Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2021 i The American Scholar

THE OTHER DAY I VISITED the home of a relative with whom, I have learned, the safest subject of conversation is sports. I asked him, in all innocence and naïveté, if he had been watching the Olympics. “You mean the woke Olympics?” he asked, an edge to his voice. Since I do not monitor Fox or its even more extreme brethren, I was startled to hear those words joined. But since I do have a general awareness that those outlets tend to use the word woke as a mantra, alongside defund and critical race theory, I knew what was coming—a patronizing lecture on patriotism. In today’s topsy-turvy world, then, it has become unpatriotic to root for American athletes in international competition and to feel a bit misty, perhaps, when the…

Jamie Floyd is a solo artist and Grammy-nominated songwriter whose work has been performed by Kelly Clarkson, Miranda Lambert, and Kellie Pickler, among others. Mêlisa Annis, originally from Wales, writes for stage, television, and radio and teaches at New York University’s Department of Dramatic Writing. The two are collaborating on a musical called The King’s Wife, which reimagines Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn as like-minded, progressive confidantes who become immersed in a ruinous game of politics and power. In this excerpt, the birth of Catherine’s sixth child has been heralded—she had been hoping for a son, as had her husband and all of England. But soon, we find her in bed, with the mood quickly turning somber. CATHERINE Where is the child? ANNE They’ve taken him. CATHERINE A boy.…

The Hour of Long Shadows It was the hour of long shadows.Because you were brave, I thoughtto teach you a little—as any mother oughtwho wishes her daughter to knowsomething of the dark that lurkswithin plain sight. “See the shapefollowing you? You cannot escapeit—stepping sideways won’t work,it will always be rightthere, even when you turn.”I said it kindly, so you could learn,but you didn’t take it as you might. Behind you, your shadow froze;you swiveled round and took off runningwith a three-year-old’s cunningbefore I could stop you. You choseto run at it, but were vexedwhen it jolted out in front of youand bolted, always twopaces ahead. For what happened next,neither of us was prepared.As I hurried to catch you up from behind,my own shade and yours combinedbefore you saw me, and…

WHEN WOMEN RULED THE WORLD: Making the Renaissance in Europe BY MAUREEN QUILLIGAN Liveright, 320 pp., $29.95 MAUREEN QUILLIGAN begins her provocative new book with a tirade: in 1558, the Scottish reformer John Knox published The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in which he declared, “To promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city is: A. Repugnant to nature. B. Contumely to GOD. C. The subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.” (The seething italics are his.) Quilligan’s response to this rant reveals why she is such a good historian. She notes that the tract has “done history a real service” by pointing out how many women wielded sovereign authority in Knox’s day. He…

BURNING BOY: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane BY PAUL AUSTER Henry Holt, 800 pp., $35 THE LIFE AND WORK of Stephen Crane derived gravity from brevity. Not one of his novels is much more than a hundred pages long, and they and his short stories strip language to its potent minimum. Crane’s short but prodigious life—he died, of tuberculosis, five months before his 29th birthday—observed the same concision. His hold on the public imagination has also lacked longevity. Crane’s most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is no longer required reading in American schools, and his other greatest hits—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), “The Open Boat” (1897), The Monster (1898), “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), and “The Blue Hotel” (1898)—have fallen out…

WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT the Spagyricus Institute, also known as the Pacific Northwest School of Alchemy, no sign indicates you have made it. No house number. No sprawling green lawn. Those who attend the Spagyricus Institute, one of the few such schools in the United States, are not here to be pampered. Any good alchemist understands that you come to the art ready to work. In fact, our modern word laboratory comes from an alchemists’ mantra: ora et labora. Pray and work. Everything is alchemical, or so a quick Internet search would suggest. Alchemy has become a modern buzzword—you can find the alchemy of herbs, the alchemy of yoga or revenge or self-doubt, the alchemy of stones, of the heart, beeswax, even air. Practicing alchemists, though, would decry the casual…

ON A COOL, EARLY SUMMER evening in June 2015, I was at the Friars Club in midtown Manhattan to celebrate my friend Talia Carner’s new novel, Hotel Moscow. I started talking with Talia’s husband, Ron Carner, and we quickly realized that we’d gone to rival Brooklyn public high schools—he to James Madison and I to Erasmus—and as soon as we discovered our mutual love of basketball, we did what aging Brooklyn hoop junkies usually do when they get together: we exchanged tales of local ballplayers we’d seen and played against—All-City and All-American players who had gone on to celebrated college and pro careers. And when we started naming players from our schools who played in the NBA—Rudy LaRusso from Madison, Billy Cunningham and Doug Moe from Erasmus—Ron stopped suddenly and…

Ambassador Taeko called me into his office, the entire top floor of the Japanese Legation to the League of Nations. The white masonry building, with its attic and mansard roof, was formerly the headquarters of a Dutch trading company, and there were residual narrow, bronze bands stamped onto the frames of each door, engraved with cursive Dutch names full of intimidating strings of consonants. All the interior walls had been removed, but you could still see the old floor plan in lighter-toned sections of the maple flooring. Here had been a secretary’s office, beyond that a storage closet, and then there must have been a bathroom, for the floorboards had two roughly circular patterns, evidence of where a toilet and a sink had recently been. The Ambassador said he preferred…

A SPLENDID INTELLIGENCE: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick BY CATHY CURTIS Norton, 400 pp., $35 “A SHILLING LIFE WILL give you all the facts,” declared W. H. Auden in his sonnet “Who’s Who.” Cathy Curtis’s A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick costs more than a shilling, but it is rich in facts. In view of her subject’s suspicion of biography as a genre, it must have taken courage for Curtis, who has also published books on artists Grace Hartigan, Nell Blaine, and Elaine de Kooning, to embark on this one. Hardwick, after all, smacked aside Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest Hemingway, calling it “bad news” and “only an accumulation, a heap.” Of Joan Givner’s account of Katherine Anne Porter, Hardwick wrote, “the root biographical facts have the effect…

THE SWEET SPOT: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning BY PAUL BLOOM Ecco, 304 pp., $27.99 ON THE TITLE PAGE of Paul Bloom’s new book, a thumbnail figure climbs toward the top right corner, pushing an enormous boulder that threatens to crush him. This is Sisyphus, the ancient Greek personification of suffering, condemned to roll his rock in endless repetition—and the paradoxical hero of Bloom’s The Sweet Spot. Bloom has crafted a motivational book for those who generally hate motivational books. Its appeal? The Sweet Spot deals head-on with the most serious of philosophical questions: How can humans live a meaningful life not only in the face of suffering but also by virtue of it? At least in America, Bloom suggests, we are living through a crisis…

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have something that takes forever. So that we can get drunk and disorderly. Say a soufflé Furstenberg. Could you do that, Monsieur Soulé?” He tutted his tongue—on two counts: he disapproves of customers dulling their taste buds with alcohol, and also: “Furstenberg is a great nuisance. An uproar.” Delicious, though: a froth of cheese and spinach into which an assortment of poached eggs has been sunk strategically, so that, when struck by your fork, the soufflé is moistened with golden rivers of egg yolk. “An uproar,” said Ina, “is…

FROM THE VALLEY of the shadow in Psalm 23 to the “millions of strange shadows” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53, from Peter Pan to the long-running radio show The Shadow, shadows have suggested metaphors for the sinister and uncanny. For the poet and critic John Hollander, “their very insubstantiality has allowed shadows to be seen … as emanations of something internal to us.” Yet, as they lengthen at the end of the day, they assert themselves like independent beings. Always attached to us, they are always out of reach. In Erica McAlpine’s “The Hour of Long Shadows,” a mother asks her daughter, “See the shape / following you? You cannot escape / it.” But the child finds that she cannot catch hold of it, either. When she tries “to run at…