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 It has been replaced by racial or ethnic identity and its cousins gender and class.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.
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[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.

Silence after the Holocaust

In the letters section of the latest Commentary, a time-honored intellectual debate is rejoined. Was there or was there not a “two-decade silence” about the Holocaust in the years following the defeat of Hitler’s Germany?

The phrase belongs to the Jewish theologian Eugene Borowitz, who declared that the period from 1945 to 1965 should be known as “the two-decade silence.” “Not until the mid-1960’s, twenty years after World War II, did the Holocaust become a central topic in Jewish religious thought,” he wrote.[1] In her new book We Remember with Reverence and Love, Hasia Diner counters that the postwar “silence” is a myth. American Jews responded to the Holocaust in all sorts of ways. Only in comparison to “the undertakings of the later period,” which are fundamentally different in kind and scope, can the early responses be dismissed as “silence.”

Nonsense, scoffs Jonathan Tobin, who reviewed Diner’s book in the April issue of the magazine. For two decades there was no “memorial culture” in the U.S. Only with the “sea change in American Jewish life” that occurred in the ’sixties and ’seventies, when American Jews became politically active “on a host of issues—most prominently Soviet Jewry and support for the State of Israel”—did the Holocaust become central to Jewish thinking.

Thus Tobin recapitulates, perhaps without being fully aware of it, the argument of Peter Novick’s polemical and deeply flawed account of The Holocaust in American Life (1999). Novick begins his book by asking “how Americans became so ‘Holocaust conscious’ ”—asking “why now?” and “why here?”—and ends by blaming the Jews. The Holocaust has “loomed ever larger in American culture,” he explains, because it has proven politically useful to the Jews. It has become “the central symbol of oppression and atrocity,” because the Jews have “defined themselves as the quintessential victim community.” They “were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics,” and the Holocaust was their ideological equipment of choice.[2]

Both Tobin and Novick agree that political motives were behind the flowering of Holocaust commemoration in America. They differ only in whether they approve of the politics. Tobin celebrates the “Jewish activism” of the ’sixties and ’seventies, saying that it provoked American Jews “to think seriously and draw conclusions about the Holocaust in a way that they had never done before.” Novick laments the fact that they were thinking about the Holocaust at all, saying that it has led American Jews to abandon their longstanding commitment to “the more equal distribution of rewards which had been the aim of liberal social policies.”[3]

Although I share Tobin’s politics, in this dispute I side with Diner. In her letter to the editor, she points out that it is ahistorical to hear a “two-decade silence” simply because the early responses do not compare to the later.

The historical error is that the current situation is specified from the outset, and the Holocaust’s reception in America is read backwards from the present. All the different ways in which the Holocaust was represented and remembered are melted down and absorbed into a single dominant image (a “memorial culture” for Tobin, a “Victimization Olympics” for Novick). The earlier period is found wanting (Tobin), or preferred for its deeper commitment to political liberalism (Novick), because it is being judged by criteria altogether different from those that were applied during the period itself.

What is ignored is that the idea of the Holocaust also has a history. Rather than inquiring into that, scholars have simply taken for granted that the Holocaust has always meant what it means now. But the meaning of history is never given. Events do not dictate how they are to be interpreted; they await men and women to give an account of them. What is now called the Holocaust is the product of interpretation, and it has changed over time. It is a distinct and particular version of events, which arose at a specfic stage in history, took shape gradually, and eventually eclipsed its historical rivals. Instead of being passed over in a two-decade silence, the Holocaust was tossed by a two-decade fitfulness of interpretation, a period during which no version commanded enough assent to get the full attention of the culture, until finally one version came out on top.

Let me give an example. One of the first American novels to witness the Holocaust was Irwin Shaw’s 1948 war novel The Young Lions. Late in the book, a U.S. infantry company enters an unnamed death camp. The smell, “beyond the tolerance of human nostrils,” reduces the soldiers to silence. The dead are “sprawled at the gate and behind the wire,” and the surviving prisoners are unable either to smile or weep at the arrival of their liberators, because they are “too far sunk in a tragedy which had moved off the plane of human reaction onto an animal level of despair. . . .” But these are as nothing compared to what awaits Michael Whitacre and Captain Green inside the barracks:

In the murky air, pierced ineffectually here and there by the dusty beams of spring sunshine, Michael could see the piled, bony forms. The worst thing was that from some of the piles there was movement, a languidly waving arm, the slow lift of a pair of burning eyes in the stinking gloom, the pale twisting of lips on skulls that seemed to have met death many days before. In the depths of the building, a form detached itself from a pile of rags and bones and started a slow advance on hands and knees toward the door. Nearer by, a man stood up, and moved, like a mechanical figure, crudely arranged for the process of waking, toward Green. Michael could see that the man believed he was smiling, and he had his hand outstretched in an absurdly commonplace gesture of greeting. The man never reached Green. He sank to the slime-covered floor, his hand still outstretched. When Michael bent over him he saw that the man had died.[4]This can hardly be described as silence about the Holocaust. Shaw explicitly offers it, in fact, to break the silence that the American soldiers are reduced to by the horror of the camp. What does remain silent, within this scene, is the experience on the other side of the wire—the experience of the “scarecrows in tattered stripped suits,” whom later Holocaust writers would teach the world to call Muselmänner. Shaw does not know their later name, cannot begin to imagine their experience, and out of respect for the limits of human knowledge and imagination, he confines himself to the G.I.’s reaction. And I am not sure that the attempt can be described as a complete failure, even in comparison to the later successes of Holocaust literature, because Shaw reaches for something beyond the immediate sensory reaction:The center of the world, something repeated insanely and insistently in Michael’s brain, as he kneeled above the man who had died with such ease and silence before their eyes, I am now at the center of the world, the center of the world.Although it would be too much to claim that Shaw anticipated how the Holocaust would become “the central symbol of oppression and atrocity,” it is clear that he was grasping for the words to establish what would later become common knowledge.

The charge that American culture in general and American Jews in particular maintained a “two-decade silence” about the Holocaust is just what Hasia Diner says it is—a myth. An earlier generation was not silent about the Holocaust, but merely constructed its meaning differently.
____________________

[1] Eugene B. Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought: A Partisan Guide, 2nd ed. (West Orange: Behrman House, 1995), p. 188.

[2] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 1–2, 194–95.

[3] Novick, p. 183.

[4] Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (New York: Modern Library, 1982), p. 140.

Literary ideology of adultery

Like everyone else in the country, I have followed the revelations of Gov. Mark Sanford’s on-the-job adultery with stomach-turning fascination. The most striking thing about the story so far, though, has been the dignity and good sense of Jenny Sanford’s prepared statement to the press.

“I believe enduring love is primarily a commitment and an act of will, and for a marriage to be successful, that commitment must be reciprocal,” Mrs Sanford said, exposing the gulf between her and her husband, who believes instead in the Stendhalian passion that sweeps a man away against his interests. The whole sorry episode reveals not that Sanford is a hypocrite, as some political antagonists will chortle, but on the contrary: he lives by the same literary ideology of adultery that rivets pretty much the entire Western world.

All the literary world loves a lover, especially if passion overwhelms his commitments and will. I dare you to name a single work of literature that focuses upon the sufferer of adultery, detailing her grief, loneliness, shame, self-loathing, and dejection. The injured party in the literature of adultery is more likely to be Othello, driven mad by jealousy. Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier is narrated by a cuckold, but John Dowell’s narrative function is to be a man whose lack of passion sets off by contrast the passions of others. The “saddest story” of the first sentence—Ford’s original title for the novel—is not Dowell’s, but those who are made to suffer for their passionate rejection of commitment and will.

The word passion originated in Latin as a Christian theological term, referring to the sufferings of Jesus. Thus it is related by blood to the word passive, which originally meant “subject to passion or emotion, capable of suffering or feeling.” The literary ideology of the Western world is that the adulterer is subjected to erotic passion, as if he were the unwilling victim of a power outside his control.

The Jews have a word for this. The word is idolatry. Why novelists find such an experience dramatically compelling is beyond me. I am far less interested in Gov. Sanford’s five days of “crying in Argentina”—for that phrase alone he deserves to be banished from public life—than in what Mrs Sanford and her four children were going through. But then I am not a novelist, but only a poor literary critic. Although it would going too far to say that literature celebrates adultery, it is fair to say that only the adulterer’s viewpoint is represented in literature.

When a woman’s experience of adultery finally breaks into literature, the woman simply becomes the adulterer and enjoys the passion earlier reserved for men. Neither Madame Bovary nor Anna Karenin lifted the taboo on the grief of betrayal. When the shattering incomprehension of loss is fully dramatized, as in Graham Greene’s End of the Affair or Claire Messud’s Emperor’s Children, the sufferer is the unmarried lover, not the abandoned spouse. And the effect on children is entirely absent, but then, as I have noted before, American literature (and English too) is largely a literature without children.

The only novel I can think of that admits the reader into the experience of what Denis de Rougemont calls “active love, or keeping faith,” is Janet Lewis’s chaste and lovely Wife of Martin Guerre. I have discussed Lewis’s slim novel at length. Bertrande de Rols, who is victimized by a double of her missing husband, loves deeply the man she knows as Martin Guerre, but when she becomes convinced that he is not her husband and has seduced her into adultery, her passion withers in the act of will by which she reasserts her marital commitment. The very fact that Lewis’s novel is not merely another example of propaganda on behalf of erotic passion makes it stand out from nearly every other novel ever written.

But even it is not an account of adultery from the other side. As a literary kind, the novel’s preference for the adulterer over the wife and children he has discarded like soiled rags is perhaps the best measure of its social position. Perhaps the itch to épater la bourgeoisie was of some slight social value when “decency” and “respectability” were the dissembling of political coercion by means of class, but in the postmodern world almost exactly the opposite is the case. The literary ideology of adultery is a means of control by those who dread the responsibility of keeping faith. I will never understand the fuss that my fellow conservatives kick up over gay marriage. A few homosexuals who wish to enter into monogamous relationships is not the biggest social problem facing us. The biggest social problem facing us is marriage. If a few homosexuals can restore commitment and fidelity to the institution, then I am firmly on their side, although I am skeptical that they will be any more successful than the rest of us in resisting the literary ideology of adultery.

Jewish hipsters do exist—but not for long

I had not even received contributor’s copies of the July/August issue of Commentary including my essay “The Judaism Rebooters” before I was attacked for it at the triumphantly inane Tablet magazine site.

Well, not me exactly. Marissa Brostoff—watch closely, Marissa, so you can see how this is done—declined to quote me by name, for she had a bear to hunt; she attributed my phrases to the “stalwart magazine” instead. A Wesleyan graduate with “an interdisciplinary degree in history, literature, and philosophy,” Brostoff apparently does not understand the function of an intellectual Jewish monthly like Commentary, perhaps because Tablet so miserably fails at fulfilling it. As Eliot E. Cohen wrote in the editorial statement upon launching Commentary in November 1945,

It goes without saying that the best magazine in the world will not solve our problems. But we have faith that a good magazine can help—by fairness, by searching out the truth, by encouraging fresh and free-ranging thinking, by bringing to bear upon our problems the resources of science, philosophy, religion, and the arts, by seeking out authentic voices and giving them open-house in which to be heard.Cohen wrote in the shadow of the Holocaust and just six months after Germany’s surrender had put an end to the war in Europe. “With Europe devastated,” he wrote, “there falls upon us here in the United States a far greater share of the responsibility for carrying forward, in a creative way, our common Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage.”

Commentary has flourished for sixty-three years, because it has given open-house to many different and sometimes contradictory voices who uniformly accept only one thing—the responsibility of carrying forward the Jewish heritage. John Podhoretz, who became its fourth editor this year, has built upon the magazine’s success and ushered it into a new era, overseeing a design overhaul that has made it more appealing to the eye. His editorial mission is much the same as Cohen’s six decades ago. In an editorial headnote to the first issue of the magazine that he edited in full, he wrote that Commentary would continue its “singular approach to matters Jewish,” concentrating primarily on “[h]ow Jews live and the role their heritage plays in the lives they make for themselves.” It would also maintain its defense of the “traditions of Western civilization, of which the Hebrew Bible is the wellspring.” And among other things, he said, this would require “taking up polemical arms against many of the flippancies of the present moment.”

Which is where my essay on “The Judaism Rebooters” comes in. My essay is a historical description of Jewish hipsterism, a movement (as I write in my opening sentence) of “young urbanites in their twenties and early thirties whose identity consists almost entirely of the assurance that it is cool to be Jewish.” Although hipster Jews like to imagine they are engaged in a daring maneuver “to rewrite Judaism in conformity with the current fashions,” they are nothing new on the Jewish scene. Jewish hipsterism is merely the latest variety of a perennial temptation in Jewish life—the temptation to believe that Jewish culture can be divorced from the Jewish religion and then passed on in the same condition to a receptive new generation. Except that it never works out like that. Secular Jewish movements have no latter-day disciples. They die out, to be replaced by a new generation of secularists who believe they can rewrite Judaism in conformity with the current fashions without losing the divine spark that keeps it alive.

“That must be why there are no urban liberal Jews left on God’s green earth,” Brostoff scoffs, “except for the ones in this article.” Yes indeed—the Bund remains a vital and viable political outlet for young Jews, as does its rival Poalei Tziyon; Yiddish theater remains vibrant in New York City, as do other institutions of Yiddishism (Brostoff herself, described as “a veteran of the Forward,” must surely contribute to the Yiddish-language blog of the Forverts); young Jews continue to extol the study of philosophy and the natural sciences as the highest form of worshipping God, just as the early maskilim did two centuries ago. The enduring monuments of Jewish secularism are many; I just can’t think of any.

There are plenty of urban liberal Jews left on God’s green earth, but urban liberal Jews of the next generation will not be their children, because (to paraphrase the historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz, whom I quote to close my essay) the Jewish content that the urban liberal Jews want to transmit—or are competent—is too meager to sustain a meaningful Jewish identity. Their Jewishness is haskalah without any sekhel.

Five Books of boxing

Light blogging today, because I have been doing something with books other than reading them—building a new bookcase for myself, using the new Bosch router that my wife presented me for my birthday.

My Five Books of baseball elicited a lot of commentary, though. So I thought I’d follow up with the Five Books of my second-favorite sport—boxing. Two of the five will come to mind even for those who are indifferent to the sport. The remaining three are treats to be discovered and rolled around on the tongue, by fan and non-fan alike.

(1.) A. J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (1956). The Library of America made a regrettable mistake in binding Liebling’s classic collection of boxing essays together with his press criticism, food writing, and character study of Gov. Earl Long. A better volume would have included the essays posthumously collected by Fred Warner and James Barbour in A Neutral Corner (1990). Anyone who reads Liebling on boxing is converted to Liebling or the sport or both. “Ahab and Nemesis,” his account of Rocky Marciano’s heavyweight title defense against light-heavy champion Archie Moore, has the taste and consistency of a good French sauce—the perfect blend of literary sophistication, inside knowledge, and an appreciation for a great man (Moore) and greater fighter (Marciano). This is Liebling at the top of his game, but anything he ever wrote about boxing is worth tracking down and reading without waiting.

(2.) W. C. Heinz, The Professional (1958). Like Liebling, Heinz was a reporter who prided himself on understanding the sport from the inside, and that includes the seamier side, including crooked managers and mob control of purses and crowns. The firsthand knowledge wards off the romantic virus that infects so much baseball fiction. Eddie Brown is a middleweight contender, and Heinz tells the story of his quest for the title without ornamentation or lyricism. Although the prose is stripped down to names, places, and straightforward dialogue—just like Hemingway said it should be—his style could hardly be described as “hard-boiled.” Heinz does not pretend to hardness and disillusionment; he lets his characters achieve them.

(3.) Leonard Gardner, Fat City (1969). The novel everyone expects to be on the list. Denis Johnson testifies to his love for the novel in words that I cannot hope to rival. All I can add is that I first read the novel a couple of years after it came out at Raymond Carver’s urging, and suddenly I saw Carver’s own fiction in a new light. If Gardner had gone on to write more fiction, Carver would not have needed to. Fat City is set among the underclass of boxing—the dead-end club fighters who never dream of glory because they don’t have enough time to dream. Robert Ryan created the role, so to speak, in Robert Wise’s 1949 film The Set-Up. John Huston’s 1972 film of Gardner’s novel, with Stacy Keach unforgettable as Tully, is less about boxing than the underworld the boxers inhabit. But it is brilliant nevertheless.

(4.) Hugh McIlvanney, The Hardest Game (1996). McIlvanney covered boxing for the Sunday Times for thirty years. His collection of fight reports opens with an essay that must be read by any hysteric who calls for boxing’s abolition. Boxing is a risky game, he acknowledges, but the risks, which every boxer knows too well, are central to the sport’s appeal. “[I]f the game loses its rawness,” McIlvanney writes, “it is nothing. If it ever became a kind of fencing with fists, a mere trial of skills, reflexes and agility, and not the test of courage, will and resilience that it is now, then it would lose its appeal for many who are neither sadists nor seekers after the trappings of virility.” The rest of the book abundantly demonstrates his case that boxing is a test of courage, will, and resilience. Yet the book also contains a sad account of the death of Welsh bantamweight Johnny Owen, who never regained consciousness after being knocked out by Lupe Pintor in September 1980. McIlvanney reminds me that you can judge a boxing writer by the fighter he admires most. For him it is Joe Frazier.

(5.) George MacDonald Fraser, Black Ajax (1997). A historical novel, not part of the Flashman series, although Flashman makes his appearance as a fan, about the early nineteenth-century bare-knuckle heavyweight Tom Molineaux, an ex-slave who fought in England. Fraser tells the story of Molineaux’s last fight, when the former great is aging, a mere shell of his former self, and near death. He uses the technique of multiple and shifting points-of-view, as if taking testimony at an inquest, to great effect. And as always with Fraser, the historical reenactment is exacting and persuasive. A tragic story about an impossibly brave man, whom history afforded no other means to display his courage—as is true of so many boxers—than in the four-cornered ring.

Five Books of baseball

(1.) John R. Tunis, The Kid from Tomkinsville (1940). Roy Tucker, a rookie pitcher who wins fifteen straight for the Brooklyn Dodgers, suffers an injury that leaves him unable to pitch again, but painfully works his way back to the majors as a .300-hitting outfielder. In a famous passage in American Pastoral, Philip Roth calls it “simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified,” about the game of baseball back before it was “illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries of earthly fate. . . .” He also says that it is “gripping to boys”—it is a boys’ book—but grownup men will read it with surreptitious absorption.

(2.) Mark Harris, The Southpaw (1953). Some readers prefer Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), which served as the basis of the best baseball movie of all time, but the sequel is even better after reading the original Henry Wiggen novel. A small-town rookie lefthander makes it to the Bigs—and in New York to boot! He “don’t speak the King’s English,” Harris wrote in a later preface, “nor the Queen’s neither.” And half the fun is the book’s language. Although a comedy, it is a surprisingly exciting account of a tight pennant race: a combination that almost no baseball books are able to bring off.

(3.) Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (1966). An oral history, although you would swear it isn’t. Ritter, an economics professor, interviewed twenty-two ballplayers who appeared in the majors between 1898 and 1946, and then edited the transcripts—lightly, he says in the preface. From the first paragraph what strikes you is the style of the players’ conversation. Here is Rube Marquand, opening the book: “My nickname what it is, you probably automatically assume I must have been a country boy. That’s what most people figure. But it’s not so. Fact is, my father was the Chief Engineer of the city of Cleveland, and that’s where I was born and raised.”

(4.) Philip F. O’Connor, Stealing Home (1979). No connection whatever to the Jodie Foster movie of the same title. O’Connor’s novel is about Little League. That’s right. Little League. The theme is now familiar: a man turns his life around by coaching a team of boys. (Hoosiers was not filmed until seven years later.) Even so, the treatment remains fresh, because O’Connor was the first, and because he does not sentimentalize it. More amazingly yet, his game accounts are unexpectedly heart-pounding. The novel is set in a small city south of Toledo, hardly the center of the American literary universe, and the main character is a longtime Mud Hens’ fan.

(5.) The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (1988; new ed., 2001). James is the one who is always blamed when those who are more interested in baseball mythology complain that the game is being buried under a million statistics. As I have tried to explain, James is a dedicated myth-buster who seeks to study baseball as if it were as important as any other human activity. What is rarely understood about him is that he is primarily a writer, and a good one. He excels at the brief sketch. Perhaps his best-known comment is what he wrote about Danny Ainge, who tried to play second and third base for the Toronto Blue Jays (1979–’81), after starring as a point guard on the Brigham Young University basketball team. James’s evaluation of Ainge’s promise as a ballplayer? “Dribble, dribble.” The Abstract is full of quirky information, and quirkier writing, and is endlessly fascinating for the true baseball fan. It’s a good introduction to the game for new fans too.

No such list would be complete without naming the worst baseball book of all time. Hands down it is Michael Chabon’s Summerland (2002). Permit me to quote from my own essay on Chabon: “In an interview with Salon, Chabon explains that he wanted to ‘get at baseball’ through this novel, but he fails because for him baseball is merely an occasion for lyricism. He quotes a sentence from Summerland that his daughter pronounced ‘nice’ when he read it aloud: ‘A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.’ No, it isn’t, any more than cream cheese is a ready smooth device for measuring the contours of a bagel.”

On being a father

To recognize the day I wanted to reel off the Five Books of fatherhood, but I came up nearly empty. There just are not five books—at least not five books about good fathers. If I’d wanted to canonize the twentieth-century literature of bad fathers, ranging loosely from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) to “Daddy” (1962), Sylvia Plath’s appalling triumph of self-pity and self-aggrandizement, I could have kept banging away at it all day and still not have compiled an exhaustive list.

But books about good fathers? Far less common, and almost unheard of when written from a father’s perspective. The book everyone thinks of is To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel’s last words offer a strong and memorable image of the good father. After Bob Ewell injures Jem in an assault, Atticus Finch puts his son to bed: “He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.” So important are these words to finishing the portrait of Atticus that Robert Mulligan also ends his 1962 film with them, spoken in voiceover by ten-year-old Mary Badham, who played Scout. Challenged to name a father in literature to rival Atticus Finch, though, most people can’t. At least my wife couldn’t. And the best I could come up with was The Chosen, in which the critical scholar David Malter and the Hasidic rabbi Isaac Saunders are both good fathers in their own ways. Indeed, The Chosen popularized the cultural practice among the Modern Orthodox, now widespread, of children’s calling their father “Abba” (Hebrew for Daddy).

Neither of these books is written from a father’s perspective, however. Scout is Harper Lee’s narrator, and her father is recollected in tranquility. Chaim Potok’s focus is on the sons. Don’t get me wrong. Most fathers would prefer to be known through their children. But the experience of fatherhood almost never makes it into the pages of literature. A notable exception is John Williams’s classic Stoner (1965), which I listed among the Five Books of professors. Williams explicitly connects his experience as a father to Stoner’s literary scholarship, suggesting that the two activities demand the same moral qualities—patience, concentration, responsibility, self-effacement, renunciation, authority, and a willingness to let someone else (a child, the author of a literary text) speak for himself.

The best novel ever written about fatherhood, though, is not even written about a father. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is probably the least read of George Orwell’s books. It was not even published in the U.S. until twenty years after the English edition, and then only because of the huge popular success achieved by Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Orwell began his third novel when he was thirty-two and finished it almost exactly a year before he traveled to Spain to cover the Civil War and gather material for his first “major” work, Homage to Catalonia (1938). Critics have consistently misread and undervalued the earlier novel. They describe it as a thematic preview of the conformist ’fifties, a warning about the threat posed by middle-class respectability to individual freedom, a confession of the inner turmoils and obsessive fears of a young novelist struggling to support himself by literature.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is none of these. It is a satire of the literary life, or at least the romantic conception of that life secretly banked up in every sad young literary man’s heart. Gordon Comstock is twenty-nine and “rather moth-eaten already.” On the strength of his first book of poetry (TLS said that Mice “showed exceptional promise”), he has chucked over a post as a copywriter for an advertising agency and signed on as a clerk in a used bookshop. The plan was to give himself the time and freedom to write London Pleasures, “two thousand lines or so, in rhyme royal, describing a day in London.” But what Gordon had not counted upon—what most young writers, dreaming of poetic glory, do not count upon—was money:

Money and culture! In a country like England you can no more be cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club. With the same instinct that makes a child waggle a loose tooth, he took out [from the shelves of McKechnie’s bookshop, where he works] a snooty-looking volume—Some Aspects of the Italian Baroque—opened it, read a paragraph and shoved it back with mingled loathing and envy. That devastating omniscience! That noxious, horn-spectacled refinement! And the money that such refinement means! For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.This bitterness makes up his mind and determines his actions, even toward Rosemary Waterlow, “his girl, who loved him—adored him, so she said.” Gordon has declared war on “the money-god and all his swinish priesthood.” For behind the desolation, emptiness, and secret despair of the modern world stands the worship of money. Gordon will not consider anything that smacks of entering the money-god’s service, including anything that might provide the secure economic foundation of a future with Rosemary. The fault lies with money, not with him: “because he had no money Rosemary wouldn’t sleep with him. Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure—they are all the same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.” The lack of money, Gordon is convinced, has even “robbed him of the power to ‘write.’ ”

Gordon struggles to stay afloat financially, but only sinks deeper into the “slime of poverty.” He behaves atrociously and alienates most of his friends, but Rosemary stands by him for some reason that he cannot fathom. The sale of a poem to the Californian Review for fifty dollars bankrolls a night on the town, which ends with Gordon, drunk on chianti, shoving Rosemary back against a wall and thrusting his hand down the front of her dress. “You’re going to bed with me,” he commands her, but she flees from him instead. He fancies that he is a “damned soul in hell.” He latches on to a prostitute, who steals the last of his money after he blacks out. He awakens the next morning in a police cell. He loses his job, his lodgings, and what little is left of his dignity.

When she learns what has befallen him, Rosemary returns to Gordon—with some advice. Why not go back to the advertising firm, where he has a standing job offer? Gordon is aghast: “Go back to the New Albion! It had been the sole significant action of his life, leaving the New Albion. It was his religion, you might say, to keep out of that filthy money-world.” Rosemary does not understand his scruples, but accepts them because they are his. “You’re letting yourself go to pieces,” she says. “You don’t seem to want to make any effort. You want to sink—just sink!” “I don’t know,” Gordon replies—“perhaps. I’d sooner sink than rise.” He longs to sink “down, down into quiet worlds where money and effort and moral obligation did not exist.” There at least he would enjoy freedom: “No more blackmail to the gods of decency!”

Perhaps because she pities him, perhaps because she is finally prepared to admit that their romance is doomed, Rosemary goes to bed with Gordon at last. And a most awful thing happens (the words are hers). She gets pregnant. When the news is delivered, Gordon feels nothing except dismay: “He did not think of the baby as a living creature; it was a disaster pure and simple.” He is resigned to marrying her; there is no alternative, he says. But of course there is, and Rosemary reminds him what it is. She could have an abortion:That pulled him up. For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about. The words “a baby” took on a new significance. They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of flesh, a bit of himself, down there in her belly, alive and growing. His eyes met hers. They had a strange moment of sympathy such as they had never had before. For a moment he did feel in some mysterious way they were one flesh. Though they were feet apart he felt as though they were joined together—as though some invisible living cord stretched from her entrails to his. He knew then that it was a dreadful thing they were contemplating—a blasphemy, if that word had any meaning.That pulled him up. Gordon marries the mother-to-be of his child, takes the job at the New Albion, where he creates a successful ad campaign for foot deodorant, and even buys an aspidistra, the symbol he had long derided of “mingy lower-middle class decency,” installing it in the front window of their apartment for all the world to see. Although he tells himself wryly that his “long and lonely war [against the money-god] had ended in ignominious defeat,” he ends the novel on his knees, his head pressed against the softness of Rosemary’s belly, listening for the sounds of their child. The posture is significant, because Gordon has been converted to a new religion, and as the Christians say, he is a new man.

Becoming a father pulls a man up, up into the noisy world where money-earning and effort and moral obligation make him a man. No one has recorded the miracle better than Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It should be on every man’s reading list for Father’s Day—to remind him, if nothing else, of what his own father had to become to become his father.

I love you, Dad.

Hidden influence of anthologies

Yesterday Buce took up Terry Teachout’s challenge to name fifteen mind-forming books in fifteen minutes. The most striking entry on his list, for my money, was The Portable Faulkner, originally published in 1946. Malcolm Cowley’s selection may have done more than any of Faulkner’s own book-length volumes to establish the writer’s reputation. As Caroline Gordon wrote in her New York Times review, Cowley edited the Portable to demonstrate that “all the books in the [Faulkner] saga are parts of the same living pattern.” After sampling the abridged version, most readers—including Buce and me, for the Portable was my introduction to Faulkner too—went on to explore the entire saga.

Anthologies exercise a far more profound influence upon the formation of our minds than we are prepared to acknowledge. We rarely think to give them any credit because we rarely conceive of them as books. They lead us to books, and then they are discarded.

Thus I compile my intellectual autobiography and honor the writers who built up my mind, such as it is. But it never occurs to me that I first encountered many of those writers between the covers of an anthology. Michael Oakeshott, for example, whose modal logic changed for all time how I think of human knowledge, was a writer whom I discovered in another of the portable anthologies published by the Viking Press—Russell Kirk’s Portable Conservative Reader (1982). The same goes for Levinas. Not only did I first read him in some anthology or other of literary theory. But what is more, the book title that I included on my list of fifteen books in fifteen minutes was a portable volume in all but title (Seán Hand’s Levinas Reader [1989], although I tried to distance myself from the anthological shame of not being able to name one of Levinas’s own books).

In an article written for the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1954) and never reprinted, J. V. Cunningham remarks upon the “enduring popularity of this long-established form which serves as a convenient and adaptable framework into which can be fitted a variety of material.” A few anthologies, he goes on to point out, have even achieved “considerable literary significance in themselves, an example being Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), in which were published for the first time the major poems of Sir Thomas Wyat and Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey. . . .”

The most famous example, of course, is the Greek Anthology, dating from ca. 700 B.C.E. to 1000 C.E. As Cunningham says, “[I]t illustrates the continuity of Greek letters for almost 2,000 years, since the works of the latest period are in language, style and feeling not too distinct from the works of the earliest; and it has had a persistent and considerable influence on later literature.” The same might be said, to take much later examples from another country, of The Best American Short Stories, published annually since 1915, or the annual volume of O. Henry Award-winning stories, published since 1919. These (or anthologies modeled upon them) are likely to be the first story collections ever encountered by young students of creative writing. Indeed, Raymond Carver assigned Short Stories from the Literary Magazines (1970), including a more voluble version of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” before Gordon Lish got his blue pencil on it, when I took creative writing from him during my sophomore year at Santa Cruz.

“The typical modern anthology in the sense of a collection of poems of a given period or nation selected for their excellence and representativeness seems to be an invention of the Latin Renaissance,” Cunningham says. The nineteenth-century introduced the innovation of arranging the texts in chronological order. Some students of literature know the subject only in this form. The Norton anthologies have much to answer for. The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990), which sought to substitute a multicultural glop for the standard roster of dead white males, only succeeded in prodding Norton to revise its anthologies to include more “minority voices.”

But that is not the only reason that I refuse to assign anthologies when I teach survey courses in American literature. The more significant reason is that few writers conceive of their texts as anthology pieces. And even if an entire novel is included, its structural integrity—its hope to stand on its own—is sacrificed to the dimensions of a much larger volume. Besides, anthologies are ugly, expensive, and awkward to read. As I tell my students, one of my purposes is to assist them in acquiring the rudiments of a library. And no one displays his college anthologies proudly on his shelves in later years.

There is, however, at least one good word to be said on behalf of anthologies. Some texts, mere slips of paper, like an epigram, or a squib by a writer who wrote nothing else worth saving, or nothing else at all, would be lost forever unless preserved there. Sir Henry Wotton’s epitaph “Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton’s Wife” is an example of one such text.

But I am thinking especially of anthologies of literature from the Holocaust. In fact, the Oyneg Shabbes Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, the collective activity to record every possible aspect of Jewish life under the Nazis (“to grasp an event at the moment it happened,” as its director Emanuel Ringelblum said), might be described as a massive participatory anthology. The archive was hidden from the Nazis, buried in the rubble of the ghetto and only dug up after the war, in order that “no important fact about Jewish life in wartime shall remain hidden from the world,” Ringelblum wrote. (For an impressive account of the illegal archive see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007].)

Brilliant writers like Peretz Opoczynski and Chaim Kaplan and lesser writers like Shimon Huberband, Nehemia Titelman, Yehiel Gorny, Nathan Koninski, Estera Karasiówna, Jerzy Winkler, and Hirsh Berlinski were rescued from oblivion and can still be read because of the anthological fury of Jews who refused to grant Hitler a posthumous victory, who believed (in Ringelblum’s words) that “the work was too sacred” and the “social function of O[yneg] S[habbes] too important for the project to be discontinued.”

15 books in 15 minutes

Via his co-blogger Carrie Frye, Terry Teachout passes on this quick game. Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Slight revision proposed: instead of the future tense (books that will always stick with you), use the past perfect. Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.

Here goes:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Francine Prose, Blue Angel
Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre
J. V. Cunningham, The Collected Essays
—————, Collected Poems and Epigrams
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes
Emmanuel Levinas, essays including “Ethics As First Philosophy” and “Art and Its Shadow” (both included in Seán Hand’s Levinas Reader)
Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World

Except perhaps for de Rougemont, not a single work of criticism comes to mind. In college I wrote under the spell of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, but by the time I graduated I preferred the earlier essays in An End to Innocence. (A post title from yesterday alluded to that book.) The earlier Fiedler led me to the New York intellectuals, of whom I have been a distant relation ever since.

Update, I: J. V. Cunningham did not classify his essays as literary criticism but as philology. I accept his self-designation.

Update, II: Patrick Kurp joins in the fun, accepting my stipulation. (May the LORD bless thee and keep thee.) “This makes [the game] more interesting than so pallid a criterion as ‘favorite’ or ‘best,’ ” he says, implicitly cold-shouldering our earlier collaboration in drawing up a list of the Best American Fiction, 1968–1998, which brought us so much opprobrium. At any rate, Kurp’s list is more diverse and wide-ranging than mine, including only two works of fiction—and those by a Russian and an Australian!

“If such a list constitutes a Rorschach test,” he asks, “what have I learned?” This is a question I neglected to ask myself. I believe, though, that I can pinpoint the exact influence of each book on my list. I owe my personal happiness to de Rougemont, for instance, who permanently altered my conception of marriage. Orwell taught me to recognize the true ambition and threat of totalitarian regimes. Not merely do they seek to assume total power, but also to take control of their subjects’ minds. After the “election” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian government moved quickly to disable Twitter and prevent blogging.

Update, III: Over at National Review Online’s Corner, Jonah Goldberg quotes the views on an internet expert about the problem of restoring heavy-volume traffic to Iran. Goldberg also has a striking graph, displaying how internet traffic in that country fell off a cliff on the night of June 13.

Winton wins Miles Franklin

For the fourth time. Australia’s leading literary award went to Tim Winton, whose surfing novel Breath manages the rare feat of being both exciting and contemplative.

In recent days it had been suggested that Christos Tsiolkas had overtaken Winton as the favorite after his novel The Slap won the Commonwealth Prize. In the end, as rarely occurs with literary prizes, the better novel won.

In an interview, Winton described Breath as being about people who have “no moral compass about the consequences of living.”

“We live this bizarre abstract life,” he went on to say. “We think someone can come in with therapy or analgesia, that can relieve us of the consequences, and it’s about not taking the flesh seriously, as though there’s no discomfort in corporeal existence, as though someone—your mum, the state or your lawyer—will fix you up.”

Winton also took home the award in 1984 for Shallows, 1992 for Cloudstreet, and 2002 for Dirt Music. The last two are his best-known books, but as I said in my review of it, Breath is a good introduction to his body of work. Perhaps now Winton win begin to receive the attention he deserves from American critics and readers.

Update: Stephen Romei has invited an “in-depth discussion of Winton’s work. Tell me if you love him, and why,” he blegs his readers. “Tell me if you think he’s overrated, and why. Tell me which of his novels are your favourites.” Romei prefers the earlier novels.