Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2022 i The American Scholar

Because of lingering pandemic anxiety, I did not attend the National Symphony Orchestra’s January performances devoted to the music of George Walker—one of my great regrets in recent months. Walker (1922–2018) is having a moment of rediscovery, of discovery really. He began his artistic life as a pianist, studying at Oberlin and with Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute. Successful recitals and appearances with major American orchestras—he played the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 with Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra and the Brahms Second with the Baltimore Symphony—foretold a career on the stage. But Walker soon realized, as he wrote in 2009, that one major talent management agency “did not want to promote a black pianist. I had encountered a pressure-resistant stone wall. All that I had done to prepare myself…

In the catalog of birds that populate the field where we live, at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains, I keep a kind of spectrum in my mind, beginning with the turkey, a frequent visitor, and ending with the great blue heron. Though both are substantial in size, they are worlds apart in deportment. Whereas the wild turkey could be called a commoner, the heron is as regal as they come. Sometimes, driving home, I pull into our road and see one standing in the field across from the mailboxes. The bird in question usually has its eyes fixed on the grass, a foot or so in front of it, or else is walking, slowly, deliberately, with its backward-folding legs in a kind of promenade. Dances of the royal…

On May 18, 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition—or DSM-5, the latest revision of the so-called psychiatric bible. On the very same day, the first and only edition of The Diagnostic Manual of Mishegas appeared, containing the writings of the brilliant, if frequently farmisht, Dr. Sol Farblondget MD, PhD, PTA. With yet another edition of the DSM coming out earlier this year (1,120 pages, $170), we asked Dr. Farblondget if he had any new case studies, any new thoughts or theories, that might be cause for a revision of his own work. “Are you kidding me?” he said, after inviting us to lunch at his New York apartment. “At 74 pages and selling retail for only $10, the Mishegas…

CARL ELLIOTT teaches philosophy and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of several books, including Lonesome Whistle, about whistleblowers, which will be published next year. It started with selfies. Hannah had never taken a selfie before, or even given the idea much thought. She was a tenured 39-year-old psychology professor at a New England college. But eight days after she started on pramipexole, a drug prescribed off-label by her psychiatrist for depression and anxiety, Hannah began taking photos of herself obsessively. She couldn’t explain the desire. At the time, it didn’t even seem especially strange. Neither did the hats. She just felt like wearing them—or, really, any item that would cover her head. A gray wig. A red fedora. A spider-webbed fascinator. A vintage, canary-yellow beehive…

SIERRA BELLOWS lives in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, and the Scholar. Man, I’m so far gone off the painting deep end. I register virtually everything I see outside in terms of a painterly effect. Now it is really scary. I have internalized it, so it is kinda normal to me and not panic inducing, but I can imagine if a stranger were to walk these shoes for like a block they’d be terrified of how they were experiencing the world. These words, part of a message sent to a friend during the early part of Matthew Wong’s career, offer a glimpse into the mind of a painter now recognized as one of the most celebrated of his generation.…

In 1825, Lydia Maria Francis was only 23 years old, but she had already written two novels that had made her a literary celebrity. She was fiercely proud of her country’s new history and bright promise, and her protagonists exhibited all the virtues Americans confidently claimed. They were principled, independent, and unbiased. They were also fair, just, and honest. Her first novel, Hobomok, caused a small sensation. “I should think more highly of the talent of the woman who could write ‘Hobomok,’ ” one admirer gushed, “than of any other American woman who has ever written.” The second, The Rebels, was set in Revolutionary War Boston and included an imagined speech by the American patriot James Otis that was so rousing that schoolchildren began memorizing it and attributing it to…

The first complete English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy appeared in 1802, and over the past two centuries, new versions have proliferated beyond count, like Beatles covers or Sherlock Holmes movies. A diverting literary parlor game is to imagine the best translations that weren’t written. T. S. Eliot would have produced something soul bending; Anthony Burgess suggested that the world lost a great Inferno when Wilfred Owen died. A similar game could be played with Divine Comedy illustrations, of which Gustave Doré and William Blake have provided the best known that do exist. Goya and R. Crumb would have produced the best that don’t. Somewhere between existence and nonexistence is the version of Dante by Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445– 1510), unquestionably the greatest artist to take up the challenge. He…

For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of the leading German thinkers of the time—Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schiller, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived 14 miles away in Weimar, was a frequent visitor and collaborator. Andrea Wulf, born in India and raised in Germany, impulsively moved to England in her late teens and adopted the English language as her professional medium. She finds kindred spirits in the proudly independent, unconventional prodigies of…

Matthew Denton-Edmundson is a writer who lives outside Roanoke, Virginia. Tucked between the highway and a steep, wooded hillside near the southwestern Virginia town of Abingdon is a scrap metal yard called Gross Recycling. On an early fall afternoon, I drove there from my home near Roanoke to meet the owner, Mary Lawson. Mary purchases scrap metal throughout the year, but she also deals in medicinal roots, which local diggers bring to her from the hills and forests of the region. I had come because of one root in particular—ginseng, something I have been fascinated by ever since my neighbor told me that he planned to send his kids to college on the proceeds of his one-acre patch. In the scrap lot, surrounded by the expanse of the Blue Ridge…

In 2019, Forrest Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of poems Be With. The title was a quotation from his wife, the poet C. D. Wright, who died suddenly in 2016. Wright’s final book, ShallCross, which was published posthumously that same year, bore the dedication, “for Forrest / line, lank and long, / be with.” Shadowed by Wright’s death, “be with” evokes loss, interruption, incompletion—separation. But the phrase can also be read as a statement about our essential connectedness with other people, creatures, and things, a reminder that being is always a being-with. Or maybe “be with” is an imperative, an ethical call to lean into that connectedness, with all the emotional, intellectual, and political challenges that entails. In Twice Alive, a recent collection of his poetry, Gander…

“There is no theory that is not a fragment of some autobiography.” —PAUL VALÉRY 1. I was in my 30s and engaged to be married when my father drove to the junction of two backwoods roads, pressed the muzzle of a shotgun against his throat, and pulled the trigger. A classic workaholic, the dynamo at the heart of our family myth, my father was nonetheless a softer, sweeter presence in the household than my mother. While she could flip in an instant from gaiety to red-faced fury, he held to a calmer, steadier course, though often one he seemed to sail alone. We had been business partners until a few years before his suicide, building and leasing shops and office space in and around Charlottesville, Virginia, where we lived. When…

ANDREA BARRETT is the author of Archangel (a finalist for the Story Prize), Servants of the Map (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Ship Fever (winner of the National Book Award), and other books. This story will appear in her forthcoming collection, Natural History. She lives in the eastern Adirondacks near Lake Champlain. For a club gathering late in the spring, Henrietta chose rosy maple moths, which Marion loved. A moth like a flower, a moth like a doll: the body furred in soft yellow, legs and feathered antennae bright pink, dark eyes shiny above pinkandyellow wings. She had some pupae just ready to open and the afternoon’s program planned, before discovering she’d have with her not only Marion but also her two other nieces. Elaine she could cradle, tightly…

According to celebrated Russia scholar Orlando Figes, Westerners tend to assess Russian domestic and foreign policy without understanding the country’s distinctive history. Even those who know it underestimate the importance of Russia’s national mythology. Figes’s new book is called The Story of Russia, he writes, because it “is as much about the ideas, myths and ideologies that have shaped the country’s history, about the ways Russians have interpreted their past, as it is about the events” themselves. Completed as the present war in Ukraine rages, Figes’s engagingly written study emphasizes how Russian self-understanding has shaped the way Putin and his followers see the world. When Winston Churchill observed that “Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” he was echoing similar Western comments that have been made…

"Your Majesty,” Sergei Diaghilev told King Alfonso of Spain at a reception in Madrid in 1916, “I am like you. I don’t work, I do nothing. But I am indispensable.” In Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World, Rupert Christiansen, dance critic of The Spectator, vividly highlights how the Russian impresario Diaghilev was both indispensable and undeterrable as he pursued his dream of showcasing Russian art and music and commissioning groundbreaking collaborations. The Ballets Russes, which Diaghilev founded in 1909, never actually performed in Russia. Many artists fled the country during the Bolshevik Revolution, after which a homesick Diaghilev was in permanent exile in Europe. Christiansen’s book, which commemorates the 150th anniversary of Diaghilev’s birth, also happens to coincide with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and withdrawal from the…

Most people think that scripture is a noun, but it’s actually a verb. That is, scripture is an event, a relational activity. It’s what happens when people read or hear a text and they transcend themselves. Like mercury releasing gold from ore, scripture releases something pure from people, compelling them to change how they live. Nothing illustrates what I mean better than the story of Segundo Villanueva, a poor Peruvian who in 1948, when he was 21, found a copy of the Bible in a trunk he had inherited from his father. Bibles were rare in Catholic Peruvian households. You attended Mass to hear the Bible; you did not read it. And what you heard was incomprehensible Latin. But Villanueva’s copy was in Spanish, he did read it, and he…

“I have no idea how he could have gotten caught up in this. I blame it on Covid,” speculated Sandra Komoroff, referring to her cousin Payton Gendron’s slaughter of 10 people earlier this year at a supermarket in an African-American neighborhood of Buffalo. At first blush, invoking Covid-19 as a factor in Gendron’s rampage seems like yet another attempt to explain away white supremacist violence with exculpatory claims of “mental illness”—especially when he wrote in his manifesto that he was targeting African Americans. He also claims mental competence: “I was never diagnosed with a mental disability or disorder, and I believe to be [sic] perfectly sane.” To contend that Covid-19 transformed Gendron into a killer seems absurd, not to mention offensive to his victims, their families, and their communities. Should…

In 1967, three years after graduating from college, I landed the job of assistant art director at Seventeen magazine. It was a chirpy, all-female place—except for Horace, who archived illustrations and prepared layouts for production. In the art department, Ellen, Honey, Mary, and I worked in blue cotton lab coats. Open pots of Best-Test Rubber Cement perfumed the air. We were all a little high. It was no secret in that sunny room that I’d fallen hard for Andy Warhol. I raved about him to Ellen, Honey, and Mary, raved to the point of vexation. "He’s a phony!” they’d snarl. “Really? A can of soup? You call that art, Patty?” Then they’d twist the knife: “Any one of us could do that stuff.” “He’s the heir to Duchamp!” I’d blast…

Then This Home at last like they say and right away the phone call’s for me. The human ear is most sensitive to the pitch of weeping. Our son practices his cello in the living room. You stand at the counter chaffing bay leaf into a bowl. Mums I placed last week in a vase wilt by the window. My friend, the stranger on the phone tells me, suddenly died, who despite every determination to go on living was waylaid by the sheer organic ineptitude of the body. On the refrigerator behind me, a photograph of our son as a baby balanced on the same friend’s outsized palm, their eyes locked in mutual thrall. Beneath my solar plexus, something like past and present circle the last chair. The music stops.…

My sophomore year in college, I took a class on the Russian novel. I remember our goodlooking young professor striding across campus in a long black coat, heads turning in his wake. It was said he looked like Lenin. His eyes burned like coals, his cheekbones were good, his pointed beard was roguish. Despite his fierce aspect, he was a kindly man, and under his tutelage, we read many novels in translation, among them Oblomov, Dead Souls, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, And Quiet Flows the Don—but no Tolstoy, for some reason. I assigned myself, from a list of optional titles on the syllabus, a book called What Is to Be Done? Its author, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, had written it in the 1860s while incarcerated in a tsarist prison. Despite…

In the 1860s, the Austrian military engineer Karl Pilhal struggled to anchor a new army barracks in the soupy ground beside the Danube Canal in Vienna. He dug down nearly 15 feet for the foundations. He called for a nearby graveyard to be churned up, then carted in the bone-rich earth to add to the silt. The towers of the Kronprinz Rudolf (later Rossauer) Barracks rose, forbidding and unshakable, across from the city’s Augarten park. Yet they hid an embarrassing design flaw. For the 2,400 soldiers quartered there, Pilhal had specified only four toilets. He was said to have killed himself in shame over his mistake. The story is almost certainly apocryphal—a quick Google search reveals that Pilhal retired in 1871 and died seven years later—but in Bold Ventures, Belgian…

Pekka Hämäläinen, Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford, has made a career of challenging a prevailing myth of Native American history— namely, that indigenous peoples were merely passive victims of European colonization. On the contrary, in his 2008 book, The Comanche Empire, he asserted that the Comanches, who dominated the southern Plains from roughly 1750 to 1875, ruled what amounted to an empire in its own right, one that pursued trade, territorial expansion, and resource extraction, among other hallmarks of imperialism. His follow-up effort, Lakota America (2019), made similar observations about the Sioux. Although challenged by some scholars, Hämäläinen’s work has informed our understanding of Native North America. In his new book, Indigenous Continent, Hämäläinen writes that “the great pitfalls in the study of Native Americans are broad generalizations…

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays: Second Series, 1844 Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? —John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644 To eat an oyster raw is to eat it alive. What does it hear as you prepare to slip its body down your throat? If you don’t bite into it, does it start to hear your heartbeat as it moves past your breastbone? —Helen Sullivan, “An Oyster,” The Guardian, June 14, 2021 His Memory he had like a Scarf. His Common Sense, like a buzzing of Bees. His Imagination, like the Chime of a Set of Bells, His Thoughts, like a…