The New Republic

Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry by Alan Mintz The Curse of Knowledge by Isaac Chotiner Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer Homer Now by Peter Green The Iliad of Homer translated by Richmond Lattimore Homer: The Iliad translated by Anthony Verity Homer: The Iliad translated by Stephen Mitchell Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad by Alice Oswald The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History by Stuart Gillespie POEM The Wife by Adrienne Su BOOKS The Alibi of Ambiguity by Christopher Benfey June 28, 2012 Newsstand Date: Thu, 2012-06-28 TRB Nanny Dearest by Timothy Noah THE MALL Gosh, Golly, Gee by John McWhorter Mayor Friendly by John R. Bohrer Richard Nixed by David Greenberg Jubilee Girl by Geoffrey Wheatcroft Wars Laureate by Drew Gilpin Faust FEATURES Revolutionary Road by Paul Berman Constitution Avenue by Jeffrey Rosen Happyism by Deirdre N. McCloskey BOOKS AND THE ARTS FILMS Differing Modes by Stanley Kauffmann BOOKS Nobility Eclipsed by Cynthia Ozick Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fa, and the Vichy Dilemma by Barbara Will Ida by Gertrude Stein Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition by Gertrude Stein, edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina The Known Unknowns by Maya Jasanoff The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History by Emma Rothschild The Need to Lead by James P. Rubin Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski POEM Cornwall by Louise Glck WASHINGTON DIARIST They Died for Westphalia by Leon Wieseltier Nanny Dearest

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In defense of Bloombergs war on soda. Timothy Noah June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am The lefts aversion applied to all sources of paternalistic authority: government, corporations, priests, university administrators, and, of course, parents. When the virus jumped to the right it mutated into an aversion only to government authority (with exemptions for the military and police) and granted blanket amnesty to private businesses, religious authorities, mom, and dad. Yet, even as liberals and conservatives profess to hate the idea of government paternalism, both practice it. Liberals support restrictions on harmful things individuals do to their bodies, like smoking, driving without a seat belt, and riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Conservatives support restrictions on actions they deem harmful to the soul, like having abortions, using contraception, and marrying a person of the same sex. Restrictions on any of these activities amount to the government saying: Dont do this; its bad for you. After the imposition of New Yorks first smoking ban, Christopher Hitchens (by then a sort of left-right hybrid) mocked Bloomberg as a baby authoritarian who knows whats good for you. Those, as you know, are the worst kinds of tyranny. But Hitchens knew well (and often documented) that the worst kinds of tyranny, far from improving the bodys condition, tend to worsen it through torture and death. The truth is that theres nothing inherently wrong with paternalistic government or, in the harsher, feminized shorthand of its detractors, the nanny state. Parents and nannies can be good or bad. No adult likes to be told how to live his life, but most of us benefit from baby authoritarianism far more than wed like to admit. The government doesnt want me talking on the phone while I drive? I cant say Ive given that vice up completely, but fear of getting ticketed makes me do it a lot less than I used to, and I may live longer as a result. The government wants me eating less salt? I dont live in New York, but, when I heard Bloomberg was tightening the noose, I reexamined my attachment to sodium chloride and found it to be fairly weak. Bloomberg didnt want Hitchens to smoke? Hitchens, who died this past December of throat cancer, went to his grave believing his vices remained none of Bloombergs business. But after being diagnosed in 2010, he conceded unsentimentally that he had long been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction. If New York City regulations persuade some of his acolytes to give up cigarettes and thereby avoid his fate, dont lets consider his legacy tarnished. What about when the nanny state instructs us to behave in accordance with its views of morality? I disagree with conservative aspirations to install the nanny state in my bedroom, but I wouldnt necessarily begrudge the state its power to play moral cop elsewhere. I approve of the government prohibition against the selling of organs, and I would never want the government to stop discouraging illicit drug use and prostitution (though I might quibble with its methods). These prohibitions all constitute the government helping to define the nations collective values, which is entirely legitimate. Public health paternalism can be carried too far, but in the current anti-regulatory political environment, I dont waste a lot of time worrying about that. Bloomberg is never going to ban soda altogether; even if he wanted to, he would find the political opposition too great. (He couldnt even persuade the state legislature to pass a sin tax.) All his nanny state can plausibly achieve is to make it slightly more difficult to drink soda in preposterous quantities. Indeed, the 16-ounce limit might actually enhance individual liberty by compelling

IN LATE MAY, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he would impose a 16-ounce limit on servings of sugary drinkssodas, sports and energy drinks, sweetened tea or coffee, and artificially sweetened fruit beverageson the grounds that they contribute to the nations obesity epidemic, which in turn elevates the incidence of diabetes and other diseases. Bloomberg previously banned smokingwhich, of course, causes cancer and heart disease, and increases the cancer risk even for nonsmokers who inhale secondhand smokefirst in indoor gathering spaces and later in outdoor public spaces like parks and beaches. Hizzoner has also banned artificial trans fats from restaurants (they raise your cholesterol); required restaurant chains to include calorie counts on their menus (obesity again); and strongly urged restaurants and food processors to reduce the amount of salt in food products by up to 40 percent (salt raises your blood pressure). These policies have been denounced, as one would expect, by restaurants, food companies, and professional curmudgeons on the right. (Fox News John Stossel: In a free society, I should be able to determine my own diet.) But theyve also been questioned from less predictable quarters. It seems to be more on the punitive side of things, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a Democrat, said about the 16-ounce limit. I am all for promoting public health, said Comedy Centrals Jon Stewart of the soda proposal. But Mr. Mayor, this plan makes your asinine look big. Bloombergs health policies are straightforwardly paternalistic, and paternalism is an idea nobody feels comfortable with. Indeed, it was loathed by the left before it was loathed by the right. Colonialism was essentially paternalism on a global scale. The 1960s counterculture brought an end to college parietalsthe prohibition against a girl spending the night in a boys dorm room or vice versa and never took government prohibitions on recreational drug use very seriously. Listen today to Arlo Guthries 1967 song Alices Restaurant and you may be surprised by how politically incorrect it has become. Yes, it mocks the Vietnam draft, but it also lampoonsas yet another petty imposition on individual freedomenvironmental regulations concerning the disposal of solid waste (known in those days as garbage).

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restaurants and bottlers to sell soda in the smaller quantities that people often want but cant get. It might become possible once again to order a Coke at a movie theater in something less than a Jacuzzi-sized tub. After all, the government isnt the only actor imposing its will on Americans today; corporations boss them around quite a bit, and, unlike the government, they seldom have to answer to anyone but their shareholders for it. When their bullying gets rough, it sure can help to have a tough nanny in your corner. Timothy Noah is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article will appear in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Gosh, Golly, Gee Mitt Romney's verbal stylings. John McWhorter June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am oathto God or related figures considered ill-addressed in such a disrespectful way. The proper person at least muted the impact with a coy distortion, la todays shoot and fudge. Hence zounds (first attestation: 1600), as in by his (Christs) wounds; egad for Ye God (1673); and by Jove (1598). To increasing numbers of modern Americans, the G-words are unusable outside of quotation marks, be these actual or implied, rather like the word perky. The proscription against swearing to God has ever less force. I recall being taught it as a child in the 70s but being quietly perplexed as to why and wondering what in vain meant. Since then, ohmigod has become an ordinary remark among even a great many churchgoers. The evasive essence of the G-words, redolent of the Beaver Cleaver 1950s Romney grew up in, has long been rejected as phony, out of line with the let-it-all-hangout essence of the culture. Indicatively, a Web search turns them up endlessly in ironic writing about Romneys assorted evasions and half-truths during his campaign. The modern American, even if he or she has one of Romneys Harvard degrees, often uses todays version of profanity in the slots where Romney slides his G-words. A more, shall we say, vibrant translation of Gee, I hope not would be Shit, I hope not, and in This was back, oh gosh, probably in the late 70s, hell would be substituted for the oh gosh, especially after a beer or two. Or, even in more buttonedup moments, our versions of those sentences might include Man, I hope not, and especially for those under about 40, Dude, I dont know much about your faith. Man and dude both reach out to the interlocutor seeking agreement. Man and dude are, at heart, solicitationsYou know what I mean, man/dude? This warmer, more personal way of speaking fits with a trend in American English during Romneys lifetime, in which casual speech styles have occupied ever more of the space that used to be reserved for the more formal. Casual speech always has more room for the folksy reach-out than formal speech does: Witness the use of yo today among younger black people. Them pants was tight, yo! I once caught on the subway. The yo isn't the grand old call from a distanceYo!the guys friend was standing right there. This new yo appended to the ends of sentences has a particular function,reinforcing that you and your conversational partner are on the same page in terms of perspectives and attitudes. This is also happening very quickly in texting and instant messaging. Its common knowledge that lol means laughing out loud, but these days, young peoples texts are full of lols that can hardly stand for guffawing. Here is an example of an actual instant-messaging session between teenagers, with details altered for confidentiality: Susan: I love the font youre using, btw. Julie: lol thanks gmail is being slow right now Susan: lol, I know. Julie: I just sent you an email. Susan: lol, I see it. Julie: So whats up? Susan: lol, I have to write a 10 page paper. The lol is the texting equivalent of black Englishs yo, a nugget of new colloquial grammar establishing a warm shared frame of reference. Language is clearly an area where Romney differs from his opponent. President Obama, for all of his coolness of demeanor, reveals himself as a more modern speakerand by extension personwith his quiet but steady sampling from the kick-back realm of language. This is true not only in the dusting of black inflection he often uses for rhetorical

Only connect, E.M. Forster told us, and poor Mitt Romney just cant, alienating the left by spelling out that he doesnt care about the downtrodden and dissing the right by describing himself as severely conservative. But Romneys lack of personal warmth goes further than his remarksor coiffure, or pet careand right down to his interjections. Its the G-words. This was back, oh gosh, probably in the late 70s, he reminisced to a radio host about a steak house. Or, Romney surmised how his Mormonism would play out during his campaign with, Oh, I think initially, some people would say, Gosh, I dont know much about your faith, tell me about it, as if his G-word fetish were the way just anyone talks these days. Or: Chris Wallace asked whether said faith might be a disadvantage in voter perceptions of him, and Romney exclaimed, Gee, I hope not! Then, Romney on carried interestone is to say, gosh, is this a true capital investment with a risk of loss? Gee, gosh, and golly are all tokens of dissimulation. They are used in moments of excitement or dismay as burgherly substitutions, either for God and Jesuswords many religious people believe should not be taken in vainor for words considered even less appropriate. Fittingly, they even emerged as disguised versions of God (gosh and golly) and Jesus (gee; cf. also jeez). This was in line with how cursing worked in earlier English. The medieval and even colonial Anglophones versions of profanity were to express dismay or vent pain by swearingmaking an

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purposes, but in a certain interjectional tic: a particular penchant for you know even in weighty contexts. You know steps outside of the formal, propositional box of a statement to solicit agreement from the listener, rather like a raising of the eyebrows or hands spread outward with palms upward. A dedicated Obama mimic could go a long way in sprinkling develop thoughtful statements with ample you know-age. Here is part of Obamas recent statement in favor of gay marriage: This is something that, you know, weve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end, the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others. But, you know, when we think about our faith . . . This usage of you know is not new. In 1998, I asked a 95year-old linguist whether he remembered people using like in the hedging way they do now when he was a child, and he said that back then, you know was used in the same way. (I have since been told this by two other nonagenarians.) The difference is that Woodrow Wilson wasnt given to saying you know in discussing the League of Nations. Language has warmed up a great deal. Romneys God-fearing, impersonal G-words, then, reveal him as linguistically a person of another time, in which the public mood was cooler than todays. That can be a good thing. Even Father Coughlin would not have called an earnest young woman, or anyone else, a slut on the radio. Yet the fact remains that there are few better ways to connote the air of a mannequin in 2012 than by saying gosh with a straight face. John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Mayor Friendly The overrated Cory Booker. John R. Bohrer June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am gunshot wounds, hunger-striking for better police protection in the projects, sleeping in a trailer for five months to halt open-air drug markets. Along with Bookers media-friendly persona, these superhero moves have ensured a steady stream of adulation. His first spate of national press came in the spring of 2000the same year that another attractive young political figure flew from Chicago to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention, had his credit card declined at the rental car station, and went home without even getting inside the arena. Yet this summer, Barack Obama will attend the second convention in his honor and compete for another term as arguably the most legislatively successful Democratic president in a half-centurywhile Booker is little further along than where he started. In 2002, during Bookers first run for mayor, the filmmaker Marshall Curry acquired Bookers consent to participate in the documentary Street Fight by asking, What would it have been like if someone had filmed Bill Clintons first campaign? Booker lost that election to the slippery Sharpe James before winning in a landslide in 2006. The reality of his mayoralty, however, has dimmed his wattage in New Jersey, and the mess he made on last months Meet the Pressdefending the record of Mitt Romneys Bain Capital and equating Democrats nauseating negative ads with ones about the presidents firebrand former pastormight have finally taken the disappointment national. Booker and Obama made their names by rejecting the business-as-usual politics of Newark and Washington, respectively. But Booker is still defined more by his promise than by his accomplishments. Although the countrys picture of him has not changed much in twelve years, in New Jersey Bookers postpartisan leadership has met with increasingly diminishing returns. Now, the mayor of a midsized city with a media profile that the average senator or governor would kill for may not have much of a political future. Whom the Gods wish to destroy, Cyril Connolly famously wrote, they first call promising. FROM THE START, Bookers career has been unconventional. Though much has been made about the money he raised from the financial services industry, Booker started out by passing up more lucrative professions to move into a housing project and take on slumlords. The conditions around him spurred a run for office, and he won a council seat in an upset. In 2002, Booker challenged James, the four-term incumbent, who eked out victory through a nasty campaign of smears and intimidation. Booker simply brushed himself off and began working toward 2006, when James stood down and he won in a landslide. Once in the mayors office, Booker faced the scourges of crime, poverty, and failing schools. He made some progress with several major economic development schemes (some begun under his predecessor) and finished his first term with impressive drops in gun crime and homicides. Newarks first murder-free calendar month in over 40 years occurred in 2010. The year ended with Booker getting buried in accolades for digging his neighbors out from a snowstorm. Although America may have wanted Booker to be its mayor, people in Newark were beginning to see things a bit differently. They had been there in the months between the narrow-lens media events. The real disappointments began in his second term Booker had been reelected after outspending his opponent 20 to 1when the Booker Team, which arrived with him in 2006, lost control of the city council. Then there were crime waves and police layoffs. That November, 167 officers were let go in the largest reduction since 1978 after Bookers unsuccessful union negotiations. The dispute

Newark Mayor Cory Bookers star has been rising for what seems like an eternity. His fame rests largely upon a number of almost absurdly heroic acts, which have varied from harrowing to Hollywood-esque: saving a resident from a burning building, cradling a twelve-year-old dying from

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worsened because of a hole in the budgeta hole created by Bookers failure to pass a bond-selling plan. It seemed that motivational maxims did not make a legislative majority, and Bookers refusal to get involved in nitty-gritty horse-trading doomed his crime-control agenda. Last year, 429 people were shot in Newark, down from 502 in Bookers first year, but far from the national standard for urban transformation to which he aspires. Bookers leadership style has seen its most disastrous effects in the mayors warm relationship with Chris Christie. When the Republican unseated Jon Corzine in 2009, state Democrats expected Booker to step up as their new championto exchange his rising-star status for standardbearer. But, even as Christie emerged as a partisan sensation, Booker chose to bolster his holier-than-thou anti-politics brand. Not only did he work with the Republican; he used his high profile to undercut his fellow Democrats. The most egregious incident came early in Christies term, as the governor pushed a constitutional amendment limiting property taxes, forcing municipalities to downsize. On the day that no-name Democratic leaders in the state legislature rolled out their alternative, Booker joined Christie at a Newark press conference with a banner blaring, property tax relief now, and Christie blasting professional politicians in Trenton. The mayor endorsed Christies constitutional amendment without even informing the city council. It was the beginning of a political pacifism that has endured through three years of Christies siege of state government. Even a year out from the 2013 election, Booker cant help but muddle his partys message. In January, Christie sought to shift the blame for his impending veto of a samesex marriage bill by proposing a referendum. Democrats accused him of playing politics: The governors let the people decide sanctimony was contradicted by his actions in 2010, when he reined in the Republican votes that would have sent the bill to the waiting pen of Corzine. Christie responded by claiming, outrageously, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South. Yet, when asked what the governor was up to, Booker replied: In politics, unfortunately, we default to the most cynical view of what a person is thinking and so I dont want to ascribe any machinations to the governor. Hes got a lot of difficult things on his desk. Its no wonder Christie publicly doubts Booker would dare to challenge him in 2013. Bookers pursuit of universal popularity has waylaid his grander ambitions, especially now that the White House probably no longer considers him a team player. But then again, President Obama never was one, either, as congressional Democrats were disappointed to learn. His 2004 convention speech is remembered not for its endorsement of John Kerry, or its attacks on President Bush, but rather for its post-partisan rhetoric. Thanks largely to aggressive Republicans, he seems to be thinking differently now, perhaps realizing that rejecting politics is not always the secret to successful governing. In this sense, Obama offers a lesson that Booker might find useful. John R. Bohrer is writing a book on Robert Kennedy in the 1960s. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Richard Nixed The Watergate wars just ended. David Greenberg June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am

IN MARCH 2011, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, opened its new Watergate Gallerythe portion of the museum devoted to the constitutional crimes for which President Nixon will always be known. For years, visitors had seen an extended apologia for Nixon, which absurdly suggested that Democrats planned to impeach him in order to make House Speaker Carl Albert president. That exhibit, drawn up with Nixons involvement, was always best understood not as credible historical interpretation but as a campaign in the former presidents lifelong quest for rehabilitation. But now, in its place, stands a meticulously researched and beautifully displayed multimedia exhibit that draws upon recently videotaped oral histories, newly unearthed archival documents, and excerpts from the roughly 4,000 hours of tape recordings that Nixon surreptitiously made as president. The exhibit traces an array of White House sponsored crimes that began well before and extended well after the famous break-in of June 17, 1972, the fortieth anniversary of which occurs this month. The extirpation of the old Nixonian propaganda came about because of an irony of history. Nixon had tried to abscond with vital records of his presidency and, after he lost a legal challenge, was excluded from the club of presidents whose libraries enjoyed official government blessing. But, by the twenty-first century, Nixons daughter Julie came to see that the museum couldnt survive unless it became a part of the National Archives, with the operating budgets that such membership affords. After a battle with her sister, Tricia, which divided the dwindling band of Nixon loyalists, the Nixon library went legit in 2007. The library director chosen, academic historian Timothy Naftali, was committed to unpoliticized scholarship. Despite some often-fierce resistance from the Nixon Foundation, as well as from old-guard archivists in Washington used to accommodating the Nixonites, Naftali succeeded in expanding the museums public programming and in writing and pushing through the new, historically credible exhibit. Though Naftali had to fight to get the display opened, what was remarkable about its ultimate reception was how little consternation it aroused. Some of the usual

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suspects carped, but no substantial opposition arose in the press, or from Congress, even under Republican control. The Nixon Wars, it seemed, were overor coming to a close. CONSENSUS AROUND Nixons guilt, to be sure, is not a new phenomenon. Nixons resignation itself had marked a rare point of bipartisan agreement. But, for the next two decades, Nixon waged a vigorous comeback bid, and many people who should have known better began to parrot specious clichsthat Watergate was a third-rate burglary, that other scandals were somehow worse, that Nixons crimes should not overshadow his accomplishments. Then, at Nixons funeral in 1994, the worlds statesmen gathered in something resembling reverence. President Bill Clinton was joined by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr., and pundits praised Nixon for his diplomatic accomplishmentsdtente, the opening to Chinahailing him as the foreign policy sage that he had yearned to be. Clinton led the way, declaring a national day of mourning and, then, at the funeral, urging that the time of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close. That carefully worded statement was classic Clinton: ambiguous enough to be read differently by different audiences. But people took it as absolution. If only Nixon could go to China, only Clinton could go to Yorba Linda. For several years afterward, some pundits and scholars started to praise Nixon with surprising frequency and enthusiasmalthough often in terms that neither his enemies nor his boosters would have recognized. The New Nixon of the 1990s was not the familiar, divisive liberalhater, but, improbably, an innovator in domestic policy and an activist steward of the Great Societyand the last of the big-spending liberals. It was the relatively conservative political climate of the Reaganized 90s (compared with that of the 1960s and 1970s) that triggered this reassessment. It became a reflex to proclaim that Nixon was more progressive than Clinton; when Clinton unveiled his market-based health care reform plan, or passed into law a welfare overhaul, observers noted that Democrats would surely have preferred policies like those Nixon had proposed two decades before. Nixon advanced far more expansive social policies, wrote Jacob Weisberg in 1996, summing up the reigning view, than any Democrat would dare suggest today. Journalists from E.J. Dionne to Michael Barone looked back with admiration on Nixons farsighted policies toward Native Americans, worker safety, and the arts. This reevaluation began to change during the impeachment drive, which returned Nixon to the spotlight. As historian David Kyvig noted in his intriguing book, The Age of Impeachment, Republicans and Democrats alike invoked Watergate: Some of Clintons antagonists seemed to be motivated in part by historical grievance, seeing a chance to balance the partisan scales. Independent Counsel Ken Starr tried to shroud himself in the legitimacy of the Watergate investigation by retaining Sam Dashcounsel to the Ervin Committeeas his ethics adviser, although the plan backfired when Dash quit in protest over Starrs behavior. Ann Coulter, then an enterprising young rightwing lawyer, leveraged the Clinton impeachment into fame and fortune with a book that claimed Clintons transgressions outstripped Nixons, likening Watergate to a staffing problem. Clintons defenders cited Watergate, tooto argue that his offenses fell short of the impeachment standard. At the House hearings, Representative Zoe Lofgren, who had worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, quoted from the committees 1974 findings: Not all presidential misconduct is sufficient to constitute grounds for impeachment. ... Only ... conduct seriously incompatible with either the constitutional form and principles of our government or the proper performance of constitutional duties of presidential office. Clintons witnesses included famous Watergate heroes: Robert Drinan, Elizabeth Holtzman, Richard Ben-Veniste. By acquitting Clinton of the charges, Congressreflecting public opinionthus rejected the argument that Clintons crimes rivaled Nixons. Indeed, Clintons acquittal implicitly repudiated the notion long advanced by Nixons defenders that everybody does it. No, not every president does what Nixon did. Clintons ordeal hurt Nixon in another way, too. As the consummate expression of take-no-prisoners partisanship, the impeachment reminded the nation of the dangerous reach of the anything-goes politics that Nixon had fostered a generation earlier. In the Nixonian view, no trick was considered too dirty, no blow too low, no law too sacrosanct to stand in the way of partisan gain. And, where Nixon had embodied those dark ideals for one generation, George W. Bush would exemplify them for the next. THE BUSH YEARS dredged up memories of Nixons lawless style. Bush was charged with resurrecting Nixons imperial presidency. Like Nixon, he played politics with national security to silence critics of a military adventure that was losing popular support. Both men brandished flag pins on the lapel and patriotism as a cudgel. Both were secretive in the extreme, isolating themselves from the news media, rigidly prescribing what staffers could say to the press, raging about leaks, deviously trying to control the news. Both men honed a conservative populism that vilified academics, journalists, bureaucrats, and professionals as out-of-touch elites, and politicized areas of the government once deemed the province of nonpartisan experts. That all these Nixonian traits showed up in the political style of the Bush administration was not a coincidence. It was an inheritance. Several of Bushs key aides learned their politics from Nixons men. Karl Rove ran the College Republicans during Watergate. In 1970, Rove had surreptitiously gained entry to the campaign headquarters of a Democratic candidate for state office in Illinois, filched campaign letterhead, and sent out fake fliers aiming to discredit the Democrata classic Nixonian dirty trick. During Watergate itself, Rove used a sham grassroots outfit (another favorite trick of Nixons) to gin up ostensibly organic support for the embattled president. The swiftboating campaign against John Kerry in 2004 also had its roots in the Nixon years, when the president and his thuggish aide Chuck Colson sought to discredit the young spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In the scholarly world, meanwhile, the man-bites-dog novelty of the liberal Nixon was wearing off, and new books were more likely to emphasize Nixons abuses of power once again. What caught the zeitgeist was Frost/Nixon, an unlikely hit. Political plays rarely succeed, but this account of Nixons 1977 interviews by the British TV personality David Frost which originated in London in 2006, came to Broadway in 2007, hit the big screen in 2008, and notched an Oscar nomination for Best Picture in 2009enjoyed both commercial and critical acclaim. It starred, appropriately enough, the former Dracula, Frank Langella, as Nixon. Although it had its flawsit wrongly suggested that Frost had extracted an apology from Nixon in those interviews the play (and film) nonetheless revealed the essence of Tricky Dick to a new generation, which viewed it, inescapably, through the lens of Bushs high-handed exercise of presidential power. In the play, as in the reallife interviews, Nixons telltale line came when he said,

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When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. Audiences roared. It was hard to hear such a line in the late Bush years without summoning to mind the expansive view of executive prerogative repeatedly expressed by the president and his staff. Frost/Nixon, moreover, endorsed an opinion thats seldom heard in journalistic commentary but that increasingly seems beyond dispute: Nixon was never really rehabilitated. Even during the early Clinton years, when Washington welcomed him back, out in the land, his name remained a synonym for presidential corruption and crime. What should have been apparent all along had finally been recognized. One person who seems to have known this was Nixon himself. For all his labors in the field of post-presidential image-making, Nixon would confess in candid moments that he doubted their efficacy. In 1990, after he had published one of his many forgettable memoirs, he sighed to his research assistant that the book had failed to change his public reputation or blot out the stubborn fact that no other president ever directed a criminal conspiracy from the White House. None of the other stuff in there, like on the Russians or the other personal stuff, made it into the news or even the reviews, he despaired. Watergate thats all anyone wants. David Greenberg, a contributing editor to The New Republic, teaches history at Rutgers University and is at work on a history of presidents and spin. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Jubilee Girl Elizabeth II, you rule. Geoffrey Wheatcroft June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am Look left, look right, the hills are bright, The dales are light between, Because tis fifty years to-night That God has saved the Queen. By the time of the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Second Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the 4th Hussarsas little Winny had becomewas on leave in England, but his festivities were interrupted by riveting news. A force was being raised by General Sir Bindon Blood (a name only the rashest author of imperial yarns would confer on a character), and Churchill was attached to it as a correspondent. He rushed back to India, where he wrote newspaper reports and then quickly produced his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, telling of how this expedition had meted out condign punishment to the Afghan tribesmen. Astonishingly enough, 55 years later, when Victorias greatgreat-granddaughter succeeded to the throne in 1952, the young Queen Elizabeth II was greeted by a 77-year-old prime minister: Churchill himself, in his rather eerie last phase at Downing Street. He was enchanted by the young queen. In a broadcast to welcome her, he said tellingly that his own youth was passed in the ... tranquil glories of the Victorian Era, though not everyone thought the era merely glorious even at the time, and it was scarcely tranquil. In between, there had been another celebration, the Silver Jubilee of George V in 1935, which became a great national street party, as English people, very sensibly, in AJP Taylors words, turned the Jubilee into a personal tribute to a king who, in a modest conservative way, had a better record as constitutional sovereign than any monarch since William III. So it was this month. To the impotent rage of malcontents, the country has been swept with delight in the Jubilee and affection for the queen. Every town and village seems to have been swaddled in bunting and Union Jacks, while the splendid flotilla coming down the Thames was watched from the banks by more than a million people, despite the rain (damn it all, this is England). Just as in Housmans lines, the hills were bright with bonfires, including a fine one in our village, and all culminating with the great service in St. Pauls Cathedral, where Victorias procession had stopped in June 1897. Americans might find this enthusiasm hard to understand, but Churchill provides a clue: The queen and her husband are one of the last surviving links to what Winny called our finest hour. AT 86, ELIZABETH II is sprightlier than Victoria at 78, when her Diamond Jubilee fell. And yet, if you look back at the low ebbs of her reignfrom the annus horribilis of 1992, with the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to Diana Week of 1997, with its incontinent synthetic mourning for the dead princess and Rupert Murdoch inspired hostility to the queenher latest sky-high popularity ratings (and the monarchys) might perplex even our sovereign. But then she could already have noticed how affectionate recent theatrical and cinematic portrayals of the monarchy have been. Alan Bennett, no reactionary royalist, gave us an engaging look at our present queen in A Question of Attribution. The Kings Speech was wildly unhistorical but served as almost a mash note to George VI. Most striking of all was The Queen, whichone suspects, unintentionallycame across as royalist propaganda. One of that films minor scenes might hold the key. Played by Helen Mirren, the queen is driving a Land Rover when it breaks down, and she calls for help on her cell phone. When given patronizing advice, she replies: You forget I worked as a mechanic in the war. And so she did. She is the only living head of state to have worn a uniform in

ONE YOUNG Englishman was exhilarated by the queens Diamond Jubilee, as he had been ten years earlier when the Golden Jubilee had celebrated her first half-century on the throne. Then twelve years old, he had written to his mother: P.S. Remember the Jubilee, followed by a series of letters begging to be taken to see the great event. They were signed, Your loving son Winny. That Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, in the summer of 1887, had seen European royalty gather in Westminster Abbey, while across the land, bonfires were lit. In A.E. Housmans words:

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World War II. Prince Philip, who was taken ill and unable to attend the service in St. Pauls, is today certainly the only spouse of a head of state to have seen action in that war. On Jubilee Sunday, he smiled as he stood aboard the Royal barge in his admirals uniform, 71 years after the 19-yearold Philip Mountbatten had been a junior officer in HMS Valiant at the Battle of Cape Matapan, which sank most of the Italian cruiser fleet in a brilliant night action. His father-in-law, George VI, had likewise been present as a midshipman at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The queen herself served in the ranks of the ATS, the womens army service. Its commander-in-chief was her mother, a woman whose life was more than touched by the reality of war. The late Queen Mothers brother Fergus was killed serving with the Black Watch in 1915, and her nephew John was killed with the Scots Guards in 1941. When the Queen Mother died ten years ago, Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian wrote, not contemptuously but rather dismissively, that few would mark the passing of this figure from a bygone age. To his credit, he subsequently acknowledged just how wrong he had been: 200,000 people came to her lying-in-state, and very many more watched her funeral procession. And this spontaneous demonstration of feeling wasnt so much about a plump elderly lady with a fondness for racehorses and gin. It was about 1940. In May of that year, the shy, inarticulate king, who had never expected or wanted to succeed to the throne, appointed Winston Churchill prime minister (it was a most uneasy relationship at first). The king and queen refused to send their children to safety in Canada or so much as contemplate leaving themselves; George practiced target-shooting with a revolver in the garden at Buckingham Palace and intended to die fighting if a German invasion came. Our memories of that year were jogged by the presence in the flotilla of some of the surviving little ships that had helped bring the army back from Dunkirk, then on Tuesday by a flypast of jetsand Spitfires, whose sight and sound always pluck a heartstring in the least jingoist soul. In the six decades that the queen has reigned, our country has changed unimaginably, and to say whether for better or worse is pointless: Obviously enough, its something of both. The empire has gone, along with national greatness and military glory, despite the uncomfortable echoes of Churchills Malakand force, with British soldiers in Afghanistan. Maybe the Jubilee could be decried as pageantry or a nation living on memories. But the memories are of something real: a time of which we remain proud, and which the queenin conspicuous contrast to modern politicians more keen to order wars than to serve in themstill embodies. Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author, most recently, of Yo Blair! This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Wars Laureate The morbid greatness of Paul Fussell. Drew Gilpin Faust June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am

THE DEFINING MOMENT in Paul Fussells long life (1924 2012) occurred on March 15, 1945, in eastern France when shrapnel from a German shell tore into the young lieutenants back and thigh. Next to him, his platoon sergeant, Edward Hudson, was killed. Thirty years later, in 1975, Fussell publishedThe Great War and Modern Memory, a defining moment in his career as a writer and critic and in our understanding of the place of war in modern society and consciousness. He dedicated the book to Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson. In the decades that followed his military service, Fussell established himself as a respected literary scholar. After acquiring a Ph.D. in English at Harvard in 1952, he produced a succession of academic works exploring the poetry and prose of eighteenth-century England and was rewarded with a professorship at Rutgers. Still, as Fussell described it, the black fury that overcame him after his wounding and Hudsons death never entirely dissipated. The war, he once observed, is behind everything I do. He came to believe that the sense of betrayal that arose from the loss of innocence and optimism in the face of wars terrible realities had shaped not just his own life, but had put a formative stamp on twentieth-century culture. Endless war became an essential condition of modern civilization. There seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding, Fussell wrote. It is essentially ironic; and it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War. Unending war certainly seemed a dominant condition of American life as Paul Fussell began work on The Great War. Vietnam dragged on, with body counts reported nightly on TV news and discusseddispassionately and, in Fussells eyes, callouslyat neighborhood cocktail parties. University campuses like Rutgers, where he worked, and Princeton, where he lived, were disrupted by student protests against the war and student anxieties about the draft. The Great War appeared in print in the same year that the United States withdrew from Saigon, a moment when Americans were primed to respond to Fussells powerful questioning of the assumptions, purposes, and political effectiveness of war. Yet this was not a traditional book about politics or statecraft or military history. It was fundamentally a study

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of language and understandingof British writers and poets who produced a literature of disillusion that refracted Fussells own experience and war-born sensibility. Many reviewers noted the books emotional force, and certainly Fussells profound identification with his subjects added power to his skills as scholar and critic. He would later insist that only those who had experienced battle could write accurately about war, could be true testifiers. Fussell reached beyond the texts of literary high culture Wilfred Owen, Siegfreid Sassoon, Robert Gravesand immersed himself in the mass of World War I archival materials deposited at Londons Imperial War Museum by hundreds of veterans and their families. Most of these collections had never been previously explored. They included notebooks covered with mud from Ypres and the Somme; mangled identity disks and mementoes; as well as letters, diaries, unit rosters, and field orders. Fussell embedded his discussion of the wars literary expression in the textured day-to-day experiences of ordinary soldiers. Language and literature came, in his telling, not just to represent an elite of education and talent, but to embody broader cultural perceptions Fussell identified as characteristic of an age. Fussells interest in the common soldier reflected emerging trends in historical writing of the early 70s. Workers, slaves, women, and others whose voices had not been included in the record of the past became in those years subjects of increasing attention from historians seeking to look beyond the lives and power of statesmen and generals. In military history, the most influential example of this development was John KeegansThe Face of Battle, which sought to divert historical focus from commanders to their men, to those who actually had to climb out of the trenches and fight. Appearing in 1976, the book explored in three battles across different centuries many of the same themes Fussell addressed on the western front: what men ate, sang, wore, believed, and feared, and how they fought and died. For both Fussell and Keegan, these particularities served as a means of shattering the euphemisms and delusions they believed had come to surround so much of our understanding of war. Fussell embraced the authenticity of the diaries and letters he found in the Imperial War Museum. The circumstantial details of everyday experience reconnected war writing with realities obscured by the pervasive romanticization of war. It was the denial and obfuscation of wars fundamental truths that created Fussells black fury. He intended his work as an enduring rejection of what Wilfred Owen called the old Lie: that it is sweet and proper to die for ones country. Fussell was not the first to suggest that World War I served as a watershed, introducing a modernity that found its fullest expression in an ensuing era of total war. He has been criticized by those who believe he overstated the wars cultural impact and its horror in comparison with earlier conflictsfor example, the devastating Thirty Years War. I have found that many of the glimpses of modernity he attributes to the years after 1914 are in fact visible in the American response to the slaughter of our Civil War a half century before. Others believe his arguments are only applicable to the British experience and not more broadly generalizable. And he has been challenged to offer a preferred alternative to war against Germany in 1914or again, to the conflict occurring a quarter century later that he portrayed in his 1989 book,Wartime, as so very far from the Good War it is now remembered to be. But these cavils and criticisms are fundamentally beside the point. We continue to ask Fussells questions and accept the framework of his analysis even as we push against its boundaries and note its limitations. Fussells moving and unforgettable work has created a language of perception and understanding that has shaped all our subsequent writing and thinking about war. His attention to memory has encouraged a whole genre of historical writing and has brought the study of war into the center of cultural history. The irony and disillusion Fussell identifies as the product of the years between 1914 and 1918 have defined our perceptions of modernity and of ourselves. Yet the black fury that characterized Fussells life and served as the wellspring of his extraordinary work paradoxically undermines an essential aspect of his powerful insight. After 1914, there could be Never such innocence again, Fussell has insisted, borrowing poet Philip Larkins oft-quoted words. Yet it was in just such innocence that young Paul Fussell went off to war, only to find on the battlefields of France the lessons he so eloquently described his predecessors learning decades before. Perhaps Fussells fury derived from discovering that innocence is born again and again. He made it his lifework to deploy the force of language and ideas to destroy that innocence before it led yet another generation of young soldiers to confront the horror he endured on March 15, 1945. Drew Gilpin Fausts most recent book is This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. She is president of Harvard. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Revolutionary Road Chen Guangcheng and the romance of the Great Escape. Paul Berman June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am

There is something beautiful and breathtaking about watching a hero of human rights make a clean getaway. The hero may go on to other troubles, and the shadows may triumph in the end. But not yet! Meanwhile, you catch a glimpse of that fleeting thing, freedom, as it goes loping around the corner. And the soul exults. The classic text on this most up-to-date of themes was written by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which he composed for The Atlantic Monthly in 1898 and 1899. Kropotkin was, formally speaking, a prince, with a rank sufficiently high to allow him to serve the czar as a page. But he was drawn to the grandeurs of the Russian populist cause of the 1870s, and

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the grandeurs led to arrest and imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Prison damaged his health. The wardens transferred him to a prison hospital. A sympathetic soldier, whispering, advised him to request a walk. The doctors assented. He went for a daily supervised stroll in the prison yardand he noticed that, from time to time, the gate opened to allow carts to make deliveries. His health recovered, but, in order to keep on strolling about the yard, he feigned otherwise all the while smuggling notes to his comrades. The comrades rented a bungalow across from the gate. A violinist remained inside, ready to strike up a tune whenever the look-outs in the streets gave the all-clear signal. Inside the yard, Kropotkin removed his hat, in token of his own readiness. He heard the rumble of a carriage outside the gate. The violin played. Only, by then he was at the wrong end of the yard, and, when his medically approved sick mans stroll brought him to the gate, the violin stopped playing: More than a quarter of an hour passed, full of anxiety, before I understood the cause of the interruption. Then a dozen heavily loaded carts entered the gate and moved to the other end of the yard. Immediately, the violinista good one, I must saybegan a wildly exciting mazurka from Kontsky, as if to say, Straight on now,this is your time! I moved slowly to the nearer end of the footpath, trembling at the thought that the mazurka might stop before I reached it. When I was there I turned around. The sentry had stopped five or six paces behind me; he was looking the other way. Now or never! I remember that thought flashing through my head. I flung off my green flannel dressing-gown and began to run. Kropotkin jumped into the waiting carriage. A comrade diverted a guard. The carriage brazened it out past a couple of policemen and disappeared down Nevsky Prospekt. His friends took him to a fashionable restaurant, where he was least likely to be sought, and then shuttled him from house to house until he was out of the country and able to board a ship that flew the Union Jackthe flag of welcome to political refugees of every sort. I greeted that flag from the depth of my heart. And away he sailed. His brother and the brothers wife had already been sent to Siberia, and now his sister was arrested, too, together with the sister of his brothers wife. The family paid the price. But those pages in Kropotkins Memoirs of a Revolutionist are thrilling. Or are they too thrilling? In the field of human emotion, the populist movement in Russia was a gigantic earthquake, which, having begun to tremble in the late nineteenth century, kept on trembling until the czar had fallen and the Communists had established their new dictatorship, and still the seismic tremors went on spreading, until imitation communists had arisen in every corner of the world and sometimes established their own dictatorships. The anticommunists of the ultra-right went on to launch their horrible wars. And so it wentquite as if the emotional earthquake that had gotten started in places like the Peter and Paul Fortress ultimately proved to be all too violent for poor, distraught mankind to endure, and half the world ended up going insane. Kropotkin himself spent most of the next few decades in London. He founded the English anarchist newspaper Freedom. He wrote his books and pamphlets and his contributions to The Atlantic Monthly, some of which were magnificent and insightful. But his political programvariously called scientific anarchism, or anarchist communist, or libertarian socialismwas long on upper-case Ideals and short on lower-case practicalities. And the combination of the cult of ethics together with the cult of ultra-radicalism sent the militants of the anarchist cause, his own followers, veering in every possible direction, admirable and appalling. His own response to the czars overthrow a few decades later was to rebuke Lenin and the Bolsheviks for establishing the new dictatorship. His followers, the ethical libertarians, ended up in the Soviet prison labor camps. But some of the anarchists came out in favor of the dictatorship, on the grounds that, whatever Lenin was doing, it was terribly radical. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, a grand dissident in communist times, composed a poem on these themes featuring a character named Mr. Cogito, who tries to be thoughtful. Mr. Cogito recalls being a little boy and playing a game called Kropotkin, in which he reenacts the mad dash to freedomthe prison yard, the violin, the horse carriage, and the comrade who distracts the guard. But Mr. Cogito is not keen on Kropotkin himself, the revolutionary theoretician: Mr. Cogito would like to be the intermediary of freedom and not, the poet adds, more than an intermediary: but he doesnt want to be responsible for what will be written in the monthly Freedom by bearded men of faint imagination he accepts an inferior role he wont inhabit history The criticism is a little hard on old Kropotkin. But it is easy to see why a Polish dissident would wish to be liberated from even the most libertarian of revolutionary utopias. So the poet draws a clarifying distinction between Kropotkins escape, which he dreams of reenacting, and Kropotkins isms, which he finds stultifying. And the clarification improves the story. CHEN GUANGCHENG, the blind, Chinese barefoot lawyer, entertains a modest, instead of a utopian, idea of human rights. He attracted attention originally by defending the right of women in China to make their own decisions about childbearing, instead of taking orders from the state; and then he was obliged to defend his own rights as a Chinese citizen. If he has drawn up a more sweeping program for transforming the whole of life, as in Kropotkins The Conquest of Bread, the program has not come to light. The Polish poet would approve. In other respects, though, the Kropotkin-like details of Chens escapeas reported by Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times and othersare uncanny. Chen underwent his house arrest in a village in Shandong Province, instead of undergoing imprisonment in a city jail, as Kropotkin did. Chen was well-guarded, though. He feigned illness. One of the guards may have sympathized with him. Then Chen jumped over several walls, helped by his wife. He broke his foot. His wife stayed behind to distract the guards, and Chen, blind and injured, made his way through the night. He brazened it out by crossing a guarded bridge, where the sentinels may have been asleep. He arrived at a prearranged meeting point, and someone from his circle of dissident conspiratorsa teacher of Englishshowed up in a car. Instead of driving him to Nevsky Prospekt, the teacher drove him to Beijing, where he appears to have spent a few days, shuttling from apartment to apartment.

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He made his way not to the Union Jack but to the Stars and Stripesto the U.S. Embassy, where the diplomats arranged to put him on a plane to New York City, together with his wife and two children. The repression fell upon other people, though. His entire village is said to have been placed under surveillance. The police arrested and beat his older brother. The brothers son, who is said to have resisted, has been charged with attempted murder. The English teacher has been put under surveillance. Then the brother made his own escape to Beijing, in quest of a lawyer for his sona sensational escape on top of the original sensational escapeonly to return to the village, in plain indication that here is a story with many chapters to go. And, to anyone who recalls the classics of Russian literature, the echoes are undeniable. It should be remembered that, in the mid-twentieth century, seismic tremors from the heroic Russian revolutionary past shook the Chinese more passionately than any other people on Earth. The most influential of the Chinese novelists in those years was Ba Jin, the author of Family and other lachrymose and sentimental novels who, until his death in 2005, at the age of 100, was occasionally mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. And Ba Jin was precisely the man who transmitted the old Russian myths and emotions to the Chinese intellectual class. He did this by enlisting in the international anarchist movement, back in the days when anarchists around the world formed a large and more-or-less organized revolutionary current. Ba Jin corresponded with Bartolomeo Vanzetti in his Massachusetts prison. He looked upon Emma Goldman as his spiritual mother. Family, with its portraits of earnest young women struggling for personal freedom against their repressive parents, has got to be the most Emma-Goldmanesque novel ever written. And it was Ba Jin who translated Kropotkins Memoirs of a Revolutionist into Chinese, together with Kropotkins Ethics. The very name Ba Jin is a nom de plume that pays homage to the Russian revolutionary tradition, with the first syllable drawn from Mikhail Bakunin (Kropotkins predecessor in the Russian anarchist movement) and the second from Kropotkin. After 1949, when the Chinese Communists established their own dictatorship, Ba Jin joined the Communist tide, and he allowed his writings to be published in expurgated versions, with the anarchist references erased. He gamely denied that Ba referred to Bakunin. He was a good Communist; he denounced himself. And yet, even then, with the multivolume editions of his writings pouring from the Communist presses, he sheepishly continued to acknowledge that Jin did refer to Kropotkin. Surely in China today, there have got to be a few elderly stalwarts who are fondling their tattered copies of Ba Jins translations and ruminating over Chen, the blind lawyer surely there have got to be a few such people thinking thoughts, as the Polish poet did, about the right ways and wrong ways to rebel. The Russian imprint on the Chinese imagination was too deep and powerful in the past to have entirely disappeared in our own time. A hint of nineteenthcentury myth touches every part of the story of Chen and his wife and his brother and nephew and the walls and the bridge and the waiting car. Here is a bell from old Russia that is right now tolling in modern China, as if it has been tolling all along. Freedom, that fleeting thing, goes loping around the corner, and the heart pounds and the soul exults. Paul Berman is a contributing editor for The New Republic. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.

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Constitution Avenue Liberals discover a theory to crush conservative jurisprudence. Jeffrey Rosen June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am scholars, the greater problem was his entire line of reasoning. Verrilli, they maintained, had failed to invoke the most powerful constitutional defense of the lawa defense that could have proved especially persuasive to the conservative justices. Einer Elhauge of Harvard Law School, for example, pointed out that the Founders had explicitly endorsed the concept of a health care mandate when the first Congress passed legislation in 1790 requiring shipowners to buy health insurance for their sailors. This law was signed by President George Washington. Taking a different angle, Jack Balkin of Yale Law School argued that the mandate is clearly authorized by Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which permits Congress to lay and collect taxes. Rather than getting tangled in the wonky particulars of exactly when individuals enter the health care market, these scholars were locating a justification for the law in the text of the Constitution and the historical understanding of the men who wrote and ratified it. This approach was striking, because for a long time, conservatives alone worshipped at the temple of originalismthat is, the belief that the highest legal authority in the United States is the original meaning of the nations Founding document. For decades, the right brandished originalist arguments to potent political effect, casting conservative judges as sober adherents to the Constitution and liberal judges as uninhibited meddlers. In recent years, however, a growing movement on the legal left has sought to fashion its own version of originalism. Its proponentsknown less than pithily as the New Textualists insist that arguments grounded in constitutional text and history can be deployed just as effectively to support liberal policies as conservative ones. So far, the New Textualists have an impressive track record of winning over conservative justices and judges. But their ideas are being strenuously resisted by the liberal legal establishmentboth by administration lawyers like Verrilli and an older generation of scholars, who fear their approach will ultimately lead to the downfall of landmark precedents, including Roe v. Wade. SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, the roots of the modern debate over originalism can be traced back to an intellectual dispute between two New Deal liberals: Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. Both appointed by Franklin Roosevelt, the two justices had been staunch allies for three decades, defending free speech and economic legislation. But their methodologies could not have been more different. Douglas was a living constitutionalist who believed that the meaning of the document had to evolve with the times. Black was a liberal textualist, who insisted that judges should only enforce rights that appeared explicitly in the Constitution. They parted company in the 1960s, when Douglas discovered a right to privacy in the penumbras of the Constitution that he invoked to protect the right of married couples to use contraceptives. I like my privacy as well as the next one, Black wrote in dissent, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision. In the 1970s and 1980s, conservatives such as Robert Bork and Edwin Meese responded to the perceived excesses of living constitutionalism by championing a jurisprudence of original intent. Cases like Roe v. Wade, they argued, were illegitimate because they were based on rights the Framers never imagined. Justice Antonin Scalia returned to Blacks emphasis on the constitutional text itself. Since the text was the law of the land, Scalia reasoned, there was no need to agonize over what the Framers might have been thinking. All that mattered was the documents objective

AT THE END OF MARCH, when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli appeared before the Supreme Court to make the case for the Affordable Care Act, he was widely perceived to have choked. When he approached the podium in the packed courtroom, the stakes could not have been higher. Verrilli was defending the Obama administrations central domestic achievement, a reform that had consumed the White House for the better part of the presidents first term. His opponent, Paul Clement, was the most soughtafter Supreme Court advocate in the country, with a knack for producing a crisp answer to any question a justice could lob his way. Verrilli, a laconic former corporate litigator, had argued many cases before the Court, but he was new to his jobhed been confirmed to succeed Elena Kagan less than a year beforeand also new to the types of constitutional arguments at the heart of the health care case. The first day of the oral arguments passed without incident. On the second day, the subject under discussion was the individual mandatethe most controversial part of the law and, as soon as Verrilli launched into his defense of it, he ran into trouble. Insurance has become the predominant means of paying for health care in this country, he began, and then coughed, cleared his throat, and coughed again. Insurance has become the prominent means of paying for health care in this country, he continued. For most Americansfor more than eighty percent of Americans, the insurance system does provide effective accesshe took a sip of waterExcuse me. But, for more than forty million Americans who do not have access to health insurance either through their employer or through government programs, such as Medicare or Medicaid, the system does not work. Later that day, audio clips of the most awkward moments proliferated on a variety of websites; the Republican National Committee spliced them together for an attack ad with the tagline: Obamacare: Its A Tough Sell. Meanwhile, the legal academy was subjecting Verrilli to a more esoteric form of Monday-morning quarterbacking. And, in the view of one group of law professors, Verrillis hapless presentation was the least of his sins. To these

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public meaning at the time it was ratified. Scalia deployed this logic in case after case in an effort to roll back not only Roe v. Wadebut much of the legacy of the Warren and Burger Courts. Scalias liberal critics pointed out that he was not above ignoring the Constitutions original meaning when it clashed with his political preferences, and, in any event, his methodology must be flawed because it suggested that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided, since the Framers had never meant to outlaw school segregation. In the 1990s, liberal constitutionalism fractured into squabbling camps that shared a dislike for Scalias originalism but very little else. In the early 90s, however, one liberal scholar decided to beat the conservatives at their own game: Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School. I had the good fortune to study with Amar at the beginning of his career, when he was very much a voice in the wilderness. Only 29 years old when I began law school in 1988 and soon to become a tenured professor, Amar was viewed by some of his liberal colleagues as a brilliant but idiosyncratic wunderkind, too convinced of his own methodology to be ideologically reliable. But he also had a deep knowledge of constitutional history and a passionate conviction that mastering it could help liberals transform the terms of legal debate. In a series of articles and in a pathbreaking book, Americas Constitution: A Biography, Amar went on to argue that many constitutional provisions are more in tune with progressive values than conservative ones. Rather than advancing any kind of grand theory of the vision of the Framers, Amar, like Scalia, emphasized the original public meaning of the text. Unlike Scalia, however, Amar stressed the importance of considering the entire documentnot only the Bill of Rights but also the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which guarantees the equal protection of the laws, as well as the amendments ratified during the Progressive era, such as the Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a federal income tax, and the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Constitutional law should have some connection to the Constitution itself, Amar told me. Thats a ground on which political liberals can proudly stand, precisely because nearly every patch of constitutional text came from four generational spurts in which [members of] the prevailing group were the liberal nationalist egalitarians of their day: the Founders, the Reconstruction Republicans, the early twentieth-century progressives, and the 1960s racial reformers. THE PERSON most responsible for taking the New Textualism from the academy to the courtroom is a 47year-old lawyer named Doug Kendall. Six-foot-three and athletic, Kendall is straightforward and unpretentious. An avid environmentalist, he has pictures on his office wall of Glacier National Park, which he has toured by bike. Raised in a single-parent home in northwest New Jersey, Kendall received a scholarship to Exeter and then paid his way through college working 90-hour weeks during the summers. After graduating from the University of Virginia (UVA) Law School, Kendall and his law school housemate James Ryannow a UVA law professorwrote an article for the Virginia Law Review about the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which decrees that private property shall not be taken for public use, without just compensation. Traditionally, the clause had been applied to eminent domain cases, but conservatives had become increasingly successful at using it to restrict environmental regulations. Kendall and Ryan argued that the Framers only intended the Takings Clause to apply to the actual seizure of propertynot to land-use restrictions that might reduce property value. Conservatives on the court were violating every principle they purported to hold dear, Kendall told me. They were ... being activist when they claimed to be in favor of judicial restraint. In 1997, Kendall founded the Community Rights Counsel (CRC), an organization dedicated to defending environmental laws using an originalist reading of the Constitution. One of its key victories was a 2002 case in which the Supreme Court ruled 63 to uphold strict landuse regulations to protect Lake Tahoe from pollution. CRC submitted a brief and urged the local agency that had written the rules to hire a hotshot Supreme Court advocate, John Roberts. His advocacy was crucial in persuading the moderates, says Kendall of the future chief justice. Following a string of similar successes, Kendall decided to expand his mission. I became convinced that the same approach could be employed in a much broader range of disputes, he told me. In 2008, Kendall formed the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), which has won over conservative justices in an eclectic mix of cases. In 2009, it filed a brief in Padilla v. Kentucky, in which the plaintiff was a Honduran immigrant and longtime U.S. resident who had been arrested for transporting marijuana. Acting on incorrect advice from his attorney, he pleaded guilty, which almost immediately triggered him to be scheduled for deportation. In a brief, CACs lawyers contended that deportation was an extreme penalty for Padillas initial crime. The Founders, they pointed out, saw banishment as one of the most serious forms of punishment. Justice John Paul Stevens echoed this point in his majority opinion deciding the case in favor of Padilla. There is a similar story behind many leading progressive victories at the Court over the past decade. In the 2008 Boumediene case, historical research by UVA scholars on the extraterritorial application of the writ of habeas corpus in seventeenth-century England was reflected in the opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy extending a form of judicial review to non-citizens detained at Guantanamo. And, in several business cases, CAC may have even helped persuade Justice Clarence Thomas, the Courts most rigid originalist. But, of the cases where CACs influence can be detected, the most important was the unexpected ruling by Judge Laurence Silberman upholding the health care law for the D.C. Circuit. Silberman is a hard-line conservative, and many had anticipated him to strike the legislation down. Instead, his opinion echoed the CACs central argument, concluding that the Commerce Clause provides no textual support for the challenge to the mandate. Of course, the Roberts Courts conservative majority has also ignored strong historical arguments in many cases. But, on those occasions, New Textualist arguments have provided a useful line of criticism. After the Citizens United decision, Kendall testified in a 2010 Senate hearing, tracing the history of how corporations have been treated differently than people from the Founding through the Progressive era. He took an idea and operationalized it, Amar has said of Kendall. He made it three-dimensional. Despite its success in convincing judges, the New Textualists have met with fierce resistance. Some of that resistance is generational. Liberal scholars who came of age during the heyday of the Warren and Burger Courts, and spent much of their careers fighting the originalism of Robert Bork, view the use of similar arguments as a kind of

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capitulation to the enemy. Liberals, write Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School and William Marshall of the University of North Carolina School of Law, should not pretend that honest answers to vexing constitutional questions can be gleaned simply by staring hard at an ambiguous text. Recently, I attended a conference at Yale to discuss Living Originalism, a sustained synthesis of New Textualist scholarship by Amars colleague Jack Balkin. Like Amar, Balkin also makes creative arguments about how the original meaning of the Constitution supports broad congressional power, the health care mandate, and the postNew Deal regulatory state, as well as much of the Warren and Burger Courts civil rights and civil liberties jurisprudence. What was most striking about the conference was the deep resistance to Balkins arguments by his liberal colleagues. What will textualists have to give up? demanded Neil Siegel of Duke University School of Law. Roe v. Wade? Much of the skepticism of the liberal legal establishment toward New Textualism can be explained by this question. Since the words right of privacy dont appear in the Constitution, many liberal scholars fear that Roe is hard to justify in textualist terms. And its true that Balkins defense of Roe is the weakest part of his book. His best argument is that the right to choose abortion might be grounded in the Fourteenth Amendments guarantee of equal citizenship for women, since restrictions on abortion force women to take on the life-altering responsibilities and social obligations of motherhood, denying them full sex equality. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has persuaded her liberal colleagues on the Supreme Court to reconceive Roe in similar terms.) But at this level of abstraction, any connection to the original meaning of the text is so attenuated that it is hard to distinguish Balkins living originalism from old-fashioned living constitutionalism. On both the left and the right, then, originalism is no longer a theory of judicial restraint, as it was once described by Black or Scalia, but a means of advancing partisan preferences. For better or for worse, liberals now expect as much of the courts as conservatives do. Given this reality, liberals might do well to set aside internecine methodological squabbles and embrace the New Textualism in an effort to change the political as well as the legal debate. Its ability to persuade conservative judges at a time of extreme polarization on the Court is striking. And one only needs to look to the Tea Partywith its ability to mobilize thousands of Constitution-carrying citizens to march on the Mallto see its popular appeal. Indeed, every major political battle waged by the right in recent decades has been earthed in a story about the Constitutions text and history: the attack on gun control, rooted in the Second Amendment; the attack on environmental law, rooted in the Fifth Amendment; and the attack on Obamacare, rooted in the Tenth Amendment. These types of arguments are available to liberals, too, should they choose to use them. The organization Marriage Equality USA, for instance, has strengthened the case for gay marriage by insisting that the Constitution says everyone gets equality under the law. Progressives were great about this years ago, during the civil rights movement, says Kendall, but have lost their way since. The New Textualism offers other advantages, too. Ever since the presidency of Bill Clinton, Democratic presidents have focused on appointing Supreme Court candidates based on their gleaming meritocratic rsums, combined with their symbolic value as icons of identity politics. But the most successful liberal justices have been those with a clearly defined vision of liberalism, and, during the Warren era, many types of liberalism were represented on the Supreme Court. New Textualism is expansive enough to encompass the different camps that make up not only liberal constitutionalism but modern liberalism more generally: Great Society liberals, who want to defend health care and the social safety net; neo-progressives like Barack Obama, who believe in the rule of experts; civil libertarians; women, gays, lesbians, and ethnic minorities; and Occupy Wall Street economic populists. After all, legal conservatives have succeeded in papering over their own considerable ideological differences in precisely this manner. Samuel Alito, Roberts, and Scalia favor muscular use of executive power, Kennedy is a libertarian, while Thomas is a pure Tea Party conservative. And yet all three camps have converged under the banner of a broadly defined originalism, which has allowed them to operate effectively as a partisan bloc. The two hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of the Constitution will occur in the middle of the presidential campaign, and, along with Obama, every living former president has been invited to Philadelphia. Kendall suggests that the occasion would be a fitting moment for Obama to mount a constitutional defense of the health care mandate. The Founders came to Philadelphia in 1787 to fix the flaws in the Articles of Confederation and to create the United States of America, a national government capable of solving truly national problems, he told me, suggesting the type of reasoning the president could deploy. Its a powerful argument, and its too bad Don Verrilli didnt make it before the Supreme Court. Soon, Obama may find his presidency depends on his ability to make the argument himself. Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Happyism The creepy new economics of pleasure. Deirdre N. McCloskey June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am

Before 2013 begins, catch up on the best of 2012. From now until the New Year, we will be re-posting some of The New Republics most thought-provoking pieces of the year. Enjoy.

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IN THE FIRST PANEL of a Peanuts stripthe preceding ones had been about Lucy scolding her little brother, Linus, for not being a good brotherLucy asks what Linus is offering her: Whats this? A dish of ice cream. Then Linus explains: I brought it to you in order that your stay here on Earth might be more pleasant. She smiles genially, and uncharacteristically: Well, thank you ... Youre a good brother. In the final panel, Linus walks away smiling: Happiness is a compliment from your sister! That about sums it up. Pleasure is to be achieved by things like dishes of ice cream. Psychologists have shown rigorously that people are most pleasured exactly as you might have thought if you are a human being: when eating, say, a heaped pastrami on rye at Mannys Deli off Roosevelt Road in what was once the garment district of Chicago. Happiness, by contrast, is more complicated, though it can also be pursued at Mannys. It is the pleasure of kosher comfort food, down to the diminishing marginal utility of that last bitebut it is also expressing ones urban identity and Chicago-ism, even at the costs of the considerable inconvenience in getting to Mannys and braving the insults of the countermen. It is introducing your friend, a nave gentile, to the Jewish side of the City of the Big Shoulders, affirming thereby your philo-Semitism. It is participating in the American democracy of a 1950s cafeteria. It is facing, too, the cost of a little addition to the love handles. And it is a compliment from your sister. Pleasure is a brain wave right now. Happiness is a good story of your life. The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia, which means literally having a good guiding angel, like Clarence the angel in Its a Wonderful Life. The schoolbook summary of the Greek idea in Aristotle says that such happiness is the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope. But nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. Further, they propose to calculate your happiness, by asking you where you fall on a three-point scale, 1-2-3: not too happy, pretty happy, very happy. They then want to move to technical manipulations of the numbers, showing that you, too, can be happy, if you will but let the psychologists and the economists show you (and the government) how. On a long view, understand, it is only recently that we have been guiltlessly obsessed with either pleasure or happiness. In secular traditions, such as the Greek or the Chinese, a pleasuring version of happiness is downplayed, at any rate in high theory, in favor of political or philosophical insight. The ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi observed of some goldfish in a pond, See how happy they are! A companion replied, How do you know they are happy? Zhuangzi: How do you know I dont know? In Christianity, for most of its history, the treasure, not pleasure, was to be stored up in heaven, not down here where thieves break in. After all, as a pre-eighteenth-century theologian would put itor as a modern and mathematical economist would, tooan infinite afterlife was infinitely to be preferred to any finite pleasure attainable in earthly life. The un-happiness doctrine made it seem pointless to attempt to abolish poverty or slavery or wife-beating. A coin given to the beggar rewarded the giver with a leg-up to heaven, a mitzvah, a hasanaat; but the ancient praise for charity implied no plan to adopt welfare programs or to grant rights of personal liberty or to favor a larger national income. A life of sitting by the West Gate with a bowl to beg was, after all, an infinitesimally small share of ones life to come. Get used to it: For now and for the rest of your life down here, its your place in the great chain of being. Take up your cross, and quit whining. What does it matter how miserable you are in this life if youll get pie in the sky when you die? Such fatalism in many religionsGod willing, we say, im yirtzeh hashem, inshAllah, deo volenteprecluded idle talk of earthly happiness. Then, in the eighteenth century, our earthly happiness became important to us, in high intellectual fashion. By 1776, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was an unoriginal formulation of what we all, of course, now admitted that we chiefly wanted. John Locke had taught, in 1677, that the business of men [is] to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasurethough he added piously, and by the comfortable [that is, comforting] hopes of another life when this is ended. By 1738, the Comte de Mirabeau wrote to a friend, recommending simply, [W]hat should be our only goal: happiness. Our only goal. To see how strange such a remark is, consider whether it could have been uttered by a leader of opinion in 1538. Martin Luther? Michelangelo? Charles V? No. They sought heavenly, artistic, or political glorynot something so domestic as happiness. Yet, in the late seventeenth century, even Anglican priests commenced preaching that God wanted us to be happy as much as holy. They called it eudaemonism. Anglicans and, astonishingly, some New England Congregationalists turned against the old, harsh, Augustinian-Calvinist line. We are not, declared the eudaemonists, mere sinners in the hands of an angry God, worms unworthy of grace. We are Gods beloved creatures, his pets. The eudaemonistic turn was a Very Good Thing, resulting in fresh projects to better our stay here on Earth, some of them remarkably successful. Democracy was one, since, if you followed the fashion for universal happiness, it became impossible to go on insisting that what really mattered was the pleasure of the Duke or the Lord Bishop. Enlightened despots of the era claimed to seek the good of all, which paradoxically gave the populace the idea that maybe they themselves could do it. Parallel with the stirrings of democracy and its accompanying welfarism, advocating for hospitals and free public education, was a new bourgeois dignity and liberty. Starting in Holland and England, and in the North American colonies of the English, the paired bourgeois revaluations combined to cause modern enrichment. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 that all the English colonies [in North America] at the time of their birth ... seemed destined to present the development of ... the bourgeois and democratic liberty of which the history of the world did not yet offer a complete model. Or again about the first industrial nation: Looking at the turn given to the human spirit in England by political life; seeing the Englishman ... inspired by the sense that he can do anything. ... I am in no hurry to inquire whether nature has scooped out ports for him, and given him coal and iron. As a result, real income per head commenced rising after 1800, from the hopeless $3 a day that humanity had endured since the caves to the $125 a day that increasing portions of the world now enjoyand anyway to the $30 a day that the average human now consumes, including Chadians and Bangladeshis in the average with the Japanese and Americans. Its ten times more stuff, more access to clean water, a higher life expectancy, and even, for the middling, more dishes of ice cream and more pastrami on rye. And, for the swiftly rising percentage of $125-a-day folk, it means more Mozart and more college degrees. In 1789, in bourgeois England, the newish doctrine of happiness was made fully scientific in method by Jeremy

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Bentham. That the pursuit of happiness rightly considered is the goal of life was by then routine, having been given contemporary philosophical dress in modern eudaemonism by, among others, David Hume. And, in a move typical since Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Bentham in 1789 construed happiness as simply pleasure. Pain and pleasure ... govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think. What Bentham uniquely brought to eudaemonism, in his Principles of Morals and Legislation and subsequent writings, was an analytical, almost mathematical, precision. Almost, indeed, to the point of lunacy: His system has been described as a chaos of precise ideas. Bentham declared in effect that we are equipped with happiness meters on the tops of our heads, from which utils can be measured and then added up across people to determine the right course of social actionprisons with central guard towers, say, or a Nicaraguan canal, or animal rights, or the repeal of the laws against usury. Benthams young friend John Stuart Mill explained in an obituary essay in 1838 that the routine idea of eudaemonism was given new force by a method of detail ... of never reasoning about wholes until they have been resolved into their parts, nor about abstractions until they have been translated into realities. But, Mill continued, this system, excellent for keeping before the mind of the thinker all that he knows, does not make him know enough; it does not make a knowledge of some of the properties of a thing suffice for the whole of it. Despite Mills complainthe was a considerable economist as well as a great philosopherthe worldly philosophers of modern economics gradually substituted their knowledge of parts for the whole. Benthamism became the doppelganger of political economy, later to be renamedmore scientificallyeconomics. You can still see Bentham in the cost-benefit analysis of a new freeway or in the measurement of national income per person per day. And the economists persuaded many. As the economist Robert Nelson argued recently, by the late twentieth century, a Benthamite economics had become the secular religion of liberal societies. There is no God, and Jeremy Bentham is his prophet. To such analytical utilitarianism was added, in the late nineteenth century, the experimental methods of the psychologists, especially in Germany. In that dawn, the best scientists were briefly hopeful that the happiness meters on the tops of our heads could actually be detected and went about testing people for them. But about the time of World War I, sadly, the psychologists grew discouraged in their neo-positivistic project of measuring happiness. There seemed to be no way to compare Connors happiness with Lilys, or even to be sure of the course of Lilys utils over time, and never a way of assigning comparable numbers to them both. The psychologists and then the economists came to realize that there are no meters on our heads. The economists at the time consoled themselves with what was known as ordinalism. You can watch me making an actual choice at Mannys between a pastrami sandwich or, for the same money, a corned beef sandwich. By my choice, I reveal that I get more pleasure from the pastrami. I rank the two in order. Yet neither a psychologist nor an economist can tell how much more pleasure I get10 utils for corned beef, say, as against 16.876 for pastrami. Utils sound nice and scientific, but, unlike inches of mercury in a thermometer or pounds of air pressure in a container, they have no natural units. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth remarked in 1881 (though he was still then hopeful that the cardinal measurement of utils might be possible), We cannot count the golden sands of life; we cannot number the innumerable smile of seas of love; but we seem to be capable of observing that there is here a greater, there a less, multitude of pleasure-units, mass of happiness; and that is enough. (Edgeworth, though a mathematical and quantitative scientist, was no barbarian: He was quoting Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, line 90, which he read in the Greek; and the golden sands is from Alfred Lord Tennyson.) His followers in economics settled into tricks for seeing what basket of goods might be preferred to another and gave up trying to measure utils. (They gave up Greek drama and English poetry, too.) What the economists could measure pretty easily, though, was the money you have for buying sandwiches or paying the rent. Income is not your happiness and doubling it will not make you twice as happybut it does measure your capability for action. As early as the late seventeenth century, the English political arithmeticians had generalized a single persons income to GDP, which is itself an additional example of early modern eudaemonism and the new concern for the economic welfare of the nation. By correcting a rise in national income for merely monetary inflationthe same pastrami sandwich that in 1960 cost $1.50 is going for $7.00 in 2012they could know how much the nations capability in pastrami and housing and Mozart concerts had increased. The biggest scientific discovery using GDP is the measurement of what economic historians call the Hockey Stick: that rise (on the blade, you see) from $3 to $125 a day. How sad, though, the economists said: The deeper happiness is not measurable. And yet, in the form of national income and cost-benefit analysis, a quantifiable shadow happiness lived on, giving comfort to the saddened behavioral scientists. Bentham, carrying his happiness meter under his arm, strides like a ghost through economistic talk. The revered Daniel Kahneman once wrote a paper called Back to Bentham? The Benthamite approach, Eric Posner and Cass R. Sunstein observed in a volume called Law and Happiness, never really went away. YET RECENTLY, the measurers have ventured on a greater pleasure than mere ordinalism in happiness and capability in income. From the 1950s to the 1970s, economists such as George Katona and Bernard M.S. van Pragg, and sociologists such as Hadley Cantril and Norman Bradburn, and then in the 1980s, on a big scale, psychologists such as Martin E.P. Seligman, Norbert Schwarz, Frank Fujita, Richard J. Davidson, the Diener family (Ed, Carol, Marissa, and Robert), and of course Daniel Kahneman re-started the once-abandoned project of measuring happiness quantitatively. In the 1990s, some economists, a subgroup in the new behavioral economics, delightedly joined the psychologists in measuring happiness as self-reported declarations of ones level of happiness, and assigning selfreported numbers to them, and adding them up, and averaging them across people and eras. Some of the quantitative hedonists have taken to recommending governmental policy for you and me on the basis of their 12-3 studies; and some of them are having influence in and on the Obama administration. Damn the ordinalism, they declare, full speed ahead! The Leiden School in the Netherlands boldly went where no ordinalist had gone before. As Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Schwarz put it in the editorial preface to their influential collection, Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, which appeared in 1999, Our aim ... was not at all modest: we hoped to announce the existence of a new field of psychology. And, on the basis of a new psychology, they announced a new social engineering: we propose, they continued, that nations should begin monitoring pleasure and pain through on-line experience

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recording among samples of respondents. So Bhutans fourth Dragon King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, proposed to do in 1972 and then, with the help of happiness measurers, did. The better to tax, nudge, and compel you to be happy. Bruno Frey is a cultivated Swiss and a brilliant insider critic of economics, but he has the usual longing among economists to count the golden sands of life. In his book Happiness: A Revolution in Economics, he acknowledges in a lone sentence that philosophers at least have had some thoughts about the matter: For centuries, happiness has been a central theme of philosophy. He attaches to the lone sentence six citationssix citations and no further discussion out of more than 600 items in his bibliography from this usually thorough scholar. But the six philosophers are merely the officially recognized sort, as though Frey supposed that The Rubaiyat or Sense and Sensibility or for that matterGroundhog Day had nothing to say about human happiness. You are walking out of the theater in Athens in 429 B.C. having just seen the new hit, Oedipus the King. Socrates walks up to you with a clipboard and asks you where your happiness lies on a three-point scale. He is inquiring into an imagined calculative hedonism of 1-2-3, or, as the good folks with clipboards want to call it, hedonics. Its not science. At the most lofty level of scientific method, the hedonicists cheekily and with foreknowledge mix up a non-interval scale with an interval scale. If you like the temperature in Chicago today better than the one on January 15, you might be induced by the interviewer to assign 2.76 to today and a 1.45 to January 15. But such an assignment is of course arbitrary in Gods eyes. It is not a measure in her view of the difference even in your heart (since to her all hearts are open) between a nice day and a cold day. By contrast, an interval scale, such as Fahrenheit or Celsius temperature on the two days in question, does measure, 1-2-3. God doesnt care which scale you use for hedonics as long as its an interval scale. Non-interval scales merely rank (and classifications merely arrange). We couldnt base a physics on asking people whether today was hot, nice, or cold and expect to get anything quantitative out of it. Recording the percentage of people who say they are happy will tell you something, to be sure, about how people use words. Its worth learning. We cannot ever know whether your experience of the color red is the same as mine, no matter how many brain scans we take. (The new hedonism is allied, incidentally, with the new brain science, which merrily takes the brain for the mind.) Nor can we know what red or happiness 1-2-3 is in the mind of God, the objective happiness that Kahneman speaks of as though he knew it. We humans can only know what we claim to see and what we can say about it. What we can know is neither objective nor subjective, but (to coin a word) conjective. It is what we know together in our talk, such as our talk about our happiness. Con-jective: together thrown. No science can be about the purely objective or the purely subjective, which are both unattainable. If a man tormented by starvation and civil war in South Sudan declares that he is happy, no, very happy, a regular three, mind you, we have learned something about the human spirit and its sometimes stirring, sometimes discouraging, oddity. But we inch toward madness if we go beyond peoples lips and claim to read objectively, or subjectively, their hearts in a 1-2-3 way that is comparable with their neighbors or comparable with the very same South Sudanese man when he wins an immigration lottery and gets to Albany. A laboriously achieved finding of the new science of hedonics is that, if you plot real incomes of a bunch of people against their happiness numbers, the upward tending plot levels off as income gets high. It has a ceiling, called in the trade the hedonic treadmill. And so there is no point in getting more income, either for a person or for a nation. The conclusion is offered all over the new literature. In a way, it is the only conclusion. It is the essence of the set-point result, for example, which says that, if you lose the use of your limbs, you will in a year or so be pretty much as happy as you reported before. And so we can trim the tort award to a paraplegic. But wait a minute. The scale is 1-2-3. Of course it levels off: The ceiling, namely 3, is built into the question, and so the survey researcher gets back what she put in. When did you stop beating your wife? If the plot is correctly scaled to have no built-in upper limit, the findings on which so many of the policy proposals depend disappear. One is gratified, of course, that 1-2-3 findings are based on massive, carefully done surveys by the National Opinion Research Center or the German Socio-Economic Panel or replicated in experiments in the laboratories. Thats great. So the happiness numbers can then be compared and averaged and put into scatter plots, yes? Its therefore science, right? No, not right. The literature regularly depends, for example, on a misuse of the bankrupt notion of statistical significance, which even the Supreme Court of the United States, not known for its statistical savvy, in 2011 dismissed for lack of scientific standing (inMatrixx v. Siracusano, 90). Virtually every paper by economists using the 1-2-3 surveys takes statistical significance to be the same thing as scientific significance. Bernard van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, for example, in an amazingly thorough book called Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach, Revised Edition, do so. Yet dozens upon dozens of theoretical and applied statisticians since the early twentieth century have pointed out that the sampling improbability of a result is not, after all, the same thing as the clinical or economic or legal importance of the result. It is like the pre-election surveys that ask people now to vote for or against President Obama in 2012. The sampling error is always 2 or 3 percent (because the sample size is always about 1,000 or 1,500 and the probability of a yes is about 50 percent: The math of the binomial calculation is left as an exercise for the reader), which is carefully reported by the journalists as though it were the error in predicting the actual election. But the error in the important prediction has nothing to do with mere sampling error. If unemployment gets below 8 percent, Obama will win, whatever the significance of the survey results now. If he is discovered to practice adultery, he will lose. And so forth: The real error has nothing to do with the sampling error. In view of this widely practiced absurdity of confusing low sampling error with human importance, one is not made happy to hear from van Praag and Ferrer-iCarbonell that in the years since the first edition of this monograph in 2004 hundreds of papers have been written where happiness equations are estimated. If hundreds is taken to be, modestly, 50 a year, then by now we have more than 300 papers based on a statistical absurdity. And the literature simply strides past the problem evident since the first criticisms of Benthamthat utils cannot be compared among people. This is not merely a technical matter. It is also a matter of human dignity. Suppose that Connor and Lily have the same happinessproducing circumstances of income and health and so forth. Yet Lilys reported very happy value of 2.8 exceeds Connors meager 1.4. Well, then: Lily must be a better machine for making happiness than Connor is. Never mind that Lily-utils have nothing to do with Connor-utils. We are in the realm

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of Why is a mouse when it spins? (The answer, of course, is, The higher the fewer.) There is in fact substantial biological and psychological evidence that some people are more cheerful than others just in case you didnt already know that. So, lets see: What are the policy implications? Shoot the Connors? Give all the money to the Lilys? A Brahmin, noted a Hindu lawyer, is entitled to exactly five-and-twenty times as much happiness as everyone else. If it would please 99 people to feed on the hundredth, then util-maximization says, get out the cooking pot. Its like placing a value on peoples lives for legal cases or for determining airplane safety. Two Connors equal one Lily? Yet the value-of-life calculation, though a trifle ghoulish, has at least the excuse that, for various serious purposes, we must do it and implicitly do, whether we like it or not, when we decide how much airplane inspection to have. But a happiness measurement has no purpose, except perhaps to throw into doubt the calculations of the value of a human life. A plane filled with depressiveslike one filled with lawyersshould get fewer safety checks than one for the cheerful. Happiness, moreover, is surely multiple, and not H = 2.718. The brisk adding up by utilitarians of sexual pleasure and career satisfaction and family love and the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope, as many psychologists have shown, does not make a lot of sense. Daniel McAdams, for example, argues for three levels of personality: dispositional traits (such as capacity for pleasure in the ordinary business of life), characteristic adaptations, and the stories of our lives that we tell. But narrativewhich will routinely demand painful challenges in order to acquire a dignified seriousness, lest one be reduced to the cattle pleasure that Aristotle properly despisedis not like eating ice cream. It is like getting a compliment from your sister, an episode in the story you build of your relation to her. Edgeworth said we could detect a mass of happiness. No we cant. It would not make sense, wrote Martha Nussbaum in a wise and devastating assault in 2008 on the new hedonics, to ask people to rank all their pleasures along a single quantitative dimension: this is just bullying people into disregarding features of their own experience that reflection would quickly reveal. Before Bentham and Immanuel Kant, it was taken as obvious that the good life was multiple: involving the Principal Seven Virtues, for example, the primary colors of a virtuous and therefore happy lifeprudence, temperance, courage, justice, faith, hope, and love. Humans do after all experience the tragedy of choice, which is the conflict of such virtues. Love for your father conflicts with your hope to go to Smith College, as Jane Addams found in her own life. Antigones faithfulness to her king conflicts with her love for her brother. Happinesses are not fungible. Happinesses are multiple, dappled things, and couplecolored. W.C. Fields was asked, off the record, for his views on sex. On or off the record, said he, there may be some things better than sex, and some things worse. But theres nothing exactly like it. The knock-down argument against the 1-2-3 studies of happiness comes from the philosophers (and the physicists) toolbox: a thought experiment. Happiness viewed as a self-reported mood is surely not the purpose of a fully human life, because, if you were given, in some brave new world, a drug like Aldous Huxleys imagined soma, you would report a happiness of 3.0 to the researcher every time. Dopamine, an aptly named neurotransmitter in the brain, makes one happy. Get more of it, right? Something is deeply awry. Decades ago, I was in Paris alone and decided to indulge myself with a good meal, which, you know, is rather easy to do in Paris. The dessert was something resembling crme brule, but much, much better. I thought, I shall give up my professorships at the University of Iowa in economics and history, retire to this neighborhood on whatever scraps of income I can assemble, and devote every waking moment to eating this dessert. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It deserved a 3.0. Heres the mental experiment, first proposed by the philosopher Robert Nozick under the name of the experience machine: Suppose you could experience any life you wanted, such as a combination of Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth and Billie Jean King, with happy endings sprinkled all around. I mean that you would feel you had experienced it, in all the grittiness of daily life, with its pleasures and its suitably modified pains. Would you do it? Lets make it tougher than Nozick did: After being hitched up to the machine for half an hour in which all life is experience, the actual you dies. Would you take it? No, of course not. You would if you could experience alternative and happier lives as though going to a movie or reading a novel, and then go home. Thats why movies and novels are life lessons, for better or worse. But, unless you were about to die anyway, such experiential, pot-of-pleasure, 1-2-3 happiness is not something for which you would trade your actual, admittedly somewhat crummy and often extremely painful life. The cherishing ofyour life is part of true happiness, and it comes with consciousness. The point is made by numerous modern philosophersMark Chekola, for example, as earlier by Robert Nozick and David Schmidtz. But it was made, too, by other philosophers and theologians and poets back to Confucius, Lord Krishna, and before. The result of ignoring all such arguments and carrying on measuring what cannot be measured is just what you might expect. The so-called empirical results thus achieved, in the cases in which they could not anyway be discerned by an alert 12-year-old girl, are often scientifically unbelievable. Frey, for example, reports on results from 19941996 in the United States that claim the bottom decile of income earners to be happy to the extent of 1.94 on the three-point scale, compared with 2.36 for the top decile. Yet does anyone really believe that an American earning $2,586 a year in 1996 prices and living in crime-ridden public housing was only 18 percent less happy than someone earning $61,836 and living on a pleasant suburban street? Remember: the scales are supposed to be interval, Gods measurement. But, if you do not believe the 18 percent, then you are not justified in plotting such a number on a chart with other variables that is, taking a non-interval scale for an interval scale. I realize that many of my respected colleagues in economics are willing to believe such an impossible thing, even before breakfast. One of the proponents of happiness studies, the eminent British economist Richard Layard, is fond of noting that happiness has not risen since the 50s in the U.S. or Britain or (over a shorter period) in western Germany. Such an allegation casts doubt on the relevance of the happiness so measured. No one who lived in the United States or Britain in the 50s (I leave judgments on West Germany in the 70s to others) could possibly believe that the age of Catcher in the Rye or The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was more fulfilling than recent times. SO IS ALL THE research on the psychology of happiness mere academic hokum? No. What makes people happy is well worth knowing, and it can be ascertained without

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descending into Benthamism and can be done with due attention to the evidence of 4,000 years of recorded human reflection. Mill remarked of Bentham that he failed in deriving light from other minds. He could distinguish poetry from prose only, he said, because prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. Bentham, like a Samuelsonian economist and a Kahnemanian psychologist, dismissed Plato and Shakespeare and all the wisdom of literature as vague generalities. He did not heed, Mill continued, or rather the nature of his mind prevented it from occurring to him, that these generalities contained the whole unanalyzed experience of the human race. In fact, the positive psychology movement created in the 90s by Mihly Cskszentmihlyi (I will just call him Mike) and Martin E.P. Seligman and now hundreds of other psychologists do useful research on the good life with full attention to what we know. It is positive, concerned with psychological strengths, as against the steadily growing number of alleged weaknesses (once homosexuality, now still gender crossing) proposed in successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Mike, for example, discovered around 1974 that good lives involve what he calls flow, the absorption in a task just within our competence: in the zone, as we say, or indeed feeling flow, which is how he came up with the word. I remember him in the early 70s explaining to me his technique for spotting it, by having people carry pagers, a recent invention, which Mike would randomly activate and have the subject write down in a notebook what she was doing and thinking right at that moment. Brilliant. The idea of flow has been fruitful as science, and it deeply acknowledges the humanities, too. The researchers have mercifully never attempted in a Benthamite manner to compare the amounts of flow achieved by Roger Federer at break point with the flow achieved by Miles Davis on Kind of Blue. In 2004, there appeared a gratifyingly sensible compendium of positive psychology, closely edited by two leaders in the field, Seligman and Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. In 664 large pages, 40 scientists from clinical and social psychology and related fields present a manual of the sanities. The conclusion? The same as Groundhog Day: People are happier when they perform the virtues, in fact the very seven virtues of the Western tradition (found also in the literature and philosophy of the East and South and no doubt the North): prudence (the virtue beloved of economists), justice, temperance, courage, faith (as identity), hope (as purpose), and love. One component in a positive psychology is a prudently adequate income, as Mike and the rest would agree, and as Aristotle said in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Material resources, for a life affording scope, are not everything, of course; but they are something. The great economist, historian, and demographer Richard Easterlin introduced happiness studies into economics in 1974. He concluded recently that how people feel they ought to live ... rises commensurately with income. The result is that while income growth makes it possible for people better to attain their aspirations, they are not happier because their aspirations, too, have risen. True. A poor Glaswegian maiden with an IQ of 140 in 1800 could aspire to no better position than head cook in an aristocratic house, and was very glad of that, not least because her equally intelligent mother had aspired merely to head milkmaid. The new cook was happy. Yet there is a surprisingly puritanical edge to the new hedonics, especially about the pleasurable income other people have. Easterlin argues that economic growth is a carrier of a material culture of its own that ensures that humankind is forever ensnared in the pursuit of more and more economic goods. The hedonicists see modern levels of consumption as vulgar, an arms race for status that the tax system should be arranged to stop. Hedonics has become a branch of the century-old campaign by the American clerisy against consumerismthat is, the getting of the silly stuff to which the non-clerisy are so enslaved, unlike our own refined consumption of opera tickets and adventure holidays. Hedonic puritanism characterizes the writings of the brilliant economist Robert Frank and the brilliant sociologist Juliet Schor and the brilliant economist Tibor Scitovsky and, a century ago, the brilliant economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. All brilliant, but scientifically and ethically mistaken. Social science since Veblen has discovered a decisive reply to the brilliant, endlessly repeated claim that other people are vulgarly enslaved. It is: We are humans, and any level of income is a carrier of a material culture$3 a day and $125 a day, equally. Meal-taking or shelter-building or taletelling ensnares people, whether Eskimos riding snowmobiles or Mad Men on the train to Westport. The economic historian Stanley Lebergott asked long ago, What society is committed to mere physical survival? and quoted, with Lebergotts liberal learning, Alfred North Whitehead: Men are children of the Universe with ... irrational hopes. ... A tree sticks to its business of mere survival; and so does an oyster. We dont. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, says, Men do not merely survive. They survive in a definite way, the way of the tribe. Consumerism, such as the extra-caloric value of a meal of rabbit meat shared over the campfire by beloved fellow Bushmen in German East Africa in 1900 or of beer and chips shared over a dollar-limit poker table with beloved colleagues in Hyde Park in 1980, characterizes all human cultures. Sneers at consumerism, or the hedonics now used to back the sneers, are scientifically and politically unjustified. Easterlin wants us to resist such consumerism and become masters of growth. One would want to watch who is the master, or us. Easterlin would probably agree that getting a Federal Bureau of Happiness involved would not be such a good idea. But surely in an ethical sense he is right. Its good and right to persuade each other to take advantage of modern freedom from want for something other than playing computer games and eating more tacos and buying that third diamond bracelet. Yet it is puritanical to bemoan the plenitude, as the hedonicists and many environmentalists do now, and have done for decades, again and again and again. Better to light a lamp than curse the darkness. We should be busy advising each other to make the ensnaring worthy of our humanness, gladly ensnared by the celebration of the mass or by Georges Seurats Sunday on La Grande Jatte or by the final hours of a cricket match for the Ashes at Lords on a perfect London day in July. The recommendation to be ensnared by what is ennobling and the enactment of the ensnaringhas been a staple of world art and literature since the beginning. Maybe the hedonicists should get a museum pass or a library card. Ignoble enslavement in gluttony and pride has nothing especially to do with the modern growth from $3 to $125 a dayexcept that, because of it, a vastly larger percentage of humanity can indulge in vaster vulgarities. Yet, because of the liberal education made possible by the same enrichment, more and more people are open to the advice to do better with their lives. The advice should be sweetly persuading, not a taxed, or a compelled, or even a nudged one. There are regions of meaning for free adults that

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social policy, even benevolently applied, should not penetrate. Ominously, however, happiness studies have been diverted into an applied science. The happiness measurers very much want to direct us and are itching to engineer a happy society. They do not know what they are talking about, but are very willing to put policies about it into practice anyway. In a finely argued but erroneous book of philosophy, for example, Daniel Haybron a few years ago made a case partly on the basis of the new science of happiness against what he calls liberal optimism, or the belief since the eudaemonic movement and the bourgeois revaluations of the eighteenth century that people tend to fare bestand pretty well at thatwhen empowered to shape their [own] lives. He doubts it. But on what basis, since psychology is singularly ill-equipped to yield such doubt? As Haybron himself points out, tests on college kids do not range across enough experience. History is more to the point. Of course people make mistakes about their lives, and sometimes spend their lives badly. But as even Haybron acknowledges, the liberal experiment since 1700 has yielded gigantically better lives in every sense for a constantly increasing number of us. Haybron, and many of the elite critics of how other people spend their time on Earth, is an admitted pastoralist and disdains the sick hurry of modern life. Yet is he himself not living a happy life, which his ancestor around 1800who in any case died in childhood and childbirthdid not? THIS BRINGS US to the deepest humanistic criticism of the 1-2-3 economists. If we economists are not going to get any deeper than such a dubious pot-of-pleasure theory, perhaps we ought to rely on what we can measure scientifically and relevantly. We can measure national income, for example, or the U.N.s Human Development Reports, which serve as reasonable indexes of human potential. Its what I call scope, or what Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum call capabilitiesthe ability to read, for example, or the potential to become the founder of a new business, or the scope to cultivate a talent as an artist. Having an income of $125 instead of $3 gives the scope to do much more. The ancestors of the pro- or antihedonomic professors Kahneman, Easterlin, Frank, Schor, Veblen, Frey, and Layard, or Cskszentmihlyi, Seligman, Haidt, Chekola, Nozick, Schmidtz, McCloskey, Nussbaum, and Sen, were illiterate peasants or impoverished street vendors. They did not have the scope to achieve happiness in a dignified human sense. Now, for the first time, billions of humans can, whether or not they report happiness as 1 or 2 or 3. Easterlin claims, joining here as he does not on many other issues the pastoral critics of innovation in the line of Henry David Thoreau, that modern growth has spawned a materialistic and individualistic culture. Common though the claim is, there is little evidence for it, even in the life of Thoreau. The historian Lisa Jardine finds in the paintings and other exotic goods admired in Europe from 14001600 a bravura consumerism, which she regards as an admirable expression of the spirit of the Renaissance and of the fierce pride in mercantilism [by which she seems to mean merchant-ness, not its more usual meaning of protectionist economic policies] and the acquisitiveness which fueled its enterprises, ... a celebration of the urge to own, the curiosity to possess the treasures of other cultures. Such urges are not always bad, and they are not confined to Europe in the industrial era. Industrialization, writes the historian Peter Stearns without, it appears, troubling to examine the evidence, has brought a steady increase in materialism. ... Consumerism, always associated with industrialization as cause and effect, focuses personal goals on the acquisition of goods, from Main Street to Moscow. Yet industrialization has given us the scope to cultivate ourselves. And, for all the chatter in the journals of opinion about the horrible materialism of modern life, psychologists find that poor people put more, not less, value on the possessions they have than people with more. One recent survey by Patrick T. Vargas and Sukki Yoon notes that cultural critics frequently assert that people living in Western nations hold a stronger belief than those in less developed nations (or [our impoverished] past societies) that happiness comes from increased affluence and material possessions, yet evidence in [the] literature [on that same questionable 1-23 happiness, alas] suggests otherwise. Such findings seem plausible, even on economic grounds. Diminishing returns make your eighth Windsor chair less fascinating. Stearnss conventional wisdom again: Other [noncapitalist] cultural activities, including art, the humanities, religion, and the people who specialize in them, tend to lose ground. No, they do not. In the growing number of affluent countries, the museums and concert halls are packed. High culture has in fact always flourished in eras of lively commerce, from fifth-century Greece through Song China and Renaissance Italy down to the Dutch Golden Age or the flowering of American high culture after World War II, with the additional stimulus then from much extended higher education. Among the 30 democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reporting such statistics today, some 27 percent of the adult population 25 to 64 years old have completed tertiary education, ranging from Turkeys 11 percent up to Canadas 48 percent. Such booming cultural activity makes for many lives beyond materialism. The economist of culture Tyler Cowen often observes that more artists are alive today than any time before. During the 60s, more professors were hired in U.S. post-secondary institutions than all who had gone before. The expansion of higher education yielded, for example, a big audience in the United States and Britain for serious literary fiction. Terry Eagleton, who is a superb if determinedly left-wing professor of serious literary fiction in English, makes the conventional claim of a monstrously egoistic civilization [the bourgeois] have created. Eagleton knows better than such a clich when he teaches Chaucer and his Pardoner, or Shakespeare and his Iagorepresentatives of monstrously egoistic civilizations of church or castle. To yearn for a simpler time, when getting and spending was not so much with us, is mostly a version of the pastoral. It has been repeated in every world literature in every age, independently of the sociological evidence. Theocritus and Horace sang a golden age of nymphs and shepherds. In 1767, Adam Ferguson lamented, Eagleton notes, the detached and solitary people of Scotland, whose bands of affection are broken. By 1800, Wordsworth and Goethe and by 1840 Disraeli and Carlyle and Dickens joined the lamentation, and on and on, to the anti-bourgeois, anticonsumerism critics of our own day. The clerisys version of a Norman Rockwell world, whether in the childhood of our parents or in the Golden Age of Kronos, is the time in which we were not so obsessed with consumption. But it is not so and never has been. Consumption itself is a matter of talk, and modern lives give many more materials with which to talk. The object, Sahlins observes, stands as a human concept outside itself, as man speaking to man through the medium of things. And, if seen through history rather than through Hellenistic pastoralism or German Romanticism, the gemeinschaft of olden times looks not so nice. The murder rate in villages in thirteenth-century England was higher than the worst police districts now. Medieval English peasants were in fact

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mobile geographically, fragmenting their lives. The imagined extended family of traditional life never existed in England. The Russian mir was not egalitarian, and its ancientness was a figment of the German Romantic imagination. The once-idealized Vietnamese peasants of the 60s did not live in tranquil, closed corporate communities. The sweet American family of I Remember Mama or Father Knows Best must have occurred from time to time. But most were more likeLong Days Journey Into Night or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As the feminist economist Nancy Folbre remarks, We cannot base our critique of impersonal market-based society on some romantic version of a past society as one big happy family. In that family, Big Daddy was usually in control. Love, in short, is arguably thicker on the ground in the modern Western capitalist world, or at any rate is not obviously thinner on the ground than in the actual world of olden and allegedly more solidarity-drenched times. There is your happiness. The descendent in todays Glasgow of the dairy maid or the cook, in whom the old intelligence shines, is richer because the society in which she lives has moved from $3 to $125 a day. She has hugely greater scope, capabilities, potential, real personal income for what Wilhelm von Humboldt described in 1792 as Bildung, self-culture, selfdevelopment, life plans, the second-order preferences fulfilled that make for inner and outer success in life. She leads a life in fullfuller in work, travel, education, health, acquaintance, imagination. A well-fed cat sitting in the sun is happy in the pot-ofpleasure sense of happiness studies. The pussy is a 3. But what the modern world offers to men and women and children as against cats and other machines for pleasure is not merely such happiness, but a uniquely enlarged scope to realize themselves. True, one can turn away fromBildung and read celebrity mags all day. Yet billions are enabled to do more. And they can also have, in proper moderation, more cat-like, materialistic, economistpleasing happiness if they wish. Good for them. These are your sands of better life, though unmeasurable. One could conclude about the 1-2-3 hedonists what Mill concluded about Bentham: no one, probably, who, in a highly instructed age, ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set out with a more limited conception either of the agencies by which human conduct is, or of those by which it should be, influenced. The literature and the philosophy of grown-ups since Mesopotamia provide better concepts. Mill remarked that Bentham was always a boy. We do not need more Benthams, or more boyish games of 1-2-3. We do not need more hedonomics or utilonomics or freakonomics. We need humanomics, which may be not an -omics at all, and a liberal society supported by it, the one that has given us the scope to flourish if we are so inclined. Deirdre N. McCloskey teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and economic history at the University of Gothenburg. Her latest books are Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cant Explain the Modern Worldand (with Stephen Ziliak) The Cult of Statistical Significance. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Stanley Kauffmann on Films: Differing Modes

Stanley Kauffmann June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am

Patience (After Sebald) Polisse Bonsi If we were to choose the fine modern novelist whose work is least apt for screening, it would probably be W.G. Sebald. His novels are meditative, pensive. If we were to choose the least apt among his works, it would probably be The Rings of Saturn. It has no cogent narrative. Here is a film made from that novel, called Patience (After Sebald), that confirms, though it somewhat buffets, our prejudgment. Grant Gee, the Englishman who made the film, is known for his work on music documentaries, but he was a university student of geography. Presumably it was this latter interest that drew him to this book, which is the account of a journey that Sebald made through East Anglia. He was revisitinghe knew the area pretty wellbut he had a variety of reasons for this protracted return. Gee attempts to reproduce the sensitive and affectionate feeling of the journey. Difficulties occur. First, the fact of the filming itself. It seems a curious treatment formally of a book that, like all of Sebalds novels, is already illustrated with photographs, made or selected by the author. Gee reproduces many of these photographs as he goes, and his film at times seems to represent the material between those photographs from the book. He also inserts archival film footage from time to time, always in grainy black and white. (Very little of the film is in color.) Much of this footage seems a rough substitute for Sebalds unique woodwind prose. Gee is aware of this danger, apparently, and attempts to forestall it, not only by actually showing bits of text on screen, but by showing various individuals including Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate of England, and Marina Warner, herself a well-known writerspeaking bits of it. All this has a curious double effect. It supports the bookishness of the source in a visually and aurally engaging way; but for those who know something of

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Sebald, it is diluting. These film visitors, as partial protagonists, scatter the books gravity. Sebald was a German who lived in England and taught German there for thirty years: he inevitably carried within him some of the complexities of modern European history. He had been born in and taught the culture of a country that had been beaten by the country he was now living in, a country that had badly damagedquite necessarilyhis own. (I once knew a former Luftwaffe fighter pilot who for a few postwar years had taught German literature at Oxford and was somewhat numbed by the ease of it.) Because of Sebalds long residence in England and because of Englands innate qualities, he had clearly come to love this second country. But his historical complexity is here eliminated by these English readers. Whats worse, its hard to say how it could have been retained except to have only a single speaker, and with a German accent. The films title is incomprehensible. The director says that it refers to a game of patience, the British name for solitaire, in another Sebald novel. Even if it does, its still incomprehensible. The original title is understandable if one remembers that Saturn was the god of harvests and that the narrator is in several senses harvesting. Gee does capture the books nineteenth-century feeling of a journey mainly on foot, often featuring feet going on. Sebald must have been literatures greatest pedestrian after Wordsworth. (The poet sometimes set out from the Lake District on footfor a European trip.) Yet the film is finally only an enjoyable tour, almost devoid of the books resonances. A FRENCH FILM called Polisse is one of the best based-onfacts police pictures. Often their relation to fact seems stretched by screenwriters. Here Mawenn, the one-name writer-director, and Emmanuelle Bercot, who co-wrote the script, have worked assiduously to enter the subject, and Mawenn has directed with passion. The locus is the CPU Child Protection Unitof the Paris police. (Presumably the title is the way some people whom they deal with pronounce police.) We never see any of the CPU in uniform. They are all on the young side, and many of them are women. All of them have had at least some rudimentary training in psychiatry, and they treat the crimesusually disgusting professionally. The films method is mosaicthat is, it keeps moving through a series of short scenes, so that the effect is addition rather than exhaustion. Mostly they are interrogations in police quarters, with a good number of searches and some highly personal sequences with the police people themselves. At first we fear that we will get only a snapshot survey, but before long we can see that Mawenn is building. We see the mindsets that are created in these officers after spending much time on the protection of childreneven babiesfrom adults, including parents. Nothing in these cases is surprising; child abuse is not a Parisian monopoly. But we can see these officers becoming hardenedor, explosively, not being hardened. The criminals are often sane-sounding persons, which only toughens the officers as they realize that their jobs will never be finished. The many child actors who are involved in the inquiries have all been brought to unwavering truth by Mawenn. She has also dealt perfectly with her large and excellent cast. The editors, Laure Gardette and Yann Dedet, contributed much to the films vitality. ONWARD GOES THE contrapuntal mode lately noted here. This is the method in which the style of filmmaking is in some sort of commenting relation to the story. Bonsi, from Chile, derived by the writer-director Cristin Jimnez from a novel by Alejandro Zambra, is the least inflected film story I can remember. It flows along placidly, heated only occasionally by a bit of sex or disco dancing. Otherwise, people talk to one another calmly, even about feelings, with verisimilitude but not much else. Meanwhile, Jimnez is recording this even-tempered life with a dazzling display of cinematic inventivenessunusual and interesting angles, rapid cutting, unexpected close and long shots. The net effect is also unexpected. All this display is engaging. The very first item announces bravura. A subtitle tells us that, at the end of this story about Emilia and Julio, Emilia dies and Julio lives. It is important, apparently, that we know this from the start. In fact, however, it doesnt make the slightest bit of difference. The subtitle is really only an announcement of Jimnezs heterodox intent. They are both university students in Santiago, studying literature. A professor asks his class if anyone has read Proust. All of them raise their hands, Julio belatedly. He then gets a library copy of the first volume and takes it to a beach. Lying in the sun, he falls asleep with the book open on his chest. (Surprise shot: we see this from directly over his head looking down, la Dal.) His chest is sunburned except where the book lay, and when Emilia, his girlfriend, asks him about the white patch on his chest, he says, Proust. References to Proust recur as the film goes on, but they have no intrinsic relevance. The film is in six parts: three of them are set in the time of the opening, and the alternate parts are set eight years later, when Diego is bearded and has a different girlfriend. He is in the same job he had at the start, typist and assistant to a famous novelist. His new girl is a translator of Japanese. We keep leaping back and forth, eight years at a time, to no apparent purpose except that an atmosphere is sustained of conventional lives more or less in the literary world. And Proust gets mentioned often. Also, the bonsai. This is a miniaturized tree which we see first as a seedling and then eight years later as a rugged little shrub. Again the relation of this symbol to this story is unclear. Julio, for instance, does not have a completed novel of his own at the end. Nathalia Galgani as Emilia and Gabriela Arancibia as the second girlfriend are adequately present. Diego Noguera, as Julio, seems so intelligent that he must have known he was playing a foil for the films style. Similarly, Jimnez, truly talented, must have had his chuckles all through the filming. So, after a fashion, do we. Now we can hope that he will find another subject and treat it straight or contrapuntally, if only it is a little less flat. Stanley Kauffmann is the film critic for The New Republic. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.

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Nobility Eclipsed Cynthia Ozick June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am now, remains a commanding thread in the American language. It is that thread, or call it a bright ribbon of feeling, that animates Robinson as she confronts Alters rendering of Psalm 30, marveling at its sacred quality of being, and at the Psalmists I, this amazing universal human singular who integrates experience and interprets it profoundly. Any translation, she concludes, is always another testimony. Here the novelist invokes exaltation in phrases that are themselves exalting, as if dazzled by a vast inner light washing out both the visual and the tactile: hence testimony, an ecstatic internal urge. But Alter responds with an illustration that hints at dissent. The KJV, he points out, has I will extol thee, O Lord; for thou hast lifted me up, while for lifted me up Alter chooses, instead, drew me up. The Hebrew word dolah, he explains, refers to drawing water from a well; the image is of a bottomless crevasse in the earth, fearfully identified in a later verse as the Pit. Rather than turning inward, the translator uncovers sacral presence in the concrete meaning of the Hebrew, so that the metaphor of the well instantly seizes on weight and depth and muscle. Which approach is truer, which more authentic? This, then, is the marrowthe unacknowledged pitof the argument. And it becomes explicit only moments afterward, in Robinsons beautiful recitation of Alters translation of Psalm 8, followed by Alters reading of the Hebrew original. The contrast in sound is so arresting that Robinson is asked to comment on it. She hesitates: it is clear that to American ears the Hebrew guttural is as uncongenial as it is unfamiliar. Diffidently, courteously, she concedes, I have no Hebrew. Well, I have, says Alter. And there it is, the awful cut exposed: the baleful question of birthright. The translator asserts his possession of the language of the Psalms: is this equal to a claim that he alone is their rightful heir? Perhaps yes; but also perhaps not. The novelist, meanwhile, has embraced and passionately internalized those selfsame verses, though in their English dressthen is she too not a genuine heir to their intimacies and majesties? Never mind that Alter, wryly qualifying, goes on to address the issue of vocal disparity: And if anyone thinks that he is reproducing the sound of Hebrew in English, he is seriously deluded. A translators gesture of humilitythe two musical systems cannot be made to meet; it cannot be done. But this comes as an aside and a distraction. What continues to hang in the air is Alters emphatic declaration of ownership. Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. Harvard and Yale in their early years required the study of Hebrew together with Latin and Greek; Yale even now retains its Hebrew motto. Divinity school Hebrew may be diminished, but it endures. And though the Hebrew Bible is embedded in the Old Testament, its native tongue is silenced. We have no Hebrew, admits biblically faithful America. Then can Hebrew, however unheard, be said to be an integral American birthright? Was Alter, on that uneasy evening in New York, enacting a kind of triumphalism, or was he, instead, urging a deeper affinity? Deeper, because the well of Hebrew yields more than the transports of what we have come to call the spiritual. Send down a bucket, and up comes a manifold historythe history of a particular people, but also the history of the language itself. An old, old tongue, the enduring vehicle of study and scholarship, public liturgy and private prayer, geographically displaced and dispersed but never abandoned, never fallen into irretrievable disuse, continually renewed, and at the last restored to the utilitarian and the commonplace. Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no

Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry By Alan Mintz (Stanford University Press, 520 pp., $65)

I. ON DECEMBER 17, 2007, on the storied stage of the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Hebrew languageits essence, its structure, its metaphysic entered American discourse in so urgent a manner as to renew, if not to inflame, an ancient argument. The occasion was a public conversation between Marilynne Robinson and Robert Alter: a not uncommon match of novelist with literary scholar. In this instance, though, the scholar is an English Department anomaly: not only a master of the Anglo-American corpus, but a profoundly engaged Hebraist and Bible translator and expositor, whose newly published volume of Englished psalms is the evenings subject. The novelist, too, is exceptional among her contemporariesa writer of religious inclination, open to history and wit, yet not dogged by piety, if piety implies an unthinking mechanics of belief. Robinson may rightly be termed a Protestant novelist, in a way we might hesitate to characterize even the consciously Protestant Updike. Certainly it is impossible to conceive of any other American writer of fiction who could be drawn, as Robinson has been drawn, to an illuminating reconsideration of Calvinism. Protestant and Jew, writer and translator: such a juxtaposition is already an argument. The expectation of one may not be the expectation of the other. The novelists intuition for the sacred differs from the translators interrogation of the sacred. And beyond this disparity stands the inveterate perplexity, for English speakers, of the seventeenth century biblical sonorities of the King James Version (KJV): can they, should they, be cast out as superannuated? The question is not so much whether the KJV can be surpassed as whether it can be escaped. From that very platform where Robinson and Alter sit amiably contending, a procession of the great modernists of the twentieth century (among them Eliot and Auden and Marianne Moore and Dylan Thomas) once sent out their indelible voicesvoices inexorably reflecting the pulsings and locutions that are the KJVs venerable legacy to poets. And not only to poets: everyone for whom English is a mother tongue is indebted to the idiom and cadences of the KJV. For Americans, they are the Bible, and the Bible, even

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longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible. And despite translations heroic bridging, despite its every effort to narrow the idiomatic divide by disclosing the true names of things (the word itself, not merely the halo of the word), we may never see an America steeped in Hebrew melodies. Yet once, for a little time, we did. II. THERE WAS A PERIOD, in the first half of the twentieth century, when Americathe land, its literature, its varied inhabitants and their historieswas sung in the Hebrew alphabet. Long epic poems on American Indians, the California Gold Rush, the predicament and religious expression of blacks in the American South, the farms and villages and churchgoers of New England, the landscape of Mainethese were the Whitmanesque explorations and celebrations of a rapturous cenacle of Hebrew poets who flourished from before World War I until the aftermath of World War II. But both cenacle and flourished must be severely qualified. Strewn as they were among a handful of citiesNew York, Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago they rarely met as an established group; and if they flourished, it was in driven pursuit of an elitist art sequestered in nearly hermetic obscurity. They were more a fever and a flowering than a movement: they issued neither pronouncements nor provocations. They had no unified credo. What they had was HebrewHebrew for its own sake, Hebrew as a burning bush in the brain. Apart from those socio-historic narratives on purely American themes, they also wrote in a lyrical vein, or a metaphysical, or a romantic. Though modernism was accelerating all around them, and had taken root through European influences in the burgeoning Hebrew poetry of Palestine/ Israel, the American Hebraists almost uniformly turned away from the staccato innovations of the modernists. They were, with one or two exceptions, classicists who repudiated make-itnew manifestos as a type of reductive barbarism. Rather than pare the language down, or compress it through imagism and other prosodic maneuvers, they sought to plumb its inexhaustible deeps. And when their hour of conflagration ebbed, it was not only because their readers were destined to be few. Hebrew had returned to its natural home in a Hebrew-speaking sovereign polity: a fulfillment that for the American Hebraists was, unwaveringly, the guiding nerve of their linguistic conviction. Who, then, were these possessed and unheralded aristocrats, these priestly celebrants unencumbered by a congregation, these monarchs in want of a kingdom? Were they no more than a Diaspora chimera? In a revelatory work of scholarly grandeur that is in itself a hymn to Hebrew, Alan Mintz has revivified both the period and the poets. The capacious volume he calls Sanctuary in the Wilderness is history, biography, translation, criticism, and morea more that is, after all, an evocation of regret. The regret is pervasive and tragic. Think not of some mute inglorious Milton, but of a living and achieving Milton set down in a society unable to decipher so much as a-b-c, and unaware of either the poets presence or his significance. Yet Mintz never condescends; with honorable diffidence, he repeatedly refers to this majestic study as merely introductory, an opening for others to come. HERE LET ME OFFER a far smaller opening into that longago reach for the sublime. From a shelf harboring a row of bilingual Yiddish and Hebrew dictionaries, I pluck out a curious little Hebrew book that has journeyed with me since childhood. It is so old that its pages are brittle and browning at the margins. The brownish-gray cover announces title and provenance: RIVON KATAN, A Little Quarterly of POETRY and THOUGHT, Volume I, Number 1. Issued by the Hebrew Poetry Society of America. Three Dollars Yearly. Spring, 5704 (1944). Editor: A. Regelson. As for the Table of Contents, its preoccupations and aspirations are self-evident: Henry A. Wallace: Century of the Common Man N. Touroff: Can a Nation Become Insane? S. Hillels: Leo Tolstoy Ben Hanagar: Walt Whitmans Native Island Elinor Wylie: Velasquez (Hebrew by G. Preil) A. Regelson: Poetry of Ibn Gabirol A. Regelson: Saul Tchernichovsky Ilya Ehrenburg: Plant and Child Henry Wallace, Elinor Wylie, and Ilya Ehrenburg, all declaiming in Hebrew! And the Hebrew Poetry Society of America? It may be that A. [Abraham] Regelson, all on his own, comprised president, secretary, translation committee, and possibly the entire membership. Striving publications of this kind were proliferating at the time, many of larger note and longer duration. Most appeared exclusively in Hebrew, bearing redolent names: Haderor (The Swallow), Hatoren (The Mast), Miqlat (Refuge)althoughHadoar (The Post), despite its more mundane designation and wider circulation, was as unstintingly literary as the others. Like the editor of A Little Quarterly, the poets who filled these periodicals were, without exception, a part of the great flood of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish immigration. Arriving as children or adolescents or in their early twenties, they came with a traditional Hebrew grounding behind them and an American education before them; and since their foundational tongue was Yiddish, they soon were easily and fluently trilingual. But to describe them merely as trilingual is to obscure their mastery. Any one of these poets might have leaped, if he chose, into the vigorous roil of Yiddish belles-lettres and its burgeoning American journals. Or, even more prominently, there was the possibility of aspiring to the canon of Englishlanguage poetsto stand, in that era, beside Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, and Robinson Jeffers. Instead, what the Hebraists chose was patrimony patrimony in the sense of rootedness in a primordial continuum. From the promise of Yiddish, long a quintessential component of Jewish civilization, the Hebraists markedly turned away. Though Yiddish, too, reveres and incorporates the legacy of Hebrew, it is nevertheless not Hebrew. Despite its evolving high culture and literary achievements, this European-derived language had its origins in an everyday vernacular, andin the tumult and bustle of American acculturationconcerned itself less with the empyrean than with the tangles of daily life. Nor could these linguistic patricians be tempted by the powerful elasticity and breadth of English, however swept away they might be by the great English and American poets. Whitman in particular quickly became a kind of model and mentor, as well as a portal to a visionary America. Influences and tutelary spirits abounded, sometimes

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surprisingly. A case in point: Regelson felt himself so seized and claimed by Yeats that he composed an Irish poem in homage to the friendship of Yeats and Gogarty: Shney Barburim vNahar (Two Swans and a River). To experience the dazzlements of Regelsons own Englishing of this extraordinary narrative ode is to recognize how the choice of Hebrew may have occasioned a genuine loss to American (and Irish) literature. Nor was it, astonishingly, a gain to Israeli letters. It may be a natural irony of historynatural because inexorable that the establishment of Israel as a modern Hebrewspeaking nation in possession of an acclaimed and robustly expanding literature should have shut out the American Hebraists. It was not even that they were considered marginal to the Hebrew center, and on that account excluded. Worse yet, their very existence was unknown. Mintz opens his study by citing the dumbfounded observations of Zalman Shazar, Israels third president and a literary figure in his own right, when on his first visit to America in the 1930s he discovered, like some Columbus encountering an unsuspected tribe, a Hebrew-intoxicated band of ascetics. IN THEIR ISOLATED nobility [he wrote], they attached themselves only to the intangible and absolute in the national spirit. They had complete mastery over the Hebrew language ... as if they lived in the Land of Israel, and they were utterly unreconciled and even oblivious to the surroundings in which they actually lived. In their loneliness, there was the sadness of being the chosen few, and in their sadness there was a marked but unexpressed pride. Just as they were alienated from their surroundings, so were they also separated from each other.... Most of them were scattered among various cities, a few here and a few there, as if no single Jewish community in America could handle them as a group. They appeared like a phalanx of knights loyal to the Hebrew language whose pride forbade them both from admitting the least hint of their difficulties to a Jew from Palestine and from paying the least heed to the seductions of English.... In this conscious renunciation of popular attention there was something of the self-gratification that proud artists allow themselves, something of the feeling of superiority enjoyed by monks offering obeisance to a Hebrew Princess and serving her with no expectation of reward either in this world or in the world to come, either in the Diaspora or in the Land of Israel. The tone of this anthropological survey as seen from the confident center is sympathetic and pityingand condescending. What the visitor saw was achingly partial, and may have derived from the early Zionist negation of the Diaspora, which viewed the continuing presence of Jewish communities elsewhere as poignantly superfluous if not tragically mistaken. And unlike self-denying monks or quixotically deluded knights alienated from their surroundings, these striving newcomers seized on whatever bounty America held out, its public high schools and universities, its landscapes and lore, above all its freedom of self-invention. (What could be more self-invented than, say, a poet residing in Cleveland raptly composing sonnets in Hebrew?) Rejection of English as a literary vehicle did not mean rejection of English as the fulcrum of advancement in the professions. Many, if not most, were engaged in building secular cultural institutions, including teachers colleges, for the rigorous study of Hebrew language and literature, though always with a wall of separation between the communal and the transcendent. The poetry was to be kept immaculately apart from the pedagogy, and if the American Hebraists could be defined by a common motif, it might be by the idea of separation. As scholars and intellectuals, they were perforce set apart from the mass of immigrant Jews, whose cultural attitudes and aptitudes they disdained. Their recoil, and often their satire, was, curiously, not very different from that of Henry James during his excursion in 1905 among the streets and cafs of the Lower East Side, where he observed the hard glitter of Israel, and predicted, thanks to Jewish linguistic infiltration, the debasement of English. It was in the light of letters, he wrote, that is in the light of our language as literature has hitherto known it, that one stared at all this unconscious impudence of the agency of future ravage. He could not have imagined, as irony has since abundantly noted, that out of those cacaphonous streets and cafs would one day arise an army of Jamesian critics and scholars, bringing not ravage but homage. In scorning what he called the New Jerusalem, James saw a fallen nation; assessing the same population, so did the Hebraists. But while James proved to be a poor seer, the poets in their pridefulness may have intuited the heartbreak and hurt to come: the immigrants children who became esoteric theorists and interpreters of Henry James (and Emerson and Hawthorne and all the rest) were at the same time Hebrew illiterates. As for the poets themselves, they were a prodigious generational accident, a miracle of literary confluence: who could have foretold an eruption of Hebrew-generative genius on the American continent which, having no offspring, then came to nothing? III. FOR HIS AMBITIOUS overview of this remarkable period, Mintz has chosen twelve out of the Hebraist cohort to contemplate in the round: the life, the work, the influences on the work, and each poets particularized interiority. The twelve are not meant to be taken as representative of the whole: among such fiercely individuated minds, there can be no type. Eisig Silberschlag, a professor of Hebrew literature at the University of Texas and a classical scholar who translated Aristophanes into Hebrew, had little in common with Gabriel Preil, an outlier singled out for his forays into modernismthe sole American Hebraist to achieve recognition in Israel, even as he lived out his days in the Bronx. Though both wrote short lyric verses, Silberschlags mature outlook was formed in Europe, where, in the 1920s, he earned a doctorate from the University of Vienna with a thesis, Mintz tells us, on the economic relations between England and Russia during the reign of Catherine II. Israel Efros, a specialist in medieval philosophy and a translator of Shakespeare, was consistently associated with universities; he founded Baltimore Hebrew College and was eventually called to be president of Tel Aviv University. As an ordained rabbi, Efros was singular among the Hebraists. Most had left traditional piety behind, no longer observing the punctilios of Jewish practicea worldliness that led some to law and medicine, and others to journalism. Like the American poets who were their close contemporaries, Wallace Stevens in his insurance office and William Carlos Williams on his doctors rounds, they sought useful livelihoods. Preil alone appeared to cultivate an Emily Dickinsonian isolation. Mintz illuminates the poets biographies, brief as they are, with the skill of a pointillist. But it is in his analysis of the poems themselves that he is most masterly. Analysis is Mintzs word; it is inadequate to the readers experience of what he brings off. Each central section of this massive volume is devoted to the body of work of a single poet, and culminates in the close reading of a single poem. Each poem is presented first in Hebrew, followed by Mintzs lucid English translation. But even close reading fails to approximate what is achieved here. A modestya felt trustworthiness inhabits these multiple renderings: the goal is honest replication without embroidery. There is no intent to rival the original musically or sensuously. Mintz

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means the poem to be understood both for its inwardness and for the air it breathes; his critical vocabulary has the discerning force of insight. Analysis defines. Insight conveys. And beyond insight is sympathysympathy as praise, as homage, and also as the kind of immersion in a writers reason-for-being that will deliver him over to the reader as the writer himself would wish to be delivered. This requires a rare critical confidence that is crucially linked to critical humility. And nowhere is the fusion of confidence and amplitude more acutely displayed than in an extended preamble titled The Apotheosis of Hebrew, which purposefully follows Mintzs more generalized introduction. Here Mintz concentrates, as he does elsewhere, on one poem by one poet, but with a difference. The poet is Regelson, and the poem is Haquqot otiyotayikh (Engraved are Thy Letters), an intricately crafted paean to the Hebrew language: metaphysical, erotic, hubristic, fanatical. It aspires to steal, in effect, the recondite procreative fire of the Creator of the Universe, if that universe is seen as coequal with Hebrew in its infinite mystical manifestations and its internal morphological permutations. Mintz sets this poem apart for scrutiny neither as linguistically representative of the American Hebraists, nor as aspirationally typical. He intends it, rather, as a touchstone, or what he identifies as a privileged hermeneutical key, the secret spring of American Hebraism, a passion that could not speak its name. In Haquqot otiyotayikh, Mintz sees the repressed religious-libidinal attachment that underlies the whole of the American Hebraist enterprise. Yet without predicating this motor of desire, he writes, it would be difficult indeed to understand the pertinacity and profusion of American Hebrew poetry. Were it not for the existence of an extraordinary exception to the general lack of self-awareness on this score, it would be presumptuous to psychoanalyze a cultural phenomenon. Regelson is that exception: Regelsons hymn to Hebrew is a dazzling work that is unlike any other poem in the corpus of modern Hebrew literature. It is an extravagant ode to a language offered by a lover in thrall to the object of his desire, which is figured as a beautiful woman. It is a classic anatomy, a literary form that exhaustively inventories the categories and components of its subject. It is a theological treatise on the divinity of Hebrew that advances an argument for linguistic pantheism. Written at the great hinge of the twentieth century, it is a historiosophical work that uses Hebrew as a marker for both the murder of European Jewry and the struggle for Jewish statehood. It is a polemic about the course of the revival of Hebrew and an attack on the purported guardians of its purity. It is an apologia for the life of a poet who, at the time of the writing, was stranded far from Zion. Above all else, the poem is a performance of virtuosity that, in its maximalist poetics, seeks to conjure up and demonstrate the full plastic and arcane resources of the Hebrew language.... Its explanatory power is crucial for an understanding of the project of American Hebraism as a whole.... a way into the inner spiritual and psychological world of American Hebrew poetry. among the Hebraists, was drawn to join the great contemporary wave of imagism and symbolism, the new formless forms, the solitary and alienated consciousness. The winner of an undeclared contest, he remains the only American Hebraist to have attained a modicum of ongoing posthumous notice. Surrounded by a culture wherein modernism was supreme, the others, faithful to the idioms of transcendence and eschewing dissonance and brokenness, may have appeared to be archaists. Preil fit in, and was welcomed. It is rivalry that determines who shall be prince and who pauper. SHIMON HALKIN was among the princes. His beginning was as favored as his years of consummation. Mintz describes him at the acme of his repute: As the occupant of the chair of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 1950s and 1960s, Halkin taught virtually every important writer and critic in the young state until his death at the age of eighty-eight in 1987. The force of his presence compelled attention to the body of his own poetry and fiction in face of the fact that his own writing flouted almost all the norms of the new Israeli literature of the time. Where the younger poets ... sought to bring the language of poetry closer to everyday speech, Halkin wrote in a high register using extreme figuration and a rarefied literary lexicon. Where they prized simplicity and the brief lyric, he championed complexity and the ambitious long poem. Where they took for granted that modern man is living in a world after faith, Halkin made the search for God a central preoccupation of his poetic endeavor.... Halkins poetry was accorded respect as much for the august power of the verse itself as for the influential figure of the poet who wrote it. But Halkin was long accustomed to acclaim. On his arrival in New York at fifteen, he was already known to be prodigious in Hebrew, a reputation that accelerated even as Tennyson and Browning continued to stir him. His earliest poems were published in prestigious Hebrew journals during his high school years, and soon after college he was offered a stipend for literary translation and, more significantly, for the freedom to concentrate on his poetry. Still later, he won a competition for yet another stipend, this one awarded by Salman Schocken, the publisher of Kafka. He was financially liberated from the start. He also won a more intimate competition. At Morris High School in the Bronx he met the young Regelson, a boy three years his senior, who turned out, astonishingly, to be his double: a secret sharer of the elixir of Hebrew. Regelson too had been a prodigy: as a child in the cheder, the rabbis schoolroom, he had composed, in fluent Hebrew, an interpretive synopsis of the thought of Rashi, the great medieval biblical annotator. At Morris High, the two teens conversed in Hebrew, and fell into passionate discussions of poetry and philosophy. Both were steeped in the English Romantics, and each early on knew himself destined for poetry: it was an idyll of elective affinities. Where they were most alike was in the style of their mature work, in what Mintz characterizes as cascading sheets of electrifying figurative writing, and in the metaphysical/mystical/lyrical cast of their abiding inspirations. Their lives ran parallel also in other ways. Both experienced interrupted sojourns in 1930s Palestine before settling there after the formal establishment of the Jewish state. Like Halkin, Regelson translated widely: Shakespeare, Milton, Herrick, Blake, Browning, Whitman, countless canonical others. Halkin, meanwhile, had already conveyed into Hebrew The Merchant of Venice and the whole of Whitmans Leaves of Grass. In 1975, Halkin was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature. In 1972, Regelson

Mintzs speculative yet tantalizing thesisthat a driven though submerged and surrogate eros accounts for the Hebrew intoxications of these poetsmay or may not be true. But rivalry, whether underground or overt, can also be a sustaining engine. Gabriel Preils turn to styles of modernism: was it an innate expression or a competitive urge? An unwilled imprint of the zeitgeist or an opportunistic choice? It is tempting to ask why Preil, alone

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was the recipient of the Chaim Nachman Bialik Prize, given in the name of the most illustrious Hebrew poet of the age. IN THE ENDRATHER, toward the middlethe parallels dissolved, the idyll cracked. The first telltale fissure began in boyhood, and came in the guise of an act of magnanimity, indeed an act of youthful noblesse oblige. As Halkin recounted it in a late memoir, he had received a letter from Regelson, written in an elegantly elevated Hebrew, and sent it on to his editor at Miqlat, where Halkins verses were already appearing. Impressed, the editor solicited and brought into print Regelsons first published poem. The younger poet had favored the older; but in becoming, through superior influence, Regelsons patron, he had also bested him. And what had begun as affinity disintegrated further when the two young men entered City College together. After a year, Regelson dropped out for reasons that remain unrecorded, though he was soon married and sooner yet the father of a son, the first of five children. Halkin went on to advanced degrees and a princely career as a revered professor of literature, while Regelson became, quite literally, a pauper who struggled to live by his pen, hoping to feed his children by the force of his imagination. But here Mintz, identifying Halkins magisterial role as a kind of tribune in the republic of Hebrew letters, takes quizzical note of a problematical omission. Halkin was lavish in maintaining relations in person or by letter with writers scattered across several generations and writing about their work out of a sense of responsibility to the larger endeavor. To the best of my knowledge, Mintz adds, the only real notice that this prolific critic gave to Regelson and his body of work was that single passing mention in Halkins memoir of his own boyhood benevolence. A bitter falling out, then. What happened? Before I supply the answer (Mintz leaves the puzzle unresolved), I am obliged to confess that if I have returned to Regelson time and again, while scanting others among this studys cardinal twelve, it is out of seeming partiality: Abraham Regelson was my uncle, my mothers brother. I hope before long to show that this apparent predisposition is made of nothing more substantial than air; yet consanguinitys advantage is ready access to buried knowledgeor call it comic melodrama, or the selfpreening misadventures of a pair of contenders. According to Regelsons daughter, who serves as her fathers archivist, the break erupted out of a volcanic charge of literary theft: Halkin accusing Regelson of plagiarism, Regelson accusing Halkin of plagiarism, each once again the double of the other. Mutual recrimination, smoldering, became mutual contempt. Still, hidden in rivalry is its symbiotic secret; all competitiveness grows out of ferocious affinity. This star-crossed operetta, however, has no satisfactory coda, and what, after all, is there to choose between Halkin and Regelson? Despite the serpents tooth of disrespect, both were enmeshed in the great ancestral Judaic chain of word and idea. Halkin held the scepter of influence, while the often impoverished Regelson toiled in journalism for breadbut who today in America, beyond a minuscule handful of specialists (two, perhaps three) reads the American Hebraists? What does it matter if a spangled recognition enthroned Halkin, or that Regelson knew himself to be self-made in the Hebrew image of William Blake? Neither weighs in an America given to the erasure of a noble literary passage it has no tongue to name. IV. THEN WHO IS TO BLAME? We are: we have no Hebrew. But who, or what, really, is this culpable we? An admission: inescapably, it is the educated American Jewish mentality, insofar as it desires to further self-understanding. The Hebrew Bible has long been the worlds possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are equals in ownership, and may not be denied the intimacy of their spiritual claim. Yet spirit is that numinous essence that flies above history, inhabiting the moments exquisite experience: it is common to all peoples, hence native to none. History, in contrast, is linked to heritage, and heritagepreeminently its expression in languageis what most particularly defines a civilization. So when, in that emblematic colloquy at the Y, Alter responded to Robinsons reticent I have no Hebrew with his quickly assertive Well, I have, it was certainly as a translator in confident command of superior skillsbut not only. It was also, irresistibly, a cry of kinship, and, even more powerfully, an appeal to deep memory. Implicit in Alters signal have is the condition of the have-nots: an absence of Jewish literacy in a population renowned for its enduring reverence for learning. Rounding off the grand architecture of his formidable study, Mintz concludes with a monitory capstone: [The American Hebraists] may have been wrong about Hebrew being the measure of all thingsthis was the monomania that contributed to their eclipsebut they were surely correct in seeing Hebrew as the deep structure of Jewish civilization, its DNA, as it were. They understood the unique role of Hebrew as a bridge that spans many cleavages: between classical Judaism and the present, between religious and secular Jews, and between Israel and the Diaspora. They further understood that any Jewish society that takes place largely in translation runs the risk of floating free of its tether to Jewish authenticity. But wait. Monomania as a cause of the Hebraists eclipse? Never. No monomania, no art. Then who killed Hebrew in America? I did, with my little bit of Hebrew, so little as to be equivalent to none. I knew Abraham Regelson as the affectionate uncle who gave me a 1910 British edition of Kiplings Just So Stories (with a gilt elephant and an Indian swastika on the cover); and I recall a postcard sent from 1930s Tel Aviv: a picture of a white building, with an X marked over one window. Here lives Bialik, my uncle wrote to his very young niece (who was innocent of the wonder of it). And did you once see Shelley plain? asks Edna St. Vincent Millay. I did not truly see my uncle plain until now, long after his death, when Mintz brought home to me the poets virtuosity: his encyclopedic mastery of the historical lexicon of the Hebrew language, his erudition in classical sources, and, most of all, his ability to take the language not just as given but rather to invent and proliferate provocative new words and dazzling constructions. Seductive gates these, through which I may not pass, forbidden by the bound feet of ignorance. This is the uncle I did not know, and could not know, and will never know. And though I am removed by the slender distance of a single generation, the civilizational gap between us reveals an abyss of loss. If the American Hebraists are in eclipse, it is because we, their children, have turned out to be incurious illiterates, who, like some intelligent subspecies, gaze at the letters and cannot see their meaning. Cynthia Ozick is the author, most recently, of Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.

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The Curse of Knowledge

Isaac Chotiner June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am

Imagine: How Creativity Works By Jonah Lehrer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pp., $26) THE YEAR IS 1965. Bob Dylan has just completed two weeks of touring in England. He is tiredexhausted actually. He needs a break. There is a tiny cabin in upstate New York where he can stay, where he can get away from it all, where he can find himself. After returning from Europe, he does just that. Its him and his motorcycle. No more songwriting, no more guitar, no more pressure, no more responsibility. Hell, he might start working on a novel. Little does Dylan know that his attempt to clear his head will actually spark a creative re-awakening. After his rest, his break, his rejuvenation, Dylan is back in his groove. With pencil in hand, and paper at the ready, he is writing. Writing like mad. He can hardly stop. Its as if someone or something has taken over his body. His creativity cannot be contained, whether or not he himself wants to contain it. And pretty soon, sure enough: Once upon a time you dressed so fine You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didnt you? People call, say, Beware, doll, youre bound to fall. You thought they were all kiddin you. These are just the opening lines to a legendary song, but before long, on June 15, 1965, Dylan cuts Like a Rolling Stone. Even John Lennon is amazed by his achievement. THAT IS THE STORY Jonah Lehrer tells in Bob Dylans Brain, the first chapter of his new book on creativity. The words are mine, but the breathless style and the use of italics are his. According to Lehrer, Dylans creative outpouring was a result of the time he spent away. As Lehrer explains, The feeling of frustrationthe act of being stumpedis an essential part of the creative process.... Its often only ... after weve stopped searching for the answer that the answer arrives. As Dylan himself said in a radio interview, I found myself writing ... this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long. Vomiting out lyrics, Lehrer repeats, was actually a stunning means of creation.

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In Lehrers account, the miracle was not just that Dylan had created a timeless song. He had created a particular type of timeless song. Lehrer quotes the lyrics excerpted above, and asks, What do these words mean? What is Dylan trying to tell us? ... These questions, of course, dont have easy answers. This was the thrilling discovery that saved Dylans career: he could write vivid lines filled with possibility without knowing exactly what those possibilities were. Before June 1965, Lehrer explains, there were only two ways to write a song. The first was to wallow in seriousnessmelancholy and complexityand the second was to compose an irresistible jingle full of major chords. But no longer. By taking a step backward, Dylan took two steps forward. And there was more: Dylan, amid his vomiting and spewing, somehow managed to coin words. Youve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely But you know you only used to get juiced in it as an influence. Bob Dylan did not invent obscure or esoteric lyrics. The argument is further muddied when, after repeatedly noting that a ghost was in control of Dylan, Lehrer adds, regarding simple love songs, that such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid. So was it the ghosts intention or Dylans intention that produced these obscure lyrics? (And what is the neuroscientific status of a ghost?) Anyway, most of the song is relatively easy to interpret, further clouding Lehrers left/right distinction. Mystery in words and music is established in many ways, and often in accordance with the plain meaning of words. The Basement Tapes demonstrated this beautifully. THERE IS LITTLE to be learned about Bob Dylan, or the creative process more generally, from Jonah Lehrer. What his book has to teach, and by example, is the fetishization of brain science, and the anxious need for easy answers to complex questions. Imagine is divided into two sections, Alone and Together, because Lehrer is interested in distinguishing between an individuals creativity and the environments that allow creativity to flourish. His basic argument regarding individuals, captured in his discussion of Dylan, is that being obsessively focused on a problem can lead to a dead end. When we are relaxed, by contrast, we are more likely to direct our attention inward, and thus detect the connections that lead to insights. Similarly, Lehrer preaches the value of so-called horizontal interactions, which are characterized by people sharing knowledge across fields. The benefit of such conceptual blending is that it allows people to look at their most frustrating problems from a fresh perspective. One of his examples is the remarkably successful Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, known as 3M. Lehrer explains that where other companies demand constant focus on specific problems, 3M encourages breaks and rest. Employees at 3M are told to take an hour out of their days and spend it thinking about, or pursuing, new ideas. Lehrer quotes from a brain study showing that alpha waves, which emanate from the right hemisphere, are an important aspect of creativityLehrer uses the words creativity and imagination synonymouslyand since these waves appear to be activated by rest and leisure, they must be the crucial facets of the imagination. It would be foolish to deny that there is some truth to many of Lehrers claims, however sloppily or broadly they are expressed. Anyone who has ever worked on a crossword puzzle can attest to the feeling of being stumped, withdrawing, and then returning to the puzzle with an answer. Sometimes a break from thinking can be the best aid to thinking. But this is true of many activities that become difficult or tedious owing to repetition or routinization. Lehrers eureka is rather banal. IMAGINE is a collection of storiesall pop-science these days must be translated into stories, as if readers, like children, cannot absorb the material any other way; but some of Lehrers stories do not necessarily support his thesis, and some of them contradict it. Consider the tale of Don Lee, who worked as a computer programmer before deciding to embark on a life of inventing cocktails. At this he has succeeded: he is currently the head mixologist at one of David Changs restaurants. Lees creation of a bacon-infused cocktail, Lehrer notes, can be attributed to the fact that Lee is an outsider. Its a parable about the benefits of knowing lessDon was a passionate amateur and the virtues of injecting new ideas into an old field. This story is only a slight variation on the previous discussions of horizontal thinking, conceptual blending, and the glories of the right hemisphere. Lehrer concludes the chapter by noting that knowledge can be a subtle curse.

Juiced in it? Lehrer asks. Its an incredibly effective phrase, even though the listener has no idea what it means. Thanks to Dylan, we now define the word as drunk. Lehrer ends his chapter as follows: In that lonely cabin, he found a way to fully express himself, to transform the fragments of art in his head into a new kind of song. He wasnt just writing a pop singlehe was rewriting the possibilities of music. Lehrers contention is that the particulars of the songs creation tell us about the workings of the brains two hemispheres, the left (the literal definition of the words) and the right (hidden connections, alternative approaches). When people are frustrated or tired, they tend to look for right-brain alternative approaches. Rightbrain tissue, Lehrer adds, shows activity before an epiphany strikes. Dylan had apparently reached a point in his career where the literal definition of words was no longer enough. By removing himself from the spotlight, he was able to find the crucial hidden connections that are the poetry of his music. The reason for dwelling at length on Lehrers consideration of Dylan is that almost everything in the chapterfrom the minor details to the larger argumentis inaccurate, misleading, or simplistic. The small stuff is less important: Dylan did not go upstate immediately after his English tour he went away with his first wife. Nor did he coin the word juiced, which was in wide circulation and which he was likely to have heard before. (Billie Holiday used it in her autobiography.) Dylans time away, moreover, lasted only several days. Lehrers ridiculous implication is that Dylan took no other similarly short breaks in his life, but he does not make any effort to back up his assumption. More worryingly, Lehrers weightier confusions cast doubt on his glib interpretations of brain experiments. There are many songs whose meanings are unclear after forty words Mr. Tambourine Man, written a year earlier and thus before Dylans breakthrough, comes to mind. And yet Lehrer is astonished that this particular songs opening is difficult to decipher (because, remember, Dylan was just vomitingnothing was making sense, until, eventually, it did). And Lehrers dichotomymarking off the two ways that one creates a songdoes not allow even for, say, Bringing It All Back Home, the Dylan album that was released earlier that year, and contains a variety of styles. And before Dylan there were the Surrealists, and before the Surrealists there was Rimbaudwhom Dylan proudly cites

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This alleged curse is Lehrers contribution to the contemporary fashion of non-knowledgeable thinking intuitionism, blinking, and so on. But some questions are bound to occur to the reader. Have most delicious alcoholic drinks been invented by outsiders? And what does the success of Don Lee tell us about anything other than the success of Don Lee? It is often the case that a certain epistemological advantage may be found on the periphery; but even if you accept Lehrers argument about the importance of outsider thinking, it is hardly the only sort of significant thinking there is. There is absolutely no reason to attribute Lees success to his outsider status. The brain research is irrelevant: maybe the guy simply knew his drinks, and would have been even more successful had he entered the field earlier in life. And if Lee was just trying all kinds of unconventional combinations, tossing ingredients into the booze until something tasted good, then luck or probability also had something to do with it, as in the old joke about the monkey who types. (Lee is described as resolute in his drink-makinghe refused to get discouragedwhich contradicts Lehrers previous warnings about the value of taking time off, but never mind.) Lehrer cites several studies in this chapterthat living abroad makes you better at problem-solving; that subjects performed better on tests when they were merely told that the tests were conceived overseas. He also describes creative breakthroughs that were the result of scientific work outside of the scientists particular field. Sometimes chemists solve physics problems, and biologists solve chemistry problems, and so on. Sure. But sometimes chemists also solve chemistry problems. Indeed, they do so more frequently than biologists. Lehrers slippery language is crucial to his method. He writes, The people deep inside a domainthe chemists trying to solve a chemistry problemoften suffer from a kind of intellectual handicap. A page later he notes that the young know less, which is why they often invent more. In both cases, the crucial, slippery word is often. In the first instance, Lehrer is just stating an obvious fact a fresh look may be useful, an outsider can see what an insider may overlookbut one which does not explain much. In the second instance, the often completely destroys the point of the sentence. Do the young invent more, or not? No doubt in the entire history of humanity, the young have often come up with inventions. But how often, exactly? And what does he mean by young? In the ancient and medieval and early modern centuries, and even into the nineteenth century, thirty or forty was not young. Their dates of birth are not all we need to know. The problem keeps recurring. Of a surfing expert with Aspergers, Lehrer writes, Clays ability to innovate in surfing is rooted in a defining feature of his mental disorder. Is Lehrer saying that Clays surfing expertise is the result of his disease, or merely that certain properties of the disease may lead to success in fields like surfing? Are there an unusually high number of surfers who suffer from Aspergers? We are not further enlightened. Lehrer may want us to believe that creativity is essentially abnormal, medically or socially or intellectually; but the history of creativity is riddled with geniuses who worked within the conventions and in the centers. So, perhaps sensing that he has made himself a hostage to fortune, Lehrer also assures us that sometimes rest and relaxation, or outsider status, or a lack of knowledge, is not really the secret to creativity. Sometimes the secret is, in fact, hard thinking. In a brief discussion of Auden, he writes that September 1, 1939, feels as if it were composed on the back of a cocktail napkin, but assures us that this ease is an illusion, and that the poem required a lot of hard work. This is one of the features of Lehrers genre: make an absurd claim, and then act as if you alone have the insight to knock it down. It is ridiculous and condescending to conclude from even a perfunctory reading of Audens poem that it could have been jotted down on a cocktail napkin. Lehrer goes on to say that sometimes inventions do not come until one can think no more, and that an obsessive focus is crucial. Uh-huh. So the lesson of Lehrers hot book is this: creativity comes from intense thinking, or it doesnt. IMAGINE is really a pop-science book, which these days usually means that it is an exercise in laboratory-approved self-help. Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it. For this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in studies and given a scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly zeitgeisty. Their sponging off science is what gives these writers the authority that their readers impute to them, and makes their simplicities seem very weighty. Of course, Gladwell and Brooks and Lehrer rarely challenge the findings that they report, not least because they lack the expertise to make such a challenge. The irony of Lehrers work, and of the genre as a whole, is that while he takes an almost worshipful attitude toward specific scientific studies, he is sloppy in his more factual claims. (In one low moment, he quotes an online poll from Nature magazine to support one of his arguments.) I am not an expert on brain science, but for Lehrer to quote a study about the ability of test subjects to answer questions when those questions were placed on a computer screen with a blue background, and then to make the lifechanging claim that the color blue can help you double your creative output, is laughable. No scientist would accept such an inference. This superficiality is a tip-off about the books intended audience. Imagine is another manual for self-styled entrepreneurs. Lehrers definition of creativity is essentially an entrepreneurial one: for him, anything that succeeds is creative. I mean this in two ways. First, any product that sells, from a mop to a drink, is a sign of creativity. It would follow from Lehrers approach that a study of movie box office numbers would prove that there must be something remarkably creative about Transformers. Second, and more worryingly, artistic and commercial creations are evaluated in exactly the same terms. Consider Lehrers story about the Barbie dollor rather the story of Ruth Handler. Handler traveled to Europe in the 1950s and saw a toy doll of a grown woman. The doll was intended for middle-aged men. But Handler, remembering that her daughter often gave her girl toys adult personalities, assumed that the toy was for kids. Handler told her husband, a Mattel executive, to make a toy of an adult woman, and pretty soon Barbie was born. As Lehrer notes, if Handler had known that the European toy was not meant for childrenif she had not been an outsidershe would never have suggested the toy in the first place. But Handler was not remotely creative. She made a useful mistake. Her story has nothing to do with the imagination or creativity, at least as properly understood, or even as previously described by Lehrer. I suppose it is intended to prove that outsiders can cause breakthroughs; but if outsider intuition is to be defined as any random notion based on error or coincidenceas anything that anybody might saythen the notion is too loose to ground a theory of discovery. Finding yourself sick for a weekend can lead to the discovery of a good television program. All of this really has nothing to do with Bob Dylan writing lyrics or a chemist solving a physics problem. The chemist, in Lehrers scenario, was presumably approaching the problem from a new or interesting entry point; but even though he was not

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trained in physics, he was trained in scientific reasoning and procedure, and was therefore not quite the pure outsider that Lehrer reveres. As for Handler, she was just confused. Lehrer does not see creativity or imagination as being intricately connected to art, or to science, or to anything that we would generally term imaginative. It is all about success. Dylan writes successful song lyrics, and Barbie dolls sell. A Nike executive is reminded of Gary Gilmores famous alleged last words, and is thus able to coin the slogan Just Do It. Lehrers unwillingness to distinguish between these types of thinking, between art, science, and commerce, is discouraging. Inside or outside, the only place that finally interests Lehrer is the marketplace. Thus, he discusses the creative culture at Pixar in an attempt to explain why the company has been so successful. His explanationthat it hires employees from diverse backgrounds and allows them to freely interact with one anotherseems plausible enough. Whats more, Pixar is physically designed to encourage interactions between employees. It is the exchanges we dont expect, with the people we just met, that will change the way we think about everything. But the problem of differentiating between artistic distinction and commercial distinction is especially problematic here. You can certainly argue that Pixars success has been both. But when Pixar workers generate new ideas, are they doing so for artistic or commercial reasons, or a combination of the two? Are these interactions helping Pixar make better movies, or more money, or both? If the films were just as good but sold fewer tickets, would Lehrer still admire them as he does? Of course there can be some overlap in the answers to these questions, and certainly creativity may be involved in an effort to make money. (Remember credit default swaps?) But if you are trying to explain the most ambitious and the most admirable exertions of human imagination and intelligence, some disaggregation, some discrimination, is necessary. THE SECOND HALF of Lehrers book is even more perfunctory. He makes an intuitively convincing case that group discussions are most effective when they involve criticism, allowing group members to more fully engage with different arguments. (Though there are studiessee, anybody can play this game!that show that this scenario leads to polarization and hung juries.) The same can hold true in a societal context. Borrowing (heavily) a page from Edward Glaeser, Lehrer is a cheerleader for cities because they allow different kinds of people to interact with one another. It is the human friction that creates the sparks, he writes. This, too, seems intuitively right, but the way Lehrer deploys his studies to prove his point is troublesome. He quotes one that shows people to be better at solving problems when in the same physical space, as opposed to online. This is hardly evidence for the success of urban spaces. Physical reality is a big place. How many people, and in how large a space? Im sure that there are other studies showing that online frictionthere is certainly plenty of itis a boon to problem-solving and innovation. Lehrer also turns to history to make his case. Shakespeare, he writes, was destined for a life of drudgery, before being saved by his time. Since Elizabethan England was welcoming of a literary culture, and since it had such robust theater attendance, and since its rates of literacy were rising, Shakespeare thrived: While Shakespeare is often regarded as an inexplicable talenta man whose work exists outside of historyhe turns out to have been profoundly dependent on the age in which he lived.... Shakespeare is a reminder, in other words, that culture largely determines creative output. Lehrer contrasts this with a subsequent period, beginning in 1642, by noting that the creative flourishing of English literature was brief. Never mind Milton, and Dryden, and the rest. So Shakespeares culture made Shakespeare? But then this creative genius must have been inside it. Yet according to Lehrers theory he must also have been an outsider. I guess he was an outsider-insider. And suppose that Shakespeare had been an open Catholic, or that an open Catholic with his talents had existed in his age: he would never have been comparably successful. This may actually support Lehrers claim that the time makes the man, but it tells us next to nothing about Shakespeares particular genius. It may have been more likely that Shakespeare would emerge from Elizabethan England than Kim Jong Ils North Korea, but such an insight is neither interesting nor surprising. Nor is it clear whether it is Shakespeares popularity or his genius that we are supposed to be evaluating. Presumably Lehrer would celebrate Shakespeare even if he sold very few tickets, but maybe not. Whoever sold more tickets than Shakespeare would have possessed the imagination most in need of explaining and imitating. The appeal of Lehrers stories is obvious. As he said in a recent interview, Creativity is a universal talent. You, me, all of us. What good news! Lehrers stories are so cool and easy to grasp because they are so uplifting, and they are so uplifting because they erase certain crucial distinctions between the realms and the methods of creativity. Nothing is more soothing than quick answers to lifes mysteries. For the first time in human history, he notes near the end of the book, its possible to learn how the imagination actually works. Really? Is he aware of the immense nonscientific literature on the actual imagination that preceded him? In an earlier book called Proust Was a Neuroscientista title for our timesLehrer at least recognized that the novelist preceded the scientist to certain understandings. Not herealthough his solutions would make a serious scientist blush. His success is certainly undeniable, but his book is a failure of the imagination. Isaac Chotiner is the Executive Editor of The Book: An Online Review at TNR.com. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Homer Now

Peter Green June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am

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The Iliad of Homer Translated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 599 pp., $15) Homer: The Iliad Translated by Anthony Verity (Oxford University Press, 470 pp., $29.95) Homer: The Iliad Translated by Stephen Mitchell (Free Press, 466 pp., $35) Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad By Alice Oswald (Faber & Faber, 84 pp., 12.99) The Song of Achilles By Madeline Miller (Ecco, 378 pp., $25.99) English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History By Stuart Gillespie (Wiley-Blackwell, 208 pp., $110.95) I. "Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleuss son Achilleus/and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians. It is over sixty years now since Richmond Lattimore first published his groundbreaking translation of Homers The Iliad. What distinguished his version from just about all its predecessors, starting with George Chapman in the sixteenth century, was that it consciously and deliberately set out to produce a text calculated to give readers with no knowledge of Greek as accurate a picture as English could convey of the Homeric original. Lattimores program included meter, rhythm, style, formulaic phrases, vocabulary, and those qualities famously isolated by Matthew Arnold in his lectures On Translating Homer: rapidity, plainness of thought, directness of expression, and a nobility of concept that could rise, without losing its simplicity, to the grand manner. The occasion that produced such an English Iliad was, of course, the huge expansion of American university education in the humanities, largely fostered by the GI Bill in the years immediately following World War II. Arguments over Homeric translation are nothing new. Virtually since the Renaissance, there has been a clear division among translators between modernists and Hellenizers. The first, in essence, follow the principle enunciated by Dryden: that were the ancient poet now living, and an Englishman, the version of him they produced would be such as the poet himself would probably have writtena formula that, of course, gave carte blanche for any anglicization, however bizarre. The Hellenizers, by contrast, aim to preserve, as far as possible, the original characteristics of the Greek, and are often thought of as upholding the cause of those whom Arnold termed the unlearned, meaning primarily those incapable of reading Homer in the original. Nothing in fact could be further from the truth than this latter supposition. It has not been only the Drydenists who assumed that their readers were themselves familiar with the original Greek texts, and could competently offer criticism of each new version; the Hellenizers did exactly the same, and looked, no less than their rivals, for knowledgeable criticism and appreciation. The enlightenment of the Greekless concerned them not at all: what mattered were the Anglo-American poetic fashions of the day. It was indeed true that between the two world wars a taste for vers libre made it look as though translators were at last moving in on the alien structure of a Sophoclean chorus or a Pindaric ode, but this was merely coincidental. The postwar development of the humanities at the college level led to a noticeable degree of contempt among conservative academics for what novelties such as Lattimores Iliadwere setting out to achieve. Old-school classicists, secure in their familiarity with Homeric Greek, regarded the whole idea as unnecessary and a dilution of proper scholarly standards, like general courses in classical civilization that relied on translated texts. When, in 1976, Malcolm Willcock produced a Companion to The Iliad based on Lattimore, elderly heads were shaken at this symptom of decline. Nor did the Greekless get any help from that avant-gardeclassical autodidact Donald Carne-Ross, who was fond of saying that what they should do was get off their butts and learn Greek: three months should suffice to let them at least read Homer by construal (this claim had more than the old fogeys shaking their heads), and having bypassed the need for the kind of help that Lattimore offered, they could move on to serious theories of translation. Carne-Ross wanted free scope, in English literary terms, for the development of creative versions, and his relentless dismissal of Lattimores workin particular in an essay on his Odyssey, significantly titled A Mistaken Ambition of Exactnesshas been one of the main reasons for the decline in Lattimores reputation in recent years. Yet the professors in English departments who benefited from the new trend found Lattimore a godsend. Since their own grasp of classical languages seldom exceeded, or even reached, Shakespeares, Lattimores careful avoidance of modern decoration meant that they were not liable, all unknowing, to criticize as Homeric a trope that originated in the mind of the translator. But they were also eager, understandably, to present Homer, Virgil, and the tragedians as part and parcel of English literary history. Thus, for them, the famous versions of Chapman and Pope, far from failing (as Matthew Arnold argued) by recreating Homer in Elizabethan or Augustan dress, played an admirable role, for that very reason, in mediating their author for the English tradition. Stuart Gillespies chapter on Classical Translation and the Formation of the English Literary Canon in English Translation and Classical Reception is fascinating in this regard. Unconcerned with evaluating Homer tout court, and even less with helping the Greekless to see him plain, such academics have acclimatized a paradox that I first came across as a joke (the influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare) in one of David Lodges novels, so that Gillespie, quite seriously, can invite us to consider Shakespeares influence on Plutarch. Such speculation, as Gillespie admits, has a heady attraction, though outside the classic-English-translationas-original scene it rapidly loses its traction. FORTUNATELY, THE survival of Lattimores remarkable tour de forcehas not depended on the say-so of captious literary critics. Despite the rival offerings of Robert Fitzgerald (much touted by Carne-Ross), Robert Fagles, and Stanley Lombardo, there are still many students who have come to Homer by way of Lattimore, and not a few of these have been inspired by his version to learn Greek and reach out to the full richness of the original. Proof of his Iliads enduring value is the excellent new edition designed, as the blurb proclaims, to bring the book into the twenty-first century, with up-to-date bibliography, maps, an onomastic glossary, explanatory running notes on background and critical trends, and, perhaps most important, a clear and comprehensive survey by Richard Martin of the very

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considerable advances in Homeric scholarship achieved since the original appearance of Lattimores Iliad in 1951. In sixty-four closely packed pages, Martin updates readers on new evidence for Troy and the Trojan Warthe accumulating likelihood of their historicity has surely sharpened our fascination with Homers versiontogether with the saga associated with it, the unique vision of The Iliad and its world, the current state of the perennial Homeric Questions, the nature of Homeric style, and changes in reception and translation. It is difficult to see how this introduction could be improved, and those who read it with care before embarking on the translation that follows will enjoy a constantly enhanced understanding and appreciation of Homers epic. Just how influential a model Lattimore has proved becomes evident on every page of two more recently published translations of The Iliad. It ishard to imagine how Anthony Verity or Stephen Mitchell would have gone about their task had Lattimore not blazed the trail that they so clearly follow. Both these translatorsVerity more closely than Mitchellhave adopted something very like Lattimores loose quasi-hexametrical line, with its varying (average five) number of stresses. Verity also keeps carefully to Homeric line-numeration, a wonderful rule against splurging, as readers of the version by Fagles, who ignored the rule, know to their cost. He also preserves those formulaic epithetscloud-gathering Zeus, bronze-clad Achaeans, swift houndsthat irritate some modern translators, including Mitchell. They cannot abide anything irrational (Apollos plague kills all the hounds, not just swift ones; swift-footed Achilles spends most of the time sulking in his tent) or, worse, anything un-English. But it is worth recalling that the poem does not give Odysseuss epithets to Achilles, or Achilless to Odysseus; and also that the occasional jolting contrast between a characters epithet and his behavior may be quite deliberate. These labels are more than merely formulaic. To omit them diminishes the text. Mitchell, though he knows Greek, is a professional translatormost notably of Rilkerather than a classicist. This may explain why he has fallen unconditionally in love with the Homeric theories of the All Souls classical guru Martin West, not bothered one bit by the fact that they are, to put it mildly, contentious. For West, Homer was neither two bards nor a string of rhapsodes: he was a single brilliant poet, who took what he needed from the tale of Troy and stamped it with his unique creative personality thus creating an Ur-text of The Iliadwhich, West believes, is theoretically recoverable. This Iliad does not include what he, along with some ancient critics, regards as late inferior insertionsin particular Book Ten, the nocturnal killing of the Trojan spy Dolon, and the capture of Rhesuss famous Thracian horses, by Odysseus and Diomedes. So out goes Book Ten in toto, for West, and for Mitchell, too: this is the first translation I know of that goes straight from Book Nine to Book Eleven. This is by far the biggest excision in Wests text (which Mitchell uses), but it is by no means the only one. Thus Mitchell (quite apart from the quality of his translation) is guaranteed to annoy more knowledgeable readers than he satisfies. These, he may be surprised to learn, are liable to include some who have considerable sympathy with Wests position. No one familiar with what survives of other epic poets, for starters, is likely to deny Homers vast superiority to all of them, and thus at least the possibility of a single creative mind at work. But a possibility, at best, is what we are faced with. As for Book Ten, it is surely no accident that Book Nine closes with Odysseuss report of Achilless obstinate refusal to return to the fray, followed by Diomedess contemptuous comments on such grandstanding. The successful commando raid that the two of them carry out that very night offers a clear alternative to the self-obsessed honor code and individual battlefield heroics that form the traditional mode of fighting an Achaean warand have already dragged the present one out for almost ten years. Note that when they get back to camp with Rhesuss Thracian horses, old-fashioned Nestors instant assumption is that the latter were either publicly battled for or the gift of a god. Thus Book Ten fits well into the story, and enhances its meanings, even if its removal, as claimed, leaves no noticeable gap in the narrative. Again, this interpretation of Book Ten is no more than a possibility. It could imply either a strong sense of irony in Wests master poet (Odysseus may have beaten Thersites for his anti-heroic realism in Book Two, but here he is behaving in a decidedly Thersitean way himself), or (as West would prefer) an insertion by a later realist, more familiar with the value of night-raid tactics and less enamored of the traditional glories of formal single combat. I suspect I will not be the only reader to be annoyed by having my mind made up for me in advance by the translator, especially when the ongoing debate remains so hard-fought. Surely the translators business is to use the traditional text without excisions (though with a warning about the doubts expressed in antiquity regarding Book Ten), and let the reader make up his or her own mind. AS TRANSLATIONS, how well do these new versions succeed, and to what extent do they justify their existence by improving on Lattimore? In particular, how do they manage meter and rhythm? Verity tells us that his version does not claim to be poetrynot the best way, surely, of promoting a great poemand in fact much of it hardly qualifies as verse. It reads in parts more like ordinary English prose chopped up to maintain line-equivalence: Andromaches famous closing funeral lament over Hector, as rendered by Verity, offers a striking example of this. Mitchell quotes the advice that Ezra Pound once gave an aspiring translator of The Iliad: Nobody will give a damn about the meter if there is flow. What produced that flow in Homers hexameters were his driving dah-didi dactyls (one long syllable followed by two shorts). Mitchells minimally iambic five-beat line has didi-dah anapests (two short syllables followed by one long) and extra syllables thrown in for variety in the search for equivalence, but di-dah iambs (one short syllable followed by one long), notoriously, climb rather than flowing or driving, while anapaests are incurably jaunty: Aristophanes loved them. My intention throughout, Mitchell says, has been to recreate the ancient epic as a contemporary poem in the parallel universe of the English language. In short, he is a Drydenist. Admittedly, the hexameter presents more seemingly insuperable problems to an Anglophone translator than any other classical meter. Since accentual English has no fixed vowel quantities, it is impossible to reproduce the subtle counterpoint between natural stress and metrical schema, so that English hexameters tend to be flat and repetitive. Worse, the Greek dactyl carries a strong firstsyllable emphasis, something that basically iambic English finds very hard to reproduce over the long haul. C.S. Calverley, a skillful and classically trained Victorian versifier who was well aware of these problems, took a shot at doing The Iliad in hexameters, but gave up, understandably, less than halfway through Book One. It is interesting to compare his version with those of Lattimore and his successors. Here is Apollos famous descent on the Greek camp, stirred to wrath by the plea of Chryses the priest, in Calverleys version:

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So did he pray, and his prayer reached the ears of Phoebus Apollo. Dark was the soul of the god as he moved from the heights of Olympus, Shouldering a bow, and a quiver on this side fast and on that side. Onward in anger he moved. And the arrows, stirred by the motion, Rattled and rang on his shoulder: he came, as cometh the midnight. Calverley makes those dactyls behave as they should especially at the beginning of the line, where first-syllable emphasis is crucialbut the effort is apparent. And at least at one point strong scansion seems to have led to a mistranslation. No one, it is safe to say, has ever seen midnight coming: what can be scary (like the approach of a god) is sudden nightfall. Lattimoresurprisingly, since it should be a showpiece for any translatoris by no means at his best in this passage. Heavily and awkwardly enjambed where the Greek is not, its overloaded third and fourth lines seem devoid of any clear accentual pattern. But his first line is a stress hexameter, and his second a fair example of the 5/6-beat quasi-hexametrical line that he pioneered: So he spoke in prayer, and Phoibos Apollo heard him, and strode down along the pinnacles of Olympos, angered in his heart, carrying across his shoulders the bow and the hooded quiver; and the shafts clashed on the shoulders of the god walking angrily. He came as night comes down. Veritys first line is identical with Lattimores, so he too scores one stress hexameter. His next two lines are vaguely iambic. His fourth is plain prose. His fifth, for no discernible reason, is in anapaests, their didi-dah cheerfulness undercutting the force of the night simile. Unlike Calverley and Lattimore, he at least makes an attempt to match the Greeks linear rhetoric (though the direct shoulders/shoulders echo is ugly, and not justified by Homer, who keeps the two words well apart): So he spoke in prayer and Phoebus Apollo heard him, and came down from Olympuss heights furious in his heart, his bow and lidded quiver hanging from his shoulders. The arrows clattered against the angry gods shoulder as he moved; and he came on like nightfall. None of these versions succeeds in capturing the four key qualities demanded by Matthew Arnold: rapidity, plainness, directness, and nobility, particularly the first and the last. But Mitchell is very conscious of them, though (as a good Drydenist) he argues that faithfulness to the Homeric style ... sometimes requires a good deal of freedom from the words of the Greek. He says he has worked hard to find a balance between endstopping and enjambment, though he clearly does not regard Homer as an adequate guide in this matter, and as a result he often transforms the poets rhetoric. West has seen to it that the quiver loses its formulaic lid, but in compensation swift to answer and with every step are Mitchells own additions: He ended his prayer, and Apollo was swift to answer, striding to Earth from the pinnacles of Olympus, filled with fury. His bow and his quiver were slung on his shoulder. The arrows rattled with every step. Down he strode, and his coming was like the night. What conclusions can we draw from all this? First, that the task of producing strict stress hexameters, at great length, is in all likelihood impossibleand, given the linguistic and accentual peculiarities of English, undesirable. Second, that the Lattimore line is to date the best substitute for the hexameter that anyone has devised. Third, that this line is open to a wide variety of prosodic abuses, several of which are on display in the examples here cited. Fourth, and perhaps most important, that translators too often seem deaf to the all-important linear rhetoric employed by Homer, with infinite skill and subtlety, in his hexametrically patterned sentence structure. Is it possible to get closer to this Homeric style? I have always thought so. Let me (perhaps rashly) attempt my own version of the passage cited above: Thus he spoke in prayer, and Phoebus Apollo heard him. Down from the peaks of Olympus he came, enraged at heart, carrying on his shoulders his bow and lidded quiver, arrows rattling loud on his shoulders as in his rage he strode on his way: his approach was like that of night. This kind of close approximation is not much in favor with translation theorists, who seem far happier with experimentalists, such as Christopher Logue in War Music, taking off from Homer with their own recreations, or with oralists, such as Stanley Lombardo, aiming to catch the current zeitgeistin spoken performance. But in an age when fewer people than ever can read Homeric Greek, there is surely a pressing need for the kind ofIliad that gives the newcomer some exciting sense of how Homer actually went about his businessan achievement quite different from the ultra-literary methods of, say, Milton or Virgil. II. THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER is that no one to date has rivaled the Homeric epics extraordinary staying power nearly three millennia now, and still going strong. What made it so memorable? Various factors have been suggested, but chief among them surely must be its uncanny universalist insight into the wellsprings of human nature, in combination with a driving dramatic narrative, both expressed in a never-to-be-repeated poetic extension of the high millennia-old oral tradition. This was caught and developed structurally on a hitherto unattainably vast scale by bards (just possibly one preternaturally gifted eighthcentury BCE poet) using the brand new tool of alphabetic writing. But it was, almost inevitably, a one-shot. From then on writing won, and the result was written literature. Even so, this Homeric blend of past and present, oral and written, survived to be heard, read, and studied in awed admiration long after the unique circumstances that engendered it were forgotten. By the sixth century the two Homeric epics were standardized and performed as an integral part of Athenss public festivals. They came to be consulted as repositories of ancient wisdom, on everything

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from chivalry to religious conduct (hence the popular tag about their being the Bible of the Greeks). Aeschylus claimed that his plays were merely slices from Homers great feast. Herodotus learned at least as much from The Iliad and The Odyssey as he did from the thinkers and doctors of Ionia. The scholars of Alexandria and Byzantium regarded the Homeric texts as by far the most important ones that they edited. From the Renaissance at least until the eighteenth century, Homer was the chief, and almost the only, Greek literary text that held its own against a heavily Latin-dominated culture: Chapmans Homer translation was out there in the Elizabethan age along with Thomas Phaers Aeneid and Ovids Metamorphoses as rendered by Arthur Golding, whereas Aeschylus went untranslated until 1777. The real spate of Homeric translations began in the Victorian age, and has never stopped. Their numbers far exceed those devoted to any other ancient poet. From those first recitations down to our own day, The Iliad and The Odyssey have always spoken, directly and uniquely, to our common humanity. The Victorian age, colonial-minded and for the most part without serious military conflicts, responded best to the linked themes of exploration and Heimweh treated in the Odyssey. But not long afterward warfare and its savagery became one of the central experiences of the West: as Richard Martin says of the period after 1914, For the rest of the blood-soaked century, the tale of Achilleus mostly symbolizes pain. Two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan, have all sent us back to The Iliad to find, as Jonathan Shay memorably demonstrated in Achilles in Vietnam, that these ancient warriors were no strangers to post-traumatic stress disorder. In some respectsnotably the communalization of grief that set rigid laws governing the recovery of bodies and their subsequent funeral ceremonies in safety under truce Homers ancient warriors did rather better than their modern descendants. The Iliadmay be for the most part the poem of force described, with ruthless vividness, by Simone Weil; but there are more moments of compassion and grace in the course of it than she was prepared to admit. Even social priorities have a part to play: when Diomedes (as tough a warrior as any) and Glaukos realize that they are bound by an old family guest in friendship, they refuse to fight each other, and exchange not only civilities, but also armor. Consider the scenes introduced on Achilless new shield by Hephaestus. Of these only one deals with battle, siege, and ambush, with personified Strife and Uproar joining in the fray. The rest convey a vivid picture of rural peace and civilized discourse: marriages, dances, festivals, ploughing, reaping, vintaging well-tended olive groves and the pasturage of cattle. Here is a world where the worst danger is from predatory lions, and a murder is resolved by carefully debated judgment over the blood price. Once again these Mycenaeans did better than their modern descendants: in Audens famous poem The Shield of Achilles, Thetis gets a shock when she sees what Hephaestus has done: She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. What is more, the strongly pacific motif worked out on that shield inThe Iliad is not merely a cynical or nostalgic whim on the part of the gods armorer. Homers famous extended similes, almost two hundred of them, spread throughout the epic, belong with few exceptions to the same halcyon world. Natural phenomenastorms and snowfall; rain and hail; the varied light of sun, moon, stars, or forest fires form their background, and their details are culled from undisturbed country life. The blood of a wound is staunched as quickly as milk curdles when fig juice is stirred into it. A dying warriors drooping head is likened to a poppy beaten down by rain. The tug-of-war over Patrocluss body calls to mind tanners stretching a hide. When both sides hold their ground, the poet evokes the image of a poor woman balancing wool against weight in the scales, anxious to earn a pittance for her children. The clatter of close-quarter fighting is likened to the din of woodcutters at work in the forest. Warriors crowding round Sarpedons corpse are said to resemble the flies that buzz round full milk pails in spring. Through these similes a kind of haunting parallel world, glimpsed at sharp intervals, exists alongside that of the battlefield. There is thus an essential ambiguityappropriate enough, given the insoluble enigma of the poems composition, at the moment of change between two radically different worldsabout the way in which the events and the characters of The Iliad are meant to be seen. This ambiguity is brought out with characteristic skill by Richard Martin: Is The Iliad a celebration of heroism or an interrogation of its basicand potentially flawedassumptions? Whom should we emulate, if anyone, in this somber depiction of men and women under extreme conditions? Is it an elegy for a lost golden age, when people lived more out-sized and exciting lives? Or is it a warning about the catastrophes such lives engender? Is it a poem meant to shore up the ideological underpinnings of a fading aristocracy of self-centered warlords? Or does it capture the first glimmerings of a communal consciousness of the type that emerged in increasingly democratic (or at least nonelite) institutions within the city-state? For me, the poems greatness is evident in the fact that it is at one and the same time all of these things, and not only because it is the product of a culture in rapid transition between the oral and the written, between historical myth and history, between the memory of the old Mycenaean warrior-kings and the emerging soldier-farmers of the citystate and the hoplite phalanx. Its extraordinary humanity can contain them all, virtues and vices alike. We understand what instincts drive the heroic Achilles, but Thersites the radical demagogue gets his moment, too. THAT IS WHY, as Martin reminds us, our experience of the Iliad inevitably becomes one of self-exploration and self-definition. In our less ambitious way we are like Aeschylus, feeding at Homers great banquet, each generation finding what best answers to its needs. The British poet Alice Oswald, in Memorial, clearly haunted by the black granite stretches of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, with its endless list of names, has conceived the idea of giving the countless casualties mentioned in The Iliad a similar list of their own, projected on a kind of virtual memorial wall, thus formalizing their ancient demise through a modern image still raw with suffering. She follows up this list with a poetic sequence of the facts about each victim that she could scrape together from the Homeric text (and then decorate with her own inventions), followed by a similarly embellished translation of any simile that takes her fancy. (These last, for some inscrutable reason, are printed twiceare they really that important?)

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Dolon, the ferret-like spy from Wests allegedly spurious Book Ten, gets a lengthy entry, but then Oswald has all of that book on which to draw. About most of Homers dead TheIliad tells us little or nothing, and Oswalds efforts to improve on this calculated reticence, taken cumulatively, irritate. Occasional jarring modernisms (elevator doors, parachutes, motor bikes) disrupt the timelessness that they are presumably meant to uphold. Rather worse are the knowing personal and sexual comments. Pylaemeness manners were loose like old sacking. It is not enough that Menesthius was killed by Paris: Paris is running in a loverage towards him/With the smell of Helen still on his hands. Echepolus is known for his cold seed-like concentration, whatever that may be. Alcathouss heart, famously, still beats with a spear through it, making the spear quiverbut for Oswald the spear began to tick tick tick but not for love. Homer tells us of Iphidamass death as a newlywed at the hands of Agamemnon, and it is Oswald who adds, gratuitously, She said even on his wedding night/He seemed to be wearing armour. What do such comments add to our appreciation of The Iliad? And, more to the point, who would like one of them in his obituary? As Richard Martin reminds us, the Western tradition was quick to see Achilles in a way that The Iliad does not see him (certainly not overtly)as a lover. As early as Aeschyluss play The Myrmidons,Achilles is shown recalling his dear companions thighs and kisses. Here, one might have thought, is where Oswald could have worked effectively. But not a bit of it: in one of her briefest entries she makes an oblique allusion to Patrocluss accidental act of homicide as a young boy, and kills him off by the end of the sentence. The only reference we are given to Achilles is that Patroclus grew up blurred under the background noise of his fosterbrothers voicehardly friendly, that, let alone romantic. FOR A MODERN fictional version of the homoerotic relationship assumed by Aeschylus, and promoted by contemporary classicists such as James Davidson, we do better with Madeline Millers much-touted first novel, The Song of Achilles. Davidson, on his own showing, should adore Millers book. In The Greeks and Greek Love, when stressing the neglected importance of starry-eyed infatuation, what he calls homobesottedness, Davidson remarks of terms such as ers that they sound as if they are all about sex, sex, sex, and we have to make a real effort to remember that they are in fact all about love, love, love. For Miller, no effort is needed. Never, not for one moment, does her overpowering atmosphere of passionate adolescent innocence let up, even when describing a sexual encounter between her doomed lovers. I suspect it is this that has been responsible for the novels success. But while her pursuit of innocence may have left the main storyline intact, it required her to change Patroclus. Originally a dominant older guide and counselorthe typical Greekerasts (lover) dealing with Achilles as a younger pretty-boy ermenos (love object)he here appears as an adoring, slightly younger worshipper. This Patroclus, indeed, is something of a wimp. How he managed, even accidentally, to kill another boy in childhood defies all comprehension. Undersized, scared of his father, he really hates fighting, and is not any good at it. (There is no real explanation of how he knocks off a seasoned warrior such as Sarpedon, even when togged out in his boyfriends armor.) Patroclus is much happier behind the lines, serving as a skilled medic and basking happily in Achilless unexplained devotion to him. This revision once granted, though, Miller takes us, at a brisk pace, through all the well-known stages of their joint career. She has a remarkable skill for making the reader accept, almost without thinking, the Homeric interplay of gods or semi-divine creatures with mortals. Achilless mother Thetis is a scary enough goddess, black-eyed, bloody-minded, with a distinct aura, and the trick of sudden manifestations and vanishings, but in Miller she is also the embodiment of the original parent from hell, with every neurosis in the book. Miller even manages, convincingly and without embarrassment, those tricky months of education on Mount Pelion with Cheiron the wise centaur, and never mind that he is a horse from the waist onward. But perhaps her most successful trickit is certainly her most daringis to prolong Patrocluss first-person narrative beyond his death by virtually ignoring it: now hes alive, now hes a shade. With minimal explanation, the same voice goes on. There are surprising moments, not least when Patroclus pursues his lover to Skyros, finds him dressed as a girl, and ends by being entrapped into sex with an angry Deidameia, already pregnant after working the same stunt on Achilles. Small wonder that their resultant offspring Neoptolemos, known as Pyrrhos (Redhead), turns up in Troy as a cold, steely, prematurely adult twelve-year-old bent on avenging his father by means of wholesale slaughter, from Priam to Polyxena: Millers explanation of this nasty conclusion to the traditional myth is all too plausible. But through it all there persists the high innocence of the lovers relationship, and after a while one begins to wish that these two adolescents, in particular the killing machine that is Achilles, would for Gods sake grow up. But then, by about Book Eleven of The Iliad, Achilless gigantic sulks and obsession with an outworn code of honor begin to have the same effect, not least when we recall the marvelous earlier scene of parting between Hector, his wife Andromache, and his baby son, Astyanaxwhose brains Neoptolemos will beat out when the city falls. What remains for us is the moving reconciliationtoo little, too late between Achilles and old Priam, and the consolation of great tragic art bringing this saga of wasted heroism and selfcentered pride to an unforgettable conclusion. To which skillEliots condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)no translation has yet done full justice, and perhaps none ever will. Peter Green is the Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics in the University of Texas at Austin, and currently serves as a faculty member of the Department of Classics at the University of Iowa. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. The Wife

Adrienne Su June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am She was nothing. I was she. Even though she understood, the pouring of silvery light into the kitchen each brisk newlywed morning, the crackling of loaves being lifted from the stone, the blackness of tea made days unfold as if divinely scripted, as if all were a discipline, universally obeyed. The lack of plans, the hunger of the ocean, the slight uncertainty

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about necessities created neither fear nor worry; all who were officially we would find their way. A man would protect his home. The community had ratified it; there were documents. In many directions lay the imagery of peace: the neighbors quince trees, orderly gardens, dogs who never gave chase. There was ambiguity of duty, money was tight, failures went unassigned, but many had lived with worse. Each day yielded a little more peace. The rain let up, or fuzzy mist shrouded the hills, which were beautiful. Like the tide, like the sun going pink and waning while she boned the bird or turned the carrots, the radio her link to agents of consequence, it unfurled, her life, theirs. What was meant to happen did, and just as in any accident, theyd later count the hundred ways it might have been better, less violent, or more profound. This poem appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. The Alibi of Ambiguity Setina (Yale University Press, 379 pp., $22) ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1951, an oddly dressed young woman appeared in an alley adjacent to the municipal hospital in Angers, a town southwest of Paris. She was wearing a pointed Alpine hat and a blue cape bearing the insignia of the International Red Cross. It was later determined that the woman in the Alpine hat could be seen from the window of a patient in the hospital, a convicted war criminal named Bernard Fa. The patient, a heavyset man who had survived polio as a child, walked with a pronounced limp and was also suffering from advanced heart disease; it might reasonably have been assumed that he was a low flight risk. He had been rushed to the Angers hospital, when his life seemed in danger, from the notoriously harsh prison of Fontevrault, a few miles away, where prisoners reportedly died at the alarming rate of two per week. Fa was not accustomed to such rough treatment. With a masters degree from Harvard, where he had admired the great supple bodies, without faults and without vices, of the undergraduates while pursuing research on the history of Freemasonry, Fa had been widely regarded as the leading French scholar of American culture during the years between the two world wars. The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America, which appeared in the United States in 1927, in which Fa deplored the regicidal and anti-clerical savagery of the French revolutionaries while praising their more aristocratic and agrarian American counterparts, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. He received an honorary doctorate from Northwestern in 1933 and gave the Bergen Lectures at Yale in 1936, but his love affair with America had begun to sour with the onset of the New Deal. His distaste for the financial manipulations of the Freemason Franklin D. Roosevelt, trained by Jewish professors at Harvard, was particularly pronounced. As Barbara Will writes in her absorbingly detailed and even-handed book on the unlikely friendship between Fa and Gertrude Stein, His hopes now centered on the more radical political model of a federalist Europe dominated by Nazi Germany. During World War II, Fa was a powerful Vichy official and Gestapo agent in occupied Paris. He ruthlessly persecuted Masons, hundreds of whom he consigned to their death. He held the Masonic menace responsible for all the decadent twists and turns of French history since 1789, Will notes, while believing, like others in the Vichy hierarchy, in the solidarity between the Jews and the Freemasons. Fas views on Freemasonry, which he referred to as a monstrous parasite on the French nation, were closely aligned with those of the Vichy leader (and hero of World War I) Philippe Ptain, whose famous handshake with Hitler in October 1940 indicated, in his own words, that he had today entered the way of collaboration. Ptain presided over the officially free portion of France from the French capitulation to the Germans in 1940 until 1942, when Germany, under threat from Allied forces in North Africa, occupied the entire country. One might have thought that the Nazis constituted the greatest threat to French autonomy, but the puppet Ptain took a different view. Freemasonry is the main thing responsible for our present-day troubles, he confided to his friend Fa. Appointed by Ptain in 1940 as director of the Bibliothque Nationale, Fa pillaged valuable books from Masonic lodges. He also purged the famous national library of eleven employees suspected of communist conspiracy, who were deported to the concentration camp of Pithiviers, and he looked on as the former director, a Jew, was dispatched to Buchenwald. Of his new duties in the library, he wrote to Stein that I have a great fun in doing all that.

Christopher Benfey June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am

Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fa, and the Vichy Dilemma By Barbara Will (Columbia University Press, 274 pp., $35) Ida By Gertrude Stein Edited by Logan Esdale (Yale University Press, 348 pp., $20) Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition By Gertrude Stein Edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily

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Despite his prominence among the top echelon of Nazi collaborators, Fa managed, through the intervention of powerful friends, to avoid a death sentence after the war. In preparation for his trial, as his prosecutors assembled the dossier of his victims and perused accounts of his intimate relations with a certain number of [male] American students while he was a lecturer in the United States, he received character references from, among others, Gertrude Stein, whose novella Melanctha and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas he had translated into French. Stein, as though reciprocating the favor, had translated many of Ptains speeches into English, adding an enthusiastic introduction. We liked the fascists, she remarked of this period in her life. On September 30, 1951, Fa, a passionate Catholic, attended Sunday Mass at the hospital in Angers. The mysterious young woman who had loitered in the alley the previous day reappeared among the congregants. On leaving Mass, Fa seemed accidentally to jostle the young woman; and in the resulting confusion, authorities later surmised, he passed her a note. Back in his hospital room, he asked his guard if he could use the bathroom. Down the dark hallway Fa made his shuffling way and never returned. The gullible guard, after waiting a discreet fifteen minutes, found the bathroom empty. An intern later reported that he had glimpsed a young blonde woman leading an elderly man through the side gates of the hospital. By the time the police in Angers were alerted, ... Will writes, Fa and his companion were already halfway across the country. On the morning of October 1, picturesquely disguised in a cassock like a priest on pilgrimage, Fa slipped across the border into Switzerland, where he lived for nearly three decades among supporters and fellow collaborators, dreaming of an eventual return to order and the simple values of family, church, and nation. GERTRUDE STEIN, who described her relationship with Fa as one of the four permanent friendships of her life, died of cancer on July 27, 1946, too early to help with his escape. But the daring scheme at the Angers hospital was funded by the sale of two works of Picassoa drawing of a woman on horseback and a gouacheby Steins widow, Alice B. Toklas. Such an arrangement might seem a fitting exchange, almost a quid pro quo, since Fa, in a letter to a Swiss newspaper published in 1960, claimed to have protected Stein and Toklas from the Nazi occupiers. He had also, at Picassos request, preserved their formidable collection of works by Picasso, Matisse, and Czanne, housed in their Paris apartment. According to Will, Fas claim that he had protected Stein during the war has been repeated uncritically by every single one of Steins subsequent biographers. The bad news that Stein collaborated with pro-Nazi authoritiesbroached in 1996 by Wanda Van Dusen in an article on Steins Ptain translation project and given widespread currency in Janet Malcolms excellent study Two Liveswill intensify the controversy that has surrounded her work for a very long time. The popular version of her, most recently on display in Woody Allens harmless confection Midnight in Paris (in which the source of all evil is a rich American family clueless about art), has not yet been contaminated by her sinister work for Marshal Ptain. She is much as I would imagine Gertrude Stein, Roger Ebert remarked of Kathy Batess performance, an American, practical, no-nonsense, possessed with a nose for talent, kind, patient. No portrait of Stein is more familiar than Picassos flat, matte, mask-like painting of 1905-1906. But a more suggestive portrait might be Jo Davidsons sculpted portrait of Stein as the Buddha (currently on view in the exhibition at the Met called The Steins Collect), which captures the ambiguity that surrounds both her literary work and her behavior during the Occupation. Why did Stein enthusiastically embrace a regime so closely tied to the policies and the predations of the Third Reich? And why was she not arrested after the war, like that other willing propagandist Ezra Pound, and placed, if not in a cage, at least in prison? Instead she was portrayed by the American journalist Eric Sevareid as a rugged survivor and favored stranger, who had been protected by affectionate inhabitants of Culoz, the village near the Swiss border and the first foothills of the Alps, where Stein and Toklas waited out the war. When the Nazis demanded, in April 1944, that all Jews, whatever their nationality, were to go, Stein and Toklas did not go, and did not wear the yellow star, presumably, Will believes, because of the interventions of Bernard Fa. It is tempting to believe that Stein was playing some complicated double game to save her skin, and that her most appalling statements somehow reflected the ambiguity so fundamental to her own best writing. In her self-pitying and self-congratulatory Wars I Have Seen, she writes of Ptains capitulation to the Nazis as though it was a remarkably clever strategy: In the first place it was more comfortable for us who were here and in the second place it was an important element in the ultimate defeat of the Germans. To me it remained a miracle. Comfortable for whom? Miraculous for whom? In 1944, when Jewish children were being rounded up in the villages surrounding Culoz and transported to Auschwitz, Stein wrote that Ptains policies were really wonderful so simple so natural so complete and extraordinary. Here one might say that Steins rose-is-a-rose style itself verges on collaboration. Dissenting from the general approbation of Steins Wars I Have Seen, Djuna Barnes remarked bitingly: You do not feel that she is ever really worried about the sorrows of the people; her concern at its highest pitch is a well-fed apprehension. Writing in this magazine in January 1945, the philosopher and Americanist Jean Wahl, who was interned in the Parisian detention center of Drancy before escaping to America, wrote that Steins claim that Ptain somehow won for the French by capitulating to Germany was almost unbelievable in its naivet. THE FREQUENT alignment of radical aesthetics with reactionary politics is old news. It is nave to believe that utopian ideas of a better society will always be progressive: nostalgia for a better time (before cities, before industry, before immigration, before democracy) motivates many artists and many worldviews. It is equally nave to believe that good writers with bad ideas can somehow be edited out of cultural history. One may deplore Pounds propaganda for Mussolini while admiring the vivid poems of Cathay, or the blameless couplet In a Station of the Metro, which may well be the single most influential American poem of the twentieth century. Gertrude Steins early work has a kindred freshness and un-erasable influence. The modernist revolution in American literature most clearly on view in such masterpieces as Sherwood Andersons I Want to Know Why and Hemingways Cat in the Rain owes much to Steins example of an impersonal style built up of radically simplified sentences and insistent verbal repetition. These writers, with Stein as example, made a decisive break with the psychological analysis and deep characters of the nineteenth century novel. Stein first struck her new note in Melanctha, an evocation, in an early draft, of a young Jewish woman in a city modeled on Baltimore, where Stein briefly studied medicine. Stein then transposed the novella into an

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account of the disappointing loves of a young woman of mixed race. Neither unambiguously white nor black, neither lesbian nor straight, Melanctha is a riddle to herself and to her narrator. Why did the subtle, intelligent, attractive, half white girl Melanctha Herbert love and do for and demean herself in service to this coarse, decent, sullen, ordinary, black childish Rose? The erasure of Jewish themes in Steins books remained a pattern throughout her career. Reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Steins friend Thornton Wilder wondered, Why does she never mention that she or Miss Toklas are Jewesses? and added, Its Henry Adams wife [who never appears in The Education of Henry Adams], again. Its possible to make books of a certain fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential. Stein claimed that Flauberts late triptych of stories, Trois Contes, had inspired her to write Melanctha and the other two stories in her book Three Lives. It has long been assumed that Flauberts A Simple Heart was the most immediate inspiration for Stein. Flauberts tale of an admirable servant woman who succumbs to dementia and comes to worship a stuffed parrot had elements of plangent sentimentality laced with savage irony, a kindred mix in Three Lives. Admirers of Stein, such as Edmund Wilson, have interpreted Three Lives as a further push of nineteenth-century realism into the psychological realm, as though Stein, a former student of William James at what is now Radcliffe College, had, along with Joyce and Woolf, adopted his notion that the mind is a stream of consciousness. But I suspect that the decisive story of Flauberts for Stein may well have been The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier, a flat story that mimics the medieval tales and stained-glass windows that inspired it. Shallowness was of the essence for Stein, as she invented ways of writing that matched, in key ways, the surface textures and visual ambiguities of the astonishing paintings by Picasso and Matisse that she bought during the early 1900s for her famous salon at the rue de Fleurus. The short prose sketchesor radiotelegrams, as Cocteau called themof Tender Buttons remain perhaps Steins most vital work. It is tempting, on first glance, to see in these prose poems a radical return to simple objects sections are named Rooms, Objects, Foodan attempt to recover the phenomenological immediacy of things in the manner of Francis Ponge or Rilkes New Poems, as in this painterly evocation of A LONG DRESS: What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current. What is the wind, what is it. Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it. With its suggestive title, however, Tender Buttons has seemed to many readers to be full of erotic allusions, as in this passage: PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE. Rub her coke. Readers affiliated with the so-called Language poets have discerned a radical disconnection between sound and sense in Steins sentences, and an insistence on language for its own sake, demolishing its mimetic or representational function. Stein invites us to seek some relation between the ostensible subject dinner and the following sequence of words: Egg ear nuts, look a bout. Shoulder. Let it strange, sold in bell next herds. One can see why many people find the book little more than an annoying experiment in random word association. In some of the most successful sections of Tender Buttons, Stein betrays an interest in riddles and ambiguous definitions reminiscent of Emily (Hope is the thing with feathers) Dickinson. Cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly sudden very little and all large holes, she writes. A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talks. Occasionally such oblique definitions take on a poignant and mysterious lyricism, as in this entry concerning A LEAVE: In the middle of a tiny spot and nearly bare there is a nice thing to say that wrist is leading. Is Stein writing about leavetaking, or does she allude to leaves falling from a bare tree? IN HER crowd-pleasing and readily accessible The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, Stein impersonated the voice of her lover while trumpeting her own genius: I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken. ... The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. During roughly the same period, Stein was working on two challenging books that recall her bracingly experimental work of the early years of the century. Her appealing novella Ida, first published in 1941, has been characterized as a reflection on her own celebrity. But Idaseems, from page to page, to be a study in disorientation, in the manner of Melanctha. Ida loses her parents: It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other. So Ida was born and a very little while after her parents went off on a trip and never came back. She loses men. She loses less definable things: One day she was there doing nothing and suddenly she felt very funny. She knew she had lost something. She looked everywhere and she could not find out what it was that she had lost. Stein was also working on a forbidding long poem she called Stanzas in Meditation, which Barbara Will calls one of Steins most hermetic published works. It is difficult to find a coherent narrative in the fragmentary Stanzas, and John Ashbery was probably right when he observed that the book will probably please readers who are satisfied only by literary extremes. The verse form in which Stanzas is written is of a hammering simplicity, sometimes recalling the playful nonsense of Alice in Wonderland: A weight a hate a plate or a date They will cause me to be one of three Which they may or may be May be I do but do I doubt it May be how about it I will not may be I do but I doubt it May be will may be. Yale published an earlier version of Stanzas in 1956. Recently the scholar Ulla Dydo made an interesting discovery: on a final pass through the proofs in early 1933, Stein had changed every use of may to can, while also finding substitutions for maybe and may be, with the resulting sacrifice of many internal rhymes and some coherence. The third line in the stanza above became Which they can or can be, and the stanza closed with Can be will can be. Why would Stein do such a thing? Dydos hypothesis is that Toklas had noticed the prevalence of the word may in the book and had suspected that it was a code word for an early love of Steins named May Bookstaver. Enraged at this betrayal, Toklas, always the stronger partner in the relationship, demanded the suppression of May from the manuscript. Yale has now published the book in its original form, with the mays restored. Is this a gain? It certainly is if a major aesthetic motif of the book is internal rhyme of the most nave and

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relentless variety, another exercise in shallowness and ambiguity. We learn from Wills book that while she was revising her Stanzas, Stein was also translating Ptains speeches into what Will calls an almost stupefyingly literal and offputting English. Writing of the French connection to their land, Stein nostalgically invoked their cemeteries where sleep their ancestors and announced, This is today french people the task to which I urge you. Was there something deliberately subversive in such a strategy? Was it a subtle stratagem for making Ptain sound foolish, childish, or inept to American readers? Or was Stein trying to improve the Marshals flatulent ideas of family, work, fatherland by giving them a livelier expression? The Known Unknowns

Maya Jasanoff June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am

IT IS UNDERSTANDABLE that those of us who admire Steins best writing might be tempted to help establish a dossier for her defense, as a writer and a wartime survivor. Her best writing is notoriously difficult to read straightif indeed there is a way to read it straight. In what way exactly she meant what she said remains at the center of scholarly debate about her work. By this I mean this, she liked to say. Even her explanations of ambiguity are ambiguous, as in this passage from the opening of her essay Composition as Explanation, from 1926: The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. The brilliant critic William Empson, circa 1930, rescued ambiguity from the scrap heap of rhetoric and convinced a generation of poets and critics that ambiguity was not a fault of careless writing but rather a crucial aspect of effective poetic expression. He celebrated poetic passages in which alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading. Empson had spent a great deal of time in Asia. He developed his ideas about poetic ambiguity, of which he identified seven distinct types, while studying the various representations of the Buddha on statuary in China and Japan. For Empson, the power of the Buddhas expression lay in its fundamental ambiguity, not quite a smile but not exactly a sneer either. Toward the end of Unlikely Collaboration, Barbara Will includes a photograph of Gertrude Stein visiting Hitlers bunker at Berchtesgaden after the war. She is surrounded by eager young American GIs. Stein and the soldiers are executing the Nazi salute. The photograph appeared in Life magazine on August 6, 1945, along with a chirpy text by Stein titled Off We All Went to See Germany. Stein seems to be wearing a jaunty little pointed Alpine hat, perhaps resembling the hat worn by the mysterious woman in the alley in Angers, and she seems to be smiling, or perhaps sneering. Will calls the photograph at once sophomoric and chilling, given Steins attraction to authoritarianism in the 1930s and 1940s. Sophomoric and chilling: a good example of Steins recurring ambiguity. Is Steins Hitler salute meant to be ironic? Well, of course, one is tempted to reply. But where exactly does the irony lie? Christopher Benfey is a contributing editor for The New Republic. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.

The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History By Emma Rothschild (Princeton University Press, 483 pp., $35) BY A RURAL SCOTTISH river on an early summers day in 1771, someone makes a catch: a package wrapped in cloth, and inside the cloth, a baby boy, and on his tiny sodden body the marks of violence that may have caused his death. It does not take long to identify a suspect, the infants mother, who works in a nearby household. She is brought to the local sheriffs court, interrogated, and charged with the murder of her son. Every suspect, by definition, invites doubt. Guilty or innocent? For this woman, though, ambiguities ringed an entire existence. Bell alias Belinda, the indictment read, was a black Girl or woman, a slave or servant. She had gone to the river, one witness said, because you was too hot or that you had catched cold; because, she said herself, she sought to discard a stillborn infant; because, the accusers said, she sought to hide evidence of infanticide. If the record-makers did not know her name, age, or status well enough to register them with certainty, then how can a historian hope to know anything more, like the name of the father, or how the child had died (by strangling ... or knocking ... on the head), or any of the reasons why? All that the documents conveyed was that Bell or Belinda worked for John Johnstone, a retired East India Company bureaucrat, and that she had come with him some years earlier from Bengal in the East Indies to his lowlands estate. Bell or Belinda sends a shiver of questions down the spine of this book. For to wonder about her storyabout how this young woman from eastern India found herself in a Fife courthouseis first to ask, in Emma Rothschilds elegantly crafted narrative, how people, things, and ideas concerned with the expanding British Empire found their way to Britain.The Inner Life of Empires searches for answers through the wonderfully well-documented family of John Johnstone, Bell or Belindas owner, and his ten siblings. These four sisters and seven brothers grew up in a coarse moorish part of the Scottish-English borders in the 1720s and 1730s, where Daniel Defoe judged nothing but what was desolate and dismal could be expected. Yet by the

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time the last of the Johnstone siblings died in 1813, their world had been transformed by economic and political revolutions, by new ideas about freedom, rights, sentiments, and the self, by the expansion of empires and invention of republics. They had witnessed nothing less than the birth of the modern world. The Johnstones played only small parts in these great changes (and Bell or Belinda a yet smaller one). So why do they merit a book? They earn it less for what they did than for what they had to say about it. They reflectedand reflected onthe changing contours of the economy, politics, world affairs, and personal relations in a family archive of amazing extent, containing legal documents, financial papers and petitions galore, diaries about carrots, inventories, complaints about torture to the Privy Council, evidence in favor of Armenian plaintiffs, letters about bundles of muslin, lists of the names of their slaves, decrees of alimony ... marriage settlements, mausolea, lawyers invoices, love letters from their lawyers. Rothschilds first achievement has been to discover and to reassemble the Johnstones stories from these thousands of small accidents of creation and survival. The Inner Life of Empires, with some 150 pages of notes to accompany 300 pages of text, is a tour-de-force of archival sleuthing. It is also a triumph of historical ventriloquism. Speaking through the Johnstones, Rothschild delivers a wise, original reflection on the shifting boundaries between home and abroad, private and public, at the dawn of the modern age. AS ONE WOULD EXPECT of such a big family, they often divided over matters of politics, religion, and taste. One sister, Margaret Johnstone Ogilvy, was an ardent Jacobite, who traversed Scotland with Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 1746, while two of her brothers fought on the other side as British government soldiers. (She was jailed in Edinburgh Castle but escaped in disguise with the help of one of her sisters, one of her brothers, and an elaborate conspiracy involving a tea kettle and a little girl, to convince the guards that she was ill in bed.) William Johnstone (later Pulteney) prominently supported the slave trade as a member of parliament, while two of his brothers, James and John, advocated abolition. Several Johnstones vocally opposed Britains war with the thirteen colonies, while their brother Gideon fought the American patriots from a Royal Navy warship off Plymouth and New York. The one thing they shared was itself a source of division, namely a tendency to geographic dispersal. The first way in which their history counterposed outer and inner worlds concerned their engagement with imperial arenas outside Britain. For ambitious upwardly-mobile Britons in the middle of the eighteenth century, there were three main opportunities for advancement: by military service, by overseas commerce, and by marriageand all three connected the Johnstones to other continents. George Johnstone entered the Navy at thirteen, fought from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Verde Islands, served as the first governor of British West Florida, and retired at the rank of commodore. Alexander Johnstone traveled to Grenada as an army officer, and ended up settling there on a sizeable plantation that he named Westerhall, for the family home in Scotland. John Johnstone, the owner of Bell or Belinda, joined the East India Company at sixteen, and spent the next fifteen years becoming a senior administrator in Bengal. William, the richest and most prominent family member, remained in Britain for his whole career, but amassed a personal fortune in land across several Caribbean islands, Florida, and New York. The Johnstone sisters, too, engaged in expanding arenas through their interests, investments, and marriages. One of the many subtle virtues of Rothschilds book is its implicit demonstration that the histories of enlightenment, industrialization, and imperialism pertained as directly, and in congruent ways, to women as to men. Barbara Johnstone Kinnaird, the eldest sister, monitored family members prospects in the East or West Indies, and lived just long enough to see her daughter marry an American medical student. Betty Johnstone, the only unmarried Johnstone sister, acted as a clearing-house for family information and an intermediary in transcontinental financial transactions. Margaret, the Jacobite, became an exile in France, where she gave birth to a daughter, also called Margaret. The younger Margaret married a Jacobite exile from Jamaica, John Wedderburn, and settled in Scotlandwhich was to her a foreign country. Her Johnstone uncles helped her become a naturalized British subject. SO HOW DID the British Empire look to the Johnstones? Uncertain, most of all. They were self-conscious, in an ironical sort of way, about the experience of living in the founding moment of a new epoch. They frequently ended up on the wrong side of events. Many of the Johnstone brothers opposed the expansion of British power in India under Robert Clive, and opposed going to war against the American colonists. Several imagined that the future of the British Empire must lie in Central and South America, and promoted imperial designs that have since been swept under historys rug, like opening access to the Pacific by way of the Lake of Nicaragua, or by seizing Cartagena, or by controlling the River Plate. The Johnstones envisaged an empire of what-ifs that werent. They also experienced an empire of centers to which they remained peripheral. As if stamped by their borderlands birthplace, the Johnstones frequently settled on the edges of greater things, making a go of it on tiny Grenada rather than on prize islands such as Jamaica; plugging away in provincial Indian outposts such as Dhaka and Burdwan before achieving significance in Calcutta; administering the wild frontier colony of West Florida, not Virginia or New York. All this roving exhausted them, when it didnt kill them first. (Patrick, the second youngest, died at eighteen in Calcutta, and Margaret, of consumption, in Paris at thirty-two.) The Johnstones uncle Walter wearied of wandering to & fro upon the face of the Earth, while John longed to be able to fix my wandering feet on some speck of Earth I could call my ownand became the only Johnstone to settle permanently in the land of his birth. Yet it was here, in the heart of Scotland, that empire may have wrought the most unexpected changes on the Johnstones. Though they traversed a wide world, in which distances translated into lengths and dangers we can scarcely appreciate now, theirs was also an incredibly small one, of minuscule political institutions, interconnected professionals and intermarried families. If six degrees of separation divide individuals in American society today, the Johnstones milieu involved perhaps two. Their family exchanges offer, as Rothschild describes it, the vista of a multiplier effect by which distant events were of consequence in the interior of Scotland. Textiles from abroad ushered in a transformation in the color and texture of daily lifeof a spade-colored or shoe-colored world that was suddenly bright with the indigo, yellow, and scarlet dyes of distant continents. Cloth even provoked the familys worst feud, when John sent a bundle of Indian muslins as a gift to his mother and sisters, with tragically imprecise instructions as to how the pieces should be parcelled out. Foreign individuals, too, entered the Johnstones households as slaves and servants: Bell or Belinda, from India; and Africans including a man called Joseph Knight, brought by John Wedderburn from Jamaica. And each domestic intervention of empire rippled outward, into the rest of the household, and the people who came into contact with the household, so that masons and

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pigeon-sellers in Stirling had ideas about the Indies in the same vague but memorable way that, as a child in upstate New York, I had ideas about Laos and Ethiopia, and difference and distance, because of the refugee kids in my school. THE INNER LIFE OF EMPIRES draws its title in part from this geographical understanding of exteriors and interiors, the relationship between the British Empire and British Isles. It responds eloquently to an objective espoused some fifteen years ago by the new imperial historians, to interleave the imperial and domestic histories of Britain. But the fertility of the Johnstones correspondence allows Rothschild, a distinguished historian of ideas, to carry this consideration of insides and outsides into more original, if more elusive, domains. For the Johnstones navigated another boundary between outside and inside, between an exterior world of incident and action and an inner, subjective self of feelings and perceptions. These frontiers were also advancing in their lifetimes, thanks to the searching intellectual inquiries that we file under the heading of the Enlightenment. New ideas about economics translated into agricultural practices that changed the drab Scottish landscape of the Johnstones childhood as vividly as the infusion of Indian colored silk did their wardrobes. New concepts of rights gave rise to laws that redefined their personal relationships. New considerations of sentiment provoked questioning about the nature and the limits of the self. A restless lot in space and time, the Johnstones shared a restlessness of the mind, or the spirit. They sparkled with curiosity, and with schemes for improvement. William studied and lived intimately [for] four years with Adam Smith. Betty investigated mineral science and hoped to find coal, the eighteenth centurys black gold, on family land. James set up a lending library for the benefit of the workers at his antimony mine. Their mental universe, no less than their material one, offered novelty, excitement, and challenges. If the Johnstones knew well the anxieties of empire, the insecurity of regimes and fortune, so the distinctions that were most self-evident a generation later between law and political power, or private and public life, or the economic and the political remained to them the subject of endless, anxious inquiry. How could freedom and slavery coexist? Could one distinguish an economic realm as distinct from the state? Where did an individuals mind or spirit end and a public career begin? Given how often Americans turn to the late eighteenth century for scripts on how to live today, it is critical to remember the great differences between the Johnstones mental universe and ours. Many of the concepts and the boundaries that organize modern lives did not yet exist for them; while some of the divisions they were raised to believe in, notably that between slavery and freedom, have become practically inconceivable now. And yet the Johnstones struggle to locate themselves in an evolving landscape of places and ideas also movingly resembles turn-of-the-millennium concerns. Rothschild beautifully plays the angles of difference and similarity. She has a keen eye for the oddities that might have appeared normal, such as pregnancies feigned with the aid of pillows stuffed up skirts, and a wonderful ear for period locutions that sound fresh today. (Our friend, Johnstone, said David Hume, has wrote the mostsuperexcellent-est Paper in the World.) Swap out the East India Company for Goldman Sachs, Grenada for the Gulf, and the administrative bodies of the Johnstones day for their wider range of present equivalents, and the familys career profiles would not sound out of place in an Ivy League alumni bulletin now. They delighted in the opportunities of global expansion and innovation, just as they worried over enduring human challenges of health, wealth, and death, mortgage payments and bad marriages and unruly children. Rothschild tells the Johnstones story in a distinctive voice: elegant, enchanting, alert to idiosyncrasy (how many other books index the phrase oysters, pickled?), and almost obsessively precise. She rarely lets a statement stand without modifying it, glossing terms in the sense meant by contemporaries, qualifying examples, layering quotes, and expanding the narrative in endnotes that constitute a book in themselves. At times, though, Rothschild leaves the reader wondering just what this series of scenes or episodes in an unsettled world amounts to as a whole. The relationship between imperial and intellectual histories remains especially murky. All history is the history of thought, Rothschild quotes from R.G. Collingwoods The Idea of History, continuing: Or some history, at least, is the history of thought: the history of empires in particular. Why is the history of empires a history of thought in particular, any more than it is a history of power, or faith, or money? Why is a history of thought any more concerned with empires in particular than it is with emotions, principles, or values? THIS SOMETIMES peculiar blend of rhetorical specificity with conceptual obscurity plays out an essential preoccupation of this remarkable book. At base, The Inner Life of Empires ponders what must be, for the historian, the hardest to chart frontier of all: the line between the known and the unknown, the recorded and the evaded, the found and the lost. Anyone who wants to understand how it really was in the past faces a dilemmaRothschild goes so far as to call it a moral dilemmain trying to write a history when there is very little evidence about the ideas of the vast majority of people who filled it. And so back to the ambiguities: back to Bell or Belinda. The Johnstones never once referred to this woman in their letters, but she moves to the center of this book, because she personifies the vexed relationship between the known and the unknown or unknowable. Rothschild has traced Bell or Belindas fate from the Fife sheriffs court as far as the documents lead: to an appeal in Perth, to a sentence of transportation, and to a ship from Glasgow to the Upper James River in Virginia. Rothschild has discovered the receipt documenting Bell or Belindas arrival in America, and then shethat is, her documentary tracevanishes. The limits, Rothschild observes, have their own story. Her exhaustive archival search has made her unusually attuned to the ambiguities of records, to their deliberate manipulations, and their unintended confusions (there were 20,426 people called Johnstone or Johnston whose baptisms were entered in the old parish registers in Scotland in this period). Where Bell or Belinda does appear, the words are often not her own. Where she might appear, in registers of North American slave sales, the documents can no longer be found. Where her inner self, her thoughts and feelings, might have resided, there was never a transcript. And yet of all the people in this book, Bell or Belinda may have the greatest claim to being an important and even a world-historical figure. Another Johnstone connection casts her story into tragic relief. In July 1772, Joseph Knight, the slave brought to Scotland by John Wedderburn, read a newspaper article about a recent decision in London, the Somerset case, which had the effect of ending slavery in England. Thinking that he also was intitled to be free, Knight successfully sued for freedom in a Perth court, establishing a similar precedent for Scotland. But Bell or Belinda fell on just the wrong side of these landmark

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judgments. Sentenced weeks earlier to be sold as a Slave for Life, she earned the dubious distinction of being the last person in Britain whose status as a slave was upheld by the law. In Rothschilds hands, the many ors of Bell or Belindas life become ands. She stands for the elusiveness of historical knowledge and the material reality of recordkeeping. She represents the marginalia of history and she signifies as an exceptional figure in relation to the law. The Inner Life of Empires also stands on the cusp of another critical and: for all its old-fashioned archival diligencethe patient unfurling of parchments, unspooling of microfilms, opening of red leather volumes that streak the hands that touch themthis history could not have been pieced together without digitization and the Internet, which can reveal sources around the globe with a few flicks of the keyboard. It invites a digital rendering, too. I strained to see these pages enriched with graphics illustrating webs of interpersonal connections, animated maps tracing individuals movements, and hyperlinks to notes and sources. Whatever the consequences of e-books for the future of publishers, bookstores, and writers, The Inner Life of Empires gestures toward the enormous intellectual potential of history e-books as written and multi-media forms. Where documents end, the imagination continues. Was Bell or Belinda thinking of Bengal that summer day in 1771? In that water-latticed land, people usually went to riverbanks to bathe or to worship; and sometimes to discard the dead. She may have been enacting what she could so distantly have seen, as she launched her childs body, wrapped in cloth, into the meandering stream. much other literature of this type, refuses to lament or exaggerate the alleged decline in American power and influence. Instead Strategic Vision offers a kind of blueprint a path that Washington must take, in Brzezinskis view, to ensure a secure international order, in which free markets and democratic principles can thrive. Brzezinski calls for the creation of a Greater West, uniting Turkey and Russia with America and Europe in a grand political alliance based on Western values. It would stretch from the Pacific Coast of the United States and Canada across North America and the Atlantic Ocean to encompass the countries of the European Union and Ukraine, and across Russia to its historic Pacific port of Vladivostok. Now thats the vision thing. Unfortunately, important parts of the books analysis seem overtaken by events, and Brzezinskis overarching ideahe has a weakness for overarching ideas is divorced from the realities that Washington policymakers will confront in the coming years. The book is certainly a welcome antidote to the dreary school of declinism now dominating much of the foreignpolicy conversation. Yes, Chinas economy continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, and Indias entrepreneurial spirit is producing fabulous new industries, and the Gulf states have weathered their previous misallocation of oil profits and boast massive sovereign wealth funds, and Brazil demonstrates that Latin America is no longer a battleground for class warfare, but rather a beneficiary of Chinas global appetite for natural resources. And even Africa boasts several high-growth success stories. But this rise of the rest (the pundit Fareed Zakaria insists that he coined that repercussive phrase, and I hereby note his claim) actually reflects the realization of long-term American foreign policy aims, which is hardly a reason for despair. An interdependent world of market-based economies and mainly democratic countries, in which state to state aggression is mostly a thing of the past and Washington no longer must dominate, is precisely what American policymakers have been promoting for decades. Brzezinski, for his part, does not seem worried that an international order along these lines will make American leadership obsolete. His fear is that Washington will not recognize the enduring need for its leadership in such a world, and will therefore adopt a complacent attitude towards military expenditures, economic competitiveness, and international involvement. In the absence of the bipolar structure of the Cold War and with no single country big enough and strong enough to police the planet, Brzezinski forecasts that a combination of weapons proliferation, terrorism, ethnic grievances, and great power rivalry will mean a world of conflict and chaos. BRZEZINKSI is a committed internationalist. He does not stand among those who cheered President Obamas call for nation-building at home, who advocate a general retreat from international engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan and the greater Middle East, who articulate new grand strategies of American restoration (an isolationist phrase first coined by Warren Harding). Instead Brzezinski spells out the profound danger of a world without Washingtons preeminence and power. In its absence, he foresees even more intensified conflict as China, Russia, and India assert dominance in their respective regions while the global commons at sea and in space become a battleground for great power competition. He can paint a chilling picture. Just as he has visions, he has nightmares. In the Asian future, Brzezinski can imagine China challenging the American strategic commitment to support Taiwan and bringing Taipei under Beijings direct control. To Europes east, he foresees trouble for Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus as a resurgent, unrepentant Russia no longer fears Western opprobrium and reestablishes

Maya Jasanoff is professor of history at Harvard and the author, most recently, of Libertys Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf). This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. The Need to Lead James P. Rubin June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am

Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power By Zbigniew Brzezinski (Basic Books, 208 pp., $26) When it comes to offering a vision to guide American foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinskis latest book, unlike so

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effective control over those countries. Emboldened by Western weakness, he predicts that Russia could well grab the oil and gas resources in and around the Caspian Sea, imperiling European energy supplies. And in South Asia he forecasts a new proxy war in Afghanistan, with Pakistan squaring off against India and Iran. He even spells out the risk of a collapsing Pakistan becoming the battleground for Chinas rivalry with India for hegemony in the region, not to mention the rise of new Islamic fundamentalist movements and rampant terrorism in that war-ravaged land. His prognosis for the greater Middle East is particularly grim. With a weaker United States unable to wield effective power, he sketches a scenario of chaos, proxy wars, and possibly even a full-scale regional war between Israel and Iran, with Arab countries reluctantly lining up with their Persian neighbor. At a minimum, Brzezinski believes that with a Shiite-led Iraq no longer serving as a bulwark against Iran, the Gulf states will turn increasingly for protection to a waxing China rather than a waning America. (Earlier this year, the UAEs government hosted Chinas prime minister in Abu Dhabi for this very reason.) And inasmuch as Washingtons relations with the four main Middle East powers Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey have deteriorated, the region will revert to age-old rivalries and chaos, inevitably jeopardizing the stability of global energy supplies. BUT JUST AS the darkness closes in, Brzezinski offers a strategy for staving off these dangers. On the home front, he explains how important it is for the United States to restore its competitive edge. Although not an economist, he pays close attention to the importance of improving our education system and our infrastructure, and urges action to reduce Americas $15 trillion debt. This is the most banal part of his analysis. Does any serious American disagree with such prescriptions? Also, like many other commentators, Brzezinski bemoans the political gridlock that has weakened Washingtons ability to achieve course corrections quickly. Curiously, although he generally avoids assigning any blame to the Obama administration for the loss of American power and prestige, he proposes that the president use his oratorical skills to educate Americans about the international dangers that he, Brzezinski, foresees, as if Obama has been lacking in speeches. An address from the Oval Office that presented Brzezinskis analysis is what the nation needs, to alarm it and enlighten it and somehow mobilize it for domestic policies aimed at restoring Americas economic and political power. But the bulk of Brzezinskis argument is devoted to his strong suits: geopolitics and American foreign policy. Here his proposal is for Washington to demonstrate new and unexpected leadership on the world stage. The United States, in his view, should act decisively to build a new grand Western alliance, while acting to ensure a stable equilibrium in Asia through conciliation and mediation as a rising China emerges. When it comes to the Middle East, Brzezinskis book feels dated. Most of it must have been written before the Arab Spring. As a result he appears worried about crises arising out of the geopolitical chess rivalries of great powers in places such as the South China Sea and the Caspian, or Washingtons weakening ties with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But American policymakers are wrestling with different questions: the bloodbath in Syria, the direction of Egypts democratic evolution, the aftermath of the fall of Qaddafi in Libya, and the stirrings of democratic values and the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time. Brzezinski was wise enough to write in general terms about the rise of democratic movements around the world in the book, but like most everyone else, he was unable to sense signs of sweeping change in the Middle East. Indeed, Brzezinskis emphasis on great power diplomacy at the highest levels may blind him more than most to the social forces that drive history from below. If nothing else, the Arab Spring has been a reminder for many of us of the perils of analyzing regimes, not peoples. Strategic Vision is crystal clear on one thing: how to respond to Irans growing nuclear capabilities. Brzezinski argues that it would be a disaster for the United States to support an Israeli military strike on Irans nuclear facilities, and he does not believe that the United States should launch such an attack itself. Instead, he argues that Israel and the Gulf states can live comfortably under an extended American nuclear umbrella if Iran were to become a fullfledged nuclear weapons state. This containment policy, of course, is precisely what the Obama administration has lately insisted it will never adopt. Brzezinskis approach to the ArabIsraeli dispute similarly feels overtaken. He wants another Camp David-type peace, where a modern-day Jimmy Carter pressures the parties into a final peace settlement. Considering that there is no Palestinian leader capable of negotiating such an agreement, that Benjamin Netanyahu has shown considerable skill in avoiding Washingtons entreaties to ease up on the Palestinians, and that most of the Arab world is far more focused on dealing with the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the threat from Iran rather than urging action on the peace process, Brzezinskis proposal seems beside the point. These days, when the Israeli prime minister meets the American president, the subject of peace talks is barely mentioned. WHILE HIS BOOK is silent on the events of the Arab Spring, Brzezinski has since spoken on two key debates. On American military action in support of the rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, he has been cautious, if not outright opposed to an American leadership role. He may call for American leadership in his book, but during the decision time of March 2011, on the question of U.S. military action in Libya, he was content to see the Obama administration adopt a strategy of simply supporting British and French leadership, or leading from behind. Brzezinskis position is revealing, because it is hard to imagine a more clear-cut case for American military action than Libya. Although the United States may have had some marginal influence over the Egyptian military during the Tahrir Square revolution, and we may have been able to support rhetorically the successful upheaval in Tunisia, it was only in Libya that American action could beand was decisive. If, instead of supporting the British and French in their determination to use air power in support of the Libyan rebellion, the United States had decided to assume leadership, it is unlikely that there would be as much talk now about the decline in American power and influence.

Remember the circumstances. A heinous dictator had turned an oil-rich country into a personal fiefdom, had been responsible for brutal internal oppression and international terrorism, and was threatening the people of Benghazi with mass slaughter; the UN Security Council had authorized the use of force; the Arab Leagueyes, the Arab Leaguewas calling for American and NATO military intervention; only air power was being requested as the rebels were prepared to fight the ground war themselves; and to top it off, the desert terrain made it possible for air strikes to provide a decisive contribution. And yet Brzezinski was hesitant about even a backseat role for the United States, saying, I cannot think of another instance in recent times, in which I myself was so uncertain in thinking about the problem, how

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we should act, because there are so many downsides and so many uncertainties. In the end, I concluded that if we didnt act, it would be worse. All this agony only about American support for a British- and French-led operation. An America that wished to restore its power and influence would not take a backseat role to the British and the French, something that has never happened before in the history of the NATO alliance. Washington could and should have led the international effort, reversing the equation, with support from Paris and London, and in so doing making clear that it supported Arab peoples seeking freedom from dictatorial rule. In that case, Washington would have more leverage in the post-war phase to minimize the chaos we now see in Libya and would have won the endless friendship of an important Arab state that happens to have a large supply of the best grade of crude oil in the region. Instead, there was worry from Brzezinski about even the limited role we played. THE CASE OF SYRIA is similarly instructive. Again Brzezinski sees others taking the lead in support of those fighting for their freedom in Homs, Damascus, Aleppo, and throughout Syria. In this case, he imagines that Turkey or Saudi Arabia should be the active players, telling CNN in February that on the military question I would be very much guided by the Turks and the Saudis. But the sad truth is that the Syrian opposition does not expect real military engagement to come from either Turkey or Saudi Arabia. At best, some smaller Gulf states may offer limited arms shipments. And this crisis is not going away. With the veil of fear now lifted, the Syrian opposition and its supporters on the streets will continue their struggle indefinitely, with or without international support, and the Assad regime will not relent in its cruelty. Either the outside world decides to intervene to bring the slaughter to an end or it will continue for a long time. While the Syrian case is certainly far more difficult than Libya, as almost any question of military action is likely to be, Brzezinski is consistent in not wanting Washington to play a leadership role. This reluctance does not square with the tone and the content of his books recommendations about the rest of the world, where he urges American leadership. And while diplomatic action in creating a larger Western alliance would be wise, and it certainly would behoove the United States to continue to play a balancing role in Asia, those steps seem far removed from the tangible dilemmas that Washington policymakers face. Just as important, the power of the United States in the world is demonstrably affected by our actions or lack thereof in the cases of Libya and Syria. Indeed, the zenith for perceptions of American power was probably reached in 2001, when the United States followed up its success in the Kosovo air war with military action to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was Iraq that weakened the deterrent power of the United States, when it took five long devastating years to bring stability to that country, a condition that may be lost in the coming months with the departure of American combat forces. Military success breeds power and influence like no other step, and it is surprising that Brzezinski of all people does not acknowledge the damage done to perceptions of American power when the world sees the United States anxious to end the war in Afghanistan as quickly as possible, leaving Iraq without the residual force in place that most expected and when the Obama administration was so hesitant to play a military role in a case as straightforward and doable as Libya. By contrast, the defeat of Assad in Syria would not only be a stunning blow to Iran, it would also give Washington new and enhanced leverage and respect in the region. RETURNING TO THE world of great power rivalry and grand strategy, Brzezinskis proposal for an enlarged Western alliance from the United States across Europe and Eurasia to the Pacific rim of Russia has much to be said for it. Certainly, such a plan would forestall the chaos and conflict that could emerge in the Caucasus and South Asia if Russia broke with the West and no longer felt constrained by pressure from Europe and the United States. Binding Turkey to Europe would no doubt bring additional benefits, including protecting Europe from instability in the Middle East, enshrining a moderate Muslim state within the West, and committing both Turkey and Russia to Western values of tolerance, free markets, and the rule of law. Brzezinski is certainly right that only American diplomacy could achieve such an historic outcome. But again, the problem is that developments in the Russia of Vladimir Putin and the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdoan over the last year make this proposal seem questionable, if not ill-advised. Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, critics have imagined that some different approach towards Moscow would have been decisive in promoting a grand turn to the West that would prompt an embrace of the rule of law and a rules-based international system. But whether it was the effect of too much, or too little, aid in the early 1990s, or too much attention to Yeltsin, or too much pressure to enlarge NATO, the result has been the same: Russia has retained its stubborn compulsion to restore its status as a superpower as its domestic policies have become more and more authoritarian. Putins recent victory in elections for a third term as president and Moscows chilling defense of Bashar al-Assad should remove whatever is left of the argument that somehow Russia is only a short step away from joining the West. Curiously, considering Brzezinskis history of antipathy towards Russia and the Soviet Union, he seems to have given too much credence to his private correspondence with former President Dmitry Medvedev. His openness to Medvedevs supposed power struggle with Putin may explain his comfort with the idea of bringing Russia in from the cold. But in light of Putins subsequent public humiliation of Medvedev, Brzezinskis analysis looks uncharacteristically nave. Turkey has seen a similarly troubling evolution. Erdoans Turkey has been enjoying sustained economic growth and increasing respect in the region. Intoxicated by his new standing, Erdoans behavior has become increasingly erratic on the diplomatic front. One day he publicly snubs Israels President Shimon Peres at an international meeting and the next day he demands, in a private meeting with the UN Secretary General, that Turkeys new status as a major power be recognized by the UN in some formal way. Meanwhile Ankara has threatened a shooting war with Israel over its desire to develop oil and gas deposits near Cyprus and permanently ruptured the Turkish-Israeli military alliance. Turkish foreign policy has been focused almost exclusively on building ties to the Arab world, in the hopes of becoming the big winner of the Arab Spring. Its dreams for a modern-day Ottomanism may be far-fetched, but so is any notion of a Turkish turn back towards Europe, as envisioned by Brzezinski. Instead, under Erdoan, Turkey is likely to remain a fair-weather friend for Washington, rather than the stalwart ally of the Cold War or the first Gulf War. Despite substantial courting by the Obama administration, Turkeys relations with the rest of Europe seem far too strained for the kind of alliance that Brzezinski imagines. The great power politics of Asia provide Brzezinski an opportunity to hark back to the days of the great practitioner of realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck. He compares the rise of China to the rise of Germany. Whether or not this is a suitable analogy, his specific strategy for Asia

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seems sensible enough: Washington should continue to play its balancing role in East Asia, and it should seek to reconcile China, India, and Japan while remaining true to its alliance partners in South Korea and Taiwan. Such was the approach, more or less, of the Bush administration, and it has been pursued strongly by Obama. Yet Brzezinski still manages to include some troubling observations that raise serious questions about where his preferences lie. He appears quite taken with how Chinas leaders have studied the fall of the Roman and British empires in a series of day-long seminars, implying that they are grand strategists while the West obsesses about less important matters. Brzezinski suggests that the flawed diplomacy and bungled execution of the Iraq war under the Bush administration has combined with the economic crisis of 200809 to discredit and damage the United Statesbut then he goes on to claim that the Chinese model has now come to be the worlds preferred model, attracting power and influence for Beijing along the way. What on earth is he talking about? Not only does such an analysis miss the fact that the entire Arab Spring is a tribute to Western democratic values, but surely there is also an American stamp all over the communication technologies and social media that helped organize demonstrations and sustain the democratic revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. The Arab Spring was hardly a tribute to Chinas model of harmony and calm. That is why China, an innovator in suppressing social media, views it as a threat. The exhilarating events in nearby Myanmar also serve as a powerful repudiation of the Chinese model and its alleged popularity. In the Burmese Spring the dissident Aung San Suu Kyi has gone from house arrest to the house of parliament and the military junta has cancelled crucial contracts with China while reaching out to the United States and the West. BUT PERHAPS MOST surprising of all, and most disappointing, is that Brzezinski fails to assign great significance to the existence and the character of Americas alliances. Surely, it is the extent of Americas alliances in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and around the world that makes the United States so different and so much more powerful than the great powers that preceded us. In South Korea, Japan, Western and Eastern Europe, and Israel, Washington has powerful, enduring partnerships based on shared values (something China does not have), not to mention the dozens of countries that engage in direct military relationships to sustain the American navys unchallenged dominance of the worlds key waterways and oceans. The critical character of these relationships in dealing with China was evident in 2001 and 2002, when China over-reached in its attempt to bully Japan and intimidate others in East Asia over its claim to the South China Sea. The result was a pushback from the United States and its alliesincluding our de facto ally Vietnam that prompted Beijing to change course and return to its quieter and less arrogant stance toward its Asian neighbors. Finally, as Robert Kagan has pointed out in these pages, the United States still has roughly the same share of the world economy as it did twenty years ago: Chinas increasing proportion has come primarily at the expense of Europe. All of which is to say that Chinas ascent is important but it is still a long way from challenging Americas global role. It is India, weirdly, that troubles Brzezinski. He is clearly uncomfortable with Indias growing wealth and power and oddly anxious about the strengthening ties between Washington and New Delhi. He seems uneasy with the worlds largest and most boisterous democracy. So great is his worry that he suggests that India is more internally unstable than China because of its mix of ethnicities. More incredibly, he asserts that its rural unrest is far worse than Chinas. Is it because of some leftover grievance from the Cold War that Brzezinski says the United States should have no more than cordial relations with India? Despite the historic improvements in U.S.-Indian relations begun under Bill Clinton, which were further cemented by George W. Bush, and then by President Obamas warm relationship with Indias Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brzezinski urges a different path. He fears that close American cooperation with India would prejudge the outcome of Chinas rise as well as risk alienating Pakistan and inspiring greater anti-American attitudes among Muslim extremists. This is perverse. Washingtons strategic shift toward India has been one of the few examples of long-range policy evolution that can and should continue to withstand the capitals partisan brawling. THE GOOD NEWS IS that one of Americas leading strategists has not succumbed to the prevailing pessimism about the United States, or accepted the idea that Americas international role is destined for decline. Perhaps the pendulum of conventional wisdom in the nations capital has already begun to swing away from declinism. Ironically, given the statements of President Obamas top political and national security aides in the administrations first two years, stressing the need to end the nations overseas wars and entanglements, the phrase popularized by Madeleine Albrightthe indispensable nationhas even made a small comeback, appearing in the presidents interviews and even in the State of the Union address. Saying that America is the indispensable nation is, of course, only the beginning. To give meaning to that phrase would require across-the-board leadership by Washington on international economics, on the Arab Spring, on climate change, and other matters. It would also mean the United States taking decisive steps to catalyze international action in support of those fighting for freedom in Syria, including the protection of civilians, the possible arming of the rebels, and even the use of air power as proposed by Senator McCain. It would also mean restoring Americas lost role as peacemaker. It was only a decade or so ago when not only the Israelis and the Arabs, but also the Serbs, the Croats, and the Bosnians, the Irish and the British, the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis, and many others in Latin America and Africa saw the White House lawn as an integral part of American foreign policy. It was perhaps not surprising that the role of America as peacemaker eroded during the eight years of George W. Bush and his war presidency, but there has not been much success in this regard in a Democratic administration either. For someone who ardently emphasizes diplomacy over force, President Obamas record of diplomatic accomplishment has been surprisingly modest. James P. Rubin was Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration. He is now Counselor to Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York. The views expressed are his own. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. Cornwall Louise Glck June 7, 2012 | 12:00 am A word drops into the mist like a child's ball into high grass where it remains intermittently visible, seductively flashing and glinting until the gold bursts are revealed to be simply field buttercups.

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Word/mist, word/mistthus it was with me. And yet, my silence was never total Like a curtain rising on a vista, sometimes the mist cleared: alas, the game was over. The game was over and the word had been somewhat flattened by the elements so it was now both recovered and useless. I was renting, at the time, a house in the country. Fields and mountains had replaced tall buildings. Fields, cows, sunsets over the damp meadow. Night and day distinguished by rotating bird calls, the busy murmurs and rustlings merging into something akin to silence. How hopeful I was! I had brought my paints with me, packing them as one might pack an umbrella for a trip to the desert. I sat, I walked about. When night came, I went indoors. I cooked modest dinners for myself by the light of candles. Evenings, when I could, I wrote in my journal. Far, far away I heard cowbells crossing the meadow. The night grew quiet in its way. I sensed the vanished words lying with their companions, like fragments of an unclaimed biography. It was all, of course, a great mistake. Even the sketchbooks remained blank, the innocent paper that asked for nothing, for drafts, merely. I was, I believed, facing the end. Like a fissure in a dirt road, the end appeared before me as though the tree that confronted my parents had become an abyss shaped like a tree, a black hole expanding in the dirt, where by day a simple shadow would have done. It was, finally, a relief to go home. I packed my paints again, I packed my sketchbooks. Frankly, I could have buried them. At home, the studio was filled with boxes. Cartons of tubes, boxes of the various objects that were my still lives, the vases and mirrors, the blue bowl I filled with wooden eggs. As to the journal: I tried, I persisted. I moved my chair onto the balcony The streetlights were coming on, lining the side of the river. The offices were going dark. At the river's edge, fog encircled the streetlights. One could not, after awhile, see the lights but a strange radiance suffused the fog, its source a mystery. The night progressed. Fog swirled over the lit bulbs. I suppose this is where it was visible; elsewhere, it was simply the way things were, blurred where they had been sharp. I shut my book. It was all behind me, all in the past. Ahead, as I have said, was silence. I spoke to no one. Sometimes the phone rang. Day alternated with night, the earth and sky taking turns being illuminated. This poem appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine. They Died for Westphalia Washington Diarist Leon Wieseltier June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am

WHAT A SPELL of cultural miseries. Oprah Winfrey commended Pierre de Chardin to the graduates of Spelman College and exhorted them to let excellence be your brand. Yale University elected to have its commencement addressed by Barbara Walters. Al Sharpton appeared in the pages of The New York Times Book Review, which warmly noted that its reviewer has lost a lot of weight and eats fish twice a week and many vegetables. And Daniel Bell was made responsible for the Iraq war. The latter comedy took place in the wastes of Salon, where it would have stayed if The New York Times had not seen fit to circulate, without challenge, the description of that great American liberal as having essentially invented the neoconservative movement that would inspire George W. Bush in his disastrous invasion of Iraq. Must error also be stupid? This howler first appeared in an overheated piece about some trivial connections between The Paris Review and the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which was of course supported in part by the CIA and therefore was an instrument of evil. The revelation of a friendship between The Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom is the best news I have heard about that flavorful journal since the announcement of its current editor. The solidarity of beauty and democracy has always been one of my fondest dreams.

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THERE IS MORE, BUT it is in no way amusing. Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations, wrote Jo Becker and Scott Shane in The New York Times, in a riveting investigation of the presidents personal campaign of drone warfare. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And so the president, alone at the top, in the isolation of his exquisiteness, decides who to kill. The presidents sense of his accountability is laudable, but I say this as a supporter of the presidents ruthlessness against terroristsBecker and Shane otherwise paint a portrait of casuistry, hypocrisy, and an almost unfathomable arrogance. Whose faith in Obama can survive the spectacle of his faith in himself? The flattering reference to the medieval philosophers was obviously provided by sources in the White House, and it suggests that the president has been qualified for the power of life and death by his reading. Perhaps he once taught the texts and their arguments; but the Oval Office is not a seminar room. This raises an interesting scruple about the relation of ideas to power. It is that the relation should never be unmediated by experience. No president can govern well without taking ideas seriously; but the mechanical application of ideas to circumstances can be dangerous, and historically amateurish, and lacking in wisdom. It is fanatical, or professorial, to move from a book to a trigger. The case of Abu Yahya al-Libi did not call for a memo about Summa Theologica II-II, Q. 64. But I do not believe for a moment that Obama reviews the old churchmen before giving the order, or that his drone war is motivated chiefly by philosophy. That is more of the Obama legend the highbrow spin. If the president were really moved by the theory of just war, the massacre of the children of Houla would not have left our Syrian policy unmodified. What is the difference, really, between a man who cares but does nothing and a man who does not care? I refer the bystander president to Augustine: The death of an unjust aggressor is a lesser evil than that of a man who is only defending himself. It is much more horrible that a human being should be violated against his will than that a violent attacker should be killed by his intended victim. HENRY KISSINGER responded to the massacre of the children with a hissing reiteration of his contempt for humane intentions in foreign policy. American action against Assad, he frigidly lectured in The Washington Post, would be a betrayal of the modern concept of world order [that] arose in 1648 from the Treaty of Westphalia, which was designed to put an end to the seventeenth-century version of regime change [that] killed perhaps a third of the population of Central Europenote the implication that democratic rebellion, and the support of it, is a variety of religious warand replace it with the preservation of equilibrium as the controlling principle of international affairs. Does America consider itself obliged to support every popular uprising against any non-democratic government, including those heretofore considered important in sustaining the international system? Kissinger does not explain why the Assad regime is a Westphalian necessity, when there is no longer any equilibrium in Syria to preserve. The stability of tyrants is an artificial and passing stability. (Augustine: Peace vied with war in cruelty and surpassed it: for while war overthrew armed hosts, peace slew the defenseless.) Kissinger acknowledges that the fall of Assad is an American interest, but not every strategic interest rises to a cause for war; were it otherwise, no room would be left for diplomacyas if diplomacy is the end, and not the means, of foreign policy. Moreover, infringements of sovereignty are a regular feature of the global state system, legally, economically, politically. Kissinger himself was a master infringer of sovereignty, not least militarily, when he was in power: he has no compunctions about interfering in the domestic affairs of another country for reasons of state. He merely cannot abide reasons of conscience. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, he remarked to Richard Nixon in 1973, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern. Yeah, maybe. IT IS NOT ONLY because of Houla that an intervention against Assad would be justified. But Kissinger and the other elders who know better than to be stirred by the sight of children with their faces blown away will carry the day. We will arrange no intervention in Syria. Instead we will wager on the moral sense of Vladimir Putin, whose memories of Beslan do not seem to have affected his thoughts about Houla. Russia is the key: that is the smart, brandy-soaked opinion now. Why is it less fanciful than more active measures? The really shocking thing is not that a massacre of children occurred. The really shocking thing is that a massacre of children hardly mattered. They died for Westphalia. Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.

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