The New York Review of Books - November 19, 2015

8/20/2019 The New York Review of Books - November 19, 2015

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JUDGE RAKOFF ON

CORPORATE CROOKS

Stacy Schiff: The Nabokovs’ Love Story

King Lear & the Real King

Svetlana Alexievich: ‘The Man Who Flew’

Marcia Angell: Medical Victims

The Spirit of Francis Bacon

Charles Simic:

How to Listen to theDebates

PART TWO OFTHEIR CONVERSATION

President Obama &Marilynne Robinson

November 19, 2015 / Volume LXII, Number 18


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Unwrap a

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CITY CREATURES

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THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Unseen Glass Plate Photographsof the Western Front

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THE LEGENDARY DETECTIVE

The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction

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NEGATIVE CERTAINTIES

Jean-Luc Marionranslated by Stephen E. Lewis

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THE STONE SOUP

EXPERIMENT

Why Cultural Boundaries Persist

Deborah Downing Wilson“Tis is the most important controlled study of howgroups construct themselves through confrontationin half a century. It is beautifully documented and

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NOTHING

Three Inquiries in Buddhism

Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn,and Timothy Morton

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SIDE EFFECTS AND

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The Economic Consequences ofHealth-Care Reform

Casey B. Mulligan“Te supply side is the great neglected side of thehealth-care debate, and Mulligan has written thebest book on it to date.”—yler Cowen, GeorgeMason University

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HOW DOGS WORK

Raymond Coppinger and MarkFeinsteinForeword by Gordon M. Burghardt

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Alex Traub and Andrew Katzenstein, Editorial Assi stants; Max Nelson, Editorial Intern; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher; Borden Elniff, Katie Jefferis, and John Thorp,Type Production; Janet Noble, Cover Production; Kazue Soma Jensen, Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Michael King, TechnicalDirector & Advertising Sales Manager; Oona Patrick, Classified Advertising; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice Fellegara, Directorof Marketing and Planning; Andrea Moore, Assistant Circulation Manager; Matthew Howard, Director of Electronic Publishing; Angela Hederman, SpecialProjects; Diane R. Seltzer, Office Manager/List Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights; Margarette Devlin, Comptroller; Pearl Williams, Assistant Comptroller;Teddy Wright, Receptionist; Microfilm and Microcard Services: NAPC, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

On the cover: President Obama presenting the National Humanities Medal to Marilynne Robinson at the White House, July 2013 (Pete Marovich/Getty Images);

Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait , 1987, oil on canvas, 14 x 12 inches (Private Collection, New York/© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved./ DACS, London/ARS, NY 2015. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery). The drawings on pages 40 and 47 are by David Levine. The illustration on page 68 is by James Ferguson.

The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February,March, April, May, June, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994. Periodicals postage paid

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Contents6 President Obama and A Conversation in Iowa

Marilynne Robinson10 Svetlana Alexievi ch The Man Who Flew, with an introduction by Jamey Gambrell14 Colm Tóibín Late Francis Bacon: Spirit & Substance16 Robert Darnton The Other Paris by Luc Sante18 Julian Lucas A Brief History of Seven Kill ings by Marlon James22 Stacy Schiff Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov, edited and translated f rom the Russian

by Olga Voronina and Brian BoydNabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita by Robert Roper

26 Fintan O’Toole The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro28 Jana Prikryl Poem29 Michael Ignatieff American Foreign Pol icy and It s Thinkers by Perry Anderson

Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy by David Milne31 Julian Barnes The Crime and the Silence : Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne

by Anna Bikont, translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles

34 Peter Brown Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint by David Potter38 Jed S. Rakoff Entrepreneurial Litigation: Its Rise, Fall, and Future by John C. Coffee Jr.41 David S. Reynolds Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson

The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters by James M. McPherson

43 Steven Mithen The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins by David R. Begun46 Garry Wills Keeping the Vow: The Untold Story of Married Catholic Priests by D. Paul Sullins48 Marcia Angell The Nuremberg Code issued by the Nuremberg tribunal

The Declaration of Helsinki issued by the World Medical AssociationThe Ethics Police?: The Struggle to Make Human Research Safe by Robert L. Klitzman

51 Leo Carey All Days Are Night by Peter Stamm, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann53 Benjamin M. Friedman Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change by Edmund Phelps55 Henri Cole Poem56 Perry Link Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi, translated from the Chinese by Shelly Bryant

A Map of Betrayal by Ha JinKinder Than Solitude by Yiyun LiThe Dog: Stories by Jack Livings

60 Amy Knight Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary SullivanStalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg V. Khlevniuk, translated from the Russian

by Nora Seligman Favorov

63 Anthony Grafton Peiresc’s Mediterranean World by Peter N. Miller66 Charles Simic Bernie & Hillary & the Future68 William D. Nordhaus ‘The Pope & the Planet’: An Exchange with William J. Teska, Harvey Cox, and Rebecca Stein68 Letters from Joshua Oppenheimer, Geoffrey Baker, Nicholas Kenyon, Martin Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson,

Sudhir Hazareesingh, Mark Lilla, Jamyang Norbu, Gerard Koeppel, George Szpiro,and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

VETLANA ALEXIEVICH is the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize inLiterature. Her latest book, Second Hand Time, will be published in Eng-

sh next year. JAMEY GAMBRELL is a writer on Russian art and cul-ure. She has translated works by Marina Tsvetaeva and Tatyana Tolstaya,n addition to Vladimir Sorokin’s three-volume Ice Tril ogy and his Day ofhe Oprichnik. Her translation of Sorokin’s novel The Blizzard will be pub-shed in December.

MARCIA ANGELL is a member of the faculty of Global Health & SocialMedicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor-in-Chief of The

New England Journal of Medicine .

ULIAN BARNES’s collection of art criticism Keeping an Eye Open is pub-shed this month. His new novel, The Noise of Time, will come out next year.

PETER BROWN is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of HistoryEmeritus at Princeton. His latest book is The Ransom of the Soul:Afterl ife and Wealth in Ear ly Western Ch rist ianity .

LEO CAREY is a Senior Editor at The New Yorker .

HENRI COLE’s most recent collection of poems, Nothing to Declare, wasublished earlier this year.

ROBERT DARNTON is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Profes-or and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard. His latest book is

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature .

BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Po-itical Economy at Harvard. His books include The Moral Consequences of

Economic Growth and Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of AmericanEconomic Policy Under Reagan and After .

ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches European history at Princeton. His mostecent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practicet the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of Fire and Ashes: Success

nd Failure in Politics.AMY KNIGHT is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Her books includeWho Killed Kirov: The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery, Spies Without Cloaks:The KGB’s Successors, and How the Cold War Began: The Igor GouzenkoAffair a nd the Hunt for Soviet Spi es.

PERRY LINK teaches at the University of California at Riverside. Histranslation of the autobiography of the Chinese dissident astrophysicistFang Lizhi, The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Science toEnemy of the State, will be published next year.

JULIAN LUCAS is an Associate Editor at Cabinet . He was President ofThe Harvard Advocate in 2014.

STEVEN MITHEN is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Early Pre-history at the University of Reading. His books include The Prehistory of theMind, After the I ce: A Glob al Hu man H istor y, The Singing Neanderthals,and, most recently, Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World.

BARACK OBAMA is the President of the United States.MARILYNNE ROBINSON ’s collection of essays The Givenness of Things is published this month.

FINTAN O’TOOLE is Literary Editor of The Irish Times and Leonard L.Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Ir ish Letters at Pr inceton. His books includeShakespeare Is Hard But So Is Life.

JANA PRIKRYL’s first book of poems, The After Party, will be publishedin 2016. She is a Senior Editor at The New York Review.

JED S. RAKOFF is a United States District Judge for the Southern Districtof New York.

DAVID S. RE YNOLDS is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Gradu-ate Center. His most recent books are Mightier Than the Sword: UncleTom’s Cabin and the Battle for America and Lincoln’s Selected Writings:

A Norton Crit ical Edit ion.

STACY SCHIFF is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) andCleopatra: A Life, among other books. Her The Witches: Salem, 1692 willbe published this month.

CHARLES SIMIC has been Poet Laureate of the United States. TheLunatic, his new volume of poetry, and The Life of Images, a book of hisselected prose, were published in April.

COLM TÓIBÍN is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humani-ties at Columbia. His most recent book is On Elizabeth Bishop.GARRY WILLS is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. Heis the author, most recently, of The Future of the Catholic Church withPope Francis.

CONTRIBUTORS

Editor: Robert B. Silversenior Editors: Michael Shae, Hugh Eakin, Eve Bowen, Jana Prikryl

Contributing Editor: Ann KjellbergAssistant Editors: Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Christopher Carroll,

Madeleine Schwartz

Founding Co-editor: Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)Publisher: Rea S. HedermanAssociate Publisher: Catherine TiceBusiness Manager: Raymond ShapiroAdvertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen

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Daily online comment from New York Review contributors at nybooks.com

Plus: Jenny Uglow on the World War I illustrations of E.H. Shepard and more

A Mem ber o f the Pers eus Bo oks G roup

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6/726 The New York Review

President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa

The following conversation betweenPresident Obama and Marilynne Rob-inson was conducted in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 14. An audio re-cording of the conversation can beheard at itunes.com/nybooks. The first part appeared in the November 5 issue

of The New York Review. —The Editors

The President : Are you somebodywho worries about people not readingnovels anymore? And do you thinkthat has an impact on the culture?When I think about how I understandmy role as citizen, setting aside beingpresident, and the most important setof understandings that I bring to thatposition of citizen, the most importantstuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learnedfrom novels. It has to do with empathy.It has to do with being comfortablewith the notion that the world is com-plicated and full of grays, but there’s

still truth there to be found, and thatyou have to strive for that and work forthat. And the notion that it’s possibleto connect with some[one] else eventhough they’re very dif ferent from you.

And so I wonder when you’re sittingthere writing longhand in some—yourmessy longhand somewhere—so I won-der whether you feel as if that sameshared culture is as prevalent and as im-portant in the lives of people as it was,say, when you were that little girl inIdaho, coming up, or whether you feel asif those voices have been overwhelmedby flashier ways to pass the time.

Marilynne Robinson: I’m not really theperson—because I’m almost always

talking with people who love books.

The President : Right. You sort of havea self-selecting crew.

Robinson: And also teaching writers—I’m quite aware of the publicationof new writers. I think—I mean, theliterature at present is full to burst-ing. No book can sell in that way thatGone with the Wind sold, or somethinglike that. But the thing that’s wonder-ful about it is that there’s an incred-ible variety of voices in contemporarywriting. You know people say, is therean American tradition surviving in lit-erature, and yes, our tradition is the in-

credible variety of voices.. . .And [now] you don’t get the conver-sation that would support the literarylife. I think that’s one of the things thathas made book clubs so popular.

The President : That’s interesting. Partof the challenge is—and I see this inour politics—is a common conversa-tion. It’s not so much, I think, thatpeople don’t read at all; it’s that every-body is reading [in] their niche, andso often, at least in the media, they’rereading stuff that reinforces their ex-isting point of view. And so you don’thave that phenomenon of here’s a set ofgreat books that everybody is familiarwith and everybody is talking about.

Sometimes you get some TV showsthat fill that void, but increasingly now,that’s splintered, too, so other than theSuper Bowl, we don’t have a lot of com-mon reference points. And you can

argue that that’s part of the reason whyour politics has gotten so polarized, isthat—when I was growing up, if thepresident spoke to the country, therewere three stations and every city hadits own newspaper and they were goingto cover that story. And that would last

for a couple of weeks, people talkingabout what the president had talkedabout.

Today, my poor press team, they’retweeting every two minutes becausesome new thing has happened, whichthen puts a premium on the sensationaland the most outrageous or a conflictas a way of getting attention and break-ing through the noise—which then cre-ates, I believe, a pessimism about thecountry because all those quiet, sturdyvoices that we were talking about at thebeginning, they’re not heard.

It’s not interesting to hear a storyabout some good people in some quietplace that did something sensible and

figured out how to get along.

Robinson: I think that in our earlierhistory—the Gettysburg Address orsomething—there was the conscioussense that democracy was an achieve-ment. It was not simply the most effi-cient modern system or something. Itwas something that people collectivelymade and they understood that theyheld it together by valuing it. I thinkthat in earlier periods—which is notto say one we will never return to—the president himself was this sort ofsymbolic achievement of democracy.And there was the human respect thatI was talking about before, [that] com-pounds itself in the respect for the per-

sonified achievement of a democraticculture. Which is a hard thing—notmany people can pull that together,you know.. . . So I do think that one ofthe things that we have to realize and

talk about is that we cannot take it forgranted. It’s a made thing that we makecontinuously.

The President : A source of optimism—I took my girls to see Hamilton, thisnew musical on Broadway, which you

should see. Because this wonderfulyoung Latino playwright produced thisplay, musical, about Alexander Ham-ilton and the Founding Fathers. Andit’s all in rap and hip-hop. And it’s allplayed by young African-Americanand Latino actors.

And it sounds initially like it wouldnot work at all. And it is brilliant, and somuch so that I’m pretty sure this is theonly thing that Dick Cheney and I haveagreed on—during my entire politicalcareer—it speaks to this vibrancy ofAmerican democracy, but also the factthat it was made by these living, breath-ing, flawed individuals who were bril-liant. We haven’t seen a collection of that

much smarts and chutzpah and charac-ter in any other nation in history, I think.But what’s most important about

[Hamilton] and why I think it has re-ceived so many accolades is it makesit live. It doesn’t feel distant. And itdoesn’t feel set apart from the argu-ments that we’re having today.

And Michelle and I , when we went tosee it, the first thing we thought aboutwas what could we do to encourage thiskind of creativity in teaching historyto our kids. Because, look, America isfamously ahistorical. That’s one of ourstrengths—we forget things. You goto other countries, they’re still havingarguments from four hundred yearsago, and with serious consequences,

right? They’re bloody arguments. Inthe Middle East right now, you’ve gotarguments dating back to the seventhcentury that are live today. And wetend to forget that stuff. We don’t

sometimes even remember what hap-pened two weeks ago.

But this point you made about us car-ing enough about the blood, sweat, andtears involved in maintaining a democ-racy is vital and important. But it also isthe reason why I think those who have

much more of an “us” versus “them,”fearful, conspiratorial brand of politicscan thrive sometimes is because theycan ignore that history.

If, in fact, you don’t know muchabout the evolution of slavery and thecivil rights movement and the CivilWar and the postwar amendments,then the arguments that are being hadnow about how our criminal justice sys-tem interacts with African-Americansseem pretty foreign. It’s like, what arethe issues here? I f you’re not paying at-tention to how Jefferson and Madisonand Franklin and others were think-ing about the separation of churchand state, then you’re not that worried

about keeping those lines separate.

Robinson: Exactly. I believe very muchin teaching history. I spend an enor-mous amount of time working withprimary sources and various sourcesand so on. And I think that a lot of thehistory that is taught is a sort of short-hand that’s not representative of muchof anything. I think that’s too bad.

The President : Do you pay a lot ofattention to day-to-day politics thesedays?

Robinson: I do actual ly. I read the newsfor a couple of hours every morning.

The President : Right. And how do youthink your writer’s sensibility changeshow you think about it? Or are you justkind of in the mix like everybody else,and just, ah, that red team drives menuts, and you’re cheering for the blue?

Robinson: Well, if I’m going to be hon-est, I think that there are some politicalcandidacies that are much more humanein their implications and consequencesthan others. I mean, if suddenly poleswere to be reversed and what I see ashumanistic came up on the other side,there I’d be. I think in my essay on fearI was talking about the assumption ofgenerosity in this culture, you know?*

We have done some very magnanimousthings in our history.

The President : Yes.

Robinson: Which seem in many waysunifying, defining. And then you seepeople running on what seem to beincredibly mean-spirited, tight-fistedassumptions, and you think, this is notus. This is not our way forward. Well,I’m getting all too political, but insult-ing people that you know will becomecitizens—however that’s managed—giving them this bitter memory to carryinto their participation in the nationallife. Why do that?

The President : We’re going througha spasm of fear. And you’re seeing it

President Obama and Marilynne Robinson at the airport in Des Moinesafter their conversation, just before he boarded Air Force One, September 2015

P e

t e S o u z a / W h i t e H o u s e

*“Fear,” The New York Review, Sep-tember 24, 2015.


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by changing his human nature. He’sa brilliant engineer. . . The father be-lieves that he’s uncovered the secret . . .That he’s God! He made his son intothe most miserable of people . . . Naturedoesn’t reveal itself to human reason. . .It only entices it.”

Here are a few more of his mono-logues. As I remember them, at least.

“The phenomenon of Hitler willtrouble many minds for a long timeto come. Excite them. How, after all,is the mechanism of mass psychosis

launched? Mothers held their childrenup crying: ‘Here, Führer, take them!’

“We are consumers of Marxism.Who can say he knows Marxism?Knows Lenin, knows Marx? There’searly Marx . . . And Marx at the endof his life . . . The halftones,shades, the whole blossom-ing complexity of it all, isunknowable to us. No onecan increase our knowledge.We are all interpreters. . .

“At the moment we’restuck in the past like we usedto be stuck in the future.I also thought I hated thismy whole life, but it turns

out that I loved it. Loved?. . .How can anyone possiblylove this pool of blood? Thiscemetery? What filth, whatnightmares. . .what blood ismixed into it all . . . But I dolove it!

“I proposed a new disser-tation topic to our professor:‘Socialism as an IntellectualMistake.’ His response was:‘Nonsense.’ As if I coulddecipher the Bible or theApocalypse with equal suc-cess. Well, nonsense is aform of creativity, too . . .The old man was bewil-dered. You know him your-

self—he’s not one of thoseold farts, but everything thathappened was a personaltragedy for him. I have torewrite my dissertation, buthow can he rewrite his life?Right now each of us has to rehabil itatehimself. There’s a mental illness—mul-tiple, or dissociated, personality dis-order. People who have it forget theirnames, social positions, their friendsand even their children, their lives. It’sa dissolution of personality. . .when aperson can’t combine the official takeor government belief, his own point ofview, and his doubts . . . how true is whathe thinks , and how true is what he says.

The personality splits into two or threeparts . . . There are plenty of historyteachers and professors in psychiatrichospitals . . . The better they were at in-stilling something, the more they werecorrupted . . . At the very least threegenerations . . . and a few others are in-fected. . . How mysteriously everythingeludes definition. . . The temptation ofutopia...

“Take Jack London. . . Rememberhis story about how you can live lifeeven if you’re in a straitjacket? You

just have to shrivel up, sink down, andget used to it. . . You’ll even be able todream...”

Now that I analyze what he said. . .follow his train of thought . . . I can seethat he was preparing for departure. . .

We were drinking tea one time, andout of the blue he said:

“I know how long I have . . .”“Vanya, what on earth are you say-

ing!” my wi fe exclaimed. “We were justgetting ready to marry you off.”

“I was joking. You know, animalsnever commit suicide. They don’t vio-late the course. . .”

The day after that conversation thedormitory housekeeper found a suit,practically brand new, in the rubbishbin; his passport was in the pocket.She ran to his room. He was embar-rassed and muttered something about

having been drunk. But he never evertouched a drop! He kept the passport,but gave her the suit: “I don’t needit anymore.”

He’d decided to get rid of theseclothes, this physical membrane. He

had a more subtle, detailed under-standing than we did of what awaitedhim. And he liked Christ’s age.

One might think he’d gone mad.But a few weeks earlier I’d heard hisresearch presentation . . . Water-tightlogic. A superb defense!

Does a person really need to knowwhen his time will come? I once knewa guy who knew it. A friend of my fa-ther’s. When he left for the war, a gypsy

woman prophesied: he needn’t beafraid of bullets because he wouldn’tdie in the war, but at age fifty-eight athome, sitting in an armchair. He wentthrough the whole war, came underfire, was known as a foolhardy fellow,and was sent on the most difficult mis-sions. He returned without a scratch.Until age fifty-seven he drank andsmoked since he knew he’d die at fifty-eight, so until then he could do any-thing. His last year was terrible. . . Hewas constantly afraid of death. . . Hewas waiting for it. . . And he died at agefifty-eight, at home. . . in an armchair infront of the television . . .

Is it better for a person when the linehas been drawn? The border between

here and there? This is where the ques-tions begin...

Once I suggested he dig into hischildhood memories and desires, whathe’d dreamed of and then forgotten.

He could fulfill them now. . . He nevertalked to me about his childhood. Thensuddenly he opened up. From the age ofthree months he had lived in the coun-try with his grandmother. When he gota bit older he would stand on a treestump and wait for his mama. Mamareturned after he’d finished school,with three brothers and sisters—eachchild from a different man. He studiedat the university, kept ten rubles forhimself, and sent the rest of his stipendhome. To Mama. . .

“I don’t remember her ever wash-ing anything for me, not even ahandkerchief. But in the summerI’ll go back to the country: I’ll repaperthe walls. And if she says a kind wordto me, I’ll be so happy. . .”

He never had a girl-friend...

His brother came for himfrom the countryside. Hewas in the morgue . . . Webegan looking for a womanto help, to wash him, dresshim. There are women whodo that sort of thing. When

she came she was drunk. Idressed him myself. . .In the village I sat alone

with him all night. Amidthe old men and women.His brother didn’t hide thetruth, although I’d askedhim not to say anything, atleast to their mother. Buthe got drunk and blabbedeverything. It poured fortwo days. At the cemeterya tractor had to pull the carwith the casket. The oldladies crossed themselvesfearfully and zealously:

“Went against God’s will,he did.”

The priest wouldn’t lethim be buried in the cem-etery: he’d committed anunforgivable sin . . . But thedirector of the village coun-cil arrived in a van and gave

his permission . . .We returned at twilight. Wet.

Destroyed. Drunk. It occurred to methat for some reason righteous menand dreamers always choose thesekinds of places. This is the only kind ofplace they are born. Our conversationsabout Marxism as a unified planetarycivilization floated up in my memory.About Christ being the first socialist.And about how the mystery of Marxist

religion wasn’t fully comprehensibleto us, even though we were up to ourknees in blood.

Everyone sat down at the table. Theypoured me a glass of homemade vodkaright away. I drank it . . .

A year later my wife and I went to thecemetery again. . .

“He’s not here,” my wife said. “Whenwe came the other times we were visit-ing him, this time it’s just a tombstone.Remember how he used to smile inphotographs?”

So he had moved on. Women aremore delicate instruments than men,and she felt it.

The landscape was the same. Wet.Dilapidated. Drunk. His mother

showered us with apples for the trip.The tipsy tractor driver drove us tothe bus stop. . .

—Translated f rom the Russianby Jamey Gambrell

‘Marx as Prometheus’; engraving, 1843

A r t R e s o u r c e

W C Y

M F D


13/72November 19, 2015 13

Ethical LonelinessThe Injustice of Not Being Heard

JILL STAUFFER“Lucid, attentive, and nuanced, this

scintillating and surprising work installs a

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Realizing Awakened

Consciousness Inter views with Buddhist Teachersand a New Perspective on the Mind

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Wall StreetersThe Creators and Corruptorsof American Finance

EDWARD MORRIS

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Morris uses the informative lens of biography

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from the saints to the sinners.”

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Green Capital A New Perspective on Growth

CHRISTIAN DE PERTHUIS

AND PIERRE-ANDRÉ JOUVET

Translated by Michael Westlake

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Walking the Night Road

Coming of Age in Grief ALEXANDRA BUTLER

“Beautiful, heartbreaking and incisive, Butler's

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mother’s tragic battle against cancer. Her

words go beyond just grief, they inspire a

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a child, and how the lines that define familial

roles are often more complex and messy

than they seem . . . Walking the Night Road is a

cathartic tribute to anyone who has ever lost

a parent.”

—Will Reiser, Screenwriter, 50/50



Late Francis Bacon: Spirit & SubstanceColm Tóibín

In his book On Late Style, publishedafter his death, the critic Edward Saidponders the aura surrounding workproduced by artists in the last years of

their lives. He asks: “Does one growwiser with age, and are there uniquequalities of perception and form thatartists acquire as a result of age in thelate phase of their career?” He con-siders the idea that some late workspossess “a special matur ity, a new spiritof reconciliation and serenity often ex-pressed in terms of a miraculous trans-figuration of common reality.” Yet healso questions the very notion of lateserenity: “But what of artistic latenessnot as harmony and resolution but asintransigence, difficulty, and unre-solved contradiction? What if age andill health don’t produce the serenity of‘ripeness is all’? ”

Said further ponders, as must anyone

who thinks about th is subject, the sheerstrangeness of Ludwig van Beethoven’slate string quartets and his last pianosonatas, their insistence on breakingwith easy form, their restlessness, theiraura of incompletion (especially thepiano sonatas), the feeling that theyare striving toward some set of mu-sical textures that have not yet beenimagined and cannot be achieved inBeethoven’s lifetime. In other words,it is that these late pieces wish to rep-resent the mind or the imagination notas it faces death but rather as it faceslife, as it sets out to reimagine a lifewith new beginnings and new possibili-ties but also with the ragged sense that

there might not be much time.Said quotes Theodor Adorno on lateBeethoven: “Touched by death, thehand of the master sets free the massesof material that he used to form; itstears and fissures, witnesses to thefinal powerlessness of the I confrontedwith Being, are its final work.” As Saidwould have it, Adorno does not seelate style as a departure. Rather, “late-ness includes the idea that one cannotreally go beyond lateness at all, cannottranscend or lift oneself out of lateness,but can only deepen the lateness.” Fi-nally, Said demands that we read latework with due subtlety, noting con-tinuity as much as rupture, noting adeepening of something rather than a

new departure. “As Adorno said aboutBeethoven,” Said writes, “late styledoes not admit the definitive cadencesof death; instead, death appears in a re-fracted mode, as irony.”

Two weeks before he died, as hisheart was failing, the poet W.B. Yeatswrote a poem he titled “CuchulainComforted,” which begins with a set

of clear statements free of metaphor,tonally stark, sharp, and pointed al-most like the arrows that appear insome of Francis Bacon’s work. Thepoem was written in terza rima, a formnew to Yeats. Unusually for his work,this poem did not need many drafts.It seemed to have come to him simply,easily, almost natura lly. In earlier Yeatspoems and plays, Cuchulain, a figurefrom Irish mythology, had appeared asthe implacable and solitary hero, pre-pared for single combat, free of fear.Now he has “six mortal wounds” andis attended by figures—Shrouds—whoencourage him to join them in the actof sewing rather than fighting. They lethim know that they themselves are not

among the heroic dead but are “Con-victed cowards all by kindred slain//Or driven from home and left to die infear.”

Thus, at the very end of his life,Yeats created an image that seemedthe very opposite of what had nour-ished his imagination most. His he-roic figure has now been gentled; hisfierce and solitary warrior has joinedothers in the act of sewing; instead ofthe company of brave men, Cuchulainseems content to rest finally amongcowards. This poem, then, is not aculminating statement for Yeats but acontradictory one; it is not a crowningversion of a fami liar poetic form but an

experiment in a form associated mostwith Dante. Instead of attempting tosum up, it is as though Yeats wished torelease fresh energy by repudiating, bybeginning again, by offering hi s hero aset of images alien to him that servedall the more to give the hero ambiguity,felt life, unsettlement.

In this way, late work becomes it-self unsettling. And in the late work ofother writers this example of an imagi-nation refusing to lie down and sum upcan be seen. It would be easy to imag-ine, for example, that Thomas Mann’sDeath in Venice was written toward theend of his life. In fact, it was written in1911, when Mann was thirty-six. It is ayoung man’s book; its images of desire,

decay, and death could not be so easilyentertained by a writer facing into lateor last work.

Mann’s last work, in fact, was a com-edy, a book filled with trickery and

amusing, almost throwaway parodies.It was begun when Mann was in hismid-thirties and continued when hewas seventy-five and prone to illness,

around the time when he would re-turn from America to live in Switzer-land. The book is titled Confessions ofFel i x Krull, Confidence Man. In its useof a heavy style to convey light mate-rial, in its episodic structure, in thesheer roguishness of Felix Krull, thenovel represents a rueful commentaryon its author’s own past seriousness,as well as a way of proposing a freshstart for him, narrated by a trickster.But more important, perhaps, is thefact that Mann completed volume one

with the suggestion that subsequentvolumes would follow. The picaresquestory that Felix told of his exploits wasopen-ended. It left room for Mann tocontinue as though there would be noend. Its very lightness set about defyingdeath, even if Mann died a year afterthe book’s publication.

“Every piece of work,” Mann wrote,“is a realization, fragmentary but com-plete in itself, of our individuality.”Perhaps the writer whose individualityseems to intensify the most, becomingin his late work both more mysteriousand more apparent, is Bacon’s closecontemporary Samuel Beckett. Beck-ett’s work in the 1980s—he died in1989 at the age of eighty-three—paresdown form and language to a minimumin both fiction and drama.

Two of Beckett’s very last worksthrow interesting light on the work ofBacon, especially the late paintings.

Both are concerned with the figure orthe self as protean, uncertain, unsingu-lar, ready to be doubled or shadowed,poised to move outward into a secondself, or another self, or into a figurehovering near, waiting for substance.

In Nacht und Träume, for example,written for German television in 1982,a figure known simply as A dreams asecond figure, B, into being. Two handsthen appear as part of the dream.There are no words, merely snatches ofthe Schubert lied “Nacht und Träume.”

Franci s Bacon : Three Studies for Self-Portrait , 1976 ; oil on canvas, in three parts, each 14 x 12 inches

B a c o n .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .

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, L o n d o n / A R S , N Y 2 0 1 5 .

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C o u r t e s y G a g o s i a n G a l l e r y .

Franci s Bacon : Study from the Human Body and Portrait , 1988;oil on canvas, 78 x 58 1/8 inches

M

u s e u m f ü r G e g e n w a r t s k u n s t S i e g e n , T h e L a m b r e c h t S c h a

d e b e r g C o l l e c t i o n / © T h e E s t a t e o f F r a n c i s B a c o n .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .

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D A C S , L o n d o n / A R S , N Y 2 0 1 5

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P h o t o g r a p h y b y C h r i s t i a n W i c k l e r . C o u r t e s y G a g o

s i a n G a l l e r y .


15/7215November 19, 2015

The dream fades when A awakens, onlyor the sequence to repeat itself morelowly as the music is heard once again.

The short play is not concerned withdeath so much as with the fluidity ofhe self, or the way in which night and

dream and indeed ghostly music allowhe self to move into another realm, ahadow realm, or a realm made pos-ible by the imagination itself in which

another figure waits.Nacht und Träume is Beckett’s pen-

ultimate play. In prose, the very lastpiece he wrote was St irr ings St ill , con-ceived toward the end of 1984 and com-pleted three years later. This short texttarts with the same idea as Nacht und

Träume. It questions the autonomy, theingleness of the self. It begins: “One

night as he sat at his table head on hands

he saw himself rise and go.” The open-ng of the second paragraph repeatshis with a minor variation. The figures not, however, moving toward death,

but toward another place in life. He willdisappear only to reappear. The pieceends with: “Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.” The very core ofhe process of fiction—the idea of self—s questioned here and undermined.

This is fundamental to the drama thatBeckett created as last work.

In this context, it is useful to look atBacon’s grave triptych Three Studiesfor Self-Portrait (1976), with its threeaces fluid against a black background.

As the eye moves from left to right, theace in the first section appears like a

mask. It is fully visible in the centerpanel, gazing outward. In the right-hand section, the face is already in an-other realm, some of it having mergedwith the blackness. What little of it re-

mains has an aura of enormous suffer-ing. It is not nothing, just as Beckett’s“Oh all to end” emphasizes the fact of

utterance within a continuity ratherthan an actual end. Nothing has ended.Instead of nothing, there is “all,” or theirony surrounding all.

As with Beckett’s Nacht und Träume or St irr ings St ill , it would be too crudeto suggest that Three Studies for Self-Portrait is a way of prefiguring death.In late work, no artist is concerned di-rectly with death but rather with creat-ing new form—often jagged, disturbingform, and often form that plays stillnessagainst some deep and energetic stirringwithin the self, as though to emphasizethat art is made only by the living.

In Beckett’s Nacht und Träume,then, the self lives with its dream-self,

its shadow-self. In some of Bacon’s otherlate work, the figure, filled with paint-erly substance, is shadowed by anothershape, a shape that has elements of thehuman form. In St ill Li fe: BrokenStatue and Shadow (1984), for example,it is interesting to see Bacon confront-ing the same problem faced by Beckettwhen dealing with the human presence,the human figure. In some of his latework, Beckett could not see the figureas single or self-contained, or simplymoving toward death; instead he saw itas being able to extend beyond its ownboundaries, finding what Joseph Conradcalled a “secret sharer,” even if the se-cret sharer was just the next sentence.

Bacon in this painting makes the

shadow figure more ghostly, strongerin outline than in positive space ortexture. It is not a shadow of the statueitself, having a different shape, whichsuggests that it has its own leftover

presence. It is, oddly, substance as wellas shadow.

This happens, too, in a number of otherlate works by Bacon, such as Study fromthe Human Body and Portrait (1988), inwhich the face is filled with substanceonly to give way to the fleshy torsoand legs that have less solid presence.And they in turn give way to their ownshadow. This happens again in F i gurein Movement (1978), as the writhing,

suffering sexual figure, filled with en-ergy and life, has a shadow almost likesomething the police might chalk onthe pavement at the scene of a crime tomark the outline where a body had been.

In both Beckett’s and Bacon’s work,this idea of the figure as fluid ratherthan, say, single or inert has its originsin necessity as much as in philosophy.There is a sense in the late work of bothartists that they are too busy seeingand working with form to be botheredthinking about or burdening us withphilosophy. There is something deeplyexciting and dramatic about a secondself, a figure waiting for the transferof energy that will allow it to come to

life, however flickeringly. Beckett was adramatist even at his most minimal. Hewished to create excitement even at hismost restrained. And so he made suchdoubles. Bacon made clear in inter-views how much the very imperativesof image-making mattered to him.

Thus these shadows, this blurringof self, at its most intense and magis-terial—for example, in Bacon’s Self-Portrait of 1987—created a force andenergy in the pictures that would strikethe nervous system of the viewer morepowerfully than any single, stable figure.

It is important to remember thatplaying with the ghostly or the shad-owy, using them to create pictorialmystery and excitement, makes its waythrough Bacon’s entire body of work,

just as the idea of a double or an alter-nate self will appear in earlier Beckettplays such as Krapp’s Last Tape, writ-ten in 1958. So, too, does Yeats use thesame sort of clear, chiseled statementsof “Cuchulain Comforted” in poemsas early as “Adam’s Curse,” publishedin 1904. And Mann was interested in

parody and trickery throughout his life.Therefore when we think about late

work we need to bear in mind connec-tions as much as distinctions, continu-ities as much as departures. Nonetheless,if we look at Bacon’s Sand Dune (1983),Paint ing March 1985 (1985), and Bloodon Pavement (1988), all three filledwith mysterious shapes, layers, andpresences, hovering toward and thenresisting abstraction, set in a sort ofaftermath, a place where the body hasbeen, it is possible to feel that Baconwas not content merely to find imagesthat would deepen what he had al-ready done, or would distill his vision,or would totalize it. Instead, there is a

restlessness here that we also find inBeethoven’s late chamber music—afeeling that Bacon might begin again,that he is searching for some way tomake images that he knows will onlybe possible for artists of the future, ifthey are even possible at all.

Working is a way, in any case, ofkeeping such knowledge at bay at leastfor the time being, a way of confrontingthe material world, of outfacing it, asthough time might actual ly relent or thespirit might gain more substance thananyone has ever before imagined.

Franci s Bacon : Sand Dune , 1983 ; oil and pastel on canvas, 78 x 58 inches

P r

i v a t e C o l l e c t i o n / © T h e E s t a t e o f F r a n c i s B a c o n .

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r e s e r v e d .

/

D A C S , L o n d o n / A R S

, N Y 2 0 1 5

.

P h o t o g r a p h y b y M i k e B r u c e .

C o u r t e s y G a g o s i

a n G a l l e r y .

Franci s Bacon : Painting March 1985 , 1985 ; oil on canvas, 78 x 58 1/4 inches



The Other Paris

by Luc Sante.Farrar, Straus and Giroux,306 pp., $28.00

All cities have ruts—paths worn by theroutines of their inhabitants as they goabout their business. Paris is especially

rutted, and the Parisians have an ex-pression for the sense of imprisonmentthat it imposes on them: “métro, boulot ,dodo” (subway, job, sleep). But thereis another Paris, the city inhabited bythose who don’t have jobs, either be-cause they can’t find employment orbecause they have opted out of life ina rut. The marginal, the poor, the ec-centrics, the bohemians, the dropouts,and the down-and-outs haunt the pagesof Luc Sante’s vivid tour of that otherParis, most of it buried under what re-mains of the nineteenth century.

Subterranean Paris still exists, someof it inhabited. I have a small apartmentin an old building in the second ar-

rondissement. One day, after leaving mybike in the cellar, I decided to explorethe subcellars. There were two of them,consisting of caves, filthy and unlit.Groping in the dark, three floors belowstreet level, I stumbled upon a body. Iran up the stairs and out the front door,looking for help. The first person I en-countered was a man washing dishes inthe kitchen of a restaurant next door.When I shouted through the open win-dow that there was a body in the bottomcellar, he replied calmly, “It’s nothing.He’s our clochard.” I hadn’t knownthat our apartment building provided arefuge for a homeless man; and after amoment’s reflection, I realized that the“our” used by the dishwasher did not in-

clude me or any other apartment owner.It referred to another Paris.

Although it is steeped in history—thoroughly understood and expertlynarrated—The Other Par i s is not ahistorical study. Nor is it a guidebook,although there exists a genre of “other”guidebooks: Thi s Other London, TheOther Side of Rome, etc. (The genrehas especially flourished in German;most European cities have inspiredguidebooks beginning Das andere . . . ;the earliest Das andere Par i s datesfrom 1983, and there is one currentlyavailable on YouTube.) Part of thefascination of The Other Par i s is thatit slips between genres. It can best be

characterized as a historical-culturaltour of a great city, or flâner ie, for LucSante invokes flaneurs throughout thebook and writes as one of them.

According to the ideal type inventedby Baudelaire, the flaneur takes in a cityby strolling through it. He (Baudelairedid not envision female flaneurs) doesnot follow a fixed itinerary but ratherloses himself in the crowd, swimmingwherever its currents take him and let-ting the cityscape work on his conscious-ness in unexpected ways. When inspired,flaneurs have produced some importantliterature. The line of their books ex-tends from the greatest of them all, LeTableau de Par i s by Louis-SébastienMercier (it grew from two to twelve vol-

umes in successive editions, all of themillegal, between 1781 and 1788),* toPar i s

inconnu (1861) by Alexandre Privatd’Anglemont, Nouvelles promenadesdans Par i s (1908) by Georges Cain,Le Paysan de Par i s (1926) by LouisAragon, Le P iéton de Par i s (1939) byLéon-Paul Fargue, Les Par i siens (1967)by Louis Chevalier, and The Streetsof Par i s (1980) by Richard Cobb.

Sante has mastered all of this litera-ture and a great deal more. He knowsthe city thoroughly, and he evokes itsspirit in the manner of Cobb, concentrat-ing on its poorest arrondissements andaccompanying his text with hundreds

of illustrations. Unlike the photographsin Cobb’s The Streets of Par i s, however,the photos in The Other Par i s have beenculled from archives and are often toosmall and blurred to be decipherable.The book fails as a picture album, butit succeeds marvelously in conjuring upstreet life, especially lives lived at theouter border of the city (the Zone) andalong its many margins—a world inhab-ited by ragpickers, prostitutes, criminals,street singers, drunks, poets, and theendless varieties of the indigent.

As Sante describes it, it is a world wehave lost, and the loss should weigh on

the consciousness of anyone who lovesthe city—not the Paris of conventionalguidebooks, or the Paris inhabited bythe rich and the powerful (those fromthe center and the west, particularly theseventh and the sixteenth arrondisse-ments), but the Paris of the poor (thosefrom the east and the north, especiallythe nineteenth and the twentieth ar-rondissements), who lived largely inthe streets and created a culture oftheir own. That culture took root at thebeginning of the nineteenth century.It bore its last fruit in the 1920s and1930s, and it is dead today.

This view of the Parisian past can eas-ily veer off into sentimentality. Toughtalk by the t it i with his gros rouge sur

le zinc—the lower-class native Parisianswearing in slang over cheap wine at a

bar—sounds impressive in the mouthof Jean Gabin, but overuse in films anddetective stories has turned it into a cli -ché. The poor were never picturesque.Several generations of social historianshave produced a convincing, disabusedview of nineteenth-century poverty.They have shown how the population

of Paris exploded, how the indigentcrowded into slums, went hungry, suc-cumbed to disease (especially dev-astating waves of cholera), and diedin droves with every downturn of theeconomy. Sante does justice to thesethemes, but he does not take them farbeyond the point where they were left

long ago by Louis Chevalier in Classeslabor ieuses et classes dangereuses àPar i s pendant la première moit ié du XIXe siècle (1958).

Instead of imparting original re-search, Sante invokes the past to indictthe present—not the new forms of pov-erty, compounded by unemployment,racism, and police brutality, in the ban-l ieues or outskirts of the city, but ratherthe general tendency to redesign Paristhat began with Baron Georges Hauss-mann. From 1853 to 1870 Haussmannsliced apart the bodies of old neighbor-hoods and built the boulevards that are

celebrated in the guidebooks of today.Along the way, he improved the city’shygiene, but his main purpose was toclear a path for troops and to eradi-cate the threat of insurrection fromcrowded areas with narrow streets,where the poor built barricades androse against oppression in 1830, 1832,1834, 1839, and 1848. The story ofHaussmannization has been told often,sometimes sympathetically, as in DavidJordan’s Transforming Par i s: The Li feand Labors of Baron Haussmann (1995). Sante breathes new life into it,not merely with vivid prose but also bypointing it in a new direction.

The spirit of Haussmann, he argues,can be read in the urban projects that

have disfigured Paris since World WarII: the disappearance of Les Halles, thecity’s central food market, replaced bya soulless, subterranean shopping cen-ter; the “aggressively repellent” Centre

Georges Pompidou at Beaubourg; theBibliothèque nationale de France (alsoknown as the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand), “which looks like a hous-ing project on the moon”; the BastilleOpéra, “which looks like a parking ga-rage”; and above all the Tour Montpar-nasse, a “giant upended turd.” These

projects were not intended to blockrevolutions, but they express état i sme,an assertion of state power, similarto Haussmann’s mauling of Paris inthe service of Napoleon III. By serv-ing Charles de Gaulle, Sante argues,Georges Pompidou and André Malrauxcompleted the work of Haussmann andset examples for further devastationin the name of progress. Their monu-ments proclaim the glory of rulers in astyle the French call pharaonien.

Sante does not merely object to thearchitecture. He sees two contendingforces in the new cityscape: on one side,

“reformers and moralists and commis-sion chairmen”; on the other, “vagrantsand eccentrics and clochards.” The for-mer have won, but the latter deservethe recognition of posterity, becausethey represent a marginal, dissidentculture generated from the bottom lay-ers of society.

Put so bluntly, the argument canseem romantic and far-fetched. Santerefrains from making it explicit, pre-ferring to let it show through a denseaccount of roughly related topics:urban geography, low life and the lowerclasses, immigrants and street people,disease and death, prostitution, booze,bohemianism, boulevard theaters,popular songs and singers, crime and

famous criminals, revolutions and in-surgents, feminists and anarchists. Thesubjects come and go, helter-skelter,blending into one another without ad-hering to any distinct structure.

The Other Par i s has no introductionand conclusion, no central thesis, nodiscourse on method or discussion ofhistoriography. Instead of announcingan argument and outlining its constitu-ent parts, Sante plunges into his sub-

ject and sweeps the reader with him.Without knowing where we are going,we are at his side, inspecting the hor-rific garbage dump of Montfaucon with12,000 dead horses. We follow the itin-eraries of ragpickers and their hopeless

stand against municipal trash collec-tion. We wander through flea markets,pausing to examine the inventory of astand from the 1890s: “Two fragmentsof Turkish carpet, some bracelets madeof hair, a lot of watches and chains inneed of repair, three portraits of Na-poleon. . . .” Back in the streets of thepoorer arrondissements—but as Santerightly remarks, poverty was verticalbefore Haussmann: the higher yourroom, the lower your status—we takein the work of le business (prostitution),and we learn what the hor izontales charged from a menu of their services:“An ordinary hand job cost thir ty-threesous, upped to fifty for the additionalinsertion of the pinky into the anus.. . .”

The details, served up straight witha great deal of offbeat erudition, pro-duce a shock effect, in accordance witha peculiarly French style of provoca-tion: épater le bourgeoi s. It is unset-

A Very Different ParisRobert Darnton

‘Hurdy-gurdy man and street singer’; photograph by Eugène Atget, Par i s, circa 1898–1899

B i b l i o t h è q u e

h i s t o r

i q u e d e l a V i l l e d e P a r

i s

Claude Bonnet, two volumes (Paris:Mercure de France, 1994).

*A superb modern edition is avail-able: Tableau de Par i s, edited by Jean-


17/72November 19, 2015 17

ling for anyone located safely in themiddle class to wander into the worldof the poor, even vicariously by read-ng about those who died a century ago.

Sante evokes that world so well that hisuccess as a writer poses a danger forhe reader: voyeurism. Flâner ie can de-

generate into slumming.Sante acknowledges the peril of “a

voyeuristic fascination with other peo-ple’s miseries.” To avoid it, he adoptshe hard-boiled tone used in some de-ective stories: don’t expect any senti-

ment, reader; you’re getting nothingbut the facts. Yet he lets his own sym-pathies show through. In a chapter oncrime, he rejects all “honor-loyalty-virility guff,” and he notes that by 1830crime had become a threat to the or-dinary poor. But in stringing togetheranecdotes about famous murderers,prison escapes, shoot-outs, and execu-ions, he presents the underworld as a

vital aspect of life at the bottom of soci-ety. Criminality and poverty—la pègre and les pauvres—grew together symbi-otically in the slums.

Sante does not go as far as Balzacand Hugo in imagining “an organizedalternative society” among the crimi-

nals, but like Eric Hobsbawm he treatscrime as social banditry. Robbery andmurder appear as a form of rebellionagainst authority, not altogether dif-erent from fighting at the barricades.

Sante describes famous crimes as “one-person insurrections,” and he writeshort biographies of the most notorious

criminals: Eugène François Vidocq,Pierre-François Lacenaire, Jean-Jacques Liabeuf, and Jacques Mesrine.They make fascinating reading, butwhat do they add up to?

Not an argument that crime fed intorevolution. While preying on the poor,some criminals collaborated with theGestapo. Others, to be sure, providedmaterial for novels with a revolution-ary message, above all Les M i sérables,but they appear in all kinds of litera-ture and appealed to all sectors of thepolitical spectrum. They might best beunderstood as a staple of urban folk-lore. Sante favors that view in a shortdiscussion of detective stories, whichhe treats as prime material for gaining

access to the “Parisian imagination,”and even its “subconscious.” But thereading public of the sér ie noire wasnot particularly proletarian. The fris-sons provided by penny dreadfuls wentdown many bourgeois spines, and it isdifficult to detect a distinctly popularelement in the literature that is com-monly identified with popular culture.Can that literature be construed as aprotest aimed against the oppressive,state-driven attempt to impose orderon unruliness? I don’t think so.

That question hangs over Sante’sdiscussion of boulevard theater and

cabaret music. He knows the subjectinside out, and he regales the readerwith mini-biographies of show peoplefrom Aristide Bruant to Édith Piaf.Far from warming over clichés aboutthe wicked ways of Montmartre, heconveys the idiom of street singers whomade names for themselves on the bou-levards. He has an impressive masteryof Parisian slang along with the skillto translate it into English. He evokes“the quintessential sound of Paris” byshowing how immigrants from Au-

vergne supplemented the accordionwith the musette, a small, high-pitchedbagpipe. He points to the seditiouscharacter of some popular songs, whichwere purged by censors under the Sec-ond Empire. Yet the bal-musette andcafé concert drew mixed audiences,and a few of their greatest stars favoredthe far right. Eugénie Buffet, the firstchanteuse réal i ste, sang for workers butsupported the anti-Dreyfusards andthe opponents of the Popular Front.

The difficulty of connecting politics

with popular culture emerges mostclearly in the chapter entitled “In-surgents,” where Sante confronts thephenomenon of revolution. It followsthe chapter on crime and criminal lit-erature and therefore poses a question:What is the relation of street violenceto political upheaval? Passing from adiscussion of faits divers (mainly an-ecdotes about murders in the popularpress), the reader plunges into greatevents: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871. TheCommune brings the series to a climax.Sante tells the story well, although hecannot attempt anything comparable tothe narrative of the most recent study,John Merriman’s superb Massacre: The

Li fe and Death of the Par i s Commune (2014). Sante does justice to the hor-rors of repression and the reactions toit, which set the course of radical agita-tion for the rest of the century. Then heends the chapter with a long account ofmurders and robberies by the Bonnotgang, a group of anarchists who shot uplarge parts of Paris in 1911 and 1912.

What is the common ground of allthese subjects? Metaphorically at least,the streets of Paris. In his final chap-ter, Sante explains that one can stroll

through the city as if one were playing aboard game, the traditional j eu de l’oie,which leads from square to square,each one evoking an experience. In thisfashion, the flaneur can call up spiritsfrom the past, those attached to whatremains of the city destroyed by Hauss-mann and the modern urban planners.It’s a game of chance, which exposes theplayer to surprises and spontaneity. In-stead of following a laid-out route, theflaneur chases unexpected associationsalong paths that Sante calls dér ives.

He takes this idea f rom Guy Debord,the author of The Society of the Specta-cle (1967) and the prophet of the Situa-tionist International, a leftist movementthat inspired many of the studentrevolutionaries in May–June 1968. Inhis last chapter, Sante pays tribute toDebord as the last in the line that leadsfrom the Communards through anar-chism, Dada, and Surrealism to “thefever dream of May ’68.” Not that Santesees straight lines in history or advo-cates a revival of the 1960s. He findsinspiration in Debord’s vision of Parisas a collection of “ambience units” orzones determined by the accumulatedexperience of their inhabitants.

The Other Par i s is an attempt to en-compass the city in this manner. Eachof its chapters can be read as a dér ive.The last stand of the Communards in theCimetière du Père Lachaise flashes byalong with sketches by Toulouse-Lautrecand graffiti such as “Mort aux Vaches”(Death to the Cops). The book streamsbefore the eyes like a film, and thatmakes it a very good read. It succeeds inwhat it sets as its goal, not to straightenout history, but to help the reader appre-hend an endlessly fascinating city.

RACHELWHITEREAD

LUHRING AUGUSTINE

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Ambush, Night & Day Julian Lucas

A Brief History of Seven Killingsby Marlon James.Riverhead, 688 pp.,$28.95; $17.00 (paper)

If hell were a place on earth, a BobMarley concert in Jamaica isn’t the firstplace you’d expect to find it. But per-

spective is everything. Bam-Bam, thefirst character to die in Marlon James’snew novel, has been running for twodays when he reaches the show, held inthe park where he sleeps. He is coveredin dog spit, desperate for cocaine, andrelentlessly pursued by his partners in afailed assassination. The crowd aroundhim is moving to the “PositiveVibration,” but Bam-Bam isalone, hemmed in by nightmar-ish visions. Invisible flames lickat his ankles, three-eyed, bat-winged babies swarm around hishead, and ghostly “duppies,” therevenant spirits of Caribbeanfolklore, take aim at him from

trees. But more frightening stillis the man he tried to murder,not only still alive, but beforehim on stage—a Rasta Orpheus,risen from the grave. Marley’slyrics crash down upon him likedamnation: “So Jah say.”

Bam-Bam is the author’s in-vention, but the concert reallyhappened. “Smile Jamaica,” heldon December 5, 1976, in Kings-ton’s National Heroes Park, wasone of the biggest shows Marleyever gave, a turning point in hislife and the history of the island.It was a peace concert organizedby Michael Manley, Jamaica’ssocialist prime minister, in the

lead-up to a nasty, violent elec-tion. The two parties were skirmishingover swing districts in West Kingston—lawless ghettos that they controlledusing posses of local gunmen. The situ-ation was especially crucial because ofwhat Marley called the “ism schism,”and which most people know as thecold war. Afraid that Manley’s Jamaicamight become another Cuba, the CIA provided the opposition Jamaica La-bour Party with weapons and train-ing. What is called in patois hataclaps ensued.

More than seventy people died in theresulting violence, which reached theworld’s ears when it almost killed Bob

Marley, the country’s most famous citi-zen. On December 3, gunmen stormedhis Hope Road residence and record-ing studio, shooting him, his manager,his wife Rita, and members of his band.Everyone survived the attack—whichinspired the song “Ambush in theNight”—and Marley gave a legendaryperformance only two days later. Buthe was shaken enough to leave Jamaicafor England, where he would stay formost of the rest of his life. The gunmenwere never captured.

And you almost have to be glad theygot away. If they hadn’t, Marlon Jamesmight never have written his grisly andmesmerizing new book. A Br ief H i storyof Seven K ill ings is a glittering slice of

Gehenna, something Roberto Bolañomight have written after watching theJamaican film The Harder They Come with Hieronymus Bosch. A merciless,many-voiced epic, it is less a crime

novel than a meditation on violence—on the way it feels to those who live it,and the way it spreads in the world. Youwon’t find much of the sunny Marleyof “One Love” in this story. (Or, forthat matter, much Bob Marley—“TheSinger,” as James obliquely names him,is essentially a plot device.) Seven K ill-ings is more like “Concrete Jungle”—aspiraling groove of crime and violencethat reverberates from 1970s Kingstonto 1990s Miami and New York.

The novel picks up where the recordleaves off, beginning with the Hope

Road gunmen and their brief, desper-ate lives. These characters are invented,but the frame of the story is real crimehistory. The gunmen belong to an or-ganization based on the Shower Posse,a Kingston group that started in localpolitical enforcement, then graduatedto the international drug trade. Theirleader, Lester Lloyd Coke, inspired thenovel’s lead antagonist, the crime lordJosey Wales. But all this internationalintrigue is secondary—background forthe lives of people caught up in it.

Among them are people like NinaBurgess, a middle-class woman whoflees Kingston after the gunmen see

her witness the attack. Seven K i

ll i

ngs follows Nina out of Jamaica and acrossfour assumed identities—a picaresqueexile that takes her, among otherplaces, to Manhattan, where the “GodBless Employment Agency” hires herto nurse the aging parents of rich NewYorkers. (One client greets her by say-ing, “You must be the new girl theyhired to wipe my ass.”) At the periph-ery of the action, Nina is l ike the grave-digger in Hamlet —a character whosebitter humor both relieves and reflectsthe violence of the larger story. Shelaughs because she can’t stop lookingover her shoulder, anticipating the daythe gunmen might arrive. “Even if itnever comes,” she explains, “the point

is I’ll be waiting for it.”It isn’t any easier for the gunmen.

They, too, are running away. The onewho gets closest to freedom is the com-plex and ruthless Weeper. Weeper, who

likes to read Bertrand Russell and plansto go to school, is swept up in a policeraid while still an adolescent. Lockedup, electrically tortured, and sexuallyabused, he emerges from prison JoseyWales’s protégé and the posse’s mostcapable enforcer. But the trauma fol-lows him for two decades and all the

way to New York, where Josey Walesputs him in charge of cocaine distribu-tion. There, he glimpses the possibil-ity of another life. He cruises the EastVillage for sex with young men, one ofwhom he begins to care for. In one ofthe novel’s only tender scenes, Weeperlies in bed admiring this man, wonder-

ing whether or not to wake him up. Hethinks about what it might mean to em-brace what he has spent so long avoid-ing—a terror of relaxing his masculinevigilance.

Weeper’s story brings out one ofJames’s most evident strengths: a keenfeeling for how violence marks thesexuality of men. There is a story likethis behind every “rudeboy” in thenovel. Demus joins the posse after heis snatched from his morning standpipeshower by the Kingston police, whoare in pursuit of a rapist. The officersmake Demus and a line of other men,all naked, hump the ground of a glass-

littered street. The one who looks likehe knows how “fi fuck the dirt,” theyreaso

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The New York Review of Books - November 19, 2015