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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

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TOWARD A JOYFUL PHILOSOPHY

READING SHILTS READING CAMUS READING A PLAGUE

THE PANDEMIC: A PHILOSOPHICAL DIAGNOSIS

CAMUS' ABSURDISM LACKS IMAGINATION

CREATION SCIENCE MAKES SENSE, BUT...

PRIMO LEVI: THE FLAWED DESIGN

NUCLEAR COUNTERINTUITION: RISK REDUCTION DURING THE COLD WAR

THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY AT 100

A SPIDER SHOWS THE WAY TOWARDS GREATER COMPASSION FOR ANIMALS

KING COUNTRY

SONNETS

WHAT ARE NOVELS GOOD FOR?

WYNDHAM LEWIS—THE INTELLECTUAL AS ARTIST

TOWARD A JOYFUL PHILOSOPHY

***

By Sam Magavern

Henri Matisse, La danse (second version), oil on canvas, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Shortly after birth, a baby has experienced life’s most basic joys: eating, embracing, moving, playing, and sleeping. Eating offers us the most intense possible integration with our world: we consume it, take it into our selves, decompose it, and convert it to more energy and life. When we die, the world will do the same thing to us – it will eat us – but while we live we eat the world. We chew, taste, savor, and (hopefully) call it good. But eating has a destructive side. When I eat a carrot, I eliminate it, destroy it, and turn much of it to waste. We offset these negative consequences by growing more food, but, as an existential model for how to relate to the world, eating may be too domineering.

Eating is often considered the most primal pleasure, but we feel our mothers’ embraces before we first eat. A joyful embrace is contact with something I love – whether that be people, animals, trees, sunshine, a cool stone, or a favorite shirt. When I eat, I consume my object, incorporating what I find valuable and excreting the rest. When I embrace, I share time and space with a fellow subject. Instead of absorbing it, I overlap with it, so that neither one of us is destroyed or depleted; instead, both of us gain energy. One way to construe my relationship with the world is to say that I want to embrace and not just eat it.

Babies love moving just for the sake of moving. The older we get, the more purposeful we become. We think of moving as a neutral means to an end – reaching our goals – and forget to enjoy it. Then we need something like sports, dance, or yoga to remind us how happy movement can be. Yoga offers a philosophical account of movement, beginning with the most primal movement of all: breathing. In yoga, living the “examined” life includes examining my body, disciplining it, and bringing it to a more harmonious relationship with the cosmos. Yoga also plays the traditional role of philosophy as preparation for death; it seeks not only to regulate the body and mind but also to free them from worldly attachments.

Every night, we free ourselves from attachments and experience a “little death” by falling asleep. What we call sleep is at least four different experiences: falling asleep, dreaming, sleeping dreamlessly, and waking up. Falling asleep, like eating, is a mix of positive and negative pleasure. We experience the positive pleasure of a warm, comfortable bed, and the negative pleasure of a break from our labors and tiredness. Dreaming and waking up are much less reliable joys: they are sometimes quite unpleasant. Unconscious sleep is our most paradoxical “experience,” because we know it happens to us every night, and we enjoy its restorative effects, but we can’t experience it in the usual sense of thinking during it or remembering it afterward. We can’t find its texture. Our bodies seem to enjoy it without us. For the mind, it is just like death, except temporary. For the body, it is revitalizing. Sleep prepares us for death by showing us that the absence of consciousness is not a void, to be avoided at all costs; it is one event among many, bringing both good and bad things to fruition.

If good sleep is joyful rest, then good play is joyful action. Play is the most complicated and cultural of our primary joys. We eat, move, sleep, and embrace because, at some level, we need to, but – at first blush – it seems that we play for joy alone. The wolf cubs frolic and tussle for the sheer joy of frolicking and tussling. But another way to think about play is as a preparation and practice for work. The wolf cubs frolic and tussle in order to learn how to hunt, fight, and establish social dominance.

In William Shakespeare’s plays, John Falstaff embodies play for joy’s sake. He is keenly aware of the exigencies of the workaday world – fighting wars, serving the country, earning a living, following laws – but he tries to avoid them or convert them into occasions for mischief. Prince Hal, by contrast, is leaving play behind for his “real” life of politics and war. He banishes play from his kingdom of work, and his work is killing and conquering. Even his marriage serves his political ambitions. Hal embodies a certain notion of virtue; he brings his appetites under control and identifies himself with the law. But his virtue seems cold and lethal when contrasted to the boundless, earthy joy of Falstaff. In a way that seems distinctly modern, Hal remakes himself by dichotomizing play and duty.

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote refuses to acknowledge the modernity – the separation of play from virtue and work – that Hal embraces and Falstaff subverts. Quixote is as quaintly moral as Falstaff is amoral, as unworldly as Falstaff is worldly. Falstaff will defend play from work and, if necessary, from virtue. Quixote demands a world where play, work, and virtue are woven together in a beautiful tapestry. Because that world can only be found in books – romances – his quest remains quixotic.

It falls to Sancho Panza to save us. Sancho Panza is as earthy as Falstaff, but with some of Hal’s practicality. He does not share Don Quixote’s illusions, and he occasionally gets injured when they clash with reality, but he not only tolerates them, he enjoys them. He deserves to become governor of a republic, and, when he does, he is doubtless a more peaceful leader than Hal. Falstaff and Hal’s friendship ends tragically – with Falstaff forsaken and dying. Sancho Panza and Don Quixote remain comic, because their love is successful. Sancho, with his gift of self-sacrifice, creates a world of play with Don Quixote that survives, however battered, its collisions and collusions with reality.

Sancho and his rucio (1904) by Jaime Pahissa Laporta (1846-1928)

Falstaff and Don Quixote have a child-like ability to imagine new forms of play and bend reality into joyful forms. In our society, adult play tends to be limited to set times and activities, many of which bear a surprisingly close resemblance to work. “Playing” a slot machine at a casino is like doing assembly-line work or data entry – trying to make money through a repetitive, solitary activity in a highly artificial environment. Contrast that sterile “play” to two children playing with little plastic animals in their living room. The carpet is a savannah; the sofa is a mountain. The children inhabit the personae of the animals, speaking and acting for them. Their game has no rules, no set beginning or end, and no point except joy.

The older we get, the more our play gets channeled into competitive sports, where the object is to “beat” the other team and boast that “we killed them.” Too many coaches drill their teams like army sergeants or factory bosses, as if play meant training soldiers and workers. Sometimes, however, playing a sport is pure joy. On a frozen lake in Minneapolis, hockey players gather every afternoon, weather permitting, for a pick-up game. Anyone can play. You don’t have to “make the team;” just wait your turn. There are no coaches, captains, referees, or penalties, but the rules get followed. There is no hitting, and no one keeps score. The players are divided into two teams, but the teams are constantly changing. There is no audience or authority to impress, no objective except to play well and find delight in a beautiful place.

Travel, too, can be reclaimed. On a canoe trip, the destination is more or less irrelevant; it is the journey that I enjoy. The trip yields no result but itself. Camping in the woods, I experience nature as a source of wonder and beauty, not just a set of substances to use. A tent is very different from even the simplest cabin. Four walls and a roof inevitably enclose me in a human cosmos, but a tent is too thin and flimsy a membrane to take me out of nature. In a tent I can still see the stars, smell the grasses, hear the birds and frogs, and feel the breeze on my face. I am in a world that I can’t control. I can read only a few fragments of the endless hieroglyphics of the stars, trees, and animals.

Joyful play often flourishes in the precincts of art and love.  “The Guitarist Tunes Up,” a poem by Frances Cornford, merges these two realms:

With what attentive courtesy he bent

Over his instrument;

Not as a lordly conqueror who could

Command both wire and wood

But as a man with a loved woman might,

Inquiring with delight

What slight essential things she had to say

Before they started, he and she, to play.

The poem rolls beauty, love, and joy into one ball: one planet on the table. It seems slight at first, but each word is rich and essential. “Bent,” for example, rhymes not only with “instrument,” but also with the “tent” in “attentive” as if to say that part of paying attention is bending, which means to re-shape one’s self into a less perfect line. The instrument itself, the guitar, is made out of bent wood; in bending over it, the player rhymes himself with its bent. To bend is to submit to another, and yet my “bent” is my autonomous, eccentric path. The poem, in pursuing its path, breaks its line after “bent” and before “over,” as if the poem itself were bending over, in its courtesy, to make a bow or a curtsey.

The rhyme of “say” and “play” tells us that talk is a form of play and that play is a form of talk, a conversation. The talk precedes the play and is “slight,” and yet, at the same time, it is “essential” and done with “delight.” The slightness of the talk is a pretense: a play. Part of talk’s delight is to play at being a mere prelude when in fact it belongs with the main act. Why does the poet interpolate “he and she” in the last line? There is no ambiguity in the word “they” that needs to be cleared up. One reason may be that play delights in repetition, in exceeding the requirements of mere sense. But the phrase “he and she” also emphasizes that, in becoming a “they,” he and she have not lost their individuality. Before he acts, he will inquire what she has to say – not assume that he already knows. They are participating as equals, not as lord and servant or even as lord and lady. He will pay court to her; she will pay court to him. To pay attention to someone is never free of cost, but it can be done in a free exchange.

Love leads to beautiful play, and art requires loving play. Making music does not just mean making the instrument respond. The musician must listen to the instrument and respond, himself. He must enter into conversation with it, not lordly domination. In the song “If I Had my Way,” the Reverend Blind Gary Davis, before he solos, asks his guitar to speak to him, and as it does, he shouts and yelps to show that it is surprising and delighting him with what it has to say. The poet cannot make her words; they predate her. She has to listen to the slight and essential things they have to say if she wants to play with them. She can’t just “use” words; she has to love them – to inquire of them with delight.

When I listen to a guitarist tune up, it is usually in a bar. Bars, besides being noxious breeding grounds for disease, alcoholism, and cheap sex, are also sanctuaries for beauty, love and joy. Like churches, bars congregate people in insulated, distinctive environments. Like churches, they use dim lighting, libations, music, and group experience to mark themselves off from the workday world. The church attempted to banish the blues as devil’s music, but the Reverend Blind Gary Davis sang gospel and blues with equal fervor. Popular music is more satisfying in nightclubs than in concert halls. The bar’s apparent liabilities – alcohol that dims my mind, people that stand too close, and amplification that makes the bass resonate in my chest – pull me out of my routine and into a mysterious, bodily communion with the music, the band, and the other members of the audience.

We seek pleasure not just from eating, moving, sleeping, embracing, and playing, but also, very directly, from drugs: alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and all the other substances that offer pleasurable feelings and altered states of consciousness. So far as I know, every society on earth has used drugs. Unfortunately, our nation has innumerable, irrational, and conflicting taboos and messages about drugs. We punish them too severely and yet use them too uncontrollably, unable to integrate them with the rest of our pleasures and customs. We fail to judge drugs individually in terms of their costs and benefits; we lump all illegal drugs together.

We may have reached a fairly rational consensus on alcohol – not demonizing the substance itself (that demon rum!), but recognizing that misuse and addiction are serious problems. Illegal drugs, however, are simply taboo, although everyone knows that they can be pleasurable, and, in some cases, like marijuana, not particularly dangerous. The taboo has some devastating consequences. While official culture penalizes their use with absurd harshness, unofficial culture bombards us with irresponsible messages about their wondrous pleasures. Young people end up experimenting with them in secret, and thus face increased risks of dangerous behaviors and addictions. The taboo also helps create a double standard in which the rich get away with using drugs while the poor get imprisoned.

Why do we have so much trouble moderating our joys? To moderate a discussion is not to censor it. The moderator guides and balances it to make it as meaningful as possible. She is like a band leader. The band leader limits the players’ autonomy not to curtail the beauty they make but to maximize the beauty they make together. To moderate my pleasures is to find the most enjoyable amount of them for the long term. Drinking too much doesn’t make me feel happy; it makes me feel sick, whereas one tumbler of whiskey yields real pleasure.

Unfortunately, though, we need to moderate our joys not just to enhance them but also because they sometimes compete with other values, such as truth and goodness. Joy itself provides some help in this effort, because if I seek joy too strenuously it often turns to ashes in my mouth. Joy prefers surprising me to being assiduously hunted down and captured. One way to moderate joy is to treat it not as a destination but as the blackberries that happen to grow on the paths I make toward other values. The berries that I don’t look for are the sweetest.

But sometimes I need to choose between eating berries and doing something more helpful. How much time can I spend on my happiness before I become selfish? One honorable way to evade this issue is to cultivate goodness, so that nothing provides greater joy than helping other people. But even for the most saintly, conflicts arise, and we do not always side with virtue. We love Falstaff even though he lies, cheats, and steals. We thrill to Antony and Cleopatra’s doomed, destructive passion.

The truth is, we love joy more than duty – especially when it is shared with others. Antony and Cleopatra provide each other with passion and poetry. Falstaff drinks and capers with a merry band. His actions are selfish, and yet they give other people generous helpings of happiness, too. We also give more weight to joy when it is linked to other values. When I buy a record I do so mainly for pleasure, but I am also supporting beauty – doing something more “valuable” than eating a candy bar. Also, some pleasures are more innocent than others. In weighing my right to a pleasure, I have to think about how much harm it does. Taking a walk in the woods and driving a snowmobile through the woods are both selfish pleasures, but walking doesn’t pollute the environment.

In the United States today, our culture is mostly entertainment: TV, movies, music, sports events, amusement parks, and magazines. Every year, more of our economy is devoted to producing pleasure. You might think that we should be the happiest people in the history of the planet. Yet we remain plagued with poverty, incarceration, chemical dependency, violence, and other forms of misery. Our pursuit of happiness sometimes seems to be just that: a pursuit, a frenzied adrenaline-filled, violent chase after an elusive target. If it doesn’t elude us, we kill it. As Bruce Springsteen says, we are “banging them pleasure machines,” but it doesn’t seem to make us happy.

I have alluded to some of the reasons that our pursuit often fails. Our puritanism depicts too many sources of joy as profane, illicit, or meaningless. By failing to integrate them into our cosmos and link them to other values, we make them isolated, guilt-ridden pleasures that lead to feelings of emptiness. Our puritanism overlaps with our consumerism, which also casts joy as an isolated product rather than as a light that can radiate out of any experience. If you try to create a microcosm that is nothing but fun – a fun-house – you risk creating a place that is about nothing, with no organic links to nature and culture. Finally, and paradoxically, even as our gigantic economy colonizes more time and space in the name of fun, it also, with its militarized, corporate ethos, colonizes more fun as training for war and work.

Beyond these cultural factors, there are some biological and existential factors that limit how much joy we can have and how successfully we can turn pleasure into happiness. One huge factor is temperament, or disposition. Due to our genes and a set of environmental factors and accidents that shape our character, we have happy or gloomy temperaments that are hard to change no matter what happens to us. Another factor is luck, because so many things that make us happy or sad lie largely outside our control – the health of our loved ones, for example. A third factor is our equilibrium: the way that new situations and circumstances in our lives soon come to seem normal. Winning the lottery might make us happy for a while, but soon our newfound wealth becomes simply “the way it is.”

Many pleasures are like chewing gum. After I’ve experienced them for a while, they lose their distinctive flavor. The power of events fades and leaves me back at the “set point” of my disposition. If I am prone to worry, then removing one set of worries leads inevitably to the arrival of a new set. Pursuing happiness is somewhat pointless, because what makes me happy tends to be not what I plan, but what surprises me, what turns out better than expected.

If it is hard to make myself happy, it is also hard to make someone else happy. Being unselfish, attentive, polite, and compassionate will certainly tend to make others happier, but, if someone else is truly miserable, I have no reliable way to make him feel better. Too many of the factors controlling his mood, including his basic temperament, lie outside my control. Even the degree to which I love him, which is crucial to how happy I can make him, is not exactly up to me. In some ways, it is easier to make people I don’t know happier. A comedian who makes people laugh, a musician playing beautiful music, and a doctor who heals can be more reliable – if less bountiful – in bringing happiness than friends, family, and lovers.

It is hard to make people happy, but it is easy to devastate them: a single cruel word will do. The first duty we have toward others is not to make them happy but to avoid hurting them. Similarly, as a society our first duty is to avoid hurting others, and our second is to relieve their suffering. We can make sure everyone has access to the components of a good life, but we can’t “make” them happy. Maximizing a society’s joy, as utilitarians try to do, is practically very difficult; that is why even a fairly hedonistic person like me thinks that we should aim for lives and societies filled with goodness, truth, beauty, wonder, meaning, joy, freedom, justice, equality, and love instead of single-mindedly pursuing happiness.

Yes, if joy is not the be-all or end-all, it remains a vital mode of existence, one that traditional philosophy has often slighted. In art, the comic has always been valued highly, from Aristophanes to Richard Pryor. In paganism, many gods are comical. But in monotheism and western philosophy, somber sobriety has been the rule. When you have many gods, it is easy to let some be grotesque and foolish. When you have only one God, it is hard to joke about him. An omniscient deity doesn’t get caught in many amusing scrapes. Yahweh never laughs, and he doesn’t appreciate it when the aged Sarah laughs at his plan to get her pregnant. The philosophers, in their delusive quest for a God’s eye-view of the universe, have not made many good jokes. Even Nietzsche, who wrote the Gay Science, is mostly just scary when he takes a stab at humor.

The true, the good, and the beautiful are not always serious. Comedy is our most profound reaction to the gratuitous fact that there is something instead of nothing: that bananas and noses and dust mites and kangaroos are present in our cosmos. The marriage that takes place at the end of a classic comedy is not just a covenant between the main characters; it is their, and our, covenant with life: we agree to generate more life, and life agrees to generate more of us. Neither promise is fully rational or explicable. They happen, by happenstance, and make us happy. Comedy, like love, calls us to the things of this world.

Still, comedy is not just a cheerleader for life. Often, comedy viciously attacks the life we are leading: the distance between our actions and our professed values. And comedy does not limit its aggression to worthy targets such as vice and hypocrisy; it also includes a primal joy at the misfortunes of others. Comedy reveals the dark secret that one of the ways we experience the joy of being alive is by witnessing death. We can’t pass through our own deaths and come out on the other side; we can only pass through the deaths of others. In comedy we rejoice at the death of evil characters, whereas in tragedy we mourn the great who have fallen. But one reason we can bear tragedy is that, as the audience, we secretly experience the comic joy of noting that the tragedy is befalling others, not us.

Philosophy, if it is to instruct and console us, must answer the question, “how can we live?” in both of its senses: what path should we take through life, and what makes life preferable to death. To answer this dual question, philosophy must give a persuasive account of values, so that we want to follow them and think they make life truly valuable. How could an adequate philosophy eschew comedy: the mode of thinking that embodies life over death, love over hate, joy over sorrow, and wonder over sterility? How could anyone trust a philosopher who has never visited, much less felt at home in, Sancho Panza’s republic?

Sam Magavern is a writer and public interest lawyer, currently teaching at the University at Buffalo Law School.  He is the author of Primo Levi's Universe. He has written in a wide variety of genres – poetry, fiction, film, scholarly essays, and comic books – and published in many of the leading literary magazines, including Poetry, The Antioch Review, and The Paris Review.

READING SHILTS READING CAMUS READING A PLAGUE

***

Steven G. Kellman

RAMBLING PROSE: SELECTED ESSAYS

By Steven Kellman

Trinity University Press, 2020

Was not Camus' only fault, apart from being too widely read, that he was right too soon?

--Bertrand Poirot-Delpech

Even before his narrative begins, Albert Camus offers a cue on how to read The Plague. He positions a statement by Daniel Defoe as the epigraph to the entire work. Any novelist writing about epidemics bears the legacy of A Journal of the Plague Year, the 1722 text in which Defoe recounts the collective story of one city, in his case London, under the impact of a plague, and uses a narrator so self-effacing that his only concession to personal identity is the placement  of his initials, H.F., at the end.

Camus' The Plague insists that it is the "chronicle"1of an "honest witness"2 to what occurred in Oran, Algeria, a physician named Bernard Rieux who is so loath to impose his personality on the story that he conceals his identity until the final pages. Rieux claims the modest role of  "chronicler  of the troubled, rebellious hearts of our townspeople under the impact of the plague."3

The particular passage appropriated as epigraph to Camus' novel comes from another book by Defoe, from the preface to the third volume of Robinson Crusoe. And, for the reader of The Plague, it immediately raises questions of representation: "It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not." Coming even before we meet the first infected rat in Oran, the Defoe quotation is an invitation to allegory, a tip that the fiction that follows signifies more than the story of a town in Algeria in a year, "194_," deliberately kept indeterminate to encourage extrapolation.

"I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here, which is tantamount to saying I'm like everybody else,"4 says a healthy Jean Tarrou, by which he suggests that the pestilence that is the focus of the story is not primarily a medical phenomenon nor is it, like Camus' adversary, quarantined in one city during most of one year, from April 16 to the following February. “I know positively - yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see - that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it," declares Tarrou. Camus' novel invites its readers to recognize that they, too, are somehow infected, though the diagnosis seems more metaphysical than physical.

In 1941, a typhus outbreak near Oran resulted in more than 75,000 deaths. However, that  epidemic was clearly a source  rather than the subject of Camus' novel. The Plague is one of the most critically and commercially successful novels ever published in France. It has managed to sell more than four million copies throughout the world and to inspire an army of exegetes. For the generation that grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, it was, like The Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Flies, and Catch-22, a book that was devoured although  (and because) it was not  assigned  in school. But its appeal has not been as an accurate case study in epidemiology. Particularly in North America, where Oran seems as remote as Oz, readers have accepted Camus'  invitation to translate the text into allegory. The Plague offered a tonically despairing vision of an absurd cosmos in which human suffering is capricious and unintelligible. The lethal, excruciating disease strikes fictional Oran indiscriminately, and when it does recede it does so temporarily, oblivious to human efforts at prophylaxis. As if illustrating Camus' 1942 philosophical treatise The Myth of Sisyphus, the health workers of Oran combat each case without ever being convinced that their labors accomplish anything.

In a famous letter addressed to Roland Barthes in 1955, Camus attempted to narrow down the terms of interpretation.  He insisted that his 1947 novel be read not as a study in abstract evil but as a story whose manifest reference is to the situation of France under Nazi occupation: “The Plague, which I wanted to be read on a number of levels, nevertheless has as its obvious content the struggle of the European resistance movements against Nazism. The proof of this is that although the specific enemy is nowhere named, everyone in every European country recognized it. Let me add that a long extract from The Plague appeared during the Occupation, in a collection of the underground texts, and that this fact alone would justify the transposition I made. In a sense, The Plague is more than a chronicle of the Resistance. But certainly it is nothing less.”6

Egypte, 1977 by Bernard Plossu (Galerie CAMERA OBSCURA)

Long after the liberation of France, readers, particularly those born after World War II, preferred to read The Plague as something more than a chronicle of the Resistance, as the embodiment of a more universal philosophical vision. The novel was, in fact, even more popular in North America, which did not experience the Nazi Occupation, than in France, where Camus' aversion to torture and violence made him politically suspect by both the left and right. The absence of an immediate historical context encouraged younger Americans to read The Plague as a philosophical novel. So, too, did our inexperience with plagues. "Oh, happy posterity,” wrote Petrarch in the fourteenth century, when more than half the population of his native Florence perished in the bubonic plague, the Black Death, "who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable."7

Before 1980, The Plague was facilely read as a fable. Polio had been vanquished, and the smallpox virus survived only in a few laboratories. Aside from periodic visitations of influenza, usually more of a nuisance than a killer, epidemics, before the outbreak of cholera in Peru in 1991 and later scourges of Ebola and Zika, had been as common in this hemisphere as flocks of auks. Those of us who first read The Plague during the era of the Salk and Sabin vaccines were hard put to imagine a world not yet domesticated by biotechnology, in which a mere bacillus could terrorize an entire city. We read The Plague not as the story of a plague, an atavistic nemesis that seemed unlikely to menace our own modem metropolises. The story was a pretext, an occasion for ethical speculation, in short an allegory without coordinates in space and time. Four decades after the publication of Camus’ novel, the scourge of AIDS would dispel our epidemiological innocence, and change the way we read The Plague. Four decades after that, the COVID-19 pandemic would again concentrate the mind on the devastation of actual pestilence and renew the popularity and relevance of Camus’ text.

Alhough published long before the first case of AIDS was diagnosed and thirty-five years before the acronym (for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was even coined, The Plague assumed a new urgency when it became apparent that epidemics were not obsolete  occurrences  or quaint events confined to distant regions. Ten years after a 1981 article in The New England Journal of Medicine reported seven inexplicable cases of severe infection, AIDS was a global pandemic. Thirty-five years after its first diagnosis, infection with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) would be responsible for approximately 39 million deaths worldwide. At first, AIDS seemed to target homosexual men,  Haitians, and intravenous drug users, but, like Camus’ Plague, it was soon striking indiscriminately, without any regard to the social status of its hundreds of thousands of helpless, hapless victims. As in The Plague, an anxious populace responded in a variety of ways but without any cure. It was no longer possible to read The Plague with the innocence of the existential aesthete.

Coimbra, Portugal by Bernard Plossu (ICP Museum)

Published in 1987, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is a detailed account of the onset and spread of AIDS and of the spectrum of reactions to it. What, to a student of Camus, is remarkable about Randy Shilts' book - which, selected for the Book of the Month Club, was a bestseller in both hardcover and paperback - is how much it has in common with The Plague. Not only does Shilts document the same pattern of initial denial followed by acknowledgment, recrimination, terror, and occasional stoical heroism that Rieux recounts during the Oran ordeal, but it is clear that Shilts had read Camus and had adopted much of the style and structure of The Plague to tell his story of an actual plague. Where Camus appropriates Defoe for the epigraph of his novel, Shilts mines Camus' The Plague for epigraphs to four of his nine sections: Parts IV, V, VI, and VII.  In Part II, describing baffling new developments amongst homosexual patients, Shilts echoes Camus' absurdist myth of Sisyphus when he states: "The fight against venereal diseases was proving a Sisyphean task."8 That same Greek myth, for which  Camus is the modern bard, is alluded to two other times by Shilts - flippantly, in reference to AIDS victim Gary Walsh's "Sisyphean task"9 of  renovating his Castro District apartment and, more portentously, in reference to the "Sisyphean struggle"10 against AIDS directed by Donald Francis, a leading  retrovirologist at the Centers for Disease Control.

Camus' existential vision of a random universe in which adversity, though gratuitous and impossible to defeat, must nevertheless be opposed provides the subtext to Shilts' book, which, translated into six languages and even adapted to an NBC mini-series, became the most influential text on AIDS. "I had written a book to change the world," explained Shilts in a 1988 Esquire memoir, 11and he did.   By alerting and prodding professionals and the general public  to respond to the crisis, And  the Band  Played  On can be credited with saving lives and altering attitudes and behavior. It is a work of committed non-fiction, though it is phrased and  organized  - with prologue, epilogue, epigraphs, and a roster of “dramatis personae" - novelistically, echoing Camus' novel in particular.

Early in The Plague, its still anonymous narrator attempts to establish his credibility by assuming the humble role of historian.  He insists on his distaste for rhetorical flamboyance and   literary contrivance, assuring the reader that: "His business is only to say: ‘This is what happened,' when it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of the whole populace,  and that there are thousands of eyewitnesses who can appraise in their hearts the  truth of what  he writes. "12 Rather than his own eccentric fabrication, what follows, he assures us, is an  impartial  account  adhering  scrupulously  to reliable sources. "The present narrator,” says the  present  narrator,  in  an  attempt at objective attachment from himself, "has three kinds of data: first, what he saw himself; secondly, the accounts of other eyewitnesses thanks  to  the part he played,  he was enabled  to learn their personal impressions from all those figuring in this chronicle; and, lastly, documents that subsequently came into his hands."13

Like Camus' Rieux, Shilts also suppresses the first-person pronoun, camouflaging his own presence as both narrator and agent. While Rieux insists on the word "chronicle” to characterize a narrative that pretends solely to record verifiable facts as they unfold in time, Shilts acquired most of his information while reporting for a San Francisco newspaper that  happens to call itself the Chronicle. A streetwalker and heroin addict named Silvana Strangis forms part of his story, and when he tells the reader that "a Chronicle reporter, tipped off by an emergency room attendant, knocked on Silvana's door,"14 that reporter is presumably Shilts himself. When an unnamed San Francisco reporter goads epidemiologist James Curran into a statement about the dangers of gay bathhouses and then publishes his remarks, Bay Area gay leaders are irate. "The reporter, they agreed, suffered from internalized   homophobia," states Shilts impassively, though it is apparent that that reporter is Shilts himself, both the chronicler and the chronicled – also, implicitly, maligned.

San Francisco by Bernard Plossu (ICP Museum)

"This book is a work of journalism," declares Shilts·in a documentational appendix, “There has been no fictionalization."15 Like Rieux, he is anxious to deny invention, to demonstrate that everything in his chronicle is a transcription of his own observations, copious interviews with others, and public documents. Like Rieux, who incorporates the journal of Jean Tarrou for access to events the narrator did not directly experience, Shilts relies on the diary of graphic designer Matthew Krieger for insights into the illness of his lover Gary Walsh.

Early in The Plague, before the epidemic forces the authorities to seal Oran off from the outside world, Rieux sends his ailing wife to a sanatorium beyond the city. At the end of Camus' novel, just as the quarantine is being lifted from his ravaged city, Rieux learns that his wife has died in exile. As chronicler, the widowed doctor claims to be a faithful representative of his fellow citizens, but his preoccupation with the plight of lovers separated by the plague is surely a product of his own poignant and singular situation. Similarly, though Shilts suppresses his personal identity and affects the impartial voice of History, his book is clearly the product of a particular sensibility. From its title to its final pages, And the Band Played On is an impassioned indictment of the indifference, vanity, and naïveté that facilitated the catastrophe. Shilts quotes with scorn the characterization of AIDS as the "the gay plague, "16 but his account of the disease makes it seem just that, as though the virus is as in love with homophilic men as they are with others of their orientation. Shilts acknowledges and emphasizes that the disease also strikes others, but the plight of gays receives the elephant's share of his attention and compassion.

Some critics have faulted the book for its slighting of other sorts of victims; Diane Johnson and John F. Murray, for example. noted in The New York Review of Books that "most of his examples are taken from homosexuals, encouraging the impression that AIDS is mainly a homosexual disease."17 AIDS did in fact affect gays disproportionately, especially in the early years that Shilts chronicles. But behind the mask of Olympian omniscience is an author who himself came out of the closet, and, though he reports on the hardships of the Haitians, blood recipients, and intravenous drug-users, it is understandable that he empathizes with the gay victims whose lives he vividly dramatizes. A clinically detached chronicler might not write with such rage about the internecine squabbles within the largely gay Castro District that delayed effective action against their microbial enemy. "At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there is always a propensity for rhetoric,” says Tarrou to Rieux, who, writing after the pestilence, eschews the rhetoric and aspires to a zero degree of writing.  Shilts is less scrupulous  about restraining  his language,  and,  amid  the mass of statistics, writes in a style that one reviewer ridiculed as "overheated Sidney Sheldonesque prose. "19 Despite the pose of third-person chronicler, Shilts narrates with fervent urgency, from within a community in peril.

In the drab and dreadful universe that Camus depicts, the possibilities of heroism are severely constricted. Yet, recognizing that readers crave heroes, Rieux nominates the perversely named Joseph Grand, a low-level municipal clerk who does his job and dreams of writing perfect sentences: "Yes, if it is a fact that people like to have examples given to them, men of the type they call heroic, and if it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include the 'hero,' the narrator commends to his readers, with to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a  seemingly absurd ideal. "20 Shilts likewise chooses his heroes from among the meek: the health professionals who, often defying directives from more eminent leaders, persisted in their struggle against the new disease, and those victims of AIDS who managed to die with grace. While his book is often scornful of celebrities such as Robert Gallo or Margaret Heckler, it is the unsung sufferers who agreed to be interviewed whom Shilts salutes in the final sentences of his "Acknowledgments": "When I'd ask why they'd take the time for this, most hoped that something they said would save someone else from suffering. If there is an  act  that  better  defines heroism, I have not  seen  it.”11

What Shilts has seen is the way crisis magnifies the grandeur of ordinary people. Recounting the arduous dedication of volunteers to the Gay Men's Health Crisis, Shilts quotes author Larry Kramer: "There are no heroes in the AIDS epidemics," but he concludes the  paragraph with a rejoinder from  Paul Popham, president of the GMHC: "There were heroes in the AIDS epidemic, he  thought, lots of them."22 Like Camus, Shilts admires the health workers who persist in their task without either pomp or victory. He is particularly impressed with Selma Dritz, the assistant director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. He so admires her stubborn refusal to ignore anything marginal to her mission of saving lives that he twice precedes her name with the adjective "no-nonsense, "23 an epithet that might apply as well to Camus’ Rieux.

Within The Plague, a sharp contrast to the selfless dedication of characters such as Rieux and Grand is represented by Cottard, an opportunist who revels in others' misery because the quarantine enables him to profit from black-market contraband. Shilts' version of the egotist is Gaetan Dugas, the Canadian airline steward referred to as Patient Zero, for being a primary source of contagion in North America. Aware that he has contracted AIDS, Dugas refuses to curtail his hedonistic promiscuity, even allegedly gloating to some of his 2,500 sexual partners:  "I've got gay cancer.  I'm going to die and so are you."24

"There was venality, and there was also courage,”25 declares Shilts, who writes with righteous wrath about the bathhouse managers who placed profits before lives and scientists who pursued careers rather than truth. Despite its guise as impartial chronicle, And  the Band Played  On is an exercise in moral indignation.  Yet its narrator is as wary of moralism as is Rieux, who keeps his distance from Paneloux, the Jesuit priest who preaches two crucial sermons strategically and symmetrically positioned - in Parts II and IV of Camus' five-part novel. In the first, Paneloux rails against the sinners of Oran, portraying the plague as a scourge from God, an instrument of retribution for the depravity of the entire community. By the time of his second sermon, Paneloux's theodicy has been shaken by the experience of watching a blameless child die in agony, and he preaches that the plague is as unfathomable as the deity we must love without understanding. Shilts also depicts high-minded homilists who pretend to see a moral pattern to the plague of AIDS. "When you violate moral, health, and hygiene laws, you reap the whirlwind," proclaims the Reverend Jerry Falwell. "You cannot shake your fist in God's face and get away with it.”26 Elsewhere, invoking a Darwinian, rather than an Augustinian, moral code, Patrick Buchanan declares: "The poor homosexuals - they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution. "27 Unlike Camus' Paneloux, neither Falwell nor Buchanan alters his attitudes within Shilts' book, and, though Shilts is highly critical of behavior that spreads the epidemic, And the Band Played On is the closest to the non-judgmental stance toward suffering that Rieux expresses in response to Paneloux: "No, Father. I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture."28

Though it purports to replicate verbatim extended stretches of dialogue and to represent the thoughts of its characters, And the Band Played On is of course not a novel. Camus invented Rieux, Tarrou, Grand, Paneloux, and Cottard, but Harry Britt, Selma Dritz, Michael Gottlieb, Cleve Jones, Bill Kraus, and Gary Walsh existed independently of Shilts' book. While Camus is virtually neo-Classical in his decision to intensify his five-act drama by confining it to one cloistered city, Oran, within less than one revolution of the earth, Shilts' story is global and ranges among San Francisco, Kinshasa, New York, Paris, Atlanta, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Washington, London, and other  locales for most of a decade. Rieux tells his tale in retrospect, after the plague has dissipated and the gates of Oran have swung open again, while Shilts writes in media res, in the muddled midst of a deadly pandemic that would surely expand before it receded.

But both Camus and Shilts personify their plagues, depicting them as animate enemies  aroused from sleep. Shilts explains that by the end of 1980: "Slowly and almost  imperceptibly,  the killer was awakening."29 In the final line of his chronicle, Camus' Rieux reminds us that any  victory over the plague  is only provisional: “that the plague  bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”30

Shilts' view of human arrogance toward natural adversity seems shaped not only by his research into the often cavalier or inept responses to AIDS but also by his reading of The  Plague. His account of Pneumocystic pneumonia, a disease that frequently results from a failure of immune systems, sounds remarkably like the final sentence  of the Camus novel. Like Rieux, Shilts provides admonition against overconfidence, since the disease will never be definitely defeated: “. . . Pneumocystic pneumonia flared sporadically, eager to take advantage of any opportunity to thrive in its preferred ecological niche, the lung. The disease, however, would disappear simultaneously once the immune system was restored. And the little creature would return to an obscure place in the medical books where it was recorded as one of the thousands of microorganisms that always lurk on the fringe of human existence, lying dormant until infrequent opportunity allows it to burst forth and follow the biological dictate to grow and multiply.”31

The day would come, Rieux reminds us, when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, the  plague,  merely dormant ,  never dead, would strike again. It strikes again when Rieux relives the collective ordeal of Oran by writing about it. But just what sort of enlightenment is brought by that account or by the plague itself remains elusive. "A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will  pass away,"  admits  Rieux, in a passage that Shilts chooses as epigraph to Part V of his book. "But it doesn't always pass away, and from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away."32 Protagoras' confidence that "Man is the measure of all things" posits a universe that is intelligible to and governable by human beings. Both Camus' plague and Shilts' AIDS arrive as a challenge to the humanist's presumption;  they are inscrutable and invincible.

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and  good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding," Camus explains, in a passage from The Plague that Shilts appropriates  as the epigraph  to Part VI: “On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point, but they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”33 Shilts, like Camus, presents himself as a clear-sighted writer in a world where most prefer to close their eyes. He reveals how denial and temporizing by scientists, physicians, politicians, and victims squandered many lives: ''One had the feeling that many concessions had been made to a desire not to alarm the public," observes Rieux about official policy toward the plague, and the description is so applicable to the initial reaction toward  AIDS as well that Shilts employs it as the epigraph to Part IV.34

As a reporter, Shilts  is  especially critical of the failure of writers to dispel the  widespread  ignorance about the growing crisis. It is not just a partisan pride in the anomalous coverage provided by his own paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, that prompts Shilts to note that: “In New York City, where half the nation's AIDS cases resided, The New York Times had written only three stories about the epidemic in 1981 and three more stories in all of 1982.  None made the   front page. Indeed, one could have lived in New York, or in  most of the United States for that matter, and not even have been aware from the daily newspapers that an epidemic was happening, even while the government doctors themselves were predicting that the scourge would wipe out the lives of tens of thousands.35

In six hundred and thirty pages densely packed with statistics and suffering, Shilts documents the evil that came from ignorance. And the Band Played On is offered to open our eyes or, to shift the metaphor, to stop the band so we might hear the sounds of torment.  Camus leaves us with his plague in temporary remission, but in Shilts' final pages, AIDS is merely gaining momentum. Neither disease is near a cure. Yet both epidemics and both books leave us enlightened:  about the limits of human understanding but the need to act on what we know. William Styron spoke for many American admirers when he praised Camus for his tonic recognition of a bleak cosmos:  "Camus was a great cleanser of my intellect, ridding me of countless sluggish ideas and, through some of the most unsettling pessimism I have ever encountered,  causing  me to be aroused anew by life's enigmatic promise.”36  Stronger on enigma than promise, Shilts nevertheless created a book designed to arouse.

Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he has taught since 1976. He is the author of The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside, The Translingual Imagination, Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text, and Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, which received the New York Society Library Award for Biography, as well as hundreds of essays and more than a thousand reviews. Among his other honors are the Gemini Ink Literary Excellence Award and the San Antonio Public Library Foundation’s Arts and Letters Award. He lives in San Antonio.

THE PANDEMIC: A PHILOSOPHICAL DIAGNOSIS

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By Mikhail Epstein

Image: Gilbert Garcin

The Pandemic as a Metaphor for Our Time

Every epoch has a predisposition for a certain type of disease that becomes its symbol. Illness is not only a physiological phenomenon, but also a moral and historical one. In the postrevolutionary 1920s, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, who suffers from sclerosis of the heart vessels and will eventually die of a heart attack, explains the nature of his ailment: “The disease of our time is one microscopic form or other of cardiac haemorrhage, brought on by a constant, systematic dissembling. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune.... The great majority of us are required to have a constant, systematic crookedness of the soul.” Soviet propaganda and rising totalitarianism turned out to be not only socially oppressive but also medically dangerous.

Some ailments are truly epochal and emblematic. Plague serves as a metaphor of the Middle Ages; syphilis, of the Renaissance; consumption (tuberculosis), of the nineteenth century; cancer, of the twentieth, and AIDS, of that century’s latter part. For example, the plague is representative of medieval culture, and reveals its meaning no less than crusades, troubadours, and carnivals... The plague is abstract, like scholasticism; it befalls humankind for unknown sins, while syphilis is terrifyingly concrete, specifically targeting the Renaissance individual’s craving for earthly pleasures: a punishment for lust. All of these are not mere diseases, but metaphors for a particular era and type of society.1

In this sense, Covid-19 is a metaphor for our time. Long before the pandemic, there was a rapidly growing biological alienation in Western and especially American society, which was becoming increasingly sterile. Fewer and fewer people were casually and naturally touching and talking to each other, because where individuals come into contact, they violate the boundaries of private space, giving rise to suspicions and accusations. It is much easier to communicate at a distance, through telephones and computer networks. Indeed, these days even a phone call can be considered “improper,” almost an invasion of privacy, unless agreed upon in advance; after all, it is a live voice, which “should” preferably be preceded, or replaced, by an e-mail message or text. People become imprisoned in their electronic shells. A human being as such appears annoying and dangerous, because s/he is not as predictable and controllable as a machine. In general, physical reality, in increasing contrast to virtual reality, where everyone is free to choose their own comfortable environment, is more and more perceived as a zone of discomfort. Even if the technical mind has not yet prevailed in its entirety in modern society, it makes its triumph known “from the opposite direction” – through distrust of all living things. This complex can be called biophobia. You don’t know what to expect from life-forms, especially from the most willful and freedom-loving of them – the human being.2 Animals and especially plants are much preferable in this sense: you can stand an orchid or a cat next to you, but a human being is far more troublesome.

Biophobia manifests itself in many ways. For example, an increasing number of asexuals prefer to avoid this overly intimate side of life altogether, or to interact rather with machinery. The Japanese term hikikomori (a kind of severe social withdrawal) has become popular among young people the world over. Teenagers who identify as hikikomori seek to isolate themselves from society as much as possible, to exclude all social contact, simply not leaving their own room. The categorical refusal of any contact with people is an alarming sign of biophobia and sociophobia. Moreover, many “hikis” remain in a state of isolation till their middle age, shutting themselves up in their apartments and/or the care of their parents. Any contact with otherness disturbs and offends them and leads to neurosis. This is a predisposition of total resentment and complaint against anyone who is different from oneself. People find it difficult to bear one another’s presence. They become more narcissistic, and the world around them becomes less tolerable.

It is significant that the growth of biophobia and sociophobia has coincided with the spread of electronic modes of communication – or discommunication, when people simply immerse themselves in virtual worlds, games, and TV series. It is no coincidence that codes of interpersonal behavior began to tighten in the 1990s, when the sphere of the Internet began to expand rapidly, and people were able to do without physical contact, with the latter increasingly perceived as difficult and annoying in contrast to the “purity” of the screen environment. The electronic world became psychologically more comfortable and attractive for people – and society was not slow to respond with the establishment of more rigorous etiquette, for instance, practically banning the “cold call.”

The invasion of viruses has sharpened this biophobia, although viruses themselves, as we know, are not living organisms – they become such only by penetrating their victim’s cells. But in the current perception, the coronavirus exemplifies the danger of life in general: the danger of human breath and touch, the danger of the air, of enclosed spaces, of any surface that has been touched by a human hand. One must keep one’s distance and protect oneself with masks, gloves, goggles, or transparent shields, or better yet, not leave the house at all.

Even before the coronavirus struck, the twenty-first century prepared people, psychologically and socially, for self-isolation. This disease is emblematic of the spirit of its time; or rather, the spirit of the time itself – remoteness, distance, inner- or self-directedness – takes the form of a disease. In this sense, Covid-19 is precisely the ailment that humanity has endured in itself in recent decades.

Homo Tegens, the Man in the Case

Now even the most familiar and anthologized texts can be reread in a new way. For example, Chekhov’s Belikov, the main character of “The Man in the Case” (1898), has always been perceived as the embodiment of philistinism and repressive narrowness, a destroyer of living social connection. “This man had a constant and irresistible desire to surround himself with a shell, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation.” Dark glasses, a sweatshirt, cotton in his ears, and more cotton in his quilted coat, galoshes and an umbrella even in good weather, and all his things, including watches and a penknife, also in cases.

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"The man in the case" (1940–41) by Kukryniksy

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If Belikov were to add a mask and nitrile gloves, he would be quite up to date – a biocorrect citizen, an exemplary figure of the coronavirus era. The 2020 version of Belikov is a model social-distancer, setting an example of civic awareness and responsibility. He elicits nothing but respect, for in isolating himself from the world, he thus isolates the world from himself.

Or consider Mavra, the wife of the village head, in the beginning of the same Chekhov story: “For the last ten years she has been sitting behind the stove, going out into the street only at night.” Note: at night, when the risk of breaking the social distancing norms or becoming infected by a passerby is minimal. A very prudent, socially sane woman. What in former times was a sign of the cruelest sociopathy and misanthropy, today becomes almost a model of reasonable self-care and worthy service to the wellbeing of humankind.

In a strange way, the whole hierarchy of values is changing and even being overturned. It seems to me, for instance, that the detective genre created by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 – not so long ago by historical standards – is running out of steam. The “cops and robbers” pairing was deeply meaningful to the era of rationalism and individualism, when the forces of society had occasion to struggle against particular villains who insidiously undermined its foundations. Now one does not feel up to tales of these particular anomalies that disturb the relatively smooth course of social life. Viruses are not criminal deviants, they are natural products of our own world; and are they not, contrary to how we fancy ourselves, nature’s most viable offspring? (A frightful question.) An infectious agent is more dangerous and all-pervasive than a “secret” agent like James Bond.

The detective tale is ready to make way for another genre, which we might call accordingly the protective. While “detective” comes from the Latin detegere, “to expose,” “to remove the veil,” “protective” comes from protegere, of the same root but with the opposite meaning: “to cover or pull a veil over oneself.” How to protect yourself from the overarching danger, what mask to put on, what fortress to build? If the detective genre shows the investigation of a committed crime, then the protective one tells of disaster prevention, protection from an anomaly that is already prevalent – the experience of surviving at the extreme.

The genre has a venerable history, much older than detective fiction, and dating back to the Bible. Noah’s ark, the motif of building an ark and being saved in it, is a prototype of the situation we are experiencing as we try to gather into our homes everything we need for a multiday, perhaps months-long stay in a life-saving confinement. As we know, the flood lasted forty days, after which the waters lifted up the ark; all life on earth perished, leaving only Noah and his companions, and the water did not begin to recede till 150 days later. We seem to face an even longer siege, until a dove with a vaccine in its sharp beak arrives and gives sufficient numbers of the people of Earth a shot.

“Protective” stories can be environmental, psychological, domestic, political, apocalyptic. Wherever there is a protective shell, a cover, a shelter, desperate hope to shut oneself away and fortify oneself, to plug all the gaps, seal all the holes – this is an example of the protective genre. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gogol’s The Overcoat, Zamyatin’s The Cave, Nabokov’s Luzhin’s Defense, Lovecraft’s The Color out of Space, Kobo Abe’s The Box Man – all are various examples of protective fiction. Protection from the wild elements, from the cold, from meteorites, from outer space and aliens, from aggression, from revolution, from utopia, from mysterious enemies and unfathomable dangers, from the outside world as such. This genre is, in fact, no less exciting than the detective one. Will the hero manage to build a defense, hide in a hole, cram into a crevice?

Sadly, the coronavirus ordeal is likely to turn the future of civilization into a myriad of layers and covers, a triumph of enclosure. Such an imperative, of course, contradicts romantic ideals, revolutionary and totalitarian utopias of all-openness, complete nakedness, the fusion of bodies and souls. But in essence, humans as the creators and creatures of culture are enclosed entities; no wonder the mask has stuck to their faces like a second skin. A human being is not limited to the cover given him or her by nature, but creates the multilayered system of “covering one another” that we call civilization. This includes the covers of the first level, clothing; of the second, shelter; of the third, the artificial habitat: the village, the city... It is this multilayered structure of their civilizational cocoon that distinguishes humans from other living beings. The species goes by many different definitions: Homo sapiens, Homo faber, Homo loquens, Homo ludens – the “intelligent,” “toolmaking,” “speaking,” “playing” person... To these we can add: Homo tegens, the “cloaking” or “encapsulated” person, the one who  throws a veil over everything including him- or herself.

Humans are the most “hidden” of all creatures, and the layering of covers attests to the depth of the mysteries they conceal within themselves. The more precious and sacred the entity, the more layers there are to envelop it. This is why the priest has the greatest number of vestments. To perform the sacrament, he covers himself with several layers of clothing, each with its own symbolic meaning. In the Orthodox Church, the priest and deacon wear a cassock, a robe, a veil, an epitrachelion (stole), and a phelonion (cape). A bishop wears a sakkos, a palika, an omophorion, a panagia, and a mitre. This tradition goes back to Old Testament religion, and is related to the arrangement of the “holy of holies,” the innermost sanctum where the ark holding the tablets of the covenant was kept. “This is how Aaron is to enter the Most Holy Place:... He is to put on the sacred linen tunic, with linen undergarments next to his body; he is to tie the linen sash around him and put on the linen turban. These are sacred garments” (Leviticus 16:4). In this broadest context, all of us, in masks and coverings, can likewise be perceived as ministers of some exotic cult, which requires all manner of self-isolation and a persistent asceticism.

In fact, the first act after the fall of man was his donning of “garments of skin” (Genesis 3:21) – in literal terms leather, but often interpreted as the very flesh put on the soul as a sign of its compaction and expulsion from paradise. It is likewise clearly no accident that the first city, a “garment” of stone, was built by Cain, the firstborn of the original sin, who in turn committed the first sin of murder and fratricide (“and he built a city” – Genesis 4:17). Sin separates man from creation, causing a chain reaction of concealment and attire, from skin to city to state.

Once humankind became ashamed of its nakedness and sought out coverings, these began to multiply and reproduce on ever more levels. This almost manic passion, the universal Belikovism, has become one of the motifs of contemporary culture, which gives packaging its own value. For example, postmodernism constitutes the self-consciousness of culture as an endless series of such hollow packages nested one within the other: pack-culture. The artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020), who wrapped entire buildings in fabrics, foil, polyethylene, or light metal, aptly imitated this infinite multiplicity of shells inherent in culture as such, or rather, in humans as clothed beings (clothed initially in their bodies, then in everything else). Christo was famous for wrapping Paris’s Pont Neuf in beige fabric in 1985, and in 1995 he covered the Berlin Reichstag in a silver metallic shell. Christo’s art deals with the ultimate expression of Homo tegens – with those ultramodern shells that over millennia of civilization have accreted to Adam’s first “garment of skin.” Now the pandemic brings us to a rapid increase in this kind of “packaging.” (“Art becomes life!”) In terms of art trends, an observer from another planet might easily take the pandemic for some new post-postmodern fashion.

Viruses are most often characterized as “organisms on the border of the living”: they have some signs of life and lack others. It is profoundly ironic that the “crown of all living things,” as Hamlet called man, must bow to the bearer of another corona. We have to sacrifice our own living space in order to resist these “half-alive entities.”

Can we consider Belikovism, however bitter it is to realize, a natural form of human survival and self-preservation in a world of microscopically small, almost molecule-like carriers of death? It is unlikely that civilization, having absorbed the new protective layer, will reject it altogether: rather, it will creatively transform it. And then will Belikov be perceived, not as a satire on the dull routine of the late nineteenth century, but as a harbinger of the era of self-isolation in the twenty-first, a pioneer of new ways to save humanity.

How Human Nature Is Changing During the Pandemic

The pandemic is a new and unique experience in history, when humanity for the first time has acquired a gut feeling of itself as a whole – not as an abstract concept, but an integral, living organism, desperately fighting the invasion of microorganisms. The significance of this event, in my opinion, goes beyond history and belongs to a larger process: anthropogenesis, the formation of humans as a species. It is still too early to define this new entity in rigorous terms, but certain projections seem reasonable.

Anthropologists have been reiterating for decades that human biological evolution is giving way to a sociocultural one, and in the twenty-first century a new vector of this process – electronic technology – has quickly come to the fore. In recent years, virtuality has been increasingly absorbing the real, and it took only a deadly threat and strong push from the real itself for civilization to begin to rapidly shift online: business, trade, services, culture, education, even sports...  Paradoxically, the pandemic turned out to be the strongest and perhaps decisive blow from nature itself to slow biological evolution in favor of the incredible acceleration of technological and intellectual evolution.

According to one major version of anthropogenesis, in the Miocene epoch, global cooling ousted the savannah rainforests and drove primates from the trees to the ground, which is what put them on their feet, freed their hands, allowed them to make tools, and turned them into Homo sapiens or “intelligent people.” Now viruses drive people out of the biosphere, inaugurating a new round of evolution in the noosphere. The human being undergoes transformation (or regress) from an upright being, Homo erectus, to one sitting (in front of a screen) – Homo sedens.

With the development of civilization and the transition to mental work and a sedentary lifestyle, the organs of sight and hearing become increasingly dominant. The main flow of information passes through them, which sets humans apart from other species that are more dependent on direct contact with the physical environment. Sight and hearing as remote organs of perception meet the epidemiological requirements of “social distance” and “self-isolation,” which, due to the preferential development of these organs, are favorable for the preservation of humans as a species. They do not require direct physical contact and therefore prove to be evolutionarily advantageous in a pandemic. One could easily imagine a jocular but essentially correct slogan: “Eyes and ears are the best antiviral agents.” Sight and hearing operate with conditional symbols, mediated by signs: this is why there are arts of speech, sound, and image (literature, music, painting, cinema, etc.) – and practically no fine arts based on the other three types of sensations. Indeed, culture as such gives priority to the “distant” in the human physiological apparatus itself.

To be sure, the sense of touch, more than all others, continues to be responsible for our representation of physical reality as opposed to illusion or hallucination. One may not believe one’s eyes or ears – but it’s hard not to believe a direct touch. “Am I dreaming? Pinch me!” – such is the stock question-exclamation used to convey bringing oneself to one’s senses, which is primarily understood as touching – “pinching.” Tango ergo sum. I touch, therefore I am. It is possible to think (cogitare) both in dreams and in visions, but the pinch is a sign of an indisputable  presence, the beginning of awakening. Going online is humanity’s departure into collective dreams, into creative fantasies, into the depths of the “I” and the “we.”

I am not saying that humanity will go entirely online, only that the virtual environment will eventually become more and more organic and productive for the development of human abilities. Nothing is stopping people from climbing trees, but after a certain evolutionary point, they became more accustomed to walking on the ground. Just so, over time, it will probably be more natural for humans to go online than to go outside. This prospect does not excite me at all; we are all pre-viral, “outside” people. But I do not rule out the possibility that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will already perceive us as “prehistoric,” “old-fashioned” – envy us in some ways, but also scoff and scratch their heads at us.

Let us hope that the current pandemic will be overcome and humanity will find ways to protect itself against new viruses, to preserve and even expand its living space on a grand scale (the exploration of other planets and star systems). Still, the push from the current pandemic will be powerful enough to allow colonization and the new frontier of civilization to move deeper into virtual worlds. We can treat this with melancholy or sarcasm, we can imagine the coming Luddites smashing electronic terminals as they once did with textile machines. But they failed to prevent the Industrial Revolution...

What Can Unite Humankind?

Now is the time of introverts. Studies show that extroverts find it far more difficult to transition to telecommuting. Extroverted teachers, for example, are much more tired when they interact with students on Zoom rather than in person. From the introvert’s perspective, on the contrary, “social distancing” – which in fact is physical distancing – promotes new forms of socialization, bringing people closer together precisely via virtual proximity.

Introverts are known to have contributed as much to the development of civilization as extroverts. In the face of a mortal enemy, humanity, divided by lockdowns, quarantines, borders, walls, doors, can internally unite, deepening  within itself. As it matures, it moves from a culture of noisy gatherings to one of introspection and selective, focused communication. We can get a much stronger sense of humanity as a single organism now than we did in the “pre-viral” era of big crowds, flowing tourism, and rapturous, fan-filled sports stadiums. We are all mostly sitting at home, under the same conditions of temporary “surrender” to the common “enemy of the human race”; but thanks to this, it is easier for us to feel the fragility of our species and the commonality of our destiny.

Many experts have proclaimed that the pandemic signals the end of globalization. Indeed, nations are fencing themselves off, and sometimes even dividing their own territory, with quarantines. But globalization means not only freedom of movement over the surface of the planet; it is also a sense of belonging to the human race. Globalization now shifts from an extroverted to an introverted stage. Faced with a ubiquitous danger that makes no national, ethnic, or religious distinctions, humanity, despite the loss of tactile contact, becomes a more palpable reality than our former vague conception of it. We have all been members of certain groups and organizations: nations, professions, churches, clubs; while humanity as a whole was perceived as a kind of abstraction (“abstract humanism”). Now it becomes Organization No. 1, not only because it is the first in importance, but also because one can belong to it only individually, one on one, in one’s own place, through self-isolation.

In the recent past, as a result of the growing nuclear threat and international tension (the US and Europe vs. China and Russia), there was a feeling that a new major war was drawing closer and could be imminent. People wondered: what could prevent it? What can unite humankind? Only something more foreign to all of us than we are to each other. It would have to be the arrival of aliens...

But instead came viruses. They have unleashed a new world war – the first world war capable of uniting rather than dividing humanity.

Is it possible for other life-forms to contribute to our unification? It seems that all of humanity, despite physical separation, has now merged into one “symphonic” body, resisting the invasion of anthropophagi, an incomprehensible form of alien vitality. These “newcomers” are scarier than aliens from other galaxies, for they are within us. Viruses have reminded humans that they are all brothers and sisters in the lungs, in the heart, in the blood vessels, and that what brings us together – life itself in its simplest foundations – is incomparably more important than what divides us.

If the Spanish flu had broken out, not at the very end of the First World War, in 1918, but before it began in 1914 – could it have averted that conflict? Or, on the contrary, would it have made it even more violent and destructive? Could the pandemic itself be a “bio-political” vaccine to prevent the death of humanity?

Mikhail N. Epstein is a Russian–American cultural and literary scholar. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (USA). From 2012 to 2015, he served as Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK). Epstein has authored 39 books and more than 800 articles and essays. His work has been translated into 24 languages. His latest books include: The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012); The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017); Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with A. Genis and S. Vladiv-Glover; Berghahn Books, 2016). The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953-1991) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019); A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture" (Brill, 2019).

CAMUS' ABSURDISM LACKS IMAGINATION

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By C. Fred Alford

Vedran Stimac: Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus / Illustration

Camus insists that he is an absurdist, not an existentialist. OK, but it is important to figure out what he means. Camus thinks a Christian can be an absurdist. I don't. I do think that absurdism is the leading alternative not only to Christianity, but religion.  Religion is said to be based on faith, as it is.  Camus' absurdism is based on a particular heroic ideal, a man who faces the truth head on, as if it were that simple.

The world is not absurd

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said.  What is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational world and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world (Myth of Sisyphus, 21)

Though Camus writes about clarity (clarté), that could be misleading.  What he means is that humans long for this world to be where we belong, that we are placed here for a reason, even if we lack clarity about it.  This belief underlies the Judeo-Christian tradition.  The absurd says there is no purpose; we just happen to be here.

The Plague is about what it means to live without this underlying assumption.  It means that humanity's job is to fight creation as we have found it (compare Genesis 1:28).  We fight creation best when we work together.  Absurdism is not a doctrine of individualism.  If you remember The Plague, you will recall that even the absurd M. Grand, who spent years rewriting the first sentence of his novel (he never gets any further), is an everyday hero, volunteering to serve in the Sanitary Squad at some risk to himself.*  Camus' point seems to be that even if the Sanitary Squad accomplished little in fighting the plague, it is noble for humans to work together to make this world a more fit place for humans to live.

From this perspective, religion is a communal creation, a story people tell each other about why we are meant to be here.  One reason religion is effective is because it is reinforced with shared rituals, another is because most of us learn it as children.  By the way, this account of religion, which is mine, says nothing about whether God exists.  We have religion, or we don't.  God is in his heaven, or he isn't.  The first sentence is logically unrelated to the second.

There is only this life

An absurd sensitivity requires that there be only this life.  If a Christian accepts this, he or she can also be an absurdist.  So says Camus (Sisyphus, 112).  First of all, a Christian couldn't accept this.  Second, Christianity isn't just, or even primarily, about an afterlife.  Christianity denies the fundamental tenet of absurdism, asserting that we are meant to be here, and God provides the answer as to why, even if his answer isn't always transparent.  God also tells us how we should live.  None of this is compatible with absurdism.  I have been unable to figure out why Camus says a Christian could be an absurdist, except that he never wanted to completely disavow faith.  In other words, he had nostalgia for Christianity.

A world without appeal

Recognizing the claims of absurdity, many religious thinkers, and Søren Kierkegaard is my favorite, argue that there is a world beyond clarity, reason, and objective truth.  Kierkegaard calls it subjective truth.  We know it through our feelings, our intuition, our desires.  We know that we are in love when we feel it, not when someone measures our endorphin levels, or whatever.  Faith works much the same way.  Love's knowledge is faith's knowledge.

Camus' response is that religious belief requires that we deny observation, logic, and experience.  Religious belief requires "philosophical suicide," as he calls it.  Mass hunger, starvation, disease, and endless war somewhere on this planet every hour of every day, is an experience of a world without appeal, as Camus puts it, a world in which we have to work out our own meaning, as the characters do in The Plague.  Absurdism does not mean not one's life is subjectively absurd, only that its meaning is not given, and so we must find it for ourselves in a world that means only what we put into it.

Hence, what Camus demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal (Sisyphus, 53).

Revolt

Camus has an old-fashioned sense of virtue, what the ancient Greeks called arete.  We live best and most nobly when we face the fact of a world without meaning and struggle against it in the way we live, as well as the way we think and feel.  Camus calls this way revolt, and sometimes manliness, echo of an earlier era.

Revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it (Sisyphus, 55).

The flaw in Camus' project

Camus courage in facing a world without appeal is admirable.  And yet there is something equally admirable in facing an uncertain world, or rather living with uncertainty.

I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. . .. If one could only say just once: "This is clear," all would be saved (Sisyphus, 27)

Camus understands that clarity is impossible, that it is the cry of a man stranded on the island named absurdity.

But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational [world] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. (Sisyphus, 21)

But how much difference is there between the clarity of the absurd and the demand that humans accept only what is certain, even if that is nothing but uncertainty itself?  Camus gets certainty by simplifying the world.  For hardly anything in this world is certain, including Camus' assertion that there is only this world (or at least we should live as though this were the case). There are more things in heaven and Earth, Camus, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, as someone famous almost put it.

Camus risks becoming the scientist he criticizes.  But Kierkegaard was right to begin with.  Much of what we call knowledge is subjective truth.  It is a subjective truth that the noble man is one who lives his life in revolt.  Why not acceptance, even acquiescence?  No reason, it's a preference, just as it is a preference of some to find meaning in God.  If Camus wants to know if he can live a life without appeal, then good for him.  But if that is nobler than some pursuits, such as hypocrisy, it is no more noble than others, including religious pursuits.

Conclusion

Camus is not writing about what we know, or even what we should believe.  He is writing about his view of "virile behavior" as he calls it.  In many respects I find his view admirable, and agree with it.  It is a contemporary version of what the ancient Greeks called arete, or excellence at being a human.  But it is certainly not the only version of a good or authentic life.

C. Fred Alford is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught ancient and medieval political philosophy for thirty-eight years. He has written eighteen books on diverse subjects: psychoanalysis and politics, natural law, trauma theory, and the legacy of the Holocaust. While not a professional theologian, Alford wrote a book on Emmanuel Levinas, one on natural law, and still another addressing the book of Job.

CREATION SCIENCE MAKES SENSE, BUT...

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By C. Fred Alford

Many Christians, and almost all adamant atheists, see creation science as a backdoor to sneaking God into school curricula, and public life generally.  Among most educated people, creation science lacks respect.  Wikipedia defines creation science as "a pseudoscientific form of...creationism, which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible."  But what if we think about creationism more generally, as the claim that mind created the universe?  Then it makes perfect sense, especially when you consider the alternatives: that the universe created itself, or that it has existed forever.  "Perfect sense" doesn't mean automatically true.  It just means that it rests on a good argument.

The odds

One argument for creationism is that the conditions under which the universe could form, including planets on which people could live, are so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.  Roger Penrose estimates it as 1 in 10 10123 . That is, 1 in 1 + 23 zeros.  It's a big number.  Physicists have estimated that the entire universe contains "only" 1080 elementary particles (Moyer, p. 238).*

The only alternative is God, or so some creationists conclude.  But that puts it too narrowly.  What if instead of God we say "mind"?   We'll see.  But couldn't life have formed itself, lightening setting off a chain reaction in a pre-biotic chemical soup?  It's possible, but again unlikely in the extreme, perhaps impossible.  As John Walton wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, “intense laboratory research has failed to produce even one nucleotide (RNA component) under geologically plausible conditions.”  Scientists have faced “insuperable problems” in explaining the origin of the information that would need to be present in “the chains of nucleotides required for the RNA world.”  RNA is the first genetic molecule capable of reproducing itself.

The big bang . . . and then what?

Today most scientists agree that the universe began with the big bang.  The universe has not always existed.  It came into existence about 14 billion years ago, is continuously expanding, and will end in about 100 trillion years when it finally collapses into itself.  But what turned this tremendous explosion of energy into the form of galaxies which contain solar systems, at least one of which includes a planet capable of supporting human life?  What organizes all this energy?

Mind is a good answer, and one upon which many scientists, as well as philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead, agree.  Intelligent design, a term which has also fallen into disrepute, is just another way of talking about mind.  If, that is, we don't cheat, assuming that mind must mean God.

Fine tuning

"Fine tuning" in physics refers to the fact that many properties of the universe fall within a narrow and unlikely range that is essential for complex forms of life to exist (Meyer, p 207).

A number of physicists believe that mind is the best, and certainly the simplest, explanation for "fine tuning."  Occam's razor (among competing explanations, always prefer the simpler one that adequately explains the phenomenon) supports mind.

Cambridge physicist John Polkinghorne said that although he did not think that the fine-tuning evidence proved the existence of God, he did think that a theistic designer provided a much better explanation of the fine tuning than any materialistic hypothesis. As he put it, “Well, I don’t say that the atheist is stupid. I just say that theism provides a more satisfying explanation.” (Meyer, p 229)

Another Cambridge physicist, Nobel laureate Brian Josephson, explained why mind is the best explanation for fine tuning.

It could have been [that there was] some mind around before the kind of universe we know came into being. And if that were right, that mind could, as it were, have intentions for the universe and been able to set it up so that the end result came out right.

In an interview for PBS television, Josephson estimated that his confidence in intelligent design as the best explanation for the emergence of life as about 80 percent (Meyer, p 229).

I could continue to quote physicists, but it would add little to the discussion.  The main point is that it is a thoroughly respectable position among many scientists that the universe, and particularly human life, is the result of a process directed by mind.

Mind is not God

But what's mind?  An intelligence that we can hardly imagine.  Mind is not God.  None of the attributes of God, as depicted in the Old or New Testaments, is implied by the claim that mind guided the creation of the universe.  They are two separate claims.  Not only that, but the claim that mind guided the universe adds nothing to the claim that the Judeo-Christian God exists. (I don't know enough about Buddhism to venture an opinion; some amateurs find Buddhism and quantum physics compatible, but this seems to be a popular misconception.**)

Think about it?  God created the universe, but that was only the beginning.  He made man and woman in his own image, so that humans could worship God and know right from wrong.  God loves us, and taught us to be kind and generous with each other.  Love God, and love one another as God has loved you.  It's a good summary of the Lord's teaching.  And none of it has anything to do with the likelihood that mind created the universe.  It has nothing to do with "mind" as a general term for a supervising intelligence, which is how I have employed the term.  "Mind" doesn't even have anything to do with theism, if we define theism as belief in a Supreme Being.

Most who write about creationism assume that this supervising intelligence must stand outside the universe it has ordered into being, but there is no reason it must be transcendent.  Why couldn't mind be a property of the universe itself?  Only, I think, because the tendency to equate mind with God is so attractive.  Just consider the title of the book that stimulated my comments, Return of the God Hypothesis.  Science, it argues, has made it possible for us to believe in God again.  In fact, science has made God no more, or less believable, than before.  Science has nothing to do with it.

God is a way of talking about our supreme values, and the meaning of life generally.  God- talk usually takes the form of stories that illustrate these values, and the cost of ignoring them.  God-talk is often concerned with the afterlife (heaven), but not always.  Jews seem far less interested in the afterlife than Christians.  As Søren Kierkegaard argues, belief in God rests on a leap to faith, a subjective choice that rests on no evidence but one's own subjectivity.

Conclusion

Belief in and stories about God are the way humans make sense of this world, something they have done for thousands of years.  Science is another way to understand the world, as well as being very good at helping us do things with it.  Neither the idea that science undermines God, or that science supports God, properly understands these two narratives.  They share the capacity for wonder, but only the God narrative tells us why and how to be better people, and perhaps to share in His divinity (for Christians, that would be communion).  Finally, the God narrative tells us how to better use science for human welfare.

C. Fred Alford is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught ancient and medieval political philosophy for thirty-eight years. He has written eighteen books on diverse subjects: psychoanalysis and politics, natural law, trauma theory, and the legacy of the Holocaust. While not a professional theologian, Alford wrote a book on Emmanuel Levinas, one on natural law, and still another addressing the book of Job.

PRIMO LEVI: THE FLAWED DESIGN

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By Victor H. Brombert

MUSINGS ON MORTALITY: FROM TOLSTOY TO PRIMO LEVI

by Victor H. Brombert

The University of Chicago Press (2013, pp.200)

A Humanistic Message?

It was hardly an insurrection. But some of the students—and not only Jewish students—were disturbed that, in describing the hell of the extermination camp, Primo Levi chose to devote an entire chapter to a canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy—a medieval Christian poem that, they felt, had strictly nothing to do with Auschwitz and with the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. What kind of Jew was Levi, really!

I did my best to explain. As a culturally assimilated Italian Jew, Levi knew far more about Dante, studied by all students in Italy, than about Jewish lore. But that was not the point. In the context of his Auschwitz experience, the chapter entitled “The Canto of Ulysses,” a clear reference to canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno, is profoundly moving. A fellow prisoner, an Alsatian Jew, had asked Levi to teach him some Italian. To provide material for the lessons, Levi struggled to recall certain lines of Dante he had learned at the liceo classico, and this retrieval of poetic fragments, this shoring up against oblivion, turned out to be a form of survival or even resurrection. It had a special meaning under the circumstances. The recourse to lines of poetry buried in the memory, but not really forgotten, carried a humanistic message. It seemed to provide a defense against death.

So at least went my argument: Ulysses in Dante’s poem is not so much the Homeric hero who outsmarted the ferocious Cyclops as he is a teacher to his men, imparting a lesson in human dignity. Levi’s invocation of Dante’s Inferno comes entirely under the aegis of teaching and the transmission of culture. At its core it is manifestly transcultural. Dante’s own teacher in the poem is the Roman poet Virgil, who guides him through the nether regions, the same Virgil who in the Aeneid had celebrated the destiny of the Trojan hero Aeneas, founder of Rome, and thus joined the epic world of Homer. From the Greek poet Homer, to the Roman poet Virgil, to the Italian poet Dante, to Primo Levi—who teaches Italian to an Alsatian Jew, his companion in misery—the survival of lines of poetry in a death camp comes to illustrate what Ulysses explicitly teaches his men: that human beings are meant not to exist like beasts but to pursue excellence and virtue.

A number of students continued to be disturbed by the implicit optimism in the genocidal context of Auschwitz. How could a Jew, himself a victim of the Nazi Holocaust, have turned to a medieval Christian poem in his account of an atrocity that could in no way be justified in either theological or poetic terms? And how could I, their teacher—this being expressed with great courtesy—how could I interpret this lengthy reference to Dante as a reassuring cultural message?

But then reactions changed altogether when some students found out on their own that, many years after surviving the death camp, Levi committed suicide. This self-destruction was quickly interpreted as the long-delayed but inexorable consequence of Levi’s camp experience, and it therefore largely invalidated, so it was felt, his humanistic optimism. Letting himself fall to his death from his fourth-floor landing negated his message for a surprising number of students. This act was moreover viewed as a fundamental contradiction, as proof of a flaw in Levi’s character and way of thinking.

The Law of Contradictions

Allowing opposites to coexist in one’s mind, questioning one’s dearly held assumptions, accepting to live uncomfortably with conflicting thoughts, may, however, be not a flaw but a sign of complexity and deeper truth.

Levi was always drawn to paradoxes and contradictions. In the preface to his personal anthology The Search for Roots (La ricerca delle radici, 1981), setting out to discuss the books that really mattered in his life, he notes that all of them involve a tension stemming from “fundamental oppositions” embedded in the fate of any sensitive and thoughtful human being. Meditating on the art of the novel—he himself tried his hand at fiction in The Wrench (La chiave a stella) and If Not Now, When? (Se non ora, quando?)—he observes that protagonists need to be “incoherent,” as we all are, in order to reveal an underlying coherence.

Paradox and contradictions lurk behind the façade of lucid objectivity and self-control in all Levi’s writings. Conflicting images alternate but are also understood to be exchangeable or convertible. Shifting moods are not infrequently perceived as simultaneous. Levi himself records in The Periodic Table (Il sistema periodico) that, at the time of his arrest in his partisan hideout in the Piedmont mountains in late 1943, his resignation at the idea of death alternated with a maddening desire for every imaginable human experience while life itself seemed to be oozing out like an unstoppable hemorrhage. Despair and hope did not merely alternate at dizzying speed; they were interlocked, as were images of death and rebirth. His personal baggage of atrocious memories—his arrest, the interrogations, the deportation in cattle cars, the horrors of the death camp—was for him “a wealth” containing the seeds that would ultimately feed renewed life.

Opposition can also mean “inversion” or “conversion,” and that carries its own danger. In one of his science fiction stories collected in The Sixth Day (Storie naturali), Levi imagines the discovery of a substance called “versamina” that converts pain into pleasure, thereby leading to self-destruction. Soldiers to whom the substance is administered rush gleefully toward their death, just as animals injected with the drug quickly meet their doom. For pain protects. A substance capable of converting the greatest physical pain or mental suffering into joy might thus act as a tempting incitement to suicide. The story entitled “Versamina” in fact concludes with a disturbing “then, why not?” (“allora perché no?”).

Musings on Suicide

Levi occasionally wondered how much of his taste for debate and contradictions rested on a talmudic heredity (“ereditá talmudica”), on an atavistic Jewish fascination with subtleties and intricate discussions, which he considered essential features of the diaspora mentality. He refers admiringly in If Not Now, When? to the bold fantasy of the Talmudists (“fantasia temeraria dei talmudisti”). But neither the taste for contradictions and inversions nor parables such as “Versamina” about the self-destructive elimination of pain can explain why throughout his life Levi never ceased reflecting on the question of suicide.

These reflections are most visibly centered on the death camp experience. But in a negative fashion. Why did so very few inmates even think of committing suicide? Levi’s answer summons up a paradox. Death in Auschwitz was so omnipresent that there was no time to think of death. Suicide, moreover, requires a human will, and, from the moment of their arrival and initiation, the camp inmates were reduced to the state of animals by brutal methods of degradation and dehumanization. The initial moments in the camp produced a “metamorphosis.” Stripped of their clothes, of their hair, even of their names; transformed into grotesque puppets in filthy rags, with a number tattooed on their left arm; deprived of all dignity and forced to run naked in front of the SS during the ritual of “selection” to determine whether they should be sent immediately to the gas chamber—the victims were further transformed (the most diabolical of SS achievements) into collaborators in brutality. “We lived for months or years at an animal level,” Levi recalls in The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati, 1986), reflecting on the events he had written about forty years earlier, after his liberation by the Soviet army. He once again explains why suicide was so rare in the Lager. Suicide is a premeditated act, “not a spontaneous, instinctive act”; it implies a deliberate choice, an “atto meditato”—and for that, according to Levi, there simply was no time in a death camp. The victims’ mental space for any choice—especially a moral choice—was reduced to zero. Even the notion of good and evil disappeared. There were no more moral laws.

But, if cases of suicide were almost unheard of in the camps, they were not at all uncommon after survivors had returned to so-called normal life. Whether it was a delayed reaction, an ultimate surrender to depression, or the impossibility of adjusting to the realities of a daily life totally out of touch with their radical experience beyond good and evil—it would seem that the demolition of a human being continued its lethal work long after the atrocities of the camp. Every postliberation suicide could thus be counted as a Nazi victory well after the defeat of the Third Reich. This is precisely how Elie Wiesel and others interpreted Levi’s suicide more than forty years after he returned from Auschwitz to his home in Turin. Levi himself came to feel that camp survivors only appeared to have survived. Well aware of a number of camp survivors’ suicides, he was especially struck by the case of the essayist and philosopher Jean Améry (Hanns Mayer), who was tortured by the Gestapo and exposed to the harshest physical labor in Auschwitz and later wrote a book on suicide before taking his own life.

Suicides made a lasting impression on Levi as early as his student days. Ian Thomson, in his meticulous biography, provides a rich documentation of Levi’s depressive reactions. Young Primo was seriously disturbed when a fellow student at the Institute of Chemistry, Agostino Neri, inexplicably took his life. He was also shocked to learn that Professor Ignazio De Paolini, a luminary in the field of analytic chemistry, had committed suicide. When Lorenzo Perrone, the Italian laborer who had at mortal risk provided extra food to Levi and saved him from starvation at Auschwitz, later literally drank himself to death, Levi interpreted this as a suicidal act. And there was the shock, in 1950, of the novelist Cesare Pavese’s suicide. Pavese had briefly been his teacher at a reputed liceo classico, noted for its antifascist faculty. Later in life, when Levi frequented the Goethe Institute in Turin to improve his German, another teacher of his, Hanns Engert, hanged himself when he was about to be exposed as a homosexual. It was on that tragic occasion (two years before his own suicide) that Levi asserted to an acquaintance that suicide was a right we all have. More telling still, during one of the recurrent depressions of his student days, he confided to his friend Alberto Salmoni that he seriously contemplated suicide.

Throughout his life, Levi considered suicide a very private affair as well as an awesome mystery. About the death of Jean Améry, he commented that this suicide, which troubled him particularly, gave rise, like all suicides, to a galaxy of explanations. The term he used, nebulosa (nebula), referring to an astronomical metaphor of fog or cloud-like patches in the sky, further stressed the notion of a mystery beyond grasp.

That suicide should be linked in Levi’s mind to the idea of a secret is hardly surprising. Suicide was indeed a family secret. It was an integral part of a collective memory, of the family mythology. In The Periodic Table, Levi mentions the rumor that his paternal grandfather had taken his life. It was not a rumor, however, but a fact. The engineer Michele Levi, at the age of forty, threw himself out of his window—it was said at the time because of insolvency and his wife’s infidelities. A premonitory event: the grandson chose a similar end by letting himself fall from the fourth-floor landing of his Turin apartment house.

The ultimately secret nature of his own suicide is ironically foreshadowed, well before the tragic act of April 1987, in one of the essays collected in Other People’s Trades (L’altrui mestiere) describing an industrial test to which he was subjected soon after his return from captivity. The least expected among the many questions of the test ran as follows: “Do you sometimes think that your problems can be resolved by suicide?” To which Levi’s private comment was: “Maybe yes, or maybe no; in any case, I’m not going to tell you.” Even more uncanny is a passage written much earlier still, in the last chapter of the Auschwitz memoir, in which Levi refers to catching diphtheria in the unsanitary conditions of the camp barracks as “more surely fatal than jumping off a fourth floor.”

Self-destruction comes up repeatedly in Levi’s writings. In the anthology of literary works that Levi claims had a special impact on him, The Search for Roots, he grants a privileged place to Job, but the passages in the biblical text that he stresses are those that express not faith in adversity but Job’s death wish and his longing for nonbeing:

Let the day perish wherein I was born. (3:2–3)

Why died I not from the womb? (3:11)

My soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than life. (7:15)

The wish is moreover for a death without resurrection:

So man lieth down, and riseth not. (14:12)

Even certain of Levi’s metaphors provide unpredictable images of self-destruction. In one of his science fiction narratives about a very special word processor, “La Scriba,” Levi imagines that the inventive gnomes who conceived the machine saw to it that, in order to cancel a text, an elaborate procedure is required, during which the computer would announce: “Careful, you are about to kill yourself ” (“Bada, stai per suicidarti”).

But the most striking themes of self-destruction appear in the science fiction story “Westward” (“Verso occidente”), a dual parable that can also be read as a confession in disguise. Two ethnologists, Walter and Anna, fascinated by the migratory drowning of lemmings, traditionally understood to be a form of mass suicide, engage in a discussion about the desire to die and the instinct of survival. Anna refuses to believe that a living creature would want to die; even without a reason we all wish to live, and life in any case is better than death. But Walter questions such an irrational clinging to life. There are individuals who simply do not love life and others who can lose this love. Moreover, between those who love life and those who have lost this love, there is no longer a common language. Walter’s deep pessimism denies any purpose to sheer existence. We are all condemned in any case, waiting on death row, while witnessing the execution of our dear ones. The tone is truly Pascalian—only Walter is a Pascal without God.

The story has a further, even more telling development. The scientific discovery of a hormone capable of fighting the “existential void” has led to the production of a new drug, Factor L, which cancels the suicidal drive. And this leads to the second part of the story, which carries an almost Voltairean ring. Walter and Anna, the two ethnologists, visit the Arunda, a gradually vanishing tribe living near the Amazon River—a tribe that knows no metaphysics, no churches, no priests, no punishments, no rewards, whose population steadily declines because of the widespread and highly approved practice of suicide. When the elder of the tribe is offered the miraculous drug, Factor L, which restores the desire to live, he politely refuses to accept the gift. He returns the remedy, explaining in an accompanying letter that the members of his tribe collectively prefer freedom to drugs and death to illusion.

Since the Time of Noah

But the law of contradictions continues to function. Anna’s faith in the attachment to life, irrational though it may be, informs Levi’s memories as well as his written record of Auschwitz. Survival remained the supreme value for the inmates, unless they had given up all hope and, according to the terrible expression, become “crematorium-ripe.” The title chosen for the American edition, Survival in Auschwitz, is surely a betrayal of the original title, If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo), yet the word survival captures an essential theme of the book, broached early on when a veteran inmate of the camp admonishes the new arrivals not to lose their self-respect, to wash even in dirty water and without soap, and to clean their footwear—not to please the SS, but in order not to “begin to die." The urgent need for human ingenuity to achieve some measure of salvation in the midst of utter wreckage—especially in the final chapter describing the apocalyptic last ten days of the camp—unavoidably brings up the symbolic figure of Robinson Crusoe. Philip Roth was quick, in his interview with Levi, to perceive that the figure of Robinson loomed over the book’s survival motif. Levi himself, in one of his science fiction stories, refers admiringly to Robinson as a supreme survival artist who for twenty-eight years lived in the most distressing circumstances without ever losing hope or the joy of being alive and was ultimately rescued. Survival and rescue stories were, moreover, as Levi well knew, an integral part of Jewish history in biblical accounts. He makes that point in the opening chapter of The Periodic Table when he refers to the atavistic survival instinct: “We are a long-lived people, since the time of Noah.”

Such a myth-rooted attachment to life might explain Levi’s admiration for Rabelais, whose vitality he extols on various occasions, even though Rabelais’s tone and substance seem quite remote from Levi’s inner world. It may also explain why, after his liberation by Soviet forces, followed by daily contact with Russians in Starye Dorogi, he came to envy the “Homeric capacity for joy” of the Russian people, whom he describes in The Truce (La tregua) as “vigorous and life-loving.” Even his early passion for science, as he himself chose to see it, implied a fascination with the principle of life (“materia prima della vita”) allowing for no defeatist surrender to “incomprehensible matter.” In a mood for literary allusions to heroic models, Levi invokes in The Periodic Table the struggle against the white whale in Moby Dick, a book he had read in the translation by Cesare Pavese, his former liceo teacher. And it is noteworthy that in If Not Now, When? the desperate struggle of the Jewish partisans against the German forces in the forests of Eastern Europe ends with the symbolic beginning of new life: the birth of a child.

Attachment to life is of central importance in The Truce, the colorful account of Levi’s circuitous way back home, which he refers to as his thirty-five-day-long “railroad odyssey.” Once again, Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus) is on his mind—Ulysses the tenacious and cunning survivor who, after the ten-year-long carnage of the Trojan War, amid new hardships and delays, returns to his human Ithaca, away from the inhuman world of gods and monsters. The Truce abounds in echoes of the Odyssey. Recalling Ulysses and his men, Levi sees himself and his group, on their mock-heroic railway journey, as modern versions of Ulysses and his companions. He humorously describes their “Homeric feasts of grilled meat” and the intense pleasure they took in spending the night recounting past adventures and remembering lost companions. (The pleasurable narration of past troubles—tsores—is tersely evoked in a Yiddish saying that Levi uses as the epigraph for The Periodic Table, one of his most personal books.) But plain physical survival was not enough. As Ulysses makes clear in Dante’s canto, which Levi remembered in Auschwitz, human beings are meant not to live as brutes but to seek virtue and excellence.

The Word as Survivor

The self-conscious literariness of Levi’s writings serves his transhistorical humanistic message. It underlines the sacredness of the logos. In the Nazi camp, as though in an accursed Tower of Babel, all the languages of Europe could be heard. But this cacophony was not altogether dismal. For words live, are threatened, seem extinct, yet somehow survive or can be resuscitated. Language, Levi loved to repeat, is what distinguishes us from animals. And whoever does violence to human beings, he maintained in The Drowned and the Saved, is bound also to do violence to language. Levi had a passion for etymologies—a study that recaptures the origins, the history, and the successive meanings of words and ultimately the sense of a surviving identity. For etymology is also a form of archaeology. Languages can become extinct or disappear, as can entire peoples and cultures. At the beginning of The Periodic Table, Levi sets out to record and thereby preserve the dialect of his Piedmontese forefathers “before it disappears.” Elsewhere, he modestly refers to his dilettantish philological curiosity. In an essay revealingly entitled “Fossil Words” (“Le parole fossili”), he more proudly confesses that all his life he has carried on an intense relation with etymological dictionaries.

Levi’s love of language is seldom of a purely sensuous nature, in spite of his abundant use of metaphors. Rather, it stems from his faith in clear communication. “To write means to transmit,” he asserted apropos Paul Celan’s famous poem “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”), which evokes the horrors of the death camp but in terms that were too hermetic for Levi’s taste. Levi went so far as to say that literary obscurity is a form of “presuicide.” Faith in verbal communication and literary expression implies communion but also redemptive virtues. During his captivity in Auschwitz, he was impressed by the nightly rounds of the cantastorie, the barracks’ bard, who recited in Yiddish rhapsodies and rhymed quatrains the details of daily realities in the camp.

His literary vocation, as Levi himself recognized, began in the Lager. From the start, the telling of what it was like held for him exorcizing and redemptive virtues. He later referred to his Auschwitz memoir as a liberating book and vividly recalled the intense joy (“gioia liberatrice”) with which he wrote its chapters. It was for him a resuscitating narrative. Its exorcizing effect is stated explicitly in The Periodic Table. Levi records that, having written the book with the compulsion of the Ancient Mariner impelled to tell his ghastly tale, he found some peace at last, feeling again like a human being. Mainly, he had exorcized (but had he really?) the worst memories, among them the guilt-ridden image of the woman who “went down to the netherworld” with him and did not return. The mythological resonance of this descent to hell (Levi uses the words discesa agliinferi) stresses the tragic condition of the surviving witness. Levi never got over the gassing of Vanda Maestro, his companion in deportation.

The Lager as Only Truth

Writing held out promise of salvation and rebirth, but survival could mean shame and guilt. In its extreme form, as Ian Thomson put it succinctly, Levi’s sense of guilt made him feel that he had in some ways “collaborated with the Nazis.” For he had survived by accepting to work as a chemist in the Auschwitz IG Farben Buna Werke on the development of synthetic rubber, which was badly needed for the German war effort. This had saved him from being worked to death or sent outright to the gas chambers. Shame and guilt were moreover attached to the act of witnessing, whether orally or in writing. What right did he, Primo Levi, have to speak for those who had really known the bottom, who had known total abjection, and not survived? Others had died in his place and thus invalidated the liberating and exorcizing book he had written. For the worst often survive—this is one of the themes of his ultimate reflections on the camp experience in The Drowned and the Saved. And what right did he have anyhow to speak for the dead? This lasting shame of not having died is known to some of the Jewish partisan fighters in Levi’s novel If Not Now, When?—the shame of not having died as others did in the death camp, the shame of being alive without deserving it. This sense of survivor shame, as one of the liberated prisoners explains, drove not a few to commit suicide.

The obsession with the drowned and the disappeared accompanied Levi to the end. In an essay on the art of the novel, he conjures up images of cinematic projections of people who have died. Such posthumous playbacks, or “riprese fi lmate,” creating ghostly effects, are likened to black magic. In a more generalized sense, a mortuary unreality oppressed Levi when he returned to Turin from Auschwitz. It was a multiple unreality: a nightmare within a treacherous illusion. The actual homecoming was fraught with bitterness; it led to despondency, to an irremediable sense of the emptiness of life, its nothingness, its utter vanitas, a word carrying emptiness at its core. The Lager experience could simply not be overcome; the poison of Auschwitz continued its lethal work. A terrible sentence, in the final paragraph of Levi’s account of his homecoming in The Truce, sums up his hopelessness: “Nothing was true outside the Lager.” Forty years after his return from camp, he again confirmed the permanence of this reality in his daily thought. In pages devoted to our common fragility and to the fear that it can happen again, he warns that the lords of death are still alive and that the death train stands nearby, ready to depart.

A History of Depressions

Even Anna, the life-loving ethnologist in the story about the suicidal lemmings, admits that she has experienced a sense of utter futility, a total “emptiness,” after giving birth. (Levi went through periods of dejection almost every time a book of his saw the light.) But even earlier, before knowing swings of mood as a writer, he was given to crises of anxiety characterized by a feeling of emptiness or worse. Shortly after his liberation, while still in the Russian zone, he lost his way in a forest near Starye Dorogi and suffered spasms of panic that he attributed to ancestral fears. There is much evidence that already as a boy, and certainly during his adolescence, he underwent periods of anguish: fear of failure, distress over his sexual timidity, doubts about his virility. His sexual awkwardness gave him, as he records, a feeling of being afloat after a shipwreck and of letting himself willingly sink to the bottom of the sea. He recalls intense experiences of nonbeing when he would close his eyes and shut off his ears and the world was canceled.

Though not a habitual reader of Giacomo Leopardi—he even claimed to feel alienated by the poet’s radical pessimism—Levi’s own brand of pessimism expresses itself occasionally in unmistakable Leopardian terms. The essay in praise of birds is an extended reference to famous pages of Leopardi in which the poet envies the joyful song and soaring freedom of the apparently carefree birds, so unlike humans, who are “unhappy above all living creatures.” Levi latches on to a notion Leopardi put forward: birds do not know noia (a term that combines the ideas of deep boredom, futility, emptiness, and vanity of existence)—the very noia Levi knew in its full dimension “vast as the sea” and heavy as the entire world.

Subject to crises of pessimism, Levi was subject also to irrational fears. He himself described his childhood terror of spiders, which he confesses never to have overcome. In an essay entitled “Fear of Spiders” (“Paura dei ragni”) he recalls how at the age of nine, lying in bed, he was terrorized by the sight of a spider, a black monster with spindly legs, advancing with the “inexorable motion of Death.” By his own account, his arachnophobia had literary roots: an illustrated edition of Dante’s poem carrying the well-known etching of Arachne by Gustave Doré in canto 12 of the Purgatorio.

Ian Thomson provides a detailed account of Levi’s depressions. During his student days, his friends were well aware of them. It got worse after Auschwitz. Already in the camp there were despairing dreams about telling and not being believed or even listened to. Depressions became more frequent, almost regularly after each book he finished, and more intensely so as of the late 1960s. With the passing years he felt increasingly out of touch with the young, who could not understand why the inmates in the extermination camps did not simply revolt or escape, in Hollywood movie style. His own children did not want to hear about his camp experiences. Then, in the late 1970s, came revisionist denials that the gas chambers had existed and that millions of Jews had perished. And there were more strictly personal reasons for swings in mood and states of dejection: the illness of his mother, about whom he had a real fixation, his own bout with shingles and then his prostate operation, and repeated anxiety about losing his memory. (The latter was a particularly painful thought for one who until the end believed that the story of the Third Reich could be interpreted as a total war against memory, a vast enterprise of falsification and negation.) Shortly before his suicide, he wrote to his translator Ruth Felman that he was going through his “worst time since Auschwitz,” that in some respect it was even “worse than Auschwitz,” concluding with the deeply sorrowful words of the Psalmist: “de profundis.”

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Levi mentioned his ancestral fears in the forest near Starye Dorogi. On other occasions, he specifically invoked his Jewish genes. The Periodic Table alludes to the lack of virility of his Jewish forefathers, more given to studying books than to physical action or manual labor. As an adolescent under fascism he was made to feel out of touch with the cult of force and martial exploits. As a young Jew under Mussolini he defined himself as an “enemy of violence.” If Not Now, When? his fictional account of Jewish armed resistance, makes much of the traditional Jewish horror of killing, always considered a sin. The band of Jewish underground combatants experience an atavistic sense of sadness and fatigue. Mendel, the world-weary partisan with whom Levi admittedly identified, is tired of war, suffering from a “thousand-year-old fatigue.” He feels that he carries in his veins the “pale blood” of his forebears. The dislike of violence is one of the reasons Levi offers for admiring Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers: it celebrates the victory of the weak over the Esaus and the Cains of this world. In a letter to Hety Schmidt-Maas, Levi openly refers to his Jewish “atavismus” as the root of his anxiety and depression.

According to theories circulating at the end of the nineteenth century, a recorded high incidence of Jewish suicides was of characterological significance. Such speculations about the Jewish temperament cast light on notions made fashionable by Otto Weiniger, a Jewish Austrian philosopher who himself committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. In his influential book Sex and Character (1903), Weiniger argued that the archetypal Jew was feminine, passive, unproductive. It is hardly surprising that Nazi propaganda later made use of his ideas. And there is little doubt that such antiheroic notions of the Jewish psyche prepared Levi to be especially sensitive to the reproach he heard so often coming from the young that the camp inmates had not fought back, that they allowed themselves to be led to slaughter like sheep, that they had not tried to rebel or escape rather than be conveyed passively to the gas chamber. They also explain his decision to write a largely fictional account about the wartime exploits of Jewish partisans behind the Nazi lines in western Russia. And supercourageous they are in Levi’s account. In order to overcome the prejudice about their lack of physical bravery, the Jewish combatants, as one of them puts it, have to be twice as brave as the others. Yet they continue to hate violence, and while engaged in killing they remember the injunction not to kill. Gedale, their leader, a cheerful avenger of many faces, plays the violin, dances like a figure out of a painting by Chagall, and sings. But his song is about the obligation to fight back: “If not now, when?”

Levi could not forget his own ineffectiveness as a young antifascist partisan hiding in the mountainous regions of Piedmont, not even sure how to use his pistol. He was obviously more at ease relating the feats of a scientist or a specialized worker, such as the adventurous rigger he described in a novel that won the Strega prize, The Wrench (La chiave a stella, 1978). Its central figure is a Piedmontese engineer by the name of Faussone—a rigger (montatore), who assembles and erects cranes and bridges as well as pylons and off shore oil derricks, with whom the narrator (transparently the writer Levi himself ) engages in dialogue. Combining the art of listening with a performer’s mimetic talent, the narrator projects the rigger’s voice and speech patterns, which consistently express pride in work well done. The rigger appears as the incarnation of homo faber, man the maker. Enterprising by temperament, he takes on difficult assignments in Alaska, India, and Russia, intrepidly facing risks and dangers. His heroic image as well as the notion of the heroism of work in general are illustrated by an admiring reference to his father, reported to have died “with a hammer in his hand.” Faussone’s own view of the epic nature of his profession is proudly affirmed by the title of the book. He likens the emblematic wrench hanging from his side to the swords of the knights of yore. And beyond the medieval knights looms the figure of Ulysses once again. Faussone’s daring and ingenuity (invenzione) are made manifest in the context of veritable battles leading to “defeats and victories.”

The ultimate message conveyed by The Wrench is that love of work represents a privilege, that man’s relation to tools and machines is not alienating, but fulfilling, and even ennobling. It corresponds to Levi’s personal code of work ethics, confirmed by the link he establishes between his own vocation as a chemist and Faussone’s engineering destiny. “I am a chemist-rigger” (“Io sono un chimico montatore”), Levi writes at one point, an affirmation that harks back to his early belief in the nobility of science, defined in The Periodic Table as the mastering of the material world by understanding matter and vanquishing it. Such dominion over matter was for Levi in the first instance the way to create the self by taking charge of one’s destiny, thus becoming “faber sui.”

But there is more behind the figure of Faussone. The full Latin saying about “faber” and responsibility for one’s fate— “Homo faber suae quisque fortunae” (every man is the maker of his destiny)—is echoed in a revealing essay on chess players, who are described as subject to the severe law of not being allowed to change a move once it is made—a move that may lead to the death of their king, which is symbolically the player’s death as well, a death for which the player is fully responsible.

In the final analysis, the story of the engineer Fausonne turns out to be self-referential, not only because of the implicit parallel between Levi the chemist and the montatore of derricks. Levi could not avoid suggesting that, as a writer, he too was a rigger of sorts, painstakingly assembling words, sentences, and thoughts, always with the risk that they would shift and fall apart. He took pride in clear, effective writing, precise work aimed at communicating, and repeatedly warned that obscurity in literature is ultimately self-negating and self-destructive. But Levi was not naive. He suspected deep down that “clear writing” might be illusory, that, despite the craftman’s satisfaction and the exorcizing virtues of verbal communication, the act of narrating was always, in one way or another, a struggle against despair. Obscurity and the irrational forces were always looming, and so was the sense of the abyss and the existential void. In characteristically Pascalian terms that ring quite personal, Levi has his anthropologist in “Westward” affirm that there is no valid protection against the black forces, that we are all on death row (“condannati a morte”), ignorant of the day of our execution.

The Face of the Irrational

The memory of Auschwitz is the memory of madness. Inside this demented world situated beyond good and evil it made no sense to ask why. The lesson was quickly learned by every inmate. Years later, in an exchange of letters with a German who had been his supervisor at the IG Farben chemical plant at Auschwitz and had treated him almost as a human being, Levi was again tempted to ask: “Why Auschwitz? . . . Why gas children?” But he knew better. He knew that the question would be senseless. The irrational was simply overwhelming.

Yet, from the time Levi asked his father to buy him a microscope, his early dream had been to scrutinize the world around him, to make sense of apparent chaos, to study chemistry out of a “hunger to understand things.” The title of his most personal and arguably most original work, The Periodic Table, points to organizing principles and to a rational display of observable elements. In this work he elevates the quest of comprehension and knowledge to a heroic level (and by implication to a tragic one) by viewing the pursuit of chemical studies as an epic struggle. When he invokes the image of “killing the white whale,” he adds the injunction never to surrender to incomprehensible matter. In this context the use of the Italian adjective incomprensibile is not exactly a hopeful signal.

Levi’s fear of the irrational casts light on his science fiction. When these stories began appearing, not a few readers thought that Levi was indulging in escapist entertainment. But these stories, many of them collected in Storie naturali (1966) and Vizio di forma (1971), while utopian in nature, are essentially disturbing, associating destruction and self-destruction with science and specifically with chemical substance. At their core lies the paradox of the irrational use of reason, together with a warning. The geometric madness of the Nazi camps with their alignment of barracks is not at all forgotten. In one way or another Levi’s science fiction narratives—“Versamina,” “Knall,” and a number of other stories— deal with inventions that can kill. There was no escape from Auschwitz and from the deliberate, calculated death plans supervised by the SS. Levi claims to have hesitated about publishing Storie naturali. But he felt that there was a connection, a bridge (ponte), between Auschwitz and his science fiction: the Lager, he explained, was for him the most “threatening of monsters born from the dreams of reason.”

The irrational use of reason—or reason placed in the service of the irrational—was for Levi a source of deep anxiety. Not only could the Nazi nightmare be repeated (the lords of death were still alive, and the death trains were waiting), but modern science, unleashing nuclear forces, threatened to put an end to all human life. Levi’s fantascienza (the Italian word for science fiction) thus served to warn of monstrous, potentially genocidal transgressions. In an essay on coleoptera, Levi describes with a dose of black humor how, after a nuclear catastrophe, only the beetles will survive, inheriting the earth, and replacing human beings as masters of this world. With bitter reference to Kafka’s “atrocious hallucination” in his “The Metamorphosis,” Levi predicts that the new kings of the earth will parasitize and devour one another. But how, one could ask, will that be different from what humans are doing to one another now?

Nature as Selection

In the final chapter of his personal anthology, The Search for Roots, Levi states his pride in the human investigation of nature. Having read an article on black holes in Scientific American (December 1974), he marvels that in this immense and ultimately unknowable universe the human mind, this sole and infinitely small island of intelligence, is capable of conceiving a notion such as a region of space from which nothing can escape. Yet, far from providing reassurance, his pride in science only increases his perception of our essential solitude. “We are alone” (“siamo soli”) in a universe that was not made for us—a universe both hostile and violent. A bitter truth for one who chose to believe in the possibility of clear communication. Levi could never forget, especially after Auschwitz, that all of us are ultimately alone in the face of death.

Survival can be grim. The Spencerian and Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest comes up repeatedly in Levi’s writings, usually in association with a pitiless natural selection in the struggle for life. The word selection has a necessarily sinister ring for Levi. In the death camp it meant the ruthless decision to send to the gas chamber those found to be unfit (or no longer fit) for hard labor. The memory of those “selections” colored even the older memory of competitive school exams, such as the academic selections for the Institute of Chemistry in Turin, about which Levi years later uses the expression “survival” (“sopravivenza”) and “selezione naturale.”

A nature that imposes such a pitiless natural selection can be called only cruel and murderous. Levi speaks of the “cynical evolutionary design of nature,” of its gigantic bloody competitions, of its developing animals that are “splendid killing machines” that devour and are in turn devoured. Death is at the center of his view of nature. Not as in Milton, where it appeared as a result of the “mortal taste” of the forbidden fruit, but as a basic flaw in the overall design (“someone somewhere made a mistake”), a gross defect, a fundamental imperfection that Levi sums up in the telling title Vizio di forma (vizio meaning “flaw”)—a book in which he muses on collective suicide and instruments of death. To have faced the truth of the vizio in the grand design is to have gazed directly at the petrifying face of the Medusa.

Death and the Medusa

Levi pretends to have withstood the sight of the Medusa. In a poem carrying the dedicatory title “A Mario e Nuto,” he claims to have tolerated the view of thechthonic monster without being turned into stone. Yet minerals and death are associated in a quite personal way as of his earliest writings. Two so-called mineral stories (racconti minerali), later incorporated in The Periodic Table, can probably be considered his very first literary efforts, at a time when he was working as a young chemist in an asbestos mine. In these stories, “Lead” and “Mercury,” lead is declared to be “the metal of death,” associated with the mythological planet Tuisto, supposedly known as “the planet of the dead.” The second of these fantasy tales, “Mercury,” situated on a volcanic island named Island of Desolation, has at its center a weeping forest (“Foresta che piange”).

These fables are rooted in early fears and lasting pessimism. His lifelong spider phobia was, as we have seen, interpreted by Levi himself as the horror of “inexorable . . . Death.” But there is more to this horror. A sense of the sin of existing seems to underlie his recurrent sensation of an immense void. Meditations on a Pascalian “eternal silence” of the universe led him, but in a most un-Pascalian manner, to transfer to nature and to a nonexistent God the responsibility for the unfathomable presence of evil in this world. In a very curious text entitled “Lilith,” Levi tells a story he claims to have heard from a fellow inmate in Auschwitz—a somewhat perverse account of the creation of Lilith, a rebellious mate of Adam’s who left him and became a she-devil with whom God himself sinned, thus causing the world’s suffering and our exile. The parable, according to Levi, conveys the kind of incurable sadness that blossoms on the ruins of “lost civilizations.”

The Incomparable Loss

In If This Is a Man, Levi raises the specter of vanishing (and vanished) civilizations. The apocalyptic final chapter, “The Story of Ten Days,” makes this explicit, even though it also serves as the prelude to the survivors’ liberation in the limbo of the infi rmary abandoned by the Germans as the Soviet army approached: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us.” Paul Valéry’s observation that even civilizations are mortal was experienced in the flesh by those who, like Levi, had known the inhumanity of the camps. In later, more serene and reflective years, Levi repeatedly mourned the disappearance of cultures and of their languages. Meditating on the Warsaw ghetto, the Shoah, and the decimation of Eastern Jewry, Levi asserted that the loss of Yiddish culture was an “irreparable” one. In an article entitled “The Best Goods” (“La miglior merce”), he maintained that the linguistic tradition of the Ashkenazim was their most valuable possession and that the extinction of a strongly creative culture with its collective memory and traditions is always a major calamity (sciagura).

Levi’s cultural and political pessimism became especially acute in the 1970s, when he complained about the “political necrosis” of Italy and other countries. Ian Thomson quotes from private letters and conversations in which Levi gave vent to his political and cultural despondency. To a Yugoslav acquaintance he wrote in November 1974 that Italy was “cancerous and decrepit” and possibly already dead and decomposed. And over a meal in Turin he confided to a British colleague that he thought that the end of Western society was near. In his science fiction the inventor Signor Simpson conceives a machine, the Torec (Total Recorder), that produces artificial sensations and at the same time a sense of total emptiness, leading the inventor himself toward death. The Total Recorder becomes the emblem of humanity’s demise.

Ulysses versus Job

Could it be that my protesting undergraduates were right after all—at least partially? Another revealing text, “Un testamento” (collected in Lilit), would seem to support the view that, despite his proclaimed humanistic faith, Levi repeatedly questioned it and ultimately even seemed to deny it by taking his own life. With an ironic reference to Descartes’s famous cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), “Un testamento” proposes a formula that amounts to a bitter parody: “I suffer, therefore I am” (“sicuro di soff rire ed ergo di esistere”). Pain is the only reality, just as Levi discovered on returning home that the Lager was the only truth.

Leopardi’s disconsolate observation, in his essay on carefree birds, that happiness is not given to humans finds an uncanny echo in Levi’s fictional dialogue between the “Poet” and the “Physician,” in which the poet appears as the total nihilist refusing all illusions, convinced that pain governs everything and that the universe remains indifferent. Though aware that he is sick, the poet refuses all medications and throws the doctor’s prescription into the gutter.

The sickness may indeed be beyond remedy. The return to Ithaca (or Turin) will always be poisoned. Past horrors can be repeated. “It has happened, therefore it can happen again,” Levi asserted in The Drowned and the Saved. Two key figures, Job and Ulysses, tower from the outset in The Search for Roots. But Levi’s Job is neither patient nor steadfast in his faith in God. Rather, he is oppressed by the world’s injustice and assailed by the death wish—a suicidal Job. Levi’s Ulysses, on the other hand, seems to justify the surprising statement in his preface—surprising to Levi himself—that, after all, his camp experience counted for so little. His Ulysses combines resourcefulness and courage. Unlike his Job, his Ulysses stands for the will to live, the will to return to Ithaca and to a fully human existence. And it is surely no accident that Levi chose Dante’s canto about Ulysses, the survival artist, to teach Italian to his companion in Auschwitz. For there is no doubt that this chapter is an early testamento, confirmed years later in The Drowned and the Saved as he rereads his old chapter “The Canto of Ulysses”: a testament that establishes a link between allegiance to life and the suicidal impulse, affirming pride in human achievements as well as faith in culture as survival.

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* " Primo Levi: The Flawed Design" Reprinted with permission from Musings on Morality by Victor Brombert. Published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2013 by Victor Brombert. All rights reserved.

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Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor Emeritus of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830–1980, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and the wartime memoir Trains of Thought.

NUCLEAR COUNTERINTUITION: RISK REDUCTION DURING THE COLD WAR

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By Mark C. Jensen

President Obama had made it clear in advance that he would not apologize, when he became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, in May 2016.  His position followed that of eleven prior administrations and was vocally supported by China and Korea - - Japan’s principal war victims - - and many US veterans’ groups.

But Hiroshima is complicated:  apology or no, Japan was officially happy to host the president, and many expressed gratitude that he could acknowledge the pain and horror experienced by civilian casualties of the 1945 bombings.  Obama concluded with a prayer for “a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”

The long delay and great delicacy of this visit speaks volumes.  American presidents have never hesitated to visit other major battlefields of World War II, especially sites of Allied triumph.  Nuclear weapons are different, in the scale of their destruction, the health and environmental effects of radiation, and the risk of reprisals.  And Hiroshima was not a site of great American courage.  Though committed in wartime for the purpose of defeating an aggressive and brutal Japanese empire, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were massive, poisonous attacks on very soft civilian targets.

After Hiroshima, the Cold War rivals somehow both built and refrained from using nuclear arsenals that really could have destroyed large parts of humanity.  The superpowers’ leaders feared reprisals, it is true, but their abstinence was not just due to the “balance of power” or isolated cases of restraint.  A long series of leaders came to realize, in the manner of Clausewitz, that there would be no political point to victory if nuclear weapons were used: even the “victors” would lose, and become pariahs to the rest of the world.  So the US and USSR, and their allies, made a series of agreements to reduce the risk that anyone would use the weapons.  Even Ronald Reagan, who’d once suggested that “we could pave the whole country [of North Vietnam] and put parking strips on it,” became a “nuclear abolitionist” in the words of the historian John Lewis Gaddis.  As President, Reagan negotiated some of the most sweeping arms reductions of the Cold War.

These were acts of self-interested self-restraint, made between parties that continued to disagree about much else, in service of larger goals.  Perhaps more important, these actions signaled that nuclear weapons were undesirable - - ruinously expensive, difficult to manage, unusable - - at least to countries that aspired to participate in the global economy.  And that may be the Cold War’s most important lesson for the future.

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The story of President Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs is as necessary and irresistible as Pandora’s Box.  We are riveted by its ethical questions:  whether it was right or wrong; whether it was necessary or proportionate to US war aims; how many US lives were saved by the sacrifice of two or three hundred thousand Japanese people; whether it violated international treaties against the targeting of civilians and the use of chemical weapons (reading “chemical” to include “radiation”); whether the US should have demonstrated the bomb first, provided a clearer warning, made its surrender demand clearer with respect to the status of the Japanese emperor (who was ultimately allowed to remain as head of state, subject to US occupying authority).  Unfortunately, as with the Smithsonian’s ill-fated 50th anniversary exhibition, the public discussion in the US often gets reduced to two groups talking past each other, as though respect for military service and avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties were mutually incompatible.

But Hiroshima’s most pertinent lesson is actually this:  no future leader will face a situation like Truman’s. The unprecedented decision about whether to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities was made in wartime by an intelligent and humble but completely unprepared man who had known about the weapon for less time than it takes to teach the first semester of college physics, during which time he also happened to be employed as President of the United States.  No future leader will write on such a blank slate.

When he became President in April 1945, Truman was not even well-prepared to follow the course he publicly promised and intended:  to follow Roosevelt’s own policies and plans as closely as possible.  Indeed, he had barely been part of the administration. He had only become Vice President that January; he had met with President Roosevelt just a couple of times after the 1944 election; FDR hadn’t even invited him to the Yalta summit with British Prime Minister Churchill and Soviet Chairman Stalin in February 1945.  (Truman’s lack of preparation is a scandal of its own.  Roosevelt’s inner circle, including the sainted Eleanor, were well aware that the President had forced to take a 6 week “vacation” in the spring of 1944 due to serious heart disease, and kept his condition from public scrutiny through the 1944 election.  Even if electoral considerations were a sufficient justification for this non-disclosure - - a highly debatable proposition - - they would provide no excuse for failing to prepare a new Vice President of the same party to take on his most important responsibilities.)

Among other things, Truman had not lived through the history of the Manhattan Project.   As Albert Einstein’s famous 1941 letter to President Roosevelt had suggested, this vast initiative had always been motivated by the fear that Nazi Germany, which had the expertise and resources, would build a bomb first. An American weapon could deter the Germans from using theirs.  But Germany fell in May 1945, before either side had succeeded.  Regarding Japan, which was understood to have no nuclear program, the best indication of FDR’s thinking was a rather inscrutable summary of a private discussion with Churchill in September 1944, to the effect that the bomb “might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.”   We don’t, of course, know what Truman or his advisors would have made of this statement if they had seen it.  In hindsight, however, it is hard to miss Roosevelt’s hedging – “might” “perhaps” “after mature consideration” and most notably, that the Japanese “should be warned.”

The Manhattan Project was cloaked in great secrecy, improbably so, with its massive tasks divided among three very remote major sites (Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; and Pine Ridge, Tennessee) and dozens of others. Only a few top-level scientists and military officers knew with certainty that the project was to build an atomic bomb.  Truman wasn’t among them. (Ironically, Stalin had high level spies inside the Project, so that when Truman finally “revealed” the bomb’s existence to Stalin at Potsdam in July 1945, it only served to reinforce Stalin’s lack of trust.)

In the event, Truman first learned of the bombs in a forty-five minute briefing from Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the Manhattan Project’s military leader General Leslie Groves on April 25, 1945, almost two weeks after he’d been sworn in.  Coming in as late as he did, Truman chose to defer to the process then in place, and postponing political or foreign policy implications.  His direct advisors were defense leaders.  Stimson convened a panel of eight civilian officials and a separate four-person scientific advisory panel, which met for about a month in May 1945.  These groups featured no voices of caution.  Churchill likewise recalled there was “unanimous, unquestioned agreement” about using the bomb to compel Japanese surrender.

The White House announcement of the bombing, delivered while Truman was still steaming back from the Potsdam conference, reflected this military focus.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base.  That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor.  They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet.  With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.  The force from which the sun draws its powers has been unloosed against those who brought war to the Far East. . . .

This was a remarkable statement for many reasons, including its righteous and threatening language, its factual inaccuracies, its low-key delivery.  But: talk about burying the lead!  The technology that will forever hang over civilization merits no mention before the third paragraph.

The statement focused instead on winning the current war, intimidating the enemy, and reiterating the enemy’s aggression and the justifications for violence.  The inaccuracies crept in, apparently for these very purposes.  The bomb actually targeted and hit the center of a major city, not a nearby army base.  The US had no actual production capability for atomic bombs; just two were then available, each with a different experimental design.  The Hiroshima device also didn’t employ nuclear fusion like the sun, although fusion weapons were already on the drawing board.

Truman and his team did have legitimate strategic objectives:  to end the Japanese war; to do so before the Russians entered and demanded influence or territorial advantage. And, as Truman’s bombing announcement repeatedly emphasized, the US had a clear casus belli.  But the leadership punted on the really difficult question of what the decision might mean for the world’s future safety.  His statement went no further than to say that he would make some proposals to the US Congress on that subject, as though the rest of the world might have nothing to say about it.

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Americans naturally celebrated Japan’s sudden surrender.  About the bombs, however, there were a few voices of concern from the first.  “All thoughts and things are split,” wrote James Agee in Time magazine.  Conservative commentator David Lawrence condemned the bombing of thousands of civilians in US News.  “[W]e shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt which prevails among us.  Military necessity will be our consistent cry in answer to criticism, but it will never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations, though hesitating to use poison gas, did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.  What a precedent for the future we have furnished to other nations . . .”

A year later, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” A classic of what would later be called “New Journalism,” Hersey’s piece followed six residents of the city through the day of the bombing and afterwards.  Beyond personalizing the attack on specific civilians, Hersey spotlighted the effects of radiation which, as Lawrence had perhaps intuited, bore a stark resemblance to the chemical weapons that had been condemned by treaty since World War I.  In the wake of the strong public response to the New Yorker article, the retired Stimson was drafted to write a semi-official response for Harper’s, soberly walking through the decision-making process that led to the bomb’s use against Japan.  Stimson’s article was also well-received and, though somewhat self-serving, performed a public service by opening the door on what had been a top-secret decision of monumental public importance.  However, Stimson offered no comfort for the future; after Hersey’s article, no one could claim ignorance of the consequences.

The culture soon reflected these technological fears.  Apocalyptic tales have been a religious and literary staple from the beginning of time, but now these fears could be made specific.  Uncontrollable technology, driven by witless and/or power-hungry scientists, became an enduring plot device for drama and satire.  Among the first was the Japanese movie “Godzilla” (1957), in which the monster’s power came from nuclear fallout.  This was practically a current event: radiation from a 1953 US thermonuclear test in the South Pacific killed the sailors on a downwind Japanese fishing boat.  Later:  “The Blob” (1958), a cult classic with Steve McQueen and some comically bad special effects involving carnivorous goo; the dark comedy “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), with Peter Sellers playing three roles including the title’s mad-bomber physicist; “2001, A Space Odyssey” (1968), featuring HAL, a mutinous spaceship computer; “The China Syndrome” (1979) with Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda, an almost too realistic foreshadowing of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident; “Blade Runner” (1982), in which no one can tell the humans from the artificial “replicants”; “Jurassic Park” (1993) with aggressive dinosaurs re-created genetically rather than from nuclear waste.

But nuclear weapons and other exotic quasi-scientific speculation weren’t necessary to promote mass fear.  The famous air raids upon London and Pearl Harbor at the outset of World War II had been answered, on a much larger scale:  US and British air forces had dropped incendiary bombs in carefully designed circular patterns to create unearthly firestorms in Dresden and Tokyo, which left tens of thousands of civilians dead.  These “conventional” attacks inspired their own line of antiwar literature, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Miyazaki’s film “Night of the Fireflies.”

The French New Wave film “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (1959) perhaps best combines these themes of fear, guilt and individual powerlessness in the nuclear age.  The film opens with images of the atomic bomb’s radiation victims, rarely shown in the US, and bright scenes of peace demonstrations, part of the real worldwide movement for a nuclear test ban in the late 1950s.  Two lovers - a French actress, in Hiroshima to film a “peace movie,” and a Japanese businessman - recount their World War II experiences in simple repetitive phrases, stories they have never told their spouses because war no longer makes sense in the new “normal” world.  While he was serving elsewhere in the Japanese army, the man’s family and hometown were obliterated by a horrifying, humiliating and unimaginable event.  In the war's aftermath, the actress was ostracized by ugly crowds in her pretty little French town because of her teenage relationship with a German soldier during the occupation.  In the film’s last scenes, the lovers name each other after their hometowns, Nevers and Hiroshima, tying together the fates of now powerless peoples.

The comparison of the conflicted war histories of France and Japan shows that an ordinary person’s life (simply living in the Japan or France of the time) may tempt fate in extraordinary ways. When the man asks the woman about her reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima, she says she was amazed that they, the Americans, built it, and she was amazed that they used it.  Amazed, in other words, at what the US had proved capable of, both in achievement and in destruction.  And if that was the reaction of a liberated ally, how might a potential enemy respond?

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The reduction of nuclear risk has two general components:  reducing the number of opportunities in which anyone might consider using the weapons, and reducing the likelihood that, in each case, the actor will decide to use them. It’s vitally important to do both for a rudimentary statistical reason:  even events with a low likelihood in each case become likely to occur with enough chances.  For example, if we (arbitrarily) assume there is a 10% probability that a nuclear state will use nuclear weapons in any given confrontation (90% chance of non-use), and if each such decision is independent of all others, after just the seventh standoff, it would be more likely than not that someone would have dropped a bomb on at least one occasion.  By the 15th, the likelihood of at least one bombing approaches 80%.

To be sure, these assumptions are wrong.  I presume that the likelihood of non-use in any given situation is much higher than 90%. Moreover, each decision is far from independent of the others, because national leaders have been well aware of history and precedent.  But the principle remains:  the greater the number of chances that someone will use a nuclear bomb, the greater the likelihood that at least one will be used.  And the wider the number of nations with nuclear capacity, the greater the number of potential confrontations.

In the shadow of Hiroshima, the nuclear strategies of successive Cold War leaders all evolved in a consistent way.  The more they learned, the more reluctant they became to engage in brinksmanship, and the more willing they were to look for other solutions to conflict, often against the advice of their own more hawkish advisors.

When deciding whether to fund the vastly more powerful thermonuclear device known as the “super,” in 1949, President Truman reasoned that if the US could build the device, it must.  “We had got to do it - - make the bomb - - though no one wants to use it.  But . . . we have got to have it if only for bargaining power with the Soviets.” While this was quite the opposite of what peace advocates wanted, it was also a far cry from the Truman who often claimed that he’d never lost a moment of sleep over the decision to bomb Japan.  The super was now part of the strategy of containing the Soviet Union, an effort to prevail without starting World War III.  Winston Churchill, who had known about the Manhattan project from the beginning and voiced no objections to the atomic bombing of Japan, came to agree that the thermonuclear devices were unusable.  But he felt that the “element of equality” with the Soviet Union offered reason for hope.

At the outset of the Korean War, Truman initially fell back upon a reflexive answer to a reporter’s question about nuclear weapons, deferring to military leadership by saying that everything was on the table.  He promptly backtracked from that stance, not wishing to expand that particular war. (As would be the case in Vietnam, there was fierce disagreement between those who didn’t want to risk open war with the Soviet Union and China, and those who felt victory was worth that risk.)  Months later, US General Douglas MacArthur, field commander in Korea, proposed dropping a couple of dozen atomic bombs along the Chinese-North Korean border, to leave a toxic wasteland that would isolate and prevent reinforcement of the Chinese and North Korean troops.  MacArthur may have been posturing.  His horrifying escalation proposal, along with numerous public disagreements with the Truman cabinet that bordered on insubordination, essentially forced Truman to relieve him.  (MacArthur’s public didn’t care, showering him with praise and tickertape parades on his return. Truman, more unpopular than ever, dropped out of the 1952 presidential race.)

Dwight Eisenhower, probably the most experienced general ever to occupy the White House, underwent a similar transformation.  In the words of Jim Newton, a sympathetic biographer: “Faced with the awesome implications of the Soviet Union’s ability to wage nuclear war, Eisenhower changed.  The nuclear enthusiast of 1953 had become a more sober leader by 1956.”  Eisenhower had once said that the military could use nuclear weapons “exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” Later he rejected multiple staff policy proposals that would condone the limited use of nuclear weapons, seeing such decisions as having unique international political risks as well as the risk of annihilating escalation. “We must now plan to fight peripheral wars on the same basis as we would fight a general war.”  The historian John Lewis Gaddis interprets this as a reflection of Clausewitz’ dictum that war must serve political ends:  there could be no political end in the end of civilization.  By making every decision all or nothing, “maximum massive retaliation,” Eisenhower believed that both sides would refrain from nuclear war.

This policy seemed crazy to many (see, “Doctor Strangelove”), but it took the twin Kennedy-Khrushchev crises of Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962 to show that limited nuclear war might have been even riskier.

When the Berlin Wall went up overnight in 1961, the US conventional forces then stationed in Germany had no realistic hope of holding back the Red Army should it seek to take over the entire city.  President Kennedy sought alternatives to Eisenhower’s massive first strike policy.  A September 1961 report by Carl Kaysen, a Harvard economics professor then working for the Defense Department, laid out a plan that, if executed without mistakes, gave the US “a fair probability of achieving a substantial measure of success” in degrading Soviet nuclear capabilities, at a cost of between half a million and a million Soviet casualties. Allowing that the Soviets might not see this as a show of US restraint, Kaysen estimated that Soviet retaliation on American cities might produce losses of five to ten million people.  Although some administration officials were appalled, Kennedy approved back up plans that included, in its final stage, the use of tactical nuclear arms.

That crisis receded, but just months later, Khrushchev approved the secret installation of short and medium range missiles in Cuba, weapons that could easily reach New York and Washington.

When US surveillance discovered the missile installations in the fall of 1962, Kennedy did not object through back channels as Khrushchev had expected.  Instead he took to the airwaves to make a public demand for withdrawal of the missiles, intentionally leaving himself little room to back down, and therefore raising the stakes for Khrushchev.  Against the advice of his more hawkish advisors, who advocated immediate bombing of the installations, Kennedy imposed a “quarantine” of Cuba - - a clever relabeling of what amounted to a blockade, which would have been an official act of war.  Even with delicate phrasing, the parties remained a step away from the brink.

Fortunately, Soviet resupply ships turned back.  But four Soviet submarines, carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes, were ordered to evade the “quarantine” and supplement forces already deployed in Cuba.  The subs’ commanders did not have clear instructions about what to do in the event of a confrontation, so it is also extremely fortunate that they did not fire when the US Navy forced them to surface.  Later, Kennedy displayed similar restraint when a US U-2 plane was shot down.  In these extremely tense two weeks, a deal was struck: removal of the missiles from Cuba, a US pledge not to invade Cuba, and a secret US pledge to later remove intermediate term missiles from Turkey (which submarine-based missiles would effectively replace).

This terrifying episode convinced Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, of the futility of even limited use. McNamara had initially believed that the US and USSR might abide by rules of war without nuclear weapons, but after Cuba he saw there was no controlling what might happen in a crisis.  He converted to an explicit proponent of “mutually assured destruction,” effectively Eisenhower’s policy.

A similar evolution took place on the Soviet side.  After the Cuban crisis, Khrushchev came to the view that a nuclear war, once started, could not be limited.  He sharply rebuked Castro for suggesting a pre-emptive strike: “There will always be a counterstrike.  . . . . Only a person who has no idea what nuclear war means . . . can talk like this.”   This did not make Khrushchev’s comrades any happier about his improvised saber-rattling.

While on a Black Sea vacation in 1964, “crazy Nikita” was summoned back to Moscow by his well-organized deputies.  It was to his credit, Khrushchev thought, “that they were able to get rid of me simply by voting.  Stalin would have had them all arrested.”   The new leadership under Leonid Brezhnev prized order and discipline; they would be more careful to avoid high-stakes conflicts with the West.

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The physicist Leo Szilard, who had urged Einstein to write his 1941 letter to President Roosevelt, also wrote a letter to President Truman in July 1945.  Now that Germany had surrendered, Szilard asked Truman not to use the bomb in Japan unless Japan had refused detailed public terms of surrender, and only after considering that “a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”

Truman probably did not see Szilard’s letter. If he had, he probably would have handed it off to the advisory committee, led by the Secretary of War.  And the truth is that the funding and resources needed for scientific and development work would always put the government in control of the projects.  Exactly this had happened with the Manhattan Project itself; General Groves effectively decided when and how the bomb would be used.

After the war, several prominent groups advocated for international bodies to regulate nuclear technology.  The most prominent was a report by US Secretary of State Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the largest electricity producers in the country.  Their report advocated, among other things, sharing scientific knowledge about nuclear energy and establishing a system of inspections by a United Nations agency to ensure that the technology would be used peacefully.  The American financier Bernard Baruch, whom President Truman had appointed to represent the US at the UN, modified the plan in its last stages, leading to its rejection by the Soviet Union.  But Stalin, though without his own nuclear weapons at the time, might have declined to participate in any such plan, just as he declined to join postwar international economic recovery programs.

The idea did not die.  In a 1950 letter to the United Nations, Niels Bohr, a Nobel Laureate in quantum physics, advocated for international transparency to reduce the chance of nuclear war.  “The ideal of an open world, with common knowledge about social conditions and technical enterprises, including military preparations . . .  will . . . obviously be required for genuine co-operation on progress of civilization . . .”

A few years later, after both the US and USSR had detonated fusion bombs thousands of times more powerful than the Hiroshima device, Albert Einstein and the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell - - each an international celebrity in his own right - - issued a manifesto calling for nothing less than the abolition of war.  Short of that, “the abolition of thermo-nuclear weapons, if each side believed the other had carried it out sincerely, would lessen the fear of a sudden attack in the style of Pearl Harbour . . .”

The internationalists, scientists and others, were accused of being naïve, or worse, in matters of foreign policy, especially during the frosty 1950s.  There was reason for skepticism, too.  After World War I, the victors had tried to put arms controls in place.  The Versailles treaty forbade Germany from re-arming, chemical weapons were banned, and the major powers entered into the Washington Naval Treaty limiting major warship construction (freezing advantages then enjoyed by the US and Britain).  But by the mid-1930s, Germany had renounced Versailles and Japan had pulled out of Washington Naval Treaty.

The imposition of terms by the World War I victors was not a completely fair comparison to a multi-lateral treaty.  In any case, regarding nuclear weapons, the internationalists understood the risk-reduction problem exactly right; they were just ahead of their time.  By preventing the spread of arms, reducing stockpiles and requiring inspections, their proposals would have limited the number of opportunities for the use of nuclear weapons. And the logic first seen by these scientists in the 1940s and 1950s would gradually, and with other labels, be adopted by alarmed Cold War leaders after the Cuban crisis.

Beginning with the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), long a goal of peace groups, the nuclear club agreed to some mutual rules.  The nuclear nonproliferation accord (1968) forbade its signatories from assisting new countries in acquiring weapons, obviously a critical step toward reducing the number of opportunities for escalation.  It also guaranteed its participants nuclear exclusivity, but that did not make it a bad idea for the rest of the world. In 1972, the US and Soviet Union signed two treaties: the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) which placed limits (rather high limits) on the parties’ long range land and sea based missiles; and the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty, which banned certain defensive weapons which could, if successfully deployed, remove one side’s fear of counterattack, the kind of one-sided situation that Truman enjoyed in 1945.

It is important to remember that much of this difficult diplomatic work took place while war raged between the superpowers’ respective client states in Vietnam.  Negotiations were at all times very difficult and often broke down.  A collapse of trust in the late 1970s, due in part to Soviet adventurism in a period of America’s post-Vietnam hangover (and in part to high oil prices), sidelined and threatened to reverse progress on arms reduction.  Indeed, President Reagan’s announcement of the practically nonexistent “Star Wars” missile defense initiative in the early 1980s went against the spirit of the ABM treaty.  But the anti-communist crusader was also an extreme skeptic of nuclear weapons. In the end the US and USSR, and later Russia, cooperated for many years to reduce their arsenals.  The danger and cost of practically unusable weapons was ultimately a subject about which the enemies could agree, and they found that they needed each other in order to reduce their arsenals.

Eisenhower came up with a valid solution to the problem of nuclear game theory, in the two-power setting, in seeing that mutual destruction deterred any use.  But the “naïve” scientists had seen the more general solution.

5

President Trump dramatically rejected this approach in 2018 by withdrawing the US from the 2016 six-country treaty, under which Iran agreed to discontinue its nuclear arms program for an extended period in exchange for a lifting of economic sanctions.  He hoped this harder line would result in a more favorable political outcome in the region (presumably regime change in Iran).  His flamboyant unilateralism, often dismissive of allies, was very widely criticized in other contexts, but a significant number of more conventional analysts also agreed with his abandonment of the Iran deal.  These observers generally argued that the treaty would reward Iran’s political and military interventions on behalf of its regional allies, while merely delaying Iranian nuclear capabilities.

In the context of the consistent evolution of the views of Cold War leaders, this position strikes me (and many others) as short sighted:  it elevates a regional foreign policy goal regarding Iran above the decades-long multinational effort to reduce nuclear weapons risk.  For one thing, a hard-line position is not the only path to positive change in the region:  peace may also come in a series of small steps that build trust on issues of consensus.   The US did not need to settle every score with the USSR in order to find areas of agreements about nuclear weapons.  Of much greater concern is the American willingness to step back from the global consensus toward nuclear risk-reduction.  Now any autocrat can cite US inconsistency as a reason to ignore international norms.

The concern is not simply about this particular bet, or the next one.  It’s the number of bets, the number of bettors, and their understanding of the Cold War leaders’ experience with nuclear weapons.  Winning nine out of ten is a losing proposition.

Still, to use Truman’s words, the end is not yet.  President Biden’s administration is attempting the difficult task of reviving the Iran treaty in an atmosphere of even less trust than before.  Perhaps, like the Cold War leaders before them, the parties may find mutual benefit in standing down.

Mark C. Jensen is an attorney and writer who lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.  He holds an AB in Mathematics from Dartmouth College and a JD from Duke University School of Law, and is of counsel with Nutter, McLennen & Fish of Boston.  He recently completed a memoir entitled “QoL: Memories of an Intrepid Traveler.”

THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY AT 100

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By David Shambaugh

On July 1 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrated its centenary anniversary. Over the past several months the country has been inundated with a 24/7 tsunami of propaganda. Bookstores are filled with newly minted books with the ubiquitous hammer-and-sickle on their covers. China’s consumer goods industry is churning out a surfeit of communist kitsch—busts, buttons, statues, posters, plates, paintings, commemorative coins, and other memorabilia.  Commemorative films play on television and in movie theaters. Work units and school children are being organized to go on pilgrimages to revolutionary sites (so-called “red tourism”). All 94 million Party members are undergoing re-immersion in the communist classics dating back to Marx, while communist martyrs are again eulogized.

The multifaceted campaign is inescapable, blanketing the nation. The CCP’s vaunted propaganda system is in overdrive. While different periods and themes are emphasized, one is at the center: Xi Jinping. Beginning with his February 20 speech kicking-off the nationwide “education campaign” to study party history, Xi has been squarely in the public spotlight—in today’s China Xi and the Party are indistinguishable. While the past nine years of his rule have seen no small degree of Xi sycophancy, the Party centenary has offered an opportunity to further burnish his personality cult.

To be sure, the CCP has much to celebrate. Most Chinese credit it with having brought the country to its superpower status of today. The Party has achieved the four-part national mission sought by all Chinese regimes since the late-Qing dynasty: wealth, power, sovereignty, and respect. These elements have driven CCP policies since seizing power in 1949, but they harken back to the late-Qing dynasty. Foreigners should not underestimate the enormous sense of pride and nationalism engendered by these accomplishments. Overcoming what the CCP ritualistically refers to as China’s “century of shame and humiliation” (roughly 1840-1949) has been the single animating goal of the Party since its founding.

Gideon Rubin (26 x 19 cm Gouache on paper 2014)

Surviving is Not Easy

Like humans who reach 100 years of age, simply surviving that long is an accomplishment. But it has hardly been smooth sailing—as the CCP has endured a number of “near death” existential experiences.

Having established itself in secret in Shanghai on July 1, 1921, it operated primarily underground. Then, on April 12, 1927 the nascent Party was subjected to a lightning strike unleashed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist security services—known as the Shanghai massacre—in which hundreds (if not thousands) of suspected communists were arrested and summarily executed in the streets. This event split the party into two rival factions, driving Mao’s clique to retreat to an isolated mountaintop stronghold in Jiangxi province.

In 1933 Chiang’s military forces zeroed in again on Mao’s sanctuary, launching a series of five “annihilation campaigns” surrounding and progressively tightening a blockade of the isolated communist forces. On the verge of capture or extermination, the CCP finally broke through the fifth siege and embarked on the Long March in October 1934. The march itself can be considered another “near death”  experience, as only 8,000 of the nearly 100,000 who departed Jiangxi on foot survived.

After coming to power in 1949, the CCP had a difficult decade during the 1950s—consolidating its rule domestically (which included brutal campaigns against various sectors of society), fighting a grueling and costly three-year war against U.S. and United Nations forces in Korea, while engaging in three tense crises in the Taiwan Strait.

The decade of the 1960s was one continuous series of struggles for the CCP. It began with the 1961-62 famine following the catastrophic 1958-60 Great Leap Forward, in which an estimated 40 million Chinese died of mass starvation (second only to the Ukraine famine of 1932-33). The largely Mao-made calamity badly tarnished the reputation of the regime and Mao’s personal power in particular. Mao withdrew from active leadership for three years, while Deng Xiaoping and other senior leaders briefly stabilized the economy and the country—before the next (self-inflicted) crisis erupted. It was also during this time that China’s alliance with the Soviet Union also ruptured, leaving China with few friends in the world.

From 1966-68 Mao personally unleashed the most serious assault ever on the Party: the so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Specifically targeting the Party and government institutionally, Mao almost succeeded in destroying them, before pulling back from the brink. The entire senior leadership were purged and incarcerated in prisons or labor camps, hundreds of thousands were tortured and died, Red Guards roamed the country and seized provincial power, while the nation descended into anarchical civil war before the military restored order in the summer of 1968. Despite the end of the fighting among Red Guard factions and the imposition of martial law, the Party was decimated and paralyzed, and would remain so until the late-1970s.

In the midst of the Cultural Revolution China faced another existential threat, this time from abroad. In March 1969 Chinese and Soviet forces fought a brief border conflict, but we now know that Moscow came a hair’s breadth from launching nuclear attacks on several Chinese cities and military targets.

Following Mao’s death in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping’s gaining  power, things stabilized until unprecedented popular demonstrations erupted in Beijing and across China in the spring of 1989—which resulted in the “Tiananmen massacre” and the deaths of 1,500 to 2,000 citizens. Whether or not the demonstrators were in fact attempting to overthrow the Party and republic, Deng and his elder colleagues explicitly defined the challenge in such existential terms. To this day, and in newly released official histories, the CCP argues that such resolute action saved the Party from the popular uprisings (and overthrows) then occurring in Eastern Europe and subsequently the Soviet Union.

Since then, the CCP has not experienced another near-death experience—although it has wrestled with a variety of serious challenges, including systemic corruption, some high-level leadership purges, unrest in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, and rising tensions with its neighbors and the United States.

Thus, as the Chinese Communist Party reaches 100, it has certainly had its share of regime-threatening experiences. To have survived these, to have maintained itself in power, and to have developed the country into a superpower are no small achievements.

Gideon Rubin (26 x 19 cm Gouache on paper 2014)

Escaping the Past

In contrast to this tumultuous past, the CCP has spun a remarkably positive, heroic, and hagiographic narrative about its history. Yet this narrative is highly selective and distorted. Treating the Communist Party’s past has never been straightforward; it is, in fact, extremely sensitive and tricky. What to emphasize and what to deemphasize, what to ignore and what to highlight? As George Orwell poignantly observed in his dystopian novel 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.” The Soviets also used to joke that “the future is bright—it’s only the past that is uncertain.”

The whitewashing and distorting of uncomfortable truths and past events are not unique to authoritarian regimes, but the CCP has done more than its fair share.  In today’s China the Party has so selectively deleted and distorted its past that reality is unknowable to its citizens, who are force-fed only official rewritten histories. Each successive CCP leadership tends to further distort it and bury its dirty linen deeper. Only once, in the 1982 document On Certain Questions in Our Party’s History, has there been anything close to a real accounting and reckoning with the Party’s misdeeds.With each false narrative that is spun and perpetuated, with each staining event that is obliterated from the historical record, a society becomes further and further disconnected from reality. It is not a sound psychological basis for a national identity or political legitimacy.

Yet, today’s history books barely mention tragedies such as the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution, the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, and numerous other destructive political campaigns. In the definitive 538-page volume recently released by the Central Party History Research Office, the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution are briskly dealt with in a couple of pages and are brushed aside as “leftist errors,” while the events of June 4th  are brusquely dismissed in a single sentence as “suppressing the Beijing region counter revolutionary rebellion” (平息了北京地区的反革命暴乱).

To address historical issues that contradict the official narrative in a heterodox manner has been labeled by Xi Jinping as “historical nihilism” (历史虚无主义). To ensure that only “correct” party history is followed, a volume of Xi’s speeches on the subject has recently been published. In addition a national webpage and telephone hotline have even been established by the National Cyberspace Administration to report any heretical thinking.

Gideon Rubin (29.5 x 20.5 cm Gouache on paper 2019)

Facing the Future

With such a selective understanding of its past, the Xi-centric caricature of its present, what is the future of the CCP as it passes 100?

Considered broadly, what kind of institution has the CCP become under Xi, and is it appropriate to a globally involved superpower? What Xi has systematically done is to turn the Party into a robotic machine, almost like a military, with rigid top-down discipline and little bottom-up or horizontal participation or feedback from society or Party members. This is a fundamental undoing of the type of responsive consultative Party which all of Xi’s predecessors since Deng had sought to build.

Many Party members, as well as various elements in society, resent the type of dictatorial Party and personal power that Xi has constructed and accrued. China has not seen this degree of control since the Maoist era or the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre. As a result of the severe repression Xi has unleashed, the Party at 100 appears in total control. Yet that masks the hidden discontent that we know does exist within the Party and several sectors of society.  The Chinese have a saying for this: 外硬内软 (hard on the outside, soft on the inside). That is not a recipe for indefinite longevity.

David Shambaugh is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs and Director of the China Policy Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs of George Washington University.

***

This article was originally published in The Wire China. The Wire is a digital news magazine dedicated to understanding and explaining one of the biggest stories of our time: China’s economic rise, and its influence on global business, finance, trade, labor and the environment.

The weekly publication — founded by David Barboza, who earned two Pulitzer Prizes while serving as the Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times — relies on a diverse, independent group of journalists and columnists stationed around the globe. Many of them have years of experience covering China and its evolving relationship with the rest of the world.

A SPIDER SHOWS THE WAY TOWARDS GREATER COMPASSION FOR ANIMALS

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By Barbara King

One June night this summer, I encountered a wolf spider on the floor near my bed. This tiny animal had somehow wandered indoors; a rescue was clearly in order. That rescue turned out to be a fraught one, but after it I felt renewed determination to help animals caught up in agriculture and biomedical research.

Does that seem absurd, making that leap from a single invertebrate in my own home to billions of animals entangled in agricultural and biomedical systems?  It is and it isn’t, as I will explain.

The spider, almost certainly a female judging from her size, remained motionless on the floor as I regarded her. Perhaps she was looking at me too. Wolf spiders have keen eyesight. They are described as ‘athletic hunters’ who ‘run down’ their prey rather than building webs, and are non-venomous.

I flashed back to a day about ten years ago.  That time, two wolf spiders had appeared in the bathroom, sitting side by side. My lifelong reactivity to arachnids, emergent in childhood and amplified by my mother’s disgust of such beings, got the better of me; I beat the pair to death with my shoe and flushed them down the toilet.

Immediately I felt terrible. How could I call myself an animal advocate and do this?

That incident become a turning point because I challenged myself to observe local spiders and learn about them, in order to overcome the reactivity. By the time I met the new wolf spider in 2021, I was in the midst of a virtual tour for Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild. Repeatedly I reported to audiences how smitten I had become with spiders, especially jumping spiders spotted in the yard and the magnificent orb weavers who set up shop outside my study. I lovingly showed favorite spider pictures and allowed myself to feel proud of a big personal evolution.

Yet, that June night, things were not going according to the compassion-to-animals script.  I’ve described here the spider as ‘tiny’, but in the moment that wasn’t part of the tight unnerved loop circling through my brain. She’s so big she’s close to the bed she can jump what if I can’t catch her she could jump on my bed I want her gone.

Clattering through drawer after drawer in a frenzy, I spied a small plastic orange urine-specimen cup left over from some past medical adventure. Using controlled motions that I willed into existence, I lowered the jar over the spider, taking good care not to press down on her legs with its rim. This small being didn’t deserve to be squished because of my agitation.

The rescue to outdoors, helped along by my husband, went just fine. Really believing that the spider wanted to live allowed me to overcome all the unfair prejudices that had unexpectedly reasserted themselves in my head.

Contesting invasive experimentation on animals in laboratories isn’t as simple as rescuing a spider, of course. Yet I’ve come to think it starts the same way, by seeing an individual who wants to live, and live safely. That makes it easier to overcome those assumptions we carry around in a culture dominated by human exceptionalism--- in this case, that animal models are necessary to do good science.

Cornelius, a rhesus monkey known also as R10033, was born at the Wisconsin Primate Research Center 11 years ago. Housed in a laboratory cage, most often in solitary, Cornelius has shown signs of illness and depression while required to participate repeatedly in invasive experiments. I know something of his life thanks to undercover animal advocates’ work, but that’s only one reason Cornelius haunts me. His is a face I can now conjure, but most laboratory animals are hidden away and unknown. According to the Animal Alliance of Canada, over 4 million animals of various species are used annually for experimentation in Canada alone. Unsurprisingly, in the US the number is much larger, around 25 million vertebrate animals.

What can we do? In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes movingly about sea mammals’ entanglement in industrial capitalism in ways that diminish all of us. She asks, ‘At least take a moment to imagine how you would move if we weren’t all  caught up in this.’

Let us imagine, then, doing science in ways that are better for Cornelius and better for us. Cornelius wouldn’t be in a laboratory at all. And we’d have left behind an antiquated system that, as I’ve written in Animals’ Best Friends, fails to translate to meaningful help for human overwhelmingly often. Peer-reviewed analysis from 2015, for instance, concludes this about drug testing using animal models:

In 2004, the FDA estimated that 92 percent of drugs that pass preclinical tests, including “pivotal” animal tests, fail to proceed to the market. More recent analysis suggests that, despite efforts to improve the predictability of animal testing, the failure rate has actually increased and is now closer to 96 percent.

Individual resistance to this systemic failure adds up. Instead of accepting what we’ve too often absorbed through the skin in our culture--- that of course animals are necessary for good science--- we can think more critically. We might read the fine print in the methods section of science articles that excitedly report breakthroughs using animals, with a goal to grasp both what the animals endured and the limitations of those experiences for helping humans. We might educate ourselves about, and support the further development off, tools and techniques for leaving behind animal models. I’m particularly excited about organs-on-a-chip, the small fluid-filled devices that allow growing of human cells from organs like the lung, kidney, or stomach for direct experimentation.

In moving from laboratories to slaughterhouses, let’s return to the site of my encounters with wolf spiders: the home. For animals like cows, pigs, chickens, goats, fish, and octopus who are labeled as food--- as if that labelling were entirely natural, somehow preordained by our evolution over the millennia---our homes may become primary sites for compassion. In preparing three meals and perhaps a snack or two each day, we may choose plant-based meals. As an anthropologist, I know that our large brains today owe their existence in part to meat-eating millennia ago in the evolving human lineage. But I also know that that fact doesn’t mean that we evolved to eat meat. We didn’t evolve to eat anything in particular; our lineage is not carnivorous but instead omnivorous and opportunistic, with individuals consuming whatever it made sense to eat at a particular time and place.

In our particular time and place—Earth in the 21st century--- it makes sense to consume as little meat, seafood, and dairy as each of us can manage. I’m not suggesting veganism is desirable or attainable for all people, but rather that all significant efforts matter. For one thing, we recognize those cows, chickens, goats, fish, and octopus as fellow travelers in a world alive with thinking and feeling beings. For another, eating plants is the single best thing any of us can do on a daily basis to mitigate the accelerating effects of global warming.

Through resisting cultural norms that for some of us are deeply ingrained and that hurt other animals, by acting in concert with the sure knowledge that other animals want to live, we help ourselves, too.

Sometimes, it takes a spider to show us the way.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary and the author of seven books about animals including How Animals Grieve. Her latest, Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild, was published in March. Find her on Twitter @bjkingape

KING COUNTRY

***

By Kirsty Gunn

Sandor Klein, American Farm Hand, 1937, oil and casein on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. Ira Miller

Their father had always let them handle the guns so they thought nothing of allowing me to touch them. Though their father was not someone I could ever speak to or know. He was a frightening  man with “a little war wound” he called it, a long red scar from where a stallion had bitten him on the thigh right through to the bone, and it made him suck his breath in between his teeth and whisper “Christ” when he had to do something in a hurry, get up, say, to give one of his boys a whack if they’d been causing trouble, or bend over to pick up a heavy bag or sack off the ground. “Christ Jesus” sometimes, he’d say then, when the wound perhaps hurt him, the ss- s in the words sounding through those strong white teeth of his in his dark, tanned face. I was a child but I desired him then, before I knew what desire was. “To come in” was the phrase I used, privately, to myself. To know what it was to be entirely in love.

But you can’t be in love with your best friends’ father – I knew that too, and the Carter boys were my best friends. Not only Taylor who was in my class at school and the skinniest, but Kip and Tommy who were both older let me be in their gang, and they were all three of them “mean buggers” their father called them. “Come here, you lot” he’d shout at them when he got back to the house after a big day out in the bush where he was working. “Get inside” and he’d whistle them in like they were a pack of dogs and it made them yell with pleasure when he did it. “Ah, yah Pappy!”, they’d scream back at him, charging around the place, tackling him, and running away just as fast.  They were acting like they were terrified only they were excited, excited, by his presence, and by the things they’d done while he’d been away.  “We’ll have your guts” Kip said to me once, when making me promise on some secret or other – a cat killed or some boy at school Tommy had cut – that I’d never tell. “Gods-Truth” all three of them reminded me. “We’ll hurt you if you squeal.”

Their father knew  the boys were tough but the exact nature of their secrets was kept from him – and they were many. Kip, who was thirteen and like a man, led on all the games and had a million cruel actions he could generate, like a machine, and then want to hide from. Like he’d skinned a rabbit when it was still half alive, and spat muck in the face of a girl we met once at the gas station because she was pretty, after he’d got her behind one of the old disused pumps and put his hand up her dress. He’d already used sticks for sex, he said, and knew exactly what he was doing. Taylor told me he’d done it loads, and what did the rest of us know about it, anyhow? I couldn’t think, but didn’t dare ask in case Kip realised I might be a girl myself and would use one of those sticks on me. He did other things, yes, but I didn’t mind them because I wasn’t really a girl. With the Carters I could be who I wanted and also stay that way; they would let me be a boy with them. So I might learn from them how to cut up animals and sell their fur, build forts from willow and fish for eels with a nail in the same way they’d taught me how to swear and run fast across rocks in barefeet and dive off the cliff straight down into the water. Of course I could come near guns and traps and knives and learn not be frightened. Everything was there before me, is how it seemed. A life laid out. So that all through the time of knowing that family I could be someone who was not a stupid girl but just wear shorts and have my shirt off and my bare chest  in the world, letting myself be free out there in the sun and wind with them, getting darker and darker so that sometimes my skin peeled off but underneath the new pink skin showed up as dark too, in time. “You’re tough, alright” Kip told me when we were kissing. “You’ll do.”

There was a mother in the picture but we didn’t talk about her much. I never knew her name and the boys only called her “Ma” which was all wrong for someone who held her body in the world the way she did, who took her time. It was only when I grew up myself and saw women who had that same look of quiet confidence, like a cat in the sunshine just sitting there like it’s never planning to move, that I realised what beauty was: the bare minimum of a thing to create the largest, largest effect. I saw women like Mrs Carter then, much later in my life when there were women, and more women... But back in those days I didn’t have the know-how or vocabulary to describe someone who knew exactly what they could do with the wild and generous terms granted them by their own bodies. Oh, I could say when years had gone by, Oh I get that, Girlie. What you’re doing to me here.  I see that. I see you. But when I was a child Mrs Carter was the only one I’d witnessed who had that kind of quality.  There in the background, maybe, but an alive’ness running all the way through her and her boys seemed to feel it too, putting their hands on her as if to take some charge off her, “Ahhhh, Ma. Go on. Go on.” I think about that now, the memory of her stance, her immobility while they crowded around her. I can’t remember anything she would say or do in response, while her husband, by contrast, seemed to surge and spark with words and activity. It was as though he was fired up, so charged by those rifles of his kept on a table in the back room, the boxes of bullets and knives beside, that he might use them any second and the whole house would explode around us. “Those are things I need for work!” he would yell at the boys, his voice like an engine. “Don’t you lot move things around when you go in there. I need to be able lay my hands on that stuff. I don’t mind you having a play, you need to learn how to manage a gun. But none of it’s for your use... Not now!”  “But when, Pappy?” the boys would shout back at him, because of course we did go in and they moved the guns around, all the time.  “When?” And Mr Carter would raise his arm as if he was going to give Kip a whipping but he’d be grinning, laughing, kind of. “When I decide!”, he’d yell back at him. “That’s bloody when!”, looking at me, too, with his black eyes. “And you as well” he said. “Don t think you’re not part of all this. You can touch, you know full well, but you can’t use.”

The boys never told him then, they never would dare, of what they got up to, whether they had access to their father’s guns or not - of the animals Kip shot with his own BB rifle, though it was only supposed to be for rabbits, or the things Tommy and Taylor did to the other kids at school, all those actions of theirs that were kept in the dark. Their father had rules. You could be tough but not disobedient, wild but not cruel. And for sure all three made certain I’d never blurt some fact out that might show how far they’d transgressed - let it go that I’d seen Taylor put a rat on the teacher’s desk, say, still moving but its guts all out, and that he swore and shouted most of the time through lessons. James Carter was not to know about any of it. Those rules of his were deep in his sons even while they disobeyed them, over and over again and terrified of what he’d do to them if he found out. It was why they liked to keep reminding me of the use of various weapons, they said, of ammunition and  triggers and of safety catches that could released. “Don’t be frightened, scared-y. But know what this is” Tommy waved his father’s oldest rifle around, pointing it at my heart. “Boom. All gone.”

For my part though, they never need have worried I’d tell. Even with the blood banging in my head for fear, standing there with them while Kip broke open the rifles one by one and cleaned inside and out with an oily rag, kidding me on there were bullets in the chamber while he did it and going “Careful now, you’ll set me off...” Still I wanted, more than any feeling normally would have allowed, to belong to all three of those boys forever and to that father of theirs whose body I felt as though it were right beside my own, humming with energy and heat and power. So I did touch the guns, and I picked them up, put them down. In order to be that “you as well” as Mr Carter had looked at me and said. To be a brother, a son. A something else I couldn’t explain that had nothing to do with my life at my own house with my own parents, that would let me do my own screaming around the place, being grabbed and brought down to the ground. To be able to put my arms around a waist like Mr Carter put his arms around his wife’s body as though she was a beautiful wild animal only he had caught her, he had her. To be similarly enclosed, to be...Come in. This was what kept me going back to the Carters, holding my tongue. So I didn’t have a father who would give chase round the kitchen table with a belt as a joke and who kept dangerous things around him? A man who was a “Pappy” and who you punched up and swore to and he gave you cigarette ends you could smoke yourself whenever you wanted? So my own father was not someone with a dark tanned face, and nothing about him crazy and handsome and strong? It didn’t matter because for a time I had them, didn’t I? The Carters? Their house only down the road, but another world.

They’d lost everything, I found out later, because Mr Carter had been in prison somewhere up North for hurting a man and people couldn’t see past it to give him any kind of job. For these reasons, and the family not leaving town because of it, he’d had to make do “on the side” as he called it, rogue farming a few acres that he’d dug himself out of the bush, forty miles or so away from town.  That, and a bit of culling for the forestry commission and managing some timber work for them, kept him going, you might say. But what does it mean, really, “kept him going” ? I think about that now. When it was the kind of country that closed up behind you as fast as you went in and with any track grown over just as quickly as it had been made? So James Carter could do that, manage being there on his own, because he was strong and he had to, my father told me once, he didn’t have a choice and he was courageous, “virtuous”, the word my father used, still, that can’t have made it any easier. “He is someone with great will,” my father went on, “and it’s a virtuous will” – though he didn’t want me hanging around the Carters even so, and would have had me home with my mother, and to attend to my schooling. Most people knew about the Carters  – as my father did, and my mother, and kids at school knew and whispered about it, what Mr Carter had done... But, my father said, that man wouldn’t have been the first to have had some bad luck and to want to make do with a bit of cleared land where he could run some goats and plant crops of various kinds, potatoes mostly, but also swede and cabbage. There would always be a kind of person who sat outside the life led in that country, in that part of the country, in those days. My parents seemed to have an understanding about it, about what it might be like for the Carters and people like them, more, perhaps, than the others in town who were mothers and fathers and like anyone else. Still, my father had a job with a clean, tidy car to take him to work each day, not a big old dirty truck that didn’t always start, and in the end, for all his talk, he would have wished me, as my mother did, to be more like other girls, think about different things.

But I couldn’t. My mind was full up with Mr Carter and his boys. From the day we moved to that town I couldn’t take my eyes off them; the way they dressed, the way they spoke. They didn’t seem to care about any one. So when Taylor said, “Come on, then”, when I went up to him at the end of my first week at the new school to look at his bike which he told me he’d stolen and then let me ride bareback home with him to his house... It was like a hook. Something grabbing at me, pulling, and it wasn’t going to be possible afterwards for me to think about anything else,  to imagine or want any other way of living. The Carters didn’t have a garden with little flowers and the front door always closed. Their place, down past our neighbours went straight onto paddock and had a broken down verandah round the back you could live out on if you wanted, Taylor told me that first day. How from there even at night you could see all the way off to where his father went on his own for work and stayed away, sometimes for days, weeks even. He pointed it out, the dark mass of land off there in the distance, darker than the dark. It was Urewera, Taylor said. King Country. The whole area was, all set to mountain and hill and ravines and gullies, thousands of acres of hidden, difficult country run through with rivers and lakes, and none of us, not even Kip, could get inside there without Mr Carter to show us the way. All three boys talking about it as though it was a place that existed only in the future, where you could never arrive at, only want to go.

So the stories started for me then - how dangerous it would be in there, where Mr Carter went for work, with seasons and days not seeming to apply it was that dark down in the valleys, with water running at spate most of the time and all sluiced up with mud and and vegetation and scree. There were sharp hard precipices, we talked about, and cliffs dropping down to the bush floor where giant trees grew, their tops blocking out the sun like a black roof above your head. We’d be all four of us out on that verandah, day or night, thinking about it, one man on his own in such a place and the choices he would have to make, the exact preparations he would need to consider in order to be safe. Of course he had to have the guns in there with him. Because it was his job, the boys told me – to herd and cull and trap and shoot and cut up for sale and cut down. There were huge boar in those mountains, Taylor showed off about in school. Mr Carter had given him a tusk as a memento, like a giant’s yellow tooth with a pointed tip that could ram through anything - and where his father went there were hundreds of these kinds of animals, Taylor told the kids in class, wild horses, great herds of deer, goats. There were possum traps filled with animals crazed with poison his father needed to clear, nets and dams to empty that were filled with huge coils of conger eels that behaved like sharks and were thick as a man’s arm. “Be quiet, Taylor Carter” our teacher would say, “We all know about your father”  but Taylor wouldn’t be quiet. It really was a King’s Ransom in there, he said, with nothing you couldn’t shoot, fish, snare and butcher. And it was being paid to you, see? Like it was given. “Meat or money?” That’s what Mr Carter shouted out to us, when he got back from one of his big trips, after being away for two weeks or more and it meant he had money from the Government and something on the back of the truck that we could eat. So Taylor was right. There was everything we needed, everything. And for sure, you could think about that as you sat on the Carter’s back verandah, smoking cigarette ends and eating jam sandwiches, looking out to the edge of country one man had come home from, arrived standing there in the doorway as tall as the ceiling with his pack and his dogs and the truck outside still hot and covered with mud. It was meat or money, alright. And all because of him. Because he’d been in there, gone into the midst of that dark, unseen world and come home again. “Now let’s have some fun” he’d say then, when he was back amongst us. “Things have been way too quiet around here while I’ve been gone.”

Remembering all this, those trips of his and how they were presented, the way they were talked about, thought through and described down to the smallest detail... Of course I can see now that the three boys understood what their father was doing to make a living in a way I never could have. But they were gracious, I think, in not letting on; instead making me feel that along with them we could only imagine the life their father had, tell stories about his hidden world and make up stuff about it and dream. Because, really, how could I expect to share their experience, have anything of their lives  - though that first day of going home with Taylor turned into weeks and months that I thought would last forever. I lived so close to that family you’d think I might have seen more, be told more, shown more. But despite the tense animal feeling of Mr Carter whenever  he was near, pressing on me an image of who exactly, when I grew up, I wanted to be, and for all the rich feeling come from his wife and sons to include me in their lives, those boys themselves versions of the self I was carefully fashioning that I might someday be one of them entire... Even so, I never knew that much about the Carters. They were on their own. And glamorous as they were to me, I was aware even then that being alone was probably how it had always been for them, fixed in and deep and very, very quiet, something they carried.

But what do you do with narrative like this? Gather it up? Even call it a story? For sure, I can write now, despite – or maybe because of - their isolation the Carters seemed to belong to that part of the North Island in a way others I’ve met since who were born around there don’t. And though I know that the area where James Carter farmed and worked doesn’t necessarily form the shape of something I can use to write about – it’s  too real for that  - even so, to think of how a part of the land stood in relation to the rest of us, so far away it seems from our small towns and cities, far from everything, does remind me of parables, myths. It’s there on the page before me - a dark region on the map we could see in the distance, tree and bush and scrub all massed together in thousands of acres of unseen terrain, rising up in foothills and mountains  - as though a certain part of my own life has never gone away. “Te Urewera.” “King Country.” Just to say the words made you feel like a man.

Even myths don’t come out of speaking, though; not any more. It’s been a long time since understanding would emerge from the dark. You need light to reveal what’s happening; without exposure any account goes unrecorded, acts and deeds as mute and invisible as any of the boys’ pitiless unspoken games. So it was that Mr Carter, who for so long had seemed to be someone in a certain kind of story, terrifying and mesmerizing in the things he did, snaking his arm around his wife or pulling his youngest son up onto his shoulder and biting his bare leg, putting Kip and Tommy to the ground in a rugby tackle so that he could keep them down there and then kiss them... Was also, in another kind of narrative, someone else. And while he’d been busy being the one I watched and felt and wanted, that presence in a room, that body, with those words and that mouth and his eyes and his breathing, right there beside me, he had also been that other man, a stranger, you might say, who I didn’t see until he was demonstrated to me, as he was in the end, in full daylight, in the middle of a bright morning.

It wasn’t until the very end of summer, though, that I found out about the other version, another account, you might say, altogether, of a life, and the solar opposite of the one I thought was being described. It begins just before we were due to go back to school, and the boys told me their father had come home from one of his early Autumn trips, as he called them, and had decided that he was going to take us out with him on a job the following week. Because, what? Take us with him? And that’s exactly when a shift, an alteration, occurred; a change in how things had been described up until now. Because a trip with Mr Carter now? After all this time? Sure, we couldn’t believe it. Why now? It made no sense - but we didn’t want to ask too many questions, either. For to be going, just to be knowing that this time when he left the house Mr Carter wouldn’t be alone but that we’d be there with him, gone with him into the mysterious place that had been the destination of our thoughts and stories... It was a gift. That was all we could think. A mighty gift. We’d be leaving very, very early in the morning, Mr Carter said, working all day and not getting back until late at night. He took us into the room with the guns to tell us. That he was bringing us with him to the farm he’d made at the foothills of the mountains, that there were things to be sorted out there, and in a hurry. That we’d need protective clothes, wet weather gear for where the river was dammed, reinforced boots. He made us remember it as a list. Petrol. The guns, of course the guns, and knives and sacks and kerosene. It was extraordinary even to hear him say the words – “leaving”, “working”, “getting back late at night” – with us there in his mind alongside them. It was the rag end of the holidays and we’d long ago given up thinking anything more was going to happen with that season. Only weeks of hot wind with the sky like a bullet of blue overhead, the paddocks all yellow and dry, and we’d had a lifetime, it seemed, Kip and Tommy and Taylor and I, of being on our own and wishing we could go with Mr Carter every time he left but having to just watch him load up the dogs, and his pack, and drive away.

So, really, yes, it was like a gift  - unimaginable and that you might cry out from it when it was given, and may not be able to accept it, even  - that after all the days and weeks of watching and waiting there’d be this, to be riding out on the back of the truck along with the dogs to go right into the foothills of the mighty Ureweras and be there with him this time. We’d be following him to see the farm Mr Carter had made - and no we wouldn’t be going any further than that, not up onto the ridges and those high plateaus where he went for the Forestry and his other work, but we’d see his farm, that was the main thing, that place he had created somewhere deep in the bush no one knew about, did they? And this time he wouldn’t be alone there because we’d be part of it, what he was doing, and adding to it  - to help with getting the vegetables in, he said, because the goats had got out and been at them and he’d need to move fast or there’d be nothing left. “I don’t want you with me” he’d told Tommy. “But I need you. I need –” my heart could barely contain its jump – “all four of you boys.” And why, why hadn’t he asked us earlier? Tommy didn’t know, no one knew. Because how could it ever be that James Carter would ever need anybody? When there was nothing dangerous going on he couldn’t manage himself, no action large or small he couldn’t have got on with himself in his own time like he always did? And as Taylor said, pulling potatoes and carrots was no big job – that “I need you”like an echo that wasn’t sounding true.

Now, of course, writing through all this, one story into another, I can understand in the way the child never could that the reason all this was happening was that it was only that his time had come. His taking a bunch of kids with him that day a way of making a final plea, I suppose,  an attempt to speak back to and counter actions already taken against him over– what? Months? More than. Before the year had started, most probably, and for more than a year... Before I even came to know the Carters – though my presence there amongst them hadn’t helped any, I found out. Even so, it had taken all that time, days and weeks and months, until that particular week, the end of the summer holidays and the vegetables not even half ready by then, for his life, for the things James Carter had chosen to do to gain a living, that “kept him going", to become at last impossible for him to carry on with. Kip said his father had told him that he would be allowed to use his 44 on any of the animals that played up while we were in there, and that Tommy could take the BB, then, as well, “just in case”. But just in case, what? I remember that thought formed an entire shape in my mind.  Mr Carter had hurt a man up North, I knew; and there’d been a gun involved then.Something below the words carrying more menace than any images of animal wildness or the uncertainty of terrain . “Shoot any mean looking bugger on four legs that even looks at you” Kip said his father had told him. He was beside himself with power - because he was the oldest and knew for himself, from what he’d done to some goats down on an empty lot where someone or other had run goats at one time, how male goats could be vicious. “Pappy doesn’t know how much skill I have in all that” he said. “And don’t you say a word about any of it, either”. We were around the side of the house where there were no windows so we couldn’t be seen, and it hurt, what he was doing, but I didn’t mind. The peel on my skin had healed over by then; you couldn’t even tell I’d been burnt and I’d have the mark of him in dirty ink and blood on me forever. “Watch me when I’m in there,” he whispered, his breath hot at my ear. “I’m going to know exactly what to do.”

And maybe, because he was the oldest, well, maybe, he did know. The story allowed out at last into the light, might have been how he saw it - as though all the dark games might now be shown and nothing more to keep secrets of - only “Watch me.” Because he was the one, Kip was, who picked up the 44 that day and used it.

“Like father like son” the men had jeered when the air had settled. “No going back now, laddie. All over for you here.”

How the Carters  - and my parents, too - must have worked hard to keep me and the boys ignorant of so much of what had been happening right up until just before that moment. That we would not have heard or seen, not really, what people in the town had been saying about the family, all through that summer, and before then...How it sharpens the picture. To know that all through those months beforehand we children were not aware of the many and intricate small acts of attrition that were being carried out against Mr Carter, opinion taking shape and forming before I even met Taylor that first day at my new school, yet there it was, amassing.  All the talk going on, discussion, about the dangerous father who’d come down from some prison up north and had expected just to move his family into town. As though he might be immune from his past! Living in a respectable community along with everyone else...Who did he think he was? So that was what attempted murder left you with? That you could ignore all that? And next thing you know the new family who’d moved down the road could just take up with them, somehow? Like that silly tomboy daughter of those people had thought she could just let herself, what? “Come in...”? What then, eh? If that was to happen? That others might follow? And then others follow the same? Well then, the talk would go on, something had better be done and there were men who would do it. Because who did he think he was? Eh? As one of them said to Mr Carter that morning in the road, before Kip even fired the shot, coming forward and poking him in the chest with his long ugly finger. “Who do you think your are, laddie? Eh? Who?”

This scene as I write it, and, of course, imagine, is that he had children with him that day in order that it might shame them, somehow...All those people who had talked about him and his family. That he might show them, by bringing us with him, just what it was they were doing, and had done. That our presence might speak back somehow. Is it how it was, though? That he really could believe any gesture he might make would stop the talk, their actions, have them think again? That he might have thought that to take us with him would remind those men he was a father, too and not so different from them, that we are all of us connected? I shall never know. Only that what I saw that morning could have only been another in a whole series of incidents and insults that I hadn’t witnessed; gestures and speeches played out in other places far from the edge of the dirt track which provided our theatre for that one morning.  And why, again, that particular week? That day, just before school went back, that a series of interventions, carried out by a group of just a few, maybe, but with the weight of prejudice and judgment behind them, would become insupportable for one man to bear? Why, after so much time had passed, he hadn’t made some kind of decision earlier, to cut his losses and protect himself, when he knew judgment had been fully realised against a family who hadn’t been trusted from the start, or wanted, and the prison sentence hanging around Mr Carter was something he could never escape, never - so why wait at all when it would only ever be just a matter of time before an itinerant family would be driven out from a town by those who felt they’d been there long enough?

I put myself in the story to “sharpen the picture”, as I wrote before, but really answers don’t exist for any of this. What is left for me instead is the sure knowledge I have now, that the girl in the story could never have possessed, nor the children in it with her, that by the time Mr Carter called us into the room with the guns to tell us we were going into the bush with him it was already too late. Too late for him to react and adjust to events already taken place and formed against him. It was always going to be too late. To be able to find a way out, recover anything of what he’d built up and get free... And it had been too late long before James Carter could begin to think maybe bringing a truck-full of kids with him that morning might have made a difference to men’s minds already made up. Their plan had been in place well in advance and they were ready and waiting for him by the time we arrived in sight of the dirt track cut into the bush that would lead to lead to the farm. After all the excitement, the anticipation of the trip, the getting up early in the dark and driving the forty miles on bad road, we got to a junction ...We turned the corner  - and were met with a road block of sorts; half a dozen armed men.

I remember it all, in absolute detail. How Mr Carter stopped the truck. And how for the first few of those  seconds nothing happened. There were about, yes I would say, six or maybe more, maybe eight, of those men in all, all holding rifles. They stood there. We hadn’t stopped in a hurry, Mr Carter hadn’t slammed on the brakes; he’d just slowly drawn the truck down to a halt, and then we were still, we waited. The men shuffled a little as they arranged themselves, they wanted us to see what they were carrying. It was a bright, bright late summer morning. The wind had disappeared, everything was still. Through the rear window of the truck, I could see Mr Carter sitting there in the cab, the back of his dark head in the sunshine, and I remember how I wanted to reach through the glass and touch his head, his hair, the back of his neck, and his brown hands that were set motionless upon the steering wheel. All the gear was on the back of the truck but he had his own rifle, I could see that, too, through the window of the cab, laid out on the seat beside him, carefully,  as though it were something that was also watching him, waiting. Long seconds continued to pass, one second, another second, then he took his hands off the wheel, opened the cab door and got out, walked towards the group of men where they were standing hard up next to each other with no space between, muttering and shuffling. He’d left the rifle where it was, laid down there on the seat of the truck. The engine was still running and the door was open.

I don’t think I knew or had seen any of those men before, and only found out later that they were the same group who’d been after Mr Carter for months beforehand, following him into his farm as early as the Spring. They’d been checking up on what he’d been doing and then going in after and interfering, maiming his stock when Mr Carter thought at first it was wild pigs doing that, weakening his fence posts that he wouldn’t notice at first maybe but then a part of his enclosure line wouldn’t hold and he’d have to do it all over. So, bit by bit, they had acted against him. One thing, another thing. And of course he had never said, about the muck and chaos, the nets wrecked, his traps left spoiled and broken. Well, the boys never said anything about it to me, I suppose is what I am really saying. Because in their house it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone would talk about in front of me, that Mr Carter was starting to realise people might be acting on their talk because they just couldn’t let go of the past, people like that couldn’t. And who knows? One of those men standing there to block our way that morning might have been a brother to the man who’d been hurt up north all that time ago? Or maybe there was there some other connection, maybe one of them someone who knew someone who knew? There could be any number of reasons that people might have had, that he would have kept to himself, Mr Carter would have, and tried to keep, too, from his boys; reasons that would have made those men feel justified in damaging the work that had been established, the paddocks that had been created created out of the dense undergrowth, and the vegetable plots and traps he’d laid, the dams for fishing and drainage and the fresh plantings of fruit trees and saplings he’d tended. Finally the fences had gone entirely so the goats had got out and the vegetables that were just coming through for some kind of harvest were trampled and eaten. And for him to realise, I think, when we got there to the entrance of his farm that morning, to find the men there waiting, waiting for him in the way they were waiting, with all those guns...That what he had hoped for a while would hold was finally gone...To have to come to see, as his truck drew up upon them, with the four of us on the back and watching, witnesses to  everything as it was to unfold, that even with us there with him, nothing was going to change, still nothing he could do would alter the outcome, or influence it at all... That people were never going to leave him alone, to understand or forgive what he’d done and now here they were with their weapons to prove it... That must have been a hard enough scene to play for sure, in that morning’s grim theatre. To have to get out of the truck, to have to face those men with their stupid guns... To have to walk up to them as he walked up to them, as though to reason with them, as though he might have tried...as though he could have ever tried....All hard. But worse by far it must have been for him to have it be so exposed, in the broad yellow light of the morning that we, too, sitting there on the back of the truck and watching, waiting, could see it, that all of this had been allowed, that Mr Carter himself had allowed it....That he had let the things be done to him which had been done to him, that had gone so far. For the boys and I to had to watch those grown men taunt their father as though he were the child, calling him and his family out as criminals, as thugs and murderers and thieves. We had to see it all, hear it all, That if it came to it, in all their remarks, the taunting and jeering, that firearms would be used, well then, they went on and on, they’d have a reason, they said, “Oh, we’d have a reason, alright.” One of them finally lifting up his rifle and aiming it. “C’mon laddie, let’s see what you’re made of. You with that woman of yours and your kids no more than animals. Who do you think you are?”

So I watched him stand his ground. His boys watched, the four of us up on the back of the truck, we could see everything from there – and he never went back for his gun, he’d just left it in the cab where it had been laid out beside him like a loaded creature, a live thing that could jump only he wasn’t allowing it, keeping himself away from it and standing so quietly there in the road, taking what they were saying to him, taking it, and taking it, and it was Kip who had somehow got to the 44, the weapon now in his hands. The engine was still running, the door of the truck open. It was as though Mr Carter had thought he might just step out to deal with those the men but then get back in again as easy and be on his way, and without anyone seeming to notice Kip had got off the back and was round the side and had grabbed the rifle and aimed and fired. The shot rang out. A million birds exploded from the trees. The air went black. For a second there was nothing but that, that sound, and the darkness of the birds flung upwards into the sky in a thick black cloud, their screaming. The second rang and rang in the air, with the screaming and the flight of birds. Kip had aimed at the centre of the group of men but there his threat had ended. Because he had lifted the rifle then, he had aimed it at the sky. And it was was sky that took the blow. Air. Nothing else had been intended... And yet.... Intended. Who cares what was intended? The shot rang out and it makes no difference, does it? What’s intended? Whether it’s a boy’s bullet meant for air, for sky, or a bullet for a leg or for a foot which, as I found out years later, was where his father’s bullet once, along ago and to his shame, had been been intended...  Still, it makes no difference what’s intended. The shot rang out now, as then, with all its dark consequences in flight risen up behind it. The shot, the gun. The stupid, stupid gun. There was a second – that murderous beat of time that is the sound of all guns everywhere, when the sky goes black, with the shattering of those birds, of their cries - and, in that second, Mr Carter turned, he saw Kip, the weapon in his hands. “Ah Christ, “ he said. “Kippy. What have you done?”

Kip dropped the rifle then. He turned to his father, his father shook his head. “Ah, no...” and his face was contorted. “My own boy...”he said, in a voice I’d never heard before, vastly changed. Kip started shouting, shouting something to his father,  to the men, idiot words, crazy words, words that made no sense. I could hear him, see him, gesturing and yelling, though he had his back to us still Tommy and Taylor and I could see, hear his voice, going on and on, all these crazy words making no sense and not stopping, only shouting and yelling and yelling... This oldest son. This grownup boy, more a young man than a boy, shouting as though he would never stop,  still shouting, crazy words going on and on uselessly into the air, but his father came over to him, and said something to him, and Kip became quiet then, he became still. His father waited another second or two with him, not speaking, his hand on Kip ‘s arm, before walking back to face the gang who were blocking the entrance to where he wanted to go.

“Please” he said.

He’d wanted to get to the vegetables that had been grown; to where his work tools had been left, and to the wrecked traps and nets that would be needed again. Is what he’d needed to do that day, to get there, and then be away. To have none of this, to forget about it by now, that anything could be restored here, made good. Only be away from it, all of it, away, with his family, with his sons... To get away somewhere private and alone where they could be on their own and no one come near them there. To be gone from this, all this, from where we were, to get the vegetables in, clear things away as best he could, pack up his stuff and be gone forever and somewhere else and in that somewhere else forever, and safe. A somewhere that was anywhere than here, that was not now, not this, all this  -  though the beauty of the place where we were was enormous upon us that day, the bright sky, the clear air of the morning, and even with everything that was happening the Carters belonging there in the green and gold loveliness of it, in the splendour of the dirt road, in a way that a group of men with their shiny cars and utes parked up beside them seemed only visitors.

One of the men kicked a dog then and killed it. All the dogs had leapt off the truck the minute they’d sensed danger and they'd been on the road, barking and snarling, though Mr Carter kept on at them to  “get inside”. Still their instincts to protect ran high and they would only stay near him, circling around him, ready to move into attack the second they needed to, their teeth bared, curling and turning...And yes, the little black and white collie that got too close to one of the men received a blow to the head with the butt of a rifle and with a tiny yelp fell down, convulsing. Two or three more boots to its head followed, and to its belly, and then it was kicked in a heap to the side of the road. Still Mr Carter didn’t do anything. It was one of his sheep dogs, the collie, not a pig dog who would not have taken a kick so easy. He took a minute, acknowledging what had happened, then he called out to us, “C’mon, boys”, and he and Kip walked back to the truck and got into the front seat, and he reversed, and we drove away. I could hear the men yelling, “She’s not one of your bloody gang. She’s just a girl and you lot have no business with our people. Get out and go back to where you came from.” Their voices should have been silenced by the sound of the truck’s revs but I could still hear them. “Ya bloody coward. What are you doing here, with the rest of us? Get out! Get out!”, with the road emptying out behind us and the dog’s black and white body, streaked with red, getting smaller and smaller, as we drove away.

That’s what light gives. Seeing. And no wonder the boys wanted to keep everything in the dark. So you might say the writer would come in at this point, to remark on that, on the seen and the unseen, those actions of the Carters -  the stick and poke of them like Kip’s school ink tattoos.... I could spend pages bringing certain details out: Look at this here, and here and here – but what then? It’s not where this was ever leading, nor what happened to me, either, the reason for it, or part of it even, the decisions about my own life I went on to make, when the story was  over and I’d had to leave the Carters behind me, put on a  dress and become a girl. Because all the kinds of secrets we children kept, the skinning and killing and the going after small animals still live in Kip’s traps when we got to them so we could do what we wanted to prolong the high pitched squealing... These come to be as nothing next to the knowledge spread out in that bright day - of who Mr Carter was, who he had become, of who he’d had to be. He didn’t say anything to us that day, after we got back to the house, and we left all the gear we’d taken with us just sitting on the back of the truck like anyone might take it, and maybe they did. And he didn’t say anything either, to Kip, about his use of the gun, or about the little dog that had been killed. And he didn’t say anything about the things we’d heard, about what those men had said, the things they’d done.

All that was history, disappeared into time, in the same way years and years later when I came back to that part of the country where I’d grown up to try and find out something about the Carters then, I couldn’t, about who they were, where they might have gone, where they’d come from, maybe, that records might have been kept... For there were none of course. They’d arrived and left again, as people like them do. Arriving, leaving. Leaving, always leaving, because they can never stay. People like the Carters get lost, don’t they, through the years? And the writer can’t find them again when she goes to the place where they’d lived, the house more broken up than ever and the family who are there now, they’ve never heard of the Carters or an old crime, or of land that was once farmed forty miles out of town somewhere in the foothills of the Ureweras because it’s all sealed up again with fresh growth, trees even, the mud so rich and red it can’t help but run back to make things the way they have always been and even if I wanted to I couldn’t find the opening into that land one man made.

He’d been imprisoned for shooting at someone who’d got a young woman out the back of one of those wild pubs they have up north with no closing hours and he had seen her, Mr Carter had, the woman who would become his wife forced up against a wall by a man who was holding her by the throat, and he had acted. He’d taken a shot at a man who’d tried to take his wife. That was what people talked about, whispered about. It was laughter as well as fear that kept the Carters away from the rest. Drink spoke, and it was one those places where shearing gangs come in and people from all over the country, in logging companies or with the vermin outfits, deer and possum culling, where anything went on in those hot dark nights, with the yellow lights turned up inside and the smoke of drinking and men’s talk. So what did he expect? And what was a woman doing there anyhow, they would have thought, all eyes on her because she was something, she was, and her own husband with eyes for her in the same way; he went on to marry her after all. So when someone else had his hands on her, took her from behind and held her down where he thought no one could see, Jim  Carter just went out and picked the rifle off the passenger seat in his ute – someone told me years later. The other had his pants open when he got there, round the side of the building in the dark, where his wife wasn’t even screaming, she’d gone so still she was like a branch.

“My spirit” Kip used to always tell me "comes from my Pappy’s own bad man interior. Look what he’s made of” he used to say, “and I’ve got what’s inside him inside me, too. See? See?”

But the story doesn’t go like that, does it? As though it were another game? Another story of a stupid gun? Nor is it the going back to pick up the lost and also remembered details out of the dark, all the boys’ talk, their shouting and the lies, the what happened next, and next, that will complete it? Because none of it - Kip’s rifle going off, and his father’s before him, all those years ago that he would spend all his life regretting - is what I am left with here. In fact, by now there are no dumb rifles left in this report, this account of mine, at all. There’s no terror, there’s no “Boom”. It’s all quiet here. The weapons have been silenced. All I’d done was run inside the house like Taylor told me to go and get matches so we could smoke out back and stay that night on the verandah, that, after everything that had gone on that day, the boys might leave their father alone, and their mother. So I’d be the one, I suppose, who had to go in there to get a light. And there are no sentences and phrases - nothing that comes close to wire and wood and weapons, the swearing and screaming, fierce whispers in the dark... All those things that I have been able to record, that made up life with the Carters – for the terrible softness that was present in the room that night, and more frightening to me than any of the boys’ actions, or anything that went on in their father’s world, the still quietness of what I saw, the sight of a woman with her husband in her arms and her holding him. His head down upon her shoulder, the silence of him, and her low words as she stroked his head, “It s okay...It s okay...” I took the matches, they didn’t see me, and I ran back outside to where the boys were waiting. It would be our last night together out on that verandah.

So in the end you might say, though I’ve failed to find the words I really need to express it, I did learn something of what it was to be that family, to be so entirely amongst the quietness of what was being brought about indoors, which those boys would have known about, of course, and seen, as I had, before, and no doubt many times... And yet though I may seem at last to have perhaps achieved it, to have conveyed another’s life by writing, to understand it and to show... Still, I find myself standing back from what I have done. Keeping, instead of knowledge, the images and ideas that first emerged for me when I began this story, that continue to turn and show themselves, that I can't let go. For it is the beginning that has been inside the narrative all along to which, always, I want to return, to stay. It’s there, everything I need, in the one account of a man who, when he stepped in the door, seemed to touch the ceiling, he was so tall. His voice yelling out to his family that he was back and them all coming gathering in. Who, as far as his family were concerned, was indeed connected to all others, the world of the country he was born to, and its animals and its ways. Who knew its hidden places and gullies, could go there to them and come home again. That story, of the man I wanted to be one day when I grew up, and longed for, and whose family, to my great blessing, I believed then as I do now, did count me for a time amongst their number. That man. Him. Gone out as not belonging, and part of no system or plan, maybe - but coming back anyhow, returned from the violence, from the secrets and the past and the dark, unarmed and unscathed, royal.

Kirsty Gunn has written five works of fiction and three short-story collections. Her novel The Big Music won the New Zealand Post Book of the Year in 2013. The Boy and the Sea was the 2007 Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and her previous work Featherstone was a New York Times notable book and received a Scottish Arts Council Bursary for literature. Her collection of short stories, Infidelities, was published in 2014 and won the Edge Hill Prize. She is a Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

SONNETS

***

By Barbara Lydecker Crane

When I Was Young

Untitled (Self-Portrait), a painting by Emily Carr

(1871-1945), Victoria, Canada, 1924-5

I liked my mop of chestnut hair cropped short.

No need to brush before I ’d rush outside

to the woodland park nearby, where I ’d consort

with creatures blessedly undignified.

A bug or bird would never have to hear

Clean up your muddy footprints yet again….

Girls are judged from how they first appear….

Of course you ’ll marry….You must do more when

your mother isn ’t well and can ’t do chores….

Recite a Bible verse you learned today.

I ’d obey, and on rainy days indoors,

I ’d paint. Two times I heard my father say,

You do not act as an English daughter should,

but my dear Em, your artist ’s eye is good.

Portrait of Mrs. Zimmerman

a painting by Prudence Heward (1896-1947);

Montreal, 1943

Arlene, a neighbor, wanted me to use

her newly-minted name in the title. She

had wed a soldier the week before he

was shipped to fight in Europe. “No excuse,”

Arlene maintains, “to mope about.” She prides

herself in gleaming yellow rolls of hair,

red lips and nails, a frank and open stare.

No dungarees today–her skirt provides

a bit of grace below her plain grey shirt.

I paint the strength of Arlene ’s legs and arms

and marvel at her mixed magnetic charms.

Of course a proper woman cannot blurt

that thought. With bright abandon I can paint,

but certain feelings stay behind constraint.

Portrait of Zamor

a painting by Marie-Victoire Lemoine

(1754-1820); Paris, 1785

The countess educated this young slave,

Zamor, then rued what proved her own undoing.

The young boy learned the lessons that she gave,

and grew…as disillusionment was brewing.

Her protegé made mention, while I painted

him in satin, that he read Rousseau.

He chattered that King Louis's court was tainted

with opulence that he'd himself forgo

if every citizen were free and equal.

Amid ensuing strife that I detest,

I learned of this accounting's dreadful sequel:

Zamor arranged the countess's arrest.

After time in prison, never seen,

my friend the countess met the guillotine.

Lifelines

Portrait of Beauford Delaney, a painting

by Georgia O ’Keefe (1887-1986);

New York City, 1943

I know he ’s troubled, this quiet, well-dressed man.

Although the critics praise this Negro ’s art,

it doesn ’t sell. He earns what cash he can

posing for other artists like me, and part-

time work as doorman or museum guard.

He hints at liking men; that ’s not at rights

with Christian precepts he was taught. “So hard,”

he shakes his head, “to live by my own lights.”

He murmurs he ’s afraid he ’ll come unstrung.

I ’ve come unstrung myself, with my depression

and a breakdown. Each of us has clung

to painting as our refuge and obsession.

We wrestle with our objects of devotion–

a burning bush, a bone, the wide sky-ocean.

Stanislawa ’s Hair is Brushed and Bowed

Self-Portrait with Daughter, a painting by Aniela

Pajakówna (b.1864 Poland, d.1912 Paris); 1907

Do you see the worry in my eyes,

my careless hair, and how my mouth is set?

My daughter knows our state. She ’s six, and wise

beyond her years. Although she ’s rarely met

her father, Stani has his stalwart will

and clever mind. A budding dramatist,

she makes up lively stories while I fill

our trunks to move again. I ’ll never miss

Vienna, Krakow, Munich, Zurich: whispers

and cold shoulders trailed us. Paris is next.

I ’ll find a room where we can live; my sister ’s

near. Can an artist earn respect

if she ’s a mother who has never wed?

Is nothing more about her to be said?

Barbara Lydecker Crane writes both light and serious poems, as well as some that land in between. Her work has been included in dozens of print journals including American Arts Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Blue Unicorn, Comstock Review, First Things, Light Quarterly, The Lyric, Measure, Rattle, Think, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. A resident of Somerville, MA, Barb is also an artist. Formerly a professional one, her landscape quilts are in public and private collections including Cambridge Savings Bank, the National Quilt Museum, Mass. General Hospital, and Mt. Auburn Hospital.

WHAT ARE NOVELS GOOD FOR?

***

By Ben D’Andrea

Hidden deep in the unwritten past lies the origin of our love for a good story. Long before the invention of such technological marvels as clay tablets or parchment, nameless storytellers, relying solely on memory, beguiled their fellow tribe folk with gripping tales of danger, courage, and sacrifice. To satisfy this perpetual desire today, we turn largely to movies and — far less often — live theatre and novels.

The novels that succeed best at satisfying our seemingly innate craving for a good story are clearly those that dominate bestseller lists. Mysteries, thrillers, fantasy, and romance are the brands of storytelling that the vast majority of readers enjoy most. Perhaps these fiction genres are the nearest — though still remote — descendants of those original tales of ancient days when, before the advent of print, to tell a story was to recite it in the shared language of the tribe.

The language of genre fiction — unlike the often experimental or poetic language of the literary novel — rarely strays from everyday speech. Genre delivers stories straight up. It relies on the vernacular, familiar and unassuming, to tell suspenseful, action-filled stories that compel us to discover what happens next. We need no special literary training to enjoy brazen cliff-hangers.

Compared to bestselling page-turners, literary novels can be challenging — as many of us discovered in high school. Back then we learned that certain novelists — Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Laurence, William Golding, F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name just a few of the worthies on high school reading lists — aspired to a purpose higher than merely telling entertaining yarns.

Unlike the humble language of many whodunit mysteries thrown into the trunk of the car before a summer vacation, along with beach towels and badminton rackets, the language of the novels we read in high school sometimes tested our adolescent mettle (unpopular introverts excepted). Passages that read like strange, wordy digressions from the tale proper were to be highlighted or underlined with great vigour as crucial to passing the final exam. These excerpts provided important clues to the meaning of the novel, and often introduced key symbols, as English teachers are programmed to point out. The meaning of those symbols, you may recall, were as contentious as the poor grades on your English essays.

The wide variety of specialty chisels in the workshop of literary novelists allows them to carve more out of words than just symbols, of course. While no two literary novelists use exactly the same set of literary tools and techniques, their ultimate purpose is to provide more than just a frothy diversion to fill your spare time in the way that a crime or mystery novel would. Page per page, literary fiction demands more patience and concentration than genre fiction. Its language is more nuanced, more finely chiselled. It obliges us to read slowly, to pause and reflect. Reading a page of Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time may prove daunting. Reading a page of a horror novel by Stephen King isn’t.

Literary fiction may be just as entertaining to some readers as genre is to the vast majority. For such atypical readers, the challenge of complex novels is worthwhile if they deliver the reward that supposedly elevates them above genre fiction. But what reward is that?

If you were bold enough in high school, you may have asked much the same question of your English teacher. The daunting homework of reading an entire novel may have fomented adolescent unrest and a demand to know why To Kill a Mockingbird or Fifth Business was required reading. Perhaps your high school English teacher hit back with a vague, didactic speech about the power of fiction. Or one about developing critical thinking skills. Or that other standby about nurturing empathy for our fellow human beings. Or maybe your English teacher, less the literary idealist than others, invoked art for art’s sake.

In 1983, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to William Golding, whose novel Lord of the Flies remains a staple in high schools. The Academy praised Golding’s novels for illuminating the “human condition” but also for being “entertaining and exciting.” These dual qualities may be the reason why Lord of the Flies has lasted as long as it has on high school reading lists. It’s an adventure story whose higher ambition is to expose humanity’s lust for power and propensity for violence.

Is insight into human behaviour, then, the singular reward we derive from serious literature like Lord of the Flies? Is that the ultimate difference between “light” reading, such as fantasy or romance, and literary fiction?

If so, the literary novel has some obvious competition. Reflections of one kind or another on the human condition — the broadest, most inexhaustible of topics, after all — find their way into every human endeavour. Human suffering and unhappiness go under the microscope in history books and documentaries, in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and philosophy, in museums and the visual arts, and in daily newspapers and tv news programs. A first-hand account of living through war or in an oppressive or intolerant society may raise questions of fundamental justice as effectively as any serious novel. Even that trove of mental rubble, social media, can be an unexpected source of insight into the human condition.

Obviously, we don’t need literary novels to expose our flawed, often contemptible humanity. If literary novels are in a special category all their own it’s because they tell stories in a particular way. Their vocation is, impractically, aesthetic. Literary novels are like paintings in an art museum: designed for thoughtful contemplation. Staring at the Mona Lisa, we abandon ourselves to our innermost thoughts and reactions. Is Da Vinci’s portrait as beautiful and mysterious as they claim?

Reading any novel is as private an experience as looking at a painting. The literary novel lays special claim to our inner selves — our concerns, uncertainties, fears — by means of language that’s in no rush to get on with the story as quickly as a thriller or spy novel would be. That language may track the emotional states and thoughts of its characters in detail. It may try to plumb the depths of meaning beneath the seemingly obvious surface of circumstances and events. In short, it’s language that reaches for what’s difficult to express in the everyday speech that’s the stock-in-trade of genre. To some, it is high literary prose, to others verbal ostentation.

Literary novels attract readers with a propensity for introspection. Spy thrillers, police procedurals, and other commercial story-types attract those less inclined to self-analyze while reading. Literary novels are just one specialized form of storytelling among many others designed to appeal to particular types of readers.

Readers of all kinds of novels, however, seek the enjoyment that all good storytelling delivers. In the end, the literary novel is as much a form of escapism as a thriller or romance — no less so because it’s favoured by the Swedish Academy, English teachers, and literary intellectuals. Reading a novel by Dostoevsky is as much a form of entertainment, of idle indulgence, as reading the latest bodice-ripper. Even novels with elevated themes and well-wrought language merely provide transient pleasure. The novels that literary reviewers praise as contemporary masterpieces manage to entertain some readers. That is all they do.

Fortunately, our survival doesn’t depend on novels of any stripe. The great novels of the past haven’t yet managed to convince us even to be kind to one another. No literary masterpiece of the nineteenth century could prevent the atrocities of the twentieth. Some may argue that novels can be a call to action, but no novel published today will be any more effective than those of the past at combatting hate or racism or sexism.

The world’s most prestigious literary award is the Nobel prize given for “outstanding contributions in literature.” But it’s literary fiction that attracts the plaudits of the Swedish Academy and its Nobel Committee for Literature. The Academy hasn’t yet honoured novelists in the mould of P.D. James or Georges Simenon, best known for their compelling crime fiction. Novelists’ methods may differ — but it’s all storytelling that originated around that campfire of ancient days. Someone had a good story to tell and we listened with rapt attention.

Ben D’Andrea is a North Vancouver writer who has taught English literature, a variety of writing courses, and procedural law in BC colleges and universities. He is the author of Rhymes Biggle and Wee, a book of limericks for children.

WYNDHAM LEWIS—THE INTELLECTUAL AS ARTIST

***

By David Richard Beasley

Portrait of Wyndham Lewis (Oil paint on canvas) by Michael Ayrton (1921–1975). Tate Modern, London

For some decades the Wyndham Lewis Society has issued annuals of essays on Lewis’s philosophical and political views. A slew of books interpret his writings. Several biographies add to his two autobiographies. The profundity and variety of interpretations make any attempt to give a comprehensive picture of Lewis in a brief essay a herculean challenge. Some attempts have been made to relate his paintings to his novels, but it is as an author that his reputation is recognized today,— that is, among the more serious class of reader.

So extensive, so varied in interpretation are the commentaries on Lewis’s writings that these views should be included in an assessment of his work. Hence, I have quoted, sometimes at length to catch the full meaning, a cross-section of critics to give the reader a sense of Lewis’s impact on the intellectual community and the recognition of the prescience of his thought for today. I also quote from Lewis’s writings where the reader will note he uses small case letters for nationalities and related identities such as “european”.

I learned of Percy Wyndham Lewis when attending a series of lectures on British authors at Oxford University in the New Year of 1955. When the lecturer read a passage from one of Lewis’s books I was attracted by the immediacy of its imagery. I expressed my admiration to the lecturer and he, learning that I was Canadian, told me that Lewis carried a Canadian passport. He lent me a book on Lewis for a couple of hours. From it I discovered that Lewis not only authored novels, political, social and art criticisms but was a painter of note. He had formed the second art movement in British painting, Vorticism, in 1913 to 1914, months before the first World War.

The lecturer’s informing me that Lewis had a Canadian passport rather than identifying him as Canadian puzzled me.

Lewis was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia in 1882 and lived his first six years there with an English mother who painted landscapes whilst his American father wrote stories of his experiences as an officer in the Union Army in the US Civil War. The early years of a person’s life leaves a defining impression. When his parents moved to England, to live on the Isle of Wight, Wyndham Lewis must have felt the strangeness of a very different culture, which became a challenge when his father eloped with the housemaid to the states, His mother moved with him to London and enrolled him as a boarder at Dr. Arnold’s Rugby School with its relentless punishments, sporting life, and fagging system. Lewis, by his own account, was hopeless at sports and the dunce of his class, coming last in the years he was there. One of his masters caught him painting with easel and palette in his room and recognizing his talent helped him escape on a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London. After two years there, owing to his indifference to the rules, he was expelled.

Was his behaviour owing to his estrangement from the society in which he found himself when transported from Canada as a boy? Canadian passports identified the owner as British until the 1970s and thus Canadians in Britain required no work permit, although the English regarded them as not-English. His English friends thought of him as European. Once on returning from Spain to England on an English cargo ship, the crew would not believe that he was English. The more distinguished of his forebears were French-Canadian mixed with Huron Indian, described in The Talented Intruder, a Canadian-issued, illustrated and comprehensive book giving details of his activities, paintings, drawings and many writings and broadcasts when living in Canada during the second World War.1

From Toronto in 1941 he wrote to his publisher in London: “I am glad to be out of the States. Who was it, by the way, who told you I was an American? That is so little true that in order to get a two months extension of my visitors permit I had to be fingerprinted and had such a dose of American officialdom that—although we have to be polite to the States in the hope that at long last they may agree to come in and help us—I am thoroughly sick of the Stars and Stripes and all they stand for. Needless to say, this is not for publication. In New York I ran into a great deal of anti-English sentiment —a hangover from Fenian days: but the mentality of the sturdily-rebellious colony, the inferiority-complex of a "new" society, is everywhere present, even at this late date. — I think they have a better president than they deserve in Mr. Roosevelt, who will help England in every way, if they will let him.”2

With improved artistry and friendship with the eccentric artist Augustus John and the writer Sturge Moore established, he went at eighteen to Paris and having avoided the conformism of formal education began the long intellectual journey to recognition as a genius. He attended Henri Bergson’s courses on the flux of time, the past as part of the present, then studied art in Hamburg, lived in Madrid and spent time in Brittany where he drew the Breton fishermen and began writing stories of their primitive lives. These stories he presented to Ford Madox Ford for a literary magazine open to works with realist content. Their publication brought Lewis the friendships of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, two ex-patriot American poets, whose work Ford promoted. They were seen as leaders in league of the avant-garde. James Joyce became one of them later.

Whether being different in dress and behaviour derived from a Canadian temperament of individualism or the nonconformism of the artist, Lewis became a strange figure whose appearances were sudden and whose background and abode remained mysterious. (He encouraged the myth that he was born on his father’s yacht in the Bay of Fundy). His bouts of paranoia when he dressed in a black cape and sat in restaurants with his back to the wall and labelled himself the Enemy, his fierce satirical written attacks on the class system, the Bloomsbury group and authors who catered to the degraded public taste for sentiment, romance and violence in return for money, his iconoclastic attitude toward art aestheticism were honest expressions cloaked in a wildness that Lewis said “disinfected him of his early respectability.” His admiration for the intellectual as against the masses. which he had discovered in his reading in philosophy and literature led him to fashion his position as the outsider, the opponent, and the innovator. During his student years, his mother supported him and intermittent financial support came from his father. When this support stopped, his life became a scramble for a livelihood to maintain his independence of thought and freedom from obligation, always in pursuit of the arts and never as an employe.

It was as an artist that he became notorious in London. Vorticism was action with stark realism in the classical sense as opposed to the cubism of Braque and Picasso which Lewis saw as static and romantic sentimentalism. At first influenced by Italian futurism which Marinetti brought to England, Lewis and his fellow artists soon found it frenetic, purposeless and leading to an idolizing of machinery, mainly the motorcar, as symbol of the state and fascism. By contrast the vortex, which is in constant motion, has a stable form and still centre. The artist, occupying the still centre, sees with detachment that the chaos whirling around him is formed  by and around his stillness.  Thus  he depicts the human figure as a machine in a pattern of rhythmic form to emphasize its dehumanization in the modern world. “The basic difference,” wrote a critic, “is that Futurism follows the sensibility of the impressionists and their subjective tradition. Vorticism, on the contrary, shares the Cubist faith in a modern sensibility and objectivity both as a corrective to the spirit of the nineteenth century and as the consequences of the scientific enunciations of Einstein, Planck, Minkowski and others, which had changed the relation between man and reality, disclosing an ambiguous, pluri-dimensional reality. . . . Whilst the futurist seeks to become one in a mystical surrender to his reality and expresses this state with sensuousness and enthusiasm, the Vorticist, despising this sense of fever and emotionality, aims to create an intellectual art, controlled and unsentimental.”3

The first World War ended Vorticism but its tenets remained with Lewis to inform his fiction and social criticism. In The Revenge for Love, the first of his novels I read,  I  sensed the intelligence in the writing and the objectivity of the story quite different from the novels of the day.

Lewis spent the early years of the first World War as a gunner on the front lines and, when recuperating from wounds, was hired by Lord Beaverbrook as a war artist to paint the scenes of Canadians at war. He continued his objective classical geometric style, which became valuable testaments to the futility of war. His aim was, he said, “to do a series dealing with the gunner’s life from his arrival in the depot to his life on the line.” Paintings such as “Pill Box”, “Battery-Shelled”, “Walking Wounded”, ”Battery Salvo”, “though decidedly angular were realistic.” They were his first one-man show, in London in February 1919, called “Guns.” Critical of his early abstract paintings, he thought abstraction eliminated nature which was important for understanding the human.

He developed his painting skill alongside his writing, including his remarkable novel Tarr until he suffered some years of illness in the twenties. He depended on his writing for an income and in his later years painted portraits for the money he so badly needed. His first portrait of T. S. Eliot became a cause célèbre when the Royal Academy rejected it and Lewis called that establishment a “disgusting bazaar.”

The Bloomsbury writers and artists, whom he satirized, made him persona non grata to editors such that he began his own journals, first Blast and then Tyro and in 1927 The Enemy, short-lasting but influential. “What must have seemed an exaggerated individualism on my part in The Tyro, as much as in The Enemy,” he wrote, “is not to be traced, oddly enough, to love of the ego, but to a sense of typicalness of a type out of place. I have never felt alone. . . . It did not matter being rather odd; like an albino in the physiological order,— It was probably a good thing to have something so contradictory around: somebody who did not hasten to agree with everybody else. . . . Something of these psychological backgrounds, that is all contributed to the particular note of mock defiance: the images of the bedizen horseman, or the masked harlot swaggering across the cover of the latter of these reviews,” [viz. “The Enemy”.]4

When the second World War began Lewis relied on his Canadian passport to give him refuge in Canada from criticism by the English press and society’s opinion-setters because of his book of 1931 in praise of Hitler’s management of Germany. He wrote to his publisher: “My presence on the North American continent is a question of force majeure. I can earn a living here whereas I doubt if I could in England. When the war started I wanted to go back, but at the time I was going through a minor economic Blitz of my own, and had not the necessary jack.”5

An introduction to his philosophy of how art affects the development of society is fundamental for comprehending his writings. I quote from scholars of Lewis’s works for explanations of the philosophical thought that interested him.

His Philosophic Roots

European influences were paramount. Lewis had studied contemporary French political writings, including those of Georges Sorel, Julien Benda, Charles Peguy and Jacques Maritain, and had read widely in German and Russian literature, philosophy and criticism. Thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, Croce, Hegel, Worringer and Santayana were influential in his own development and subsequent work. Lewis's self education may have seemed a haphazard and unsystematic affair, but it is this background which provided a rich, if eclectic basis for the formation of his aesthetics and philosophy. It is the influence of Nietzsche and of Schopenhauer that Lewis readily admits of importance in his early years; Kant was found equally accessible and continued to exert a powerful and active influence on aspects of Lewis's thought after both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had been denounced as precursors of the time-philosophy.

Both Lewis and Schopenhauer, however, shared a ‘veneration for ‘timeless values' and would have agreed on the ominous effects of 'Time', which immediately aligns them together against the Bergsonlan view of duration as a positive life-force.

Henri Bergson’s teaching of the importance of the flux of time to the development of society had a major influence on artists and particularly on modern literature with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past its most popular example.

Real time consisting of heterogeneous moments is perceived as “pure duration” by intuition and intellect combined. Duration stresses the open flow of time, a continuous progress of the past “gnawing” into the future as opposed to one instant succeeding another which would mean a continuous present with no past. As the past grows without ceasing, there is no limit to its preservation—”all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it.”

The act of knowing is dualistic. One strand is the intellectual, spatializing process, representing the portals of consciousness, the seeing of things in the world as static, solidified and mechanistic. The other strand is intuitive knowledge, an unconscious feeling and emotion that allows humans to have inner knowledge of other selves and matter. Bergson claims that the spacializing process facilitates decision-making and helps us act in the physical world but cannot apprehend the “real”, since duration and flux, which are ineffable, may only be understood in terms of intuitive, sympathetic means. Man cannot experience change which operates outside him and be subject to the vagaries of movement through time, since the true self is the movement through time itself. We exist dynamically as change, and we are most aware of our essential selves when we live by intuition, identifying with the elan vital, the life-force (the inexpressible spiritual and creative energy, the ultimate reality of the universe.)6

To believe in the ultimate, supreme reality as consisting of time, to which all forms of life, intelligence and matter are subject was anathema to Lewis because it undermined the notion of self and the individual in a universe determined by temporality. Bergson by substituting time for the unconscious propels the inner recesses of the mind into a public domain where all is accessible and nothing is exclusive to the self. It leaves no place for the spatial, classical intellect. It denies that there are unique creative personalities since creativity itself is wrested from the individual and distributed universally at the behest of the elan vital. It threatens the artist’s ideas and beliefs about the uniqueness of his medium and mode of expression.

Lewis thought that a dual source of creativity, intellectual and instinctive, produced art. The plastic artist valued the forms, outlines, surfaces and external appearance of things and would attempt to maintain the objective hardness of material objects rather than have them dissolve into the flux and cease to exist as a separate activity in a spacial reality.

One of the most important characteristics of this spatial world—with its ties to the visual, the common sense, the mind, and thus the personality—is that in it, Lewis believes, we can maintain a clear distinction, a clear opposition, between a dead material world and the living mind. The introduction of private and subjective time-systems by the time philosophers—Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Oswald Spengler et. al. —destroy the autonomy of both matter and mind by breaking up the composite space of the assembled senses into an independent space of touch, a space of sight, a visceral space, and so forth: the conversion of the things into a series of discrete apparitions. In the world of the time-cult, both object and subject are dissolved into fragments, mind and matter merge into each other, and our power as thinkers is abandoned. In his space world, Lewis claims, matter stays dead and we retain our primacy. The time-cult’s emphasis on discontinuity between different temporal versions of the self Lewis rejects with the statement: "The more highly developed an individual is, or the more civilized a race, this discontinuity tends to disappear. The 'personality' is born. Continuity, in the individual as in the race, is the diagnostic of a civilized condition. If you can break this personal continuity in an individual, you can break him. For he is that continuity." He added, “. . . as stability is the manifest goal of all organic life, and the thing from which we all of us have most to gain, we see no use, in the first place, and in the second see no theoretic advantage, in this fusion [of space and time]. For the objective world most useful to us, and what may be the same thing, most ‘beautiful', and therefore with most meaning, and that is further to say in a word with most reality, we require a Space distinct from Time.” 7

Man’s capacity for a detached and dispassionate analysis appealed to Lewis and therefore the intellectual was a central figure to his thought. “Men owe everything they can ever hope to have to an ‘intellectual' of one sort or another.” He preferred an engagement in the politics of the intellect rather than the politics of power. The intellectual such as Marx, Proudhon and Rousseau, being the source of suggestions and definitions of human possibility, is the source of political change. “I claim further that the intellectual is the only person in the world who is not a potential "capitalist," because his "capital" is something that cannot be bartered. What he deals in, even when it gives him power, gives him no money. . . . The intellect is more removed from the crowd than is anything: but it is not a snobbish withdrawal, but a going aside for the purposes of work.”8

Lewis’s most productive period was the decade between 1924 and 1934, when he published some nineteen volumes of fiction and criticism, a "series of books devoted to the work of radical analysis of the ideas by which our society has been taught to live."' Originally conceived as one enormous work to be called “The Man of the World”, these books illustrate the major concern of Lewis's work as a critic (and, to a considerable extent, as a novelist): the hidden connections, motives, and consequences of apparently unrelated phenomena, "the notions behind the events occurring upon the surface." . . . His best and most representative volume of criticism, is the massive Time and Western Man, Lewis's analysis of modern literature and philosophy (with forays into history, psychology, popular culture, theoretical physics, politics, and a score of other topics).9

Nonfiction

In Time and the Western Man Lewis studies “the time notions which have now, in one form or another, gained an undisputed ascendancy in the intellectual world”. He “defeats” them by showing the time cult “in full operation” in the works of writers such as Proust and Joyce and “unmasks the will” behind the Time-philosophy.

A letter he wrote to an American college for a prospective teaching post reveals the importance he placed on the book.10

What I should aim to impart at Bard would be more especially the projection downwards, as it were, upon the social plane, of certain modern philosophies: what in practice they stood for. And I should show, by way of classical analogy, how Plato's teaching would work out on the social plane, what his teaching was calculated to do to those who came beneath his sway, upon the social and political plane: what type of life was adumbrated in his philosophy.

This was, of course, the kind of problem which occupied me in Time and Western Man. Treating metaphysics as arbitrary myths, almost as much as does Professor Ayer [a logical positivist]— as doctrinal propaganda for an individual, or a group, personality and its way of life (cf. Hegel and the god-State, as example of group expression, Vico as example of personal), I set out to analyse, from this standpoint, the contemporary systems in which the concept Time played so revealing and monopolistic a part.

D. G. Bridson’s The Filibuster. A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis discusses several of Lewis’s nonfictional books, especially Time and Western Man, Paleface, and The Art of Being Ruled. One passage provides a segue from Lewis’s abstract argument about the dangers of the Time Cult to its expression in modern literature.11

. . . with his essay Paleface, he drew down a great deal of abuse for what was regarded (quite unfairly) as his 'racialist' attitude towards the Black American and the American Indian. . . . If anything, Paleface is a book about White emancipation. It is a protest against the sense of inferiority which the white race is being invited to feel when faced with the moral integrity, innate understanding and artistic achievements of the coloured races—the invitation coming as much from certain white intellectuals as from the coloured races themselves. It is, in fact, one more broadside in Lewis's onslaught against a Bergsonian over-selling of the intuitive in art at the expense of the intellectual tradition. We are back once more with the hip and the square—the Black and the Hopi being the hipsters on this occasion, and Lewis once more the square determined at all costs to defend his classical values. It is the insistence of certain writers on the moral superiority of the primitive that he is disputing. Such an insistence, allied as it was to a modern obsession with the primitive in art, he sees—once again—as a deliberate undermining of the intellectual position. It is to substitute the instinct for the intelligence, the emotion for the thought, and the spontaneous for the calculated. . . . It is, in short, a dangerous form of sentimentality; and when he finds writers of the calibre of D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson indulging in that sentimentality, Lewis once more moves up his artillery. . . . .

Paleface becomes political only when it moves on to examining the reasons behind the fashionable acceptance of Lawrence's love for the primitive by an audience that could hardly have been expected to share his 'little ghost'. The fact is, says Lewis, that the popular acceptance of the 'superiority' of the coloured races by liberal intellectuals is based upon something far deeper than a romantic liking for the strange and the exotic. It is an outcome of the inferiority complex which the white race has been developing over the years, and which the writings of Sherwood Anderson, Lawrence, the Green Mansions of W. H. Hudson and other works were doing far too much to encourage.

In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis writes of modern literature’s effects on society.12

The Lunatic, or the Demented, and the Child are linked together by psycho-analysis, the link being its dogma of the Unconscious. . . . The willed sickness of the modern man is connected with the atmosphere of revolution and threatening chaos . . .

Miss Gertrude Stein is the best-known exponent of a literary system that consists in a sort of gargantuan mental stutter. What she is exploiting in her method is the processes of the demented. . . .Her art is composed, first, of repetition, which lyricizes her utterances on the same principle as that of the hebrew poetry. But the repetition is also in the nature of a photograph of the unorganized word-dreaming of the mind when not concentrated for some logical functional purpose. Mr. Joyce employed this method with success (not so radically and rather differently) in Ulysses. The thought-stream or word-stream of his hero's mind was supposed to be photographed. . . .

The exploitation of madness, of ticks, blephorospasms, and eccentricities of the mechanism of the brain, is a thing of a similar order in language to the exploitation of the physical aspect of imbecility in contemporary painting. The acromegalic monsters of Picasso, which gaze at you with the impenetrable dullness of the idiot, are an example of this. Matisse provides, throughout his work, an excellent illustration of the fascination felt for not only disease and deformity, but imbecility.

Lewis illustrates how Ernest Hemingway used Gertrude Stein’s method of repetition and simplicity to form his “infantile, dull-witted” style. Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and himself are dissected in his Men Without Art but his  analysis of Hemingway’s style is most revealing.13

Take up any book of his, again, and open it at random: you will find a page of stuff that is, considered in isolation, valueless as writing. It is not written: it is lifted out of Nature and very artfully and adroitly tumbled out upon the page: it is the brute material of every-day proletarian speech and feeling. The matiere is cheap and coarse: but not because it is proletarian speech merely, but because it is the prose of reality — the prose of the street-car or the provincial newspaper or the five and ten cent store. . . .

This is the voice of the “folk," of the masses, who are the cannon-fodder, the cattle outside the slaughter-house, serenely chewing the cud — of those to whom things are done, in contrast to those who have executive will and intelligence. It is itself innocent of politics —one might almost add alas! That does not affect its quality as art. The expression of the soul of the dumb ox would have a penetrating beauty of its own, if it were uttered with genius —with bovine genius (and in the case of Hemingway that is what has happened): just as much as would the folk-song of the baboon, or of the "Praying Mantis." But where the politics crop up is that if we take this to be the typical art of a civilization —and there is no serious writer who stands higher in Anglo-Saxony today than does Ernest Hemingway — then we are by the same token saying something very definite about that civilization.

This leads him to his major concern, the decay of society under democracy and the challenge of authoritarianism, which he eventually sees as worse.

Democracy vs Authoritarianism

“A kind of gigantically luxurious patriarchate is what democracy and monster industry together have invented. The analogy between a great industrial city and the desert—the emptiness and abstractness of industrial life—is patent enough. So patriarchal conditions in contemporary urban life are not so unnatural as would appear at first sight. There is no king; but there are many mercantile despots, more or less benevolently patriarchal, indistinguishable in taste, culture, or appearance from their servants, or subjects, or "clients." This is how it comes that the family once more occupies the foreground of our lives. With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping "homeliness" entirely of this unreal, materialist world, where all "sentiment" is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called "the Public," the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state. The government becomes an emperor disguised as Father Christmas, an All-father, a paterfamilias with his pocket full of crystal sets, gramophones, Russian books, and flesh-coloured stockings, which he proceeds to sell to his "children."14

All are potential blood-donors to swell the veins and magnify the bulk of a Moloch called 'the State'. (For this Power House goes by the name of 'the State'). Its Bank is a 'Blood-Bank'. We are forcibly bled to feed it. Its Capital is drawn from our veins. . . . The much-photographed, well-housed, well-fed politician, the object of much deference and flattery, is rather like the much-photographed Hollywood Star — he is only envied by the very simple and untalented people, or by the power-addict. On the other hand he has something the glamorous Star has none of —namely power. This means licence to interfere with, direct, and control other people.15

The disintegration of society is being brought about by the feminization or neutralization of the White European. “The feminist had been followed by the feminising male — a compensatory movement — and these developments took a spectacular form. New York was far less affected than London; the American he-man is a redoubtable conservative obstacle.”

The change from the traditional social pattern, dominated by sex, into an asexual pattern, with maleness shorn of all but its merely organic distinctness, will come about in many ways. One of the most obvious, is via class-war. Man constitutes as it were a class. Among the many class-wars by which European society is being very effectually disintegrated, the sex-war occupied a position of great importance. Though no longer a 'war', the effects of that civil war of the sexes are everywhere evident: in the form of pressures tending to dissolve the Family (which is the stronghold of the 'masculine' as much as of the 'eternal feminine') is revealed the same great design as was, in the first place, responsible for setting in motion the 'sex-war', and its Press-slogans injurious to the man as husband. . . .

Lewis's antipathy to the chaos of democracy stemmed from a fundamental preference for “the rational and well ordered.” By treating people functionally autocratic government could make them more contented by persuading them to stop “seeking always outside themselves objects of happiness” and instead to discover “their own reality.” As he saw matters, the “‘noble' exactitude and harmonious proportion of the European, scientific, ideal" was threatened not only by the impressionism of movements such as futurism and surrealism, but also by the levelling drifts of parliamentary government. [“The parliamentary system . . . lost its meaning. . . the humbug involved in such a transparently one-sided assembly makes it impossible to go on with it once a certain point of enlightenment or exasperation has been reached. . . .All the liberal tricks are seen through and known now by heart.”]16

Lewis likens fascism to marxian doctrine, all etatisme or collectivism. He sees that militant liberalist elements are being physically wiped out “as happened in Russia, but they are being eliminated quite satisfactorily without recourse to murder on a large scale.” Written a century ago, his words are eerily prescient.

In ten years a state will have been . . .the creation of a tyrant or dictator, with virtual powers of life and death: for with his highly disciplined, implicitly obedient, fascist bands, no person anywhere will be able to escape assassination if he causes trouble to the central government, or holds, too loudly, opinions that displease it. As the press will be — is already — under the direct control of the central government, and its editors and responsible staffs appointed by it, death, imprisonment, or banishment can be inflicted on anybody, anywhere, without ruffling the surface of opinion — indeed, can occur, if required, without its being reported. In such a state it is difficult to see how "politics" could exist. "Economics" will similarly disappear. All the boring and wasteful sham-sciences that have sprung up in support of the great pretences of democracy, and in deference to notions of democratic freedom, will die from one day to the next: for they are the most barren of luxuries, and no one would be interested to keep them alive for their own sakes (in the way that arts are sometimes kept alive) for an hour. . . . That the greater number of socialists, especially of the reformist type, still live in a quite unreal world of liberal idealism is an absurdity that cannot be imputed to any neglect on the part of fate in supplying them with portents. Darker portents, from their point of view, could hardly have been devised for them. Nor can leaders of revolutionary opinion, like Sorel, be accused of leaving them unenlightened as to what a dark and desperate world they have chosen to dream their dreams in. . .  The intelligence of the white races has been softened by success; they have been used for so long to easy and unchallenged power where other races were concerned, they succumb at once to a little intelligence. That is the weapon they have scorned and neglected, alas for them: and a litany of such scorn they are being today carefully taught, to the tune of "You may have those highbrow airs.”17

In his The Lion and the Fox. The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare, Lewis analyses “Coriolanus”, the exemplar of a dictator. (I see the Roman man-child in the former U.S. President Donald Trump, who is regarded as an obstreperous ten-year old with a psychopathic mind-set.)

In Machiavelli's case the ‘Prince' was, it is important to recall, a new self-made ruler, a martial adventurer: one, that is to say, who did not inherit power, but seized it. This Italian was only interested in the founding of States, and he thought uniquely of power. — The attention paid by Shakespeare to his doctrines would certainly not be that of one sharing this nasty obsession. What would attract him in Machiavelli would be the latter's exposure of the manner in which the thirst for power maddens men, and how ruling is in fact a disease. . . .

Coriolanus, as a figure, is of course the super-snob. Of all Shakespeare's heroes he is the coldest, and the one that Shakespeare himself seems to have felt most coldly towards. He was the child of Volumnia, not of Shakespeare, and one that never became anything but a schoolboy, crazed with notions of privilege and social distinction, incapable of thinking (not differing in that from the rest of Shakespeare's nursery of colossi), but also congealed into a kind of machine of unintelligent pride. He is like a Nietzschean, artificial "aristocrat," with little nobility in the sense that Don Quixote caricaturally embodies the noble, but possessing only a maniacal tolerance and stiffness. . . 18

Lewis recalls a performance of “Coriolanus” at the Comedie Francaise “in the feverish thirties” that “was productive of the next thing to a riot. At that moment in the play when Coriolanus passionately denounces, in the presence of the Tribunes of the People, the populace, the French Theatre audience, unable to contain itself any longer, leaped to its feet. Men shouted defiance at one another, fists were brandished: in some instances hot partisans of the aristocratic principle seized vociferous proletarians by the throat, bellowing 'communard!' (Where I sat the 'aristos' were in far greater force than 'le populaire'. There were some brisk exchanges.)”

Lewis concludes: “There remains the personal question —not as that affected Shakespeare in his grandiose single figures (either kings or great captains) but in its application to theories of the State. Ever since the English cut off the head of Charles I, personal rule has been invested for them with many of the attributes of Satan. Yet there is much to be said, in theory, for personal rule. And much was said in favour of rule by the One in ’The Lion and the Fox'. Even, as you may recall, a famous Englishman expressed the view that ‘a benevolent tyrant would be the best type of ruler’. It is the benevolence that is the trouble.”19

His Lesser  Known Nonfiction

From an overview of the controversies that Lewis addressed in his more important books we touch upon three other books of interest among many that are worth finding. (Finding them can be expensive: the only copy of Anglosaxony I discovered was selling online for $3,000)

In 1932 Lewis published The Doom of Youth, which attacked the encouragement of intense consciousness of youth.. . .  For youth, trained, militarized, rigidly organized (and organized to appear spontaneous and un-rigid), was becoming "mechanical." Futurists and the Italian Fascists were exploiting youth in the first instance, but the period following the first World War was everywhere fertile in "youth-politics," since the male principle, representing authority, had shown itself capable of being overthrown. The result was that youth and woman could more easily take hold of values.

Lewis warned that "youth-politics" intended to shorten human life by insistence on being young (the "doom" of youth), to level genius, break up family life, encourage precocity and radicalism, extinguish the true individual, effeminize values, and turn youth into a unique value at the same time as (in fact) abolishing it, a divide et impera policy on the part of big business aimed both at cheap labor and an uncritical consumer public.

Lewis had written in praise of the “Hitler Youth” the previous year in a short book of collected articles on the “peace-seeking” Hitler and his growing of the German economy. He downplayed the anti-Semitism that he had seen on a visit as did many others in Britain. The appearance of a book critical of the youth movement implies that he was having second thoughts. He found Italian fascism admirable in reinvigorating Italy but he was undecided about the German version. By the late 1930s he realized his huge miscalculation and his stupidity in dismissing those voices who tried to inform him of the true savagery of Hitlerism. His book of 1939 The Hitler Cult condemned Hitler as “vulgar, warlike and romantic insofar as his movement became an “unsubstantial Gothic dream.” His disillusion with Mussolini is complete. Also in 1939 appeared his The Jews, Are They Human? (following the successful The English, Are They Human?) which is a direct plea for the Jewish race. It attacks anti-Semitism, pays tribute to Jewish ability, and criticizes current German racial theories. Lewis rejects his former idea that, like the Negro, the Jew is in power, his supposed racial inferiority a myth, and that in reality the Aryan is the victim of intolerance in our society can be attributed to his sincere belief (expressed in Hitler) that racial bias breaks down class bias. "The more racial feeling, the less class feeling."

"I do not think it is unfair to say,” wrote George Orwell in 1939, “that Mr Wyndham Lewis has 'gone left'," and has declared himself a 'revolutionary' and 'for the poor against the rich.' He was referring to The Mysterious Mr. Bull, in which Lewis examines already-existing opinions, and dismisses all of them. He concludes that there is no such thing as "John Bull," and he is "mysterious" because he does not exist. Lewis narrates English history from the workingman’s experiences; thus the book can be said to dissolve actively the ideologies of Englishness, in all their variety.20

The writings we have discussed give us a foundation upon which we can survey his fiction with perhaps a better understanding than we would have had otherwise.

Lewis’s Fiction

I found three of his fictional works the most readable—Mrs. Dukes’ Million—The Revenge for Love—Self-Condemned. Professor Daniel Schenker also favoured them in his excellent study, Wyndham Lewis; Religion and Modernism.

Mrs. Dukes’ Million, according to Professor Schenker can be read as an ingenious and intellectually sophisticated mystery novel that belies the indifference of its author. (The manuscript was rejected for publication and found in a London junk shop about forty years later).

The mysterious Raza Khan, an Eastern potentate living in London who heads a gang of criminals dedicated to the staging of elaborate impersonations for personal gain, gets word of a one-million pound estate left to old Mrs Dukes by her deceased husband who left her thirty years ago. He decides to defraud the old woman, kidnap her, replace her with one of his “Actor-Gang’ and enjoy the artistry of his actors acting and living at the same time. The actor imitating Mrs Dukes is bored with repeating the same mechanical scheme of robbery. By avoiding the police and Khan’s henchmen, he escapes with the money. The plot of Lewis's novel rests upon two premises of aestheticism: the corrupt nature of the social and material worlds, and the redemptive power of the individual artist's imagination.

Critic Hugh Kenner noted that Lewis regarded it as a potboiler which would gain him enough money to have the time to write Tarr, a novel about student life in Paris. His other attempts to write bestsellers lacked “a cardinal motif: empathy: a sequence  of small unfakeable indications that the writer in some fundamental important way enjoys the world he is presenting.” But here Lewis is ‘having fun. . . . As it twists and turns like a merrily epilectic snake, his plot achieves scene after scene of pure farce.”21

Revenge for Love

The novel opens as Percy Hardcaster, an English communist agent, tries and fails to escape from a Spanish prison. After recovering from the bullet wound that cost him part of a leg, Hardcaster returns to England, where he is lionized by London's "salon-Reds," middle-class artists and intellectuals sympathetic to international communism. On the outer fringes of this group we meet Victor and Margot Stamp. Victor is a young, rugged-looking Australian artist whose modest talents have brought him nothing in the way of material success; Margot (not legally Victor's wife) is a quiet and perceptive woman whose being is determined by her absolute devotion to Victor. Unable to make a living as an artist, Victor becomes involved with two well-heeled fellow travelers named O’Hara and Abershaw, who first employ him in the "manufacture" of lost Van Gogh masterpieces and later send him on a gunrunning expedition into Spain. There he and Margot link up with Hardcaster, who, disgusted with the hypocrisies of his English admirers, is only too happy to return to the dirty but honest work of revolution. What none of these three realize is that O’Hara and Abershaw intend to use Victor as a decoy and have already betrayed him to the Spanish authorities in a move calculated to protect the real gun shipment. Hardcaster, who has developed a genuine affection for Victor and Margot, is captured once again as he attempts to warn them of the double cross; later, in his prison cell, he reads a newspaper account of how the couple perished in the mountains attempting to escape back into France.

Professor Schenker writes: “By the mid-1930s, Lewis sounded like a jaded old revolutionary, complaining about how the world had "fallen back" from the future he and his contemporaries had tried to create for it.  An important sign of Lewis's change in temperament was the modified scale of his writing in the 1930s. . . . His major works of the decade (Snooty Baronet, Men Without Art, Blasting and Bombardiering, The Revenge for Love, and The Vulgar Streak) have a narrower focus. Each of them is less concerned with metaphysics than with localized events. Although Lewis may have been forced to this position by disillusionment, he soon exploited the resources that this new literary territory afforded him, as we can see in what is often acknowledged as his most well-crafted novel, The Revenge for Love.”

Rebecca West regarded Lewis’s novel the only realistic portrayal of the Spanish Civil War. She wrote a review of Revenge:  “This extraordinary work is the first truly modern novel to express artistically the complete absolute quintessential Nothing, the underlying lie of this imperialist epoch. There may be writers who have felt this but so far only Wyndham Lewis has succeeded in giving it form.22

Every part of the book carries on the electric charge until the circuit is complete. . . . That daring leap, from the kingdom of dehumanising necessity to the kingdom of freedom, that creative Promethean act by which a revolutionist, a friend, a woman, an artist attempt to break the cash-nexus, that creative love the crime of crimes against the system, must be crushed out by torture, must be revenged. This revenge for love is the large theme of the novel expressed variously in the outrageous punishment meted out to Hardcaster, revolutionist, Stamp the artist, and Margaret his wife, a character very much like Lear's loneliest daughter Cordelia. The tension is like that in Lear— they are flies to wanton boys who kill them for their sport. These three are trapped in an absurd wanton senseless system, a system of lies which Wyndham Lewis symbolises in the "immense false-bottom underlying every seemingly solid surface" upon which they tread, the "prodigious non-sequitur". Like a composer developing a motif, not by simple repetition but by a continual transforming and deepening of all the incalculable resonances latent in the original motif, Wyndham Lewis traces the "false-bottom" in faces, gestures, places, communists, lovers, friends, artists, and finally in the ex-bootleg machine turned into a gun-running machine, with yet another false bottom — no guns!

What underlies the fiasco in Spain, none of the novelists have made clear. Malraux, Hemingway, and others smear the issues with eloquent rhetoric. Take this eloquence and "literachoor” and wring its neck for hiding the truth! Fearlessly truthful, Wyndham Lewis alone has expressed in art, what (others have) expressed in polemic. He did not take the romantic battlefield, the heroic martyrs, beat our brains with the bones of corpses or blind us with the mass bombing. He did not attempt an analysis of a whole epidemic. Like a scientist, he isolates instead some microbes during the Lerroux administration. . . . shows up all the false "politics" which made such a lavish use of the poor and the unfortunate, of the "proletariat" . . . to advertise injustice to the profit of a predatory Party, of sham underdogs athirst for power: whose doctrine was a universal Sicilian Vespers, and which yet treated the real poor, when they were encountered, with such over-weening contempt, and even derision. This devastating portrait is not . . . from a reactionary viewpoint. The figure that unmasks the bourgeois fraud in the Popular Front is himself a communist. . . . In this book there is no moralising, no cant, neither sentimental Hope (Malraux) nor hysterical fear.'

Lewis commented: “Just as real war is not an affair of waving operatic plumes, surmounting a proudly erect figure, brandishing a sword, but the squalor of a mud-caked, or dust-steeped, perspiring creature, as often as not on his belly, or emulating the stealth of an Indian rather than the martial stance of a Sixteenth-Century copperplate of a plumed Capitan: so it is in the class-war, necessarily. That reality I attempted to convey.”23

Self-Condemned

As I mentioned, Lewis had to leave England in 1939 owing to his early praise of Hitler in his book of that name. (“I hoped to break the European ostracism of Germany.”) Although his book The Hitler Cult published in 1939 depicted the real monster he had mistaken for an efficient reformer, the claque was unforgiving and vociferous. He took refuge in Toronto, Ontario.

Ontario in the 1940s was bleak intellectually and artistically. Lewis and his wife managed to survive, an achievement he narrated in his novel Self-Condemned, considered  by some to be his best.

Lewis’s latent hostility toward the grand designs of history in The Revenge for Love becomes explicit in his next important novel, Self-Condemned, published almost twenty years later.24

Professor Rene Harding, on the eve of World War II, can no longer in good conscience teach the record of criminal acts that passes for Western history and leaving a British university for Canada, he and his wife, Hester, occupy a one-room flat in a seedy Toronto hotel. Months of loneliness and a devastating fire that destroys the hotel drive Hester to suicide and Rene to a nervous breakdown. He recovers a semblance of mental health after a few months in a Catholic seminary and later returns to academic life, accepting a position at a major American university.

The Hardings, completely contained within the hotel room—"twenty-five feet by twelve"—live in virtual isolation from their somewhat xenophobic Canadian neighbours. Grateful for even the smallest kindness extended to them, they develop an affection for the hotel manageress Mrs McAffie, a flying wraith, who dashed, flew and darted everywhere.

Rene Harding's transition from history professor to hotel resident, accompanied by an increasing concern with life (as opposed to art)  made him forsake satire for an appreciation of humanity. “Neither in this novel nor the ones that follow does Lewis adopt a humanist position, if we understand humanism as a philosophy that sees man as the ultimate measure of things,” Schenker writes. “His way of seeing the world is analogous to the Vision of the Saints. But it is not necessarily in any way connected with saintliness. . . . in reality, is a taking to its logical conclusion the humane, the tolerant, the fastidious.'"  "Fastidious" is a key term here, balancing "humane" with its suggestion of the continuing need for careful discriminations among the things of this world, and reminding us that Lewis's religious sensibility remains hieratic rather than mystical. . . . the belief that the divine exists not only for its own sake, but also as the measure of man's essential humanity.”

Rene proceeds to dig himself in "with concrete and steel" against any future misfortune by becoming a respected citizen of academe, and by the time he accepts his professorship at a prestigious American university, he is little more than the "glacial shell of a man," who once proposed a new way of thinking about history.

Alan Munton writes: “The postwar novel Self-Condemned (1954), particularly, is a reflexive commentary on the failure of the 1930s. The primacy of the intellectual in initiating change too often issued in contempt for the passive 'mass' of people for failing to resist the tricks democracy played upon them.” Timothy Materer referred to it as a book of 'remorse'. “It was conceived out of the same wartime experience of Canadian exile which changed his politics in a crucial respect: 'All the hostility I felt for the centralizer I no longer feel', Lewis wrote in 1941. ‘But it is a wish for global centralization-universalism that has made decentralization 'an absurdity'; 'universalism' will be 'much better than internationalism'.25

Satire

In Wyndham Lewis. Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy, Geoffrey Wagner defines Lewis’s type of satire:

Lewis called English humour “the greatest enemy of England”. He detested the cosy or Punch variety. Humour is a delightful dope, based on the evasion of reality, which can be used as a political weapon to keep the masses quiet—a brief romantic tool. George Bernard Shaw exemplified this humour; he evaded reality and created safe, lovable characters to take the mind off any real social change. Satire, however, presupposes change and reforms society. By doing something to you, it is accordingly hated by the indolent many.

. . . Like Flaubert, he says, the modern satirist must show up his age far more than his classical antecedent was required to. To this end contemporary satire must be disinterested and cruel. It must be violently destructive. . . . Lewis constantly asserts that it must be amoral. "I am a satirist . . . But I am not a moralist.” Yet of course he is a moralist, in the sense that the urge to change the status quo, which avowedly prompts his satire, has a moral intention. One presumes that Lewis is exposing the evils in our society by means of satire in an effort to correct them. But what he clearly desires is that satire should not be "edifying." Any overt connection with a system of contemporary morality, especially one embedded in a religion, will vitiate the work of art for Lewis. It will soften it and make it ineffectual. "Perfect laughter, if there could be such a thing, would be inhuman," he writes. To succeed satire must have a painful effect.’ It is a mixed form, so capacious that it can deal with almost any subject.26

Some consider Lewis’s satirical works among his best but then a taste for Lewis’s  merciless punctures of pride, pretence and perversity has to be special.

Tarr

In 1928 Lewis’s novel Tarr, a revised edition of the first, which he wrote in 1909-10 and published in 1918, established him as a satirist of the social scene. It has become a talisman in the world of the artist. Praised as a mixture of originality and vitality when it first appeared, it was boosted by Ezra Pound—“the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time”—and by T. S. Eliot—“the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man.”

It concerns the Parisian adventures of Frederick Sorbert Tarr, a young English painter, and Otto Kreisler, a failed German artist in his mid-thirties who is engaged on a path of self-destruction. Tarr considers himself to be a true artist in a world of 'bourgeois bohemians', the pseudo-artists of Paris who lack talent but can afford to rent studios for themselves, and who declare their independence from bourgeois society even as they create their own hypocritical community with its own equally predictable societal mores. Tarr acts as the spokesman for the novel's aesthetic ideas, and he proclaims, as the model post-Nietzschean his first name 'Frederick' suggests, that he stands beyond conventional morality. The plot follows his romantic and sexual involvement with two women. The long-suffering Bertha Lunken, a German, is soft-hearted, simplistic, and filled with conventional ideas about romance, while the stylish cosmopolitan Anastasya Vasek exemplifies the new woman of the early twentieth century, intellectually self-sufficient and sexually independent perhaps to the point of alarm. The novel describes a sort of roundelay between these four characters, who change partners in a quasi-symmetrical dance of coupling and uncoupling.

Tarr holds up to scorn the absurdity of the Germanic Romanticism that underlies both Kreisler and Bertha, the former a product of Prussian militarism, the latter steeped in received middle-class worship of the culture of Goethe and Beethoven. It scathingly reveals the inability of many of its characters to keep separate those human energies antithetically appropriate to the making of art versus the making of love. . . . No novel before the work of Samuel Beckett so thoroughly introduces to the English tradition the idea of the Absurd ('we represent absolutely nothing thank God!', Anastasya drunkenly proclaims in the restaurant with Tarr, as though she has reached an apotheosis.) No other English novel sets its action in play with so little concern for morality.

Geoffrey Wagner sees the prophetic warning in the novel: Kreisler's tragi-comic flaw is his inability to come to terms with reality. . . .In this martial nihilist, who ‘hated powerfully,’ the comic type as envisaged by Lewis achieves real stature. No character he has created since matches Kreisler in importance, or suggests that need for social reform which the best satire presupposes. . . . There is something of Kreisler in every adolescent. But it is as a nationalist symptom that he makes an especially disturbing character to read today. With his hatred, bellicosity, paranoia, romanticism, and love of the alt'deutsch, Kreisler is Goebbels or Hitler. And the sexual side of the Nazi myth is in him also. So Lewis writes prophetically in this work: "Instead of rearing pyramids against Death, if you can imagine some more uncompromising race meeting its obsession by means of an unparalleled immobility in life, a race of statues, in short, throwing flesh in Death's path instead of basalt, there you would have a people among whom Kreisler would have been much at home.”27

The Apes of God

Paul Edwards wrote, “The phrase 'neglected masterpiece' is used too often, but it justly describes The Apes of God.” Rave reviews mixed with “dissentient voices”. The Bookman wrote: "The greatest novels the twentieth century has so far produced, it is generally agreed, are James Joyce's Ulysses and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. With the publication of Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, a third takes its place among them, and can claim superiority so far as intellectual content is concerned.”

Stephen Klaidman attacks Lewis as biting the hands that fed him because Lewis ostensibly lampooned Sydney Schiff, a rich friend of artists whom he aided financially at times. “Wyndham Lewis, a man with a capacious intellect, had a diminutive idea that he transmogrified into a monstrous, ramshackle literary blunderbuss,” he wrote. “Most of The Apes is hopelessly obscure and forgotten because it is pretentious in its display of frequently irrelevant erudition that would distract from the narrative if there were one. And it was forgotten because its argument, much but not all of which is banal, is too often encrusted in deliberately baroque language spoken by puppets, not people.”28

Paul Edwards’ article “The Apes of God: Form and Meaning” provides a starting point for understanding the novel:29

The Apes of God is a portrayal of a 'time without art’— a portrayal of a world in which there is a disjunction between meaning and appearance. One of the major achievements of Lewis in this book is to create a style capable of depicting such a world. It is not a world from which meaning is completely absent, but one in which the categories imposed on naked experience are second-hand and ill-fitting. The superfluity of imaginative material with which the artist informs reality is, in the social life of the Apes, replaced by a series of hastily assumed conventional facades. It is as if they were constantly signaling to each other, but the signs never mean anything of value. . . . The Apes of God who are the main objects of Lewis's attack are the prosperous amateurs who have monopolized the artistic world and frozen out those with real talent, making the creation and survival of true art virtually impossible. . . these are people with no future. At the same time they represent the future, since no-one is producing imaginative fictions upon which an alternative future might be modeled. The Apes are important not as relics of the bourgeois era soon to be superseded; on the contrary, they are actually a sample of the future:

It is picaresque and episodic, the picaro being the beautiful but moronic Irish youth, Dan Boleyn. This simpleton is conducted round various salons and visits numerous pseudo-artists under the wing of the sixty-year-old albino Horace Zagreus, whom he reveres, and who in turn is captivated by the youth and 'genius' of his protege. Unlike the usual picaro, Dan is desperately shy and reluctant to undertake any adventures, learns virtually nothing from those he is forced into, and, as if Lewis were mocking the responses of his readers, is painfully and paralytically bored by the constant lecturing and explaining that he has to sit through, most of which he is unable to understand. . . .

The story begins and ends at the great town house of the Follett family, there being competition between relatives for the Follett inheritance. Ninety-six-year-old Lady Fredigonde Follett, whose toilette is described in the book's prologue, favours Horace Zagreus, who needs money to finance his Ape-hunting, while Fredigonde's equally ancient husband, Sir James, favours a nephew, Dick, who is rich already and, being an amateur professional artist, is a specimen Ape. There is also rivalry between Zagreus and Melanie Blackwell over the person of Dan Boleyn. Dan's relationship with Horace Zagreus reaches its zenith . . . when Dan learns that he has been replaced in Horace's affections by the Jewish cockney, Archie Margolin, and is abandoned to Melanie Blackwell.

More significant than the plot itself is its formal disposition—a pattern in which the resolution of the plot is a mirror image of its statement at the opening.

Edwards recommends Cena Trimalchionis of Petronius, Pope’s The Dunciad, Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, and Joyce’s Ulysses to help a reader understand and place The Apes of God. The range of these literary relationships, coupled with Lewis's selection of the General Strike of 1827 as a conclusion to the work, reinforces the notion that The Apes of God is far more ambitious than the description of it as a satire on artistic life suggests.

The only one true artist in the book, the elusive Pierpoint, provides all the 'meaning', without which it would be a collection of discrete appearances. 'Life' in itself is nothing (Lady Fredigonde is the representative of life); only art gives it meaning and value.

Geoffrey Wagner’s sees it as “a merciless exposure of men and women as social symptoms” and as Lewis wrote.’”a social decay of the insanitary trough between the two great wars, an inferno of local decadence.”30

"A society has premonitions of its end,” Lewis wrote. “Mortification already set in at the edges. They began to stink. I have recorded that stink." Homosexuality, the youth cult (Dan has the "prestige of the 'under-twenties'"), the revolutionary orthodoxy, all are flayed in this unforgettable picture of a moribund society—primarily leveled against the class in which Lewis lived and by which he was most hurt, namely the literati—the "lettered herd." The artistic amateurism is for Lewis only one more example of the collapse of the authoritarian tradition which is the principal weakness of our societies today. The longing for irresponsibility in the child, artist, and imbecile (all three conveniently coalescing for Lewis in a figure like Gertrude Stein) is itself a social phenomenon against which Lewis inveighed. . . . the work does show us the tragic fall from high estate. . . .The satire of this moribund society—now dead?—begins appropriately with the prelude of Lady Fredigonde preening herself, getting ready, in fact, to die. "The especial effluvium of death, like a stale peach crept in her nostrils.".

Geoffrey Wagner concludes: “Of all Lewis' works The Apes has for me the greatest artistic integrity. Hugh Kenner calls it Lewis' "worst-written" book. It is, of course, his best. Every page has been composed with honesty. Every page, despite one's immediate feeling to the contrary, is functional.”

Today in the 2020s The Apes of God seems irrelevant in a world so different.—English society characterized by Sidney and Violet Schiff, the Sitwells, Virginia Woolf long gone. Certain passages are gripping, i.e. when a gay male model poses for a lesbian sculptor. Lewis’s later satires such as Snooty Baronet and The Vulgar Streak are lighter, easily readable and still relevant as they expose the English class system as a sham and ridicule the London literati as at a house party in The Roaring Queen). Lewis’s last published novel, The Red Priest, is the most dramatic. It uncovers an Anglican priest whose gentle facade is broken when he kills an assistant over a theological disagreement.

Anne Blott in her article, “The Merman and the Mint: A Study of Wyndham Lewis’s The Vulgar Streak” demonstrates the depth of Lewis’s “lighter” novels.”31

“For Lewis freedom, the gift of nature,” she writes, “depended upon clarity of perception and access to exact information. He saw in modern culture a growing technology of misinformation and psychological control, leading to a reduction of the reality of the self to a behaviorist's dummy whose perceptions were increasingly controlled by print and electronic media. .  .  . A firm and unsentimental grasp of the main features of the present was one means of securing this freedom, and each of Lewis's books has its provenance in a particular set of features from the immediate historical and social context. He took the position that every serious work of art is grounded deep in philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and theology — intellectual departments that form the structures of meaning in his work.

The story opens in Venice with two Englishmen, an upper-class effeminate with a fake stutter and his friend, Vincent Penhale, who had escaped from a working-class background to pose as a rich dilettante artist with an income derived from passing counterfeit bank notes. The time is the autumn of 1938, at the peak of Hitler's war of nerves over Czechoslovakia. Vincent manoeuvers to seduce socialite April Mallow, and his subsequent marriage to her marks the summit of his climb to social power. Confident of having legitimized his position by this marriage into an established family, Vincent returns to London for his father's funeral, a brief but compelling sequence of dialogue and narration in the world of the working poor, from whose ranks Vincent had so anxiously fled. Meanwhile, Vincent's former counterfeiting partner murders a man who suspects them, and Vincent, when arrested and charged as an accessory, sees his claims to respectability rapidly evaporate. At this point, he begins to appreciate that he has sacrificed real love and humane values in his greed for power, and so he hangs himself, leaving behind him sardonic messages to the survivors of his world.

The hidden meanings of the novel are not easily seen from the action on the surface. Lewis correlates the narrative with patterns of political and economic history as Europe stirred into war. He explores a type of mind and standard of values. The metamorphosis of a society is wrought as much by a process as by a single man.

In Crime and Punishment, Lewis wrote, the hero follows in the footsteps of Julian Sorel (and of Napoleon). It seemed to me that the time had come to add another book to this line: that the doctrine extracted by Mussolini from Les Reflections sur la Violence and from Nietzsche (who got his stuff fundamentally from Darwin) — it seemed to me that this doctrine taken over by Hitler, and influencing so many minds in Europe, might be made to do its fell work in the soul of a character in fiction, once again. On very different lines, it was time to project another Sorel or Raskolnikoff; whose bug could not be the Napoleonic bug this time, but rather the self-consciousness 'power', 'force', and 'action' that has infected so many people today.

“Even if the reader could ignore the insistent clamor of the newspaper headlines that Lewis has laced throughout the text of The Vulgar Streak, Lewis's careful plotting of times, settings, and actions shows that the plot is linked to contemporary political developments. . . .Vincent Penhale shares several individual characteristics with Hitler. For example, Alan Bullock describes Hitler as a consummate actor, 'with the actor's and orator's facility for absorbing himself in a role and convincing himself of the truth of what he was saying ... there were few who could resist the impression of his piercing eyes, the Napoleonic pose, and the "historic" personality.'  Both men of action manifest an aggressive use of the personality, with the voice as an instrument of an over-riding will. . . . Alan Bullock observed that Hitler's power to bewitch his audiences worked the 'occult arts of the African medicine-man or the Asiatic Shaman . . . and the ‘magnetism of a mesmerist.’ Vincent, the ‘mer-man of action’, wields a magic force over his family.  The shaman's control over others is especially dangerous in politics, Lewis wrote, because it disarms the spectator. The shaman specializes in transmutation: bashfulness overtakes him when he begins to transform himself for this office; he becomes womanized, a soft man whose dissimulations go unnoticed. From contemporary accounts of Hitler, Lewis assembled an image of a 'monster of shyness' and a 'paranoiac violet.’ Like Vincent in the novel, Hitler conformed consciously to the stereotype of the artist: nervous, volatile and prone to emotional excesses. Vincent himself describes the construction of the 'artistic' temperament as a 'damned convenient thing’.

Through Vincent Penhale, Lewis was developing an exploration of the selfish manipulation of power by fomenters of revolution and violent action. The citizen of modern society who did not recognize in the twentieth-century environment new forces which were fundamentally changed from those of the past was inevitably marked out for exploitation by men who, potentially, could control his education and the media that are his sources of information. The mass of men in contemporary society seemed numbed by vulgarizations of technology, mesmerized by advertisement, and dulled by commercialism and cliché. The politician, by taking advantage of this human peculiarity, operates, and brings off his most tragic coups. Those who ignored their present situation were 'firmly on the side of those people who would thrust us back into the medieval chaos and barbarity; at whose hypnotic "historic" suggestion we would fight all the old European wars over again, like a gigantic cast of Movie supers, and so fill the pockets of these political impresarios.’ These concepts of hypnosis, mesmerism, and torpidity operate symbolically throughout Lewis's presentation of Vincent's conquest in The Vulgar Streak. Vincent, like Hitler, is a charismatic form of energy, gesticulating theatrically to control the will of his passive audience. But behind this facade of magnetic personality and hypnotic voice is emptiness only. Hitler called himself a 'sleepwalker' and was guided into disastrous decisions of strategy by forces he could neither control nor understand. So it is with the 'mer-man of action' in The Vulgar Streak.

As for the “Mint” in the essay’s title, it refers to Lewis’s exploring of the monetary system. “Not only Vincent but also the whole British economy of the pre-war years is shown to be living on an overdraft. . . . One falsehood leads irrevocably to another in the novel; when the characters have been deceived or self deluded into accepting one false standard of value, they can no longer measure the true value of anything. . . . This system of counterfeit credit and unreal value, of which the forged bank note is the emblem, blights the larger field of the novel, as the forger takes his place in a setting of international fakery and deception. The 'phoney war' of 1939-40 was a prelude to real destruction, and was sustained in part by the false fronts of the Maginot and Siegfried lines. Again, the appeasement of Hitler at Munich was bought with a phoney note, the 'scrap of paper.' Winston Churchill's address to the Commons in October, 1938, amplifies this point: “At Berchtesgaden ... £ 1 was demanded at the pistol's point. When it was given (at Godesberg), £ 2 was demanded at the pistol's point. Finally the Dictator consented to take £ 1.17s.6d. and the rest in promises of good will for the future. ... We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude.”

The Human Age

“The Human Age” was the title Lewis gave to the four novels he planned to write on the afterlife. In 1928 he published the first volume The Childermass, whose characters are in purgatory hoping to get to Heaven. The next two volumes Monster Gai and Malign Fiesta he did not start writing until his return to England after World War II.32

The narrative relates to events of our day when autocracy is trying to destroy democracy. In an imaginary all male afterworld controlled by a figure called the Bailiff,  an intellectual, Pullman, who is deceived by the Bailiff, . . .”represents all those forces in Western European democracies which diminish freedom”. Instead of opposing him, as Lewis believes he should, Pullman accepts the Bailiff's view of the world, and concedes his authority. The Childermass shows what it is like to experience the demands of a ruler who pretends to be a democrat, but is in fact a ruthless exploiter of all the means of persuasion available to him. Pullman abjectly renounces all those critical powers that the intellectual should possess; we see him betray the intellect and, in effect, the intellectual community.”33

Alan Munton recognized the tradition of the satiric method Lewis used: Lucian [Roman author of The Golden Ass] uses the journey between the world of the living and the underworld as an opportunity for satire in his story 'Menippus', which attacks false philosophers and includes a guided visit to the underworld. It provides a precedent for both parts of The Childermass. 'Menippean satire', a term proposed by Northrop Frye, places such works as Brave New World, Samuel Butler's Erewhon books and the satires of Peacock and Voltaire in a tradition which goes back 'through Rabelais and Erasmus to Lucian’.  Frye describes the 'short form of the Menippean satire' as 'a dialogue or colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than of character' and this clearly describes the latter part of The Childermass, where the form is much expanded.

The Bailiff must find supporters, for he does not have full control over his world; it is unstable and subject to sudden changes. Satherwaite, who mistrusts the Bailiff, as a schoolboy on earth was Pullman’s fag, wanders with Pullman in the ever-changing 'Time-flats', where objects move, not in space but in and out of different times. As Pullman guides them forward he is on the qui vive for the new setting, fearing above all reflections, on the look-out for optical traps, lynx-eyed for threatening ambushes of anomalous times behind the orderly furniture of Space or hidden in objects to confute the solid at the last moment, every inch a pilot. Because he has to do this, Pullman knows well that his admired Bailiff has limited control. To sustain his admiration he has to deceive himself, and try to deceive “Satters" too.

“On their mock-epic journey through the Afterlife, the anti-heroes of The Human Age fail to discover an ideally perfect place, whether in its social, political, or moral aspects,” Peter Caracciolo writes. “In The Childermass the newly dead souls find themselves in ‘a pretty dud Heaven’. Across the River Styx looms what might be Augustine’s City of God, one of the two great archetypes of the Christian Utopia—the other being the Messianic Kingdom of Heaven. Almost immediately, though, such hopes are checked, the city looking as if it had suffered a ‘tragic exodus’“ 34

With Monstre Gai, the second volume of the sequence, there is an increased sense of God’s absence. . . .What this ‘degenerate, chaotic outpost of Heaven’ offers Mankind is scarcely Purgatory (as Catholic theologians and many other Christian thinkers have understood the concept) . . . as for Womankind, their fate is utter degradation. In the third volume Malign Fiesta the Devil (bored with acting as the torturer in the Divine scheme of things) attempts to reconstruct his Nazified Hell as a Hollywood utopia. His celebratory Carnival ends in an eschatological failure of the kind revealed in John’s Apocalypse.

The books mirror “an appalling epoch”, writes Caracciolo: The first part of “The Human Age” emerges from the trauma of the Great War and the bloody revolutions of Right and Left that ensued. In the Bailiff’s concentration camp, Pullman and “Satters" are far from the Judgement Seat of Judaeo-Christian tradition; the irregular proceedings presided over by the Old Bailiff resemble more the Soviet show trial and its Surrealist prototype. Indeed, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955) are horrified responses to Gulag, Blitz, Shoah, and the threat of Nuclear Holocaust. In “The Human Age” there is little sign of utopia.35

The British Broadcasting Service subsidized Lewis, who wrote the last two novels when blind. It dramatized the three novels for radio.

Alternate  View

Another “Outsider”, the prolific Colin Wilson, in his essay, “Wyndham Lewis: A Refracted Talent?” judges Lewis’s writing by his Existential Criticism, an original conception advocating that a writer’s work should be judged by what he has to say rather than how he says it—“to see how much of reality it incorporates, or, conversely, to determine how far a writer’s attitude to the world is parochial or based upon some temperamental defect of vision.” Defects in the Lewiston vision, he wrote, were “solipsistic realism” and artistic pessimism. Tarr, he found, was obsessed with the trivial and personal—that Lewis never forgets himself for a moment and lacks “the redeeming flights into impersonality.” Lacking the capacity for such abandonment of the self, Lewis turned to politics as his form of objectivity.36

Wilson thought Lewis was attempting a post-impressionist revolution in prose by translating into text the Cubist craving of beauty through abstraction. The new classicism that Lewis promoted was overcome when the emotional romanticism of the eighteenth century “gave way to an intellectual romanticism of Proust, Ulysses, The Waste Land or Musil’s Man Without Qualities.” Lewis failed to translate the discriminating idealism of precision and “coolness” of his painting into his prose, “where one needs the patience of Job to cut through the blanket of fog to figure out what it is about.” Lewis believed the writer should kneed the exterior world as an amorphous imitation of himself into himself. Wilson claimed the great writers do not kneed the world into their own image. They get rid of themselves from their work as if they were mirroring reality.

Much in Lewis’s writings contradicts Wilson’s assumptions. Wilson does admire Lewis’s criticism of the time-philosophers through his belief in a world of timeless ideals but insists that Lewis’s “Platonic Nature” led him into artistic pessimism, a sense that the real world is corrupt and disjointed. It deprived his work of that all-important “vital creation”.

Lewis’s personality

The man’s output of art work and writings was phenomenal. One can get a valuable education by reading his works, those written about them and by consulting the various philosophers and authors who informed his intellectual development.

He had setbacks: “From 1932-36 I was very seriously ill,” he wrote in Rude Assignment, so ill that it was currently reported that I was dying, and those standing to benefit in business ways by the death of a well-known person began to look at me hopefully for a short while. I underwent several operations: this cost, first and last, a great deal of money. As a consequence I was unusually hard-up and could ill afford to write unpopular books.

“At length I was so pressed for money—to be thoroughly circumstantial that I went for an operation into the general ward of a hospital. (I must have been in every nursing home in London before this). Some patients would die every twenty-four hours or so where I was: I still can hear the soft thudding rush of the night-nurses, when certain signs apprised them of the approaching end. For some reason it was preferred that death should occur in another ward, reserved for the purpose. The patient would be hurriedly wheeled out to die. Though I saw death often enough as a soldier, that was the only occasion on which I heard the authentic death-rattle.

Then in December 1949 Lewis was told his optic nerves, at their chiasma, or crossing, were being pressed upon by the cranial pharyngeoma. He was totally blind in 1951 and could no longer write reviews of art openings for the BBC’s Listener. He wrote, however, on a large pad and dictated his last books to his patient wife Froanna and Agnes Bedford his old friend and one-time lover.

His views were often controversial and brought him enemies.

The personal loss entailed, in every sense, by my stand against war was incalculable. Had it been a capitalist war it would have been otherwise: but it was a Left-wing war (though it was not because it was a Left-wing war, but because it was war, that I acted). I received less money — to take that first — than I should for any other type of book, and for one of the best of them practically nothing, as advances go. I did myself so much damage that at the time it diminished the value of my other books.

He was dedicated to his art such that his relations with people suffered. He had two children with one mistress, helped support them when they were very young and then abandoned that family, and two with another mistress. Later in life he reportedly blackmailed their stepfather by threatening to disclose to his upper-class family that the children were his. (His biographer did not know if this was said in jest). When he married, his wife, Froanna, agreed not to have children. They seem to have been happy even though his wife was kept out of sight of visitors in the early years of their marriage.

He could be curt, even hostile, to some people and gracious to others. He mellowed in middle age. His apparent misogyny abated. He was recognized, in accord with the title of a biography about him, as “Some Sort of Genius.”37 He died in 1957. T. S. Eliot wrote an appreciative obituary: “There is, in everything he wrote, style. I would even affirm that Wyndham Lewis was the only one among my contemporaries to create a new, an original, prose style. Most prose of my time, indeed, seems to me, when compared with that of Lewis, lifeless. A great intellect is gone, a great modern writer is dead.”

David Richard Beasley lives in Simcoe Ontario. Born Canadian he lived in Europe and Manhattan for 40 years, has a PhD in political economics, worked for years at the New York Public Research Libraries where he was the president of the union of library workers. He has written over a score of books in all genres including biographies of Canada’s first novelist, of North America’s greatest actor, of the great artist Clay Spohn, of the curator Douglas MacAgy, a major force behind modern art,  historical novels of WWII in Burma, escape from slavery in North America, child abuse in 1805, and 19th century Hamilton Ontario, a trilogy of acclaimed detective novels set in New York city, travels by donkey in Turkey and canoeing down a Canadian river, a political-economic study of the invention of the automobile, light entertaining social novels, short stories, novellas and Episodes and Vignettes; an Autobiography. Sarah’s Journey, the story of a slave escaping to Upper Canada in 1820, won a literary prize and with From Bloody Beginnings; Richard Beasley’s Upper Canada won a Brag Medallion. He was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for his writings.   See www.davuspublishing.com

Table of Contents

TOWARD A JOYFUL PHILOSOPHY

READING SHILTS READING CAMUS READING A PLAGUE

THE PANDEMIC: A PHILOSOPHICAL DIAGNOSIS

CAMUS' ABSURDISM LACKS IMAGINATION

CREATION SCIENCE MAKES SENSE, BUT...

PRIMO LEVI: THE FLAWED DESIGN

NUCLEAR COUNTERINTUITION: RISK REDUCTION DURING THE COLD WAR

THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY AT 100

A SPIDER SHOWS THE WAY TOWARDS GREATER COMPASSION FOR ANIMALS

KING COUNTRY

SONNETS

WHAT ARE NOVELS GOOD FOR?

WYNDHAM LEWIS—THE INTELLECTUAL AS ARTIST