Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i The American Scholar

Mara Klein grew up with a father who loved photography and travel. Even now, on walks together, the Berlin-based photographer and her father will sometimes spot the same picture-worthy image. Klein applies this practice to her work, which reflects her talent for capturing small, wonder-filled moments of everyday life. For her “Holy Land(s)” series, she traveled to Israel, where she took this photo on an early morning walk through the Negev Desert. —KATIE DANIELS “In October 2019, I revisited Israel and the places that I’d discovered on my first trip there in 2011. I traveled to the olive groves of northern Israel, gazed at the vastness of the Mediterranean Sea, and wandered in the Negev Desert. There is an energy to these areas that speaks to a different concept of…

Fighting for Freedom In the late 1700s, enslaved people in America tried to gain their freedom by a revolutionary means: suing for it in court. More than 500 “freedom suits” were filed in Washington, D.C., and Maryland from 1790 until the Civil War, and about half of them were successful. “African-American families were laying claim to freedom, and they were using law to challenge slavery,” says William G. Thomas III, a history professor at the University of Nebraska who is at work on a book about those lawsuits, to be called Out of the Vineyard. Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Thomas and his collaborators, Kwakiutl Dre-her and Michael Burton, are creating an hour-long animated film, The Bell Affair, that tells the story…

TYPICALLY CHARACTERIZED as a fantasy novel, Vincent McHugh’s 1943 I Am Thinking of My Darling imagined New York City in the grip of a tropical virus that rendered the infected void of any moral sense, particularly with regard to sex and fidelity. The city came to have the “unmistakable feel of a place with its hair down and a flower dangling over one ear,” its residents exhibiting “no more morals than a tomcat.” Yet for all the comic fornication and unconcern for consequences, the novel presented this radical changing of habits—“The toughest social force there is, probably”—as a genuine public crisis, the act of a society undergoing self-inflicted disorganization. Two years later, when President Truman announced that the war with Japan was effectively over, San Francisco experienced 72 hours of…

IF BRAD PITT DOESN’T break your heart in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s most recent film, nothing will. Pitt portrays Cliff Booth, the stunt double of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the former star of the Western television series Bounty Law. Popular in the 1950s and early ’60s, Bounty Law was canceled because of Rick’s lack of any lasting allure. Now, nearly a decade later, it’s Cliff who holds together the chaotic pieces of Rick’s shattering persona, Cliff who “carries the load.” Rick’s driver’s license is suspended, so Cliff serves as his chauffeur—and his squire. But Rick isn’t much of a knight. Rather, he’s a crybaby wallowing in the tattered remains of his career. And Cliff is a complicated squire. Unable to land a job—stunt coordinators don’t…

Review by Rachel Hadas LOVE UNKNOWN: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop BY THOMAS TRAVISANO Viking, 432 pp., $32 WHAT IS THE RELATION between a poet’s life and art? A young Elizabeth Bishop offered the following advice: “The best way to understand Shelley is to read part of his biography and then read his poems that were written during the same period of his life.” Thomas Travisano’s study of Bishop, Love Unknown, implicitly invites us to follow this advice. To get the most out of his book, it’s best to keep a copy of Bishop’s works at hand and to consult each poem that Travisano mentions in the course of recounting her life. Yet there’s an essential problem with biographies of writers. Travisano’s detailed account has filled in many…

Why the Admonition? “Moral Courage and the Civil War” was the perfect title for Elizabeth D. Samet’s superb cover story on Ulysses S. Grant (Autumn 2019). But why the caveat at the end: “The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Defense Department, or the U.S. Government” ? Such a warning seems antithetical to a magazine dedicated to intellectual rigor. As an American citizen, I would feel more secure knowing that my government fully endorsed the sentiments expressed in Professor Samet’s admiring profile of the heroic general who led an army that emancipated four million people and saved our nation. KITTY KELLEY Washington, D.C. Those Who Can Teach, and Those Who Can’t It seems…

1 Maybe it was the smell of slowing trains that drove my heartbeat up into my throat. The heating brakes, perhaps, the screams of steel-rimmed wheels, or the decelerating strobe of shadows cast by electric poles. I knew no word to describe the sudden narrowing and darkening of the world, the sweaty hands, the single-minded focus on having to catch my connection, the sense that anything—anything!—would be better than having to wait on a platform or inside a station hall, even in pleasant weather, even with a novel, even for an hour or less. At 20, when I rode three connecting trains back and forth from college two or three times every week, I would have named the feeling “changing trains.” Doctors, had I thought to consult them, would have…

I AM SITTING IN RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S study at the Old Manse, a gray clapboard house in Concord, Massachusetts, built by the writer’s grandfather in 1769. More precisely, I am sitting in Emerson’s chair, trying to do what he did: write. I am relying, in other words, on inspiration plus muscle memory, even if the memory is not my own. There are some obstacles. The chair itself, a facsimile with a built-in desk and a spanking-new coat of green paint, was clearly designed to be used with pen and paper. There’s something absurd about propping up a slender, metallic, electricity-gobbling laptop on the inclined writing surface. It’s an affront of some kind. Emerson, whose portrait hangs over my right shoulder, would doubtless be fascinated by the technology and its infinity…

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, I flew out to western Montana from South Carolina to spend the summer with my brother John and his family in Seeley Lake, a small town near the Mission Mountains. John was a forester with the U.S. Forest Service. Marilyn, my sister-in-law, was being treated for breast cancer. My job was to drive her to Missoula, 52 miles away, for radiation. I was also supposed to babysit my niece, Meg, who was two. Norman laid the papers in his lap and began to talk to me about my poems, telling me things I hadn’t noticed before. Never had an adult taken me so seriously. My second Saturday in Seeley Lake, we were going out to dinner with Professor Norman Maclean, a widower friend of John’s…

AHAB’S ROLLING SEA: A Natural History of Moby-Dick BY RICHARD J. KING University of Chicago Press, 464 pp., $30 IN SEPTEMBER 1891, retired District Inspector No. 75 for the Port of New York died at home on East 26th Street. Literati shrugged. Herman Melville, once known as “the man who lived with cannibals,” was an antique footnote from the age of sail. His Pacific swashbucklers, Typeeand Omoo,were long out of print, and his meandering seaborne epic Moby-Dicksank on publication in 1851, taking his writing career with it. But the 1919 centenary of his birth inspired a Melville revival, then a Melville industry. Modernist critics revisited the Pequod’s bleak and bloody voyage; scholars soon recovered one magnificent lost novella (Billy Budd, stashed for decades in a tin breadbox) and…

UKRAINE GREETED the news that it was in the middle of the most consequential scandal of the Trump administration with a collective shrug. “I read the transcript of the call—Trump didn’t pressure Zelensky,” my uncle, a retired engineer, told me one evening this fall while I was visiting Kiev. “The Americans are making an elephant out of a fly.” My aunt, stirring borscht at the stove, murmured in agreement. Dysfunction still prevails in Ukraine, especially in the war-torn east; for the rest of the country, the challenges are financial. To be sure, Ukrainians are used to surreal politics. Fifteen years have passed since Ukraine produced one of the biggest scandals of the post-Soviet era: a promising presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, suffered dioxin poisoning after having dinner with Ukrainian security service…

WHEN HE WAS 18, in 1993, Billy Joe Wardlow shot and killed an 82-year-old man named Carl Cole during a robbery in Cason, Texas, a rundown town of fewer than 200 people in the state’s rural northeast corner. Two years later, he was convicted of capital murder, making him eligible for the death penalty. The jurors who convicted him, in deciding whether to sentence him to death or to life without parole, had to determine first whether he “would constitute a continuing threat to society,” including inside the prison. When the answer to that question was yes, they had to decide whether, “taking into consideration all of the evidence, including the circumstances of the offense, the Defendant’s character and background, and the personal moral culpability of the Defendant,” there was…

NEW YORK CITY’S FRICK Collection famously gathers beautiful artworks in a range of sizes, from monumental wall paintings to smaller works such as Limoges enamels, medals, and miniature statues, the kinds of objects that were crafted to be held as well as seen. This tiny, intimate scale was the one at which the Florentine sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni (c. 1440–1491) excelled. Virtually unknown today except to specialists, he was eclipsed in his own lifetime by more epic figures like his teacher Donatello, his contemporary Andrea del Verrocchio, and above all by a young man who haunted the Medici family gardens where Bertoldo served as caretaker: Michelangelo Buonarroti. Bertoldo, in other words, spent his days among some of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, in the Florence of Lorenzo de’…

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF RALPH ELLISON EDITED BY JOHN F. CALLAHAN AND MARC C. CONNER Random House, 1,072 pp., $50 THERE IS SOMETHING mysterious about how Ralph Ellison became an enduring literary giant on the strength of one award-winning novel, Invisible Man (1952), and two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). How the legend of his long-awaited second novel grew in fame with every year it was not published. And how after his death in 1994, the redaction of that novel, Juneteenth (1999), by John F. Callahan, cemented his reputation as a great American dreamer whose dream was deferred. (In 2010, we literary nerds were joyous to receive the full, overlong, and sometimes confusing manuscript from which Juneteenth was compiled, Three Days Before…

THOMAS JEFFERSON’S EDUCATION BY ALAN TAYLOR Norton, 426 pp., $29.95 REVOLUTIONARY BROTHERS: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations BY TOM CHAFFIN St. Martin’s Press, 529 pp., $29.99 ALAN TAYLOR REVELS IN having a broad canvas to fill, so readers who pick up Thomas Jefferson’s Education expecting a concise treatment of that narrow topic will instead find themselves swept along on a panoramic journey through Virginia history from the 1730s to the 1860s. Jefferson’s alma mater, the College of William & Mary, shares the spotlight with the institution he founded, the University of Virginia, where Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History. But Taylor’s learned, sprightly text illuminates the larger milieu that educated Jefferson—Virginia’s rabidly partisan politics; its struggles over the…

DANGEROUS MELODIES: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War BY JONATHAN ROSENBERG Norton, 512 pp., $39.95 IF YOU HAD WANDERED into an American concert hall in the late 19th century, the odds of your encountering a work of German symphonic music would have been astonishingly high. Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Wagner were the lifeblood of American orchestras, with Wagner also reigning in the opera house. American conservatories, meanwhile, were run according to the German pedagogic tradition, and American composers largely wrote tone poems and symphonies in the manner of their continental cousins. With every major conductor of German extraction, and with so many German musicians making up the ranks of symphony rosters—from New York to St. Louis, Boston to Chicago—the lingua franca of orchestral rehearsals…