le Noir (1830), back to Dostoyevsky, then
to A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927),
then to critical comments by Virginia Woolf
on Dostoyesky and Ford Madox Ford on
Conrad. The connection with the chapter
title seems to be that later novelists dis-
covered how to give a sense of the
psychological hinterland of a character, but
clearly that is not all that might be covered
by “consciousness,” and, even if it were, the
“stunning technical progression” of which
Wood speaks cannot be shown by his grass-
hopper approach.
On that vexed and somewhat tedious
topic of “realism,” however, Wood has
helpful things to say. “Realism is not realis-
tic,” he points out, but merely another con-
vention, and conventions tend to become
conventional; it is too often the first resort
of weary hacks desperate to convince us not
that “this is real” but “this is what reality in
a novel like this looks like.” Realistic detail
sells novels in a market dominated by
readers who don’t want to think, and comes
in handy for the TV or film version on
which some writers have their eye all along.
All this is well said, but when Wood pro-
poses to replace the criterion of realism with
one of truthfulness he obviously invites a
host of objections, among them that “truth”
in fiction is just as much a matter of artifice
64 The New Criterion October 2008
as “realism.” The only thing that matters in
the end is whether we assented to the fic-
tion while reading it. No amount of realism
will be any use if we didn’t, and no amount
of unrealism will be any hindrance if we
did. A useful example here is Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, in which the ma-
nipulation of perspective and temporal
frames of reference works simultaneously to
convince us that Sterne is making the story
up before our eyes, mimicking the random-
ness of actual perception and memory, and
to remind us that the novel is an elaborate
contrivance for just this purpose. The artifi-
ciality is absolutely real. I am astonished
that Sterne’s novel is not mentioned at all
by Wood, since it is central to every topic he
discusses, but he explains that he has taken
examples only from books he actually owns.
All I can say is, he should buy a copy of
Shandy at once.
Until very recently, a central claim for the
novel was that it was a vehicle for moral and
ethical enquiry. Cheeringly, Wood does not
agree with the superior persons who assure
us that such a view is hopelessly naïve, and
explain that no novel is about anything ex-
cept the act of its own composition. (That,
of course, is all that many of those who have
learned to write novels in creative writing
courses can write about.) Wood sees in the
novel the virtue that Bernard Williams found
absent from much moral philosophy, that of
reflecting the choice between conflicting
goods rather than between a polarized good
and bad. Novels should not be propaganda
on behalf of a particular moral code—Wood
justly deplores the “contagion of moralizing
niceness” endemic in online reader reviews
—but they have characteristically enquired
into the sustainability of such codes (and this
is true even of novelists, such as Robbe-
Grillet, who disown such an agenda). A long
list of examples could be given; in fact the
di˝culty would be who to omit.
Wood himself, in The Book Against God,
examines the question of religious faith, and
more broadly of the kind of faith one can put
in other people—and oneself. His child-

hood, we discover from The Broken Estate,
was divided between an evangelical home
and a chorister education; he has shed his
faith, not wholly gladly, but he is wise
enough not to believe in fiction as a sub-
stitute, as Arnold hankered to believe in
poetry. Fiction has its own kinds of truth,
but its status as a provisional report on ex-
perience has been its great virtue. In Austen,
George Eliot, James, and Lawrence, as in
Tolstoy, Kafka, or Camus, what awaits us is
not escapism or reverie but an encounter
with a world often too painful to bear. Per-
haps the greatest claim we can make for
novels is that they show us how human
beings work.
As deep as England
Christopher Reid, editor
Letters of Ted Hughes.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
784 pages, $45
reviewed by Richard Tillinghast
After the success of Sylvia Plath’s book of
poetry, Ariel, and her novel, The Bell Jar,
feminists came to view Plath as their saint
and martyr. Her husband, Ted Hughes
(1930–1998), became the prototype of
everything rotten about men as well as a
demonic embodiment of everything Ameri-
ca does not understand about the Old
World, England in particular. Hughes
was reviled by Plath devotees like Paul
Alexander, who has been (literally) retailing
the story of Plath as victim in his sensational
and wildly inaccurate biography Rough
Magic, and in a play called Edge which had a
successful run on the New York stage a few
years back. Reviewing the play in The Vil-
lager, Jeremy Tallmer wrote, “Every woman
in the world—every woman who can
read—knows, or believes, that Sylvia Plath
went to her death, leaving behind their two
young children, because she had been
ditched and coldly mistreated by her hus-
band, the British poet (later Poet Laureate)
Books
Ted Hughes.” More extreme subscribers to
the Plath cult repeatedly chiseled the name
Hughes o¸ her tombstone in Yorkshire.
(Readers who wish to explore this subject
are directed to the chapter called “Digging
for the Truth about Sylvia Plath” in my
2004 book, Poetry and What Is Real.) Guar-
dians of the Plath shrine will no doubt in-
terrogate his selected letters, just published,
for evidences of Hughes as villain.
Largely as a result of the Plath fantasia,
Hughes is not generally accorded the same
level of respect and acclaim here that has
been considered his due in the British Isles
ever since the publication of The Hawk in the
Rain fifty years ago. In Britain he is justly re-
garded as one of the great twentieth-century
masters, appointed Poet Laureate in 1985 to
succeed John Betjeman, another English
poet worth knowing better. In part, this lack
of recognition reflects the estrangement that
exists between our two literary cultures:
“two nations,” as the saying often attributed
to Shaw puts it, “divided by a common lan-
guage.”
Anyone with an interest in England and
English poetry should get to know Hughes’s
letters. Selected and edited by Christopher
Reid, they run to over 700 pages, and Reid
asserts that “An edition in three or four
volumes, each just as big, could have been
assembled, with the guarantee that no page
would have been without its literary or
documentary value.” I would welcome fur-
ther collections of Hughes’s letters; what we
have here makes for fascinating reading. Like
many people we characterize with that
peculiar word “genius,” Ted Hughes was
prodigiously energetic, interested in any as-
tounding number of subjects, immensely
prolific.
Reading them, and reading Hughes’s
poetry alongside them, makes one realize
that the England Hughes inhabited, both
literally and imaginatively, was not the
England we in America tend to be familiar
with—an England brilliantly served up to
us in the plays of Noel Coward and Harold
Pinter, the novels of Evelyn Waugh,
Graham Greene, Amis père et fils, the poetry
The New Criterion October 2008 65
 Books
of W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, and Philip
Larkin, the songs of the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones, films starring actors like
Hugh Grant and Simon Callow.
While all the artists I have named give me
immense pleasure, Hughes’s England is a
place where polish and refinement, wit, high
culture, the with-it and cutting-edge count
for less than qualities one might describe as
essential, primal—the English countryside as
opposed to various civilized milieux. There is
tradition aplenty in Hughes’s England and a
sense of history embedded not in manners,
ceremony, and institutions, but in human
nature, in the land itself, its seasonal
rhythms, the hard truths of the struggle be-
tween predator and prey. Hughes is in touch
with “deep history,” strands of which precede
the coming of Christianity, not to mention
the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the
dissolution of the monasteries and any num-
ber of epoch-making events. One catches a
glimpse of it in these lines from “Pike,” a
favorite of mine for over forty years:
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them—
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. . . .
H ughes had strong convictions, ideas, and
theories—obsessions is a word he himself
uses—on many subjects including transla-
tion, which he championed and practiced
with notable results, and on being a father
who raised two children from infancy, an ex-
pert fisherman, a writer for theater and
radio, and an advocate for cultural issues in
Britain. It’s hard to know where to start in
describing the range of these letters. For one
thing, he was a convinced believer in astrol-
ogy—not of the “What’s your sign?” variety,
but a real student of the ancient system who
cast charts and repeatedly advised his pub-
lishers as to the most propitious dates for his
books to appear. As a student of anthropol-
ogy and myth at Cambridge, he was one of
66 The New Criterion October 2008
the first to perceive the parallels between the
shaman and the poet. This identification has
lost some of its bite now that both roles tend
to be claimed by people who are neither
genuine poets nor shamans. For him
shamanism was not just a fanciful metaphor.
He approached his task as Poet Laureate
in the way a shaman might approach his task
of ministering to the health of the land for
which he bore responsibility. One can see
certain parallels between Hughes’s “alterna-
tive” interests, some of which may at first
glance seem a bit dotty, and a few of the
issues such as organic gardening and the
preservation of traditional architectural
styles championed by the Prince of Wales,
another contemporary Briton who has had
his detractors but who in fact has been a sen-
sible advocate for taking an approach to cul-
ture that is at the same time “green” and
conservative. Prince Charles’s opposition to
the hideous new buildings being erected
in London—Norman Foster’s infamous
“Gherkin” comes to mind—is of a piece with
many of the things Hughes championed in
his role as public advocate for literacy. In a
letter to his daughter, Frieda, who has be-
come a painter and poet, he writes: “T. S.
Eliot said to me ‘There’s only one way a poet
can develope [sic] his actual writing—apart
from self-criticism and continual practice.
And that is by reading other poetry aloud—
and it doesn’t matter whether he under-
stands it or not (i.e., even if its [sic] in
another language). What matters above all,
is educating the ear.’” On a related issue, he
lobbied the educational authorities to re-in-
troduce memorization into the curriculum.
So in a way, Hughes was the perfect fit as
Poet Laureate during these later years of
Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. O¸ the top of my
head I can’t think of any Laureate poetry that
has been truly distinguished: much of it is
positively comical. But in a poem like “Rain-
Charm for the Duchy,” subtitled “A Blessed,
Devout Drench for the Christening of His
Royal Highness Prince Harry,” one can at
least see what Hughes thought he was up to.
The poem celebrates the end of a five-month
drought, implicitly linking the state of the

kingdom with the fertility of the royal
family, naming the kingdom’s rivers, in what
the Irish call dinnseanachas or evocation of
the spirit of the land through recital of
place-names, as the drought breaks and the
rivers start to flow: “the Dart, her shaggy
horde coming down/ Astride bareback
ponies, with a cry,/ Loosening sheepskin
banners, bumping the granite,/ Flattening
rowans and frightening oaks.”
He was convinced that poetry was not the
“criticism of life” that Matthew Arnold
posited, nor did it fit any of the Aristotelian
formulations people have come up with over
the years. To Hughes, poetry at its most
genuine meant inner work that because it
engaged the poet’s psyche at the deepest
levels, was capable of a¸ecting readers in the
same way, sometimes as a form of spiritual
healing. It was not a matter of choosing a
style and consciously working within it. This
view helps one see Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems
as an attempt to exorcize the death-spirit
represented by the presence in her psyche of
her buried father, who died when she was
eight. For the brief period before their mar-
riage foundered, Plath and Hughes were so
close that they constituted their own collec-
tive unconscious.
As opposed to the popular interpretation
that her suicide was the logical consequence
of the Ariel poems, in Hughes’s view the
exorcism had been successful: she had freed
herself in important ways and was ready to
live and write. He attributed her suicide to a
last-minute surfacing of her demon just at
the moment when she had conquered it,
combined with a anti-depression medica-
tion prescribed by an English doctor un-
aware that the same drug under a di¸erent
name had produced suicidal tendencies in
Plath while she was living in America. As to
the connection between his own writing
and his life, in 1998, the year of his death, he
wrote to a man doing a paper on him, “I
stopped writing stories and radio plays etc.
in the 60s because I began to realise that
each one foretold an episode in my life—
sometimes in quite unbelievable physical
detail.”
Books
N aturally, Auden’s assertion that “poetry
makes nothing happen” and Larkin’s rejec-
tion of what Jung called the collective un-
conscious as a “myth-kitty” were anathema
to Hughes. Likewise he despised the search
for technical fluency in poetry. As Roger
Kimball observed in these pages in May,
1999, “technique, uncatalysed by sensibili-
ty and subject matter, can be the enemy of
poetic achievement. In any event, for
Auden, technical fluency sometimes result-
ed in poetry that seemed to proceed on ver-
bal autopilot.” Hughes’s convinced belief in
the importance of myth for poetry and its
rootedness in the unconscious as inter-
preted by Jung put Hughes at odds with
Auden, whose poetry has its roots in Freud,
Marxism, and, finally, Anglo-Catholicism.
In a letter on a review Auden had written
about Yeats, Hughes has this to say:
Auden dismissed the whole of Eastern mysti-
cal and religious philosophy, the world tradi-
tion of Hermetic Magic (which is a good part
of Jewish Mystical philosophy, not to speak of
the mystical philosophy of the Renaissance),
the whole historical exploration into spirit life
at every level of consciousness, the whole
deposit of earlier and other religion, myth, vi-
sion, traditional wisdom and story in folk
belief, on which Yeats based all his work,
everything he did or attempted to bring about
as “embarrassing nonsense.”
These subjects that Auden dismissed out of
hand were the cornerstone of Hughes’s
poetry.
From adolescence on he was a firm ad-
herent of Robert Graves’s thesis in The
White Goddess that all true poets are in thrall
to a pre-patriarchal Goddess—the figure of
whom Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner writes, “The Night-Mare Life-in-
Death was she,/ who thicks man’s blood
with cold.” Responding to questions about
The White Goddess from a man writing a
paper on him, Hughes replies, “The overall
pattern of Goddess-centred matriarchy be-
ing overthrown by a God-centred patri-
archy was most likely something I first really
The New Criterion October 2008 67
 Books
grasped in the Graves.” Yet he criticizes
Graves for his distanced, intellectualized
approach: “I think what I resented about
Graves was the way he took the Moon, and
all the reflections of its properties and its
possessions, without ever convincing me
that he has done more than perceive their
poetic significance. . . . I can’t ever feel that
he experiences them first hand and recreates
them in their occult terms.”
Hughes’s little sketches of America and
American poets during his and Plath’s brief
residency here in the late 1950s are worth the
price of the book in themselves. “I met John
Crowe Ransom the other week, little whim-
sical gentle man. He read his poems
as you can’t imagine. ‘Wind’ was ‘Wined’
and ‘wounds’ were ‘wownds’—and such a
strange grandmotherish story-telling way of
speaking them, very good.” And since I
began by talking about the gap in under-
standing between England and America, it
seems appropriate to close with some of
Hughes’s extravagant and no doubt unfair
impressions of our country in the late 1950s:
The great sin in America is “not-to-be-able-to-
mix.” . . . So everybody’s in everybody else’s
arms, and all burstingly happy & well-adjusted
so far as their facial expressions go. . . . The
houses are splendid here—each in its little
grounds. The food, the general opulence, is
frightening. My natural instinct is to practise
little private filthinesses—I spit, pee on shrub-
bery, etc., and have a strong desire to sleep on
the floor—just to keep in contact with a
world that isn’t quite so glazed as this one.
Sacred monsters
Michael Burleigh Blood & Rage:
A Cultural History of Terrorism.
HarperPress, 545 pages, £25
reviewed by Andrew Stuttaford
If you are searching for a few scraps of
comfort about the nature of our species,
you would do very well to avoid Blood &
68 The New Criterion October 2008
Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, the
latest in a series of profoundly depressing
books by the British historian Michael Bur-
leigh. If, on the other hand, your objective
is to examine the current global eruption of
Islamic extremism through a wider per-
spective than the usual minaret, mullah, and
middle-eastern rancor, Blood & Rage is an
essential, imperative read, and well worth
crossing the cyber pond to buy (it’s as yet
unavailable in the United States).
A decade ago this was probably not a
volume Professor Burleigh would have an-
ticipated writing. In the final sentences of
his grim, grand, and uncomfortably per-
ceptive The Third Reich: A New History
(2000), even the generally gloomy Burleigh
was cheered by the way that the disasters of
the twentieth century appeared to have dealt
a devastating blow to the millenarian
dreaming that had done so much to devas-
tate that era:
The lower register, the more pragmatic ambi-
tions, the talk of taxes, markets, education,
health and welfare, evident in the political
culture of Europe and North America, con-
stitute progress. . . . Our lives may be more
boring than those who lived in apocalyptic
times, but being bored is greatly preferable to
being prematurely dead because of some
ideological fantasy.
The following year, the twin towers fell.
History, once again, had made a fool of
the historian. By 2008 Burleigh could write,
apocalyptically enough, of “an existential
threat to the whole of civilization.” If the
Clinton years had seemed a little “boring”
when compared with what had gone before,
it was only because we were too distracted,
too complacent, and too incurious to notice
what beasts were slouching our way.
Burleigh doesn’t want us to repeat that
mistake. Blood & Rage is urgent, insistent,
and angry, so much so that it occasionally
topples over into the clichés of what Brits
dub “saloon bar” wisdom (imagine Fox’s
Bill O’Reilly pontificating in a Surrey pub).
Like much of Burleigh’s work, Blood &

Rage is panoramic in its scope (it begins
with Fenians and ends with jihadis), and it’s
packed with intriguing and awkward his-
torical detail, quite a bit of which is
guaranteed to irritate the usual suspects on
campus and in the media. The book has
been criticized for lacking a clear unifying
theme, but there’s not a lot that nationalist
killers such as, say, the ira, eta, or Black
September have in common with the mil-
lenarian butchers of al Qaeda or the Russian
anarchist fringe—except, most notably, the
corpses they leave behind (it says a great
deal about Burleigh that he often takes the
trouble to record the names of the victims).
If there is one broader lesson to be drawn
from Blood & Rage, however, it’s this: ter-
rorism may ebb and flow, but it will, like
Cain, always be with us.
For a deeper understanding of the specific
plague that we pigeonhole as “al Qaeda,”
read Blood & Rage in conjunction with
Earthly Powers (2005) and Sacred Causes
(2006), Burleigh’s remarkable two-volume
depiction of the danse macabre of religion,
politics, and revolutionary violence that has
whirled its way through four centuries of an
emerging “modern” era that still has, evi-
dently, plenty of room for the old Adam.
Taken together, these three extraordinarily
wide-ranging books can be seen, among the
many other attributes they share, as a
shrewd and unsettling investigation of the
persistence, allure, and danger of religious
(in a very broad sense of the word) ab-
solutism, a phenomenon that has, in one
way or another, been an important element
in all too many of mankind’s attempts to
establish an organizing principle for its
societies.
In earlier epochs, enforcing its impera-
tives was made (for those who needed it to
be made easier) by the belief that to do so
was God’s will. Thus killing the heretic was
worship, not murder, a tough, noble deed
that brought heaven just a touch closer. But
in Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes Burleigh
reminds us that you don’t need God for an
Inquisition or, for that matter, a religion.
Books
Oddly, Sacred Causes is subtitled “The Clash
of Religion and Politics, from the Great
War to the War on Terror.” Clash? It’s true
that the years after 1918 were marked by an
onslaught on the established churches by
Europe’s new totalitarian states, but the na-
ture of that attack was itself, in many
respects, “religious.” This wasn’t a clash be-
tween religion and politics so much as an
attempt to merge the two forcibly. Belief in
God was sometimes a casualty, rationality
always. “The people dream,” wrote Konrad
Heiden (Hitler’s first biographer), “and a
soothsayer tells them what they are dream-
ing.” As Burleigh explains, these totalitarian
regimes “metabolized the religious instinct.”
Both state and state-sponsored cult became,
he argues, “objects of religious devotion,”
their ideologies “political religions” of a
type already visible in the revolutionary
France that is in some ways the principal
villain of Earthly Powers.
This is, I suppose, a perverse tribute to
the persistence of man’s innate religious in-
stinct, something to which Burleigh at-
taches an importance at odds with the usual
orthodoxies. Of course, it’s not particularly
novel to regard Nazism as a cult (although
in The Third Reich, Burleigh extends this
analysis further than most), but it’s some-
what rarer to see a similar diagnosis applied
so comprehensively to Bolshevism (the
Asian variants of Communism are, unfor-
tunately, outside the scope of these books,
although I can guess what Burleigh, a writer
who is as humane as he is caustic, would
have made of Maoism) and, more provoca-
tively still, to the very roots of supposedly
“scientific” socialism itself.
But if God died, He took His time doing
so. We have grown accustomed to the idea
that religion in Europe spent the post-
Enlightenment centuries rapidly retreating
to the private sphere, and thence to quietist
oblivion. This process may have been un-
even, but it was, so runs the argument, as
continuous and as inevitable as the defeat of
those throne-and-altar types who tried to
impede it. Burleigh reveals this narrative to
be as inaccurate as it is incomplete. He
The New Criterion October 2008 69
 Books
resurrects philosophers, politicians, and
movements largely written out of more
conventional accounts of the past. To be
sure, some of those exhumed are so mar-
ginal and so mad that they might have been
better left to molder on undisturbed, but
the cumulative e¸ect is fascinating, a rich
rococo mess, rather than the dully one-
directional tramline that defines the pro-
gressive view of history.
If the religious instinct survived (as it was
always bound to—we are what we are), the
weakening of long-established vehicles for
its expression left it vulnerable to the new
political religions and with them the delu-
sion that it was possible for man to build
heaven here on earth, a fantasy that paved
the way for attempts to create a state of
limitless reach and unbridled cruelty. That’s
not to claim (and Burleigh wouldn’t) that
the totalitarian impulse is now solely the
preserve of the unbeliever. In an age defaced
by the Taliban and al Qaeda, who could?
Besides, attempting to pin the blame on
either godliness or godlessness is less useful
than looking at the very nature of belief it-
self—and how it can, and frequently does,
mutate so horrifically, and how, for that
matter, it can be manipulated. After reading
Burleigh’s books and contemplating their
rogue’s gallery of madmen, prophets, and
monsters, it’s di˝cult to avoid the conclu-
sion (even if it’s never directly spelled out)
that the origins of jihadi violence lie as
much in the darker recesses of the human
psyche as in the peculiarities of any one
religion or, indeed, region. As Burleigh
demonstrates, a Bernard Lewis may be an
invaluable guide to the appeal of bin
Ladenism, but so is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In his ideas, in the breadth of his writings,
and in the distinct, acerbic, and sometimes
bleakly humorous spirit that permeates
them, there’s a hint of Edward Gibbon about
Burleigh. If we listen to what he has to say
(including some useful practical suggestions
at the end of Blood & Rage), we may have
a better chance of avoiding our very own
decline and fall. The last one was bad
enough.
70 The New Criterion October 2008
Dispiriting
Rob Riemen
Nobility of Spirit:
A Forgotten Ideal.
Yale University Press, 160 pages, $22
reviewed by Joseph Bottum
History shows innumerable examples of
intellectuals whose political judgments
turned out to be misdirected, misguided,
and just plain mistaken. To borrow an old
line, there are propositions so bizarre that
only an educated person could believe
them. Cleon pointed out as much during
the heated Mytilenian debate of 427 B.C.,
when he urged the common folk of Athens
to ignore the intellectuals and continue the
war against Sparta.
Which they did, at least until the Battle of
Amphipolis in 422, when the Athenians
were defeated and Cleon was killed. In
truth, throughout history, the eggheads,
longhairs, and bluestockings have often
been wrong—but that doesn’t necessarily
make the people right, particularly when
there are vicious demagogues such as Cleon
to urge them on.
“In a democracy that does not respect in-
tellectual life and is not guided by it,”
Thomas Mann wrote in his 1938 The Com-
ing Victory of Democracy, “demagogy has free
rein, and the level of the national life is
lowered to that of the ignorant and uncul-
tivated. But this cannot happen if the prin-
ciple of education is allowed to dominate
and if the tendencies prevail to raise the
lower classes to an appreciation of culture
and to accept the leadership of the better
elements.” Mann did not think that aris-
tocracy and democracy were necessarily in-
compatible. An aristocracy of the spirit and
the mind was, in his opinion, the best
safeguard of democracy: Democracy is true
to itself only when it is ennobled by hu-
manistic principles.
Sound good? Or, at least, sound interest-
ing? Well, that’s about as favorable a reading
as it is possible to give Rob Riemen’s recent

book, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal.
The founder of a center-left think-tank in
Holland called the Nexus Institute, Riemen
has written a series of personal reflections
on the notion of the nobility of spirit and
the role of intellectuals as the guardians of
civilization. The result is, in the end, an un-
serious book with half a serious truth
lurking within it.
The unserious portion looks like this:
People with noble spirits could save us from
the horrors of nihilism, if only we would let
them. But the awful turn toward egalitar-
ianism in early modern times produced
nihilism in late modern times, and now
everything has gone sour. You’d think that
this means we should obey the authority of
our elites, but it turns out that, for Rieman,
the archetypal bad guys are Nazis and
Catholics, because they teach obedience to
authority. Looks like a contradiction in
Nobility of Spirit, yes? Ah, but the Nazis and
Catholics—conveniently combined by Rie-
man in the imaginary figure of a priest with
a swastika, standing in an Italian jail brow-
beating a prisoner—want obedience even
from intellectuals. And intellectuals must be
absolutely free, or they won’t be able to
keep up their noble spirit, which is what re-
quires obedience from the rest of us.
To which, about all one can say is: Bah.
Still, Rieman actually has something like a
genuine idea kicking around the edges of
his book. Every time it looks as though
Nobility of Spirit is going to let the idea take
center stage, it gets shoved into the wings
so Reiman can trot out his flea-bitten dog-
and-pony show of brave humanists beaten
down by oppressive forces. But let’s pretend
the author had actually had the sense to
focus on his one interesting thought. In
that case, Nobility of Spirit would be a book
that at least has the sense to raise the ques-
tion of why culture is necessary to preserve
civilization.
Riemen’s hero is the German novelist
Thomas Mann, who, more than anyone else
in Riemen’s judgment, fit the ideal of the
intellectual of noble spirit. “When Thomas
Mann met President Roosevelt,” George
Books
Steiner notes in his foreword to the book,
“he was introduced as the ‘incarnation of
European civilization.’” Mann was born in
1875, which means that he was fully shaped
before the beginning of the First World
War—the war that put an end to the old
epoch of European culture. Mann did not
involve himself in supporting any ideologi-
cal movement. In 1918 he published his
Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, which de-
fends “essential values” but warns that “cul-
ture can degenerate into barbarism when
sociopolitical developments are ignored.” As
Riemen puts it, “It is a conservative book,
albeit on behalf of the future and not the
past.”
By the time Mann moved to the United
States in 1938, the political scene had
changed: Nazism, Fascism, and Bolshevism
overshadowed his earlier concerns. Nazism
was evil, but Mann became disappointed
with “the cynicism of the Western democ-
racies,” which could put up with Nazism
and Fascism to prevent the spread of Bol-
shevism. During the early 1950s the fbi
opened a file on Mann and his children. The
fbi saw in Mann’s earlier political views a
“premature anti-Fascism.” As Riemen inter-
prets it, this means “resistance to Fascism
before America declared war on Germany”
—which is to say that even a democratic
government proves incapable of su¸ering
true independence of thought.
R iemen begins Nobility of Spirit not with
Mann himself, but with Mann’s youngest
daughter, Elisabeth, who was Riemen’s per-
sonal acquaintance. If Thomas Mann was a
man of the nineteenth century, his daughter
“was a true embodiment of the twentieth
century.” Elisabeth was born in 1918 and in
1938 moved to the United States with her
parents. Later, she married a well-known
anti-Fascist, Giuseppe Borgese. She was a
social activist, a professor at Dalhousie
University in Canada, and the only female
founding member of the Club of Rome.
She spent the last years of her life in New
York, where she experienced the attacks of
September 11, the discussion of which
The New Criterion October 2008 71
 Books
Riemen interweaves with anecdotes from
her personal life in New York.
For Riemen, September 11 forces us to
face the idea of civilization. It was, he notes,
the eighteenth-century French writer Con-
dorcet who defined the term civilization to
mean a society “that needs no violence to
introduce political change.” Some such
definition is what allows us to condemn
political violence and to call acts of such
violence barbaric—for they are, by their na-
ture, uncivilized. Both the Nazis and the
Fascists were barbarians, in this sense, and
we have no di˝culty condemning them.
Yet many intellectuals these days blame
the victims, rather than the perpetrators, for
the attacks of September 11. Take Dario Fo,
for example. Shortly after the attacks, the
Italian Nobel Prize-winning author con-
trasted the small number of victims in New
York with the millions of people dying from
poverty. Since America is to blame for
world poverty, the American victims were
(indirectly) to blame for the fact that they
were murdered.
One can go on and on, quoting the intel-
lectuals who insisted that September 11 was
America’s fault. And it seems obvious
enough that the error lies with those intel-
lectuals. And even if Riemen can’t quite
bring himself to admit the error, he does see
that something in the intellectual life has
gone badly wrong: “When millions of
people can ‘believe’ in nihilism, the guar-
dians of the cultural heritage have failed or,
worse, have committed treason. They la-
ment capitalism, commercialism, and su-
perficiality, yet support these ways of life by
continuing their chatter that nothing is
timeless or universal because everything is
relative.”
“Where I am, there is German culture,”
Mann once said. He intended not to boast
but to say that he retained within himself a
deep awareness of what was best in Euro-
pean civilization. Perhaps Riemen would
have gotten further if he had asked how
many present-day intellectuals could say
about themselves what Mann said. Who
among the American intellectuals can ac-
72 The New Criterion October 2008
tually say: “Where I am, there is American
culture”?
And yet, simply to blame intellectuals
would be too easy. There is also the pos-
sibility that Thomas Mann’s hope for enno-
bling democracy by the “leadership by the
finest and the best” is futile. Why should we
assume that Cleon is unrepresentative of
democratic leadership? Without much grasp
of why common people rush to embrace
egalitarianism whenever it’s o¸ered it to
them, Reimen has only half the problem in
view.
Still, even that half is enough to be un-
settling. “If the discrepancy between politics
and people on the one hand and the intel-
lectual elite on the other—‘guardians of civ-
ilization,’ as Socrates called them—is so
huge as to be irreconcilable,” as Nobility of
Spirit rightly notes, “then the ideal of civili-
zation, whatever it may be, is in deep
trouble.”
Whitman’s spell
Michael Robertson Worshipping Walt:
The Whitman Disciples.
Princeton University Press,
350 pages, $27.95
reviewed by Thomas M. Disch
The best biographies of Whitman reveal
what one expects, the self-appointed Bard
living in a bubble of self-proclaimed glory.
That Whitman is best encountered in his
own poems. If he had had any secrets a
biographer would like to ferret out, he did
such a good tidying up that even a century
later the interesting questions about his life
are still unanswered. Was he gay, in the
sense we use that word today? We can’t say.
How much of his grandiosity was an act,
and intended to be understood as such?
That’s to say, was he a charlatan? He was
too canny to be nailed down there either.
Sometimes he seems a Holy Fool after the
fashion of Parsifal or Prince Mishkin, but he
was also a shewd and resourceful self-

promoter, who, when Emerson sent him a
letter that praised his poems in the highest
terms (it concludes, “I greet you at the
beginning of a great career”), immediately
brought out a new edition of Leaves of Grass
quoting the whole letter on the cover.
Critics cried foul, for such self-promotion
was not gentlemanly, but Whitman’s career
caught fire directly, as it might not other-
wise have done. Thereafter, though he often
had to scrounge for a living, writing news-
paper filler for peanuts, he was adored by
those who read his poetry, in which he was
free to expand on his abiding and favorite
theme, namely himself. Cocooned in his
career, his life was not that interesting. But
the lives of those for whom Whitman be-
came a mission and a faith have the fascina-
tion of stories heard for the first time. All
the jokes are fresh and the endings full of
surprises, both happy and plangent.
The first of the disciples Michael Robert-
son zooms in on are William O’Connor and
John Burroughs. Whitman came to know
them in his years working in a government
o˝ce during and just after the Civil War. He
was also constantly ministering to the needs
of wounded and ill soldiers being treated
(and maltreated) in the makeshift hospitals
of the city (the still a-building Capitol
among them). The most upbeat poems of
Leaves of Grass had already been published
and his genius proclaimed, but beyond mere
literature and transcending it, the Whitman
that O’Connor and Burroughs met was a
kind of secular saint, going about the
nightmarish hospital wards and o¸ering the
shell-shocked and the amputees the things
they desperately needed—warmth, compan-
ionship, love. Whitman had always had a
thing for sailors, workmen, and young
toughs of all kinds, but the war had trans-
formed that taste into a vocation. Whitman
became a saint malgré lui, and this became
visible to those who knew him in Washing-
ton.
Even before the war Whitman had fancied
the mission of poetry to be religious. “The
1860 Leaves of Grass,” Robertson writes, “was
perfectly positioned to become the bible of a
Books
liberal post-Christian American spirituali-
ty”—and Whitman would be its prophet,
even, according to O’Connor in his fervent
pamphlet “The Good Gray Poet,” its “Christ,
soothing, healing, consoling, restoring,
night and day, for years.” O’Connor ex-
panded on that theme in “The Carpenter,” a
parable of Whitman as Christ, published in
Putnam’s Magazine in 1867. The story was
egregiously sentimental and very popular.
Readers recognized Whitman in the title
role, and so was launched his career as a
secular saint on a par with those of our own
day, Albert Schweitzer and Mohandas
Gandhi.
The other disciple from Whitman’s Wash-
ington years, John Burroughs, became the
most popular nature writer of the nineteenth
century (a sample of his botanic prose can be
found in the new eco-friendly anthology
from The Library of America, American
Earth). Burrough’s praises of Whitman ex-
ceeded even O’Connor’s: “If that is not the
face of a poet, then it is the face of a god.” He
went on in this idolatrous vein for a good
fifty-three years, and his final testimony, at
the age of eighty-three, is still unstinting: “I
look upon him as the greatest personality . . .
that has appeared in the world during the
Christian era.” This, from a writer notable
for his calm and lucid appreciation of the
natural world in its humblest aspects. (He is
great on chickadees and nuthatches.)
T he next Whitman disciple was his Mary
Magdalen—Anne Gilchrist, a widow from
London with four children to raise, who at
the age of forty-eight, inspired by her love of
his poems and a deep conviction that they
were erotically directed to her in particular,
uprooted herself and three of her children
from England and sailed to Philadelphia to
o¸er herself to Whitman as the bride Fate
had predestined for him. Whitman brushed
her o¸ in the most gentlemanly way, but
then comes the twist ending. Whitman
needed a family more supportive than the
brother and sister-in-law he was living with
as an invalid boarder. The Gilchrists became
that family, and Anne’s teenage son Herbert
The New Criterion October 2008 73
 Books
fell under Whitman’s spell the same way his
mother had, though in his case the feeling
was reciprocated. Anne was an author in her
own right, a biographer of William Blake, a
neighbor in Chelsea of the Carlyles, a friend
of William Rossetti, and well worth a biog-
raphy of her own. Clearly, she was no star-
struck simpleton, which makes her words of
witness all the more remarkable: “Whitman
is, I believe, far more closely akin to Christ
than to either Homer or Shakespeare or any
other poet. . . . Here at last is the face of
Christ, which the painters have so long
sought for.” The hyperbole goes on, and the
temperature rises.
Robertson’s next disciple is R. M. Bucke,
the director of an immense insane asylum in
Ontario, one of the Wonders of the New
World in its day, and the author of Cosmic
Consciousness, a book that has been a reliable
bestseller in occult bookstores since its
publication in 1901, and so a Wonder of the
New Age. Bucke took on the task of trans-
lating the poems of Whitman into a consis-
tent philosophy on the order of Theosophy,
the brainchild of Madame Blavatsky. Whit-
man himself, however much he liked to
have minions sitting at his feet, found
Bucke’s e¸usions hard to take.
As Whitman aged, he grew feebler and
his needs multiplied. He needed help just
getting around, help in the PR department
(he used to do just fine on his own), and
mostly he needed company, a hand to hold,
an ear to bend. Whitman’s daily compan-
ion, uno˝cial secretary, nurse, and most
beloved disciple in his last years was Horace
Traubel. Traubel came round every day to
Whitman’s unkempt wreck of a sickroom
and sorted through the papers on the
floor—all Scripture in Traubel’s view, and all
subsequently published in a scholarly edi-
tion thanks to his foresight. After an hour
or two of Whitmaniac pronouncements,
Traubel went home and wrote a detailed
record of that day’s table talk. No writer of
stature has been listened to so attentively
since the days of Dr. Johnson or Goethe.
Whitman needed disciples, and the dis-
ciples came—many all the way from
74 The New Criterion October 2008
England. Often there had been a long cor-
respondence first, full of questions about
certain passages in his work that suggested
the possibility of a love between comrades
that might be . . . well, it did not quite dare
to speak its name, and indeed the euphe-
misms then in use are now almost extinct.
One disciple, John Addington Symonds,
provoked Whitman to some of his most
alarmed evasions: “That the calamus part
[of Leaves] has even allowed the possibility
of such construction as mention’d is ter-
rible—I am fain to hope the pages them-
selves are not to be even mention’d for such
gratuitous and quite at times entirely un-
dream’d & unreck’d possibility of morbid
inferences—wh’ are disavow’d by me &
seem damnable.” Henry James could not
have put it better.
iPods & nimrods
Mark Bauerlein
The Dumbest Generation.
Tarcher, 272 pages, $24.95
reviewed by Liam Julian
Paeans to the new batch of Millennial work-
ers appear, it seems, in every other edition of
the Sunday paper, detailing the sharp apti-
tudes, habits, likes, and dislikes of “Genera-
tion Y.” But these articles mean little to Mark
Bauerlein. Author of The Dumbest Genera-
tion: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young
Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or,
Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) and a professor
of English at Emory University, Bauerlein
believes that behind the supposed worldli-
ness and tech-savvy of today’s twenty-some-
things and teens is mostly air. Millennials, he
thinks, possess little substantive knowledge
and, therefore, even less wisdom.
That young people are uninformed about
a great many things is old hat. The ancient
Greeks engaged in generational spats be-
tween devotees of Sophocles and younger,
rowdier, surely irresponsible fans of Aris-
tophanes. More recently, Chester E. Finn,

Jr. and Diane Ravitch published in 1987
What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?—a critical
review of the scores achieved by 8,000
seventeen-year-olds on tests of history and
literature—and answered their eponymous
question thusly: Not much. In their last
chapter, “A Generation at Risk,” Finn and
Ravitch wrote, “We do not contend that the
‘younger generation’ is going to the dogs.
We merely conclude that it is ignorant of
important things that it should know, and
that it and generations to follow are at risk
of being gravely handicapped by that ig-
norance upon entry into adulthood, citi-
zenship, and parenthood.”
Twenty-one years later, Bauerlein is writ-
ing much the same thing but putting some
edge on it. Whereas What Do Our 17-Year-
Olds Know? began with a question, The
Dumbest Generation starts things o¸ with an
accusation. Even Bauerlein’s imperative sub-
title is biting: “Or, Don’t Trust Anyone
Under 30.” But Bauerlein himself isn’t suspi-
cious of all under-thirties; his book is far
more nuanced than its explosive title and
subheads indicate. American teens and
young adults, he writes, live in an age of
abundance, “have grown up with more
knowledge and information readily at hand,
taken more classes, built their own websites,
[and] enjoyed more libraries, bookstores,
and museums in their towns and cities,” but
nonetheless remain woefully ignorant. “They
don’t know any more history or civics,
economics or science, literature or current
events.” Why?
The Dumbest Generation points to tech-
nology. Today, young Americans’ “talents
and interests and money thrust them not
into books and ideas and history and civics,
but into a whole other realm and other
consciousness.” The internet and social net-
working and cellular phones that double as
global positioning devices promised that as
their users became more interconnected
they would also become more aware, more
excited by the array of people and thoughts
to which they could easily link. A broken
promise, Bauerlein believes. According to
him, these technologies have simply made it
Books
easy for people to stay connected to those
most like them, and teenagers are especially
prone to the seductiveness of remaining in
this way disconnected, behind locked bed-
room doors only engaging in interlocutions
within their own niche. Writes Bauerlein,
“The autonomy has a cost: the more they
[teens and twenty-somethings] attend to
themselves, the less they remember the past
and envision a future.”
Thus, the disheartening facts: All Ameri-
cans, but especially the young, turn to
books more infrequently than they once
did. The fall has been steep, too. Between
1982 and 2002, the rate of literary reading of
eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds declined
by 28 percent. And fewer young people un-
derstand history. In 2006, two-thirds of
high-school seniors could not explain the
meaning of a 1950s-era photograph of a sign
that read, “Colored Entrance.”
But while Bauerlein conclusively shows
that large swaths of the Dumbest Genera-
tion are strikingly ignorant, his impugna-
tion of technology is less solid, largely
because little evidence exists to show a
strong, causal connection between iPods
and nimrods. The major custodians of
young peoples’ ignorance are, of course,
adults who allow them to remain ignorant.
That’s not an original or innovative obser-
vation, but it’s true. The Dumbest Generation
would be more convincing if its pages con-
tained less about online learning and pod-
casts and more about what students aren’t
taught in their K-12 literature and history
classes and at university.
V ictor Davis Hanson, among others, has
poignantly noted that older Americans, who
were privileged to receive in their classes
rigorous instruction in important subjects,
have actively deprived today’s young people
of similar opportunities. Humanities courses
on college campuses more often than not
o¸er flimsy training in flimsy topics, and K-
12 public education has been progressively
dumbed down and sterilized. Perhaps this is
why young Americans can seem disinter-
ested, selfish, and flippant. Most of them
The New Criterion October 2008 75
 Books
have gone without a serious education in the
core liberal arts, which leaves them, as Han-
son writes, without “any notion of mag-
nitude.” If teenagers and twenty-somethings
appear satisfied to nurture only their own
ephemeral diversions, it could be because
they’ve never been taught about the events,
the struggles, the art, the literature, the
genius that preceded them. For this, Bauer-
lein has only his own generation to blame.
The family Lincoln
Daniel Mark Epstein
The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage.
Ballantine, 576 pages, $28
reviewed by Alexander Nazaryan
W hile Abraham Lincoln was many things
to many people, one rarely thinks of him as
a model of domesticity. One would rather
like to believe that the man responsible for
the Gettysburg Address had no trouble
rising above marital squabbles, and that
childrearing, even in the national limelight,
was nothing compared to the rift between
North and South. While European politics,
with its empires and dynasties, has always
been a family a¸air, it is hard to imagine the
Lincolns engaged in the kind of high drama
that was at the heart of Hapsburg or
Romanov rule.
In fact, Lincoln’s ascendancy to the White
House in 1860 provided the divided nation
with a marriage as fraught and contentious
as that between its feuding states. Abraham
had been a taciturn lawyer from Illinois,
rising to national prominence on an aboli-
tionist platform; Mary, daughter of a
prominent Kentucky family, was not im-
mune to rumors that she favored the Con-
federate cause. For the first time there were
young children in the White House, pulling
fire alarms while the fields of Gettysburg
burned. Not until Monica Lewinsky set
foot inside the Beltway would tabloid
broadsheets have so much to write about.
In The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage,
76 The New Criterion October 2008
Daniel Mark Epstein depicts the Lincoln
presidency as largely a product of his mar-
riage to Mary, teasing out of that fraught
union the microcosm for the entire presi-
dency. A prolific poet, Epstein has already
written a book on Lincoln and Whitman,
marrying the fortunes of the brooding
abolitionist and the exuberant aesthete. The
material in The Lincolns feels more forced,
with Epstein constantly shifting between
home decorations and the drumbeats of
war. His expostulations (“Marriage is a state
of mysterious paradoxes”) can also smack
too strongly of Dr. Phil, but such instances
are overshadowed by acute insights on how
the Lincoln marriage ebbed and flowed in
rhythm with the nation.
A mercurial young man of restless tem-
perament and boundless ambition, Lincoln
first caught the eye of Mary Todd, “one
of the most attractive, nubile ladies of
Springfield,” at a dance in 1839 for which he
was one of sixteen managers. They quickly
commenced a relationship that had the
town gossiping and her wealthy Southern
family displeased, despite Mary’s private
convictions that the young lawyer was
bound to go far in life.
He did not make it easy, however, to love
or be loved. Overcome by “Byronic moods
of melancholy” and su¸ering from bouts of
hypochondria, he would confide to a friend
that “I can never be satisfied with any one
who would be block-head enough to have
me.” In 1841 he suddenly broke o¸ their en-
gagement in a fit of passion (possibly
brought on by a case of syphilis) only to
come back to her a year later; then, shortly
after challenging another suitor to a duel
that never transpired, he showed up on
Mary’s doorstep, announcing, “I want to
get hitched tonight.”
Her agreement to marriage was not ab-
sent of self-interest. As Epstein argues, her
investment in her husband’s future was very
much the product of a privileged upbring-
ing: “She dreamed that the two of them
might occupy a place in society that would
transcend everything that she and her more
snobbish sisters had ever known. The key to

this was politics.” Much of what follows ex-
plores the Lincolns’ shared ambitions in the
context of Civil War politics, and Epstein is
most successful when dissecting the peculi-
arities of Mary’s personality and their e¸ects
on her husband career.
It is well-known that Abraham su¸ered
from a depressive temperament, but Mary
was closer to outright psychosis. Earlier
works like The Madness of Mary Lincoln
have treated her supposed insanity at
length, but Epstein avoids the lure of his-
tory-as-psychology. This is not to suggest
that he shies away from accurate portrayals
of Mary as enraged, self-pitying, irrational,
insecure, coarse, vain, and uninteresting,
among other colorful adjectives used both
by Epstein and contemporaneous observers.
He recounts episodes in which she threw
co¸ee in her husband’s face, chased him out
of the house with a broomstick, hurled
water at him from a window, and struck
him in the face because she did not like the
cut of meat he bought. He, for the most
part, bore these outbursts with the patience
of Job.
Less riveting are the passages describing
Lincoln’s well-known climb to the presi-
dency. Epstein seems to know as much,
spending considerably more ink on how
Mary might have furnished their Washing-
ton home than on the composition of the
Gettysburg Address.
The drama reached its height in 1860, when
Lincoln won the White House. With the
nation plunging into war, Mary took on the
questionable task of transforming the staid
White House into “a center of calm civili-
zation in the midst of pandemonium.”
While soldiers fell at Bull Run and An-
tietam, she shopped in New York and ex-
ceeded the White House decorating budget
Books
by thousands of dollars, earning the title of
“Illinois Queen” and fostering rumors of
her “secessionist sympathies.” Understan-
dably, it took a toll on Lincoln to defend his
wife’s honor; with her away at the summer
retreat of Soldiers’ Home, he would spent
protracted periods of time with Captain
David Derickson, going so far as to share a
bed with him. Epstein does not imply that
the two men shared physical intimacy, but it
is clear that Abe was badly in need of a
stable companion.
But what truly unraveled the Lincolns
was a tragedy closer to home than even the
Confederate Army approaching Washing-
ton. Perhaps because there had been so little
time to raise their children properly, their
deaths—only one of four would live into
adulthood—were an especially bitter trage-
dy. Eddie, not yet five, had died in 1850
from tuberculosis, which, in 1871, would
also claim eighteen-year-old Tad. But par-
ticularly devastating was the 1862 death of
beloved Willie, twelve, from typhoid fever
at the height of the Civil War. Abraham
sank further into himself and, busy with a
war that was going poorly, left most of the
guilt to his wife, who “begun to experience
the delusions and hallucinations of what
would now be diagnosed as clinical
psychosis.”
In other words, whatever remained of
their marital bliss dissipated long before
Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865.
Epstein ends his tale with the bloodshed at
Ford’s Theatre, allowing Mary to live out
her years until “death of apoplexy” two
decades later. The Lincolns thus largely suc-
ceeds in its aim, providing a well-researched
view into those brief moments of domestic
bliss and longer periods of discord that
largely mirror a nation at war with
itself.
The New Criterion October 2008 77
 Notebook
i.m. Shusha Guppy, 1935–2008
by Ben Downing
P ersian: that’s the word I’ll always associate
with Shusha Guppy. Uttered with a lux-
urious protraction of the first syllable—
Purrrzhen, as if a . . . well, Persian cat were
being stroked—it conjured up all those
Oriental refinements rudely swept aside by
the ayatollahs, a lost world of Hafez recita-
tions and elaborate compliments (taarof, as
she taught me to call them) paid in jewel-
like gardens. Though she’d occasionally
employ the bare geopolitical term “Iran,”
the adjective was always “Persian,” and so
was the name, in English, of her mother
tongue—Allah help anyone who referred to
it in her hearing as “Farsi,” which, she
would witheringly point out, was like
saying “Deutsch” or “français.”
Yet Shusha was no exile. While she abom-
inated the revolution of 1979 as roundly as
anyone, she had voluntarily left home long
before it, and found for herself, first in
France and then England, a life at least as
rich as the one she’d abandoned. Just how
rich I learned for myself during the seven
years it was my privilege to know her. With
an almost American forwardness that was
one of her virtues, she’d written me about a
piece I’d published on Patrick Leigh Fermor,
who turned out to be a close friend of hers.
Her letter, disarmingly heart-on-sleeve and
full of the most generous praise, concluded
by inviting me to a party to be thrown for
her later that month by another friend,
George Plimpton. (Until 2005, she held the
aptly cosmopolitan title of London Editor
78 The New Criterion October 2008
for The Paris Review—which is, of course,
based in New York.) We hit it o¸ at once and
thereafter met up whenever possible. Over
time I cobbled together the main parts of her
story, supplementing what I gathered at first
hand by reading her two fine memoirs, The
Blindfold Horse and A Girl in Paris. The
lineaments that gradually took shape were
unique.
Born Shamsi Assar (“Shusha” was a
childhood nickname) in 1935, she belonged
to a distinguished intellectual family. When,
ten years before her birth, Reza Shah came
to power, he put her jurist grandfather in
charge of drafting a new civil code, to which
her father, a philosopher and theologian at
the newly founded University of Tehran,
contributed as well. Determined to combat
illiteracy, Reza Shah also spurred Western-
style education, including for girls, and
before long Shusha had fallen hard for
European literature. “The Persia in which I
lived,” she writes, “was very much like the
nineteenth-century Russia described by its
great authors.” French authors also mir-
rored her own reality—“my paternal rel-
atives came straight out of Balzac and
Flaubert”—and it was to their country that
she found herself most drawn. Having won
a scholarship to the Sorbonne, she moved
to Paris at sixteen, all by herself and with
absolutely no foreign travel under her belt.
Her initial loneliness and disorientation
were severe, but she eventually found her
way into the Left Bank demimonde, carry-

ing on the obligatory flirtation with Com-
munism (soon renounced with proper dis-
gust) and mingling with Café Flore types;
one scene in A Girl in Paris finds her com-
forting a friend who’s just been seduced and
tossed aside by Camus. She also stumbled,
to her own surprise, into a music career. For
several years in Paris she’d been taking clas-
sical voice lessons—“Since you are Persian,”
one teacher announced, “we will start you
with the aria in Handel’s Xerxes”—without
giving much thought to her native tradi-
tions, until Jacques Prévert (who became a
lifelong friend) encouraged her to try her
hand at Persian folksongs and helped ar-
range a record deal. The result was a string
of fourteen LPs, with songs—mostly written
by Shusha herself—in Persian, French, and
English, as well as countless performing en-
gagements, both in France and England.
England had never been in her plans. In
1961, after a decade in Paris, she’d decided to
return to Iran by way of London, where she
meant to spend only a week. A friend had
urged her to look up an art dealer and
Amazon explorer named Nicholas Guppy, of
the eponymous Anglo-Trinidadian fish fam-
ily. On her first night in town she did so, and
by the next day the two were engaged,
having been poleaxed by the kind of coup de
foudre one associates more with Paris than
London. The marriage produced two sons
—one of whom, Darius, is something of a
tabloid celebrity in Britain for his scrapes
with the law and misadventures with his Old
Etonian cronies Earl Spencer and Boris
Johnson—but ended after fifteen years.
London, however, became her permanent
home. She continued as a professional singer
for a time before shifting primarily to writ-
ing—memoirs, a travel book, literary jour-
nalism, all of it shot through with her
distinctive avidity—interspersed with the
occasional documentary film or radio broad-
cast.
But in a sense her ultimate vocation was
friendship. The number and variety of
people she knew never ceased to amaze me:
besides Leigh Fermor, Plimpton, and Pré-
vert, she was on close terms over the years
Notebook
with everyone from Lady Diana Cooper to
Ted Hughes, A. J. Ayer to Francis Bacon
—hardly a predictable accumulation. She
seemed to have friends positively every-
where; when I told her I was going to be in
Aleppo, she at once insisted I look up the
Italian consul and his wife, a French novelist
(and I was to inflict myself on other friends
of hers in Beirut). On her own turf she en-
joyed playing the salonière, hosting some
formidable polyglot assemblages of charm
and brainpower. Yet she was no mere collec-
tor of people. Fame and an illustrious
pedigree probably counted a bit, but only
when backed up by real character, and even
her fanciest friends were devoid of stu˝ness.
One of my fondest memories is of a party in
Shusha’s honor, thrown by a granddaughter
of Churchill, at which an uproarious food
fight broke out. (With full Winstonian zest,
the granddaughter at one point nailed me
between the eyes with a hunk of baguette.)
W hat made Shusha such a magnet for so
many? I can’t speak for others, but for me the
attraction had to do in part with her ap-
proach to friendship, which she took more
seriously and raised to a higher art than any-
one I’ve known, fusing a somewhat mystical
reverence for the abstract ideal—both her
Sufism and the Persian “cult of friendship,”
as she called it, informed this touching exal-
tation—with all the reality-tested, on-the-
spot qualities one could wish for in a friend:
loyalty, thoughtfulness, and so forth. Even
more alluring, though, was her sheer per-
sonal presence. A hint of the gypsy in her
look combined with the Zsa Zsa Gaborian
huskiness of her voice (“Dahling, how
mahvelous!”) to produce a certain crystal-
ball manner. Yet this slight otherworldliness
was o¸set by an earthy torrent of ebullience,
curiosity, and, above all, warmth; to see her
again after an interval was to be instantly
swept up into a whirlwind of a¸ection and
fun. At the same time, she could be openly
egocentric; on hearing that I was about to
start her Blindfold Horse, her reaction was,
“My dear, how I envy you the pleasure!” Ini-
tially taken aback, I came to appreciate her
The New Criterion October 2008 79
 Notebook
frank self-regard as a welcome change from
the usual false modesty. One thing I learned
from her example, in fact, is that those who
are well pleased with themselves often make
the best friends, since they are in a better
position to toast one’s own little triumphs
and mourn one’s defeats wholeheartedly—
no sour grapes or Schadenfreude from such
as she.
L ast December, I saw her in New York,
and she was in top, sparkling form as al-
ways. A few days later, after returning to
London, she felt dizzy, went to the doctor,
and was told she had terminal brain cancer,
with no more than a few months to live. In
February, I went to see her for what we
knew would be the final time. Wearing a
scarf to conceal her ravaged hair, she looked
more than ever like an optimistic Madame
Sosostris. No tarot cards had foretold her
own sudden reversal of fortune, and I ex-
pected her to be at least somewhat bitter at
having abruptly to give up a life she so
relished. But during the three days I spent
at her bedside—she was resolved to die at
home, in her modest Chelsea flat—I detect-
ed not a trace of self-pity, nor of fear. Except
for her diminished stamina, she was the
same gregarious dynamo as usual. The
phone seemed to ring every ten minutes as
word of her illness continued to spread, and
she’d e¸ortlessly switch from English to
French to Persian and back again. (Once,
after she finished an animated long conver-
sation in Persian, I asked her who’d called.
It turned out to have been Empress Farah,
widow of the last Shah of Iran.) Also in
three languages, she quoted reams of poet-
ry, as if taking inventory of a lifetime’s
absorption; particularly compelling were
her recitations of Baudelaire. There were
flashes, too, of the old scornful fire, which
had always given point to her essential
80 The New Criterion October 2008
sweetness; when I brought up the notori-
ously feeble and corrupt Qajar dynasty,
deposed by Reza Shah, she reviled it as
vehemently as if it had been ousted only
yesterday: “I’d die of shame,” she thun-
dered, “if I had a single drop of Qajar blood
in my body!” And she was full of surprises
to the end. One day she mentioned in pass-
ing that Prince Charles had been by to see
her just before my arrival. Prince Charles?
Though I’d never previously heard a word
about it, they’d been friends for years. It
takes a special kind of restraint not to drop a
name like that.
The week after my visit, she published in
The Guardian a fervent paean to the prince,
whom she praised in terms of the ideal of
Persian kingship articulated in the national
epic, the Shahnameh, which had been much
on her mind. The editorial concludes with
this paragraph: “Well, the doctors have told
me that my cancer is terminal, and so I am
having to dictate what is certainly my last
piece of journalism. I shall end, perhaps un-
journalistically, by declaring precisely what I
feel: God save the Queen! And God bless the
Prince of Wales.” How like her, how stub-
bornly and gloriously like her. She was one
of nature’s aristocrats.
About a month later she died, on March
21. Since then, I’ve thought often of a Per-
sian proverb or line of poetry (I never
learned the source) I heard her quote in
translation several times over the phone,
whenever the friend she was talking to
began to crumble at the prospect of losing
her. “The bird dies, but the flight remains,”
she’d gently say. She meant the soul,
presumably—firm was her belief in an after-
life—but I picture something like a contrail,
a bold lingering arc through the ether,
described by a rara avis of magnificent
plumage.