Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i The American Scholar

THOSE OF US WHO live our lives without committing serious criminal acts would say we do so for ethical or religious reasons. And who would dispute that this is the firmament on which a law-abiding life rests? But isn’t there a more visceral reason for not harming other people, stealing from them, or destroying their property? What normal person can imagine pulling the trigger, twisting the knife, battering the weak, or striking the match and not turn away in revulsion? Still, crime happens. Punishment is a major national industry, and the psychology of criminality is a fruitful intellectual enterprise. But whatever clarity these matters might have for us in civilian life grows murkier in the context of the military. Traditions of duty, honor, country, of military discipline, of bands of…

OFTEN POETRY DEPENDS on the poet’s finding not the right word, but the wrong one. Well, maybe not the wrong word, but the word that we didn’t know was right—the word we didn’t expect—in advance. This effect typically involves a substitution of one word for another along the semiotic axis of language—that is, language as a sign system in which words link with other words by virtue of their sounds and letters, rather than the semantic axis along which they point beyond words to ideas and things. Poetry only works toward the second, referential axis by exploring the first. Its business is with the words inside, under, or to one side of other words. From the chaotic play of sound and letters, and their potential nonsense, fresh meanings come. Mary…

EVERY SPRING, WHEN THE FIRST stalks appear in the market, I buy rhubarb to make a pie. I follow a simple recipe, folding eggs, sugar, lemon juice, and diced fruit into a shallow crust. Bake for 40 minutes. Lately I’ve taken to growing rhubarb in my back yard so that as winter morphs into spring and summer into fall, I can harvest the plant myself, recalling, as I slice through the thick stalks, a woman I loved. She is bent over in my grandfather’s garden, barely visible behind its white fence. With a paring knife in one hand, Carrie works quickly, severing the crimson stems near their base, gathering a bride’s bouquet of rhubarb in her arms. As she heads back to the house, she pauses at the compost bin,…

HALF THE FUN (AT LEAST) of being an editor of a literary review must be matching a book and its reviewer. What will that reveal about the book, and what about the reviewer, and what about their conjunction? Robert B. Silvers, who with Barbara Epstein (his co-editor for 43 years until her death in 2006) had that duopoly followed by his monopoly for all the life of the “paper,” as they called The New York Review of Books. Silvers, who died in March, wanted to get something new out of each matchup—his favorite term of praise for the result was that it said something “fresh.” But he did not think of the job as confined to just that one creative gamble. He personally oversaw every stage of the resulting review,…

GASTROPHYSICS: The New Science of Eating BY CHARLES SPENCE Viking, 336 pp., $27 FOR SEVERAL DAYS IN APRIL, the American media took a break from their around-the-clock coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days to comment on another outsider with unnatural coloring: the Unicorn Frappuccino from Starbucks. Much of the criticism-cum-comedy focused on several of the drink’s ingredients—pink powder, blue drizzle, sour blue powder topping—that Starbucks unabashedly promoted via its PR machinery. “When a news release identifies a drink’s component parts by its colors, rather than its flavors—well, that’s a pretty telling detail,” wrote one of my colleagues at The Washington Post. Late Show host Stephen Colbert piled on: “That’s all your food groups right there: Mango, pink, blue, and obviously, topping. The FDA recommends at least three servings of…

DRAW YOUR WEAPONS BY SARAH SENTILLES Random House, 320 pp., $28 “THIS REPORT CONTAINS Graphic Content,” the video warns; “Viewer Discretion Is Advised.” A man lifts a dead girl from a hospital bed while music oddly reminiscent of The X-Files theme plays in the background. The film cuts to a room full of bodies—children, old men, women—killed by sarin gas. Then the dirty, bloodied five-year-old whose shell-shocked face the world came to recognize as #SyrianBoy, Omran Daqneesh. Finally, a montage of corpses and trauma care connected to April’s chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria. Watching these images does not make me a better person. They do not help me understand the Syrian civil war, honor the dead or help the living, or ease anyone’s suffering. They might shock and appall,…

Not So Fast, Golden State In addressing the prospect of “Calexit” in “A Brief History of Secession” (Spring 2017), Richard Striner ignores California’s pronounced geopolitical division. Twenty-five of its 58 counties, occupying nearly half its land area, went for Donald Trump in 2016 and would never willingly join the state’s left-leaning majority in a separate nation. Calexit would surely spawn another state comprising these northern and eastern counties. Liberal California would depart with a much-reduced area and leave behind a new conservative state, augmenting the Republicans’ national dominance. BARRY MACKINTOSH Lincoln, California Richard Striner’s piece suffers from an almost utopian sense of idealism coupled with a desperate dismissal of reality. The author—a historian, not a lawyer—brushes aside in a single sentence both the Civil War and the Supreme Court’s postwar…

FICTION EXCERPT Henrietta Atkins is a recurring character in the fiction of ANDREA BARRETT, appearing first in two of the long stories, set in the 19th century, that composed the book Archangel, then in two further works, “Wonders of the Shore” and the recent “Open House.” Henrietta figures prominently in Barrett’s current work of fiction, an excerpt of which appears below. Why does Barrett keep returning to Henrietta, exploring various stages of the character’s life? “Probably I wouldn’t keep writing about her,” she says, “if I knew the answer to that. Her mind intrigues me, and her independence. Also the many things she fails to understand, despite all she knows.” One of her jobs at the Deverells’ was to gather up the letters, after they’d been read by the family…

The Fortune Cookie No one remembers any morewhat the fortune cookie said.What’s come down in family loreis that it was read: that is, that it was shewho read it, though she was only three.The two nice daycare ladieshad stood by as she flipped open the SleepingBeauty lunchbox;observed her as she slippedthe cubes of cheese, the apple slices into the obedient mouththat had been promisedthe cookie as reward.Then she cracked it as you would a new-laid egg,and out spilled the goldenpresent of a long long sentenceand all their cries of praise. Her father came in his car.Yes, it was he who’d taught her the game, letter by letter.We tested her, they told him, with other words, and everyonewho’d doubted her was wrong!What would she be when she grew up?Some masterpiece of…

NADAR—THE PSEUDONYM of the most famous photographer in 19th-century France, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon—was a celebrity, renowned not only for his portraits of eminent contemporaries but also for his caricatures, his writings, his radical politics. The person Félix photographed most frequently was himself—out of curiosity more than vanity. He experimented on himself, attempting to push portraiture as far as it would go in its fundamental mission of revealing identity. In other words, he tried, fitfully, to set aside his habitual showmanship and show who he was. He worked at a disadvantage: there was no one to charm him out of his self-consciousness. His usual trick was to banter with the sitter, but he couldn’t be expected to banter with himself. Also, he was notoriously bad at holding still: the real Félix was…

 BEHAVE: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst What happens in brains and bodies at the moment humans engage in violence with other humans? That is the subject of Robert Sapolsky’s new book. BY ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY Penguin Press, 800 pp., $35 HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT about killing someone? I have, and I confess that it brought me peculiar feelings of pleasure to fantasize about putting the hurt on someone who had wronged me. I am not alone. According to the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, who asked thousands of people this same question and reported the data in his 2005 book, The Murderer Next Door, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women reported having had at least one vivid homicidal fantasy in their life. It turns…

HOUSMAN COUNTRY: Into the Heart of England BY PETER PARKER Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pp., $30 I CAN STILL HEAR MYSELF, when I think about it, replying to an American lady in Cairo who asked me if I was British. It was sometime in the late 1940s, I would guess, and being British in Egypt then was not always comfortable. “Say, are you British?” she wanted to know, and I answered in kind. “O, very British,” said I. What another world it was in those days! To be British meant something altogether different—to her, to the world at large, and to me. But it would not last. Americans would soon begin to lose the inherited respect that so many of them felt toward the Old Country. The nations of…

 I SIT SLEEPILY ON a stone bench, lolling in a half-dreamy state, only dimly perceiving the limestone escarpments lightening above me. Gradually, though, I perk up: the predawn sky, a rich cobalt in the west, is paling to eggshell blue in the east. Beside me flow the dark bubbling currents of the Sorgue, the transalpine river that originates in the foothills of the Vaucluse Mountains, just outside Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, the Provençal hamlet where I’m staying. Soon, with daybreak, the waters acquire an almost otherworldly glow; I can imagine how the beautiful Sorgue, hallowed for millennia, would have inspired one of the seminal works of the Renaissance, the Canzoniereof the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch. The great Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch came here for enduring inspiration—and respite from the world’s woes. Petrarch…

THE FIRST TIME I MET Ben Sonnenberg, he handed me a check with his teeth. He was in a wheelchair, so this did not reflect the refinement of the man; in fact, the gesture somehow accentuated it. The year was 1981, when I was studying fiction at Columbia University and sending out my stories to magazines. A friend recommended I try a new journal called Grand Street, and I went to a bookstore and looked at the first issues with their thick creamy paper and old-fashioned layout. The journal was beautiful, the work inside intimidating. Only because I was told to, I sent my story off. A square card with the Grand Street logo of a mangy goat arrived in the mail, signed by Sonnenberg, the magazine’s editor. It was…

FIRST YOU SHOULD KNOW: I was born with a blue butt. So was my mother. Thirty-two years and many thousands of miles of land, sky, and sea separated her creation from mine, yet we emerged the same: wailing, mad for first breaths, 10-fingered, 10-toed, chick-like tufts of black hair nested atop our soft skulls, and, incredibly, a wavy-bordered blue spot not unlike that of Rorschach’s inkblots, blooming across our tiny bums—blue like ice-cold lips, blue like the ocean at midnight, Picasso’s most melancholic bluest of blues. By the time I learned about my blue butt, it was gone. Like a spy’s secret message written in vanishing ink, the spot disappeared sometime after my fourth birthday. The timing seems strange—to think that as soon as I could form my earliest memories,…

WE OPEN ONTO A BLACK SCREEN. We hear the clack of footsteps, almost like the very voice of doom. Suddenly the screen breaks into light, and we witness a panorama of 15 young women in lace collars, standing in three ragged rows, like some silent chorus. Only one of the women is really discernible. She’s in the second row—it’s young Emily Dickinson, played by Emma Bell with a ferocious, quiet dignity. The other girls are almost invisible in their plainness. Someone is addressing this silent chorus in a slightly sinister voice. The camera twists about to reveal Mary Lyon (Sara Vertongen), headmistress of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the first women’s college in America—it’s 1848. Mary Lyon isn’t fooling around. She insists that the souls of these young women are at…

THE POETRY OF WELDON KEES: Vanishing as Presence BY JOHN T. IRWIN Johns Hopkins University Press, 120 pp., $32.95 WELDON KEES IS THE most mysterious figure in modern American poetry. Lean, handsome, and impeccably dressed, he looked like a B-list Hollywood star, the sort who played the nightclub owner in film noir. In photographs, Kees smokes and broods—cool, stylish, and doomed. Born in Nebraska in 1914, he drifted through half a dozen colleges and cities before arriving in New York in 1943. An artistic polymath, he excelled at every medium he attempted—poetry, fiction, painting, jazz, journalism, and film. His poems appeared in The New Yorker. His paintings earned him a one-man show, praised by his fellow abstract expressionists. He wrote for Time, edited newsreels for Paramount, succeeded Clement Greenberg as…

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer—its dust and lowering skies. It remains for me a season of storms. —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 1970 Being embraced and sustained by the light-green water seemed not as much a pleasure as the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project. He hoisted himself up on the far curb—he never used the ladder—and started across the lawn. When Lucinda asked where he was going, he said he was going to swim home. —John Cheever, “The Swimmer,” 1964 Pigeons on the grass alas. —Gertrude Stein, libretto of Four Saints in Three Acts, 1928 It is neither just nor accurate to…