A Happy Marriage

Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage (New York: Scribner, 2009). 369 pp. $26.00.

Few books have disappointed me more than Rafael Yglesias’s novel A Happy Marriage. Its title raised my expectations to probably unreachable heights. I have complained that the tradition of the novel is far more open to adultery than faithful marriage. I have regretted how very little of ordinary life—family life—gets into American writing. A Happy Marriage promised at first glance to reverse those trends. It is touted by Scribner as an “achingly honest story about what it means for two people to spend a lifetime together—and what makes a happy marriage.” But it is none of that. It aches not; neither is it honest. And it is not about what makes a happy marriage.

Yglesias, now fifty-five, first made a splash when he dropped out of his private high school to become a writer, publishing his first novel at seventeen. Hide Fox, and All After (1972) was about a teenager who leaves his private high school to become an actor. His second novel, appearing four years later, told the story of a young novelist who published his first novel in his teens. As the main character of A Happy Marriage ruefully admits, his fiction tends to be autobiographical. To date the principal exception of Yglesias’s career has been Fearless (1993), about the survivors of an airplane crash, filmed the same year by Peter Weir with a screenplay by the author. In his ninth novel—his first in thirteen years—Yglesias reverts to form, writing a flimsily disguised autobiographical account of his wife Margaret’s death from bladder cancer five years ago.

Something the poet and critic William Logan wrote upon reviewing Yglesias’s second novel The Work Is Innocent in 1976 bears repeating:

When an author hews so closely to the facts of his life, one wonders if any life, merely described, has the drama and integrity a novel demands. Fiction substitutes drama for the sustained personal insight of, say, a memoir. We would insist that autobiography more closely examine acts that stand here more symbolic than understood.After reading the opening chapters of A Happy Marriage, I began to suspect that Yglesias had chosen the transparent disguise of autobiographical fiction precisely to avoid examining his nearly three-decade marriage to Margaret Joskow more closely.

Narrated in alternating chapters, the book traces the early stages of the romance between Margaret Cohen and Enrique Sabas—the same surname as the hero of Hide Fox, and All After—and the late stages of her terminal metastatic cancer. Enrique is twenty-one when he first meets the four-years-older Margaret and fifty when she dies. When she was first diagnosed, he tried to encourage and cheer her, although he was frightened:But all those desperate feelings were long ago, two years and eight months ago, one hundred and forty-seven days and nights in the hospital ago, three major surgeries, a half dozen minor surgeries, and fourteen months of chemo ago, two remissions and two recurrences ago. Looking back through the defeated gaze of fatigue, it seemed inevitable now that it would end like this, this inch-by-inch dying, this one-track terminus when hope had become a skeleton’s grin.Detailing the progress of her disease like this, through the gaze of his own fatigue, is not as narcissistic as it may sound. The terminal cancer patient has the relatively easy part. All she must do is to die. The spouse is left with her permanent absence.

A Happy Marriage, then, might have been written to invoke her presence—to seek an immortality for her, and to share it with her. Yglesias dedicates the novel simply “For her.” But from first to last, his attention is upon himself. Margaret comes to life only as she affects him. Enrique knows as much—when heading out to purchase birthday gifts for her he realizes that he is ignorant of her tastes, when a marriage counselor asks her how she feels about their marriage he realizes that he has never made the same request—but the knowledge never grants him the power to overcome his self-involvement. He accepts it as his fate or donnée. The marriage of the title is merely Margaret’s status. Only once—in a deathbed interview with her mother upon which Enrique eavesdrops—is Margaret glimpsed in relation to someone other than him, although he confides plenty about himself apart from her.

Some such impoverished notion of it may explain the novel’s unsettling approach to the business of telling what makes a marriage happy. The first fourteen chapters—well over half the book—take Enrique and Margaret from first meeting to first night in bed. The next stage of their relationship, or at least the next stage that Yglesias finds worth recording, occurs seven years later when Enrique finds himself passionately involved with another woman. (This flashback immediately follows the eavesdropping scene at which Enrique realizes that Margaret is “so good and so kind” and he is “so mean and so bitter.” Rather than proceeding to describe her goodness, though, he hurries to justify the self-accusation of meanness.)

As this chapter of their lives closes, he and Margaret enter marriage counseling. Fifteen years later they are in Venice for their twentieth wedding anniversary. In the very next chapter—at this point Yglesias discards the mechanical device of alternating chapters—they are back in therapy, fifteen years earlier. To his credit, Enrique realizes that, in “his social class and time, New York 1983,” the conventional wisdom holds that a “bad marriage was worse for a child than a divorce.” He decides to break off the affair and remain with Margaret. Twelve years later, in 1995, his father dies of prostate cancer. In his grief, he accuses Margaret of not loving him. She protests. “I’m never going to stop loving you,” she says. “You’re my life.” Apparently these are the peaks of a happy marriage: courtship, surviving adultery, a memorable anniversary trip, solace during grief.

At one point during their courtship, Margaret tells Enrique about all the classes she has taken—tap dancing, photography, lithography, French, basic acting technique—all for fun. He reflects:He too wanted to know as much as possible about how the world worked. Not, however, for something as pointless as having fun. He wanted information to impress readers and to burrow into a character’s inner life. Work was the most invested and complicated expenditure of most people’s time; it bothered him to write about characters and not know, in a tactile and intimate way, precisely what they did each day on their jobs.An excellent point, and perhaps more novelists will begin to write about something other than writing and a writer’s special worries. Yglesias will not be among them, however. He cannot even be bothered to say anything about what his wife Margaret did each day on her job; she worked as the deputy art director of Newsweek. He is rather good, though, at something similar. He captures life on the strange and distant planet of late-stage cancer. Only then, with her tubes and shrunken flesh and consciousness dimmed by drugs, is Margaret truly other—perhaps because the experience is so defamiliarizing, and perhaps because she must go through it alone.

There is little else to recommend the novel. It frequently reads like a roman à clef. Some of the key is included. Yglesias’s father, called Guillermo in the novel, was a Cuban-American novelist, and his mother Helen Yglesias (Rose in the novel) was also a novelist. Margaret’s family is described in terms that makes them equally easy to identify. Her father Jules Joskow cofounded National Economics Research Associates, a consulting firm, in 1961; Andrew Joskow, her younger brother, now serves as its senior vice president; her older brother Paul Joskow is a professor of economics at MIT.

Naturally, then, you want to guess the true identity of Bernard Weinstein, the young Cornell graduate who introduces Enrique and Margaret. Thwarted in his ambition to become a novelist,he had evolved into one of the country’s leading cultural critics, and certainly its most visible. He had reviewed books for the daily New York Times for ten years, movies of The New Yorker for five, was still a columnist for Time as well as the author of two bestsellers of general cultural musings.Same for Porter Beekman, a New England novelist who is the second-string movie critic for the New York Times. You find your fun, pointless though it may be, where you can.

But after a while the enjoyment pales and the eyewitness account of terminal cancer yields information, but no insight. The reason did not strike me until I did a bit of digging. Although the events of A Happy Marriage antedate the deaths of his mother and half-brother—Helen Yglesias died in April 2008 at the age of ninety-two, while Lewis Cole, a film professor at Columbia University, died six months later at the age of sixty-two from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis—neither of them receive any charity from the author. Enrique describes his mother Rose as unvaryingly self-pitying, while his half-brother Leo is “willfully dense” and useless to Enrique in his ordeal: “[I]n lieu of visiting Margaret at the hospital, [Leo] insisted on inviting Enrique over to his apartment for dinner. . . .” Even his father is cheerfully dismissed as narcissistic. This is not honest. It is merely vicious.

“My father and mother talked about novelists at home, and I thought they were gods,” Yglesias told the New York Times upon the publication of Hide Fox, and All After when he was seventeen. “I wanted to be a god, too, in a sense, to have some power.” Rafael Yglesias appears never to have recovered from the heady arrogance of teenaged authorship, and in A Happy Marriage he has told the story of a marriage that was happy because it outlasted the death of his wife. Margaret Joskow must have been an extraordinary woman, but from this novel the best you can do is to suppose so.

Update: Nancy Connors praises the novel in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “What glue holds a marriage together despite disloyalties, professional failures, free-floating anger and regret for the life not lived?” she asks, failing to notice that neither she nor Yglesias answer the question. Malena Watrous reviews the novel favorably for the New York Times Book Review, suggesting that Margaret’s cancer is what makes Enrique aware of his marriage’s happiness. At Bookforum.com, Karen Karbo calls A Happy Marriage “beautiful and disturbing,” while the author is “superb and courageous.”

On vacation

“How perillous vacancie from affaires hath ever bene, may appeare by ancient and moderne examples, whose Tragicall catastrophe wold crave teares immix’d with lines. Let this suffice, there is no one motive more effectually moving, no Rhetoricke more movingly perswading, no Oratorie more perswasively inducing, then what we daily feele or apprehend in our selves. Where every houre not well employed, begets some argument or other to move our corrupt natures to be depraved. Let us then admit of no vacation, save onely vacation from vice. Our lives are too short to be fruitlessly employed, or remissly passed.”—Richard Brathwait, Natures Embassie (1621).

A Commonplace Blog will be on vacation until Thursday, July 23rd.

Self-reference and narcissism

It is fast becoming a commonplace of American criticism that frequent use of the first person betokens narcissism. Last month Stanley Fish reported that he had listened closely to President Obama and had detected a growing preference for big I’s over little we’s. “[T]he note of imperial possession, the accents and cadences of a man supremely aware of his authority and more than comfortable with its exercise,” have creeped into his speech, Fish concluded. But it was not only the Left devouring one of its own. Last week Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan—best known as a speechwriter for President Reagan—belittled Governor Sarah Palin for being “self-referential to the point of self-reverence.” In the July 3rd announcement of her resignation from Alaska’s governorship, Palin kept saying “I’m, I’m, I’m,” Noonan complained. Over at the Language Log, Mark Liberman submitted Noonan’s claim to careful scrutiny (h/t: Neil Verma).

Adopting “two crude measures of ego-involvement,” Liberman compared Palin’s announcement to three similar speeches—Richard M. Nixon’s concession in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement in 1968 that he would not seek reelection to the presidency, and President Nixon’s resignation in 1974—and found that, by these measures, “Palin is more ego-involved than LBJ, but less than Nixon.” She used the various forms of the first-person singular four percent of the time, while Nixon was at 6.1% and 4.6% and Johnson at just 2%. Liberman also calculated the ratio of the first-person plural to the singular, observing that a “higher ratio suggests less ego-involvement,” and found that Johnson had the highest ratio (1.37), but that Palin’s (0.81) was strikingly higher than Nixon’s (0.17, 0.48).

I want to take Liberman’s analysis one step further, not to defend Palin—frankly, she doesn’t need my help—but to show that the folk psychology about frequency of the first person is badly off the mark. In short, self-reference is not evidence of narcissism, because historically even Nixon’s rate of I-talk is within the range of normal.

Plagiarizing Liberman’s method, I examined three English-language classics of the eighteenth century that were written in the first person and three from the nineteenth. Here are the results. (Please forgive the lack of a table.)

Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son (1746–71)
Words = 286,074
1st sing. = 8,636
% 1st sing.= 3.0%
1st pl. = 777
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.089

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759)
Words = 190,268
1st sing. = 6,641
% 1st sing. = 3.5%
1st pl. = 816
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.123

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771)
Words = 65,935
1st sing. = 2,963
% 1st sing. = 4.5%
1st pl. = 678
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.229

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
Words = 362,889
1st sing. = 22,959
% 1st sing. = 6.3%
1st pl. = 2,701
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.118

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Words = 116,519
1st sing. = 4,914
% 1st sing. = 4.2%
1st pl. = 1,062
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.216

The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885–86)
Words = 241,878
1st sing. = 4,692
% 1st sing. = 1.9%
1st pl. = 1,758
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.375

What do these figures prove? Accusations of narcissism cannot be sustained by citing the frequency of self-reference, not even as contrasted with the use of the first-person plural. While Ben Franklin has the second-highest percentage of references to himself, he also manages the second-highest ratio of plural to singular uses. In Liberman’s language, he displays both a relatively high degree of ego-involvement and clear evidence of relatively less ego-involvement. Again, it is not surprising to find that Grant, a military man, has the highest ratio of plurals to singulars among the six authors. What is surprising is that Nixon achieved a higher ratio (0.48 versus Grant’s 0.38) when he told the country at last that he was giving up the presidency.

I am left with two hypotheses, neither of which the folk psychologists and critics of American political discourse have entertained. First, the frequency of the first person is pretty likely to be a product of culture and history. The eighteenth-century British writers use the first-person forms less than the other four on my list. And in the twenty-first century heavy use of the first person is an accepted norm. An accepted grammatical norm, I might add. All it may demonstrate is a preference for constructing sentences in a certain way—a relatively easy way.

Replying to criticisms of first-person narration, the novelist David Isaak points out that the first-person encourages a straightforward construction that can wear upon readers:

I’ve heard more than one person comment that first-person narratives tend to start too many consecutive sentences with “I,” giving the impression we are listening to a Mexican folk song (“Ai—Ai—Yi—Ai . . .”). Fine—but I’ve seen just as many third person manuscripts starting paragraph after paragraph with “He.” Is “hee-hee-hee” somehow better?Isaak doesn’t notice that he starts both of his sentences the same way. But this is not to fault him. Starting sentences with the I is the default construction in current English, especially in informal discourse when the speaker’s (or, as here, the writer’s) mind is not on the form of what is being said.

And thus the second hypothesis. Person reflects genre. Despite the fact that he is an eighteenth-century author like Sterne and Chesterfield, Franklin uses the first person more often because he is writing an autobiography, a literary kind that, except when it is an exercise in long-winded self-concealment, like The Education of Henry Adams, depends helplessly upon the first person. Similarly, to accuse David Copperfield of “ego-involvement”—he uses some form of the first person 6.3% of the time—does not seem quite right. David is as much a “camera” as Christopher in The Berlin Stories; he is at least as interested in the people in his life as in himself. Consider, for example, the passage in which David first studies Uriah Heep in Mr. Wickfield’s office:It so happened that this chair was opposite a narrow passage, which ended in the little circular room where I had seen Uriah Heep’s pale face looking out of the window. Uriah, having taken the pony to a neighbouring stable, was at work at a desk in this room, which had a brass frame on the top to hang paper upon, and on which the writing he was making a copy of was then hanging. Though his face was towards me, I thought, for some time, the writing being between us, that he could not see me; but looking that way more attentively, it made me uncomfortable to observe that, every now and then, his sleepless eyes would come below the writing, like two red suns, and stealthily stare at me for I dare say a whole minute at a time, during which his pen went, or pretended to go, as cleverly as ever. I made several attempts to get out of their way—such as standing on a chair to look at a map on the other side of the room, and poring over the columns of a Kentish newspaper—but they always attracted me back again; and whenever I looked towards those two red suns, I was sure to find them, either just rising or just setting.David refers to himself eleven times in this passage—exactly five percent of the words are first-person forms—while referring to Heep just seven times (ten, if the references to Heep’s eyes almost as impersonal objects are included). Yet his entire attention is on Heep, not himself. The narrative strategy is to register Heep’s effect, because that is how—at least for Dickens—a man is to be judged.

Unless first-person genres and their self-referential purposes are taken into account, complaints like Fish’s and Noonan’s about “self-reverence” and the “imperial possession” are empty moralizing.

Update, I: Here are the numbers for this Commonplace Blog.

Words = 179,427
1st sing. = 2,362
% 1st sing. = 1.3%
1st pl. = 453
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.192

After the basic components of a sentence, the most common words here have been not (1,284), novel or novels (724), literature or literary (706), book or books (531), all of the various variations on the word Jew (386), and then American (359). No idea what to make of all this.

Update, II: Three more sets of figures.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1869)
Words = 197,669
1st sing. = 10,827
% 1st sing. = 5.5%
1st pl. = 1,189
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.110

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1900)
Words = 74,130
1st sing. = 3,120
% 1st sing. = 4.2%
1st pl. = 718
Pl./sing. ratio = 0.230

Woodrow Wilson, Presidential Addresses (1913–18)
Words = 92,886
1st sing. = 1,294
% 1st sing. = 1.4%
1st pl. = 2,069
Pl./sing. ratio = 1.599

The Moonstone is the first example of an unreliable narrative given by Wikipedia. Its numbers are nearly the same as those of Dickens’s novel, published eighteen years earlier. The age? The genre? Washington is close enough to Franklin to suggest that something around 4% is the rate at which autobiographies drop into self-reference. Meanwhile, Wilson’s use of the first person almost exactly mirrors Grant’s. His ratio of plurals to singulars, though, is the highest I have found, identifying an integral element of his political rhetoric.

Thicker than Water

Vera Caspary is almost completely forgotten today, but in her day she was something of a literary pioneer. The White Girl (1929), her first book, was one of the earliest American novels about “passing.” Her play One Beautiful Evening, rewritten as Blind Mice with Winifred Lenihan in 1930, was described by the press as “manless”: its cast was composed exclusively by women. Her story “Suburbs,” filmed in 1932 as The Night of June 13th, unmasked the quiet desperation of suburban lives thirty years before Richard Yates got around to it. An unapologetic Leftist, she was one of the few American writers to speak out publicly on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. In Laura, her best-known book, a 1942 mystery in which the detective falls for a crime victim, filmed by Otto Preminger two years later, she may have invented the genre of the psycho thriller.

Caspary’s most ambitious and unusual project was Thicker than Water (1932), a 425-page chronicle of a Sephardic Jewish family living in Chicago. Although I have been unable to confirm my hunch, chances are that Caspary based the novel on her own family. The daughter of a buyer for a Chicago department store, she was born in November 1899 into a “mixed marriage.” Her father’s father was a German Jew, but her mother’s father was a Sephardi whose family had settled in Amsterdam after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. In the novel, a suitor is dismissed with a single scornful phrase: “But he’s a German.” And when a Sephardic child marries “a Jew of humbler stock,” he is “disowned by his parents, mourned as if he were dead.” The family jealously guards “the Portugese purity” of their blood:

They could trace their history back to those days when their ancestors were rich and powerful, patrons of art, friends of dukes and intimates of princes, holders of vast properties, vintners of fine wines, builders of great castles, and always learned scholars. When, in 1499, they had been forced to flee their home, they had settled in Holland with a group of refugees, as self-conscious and aloof in their poverty as they had been in the days of their grandeur. The refugees had again become prosperous, although they were never granted the privileges of citizens in this land, and they had intermarried among themselves as if they had been the few proud members of a dwindling royalty.By the time the novel opens in 1885, the family fortune has disappeared, and all that remains is the family pride and the family traits—a thin parrot nose, sunken cheeks, and “inkily shadowed eyes.”

Rosalia Piera is the main character. Well-aware that the family traits have prevented her from being a beauty, she brags about being plain and compensates with a hypercritical biting mind. The first female Jewish intellectual in American literature, Rosalia detests the local Canaan Literary Society—its chatty Oprah Book Club-like atmosphere has nothing to do with the mental life—and yet she attends its meetings, hoping secretly to meet “the tall, fine suitor of Spanish and Portugese blood, with whom she had carried on so many phantom conversations.” Instead, her heart is captured when, intending to embarrass a dandy from a rich German Jewish family who had read a sentimental poem in praise of her large-breasted cousin at an earlier meeting, she is lacerated by pity for him. She “emerge[s] from a dark place where she had been hidden for years.” Within a year she and Adolph Reisinger are married. Thus begins the family whose history Caspary chronicles through three generations.

Caspary has been enrolled among the radical novelists, but in Thicker than Water she raises no placards. Perhaps anti-capitalist pluck emboldens her portraits of the Jewish businessmen who log long hours, earning money and talking about it endlessly and coming home too exhausted to attend to their wives, but far more noticeable is her knowledge of the millinery and department-store trades, which she might well have acquired from her father. The novel spans the rise and fall of the family’s silk-jobbing business—and its eventual sale—while Rosalia’s brother Saul leaves the firm to become a partner in a West Side department store and a relative by marriage leaves to join a brokerage. The third generation abandons business altogether for art, romance, or philanthropy.

Throughout it all, Caspary’s focus remains on the branching and leafing family—its marriages, homes, children—and the changing notions of status. Book One, “Prejudices,” comes to a head when a cousin marries a sharp-eyed salesman named Smith, who turns out to be a Polish Jew originally named Slivowski. “He’s a kike,” says Rosalia’s husband Adolph. “You can always depend upon them to take advantage of a situation.” Caspary elaborates:Such an attitude was not unusual. No doubt most of the good stolid German-Jewish merchants . . . said the same thing about kikes. . . . With the exodus of Jews from Russia and Polish Russia in the two decades since a bomb had been hurled at Alexander II, bitter prejudice had risen among American Jews against their Russian co-religionists. This bitterness did not ferment so rapidly in the Middle West as in the Eastern cities where the greatest number of immigrants sttled. But gradually as they came to Chicago, as the section around Maxwell Street grew crowded with uncouth, unclean strangers, speaking a guttural jargon, the old solid citizens felt their security threatened, their place in the community, the respect of their Gentile neighbors, their social position and their prosperity.In time, though, Rosalia’s practical-minded advice carries the day: “Perhaps you’re right,” she tells her husband. “Only it was that very thing, that ruthlessness and that quickness at seeing an advantage that made him so valuable to you.” The family “kike” stays in the business, and because of him, the business prospers.

Book Two, “Possessions,” details the family’s prosperity. Through marriage, the Pieras ally themselves to an even more prominent Chicago Jewish family—the descendants of a peddler. Caspary’s moral seems to be that, in America, money creates caste. “Descendant of a family who could trace its adventures from the fifteenth century,” Rosalia is amused that the “sons of meat packers, wheat farmers and steel puddlers had become the nobility of the Western world.” But it might just as easily be said that business knocks down the barriers of prejudice in its ruthless demand for the best talent and the most customers. Caspary does not show that the pursuit of financial success leads to cruelty and unhappiness, if that is what she is trying to do. The lives of the third generation are largely empty, and they are also strangers to Jewish tradition, badly educated, and concerned with little beyond pleasure. If capitalism is to blame, you couldn’t prove it by Thicker than Water.

The family chronicle is a native form of Jewish narrative. In the book of Genesis, the first family chronicle in Jewish literature, Abraham receives three promises from God, but they are not fulfilled in his lifetime. Since then the Jews have understood that several generations may be required for a promise to work its way through the system. Early on, Rosalia reflects that “no one living could remember the day when there had been anything but intelligence and good blood in the dark Piera family,” but by the conclusion of the novel, the family has intermarried, acquired land and valuable possessions, and given birth to many grandchildren. The blood may have thinned, but it is still Thicker than Water.

Five Books of Jewish fiction

Tim Davis asks me to “recommend [a] handful of books (fiction) in which Judaism either is a central theme or is the foundational spirit the author draws upon for the book’s style and tone.”

Sure thing. Before I do, though, let me direct you to the great Ruth R. Wisse’s 2000 book The Modern Jewish Canon. Moreover, the Yiddish National Book Center compiled a longer list of one hundred great Jewish books as selected by Wisse, Hillel Halkin, Robert Alter, and four other critics. In what follows I try my best merely to supplement their canons. I have also restricted myself to American writers, if only to narrow the field that I must survey to compile such a humash. The Amateur Reader can add more Yiddish titles. Perhaps Israeli novels will make up another Five Books some day.

(1.) Isaac Rosenfeld, Passage from Home (1946). The novel might have been entitled Call It Sleep: The Next Generation, if only Henry Roth’s superlative novel had not already disappeared twelve years after its publication. An immigrant Jewish family; the fifteen-year-old son, “sensitive as a burn”; the inevitable conflict with the Old World father, who has submerged his own intellect in ambitions for his son—much that would become familiar is here. The boom in American Jewish fiction was ignited by this book, which explains most of what came after.

(2.) Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957). As much as I dislike The Natural do I revere Malamud’s novel about Frank Alpine, the young Italian-American who goes to work in Morris Bober’s grocery after sticking it up. I know all the objections against it: for Malamud the Jews are symbols of metaphysical suffering, the Yiddish-inflected English is artificial and nothing like what any Jew has ever spoken, etc. I could not care less. No one gives a better flavor of the Jewish spirit of hope in the midst of despair.

(3.) Chaim Potok, The Chosen (1967). Another novel that has undergone a deflation in recent years. For a glimpse of Orthodoxy with its glorification of Talmudic study, its intense family life, and its rivalries between modernists and hasidim, no book is a better introduction. When this book made him famous, Potok was liberated from the editors who stayed after him to plane The Chosen into shape. The story is uninvolved, and so is the prose. The people are sharply individuated and yet wholly recognizable. In a real sense, although he published eight novels, Potok was a one-book author.

(4.) Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983). In one of those coincidences that God seems to delight in, it was published the same year as Arthur A. Cohen’s Admirable Woman, which was also based on the life of Hannah Arendt. In Ozick’s novel, the Arendt figure is a mother in conflict with the Jewish educational establishment. Although I’ve never heard it described this way, it is a novel about the ancient quarrel between official institutional Judaism and the text-centered culture inhabited by deeply religious Jews. Except for Agnon, no other Jewish novelist is so hypertextual with Jewish texts. You may not catch all of the allusions, but you will get a taste for Jewish textualism.

(5.) Zoë Heller, The Believers (2009). I have already reviewed the novel at unconscionable and unbloglike length, and then went on to discuss it further. My addendum is autobiographical. Like Rosa, I am a baal teshuvah, a Jew who “returns” to Orthodoxy—that is, who becomes Orthodox in adulthood. I can say this much: Heller gets it exactly right. You may not feel the rightness for yourself, but believe me, this is how it happens.

The Middle of the Journey

“Yech,” said my neocon friend when I told him that I admired The Middle of the Journey. Yet Lionel Trilling’s 1947 novel—Trilling himself—is more admired on the Right than on the Left these days. Nothing like liberal anti-Communism, which Trilling championed, exists any more; and not just because Communism has been discredited everywhere except on the academic Left. It is not clear any more what tyranny the Left is anti-, other than a firefighter who objects to being discriminated against on the basis of race.

His theme, as Trilling wrote in an Introduction when the novel was reissued in 1975, was “the powerful attraction to Communism felt by a considerable part of the American intellectual class during the Thirties and Forties.” And the equally powerful revulsion from it, he might have added, on the part of ex-Communists. The opposing forces are dramatized in the character of Gifford Maxim, “this huge, dedicated man,” and the reaction he provokes. By now everyone knows that the character was based on Whittaker Chambers, who had “pledged himself to the cause of Communism and had then bitterly repudiated his allegiance.” At the time the novel was published he could “scarcely be called a historical figure,” but less than a year later Chambers testified in a public hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee that an “underground group” whose purpose was “the Communist infiltration of the American government,” although espionage as “certainly one of its eventual objectives,” included former State department official Alger Hiss and two other members of the Roosevelt administration. Since that moment Trilling’s novel has been treated as a footnote to history, but there is a case to be made for its literary interest. Especially because readers on the Left will have nothing to do with Chambers’s 1952 autobiography Witness—the greater book on Communism’s powerful attraction—The Middle of the Journey deserves to be more widely read.

Right off it must be admitted that you either put up with Trilling’s style or lose patience with it. Exquisiteness and tact may serve the purposes of criticism, depending as it does on incongruities of wit, but few novelists besides James have succeeded in writing such prose without sounding fussy—particularly when the care is being taken to distinguish between abstractions and approximations. John Laskell, the novel’s protagonist, a young scholar who has written Theories of Housing, has a private income:

It preserved him from the very beginning from the brunt of those problems of “integrity” which, although they had always been of importance in American careers, were just now of more importance to men of talent than ever before. Laskell, with only a little caution and not much sacrifice, could manage to live without a salary. The alternatives to doing what he thought right did not present themselves, as they did to many of his friends, as “selling out” or as “corruption.” He did not have to think of himself in such heroic and tragic language and this suited his reasonable temperament.In the summer of 1936, Laskell comes to the Connecticut countryside, “the stranger, the outlander, the foreigner from New York,” to stay with his friends Arthur and Nancy Croom after an unspecified illness which had nearly killed him. He comes bearing news, “quite momentous news about Maxim—the grotesque story of his break with the Party.”

The Crooms are radicals. They are “the decent people, the people of good will.” They wear “the armor of idealism.” They belong to “the near future—not the far future when the apocalyptic days would come, but the time now at hand before things got very bad.” They take pains “to think in terms of mankind in general.” They oppose war, but make an exception for revolution. They “grant or refuse requests according to nothing but reason.” Their passion of mind and will is so pure that they “could not believe that anything that opposed it required consideration.”

Their reaction to the news that Gifford Maxim has broken with the Communist Party is incredulity. They stare at Laskell as if had had just told them of the Reichstag fire. Although not themselves members of the Party—they are what used to be called fellow travellers—they assess political action in reference to it. For them “the Party [is] a fixed point from which all deviation implied something wrong with the person deviating.” There are only two possible explanations for Maxim’s break. Either he has gone insane or has “moved so far as to be on the other side,” becoming “the blackest of reactionaries.” Thus, when Laskell appears to take Maxim’s own explanation seriously—when he seems to be saying, in effect, that Maxim is telling the truth about the Party—he becomes, in the Crooms’ eyes, “touched with Maxim’s guilt.”

Maxim’s explanation is simple. He was a Party professional, not an idealist; he cared only for results. “[I]f you take the professional attitude about revolution,” he explains to Laskell, “you don’t permit yourself the luxury of ideas.” At some point, though, the results ceased to please him; they were more than he had bargained for. They were, in fact, evil.

Then as now, the use of the word evil separates Right from Left. The Crooms are not mistaken: Maxim has joined the other side, the side of law in open antagonism to evil. “Is it not strange,” he says,do you not find it strange that as we become more sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, we become more and more cruel? The more we think of the human body and the human mind as being able to suffer, and the sorrier we feel for that, and the more we plan to prevent suffering, the more we are drawn to inflict suffering. They more tortures we think up. The more people we believe deserve to be tortured. The more we think that people can be fuled by fear of suffering. We have become our brother’s keeper—and we will keep him in fear, we will keep him in concentration camps, we will keep him in straitjackets, we will keep him in the grave.Then Maxim pays a visit. And despite the Crooms’ initial reluctance even to dine with him, he becomes involved in the human drama of the Connecticut countryside. One thing leads to another, and a child dies. At first it appears that her father has murdered her—a genuine working-class man, a victim of capitalist injustice, who is for the Crooms “not so much a man as a symbol. He was a symbol of something good, of something that deserved to be talked about endlessly. . . .” Although he is cleared of his daughter’s murder, he is no longer a symbol of good. “I can’t stand the idea of having him around me,” Nancy says. “Not that I’d be afraid, but I’d always be thinking that this man killed his child.” Arthur falls back upon Marxist clichés (“social causes, environment, education or lack of education, economic pressure,” yadda yadda), and Nancy agrees that he is not to blame “personally, individually,” but even so she remains adamant about not seeing him again. She is deeply perplexed by her contradictory feelings.

“Nancy’s dilemma is an inevitable one,” Maxim observes. “She refuses to say that Caldwell has any responsibility, any blame or guilt. And then she refuses to allow him to come near her.” He explains the advantage of the system with which he has replaced Communism. To his new way of thinking, the child’s father is “wholly responsible for his acts,” and all men are responsible for one another. To use his exact words: “if we are all members of one another, then each of us is in some part God.” Thus Nancy Croom can embrace the man who killed his daughter only in the abstract, while rejecting him in the flesh. Maxim is able to reconcile the two impulses. “Absolute responsibility,” he concludes: “it is the only way that men can keep their value, can be thought of as other than mere things.”

In the end, then, Maxim triumphs. The Left’s refusal to acknowledge the evils perpetrated in the name of Communism—even to speak the name of evil—divides it against itself. But this is not the claim that Trilling’s novel has on the attention of readers in 2009. Nor is the novel most interesting, as several critics have pointed out, in prophesying the rise of neoconservatism. “The time was getting ripe for a competing system,” Laskell decides. The Middle of the Journey is that rare thing, a successful novel of ideas. And the key to its success is that Trilling takes what Aristotle called dianoia (“thought,” which he defined as a lesser element of tragedy), and makes it indistinguishable from ethos, character. To accept or reject a man is to accept or reject his thinking. At the end of the novel, Laskell includes the radical Crooms among the dangers of the world, and so does Lionel Trilling’s attentive reader.

New issues, frames, non-existent empires

The second issue of Daniel E. Pritchard’s Critical Flame is up. Nora Delaney looks at Mark McGurl’s Program Era, while three different reviewers examine recent fiction. Pritchard himself takes a gander at the “exciting and enjoyable” D. A. Powell’s fourth volume of poetry.

The Amateur Reader begins reading Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories in which a commercial traveler listens to the tales of the passengers in a third-class Ukrainian railroad car. Ruth R. Wisse calls Aleichem’s frame stories “the natural form” of Yiddish literature, creating an “internal dialogue between Jews.”

Roberta Rood praises The Little Stranger by the compulsively readable Sarah Waters. Rood points out that the novel is 463 pages long, but consumes the reader with curiosity and becomes a “real page turner.”

Thirteen writers suggest some beach-bag stuffers in National Review Online’s annual symposium on summer reading.

Ron Slate recommends Kevin Canty’s story collection Where the Money Went. Canty tends to write about the approach of a “revelation which does not occur.” That is his book’s “secret sauce,” according to Slate.

Martin Levin explains his “mixed feelings” for Gore Vidal. He both likes and dislikes that Vidal is a “hyperarticulate critic of the excesses of the American Empire.” Ah. That explains my own 99% pure distilled hatred for Vidal’s writing. No such empire exists.

A. F. Jurek declares that blogging is dying, the victim of Twitter, Facebook, and the difficulty of doing it regularly.

The Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy wishes a happy seventy-sixth birthday to Oliver Sacks.

Matthew Cheney takes seriously two new G. I. Joe books that are “media tie-ins.” “As with Bond,” he concludes, “the ideal audience seems to be adolescent heterosexual boys and maybe some lesbians. . . .”

Carrie Frye has the latest intriguing details on The Original of Laura, the novel left unfinished by Nabokov upon his death in 1977.

Vikram Johri enjoys The Link, Colim Tudge’s account of how Norwegian paleontologist Jorn Hurum acquired “Ida,” the 47-million-year-old “missing link” between primates and man.

Sam Sattler awards Ellen Feldman’s novel about the Scottsboro Boys four out of five stars. Narrated by a “desperately poor white” in Alabama, Scottsboro “makes what happened, in the context of its times, almost understandable.”

Litlove clears some books off her table before leaving for vacation.

R. T. Davis’s book blog Novels, Stories and More seems to have disappeared from the blogscape again. If anyone has heard from R. T., or has any news of him, please leave a comment.

Suspended in literary amber

For the past fifty-eight years, Holden Caulfield has been “stuck in time and place on the 256 pages J. D. Salinger allotted him in 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye,” Julie Steinberg writes in the Wall Street Journal today. And if Salinger has his way, that’s where Holden Caulfield will remain.

Last month Salinger sued to enjoin the publication of an unauthorized sequel, and just last week the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in his favor, holding that the sequel—60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by the Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting—does not constitute fair use of Salinger’s original material. “Mr. Salinger is notorious for his protection of his creations,” Steinberg observes. “He has denied movie directors the rights to option Catcher and turned down licensing deals that could have turned Holden Caulfield into a mass-marketing bonanza.” But I wonder if she hasn’t missed the point.

Salinger last published a new piece of fiction more than four decades ago, and it is just possible that Holden Caulfield’s “suspension in literary amber,” as Steinberg calls it, is to blame. For fifty-eight years Salinger has been dominated by his creation. It would be as if Mark Twain had managed to publish only Merry Tales and The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories after creating Huck Finn. Instead, Twain turned out A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court five years later, taking the attack upon Sir Walter Scott that he’d begun earlier—you will remember that the wrecked steamboat where Jim sees Pap’s body is called the Walter Scott—in an entirely new direction. Imagine if Salinger had turned his attention to the warning from Mr. Antolini, the “perverty” English teacher who reminds Holden of his cherished older brother D. B. After Holden is kicked out of Pencey, Mr. Antolini warns him that he is “riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall.”

It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don’t know. But do you know what I’m driving at, at all?Holden says, “Sure,” although he disagrees about “that hating business.” He only hates football players for a little while. Mr. Antolini tries again:This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.Mr. Antolini is pretty clearly talking about himself—he is a frustrated poet, married to a woman who is “about sixty years older,” according to Holden. What if Salinger had written about such a man? What if he had tried to dramatize the fall instead of merely describing it secondhand? Or what if he had made an about-face and tackled the subject of a man who believed that his environment did supply him with what he was looking for?

What few readers of The Catcher in the Rye have noticed is that Holden longs for exactly the kind of reclusive life that Salinger himself ended up with:What I’d do, I figured, I’d go down to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I’d bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I’d be somewhere out West where it was pretty and sunny and where nobody’d know me and I’d get a job. I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of a job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody. I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.Since moving to New Hampshire in 1953, Salinger has been through with stupid useless conversations. He succeeded in turning himself into a literary deaf-mute.

His four unproductive decades might have been avoided if he had relinquished control over Holden Caulfield—if he had granted a movie director the rights to The Catcher in the Rye and signed the licensing deals that could have turned Holden into a mass-marketing bonanza. Instead, as attested by the court papers accompanying his lawsuit to block publication of a sequel, Salinger remains fixated on his creation, “one of the most recognized characters in American literature” who has taken “his own place in American culture as the prototype of the angst-filled, cynical teen coming into his own.” Indeed, these words are deeply dishonest, because Salinger has refused to permit Holden to find “his own place.” Like an overprotective parent, Salinger has fought desperately to prevent Holden from achieving independence, and the folie à deux has arrested the development of both. Among other things, The Catcher in the Rye is a less interesting novel because it has had no descendants and inheritors, only rivals and apes.

Ideology as cultural marker

Man from the cradle is a racist. He prefers his own kind and turns up his nose, sometimes literally, at those from the next tribe. Or so, at least, argue evolutionary biologists. Human beings are hard-wired “to favor alliances . . . with others in direct proportion to degree of kinship and/or phenotypical similarity to these”; they display a “biologically based predisposition to have negative attitudes toward others on the basis of real or perceived differences that are typically, though not exclusively, of an ethnic nature.”[1] Thus ethnic groups develop cultural markers to distinguish those who belong from those who do not. In her now famous “wise Latina” speech, for example, Judge Sonia Sotomayor said:

For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandules y pernil—rice, beans and pork—that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events. My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla (pig intestines), patitas de cerdo con garbanzo (pigs’ feet with beans), and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito (pigs’ tongue and ears). I bet the Mexican-Americans in this room are thinking that Puerto Ricans have unusual food tastes.So much for “Latina identity.” On her own showing, their food tastes mark “Newyorkricans” as different from Mexican-Americans. Such markers can become so subtle that they create concentric circles of in-groups. Thus many Christians wear crosses, but Evangelical Protestants wear an “empty” cross to distinguish themselves from Catholics, whose crucifixes bear the figure of the broken Christ. Similarly, Orthodox Jews wear skullcaps to separate themselves from non-Jews (and the non-Orthodox), but Modern Orthodox wear kipot serugot (knitted skullcaps) while the haredi wear black velvet.

Not only the recognition but also the sharing of cultural markers can add to the appreciation of a novel, although sometimes I wonder if they are intended merely to create an alliance with some readers. In Thicker than Water, Vera Caspary’s 1932 novel about Sephardic Jews in Chicago, which I shall be reviewing at greater length in a few days, cultural references serve to differentiate one set of Jews from another, but since Caspary takes their differentiating force for granted and does not explain them further, they do double-duty as a signal of welcome to Jewish readers:Of course there was nothing outwardly Jewish in the strictly modern cuisine of Pine Point [a summer resort hotel for Jews]. They thought the cooking better than in other resorts, although Grandma Reisinger was often heard to complain that the kitchen was more more Amerikanisch each year. The cooking was not kosher. Most of these moderns looked on the discrimination against lard and shell fish as old-fashioned, superstitious and suspiciously Polish. Melanie’s mother would not come to the resort, for she still served meat and butter separately, but the younger Jesuruns had no patience with such outworn ideas. None of their friends set kosher tables.[2]The younger generation of Americanized Jews has liberated itself most thoroughly from kashrut; the older generation of Sephardic Jews continues to observe such prohibitions as that against mixing meat and dairy; and the Polish—or Ostjuden, that is, the Jews from Eastern Europe—keep kosher. In the next paragraph, a “homely old crone who wore a sheitel” leaves the hotel “without having touched a bite of food.” Although Caspary deftly shows that a sheitel is a wig, she does not explain its significance. That the crone is Polish must be constructed by the reader as a kind of logical inference: the Polish keep kosher, the crone keeps kosher, therefore the crone is Polish—that is, Orthodox. For Jewish readers, however, who immediately spot the significance of the sheitel, no inference is necessary.

In more recent American fiction, ideological sloganeering does the cultural work of forging an alliance between writer and reader. In Bridge of Sighs, his weakest novel since his first novel, Richard Russo directs his first-person narrator to explain that his motherdespises our president as a dishonest fool whose lies and stupidity have cost over two thousand American lives, but her deepest contempt is reserved for those who voted for him. . . . Even more personal is her claim that our president’s stupidity is apparent in his physical appearance, particularly his facial expressions. All you have to do is look at him, she claims. . . . [He] does, I admit, bear a striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman.[3]What else is the function of this passage than to appeal to readers who share the commonplace of George W. Bush’s stupidity and to announce to them, “I, the author, am on your side”? The formulaic cut-and-paste wording his lies and stupidity have cost over two thousand American lives and the narrator’s “admission” that President Bush resembles Alfred E. Neuman—as on the November 13, 2000, cover of The Nation—serve no other narrative purpose. The passage is irrelevant to the story.

This anxiety to win the approval of leftwing readers suggests to me that Russo, at least in The Bridge of Sighs, is a stranger to his own sensibility. A far more interesting passage occurs later in the novel when a Jewish mother confides that she does not believe in the sacramental conception of marriage. No surprise, really, since the Jewish conception is closer to that of a formal covenant. Russo appears not to know that. Instead, this is a slip—a simple failure of research. It reveals his cultural assumption—namely, that marriage is to be conceived in sacramental terms. When he is not trying to impress upon his readers that he shares their political opinions, Russo’s deepest instincts are Catholic.

Zoë Heller’s superb novel The Believers is all the more astonishing in this light. Since writing my review of it, I have learned that Heller is a Lefty. Yet she alludes to President Bush without winking broadly at her readers. Her allusion is poker-faced, neutral. For she is not interested in establishing her own ideological fides, but in showing in precise detail how ideology operates as a cultural marker separating her characters—especially Audrey, the self-described harridan and lifelong socialist—from those who are beneath their notice. The unavoidable conclusion is that ideology has little to do with ideas. Its real purpose is cultural: to sustain a feeling of kinship among those on the same side.
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[1] Joseph Lopreato and Timothy Crippen, Crisis in Sociology: The Need for Darwin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999), p. 267. Quoted in Russell K. Nieli, “Selling Merit down the River,” National Association of Scholars (July 6, 2009): 46–47.

[2] Vera Caspary, Thicker than Water (New York: Liveright, 1932), pp. 122–23.

[3] Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 177.

Baseball novels from top to bottom

The Hardball Cooperative, a blog written by ten fans and students of the game, hosts a symposium on the best and worst baseball novels of all time. Mark Harris’s Southpaw, my own choice, was nominated twice for the top spot, while The Natural, published just one year earlier, was named both best and worst. Tim Morris, a scholarly authority on baseball fiction, recommends Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s 1983 historical novel The Celebrant and makes a fine case for it. Excuse me while I hurry over to Abebooks.com.

Update: The nonfiction selections were announced today (Wednesday, July 8).

Update, II: Lots of comments over at the Baseball Think Factory on the Hardball Cooperative symposium. One of us symposiasts, according to a commentator, is a Primate. If none of the others has dibs on it, I get to be the Primate.

On style

Patrick Kurp closes a typically fine discussion of the Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie by quoting him on style:

A writer’s style is the measure of his personality, and cannot be acquired consciously. It shows unmistakably what you are: gives you away for what you are.Michael Oakeshott, his six-years-younger contemporary, says something similar. “Not to detect a man’s style,” he writes, “is to have missed three-quarters of his actions and utterances; and not to have acquired a style is to have shut oneself off from the ability to convey any but the crudest meanings.”[1]

A writer’s style is the most effective means of identifying him. Yet style is neglected in literary criticism and education. It has been replaced by racial or ethnic identity and its cousins gender and class. A writer is identified, not by detecting his unique and peculiar style, but by identifying him with a physiological category or social group with which he may share only superficial resemblances. This eliminates any need to wrestle with his thought, which might distinguish him from the group.

The problem, of course, is how to define style. In his introduction to an anthology on the problem, J. V. Cunningham shows that there are three basic kinds of definition—negative, affirmative, and neutral. Benedetto Croce is advanced as a spokesman for the first, holding that “how a thing is expressed is indistinguishable from the expression. . . .” Cicero and “Longinus” represent the second view; for them style appears but seldom, but when it does it deserves praise. The “neutral concept” is that “everything has style, though one may contrast various styles and find this good and that bad.”[2]

My own is a neutral conception of style. Gerhardie and Oakeshott, quoted above, are affirmative: a style is a good thing to have. (To rephrase from my point of view: a good style is a good thing to have.) Style is the trace of mind, or what the Jews call sekhel, implying native shrewdness in addition to intelligence. What logic is to reasoning so style is to writing. It is where a man takes hold of a subject, how he turns it over, when he pauses and when he hurries on. A return to style from the fumbling of identity would also make it possible to distinguish a man’s thought from what he is saying. For style, as I would define it, is the stance and tempo of a mind.
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[1] Michael Oakeshott, “Learning and Teaching,” in The Voice of Liberal Learning, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 56.

[2] J. V. Cunningham, “The Problem of Style,” in Collected Essays (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976), pp. 251–52.

The Passionate Torah

Danya Ruttenberg, ed., The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 320 pp. $19.95.

Postmodernism, feminism, and queer liberation have raised “a whole new set of questions with which to address our time-honored traditions,” Danya Ruttenberg says in her introduction to this collection of eighteen essays by diverse hands. The intention is to explore such topics as “queer sexuality,” masturbation, “female sexual empowerment,” prostitution, “inter-religious coupling,” monogamy, modesty, and “the erotics of sexual segregation” in hopes of finding “a new model of [Jewish religious] practice for the future.”

The hope is repeatedly disappointed. And the reason is that all of the answers to Ruttenberg’s new set of questions are provided by modernity and postmodernity. By addressing Jewish tradition, Ruttenberg and her contributors really mean that the tradition will just have to adapt.

A good small example appears in an otherwise useful survey of birth control and procreation by Elliot N. Dorff, an ethicist and ordained rabbi who has helped to decide such questions for Conservative Judaism. Observing that the Talmud “prohibits masturbation as ‘wasting of the seed’ (hashhatat zera),” he abruptly turns and announces without warning that “masturbation, which is harmless, is preferable to nonmarital sex. . . .” Dorff is a trained philosopher and perhaps the clearest thinker in Ruttenberg’s volume. The non sequitir escaped his notice, most likely, because the assertion that masturbation is harmless seems uncontestable to him. Medical science has established the fact, regardless of what the Talmud says.

And that is the point. When one of the most Jewishly learned contributors to The Passionate Torah disregards the Talmud, because the testimony of medical science is silently treated as superior to it in wisdom, the result is not to ask how “new ways of thinking” impact Jewish understanding, but rather to dress up in a quasi-Jewish vocabulary to talk about what literary intellectuals, academics, and the young always want to talk about—sex.

Judaism is not silent about sex, but its speech is consistent. It can be reduced to variations on a single refrain: Judaism is a sexual discipline, which is demanded of a Jew in order to sanctify the body. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik explains:

Disciplining the body, interfering with its pleasure-seeking drives, organizing them into a meaningful whole, and relating them to a higher frame of reference by refusing to yield to the powerful push of the flesh and by resisting the rush of primitive lust, are attainable only at a high price in terms of self-denial, self-despair and self-sacrifice. Desires unfulfilled, pleasure pursuits interrupted when attainment is in sight, and withdrawal from something fascinating are painful events.But to experience the pain and self-denial of a sexual discipline, Soloveitchik concludes, is to experience “the dynamics of holiness.”[1]

The language of sexual discipline is entirely absent from The Passionate Torah. Discussing a famous story in tractate Menahot in which a rabbi stops himself from bedding a prostitute when his tsitsit strike him in the face—the prostitute, moved by his restraint, converts to Judaism and ends by marrying him—Melanie Malka Landau says that “one way” to interpret the story is that “sex that began as ‘illicit’ becomes ‘holy’ within the appropriate framework.” But this is no guarantee against sexual objectification, she says. The truth is that “good sex” (her phrase) also depends upon “a deep recognition of humanity.”

A beautiful doctrine, but what are its consequences? Landau moves immediately to call into question the traditional Jewish conception of a husband’s obligation in marriage. “Male access to ongoing heterosexual sex from their partners is secured through the guise of a commandment incumbent on the male to pleasure his wife,” she writes, reversing the priorities of the tradition. Besides, she goes on, “the woman’s consent in sex is potentially ambiguous, perhaps because sex is construed as part of her husband’s obligation to her.” The deep recognition of humanity, in short, is a better guide to the sexually perplexed than Jewish law. And even when the law appears to promote “female sexual empowerment,” the opposite is probably the case.

Contrast this to the views of the Orthodox thinker Eliezer Berkovits, whose sexual ethic parallels Landau’s to a striking extent. Berkovits founds his conclusions upon the principle that “man is not an animal,” a “Jewish affirmation that cannot be given up without surrendering Judaism itself.” Because sexuality is not merely biological, it is not to be rejected; but because it is also biological, it has the power to turn a man into an animal. In that case, “[i]t is not what man does,” Berkovits writes, “but what is happening to man.” The danger is not simply that the partner will be objectified—that the sex act will become, in Landau’s phrase, a “power play”—but that man will become the object of his lust. Animal sexuality is a “pointing from genital to genital”; human sexuality is a “call from person to person.” For Berkovits, though, the drama of sexuality does not end there. Persons are called to persons, but Jews are also called to God. Sex is not merely “a deep recognition of humanity,” but also a mitsvah. He tells the same Talmudic story as Landau, but his conclusion is utterly different. After the rabbi marries the ex-prostitute, the mitsvah of wearing tsitsit is “fulfilled, not only in ritual observance, but also in recovered personal dignity.” Human sexuality deepens one’s obligation to God.[2]

Ruttenberg’s own contribution to the book is an attempt to reconceive tsniut (“modesty”) so that it no longer involves either hypocrisy or “the absolute erasure of female potential.” The argument is grounded in the ideas of the feminist Audré Lorde, who “defines the erotic as that which embodies the deepest and most fundamental connection to the self. . . .” Lorde is treated as a source whose authority equals the Talmud—which Ruttenberg then quotes, but not in a way that is indispensable to her argument. Her prooftext is feminist theory, not the Torah.

She concludes that “true modesty involves a subjective connection to the erotic,” and thus its definition must be placed “in the hands of each individual.” But this is incoherent. Ruttenberg is not talking about tsniut, but self-expression. For modesty is not yet another means of establishing personal autonomy; it is a matter of social and communal concern. It is the price for entering into a community where one’s individual standards are submerged in the mutual agreement to treat one another as fully deserving of respect and welcome, or separating oneself from the community to pursue one’s subjective connection to the erotic.

The book is at its best when the contributors stick closely to Jewish texts. Gail Labovitz, for example, gives a reading of Kiddushin 81b that turns the traditional interpretation on its head, making a rabbi’s wife into a “legal guerilla” and a model for feminist sexual ethics. She does not belabor the last point, however, recognizing that hers is only one reading “among several possibilities.” Rather than twisting the story further to press it into the service of practical reform, she permits her interpretation of the text to stand on its own. In similar fashion, Judith R. Baskin provides an entertaining survey of biblical and rabbinical texts on prostitution. Only in her closing sentence does she turn to the question of practical consequences. At their best, the contributors’ textual interpretations can be enjoyed by ignoring the utilitarian recommendations that grow out of them.

A common error throughout the book is to assume that Jewish ritual must be reinterpreted to make it available to a new generation. How can anyone expect young women to practice sexual separation from their husbands during menstruation if the laws of niddah suggest they are unclean? The error here is to confuse belief in with belief that. A believing Jew guards the mitsvot out of belief in the God who ordained them, while not permitting his occasional disagreement—his inability to believe that they are universally true—to interfere with his obedience. The performance of a mitsvah is not symbolic, but intrinsically meaningful; it does not require an extra layer of interpretive validity to validate it.

None of the contributors to The Passionate Torah comes out of Orthodoxy, and the first language of most is postmodern theory. Small surprise, then, that their primary goal is not for Jews to recover the mitsvot, but (in the words of Haviva Ner-David) to “reevaluate their implementation of these laws.” Ner-David recommends, for example, that a couple “celebrate” the wife’s menstrual cycle by going to the ritual bath together so that both might immerse themselves, one after the other. Again and again, the question in this up-to-the-minute book is not how contemporary Jews might serve God through observing his commandments, but how the commandments might be reinterpreted and revised to serve the sexual needs of contemporary Jews.
____________________

[1] Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Redemption of Sexual Life,” in Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships, ed. David Shatz and Joel B. Wolowelsky (New York: Toras HoRav, 2000), pp. 73–104.

[2] Eliezer Berkovits, “A Jewish Sexual Ethics,” in Crisis and Faith (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976), pp. 41–82.

Choice and being chosen

I have written my last word on hipster Jews—for now. The criticism that my view of choice and being chosen is “static,” though, continues to rankle.

The source of my thinking, as so often the case, is J. V. Cunningham:

Allegiance is assigned
Forever when the mind
Chooses and stamps the will.
Thus, I must love you still
Through good and ill.

But though we cannot part
We may retract the heart
And build such privacies
As self-regard agrees
Conduce to ease.

So manners will repair
The ravage of despair
Which generous love invites,
Preferring quiet nights
To vain delights.

Cunningham was a renegade Catholic—the term he preferred to “lapsed Catholic”—and in some important ways this poem derives from the Catholic understanding of the sacrament of marriage. And doubtless some will read this poem as bleak and even unloving.

It has never struck me as that. It is a firm repudiation of romantic love, however. Under the régime of romantic love, the problem is finding the right person. The real problem of love, as anyone who is happily married can tell you, is rightly loving the person you have found. Cunningham explains how: “We may retract the heart.” Not only from our spouse, but from anyone who might be tempted to seize and break it. This does not mean that we grow distant and cold toward our spouse, but that the heart—the seat of desire, the immediacy of feeling, the swoon of infatuation—no longer regulates our behavior toward him. We can’t fall out of love either.

The mind stamps the will: a learned pun is contained in the line. An ethos or character is stamped upon a coin—that’s where the term and concept originate. The mind creates our character by controlling our intention, permanently. Thus whether we choose or are chosen is irrelevant, because the effect is the same either way. Once we choose we are as good as chosen. We have committed ourselves to a way, and there is no turning back.

For this reason, the theologian Michael Wyschogrod says that a convert to Judaism undergoes a miracle. While a Jewish proverb calls the convert a yiddishe neshama in a goyishe bod—a Jewish soul in gentile flesh—Wyschogrod holds that the convert becomes carnally Jewish, as if born to a Jewish mother. Once the convert chooses, his choice disappears; forevermore, he is chosen.

Perhaps the eternity of this sentence, whether in marriage or covenant, will cause some to despair. Modern culture teaches that we must pass up none of its delights. The cost is repression! You know what happens to repressed desires: they return eventually! But those of us who believe in being chosen prefer quiet nights to vain (self-flattering and bootless) delights. And if the repressed returns, we can react with good manners, and pretend the impropriety never occurred.

The search for Jewish answers

Hipster Judaism is not the first Jewish youth movement to seek the reinvention of Jewish culture. Perhaps the examination of an earlier “innovation movement” might bring some differences into focus.

The anti-war campaign of the ’sixties was heavily populated by college-age Jews, but not many would have described themselves as committed. What they sought lay outside the Jewish life. They knew enough about it to know that. “Our young people know very well what Judaism is, and what it is not,” wrote Jakob J. Petuchowski. “That is why they speak of Judaism’s ‘irrelevance’ in the first place. They know that many of their mores and behavior patterns do not coincide with what Judaism has always been understood to teach.”[1]

What the young Jews demanded was more attention to what was “relevant” to their lives: racism, the draft, the Vietnam war. But not even the most politically engaged were particularly concerned about Jewish issues. “The Jewish campus activist,” said a Hillel rabbi, “who has a fluent vocabulary of slogans about justice and equal rights cannot see the plight of Soviet Jewry as equal to all other human concerns. He is unmoved by the Hitler era. Such issues appear far from him personally. . . . He considers them irrelevant.”[2]

A small minority of Jewish campus activists, however, sought specifically Jewish answers to the social problems they identified. They tended to remain aloof from anti-war demonstrations, feeling a “reluctance to engage in protest when there was nothing unique for the Jewishly involved students to do.”[3] They wanted to “see the world through Jewish eyes—eyes deep with the past, a bit too sad for constant merrymaking, too wise for boisterous idealism, eyes that shine with rage and hope, but that glisten with tears when confronted with innocence.”[4] They understood themselves as “self-aware intellectuals, who, though born into the Jewish community, find themselves in tension with that community.”[5]

In language that echoed the Port Huron Statement, the young Jews complained about the “crust of apathy” that covered the American Jewish community and the “inner alienation” they experienced growing up in it. They were contemptuous of institutional Judaism with its overlapping bureaucracies and self-preserving goals. In November 1969 a group calling itself Concerned Jewish Students issued a set of demands to the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, then meeting in Boston. The students objected to “distortions in the budget priorities of Jewish Federations,” and demanded that “all local Federations undertake a drastic and immediate reordering of domestic priorities in their local communities in order to improve the quality of Jewish education on all levels, and to stimulate the growth of Jewish cultural life on campus and in the community.”[6]

The young Jewish radicals derided Jewish illiteracy. Without an adequate Jewish education, they observed, the next generation would not be motivated to enter into the Jewish community. They themselves did not break entirely with institutional Judaism, but sought to expand it by creating institutions of their own. They started Response, a quarterly magazine of Jewish scholarship and opinion, and almost singlehandedly founded the havurah movement; they blew upon the sparks of interest in kabbalah; they defended Israel “without apology”; they raised the issue of Soviet Jewry; they turned attention to the Holocaust. Their activism contributed to the explosion of Jewish day schools and university-level Jewish studies programs around the country. In sum, they effected a “sea change in American Jewish life,” as I quoted Jonathan Tobin’s saying the other day.

The Jewish radicals of the ’sixties sought to reconcile freedom and authority, the hip and up-to-date with a 3,000-year-old rabbinical tradition, but their efforts were solidly grounded in Jewish texts. As Alan Mintz put it in the anthology that brought many of the young Jewish radicals together between two covers,

On the one hand, they are so eager to be considered new and fresh, to draw distinctions between themselves and the insights and positions of the established community; yet on the other, the very fabric of discourse is shot through with symbols from the Jewish past, evincing a strong reaching backwards in time, an impulse toward re-authentication.[7]Indeed, the The New Jews Table of Contents reads like a roll-call of currently important Jewish scholars: Mintz himself, of course, and also the literary critic David G. Roskies of Jewish Theological Seminary, the biblical scholar Michael Fishbane of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, Barry W. Holtz, dean of the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Arthur A. Green, the biographer of Nahman of Breslov, and the sociologist of religion Hillel Levine of Boston University.

In a word, the young Jewish radicals of the ’sixties were consequential. They left their mark on American Judaism. And the reason is that they did not seek a secular upgrade for the Jewish religion. They conceived their radicalism in uniquely Jewish terms, and when the occasion of their radicalism—the Vietnam war—faded away, they were left with the search for uniquely Jewish answers. The question for the current generation is whether, once their search for difference evaporates, they will be left with anything of substance.
____________________

[1] Jakob J. Petuchowski, “Relevance,” Jewish Spectator 34 (1969): 13–16.

[2] Herman L. Horowitz, “Can the Campus Lead the Way?” Jewish Specator 32 (1967): 10–11.

[3] Alan L. Mintz, “Jewish Students and the War: A Strategy,” Response 2 (Fall 1968): 32–35.

[4] James A. Sleeper, Introduction to The New Jews, ed. Sleeper and Mintz (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 3–22. Emphasis in the original.

[5] Richard Narva, “Judaism on the Campus—Why It Fails,” in The New Jews, pp. 101–110. Originally published in Response 2 (Fall 1968): 11–17.

[6] Quoted in Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, “Jewish Youth Fights Gerontocracy,” Jewish Spectator 34 (1969): 2–5, 29–32.

[7] Mintz, Epilogue to The New Jews, pp. 244–46.

Such Jews are not hipsters

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is a nearly century-old institution of Jewish life in America. Although it is a news service, describing itself as “the definitive source for American Jewish community news and opinion,” its press releases are written in a style familiar to anyone who, out of idle curiosity on the way to the trash can, has dipped into the free community newspaper tossed into his front yard once a week. The JTA provides the fillers between the ads and activity calendars in Jewish weeklies around the country. Given its position of dependence, it is extremely protective of institutional Jewish privilege in the U.S.

So it comes as no surprise that a JTA writer by the name of Ben Harris has taken the trouble to savage my essay “The Judaism Rebooters,” which appears in the July/August issue of Commentary. The essay, Harris says, is “[m]ore caricature than fact,” it is a “screed,” I am “wrong,” I am “lazy,” I have “chosen to condescend.” (Rather than what? To gnaw on the jaw-breaking ideas of the leading hipster thinkers? Harris names none, because it is easier to accuse me of going after “the low-hanging fruit” than to correct my negligence with an introductory reading list. Perhaps, however, the reality is that there are no hipster thinkers to name.) Worst of all, I offer “no answer to the question of how to engage Jews in contemporary times.” I have “nothing to say about how to understand an ancient tradition in a radically changed world.”

Most of Harris’s charges deserve no reply. True, he does catch a typo. I misspelled Jennifer Bleyer’s name. Yes, I did; it was sloppy of me. Sadly, I have made this kind of mistake before. But Harris’s ideas (such as they are) do not provide much of a correction. They derive wholly from current commonplaces, and his grasp of history is shaky. In my essay I had pointed out that “the term hipster came out of the jazz scene around the Second World War,” and then was “given currency by Norman Mailer [in the] 1957 essay ‘The White Negro.’ ” To which Harris responds:

His observation that the term hipster itself emerged from jazz and the counterculture is instructive. Then too, it was fashionable for elite intellectuals to attack the craven self-indulgence of hippie culture. They were an easy target: pot-smokers who dressed funny and smelled bad and spent their days listening to the Dead and having casual sex. (Hippies also spoke about radical freedom and unfettered personal expression but then, depressingly, everyone wound up agreeing on the sartorial virtues of tie-die and bell bottoms.)The term did not emerge from the “counterculture.” Speaking as an ex-hippie (“Gimme a head with hair!”), I regret to inform Harris that it was already dated by the ’sixties. The difference between the era of “The White Negro” and the era of Black Power, to say nothing of the difference between the hipster and the hippie, is rather significant.

So too the difference between radical personal autonomy and freedom. Here is the one point, and one only, where I need to expand my essay to reply to Harris. “The shift from external authority to individual control over Jewish identity is the hallmark of the hipster movement,” I had written. Harris observes that this is “also the hallmark of contemporary society,” failing to draw the obvious conclusion that Jews who insist that they themselves decide whether and how they are Jews—regardless of their birth, marriage, or daily regimen—are thus the products of contemporary society and not Jewish tradition. The question, Harris goes on doggedly, is “how to reconcile” the ethic of radical personal autonomy “with the external demands that Judaism has traditionally sought to exert.” How do you do that “in an age when personal autonomy is deemed sacrosanct and in a country where notions of liberty and freedom from government interference have birthed a culture of radical individualism?”

But personal autonomy and “freedom from government interference” are not the same thing, and deeming the former “sacrosanct” does not make it so. (It is also not true that radical autonomy was “birthed” by American notions of liberty, but that’s a discussion for another time.) The quick and dirty answer is that the doctrine of the “sovereign self,” as Harris calls it, cannot be reconciled with Judaism. In as far as the age deems radical autonomy sacrosanct, Judaism is countercultural. It provides an alternative to the sovereign self, a means of escaping the limitless demands of personal fulfillment.

It seems never to occur to Harris that some Jews, young and old, might experience their freedom, not as a liberation from external demands, but as the elective decision to treat someone other than themselves as sacrosanct. And whatever else they are, such Jews are not hipsters.

Update: Daniel Sieradski decides I “dislike” that hipster Jews “are liberal.” No, what I dislike is the confusion of political liberalism—well, liberal attitudinizing, really—with Jewish commitment. Nor is this confusion particularly new, although Sieradski prefers to call Jewish hipsterism the “innovation movement.” (The thing I like about Judaism is that it is immemorial.) Whatever it is called, Sieradski claims that the latest movement of liberal Jewish secularism has “succeeded tremendously.” I doubt it, but we shall see in a generation or so. In the mean time, my money is on Orthodoxy.

Five Books of the American Revolution

Independence Day is Saturday, when I am otherwise occupied. Here, then, two days early—in order to give you time to read them before Saturday—are the five essential books for learning about the American Revolution. Of course I wanted to include some historical fiction, but except for Esther Forbes’s “young adult” novel Johnny Tremain (1943), which remains readable, there is little or nothing of note. Neither The Spy nor Israel Potter is anywhere near James Fenimore Cooper’s or Herman Melville’s best novel. Winston Churchill’s 200,000-word Richard Carvel can be read at Project Gutenberg, if you have the patience. (That’s the American novelist Winston Churchill [1871–1947], by the way, and not the immortal Sir Winston.) Sarah Orne Jewett wrote a 400-page romance called Tory Lover (1901), which Henry James hated and begged her never to repeat. Robert Graves wrote a 1940 historical novel—again, one of his weaker efforts—called Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth in England and Sergeant Lamb’s America over here. And that’s about it.

The historians command the field. Luckily, this is one of those times when being an outsider is an advantage, making it easier to reduce a swaying stack of books to a mere five. As always, literary considerations have been nearly as important—if not quite as important—as intellectual qualities.

(1.) Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922). The subtitle is not quite right. For Becker’s is almost as much a literary study of the Declaration as a history of its ideas. His account of Jefferson as a writer is matchless. (More literary scholars should consult it.) As a history of the liberal ideas behind the Declaration, though, Becker’s 87-year-old book remains fresh and engaging. Arthur M. Schlesinger said that it provides the best account of “the unfolding of American constitutional theory, 1763–1776,” ever written.

(2.) Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89 (1956). At the age of ninety-three, the emeritus professor of history at Yale and student of Perry Miller published his eighteenth book earlier this year. This is his “standard” work, a 150-page book that remains the best place to begin reading about the Revolution. As a frankly introductory study, The Birth of the Republic aspires after balance rather than hawking a thesis. But its commitment becomes clear rather quickly. Morgan believes the revolutionaries were right to go to war in defense of property in addition to life and liberty, but as they stoutly maintained their rights against the crown, they happened into the principle of human equality.

(3.) Forrest McDonald, E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic (1965). McDonald began his career by debunking the economic interpretations of American history spawned by Charles A. Beard. With this work, he offered an alternative interpretation, rooted in a deep admiration for the Framers. The question that faced them, he says, is this: “Would the United States be politically one nation?” The answer is yes, and the credit goes to the Framers, especially in Virginia and Massachusetts, who were able to restrain the disunifying forces of revolution they themselves had unleashed. McDonald is particularly good at overturning the received ideas of Revolutionary history, and his character sketches of the historical players are sharp and memorable.

(4.) Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). Although its prose is at best clear and serviceable, Bailyn’s book remains unsurpassed. The Revolution was not a struggle for social change, Bailyn argues, but a highly ideological fight for political freedom. The Americans saw themselves as freedom’s last line of defense. It is impossible to read Bailyn’s book, especially its concluding chapter on the democratic vision, without a permanent alteration in your conception of America—a nation founded upon an idea.

(5.) Page Smith, A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution (1976). That’s people’s not as in “People’s Republic,” but as in “ordinary reader’s.” The founding provost of Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz, Smith was known as the most outspoken advocate of narrative history—honest storytelling as opposed to scholarly disputation—among professional historians. This two-volume work is his masterpiece, and was also the best book to come out of the Bicentennial.

“You had to suffer it to know”

American writers and artists were not silent about the Holocaust for two decades, but merely constructed its meaning differently. It was not, for them, as it would come to be, “the Holocaust kingdom” or “Planet Auschwitz,” a place apart. Even when it was described as “the center of the world,” as in The Young Lions, it belonged to the war. The concentration camps first appeared in war stories, and the horror of the Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jewry was first recorded in the reaction of American G.I.’s to what they found upon liberating the camps. In Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 film The Search, to name another example, U.S. Army engineer Ralph Stevenson (Montgomery Clift) helps to reunite a Jewish refugee boy with his mother, who survived Auschwitz. Zinnemann, an Austrian Jew who fled to the United States ahead of the Anschluss, may have been the first American artist to put the name of Auschwitz before the American public.

But American readers were not conducted into Auschwitz, unless I am mistaken, until 1959 when the first-person narrator of Meyer Levin’s Eva is imprisoned there. In the immediate postwar years, the Nazi camp as sign and proverb was Dachau. And more perhaps than anyone, the novelist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn fixed Dachau in the popular imagination. Gellhorn covered the war for Collier’s. She arrived at Dachau on May 7, 1945—the day on which Germany surrendered to the Allies. “It was a suitable place to be,” she wrote. “For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau and all the other places like Dachau and everything that Dachau stands for.” Her dispatch from the prison camp was published the next month and reprinted in the Library of America’s two-volume anthology Reporting World War II. Three years later she incorporated her observations into the novel Point of No Return. (It was originally published by Scribner’s in 1948 as The Wine of Astonishment.)

After the narrative taboo against “appropriation” or “stealing the Holocaust from its victims” had arisen, Gellhorn could not have got away with what she does in Point of No Return. She installs a Jewish G.I. as her protagonist and eyewitness to Dachau. Jacob Levy, an infantryman from St. Louis, decides that he must see Dachau for himself after he overhears two G.I.’s from the 12th Armored Division, which had liberated one of the Dachau subcamps near Landsberg on April 27, 1945, talking about “the biggest one of these kraut death prisons.” Levy tells himself that “you had a right to be curious.” With his C.O.’s permission, he requisitions a jeep from the motor pool, and enjoys his first chance since coming to Europe “to go off for his own pleasure. It was almost like getting into the car at home and going for a drive.”

On the way, Levy imagines “something like Sing Sing in the movies,” but when he arrives, the village of Dachau is pleasant—houses with flowers in the window boxes, flowers in the yard. “The bombers had not troubled this place,” he reflects: “it didn’t seem as if the war had bothered [the residents] any way. They were well-off, lucky people; they’d had it easy.” The prison itself looks pretty good to him; “those 12th Division guys were just drunk and shooting a line,” he decides.

Levy strolls over to the gate and asks the sentry about “getting in.” Although the American officer now running the prison is reluctant to admit visitors, the sentry believes that the Army ought to let people in “to see what the krauts did to those Jews.”

“Is that what they got in there?” Levy asks.

“Jews? Sure, I guess so,” the sentry says. “That’s what they look like. That’s who Hitler wanted to bump off.”

Levy is sprayed with DDT against typhus, and enters the barbed wire. Almost immediately, he wants to turn back. The prisoners frighten him:

They moved about in a way that was almost like crawling even if they were walking, slow and aimless and sick. Their eyes were all the same: too big, black and empty. There was no recognition or curiosity or anything in those eyes, just sick dead eyes in yellow or grey faces. Their bodies moved, without reason, as there was nowhere to go; and they stared at him. He had never imagined people could look like this.These of course are the Muselmänner: “thousands of starved mindless men.” The limits of human imagination are reached at the very sight of them.

A small man detaches himself and drifts up to Levy. He introduces himself as Heinrich, and offers to act as Levy’s tour guide. He looks like a “bundle of rags that walked,” but his eyes are intelligent, although “the intelligence was bitter and cold and not at all human.” He takes Levy to the infirmary, smelling of decay, where a Polish doctor is attending to the survivor of “the last death transport.” The Americans had to dig him out. Although he is twenty-two, he looks sixty and weighs “possibly ninety pounds.” As Heinrich describes the medical experiments and prisoner castrations, the doctor watches Levy closely “to see how an outsider would receive news from this world of darkness where they all lived.”

Heinrich shows him the women’s camp and the isolation chamber, which he calls “nacht und nebel.” Levy hears his own feet scraping on the cement floor as he struggles to understand what he is being shown and told. Impatient at last with the restrictions that an American soldier’s reactions have imposed upon her, Gellhorn abruptly switches to free indirect discourse from Heinrich’s point of view:Heinrich suddenly felt ashamed, because all he had to show, the only world he knew, was this place. He had no other life and no other knowledge; he knew that he could not live anywhere now because in his mind, slyly, there was nothing but horror. He wanted the others to know; the sane, the healthy, the free; he wanted to infect them with his pain, or what had been pain. Now he had no feeling but he wanted them to know. They could never know; no one could know; you had to suffer it to know.Despite its anticipation of what Primo Levi, nearly forty years later, would call the “belated shame” of the survivor, “concrete, heavy, perennial,” this passage is remarkable primarily for demonstrating the limitations, not merely of Martha Gellhorn’s art, but of narrative art as such. The experience inside the Nazi camps could not really be described until a literary genius who was also an ex-prisoner, someone who knew the experience because he had suffered it, was able to invent a narrative technique for describing it. Holocaust literature really begins with Tadeusz Borowski, whose first Auschwitz stories appeared in Polish the same year as Gellhorn’s novel. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman was not published in English, however, until 1967—the date that, for most scholars, marks the end of the “two-decade silence.”

Gellhorn did her best with the art she had at her disposal. Her tour of Dachau ends with Jacob Levy’s being led into a gas chamber. “The gas comes from there,” Heinrich explains as Levy covers his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, his eyes stinging from the smell. He follows to the other side of the building, where bodies cover the floor. “They had not time to burn these,” Heinrich starts to say, but Levy flees.

Many things might be said about American novelists like Martha Gellhorn, whose art was defeated by the enormity of the Nazi death machine, but that they were silent about “what the krauts did to those Jews” is not among them.

Point of No Return was reissued in paperback by the University of Nebraska Press in 1995, and remains in print.