I. Slightly more on Bob Dylan — sorry gang — the ride never ends.

I thought writing a gigantic essay on Bob Dylan would get him out of my system for a while, as writing gigantic essays on people tends to do, but such a thing did not occur and instead I continue to do deranged things like pay seven dollars a month for a podcast that exclusively discusses Dylan tour bootlegs. So I feel I have to briefly chime in on the questions raised in this recent answer from an interview with friend-of-the-newsletter Henry Oliver:

Manuel: There’s a line by Norman Mailer about Bob Dylan: “If Dylan’s a poet, I’m a basketball player.” I didn’t quite get it until I read about “philistine supremacy.” I’m not saying this is exactly what you mean by that term, but let me ask you anyway. Making pop songs is not the same as writing literary novels. It just isn’t. And I love Bob Dylan (though I wasn’t thrilled about him getting the Nobel Prize). Is it philistine to say that reading good novels is just as worthwhile as listening to Dylan — or to The Beatles, for that matter (and I love them too)?

Henry: Here is a little cluster of thoughts about that topic. I see no reason in principle why someone like Dylan should not win the Nobel Prize. Some of the Elizabethan poetry that we prize was written as song lyrics. (Personally, I think there should be room in the Oxford Book of English Verse for a page of Noel Coward’s lyrics.) However, in practical terms, Mailer is right: these are distinct art forms and it usually isn’t meaningful to call a singer a poet.

But when you say “just as worthwhile” I don’t think they can be directly comparable. There are better and worse uses of our time, just as there are better and worse works of art and culture, but in general, I take a catholic view of culture. Shakespeare is better than Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I enjoy both and don’t see them as being directly comparable. There is a plurality of good art, as there is a plurality of other goods.

Whether something is “just as worthwhile” will be a personal decision, not necessarily related to whether those things are “equally good”. There’s a great deal of merit in Dylan and The Beatles, irrespective of how much any individual rates them. The overall balance for any one person will depend on individual factors. If you prefer The Beatles to reading novels, that is fine. Enjoy the Beatles! But that preference has nothing to do with which of them is “better”. You can love them both, for different reasons! A lot of the time, when someone says Dylan is “just as good” as Tolstoy, or whatever, they simply don’t know what they are talking about, or they are confusing their preferences for critical judgement. One implication of pluralism is that we are forced to choose, and in those choices we might debate the superiority of one to another. But that is still a question of preference, not judgement.

Henry is of course right that these types of comparisons are often sort of nonsensical. (Is Bob Dylan better than Tolstoy? Are the Eagles as good as Sir John Suckling? Is biting into a hot Krispy Kreme donut better than The Seven Samurai?) And yet, with the caveat that it’s never easy to say exactly what one means in an interview, I think he is being slightly equivocal here and, without coming out and saying it, categorizing Dylan as closer to Curb Your Enthusiasm than to Shakespeare. I appreciate this instinct, because I am his ally against vulgar poptimism. I think we should be able to say that some things are better than others, even if you personally enjoy them less. But the curious thing about Dylan is that over the last few years, as I’ve gotten really deep into the history of English literature, he has risen in my estimation rather than fallen. If there’s such a thing as a spider-sense that goes off in your head when you encounter a capital-G capital-A Great Artist, a sense you can develop by reading widely and deeply in the literary canon (whatever that is), he sets it off.

Nevertheless, I agree with Henry (and Norman Mailer) when they say pop music is not poetry, because the lines do not stand on their own but are part of a cohesive unit that includes the song’s melody, its instrumental accompaniment, and the vocal delivery itself. Though they are related, writing lyrics is a very different art to writing poetry, and people who are accomplished at one can be only moderately good or downright bad at the other. In his book Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim remarks that poets often make poor lyricists, “because their verse has its own inner music and doesn’t make allowance for the real thing.” Attempts by great poets like W.H. Auden or Langston Hughes to write lyrics or librettos “convey the aura of a royal visit,” they “announce the presence of the writer.” Anything overwritten will not survive as a lyric. As Sondheim points out, something as simple as:

Oh what a beautiful morning,
Oh what a beautiful day.
I’ve got a beautiful feeling,
Everything’s going my way!

takes on the grandeur of Robert Frost when set to musical accompaniment, while something like:

You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.

becomes even more bathetic in song than in print.

I think much of the grumbling about Dylan comes from a tendency in many of his fans to overrate his 60s lyrics and their easy-to-parody surrealist/symbolist style, a style that he only wrote in for a few short years at the height of his fame and influence. These songs are important and influential because no one had written pop music like this before. They’re full of memorable images, and they’re sung and performed brilliantly. But through the years, rock critics, most of whom haven’t read a lot of poetry, have tended to claim that they’re great poetry in themselves, which is not really true; for every good line in early Dylan there is an overcooked one. If a 24-year-old came to you with “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” or “Desolation Row” as a poem, you would think they had a lot of talent and a bright future. You wouldn’t say they’re as good as Eliot or Yeats. (This is why Geoffrey Hill thought Christopher Ricks was wasting his time in writing a book on Dylan’s lyrics.)

But when I think of what I love most about Dylan’s music, I don’t necessarily think of the really “poetic” moments, all the lines that are like “The Three Stooges and Captain Ahab are playing cards with Dracula” or “her perfume is a mask that drips with jewels” or whatever. (I made both of those up.) I think instead of moments like:

Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one

from “Standing in the Doorway,” or, from “Idiot Wind”:

We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

On the page, those don’t look like much. But in their proper context, they are beautiful and devastating, because lyrics, instrumentation, and vocal delivery all coalesce perfectly, with no one element getting in the way of the other. Is this a lesser art than poetry or novel-writing? I would invite those who think so to try it.

Let me take another angle. Imagine an artist. In his early career, he writes in a newly-revitalized folk tradition, making thrilling new art out of the old stories and legends of his country. His youthful idealism leads him into politics and he suddenly finds himself looked to as a messianic voice during a moment of great social crisis. He becomes disillusioned and retreats. He gets religion, alienating many of his former followers. After much personal tumult and romantic agony, he refines his late style into something magnificently grave, simple yet majestic, an old man’s perspective on an eventful life and all its failures and triumphs. He is respected by everyone and wins the Nobel Prize.

The above paragraph describes the career of both Bob Dylan and William Butler Yeats. Having similar careers doesn’t mean their art is necessarily equal, and one is free to believe that Yeats is great and Dylan is terrible. But with both of them, it is not a single accomplishment we prize but an accumulation of material that, taken as a whole, forms a portrait of a life lived through art. Yeats’s poems and Dylan’s songs are great in a vacuum, but it means more to read “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” if you’ve also read “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” just as Dylan’s most recent material is made more meaningful by the long career that preceded it. This is just an instinct, not anything I can convincingly argue, but having been deeply obsessed with both Dylan and Yeats at different times in my life, when I look at the careers of both, I feel as if I am seeing two figures of roughly similar stature.

If the question Henry and Manuel are trying to answer is simply “should you win the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing pop lyrics”—probably not, I guess? It would be odd if they gave it to Werner Herzog or something, even if his stature as an artist might merit it, because film is not literature and neither is pop songwriting, though it’s closer. Personally, I don’t care at all about the Nobel Prize and it really baffles me that people pay attention to all the inside baseball, the “they gave it to an American last year so they won’t do it for another ten years,” “giving it to Dylan was a secret middle finger to American literature,” sort of thing. Surely the mere fact that this inside baseball is played invalidates the stated purpose of the prize! To think of Susan Sontag and Philip Roth in their final years, agonizing over the fact that some faceless cabal of Swedes didn’t recognize them! Who cares!

But if the question is “is Bob Dylan as important and talented as the novelists and poets who were his peers,” well, with the caveat that only time will tell for sure, I would very strongly advocate that he is. The omnipresence of popular music as an art form makes it easy to forget how relatively new it is. The mass manufacture of 78rpm records (which could hold about 8 minutes per side; a Verdi opera was released as a 40-disc set) dates to the 1910s. The idea of a pop record as a cohesive work of art and of the songwriter as auteur rather than craftsman only emerged in the 1950s, when the long-playing record became common. Whatever this thing is, it has existed in its current form for less than a lifetime. Only now, as Dylan and his peers reach the end of their journeys, are we beginning to understand what it can artistically accomplish. To look at him is to realize it can accomplish quite a lot.

II. Short stories: are they any good?

One big issue with writing on Substack is that it is extremely hard to cultivate an Olympian grandeur and detachment in one’s work, to issue the kind of lofty-yet-controversial pronouncement that one enjoys so much in Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia and the like. This is because when you throw a little bomb into the discourse for fun, thanks to this website’s social features, you get instantly deluged with everyone’s opinion, not only the opinions of your friends and peers (with whom you might assume good faith and fellowship even if you disagree), but also the opinions of complete strangers who, only knowing you from a quoted sentence, assume you are some sort of idiot and claim that your offhand remark elicits violent impulses within them. (In Vidal and Sontag’s day, you had to write a letter to the editor in order to call someone an idiot.) Of course, there’s no point in crying about it—you threw the bomb! What did you expect? Nevertheless it is always aggravating to be misinterpreted, and though I wish I could glide over it all in true Vidalian fashion, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. So here are my true unfiltered and honest thoughts about the contemporary short story.

Obviously, for the purpose of an essay defending the essay form itself, I was being a little hyperbolic when I claimed to “secretly sort of dislike” short stories. “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The Lady with the Dog,” “A Hunger Artist,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” “Signs and Symbols,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” “The Dead,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Defender of the Faith” — you’ll get no argument from me that these are great works of art. Still, I always find myself slightly reluctant to read a short story. There is something about the vast majority of even the best ones that I admire but cannot quite bring myself to love. I admit I have always been puzzled by my own feelings in this matter. How best to explain them?

Outdoor enthusiasts distinguish between “Type 1” and “Type 2” fun. Type 1 fun is fun while you’re doing it: walking on the beach at sunset, blasting music with the top down, sex, drugs, blue skies, cold drinks. Type 2 fun is difficult or strenuous in the moment, but rewarding and enjoyable later: climbing a mountain, running a marathon, reading the most complex stretches of Joyce or Proust. What I was trying to say is that most short stories, at least most contemporary realist or realist-adjacent short stories (as opposed to tales, yarns, legends, or Borgesian thought experiments, which are often fun while you’re reading them), feel distinctly Type 2. When they’re good, I’m glad to have read them. But the process of reading them is often not very fun, so even if I know it’ll be good for me, I find myself putting them off for the more capacious and immediate pleasures of the novel.

This sounds counterintuitive. Surely one has to work for the rewards of a novel more than those of a short story, which might take ten or twenty minutes to read? But the novel distributes its pleasures throughout. Think of the thrill you get, when you start a new one with all its possibilities. Think of the rush that comes in the last fifty or sixty pages, when you get the feeling of accomplishment that comes with finishing something long. Think of how it feels to live with a character for so much time, and the strange sensation that comes when you are done with a great book and feel as if you have parted with a friend.

The pleasures of the short story, conversely, so often exist largely in retrospect. Take “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I think this is a magnificent story, one of the most haunting and powerful ever written. I have nothing but admiration for it and my life is better for having read it. But while you’re reading it, until the final few pages, it’s kind of boring! Most of it is just a family arguing, a family that is purposefully portrayed as not particularly interesting or notable and even rather annoying. It’s only once you’ve read the entire thing that you understand why the first ten pages were necessary. So many short stories are, to put it vulgarly, setup for a punchline, and getting to that punchline is often a lot of work, and only rarely worth it.

The best essay about contemporary realist short stories is Elif Batuman’s “Short Story and Novel” from 2004, in which she says:

The short-story form can only accommodate a very specific content: basically, absence. Missing persons, missed opportunities, very brief encounters, occurring in the margins of “Life Itself”: when the content is minimalist, then it makes sense to follow the short-fiction dictates: condense, delete, omit.

Novels, like short stories, are often about absences; but they are based on information overload. A short story says, “I looked for x, and didn’t find it,” or, “I was not looking anymore, and then I found x.” A novel says, “I looked for x, and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.” The novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself.

For me, much as I may enjoy and admire many short stories, the reason to read fictional narratives is ultimately contained mostly in a, b, c, g, q, r, and w rather than x. I love watching characters grow and develop. I love strange digressions and longueurs. I love passages of descriptive prose that are not strictly necessary. I love waking up each day excited to return to a fictional world. I like to be taken on a journey; I don’t think it’s an accident that so many of my favorite novels—Moby-Dick, Mason and Dixon, The Savage Detectives, Mating—involve long journeys of some sort. I don’t know how we would set up the system differently, but it seems a shame to me that so many contemporary authors must toil in the short story mines for a while when their strengths may not necessarily be suited to its very specialized kind of narrative.

This is certainly not true for everyone— some people, like Lincoln Michel, claim to prefer the elegant short story to the “inevitably bloated and repetitive” novel. Though this reads to me like claiming to prefer a stick of plain celery to a sizzling steak, I take him at his word. And of course, one doesn’t actually have to choose between the two forms, it’s certainly possible to enjoy both and I do, most of the time. But the inconvenient fact remains. I wish I could feel differently, but in my heart of hearts, in my secret self, in the mask below the mask below the mask which I only reveal when I’m alone, even when I’m reading a short story collection of undeniable brilliance and power, even if I turned the last page of the previous story and had to just sit and stare out the window for a while because I was so moved by its beauty and pathos, when I start on the next one and the opening sentence says something like “Diane was in the kitchen doing the washing-up when the doorbell rang,” some small, shameful part of me is always going to think: Oh God, not fucking Diane!

Every few months, some magazine or other does some “state of criticism” roundtable where they get, I don’t know, Becca Rothfeld or Lauren Oyler or Dwight Garner or whoever to opine upon the value and necessity of criticism as an art form and how isn’t it such a shame that there isn’t a robust critical ecosystem the way there used to be, and so on. These, like all forums in which writers talk how special and important they are, are mostly useless, not much more than special pleading in the face of vast and implacable historical forces. Maybe if we all hold hands and wish really hard we can bring back the Partisan Review days, but I’m doubtful.

Sometimes, however, someone talks about criticism in a way that does actually set the brain buzzing for a week or more, and such was the case with this interview with Leo Robson in the Ideas Letter, which I enjoyed so much that I would just quote the whole thing below if I could. Robson is magnificently perceptive on the role of the critic or essayist. He discusses how critics became figures of aspirational glamour around the 1950s, how they offered a vision of the writing life that was less “bookish and sedentary,” and how these supposed critical golden ages of the past are often products of hindsight (His well-chosen example is the 1980s, when intellectuals were panicking about “encroaching vulgarity” and all the while you could pick up an issue of Time or Vanity Fair or The New York Review of Books and find Hughes, Kael, Wolcott, Vidal, and many others.) Most importantly, he posits that there has always been a more vibrant and expansive belles-lettres tradition alongside that of the “pure” novelist (“an ideal devised by Flaubert, apotheosized by Joyce, and institutionalized by the CIA-MFA,” to quote John Pistelli):

Nowadays readers are accustomed to fiction that has things in common with non-fiction forms. A list of writers who people have gotten very excited about would include practitioners of “autofiction” and the essayistic novel, but also novelists who wrote other things readers care about: Woolf, Milan Kundera, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, Zadie Smith, John Berger, Chris Kraus, Camus. I’m not saying people don’t prize novels, but not many of the people you’d see on a t-shirt or a tote bag were purely novelists. I don’t think being purely a novelist is very appealing, and many novelists who could get away with doing nothing else appear to agree with that. Being just a reviewer is also crap, of course.

I’m highlighting Robson’s interview because its appealing vision of the life of the man of letters was one of two pieces of writing that kept me from totally abandoning my most recent essay, the one on Bob Dylan’s late career. I was banging my head against the wall with this thing. I was in absolute despair. I was taking a very critical-analytic approach, writing these little chronological blurbs about each album and I soon got to feeling like it was a completely pointless and contemptible exercise. It’s not that Bob Dylan is above criticism or anything like that, it’s just that he is such a titanic figure that it just doesn’t matter. Saying that you might have cut a few of the more generic blues numbers from Time Out of Mind, or that the production on “High Water” sounds a bit too much like a whiskey commercial… who cares? You might as well piss into the Grand Canyon, throw a pebble at the Statue of Liberty. Who am I compared to him? What can I say that isn’t contained in the first five seconds of “Like a Rolling Stone”? I wake up early to write these things. I sit inside on beautiful sunny Southern California afternoons. For what? To be some pedantic footnoter, some village explainer? Why?

Around then I was also reading an essay in Harper’s—you probably know the type—the ones that are done in the kind of longform nonfiction voice where the writer is making a performance of doubting himself, and doubling back, but he’s not really doing it, he’s just using humility and uncertainty as an excuse for insufficient rigor and an unwillingness to make strong claims. The kind of dithering that makes you wish you could go back in time and erase David Foster Wallace from existence. What’s the point, I began to think. The novel is on life support and beginning to flatline, and creative nonfiction and cultural criticism is just this useless, masturbatory, parasitic enterprise. What a horrible curse it is, to be deeply invested in this dying animal. It sickens me. Let the chatbots do it. Maybe I’ll buy a guitar.

But Robson’s interview lit enough of a fire under me that it made me want to go back to the sources, the things I really admired. So as well as Robson’s interview, I reread “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Elvis” (a brilliant 1995 Esquire essay on Elvis and Graceland from a rather unheralded writer named Julie Baumgold), and some Didion and some Greil Marcus and a few other things. And those helped, a little. But what really did it for me, what really set me on the right straight road all men should tread, was re-reading this completely brilliant performance from Stanley Crouch, “Miles Davis in the Fever of Spring, 1961.”

Crouch was a longtime Village Voice writer, a sort of Norman Mailer of the jazz world, though he wrote about many subjects. Like Mailer, his politics were a strange mixture of radical and conservative. He railed against free jazz, which he believed strayed too far from the rhythmic principles at the core of the genre, against rap music, and against liberal secular saints like Toni Morrison, which led many to characterize him as a black conservative. But he also deplored “putting the white man in charge” of jazz criticism and jazz programming, and thought of himself as an adherent of the pluralistic liberal tradition in black American writing, a heir to Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison. He worked on a long novel that he assumed would be greeted as a masterpiece, only to have it land with a dull thud. He was pugilistic, quick to anger, willfully offensive, legendarily long-winded, and given to socking critics in the nose. When he died, Ishmael Reed wrote perhaps the most vicious eulogy ever published.

But when he was on, he was really on, and when he wrote “Miles Davis in the Fever of Spring,” he was—I hope the rap-hating Crouch will forgive the metaphor from beyond the grave—absolutely blacking out in the booth. Ostensibly a review of the Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall CD release, “Miles Davis in the Fever of Spring” runs nearly thirty pages and, in language of supreme Ellisonian-Bellovian authority and rhythm, summarizes everything going on in the world of jazz circa 1961 and in larger American culture, currents social, sexual, racial, political, and musical, taking Davis apart so you can see everything that led up to those few hours on that stage. (The essay is not online, but I’ve uploaded it to Google Drive here. Or you can read it in his collection Considering Genius on archive.org.) To excerpt only two great paragraphs from an essay full of them, here is Crouch’s first description of Davis:

Now was his time, nobody else’s. The trumpeter was ahead of the curve, holding a position that was much larger than the sound of anybody’s music. His attire was under as much awed scrutiny as the notes he chose to play. He had been setting styles among Negro musicians and others for at least six years, defining what was hip and what was not. Philadelphia drummer Rashied Ali remembered how an album cover of the middle fifties with Davis in seersucker jacket, no shirt, and cap had kicked off a trend. Trumpeter Ted Curson observed how musicians laughed at white buck shoes until Davis wore a pair and let them know that those, too, were theirs for the having. Opening the way was his business. The attitude with which he carried himself, a chastening kind of arrogance, exuded something that made it possible for him, as trumpeter Bill Dixon recalled, to enter and change the context of a room as thoroughly as did Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, two other Negro men whose power took on a palpable condition in the atmosphere as soon as they came through the door. Davis didn’t announce songs and he never seemed too happy to be anywhere. Geniality was verboten. Were his attitude reduced to one question, it would have been, “So?”

Here is the rest of the jazz world, circa 1961:

Ornette Coleman had arrived in New York fifteen months earlier and was at the center of a controversy about so-called free jazz, which dispensed with harmony in favor of a shifting, quirky, angular, simplistic, and gripping rendition of the demons and the dreams in the disaffected soul of the time—the discomfort with the drab order of suburban suffocation, the desire to return to some kind of primitive purity, the anger at the facelessness of the individual in the cheese dip of melded Americana, that terror of the end of the world that could be brought about by a small number of men with unprecedented weapons of incalculable destruction, that lonely-boy shriek and sob that Coleman conjured up through his white plastic saxophone with such boundless determination. Some felt as though they were not so much listening as watching bricks passionately but fruitlessly thrown through the endless windows of a factory intent on making humanity no more than a mechanistic extension of a constricted sense of order and production. Coltrane, considered by his least-sympathetic listeners as no more than an incredibly long-winded and hysterical academic, went for the call of the wild, too, and the vastly intellectual blast furnace that he had brought to Davis’s bandstand was now busy incinerating the distance between the academy and the outback—the blues cry jumbled up in all kinds of incantational rhythms, the simple but layered forms turning the piano and the bass into extensions of the scalding, polyrhythmic drums—with the saxophonist down on one knee, as often as not exhausting himself and his audience as he produced an auditory image that took his bedazzled listeners deeper and deeper into the horrors and the magic of the rain forest.

What was cool Miles Davis going to do about all of that?

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I read this and instantly knew everything that was wrong with my Dylan essay and how to fix it. I needed to reach for that mythic feeling, to be bardic, rather than analytic. To reach for a form that, well, you can call it criticism, but it’s not really that, is it? Not exactly. It has a critical argument—detailing how Davis (and Dylan) successfully adapted to a moment of artistic crisis—but it’s not particularly argumentative or analytical. It’s more like a legend, like a story, like a tale of the tribe that shores up certain traditions and ways of thinking, that entertains and edifies. Reading “Miles Davis in the Fever of Spring” you can feel Crouch’s lifetime of experience: his lifetime of listening, his lifetime of playing, his innumerable nights spent in plush Midtown dinner clubs and smoky Village dives among writers and jazz musicians. You can feel him taking all that embodied knowledge and using it to illuminate this one specific performance, so beautifully and comprehensively that no one ever needs to write about this particular night at Carnegie Hall ever again. You can feel what it was, to be at the center of the storm in 1961. You are Davis and you are the audience. You are there. You see it all anew. What more could you possibly ask for in a piece of writing?

It’s not the right approach all the time or for every subject, but when you write in this way, this sort of encyclopedic-mythic mode, you can transcend your idea of your own critical authority. Authority ceases to matter. You stop worrying about what it means that you’re a mere footnote to this greater artist. Of course you’re a footnote! What else would you be! But at the same time, you feel as if you’re the heir to a tradition. You’re a footnote the way Homer was a footnote to Achilles and Odysseus. Crouch started as a jazz drummer, and he was never more than just okay. But on his own turf, in his own realm, once he came to terms with the fact he would never make Kind of Blue, he could perform at the highest level. He could do what he was born to do.

I don’t really worry about not being Bob Dylan, or Miles Davis, or Melville or Faulkner. I know there is an essential difference between them and me. I love writing, really love it, but I am not, so far as I can tell, driven by a hole in my soul that will never be healed. If some genie appeared to me and forced me to choose either my writing or my family and my girlfriend and all the people I love in this world, I would reluctantly put down the pen. I don’t think you can ever be great, like world-shakingly great, if that’s your answer.

But don’t confuse that for a lack of ambition. I did set out, when I started, to write the best essay on Bob Dylan that has ever been written (particularly given how ill-served Dylan has been by most of his biographers and critics, who tend to lapse into weird resentment of their hero, or pedantic Dylanology.) Whether I succeeded is another matter, of course, but I look at “Miles Davis in the Fever of Spring” and I think: This is my field. I’ve been given a sacred duty, to carry on this tradition, to match my predecessors–or surpass them. I enjoy the thrill of it, the challenge. It feels like standing at the foot of a great mountain. You’re faced with these larger-than-life figures, Mount Davis and Mount Dylan, so important and imposing and impossible to capture. And then slowly, cautiously, you strap on your crampons and your axes and you make your way up the peak.

Robson, in his interview, is not given to making inflated claims about his craft. “The writing in even the greatest reviews,” he admits, “is not in the same stratosphere as Absalom, Absalom!, Beloved, Moby-Dick, Tender is the Night, To the Lighthouse.” This is undeniably true; there is a high realm of art, a sort of pure, blinding transmission of experience and beauty, that is closed to the mere scribbler, whose subject is the mundane world and not our phantasmagorical interior landscapes. Yet the thing Robson doesn’t mention is that essays can live in your head in a way that these longer books don’t. Moby-Dick is probably my favorite novel, but reading Moby-Dick is not exactly an afternoon’s work, so I’ve only read it twice. I don’t think I’ve read even my favorite short stories more than a few times. (I think many people, if they were honest with themselves, would admit that they secretly sort of dislike short stories, even the good ones.) But I’ve read “Miles Davis in the Fever of Spring,” and “Frank Sinatra has a Cold” and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Elvis” and “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” and “Moderation or Death” and “A House of One’s Own” and “Shooting an Elephant” and a few others dozens of times each. I’ve revisited them over a lifetime, like poems or songs. I know them inside and out, in a way I’ll never know a longer prose narrative.

Crouch has lots of other work worth reading (as well as a lot of bunk), but nothing else of his I’ve read is as brain-meltingly inspired as “Miles Davis in the Fever of Spring.” Sometimes you only touch the face of the Empyrean once. But if your legacy—if my legacy—as a writer is even one of those in a lifetime’s work, one ten or twenty-page thing that affects someone like one of those essays has affected me… hey, it ain’t Moby-Dick, but it sure isn’t nothing. So that’s why I keep writing these stupid things for free.

I.

They say it was bat shit that almost did him in, something he might have breathed in while riding his motorcycle on a gusty spring day, or maybe at a rest stop before a show in Memphis, or maybe while he was taking a walk in the woods. The fungus is called histoplasma capsulatum, and it grows on bird and bat droppings in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valley, when the air is thick with pollen and the rivers are stagnant with muck. If it gets into your lungs, it can swell the sac around your heart, make it hard to breathe, give you a stabbing pain in your chest, and eventually, if left untreated, stop your heart entirely. That’s what almost happened to Bob Dylan in May of 1997.

He had wandered in the wilderness since his temporary conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1978 and the trilogy of gospel albums that followed. Despite the musical strengths of those records, and the fiery live performances that accompanied them, the press, as well as many Dylan fans, didn’t take kindly to being proselytized to and looked upon his conversion as a betrayal. He abandoned the fire-and-brimstone tone after a few years, but the odd critically acclaimed album—Infidels in 1983, Oh Mercy in 1989—was always followed by a disappointing sequel, like 1985’s Empire Burlesque or 1990’s Under the Red Sky. On tour he was erratic, sometimes brilliant but often sloppy, maybe drunk. In 1991 he was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, performed a nearly-unrecognizable version of “Masters of War,” took the stage sweating and fidgeting next to a grinning Jack Nicholson, and gave a strange oration:

Well, my daddy he didn’t leave me too much, you know, he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he did tell me was this—he said so many things, you know. He did say, “Son, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your own ways.” Thank you…

He had never been one for straightforward speeches, but it was a distressing sight. Around the same time, he was performing “Desolation Row” in Australia when his eyes flooded with tears, and he had to retreat to the back of the stage to compose himself. He had been attempting to sing the lines “You would not think to look at him / But he was famous long ago.”

The early nineties also brought two records of traditional folk and blues covers: Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. Both were well-received, but to outside observers they seemed to signal a retreat to the source, a surrender, an exhaustion. The icon of the counterculture, the mercury kid whose songs spilled out of him faster than he could write them down, who burst out of the coffeehouse folk scene with protest anthems and love ballads of startling power and originality, who left all that behind for sunglasses and amphetamines and blaring electric guitar, who wrote and released Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde in a matter of months, who made his own myths wherever he went: Newport, “Judas!,” the motorcycle crash, Woodstock, The Basement Tapes, Blood on the Tracks, the Rolling Thunder Revue…that guy… that guy was out of ideas. We would never see his like again.

So most people thought, anyway. In reality, he was on the road, purifying and refining himself, searching for new spaces in the old sound. His revitalization had begun in 1987, on tour with Tom Petty, out of inspiration and considering retirement. His last two albums had been critically savaged and he found he could hardly write anymore, relying on partners like Sam Shepard and the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter to whip his songs into shape. On stage, he often wore a hoodie and dark glasses, barely looking at the audience. He felt as if his own songs had become strangers to him, like (he wrote in his memoir Chronicles) “an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.” One last tour and he would call it quits, retreat to his compound in Malibu or his farm in Minnesota, maybe spend the rest of his days playing the old spirituals and murder ballads he loved, maybe play nothing at all.

Something happened to him on stage in Locarno, Switzerland. In Chronicles, he is almost comically vague about the nature of this revelation, but a 1997 Newsweek interview offers slightly more clarity. He was standing on stage when everything seemed to suddenly drop out.

It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was even me thinking it. “I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not.” And all of a sudden everything just exploded. It exploded every which way. [...] After that is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.

There were two other revelations that same year: one came while watching a jazz singer in San Francisco, the other had to do with a kabbalistically complex new guitar technique based on the number three, both of which are discussed in Chronicles with the same sense of vague awe, rushes of feeling that can’t be explained. Whatever happened, he was off the next year on what fans took to calling the “Never-Ending Tour,” a grueling schedule of live performances, often over a hundred a year, which he has maintained ever since. (He played only 166 shows between 1980 and 1987, and around 250 in the miraculous 1961-66 period. Between 1988 and the present, he has played over 3,500.) Written off as a relic, away from the distractions of celebrity, he was able to find new ways to approach his music and his own legend, often performing similar setlists but with arrangements changing from show to show—one night a song might be a stately waltz, the next night a ferocious country blues. It wasn’t a straight line upward from there, there were plenty of flubs, bad shows, crises, and low moments. But slowly, surely, he was pulling himself out of the pit.

So when he got through that hospital stay (“I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he cracked to the press), he might have grinned at the irony, that just as he was set to make his return to the popular consciousness, he was almost cut down by the same muddy river country that had birthed the whole tradition of American vernacular music in which he worked. He spent six weeks off his feet, and then got right back on tour, still weak and on medication, sleeping hours a day on the bus, saving all his energy for that night’s show. And in September 1997, he released Time Out of Mind, his most universally hailed album since 1975’s Blood on the Tracks and the beginning of the most startling second act in American popular music.

Time Out of Mind was humid and haunted, full of phenomenal fire and mystery. Oh Mercy producer Daniel Lanois swathed Dylan’s voice in reverb and murk, often filtering it through an old amplifier that made it sound like it was coming from a busted radio. Just like Highway 61 Revisited, Time Out of Mind began with the sound of an organ, but instead of the fierce, joyful lift of “Like a Rolling Stone,” with its gunshot snare and rumbling guitar and words tumbling out—onceuponatimeyoudressedsofine, etc—the organ on opening track “Love Sick” was the loneliest sound you could imagine, the lyrics spare and simple:

I’m walkin’
Through streets that are dead
Walkin’
With you in my head.

“I’m sick of love,” the chorus went “I wish I’d never met you.” Elsewhere, “You left me standing in the doorway crying / I’ve got nothing to go back to now.” Elsewhere, “Last night I danced with a stranger / but she just reminded me you were the one.” It’s always a dangerous game to read an artist’s personal life into their music, and Dylan has always maintained that the two are separate entities, famously claiming the stormy breakup songs on Blood on the Tracks, universally seen as springing from the end of his relationship with his then-wife Sara, were inspired by nothing more than reading Chekhov. But just as no one could write “Idiot Wind” just by reading Uncle Vanya, no one could write the blasted songs of hopelessness and despair on Time Out of Mind unless he was really, really going through it.

Dylan’s batshit-induced brush with mortality took place after Time Out of Mind was written and recorded; it’s an eerie coincidence, but not an inciting incident. That didn’t stop the press, perhaps high on Johnny Cash’s recent death-haunted comeback American Recordings, from characterizing Time Out of Mind as the 55-year-old Dylan’s one-foot-in-the-grave mortality record, particularly album highlight “Not Dark Yet,” ballad “Trying to Get to Heaven” and epic closer “Highlands,” in which Dylan fantasizes about a lost Eden while sitting in a Boston diner that might as well be purgatory. It’s admittedly hard to listen to his dirt-road voice growl “It’s not dark yet / But it’s gettin’ there” or “The party’s over and there’s less and less to say / I got new eyes, everything looks far away” and not think about death, but read the lyrics of Time Out of Mind closely and you’ll find they refer more to despair, depression, and heartbreak than to the Big Casino itself. (As late as 2011, Gilbert Cruz, then of Time, now head of the New York Times Book Review, was calling “Not Dark Yet” “a moving end-of-life song written and sung by an aging artist who has somehow managed to remain vital.”) Dylan, who had dealt with the projections and expectations of the press for nearly forty years now, laughed it off:

People say the record deals with mortality — my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say: “It deals with my mortality” — you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way — like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn’t. I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that.

But you can’t entirely blame them for thinking so. There’s a cosmic feeling in Time Out of Mind, a feeling older and deeper than anything that could be accessed by the buzzing stream-of-consciousness wild kid of the early years or the tormented wanderer of the middle ones. It’s partially due to Lanois’s production, which aims for what he calls “depth of field,” the recreation on a record of the washes of sound and blending of tones that occur in a three-dimensional environment. For him, this emerges not as a crisp, you-are-there quality, like the Blue Note jazz records from the 1950s and 1960s, but as something like the dream of a song, where instruments continually shift, emerge out of a haze of smoky echo for a few seconds, then disappear.

It’s also partially due to Dylan’s compositions. Time after time, the saddest lines in the world are augmented by music that wraps the listener up, murmurs assurances, shows us that life is full of hardship and trouble but we’ll get through it, really we will. Alex Ross, in a 1999 New Yorker essay on Dylan, writes about “Not Dark Yet”:

The song ends, “I don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer / It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” This couldn’t be bleaker, could it? Bob Dylan stares into the face of death and decay. But as he sings “murmur of a prayer” he lifts the tune yet another step and does a graceful little turn at the top, creating an altogether new melody. And he slips in a triplet—a slight dancing rhythm that someone else picks up on guitar. As the song winds down, it’s not the darkness that lingers but the freshly swaying motion in the music, and that momentary possibility of a “murmur of a prayer.” The man who worships Hank Williams is looking back at “I Saw the Light”—a would-be uplifting gospel number that was really filled with terror. “I saw the light, I saw the light, / No more darkness, no more night,” Hank insisted, in a melody that fell, and you didn’t believe him. Bob declares, with a gallant upward turn, “I don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer.” You don’t believe him, either.

The same technique is used on “Trying to Get to Heaven,” where the music behind lines like “When you think that you’ve lost everything / you find out you can always lose a little more” sounds weary, but resolute, and where the ending harmonica solo is a defiant one-note chug, a pledge to keep going. And on “Standing in the Doorway,” where a desperate lovers’ plea is backed by simple, romantic arpeggios; a doo-wop 45 playing in an empty high school gymnasium. All of this combines to give the record oceanic sense of wisdom, of the whole journey from anger to despair to acceptance. It somehow seems to knows more about life than Dylan does, or than we do.

II.

After Time Out of Mind, something came loose and the floodgates opened. Dylan’s output from 2001-2006 encompasses two records of originals, “Love and Theft” (quotations intentional) and Modern Times, his fractured and fascinating memoir Chronicles, the film Masked and Anonymous, which he co-wrote and starred in, several great songs buried on film soundtracks, the first season of his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, and hundreds upon hundreds of live performances, many of them, with their slick and revitalized countrypolitan sound, counted among the best of the Never-Ending Tour. There hadn’t been anything like it since the initial five year stretch in which he went from fresh-faced Woody Guthrie acolyte to shamanic spirit of the age.

Yet unlike that time, when the great spotlight of the world had swiveled and shone upon him strong enough to blind, and reporters and critics and barefoot young seekers had grabbed at the hem of his garment and begged him to lead them, the older Dylan, now comfortably categorized as an American Icon, was free to build up a private universe, a dangerous and alluring world of carnival barkers, street hustlers, jobbing comedians, busking musicians, con men, card sharps, and leering minstrels. His persona in these years was like Old Bull Lee, the William Burroughs stand-in in On the Road, who:

…had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910 when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinamen smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone.

His interest went back a bit further than that; he landed on the Civil War and Reconstruction as the period from which everything that concerned him sprang. He wrote in Chronicles of how, when he first arrived in Greenwich Village, he would spend biting winter days in the New York Public Library, reading newspapers from that era on microfilm, how he found himself convinced that it marked a moment in which “the common destiny of the human being [was] thrown off course.” The South’s stubbornness on slavery damned us all, he determined, not only because of the frenzy of killing it provoked but because the war set the stage for the final consolidation of Northern industrial power, the replacement of the rhythms of the land with tightly-regulated clock time, and the imperial march of conquest and murder, first across the plains, then across the seas. But it was also a new beginning, and as former slaves were able to congregate freely for the first time, they created the music that, together with border ballads and nursery rhymes and hymns and all the other oral literature of America, would eventually evolve into the musical tradition in which Dylan worked. “Back there,” he wrote, “America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected.”

There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.

I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.”

Forty years later, the truck pulled up at his door. Both “Love and Theft” and Modern Times lift extensively from Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry Timrod, the all-but-forgotten poet laureate of the Confederacy, often pairing his florid Victorian lines with a gutbucket blues couplet (Well a childish dream is a deathless need / And a noble truth is a sacred creed / My pretty baby, she’s lookin’ around / She’s wearing a multi-thousand dollar gown.) “Nettie Moore,” a sparse, spiraling number on Modern Times, one of those songs that feels as if it has always been playing somewhere and was just waiting for someone to discover it, is based in part on a ghoulishly saccharine Confederate ballad called “Gentle Nettie Moore,” about a slave pining for his lover, who has been sold away. In Masked and Anonymous, an utterly bonkers and surreal film in which Dylan plays “Jack Fate,” a musician sprung from prison to play a shady benefit concert, the near-future America depicted is in a state of civil war itself, presided over by a gaudy dictator and marked by street violence and corruption. (Director and co-writer Larry Charles recalled that Dylan was “very, very obsessed with the Civil War” during filming.) In one scene, Dylan and his band sing “Dixie” to an enrapt and conspicuously racially mixed audience, which includes a man dressed as Abraham Lincoln. And on “‘Cross the Green Mountain,” a great song buried on the soundtrack to Ted Turner’s failed 2003 Civil War epic Gods and Generals, Dylan’s narrative seems to rise up from the scarred and smoking battlefields of the war, up from “the dim Atlantic line” where “the ravaged land lies for miles behind,” to encompass human conflict in all its eternal folly, ending on a redemptive rather than vindictive note:

They were calm, they were blunt, we knew ’em all too well
We loved each other more than we ever dared to tell

A view that the Civil War was a Greek tragedy and not the triumphant Second American Revolution, as it is more commonly characterized as in liberal circles today, shouldn’t be misread as some sort of Lost Cause nostalgia or apologia for the Confederacy, certainly not from the man who wrote “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” “This country is just too fucked up about color,” Dylan growled in a contentious 2012 Rolling Stone interview. “Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that [...] It’s doubtful that America’s ever going to get rid of that stigmatization. It’s a country founded on the backs of slaves. [...] There’s nothing heroic about any lost cause.”

The title of “Love and Theft” seemed at first to be nothing more than a neat summation of the task of the artist, and a wink towards those who had taken Dylan to task for lifting lines and melodies from so many old songs. But Dylan fans, newly empowered by a nifty invention called the internet with the ability to track down every reference and allusion, quickly realized it also shared a name with an academic book by Eric Lott, the full title being Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. The image of the minstrel had been a spectral presence in Dylan’s art for a while now. He had famously donned whiteface on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and before recording Oh Mercy in 1989, he had sent Daniel Lanois and his mixing engineers a tape of Al Jolson performances with the note: “Listen to this, you can learn a lot.” In Chronicles and in various interviews, he recalled seeing one of the last blackface minstrel shows at a traveling carnival in Duluth. And in Masked and Anonymous, Dylan’s character is visited by the ghost of an old showman played by Ed Harris, in the full white-gloved blackface getup.

It’s difficult to determine an easy moral or a didactic point in his use of this charged imagery, but Eric Lott, for his part, addressed Dylan in Black Mirror, his follow-up to Love and Theft, writing: “I would guess that Dylan regards minstrelsy, whatever its ugliness, as responsible for some of the United States’ best music as well as much of its worst.” Few would claim a love for minstrel music the way one might love the country blues or Appalachian folk ballads; it’s kept out of sight, spoken of in low tones, American music’s madwoman in the attic. (Dylan mentions that madwoman—Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason—in “Love and Theft”’s “High Water,” slipping her name into a Charley Patton line.) But it was, as Nick Tosches wrote in Where Dead Voices Gather, “the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture,” and a major influence on all that followed it, a thick root of the tree of American music, even if it is a poisoned one. To work honestly in this tradition, to be a middle-aged white man from Minnesota convincingly able to sing “Had to go to Florida, dodgin’ them Georgia laws” or “I got a house on the hill, I got hogs out lyin’ in the mud,” without sounding like some leather-pants millionaire poking around in a tradition he had no business in, like the many other middle-aged rock musicians who have “gone back to their roots” and gotten really into the blues, Dylan had to drag this music’s history into the light, and transfigure it into something new.

Taken together, “Love and Theft,” Masked and Anonymous, and Modern Times feel like one of those great turn-of-the-millennium American novels, like Paradise, Mason and Dixon, or Underworld: deep and ambitious attempts to wrestle with national history, to determine whether all its war and racial strife and pain was inevitable or preventable. As in those novels, no easy answers to that question are forthcoming, but the world they create in their search is sinister, captivating, beautiful, and true. They’re the art of a man with nothing left to prove to anyone, able to collapse time and speak through many voices, free to be as strange as he wants.

Not that his work was all church bells and horse-drawn carriages; on those records the nineteenth century sat alongside the mid-twentieth, the world of possibility and speed and teenage freedom opened up by the 45 single and the radio and the automobile, with some winks to the present day thrown in as well. (A reference to Alicia Keys on Modern Times jolts the listener upright, it’s like seeing a television in a Jane Austen adaptation.) The same year he released Modern Times, Dylan began presenting his satellite radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, in which he not only played an hour of songs centered around a loose theme—“Mother,” “Baseball,” “Days of the Week,” and so on—he also stepped into the role of smooth-talking DJ, giving offbeat biographies of each musician, answering listener emails, cracking jokes, reading beat poetry, and sharing cocktail recipes, in a voice that sounds like Bob Dylan’s idea of someone doing a Bob Dylan impression. (It’s a delight to hear him bite into words you’d never thought you’d hear him say, like “SpongeBob,” “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” and “Wikipedia.”) Theme Time left behind the 19th-century carnival atmosphere of his earlier work and skipped forward to a noirish Edward Hopper landscape of lonely men in diners and sad women in jazz clubs. Each episode begins with a sort of urban haiku from actress Ellen Barkin. “It’s night time in the big city,” she says “There’s a strange car parked outside.” Or “Fog rolls in from the waterfront.” Or “A man gets drunk and shaves off his mustache.” The music ranged all over, but mostly stuck to the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, the music that inspired him as a young boy. In one episode, a listener writes: “Dear Theme Time Radio Hour, I notice you play a lot of old songs. What do you have against new songs?” “Well,” he rasps, and one can hear the wry smile, “truth is, there’s a lot more old songs than there are new songs.”

Every episode was quickly catalogued and archived by online fans, but mysteries remained. Were the emails he answered genuine or was the entire show scripted? Where was “Studio B, the historic Abernathy building,” where the show was purportedly recorded? (It didn’t exist.) Was it a coincidence that the names of associate producers “Sonny Webster,” “Ben Rollins,” and “Nina Fitzgerald-Washington” were all taken from famous jazz musicians? (Almost definitely not.) What about studio engineer “Tex Carbone,” was he real? (Unknown.) And who was the announcer, “Pierre Mancini,” who rattled off these names at the end of each episode? (He was suspected to be the voice of Eddy Gorodetsky, screenwriter and producer of various 1990s sitcoms, obsessive music collector, and friend of Dylan’s who was behind both Theme Time Radio Hour and Dylan’s cameo appearance on Dharma and Greg.) In one sense, these little pranks and in-jokes didn’t really matter. In another sense, they were a key into the whole project: helping to restore a lost sense of romance to American music, showing people what it was like on clear nights when the young Dylan, the solitary and dreamy kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, could hear the Grand Ole Opry and the National Barn Dance and the R&B and blues stations from Shreveport and Jackson and New Orleans, blasting up from the southern states all the way up into the Iron Range on their 50,000 watt AM transmitters, all those unknown and enticing worlds singing in the wires.

2009’s Together Through Life was co-written with the Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter, and the accordion featured on every track brought Dylan’s sound into the Texas-Mexico borderlands, the landscapes of Lonesome Dove and Giant with their wild horses and rolling clouds. One would think a collaboration between two of the great American lyricists would be a monumental event, but Together Through Life is more of a laid-back, likable affair, a lighthearted record for summer drives and young romances, if you don’t mind your romance being soundtracked by Dylan’s croaky voice. 2012’s Tempest brought the sturm und drang back, with rough, sinister tracks like “Pay in Blood,” “Scarlet Town,” and the fourteen-minute title track about the Titanic. It’s as reliably good as anything post-Time Out of Mind, but one knows the formula by now: a few straightforward blues tracks, a 1940s-style moon-June love song or two, an epic closer, the continued evocation of the world of (as he put it in Chronicles) “outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers, and gospel truths [...] Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys, and John Henrys,” and no mention of any technological innovation more recent than the jukebox. No one, of course, would have begrudged him for releasing records of this quality until the day he died; he had already proved that he could reinvent himself many times over. But he was as restless as ever, and beginning in 2015, he reinvented himself once again, this time as a singer of other people’s songs.

III.

“If you have the time, can I tell you how I grew up?,” Bob Dylan asked Daniel Lanois, the afternoon light streaming into Lanois’s kitchen. He had just finished recording twenty-one Great American Songbook standards at Capitol Records Studio B, Sinatra’s old haunt. Recalled Lanois:

He spoke for an hour and a half on how, as a kid, you couldn’t even get pictures of anybody. You might get a record but you didn’t know what they looked like. So there was a lot of mystery associated with the work at the time. As far as hearing live music, he only heard a couple of shows a year, like the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra might come through.

But the music he did hear really touched him and he felt that a lot of that music was written not only by great professional songwriters at the time, but a lot of it was written from the heart, from the wartime, and people just pining for a lover. He felt there was a lot of spirit in that music. He felt there was a kind of beauty, a sacred ground for him.

After having said all that, we then listened to the music and I felt everything that he talked about. For one of America’s great writers to say, ‘I’m not gonna write a song. I’m gonna pay homage to what shook me as a young boy,’ I thought was very graceful and dignified.

Several times in his career, Dylan has retreated to the canon of popular song to revitalize himself, and each time the critical establishment has reacted like a spurned lover. Self-Portrait, a rambling double album of traditional ballads, contemporary covers, and studio outtakes released in 1970, was widely seen as a mark of artistic exhaustion (“What is this shit?,” began Greil Marcus’s 7,000 word review/breakup letter in Rolling Stone), as were Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. When Dylan released Shadows in the Night, the first of his three albums covering the pop standards of the 1930s and 40s, the response was warily respectful. Dylan’s affection for this music was evident to anyone who listened closely to his late period. “Bye and Bye” and “Moonlight” on “Love and Theft” and “Spirit on the Water” and “Beyond the Horizon” on Modern Times were near-straightforward attempts to write in this style, albeit with lyrics more ambiguous and unsettling than their inspirations.

But when Shadows in the Night was followed by Fallen Angels a year later and the 30-song Triplicate a year after that, people began to get antsy. Was this some sort of a joke? Was Dylan’s last act really going to be covering these well-worn songs in (what biographer Ian Bell called) his “magnificent ruin” of a voice, putting his cracked and guttural instrument up against Sinatra and Billie Holiday and all the great jazz and pop vocalists of the century? Ten well-chosen songs were one thing, but fifty? And anyway, didn’t the embrace of the Great American Songbook usually signify the bland winding-down of a career, as it did for Rod Stewart and Paul McCartney, or a desperate attempt to look mature, as it did for many an American Idol contestant?

In retrospect, one can enjoy Dylan’s ventures into interpreting the songs of others armed with the knowledge that more was yet to come, that Self-Portrait was a part of the process that would eventually birth Blood on the Tracks, that Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong laid the foundation for Time Out of Mind, and that the standards albums were followed by the magnificent Rough and Rowdy Ways. But the three standards albums are more than a technical exercise or a creative sidequest, there are deep truths and mysteries in them just as there are in the albums of originals. In The Old, Weird America, his book on the origins of Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Greil Marcus wrote of an answer Dylan gave to a critic who asked him about Bruce Springsteen.

People like Springsteen had missed something, Dylan said, with Springsteen only eight years younger and still born too late: “They weren’t there to see the end of the traditional people. But I was.” What was he saying? He might have been saying that as in 1963 he watched Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Sara and Maybelle Carter— “the traditional people,” standing on the Newport stage, for Dylan’s cryptically perfect phrase, both as themselves and as a particularly American strain of fairy folk—he had learned something about persistence and renewal. Or he might have been saying something simpler, and harder: I saw a vanishing. He was present to witness an extinction, to see the last members of a species disappear. Thus it was left to him to say what went out of the world when the traditional people left the stage.

He would thread the work of the “traditional people” throughout the songs of his late career; in nearly every composition of his from 1997 onward there is a borrowed line or melody from an obscure country, R&B, or blues song. Writers like Marcus venerate Dylan because he carries the torch for this lost America, which has been systematically commercialized, paved over, and forgotten; the general stores turned into Wal-Marts, the juke joints and roadhouses replaced with their ersatz equivalents.

Yet there was a commercial culture in that period, too. The flipside of the Old, Weird America, of the bluesmen and the jug bands and the Sacred Harp singers, was the melodic and sophisticated world of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, songs that, from the First World War to the end of the Baby Boom, formed the raw material for a million dreams, narrated a million triumphs and heartbreaks, soundtracked the everyday troubles of everyday people. Were the men and women who wrote these songs, many of them, like Dylan, the descendants of European Jewish immigrants, any less deserving of the title “traditional people,” just because they grew up on the Lower East Side instead of in a Mississippi shack or a Kentucky holler? And just as he put an end to the Greenwich Village folk scene, as the old coffee houses filled with archivists and lefty intellectuals were flooded with a thousand wannabe Dylans, didn’t he also, by creating the figure of modern singer-songwriter as individual poet-genius, definitively slam the Great American Songbook shut? Might it be understandable, that he might want to help maintain the memory of what he inadvertently helped destroy?

“I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way,” he wrote in the press release for Shadows in the Night. “They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter of fact. What me and my band are doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.” To do this, instead of attempting to replicate the lush orchestration of the 1950s, as most standards revival records had done, he stripped them down to their essence, just his voice accompanied by upright bass, pedal steel, and occasional flourishes of guitar, horns, and percussion, halfway between a sophisticated jazz trio and a particularly melancholy honky-tonk country outfit. He gave his beautiful arrangements their due space, often letting the introduction ride for a long while before he started to sing. He found that, just as old age gave a gravitas and meaning to the “traditional people” he watched in New York and at the Newport Folk Festival, it gave a sense of deep weight to these seemingly-ephemeral songs. Initially, there is something comical in listening to his gnarled voice perform these songs; play his version of “Some Enchanted Evening” to an unsuspecting listener and you’re sure to get a burst of surprised laughter when his vocal comes in. Yet sit with them and you begin to realize that there is a pathos that could only come from someone whose voice is so weathered, who has experienced so much of life, when he sings:

Love is funny or it’s sad
Or it’s quiet or it’s mad
It’s a good thing or it’s bad
But beautiful.

Or, in “Why Try to Change Me Now?,” a composition from 1952 that seems to have been written especially for an aged and reflective Dylan:

Why can’t I be more conventional?
People talk, people stare, so I try
But that’s not for me, cause I can’t see
My kind of crazy world go passing me by.

He used the contours of the standards, the education they offered in melody, phrasing, and timing, to retrain his voice, which years of touring had degenerated into a rough bark. Non-fans may laugh at the idea that Dylan’s late-career singing, an acquired taste if ever there was one, went through better and worse periods, but compare his voice now to that of live recordings from the early 2010s (when I first saw him in concert and dismissed him as well and truly over the hill) and you’ll find that he no longer sounds as if he has a Texas-sized frog in his throat. He is, post-standards albums, capable of a much greater delicacy, a strange kind of ragged beauty.

So we would all discover in late March of 2020, when the world seemed to rapidly be falling apart. “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.” The message was attached to “Murder Most Foul,” the first single from Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first album of original songs in eight years. The seventeen-minute song begins as a ballad about the JFK assassination and then expands outward, as the dying president hallucinates a series of twentieth-century tableaus and moments in musical history, ending in a long series of requests to the midcentury radio DJ Wolfman Jack, of which only a small part is excerpted below:

Play, “Lonely At the Top” and, “Lonely Are the Brave”
Play it for Houdini spinning around his grave
Play Jelly Roll Morton, play, “Lucille”
Play, “Deep In a Dream” and play “Driving Wheel”
Play, “Moonlight Sonata” in F-sharp
And, “A Key To The Highway” for the king of the harp
Play, “Marching Through Georgia” and, “Dumbarton’s Drums”
Play, “Darkness” and death will come when it comes
Play, “Love Me Or Leave Me” by the great Bud Powell
Play, “The Blood-stained Banner”
Play, “Murder Most Foul”

Dylan is always discussed as a lyricist first and foremost, and many fans are first drawn in by the wild poetic force of the lyrics on the early records, which books like Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin analyze the same way one might analyze Keats or Milton. But “Murder Most Foul” isn’t self-consciously baroque, like “Desolation Row” or “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” or magnificently stark and elemental, like “Simple Twist of Fate,” or “I Threw It All Away.” It’s a little obvious, goofy even. (‘“Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ‘63 / A day that will live on in infamy.”) Its rhyming couplets are like something you might make up in the shower. Your first reaction, upon hearing it, might be to roll your eyes at this hackneyed piece of boomer self-mythologizing. Oh, the JFK assassination was the day our national innocence died? Tell me all about it, Don McLean.

Yet all the elements of “Murder Most Foul” combine to make it one of his great late achievements. How utterly right and strangely comforting it felt, in those surreal and terrifying early pandemic days, to hear his voice over those hushed pianos and violins. You want to resist the song at first, scoff at how straight-faced and simple it is, but it beckons you in and, hypnotized, you follow. “The soul of a nation has been torn away / And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay,” he sang, and here was that decay finally making itself known, in mass death, in burning cities, in unemployment and unrest, and in the realization that no one, anywhere, knew what to do, that there were no experts in the room, that no one was coming to save us. And here was Dylan at 79, narrating one moment where, perhaps, the course of the country became inevitably set, but also narrating all that we have to celebrate, all the human vitality and intensity and love that found expression in the music of the twentieth century, which no corrupt politician or shadowy assassin could destroy.

As any great artist ages, their work becomes more imbued with leaden significance, treated as if it could be their deathbed statement to the world. Time Out of Mind had been received that way, but the records after had mostly avoided it—they were too playful and vaudevillian to carry such metaphysical weight. Rough and Rowdy Ways was different. When Dylan and Larry Charles were writing Masked and Anonymous, Charles recalls, they built the story and characters using a box of hotel stationery Dylan had filled with disconnected names and poetic phrases. One gets the sense that that’s how Dylan’s post-Time Out of Mind records were mostly written, as collages from many different half-remembered sources, more focused on creating an atmosphere than making literal sense. You could swap many of the lines lifted from old bluesmen and poets around and it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Rough and Rowdy Ways was different, it spoke more directly to us. He sang of his own creative process on “I Contain Multitudes,” “My Own Version of You,” and “Mother of Muses,” of love on the tender “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” and of age and death on “Black Rider,” “Crossing the Rubicon,” and “Key West.” The backing band was delicate and nocturnal, just as it had been on the standards records. The lyrics were full of earthy humor and wisdom; it was like listening to Prospero, or late Yeats. And the record ended (by some accounts—“Murder Most Foul” is the last track on streaming services, but the CD version puts it on a separate disc) with “Key West,” a song somewhere between a brochure for the Florida tourist board and a Blakean vision of heaven, where the southernmost point of the nation is made into a gateway between this world and the next. It’s certainly possible that he’ll release more music, and the Never-Ending Tour certainly shows no signs of slowing down. But if the lulling accordion vamp that slowly fades and falls away at the end of “Key West” end up being the last notes he ever gives us on a record, it’ll be a ride off into the sunset as perfectly bittersweet and satisfying as you could imagine.

IV.

When he came to New York he famously sang to a dying Woody Guthrie in the hospital, which was both a sincere act of devotion from one artist to another and a canny PR move that helped position him as Guthrie’s heir. If there’s an heir to Dylan, I don’t see who it is. Great music and great art are still being made and will always be made, and one day someone of his stature will emerge. But this particular age of heroes is over. The world is too fractured for one person to change things the way he did, and there’s too much information out there to come from nowhere and create your own self. “To live outside the law, you must be honest,” he once sang, and it worked for him. Now we’re all bound by the law, constantly scrutinized and under surveillance, overly suspicious of anything that seems pure or true. Read the sections in Chronicles in which a fresh-faced Dylan arrives in New York with only a suitcase and a guitar, sleeping on couches and playing for spare change, spinning tall tales about his past to flannel-suited Columbia Records executives, and it feels unreal that all of this could have happened so recently, within living memory. It feels like reading about Johnny Appleseed, or Billy the Kid, or Luke Skywalker.

But beyond the cloud of rumors and ghosts and tall tales there is a corporeal man, a man I saw just a few weeks ago at an anonymous minor-league hockey rink and event venue in Palm Springs, where he and his band played languid, liquid roadhouse jazz versions of his songs—mostly from Rough and Rowdy Ways and Tempest with a few greatest hits and obscure covers thrown in. It was a greying crowd, as you might expect, and as has been the case with every Dylan show I’ve seen, some were rapturous and some hostile, wondering why he didn’t play recognizable versions of his hits, why he never took his hood off or addressed the audience, why he was so seemingly uninterested in giving us what we paid to see. But that has never been his game. Though he loves the gone world, the Old, Weird America, he has no affection for his own past and never bought into the founding myths of the generation he was made to speak for, the false promises of boomer counterculture, all of which fizzled out into the proverbial Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. He only goes forward, trying his best to exhaust the possibilities of his songs and finding many of them to be inexhaustible. A few days before I saw him, in a brief interview in the New York Times, he had described himself as “an old king from some vanished country.” While I was watching him I thought of that old king, of Tennyson’s Ulysses, readying the ship for his final voyage, “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” I know he will die on the road.

I don’t want to think about that day, the day we’ll have to start considering what the world of American music looks like without him. But—God!—sometimes I just want to go up to people, random people on the street, and make them understand how lucky we are to have overlapped with him, to have lived at the same time as someone who, I have no doubt, will be as beloved in 200 years as Whitman and Blake are today. People wonder where all the titanic figures are, why everything seems so small these days, and all the while a giant strides in their midst. He saw the last of the traditional people. We saw the man who gathered up everything the traditional people ever did and turned it into something singular and beautiful. How lucky we are that he had this second act, that he learned to work side-by-side with the muse who had possessed him in his early years. How lucky that we learned from him what it looks like to keep your art vigorous and alive and never complacent, even after the fire of youth has gone. How lucky we all are, in these dark and desperate times, to have seen the last of his kind, the last emissary from the old world, to have seen Bob Dylan, the last great American myth.

“His stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree…”

— Bob Dylan on John Prine

The highway is a good place to take stock of things. Drive the open road on your own with no destination in mind and before too long you’ll find yourself drifting through your memory palace, cataloguing regrets, lost loves, departed friends, and missed opportunities. Most people, long-haul truckers and wandering troubadours aside, don’t get the chance to reflect like that too often, given the petty distractions and responsibilities that fill up the working week. But writer Meaghan Garvey, poet laureate of this phenomenon, has distilled and bottled the experience for the rest of us in her looping, nonlinear, sort-of-travelogue sort-of-memoir debut, Midwestern Death Trip.

Back in October, I wrote a short profile of Garvey and her “vibes-based newsletter” for the Substack Post. I won’t repeat myself too much when discussing her work, but for newcomers, here’s the gist. Garvey’s work is a series of dispatches and trip reports, mostly from her native Midwest but occasionally from other environs. She travels to various dive bars, supper clubs, honky-tonks, roadside attractions, and other strange slices of America, meeting people, listening to their stories, and, one gets the sense, following some unnameable impulse within herself. She does all this in a fantastically evocative and singular voice, wry and understated, self-deprecating and charming.

Now, she’s back with a full-fledged book on County Highway’s Panamerica imprint. Most of the material in Midwestern Death Trip has its origins in SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE, but all of it has been expanded upon, remixed, reworked, and contextualized—I never miss an issue of the newsletter and I still feel as if I got my money’s worth, though I did regret the absence of Garvey’s accompanying photographs of carpeted bars, neon signs, and lonesome backwoods. The book is made up of a series of separate essays, but has a satisfying narrative arc, with themes and characters and motifs dancing in and out of its 237 pages. Garvey attends the Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, searches for the ghost of a drowned pilot in Lake Michigan, and meets Lynchian eccentrics in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She considers the region’s long tradition of cult leaders, torch singers, and outsider artists. And she considers her own life: the early death of her mother, whose own writing dreams were frustrated, her penchant for self-destructive romances, and her choice to live a peripatetic life on the road.

Not that the new material is all boring auto-therapeutic memoir or anything; the stories of her most debauched days, when they’re not harrowing, are generally extremely funny. (I laughed out loud at the YouTube search history of a hippie roommate: “‘niel young live rare,’ ‘morel hunting in illinois,’ ‘amazing skills,’ ‘grateful dead live rare,’ ‘bikini fashion show 2020.’” Shortly after, he asks Garvey: “Hey, you wanna rip some lines and visit my friend’s grave?”) But compared to the stories in her newsletter, the book feels a bit more honest, a bit more circumspect. Garvey seems newly willing to let a darkness into her work that was always around the edges, but sometimes obfuscated in her newsletter was by her insouciant persona. The section on searching for “Seaweed Charlie,” the aforementioned pilot ghost, takes on a jittery, paranoid edge when you learn that she was cracked out on “Malaysian fighter-pilot speed,” the whole time; the celebrations of roadside America don’t ignore the palpable sense of decay and despair that suffuses much of the heartland.

The road trips around which Midwestern Death Trip is structured take place roughly between 2020 and 2025, and disquieting and hyperreal events—the trippy early pandemic days, the failed Trump assassination, the successful Charlie Kirk one—hover in the background of the book, occasionally forcing their way into the foreground in the form of a Wisconsin barfly mumbling conspiracy theories or in a supper club slickster who claims to have been Jeffrey Epstein’s personal exterminator. You should have to put five dollars in the cliché jar when you compare a female journalist to Joan Didion, so forgive me, but the way Midwestern Death Trip documents of the early 2020s reminds me of nothing so much as The White Album and its chronicle of the wave of bad vibes that slowly crept across America between the Summer of Love and Watergate. The pitched, eerie, detached tone here is pure JD.

Something in the atmosphere had shifted earlier that summer, and suddenly it felt as if reality were melting. The qualities that once distinguished real life from a simulation now seemed vague and muddled and worse, irrelevant. Mundane daily tasks required the utmost vigilance. [...] Information floated on intense waves of feeling that were always at the mercy of the changing winds of fate, otherwise known as “vibe shifts.” Each day, my texts were inundated by odd, flirtatious robots wondering whether I would like to have a picnic on Saturday or whether I was free to come over for beef stew.

But unlike Didion’s clipped WASPisms, there is within Garvey a great and friendly Midwestern sensibility, a fundamental decency and love of life, in both its big wins and its bad beats. Not everything is going great in Garvey’s America, in fact things are mostly going very badly, but that doesn’t mean that adventure isn’t worth seeking out and—crucially—that people aren’t worth talking to. There’s very little cynicism in Midwestern Death Trip about the human race, no big-city disdain for the weirdos she talks to, no political rancor, even as she makes her own views clear. It’s really refreshing to read something that has so much faith in people, and that makes such an effort to pay attention to their stories.

This act of generosity is all the more affecting because, even though it’s glamorous and romantic and fun to read about in all sorts of ways, the life she has chosen is not an easy one. She has made a decision to embrace the moment, without much of an eye on the future, and trust in the universe to provide, to forge ahead like Wile E. Coyote building the bridge in front of him as he goes, aware at any time he might find himself falling into the abyss. “I choose to be a stranger,” she writes in Midwestern Death Trip:

It is a role I play well. My friends with whom I used to drink have gotten married and started families. My father has remarried into a new family of his own. And me, I go from bar to bar, trading stories with people I’ll never see again. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t plan for it to go this way.

She’s honest about the costs of that role, about her fraught relationship with her own barflydom, and about the possible futures she might be foreclosing on. So I feel profoundly grateful to her for playing it. Look around you and everything feels hyper-optimized, deeply anti-romantic. You find love via algorithm, you take pills to suppress your passions and appetites, you wake up every day to find new assurances that the unseemly business of self-expression will soon be entirely outsourced by machines. Sometimes it feels as if the world is in the hands of people who hate all the most ineffably human things: the second beer at the bar, the shared glance across the room, the act of artistic creation itself. So if an American literary tradition is going to flourish, we need writers like Garvey, who show through their example that you can still choose to dismiss all this and live a different way, even if that way comes with undeniable costs. Or, as she puts it, “Never take life advice from people who hate life.”

Let me end on a synchronicity that feels significant, even if it may be of interest only to myself. As I was reading Midwestern Death Trip, I was also in the preparation stages for an essay on Bob Dylan’s late career, the spectral, gothic vision of America he’s been conjuring up ever since 1997’s Time Out of Mind. Midwestern Death Trip and latter-period Dylan felt like ideal companions, both of them portraits of the country’s backroads and folk traditions that mixed strangeness and darkness with a certain resilient humor and curiosity. I wrote down as much in my notes, but figured I just thought as much because I’m always thinking about Dylan in some sense or another. But no! In the final essay, ten or so pages from the end, THERE HE WAS! Garvey travels up to his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota and writes evocatively on not just Dylan but Late Dylan, claiming a preference, which I largely share, for his recent work over the classic 60s material, for the grizzled storyteller at the end of the bar over the young troubadour. On seeing him in Milwaukee with an ex-husband, she recounts:

Dressed in sequined black and hovering over the baby grand, an 82-year-old Dylan spent the next two hours obfuscating his own myth, reworking his most beloved songs to be unrecognizable or ignoring them entirely to play long, rambling new ones that shouted-out the Bible, Buddy Holly, Jimmy Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Elvis Presley, and Martin Luther King Jr. [...] He melted time into a roiling living history with no beginning or end, in which the forces of the sublime and the reckless perpetually clashed against death and decay. “I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life,” he yowled to the crowd of wine-drunk boomers. “Can’t remember when I was born and I forgot when I died.”

Afterwards, she describes a coffee-cup-flinging screaming match with said ex-husband in a very “Tangled Up in Blue” way, and writes of the lonely, desolate landscapes of Minnesota’s Iron Range, the wind-blasted steel towns Dylan was raised among. Somehow, the juxtaposition of the cultural and personal in this chapter captures a feeling—of how art fits into life, how it decorates it, raises the petty and mundane up into the spheres—that dozens of books by scrupulous and neurotic boomer Dylanologists miss.

Should I have expected that a chronicler of the Midwest would write about the greatest musician to emerge from the region? Probably. Did I nevertheless feel an electric shock when I came across the Dylan section, like it was a sign from the universe that I was on the right track, a sign that Garvey, Dylan, and myself, relative disparities in talent aside, shared an essential outlook: a set of beliefs, a sensibility, a yearning? Yeah, honestly, I did. So it feels right to say that this particular synchronicity cemented my belief that Midwestern Death Trip is a special book, that it earns a place near On the Road and Slow Days, Fast Company, near Two-Lane Blacktop and Paris, Texas, near Diamond Jubilee and Rough and Rowdy Ways. It’s one of those works of art that captures a certain spirit, one that can be found in the ruins and the decay, in the weed-choked neighborhoods, in the old bars, in the forgotten corners, in the freezing Minnesota winters, in the kindhearted strangers, and in the sparks of personality and strangeness and adventure that still remain, here in our crumbling republic.

Mention editors or editing on Substack and a torrent of ahistorical blather will come at you from two camps. The first camp, generally those who came up in the traditional magazine and publishing world, will issue breathless testimonials on how they’d be nothing without their editor, how editors are God’s own unsung heroes who live faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs, and how it is through their stern-but-fair red pen that a common pumpkin of an essay is transfigured into a bejeweled coach-and-four. This ignores the fact that while writers have no doubt relied on feedback and collaboration since the days of cuneiform, heavy-handed editorial intervention of the kind practiced by modern magazines is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Montaigne, Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, even a writer as relatively recent as Orwell are none the worse for not having had a William Shawn looming over their shoulder. (“Yet to come across a Substack that didn’t need an editor or didn’t need to be shorter,” sniffs an anonymous source in The Cut’s Book Gossip newsletter. Would you have said as much to Thomas Paine??)

The second camp claims that this exaltation of the editor is a mere status play from the snobs and grade-grubbers still clinging to the rapidly-sinking ship of mainstream media, and that the dynamism and clamor of the individual pamphleteers on Substack is a more valuable product than the inoffensive dithering and to-be-sures found in overly-edited prestige products like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. But of course, most people are not Montaigne or Hazlitt, much writing could be improved through a process of collaboration and revision with an intelligent and sympathetic interlocutor, and the median essay in The New Yorker of The Atlantic is almost certainly better than the median essay on Substack (And anyway, much of this purported dynamism and energy on Substack seems to consist of essays complaining about how the writer has been unfairly rejected by institutions like The New Yorker and The Atlantic.)

Suffice it to say, there is a lot of noise on the subject. So, when Kyle Berlin asked me for a reflection on the process of developing my essay “Little Modernist Magazines” for his magazine Souvenir, I realized I was in a fairly unique position. I had written very little public-facing work before I began writing essays on Substack. When Kyle first contacted me about writing an essay for him on the Anglophone literary magazines of 1920s Paris, I had been edited before—a cut here, a rewritten paragraph there—but never in the intensive, collaborative, rigorous manner that is (or was) the standard at The New Yorker, Esquire, and all my other beloved American midcentury institutions. In fact, I had stuck mostly to book reviews and had little experience with essays in which many sources are synthesized into a coherent narrative. So what follows are some notes on the editorial journey undertaken by myself, Kyle, and fellow editor William Lambert. Did I discover a hitherto-unknown imaginative or prosaic power within myself? Did Kyle and William manage to transform an unlicked cub, an unlettered ruffian, a mere pamphleteer into a smooth and professional Writer?

Over the several months that it took to shape my essay from first draft to final draft, my two interlocutors did all that I expected of them: they had me lay more groundwork for the common reader, add some historical context about the world of French letters prior to the influx of American and British expatriates (which necessitated a great deal of research for about four sentences of background detail), suggested phrases to tighten, details to clarify, and bad jokes to cut. But looking back on the process, the single most valuable service they provided was — though they couched it in kinder terms — exposing me when I was being false, not expressing my true feelings or thinking hard but just joining the dots and saying the expected thing, which is the phenomenon that leads to so much contemporary prose feeling rote and performative. Here, for instance, is the conclusion of the section on the publisher and impresario Robert McAlmon from my first draft:

And indeed, as he lay dying of pneumonia in Palm Springs, aged only 60, he may have cursed fate for making him an attendant lord rather than a main character of modernism. In certain ways his story is a tragedy; he could run in these artistic circles as long as he was willing to pick up bar tabs and printer’s fees, but, ever the acid-tongued outsider, he was unable to form many stable friendships. William Bird remembered him as “the third corner in every triangle…preyed upon by the vultures of the writing world.” But figures like him, though they may not have produced a great masterpiece, were essential to the working of the whole operation; and for those efforts, as well as for Being Geniuses Together, one of the essential memoirs of the period, he deserves to be remembered as more than a hanger-on or a never-was.

Lazy stuff! Here is the final version, in which the bland appeal to some anonymous canon-maker (“deserves to be remembered”: by who, exactly?) is replaced by a more finely detailed character sketch, and in which I let the figures I was writing about have the last word instead of my own big mouth:

And indeed, as he lay dying of pneumonia in Palm Springs, aged only 60, he may have cursed fate for denying him the acclaim that so many of his friends enjoyed. In certain ways his story is a tragedy; he could run in these artistic circles as long as he was willing to pick up bar tabs and printer’s fees, but, ever the acid-tongued outsider, he was unable to form many stable friendships. William Bird remembered him as “the third corner in every triangle . . . preyed on by the vultures of the writing world.” Like the cowboys upon which he modeled his persona, he was a drifter, always moving, always after something he couldn’t quite reach. He claimed to want the literary success and status that his peers enjoyed, but one doubts that it would have made him happy. Those who did manage to form solid friendships with him remembered him fondly, and it is undoubtedly true that he was a key resource for the writers of the period. Perhaps there is something in the peripatetic nature of figures like him that inspires others, something in their eternal dissatisfaction that makes them a good friend to writers who might benefit from the eyes of a skeptical but supportive outsider. “It was a tremendous experience knowing him,” eulogized Glassco in a letter. “He was always so alive and refreshing. And I was very fond of him — even when he became intolerably insulting: somehow, one excused him everything . . . ”

Another major site of revision was the essay’s ending. Endings are particularly difficult for a literary-historical essay, because the topic is generally interesting on its own, and the attempt to spell out a larger contemporary lesson to be taken from it can feel forced. Because I often write about the past, I often find myself wanting to end an essay on a note of optimism about the future, lest I become a tiresome declinist whining that things weren’t as great as they were in 1920 or 1960. And because I am a fairly talented scribbler and man of letters but not a great genius aflame with visionary power, I’m sometimes tempted to argue that the former is just as important as the latter. Yet those choices are not always the right ones. Here is the ending of the first draft of “Little Modernist Magazines.”

Though it is writers and artists who produce the work, it is these humble enterprises, the magazines and small presses, who were and continue to be the keepers of the flame. They are put together under financial pressure and with no expectations of success, out of simple passion and reckless belief. There are casualties: friendships end, jobs are lost, bank accounts are drained. But very occasionally, things break right, and when that happens, as happened in Paris between 1920 and 1930, suddenly the stars fall into alignment, talent finds talent, effort and daring begets effort and daring, and that flame catches, and turns into a great, glorious blaze.

Here is the still stirring, but more circumspect and honest ending of the final version:

When they didn’t produce lasting work of their own, as Pound and Ford did, we tend to lack a category for these scene figures: the impresarios, the organizers, and the editors who took inchoate masses of energy and promise and molded them into storied figures of literary history. One’s impulse in essays such as this one is always to raise them up, to protest that they and their projects — their magazines, their small presses — are just as important as the artists they promoted. This is a comforting thought for those of us not cut out to be a Joyce or a Hemingway. It is also not entirely true: artistic history is unavoidably the history of individual accomplishment, even if those individuals require specific conditions to flourish. One could write an interesting history of baseball through its scouts and managers or of jazz through its club promoters and record executives, but at the end of the day, Babe Ruth had to hit the home runs and Miles Davis had to play his horn. Yet we should, from time to time, spare a thought for the minor characters and background toilers of literary history. They worked out of simple passion and reckless belief, to impress one another and to promote work they believed in. They had no real expectations of success, and more often than not their humble enterprises ended in drained bank accounts, shattered friendships, and artistic disappointment. Yet thanks in no small part to their efforts, for five or seven or 10 years a few shabby neighborhoods on the Left Bank functioned as zones of infinite possibility, and from these zones emerged work that changed forever the way our language is spoken, written, and thought. Were the stars to align in the right way, it is not so impossible that such a thing could happen again.

It was Kyle and William who pushed me to interrogate my true feelings about how literary movements are made, and to admit my limits and doubts rather than tossing off an optimist platitude. Recently, I published an essay on Yeats and the Easter Rising, for which my only editor was myself. I’m proud of that piece and all the research and analysis within, but I agonized over a proper ending for a day or two before giving up and going with my original, which is a rather undergraduate-y point about how the men and women immortalized in Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” are dead but their memory lives on and blah, blah, blah. Not horrible, but not the fresh and unexpected yet perfectly logical ending that separates great essayists from competent ones, the resonant chime that echoes in the head long after reading. If I had been working with Kyle and William, I don’t doubt that one of them could have said something that would have removed the log jam in my mind and taken the ending of that essay to a new and more interesting place.

If I had to put a vulgar number on it, I would say “Little Modernist Magazines” is about 15% better than it would have been without editorial guidance. That is no small thing; as anyone who plays a sport or practices a craft can tell you, the last 20 percent of anything is exponentially more difficult than the first 80, and at the very highest levels, small distinctions—this or that choice of word, this or that detail—begin to make much more of a difference. And that’s where I want to be: at the highest level. Whether as a solo act or part of a magazine, I want to be working at the absolute limits of whatever God-given talent I have, and it is through intelligent and sympathetic editors like Kyle and William that I can learn where those limits lie.

Yet being a common scribbler isn’t the worst thing in the world, either. Those of you who have followed my writing for a while know of my affection for the 20th-century magazine world that produced so much brilliant criticism and reportage, and how often I’ve written of my impossible dream that that world would return. But recently, I’ve also had a growing interest in the 18th and 19th-century men of letters I mentioned in the beginning; the pamphleteers and polemicists and Grub Street hacks and Oxford sages who, though they may have written for magazines, had a very different relationship with them than Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe did. It feels to me as if we are moving into a media ecosystem that resembles the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century more than it resembles the mid-twentieth, and I find that a not entirely dispiriting prospect. The bustle and excitement of a thousand ranting voices does have its charms, even as we may long for the erudition and subtlety of the old black-gowned priests at Partisan Review and The New Yorker.

So I strive to make my way in both worlds, if such things are possible. It is very fulfilling to write for oneself and one’s own audience, untethered to anyone else’s demands or the need to have a contemporary angle, free to indulge in longueurs, digressions, and bad jokes. But I also hope magazines with a robust editorial process and a clearly defined aesthetic vision continue to exist for as long as people still read, and I commend Kyle and Souvenir, as well as my other compatriots at The Metropolitan Review and Magazine Non Grata and The Republic of Letters and all the rest for their efforts to join with like-minded people and create something that no individual writer could achieve.

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

So begins William Butler Yeats’s “Easter, 1916,” the most complex, ambivalent, and enthralling political poem of the twentieth century. But Yeats was not among the rebels and republicans in Dublin when he wrote it; he had not in fact “met them at close of day” for some time. When he heard the news of the Easter Rising, he was at a friend’s cabin in the Cotswolds, and he soon returned to his home at 5 Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, where he had been living since 1895. He made periodic trips to the capital to manage the affairs of the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded, but if he found any inspiration in Ireland he found it in the woods and streams of Coole in the far west, where he spent his summers, and not in the cramped, petty world of Dublin literature and politics. He was fifty years old and largely disillusioned with his youthful nationalism. “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave,” he had spat in a poem written three years earlier.

Now news, gossip, and rumor trickled into London and a dreadful picture slowly became clear: the city center of Dublin taken and barricaded, a republic declared, thousands of British troops massing on the outskirts, Britain declaring martial law in turn, heavy fighting in the streets, gunboats on the Liffey, artillery pounding St Stephen’s Green, hundreds dead, and then—failure, surrender, custody, court-martial, and execution. Men Yeats had known personally, men he had sparred with in the papers and toasted with in the pubs, were marched one by one into a dismal, high-walled stone courtyard and shot dead. One of them, James Connolly, had been injured in the leg during the fighting and couldn’t stand. He was shot sitting down.

“I am very despondent about the future,” Yeats wrote to his friend and patron Lady Gregory, a few days after the events. “At this moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature & criticism from politics.” He locked himself in Woburn Walk, claiming he was too sick even to attend the funeral of his friend Mabel Beardsley (sister of Aubrey). He had already begun to write “a poem on the men executed” and had come up with something close to its central refrain, as he put it in a letter of May 11: “terrible beauty has been born.”

Yet “Easter, 1916” was not finished until September 25, almost exactly four months after the uprising began. Reading it, one can see why Yeats struggled to wrestle it into shape. It is no straightforward elegy for the valiant martyrs, but is rather shot through with a deep sense of uncertainty, the product of months of tormented reflection. Richard Ellmann’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks, one of the first major biographical studies of Yeats, highlights how throughout his life Yeats created various personae which he set in dialogue across his body of work; here a dreamy and reflective loner, there a fiery orator and public figure, all of them together making up a man in his full complexity. In parts of “Easter, 1916” one can almost hear the barroom argument among these various masks, one thrilled by heroic bloodshed, one appalled at the loss of life, one somewhere in between.

After the regret and self-criticism of the opening lines, Yeats begins to describe the men and women he knew, who in all their flaws have been transfigured by their sacrifice into symbols. The second stanza begins:

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?

This rather callous description is our first signal that “Easter, 1916” will not be your standard catalogue of fallen heroes. “That woman” is Constance Markievicz, née Constance Gore-Booth, who Yeats had known since childhood. Both were members of the Anglo-Protestant Ascendancy, but while the Yeats family was merely well-off, the Gore-Booths—Constance and her sister Eva—were full-on aristocrats, and like a surprising number of aristocratic young ladies, they adopted radical views. Eva devoted herself to the suffragist cause, moved to Manchester, and lived as a more-or-less out lesbian, while Constance stayed in Ireland and became involved in nationalist politics (her surname came from a Polish count, who she had married while studying art in Paris). Yeats’s feelings towards both strong women and his own class position were complicated to say the least, and there seems to have been some remnant of Ascendancy snobbery in his resentment of the “shrill” Markievicz for abandoning her youthful beauty and aristocratic life. (To “ride to harriers” is to hunt with hounds.) This side of him reemerged in his 1927 elegy for her and her sister, in which he condemned her for having spent “lonely years / Conspiring among the ignorant.”

To Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the uprising, Yeats gives only two lines of commemoration:

This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;

He reserves more praise for Thomas MacDonagh, a writer and teacher who worked closely with Pearse.

This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.

Yet reading about Pearse, one cannot help but think that it was his sacrifice which troubled Yeats the most, for Yeats, had things gone differently, might have been him. Pearse was another writer and poet, another aloof, dreamy man who became enthralled with Irish language and mythology. One might think this would have made him a natural ally for the youthful Yeats, whose early poems and plays conjured a languorous “Celtic Twilight” world of faeries, spirits, and legendary heroes. But to Pearse, Yeats’s decision that the Irish Literary Revival would be conducted in English (for he had no Irish) represented a betrayal.

If we once admit the Irish literature is English idea, then the language movement is a mistake. [...] Against Mr Yeats personally we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre it is time for him to be crushed.

This was in 1899; in later years the two mended their quarrel and several times worked together at the Abbey. While Yeats the cosmopolitan made his way to London, Pearse went to Rathfarnham, on the outskirts of Dublin, and founded St. Enda’s, a progressive, bilingual school that would be an alternative to the rigid National School system, which he regarded as an English institution. Former teachers and students at St. Enda’s remember the sense of camaraderie and pride that the Irish-centered curriculum gave to the students, and the free and democratic atmosphere engendered by the lack of British institutions like corporal punishment and the prefect system. But a trace of the impulse that would drive Pearse to his martyrdom was already evident. Above the doors of St. Enda’s were written the words of the mythical warrior Cúchulainn: “I care not though I were to live but one day and one night, provided my fame and my deeds live after me.”

Though solitary and introspective, Pearse was a skilled public speaker, and in August 1915 he was called upon by the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood to speak at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, one of the last men standing from the IRB’s first generation, who had died in exile in New York after a long stay in a British prison. Dressed in a green military uniform, working without notes, he stood by the coffin of the old Fenian and gave the following oration, the final words of which became a revolutionary slogan:

This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O’Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression – and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them. [...] The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but—the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead; and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

This was eight months before the Rising. Pearse was deeply in debt and worried he might have to close the school; these pressures had made him more militant, even messianic. He became obsessed with the example of Robert Emmet, a charismatic orator who led an ill-fated revolt against the British in 1803, and who had hidden in Rathfarnham for a time before his capture and execution. “It was the spirit of Emmet who led me to these hillsides,” he wrote, and he later claimed, in a tone that made it eerily unclear whether he was speaking metaphorically or literally, to have seen Emmet walking the grounds of St. Enda’s.

Yeats, in a letter just after the Rising, described Pearse as “a man made dangerous by the Vertigo of Self Sacrifice. He has moulded himself on Emmet.” Ezra Pound, describing Yeats’s views to another correspondent, claimed Yeats “said for years that Pearse was half-cracked and that he wouldn’t be happy until he was hanged. He seemed to think Pearse had Emmet mania, same as some other lunatics think they are Napoleon or God.” Yeats and Pearse had both identified with Cúchulainn and other old Irish heroes, and used their mythic resonance as material for their poetry, but Yeats’s study of the occult led him to read widely in a variety of traditions and disciplines, and move beyond his infatuation with Ireland’s past. In Pearse, Yeats perhaps saw a warning of who he might have become if he had allowed that infatuation to harden into a suicidal romanticism.

The most striking lines in the second stanza of “Easter, 1916” are those about Major John MacBride:

This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

This is one of the most thrillingly human moments of the poem; who among us has not grudgingly admitted to having misjudged an enemy, and, in order to salvage our own pride, slipped in a few final insults with our admission of error? Yet to anyone who knew the poet and his circle, even a qualified admission of MacBride’s heroism would still have been shocking, for Yeats held a true hatred for him. Unlike the other martyrs of the uprising, MacBride was not a writer or an intellectual or an aesthete but a handsome and vigorous soldier. Known as “Foxy Jack” for his red hair and beard, he had led an Irish volunteer brigade against the British in the Boer war, returned to Dublin a hero, and become a spokesman for the republican cause, exemplifying the kind of boorish, chest-thumping nationalism Joyce later satirized in Ulysses with the figure of the Citizen (and like the Citizen and many other republicans, he was anti-semitic; when he stood for Parliament in Mayo his candidacy was characterized as “The Gold of the Jews against the Irish Brigade.”)

More importantly, MacBride had married Maud Gonne, “the Irish Joan of Arc,” a great beauty and fiery patriot and Yeats’s lifelong muse. Yeats had been in love with Gonne from nearly the moment they met, had dedicated many poems to her, and had cast her in his plays at the Abbey Theatre. Several times he had asked her to marry him and several times she had rejected him, claiming on separate occasions that marriage was incompatible with her feminist principles, that she had an aversion to sex, and that she was married to the cause of Irish freedom. On the night of February 21, 1903, Yeats was preparing to give a lecture when he was handed a letter from Gonne, informing him that she had just married MacBride in Paris. Thunderstruck, he proceeded to give the lecture, but later recalled that he could not remember a single thing he had said.

“I am getting old [she was 36] and oh so tired and I have found a man who has a stronger will than myself and who at the same time is thoroughly honourable and who I trust,” Gonne wrote in a letter to her sister, “As for Willie Yeats I love him dearly as a friend but I could not for one minute imagine marrying him.” Gonne, like many involved with the republican movement, moved between the world of intellectual and cultural nationalism exemplified by the Abbey and the grim, hard world of revolutionary violence. To Yeats, it must have seemed as if she had definitively chosen the latter over the former, chosen the man of action over the poet and dreamer, and one can imagine the strange mixture of vindication and anguish he must have felt when the marriage came to grief.

It is easy to see how Gonne and MacBride’s shared political commitments, as well as the close quarters occasioned by their two speaking tours of the United States, could have kindled a passion between the two. It is equally easy to see how the marriage was destined for ruin. The domineering Catholic MacBride was by all accounts a drunk and possibly a philanderer, who resented Gonne’s emancipated ways, her insistence on maintaining a correspondence with her former lovers, her ability to travel freely to Ireland, from which he was exiled, and her friendship with Yeats, who he cruelly (but it must be said accurately) referred to as “weeping Willie” and once threatened to shoot. They were living apart by late 1904, with Gonne soon granted a separation by the French court, though not the divorce she had wanted.

Yeats, for his part, loathed MacBride not only for these reasons but because Gonne had told him MacBride had seduced her seventeen-year-old half sister, Eileen Wilson, and molested her eleven-year-old daughter Iseult. The veracity of these accusations has long been contested, with Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster treating them as fact and others pointing out that the French divorce court dismissed them as baseless, conceding only that MacBride had been a drunk. In any case, Yeats believed them to be true, and thus it was a considerable achievement for him to swallow his pride and number MacBride among those who have been “transformed utterly.”

But MacBride, though he was one of the executed men, was not directly involved in the planning of the Easter Rising. It was Pearse and his allies—among them Tom Clarke of the IRB, the Marxist James Connolly, who led the militantly left-wing Irish Citizen Army, and Pearse’s friend and fellow St. Enda’s teacher Thomas MacDonagh—who were planning the action in secret council, against the wishes of many of their fellows. The outbreak of the Great War had dampened enthusiasm for their cause; many young Irishmen had joined the British army and popular sentiment had deemed Germany a more immediate threat than Britain, which in any case had promised to grant Home Rule at the conclusion of the war (the source of Yeats’s lines “For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said.”) A spectacular public action was needed to re-energize the movement while the British mainland was still reeling from the slaughters at Ypres and Gallipoli. O’Donovan Rossa’s lavish public funeral would be the spark; it would remind the men and women of Ireland of all that those who came before them had sacrificed. An armed uprising would compel those men and women to action—whether it ended in the operation’s success, or in the rebels’ martyrdom.

It was to be the latter, which all involved likely knew well before the first communication lines were cut and the first public building was seized. A plan to smuggle German guns and ammunition into Ireland via ship had failed; the ship was intercepted and the aristocratic rebel Sir Roger Casement, who had negotiated the shipment with German officials, was captured the next day. Without their guns and with the British now on high alert, the more moderate republican leaders frantically attempted to cancel the planned uprising, knowing it to be suicidal. Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, and Clarke were resolute: “We start operations at noon today, Monday,” the message to their men read. “Carry out your instructions.”

So it was that about 1,200 men and several dozen women embarked on their quixotic rebellion. They occupied several buildings in the center of Dublin, raising above each a green banner that read “Irish Republic.” Pearse emerged from the captured General Post Office to read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to a crowd of shoppers and civil servants, who were largely confused and indifferent. Constance Markievicz, in green uniform and ostrich-feather hat and waving a revolver, set herself up on St. Stephen’s Green. MacDonagh and his men occupied a biscuit factory. The historian Peter Hart called the uprising “a unique example of insurrectionary abstract art.”

The surprise, the proclamation, the tricolour, the seized buildings and barricades were all there, but the targets seem almost purely symbolic or even arbitrary: instead of the arsenal, city hall or barracks, they occupied a post office, a bakery, a public park. There was probably some military rationale involved – it’s hard to tell since no record of the plan has survived – but there was certainly no intention of seizing power.

As for MacBride, he claimed that he had joined the uprising essentially by accident. The end of his marriage to Maud Gonne and the vicious accusations she had leveled at him had damaged his reputation, and British authorities, having determined that he posed no threat, had made no attempt to prevent him from returning to Ireland, where he was involved in republican causes only peripherally. That day he had gone into town to meet his brother for lunch and walked straight into the middle of occupied St. Stephen’s Green. Feeling it his duty to fight with the rebels, he joined MacDonagh at the biscuit factory, still in his civilian clothes.

After five days of fighting, Pearse and his men surrendered “to prevent further bloodshed.” The British had pounded the center of Dublin with shells, and hundreds of civilians as well as soldiers were dead. In the aftermath, troops descended on the city, arresting anyone associated with the republican movement and holding hundreds of secret trials. Markievicz, being a woman, was given life in prison (“I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me with my friends,” she told her captors, with typical Ascendancy imperiousness.) Pearse, MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, Clarke, and others identified as leaders were court-martialed and shot.

The third stanza of “Easter, 1916” does not narrate the story of the Rising, recount heroic deeds, or curse the British oppressors. Instead, it leaves the rebels behind after four lines, shifting to a gorgeous pastoral mode.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Here again Yeats’s ambivalence is on display. The stone of which he speaks is alternately the admirable persistence of the Irish struggle from generation to generation, and a meaningless obsession that hinders the free progress of the natural world, which lives “minute by minute,” free from the tyranny of ideas. Yeats had retreated to Lady Gregory’s estate at Coole to finish the poem, and while he was there he would have walked among the rivers, clouds, and woods, in a world of flux and animal vitality far from the political tumult in Dublin. He had written earlier of his frustration with the way the nationalist cause crept into everything; Ireland, he said, was “like a man diseased who can only think of his disease.” Thus the pastoral imagery of the stanza constitutes a subtle argument in itself. These causes that so many men and women were willing to kill and die for— what did they matter to the moor-hens and moor-cocks?

By the next stanza, the stone has assumed a darker meaning.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;

Yeats recognizes that his role as a poet is to “murmur name upon name,” to memorialize the dead. But doubts continue to creep in. Just as living for the cause made Markievicz “shrill,” so too can it dull one’s sensitivity to life, make “a stone of the heart.” “Was it needless death after all?” This question becomes more urgent when one learns of the Rising’s many civilian casualties, including 40 children. It was the British who chose to shell the heavily populated center of Dublin, but the rebels nevertheless must have known that it was not solely their own lives they were choosing to sacrifice for their cause.

When Maud Gonne read “Easter, 1916,” soon after it was written, she was incensed.

My dear Willie,

No I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of the subject [...] There are beautiful lines in your poem, as there are in all you write but it is not a great WHOLE, a living thing which our race would treasure & repeat, such as a poet like you might have given to your nation & which would have avenged our material failure by its spiritual beauty.

You will be angry perhaps that I write so frankly what I feel, but I am always frank with my friends & though our ideals are wide apart we are still friends.

It is understandable that Gonne thought a poem that wondered whether their deaths were “needless” was a poor tribute to the martyrs and she certainly would have no illusions about England keeping faith. But, if we may venture to say so to one who lost so much in the struggle, history has proved Gonne wrong. It is precisely the poem’s inclusion of all that periods of revolutionary violence contain—sacrifice and heroism and foolhardy, needless death alike—that has caused it to endure. It does not avenge material failure by spiritual beauty—what could?—but it is, contrary to Gonne’s prediction, treasured and repeated to this day.

After finishing the poem at Lady Gregory’s estate, Yeats put “Easter, 1916” into a preliminary contents page for his next collection, The Wild Swans at Coole, but then withdrew it; the wound was still too fresh. It was circulated privately among friends, and did not see publication until the New Statesman printed it in 1920, by which time the unrest in Ireland had metastasized into a full-blown guerrilla war, the culmination of the country’s long struggle for independence. Yeats’s final claim had proved accurate:

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

For most of human history, poetry was, in Ezra Pound’s words, “the tale of the tribe,” a common stock of stories which served to reaffirm group identity and culture, memorized and recited and passed down by a specialized class of bard. For a comparatively small part of the lifetime of our species, it has been the expression of a singular consciousness and its movement from one state of mind to another. In “Easter, 1916” Yeats managed to unify these two strains of the poetic tradition: its premodern function as collective memory and its modern function as an expression of the tumult and dialectical clash of individual thought. It is a heroic epic turned into an individual lyric, held together by language of supreme simplicity and beauty. In an introduction to “Easter, 1916” in The Atlantic, the poet David Barber wrote the following:

An insular political tragedy in another time, a poet bent on atoning for his past silences, a eulogy rife with regional and generational allusions—why should "Easter 1916" have any vital claim on us, now so far removed from its griefs and its grievances? The most persuasive answer, I'd contend, is auditory. [...] [T]he general reader can immediately appreciate the architecture of its orchestration with little or no grounding in Yeatsian arcana or the “Irish question.” Its command lies not in its attitudes so much as in its acoustics: the quietly throbbing insistence of the poem’s three-beat measure, the unobtrusively interlacing pattern of a-b-a-b rhymes, the tug and surge of colloquial syntax winding with sinuous fluency over the sharply enjambed lines, the ringing and increasingly disquieting refrain that tolls like a summons, as if from a desolate parish steeple or some moss-shrouded stone tower.

This is quite true, and beautifully expressed. And yet the vivid imagery and the slow, inevitable rhythm of the poem compel one not just to enjoy the acoustics but to place oneself in Yeats’s time, and to learn more about the struggle that so occupied his mind. For my part, I have no Irish ancestry and no connection to the 110-year-old events of which he spoke, but because of my encounter with “Easter, 1916,” (as well as those of the many biographers and historians I consulted to better understand the poem) I now know much more about the events he commemorated, and have a living picture in my head of these historical personages: dreamy Pearse, loutish MacBride, sensitive MacDonagh, fierce Maud Gonne and fiery Constance Markievicz and all the rest. Anyone who studies Yeats’s poetry will soon run up against his dizzyingly complex occult system, full of gyres and Great Wheels and the cycles of the moon, which I do not pretend to understand. But it seems to me that all of his magical obsessions, whatever spells he thought he was working, are mere sleight-of-hand compared to his achievement in “Easter, 1916,” a work which, because of its doubt and ambiguity and essential humanity, has ensured that “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse” will live on in our collective memory, now and in time to be.

I.

So it all began when I reread George Orwell’s 1940 essay “Inside the Whale” for the first time in years and it sent me into a not entirely mild state of crisis. Discussions about literature came to seem pointless; phrases like “conglomeration” and “MFA program” and “The New Yorker” tasted bitter on the tongue. Scrolling my Substack timeline produced an acute feeling of surfeit and nausea. My internal monologue began sounding like Ecclesiastes. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.

I felt that way because it turns out that every tiresome argument on the timeline was anticipated in “Inside the Whale,” 86 years ago. One often hears, in assessments of the state of contemporary literature, that writers go straight from top high school to elite college to MFA program, and are spat out with only their institutional experience to write about, whereas writers back in the day used to go to sea, go to war, play piano in a Parisian brothel, and otherwise accumulate the life experience necessary to produce a wide and varied and thriving art form, and not just a series of navel-gazing novels about writers attending fellowships and having affairs in Brooklyn. Here, then, is Orwell:

‘Cultured’ middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a public-school education — five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery — can actually be looked back upon as an eventful period. To nearly all the writers who have counted during the thirties, what more has ever happened than Mr Connolly records in Enemies of Promise? It is the same pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour — hardly even words.

One often hears that publishing has been ideologically captured by a cabal of woke zealots, who spurn art that is genuinely uncomfortable or interrogative in favor of didactic moralism performed by people with the right identity characteristics, who have brought a thriving art form to its knees with their well-intentioned meddling and prim, censorious attitudes. Here, then, with slight variations, is Orwell:

No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be touched by the zeitgeist was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a sort of voluntary censorship (‘Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?’) was at work in nearly everyone’s mind. It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. ‘Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

And one constantly hears—oh God, how one hears!—of the tension between art and politics, of whether it is the artist’s job to critique society or simply describe it, of whether all art is political or none is. “Inside the Whale,” which begins as a review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and expands outward to take in the entire literary history of the past two decades, takes up that question and answers it very ably. Tropic of Cancer, says Orwell, which narrates the Miller-protagonist’s life among the deadbeats and down-and-outs of Paris in scabrous and sexually explicit prose, has a “mental atmosphere” that seems to “belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.” The poets and novelists that emerged in the 1920s, he says, had a range of often-incompatible political views but shared a sense of pessimism and disenchantment, which you can see equally in Eliot’s mournful “twilight-of-the-gods feeling,” Pound’s snarling Fascism, Hemingway’s wounded drifters, and Joyce’s chastened liberalism, that of “a Catholic who has lost his faith.”

This made for an age where, while writers may have subscribed to a wide range of ideologies, politics and aesthetics were not inextricably linked. Indeed, for many of these writers, their politics seem to have been a largely aesthetic stance. Lawrence’s longing for the sex-and-death world of the Aztecs and Yeats’s Celtic esotericism are not exactly workable political programs. In larger cultural circles, ars gratia artis held sway, “Literature was supposed to consist solely in the manipulation of words,” says Orwell, “To judge a book by its subject matter was the unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked on as a lapse of a taste.”

As Stalin and Hitler ascended and the world seemed to be hurtling towards a final apocalyptic conflagration, orthodoxies began to harden. Writers who had shared bylines in the same little magazines were now forced to choose a side; they found themselves drafted into—does this sound familiar?—reactionary Catholicism on one side, and earnest Marxism on the other, the latter exemplified by the poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNiece, and Cecil Day-Lewis. This commitment to bringing about world revolution or universal salvation produced a smug certainty, a blithe attitude towards the lives of others. Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and barely escaped being murdered by Stalin’s agents, reprimands Auden for a line in his poem “Spain” about “necessary murder.” What could this bright-eyed Oxford boy, safe in his perch in the London literary world, know about the meaning of murder?

But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men – I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means – the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’ or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

Finally, having surveyed much of the landscape of English letters between 1918 and 1940, Orwell returns to Miller. Miller’s perspective is valuable, he says, precisely because it lacks this millenarian certainty. He is “inside the whale,” he “has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.” His perspective is a true account of how many people feel: buffeted about by great upheavals, foam on the tides of history. Nearly all the worthwhile literature from the Great War, he notes, was written not by “cocksure partisans telling you what to think,” but by “common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about.” It is all well and good to strive to make a political point in your writing, as Orwell had done in Homage to Catalonia and would go on to do in Animal Farm and 1984 and many more essays. But simply capturing the feeling of the times can be equally valuable, and in many cases more likely to endure. If Orwell had been a soldier in the trenches of the Great War, he writes, he wouldn’t have wanted to read some jingoistic pamphlet or cry against the pointlessness of war. He would have wanted to read Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” because it was, in the midst of the “bombs and the food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice.” And that’s what it’s all about… right?

II.

A few days after I reread “Inside the Whale,” the writer Grace Byron published an attack on two of her contemporaries. “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-girl” sets its sights on Madeline Cash’s novel Lost Lambs, and Anika Jade Levy’s novel Flat Earth, accusing these writers, who operate in an internet-addled post-Didion post-Ellis post-everything key, of making literature safe for the MAGA crowd.

These women pretend to satirize the conservative world they inhabit when in reality their belief system is a dog whistle for conservative far-right values. They use internet aesthetics (emojis, Epstein satire, Dimes Square Catholicism) as linguistic currency to obscure the emptiness of their beliefs. In interviews they say they’re writing about flat, archetypical women as a way to skewer male perceptions. But merely depicting misogyny, sex work, conservatism, the shallowness of internet culture, and eating disorders is not inherently radical or progressive. Their novels are about “flat” women who only want men and sex and to be skinny.

And so on, and so forth. If you follow contemporary culture you will, perhaps against your will, recognize the opposing forces here. Here are two groups of downwardly mobile bohemians adrift in the ever-more-unaffordable metropole, one choosing to judge art via a rigid political framework that suffocates the irony and tension that powers the novel, the other making that irony so pervasive and their ennui so corrosive that saying anything true becomes nearly impossible. Normally with this sort of thing I would peruse the responses and counter-responses, write it off as a mildly entertaining contretemps of no real significance, and call it a day.

But putting aside Cash (I have not read the much-discussed Lost Lambs, though I enjoyed her initial collection Earth Angel), I noticed something about the dichotomy of Byron and Levy specifically: it was “Inside the Whale”! It was exactly that of Auden and Miller in “Inside the Whale”! Levy is Miller: flat and passive and deadpan. Flat Earth is an immersion in a Downtown nightmare world of art openings and trendy bars, where friendship is cheap, sexual encounters are transactional, and money flows in from suspicious places. Byron is Auden: earnest, passionate, doctrinaire. She too had written a novel: Herculine, a pulpy horror story set on a trans commune in Indiana. As for myself, I had been thinking about trying harder to survey the scene of contemporary literature, and not just write about the art form as if it was something that had a good run, but ended around 1998 or so. This was perfect. I would read these two books and learn something and the contours of the direction and future of the novel would become slightly clearer. I would revitalize the discourse. I would develop a new synthesis of the aesthetic and the political. I would be the George Orwell of Pasadena, California. I would write “Inside the Whale 2”!

Look, I’m not naive, I didn’t expect or need Flat Earth and Herculine to be Tropic of Cancer or “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” or “September 1, 1939.” I thought they would each have some good aspects, some bad aspects, and some interesting sociological takeaways, and I really did go in with an open mind, ready to enjoy myself, with no bias towards either camp. But I didn’t expect the experience to frustrate me this much.

The idea that I could use these books to illustrate some major ideological rupture and its tendencies fell apart almost instantly. These books do not illustrate two opposing worldviews on how society should be organized and what should be valued, as the work of Auden and, say, D.H. Lawrence quite genuinely did. In fact, Levy’s politics, both inside and outside the text, seem to be fairly standard liberal ones. Flat Earth reads to me as a bleak and acidic but nevertheless feminist-ish critique of how women in the art scene are seen only in terms of their sexual value. In a recent interview, she discusses her discomfort with the darker aspects of the “intense infusion of tech and crypto money downtown,” and refers to Trump as an “evil tyrant.”

Instead, these two books illustrate two nearly infinitesimally different sets of consumer preferences. Ridgewood vs. Dimes Square. Ketamine vs. Cocaine. A24 horror films vs. A24 dramas. Zohran vs. who-gives-a-shit. Here is a passage from Flat Earth describing a man the narrator dates:

In his Artforum interview, the only influences he cited were authors: David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, and unsurprisingly, Roberto Bolaño. I had never actually read Bolaño but I did have a reference to The Savage Detectives (1998) tattooed on my right wrist because I thought the drawing was beautiful and because experience had taught me that this book was popular with the type of literary male who will enthusiastically slap you around during sex.

Here is a passage from Herculine describing the same:

He was the kind of Brooklyn white guy to react if you critiqued the micro-identity he’d carefully formed through years of scrolling. He downplayed his Supreme addiction in favor of Male Feminist discourse, David Lynch’s coffee line, and Roberto Bolaño’s “complicated engagement with femicide and surrealism.” He asked me to go to Film Forum a few times a month and as much as I enjoyed a seven-hour movie, I usually tried to find an excuse not to.

(Can’t a guy enjoy a little Bolaño these days? Christ!)

Both of these books feature dissatisfying, dissociative hookups. Both of these books feature professional jealousy: Herculine’s nameless narrator seethes at the “Hot Freelance Girls” who write for Vogue and the Times and Flat Earth’s Avery watches her best friend Frances achieve success and acclaim as a filmmaker. Both of these books feature thinly disguised locales and side characters that those in or adjacent to their world will recognize (hey, it’s the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research!). Both even feature a long chapter set at a gallery opening, so the narrator can make witty remarks about various denizens of bohemia. Only the first third of Herculine is a New York Art World novel; the narrator soon flees her dissatisfying life for her ex’s commune, which turns out to have cut a Faustian bargain with various evil supernatural entities, and stock horror scenes (bug hallucinations, demonic pregnancies, summoning rituals) ensue. But this is merely to trade one set of cliches for another, the demons are named “Asmodeus” and “Dagon,” and the way in which the horror elements are deployed, in their pacing, their content, and their lack of interiority, is lifted straight from a thousand films.

Flat Earth at least wants to be a novel, and is not settling for being one. It has some arresting images and sequences, and some lovely bits of writing, particularly in the first section, a road trip narrative through the middle of the country. But it is ultimately not much more than a series of scenes. Avery is the same jaded, indolent, self-loathing character on the first page and the last. Perhaps that doesn’t matter in a book this short—224 pages, lots of blank space—but it leads to a thin, depressing feeling, particularly when the various sketches of Downtown life are padded out with impressionistic stream-of-consciousness sections (some of which, to be fair, I did rather like). Herculine does have a genuinely suspenseful plot and a sort of rough and passionate energy, but the prose is astonishingly, if you’ll pardon the pun, graceless. A pulp horror novel doesn’t have to be Proust, but both Herculine and “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-girl” contain sentences that (as Ella Dorn has elsewhere pointed out) simply do not meet the basic requirements of English prose.

I walked through wind tunnels formed by huge towers hunting for high-end moisturizers.

The autumn wind blowing in with a few final pranks. But the aura of the camp felt hostile. The landscape of my nightmares easily mapped onto the eerie woods. Birches boxed us in like a ruptured womb. I felt a Freudian attachment to the sacrificial pig. How long would it before [sic] that was me on the spit?

Renata Adler was able to tap deep wells of political weather and crystalline, biting prose.

I’m not trying to cry woke scold, not entirely, I’m pointing out that this satirical bend is a foggy fictional tool that these women can hide behind.

Anyone can cherry-pick some grammatical infelicities, so you’ll have to take me at my word that when I say there are quite a lot of these. In my last essay I got some pushback for saying it was incumbent upon writers to read the classics in their tradition; well here is a book that would have been much improved if its author had spent six months reading Middlemarch and Ulysses and The Portrait of a Lady and all the other Novels 101 books to learn how elegant variation and vivid metaphor and descriptive precision work. It should be said that Byron is not some random Substacker publishing on a tiny small press, who it would be churlish to attack. This is a Simon & Schuster book by a writer with bylines in America’s most prestigious publications. Someone I know whose book is coming out on a major imprint recently told me her book is not being edited at all; not for structure, not on the line level, no proofreading, nothing. I suppose that’s where we’re at.

All of this can’t help but instill in me the feeling that these are not books but book-shaped discourse objects, meant to appear on a shelf to display your allegiance to one or another subcultural tribe, and that I’ve been played for a sucker by thinking they might have something to tell me. It makes me feel like the one inhabitant of a Potemkin village, trying to find the post office and wondering why the grocery store is never open. I was nearly done with Herculine when I read this note from Isabel Pabán Freed that, as the kids say, oneshotted me.

i kinda feel like at this point, we’ve done enough Contemporary Literature Discourse that we could do the situation so described by zizek here with new novels and the essays criticizing them: one machine writes three to four novels about trying to navigate feeling complicit with an apocalyptic capitalism, all of which produce a reading experience uncannily similar to scrolling on your phone; the other machine groups said novels under a shared name that is somewhat dismissive of their theme, and then at the end, gestures at how novels could be good, again. meanwhile, novelist and critic have retired to the breakfast nook, where we can sip our coffees and discuss the changing weather and sexual mores

She’s right. Who cares? I could go into more detail on these books and their flaws, but it feels pointless. There is just so little at stake. Many writers I otherwise respect praised the stunningly incoherent “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-Girl,” which seemed to prove that much criticism of this type is not actually read, but simply rapidly scanned for good lines to use against one’s purported aesthetic or ideological foes. I’m not interested in providing that type of ammunition for anyone. I could be really vicious and cutting about these books and probably churn up a lot of discourse and get a lot of shares and likes (I did, of course, buy and read Byron’s book because of her hostile essay, the system works!), but it wouldn’t feel like I was doing anything noble or worthwhile. Byron and Levy may have good bylines and a book deal, but those don’t buy you a summer cottage in Amagansett like they used to. I have no doubt they feel just as precarious and disposable as I do. The ship has sunk and we’re all clinging to the wreckage. I genuinely wish both of them the best.

Contrast that with “Inside the Whale,” where the stakes feel very high. Orwell predicts that civilization is entering “an age of totalitarian dictatorships — an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction” and that “The literature of liberalism is coming to an end.” And yet he still thinks it is worthwhile to spend much of his time discussing it. This is a man who went to Spain and got a bullet in the throat for his troubles. When he upbraids Auden for not knowing the meaning of murder, it means something, it is not just a minor quarrel among different species of Brooklynite. He criticizes Auden in strong terms because he believes literature is a very powerful thing.

I have the Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell’s essays, a big red 1400-page brick. There is much in there about Hitler and Stalin and Churchill and Spain, there are the famous essays on the common toad and the ideal English pub and how to make a cup of tea, there are thoughts on the condition of the poor, there are the brilliant portraits of colonial life “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.” But the vast majority, perhaps seventy percent, are about books. Orwell was not some scholar who retreated into the written word because he couldn’t face life in all its complexity. He traveled the world, he worked in the lowest of conditions, he threw himself into political causes, he was ready to die for his beliefs, and still he came to the conclusion that writing was the supreme human activity, the one most worth thinking about. This attitude was once common. I now question if it exists even among the shrinking pool of people who do it for a living.

III.

Yet as a great poet once said, hope is a dangerous thing for a writer like me to have—but I have it. I can’t stop myself from rolling the boulder uphill. I’m going to follow the script and “gesture at how novels could be good, again.” More accurately, I’m going to point out that novels are still good—really!—it is just that our means and method of discussing them are very badly broken.

I’m a little over halfway through The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker-winning novel about a young gay aesthete who finds himself living with a family of Conservative power brokers in Thatcher’s England. It turns out that as recently as 2004 you could skip all the postmodern Infinite Jest-George Saunders-Cloud Atlas self-consciousness and insecurity and write a novel that feels like it slots right in there with the greats, a novel of exquisite sensitivity and grace, without any showstopping passages but with an accumulation of finely chosen details that renders a world and a time with startling, vivid accuracy and care, a novel of long languid dusks and champagne flutes on manor lawns, of the heady rush of first love and the scent and fumbling of sex and the spiraling crashing feeling of heartbreak and pain. It’s the kind of novel that you put down at the end of a page or a chapter just to think: fucking hell, this is what it’s all about. 2004 was a long time ago now, but Hollinghurst is still active and only 70 years old, not nearly in his nineties like Pynchon or DeLillo or Norman Rush. He released a new novel, Our Evenings, a little over a year ago. If it’s half as good as The Line of Beauty, I’m not ready to give up on the form.

I’ve written here and there about the work of Bruce Wagner, though never at length (a comprehensive Metropolitan Review piece by John Pistelli has already done the honors). Wagner, born in 1954, has spent the last decade in a furious late-career burst of creativity comparable to the Philip Roth of Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral. His recent novels, The Marvel Universe, ROAR, and Amputation are fearless and psychedelically vivid; he takes subjects that should be a young person’s game (the fluidity of gender, the churn and pull and jabber of social media, the feeling of hyperreality that pervades everyday life), and depicts them better than most young writers, marrying them to the big, majestic, Tolstoyan questions of life and death. With his low, rumbling voice and buddhistic calm, Wagner is a fixture on the alternative media circuit, having appeared on Red Scare, WTF With Marc Maron, and The Rich Roll Podcast, one of those fitness/pop-science/self-help podcasts for manly men, which I had never heard of but which has nearly two million subscribers. Any major publishing house (Wagner publishes on the distinguished but tiny Arcade) would kill to publish something that resonates with jaded e-girls and new age gym bros alike, so it is quite depressing that the mainstream literary press has overlooked these astonishing books, all of which would have been an Underworld-level literary event twenty years ago. But hard work and passion and true belief on their advocates’ part has nevertheless found them an audience, a fit audience, which is all that one can really hope for at the end of the day.

What of writers of my own generation, the writers I have so thoroughly registered my disenchantment with above? Well, it turns out that even books that seem to come straight from the assembly line, zany Zillennial novels about a young woman trying to find love in (shudder) Brooklyn that get the standard hosannas and critiques from the standard magazines, can still surprise you. Towards the end of writing this essay, I started leafing through Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic, which catches a stray in “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-Girl,” just to cover all my bases. To my surprise, I spent the next two days reading through it with delight. Paradise Logic, which follows a moony young woman named Reality Kahn on a surreal quest to become “the greatest girlfriend of all time,” is very good. It is playful and inventive and strange and funny. You can tell Kemp cares deeply about language and style, about writing a book for the book’s sake, not creating some sort of Clout Object to better position herself as a public intellectual and online personality. There is a lot of Joyce in this book, a lot of Gertrude Stein. I happened upon her Goodreads profile after reading Paradise Logic (she’s the top review of it) and was smugly satisfied to find that she reads not just Speedboat and The Princess of 72nd Street but Stendhal and Colette and Henry James. She studies the blade! She cares! And you can tell, reading Paradise Logic. No novel could be more dissimilar to Henry James, yet it nevertheless has that extra special something, the cube of butter in the sauce, the flaky sea salt on the steak. It is a slim (what’s with all the white space these days?) and mostly silly book, but it is a novel, a literary work of art, a real one, for an age that is sorely lacking in them.

Yet you wouldn’t know that from reading the reviews, positive though most of them are, because they approach the book through such an instantly-deadening discourse lens. Paradise Logic, to go by the coverage it has received, is about an “E-girl” (the internet hardly features in the book). It “confronts toxic masculinity and the contradictions of female desire.” It is about a world of “heteropessimism” where “gender roles are a prison.” Most of this is not inaccurate per se, but all of it misses the sheer exuberance of the book, the way it delights in itself, the way it is in conversation with its predecessors. Had I not been doing my due diligence for this essay, I almost certainly would have skipped Paradise Logic. In their praise, they manage to make it sound bad, to make it sound just like everything else.

One always hears that it takes time for the shape of an era to become clear, for the work that will last to emerge. Yet, reading “Inside the Whale,” one is surprised at how by 1940 it was in fact quite clear who would still be read in nearly a century. The modernists were all canonized by this point; there is no question, to Orwell, of the centrality of Joyce, Eliot, and Yeats. Miller has slipped in acclaim, but you can still find Tropic of Cancer at any reputable large bookstore. Auden turned out to be one of the major English poets of the century. Of course some reputations have inevitably fallen and others have risen, but on the whole, Orwell’s picture of his time was quite accurate. Not so for us. Hype and fads and puffery are nothing new, of course—as Orwell laid out for us in the beginning of this essay, hardly anything is new—but our current literary ecosystem has a distinct Late Soviet feeling. It is hard to tell who or what is real, difficult to sort worthwhile art from the objects masquerading as such. The factories are staffed by skeleton crews, they let books pass through the assembly line unedited and un-fussed over. The border guards and customs officials in the press give them a cursory glance, sort them into some identifiable category (zany e-girl, upper-middle-class identity narrative, angry young man, heartwarming family saga), and dutifully rubber stamp them, or else consign them to oblivion. The likes of you and I wander through windswept streets under grey skies, past empty tower blocks and the looted and graffitied remains of the People’s Assembly Palace and the Great Patriotic War Memorial. Does any of this matter any more? Does anyone care?

Obviously at least some people do, or I wouldn’t have an audience and you wouldn’t be here, at the end of these 5500 words on the subject. I have ended too many essays with a roll call of all my friends from the computer, and so I will refrain from doing that here, but the last few years have been a slow realization for me that people, given the proper platforms and opportunities, do still care about the written word, and that good work will still find its way to those who look for it. New publications spring up all the time and old ones are revitalized; new passions and new perspectives abound. The novel and the poem and the essay are tough old beasts, and they will endure, even in these inauspicious circumstances.

“Literary criticism is not essential to literature,” Martin Amis once said, “but both are essential to civilization.” The forms that both of these things take in our time won’t look like it did in 1940 or 1970 or 1990; a painful lesson I am still trying to internalize. And the great ideological clash of our time won’t be between civilization and fascism, as it was for Orwell, but between human and anti-human, between the people who believe art can be produced and criticized and consumed entirely by machines and the people who believe all of those things rely on the expression of an individual consciousness.

So we had better get to it. We have inherited a crumbling house, and much of our time will have to be spent restoring the basic functions: cleaning out the chimney, putting in the windows. We most likely won’t make a living off of it, or enjoy widespread acclaim and celebrity. But with the proper work ethic and attention and passion, it’s still possible to rebuild that house in our own image, slowly and carefully, brick by lonesome brick.

You don’t get much free time in this short life. Ten percent of your total span on earth, perhaps, depending on your job, family status, income, and other obligations. Competing for that limited chunk of hours is an endless array of activities, more options than have ever been available in human history: you could work your way chronologically through the entire history of filmed entertainment, you could learn an instrument, you could garden, you could juggle, you could cook elaborate meals, you could ingest Chinese research chemicals from the internet. How is one to choose?

Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), out in May from Princeton University Press, is a short treatise on why one might opt to spend a solid chunk of this time reading what Naomi calls the Great Books, and what you might know as the classics or the canon, a mutable but generally agreed-upon list of literary works stretching from Beowulf to Beloved (I follow John Pistelli in using the familiar “Naomi” rather than the distant “Kanakia,” to signify this as an engagement with a friend whose work I admire rather than a disinterested consumer report). Previous books on this topic have followed two models. There’s the professorial approach—The Western Canon, The Closing of the American Mind, The Culture We Deserve— in which a great man of letters produces a gaseous lament for the declining standards of our time, flings around big words like Truth and Beauty, and subtly implies that those who don’t choose to cultivate the life of the mind are essentially automatons, human batteries choosing to live in the Matrix. And there’s the middlebrow regular-guy approach: My Life in Middlemarch, How Proust Can Change Your Life, David Denby’s Great Books, which usefully approaches these texts with an eye towards what they might do for the man or woman on the street, but often end up treating them as some sort of banal self-help course, taming their rough edges and making their impieties and challenges safe for contemporary bourgeois life.

What’s So Great… leans more towards the latter approach, but largely avoids the glib New Yorker tone. I have always admired Naomi’s writing, both fictional and essayistic, for its sense of directness and honesty. She has the rare quality of being able to avoid the usual evasions and politesse and describe literary and social dynamics as they are, simply and clearly. “Is literature a false God?”, a searching post written just after Trump’s inauguration, wrestles with the tension between politics and aesthetics, and describes how going too far in one direction or the other will grant you some time in the sun, but inevitably consign you to irrelevance once the party line shifts. “A creative-writing degree can be quite useful” is a sort of pitiless realpolitik description of how writers are made and sold, much more interesting and informative than most accounts of this process, which are either steeped in bitterness from decades of rejections, or overly sunny in their belief that talent will always win out. Her grand view of the social landscape, one that demonstrates a sympathy for all parties involved and their ordinary human failings, is a quality one finds in Austen or Tolstoy, and thus I was heartened to find that she concurs that the main benefit she took from the Great Books is not some grand life lesson or guidance in her darkest hour but the quiet “standard they set for uncompromising honesty.” That honesty remains on display in What’s So Great About the Great Books?

The book is structured as a dialogue, a series of responses to questions posed by a rather humorless and prosecutorial left-liberal interlocutor (“Why not read other books that are equally beautiful, but have better politics?” “When we say ‘The Great Books are worth reading,’ do other people hear ‘White men are inherently superior’?”). At first, I was annoyed she was giving so much space to these arguments, which I find are mostly advanced as a spurious moral cover for apathy and disinterest—few serious left-wing thinkers will actually say you shouldn’t read Proust or Shakespeare. Yet it is true that there is a certain sense in which reading the Great Books has become, as they say, right-coded, and it’s common to read a witty and erudite article on, say, a new translation of Gogol in First Things or Claremont Review, sandwiched between The Case for Mandatory School Prayer and The Trans Menace in Our Military. Naomi, a trans woman herself, writes movingly in a late chapter about the lonely and difficult experience of realizing that many fellow advocates for the Great Books consider her not an ally but an affront to their vision of civilization. When she comes to her conclusion that these books are nevertheless “the birthright of every human being,” it reads as a revelation earned rather than as so much Bloomian cant and blather.

These autobiographical sketches coexist with the more straightforwardly rational arguments in the book. She writes of her self-education, which began when she applied to MFA programs, and assumed everyone there would already have a deep knowledge of the classics (“If you’re writing fiction, no one expects you to have read Balzac or Stendhal or Milton,” she writes. So much the worse for us!), of her romantic and social life, and of her various encounters with this or that book in the canon. Naomi has complained, in the past, of having to compromise her vision and make her novels more autobiographical than she might have wanted; that what editors expect from an Indian-American trans woman is a book about the experience of being such a person. So I wondered, while reading What’s So Great… if the autobiographical details were gently encouraged by her editors, and if she would have preferred to do without them. Yet if the book succeeds, it succeeds because she is highlighting her own story in all its particularities rather than offering some cultural lament or prescriptive take on how we could reform society so everyone grows up performing Shakespeare instead of playing Roblox. I really fell for What’s So Great… when I read the following passage, early in the book:

I enjoyed college quite a bit, particularly the quarter where I dropped LSD every weekend—I reached the point where, for a year, even when sober, every night I’d hallucinate a six-legged cat that’d cuddle and purr in my bed as the Angel of Death hovered powerlessly over me, just out of arm’s reach.

As a result of this background, I don’t have strong opinions on what should be taught in college.

This is funny, and details such as this lend personality to the book throughout, but it also gets at something true. Most discussion of the Great Books is centered on what should be taught in college, and thus the various arguments that you’ll read on the subject in The New Republic or The Point all read like a squabble among a tiny clique of academics. So here I must depart from the book a little and offer up my own experience, as both a contrast to our perpetual obsession with what’s on the syllabus, and an affirmation of Naomi’s larger point that reading these old books can, corny as it is to say, change your life.

I can remember some humanities classes I took that I found interesting and exciting, but I personally didn’t experience college as some crucible of intellectual formation. Even for someone like myself, probably in the 95th percentile or above for “interested in books and learning,” the attraction of sitting at the feet of some besweatered Dead Poets Society guru and reading Plato paled in comparison to the chance college offered to experience unconstrained adult life for the first time: to take advantage of the dizzying opportunities of the city, to fall in and out of love, to ingest mind-altering substances, to make dreadful experimental techno music. I suspect this is the case for many, and anyone offering yet another prescription for how to reawaken a widespread love of learning in our universities might do well to consider the conflict between the discipline required for rigorous humanistic inquiry and the intoxicating first flush of youthful freedom.

When I rediscovered reading for pleasure in my early twenties, I stuck to the Young Men’s Section of the canon: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Melville, Pynchon, the strange and gnomic sides of modernism. Eventually, I figured, I could get around to Romantic poetry and domestic novels and verse epic and the other giant, imposing cultural mountains that loom for the autodidact to scale, but I could do it piecemeal, on my own time. After all, who was I trying to impress?

That all changed in 2024, when John Pistelli, on whose Substack newsletter I was a regular commenter, started his series of lectures, The Invisible College; roughly one lecture per week on a canonical work of world literature, structured into units ranging from Romantic poetry to the Greek classics to the modern American novel. Suddenly my leisure time had a degree of discipline that it had hitherto lacked: read these Keats poems by Friday and you’ll have something entertaining to listen to at the gym, get through ten more pages of Pride and Prejudice before you fall asleep and you’ll have kept to your self-imposed schedule. And just as suddenly these works I had promised myself I would get around to eventually began to fall like dominoes, and I began to feel something different, an inner authority that I hadn’t possessed before. It means something, to feel as if you have the right to speak, to contribute to the great ongoing conversation about art, and at least for myself, that right to speak was contingent upon having actually read the books most central to world literature. Directly after the summer unit covering Ulysses (which I had tried and failed to read twice already) and Middlemarch, I wrote my first long essay on this website, and since then, this activity has structured my days: when I’m not doing my day job and attending to my social obligations and cooking dinner and taking out the trash and all the other stuff of everyday life I’m reading, writing, or thinking about doing so. My goals for and vision of myself have completely changed; I find it hard to recollect what I wanted from my life or what my larger ambitions were before I started writing. It seems as if it had always been there waiting for me.

It’s a nice story. The trouble with it as an argument for reading the Great Books is it’s completely recursive. Saying that reading a lot of classic books gave me the confidence to write literary criticism is not much of a reason for doing so; it’s a bit like telling someone to get baptized so they can better spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. If you’re not already bought in, who cares? And there is indeed a hint of irritating religiosity in those who advocate for deep and serious and not always entirely pleasurable reading, an idea that we are the keepers of some privileged secret which one can only access through this mystical experience, which just so happens to be available at your local Barnes & Noble.

And yet, I don’t know, we kind of are, and it kind of is. I am convinced that my life has been seriously altered for the better, first by the wide and formless reading I did in the years after college, and then by the more focused and disciplined reading I’ve done since 2024, whether for the Invisible College or as research for essays. Some of it is most likely simple gamification; it’s pleasurable to get a fun, enlightening, often gossipy three-hour podcast as a reward for what can sometimes be tough reading, and it’s pleasurable to write and watch your own thoughts take form and hopefully enjoy a blissful day of reading comments, reposts, praise, and counterarguments. Yet the rest—the really important part—is an ineffable mystery: the mystery of aesthetic experience itself. Naomi addresses this early in the book, comparing In Search of Lost Time and Gone Girl. Gone Girl is riveting and intense, Proust is “slow going, frequently difficult and boring, and sometimes incomprehensible on a surface level.” It’s understandable that one might prefer Gone Girl and think that everyone who claims to enjoy an exhaustively detailed 1.3 million word novel about time and memory and Parisian high society is lying or posturing. Nevertheless:

You can make what arguments you’d like to make using mere words, but Proust is indeed the superior author. To find out why, you simply need to read and appreciate him, because what you learn from reading him is something you need to read him to learn! If it could be conveyed without reading the book, there’d be no need to read the book. The answer is distinctly unsatisfying, but true.

To which I might add: besides their aesthetic qualities, if I hadn’t decided to confront the mystery of these books for myself, there are many places I wouldn’t have gone, experiences I wouldn’t have had, interesting people I wouldn’t have met. Naomi, of course, being one of them.

What makes What’s So Great… work is that it is not, in the end, a plea for everyone to read the canon—Naomi openly acknowledges that many people simply aren’t interested in doing so and have chosen different and equally fulfilling ways to spend their life. Rather, it is a larger case for using one’s limited leisure time ambitiously, for setting a lofty goal and trying to reach it, rather than being satisfied with passive day-to-day existence. Naomi’s choice to do this with the Great Books has given her many gifts: a rare set of skills as a writer, a lively and intelligent online community, and, though she didn’t know it while she was writing What’s So Great…, a book deal with a major publisher. There is no guarantee that whatever activity one chooses to spend one’s time on will bring any material or social success; indeed in most cases it almost certainly will not. But break from your routine, devote yourself to some improbable project or strange obsession, try to read all the greatest hits of world literature, catalogue every species of beetle in your area, hike from Tijuana to Vancouver, write about every painting in the National Gallery, restore a 1965 Thunderbird, and you may discover that great and hitherto-unknown vistas open up within you, and strange and wonderful opportunities emerge.

It’s the 35th anniversary of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which I read recently and found to be a stranger and more haunting novel than its reputation as an extreme exercise in blood and guts suggests (though, to be clear, it’s not for the squeamish). For the New Statesman, I’ve written an essay on the book and specifically on the character of Patrick Bateman, who is one of very few characters in the recent past to have made the leap from literary fiction to the common consciousness. I consider his curious appeal as a meme and inspirational figure, the many ways in which behavior that was supposed to read as obviously strange and freakish at the time has become entirely normal, and the strange sense of pathos and “cosmic loneliness” in the novel. Here’s a taste:

It’s fair to wonder why you would ever want to subject yourself to this. But as you read, a greater design and moral purpose becomes clear. Ellis puts the reader on edge by introducing the slippage of reality, starting small (Bateman’s outfits and the names of his friends and dates seem to shift within the same scene) and, by the novel’s bloody final quarter, doing away with realism entirely (the morning talk show Bateman watches religiously becomes more and more absurd, by the end of the novel it features an interview with a “surprisingly articulate and charming” Bigfoot). As the murder scenes become longer and more gruesome, Bateman’s bleak reveries become stranger and more poetic. The book’s hallucinatory imagery of blasted landscapes and sinister cities reads like The Waste Land rewritten for the Reagan era:

“… where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. […] Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …”

Yet the possibility of some sort of moral redemption is not entirely foreclosed, and some tiny part of Bateman still strives for human connection. A dreamy interlude in the Hamptons with a girlfriend is almost sweet – Bateman reads aloud from Doctor Zhivago and A Farewell to Arms (“my favourite Hemingway,” he says – this guy has a “favourite Hemingway?”), watches Audrey Hepburn movies, and goes skinny-dipping at midnight. It comes to an end as his psychosis sets in and he finds himself “roaming the beaches, digging up baby crabs and eating handfuls of sand”. He has a secretary who, alone among the book’s characters, seems to have retained her humanity, and in a late chapter where they have dinner together he nearly manages to establish some sort of emotional connection, he finds himself “almost dazzled and moved” at the thought that he “might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love,” before the doors of his psyche slam shut again. “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” are the unsubtle first words of the novel, graffiti scrawled in “blood-red lettering” on the side of a bank. Yet the novel keeps tantalizing us with the idea that there might be some hope, somewhere.

The governments of both the USA and UK have recently mandated that one magazine piece in every ten must mention Clavicular, so I do do that, but as part of a wider look at how it feels to be alive in what I call “a massive, sinister casino, full of flashing lights and nauseating scent and smoke, which promises a way out if you can only contort and suppress and deny yourself enough.”

You can read the rest here. Many thanks to editor, encourager, and A Good Hard Stare “mensch of the week” .

Lastly I must toot my own horn and mark the accomplishment of my first piece for a real-deal, you-can-buy-it-at-the-airport, home-to-many-of-my-literary-heroes magazine. There will be more in the future, as well as the long, rambling Substack essays you’ve grown to expect.

For my first episode, I called upon , author of the books Exit Right and Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art and host of the newsletter and podcast. As I recount in the introduction, Eminent Americans is just about my favorite podcast, a true tribute to the art of conversation in all its glory, and as such I felt that I was in good hands as I waded nervously into the vast and churning sea of recorded conversation. We discuss his career, his two excellent books, our mutual love for Janet Malcolm and Terry Castle, the long cycles of American political progress and retrenchment, the secret sauce behind Eminent Americans, and we introduce the official Good Hard Stare Enemies List.

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis (2023)
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams by Nick Tosches (1992)

I.

Beware the biographer: the scuttler in the archives, the interviewer of relatives, the Monday morning quarterback, the renderer of judgements, the mad constructor of a monstrous facsimile made up of the detritus and the impressions and the letters and the paper trail his subject leaves behind. Beware the biographical urge: to spill out the secrets of the dead or nearly-dead, to act as if one is doing a noble task when what one is really doing is (as Janet Malcolm has pointed out) “listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.” Beware the initial infatuation with the subject which slowly turns to hatred, to cruel pity, to contempt. Beware the biography itself, the dutiful trudge from cradle to grave, the excruciatingly uninteresting childhood and family tree sections, the affectless prose, the easy recourse to cliché. Beware the show-your-work type who itemizes every meal and hotel, every flight and fuck and flirtation, who devastates acres of pristine forest for their two, three, four volume epic, which will never be read save by the critics assigned to review it, and the later biographers intent on correcting the errors of their predecessor.

And yet, as Boswell, Ellmann, Strachey, and Suetonius knew, there are still truths that biography can provide that no novel can, if the writer is willing to cut through the fog of facts and use a life to illuminate something universal, something normally left unsaid. Here, then, are two biographies of this kind, one a new entry into the pantheon, one an acknowledged (if underrated) classic. Both deal with entertainers of the 1950s and 1960s; their subjects have the whiff of mothballs and dollar bins; they are rapidly fading out of memory as the generation who knew them in childhood begins to pass from the world. Both books have something to say about celebrity, about pleasure, about life at its limit. And both, if read closely, may prove to be not just gossipy entertainments but illuminators of some fundamental truth about our present age: the age of mass media, the age of stars.

II.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: remember them? I have more affection for Old Hollywood than most and they still seem slightly fuzzy and indistinct to me. In their prime they were perhaps the most famous couple in the world, their celebrity was white-hot, all-consuming, beyond anything our polycultural world can comprehend. Today, they are remembered as a duo for one very good film (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), one that has become a byword for disaster (Cleopatra), and, among aficionados, a series of deeply strange late-60s dramas (the wigged-out romance Boom!, the Graham Greene adaptation The Comedians, a surreal Doctor Faustus). As solo acts, they made many good films and even some great ones, but neither ever had that one AMC-lobby-mural role, the role that confers not just fame but immortality: Dorothy Gale, Norma Desmond, Rick Blaine, Travis Bickle. So they fade and diminish and pass into history: once bigger than life, now small, like you and me.

But Roger Lewis’s extraordinary Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor has convinced me that Burton and Taylor were, for a time, the very sun and moon. Erotic Vagrancy is not a biography, not exactly. The experience of reading it is more like reading a hallucinatory, monologic novel, a more exuberant Bernhard or Old Hollywood-obsessed Céline. As I read Erotic Vagrancy I thought of all those useless little stocking stuffers: Why So-and-So Matters, How Such-and-Such Can Change Your Life. How pathetic, these polite requests for my attention! How mannered, how contemptible! Better to do what Lewis has done and demonstrate your love for the subject by writing a 600-page near-stream-of-consciousness, self-indulgent, provocative, ridiculous, meandering epic, a book that does not shuffle up and demurely ask if you would mind reading it but that plunges into the abyss and dares you to follow. The appeal is inherent in the form: the book is about excess, therefore what could it be but excessive? I wouldn’t read a smoothly competent 300-page book that explains Burton and Taylor for the upper-middlebrow NPR set. But, as an admirer of ambition, spectacle, and mania, I was helpless before Erotic Vagrancy.

The book is structured into five acts, like a Shakespearean tragedy. Acts One and Two introduce Taylor and Burton, respectively. In Act Three they meet on the set of Cleopatra, the most famous debacle in Hollywood history, and begin the most famous extramarital affair in Hollywood history (the book’s title comes from a condemnation of their public infidelity issued in L’Osservatore della Domenica, the official Vatican newspaper: “you will finish in an erotic vagrancy, without end or a safe port”). Act Four: marriage, top of the world. Act Five: decline. Within these five acts lie many diversions, tangents, riffs, and dead ends. A sixty-page prologue quickly drifts from Burton and Taylor to cover, among other things: the troubled marriage of their Cleopatra co-star Rex Harrison, Taylor’s various illnesses, the children’s book she wrote about Nibbles, her pet chipmunk, the films Liz and Dick (2012, Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler playing the couple) and Burton and Taylor (2013, Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West), Lewis’s hatred for traditional biographies, and the origin of the book itself, which Lewis began writing after he watched their strange run of late-60s films while in the hospital with pancreatitis, doped up and feverish. On page 50, we get this statement of intent:

Like some of my favourite bedside books – Roland Barthes on Japan or the fashion industry, Stefan Zweig on Mary Queen of Scots or Susan Sontag on photography and illness as metaphor (except Erotic Vagrancy has more of an irresistible tidal pull of comedy and satire than they’d manage in a thousand years) – I make no apology for this being a visionary book, a fierce book, a prose version of a portrait in pinks and lilacs and orange and yellow; a book about more than it seems at first to be about, in which the fame of great stars is to be contrasted with our own unimportance and silliness. For the point of great stars and their living fire is that they displace us, make most of us seem like nothing in particular – and with Burton and Taylor, illusion and reality became the same thing. It is an infernal story; an alcoholic story; a Pop Art story; an occult story. Their art, their catalogue of films, is determined by eroticism, or at least by amorous fantasy. Burton and Taylor were Bacchus and Venus, icons of indulgence, animal spirits. They were libertines.

We get around to “Elizabeth Taylor was born on…” on page 84.

So who were Burton and Taylor? What makes them fitting subjects for this mad disquisition? Both started young: Burton, born Richard Jenkins in Pontrhydyfen, Wales (Lewis is himself Welsh, and there is a lot of meditation on Welsh identity in Erotic Vagrancy), was bookish and driven. He set out from his tiny mining town for Oxford, impressed John Gielgud in a student production of Measure for Measure, and soon became a stage actor of great promise, then a Hollywood hopeful, then a star. He was intensely intellectual, memorizing reams of Shakespeare, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas, but a scholarly ascetic he was not. “I do it because I rather like being famous,” he said in that rich, round, peaty voice of his, when asked by the BBC why he had chosen forgettable war films and wooden Biblical epics over playing Hamlet and Hal, “I rather like being given the best seat in the plane, the best seat in the restaurant.”

Burton wanted the best of everything, Taylor had grown up with it. She was a teenage star, raised on the MGM lot, attending classes in the Little Red Schoolhouse next to the Thalberg building, and making gee-whiz films like National Velvet and Courage of Lassie (Lewis: “In Courage of Lassie, we see Taylor in a sylvan or elemental habitat, as if she’s present at the beginning of the world”). Her transition to adult roles, in films like A Place in the Sun and Giant, made her the most famous actress in the world; there is an astonishing shot in A Place in the Sun that serves as her coming-out party. The camera stays on Montgomery Clift’s sweaty factory worker, soon to fall in doomed, desperate love with Taylor, as Taylor, indistinct, enters in the background in silk and furs, walks down a long hallway, and suddenly swoons into focus, enormous eyes, breathy voice and all, a heartbreaking, overwhelming vision, too fresh and innocent and beautiful to be real. “There used to be stars!,” my girlfriend always says in gentle mockery when she finds me up late watching a black and white movie. I say it to you now in all sober seriousness: there used to be stars.

Taylor off the screen was extravagant beyond measure, appetitive, childlike. How could she not have been, having grown up the way she did? She left hotel rooms a wreck (her five-foot-three form somehow managed to leave lipstick stains on the ceiling of her suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel), ate steaks and ice cream with great gusto, and was surrounded by a menagerie of animals: dogs, cats, chipmunks, even a monkey, none of whom were house-trained. She loved to throw fits, demand presents, fight and make up. “Just a little 50,000 dollar diamond,” recalled her fourth husband Eddie Fisher (who she had stolen away from Debbie Reynolds, and would leave for Burton), “would make everything wonderful for up to four days.” When the producer Walter Wanger courted her for Cleopatra, she quoted him an absurd figure—$1 million and ten percent of the gross—figuring it would get him off her back. Instead he shrugged, and accepted.

So they collided, this golden California girl and this stormy-eyed Heathcliff of the moors and fens, in Cleopatra, the most expensive film in Hollywood history to that point. The film’s two directors, numerous reshoots, massive sets built and torn down unused, thousands of outfits (dozens for Taylor alone), thousands of extras, delays, illnesses, and disasters are all catalogued day by day in the middle section of Erotic Vagrancy, but it was only when I actually watched Cleopatra that I began to understand, to see what Lewis sees. The film exists in the curious jet age dreamworld of fifties Hollywood epics. The wives of Roman senators have beehive hairdos; the shot of them looking on during Cleopatra’s entrance into Rome looks like a scene from a Lyndon Johnson rally. Cleopatra’s inner chambers look like an Eero Saarinen airport lounge. At no point does it feel like Taylor is playing the queen of an unfathomably ancient and sophisticated civilization, she simply registers as Elizabeth Taylor, pouting, hissing, seducing. And hanging over it all is the real life romance, the sexual chemistry that is not feigned for the screen but was being acted upon in trailers and hotel rooms at the end of each day of shooting. Suddenly one realizes: Burton and Taylor are not playing Antony and Cleopatra. They are Antony and Cleopatra. Whatever immortal spirit of eros descended on the real historical couple, and on Shakespeare when he wrote his play, has reincarnated itself in Taylor, the most famous, beautiful, extravagant woman in the world, playing Cleopatra, the most famous, beautiful, extravagant woman in the world, and in Burton, the intelligent, madly ambitious striver, charmer, and seducer playing Antony, the same. The film is talky and inert, if often ravishingly beautiful, the mock-epic dialogue clangs. Taylor, suffered all manner of illnesses and hospitalizations during filming, partially due to real ailments, partially due to a diva’s hypochondria, partially due to a retinue of Dr. Feelgoods plying her with speed and Seconal. She visibly fluctuates in weight between scenes, and the scar from a tracheotomy she endured halfway through filming is visible in many shots. Yet none of it matters, because the strangeness present in Cleopatra, of art imitating life imitating art, is overwhelmingly powerful. You feel that you can, for a moment, see behind the veil and catch a glimpse of eternal cycles, of stories older than time, of the gods, laughing and playing us for sport.

From there it was mad excess, which Lewis charts with glee. Burton and Taylor together were like a small country: gigantic houses, armies of staff, meetings with world leaders, diamonds, yachts. From their first scene in Cleopatra to their second divorce, Taylor cost Burton approximately $1000 an hour. She would send her once-worn outfits to Burton’s relatives in Wales; his cousins and nieces would parade around their tiny coal towns in Chanel and Givenchy. Burton, always quick to proclaim his working-class authenticity, nevertheless had a curious affinity for tinpot dictators, hanging around in Yugoslavia with Tito and in Haiti with Baby Doc. They made strange films: commercial flops and critical failures. They lived in a high society world of “affectless ghouls”: Maria Callas, Andy Warhol, Princess Margaret, various minor royals, a cold, dead, oppressive scene. They were never alone. They divorced, then remarried (in Botswana, among giraffes and elephants), then divorced again. The blowsy, spoiled, hysterical Taylor ended up being the one who handled late fame quite well: she made more money from her signature perfume than she ever did from acting, went through two more husbands, became an early and prominent activist for AIDS research (“Without homosexuals, there’d be no Hollywood, no show business,” she grandly declaimed), and died in 2011, celebrated as the last of the classical Hollywood goddesses. The stoic intellectual Burton went to pieces: always an alcoholic, his drinking got worse and worse, his roles smaller, his behavior more erratic. He was dead by 1984, at fifty-eight.

Not that you could really get a grasp on this from the final two sections of Erotic Vagrancy, “The Age of Vulgarity” and “Separations,” which eschew chronology even more than the first three. All sense of the arc of their relationship is lost, replaced by film analysis and long stretches where Lewis begins to talk about what’s on his mind—a few pages on why he hates Lawrence of Arabia, for example, a few on Sylvia Plath, a few on Sophia Loren. On page 480, after a long stretch describing the nightmare of fame, he crescendoes:

I absolutely refuse to disapprove of them. Burton and Taylor uplift me; they never make me feel sad or sorry for them or superior to them [...] they are like posters of palaces and golden domes in a travel agency window, advertisements for a land of smiles, a place which will stay just out of reach.

There are still 125 pages to go.

You could easily call this laziness or logorrhea, say that all of us who buy into the mad method of Erotic Vagrancy are simply falling for a confidence trick, pretending that there is something worth teasing out in the ramblings of a madman. But to me, this descent into feverish confusion before the final curtain falls felt somehow appropriate to the book’s attitude toward image, celebrity, and reality. It brought to mind a moment that was once common and has now become rare, as a frictionless digital world has crept like kudzu over our waking life: the moment when the dream world of film can’t handle contact with the waking one, when a lightbulb burns too hot or a bit of ash from the projectionist’s cigarette falls onto the reel, and all suddenly melts into confusion, and the gigantic screen burns, burns, shimmers, and goes white.

III.

Erotic Vagrancy is a singular book, but I feel nearly certain that Roger Lewis has read Nick Tosches’ Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, perhaps my favorite show-business biography ever written. That’s right: Dino, Dean Martin, the “That’s Amore” guy, who you can see sleepwalking his way through the original Ocean’s Eleven and playing straight man in many now-forgotten comedy films with Jerry Lewis, a cornball, an easy swinger, a hunk of parmesan, a big goofy paisan. If you’re not someone who has fully bought into the Rat Pack mythology (and god help you if you are), it’s difficult to imagine why you’d want to read a whole book about the guy. But Tosches, a tough-guy biographer and novelist who took as his subject the second tier of American icons, the ones who were too dark and cracked and wrong to reach true immortality (not Sinatra but Dino, not Ali but Sonny Liston, not Elvis but Jerry Lee Lewis), found in Dean Martin a subject for the ages. It’s no surprise that Martin Scorsese spent a few years trying to adapt Dino; aside from the obvious surface themes of crime, show business, and Italian-American identity, Tosches’ Dean Martin has that curious sociopathic blankness common to Scorsese protagonists, that refusal to ever let anyone below the surface, if indeed there is anything below the surface at all. “There was a pin-tumbler sidebar lock on his guts that no one could pick,” writes Tosches, in his Raymond Chandler mode (elsewhere he gets baroque, flowery, ironic, almost Dickensian), “That was just the way he was, and it was just the way he always would be.” Tosches employs two Italian loanwords as leitmotifs to characterize this quality in Dean. Lontananza, distance, closed-offness, emotional remove, and menefreghismo, a word that roughly translates to the quality of “simply not giving a fuck.”

Cue the mournful music of the old country: Dino’s opening chapters trace Dean’s family from Abruzzo to l’America, Steubenville, Ohio, to be precise, where young Dean dealt blackjack, palmed chips, and sang for his supper. It all seems so alive, this section; I think of former steel towns like Steubenville and I think of rot and decay and hollow faces, but at its peak it seems to have had more 24-hour nightlife than Los Angeles does today: the numbers, the horses, blackjack, poker, roulette, amateur prizefighting, drinking, music, seven days a week in the back of cigar stores and roadhouses, the local constabulary paid handsomely to look the other way. Young Dean sang his way from Steubenville to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, eventually New York, where he found himself sharing a bill with “a creepy-looking Jewish kid” named Jerry Lewis.

Dino spends less time than one would expect on Vegas and the Sands and the hard-drinking torch-singer period, and lots of time on the Martin and Lewis partnership, which quickly grew from a nightclub sensation to a national phenomenon, encompassing radio, TV, and film. There was some psychic need they fulfilled, this sleepy-eyed Italian, who mumbled and cracked half-smiles and barely seemed to move, and this rubber-faced, nasally Jew, one of the most obnoxious and abrasive men ever to become a household name, who seemed like he was on the verge of vibrating off the screen, reaching out and flicking an audience member in the nose. Unlike Bugs Bunny or the Marx Brothers or Hellzapoppin, the appeal of Martin and Lewis to our era feels “as alien and as difficult to translate as the language, syntax, and meter of Catullus.” (Tosches, who loves his classical references, used to spend his afternoons at CBGB’s nursing a beer and a battered Loeb hardcover) “And yet,” he admits, “the howling laughter present in many of those fragments, in the radio shows and television performances, all done before live spectators, is unanswerable.”

The ethnic concord angle may have explained some of it (finally, they let an Italian do comedy!), but Tosches blames most of it on the tensions of the time, the old fifties cliche of sunny skies and aproned housewives and big tailfins and the ever-present threat of total atomic annihilation. While the Beats and the beboppers and the Abstract Expressionists and Lenny Bruce and Sun Records and James Dean offered jumpy, edgy catharsis in this world of contradictions, Dean and Jerry’s childish antics offered all the comforts of the womb:

Not laughter in the dark, but a denial of darkness itself, a regression, a transporting to the preternatural bliss of infantile senselessness. It was a catharsis, a celebration of ignorance, absurdity, and stupidity, as meaningless, as primitive-seeming, and as droll today as the fallout shelters and beatnik posings which offered opposing sanctuary in those days so close in time but so distant in consciousness.

The organ-grinder and the monkey, he calls them, and it was inevitable that the two of them, neither sure who was the man and who was the ape, would come to hate one another. Dean’s cool was ruffled by Jerry’s creative ambition and manic mood swings, Jerry was jealous of Dean’s classical looks and charm. They’d do their act onstage, rev up the old magic, and leave through separate doors, never exchanging a word. By 1956, ten years after their nightclub debut, it was all over, and Jerry tried to patch things up one last time. “What we do is not very important,” he said to Dean on one of their final days, hat in hand. “Any two guys could have done it. But even the best of them wouldn’t have had what made us what we were.” He spoke of the love they had for each other, of the good times they had shared. Dean, menefreghista, looked up, fixed Jerry with one of those half-lidded glances. “You can talk about love all you want. To me, you’re nothing but a fucking dollar sign.”

And he never gave an inch, never cracked, not through the Vegas years with Sinatra and Sammy Davis, not through dozens of corny TV specials and disposable pictures. He made some good films, like Some Came Running and Rio Bravo, and then, apparently satisfied that he could act with the best of them if he tried, stopped trying. He made decent records, but didn’t care about making them lasting or definitive works of art, as Sinatra did. You can hear early warning signs of Dino’s drift into nothingness on The Rat Pack: Live at the Sands, one of the only surviving audio documents of that storied Vegas residency. Sinatra, once you clear your modern ears of all the tired associations, all the JFK, Marilyn, Bucca Di Beppo, shooby-dooby-doo crap, is a supreme technician, his voice astonishingly flexible and subtle. Tosches maintains an anti-Frank streak in Dino, calls him a wannabe, a mama’s boy, a phony, but he was a perfectionist, always at the limit of his art, always searching for new things to do with arrangements and deliveries, a man who left an indelible stamp on the recording industry, and when you hear him on Live at the Sands delivering ferocious versions of “I Only Have Eyes For You” and “Luck Be A Lady,” you feel thankful for all the effort that must have gone into that effortless, triumphant glide. Dean was also blessed with a voice of memorable warmth and depth, but you can’t imagine him on a coffee-and-cigarette all-nighter with his arranger, trying to get everything just exactly perfect. He’ll go through thirty-two bars of a song then dismiss it with a wisecrack, above the material, above caring. He plays up his disinterest, preferring to riff it up onstage with innumerable jokes about his drinking and lines about women, Jews, coloureds, queers that aren’t even effortful enough to really bother being offended by. This is what it was all for, you think. This is why we split the atom and rained death on Europe and Japan and became the most powerful empire the world has ever seen, so these guys could sell their dopey vision of endless fraternal pleasure to the Insurance Salesmen of East Orange and the Rotary Club of North Reno, a bunch of slobs sitting at their tables in the Copa Room, imagining themselves as one of the boys. “Hey Sammy, how do you make a fruit cordial?” “Be nice to him, I guess.” Yuk yuk yuk yuk yuk.

In 1976, Sinatra talked Dean into surprising Jerry on his muscular-dystrophy telethon, and the two made a show of public reconciliation, and “the grins that lighted both their faces as they embraced were brighter and more real than any they had shown in their ten long years as a team.” The next day, Jerry sent Dean a heartfelt letter; he wanted to strike up the old friendship again, let bygones be bygones. Dean never responded. God knows if he even opened it.

Co-stars in his films remember him as the epitome of professionalism and charm, easy to work with, but always somehow far away. Even Jeannie, his wife for 24 years, never felt she really knew him. “He’d come home, I’d say, ‘What happened today?’ He’d say, ‘Nothing.’,” she reminisced to Tosches, “I’d look at the news, and there would be the king and queen of England visiting the set and meeting Dean Martin. It just simply didn’t faze him. No one, nothing impressed him deeply.” This essential lack in his character fuels the best stretch of Dino, the long slow-motion car crash of its last hundred pages, in which Dean, like Richard Burton, fades away into drunken ennui, divorcing Jeannie and courting a succession of younger and younger beauties, trying to stave off time, to let the party go on just a bit longer so he doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to wake up and realize who and where he is. The apotheosis of this section, and of the book, and perhaps of celebrity biography as a whole, comes in Tosches’ description of the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast TV specials, which, what the hell, I reproduce in full below:

It was a dais of despair. They sat at banquet tables at either side of the podium: the undead of dreamland and the fleeting stars of the television seasons, each rising in turn, at the beckoning of Dean or his bloated sidekick, Orson Welles, to deliver the moribund jokes consigned to him for the occasion. Taped in part at the NBC studio in Burbank and partly at the Ziegfeld Room of the MGM Grand in Vegas, guests often delivered their lines to empty chairs or pretended spontaneous laughter at words that had been uttered in another state. As many as a thousand cut-and-paste edits were done to give each show the illusion that everyone was together in the same place at the same time. But no amount of editing could vanquish the pervasive air of hollow artificiality that came through. The forced attempts at humor came from a ten-writer assembly line; only Jonathan Winters and Don Rickles were ever allowed to write their own material. The jokes were so bad and the canned laughter so false, and that pervading hollow artificiality so funereal, that the shows had the quality of a relentlessly monotonous but vaguely disquieting dream. There were those who found “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast” entertaining. There were those who lived canned lives, who found release through canned laughter. “Time cries and lets you care,” the commercial said. Canned sadness, canned happiness: a wasteland full of empty cans. And there slouched Dean boozily at the dais—perhaps alone among the empty chairs, perhaps with the ghosts of others nearby laughing forlornly at God only knew what. That image of him, presiding abstractedly at this convivium of artificial life, would be the one that America retained, a final remembrance, as he faded from the prime-time heartland of mediocrity to the realm of myth.

Alzheimer’s found him a few years later and lung cancer a few years after that. But reading Tosches’ biography, you get the sense that they needn’t have bothered. He’d been dead for years.

IV.

Dread and dark times in America as I write this: murder in the streets, federal thugs in black Tahoes, frenzies of hatred and despair, violent fantasies of annihilation infesting our digital and physical commons. I promised myself I would never do this hacky “in the age of Trump” bit, which has stifled original and interesting cultural criticism for a decade now. (A decade! One-third of my one and only God-given sacred animal life!) I admit, though, that it’s difficult to read 1100 straight pages about excess, about celebrity, about having everything you want and still being miserable, about searching for meaning that won’t, can’t come, and not think of our disordered national character, and of the man in the White House, whose favorite song is—you really can’t make this up—“Is That All There Is?”.

But it’s not enough to sit on my high horse and condemn, to act as if these stories are useful simply as a way of taxonomizing people and tendencies I dislike. The death drive is everywhere these days, and it doesn’t see ideology (“Kill me!” a Minneapolis protestor shouts, in a video clip I recently saw, “Fucking kill me! Why don’t you fucking shoot me in the head!”). So I think about these two demented biographies and why I love them, and how the rise is okay, but really the allure for me is in the fall: Burton pickled in drink (I am dying, Egypt, dying), Dino mute, numb, and withdrawn, Elvis moping around Graceland, car crashes, overdoses, ghoulish makeup, past glories, shadowy mansions, bodies floating in pools. Our conventional wisdom about the dark side of fame is not quite right, I think. Beware of money, power, and celebrity, we say, they won’t make you happy. But in actuality, we crave the lows of fame just as much as the highs. Don’t we read these biographies to indulge in life at its limit, without morality, without scruples, and to see all the satisfyingly tragic consequences thereof? Isn’t there some part of you that imagines yourself famous and beloved, able to have anything you want—and then disgusted and bored with the whole thing? Isn’t that boredom and nihilism its own kind of glamour? Don’t you want to feel a little numb? Don’t you feel, just a little bit, the call of the void?

I also think about why I find myself so interested in this subset of maximalist writers, these men over 60 who crashed through the end of Hollywood and pop culture and were left trying to pick up the shards: Lewis (born 1960), Tosches (born 1949, died 2019), Bruce Wagner (born 1954, his brilliant mock-bio ROAR could easily have had a place in this essay), Bret Easton Ellis, James Ellroy. What are they doing that my peers aren’t? Why does it seem like these half-decrepit boomers can capture the decadence and terror and hallucinatory feeling of the present better than we can? Why have these two silly little showbiz books given me more to wrestle with than most novels that attempt to assay the contemporary?

I think it is because they are fearless, in the true sense of the word, which doesn’t mean they are needlessly provocative or puerile, or lazily cynical, or self-obsessedly confessional, all modes that look brave but are often their own forms of cowardice. Instead they acknowledge that call of the void, the darkness that is in all of us, no matter how we vote or how we feel or how unimpeachable our daily conduct is, and they wage a battle with it that reaches some form of synthesis or temporary reconciliation, even if it doesn’t look like one to the naked eye. That’s what’s going on below the surface in these biographies, and that’s why they are so dark, dreamy, and compelling compared to the usual workmanlike cradle-to-grave jobs.

To feel and to write with that fearlessness is a difficult task for me, having grown up online, in the arena, the panopticon where everyone is looking at you all the time. I’d much rather deceive myself, hide from my worst impulses, obey the policeman in my head. Yet that is no way forward, there can be no positive understanding or growth that way, in art or in life. Perhaps part of me needed to read these twin portraits of vice and debauchery to begin to understand that. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, William Blake once said. If only he could have seen Cleopatra.

Here’s a proposition for you: the American vernacular that emerged between roughly 1920 and 1970 was the second great peak of the English language, right up there with the era of Shakespeare and Donne. The Elizabethans had the printing press and the English Bible and reams of Ovid and Cicero beaten into them by country schoolmasters. Americans had immigration and mass media, which took Black street slang and Yiddish irony and showbiz argot and Park Avenue elocution and crashed it all together, creating the high-low bebop register found (in various combinations) in the work of Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Cab Calloway, Slim Gailliard, His Girl Friday, Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, Guys and Dolls, Dorothy Parker, Mad magazine—you get the idea. Other worlds and times might have had the edge on the nonverbal aspects of art, and it’s understandable that one might prefer Dickens or Dostoevsky to these priapic midcentury Yankees. But when it comes to not what you say but how you say it, when it comes to rhythm and slang, assonance and resonance, velocity and compression, words, words, beautiful words, all I can say is: buy American, baby.

And no critic captured the sheer pleasure of words in this period quite like James Wolcott, who came in at the end, in the early 1970s, and thus had the verbal riches of the entire era at his disposal. Eagle-eyed readers of A Good Hard Stare may have noticed that this is the third in a trilogy of tributes to the great essayists of the past few decades, a digestivo of sorts to the first two entree-sized entries on Janet Malcolm and Susan Sontag (found here and here). Malcolm and Sontag are colossi by anyone’s metric, when discussing them you reach for phrases like “keen moral intelligence,” “penetrating insight” and “prodigious erudition.” And it’s certainly true that I could read The Silent Woman and Against Interpretation every day for a week and twice on Sunday and find something new to love every time. But Wolcott is pure fun, in a way they aren’t. Reading him is like spending time with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success, with its hyperreal hepcat dialogue (“The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river,” “If you’re funny, I’m a pretzel,” and so forth). If he has a critical philosophy, it’s that every sentence should contain an image that surprises and delights. He disdains archons of high seriousness like Sontag (in his memoir Lucking Out he refers her practice of giving endorsements as “swinging her incense ball,” and describes her acolytes as having a “pinched anality.”), instead favoring an all-but-forgotten alterna-canon of critics with schlemiel-y names like Seymour Krim and Marvin Mudrick. His style is snappy, witty, jazzy, full of Walter Winchell patter and alliteration. It’s one developed not at the academy, or in the demure pages of Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker but at the Village Voice and Vanity Fair, where it had to compete for eyeballs with maverick rock critics and true tales of Fear City at the former and with scratch ‘n sniff perfume ads and Annie Leibovitz glamour shots at the latter. Boring or puffed-up criticism was (with certain exceptions) quickly shown the door in the glory days of those outlets. Wolcott seems to have decided he would simply never be boring.

Though his purchasable output is relatively small—one big best-of collection (Critical Mass), one slight-but-charming novel (The Catsitters), one memoir (Lucking Out), and one book-length anatomy of Bush-era conservative media (Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants, I have to admit I skipped this one)—Wolcott has occupied a visible perch nearly from the beginning. A college dropout from Maryland, he arrived in Manhattan like some Balzacian arriviste, with nothing to his name but a letter of introduction. Luckily, said letter was from no less than Norman Mailer, recommending the young go-getter to Dan Wolf, editor of the Village Voice, and after a bumpy start Wolcott found himself a place in the fizzing, sparking laboratory of journalism and criticism that was the Voice in the 1970s. Editorial changes led to a quick climb up the ladder for Wolcott (“Up blew the whale spout and on a spume of foam I flew,” as he mellifluously puts it) and he settled into a role reviewing music, television, and film, the latter under the tutelage of Pauline Kael, whose role in Wolcott’s life and the life of his fellow “Paulettes” is given many pages in Lucking Out. I’ve never gotten on Kael’s wavelength as a critic—a real you-had-to-be-there phenomenon, it seems to me—and Wolcott’s accounts of her and her toadies whispering loudly through screenings and then retiring to the Algonquin to snicker the night away frankly sound like slow death to me, but there must have been some alchemy there, because Wolcott kept improving, graduating from 1000-word quickies at the Voice to longer, looser work, first in Harper’s, then in a long-running column for Vanity Fair. (Lucking Out ends at the close of the 70s, but 80s Wolcott features as a minor character in Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries, “pale and raffish,” exuding “vague, downtown hostility.”)

My favorite Wolcott essay from this era, which will give you a taste of his Groucho-Marxian attitude towards the pretentious and powerful, is one of his last for the Voice: “Knowledge is Good? The Intellectual Killer Elite,” a long dispatch from a 1980 conference put on by the literary magazine Salmagundi at which now-chieseled-in-stone names like Sontag, Christopher Lasch, George Steiner, and Leslie Fiedler mused publicly on the fate of capital-W capital-C Western Culture. For those of us who are prone to romanticizing the era when the New York Review of Books really meant something, the essay is a welcome and hilarious dose of reality, showing as it does that these 92nd Street Y bull sessions were just as ghastly then as they are now. God, how ridiculous and humiliating the “public” part of “public intellectual” can be! Wolcott’s wryly defamiliarizing blow-by-blow is a welcome pricking of the balloon; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for nerds.

It was a Luis Buñuel nightmare, invisible hands gripping us to the chairs as swallows chirped in Esperanto—a subcommittee meeting at the United Nations couldn’t have been more soul-stifling. It wasn’t all boredom: Sontag, after needlessly fluffling her feathers to inform us that she had slaved “five years on the six essays” in On Photography, spoke at some length about the Americanness of American photography: Fiedler, ebullient as Falstaff in an ale-house, claimed that a male sexist conspiracy was responsible for Harriet Beecher Stowe being denied her great due (sighs, groans); and [Gerald] Graff stirred the audience to hisses when he told them they didn’t ask good questions. As if to prove his point, a Vietnam veteran who had asked a question the previous day complained that his query hadn’t been satisfyingly answered. [Stanley] Kauffmann said, Excuse me, I thought I had answered your question; no, said Sontag, I don’t believe you did, Stanley. Well, why don’t you ask your question again? said Kauffmann, the Soul of Liberal Reason. And, dropping a needle into a groove, the man said, “I’m a Vietnam veteran …” and reasked his question word for tiresome word.

The 1990s found Wolcott following Tina Brown to The New Yorker, before retreating back to Vanity Fair—to hear Dwight Garner (!) tell it in a 1997 Salon article on the reign of Queen Tina, he was “boxed into the TV beat,” at the New Yorker, “[grappling] futilely with an endless parade of talk shows and Fox sitcoms.” He left Vanity Fair again in 2018 (or was gently shown the door after the fall of the Graydon Carter regime—we’ll leave that one to the magazine historians) but remains active to this day, popping up regularly at Carter’s Air Mail and Leon Wieseltier’s Liberties. The fastball has perhaps lost a few ticks—the smug anti-Bernie Bro essay in Liberties is a tough sit, and the long demolition job on the New York Times in the same publication should be good but has a certain sweatiness to it—but the pen mostly still flashes and whizzes, bringing verbal dynamism to the buttery-smooth airport-lounge stylings of the former and color and character to the somber Partisan-Review-revisited pages of the latter. He’s still a drop-everything-and-read writer for me, which is saying something when the fate of so much talent is to languish in my dozens of browser tabs for days, and to be closed unread when my laptop, overburdened, begins to emit steam and sparks.

His best period, however, is his late 2010s and early 2020s work at the London Review of Books, which allowed him to stretch out, step away from the weekly grind of talking about Mare of Easttown or some other now-forgotten streaming product, and unfurl luxurious seven, eight, nine thousand word dispatches about the great and not-so-great writers of days just gone by: big names like Bellow, Roth, and Sontag, and also-rans like Norman Podhoretz and William Styron (any family resemblance between his essays on Norman P. and Susan S. and my own is, I assure you, purely uncoincidental). Biographies and collected letters were just beginning to emerge for these recently or nearly-dead figures, so the time was right for a summing-up, a final verdict rendered in technicolor prose, and these long, exploratory riffs on the pleasures and failures of an entire career proved to be the ideal form for Wolcott: more substantial than his quick takes for Vanity Fair and the like, but not so long that his florid style begins to grate. Consider the following, on Roth and the ill-fated Blake Bailey biography. This is criticism as brainy standup or Portnoyish-Herzogian monologue: arguing with yourself, arguing with the world, making a performance of your ambivalences and contradictory feelings and rendering it as a neurotic, brilliant stream of prose.

Exemplary craftsman, incorrigible satyr, subversive joker, avid grievance collector, liberal humanist, good son, bad husband, bountiful benefactor, Philip Roth in his prickly contrarieties aroused an ambivalence unlike that of almost any other American writer, and this ambivalence may have been what helps keep him alive for us, always under contention, a disputable proposition. Or kept him alive because, from here on, who the hell knows? I’ve been switching tenses around like a three-card monte dealer because I don’t know where we are with Roth. He’s a great writer but is he a great writer? And what does ‘great writer’ mean now anyhow? I find that I’ve gone numb of feeling for and about Roth in the study of his dinosaur bones. He has been abstracted into unreality. I almost feel sorry for his ghost. Roth’s glowering omnipresence this spring, thanks no thanks to the Bailey imbroglio, has obliterated him as a writer citizen and former earthling, and substituted in his stead Philip Roth, a man-shaped mass of dark matter sucking in everyone’s antipathies, not so much cancelled as stencilled black.

More than any other jobbing critic, I think, Wolcott has made me consider the (brace yourself) purpose of criticism. After all, guys like him aren’t theorists pursuing some specific aesthetic program or using literature and culture to chart the limits of the Liberal Imagination or otherwise intoning with the seriousness of a Trilling or a Sontag or a James Wood or any other incense-swinger. Those long LRB essays I adore, for example—a maximally uncharitable reading would accuse them of being not much more than Wikipedia pages in colorful drag, leavened with the occasional sprinkle of opinion or sardonic aside. More fun than Wikipedia, to be sure, but what’s that sort of thing doing, besides providing a few chuckles? Is there really honor in being a glorified summary merchant, or in leveling a few rude jibes or judicious spoonfuls of praise at some work of art which someone labored mightily to bring into this world?

My answer, and Wolcott’s, I suspect, would run something like this: when you really care about something, whether that care takes a positive or negative form, you want to add your own stamp to it, want to make your interpretation part of its greater objecthood, like a jazz musician laying into a hoary old Broadway number like “All the Things You Are” or “Night and Day.” And the best way to do that is through a language of freshness, invention, and variety which, at its best, leaves an indelible imprint, adds a little dab of detail to the great canvas of the world. I’ll never look at a magazine masthead again without thinking of Wolcott describing the Hudson Review’s “bullpen of hard-throwing critics.” Every time Frank Sinatra floats over the speakers, I think of Wolcott’s description of his “Manhattan-skyline voice” (such an obvious descriptor, and yet no one had ever thought to employ it). The sentences of his Village Voice comrade James Tipmore he describes as having “a white-birch quality: lean, upright, singular.” Once read, never forgotten, Wolcott sentences at their best are little bursts of mind-altering joy.

So whither the Wolcottian scribbler? Lucking Out, like all these 70s New York memoirs which some sick compulsion forces me to purchase by the truckload, has an elegiac tone to it. Things were great then, even though you might get knifed on the subway, now they’re not so great. Critics were important and interesting, now they’re not. An omnivorous cultural and critical public, not yet hit by AIDS, high rents, and the collapse of media, would go to a Balanchine ballet in the morning, a new Coppola flick in the afternoon, and CBGB’s at night, now we all stay in and order DoorDash and watch Beast Games, and so on and so forth. To be fair to Wolcott, he published Lucking Out in 2012, right as the old sequoias were falling and no green shoots had yet emerged to take their place, and anyway, buying a memoir like this and getting annoyed that it contains those-were-the-days sentiments is like ordering a bacon cheeseburger and complaining about the cholesterol.

Yet as I read it I thought of my own circle, of the many who parlayed comments section cut-and-thrust and online graphomania into something resembling success. I’m not trying to be cute when I say this: I’ve read a lot of essays in my time and I think you could put a masthead of my peers— , , , , , and many more—up against any murderers-row lineup from the Village Voice and its ilk and come away with, if not a knockout, at least a hard-fought ten rounds. And, if I can humbly offer my own example, exactly one year ago as I write this I was holed up in an AirBnB, wondering if my apartment was going to burn down in the LA fires and writing an essay for Metropolitan Review, the first piece of writing I ever got paid for. I was just some schmuck, obsessed with Wolcott and with Martin Amis and Peter Schjeldahl and all those other lords of language. Now I’m still some schmuck, but things have improbably progressed to the point where I can, if I squint, say to myself what Mailer said to Wolcott in his letter: “I think you have a career.” “So much is gone, stricken from the scene,” begins Lucking Out. So much indeed, but all is not lost. The institutions may change or collapse, the money may dry up, and the cultural power of the writer may shrink. But as long as critics like Wolcott are around to inspire, this deeply silly vocation, this compulsion to transmute experience into words, will continue to call to a certain subset of weirdos. Wolcott said as much himself in his introduction to Critical Mass, so let’s let him play us off the stage:

Non-practitioners envy the life of a writer, even if that life isn’t what it used to be, because for all of its anxieties and discouragements, writing is the greatest form of aviation that you can perform while firmly planted: the freedom, the vistas, the right word snapping a sentence to attention like the click of a gun, the passages that stretch into long solos, the nights when everything recedes and you feel as if you’re the only one awake in the world: welcome to the pros.

I. The Life

She was the Girl from the Golden West, born on Long Island but coming to awareness first among the red rocks and tumbleweeds of Tucson, then in Sherman Oaks, where she played World’s Smartest Valley Girl at North Hollywood High. There was always something different about Susan Sontag, some mysterious inner drive that was nowhere to be found in her glamorous, alcoholic mother, in her long-dead father (a fur trader in China), or anywhere else in the family tree. From an early age she worked at becoming an intellectual the way Tom Brady worked at throwing spirals, ripping through Les Misérables at age nine, laying out her disagreements with Schopenhauer at fourteen, hiding copies of Critique of Pure Reason behind the Reader’s Digests she was made to sit with in class (this actually happened, at least according to her). In California she found the combination that would power so many of her early essays: high culture, low schlock. She and her friend Florence Malraux (daughter of Man’s Fate novelist André) would catch matinees of Sunset Boulevard and Winchester ‘73 and The Thing From Another World while Thomas Mann and Theodor Adorno sat brooding on the fate of civilization in Brentwood, just a few miles away. She haunted a newsstand on Hollywood and Las Palmas that kept “the porno in the front and the lit mags in the rear.” The rest of her time she spent reading, reading, reading, filling up her icy, self-lacerating journals with aspirations and exhortations “to see more, to hear more, to feel more,” a phrase that becomes a leitmotif in Benjamin Moser’s thick-as-a-brick 2019 biography Sontag: Her Life and Work. “My greatest dream,” she later said, “was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.” She got all that and much more.

But first, there were the wilderness years: a whistlestop tour of the Western world’s premier fortresses of intellect—Berkeley and UChicago for undergrad, then Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne—and an unhappy nine-year marriage to Philip Rieff, a UChicago sociologist who Sontag married after a ten-day courtship, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-eight (Their union was sealed by a justice of the peace in Burbank, and celebrated with milkshakes at Bob’s Big Boy). “They stayed in bed most of the first months of their marriage,” Sontag later wrote in an autobiographical sketch “making love four or five times a day and in between talking, talking endlessly about art and politics and religion and morals.” She gave birth to their son, David, when she was just nineteen. But Rieff, like many men of his generation, was domineering, insecure, and, one surmises, resented his wife’s brilliance, and Susan generally—though not always—preferred the company of women. Leaving David behind, she split for Oxford, then Paris, then New York, charming the local intellectual heavyweights wherever she went, from Iris Murdoch to Jean-Paul Sartre to Lionel Trilling. In New York she wrote theatre criticism for Partisan Review, as Mary McCarthy had once done, and published The Benefactor, a book in thrall to the then-trendy French idea that since life is fragmentary, difficult, and often boring, so too should be the novel (“This surrender of the novel’s commitment to facileness, to easy availability and the perpetuation of an outmoded aesthetic, will undoubtedly give rise to a great many boring and pretentious books, and one may well come to wish the old unselfconsciousness back again.” she wrote in her essay/manifesto “Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel,” “But the price must be paid.” Christ, must it?). She was a bright new star in the PR firmament, a model student. Or she was until, in the fall of 1964, she published a slim, brilliant essay, a cocktail of aphorisms, erudite historical claims, insouciant winks, and just-spitballing-here casualness: “Notes on Camp.”

“Notes on Camp” hit New York intellectual society like Beatlemania—suddenly, everything that was once new seemed very, very old. The old PR crowd, the McCarthys and MacDonalds and Podhoretzes with their long skirts and flannel suits and dry martinis and arguments over Stalin and Freud and Mass Man and The Party all looked positively Elizabethan compared to Susan, doing screen tests at the Factory, spreading the gospel of science fiction films, of Godard and Bresson, of the gay underground and downtown theater. “The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility” she wrote in “Notes on Camp” “are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.” “Notes on Camp”—original title “Notes on Homosexuality”—had turned the dial way down on the former and injected a healthy dose of the latter into the rabbinically serious Partisan Review. What’s worse, it had gone as viral as an essay could go in 1964, reprinted in Time and discussed in the New York Times Book Review. “Now everyone is to do “his thing,” high, middle, or low; the old puritan habit of interpretation and judgment, so inimical to sensuousness, gives way to a programmed receptivity” sniffed Irving Howe, and Hilton Kramer accused her of contributing to “the spiritual bankruptcy of the post-modern era” by severing “the link between high culture and high seriousness.” Harsh words, but the bellows of a wounded beast. Rhetoric like this suddenly felt as fusty as the leaden Hollywood epics of the early 60s did compared to Breathless and Pickpocket. It was Susan’s time now.

As Moser points out, flipping through a copy of Sontag’s debut collection Against Interpretation, with its high-handed essays on Sartre, Weil, Lukács, and Artaud, provokes the thought “If this woman is an enemy of high culture, who could possibly be its friend?” And it is also true that much of the criticism of “Notes on Camp” was coded homophobia; the PR intellectuals, bookish Jews still smarting from being called a sissy in their stickball games and tenement rumbles, were perturbed at the suggestion that they were in danger of losing their title as arbiters of culture to a bunch of downtown fairies. But Against Interpretation did pose a real challenge to the previous generation of intellectuals with the famous final sentence of its title essay: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” That is to say, criticism must “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it,” we must put down Marx and Freud, those old decoder rings, and find a way to deal with art directly. Kafka’s The Castle, goes her famous example, is not a religious allegory, a psychoanalytic fable, or a criticism of the totalitarian state. It is all of those things and more, it is itself, and must be dealt with as such.

Did Sontag follow her own dictates? Reading through Against Interpretation, one sees the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. She belongs to no school, applies no deadening ideological lens. She is a great popularizer; one can read hundreds of accounts of picking up Against Interpretation, with its glamour shot of Sontag on the paperback cover, and discovering a new, secret world of literature, theatre, and film. She has a great talent for aphorism and can begin and end an essay like nobody’s business: “Great writers are either husbands or lovers” begins her essay on Camus, “The cultural heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois” begins the one on Weil. She writes simply and compellingly about the process of thought and reflection that occurs upon encountering a work of art. And she avoids concrete conclusions, preferring to probe, investigate, follow her nose. “The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it,” wrote A.O. Scott in a 2019 appreciation.

Yet there is another, less charitable way of phrasing that—namely, that she sometimes uses a lot of words to say not very much at all. The great Sontag essays are exhilarating examples of thinking around a subject, examining it from every angle and writing up the results. They are pure exercises of mind and of investigation, carried by an unforgettable confidence. The lesser ones get lost in their own windy circumambulations, in love with the sound of their own pronouncements. When she opens an essay in Against Interpretation with a banal statement of fact instead of an interesting provocation, such as “The theater has a long history as a public art” or “The supreme tragic event of modern times is the murder of the six million European Jews,” the reader is so primed to expect a thunderbolt from the heavens that these truisms strike a faintly comic note. So saith Sontag! This, it should be said, was the house style for New York intellectuals of the early sixties; the above description could apply just as easily to Lionel Trilling. But a different time demanded a different attitude from its celebrity literary critics, and as she found herself facing the cultural ruptures of the seventies and eighties, this tendency to speak in declarations would sometimes wear out its welcome.

Not yet, though. Sixties Susan—one can almost hear the strains of “Fortunate Son” and see the montage of love-ins, sit-ins, and be-ins. Susan at Elaine’s with Leonard Bernstein, Richard Avedon, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Susan going to Europe to make films, Susan at Cannes with Jean-Luc Godard and John Lennon. Susan protesting against the Vietnam War with all the other writers of the era, and facing down an outcry for her claim that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” Susan photographed (she photographed so well) by Arbus, Hujar, Avedon, Cartier-Bresson. Even Moser can’t make much out of her 1967 novel Death Kit (mostly notable for having a protagonist named “Diddy”), but her 1969 collection Styles of Radical Will is perhaps her strongest: long, meaty essays on pornography, Cioran, Bergman, and her two essays on Vietnam, the petulant “What’s Happening in America,” with the aforementioned kill-whitey sentiments, and the longer reflection “Trip to Hanoi.” She claimed deep discomfort with writing in the first person and with becoming a character in her own work, as her contemporary Norman Mailer was doing, but “Trip to Hanoi” outdoes even Mailer’s Armies of the Night in its self-searching fearlessness, in its abandonment of cliché, and in its attunement to Sontag’s own uglier feelings—the disorientation and alienation she found on her trip to North Vietnam, despite her professed solidarity with its residents. She rarely returned to the personal, except obliquely, but her honesty about the limits of her sympathy and perception makes her achievement within those limits all the more admirable.

1975 brought a shock: breast cancer, stage four, prognosis dire. It was the first of her three heavyweight bouts with the disease—but no, one shouldn’t describe it as such, because her grueling cancer treatment produced her most straightforward and fiery work: Illness as Metaphor. Making no reference to her own situation, Illness as Metaphor contrasted tuberculosis, which was seen in its day as the disease of the sensitive soul too good for this earth (Keats, Shelley, the saintly, virginal cousin in The Portrait of a Lady) and cancer, which, in those Wilhelm Reich-y times, was widely seen as a disease brought on by repression. Neither is any such thing, Illness as Metaphor argues, and the fact that no one today espouses the romantic view of tuberculosis should cause us to question our attitudes towards cancer and towards illness as a whole. That today some of it reads as antiquated—doctors wouldn’t use the C-word with patients? People really blamed themselves for being too stressed or sexually frigid?—is a testament to the real shift in attitudes it helped to create, and even with its societal mission mostly accomplished, it is still thrilling to feel the sense of secret urgency vibrating just behind the coolly analytical text. Like “Against Interpretation,” it crackles with dialectical tension: metaphor can lead us into traps, dull our thinking, but metaphor is also inescapable, the art of writing is itself metaphor. How could Illness as Metaphor’s famous first sentence—“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.”—exist without it?

Against long odds, she lived. Her brush with her own mortality made her both productive and briefly beatific, her cancer was “the only time in my life I knew I was loved,” she wrote in her journals. Chemotherapy had turned her hair silver; she dyed it back to black but left one Bride-of-Frankenstein streak, creating the most famous hairdo in the history of literary criticism. And she redoubled her efforts: Illness as Metaphor was the second in her late-70s trilogy—On Photography, a dyspeptic series of reflections on the promise and betrayal of the photograph, had come out a year earlier and her essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn appeared in 1980. Under the Sign of Saturn is Sontag at her most majestic: the raven queen of the intellect, black wings spread wide. It contains some of her greatest hits: the title essay, a beautifully observant elegy for Walter Benjamin, “Fascinating Fascism,” her demolition of the attempted rehabilitation of Leni Riefenstahl, and “Mind as Passion,” a portrait of Elias Canetti that doubles as a portrait of Sontag herself. “So whole-hearted is Canetti’s relation to the duty and pleasure of admiring others,” she writes, “so fastidious is his sense of the writer’s vocation, that humility—and pride—make him extremely self-involved in a characteristically impersonal way. He is preoccupied with being someone he can admire [...] Canetti is constantly prodding himself with the example of the great dead, identifying the intellectual necessity of what he undertakes, checking his mental temperature, shuddering with terror as the calendar sheds its leaves.” Sound like anyone you know, Susan? Under the Sign of Saturn is a hymn to knowledge, to the pleasures and duties of a life spent reading, writing, and thinking. While reading it, one is convinced there can be no higher vocation.

Yet some of the lithe and curious energy that powered Against Interpretation has gone. No more camp, no more Flaming Creatures, no more nouvelle vague, no more Warhol, no more ear-to-the-ground reports on America’s intellectual and cultural upheavals. Under the Sign of Saturn is preoccupied with raising edifices, constructing gleaming marble monuments to melancholy Mitteleuropeans. A tone of austerity pervades. No Nabokovian delicacy or Wildean wit allowed in Sontag’s new canon; she prefers writers who strap on their swords and venture like Siegfried into the dragon’s lair, and show the sweat and toil of their efforts in their output, writers who skirt the edge of madness or whose melancholy renders them too good for this world. Benjamin is admired for being “fastidious, intransigent, fiercely serious…a prince of the intellectual life.” Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s seven-hour Hitler, A Film From Germany “belongs in the category of noble masterpieces which ask for fealty and can compel it.” Oh boy, one thinks, fealty.

Creaking under the weight of Western Culture, her public output slowed, though her star continued to ascend: she gave lectures, spoke at galas, appeared on television, accepted awards. “Everything your society has worked so hard to accomplish over the centuries, that’s what we aspire to; we want to be civilized.” croaks a creature in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch. “The Geneva Convention. Chamber music. Susan Sontag!” By 1990, the year of the film’s release, she was pop-culture shorthand for a grande dame of high seriousness, and for the first time in her life, she had the money to match. Her relationship with the fabulously wealthy Annie Leibovitz, with whom she would spend the rest of her life, catapulted her into a world of car service, first-class flights, and private chefs. She traded in her blue jeans for silk and cashmere and moved into a massive Chelsea apartment with “broad views of the Hudson and the Empire State Building and marble fireplaces in tall rooms.” It was the full flowering of her diva era and the anecdotes of her bad behavior come thick and fast. Every belletrist and scribbler in Manhattan had a Sontag story. “The contents of daily reality exasperated her beyond endurance,” wrote her former friend Gary Indiana in his memoir. “She was unflaggingly rude to waiters, cab drivers, hotel clerks.” Her relationship with Leibovitz had a strange, Sadean character. “People couldn’t bear to be with her at dinner when she was with Annie because she was so sadistic, so insulting, so cruel,” recalled Joan Acocella. And her appetite for culture, the all-consuming drive that had powered her formative years, never abated. “An ideal evening might include a play at La Mama, dinner in Chinatown, followed by a film at the Bleecker Street Cinema, with a midnight kung fu double feature in Times Square as a nightcap,” wrote Indiana.

She worked up to her exaltations with an eye to impress those around her with a depth of feeling that seemed a bit dramatized and artificial. It took formidable willfulness for her to cry at the end of Vigo’s L’Atalante, I thought, when she had already seen it thirty times.

She and Leibovitz kept separate apartments, and their travel schedules often separated them, but she had a pathological fear of being alone. She installed David as her editor at FSG, and saw him nearly every day. Most writers require solitude, she abhorred it. “Come to my room,” she would tell the critic Michael Silverblatt. “I’m going to be writing. We can babble.”

She waded into the thick of certain social issues. She turned on communism, calling it “fascism with a human face” to widespread consternation from her old lefty colleagues. She used her position as president of PEN to muster a vigorous public defense of Salman Rushdie during the Satanic Verses affair, when many writers had been shamefully timid and equivocal. She skirted others: gay activists castigated her for never publicly coming out during the AIDS epidemic, when her friends were dying in droves (Her thin would-be sequel to Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and its Metaphors, is Sontagian dithering at its worst, aimless and windy). In the early 1990s, however, she found a cause she could throw herself into wholeheartedly, when she took the first of her many trips to Sarajevo.

Sontag’s time in the besieged city, where she directed a production of Waiting for Godot, has been the butt of many jokes: Toni Morrison quipped she was going to Mogadishu to direct A Raisin in the Sun. Sontag’s nemesis Camille Paglia called it “a ghoulish attempt to re-create her glory days, using other people’s misery as a backdrop.” And it does seem eminently mockable; the out-of-touch intellectual parachuting in among the starved and bombed to spout about the importance of art in a crisis. But Moser convincingly argues for her real heroism and bravery. Sarajevans quoted in the book are unanimous in their conviction that, while many public figures did indeed approach the conflict as a brand-building photo-op, Sontag was different. “We were very cynical about the whole circus element of these war safaris,” one says, “I just assumed she was in for a quick look at how these people on the reservation lived—and she would go. Then she stayed. That was very, very surprising.” Unlike in Vietnam, the mature Sontag found a sense of kinship with the Sarajevans. Her New York haughtiness and nervousness disappeared; she brought them food, cigarettes, luxury goods, worked ten-hour rehearsal days, refused to wear a flak jacket, stayed with her actors during the shelling of the city. Those involved with the play, whether as actors or audience members, remember it as a lifeline of purpose and sanity during a chaotic, terrifying time. Like Beckett in the French Resistance or Orwell in the Spanish Civil War, she joined a rarified class of writers: those who put their bodies on the line for their beliefs, in her case, her belief in art as the highest good. I must confess I was one of those who have in the past used Sarajevo Susan as an example of public intellectuals at their most delusionally egotistical. I stand chastened and corrected. It was, to use a favorite word of hers, an exemplary episode in her life.

She returned to novels. In 1992 she published a brainy historical romance and surprise bestseller, The Volcano Lover, and followed it with 2000’s In America, which won the National Book Award. No longer an advocate of intentional difficulty or a disparager of plot and character, she claimed that she had discovered a second life as a storyteller. In 2003 came Regarding the Pain of Others, an extended essay on war photography drawn from her experiences in Bosnia, and published just before the invasion of Iraq. Regarding the Pain of Others lacks the force of her earlier essays, and like AIDS and its Metaphors, suffers from an unwillingness to draw any conclusions other than those the reader would likely already have held: war photography can be used for activism or propaganda, photographs are often staged but suffering is real, images can be equally enlightening and treacherous. Yet one admires the book’s willingness to look askance at her earlier positions, to circle back to certain claims made in On Photography and Against Interpretation and test them against the reality of her time under siege. It ends on a note of warning: those who have lived their lives in comfort, free from danger, can never really grasp the reality of war. In its way this is a restatement of her thesis in “Against Interpretation”: direct experience alone is sufficient. Yet elsewhere in the book she concedes that while this may be the case, one nevertheless cannot shirk one’s duty to the intellect.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision—the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.

“There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking,” the chapter concludes. A fitting epitaph.

She only got a few short years to enjoy life as both an acclaimed novelist and a first-team all-pro public intellectual, titles she had wanted since those dreamy Southern California days. The end came badly. Cancer, again; she had survived it twice already (it had recurred in 1998, chemotherapy sent it packing), she wasn’t going to stop raging against the dying of the light now. From hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee, she might have said, had she preferred polymorphous and queer American writers to dour and saturnine continentals. Given six months to live, she flew to Seattle to undergo an excruciating bone-marrow transplant. Her friends stayed by her side as she recovered, reading to her, listening to Wagner and Verdi, and watching movies, “not Dreyer or Bergman but Cary Grant and Fred Astaire,” sunny fantasies from the golden age of the American musical. She began to regain her strength and it looked, for a moment, like she might have done the impossible again. But the graft failed and her condition rapidly deteriorated. “But this means I am dying!” she screamed at the doctors. She couldn’t, not yet, she had work to do, books to read. She flew back to New York in a medevac plane, and was installed in Sloan-Kettering. On good days she worked on her final published essay, an introduction to Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness, and kvetched about the quality of writing in the New Republic. On bad days she developed paranoid fantasies, claiming that the nurses and doctors were plotting against her. Until the very end, she spoke of what she would do when she got out of the hospital.

To philosophize is to learn to die, they say, and it is disquieting to know that imbibing three thousand years of the Western intellectual tradition doesn’t seem to have helped Sontag accept her own fate. But one can’t help but admire her refusal to submit, like Ahab, defiant to the last. On her final morning, she roused briefly, asking for David. He leaned in close. “I want to tell you…” she said and then she said no more.

II. The Afterlife

Après Susan, le déluge. Before the dirt finished settling on her grave (in Montparnasse Cemetery, with Baudelaire, Barthes, Sartre, and de Beauvoir), everyone who ever clinked glasses or shook hands with Sontag set out to canonize her, tear her down, or chart some ambivalent middle way. Her generation of critics and essayists had to reckon with her as a peer, a devouring mother who sucked up all the oxygen in the room. The generation after her looked to her as a model, the public critic who rubbed shoulders with real power, and they had to reckon with their disappointment that the field had shrunk, and that none of them were likely to get an 800-page biography or hear their name come out of the mouth of a gremlin puppet. An anecdote from Moser illustrates the long shadow her personality cast over New York intellectual life:

Jeff Seroy, head of publicity at FSG, once mentioned her to his psychiatrist, only to hear the shrink burst out laughing. Seroy asked what was so funny. The doctor answered: “You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that couch over the years and talked about Susan Sontag.”

So it was no surprise when, after the usual round of toasts and farewells, the first Jacobin pamphlet appeared in the London Review of Books: Terry Castle’s essay “Desperately Seeking Susan,” a memoir of her friendship with Sontag that drew her as “great comic character” whose “carefully cultivated moral seriousness [...] co-existed with a fantastical, Mrs Jellyby-like absurdity.” In its most famous setpiece, the regal Sontag dashes serpentine down Palo Alto’s suburban main street, “pointing at imaginary gunmen on rooftops and gesticulating wildly at me to follow,” demonstrating to Castle how she evaded sniper fire in Bosnia. Elsewhere, Castle recalls with exquisite Waughian cringe comedy a nightmarish dinner party featuring Sontag, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Marina Abramovic, in which the non-famous Castle is utterly ignored:

At one point I thought I saw Laurie Anderson, at the other end of the table, trying to get my attention: she was smiling sweetly in my direction, as if to undo my pathetic isolation. I smiled in gratitude in return and held up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed, she gestured back impatiently, with a sharp downward flick of her index finger: she wanted me to pass the wine bottle […] [Sontag] did not react when I finally decided to leave – on my own – just after coffee had been served.

These days, given what we know about Sontag’s bad behavior, Castle’s sustained comic routine of her time loving, hating, befriending, and being spurned by her fellow critic doesn’t come off as particularly cruel or iconoclastic. But she was the first to puncture the balloon and she paid the price: a nasty email from David Rieff and a disinvitation from Sontag’s memorial service. Eliot Weinberger in the New York Review of Books got his kicks in a few years later. Reviewing her final collection, he was respectful of her talents but clearly regarded her as part of the enemy camp. A polymath and internationalist, who had hitchhiked across South America and spent his days translating everyone from Octavio Paz to Tu Fu, he had no time for Sontag, for whom culture was something produced between Lisbon and St. Petersburg, and who couldn’t see what was going on in her own backyard.

What was missing in the book was any sense that Sontag was raising the revolutionary banner in a very tiny kingdom. When, in a famous sentence—the entire last section of her title essay—she declared, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” the first-person plural reflected how isolated that kingdom was. It was already forty years after the first Surrealist manifesto or, closer to home, seven or eight years after “Howl” or On the Road. “We” could have taken the subway downtown.

In the end, he concluded, she may “belong more to literary history than to literature.”

New bits of Sontagiana continued to appear at a steady clip, a long public therapy session. There were the memoirs, like Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan, a mostly wistful recollection of Nunez’s time living with Sontag and David, her boyfriend at the time, in their uptown apartment. Sempre Susan presents Sontag the diva in all her aggravating glory, but shows her softer side as well; one wants to see it adapted as a Richard Linklater autumn-in-New-York coming-of-age film. There were the mementos mori: Sontag’s dreadful final days were documented visually by Leibovitz, whose publishing of photographs of her dying, bloated lover spurred accusations of bad taste, and in David Rieff’s brief, powerful meditation Swimming in a Sea of Death. They were documented again in captivating, should-I-even-be-reading-this detail in the brutally magnificent opening chapter of Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. There were the cameos: Sontag enjoys a walk-on role in nearly every memoir of 70s and 80s cultural life, from Gary Indiana’s scuzzy I Can Give You Anything But Love to Tina Brown’s court chronicle The Vanity Fair Diaries.

And there was Moser’s titanic biography, a literary event six years in the making, full of unpublished material from the letters and journals. Sontag: Her Life and Work came out to the requisite hosannas that accompany any book with enough interest and momentum and big-five marketing clout, and won Moser the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. But grumbles were audible, for those who were paying attention. There were several points of dispute. First, Moser claimed that Sontag had not only contributed extensively to Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, as was generally agreed, but had written the entire book herself, and he went so far as to tag quotations from the book with “she said” or “Sontag writes” (Rieff’s defenders pointed out that there is a very clear path from The Mind of the Moralist to later work like The Triumph of the Therapeutic, written well after their divorce). Second, he psychoanalyzed Sontag to a sometimes-unseemly degree, tracing everything back to her missing father and alcoholic mother and diagnosing her with a “Cluster B personality disorder.” “Indeed, many of the apparently rebarbative aspects of Sontag’s personality are clarified in light of the alcoholic family system,” he wrote, oblivious to the fact that we are not interested in what made Sontag difficult, like an annoying coworker, but what made her different. They fuck you up, your mom and dad, but in most cases they don’t turn you into Susan Sontag.

Third, beneath the smooth surface of the text he was clearly quaking mad at Sontag for her failures of solidarity. The book spends several pages scolding her for her refusal to come out during the AIDS crisis:

Not everyone—not every writer—needed to scream. But Sontag had always been willing to put her body on the line, and scorned those who did not: those who failed to make the trip to Hanoi or Havana; those who refused to risk death for Salman Rushdie or, soon, Sarajevo. The new AIDS activism was her kind of activism. She would not have needed to storm the Pentagon or ambush the cardinal-archbishop of New York. But there was much she could have done, and gay activists implored her to do the most basic, most courageous, most principled thing of all. They asked her to say “I,” to say “my body”: to come out of the closet. Signorile called Leibovitz’s studio day after day, asking her and Susan to comment on their relationship. Neither returned his calls.

Moser may well be correct that Sontag’s reticence to label herself dampened her solidarity with AIDS activists and made AIDS and its Metaphors an artistic failure. But who is this “Signorile,” who is so persistent on the phone? A few pages earlier, we learn that Michelangelo Signorile was a journalist, a columnist in OutWeek magazine, who became “notorious for revealing the homosexuality of famous people.” Moser reproduces this long quote from him, with evident approval.

“Even five years ago, many in the mainstream considered it an “embarrassment” to be out of the closet, “flaunting” one’s sexuality. People who were doing that were said to be “indiscreet” and were even considered “unfashionable.” But outing focused attention on the closet and what a horrible, pitiful place the closet is. Outing demands that everyone come out, and defines the closeted—especially those in power—as cowards who are stalling progress. With outing, the tables have turned completely: It is now an embarrassment to be in the closet.”

No doubt the closet can be a painful place. But to be forcibly labeled for your own good, to have to define yourself, so that the masses know how to categorize you, for your epistemological validity to rest on on what you admit to doing in the bedroom or in the house of worship—to be not a writers but a “lesbian writer,” a “Jewish writer,” a “woman writer”—these are things Sontag stood resolutely against. When faced with emotional blackmail, with you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, she tended to haughtily withdraw. One can make a case for what moral responsibility she may or may not have had to the victims of AIDS, many of whom were her close friends and contemporaries. But one can hardly blame her for not wanting to give this asshole the satisfaction.

And when Sontag clashed with Adrienne Rich in the pages of the New York Review of Books, Rich having accused her of insufficient sympathy with the feminist movement, Moser took Rich’s side. Rich, the militant feminist, lived her values, he claimed, while Sontag was unsisterly. (He also claimed Rich’s essays were “in no way inferior to Sontag’s,” to which I say: get real). “Susan’s growing cultural power, the power of her admiration, depended on being unquestionably established as a universal arbiter.” he wrote, “To be known as a feminist, much less as a lesbian, would have pushed her to the margins.” This accusation of cowardice and careerism seems absurd when considered alongside the fact that many female intellectuals of the 20th century, from Joan Didion to Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt to Helen Garner, shared Sontag’s stance of being pro-women but uncomfortable with the “Women’s Movement” and its demands of sisterhood above all.

All that being said, I like Moser’s biography. It has much to recommend it: its sweep and scope, its epic character, its narrative drive. It is a formidable scholarly achievement, and never boring. If you see him walking down the street in Utrecht, buy him a beer. Yet it’s worth looking at two responses to Moser, by two of this publication’s biggest literary influences. Janet Malcolm, whose New Yorker review was titled (Say the line, Bart!) “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography,” accused Moser as having “[dropped] the mask of neutral observer” and revealed himself to be “an intellectual adversary of his subject.” She then rose to defend Sontag, as someone whose flaws are to be, if not excused, at least understood, because she simply lived on a grander scale than the rest of us.

Moser’s anecdotes of the unpleasantness that she allowed herself as she grew older ring true, but recede in significance when viewed against the vast canvas of her lived experience. They are specks on it. The erudition for which she is known was part of a passion for culture that emerged, like a seedling in a crevice in a rock, during her emotionally and intellectually deprived childhood. How the seedling became the majestic flowering plant of Sontag’s maturity is an inspiring story—though perhaps also a chastening one. How many of us, who did not start out with Sontag’s disadvantages, have taken the opportunity that she pounced on to engage with the world’s best art and thought? While we watch reruns of “Law & Order,” Sontag seemingly read every great book ever written. She seemed to know that the opportunity comes only once.

John Pistelli, in one of his most entertainingly-blistering reviews, took a similar tack:

As Moser’s biography wore on, I began to be conscious of reading it against the grain. I responded to each new anecdote of Sontag’s cruel and imperious late-life diva-dom (or diva-domme) with aesthetic pleasure. Isn’t it grand to see someone living so large? Don’t we sometimes wish we could? Don’t we read—biography and fiction—not only to feel the warm glow of empathy, but also to make the often icy acquaintance of vast personae? Is a good little girl all that there is to be in this world?

I remember arguing with a friend as an undergraduate about the likes of Milton and Tolstoy. Did they have to so bestride their world like colossi, with so little heed of those they domineered or crushed? My friend claimed that they were simply bad people, that this unsympathetic grandeur undermined the moral force of their work. I suggested conversely that the will required to bring such monuments as Paradise Lost and War and Peace into the world was hardly going to be tamable in other circumstances.

Here we see an irreconcilable and illustrative difference in critical temperament. For Moser, the NPR intellectual par excellence, Sontag’s flaws are unfortunate and correctable. If she had only gone to therapy or read Adult Children of Alcoholics, perhaps her “rebarbative aspects” could have been softened without sacrificing her literary and intellectual abilities. And if she had only listened to her peers in the feminist and gay movements—if she only had caved to social pressure—we could have extolled her as a model citizen as well as a great writer.

Malcolm and Pistelli, those Emersonian individualists, admire Sontag for her stormy singularity. They acknowledge that extreme forces of will and larger-than-life-personalities occasionally emerge, and that those qualities are often inseparable from being a difficult person to be around (and anyway, Sontag’s sins were hardly those of Mailer, or of Pound). They do not believe that it is the duty of all women or all lesbian writers to drop the pen and take up arms for the cause when so called, they believe that prodding at the contradictions of one’s own side is a higher duty than propagandizing, and that one’s private life should, if one wishes, be afforded some measure of dignity and privacy, not forcibly put on display as a legitimating tactic. The reader will not, I hope, need to be told which of these sides I find myself allied with. It is Moser’s chastening view that was ascendent in biographical criticism back in the now distant-seeming 2010s. No one should receive a get-out-of-jail-free card for being a genius, but one hopes that our benighted era will nevertheless produce scholarship of a more sympathetic cast.

But we must still thank Moser, whose biography gives Sontag’s life definitive shape, a shape refined by the recollections and reassessments that continue to appear (The latest, Robert Boyers’ Maestros and Monsters: Days and Nights with Susan Sontag and George Steiner, mostly contains descriptions of literary panels, those intellectual boondoggles at which no interesting thought has ever been uttered.). As for Sontag herself, Eliot Weinberger’s prediction that she would fade into history has not yet come to pass. Picador, bless them, have recently rescued her work from the hideously ugly editions of the early 2000s, which look like monographs on 15th-century grain prices, and begun reissuing elegant modernist paperbacks designed to sit alongside Speedboat and My Year of Rest and Relaxation in a certain contemporary bookshelf. Kristen Stewart is working on a “hybrid documentary, research project, experiment, film-within-a-film type thing” about Sontag that will be “made over a long period of time.” Her life continues to compel, as both a model and a warning. This is what it is to give yourself to the life of the mind, it says. This is what it is to make culture your vocation, your absolute north star. This is what it means to shut out everything else. Could you handle it? Would you want to? Even the most intellectually ravenous among us desire such things as fulfilling and stable relationships with our friends and lovers, a healthy relationship between mind and body, and the ability to appreciate morning sunshine, fresh grass, and first snow without first mitigating them through art or checking them off on some cosmic list of experiences. Sontag wasn’t like you or me. She made the sacrifice, she went there, all the way, at great cost. One could even call her, in her own strange way, a martyr. She would tell David not to look out the window on trains and in airplanes, to focus on his book, that he could learn nothing from the view.

She wanted to be a major novelist. If that didn’t work out, she wanted to be Eliot or Matthew Arnold—a black-clad gatekeeper at the portcullis of Culture. Yet the way in which her example inspires brings to mind neither of those two, nor does it bring to mind Benjamin or Canetti or Adorno or any of her other European models. Instead it makes me think of Oscar Wilde, to whom she dedicated “Notes on Camp.” Wilde’s literary output was wonderful, but his greatest work of art was his life and his myth. So too with Sontag. She created herself so that we might know what a life lived her way would entail, in all its glory and its difficulty. She would have been furious to hear me define her this way; she would have protested that the work alone was what mattered. The tragedy is she wouldn’t have realized the compliment. They still leave flowers at Wilde’s statue in Dublin, and plant kisses on his stone mouth. Who the hell reads Matthew Arnold?

I.

Once upon a time writers were all hot, or if they weren’t hot they were striking and sharply-dressed, and they all lived in Manhattan and London and everyone slept with everyone else and threw drinks in one another’s faces at parties and you could live for ten years off the proceeds of a modest bestseller, all the while commanding a corner table at Elaine’s between Warren Beatty and Henry Kissinger. The New Yorker paid $50,000 in today’s money for a short story and only slightly less for a listicle on what pants to buy this season. Dick Cavett would call you up, personally, three times a day, and beg you to fly to Hollywood and dispense a few bon mots for his viewers. Sorry, Dickie, you’d say, I’m veritably chained to the old Selectric, and anyway I find television talk shows rather a shallow sort of thing, don’t you agree?

II.

So goes the myth in whose shadow we all labor, grumbling as we tend our little digital plots of land that the glory days are gone. Though we all go on producing short stories, poetry, interesting and ambitious novels, longform journalism, sharp and voice-y criticism, etc, it’s undeniable that we all feel some lack, some ache. Why does it all feel so cloistered, so lame? Why has the cultural power it once commanded so badly waned?

I don’t want to weigh in with some material explanation, of which there are many, but rather investigate a few feelings, follow a few impulses. Hopefully you’ll indulge this rather meandering format—it did, after all, make Susan Sontag a star.

III.

Two notable interventions into this oft-discussed topic have recently been published. First, upstart literary journal The Metropolitan Review recently paid a visit to the last don of midcentury journalism, 93-year-old Gay Talese. Their long interview with and week-long tribute to Talese was a way of not only honoring a forerunner, but establishing their claim as the heirs to and revivalists of his tradition of graceful yet streetwise criticism and reportage. And reviving is what this flatlining tradition needs. Quoth the old padrone:

When Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Joan Didion were getting published in magazines, I would hear, Salinger’s got a new piece in the New Yorker next week. Norman has this piece on the convention. Tom has got a piece coming in New York magazine. You’d go buy it, soon as you could. We’d hear about it. I don’t hear about it anymore. I don’t know that there’s prestige in magazine writing now that’s comparable.

Only a sucker would deny it. When n+1 launched back in 2004, they cried decline too, but they still had to perform a ritual patricide by lobbing a few bombs in their inaugural issue towards The New Republic’s James Wood, whose austere mandarinism represented serious criticism at that time. Met Review has published a few splashy pans of otherwise well-regarded midcult novels, but today there is no one fearsome figurehead to topple in their pursuit of a new brand of literary journalism. Who would it be, Dwight Garner? Merve Emre? Criticizing them doesn’t exactly make for flying-off-the-stands material (Dwight seems like too much of a mensch, anyway.). There’s no one, because it just doesn’t matter all that much any more. Instead, they have to go back to Grandpa Gay, Master Yoda in his Manhattan townhouse, and seek the wisdom of the ancients so that the old ways might yet return.

The other venture into this topic was ’s recent essay for Asterisk, which looks at W. David Marx’s recent Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century and Tricia Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice, The Freaks Came Out to Write, to address the question of whether culture is really in decline or not.

While great artworks can be produced in isolation, art movements — which organize disparate works into coherent scenes and sensibilities — are what contribute to a feeling of progress. If we assume that innovation can be measured by new artistic movements, and those movements are facilitated by a critical culture, then a weakened critical ecosystem will lead to the “blank space” that W. David Marx describes, where art and culture feel stagnant.

This is, as it turns out, exactly what happened in the last decade of the 20th century, with lasting repercussions in the 21st.

Nguyen looks at the Voice as a sort of “Bell Labs of cultural criticism,” a place where many different critical sensibilities were given a lot of freedom to experiment. The criticism fueled the art, the art fueled the criticism, and interesting cultural moments were produced at a steady clip. Now that ecosystem has broken down, authority has scattered to the winds, and the three-way-relationship between artists, critics and journalists, and audiences no longer functions.

IV.

What Talese remembers and Nguyen highlights is something slightly orthogonal to “good writing.” There is plenty of good writing, after all. The New Yorker isn’t quite what it used to be, but it still means something to see one’s name in that elegant font. New York is still irreverent and attention-grabbing, it’s truly impressive how they or The Cut manage to put out a light-up-the-group-chat story nearly every day. The London Review of Books is still the best serious intellectual organ in the world. And there are internet essayists who really do command a lot of attention: Sam Kriss if you’re a bookish and intemperate weirdo (tone complimentary), Scott Alexander if you’re building the machine god, and so forth. There are of course the exciting new publications I find myself aligned with: The Metropolitan Review, Romanticon, Souvenir. Nguyen is right to note that intelligent and passionate criticism and journalism continue to be produced, even though the money’s mostly gone. But one other thing that is lacking is a sense of glamour.

V.

I’ve been thinking about literary glamour. It seems frivolous to mention, even embarrassing. The point of writing should be the work, after all, not being some sort of scene figure. And personally, I’m no party animal, I get sleepy around midnight. But I still think there is something to it, to wanting to write not just for yourself and for strangers, but to be part of something, to be a member of a circle. To embody an image you have created for yourself, to feel as if you are, in some small sense, in contact with the pulsing center of the world.

Better to show than to tell, I think. You probably know this one, but let’s read it anyway. It’s “Personal Poem” by Frank O’Hara, from 1964’s Lunch Poems.

Personal Poem

Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I’m happy for a time and interested

I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I’d like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside birdland by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then

we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so

Whatever mental place this is, with its gentle, funny insouciance and pure joy in friendship and conversation and city life, I could live there forever. I have circled around this topic so many times and never quite figured it out, in essays on magazines, on magicians, on the Great American Songbook, on Willem de Kooning and Sweet Smell of Success. Some lightness, some magic that can’t be captured in words. I guess glamour as a term isn’t quite there—too Elizabeth Taylor—but it’s the best I’ve got.

VI.

It’s a tricky thing to define. It is not exactly beauty, luxury, or grace. It is an aura, a cousin to desire, a cousin to envy, a form of pleasurable yearning—I want to be him, I want to be her, I want to be there, in that image, with those people. But envy, in most cases, doesn’t produce many good results. Glamour does. People went into journalism because of All the President’s Men, they studied classics because they read The Secret History, they started writing because they idealized the writing life. Some were disillusioned, but many, in their pursuit of an image, discovered something real.

VII.

Nguyen ends her essay with some heartening words about the great burst of critical activity online, which, after all, has allowed writers like her to grow an audience. She highlights homegrown enterprises like Manhattan Art Review (which, in its DIY spirit and cheeky assumption of authority, was a big influence on this publication’s early days as an art blog). “These are dispiriting times.” she says “But I refuse to believe that the past will always be better than the future, that art and technology are inevitably opposed, that Silicon Valley can only destroy — instead of transform — cultural innovation. And I refuse to believe that more participation leads to a degraded cultural ecosystem.”

I agree, mostly. But I can’t convince myself that when a whole world moves online, when face-to-face interactions become only a small component of a discursive and social environment that consists mostly of typing into a series of small boxes, that things can be as productive and interesting as they were when O’Hara was writing about neon in daylight and stopping for a cheeseburger and going to meet so-and-so. When you read those, there’s nowhere on earth you’d rather be than in his place, in his mind, among his friends. One needs sympathetic people to gossip, blab, jest, and kvetch with. One needs chance encounters, friends, enemies. And young hopefuls need that emerald city to go after, even if it’s mostly an illusion.

VIII.

Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me is not very good, but I’ve always remembered this line: “Paradise on earth is to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”

IX.

I’ve been reading ’s Writer’s Diary, the book of aphorisms, stray thoughts, and social narratives sourced from his Substack of the same name. I couldn’t live the way Gasda does—this guy is forever on the move—but I am full of admiration for his relentless commitment to the artist’s life, a life he has achieved against long odds, a life many people will tell you is impossible, so don’t bother. I like reading the diaries of people like Gasda who work in the theater (Peter Hall’s are great too, as are Kenneth Tynan’s). They’re always frenetic and social and full of generative encounters, they put me in a productive, slightly manic mood. They make me want to be there. Similarly, I think the recent-ish phenomenon of the “reading” as a raucous occasion for attractive young people, rather than a sedate affair, plastic cups of bad wine in the back of a Barnes & Noble, is encouraging, even if it does end up producing a lot of bad notes app sex poetry.

X.

Media and publishing, once relatively simpatico, now seem divided as to the importance of IRL merriment and conviviality. Read the party reports in and and and you might be convinced for a second that it’s still 1985, that news organizations and magazines haven’t been gutted and devastated. Those in the media, for better or for worse, still understand themselves as denizens of the glittering world, even if there’s no longer any place in that world for a Didion or a Wolfe or a Talese. Meanwhile, publishing seems possessed by this sort of mania for demystification. “Don’t follow my Substack if you are attracted to the mystique of publishing.” reads a recent Note by one of the numerous book-world influencers that the algorithm insists on exposing one to.

If you like to imagine authors writing in splendid isolation in glamorous Parisian apartments - except for when they go on book tours, of course - avoid the subscribe button at all costs. If your image of an agent is of an NYC hot-shot in a suit shouting ‘show me the money!’ over the phone, and you’d like to keep imagining that, don’t even glance at my backlist of agenting posts. And if your idea of an editor has been informed by Hollywood - pumping out bestsellers with the help of multiple overworked assistants while sitting in a glass corner office drinking black coffee - you won’t like my substack … unless you want a reality check. Fair warning.

Elsewhere, a popular industry newsletter writes that “Lavish Book Parties Do Not Meet the Moment.”

Book parties can be an immense pain and a budget drain. I am not talking about nice launches at bookstores. It’s the parties that are written about as if we should all clamor to attend. Those parties are less about community and more about bragging rights, which, in this day and age, really?

I certainly agree that “​​if a publisher can’t allocate marketing dollars to some of its midlist authors, it shouldn’t overspend on parties.” And it’s quite true that if you seek a career in mainstream publishing you should probably be aware that you’re likely not going to be minting the next great American novelist, but putting together KPIs for various types of dragon smut. These are belt-tightening times and we’re not going back to the era of the editor-as-hero and the three-martini lunch, I get it.

But I don’t know. Should we throw up our hands and admit defeat? Or should we try to strike a balance between realism and romanticism, try and manifest the fantasy at least a little bit? Even the most cynical pencil-pusher here in Hollywood will tell you they grew up idolizing the great gleaming machine of the studio era, or the mavericks and renegades of the seventies. The film industry now shoots all its disposable streaming content in Toronto and Atlanta, and the middle-class character actor is disappearing in the same way as the midlist book, but they sure as hell won’t tell you any of that on the Universal Studios tram tour or in the Nicole Kidman ads at your local AMC. Hollywood has self-mythologized enough, in every flavor from Day of the Locust to Singin’ in the Rain, to make sure that the film industry’s vision of itself will always have some cachet. There’s no need to fiddle while Rome burns, but I would like to see a world that treats writing as an important cultural institution, which just assumes it is glamorous and important and everyone should be talking about it, which does not necessarily disdain the bright lights under which mass culture is made.

XI.

When Shadow Ticket came out, I was hoping some enterprising bookstore would throw a Harry Potter-style midnight launch, a minor soirée of some sort to mark the occasion of what is likely the last book from one of the last great authors of the American century (especially in LA, a city with more claim to Pynchon than anywhere else). But there was nothing. I just walked into my local bookstore on the day it launched, picked up the book I had waited twelve years for, and walked out. The words on the page are the thing, of course, but it nevertheless left me with a bit of a lonesome feeling. If we don’t act like these things are important, if we don’t celebrate them, who will?

XII.

One more example, just for fun: in “Sontag, Bloody Sontag,” her long poison pen letter to her raven-haired rival, Camille Paglia briefly reflected on the launch of Sexual Personae.

Brentano’s commissioned a giant blow-up of the cover and devoted an entire Fifth Avenue window to the book for a week. Tower Books, in Sontag’s domain of downtown New York, installed a Sexual Personae electric-lightbox display that loomed over the entry staircase for two years

It was only thirty years ago that a dense 700-page book about gender in Western art could command a giant “electric-lightbox display” (I assume that refers to some sort of tastefully-lit display case, but I like to picture it as the head of Nefertiti that adorns the cover, rendered in glowing red neon). Could such a thing happen again? I don’t think it’s completely impossible.

XIII.

I am loath to diagnose decline and I am loath to prescribe quick and easy solutions. We all know all the reasons things have changed: it’s the phones, it’s the advertising money, it’s the high rents, the easily available digital brainrot—pick anything you like. You can write a million essays on why the downtown bohemias of forty and fifty and sixty years ago were great, none of them will beat back the inexorable wheels of history. So in lieu of some generically upbeat conclusion, I want to end with a single moment, something I read a few years ago that stuck with me the same way the O’Hara poem has. It’s by the writer and critic and it’s about going to look at a painting.

For my money the most wonderful experience you can have in front of a painting right now in London is in Duke Street St. James, where MacConnal Mason are showing a few canvases by L S Lowry. Lowry is known for his scenes of Salford life, where colourful matchstick men walk shadowless beneath lead-white skies. Lowry is sometimes written about back-to-front, with the subject matter taking pride of place. It’s certainly important that there was a serious painter who would paint men going to the football (and it’s important that we preserve that particular canvas, which the nation is under threat of losing to some private collector). But the best two canvases at MacConnal Mason are captivating, stop-you-in-your-tracks urban landscapes. They blend a bustling, wintry delight with a more atmospheric anomie. I challenge you to look at them without thinking of Brueghel’s skaters.

The best thing about them right now though, is this: with one in each window, you can’t see them in the store. You have to stand out in the grey and the cold and look inward. You can even bring a pint over from the Chequer’s pub and stand out with it. Have a pint and a cigarette and really take your time. It’s great to be standing outdoors in the cold looking at a cold, urban painting. Bring a friend. Bring four, and afterwards go to Maison Française across the road for a whole gourmet rotisserie chicken with chips and salad, which will cost you £14 each split five ways. Then go back to the pub and grab another pint, before going back to the Lowry. They bring the shutters down at about 4:30pm, after which you can’t see the paintings any more.

Christ! I think this is my single favorite piece of art criticism of the twenty-first century. “It’s great to be standing outdoors in the cold looking at a cold, urban painting.” Man, god damn, it really is! To me, these two paragraphs exemplify a world I want to live in, somewhere cosmopolitan and convivial, where art and literature are not some rarified experience but simply part of life, fit in before dinner, a world where there are friends and lovers everywhere you turn, where it’s always the first sip of the first pint and the first draw off the cigarette and it’s cold outside but not too cold. That world is of course a fantasy, it exists only in flashes, the quest for it is impossible, quixotic, misguided. But we could have some fun along the way.

For , I have written a long essay on biographical approaches to William Blake, covering the last thirty years of Blake biography, including what I call the magical war for Blake’s soul that took place between English writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, John Higgs’s breezy Blake-as-TED-Talk explainer William Blake vs. The World, and Philip Hoare’s mad, wonderful compendium William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Blake is an artist who has been such a constant presence and inspiration in my life that I felt trying to write directly about him would be like trying to describe the sun, but I have always loved what could be called biographies of reputations, books like Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman or Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars, so I was pleased to make a contribution to this genre via an artist who has meant so much to me. The full piece is paywalled, but a generous chunk (2,500 words or so) covering Ackroyd and Sinclair is free. I do of course encourage you to support Romanticon with a paid subscription.

I should also mention that though it has been rather quiet in the inbox, the last two months have in fact been the hardest I have ever worked at writing, and there are several things I’m very excited to see published, two of which should appear in the next few weeks and one of which will appear in early 2026. I wrote last month of my mild discomfort with the content-creator/subscriber relationship, and in general I would much prefer to strike the aristocratic pose and let writing emerge when it is ready, even if it sometimes means a month or more of silence. The last thing I want is to feel as if you are my customers and I am the harried waiter assuring you that the steak you ordered will arrive on your table soon. And yet, I do feel the need to reassure you, if only because I feel I have done a faintly absurd thing in maintaining a rigorous publishing schedule, writing a long my-year-in-writing recap in which I gush about how much I love maintaining this Substack and subtly intimate that paid subscriptions would be helpful1, and then going dark for a month. Whoops! In any case, be assured you will soon be unable to escape my work, my byline will be in every magazine, my grinning face will be plastered on every billboard and telephone pole, and all of you will curse the day you ever clicked that little blue Subscribe button.

Hello,

Usually this newsletter contains no news, and is not exactly a letter. I prefer, somewhat pretentiously, to treat it as my own evolving collected works, hopefully good enough to be read and reread. And when I try to adopt the cheery “hey subscribers!” tone I feel some horrible spirit has taken up residence within me and is speaking through my mouth, like The Exorcist.

But exactly one year ago today I posted an essay on Christopher Logue’s long poem War Music which, if one discounts a few false starts and early attempts, began A Good Hard Stare. On that day, I pledged I would keep at this on a regular basis, even if only for a dozen people, for as long as it was productive and fun. There are, to my surprise, substantially more than a dozen people here now. So for the first anniversary, allow me to briefly step out from behind the curtain and address everyone directly. I can hear the Academy Awards get-off-the-stage-music playing faintly in the background already, so I’ll keep it (relatively) short.

A Statement of Intent

I grew up reading Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, who led me to Burroughs and Pynchon and Philip K. Dick, who led me to the wider world of literature, so I have always believed that magic is, in some sense, real, and that writing is fundamentally a magical act, perhaps the most basic magical act there is. In the past twelve months I’ve written more than I ever have in the rest of my life combined, and I now have even more cause to believe that is the case. Channeling my energy into the word and then sending these essays out as sigils, as charged objects, has changed my life in unimaginable and unpredictable ways. I feel as if I have tapped into a stream of energy or ambition that I didn’t know was there, which I had suppressed because I thought that I would never have any outlet for it. It’s funny to look back on your life and see the signs that were there all along: my family of screenwriters and copywriters, or my chronic haunting of used bookstores and dreams of opening one, which I now realize was a sublimated desire to live among the ruins of the past because I thought literature and literary community held nothing for me in the present.

It’s given me cause to think about what I am doing here, exactly. Most of my writing is about books, but there is a certain aesthetics of bookishness, a certain literature-as-secular-religion tendency I have tried hard to avoid. I am not interested in dim libraries and dusty tomes for their own sake. There are many besweatered and bespectacled young men on YouTube and Substack telling you about the Western Canon; all due respect to those people but I am not trying to be one of them. I think literature is more important than that. What I want to do is to use it as a tool with which to investigate the higher questions, as a series of mirrors that show the different angles of the oversoul. I don’t want to subordinate myself to literature, I want to make it work for me, to rise to the level of my own thoughts and aspirations. To create, out of raw material, a narrative, a secret history, a world.

It’s a little embarrassing to make these grand mystical claims about critical writing, which is obviously below the novel and the lyric or epic poem in the grand scheme of things. “I will not Reason and Compare, my business is to Create,” said Blake. Many of my friends are writing or have written actual novels and lasting works of art, while my attempts at those have thus far felt halfhearted somehow, incomplete, vestigial, false. Sometimes I worry I am like my beloved twentieth century critics, able to define and sort and categorize but lacking the spark of inspiration or the touch of the divine, doomed to forever be looking longingly up into the higher spheres.

But I don’t know. Why climb some self-imposed imaginary ladder? Is being Samuel Johnson, or Emerson, or Janet Malcolm, or Joan Didion, or Eliot Weinberger such a bad goal to aim for? And in my best work, the work I’m most proud of, I really did feel like I was not entirely in control, like something was speaking through me and it was all I could do to get everything out onto the page in time. So, while I reserve the right to change my feelings on a dime, I do feel, for the moment, as if I am traveling the right path, doing what I’m supposed to do.

A Revealing Anecdote

A few months ago, I attended the AWP Conference & Bookfair for my day job. AWP, if you don’t know, is like book Coachella. All the small and academic presses and all the MFA students and adjuncts and assorted industry professionals come together in a big convention center; there are official panels like “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Music of Taylor Swift” and “The Intimate Podcast: A Path to Community” as well as “cool” “underground” off-site readings in which poetry students and novelists gather to express the exact same inculcated bourgeois values, only they smoke cigarettes while they do it, I guess.

I won’t lie, though I had some good times and met some nice people, I found the whole thing rather depressing. All these writers scurrying around the convention floor, schmoozing and catching up and waiting in line to buy $24 chicken tenders. It reminded me that writing is truly an industry, there is essentially no difference between AWP in Los Angeles and a convention of tire manufacturers in Akron. All these dutiful little technicians, exchanging tricks of the trade! All these bad outfits (it’s still Williamsburg circa 2010 out there in MFA-land), all this quiet desperation, all these small stakes, all these professional structures that churn out memoirs and chapbooks and novels that exist just to exist1.

My company’s booth was a few tables down from New Directions’s. When I first discovered New Directions, it was like a bomb going off in my consciousness. In those stark black and white spines with their impassive centaur logo lay my gateway to modernism, to the Latin American boom, to classical Chinese poetry, to vast and intricate cathedrals I had apparently been living next to and never noticed. I went up to the nice intern or staffer or whoever it was working at their booth and expressed as much and she said “Oh… that’s great!” in the tone of the restaurant host when the party of four walks in five minutes before closing. I don’t blame her, of course. I was tired of talking at that point too. It was just a strange moment, to see this powerful sigil, which to my youthful self acted as the mark of a secret commonwealth and as a portal to aesthetic experiences beyond my imagination, reduced to a halfhearted interaction and to another table covered with a cheap cloth on a stuffy, bright air-conditioned nightmare of a convention floor.

The last day of AWP also happened to be my 30th birthday and I was so overcooked and tired and frazzled that I couldn’t work up the urge to celebrate, couldn’t imagine seeing another face or having another conversation. Instead I went home and got straight into bed and read 100 pages of Howards End, which I was reading at the time, a wonderful novel, a novel that reminds you why you love novels. Immediately a weight was lifted. It was like a cool tide washing over me. I came back to myself. Oh, right, I thought. This is what it’s all about.

I stress that this is not a reactionary tirade against the publishing industry or the MFA system or anything so tired as that; I work in, or at least adjacent to the industry, after all, and believe the art/commerce tension is in many senses useful and productive. Obviously if there were no publishing industry there would be no Howards End or New Directions, if there were no commercial apparatus there would be no Shakespeare and maybe even no Homer. All of this stuff is mostly necessary and basically fine.

But I keep thinking about the secret world, about Blake again, the golden string which leads you “to heaven’s gate / built in Jerusalem’s wall,” the string that stretches from the Eleusinian mysteries even to the latest Romantasy saga or Dimes Square tell-all. When I think about literature, as you may have noticed in this letter, I think about portals, sigils, secret orders. I think about the esoteric, the mysterious and occult. I was drawn to Morrison and Moore as a teenager because they suggested that there were other worlds out there to be explored, rich, dangerous, and alluring, and that writing could be an act of self-creation and of glamour. I think about feelings I don’t have names for, and about strange moments in which an impossibly intimate connection to another mind is made via staring at marks on paper and hallucinating vividly. I don’t feel like any of that can square with the harsh fluorescent world of deals and reviews and grants and gossip. It all seemed so small, and I know that art is big, bigger than any of us.

So I’ve been thinking about our thing, whatever you want to call it, a certain group of writers and critics that have coalesced around this corner of this platform and who I am lucky enough to call colleagues and even friends. Is there really a “New Romanticism”? I’m not sure. Can a literary movement really be based around what is essentially a social media platform with a payment processor? Probably not. Is this all just playing the last few bars of “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship goes down into the bottomless fathoms and a torrent of AI slop and short form video content puts an end to the Western literary tradition forever? Quite possibly.

Nevertheless, for all its flaws and all the tiring and sinister and corny aspects of timelines and algorithms, I feel for the first time as if I am among a community of people who Get It, who respect the mystery and want to act as its caretakers, who know that art is not a career path or a fashion statement, it is… well, I don’t think we have figured out exactly what it is. Pure aestheticism has its own traps and dead ends. I don’t think I can articulate in plain language why all of this is anything other than a way to idle away your time before you die. But nevertheless, beyond my more rational instincts I am convinced it is something more, and I know the people I’ve befriended on this platform share that feeling, and all of that makes me feel a little less alone than I did twelve months ago.

A Few Sentimental Remarks

The get-off-the-stage music is beginning to blare now. It’s always a little irksome when people act all humble and aw-shucks and thank all their wonderful readers. So I’ll just reiterate briefly that the past year has been one of the most extraordinary and transformative periods of my life. I feel as if, after many dead ends and false starts, I have found something I am truly suited for, and I want to follow it wherever it leads. Every time someone subscribes, I am amazed anew that anyone is interested in all this. If you, for some reason, have decided to send me five dollars a month despite getting no premium content for your troubles, you are one of the elect and your name will be etched in the golden halls of literary Valhalla. It’s doubly irksome when people start shaking the tin cup, so I will only say that if enough of you were to do this, I could write an awful lot more.

Lastly, among many people whose kind words have meant more to me than they will ever know, I want to mention and , who read and complimented that first Logue essay. That day I talked to my friend and he said I seemed really over the moon about something, and I said it was because two of the finest literary minds in America had praised my work. I meant it utterly.

And especially to John, il miglior fabbro, a true magus. Without his work, I (among many of us, I think) would not be doing this. Among other things, I think finally finishing Ulysses under the sign of the Invisible College was what gave me the inward authority to start writing. You get to that final Yes and you’re filled with generative energy, which manifests itself in strange and wonderful ways. Like I said, it’s magic.

Okay, enough logrolling, they’re cutting off my mic. My sincere thanks to everyone for reading and commenting and here’s to another year of—(pulled off stage with giant vaudeville hook).

Florida—America’s problem child, God’s waiting room—hangs down at the bottom of the Eastern Seaboard, priapic and slightly obscene. Through its lands and waters roam alligators, manatees, flamingoes, iguanas, and all manner of colorful characters: hustlers, tricksters, exiles, swamp dwellers, and RVers, as if the country were tipped forty-five degrees to the right, and all the pure products of America, who had nothing to hang onto, wound up there. Like Texas or California or Louisiana, it’s a country within a country. An invisible republic, whose presence hangs heavy in the air.

Perhaps at some later date we’ll turn our eyes to the cultural and artistic output of Florida’s mainland, to Tampa or Their Eyes Were Watching God or Annihilation or Spring Breakers or the great tradition of the Miami crime novel. But for now I want to point our car south through the monotonous green tunnels of I-95 or Florida’s Turnpike and watch the magnolias and live oaks turn into seagrapes and bald cypresses until we come to the very edge of the continental United States. And to keep driving, off the edge, out into nowhere, until we hit Key West.

Despite never having actually made it there during the year of my life I spent wasting away in the Florida Panhandle, I’ve always been somewhat enamored of Key West. Its actual physical manifestation might be a wholly unaffordable tourist trap choked with retirees and spring breakers, but my mental picture of it still whispers of the half-legendary pirate utopia, of Hispaniola or Libertalia, of the feeling I got reading about Jean Lafitte and Captain Kidd in my youth, and reading Hakim Bey and William Burroughs as a teenager. I swoon at the idea of the very end of America, a haven for eccentrics, rogues, smugglers, and ne’er-do-wells of all types.

My interest further increased when I discovered the grotty crew of writers that made their home there. Hemingway, of course, whose ghost hovers over the place and whose six-toed cats roam through it, and Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop and Hunter S. Thompson, but most enticingly a group of refugees from the collapse of the counterculture, who washed up in Key West after various personal and professional failures, seeking somewhere to write, fish, and generally dissolve into the surf: sad, strange, childlike Richard Brautigan, the affable Michigan gourmand Jim Harrison, and the ringleader of this crew, Thomas McGuane.

Of those three, it’s McGuane whose work dealt most directly with the island, in two novels, Ninety-Two in the Shade and Panama, both of which deal with a half-cracked holy fool returning to Key West and finding trouble. In the former, it’s Tom Skelton, a fishing guide who finds himself pulled into a deadly rivalry with a more established practitioner of the trade, and in the latter it’s Chester Pomeroy, a former rock star given to lurid and extravagant romantic gestures, dealing with the wreckage of his relationships with his father and ex-girlfriend.

I enjoyed both of these books and recommend them if you’re in the mood for their particular brand of sunstroke prose, but I did find myself alternating between enchantment and frustration in a particularly jarring manner. As Jonathan Lethem once said of Norman Mailer, some writers are inconsistent book to book, he’s inconsistent paragraph to paragraph. McGuane is going for broke all the time trying to communicate the frazzled state of his protagonist, which means he never uses a straightforward description when an off-kilter one will do. A two-page stretch of Ninety-Two in the Shade finds flowers in a “delicately emblematic subdivision of light,” a bouncing bed giving a “rachitic sprung utterance,” and a window letting in a “pure convexity of luminous air” and “a bar of fluorescing sun,” all of which causes the protagonist to consider that “The chrysalis he sometimes felt inside was beginning to shed and stream quite lambently.” As a partisan of exuberant language, I endorse the attempt, but too much of this can start to feel like a big pile of whipped cream on a small slice of key lime pie. Perhaps it’s a personal thing: that brand of rootin’ tootin’ Vintage Contemporaries flowery masculinism that I go absolutely crazy for in its cinematic and musical variants can sometimes let me down in an obscure way in a novel; there can be something a little precious in it, a little bit overcompensatory, a little bit of an odd note in all these stories about junkies and cowboys and grizzled fishing guides whose free indirect discourse reads like Moses Herzog.

But just when you start to get a bit sick of this overwhipped meringue, he’ll hit you with something really good, like the below paragraph, which comes just after all the tortured descriptions I just quoted.

When the shining city is at hand, a special slum will be built for me and my meanness. I will be the person, if that’s what I am, in the slum; there will be one of everything; one rat, one tin can. The shining city will beckon in the distance. The shadow of the Bakunin monument will not quite stretch to my door. In the evening the sound of happy syndicalist badminton finals will be borne to me on a sweet wind that sours as it enters my slum. I will behave poorly.

That’s true weirdness, and true brilliance, the communiqué of a fried mind that doesn’t lean on a haze of hey-i’m-writing-here descriptions for effect. And make no mistake, these are two of the most deeply fried novels I’ve ever read in my life; edges curling up and the yolk all but set. In some stretches it can be difficult to tell what exactly is going on, especially in Panama, which starts to feel like The Golden Bowl in a Hawaiian shirt. I would read them in the morning before work and feel woozy, as if I had been baking in the harsh sunlight for hours, all day.

McGuane’s adventures with his convivial crew of freaks was captured in the documentary Tarpon, an hour-long, immaculately vibed hangout movie that alternates scenes of bohemian merrymaking and kibitzing with long, slow, meditative scenes of fishing out on the flats for the titular creatures, who upon being hooked launch themselves out of the water, writhing and wriggling spectacularly. To watch the recent 4K restoration of Tarpon is to be convinced that the Keys in the 1970s were the most gorgeous place on earth. The film is saturated with shades of blue—the azure bay, the sparkling turquoise flats, the blindingly clear sky—that serve, like the great Impressionists, to remind you just how many variations of color exist in the world. Watching it on even a halfway decent TV gives it at once the slightly unreal fuzz of 35mm film and a sharpness and clarity that one imagines not even the filmmakers experienced, and all this natural sublimity combined with the toytown world of tourist stands and sailors’ bars on the island gives the film as a whole the quality of a strange and delicious dream, an impermanent, hazy pleasure, like a long afternoon nap in the sun.

No Eden ever lasts, though, and a few scenes in Tarpon purposely contrast the utter beauty and serenity of the flats with the ever-present forces of American greed and darkness, most notably in a brief interview with a shark-eyed barfly who brags about his experiences doing God-knows-what during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and an excruciating scene of a tourist charter chumming the water for sharks, hauling them onto the deck, and letting mainlanders with bovine grins take turns whacking them to death. Souvenir pictures of them with their gruesome prizes are sold on shore for seventy-five cents each.

This element of disquiet makes Tarpon a great film and not just a particularly well-made advertisement for the Florida Tourism Council. The uncomfortable thought arises that the shark-whackers and James Ellroy side characters are the true face of the island, and the chivalric and honorable tarpon fishers, who release their opponents after defeating them, are kidding themselves, upholding a tradition that never existed or was a simple fig leaf for strip-mining the island paradise of all its charms and selling it back to tourists. But these questions only lurk in the background, and most of Tarpon is a hymn to the good life; like The Big Lebowski or The Beach Bum (for which it was almost certainly an influence) a portrait of chilling out as a high-level artistic practice. It’s all helped along, by the way, by the superbly atmospheric instrumental soundtrack courtesy of McGuane’s brother-in-law, a young musician on the make by the name of Jimmy Buffett.

Ah, Jimmy. Ever since I discovered that Jimmy Buffett was introduced to Key West by the great country singer Jerry Jeff Walker, and subsequently spent years palling around with McGuane’s righteous band of weirdos and playing for free beer in dockside dives, I’ve been fascinated by the man, who I had written off as nothing more than a cynical purveyor of empty-headed good-time music for alcoholic boomers. Who was he below the persona? Did he ever regret trading in his artistic integrity for billions of dollars worth of chain restaurants, hotels, retail stores and casinos? Was he a wannabe Dylan who took the commercial path when the artistic one didn’t shake out, or a cold striver the whole time?

It would really fit my narrative to say that his first few records, before “Margaritaville” sent him on the path to stardom, are unlikely 70s singer-songwriter classics and that he sold his soul in order to sell America a mass-produced vision of the beach-bum lifestyle, but that’s not quite the case. There’s a lot of talent there and a few genuinely really good songs—the gorgeous, downcast “A Pirate Looks at Forty” stands up to anything on On the Beach or If I Could Only Remember My Name—but the records are marred by a reedy smugness and a too-broad sense of humor. Perhaps it’s because it’s impossible to hear them with fresh ears and no knowledge of his subsequent ventures, but one detects a hint of the false smile of the American businessman, the Ray Kroc type. Buffett’s midwestern contemporary, John Prine, employs a similar Prairie Home Companion register and nasally tone, but his complex and heartfelt genius and unabashed sincerity and empathy prevents him from falling into kitsch. Buffett is just a bit too pleased with himself and a bit too calculating to successfully walk that line.

Would you believe me, though, if I said that his short story collection Tales From Margaritaville is lowkey kind of good? There are immaculately credentialed collections coming out on FSG and Picador this month that I guarantee are worse. His writing is straightforward, a touch flat, but enthusiastic and creative, with an evident love for Mark Twain and Hemingway and Steinbeck and the rest of the American tradition of good-hearted adventure fiction. His subjects are simple little moral fables and picaresques about cowboys, road trips, football teams, diner waitresses, and other stock figures, none of which bother too much with a plot, content to revel in the vibes. The whole thing goes down easily and pleasantly, like a few episodes of a cheerful sitcom. Clearly knowing McGuane, Harrison and company rubbed off on him; it really isn’t half bad at all and would be an amiable companion on the beach or with a few tropical drinks.

Once again, though, the smarm can get in the way. Nearly every story in Tales From Margaritaville, as well as many lines in his early records, has a moment of uptight, I-was-here-first complaining about obnoxious tourists, or has as its villain rapacious commercializers and developers, trying to cramp the style of our laid-back, rascally heroes. In the first story, a Mark Twain-loving cowboy visits his hero’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, only to find “The Mark Twain Home and Museum, the Mark Twain Village Shoppes, the Twainland Express Depot, the Mark Twain Motor Inn, the Tom Sawyer Diorama, and the Huck Finn Shopping Center.” I hardly have to mention the irony here: that the author, already subject of a fervent cult following, would soon establish the Margaritaville restaurant chain, the Margaritaville Hotel and Casino, the widely reviled Broadway musical Escape to Margaritaville, the Margaritaville at Sea Paradise cruise ship, and Latitude Margaritaville, three “active retirement communities” for those “55 and better” who want to “live the Margaritaville lifestyle every day.”1 I find this all a bit insulting: you find yourself part of a strange and wonderful moment in time, you grouse about all the people ruining it, and then you resolve to get a piece of the action yourself and sell the tropical lifestyle to harried midwesterners living lives of quiet desperation.

But I can’t dislike him in the end. Everyone likes boats and beaches and drinking and playing music, and he happened to be the one who managed to make millions doing it, capturing the sound and outlook of a slice of America—the Gulf Coast and environs—whose way of life had not yet to that point been entirely wrapped up and individually packaged for public consumption (New Orleans and its long and separate musical tradition notwithstanding). When he died, there was an outpouring of goodwill from unlikely corners; no other artist could have had a tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl that brought together Paul McCartney, Pitbull, Snoop Dogg, Harrison Ford, and longtime Miami Heat coach Pat Riley. By all accounts, he was a kind and decent guy in person. And on some level, ruthlessly parlaying a few years spent as a ragged beach burnout into a lifestyle brand worth millions is so archetypically, audaciously American that it’s hard to get mad. I put it to you that Buffett is one of the twentieth century’s great self-made characters, as fascinating and enigmatic in his way as Jay Gatsby. His story stands waiting to be novelized. Rouse up O young men of the Gulf!

If Buffett helped create the easy, breezy commercial image of Key West, and McGuane and Hemingway write about the sensations of the body—low down, beat-up, hungover protagonists frying in the sun—Wallace Stevens stands as its representative of the intricate palaces of the mind. Here I enter perilous territory; I’ve always had a bit of a hard time with Stevens. He’s the great poet as philosopher and I am congenitally incapable of philosophizing, the great poet of atheism whereas I incline towards poetry that reifies our connection to the divine, however one chooses to define that. Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction—ugh, no thank you. When I compare him to Emily Dickinson, our other great mapper of the vast interior spaces of consciousness, I feel that even when I can’t understand what she’s getting at, I thrill to her and connect to her, whereas my mind slides right off Stevens at his most obscure.

But all that said, I love Stevens when I read his poetry written in or around or about Key West, where he spent his winters for twenty years. It’s a poetry at once beguiling and playful, full of heavy fragrances, tropical fruits, light reflecting off blue waters. Michael Hofmann in the LRB writes, thrillingly:

It’s both lovely and a caution to imagine Stevens, not just with Tampa cigars and ‘big, rough lemons’ to put in his drinks, but an unshaven patriarch with sandalled feet and a mob of grandchildren. He reads and feels like a hemispheric poet: one not just of and for and from the United States, but of and for and from all the Americas. His actual character may be typical Pennsylvania Dutch, withdrawn, buttoned-up, saturnine (‘From the Misery of Don Joost’ is one suggestive title); his wildly and profusely and lovingly put together tropical world tells another story.

Hofmann also provides this lovely list of titles: ‘Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion’, ‘The Load of Sugar-Cane’, ‘The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade’, ‘Floral Decorations for Bananas’, ‘On the Manner of Addressing Clouds’, ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws.’ He really is weirdly similar to Buffett, when you get down to it. Buffett’s songs are attractive to workaday Americans because they promise a hit of leisure, a couple of boat drinks at the end of a long workday. Even at their most grating, they are suffused with a sort of wistfulness about the difficulties of life and the need to escape, if only briefly. Stevens, famously an insurance agent in Hartford for the majority of his career, often writes about New England in similar tones of exhaustion, as a pinched, cold, Puritan world full of busybodies (“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”) and bleak weather (“The Snow Man”). And this, for all the forbidding concepts drawn from Santayana and Spinoza, makes Stevens charmingly relatable. He can’t wait to get on the first train south so he can bury his toes in the sand.

Key West to Stevens seems to stand for a terminus of consciousness, beyond which lie deeper, unexplored regions—most famously, of course, in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” with the woman who sings “beyond the genius of the sea” and the poem’s tension between human-imposed rational order and swirling, primordial reality. But my favorite single image from coconuts-and-hammocks Stevens comes in his late poem “Of Mere Being,” reproduced in full below.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

The palm at the end of the mind! There is perhaps no more single psychedelic and mysterious line in American poetry. Stevens’ tropical work can sometimes remind me of reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a child, the mid-period Narnia book in which Lewis’s Christian moralism gives way to a vigorous eighteenth-century picaresque, as the heroes sail beyond the edge of the known world and encounter strange, half-allegorical creatures. Beyond Key West, beyond the doors of perception, who knows what one will encounter? Perhaps that is mere orientalism, unfair to the countries that lie south and east of America which simply contain other people with hopes and dreams of their own, but so it goes; no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to stop the human mind from creating metaphorical meridians, beyond which everything suffers a sea-change, into something rich and strange.

Pausing to note a theme: all of this Key West media has had some flaw that has kept me from loving it entirely, a slight ambivalence. McGuane, too purple, Stevens, too recondite, Buffett, too corny2. There is, however, one unimpeachably perfect piece of art about the island, and, as if it were written in order to provide a good ending for this essay, it somehow manages to combine elements of all three into one mystical, miraculous work.

Bob Dylan’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”...man, what to even say? When all the dust settles, I think late Dylan will be as highly regarded as late Yeats, with “Key West” as his “Circus Animals' Desertion.” It’s the summit of his 21st century output (and I love nearly all of it, including and especially the standards albums), a ten-minute epic anchored by two ghostly chords, a groove like “Sleep Walk” or “Me and Paul” that seems as if it could go on forever, that brings to mind eternity and reincarnation. It encompasses vast and disparate swaths of American history, from McKinley’s assassination to the Delta blues to The Wizard of Oz, and reflects on the whole of life from childhood to old age. When he suddenly swerves into a brief passage about his relationship with God and Judaism, it feels like the most bracingly direct and personal that this man of masks has ever been3.

And whether it’s the afterlife or the bardo or the realm between worlds or just the island itself, whatever Key West stands for in the song clarified why this place I’ve never set foot in has so fascinated me, even if I can’t put it precisely into words. It makes perfect sense that the great bard of our times would choose it as a valedictory symbol on what might be the final track of his final album. He’s attuned to the country he has crisscrossed over and over again for sixty years, and knows where the veil is thin. He’s seen everything, done everything, experienced everything. Now he sits at the southernmost point, half in this world and half out, reduced to a radical simplicity, ready to take that final awesome step beyond the horizon line.

I always rolled my eyes a little bit at Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion that "on or about December 1910, human character changed.” Really, lady, human character changed because you and your friends wrote some experimental novels and dared to utter the word “semen?” Obviously she’s aware of her own hyperbole, but it nevertheless carries a whiff of what can be off-putting about Woolf and Bloomsbury and artistic scenes in general: their provincialism and snobbishness, their assumption that nothing of interest could possibly happen south of the Thames or above 14th Street, the idea that a shift in what is acceptable to write or say among a small group of people in North London really does, on some deep level, constitute a revolution in human consciousness itself.

Yet recently, as I’ve been reading more novels from around the turn of the century, I have started to better see what she meant. The period from 1900-1925 now seems to me a much bigger leap than any period since, bigger than the transition from the buttoned-up 1950s to the groovy 1970s and certainly bigger than from the turn of the millennium to today. It’s not just technological changes that account for this, rather there is a feeling that the human soul itself underwent some sort of metamorphosis. Anyone who knows anything about art and literature can tell you that the First World War sent an already-begun process of modernization into overdrive, and that those years produced a gigantic artistic and social revolution, the effects of which reverberate even today. But it’s one thing to know it and another to feel it, viscerally, which is one of the unique pleasures of literature. Not too long ago, I read A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910); the last great novels of the English class system before the war swept it all away. While they’re both wonderful novels, when I try to think of their characters, who live supremely sheltered lives governed by a set of arcane and inscrutable social codes, interacting with those from The Great Gatsby (1925) or The Sun Also Rises (1926) or even Decline and Fall (1928), I short-circuit a bit. I can’t make it cohere. Those, to me, are two different species of human being.

I mention all this temporal stuff because Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence occupies a fascinating place within it. Before I picked it up, I had for whatever reason assumed that it was written around the 1870s, the time in which it takes place, and that it was a fat, long Victorian novel full of winding circumlocutions and minute descriptions of rooms and furniture, the kind of book that can of course be wonderful and rewarding but that does require a real conscious commitment to tackling. But no! The Age of Innocence was in fact published all the way in 1920, a contemporary of This Side of Paradise and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And it’s a brisk 270 pages, written not in a Dickensian forest of clauses but in a clear, direct, vigorous, and understatedly beautiful style that descends from Flaubert and sets the tone for nearly all twentieth century American fiction. This makes it a novel curiously out of time, one whose ironic title connotes both nostalgia for the world it depicts and self-conscious awareness of its own modernity. It is poised on the knife edge between the society of Joyce and Fitzgerald, which for all its differences is fairly recognizably our own, and a society whose customs may as well be from Pluto, a vision of the 1870s that is also about the 1910s, just as Chinatown is a movie about the 1930s that is really about the 1970s. When characters in The Age of Innocence talk about the opera or what dresses are fashionable or about reading Middlemarch, it is a self-conscious and even slightly cornily insistent evocation of its era, like when you watch a biopic of some famous figure and the headlines in the background say JFK ASSASSINATED or MAN LANDS ON MOON.

In addition to those interesting questions of world and time, I must also admit that I write about it here because, in the midst of my reading for another essay (soon to appear), I idly picked it up one evening and found myself utterly captivated, unable to think about or read anything else until I had finished. So, if you’re looking for a straightforward answer as to whether it’s good or not, as well as an answer to why this post is slightly later than my usual bimonthly clip, there you go.

Set in aristocratic New York society just before oil and steel and railroad money stormed through the gates, The Age of Innocence is the story of a love triangle between hapless, paralyzed protagonist Newland Archer, his beautiful, respectable, and utterly conventional fiancée May Welland, and her exotic and semi-disgraced cousin Ellen Olenska, who has returned to New York in shame after the destruction of her disastrous marriage to a wealthy Polish count. Archer is just smart enough to chafe against the bonds of his incredibly rigid and formal way of life, while Ellen finds herself outcast from society’s good graces, and the two begin an unconsummated but not unrequited love affair, while Archer schemes desperately for a way to escape his marriage, having realized not only that he loves Ellen but that May is in every respect a perfect product of her society and so “never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion.”

It’s hard to decide whether Wharton is ultimately a kind novelist or a cruel novelist. It’s certainly true that she is a ruthless and sharp-tongued anatomist of her society, that the primary mode of The Age of Innocence is cruel irony, and that the primary internal reaction one experiences while reading it is Oh God—Oh God—I can’t watch! Like any tragic hero, Archer is the architect of his own fate: it is he who convinces Ellen not to go through with her divorce (given the great shame that any divorce, no matter how justified, would bring her cousin May’s family). Trying to escape his own feelings for Ellen, he convinces May to move the date of their wedding up, setting up a masterful twist of the knife in which just after Archer and Ellen confess their love to one another, a telegram from May arrives announcing their imminent marriage. And the further Archer marches down the path that signifies respectability and success in Old New York, the more its banal concerns come to seem “like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.”

Yet Wharton is not like her model Flaubert, who dissects his pinned and wriggling characters with a casual and cheerful pitilessness (though a scan of Wharton criticism has led me to understand that The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country operate more in this vein). Throughout the novel there is sympathy for its characters, who fumble along doing the best they can in their prescribed roles, here too passive, there too much a hostage to the dictates of good society, but rarely consciously mean or selfish. Wharton, for all her emulation of the European novel (and her residence in France at the time of The Age of Innocence’s composition), attributes to the American character something essentially honest, exemplified in a scene where an emissary from Ellen’s aristocratic husband, sent to convince Ellen to return, renounces his mission:

She's an American. And that if you're an American of HER kind—of your kind—things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take—become unthinkable, simply unthinkable.

At the novel’s end, after much twisting and turning, Archer realizes that May, whom he has consistently denigrated as incurious and empty-headed, nevertheless possesses an acute social intelligence that has allowed her to outmaneuver him. Always portraying to his face a placid ignorance regarding Archer’s feelings towards her cousin, she has orchestrated the situation so that Ellen is able to return to Europe with an income source that prevents her from having to go back to the cruel count, and gently pushed Ellen out the door by revealing to her that she (May) is pregnant with Archer’s child. In a startling moment, at Ellen’s going-away party, Archer realizes that all of society has conspired to put an end to this indiscretion, while never revealing to him for a moment that they all know exactly what is going on.

…it became clear to Archer that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on. The silent organisation which held his little world together was determined to put itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of Madame Olenska's conduct, or the completeness of Archer's domestic felicity. All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary; and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska's lover. He caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief.

Could it have happened any other way? When I wrote about Norman Rush’s Mating a few months ago, I discussed how heartening it felt to see, in our profoundly unromantic age, a book that genuinely believes in risking it all for love; an intelligent, demanding, and odd novel that is nevertheless not afraid to get a little Hallmark Channel with it. The pleasures of The Age of Innocence are of the opposite kind. It is a novel in which no questions have easy answers. It’s possible that there is a brief moment somewhere in the first third of the novel in which Archer could have extricated himself from his engagement with May and married Ellen with some degree of scandal but not a life-ruining level. But he fails to realize his own situation quickly enough and from then on, the die is cast. The more worldly-wise Ellen, having been through a difficult marriage and the subsequent social shame, realizes this, and when Archer proposes they escape together, she gently rebukes him.

"I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."

She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who've tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."

The only way their love can be something meaningful instead of something tawdry is if it is never acted upon: "We're near each other,” Ellen explains, “only if we stay far from each other.”

Wharton, looking back on her past at the threshold of the free-and-easy Jazz Age, does not allow us to simply condemn old-fashioned morals and move on. The tragedy of Archer and Ellen is in certain ways the fault of their rigid society: it is that society that pushed Newland Archer along the path that he did not realize led away from his true desires until it was too late. But mostly it’s a simple case of bad timing, of failing to realize one’s own feelings, and of confusing what you want for yourself with what society says you should want. Such tragedies, in our supposedly more enlightened and advanced age, continue to happen every day, and in fact, as Wharton gently reflects in the epilogue set twenty-six years later, the admittedly silly and stifling customs of Old New York nevertheless allowed for the situation of Archer and Ellen to be handled with exquisite delicacy and tact rather than explode into a scandal that destroyed their lives and the lives of their families. It’s possible Archer would have been happier if he had run away with his true love rather than living out his life in a genial and harmonious if not particularly passionate marriage, raising a fine family, and becoming a respected pillar of society. And there is a particular appeal to books like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, that depict the tragic consequences of these decisions but nevertheless locate a certain heroism and grandeur in the defiant actions of their protagonists. But, Wharton asks the reader, if you were faced with a similar situation, would you really be brave or foolish enough to stake your entire life on it?

I realized something else reading The Age of Innocence. When I was younger, I never really understood why people spent their time reading stuffy bourgeois realist novels about love and marriage. There are people who can get really into Austen and Eliot and even midcentury stuff like Updike or Yates as a teenager; I was never one of them. To me, fiction was for doing things that no other art form could do: for traveling to fantastic worlds, whether historical or science fictional, for creating mind-bending Borgesian concepts or crafting vivid and sustained performances of argot or shaggy picaresque narratives. While I could appreciate certain exceptions like the aforementioned Anna Karenina for their prose mastery and for their vivid portrait of life in another age, the thought dogged me: why this? Why is so much of the canon such banal stories of the everyday? Why not something more exciting? I just didn’t understand why, of all things under the sun and with no limits to the prose medium but one’s own imagination, so many novels were fixated on middle and upper-class domestic life and particularly on marriage.

Recently, though, I’ve been reading bourgeois domestic realism at a furious clip; not just Wharton but Sentimental Education and Revolutionary Road and James Salter and others. What changed is not that I got married (I didn’t) or that I live a comfortable bourgeois life (I don’t, though feel free to help me do so by clicking the “upgrade to paid” button below) but that I began, like anyone, to accumulate regrets and see roads not taken. I’m not that old or anything, in fact I would hazard a guess that I’m a bit younger than my median reader. But ten years in the adult world is enough time to begin to understand that as you age, certain doors close forever, certain choices that seemed trivial at the time are in fact meaningful and irrevocable, and certain chances that could have been taken, for better or for worse, were not. I’ve lived long enough to see friends with whom I once promised to conquer the world fall, like Newland Archer, into dull routine and proceed along predetermined tracks, the light imperceptibly fading from their eyes a bit more every day; long enough to have relationships fall apart for ultimately silly and stubborn reasons, or because I failed to be as courageous or as honest as I might have been. And I realize now that that’s what all these novels are actually about. The bourgeois realist novel is not really about how marriage is hard, how adultery is tempting, or how life in the suburban middle classes or in high society presents various obstacles to happiness. It’s about getting older.

So I get it a bit more now. It’s not that novels like The Age of Innocence are moral teachers, or that they advise us to seize the day and throw your life away for love, or anything like that. But in their tragedy, in their complexity, in their rueful appraisal of the everyday human predicament and in the clean, fresh, penetrating air of their prose, perhaps they help to remind us to hold fast to our goals and be attentive to our true feelings, to not be swept along by the currents of propriety, and above all, to keep the flame of life, which flares so hot in youth and dwindles for so many of us as we age, burning steadily within us.

I’ve been reading On the Road. I really, really, really, really did not want to write about it.

Lately I feel as if my work here has come dangerously close to resembling clocking in for a shift at the Dead White Male Rehabilitation Factory. Whether it’s Hitchens, Mailer, or Wolfe, the formula is the same: acknowledge the faults, point out the good things, and end in a sense of grudging admiration, having done my bit to ease the passage of these disreputable figures back into the canon. Sotto voce there is perhaps even a bit of prurient nostalgia for a time when writers were allowed to be so boisterous on the page, when they lacked an inner flinch, an inner censor, even if it came at a high cost to others.

I stand by everything I’ve said about those guys, but one must not travel the same road a thousand times. And writing about Kerouac, perhaps the most maligned canonical American author of the century, seems like self-parody, almost. And anyway he was never someone I had a particularly strong affection for; the only Beat I ever really loved was Burroughs. But my notes kept accumulating, my thoughts kept racing, and grand theories started formulating, theories about America, about the road, about the secret kingdom underneath it all. So hang with me, we’ll leave the book and light out for new territories soon enough.

Beyond the boundaries of North Beach the Kerouac Industry has fallen on hard times. Amanda Petrusich, who actually has travelled the byways and backroads of America writing books on blues and folk music and collectors of rare 78rpm records, must still flash her Legitimate Critic badge for the readers of The New Yorker and declare “At a certain point in a person’s life, liking Jack Kerouac becomes embarrassing.” The general strategy to writing sympathetically about On The Road in the 2020s is to confess that you liked it at fifteen, it was a huge part of your life, and eventually you outgrew it, but god dammit, that kid is still in you somewhere and it’ll always mean something to her. When I was a child, I spake as a child, et cetera, et cetera.

I, unfortunately, cannot lean on that old saw. When I was growing up in San Francisco, there were still a few old Beats around, part of the city’s literary fabric, but my natural interest in my forefathers was tempered with a typical and healthy teenage resentment of smug adults telling you what the counterculture ought to be, man. Anyway, if people go around saying a book is strictly for teenagers, smart teenagers will get a sense of the prevailing sentiment and skip those books entirely, which is why I only read The Catcher in the Rye and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas this year. I did try On the Road around age sixteen and found it kind of boring. I’m not sure if I ever finished it. I mostly read science fiction back then.

But hey, at thirty it’s pretty good. Better than I expected at any rate. In fact I’ll go so far as to say it is a flawed and blinkered and sometimes irritating book that nevertheless has an irrepressible exuberance and vision to it that makes it more valuable than many of its more right-thinking contemporaries and has kept it alive throughout the years despite an air of institutional eye-rolling1. There are wonderful little picaresque episodes and gorgeous descriptions of cities and highways and bayous and strange characters who wander in and out. The energy and pace, particularly in the original scroll version which keeps the formatting as one long paragraph and reverts to everyone’s real names, reminds me of one of those great 1950s Blue Note records by Hank Mobley or Art Blakey, all drums and bass and horns, drive, drive, drive2. And the book is more ambiguous and self-critical about its middle-class protagonists searching for kicks among the down-and-out than its reputation might suggest (anyway, why does everyone forget how explicitly gay a literary movement this was?).

The major criticisms, though, are all still basically sound. Women exist in the novel to be fucked and do the dishes and occasionally cause problems (on second thought, I guess everyone forgets how gay the Beats were because you get the sense it’s because they really can’t stand those nagging broads). And a few ambiguities here or there don’t really change its naive exoticizing of the American preterite, whether black jazz musicians or Mexican grape pickers. If I were alive when On the Road became a national phenomenon and I were not among its chosen demographic, I could see myself getting pretty annoyed.

But as I said, I’m not here to steer the ship of criticism through the rapids of reputation. I’m after bigger game.

What I’ve been thinking about is a persistent low-level hostility towards the visionary and the exploratory in the novel, a fear of it even. After all, there are definitely many worse books than On the Road, both aesthetically and morally, that people don’t seem to feel the need to apologize for or attack quite so vehemently. As it happens, there’s another late-50s-early-60s novel on my bedside table that I’m excited to start. It’s also about the stifling effects of placid suburban American culture and the search for something more and it even has a similar title: Revolutionary Road. Now, if its reputation is at all accurate I’m quite confident I’m going to enjoy Revolutionary Road and its portrait of the shattered dreams and broken promises of a middle-class 1950s marriage. But there’s something that bugs me in the different positions these two books occupy in the cultural imagination.

I’ll tell you what I mean. In an early section of On the Road, Jack falls in with Bea, a Mexican immigrant escaping from an abusive marriage. They begin an affair and Jack goes back with her to her family in Bakersfield, where they eke out a living picking cotton and grapes (“I was a man of the earth precisely as I had dreamed I would be in Ozone Park,” he rhapsodizes about subsistence farming, a condition that humanity has spent tens of thousands of years inventing ways to escape). Eventually they part ways, knowing it can’t last, and Jack wires his mother for money and gets on a bus back to New York.

This section left a bad taste in my mouth, as I’m sure it does to many modern readers. Who is this guy to go bumming around some of the poorest and most put-upon people in the country, romanticizing their simple connection to the land, until he gets bored and goes back to his privileged life? The guy went to Columbia, for God’s sake! It’s just arrogant, insensitive cultural tourism in order to have some sort of groovy way-out identity-building experience, a perfect example of everything bad about the Beats and their purported vision quests that are really just interesting new consumer lifestyles.

And yet I also find myself thinking: shit, at least it tries. This is where Revolutionary Road comes back in. Now, I’m obviously not faulting Revolutionary Road for not being about Mexican laborers any more than I would fault Middlemarch or Anna Karenina; bourgeois marriage is one of the great preoccupations of the novel as a form. I’m just saying that no one would consider it immature if it happened to be your favorite book. Write a novel about escaping the suburbs and looking for a new way to live and it’s juvenilia, write a novel about staying in them and crumbling into despair and it’s a mature American masterwork.

It all made me think about an attitude that persists subtly among many right-thinking liberals (an attitude, I hasten to add, that I do not exempt myself from): any attempt by the educated classes to freely interact with the other tribes in America, whether separated by class or race or folkway or anything else, will always have some tinge of condescension or insensitivity or the stink of unearned privilege, so it’s better not to try (with exceptions, I suppose, being made for attempts to recruit them to some political program or other, or desultory charity work). If your novel never leaves the neighborhood, as these novels of suburban disenchantment don’t, it won’t offend. Avoid interacting with people in the wrong way by never interacting with them at all.

The road novel in general seems to get a certain class of people hot under the collar. This hostility reaches its pinnacle in this frankly astonishing article by David Kurnick on the contemporary academic reception of The Savage Detectives, a book deeply indebted to and in conversation with On the Road, and a book that I actually did love as a young man and continue to love today. It turns out that bigwigs in Latin American studies hate The Savage Detectives. They don’t even really know why. They’ll throw any reason at the wall to see what sticks: Bolaño is a one-trick pony, he’s too theoretical, he’s not theoretical enough, he’s a romantic stereotype for gentrifiers and gringos, and most absurdly of all, Bolaño’s popularity is “an excuse for American readers not to read any other Latin American literature.”3 In general the actual problem seems to be that, like Kerouac, the wrong people like it in the wrong way.

The centerpiece of Kurnick’s exposé is a 2009 paper by the esteemed scholar Jean Franco called “Questions for Bolaño.” The actual paper is cloaked in more genteel academic language than this, but Kurnick sums up its basic preoccupations pretty well:

Franco establishes the kinship of The Savage Detectives with formally jumpy, art- and politics-obsessed novels by Julio Cortázar and Roque Dalton; she is acute, and dubious, about what she calls Bolaño’s “romantic anarchist” politics—his pre­occupation with friendship as the most meaningful unit of social and ethical life, the absence in his fictional worlds of explicit appeals to state reform, a fatalism that can feel apolitical.

CHRIST!! There it is right there: everything I stand against. I’ll read a thousand mediocre, self-aggrandizing Kerouac ripoffs before I let these people dictate culture. Let’s go down the list:

• “Romantic anarchist”—I would be thrilled if I were tagged with this description, one of the ideal political temperaments for a poet or novelist. Let’s go ahead and censure Whitman and Melville and Blake for being those things while we’re at it (don’t you hate when you’re at a party and some Blake Bro comes up and talks your ear off about Orc and Urizen?). Give me romantic anarchists like the aforementioned or cheerful nihilists like Shakespeare and Flaubert. Only the really, really good, like George Eliot, can get away with being sensible liberals and almost nobody can get away with being a middle-class radical, spouting the rhetoric of human emancipation to conceal their secret desire for another bureaucracy to rise in.

• “pre­occupation with friendship as the most meaningful unit of social and ethical life” —One can quibble with this I suppose, though it seems a strange thing to be bothered about. I’ll just say in its defense that if you’re younger than fifty or so, your oldest friendships will inevitably be older and more storied than your longest romantic relationships, even if their passion and intimacy manifest in different ways. Unless we should all be writing books about our parents, I guess.

• “the absence in his fictional worlds of explicit appeals to state reform” and “a fatalism that can feel apolitical”—tiresome, small-souled commissar nonsense, immediate Pay No Mind list.

What are we doing here? The visionary tradition, the quest narrative—away from the state, out on the road—is as old as literature itself. What is writing for if not to slip the surly bonds of earth? What is it for if not to chase after the transcendent, even if the attempt ends in disillusionment or disaster? None of these concerns are new. Eliot Weinberger points out that in the Jerusalem Bible, a 1966 attempt by eminent scholars and theologians to translate the Bible into unadorned language more appropriate to the desert tribes from which it sprang, many of the psalms sound strangely familiar. They sound, unintentionally, like 20th century beat poetry:

The voice of Yahweh over the waters!
Yahweh over the multitudinous waters!

The voice of Yahweh in power!
The voice of Yahweh in splendour!

The voice of Yahweh shatters the cedars,
Yahweh shatters the cedars of Lebanon,
making Lebanon leap like a calf,
Sirion like a young wild bull.

The voice of Yahweh sharpens lightning shafts!

Perhaps now is the time to say that I also took a long car journey through America that was very transformative and important for me. Reeling in the wake of a shattered relationship a few years ago I packed up the car and spent weeks moving from Florida back to California, passing through the bayous and swamps of Louisiana and through the West Texas plains, through New Mexico and Arizona and Colorado and the bleak and blasted Nevada desert and back into the Sierras and home. I met a cowboy musician in Cloudcroft, New Mexico who was traveling from Lubbock to Denver and had shared bills with Terry Allen and The Flatlanders. I slept in a man’s yard on the Mescalero Reservation and we smoked joints and ate Cheez-its and he told me about growing up on the rez, and on the way out the next morning I took a wrong turn and had to inch along a muddy dirt road alongside a pack of jumpy, half-starved wild horses. I saw a huge black wildcat in the Sierras that to this day I have no reasonable explanation for. I found that something about being alone on the road makes you a better version of yourself: looser, more open, more willing to shed the burdens and expectations and prejudices of everyday roles and meet the people you encounter as they are, with no fear or expectations, face to face.

I say this appropriately chastened. I know that it takes a certain amount of privilege to be comfortable rambling around the country alone. But it’s probably the single best thing I ever did for myself. I find episodes from those few short weeks resurfacing again and again where I least expect them, in my creative work, in my outlook on life, and in my attitudes towards America and its inhabitants.

Recently, first-team all-pro friends-of-the-blog John Pistelli and Gnocchic Apocryphon had an exchange where JP proffered the following about this country of ours:

One’s liberties are not up for deliberation. If they are, they aren’t liberties. (“Rights” are not liberties. That’s a word the state uses to pass off its presumptuous permissions as freedom.) The American left and American right both understand this, but they only apply it in selective and opportunistic contexts; hence why one loves to see a trans woman with a gun. Isn’t this—liberty, not democracy—the meaning of America, a country founded by rogues and extremists as a utopia for outlaws and cults?

To which GA responded:

I have my own “get off my lawn” type tendencies, but can this kind of Emersonian-Whitmanian pastoral really be squared with American history, with the place in the world we’ve occupied?

GA is entirely correct, it cannot. America isn’t an outlaw utopia, not the America of white picket fences and whites-only signs, of Exxon and OpenAI and Disney and the CIA all under the black sun. Not the nasty, rapacious, hateful America you can turn on the news and see.

And yet my heart can’t help but be with JP, and with William Burroughs, depicted in On the Road as “a Kansas minister with exotic phenomenal fires and mysteries” who “had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910 when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinamen smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone.” I do think that GA is wrong in a certain sense. Sometimes, in moments, in flashes, the outlaw utopia BECOMES real. It becomes real in part because our Whitmans and our Emersons and our Blakes, Dylans, Coltranes, Pynchons, Nelsons, and yes goddammit, even our Kerouacs all do their bit to dream it into existence. And I really did experience something of it when I drove from coast to coast and saw great mountains and vast canyons and met strangers and slept under the stars.

Marxists return again and again to the Paris Commune, their brief moment of possibility in which the future was unwritten, in which, maybe, a new society could actually be born. There are moments like that in American life all the time, certain moments that are possible here because of an ethos of individualism and self-creation that can be disastrous, that has wrecked too many lives to count, but that has also created wonders. Wonders that surface occasionally, briefly, in the jazz club and in the honky-tonk, in the light over the ranges on the cattle drive, in the still moment at the top of the arc of the Hail Mary pass and in the deep fly ball hanging in the air, the crowd willing it to go, go, go just a little further. And in the sensation of driving fast, up into the hills at last light, music blasting, destination unknown.