Innholdsfortegnelse for October 26, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

LISA APPIGNANESI is Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and former Chair of the Trustees of the Freud Museum in London. She is the author of Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, among other books. NEAL ASCHERSON is the author of Black Sea, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, and the novel Death of the Frosac. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. MARIANNE BORUCH ’s most recent books are Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing, a collection of poems, and The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays Toward Poetry. DAVID BROMWICH is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. Moral Imagination, a collection of his essays, was recently published in paperback. PETER BROWN is the Philip and…

The Nazi- Fascist New Order for European Culture by Benjamin G. Martin. Harvard University Press, 370 pp., $39.95 “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.” This philistine wisecrack is often attributed to Air Marshal Hermann Goering, or some other Nazi notable. Benjamin Martin sets us straight on its source: the 1933 play Schlageter by the Nazi Party member Hanns Johst, in which a character says: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I release the catch on my Browning.” Martin’s illuminating book The Nazi- Fascist New Order for European Culture shows how badly astray this famous quip leads us: cultural concerns were in fact vital to the imperial projects of Hitler and Mussolini. We do not normally associate their violent and aggressive regimes with “soft power.” But…

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn. Knopf, 306 pp., $26.95 In January 2011, just before the beginning of the spring semester, Daniel Mendelsohn—well known to readers of The New York Review and a professor of classics at Bard College—was approached by his eighty- one- year- old father, a retired research mathematician and instructor in computer science. Could he, Jay Mendelsohn asked his son, “for reasons,” Daniel writes, “I thought I understood at the time,” sit in on his annual freshman seminar on Homer’s Odyssey? Nervously, Daniel welcomed this unexpected auditor, believing, as he was assured, that the old man would be happy just listening. Before the first session was over he had realized his mistake and was thinking: This is going to be a…

Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews. Metropolitan, 746 pp., $40.00 Frederick Crews has a loyalty of preoccupation rare in a literary academic. His attacks on Sigmund Freud began way back in the mid- 1970s with his publicly proclaimed conversion away from the Freudian literary criticism he practiced at the time. Since then his assault has drawn sustenance from a variety of revisionist Freud sleuths and scholars. High among the sleuths is the tireless Peter Swales, a onetime assistant to the Rolling Stones and a follower of the cultish G. I. Gurdjieff, who grew interested in Freud because of his cocaine use and sniffed out all manner of facts about the originals of his cases and his supposed affair with his sister- in- law. The scholars include more…

Confessions by Augustine, translated from the Latin by Sarah Ruden. Modern Library, 484 pp., $28.00 In 2012, Sarah Ruden brought us, in a crackling translation, the secondcentury- AD Latin novel known as The Golden Ass of Apuleius. The Golden Ass is full of impudent incongruities. A topsy- turvy tale about a hapless young man turned into a donkey is combined with a love story (of Cupid and Psyche) as bright and delightful as the tapestries that would illustrate it throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Utterly unexpectedly, the book ends with the vision of a goddess rising from the swell of a moonlit sea.1 Ruden now leads us to a yet more incongruous masterpiece. A little over two centuries after The Golden Ass, we discover a person who…

On Empson by Michael Wood. Princeton University Press, 212 pp., $22.95 Ambiguity has been an arresting feature of language ever since people learned to care about words for reasons unconnected with utility. An instruction manual on fixing a wheel shouldn’t leave you uncertain whether a wood or a metal spoke is preferred. But diplomacy can allow for “strategic ambiguity,” well understood by all parties, where too much specification would hamper an agreement. Ambiguity in literature is a more elusive thing—not a matter of tacit meanings suppressed to secure a particular end. An ambiguous moment in a poem may indicate a suspension between two states of mind, in a situation where someone confined to either state could not know the reality of the other. It commonly turns on a hidden complexity…

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe. Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 420 pp., $28.00 In an interview with Gene Shay for the “Folklore Program” broadcast on March 12, 1967, Joni Mitchell revealed the improbable origins of one of her best- known and most frequently covered songs: I was reading a book, and I haven’t finished it yet, called Henderson the Rain King. And there’s a line in it that I especially got hung up on that was about when he was flying to Africa and searching for something, he said that in an age when people could look up and down at clouds, they shouldn’t be afraid to die. And so I got this idea “from both sides now.” In the event, Joni would…

How salmon love sex enough to fight uphill in waters blasting brilliant, some one hundred mph (fact-checkers, forget it, I’m close.) How we stood, old inkling of such exhausting omg Darwin would have . . . (the difference, the samethingness, animal hungers and fury and persistence, the belief, some amazing something next) exploded!—his head on a pillow most afternoons in the parlor, wrapped in her quiet concern. Emma the perfect nurse, they say, who married the perfect patient, Victorian fable, velvet-striped wallpaper even on the ceiling would be my guess. Because that trip he took in youth is everlasting youth, island of huge tortoises and the tiny cactus finch plus that other green spot in the sea, its DNA trace of the grand extinct Dodo too trusting to run from…

Ferdinand Mount First Confession: A Sort of Memoir by Chris Patten. London: Allen Lane, 312 pp., £20.00 Kind of Blue: A Political Memoir by Ken Clarke. London: Pan, 525 pp., $15.95 (paper) History to the defeated doesn’t even say “alas,” it just cuts them dead. In the British Conservative Party especially, the waters of oblivion close over the defenders of deserted orthodoxies like appeasement and the Corn Laws. So now with the Tory Europhiles. For a generation and more, to be “a good European” was the passport to promotion in the party. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Young Conservatives prided themselves on being the largest youth movement in the free world, and they were as passionately devoted to the Common Market as they were to table tennis and the…

MORE RULES OF IMPEACHMENT To the Editors: I write to clear up misconceptions about the Constitution, the law, and my book in the review of The Case for Impeachment [NYR, September 28]. The reviewers’ most serious error, with profound implications for current debates, is their claim that impeachment is inapplicable to offenses occurring prior to the presidency. The reviewers cite no authorities for this proposition and ignore the lack of any such limitation in the Constitution. They dismiss my example of a federal judge impeached for transgressions before assuming the bench, saying, “Judges may be different from presidents, since past criminal activity could impinge on their ability to deliver justice fairly.” Yet they fail to draw the obvious connection that any collusion between Trump and the Russians would profoundly impact…

1. Long focused on the impact of live theater, Stalin did not immediately grasp the full power of film. But the producer Boris Shumyatsky persisted, and goaded the Party to issue a directive to film all major events in the USSR, design handheld cameras to be put into wide production, and have regional officials treat newsreels the way they treated the press. Stalin began to review the newsreels at Kremlin cinema sessions. But it had really been his previewing of the 1934 film Chapayev that transformed him—a person accustomed to working with written texts— from someone who occasionally viewed films for diversion to their executive producer, overseeing everything from the backgrounds of scenes to the dialogue and score. The dictator played a decisive part in supporting not just subjects of…

Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror by Helen C. Epstein. Columbia Global Reports, 262 pp., $14.99 (paper) When I was twelve years old, a new man-about-town arrived in Monrovia, the city of my birth. His name was Captain Stevens, he had a mysterious job in the United States military, and he had just been detailed to the American embassy in Mamba Point. He showed up at parties hosted by my aunt and uncle, sipped cognac, and charmed the Liberian ladies, who all whispered about the handsome African-American military officer. What I would find out two years later was that Captain Stevens was spending much of his time in Liberia meeting with disaffected men in the Liberian military who were plotting to overthrow the government. A century…

The Conference of the Birds by Attar, translated from the Persian by Sholeh Wolpé. Norton, 376 pp., $25.95 Almost nothing is known for certain about the life of Farid ud- Din Attar, a Persian poet celebrated for his delightful long poem The Conference of the Birds. He had no contemporary biographers and the few vignettes of his life that do exist feel apocryphal. He was born toward the middle of the twelfth century and made his living as an apothecary (Attar, a pen name, means “perfumist” or “pharmacist”). In addition to The Conference of the Birds, he composed three other long narrative poems, a large collection of shorter verses, and a charming book of anecdotes about famous followers of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.1 Later Persian poets such as…

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie. Random House, 380 pp., $28.99 Whether by design, chance, or oracular divination, Salman Rushdie has managed, within a year of the 2016 election, to publish the first novel of the Trumpian Era. On purely technical merits this is an astounding achievement, the literary equivalent of Katie Ledecky lapping the Olympic field in the 1500- meter freestyle. The publishing industry still operates at an aristocratic pace; Egypt built the new Suez Canal in less time than it typically takes to convert a finished manuscript into a hardcover. As a point of comparison, the first novel to appear about September 11, Windows on the World, by the French author Frédéric Beigbeder, was not published until August 2003. Yet less than eight months into the administration, Rushdie…

Half- light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 by Frank Bidart. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 718 pp., $40.00 Twenty years ago, Frank Bidart called his sixth book Desire. It is desire that drives his poetry, just as making desire believable on the page drives his imagination. Besides its erotic reach, “desire” signifies for Bidart a yearning toward the absolute in any domain. To desire to create a perfect work of art; to find provable truth; to speak with a candor “that gives a candid kind to everything” (Stevens) is—as any adult knows—to fail. And yet. It is that “and yet” that gives passion to Bidart’s voice, as he both succumbs to and resists desire. Hoping in love for a perfect entwining of body and mind, the young are violently disappointed by each broken…

A CURRENT LISTING Alexandre Gallery (212)755-2828; inquiries@alexandregallery.com; www.alexandregallery.com. Tom Uttech: New Paintings On view through Saturday, November 25, 2017. Illustrated catalogue with text by Lucy Lippard available. John Davis Gallery 362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518) 828-5907; art@ johndavisgallery.com; www.johndavisgallery.com La Wilson, Constructions, 10.14–11.08 "I try to steer clear of objects that are too loaded with meaning; but then, when I think about it, everything I use is loaded—snakes, pencils, firecrackers, matches, hair pins. What I try to do is free myself from the conscious associations so that the unconscious ones can take over. I am much more interested in what I don't know than what I do know." Swann Auction Galleries 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010; (212) 254- 4710; swanngalleries.com. Upcoming Auction: “Old Master Through Modern Prints,”…