Indholdsfortegnelse for Autum 2024 i The American Scholar

Listen to just about anything Charles Ives wrote—his symphonies, his songs, his monumental Concord Piano Sonata—and you may experience a range of simultaneous emotions: awe, nostalgia, exhilaration, but also perhaps bewilderment. Ives remains, in his 150th anniversary year, a notoriously difficult composer, often misunderstood, woefully underperformed. The time for reassessment, writes Joseph Horowitz in this issue, is now. Horowitz, both as a cultural historian and as a concert producer, has long championed Ives's music. This year, he is co-curating a major interdisciplinary festival devoted to Ives, to be held at Indiana University from September 30 to October 8. Several leading artists will perform. In early September, we will continue our own Ives exploration, with a collection of essays on our website (theamericanscholar.org) by Princeton historian Allen C. Guelzo, Yale art…

On a visit to Seattle early in 2001, I happened to see an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent at the Seattle Art Museum. The artist had made brief appearances in two biographies I had written—one, of Alice James, the younger sister of William and Henry James; the other, of the financier and art collector J. Pierpont Morgan. My publisher had reproduced part of a Sargent painting, The Breakfast Table, on a paperback edition of Alice James. All these figures—Sargent, Morgan, the Jameses—were Americans who lived transatlantic lives between the 1850s and early 1900s, and their worlds occasionally intersected. Sargent and Henry James were neighbors in London and good friends; the artist's painting of the writer is a masterpiece. Having published his novel The Portrait of a Lady in…

LEIGH ANN HENION is the author of Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and other publications. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark, to be published by Algonquin Books. In western North Carolina, the mountain growing season is short, and autumn is already tossing yellow-and-red confetti against my windshield as I drive the back roads to my friend Amy's homestead. Curve after curve, I find locust trees that are a few shades lighter than they were last week. Buckeyes also seem well on their way to change. It is now hard to tell the difference between orange leaves falling…

In “Gravity Archives,” a new long poem, Andrew Motion sorts through his personal past while charting the ongoing present with its .fluctuating moods, obsessive memories, and .fleeting observations, almost in the manner of a diary. The poems here follow Motion on a return to England, his native country, from the United States, where he lives now. The central motif is gravity. That includes everything that weighs on us and threatens to pull us down or back into the past. Motion gives us multiple images of “falling,” starting with his redeye arrival in London, where the morning light is “catastrophic” (a Greek word meaning a sudden fall or “downturn”). Parakeets in the trees and a fox on the street: these familiar sights from North London remind Motion of “love's labour lost.”…

JEFFREY LENT is the author of six novels. So far. He fell off the cliff of a seven-inch zafu. He couldn't get up because of his surgery. He believes in the Resurrection mostly because he was never taught how not to. —“Where Is Jim Harrison?” Dead Man's Float, 2016 Growing up in rural Vermont and later in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, I was a bookish youth, reading and making attempts at writing from an early age. Both of my parents were readers, there were several good-size bookshelves in the house, and early on I was provided with a desk and a bookshelf for my room. Most every birthday and Christmas, there would be at least one book among the gifts. I was read to, as well,…

In this devastating and essential world history, Sunil Amrith sets out how we humans, during the past thousand years, have altered Earth and, often as not, ravaged it. “To have any hope of undoing the densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm,” he writes, “we need to understand its origins.” Among the many significant events that Amrith discusses is Columbus's 1492 arrival at Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that now comprises the Dominican Republic and Haiti. There, Columbus and his crew discovered “trees and flowers and birds” that they could not name. Returning to the island the following year, they brought pigs, chickens, dogs, and cats, all of which reproduced prolifically. They brought barley, wheat, leeks, onions, cucumbers, broad beans, citrus fruits, olives, and parsley. They planted sugar cane.…

André Aciman's introduction to Italy was a nightmare. His first memoir, Out of Egypt (1994), describes how a prosperous, sophisticated Turkish-Jewish family was forced out of Alexandria in the mid-20th century by President Gamal Abdel Nasser's campaign to rid Egypt of “Egyptianized” foreign nationals. In the years between 1952 and 1970—from the anticolonial coup that brought Nasser to power, through the Suez Crisis of 1956 that brought the waterway under Egyptian control, to the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel—Alexandria, the great capital city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, lost most of the people who ensured its immemorial mix of cultures, languages, and religions. Alexandrians with Greek, Italian, English, Maltese, French, Jewish, and Armenian connections, identified broadly as “European” and “Western,” fled increasingly restrictive educational and…

Most fans of Robert Louis Stevenson associate him with childhood readings of Treasure Island or Kidnapped, but I first encountered his work as an adult. I was traveling in the Cévennes, a range of mountains in southern France, researching the efforts of French Protestants to hide refugee Jews during the Second World War. Besides visiting sites tied to this moving history of resistance and resilience, I also took in an unrelated one that in an odd way celebrated those same qualities: le chemin de Stevenson. This was the trail the young Stevenson, accompanied by a difficult donkey named Modestine, rambled down in 1878 and made modestly famous in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, published the following year. The book is an occasionally snarky, frequently funny, and at times…

I lived in New York City when it was more violent and dangerous than it is now. Needle Park was still a place where people were killed and women were raped, and the Lower East Side was a place where you wanted to be careful. Mobsters shot each other in the city, as in Joey Gallo getting gunned down in Umberto's clam bar in Little Italy. Morningside Heights was a place to avoid after dark, and Harlem wasn't as friendly as it had once been. It is hard to evoke the mood of New York in the early 1970s, but it had a whiff of Belfast about it, violent, poor, and seemingly unchangeable. In those days, I was a graduate student in the newly established MFA program at Columbia, where…

The timing was uncanny, a bit charmed even, but then again—during a Hall of Fame career that spanned nearly a quarter of a century, and that led him from the Jim Crow South to New York to San Francisco and then back east—Willie Mays had nothing if not exquisite timing. Mays passed away in mid-June, age 93, two days before the San Francisco Giants faced the St. Louis Cardinals in a game organized to honor both him and the Negro Leagues. The venue was Rickwood Field in Alabama, the oldest ballpark in the country, where a 17-year-old Mays got his start with the Birmingham Black Barons. And it was at Rickwood where word spread that Mays, too ill to attend the ceremonies, had died, turning the event into a memorial…

JOSEPH HOROWITZ is the author of 13 books exploring the American musical experience. His Naxos documentary €lms include Charles Ives’ America. As director of the NEH-funded “Music Unwound” consortium, he has initiated Ives sesquicentennial celebrations via Indiana University, the Brevard Music Festival, the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Bard College. His “More Than Music” series, on National Public Radio, will feature additional Ives tributes. I Among canonized composers of classical music, Charles Ives—born 150 years ago this autumn—possesses the most elusive, least stable reputation. There are composers whose standing has sharply declined (the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer were once repertory staples) or risen (Sergei Rachmaninoff is no longer despised as a sentimental anomaly). There are composers whose full stature was only recognized generations after they died (Hector Berlioz's opera The Trojans languished…

1. Jetlagged visitor in London dark awry with first light catastrophic: tender welts and bruises, smears of iodine, bare bones scraped fleshless, fallen anyhow. What disaster fell and welters out of sight? But day distracts. Cold tube train wheels squeeze new weight briefings, sparrows scuffle-dream, then parakeets quick-fire their brass cacophony from trees less green. And pause. Mind taking wandering steps hears Mr Fox tiptoeing close and tells itself his famished yap laments love's labour lost. 2. I crashed my life here roads ago, but still its fragments—ragged jags and blades, bright gleams of form with no exact design— eviscerate me everywhere: bright days which once unwound to lead me home now lead to nowhere known, or cul-de-sacs where railing at myself, then mute with smothering apologies, I try to…

MARK EDMUNSON is a University Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World. In 1992, Gerald Graff, a distinguished English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a book called Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. His aim was to enrich the teaching of literature by making it a ground for intellectual contention. I admired the book, and still do, but for one reservation: when two critics put forward differing interpretations of a text, the text too often recedes into the background. The critics themselves take center stage. So a dialogue between, say, Walter Jackson Bate and Paul de Man on an ode by…

One St. Patrick's Day in the early 1980s, I met Seamus Heaney for lunch at the Faculty Club at Harvard, where we were both teaching. The Boston area is one of the most proudly Irish places in America, and everybody was wearing green for the day. Everybody except Seamus Heaney, that is. Heaney was Irish to the core, but he had no patience for superficial symbolism. The challenge he faced was how to represent the essence of Irish culture to the world while brushing off the green-beer sentimentality we get a taste of every 17th of March. Heaney would not have chosen to be a spokesman for Ireland, but he found himself thrust into that position by his fame. His newly published letters—800 pages of them, ably edited by Christopher…

Initially, some readers might be puzzled by the subtitle of Wright Thompson's new book—“The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” The torture and murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955, in a barn outside Drew, Mississippi, made headlines around the world—as did the acquittal weeks later of his killers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. The event, which galvanized the civil rights movement, has been the subject of numerous books over the past seven decades, including Timothy B. Tyson's 2017 bestseller, The Blood of Emmett Till. The murder likewise inspired a critically acclaimed 2022 film. So what secrets could Thompson be referring to? To begin with, he shows how in the decades following the murder, white Mississippi politicians, legal authorities, parents, and teachers managed to keep news of…

Your meal at Hank's Oyster Bar, a small seafood chain in the Washington, D.C. area, always ends in something sweet, even if you don't order dessert: a petite glass bowl loaded with chunks of dark chocolate, a gift from the house. As with most gifts, you don't ask questions. You just savor the morsels, as the chocolate crumbles and slowly melts, releasing buttery, subtly fruity flavors across your tongue. This brief moment of bliss, however, is not free of guilt, as I learned recently after asking Jamie Leeds, the chef and owner of Hank's, about the source of her treats. These nuggets of dark chocolate are made by Callebaut, a large Belgian company that blends beans from three countries, including Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, where farmers have mercilessly altered the…

After crooning “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” Jack Robin (né Jakie Rabinowitz) turns to his audience in a scruffy cabaret called Coffee Dan's. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin’ yet,” he says. “Wait a minute, I tell ya. You ain't heard nothin’.” It is a metafictional moment early in The Jazz Singer (1927), as Al Jolson, playing Jack and breaking through the fourth wall, signals a revolution in the history of cinema. In the Œrst feature film with synchronized sound, the theater audience is now able to hear something. Jolson deserves to be remembered as the star of the pioneer talkie, but though he was the most popular and reputedly the highest-paid singer of the 1920s, when few challenged his self-designation as “the greatest entertainer in the…

I am not the first person to consider a tree a friend. The Giving Tree, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Secret Life of Trees, just to name a few books, are testaments to the reciprocity between trees and humans. I recall a friend from Israel who would speak at length of his childhood, of how he would sit beneath a fig tree and be blessed by the shade of its foliage and by its fragrance—the sweetness of earth and fruit and sunlight. He was clearly moved by the memory. And I think of my friend the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who has written about her Palestinian father longing to grow a fig tree in the back yard of every home the family lived in when she was growing…

I first encountered Wallace Stevens's poem “Sunday Morning” as a young man in college. Its way of juxtaposing “morning” pleasures against “evening” concerns—the delights of the body silhouetted against the extinction awaiting us—arrested me. What could it mean for his poem to posit death as “the mother of beauty”? How might the resistless undoing that is our lot be fruitful? I grasped even then—who does not?—that there is no gainsaying the process of incapacitation awaiting the elderly. Yet Stevens's protagonist in “Sunday Morning” seems far from anguished about what will be heading her way. Rather than piously spend her Sunday mornings in church—so as to convert the menace of eventual extinction into spiritual transcendence—she relishes the abundant time in the bedroom, the unrushed unfolding of sensuous pleasures: “Complacencies of the…

AUGUSTINE SEDGEWICK is the author of Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug, winner of the 2022 Cherasco Prize, and the forthcoming Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power. When Henry Thoreau was a boy, he asked his mother, Cynthia, what he should do when he grew up. “You can buckle on your knapsack,” she told him, “and roam abroad to seek your fortune.” It was a familiar route into the world for second sons especially, but for Henry the possibility was too awful to contemplate. As tears filled his eyes, his older sister, Helen, came to his rescue. “No,” she assured him, “you shall not go: You shall stay at home and live with us.” So Henry did, virtually all his life, and paid…

ROSANNA WARREN's most recent books are So Forth and Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. In 1935, Berenice Abbott was photographing scenes for her monumental collection Changing New York when a male bureaucrat at the Federal Art Project admonished her. “Nice girls” didn't venture into rough neighborhoods like New York City's Skid Row, he said. “Buddy, I'm not a nice girl,” the 37-year-old Abbott snapped back. “I'm a photographer … I go anywhere.” Abbott is among an extraordinary array of “not-nice girls” whose work is now on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in an exhibition titled “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939.” The works suggest the dramatic differences among these expatriate American artists, writers, and performers who found their way to Paris from…

ARTHUR KRYSTAL is the author of five books of essays and Some Unfinished Chaos: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some 50 years ago, I came across a question that I have been mulling over ever since. It appears in Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, which traces its source to Goethe's West-östlicher Divan, his 1819 series of poems influenced by the Persian writer Hafiz, whose collected works are known as the Divan. The question Goethe poses is this: Lebt man denn wenn andre leben? “Does a man live when others also live?” A hell of a question, isn't it? What could he possibly have meant by it? According to Bloom, it was Goethe's way of addressing poetic anxiety. At 75, Goethe was apparently so confident of his own talent,…

“You're writing a history of sex? The whole of it?” Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, was asked several times in recent years. Her response is Fierce Desires, a chronicle of how cultural forces have shaped America's understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender expression, from 17th-century Jamestown to the Dobbs decision. Those forces have included race, religion, science, the law, language, economics, publishing, the postal system, the growth of cities, immigration, education, social justice movements, disease, war, the military, the internet. Davis gives us chapters on slavery, Native American kinship structures, Mormon and Oneida communities, homosexuality in the Wild West, the rise of sex work and pornography, and Anthony Comstock's lifelong crusade against porn and contraception. She covers San Francisco's queer community in the…

Intellectuals, like baseball players, don't handle every position well. The philosopher tries to write an Umberto Eco novel, but drops the ball. The psychologist decides she's also a poet, but strikes out. Add the historian who transitions into a philosopher-memoirist. If one admires and appreciates Yale historian Timothy Snyder, as I do, it's difficult to know what to make of the hodgepodge that is On Freedom. As a scholar and public intellectual, he's on the side of the angels: skilled as a researcher, indefatigable as an author, antifascist to the core, a fount of worthy policy goals, and the historian who brought Eastern European history to nonspecialist readers. Alas, it may be his very success that explains this departure from the previous high quality of his work. Snyder first drew…

Tahlequah gave birth to a daughter in July 2018. The infant lived for only half an hour, but for 17 days, across more than 1,000 miles, Tahlequah would not let her baby go. The mother carried her infant's corpse halfway across an ocean, balancing it on her snout to prevent it from sinking—a feat all the more impressive since, as an orca, Tahlequah had no hands, and her newborn calf weighed hundreds of pounds. The story of the bereaved orca went viral, inspiring poems, essays—and debates about how, or even whether, animals understand death. The study of this provocative topic is a new field, known as comparative thanatology, and the subject of philosopher Susana Monsó's new book, Playing Possum. The discipline traces its origin, Monsó tells us, to another, equally…

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973 Some 260 species of owls exist today. … There are Chocolate Boobooks and Bare-legged Owls, Powerful Owls and Fearful Owls (named for their bloodcurdling, humanlike scream repeated every ten seconds), White-chinned Owls and Tawny-browed Owls, Vermiculated Screech Owls and Verreaux's Eagle Owls, Africa's biggest, with its startling pink eyelids. Some owls, like the ubiquitous barn owls that occur in multiple forms worldwide, carry a raft of common names reflective of their mythic power: demon owl, ghost owl, death owl, night owl, church owl, cave owl, stone owl, hobgoblin owl, dobby owl, monkey-faced owl, silver owl, and golden owl. —Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows, 2023 Pandemonium! What a great thing football is, that allows us at rare…