FALL BOOKS

OCTOBER 17, 2016

5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

23 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson on the third-party candidates;
NeverTrump; Bonnie Raitt; Norm Macdonald;
James Surowiecki on Trumps other tax ploy.
THE POLITICAL SCENE
Ryan Lizza 30 Taming Trump
The trials of the campaigns third manager.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Jack Handey 37 Never Give Up
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Julie Phillips 38 Out of Bounds
Ursula K. Le Guins unruly imagination.
PROFILES
David Remnick 46 How the Light Gets In
Leonard Cohen and the voice of God.
SKETCHBOOK
Barry Blitt 55 Hillary 2016 Campaign Memorabilia
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Dexter Filkins 60 The Thirty-Year Coup
An exiled Turkish clerics shadow army.
FICTION
Cynan Jones 72 The Edge of the Shoal
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Alexandra Schwartz 80 Emily Witts Future Sex.
Adam Gopnik 85 Novelists rewriting Shakespeare.
Zo Heller 90 Shirley Jacksons mad, mad world.
Leo Robson 94 Evaluating the novelist Henry Green.
99 Briey Noted
Dan Chiasson 100 Thomas De Quinceys doped-up genius.
MUSICAL EVENTS
Alex Ross 104 Tristan und Isolde, Das Rheingold.
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 106 Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 108 The Girl on the Train, Under the Shadow.
POEMS
Marianne Boruch 69 Hospital Linens
C. L. ODell 97 My Father Sings Like a Crow
COVER
R. Kikuo Johnson The Finish Line

DRAWINGS Will McPhail, Robert Leighton, Trevor Spaulding, Benjamin Schwartz, Michael Crawford, David Sipress, Shannon
Wheeler, Liam Francis Walsh, Edward Koren, Edward Steed, David Borchart,William Haefeli, Jason Patterson, Jack Ziegler,
Emily Flake, Frank Cotham, Amy Hwang, Tom Toro, Paul Noth, Avi Steinberg, Charlie Hankin, Danny Shanahan, P. C. Vey
SPOTS Giacomo Bagnara
 CONTRIBUTORS
Ryan Lizza (Taming Trump, p. 30), a
Washington correspondent for The
New Yorker, is also a political commen-
tator for CNN.
Dexter Filkins (The Thirty-Year Coup,
p. 60) is a sta writer and the author
of The Forever War, which won a
National Book Critics Circle Award.
Sheila Marikar (The Talk of the Town,
p. 24) is a writer living in Los Ange-
les. She is currently working on a book
about modern-day communes.
Jack Handey (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 37)
has written several humor books, in-
cluding, most recently, Squeaky Poems:
Rhymes About My Rat.
Julie Phillips (Out of Bounds, p. 38) is
working on a book on writing and
mothering, and is researching a biog-
raphy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover), an illustrator
and cartoonist, teaches cartooning at
the Rhode Island School of Design.
NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more.
PHOTO BOOTH
Images by the photographer Peter
Hujar, who captured the characters of
downtown New York in the seventies.
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2 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 80) be-
came a sta writer earlier this year.
Cynan Jones (Fiction, p. 72) is the au-
thor of ve novels, including The Dig
and Cove, which will be published
in the U.K. this fall.
Zo Heller (Books, p. 90) contributes to
The New York Review of Books. She has
published three novels, including Notes
on a Scandal.
C. L. ODell (Poem, p. 97) is a poet and
the editor of The Paris-American.
Leo Robson (Books, p. 94) is a freelance
writer based in London.
Alex Ross (Musical Events, p. 104), the
magazines music critic since 1996, is
working on a book entitled Wag-
nerism: Art in the Shadow of Music.
Anthony Lane (The Current Cinema,
p. 108) is a sta writer and lm critic
for the magazine. Nobodys Perfect
is a collection of his New Yorker pieces.
LEFT: COURTESY PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE AND PACE/MACGILL GALLERY;
RIGHT: KELLY NILAND AND ERIK T. JOHNSON
TRUMP AND THE TRUTH
Spin a wheel of Trumps statements
to explore our series of reported essays
on the G.O.P. candidates untruths.
 THE MAIL
A MUSEUMS UNSUNG HERO
Vinson Cunninghams piece on the
Smithsonian Institutions new National
Museum of African American History
and Culture describes the museums long
period of gestation, the obstacles it faced,
and its many champions, but neglects to
mention one of its major contributors,
the late African-American architect
J. Max Bond, Jr. (Making a Home for
Black History, August 29th). The idea
of a national museum dedicated to the
African-American experience was rst
discussed in 1915. In 1991, while working
on the Birmingham Civil Rights Insti-
tute with the congressman John Lewis,
Bond joined the eort. In 2006, he and
another noted architect, Phil Freelon, re-
ceived the commission to dene the proj-
ects objectives and to choose its site on
the Mall. The early work of Bond and
Freelon, who joined forces with the mu-
seums director, Lonnie Bunch, and the
Smithsonian, led to an open design com-
petition. A rm believer in the power of
collaboration, Bond invited David Ad-
jaye to join him and Freelon, to form a
partnershipFABwhich ultimately won
the commission. Bond, who died in 2009,
saw the design process as akin to a jazz
ensemble, where individuals would in-
spire one another to create a structure
that reected the richness and diversity
of African-American life. The museum
is not the eort of a single architect, Ad-
jaye, as Cunninghams article suggests.
While Bond cannot be here to share in
the triumph, the decade of eort by him
and his team should be recognized.
Charlie Shorter
Senior Adviser, Davis Brody Bond
New York City
1 yet less than it is for most people, to whom
A STAR TURN
Yuja Wangs emergence as a gifted
Mozart interpreter is a less recent phe-
nomenon than Janet Malcolm claims
in her Prole of the pianist (Perfor-
mance Artist, September 5th). I saw
Wang perform in 2008 with the Acad-
emy of St. Martin in the Fields, at the
age of twenty-one, when the pianist Mur-
ray Perahia, who had been scheduled to
both conduct and perform, had to drop
out. The late Sir Neville Marriner con-
ducted, and Wang, with just a few weeks
notice, took on the planned Mendels-
sohn and Mozart concertos. Her per-
formance of Mozarts C-Minor Con-
certo was remarkable. As her teacher
Gary Graman told Malcolm earlier this
year, Who can play Mozart the way she
did? It was so natural, in such good taste.
One of the orchestra musicians later told
me that they had all been impressed
as strong a recommendation as any Mo-
zartian could wish for. Later, I saw Wang
chatting with friends backstage. She had
already changed into jeans and at shoes.
Whatever she chooses to wear, her excep-
tional musicianship is the genuine article.
David Beech
Monterey, Calif.
1
CHOPPED
I read Ian Parkers piece on the Times
restaurant critic Pete Wells on Septem-
ber 11th, ironic timing for a piece that
refers to ve-hundred-dollar dinners
(Knives Out, September 12th). I was
left with real sympathy for both Wells
and the chef-restaurateur David Chang,
whose restaurant was the subject of one
of Wellss critical reviews. Eating at a
Manhattan destination restaurant is an
increasingly vainglorious experience; no
wonder the food often disappoints and
the fun has become dicult to locate.
Wells tells the devastated Chang, This
is the life you chose, and so did Wells,
who has the power to make or destroy
careers. But its worth noting that they
work in a rareed arena, in which good
food has become something more and
it means sustenance and community.
Hank Benson
New Haven, Conn.
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of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 3
 OCTOBER 12 18, 2016

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Anna Deavere Smith has carved out a singular niche straddling performance art, academia, and public-
interest journalism. Her documentary solo works, in which she plays a panoply of interview subjects,
have covered topics from the Crown Heights riots to the frailties of the human body. In her latest, Notes
from the Field, beginning previews Oct. 15 at Second Stage, Smith (above, in costume) draws on more
than two hundred and fty interviews to explore hot-button issues of education and inequality.
PHOTOGRAPH BY RYAN PFLUGER

ART
1 cusis photographs of his own Paris studio, and
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Museum of Modern Art
Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and
Shelter
No word but disgrace can describe our passivity
in the face of the current displacement of more
than sixty-five million people. This grave, accu-
satory exhibition evokes the transit, and the in-
termittent protection, of refugees through pho-
tographs, artists projects, water-purification
tablets, and a steel-frame tent from the United
Nations Refugee Agency: temporary shelter that,
for too many people, has now become permanent
housing. Photographs appropriated by Xaviera
Simmons consider the near-daily deaths in the
Mediterranean, and are accompanied by a list
of the drowned. Refugee camps from Lebanon
to Kenya are among the worlds fastest growing;
while this show fails to acknowledge the expe-
riences of people trapped in Lesbos or Calais, it
complements Bouchra Khalilis videos, recently
on view at the museum, that gave voice to ref-
Sam McKinnisss painting Swan II, in Egyptian Violet, at the Team gallery, opening Oct. 13.
The exhibition title refers to the crepuscular pigment the young artist uses, to striking effect.
6 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
ugees who risked their lives to reach Europe.
The most shattering object here is the smallest:
a color-coded plastic bracelet, used by Doctors
Without Borders to measure arm circumference
and gauge malnutrition. It rests on a pedestal
near a Dorothea Lange photograph of a migrant
mother outside a tent in Depression-era Califor-
niaa reminder that Americans have been dis-
placed persons, too. Through Jan. 22.
1 ists strenuously charming show. They bat their
GALLERIESUPTOWN
Sally Mann
The photographer commemorates her long
friendship with Cy Twombly in a series docu-
menting his modest studio in their home town
of Lexington, Virginia. (She began the project
in 1999; it ended in 2012, a year after his death.)
The painter is absent from these pictures, but
Mann remains alert to his presence, most ob-
viously in her photographs of his paintings and
sculptures, and of their splattered traces. He
feels present, too, in the soft glow of lighta
series of Shamess cant avoid the trivializing tug
flare, an aura, a dotted pattern of sun on the
wall. The emptiest of these images recall Uta
Barths equally poetic interior views, but Manns
pictures of a room crowded with Twomblys
spindly totemic sculptures hark back to Bran-
are every bit as unfussy and elegiac. Through
Oct. 29. (Gagosian, 976 Madison Ave., at 76th St.
212-796-1224.)
1
GALLERIESCHELSEA
Ryan Gander
Motion-detector-activated googly eyes, set
into the wall, greet visitors to this British art-
lashes and waggle their brows, shameless flirts.
Further entertainments include antique mirrors
draped with what appears to be cloth but is, in
fact, solid marble, and human-size stick figures
made of gleaming hardware which, while face-
less, bespeak mopey moods. Thirty-two sculp-
tures and assemblages (incorporating a box of
passport photographs and a tastefully deco-
rated ceramic dildo, among other objects) ride
a conveyor belt behind a hole in a wall. Clearly,
Gander expects you to like him. Through Oct. 15.
(Lisson, 504 W. 24th St. 212-505-6431.)
Meleko Mokgosi
The Botswana-born, New York-based painter
impresses and tantalizes with his aggressively
enigmatic realist paintings, in many shapes and
formats. They depict figures sprung from the
artists imagination, whether prosperous Afri-
can citizens or an elegant woman being adored,
or perhaps assaulted, by winged putti (based on
a canvas by Bouguereau). Several works in this
two-part exhibition contain words, hand-printed
in white on raw linen, in the Setswana language
of southern Africa. (According to Mokgosi, they
are tales from an oral tradition; he declines to
provide English translations.) Post-postcolo-
nial with a vengeance, Mokgosi immerses us
in currents of a powerful, complex civilization.
Through Oct. 22. (Shainman, 513 W. 20th St. and
524 W. 24th St. 212-645-1701.)
Oscar Murillo
At the age of thirty, the London-based artist has
been a market phenom for several years, but he
may feel that he still has something to prove.
In his second solo in New York, Murillo comes
on like a house afire with big, heavily stitched,
messy but strangely elegant paintings that fea-
ture fugitive antique images, including one of a
marching band; many handmade books of furi-
ously scribbled drawings and personal snapshots;
and an immense installation. The latter, entitled
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TEAM GALLERY, NEW YORK
A Futile Mercantile Disposition, deploys steel
and PVC pipe in frameworks supporting metal
shelves or bunks, draped with swatches of black-
painted canvas and linen. There are hints of so-
cial animus. But Murillos chief motive seems
to be art about art, with a debt to the Germans.
Imagine a mashup of Beuys, Polke, and Kiefer,
spun by a d.j. who is high on something. Through
Oct. 22. (Zwirner, 525 W. 19th St. 212-727-2070.)
Stephen Shames
The New York photographer got his start in 1966,
documenting the founding and growth of the
Black Panther Party, in pictures that emphasized
substance while admiring style. Any show of that
of radical chic (Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and

Bobby Seale are dazzlingly charismatic), but the
focus of this smart exhibition is on the Panthers
community serviceschools, clinics, and free-
food programsas well as its armed resistance.
In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, the
show and its related book do more than mark a
fiftieth anniversarytheyre an inspired call to
continue the fight against poverty, racism, and
police brutality. Through Oct. 29. (Kasher, 515
W. 26th St. 212-966-3978.)
NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; its advisable to check
in advance to conrm engagements.
Tredici Bacci
A few years ago, the guitarist Simon Hanes, a New
England Conservatory graduate obsessed with
Italian and French soundtracks of the nineteen-
sixties and seventies, put together this fourteen-
piece band of well-trained musicians to play his
complex tunes, which pay tribute to Ennio Mor-
ricones spaghetti-Western scores and to the sleazy,
funk-tinged lounge compositions of Morricones
contemporary Armando Trovajoli. Tredici Baccis
forthcoming dbut, Amore per Tutti, includes sul-
try ballads with feathery harmonies, up-tempo tunes
with aggressive bass lines, and a snarled guest vocal,
delivered by the downtown scum-rock legend J. G.
Thirlwell, on the records most addictive cut, Give
Him the Gun. This performance features a nine-
piece version of the bandplenty to fill the cozy
back room of this elegant little club. Opening will
be the Actual Trio, a Berkeley-based jazz group that
includes John Hanes, Simons father, on drums. (The
Owl, 497 Rogers Ave., Brooklyn. 718-774-0042. Oct. 12.)
Craig David
This U.K. pop martyr has staged a resurrection
that few people could have seen coming, but which
seems all the more fitting with each listen to the
Hot 100. The dots connected last September, when
David performed his 2000 classic, Fill Me In, on
BBC 1, over the instrumental to Jack s smash,
Where Are Now. The harmonies were in key,
the drops lined up, and the studio erupted at the
realization that the U.K. garage sound had snuck
back on air. A video of the performance racked up
four hundred thousand views, and within weeks
David had announced a new album and gone back
on tour. But hed been setting the stage since 2013,
when he started the TS5 party series in Miami,
spinning rave, soul, R. & B., and garage while im-
provising live performances throughout. The party
comes to Rough Trade this week, in celebration of
Following My Intuition, Davids first No. 1 album
in sixteen years. (64 N. 9th St., Brooklyn. roughtra-
denyc.com. Oct. 14.)
Luscious Jackson
Luscious Jacksons dbut record, Natural In-
gredients, was the first release on the Beastie
Boys now-defunct label, Grand Royal. In 1991,
Jill Cunniff, Gabrielle Glaser, Vivien Trimble,
and Kate Schellenbach offered an X-Girl alter-
native to Pauls Boutique, blending rumbling
funk breaks and dusted post-punk riffs as a foun-
8 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
ART
1
GALLERIESDOWNTOWN
Aneta Grzeszykowska
This unabashed artist from Warsaw appears at
the beach or the breakfast table in a dozen so-
larized photographs, but she stands out from
her surroundings in strange shades of gray. A
related video reveals her process: we see Grze-
szykowska paint her nude body in black, then
apply white contours to her eyelids and nip-
dation for monotone femme-rap parables. Semi-
automatic sisters, Cunniff sings on Daughters
of the Kaos, I might be strong, but dont call me
mister. Fans of the groups biggest hit, the rave-
friendly Naked Eye, will likely enjoy its 2013
reunion album, Magic Hour. The continuity is
uncanny, given that Trimble opted out of the new
incarnation of the act. Also in 2013, the band re-
leased Baby DJ, a record for the young children
that members conceived while on hiatus; catch
their only live performance of the year. (The Bell
House, 149 7th St., Brooklyn. 718-643-6510. Oct. 14.)
Rhythm of Afrika
Some of the most exciting sounds in dance are com-
ing from militant producers bent on jamming hard-
edged club rhythms together with transcendent
Afrobeats. The results are sprawling and rich, re-
configuring everything that fans love about house
and dancehall. Such d.j.s and producers are regu-
lars at this monthly rave, and are increasingly influ-
ential on the pop circuit; summer hits from Party-
NextDoor and Drake leaned on the jumping tropical
rhythms that are standard across select D.I.Y. venues
and dives. STA7CK (pronounced stark) and Brian
Lee McCloud (known as B.L.M.) are two young
jockeys with boundless taste and mixes worth sift-
ing through for hidden African house gems; they
co-headline this sweaty installment at the Knock-
down Center, a converted glass-and-door factory
that lures club rats out to Queens each weekend.
(52-19 Flushing Ave., Maspeth. 347-915-5615. Oct. 14.)
Caetano Veloso
Earlier this year, the seventy-four-year-old Bra-
zilian legend Veloso released Dois Amigos, Um
Seculo de Musica, an exquisite live album with
his lifelong friend and sometime musical collab-
orator Gilberto Gil. The stripped-down record,
a high point in a half-century-long career filled
with them, features Velosos 1967 saudade classic
Corao Vagabundo, along with newer songs
that showcase his undiminished talent for lyrical
sophistication and harmonic ambiguity. For this
solo concert, Veloso will present material spanning
several decades in a similarly spare manner, but
his primary motivation is to draw attention to the
opening act, Teresa Christina. Christina, a subtle,
potent singer, will perform the songs of the samba
pioneer Cartola, accompanied by her tasteful, vir-
tuoso guitarist, Carlinhos Sete Cordas. (Town Hall,
123 W. 43rd St. 212-840-2824. Oct. 12-13.)
1 from coaxing magic from the horn. Smulyan,
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Henry Butler
New Orleanss own Butler is an astonishing pi-
anist whose technical agility is matched only by
ples. A concurrent exhibition, at the 11R gal-
lery, includes fascinating photographs of ef-
figies that the artist makes in pink pigskin,
based on parts of her body (lips, finger, breast,
navel)a partial self-portrait. Grzeszykow-
skas treatment of the fragmented figure has
affinities with another Polish experimentalist,
the late, great Alina Szapocznikow. Through
Oct. 16. (Lyles & King, 106 Forsyth St. 646-484-
5478.)
his stylistic versatility; hes got the entire his-
tory of the music under his fingers, and a solo
performance will be the optimum way for him
to share his encyclopedic knowledge and breath-
taking virtuosity. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St.
212-576-2232. Oct. 12.)
Freddy Cole
Old-school suave and still in hale voice, Cole
(here celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday) has
yet to encounter a ballad or a swinging blues
number that he couldnt finesse to a shine. It
took him decades to step outside the shadow
of his brother Nat, but Freddy now commands
from a throne of his own. (Jazz Standard, 116
E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. Oct. 13-16.)
Christine Ebersole
If portraying both Big and Little Edie Beale
in the same production of the musical Grey
Gardens doesnt confirm your theatrical bona
fides, then what can? The veteran actress and
vocalist Ebersole won her second Tony Award
for that dual performance, and her manifold
talents are sure to be on vivid display during
this intimate engagement. (Caf Carlyle, Car-
lyle Hotel, Madison Ave. at 76th St. 212-744-
1600. Oct. 11-22.)
Jazz 100: The Music of Dizzy, Ella, Mongo,
and Monk
Other than their legendary jazz status, what do
Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Mongo San-
tamaria, and Thelonious Monk have in com-
mon? Theyll all have their hundredth birthdays
in 2017. For this early celebration, a hand-picked
ensemble, under the direction of the pianist
Danilo Perez, including Chris Potter, Wycliffe
Gordon, and Ledisi, reinterprets music from
each of the icons. (Rose Theatre, Jazz at Lin-
coln Center, Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500.
Oct. 14-15.)
Bucky Pizzarelli Trio
Pizzarellis dulcet tone and perfectly turned
phrases have filled the air for some eight de-
cades nowthis year, the dean of mainstream
jazz guitar turned ninety. Supported by his son
Martin on bass and the second guitarist Ed Laub,
Pizzarelli will demonstrate undiminished flair
on his trademark seven-stringed instrument.
(Jazz at Kitano, 66 Park Ave., at 38th St. 212-885-
7119. Oct. 14.)
Gary Smulyan
The baritone may never attain the sexy cachet
of other members of the saxophone family,
but that hasnt discouraged persuasive stylists
among the handful of contemporary titans of
the instrument, unites a hefty sound with near-
frightening dexterity. (Smoke, 2751 Broadway,
between 105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-6662.
Oct. 12-13.)

Mystery Woman
Rachel Weisz returns to the stage.
Toward the end of Peter Brooks in-
spiring 1968 book, The Empty Space,
the esteemed director says that an actor
must bring into being an unconscious
state of which he is completely in charge.
In a way, what we look for in the best per-
formers is not only a face and a body that
distill emotions we may or may not have
been aware of but also a person who reects
something of the times. While we some-
times associate the lush, forty-six-year-old
British-born consummate actress Rachel
Weiszs romantic countenance and mind-
fulness with epochs other than her own
10 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
THE THEATRE
in certain roles, she brings to mind the
pluck, imagination, and melancholy of a
star from the nineteen-thirtiesshe is
completely modern in her depiction of
women who long to escape their times, or
who are uneasy in them while endeavoring
to make splintered worlds whole.
Weisz was born into a world dened
by displacement. Her parents, both from
Central Europe, emigrated to England to
escape the Second World War; as Jews,
they were outsiders in a country where
anti-Semitism was often the rule, not the
exception. Weiszs dierence made her
watchful, interior, rebellious. At secondary
school, she was fortunate to meet an in-
structor who picked up on her talent for
reading and analyzing poetry. At Cam-
bridge, she wrote her dissertation on Car-
son McCullers and her break from ideas
of femininity formed in and by the ante-
bellum South. It was while Weisz was at
universityshe had been modelling for a
number of yearsthat she began to per-
form. Her rst part, she told me one recent
evening, was as a Saxon slave girl in The
Romans in Britain. She describes the role
as less than satisfying. To nd herself as an
artist, she started a theatre company with
friends called Talking Tongues (a precur-
sor of 600 Highwaymen, one of New
Yorks best nontraditional companies),
where she starred in Savage/Love and
Tongues, early pieces by Sam Shepard.
Weiszs performances often create a
hunger in her audiences; we want to know
more about whats behind the mysteries
and intimacies that her characters let us into
and then turn away from. Indeed, her rst
large-scale success was playing that open
mystery Gilda, in the 1994 Donmar Ware-
house production of Nol Cowards 1932
Design for Living, a play about bisexual-
ity, art, and fast modern lives. It was that
production, Weisz told me, that led to lms.
Co-starring in immensely popular ac-
tion pictures like The Mummy, in 1999,
did not, as it so often does with young
actresses, keep Weisz waiting to repeat past
commercial successes. She was an artist,
and interested in how that artistry might
grow and develop in dierent contexts, in
front of dierent lenses. Eventually, direc-
tors such as Wong Kar-wai, Terence Da-
vies, and Yorgos Lanthimos caught up with
her, knowing that what she showed was as
important as what she didnt show.
Now Weisz is entering into the life and
mind of another ultimately unknowable
womanSusan Traherne, in David Hares
1978 play, Plenty (at the Public, through
Nov. 20). Restless, unsure, and bored by
ILLUSTRATION BY PIERRE MORNET
the safety of the present, Traherne makes
a romance of the past, just as audiences
tend to make a romance of Weisz. Part of
her strength is her ability to resist such
easy classications, and to show us various
unconscious states consciously, with a
conjurers truth.
Hilton Als
 THE THEATRE
1
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
The Cherry Orchard
The Roundabout presents a new adaptation of
the Chekhov play by Stephen Karam (The Hu-
mans), directed by Simon Godwin and starring
Diane Lane, Tavi Gevinson, Joel Grey, Chuck
Cooper, and John Glover. (American Airlines
Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300. In previews.
Opens Oct. 16.)
Chris Gethard: Career Suicide
The comedians solo show, directed by Kimberly
Senior, looks for humor in such weighty sub-
jects as mental illness, suicide, and alcoholism.
(Lynn Redgrave, 45 Bleecker St. 866-811-4111. In
previews. Opens Oct. 13.)
Coriolanus
Red Bull Theatre presents Shakespeares politi-
cally minded tragedy, directed by Michael Sex-
ton and starring Dion Johnstone as the Roman
general. (Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212-
868-4444. Previews begin Oct. 18.)
Heisenberg
Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt reprise
their roles in Simon Stephenss drama, about two
strangers who cross paths at a London train sta-
tion. Mark Brokaw directs the Manhattan The-
atre Club production. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261
W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens Oct. 13.)
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Janet McTeer, Liev Schreiber, and Birgitte Hjort
Srensen star in Josie Rourkes revival of the
Christopher Hampton drama, depicting the se-
ductive games of aristocrats in pre-Revolution-
ary France. (Booth, 222 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.
In previews.)
Master Harold . . . and the Boys
Athol Fugard directs his 1982 drama, set in a
tea shop in South Africa in 1950, where two
black men and a white boy face the cruelties of
apartheid. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480
W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. Previews begin Oct. 18.)
Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812
Josh Groban and Dene Benton star in Dave Mal-
loys electro-pop adaptation of a section of War
and Peace, in an immersive production directed
by Rachel Chavkin. (Imperial, 249 W. 45th St. 212-
239-6200. Previews begin Oct. 18.)
Orwell in America
Joe Suttons play, directed by Peter Hackett,
imagines George Orwell on a book tour for An-
imal Farm, for which his publisher has deployed
a young woman to keep his political pronounce-
ments in check. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-
4200. Opens Oct. 12.)
Sell / Buy / Date
Sarah Jones (Bridge & Tunnel) performs a new
multicharacter solo show exploring the com-
mercial sex industry, directed by Carolyn Can-
tor for Manhattan Theatre Club. (City Center
Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. In previews.
Opens Oct. 18.)
She Stoops to Conquer
The Actors Company Theatre revives the eigh-
teenth-century comedy by Oliver Goldsmith, in
which a young lady poses as a barmaid to appeal to
a shy suitor. Scott Alan Evans directs. (Clurman, 410
W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens Oct. 16.)
12 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Sweat
Kate Whoriskey directs a new play by Lynn Not-
tage, about a group of friends from an assembly
line who find themselves at odds amid layoffs
and pickets. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-
7555. Previews begin Oct. 18.)
1
NOW PLAYING
Afterplay
The conceit of Brian Friels one-act play from
2002, directed by Joe Dowling, is intriguing from
an intellectual angle. Andrey (Dermot Crowley),
the once promising academic from Three Sis-
ters, and Sonya (Dearbhla Molloy), Astrovs
disappointed lover from Uncle Vanya, meet in
a somewhat seedy tearoom in nineteen-twenties
Moscow, many years after the action of their re-
spective plays. There, in thoroughly Irish con-
versation, they get to know each other, sharing
confidences, deluding themselves and one an-
other along the way. For dedicated students of
Chekhov, this exercise may hold some interest,
but as a stand-alone piece of theatre theres lit-
tle to draw the audience toward the two charac-
ters. (Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737.)
Holiday Inn
In a season of American agita, the Roundabout
serves a nice glass of warm milk: a musical ad-
aptation of the 1942 film, which gave us Bing
Crosby crooning White Christmas. Gordon
Greenbergs production pads out the story with
other Irving Berlin standards, including Blue
Skies and Cheek to Cheek, sung and danced
to by a game, bright-eyed cast. Corbin Bleu, fill-
ing Fred Astaires tap shoes, plays Ted, a night-
club entertainer who craves the spotlight. Bryce
Pinkham is his partner, Jim, who just wants to
give it all up for a farm in Connecticut, where he
meets a girl (Lora Lee Gayer) and puts on a show
to pay the bills. Dont expect an iota of irony; like
Jim, the show longs for simpler pleasures, and
delivers them by way of well-polished choreog-
raphy, familiar tunes, and two debonair leading
men. (Studio 54, at 254 W. 54th St. 212-719-1300.)
The Maids
Jean Genets play is one of theatres most irresist-
ible mystery texts, and Jos Riveras new adapta-
tion threatens to overload it with yet more com-
plexity. The setting is transposed to the Puerto
Rican island of Vieques in 1941; two actors play
one of the shows housekeeping sisters, and three
(including Rivera himself) play the other, all of
them tag-teaming or even double-teaming the
roles according to a logic that only the creative
team knows. This is an aggressively bodily, glee-
fully obnoxious, and gratifyingly maniacal take
on Genet, complete with dance breaks and ac-
tors climbing on the ceiling (including Daniel
Irizarry, who plays the maids boss and also di-
rects). Audiences game for such wild impish-
ness will find a production that positively gushes
with superb physical comedy yet stays true to
the spirit of the original. (INTAR, 500 W. 52nd
St. 212-352-3101.)
The Roads to Home
Few actors have as much command of Horton
Footes sensibility as his daughter Hallie, who
is a living through line to much of his work. She
is a highlight of Primary Stagess revival of a
trio of linked one-acts, and she has a magnifi-
cent accomplice in Harriet Harris; the pair play
friendly housewives in nineteen-twenties Hous-
 THE THEATRE

ton. The first two pieces are pure, if slightly un-

dercooked, Horton Foote, with seemingly in-
nocuous chatter suggesting the woven fabric
of family and community. The central charac-
ter in the third is a lovely belle at a Texas ball
MOVIES
(Rebecca Brooksher, in a part played by Hallie
in 1992) whose grip on reality is frayingthe gions of working-class Britain, now turns her atten-
1
party is held in an insane asylum. Its a jarring OPENING tion to the United States. The result is her longest
coda to the show, though Foote fans will be fas- and loosest movie to date: a road trip, undertaken by
cinated to see the playwright dip a toe in Ten- The Accountant Ben Affleck stars in this thriller, the eighteen-year-old Star (Sasha Lane), in the com-
nessee Williams waters. (Cherry Lane, 38 Com- as an organized-crime bookkeeper who tries to pany of a mad and merry gang. In charge is the ad-
merce St. 866-811-4111.) maintain the appearance of legitimacy. Directed amantine Krystal (Riley Keough), who, like Fagin,
by Gavin OConnor; co-starring Anna Kendrick sends her minions onto the streets and takes a cut of
Stuffed and J. K. Simmons. Opening Oct. 14. (In wide re- the earnings; the difference is that these youngsters,
After forging her reputation with hilariously vi- lease.) Aquarius A drama, directed by Kleber Men- uprooted and adrift, are not picking pockets but sell-
cious contributions to celebrity roasts, the so- dona Filho, about a woman in Brazil who resists ing magazines. Stars orbit takes her through park-
called insult comic Lisa Lampanelli is making her selling her beachfront apartment to a developer. ing lots, motels, and truck stops; there are passing en-
dbut as a playwrightthough the show is best Starring Sonia Braga. Opening Oct. 14. (In limited counters with oil workers, rich types in cowboy hats,
when she breaks for a standup-like monologue, release.) Certain Women Reviewed in Now Play- and impoverished kids whose mother is too strung out
complete with a handheld mike. In Stuffed, ing. Opening Oct. 14. (In limited release.) Christine on drugs to care. The cameras gaze is restless and en-
which might have been called Love, Loss, and Rebecca Hall stars in the real-life story of Christine cyclopedic, and the grimness of the settings is offset
What I Ate, Lampanelli and her three co-stars Chubbuck, a television reporter who committed sui- by a raucous soundtrack, and by Arnolds trademark
embody various aspects of womens fraught re- cide on the air in 1974. Directed by Antonio Cam- splashes of hot and concentrated color. Whether her
lationships with food, weight, and body image. pos; co-starring J. Smith-Cameron, Tracy Letts, feeling for American lives on the move is as strong
One character (Ann Harada) is comfortable with and Michael C. Hall. Opening Oct. 14. (In limited as her grasp of British earthiness, though, is open to
her extra pounds; another (Jessica Luck) is an- release.) Little Sister Reviewed in Now Playing. question, and the movie is menaced by its own aim-
orexic; a third (Zainab Jah) is a skinny bitch; Opening Oct. 14. (Metrograph.) Tower Reviewed in lessness; such hunger for sensation can never have
and the fourth is Lampanellis Lisa, who eats Now Playing. Opening Oct. 12. (In limited release.) enough. With Shia LaBeouf.Anthony Lane (Reviewed
her feelingsand eventually gets gastric-sleeve in our issue of 10/10/16.) (In limited release.)
surgery, like her real-life creator. The comedians 1
blue streak is refreshing, but it cant cut through NOW PLAYING LArgent
the rosy glow of mutual acceptance and self- Robert Bressons last film, from 1983, adapted
empowerment. (McGinn/Cazale, 2162 Broad- American Honey from a story by Tolstoy, features Christian Patey
way, at 76th St. 866-811-4111.) The British director Andrea Arnold, who, in films as Yvon, an oil-truck driver who is paid by a client in
like Fish Tank (2009), has scoured the rougher re- counterfeit money. Arrested for passing the bills,
That Golden Girls Show!
Season after season, The Golden Girls sus-
tained an astonishingly dense barrage of zing-
ers, craftily delivered by a fabulous cast. Now
Jonathan Rockefeller has written new adven-
tures for the infamous Miami ladies that make
use of their superpowers: throwing shade and
firing off ribald jokes. The gimmick is that So-
phia, Blanche, et al. are played by hand pup-
pets, la Avenue Q. The gimmick to the gim-
mick is that Bea Arthurs Dorothy is voiced by
a man. This could have been a misogynist fi-
asco, but Michael LaMasa has such a command
of Arthurs inflectionsand an uncanny ability
to mimic her lethal slow burnthat his perfor-
mance is loving rather than caricatured. The real
problem is that the show peters out after thirty
minutes, with another sixty to go. Theres a rea-
son sitcoms stick to a half hour. (DR2, at 103
E. 15th St. 212-727-2737.)
1
ALSO NOTABLE

All the Ways to Say I Love You Lucille Lor-

tel. A Day by the Sea Beckett. Duat Con-
nelly. The Encounter Golden. Falsettos Wal-
ter Kerr. Fit for a Queen 3LD Art & Technology
Center. The Front Page Broadhurst. Hamil-
ton Richard Rodgers. The Humans Schoen-
feld. A Life Playwrights Horizons. Love,
Love, Love Laura Pels. Marie and Rosetta At-
lantic Theatre Company. Through Oct. 16. Nat
Turner in Jerusalem New York Theatre Workshop.
Through Oct. 16. Notes from the Field Second
Stage. Oh, Hello on Broadway Lyceum. Pub-
lic Enemy Pearl. A Taste of Honey Pearl. Tick,
Tick . . . Boom! Acorn. The Trial of an Ameri-
can President Lion. Through Oct. 15. Two Class
Acts Flea. Underground Railroad Game Ars
Nova. Verso New World Stages. Vietgone
City Center Stage I. Waitress Brooks Atkinson.

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 13

 MOVIES
Yvon loses his family while imprisoned; when he
gets out, he acts on his blankly righteous rage.
Bresson captures the moral weight of tiny gestures
in brisk, precise images, and conveys the cosmic
evil of daily life through one of the all-time great
soundtracks, full of the rustle of bills and the clink
of change, the click of a cash register and the snap
of locks. These noises make the exchange of labor
and goods for money play like original sin itself.
Bresson builds a brilliant sequence from an oppres-
sive succession of doorsof a paddy wagon, a store,
and a subway car, ending with the hellish barriers
that separate a prisoner from his freedom. A spir-
itual filmmaker, Bresson is fascinated by violence.
Here, he revisits a classic moment from Psycho in
a terrifying wink and reveals the makingas well as
the meaningof a sacred monster. In French.Rich-
ard Brody (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Oct. 12.)
Certain Women
The three sections of Kelly Reichardts new film
set in Montana and adapted from stories by Maile
Meloyare consistent in their restrained tone but
divergent in their impact. The first two episodes
offer little besides moderately engaging plots, but
the third packs an overwhelming power of mood,
observation, and longing. In the first, Laura Dern
plays Laura, a lawyer whose affair with a married man
named Ryan (James Le Gros) is ending just as a cli-
ent (Jared Harris), a disabled construction worker,
comes unhinged. In the second, Ryan and his wife,
Gina (Michelle Williams), who is also his boss, visit
an elderly acquaintance, Albert (Ren Auberjonois),
to buy stone for their country house. The third story
features Lily Gladstone as Jamie, a young caretaker
at a horse farm who drops in on an adult-education
class and strikes up a tense and tenuous friendship
with the teacher, a young lawyer named Beth (Kristen
Stewart). Here, Reichardt infuses slender details with
breathtaking emotion. The fervent attention to light
and movementas in a scene of a quietly frenzied
nocturnal pursuitseems to expand cinematic time
and fill it with inner life.R.B. (In limited release.)
Deepwater Horizon
Peter Bergs account of the explosion on an oil rig off
the coast of Louisiana, in 2010, is so expertly done,
and so thrilling to behold, that you end up slightly
troubled by your own excitement. Should the story
of a true catastrophe, which left eleven people dead
and wrought havoc on the environment, really be
this much fun? We get a small squad of characters
to guide us through the tangle of the incident. Mark
Wahlberg plays Mike Williams, the chief electron-
ics technician on the rig, with Kate Hudson as his
wife and an indestructible Kurt Russell as his boss,
known to all as Mr. Jimmy. The villain of the piece,
a senior figure from BP, isas you would hope
played by John Malkovich. (Though the bulk of the
blame ultimately went to BP, fault was also found
with other companies; but the film has no room for
such niceties.) The movie, credible and relaxed as
it delves into the daylight habits of the crew, bursts
into pandemonium as the well blows, night falls, and
the flames assume command. If you dont quite un-
derstand whats happening, youre not alone; even
some of the old hands, struggling to contain the
chaos, are at sea.A.L. (10/10/16) (In wide release.)
Little Sister
The 2008 Presidential election and the intimate dev-
astation resulting from misguided politics are the fully
integrated context of Zach Clarks fierce, tender, and
grandly visionary story of a broken family in broken
times. Addison Timlin plays Colleen, a young novi-
tiate in a New York convent who is summoned to her
familys home, in North Carolina, to visit her brother,
14 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Jacob (Keith Poulson), a wounded Iraq War veteran
newly released from the hospital. Grievously burned,
Jacob lives as a recluse; his girlfriend, Tricia (Kristin
Slaysman), works hard to sustain their relationship.
Their mother, Joani (Ally Sheedy), who suffers from
depression, and their father, Bill (Peter Hedges), a
failing actor, maintain a veneer of exuberance, which
Colleens arrival quickly shatters. Despite the fami-
lys troubles, the film is as joyful and energetic as it
is unsparing and compassionate. Infusions of goth
styles retrieved from the siblings adolescence and
their ecstatic reunion with old friends, vibrant un-
dercurrents of local weirdness and echoes of radi-
cal activism shake the core of heartland stereotypes.
With its blend of terrifyingly intense family bonds
and the howling furies of the world outside, this is a
great American political film.R.B. (Metrograph.)
The Magnificent Seven
A well-meaning rehash of John Sturgess 1960 West-
ern, Antoine Fuquas movie takes place in 1879, in a
town that is blessed with a gold mine and cursed by
the heavy hand of Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sars-
gaard). Murdering, menacing, or buying off the cit-
izens, he seems invincible, until one proud widow
(Haley Bennett) brings in a gaggle of mixed mer-
cenaries. They are played by Denzel Washington,
Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Byung-hun Lee, Ma-
nuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, and an ur-
sine Vincent DOnofrio: not a bad gang, and cer-
tainly diverse enough to meet our ethnic demands,
yet it lacks the near-wordless cool that radiated
from some of Sturgess teamYul Brynner, James
Coburn, Robert Vaughn, and Steve McQueen. The
shootouts, too, fall short of the old dexterity; the
most interesting innovation, mid-finale, is the cruel
arrival of a Gatling gun, which allows the unchiv-
alrous shadow of the modern age to fall across the
West.A.L. (10/3/16) (In wide release.)
Masterminds
Jared Hesss wildly plotted comedy of clueless crim-
inals, based on a true story, is intermittently funny
but consistently inspired. Its about an armored-car
driver named David Ghantt (Zach Galifianakis),
who, in 1997, in rural North Carolina, is persuaded
by Kelly (Kristen Wiig), with whom hes hopelessly
in love, to steal millions in cash from his companys
vault. She, in turn, is under the influence of a coolly
devious friend (Owen Wilson), who ships David off
to Mexico and sends a hit man (Jason Sudeikis) to
keep him silent. The reversals of fortune, the nar-
row escapes, the plans for revengeand, for that
matter, the ludicrous details of the robbery itself
are gleefully outlandish, and Hess infuses them
with his unique sugar-frosted style and religious
substance. The carefully coiffed, goofily tucked-in
David seems to be answering, in his own blunder-
ing way, the call of a higher power; Davids jilted fi-
ance, Jandice (Kate McKinnon), blends sacred love
with profane humor; and all of the amateur miscre-
ants have a wide-eyed navet that veers toward holy
innocence.R.B. (In wide release.)
Sully
Clint Eastwood transforms the events, in 2009, of
Flight 1549which Captain Chesley Sullenberger
and First Officer Jeff Skiles safely landed in the Hud-
son River after losing both jets in a bird strikeinto
a fierce, stark, haunted drama of horror narrowly
avoided. Eastwoods depiction of Sully (played, with
terse gravity, by Tom Hanks) begins with a shock: the
captains 9/11-esque vision of his plane crashing into
New York buildings. The action of the film involves
another shock: federal officials question Sullys judg-
ment and subject him and Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) to
an investigation that could cost him his job and even
 MOVIES

his pension. Eastwood films the doomed flight with
a terrifyingly intimate sense of danger, focussing
on its existential center, the little red button under
the pilots thumb. The film movingly depicts Sullys
modest insistence that he was just doing his job and
the collective courage of flight attendants, air-traffic
controllers, police officers, and the passengers them-
selves. But, throughout, Eastwood boldly thrusts at-
tention toward the aftermath of the flight: the nerve-
jangling media distortion of events and personalities,
plus the investigators ultimate weapon, a computer
simulation of the landing, a movie on which Sullys
honor depends. The result is Eastwoods dedicated
vision of moviemaking itself.R.B. (In wide release.)
13th
Ava DuVernays brilliantly analytical and morally
passionate documentary traces the current-day mass
incarceration of black Americans to its historical or-
igins in the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned
slavery and involuntary servitude except as pun-
ishment for a crime. That exception, as she demon-
strates by way of a wide range of interview subjects
(including Jelani Cobb, of The New Yorker) and archi-
val material, quickly led to the systematic criminal-
ization of black people. When Jim Crow laws yielded
to the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-sixties,
Richard Nixons Southern strategy and law and
order campaignwhich endure to this dayaimed
to keep black citizens subjugated and out of power.
DuVernay shows Ronald Reagans war on drugs,
his economic policies, and his efforts at voter sup-
pression to be a part of the same strategy. Mean-
while, DuVernay traces the rising number of black
prisoners (Bill Clintons policies, many undertaken
with the support of black politicians, were also to
blame) as well as the widespread tolerance of police
violence against black people, linking legal depravi-
ties to entrenched economic interests. The film re-
veals crimes that have been fabricated in the service
of oppression as well as another, real and ongoing
crimeagainst humanity.R.B. (In limited release.)
Tower
This documentary, by Keith Maitland, reconstructs
with forensic precision and dramatic immediacy the
1966 sniper attack at the University of Texas at Aus-
tin that left eighteen people dead, an event thats
widely considered the first modern mass shooting.
Maitland blends archival footage, original inter-
views with survivors and responders, and animated
images of several sortsincluding, strikingly, ones
that return the interviewees to their age at the time
of the attack. The animation, by Craig Staggs, has
a notable imaginative specificity, and the meticu-
lously complex interweaving of styles turns the film
into a horrifying true-crime thriller thats enriched
by a rare depth of inner experience. The effect is as
much intellectual as emotional, folding the movie
reflexively into its subject: the personal importance
of public discussion. The dearth of archival inter-
views regarding this event corresponds to the inter-
viewees retrospective view of the mid-sixties. Ex-
horted at the time to put the troubles behind them
and discouraged from speaking about their expe-
riences, many of the subjects approach Maitlands
interviews as long-overdue, albeit pain-filled, acts
of personal liberation.R.B. (In limited release.)

DANCE
New York City Ballet reographers previous multimedia works, but its
In the last week of the season, Jerome Robbinss similarly intense. The piece, part of the Crossing
Dances at a Gathering, a favorite of audiences and the Line Festival, is two solos that overlapat-
dancers alike, will be performed four times as part of tracting, repelling, and sometimes colliding with
a double bill, with George Balanchines Firebird. each other. Lora Juodkaite, who spun with relent-
Dances at a Gathering, from 1969, marked Robbinss less virtuosity in Ouramdanes Ordinary Wit-
return to ballet after years of working on Broadway. nesses, spins again here, while Annie Hanauer,
Made up of a series of solos, duets, trios, and ensem- who has one prosthetic arm, seems stripped of de-
bles set to Chopin piano works, it is linked by a thread fenses as she twitches. (Baryshnikov Arts Center,
of lyricism, humor, and delicate emotion. Firebird, 450 W. 37th St. 866-811-4111. Oct. 13-15.)
in contrast, is a Russian folk tale with all the trim-
mings: a magic bird, a sorcerer, a pure-hearted prince, Danish Dance Theatre
and a wondrous score by Stravinsky. Oct. 11 and Denmarks foremost contemporary dance ensemble
Oct. 13 at 7:30 and Oct. 14-15 at 8: Dances at a Gath- appeared at the Joyce in 2013, as part of a Nordic
ering and Firebird. Oct. 12 at 7:30: Serenade, dance festival. Now its back, on its own, with a new
American Rhapsody, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, work (Black Diamond) by the companys artis-
and Western Symphony. Oct. 15 at 2: For Clara, tic director, Tim Rushton. With an abstract theme
The Dreamers, ten in seven, Unframed, and (the inherent duality of everything) and futur-
Everywhere We Go. Oct. 16 at 3: Glass Pieces, istic unisex costumes, the piece is self-consciously
Thou Swell, and Stars and Stripes. (David H. contemporary. It begins with a flash: a landscape of
Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600.) exploding fragments. The movement, which ranges
from legato partnering to angular, robotic moves,
Company Wang Ramirez is set to a sound collage of Philip Glass, Alexander
Sbastien Ramirez is French, and of Spanish de- Balanescu, and electronic beats. (Joyce Theatre, 175
scent. Honji Wang is German-Korean. They are a Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. Oct. 13-16.)
couple, onstage and off, and Monchichi is about
their merging. Cutesy skits riffing on intercultural Platform 2016: Lost and Found
challenges alternate with impressive but quick-fading Danspace Project, the site of many memorials
bursts of dancing in their common physical lan- for dancers who died of AIDS, looks back at
guage, an elastic extension of hip-hop. (BAM Fisher, the plague years and their impact on the pres-
321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Oct. 12-15.) ent in a six-week series of performances, conver-
sations, and film screenings. Much of the em-
Rachid Ouramdane phasis is on the hidden influence of careers cut
A white set, two dancers: Tordre (Wrought) is short and people left out of standard histories,
much more spare than the French-Algerian cho- but the first week focusses on such prominent

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 15

 DANCE

survivors as Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg, as

CLASSICAL MUSIC
well as on the voguing pioneer Willi Ninja, who
died in 2006. (St. Marks Church In-the-Bowery,
Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111. Oct. 13-15.
Through Nov. 19.)

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Vortex

Temporum
For years, the Belgian choreographer has been
fascinated by the physical qualities of sound and
by the kinship between sound and movement.
How do we experience a Bach violin partita while
sitting in the dark? Or the trajectory of voices
around an open space? Vortex Temporum, from
2013, is the most recent of these aural experi-
ments to arrive in the U.S. The contemporary-
music group Ictus plays Grard Griseys 1995
piece, a study in tonal colors for flute, piano,
clarinet, and strings. At first, the musicians
are alone. Then, the dancers take over. Finally,
the groups begin to mingle, moving in spare,
simple patterns. A warning to the impatient:
De Keersmaekers work can be extremely de-
liberate and rather plain. But this restraint can
lead to small revelations. (BAMs Howard Gil-
man Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. 718-
636-4100. Oct. 14-15.)

The American Dance Guild Performance

Festival
The choreographer Jean Erdman, like her hus-
band, Joseph Campbell, was fascinated by myth-
ological archetypes. A distinguished member of
the Martha Graham company, she was most fa-
mous for her dance-theatre adaptation of Fin-
negans Wake. A weekend focussing on Erdman
(who is a hundred years old and too frail to travel
from her home, in Hawaii), in celebration of the
Guilds sixtieth year, begins with a Fridays at
Noon presentation featuring reconstructions of
the 1942 solo The Transformations of Medusa
and the 1946 solo Passage, each performed
by a former Graham dancer (Christine Dakin
and Miki Orihara). From Friday night through
Sunday, these and other Erdman pieces join
twenty-some other historical and contemporary
dances on mythical themes. (92nd Street Y, Lex-
ington Ave. at 92nd St. 212-415-5500. Oct. 14-16.)
Taylor 2
The chamber ensemble associated with the Paul
Taylor Dance Company will perform the Taylor
classic Aureole. More than fifty years after its
creation, it still feels like a joyous exposition of
Taylors style: athletic, fluid, unsentimental. Also
on the program are Dust and Piazzolla Cal-
dera. (Schimmel Center, Pace University, 3 Spruce
St. 212-346-1715. Oct. 15-16.)
Letter to a Man
Vaslav Nijinsky was referred to as le dieu de la
danse, and certainly in our time Mikhail Barysh-
nikov has been the closest thing to a dance god.
Now sixty-eight, Baryshnikov has turned increas-
ingly to theatre. Letter to a Man, inspired by
the diaries of Nijinsky, is his second collabora-
The art of Max Beckmann and the music of Paul Hindemith meet at the Met Museum on Oct. 16.
The Good Germany
Leon Botstein makes a case for a
neglected mid-century masterpiece.
The composer Paul Hindemith (1895-
1963) and the painter Max Beckmann
(1884-1950) had many things in common.
Both were formidable, German, and bald.
Both ed Nazi Germany in the nineteen-
thirties, eventually reaching the United
States. Each maintained a prolic output
yet never compromised on craftsman-
shipa zeal that made them natural (and
distinguished) teachers. After the First
World War, each moved from Expression-
ism to the New Objectivity, and then on
to a more personal kind of mastery. Most
important, each did so without abandon-
ing what might be called the human gure:
Hindemith, by subtly reinventing the tra-
ditional language of melody and tonal
harmony; Beckmann, by remaining a rep-
resentational artist at a time when abstrac-
tion was all the rage. The two will meet at
the Metropolitan Museum on Oct. 16,
where Leon Botstein will lead the Orches-
that the composer wrote in 1934, while
preparing his opera of the same namea
dramatic meditation on the life of Mat-
thias Grnewald, the creator of the Is-
enheim Altarpiece, who struggles to
balance his sympathy for the failed Ger-
man Peasants Revolt (1524-25) with his
duty to God and to his art. Hindemith,
a modern-day Grnewald trying to sur-
vive within the tightening cultural noose
of Nazi Germany, wrote a symphony that
seeks balance between personal and com-
munal expression. G-major chords in the
strings evoke heavenly radiance;
D-at-major chords in the brass signify
warm, earthly power. Quotes from Ger-
man folk song and Gregorian chant
coexist with angular remnants of Expres-
sionist angst. There are abundant, long-
limbed melodies, but their svelte, mod-
ernist contours, phrased in irregular
lengths, shine with a serene impersonal-
ity, like the songs of angels.
The incisive individualism and the-
atrical air of Beckmanns workseen
strikingly in the postwar triptych The
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA

tion with the director Robert Wilson. The one-

man show explores the poetic, exalted, often
obscene writings of Nijinsky, scribbled in three
notebooks during the six months before his diag-
nosis of schizophrenia and his subsequent seclu-
sion in a series of mental hospitals. There is little
dancing here; Wilsons concept is like high-art
vaudeville, with Baryshnikov as a tragic and gro-
tesque but always elegant master of ceremonies.
(BAMs Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn.
718-636-4100. Oct. 15-16. Through Oct. 30.)
16 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
tra Now (TN), a symphonic ensemble
based at Bard College, in Hindemith &
Beckmann: Expressionism and Exile, a
program that illuminates their mutual ge-
nius through discussion and performance.
Botstein will conduct Hindemiths
Mathis der Maler (Mathis the
Painter) Symphony, a once popular work
Beginning, in the Mets upcoming ex-
hibition Max Beckmann in New York
(opening Oct. 19)jibe with our own
cultural moment. Hindemiths sym-
phony, for all its glory, does not. But if
anyone could convince us otherwise, its
Leon Botstein.
Russell Platt

1
OPERA
Metropolitan Opera
It is a cruel twist of fate that a work as sprawl-
ing, ambitious, and influential as Rossinis Guil-
laume Tella three-and-a-half-hour hybrid of
Italian bel canto and French grand operawould
be known primarily for its admittedly wondrous
eleven-minute overture, a pops-concert favorite.
For the past eighty-five years, the Met has been
among those opera houses scared off by the de-
mands of Rossinis final opera, but now its re-
ceiving a high-profile new production by Pierre
Audi with a first-rate cast, including Gerald Fin-
ley, Marina Rebeka, and Bryan Hymel; Fabio Luisi
conducts. (Oct. 18 at 6:30.) Also playing: Ros-
sinis fun and fizzy comic opera LItaliana in Al-
geri has returned to the house, with Marianna
Pizzolato joining the short list of mezzo-sopranos
whom the company has entrusted with the title
role. The bass Ildar Abdrazakov and the tenor Ren
Barbera join her for Jean-Pierre Ponnelles tradi-
tional production, from 1973; James Levine. (Oct.
12 at 7:30 and Oct. 15 at 8.) As in his 2015 stag-
ing of Iolanta, Mariusz Treliskis production of
Tristan und Isolde turns late-Romantic romance
into post-Hitchcockian psychodrama. The result
is risky but effective. Wagners opera, set mostly
on a modern-day warship, now has a Marnie-like
backstory: Tristans yearning for oblivion stems
from the early loss of his parents, which his foster
father, King Marke, an admiral, cannot heal, per-
haps because of his own complicity. The staging
is more than matched by formidable singing from
Nina Stemme (Isolde, her finest role at the house),
Stuart Skelton (Tristan), and Ren Pape (once a
firebrand King Marke, now older and wiser). Under
the fierce command of Simon Rattle, the orchestra,
miles away from Levine-like lushness, is an acous-
tical anaconda, squeezing the characters until not a
speck of truth remains unheard. (Oct. 13 and Oct. 17
at 6:30.) Christmas comes early this year, as the
Met presents the first of three runs of a holiday fa-
voriteFranco Zeffirellis snow-kissed staging of
Puccinis evergreen romance La Bohme. Ailyn
Prez, Susanna Phillips, Dmytro Popov, David
Bizic, and Ryan Speedo Green take the leading
roles; Carlo Rizzi. (Oct. 14 at 8.) The British bari-
tone Simon Keenlyside, who returns to the Met for
the first time in four years after a bout of ill health,
is a revelation in the title role of Mozarts Don
Giovanni. With a voice that can be seductively ro-
bust or cleverly insinuating, he turns the don into
an elegant nihilist who takes his pleasures (wine,
chocolate, and sex) very seriously, but not much
else. The rest of the cast also turns in strong char-
acterizations: Hibla Gerzmavas emotionally at-
tuned Donna Anna; Serena Malfis wholesome Zer-
lina; Malin Bystrms Donna Elvira, who swoops
through the opera like an avenging fury; Paul Ap-
plebys Don Ottavio, who harbors hints of heroism
in his impressive top notes; and Adam Plachetkas
smart yet loutish Leporello. Fabio Luisimar-
shalling his strength for Rossini, perhapstends
to hang fire in the pit. (Oct. 15 at 1.) (Metropolitan
Opera House. 212-362-6000.)
National Sawdust
The au-courant venue devotes its weekend sched-
ule to experimental-music luminaries old and
new. On Saturday, the Dutch director Jorinde
Keesmaat stages a double bill of vocal works
by the venerable minimalist master Louis An-
driessen: the monodrama Anas Nin (with the
mezzo-soprano Augusta Caso) and Odysseus
Women (for four voices), with Neal Goren con-
ducting. On Sunday, the composer David T. Lit-
18 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
CLASSICAL MUSIC
tle and the librettist Royce Vavrek celebrate the
release of the original-cast recording of their hit
opera Dog Days, a tense dystopian drama. Sev-
eral of the shows cast members, including the
riveting Lauren Worsham, perform excerpts from
the work, with James Johnston at the piano. (80
N. 6th St., Brooklyn. nationalsawdust.org. Oct. 15
at 8 and Oct. 16 at 7.)
1 This years festival begins with a piece that per-
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
New York Philharmonic: Kaija Saariahos
Circle Map
Saariaho, the long-prominent Finnish composer,
is a constant presence in New York recital pro-
grams, but this fall her profile will grow expo-
nentially. The first major event is presented by
the Philharmonic and the Park Avenue Armory,
a program of four works, all of which benefit
from spatial realizationLumire et Pesan-
teur, Dom le Vrai Sens, Lonh, and Circle Jochen Sandig, which takes place at the capacious
Mapwill be performed in the Armorys cav-
ernous Drill Hall in an immersive production by
the Armorys director, Pierre Audi. Saariahos val.org. Oct. 16 and Oct. 18-19 at 7:30.)
husband and frequent collaborator, Jean-Baptiste
Barrire, will provide projections that expand on
the composers literary and artistic inspirations;
the Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Sa-
lonen, will be at the center of the action. (Park
Ave. at 66th St. armoryonpark.org. Oct. 13-14 at 7.)
Orchestra of St. Lukes
The versatile David Robertson leads the dis-
tinguished chamber orchestras first Carnegie
Hall concert of the season, an evening that be-
gins with Testament, a piece by the noted Aus-
tralian composer Brett Dean which pays tribute
to Beethovens Heiligenstadt Testament, con-
tinues with songs from Mahlers Des Knaben
Wunderhorn (with the baritone Thomas Hamp-
son), and concludes with Beethovens Symphony
No. 7 in A Major. (212-247-7800. Oct. 13 at 8.)
Jeremy Denk and the Saint Paul Chamber
Orchestra
The classical season at the 92nd Street Y begins
auspiciously, with Denk, one of the great New
York pianists, joining forces with some favorite
out-of-towners, the musicians of the S.P.C.O.
The orchestra goes it alone in a new work by the
Grawemeyer Award-winning composer George
Tsontakis, O Mikros, O Megas (The Small
World, the Huge World), and in Schuberts
winsome Second Symphony, with Denk lead-
ing from the keyboard in Mozarts Piano Con-
certo No. 23 in A Major. (Lexington Ave. at 92nd
St. 212-415-5500. Oct. 15 at 8.)
Ensemble Connect and Simon Rattle:
Winterreise
The British conductor, very much in town con-
ducting Tristan at the Met, is also branch-
ing out for other concerts. He conducts Car-
negie Halls superb Ensemble Connect (the
pre-professional group formerly called Ensem-
ble ACJW) in a novelty that extends our current
love affair with Schubert: Schuberts Winter-
reiseA Composed Interpretation, by the com-
poser and conductor Hans Zender, which recasts
the works piano part for a small orchestra. The
singer is another British star, Mark Padmore.
(Zankel Hall. 212-247-7800. Oct. 16 at 3.)
Music Before 1800 Series: Juilliard415
The essential, high-quality period-performance
series likes to bring in groups from all over, but
this years season starts with talented students
from Juilliard. Their guest leader, the esteemed
Baroque violinist Rachel Podger, will be a solo-
ist and conductor in A Pi Stromenti: The Ital-
ian Concerto, an afternoon of works for strings,
oboes, flutes, and bassoon. (Corpus Christi Church,
529 W. 121st St. 212-666-9266. Oct. 16 at 4.)
White Light Festival: Human Requiem
fectly embodies its nondenominational spiritual
ethos: Brahmss surpassingly eloquent German
Requiem, a work that uses Lutheran Bible verses
instead of the Catholic Liturgy, putting the em-
phasis on the emotions of the living rather than
the rites for the dead. Simon Halsey and his
Berlin Radio Choir, which made waves in Peter
Sellarss Berlin Philharmonic production of the
St. Matthew Passion at the Park Avenue Armory
in 2014, returns on its own, performing the piece
in the piano four-hands version in a staging by
Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Di-
vine. (Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St. whitelightfesti-
1
RECITALS
Brooklyn Rider and Anne Sofie von Otter
If theres any classical vocalist today who can pull
off a program of songs by Bjrk, Elvis Costello,
Kate Bush, and Nico Muhly as arranged for
string quartet, its the Swedish mezzo-soprano,
a lauded veteran still exploring new boundaries.
Von Otter and her dynamic young partners offer
these selections and othersCaroline Shaws
Cant Voi lAube, Colin Jacobsens For Sixty
Cents, and the aria Am I in Your Light?, from
John Adamss Doctor Atomicfrom their new
album, So Many Things. Brooklyn Rider also
plays Janeks bracingly beautiful String Quar-
tet No. 1, The Kreutzer Sonata. (Zankel Hall.
212-247-7800. Oct. 13 at 7:30.)
Music at the Frick Collection:
Carducci Quartet
The brilliant young Anglo-Irish ensemble, re-
nowned for pulling off marathon concerts of all
the Shostakovich string quartets, limits itself
to the composers fleet and enigmatic Quar-
tet No. 11 in F Minor in a concert that also fea-
tures Mendelssohns stormy Quartet No. 6 (in
the same key) and Beethovens Razumovsky
Quartet No. 3 in C Major. (1 E. 70th St. 212-547-
0715. Oct. 16 at 5.)
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Opening Night
New Yorks major-league chamber squad kicks
off its new season with a themed concert loosely
inspired by the travels of the young Felix
Mendelssohn. The imagined journey begins in
England, with a chamber-ensemble performance
of Haydns Surprise Symphony; songs by
Mendelssohn and Schubert (Shepherd on the
Rock, sung by the soprano Lisette Oropesa)
cover the composers Germanic exploits. And
Italy and France receive a nod, respectfully, with
a string-quartet version of Palestrinas Sanctus
from Missa Aeterna Christi Munera, followed
by Ravels Piano Trio, an arresting work from
the twentieth century performed by the
youthful combo of the pianist Michael Brown,
the violinist Erin Keefe, and the cellist Mihai
Marica. (Alice Tully Hall. chambermusicsociety.
org. Oct. 18 at 7:30.)
 ABOVE & BEYOND
City of Science
An exhibition of immersive demonstrations ar-
rives at the Park Slope Armory, the fourth stop
on the World Science Festivals borough-wide
tour. Aimed at budding experimenters of all ages,
City of Science will feature activities and presen-
tations based on physics, chemistry, technology,
and engineering, including principles of giant
waves, a pool that allows for walking on water,
and a game of tug-of-war on wheels. The festi-
val is open to the public; tickets, which are free,
are recommended but not required. (361 15th St.,
Brooklyn. 212-348-1400. Oct. 16.)
Open House New York
Historic residential and commercial buildings
will be opened to the public during this annual
architecture-tour-and-talk series. Attendees will
enjoy unparalleled access to more than two hun-
dred and seventy-five sites across the city, along
with informative lectures from the designers and
developers who continue to shape civic life and
build the New York of tomorrow. Highlights in-
clude the African Burial Ground National Mon-
ument, in Tribeca; the newly restored Alexander
Hamilton U.S. Custom House, in the financial
district; the rooftop farms of Brooklyn Grange;
a trip to the top of Cathedral Church of St. John
the Divine; the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, in
the Bronx; the Met Breuer, which opened last
March, on the Upper East Side; and Kings The-
atre, in Flatbush, which was restored and re-
opened in January, 2015. (Various locations. ohny.
org. Oct. 15-16.)
1 versation with Bette Midler; in 1977, the duo
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES
Nobel Prize medals have proved a lucrative new
niche in the auctions market. The latest to come
up for sale is the one awarded, in 1994, to John F.
Nash, Jr., the troubled mathematician who in-
spired the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind. (Nash,
who profoundly influenced the fields of game
theory and differential geometry, died, with his
wife, in a car crash last year.) The medal goes
under the gavel at Sothebys on Oct. 17. (York
Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) After a sale of
bric-a-brac and paintings from the nineteenth
century (Oct. 13-14), Christies offers a selec-
tion of jewels (Oct. 18) led, as usual, by plump
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO
diamonds. This week also marks the start of
an online auction of photographs (Oct. 18-27)
from the collection of Shalom Shpilman, the
founder of the Shpilman Institute for Photog-
raphy, in Tel Aviv. The images in the saleev-
erything from Surrealist collages by Edouard
Lon Thodore Mesens to the conceptual art of
Sophie Calleall relate to the human form. (20
Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.) A
sale of prints at Doyle (Oct. 18) includes pieces
by Lucien Freud (Woman with an Arm Tat-
too), Ellsworth Kelly (Colored Paper Image
XIII), and Andy Warhol (Mick Jagger). (175
E. 87th St. 212-427-2730.)
1
READINGS AND TALKS
Powerhouse Arena
The crime scene of glitter and hair spray that
was glam rock is now distant enough to revisit
with a documentarians eye: the rock critic Simon
Reynolds takes a brave step with his new book,
Shock and Awe. Focussing on the years from
1971 through 1975, Reynolds situates the pag-
eantry against a backdrop of social and cultural
upheaval, positioning the music and style of
the era as a celebration of artifice over authen-
ticity in a time when the truth was hard to con-
front. The potent period gave us David Bowie,
Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, and, ul-
timately, public spheres in which to engage an-
drogyny, astrology, and excess. (28 Adams St.,
Brooklyn. 718-666-3049. Oct. 13 at 7.)
92nd Street Y
The Oscar, Grammy, and two-time Golden
Globe winner Carole Bayer Sager is an un-
matched songwriting talent who has lent her
skill to landmark vocalists for five decades.
Sager wrote her first hit, A Groovy Kind of
Love, at just seventeen, and shes since helped
iconic singers like Anita Baker, Neil Diamond,
Michael Jackson, Carole King, and Dolly Par-
ton find the right words. She appears in con-
co-wrote Sagers first hit as a recording artist,
Youre Moving Out Today. They reflect on
Sagers career in celebration of her new mem-
oir, Theyre Playing Our Song. (1395 Lexing-
ton Ave. 212-415-5500. Oct. 17 at 7.)
Cornelia Street Caf
Americans married in great numbers in the
postwar fifties, when citizens looked to affirm
victory and prosperity with green lawns and
picket fences. But, before that, the Second World
War had a different effect on Western gender
roles. Women were tapped to fill the void in the
workforce left by draftees, and when soldiers
returned a new generation of financially inde-
pendent women faced a choice: proceed with
working life in big cities or settle into the role
of wife and mother. In The Courtship of Eva
Eldridge, Diane Simmons traces one womans
story through hundreds of wartime letters and
papers, ultimately uncovering postwar Americas
rampant bigamy and the women who overcame
it. She discusses the book with Rachel Hall, the
author of Heirlooms. (29 Cornelia St. 212-989-
9319. Oct. 18 at 6.)
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 19

TABLES FOR TWO
1633
1633 Second Ave., at 85th St.
(212-837-8285)
Until very recently, the front of this
new Greek restaurant was intentionally
boarded up, in order to throw diners o.
We started with a speakeasy vibe, a
waiter explained the other night. You
had to come in through the kitchen, but
the clientele didnt understand that. He
sighed. Its the Upper East Side. But
even with the boards gone 1633 contin-
ues to vibe, wonderful and strange, in a
neighborhood not usually synonymous
with risk-taking. Theres something
magical about the surrealism of the
sculpted putti and painted pigs frolick-
ing on the walls and the chintzy oral
patterns that bloom across the ceilings.
The over-all eect is as if David Lynch
and Marguerite Duras had opened a
Mediterranean saloon somewhere in
Mitteleuropa.
On the other hand, 1633 also manages
to strike a classic Manhattan timbre.
Perhaps this is merely an eect of the
disco soundtrackthink Larry Levan
at the Paradise Garagebut more likely
it arises from the melding of cultures
that results in excellent dishes like the
gyro pizza: steaming heaps of pork belly
and lamb shoulder, nely ground, over
crispy pizza dough spread with tzatziki.
The chef Dionisis Liakopouloss dishes
20 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
FD & DRINK
manage to be fun and surprising while
brimming with the freshness of the three
New Jersey farms that he buys from.
On the small plates section of the
menu is Fire in the Ocean, a small black
pot lled with clams and mussels in
an eervescing chili-wine broth. This is
best mopped up with chunks of ba-
guette, which, spread thick with coppery
torched bchamel, comes alongside.
Wash it all down with a Maine-lobster
cappuccino, the sole inhabitant of the
menus liquid food section. Or, if thats bartender joked, then inquired where the man was
too surreal, try a more traditional cock-
tail, like the Moro Mou (my baby in
Greek), in which tequila and salted-
pistachio orgeat lap at a single rock of
cut ice.
Most of the main dishesdelicate
pieces of fried red mullet, lamb cooked
and served in a plastic bag next to a bit
of roasted-pepper ketchupfeel about
the same size as the small plates. The
exception, however, is the astako pasta,
in which an imperial lobster, resplendent
in full garnet regalia, presides over a
realm of soft fettuccine. For Liakopou-
loss nal chapter, entitled sweet
(dreams), the brightest star is baklava
swimming in a jar with ice cream and
spiced syrup. One feels that if only the
Sibyl of Cumae, that other great resident
of a jar, had just had some baklava, shed
have been happy to live forever. (Entres
$24-$69.)
Nicolas Niarchos
1
BAR TAB
Ear Inn
326 Spring St. (212-226-9060)
On a recent evening at Ear Inn, a bartender cheek-
ily mimicked a customer asking about the draft-
beer selection. He sounds like a Russian spy, the
fromMilan. On a less recent evening, in 1817,
James Brown, an African-American who fought
under George Washington in the Revolutionary
PHOTOGRAPH BY AMY LOMBARD FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
War and later became a tobacconist, supervised
the finishing touches on his house, then just a few
steps from the Hudson. He sold it in the eighteen-
thirties, and since then the exquisite Federal-style
building has been home to a number of taverns of
varying legality. Ear Inn was born there in 1977,
when the building was bought by its current own-
ers, Rip Hayman and Martin Sheridan. The duo
have covered the bars time-warped ceilings and
storied walls with curios from the ages: eighteenth-
century wine jugs that were dug up in the cellar
during excavations, porthole-framed paintings,
numerous sculptures and drawings of ears. At a
table with a tasty cheeseburger ($12.50) and a
Moscow Mule ($11), a visiting Mancunian told of
the Williamsburg Airbnb where he was staying,
which was owned by a hunter and came with a
fridge full of complimentary bear and deer meat.
Airbnb users with tastes less carnivorous and more
historical can find an apartment that Hayman calls
Ear Up on the site. Sitting outside on a wooden
bench that hugs two trees, one can peek up at the
ceiling of the living room. Reviewers of the rental
mention that, despite the vibrant scene downstairs,
no noise is audible, but one voiced concern about
hearing ghosts bumping around. Perhaps the pol-
tergeists had a few too many pints before heading
upstairs.Colin Stokes
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
THREES A CROWD
L Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico
ast Wednesday, Neil Cavuto, of Fox News, oered
and the Libertarian Presidential nominee, a scenario: Hil-
lary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a boat, and they
both fall overboard. Who are you going to save? Cavuto
asked. Instead of considering the question, Johnson col-
lapsed into giggles, as though the prospect of both candi-
dates ailing in the water while he watched was the fun-
niest thing hed heard in a while. Well, America will be
saved, he said.
Johnson was on Fox, in part, to refute reports that
his running mate, William Weld, the former governor of
Massachusetts, might be taking a more sober view.
The day before, Weld had told the Boston Globe that
Trump now has his full attention, owing to the singular
awfulness of his foreign-policy positions. The Globe,
buttressed by sources close to Weld, took this to mean that
he would focus exclusively on insuring that Trump would
not be President. Follow-up reports in other publications
worked on the assumption that Weld was, in eect, giv-
ing up on his own running mate and endorsing Clinton.
After all, the Johnson-Weld ticket
is polling at about seven per cent
nationally, and Weld has previously
said that he is not sure anybody is
more qualied than Clinton to be
President. And, if Trumps reckless
comments about Americas place in
the world werent enough to per-
suade him, then surely those of his
running mate were. Weld must have
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
been mortied, the thinking went,
when Johnson drew a blank after
being asked about the besieged Syr-
ian city of Aleppo, then followed
that by calling his failure to come
up with the name of a single for-
eign leader he admired an Aleppo
moment. ( Johnson has since looked
into the tragedy of that city and decided that it is kind of
Clintons fault.)
Still, logic is a poor tool for analyzing political speech in
this election. Johnson quickly told the Times that Weld had
merely suggested a division of labor, in which he, Johnson,
would focus on Hillary. Weld, in turn, said that he wasnt
campaigning for anyone but himself and Johnson, and would
continue to strive to break up what he called the two-party
duopoly. In an interview on Fox Business News, he said,
This is a year when voters looking at the two establish-
ment parties are thinking, Im watching a scary movie and
I cant change the channel. Well, you can change the chan-
nel!as if, having tired of the nalists on The Celebrity
Apprentice, one could simply switch to Shark Tank and
be done with it, tuning out the White House and the world.
Nor would Weld concentrate, as had also been sug-
gested, on solidly red states, where he wouldnt harm Clin-
tons electoral-college chances: last Friday, he campaigned
in Maine and New Hampshire, where the polls show only
a couple of points separating Trump and Clinton, and where
more than ten per cent of likely voters favor the Libertar-
ian ticket. There are, in fact, eleven
states where the dierence between
Trump and Clinton is less than the
sum of likely voters who say that
they support either Johnson-Weld
or Jill Stein, the Green Party candi-
date, and her running mate, Ajamu
Baraka, who are at about two and a
half per cent in the polls. ( Johnson
is on the ballot in all fty states, Stein
in forty-four.) In Florida, for exam-
ple, Clinton has a narrow lead in a
head-to-head contest with Trump,
which diminishes when the contest
is polled as a four-way race. In 2000,
Al Gore ocially lost Florida to
George W. Bush by ve hundred and
thirty-seven votes; Ralph Nader, the
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 23
Green candidate, got almost a hundred thousand votes there.
Beyond the electoral math, with Trump premptively
alleging that if he loses it will likely be the result of cheat-
ing, the popular vote may matter a great deal in terms of
securing the winners mandate. Yet many Americans con-
sider their votes to be meaningless, because they see the
major parties as members of the same corporate oligarchy
or as big-government enemies of individual freedoms, or
the candidates as generic self-serving politicians. Some-
thing has gone deeply awry in the nancing and the func-
tioning of our electoral process. But one cannot imagine a
more destructive embodiment of that breakdown than a
President Trump.
Senator Bernie Sanders, no stranger to the concept of
duopolies, has demonstrated in the past few months that
it is possible to resist the lure of the sort of political nar-
cissism that disguises itself as purity. Last Thursday, in a
speech to the United Auto Workers in Dearborn, Michi-
gan, another swing state, he spoke with his usual progres-
sive passion (Wells Fargofraud! Bank of America
fraud! Goldman Sachsfraud!), but insisted that there is
only one option left in this election. I understand that nei-
ther Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump are particularly
popular, he said. But forget about that for a moment. Take
a hard look at the agendas of the campaign. Clinton, he
said, was the necessary choice. (Sanders has also said that
he wouldnt vote for Johnson even if he could win, because
of Johnsons extreme anti-regulatory policies.) Some of his
supporters will nonetheless conclude that there is nothing
wrong with enabling the election of a bigoted demagogue
if it serves to disrupt the current system.
But revulsion at the cronyism and the decrepitude of ma-
jor-party politics cant be whats driving Jeb Bush and Mitt
Romney, two eminent members of the establishment. Both
have said that Trump would be a disastera chaos candi-
date, a phony, a fraud. Yet both have also said that they
cant imagine voting for Clinton and have hinted that John-
son could be their choice. This is so despite their professed
respect for experience and expertise. For them, Johnson is a
cover, a way to keep playing to the elements in the Republi-
can Party who see Clinton as a dangerous criminal. Its hard
to sort out the mixture of vanity, partisanship, and wounded
feelings that would lead them to underscore the bitterness
that this campaign has brought to the country, rather than
try to mitigate it. They know better, as do other Republican
leaders who dally with Johnson, about the damage that Trump
could do, and about who in America might be left to drown.
Amy Davidson

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT. Delhi. He arrived in the United States
TRADING VS. TRUMP in 1998, to pursue a Ph.D. in computer
science, with two suitcases and two
hundred dollarsthe canonical Indian
story.
Kumar dropped out of his program
when the rst dot-com boom beck-
oned. He hopped between computer-
drives a gray Tesla with his new com-
panys name on the license plate: Trim-
ian, short for three simians, a nod to
the wise monkeys of Japanese legend.
It builds networking apps for profes-
sionals. Emoji monkeys covering their
eyes, ears, and mouth adorn the door
of Trimians oce, which is sandwiched

T Roosevelt, the MTV generation

he Depression era had Eleanor
had Rock the Vote. Our current age
has apps. In August, Amit Kumar, an
entrepreneur in Menlo Park, Califor-
nia, distressed by the popularity of Don-
ald Trump, released a mobile app called
#NeverTrump, which allows users
there are now more than a thousand
of themto win points for prodding
friends in swing states to vote. The app
matches a users contacts with publicly
available data, gures out whom the
user knows in battleground states, then
oers to send those people automated
reminders to vote and, especially, to not
vote for Trump. On Facebook, a lot
of people post, I want to do something,
but Im in California, I feel powerless,
Kumar said the other day, at an Asian-
fusion restaurant in Sunnyvale. Now
you have something to do.
Kumar, a slim, genial man of thirty-
nine, ordered American chop suey, a
favorite during his college days in New
24 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
networking startups before joining
Yahoo as an engineer, in 2005. After
three years, he left and, in 2009,
founded Lexity, which used a Web bot
named Sophie to help small businesses
market themselves. (Sophie would
say, Ive done some analysis on your
site. The best course of action is to ad-
vertise on Google and spend three
hundred dollars a month. ) In 2013,
he sold the thirty-person shop to
Yahoo for a reported thirty-ve to
forty million dollars. Kumar calls it a
life-changing event.
A few months after the sale, Kumar
and his wife, who works for Cisco Sys-
tems, became eligible for citizenship.
Our accountant sat us down and said,
Do you really want to do this? Because
youll have a lot of negative conse-
quences from a tax perspective, Kumar
said. We didnt have to think twice.
They took the Oath of Allegiance at
a community hall in Cupertino.
Kumar wears designer denim and
between two acupuncture studios in a
Sunnyvale oce complex. If youre
looking for Google or Facebook, this
isnt it, Kumar said. He passed a pan-
try stocked with kale chips and pro-
tein bars, and a graphic designer bal-
ancing on a concave boogie board while
typing at a standing desk.
He sat down by a whiteboard and
opened the #NeverTrump app on his
iPhone. (He coded the beta version
over a weekend, and his employees,
most of them immigrants, jumped in
to ne-tune it.) A pixellated monkey
asked Kumar where he was registered
and whom he plans to vote for. For ar-
guments sake, Kumar said he was in
Ohio and voting for Gary Johnson.
The friendly monkey disappeared, re-
placed by an admonition: You are vot-
ing for Gary Johnson in a swing state,
which could deliver the White House
to Donald Trump. The app explained
how Kumar could nd a friend in a
non-battleground state and trade his
votehe votes for Clinton, the friend
promises to cast a ballot for Johnson.
Sixteen per cent of #NeverTrump users
are registered in swing states, and half
of them want to vote for a third-party
candidate. Last weekend, #NeverTrump
unveiled a feature that suggests ve to
ten users with whom these voters can
trade, so they can vote their conscience
without inadvertently helping elect
Trump. Theres also a chat room where
people post messages like Hey, Rob-
ert, if youll vote Hillary in Co., I will
vote Stein in N.J.
Lets say there are millions of such
people, and the margin of victory for
Trump is, like, a hundred thousand,
Kumar said. If we can shift just a
few of them over to Hillary . . . He
paused. This only matters on the
boundary condition, when theres a
coulda, woulda, shoulda. Its back to
Bush versus Gore.
A casual observer of politicsI
wouldnt consider myself a Demo-
cratKumar was pushed over the
edge by Trumps rhetoric against im-
migrants and Muslims. Outside, by the
Tesla, he brought up Martin Niemllers
poem First They Came . . . . This
poem about the Holocaustwho would
have thought that, less than a hundred
years on, we would have to invoke that?
he said.
America was supposed to be the
last bastion of bring me your tired, hud-
dled masses, he went on. It doesnt
matter what they believe in, who they
believe in. This was their nal place. If
youre persecuted, if youre looking for
opportunity, theres one place you can
go. Hence my Iranian swim instructor.
Sheila Marikar
1 He toured into his early eighties.
THE INDUSTRY
SING IT STRONG
I ve never even been to Bed-Stuy
before, Bonnie Raitt said. She was
at the deep end of Bar Luntico, which
is owned by her friend Richard Julian, a
singer and songwriter. A few years ago,
Julian, amid the ongoing struggle of try-
ing to make a living in the music busi-
26 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
ness, decided to diversify, so he bought
a building in Brooklyn, moved in up-
stairs with his wife and child, and turned
the ground oor into a bar, with a stage
crammed in one corner. Raitt was here
to hang out, not to perform. She favors
bigger venues, and has been successful
and sensible enough in her aairs to have
the luxury of forgoing diversication.
It was early evening, and there werent
many people around. She had on black
boots, black jeans, a faux-leather mesh
shirt, and a necklace of brass skeleton
keys. To go incognito, shell often not
wear eye makeup and truss up her red
hair under a hat, but on this night she
felt no need to hide. She looked like
Bonnie Raitt. She tasted her drink, a
nonalcoholic craft cocktail, and said, I
might have to hit on myself later.
Its really nice to be here and watch
the daylight fade, she said. On the road,
she explained, she spends her late after-
noons in windowless rooms and halls
sound check, dinner, prep, performance
and doesnt get outside again until after
midnight. Small price to pay for the gig
I have, but I really miss watching the day
end and the night come on.
When Raitt passes through New York,
she tries to build in extra time. She likes
to bike the loop around Central Park.
She has tenuous roots here. Her early
childhood was spent in Westchester
County, while her father, John Raitt, held
down the lead in The Pajama Game
on Broadway. I knew all the alternate Im in love with someone whos mar-
parts of the shows he was in, she said.
Carousel. Oklahoma! It was really cool then I turn around and help somebody
to hang out backstage when I was a kid
and soak up all that warming up and all
the half-naked people running around.
He did twenty-ve years of summer stock.
When she was seven, he moved the
family to Los Angeles. Summers, she at-
tended a Quaker camp upstate. I raced
to get old enough to come to New York
in the sixties, but I was too late. It was
in 1969, post-heyday, that she got her
rst real gig, at nineteen, at the Gaslight,
in the Village. In the seventies, she often
played the Schaefer Music Festival, at
Wollman Rink; early sets led to late nights
at J.P.s, a notorious den on the Upper
East Side.
Raitt got sober decades ago. I
needed to get healthy. Also, I was get-
ting chunky, and I wanted to lose
weight. Women at my end of the spec-
trum often blow up and then get into
money problems and all thatwhether
its Judy Garland or Billie Holiday or
any number of chanteuses who had no
money at the end of their careers. I
thought, You know, this is gonna get
out of hand if I dont do something. I
was maybe going to work with Prince,
and I thought, Man, if we make a video
together, this is gonna look rough.
She went on, Theres always some-
one who can give you advice about stalk-
Bonnie Raitt
ers or investing your money or not sign-
ing your publishing away. You know,
riedwhat did you do? People help me,
else. It sounds facile, but its what gets
you through.
A friend of Raitts walked up with an
older guy, who had on worn dungarees
and a black American-ag T-shirt and
was carrying a guitar case.
Know this cat? the friend said. It
was Danny Kalb, a bluesman from the
old Village days, who was there to play
a tip-jar set.
Danny! Nice to see you.
Bonnie Raitt! Are you going to hear
me tonight?
Im gonna hear a little bit. I have to
get up early tomorrow.
Kalb went to set up, and Raitt said,
I havent seen him since the sixties. I
only met him once. She went on, I feel
really lucky at sixty-six to still have a gig,
because theres an awful lot of people
who do this who arent suited for other Pitt. He then walked through Times
kinds of work. What are they supposed Square, reecting on his anxiety that,
to do, re-create themselves at sixty? having now read half of the rst volume
Soon, Kalb began to play a low, mut- of In Search of Lost Time, he might
tering blues, accompanied by a younger have chosen the wrong translation. A
man on standup bass. Danny Kalb! section of Forty-second Street was closed,
Raitt half whispered. He was already because of a bomb scare, and the atmo-
famous when I was starting out. Hes sphere in Champs Sports, at the edge of
much older than me. She laughed. (Hes the cordoned area, was not restful. Mac-
seventy-four.) donald left without buying anything;
Sing it high, sing it strong, he grum- he wondered if Champs was the small-
bled into the mike. Everything Ive had est sports store in the world.
is now done and gone. In the park, Macdonald considered
Later, between numbers, he said, two plans: one was to rent an apartment
Tragedy. Its kind of built into it, isnt in New York for a few months next spring;
it, Bon? the other was to go to college. I always
She nodded. Outside you could hear wanted to be educated, and always en-
the rev of motorcycle engines. vied educated people, he said. He pre-
Nick Paumgarten fers long-dead authors, but said that his
1 son, who is twenty-three, and who has
INK published poetry and short stories, had
TEMPS PERDU recently persuaded him to try Raymond
Carver. And Carver really reminded me
of Chekhov, whose work I love, he said.
Macdonald had tickets for a matine pre-
view of The Cherry Orchard that af-
ternoon; this was only the third or fourth
time hed been to the theatre.
dying, you know: Youre going to be dead
soon. Macdonald laughed. So, any-
ways, the guy dies, and then Chekhov
continues the story. They put him in a
kind of duelbag, a sack, and throw him
overboard. He sinks in the ocean, his
dead body. And one sh grazes against
him, rips the sack, and his body tumbles
out, and a bunch of minnows come and
eat little bits of him. And a big sh comes
and takes away his legs, and thats the
end. (Some of these details are not in
the original.) You sort of go, What? Its
still going on? The guys dead. Hes still
asked to endure these indignities! Its a
really cruel ending, and I like that.
Macdonald jerked his head to one
side. That bird almost hit me in the
face, like Fabio on the roller coaster,
he said.
Macdonald, who includes imaginary
stghts in his memoir, and in his com-
edy, said that there was a kind of joy in
the real thing. If you punch a guy, and
it doesnt hurt your st or anything, and
he just fallsI dont know, but its fun,
he said. One time I was in a ghtI
was nineteen or twentyand the guy

N and former Saturday Night Live

orm Macdonald, the comedian
cast member, who lives in Los Angeles,
recently visited New York. One morn-
ing, he was drinking coee at a table in
Bryant Park, wearing a red polo shirt
from the Shadow Creek golf course, in
Las Vegas. He had just made an appear-
ance on Fox & Friends, where he talked
about his new and largely ctional mem-
oir, Based on a True Story, and about
the breakup of Angelina Jolie and Brad
The operator of the Bryant Park car-
rousel began to remove overnight cov-
ers that protect the horses. Macdonald,
who is fty-six, and whose performances
have a sort of sunny nihilism, talked about
Chekhovs stories. I like the endings
where nothing happens. And I like bleak-
ness, because I grew up in a bleak area,
he said. (In Quebec, then Ontario.)
There is one story about a guy whos
on a boat, whos dying, on this long, long
trip. And everyones taunting him, about
was short, but he was strong, and he kept
hitting me and hitting me. So I got in
closer and embraced him, and I pushed
down, and his head hit the cement. I
picked him up, and then the head hit
the cement again. And then the terrible
terrible part was: I picked him up again,
and he was limp, and I hit him against
the cement. Which, at that point, I guess,
was . . . murder, attempted murder, or
something. So I just went home, and I
was so scared. I was thinking, God, I
hope he didnt die, I hope hes O.K.
Macdonald was laughing. And he was
O.K. We were both having sex with a
girl who was married to another guy. So
we were both bad.
He walked back to his hotel; in the
lobby, he read a text message on his
phone. Fucking Louis C.K., he said,
half-seriously. He always wants to meet
and then hes, Nope, cant do it. C.K.,
a friend, was asking if they could change
a plan, and meet that afternoon, at a
time when Macdonald would be see-
ing The Cherry Orchard. How do I
lie my way out of this? Macdonald
asked, putting the phone back in his
pocket. A moment later: The truth! I
never considered the truth.
Ian Parker
 THE FINANCIAL PAGE
TRUMPS OTHER TAX PLOY
T in the mid-nineties may have enabled him to avoid
he revelation that Donald Trumps business losses
paying federal income tax for nearly two decades may be
the biggest October surprise of any recent Presidential
campaign. But the substance of it was no surprise at all.
When, in the rst debate, Hillary Clinton challenged him
about years in which he may not have paid federal taxes,
he boasted, That makes me smart. And his real-estate
empire, such as it is, was built on exploiting just about every
government tax abatement, credit, and subsidy available.
Still, whatever tax savings Trump has nagled over the
years are dwarfed by the huge tax break
he plans to give wealthy Americans if
he wins. According to the Tax Founda-
tion, Trumps tax plan would boost the
after-tax income of the top one per cent
by ten to sixteen per cent, while aver-
age households would gain only between
.08 and 1.9 per cent. He would lower
the estate tax, which only the rich pay.
He would slash the corporate tax rate
by more than half, to fteen per cent,
and has said that any business would be
able to take advantage of that lower
rate, even so-called pass-through cor-
porations, whose prots are typically
taxed via personal income taxes rather
than via corporate taxes. That would
mean a huge windfall for, among others,
hedge-fund and private-equity managers.
None of this is shocking, given Trumps obvious aec-
tion for paying as little in taxes as possible. But its worth
noting how oddly tax cuts for the wealthy t with the rest
of his campaign. Trump has presented himself as an out-
sider sticking up for the ordinary voter against fat cats and
special interests, and, as he says, taking on big business and
big media and big donors. He has burnished his populist
credentials by challenging G.O.P. orthodoxy on issues like
trade and immigration, while promising to protect Social
Security and Medicare. Yet his tax plan follows conven-
tional Republican supply-side economics: hefty tax cuts for
the wealthy and for corporations, and blind faith that cut-
ting marginal tax rates will drive growth.
This ployPalin in the streets, Reagan in the balance
sheetsis a crucial part of Trumps strategy for winning in
November. No matter how much his core supporters love
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
him, he has no chance unless he can persuade traditional
Republicans, many of whom would have preferred a more
traditional candidate, to turn out. Theres little that this
base cares about more than cutting taxes, an issue that has
taken on the status of a moral creed. In 2012, the Repub-
lican platform stated, Taxes, by their very nature, reduce a
citizens freedom. Trumps tax plan signals to conservatives
that he is ultimately on their side.
There are political risks to Trumps embrace of supply-
siderism. After all, more than sixty per cent of Ameri-
cans think that the wealthy should pay more in taxes.
And his plan will only reinforce the image of the Re-
publican Party as the home of rich people, something
that has already started to worry a few Republicans,
known as reformocons. There are a lot of voters who
look at Republican politicians and say that all they care
about is cutting taxes for rich people, Michael Strain, a
fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Insti-
tute, told me. Strain and other reformocons think that
the Party could draw new supporters if it started think-
ing creatively about using tax credits and subsidies to
incentivize work, education, and long-term investment.
But, though Trumps tax plan may
not attract many independents, let
alone Democrats, its unlikely to bother
the white working-class voters who
are his most ardent fans. Few voters
pay attention to the small print of tax
proposals, which makes it easier for
tax-cut proponents to put their poli-
cies in the best possible light, as Trump
is doing by insisting that cutting taxes
for the rich is really all about boost-
ing employment. The wealthy are
going to create tremendous jobs, he
said in the rst debate. More funda-
mentally, polls show that taxes just ar-
ent an emotive issue for most voters.
As long as Trumps working-class sup-
porters believe that hes with them on
the issues they care about mostbring-
ing back jobs, keeping immigrants outno tax policy will
drive them away.
Put simply, white working-class voters are willing to tol-
erate a handout to the rich in exchange for the rest of Trumps
ideological agenda, while the Republican establishment is
willing to elect an ethno-nationalist populist in exchange
for tax cuts. The fact that more than eighty per cent of reg-
istered Republicans now say theyll vote for Trump demon-
strates that, as long as a candidate can be counted on to
bring taxes down, traditional Republicans will overlook any
number of heresies and oensive statements. Coming out
against free trade and open borders, defending entitlements,
attacking veterans, cozying up to foreign autocrats, indulg-
ing in openly racist and xenophobic rhetoric: none of these
things have hurt Trump with the vast majority of Republi-
can voters and politicians. If he had wavered on tax cuts, it
would have been a very dierent story. Trump may be the
most politically incorrect man in America, but even he knows
that there are some taboos you cant violate.
James Surowiecki
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 29
 reading from a teleprompter, sounded
THE POLITICAL SCENE almost like a conventional politician as
he spoke about breaking up the spe-
cial-interest monopoly and described
TAMING TRUMP America as a nation of strivers, dream-
ers, and believers. Conway was being
A new campaign manager tries to reform an unreformable candidate. lauded as the Trump whispererthe
only person who could persuade him
BY RYAN LIZZA to prepare for his crucial showdown
with Clinton.
For the rst twenty minutes of the
debate, held at Hofstra University, on
Long Island, on September 26th, Con-
way seemed to have succeeded. Trump
adroitly pressed Clinton on the fact that
she had once praised the Trans-Pacic
Partnership trade deal, which she now
opposes. The comedian Samantha Bee,
on her show Full Frontal, depicted the
start of the event with an image of Con-
way controlling Trump with an elec-
tronic dog collar. But Trump soon re-
verted to his natural state, bragging about
not paying federal taxes, claiming that
cheering for the housing-market crash
was good business, lying about his sup-
port for the Iraq War, failing to apolo-
gize for his tenure as the leader of the
birther movement, and gratuitously at-
tacking Rosie ODonnell.
After the debate, Trumps aides were
slow to enter the spin room, a gymna-
sium, where each campaign made the
case to reporters that its candidate had
won. Bannon, in a blazer and open
shirt, kept his distance from the cam-
eras and the microphones. Conway,
wearing a royal-blue lace dress, stepped
forward to deliver the Trump cam-
paigns message.

I Trump spoke in Chester Township,

n late September, when Donald
Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, he
wasnt the only star at the event. Kelly-
anne Conway, his new campaign man-
ager, who grew up nearby, and who has
become ubiquitous on television, was
greeted as a celebrity. Did you see the
people asking me to sign their posters
and hats? she asked me in a text while
Trump was speaking. So weird.
In August, Conway, who is forty-nine,
and a longtime Republican pollster, be-
came Trumps third campaign manager.
Steve Bannon, the former head of Breit-
bart, a right-wing news site that has
championed Trumps candidacy, was
named C.E.O. Conway, who is the rst
woman to run a Republican Presiden-
30 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
tial campaign, told me that she was proud
of the milestone but not hung up on it.
Ive been in a very male-dominated
business for decades, she said. I found,
particularly early on, that theres plenty
of room for passion, but theres very lit-
tle room for emotion. She added, I tell
people all the time, Dont be fooled,
because I am a man by day.
When Conway took over, the cam-
paign was foundering, owing to Trumps
repeated insults to the parents of Hu-
mayun Khan, a soldier killed in action
in Iraq. Polls showed that Trump was
losing to Hillary Clinton by up to ten
points. By the time of the Chester
speech, four days before the candidates
rst debate, Conway and her team had
brought the race to a near-tie. Trump,
I love the fact that he restrained
himself tonight and he was a gentle-
man toward her, she told a knot of re-
porters. He denitely couldve gone
where a lot of America was thinking
he should or could go, which is to talk
about her husband and women, and he
did not. He restrained himself, and you
know what? Restraint is a virtue, and it
is certainly a Presidential virtue, and I
think many voters today, particularly
women, probably saw that and respected
that a great deal.
For almost three hours, Conway
strolled around the Hofstra gym, spread-
ing the message with a smile. Others in
the Trump campaign thought his per-
formance was catastrophic, and they
blamed the Conway camp. (The Trump
ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT
campaign has several power centers, and
his advisers are quick to savage one an-
other, though not always on the record.)
I view her as an enabler, one Trump
campaign ocial told me. Right now,
post-debate, I guarantee you theres a
fucking Kool-Aid cooler the size of a
fucking wheat silo that theyre all drink-
ing from. I guarantee you, because none
of them can accept the blame for what
they failed to do.
The next day, Conway was sitting
in the Trump Grill, in the peach-mar-
bled lobby of Trump Tower, which has
served as a set for several of the cam-
paigns famous moments. The restau-
rant has a view of the escalator that
Trump and his wife, Melania, descended
when, on June 16, 2015, he declared
his candidacy, and adjoins the area
where, the same day, he claimed that
Mexico was sending rapists to the
United States. Eric Trump, the candi-
dates thirty-two-year-old son, who is
an executive vice-president of the
Trump Organization and one of his
fathers closest campaign advisers, was
dining at a nearby table. Conway noted
his presence with a wink, as if to sig-
nal that we should be on our best be-
havior in front of the bosss kid.
She had already appeared on four
morning shows, but she seemed as en-
ergetic as ever. She was, though, irri-
tated by some conversations on Twit-
ter. Her assistant, who had access to her
Twitter account, was posting the re-
sults of nonscientic polls that declared
Trump the winner of the debate, and
readers were pillorying Conway for shar-
ing bad data. She tapped out an urgent
message to her assistant, asking her to
stop polluting her feed.
Conway had no such control over
Trump. As we met, he sent out a cele-
bratory montage of the results of ten on-
line polls. Such a great honor, Trump
wrote. Final debate polls are inand
the MOVEMENT wins! In fact, according
to polls that used representative samples,
voters believed, by a two-to-one margin,
that Clinton had won.
There were other frustrations. The
day before, BuzzFeed had posted an
article suggesting that Conway was
nothing more than window dress-
ing for the campaign. Well, I know
better, she told me. I thought it
was really sexist, and Im not one to
32 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
run around screaming about sexism.
Shortly after the debate, Stuart Ste-
vens, who served as Mitt Romneys
top strategist in 2012, and who is out-
spoken about his distaste for Trump,
had picked up the criticism. Saw last
night why campaign managers focus
on helping their candidates prepare for
debates & dont live on tv talking about
debates, he tweeted. He later noted
that, during the primaries, Conway had
helped run Keep the Promise, a Ted
Cruz super PAC, and that Trump had
criticized Cruzs wifes appearance. And
yet Conway still goes to work for that
man? Stevens told me. To me, that
smacks of desperation.
The attacks stung Conway. She sup-
ported Romney four years ago, donat-
ing to his campaign and oering it ad-
vice. I was a good little soldier, she said.
And, even if theyRomney and his
former aidescant give that kind of
support in return, then they should at
least realize, hey, give us our chance to
lose eight of the nine swing states like
you did! Ive noticed a lot of people are
very bold and blustery on Twitter, be-
cause its easy to do that with the poi-
son keyboard and a hundred and forty
characters.
Conway, who has four young chil-
dren, continued, For Stuart Stevens to
say I, quote, live on TV? You know where
I live? I live with four kids who need
their mother, in a household that I run.
She added, This smacks of misogyny
and sexism, to suggest that I cant do the
job of a campaign managerI can only
go on TV. How about if I could do all
of the above?
She said that she was trying to spend
more time on campaign management,
but for Trump a measure of her success
was her presence on television. Ive cut
my TV time in half, she told me. And
hes, like, I didnt see you on TV in the
last hour. Where are you? Im, like, Mr.
Trump, managing the campaign means
talking to the state directors and the mail
house and the R.N.C.
Conway worked for Newt Gingrich
in the nineties, when he was rising in
the House of Representatives, and in
2012, when he ran for President. Ging-
rich, who is one of Trumps most prom-
inent supporters, told me that he had re-
cently observed Conway and Trump on
Trumps plane. They have very good
chemistry, he said, adding that previous
advisers had made the mistake of trying
to reshape him.
Gingrich said, Thats not going to
happen, because hes a seventy-year-old
adult billionaire who has been on a top-
rated TV show, had the No. 1 book in
the country, beat sixteen people, got
the record number of votes as the nom-
inee. He actually thinks he knows some-
thing. Gingrich went on, Her view is
that she needs to intuit what hes good
at and what hes bad at, and how to
deal with them.
R paign is like being the drummer in
unning Donald Trumps cam-
Spinal Tap: those who take the position
tend to disappear in mysterious circum-
stances. First, there was Corey Lewan-
dowski, an operative from New Hamp-
shire, who oversaw Trumps rise from
reality-television star to Republican-pri-
mary front-runner, but who was seen as
indulging his erratic behavior. Corey
was ideal for that rst phase, because
Trump just wanted someone who would
follow orders, a Trump adviser told me.
There was never any juncture during
which Corey would ever say to him, Well,
wait a minute, Mr. Trump. Maybe thats
not a good idea.
Lewandowski had near-total control
of the campaign, and he gradually alien-
ated Trumps eldest children, Donald, Jr.,
Ivanka, and Eric, and Ivankas husband,
Jared Kushner, the owner of the New
York Observer. The Trump children
didnt like Corey, because they thought
Corey was becoming too familiar, the
Trump adviser said. He started regard-
ing himself as another Trump child.
Corey, who is from a relatively poor,
working-class background, became quite
mesmerized with the life style.
In March, Trump hired Paul
Manafort, a Republican lobbyist who
was a partner in the rm Black,
Manafort, Stone & Kelly. His job was
to make sure that Republican delegates
would not be able to stage a coup against
Trump at the Convention. The end for
Lewandowski came when Manafort
and Kushner allied against him. When
Manafort was brought on, Corey and
Manafort basically went head to head,
the Trump campaign ocial said. Jared,
the son-in-law, who is a snaky little
motherfucker, a horrible human being,
hated Corey, so Jared sided with Paul
to get rid of Corey.
Manafort became the campaign
chairman in May, and took full control
when, a month later, Lewandowski was
red. But Manafort turned out to be
too blunt to get Trump to do his bid-
ding. You have to know how to in-
uence Trumps thinking, and that takes
a mix of diplomacy and psychiatry, the
Trump adviser told me. Manafort, he
claimed, had no chemistry with Don-
ald. Manafort wanted Trump to pay
for polling and focus groups to test TV
advertisements. Donald went berserk,
a Republican close to Manafort said.
Trump is known to disdain the tradi-
tional tools of politics. He thinks this
is all just a public-relations exercise, the
Trump adviser said, and hes a master
of public relations, and the rest is all
bullshit. Kushner sided with Trump.
By early August, Manafort was fur-
ther weakened, by scandals related to
political work that he had done in
Ukraine. After the Times reported that
he might have received millions of dol-
lars in cash payments from a party
aligned with Vladimir Putin, there was
open speculation about how long he
could keep his job. When the Ukraine
stu comes to pass, Jared now is hold-
ing the axe over Pauls head, the cam-
paign ocial said. The Trump adviser
added, The real campaign manager, in
fact, the entire time, has been Jared
Kushner, who is still the real campaign
manager, even today.
At the start of the election cycle, Con-
way talked to several Republican candi-
dates, including Rand Paul, Scott Walker,
Rick Santorum, and Carly Fiorina, about
joining their campaigns. She spoke to
Lewandowski, too, but she ended up
working for Keep the Promise, the Ted
Cruz super PAC. Keep the Promise had
an important supporter, the conserva-
tive hedge-fund manager Robert Mer-
cer, who donated more than ten million
dollars to the pac. Conway said that
working for Cruz was a geographic de-
cision, because the Mercer super PAC is
in New York. But she also knew Mer-
cers daughter Rebekah, who leads many
of the familys political eorts. Rebekahs
a very close friend of mine, personally,
Conway said.
During the primaries, Conway oc-
casionally took shots at Trump on behalf
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 33
of Cruz. She said that Trump should
be transparent about his tax returns,
and described his personal attacks on
his rivals as fairly unpresidential. And
she objected to his comment, in a tele-
vision appearance in March, that there
has to be some form of punishment
for women who have abortions. Con-
way passionately opposes abortion rights,
but she knows the subject has to be ad-
dressed with care, and has
spent years shaping lan-
guage to articulate the pro-
life position. When we
spoke, she was still both-
ered by Trumps statement.
Pro-lifers believe there are
two victims in an abortion:
the unborn child and the
woman who felt that that
was her best option, she
told me. We never look at
her as the perpetratorever. Trumps
remark was a great example of him just
undoing decades of work where we
worked really hard.
Steve Bannon had his own alliance
with the Mercer family. Since 2011,
Robert Mercer has been a major backer
Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster, submit-
ted a budget that Kushner thought was
too high, Conway oered a cheaper al-
ternative. Kellyanne gives him a budget
of between one and a half and three mil-
lion dollars, the campaign ocial said.
Come on. I mean, Senate races do more
than that. You cant do a modern Presi-
dential campaign on that.
In August, the Mercers recom-
mended that Trump bring
in Bannon to lead a reor-
ganized eort. Ive never
run a campaign, Bannon
told Trump. Id only do
this if Kellyanne came in
as my partner. Conway
said that Trump oered her
the job of campaign man-
ager on August 12th, in
a private meeting in his
oce.
Were losing, she told him. fore passing in Arkansas, Conway was
Nolook at the polls, Trump
replied.
I looked at the polls. Were losing,
she said. But we dont have to lose.
Theres still a pathway back.
She discovered politics in 1984, when,
in high school, she wrote for a local paper
about the Democratic and Republican
National Conventions. I loved Cuomo
and Ferraro at the Democratic Conven-
tion, she said. Geraldine Ferraro, the rst
female nominee on a major-party Pres-
idential ticket, and Mario Cuomo, then
governor of New York, were the two best-
known Italian-American politicians in
the country, and both gave speeches. But
when she saw Ronald Reagans speech
she knew that she was a Republican. He
really touched me, she said. I liked the
more uplifting, aspirational, yet tough-
guy kind of thing.
Conway went to Trinity Washington
University, a Catholic college in Wash-
ington, D.C., and received a law degree
from George Washington University.
She pointed out that, while Hillary Clin-
ton failed the D.C. bar exam in 1973, be-
allowed into the D.C. bar after passing
the exams in Pennsylvania and New Jer-
sey. Conway said she thought about that
during the rst debate: Boy, she really
can cram a lot of information into her
head for one performance. How the heck

I her for a boss like Trump. Born Kel-

of Breitbart, Bannons news site, and
Bannon has served as a political adviser
to the Mercers. Breitbart enthusiasti-
cally embraces the nationalist right,
and, as Trumps political fortunes rose,
Breitbart became his most obsequious
media booster. You can make the case
that Breitbart pretty much wrote Trumps
immigration policy, Kurt Bardella, who
resigned as Breitbarts spokesman in
March, told me. He added, Bannon is
the poster child for that white, nation-
alistic, alt-right world view.
After Trumps victory in the Indi-
ana primary, on May 3rd, Cruz dropped
out of the race, and the Mercers, with
Bannons encouragement, moved into
the Trump camp. Later that month,
Rebekah Mercer and Conway met
with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kush-
ner at Trump Tower to discuss the
campaign. In late June, the Mercers
transformed Keep the Promise into
Make America Number 1, a Trump
super PAC, and the Trump campaign,
at the Mercers urging, hired Conway
as a pollster.
With Manafort falling out of the
Trump familys favor, Conway began
subtly undermining his strategists. When
34 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
n a sense, Conways life prepared
lyanne Fitzpatrick, she grew up in Atco,
New Jersey, twenty miles from Philadel-
phia. Her mother raised Kellyanne in a
house that they shared with her grand-
mother and two unmarried aunts. These
four Italian women raised me, she said.
Its like South Jerseys version of The Im a female consultant in the Repub-
Golden Girls. When Kellyanne was a lican Party, which means when I walk
teen-ager, her mother worked at the Clar-
idge Hotel and Casino, in Atlantic City,
as a shift supervisor in the main cage,
where players cash their chips.
Her father was a truck driver, and was
divorced from her mother by the time
Kellyanne was two years old. She didnt
see her father again until she was twelve
or thirteen. She said, rolling her eyes,
that he is now married to his fourth wife.
The family was religious. We had pic-
tures of the Pope and the Last Supper
and anything I drew at school, she said.
We never had pictures of Kennedy or
Reagan. We never had a single political
conversation that I can remember. I
shouldve been a Democrat. I mean, I grew
up with all women in the nineteen-sev-
enties. She recalled that someone gave
her mother a subscription to Ms.
did she fail the D.C. bar?
While Conway was in law school, she
worked as a research assistant in the rm
of Richard Wirthlin, Reagans longtime
pollster and strategist. She briey prac-
ticed law, and later worked for the Re-
publican pollster Frank Luntz. The poll-
ing business was dominated by men.
into a meeting at the R.N.C. or some-
where I always feel like Im walking into
a bachelor party in the locker room of
the Elks club, she said.
Conway found mentors in political
xers such as Charlie Black, a partner
in Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly. To
Conway, the rms principals, who
worked for Reagan and George H. W.
Bush, were the untouchables. They
were the gold standard of lobbying, Cap-
itol Hill access. Early in her career, Con-
way was invited to Black, Manafort,
Stones Christmas party, and, she said,
it was, like, What am I gonna wear?
It was like Cinderella.
They talked, and she listened. Char-
lies one of those men in Washington
and there have been many of them
who, early on in my career, took an
interest in what I was doing and would
stop by the oce, or wed go have lunch
at the Palm, Conway said. I tended to
learn from what I would consider the re-
vered wise men, the veterans, the polit-
ical veterans who really took an interest
in my career.
Conway founded her own rm, the
Polling Company, in 1995, and devel-
oped a niche advising corporations
American Express, Hasbro, Vaseline,
and othersabout consumer trends,
especially among women. Her most
well-known political clients, includ-
ing Gingrich, Mike Pence, and Dan
Quayle, have been socially conservative
Republicans who needed help reaching
female voters. She spent most of her
career looking at polling data, with a
particular emphasis on consumers and
on women, Gingrich said. So she sees
them more holistically than a lot of po-
litical pollsters.
In the nineties, Conway started ap-
pearing on television, as a panelist on
Bill Mahers Politically Incorrect,
which brought together an eclectic group
of entertainers and political commen-
tators, and featured a new generation of
female pundits. Bill Maher gave a great
platform to the young conservative
women who were just coming into their
careers, Conway said. You cant put a
young girl in her twenties of any polit-
ical aliation alone in a room with half
of Congress. Its like an occupational
hazard. But I always felt Bill Maher was
a perfect gentleman.
Maher said, I think were the show
that kind of made Ann Coulter and
Kellyanne and Laura Ingrahamyou
know, those were, like, our blond Re-
publican ladies.
For a time, Conway stopped appear-
ing on Mahers show, because she had
grown tired of his anti-Catholic senti-
ments. Earlier this year, Trump showed
his own lack of respect for the Church.
Pope Francis said that a person who
wants to build walls is not Christian,
and Trump called the comment dis-
graceful. Conway spun this into proof
of Trumps virtue. Oftentimes, Mr.
Trump punches down, she told me. I
actually think the Pope is punching up
or punching across, if you will, if youre
Mr. Trump.
Maher, who despises Trump, said
that he didnt remember any disagree-
ment with ConwayIve blocked it
out, like an uncle who molested me
but he was incredulous at her descrip-
tion of Trumps response to the Pope.
Wow, he said. That so epitomizes the
whole campaign. Everything Donald
Trump does is marked on a curve. He
went on, Because Donald Trump is
normally a giant asshole who punches
down, the one time that he does it up
to the Pope then we say its O.K. If
theres a Nobel Prize in hypocrisy, those
people have got to win it this year.
Kellyannes husband is George T. Con-
way III, who as a young lawyer played a
historicand largely hiddenrole in the
impeachment of Bill Clinton. Conway, a
graduate of Harvard College and Yale
Law School, worked at the New York
City rm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &
Katz, and was a member of the Federal-
ist Society, the conservative organization
that led many of the legal challenges to
the Clinton Administration. When Paula
Jones sued Bill Clinton for sexual harass-
ment, Conway wrote the Supreme Court
brief, though his name never appeared on
it. The Court, in a landmark decision,
agreed with Joness argument that a sit-
ting President could face a civil lawsuit.
During depositions in the lawsuit, Clin-
ton denied having a sexual relationship
with Monica Lewinsky, which eventually
led to his impeachment trial. George Con-
way became deeply involved in getting
out information from the depositions.
During that period, he reportedly e-mailed
Matt Drudge an infamous scoop about
the shape of Clintons penis.
In January, 1998, the month that
Drudge broke the Lewinsky scandal,
Conway saw a picture of Kellyanne Fitz-
patrick on the cover of a Washington
society magazine and asked a mutual
friend to set them up. They met the fol-
lowing year, and married in 2001. Their
four children are between the ages of six
and eleven. I had my rst children at
thirty-seven, then I had two daughters
in my forties, forty-one and almost for-
ty-three, she said. They say there are
no eggs left in your forties, but there were
two rolling around in there somewhere.
I was surprised both times, like, Oh!
O.K. Not a stomach ache.
In 2004, Conway wrote a book with
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster,
called What Women Really Want. We
have the common bond of struggling in
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 35
a male-dominated business, Lake said.
Lots of women consultants told us to
be careful how much you do about
women voters, because that can be a
ghetto, not just a franchise. Lake joked
to me that Conway has tried to teach
Trump some of the lessons of their book,
which emphasizes that women respond
better to the language of inclusion than
to that of division, but Trump wont
stay on the lessons learned.
In 2001, the Conways bought an
apartment in Trump World Tower, near
the United Nations, where they lived for
seven years, and where she got to know
Trump. I sat on the condo board, and
hes very involved in his condos, she said.
Over the years, he would ask me my
opinion about politics. One of her top
clients at the time was Major League
Baseball, which relied on her advice about
marketing the game to female fans. In
2008, the Conways moved to a six-mil-
lion-dollar home in Alpine, New Jersey,
a town that Forbes has called Americas
most expensive Zip Code.
In late 2013, Trump was considering
running for governor of New York, and
Conway produced a poll for him. She
thought that it was possible for him to
win New York, Michael Caputo, a
Trump adviser at the time, who resigned
from his Presidential campaign after
clashing with Lewandowski, told me.
In a memo on the poll results, Conway
wrote, NY loves its celebrity politicians
and families: the Kennedys, Moynihans,
Buckleys, Clintons, and even the Cuo-
mos. Donald Trump ts that (loose) bill,
and he has the money and moxie to
compete if he chooses to enter the race.
Conways research showed Trump los-
ing to Andrew Cuomo by thirty-ve
points, but she chose not to include that
gure in her memo.
A Trump adviser involved in the dis-
cussion said that Conway misrepresented
Trumps prospects: She produces an anal-
ysis that buries every terrible number and
highlights every positive number. Its just
an enormous crock of shit. He added,
Shes looking for a client because Trump
is talking about spending a hundred mil-
lion dollars to run for governor, which
we both know he was never really going
to do, just like he was going to spend a
hundred million dollars in this race, which
he has not done. Conway responded, I
see nowhere in the memo where I claim
36 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Trump is ahead or can win. She added,
This does not account for the private
presentation I and another team mem-
ber had with him about the data.
Conway told me that some advisers
asked Trump, If youre going to run
for oce, why not start with President
of the United States? And, you know,
its a fair question, and he ultimately
decided that.
T he period after the rst Presi-
dential debate has been perhaps the
worst of Trumps campaign. Of the rst
two dozen swing-state polls that were
released, Clinton led in all but one.
Trumps pre-debate gains evaporated as
he reverted to the erratic caricature that
the two previous campaign teams had
struggled to control. The campaign o-
cial claimed that Conway and Bannon
sent Trump onstage without a strategy
for the debate or what followed. These
people make decisions knee-jerk and
haphazardly, he said. There has never
been a written campaign plan for this
campaign, ever.
Another senior member of the cam-
paign said that the goal of the rst de-
bate was simply risk mitigation, and
claimed, I think he won. You know
why? Because we got through the rst
big thing in front of eighty million peo-
ple, where shes the greatest in world
history and she brought a good game,
and guess what? Nothing happened,
right? He noted Trumps direct hit on
the Trans-Pacic Partnership, but con-
ceded that Trump was unable to deliver
the lines that were prepared for him on
immigration, Obamacare, and other
policy issues. He had ve other pack-
ages ready to go. They didnt come up
or he wasnt able to bring them up into
the debate.
During the debate, Clinton baited
Trump by speaking about a woman named
Alicia Machado, who was named Miss
Universe in 1996. Later that year, Trump
bought the contest, and he humiliated
Machado, calling her Miss Piggy and
Miss Housekeeping. Conway and her
colleagues couldnt get Trump to let it go.
On Twitter, he called Machado disgust-
ing and told supporters to check out
her sex tape (none emerged).
Conway told me that she understood
Trumps impulse to respond once hes
provoked. He and I have this in com-
mon, she said. I really dont draw rst
blood. Theres no fun, theres no point,
and there should be no joy in gratu-
itously attacking someone or picking
an argument out of whole cloth. she
continued, He feels that he should be
able to defend himself. Everybody says
no grievance too large or too small, but
thats just the way he feels: that theres
a way to settle the score.
On Friday, Conways task of spinning
Trump became all but impossible. The
Washington Post published a video from
2005 in which Trump talks about women
in the most degrading terms. When
youre a star, they let you do it, he says.
You can do anything. Grab them by the
pussy. (Conway declined to comment.)
Conway told me that she did have a
productive conversation with Trump, on
the day he hired her as campaign man-
ager. She was upset with him after he
appeared on CNBC and said that he
wouldnt mind if he lost, because he would
just go back to a very good life. He
added that he would take a very, very
nice, long vacation. Conway confronted
Trump: I told him, You cant say that.
Everybody thinks I sugarcoat it, but I
dont. I can actually deliver tough news
in a friendlier way.
Conway says that she told him, Peo-
ple believe that this election is not about
youits about them. And when you
say I, I, I you sound like her: Im with
her, Ready for Hillary. She should just
shortcut all of her slogans to say Me,
me, me, me, me. Conway continued,
Youve built a whole movement, and
people feel like theyre part of it. Mr.
Trump, people have stood in the rain
for three hours just to say they were
there when you were there. They so be-
lieve in you that when you say, Eh, if
it doesnt work out, Ill go back to the
happy place, they dont think that they
will. Since his dressing down by Con-
way, Trump hasnt repeated the remarks.
At the end of our interview at Trump
Tower, Conway told me that she will
turn fty on January 20th, Inauguration
Day. Before she started working for
Trump, she promised her family a trip
to Italy to celebrate her birthday. Now
she hopes to be in the capital, but, like
Trump, she has a backup plan. Ill ei-
ther be at a fabulous party in Washing-
ton, D.C., or Ill be in Italy, she said,
with a smile and a wink. I cant lose.
 give up. With each unnatural sex act,
SHOUTS & MURMURS you will be one step closer to your goal.
When you nally reach the rst
stage of success, congratulate yourself.
NEVER GIVE UP But remember that there are twen-
ty-four more stages of success.
BY JACK HANDEY Some people may ask, If I take a
rest, even a little one, is that the same
as giving up? Yes, it is. But if you need

I people of today, it would be this:

f I could say one thing to the young
Never give up. Keep trying and push-
ing and struggling, even if you dont
know what your goal is or why you
would want to achieve it.
As you march down the street not
giving up, hold your head high and
swing your elbows. People will recog-
nize you as someone who wont give
knowing that you have a higher pur-
pose. Remember, nobody liked van
Goghs work, and if nobody likes yours
its probably a sign that youre a genius.
Look to the horizon. See that little
dot? No, not that onethe one thats
even farther out. You can barely see it.
Now dont stop until you reach it. Take
out your machete and hack a new path
through the jungle, even if there is an
to pretend to give upso that peo-
ple will leave you alonego ahead.
Then keep doing what you do, but even
harder.
Several years ago, there was a man
who wouldnt give up. He was just
an actor, but he had bigger things in
mind, in the world of politics. Peo-
ple tried to talk him out of his wild-
eyed notions, but he wouldnt listen.

up, and they will get out of your way.
Some of them will even hide.
Some will try to discourage you.
Theyll say that what youre doing is
illegal, or a sin, or a violation of the
health code. They may cling to your
legs, causing you to drag them along,
or jump onto your back, pleading, In
the name of God, please stop what
youre doing!
Keep going. Rest assured, theyre
jealous.
Were not jealous, honestly, they
may say. Just please stop! Maybe
youve struck a nerve.
No, you havent struck a nerve,
theyll say. What youre doing is just
ANDY REMENTER
old path just a few feet away. Fend o
the monkeys of good manners and
the sloths of patience.
We are born with the instinct not
to give up. As babies, we cry and scream
until we get what we want. But some-
where along the line we lose that abil-
ity. People talk us out of our crazy
ideaspeople who live in the so-called
real world, where things make sense.
Theyve never attempted the impossi-
ble. But you have, many, many times.
Keep pushing aheadnot in a way
that seems pushy but in a way that says
you wont stop. Some people say you
shouldnt bang your head against a wall.
Tell that to the woodpecker.
And that man was John Wilkes Booth.
Keep pushing and scraping and
clawing and begging. Even in your
dreams, dont give up. If you dream
that you are wearing nothing but un-
derpants, try to make them expensive,
executive underpants.
Eventually, all your determination
will pay o. The same people who
mocked your ideas and tackled you will
now claim to love your vision. We
love it! We love it! theyll say. Theyll
tell you that the governor is interested
in your ideas and will bundle you o
in a car to the governors mansion. But
when you pass under the stone arch-
way youll notice that it doesnt say

awful, and wed like you to stop!
Let that be your inspiration. Shake
o the naysayers and trudge on, through
the mud and the lth and the slime,
Along the way, there will be com-
promisesbribes and torture and
hunting accidents. You may have to
engage in unnatural sex acts. But dont
Governors Mansion but Insane Asy-
lum. Jump out of the car and run into
the woods. Keep running. Never give
up running.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 37
 A Meditation in the Desert, she imag-
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS ines a stone being full / of slower, lon-
ger thoughts than mind can have.
She has roots in eastern Oregon that
OUT OF BOUNDS go back to the early days of white set-
tlement. Not long ago, she told me ex-
The unruly imagination of Ursula K. Le Guin. citedly that shed rediscovered records
in the attic of her grandmothers child-
BY JULIE PHILLIPS hood: My great-grandfather, with my
grandmother age eleven, moved from
California to Oregon in 1873. . . . They
drove three hundred and fty head of
cattle up through Nevada and built a
stone house on the back side of Steens
Mountain. I dont think he made a
claim; there was nowhere to make it.
He was one of the very rst ranchers
in what is still very desolate country.
The family stayed there for ve years
before they moved on, in search of
new grass or less isolationher grand-
mother didnt say. The story gives hints
of what Le Guin already knew: that
the empty spaces of America have a
past, and that loneliness and loss are
mixed up with the glory.
The history of America is one of
conicting fantasies: clashes over what
stories are told and who gets to tell
them. If the Bundy brothers were in
love with one side of the American
dreamstories of wars fought and won,
land taken and tamedLe Guin has
spent a career exploring another, dis-
tinctly less triumphalist side. She sees
herself as a Western writer, though her
work has had a wide range of settings,
from the Oregon coast to an anarchist
utopia and a California that exists in
Le Guin says she is not just trying to get into other minds but other beings. the future but resembles the past. Keep-
ing an ambivalent distance from the

P of people lately, and Ursula K. Le

olitics has been obsessing a lot
Guin is far from immune to bouts of
political anger. In an e-mail to me last
winter, she wrote that she felt eaten
up with frustration at the ongoing oc-
cupation of an eastern Oregon wild-
life refuge by an armed band of anti-
government agitators led by the broth-
ers Ammon and Ryan Bundy. She was
distressed by the damage they had done
to scientic programs and to histori-
cal artifacts belonging to the local Pai-
ute tribe, and critical of the F.B.I. for
being so slow to remove these hairy
gunslinging fake cowboys from pub-
lic property. She had been mildly
cheered up, she added, by following a
38 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Twitter feed with the hashtag #Bundy-
EroticFanFic.
The high desert of eastern Oregon
is one of Le Guins places. She often
goes there in the summer with her hus-
band, Charles, a professor emeritus of
history at Portland State University,
to a ranch on the stony ridge of Steens
Mountain, overlooking the refuge. She
has led writing workshops at the Mal-
heur Field Station, a group of weather-
beaten buildings used mainly by biol-
ogists and birders, and published a book
of poems and sketches of the area, with
photographs by Roger Dorband, called
Out Here. She likes the awareness back porch, where I was sitting with
the desert gives her of distance, empti-
ness, and geological time. In a poem,
centers of literary power, she makes
room in her work for other voices. She
has always defended the fantastic, by
which she means not formulaic fan-
tasy or McMagic but the imagina-
tion as a subversive force. Imagina-
tion, working at full strength, can
shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-
absorption, she has written, and make
us look up and seewith terror or with
reliefthat the world does not in fact
belong to us at all.
When I met Le Guin at her house
in Portland this summer, she was in a
happier mood. Coming out onto the
Charles in the late-afternoon sun, to
oer us a bourbon-and-ice, she was
ILLUSTRATION BY ESSY MAY
positively cheerful, her deeply lined,
expressive face bright under a cap of
short white hair, her low, warm wood-
wind voice rising into an easy laugh.
The bourbon is part of the couples
evening ritual: when they dont have
company, they have a drink before din-
ner and take turns reading to each other.
On the hillside below us, two scrub
jays traded remarks through the trees.
The cheerfulness was relative, she
told me: it was partly because a con-
ference call set for earlier that day, with
the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and
some lm people who had a project to
propose, had been postponed, leaving
her with enough energy for a conver-
sation. Her back is bent now with age
shell be eighty-seven this month
and she has to be careful with a resource
she once had in abundance. My stam-
ina gives out so damn fast these days,
she said.
The house where Le Guin has lived
for more than fty years has, in certain
respects, come to resemble its owner.
Past the barriers at the entrance
Charless menacingly thorny roses, the
lions-head knocker that guards the
doorthe dark-panelled Craftsman
living room, with its Victorian feel,
might stand for her books set in Eu-
rope, or for the great nineteenth-century
novels she has always loved, with their
warmth, humanity, and moral concern.
The front hall is surveyed by a row of
British Museum reproductions of the
Lewis chessmen, souvenirs of the Le
Guins two sabbatical years in London,
when their three children were small.
Some of her awards are in the attic,
but she keeps several, notably her rst
Hugo, from 1970, discreetly displayed
in the hall on the way to the kitchen.
A place of honor at the right of the
replace is given to a portrait of Vir-
ginia Woolf, a hand-colored print that
is a treasured gift from a writer friend.
Later, I went with her into the
kitchen, where its easy to end up in
the Le Guin household. Its a homey
room with white appliances, cream cab-
inets, and no sign of steel or marble,
as indierent to fashion as its owners.
Le Guin dresses well, but casually, fa-
voring T-shirts, and wears little jew-
elry, though occasionally she puts on
earrings fastened with clips or mag-
nets. You put the stone in front and a
tiny magnet behind your earlobe, she
explains. The trouble is that if you
bend down near the stove, for instance,
all of a sudden your earrings go wham!
and hit the stove. Its kind of exciting.
Europe ends and the West begins
outside the windows, on the back porch,
with its view stretching over the Willa-
mette River, past the city, to three vol-
canoes of the Cascade Range: the white
peak of Mt. Adams, distant Mt. Rainier,
and the sullen ash heap of Mt. St. Hel-
ens. The span of it evokes the feeling of
distance and isolation that runs through
her work, and the awareness, more often
found in science than in ction, that
what we can comprehend is a small part
of everything there is to know. Imagi-
native literature, she has written, asks us
to allow that our perception of reality
may be incomplete, our interpretation
of it arbitrary or mistaken. Michael
Chabon, a friend and admirer, sees her
as untiringly opening her work up to a
perspective, to a nature that feels some-
how beyond human, and yet fully human
and recognizable. She gives us a view
from the other side.
To talk to Le Guin is to encounter
alternatives. At her house, the writer
is present, but so is Le Guin the mother
of three, the faculty wife: the woman
writing fantasy in tandem with her
daily life. I asked her recently about a
particularly violent story that she wrote
in her early thirties, in two days, while
organizing a fth-birthday party for
her elder daughter. Its funny how you
can live on several planes, isnt it? she
said. She resists attempts to separate
her more mainstream work from her
science ction. She is a genre author
who is also a literary author, not one
or the other but indivisibly both.
Le Guin can be polemical, prone to
what one close friend calls tirades on
questions she feels strongly about. I
once watched her participate in a panel
discussion on gender and literature at
WisCon, an annual gathering of fem-
inist science-ction writers, readers,
and academics in Madison, Wiscon-
sin. Scowling like a snapping turtle, she
sat waiting for illogical remarks, which
she then gently but rmly tore to bits.
Yet a conversation with Le Guin is
often full of comic asides, laughter,
anda particularly Le Guin trait
good-natured snorts. Humor seems to
be her way of taking the edge o the
polemic, as well as an introverts chan-
nel of communication. Behind even
the lightest remarks, one is aware of a
keen intelligence and a lifetime of
thought, held back for the purposes of
casual conversation.
She has never felt at home temper-
amentally with establishments of any
kind. But now she nds the establish-
ment wanting to hear what she has to
say. Her criticism of the economics of
publishingobjections to Amazon, a
ght with Google over its digitization
of copyrighted booksis widely re-
ported in the news. Earlier this year, a
Kickstarter campaign for a documen-
tary about Le Guin, by the lmmaker
Arwen Curry, raised more than two
hundred thousand dollars, nearly three
times the requested amount. In 2000,
the Library of Congress declared her
a living legend, a designation that has
made its way into many introductions
to her readings. Last month, her Or-
sinian Tales and the novel Malafrena
appeared as a volume in the Library of
America. (She and Philip Roth are the
only living novelists included in the se-
ries.) I am getting really sick of being
referred to as the legendary, she pro-
tests, laughing. Im right here. I have
gravity. A body and all that.
I tall house in Berkeley, California, a
n the late nineteen-thirties, in a
girl climbs out the attic window onto
the roof in search of solitude. If she
scrambles far enough up the redwood
shingles, she can reach her own Mt.
Olympus, the roof s peak. From here,
she can gaze out over the rough blue
of the bay to the city of San Francisco,
row upon row of white houses climb-
ing the hills above the water. The city
is strange to hershe rarely ventures
so far from homebut the view is hers,
and splendid. Beyond it she knows
there are islands with a magical name:
the Farallons. She imagines them as
the loneliest place, the farthest west
you could go.
Meanwhile, inside the house, the
girls father is at work, thinking about
myths, magic, songs, cultural patterns
the proper territory of a professor of an-
thropology. From him she will take a
model for creative work in the midst of
a rich family life, as well as the belief
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 39
that the real room of ones own is in
the writers mind. Years later, she tells
a friend that if she ended up writing
about wizards perhaps its because I
grew up with one.
Ursula Kroeber was born in Berke-
ley, in 1929, into a family busy with the
reading, recording, telling, and invent-
ing of stories. She grew up listening to
her aunt Betsys memories of a pioneer
childhood and to California Indian leg-
ends retold by her father. One legend
of the Yurok people says that, far out
in the Pacic Ocean but not farther
than a canoe can paddle, the rim of the
sky makes waves by beating on the sur-
face of the water. On every twelfth up-
swing, the sky moves a little more slowly,
so that a skilled navigator has enough
time to slip beneath its rim, reach the
outer ocean, and dance all night on the
shore of another world.
Ursula absorbed these stories, to-
gether with the books she read: chil-
drens classics, Norse myths, Irish folk-
tales, the Iliad. In her fathers library,
she discovered Romantic poetry and
Eastern philosophy, especially the
Tao Te Ching. She and her brother
Karl supplemented these with science-
ction magazines. With Karl, the clos-
est to her in age of her three broth-
ers, she played King Arthurs knights,
in armor made of cardboard boxes.
The two also made up tales of polit-
ical intrigue and exploration set in a
stued-toy world called the Animal
Kingdom. This storytelling later gave
her a feeling of kinship with the
Bronts, whose Gondal and Angria,
she says, were the genius version of
what Karl and I did.
Her father was Alfred L. Kroeber,
one of the most inuential cultural
anthropologists of the past century. A
New Yorker from a prosperous Ger-
man immigrant family, he went west
in 1900, when he was twenty-four, and
did eld work among the Indians of
Northern California. Throughout his
career, he learned about cultures that
were rapidly being transformed or de-
stroyed from men and women who
were among the last survivors of their
people. At a time when the dominant
story of America was one of European
conquest, Ursula was aware, through
her father and his Indian friends who
came to the house, that there were
40 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
other stories to tell and other judg-
ments that might be made.
Ursulas mother was Theodora Kra-
caw Kroeber, born in Denver in 1897
and raised in the mining town of Tel-
luride. A friend of Le Guins recalls
seeing her, at the house in Berkeley,
coming down the long staircase, a
majestic-looking woman with a long
gown and a great big Indian silver
and turquoise necklace. She was very
stately. Theodora took to writing in
her late fties, and produced Ishi in
Two Worlds, a nonction account of
the last survivor of the Yahi people. Le
Guin loved her mother and admired
her psychological gifts. But she says
that their relationship also contained
something darker and stranger that
she has never quite understood. We
were very lucky, because we never had
to act that out. But if I see daughters
and mothers act it out toward each
other it doesnt shock me or surprise
me. Its there.
The Kroeber household was full of
voices as well as stories. Alfred liked
to pose philosophical questions or puz-
zles over the dinner table and ask his
four children about anything that in-
terested them. The kids were encour-
aged to take an active part in the con-
versation, but, as the little sister, Ursula
rarely got a word in: There were too
many people, and I was outshouted by
everybody else. Learning how to be
heard taught her persistence and gave
her a tendency to appear ercer than
she is. People think I mean everything
I say and am full of conviction, often,
when Im actually just oating balloons
and ready for a discussion or argument
or further pursuit of the subject. Its
my faultI speak so passionately. Prob-
ably because, as the youngest and shrill-
est child of an extraordinarily articu-
late and passionate family, I could only
be heard by charging over the top,
shouting, Marchons, marchons! Quun
sang impur abreuve nos sillons! every
time I entertained a passing opinion.
Le Guins work combines a Berke-
leyites love of alternative thought with
a strong scientic bent that she sees as
an inheritance from her father. In her
ction, she has tried to balance the an-
alytical and the intuitive. Both direc-
tions strike me as becoming more and
more sterile the farther you follow
them, she says. Its when they can
combine that you get something fer-
tile and living and leading forward.
Mysticismwhich is a word my fa-
ther held in contempt, basicallyand
scientic factualism, need for evidence,
and so on . . . I do try to juggle them,
quite consciously.
If it was dicult to be the youngest
and most precocious of the Kroeber
children, leaving the house to enter the
world made Ursula feel like an exile
in a Siberia of adolescent social mores.
In the fall of 1944, at fourteen, small
for her age, disguised in the sweater,
skirt, and loafers of a bobby-soxer (a
term that still makes her shudder), she
began her rst year at Berkeley High
School, a huge, impersonal institution
where popularity mattered more than
learning, and tting in was the ideal.
When Le Guin speaks of her teen-age
years, she speaks of loneliness, confu-
sion, and the pain of being among peo-
ple who have no use for ones gifts.
Youre just dropped into this dreadful
place, and there are no explanations
why and no directions what to do.
She found a refuge in the public li-
brary, reading Austen and the Bronts,
Turgenev and Shelley. In ction, she
could satisfy her deep romantic streak:
she fell in love with Prince Andrei in
War and Peace and once, at thirteen,
defaced a library book by cutting out
a still of Laurence Oliviers Mr. Darcy
and taking it home to look at in pri-
vate, guilty rapture. From Thomas
Hardy she learned to handle strong
feelings in ction by pouring them into
landscapes, letting the settings carry
part of the emotional charge. Theres
a patronizing word for that: the pa-
thetic fallacy, she says. Its not a fal-
lacy; its art.
As a child, she was painfully shy, and
she still alludes to anxieties that she
keeps hidden from the world. I caught
a glimpse of that when she asked me,
cautiously, Wouldnt you say that any-
body who thought as much about bal-
ance as I do in my work probably felt
some threat to their balance? After a
long pause, she added, Of course all
adolescents are out of balance, and very
aware of it. To become adult can cer-
tainly feel like walking a high wire, cant
it? If my foot slips, Im gone. Im dead.
E in Le Guins great works about ad-
quilibrium is a central metaphor
olescence, the six-volume Earthsea se-
ries, which began in 1968 with A Wiz-
ard of Earthsea. That book follows
Ged, a lonely teen-ager with a gift for
magic, who at wizards school learns a
painful lesson in achieving balance
rather than forcing change. Theres lit-
tle resemblance between the school on
Roke Island, with its Taoist magic (a
mage is taught to do by not doing),
and Harry Potters Hogwarts. There is
some resemblance between Ged, the
provincial boy with a chip on his shoul-
der, and Ursula Kroeber, the Califor-
nian in jeans arriving at Radclie Col-
lege in 1947, all books and opinions,
never before out of her home state,
eager to prove herself as a poet. Her
Radclie friend Jean Taylor Kroeber,
who became her sister-in-law, recalls
that, before she and Ursula bonded
over Russian literature, jokes, and music,
she found her a little frightening. Its
not that she meant to be, but thats the
way it came across . . . that there was
a good chance that she was ahead of
you, in wherever the conversation was
going. And one rather brief acute re-
mark could set you back on your heels.
Ursula had her rst clash with the
literary establishment when she and a
friend signed up to read submissions
for a new Radclie literary magazine,
Signature. Rona Jae worked on the
magazine, and its undergraduate con-
tributors included Edward Gorey, Har-
old Brodkey, and Adrienne Rich, whose
poem Storm Warnings was published
there. The magazine accepted nothing
of Ursulas, and she found those fellow-
students cliquish and unfriendly:
Their comments on what we submit-
ted ourselves, even the comments on
our comments, were often remarkably
savage and dismissive. We got out again
and gratefully went back to our in-
visibility. When Rich won the Yale
42 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Younger Poets Prize in her senior year,
Le Guin, still unpublished, felt pangs
of envy.
On top of that, Radclie women
were given a double message, receiv-
ing an excellent education while know-
ing, in Richs words, that the real power
(and money) were invested in Har-
vards institutions, from which we were
excluded. Though Radclie has long
since become part of Harvard, Cam-
bridge remains a place of mixed emo-
tions for Le Guin. She has told me
both that her college years were won-
derful and that she has come to dis-
like the institution; the two emotions
shadow each other. Her senior year was
marred by a handsome and arrogant
Harvard student, an accidental preg-
nancy, a broken heart, and an illegal
abortion. Im often startled at the depth
of my anger at Harvard, she told me.
I know some of the reasons for it, but
it wouldnt be so immediate and un-
controllable if it were accessible to rea-
son. I did get a splendid education
therethere was wonderful Widener,
the Fogg, the elmy campus, which I
remember fondly. But the angers there
like a mine, ready to go o at a quiver
of the ground.
Le Guin graduated from Radclie
with a degree in French, in 1951. Over
the decade that followed, she wrote
poems, short stories, and at least four
novels. She submitted them to pub-
lishers; they came back with encour-
aging rejections. She felt her way ten-
tatively forward, unsure of her direction,
lacking models. American literature
was still under the spell of Heming-
way, Faulkner, Richard Wright; real-
ism held sway, and there was little in-
terest in play or fantasy. I was going
in another direction than the critically
approved culture was, Le Guin has
said. I was never going to be Norman
Mailer or Saul Bellow. I didnt know
who my fellow-writers were. There
didnt seem to be anybody doing what
I wanted to do. She was alarmed by
the literary rivalries of the period; she
remembers thinking, Im not compet-
ing with all these guys and their em-
pires and territories. I just want to write
my stories and dig my own garden.
Instead, she found allies in foreign-
ers I never met, reading Woolf s Or-
lando, Isak Dinesens Seven Gothic
Tales, and the short stories of Sylvia
Townsend Warner, with their playful
and revelatory shifts of perspective. She
also became fascinated by the prema-
ture, failed revolutions of 1830 and the
passionate political documents of the
Romantic period, such as My Pris-
ons, by the Italian poet and patriot
Silvio Pellico. Books like that were
very exciting to me because I could
handle them better than I could the
contemporary works, she says. They
opened up the distance that I needed,
and probably have always needed, be-
tween me and the raw, implacable fact
thats going on right now. Ive never
really been able to handle that. If its
right in my face, I cant see it.
Some writers of her generation em-
braced confessional literature and, later,
memoir. Le Guin has always preferred
self-concealment to self-exposure. In
the introduction to the Library of
America volume, she writes, I have no
interest in confession. My games are
transformation and invention. In col-
lege, she began setting her ction in
an imaginary Eastern European coun-
try called Orsinia and found that it
freed her up as a writer. Away from the
small and stony ground of realism,
her imagination began to ourish. Or-
sinia also gave her the distance to com-
ment, indirectly, on Communist repres-
sion, the persecutions of the McCarthy
era, the unfreedom of the age, and her
decision to follow her own path.
During the fties, she worked on
Malafrena, a novel about a young no-
bleman who obeys his moral compass
by ghting for freedom of speech and
thought. Freedom is a human need,
like bread, like water, he insists. Pressed
to dene it, he replies, Freedom con-
sists in doing what you can do best,
your work, what you have to do. For
Le Guin freedom is a complex ideal
and a word too big and too old to be
devalued as a platitude or appropriated
by hypocrites. Of course it gets mis-
used, she says. But I dont think you
can really damage the word freedom
or liberty.
A Cannon Beach, a summer town
nother of Le Guins places is
on the Oregon coast where she and
Charles have a small house on a street
leading to the ocean. Although she
claims to share her fathers incapacity
for reminiscence, she and I went there
to talk about her past. The prospect
made her uncomfortable at rst, and
when we entered the shut-up house
she threw nervous energy into clean-
ing, enlisting me to stand on a chair
and brush cobwebs o the ceiling. At
a little kitchen table, over tea served in
the indestructible handmade earthen-
ware mugs of the seventies, she com-
mented, somewhat deantly, that she
had always taken pleasure in cooking
and keeping house. It sounded like crit-
icism of the heroic writer, alone in his
garret, but theres more to it than that.
She feels that marriage and family have
given her a stability that supported her
writingthe freedom of solitude within
the solidity of household life. An art-
ist can go o into the private world
they create, and maybe not be so good
at nding the way out again, she told
me. This could be one reason Ive al-
ways been grateful for having a family
and doing housework, and the stupid
ordinary stu that has to be done that
you cannot let go.
When Ursula graduated from Rad-
clie, her plan was to get her doctor-
ate and become an academic, like her
three older brothers. She got her mas-
ters in Romance languages at Colum-
bia University, then received a Fulbright
fellowship to do research in France for
her dissertation. On the boat going
over, she met Charles LeGuin, a his-
torian with an attractive Georgia ac-
cent who was writing his thesis on the
French Revolution. They shared a sense
of humor; they liked the same books;
in Paris, they went together to the opera
and the Louvre. Within two weeks
they were engaged. When they applied
for a marriage license, a triumphant
bureaucrat told Charles his Breton
name was spelled wrong without a
space, so when they married they both
took the name Le Guin.
Ursula abandoned her Ph.D. thesis
on medieval French poetry, and while
Charles nished researching his own
thesis she read, wrote, and talked with
him about Europe and revolution.
Charles became the rst reader for all
her work, made sure she got time to
write, and when they had children
shared in their care. They spent the
next few years in Georgia and Idaho,
With the money well save by shutting down quality control,
we can issue some truly spectacular apologies.
until, in 1959, Charles got the job at
Portland State. Ursula recalls ying up
from Berkeley with a child on her lap
and pregnant with her second. The
plane came in low up the Willamette
Valley and circled the city, and I was
in tears, it was so beautiful. I thought,
My God, Im going to live there.
Stubbornness and a self-confessed
arrogance about her work helped Le
Guin through her unpublished years.
Then and now, she feels that she is the
best judge of her writing; she is un-
moved by literary trends, and not eas-
ily swayed by editorial suggestion. Writ-
ing was always my inmost way of being
in the world, she says, but that made
rejections increasingly painful: I suered
a good deal from the contradiction be-
tween knowing writing was the job I
was born for and nding nowhere to
have that knowledge conrmed. Then,
in 1961 and 1962, two of Le Guins sto-
ries were published. One, set in Orsinia,
a meditation on the consolations of art,
went to a small literary journal. The sec-
ond, about a junior professor liberated
from academia by an act of magic, was
bought by the science-ction magazine
Fantastic.
I just didnt know what to do with
my stu until I stumbled into science
ction and fantasy, Le Guin says. And
then, of course, they knew what to do
with it. They were the editors, fans,
and fellow-authors who gave her an
audience for her work. If science c-
tion was down-market, it was at least
a market. More than that, genre sup-
plied a ready-made set of tools, includ-
ing spaceships, planets, and aliens, plus
a realmthe futurethat set no lim-
its on the imagination. She found that
science ction suited what she called,
in a letter to her mother, her peculiar
talent, and she felt a lightheartedness
in her writing that had to do with let-
ting go of ambitions and constraints.
In the fall of 1966, when she was thirty-
seven, Le Guin began A Wizard of
Earthsea. In the next few yearswhich
also saw her march against the Viet-
nam War and dance in a conga line
with Allen Ginsberg, when he came
to Portland to read Vedas for peace
she produced her great early work, in-
cluding, in quick succession, The Left
Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of
Heaven, The Farthest Shore, and
The Dispossessed, her ambitious
novel of anarchist utopia.
Science ction opened her up fur-
ther to writing from alien points of
viewcomposing the political mani-
festo of an ant, wondering what it would
be like if humans had the seasonal sex-
uality of birds, imagining love in a so-
ciety in which a marriage involves four
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 43
people. Le Guin says her ambition has
always been not just trying to get into
other minds but other beings. She
adds, Somewhere in the nineteenth
century a line got drawn: you cant do
this for grownups. But fantasy and sci-
ence ction just kind of walked around
the line. Another use of the fantastic
for Le Guin was to bring her ethical
concerns into her ction without be-
coming didactic. Take a metaphor far
enough and it becomes a parable, as
with her widely anthologized story
The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas. Le Guins story begins with
an ethical question posed by William
James: If all could be made blissfully
happy by the fact that one person was
being kept in torment, would we ac-
cept that condition? She gives the prob-
lem just enough reality for the reader
to picture the single abused child and
feel the consequences of the bargain.
Her inuential thought experiment
The Left Hand of Darkness uses
this strategy to explore gender and al-
terity. Genly Ai, a man from a future
Earth, arrives on the planet Gethen,
which is inhabited by human beings
who are neither male nor female but,
for a few days a month, in a sexual
phase, can become either. Ai, as a per-
manent male, is to them a pervert.
Welcome to tonights panel on interfaith humor.
His isolation and wariness are mir-
rored in the landscape of Gethen, a
place of perpetual winter.
No one trusts Ai but Estraven, a
Gethenian who is in exile; these two
characters take turns narrating the book,
so that we see how strange they appear
to each other, and how they struggle
to connect. Among the books central
themes are balancelight is the left
hand of darkness, the Gethenian say-
ing goesand trust.These are set against
anxieties about otherness, about con-
trol and the loss of it. Estraven hopes
that Ai can prevent impending war be-
tween two rival states, and asks him:
Do you know, by your own experience,
what patriotism is?
No, I said, shaken by the force of that in-
tense personality suddenly turning itself wholly
upon me. I dont think I do. If by patriotism
you dont mean the love of ones homeland,
for that I do know.
No, I dont mean love, when I say patrio-
tism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And
its expressions are political, not poetical: hate,
rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear.
To fulll this mission, Ai must see
beyond his own narrow perspective
and learn to trust, even love, this per-
son whose nature calls his own into
question.
The novel earned Le Guin her rst
Hugo and Nebula awards, the top hon-
ors in science ction; her migration
from the margins was well under way.
Despite her growing success, she
suered periods of depression in the
nineteen-sixtiesdark passages that
I had to work through is how she de-
scribed them to me, as if they were
vexed sequences in a novel. She wrote
them into her ction, she added, in the
Earthsea novel The Farthest Shore,
exploring a metaphor she borrowed
from Rilkes Duino Elegies: depres-
sion as a journey through the silent
land of the dead.
Another dicult time for her came
in the long period that began after
The Dispossessed was published, in
1974, when she was rethinking the sub-
jects of her work. She had been writ-
ing about imaginary revolutions, but
by then an actual liberation movement,
feminism, was gaining traction. In the
light of the personal is political, her
Left Hand of Darkness seemed to
some readers too oblique and meta-
phorical, her sense of play not illumi-
nating but evasive. Up until then, al-
most all of Le Guins protagonists had
been male, and she wasnt sure how to
write from a womans perspective, es-
pecially since she had long resisted
writing directly from personal experi-
ence. As a wife and mother who had
always had her husbands support, she
was wary of the angry anti-family rhet-
oric of some mid-nineteen-seventies
feminists. She explained, I had lost
condence in the kind of writing I had
been doing because I was (mostly un-
consciously) struggling to learn how
to write as a woman, not as an hon-
orary man as before, and with a free-
dom that scared me.
She went on working steadily, writ-
ing short stories, essays, poetry, and
young-adult ction. She revised and
published some of her older work: Or-
sinian Tales (which was a nalist for
a National Book Award) appeared in
1976; Malafrena in 1979. She did begin
writing from female points of view. But
her turn to writing as a woman, while
it won her new readers, alienated part
of her old audience. Some of her new
work was criticized as unsubtle or mor-
alistic. Her mother died in 1979, a pain-
ful loss. She came to think of this time
as the dark hard place.
 Le Guin emerged from this period
by stepping over the boundaries that
separated science ction and literature.
Starting in the nineteen-eighties, she
published some of her most accom-
plished workction that was realist,
magic realist, postmodernist, and sui
generis. She wrote the Borgesian fem-
inist parable She Unnames Them,
and in 1985 an experimental tour de
force of a novel, Always Coming
Home. She produced Sur, the epic
tale of an all-female Antarctic explor-
ing party that may be her greatest and
funniest feminist statement. Her short
stories began appearing in The New
Yorker, where her editor, Charles Mc-
Grath, saw in her an ability to trans-
form genre ction into something
higher.
In fact, it was the mainstream that
ended up transformed. By breaking
down the walls of genre, Le Guin
handed new tools to twenty-rst-cen-
tury writers working in what Chabon
calls the borderlands, the place where
the fantastic enters literature. A group
of writers as unlike as Chabon, Molly
Gloss, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler,
Junot Daz, Jonathan Lethem, Victor
LaValle, Zadie Smith, and David
Mitchell began to explore whats pos-
sible when they combine elements of
realism and fantasy. The fantasy and
science-ction scholar Brian Attebery
has noted that every writer I know
tional Book Awards ceremony. In a
new collection of nonction, Words
Are My Matter, she writes that draft-
ing her six-minute speech took her six
months. I rethought and replanned it,
anxiously, over and over. Even on a
poem, Ive never worked so long and
so obsessively, or with so little assur-
ance that what I was saying was right,
was what I ought to say. But, having
clashed with corporate publishing in
the past, she felt an obligation to take
the industry to task.
Standing at the lectern, she gave an
uncharacteristically apologetic smile.
Then she scowled at her audience of
editors and publishers and unleashed
a tirade. I see sales departments given
control over editorial. I see my own
publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance
and greed, charging public libraries for
an e-book six or seven times more than
they charge customers. . . . And I see a
lot of us, the producers, who write the
books and make the books, accepting
thisletting commodity proteers sell wary young woman, ill at ease in front
us like deodorant and tell us what to
publish, and what to write. Instead,
she admonished them, Well need
writers who can remember freedom
poets, visionariesrealists of a larger
reality. At her conclusion, members of
the audience hesitated, looked around,
and then slowly rose to their feet for
an ovation.
in her dislikes. (The enthusiasms in-
clude works by Saramago, Rushdie, and
Atwood; the dislikes include present-
tense narration, ction about dysfunc-
tional American suburban families,
and mainstream writers who attempt
science ction without understanding
its rules.) She is turning more now to
poetry; her most recent collection, Late
in the Day, was published last year.
She told me she was writing some
poems exploring extreme old age, play-
ing with the metaphor of an explorers
sea voyage to the West. I think some
testimony from the late eighties could
be useful to people, she said. Then she
added, laughing, Other people in their
late eighties might want to read it. I
dont know about anybody in their
late fties: Oh, God, I dont want to
go there.
At the house in Cannon Beach, she
showed me the familys photo albums.
Over the years, Le Guins author pho-
tos show a steady progression from a
of the camera, to someone more at
home in a public role. But I had asked
about the private photos, and here was
Ursula, age six or seven, with short
black hair, bare-legged on dusty Cal-
ifornia ground, playing with a toy car
and staring into the distance at some-
thing unseen.
I like that one, she told me. I look
feral. I guess I was rather feral.

S Le Guin returned in earnest to his-

who talks about Ursula talks about a
sense of having been invited or em-
powered to do something. Given that
many of Le Guins protagonists have
dark skin, the science-ction writer
N. K. Jemisin speaks of the importance
to her and others of encountering in
fantasy someone who looked like them.
Karen Joy Fowler, a friend of Le Guins
whose novel We Are All Completely
Beside Ourselves questions the nature
of the human-animal bond, says that
Le Guin oered her alternatives to re-
alism by bringing the fantastic out of
its underdog position. For writers,
she says, Le Guin makes you think
many things are possible that you maybe
didnt think were possible.
Le Guin still has strong feelings
about artistic liberty. In November,
2014, she travelled to New York with
her son, Theo, to accept the Distin-
guished Contribution medal at the Na-
tarting in the nineteen-nineties,
torical ction, in Lavinia, and to sci-
ence ction and fantasy. Some of her
best late work in this mode appears
in The Found and the Lost, a new
eight-hundred-plus-page compen-
dium of her novellas. But a few years
ago Le Guin stopped writing ction,
saying it took an energy she didnt
havealthough she doesnt rule out
anything in the future. Never and
last, she wrote in a recent blog post,
are closing words. Having spent a
good deal of my life trying to open
closed doors and windows, I have no
intention of going around slamming
them shut now.
She still gives readings, which at-
tract a notably youthful audience. And
she writes nonction, including book
reviews for the Guardian, in which she
is glowing in her enthusiasms and erce
Then there was Ursula at the Arc
de Triomphe, a gamine holding an arm-
ful of roses, and Charles, looking dash-
ing in a new Parisian coat, climbing
Mont Sainte-Victoire. Infants enter
the pictures, then small children. In a
photo of Ursula in her twenties, she
glances up from a typewriter with a
look Id come to recognize: startled,
her eyes unfocussed, her thoughts in a
place the camera cant follow.
The next morning, Le Guin stood
in the front yard of her house at the
edge of the world, feeding a family
of crows. The sun was out, and a
block away the surf beat gently on the
broad beach, where the town meets the
waters of the North Pacic. Here the
land seemed undone by the unknown
distances of the ocean, and Le Guin
seemed to be standing where the forces
met, gazing beyond her garden to some
farther shore.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 45

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN
W
hen Leonard Cohen was
twenty-ve, he was living
in London, sitting in cold
rooms writing sad poems. He got by
on a three-thousand-dollar grant from
the Canada Council for the Arts. This
was 1960, long before he played the
festival at the Isle of Wight in front
of six hundred thousand people. In
those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the
provincial abroad, a refugee from the
Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose
family was both prominent and cul-
tivated, had an ironical view of him-
self. He was a bohemian with a cush-
ion whose rst purchases in London
were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue
raincoat at Burberry. Even before he
had much of an audience, he had a dis-
tinct idea of the audience he wanted.
In a letter to his publisher, he said that
he was out to reach inner-directed
adolescents, lovers in all degrees of an-
guish, disappointed Platonists, por-
nography-peepers, hair-handed monks
and Popists.
Cohen was growing weary of Lon-
dons rising damp and its gray skies.
An English dentist had just yanked
one of his wisdom teeth. After weeks
of cold and rain, he wandered into a
bank and asked the teller about his
deep suntan. The teller said that he had
just returned from a trip to Greece.
Cohen bought an airline ticket.
Not long afterward, he alighted in
Athens, visited the Acropolis, made
his way to the port of Piraeus, boarded
a ferry, and disembarked at the island
of Hydra. With the chill barely out of
his bones, Cohen took in the horse-
shoe-shaped harbor and the people
drinking cold glasses of retsina and
eating grilled sh in the cafs by the
water; he looked up at the pines and
the cypress trees and the whitewashed
houses that crept up the hillsides. There
was something mythical and primi-
tive about Hydra. Cars were forbid-
46 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
PROFILES
Leonard Cohen at eighty-two.
BY DAVID REMNICK
den. Mules humped water up the long
stairways to the houses. There was
only intermittent electricity. Cohen
rented a place for fourteen dollars a
month. Eventually, he bought a white-
washed house of his own, for fteen
hundred dollars, thanks to an inheri-
tance from his grandmother.
Hydra promised the life Cohen had
craved: spare rooms, the empty page,
eros after dark. He collected a few
paran lamps and some used furni-
ture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a
writing table, chairs like the chairs
that van Gogh painted. During the
day, he worked on a sexy, phantasma-
goric novel called The Favorite Game
and the poems in a collection titled
Flowers for Hitler. He alternated be-
tween extreme discipline and the va-
rieties of abandon. There were days of
fasting to concentrate the mind. There
were drugs to expand it: pot, speed,
acid. I took trip after trip, sitting on
my terrace in Greece, waiting to see
God, he said years later. Generally, I
ended up with a bad hangover.
Here and there, Cohen caught
glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian
woman. Her name was Marianne
Ihlen, and she had grown up in the
countryside near Oslo. Her grand-
mother used to tell her, You are go-
ing to meet a man who speaks with a
tongue of gold. She thought she al-
ready had: Axel Jensen, a novelist
from home, who wrote in the tradi-
tion of Jack Kerouac and William Bur-
roughs. She had married Jensen, and
they had a son, little Axel. Jensen was
not a constant husband, however, and,
by the time their child was four months
old, Jensen was, as Marianne put it,
over the hills again with another
woman.
One spring day, Ihlen was with her
infant son in a grocery store and caf.
I was standing in the shop with my
basket waiting to pick up bottled water
and milk, she recalled decades later,
on a Norwegian radio program. He
is standing in the doorway with the
sun behind him. Cohen asked her to
join him and his friends outside. He
was wearing khaki pants, sneakers, a
shirt with rolled sleeves, and a cap.
The way Marianne remembered it, he
seemed to radiate enormous compas-
sion for me and my child. She was
taken with him. I felt it throughout
my body, she said. A lightness had
come over me.
Cohen had known some success
with women. He would know a great
deal more. For a troubadour of sad-
nessthe godfather of gloom, he
was later calledCohen found fre-
quent respite in the arms of others.
As a young man, he had a kind of
Michael Corleone Before the Fall look,
sloe-eyed, dark, a little hunched, but
high courtesy and verbal uency were
his charm. When he was thirteen, he
read a book on hypnotism. He tried
out his new discipline on the family
housekeeper, and she took o her
clothes. Not everyone over the years
was quite as bewitched. Nico spurned
him, and Joni Mitchell, who had once
been his lover, remained a friend but
dismissed him as a boudoir poet. But
these were the exceptions.
Leonard began spending more and
more time with Marianne. They went
to the beach, made love, kept house.
Once, when they were apartMari-
anne and Axel in Norway, Cohen in
Montreal scraping up some money
he sent her a telegram: Have house
all I need is my woman and her son.
Love, Leonard.
There were times of separation,
times of argument and jealousy. When
Marianne drank, she could go into a
dark rage. And there were indelities
on both sides. (Good gracious. All the
girls were panting for him, Marianne
recalled. I would dare go as far as to
Leonard Cohen at home, Los Angeles, September, 2016.
PHOTOGRAPH
BY GRAEME MITCHELL THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 47

Less bromance, more broductivity.
say that I was on the verge of killing
myself due to it.)
In the mid-sixties, as Cohen started
to record his songs and win worldly suc-
cess, Marianne became known to his
fans as that antique gurethe muse.
A memorable photograph of her, dressed
only in a towel, and sitting at the desk
in the house on Hydra, appeared on the
back of Cohens second album, Songs
from a Room. But, after theyd been
together for eight years, the relation-
ship came apart, little by littlelike
falling ashes, as Cohen put it.
Cohen was spending more time
away from Hydra pursuing his career.
Marianne and Axel stayed on awhile
on Hydra, then left for Norway. Even-
tually, Marianne married again. But
life had its burdens, particularly for
Axel, who has had persistent health
problems. What Cohens fans knew
of Marianne was her beauty and what
it had inspired: Bird on the Wire,
Hey, Thats No Way to Say Good-
bye, and, most of all, So Long, Mar-
ianne. She and Cohen stayed in touch.
When he toured in Scandinavia, she
visited him backstage. They exchanged
letters and e-mails. When they spoke
to journalists and to friends of their
48 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
love aair, it was always in the fond-
est terms.
In late July this year, Cohen re-
ceived an e-mail from Jan Christian
Molle stad, a close friend of Mari-
annes, saying that she was suering frequent visitors, and an old friend of
from cancer. In their last communi-
cation, Marianne had told Cohen that
she had sold her beach house to help
insure that Axel would be taken care
of, but she never mentioned that she
was sick. Now, it appeared, she had
only a few days left. Cohen wrote back
immediately:
Well Marianne, its come to this time when
we are really so old and our bodies are falling
apart and I think I will follow you very soon.
Know that I am so close behind you that if you
stretch out your hand, I think you can reach
mine. And you know that Ive always loved you
for your beauty and your wisdom, but I dont
need to say anything more about that because
you know all about that. But now, I just want to
wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old
friend. Endless love, see you down the road.
Two days later, Cohen got an e-mail
from Norway:
Dear Leonard
Marianne slept slowly out of this life yes-
terday evening. Totally at ease, surrounded by
close friends.
Your letter came when she still could talk
and laugh in full consciousness. When we read
it aloud, she smiled as only Marianne can. She
lifted her hand, when you said you were right
behind, close enough to reach her.
It gave her deep peace of mind that you
knew her condition. And your blessing for the
journey gave her extra strength. . . . In her last
hour I held her hand and hummed Bird on
the Wire, while she was breathing so lightly.
And when we left the room, after her soul had
own out of the window for new adventures,
we kissed her head and whispered your ever-
lasting words.
So long, Marianne . . .
L ond oor of a modest house in Mid-
eonard Cohen lives on the sec-
Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous pre-
cinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two.
Between 2008 and 2013, he was on
tour more or less continuously. It is
highly unlikely that his health will
permit such rigors ever again. Cohen
has an album coming out in Octo-
berobsessed with mortality, God-
infused, yet funny, called You Want
It Darkerbut friends and musical
associates say theyd be surprised to
see him onstage again except in a lim-
ited way: a single performance, per-
haps, or a short residency at one venue.
When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen
out for dinner, he said that he was
more or less conned to barracks.
Not long ago, one of Cohens most
mineRobert Faggen, a professor of
literaturebrought me by the house.
Faggen met Cohen twenty years ago
in a grocery store, at the foot of Mt.
Baldy, the highest of the San Gabriel
Mountains, an hour and a half east of
Los Angeles. They were both living
near the top of the mountain: Bob in
a cabin where he wrote about Frost
and Melville and drove down the road
to teach his classes at Claremont Mc-
Kenna College; Cohen in a small Zen
Buddhist monastery, where he was an
ordained monk. As Faggen was shop-
ping for cold cuts, he heard a famil-
iar basso voice across the store; he
looked down the aisle and saw a small,
trim man, his head shaved, talking
intently with a clerk about varieties
of potato salad. Faggens musical ex-
pertise runs more to Mahlers lieder
than to popular song. But he is an
admirer of Cohens work and intro-
duced himself. They have been close
friends ever since.
 Cohen greeted us. He sat in a large
blue medical chair, the better to ease
the pain from compression fractures
in his back. He is now very thin, but
he is still handsome, with a full head
of gray-white hair and razory dark
eyes. He wore a well-tailored mid-
night-blue suiteven in the sixties he
wore suitsand a stickpin through
his collar. He extended a hand like a
courtly retired capo.
Hello, friends, he said. Please,
please, sit right there. The depth of
his voice makes Tom Waits sound like
Eddie Kendricks.
And then, like my mother, he oered
what could only have been the com-
plete catalogue of his larder: water,
juice, wine, a piece of chicken, a slice
of cake, maybe something else. In
the hours we spent together, he oered
many refreshments, and, always, kindly.
Would you like some slices of cheese
and olives? is not an oer you are
likely to get from Axl Rose. Some
vodka? A glass of milk? Schnapps?
And, as with my mother, it is best,
sometimes, to say yes. One day, we had
cheeseburgers-with-everything or-
dered from a Fatburger down the street
and, on another, thick slices of gelte
sh with horseradish.
Mariannes death was only a few
weeks in the past, and Cohen was still
amazed at the way his letteran e-mail
to a dying friendhad gone viral, at
least in the Cohen-ardent universe.
He hadnt set out to be public about
his feelings, but when one of Mari-
annes closest friends, in Oslo, asked
to release the note, he didnt object.
And since theres a song attached to
it, and theres a story . . . he said. Its
just a sweet story. So in that sense Im
not displeased.
Like anyone of his age, Cohen
counts the losses as a matter of rou-
tine. He seemed not so much devas-
tated by Mariannes death as over-
taken by the memory of their time
together. There would be a garde-
nia on my desk perfuming the whole
room, he said. There would be a lit-
tle sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweet-
ness everywhere.
Cohens songs are death-haunted,
but then they have been since his
earliest verses. A half century ago, a
record executive said, Turn around,
kid. Arent you a little old for this?
But, despite his diminished health,
Cohen remains as clear-minded and
hardworking as ever, soldierly in his
habits. He gets up well before dawn
and writes. In the small, spare living
room where we sat, there were a cou-
ple of acoustic guitars leaning against
the wall, a keyboard synthesizer, two
laptops, a sophisticated microphone
for voice recording. Working with an
old collaborator, Pat Leonard, and his
son, Adam, who has the producers
credit, Cohen did much of his work
for You Want It Darker in the liv-
ing room, e-mailing recorded les to
his partners for additional rene-
ments. Age and the end of age pro-
vide a useful, if not entirely desired,
air of quiet.
In a certain sense, this particular
predicament is lled with many fewer
distractions than other times in my
life and actually enables me to work
with a little more concentration and
continuity than when I had duties of
making a living, being a husband, being
a father, he said. Those distractions
are radically diminished at this point.
The only thing that mitigates against
full production is just the condition
of my body.
For some odd reason, he went on,
I have all my marbles, so far. I have
many resources, some cultivated on a
personal level, but circumstantial, too:
my daughter and her children live
downstairs, and my son lives two blocks
ther died; this moment, a primal
down the street. So I am extremely
blessed. I have an assistant who is de-
voted and skillful. I have a friend like
Bob and another friend or two who
make my life very rich. So in a certain
sense Ive never had it better. . . . At a
certain point, if you still have your
marbles and are not faced with seri-
ous nancial challenges, you have a
chance to put your house in order. Its
a clich, but its underestimated as an
analgesic on all levels. Putting your
house in order, if you can do it, is one
of the most comforting activities, and
the benets of it are incalculable.
C His Montreal, however, was noth-
ohen came of age after the war.
ing like Philip Roths Newark or Al-
fred Kazins Brownsville. He was
brought up in Westmount, a predom-
inantly Anglophone neighborhood,
where the citys well-to-do Jews lived.
The men in his family, particularly on
his fathers side, were the dons of Jew-
ish Montreal. His grandfather, Cohen
told me, was probably the most signi-
cant Jew in Canada, the founder of a
range of Jewish institutions; in the
wake of anti-Semitic pogroms in the
Russian imperium, he saw to it that
countless refugees made it to Canada.
Nathan Cohen, Leonards father, ran
Freedman Company, the family cloth-
ing business. His mother, Masha, came
from a family of more recent immi-
grants. She was loving, depressive,
Chekhovian in her emotional range,
according to Leonard: She laughed
and wept deeply. Mashas father, Sol-
omon Klonitzki-Kline, was a distin-
guished Talmudic scholar from Lith-
uania who completed a Lexicon of
Hebrew Homonyms. Leonard went
to ne schools, including McGill and,
for a while, Columbia. He never re-
sented the familys comforts.
I have a deep tribal sense, he said.
I grew up in a synagogue that my an-
cestors built. I sat in the third row. My
family was decent. They were good
people, they were handshake people.
So I never had a sense of rebellion.
When Leonard was nine, his fa-
wound, was when he rst used lan-
guage as a kind of sacrament. I have
some memories of him, Cohen said,
and recounted the story of his fathers
funeral, which was held at their house.
We came down the stairs, and the
con was in the living room. Con-
trary to Jewish custom, the funeral
workers had left the con open. It
was winter, and Cohen thought of the
gravediggers: it would be dicult to
break the frozen ground. He watched
his father lowered into the earth. Then
I came back to the house and I went
to his closet and I found a premade
bow tie. I dont know why I did this,
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 49
I cant even own it now, but I cut one
of the wings of the bow tie o and I
wrote something on a piece of pa
perI think it was some kind of fare
well to my fatherand I buried it in
a little hole in the back yard. And I
put that curious note in there. . . . It
was just some attraction to a ritual re
sponse to an impossible event.
Cohens uncles made sure that
Masha and her two children, Leon
ard and his sister, Esther, did not suer
any nancial decline after her husbands
death. Leonard studied; he worked in
an uncles foundry, W. R. Cuthbert &
Company, pouring metal for sinks and
piping, and at the clothing factory,
where he picked up a useful skill for
his career as a touring musician: he
learned to fold suits so they didnt wrin
kle. But, as he wrote in a journal, he
always imagined himself as a writer,
raincoated, battered hat pulled low
above intense eyes, a history of injus
tice in his heart, a face too noble for re
venge, walking the night along some
wet boulevard, followed by the sym
pathy of countless audiences . . . loved
by two or three beautiful women who
could never have him.
And yet a rockandroll life was far
from his mind. He set out to be an au
thor. As Sylvie Simmons makes plain
in her excellent biography Im Your
Man, Cohens apprenticeship was in
letters. As a teenager, his idols were
Yeats and Lorca (he named his daugh
ter after Lorca). At McGill, he read
Tolstoy, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound,
and he fell in with a circle of poets,
particularly Irving Layton. Cohen, who
published his rst poem, Satan in
Westmount, when he was nineteen,
once said of Layton, I taught him how
to dress, he taught me how to live for
ever. Cohen has never stopped writ
ing verse; the poem Steer Your Way
was published in this magazine in June.
Cohen was also taken with music.
As a kid, he had learned the songs in
the old lefty folk compendium The
Peoples Song Book, listened to Hank
Williams and other country singers on
the radio, and, at sixteen, dressed in
his fathers old sude jacket, he played
in a countrymusic combo called the
Buckskin Boys.
He took some informal guitar les
sons in his twenties from a Spaniard
50 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
he met next to a local tennis court.
After a few weeks, he picked up a a
menco chord progression. When the
man failed to appear for their fourth
lesson, Cohen called his landlady and
learned that the man had killed him
self. In a speech many years later, in
Asturias, Cohen said, I knew noth
ing about the man, why he came to
Montreal . . . why he appeared at that
tennis court, why he took his life. . . .
It was those six chords, it was that gui
tar pattern, that has been the basis of
all my songs, and all my music.
Cohen loved the masters of the
bluesRobert Johnson, Sonny Boy
Williamson, Bessie Smithand the
French storytellersingers like dith
Piaf and Jacques Brel. He put coins
in the jukebox to listen to The Great
Pretender, Tennessee Waltz, and
anything by Ray Charles. And yet
when the Beatles came along he was
indierent. Im interested in things
that contribute to my survival, he said.
I had girlfriends who really irritated
me by their devotion to the Beatles. I
didnt begrudge them their interest,
and there were songs like Hey Jude
that I could appreciate. But they didnt
seem to be essential to the kind of nour
ishment that I craved.
T tuned in to Bob Dylan, in 1961,
he same set of ears that rst
discovered Leonard Cohen, in 1966.
This was John Hammond, a patrician
related to the Vanderbilts, and by far
the most perceptive scout and pro
ducer in the business. He was instru
mental in the rst recordings of Count
Basie, Big Joe Turner, Benny Good
man, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Hol
iday. Tipped o by friends who were
following the folk scene downtown,
Hammond called Cohen and asked if
he would play for him.
Cohen was thirtytwo, a published
poet and novelist, but, though a year
older than Elvis Presley, a musical nov
ice. He had turned to songwriting
largely because he wasnt making a liv
ing as a writer. He was staying on the
fourth oor of the Chelsea Hotel, on
West Twentythird Street, and lled
notebooks during the day. At night,
he sang his songs in clubs and met
people on the scene: Patti Smith, Lou
Reed (who admired Cohens novel
Beautiful Losers), Jimi Hendrix (who
jammed with him on, of all things,
Suzanne), and, if just for a night,
Janis Joplin (giving me head on the
unmade bed / while the limousines
wait in the street).
After taking Cohen to lunch one
day, Hammond suggested that they
go to Cohens room, and, sitting on his
bed, Cohen played Suzanne, Hey,
Thats No Way to Say Goodbye, The
Stranger Song, and a few others.
When Cohen nished, Hammond
grinned and said, Youve got it.
A few months after his audition,
Cohen put on a suit and went to the
Columbia recording studios in mid
town to begin work on his rst album.
Hammond was encouraging after every
take. And after one he said, Watch
out, Dylan!
Cohens links to Dylan were obvi
ousJewish, literary, a penchant for
Biblical imagery, Hammonds tute
lagebut the work was divergent.
Dylan, even on his earliest records, was
moving toward more surrealist, free
associative language and the furious
abandon of rock and roll. Cohens lyr
ics were no less imaginative or charged,
no less ironic or selfinvestigating, but
he was clearer, more economical and
formal, more liturgical.
Over the decades, Dylan and Cohen
saw each other from time to time. In
the early eighties, Cohen went to see
Dylan perform in Paris, and the next
morning in a caf they talked about
their latest work. Dylan was especially
interested in Hallelujah. Even be
fore three hundred other performers
made Hallelujah famous with their
cover versions, long before the song
was included on the soundtrack for
Shrek and as a staple on American
Idol, Dylan recognized the beauty of
its marriage of the sacred and the pro
fane. He asked Cohen how long it
took him to write.
Two years, Cohen lied.
Actually, Hallelujah had taken
him ve years. He drafted dozens of
verses and then it was years more be
fore he settled on a nal version. In
several writing sessions, he found him
self in his underwear, banging his head
against a hotelroom oor.
Cohen told Dylan, I really like I
and I, a song that appeared on Dylans
album Indels. How long did it take
you to write that?
About fteen minutes, Dylan said.
When I asked Cohen about that
exchange, he said, Thats just the way
the cards are dealt. As for Dylans
comment that Cohens songs at the
time were like prayers, Cohen seemed
dismissive of any attempt to plumb
the mysteries of creation.
I have no idea what I am doing,
he said. Its hard to describe. As I ap-
proach the end of my life, I have even
less and less interest in examining what
have got to be very supercial evalu-
ations or opinions about the signi-
cance of ones life or ones work. I was
never given to it when I was healthy,
and I am less given to it now.
Although Cohen was steeped more
in the country tradition, he was swept
up when he heard Dylans Bringing
It All Back Home and Highway 61
Revisited. One afternoon, years later,
when the two had become friendly,
Dylan called him in Los Angeles and
said he wanted to show him a piece
of property hed bought. Dylan did
the driving.
One of his songs came on the
radio, Cohen recalled. I think it was
Just Like a Woman or something like
that. It came to the bridge of the song,
and he said, A lot of eighteen-wheelers
crossed that bridge. Meaning it was
a powerful bridge.
Dylan went on driving. After a
while, he told Cohen that a famous the counterpoint linesthey give a His tone is far from condescending or
songwriter of the day had told him, celestial character and melodic lift to mocking. He is a tough-minded lover
O.K., Bob, youre Number 1, but Im every one of his songs. As far as I know, who doesnt recognize the brush-o.
Number 2. no one else comes close to this in mod- Leonards always above it all. Sisters
Cohen smiled. Then Dylan says ern music. Even the simplest song, like of Mercy is verse after verse of four
to me, As far as Im concerned, Leon- The Law, which is structured on two distinctive lines, in perfect meter, with
ard, youre Number 1. Im Number fundamental chords, has counter- no chorus, quivering with drama. The
Zero. Meaning, as I understood it at point lines that are essential, and any- rst line begins in a minor key. The
the timeand I was not ready to dis- body who even thinks about doing second line goes from minor to major
pute itthat his work was beyond this song and loves the lyrics would and steps up, and changes melody and
measure and my work was pretty good. have to build around the counterpoint variation. The third line steps up even
Dylan, who is seventy-ve, doesnt lines. higher than that to a dierent degree,
often play the role of music critic, but His gift or genius is in his connec- and then the fourth line comes back
he proved eager to discuss Leonard tion to the music of the spheres, Dylan to the beginning. This is a deceptively
Cohen. I put a series of questions to went on. In the song Sisters of Mercy, unusual musical theme, with or with-
him about Number 1, and he answered for instance, the verses are four ele- out lyrics. But its so subtle a listener
in a detailed, critical waynothing mental lines which change and move doesnt realize hes been taken on a mu-
cryptic or elusive. at predictable intervals . . . but the tune sical journey and dropped o some-
When people talk about Leonard, is anything but predictable. The song where, with or without lyrics.
they fail to mention his melodies, just comes in and states a fact. And In the late eighties, Dylan per-
which to me, along with his lyrics, are after that anything can happen and it formed Hallelujah on the road as a
his greatest genius, Dylan said. Even does, and Leonard allows it to happen. roughshod blues with a sly, ascending
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 51

Youve been traded to Carthage for two third-round
picks and a hippopotamus.
chorus. His version sounds less like
the prettied Je Buckley version than
like a work by John Lee Hooker.That
song Hallelujah has resonance for
me, Dylan said. There again, its a
beautifully constructed melody that
steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in
quick time. But this song has a con-
nective chorus, which when it comes
in has a power all of its own. The
secret chord and the point-blank
I-know-you-better-than-you-know-
yourself aspect of the song has plenty
of resonance for me.
I asked Dylan whether he preferred
Cohens later work, so colored with
intimations of the end. I like all of
Leonards songs, early or late, he said.
Going Home, Show Me the Place,
The Darkness. These are all great
songs, deep and truthful as ever and
multidimensional, surprisingly me-
lodic, and they make you think and
feel. I like some of his later songs even
better than his early ones. Yet theres
a simplicity to his early ones that I
like, too.
Dylan defended Cohen against the
familiar critical reproach that his is
music to slit your wrists by. He com-
pared him to the Russian Jewish im-
migrant who wrote Easter Parade. I
52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
see no disenchantment in Leonards
lyrics at all, Dylan said. Theres al-
ways a direct sentiment, as if hes hold-
ing a conversation and telling you
something, him doing all the talking,
but the listener keeps listening. Hes
very much a descendant of Irving Ber-
lin, maybe the only songwriter in mod-
ern history that Leonard can be di-
rectly related to. Berlins songs did the
same thing. Berlin was also connected
to some kind of celestial sphere. And,
like Leonard, he probably had no clas-
sical-music training, either. Both of
them just hear melodies that most of
us can only strive for. Berlins lyrics
also fell into place and consisted of
half lines, full lines at surprising inter-
vals, using simple elongated words.
Both Leonard and Berlin are incred-
ibly crafty. Leonard particularly uses
chord progressions that seem classical
in shape. He is a much more savvy mu-
sician than youd think.
C ing unnerving. His rst major at-
ohen has always found perform-
tempt came in 1967, when Judy Col-
lins asked him to play at Town Hall,
in New York, at an anti-Vietnam War
benet. The idea was that he would
make his stage dbut by singing Su-
zanne, an early song of his that Col-
lins had turned into a hit after he sang
it to her on the telephone.
I cant do it, Judy, he told her. I
would die from embarrassment.
As Collins writes in her memoir,
she nally cajoled him into it, but that
night, from the wings, she could see
that Cohen, his legs shaking inside
his trousers, was in trouble. He got
halfway through the rst verse and
then stopped and mumbled an apol-
ogy. I cant go on, he said and walked
o into the wings.
Out of sight, Cohen rested his head
on Collinss shoulder as she tried to
get him to respond to the encourag-
ing shouts from the crowd. I cant do
it, he said. I cant go back.
But you will, she said, and, nally,
he acceded. He went out, with the
crowd cheering, and nished singing
Suzanne.
Since then, Cohen has played thou-
sands of concerts all over the world,
but it did not become second nature
until he was in his seventies. He was
never one of those musicians who talk
about feeling most alive and at home
onstage. Although he has had many
successful performance strategies
wry self-abnegation, drugs, drink
the act of giving concerts often made
him feel like some parrot chained to
his stand. He is also a perfectionist;
a classic like Famous Blue Raincoat
still feels unnished to him.
It stems from the fact that you are
not as good as you want to bethats
really what nervousness is, Cohen
told me. That rst time I went out
with Judy Collins, it wasnt to be the
last time I felt this.
In 1972, Cohen, now accompanied
by a full complement of musicians
and singers, arrived in Jerusalem at
the end of a long tour. Just to be in
that city was, for Cohen, a charged
situation. (The following year, during
the war with Egypt, Cohen showed
up in Israel, hoping to replace some-
one who had been drafted. I am com-
mitted to the survival of the Jewish
people, he told an interviewer at the
time. He ended up performing, often
many times a day, for the troops on
the front.) Out onstage, Cohen started
singing Bird on the Wire. He
stopped after the audience greeted
the opening chords and phrase with
applause.
I really enjoy your recognizing
these songs, he said. But Im scared
enough as it is out here, and I think
something is wrong every time you
begin to applaud. So if you do recog-
nize this song, would you just wave
your hands?
He fumbled again, and what at rst
had seemed like performative charm
now appeared to signal genuine anx-
iety. I hope you bear with me, he
said. These songs become medita-
tions for me and sometimes, you know,
I just dont get high on it and I feel
that Im cheating you. Ill try it again.
If it doesnt work, Ill stop in the mid-
dle. Theres no reason why we should
mutilate a song just to save face.
Cohen began singing One of Us
Cannot Be Wrong.
I lit a thin green candle . . .
He stopped again, laughing, unnerved.
More fumbling, more deective jokes.
I have my rights up here, too, you
know, he said, still smiling. I can sit
around and talk if I want to.
By then, it was apparent that there
was a problem. Look, if it doesnt get
any better, well just end the concert
and Ill refund your money, Cohen
said. I really feel that were cheating
you tonight. Some nights, one is raised
o the ground, and some nights you
just cant get o the ground. And theres
no point in lying about it. And to-
night we just havent been getting o
the ground, and it says in the Kab-
balah . . . The Jerusalem audience
laughed at the mention of the Jewish
mystical text. It says in the Kabbalah
that if you cant get o the ground you
should stay on the ground! No, it says
in the Kabbalah that, unless Adam
and Eve face each other, God does not
sit on his throne, and somehow the
male and female parts of me refuse to
encounter one another tonightand
God does not sit on his throne. And
this is a terrible thing to have happen
in Jerusalem. So, listen, were going to
leave the stage now and try to pro-
foundly meditate in the dressing room
to get ourselves back into shape.
I recalled this incident to Cohen
its captured on a documentary lm
that oats around the Internetand
he remembered it well.
It was at the end of the tour, he
told me. I thought I was doing very
poorly. I went back to the dressing
room, and I found some acid in my
guitar case. He took the acid. Mean-
while, out in the hall, the audience
started singing to Cohen as if to in-
spire him and call him back. The song
was a traditional one, Hevenu Sha-
lom Aleichem, We Have Brought
Peace Upon You.
How sweet can an audience pos-
sibly be? Cohen recalled. So I go
out on the stage with the band . . .
and I started singing So Long, Mar-
ianne. And I see Marianne straight
in front of me and I started crying. I
turned around and the band was cry-
ing, too. And then it turned into
something in retrospect quite comic:
the entire audience turned into one
Jew! And this Jew was saying, What
else can you show me, kid? Ive seen
a lot of things, and this dont move
the dial! And this was the entire skep-
tical side of our tradition, not just
writ large but manifested as an ac-
tual gigantic being! Judging me hardly
begins to describe the operation. It
was a sense of invalidation and irrel-
evance that I felt was authentic, be-
cause those feelings have always cir-
culated around my psyche: Where do
you get to stand up and speak? For
what and whom? And how deep is
your experience? How signicant is
anything you have to say? . . . I think
I wish Id never bought Harold that 3-D printer.
it really invited me to deepen my prac-
tice. Dig in deeper, whatever it was,
take it more seriously.
Back inside the dressing room,
Cohen wept ercely. I cant make it,
man, he said. I dont like it. Period.
So Im splitting.
He went out one last time to speak
to the audience.
Listen, people, my band and I are
all crying backstage. Were too broken
up to go on. But I just want to tell
you, thank you and good night.
The next year, he told the press,
half-seriously, that the rock life was
overwhelming him. I dont nd my-
self leading a life that has many good
moments in it, he told a reporter for
Melody Maker. So Ive decided to
screw it. And go.
F revered than bought. Although his
or many years, Cohen was more
albums generally sold well enough,
they did not move on the scale of big
rock acts. In the early eighties, when
he presented his record company with
Various Positionsa magnicent
album that included Hallelujah,
Dance Me to the End of Love, and
If It Be Your WillWalter Yetniko,
the head of CBS Records, argued with
him about the mix.
Look, Leonard, he said, we know
youre great, but we dont know if youre
any good. Eventually, Cohen learned
that CBS had decided not to release the
album in the U.S. Years later, accepting
an award, he thanked his record com-
pany by saying, I have always been
touched by the modesty of their inter-
est in my work.
Suzanne Vega, a singer-songwriter
who is in her late fties, sometimes
tells a funny story onstage about Co-
hens secret-handshake appeal. When
she was eighteen, she was teaching
dance and folksinging at a summer
camp in the Adirondacks. One night,
she met a handsome young man, a
counsellor from another camp up the
road. He was from Liverpool. And his
opening line was Do you like Leon-
ard Cohen?
This was nearly four decades ago,
and, in Vegas memory, admirers of
Leonard Cohen in those days were a
kind of secret society. Whats more,
there was a particular way to answer
the young mans semi-innocent ques-
tion: Yes, I love Leonard Cohen
but only in certain moods. Other-
wise, your new friend might think you
were a depressive.
But because the young man was
English, and not given to the fake
cheer of Americans, he replied, I love
Leonard Cohen all the time. The re-
sult, she says, was an aair that lasted
for the rest of the summer.
In the years to come, Cohens songs
were fundamental to Vegas own sense
of lyrical precision and possibility. It
was the way he wrote about compli-
cated things, Vega told me recently.
It was very intimate and personal.
Dylan took you to the far ends of the
expanding universe, eight minutes of
one hand waving free, and I loved
that, but it didnt sound like anything
I did or was likely to doit wasnt
very earthly. Leonards songs were a
combination of very real details and a
sense of mystery, like prayers or spells.
And there was the other thing, too.
Once, after Cohen and Vega became
friendly, he called and asked her to
visit him at his hotel. They met out
by the pool. He asked if she wanted
to hear his latest song.
And as I listened to him recite this
songit was a long oneI watched
as one woman after another, all in bi-
kinis, arranged themselves on beach
chairs behind Leonard, Vega recalled.
After he nished reciting, I said to
54 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Leonard, Have you noticed these
women in bikinis arranging them-
selves here? And completely deadpan,
without glancing around, Leonard
said, It works every time.
A world of such allurements had
costs as well as rewards. In the seven-
ties, Cohen had two children, Lorca
and Adam, with his common-law wife,
Suzanne Elrod. That relationship z-
zled when the decade did. Touring
had its charms, but it, too, wore down
his spirits. After a tour in 1993, Cohen
felt utterly depleted. I was drinking
at least three bottles of Chteau La-
tour before performances, he said, al-
lowing that he always poured a glass
for others. The wine bill was enor-
mous. Even then, I think, Chteau
Latour was over three hundred bucks
a bottle. But it went so beautifully with
the music! I dont know why. When I
tried to drink it when there wasnt a
performance coming, it meant noth-
ing! I might as well have been drink-
ing Wild Duck or whatever they call
it. I mean, it had no signicance.
At the same time, a long relation-
ship with the actress Rebecca De Mor-
nay was beginning to come undone.
She got wise to me, Cohen has said.
Finally she saw I was a guy who just
couldnt come across. In the sense of
being a husband and having more chil-
dren and the rest. De Mornay, who
remains friends with Cohen, told the
biographer Sylvie Simmons that he
was having all these relationships with
women and not really committing . . .
and having this long relationship to
his career and yet feeling like its the
last thing he wants to be doing.
S uncles in his grandfathers syna-
ince his days davening next to his
gogue, Cohen has been a spiritual
seeker. Anything, Roman Catholi-
cism, Buddhism, LSD, Im for any-
thing that works, he once said. In the
late sixties, when he was living in New
York, he studied briey at a Scientol-
ogy center and emerged with a certi-
cate that declared him Grade IV Re-
lease. In recent years, he spent many
Shabbat mornings and Monday eve-
nings at Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue
on Venice Boulevard, talking about
Kabbalistic texts with the rabbi there,
Mordecai Finley. Sometimes, on Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Finley,
who says that he considers Cohen a
great liturgical writer, read from the
pulpit passages from Book of Mercy,
a 1984 collection of Cohens that is
steeped in the Psalms. I participated
in all these investigations that engaged
the imagination of my generation at
that time, Cohen has said. I even
danced and sang with the Hare Krish-
nasno robe, I didnt join them, but
I was trying everything.
To this day, Cohen reads deeply in
a multivolume edition of the Zohar,
the principal text of Jewish mysticism;
the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts.
In our conversations, he mentioned
the Gnostic Gospels, Lurianic Kab-
balah, books of Hindu philosophy, Carl
Jungs Answer to Job, and Gershom
Scholems biography of Sabbatai Sevi,
a self-proclaimed Messiah of the sev-
enteenth century. Cohen is also very
much at home in the spiritual reaches
of the Internet, and he listens to the
lectures of Yakov Leib HaKohain, a
Kabbalist who has converted, serially,
to Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism,
and lives in the San Bernardino moun-
tains with two pit bulls and four cats.
For forty years, Cohen was associ-
ated with a Japanese Zen master named
Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. (Roshi
is an honoric for a venerated teacher,
and Cohen always refers to him that
way.) Roshi, who died two years ago
at the age of a hundred and seven, ar-
rived in Los Angeles in 1962 but never
quite learned the language of his adop-
tive home. Through his translators,
though, he adapted traditional Japa-
nese koans for his American students:
How do you realize Buddha nature
while driving a car? Roshi was short,
stout, a drinker of sake and expensive
Scotch. I came to have a good time,
he once said of his sojourn in the States.
I want Americans to learn how to truly
laugh.
Until the early nineties, Cohen used
to study with Roshi at the Zen Cen-
ter, on Mt. Baldy, for periods of learn-
ing and meditation that stretched
over two or three months a year. He
considered Roshi a close friend, a
spiritual master, and a deep inuence
on his work. And so, not long after
getting home from the Chteau La-
tour tour, in 1993, Cohen went up to
 SKETCHBOOK BY BARRY BLITT

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 55

Mt. Baldy. This time, he stayed for
nearly six years.
Nobody goes into a Zen monastery
as a tourist, Cohen told me. There
are people who do, but they leave in
ten minutes because the life is very
rigorous. You are getting up at two-
thirty in the morning; the camp wakes
up at three, but you have to light res
in the zendo. The cabins are only heated
a few hours a day. Theres snow com-
ing in under the badly carpentered
doors. Youre shovelling snow half
the day. And the other half of the day
youre sitting in the zendo. So in a cer-
tain sense you toughen up. Whether
it has a spiritual aspect is debatable.
It helps you endure, and it makes whin-
ing the least appropriate response to
suering. Just on that level its very
valuable.
Cohen lived in a tiny cabin that he
outtted with a coeemaker, a meno-
rah, a keyboard, and a laptop. Like the
other adepts, he cleaned toilets. He
had the honor of cooking for Roshi
and eventually lived in a cabin that
was linked to his teachers by a cov-
ered walkway. For many hours a day,
he sat in half lotus, meditating. If he,
or anyone else, nodded o during med-
itation or lost the proper position, one
of the monks would come by and rap
him smartly on the shoulder with a
wooden stick.
People have the idea that a mon-
astery is a place of serenity and con-
templation, Cohen said. It isnt that some former students, writing in In-
at all. Its a hospital, and a lot of the
people who end up there can barely
walk or speak. So a lot of the activity
there is to get people to learn how to
walk and speak and breathe and pre-
pare their own meals or shovel their
own paths in the winter.
Allen Ginsberg once asked Cohen
how he could reconcile his Judaism
with Zen. Cohen said that he wasnt
looking for a new religion, that he was
well satised with the religion he had.
Zen made no mention of God; it de-
manded no scriptural devotion. For
him, Zen was a discipline rather than
a religion, a practice of investigation.
I put on those robes because that was
Roshis school and that was the uni-
form, he said. Had Roshi been a pro-
fessor of physics at the University of
Heidelberg, Cohen says, he would
have learned German and moved to
Heidelberg.
Roshi, toward the end of his life,
was accused of sexual misconduct. He
was never charged with any crime, but
ternet chat rooms and in letters to
Roshi himself, said that he had sexu-
ally groped or coerced many Buddhist
students and nuns. An independent
Buddhist panel determined that the
behavior had been going on since the
seventies, and that those who chose
to speak out were silenced, exiled, rid-
iculed, or otherwise punished, accord-
ing to the Times.
One morning, Bob Faggen drove
me up the mountain to the Zen Cen-
ter. A former Boy Scout camp, the cen-
ter comprises a series of rough-hewn
cabins surrounded by pines and cedars.
It was striking how few people were
around. One monk told me that Roshi
had left no successor and that the cen-
ter had not yet recovered from the scan-
dal. Cohen, for his part, took pains to
explain Roshis transgressions without
excusing them. Roshi, he said, was
a very naughty guy.
In 1996, Cohen became a monk,
but that did not safeguard him from
depression, a lifelong nemesis; two
years later, it overwhelmed him. Ive
dealt with depression ever since my
adolescence, he said. Moving into
some periods, which were debilitat-
ing, when I found it hard to get o
the couch, to periods when I was fully
operative but the background noise of
anguish still prevailed. Cohen tried
antidepressants. He tried throwing
them out. Nothing worked. Finally,
he told Roshi he was going down the
mountain. In a collection of poems
called Book of Longing, he wrote:
I left my robes hanging on a peg
in the old cabin
where I had sat so long
and slept so little.
I nally understood
I had no gift
for Spiritual Matters.
In fact, Cohen was hardly done
with his searching. Just a week after
returning home, he boarded a ight
to Mumbai to study with another spir-
itual guide. He took a room in a mod-
est hotel and went to daily satsangs,
spiritual discussions, at the apartment
of Ramesh Balsekar, a former presi-
dent of the Bank of India and a teacher
of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu disci-
pline. Cohen read Balsekars book
Consciousness Speaks, which teaches
a single universal consciousness, no
you or me, and denies a sense of ve million dollars.
individual free will, any sense that any
one person is a doer.
Cohen spent nearly a year in Mum-
bai, calling on Balsekar in the morn-
ings, and spending the rest of the day
swimming, writing, and wandering
the city. For reasons that he now says
are impossible to penetrate, his de-
pression lifted. He was ready to come
home. The story, and the way Cohen
tells it now, full of uncertainty and
modesty, reminded me of the chorus
of Anthem, a song that took him
ten years to write and that he recorded
just before he rst headed up the
mountain:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect oering
There is a crack in everything
Thats how the light gets in.
Even if he was now freed of de-
pression, the next crisis was not far
o. Aside from a few indulgences,
Cohen was not obsessed with luxury.
My project has been completely dier-
ent than my contemporaries, he says.
His circle in Montreal valued mod-
esty. The minimum environment that
would enable you to do your work with
the least distraction and the most aes-
thetic deliverance came from a mod-
est surrounding. A palace, a yacht would
be an enormous distraction from the
project. My fantasies went the other
way. The way I lived on Mt. Baldy was
perfect for me. I liked the communal
life, I liked living in a little shack.
And yet he had made a consider-
able fortune from album sales, con-
certs, and the publishing rights to his
songs. Hallelujah was recorded so
often and so widely that Cohen jok-
ingly called a moratorium on it. He
certainly had enough money to feel
secure about his two children and their
mother, and a few other dependents.
Before he left on his spiritual ad-
ventures, Cohen had ceded nearly ab-
solute control of his nancial aairs
to Kelley Lynch, his business manager
for seventeen years and, at one time,
briey, his lover. In 2004, however,
he discovered that his accounts had
been emptied. Millions of dollars were
gone. Cohen red Lynch and sued her.
The court ruled in Cohens favor,
awarding him more than
In Los Angeles County
Superior Court, Cohen
testied that Lynch had
been so outraged by the
suit that she started call-
ing him twenty, thirty
times a day and inundat-
ing him with e-mails, some
directly threatening, even-
tually ignoring a restraining order. It
makes me feel very conscious about
my surroundings, Cohen said, accord-
ing to the Guardians account of the
trial. Every time I see a car slow down,
I get worried. Lynch was sentenced
to eighteen months in prison and ve
years probation.
After thanking the judge and his
attorney in his usual high style, Cohen
turned to his antagonist. It is my
prayer, Cohen told the court, that
Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wis-
dom of her religion, that a spirit of
understanding will convert her heart
from hatred to remorse, from anger to
kindness, from the deadly intoxication
of revenge to the lowly practices of
self-reform.
Cohen has never managed to col-
lect the awarded damages, and, be-
cause the situation is still a matter of
litigation, he does not like to talk about
it. But one result was plain: he would
need to return to the stage. Even a
Zen monk has to earn some coin.
T about Cohens charm. For proof,
here is something irresistible
take a look at a YouTube clip called
Why Its Good to Be Leonard Cohen:
a lmmaker follows Cohen backstage
as a beautiful German-accented ac-
tress tries to coax him, in front of a
full dressing room, to go somewhere
with her as he wryly rebus her. He is
no less charming with men.
So it was more than a little surpris-
ing when Faggen and I returned to
the house one afternoon thinking that
we were on time and were informed,
in the sternest terms imaginable, that
we were not. In fact, Cohen, wearing
a dark suit and a fedora, settled into
his medical chair and gave us the most
forbidding talking-to I have experi-
enced since grade school. Im one of
those tiresome people who are rarely,
if ever, late; who show up,
old-mannishly, for ights
much too early. But there
had apparently been a mis-
understanding about the
time of our visit, and a text
to him and his assistant
seemed to have gone un-
seen. Every eort to apol-
ogize or explain, mine and
Faggens, was dismissed
as not the point. Cohen reminded
us of his poor health. This was an abuse
of his time. A violation. Even a form
of elder abuse. More apologies, more
rebus. This wasnt about anger or
apology, he went on. He felt no rage,
no, but we had to understand that we
were not doers, none of us have free
will. . . . And so on. I recognized the
language of his teacher in Mumbai.
But that didnt make it sting any less.
The lecturesteely, ominous, high-
ownwent on quite a long time.
I felt humiliated, but also defen-
sive. In the dynamic of people getting
something o their chest, the speaker
feels cleansed, the listener accused and
miserable.
Finally, Cohen eased into other
matters. And the subject that he was
happiest to talk about was the tour
that began as a means of restoring
what had been stolen from him. In
2007, he started conceiving a tour with
a full band: three backup singers, two
guitarists, drummer, keyboard player,
bassist, and saxophonist (later replaced
by a violinist). He rehearsed the band
for three months.
I hadnt played any of these songs
for fteen years, he said. My voice
had changed. My range had changed.
I didnt know what to do. There was
no way I could transpose the positions
that I knew. Instead, Cohen tuned the
strings on his guitar down two whole
steps, so, for instance, the low E was
now a low C. Cohen had always had
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 57
a deep, intimate voice, but now, with
age, and after countless cigarettes, it is
a fantastical growl, conding, lordly.
In concert, he always got a knowing
laugh with this line from Tower of
Song: I was born like this, I had no
choice / I was born with the gift of a
golden voice.
Neil Larsen, who played keyboards
in Cohens band, said that the prepa-
ration was meticulous. We rehearsed
very close to the way you would re-
cord, he told me. We did one song
over and over and made adjustments.
He was locking the lyrics into his
memory, too. Usually it takes a while
before a tour jells. Not this one. We
went out ready.
The tour started in Canada, and
then went everywhere during the next
ve yearsthree hundred and eighty
shows, from New York to Nice, Mos-
cow to Sydney. Cohen began every
performance saying that he and the
band would give everything weve
got, and they did. I think he was
competing with Springsteen, Sharon
Robinson, a singer and frequent co-
writer, joked about the length of the
shows. They were close to four hours
some nights.
Cohen was in his mid-seventies by
this time, and his manager did every-
thing possible for the performer to
marshal his energies. It was a rst-
class operation: a private plane, where
Cohen could write and sleep; good
hotels, where he could read and com-
pose on a keyboard; a car to take him
to the hotel the minute he stepped o
the stage. Some of the most memo-
rable musical performances Cohen
had ever seen were by Alberta Hunter,
the blues singer, who had a long res-
idency in the late seventies at the
Cookery, in the Village. Hunter had
retired from music for decades and
worked as a nurse, and then made a
comeback in the last six years of her
life. Leonard Cohen was following
suit: an elderly man, full of sap, sing-
ing his heart out for hours, several
nights a week.
Everybody was rehearsed not only
in the notes but also in something un-
spoken, Cohen recalled. You could
feel it in the dressing room as you
moved closer to the concert, you could
feel the sense of commitment, tangi-
58 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
ble in the room. This time, there was
no warmup with Chteau Latour. I
didnt drink at all. Occasionally, Id
have half a Guinness with Neil Larsen,
but I had no interest in alcohol.
The show that I saw, at Radio City,
was among the most moving perfor-
mances Ive ever experienced. Here
was Cohen, an old master of his art,
serving up the thick cream of his cat-
alogue with a soulful corps of exact-
ing musicians. Time and again, he
would enact the song as well as sing
it, taking one knee in gratitude to
the object of aection, taking both
knees to emphasize his devotion,
to the audience, to the musicians, to
the song.
The tour not only restored Cohens
nances (and then some); it also
brought a sense of satisfaction rarely
associated with him. One time I asked
him on the bus, Are you enjoying this?
And he would never really own up to
enjoying it, Sharon Robinson recalled.
But after we nished I was at his
house one day, and he admitted to me
that there was something extremely
fullling about that tour, something
that brought his career full circle that
he hadnt expected.
In 2009, Cohen gave his rst per-
formance in Israel since 1985, at a sta-
dium in Ramat Gan, donating the
proceeds to Israeli-Palestinian peace
organizations. He had wanted to per-
form in Ramallah, in the West Bank,
too, but Palestinian groups decided
that this was politically untenable. And
yet he persisted, dedicating the con-
cert to the cause of reconciliation, tol-
erance, and peace, and the song An-
them to the bereaved. At the end of
the show, Cohen raised his hands, rab-
binically, and recited in Hebrew the
birkat kohanim, the priestly blessing,
over the crowd.
Its not self-consciously religious,
Cohen told me. I know that its been
described that way, and I am happy
with that. Its part of the intentional
fallacy. But when I see James Brown
it has a religious feel. Anything deep
does.
When I asked him if he intended
his performances to reect a kind of
devotion, he hesitated before he an-
swered. Does artistic dedication begin
to touch on religious devotion? he
said. I start with artistic dedication.
I know that if the spirit is on you it
will touch on to the other human re-
ceptors. But I dare not begin from the
other side. Its like pronouncing the
holy nameyou dont do it. But if you
are lucky, and you are graced, and the
audience is in a particular salutary con-
dition, then these deeper responses
will be produced.
The nal night of the tour hap-
pened to be in Auckland, in late De-
cember, 2013, and the last songs were
exit songs: the prayerful If It Be Your
Will, and then Closing Time, I
Tried to Leave You, and, nally, a
cover of the Drifters song Save the
Last Dance for Me.
The musicians all knew this was
not only the last night of a long voy-
age but, for Cohen, perhaps the last
voyage. Everybody knows that every-
thing has to end some time, Sharon
Robinson told me. So, as we left, there
was the thought: This is it.
T ing ahead. What is on Cohens
here is probably no more tour-
mind now is family, friends, and the
work at hand. Ive had a family to
support, so theres no sense of virtue
attached to it, he said. Ive never
sold widely enough to be able to relax
about money. I had two kids and their
mother to support and my own life.
So there was never an option of cut-
ting out. Now its a habit. And theres
the element of time, which is power-
ful, with its incentive to nish up.
Now I havent gotten near nishing
up. Ive nished up a few things. I
dont know how many other things
Ill be able to get to, because at this
particular stage I experience deep fa-
tigue. . . . There are times when I just
have to lie down. I cant play anymore,
and my back goes fast also. Spiritual
things, baruch Hashemthank God
have fallen into place, for which I
am deeply grateful.
Cohen has unpublished poems to
arrange, unnished lyrics to nish and
record or publish. Hes considering
doing a book in which poems, like
pages of the Talmud, are surrounded
by passages of interpretation.
The big change is the proximity
to death, he said. I am a tidy kind
of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I
can. If I cant, also, thats O.K. But my
natural thrust is to nish things that
Ive begun.
Cohen said he had a sweet little
song that hed been working through,
one of many, and, suddenly, he closed
his eyes and began reciting the lyrics:
Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Dont listen to me.

Listen to the buttery

Whose days but number three
Listen to the buttery
Dont listen to me.

Listen to the mind of God

Which doesnt need to be
Listen to the mind of God
Dont listen to me.

He opened his eyes, paused awhile.

Then he said, I dont think Ill be able
to nish those songs. Maybe, who
knows? And maybe Ill get a second
wind, I dont know. But I dont dare
attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I
dont dare do that. Ive got some work
to do. Take care of business. I am ready
to die. I hope its not too uncomfort-
able. Thats about it for me.
Cohens hand has been bothering
him, so he plays the guitar less than he
didIve lost my chop but he was
eager to show me his synthesizer. He
sets a chord progression going with his
left hand, ips some switches to one
mode or another, and plays a melody
with his right. At one point, he ipped
on the Greek mode, and suddenly he
was singing a Greek shermans song,
as if we had suddenly transported our-
selves back in time, to Douskos Tav-
erna, in the deep night of xed and
falling stars on the island of Hydra.
In his chair, Cohen waved away any
sense of what might follow death. That
was beyond understanding and lan-
guage: I dont ask for information that
I probably wouldnt be able to process
even if it were granted to me. Per-
sistence, living to the last, loose ends,
workthat was the thing. A song from
four years ago, Going Home, made
clear his sense of limits: He will speak
these words of wisdom / Like a sage,
a man of vision / Though he knows
hes really nothing / But the brief elab-
oration of a tube.
The new record opens with the title
track, You Want It Darker, and in
the chorus, the singer declares:
Hineni Hineni
Im ready my Lord.
Hineni is Hebrew for Here I am,
Abrahams answer to the summons of
God to sacrice his son Isaac; the song
is clearly an announcement of readi-
ness, a man at the end preparing for
his service and devotion. Cohen asked
Gideon Zelermyer, the cantor at Shaar
Hashomayim, the synagogue of his
youth in Montreal, to sing the back-
ing vocals. And yet the man sitting in
his medical chair was anything but
haunted or defeated.
I know theres a spiritual aspect to
everybodys life, whether they want to
cop to it or not, Cohen said. Its there,
you can feel it in peopletheres some
recognition that there is a reality that
they cannot penetrate but which in-
uences their mood and activity. So
thats operating. That activity at cer-
tain points of your day or night insists
on a certain kind of response. Some-
times its just like: You are losing too
much weight, Leonard. Youre dying,
but you dont have to coperate en-
thusiastically with the process. Force
yourself to have a sandwich.
What I mean to say is that you
hear the Bat Kol. The divine voice.
You hear this other deep reality sing-
ing to you all the time, and much of
the time you cant decipher it. Even
when I was healthy, I was sensitive to
the process. At this stage of the game,
I hear it saying, Leonard, just get
on with the things you have to do.
Its very compassionate at this stage.
More than at any time of my life, I
no longer have that voice that says,
Youre fucking up. Thats a tremen-
dous blessing, really.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 59

THE THIRTY-YEAR COUP
Did an exiled cleric try to overthrow the Turkish government?
A
t nine oclock on the night
of July 15th, General Hulusi
Akar, the chief of the Turkish
Armys general sta, heard a knock on
his oce door in Ankara, the nations
capital. It was one of his subordinates,
General Mehmet Dili, and he was there
to report that a military coup had begun.
We will get everybody, Dili said. Bat- trol of only one television station, and
talions and brigades are on their way.
You will soon see.
Akar was aghast. What the hell are
you saying? he asked.
In other cities, ocers involved in
the coup had ordered their units to de-
tain senior military leaders, block major
roads, and seize crucial institutions like
Istanbul Atatrk Airport. Two dozen
F-16 ghters took to the air. Accord-
ing to statements from some of the
ocers involved, the plotters asked
Akar to join them. When he refused,
they handcued him and ew him by
helicopter to an airbase where other
generals were being held; at one point,
one of the rebels pointed a gun at Akar
and threatened to shoot.
After midnight, a news anchor for
Turkish Radio and Television was forced
to read a statement by the plotters, who
called themselves the Peace at Home
Committee, a reference to one of the
countrys founding ideals. Without men-
tioning the President, Recep Tayyip Er-
doan, by name, the statement said that
his government had destroyed the coun-
trys institutions, engaged in corruption,
supported terrorism, and ignored human
rights: The secular and democratic rule
of law has been virtually eliminated.
For a time, the rebels seemed to have
the upper hand. Provincial governors and
community leaders surrendered or joined
in, along with police squads. In a series
of text messages discovered after the
coup, a Major Murat elebiolu told his
group, The deputies of the Istanbul po-
lice chief have been called, informed, and
the vast majority have complied.
60 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
A REPORTER AT LARGE
BY DEXTER FILKINS
A Colonel Uzan ahin replied, Tell
our police friends: I kiss their eyes.
But the plot seemed haphazard. A
helicopter team sent to locate Erdoan
in Marmaris, the resort town where he
was vacationing, failed to capture the
President, despite a shootout with
guards at his hotel. The rebels took con-
in Islam. Glen met with Pope John
left cellular-phone networks untouched.
Erdoan was able to record a video
message, played on CNN Turk, in which
he called on Turkish citizens to take
to the streets. They did, in huge num-
bers. Faced with overwhelming popu-
lar resistance, the troops had to decide
between shooting large groups of dem-
onstrators and giving up. By morning,
the uprising had been broken.
Erdoan declared a national emer-
gency and, in the weeks that followed,
made a series of appearances to remind
the nation of the cost of the coup. Some
of the plotters had brutally shot demon-
strators and comrades who opposed them.
One rebel major, faced with resistance,
had texted his soldiers, Crush them,
burn them, no compromise. More than
two hundred and sixty people were killed
and thousands wounded. The F-16s had
bombed the parliament building, blast-
ing holes in the faade and scattering
chunks of concrete in the hallways.
In Erdoans telling, the coup was
not a legitimate sign of civic unrest. In
fact, it did not even originate in Tur-
key; the rebels were being told what
to do from Pennsylvania. For Turks,
the coded message was clear: Erdoan
meant that the mastermind of the coup
was Fethullah Glen, a seventy-eight-
year-old cleric, who had been living in
exile for two decades in the Poconos,
between Allentown and Scranton.
Glen, a dour, balding proselytizer
with a scratchy voice, had ed Turkey
in 1999, fearing arrest by the countrys
military rulers. From afar, though, he
had served as a spiritual guide for mil-
lions and overseen a worldwide network
of charter schools, known for oering
scholarships to the poor. Glens ser-
mons and writings emphasized recon-
ciling Islam with contemporary science,
and promoted charity; his movement is
called Hizmet, or service. For many in
the West, it represented a hopeful trend
Paul II and the leaders of major Jewish
organizations, and was fted by Presi-
dent Bill Clinton, who saluted his ideas
of tolerance and interfaith dialogue.
To many outside observers, Er-
doans accusation sounded like some-
thing out of an airport thriller: a secret
cabal burrowing into a modern state
and awaiting orders from its elderly
leader on a hilltop half a world away.
For Erdoan, though, it was a state-
ment of political reality. Glen, once a
crucial ally, had become the leader of
a shadow state, determined to bring
down the Administration. In the fol-
lowing weeks, Erdoans forces detained
tens of thousands of people who he
claimed were loyal to Glen. In out-
raged statements to the United States
government, he demanded that Glen
be extradited, so that he could be made
to face justice in a Turkish court.
E Pennsylvania countryside, he has
ver since Glen retreated to the
been a recluse, ooding Turkey with
audio and video recordings but refus-
ing to appear in public. When I rst
asked to talk with him, in 2014, I wasnt
hopeful. At the movements Manhat-
tan oce, the Alliance for Shared Val-
ues, the executive director, Alp Aslan-
doan, told me repeatedly that an
interview might never happen. His
health is very fragile, he said. Even if
Glen agreed to speak, it was possible
that after a few questions he would be
too tired to continue.
The following July, after a year of
refusals, I was abruptly summoned to
Fethullah Glen, who lives in a compound in the Poconos, has millions of followers in Turkey.
PHOTOGRAPH
BY CHRISTAAN FELBER THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 61

the compound. From New York, I drove
west through the farmland of northern
Pennsylvania, then south down a wind-
ing road to Saylorsburg, a town of about
twelve hundred people. A couple of
miles away, past the Mt. Eaton Christian
Church, I found Glens compound, the
Golden Generation Worship and Re-
treat Center, which occupies some twenty-
ve acres of woodlands and lawns.
Getting out of the car, I felt as if Id
arrived in the Anatolian countryside:
the two main buildings were in the Ot-
toman style, with high windows and
obliquely slanted roofs; women wore
the stylish tted head scarves popular
among Turkeys middle class; everyone
was speaking Turkish. Aslandoan
greeted me and led me to an ornate
conference room furnished with couches
that all faced a thronelike chair, which
was reserved for me.
After a few minutes, Glen entered.
He was dressed in a black suit, the kind
you might nd at Target or Marshalls;
his head was bowed, and he moved with
a hesitant shue, more resembling a
pensioner awakening from his after-
noon nap than the patriarch of a global
organization. He had a large, pale head,
an expansive nose, and eyes freighted
by enormous sacks. The only trace of
62 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
vanity was a wisp of gray mustache.
Glen greeted me with an indierent
nod; after seventeen years in the U.S.,
he speaks almost no English. He led
me into a hallway to show me his liv-
ing quarters: two tiny rooms, with a
mattress on the oor, a prayer mat, a
desk and bookshelves, and a treadmill.
There was no chitchat, and Glen
didnt smile. When I asked about his
relationship with Erdoan, he told me,
through an interpreter, that Erdoan
had never willingly shared power with
anyone. Apparently, he always had this
vision of being the single most power-
ful person, he said. Erdoan and his
followers were all alike: In the begin-
ning of their political careers, they put
up a faade of a more democratic party
and leadership. And they appeared to
be people of faith. And therefore we
did not want to second-guess their mo-
tives. We believed their rhetoric.
He spoke elliptically, something he
is famous for. You cant understand him,
a Turkish intelligence ocial warned
me. When I asked whether his move-
ment had an interest in politics, Glen
told me he had so many followers that
some were bound to end up in import-
ant places, but that hardly amounted to
a conspiracy. No citizen or social group
can be completely isolated from poli-
tics, because policy decisions and actions
aect their lives, he added. Such a role
for civil-society groups is normal and
welcome in democratic societiesand
it doesnt make Hizmet a political move-
ment. We talked a little more, but, as
his aides had predicted, Glen seemed
to tire. After about forty-ve minutes,
Aslandoan signalled that the interview
had come to an end.
I Glens ideas in Turkey: Mustafa
had found a better embodiment of
Aksoy, a businessman I met in 2011, in
the caf of an Istanbul hotel. (After the
coup and the subsequent crackdown,
Aksoy asked to be identied by a pseu-
donym, to protect his family in Tur-
key.) Like many followers of Glen,
he was clean-shaven, wore a Western
business suit, and projected an almost
aggressively cheerful appearance. He
was a very successful man: he owned
a construction rm, a hotel-services
company, and a housewares factory,
which together employed about six
hundred people. For three years, Aksoy
had lived in Europe. He spoke uent
English and was married to a Scandi-
navian woman; his work had taken him
to every corner of the world.
Aksoy told me that he became asso-
ciated with the Glenist movement in
1993, when he accompanied a group of
businessmen on a trip to Turkmenistan,
one of the Turkic-speaking countries of
Central Asia. While there, he was given
a tour of a secondary school that had
been built by Glens followers. The
school stirred Aksoys patriotic pride; it
was named for a former Turkish Pres-
ident, a Turkish ag ew at graduation,
and a large photo showed the Turkish
and Turkmen Presidents shaking hands.
It was the best school in the country,
Aksoy said. All the parents were try-
ing to get their kids into it.
Through the schools, Aksoy got in-
volved in the Glen movement, donat-
ing money as he travelled throughout
Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast
Asia. It became like a hobby for me
whenever I go somewhere, I just go and
visit the Glen school, he said. The
schools served as a sort of beachhead
for Turkish interests. Even in Califor-
nia, in the Hispanic area, I see schools
that are totally Turkish. When I arrived
in Tanzania, there were two schools there, judicial system, liberalized the econ-
but no embassy. Now there is an em- omy, and eased relations with long-
bassy and many businesses. suppressed minorities like the Alevis
Aksoy said the schools formed a loose and the Kurds. The G.D.P. doubled.
network: Theyre communicating with In the West, Erdoan was seen as a
each other, and theyre keeping up stan- bridge to the Islamic worldthe leader
dards. Theres a continuous ow of in- of a prosperous, democratic, and sta-
formation. But, like Glen, he insisted ble Muslim country.
that the movement had no secret agenda. In the same years, Glen was mak-
He said the complaints about the ing his own accommodation with Tur-
Glenists tended to come from people keys secular establishment. Glen, a
who were nostalgic for Turkeys old preacher in the coastal city of Izmir,
secular order, an era that he regarded may have been employed by the state,
as dead. The people who lost power but he charted his own spiritual path;
cannot see the real changes, he said. for inspiration, he looked to the theo-
Things are changing so fast in Turkey, logian Said Nursi, who emphasized the
and they need to blame someone. compatibility of Islam with reason and
scientic inquiry. While many Islamists
executed perfectly, are blessings from
God, he once said on Turkish televi-
sion. Such proclamations earned Glen
the ire of Islamist leaders, but they
seemed to buy him a measure of pro-
tection from secular authorities.
To Western audiences, Glens ap-
peal could be mysterious. He speaks in
Koranically inected Turkish, and his
theology can seem like a blend of
bumper-sticker slogans about love, peace,
tolerance, and interfaith dialogue. His
charisma comes from his emotion, one
former follower explained. He cries, he
reacts quickly and unpredictably, he
shows all of his emotions. For Western-
ers, this might be dicult to understand.
But for Muslims it can be magical.

F Republic was designed as a secular

rom the beginning, the Turkish espouse anti-Western, anti-capitalist, In a kind of verbal sleight of hand,
and anti-Semitic views, Glens ser- Glen sometimes quotes peoples ac-
state. It was founded in 1923 by Mus- mons were pro-business, pro-science, counts of speaking to the Prophet, giv-
tafa Kemal, better known as Atatrka andvirtually unheard of in the Mus- ing the impression that he was the one
erce nationalist who believed that re- lim worldconciliatory toward Israel. who had the divine encounter. I was
ligion and politics needed to be kept In 1971, after a military coup, the new doubled over with the troubles of Mu-
strictly apart. Once in power, he abol- regime arrested Glen on charges of hammads followers and especially the
ished the Islamic Caliphate, which had conspiring to overthrow the secular Turkish people, Glen said, in one
existed for thirteen hundred years, and order, and he served seven months in sermon. Then I cleared my mind and
put the countrys clerics on the state prison. After that, he became a model said O Muhammad, what will become
payroll, to make sure they didnt step Islamist of the secular establishment, of us? All of a sudden, Muhammad
out of line. meeting often with the countrys lead- graced me with his appearance. This
As a result, for most of the twenti- ers and publicly expressing his support. wasnt a dream.
eth century Turkeys pious majority was I have said time and again that the re- When Erdoan took oce, Glen
governed by a small secular lite. The publican order, and secularism, when estimated that he had as many as three
Turkish military, perhaps the countrys
strongest institution, saw itself as the
guardian of Atatrks secular state; sev-
eral times in the nineteen-seventies and
eighties, Islamist parties rose to prom-
inence, only to be shut down and banned.
Displays of religious fervor were seen
as undesirable, even dangerous.
In 2001, the Justice and Development
Partyknown by its Turkish initials,
A.K.P.was founded by a group of men
led by Tayyip Erdoan. A dynamic for-
mer mayor of Istanbul, Erdoan had re-
cently emerged from prison; he had been
jailed by the countrys military leaders
after giving a speech that included the
lines The mosques are our barracks . . .
and the believers our soldiers. The next
year, he announced his candidacy for
Prime Minister. In campaign speeches,
he proclaimed himself an Islamist, a
voice for pious Turks, but he also prom-
ised to keep Islam out of politics.
The A.K.P. swept into power in na-
tional elections, and Erdoan began
remaking Turkey. He overhauled the
million followers in Turkey, part of a
rising class of entrepreneurial, moder-
ately religious Turks who were chal-
lenging the secular lite and taking
places within the countrys bureau-
cracy. As Glen preached in favor of
business, his followers had set up a
network of test-preparation centers,
which readied young people to take
entrance exams for college, military
academies, and the civil service. The
centers were said to be highly lucra-
tive, and successful adherents donated
money to Glens programs. Gradu-
ally, his followers built an empire,
reportedly worth billions of dollars,
that included newspapers, television
stations, businesses, and professional
associations. The Glenist schools
spread; there are now two thousand of
them, in a hundred and sixty coun-
tries, including at least a hundred and
twenty in the United States.
In the early years of Erdoans ten-
ure, he and Glen shared an interest in
nding a place for Islam in public life,
but they collaborated only sporadically.
Then, in the spring of 2007, Erdoan
and the military had a dramatic con-
frontation. After he attempted to nom-
inate an Islamist condant as President,
the oce of the chief of the general
sta posted a memorandum on its Web
site. It should not be forgotten that the
Turkish armed forces are a side in this
debate and are a staunch defender of
secularism, it said. They will display
their convictions and act openly and
clearly whenever necessary.
Instead of backing down, Erdoan
denounced the military, called for an
election, and won decisively. Still, he
was terried that the generals, backed
by the secular establishment, would
come after him again. The Glenists
saw an opportunity, Ibrahim Kaln, an
Erdoan aide, told me. We were new-
comers. When our party came to power,
the only thing it had was the support
of the people. Our party did not have
any access to state institutionsno
judiciary, no security forces. Glen,
with his supporters in the bureaucracy,
was an appealing ally. He and Erdoan
began to work together more closely.
Erdoan thrived in the years that
followed, but rumors spread about the
price that he had paid for his alliance
with Glen. In late 2011, I drove to the
outskirts of Ankara, to visit Orhan Gazi
Ertekin, a judge in the secular tradi-
tion; at his oce, a portrait of Atatrk
hung on the wall, and Nina Simone was
playing on the stereo. Ertekin told me
that he had recently attended a conven-
tion to elect the Supreme Council of
Judges and Prosecutors, which picks ju-
rists for appointments across the coun-
try. I had arrived with some candidates
in mind, and I came prepared to make
deals and coalitions, he said. At the
conference, though, he began to believe
that a group of fellow-judges, all
Glenists, were conspiring to exclude
others. In the beginning, I had only
the vaguest idea of what was happen-
ing, he said. They were using a secret
language. After the vote, Ertekin saw
that several new council members were
followers of Glen. The Glenists had
decided who they were going to choose,
and they had no need to coperate.
Ertekin told me that Glen con-
trolled the justice system. Erdoan can
accomplish what he wants in the judi-
ciary only by going through Glen, he
said. The Glenists determine the out-
come of every important political and
economic trial. He was increasingly
worried, but felt that it was dangerous
to speak up. There is no public domain
in which free and open criticism of the
Glenists can take place, he said.
I wasnt sure how seriously to take
Ertekins claim. The secular tradition in
Turkey was on the wane, and it seemed
possible that he was spinning a conspir-
acy theory to explain its decline. But as
I travelled around Turkey I heard more
stories of this kindtales of people who
raised questions about the schools, or
about Glenist inltration of the po-
lice corps, and were arrested and sent
to prison. In private, people spoke of a
secretive cabal, hidden within the state,
that was steadily growing in power.

I freshman in the central Turkish city

n 1973, Ahmet Kele, a high-school

of Krkkale, rst heard a tape record-

ing of a sermon by Glen. Kele was
awestruck; Glen spoke so passion-
Well have a bottle of your flattest water. ately about the Holy Prophet that as
he listened he started to cry. Kele was
from a poor familyhis father ran a
small store selling table decorations
and for the rst time he came alive to
his faith. Glen was making people ask
themselves, What is your mission as a
Muslim?
That summer, Kele travelled to
Izmir to meet Glen, who invited him
to attend his summer camp, free of
charge. Kele did, and returned for the
next two summers. After he graduated
from high school, Glen asked him to
run one of his lighthousesstudent
dormitories that doubled as religious
discussion centers.
Many Glenistsperhaps most of
thempractice their leaders ecumen-
ical ideas earnestly. But as Kele was
pulled into the movement he came to
understand that it had a clandestine
goal. The only way to protect Islam
was to inltrate the state with our fol-
lowers and seize all the institutions of
government, he explained. The legal
way to do it was by election, by parlia-
mentbut you couldnt do it that way,
because the military would step in. The
only way to do it was the illegal way
to inltrate the state and change the in-
stitutions from within.
From then on, Kele told me, all his
energies were dedicated to preserving the
Glen secret while maintaining a posi-
tive faade. This is the dual structure
it is in the genetic code of the organiza-
tion, he said. Kele rose through the
ranks, taking on larger and larger tasks
with growing pride. ImagineI am the
son of a poor laborer and I am involved
in this powerful organization, he said.
I felt like a very important person.
Kele, who has since left the move-
ment, said that while Glen presented
himself as a humble, self-denying cleric,
in private he was entirely dierent: vain,
megalomaniacal, demanding total obe-
dience. The organization was hierarchi-
cal, divided into seven levels, with Glen
at the top. Kele joined level threea
senior leadership assembly. Level two
conducted covert operations, which he
said he was never informed of. (Aslan-
doan, the manager of Glens Manhat-
tan oce, says that this characterization
is misleading.)
In meetings of the leadership assem-
bly, Glen described his plans as di-
vinely ordained. He would tell us, I
met with the Prophet last night, and
he told me to do the following things,
Kele said. Everyone believed him. In-
deed, Glens followers came to see his
teachings as an entirely new faith. He
started with Islam, but he created his
own theology. We thought Fethullah
Glen was the Messiah.
Other former Glenists told me
much the same thing. On the surface,
he projects this idea that he
is not interested in money
or women or power, that he
only wants to be close to
God, Said Alpsoy, a fol-
lower for seventeen years
who left the movement in
2003, said. The goal is
powerto penetrate the
state and change it from
within. But they will never
talk about power. They will deny it.
In a taped sermon from the late nine-
ties, Glen exhorted his followers to
burrow into the state and wait for the
right moment to rise up. Create an image
like you are men of law, he told them.
This will allow you to rise to more vital,
more important places. In the mean-
time, he urged patience and exibility.
Until we have the power and author-
ity in all of Turkeys constitutional in-
stitutions, every step is premature, he
said. But, ultimately, he promised, their
work would provide the guarantee of
our Islamic future.
Kele told me that the chief targets
of inltration were the police and the
judiciary. The schools and test-prep-
aration centers were central to the plan.
At the schools, acolytes were recruited
at an impressionable age; at the centers,
they were prepared for entrance exam-
inations to the countrys bureaucracy. In
many cases, brothers within govern-
ment agencies fed answers to Glenist
candidates. Once the recruits were hired,
fellow-Glenists promoted them and
furthered their careers.
In inltrated police departments, in fantastical rituals. In one, a group of
each Glenist ocer had a code name,
and each unit was overseen by an out-
side imam, regarded by the ocers
as a higher authority than the police
chief. By the early nineties, Kele said,
he had become the movements imam
in Central Anatolia, overseeing fteen
cities. By then, he estimated, forty per
cent of the police in the region were
followers, and about twenty per cent
of the judges and prosecutors. We
controlled the hiring of the police,
and the entrance exams, and we didnt
let anyone in who wasnt a Glenist,
he said.
Glen, despite his reputation in the
West for moderation, at times took hard-
line positions, denouncing the United
States as our merciless enemy and sug-
gesting that wife-beating
could be acceptable if it
would make a hundred
women more obedient. His
book From Chapter to
Chapter, published in 1995,
contained a rant in which
he accused the Jewish tribe
of developing ideas, such as
Communism, that seduced
the world into disaster.
This intelligent tribe has put forth
many things throughout history in the
name of science and thought, Glen
wrote. But these have always been
oered in the form of poisoned honey.
He continued, Jews will maintain their
existence until the apocalypse. And
shortly before the apocalypse, their mis-
sion of acting as the coil-spring for hu-
manitys progress will come to an end,
and they will prepare their end with
their own hands.
Kele told me that at rst he rarely
questioned Glen, even when he started
to speak of world domination. My fa-
thers only goal was to have his son work-
ing as a laborer, he said. And here was
this man with a plan to manage the
world. Today, Kele is astonished by
how credulous he was; he attributes it
in part to Glens charisma. The line
between crazy and genius is very thin
with him, it was the same thing, he
said. His knowledge, his theological
views, his organizational skillhe is a
genius. We were all crazy at that time.
Inside the movement, Kele and Alp-
soy said, people often lost themselves
men gathered in a room would grab a
comrade, pin his legs and arms, and re-
move his socks and shoes, often against
his will. They would hold him down,
and everyone would kiss his feet, Alp-
soy said. This I witnessed hundreds
of times.
In the Islamic world, feet and shoes
are symbols of lth; in many places, it
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 65

Thats not who I am anymore.
is considered oensive to cross your legs
and show the bottoms of your feet. The
foot-kissing ritual, Alpsoy said, was a
way of demonstrating pure aection: If
you kiss a persons feet, then you must
really love him. Alpsoy could never bring
himself to kiss anyones feet, he said, but
they did it to me three or four times.
Kele recalled that the ritual some-
times took other forms: To show love
for someone, people would ll his shoe
with water and drink from it. (Aslan-
doan says that he has no knowledge of
such rituals.) Alpsoy said that once a
man appeared at a service with a shoe
that he said had been worn by Glen.
People were so excitedthey stripped
the leather from the shoe and boiled it
for a long time. Then they cut the leather
into pieces and ate it. Members often
fought over scraps of food that Glen
had left on his plate. A Turkish intelli-
gence ocial told me that one Glenist
received a package from her husband,
who was living on the compound in
Pennsylvania: inside was a piece of bread
that Glen had gnawed on and left be-
hind. Glen knew about all these things,
Kele said, but he would just laugh.
It took years for Kele to leave the
movement. The turning point came in
1997, when Glen publicly attacked Nec-
mettin Erbakan, Turkeys rst Islamist
66 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Prime Minister, directing his followers
in the media to undercut him. Under
pressure from the military, Erbakan
stepped down in 1997. Erbakan and
Glen said they wanted the same
thingsan Islamic stateand yet Glen
destroyed him, Kele said. Power was
more important to him than religion.
Not long after that, Kele wrote a let-
ter to Glen, enumerating the ways in
which he had drifted from Islam in the
pursuit of power. Glen expelled him
from the movement. Kele said that it
was only after he left that he realized
how cut o he had been. I woke up to
the real world, he said.
I ten by Stuart Smith, an American
n 2005, according to a cable writ-
diplomat, three senior members of the
Turkish National Police visited the U.S.
Consulate in Istanbul, seeking a favor
for Glen. Three years earlier, Glen,
living in exile in the Poconos, had ap-
plied for permanent residence, claim-
ing that he was an exceptional individ-
ual who deserved special consideration.
The U.S. declined his application, on
the ground that he was not an espe-
cially remarkable person and that he
had exaggerated his credentials as a
scholar. The policemen at the Consul-
ate were pressing an appeal.
Smith was skeptical. In his cable, pub-
lished by WikiLeaks, he noted Glens
sharply radical past as a ery Islamist
preacher and the cult-like obedience
and conformity that he and the layers
of his movement insist on in his global
network of schools, his media outlets,
and his business associations. If anyone
was being persecuted, he suggested, it
was Glens critics: Given the Glenists
penetration of the National Police (TNP)
and many media outlets, and their rec-
ord of going after anyone who criticizes
Glen, others who are skeptical about
Glens intentions feel intimidated from
expressing their views.
Despite such ocial American as-
sessments, Glen won his appeal, in part
because inuential friends wrote letters
in his support. They included George
Fidas, a former director of outreach for
the C.I.A.; Morton Abramowitz, a for-
mer American ambassador; and, per-
haps most notably, Graham Fuller, a for-
mer senior C.I.A. ocial.
During the Cold War, while Fuller
was a eld ocer in Turkey, the C.I.A.
advocated supporting the growth of
Islam along the southern border of the
Soviet Union, in places like Iran and
Turkey, to contain its expansion, with a
cordon known as the green belt. Fuller,
who now lives in Canada, told me that
he had met Glen only after retiring
from the agency, while researching a
book on political Islam, and said that he
was unaware of an arrangement between
him and the C.I.A. He had written to
the F.B.I. because he admired Glens
highly progressive vision of Islam, and
wanted to help resist any attempt to ex-
tradite him to Turkey. Id write the let-
ter again, he said.
In Turkey, though, the connection has
fed theories that Glen was supported
in his early years by the C.I.A. Some
prominent Turks have said that the as-
sistance continued at least into the nine-
ties, when the Muslim-majority states
of the former Soviet Union declared in-
dependence and Glens network began
to establish itself there. In 2010, Osman
Nuri Gnde, a former senior intelli-
gence ocial, wrote in a memoir that
Glens schools in Uzbekistan and Kyr-
gyzstan had sheltered as many as a hun-
dred and thirty C.I.A. agents, posing as
English teachers. Ismail Pekin, a former
head of Turkish military intelligence,
told me that the agency maintained a
similar arrangement with workers at
schools in Africa. They might not have
been C.I.A. employees, but they were
engaged in intelligence gathering and
mobilization, he said. Pekin had raised
concerns about Glen to American o-
cials, he said, but they were routinely dis-
missed: We always brought it up at NATO
meetings, every time. Every time, the
subject of Glen was pushed aside as
Turkeys domestic problem. secular lite and the military. In 2007,
Within the country, the military saw
Glenists as a considerable threat. Ga-
reth Jenkins, a fellow at the Central Asia-
Caucasus Institute in Istanbul, said that,
during the nineteen-nineties, the armed
forces expelled hundreds of ocers on
suspicion of harboring links to Glen. In
a cable released by WikiLeaks, an Amer-
ican diplomat wrote that secular ocers
devised a test: they invited fellow-soldiers
and their wives to pool parties, reason-
ing that women who declined to appear
in public wearing swimsuits must be re-
stricted by their religion. According to
the diplomat, the Glenist wives became
aware of the tactic and came up with a
countermeasure: they started wearing bi-
kinis more revealing than their hosts.
When military inspectors began search-
ing ocers homes, the Glenists stocked cially, Kurdish activists.
their refrigerators with decoy bottles of
alcohol and planted empties in the trash.
Glens followers recognized that they
needed greater numbers in the military.
A former A.K.P. member named Emin
irin told me that in the fall of 1999 he
visited the compound in Saylorsburg,
and Glen told him that a golden gen-
eration of acolytes were working their
way into Turkeys institutions. If a more
tolerant general was appointed to lead
the military, he said, it would bring me
peace. He mentioned General Hilmi
zkok as a desirable candidate. I thought
what I heard was insane, irin recalled.
But in 2002 zkok was named chief of
the Army, and the vigilance within the
military relaxed. According to Jenkins,
Glens followers began to ll the ranks.
This created an enormous amount of
unease in the ocers corps, he said.
A in 2007, the growing momentum
s Erdoan started a new term,
toward political Islam in Turkey brought
him and Glen closer. Glen had di-
vided the country into seven districts,
each with a regional chief, who regu-
larly travelled to Pennsylvania to con-
sult on initiatives. Erdoan, too, sent
high-placed representatives to Glens
compoundnot every month, but when
he needed support for something, Jen-
kins told me. Glen was sometimes re-
ferred to as the second most powerful
man in the country.
The strengthening alliance helped
Erdoan to confront his rivals in the
itary and police ocers but also aca-
police arrested the rst of hundreds of
people whom the government accused
of forming a secret organization devoted
to keeping Islamist aspirations in check.
Turks called this network derin devlet,
the deep state, and it was said to have
links across the military, media, academia,
and law enforcement.
Turks have long disputed the exact
size and nature of the deep state, but
few doubt that something like it once
existed. According to scholars and for-
mer ocials, it was a network of police,
soldiers, and informants, begun during
the Cold War, to control domestic dis-
sent and keep democratically elected
governments o balance. It is believed
to be responsible for many assassina-
tionsof Islamists, leftists, and, espe-
When the arrests began, police
claimed they had nally penetrated to
Looklets just get past today, O.K.?
the deep state: a secret organization
called Ergenekon, named for a myth-
ological place in Central Asia that is
sometimes invoked by ultra-nationalists.
Shortly thereafter, they began a sec-
ond investigation, aimed at the most
senior generals in the Turkish military,
who they claimed were fomenting a
plot, called Sledgehammer, to over-
throw Erdoans government. The cases
spread to include not just former mil-
demics, journalists, aid workersthe
core of the opposition to the new Is-
lamic order.
According to Turkish and Western
ocials, both investigations were
headed by Glenists in the police and
the judiciary. For years, Zaman, the
countrys largest newspaper, and Sa-
manyolu TV, both run by Glen loy-
alists, cheered on the investigations
and demonized anyone who questioned
the evidence. In some cases, the crit-
ics were vilied, James Jerey, the U.S.
Ambassador to Turkey from 2008 to
2011, told me. In others, they were
arrested outright. Erdoan supported
the investigations with equal enthusi-
asm, saying that they were necessary
to remove the shadow of the military
from public life. How and why could
anyone try to stop this? he said in a
speech to his party in 2009. The
crimes in these charges violate our
constitution and laws. Let the justice
system do its job.
As diplomats and independent jour-
nalists began to review the prosecu-
tions, it became clear that both con-
tained fabricated evidence. In my own
investigation into the two cases, I found
several instances of unmistakable forg-
ery. The evidence in Sledgehammer
was built largely on a series of com-
puter disks, which ostensibly contained
blueprints for a wide-ranging military
coup. But, while prosecutors alleged
that the plan had been drawn up in
2003, it was written mostly on a ver-
sion of Microsoft Oce that wasnt
released until 2007. Similarly, many
specics of the planslicense-plate
numbers of cars to be seized, a hospi-
tal to be occupiedreferred to things
that did not exist in 2003.
Hane Avc, the police chief for Es-
kiehir Province, told me that he saw
Glenist police, prosecutors, and judges
fabricate evidence in political investi-
gations. But when he alerted his supe-
riors he was ignored. I talked to min-
isters and I wrote memos and didnt get
any replies, he said.
In 2009, Avc secretly began writ-
ing a book detailing the Glenists ac-
tivities in the police and judiciary. He
described a movement of protean
adaptability, whose methods resem-
bled those of terrorist groups and
criminal organizations; they framed
opponents by planting evidence or
blackmailed them with information
gleaned from wiretaps. What made
the Glen movement dierent is that
it was inside the state, he said, not-
ing that inltrators in his department
had sabotaged the careers of at least
ten colleagues. The book, called Si-
mons Living on the Golden Horn
(the title is an abstruse metaphor for
not seeing what is in plain sight), be-
came a best-seller. It seemed espe-
cially authoritative because Avc, a
conservative Islamist, had two chil-
dren in Glenist schools.
A month after the book was pub-
lished, Avc was arrested and charged
with membership in a Communist ter-
rorist organization called the Revolu-
tionary Headquarters. Avc insisted that
he was innocentIm not even a lib-
eral, he saidbut prosecutors only
68 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
added to the charges, claiming that he
had written the book on orders from
Ergenekon. Avc was sentenced to fteen
years in prison.
Some six hundred people were con-
victed in the Ergenekon and Sledge-
hammer trials, including scores of se-
nior generals in the Turkish military
and several prominent journalists.
About two hundred were sentenced
to long prison terms, many in cases
presided over by judges thought to
be loyal to Glen. After the trials,
Turkeys secular lite was completely
vitiated.
That left Erdoan and Glen as the
two strongest forces in the country,
and they soon began to turn on each
other. The judiciary, emboldened by
Ergenekon and Sledgehammer, pur-
sued the investigations ever closer to
Erdoan. In the early months of 2012,
police issued a subpoena to Hakan
Fidanthe chief of national intelli-
gence and a condant of the Prime
Ministerand arrested Ilker Babu,
the countrys highest military ocer.
They felt that they could arrest any-
one, Gareth Jenkins said. Erdoan re-
sponded in a way that seemed calcu-
lated to hobble the Glenists: he started
closing down their schoolsa crucial
source of incomeand working to re-
strain the police. For Erdoan, that
was a declaration of war, Jenkins said.
O a cargo jet from Accra, Ghana,
n the evening of January 1, 2013,
bound for Sabiha Gken Interna-
tional Airport, in Istanbul, was di-
verted, because of fog, to Istanbul
Atatrk Airport. When the plane
landed, customs ocials found that a
shipment labelled mineral samples
actually contained more than three
thousand pounds of gold bars. The
gold belonged to Reza Zarrab, a twenty-
nine-year-old Turkish-Iranian busi-
nessman who counted among his
friends some of Turkeys most power-
ful politicians, and it was ultimately
destined for Tehran. Turkish investi-
gators, listening in on Zarrabs phone,
determined that he was transporting
extraordinary amounts of gold to Iran,
as part of a far-reaching scheme to
help the Iranian regime evade eco-
nomic sanctions. At the peak of the
operation, Zarrab said later, he was
moving two thousand pounds of gold
a day.
It seemed at rst as if the case had
limited implications within Turkey. We
didnt expect this little investigation to
give way to a bigger one, Nazmi Ard,
the chief of the Istanbul police depart-
ments organized-crime unit, told me.
Then, investigators say, they heard wire-
tapped conversations suggesting that
Zarrab was bribing ocials in Erdoans
government. Within days, Ard said,
police and prosecutors determined that
Zarrab had paid millions of dollars to
at least four Turkish cabinet ministers.
According to documents led in U.S.
District Court in Manhattan, the Min-
ister for the Economy, Zafer alayan,
accepted more than forty-ve million
dollars in cash, gems, and luxury goods.
When police entered the home of S-
leyman Aslanthe C.E.O. of Halk
Bank, which Zarrab used to launder
moneythey found shoeboxes stued
with four and a half million dollars
worth of cash.
The bribery allegations electried
Turkey. Zarrab, the center of the in-
vestigation, seemed made for tabloid
news. A brash young trader with a
pouf of dark hair, he was married to
one of the countrys biggest pop stars,
Ebru Gnde, famous for such songs
as Fugitive and I Dropped My An-
chor in Solitude. He was also friendly
with Erdoan: hed stood with him
at public functions and donated $4.6
million to a charity run by his wife,
Emine.
The allegations came at a time when
Erdoan was increasingly embattled,
and also increasingly aggressive. In the
spring of 2013, police had broken up a
peaceful demonstration in Istanbuls
Gezi Park, igniting protests in which
millions of people took part. Erdoan
turned loose the police; eleven people
died, and more than eight thousand
were injured. That year, more than a
hundred journalists were red after crit-
icizing Erdoan.
On December 17, 2013, police ar-
rested Zarrab and eighty-eight oth-
ers, including forty-three govern-
ment ocials. Although they did
not arrest any of Erdoans ministers,
they detained the sons of three of
them, claiming that they were con-
duits for bribes. Erdoans son Bilal
 Pennsylvania, he told a rally in Febru-
ary, 2014. If Turkey is your motherland,
HOSPITAL LINENS come back to Turkey, come back to your
motherland. If you want to get involved
They take the linens every day, the bloody linens in politics, go ahead and go into the
worn through by sweat and sleeplessness. public squares and make politics. But
Simple bleach at the end of it, dont mess with this country, dont steal
huge washers, soap swirling itself gray-green, its peace. . . . The parallel structure is
the sound of planes landing. involved in grand treason.

A Erdoan pursued the Glenists re-

Not just surgeries. Its mainly fter the bribery case collapsed,
ordinary seepage, the drip down tubes into arms,
drains in secret to abdomen lentlessly. Thousands of public employ-
and lung. Always sheets bearing up their cool nish ees who were suspected of having ties
as if nothing will happen, then caught in to Glen were pushed out, and govern-
ment agents raided Glenist businesses.
that lie. The life behind fabriccotton, ax Senior leaders in the movement began
in the weaveis a seed broken, to ee the country.
getting ahead of itself by tiny increments On Christmas Day, 2015, Turkish
unwatchable because we intelligence breached an encrypted mes-
have no patience with the slower inscrutables. saging app called ByLockan appar-
ently homemade network with two
A woman drives this morning, takes the linens out hundred thousand users. According to
one door, to the street, and into another. Turkish ocials, it was set up not long
Huge plastic bags encloud her. Bedazzlement keeps after Erdoan began purging suspected
staining, the dry brush-by of Glenists from the government. When
so many wings. She has a hard time with balance. the network was discovered, the server,
in Lithuania, quickly closed down, and
Nothing to make of it, nothing but its users switched to Eagle, another en-
look again. The bloody linens, evidence. crypted messaging app. They went un-
And the little truck they drive derground, a Turkish government aide
not much more than told me.
a go-kart really, a runabout. The intelligence ocials say that they
Marianne Boruch were able to decrypt the exchanges, and
one told me, Every conversation was
about the Glen community. By check-
also came under suspicion, after a attempt to topple Erdoans govern- ing the ByLock users names against
wiretap captured what was alleged to mentbut that the evidence seemed government records, they found that at
be a conversation between him and credible. As the investigation gathered least forty thousand were civil employ-
his father. Erdoan has insisted that force, four of Erdoans ministers re- ees, mostly from the judiciary and the
the tape was doctored, but it circu- signed. One of them, Erdoan Bayrak- police department. In May, two months
lated widely on social media, and Turks tar, called on Erdoan to quit, saying, before the coup, the government began
claimed to recognize his voice. The Prime Minister, too, has to resign. suspending them.
Tayyip Erdoan: Eighteen peoples homes Instead, Erdoan struck back. He In July, the intelligence department
are being searched right now with this big cor- denounced the investigation as a judi- notied the military that it had also
ruption operation. . . . So Im saying, what- cial coup and enacted a wholesale re- identied six hundred ocers of the
ever you have at home, take it out. O.K.? organization of the countrys criminal- Turkish Army, many of them highly
Bilal: Dad, what could I even have at home? justice system, forcing out thousands of ranked, among the ByLock users. Mil-
Theres your money in the safe.
Tayyip: Yes, thats what Im saying. police, prosecutors, and judges linked itary ocials began planning to expel
to the Zarrab case. Ard, the police them at a meeting of senior generals
A little while later, the two appar- chief who headed the investigation, was that was scheduled for early the next
ently spoke again. removed from the case and later im- month. We think the coup happened
prisoned. Ultimately, the bribery charges in July because they needed to move be-
Tayyip: Did you get rid of all of it, or . . . ? were dropped. fore they were expelled, Ibrahim Kaln,
Bilal: No, not all of it, Dad. So, theres
something like thirty million euros left that
In speeches, Erdoan began lash- the Erdoan aide, told me.
we havent been able to liquidate. ing out at his former ally, speaking of The details of the failed coup are
a parallel structure that sought to rule murky and often contradictory, but it
Western ocials told me that they Turkey. O Great Teacher, if you havent seems clear that the attempt was orga-
regarded the investigation as a Glenist done anything wrong, dont stay in nized in haste. Several detained soldiers
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 69
said that it was supposed to begin six
hours later, at 3 A.M., then was rushed
for reasons that are unclear. As the
ocers scrambled to take control, no
leader came forward. In some cases,
troops whod received orders from rebel
commanders apparently didnt realize
that they were taking part in an opera-
tion to overthrow the government, and
refused to go along when they did.
Indeed, it seems that the plotters
staked their operation on capturing or
killing Erdoan and persuading Gen-
eral Akar to join them. If those things
had happened, the coup would have suc-
ceeded, Kaln said. But none of the most
senior generals of the Turkish armed
forces could be persuaded to join, which
may have left the plotters without a mil-
itary leader. By 4 A.M., the coup plotters
were running for their lives.
Has the operation been cancelled,
Murat? one ocer asked, in a text
message.
Yes, Commander, Major elebiolu
replied. When another ocer asked
whether to mount an escape, the Major
replied, Stay alive, Commander. The
choice is yours.
After the coup, several statements,
purportedly from the plotters, were re-
leased to the press. The statements were
impossible to verify. None of the men
who confessed have spoken publicly, and
most of their statements appear to have
been heavily expurgated. Photographs
have circulated of ocers who confessed;
in several cases, they have wounds on
their faces, suggesting that
they were beaten.
Two Western diplomats
who spoke on the condi-
tion of anonymity told
me that they found the
governments accusations
against Glens movement
compelling, if not entire-
ly convincing. One said,
Un doubtedly, Glenists
played a credible role in it. But there
were also anti-Erdoan military oppor-
tunists mixed in. Many people in the
armed forces, and in Turkish civil so-
ciety, were enraged by Erdoans grow-
ing authoritarianism. Brigadier Gen-
eral Gkhan Snmezate, one of the
plotters who went to Marmaris to cap-
ture Erdoan, said in a confession, I
am absolutely not a Glenist. But when
70 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
one of the plotters called on a secure
line to recruit him, he thought that
things in the country were bad enough
that he agreed to go along.
Some former American ocials said
it was likely that Glenists played the
leading role. After the purges of the pre-
ceding decade, they argued, no other
group in the Army was large enough or
cohesive enough. The Glenists are
the only people who could have done
this, Jerey said. One ocer, identied
only as Lieutenant Colonel A.K.,
testied that he was informed of a coup
plot a week before, by a man who he
assumed was a Glen leader. The man
spoke of the troubles that the move-
ment had been facing, and said that
some three thousand ocers were going
to be purged during the meeting of se-
nior generals in August. Glen didnt
want this meeting to happen, the man
said. We cant lose our last fort.
Erdoans government has given the
U.S. tens of thousands of pages of doc-
uments, tracking the Glenists history
in Turkey. According to American o-
cials, little or none of it is relevant to
the question of Glens direct involve-
ment in the coup. General Akar, the
chief of the general sta, said in a state-
ment that while he was being held cap-
tive, one of the senior plotters said, If
you wish, we can put you in touch with
our opinion leader, Fethullah Glen.
One of the Western diplomats, who has
followed Akar throughout his career,
told me, Akar has been, since he took
the position, a guy dened
by integrity.
The most compelling ac-
count came from Lieutenant
Colonel Levent Trkkan,
one of the ocers who took
Akar captive. The son of
a poor farmer, Trkkan
dreamed as a boy of join-
ing the Army. His family
couldnt aord to send him
to a test-preparation school, so he started
studying in the homes of Glenist
brothers. On the eve of the exam to
get into an lite military school, the
brothers gave him the answerstaking
care to include a few wrong ones, to
avoid arousing suspicion. He has re-
mained a follower ever since. I believed
that Fethullah Glen was a divine en-
tity, he told his interrogators. In his con-
fession, he identied seventeen colleagues
as Glenists, including Erdoans per-
sonal military aide, Colonel Ali Yazc.
(Aslandoan disputes Trkkans testi-
mony, but says that he cant speak to
specic claims.)
In 2011, Trkkan was promoted and
became an aide to General Necdet zel,
the chief of the Turkish Army. I started
carrying out assignments given by the
sect, he said. For four years, he planted
a small listening device in zels oce
every day and removed it every night.
The battery lasted one day, he said. I
would take the full device to my sect
brother once a week and get an empty
one from him.
The night before the coup, Trkkan
said, a fellow-Glenist, a colonel, asked
him to step outside for a cigarette. Once
they were alone, he described a plan:
The President, the Prime Minister, the
ministers, the chief of general sta, other
chiefs of sta and generals would be
picked up one by one. Everything would
be done quietly. Trkkans assignment
was to help nd Akar and pacify him.
Disturbed, Trkkan went to see his
brother in the Glen movement, who
lived in a house behind a nearby gas sta-
tion. He wasnt there, but several others
were, and they conrmed the operation.
Trkkan has suered since the coup.
In a photograph released with his testi-
mony, he is wrapped in a hospital gown,
with his face visibly battered and his rib
cage and hands swaddled in bandages.
In his confession, he expressed bitter re-
morse. When I learned from the TV
that the parliament was being bombed
and civilians were being killed, I started
regretting it, he said. What was being
done was like a massacre. This was done
in the name of a movement that I thought
worked for the will of God.
T doan, addressing a group of local
hree weeks after the coup, Er-
ocials in Ankara, apologized for hav-
ing once been Glens ally. We helped
this organization with good will, Er-
doan said. He said that he had trusted
Glen, because of his apparent rever-
ence for education and his organiza-
tions aid work. I feel sad that I failed
to reveal the true face of this traitorous
organization long before.
For Erdoan, though, retribution has
always come more easily than apologies.
The state of emergency that he declared
after the coup gave him dictatorial
powers, which he used to carry out a
far-reaching crackdown that began with
Glenists but has grown to encompass
almost anyone who might pose a threat
to his expanded authority. The gures
are stupefying: forty thousand people
detained and huge numbers of others
forced from their jobs, including twenty-
one thousand police ocers, three thou-
sand judges and prosecutors, twenty-
one thousand public-school workers,
fteen hundred university deans, and
fteen hundred employees of the Min-
istry of Finance. Six thousand soldiers
were detained. The government also
closed a thousand Glen- aliated
schools and suspended twenty-one thou-
sand teachers.
Its dicult to know whether those
targeted were hard-core followers of
Glen, or sympathizers, or not related
to the movement at all. Public criticism
of Erdoan has been almost entirely
squelched, either by the outpouring of
national support that followed the coup I need something sturdy enough to withstand
or by the fear of being imprisoned. Er- the scrutiny of other parents.
doan has closed more than a hundred
and thirty media outlets and detained
at least forty-three journalists, and the

purge is still under way. The Glenist
cult is a criminal organization, and a big he has also put himself in the awkward mon recorded a few days later, he said,
one, Kaln, the Presidents aide, told position of denouncing a man who en- Let a bunch of idiots think they have
me. You know, over eleven thousand abled his rise. Talking about Glen and succeeded, let them celebrate, let them
people participated in the coup, accord- his movement, he can seem almost to declare their ridiculous situation a cel-
ing to our current estimates. Were going be in pain. They came asking for sev- ebration, but the world is making fun
after anyone with any connection with enteen universities, and I approved all of this situation, and that is how it is
this Glenist cult, here and there, in the of them, he told a crowd in 2014. He going to go down in the history books.
judiciary, the private sector, the news- asked for land for schools, we gave it to Be patient, he told his followers.
papers, and other places. him, he added. We gave them all kinds Victory will come.
The irony of the attempted coup is of support. Erdoan rarely spoke Glens Glen is old and ailing; it seems un-
that Erdoan has emerged stronger than name in these speeches, but this time likely that he will be able to keep up
ever. The popular uprising that stopped he addressed him and his followers di- the ght for much longer. Listening to
the plot was led in many cases by peo- rectly. So this is treason? he asked, his sermon, I thought back to my meet-
ple who disliked Erdoan only margin- sounding dismayed. What did you ask ing with him last year. Even then, his
ally less than they disliked the prospect for that you couldnt get? movement was being dismantled, his
of a military regime. But the result has followers on the run. I asked how he

T emerged from seclusion, summon-

been to set up Erdoan and his party
to rule, with nearly absolute authority,
for as long as he wants. Even before
the coup attempt, we had concerns that
the government and the President were
approaching politics and governance in
ways that were designed to lock in a
competitive advantageto insure you
would have perpetual one-party rule,
the second Western diplomat said.
Erdoan has solidied his power, but
he day after the coup, Glen
ing reporters to his compound for a
press conference, at which he denied
any involvement. As he watched his fol-
lowers being arrested en masseand as
he became a national pariahan edge
crept into his voice. He told his follow-
ers that Erdoan had staged the coup,
and that no one outside Turkey believed
that Glen was responsible. In a ser-
thought he would be remembered, and
he gave me an answer the like of which
Ive never heard from another leader
in politics or religion. It may sound
strange to you, but I wish to be forgot-
ten when I die, he said. I wish my
grave not to be known. I wish to die
in solitude, with nobody actually be-
coming aware of my death and hence
nobody conducting my funeral prayer.
I wish that nobody remember me.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 71
 FICTION

72 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI

H
e swings the sh from the
water, a wild stripe icking
and ashing into the boat, and
grabs the line, twisting the hook out,
holding the sh down in the footrests.
It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something
rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the
shallow of the open boat.
Flecks of blood and scales loosen,
as if turning to rainbows in his hands,
as he picks up the sh and breaks its
neck, feels the minute rim of teeth in-
side its jaw on the pad of his forenger,
puts his thumb behind the head and
snaps.
The jaw splits and the gills splay,
like an opening ower.
He was sure he would catch sh.
He left just a simple note: Pick salad x.
Briefly, he looks toward the inland
clis, hoping the peregrine will be there,
scanning as he patiently undoes the
knot of traces, pares the feathers away
from one another until they are free,
and feeds them out. The boat is ecked.
Glittered. A heat has come to the morn-
ing now, convincing and thick.
The kayak lilts. Weed oats. He
thinks of her hair in water. The same
darkened blond color.
Its unusual to catch only one. Or
it was just a straggler. The edge of
the shoal. Something split it from the
others.
He retrieves a carrier bag from the
dry bag in back and stores the sh.
Then he bails out the blood-rusted
water from the boat.
Fish dont have eyelids, remember.
In this bright water, its likely they are
deeper out.
Hes been hearing his fathers voice
for the past few weeks now.
Ive got this one, though. Thats
enough. Thats lunch.
The bay lay just a little north. It was
a short paddle from the at beach in-
land of him, with the caravans on the
low elds above, but it felt private.
His father long ago had told him
that they were the only ones who knew
about the bay, and that was a good
thing between them to believe.
Youll set the pan on a small re and
cook the mackerel as you used to do
together, in the pats of butter you took
from the roadside caf. The butter will
be liquid by now, and you will have to
squeeze it from the wrapper like an
ointment.
The bones in the cooling pan, ngers
sticky with the toee of burned butter.
He was not a talker. But he couldnt
imagine sitting in the bay and not
talking to his father.
There is a strange gurgle and a ra-
zorbill appears, shudders o the water,
icks its head and preens. It looks at
him, head cocked, turns as it paddles
o a few yards. Then it dives again,
and is gone.
He takes the plastic container from
the front stow. It has warmed in the
morning sun, and it seems wrong to
him, the warmth. As if the ashes still
had heat.
He unscrews the lid partially, caught
by a sudden fear. That he will release
some jinni, a ghost, the fatal germ. No.
Theyre sterile. He throws science at
the fear.
Hes had to go through so many
possessions, things that exploded with
memories during the past few weeks;
but it is the opposite with the ashes.
He tries to hold away the fact they
know nothing of what they are. Wants
to remind the ashes of events, moments.
To make them the physical thing of
his father.
After the brief doubt, he relaxes
again. Can feel the current arc him out,
its subtle shift away from shore. A
strong draw to the seemingly still water.
He has a sense, out here, of peace.
Thinks, Why do we stop doing the
things we enjoy and the things we know
are good for us?
When he had fetched the kayak out
from under the tarp, there were cobwebs,
and earwigs in among the hatch straps.
He had not told her he was going.
Hed expected it to be a weight he
wanted to lift by himself.
There is a piping of oystercatchers,
a clap of water as a sh jumps. He sees
it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing
deliberately, for a brief astounding mo-
ment, broken from its element.
Round the promontory, he fades the
kayak, lets it drift, wiggling his ankles,
working his feet loose with arrival. The
water beneath him suddenly aglut, sen-
tinel somehow, with jellysh. He won-
ders if they are a sign, of some increas-
ing heat perhaps. Then the noise of
music hits him.
A child knee-high in the water, slap-
ping at the waves. Another coming
tentatively down the stones. A mother
changing inside a towel.
The ashes sit perfectly in the drinks
holder by his legs.
Laid out farther o, an adolescent
girl.The sound of her radio travelling.
A pile of bright things.
The child has found a whip of kelp
and slaps at the waves.
Its O.K., Dad, he says. Well come
back later.
The sound of a Jet Ski, from the
beach in front of the caravans. An urban,
invasive sound.
Well come back when theyve gone.
Out in the distance, a small cloud.
A white urry. A crowd of diving
birds.
They wont be here all day.
Then he paddles, the ashes by his
legs, in a straight line out to sea.
Its as hes holding his hands in the
water, rubbing the blood and scales
from them, that the hairs on his arms
stand up and sway briey, like seaweed
in the current.
The birds that had indicated the
sh had lifted suddenly. They are faint
implications now, a hiatus disappear-
ing against the light o the sea.
He is far enough oshore for the
land to have paled in view.
The rst lightning strikes some-
where out past the horizon. At rst he
thinks it just a sudden glint. The thun-
der happens moments later, and he
feels sick in his gut.
He sees the rain as a thick dark band,
moving in. Starts to paddle.
Then there is a wire of electric bright-
ness . Three. Four. A rumble that seems
to echo o the surface of the water.
He counts automatically, assesses
the distance to land. Another throb
of light. The coast still a thin wood-
colored line.
The wind picks up, cold air mov-
ing in front of the storm. And then
there is a basal roll. The sound of a great
weight landing. A slow tearing in the sky.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 73

Should we have to evacuate the building, lets not forget him.
One repeated word now. No, no, no.
When it hits him there is a bright
white light.
He wakes floating on his back, caught
on a cleat by the elastic toggle of his
wetsuit shoe. Around him hailstones
melt and dissipate. They are scattered
on the kayak, roll o as it bobs on the
slight waves. There is a hissing sound.
The hailstones melting in the water.
He stares around, shell-shocked, try-
ing to understand, a layer of ash on the
surface of the water. He cannot move
his arms. They are held out before him
as if beseeching the sky.
Dead sh lie around him in the
water.
He gets himself to the boat, the boat
to him, drawing it with his leg, shak-
ing until he frees the toggle, turns, kicks,
twists, trying to lever with his useless
arms. Somehow tips himself into the
boat.
Live, hes thinking. Live.
His shing rod on re upon the
water as he slips o the world again,
and passes out.
He moves because he coughs, a cough
made of glass. Slowly lifts himself. One
eye closed with salt. His face has been
74 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
in the oor of the kayak and the salt
is from the evaporated water. The sun
had come out hard after the storm and
evaporated the water, leaving the salt
in a crust on his eye. When he opens
the other, the light blinds him.
It hurts to breathe because his whole
body hurts. As if he has suered a great
fall. His mouth, too, is crusted with
salt. He does not know where he is.
There is a pyroclast of ne dried ash
across his skin.
He blinks and struggles to raise him-
self a little, the kayak shifting below
him. The world slipping, rocking. When
he grimaces, his lips split and bleed.
He looks down at his hands, feels
the briefest twitch in his right arm, a
wave and it spasms, smashes unfeel-
ingly against the inside of the boat and
goes dead again, falls against his side,
a sh icking after suocating.
What happened? His consciousness
a snapped cord his mind tries to pull
back together.
His left hand stays inert, fractalled
with purple; seems tattooed, in a pat-
tern like ice on airplane glass.
The right arm, for a while, is way-
ward. Movable, but numb, clumsy.
He does not know how long he has
been like this. Who he is.
He sees a rouge burn through the
dry salt on the muscle of his forearm,
sees the line of his shinbone startled
and red. Feels his face. Like something
felt through packaging, hears more than
properly feels the paper of his dry,
cracked lips. He has the strange con-
viction that if he opens his stuck eye
he will see what happened.
When he tries again, its as if that
eye leaves his face and utters by him.
A buttery.
It takes him a while to focus, to ac-
cept it. Hes forgotten there is other
life. It puppets around him.
He cannot believe that a thing
so small, so breakable, is out here.
A thing that cannot put down on the
water. How far must we be from land?
The buttery settles on the bright
lettering of the boat. He watches it
open and close its wings in the sun.
Opens and closes his working hand.
He reaches up and scrapes the salt
from his closed lid, picks at the hard
crystals. He wets his hand in the water,
blinks with the sting as he bathes
the eye.
When he refocusses, the buttery
is gone. For a split second, he believes
again it was his eye, then he spots it,
heading out over the water.
He feels a confusion, a kind of throb
in his head. There is a complete hori-
zon. A horizon everywhere around and
no point of it seems closer than an-
other. It brings claustrophobia. He does
not know if hes movingif hes trav-
elling. He cannot tell in which direc-
tion if he is.
He feels only the rock, the sway, the
dip and wallow of the boat.
For a moment, as he lifts from sleep,
he thinks the warm sun on his neck is
someones breath. Hears, far o, the
sound of a speedboat engine. There is
land in sight, like a presence that has
woken him.
He wakes with the understanding
that the paddle is gone, and with that
comes low panic.
His good arm has been in the
water, and it is only as he raises it that
he feels the little nger has been
stripped.
It is torn and frayed to the rst
knuckle, skinned and swollen ragged
with water, the pain searing and hot. The
nail is still there but tooth-marked
where the little sh have bitten at
it. As he touches the nger, his head
spins, and when he passes out, again,
its like another white light shoots
through him.
The thump of the n stirs him.
His head was resting on the gun-
wale as the dark n struck.
He does not move. Cannot move.
A few yards o, the n rises again, a
half-metre sail out of the water, a gun-
gray body. His primal systems re a
wave of fear through him, the adren-
aline trying to get through him like
water poured on ice; and the n folds,
disappears.
He is frozen, urinates, cannot move
his head.
When it bumps again it is as if the
n had grown tactile. It folds and ops,
reaches into the boat, hallucinatory,
cartoonish, like a sea lions ipper. And
then the body of the sh, clownlike,
lolls side-on in the water, a disk the
size of a table.
This cannot be happening, he thinks.
The sunsh and he eye to eye, its cu-
rious n folding, opping. An aberrant
ripple to the water in the otherwise
lambent calm. This is it, he thinks.
This is it.
The sunfish stayed with him for hours. It
could be said it steered him. It was almost
the size of the kayak in length and bumped
and rubbed the boat with a droll instinct,
as a cow might a post.
The sunsh is not shable, not edible,
and no instinct has been driven into it to
stay away from man. And perhaps it was
the warmth of the boat it liked, with the
plastic heated by the sun. Or perhaps it
was something more.
But it stayed and bumped the boat for
hours, and by doing so steered it; and it
cannot be known whether it was delib-
erate, benevolent, that it did not steer the
kayak farther out to sea.
He tries the screw of the locker in
the center of the kayak, confused by
his sureness that there is a rst-aid kit,
confused given the things he does not
76 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
know. The locker will not shift. Focus,
he thinks. Just accept the pain. Focus
on the fact that the land is there.
He turns in his seat and reaches
for the dry bag, husbanding the n-
ger. Uses his teeth and his hand to
open the bag and spill out the looser
thingsthe sunblock, the T-shirt, the
old cloth.
His ears are blistered and cracked.
His skin parched and sore, stretched
and gritty with salt. He rubs the sun-
block in. A baing thought of holi-
days. Works urgently, as if the next few
moments were vital.
He rubs it on his dead hand and is
frightened. That he cannot feel it. That
it lies so inert. He feels a sort of hor-
ror at his body. How long has this taken
to happen? How long have I been out
here?
He looks again at his useless hand,
the now fernlike pattern. It seems to
follow his veins, mark tiny capillaries,
a leaf skeleton disappearing under
the tide line of ash into the sleeve of
his top.
A wave of sick goes through him.
The idea of breath on his neck lies
under everything. A suspicion that
someone has been left behind.
He takes the T-shirt and wets it,
wraps it on his head, the touch of it a
heat at rst against his burned skin.
But then it cools, and there is a sort of
weight lifted, as if the sun had stopped
pressing.
He unzips the pocket of his buoy-
ancy aid and fumbles out the phone,
drops it into his lap as he pops open
the waterproof pouch. He turns it up-
side down and tips the phone out, thunk
on the boat, picks it up and tries to
start it. Nothing.
Take it apart. Let it dry out.
He struggles with it until the back
slips o. And there against the battery
is a wren feather.
He traps it with his thumb. Holds
it carefully. His memory like a dropped
pack of cards.
Next doors cat. Its strange posses-
sive mewling, crouched over the wren,
the bird like a knot of wood.
The bird vibrated briey when he
picked it up, a shudder of life. Then
ew away.
He could not picture her, but a sense
of her came back with that.
They had kept a feather each.
Shouts. Faintly. Loud shouts that
reach him quieter than whispers. That
seem to carry on the air like faintly vis-
ible things.
He notes movement, just a shifting
of the air, the smallest breeze that bears
the shouts; a sure current, the kayak drifts.
Goes sideways past the shingle bay.
He is in a dream. He sees, there, a
penguin crowd of people bathing in
their clothes. In black-and-white suits.
They are playing in the water. Chil-
dren in waistcoats. As if a wedding had
run into the sea.
Where am I?
He lifts his arm. They are far o.
Tiny on the shore. Tries to shout. Shouts
like a puncture. Like a hiss of air.
Hears the draw and swash of the
waves breaking in the bay, sees the chil-
dren jumping the water. The sound of
play. A bus parked on the road behind
the beach.
Are they celebrating the end of the
world? he thinks. I am dreaming. They
are bathing in their clothes.
He watches the land fade, as if it
were slowly sinking into the ocean.
He has bailed out the cockpit as best
he can. The cloud of dark piss, the tide
mark of salt that shows how the water
has evaporated.
Scales of mackerel decal the inside,
here and there is a zip of dried blood.
The ringing in his head is a hum
now, a low choir, the ick of water on
the boat constant, random, like the
sound of work in the distance.
For a while, as he drifts, it is not the
thirst, nor the sun, nor the open space
around him that occupies him most. It
is the need to stand up.
He tries the locker again. Pressures
and turns with his thumb and nger,
patiently, until the screw hatch jumps
and, after a few hard-fought-for mil-
limetres, rattles loose.
He shes out the built-in pouch,
squeezes the toggle and loosens the
drawstring.
He unrolls the rst-aid bag, the rip of
Velcro a strange abrupt noise that seems
to tear the fabric of sounds he has got He keeps to hand the thick jumper. one end of the paddle leash to the carry
used to. With the violence of the act, Tucks the cagoule in by the seat. Takes handle, the other round his ankle. It is
some of the dried ash falls aked from a brief inventory of the boat. He does nothing. But it is all that he can do.
his skin, as if drawing attention to itself. not add: One man. One out of two
He opens his mouthwinces at the arms. Four out of ten ngers. No pad-
chapped cracks of his lipsand bites dle. No torch. One dead phone. With dark, the cold hits. It is imme-
down on a roll of gauze, uses an anti- diate, comes with a sureness that it will
septic towel on his nger. He even smells get colder.
the sting, as he did as a child, Dettol The sun drops beautifully. For a long time he ghts the need
on a grazed knee. He rocks it away, He takes o the buoyancy aid and pulls to piss. Or what feels like a long time.
humming through the gauze, rocks until on the jumper, useless arm rst. The swell picks up. The boat dips,
he can open his eyes on the pain. He puts the cagoule on, again the use- sways as if two unseen hands are shift-
He tears the dressing packet, puts the less arm rst, but cannot zip it up. Then ing it, panning for rare minerals. With
pad down on his thigh, and wraps it he puts the buoyancy aid back on, and in his empty stomach, he feels a constant
clumsily around his nger. The eort the doing of it loses the T-shirt from his bowl of nausea.
makes him reel. Then he pulls the pa- head. Watches, stoical, as it oats out on He lifts o the bungee, kneels in
pery tape with his teeth and gets an end the water. There is a slight swell to the the boat, and pisses o the side, a weak
around the dressing, jams the roll be- sea now, and the pan and the bottle in stream, a stench he hears pattering on
tween his knees, makes a clumsy ban- the forward hold roll and scrape inside, the side of the gunwale. But where it
dage. Fits on a plastic nger guard. roll and scrape with the loll of the boat. hits the water there is a sudden light,
He scoots forward, opens the hold a gorgeous phosphorescence.
cover, horribly aware in that instant how When he sits back, he redoes the bun-
The water slapping the side of the small the kayak is, stus the pan and the gee round himself. That some of the stars
boat picks up. Its just the angles, he bottle under the dry bag to jam them. on the horizon might be the lights of
tells himself. Its because Im shifting Of all the things to put up with, that ships, of land, he cant allow himself to
my weight. would be too much: the persistent think. Cannot allow himself to imagine
He leans over the front stow, un- clunking. It is one of the few things he the warmth, the food, the safety they
clips it, and draws out the large dry has any say in. would mean. It is better that they are stars.
bag, sees the small pan in the hold, the He has a horrible fear of falling How long? How long has it been? Is
rolled cloth that contains cutlery, a out of the boat. Its frail platform. Of this my rst night out? I would have
wooden spoon. being aoat in the coming darkness. been thirstier, wouldnt I, if Id been
He feels odd little humpback lurches, He slips the bungee from the back out longer?
an empty sickness without food. He has bay over himself like a seat belt, fastens He looks. A child awake in a dark
the bizarre sense that he could reach out,
feel the same little kick in her stomach.
He pulls out a carrier bag. It is heavy
with a bottle of water and a bottle of
dark beer. He stares at the beer for a
moment. He was going somewhere. He
was going to drink a beer. Then, fum-
bling, urgent, he takes a drink of water,
warm, hot almost, wets his mouth, lips,
lets it spill wastefully over his chin.
There is a shock at the immediacy of
its eect, a voice screaming, Do not
waste this; do not drink too much. He
brings the bottle down with a sort of
fear. Dont drink too fast. Remembers
watering a dry plant too quickly.
You have to save this, he thinks. Dry
dirt will repel the thing it needs the most.
Stares again for a moment at the beer.
He empties out the dry bag: Small gas
stove. Espresso cup. Coeemaker. Small
plastic box of coee. Tackle box with
traces, hooks, weights, swivels, lures.Thick
jumper. Reel of shing line. Cagoule.
You went out. You went out too I have unfortunately linked my self-worth
far shing. to something Im not very good at.

There isnt a siege. Were all in line for the bouncy castle.
bedroom. And, after a while, the stars
seem to fade, at rst very slowly. He
does not know if it is an illusion, but
they start to go out, like houselights
across a night landscape.
He unwraps the emergency blan-
ket, the silver foil of it speaking with
reected light.
The boat shifts up and down, a lul-
laby hush.
It is cold and it is pitch-black. Blacker
when he opens his eyes, blacker than
it was when they were closeda stun-
ning nothingness. He is hardly con-
scious. And he hears the childs voice.
Hears the clear troubling cry of a child.
This is not real, he thinks.
He feels that his heart is slow, his
breathing accid.
Then comes the cry again.
The cold a complete tiredness. A
calm. Like an acceptance of drowning.
I can go now, he thinks. Ive done my
best. He feels passive toward it. He is so
cold that if there was any challenge to
him he would let it happen, gently yield.
A spray of water covers him, patter-
ing the plastic blanket, falls on him,
warmer than his skin, and he opens his
eyes, sees the green light, the perfect
shape of dolphins playing round the boat.
78 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
This is just rhythm, he says. You can-
Somewhere he feels his ticking heart,
an engine trying to start. Was he nearly
gone? Was he gone? The childs cry, close
by now, of the dolphin calf, and the
mother breaks the water, a luminous green
form leaving a gure of itself in the air,
bright water dropping, a glow, crashing
color landing , back , into the water.
The calf sounded so human. A baby
in an upstairs room.
Stay alive, he thinks.
A bright tail, beautiful triangle.
You have to stay alive.
pact that terries him, wakes him. His
He wakes with a strange, specic clar-
ity. Three solid simple things: her, the
child, his physical ability. These, now,
are his landmarks. The night has left
him alive.
He sits up. His skin where it is bare
has tightened. Where he touches there
is a ne sand of dried salt.
He is uncertain of it, but he seems to
sense something from his deadened arm.
He takes the sh from the carrier bag
in the dry bag, and the shing knife, and
puts the sh down on the side of the boat,
bringing a hollow gawp to his stomach.
He cuts behind the gills, turns the
blade at and draws it along, feel-
ing it bump over the bones of the spine.
The llet peels o like a ap, the
meat changed and cured in the heat.
He chews the llet, the salt meat of
it, then drinks some water, cooled again
after the night.
It is not possible for him to believe
that he will die, but he begins to fear
that he will leave her alone.
This is going to be about rhythm.
You cannot control anything else. Just
your rhythm. You have half a small sh
and four inches of water. If you grow
impatient, it will go wrong.
The foily taste of the sh grows as
he swallows the water, brings a sting
to his mouth.
You have to conserve energy, and
you have to be patient.
When he turns round to stow the
dry bag, there is the land.
not race. You will move the boat only
a little, but you must not be impatient.
He takes o the jumper and folds
it into a pad. Then he kneels on it, puts
on the buoyancy aid, and picks up the
small frying pan as a paddle.
After a few strokes, he gets the boat
around.
The pain of resting on his burning
shins balances the pain of using his raw
nger into a tough holdable thing.
Thats the land, he says. Thats ev-
erything. It was a low undulating line.
Its all about rhythm now.
All of his life hes had a recurring dream:
the car leaves the road. It is never the im-
fear comes the moment he feels the car go.
His life does not pass before his eyes.
There is even a point when he feels calm.
But then he sees the faces of the people he
loves. He sees their faces as they see him go.
The lick came into the waves late af-
ternoon, and with it a wide swell to the
water. The clouds now were an intentful
dark strip on the horizon and they were
incoming, and the breeze came before
them, bringing patches over the water
like a cats fur brushed the wrong way.
He had continued to paddle on and o.
Had thrown up after eating the second
piece of sh, and that had aected him.
There was a thin bare moisture in
the breeze, and every now and then he
opened his mouth to it. Gradually
he neared the land. The colors now
distinguishable.
It was less easy to bear, having the
land in view. He did not think, If I die
you must nd someone else; he could not
think that. He felt a great responsibility.
He wanted to make sure she knew
how to reset the pilot light on the boiler.
Pictured a coee cup, never moved, the
little liquid left growing into a ghost
of dust. The note: Pick salad x.
He thought at rst it was a bag or
a sack oating stiy in the water. It
was a fence banner. He turned the boat
frantically, the handle of the pan rat-
tling and worked loose now.
Seaweed and algae had grown on
the banner, so it looked somehow furred,
like a great dead animal on the surface
of the water.
He pushed at the fur of algae and
it slid easily, uncovered a bright pic-
ture of a family car.
There were metal eyelets in the cor-
ners and along the edge of the plas-
ticked canvas, swollen and rusted in
the water, and as he lifted it into the
boat the banner caught and bridled in
the breeze, the car rippling.
He scraped the bigger patches of
algae from the banner with the back
of his knife, then doubled the shing
line and fed it slackly through an eye-
let and brought it back, tying it to the
cleat where he clipped his seat. He did
the same at the other corner.
Then he cut the toggle away from
one end and took the drawstring from
the hem of the cagoule to give himself
a cord. With that he tied the other cor-
ners of the banner around the carry
handles of the boat.
When he put his feet to the banner
and lifted it aloft, the wind caught it
with a snap.
He had an idea that the land was a
magnet. If he could get close, it would
draw him in.
The light dropped prematurely with
the rain. At rst thin, persistent gray
drizzle.
He cut the top from the bottle and
lled it where the rain ran down the
sail of banner. His skin loosened. His
eyes stung with salt that the rain washed
into them. Every so often he bailed out
the boat.
It was a light, saturating rain that
pattered sharply on the cagoule he had
put back on. Through it the land was
visible and gray. Very sparsely, lights
appeared.
The wind now brushed the crests
from the waves and it lled the sail,
blew a ne spray into the boat.
In the falling light it seemed that a
shadow lifted up from the water and
went past him. A low whir of shear-
waters. A ghost.
He thought then how, for the time
he had been drifting, he had not
seen other birds. He had not seen a plane.
What if this is it? What if there has
been some quiet apocalypse? Some
sheet of lethal radiation I survived.
Some airborne plague.
He thought of the sunburn on his
body, a momentary scald. Of the but-
tery. A sect, drowning themselves in
the water. The heat, liquid. Sluicing
from the air.
Partly, there was relief in the idea.
That he would not hurt them if they
were already gone.
He shook the thought away.
The premature evening stars. How
she wanted glow-in-the-dark dots stuck
to the ceiling of the nursery.
When it was beyond doubt that the
land was nearing, he wept quietly. The
tears went into his mouth.
He lifted the banner with his feet a lit-
tle and saw the growing details of the
land. Then he rested, looked at the pic-
ture of the bright car. He could not get it
out of his mind that she would be wait-
ing on the beach; the bell of her stomach.
It was only then he recognized the
danger, staring at the car: The car leaves
the road. I have no way of steering. The
land is now a wall.
The light was going. The storm was
coming.
He felt it in the water rst, like a
muscle tensing. He would be better o
farther out. If he could stay in the boat.
If he could stay on it. Ride the storm.
He could hear now, distantly, the
boom of water hitting clis. A low
echo. The rst sound of land.
Hold out. All you need is daylight.
You could go in on your own if you
could see. Trust the buoyancy aid, trust
the oat. Just swim yourself in.
He turned, tried to look back out
to sea. A dark bank moving in.
The squall came in like a landslide,
with a physical force.
It cracked into the sail and drove the
nose down and he struggled to level the
boat, the cockpit lling and spewing.
As the sea picked up, he knew it
was useless. The sign sang and hissed
and seemed to bolt from him. You feel
the strike, he knew now. You feel the
strike coming.
He cut the cord, sending the ban-
ner out like a kite. A bird apping.
Then the line snapped and it ripped
free, skimmed o over the water. A car
out of control.
He held the carry handle, tried to
jam his useless arm behind the seat.
You should have kept the banner.
You should have kept it as a sea anchor.
It might have kept you on to the waves.
His fathers voice was everywhere
now, as if he had entered the sky.
There was no control. There was a
randomness to the water. As if a great
weight had been dropped into it. He
was horried, tried to convince him-
self they could not see him, that they
were not watching.
The back tipped, tipped him,
plunged with the whole body of the
kayak shuddering.
In the half-light it was as if the boat
had been driven into a dark rut.
He tried to press the kayak into the
water, to cling on, as if to the ank of
some great beast. Tried to lean the kayak
into the waves. But the boat went round.
The sea was up. An uprushing ground.
He thought of the land, the rock.
He passed now beyond any sense of
danger to a blank expectant place as
he undid the paddle leash.
I do not want the boat to come with
me. It would be like a missile.
If a bird the size of a wren can sur-
vive in the jaws of a cat.
Trust the oat now. You have to
trust the oat.
NEWYORKER.COM
Cynan Jones on his story, The Edge of the Shoal.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 79

WHAT SHES HAVING
Emily Witts adventures in a sexual wonderland.
F erotic optimism than the packed
ew places are less conducive to
waiting room of a public health clinic
in Brooklyn. Sitting on a hard plastic
chair under a uorescent buzz as an
employee lectures on proper condom
usea catechism you know by heart
yet sometimes fail to heedyou may
conclude, as Emily Witt did, that the
time has come to change your life. It
was March of 2012. Just before Valen-
tines Day, Witt had slept with a friend.
She was single; he was not. A few weeks
later, he called to report that he might
have chlamydia. He was overcome
with guilt. His girlfriend was enraged.
Witt didnt feel too great, either. She
was thirty, and depressed after a recent
breakup. Though she had spent the en-
suing months hooking up with vari-
ous acquaintances, her hopes were set
on long-term monogamy. I still envi-
sioned my sexual experience eventu-
ally reaching a terminus, like a mono-
rail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center,
Witt writes in Future Sex (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux), her gutsy rst book.
Instead, she found herself enmeshed
in sexual relationships that I could not
describe in language and that failed
my moral ideals. She didnt have chla-
mydia, it turned out. What she caught
was worse: a dismal self-accounting of
her existential shortcomings.
Marriage, for many, signals the start
of a new life stage. As Witts image of
the Epcot monorail suggests, she pre-
ferred to see it as an endpoint, the mo-
ment that would bring the aimless li-
aisons of her single years to a full stop.
Witt grew up in Minneapolis, went to
college at Brown, and got a masters
degree in investigative journalism at
80 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ
Columbia. She was raised by liberal
boomer parents who came of age in
the sixties. Inuenced by that decades
liberties, and chastened by its excesses,
they encouraged her to think of youth-
ful sexual experimentation as a healthy
prelude to a coupled life. In this, Witt
was hardly alone. For young, straight,
well-educated American women, sleep-
ing around for pleasure and experience
has become a social convention, the
way dancing the cotillion at a dbu-
tante ball once was.
Witt was ready to move on. Follow-
ing her visit to the clinic, she fanta-
sized about giving herself over to the
project of wifeliness, as she saw many
of her peers doing, indulging in the
sort of triumphal social-media posts
engagement photos, wedding photos,
baby photosthat advertise the twenty-
rst-century life cycle of young cou-
ples. Monogamy, she felt, would be all
the more satisfying for being obviously
traditional, a path she could see as a
destiny rather than a choice. She was tures she had reason to believe she
tired of choosing. Better, she thought,
to fall in love with one person and have
sex with him for the foreseeable future.
But love failed to arrive. Her mono-
rail glided on, Epcot nowhere in sight.
Without the pressure of emotional
commitment, Witt was free to do what
she liked sexually, but she had little use
for a freedom she had already decided
to give up.
Maybe the problem had to do with
a failure of imagination. Sexual free-
dom can be put to more interesting
uses than sleeping with your friends.
Those of us born in the nineteen-
eighties belong to the rst generation
whose experience of pornography comes
almost exclusively from the Internet,
which, Witt points out, constitutes the
most comprehensive visual repository
of sexual fantasy in human history.
Never before has such a wide variety
of sexual preferences and behaviors en-
joyed such social sanction, or been so
easy to explore by typing a few words
into a search engine in the privacy and
the safety of ones own home. Google
may be the great sexual equalizer. The
answers its algorithms harvested as-
sured each person of the presence of
the like-minded: no one need be alone
with her aberrant desires, and no de-
sires were aberrant, Witt writes. She
began to see that she was living in a
time of unprecedented erotic possibil-
ity, a sort of sexual future. Might she
have a particular set of unrealized de-
sires, a sexual identity she hadnt yet
discovered?
Witt decided to take action. She
bought a ticket to San Francisco in
order to report on the sexual subcul-
would nd there. (Parts of Future Sex
rst appeared in n+1, to which Witt
is a frequent contributor, as well as in
the London Review of Books and Mat-
ter.) They believed in intentional com-
munities that could successfully dis-
rupt the monogamous heterosexual
tradition, she writes, with a touch of
the East Coasters skepticism toward
the Bay Areas positive-thinking citi-
zens. They gave their choices names
and they conceived of their actions as
ABOVE: LUCI GUTIRREZ
social movements. But she is honest
about her true motivations: I used
the West Coast and journalism as al-
ibis. She was going to see how strang-
ers in California used the Internet to
Witts sexual quest leads her to Burning Mans orgy dome, a B.D.S.M. video shoot, an orgasmic-meditation workshop.
ILLUSTRATION
BY OLIMPIA ZAGNOLI THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 81

Hey, wed fight to the last Spartan if this rain would let up.
organize and make sense of their de-
sires, but the life she intended to hack
was her own.
W dating. She used OkCupidTin-
itts first stop was online
der was months away from launching
and discovered that, though its match-
making algorithm could be eerily accurate
about the sorts of people she would like,
it couldnt predict whether the sight of
those people in the esh would ood her
with desire or leave her cold. This is un-
derstandable. Even if youve been happily
partnered for years, let me recommend
that you ll out an OkCupid prole to
see what its like to squeeze your person-
ality and desires through the sieve of ques-
tions posed by its jovial anthropomor-
phic algorithm. How much inuence do
your parents have over your life? Do you
think youre smarter than most people?
Which are worse, starving children or
abused animals, and which answer would
you accept in a prospective match? Will
your sanity be intact at the end of this
interrogation?
While still in New York, Witt went
out with a composer, a woodworker,
and a hair stylist. In San Francisco, she
82 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
you might wonder why anyone would
met a Brazilian who showed her his
marijuana plants. Even when her dates
exceeded what Witt calls, in self-dep-
recating scare quotes, her standards,
attraction failed to materialize. Until
the bodies were introduced, seduction
was only provisional, she writes.
Witt found that she often couldnt
discuss sex with her OkCupid pros-
pects. It struck her as too direct. In
this, she was not alone. One way that
companies mitigate their female cus-
tomers sense of vulnerability, Witt
learns, is through the notion of the
clean, well-lighted place. Women are
more likely to go for sex, entrepreneurs
have found, if its not presented with
a louche, porny aesthetic. When Witt
was using OkCupid, she felt that the
right to avoid the subject of sex was
structurally embedded in the site. Fem-
inist sex-toy shops long ago discovered
that women prefer to buy dildos and
vibrators if they are displayed like Bran-
cusi sculptures, the kind of objet dart
that you might nd on a coee table
at West Elm rather than at an XXX
peepshow den in pre-Giuliani Times
Square. Its a marketing tactic meant
to give women a sense of order in their
lives, akin to Marie Kondos teachings
on decluttering.
The cleanest, best-lighted place Witt
nds is OneTaste, a San Francisco com-
pany specializing in orgasmic medi-
tation. At an open house at the orga-
nizations headquarters, a man and a
woman projecting the human neutral-
ity of an Apple store or IKEA lead a
group of visitors in the sort of ice-
breaker games that recall college ori-
entation, mildly spiked with eros. Going
around a circle, participants describe
their red hot desire; one after another,
they agree to sit in the hot seat and
answer questions posed to them by
their fellows, who are instructed to
limit all responses to thank you. Eye
contact is encouraged.
The orgasmic-meditation prac-
ticea word, Witt notes, meant to
signal an ongoing, daily ritual in which
one gained incremental expertise and
wisdom over timeis so simple that
pay the hundred and forty-nine dol-
lars it now costs to be certied to en-
gage in it, never mind the twelve thou-
sand that it costs to become a OneTaste
coach. With a partner, a woman sets
up a nest of pillows and blankets on
the oor, then lies on it, naked from
the waist down. Her clothed counter-
part sits on a cushion to her right, puts
on a pair of latex gloves, applies lube
to a nger, and, after asking for per-
mission to touch her and poetically
describing her vulva, proceeds to stroke
her clitoris. An iPhone timer is set for
fteen minutes; when it goes o, the
stroking stops, the partner covers the
woman with a towel, and the pair ver-
balize their reactions.
At the certication Witt attends,
the stroking is performed by OneTastes
founder, a woman who had been on
the verge of committing herself to cel-
ibacy at the San Francisco Zen Cen-
ter before a Buddhist she met at a party
gave her the idea for orgasmic medi-
tation. After the demonstration, the
audience is separated by gender into
two lines and shued along at inter-
vals, speed-dating style, under instruc-
tions to describe the face of each new
person to appear opposite. As a man
described to me the traces of my
makeup, a blemish on my chin, and
other aws in my appearance that I
had convinced myself were too small
to be noticeable, Witt writes, I felt a
unique experience of horror.
Witt sees the appeal of orgasmic
meditation. The timed stroking was a
sexual technique that allowed for an
intimate connection but preserved an
emotional distance, a way of estab-
lishing a clear set of boundaries to allow
women to give themselves over to plea-
sure without the pressure to recipro-
cate. Its terms, unlike those of casual
sex, didnt have to be negotiated every
time. The woman didnt have to won-
der about her partners character or in-
tentions; she didnt even have to be at-
tracted to him. The articiality of the
structure was its point.
The same is true, in a very dierent
way, of the experience Witt recounts
in her best chapter, Internet Porn.
Kink.com is a B.D.S.M. (bondage,
domination, submission, and masoch-
ism) Web site based in a landmarked
armory in San Franciscos Mission Dis-
trict. It was founded by a man, but the
person of particular interest to Witt is
a woman: Princess Donna Dolore, an
accomplished dominatrix who has pre-
sided over the sites Public Disgrace
channel since she came up with the
idea for it, in 2008. In Public Disgrace
videos, a woman (or a few) is stripped,
bound, and subjected to a series of tor-
ments, such as getting zapped with
electrical current or ogged, while an-
other performer (or a few) prods and
penetrates her body to the cheers and
enthusiastic insults of onlookers. Im-
mediately afterward, the submissive
performer records a testimonial to as-
sure viewers that she thoroughly en-
joyed herself.
The shoot that Witt describes took
place at a bar in a seedy neighborhood
south of the Tenderloin. The female
performer, a ve-foot, twenty-three-
year-old blonde who goes by the stage
name Penny Pax, has discussed ahead
of time with Princess Donna what she
will and will not do, and what kinds
of things she especially wants done to
her. Her partner for the evening is a
Spaniard with the palindromic nom
de porn Ramon Nomar and a penis,
in Witts memorable description, like
the trunk of a palm tree. Members of
the public are recruited to be specta-
tors in Public Disgrace videos and are
directed by Princess Donna, who both
riles them up, encouraging them to
slap or spit or jeer, and keeps them in
check, lest the abuse go too far. Their
presence gives the scene its veneer of
reality. Our job was to play the role
of an unruly and voyeuristic crowd for
the real audience, the people who paid
to watch a series called Public Dis-
grace on the Internet, Witt writes,
though she has the additional job of
jotting the whole thing down, coming
as close as anyone has to embodying
Nora Ephrons epithet for a journalist:
the wallower at the orgy. shoot:
Witts account of the scene is ter-
rically done, an oddly sweet exercise
in descriptive economy and dry comic
timing. Paying attention to the start-
stop momentum intrinsic to any lm
shoot, she captures the moments of
tenderness and restraint that have no
place in the nal cut: Princess Donna
gently wiping Pennys sweat during a
break, giving her water and a kiss on
the cheek; Ramon, wearing only com-
bat boots, pacing and shaking out his
arms like a long-distance runner who
has just crossed the nish line, ignored
by the crowd as Princess Donna fullls
Pennys special request to be anally
sted.
Then, theres the crowdmostly
men, though there are women, too, in
pairs or with their boyfriends. One in
particular catches Witts eye, or, rather,
her ear. She calls him the shouty man.
He seesaws between raw id, when the
camera is rolling (he is particularly
enthusiastic about yelling worthless
cunt, Witt notes), and bashful super-
ego, when its not. You are beautiful
and Id take you to meet my mother!
he calls out during a break, as if to re-
assure himself that hes still a nice guy.
Like the Public Disgrace scene itself,
the shouty mans performance is a com-
pound of ction and reality, though he
seems uncertain which part is which.
It all works in the regulated fantasy of
the dungeon, but you might want to
keep your distance from him at an ac-
tual bar.
W behavior and the motivations
itt is a sharp observer of the
of others, a wry, aectionate portrait-
ist of idealistic people and the in-
creasingly surreal place they belong
to. Among other things, Future Sex
oers a superb account of the absur-
dities of San Francisco in the rst
half of this decade, a bouncy castle of
a city where the private pleasures of
the conquering tech class are con-
strued (and marketed) as social benets
for all.
But where is she in these exploits?
What progress has she been making
in her quest to discover and express
new desires? I, personally, was not hav-
ing sex while all this was going on,
she confesses, after the Public Disgrace
The Kink actors were more like athletes or
stuntmen and -women performing punishing
feats, and part of what I admired was the ease
with which they went in and out of it, the com-
fort with which they inhabited their bodies,
their total self-assurance and sense of unity
against those who condemned their practice.
I possessed none of those qualities. I was, at
that time, so miserable about being alone, and
half-convinced by the logic that I could some-
how solve the problem of loneliness by avoid-
ing sex until I fell in love, that I was in the
middle of a long and ultimately pointless stretch
of celibacy.
This is a surprising admission.
Witts adventure started because she
decided that she had better get ahead
with the physical side of things in
case the love part didnt happen for
her. It seems that shes been holding
out for love anyway. I performed,
and experienced, detachment, she
says, of her rst attempt at orgasmic
meditation. Detachment, though a
useful quality for a reporter, is an
aiction for a person in search of a
sex life.
Witt does sometimes push herself
to participate. In a chapter on live
Webcams, she tries out Chaturbate, a
site that allows users to stream videos
of themselves that others can watch
for free. Writing wistfully of the gay
cruising scene of pre-AIDS New York,
she makes the case that a voyeuristic
platform like Chaturbate can let
women experience similar anonymous
encounters without worrying about
physical danger, though when she
nally initiates a private video chat
with a naked man shes too embar-
rassed to take her clothes o. At Burn-
ing Man, the annual festival in the
Nevada desert thats awash in hallu-
cinogens and tech money, she meets
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 83
a guy she likes; they enter the orgy
dome, where they have sex together
as other couples and groups do their
thing. In a novelistic chapter on a young
polyamorous couple she spent time
with in the course of a few years, she
writes, I envied their community of
friends, the openness with which they
shared their attractions. But shes not
so sure that she envies the nature of
the attractions themselves. Like Alice
making her way through Wonderland,
she is a visitor deciphering the codes
and customs of a world shes bound
to leave behind.
In that chapters nal scene, Witt
is at a sex party arranged by Elizabeth,
one of the polyamorous pair, inhaling
whip-its, nitrous oxide dispensed
through the nozzle of a whipped-
cream can. The gas leaves her giddy
and relaxed. A man touches her. It
feels nice. They kiss, and smack each
other playfully with a riding crop.
Around them, people cuddle and
spank. A paragraph later, still warm
with the evenings glow, Witt reveals
that she has a boyfriend back in New
York who didnt want her to go to the
party. A boyfriend! The time line is
hazy, but we seem to be a few years
past Witts lonely celibate phase. She
found what she had been looking for.
Now she may not want it after all.
She regrets her shyness at the party;
shes sorry that she kissed only one
person rather than join the group cud-
dling on a satin-sheeted bed. I was
still thinking of myself as just a visi-
tor, or rather neither here nor there,
she writes, someone undertaking an
abstract inquiry but not yet with true
intention.
married, in the late nineteen-fties,
essentially two sexualities were avail-
able to him: normal and deviant. A
couple of decades later, that picture
had irrevocably changed. He had de-
cided on his sexual future during a
time of relative scarcity. Now that there
was a surplus to samplemassage par-
lors and swingers partieshe wanted
to feast.
To Witt, who grew up in the era of
the sexual supermarket, the abundance
of options was less an allure than a
challenge. Through Chaturbate, she
meets Edith, a young woman who likes
to bare her body to strangers on her
Webcam but is not sexually active o-
line. Edith is Internet-sexual, she
tells Witt. She has found her niche,
while Witt is still searching for hers.
As Witt realizes, the problem may lie
with the very notion of choicethe
idea that theres always something bet-
ter to select, that ones experience can
be optimized if only the right search
terms are found. In the red hot de-
sire orgasmic-meditation exercise,
Witt tells her partner that her wish is
to surrender to another person with-
out having to explain what I wanted.
The expectation that a person learn to
articulate his or her pleasure is crucial
to contemporary sexual mores, the
key to consent. It also means that you
have to know the right words for what
you want. If you dont, the Google-
era Internet, built to catalogue and
categorize and suggest based on pre-
viously expressed preferences, cant be
of much help.
Witt leaves her Wonderland with-
out being able to say exactly how it
has aected her. Five years passed,
and my life saw few structural changes,
erosion of the primacy of marriage.
Witt, in short, has made the search
for identity her identity. In this light,
her forays into the world of future sex
gain a certain retroactive moral glam-
our. I had wanted to seek out a higher
principle of life than the search for
mere contentment, to pursue emo-
tional experiences that could not be
immediately transposed to a party of
young people in a cell phone ad, even
if it meant delving into ugliness, con-
tracting an STD, or lifting my shirt
to entice someone jerking o over the
Internet. There was no industry of
dresses and gift registries for the sex-
uality that interested me in these years,
she writes. This pronouncement has
a nicely engag ring to itits cer-
tainly not detachedbut it doesnt
entirely convince. For one thing, the
sexualities that interested her have all
been commercially co-opted in their
own way. (B.D.S.M. has its own ap-
parel industry, and its tropes grace
many an advertisement.) For another,
the people whose commitment to un-
conventional sexual principles Witt
admires most are motivated by their
own search for contentment. Theyre
following their bliss, not choosing it
from a drop-down menu. After the
Kink shoot, Witt skeptically asked
Penny Pax if she had experienced mo-
ments of genuine pleasure. Pax, she
reports, looked at me like I was crazy.
Yeah. Like the whole thing! What
Witt considers extreme is heaven to
Pax. Everyone has her own garden to
cultivate.
Contentment doesnt have to mean
complacency. The best sex Witt de-
scribes in her book is with a man she
had encountered at a wedding and

W for Future Sex was Thy

itt has said that one model
Neighbors Wife (1981), Gay Taleses
account of sex in the nineteen-seventies.
The books are markedly dierent in
approach and style. While Witt is rel-
atively narrow and idiosyncratic in her
selection of topicsKink.com rep-
resents a sizable sexual subculture;
OneTaste does notTalese set out to
write an encyclopedic account of the
eects of the sexual revolution on
American life. A reluctance to join in
was, notoriously, not his problem.
Talese was born in 1932. When he
84 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
she reports. She now sees sexuality as
being determined not by a set of ac-
tions but by the way those actions are
framed. A husband who cheats on his
wife and a polyamorist who sleeps
with a person outside his primary cou-
ple do much the same thing, but their
behaviors have dierent meanings.
Witt remains, as ever, unsure of where
she ts in. She likes the idea of pledg-
ing herself to the principle of free
love, though she seems to mean this
as a statement of political solidarity,
a way of allying herself with a set of
valuesfeminism, gender equality, the
agreed to meet up with at Burning
Man. He works in tech; the two of
them have nothing in common aside
from a thrilling mutual attraction. I
want to have sex with this person for-
ever, she thinks, after they hook up
in the R.V. they are sharing with half
a dozen other people. Its a relief to
read this, and not because the idea of
having sex with someone forever sug-
gests that Witt has surrendered to
conventional monogamy. If you need
to label it, call it happiness. For the
rst time, she sounds like shes enjoy-
ing herself exactly where she is.
 month then? These were not the slow-
BOOKS cooked stories and intricately intertex-
tual fables of the modern art novel.
One thing Shakespeare certainly
BRUSH UP YOUR never did is what all the novelists
adapting him for Hogarth must have
SHAKESPEARE done, and that is worry at length about
whether or not it would be an inter-
When novelists rewrite the Bard. esting artistic challenge to adapt a
classic. Homer, Plutarch, Holinshed,
BY ADAM GOPNIK MenanderShakespeare just did them
and dropped them. (Though, like the
novelists, he was surely glad to get paid
once he had got it done.) And then
the story content of a Shakespeare play
is the least content it has. Saluting
Shakespeare with new versions of his
stories is a bit like saluting Mozart by
commissioning Philip Glass to write
a new opera to the plot of Cos Fan
Tutte, with its disguised Albanians
and absurd coincidences. Shakespeares
music counts for far more than his ma-
terial. Adaptations of Shakespeare,
from West Side Story to The Boys
from Syracuse, have ourished from
time to time, but it is notable that the
early, more strongly plotted plays are
remade most persuasively: the musi-
cal adaptation of Othello (which
starred, of all people, Jerry Lee Lewis)
remains a memorable oddity. The
Tempest has been retold many times,
from science ction (Forbidden
Planet) to dense philosophical poetry
(Audens The Sea and the Mirror),
but the retellings all tend to force one
back to the original.
Most of the authors in the Ho-
garth series, to their credit, arent so
much reimagining the stories as re-
acting to the plays. Theyve taken on
not the tale itself but the twists in the

T London, with ambition and au-

he revived Hogarth Press, in terprise at rst, given that Shakespeare tale that produced the Shakespearean
grabbed his stories more or less at ran- themes we still debate: anti-Semitism
dacity and what must also be a very dom from Holinsheds history of Brit- in Merchant of Venice, the subjuga-
large fund for advances, has commis- ain and Plutarch and old collections of tion of women in The Taming of the
sioned a series of novels by famous Italian ribald tales. As the ordinary Shrew, art and isolation in The Tem-
novelists that retell tales from Shake- poet of a working company of play- pest. Each of the novels gives us a re-
speare. The novelists include Howard ers, he sought plots under deadline visionist account of the central Shake-
Jacobson, who has done The Mer- pressure rather than after some long, spearean subject, and asks us to think
chant of Venice (as Shylock Is My deliberate meditation on how to turn anew about that subject more than
Name); Anne Tyler, whos done The ction into drama. What have you got about the story that superintends it.
Taming of the Shrew (as Vinegar for us this month, Will? the players Howard Jacobson, who is famous as
Girl); and now Margaret Atwood, asked him, and, thinking quickly, hed a sort of English Philip Roth (though
doing The Tempest (as Hag-Seed). say, I thought Id do something with often making one more grateful than
Retelling Shakespeares stories, albeit the weird Italian story I mentioned, ever for the American one), was a nat-
in honor of the four-hundredth anni- the one with the Jew and the contest. ural for Shylock. His version of Mer-
versary of his death, seems an odd en- Italy again? All right. End of the chant has a plotline so complicated,
ILLUSTRATION
BY BENDIK KALTENBORN THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 85
so overpopulated with players and ideas
and unrelated ris, that I will confess
I had to go back and reread it before I
could make sense of it. We meet both
a contemporary British Shylock, an art
collector named Simon Strulovitch,
and the original Shylock, teleported
forward to our time, into whose mono-
logues we peer, and with whom Stru-
lovitch has intense exchanges about
money-lending, circumcision, and Jew-
ishness generally. The dramatis personae,
augmented by these twin Shylocks, in-
clude an English professional footbal-
ler who has disgraced himself, as some
French footballers have done in life, by
oering the quenelle, the ambigu-
ously inverted Nazi salute. The central
action turns on the footballers proposal
to Strulovitchs daughter, and on Stru-
lovitchs insistence, as a conscious par-
ody of the demand of Shakespeares
Shylock for a pound of esh from
Antonio, that the Gentile athlete be
circumcised. There is a large cast of
secondary, mostly Jewish-British char-
acters, including an irresistible Nigella
Lawson-like gure named, in a Joyc-
ean sideswipe, Anna Livia Plurabelle.
Jacobson has an unmatched repu-
tation in his homeland as a humorist,
but not all of it translates for an Amer-
ican reader, since the jokes seem to de-
pend more on extreme aggravation of
tone than on close observation of life.
Everything in Jacobson sounds as if it
should be read out loud by Alan Rick-
man, as when Strulovitch speaks to
Shylock about his daughters suitor:
Here Ive been steeling myself against the
next over-principled, money-hating, ISIS-back-
ing Judaeophobe with an MA in ne art shes
going to bring back from college and she hits
on someone whos probably never opened a
book and certainly never heard of Noam
Chomskya hyper possessive uneducated
uber-goy from around the corner. Ive no idea
how or where she met him. At a wrestling
match, is my guess, or at the dodgems. . . . If
I hadnt frightened her o Jewish boys by tell-
ing her she had to nd one she might have met
a nice quiet embroiderer of skullcaps.
At one point, Jacobson uses the word
sarcastic to describe a speakers tone,
and he is often sarcastic, instead of, in
Roths American way, mordantly ironic;
his tone can become tetchy and irrita-
ble as a result. Irritability is an odd trait
for literature, but it seems a dominant
one in contemporary English ction,
86 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
at least that written by men. We even
have, in Glen Duncans Bloodlines
trilogy, an irritable werewolf.
The best things in the book are often
the most discursive, the philosophi-
cal-historical exchanges between Stru-
lovitch and Shylock. Shylock has a
wonderful ri, concerning Strulovitchs
art dealing, about why words are, for
Jews, always more fundamental than
images: God had spoken the world
into existenceLet it behe had not
painted it. Had God been a painter
the world would have been other than
it is. Better or worse? Well, less dispu-
tatious and declamatory, which might
not have suited Shylock. (A reader recompense them in kind, for the greater the
may have the satisfying suspicion that
Jacobson, like a few other contempo-
rary novelists, would actually rather
be a magazine writer, since the ris
are usually more compelling than the
relationships.)
Much of Shylock Is My Name is,
indeed, taken up with set-piece dis-
courses on the perils and pleasures of
being an English Jew; though the book
takes us in the end to Venice, most of
it is set in Manchester. These things
are ordered dierently in England, one
sees. American Jewish writers once
faced the double comedy of being out-
siders to Gentile culture writ large and
outsiders to English literature speci-
cally, thus producing the kind of pa-
thos that the critic Lionel Trilling felt
so keenly in his life, trying to be a gen-
tleman devoted to Matthew Arnold as
a moral tutor while living a mixed-up
Jewish life on the Upper West Side.
British Jews, one feels, reading Jacob-
son, have long been more at home with
the language of Shakespeare and more
uneasy as patriots and citizens. A Brit-
ish Jew couldnt begin a book, Augie
March style, with I am an English-
man, Manchester born. They seem to
enter Shakespeare with ease but En-
glish football with diculty, where
American Jews enter the ballpark non-
chalantly, Shakespeare aspirationally.
Though the apparatus of Jacobsons
novel can be exhausting, several lovely
turns and switcheroos lead us to a gen-
uinely touching scene in which the
original Shylock returns to Venice and
paraphrases Portias great speech on
mercy (rachmones, in Yiddish), reclaim-
ing it as a Jewish invention:
No man can love as God loves, and it is
profane of any man to try. But you can act in
the spirit of Gods love, show charity, give
though it is gall and wormwood to you to give,
spare the undeserving, love those that do not
love youfor where is the virtue merely in re-
turning love?give to those who would take
from you and where they have taken do not
oence the greater the merit in refusing to be
oended. Who shows rachmones does not di-
minish justice. Who shows rachmones acknowl-
edges the just but exacting law under which
we were created.
Shakespeares anti-Semitism, Jacob-
son insists, is simply a category error;
the morality in his play derives from
his villains religion. With mercy and
charity claimed as Jewish specicities,
the sarcasms of the book at last rise
and resolve into something like poetry.
A ing of the Shrew is, predictably,
nne Tylers take on The Tam-
winsome, straightforward, and smart.
Instead of making her Kate into, say,
a caricature feminist professor, as might
have seemed tempting, Tyler seizes on
a less obvious but essential part of Kates
psychologyher social awkwardness
and her complicated relationship with
Bianca, here represented as a sexy
younger sister called Bunny. It is the
fate of Tylers Kate not to be tamed,
certainly, but to be socializedin this
case, by a still more socially awkward
Russian-migr biologist named Pyotr.
From Shakespeares fable, Tyler has
gracefully distilled a congruent but very
dierent onenot one in which Kate
needs to be tamed by a masterful man
but one where she becomes more her-
self by being made to engage with
someone as odd as she is.
The tone is Austen-Trollope, light
and stinging and socially secure. The
characters are assumed to be doing
something important, even if they do
it comically: Kates father, Dr. Battista,
who urges Pyotr on her in order to
keep him in his lab, is a bit of a clown,
but also an important immune biologist.
Searching for the equivalent of an ar-
ranged marriage in our romantic day,
Tyler ingeniously has found the one
situation in which arranged marriages
are acceptable in American lifein
order to get a green card for a deserv-
ing alien.
Tylers quiet and quirky comic gift
is on display throughout the book.
The scenes in the kindergarten where
Kate works have a delightful, slightly
Salingeresque tang, and the wedding
taking place shortly after experi-
mental mice in the laboratory Pyotr
shares with Dr. Battista have been kid-
nappedis a lovely scene in a Laura
Linney comedy:
Pyotr was walking him towards the front
of the chapel now, his hand still resting on Dr.
Battistas shoulder. I wake up early, he said.
I think I will go to lab early so I am in time
for wedding. I get to door; is locked the same
as always. I punch combination. I go inside. I
go to mouse room.
They slowed to a stop a few feet from the
altar. Uncle Theron and Kate and Bunny stayed
where they were, watching. Then Pyotr turned
to look back at Kate. Where are you? he
asked her.
Me?
Come on! We get married.
Oh, well, Dr. Battista said, I dont know
if thats really. . . . I think Id just like to get
on down to the lab now, Pyoder, even if
But Kate said, Wait til we say our vows,
Father. You can check the lab afterward.
Just as Jacobson takes Portias fa-
mous mercy speech and paraphrases it
for modernity, Tyler, as the arranged
marriage becomes a love match, takes
Kates notoriously servile nal speech
on men (is there something in the Ho-
garth contract that says you have to re-
write the big speech?) and re-orchestrates
it to become at once a feminist state-
ment, a love letter, and a musing on the
perils of modern masculinity:
Its hard being a man. Have you ever thought
about that? Anything thats bothering them, men
think they have to hide it. . . . Theyre a whole
lot less free than women are, when you think
about it. Women have been studying peoples
feelings since they were toddlers; theyve been
perfecting their radartheir intuition or their
empathy or their interpersonal whatchamacallit.
Its like men and women are in two dierent
countries! Im not backing down, as you call it;
Im letting him into my country. Im giving him
space in a place where we can both be ourselves.
For Tyler, the very idea of the taming
of the shrew is obviously defunct. But
the shaming of the trueour struggle
with the truth that only authentically
facing another can enable any of us to
be ourselvescontinues.
In contrast to the elaborate po-mo
agonies of Jacobson and the neat un-
dermining charm of Tyler, Margaret
Atwoods Hag-Seed lays out a satiric
account of contemporary plays and
players. Setting her tempest within a
production of The Tempest, she
brings us to what any Canadian reader
will recognize as the Stratford Shake-
speare Festival, where an artistic direc-
tor is elbowed aside by his aideStrat-
ford can be a bloody placejust as he
is about to mount a full-court-press
modernized production. (His Ariel,
hed decided, would be played by a
transvestite on stilts whod transform
into a giant rey at signicant mo-
ments.) Sent into the cultural wilder-
nessa comfortable Canadian cul-
tural wilderness, to be surehe returns,
twelve years later, with a revival of his
production staged within the walls of
a prison.
And let us add to the Hogarth se-
ries another hot British retelling, Mac-
beth, Macbeth (Bloomsbury), by the
Shakespeareans Ewan Fernie and
Simon Palfrey. The point of the exer-
ciseimmensely pleasing to the
neo-Marxist Slavoj Zizek, who calls it
a miracleis that it opens up the
plays absences, telling the human
tales of all the little people whose fate
Shakespeare leaves out of his tragedy.
It is a solemn version of the joke that
James Thurber played so well, decades
ago, in The Macbeth Murder Mys-
tery, in which a hidden pattern involv-
ing obscure rustics is found within the
play. Here the hidden pattern is that
of the cruelty, starvation, and pervasive
oppression of ordinary people, pushed
to the fringes by Shakespeares con-
centration on the lite.
B also outside the Hogarth estate, is
etter than any of these, though
Ian McEwans Nutshell (Doubleday),
a short, modern-dress take on Ham-
let, in which the tale is narrated by
the fetus of the Prince, observing life
from the womb as his mother, Trudy,
and uncle, Claude, plot to poison his
father. (Their prize in this case is not the
Kingdom of Denmark but something
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 87
far more valuable: a prime bit of Lon-
don real estate.) Though the names
and many of the details are taken from
the play, Nutshell would succeed as
a story even if the connection to Shake-
speare were made far more subter-
raneanly. Its essentially an extreme
closeup study of how mad, adulterous
passion leads to murder, with the evil
couple being caught at the end more
eciently than they are in the play
a tale on the whole closer in tone to
James M. Cain than to Shakespeare.
For a reader utterly innocent of its
source, the book would still work,
though many of the details are cun-
ningly punned: the unborn Hamlet
conspires to revenge his fathers mur-
der with a endish touch of his nger-
nail, sending Gertrude into labor just
as the couple are about to abscond, a
detail surely meant to invoke the foil
by which, in the play, the Prince also
brings justice to that pair.
The device of the omniscient fetus
is one that McEwan takes up with a
comic air more darkly mischievous
than McEwan fans, accustomed to
his usually melancholic-meditative
tone, might expect. The conscious-
ness that McEwan provides for the
unborn babe is, once one accepts the
premise, persuasive in that he knows
a lot but not too muchhe is inno-
cent of the dierence between green
and blue, but does know everything
political passing in the world, evi-
dently from hearing the BBC all day
and night. Many beautiful notes reg-
ister, as with the embryonic Hamlets
ne palate for the wines he consumes
through the plumbing of his guilt-
racked mother. (This, of course, is the
one sensual detail that a hyperliter-
ate fetus would be expert in.) One
also suspects that, in addition to the
ghosts of Shakespeare, the book is
haunted by John Updikes earlier, sym-
pathetic take on the story of Gertrude
and Claudius, in his 2000 novel of
that name. Certainly the marked tone
of serene sexual relish seems deliber-
ately Updikean, particularly in our
wombs-eye view of the lovers rut-
tings. (There is also the telling little
detail that the good father, a poet, is
identied by his psoriasis, the skin
signature of the bard of Shillington.)
The book, despite its small size,
88 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
eventually bursts at the seams a bit
with occasional essays and drive-by
editorials, though for the most part
McEwan curbs the inevitable aging-
novelists need to register opinions on
contemporary absurdities, or what seem
so. An exasperated digression into the
stupidity of safe spaces and trigger
warnings resolves into a beautiful med-
itation on time and temperament, with
Gertrude embodying the instantly
achieved innocence of the postmod-
ern mind, against her consorts darker
guilt: Her grief, her tears, are proof
of probity. Shes beginning to convince
herself with her story of depression
and suicide, imputed to the man
theyve poisoned. Claude, unlike
Trudy, owns his crime. This is a Re-
naissance man, a Machiavel, an old-
school villain who believes he can get
away with murder. The world doesnt
come to him through a haze of the
subjective; it comes refracted by stu-
pidity and greed, bent as through glass
or water, but etched on a screen be-
fore the inner eye, a lie as sharp and
bright as truth.
W of all this revision? We are sup-
hat would Shakespeare make
posed to say that he would be pleased,
but in truth he would be puzzled. A
long stretch of literary invention lies
between him and us, and it involves
both the internalization of action into
psychologya thing he is taken to
have begun but not completedand
the overcomplication of narrative. The
low-key, chastened, anti-dramatic
movement of Anne Tylers imagina-
tionno marvels or events, really, just
inner action rebounding o half-
spoken ideawould have baed him.
This sells? He was used to getting
half of London on their asses for a
play, and he knew you needed bloody
scenes and children baked in pies to
do it. And then to the inner conscious-
ness of the modern novel we add the
extreme self-consciousness of the post-
modern one, as in Jacobson, with the
insistent mashup of forms and genres
and characters. Shylock in Manches-
ter now? Oh, right, nice move. Shake-
speare is a dramatic poet rather than
a psychological novelist or a self-
conscious critic of texts, and his imag-
ination runs in broader, potent strokes
that are not so much illuminated as
belied by the inward-turning ironies of
the modern psychological novel.
Shakespeares poetic imagination
runs on such bold lines that we as-
sume his moral imagination must, too.
But that is a modern assumption: if
we had asked Shakespeare or any of
his company what to think about Shy-
lock, we would have been told that its
a great partgiving full scope to
human behavior, a mirror held up to
naturebut not that hes a sympa-
thetic man. The empathy that Fernie
and Palfrey ask us to feel for Macbeths
victims is not part of Shakespeares
vision. We feel sorry for poor old Po-
lonius being killed by accident, but
when Hamlet says hell lug the guts
out of the room after hes killed him
we are not meant to feel the chill sense
that Hamlet is a psychopath (though
by our standards he behaves like one,
ong Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guil-
denstern without much more than a
morbid pun or two). Hes still a hero.
Shakespeares heroes kill innocent
people.
Shakespeare believed in fate, order,
and forgiveness; we believe in history,
justice, and compassionthree pair-
ings so similar as to sometimes seem
the same, though they are not. The
novelistic, psychological work of ex-
plaining why evil people are evil gets
very little energy from him. His vil-
lains are the products not of trauma
and history but of nature and destiny.
He amputated Iagos motive for ma-
lignancy from the Italian story where
he found Othellos tragedy, in order
to make the evil more absolute. Even
to ask if Shylocks graspingness is a
product of his peoples history of ex-
clusion would not have seemed im-
portant to him. He wasnt looking
for causes. Though not satisfying to
our modern sense of psychology,
this is actually psychologically quite
satisfying. The malevolent people
we encounter in life are mostly just
like that. They dont have a particu-
lar trauma that, if addressed and cured,
would stop them from being evil. They
were creepy, malignant kids, too.
And Shakespeare believed in order
as an absolute good. His most elo-
quent speeches are given to singers
of well-ordered communities, as with
Canterburys speech on the beehive in
Henry V, or, most memorably, Ul-
ysses in Troilus and Cressida: Take
but degree away, untune that string /
And, hark, what discord follows! / Then
every thing includes itself in power, /
power into will, will into appetite /And
appetite, an universal wolf devours
all. Maybe he felt this way because the
circumstances of the religious wars
lled his youth, but even to put it like
this is to show our prejudice for anach-
ronistic historical or biographical ex-
planations. He liked order. Most peo-
ple do. He was perfectly aware that the
social order he saw before him was ar-
bitrary and unjust, but he was con-
vinced that its absence would lead to
chaos and cruelty, not to liberation and
kindness. Although modern scholars
like to pretend that this is one point
of view among many on oer in the
plays, any sensitive reader recognizes
in the eloquence of the argument the There are plenty of children out there who would love being a pirate.
pressure of personal faith.
But Shakespeare also believed in
forgiveness in a way that we dont.

Really rotten people get forgiven, in
the comedies and romances, at least, shrewish when she is only shy; shown uals or kill himself rst, and they vibrate.
in ways that still make us uneasy. In Gertrude and Claudius grappling with Speaking for humanity, Shakespeare
The Tempest, As You Like It, their erotic compulsion toward each spoke for the dehumanized. But it
Twelfth Night, bad actors get easy other in a manner essentially sympa- would take a tortured reading of the
outs. Even Shylock isnt killed. Dr. thetic to their entrapment. We apply text to nd within it a message of equal-
Johnson thought the moment when our dutifully expansive moral imagi- ity or of what we understand to be
Hamlet delays killing Claudius in order nation to the plays, and, while this human freedom. A permanent Shake-
to deprive him of any chance of for- makes them seem fuller to us, it brings spearean paradox remains: his people
giveness was too horrible to be read us no closer to Shakespeare. Our eort, continue to haunt us after the social
or to be uttered. We are much more in the end, is hardly dierent from the and ethical structures that held them
ostentatiously compassionate and much eighteenth centurys insistence on tack- up have disappeared. It turns out to be
more eectively vindictive. Small in- ing a happy ending on to King Lear, just as possible to nd persuasive
cidents of plagiarism end careersnot wishful thinking in the guise of an human beings in a world governed by
a rule that Shakespeare himself would improvement. fate and order and forgiveness as in
have escapedand sexual sins can place If Shakespeare is our contempo- one governed by trauma and justice
their perpetrators forever beyond the rary, it is not because he shares our and compassion. Shakespeare oers
bounds of redemption. In Shakespeare, attitudes but because he shares our not so much an argument for univer-
rotten people do rotten things, but agonies. A production of The Mer- sality as evidence for it. The settings
if they stick around and say theyre chant of Venice that treats Shylock change. The roles dont, because the
sorry they are forgiven. By contrast, as anything other than the most in- players cant.
we feel everyones pain, forgive no ones teresting person in the play will al-
trespasses. ways fail. But one that makes him into
1
Correction of the Week
Our novelists aim at modernizing its hero has to ght so hard against From the Times.
Shakespeare by adding history or a the text that it will fail, too. Kate is An article in some editions last Sunday
greater sense of justice or more com- persecuted and oppressed in horrible about bars where dogs are still welcome inside
passion to plays that seem to lack them. ways, but she lives as she is. Tell stu- in violation of New York Citys health code
We are asked to feel for Macbeths vic- dents that Hamlet is a study in the misidentified the breed of a dog visiting a bar
tims plight; given a discursive expla- horizons of personal liberation, and in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He is a yellow Lab-
rador, not a golden retriever. The article also
nation of how Shylock came to behave they will fall away, puzzled. Tell them omitted part of the dogs name. He is Captain
as he does; presented with an under- that its about a man who cant decide William Trigger of Ludlow, not Captain Trig-
standing of why a woman might seem whether to obey his fathers revenge rit- ger of Ludlow.

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 89

 In 2010, when the Library of America
BOOKS published an edition of Jacksons se-
lected works, edited by Joyce Carol
Oates, a critic at Newsweek protested
HAUNTED HOUSES that it was an exercise in barrel-scraping:
Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly fa-
What frightened Shirley Jackson? mous for one short story, The Lottery.
Is LOA about to jump the shark?
BY ZO HELLER In a new, meticulously researched bi-
ography, A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth
Franklin sets out to rescue Jackson from
the sexists and the genre snobs who have
consigned her to a dungeon of kooky,
spooky middlebrow-ness. Franklins aim
is to establish Jackson as both a major
gure in the American Gothic tradition
and a signicant, proto-feminist chron-
icler of mid-twentieth-century womens
lives. In contrast to Jacksons rst biog-
rapher, Judy Oppenheimer, whose 1988
book, Private Demons, somewhat
played up Jacksons alleged occult pow-
ers, Franklin argues that Jacksons sor-
ceress persona was mostly shtick: a fun
way to tease interviewers and to sell
books. Jackson was interested in witch-
craft, she writes, less as a practical method
for inuencing the world than as a way
of embracing and channeling female
power at a time when women in Amer-
ica often had little control over their
lives. Similarly, Jackson used supernat-
ural elements in her work not to deliver
cheap thrills but, in the manner of Poe
or James, to plumb the depths of the
human condition, or, more particularly,
to explore the psychic damage to which
women are especially prone.

A new biography argues that Jacksons books should be seen as proto-feminist.

J inackson was born in San Francisco
1916 and brought up, with a young-

H ously as a woman writer: Use de-

eres how not to be taken seri- in a New England village (rst published er brother, in one of the citys auent
in this magazine, in 1948), has become suburbs. Her parents were conservative SOURCE: FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (HOUSE)

mons and ghosts and other gothic par-
aphernalia in your ction. Describe
yourself publicly as a practicing ama-
teur witch and boast about the hexes
you have placed on prominent publish-
ers. Contribute comic essays to womens
magazines about your hectic life as a
housewife and mother.
Shirley Jackson did all of these things,
and, during her lifetime, was largely dis-
missed as a talented purveyor of high-
toned horror storiesVirginia Were-
woolf, as one critic put it. For most of
the fty-one years since her death, that
reputation has stuck. Today, The Lot-
tery, her story of ritual human sacrice
90 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
a staple of eighth-grade reading lists,
and her novel The Haunting of Hill
House (1959) is often mentioned as one
of the best ghost stories of all time. But
most of her substantial body of work
including her masterpiece, the beauti-
fully weird novel We Have Always
Lived in the Castle (1962)is not widely
read. In recent years, there have been
signs of renewed interest in Jacksons
work. Various writers, including Neil
Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, and A. M.
Homes, have praised her idiosyncratic
talent, and new editions of her work
have appeared. But these attempts to re-
claim Jackson have had a mixed response.
country-club people, who regarded their
high-strung child with some perplexity.
Jackson identied herself early on as an
outsider and as a writer. When i rst
used to write stories and hide them away
in my desk, she later wrote in an unpub-
lished essay, i used to think that no one
had ever been so lonely as i was and i used
to write about people all alone. . . . i
thought i was insane and i would write
about how the only sane people are the
ones who are condemned as mad and
how the whole world is cruel and foolish
and afraid of people who are dierent.
The chief representative of the cruel
and foolish world during Jacksons
ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO
childhood was her mother, Geraldine,
an elegant, rather vapid woman, who
was disappointed by her daughter and
who made it clear that she would have
preferred a prettier, more pliable one.
She told Jackson that she was the prod-
uct of a failed abortion and harangued
her constantly about her bad hair, her
weight, and her willful refusal to cul-
tivate feminine charm. Long after Jack-
son had grown up and moved away,
Geraldine continued to send letters crit-
icizing her helter skelter way of liv-
ing, her repetitious ction, and her
appearance: I have been so sad all
morning about what you have allowed
yourself to look like. Quotations from
the correspondence of the awful Ger-
aldine are a source of guilty entertain-
ment throughout Franklins biography.
Jacksons adult life was ostensibly a
rebellion against her mother and her
mothers values. She became a writer; she
grew fat; she married a Jewish intellec-
tual, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and ran a bo-
hemian household in which she dyed the
mashed potatoes green when she felt like
it. But she never quite shook Geraldines
tentacular grip, or ceased to be tormented
by her disapproval. And in her marriage
to Hyman she found a person with whom
to replicate the abusive relationship.
Jackson and Hyman met at Syracuse
University; he sought her out after read-
ing her rst published story, Janice, in
a college magazine and deciding that
she was the girl he was going to marry.
To Jackson, who had already begun
to experience the anxiety, depression,
and fears of people that plagued her
throughout her life, Hyman seemed a
savior: a brilliant man who didnt think
she was ugly, who understood her and
loved her, who believed in her promise
as a writer. His main drawback was his
principled insistence on sleeping with
other women. He also expected Jackson
to listen good-naturedly to accounts of
his sexual adventures. On a few occa-
sions during the early stages of their re-
lationship, Hymans behavior drove Jack-
son into such paroxysms of anguish that
he worried she might be mentally ill.
But he refused to compromise his in-
tegrity on the issue. If it turns you queasy,
you are a fool, he told her. Jackson, whom
Franklin describes as having been primed
by her mothers criticisms to accept a
relationship with a man who treated her
disrespectfully and shamed her for le-
gitimate and rational desires, reluc-
tantly went along with his terms.
They marriedin the face of deter-
mined opposition from both sets of par-
entsshortly after graduating, and moved
to New York. During the next couple of
years, both of them began contributing
to The New Yorker, she as a ction writer
and he as a contributor to The Talk of
the Town and, later, as a sta writer. In
1945, after their rst child was born, they
settled in Vermont, where Hyman had
been oered a post on the literature fac- unfaithful, mostly with former students.
ulty at Bennington College. Here, in a
rambling, crooked house in North Ben-
nington, they raised four children and
became the center of a social set that in-
cluded Howard Nemerov, Ralph Ellison,
Bernard Malamud, and Walter Bernstein.
Their domestic life, as described in the
comic dispatches that Jackson wrote for
Good Housekeeping and Womans Home
Companion, was raucous and warm. But
Jackson was miserable a good deal of
the time, as indicated by her increasing
reliance on alcohol, tranquillizers, and
amphetamines. She felt patronized in
her role as a faculty wife and frozen out
by the townspeople of North Benning-
ton. (She took her revenge by using
them as the model for the barbaric vil-
lagers in The Lottery.) Most of all,
she felt oppressed by her husband.
Hymans lordly expectations of what pointment of Jacksons marriagethe
he was due as the family patriarch were
retrograde, even by the standards of the
time. Jackson did the cooking, the clean-
ing, the grocery shopping, and the
child-rearing; he sat at his desk, pon-
dering the state of American letters and
occasionally yelling at his wife to come
and rell the ink in his pen. (His brother
Arthur once commented that Hymans
views on the domestic division of labor
were the only aspects of his traditional
Jewish upbringing that he had retained.)
Long after Jackson became the chief
breadwinner in the marriage, Hyman
continued to control the familys -
nances, meting out portions of Jack-
sons earnings to her as he saw t. Al-
though he always encouraged Jacksons
writing, in part because it was her writ-
ing that kept the family aoat, he came
to resent how completely her career
had eclipsed his. His major published
worksThe Armed Vision (1948), a go home afterward. . . . i would have
comparative study of modern methods
of literary criticism, and The Tangled
Bank (1962), on the literary strategies
of Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Sir James
Frazerwere grand projects of intel-
lectual synthesis, and both had taken on
a dusty, doomed, Casaubonish quality
by the time he completed them. He
took solace in characterizing Jackson to
their friends as a sort of gifted idiot,
who composed her ction in a trance
state of automatic writing and had to
take it to him to have it explained. He
also continued to be chronically, blithely
The motif of a lonely woman setting
out to escape a miserable family or a
grimly claustrophobic community and
ending up lost recurs throughout Jack-
sons stories. Sometimes a woman comes
to a place of apparent refugea house
that seems to oer security and love
only to discover, once she is there, creep-
ing menace or hidden evil. Sometimes,
as in several of the stories included in
Jacksons rst published collection, The
Lottery; or, The Adventures of James
Harris (1949), a woman encounters a
romantic, chimerical gure, a daemon
lover, who promises to rescue her and
then vanishes, leaving her alone and on
the brink of madness, in a frightening,
alien landscape. Always, the hope of an
alternative, happier life proves illusory.
If these stories allude to the disap-
escape from her mothers house which
proved to be no escape at allthey also
suggest the nature of the anxieties that
prevented her from ever leaving Hyman.
She was full of rage toward him, and she
expressed this not only in the portraits
of insuerably pompous men that she
smuggled into her ction but also in
strange revenge-fantasy cartoons that
showed her serving Hyman entrails for
dinner, or creeping up behind him with
a hatchet. She once wrote Hyman a six-
page letter explaining why she would
eventually divorce him: I used to think . . .
with considerable bitter amusement
about the elaborate painstaking buildup
you would have to endure before get-
ting [one] of your new york dates into
bed . . . they had been sought out, even
telephoned, spoken to and listened to,
treated as real people, and they had
the unutterable blessing of being able to
changed place with any of them. Yet
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 91
fear always inhibited her ability to act
on her anger. However intense the mis-
eries of life inside her house, they were,
in the end, less vivid to her than the
imagined horrors lurking outside it.
J acksons fiction is a sort of serial
investigation of the malevolent, im-
prisoning power of her own fears. Her
mother, in a letter, once reproached her
for the excess of demented girls in
her storieswhich was both an excel-
lent Geraldinism and a not entirely
unjustied complaint. Eventually, Jack-
son herself came to lament the nar-
rowness of her thematic range: I wrote
of neuroses and fear and I think all my
books laid end to end would be one
long documentation of anxiety.
While her early stories are often about
people being oppressed and persecuted
by closed-minded communities, in her
later work she focussed increasingly on
the demon of the mindthe evil that ers to The Lottery, she notes, The
aicts its victims from within. In The
Lottery, a woman is stoned to death by
her neighbors and family; in The Haunt-
ing of Hill House, written eleven years
later, the stones that rain down on the
childhood home of the protagonist, El-
eanor, have a more ambiguous source.
Eleanors mother thinks vicious neigh-
bors are responsible; Eleanor and her sis-
ter blame each other; but the strongest
suggestion is that the stones are the work
of Eleanors poltergeist, a paranormal
manifestation of her rage and unhappi-
ness. At Hill House, where the adult El-
eanor has been invited to assist in an in-
vestigation of psychic phenomena, she
imagines that she is being ganged up on
by the other people at the house and that
its spirits have singled her out as their
target. But what tortures her and ulti-
mately drives her to insanity is her own
complex of childhood fear and guilt. The
leader of the paranormal investigation
assures his assistants that if they ever be-
come too scared they can always run away
from the house: It cant follow us, can
it? But the horror for Eleanor is that she
cant run away from what haunts her.
The persona that Jackson presented
to the world was powerful, witty, even
imposing. She could be sharp and ag-
gressive with fey Bennington girls and
salesclerks and people who interrupted
her writing. Her letters are lled with
tartly funny observations. Describing the
bewildered response of New Yorker read-
ality: the potent, angry woman, whom
number of people who expected Mrs.
Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing
machine at the end would amaze you.
Of Katinka De Vries, the wife of the
novelist Peter De Vries, she writes that
she found it dicult to spend the day
with someone named Katinka, even
though she is very nice.
Some of the women in her novels
speak with this sort of condent humor.
They often function as the alter egos of
her fragile, insecure protagonists, repre-
senting the boldness and the freedom
that they can never achieve. In The
Haunting of Hill House, one of Elea-
nors fellow-assistants is the self-assured,
ironic Theodora. In Hangsaman (1951),
Natalie, a lonely college freshman, has a
daring imaginary friend named Tony. In
The Birds Nest (1954), Elizabeth, a
shy clerical worker, develops three other
personalities: the charming Beth; the
vain, frivolous Bess; and the monstrous
Betsy, who promises, Someday I am
going to get my eyes open all the time
and then I will eat you and Lizzie both.
In We Have Always Lived in the Cas-
tle, it is the protagonist, Merricat, who
is the courageous, adventurous gure
and her sister, Constance, who is the
domestic, gentle partner.
Jackson described Merricat and Con-
stance as two halves of the same per-
son, and its possible to see all of her fe-
male couples as depictions of the two
contradictory halves of her own person-
she characterized in her letters as Snarly
Shirley, or Sharly, and the cowed woman
who felt trapped inside her house. Frank-
lin argues that Jacksons portraits of split
women anticipate Betty Friedans de-
scription of the nineteen-fties house-
wife as a virtual schizophrenica
woman, as Franklin puts it, pressured
by the media and the commercial cul-
ture to deny her personal and intellec-
tual interests and subsume her identity
into her husbands. All of Jacksons work,
Franklin writes, is animated by the ten-
sion she felt between her socially sanc-
tioned role as a happy homemaker and
her vocation as a writer. As such, it con-
stitutes nothing less than the secret his-
tory of American women of her era.
The tension between socially accept-
able housewifery and creative ambition
is certainly easy to nd in Jacksons life,
but its rather harder to locate in her c-
tion. Theres no question that, in her
books, the house is a deeply ambiguous
symbola place of warmth and security
and also one of imprisonment and ca-
tastrophe. But the evil that lurks in Jack-
sons fair-seeming homes is not house-
work; its other peoplehusbands, neigh-
bors, mothers, hellbent on squashing and
consuming those they profess to care for.
And what keeps women inside these
ghastly places is not societal pressure, or
a patriarchal jailer, but the demon in their
own minds. In this sense, Jacksons work
is less an anticipation of second-wave
feminism than a conversation with her
female forebears in the gothic tradition.
Her stories take the gure of the impris-
oned madwoman, as found in Char-
lotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-
paper or Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre,
and make her the warder of her own jail.
If there is an animating tension in
Jacksons ction, it is surely the tension
between wanting to get out and being
too frightened to go, or between long-
ing for a home and knowing that in all
homes one person inevitably ends up
swallowing the other. (As Elizabeths
psychiatrist in The Birds Nest ob- able to write. Toward the end of this pe-
serves, Each life, I think . . . asks the
devouring of other lives for its contin-
uance.) The problem with hunting for
signs of nascent feminist sentiment in
Jacksons stories is that doing so tends
to shut down, rather than open up, what
is most interesting in them. It empties
the haunted air and installs a simmer-
ing housewife to ll the vacuum. You
can, I suppose, seize on the fact that the
villager who is stoned to death in The
Lottery is a woman, and read the story,
as Franklin does, as a parable for the
ways in which women are forced to
sacrice themselves: if not their lives,
then their energies and ambitions. But
only if you ignore the fact that the lot-
tery is an equal-opportunity selection
processas likely to pick a man as a
womanand therefore a rather weak
metaphor for patriarchal oppression.
In making the case for Jackson as a
herald of Friedan and others, Franklin
doesnt say much about Jacksons humor novela funny, happy novel, in which a
which is a pity, because one of her most
distinctive and appealing characteristics
is a tendency to interleave unheimlich at-
mospheres and dark portraits of psycho-
logical breakdown with bursts of spry
drawing-room comedy, droll Mitfordian
dialogue, and the odd joke about eating
children. ( Jackson is sometimes com-
pared to Muriel Spark or to Flannery
OConnor, but the writer with whom
she has more in commonand whose
inuence she worried lay too heavily on
her workis Ivy Compton Burnett.)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
perfectly demonstrates her talent for mix-
ing creepiness with wit. The sisters Mer-
ricat and Constance nally achieve a
fairy-tale ending, by killing o the other
members of their family and barricad-
ing their house against all intruders. They
retreat into a cheerfully mad, private
world, not unlike the one created by Big
Edie and Little Edie in the Maysles
brothers documentary Grey Gardens.
S We Have Always Lived in the Cas-
hortly after the publication of
tle, in September, 1962, Jackson suered
a nervous breakdown and a prolonged
bout of acute agoraphobia that prevented
her going outside for half a year. I have
written myself into the house, she said.
It took her two years to recover com-
pletely, during which time she was un-
riod, when she was beginning to recover,
she tried to coax herself back into pro-
ducing ction by starting a journal. In it,
she looked forward to a future in which
she would be free from fear, and able,
nally, to leave her husbandto be sep-
arate, to be alone, to stand and walk alone,
not to be dierent and weak and helpless
and degraded. This new, liberated per-
son, she speculated, would have to nd a
new subject, a new style, for her writing:
if i am cured and well and oh glorious alive
then my books should be dierent. who wants
to write about anxiety from a place of safety?
although i suppose i would never be entirely
safe since i cannot completely reconstruct my
mind. but what conict is there to write about
then? i keep thinking vaguely about husbands
and wives, perhaps in suburbia, but i do not
really think this is my kind of thing. perhaps a
funny book. a happy book. . . . plots will come
ooding when i get the rubbish cleared away
from my mind.
Jackson did eventually begin a new
recently widowed woman abandons her
old name, calling herself Angela Motor-
man, and embarks on a new life in a
boarding house, unencumbered by pets,
address books, souvenirs, or even friends.
She is alone but condent that she can
provide her own ne high gleefulness.
Jackson was seventy-ve pages into this
novel when she died in her sleep, of heart
failure, at the age of forty-eight.
She never found out whether this style
was going to work, or whether she would
ever really be capable of living alone. But
the last words in her journal, written six
months before she died, suggest a woman
heroically trying to persuade herself into
optimism: I am the captain of my fate.
Laughter is possible laughter is possible
laughter is possible.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 93

BOOKS
DOINGS AND UNDOINGS
How great was the novelist Henry Green?
BY LEO ROBSON
O the actress Elaine Dundy was leav-
ne night in the spring of 1955,
ing a party in New York when a sharp-
nosed, oppy-haired young man came
toward her and, without context or in-
troduction, asked, Do you know Henry
Green? Dundy replied that she did.
The young man told her his name
she instantly forgot it. Dundy told him
to contact her, but he didnt call. In-
stead, he started appearing in the lobby
of the Buckingham Hotel, in the West
Fifties, where Dundy was staying. On
one occasion, he had been waiting
around so long that, by the time Dundy
showed up, the tulips he was holding
had gone droopy. Dundy apologized:
Greens peculiar style arose from a keen sense of human unknowability.
94 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
could they speak another time? The
young man returned the next day, and
so did the tulips. But Dundy was run-
ning late. When, nally, he caught her
at a good time, she invited him up to
her room, and he helped her prepare
for the arrival of guests while explain-
ing that his name was Terry Southern,
that he was a writer from Alvarado,
Texas, and that he had waited a very
long time to nd someone who, on
being presented with the question he
had posed at their rst meeting, was
able to answer yes.
At the time, Green was in his late
forties and the author of nine novels,
including Living, Party Going, and
Loving, and a memoir, Pack My Bag.
His stock was high among fellow-
writers. In a 1952 Life prole, W. H.
Auden was quoted calling him the best
English novelist alive. The following
year, T. S. Eliot, talking to the Times,
cited Greens novels as proof that the
creative advance in our age is in prose
ction. But Green had never been a
popular success. In 1930, Evelyn Waugh
had reviewed Living, Greens novel
about Birmingham factory life, under
the headline A Neglected Masterpiece.
It was the rst of several dozen articles
that bemoaned Greens lack of ac-
ceptance and helped bind his name as
closely to the epithet neglected as Pal-
las Athena is to bright-eyed.
Waugh blamed philistine book re-
viewers, but he knew that Greens image
hadnt helped. From motives inscru-
table to his friends, the author of Living
chooses to publish his work under a
pseudonym of peculiar drabness, he
wrote. Green was born Henry Vincent
Yorke, to a prominent Gloucestershire
family, and he worked as the manag-
ing director of H Pontifex & Sons Ltd.,
a manufacturing company purchased
by his grandfather; he presented him-
self as a Sunday writer. (Where other
novelists might serve as secretary of
PEN, Green did a stint as chairman of
the British Chemical Plant Manufac-
turers Association.) He claimed that
he wrote under an assumed name in
order to hide his writing from col-
leagues and associates. The Life prole,
The Double Life of Henry Green,
had the subtitle The secret vice of a
top British industrialist is writing some
of Britains best novels. But Greens
rst book, Blindness, was published
in 1926, while he was at Oxford, and
a desire for privacy characterized much
of his behavior. After a certain point,
he refused to have his portrait taken.
Dundy had rst recognized him from
a Cecil Beaton photograph that showed
only the back of his head.
The literary scholar Nick Shepley,
in Henry Green: Class, Style, and
the Everyday (Oxford), writes that
CECIL BEATON/COND NAST
the search for an identiable or classi-
able Henry Green retreats into the
shadowy distance as the layers accu-
mulate. But, as Shepley notes, and
as NYRB Classics new reissues of
Greens novels illustrate, his ction was
autobiographicalat times consciously
parasitic. He claimed that he disliked
Oxford because literature is not a sub-
ject to write essays about. In reality,
he had discovered that Oxford was
not a subject to write novels about
at least, not his time there, which was
mostly spent watching movies, play-
ing billiards, poring over Proust with
his Eton classmate Anthony Powell,
and ignoring his tutor, C. S. Lewis. In
a letter to his father, Green explained
his decision to abandon his degree in
favor of a stint working on the oor
at the Pontifex iron foundry: Of course
I have another book in my minds
eye. . . . I want badly to write a novel
about working men.
There may have been a similar im-
pulse behind Greens decision, in 1938,
to volunteer for the Auxiliary Fire Ser-
vice. Anyway, once he had joined, he
assured a friend, It will make a good
book one day. That day soon came.
During the early years of the Second
World Warthe so-called Phoney or
Bore War, then the Big Blitzwhile
his wife, Dig, and son, Sebastian, were
living in the countryside, Green re-
mained in London, responding to air
raids, frequenting jazz clubs, falling
serially in love, socializing with other
remenand writing one of his best
novels, the charged, ornate, and wrench-
ing Caught (1943), which amounted
to a virtual live feed of all that activity.
(At that period the Fire Service came
next after pilots with the public. . . .
Street cleaners called Richard mate. )
To Elaine Dundy and Terry South-
ern, a pair of Americans in their early
thirties, this odd upper-class English-
man embodied hope for self-fulllment.
Dundy had been introduced to Green
at a party, and the two began meet-
ing for lunch regularly. For Dundy,
these lunches provided relief from the
anguish of her marriage to Kenneth
Tynan, the theatre critic. Green was,
she later wrote, an enheartener. But
the personal connection had literary
consequences: the enheartener was also
a muse. Green had a gift for drawing
you out and staying in step with you,
she wrote; in his company, she found
herself adopting a comic persona that
was me but that wasnt me. On her
return to England from New York, she
started work on a novelit became
The Dud Avocadowhich she chose
to write in the rst person, using the
voice Id been polishing up on Henry.
Until that point, Southerns rela-
tionship with Green resembled Greens
denition of the ideal prose contract:
a long intimacy between strangers
with no direct appeal to what both may
have known. Southern had rst en-
countered Green not at a party but in
the pages of Partisan Review. An essay
titled The Novels of Henry Green,
in the journals May, 1949, issue, might
have been designed to snare the young
rebel. It called Green a terrorist of
language.
A degrees, Greens writing had omit-
long the way, and to diering
ted the denite article (a habit his mother
lamented on his wedding day); avoided
the relative pronoun (favoring and this
had over which had); played havoc
with the comma; ddled with tense;
taken a guillotine to the adverbial sux
-ly (she said, more serious). Green
believed that well-groomed, well-
behaved English was an obstacle to ex-
pression. But his style wasnt a merely
negative exercise, a winnowing or clear-
ing out: he delivered a gorgeous, full-
bodied alternative. The Henry Green
noveltypically portraying failures of
love and understanding, and noisy with
the vernacular of industrialists and Cock-
neys, landowners and servantswas
terse, intimate, full of accident and un-
nerving comedy, exquisite though still
exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reex-
ively gurative yet always surprising,
preoccupied with social nuance, gener-
ational discord, and sensory phenom-
ena while maintaining an air of abstrac-
tion, as reected in those ighty gerund
titles. (The Oxford classicist Maurice
Bowra, who knew the undergraduate
Green, said that his mind worked with
a piercing insight, stripping men and
ideas of their disguises and going straight
to some central point.)
Blindness was justly celebrated for
its precocity, Living for its politics-
freeand article-lighttreatment of
the working class. But Green made a
terric leap in his next novel, Party
Going (1939), a discomting social
comedythink Buuel meets Forster,
or Beckett meets Mitfordthat fol-
lows a group of daft and desiccated
Bright Young Things for a four-hour
period during which their trip to France
is delayed by fog. As his characters hang
around the train platforms and hotel
rooms of Victoria Station, Green, show-
ing a new appetite for the long sen-
tence, assails the reader with hazy sym-
bols and exotic metaphors. But his
characters, for all the resources of their
creators language, remain fumblers and
muddleheadsstrangers to one an-
other and to themselves.
Much of Party Going is taken up
with the saturated love life of the wealthy
ibbertigibbet Max Adey, who, in going
on a holiday that he has proposed, will
be spending time with a girlfriend hes
lukewarm about, Julia Wray, at the ex-
pense of the society beauty Amabel,
whom he thinks he may worship. He
tells himself that he could not leave
Amabel, but the news that his things
are nearly packed engenders the feel-
ing that he might as well leave Ama-
bel. On arriving at Victoria, he takes
Julia to a private room and hassles her
for kisses. But when Amabel suddenly
appears he realizes that she still swayed
him like water moves a trailing weed,
and the two get together:
She lay on his shoulder in this ugly room,
folded up with almost imperceptible breathing
like seagulls settled on the water cock over gen-
tle waves. Looking at her head and body, richer
far than her rare fur coat, holding as he did to
these skins which enfolded what ruled him, her
arms and shoulders, everything, looking down
on her face which ever since he had rst seen
it had been his library, his gallery, his palace,
and his wooded elds he began at last to feel
content and almost that he owned her.
Lying in his arms, her long eyelashes down
along her cheeks, her hair tumbled and waved,
her hands drifted to rest like white doves drowned
on peat water, he marvelled again he should ever
dream of leaving her who seemed to him then
his reason for living as he made himself breathe
with her breathing as he always did when she
was in his arms to try and be more with her.
It was so luxurious he nodded, perhaps it
was also what she put on her hair, very likely
it may have been her sleep reaching out over
him, but anyway he felt so right he slipped
into it too and dropped o on those outspread
wings into her sleep with his, like two soft eve-
nings meeting.
The tone could hardly be more rap-
turous; it may be the most beautiful
passage in all of Greens writing. But
when Max wakes upthe crowd on the
station concourse has given out a huge
wild roarhe nds himself wondering
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 95
what it would be like to have Julia
here in his arms to sleep on his shoul-
der for if he had only slept ve min-
utes it was as though he had travelled
miles. He has already forgotten the
urgency of what Amabel had been.
O to Greens admirers, such as South-
ne of the things that appealed
ern and the French writer Nathalie
Sarrauteand, later, John Updike
was that he had thought deeply about
what he was doing. In this, he resem-
bled Henry James, whose preface to
What Maisie Knew he had read care-
fully. Green was going for something
that was not so dierent: ction that
was illuminating, yet disorderly enough
to conveyin Jamess words, really to
representa sense of life. And, as with
James, the desire led him in extreme
directions.
In 1950, Green wrote a BBC radio
talk, A Novelist to His Readers, which
was subsequently published in The Lis-
tener. He said nothing about the things
that his readers might have considered
obvious topicsthe use of symbolism
in scene-setting, for instance, or the re-
lationship between metaphor and mud-
dle. Instead, he launched an assault
on the very idea of the narrator, whom
he branded a know-all. We cannot
tell what people in life are thinking
and feeling, he said. Writers should,
therefore, restrict themselves to what
their characters say out loud. Green ac-
cepted that he could not do without
narration altogetherthe reader must
at least be told who is speaking and
how a character behaves after speak-
ing. But he had turned his back on
what he called very carefully arranged
passages of description. Now he oered
the example He seemed to hesitate
as suitably tentative, comparing it to
He hesitated, which was too direct
a communication from the author.
Green had just written a very talky
novel about upper-class amatory in-
trigue, Nothing (1950), and was work-
ing on another, Doting (1952). He
achieved the unintrusive eectand
sombre tonehe wanted, but, in seek-
ing to correct what he perhaps consid-
ered the bossiness of his previous novel,
Concluding (1948), which used inte-
rior monologue and prcis, he over-
looked the innovations of his earlier
96 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
works, which had found their own ways
of avoiding authorial omniscience.
It is true that in Party Going we
learn a great deal, very directly, about
what the characters are thinking, no-
ticing, failing to realize, or neglecting
to notice, but we are also given cause
to mistrust what we are told; the nar-
rator, far from being a know-all, has a
shaky grasp on who is doing what, and
how, and possibly why. (Waugh, on
reading a draft, sent Green a list of be-
wildered questions about hotel etiquette
and train-travel logistics; Green ex-
pressed his gratitude, and didnt change
a thing.) And in Loving (1945), prob-
ably his greatest novel, Green conned
himself to a mixture of deduction and
conjectureprobably, you could of human feeling. Loving begins with
safely saywhich worked in league
not only with the characters chatter
but also with the fevered notation of
surfaces. (In all, he uses color words
more than two hundred times.)
Loving, which takes place at an
Irish castle in the early nineteen-for-
ties, opens with the death of an old but-
ler, Eldon, and portrays the gae-prone
early days in the regime of his succes-
sor, Charley Raunce. A ring belonging
to Mrs. Tennant, the lady of the house,
goes missing; one of the castles pea-
cocks is killed by a young evacuee from
London; Edith, an underhousemaid
whom Raunce adores, discovers Mrs.
Jack, Mrs. Tennants daughter-in-law,
in bed with a man who isnt her hus-
band. Greens descriptions are lush and
freethey do more than identify the
speaker. But the emphasis is on dra-
matic presentation, the audible and the
visible; seemed is given a thorough
workout. In one scene, Raunce nds
Edith standing in the pantry with his
assistant Bert:
Raunce eyed her very sharp. He seemed to
appraise the dark eyes she sported which were
warm and yet caught the light like plums dipped
in cold water. He stayed absolutely quiet. At
last she said quite calm,
Would the dinner bell have gone yet?
My dinner, he cried obviously putting
on an act, holy smoke is it as late as that,
and this lad of mine not taken up the nurs-
ery tray yet. Get going, he said to Bert, look
sharp.
Later in the novel, Raunce and Edith
are in a library together:
Love, he went on toneless, what about
you an me getting married? There, Ive said it.
Thatll want thinking over Charley, she
replied at once. Her eyes left his face and
with what seemed a quadrupling in depth
came following his to rest on those rectan-
gles of warmth alive like blood. From this
peat light her great eyes became invested with
rose incandescence that was soft and soft
and soft.
Green was an obsessive cinemagoer,
and Loving, in its plot and setting,
has strong resemblances to Jean Renoirs
The Rules of the Game (1939), which
concerns upstairs-downstairs antics at
a French villa over a shooting weekend.
Between the Mozart waltz during the
opening credits and the closing shot of
symmetrical shrubbery, an atmosphere
of chaos reigns: decorum and ceremony
are continually undone by the overow
Once upon a day and ends with hap-
pily ever after, but along the way Green
thwarts the readers desire to impose a
sense of order on the action. (Those
fairy-tale phrases are booby-trapped,
too: Once upon a day is confound-
ing, and its not clear that the ending
will be happy in the least.) A game of
blindmans bu played by the servants
in Loving is similar, in its position and
its import, to a game of hide-and-seek
in The Rules of the Game.
Renoir and Green also share the use
of a perspective that is neither omni-
scient nor subjectiveone that is par-
tial and imperfect, but not obviously
unreliable. In The Rules of the Game,
the camera, rather than anticipating
where its characters will go, can hardly
keep up with their movements. The
Green narrator sometimes knows a lot
and at other times is likely to throw up
his hands and say, It may have been a
few days later that . . . Neither novel
nor lm tells us much of its characters
histories.
Encoded in these habits is a wider
aversion to authorial condence and
an embrace of human mystery. As Oc-
tave, the character played by Renoir in
The Rules of the Game, says, Ev-
eryone has their reasons, so Raunce
tells a housemaid, Everyone has their
feelings. In A Novelist to His Read-
ers, Green notes that he is talking
about method and not theme: We
are all individuals and each writer has
something of his own to communi-
cate. But in Loving, as in Party
Going, the method is at one with the
 ingly cryptic parablesand Green is
only too happy to oblige. Although the
MY FATHER SINGS LIKE A CROW Paris Review exchange was conducted
by letter, the nal transcript pretended
My father is a lamp, a boy, is two fathers: his own to describe an encounter in which
and a wolf father. Me, other kids, camp Greens partial deafness had been a re-
around his flame; night dissolves like snow on his skin. curring problem. (When Southern asks
A whole life lives in each fist of my father if Greens work is too subtle for Amer-
the way a burning city lives in a fireflys gut. Its there, ican readers, Green replies with a de-
a faint light cradling a chicken egg, clutching an axe, nition of suttee, the Hindu self-
raising a newborns almost see-through body. sacrice ritual.)
There is an animal looking back and leaping forward In a letter devising the interview,
inside him. My father carries a shadow speckled Southern envisaged a sharp boost in
with the soot of dawn, and drags a darker one. American demand; a burst of reprint-
There is a boy there building everything, and he is free, ing; stage, lm, and video oers; dol-
and when he is lost he burns down a mountain lars pouring in by the veritable barrel-
or sings like a crow. But he is never lost. ful! But in the interview itself South-
ern appears to nd Greens neglect
C. L. ODell admirable, as if obscurity were a mark
of integrity. He stresses the zany ab-
surdism of Greens writing. His one re-
message: the diculty of getting a to resurrect me. Southern and Green mark about Loving is a complaint
proper hold on things. Toward the end started work on a Paris Review inter- that none of the critical analyses had
of Loving, Mrs. Tennant says that view, which appeared in 1958 and oers wondered what all those English ser-
she doesnt like it when theres some- the best account of what it is like to vants were doing in an Irish household.
thing unexplained. Being out of ones read a novel by Green. You do not for- And in a short introduction he calls
depth is an inevitable fate for a Henry get that there is an author, Southern Green a writers writers writer.
Green character. Despite drawing on says, but must remind yourself that Greens conduct only became odder.
a repertoire far broader than speech there is one, owing to discrepancies in He fell out of touch with Southern be-
plus tentative stage directions, Lov- the storytelling, apparent failures to stress fore his friend and fan co-wrote the
ing convincingly inhabits a world of the signicance of certain events, and lms Dr. Strangelove, The Cincin-
the unexplaineda world in which, as a disquieting sense that the reader sees nati Kid, and Easy Rider. In the de-
an insurance man recovering from den- more in the situation than the author cade before Greens death, in 1973, he
tal surgery puts it, nobody theemth to does. The eect, Southern decides, is rarely went outdoors. Visiting inter-
know nothing. that the characters and story come alive viewers, expecting an Old Etonian wit
in an almost incredible way, quite be- and raconteur, maybe even a theorist

I Southern and Green in touch, South-

n November, 1955, after Dundy put
ern wrote Green a fan letter. He said
that he had read his books many times,
except for Blindness (which was out
of print), and was familiar with one of
his manifesto-essays, which he had
tracked down in a French translation.
Southern explained that he was work-
ing on a novel inspired by Green, called
Flash and Filigree. (He later said that
the title was an apt description of
Greens style.) Green read the manu-
script, which he declared amazingly
good, and after Southern moved to
Geneva, where his wife had taken a
teaching job, Green, whose conduct had
become increasingly erratic, sent them
yond anything achieved by conven-
tional methods of writing.
But Southern, despite his lucid con-
ception of Greens eects, was also eager
to present him as eccentric. The printed
interview opens with Southerns sug-
gestion that critics consider Greens
body of work the most elusive and
enigmatic in contemporary literature,
and Green himself, professionally or
as a personality, none the less so. As
we learn from the recently published
Yours in Haste and Adoration: Se-
lected Letters of Terry Southern (An-
tibookclub), he advised Green that
the appeal of these interviews is, so
they suppose, based on the personali-
ty-cult phenomenon and the fascina-
of the nonintrusive, unexplaining novel,
found instead a dazed, haunted gure
or, in Michael Holroyds recollection,
a body asleep on the staircase. Some-
how he retained a muse-like quality:
his daughter-in-law the novelist Emma
Tennant, in her memoir Girlitude,
recalled thinking, In all his rumpled,
ash-bestrewn state, drunk and fre-
quently lled with bile, Henry Green
will inspire me. But Greens own writ-
ing stopped. Nothing and Doting
the fruit of his campaign against nar-
rationwere his nal books. He told
people that he had forgotten how to
write, though it seems just as likely that
he had little to write about.

G quickly, and looked set to be a se-

a telegram claiming exhaustion and ask-
ing, CAN YOU PUT ME UP SEVEN DAYS.
He was a welcome guest.
Excited by this new friendship,
Green had told Dundy, Were going
tion (for the general reader) of tem-
peraments which are odd, artistic,
individual, and so on. He suggests
that instead of answering questions
directly, Green could reply in haunt-
reens afterlife got going very
ries of false dawns. Between 1977 and
1980, all his books were reissued in
Britain, prompting adjectives like great
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 97

And if the golf area of the brain was somehow destroyed,
there might be a little something extra in it for you.
and major alongside neglected. John scholar, published an agenda-setting
Updike, introducing a compendium of
Living, Loving, and Party Going, tion and Poetry, 1939-1945, which ar-
said that Green had revealed what
English prose ction can do in this
century. V. S. Pritchett, in a review of
Blindness, which was available for
the rst time since 1932, called Green
the most luminous novelist of the
Thirties and Forties. But the new vol-
umes soon fell out of print.
After failing to be a readers writer,
Green failed to become a teachers pet,
his work stubbornly resisting every label.
He was born too late to be a high mod-
ernist like Woolf and Joyce. But when
the ction of the nineteen-thirties be-
came the subject of literary histories
he was not really part of that story, ei-
ther. In the years that Waugh published
eleven booksand other contempo-
raries were similarly productiveGreen
had been busy running Pontifex, and
managed only Party Going. And
though the eminent scholar Frank
Kermode, an expert on the workings
of the canon, discussed Party Going
alongside Ulysses and the Gospels in
his Norton Lectures, at Harvard, he
did not spur a fashion for exploring
Greens symbols and enigmas.
Help arrived in an unlikely form. In
1995, Adam Piette, a British literary
98 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
book, Imagination at War: British Fic-
character is reading Back, Greens
gued that the subject had been ignored
for half a century out of a sense of guilt
that the real suering had taken place
in continental Europe. Green made an
appearance as a Second World War nov-
elist, which previously hadnt really been
a recognized category. Three years ear-
lier, Greens grandson, Matthew Yorke,
compiled Surviving: The Uncollected
Writings of Henry Green (1992), mak-
ing available the wartime stories The
Lull, A Rescue, Mr. Jonas, and The
Old Lady, along with some pages from
the manuscript London and Fire 1939-
1945, a nonction version of Caught
on which Green worked intermittently
in the late nineteen-fties.
All this lent support to a new way
of approaching Green. Yorkes collec-
tion also featured Southerns strenuously
oddball Paris Review interview, which,
in this context, revealed various war-
shaped traces. Responding to South-
erns baement about the Cockney cast
of Loving, Green said that he wanted
to show the conict, for Raunce, of
being in Irelanda neutral country
while England was at war. (The novels
setting is established with the sentence
For this was in Eire, where there was
no blackout.) And Green revealed that
his time in the Auxiliary Fire Service,
the subject of Caught, had also been
an indirect source of inspiration. Asked
about the origins of Loving, Green
recalled the words of a volunteer who
had been a manservant:
He was serving with me in the ranks, and he
told me he had once asked the elderly butler who
was over him what the old boy most liked in the
world. The reply was: Lying in bed on a sum-
mer morning, with the window open, listening to
the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty
ngers. I saw the book in a ash.
Nick Shepley, in his new study of
Green, complains that the recent em-
phasis on what he terms the 1940s c-
tion has unfairly obscured Greens other
work, in particular the dialogic nov-
els. For the time being, his resistance
looks like a lost cause. The literary his-
torians war-focussed version of Green
has migrated to the public realm.
Greens inuence is evident in novels
set in the period, such as Sarah Wa-
terss The Night Watch and Shirley
Hazzards National Book Award-
winning The Great Fire, in which a
1946 novel about a wounded soldier
returning home. Three years ago, Lara
Feigel gave Green a starring role in
The Love-Charm of Bombs, her pop-
ular account of ve writers in the Sec-
ond World War. Last year, The Lull
was included in The Penguin Book
of the British Short Story. And NYRB
Classics is starting its new uniform edi-
tion of Greens books with Caught,
Loving, and Back.
The Second World War has the ad-
vantage of giving Greens writing a
semblance of cohesion: more than half
of his books either portray the war or
signal its imminence (Party Going,
Pack My Bag). And it makes him a
more graspable writer. In Caught, a
character thinks that war is sex, but
the novel shows that to Green war was
life, only more so: calamitous, ineable.
In the nal pages, Richard Roe is re-
lieved of duty after a breakdown
Greens rebuke to the evolving myth
of the stoical Blitz spiritand be-
comes frustrated as he struggles to re-
capture the experience of reghting:
We had been ordered to Rhodesia Wharf,
Surrey Commercial Docks. I never felt so alone
in all my life. Our taxi was like a pink beetle
drawing a pepper corn. We were specks. Ev-
erything is always so dierent from what you
expect, and this was fantastic. Of course, we
couldnt hear from the noise of the engine, and
we had shut the windows so as to get more in-
side. There was only the driver, old Knocker,
on the front. No one said a word. Yet I sup-
pose it was not like that at all really. One changes
everything after by going over it....The point
about a blitz is this, theres always something
you cant describe, and its not the blitz alone
thats true of.
In a letter to the novelist Rosamond
Lehmann written in 1945, Green re-
ported a frightful surge of power and
ideas, and called these times . . . an
absolute gift to the novelist.
Could it be that war inspired him
because war had helped to form him
in the rst place? Updike said that
one looks in vain in Pack My Bag,
Greens memoir, to understand how
he became such an original writer.
There may be more clues than Updike
realized. In 1917, when Green was a
boy of eleven or twelve, Forthampton
Court, his family home, was turned
into a hospital for convalescent ocers.
Green wrote that he began to learn
the half-tones of class, and then pre-
varicates: or, if not to learn because I
was too young, to see enough to rec-
ognize the echoes later when I came
to hear them. And he learned some-
thing even more valuable: how to lis-
ten, to surrender, to make himself a
vehicle or channel. The soldiers, he re-
called, found in me a boy who looked
on them as heroes every one and who
enjoyed each story of blood and cru-
elty they had to tell.
Green knew that these encounters
had been formative: in Caught and
in the London and Fire manuscript,
he noted the eects of war on children.
And in an essay on the Victorian writer
C. M. Doughty, published in 1941,
Green seems to be alluding to experi-
ences both past and recent. After prais-
ing Doughtys travelogue Arabia
Deserta (the words that exactly de-
scribe, the sentences that meander),
he reects on the benets of war for
the writer: it sends him out into ter-
ritorythough it may well be at
homethat, by being strange and de-
manding the acceptance of strange-
ness, forces him to develop a pure,
honest, singular style that shall be his
monument. folk traditions, he says, but too often get stuck there.
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Mothers, by Brit Bennett (Riverhead). In this compelling
dbut novel, set in a black community in Southern Califor-
nia, two seventeen-year-old girls form a bond. Both have lost
their mothersone chose husband over daughter, the other
killed herselfand both love the same broken man. In the
next two decades, as their lives develop, the pair are watched
over by the female congregation of Upper Room Chapel (the
Mothers of the title), who contribute choruslike sections of
narration. Sharing secrets and bringing food to the bereaved,
the Mothers are an all-knowing entity, at once witness and
impetus. They anchor Bennetts theme of female community:
the two motherless women, overseen by the Mothers, strug-
gle with the choice of whether to become mothers themselves.
On Jupiter Place, by Nicholas Christopher (Counterpoint).
Memory and longing form the core of this poetry collec-
tion, which ranges in subject from the formative absence of
the poets tubercular mother during his childhood to the
doomed romance of Lois Lane and Clark Kent. Many of
the poems are highly narrativeChristopher is also a re-
spected novelistwhile others are short epiphanies, includ-
ing diarylike fragments composed in the months after the
death of his father. Set against deaths inexorability are signs
of continuancean apple tree in a former childrens prison,
a meal made by a strangerand celebrations of moments
of feeling as immortal as well ever get.
Looking for The Stranger, by Alice Kaplan (Chicago). This
quasi biography of Albert Camuss 1942 novel Ltranger
seeks to strip away the books fame to see it as it was when
it left Camuss desk. The novel acquired labels soon after pub-
lication (existentialist, absurdist) and, later, became em-
blematic of political and racial conicts that still dominate
its interpretation. Returning to the source, Kaplan presents
an intimate narrative of Camuss life in Algiers and Paris in
the thirties and forties. She oers various interpretations of
the victim of the books famously motiveless murder (an Arab
shot by a European), which are compelling, if inconclusive.
Paraphrasing Sartre, she writes that Camuss novel is a re-
minder that a novel could exist with nothing to prove.
Murray Talks Music, by Paul Devlin (Minnesota). The critic and
novelist Albert Murrays opinion that race has no place in a
real discussion of art set him at odds with many of his twentieth-
century black contemporaries. But his refusal to see race as
monolithic and determinative has aged well. This collection
of his jazz writings, marking the centennial of his birth and
compiled by a proteg, collects essays, talks, and interviews
with, among others, Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis, and
the producer John Hammond. These often casual forums nd
Murray at his most outspokenassailing those who rely on
theories of race relations to interpret blues music and insist-
ing on a categorical division between vernacular and ne art.
Black artists and writers such as Langston Hughes understand
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 99
 ness was always dangerously leveraged.
BOOKS Wilsons book is a revelatory study of
its subject. De Quincey was thirty-six
when Confessions of an English Opium-
HELL OF A DRUG Eater, his sensational memoir of addic-
tion, was published, anonymously, in 1821.
The spaced-out brilliance of Thomas De Quincey. At the time, Wilson writes, England was
marinated in opium, which was taken
BY DAN CHIASSON for everything from upset stomachs to
sore heads. It was swallowed in the form
of pills or dissolved in alcohol to make
laudanum, the tincture preferred by
De Quincey. The Turks, it was said, all
suered from opium dependence. But
English doctors prescribed it with aban-
don. The drug was given to women for
menstrual discomfort and to children for
the hiccups. All the while, its glamour
was growing: it was ancient, shamanic,
a supernatural tether to otherworldly vi-
sions. You could nd reference to it in
Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Shake-
speare. In his essay Coleridge and
Opium-Eating, De Quincey wrote that
he had found it referenced, too, in John
Miltons great Biblical epic:
You know the Paradise Lost? and you re-
member from the eleventh book, in its earlier
part, that laudanum already existed in Eden
nay, that it was used medicinally by an arch-
angel; for, after Michael had purged with eu-
phrasy and rue the eyes of Adam, lest he should
be unequal to the mere sight of the great vi-
sions about to unfold their draperies before
him, next he forties his eshly spirits against
the aiction of these visions, of which visions
the rst was death. And how? He from the
well of life three drops instilld.

The image of Adam getting high in

L
ong before he tried opium,Thomas
De Quincey, the English essayist,
was addicted to books. The cycles of
remorse and deadly anxiety that he
suered in his adult life began when he
was seven, after a kindly bookseller lent
him three guineas. This, according to
Frances Wilsons new biography, Guilty
Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was De
Quinceys earliest trespass: a myste-
rious (and indeed guilty) current of debt
that he feared would carry him away.
Among the books De Quincey acquired,
there was a history of Britain, expected
to grow in time to sixty or eighty parts.
But he craved something vaster and more
dangerous, so he purchased a general
history of navigation, supported by a
For De Quincey, opium put the actual and the imagined on equal footing.
100 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
vast body of voyages: a work that was,
like its subject, indenite as to its ulti-
mate extent and, as he was told by a
jesting clerk, might involve as many as
fteen thousand volumes. It would never
end, De Quincey reasoned, since by the
time all the one-legged commodores
and yellow admirals of one generation
had nished, another generation would
have grown another crop of the same
gallant spinners. You can hear the ela-
tion mixed in with the dread: according
to a logical short circuit that was char-
acteristic of his thought, an innite sub-
ject meant innite books. Debt was only
the punctuation between ecstasies. De
Quincey was happiest when he was chip-
ping away at the sublime, volume by vol-
ume or vision by vision, and his happi-
the Garden of Eden may seem outland-
ish, but opium had made a kind of Adam
out of De Quincey: in the bosom of
darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of
the brain, he wandered through ancient
cities beyond the splendour of Babylon
and Hekatmpylos, crammed with tem-
ples, beyond the art of Phidias and Prax-
iteles. Opium deepened his natural in-
clination for a solitary life by giving a
cosmic cast to idleness. More than once,
he wrote, it has happened to me, on a
summer-night, when I have been at an
open window . . . from sun-set to sun-
rise, motionless, without wishing to
move.
Motionlessness is not peace of mind,
but De Quincey, who struggled his
entire life to nd a comfortable way
to inhabit time, had good reason to
prize it. Writing late in his life to his
ILLUSTRATION BY LEIGH GULDIG
daughter, he identied procrastina-
tion, which he linked with unpardon-
able guilt, as that most odious of vices:
the procrastinator is doomed, since in
midst of too-soonness he shall suer the
killing anxieties of too-lateness. Our
fate is always to nd ourselves at the
wrong station, he wrote. Once hed
bought one book, it was too late; he
had, in eect, bought them all, which
excused him to buy a second book and
then a third. This was the destructive
logic behind his opium use: to have
started something was to be already
too late to stop it, as though a delegate,
sent to the future, were messing things
up for the innocent De Quincey, back
here in the past. It was an insight about
time, and also about identity. De
Quincey seemed to fear the idea that
there were others of him, distributed
throughout time and space, acting as
his agents without his explicit com-
mand. He understood himself, for good
or for ill, to exist in duplicate or trip-
licate. Probably every great autobiog-
rapher, characterizing the choices and
dilemmas faced by an almost unrecog-
nizable younger person whose name
he bears, feels a version of this; for De
Quincey, it was a lifelong xation,
heightened by his addiction and mar-
ring his happiness even as it informed
his greatest work.
H born Thomas Quincey, in Man-
is confusion set in early. He was
chester in 1785; the prex was added
when he was around eleven, in one of
his mothers many attempts to suggest
an aristocratic lineage. A series of blows
levelled the family before De Quinceys
tenth birthday. His sister Jane died when
he was four. Two years later, his beloved
sister Elizabeth, his leader and compan-
ion, died at the age of nine, likely of
meningitis. In Suspiria de Profundis,
De Quincey writes that on the day after
her death he sneaked up the back stair-
case to view her body, laid out in her
bedroom:
Entering, I closed the door so softly, that,
although it opened upon a hall which ascended
through all the stories, no echo ran along the
silent walls. Then turning round, I sought my
sisters face. But the bed had been moved; and
the back was now turned. Nothing met my
eyes but one large window wide open, through
which the sun of midsummer at noonday was
showering down torrents of splendour.
The corpse is dispatched with stock ad-
jectives: frozen eyelids, marble lips, When William died, in London, at the
stiening hands. De Quincey is x- age of seventeen, Thomas, now the
ated, instead, on the solemn wind that
swept the elds of mortality for a hun-
dred centuries . . . the one sole audible
symbol of eternity. He adds, And three
times in my life I have happened to
hear the same sound in the same cir-
cumstances, namely, when standing
between an open window and a dead
body on a summer day.
De Quinceys writing often boils
down trauma to its core variablesa
window, a dead body, summerso as
to make the experience repeatable, both
for him and for his readers. He called
these combinations of concrete objects,
recurring in time, involutes, a term he
borrowed from conchology. The highly
spatialized memory of his sisters death,
with its signicant staircase and closed
door and open window, as well as his
insistence on later iterations of it, is
emblematic of his thinking. The great
endeavor of his writing was to convert
time, with its irremediable losses, into
space, a container where all things can
exist simultaneously. But this tactic also
turned grief into paranoia: if nothing
was lost, much, he feared, must be hid-
den from him.
De Quinceys father, then a pros-
perous merchant, died just a year after
Elizabeth; soon, his loathed older
brother, William, who was eleven, re-
turned from boarding school. William
was known for all manner of house-
hold torments, some directed at the
petshe had succeeded, De Quincey
wrote, at bringing down cats by para-
chutesand Wilson writes that he
despised Thomas. Mrs. De Quincey
soon moved the family to Bath, the
ne and striking spa town where Jane
Austen set Northanger Abbey, and
rented a prominent house whose most
recent occupant had been Edmund
Burke. De Quincey was sent to the
local grammar school, where he was
considered a prodigy in Greek, but he
suered a setback when his teacher ac-
cidentally struck him in the head with
a cane aimed at a misbehaving student.
He spent several weeks in bed, cared
for by his mother, who read Milton to
him aloud; upon his recovery, she re-
fused to send him back to school, on
the ground that his success there might
swell his ego, and instead hired a tutor.
male head of the family, saw it as the
answer to a prayer, Wilson writes.
T is often described as the dawn of
he turn of the nineteenth century
Romanticism, the movement in the arts
that so enthralled Europe. But its early
stirrings were strange and diuse. In
Bath, De Quincey was deeply aected
by the unusual story of Thomas Chat-
terton, a teen-age poet from nearby Bris-
tol who had found dusty medieval doc-
uments in the muniment room of his
parish church and, his imagination ig-
nited, invented the gure of Thomas
Rowley, a fteenth-century blind monk
and poet. Wilson writes that Chatterton
smeared his forged poems with yellow
ochre and lamp charcoal and passed
them o as his discoveries. He died, a
suicide, at the age of seventeen, but he
became an idol of the Romantics. Keats
dedicated Endymion to him, and
Wordsworth, in homage, penned his fa-
mous couplet: We Poets in our youth
begin in gladness; / But thereof come in
the end despondency and madness. Soon
De Quincey, now around fourteen, made
his own discovery: the anonymous man-
uscript copy of Wordsworths ballad We
Are Seven, then making its way around
Bath. He called it the greatest event in
the unfolding of my own mind. A new
literary phase was taking shape, and it
looked to be a weird one, distinguished
by anonymity and hoaxes, made-up
monks and rural sages. For De Quincey,
a complex identication with Words-
worth began, tantalizingly, even before
he had heard the mans name.
De Quincey was early to recognize
Wordsworths geniusearly in his own
life, early in the career of the great poet
which meant, by his inescapable logic,
that he was already too late to do any-
thing about it. He was still in his teens
when he encountered Lyrical Ballads,
published anonymously in 1798 and in
a second edition, signed by Wordsworth,
in 1800. Resolving to meet Wordsworth
as soon as he could, he set out on a
northern road, but soon decided that he
was unworthy of presenting himself to
such a hallowed character. After wan-
dering in Wales, he found himself pen-
niless in London, an adolescent runaway
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 101
squatting in the empty residence of his
attorney and spending his days with a
fteen-year-old prostitute named Ann,
whose companionship he soon lost. Ann
was the rst of many latter-day versions
of his sister Elizabeth, whose centrality
and loss were yoked together: lost be-
cause she was central, central because
she was lost. For the rest of his life,
whenever he visited London, he scanned
many, many myriads of strangers
faces in the hope that he would nd Ann
again. On one of these missions, in 1804,
a fellow-student recommended opium
to De Quincey, for pains. It was his rst
experience with the drug.
At the time, Wordsworth was living
with his sister Dorothy and his wife
Mary in a former inn in Grasmere, which
by the time of his death was known as
Dove Cottage. In 1805, while a student
at Oxford, De Quincey again resolved
to meet his hero, with whom he had
now been exchanging letters. He boarded
an English mail coach headed to the
Lake District but, a few miles south of
his target, panicked and turned back; a
year later, he tried again, got within spot-
ting distance of Wordsworths little
white cottage, and once more lost his
nerve. When, on November 4, 1807, De
Quincey nally met Wordsworth, near
his front door, the poet appeared like a
ash of lightning, as De Quincey put
it. He was ushered up to Wordsworths
study, which served also as the familys
dining room, the childrens playroom,
and the drawing room. A paltry two or
three hundred volumes of books, neg-
ligently arranged, lled a bookshelf. The
poet, then thirty-seven, looked, to his
worshipper, rather over than under
sixty, his body nearly deformed by
the mismatch of his short legs and his
long torso; he walked like some sort of
insect, De Quincey wrote. It is hard to
know exactly what De Quincey wanted
from Wordsworth, but, whatever it was,
it seems clear that he could tell from the
start he wouldnt be getting it. Venera-
tion can be a stop on the road to con-
tempt, and De Quincey, who had so
much of his self-esteem invested in his
idolatry of Wordsworth, behaved around
the poet like a man who, in being let
down by his hero, had been confronted
with his own insuciencies.
In time, needing to act out his cycles
of approach and withdrawal in tighter
102 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
and tighter circuits, De Quincey ingra-
tiated himself into Wordsworths family,
acting as a surrogate uncle to the chil-
dren and kindling the aections of poor
Dorothy Wordsworth, whom many be-
lieved to be in love, and some believed
to be in a sexual relationship, with her
brother. These dramas were De Quin-
ceys specialty, and were certainly ren-
actments of his childhood. He had even
selected his latest version of Elizabeth
in the person of the young Catherine
Wordsworth, who was born with a con-
dition consistent with Down syndrome
and died of convulsions at the age of
three. De Quincey, by then renting Dove
Cottage after Wordsworths departure,
was abject. He slept on the girls grave
for more than two months, and witnessed
her apparition walking the nearby elds.
The grief led to stomach pains; the stom-
ach pains, De Quincey said, yielded to
no remedies but opium.
De Quincey had seen as a warning
the escalating addiction of Coleridge,
who, for his part, recognized in De
Quincey a doppelgnger, their two faces,
each of a confused countenance, blended
with the same mixture of muddiness
and lustre. But De Quinceys opium
use now passed the point of no return,
peaking at a rate of approximately four
hundred and eighty grains per day, or
twelve thousand drops of laudanum. The
next several years of his life, though they
coincided with the birth of his rst child,
William, in 1816, and his subsequent
marriage to the mother, Margaret Simp-
son, a pure-of-heart girl from a farm
family of primordial English stock, can
be understood only in terms of the dark
visions and anxieties that dogged him
constantly. Coleridge had his person
from Porlock, whose knock at the door
of his cottage both interrupted and made
possible the composition of Kubla
Khan. For De Quincey, his anxiety
about the birth of his child was linked
to the sudden appearance of a mysteri-
ous Malay in turban and loose trousers
of dingy white, who turned up on the
doorstep of Dove Cottage and, having
ingested a large share of De Quinceys
opium, bolted and was never seen again.
In De Quinceys mind, the disappear-
ance was, like Margarets pregnancy, an
interlude terminated by a transforma-
tive event: the Malay, he worried, would
be found dead, poisoned by the drugs;
likewise, his child would be born, which
struck De Quincey as a dierent sort
of tragedy.
W course with her subject. This is
ilsons book is on a collision
always the case with biographies of great
autobiographers. Somehow one needs
to gure out how to do more than tidy
up after the subjects mind has swept,
cyclone-like, through the details of his
life. But in De Quinceys case the chal-
lenge is even bigger. He wrote in deance
of chronology, which he called a hack-
neyed roll-call. In his visions, events
widely separated in time were yoked to-
gether by the imaginationwhich, in
turn, because of his delusions, was his
reality. Our deepest thoughts and feel-
ings, he wrote, pass to us through
compound experiences that dissolve
the gap between one end of the time
line and the other. The details of his life
were like carrousel horses, disappearing
around the bend and reappearing, in his
visions as in his writing, with fresh in-
tensity and vividness.
The rst half of De Quinceys life is a
long and convoluted story. But the sec-
ond half is the story of his retelling of that
story, rst in stray passages in his journal-
ism, then in the articles that became the
Confessions, and later in many remark-
able extracts from his autobiographical
work. De Quinceys life, like that of Beck-
etts Krapp, was fundamentally the record
he kept of it, and that record owes its ex-
istence and its brilliance to the drug that
all but destroyed him. De Quincey knew,
as one scholar put it, how one thing has
a bearing on another, and so does Wil-
son. She is a biographer with a De Quin-
ceyan eye for pattern, and a sharp sense
of the ironies that made her subjects life
at once so rich and so depleted.
These ironies were not lost on De
Quincey: they fed his imagination. His
writing career began with a series of fail-
ures that nevertheless opened to him his
true subject. A longtime conservative,
he got a lucky break when asked, in 1818,
to take over as editor of a local Tory
newspaper, the Westmorland Gazette.
Under his editorship, the quiet family
paper started running columns about
opium trips, opinions about Kant, and
salacious tabloid items about murders
across Europe. De Quincey resigned
after eighteen months, but during his
tenure he introduced the use of imagina-
tive fantasias to frame his own travails
as a subject worthy of the public eye. His
pieces were often marked by accounts of
the dramas he suered while trying to
write them, the odd personal intercala-
tions reliant upon the expectation that
he would write straight journalism. The
formula had been set early: debt, here in
the form of deadlines unmet; procrasti-
nation; and opium. But now there was
a new addition to the sequence: writing.
In The Age of Wonder, Richard
Holmes writes that the idea of the ex-
ploratory voyage, often lonely and peril-
ous, is in one form or another a central
and dening metaphor of Romantic sci-
ence. That idea was easily internalized,
and brought together in one heroic quest
De Quinceys opium visions and the writ-
ing that he concocted to describe them.
When the Confessions was rst pub-
lished, in The London Magazine, it ap- Of course, now that my assistant has passed
peared in two installments; the second away this isnt nearly as exciting.
included sections on the Pleasures of
Opium and the Pains of Opium.There
were familiar disputes about whether De

Quincey was corrupting the young, but
the main intoxicant on display was his it was, while the new Romantic literature turous perception that feeds some of his
prose, which derived its power from being acted like a lamp generated by individual greatest eects. There are sections in
written in the grip of its subject. De minds, peering into spaces illuminated by The Prelude that tell us how to see
Quincey beheld, in the theatre of his their subjectivity. De Quincey is a special things close up, from afar, from above
mind, along with more than earthly case, since he experienced subjective im- and below. A celebrated passage describes
splendours, horrors beyond belief: vast pressions as though they were real and the process by which a person can hang
processions of mournful pomp, and wrote about them as though their reality down-bending from the side of a boat
friezes of never-ending stories as terri- could be conveyed, in all its Technicolor and witness, in palimpsest, the weeds,
fying as Greek tragedies. Space swelled wonder and horror. He witnessed with shes, owers, / Grots, pebbles, roots of
around him; time hemorrhaged so that his senses what some of his contempo- trees mingled with reections of the
he seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 raries only pondered in the abstract; opium rocks and sky, / Mountains and clouds.
years in one night. He especially dreaded levelled, for him, the distinction between He also showed, in an exercise crucial
a recurring vision of the ocean paved actual and imagined things. I seemed before the invention of photography, how
with innumerable faces, upturned to the every night to descend, not metaphori- to experience time as a spot that could
heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, de- cally, but literally to descend, into chasms be revisited on demand. We all do this:
spairing, surged upwards by thousands, and sunless abysses, depths below depths, in my case, I think of being inside a wood-
by myriads, by generations, by centuries. he wrote. When the writer Maria Edge- shed at the back of our property in Ver-
worth read Miltons lines about Hell (And mont, with an orange breglass roof that

R use in England when De Quincey

omanticism wasnt a term in broad
began writing. It wasnt like modernism,
a movement founded more or less inten-
tionally, its constitution rened and de-
fended in strategic ways by its adher-
ents. Wordsworth and Coleridge had no
idea they were Romantics. But M. H.
Abramss distinction in the title of his
seminal study of the period, The Mir-
ror and the Lamp, still holds. Abrams
argued that early eighteenth-century lit-
erature was a mirror, reecting reality as
in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still
threatening to devour me opens wide),
she objected: How could the lowest deep
open into a lower deep? De Quincey an-
swered, In carpentry it is clear to my
mind that it could not. But in cases of
deep imaginative feeling it was natural
to behold the never-ending growth of
one colossal grandeur chasing and sur-
mounting another, or of abysses that swal-
lowed up abysses.
Wordsworths work often shows us
how to achieve, for ourselves, the rap-
made the entire space glow eerily. There
I am ve years old.
What Wordsworth is to the world of
perception, De Quincey is to the dream
world, giving us concrete structures in
place of mental static, structures impos-
sible to describe except in the sentences
he built to accommodate their labyrin-
thine organization. Reading about his
visions, were experiencing them; his prose
is their conveyable form. His imagina-
tion thrived on poison. But his sentences
transmute all that pain into beauty.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 103
 aged. Mariusz Treliski, in a production
MUSICAL EVENTS now playing at the Metropolitan Opera,
goes farther than most. Not only does
Isolde slit her wrists before singing her
WAGNER WEEKEND farewell; Tristan suers a self-inicted
wound, and, in a ashback presented as
Tristan at the Met, and Das Rheingold in Chicago. a black-and-white lm montage, Tristans
father shoots himself. Such bloody-
BY ALEX ROSS minded scenarios tend to wipe away the
sensuous mysticism of Wagners creation.
Treliskis staging, with sets by Boris
Kudlika and costumes by Marek Ad-
amski, is a consistently gloomy aair.
The rst act unfolds on a modern war-
ship of indeterminate nationality. The
second act, with its immense love scene,
is set largely in a munitions storage room.
The third act takes place in a hospital
with cold tiled walls. Black, gray, and sil-
ver tones predominate, accented by ra-
dar-screen green, searchlight yellow, and,
for a happy moment, a multicolored,
shimmering aurora borealis. Electric
fans rotate noirishly; grainy surveillance
video ickers. I kept thinking that Matt
Damon was about to run onstage and
get into a shoot-out with King Markes
beefy guards. The unrelenting grimness
matches the operas darkest moods but
misses its ashes of joyand hence its
complexity. Dark is not always deep.
Still, Treliski is a thoughtful, metic-
ulous director, and he brings to Tristan
the same nely observed detail that dis-
tinguished his prior Met eort, a dou-
ble bill of Bluebeards Castle and Io-
lanta, last season. The military setting
yielded some striking, unsettling images:

C tan und Isolde does not end with

ontrary to popular belief, Tris-
a Liebestod, or love-death. In the nal
minutes of the opera, Isolde indeed col-
lapses, lifeless, after singing an aria of
serene ecstasy over Tristans body. But
Wagner called that monologue Isoldes
Transguration. He applied the word
Liebestod to the music of groping long-
ing that appears in the Prelude and re-
curs in Act I, as the lovers partake of the
potion that they mistakenly believe to
be poison. It was Franz Liszt who, in an
1867 piano paraphrase, dubbed the end-
ing Isoldens Liebes-Tod. In its origi-
nal context, Liebestod indicates a death
that turns into love. The later usage im-
plies the opposite, a love that turns into
death.The misnomer is particularly ironic
Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton reached the stratosphere of Wagner performance.
104 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
because the dying Isolde never mentions
death: instead, she hears Tristans voice
immortally resounding. Her transgu-
ration unveils a metaphysical realm in-
distinguishable from music itself.
The migration of the Liebestod from
the beginning to the end of Tristan en-
couraged the impression that the opera
is a ritual of erotic suicide. In Gabriele
dAnnunzios 1894 novel, The Triumph
of Death, a Wagner-besotted nobleman
tries to persuade his beloved to undergo
a Liebestod, and, failing to do so, hurls her
and himself over a cli. In Yukio Mishi-
mas 1966 lm, Patriotism, a Japanese
lieutenant and his wife commit seppuku
as Tristan plays. And, in more than a
few latter-day stagings, Isolde meets a
grislier demise than what Wagner envis-
for example, the intersecting ashlights
of rival groups during a blacked-out ght
in Act III. (Less pleasing was the muddy
amplication of ostage voices.) And,
however dubious the emphasis on sui-
cide, the nal tableau was heartbreak-
ing: the lovers sitting on a bench, Isolde
resting her head on Tristans shoulder.
On the second night of the run, mu-
sical values reached the stratosphere of
modern Wagner performance.The Swed-
ish dramatic soprano Nina Stemme has
been singing Isolde for more than a de-
cade, and her voice shows little wear; if
anything, she sounded fresher and more
youthful than she did last season at the
Met, when she had the title role in Elek-
tra. Her high notes burn through the
orchestra; her lower range has a dusky
gleam. Perhaps her greatest asset is her
diction: in her Act I entrance, you could
ILLUSTRATION BY RUI TENREIRO
make out every biting word of Wer wagt
mich zu hhnen? (Who dares to mock
me?). The missing element may be a
warm, rounded tone in quieter stretches.
Mild und leise (Softly and gently),
the rst words of the Transguration,
were a touch hesitant. Yet the voice was
never anything but beautiful.
No less thrilling was the Tristan of Stu-
art Skelton, who rst sang this cruellest
of tenor roles in March, when Treliski
presented his staging in Baden-Baden.
Skelton, a forty-eight-year-old Austra-
lian, has the musical intelligence to un-
dertake the part and the physical stamina
to survive it. Only a few rough high As
in the extended delirium of Act III be-
trayed fatigue, and these seemed in char-
acter for a dying man. Best of all was his
poignant ardor in such passages as Wie
sie selig, hehr und milde wandelt (How
blissfully, bravely, and gently she wan-
ders). Ren Pape repeated his tour de
force as King Marke, which rst awed
Met audiences in 1999. Ekaterina Guba-
nova was a burnished Brangne, Evgeny
Nikitin a punchily aecting Kurwenal.
Simon Rattle, in his second conduct-
ing assignment at the Met (the rst was
Pellas et Mlisande, in 2010), achieved
wonders. The performance had a mas-
terly architectural shape; it was phenom-
enally precise (you could hear every note
of the upward-rushing violins in the Pre-
lude); it allowed the singers to be heard
without strain; it did not stint on Wag-
nerian majesty and mystery. If only the
frenzy of feeling that erupted in Act II
had been visible onstage.
E I was on a plane to Chicago for the
ight hours after Tristan ended,
rst installment of a new Ring of the
Nibelung at the Lyric Opera. David
Pountneys playful, buoyant production
of Das Rheingold came as a relief after
all the bleakness at the Met. Pountney,
who recently won praise for reviving
Mieczysaw Weinbergs Holocaust opera,
The Passenger, disclaims any grand
revisionist agenda. In a program note,
he writes, The emphasis in our case
will be to tell the story. The question
then becomes: what is the story, when
Wagner drew not only on Teutonic and
Norse legends but also on Aeschylus,
Shakespeare, Caldern de la Barca, and
Schopenhauer?
Pountney avoids the digital tricks that,
at the Met, too often substitute for the-
atrical craft. Instead, working with sets
designed by Robert Innes Hopkins and
the late Johan Engels, the director repur-
poses quaint, pre-cinematic devices. The
waters of the Rhine are evoked by bil-
lowing blue banners yanked by ropes; the
giants are conjured with heads atop tow-
ers and with oversized puppet arms. The
gods, attired in an amusingly garish array
of caps, coats, breeches, and gowns (the
costume designer is Marie-Jeanne Lecca),
resemble Restoration-comedy and opera-
bua characters who have wandered into
a Norse comic book. The dwarfs wield
Jules Verne-looking contraptions. Mem-
bers of the stage crew scurry about in
plain sight, and the singers pitch in. When
Donner summons his storm, you see a
thunder sheet shaking on one side of the
stage, and Loge operating it.
At times, the whimsy proliferates to
excess, crowding out Wagnerian politics
and psychology. Wotan builds Valhalla
to compensate for a loveless marriage;
Alberich forswears love to forge the Ring.
The motivations of Pountneys sashay-
ing gods and cackling dwarfs are less
clear. The great American bass-baritone
Eric Owens was singing his rst Wotan
onstage; the opera world has long awaited
the occasion, but Owens was curiously
reserved on opening night, his voice not
quite booming out at climactic moments.
Still, his portrayal oered a characteris-
tic wealth of nuance: this god seemed
haunted and melancholy from the start,
at odds with the scherzo-like mood of
the production. Samuel Youn, a main-
stay at Bayreuth, sang Alberich with
manic force, even if his curse upon the
Ring lacked the anguished menace that
Owens evinced at the Met in 2012. te-
fan Margita all but stole the show with
his sly, antic, liquid-voiced Loge, and it
made sense that the gods mischief-maker
dominated Pountneys conception.
The Lyric Opera cast had impressive
depth, with ne younger Germans (Tanja
Ariane Baumgartner as Fricka, Okka von
der Damerau as Erda) joining ascendant
Americans (Zachary Nelson as Donner,
Jesse Donner as Froh). Andrew Davis led
a performance of vigor and heft: the horns
were idyllic at the start and steel-plated
at the end. As at the Met, the musicians
delved into territory that went unexplored
onstage. Wagner remains, on most nights,
a theatre of the mind.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 105
 phrenia, managed to derive a philoso-
THE ART WORLD phy, amounting almost to a gospel, of
happiness. There is nothing cuddly
about Martin. (You will know the feel-
DRAWING LINES ing of one close acquaintance to whom
she said, I have no friends, and youre
An Agnes Martin retrospective. one of them.) But there is joy.
The show starts with a late climax:
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL The Islands I-XII (1979), a dozen
paintings in acrylic that at rst glance
appear almost identically all-white but
which deploy dierently proportioned
horizontal bands and pencilled lines.
Admixtures of light, almost sublimi-
nal blue cool some of the bands. The
design stops just short of the sides of
the canvas. When you notice this, the
elds of paint seem to jiggle loose, and
to hover. If you look long enough
the minute or so that Martin deemed
sucient for her worksyour sensa-
tion-starved optic nerve may produce
fugitive impressions of other colors.
(At one point, I saw green, and then I
didnt.) It helps to shade your eyes. This
causes tones to darken and textures to
register more strongly. Looking at Mar-
tins art is something of an art in itself.
Motivated by continual, ineable re-
wards, you become an adept.
The Islands crowned the second
act of Martins career. The rst peaked
in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when she
was living in New York, with the pub-
lic success of the grid picturestypi-
cally, uniform rectangles pencilled or
incised on painted square canvases. She
had begun making them in 1958, at the
Summer (1964): Synthesizing both Abstract Expressionism and minimalism. age of forty-six, after a long appren-
ticeship in modern art. In 1967, she

T tin died in 2004, at the age of

he abstract painter Agnes Mar-
ninety-two, and a new retrospective at
the Guggenheim Museum arms that
the greatness of her work has only am-
plied in the years since. Thats some-
thing of a surprise: no setting would
seem less congenial to the strict angles
of Martins paintings than the curves of
Frank Lloyd Wrights creamy seashell.
I also worried that the works repetitive
lar pilgrimage, on which you may feel
your perceptual ability to register min-
ute dierences of tone and texture
steadily rened, and your heart am-
bushed by rushes of emotion.
Each canvas, as selected and installed
by the curators, Tiany Bell and Tracey
Bashko, evinces a particular charac-
ter. Drawings and On a Clear Day
(1974), a remarkable suite of silk-
screened grids and lines in inks that
stopped working and left the city, head-
ing out in a pickup truck for a year and
a half of solitary wandering and then
the building of an adobe house for her-
self near Santa Fe. It was several years
before she resumed painting.
Martin was at no pains to explain
the interregnum, beyond remarking with
satisfaction, in a letter to a friend at the
time, Now I do not owe anything or
have to do anything. (She added, Do
COURTESY PATRICIA L LEWY GIDWITZ

formulasgrids and stripes, mostly gray
or palely colored, often six feet square
would add aesthetic fatigue to the mild
toll of a hike up the ramp. But the shows
challenges to contemplation and stamina
turn out to intensify a deep, and deep-
ening, sense of the artists singular pow-
ers. The climb becomes a sort of secu-
106 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
uncannily mimic graphite, provide
rhythmic relief. The cumulative eect
is that of intellectual and emotional
repletion, concerning a woman who
synthesized the essences of two world-
changing movementsAbstract Ex-
pressionism and minimalismand who,
from a tortured life, beset by schizo-
not think that that is sad. It is not sad.
Even sadness is not sad.) In recent years,
she had been hospitalized for spells of
psychosis, tending toward catatonia, and
was plagued by doomy thoughts. (I
have tried existing, and I do not like it,
she wrote.) Stardom in the art world
imposed pressures that she seemed to
nd intolerable. But her ight, even
from her own creativity, remains a mys-
terycomparable to Arthur Rimbauds
abandonment of poetry for adventur-
ing in Africa.
As detailed in a crisp and penetrat-
ing recent biography, Agnes Martin:
Her Life and Art, by Nancy Princen-
thal, the artists hard existence began, in
1912, in a small town on the plains of
Saskatchewan, as the third of four chil-
dren of Scottish Presbyterian parents.
Her father, who farmed wheat, died two
years later. Her mother, Margaret, was,
by Martins account, harsh and unlov-
ing. (Martin seldom spoke of her past,
and what she told wasnt always to be
trusted.) Margaret eventually moved
the family to Vancouver, where, in high
school, Martin excelled at swimming;
she just missed qualifying for the Ca-
nadian Olympic team, for the 1936
Games in Berlin. She reportedly at-
tended the University of Southern Cal-
ifornia on a swimming scholarship, but
dropped out and taught in elementary
schools for a couple of years, before com-
pleting a degree at the Teachers Col-
lege of Columbia University, in 1942.
Then, at the age of thirty, Martin
found a vocation in painting. She made
gurative work, while working odd jobs
in New York, and went to study art at
the University of New Mexico, in 1946.
Five years later, she returned to Colum-
bia to earn a masters degree in ne-arts
education. During that time, she ab-
sorbed principles of Taoist and Zen
philosophy that would thenceforth
guide her thinking, or, more accurately,
her refusals of thought, even as she de-
veloped sternly logical solutions to the
problems of painting. (Never religious,
she was the most matter-of-fact of mys-
tics.) Exposed to the high noon of Ab-
stract Expressionism in the city, she de-
stroyed most of her early works and
gravitated to abstraction.
Martin was back in New Mexico
when, in 1957, the august New York
dealer Betty Parsons saw her work
which at that point ran to abstracted
landscapes incorporating jagged shapes
reminiscent of Clyord Stilland
oered her a show, on the condition
that she move back to the city. Martin
took a loft, which had electricity but no
running water and little heat, down-
town on Coenties Slip, the most justly
fabled address of budding artistic rev-
olutionaries since the Bateau-Lavoir of
Picasso, Juan Gris, and their associates.
Her neighbors included Robert Raus-
chenberg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly,
and James Rosenquistmost of them
gay (she was a lesbian) and determined
to counter the histrionic paint-monger-
ing that was then in vogue. Her works
from that seedbed period tell a gripping
tale of borrowed stylistic ideasredo-
lent of Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko,
Barnett Newman, and other Abstract
Expressionists, and of Johns and Kelly
which she didnt so much follow as test,
one by one, and expunge. Amid the
times cross-ring models of aesthetic
and rhetorical innovation, she struggled
less forward than inward. She wanted,
passionately, to be alone.
Martin had, from the start, an ex-
traordinary sensitivity to subtleties of
light and touch. When she hit, at last,
on the format of the grida motif
that was tacit in modern painting after
Cubism but never before stripped, and
kept, so bareshe found ways to make
those qualities the exclusive basis of
a wholly original, full-bodied art. She
insisted that the results did not ex-
clude nature but analogized it. She
said, Its really about the feeling of
beauty and freedom that you experi-
ence in landscape. (Apropos of the
slightly varied forms in some series of
her paintings, she recalled studying
clouds in the sky: I paid close atten-
tion for a month to see if they ever
repeated. They dont repeat.) The
eect of Martins art is not an exercise
in overarching style but a mode of
moment-to-moment being.
The relation of Martins mental ill-
ness to her art seems twofold, combin-
ing a need for concealment and for con-
trolthe grid as a screen and as a
shieldwith an urge to distill positive
content from the oceanic states of mind
that she couldnt help experiencing. She
knew herself profoundly, because she
had to. In a marvellous 1973 essay, On
the Perfection Underlying Life, she
coolly contemplates the panic of com-
plete helplessness, which drives us to
fantastic extremes. But the problem
produces its own answer. She concluded
that helplessness when fear and dread
have run their course, as all passions do,
is the most rewarding state of all.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 107
 arrived. Bennett is currently outgunning
THE CURRENT CINEMA most of the guys in The Magnicent
Seven, a ush of anger heightening the
hue of her cheeks; Ferguson was top ba-
SEEING THINGS nana in last years Mission: Impossi-
bleRogue Nation, leaving a baed
The Girl on the Train and Under the Shadow. Tom Cruise to work out what sort of
banana he was meant to be; and Blunt
BY ANTHONY LANE is Blunt, a deserving object of worship
ever since, armed with a queenly dis-

H
ere is an introduction to The Hawkins. Half the sentient beings on dain and the best eyelids in the busi-
Girl on the Train. Listen care- earth appear to have read the book, al- ness, she held her own against Meryl
fully, and answer the questions that fol- leging with near-unanimity that they Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. It
low. Rachel (Emily Blunt) used to be couldnt put it down. I couldnt pick it is with innite regret, therefore, that I
married to Tom ( Justin Theroux), but up. I tried, frequently, but it always fell must report on the veil of dourness that
Tom had an aair with Anna (Rebecca from my grasp, tugged down by the settles over all three actresses in The
Ferguson), who is now his wife. He and dead weight of the prose. Still, plenty Girl on the Train. None of them are
Anna have a baby, whose nanny is of viscous books have been transgured allowed a urry of wit or a lighthearted
named Megan (Haley Bennett). Megan into sprightly lms. Clint Eastwood shrug, and to switch from Grace Kelly,
looks a bit like Anna. She in Rear Window a movie
Megan, not Annalives that dared to suggest how
with Scott (Luke Evans), much fun might be had from
who is creepy and possessive, the wicked watching of other
although Tom also looks a lives and the amateur prob-
bit clenched. Not as clenched ing of crimesto Taylors
as Kamal (Edgar Ramrez), heroines is to pass from lu-
however, who is Megans su- minescence to a zone of quer-
perhot shrink. Rachel will ulous gloom. The tale is set
later enroll as a patient of largely in a suburb on the
Kamals. Stay with me here. Hudson, and nothing is duller
It so happens that Rachel, or more stiing, as a rule, than
who is obsessed with her people who wish to make it
ex, takes a twice-daily train perfectly plain how stied
ride that passes the house they feel by their dull subur-
where Tom and Anna live. ban existence.
One day, sheRachel, not Does it matter that the
Annasees, or thinks she plot is so full of holes that
sees, a woman with blond you could use it to drain spa-
hair, who could be Megan, ghetti? (For a more water-
although she might be mis- tight version, consult Agatha
taken for Anna, kissing a Christies 4:50 from Pad-
man with dark hair, who dington, in which a passen-
could be Scott, Tom, Kamal, gera chum of Miss Mar-
or possibly the FedEx deliv- ples, thank heavensitting
ery guy, on a balcony. Faced in one train spots a stran-
with this devastating evi- gling in another.) Newcom-
dence, she, Rachel, becomes ers, innocent of Hawkinss
a sleuth, teaming up, slightly novel, may not even care that
unwisely, with Scott, who Emily Blunt in Tate Taylors film of the best-selling novel. the nal twist is visible from
believes, slightly wrongly, many leagues distant. What
that she is a friend of Megans. So made something watchable out of The does rile, though, is the drink. Rachel
(1), who beds whom? (2) Who doesnt? Bridges of Madison County, a public is a lush, decanting vodka tonics into a
(3) Who gets whacked? (4) Why cant feat that ranks with the raising of plastic beaker for boozing on the move,
Rachel mind her own business? (5) Frankly, Lazarus. Perhaps the same could be and Blunt presents a gaunt and sorry
who gives a damn? done with Hawkinss narratorsthree spectacle, with aking lips, unfocussed
Such are the issues that spring from of them, no less, maundering on in the gaze, and rosy nose. Whereupon she
the lm, which is directed by Tate Tay- rst person, often in the present tense, attends a single A.A. meeting and
lor, written by Erin Cressida Wilson, and each as annoying as the next. bingo!the problem starts to clear.
and adapted from the novel by Paula Spirits rose when news of the cast We realize that alcoholism was never
108 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIAN TOMINE
a serious theme; it was merely an ex-
cuse for false-memory syndrome, and
hence a lazy way to mess with the logic
of the story. Judging by the restive sighs
that crowned the screening I went to,
not everyone is fooled.
Last and least, there is the title.
Whether there was an overt attempt,
rst by Hawkins and then by the lm-
makers, to cash in on Gone Girl, I
cannot say, but in both cases an enfee-
bling example has been set. By any
measure, the principal gures in both
works are women, and to label them
as girls is to tint them with childish-
ness, as if they were easily cowed by
circumstance or stormy feelings, and
thus more liable to lash out, or to sink
into a sulk, rather than submit their
troubles to adult consideration. In 1942,
Katharine Hepburn starred in Woman
of the Year as a prize-winning polit-
ical columnist. Try zipping back in
time, telling Hepburn to rename the
movie Girl of the Year, and see how
far you get.
and is lucky to get o with a repri-
mand. Her name is Shideh (Narges
Rashidi), her child is Dorsa (Avin Man-
shadi), and they have just ed from
their apartment. This is not because
Shidehs husband, a laughably hand-
some doctor named Iraj (Bobby Na-
deri), has been drafted to serve near
the front line, leaving his wife and
daughter to fend for themselves, or
even because of the missile that landed,
not long ago, on their building and
failed to explode. (The nose cone pro-
truded through the roof, and spidery
cracks from the impact spread across
the ceiling of the apartment.) What
propels Shideh into the night is the
belief, shared with her daughter, that
their home is possessed by spirits.
Under the Shadow is being sold
as a horror lm, and understandably
so; there are a few nasty surprises that
will bop you right on the nose cone.
At what point, though, will the un-
warned viewer become aware that this
is a horror lm at all? Many scenes are
chafed by vexations that could not be
experience of growing up in Tehran,
and grates the nerves of his characters
against the abrasively real. The lights
dont go out for no reason, in a bid to
stoke the mood; they go out because
of a power cut. And you dont go un-
derground to confront the bogeyman;
you go there to avoid being bombed.
Yet there is a bogeymana djinn,
beloved of Persian legend, cited by con-
servative neighbors, borne on the wind,
and scoed at by Shideh right up to the
moment that she meets one. Is it a sym-
bol of oppression, by gods and men (es-
pecially men); a symptom of contagious
anxiety, passed from child to parent; or
nothing but a noisome dream? All these
and more, the result being that, by my
calculations, Under the Shadow is pre-
cisely thirty-six times more interesting
than The Girl on the Train. Where
the conceit of that movie feels timid,
cooked up, and culturally thin, Anvaris
is nourished by a near-traumatic sense
of history, and, in terms of feminist
pluck, Rashidis presence, in the lead-
ing role, is both gutsier and more plau-

A street. Her feet are bare, and so is

woman runs in terror down a
her head. She carries a child in her arms.
Darkness has fallen, and its a relief
when we see the lights of a police ve-
hicle ahead; surely these men will come
to her aid. Instead, they start to chide
her, saying, Are we in Europe now?
No, we are not. Welcome to Teh-
ran, in 1988, during the exhausted last
stage of the Iran-Iraq War. Hundreds
of thousands have died, and the city is
a target for Iraqi missiles, but what
concerns the authorities, at this instant,
is that the woman has appeared out-
side without a chador. She is detained,
less supernatural: Shidehs dismay upon
learning that she is forbidden to com-
plete her medical training; her quar-
rels with Iraj, who reckons that she
should swallow that humbling fate; the
solo workout sessions, in her living
room, in front of banned Jane Fonda
videos; her trips to the doctor, when
Dorsa develops a fever; tea with the
landlords wife; and the dashes to the
cellar when the air-raid sirens cry. But
theres the rub. Low-grade horror rus-
tles up its fears from nowhere, invent-
ing cheap curses or doltish backstories,
but the writer and director of this lm,
Babak Anvari, grounds it in his own
sible than the combined eorts of all
the main performers in Taylors lm.
Shideh is by turns testy, moody, grace-
ful, dog-tired, determined, and brave,
even when the ceiling cracks begin to
bulge, or when she glimpses behind her,
mirrored in the TV screen, something
that shouldnt be there. As for special
eects, did you honestly doubt that peel-
ing duct tape and a sheet of printed fab-
ric, if handled with imaginative brio,
could be as frightening as any ten-million-
dollar monster? O ye of little faith.
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 109

 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this weeks cartoon, by David Borchart, must be
received by Sunday, October 16th. The finalists in the October 3rd contest appear below. We will announce
the winner, and the finalists in this weeks contest, in the October 31st issue. Anyone age thirteen or older
can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEKS CONTEST

..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

Lets not mistake his confidence for leadership.

Michael Shainline, Denver, Colo.

I think I will unfollow him. Hes not reinventing ithes making it great again.
Andrew Ng, San Francisco, Calif. Tim Noble, Brooklyn, N.Y.

You think thats impressive? Wait till we get to the lake.

Bob Munro, Naperville, Ill.