Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i The American Scholar

AFTER THE BLOODY NATIONAL CATASTROPHES of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln, the people of the reunited union deserved a period of calm. That was not to be. “Peace had come,” the journalist Matthew Josephson later wrote, echoing Jeremiah, “but there was no peace.” Brenda Wine-apple quotes Josephson in our cover story, an excerpt from her soon-to-be-published book on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. President Lincoln had been determined to undertake the reconstruction of the badly damaged South, while fulfilling the promise of emancipation to grant full citizenship to those who had been enslaved. Hopes that his successor—a southern Democrat who had argued against secession before the war—would advance Lincoln’s goals were soon dashed. As Wineapple writes, President Johnson instead “sought to obstruct, overthrow, veto, or challenge…

In the early 1990s, sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to describe public spaces, separate from our homes and workplaces, where people intentionally meet and socialize. These include churches, bars, parks, community centers, and clubs. Though varied, what third places have in common is that they help human conversation flourish. But as technology alters our ways of connecting with one another and allows more people to work outside the office, what role do third spaces now serve? Do we still use them in the same way, and does their design reflect any changes? To find out, Michael Broadway and Olivia Engelhardt, of Northern Michigan University, set out to study the most ubiquitous third place of all: the coffee shop. “These are places where we specifically used to go…

1. From Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya (letters exchanged between critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov): Dear Volodya: I was awfully glad to hear about your book. Did you make any arrangement with them for subsidizing you while you write another? Subsidized! Surely no joke can be intended. This is definitely not a case of a member of the establishment dissing an ambitious writer. A bald-headed critic (no value judgment is implied) and a lepidopterist-writer privileged to spend his time running around with butterfly nets. Imagine their power, occupying their respective places (the academy and the lawn)! Also, each was privileged to have the money to buy any number of pre-Forever stamps to correspond with the other; these estimable, cis-gendered men were entirely simpatico as they encouraged each other in…

MY PURPOSE IS CHIEFLY to describe what is bothering a good many people today, rather than to go deeply into the causes of disquiet and unrest in the Western world, much less to offer remedies or advocate revolution. I take it for granted that we all know what we mean by “quality,” but the term “life” is not exactly a clear and distinct idea. It can stand for a number of things, and people in fact take it very differently. Some stress the value of life from the point of view of society—the need for talent, the opportunity for service. Others find the existence of another person satisfying—wife, child, lover, friend, and so on. I think we have to start a little further back if we are to understand the…

Remembering Poughkeepsie  for William Gifford, 1928–2015 The river. Always the same, never the same.Poughkeepsie. A place north of where I am.To remember you is to remember Poughkeepsie.To remember Poughkeepsie is to remember the river.I am downriver now & you are a memoryI carry everywhere, both light & heavy,the way memories are. Light & heavy, that day in December.Bitterly cold. The river shining. Gray.We were the only ones out that day,two tiny figures bundled against the cold,crossing the Hudson on the walkway.Halfway to the other side, you stopped.Had to turn back. But I went on.Nothing would stop me. Tapped the far shorequickly. Came back to where you waited.Cold. Ready to call it a day. There used to be words for what I want to say.You knew me when there were words.Words…

THE IDEAS THAT MADE AMERICA: A Brief History BY JENNIFER RATNER-ROSENHAGEN Oxford University Press, 220 pp., $18.95 REAL PRESIDENTS READ BOOKS. When the Library of Congress was destroyed in the War of 1812, the former president Thomas Jefferson offered his collection to replace it, commenting that “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from this collection … there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” Congress agreed, purchasing the bulk of Jefferson’s library, 6,487 books, for $23,950. That this interaction between Congress and a president—this cooperation based in a common love of knowledge—is completely unthinkable today should be a cause of deep and sustained sadness. The story of Jefferson and…

DIDEROT AND THE ART OF THINKING FREELY BY ANDREW S. CURRAN Other Press, 520 pp., $28.95 DENIS DIDEROT (1713–1784) has never burned with the reputational brightness of French Enlightenment stars like Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Leading-man status has perpetually eluded the philosophe associated with that age’s Encyclopédie.Four years before his death, Diderot himself wistfully acknowledged that he had never, in his lifetime, published a masterpiece. Moreover, as Andrew S. Curran recounts in his deeply researched and absorbing new biography, Diderot’s was not even the world’s first encyclopedia. Such works stretched back to ancient times, and the immediate antecedent for Diderot’s enterprise, Ephraim Chambers’s two-volume Cyclopaedia,was published in London in 1728. (Indeed, the Encyclopédie began as an aborted project to translate Chambers’s volumes into French.) Diderot was not even the sole…

What’s Race Got to Do With It? In the opening paragraph of “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre” (Winter 2019), Farah Peterson characterizes Crispus Attucks as an unarmed black man, shot and killed by men in uniform who “got away with it.” This bald statement seriously distorts or disregards the historical evidence. Attucks arrived at King Street heading a group of sailors, armed with clubs fashioned from the legs of marketplace stalls or from cordwood, each about the thickness of a man’s wrist—equivalent in heft to today’s baseball bats. The chaotic scene centered on a group of eight redcoats, armed with muzzle-loading muskets, facing not mere peaceful demonstrators but a rowdy, raucous crowd of at least 200 men and youths deeply hating the British government and its “hirelings,” throwing snowballs,…

MONICA L. SMITH, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, specializes in the history of cities with a focus on ancient urban development on the Indian subcontinent. She is the author of A Prehistory of Ordinary People and the forthcoming Cities: The First 6,000 Years. We asked her to pose five questions about the future of cities. 1. Cities are efficient places to get anything we want, from employment and education to museums and sporting events. This economy of scale entices consumers with its variety but also rewards producers. The diversity and density of people in cities mean there’s almost always someone adventuresome enough to be the trendsetter who buys something avant-garde. And for every person who aspires to leave the city to raise goats or take up organic farming, there…

Kelly McMasters is the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town. In her forthcoming book of nonfiction, A Measurement of Loneliness, she explores one woman’s struggle for home and self. Her essay about a murder-suicide that took place on the author’s dirt road raises questions about the relationship between beauty and loneliness. One person’s secluded paradise is another person’s isolated nightmare. So I learned each time friends would visit from the city. They would drive up the long driveway, unfold out of the car from the long three- or four-hour trip, look around in a daze. Isn’t it peaceful? I’d ask. Aren’t you afraid? some would whisper in response. The farmhouse is located on part of an old dairy farm with nothing but nature surrounding us…

THE AIR IN THE BARRACKS DETENTION CELL was hot and sultry—typical July weather for the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. Not surprisingly, the woman lying on the cot was bathed in sweat. But the reason wasn’t just the stifling heat. It was also fear. A few hours earlier, she had been captured by the Gestapo while combing through intelligence reports from her resistance network. The Germans who had taken her captive knew she was an Allied spy, but they had no idea of her true identity. According to her papers—forged, of course—she was a French housewife named Germaine Pezet. Dour and dowdy, she wore spectacles, was drably dressed, and had lusterless, jet-black hair. It was the latest of her many disguises, this one concocted in part by a dentist in…

Three days after Anton Antonovich Popov garroted himself with piano wire, Elsie Green motored up his looping driveway—voice recorder and notepad in her shoulder bag—to write Popov’s first, and her 200th, obituary. Popov, composer of an acclaimed debut opera, a second opera reviled by audiences and critics alike, a small body of symphonic work, and countless commercial jingles, had purchased the small mountain in cash, clear-cut the top, and constructed a heptagonal lodge at the peak—one wall for each note in the musical scale. A haze of steam wafted from the heated driveway. Winter had just begun to relent, and the foothills of western Maine were a mush of gray. The doorbell sounded The Rite of Spring— Stravinsky, Elsie knew. The door flung open to reveal Mrs. Popov, 50ish, petite,…

LIKE ALL TRULY AGGRAVATING people, Lillian Smith refuses to go away. That is, the corporeal Lillian Smith may have died in 1966, but her words refuse to go away—words that described white privilege before that was a phrase, words that seem newly relevant in an era when cell-phone videos of police brutality perpetrated on black people are impossible to unsee. With the publication of Strange Fruit, her reputation flourished outside the South, but southerners treated her to a staggering amount of vitriol. Who is Lillian Smith? Unless you’re an academic or a women’s studies major, you’ve probably never heard of her. It’s understandable; she’s ancient history. We are nearly three-quarters of a century past Strange Fruit,her 1944 novel about a doomed interracial love affair in a…

MR. STRAIGHT ARROW: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima BY JEREMY TREGLOWN Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $28 THIS ADMIRABLE BOOK about an admirable man, while insisting it is not a biography, recounts enough of John Hersey’s life to explain some of his enduring concerns and the arc of his career. It belongs to that elegant, reticent, wholly non-sleazy, and sadly disappearing genre known as literary biography, and for anyone interested in how a writer’s life is really lived as opposed to its incidental moments of glamour, Jeremy Treglown’s account of Hersey’s career—its constraints and opportunities, the worries and satisfactions, and the nature of the actual work—is deeply satisfying. Hersey’s parents were missionaries working on behalf of the YMCA in China, where the boy lived…

Diane Ackerman Aimee Anderson Steven Anderson Maria Augusto Katrina H. Avery James Babcock Thomas Bethell Ritu Birla Allison Blakely William Bradnan Gregory D. Campbell Joan Canny Lincoln Caplan Fred and Beth Cate Nancy Crooker Sidney Diamond Pat Eisenberg Phoebe Ellsworth Brad Edmondson Ernest B. Furgurson John Geissman Werner Gundersheimer Rachel Hadas Ann Hulbert Steven L. Isenberg Priscilla Kawakami Brent Kendrick Donald S. Lamm Kate and Jim Lehrer David Levering Lewis Dana Lindquist Mark Luprecht David Lyons Jill McCorkle and Tom Rankin Ann B. Marsh-Meigs Richard Moe Cullen Murphy Joanne Myers Michael O’Donovan Edward Orlando Douglas Paulson Eleftherios Terry Papoutsakis Russ Powell John Ramsbottom Sheppard Ranbom Diana Ranson Richard Restak Michael Robbins Mike Rose Herbert Royden Judith Shapiro Ellen Siegelman Efrem Sigel Joanne Smallen Marcia Stanton Juliet Stopak Robert Vogt Gary…

An April Sunday brings the snow Making the blossom on the plum trees green, Not white. An hour or two, and it will go. —Philip Larkin, “An April Sunday brings the snow,” 1948 Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves. —Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1837 Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it was always the same. When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I sometimes exclaimed ‘Hot Ziggety!’— a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in Kansas. Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to hear him exclaim ‘Hot Ziggety!’ when my wife put the bread and cheese before him. —Norman Malcolm,…

Introduction CHARLES BARZUN AND MATTHEW BARZUN THE ESSAY THAT FOLLOWS WAS originally delivered as a lecture in 1969, but the two of us learned of its existence only in 2002. We were visiting our grandfather and his wife, Marguerite, at their home in San Antonio, Texas. After dinner, our grandfather offered us a CD on which was written in permanent magic marker, “Present-Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life (1969).” A stranger had sent it to him, but he had no memory of, or interest in, its contents. We were free to take it. At the time of our visit, Jacques Barzun was 95 years old. He had been retired for more than 25 years from his post at Columbia University, where he had taught history for nearly 50 years…

“REMEMBERING POUGHKEEPSIE” is Elizabeth Spires’s sharp-edged elegy for her mentor, William Gifford, a literature professor at Vassar who helped Spires start out on her four-decade-long career as a poet. Spires describes a cold walk that she and Gifford took long ago by the Hudson River, which flows past the college town. The Hudson quickly becomes multivalent. It is the river of time, Heraclitus’s flux, and the Styx. It also represents the distance between two people at different stages of life. When the teacher stops on the bridge crossing the river, “Ready to call it a day,” and the student continues (“Nothing would stop me”), that’s the way it must be. The poem’s fragmentary sentences are stabbing and staccato, anything but flowing. They push back against the current. Writing “downriver” where…

OF THE THREE GREAT ARTISTS who dominated Venetian painting for much of the 16th century, Tintoretto was the wildest and most avant-garde. In 1568, the Tuscan artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, who had met Tintoretto in Venice and liked him, reported that aside from the artist’s musical talent and pleasant company, “he was extravagant, capricious, swift, and resolute, the most formidable brain that painting has ever known”—this from someone who had also written a biography of Leonardo da Vinci. From March to July of this year, the National Gallery in Washington is hosting an ambitious exhibition devoted to Tintoretto and what Vasari called “the novel and capricious inventions and strange whims of his intellect”— that is, his paintings. “Whims” is really too pale a translation for Vasari’s colorful term, ghiribizzi,…

STONY THE ROAD: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. Penguin Press, 320 pp., $30 IN Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The forces that pushed the freedmen back and how the black community responded are the subjects of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Stony the Road, its title taken from James Weldon Johnson’s 1900 poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Gates, a distinguished scholar, filmmaker, and critic, writes with clarity and force about Reconstruction, Redemption, and the problem of representation. He describes his book—a combination of text and visual essays—as “an intellectual and cultural history of black agency in the…

FOURSOME: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury BY CAROLYN BURKE Knopf, 432 pp., $30 THIS IS THE STORY OF FOUR talented people: Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Rebecca Salsbury, who met by chance and remained involved with one another for the rest of their lives. Rather like partners in a quadrille, that 19th-century British craze and forerunner of the square dance, they bowed, circled, advanced, retreated, formed new patterns, and incidentally brought further perspectives to the often-told story of their lives. This latest attempt was made possible by newly available collections of letters, the raw material for Carolyn Burke, widely admired for her portraits of Mina Loy, Lee Miller, and Edith Piaf. There is, of course, nothing new in the history of artists’ forming close relationships…