Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 i The American Scholar

In his essay about the twin perils of hurricanes and wildfires, David Gessner recounts a scene he witnessed in the West two summers ago: "I can see fire burning on the ridge, the flames kicking up and leaving behind burned trees like sticks, the red of the flames reflected in the clouds above it, showers of sparks.” I lingered over that sentence while editing, not because it needed work but because I was reminded of a writer I used to love, a man who knew a thing or two about fire. William Sansom (1912-1976) was once thought of as an English Kafka. Today, he is all but forgotten. At the outset of the Second World War, Sansom volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service, and it was in London during the…

In August, Salman Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed in front of a crowd of terrified onlookers who had come to Chautauqua, New York, to hear the novelist speak. Though the assailant’s motives remain vague, his characterization of Rushdie as “someone who attacked Islam” echoes the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who in 1989 famously issued a fatwa against the writer for the way the Prophet Muhammad was depicted in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie did not think of the novel as a criticism of Islam but as a work about “migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay,” as he wrote in a 1989 New York Times article. And like Midnight’s Children—Rushdie’s seminal 1981 novel—it cannot be divorced from Rushdie’s experience growing up in a Muslim family in India in the…

If humanity’s technological progress can be compared to climbing a mountain, then the Anthropocene finds us perched on a crumbling ledge, uncertain how long we have until it collapses. The most obvious way out is to turn back and retrace our steps to an earlier stage of civilization, with fewer people using fewer resources. This would mean acknowledging that humanity is unequal to the task of shaping the world, that we can thrive only by living within the limits set by nature. But this kind of voluntary turning back might be so contrary to our nature that it can never happen. It is far more plausible that the human journey was fated to end up in this dangerous spot ever since we first began to change the ecosystem with farming…

In 1981, when Darrel Ellis (19581992) was a young artist in search of a style, he received a present that would change his life: an extensive archive of photographic negatives that had belonged to the father he’d never known. Thomas Ellis, a postal clerk and former U.S. Marine, was killed by two off-duty police officers in 1958, when his wife was pregnant with Darrel. The elder Ellis’s photographs of his extended family became central to his son’s artistic endeavors, which included photography, figurative painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. As Darrel Ellis cultivated his own evocative, elusive style, he seemed to be continually engaging, in ways both subtle and overt, with the story of his father’s passing. Ellis’s depictions of his family are quiet and poetic. Some appear to be…

JESSICA LOVE holds a doctorate in cognitive psychology and edits Kellogg Insight at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. When children arrive, nothing from our old lives is sacred anymore. Not sleep and not sex, not furniture arrangements or retirement plans or long-settled agreements about who washes dishes and who folds laundry. And then, as our children grow into themselves, the disruption can feel weirdly personal. Bookworms find themselves raising budding athletes. Sworn night owls have a brood of early risers. Hog farmers land an indignant vegan. In the calm of night, we envision who our children will become and who we will become on their behalf but we plan and God laughs. Sometimes, God has a field day. Seven years ago, I was an expert. I had a PhD…

The three words most closely identified with the French revolutionary tradition must surely be liberté, égalité, and fraternité. And though the ideas of liberty and equality have inspired countless individuals to take up muskets or pens, not so with the idea of fraternity, which tends to inspire little more than indifference. Of the three elements in France’s national motto, fraternité is more like the poor relation that, as the political theorist John Rawls remarks in his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, “has had a lesser place in democratic theory.” In most school textbooks, life, liberty, equality, and property feature prominently in chapters about human rights, but fraternity merits not even a footnote. Rawls nevertheless argues that although friendship is not a democratic right, a democracy worthy of the name…

A round 400 BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus proffered the idea that all matter was composed of indivisible, featureless constituents. He described them using the Greek word for “uncuttable”: atomos. Two thousand years later, scientists found that Democritus had, at least in principle, been correct. But the particles he envisioned—now called atoms—were neither featureless nor indivisible, but instead were made up of large nuclei surrounded by small electrons. In time, the atomic slicing continued, homing in on the ever-smaller components of the universe: nuclei were actually concentrations of neutrons and protons. And these particles, it turned out, consisted of quarks held together by gluons. How did physicists learn these things? And have we finally uncovered the smallest constituents of matter? Suzie Sheehy tells the story. Her book is a historical…

Nothing is as important to our ability to survive as our ability to hurt. -Haider Warraich, The Song of Our Scars, 2022 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793 Little is understood, for example, of how the Vikings measured time. Their music and songs are a mystery. … It is unclear where women were believed to go when they died. Why was so much silver buried in the ground and never recovered? These and other questions go on and on, and have vexed scholars for centuries. Some questions are more tentative, and their answers may be unknowable. But they are still worth asking. If you truly believed—in fact,…

Josh Ritter’s “Folk Bloodbath” is a haunting, hallucinatory song featuring the title characters from three great American murder ballads: Stacker Lee, Delia Green, and Louis Collins. Ritter methodically kills them all off and inters them in the same graveyard: “And out of Delia’s bed came briars, / And out of Louis’s bed a rose, / And out of Stacker Lee’s came Stacker Lee’s cold lonely little ghost.” It’s a strange and lovely mashup, a sidelong commentary on the curious human tendency to set brutal stories to beautiful melodies, and to tell those stories over and over again, in endless variations. Which makes it a little surprising that Ritter chose to build the song around “Louis Collins” and its famous refrain, “The angels laid him away.” It’s the least typical murder…

A reported 82 million households watched the first season of the Netflix show Bridgerton—writer and producer Shonda Rhimes’s romance set in early-19th-century Britain—but until recently, mine was not one of them. Not that I didn’t want to see it. I’d heard a great deal about this period drama, with its prominent Black and women characters. I also knew that those bold casting decisions had led to its massive success, especially with people of color. And yet, just four minutes and 25 seconds into the first episode, I found myself wanting to gag. Bridgerton unquestionably looks good. The surfaces—from the lavish furniture to the kaleidoscopic costumes to the made-up faces of all the beautiful peopleare impeccable. But watching it was like overdosing on cotton candy. In particular, I couldn’t get past…

Wong May’s reader needs to be ready to dream a little. Her poems unfold with the intensity, the abrupt shifts of focus, and the uncanny, enigmatic quality of our dreams, even when she is writing about ordinary sunlit experience. Take the poem titled “The World.” Here we’re in a taxicab in an unfamiliar city. The “Much exercised” driver is “exasperating.” He seems lost, yet the poet trusts him. They “have a special understanding”; they are both as “foreign” as the world they find themselves in. “How did we get here?” Neither one can say. The car stinks of vomit. “The radio is carsick / With human speech.” “Ho—Ho // Ho— Hell,” the driver says when they finally pull up at her hotel. A hotel—the appropriate home for the dislocated, transnational…

ROSANNA WARREN is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collection So Forth and Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. From early childhood, I used to haunt my parents’ bookshelves, leafing through “grown-up” works that I couldn’t yet understand. By the time I was 15 or so and could read French, I was particularly drawn to the bookcase that held my mother’s French and Italian editions. It was up in what we called the gallery: the old hayloft of the Connecticut barn that my parents—Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren—had converted into our family home. The gallery served partly as a guest room, partly as storage space. One afternoon, we were both up there, my mother and I; she was folding sweaters and tucking them away…

DENNIS MCFARLAND’S most recent novel is Nostalgia. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the Scholar, among other places. When Kevin arrived at the top floor and stepped into a long dark hallway, he couldn’t recall the circumstances of his getting there. Likewise, he faltered on the subject of his purpose, though he felt it related to something material, like architecture or interior design. The ancient elevator man with the scary swooping eyebrows had brought him to the 15th floor—he knew that much at least—but he was pretty sure someone had dropped him off at the front of the building. A very pale woman with reddish hair (his sister Michelle?) had waved from the open back seat window of a car and wished him…

“The Waste Land,” not “The Wasteland” or “Waste Land,” and “not Waste Lands,” T. S. Eliot would correct people regarding the title of his epoch-defining poem. Originally he’d had in mind another title altogether, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a phrase pinched from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. But that belonged to an earlier vision of the poem, a sort of literary vaudeville review in acts and interludes of differing registers, voices, and intensities. What Eliot ended up with—thanks especially to the committed intervention of his friend Ezra Pound—was more a symphony of ruin in five movements, an “emotional unit.” How this poem came to be, its life and times, is explored on the occasion of its centennial, with aplomb and intelligence, by poet and editor Matthew Hollis in…

The early 21st century is a time of reckoning for architecture. The field is grappling with its subservience to global capital and complicity in the agendas of autocrats like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. There is broad recognition within the profession that it has long marginalized women, and a growing awareness that lionizing “star” designers obscures labor relations that verge on the exploitative. Meanwhile, interest in vernacular and non-Western design traditions has swelled in recent years, and some architects have found an urgent new mission in devoting their skills to the fight against climate change. This existential crisis doesn’t permeate The Story of Architecture. In an initial note to his readers, Witold Rybczynski describes what to expect in the pages ahead: a history of celebrated works from the Stone…

“ In the summer of 1947 … [William Kapell] played the Third Rachmaninoff Concerto. No one who heard it will forget that performance. With it Kapell moved into the company of Horowitz and Rachmaninoff himself, who alone had conquered the citadel of that strange concerto, which is cheap unless it is magnificent. He forged the full splendor of the score from his amazing equipment of poetry and fire, of impishness and blazing technique. He conjured its curious fragrance by coaxing from the piano its loveliest songs. ”…

In the mid-1950s, the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance in New York City authorized the demolition of a working-class Black and Hispanic neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side—a culturally rich community that included among its residents Thelonious Monk, Benny Carter, and Zora Neale Hurston. The clearance, part of Robert Moses’s widespread campaign of urban renewal in the city, saw homes, schools, and about 800 businesses razed to make way for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Throughout the 1960s, the fortresslike arts campus arose on 18 city blocks, its buildings designed by such architects as Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and Pietro Belluschi. Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall and now called David Geffen Hall) opened in 1962 as the new home of the New York Philharmonic. The Metropolitan Opera…

Four years ago, I bought myself a paperback atlas—a floppy, glossy, 200-page edition quite unlike the hardback tome that had gathered dust on my shelf for decades. And this flimsy new atlas soon altered my grasp of reality in a way so elemental that I realized I’d obtained an essential tool of knowledge and power, all for a modest $14.95. For when I found it in my local bookshop, I vowed from that day on to look up every place I encountered in my reading, no matter what. Previously, while reading, I would hear a voice in my head saying, Don’t get up. Stay on the page. You don’t really need to know where Ulan Bator or Burma or Lyme Regis is. You’ll lose the pleasure of the story ……

The Chair You have to first Sit in the temple gloom In the mahogany chair & despair. The only glimmer In the temple (being the inlaid bits of The Mother-Of-Pearl shells On the tall, more than humanly tall Chair back, for these These too Are the reputed “Tears of Things” Of this world as seen By the world. In that other chair behind Temple curtains Sits Mother Mother Who believed For a good part of her later life You were there somewhere In the temple Writing A book About her. She could hear you In prose Telling tales. Mother had an interesting life Because she was beautiful & she wrote poetry & poetry ruins lives. (Does this sound like a fatwa, Girls? “May your life be messy, Your poems tidy.”)…

KARL KIRCHWEY is a professor of English and creative writing at Boston University. He is the author of seven books and editor of two anthologies, including, most recently, Poems of Healing. I. My father’s younger brother, for whom I am named, was a Navy fighter pilot attached to the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise during World War II. He was 22 and a lieutenant (junior grade) with Fighting Squadron Ten, called “The Grim Reapers”—its logo was a skeleton, wearing a flying helmet and goggles, making a steep dive while holding a bloodstained scythe. On June 15, 1944, the first day of the invasion of the island of Saipan, in the Northern Marianas, his plane was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire—or perhaps by friendly fire from a U.S. Navy ship bombarding…

Many a biography has made its subject carry the weight of the “American Century,” Time publisher Henry Luce’s phrase for the nation’s ascendancy in the middle decades of the 20th century. Among recent examples, William McKinley was said to have been its architect and Richard Holbrooke to have ended it, while George C. Marshall and Dorothy Day and countless others embodied it. But none can truly be said to have lived it, reflected it, and shaped it as thoroughly as did J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover’s longevity as America’s policeman-inchief is the most remarkable fact of his life. In the aftermath of World War I, he was present at the creation of what later would be known—and thanks to his imprint, celebrated and feared—as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was…

Early in this compelling account of the tangled relationship between liberty and slavery, Edward J. Larson, a professor of history at Pepperdine University, cites the chaotic 1770 riot known as the Boston Massacre. Six Bostonians protesting import duties were shot dead by British soldiers, who later went on trial for murder. The killings became a rallying cry for American patriots who viewed the incident as proof of the Crown’s determination to “enslave” freeborn, white Americans by depriving them of their liberties. The soldiers were defended by the young John Adams, an antislavery patriot who nonetheless argued in court that the soldiers had been provoked by one of the dead men, a mixed-race sailor named Crispus Attucks, whom Adams described disdainfully as “a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough…