Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2017 i The American Scholar

PERHAPS BECAUSE I AM a white Virginian of a certain age, or perhaps because I am just a little dense, I’ve come late to an understanding of why Confederate statues in prominent civic spaces must go. No, I am not a Lost Cause type, although I confess that my first name comes indirectly from a great-grandfather born in Virginia during the Civil War and named after Robert E. Lee. Still, in spite of that historical burden, I have never gazed upon a Rebel flag with anything but unease and the belief that its disappearance from public display cannot come too soon. But the monuments seemed different. I somehow conflated the memorials that represented the grief of widows and mothers for those lost in the war with the heroic statuary of…

The Last of England Three o’clock in the morningin this hotel whose nameI cannot remember. Am I screaming nowam I making any sound at all? Concentrate Andrew. Imagine tomorrow. Imaginedozens of knives and forksin kitchen drawerslined with soft green baize. Imagine the shoe-shine boyalready skimming his tin of polish. And rows of new-laid eggswaiting at room temperature. But still the ship will not sailthe glittery liner whose namewill come to me in a moment. Still it ismoored to the solid earth. Bound to the stifling earthwhile vast wheels of starscontinue to spin overheadand dawnrefuses to meet the horizon. Hawthorn In memory of Private James Crozier executed in Picardie, 27 February 1916 There is no question of day breakingsuddenly—one minute slow darkness,the next sunlight like a blind drawn up.There is seepage.…

LOVE, IN JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS, IS A SLOW OUTGROWTH OF FRIENDSHIP, NOT SOMETHING THAT MAGICALLY HAPPENS TO YOU. I WAS SITTING THERE AT MLA, THE annual convention of the Modern Language Association, interviewing for an academic job. This was about 10 years ago. The conversation had been going on for a while (it was a big committee) when finally the dean in charge, by way of drawing things to a close, posed a question that she must have been dying to ask for a long time. Glancing down once more at my CV—I had written a dissertation on The Novel of Community from Austen to Modernism, published a book titled Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, and was planning a study called “Friendship: A Cultural History from Jane Austen…

Wallace regales his readers with an extraordinary parade of standout figures—scores of them, the well remembered and the long forgotten. GREATER GOTHAM: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919 BY MIKE WALLACE Oxford University Press, 1,196 pp., $45 MIKE WALLACE’S Greater Gotham is a brightly hued kaleidoscope of themes, facts, stories, and characters. Every turn of its cylinder rearranges the shiny bits into new configurations, fresh ways to consider the blink-of-an-eye transformation of New York City into an “imperial metropolis,” “the de facto seat of America’s budding empire.” Wallace, a distinguished professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History for his previous work, Gotham, co-authored with Edwin G.…

Retaliation or Restraint Jeffrey Lewis (“Our Nuclear Future,” Summer), in his warning about escape through technology, concludes by saying that only changes in ourselves can save us. Not being a psychopath myself (on fairly good evidence), I have always assumed that the president of the United States would not respond reflexively to a genocidal attack with equally massive retaliation—from a sane perspective, what would be the point? It would be interesting to know, however, how many Americans share this hopeful assumption, since the end of the world seems to be part of the belief system of many. JOHN S. HARRIS St. Louis, Missouri Thoreau for the Ages As I read through William Howarth’s “Reading Thoreau at 200,” I recognized a valiant attempt to distill the essence of Thoreau, both the…

DANIEL SCHULMAN’s forthcoming book, Money Kings: The Unlikely Men Who Built Wall Street and Unleashed the Modern Financial Age, describes the journeys of four German Jews who fled religious persecution in 19th-century Europe. Settling in New York City, together they pioneered the field of investment banking and helped the United States become a global economic power. They had different names but a common story. By wagon or on foot, the young men departed the villages of Baden and Bavaria, Palatinate and Hesse, their possessions packed in steamer trunks or bundled in canvas sacks. They traveled for days or weeks, camping by the roadside at night until reaching the ports of Bremen, Hamburg, or Le Havre. There they boarded ships and descended into the clamor and claustrophobia of steerage class, where…

WHEN THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT first arrived almost 50 years ago, I found myself unable to join it. I can’t say I rejected it—it was too big and in many ways too right—but I privately resisted it, and have continued to do so ever since. Not quite immediately: for a year or so I welcomed it in a mild, distracted way. After all, I’d grown up with it. I was a feminist avant la lettre, a young woman who’d never expected to live her life according to traditional gender expectations. I’d been raised in an academic family, attended progressive schools, worn my hair chopped short like Jean Seberg in Breathless, though on me it wasn’t as becoming. To me, feminism had always been axiomatic, and at first it seemed that the…

MATTHEW HILLSMAN TAYLOR JR., nicknamed Pete, decided early to become simply Peter Taylor. The name has a certain directness, as well as a hint of elegance. Both qualities were also true of his writing, though his directness was reserved for energizing inanimate objects, as well as for presenting physical details. (His sidelong psychological studies, on the other hand, take time to unfold.) It was also his tendency to situate his characters within precisely rendered historical and social settings. His stories deepen, brush-stroke by brushstroke, by gradual layering—by the verbal equivalent of what painters call atmospheric perspective. Their surfaces are no more to be trusted than the first ice on a lake. Born in Trenton, Tennessee, in 1917, Taylor was a self-proclaimed “mama’s boy,” though he said his mother never showed…

THE RISE AND FALL OF ADAM AND EVE BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT Norton, 432 pp., $27.95 MOST PARTS OF THE Bible have a historical, rhetorical, or poetic cast—often all three at once; they seek to explain things to the reader in more or less congenial terms. Even narratives like the Binding of Isaac in Genesis, the Book of Job, and the Book of Revelation, which present God’s purposes bafflingly or disturbingly, at least have happy endings to quiet the mind of the devout and the doubt-prone alike. The story of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin, suffering, and mortality is different. It was probably borrowed and adapted by Jewish scholars from a foreign creation myth or myths during the Babylonian Exile, and is an awkward graft onto indigenous (or at least…

He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn’t ordered. —Ring Lardner, on William Howard Taft Great rains at last replenish the springs, the brooks, the swamp, and impregnate the earth. Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow, though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer. —J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782 He had ten yards in the clear and picked up speed, breathing easily, feeling his thigh pads rising and falling against his legs, listening to the sound of cleats behind him, pulling away from them … How long ago? It was autumn then, and the…

IN FORD MADOX BROWN’S famous Victorian-era painting The Last of England, a man and woman, two emigrants, stare straight ahead, steadfast and chilled, as the White Cliffs of Dover recede behind their dauntingly open boat. Andrew Motion’s poem of the same title invokes their clenched expressions as the poet, talking to himself to get up his nerve, prepares to push off from his native England for a fresh start in the United States. The occasion for the poem was his relocation from London to Baltimore, where he joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 2015—a move in which more was at stake than adjusting to a new address and employer. Motion, the former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, is a quintessentially English poet, as reflected in…

Freud’s terms are imperfect, but for those who need to develop their powers of introspection—and who doesn’t?—his concepts are a superior starting point. FREUD: The Making of an Illusion BY FREDERICK CREWS Metropolitan, 768 pp., $40 THE FREUD WARS may be over, but Frederick Crews is still shooting. Freud’s thoughts about human nature are not regarded as scientific, despite his aspirations to being a scientist. And many of his views on women (for instance that they suffer from a castration complex) are now roundly reviled. Few people believe that classical psychotherapy—five times a week, patient on the couch, analyst given to prolonged silences—is efficient or effective. Drugs like Prozac, it’s thought, have done more to help patients than psychoanalytically oriented therapists ever could. Insurance companies are increasingly hesitant to fund…