“…not for gold would I recommend it [writing] as a career to any one who cared a hoot for the reward, for the praise, for the prizes, for the embarrassment of being recognized in the restaurants, or for anything at all save the secret pleasure of sitting in a frowsy dressing-gown, before a typewriter, exulting in the small number of hours when the words, (noble, or ribald, it doesn’t matter) come invigoratingly out in black on white, and the telephone doesn’t ring, and lunch may go to the devil.”

—Sinclair Lewis on his literary philosophy for The New York Times, 1937

December 24, 2024, amid the horizontal wind characteristic of winter on Lake Superior, my children and I are deshuttling while my dad’s yell for our bags cuts through the gale and I match his decibel in French expletives at the children to hurry toward him. In the midst of all this, a fellow passenger I hadn’t noticed while white-knuckling the drive—a beautiful woman about my age—asks where might we be from. Between overheard French and a mention of New York, we had piqued her curiosity on this unglamorous ride in Siberian weather on Christmas Eve. I let her know I was from here but had lived in New York the last 20 years and was home for the holidays, including my dad’s 75th. I howled over the howl for her name, and she said I could find her email on some website to do with Duluth chamber music.

Good thing because neither Sayaka Tanikawa nor Cassandra Csencsitz would lend themselves to easy finding without the spelling written down, the doing of which would have frozen our fingers right off. Some time later I did track her down, and it formed the beginning of our friendship and a musical exchange in New York that came full circle in Minnesota last week for the 5th annual Duluth Chamber Music Festival.

Sayaka’s and my chance meeting echoed hers with Duluth neurosurgeon, Dr. Dino Terzic, through San Francisco Symphony violist Matthew Young, Sayaka’s Festival co-founder and classmate from Yale grad school. En route to San Francisco in 2021, the friends had stopped in Duluth to see Dr. Terzic, a former roommate of Matt’s, as the world re-opened. Hosted by Dino at his Duluth mansion, the musicians played an informal concert then began dreaming about bringing their work to the community. And bring it they have.

It was at my first New York meeting with Sayaka, a world-class pianist who now teaches privately and at Juilliard, that I got this backstory after laughing about our initial subzero encounter. Further coincidences soon enriched the sense of serendipity around our meeting. In telling me about her Duluth host, she said, “He owns the former mansion of an important local writer…,” trying to drum up the name. I got chills (not the Duluth kind) and said, “You mean Sinclair Lewis?” She said that sounded right. Minnesota’s Sinclair Lewis. American bestselling and first Nobel Prize winning author. The writer to whom my late grandfather Roger Forseth (1927-2016) dedicated the largest share of his scholarship and whose writings I have published in book form while continuing Lewis studies of my own.

Buzzing from caffeinated emotion at that discovery, it tipped the scales when she let me know that each year prior to the main stage concert there is a private musical fundraiser at the mansion and that I’d be welcome “next summer.” Fast-forward to last week, and for the first time after circling “Lewis’s home” throughout my youth, I had an invitation for myself and my grandfather’s daughters (also characters in this Substack) to be received there. Let it be known that in the same conversation we discovered that I know Sayaka’s brother-in-law, Adam Birnbaum, a pianist who has played in musical events I have produced in NYC. I pulled up a photo of Adam and her sister, also a pianist, in our former restaurant following a Big Band holiday concert we had hosted just the year before.

It was all quaintly serendipitous and informed the sense of occasion felt by me, my mom, and my aunt last Tuesday. We kept tears at bay but agreed Grandpa was with us for this continuation of his Lewis studies. When I was little, they and my grandma would attend Grandpa’s talks in Lewis’s hometown of Sauk Center, MN. Guilty of some arrested development when together on any exceptional adventure, the sisters were prone to getting the giggles during particularly dull talks, and I’ve long heard about my grandma’s famous glare to quiet her grown-up daughters down. In college I too attended Grandpa’s talks, only in Chicago for the Midwest Language Association or the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, making the quick trip down from Kalamazoo to see my favorite people (I never giggled).

Albeit for chamber music and nothing to do with Lewis studies, the late Minnesota authors were there with us, in the air during the salon performance of a splendid program in honor of America’s 250th. Co-founders Sayaka and Matt were joined by San Francisco Symphony’s Davis You on cello and Kingston Ho on violin, and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Eunae Koh on violin. Ho was a last-minute replacement owing to personal emergency and united seamlessly after racing to save the day. Each performer was respectively soaring, theatrical, and poetic, giving their all to Duluth's ears.

The program was the right blend of important and audience building, including William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost Rag, the second movement of Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11; selections from Jascha Heifetz’s arrangements of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, a solo piece for cello called Varsha by Reena Esmail, and some unforgettable Dvořák: String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, “American,” the result of the Czech composer’s 1893 visit to Iowa. You could hear the American in the Bohemian, the new in the old; Willa Cather would have approved. The encore by Thomas Newman from the Scent of a Woman soundtrack showed a breadth of American contributions to the canon.

As for setting, Dr. Terzic’s 1913 home is a marvel, and with his ongoing renovations put me in mind of last summer’s visit to the Vanderbilts’ Newport mansions. It was surreal to be experiencing this sense of American history and grandeur in “my Twin Ports” which, despite some privilege, have been more characterized for me and my family by rock ‘n’ roll bars than mansions and chamber music, to say the least.

I love my dad’s cover band, in which I cut my singing teeth after studying voice with pianist David Leighton in New York, and I loved this reintroduction to the glory of chamber music. In youth I had fallen for the genre through another chance meeting, on study abroad in France with the daughter of two members of the Cleveland Quartet. I now see that it is the intimacy, unity, and individual distinction amid the small ensemble that I am drawn to. Strings are also like the voice, stretching infinitely to their limits, in a way I hear differently now. DCMF has inspired me to experience more classical music in New York, much the way they have hoped to satisfy and expand appetites for classical music in Duluth through their formal performances and community engagements at schools, hospitals, and retirement homes. To quote their program, they believe simply and correctly in “music’s remarkable ability to bring people together across generations and experiences.”

A further bow was put on the week by the company of two Minneapolis-born Princeton classicists I met through poetry with my longtime mentor and dear friend, the great Rachel Hadas. The young and luminous scholars turned their trip home into a North Shore adventure and completed this sense of New York on Lake Superior, each strand of this story conveying a love of letters and music, a yearning that led me away from my birthplace and now brings me home. Joining us were a baker’s dozen of family and like-family friends, all with connecting points to letters and music galore.

For perspective, in the 1860s and 1870s, Duluth expanded so fast it briefly rivaled Chicago and boasted one of the highest concentrations of millionaires per capita in the United States. As iron ore mining and shipping changed over decades, Duluth transitioned from a raw industrial titan into a regional hub and tourism destination, leaving behind a legacy of historic architecture from its gilded age. The economic downturn hit my factual hometown hard. Superior, the other Twin Port, a bridge away on the Wisconsin side of the tracks, has gorgeous coasts but lesser views, forever looking up—despite its name—at the more elevated Duluth.

150 years later signs of culture and health co-exist with the relics of hard times and a persistent anti-elitism that can both try my patience and come in welcome relief to NYC. On Hwy 61 at the mouth of the glorious North Shore, the Twin Ports are a study in contrasts, with the unbelievable wind chill factor and gritty Iron Range alongside some of our country’s greatest natural beauty and the “saltless sea” I am wont to aggrandize for its Mediterranean worthiness in appearance (summer hypothermia notwithstanding). Efforts like the DCMF alongside the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera of the North (LOON, state bird), and running 127 years the Matinee Musicale, to name a few, give this "climate-proof” destination, duly spoofed and celebrated, a classical music scene. I hope both for the area’s glory and continued lesser-knownness, my own counterpoint to New York, my first and forever home.

Lewis got the first word, with my epigraph of his inspiring 1937 tribute for The New York Times to a Candidian love of work, in the same piece quoting Mary Heaton Vorse that, “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” I’d like to also give Lewis the last word, only this time via my grandfather. I sometimes want to separate my grandpa’s admiration of his writing from his study of Lewis’s addiction, but as in theatre, the truth makes the drama, the fury, the beauty. In general my own experience of Lewis is awe at his seeming virtuosity; there is an orchestral brilliance to his depictions, uncannily apt, sometimes harshly true, others suddenly soft.

So I leave you with this troubled missive, dispatched by Lewis from the home I was in last Tuesday, Lewis and my grandfather’s excellent writing entwined—the older afflicted with unresolved alcoholism, the other in a state of forever-recovery from which he lent the authors he loved a lens of empathy through wellness while revering the great books, hard-won by degrees, that they gave us.

Let us read this with the empathy of Richard Lingeman, redemptive Lewis biographer who left us this month at 95, and who shared my grandpa’s approach to Lewis that mercifully sought to capture the complexities of his life and the scale of his literary contributions in the shadow of Mark Schorer’s biography, a feat of sadomasochism that reveled in his subject’s defects to a degree one wonders about his own. Please bear in mind this Lewis excerpt is from a man whose work and wives betray his reverence for strong women and recognition of society’s hamstringing of them. Long sick with alcoholism and less than five years before his death, it is from a failed husband and broken man, but I appreciate both the truth of the portrait—of the man and the disease—as well as sheer delight in the written word. Here goes from the title piece of my grandpa’s book, Alcoholite at the Altar: Sinclair Lewis, Drink, and the Literary Imagination (1985):

Forseth: But the saddest and most revealing example of Lewis’s obsessive and unresolved rage against women is not in his fiction but in the account by Frederick Manfred of his visit to Lewis in Duluth in 1946. Manfred quotes the following monologue:

Lewis: Yes, Dorothy was a great gal. A wonderful gal. If only she hadn’t been so damn bossy…. But…she being what she was, she just had to be bossy. Too bossy. That poor fellow she’s married to now, I sure pity him. I know exactly what he’s going through.…

“Why don’t you leave us poor little fellows alone? We’re only trying to get along the best we can. In our little way.…“[L]et us have some freedom. So we get a chance to grow up.…”

Forseth: Warming to his subject, he continues:

Lewis: You know how a man is in the morning. After he’s washed the sleep out of his eyes, and is sipping at his coffee, why, he slowly starts getting a few ideas on how he’s to face the day. Ideas at that time are very delicate and uncertain. They need to be encouraged. They need warmth and love. Gentle love. So here he is, the poor sucker, warming his hands around his cup of coffee, savoring it, feeling the warmth of it rising in his nostrils, and slowly but surely becoming aware of a few timid little morning notions in his head, and vaguely hoping that these little timid creatures may grow up…when all of a sudden his hag of a wife has to mention some horrible personal defect of his, some trivial little thing that sticks him in the soft spot, that only she could know because she dresses and undresses on the opposite side of the bed from him. And wheeet! Gone are the little timid embryo ideas for that day. How that man has refrained from poisoning her is beyond me. Beyond me. No, most modern American women are ruined.”

Forseth: And his rage concludes:

Lewis: American women are like that. Killers of talent. Unless it’s talent that helps them obtain power. But the minute it’s talent that they can’t control or understand, why, stab, stab, stab, they’ve got to prick the balloon.…”

Forseth: This outburst is clear illustration of an alcoholic (whether sober or drunk) accumulating unresolved feelings of resentment and hostility and then suddenly giving uncontrolled vent to them.16 Most nonalcoholics would not let the process of resentment go on in anything like this fashion.

Though Lewis’s words might well seem those of a man out of control, because they are from a masterfully articulate wordsmith, they precisely reflect, in diction and intensity, his deepest feelings at that time, and there is, I believe, more raw, concentrated passion here than in all Cass Timberlane. Cass Timberlane is a disappointing book precisely because, unlike the diatribe in his Duluth home told to us by Manfred, Lewis was just going through the motions. The depiction of the relationship between Jinny and Cass is a good story told with a great deal of skill, but it is an exercise and no more.

I also love the sentiment in this quote from later in the piece:

Forseth: To my mind, in fact, there is something admirable, even heroic, in his continuous productivity. Cass Timberlane, for example, is no match for Main Street artistically, but it certainly was financially. To the end of his life he had something to sell, and he sold it. If this kind of success contains an element of irony for the author of Babbitt, I for one am hard put to scorn it.

I don’t think any writer could ask for more.

Homer’s Odyssey comes up so much, I had downplayed the magnitude of going to see Christopher Nolan’s movie version in NYC’s only true IMAX theatre, a hot ticket we had thanks to our dearest friend in film. I haven’t seen much of Nolan, and to me it seemed just like the latest Odyssey thing. Overly A-list packed, I didn’t expect more than Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), which was an abysmal adaption of Homer’s preceding epic except for Peter O’Toole as Priam. That heart-stopping speech, begging Achilles (Brad Pitt) for his son Hector’s body, is a master class that, along with scantily clad Brad, made the movie worthwhile.

But when a work of art informs so much of modern entertainment and has been with you personally since childhood, it can become more than something you’ve read or seen and part of your own life story. My introduction to the Odyssey came through Mr. Blackburn, an inspiring junior high teacher who treated our young brains with great respect. One of our debates was the difference between liking something and its being good. I think Mr. B, with whom I’m still close, thinks we should learn to dislike things that are not good. I disagreed at age 12 and stand by my early impulse; not only do I always hope to love the art I take the time to see, but I still allow myself to like things I enjoy, excellence (within reason) be damned.

This made me a great candidate for seeing The Odyssey. Critics and classicists are having a field day with the film’s shortcomings, namely dialogue woodier than a Trojan horse and character development that seems a sidenote to Nolan’s larger audiovisual and emotional goals. I’m glad for the experts who are deepening our knowledge of the original by calling out Nolan, especially if after questioning his choices they remember to thank him for all the Odyssey book sales as classics programs continue to die on the vine.

Ticketed in the middle of the first row at AMC’s Lincoln Center, I was a little worried about getting dizzy that close up and knowing I wouldn’t make three hours without needing to step out once. And if I haven’t gotten tired of Greek-adjacent stories (never!), maybe I’ve gotten a little tired of my own. As a Cassandra, my whole life men of a certain stripe have asked me to prophesy sports outcomes, for example, half-testing whether or not I know the source of my own name. My husband and I met on a Greek island tour while he was playing, no kidding, a suitor in a comedic musical version of the Odyssey. We have a great origin story that I have told at least as many times as the number of ships launched by Helen’s face.

But from the moment the film began, I was overwhelmed by what these stories have meant to me personally. The fall of Troy and the war that gave us so many of our Greek tragedies and their offspring, including Tantalus, a ten-hour play that Bret and I saw in Denver in 2001. The puppy Argos and what he portends. The first scenes of Odysseus’ divided family, wife Penelope and son Telemachus back in Ithaca, with Odysseus trying to span the Mediterranean home, brought back my St. John’s graduate seminar on the work and our teacher’s opening question, “What is the truth in the Odyssey?” I remembered raising my hand first and answering, “Home.” Home, about which I write often, has always been my truth, too.

Sitting between my Telemachus-sized son and not-quite-Odysseus-sized husband, The Odyssey’s power was translated, this time for a change, on screen. Is anything more exciting than the Trojan Horse—in image or story? Bill Irwin’s Cyclops is the marriage of his performance with a 60’ puppet that, speaking of Wolfgang Petersen, made me feel like a kid watching the Never Ending Story. Madeline Miller, author of the sublime Circe, gets a lot of credit from me for how important that character now feels, however the director and Samantha Morton chose to portray her. Odysseus’ scene in the underworld and little chat with the late Agamemnon, freshly killed along with my namesake by his wife Clytemnestra, felt both epic and possible, shrinking the gap between myth and life. And then very-old Argos, waiting to see his master before dying, sets up a contrast between pure emotion and the happiest violent ending in the history of homecomings.

Modern interpreters mine the Odyssey, the better to know 7th century BC Ionia, to play with its stories, and to tease out the poem’s rich emotional content. (Maybe even the “ancient” human condition is more sentimentally consistent than we thought?) In recent years I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, a memoir that forever deepens the father-son story of Odysseus and Telemachus. Around the same time I was obsessed with Classic Stage Company’s black odyssey, a musical version set in Harlem where my family has lived since 2017 (imagine the Sirens as The Supremes). Harkening back to the University of Detroit’s musical version that brought us to Greece so long ago, black odyssey made a little circle in my life that echoes Homeric ring composition (or chiastic structure), a cyclical storytelling device that helped ancient singers memorize the epic poem and enriched the poignancy of its most important themes.

In the end, I didn’t really see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I became part of it. Its sound shot through me, I was hypnotized by its images, and my mind went on quite a trip. But most importantly, in the front row at AMC Lincoln Center, I was in the front row of my life. I’m grateful to my parents for the good name, my grandparents and teachers for the good books, and my dear friend Shawn for taking us to the movies.

“Grandmother was perfectly happy. She and the twins were about the same age; they had in common all the realest and truest things. The years between them and her, it seemed to Mrs. Harris, were full of trouble and unimportant. The twins and Ronald and Hughie were important.”
—From the end of Old Mrs. Harris

I write from home in the Twin Ports of Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin. My children, each born in New York, always arrive here with a sigh. “I am more comfortable here than anywhere in the world,” the big one (16) said. The little one (11) added, “I like to think of this as my #1 home.” My parents and grandparents, whose home since 1963 is now ours, have given us this solidity and continuity. It is a welcome complement to New York indeed.

Also very important are cats. The children miss them second only to their grandparents, and we relish their stories from afar. The petite and very vocal thirteen-year-old male Frisky is living less up to his name, and the all-but-mute humongous five-year-old female Gracie is betraying a dark side very unbefitting of hers. They are both black and white and, before Gracie outgrew Frisky, were easy to mix up. And though Gracie chooses not to use her vocal chords, over the past year we have learned how bullish she can be. When my parents were hosting a sick friend’s cat, she hated every inch of the sweet interloper, charging him into corners and staring him down lest he dare leave his second-class spot. It was very unattractive behavior that has changed my view of her. Less nefarious but still telling are the wild fights she picks with Frisky, as she towers over and boxes him while he snarls with little paws defending his face.

My dad and I reminisced yesterday about my kitty Sugar, who passed away when I was getting engaged in Lyon, France, twenty years ago. My parents waited to tell me until my return, and I cried myself to sleep for a week. We debate her age but know she was over 20. I remember when my dad gave her to me, pulling the tiniest white ball from inside his jacket. I was not younger than five so she was maximum 21, but he insists she was 23. His math isn’t mathing, but I’ll let him believe it (unless he reads this, then we can go over the dates…again). I’ll never forget how she first looked lapping up milk from behind, her short kitten tail pointy like a stingray’s. And more stingray than sweet Sugar was. Never a cuddler or a lap kitten, she was a tremendous huntress, a suburban outdoor warrior whose skills belied her size. I would come home from college, drop my bags, and always find her in the same basket. My crabby little love.

I recently read Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels, and the vehicular loss of her cat Ballo, depicted as a sort of feline soulmate, made me weep in the way that pet passings do. It put me in mind of the greatest example of feline love that I can recall in literature, a subplot of Willa Cather’s short story Old Mrs. Harris. Written in 1930 at the peak of her powers, it was published in a collection of three shorts called Obscure Destinies, including a riveting study of communication and politics called Old Friends, and the heartwarming Neighbor Rosicky, which I have guest taught at NYU. The title character of Old Mrs. Harris owns Blue Boy, a cat that serves Mrs. Harris and her author as a narrative second self.

A couple of years ago I led a Great Books seminar for the St. John’s College New York alumni association on Old Mrs. Harris. Like so many of our best novelists, there is no room for Cather on the 100+ Great Books list that, after you get through the Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, and Russians, leave only a handful of slots for fiction under two hundred years old during its four-year program. They fill some gaps with additional elective programming like the alumni seminars and other recreational reading. It felt redemptive to include Cather in this way, and the response was tremendous by so many who hadn’t previously connected with her work. I felt the satisfaction of reaching more people with a writer who has long lit my way.

Below is the outline of our discussion, anchored by Cather’s intoning of the words “real” and “important” throughout Old Mrs. Harris, which informed my introductory question in the Socratic tradition with which Great Books seminars are led.

September 17, 2024, at the Home of Dr. Philip Mitsis on Washington Square Park

Thank you to the Daniel Van Doren and the Alumni Association for allowing me to add Willa Cather to our Great Books conversation with this class. I’m thrilled to have such a great turnout and must make special mention of Phil LeCuyer, one of St. John’s most celebrated tutors. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since I graduated and 22 since I studied with Mr. LeCuyer during my first term. (To Mr. LeCuyer) I’m honored you’re here and hope to see you again when back in Santa Fe for my 45^th birthday next month.

Lately I’m scratching my Great Books itch via the New York Review of Books. In last night’s seminar Merve Emre was all over Emma with talk of “free indirect style,” a way of writing in the third person that blends a narrator's voice with a character's inner thoughts. It was fascinating, but don’t recall the use of such terminology at St. John’s. It was not customary nor maybe even permissible to deploy literary lingo or biographical context to discuss the works. St. John’s belief is that the works stand alone and, as Zena Hitz and her Catherine Project have it, anyone desirous of engaging with these works can understand them. No showing off that you bring additional knowledge to the table.

That said, in Santa Fe it is a biographical delight to have Cather in the air through her Southwestern writings, including her self-described “best book,” Death Comes to the Archbishop. When living there I read her on the side and, more recently, have relished learning about her own brand of “free indirect style” that she called “the thing not named.” I now believe this is the key to her emotional impact, of which we have a beautiful example in the story we read for today. Through Mrs. Harris’s cat Blue Boy, Cather is able to indirectly—and therefore more powerfully—convey the old lady’s dignity and prepare for her death.

As you now know, Old Mrs. Harris tells the story of a family relocated from the traditional south of Tennessee to the “wild west” of Skyline, Colorado. It centers on the lives of the uprooted Templeton family and how the three generations are viewed by their new neighbors, namely the kind, wealthy, and childless couple, the Rosens.

It’s impossible to miss early in the story the repetition of the word “real” and then later the word “important.” Through our discussion today I’d like to ask us to keep returning to the question, What does this story tell us about how Willa Cather views what is “real” and “important”?

When we meet Mrs. Harris, it’s through the eyes of Mrs. Rosen who describes the old woman’s appearance then states that the purpose of her visit is to know “the real grandmother. ” What Mrs. Rosen seeks is a glimpse of Mrs. Harris outside the context of her servile role in the home of her handsome, vain and dissatisfied daughter Victoria, beleaguered by successive pregnancies and too many mouths to feed. Victoria is away, and Mrs. Rosen sneaks a visit:

The old lady was always impressive, Mrs. Rosen was thinking,—one could not say why. Perhaps it was the way she held her head,—so simply, unprotesting and unprotected; or the gravity of her large, deep-set brown eyes, a warm, reddish brown, though their look, always direct, seemed to ask nothing and hope for nothing. They were not cold, but inscrutable, with no kindling gleam of intercourse in them. There was the kind of nobility about her head that there is about an old lion’s: an absence of self-consciousness, vanity, preoccupation—something absolute.

She continues the description then makes a fruitless attempt at easy chat after which we learn:

Mrs. Rosen felt that she was not getting anywhere. She almost believed that Grandma thought she had come on an equivocal errand, to spy out something in Victoria’s absence. Well, perhaps she had! Just for once she would like to get past the others to the real grandmother,—and the real grandmother was on her guard, as always. At this moment she heard a faint miaow. Mrs. Harris rose, lifting herself by the wooden arms of her chair, said: “Excuse me,” went into the kitchen, and opened the screen door.

The comparison is obvious. Right when Mrs. Rosen is looking for the real Mrs. Harris, her cat Blue Boy enters in style:

In walked a large, handsome, thickly furred Maltese cat, with long whiskers and yellow eyes and a white star on his breast. He preceded Grandmother, waited until she sat down. Then he sprang up into her lap and settled himself comfortably in the folds of her full-gathered calico skirt. He rested his chin in his deep bluish fur and regarded Mrs. Rosen. It struck her that he held his head in just the way Grandmother held hers. And Grandmother now became more alive, as if some missing part of herself were restored.

What is this missing part? What is Cather’s feline agenda? First Mrs. Harris is lion-headed, then she is completed by her domestic cat who Cather anthropomorphizes, further blurring the two beings:

This is Blue Boy,” she said, stroking him. “In winter, when the screen door ain’t on, he lets himself in. He stands up on his hind legs and presses the thumb-latch with his paw, and just walks in like anybody.

Mrs. Harris goes on to brag about Blue Boy in the charming way we do about the pets who give us only pleasure and love, and who really only hurt us by not living as long as humans we like a whole lot less.

Here Mrs. Harris made her first unsolicited remark. “If you was to be troubled with mice at any time, Mrs. Rosen, ask one of the boys to bring Blue Boy over to you, and he’ll clear them out. He’s a master mouser.” She scratched the thick blue fur at the back of his neck, and he began a deep purring. Mrs. Harris smiled. “We call that spinning, back with us. Our children still say: ‘Listen to Blue Boy spin,’ though none of ‘em is ever heard a spinning-wheel—except maybe Vickie remembers.”

While we ponder what Cather means by “real” and the cat’s role in it, I’d like to steer us to the use of the word “important” that first appears about halfway through the story. Here is Mrs. Harris reflecting on the Southern way regarding elders and justifying her subservience in her daughter’s home:

“We are only young once, and trouble comes soon enough.” Young girls, in the South, were supposed to be carefree and foolish; the fault Grandmother found in Vickie was that she wasn’t foolish enough. When the foolish girl married and began to have children, everything else must give way to that. She must be humoured and given the best of everything, because having children was hard on a woman, and it was the most important thing in the world. In Tennessee every young married woman in good circumstances had an older woman in the house, a mother or mother-in-law or an old aunt, who managed the household economies and directed the help.

As an aside, this is just one of many places in the story where Cather, not herself a wife or mother, inhabits the condition of women in a man’s world and the hardships of what we call family planning today. (One of my favorite lines: “Invested; that was a word men always held over women, Mrs. Harris thought, and it always meant they could have none of their own money.”) After a long, sober reflection on how her transplanted family is faring—from her perspective both directly and indirectly—the sun rises as only Cather can raise it:

Sometimes, in the morning, if her feet ached more than usual, Mrs. Harris felt a little low. (Nobody did anything about broken arches in those days, and the common endurance test of old age was to keep going after every step cost something.) She would hang up her towel with a sigh and go into the kitchen, feeling that it was hard to make a start. But the moment she heard the children running down the uncarpeted back stairs, she forgot to be low. Indeed, she ceased to be an individual, an old woman with aching feet; she became part of a group, became a relationship. She was drunk up into their freshness when they burst in upon her, telling her about their dreams, explaining their troubles with buttons and shoe-laces and underwear shrunk too small. The tired, solitary old woman Grandmother had been at daybreak vanished; suddenly the morning seemed as important to her as it did to the children, and the mornings ahead stretched out sunshiny, important.

For Cather, something of an introvert with a misanthropic streak who wrote, “One realized human relations are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time running away from them,” this is even more true. Ultimately she knows that relationships, community, and family are lifeblood, especially at the beginning and the end.

This heartwarming excerpt comes right before the great grief of losing Blue Boy, a study in suffering we see through the children’s then Mrs. Harris’s eyes. The cat had gotten sick with distemper, a fatal digestive virus. His suffering and the children’s reaction to it are given substantial ink that builds to this point, after the boys had gone about the adventures of their day and return to look for their grandma:

Grandmother was not in her room, and the kitchen was empty. The boys went out to the back porch to pump a drink. The coal-shed door was open, and inside, on a low stool, sat Mrs. Harris beside her cat. Bert and Del didn’t stop to get a drink; they felt ashamed that they had gone off for a gay ride and forgotten Blue Boy. They sat down on a big lump of coal beside Mrs. Harris. They would never have known that this miserable rumpled animal was their proud tom. Presently he went off into a spasm and began to froth at the mouth.

“Oh, Gram’ma, can’t you do anything?” cried Albert, struggling with his tears. “Blue Boy was such a good cat,—why has he got to suffer?”

“Everything that’s alive has got to suffer,” said Mrs. Harris. Albert put out his hand and caught her skirt, looking up at her beseechingly, as if to make her unsay that saying, which he only half understood. She patted his hand. She had forgot she was speaking to a little boy.”

The wrenching scene concludes with a reminiscence about her life in Tennessee and the difference between how much suffering she and these young boys had seen:

Many a child and many a woman she had laid out and got ready for the grave. In her primitive community the undertaker made the coffin—he did nothing more. She had seen so much misery that she wondered herself why it hurt so to see her tom-cat die.

With hands full of children, Mrs. Harris’s daughter Victoria feels sorry about the loss of Blue Boy, for a hot minute. Her practical direction to have his remains brought out with the trash next day is a devastating dismissal of her mother’s being and importance. Mrs. Harris then challenges her grandsons:

“’Air you two boys going to let them take Blue Boy and throw him onto some trash-pile?”

The sleepy boys were frightened at the anger and bitterness in her tone. They stood still and looked up at her, while she went on:

“You git up early in the morning, and I’ll put him in a sack, and one of you take a spade and go to that crooked old willer tree that grows just where the sand creek turns off the road, and you dig a little grave for Blue Boy, an’ bury him right.”

They had seldom seen such resentment in their grandmother. Albert’s throat choked up, he rubbed the tears away with his fist.

“Yes’m, Gram’ma, we will, we will,” he gulped.

Blue Boy’s passing and the fate of his remains both presages Mrs. Harris’s death and her fear of its potential unimportance, as if she, too, might be thrown on the proverbial trashpile, little mourned and soon forgotten.

Between Blue Boy’s and her own end, however, Mrs. Harris steps outside her comfort zone to impact her granddaughter’s future in a most real and important way. She goes to see Mrs. Rosen and, with lion-like nobility, makes clear that Vickie is short a sum of living expenses required for her to accept the scholarship she has been offered. The sympathy between the two women makes it easy for Mrs. Rosen to see how she could help and to offer it, shaping the future of a young life, the child she never had. Mrs. Harris makes this possible for her, and she makes helping her granddaughter possible for Mrs. Harris. This feat allowed the old woman to begin to let go. After her final decline begins, the word important returns from the perspective of her faithful foot-rubbing bound girl, Mandy:

Mandy had to manage the house herself that day, and she was not at all sorry. There wasn’t a great deal of variety in her life, and she felt very important taking Mrs. Harris’s place, giving the children their dinner, and carrying a plate of milk toast to Mrs. Templeton.

Then, as if completing her thesis, Cather brings the words real and important together in the same paragraph at the end of Mrs. Harris’s consciousness:

Grandmother was perfectly happy. She and the twins were about the same age; they had in common all the realest and truest things. The years between them and her, it seemed to Mrs. Harris, were full of trouble and unimportant. The twins and Ronald and Hughie were important.

Like Neighbor Rosicky in this collection and Father Latour in Death Comes to the Archbishop (1927) from a few years prior, Mrs. Harris is treated to the best of deaths, empty of resentment, regret, or the agony of Blue Boy. She observes her powers beginning to fail then sees herself out of this world, going gently with complete independence and dignity. In an extraordinary passage she says, “To be pitied was the deepest hurt anybody could know,” and she herself, in the end, is the opposite of pitiable. Her last act was passionate toward her granddaughter, and her last thoughts nostalgic and compassionate toward her daughter.

Love, kindness, suffering. This is the cycle of life that Old Mrs. Harris asks us to keep our hearts ajar to. The pain of loss is part of the love worth hurting for. From cats to friends and family, the human capacity for understanding, generosity and forgiveness are real and important. They are more powerful than xenophobia, small-mindedness and death. We use our pets to embody the best of ourselves, and they give so much without asking anything in return that ever costs us very much.

For those who wish to read the story in full, I recommend Cather’s Collected Stories, or please find a PDF of Old Mrs. Harris here.

“I think, sometimes, there are only two kinds of people: Those who ask questions of others. And those who don’t.”
—Jacki, The Fear of 13, Scene 4

I deemed David Cromer a magical director upon seeing his Our Town three times at the now-closed Barrow Street Theatre in 2009. My first viewing, starring the director-actor as Stage Manager, I cried harder than I ever have at the theatre, thanks to Act III’s epically emotional funeral and birthday scenes. (To be fair, I was pregnant and didn’t know it yet.) I had adored his Orson’s Shadow, also at Barrow, written about his Adding Machine for American Theatre magazine, and then in 2018 I saw The Band’s Visit on Broadway twice. Over the years I have missed too much of the prolific Chicago director’s work, but what I have seen has marked my heart. Last weekend I had the unique experience of seeing two plays boasting his direction, Off Broadway on Saturday and then Sunday on Broadway for the final performance of The Fear of 13, outcrying my previous Our Town record. Cromer knows how to move.

Saturday’s fare was Todd Almond’s remounted from 2024 one-man musical memoir I’m Almost There at BAM Fisher. Over the past couple of years, I have noted the number of shows I was seeing Cromer’s name attached to and wondered how he was doing it. In 2025 alone, he went straight to Dead Outlaw on Broadway after Good Night and Good Luck, followed by Meet the Cartozians and Caroline Off Broadway before Bug kicked off 2026. Not having seen most, I wouldn’t dare comment on the quality he is upholding despite the volume. But I’m Almost There did leave me wondering what Cromer had seen in Todd’s script and what he had done with it, both back at Minetta in 2024 and for the reboot today.

There is certainly much to see in Todd Almond himself. I’ll never forget his performance as the ghost of a drowned grown-up child in A Girl from the North Country. I can still hear Simon Hale’s arrangement of Dylan’s “Duquesne Whistle” in Todd’s voice with its super-sonic a cappella opening. In Laura Benanti’s memorable Nobody Cares, Todd was a great, if underutilized, presence on keys whose perfect comedic and musical timing parried with Laura well. His book Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” and Broadway’s Rebirth is on my shelf and, in order to stay excited to read it, I’m going to attempt to override my most recent memory with the vision of the 6’6” actor in a white suit belting, “LISTEN, to that Duquesne whistle bloooooowowowing…”

Todd’s vocals and phrasing are the commendable aspects of I’m Almost There. His beautiful sound, most satisfying in the middle of his voice, almost make the otherwise confusing 65 minutes pass pleasantly. I say confusing because, in good faith, you keep waiting for it to gain momentum. It’s directed by David Cromer after all! But the story, despite advertising early on that we are in vague Odysseus-Orpheus territory (“I miss home…osexuals”) and time-bending romantic adventures in an NYC apartment building that serves both as the distance from Troy to Ithaca and earth to underworld, goes nowhere. Going nowhere can of course be great (The Maids, Happy Days, the Absurd list goes on), but in this case the text is so prosaic and its interstitial musical musings so unsonglike, it begs too many questions about how it got this far, and with such a great theatre and director attached to it. It’s not even almost there.

I noted once again that post-pandemic audiences seem to standing ovate as a given, but some may have earnestly enjoyed it? Heck, The New York Times called I’m Almost There a “work of wonder” in 2024 and this month included it in a round-up of eight Off Broadway shows to see, so what do I know. My disappointment was proportionate to my excitement.

The next day at Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre, I leapt from my seat (with the rest of the audience, of course) upon the last seconds of The Fear of 13, Lindsey Ferrentino’s snappy and lyrical adaptation of David Sington’s 2015 documentary about the true story of Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years on death row (1982-2004) for a crime he didn’t commit. He also became the first person sentenced to death in Pennsylvania to be exonerated by DNA evidence thanks to the Innocence Project. This was Cromer at his emotional ensemble-theatre best with stars in their Broadway debuts: Adrien Brody as great as he has ever been on screen and Tessa Thompson, possessed of a quiet power that made intimate the 1092-seat theatre. Like Giant and Oedipus earlier this year, it was electric proof of what theatre at its best can do.

As the wrongfully convicted Yarris, Brody opens the play on a serious note before a dramatically bellied, bellicose guard (Joel Marsh Garland) turns a housekeeping rant to prisoners into the most clever audience talking-to about cell phones, wrappers, etc., I’ve heard. It was a funny and charming amuse-bouche while we fastened our seatbelts for the almost two-hour, no-intermission ride:

GUARD. LISTEN UP!

I mean, you all should already know this, but I’ll say it again.
No photography, no phone calls, no pagers.
For Chrissakes, just nothing that fucking beeps.
No matter how many times you’ve heard this, there always seems to be one.
And let’s hope you already went to the bathroom ‘cause now that you’re in here, that’s fucking it.
You gotta piss, cross your legs.
No cookies, no candies with crinkly-ass wrappers, no chicken chow mein.
Why would you eat in here? Eat at home.
No cigarettes, no crack-cocaine, no needles, no drugs, no teddy bears.
All visitors will dress appropriately.
Women, for the love of God, wear a bra.
But no bras with underwire, as you may not pass the final metal detector.
Nothing hoochie, nothing with writing - sexual, sarcastic, political, or otherwise.
(To JACKI) No pens, no paper.

This speech sets the tone for the play, a seamless mix of dialogue and direct address, humor, terror, and heartache. We soon learn that death row prisoners are all in solitary confinement, spending 23 hours a day in their cells and just one in the prison yard. They are initially bound to a draconic silence system; Nick himself didn’t speak a single word for more than two years. An a cappella group formed by non-death-row prisoners underscore the agony of the voiceless life. The play gets its thesis statement when, after Ephraim Sykes exquisitely sings The Temptations “I Wish it Would Rain,” inmate Michael Cavinder follows with the first bars of “Just my Imagination.” The lyrics of this iconic tune, one many of us have loved our whole lives but maybe not thought about in a while, hover over the rest of the play as love and freedom become imaginative acts we can learn to subsist on.

Tessa Thompson is the volunteer death-row abolitionist Jacki who, in one hour a week, is the only human interaction prisoners are permitted. Her interviews with Yarris form the heart of the play, becoming increasingly personal as his smarts and charms are revealed. In the tradition of books as portals to freedom, from Shawshank Redemption to last year’s amazing Call Me Izzy, Nick has become a reader in prison giving him and Jacki, a PhD student of poetry, a profound common ground. “I’m so glad I’m a drug addict, ’cause I got addicted to books,” Nick adorably says like a come on, for he is also falling in love with her, and she him. Theirs becomes a story of improbable love, technically inappropriate yet so credibly rendered it is swiftly destigmatized; we can’t help but dwell on its beauty.

And this is before more than halfway through the play we and Jacki learn of Nick’s innocence. It was a wonderful dramatic choice to hold this back, that collectively we take his guilt for granted, grow fond of him anyway, and then gasp at the reveal. He wasn’t keeping secrets; he’d become so resigned that his innocence feels moot. Merely a “dumb kid” who mainly boosted cars for joyrides before starting to steal them and falling into meth, Nick tells us his whole story of hapless self-sabotage that led to a wrongful murder charge at a time in our (relatively recent) legal history that convictions were made without evidence. Jacki believes him and turns from volunteer advocate to detective, ultimately marrying him to give her more leverage in his case.

After keeping his spirits preternaturally high, eternal waits and bad turns of luck wear Nick down. Nine years in, Jacki makes a final push before giving up to re-start her own life. Nick writes a letter waiving his last appeals to expedite his execution, his one remaining right. The judge, a caricature of detached rule whose guilty rabble are all dehumanized, seems almost entertained by such a rare request. He prioritizes reopening the case, expediting the DNA testing of a remaining pair of gloves. Some of this gets a little unclear (The New York Times called this one “narratively slippery” and “oddly uneven”), but for me all narrative disbelief was suspended by the power of story and staging as the arc bends toward justice.

“Scene 27, A New Story.” After 22 years, Nick is exonerated. He waits a final year to get out, and we see daylight with him. The house is sniveling hard as the final coup de théâtre, a real dog running out to join him just before curtain call, puts us all over the edge. Mentions of his childhood dog Jocko throughout the play had come to symbolize the frozen innocence—literally arrested development—and lost freedom of one imprisoned so young. Freedom means riding bikes, the ability to have a dog, to go to Bed Bath & Beyond, to talk and to touch.

If this all wasn’t enough, after a few minutes of intense applause, our eyes catch someone waving from a balcony. A tall, wiry bald man stands, an Ed Harris look to him. He is smiling big and begins to speak. The energy around him calls our attention and, rather than begin exiting, we all quiet down, still standing, as it dawns on us who it must be. It his him. Nick Yarris himself, a real-life deus ex machina come to put a bow on this supremely cathartic theatre experience. A man in the flesh who survived 22 years on death row and, 22 years later, is living and smiling to tell. To go from Brody to Yarris—from theatre to life—in this way was a communal brush with immortality, proof of our shared human condition and the power of imagination, running away with us all.

It was gratifying on Wednesday to return to Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre where Audible Theater has been producing a mounting list of hits since 2018. This particular theatre-going decision was prompted by a revival of the late Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was… (1992) starring Cecily Strong in her first play. In partnership with Together Theatre, a new collaboration between Sonia Friedman and Hugh Jackman with director Ian Rickson, What Happened Was… is the second in a three-play season directed by Rickson with the separate casts being treated as one company (Jackman stars in two). It’s a lovely way to cohere a season that I look forward to watching play out.

Hearing great things about the show from people I respect—in addition to its being a New York Times Critic’s Pick, a distinction I agree with about half the time—I was personally keen to see Cecily Strong who I’ve been drawn to over her eleven seasons on Saturday Night Live. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen an SNL-made star on stage and am happy to say she manages straight naturalism as beautifully as crooked nuttiness including, my favorites, clichéd Frenchies and The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party. In What Happened Was…, a ninety-minute two-hander set in 1992 New York, she’s joined on an ambiguous date by Corey Stoll, whose troubling turns on stage and screen have stayed with me. He is softer here.

Work colleagues, Strong is hosting Stoll for dinner alone at her home on what is, unbeknownst to him, a birthday she is throwing for herself. It’s loaded. As the night unfolds, they plant you in the angst bordering on anguish of lonely adults trying to breach each other’s barriers—or muster the trust to let their own guards down. The risk is vulnerability, the reward a deeply needed human connection (and hopefully a roll in the hay). Wine glass glued to her hand, drink became something of a choreographed third character in an interesting way as she unabashedly increased her buzz (it was the nineties) and Stoll eventually followed suit.

Despite its admirable subtlety, the play didn’t affect me emotionally as it might those whose narrative it more closely recalls. I don’t need to factually relate to art in order to feel nor does my imagination suffer, but there was something between me and a visceral experience of the characters’ dilemma that held back deeper feelings. It might have been the fact that, for better or worse, I’ve never been single in New York (sorry, honey). Their pain was abstracted.

Or that alienating force might have been some of the worst audience members I’ve ever sat near. Smack behind me, in the last row of the orchestra, was a peanut gallery of some half dozen strong, a group of women between my mom’s and my age who were chatting aloud in real time throughout the play, like commentators over a tennis match. Gems such as, “Oh my gosh,” “This is so cringe…” “No she diddddn’t…” “Stooooppp” were mixed with compulsive chuckles and gasps. I would kill to know where in tarnation they came from. Several subtle looks over my shoulder didn’t do it, so finally a really sharp one caught their attention. Strike three wasn’t going to be pretty.

They mostly quieted down after that, but I didn’t understand why an usher hadn’t beat me to it. And while I was able to hear the actors (who mercifully could not hear the Ladies I Wouldn’t Start a Conversation With at a Party), my anger and disgust did form an emotional barrier or delay of sorts; I experienced the first half of the play through the soundtrack of their free-for-all. People go to the theatre and take a shared vow of silence to be transported together. This was dishonored, and so casually. Maybe they thought Audible’s name was literal?

Despite that bad taste, Minetta’s charming lane and incredible location next to the West 4th Street subway stop make it a dream destination and New York night, especially if you have a perfect bite at Noortwyck prior. I missed Jackman with Ella Beatty in the also highly praised Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes but will plan to catch him next in New Born by Ella Hickson. Maybe I’ll volunteer to usher.

A PORTAL TO SANTA FE

Last week I had the poetic joy of hosting a book party about my favorite writer, Willa Cather, and one of the places dearest to me, Santa Fe. I was intent on giving author Garrett Peck a New York book event following his schlep east to D.C., and it came together thanks to the open arms of family-owned Santa Fe BK, NYC’s most authentic New Mexican restaurant. To summon Cather surrounded by traditional rustico decor was sentimental in the best of ways, and it was an absurdly feel-good day, contributed to by the presence of children, mine and the owners’ as well as those of a few guests, warmly welcomed so their parents could attend. (Auntie Willa would have approved.) I was honored to have Cather scholars from her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska in the house among an assortment of other literature and Southwest lovers to celebrate Mr. Peck’s “Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop.”

30 years in the making, Bright Edges viscerally re-creates the arduousness and ardor of the six cross-country journeys Cather made by train from New York to Santa Fe in 1912-16 and 1925-26. It is at once a history book, literary biography, and inside scoop from the front lines of Santa Fe’s ever-evolving culture today. Peck transports us back in time, relaying Cather’s experience as she fell in love with the region and eventually the Archbishop, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who inspired her self-described “best book,” Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). As the author of nine books on American history, a full-time Santa Fe resident since 2021, and wide-ranging Santa Fe tour guide, Peck is equipped to handle the complex and sensitive reality in talking about cultures other than one’s own and American history in general, a conversation that is inherently potholed with injustice and offense.

I met author Garrett Peck on a Willa Cather walking tour in Santa Fe in October of 2024. It was a milestone solo trip for my 45th, twenty years after completing the Great Books graduate program of St. John’s College at their “new” Santa Fe campus founded in 1964. (The original in Annapolis is the nation’s third oldest college, est. 1696.) On Mr. Peck’s fact-packed two-hour tour, I learned more about local history than during my two years living in Santa Fe, when I was more overwhelmed by love for the region than a student of it.

On the tour I learned things such as how, at the start of the Mexican-American War in 1846, President Polk ordered the Army to march from Missouri to capture Santa Fe and take New Mexico. Rather than shoot or fight, the Mexican governor fled. Zero lives were lost, so this quiet conquest was named the Bloodless Occupation. Peck wove in these lessons as we traced Cather’s steps, and I was tickled when he shared that he was writing his own book about the making of Death Comes for the Archbishop, widely considered Cather’s magnum opus.

More narrative than novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop holds you in a breathless spell throughout its tale of frontier friendship between two French Catholic missionaries in the 19th century Southwest. I too loved this work and vowed to keep track of Mr. Peck’s book, with the hope of supporting it however I could. A year and a half later it was launched to great fanfare in Santa Fe, and last week in Brooklyn I think Mr. Peck and I both felt the poignancy of honoring Cather à la Southwest in the town that she tussled with emotionally—as so many of us do—likely dreaming a little too often of Santa Fe.

Critically speaking, Peck’s book exceeded my excitement. As a scholar and historian, he achieves several important things while also providing a vivid experience of virtual travel. Read it in the sun with piñon incense burning, and you will go back in time with Cather, then many centuries further as Mr. Peck delves into ancient indigenous American history. Deftly interweaving time, he will also transport you to contemporary Santa Fe and inspire you to plan a Southwestern itinerary as a now sophisticated, in-the-know tourist. He paints his own portrait of Cather’s clerical inspirations, the real Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Bishop Joseph Machebeuf, walks us through Cather’s own discovery of them, and then presents her imaginings in the characters of Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant. Peck also makes a clear-eyed contribution to Cather studies after which you feel you know her personally, shortcomings and all, and yet leave happy to have met your hero. Importantly, he makes a welcome case for our foremost writer of nostalgia as “unquestionably a modern writer.”

“UNQUESTIONABLY A MODERN WRITER”

“Despite Cather’s themes that explore bygone days, she was unquestionably a modern writer. She highlighted the role of art, examined women’s success in a man’s world, and criticized American capitalism and consumerism. Her writing style was spare and pared back. She rejected flowery Victorian descriptions and complicated sentences” (60).

He explains how and why she did this via “her method of hinting toward an idea without explicitly naming it, leaving the reader’s imagination to fill the gap” (61) that she famously laid out in an essay for The New Republic in 1922 called “The Novel Démeublé” (the unfurnished novel):

This was the first time I’d seen put into words the why behind my Cather addiction, the emotional fix I seek from her and so much want to share with others. Lesser known than her contemporaries like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who were younger but peaking at the same time, Cather’s relative lack of name recognition has often compelled me to think about and even defend my “why Cather” while proselytizing, sometimes to untuned ears. I realize now that it’s quite simple. Reading her makes me feel how I want to feel, and she begs to be re-read more than most, the way one revisits poetry or replays music or goes to see the same painting more than once. For me, her emotional impact surpasses that of any other writer. How fitting that her name shares a root with catharsis.

To seal the deal, later in the book Peck references Cather’s method of juxtaposition, which contributes to the spell her prose can cast and the secret of Archbishop’s magic (without of course implying it’s a trick that someone else could simply learn):

“Besides unfurnishing a novel, Cather developed a technique in the 1920s that she called juxtaposition. She defined it as a way “to cut out all analysis, observation, description, even the picture-making quality, in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my part.” Cather got her point across by showing rather than explaining ideas in contrast with one another…. In Archbishop, Cather uses juxtaposition through the various tableaus that form the novel, like paintings lined up at an exhibit” (153).

It struck me for the first time that Cather is like Cézanne, whose thin paint and bare canvas are studies in minimalism, counterpoint, and light. I always thought if Cather were a painter, she would be Millet, but that is true in content not in form. In form, she is mostly certainly Cézanne. (And it always makes me happy to think that if she were a song, she’d be Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams”—welcome to my brain.)

PRESENTISM, AN AH-HA MOMENT

It is impossible to talk about much art today without talking about cancel culture, from book banning to Wagner, the classic go-to. See my piece on Roald Dahl and Giant here. When I first read Peck’s introduction, his discussion of presentism was an epiphany, giving me a new word to simplify and anchor the complex minefield of defending artists whose work we love.

“Studying history is about understanding context. All too often people judge the past by how they feel about it now. Historians call that ‘presentism.’ I intend to gently steer you away from presentism and help you understand Cather and her novel in the context of their time. Importantly, some words we use today didn’t exist in Cather’s time, such as decolonization, gender nonconforming, genocide, historical fiction, LGBTQ+, mansplaining, overtourism, and settler colonialism” (4).

Whether it’s re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder with my daughter, Mark Twain with my son, or Cather, whose word choices or subtext are only occasionally jarring, I’ve learned it’s responsible to attempt to “know our players” before throwing out the book with the racist water. I think we can all also take Mr. Peck’s phrase—striving to “understand art in the context of its time”—to the bank, seeking to understand context and biography, if we wish, and then deciding if we can live with what we learn. This of course is easier if we have proof enough to know how humanely huge-hearted the likes of Wilder and Twain are versus Dahl’s (or Wagner’s) more problematic prejudice, whereupon the individual has to make a decision about how much the work means and if they can compartmentalize its creator’s ism or keep it out of the house. But I feel pretty clear at this point that the decision shouldn’t be made to edit the art, rewrite history, or ban it for others. It’s important to note that I am not talking about “art” that promotes hate of any kind (and I wouldn’t call such a crime art, anyway).

It is the historian’s job to expose or interpret whatever truths they can. One of Peck’s most memorable points from his tour is how laughable it is to call America the “New World,” when we had sophisticated indigenous cultures a thousand years ago, and human life going back tens of thousands of years before. It’s silly that I needed that pointed out to me. I thought I had long-since dispensed with shame around my own small-town roots in contrast with, for example, my Hellenophilia. Until now I didn’t realize I was insulting the ancient culture within our own country by looking down Europe’s nose at our provincial “new world.”

Topophilia: The City Different in the Land of Enchantment

Cather first saw New Mexico in 1912, Garrett Peck in 1998, and I in 2002. We all had the same reaction. I’ve written about topophilia before, my own passionate relationships to place, and it’s clear that Santa Fe qualifies for many, “driving you dizzy with delight,” as Cather said. Peck’s history of Santa Fe chronicles how lucky we are that, through some fortunate timing, smart branding, and good judgement, “The City Different” became just touristy enough, getting on the beaten path without becoming a theme park.

For example, it was fascinating to read about Fred Harvey, a restaurateur who “wanted to improve the atrocious food that he experienced while riding the rails” (thank you, Fred!). Peck tells us that, “In Appetite for America, Stephen Fried called Fred Harvey ‘the founding father of the American Service industry.’ He noted that Harvey ‘created the first national chain of restaurants of hotels, of newsstands, of bookstores—in fact, the first national chain of anything—in America’” (41). Willa liked to eat well, so we can probably thank Fred Harvey for Death Comes for the Archbishop. In all seriousness, with intolerable hospitality, she might never have revisited the Southwest enough times to find her Archbishop.

Peck’s book is rich with these gems and he uses them to fully establish his landscape. He sets the stage then backs into his title subject, the Archbishop’s death then Cather’s own, building to his own emotional denouement, both mirroring and deepening our study of Cather’s sublime ending and own end of life. Readers of Archbishop will experience its virtues anew, others will run to read it, yearning to know more about this unfashionably unfurnished non-novel that almost won her another Pulitzer, became a longstanding bestseller, and in 2024 was included in The Atlantic’s “The Great American Novels” list from the prior 100 years.

CODA

While living in Santa Fe, I was eager to learn more about Native American culture. In the Duluth of my youth, Native Americans were a marginalized second culture, the Ojibwe/Chippewa living on the fringes within and without Duluth, mainly relegated to casinos. I’m not sure I’ll ever resolve how troubling it feels that the people symbiotic with nature got stuck with the most unnatural world of all, the American casino. Of course I do not understand the nuances of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, for example, and what the financial pros at that juncture in tribal history meant and mean. After so much damage, it might have been more good than bad. But I left childhood with a desire to know more and, as a young adult in Santa Fe, I had the chance. (N.B. My impressions and anecdotal evidence stem from experience, not expertise.)

After getting settled at St. John’s, I found a job substitute teaching 11th grade English at the Santa Fe Indian School, including a month-long stint when the teacher took a brief sabbatical. In general it’s certainly doing god’s work to try to hold most teens’ attention, especially when one is fresh substitute meat, but we did okay. I recall reading The Things They Carried, so beautiful and painful, and the completely traumatic Push, set in Harlem where I now live. I got close with one student, Jennifer, who cared and wrote well from her heart, and who also designed jewelry. I spent two holidays, an Easter and one Native celebration, “on the rez” with her family. I have long since lost my hotmail account or any way to reach her, but my daughter and I polished and wore pieces of her jewelry to last week’s event. Jenn is probably around 40 now, and I pray she is well.

Taken together, this whole little adventure of Willa in Williamsburg gave me, to quote My Ántonia, “the sense of coming home to myself.” I’m grateful to the author for letting me hitch my wagon to his work and to Santa Fe BK for being so like-minded and game. I won’t ever forget it.

The last Robert Wilson play I saw was Threepenny Opera at BAM in 2011 and about which I wrote for American Theatre magazine. Fifteen years later, I was not prepared for the multi-sensory bliss of Moby Dick, the director’s final masterwork and, at a relatively short ninety minutes, a display of lean command at the peak of an artist’s powers. Developed at his Watermill Center in Long Island, it premiered at Germany’s Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2024 and was reprised last week for just five performances—the first revival since Wilson passed away at age 83 in June of last year.

Even in a frequent music and theatre-going life, my Wilson return was nothing short of transcendent. British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi’s exhilarating rock music and Wilson’s choreography, which seems to bend time, converge to create the feeling of a fourth dimension. His lighting wizardry in concert with the actors’ faces, painted with German Expressionist makeup, otherworldly set designs, ocean video sequences, and a dual-language deluge—alternating English and German firing up the brain—unite to simulate ecstasy, an almost overwhelming level of artistic pleasure.

Composed of highlights from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the story’s hero is Ishmael, played by an indelible Raphael Gehrmann as a lost soul going to find himself at sea. The astonishing Christopher Nell is a countertenor clown named Boy, a character invented by Wilson to mitigate over-seriousness, and the actor’s range of physical and vocal abilities would be hard to overstate. With strawberry blond hair and soft pink cheeks, Boy provides a pop of pastel against the production’s black-and-white palette and serves as lighthearted antidote to the grim reality of sailors embarking a multi-year whaling expedition. Both Melville and his Ishmael were rare survivors of such efforts—in pursuit of whale oil for lamps—that ravaged and claimed countless seafaring lives until the advent of kerosine in the mid-19th century.

Rosa Enskat is the lone female actor as the whale-revenge-obsessed Captain Ahab. She too was riveting, something about her recalling Blond Ambition-tour Madonna, only with windswept curls frozen sideways, as a troll doll’s, which formed the play’s most picturesque image. I can still hear her peg leg thumping, its rhythm becoming one of the live orchestra’s instruments as each step vibrated through the theatre and portended doom.

Eight more performers were so charismatic they could each carry their own show. Unlike the typically scary physiognomy of German Expressionism, their stark-white faces wore curved lips and brows for a mostly friendly and often humorous effect. Their ironic expressions became part of Wilson’s choreography and, combined with Robert Koall’s tongue-in-cheek adaptation and Calvi’s witty lyrics, seemed to celebrate rather than decry life in this story of death. It is a distinctly human joy to behold what actors like these can do with their facial muscles, their expressions forming a visual language and one of many afterimages I brought home.

Dramaturg Robert Koall has adapted Melville and a German translation for the stage, reducing Moby-Dick’s more than 200 thousand words to about a tenth, including both languages, lyrics, and repetition, and therefore minimal original text. In Koall’s hands, the original’s, “Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!” is trimmed to, in overlapping English and German, “I lack the enjoying power; damned in the midst of paradise!” and “fehlt’s mir am niederen Vermögen zu genießen verdammt mitten im Paradies!” Supertitles highlight every word choice while following the plot becomes secondary to the thrill of Wilson’s images that need no narrative.

Highlights from Calvi’s music include a poignant refrain, “’Cause if I dream it, maybe it will happen,” sung with a Jeff Buckley-sounding strain, and gorgeous euphony: “My wanderlust feels rapturous.” German and English meet at “wanderlust,” a word that may best describe the very origin of Melville’s life and story, though it wasn’t yet used in English at the time of his writing. One famous and lyrical quote from Moby-Dick reads, “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

Against Wilson’s surreal style, the realism of the extensive video sequences, some from the 1956 John Huston film Moby Dick, provided a stark reminder that going to sea is no form of entertainment. Twice Wilson lingers on a slightly animated still from the movie of women on a dock sending off their men. In juxtaposition to the stylized beauty of Wilson’s production, a bearded lady becomes intensely human, an aching counterpoint of life’s stakes in contrast with those of fiction.

At the final performance of this briefest of runs, our audience leapt to its feet. I’ve never partaken in a more sincere or effusive standing ovation. It was partly for Wilson, no doubt, but even more so the miraculous cast who looked genuinely moved by our appreciation. Or should I say awe. The Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus (simply meaning Düsseldorf Playhouse), one of the largest and most historic public theaters in Germany was founded in 1904. I should be so lucky to see their work again. So far this is a theatre-going year filled with reminders about the gifts and glories of live theatre in which Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick is, quite literally, a whole different world. Thanks to BAM for inviting me to review it.

“You have to keep at them. Don’t let them slide. Keep at them. Reading! Reading is the great medicine! Builds the brain back up.”
—From Giant by Mark Rosenblatt

Last June Frank Rich gave me the heads-up that a play about Roald Dahl starring John Lithgow should be coming from the West End to Broadway, and that it was not to be missed. Before knowing that Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant is far from fantastical fun—that contrarily it centers on Dahl’s public anti-Zionism turned antisemitism—I had decided our family must see this richly recommended play about the writer who made readers of our children.

We are fortunate that our grandpa figures here in New York snapped up six tickets, and last week together we finally made our way to the Music Box with an air of pilgrimage; since Mr. Rich put Giant on my radar, the play’s reputation has grown worthy of its name. Our sense of occasion was further enhanced by my abiding wish that the children fall in love with “straight” theatre and my hope that Giant would be the one. I had jumped the gun taking William (15) to Leopoldstadt when he was 12, gave both kids my Twelfth Night tickets to Shakespeare in the Park last summer (the most entertaining of plays starring their beloved Jesse Tyler Ferguson of Modern Family, how could that not be a homerun?), and then we all went to see Ferris—sorry, Matthew—in Tartuffe, one of the canon’s other foolproof plays.

Well, not so much. The kids merely “liked” Twelfth Night and, despite the uniformly fabulous cast of Tartuffe, the dismayingly lackluster adaptation, devoid of lyricism or wit, begged the question of how that production ever came to be in the first place. I’d been excited about it for nine months, probably overdoing the build-up, and we all left deflated. (Matthew has since made it up to us in Ulster American, the rip-roaring three-hander playing at Irish Rep through May 10.)

So after learning more about Giant, we knew it might be too heady for Cordelia (11), but we also thought she was possibly up for it. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict it dissects is on the lips of New York kids whose friends and parents’ friends include people of every faith and viewpoint. Since the attacks of October 7, 2023, curriculums have changed—somewhat ironically—to do justice to Palestine, and the kids discuss and debate beyond their years, mostly respectfully, trying to navigate media sources and lie-detect whether they are of human or AI origin. With the invasion of Ukraine now four years ago in their little lives, these young minds have learned to grapple.

Tucked dead center in the lovely last row of the orchestra at the intimate Music Box, it didn’t take long for me to realize this would be the second time in 2026 I’ve seen theatre achieve the impossible. The first was when Robert Icke’s astounding new Oedipus recast the unbearably verboten romance between Oedipus and Jocasta as a love story we can imagine if not understand. He replaced dismissive cringe with heartfelt catharsis, thereby heightening the tragic relatability of Sophocles’ nailbiter. We are always riveted by Oedipus, but we rarely cry, and most of the time the audience is in-the-know. Icke’s script is written for both poles; winks are woven into thoroughly believable updates surrounding an election countdown, providing a brilliant device for a two-hour one act. On Broadway with a celebrity cast, namely the unforgettable Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, there were newcomers in the crowd and therefore occasional gasps of astonishment. It was a thrill to hear. And then most of us wept through curtain call (I could hear the sniffling around me). Pure theatre magic.

With Giant, we have one of our greatest actors, John Lithgow (80 and shrunk an inch so 6’3”) playing “the world’s greatest storyteller” at age 67 and 6’6”. (80 is the new 70?) Directed by Nicholas Hytner, those high expectations were well-met by the ensemble of five who joined him, including Rachael Stirling as his fiancée “Liccy,” Elliot Levey as his British publisher friend Tom, Aya Cash as his American publisher foe Jessie and the domestics, Stella Everett as Hallie inside and David Manis as Wally without, who participate in some of the play’s finest moments.

These (mostly) lovely people have come together upon the near-publication of The Witches to cope with Dahl’s 1983 review of God Cried, a book detailing the 1982 siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army, in hopes of salvaging the release. Rosenblatt’s invented plot is that Dahl’s American publisher Jessie has come over to extract an apology by way of damage control. For this New Yorker—and I suspect I’m not alone—the tug-of-war that ensues is therapy in answer to approximately two-and-a-half years of failed attempts to properly think let alone talk about the ceaseless tragedy of Israel and Palestine. Rosenblatt covers all bases with the American and British publishers, both of whom are Jewish but who respectively do and do not practice the faith, giving us a gamut of viewpoints.

The writing, direction, and acting came together to hold our attention so tightly that, if not for intermission, I don’t believe there would have been a single lapse. It’s also the only intermission at which I’ve almost accidentally given a standing ovation. At the close of Act I, Aya Cash’s peal of an outcry, “So, yes, yes, you do. Owe me an apology. Yes, yes. Yes, sir. Yes, you do,” rumbled 45th Street.

The children’s lack of fidgeting told its own story as we navigated complex feelings about this overgrown problem child. Dahl’s humor and depth of empathy toward children, approaching a sixth sense, leave you wanting to like him. But as his behavior becomes more problematic, it’s clear that the gift of childhood sense memory comes with the curse of arrested development, a sort of limited playground way of seeing the world. His stunted viewpoint has confused consistent concerns about Israel with a half-baked bigotry that by now seems entrenched—something he comes to unapologetically admit.

Woven throughout the play, too, are truths of Dahl’s life that humanize him; he was bullied by kids and beaten by adults in youth; he was a Royal Air Force vet of WWII who lived with chronic pain from a plane crash that should have killed him; he lost his eldest child, his eight-year-old daughter, to a measles-related complication; his infant son was hit by a car in his stroller and brain damaged. The playwright only touches on these points, but the extent of Dahl’s suffering as a child and for children—his own and all—may shed some light on, without ever excusing, his cognitive threshold.

In the grip of all this agonizing thought, humorous highlights were jubilant, especially when they struck a personal note. One line from a discussion about his American publisher’s son, “Fifteen-year-old boys are generally not nice” got a roar of recognition from our sextet as we jerked our heads to a sheepish William (who is quite nice).

Then, when Dahl is being prompted to dictate a letter of apology to a New York bookseller, he doubles down on baiting and infuriating both Jessie and Tom:

ROALD. “Please tell him that it is now upon his head, that the kinder—children is “kinder,” Tom, in Yiddish?

TOM. Yes.

ROALD. —yes, that the kinder of his shtetl in upstate Noo Yoik will have to make do—no, survive on a strictly kosher diet of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Lithgow drags out “Laura Ingalls Wilder” to delicious effect, her maiden name emphasized like an f-bomb. In a matter of seconds we went from disgust at Dahl’s mocking and racist appropriation of Yiddish, with the clear intent to hurt and offend, to belly laughing at the Wilder dig. Cordelia and I, who are almost done with the Little House series and have gained much by it, exclaimed with laughing horror in her defense.

Dahl even goes after librarians, of which I have several beloved in my life, and really got my funny bone with this one:

JESSIE (pushing forward). Mr Strauss wants to convey very clearly that if The New York Times attacks you, we might also lose the ALA.

TOM (to Liccy). The Librarians.

LICCY. Yes yes we know them well.

ROALD. God. Satan’s Spinster Army. Gluttons for a wholesome message.

That laugh teed up the following perfectly:

TOM. But we have to be strategic. Even without the Times egging them on, we can’t guarantee the librarians will love a coven of diabolical, child-pulping witches.

ROALD. Won’t they rejoice that their story is finally being told?

Without any idea what or if anything Dahl really has against librarians, this is very funny stuff that is still making me chuckle (“Satan’s Spinster Army”...). There are works of art that stay with you physically—change the air around you for a day or so. Oedipus was one, Hamnet another, and most recently Giant so completely filled my mind and soul that I could neither talk about it nor take in anything more until the spell turned theoretical and could be unpacked.

At intermission the children were live wires, eyes wide, tongues wagging. Cordelia made friends with an older woman in the bathroom queue who’d forgotten her reading glasses. To the woman’s surprise, Cordelia said she loved the play and, upon being asked, read the actors’ bios aloud while we waited. (I was now bursting in two senses.) A few years ago Dahl made her a reader, then the antihero within himself, embodied by this play, has shown an eleven-year-old what theatre can be.

First performed in London on September 20, 2024, Giant was conceived in 2018, five years before the attacks of October 7, 2023. For general audiences today, it’s topical on an uncanny level, down to the recent raids on Lebanon as backdrop to the Broadway run. Whereas many have long been preoccupied with the crisis between Israel and Palestine, as a New Yorker of 22 years, I can attest that it was not much on the lips of my large Jewish and non-Jewish American and international circles until after October 7. I was then shocked by a brand of sneaky pent-up antisemitism that seemed just poised to leak out alongside the heartbreak for Gaza, whose situation I wish I had studied and honored sooner. But on the heels of the October 7 attacks, the Jewish backlash felt akin to the permission that Trump’s presidencies have given certain types to regress around rights and events that I thought we’d long-since agreed upon. Dahl’s final speech returned me to those uncomfortable feelings:

ROALD. Certainly I’m anti-Israeli, no secret—but yes, I do now think I’ve also become antisemitic in as much as you get a Jewish person in another country like England supporting Zionism. So I used to think they were separate things—Israelis, Jews—but now, now I see... no matter what they say, it’s the same bag: the clubbing together, the assertion of influence, the outraged defence: you’re imagining things! It’s in your heads! Then bam! Right there, running rings round us. I mean Hitler, I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.

This is a tightrope act by the playwright who skims the xenophobia...or maybe xenophthonos (“other envy”) is more apt...at the heart of the matter. In hindsight I see that my visceral reaction to total conviction against Israel upon the Hamas attacks was because it felt begrudging, tinged with a “stiff measure of something else,” as Jessie said of Dahl’s book review. In this last speech Rosenblatt reveals Dahl’s combination of confusion, disrespect, and jealousy toward Judaism with convoluted talk… “the assertion of influence” “running rings around us.” Dahl’s logic is poor because generalizations are by nature false, and his vagaries are tinged with that “stiff measure” that makes hate crimes, for example, actually worse.

In the infamous book review, Dahl had certainly indulged his pen and shown his hand, but the ensuing personal dilemma, on the brink of being canceled by the U.S. market, for sure losing a shot at knighthood, and disappointing his fiancée right when they could have settled down put him in the position of deep self-inquiry before our eyes. While not seeming the least bit troubled (its own red flag), he is dedicated to personal honesty. What is his truth, even if guilty or ugly, and how could he possibly compromise it now?

In the end, Dahl’s “what should I do?”—to apologize or not to apologize—is the, “Who am I?” of Oedipus. Whether or not his views come from a hateful place—and why—becomes the play’s most complex question and Dahl’s bravest, if far from heroic, moment as we watch him refuse to lie, even to himself. But the writer seems to have made himself the same vow as Icke’s Oedipus: to tell the truth at every cost, blind spots be damned. At the end of the play Dahl admits to his antisemitism as a sort of done deal—and is willing to pay for it. That, at least, has some twisted integrity to it. Where it becomes really scary is when you contemplate that if someone like Dahl can’t, or won’t, open his heart or mind to overcome the flaw in his thinking, what do we do with the rest?

Rosenblatt doesn’t pretend to have the answer. Instead he has achieved the clear head of Virginia Woolf, taking his pain about his own family’s Holocaust-born trauma and pouring it into art. He lets his Jewish characters speak, unleashes counterargument from Dahl, then lets us decide—no polemics, zero theatre-splaining. Without knowing any backstory, you wouldn’t even be entirely sure where the author stood, which gives every audience member the opportunity to sit out offense and defense for once, and just listen.

Giant runs on Broadway through June 28 and, according to Lithgow, is likely his last play.

“The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women...was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
—Virginia Woolf

Room. Womb. Tomb. I began bandying Woolf’s pregnant title, A Room of One’s Own, after seeing the 2023 NYPL exhibit, before having read the work. Knowing its premise—that a woman must have a little money and privacy to be a writer—I therapeutically co-opted the famous phrase when coping with my own fractured focus over the past couple of years. Adding to my case was the financial fallout of pandemic-related events and blind spots, closing our restaurant, not once but twice, and narrating the first half of my 40s before I knew it.

Loving Woolf’s fiction even more with age, I was sure it would be a rip-roaring read, fueling my fire and maybe even preaching to my choir. Perhaps that is why I didn’t get to it sooner—or maybe I was scared of something I haven’t yet unpacked. But presuming Woolf had me at her title alone was crabby and sloppy (crappy?), feeding a victim narrative around my own lack of time—and management. Note to self: no more talking about books you haven’t read!

What I didn’t know until actually reading Room this month is that the groundbreaking essay would, almost one hundred years after its publication (1929), be as healing as it is vindicating. How after amplifying our sense of injustice, Woolf would purge unproductive anger, helping clear the emotional decks of her readers that we may better work with what time and space we do have. This is not some bootstraps tract; it is a fact that women have a much briefer literary tradition than men to draw upon and that we will be, inevitably, interrupted more—usually by men or the children we have with them. This tends to mean less money/room and, harder to measure but as important, headspace.

This is where Woolf comes in. Throughout A Room of One’s Own she conducts a sort of magic trick, showing us by her own example and via a selection of predecessors’ outcomes, that if we achieve emotional peace with our past and present realities then we have a shot at optimal artistic expression. (Free your mind, and the rest will follow?)

N.B. All citations follow the new 2025 St. Martin’s Essentials edition with foreword by Katha Pollitt.

At age 49 and the peak of her fame, Woolf achieves this miracle of healing and inspiration by walking us through her research process as she famously prepared the talk on “women and fiction” that became this extended essay. With deadpan humor and restrained fury, she recounts processing her anger upon running across a book entitled The Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex, a claim that hangs darkly and comedically over the book. (It is a thrill to feel Woolf disprove the absurd title with each passing word.) She matter-of-factly touches on the history of commonplace barbarity toward women, including unapologetic wife-beating across the board.

As for our intellectual restraint, she shows us an average day in a woman’s life on the edges of Oxbridge, forbidden on this path or in that building, as we walk and think about this talk with her. Progress in 1929—as in the U.S. women had had the vote less than 10 years—still meant exclusions from the libraries and universities in Woolf’s own formation and, nutritionally, worse food and drink! My own grandma still had a far inferior dining room at Carleton College in the late 1940s, something we used to sort of laugh about with my grandpa who ate handsomely across the quad. Woolf tidily serves up this grim context, plainly stating how we got here and the facts such as they are going forward. In her astounding “mirror theory” she even sorted out why men must needs view women as inferior and how they manage to suck us dry. Just take this sweep of genius from Chapter 2, pp. 40-41:

Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult. a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself...

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

This just makes sense. King at home with zero resistance to his will or reason has enabled men to endure or conquer the outer world. Women being trapped at home and challenged to provide total tranquility in contrast to worldly tensions has been essential to the prospects of any family. Both genders sharing in the responsibilities and opportunities of home and world is the only answer to this imbalance, and thankfully most cultures have this choice today. But understanding history defuses the anger that clouds our minds and compromises our work.

Far later, in the peroration of Chapter 6, much of what Woolf has to say about money applies to men as well as women, quoting Cambridge Professor of Literature Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (actual surname!) to support her argument that “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom” (p. 133). Quiller-Couch’s most powerful line, “A poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born,” rings with painful truth.

The breadth of Woolf’s truisms are particularly apt a century later, when women may be more empowered but human nature and the world order remains, aspects of which innately hinder the unsung genius as well as the quotidian artist who might only be built to pursue happiness or serve society through their muse. In 2025 certain gendered grievances may be moot, but I still have children to advise and affairs to conduct with an eye to financial and therefore creative freedom.

In Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell movingly imagines the extent to which Shakespeare’s wife supports a city of his own, and far more. (I write more about Hamnet here.) It is in her section on Shakespeare, in chapter two of six, that Woolf begins to formulate what becomes the book’s insistent equation:

…the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s…There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed…[all] hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare’s mind” (pp. 68-69).

This equation—this problem—is one that Woolf solves by the end. Her thesis about the all-importance of clearing the mind builds its argument: clarity begets fluidity—i.e., the best writing, like legato in music—which allows for “integrity,” by which she means truth. In fiction clarity and flow come together to conjure the effect of truth.

Back to money, the clarity conversation becomes one of class pretty quickly. This next passage was seismic for the middle-class Midwesterner in me, the one who as a reader-writer since youth has “lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways (p. 57),” who like Woolf is preoccupied by “the accumulation of unrecorded life” (p. 110), but who has not figured out how to monetize a creative life (and live well, too). Of the writer Alpha Behn, whose name was new to me, Woolf writes (pp. 77-79):

And with Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs. Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote…for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen…

…The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing…

…The middle-class woman began to write.”

“The middle class woman began to write.” Shut the front door, then padlock it. To Ms. Behn we now owe a daunting debt of gratitude. Abused mentally, morally, and physically for most of time, some few women over innumerable years poured water into fissures and watched them freeze almost imperceptibly wider, winter after winter, until there was a little space and, eventually, a little money with which to claim a room of one’s own. The “room” in Woolf’s title now stands for any and all factors that allow for “the freedom to think of things in themselves” (p. 49).

I shall let you read the rest yourself and leave you with a question that Woolf doesn’t quite resolve for me. What happens if anger IS what you want to express? My friend Carrie Heitman’s play Plan C, which I reviewed last week, channeled her anger about the overturning of Roe v. Wade into action and art. This year’s Oscar-winning Mr. Nobody Against Putin did the same. There is plenty to be angry about when reading the gender dynamics in Woolf’s masterpieces and easy to imagine that some degree of anger was part of her source. How does Woolf get clear of anger in a way that she doesn’t feel, for example, Charlotte Brontë did, in comparison to her sister, or Jane Austen, or Shakespeare?

Perhaps part of the answer lies in this quote from some seriously next-level journaling in a diary entry on New Year’s Day, 1898:

“Here is life given to us each alike, & we must do our best with it: your hand in the sword hilt —& an unuttered fervent vow!”

Life for Woolf was innately knightly; she ennobles our awkward project—from Mmes Dalloway to Ramsay and everyone in between—with her hard-won, flowing words.

Please comment if you wish, and subscribe to support my wits!

Subscribe now

“At its core, this production asks what it means to act on one’s convictions. The characters must choose whether to obey unjust laws or protect their communities; remain safe or intervene. Their decisions are immediate and costly. They take risks because they have hope.”
—From the director’s note by Carrie Heitman

I met Carrie Heitman 29 falls ago when she was playing Puck at Kalamazoo College. This month she has stepped aside as actor to conduct the uniformly excellent cast of her own theatre company, Hook & Eye. Plan C, a work of devised theatre co-written and performed by an ensemble of nine, marks their largest production to date and runs through April 12 at The Tank.

The cast alone warrants a trip to 36th Street. I see a lot of shows on and off Broadway and can’t recall a more uniformly excellent and committed ensemble. Devised theatre is an act of co-creation, making the result everyone’s baby. At its best this parental sense of love toward the work is palpable. In Plan C the characters do not feel remotely put on or performed in actorly ways but as second skins. Unified by Heitman, each player is fascinating to watch in their own right. There is no hierarchy of talent or in the text; as in a V-formation, when the lead bird changes, the flock doesn’t skip a beat.

Conceived by Heitman four years ago upon the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Plan C shifts between 1628 Brussels and present-day Virginia to interweave the stories of two revolutionary spirits, one real and one imagined. Alexandrine Von Taxis became Imperial Postmistress of the Holy Roman Empire after her postmaster husband died during the Thirty Years’ War and she began intercepting letters. Charley Gibson, owner of a present-day family hardware store, runs an underground abortion pill distribution operation in response to the Supreme Court’s backwards decision in 2022. What sparks a revolution? What prompts individual risk? What would you die for? These questions are at the play’s heart and increasingly less abstract for many Americans today.

With a text contributed to by some two dozen performers over four years of development, how does its narrative gel? To paraphrase Heitman and her assistant director Kyle Abouriz in their excellent podcast on Theatre Geeks, a “joy of upending the commercial model of theatre” is “intentional ambiguity” that keeps audiences on their toes in the name of intellectual and emotional “payoff at the end.” Being challenged means we grow muscles in only the ways the flexing them can (i.e., AI can’t do it for you). Why go to theatre for this? In Plan C, dark humor and heartwarming relationships are the spoonfuls of sugar that help the gravitas go down.

It also helps that transitions between the two storylines—including complex set and costume changes—are seamless. The choreography by Leslie Galán Guyton and Adrianna Di Liello is beautiful and exciting, making it a pleasure every time the unit breaks into movement. Their precision of movement put me in mind of when I first fell in love with SITI Company, Big Dance Theater, and The Anthropologists. Devised theatre just feels different, as if a new dimension becomes possible when humans work tightly together.

SEET IT

Since meeting at Kalamazoo, Ms. Heitman and I have experienced a lot of theatre and life, some shared. Our signature story is how she came to meet my then-crush-now-husband after they met working at the same restaurant. This was before learning they both knew me when I came to see him at the restaurant one day and ran into her. One can imagine the youthfully dramatic ephiphany. They went on to make theatre together—specifically a puppet play in Central Park based on Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (gotta love the early aughts)—while I was on study abroad in France. A lifetime ago indeed.

In light of our story I can’t close this appraisal of Plan C without acknowledging what a joy it is to see actor-director-theatre founder Carrie Heitman at this stage of her career, pulling no punches as a personality, historian, classic theatre lover, modern theatre maker, and razor-sharp activist. Conviction. Courage. Creation.

C is a wonderful letter.

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself.”
—From The Awakening by Kate Chopin

A great thing about a serious but low-stakes book club is the ability to evolve our syllabus as ideas arise. Thrilled with my son William’s reading list at New York’s Beacon High School, I glommed on hard at the start of the year, re-reading classics (Frankenstein, Metamorphosis) for the first time in 30 years with unabashed vicarity, all but doing his assignments not for but in addition to him. Nostalgia much?

When I saw that Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was up next, I thought it would be perfect for my mom and aunt, too, considering we seem to be unofficially reading books only by women. What’s more, they spent six years of childhood in NOLA when my grandpa was teaching there, so the Creole setting was an additional connecting point. We jumped into the warm waters around turn-of-the-century Grand Isle (about two hours from New Orleans) and were swept into the spoiled but dysfunctional marriage of Edna Pontellier, whose husband places her first in his love of beautiful things and is also given to coming home drunk and voluble—waking her from a dead sleep, picking a fight, and then making those kinds of demands. Chopin gives us his number early on, and it’s hard to unsee.

Then the fun begins. Initially we were squeamish that William (15) was reading something so steamy and quickly decided not to bring him into our “class” as planned. (I’m sure he was crushed.) I then remembered that the now-blatant innuendo had once been lost on me, too. For a bunch of para-puberty teens, Edna’s extramarital crush is a romantic and cruelly unfair story of unrequited love, not the one of white-hot repression it may seem to monogamous mommies. Or so I hear. As a high school read, the symbolism alone makes it an obvious choice for literary training, to say nothing of Chopin’s virtuosic writing that Willa Cather calls, “exquisite and sensitive, well-governed…She writes much better than it is ever given to most people to write…a genuinely literary style…light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects directly and simply.”

A Google of “Kate Chopin Awakening and Willa Cather O Pioneers!”—born of the thought that Cather’s tragedy might have been influenced by Chopin—led me to that praise in this thrilling little 1899 review in the Philadelphia Ledger by a 26-year-old Cather. The plot thickens when Cather, famously a tad rigid despite many of her characters’ own unrequited steam, damns Chopin for devoting her talents to “so trite and sordid a theme” and hopes that next time she will “devote that flexible, iridescent style of hers to a better cause.”

Contrary to Cather, today’s more progressive pedagogy (depending on where you live) would also be using Edna’s ennui, trapped marriage, and array of mental health flags to enlighten young minds to women’s condition before the dream we are living today (says she sardonically). Consequently, my son found Cather to be unempathetic, but the writer who makes rightful heroes of immigrants and farmers has little patience for the very idle, even if the idleness isn’t her choice or fault. As for writing “better than it is given for most to do,” the young Cather herself goes on to define the nervous disposition with an alarming confidence and ring of truth: “Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get even. Nobody ever cheats them, really.” Well, I guess that’s sorted.

For our study purposes, Edna Pontellier pointed me toward the “Bovary canon,” which won’t for now include the original masterpiece. We shall read Edith Wharton’s Summer, Cather’s novella A Lost Lady and her short story Old Mrs. Harris, influenced by and often published with Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. To supplement we’ll read this 1933 piece for The Atlantic that Cather wrote about a chance meeting with Flaubert’s granddaughter in Aix-les-Bains, France—in case you want to follow suit.

These intersections, chance findings from a Google here, a Google there, are a joy to me, rooting our great writers in time and place and relation to each other. This makes them seem closer and more real, a comforting feeling when you turn out the light.

Oh and as for William? The Awakening is his favorite book so far.

Shortly after the pandemic I realized that during my first ten years of motherhood I had read little more than essays, short stories, and plays. Intent on raising readers, I became concerned about my own example and, at middle age, my classic and contemporary gaps. One summer at 16 I hadn’t been able to put down Homer, Flaubert, and Dostoyevsky. I wanted to find that girl again—or die trying.

Not long after this reckoning I met Daniel Mendelsohn at my husband’s and my late restaurant and learned about the online New York Review of Books Seminars he led. I enrolled for a year (2023-24) in a five-part seminar series starting with The Odyssey—not yet his own major new translation but that of Robert Fagles, one of his mentors at Princeton. Curated around the polysemous notion of “Journeys,” Daniel’s unexpected syllabus flowed from Homer to Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) then James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room), W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and finally Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Second Place.

My brain was exploding. Of the authors I had only read Homer and Woolf, and neither in a while. The writing was exquisite, the stories riveting, the meanings salvific. Each title seemed to slip into conversation with the next, building upon each other’s joys, each writer increasingly adept at slowing down time and training their eye more microscopically on—and thereby dignifying—the human condition. Finally Ms. Cusk thrust me into the 21st Century, slapping me awake to how much I’ve missed by at least one living writer alongside the unfinished Great Books list that haunts me.

The next year I continued with Merve Emre’s “What Will She Do?” series, which began began with Emma then took us through the life-changing Middlemarch, which now makes it easy for me to answer the “favorite book” question, although my favorite author remains Willa Cather. We concluded with Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and a formative discussion around the evolved characteristics of modern tragedy. At the same time I couldn’t resist joining Mendelsohn’s (ancient) Greek tragedy series for a chance to study—with one of our great living classicists—the plays that inspired my love of theatre in the first place.

Best of all, envious of my seminar bliss, my mom had joined the Emre classes, allowing us to ready formally and study together for the first time in our lives. After Emre called it a year, we could’t imagine not meeting on Mondays and decided to forge on en famille. My aunt, a retired librarian, caught wind of our plan and was eager to join. In the year-plus since, I’ve taken on the role of facilitator, curating a syllabus and starting our conversations with a question prompt, the best way to start I learned from my alma mater’s Socratic method.

Where did I start us? Cather, of course. We read Professor’s House, My Antonía, and O Pioneers! We had to veer dramatically—though they admired each other's work—to Sinclair Lewis and It Can’t Happen Here for a talk I was to give at the Lewis Society, continuing in my grandfather’s shoes. Reeling from that read while it was—and still very much is—happening here, we then turned back to Austen with Mansfield Park and Persuasion, the Morgan’s exhibit making me feel closer than ever to our literary mater of maters.

It’s been a little hard to get Mom and Auntie off Jane, what with her romantic delayed gratification and happy endings, but I do have other things I’d like to read, so we paused with her there for now. Before doing so, we celebrated in person together with the excellent 1995 adaptation of Persuasion, watching it at my childhood home last week, much like I’d watched my VHS of the 1938 Pride and Prejudice on repeat throughout high school, Olivier and Mr. Darcy merging to very clearly form my taste in husbands.

This brings you almost current. For the next year, I’d like to share brief posts on what we are reading and why, sharing any supplemental materials I can with you, should you like to get on board.

Lastly, the grim name of this Substack is earnest in a sense; I would never again want to live in a way that didn’t allow me to read...a lot. The past five years I’ve made a dent, and the read goes on. I look forward to sharing some of this renaissance with you.

“She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts…”
—Maggie O’Farrell on motherhood in Hamnet

A Shakespeare friend gave me Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet when it came out in March of 2020. A self-described “novel of the plague,” it was sent to print well before COVID landed and published just weeks after. With my usual reading backlog, it wasn’t until this winter that having heard about the movie, I moved Hamnet up my queue. I finally turned to it on a December weekend, just after my ten-year old daughter and I had been bedbound for several days with the flu and were beginning to recover. Over the first chapters, O’Farrell’s tone cast a slow spell, her sensuous style cloaking me as I waded in. Soon enough, owing in part to cliffhanging shifts in time at each chapter mark, I couldn’t put it down.

If at first those episodic waits felt like a page-turning trick, enduring them became something deeper as the story took its hold. I got the feeling O’Farrell was asking us to do more than read. As the stakes became a matter of life and death, I came to think of the patience required to shift between the two main storylines—young Shakespeare and Agnes’s courtship and, some 15 years later, their twins’ fraught birth then later battle with the plague—as the least I could do for them, morally imperative. Beyond being invested, it was as visceral a reading experience I can recall, with more of a dream’s realism than anything I thought possible in art.

Heightening the drama was my own domestic story. While Agnes and her children fought for their lives at birth and death, mine were safe in the next room. And if they did have the plague, today an antibiotic would cure it. Agnes lost her mother as a young child during the stillbirth of a sibling. I have fear-free birth stories, and I still have my own mother, a bounty that was keenly felt as I both fell in love with Agnes and was humbled by her heroism. As O’Farrell interwove time, love, and loss, sharing Agnes’s births and grief with her became larger than catharsis, more about what I could feel on her behalf than any relief from emotion purged. Painful as it was, suffering and surviving with her—willing with her—was the very least I could do.

I closed the final pages after scarcely getting out of bed that Sunday, and not because of the flu. For hours I hadn’t been able to stop reading and crying, crying and reading, stumbling out only to get water, ignore my husband, and clutch at the children—my 15-year-old son whose boyhood is receding before my eyes, and my daughter, the exact age and pallor of Shakespeare’s twins, who the week prior had languished with that flu. A sliver of life, 70 pounds of normally noteworthy strength, she had been possessed by fever’s extremes, alternately begging for ice, the heating pad, and warm baths in search of relief. Even without fear for her life, it was pathetic enough to put the dramatic imagination in a morbid state of mind.

Summarizing how I felt about the book was immediately easy. O’Farrell had made us an unprecedented ode to women, wives, natural birth, motherhood and the magic of twins, which also hits me very close to home. The fact that Hamnet is also “about” Shakespeare is a thrilling billing that quickly becomes secondary to his family story and how O’Farrell’s imagines his wife to life. Showing great restraint, she normalizes the writer in the background, allowing him to come in and out of focus through his wife’s perspective. The result is that, instead of the Homeric aggregate that mystery has made of Shakespeare, O’Farrell’s unexpectedly subtle treatment brought a plausible version to life. It was wonderful to meet him, this poet who means so much to most readers and writers all their lives, and about whom we will likely never know factually more, though we have his bones if not his skull long buried in Stratford alongside his bride.

To consider seeing Hamnet the movie seemed an unbearable proposition, impossible even, having already simulated its grief with my mind’s eye which, as with violence or sex offstage, is more intense—closer to lived experience—than anything film or theatre could show us. But after reading the book I allowed myself to begin taking in the raves from feeds and friends, specifically about Jessie Buckley whose work I had only just experienced for the first time via HBO’s Chernobyl, the 2019 series I hadn’t yet seen. I was deeply drawn to the actress who, until Hamnet the movie frenzy, was anonymous to me. So I decided to see it, last week choosing a 1:15pm Wednesday matinee and arming myself with all the accoutrements of disguise, self-conscious about crossing over emotionally, even amongst strangers.

I’ll be forever glad I went. To read and see a work of dramatic literature provides different thrills and, when successful, together form a complete experience of a work. Hamnet the book and movie are now companion pieces belonging to both fiction and film, neither greater than the other but as if born together, each offering the different gifts of their medium and authors. In the case of the movie, authorship includes the director Chloé Zhao, who co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell. Actors in a film become authors, too, not only divine vessels for the story as in Greek terms but also its most recognizable legacy, especially when they are this great. Together the movie’s creators gave us a book adaptation with wise omissions and inspired additions that both build upon the original and yet leave many riches that can only be found in its pages.

And yes Buckley’s performance was all that Jane Fonda so beautifully put. But Mr. Mescal—whose work I know from live theatre as quintessential alpha male Stanley Kowalski in BAM’s A Streetcar Named Desire and his gentle opposite in a film that is Zhaoesque in its beauty and pain, All of Us Strangers—is not far behind. How fitting it felt, then, to see him realize our playwright of playwrights on screen, the writer whose gifts seem infinite, from his vast expansion of Anglophony to the stories that keep multiplying every time a modern imagination seeks to render him in a movie, book, or play.

Unavoidably there are emotional and dramatic sacrifices in cutting the story to fit the screen; I missed the book’s longer treatment in several places. But we are more than rewarded by the space created for a movie to become a play in a way that only cinema could give us. The final fifth of the film is dedicated to watching Agnes watch Hamlet, the first play of her life, written by her husband for her late son. I will never see the bereaved Prince and murdered King the same way again. I hope to retain the sense memory of Agnes barging into the Globe, talking out loud and being shushed as she forced her way to the stage, her initial panic turning to confused wonder at the seemingly real. And I will never forget the final moments of Hamlet within Hamnet that I hope you all see.

I left both book and movie intent on feeling closer to life, inclusive of pain. The screenplay’s invocation to “keep your heart open”—not an earth-shattering line but epic in these hands—has stayed with me, as has its study of the male artist, a subject I felt even more sensitive to having been greatly moved by Springsteen’s open heart in Deliver Me from Nowhere a few days before. He is a poet, too, who suffers Hamlet’s mortal quandary. Boss or Bard, these are good men who are great artists bedeviled by life, and they need a room of their own—a preoccupation I usually reserve for women and mothers—to follow their muse. In the case of this Shakespeare, his remarkable wife knew him better than he knew himself, and more than give him permission to find his way, she insisted on it. I also left wanting to be more generous and gentle with the above-mentioned husband, my own good man of artistic power.

AMC Theatres concludes its previews with a bombastic, “Your escape starts now.” I chuckled at that line while fastening my seatbelt for the spectacle of agony that laid ahead. “Escape” strikes me as a little on the nose, AMC, for isn’t it supposed to be a secret that we use art as not mere escape but enrichment, that loftier aim? Two hours later, I snapped back to my life and realized I had in fact escaped, but in the sense of freedom gained. I had grown emotionally, been drained of bitterness. I had once again (narrowly) escaped cynicism and disillusionment and, thanks to Hamnet, got myself ready for another round of life.

I realize now, though, that the current underpinning all my thoughts is that art begets freedom in an even deeper sense, helping us elude mortality, tricking it as little Hamnet did and as Shakespeare does every time Hamlet is played. For the agnostic, the only thing stronger than life or death is our human connection over time through shared experience, whether in suffering and empathy or the golden moments of life, big and small, in which we rejoice. The Hamnets together form a dual work of art that renews our vows to love and life. Whatever order you experience them in, I urge you to take in both and let them complete each other.