The New Criterion October 2025 PDF Free Download
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A monthly review edited by Roger Kimball
Notes & Comments, 1
Punitive medicine by Gary Saul Morson, 4
A single song always sung by Rachel Hadas, 11
Tyndale’s legacy by Joseph Loconte, 17
Savage wars of peace by Peter W. Wood, 22
New poems by Jay Rogo, Beverley Bie Brahic & Henry Stimpson, 27;
Reflections by David Lehman, 30; Reconsiderations by David Guaspari, 35;
Theater by Kyle Smith, 38; Art by Karen Wilkin, 42; Music by Jay
Nordlinger, 46; The media by James Bowman, 50; Books: Andrew Jones &
Laura Hodgson The London club & Seth Alexander Thévoz London clubland
reviewed by Simon Heer, 54; James King “Our little gang” reviewed by D. J.
Taylor, 57; Vernon Duke, edited by Boris Dralyuk Passport to Paris and
Los Angeles poems reviewed by Adam Kirsch, 60; Rick Atkinson The fate of the
day reviewed by Jeremy Black, 62; Cynthia Ozick In a yellow wood reviewed by
Sunil Iyengar, 65; Philip Hoare William Blake and the sea monsters of love
reviewed by Nicholas Shrimpton, 67; Terry Eagleton Modernism reviewed by Paul
Dean, 70; Hanna Diamond Josephine Baker’s secret war reviewed by Paul
Devlin, 72; Peter Charles Hoer Three speeches that saved the Union
reviewed by Marc M. Arkin, 73; Notebook by Jacob Howland, 77
Volume 44, Number 2, $9.95 / £9.50
October 2025
Editor & Publisher Roger Kimball
Executive Editor James Panero
Managing Editor Benjamin Riley
Associate Editors Robert Erickson & Isaac Sligh
Poetry Editor Adam Kirsch
Visiting Critics Victor Davis Hanson & Andrew Roberts
Hilton Kramer Fellow Anatoly Grablevsky
Oce Manager Caetlynn Booth
Assistant to the Editors Jayne Allison
Founding Editor Hilton Kramer
Founding Publisher Samuel Lipman
Contributors to this issue
The New Criterion. ISSN 0734-0222. October 2025, Volume 44, Number 2. Published monthly except July and August by The Foundation
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Marc M. Arkin is a professor emerita at the
Fordham University School of Law.
Jeremy Black is the author of Fighting for
America (Indiana University Press), among
many other works.
James Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics
and Public Policy Center and the author of
Honor: A History (Encounter).
Beverley Bie Brahic’s latest books are Apple Thieves
(Carcanet), The Hotel Eden (Carcanet), and a
translation of Hélène Cixous’ Rêvoir (Seagull).
Paul Dean is a eelance critic living in Oxford, U.K.
Paul Devlin is the author of Ralph Ellison in
Context (Cambridge University Press).
David Guaspari is a writer and lapsed
mathematician living in Ithaca, New York.
Rachel Hadas is Original English Verse Editor of
The Classical Outlook. Her new books are
Pastorals (Measure Press) and Ghost Guest
(Ragged Sky Press).
Simon Heffer’s Sing As We Go has recently been
published in paperback by Penguin.
Jacob Howland writes on contemporary issues
om a classical perspective.
Sunil Iyengar is the editor of The Colosseum Book
of Contemporary Narrative Verse (Franciscan
University Press), out this fall.
David Lehman, the series editor of The Best
American Poetry since its inception in 1988, is the
latest winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize.
Joseph Loconte is a presidential scholar at
New College of Florida and the C. S. Lewis
Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College.
Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas
Professor of the Arts and Humanities at
Northwestern University and the author of
Wonder Cononts Certainty (Belknap Press).
Jay Nordlinger publishes journalism of various
kinds at Onward and Upward, on Substack.
Jay Rogoff ’s books include Loving in Truth:
New and Selected Poems and Becoming Poetry,
both om Press.
Nicholas Shrimpton is the editor of the Oxford
World’s Classics edition of the poems of
William Blake.
Kyle Smith is the lm critic for The Wall Street Journal.
Henry Stimpson writes poetry and nonction and
is a volunteer tutor in Massachusetts.
D. J. Taylor ’s book of short stories Poppyland was
released earlier this year by Salt Publishing. He
is working on a book about J. R. R. Tolkien.
Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.
Peter W. Wood has served as the president of the
National Association of Scholars since 2009.
The New Criterion October 2025
The New Criterion October 2025 1
Notes & Comments:
October 2025
Unalienable rights
Since we are coming up on the celebrations for
America’s two hundred ieth birthday—next
July 4 marks the semiquincentennial of the sign-
ing of the Declaration of Independence—we
would like to suggest that a public-spirited citi-
zen give Tim Kaine, Virginia’s junior senator
and Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, a
copy of that foundational document. Although
Senator Kaine earned a Juris Doctor om Har-
vard, there are grounds for concluding that he
has failed to absorb the fundamental teaching of
Thomas Jeerson’s brief but potent manifesto.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee
hearing last month, Senator Kaine took strenu-
ous issue with some remarks made by Riley M.
Barnes, President Trump’s nominee for assistant
secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy,
Human Rights, and Labor, in his opening state-
ment before the committee. Barnes quoted with
approval Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s ob-
servation that “We are a nation founded on a
powerful principle, and that powerful principle
is that all men are created equal, because our
rights come om God our Creator—not om
our laws, not om our governments.” Barnes
expanded on Rubio’s point. “We are,” he said,
a nation of individuals, each made in the image of
God and possessing an inherent dignity. This is a
truth that our founders understood as essential to
American self-government. I believe our country
and our government is the best in the world, and
our strength comes om our enduring values.
These values aren’t an endless list of “rights” that
people create and change and form to meet their
own needs or desires. . . . They are the historic,
natural rights that we have as individuals, pursu-
ing life, liberty, and happiness in this world. For
rights to be untethered om this core principle is
to make them mere sentiments, easily manipulated
by authoritarians and bad actors.
These, as our readers will recognize, are ex-
ceedingly familiar views. But to Senator Kaine
they were appalling. “The notion that rights
don’t come om laws and don’t come om
the government,” he said, “but come om the
Creator, that’s what the Iranian government
believes. . . . So the statement that our rights
do not come om our laws or our govern-
ments is extremely troubling.”
Senator Ted Cruz, who joined the hearing just
as Kaine spoke, was abbergasted. What Kaine
described as a “radical and dangerous” idea, Cruz
noted, happens be the “principle upon which
the United States of America was created.” Cruz
went on to quote om the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, calling up the preamble, which reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Govern-
ments are instituted among Men . . .
2 The New Criterion October 2025
Notes & Comments
We added the italics for the benet of Senator
Kaine, who seems to believe that acknowledg-
ing a moral source for human rights beyond the
vacillating whims of the political establishment—
i.e., the government—is tantamount to endors-
ing a “theocratic regime.”
Senator Kaine is confused. On the one hand,
he said that he was “a strong believer in natural
rights.” On the other, he thinks that because there
are dierent religious traditions espousing dier-
ent beliefs about natural rights, whatever tradi-
tion is dominant may try to impose its beliefs on
others, robbing them of their rights. He thinks
government is the appropriate prophylactic for
the danger of such encroachment. The Four-
teenth Amendment is his panacea.
We would invite the senator to ponder the
phrase “unalienable rights.” What makes such
rights “unalienable” in his view? Government?
We also would remind Senator Kaine of the wise
observation popularized by President Gerald
Ford: “A government big enough to give you
everything you want is a government big enough
to take om you everything you have.”
The Constitution is not only a delineation of
our government’s structure and an enumeration
of its powers. It is also, critically, a bulwark
against governmental overreach. Implicit in
Tim Kaine’s argument is a utopian faith in the
benecence, or at least the ecacy, the power,
of unlimited government. Riley Barnes touched
on a fundamental deciency of this view when
he noted that if rights were to be “untethered”
om the “core principle” articulated in the Dec-
laration of Independence, that would transform
rights into “mere sentiments, easily manipu-
lated by authoritarians and bad actors.”
This, we believe, is true. Whether politicians
like Tim Kaine regard that metamorphosis as
a feature or a bug is a question worth asking.
Unmerrie England
Edgar Vincent, the rst (and, as it happens,
the last) Viscount D’Abernon, once remarked
that “An Englishman’s mind works best when
it is almost too late.” He died in the dark days
of 1941 and so did not live to observe how
events seemed to corroborate his maxim.
For anyone contemplating the fate of Great
Britain today, the primary question would be
whether that “almost” is still justied. There
are, we think, two interrelated set of problems.
One is the rapid Islamication of Great Britain.
The other is the triumph of political correct-
ness, the intolerant ideology of “wokeness.”
The two are interrelated because the woke-
ness thrives in part as an excuse for, distraction
om, or lubricant of Islamication.
Currently, Muslims account for about
6.5 percent of Britain’s population. That may
seem like a small number. But there are two
things worth noting. First, the Muslim popula-
tion is likely to double within decades, in part
because of untrammeled immigration om
Muslim countries, in part because of the high
birth rate of Muslims in Britain.
Second, even at 6.5 percent the Muslim pres-
ence reverberates everywhere in British society. In
London and many other cities Muslim women
parade through the streets in burkas. There are
more than 1,800 mosques across Britain. There
are also more than eighty Sharia courts operating
in the shadow of British law courts. “Muham-
mad” is far and away the most popular name
for boys. More than a quarter of Muslims live
in government housing. Ramadan prayers echo
not only in mosques but also in such traditionally
British institutions as Windsor Castle. The mayor
of London is a Muslim, as is the lord mayor of
Sheeld and the deputy mayor of Luton. The
newly appointed British Home Secretary, in
charge of immigration, policing, and national
security, is Shabana Mahmood, a Muslim of
Pakistani descent. Last year, J. D. Vance specu-
lated that the United Kingdom might well be
the “rst Islamist country with nuclear weap-
ons,” a contingency, he noted, that would present
America with a serious national-security issue.
We have oen had occasion in this space to
comment on the fate of ee speech in Britain.
In February, a seventy-four-year-old woman was
arrested for holding up a sign outside an abor-
tion clinic. Meanwhile, Muslim rape gangs in
3The New Criterion October 2025
Notes & Comments
Rotherham and elsewhere operate with virtual
impunity, but displaying a Union Jack around
refugees can get you arrested. Last month, the
Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was met
and arrested by ve armed policemen when he
touched down at Heathrow. His tort? Writing
three posts on the social-media platform X criti-
cal of transsexuals. He was later released with a
bail condition barring him om posting on X.
As we write, U.K. police are docketing “non-
crime hate incidents” even as legislation enact-
ing a so-called banter ban is wending its way
through Parliament. The practice of recording
“non-crime hate incidents” was begun by the
police in the early 2000s and rearmed in
June 2023. In 2022 the London mayor’s oce
noted that in cases “[w]here there is no criminal
oence, but the person reporting perceives that
the incident was motivated wholly or partially
by hostility, the incident will be recorded as a
non-crime hate incident. Police ocers may also
identify a non-crime hate incident, even where
no victim or witness has done so.” In other
words, if you say something mean about some-
body, prepare to have your remarks—or even
just your “whole or partial” hostility—recorded
and put into an ocial database that might then
be scrutinized by prospective employers.
Who or what oversees this database? The
College of Policing, a quasi- that provides
guidance for the police forces of England and
Wales. Recording such incidents is not required
by Parliament. Rather, it is part of the increas-
ingly vast, quasi-governmental surveillance
apparatus that has grown up in formerly ee
countries such as the United Kingdom.
The College of Policing approximates “hostil-
ity” as the expression of “ill-will,” “ill-feeling,” and
“dislike.” Apparently, shouting “We love bacon”
outside a mosque qualies, as a man who was
arrested in August for doing that discovered.
Just in case the recording of people saying
mean or “hostile” things is not enough to stie
ee speech, Britain seems to be on the verge
of passing a Labour-sponsored law banning
hurtful or possibly hurtful “banter” in pubs
and other public places. “Under Labour’s new
law,” an article in The Express contends,
employees will be able to take oence on behalf
of one of their colleagues. Given that we live in
an age in which some are hyper-sensitive, the
implications for the hospitality sector of turbo-
charging the Equality Act in this way are mind-
boggling. What “reasonable steps” will a publican
be expected to take to protect his or her sta om
overhearing conversations between customers
that might upset them?
Will it be sucient to include a notice on the
wall warning customers to keep their opinions to
themselves, on issues such as gender neutral toilets,
mass immigration and the Israel–Gaza conict?
Or will publicans need to go further and employ
“banter bouncers” to eavesdrop on customers and
eject anyone for saying something “inappropriate”
or “problematic,” such as telling a saucy joke?
Good questions. Already, one pub a day is
closing in Britain. Can there be any doubt that
the criminalization of banter will accelerate the
trend? Or that pubs that remain will be trans-
formed into “sanitized ‘safe spaces’ in which
no one dares express a controversial opinion
or tell a joke”? And of course, it is not only
pubs that will be targeted. There is plenty of
banter elsewhere in British society.
Which brings us back to Lord D’Abernon
and the overlap between burgeoning Muslim
triumphalism and the Orwellian wokeness of
Britain’s metastasizing censorship apparatus. In-
creasing Islamication always begets increasing
anti-Semitism. In Britain authorities have tended
to turn a blind eye to bad behavior by Muslims
while vigorously prosecuting criticism of Islam.
The result is seething popular discontent, evi-
denced, for example, by the sudden appearance
of thousands of St. George’s and Union Jack ags
across the country. The ags were prominent
among the estimated seventy thousand people
who attended a march against anti-Semitism last
month, one of many events that prompted some
observers to wonder whether a corner had been
turned in the Islamic-Orwellian subversion of
Britain. It would be pleasant to think so. The
question is whether the ocially countenanced
assault on British identity has passed the point of
no return. We will know the answer very soon.
4 The New Criterion October 2025
Punitive medicine
by Gary Saul Morson
W
hen did reasonable people begin to distrust
those who speak for “science”? Perhaps om
the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when
public ocials presented educated guesses as
“settled science”? Or was it when they went
a step further and oered patently political
opinions as scientic facts?
“Suddenly, Public Health Ocials Say
Social Justice Matters More than Social Dis-
tance,” Politico reported on June 4, 2020. Those
who had followed strict instructions to avoid
even outdoor church gatherings were told, by
the same spokesmen for science, that Black
Lives Matter marches were not only permit-
ted, but even helpful. Did the abashed virus
acknowledge the justice of the movement? Or
had it suddenly turned out to be less deadly?
“We should always evaluate the risks and
benets of eorts to control the virus,” declared
Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University
epidemiologist. “In this moment the public-
health risks of not protesting to demand an end
to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of
the virus.” This view, Politico reported, “was
echoed by media outlets and some of the most
prominent public-health experts in America,”
such as the “former Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who
loudly warned against eorts to rush reopening
but is now supportive of mass protests.”
Even if racism is seen as a threat to public
health, that is surely not a conclusion belong-
ing to epidemiology. It is not settled science
because it is not science at all. Neither, for that
matter, is the assumption that marches against
racism will reduce it, let alone save more lives
than suspended disease-prevention measures.
What calculations were involved?
“Science” had evidently become a magic
word used as a substitute for argument. As
medieval thinkers forestalled objections by
claiming a revelation om God, their modern
counterparts invoke science.
One might ask: did Drs. Nuzzo and Frieden
estimate how many lives might be lost dur-
ing the next public-health crisis when people
would no longer credit those who have be-
trayed their trust? As the boy cried wolf, the
epidemiologist cried science.
Experts who betray the public’s trust do
especially great harm because they weaken the
bonds on which society rests. It is one thing
for a paymaster to take a bribe, quite another
when a judge does. When judges are cor-
rupt, justice itself suers. One reason Russia
remains impoverished is that corrupted courts
render property rights insecure, which is why
when large Russian companies sign a contract,
they sometimes specify that disputes will be
resolved in a British court.
When lawyers steal om their clients or
doctors purposely harm their patients, they
commit an oense not only against their vic-
tim but also against their profession and the
public’s regard for it. That is why professional
associations may take action. By the same to-
ken, when scientists go beyond the evidence
or represent their social opinions as scientic
facts, science itself comes into disrepute. All
scientists are obliged to speak up. Very few do.
5The New Criterion October 2025
Punitive medicine by Gary Saul Morson
As always, Russian experience provides an
extreme example. By examining it, we can see
how much damage might be caused should
the corruption of science continue. Ideol-
ogy oen trumped real science in the ,
but perhaps the most chilling case concerns
psychiatry. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev,
it became routine to imprison dissidents in
mental institutions, where they were given
“treatments” involving physical torture and
mind-destroying drugs—or “menticide,” as
the practice has been called.
No one did more to bring this issue to
the attention of the West than Alexander
Podrabinek, whose book Between Prison and
Freedom: Memoir of a Soviet Dissident has just
appeared in an excellent translation by Mar-
ian Schwartz, known for her superb versions
of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s series of novels
The Red Wheel. David Satter, the foremost
journalist to write about Russia in the late-
Soviet period and under Putin, has supplied
a foreword about the mistakes of “Soviet
conformists and Western ‘realists.’”
In 1973, the twenty-year-old Podrabinek,
who was completing his training as a medi-
cal assistant, read in the samizdat Chronicle
of Current Events about the punishment of a
dissident, Vladimir Gershuni, in a “Special
Psychiatric Hospital” (). Such punish-
ments were becoming increasingly common.
Podrabinek immediately resolved to research
this topic and write a book about it, and within
a few years he did so. Podrabinek’s Punitive
Medicine (1979) made the Soviet abuse of psy-
chiatry known outside the . He suered
the consequences (rst exile to Siberia, then
imprisonment), as he knew he would. “It was
terrifying to add myself to the list of enemies
of the state,” Podrabinek recalled. “But I had
been singed by the memoirs of Gershuni . . . .
Playtime was over. Life now took on com-
pletely dierent contours.”
Victims of psychiatric abuse included not
only now-famous human rights defenders, but
also many others: Ukrainians, Estonians, and
1 Between Prison and Freedom: Memoir of a Soviet Dissident,
by Alexander Podrabinek, translated by Marian Schwartz;
University of Notre Dame Press, 448 pages, $38.
members of various other minority nationali-
ties; Jews wanting to emigrate om the So-
viet Union to Israel and ethnic Germans to
Germany; Crimean Tatars and Chechens hop-
ing to return om Siberia where Stalin had ban-
ished them; and religious believers of various
creeds. Podrabinek witnessed police bursting
into a Baptist meeting and arresting participants
one by one. Amazingly enough, those not yet
arrested acted as if nothing were happening and
went on singing their hymns, louder and louder.
“They were obviously answering violence with
prayer,” Podrabinek realized.
What was happening gripped me with genuine
ecstasy, which I felt in the singers’ voices and
read in the eyes of those praying. It was like
encountering good and evil, faith and power,
in their pure forms.
Podrabinek resolved to defend them.
What sort of person runs such risks? We
get a sense of who Podrabinek was when he
describes the moment when, as a teenager,
he and his brother had to choose their ocial
ethnic (“national”) identity, to be recorded
on the internal passport everyone was obliged
to carry at all times. Since their father was
Jewish and their mother Russian, they had a
choice. Given the prejudice against Jews and
the Jewish quota for admission to university,
the answer seemed obvious, but to the pass-
port ocial’s amazement, they chose “Jew.”
“Anything else seemed indecent. Being on the
side of the oppressed was natural,” Podrabinek
felt. He told people that he was a “Jew out of
a sense of contradiction.”
A spirit of daring also played a role. (“I loved
adventures.”) Although Podrabinek had a girl-
iend and good iends, he explains, “I felt I
was behaving too meekly, too quietly. I was
ashamed to be a mouse . . . and it occurred to
me to do something vivid and bold. I thirsted
for action; I wanted to come face to face with
evil.” Soon enough, he did.
Why did the regime not either shoot oppo-
nents or send them to the Gulag, as happened
under Stalin? Aer Khrushchev’s 1956 speech
denouncing Stalin’s lawless “cult of personali
-
ty,” the Soviets made an eort to observe at least
6 The New Criterion October 2025
Punitive medicine by Gary Saul Morson
the forms of legality. Charged with criminal
activity, dissidents received a trial (to be sure,
one with its outcome predetermined) where
they could defend themselves. Despite eorts
to keep the trials closed, dissidents’ speeches
sometimes leaked out and inspired further dis-
sent. That outcome could be avoided if the
criminal was ruled insane, because then he re-
ceived no trial, since a trial could “exacerbate
his condition.” Even better for the authori-
ties, sentence to a madhouse was indenite,
so the patient could be kept there for life, or
at least until he recognized that his opinions
were indeed insane and promised to change his
ways. Best of all, the dissident’s views could be
discredited as the beliefs of a madman.
Before Khrushchev, it was an act of mercy to
send a prisoner to a mental hospital instead
of prison or the Gulag. But in the 1960s and
1970s, those who succeeded in getting them-
selves declared insane soon realized their mis-
take. Conditions in an were unspeakable.
Describing the arsenal of punishments at the
regime’s disposal, the writer Varlam Shalamov
distinguished between “physics” (beating and
other tortures) and “chemistry” (the use of
drugs). Prisons restricted themselves to physi-
cal pressure, but s used both.
Inmates were supervised not by medical
personnel, whom they rarely saw, but by
orderlies who were themselves imprisoned
(nonpolitical) criminals, given to violence and
oen sadistic. Food was insucient to sustain
life, unless the inmate’s relatives sent parcels
or bribed those in charge. To extract infor-
mation om “patient prisoners” about other
dissidents, the used “tongue-loosening
drugs.” To keep them quiet, prisoners might
undergo “sleep therapy,” with pills making
them sleep for eight days straight, except for
brief interludes of eating and excreting. In
Punitive Medicine, Podrabinek mentions a par-
ticularly hideous “treatment”: progressively
larger injections of sulfazine—a 1 percent so-
lution of puried sulfur in oil—which causes
unspeakable, unrelenting pain and high fever,
as well as sores and swelling that prevent the
patient om sitting or sleeping on his back
and leave him barely able to walk.
Physical punishments also included the “wet-
pack.” According to the dissident Vladimir Bu-
kovsky, the patient was wrapped om head to
foot in wet canvas so tightly that it was dicult
to breathe. As the canvas dried, it slowly shrank
and tightened until the prisoner was about to lose
consciousness. When his pulse weakened, and
he was near death, the canvas would be eased.
Worst of all were the various forms of what
Solzhenitsyn called soul murder. A prisoner
might be injected with numerous drugs that
deprived him of the ability to read, write, or
think coherently. When the mathematician
Leonid Plyushch’s wife visited him aer three
months in an , “he started to gasp for breath
and was seized with convulsions. It was clear
om time to time his hearing lapsed and he
lost the ability to speak.” On her next visit, she
found him deeply depressed, apathetic, hope-
less, and overcome with drowsiness. The person
she knew was not there. Would he ever return?
“It is time to think clearly,” Solzhenitsyn
wrote in an open letter entitled “This Is How
We Live.” “Once you think in other ways than
is prescribed—that means you’re abnormal!”
Psychiatrists “break their Hippocratic oath” to
have those who think dierently declared in-
sane because “well-adapted people . . . must all
think alike.” In fact, Solzhenitsyn concluded,
“the incarceration of healthy people in mad-
houses is soul murder,” which is like the Nazi
gas chamber but “even more cruel,” precisely
because it involves not only torturing the body
but also destroying the soul. “Like the gas
chambers these crimes will never be forgotten.”
Which diagnoses condemned dissidents
to an ? Much as Soviet law did not in-
clude the presumption of innocence, so it also
lacked the presumption of sanity. The biologist
Zhores Medvedev was found to have a “split
personality” because, believe it or not, he also
engaged in “publicistic work” by writing a
book about the formerly ocially approved
charlatan Trom Lysenko. The idea that pur-
suing two dierent occupations constitutes a
split personality led some waggish dissidents
to refer to “the da Vinci syndrome.”
Most equently, dissident opinions were
themselves taken as signs of insanity. When
the doctor in Tom Stoppard’s play Every Good
7The New Criterion October 2025
Punitive medicine by Gary Saul Morson
Boy Deserves Favour (1977), which is set in a
Soviet , refers to the imprisoned dissi-
dent’s “symptoms,” the patient replies: “I have
no symptoms. I have opinions.” The doctor
counters: “Your opinions are your symptoms.”
Stoppard took this exchange directly om life.
Khrushchev stated, and seems really to have
believed, that anyone opposed to the Soviet
system, scientically proven to be the most
advanced in world history, had to be insane.
Aer all, Marxism–Leninism, as interpreted
by the Communist Party, was the science of
sciences. Doubting it was equivalent to reject-
ing the law of gravity or the Pythagorean theo-
rem. And so otherwise healthy people were
diagnosed with “schizo-dissent,” “obsessive
reformist delusions,” “Marxismomania” (for a
disapproved interpretation of Marx), “litigious
delirium” (for insisting on rights specied in
the Soviet Constitution), and “a mania for
justice seeking” or “truth seeking.”
The famous dissident General Grigorenko os-
tensibly suered om “the presence of reformist
ideas, in particular for the reorganization of the
state apparatus; and this was linked with ideas
of overestimation of his own personality that
reached messianic proportions.” Since every dis-
sident hoped to change the system, they could
all be diagnosed with “overestimation of their
own personality,” just as they all suered om
a sense of “persecution.” Why, some dissidents
actually maintained that perfectly sane people
were being locked up in madhouses!
Religious believers might be diagnosed with
“schizophrenia with religious delirium.” That
diagnosis was especially likely for people who
had come to God as adults. In their authorita-
tive study Russia’s Political Hospitals: The Abuse
of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union, Sidney Bloch
and Peter Reddaway cite a psychiatrist’s expla-
nation for one convert’s incarceration:
Everything that you have just told us conrms
us in the view that illness lies at the root of your
“conversion.” Of course, you yourself cannot
understand this; but you must have condence
in us; we are specialists. If you had grown up in
a religious family or had lived somewhere in the
West, well, then we could have looked at your
religiousness in another way. . . . But you were
educated in a Soviet school, and were brought
up in a family of non-believers. . . .You are an
educated person; I am ready even to admit that
you know more about philosophy and religion
than I do. . . . And suddenly . . . wham! . . . you
are religious! . . . It’s very odd indeed . . . and
makes one wonder if some abnormal processes
were not already developing in you in your
youth, which later on brought you to religion.
You must have condence in us; we are specialists:
these are the words of experts everywhere. The
possibility of saying them serves as a perpetual
temptation to present opinions as scientically
warranted, as happened equently during the
recent pandemic. Aer all, to doubt the trained
expert is, as Dr. Fauci said of those who ques-
tioned him, to doubt science itself.
Due to the eorts of Podrabinek, Bukovsky,
Andrei Sakharov, and others, word of what
was happening in Soviet psychiatric hospi-
tals reached the West. When some Western
psychiatrists objected to the imprisonment of
dissidents, Soviet psychiatrists piously main-
tained that all these patients were genuinely ill.
The most eminent Soviet psychiatrist, the aca-
demician A. V. Snezhnevsky, identied three
types of schizophrenia: continuous, shi-like,
and periodic. The continuous form inevitably
worsened over time without any possibility
of remission or recovery. The “sluggish” ver-
sion of continuous schizophrenia progresses
slowly, so the ability to function normally may
be retained for a while. It was om sluggish
schizophrenia that most dissidents suered.
This diagnosis conveniently explained why
the suerer might appear normal to the un-
trained eye. That was evidently true of Zhores
Medvedev. Dr. Bondareva explained:
In this kind of situation it is very dicult for
psychiatrists to nd a common language with
relatives or other people who know nothing of
the subject. It sometimes happens that a patient
shows no external signs of illness and behaves
like an absolutely healthy person.
Then why is he deemed not only ill but so ill
that he must be imprisoned indenitely?
8 The New Criterion October 2025
Punitive medicine by Gary Saul Morson
Although most Americans familiar with So-
viet psychiatric abuse remember how Western
professional associations condemned this So-
viet practice, in fact, as Bloch and Reddaway
exhaustively demonstrate, they at rst did
everything possible to avoid the issue. When
they did at last address it, they initially used
vapid “sin is bad” statements, which con-
demned psychiatric abuse in general without
mentioning the —much as congressional
Democrats balked at condemning Ilhan Omar’s
anti-Semitic statements and instead passed a
resolution condemning all forms of hatred.
To be sure, some Soviet psychiatrists were cyn-
ical careerists, while other went along out of fear.
But many sincerely believed in ocial diagnoses.
If they accepted Marxism–Leninism, Bukovsky
explained, they had no alternative. The conclu-
sion seemed inevitable: the ruling doctrine asserts
that “being determines consciousness”—that is,
beliefs inevitably reect society’s class structure.
Since the is Socialist and building Com-
munism, “the consciousness of people must be
exclusively Communist.” But it turns out there
are exceptions, including religious believers, so
one is bound to ask how that can be, “if for
sixty years atheism has been propagated and the
preaching of religion outlawed?” And how can
there be dissidents?
“Within the connes of Communist doc-
trine,” Bukovsky asserted, “there are only two
possible explanations: the cause must lie either
in subversive activity om abroad . . . or in
mental illness: dissent is just a manifestation
of pathological processes in the psyche.” Or,
as Khrushchev declared, “we can say that now,
too, there are people who ght against Com-
munism . . . but clearly the mental state of
such people is not normal.” It is entirely pos-
sible that a doctor was sincere when he asked
Zhores Medvedev: “What can be the use of
the publication of this book, when the truth
has already been established?”
Western intellectuals at least pay lip service—
or did until recently—to the idea that children
should be educated to evaluate claims critically
and to think for themselves. But Soviet children
were educated to overcome their bourgeois
habit of questioning. As Bukovsky explained
to his Western readers:
Soviet children are not supposed to exhibit any
independence; they have to do only what they are
told. Playfulness, mischievousness, restlessness—
the natural attributes of a normal child—are root-
ed out at all costs. Soviet school authorities, who
dish out tedious reprimands and punishments
and set the parents onto the children, won’t allow
anyone simply to be himself; they have to try to
change everyone and re-educate everyone, as in
an institution for young criminals.
The supreme Communist virtue, partiinost
(partyness), consisted in always being able to
subordinate one’s own preferences to those
of the Party. Indeed, someone who had truly
achieved partyness would not even have any
preferences at variance with those of the Party
in the rst place. The goal is to become a per-
fect cog in the machine, and Stalin once raised
a toast: “to the cogs!”
When Innokenty Volodin, the protagonist
of Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, be-
gins to doubt ocial ideology, he discovers
a trove of his mother’s letters written before
the revolution. He is amazed that she and her
iends sincerely believed in truth, beauty, and
goodness as absolute values rather than con-
structions designed to serve the interests of a
particular class, as Marxism teaches. What’s
more, she valued intellectual tolerance—
“Respect other people’s opinions even when
they are inimical to yours.” Volodin’s rst re-
action to this strange idea is this: “If I have a
correct worldview, can I really respect those
who disagree with me?”
There is no questioning Marxism–Leninism
or, as we hear today, there is no question-
ing “science,” since “science is real.” As
Volodin falls under his mother’s spell, he dis-
covers that he does not even know how to
read properly:
His whole education had trained him to take
certain books on trust and reject others unread.
From boyhood he had been sheltered om er-
roneous books and had read only those that
were warranted sound, so that he had got into
the habit of believing every word, of submitting
without question to the author’s will.
9The New Criterion October 2025
Punitive medicine by Gary Saul Morson
But now he began to read authors who con-
tradicted each other, so he could not submit to
both. “What he found most dicult was to lay
down the book and think for himself.”
How does one learn to be intellectually re-
liable? One does so, above all, by accepting
one’s beliefs as a package. Once one considers
oneself a loyal Communist—or progressive,
or whatever—all other beliefs follow. Such
package thinking is by no means limited to
the .
At the beginning of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
describes Anna’s brother Stiva as a steadfast
liberal who reads a liberal paper.
And in spite of the fact that science, art, and
politics had no special interest for him, he rmly
held those views on all these subjects which were
held by the majority [of his circle] and by his
paper, and changed them only when the majority
changed them—or, more strictly speaking, they
seemed to change of themselves within him.
“On all these subjects”: people who adopt their
views as a package do not evaluate each one
separately. If they did, they might agree with
some prescribed opinions but not others. Al-
though they never seriously consider oppos-
ing views, they learn what one is supposed to
say in answer to them. When the views of the
preferred group evolve, Stiva’s evolve in lock-
step with them. Strictly speaking, he does not
change his views; rather, they “seem to change
of themselves within him.” Once one has chosen
one’s camp, no further agency is involved.
Package thinking is most common when
views become a matter of identity. In that case,
to reject even a prescribed view is to isolate one-
self om one’s self-dening circle. Before one
can challenge a single shared opinion, one must
rst accept the possibility of challenging any or
all of them. One risks fundamental self-doubt.
What Tolstoy treats comically, Dostoevsky,
who called such thinking “wearing a uni-
form,” regarded and presented as supremely
dangerous. In The Possessed, Dostoevsky’s
great novel about revolutionary terrorism,
the conspirator Pyotr Stepanovich explains
that he can overcome all reluctance among
young intellectuals simply by telling them
they are not progressive enough. They cannot
resist “ready-made” ideas.
Once one thinks this way, one can be led
to sanction literally anything. Lev Kopelev,
the model for the Communist Rubin om In
the First Circle, recalled with horror that his
willingness to believe Party doctrine without
question once led him to participate in Stalin’s
deliberate starvation of millions of peasants dur
-
ing the collectivization of agriculture. “I took
part in this myself . . . stopping my ears to the
children’s crying and the women’s wails.” He
had been ashamed not of starving these people
but of pitying them while doing so. Aer all, “I
belonged to the one and only righteous Party!”
How dierent are our public-health ocials
and physicians om those Soviet psychiatrists?
Could they support punitive medicine if it
came to be regarded as progressive? Would
they insist that they were just following “sci-
ence”? In “The Doctors Who Cry ‘Science,’” a
recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Allysia
Finley cites several recent instances in which
experts have represented their political and
social views as “science.” They neither looked
skeptically at research supporting their point
of view nor seriously considered objections to
it. They proclaimed dubious arguments indu-
bitable. Or, as Finley observes, they invoked
“science” even
when the science is murky or conicted at best.
. . . Experts squandered public trust during the
pandemic by falsely claiming that lockdowns
and school closures were guided by science. As
Anthony Fauci later admitted, the 6-foot rule
for social distancing “sort of just appeared” and
“wasn’t based on data.”
When the American Medical Association
“argued in a iend of the court brief . . . that
racial preferences in college and medical school
admissions” are a “medical imperative” bol-
stered by an “overwhelming body of scientic
research,” did they really believe they were
impartially reporting the data without going
beyond their expertise?
As early as 1977, Bukovsky recognized that
many of the Western scientists who objected to
10 The New Criterion October 2025
Punitive medicine by Gary Saul Morson
Soviet punitive psychiatry might well behave
the same way in similar circumstances.
Now, when I hear om all sides so many high-
sounding words . . . when I hear condemna-
tion of dishonest Soviet psychiatrists, when I
see amazement in people’s eyes—“How could
doctors be so venal?”—I involuntarily nd myself
wondering: who among you, if you suddenly
lived in the Soviet Union, would choose the ee-
dom to be dierent? Would many of you be so
eccentric as to want to be persecuted for the sake
of an abstract honesty before your conscience?
At least those Soviet psychiatrists could
plead that they had been educated not to
question authority and that they had no ac-
cess to disinterested sources of information.
And of course, they risked consequences far
worse than any dissenting American phy-
sician would. Doctors who object to
policies, doubt Anthony Fauci, or question
the are not going to be put in special
psychiatric hospitals.
The real lesson of Soviet punitive medicine
is that the same thing, or something as bad,
could easily happen here. We have no vac-
cine to immunize us against conformity and
cowardice. At the conclusion of The Gulag
Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn addresses those
Westerners who imagine otherwise:
As far as you are concerned, this whole book
of mine is a waste of eort. You may suddenly
understand it all someday—but only when you
yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!”
and step ashore on our Archipelago.
Perhaps no danger posed by the misuse of
scientic knowledge exceeds that of scientists
claiming a scientic basis for social and politi-
cal views. Democracy depends on open-ended
dialogue and on the ability to test or contest
opinions, but that is impossible for opinions
exempted om serious examination. When
scientists betray science in this way, and when
experts of any sort misuse their status, oth-
ers don’t know where to turn. Whether they
adopt pseudoscientic beliefs, as many rush
to do, or imitate the habit of claiming timeless
certainty for transient opinions, the dangers of
suppressing dialogue know no limit.
The New Criterion October 2025 11
A single song always sung
by Rachel Hadas
Greek tragedy is, as Keats wrote of human
life, a large mansion with many apartments.
Large but somewhat shabby, it features nu-
merous gaps and half-wrecked rooms. Yet this
structure has withstood time; there are still
intact doors and windows, and the place has
a familiar feel. It’s been said that Shakespeare
was clearly a reader of Marx, Freud, and Der-
rida. By the same token, the Greek tragedians
were conversant not only with those theo-
rists but also with their twenty-rst-century
descendants. From medical humanities and
feminist theory to the study of and fam-
ily dynamics, a vast number of disciplines
have made their mark on the tragedies that
are le to us. Or wait—isn’t it the other way
around? Somewhat as the few chapters de-
voted in Genesis to the tree of knowledge,
the temptation, and the expulsion om Eden
constitute a startlingly scanty foundation for
an immense edice of literature and theol-
ogy, the cultural scope of Greek tragedy far
exceeds the modest number of texts we have.
Texts, of course, are important. Perfor-
mances are important. Yet when I think of
my own early exposure to Greek tragedy,
nothing as simple as one play or one perfor-
mance comes to mind. Rather I recall versions
and approaches piled on another. It must
have been in high school that I encountered
both Aeschylus’s Oresteia, in Richmond Lat-
timore’s still unsurpassed translation, and
Sophocles’ so-called Theban trilogy in the
graceful renderings of Robert Fitzgerald and
Dudley Fitts. I also recall sitting, at around
the same time, on the little loveseat in the
dim living room of the rst-oor apartment
on Riverside Drive where I grew up, with a
fat orange edition of the Moses Hadas and
John McLean translation of Euripides open
on my knees. My father and his collaborator,
working in the early 1930s, had chosen prose,
formal and somewhat uncolloquial but not
archaic, to render the dialogue portions of the
plays. To convey the lyric texture of the cho-
ruses, they had hit upon the idea of printing
those portions (still prose) in an italic font.
To this day, when I read poetry I still look for
what I think of as italicized language—that
distinctness, that intensity. Since Euripides
graciously ceded his share of the prots, those
prose renderings, subsequently published in
paperback by Bantam, still earn modest royal-
ties every year. A classic is a classic.
Later, in second- or third-year college Greek,
we read Antigone and Agamemnon and Pro-
metheus Bound. When I look at the Greek
now, almost sixty years later, it’s good to see
that many passages, particularly om open-
ing scenes, seem to have stuck with me. I also
clearly recall that in a class on Oedipus the King
led by Wendell Clausen, a Virgil scholar who
seemed none too eager to teach Sophocles,
we mostly if not exclusively discussed issues of
grammar and reached the end of the semester
before we’d nished the play.
So which of these was my true introduction
to Greek tragedy? Stir in Aristotle’s Poetics;
lms by Cacoyannis; a few stage performances
(Fiona Shaw in Medea, Charles Mee’s Iphige-
12 The New Criterion October 2025
A single song always sung by Rachel Hadas
nia). Add the poems of Cavafy and Ritsos;
add novels by Mary Renault, Barry Unsworth,
and most recently Ferdia Lennon. All of these
interpretations, theatrical, poetic, or ctional
(and one could add many, many more), derive
in one way or another om Greek tragedy,
and all lead back toward it.
One’s rst exposure doesn’t really matter.
All lovers of Greek tragedy nd their own path
toward it, a route that might include television
shows, movies, stage performances, graphic
novels, video games, or other media I’m too
elderly to be familiar with. Compared with
this lavish array of options, the experience
of merely reading a tragedy might feel pallid
and disappointing. I’m wedded to the printed
page; I’ve studied Ancient Greek; and yet at
this point in my life, the more I consider trag-
edy as a genre, the less I nd myself remember-
ing a particular text. Rather, I seem to respond
to novels that vividly evoke the experience of
acting in or watching a tragedy—and that
aren’t chiey concerned with the actual text.
What most oshoots of tragedy work with is
story. My Rutgers students showed me over
and over again that plots, even convoluted
plots, stick in the memory when unfamiliar
polysyllabic names blur and fade. Aer all,
as Aristotle noted, plot is the soul of tragedy.
An alert seven-year-old can and will give a
plot synopsis. But how to render the poetry
of a Greek play? How to make a character’s
words sound plausible, let alone beautiful
or moving? Translating Greek tragedy isn’t
for the faint of heart. (I should know; not
only have I read myriad translations, I’ve also
committed a few myself.) No matter how
awkward the translation, it’s almost impos-
sible to ruin one of the Homeric epics: even
when the poetry doesn’t come through, the
story carries us along. But Greek tragedies in
English oen feel as if they’re in a language
no one ever spoke.
The oddities of Aeschylean diction as ren-
dered by a faithful translator are wickedly
captured in A. E. Housman’s “Fragment of
a Greek Tragedy,” which is hilarious not least
because it exaggerates only a little. A agment
of this agment will have to suce here. Read
-
ers of Agamemnon will recognize the reference
in the last three lines to an irritated Clytem-
nestra’s nonsensical command to Cassandra:
O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou
come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know,
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.
Of course the grotesquely stilted language
with which Housman has so much accurate
fun can be, and repeatedly has been, toned
down or updated; the results (speaking of
English alone) vary om decade to decade,
om translator to translator. But the chal-
lenges don’t go away. Still, texts are where
our knowledge oen begins, and when we’re
dealing with the text of a Greek tragedy, trans-
lation is crucial.
Beginning in 1953, the University of Chi-
cago Press began issuing what their website
describes as
a momentous project, a new translation of the
Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate re-
source for teachers, students, and readers . . . .
[T]hose translations combined accuracy, poetic im-
mediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the
surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides in an English so lively and compel-
ling that they remain the standard translations.
The Complete Greek Tragedies is currently in its
third edition, for which “Mark Grith and
Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the trag-
edies to bring them even closer to the ancient
Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which
the Chicago English versions are famous.”
This third edition replaced the translations of
four Euripidean tragedies (Medea, Children of
Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the
Taurians) with new translations, as well as in-
cluding “agments of lost plays by Aeschylus,
and the surviving portion of Sophocles’ satyr-
drama The Trackers.”
13The New Criterion October 2025
A single song always sung by Rachel Hadas
The new Greek Tragedies volume under
review is not the third edition per se, with
its tantalizing promise of agmentary mate-
rial, but rather a selection of seventeen plays
om the third edition: Aeschlyus’s Persians,
Prometheus Bound, and Oresteia; Sophocles’
Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus,
and Electra; and Euripides’ Alcestis, Medea,
Hippolytus, Hecuba, Electra, Trojan Women,
Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Bacchae.
Questions abound. Why is there no ac-
counting for the choice of these seventeen
tragedies? Why is there—at least in this se-
lected version—no explanation of the third
edition’s editorial policy? More to the point,
why were some of the translations replaced?
Anyone paging through a poetry anthology
will cavil at both inclusions and omissions; so
when I sigh at the absence om these seven-
teen plays of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, I’m simply
doing what readers of anthologies always do.
The most pressing questions, though, are
occasioned by the website’s claims that the
Chicago tragedies “remain the standard trans-
lations,” and that the translations that have been
“updated” (which are those—some of the plays?
all of them?) retain “the vibrancy for which the
Chicago English versions are famous.”
I’m not sure where the language of the web-
site originated or when it was revised. It’s clear,
though, that there is today no such thing as
standard translations of Greek tragedy. Since
the middle of the twentieth century, when Chi-
cago began to issue its series, translations have
burgeoned—om Penguin, Bantam, Oxford,
the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hop-
kins University Press, Hackett, and elsewhere.
Some of the translators, including Deborah
Roberts, Diane Arnson Svarlien, and Charles
Martin, are classicists. Some, like Martin and
Carl Phillips, are both poets and classicists.
In the Oxford series, classicists were paired
with poets—for example, Diskin Clay and
Carl Phillips collaborated on the translation
1 The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, edited by David Grene and
Richmond Lattimore, with introduction and notes
by Mark Grith and Glenn W. Most; University of
Chicago Press, 1,136 pages, $25.
of Philoctetes. Some of the translators haven’t
known Greek: Mark Rudman, William Mat-
thews. There’s a tremendous variety om
which to choose.
What the Chicago translations share is a
certain directness and spareness, a family
resemblance that may have as much to do
with typeface and format as with the way
the translators handle the challenges of their
task. Beyond the look of the printed page,
this edition by and large maintains a level of
clarity, a middle diction that’s neither jarringly
archaic nor especially colloquial. As for the
“vibrancy for which the Chicago versions are
famous,” one person’s vibrancy is another per-
son’s quickly dated slang. Betting the middle
path the Chicago editions tend to choose, my
looking through these seventeen plays was a
middling experience. The language was rarely
confusing. It was sometimes, as in Lattimore’s
Oresteia and Fitzgerald’s Oedipus at Colonus,
beautiful—so compelling that I remembered
having read these same translations many de-
cades ago. I paused with pleasure over “Argos,
old bright oor of the world” in the prologue
of Emily Townsend Vermeule’s rendering of
Euripides’ Electra. In Anne Carson’s new
translation of Iphigenia among the Taurians,
which for unexplained reasons has replaced
Witter Bynner’s, there’s a pulsing energy in
the Chorus: “One day in a whirl of winged
horses/ the Sun changed course/ and turned
his holy face away.”
More oen, the translations felt workman-
like; they got the job done. When Aphrodite,
at the end of her prologue to Hippolytus, says
of the unsuspecting eponymous character, “He
does not know/ that the doors of death are
opening for him,/ that he is looking on his
last sun,” there’s a genuine shiver. But it takes
nothing away om the translator David Grene
to note that in such tragic passages, it would
be dicult to botch the isson. In general,
Grene’s translations, which in addition to Hip-
polytus include Prometheus Bound, Oedipus the
King, and Sophocles’ Electra, are clear and
clean, as are Elizabeth Wycko ’s Antigone, Em-
ily Townsend Vermeule’s Electra, and William
Arrowsmith’s Hecuba and Bacchae. We don’t
14 The New Criterion October 2025
A single song always sung by Rachel Hadas
have to struggle to comprehend the meaning,
and the dramatic situations, unimpeded, take
care of themselves.
In other places, though, especially in the
challenging choral passages, the language
comes uncomfortably close to what Housman
parodies. I still nd Richmond Lattimore’s
Oresteia unrivaled in its triumphant unity of
imagery, meter, and meaning. Yet here is Lat-
timore struggling to render a choral passage
in Alcestis:
I myself, in the transports
of mystic verses, as in study
of history and science, have found
nothing so strong as Compulsion,
nor any means to combat her,
not in the Thracian books set down
in verse by the voice of Orpheus,
not in all the remedies Phoebus has given the
heirs
of Asclepius to ght the many aictions of
man.
Compare the choral portion in Housman’s
parodic “Fragment”:
In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But aer pondering much
To this conclusion I at last have come:
.
This truth I have written deep
In my reective midri
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: , I say,
.
And here’s the Chorus in Oliver Taplin’s
Medea:
I heard her call, I heard her cry,
Medea’s pain, the Colchian.
So she has still not settled calm?
Old woman, tell. I heard her voice
om deep inside her mansion gates.
The suerings of this household cause
me pain—my iendship’s blended close.
The meaning is clear, but the English is odd
(“settled calm”?), and both the rhyme and meter
of the nal couplet limp. Another jarring ex-
ample of Taplin’s way with meter can be found
in a choral antistrophe later in the same play:
Can there be any event so foul
that it remains still impossible?
The bed of women, love-bed of night—
how many troubles are caused by your might.
Taplin’s translation of Medea has replaced Rex
Warner’s for what might be excellent reasons,
but it would be good to know them.
The Greek of Euripides is relatively simple.
Aeschylus is a tremendous challenge; the ob-
scurity and grandiloquence of his style were
subject to parody as early as the Frogs of Aris-
tophanes. Any translator of Persians and Pro-
metheus Bound runs a greater risk of sounding
like Housman’s parody than the renderer of
Euripides. Here’s Seth Benardete translat-
ing not a choral ode but a trimeter dialogue
speech, in Chicago’s Persians:
Leaving my gold-clad palace, marriage chamber
of Darius and of myself,
his queen, I’ve come. Care quite grates my heart;
I fear, my iends, though not fearful for myself,
lest great wealth’s gallop trip prosperity . . .
A little later, Queen Atossa continues:
With equent, constant, and nocturnal dreams
I have lived, ever since my son, gathering
his army, departed, his will to pillage Greece;
but never a more vivid presence came
than yesternight’s.
Compare Benardete’s rendering of these
two passages with Deborah Roberts’s accu-
rate, clear, and graceful version om 2024
(published by Hackett):
I have le the golden halls
and the bedroom that Darius used to share
with me.
Anxiety tears my heart too. . . .
I live with dreams—many, and every night—
15The New Criterion October 2025
A single song always sung by Rachel Hadas
since my son raised an army and went o
to ravage Greece.
Roberts’s lines are easy to say, the metric pulse
easy to hear; Benardete’s feel cluttered, over-
punctuated, halting.
There’s no end to comparing translations.
Robert Fagles (Viking) captures Aeschylus’s
packed, baroque quality in a dierent key om
Lattimore; I tend to prefer the latter, but both
translators manage to convey the Aeschylean
avor. Charles Martin’s Medea (University
of California Press) is succinct and barbed
throughout. Diane Arnson Svarlien’s transla-
tions (Hackett) take scrupulous care with both
diction and meter, whether of the stichomy-
thia or choral lyrics; in addition, she’s always
accurate, and the notes supplied by her edi-
tions are more complete and helpful than what
one nds in the Chicago selections. There are
many, many other translations (Robert Bagg
for various publishers, Aaron Poochigian for
Johns Hopkins University Press), ranging
om unactable to eective—far more than
I’m aware of, and the list goes on expanding.
What seems safe to repeat is that the Chicago
versions do not remain, if indeed they ever
were, the standard translations.
Tragic vibrancy is to be found less in trans-
lation than in content and context. Bryan
Doerries, for his Theater of War productions of
some of the plays, simplies and claries in the
interest of making the plot, that soul of trage-
dy, not only accessible but applicable, whether
to Ukrainian refugees (Aeschylus’s Suppliants)
or to the various other suerings inicted by
war (Ajax, Philoctetes, Trojan Women). Edith
Hall, in her compelling 2024 book Facing
Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks,
and Me (Yale University Press), also refers e-
quently to Ajax, as well as to The Children of
Heracles and other plays. Hall draws upon the
plots of these tragedies to bolster her argument
that the approach to suicide in Greek tragedy
is both notably nonjudgmental and particu-
larly sensitive to the damage suicide inicts on
families. Emily Katz Anhalt, in her 2021 study
Embattled (Stanford University Press), takes
us line by line through the argument between
Haemon and Creon in Antigone. Both Hall
and Anhalt use their own translations; Anhalt
even supplies stage directions by using verbs
like “snarl” and “snap” and “shout.” But it’s
not their phrasing that stays with me; it’s the
esh insight these scholars both derive om
and apply to the perennially rich material of
the tragedies.
Of course such insights can be mined om
any translation that doesn’t actually erect a
barrier between the text and the reader. But
such barriers are increasingly being disman-
tled, less by translators than by a variety of
adapters, om Mary Renault to Madeline
Miller to A. E. Stallings. These gied po-
ets and novelists, and many others, revise
or recycle tragic material, drawing upon the
same deep springs of mythology om which
the tragic playwrights—oen also revising
their material—drank. In Stallings’s sonnet
“Medea, Homesick,” Medea, a precocious
pupil and gied young witch, is imaginable
as the gure we know om Euripides. But
the poem presents her, either earlier in her
career or else looking back nostalgically to
her student days, rather as a “chalk-ngered”
graduate student than as the wife, mother,
and murderess of the play.
The Bull om the Sea (rst published by
Pantheon in 1962), Renault’s rendering of
the emotional tangle that powers the plot of
Euripides’ Hippolytus, provides more details
of backstory and hence more plausible psy-
chological motivation than the drama itself
does, both for Phaedra’s obsession and for
her stepson’s revulsion. Renault also feels ee
to adjust the manner and agent of Phaedra’s
death. Such so spots in myths leave space
for interpretation, for vision and revision,
without damaging the essential charge of the
plot. (The question of how and why Medea’s
children died, for instance, or of what really
happened to Iphigenia, had more answers
in the ancient Greek world than our trag-
edies provide.) The tragic conclusion of a
heartbroken Theseus’s understanding that
the son he has cursed, banished, and lost is
innocent is essentially the same in Renault’s
novel and the Euripidean drama. Madeline
Miller’s 2018 novel Circe (Little, Brown and
16 The New Criterion October 2025
A single song always sung by Rachel Hadas
Company) oers us memorable glimpses
both of Circe’s sister Pasiphae (about whom
no tragedy survives but who is ominously
referenced in Hippolytus) and of her niece
Medea; yet the novel presents Medea not as
a tragic protagonist but, earlier in her career,
as Circe’s wayward niece, besottedly in love
with a reluctant Jason.
The tapestry of myth extends backwards
and forwards; preceding the tragic dramas
remaining to us, it supplied their plots (or
souls), which were massaged or tweaked in
the process. And the mythical fabric—perhaps
process is an apter word—continues its busy
weaving, its presentations and interpretations,
unstoppably. Indeed, one of the strengths of
the Chicago edition is that the introduction to
each play refers to a generous range of newer
versions, om—in the case of Medea alone—a
Grillparzer tragedy, a Cherubini opera, and
paintings by Delacroix and Moreau, to a
Martha Graham dance drama and lms by
Pasolini and von Trier. There are also Seneca
and Racine and Goethe and Shelley and a
host of others.
The narrator of Ferdia Lennon’s 2024 novel
Glorious Exploits (Henry Holt & Company)
listens to the chorus rehearsing for an unlikely
performance of Medea in the Syracusan quar-
ries where the defeated Athenians have been
imprisoned aer the disaster of the Sicilian
Expedition. (Unlikely but not utterly impos-
sible: Thucydides tells us that knowledge of
any passages om Euripides was a valuable
commodity among the captured Athenians,
since the Syracusans valued his plays highly.)
The members of the chorus are starving pris-
oners of war—and yet “for a moment I have
the feeling that the future and the past aren’t
separate at all, just dierent snatches of a single
song always sung, given consequence when
heard.” If the plot is the soul, then the tragic
poets set that soul to a music we can still hear
snatches of, and that still inspires us to make
our own music.
The New Criterion October 2025 17
By the book
by Joseph Loconte
A
t a dinner party hosted by Sir John Walsh, a
wealthy iend of Henry
VIII
, a young human-
ist scholar and preacher caused a stir by insist-
ing on the supreme authority of the Bible and
that it be translated into vernacular English—a
crime in Catholic England. “We were better
to be without God’s law than the Pope’s,” de-
clared one of the guests.
The scholar reputedly delivered one of the
greatest rebuttals in history:
I defy the Pope and all his laws and if God spare
my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that
driveth the plow, shall know more of the scrip-
ture than thou dost.
Displaying almost reckless courage, Wil-
liam Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536) embarked on a
campaign to translate the entire Bible om
the original Hebrew and Greek into English.
Nothing like it had been attempted since the
fourth century, when the Catholic Church
adopted the Latin translation om Jerome.
In the summer of 1525—ve hundred years
ago—Tyndale’s English New Testament began
to take shape in a print shop in Cologne. Pub-
lished a year later and smuggled into England,
it was the cultural equivalent of the splitting
of the atom.
Indeed, the political and social consequenc-
es of Tyndale’s achievement, touching nearly
every aspect of our modern lives, are incal-
culable. His dissent in the face of autocratic
power and oppression is a standing rebuke to
the illiberal impulses of our own age.
No one could have foreseen it. Elsewhere in
Europe, the Catholic Church had permitted
some vernacular translations of the Bible—but
only om the Latin Vulgate and only under
close supervision. In England, the Constitu-
tions of Oxford of 1408 had outlawed any
unauthorized translation of the Scriptures into
English, under pain of punishment for heresy.
As the biographer David Daniell summarizes
it: “The prejudice that maintained that the
Latin Bible was the original was deep and bit-
ter enough to cost lives.”
Tyndale therefore le for the Continent and
found safe haven in Martin Luther’s Germany,
where the Protestant Reformation was in its
early stages. But he lived as a fugitive with a
price on his head. The formidable Sir Thomas
More, one of the most powerful Catholic lead-
ers in England, led the hunt. To More, Tyndale
was “a serpent,” a “son of iniquity,” and a “hell-
hound in the kennel of the devil.”
By the summer of 1526, the inux of “Tyn-
dale Testaments” into England—thanks to
prot-minded printers—prompted an emer-
gency meeting of bishops. The bishop of
London denounced Tyndale’s translation for
corrupting the Holy Scripture “with cunning
perversities and heretical depravity.” All avail-
able copies were to be seized and burned. A
bonre was lit at St Paul’s Church, and copies
of Tyndale’s New Testament were tossed into
the blaze.
Within a decade, Tyndale himself met the
same fate. But not before he produced the text
that has formed the basis for all subsequent
18 The New Criterion October 2025
By the book by Joseph Loconte
English Bibles. As such, it has anchored virtu-
ally every argument in the English-speaking
world for expanding human liberty. Even
Christopher Hill, a Marxist historian of
seventeenth-century England, could not
deny its inuence: “The availability of the
Bible in English . . . was a cultural revolu-
tion of unprecedented proportions, whose
consequences are dicult to over-estimate.”
It arose in troubled times. When King Hen-
ry VIII broke with the Catholic Church over
his divorce om Catherine of Aragon and
subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, he
unwittingly created an opening for Tyndale’s
transformative text. Supporters of a vernacular
Bible got appointments under his reign, in
part because they had the backing of the new
queen, who possessed a copy of Tyndale’s New
Testament. As the historian Brian Moynahan
puts it, “Anne had no hesitation in reading
banned books.” In 1534, Henry’s bishops urged
the king to authorize a new English transla-
tion of the Bible. Miles Coverdale, who had
assisted Tyndale in Hamburg, was given the
task of completing the English translation of
the Old Testament that Tyndale had begun.
The eventual result, “the Great Bible,” was
printed in 1539 and, by royal decree, was au-
thorized to be read aloud in England’s Protes-
tant churches. The English Reformation was
in high gear.
It was Tyndale’s grasp of the “linguistic
marriage” of Hebrew and English, though,
that guided his successors, who completed the
work aer his execution in 1536. “And the prop-
erties of the Hebrew tongue,” Tyndale wrote,
“agree a thousand times more with the English
than with the Latin.” Daniell, the editor of
Tyndale’s Old Testament (1992), argues that “all
Old Testament English versions descend om
Tyndale.” The same must be said of his New
Testament, translated om the original Greek:
until the twentieth century, every English ver-
sion drew largely om that of Tyndale.
These facts were to have a profound eect
on the American story. Central to that story is
the King James Bible—the chief beneciary of
Tyndale’s work—which played a decisive role
in the political revolutions that transformed
Britain and, subsequently, Britain’s most im-
portant colonial possession.
Aer the death of King Edward VI, Mary
Tudor’s attempt to return England to the
Catholic fold backred. Her violent crack-
down on dissenters deepened the Protestant
community’s attachment to the English Bible
and the right of individuals to interpret it for
themselves. Thus, when Elizabeth, Mary’s suc-
cessor to the throne, walked in procession to
assume the crown, she paused to kiss a copy
of the Bible in English and pledged “diligently
to read” the Scriptures.
Aer the death of Queen Elizabeth, the
Church of England faced multiple sources
of religious division. The new monarch,
James I—ostensibly motivated by a “zeal to
promote the common good”—commissioned
a group of scholars to produce a esh transla-
tion of the Bible. Almost immediately upon
its appearance in 1611, the King James Bible
(also known as the Authorized Version) was
hailed as a literary masterpiece.
The extraordinary quality of Tyndale’s origi-
nal translation is an essential reason why the
King James Version has had such a catalytic
eect on the politics and culture of the West.
Tyndale did much more than nd the Eng-
lish equivalent of the ancient languages of
the Bible. His masterly and poetic ear for the
rhythm of the modern English language, then
in its infancy, imbued his translation with a
vigor, charm, and clarity that have never been
surpassed. Almost the entirety of his New Tes-
tament, and most of his Old Testament, were
incorporated into the King James Bible.
Consider a few lines om his translation of
the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–8):
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall
be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit
the earth.
With Tyndale’s translation, anyone could read
the Christmas story—or hear it read aloud in
church—in stunningly vibrant English, for
the rst time.
19The New Criterion October 2025
By the book by Joseph Loconte
Be not aaid. For behold I bring you tidings of
great joy that shall come to all the people: for
unto you is born this day in the city of David a
savior which is Christ the lord.
The God of the Bible was no longer con-
ned to speaking in a language—Latin—that
no one outside of an educated elite could
understand. The immediacy of divine grace
quickened a deep-seated spiritual hunger that
could no longer be suppressed.
Prior to Tyndale, much of the priesthood in
England was as ignorant of the Bible as the
laity. Propelled by the burgeoning printing
industry, Tyndale’s achievement ensured the
democratization of Bible ownership: an act
of individual empowerment that proved ir-
resistible. Martin Luther had launched this
revolution with his German translation of the
Scriptures. With the arrival of the King James
Bible, placed on display in every Protestant
church in England, there was no turning back.
As the historian Mark Noll explains, by
achieving hegemony over all other translations,
the King James Bible penetrated cultural and
political discourse and thus occupied the “cen-
tral conceptual space for the entire civilization”
of the English-speaking world. This singular
English Bible, largely dependent on Tyndale’s
translation, became the authoritative religious
text for Britain and her colonies. As such, the
great political debates in seventeenth-century
England—about natural rights, government
by consent, and religious liberty—were not
only amed by biblical assumptions; they were
also awash in the language and imagery of the
English Bible.
Herein lies a paradox. Although the Catho-
lic medieval project had been shattered by
the Reformation, many of its fundamental
assumptions about political and religious
authority remained. Advocates of absolute
monarchy, the divine right of kings, and the
necessity of national churches—Protestants
as well as Catholics—all drew on the Bible
to support their versions of Christendom.
Modern progressive theorists and historians
assume that it was the forces of secularization
that discredited these medieval beliefs about
political life. In fact, it was the arrival of the
English Bible—and the democratic outlook
it nurtured—that assured the total defeat of
Christendom and the triumph of the concep-
tual pillars of liberal democracy.
John Locke, the intellectual father of
the liberal-democratic project, had the
King James Bible close at hand as he draed
his indictment of political absolutism, his Two
Treatises of Government (1690). Taunting his
opponent, Robert Filmer, Locke dared him to
“show me the Place and Page” om the Bible
that upheld the idea of absolute monarchy.
Scholars oen neglect the fact that the First
Treatise is an exacting biblical refutation of
patriarchal absolutism.
And even Locke’s Second Treatise, regarded
as a natural-law argument for government by
consent, draws upon biblical concepts. Locke’s
defense of man’s natural rights—life, liberty,
and property—is rooted in the language of
the New Testament:
For men being all the workmanship of one om-
nipotent, and innitely wise Maker . . . they
are his property, whose workmanship they are,
made to last during his, not another’s pleasure.
Locke’s audience would have recognized his al-
lusion to a passage in Paul’s letter to the Ephe-
sian church: “For we are God’s workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which
God prepared beforehand, that we should walk
in them” (Ephesians 2:10).
Thanks to Locke’s ability to combine natural-
law arguments with biblical teachings, he ex-
erted a profound inuence over the American
mind—a dissenting Protestant mind that was
even more saturated in biblical language than
Protestant England’s.
In Reading the Bible with the Founding
Fathers, Daniel Dreisbach observes that the
King James Bible served as the primary text-
book for education, law, letters, and civil
government during the colonial era. “The
Bible was the most accessible, authoritative,
and venerated text in early colonial society,”
he writes. “Indeed, no text provides richer in-
sight into the world of the founders and their
experiment in republican self-government and
20 The New Criterion October 2025
By the book by Joseph Loconte
liberty under law.” In America—like nowhere
else in the Western world—the Bible was de-
ployed as an agent of democratic resistance and
revolution. “The genius of the authors of the
United States Constitution,” writes Tom Hol-
land in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution
Remade the World, “was to garb in the robes
of the Enlightenment the radical Protestant-
ism that was the prime religious inheritance
of their edgling nation.”
Biblical phrases and allusions animated the
discourse of the colonial Patriots in the years
leading up to the American Revolution. It was
not only the nation’s evangelical ministers,
though, who cast the struggle against British
“slavery” and “tyranny” in biblical terms. In
July 1776, in their proposed design for the
Great Seal of the United States, Thomas Jef-
ferson and Benjamin Franklin—sons of the
Enlightenment—both suggested the Exodus
story of God delivering the Jewish people om
the bondage of the Egyptian pharaoh.
It is thus unsurprising that Thomas Paine,
a religious skeptic, drew heavily on the Bible
to denounce the British monarchy in his ex-
plosive missive for Independence, Common
Sense (1776):
As the exalting of one man so greatly above the
rest cannot be justied on the equal rights of
nature, so neither can it be defended on the au-
thority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty,
as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel,
expressly disapproves of government by kings.
Aer delivering several pages of biblical ex-
egesis on the topic, Paine concludes, “That
the Almighty hath here entered his protest
against monarchical government is true, or
the scripture is false.” According to Mark
Noll, Paine’s treatise “propelled scriptural
argumentation into the center of Revolu-
tionary consciousness.”
The success of Common Sense reveals the
unique character of American Protestantism:
armed with the King James Bible, colonial
Americans advanced radical reinterpretations
of the Scriptures to underwrite virtually every
facet of their democratic journey.
John Adams was typical among the founders
in describing the Bible as “the most republican
book in the world.” Benjamin Rush, a signer
of the Declaration and a surgeon in the Con-
tinental Army, argued that inculcation in the
teachings of the Bible was essential for creating
virtuous, self-governing citizens:
We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect
the only means of establishing and perpetuating
our republican forms of government, that is, the
universal education of our youth in the principles
of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this
divine book, above all others, favors that equality
among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all
those sober and ugal virtues which constitute
the soul of republicanism.
Nowhere is this outlook more powerfully on
display than in the American commitment to
religious liberty. William Penn and Roger Wil
-
liams, for example, drew heavily om the Bible
to establish their colonies of Pennsylvania and
Rhode Island as havens of religious eedom.
Pennsylvania’s constitution, the Charter of
Liberties and Frame of Government (1682),
is awash in scriptural citations. “For the his-
tory of the Bible in what became the United
States,” writes Noll, “it was of rst importance
that Penn carried out his experiment as an
exercise in scriptural Christianity.”
The subversive use of the Bible to demolish
Anglican establishments and make the case for
religious liberty became a ubiquitous feature
of colonial rhetoric. It formed part of the brief
for independence against the “popish” ten-
dencies of England. More importantly, even
before the Constitutional Convention, the
amers took it for granted that biblical Chris-
tianity supported eedom of conscience, reli-
gious pluralism, and the separation of church
and state. In his “Memorial and Remonstrance
Against Religious Assessments,” for example,
James Madison rejects government support
for the Christian religion because “every page
of [the Bible] disavows a dependence on the
powers of this world.”
The enduring inuence of Tyndale’s literary
achievement appears in the wealth of expres-
sions in our modern English prose: am I my
21The New Criterion October 2025
By the book by Joseph Loconte
brother’s keeper?; seek and ye shall nd; the
spirit is willing, but the esh is weak; the salt
of the earth; let not your hearts be troubled;
for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
“An astonishing quality of Tyndale’s transla-
tions,” writes Daniell, “is that so much has not
only survived, but has permanently enriched
the language.”
In theology, politics, literature, educa-
tion, the arts: over the last half millennium,
no book has exerted a greater inuence over
the direction of Western civilization than the
King James Bible. It is not too much to say that,
without it, there would have been no Glorious
Revolution of 1688 and no American Revolu-
tion of 1776. Without it, there would have been
no Shakespeare, no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim’s
Progress, no Handel’s Messiah, no Gettysburg
Address, and no Letter om Birmingham Jail.
Without Tyndale, there would have been
no King James Bible. In his determination
to translate the Scriptures into English, Tyn-
dale allowed no obstacle—exile, shipwreck,
poverty, imprisonment—to stand in his way.
In the end, it cost him everything.
Betrayed by a iend at a safe house in
Antwerp, Tyndale was arrested and sent to
Vilvoorde prison—modeled aer the hated
Bastille in Paris—where he spent sixteen dreary
months in isolation. He was to be executed
as a heretic because, based on his reading of
the Bible, he taught that justication could
not be earned by good works but rather was
“a ee gi of God.” It was only by faith, he
insisted, that “the love of him who overcame
all the temptations of the devil shall be im-
puted to us.”
On October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was
strangled to death and his body burned. Yet his
achievement survived the ames: the democ-
ratization of the Word of God, arguably the
most liberating event in Western civilization
for more than a thousand years, was at hand.
To the authoritarianism of his age, Tyndale
was uninchingly deant. “Has not God made
the English tongue as well as others?” he asked.
Using all of his remarkable gis, Tyndale ef-
fectively gave God an English voice, one that
resonated throughout England’s colonies,
especially among the rebellious Protestants
of colonial America. “It was a vernacular Scrip-
ture that liberated the English voice,” writes
the biographer David Teems, “and the English
conscience along with it.”
If so, then perhaps no other gure in mod-
ern history has done more to awaken the
conscience of the West: to stir a yearning for
political and spiritual eedom that resounds
in our own day.
22 The New Criterion October 2025
Savage wars of peace
by Peter W. Wood
David Narrett’s The Cherokees: In War & at
Peace, 1670–1840 is a bracing reminder of the
vicious animosities among the native tribes of
North America. When European explorers
and later colonists stepped into this world,
they were instantly caught up in the eorts
of rival groups to kill, kidnap, extirpate, or
control one another. Sometimes this played
to the advantage of the Europeans. The Pil-
grims who survived the bleak winter of 1620
at Plymouth owed their rescue by the Wam-
panoag to that tribe’s fear that they would be
massacred by the Narragansett. Massasoit, the
Wampanoag sachem or chief, hoped English
guns would oset the Narragansett advantage
in able-bodied warriors.
All down the Atlantic Coast, wherever they
disembarked, Europeans were immediately
factored into the calculations of native peoples
on the lookout for new ways to dominate
neighboring tribes. When Thomas Hobbes
wrote in De Cive (1642) that the state of nature
is “Bellum omnium contra omnes” and repeated
it in Leviathan (1651) as the “warre of every one
against every one,” he might well have been
thinking of what Englishmen had encountered
in Virginia and New England.
Hobbes carried his point a little too far. The
underlying state of “warre” in human society
has never been among isolated individuals. No
one sans parents, uncles, and cousins could
survive long enough to chip an arrowhead,
1 The Cherokees: In War & at Peace, 1670–1840, by David
Narrett; Belknap Press, 608 pages, $35.
string a bow, or carve a club. “Warre,” however,
was the prevailing condition of tribal societies,
modied by their practical need for treaties
and alliances.
The Cherokees: In War & at Peace is very much
a work of narrative history. It is quite light on
ethnography. The reader looking to understand
the dynamics of Cherokee social life and the tex-
ture of Cherokee culture will encounter glimpses
of both, but those are not Narrett’s focus. The
American Southeast is a well-studied region, and
I have a fair number of key books on the Indian
tribes who lived there at hand; the reader who
doesn’t will have to take the narrative at face
value, or rely on my summary.
This is not to fault David Narrett. He is an
accomplished professor of history at the Uni-
versity of Texas at Arlington and the author
of substantial works on the Louisiana–Florida
borderland and colonial New York. The Cher-
okees is a masterly synthesis of archival materi-
al, but Narrett relegates much of what would
be needed to make deeper sense of Cherokee
life to a two-page comment in the opening
pages on “Peoplehood and Clan.” There he
mentions that the Cherokee were divided
into seven matrilineal clans, with members
of all seven present in every Cherokee town.
This meant that wherever a Cherokee went
within the seventy thousand square miles of
Cherokee territory and sixty-ve Cherokee
towns, he would nd members of his own
clan obligated to host him. It also meant that
the divisions, rivalries, and alliances through
marriage within each town were more or less
23The New Criterion October 2025
Savage wars of peace by Peter W. Wood
replicated in all the others. An anthropolo-
gist such as myself would surely make more
of this than the English colonists did at the
time or than Narrett does, but Narrett at least
recognizes that something important is em-
bedded in these facts. He quotes an unnamed
author that the clans “linked the Cherokees
not as a political state but as an ethnic nation
of shared experience and common culture.”
“Ethnic nation,” however, is an approxima-
tion that distorts how personal the ties of kin-
ship and clanship are within societies like the
Cherokee. Narrett’s reading of how Cherokee
responded to the instances in which colonists
killed even their distant relatives suers om
his limitations on this point.
The Cherokee were a southern Appalachian
tribe, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, at least
when they entered the historical record. Their
own traditions suggest they displaced a previ-
ous population (the “Moon-Eyed People”),
and their language is part of the Iroquoian
family, in contrast to most of the neighbor-
ing tribes, which spoke Muskogean languages.
That and other evidence points to a northern
origin for the Cherokee, who may have colo-
nized the Blue Ridge area aer the decline
of the great mound-building Mississippian
culture that once extended that far east.
Here and there Narrett provides clues to
the Cherokee’s northern roots. When a Seneca
raiding party om the Finger Lakes region of
New York kidnapped an English trader and
his assistant in South Carolina, the Cherokee
hosted the raiding party with their captives
(who were subsequently murdered), despite
having a peace treaty with English. The Eng-
lish were baed by this, but the Cherokee
recognized the Seneca as kin: similar language,
same system of matrilineal clans, and appar-
ently part of a long-distance alliance.
English colonization of coastal South Caro
-
lina commenced in 1670. French Huguenots
had attempted to build a colony on the coast in
1562, but it survived only a few months. When
the English arrived, the resident native people
were the Guale, who had been missionized by
the Spanish. The Guale revolted in 1597, kill-
ing six Franciscan iars. They rebelled again
in 1645, casting the missions out altogether.
But the coastal islands and littoral by then had
become home to refugees om other inland
tribes eeing armed groups of Indians intent
on taking slaves. The mixed population of
Guale and refugees emerged as a new tribe
called the Yamasee.
The Yamasee became dependent on Euro-
pean trade and crops but were far om content
to be European subjects. They too rebelled in
1715—this time against the English—and in a
grand alliance with the Muscogee, Cherokee,
Catawba, Apalachee, Apalachicola, Yuchi, Sa-
vannah River Shawnee, Congaree, Waxhaw,
Pee Dee, Cape Fear, and Cheraw Indians. The
Yamasee and their allies ravaged the English
colony centered on Charles Town. About
7 percent of the white colonists were killed
in this two-year war, which might have suc-
ceeded in driving the English out, except that
the Cherokee, who had been a passive part of
the native alliance, abruptly switched sides.
They joined the colonists on the promise that
the English would help them ght their long-
time enemy, the Creek Indians—a larger, more
powerful tribe to the south.
The Yamasee War was a crucial event in the
history of the Cherokee “nation.” Under-
standing the war requires deep attention to
numerous factors beyond the local rivalries of
the native tribes. European traders had pene-
trated the interior and stimulated the appetite
for European goods, including rearms. Plan-
tation rice agriculture had arrived and with
it a market for Aican slaves in addition to
the dwindling number of Indian slaves. The
tribes themselves had long engaged in their
own systems of slavery, which now became
entangled with the English system. Nearby,
the Tuscarora War in North Carolina, 1711–15,
set the Iroquois-related Tuscarora o against
Europeans and Yamasee and broke a half-
century of relative peace in that area. The
Tuscarora subsequently moved to New York
and became the sixth part of the Iroquois
League, made up of the most formidable and
belligerent of the eastern tribes.
In short, European colonists had brought
new opportunities to a social situation in
which large numbers of highly mobile na-
24 The New Criterion October 2025
Savage wars of peace by Peter W. Wood
tive peoples, who were skilled in personal
violence and the tactics of intertribal war,
saw ways to gain advantage. The Europeans
had good reasons to fear the native peoples
for their violence and out of apprehension
that they might incite the growing popula-
tion of Aican slaves to rebel or desert. The
Cherokee, however, grew to like the idea of
European-style Aican slavery and eventually
themselves became large-scale slaveholders.
Initially the Cherokee Indians lived on the
far edge of the aforementioned conicts, in
settled towns in the river valleys on the south-
ern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, extend-
ing om the Little Tennessee River down to
the headwaters of the Savannah River. The
Cherokee towns were scattered where Ten-
nessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Georgia now abut.
The reader of Narrett’s book would be
well served by having some of this history
and geography in hand before venturing into
its pages. Narrett oers a richly detailed and
fairly dense account of the 125 years of Chero-
kee history om 1670 to 1785. The book’s
subtitle announces that it extends to 1840—
which is to say to the notorious era of the
Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, in
which the Cherokee were forced to relocate
to Oklahoma—but Narrett’s treatment of the
period om 1795 to 1840 is cursory. That may
be justied by the attention other historians
have given to the period of Cherokee dis-
possession. What Narrett really has to oer
is a ne-grained account of a native people
encountering what we are now told to call
“settler colonialism.”
What then do we learn about the Cherokee
om Narrett? The Cherokee in contemporary
America enjoy a reputation as one of the ve
“civilized” tribes of the southeast—the oth-
ers being the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek,
and Seminole. These ve gained the adjec-
tive by becoming Christian and being drawn
into slave-based plantation agriculture. The
Cherokee were also seen as high achievers who
among other things developed their own sys-
tem of writing, invented by Sequoyah in the
early nineteenth century. But they are said to
have been ruthlessly betrayed by the United
States when they were forced to move west.
Yet the Cherokee that emerge om Nar-
rett’s account—through Narrett is strongly
sympathetic to them—are every bit the blood-
thirsty killers that Thomas Jeerson cited in
the Declaration of Independence: “the mer-
ciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of
warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of
all ages, sexes and conditions.” (The Chero-
kee sided with the British during the Ameri-
can Revolution, which convinced Jeerson
once and for all that they should be removed
across the Mississippi.) While Jeerson’s de-
scription may be oensive to contemporary
sensibilities—“The Shameful Final Grievance
of the Declaration of Independence,” Jeey
Ostler called it in an article in The Atlantic
in 2020—there is no shortage of historical
detail to substantiate his point. The story is, of
course, complicated: a patchwork of would-
be peacemakers and determined scalp-takers,
with both Indians and settlers driven by op-
portunism, resentment, and fear.
One Cherokee chief, Attakullakulla—the
strongest ally of the English—made it clear in
a 1759 meeting with the governor of Charles
Town, William Henry Lyttleton, that his pri-
mary concern was to protect the Cherokee. He
dealt with the English colonial and military of-
cials during the French and Indian War, osten-
sibly as their ally. But as he told the governor,
My love for my own people and their young ones
has always determined me to do everything in
my power to prevent their falling-out with the
white people, having told them [the Cherokee]
they would thereby be destroyed.
(Narrett mined this and a great deal more om
the ocial colonial records.)
The occasion of this speech was Attakulla-
kulla’s dispute with the British general John
Forbes, who had looked to the Cherokee in
1757–58 for support in the English campaign
against the French in the Ohio River Basin.
Aer campaigning with Forbes through Ohio
and later Virginia, the Cherokee warriors were
ready for a break. Around the same time, on-
tier settlers in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley
25The New Criterion October 2025
Savage wars of peace by Peter W. Wood
massacred and scalped three Cherokee men
they accused of plundering livestock. The
nervous Virginia militia then compounded
the problem by killing sixteen or seventeen
more Cherokee. They probably did not re-
alize that these killings made every English
man, woman, and child in the entire region
a potential target for reprisal by hundreds of
relatives of the dead men.
Attakullakulla had his hands full in trying to
prevent all-out war. In spring 1759, seeking re-
venge, Cherokee war parties attacked and killed
more than twenty North Carolina settlers, with
“roughly half of the slain women and children.”
The situation, as situations will, grew more
and more complicated. Attakullakulla oered
the English support for a planned attack on
Fort Duquesne, but he pulled his men out at
the last minute. General Forbes was livid, but
Attakullakulla played the situation adroitly,
explaining to Governor Lyttleton that he with-
drew om the campaign aer learning om
the Ohio Shawnee Indians that the French
were ready to abandon Fort Duquesne, so
the Cherokee warriors were eed om their
obligation to help take the fort.
Attakullakulla’s diplomacy was only a tem-
porary success. Later that month, Moytoy, the
head warrior of the Cherokee town of Settico,
led another revenge raid in which more than
twenty additional settlers were killed, includ-
ing eight children. None of these settlers had
anything to do with the killing of Cherokee
in the Shenandoah Valley. But that was not
how many Cherokee viewed the matter. The
members of any tribe were interchangeable.
Conversely, the Cherokee did not act as a single
body. Thirteen of the Cherokee towns sent no-
tice to Governor Lyttleton that they repudiated
Moytoy’s behavior and the town of Settico’s
“disrespectful” treatment of the English.
T
his compresses Narrett’s considerably more
detailed account. The story of course continues
as Lyttleton and his agents and spies attempt
to get the upper hand with the Cherokee, with
unsatisfactory results. Bloodshed and brutality
ensue, with the Cherokee showing themselves
more adroit than the English both with am-
bush and in parlay.
Nearly ve hundred pages of such narrative
is an impressive feat of historical reclamation
for a largely forgotten era. The Cherokees is
a work of scholarship that resembles Fran-
cis Parkman in his seven-volume France and
England in North America, which is likewise
saturated with spilled blood and scenes of hor-
ric cruelty. Narrett, unlike Parkman, does not
revel in the darkness, but he doesn’t avoid it
either. We get an account of the Cherokee as
sophisticated “in war and at peace,” but in nei-
ther pursuit living in the same moral universe
as the English settlers.
That is not to hold up the settlers as moral
exemplars. They could lie, deceive, and kill with
the same alacrity as the Indians. Narrett observes:
Diplomatic acuity encompassed the ability to
dissimulate as well as to speak literal truth. To pal-
liate wrongs committed by one’s own group—or
even to conceal them—was quite as much an
Indigenous as a colonial approach to compro-
mising situations.
But there is nonetheless a division between
the two sides that was profound and irre-
sponsible. Jeerson was not wrong about
that. Perhaps it comes down to the view that
murdering innocents, including women and
children, is a morally acceptable form of repri-
sal. Taking and keeping scalps as prized pos-
sessions also indicates a level of inhumanity
in the midst of shared humanity. The closest
Narrett gets to making sense of the situation
is to say that the “intersecting Native and
colonial worlds were characterized by asser-
tions of power, tempered by acute awareness
of vulnerability.” And,
The Indigenous tenaciously guarded indepen-
dence and resisted subordination—and for this
very reason oen sought powerful allies within
ameworks of respect and reciprocity. To the
Cherokees such relationships were ideally a bond,
implicitly covenantal and not merely contractual.
These are, however, bland pronouncements—
true as far as they go, but paraphrases of hu-
man nature that fail to reach the ontier
where civilization meets what we used to
26 The New Criterion October 2025
Savage wars of peace by Peter W. Wood
call barbarism. The barbarians have always
had their virtues, including self-knowledge
of vulnerability, the capacity for respect, and
a deep sense of reciprocity. But their moral
communities are palisaded against common
humanity. Their reciprocity is contained
within the simple bargain, seldom touching
more diuse forms of generosity. Or to put it
in shortest form, the Cherokee in war and at
peace, at least in the period om 1670 to 1840,
were not good neighbors. Forcing them to
move to Oklahoma was a grave injustice, but
Narrett’s book leaves one wondering what
the alternative might have been. Selsh as
the colonists oen were, the Cherokee were
not people with whom they could live safely.
R
eading the book today, it is hard to escape
the impression that the history of the Chero-
kee has something in common with the Pal-
estinians in Gaza. They too have been willing
to engage in mayhem that exceeds all bounds
of common humanity, and likewise to pursue
this course to the point of inviting their own
destruction. We can learn something om
the real history of “settler colonialism.” The
Warre of civilization against the Savage is
never really over.
27
New poems
by Jay Rogo, Beverley Bie Brahic &
Henry Stimpson
Holes
A box of chocolate donut holes, a box
of air. My mother’s tiring, even of
the empty cake delights she used to love
to gobble by the handful, ve or six,
which no longer add fat to her T. rex
forearms and talons. In season, she’ll still crave
her Mallomars but doesn’t need to starve
herself, as in the past, to eat her x.
Barer and barer going we all are,
like bonny Bedlam boys, we live of the air,
promise-crammed. You can’t feed capons so,
nor my mother, her cheek growing more hollow.
She drinks the wind till her lungs ll with holes,
and eats the space round atoms’ particles.
—Jay Rogo
28
Polar route
I am unlikely ever to be more
Than a visitor now, lied o the plane
Geometry of France to cruising altitude,
Silent shadow skimming Scotland,
The North Atlantic’s printed waves.
Far below—can that be Ban?
Home—you could miss it so easily.
I press my nose against the rear galley’s
Shuddering porthole: is that Pond Inlet—
Mittimatalik its old-new name—
Where one summer the sun never set on,
With our simple tools we scraped
Thawed crumbs of earth om a Dorset
Encampment, summer hunting ground:
Narwhalers whose Inuit descendants
Still le ensed carcassses
To bleach in the midnight sun: vertebrae
And ribs we repurposed for a playpen
For the baby. Oshore an iceberg goose,
One wing eed om oe ice,
Tossed and turned in our sleep.
Now Saskatchewan our ight map blinks.
Can I corner a fellow passenger,
Exclaim, “Down there’s where I was born.”
Corroborate my disbelief? The prairies!
Remember on road trips how we vied
To be rst to see the barn-red silos
Of wheat breach the monotony of grass?
—Beverley Bie Brahic
29
Fresco in a French Romanesque church
Father told us kids one mortal sin
will damn your soul to hell forever
unless you confessed your sins to him,
but I know we graduate to nothingness.
On this vaulted dusky wall, a nude couple
is about to be devoured whole
by a brown-striped poker-faced demon.
Covering their sex with a hand,
the adulterers calmly stand facing away
om its gaping baroque mouth.
I thought it a scene in hell, but no,
they just can’t see the gigantic maw,
though they’re partway in it,
imminent passage to eternal torture.
This faded esco that cowed peasants
now gives even prideful me the willies.
On a luminous Sunday aernoon
in August, the town is dead.
The squat tower rises heavenward
om the square of shining grass.
—Henry Stimpson
The New Criterion October 202530
Reections
Ovid in exile
by David Lehman
Who among lovers of literature and myth
would want to do without the story of Mars
and Venus and what they were doing when
Vulcan imprisoned them in a net? Of Midas
and the disastrous request he made when the
god Bacchus oered to grant his any wish? Of
Daphne and her antic eorts to outrun the
swi-footed, love-struck, lust-driven Apollo?
Of Daedalus and the ying contraption he
fashioned—with unfortunate consequences
for his hubristic son, Icarus, who ew too
close to the sun? Of the blind prophet Tiresias
and the experiences that made him supremely
qualied to judge whether a man or a woman
gets more pleasure out of sex? Of how even
Tantalus stopped trying to reach water, Sisy-
phus climbed on his rock to listen, and for the
rst time ever, the Furies wept, when Orpheus
sang of his love for Eurydice?
All these stories are found in the Metamor-
phoses, the indispensable compendium of Greek
and Roman myth by the prolic Latin poet
Publius Ovidius Naso, known to us as Ovid.
Long a mainstay of great-books courses, the
Metamorphoses has inuenced—and supplied
source material for—painters om Brueghel
to Titian and writers om Chaucer and Shake-
speare to Yeats, Rilke, Kaa, Joyce, and Eliot.
Not the most demanding book in a founda-
tion course, it performs the vital function of
gathering together many myths and legends
of lasting interest. Some of the tales have the
quality of parables that may be uitfully pon-
dered. Knowledge of them will help prepare
the student for myths in modern dress (Shaw’s
adaptation of the story of Pygmalion, Jean
Cocteau’s lm version of Orpheus) and for
the vast number of works that make reference
to the Metamorphoses. Consider Albert Camus’
existential musings in The Myth of Sisyphus or
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. According to
Eliot, Tiresias is “the most important person-
age in the poem.”
Quite aside om its pedagogical advan-
tages, Ovid’s masterwork has given pleasure
to generations of serious readers. It has of-
ten been a required text in Columbia’s “Lit-
erature Humanities” course, a glory of the
university’s core curriculum since the 1920s.
(I took the yearlong course in my eshman
year at Columbia and it changed my life.) In
2015, however, Columbia students mounted a
campaign against canonical texts that contain
“triggering and oensive material that mar-
ginalizes student identities in the classroom.”
Four students, members of Columbia’s Multi-
cultural Aairs Advisory Board, collaborated
on an op-ed column in the Columbia Daily
Spectator categorizing Ovid’s Metamorphoses
as among those “texts” that are “wrought
with histories and narratives of exclusion and
oppression” and therefore “can be dicult
to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of
color, or a student om a low-income back-
ground.” The faculty hemmed and hawed be-
fore capitulating. As Liza Libes, a veteran of
Literature Humanities, recently wrote, more
in sorrow than in anger, “Ovid was sent on a
three-year furlough, returning to the syllabus
briey in 2018 before being nixed entirely.”
Reections
31The New Criterion October 2025
In plain English, the students singled out
the Metamorphoses because of the Greek and
Roman gods’ habit of coming to earth, pursu-
ing mortal nymphs, and raping them. In Ovid,
Pluto takes Proserpine; Jupiter, in the guise of
a bull, rapes Europa; Tereus rapes Philomela;
and Apollo would possess Daphne if her arms
did not become branches, her hair not turn
into leaves, as, in answer to her plea, she is
transformed into a tree, a bay laurel—which
explains why Apollo will henceforth use the
leaves of a bay laurel to crown a champion.
Jupiter in Ovid is not the rst amorous god
of myth who, smitten with a beautiful young
woman, metamorphoses into an animal in pur-
suit of his prey. In Greek mythology, Zeus
(the Greek name for Jupiter) assumes the form
of a swan, swoops up the beautiful maiden,
impregnates her with illustrious ospring, and
inspires a great poet to write a sonnet ending
in an unanswerable question: “Did she put
on his knowledge with his power/ Before the
indierent beak could let her drop?”
It is not astounding that the privileged and
outlandish behavior of Greek and Roman gods
should make some students uneasy. But it is
a pity that they feel they need to be shielded
om the stories that make Ovid an intellectual
adventure not to be missed. It is also somewhat
disconcerting if only because it is a blatant sign
of humorless self-righteousness. What we see
and hear today in movies, on television, and in
videos that go viral is far more disturbing than
the magical metamorphoses of Ovid. Could it
be that the stated objections are as ambiguous
and misleading as the manifest content of a
dream? Perhaps something else, something
unstated, is going on when there is an eort
to ban a book.
The conviction has taken hold that the lit-
erature we read and study should conform
to our own standards of belief and behavior.
The view that misogyny, racism, and other
vices are structurally present in the hallmarks
of Western civilization—and that these works
are fatally compromised therefore—has gained
traction. Faced with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the
ideologically driven are presumably unmoved
by the argument that to read is not to endorse.
The aesthetic argument rarely defeats the po-
litical in such disputes. Nevertheless, it should
be pointed out that in Ovid we encounter an
alternative culture, a larger-than-life version
of the “other,” a momentous episode in the
history of belief. Moreover, the work is beguil-
ing as a whole and in its component parts; it
exemplies a exible narrative style, and the
verse is worthy of our best eorts at transla-
tion. When Venus, the goddess of beauty, is
grazed by one of her son Cupid’s arrows, she is
smitten with Adonis to the exclusion of all else:
She stays away
Even om Heaven, Adonis is better than
heaven.
She is beside him always; she has always,
Before this time, preferred the shadowy places,
Preferred her ease, preferred to improve her
beauty
By careful tending, but now, across the ridges,
Through woods, through rocky places thick
with brambles,
She goes, more like Diana than like Venus,
Bare-kneed and robes tucked up.
That is om Rolfe Humphries’s 1955 transla-
tion. And here, in Daryl Hine’s translation, is
Ovid’s description of the metamorphosis of
Jupiter into a bull:
Majesty is incompatible truly with love; they
cohabit
Nowhere together. The father and chief of the
gods, whose right hand is
Armed with the triple-forked lightning, who
shakes the whole world with a nod, laid
Dignity down with his sceptre, adopting the
guise of a bull that
Mixed with the cattle and lowed as he ambled
around the esh elds, a
Beautiful animal, colored like snow that no
footprint has trodden
And which no watery south wind has melted.
In an essay in The New Yorker about the liter-
ary advantages of adopting a foreign language
as your own, Jhumpa Lahiri writes that once,
when asked a perennial question, she replied
“without any hesitation that my favorite book
32
Reections
The New Criterion October 2025
was the Metamorphoses of Ovid. It’s a majestic
work, a poem that concerns everything, that
reects everything.” She read it rst in Latin.
“It was an unforgettable encounter, maybe the
most satisfying reading of my life.”
When the Columbia faculty took up the
question of Ovid, a compromise was sug-
gested: teach the book but be sure to attach
a trigger warning, notifying students that
they may encounter something that could
make some of them uncomfortable. If I were
a college student, I would hate trigger warn-
ings, except perhaps as a come-on, the way
an X rating used to get my adolescent self
particularly eager to read such verboten books
as Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, and Lady Chat-
terley’s Lover. Trigger warnings are, aer all,
merely spoiler alerts, advisories to the reader,
a kind of rating system meant to draw atten-
tion to an oensive point of view, an instance
of gratuitous violence, or the expression of
a prejudice that was once common but is no
longer deemed tolerable.
Wary of trigger warnings, I worry about
the larger tendency they represent—the
modication of canons instigated by con-
temporary articles of faith that have no sure
lasting power. This puts me in opposition to
the glib idea that professors should “teach the
conicts,” that is, emphasize the behind-the-
scenes quarrels that make academic faculty
meetings a special kind of torture. Teaching
a classic text ought not to be compared to
hosting a cable-news segment in which a
proponent and an opponent of a policy get
a minute or two to make their case. Such a
balanced presentation works to make the two
sides appear to be of equal merit.
From the inception of Columbia’s great-
books program in 1919, it has always been a
principle that the students should read the
work, be it Augustine’s Confessions or Rous-
seau’s, without the help or hindrance of criti-
cal and scholarly writing, let alone that of
ideologues with a parti pris. It is, moreover,
a crucial premise that the reading of a book
does not imply approval of the point of view it
advances. One may dislike the views expressed
in the Communist Manifesto or Rousseau’s So-
cial Contract, but the liberal imagination, at
least as Lionel Trilling conceived it, calls for
an acquaintance with such works.
The organized objection to Ovid reinforces
the conviction that we have deprecated the
study of the Greek and Latin classics. It is
reasonable to fear that certain texts that have
lasted two thousand years may, with our
blessings, go down the long chute into the
void. Once you admit the possibility that, in
a consumerist university culture, a text once
thought great may be morally reprehensible
and therefore should not be taught, which of
the great books shall ’scape whipping?
A faculty committee formed to devise a safe
and harmless great-books course would realize
pretty quickly that, with the possible exception
of Jane Austen, almost every book on the list is
vulnerable to objection. The Iliad glories war.
The Odyssey perpetrates a double standard in
which Odysseus is allowed the pleasures of Ca-
lypso while Penelope must resist the attention
of her suitors. Genesis propounds creationism.
The Oedipus cycle of Sophocles and the Oresteia
of Aeschylus conont readers with parricide
and matricide, respectively, which may trigger a
mental upheaval if Freud was on to something,
though Freud is himself out of intellectual fash-
ion and you’re unlikely to nd Civilization and
Its Discontents in a class devoted to major works
of Western civilization.
And why stop there? Apuleius turns a man
into a donkey in The Golden Ass. Dogmatic
Dante audaciously puts Muhammad in a low
circle of the Inferno. Rabelais is ribald. King
Lear is cruel and demonizes daughters. Para-
dise Lost either lays too much guilt on Eve or
secretly makes a hero out of Satan. Alexander
Pope’s satirical masterpiece “The Rape of the
Lock” has to go on the grounds that the very
conceit of the poem trivializes rape. Swi’s
Gulliver’s Travels is expendable because the hero
puts out a re in Lilliput by urinating in it.
Does Heart of Darkness privilege the colonial-
ist point of view? You can argue that it does,
and that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a rank
example of orientalism, and that the prince’s
treatment of Ophelia is unforgivably caddish
in Hamlet. But do we really want to discard
these works?
Reections
33The New Criterion October 2025
When books are shunned or scorned be-
cause the practices described therein violate
our moral codes, we commit the error of
cultural superiority vis-à-vis the past, which
professional historians used to warn us against.
The censoring of unseemly works, Ovid’s in-
cluded, is a little like airbrushing the cigarette
out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s lips
on a postage stamp. It is the erasure that denies
the past its pastness, its right to exist on its
own terms, whether we approve of it or not,
whether it appears to us as a precedent or a
premonition or neither. The point of great-
books courses was always to challenge our as-
sumptions and conont us with disagreeable
possibilities. In my own experience, a seminar
room at Columbia, Cornell, Yale and the like is
(or at least was) as “safe” a space as one could
hope to nd for talking about such matters.
In the 1960s at Columbia, the desire of stu-
dents to conont the modern literature most
likely to prove upsetting was intense. It led a
reluctant Lionel Trilling to devise such a course
and then to reect on the experience in a fasci-
nating essay. Trilling writes that he has given
his students a taste of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,
Freud, Nietzsche, Conrad, Thomas Mann,
and William Blake:
I have asked them to look into the Abyss, and,
both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into
the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with
the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study,
saying: “Interesting, am I not? And exciting if you
consider how deep I am and what dead beasts
lie at my bottom.”
Trilling could question the maturity of stu-
dents who moved “through the terrors and
mysteries of modern literature like so many
Parsifals, asking no questions at the behest of
wonder and fear.” But the Columbia profes-
sor had no doubt that the teaching of mod-
ern literature—including that which may be
said to bear an adversarial relationship to the
prevailing culture—was worth doing well and
with a full consciousness of what the enterprise
entailed. How dierent om the atmosphere
in universities today.
John H. McWhorter, who teaches linguis-
tics, American studies, philosophy, and music
at Columbia, has used the phrase “mob ideol-
ogy” to characterize the campus paranoia that
results om the indiscriminate use of attack
words—racist, sexist, and the like—on social
media. Self-censorship is one sure consequence.
Back in 2015, when some Columbia undergrads
attacked Ovid, McWhorter wrote optimisti-
cally that “a true university culture will resist
sacricing professors or administrators who are
advocates of reason on the altar of convenient
pieties.” As a moral imperative, I couldn’t agree
with it more; as a prediction, alas, it has fallen
on its face.
For along came cancel culture, which, as
David Bromwich has observed, is “a weak
phrase for the organized eort to destroy the
careers of persons who violate the most recent
canons of upright verbal behavior.” Bromwich
gives us two examples:
the ring of David Shor om a progressive con-
sulting rm for having recommended, during the
George Floyd protests, a scholarly paper show-
ing that riots can cause political backlash; and
the forced resignation of Donald McNeil om
The New York Times for quoting a racial slur in
answer to a question about the slur.
Plenty of other examples come to mind.
And aer cancel culture, October 7 hap-
pened and, in its wake, the vilication of Zion-
ism, the harassment of Jewish students, and the
emergence of the keyeh as the latest belliger-
ent statement endorsing censorship and hate.
How long has it been since universities
became sites of lockstep thinking and erce
intolerance, where codes are enforced with
job oers or rejections and taking an incorrect
position is as socially unacceptable as smoking
in the department chairman’s living room?
Longer than you might think. In 1965, Lionel
Trilling observed tartly that the “progressive
educational prescription to ‘think for yourself’
. . . means to think in the progressive pieties
rather than the conservative pieties (if any
of the latter do still exist).” Trilling believed
that in the post-war era liberalism had for all
intents and purposes emerged triumphant in
34
Reections
The New Criterion October 2025
the clash of ideas in the academy. The author
of The Liberal Imagination might have been
expected to applaud the development, but
Trilling valued the dialectic movement of the
mind, where thesis meets worthy antithesis
and produces a tentative synthesis, and he
foresaw danger in the hegemony of ideas.
Would self-criticism prove a casualty? Toler-
ance stems om the self-critical impulse. Re-
move it and you cut out the ground beneath
the very idea of civil engagement.
I note that eorts have been made to restore
Ovid to campus popularity. The Columbia pro-
fessor Gareth Williams, the author of On Ovid’s
Metamorphoses (2023), told an interviewer,
Ovid’s eye for the skeptical questioning of our
political leaders, for the ceaseless changefulness
of human experience, for the eccentricities and
nonconformity of so many behavioral types, and
for ironic commentary on the vagaries of life—all
of these features and more resulted in an Ovid
revival. His Metamorphoses provides a powerful
point of contact for 21st-century existence.
Should one feel placated by this reminder that
truth in academe is no more stable than fashion
in woman’s apparel?
In Areopagitica (1644), Milton declared his ve-
hement opposition to censorship:
Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s
image; but he who destroys a good book, kills
reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in
the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth;
but a good book is the precious life-blood of a
master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on
purpose to a life beyond life.
He believed that truth would prove victorious
in any battle with falsehood:
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose
to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the eld,
we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting
to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood
grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse,
in a ee and open encounter?
I wish I felt Milton’s condence. I wish
I were optimistic enough to end this piece
with an assertion rather than a hesitant ques-
tion. Does the truth still have the ability to
vanquish falsehood, fakery, propaganda, lies,
and deceit that spread on the internet with
unprecedented speed?
We mourn the passing of
Nancy Shivers (1949–2025)
A valued supporter of The New Criterion
35The New Criterion October 2025
Reconsiderations
Christie meets Wilde
by David Guaspari
I am a scholar. . . . Few mysteries are impenetrable
to the trained mind.
I am an historian—my profession largely consists
of speaking ill of the dead.
—Hilary Tamar in Sarah Caudwell’s The Shortest
Way to Hades, 1985
S
arah Caudwell (1939–2000) published four
brilliantly witty and entertaining novels in the
style of Golden Age mysteries: stories in which
an amateur detective unravels a complex puzzle
om details whose meanings will, until the
nal revelation, elude ordinary mortals. An
elevator pitch for the series might be “Agatha
Christie meets Oscar Wilde.” Under her real
name, Sarah Caudwell Cockburn was an ac-
complished barrister specializing in property
and tax law. Tax problems and tax-avoidance
schemes, sometimes mind-bogglingly com-
plex, set her plots in motion.
The narrator of all the novels is Hilary Tamar,
a don in the Oxford faculty of law but not
a lawyer. (“[M]y interest in the principles of
English law wanes with the Middle Ages.”)
Mystery investigations interrupt work on a
projected magnum opus, Causa in the Early
Common Law—thus delaying “the appearance
in learned journals of such phrases as ‘Profes-
sor Tamar’s masterly exposition,’ ‘Professor
Tamar’s revolutionary analysis,’ and so forth”
but serving a higher good by demonstrating
the power of (as Hilary would put it) Scholar-
ship and Reason to establish Truth. The pace
at which even uninterrupted research for the
Causa seems to be proceeding suggests that it
is unlikely soon to forthcome, if ever.
Hilary is, essentially, a voice—mannered,
mandarin, self-important. That voice “was in
my head before any of the plots,” Caudwell
told an interviewer. “I knew om the outset
Hilary must be an Oxford don—but of equivo-
cal sex and even equivocal age, resembling that
precise, donnish kind of individual who starts
being elderly at the age of twenty-two.” The
voice weaponizes understatement:
[A] particular tone is used by young men appar-
ently ingenuous to make observations apparently
innocent in a manner apparently respectful with
the intention of being extremely impertinent:
one can hardly hope, in academic life, to be un-
familiar with it.
Caudwell was known as a feisty feminist, but
leaving Hilary’s sex unspecied has opened the
door to saddling the books, anachronistically,
with current fashions about gender. The audio
versions, beautifully read, are introduced with
a po-faced lamentation that regrets the need
to impose on the listener an actual reader of a
recognizable sex (in this case, female).
It’s more helpful to look at things the other
way around: if the goal is to create a character
who is essentially a voice, then references to its
embodiment, including physical description,
are distractions to be avoided. Hilary is given
only two eshly pursuits, eating and drinking,
especially when someone else pays, and their
function is to provide occasions in bars and
36
Reconsiderations
The New Criterion October 2025
restaurants for conversations that advance the
plots. Hilary’s uncorporeality shows in this
response to a crime of passion:
One could not wish, for oneself or for one’s
iends, any rst-hand experience of such extrem-
ity of feeling—it is not conducive to comfortable
living. And yet there is about it, when observed,
something curiously touching and attractive, so
that one almost, absurdly, regrets one’s own in-
ability to entertain it.
To avoid syntactical contortions, it will be
convenient to refer to Hilary as “she,” consis-
tent with the voice that narrates the audio-
books and also (based on a sample of two) the
experiences of readers approaching the stories
innocent of any theory about them.
Caudwell adapts her chosen form in playful
ways, putting a spin on conventions common in
the design of a classical detective: to begin with,
a physical appearance that either radiates single-
minded intelligence (Holmes, tall and lean, with
“piercing eyes” and “hawk-like nose”) or takes
advantage of concealing it (Lord Peter Wim-
sey’s “vaguely foolish face” and Father Brown’s
face “round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling”).
We know no more of Hilary’s looks than their
conformance to the basic human body plan.
There is also the signature habit or eccentric-
ity (Nero Wolfe’s orchids, Poirot’s mustache).
But Hilary is all essence, no accident—and so
lacks any inessential feature to which such a
decoration can be attached.
And the air for the revelatory denoue-
ment: the rst time Hilary tries that, in Thus
Was Adonis Murdered (1981), her listeners dri
away one by one, leaving a single, peripheral
character to be apprised fully of the truth
and impressed by the Methods of Scholar-
ship. In The Sibyl in Her Grave (2000), she
is reduced to explaining that the sequence of
erroneous and mutually contradictory theories
on which she’s been acting was the result of
minor course corrections dictated by those
methods—bringing to mind Fearless Fosdick’s
dismissal of bullet holes riddling his torso as
“mere esh wounds.”
While the classical detective operates with
an air of authority, Hilary gets little deference
om the iends who drag her into mysteries in
which they have themselves become involved:
“I trust that [one of them] has not given you an
exaggerated notion of my abilities . . .”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Clementine. “What
he said was—well, what he actually said was that
you were awfully good at picking up odds and
ends of gossip and nding out things that weren’t
any of your business.”
That set of iends consists of young barristers:
Selena Jardine (competent and ecient), Julia
Larwood (chaotic, disheveled, perpetually in
search of sexual adventure), Desmond Rag-
wort (old-fashioned), and Michael Cantrip (a
graduate not of Oxford but of Cambridge—for
which he is rather to be pitied than blamed).
Hilary prefers, when possible, to remain in
Oxford or London and subcontract important
narration to letters they send about events oc-
curring elsewhere—a device possible because
the stories are set before the ubiquity of cell
phones and the internet. Caudwell abandons
without shame any pretense at realism; the let-
ters are absurdly long, detailed, and amusing.
It’s not always obvious that someone could
have enough time both to write such a let-
ter and to engage in the events it describes.
Caudwell exploits the double-time schemes
that result when information om a news bul-
letin or long-distance telephone call arrives out
of sequence with that om the letters.
The auxiliary narrators have voices of their
own, but all of them, whether in face-to-face
conversation or through the mail, describe events
large, small, admirable, deplorable, mundane, or
bizarre with an aect suited to chatting about
the weather. Aer inadvertently attending a sex
party, Julia and Selena describe it as follows (here
set out with elisions and dialogue tags):
: [Selena] cast o all conventional re-
straints and devoted herself without shame to
the pleasure of the moment. . . . She took om
her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and
Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining
all oers of conversation. I have never known
you, Selena, so indierent to the demands of
social obligation.
Reconsiderations
37The New Criterion October 2025
: [The host] equently interrupted his
artistic activities . . . to urge me to take my clothes
o and enjoy myself—this made it very dicult
for me to concentrate on Pride and Prejudice.
: You should have le forthwith, paus-
ing, if at all, only to utter a brief denunciation.
: [Another guest] seemed very anxious
that I should try [on a schoolgirl’s gym outt].
The idea, to be candid, did not greatly appeal to
me—I did not think it at all a becoming garment.
She grew so insistent, however, that I could not
politely refuse.
Such episodes of brittle dialogue are among
Caudwell’s basic comic tools, and the tempta-
tion simply to go on quoting it is strong. (“You
will be sorry to hear that [Julia] is at present
detained in Venice on suspicion of murder”;
“Dear me, how disagreeable for her. Has she, as
a matter of interest, actually murdered anyone?”)
Another is satire:
[It was] that season of the year when the warm
days of summer draw luxuriantly towards their
uitful and abundant climax and there is an al-
most universal impulse to give thanks in some
way for the richness and generosity of the earth;
that is to say, in the case of an upper-class Eng-
lishman, to go out and kill something.
Another is the application of technicalities and
technical idioms in absurd or incongruous con-
texts, as when Julia conducts a seduction based
on details in the Finance Act, or when Selena,
discussing a case involving people whose identi-
ties are known to all her listeners, nonetheless
maintains a pretense of respecting condentiality:
My client, whom I shall refer to as “my client,”
is the Chairman of a small but highly respected
merchant bank, which I shall refer to as “the
Bank” . . . [along with two] members of the
board of directors, whom I shall refer to as “A”
and “B,” though those are not their real names.
Caudwell can also orchestrate knockabout
farce: that sex party or the extended visit om
Michael Cantrip’s rambunctious uncle, an old
soldier with an enthusiasm for nightlife, ready
always for a ght. Pub-crawling with Julia aer
a night at the theater, Colonel Cantrip en-
counters an actor he’d just seen onstage and
feels obliged to conont him over the moral
failings of the character he portrayed. At the
climax of The Sirens Sang of Murder (1989),
when Michael’s life is in danger, the colonel
improvises a rescue using a stolen helicopter.
Solutions to the mysteries can strain plausi-
bility, but the plots are well carpentered. Farci-
cal episodes and seemingly digressive subplots
are not just entertaining diversions but also
contribute information that will turn out to
be important. When police raid the sex party
and Selena is forced to hide on a balcony, she
learns that om there it would be impossible
to see the Oxford versus Cambridge boat race,
which a murder victim was supposedly watch-
ing when she fell to her death. The Shortest Way
to Hades contains a punishingly long recitation
of clauses in a will, which makes clear how easy
it would be to lose one’s place among the de-
tails, a key to creating the motive for a murder.
And each novel concludes with a rush of
well-paced action, though not always in the
Mission Impossible style of a helicopter rescue.
In Thus Was Adonis Murdered, Hilary choreo-
graphs, om London, a precise sequence of
encounters in the streets of Venice to provoke
conontations that will unmask the killer.
Caudwell herself seems to have been a char-
acter: gru-voiced, a pipe smoker, a equent
nalist in the formidable Times crossword
puzzle competition. The books suggest that
her enthusiasms also included sailing (a skill as-
signed to Selena) and travel. She writes vividly
about, among other places, Venice, the Greek
islands, the Channel Islands, and Monaco (with
its “neat rectangular harbour, glittering in the
sunlight and crowded with the yachts of those
too rich to aord to live elsewhere”).
The true pleasure of these books comes not
om their scaolding of plot but om what
lies on the surface it supports—the wit, which
I’m dismayed, but not surprised, to nd is
oen side-eyed as an acquired taste. I’d like to
think that someone for whom wit can be an
end in itself will have the taste already.
The New Criterion October 202538
Theater
Tortured souls
by Kyle Smith
R
eleased in 1989, the black comedy Heathers
(written by Daniel Waters, directed by Mi-
chael Lehmann) carries an unusual teen-movie
distinction: thirteen citations in the Oxford
English Dictionary. From “I’m sorry? What are
you oozing about?” to “Grow up, Heather.
Bulimia’s so ’86” to “God, Veronica, drool
much?” the movie’s distinctive lingo made its
mark. Part John Hughes, part David Lynch, it
was a box-oce op yet ahead of its time in its
vision of a murderously misanthropic young
adult and his initially unsuspecting girliend.
The comedy lost much of its zing, however, a
decade later. The Columbine killers, driven by
the same nihilism as the rageful central char-
acter of Heathers and even adopting similar
dress, inaugurated the era of mass killings in
high schools.
Nevertheless, certain aspects of the lm
reappeared in such subsequent pieces as the
musical (and movie) Dear Evan Hansen and
the movie (and musical, and movie-musical)
Mean Girls. Waters’s fable was essentially Swee-
ney Todd with Trapper Keepers. His antihero’s
emotional register of bitter animosity toward
everyone, which is aided by his girliend’s ex-
asperation about the eort it takes to maintain
popularity, captured something recognizable
to those of us old enough to remember going to
high school in the 1980s or earlier: teens were
really nasty to each other back then.
Heathers: The Musical was rst performed
as a concert at Joe’s Pub in 2010, then debuted
o-Broadway in 2014 at New World Stages,
which is also home to the new revival (on
through January 25). Written by Laurence
O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, who share du-
ties on book, music, and lyrics, it smooths
down the rough edges. Steering away om the
source material, it builds to a much dierent
and less chilling ending.
And it’s a pleasing show, dark but not too
dark. Winona Ryder’s character in the lm, Ve-
ronica, is played by the mild and sweet Lorna
Courtney and seems merely a dupe rather than
an enthusiastic co-conspirator in the murder
spree. Casey Likes, who is making a career out
of playing the teen protagonists of musicals
adapted om lms (William Miller in Broad-
way’s Almost Famous, 2022; Marty McFly in
Broadway’s Back to the Future, 2023), steps
into the role that made Christian Slater fa-
mous as the sly, black-clad, Baudelaire-quoting
cynic Jason “J. D.” Dean, who wears long,
moody trench coats and is given to remarks
such as “We are all born marked for evil.”
Some more than others, apparently. That this
J. D. is genuinely evil gives the story consider-
ably more he than you’d expect and furnishes
Heathers with a neat little thematic twist: as
annoying as the jocks and the popular girls are,
they’re innocuous compared to the school’s
real danger, the mist self-styled genius who
attracts no attention, at least for a while.
The show makes clever use of a cultural
trend of the 1980s, which was a general con-
cern with teen suicide, then being linked by
pundits to heavy-metal music. Heathers sug-
gested that there was so much focus on self-
harm that simply forging a suicide note and
Theater
39The New Criterion October 2025
leaving it near a murder victim might easily
fool authorities. The expert forger is Veronica,
the stressed-out junior member of a quartet
of popular girls. Each of the others is named
Heather. (Today they’d be Olivias or Bellas).
Veronica is barely able to handle the strains
of keeping up with the Heathers, whom she
describes in the show (as in the movie) as
“like people I work with and our job is be-
ing popular.” Her ability to imitate anyone’s
handwriting is highly regarded because it helps
the Heathers’ ongoing project of humiliating
lower-status teens such as the overweight Mar-
tha Dunnstock (adorably portrayed by Erin
Morton), whose cruel but not inapt nickname
is “Dumptruck.”
The alpha Heather, and obvious model
for Regina George in Mean Girls, is Heather
Chandler (McKenzie Kurtz), who sports color-
coordinated red skirts and jackets. Kurtz is easily
the funniest and most dynamic member of the
cast. The deputies and enforcers of Chandler’s
whims are Heather Duke (Olivia Hardy), who
wears green, and Heather McNamara (Eliza-
beth Teeter), in yellow. Veronica is typically serv-
ing the needs of her mistress (who is nursing a
hangover) when her boyiend, J. D., casually
suggests slipping her some poison. He turns
out to favor killing all of the “assholes,” and
“assholes” means pretty much everyone. Omi-
nously, J. D.’s father runs a demolition business.
Some, but not all, of this is played for laughs
and for typical theater shenanigans: when two
blazingly heterosexual football players get dis-
patched, alongside a note that says they were
lovers who preferred to die rather than incur
society’s disapprobation, it triggers a wacky
funeral scene in which their butch dads also
turn out to be lovers and embrace passionately
to cheers.
Dead kids, in other words, yield rich comic
material (and the three murder victims keep
coming back onstage aer their deaths to of-
fer wry running commentary on the action,
the boys clad only in matching underwear).
Heathers admirably sticks to its black-comic
tone without generating any ponderous anti-
bullying lectures, and though the songs are
typical of today’s musicals in that you probably
won’t experience an overwhelming desire to
hear any of them again, they work perfectly
well in situ. If you don’t like this show, the
question arises: what’s your damage?
T
he path to riches in fashion seems clearly illu-
minated: Recognizing that name is everything,
cra runway collections around unwearable
and preposterous outts. Infuse your creations
with themes that have nothing to do with look-
ing good and everything to do with attracting
attention, such as violence or poverty. Ensnare
the tabloids by getting dubbed a “bad boy,”
and get the genteel press to call you an “enfant
terrible.” Become known for being “controver-
sial” and “provocative.” Finally, pivot to where
the actual money is: “luxury” handbags for
women who read fashion magazines, sold at
eye-watering markups. To the working class,
sell T-shirts, blue jeans, and belts.
Such was the trajectory of Lee Alexander
McQueen, among whose innovations were
a line of clothing inspired by Jack the Ripper
(rape and murder: fabulous) and “bumster”
trousers, cut so low as to allow vertical cleavage
to peek out above. McQueen was equently
dubbed a genius, though not by the kind of
people you would ever take seriously.
Darrah Cloud’s House of McQueen (at the
Mansion at Hudson Yards through October 19)
nevertheless manages to make the designer
more interesting than I would have guessed
by emphasizing his humility and his touching
attachment to his mother (he hanged himself
at forty in 2010, nine days aer she died).
McQueen, the son of an East End cab driver,
was chubby, unassuming-looking, and given
to wearing baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts.
His work ethic was as strong as his personality
was recessive. The designer as captured in the
play was simply possessed by a hunger to do
innovative, interesting work. In several situ-
ations, he is seen intoning, “I want to learn
everything, everything, everything” about mak-
ing clothes. In a world of exhaustingly loud
people, McQueen was quiet and let his clothes
do the talking. According to the text, as deep
as eight collections into his career, McQueen
was still so broke he ate at McDonald’s.
Cloud (best known for writing made-for-
television Christmas movies) has penned a play
40
Theater
The New Criterion October 2025
that, at least as directed by Sam Helich, an
experienced opera and theater director, seems
to be aimed more at an audience of fashion
connoisseurs than at stage acionados. It was
timed to launch concurrently with New York
Fashion Week. The writing tends to be blunt,
and dialogue is delivered in low, somber tones.
Events are accompanied by a hum of ominous
music, and some abstract interludes are so ear-
nestly solemn and weird they’re downright
silly, in accordance with fashion’s imperative
for creating a feeling of icy hipness.
The space, most unusually for an o-Broad-
way house, is technologically au courant.
Helich employs a very wide stage with two
platforms that rise and recede at various points
in the production, with huge video screens
both over the actors’ heads and beneath their
feet, as well as a third behind them, providing
background to suggest new settings or live
video feeds of McQueen and his mother (seen
interviewing him on the , though the ex-
change was actually conducted for The Guard-
ian newspaper). The feel is concordant with a
hypermodern, exotic runway show.
As played by Luke Newton (through Sep-
tember 28), a star of Netix’s racy brummagem-
Austen drama Bridgerton, Lee McQueen (as
he was known before he became a designer) is
an enticingly shy fellow who as a boy (played
by either Cody Braverman or Matthew Eby
depending on the performance) was a “sissy,”
in the parlance of the time, with a penchant
for drawing on walls and playing with paper
dolls. His gru Scottish-born father, Ron (De-
nis Lambert), was aaid he’d get beaten up in an
alley (at several points in the play, the prophecy
comes true, punctuated by unfortunate images
of comic-book sound-eect bubbles: “!”).
The boy was ercely protected and encouraged
in his creativity by his older sister Janet (Jo-
nina Thorsteinsdottir) and especially his doting
mum, Joyce (Emily Skinner), who is one of
the three leads of the play. Her interview with
him provides a reective base to which the play
keeps returning as it jumps around in time but
mostly proceeds chronologically.
The third lead is the nancially strapped
but amboyant magazine editor Isabella Blow
(Catherine LeFrere), who was so delighted
by McQueen’s 1992 art-school graduate col-
lection for Central Saint Martins college that
she bought the lot, for £5,000, though she
could pay only in £100 installments. The col-
lection was called “Jack the Ripper Stalks His
Victims” and paid homage to bloody murder.
The signature piece (worn by Isabella in several
scenes of the play) was a pink ock coat lined
with images of thorns and simulated blood
stains; today it hangs in the Victoria & Al-
bert Museum. Blow—“Issy”—opened doors
for McQueen in the London fashion world.
In the play she styles herself as his muse but
is actually something far more useful: his pro-
moter. Issy also committed suicide (at forty-
eight, three years before McQueen), and the
play suggests that perhaps the fashion world
is not entirely a contented one.
Fragmenting the designer’s life into vi-
gnettes, some of them brief and poignant
and others bizarrely long and pretentious
(notably an endless and pointless second-act
scene in which cast members ballroom-dance
to electronic music while interjecting random
observations), the play runs through various
formative episodes and career highlights such
as the meeting at which McQueen became the
head designer for the French house Given-
chy and the especially lucrative one at which
he was hired by Gucci. Love proved elusive; he
complained that other gay men were interested
only in maximizing sexual encounters rather
than true attachment.
As might be the case with any subject who
took his life while relatively young, the story is
mainly a study in sadness. I was unconvinced
by the many hectoring interjections by an ac-
tress standing in for the journalism profession
that McQueen’s work was of monumental im-
portance, but those who agree are likely to be
transxed by the tortured meekness of the man.
A
. R. Gurney’s 1988 classic Love Letters, which
generally features two performers seated side
by side at desks and facing the audience as
they play iends reading epistles to each other
over a lifetime, is cheap to stage and easy on
the actors, who need not even memorize their
lines. It’s also surprisingly powerful, as is an
imitator, Pen Pals (at the DR2 Theatre through
Theater
41The New Criterion October 2025
December 21), which deploys the same format
to similarly winsome eect. The playwright,
Michael Grio, wrote it to honor his mother,
a New Jersey housewife like the one depicted
in the play, which debuted last fall in Long
Branch before transferring to o-Broadway
and has now returned at a dierent venue.
The current production features rotating
casts, changed every two weeks, that include
names familiar to television viewers of bygone
eras. Maureen McCormick (Marcia on The
Brady Bunch) and Marcia Cross (Bree on Des-
perate Housewives) are among the best-known
names. The roles were created by the actresses
I saw perform them: Nancy McKeon, who
once starred on The Facts of Life, and Gail
Winar, a veteran acting teacher, director, pro-
ducer, and creative consultant with no notable
previous acting credits. Both turn in superb
performances, especially McKeon, who is
utterly charming as Bernadette, an Italian
American girl in 1955 Newark who is randomly
assigned an English pen pal by a high-school
teacher and begins a y-plus-year iendship
with her correspondent, Margaret (Winar),
who lives in Sheeld and is the daughter of a
publican. Their letters to each other follow no
particular pattern, push no sociocultural mes-
sage, and avoid positioning either character
as a symbol of the changing roles of women
om the Eisenhower era into the twenty-rst
century. The tales the women tell about them-
selves, such as they are, simply retrace the
zig-zag paths of two ordinary people as they
struggle with relationships, loss, setbacks, and
moments of pride and pleasure. If Bernie and
Mags, as they take to calling each other, don’t
quite achieve the transcendence of indelible
literary creations, by the end of the play they
feel almost as dear to the audience as they do
to one another.
When they begin writing to each other, Ber-
nie is girlishly enthusiastic about everything
(the way McKeon hunches her shoulders to
indicate excitement, albeit decreasingly as the
character ages, is infectious). She shares her
thoughts about starring in school plays, a rst
kiss, other boyiends who pass in and out so
rapidly they are mentioned only once each,
and eventually her husband and children. Ber-
nie is determined to nd the good in people;
she alludes to aws in her spouse, Joey, but
doesn’t harp on them. If her hausau status
is disappointing or unfullling, she never says
so. In contrast to his portrayal of Mags, who
doesn’t hold back anything, Grio makes clear
that much of Bernie’s personality is beneath
the surface, perhaps unexplored even by her-
self. The chief source of sorrow in her life is a
miscarriage she suers early in her marriage.
Grio paints Mags in very dierent colors.
She is notably brighter than Bernie (to whom
she is forever supplying suggested reading lists
of classic novels; the American can barely get
through Jane Eyre) and has a slightly dark or self-
defeating streak. Or is it that she is merely un-
luckier than her cross-Atlantic iend? As a young
woman she is kissed against her will by a much
older man in the family pub, and the event seems
lastingly traumatic; Bernie, meanwhile, never
mentions any kind of sexual assault, although
she is possibly the type of person who would
simply lock away any such bad memories. Un-
like Bernie, who leads a more or less blameless
life and apparently shares her bed with only one
man, Mags makes some vexingly poor choices.
One of them leads to Bernie cutting o corre-
spondence, at least for a time. When McKeon
exits the stage while Winar continues to read
o unanswered letters, the eect is devastating.
The play is light and amusing on the surface,
but what goes unsaid is worthy of consider-
ation. Crucially, the play is about character
rather than using character to post reections
on history; when the women’s letters reach 1963,
a certain dread sinks in. Are we going to be told
again that President Kennedy’s assassination le
a deep wound on the country? Not really; the
matter is mentioned briey, and the women
get on with their lives, as people did. The sub-
sequent rise of the Beatles is also dealt with
briskly. Such clichéd supposed landmarks in the
American mind as the Vietnam War, “women’s
liberation,” and the fall of Richard Nixon don’t
get mentioned at all. Grio neatly dodges all
intellectual pitfalls. Nothing the women say to
each other sounds like a playwright preaching
his themes; their words don’t sound like writ-
ing. This is a rare achievement for a writer, and
Pen Pals is a gratifying experience.
The New Criterion October 202542
Art
Dodd’s discoveries
by Karen Wilkin
Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
—Emily Dickinson
Is it a stretch to call Lois Dodd the Emily
Dickinson of painting? I don’t mean in terms
of her biography, of course. Far om being
a recluse, Dodd has long been an actively
engaged member of artist circles, somewhat
sidelined at times but described by her ad-
miring colleagues as a “painter’s painter.”
Born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1927, she
studied at Cooper Union in the 1940s, at-
tended Skowhegan School of Painting and
Sculpture’s prestigious summer program,
and in 1952 was a founder of the artist-run
cooperative Tanager Gallery—an important
alternative to the staid uptown institutions
of the time. The mother of a son whom she
largely raised alone aer her then-husband,
the sculptor Bill King, le his young family,
Dodd taught at Brooklyn College and Skow-
hegan, always continuing to paint. Now, at
ninety-eight, with an admirable, growing list
of exhibitions, publications, and museums
that own her work, Dodd is having a retro-
spective at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague,
Netherlands, titled “Lois Dodd: Framing
the Ephemeral.” Since I had the pleasure of
contributing to the show’s catalogue, what
follows is not a review but an introduction to
the work and methods of this singular artist,
1 “Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral” opened at the
Kunstmuseum, The Hague, on August 30, 2025, and
remains on view through January 4, 2026.
based on my years of looking at and thinking
about her paintings.
Like Dickinson, Dodd deals only with es-
sentials and has consistently deed conven-
tional expectations. She came of age as an
artist at a time when serious painting in New
York was equated exclusively with abstraction,
especially with the contingency and dragged
layering of gestural Abstract Expressionism,
seasoned with an ample supply of anxiety.
From the start, Dodd rejected this approach,
preferring to work om the motif, albeit ee-
ly. It was during a stay in Maine in the 1950s,
with King as well as Alex Katz and his then-
wife (their classmates om Cooper Union),
that she found her distinctive language and
way of working. Fascinated by spotted cows
moving through the landscape in the clear,
coastal light, she began to draw them and
use the drawings as the basis for paintings
done in the studio. “They wouldn’t stand still
long enough for me to paint them,” Dodd
said later. But, she recalled, “Alex Katz was
painting outside, so I thought I would, too.”
(Katz was beginning to work om perception
in the manner that has dened his career.)
Dodd has, essentially, worked directly om
the motif ever since that formative early stay
in Maine, usually en plein air, scrutinizing the
environs of her homes in Cushing, Maine, and
Blairstown, New Jersey, near the Delaware
Water Gap, painting in her yard or trekking to
nearby woods and ponds, studying neighbors’
houses; occasionally there are disquisitions on
the interiors of her Cushing and Blairstown
Art
43The New Criterion October 2025
houses. Working out of doors, Dodd has
taken as starting points the intense light of
high summer, snow-covered elds and o-
zen lakes, and even moonlit nights, painted
in the dark. (There have been occasional de-
partures, such as a series of nude women out
in the sun; far om being indolent Arcadian
nymphs, they are athletic and active, sawing
wood or carrying and stacking logs.) There’s
a famous photograph of the intrepid artist,
folding French easel in hand, canvas stool
slung around her, prepared for the vagaries
of weather in a broad-brimmed hat and a rain
poncho. Back in New York, she punctuated
her plein air paintings with directly observed
interiors of her downtown Manhattan lo
or views om its windows. Night scenes of
the oating rectangles of the lit windows of a
men’s shelter across the way recur om time
to time, as do daytime views of the geometric
façade. These days, however, during her Maine
sojourns, Dodd works om the sunroom of
the Cushing house, responding to the shis
wrought in her well-known surroundings by
changing seasons, weather, and time of day.
Back in New Jersey for the winter, in her light-
lled Blairstown house, she makes portraits of
agments of the natural world brought inside.
She disarms us with the apparent straightfor-
wardness of her un-picturesque landscapes,
her descriptions of vernacular buildings,
and her evocations of modest rooms and
stairways. Just as Dickinson’s poems seem to
be simple and plainspoken at rst encounter,
Dodd’s images also appear to be simple and
plainspoken, but, like the poems, they reveal
complexities and subtleties of meaning, evi-
dence of an unfailing ability to discover nu-
ance and the unexpected in the everyday and
familiar—all the truth told slant.
Just as Dickinson’s lean, pared-down po-
ems can appear, in a supercial reading, to be
faithful responses to actual experience, Dodd’s
economical images of clapboard houses,
weathered barns, and laundry lines, of win-
dows, Northeastern landscapes, and unfussy
interiors, convince us, at rst viewing, of the
accuracy of her perceptions. Her orchestrations
of tone and hue conjure up particular seasons,
times of day, and weather, triggering countless
associations. And while anyone who knows
New England will immediately sense the speci-
city of her paintings of rural Maine, where she
has spent summers since the 1960s, just as her
fellow New Yorkers will recognize the urban
streetscape outside her Lower East Side lo,
Dodd’s paintings transcend the characteristics
of place at the same time that they celebrate it.
Spend enough time with her work and you be-
gin to recognize houses and sheds, the congu-
ration of a yard, the location of a clothesline
or a owering shrub, the shape of a window,
an oval mirror. She concentrates on motifs
she knows well, subjects that she has studied
over a long time, but she is able to nd esh
ways of thinking about them, even of seeing
them, possibly because of the sheer intensity
of her scrutiny. One series of recent paintings
studied a larch outside her home in Maine
as it changed over the year, while a group of
small paintings of an amaryllis forced to bloom
indoors recorded it not only in gorgeous full
ower, but also as a shriveled, withered relic of
its former self. The skies in her paintings seem
mutable. The moon in a night scene will vanish
behind a cloud, the laundry on the clothesline
will ap in the wind, irrevocably altering the
composition. Especially in the small, directly
painted works done on aluminum ashing,
oen at night, we sense the speed and urgency
with which the artist worked, as she rapidly
responded to unpredictable conditions and,
oen, a lack of light. We could argue that such
subject matter introduces the element of time
into the paintings and speculate on just what
that means in the work of a painter who has
lived for nearly a century, but that element of
transformation informs not just her recent ef-
forts, but in fact all of Dodd’s work. “When I
rst came to Maine,” she has said, “I thought
I’d stay here a while, until I’d exhausted what
there was to paint, and then I’d have to move
on. But things change all the time. Trees grow
or they fall down. It’s never the same.”
D
odd insists, a little disingenuously, that she
simply paints what she sees, and convinces us
of the truthfulness of her apparently straight-
forward paintings, yet we simultaneously
acknowledge the presence of the artist and
44
Art
The New Criterion October 2025
the action of her hand because of their broad
paint-handling and restrained surfaces, even
as we capitulate to their potent suggestions
of things we know. But just as we become
involved in her work’s powerful sense of the
recognizable, Dodd disarms us by asking si-
multaneously that we recognize the Platonic
order that disciplines all her compositions. “If
I don’t have the geometry,” she has said, “I
can’t go on.” That order is found, not imposed.
It’s as if she were following Paul Cézanne’s
advice “to seek the cone, the cylinder, and the
sphere,” nding them beneath the irregulari-
ties of the world around us and reminding us,
quietly, of the archetypical forms that underlie
our ordinary surroundings, making us recon-
sider actuality.
“I’m not interested in still lifes,” Dodd has
said, “because I don’t like the idea of arranging
things. I like to discover what’s already there.”
What’s already there can include her own
shadow on bright grass, as in a well-known
self-portrait, or imperfect reections on dirty
glass. It can include, as well, the rectangles of
windows, the horizontals of clapboard, the four-
square shapes of laundry, and the pragmatic
forms of New England architecture or Lower
Manhattan buildings, along with the verticals
and clean lines of tree trunks and branches, or
even leaves and ower petals seen up close. The
tension between the apparent casualness of her
subject matter and the rm geometric underpin-
ning that subtly supports it, like the continuo
in a Baroque composition, invigorates Dodd’s
images, even the most seemingly modest. It is
conceivable that The Hague’s Kunstmuseum
decided to mount Dodd’s rst European ret-
rospective in part because of this fusion of the
quotidian and geometric structure—the charac-
teristics of the best Dutch seventeenth-century
interiors, here translated into a modern-day,
vernacular American idiom. Her admiration
for Piet Mondrian surely factored in as well.
Dodd may, in fact, paint what she sees, as
she claims, but she is preternaturally attuned to
things the rest of us might miss—reections,
conations of near and far, glimpses in and
through. She destabilizes us by itemizing the
layered, dened spaces of a sequence of rooms
or by allowing us the guilty pleasure of peering
into illuminated windows, further keeping us
o-balance with her not-quite-“real,” slightly
intensied or modulated color. Her repeated
window motifs can tantalize us. She teases us by
making the sash more or less congruent with the
boundaries of the canvas, causing us to wonder
whether we are inside or out—without resorting
to a conventional trompe l’oeil device. Sometimes
a narrow indication of exterior clapboard allows
us to orient ourselves, but the rectangular panes
are so conontational that we oen remain un-
certain of where we are located. Dodd has said
that she enjoys the way the panes of a typical
double-hung, six-over-six window organize
things, but she also evidently enjoys playing
with ambiguity. In one extraordinary work, a
pale window ame coincides with the edge of
the canvas, turning all internal incidents into a
painting within a painting. A bright rectangle
of sunlit tree trunks interrupts the pattern of
dark woods contained by the mullions. At
rst, we are engaged by the play of touches
and the range of murky greens spread across
the foursquare window, but we are disoriented,
not entirely sure of what we are dealing with,
until we concentrate on the broadly painted
shadows on the window ame. Then we realize
that we are outside, that the expanse of treetops
is a reection of woods behind us, and that
we are seeing through a dark interior and out
another window opposite. It’s a little dizzying.
We return to savoring the play of so-edged
and crisp shapes, the range of subdued colors,
and the pulsing space suggested by the com-
plicated view. Dodd’s assured paint-handling
grounds and anchors us, as does the economy
and forthright quality of her representations,
but she plainly revels in discomting her view-
ers. A disquieting interior makes us begin to
doubt our perceptions; we are faced with a leafy
landscape, seen through a window amed with
yellow curtains, in a wall painted to look like
a forest. It takes a while to gure out what is
a depiction of a depiction, what a shorthand
representation of the exterior world.
R
eections and ephemeral eects of light prove
to be signicant motifs in Dodd’s lexicon—
more of Dickinson’s truth told slant. In a bold
interior, the dislocated inside space reected in
Art
45The New Criterion October 2025
an oval mirror standing on the oor competes
with the urban night view through a nearby
window. Or are some of those illuminated
rectangles also reections? In another paint-
ing, the oval mirror and the image within it are
joined by a smaller, rectangular mirror at a dif-
ferent angle, oering a dierent point of view.
A setting sun becomes an explosion of white
on white, surrounded by rhythmic scribbles,
reected in an icy pond. A house is devoured by
ames—a training exercise for local volunteer
remen, Dodd assures us—with emphasis on
the contrast between the sharp edges of roof and
wall, and the unstable explosions of luminous
oranges and yellows above. Once again, Dodd’s
forthright, no-nonsense paint handling, along
with a color palette that seems almost natu-
ralistic but remains surprising, and a spatially
elusive image compete for dominance, making
us slow down and concentrate in an eort to
grasp exactly what is happening—an eort that
also makes us more aware of the sturdy abstract
architecture of the painting.
The clarity and the powerful evocation of
place, time, and season may be what rst at-
tract us to Dodd’s work, but we are soon en-
gaged by the unexpected complexities of her
deceptively simplied images. We may nd her
subject matter familiar; if we know New Eng-
land or the Delaware Water Gap or Lower
Manhattan, her images may trigger specic as-
sociations; but Dodd is neither a literal nor an
anecdotal painter, and no special experience is
required to nd her paintings compelling. She
is denitely not a storyteller. Her images never
suggest even oblique narratives but seem, in-
stead, to be pure manifestations of the act of
seeing—declarations of her having been at a
certain place at a certain time and having tran-
substantiated that fact into an image. Dodd
bears witness to her chosen subject matter but
translates it into her own pictorial language,
unconstrained, for example, by conventional
viewpoints, preferring to turn a selected mo-
tif into a near-abstraction, without losing its
intrinsic character, by playing with scale and
with the beholder’s relationship to the image.
Nor does she apparently feel obligated to be
faithful to local color—the naturalistic hues of
a specic subject—but instead somehow man-
ages to evoke, say, a midsummer landscape in
Maine’s bright coastal light by means of hues
that we cannot name, without resorting to
arbitrarily intensied chroma. Just as she clari-
es and simplies her imagery, Dodd subdues
some colors, shis others, and heats up still
others, for the abstract—for lack of a better
word—benet of the painting, reminding us
subtly of the artice of picture-making and of
the presence of the artist, while still convincing
us of the accuracy of her observations.
I
f we spend more time with Dodd’s deceptive-
ly matter-of-fact paintings, we acknowledge
that they are about what has been seen, but
we also begin to make associations with artists
that she perhaps admires or wishes to chal-
lenge. We begin to think about an eclectic list
ranging om Joseph Mallord William Turner
and Charles Willson Peale, to Paul Cézanne,
Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian—and
more. Dodd claims our attention by appeal-
ing to our perception of the world around
us and then seduces us with solid pictorial
invention, liberally laced with wit. Later in
the poem that begins “Tell all the truth but tell
it slant,” Dickinson cautions that “The Truth
must dazzle gradually.” That’s good advice for
approaching Lois Dodd’s paintings. They are
immediately captivating, but they yield their
full richness and complexity when we pay them
close attention over time. Anyone going to
The Hague before January 4, 2026, will have
ample opportunity to do so.
The New Criterion October 202546
Music
Salzburg chronicle
by Jay Nordlinger
Over the years, I have sometimes sounded
more like a weatherman than a music critic. I
have reported on the temperatures inside halls.
Salzburg’s halls are usually hot. Twenty-some
years ago, I nicknamed the Grosser Saal of the
Mozarteum the “Grosser Sauna.” But in July
of this year, I attended the opening night of the
Proms, in Royal Albert Hall (London). Talk
about hot. It was “hotter than blazes,” I wrote in
my chronicle—“punishingly hot.” In Salzburg
the next month, the halls did not seem so bad.
The Proms bills itself as “the world’s greatest
classical-music festival.” The Proms is indeed a
great festival. But anyone thinking that it is the
“greatest” should become better acquainted
with the Salzburg Festival.
In Salzburg, during Festspielzeit (festival
time), the Vienna Philharmonic is the resident
orchestra. And once a summer, a handful of
players leave the orchestra to present a chamber
concert, in the Grosser Saal. This year, the con-
cert was spearheaded, so to speak, by Rainer
Honeck, one of the orchestra’s concertmasters.
He is both a very good player and a leader (as
a concertmaster should be).
The program began with Mozart’s Clarinet
Quintet—giving me a memory om 2017. The
same quintet was on the Vienna Phil’s chamber
program that year. The clarinetist was Daniel
Ottensamer, who had served in the relevant
section of the orchestra alongside his father,
Ernst. Two weeks before the concert in ques-
tion, the senior Ottensamer had passed away.
The concert was dedicated to him. Daniel’s
playing, I wrote, was “painfully good.”
Daniel Ottensamer is still in the Vienna
Philharmonic. (Until recently, his brother An-
dreas was the principal clarinet in the Berlin
Philharmonic, but Andreas is now focusing
on conducting.) The clarinetist in the Mozart
work this summer, however, was Gregor Hin-
terreiter, who hails om Linz.
Ottensamer or not, he is a very, very good
player. He makes a beautiful sound. He can play
seamlessly. He has a legato—a connectedness—
that any singer would envy. Speaking of singers,
I thought of something that Renée Fleming, the
American soprano, once told me. She was talking
about Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the Russian bari-
tone, and, in particular, his ability to sing in long
stretches, without taking a breath. “We think he
has a third lung,” she said. For Herr Hinterreiter,
taking a breath seems purely optional.
Aer Mozart came Debussy—the Trio So-
nata for ute, viola, and harp. This work is an
example of Debussy’s superb crasmanship,
and his unshowy genius. The three players have
equal prominence. The ute, however, can ap-
pear to be in the lead, perhaps because that in-
strument is the highest (certainly the pipingest).
In the Grosser Saal, Karl-Heinz Schütz was
a ûte enchantée. Elmar Landerer was the very
skillful violist. It is a versatile and useful instru-
ment, the viola. When high, it can sound like a
low violin, and when low, a high cello. Anneleen
Lenaerts, on the harp, made good use of her ten
ngers. Debussy has them y all over the place.
He has many moods, and exhibits many
qualities, in this sonata. There is gauziness,
sparkle, mystery, piquancy, humor—a hint of
Music
47The New Criterion October 2025
jazz. The nal movement is driven as if by a mo-
tor. The Vienna Phil players did justice to it all.
On the second half of the program, there
was a work almost symphonic in scope: Tchai-
kovsky’s String Sextet in
D
minor, a.k.a. “Sou-
venir de Florence.” (The composer conceived
one of the melodies while visiting that city.)
Though the sextet is in a minor key, the work
is full of happiness. It courses with happiness.
There is vibrancy on virtually every page, and
the players onstage were correspondingly vi-
brant. They were accurate, too. They demon-
strated a unity, om rst to last.
Sitting next to Rainer Honeck was the vio-
linist Lucas Takeshi Stratmann. He joined the
orchestra recently. Honeck joined forty years
ago. Stratmann is a New Yorker, who attended
the “Fame school” (LaGuardia High School
for music, art, etc.) and then Juilliard, where
he was the concertmaster of the orchestra. In
the Vienna Philharmonic, senior players have
always mentored junior players. I liked seeing
young Stratmann sitting next to Honeck. It
said to me, “Continuity.”
This group played an encore, Dvořák’s
Waltz No. 1, Op. 54, and played it with sweet
insouciance. A good evening, a rst-rate cham-
ber concert.
Andrè Schuen has an unusual name. Why
is that accent pointed that way? Schuen is
om an unusual place (though not unusual to
those who live there, to be sure): South Tyrol,
in Italy (northern Italy). As his bio tells us,
Schuen “grew up speaking three languages:
Ladin, Italian, and German.” Also om South
Tyrol is Jannik Sinner, currently the number-
one player in tennis. Schuen is a baritone, and
he gave a recital in the Grosser Saal, along
with Daniel Heide, a pianist om Weimar.
Liszt lived for a long time in that city. Heide
went to the conservatory named for him there.
Schuen and Heide began with Richard Strauss
and ended with him: six songs at the outset, six
songs to close. Two or three of the songs were
o the beaten track—including the opening
one: “Frühlingsgedränge.” But most were very
well-known, constituting a veritable Strauss hit
parade: “Allerseelen,” “Cäcilie,” “Morgen!” and
so on. (By the way, Salzburg’s program booklet
omitted the exclamation point om “Morgen!”
Silently, I exclaimed, “Wrong!”)
Following the rst Strauss set, there was
Wagner: his Wesendonck Lieder. But haven’t
I said that Schuen is a baritone? And didn’t
Wagner write these songs “for a female voice,”
explicitly? Yes. But men, deant, have sung
the Wesendonck Lieder. The tenors Christoph
Prégardien and Jonas Kaufmann, for two. Un-
til the Schuen/Heide recital, however, I had
never heard a baritone sing them. That is a
stretch—a stretch downward. But my general
view is that songs are for singers, who can take
them or leave them, as they fancy.
Before the closing set of Strauss songs, there
was a set by Zemlinsky—Alexander Zemlin-
sky, the Viennese composer who lived om
1871 to 1942. He was one of the composers
damned as “degenerate” by the Nazis. He was
in good company, however, with Schoenberg
and Stravinsky, among others.
About Mr. Schuen, I will generalize a lit-
tle. He has a beautiful voice, which is bassy
in its lower register and tenorial in its high.
Like a viola, the baritone voice is a versatile
instrument. Schuen’s primary color is dark, I
think. One of the Strauss songs begins, “Von
dunklem Schleier umsponnen”—“Enveloped
in a dark veil.” From Schuen, you could re-
ally hear that. He proved himself a consis-
tent singer: serious of purpose, unfussy,
un-cutesy. But the consistency sometimes—
sometimes—felt like monotony. In a few of the
songs, I would have liked more release om him.
I wanted the sound to y a little. He could seem
bounded where I wanted unboundedness. But
Schuen has a great deal to oer.
So does Daniel Heide, at his piano (or
Steinway’s). His playing in Strauss’s “Freund-
liche Vision,” I can best describe as “iendly.”
In “Ständchen,” by the same composer, he was
smooth and sprightly. I thought of Walter
Gieseking’s arrangement of that song for pia-
no alone. Gieseking would have liked Heide.
On occasion, however, Heide socked notes
that seemed to me strange to sock—in Wag-
ner’s “Träume” (Dreams), for example. Was
that “Träume” or “Trauma”?
Singer and pianist gave us two encores, be-
ginning with the most common of all encores
48
Music
The New Criterion October 2025
in a vocal recital: Strauss’s “Zueignung.” They
then bade farewell with a Schumann song,
o the beaten track: “Entieh’ mit mir und
sei mein Weib.” The singer is imploring the
object of his desire: “Elope with me!”
A Salzburg audience is a very disciplined
one. In the middle of a Strauss set was “Cä-
cilie.” How you can reain om applauding
aer that song, I don’t know—but this audi-
ence did. To my sense, it was practically wrong.
P
éter Eötvös was a Hungarian musician, who
lived om 1944 to 2024. I have said “musi-
cian”: he was a composer and a conductor.
I heard him conduct Bluebeard’s Castle, the
opera by his country man Béla Bartók, at the
Salzburg Festival in 2008. This year, an opera
of his own was staged: Three Sisters (1998),
based on Chekhov’s play. The score is light in
texture—chamber-like—and it is oen bleak,
as bets the story. But it also allows for streaks
of light (again, as bets the story). Eötvös
makes shrewd use of percussion. All around,
this is an intelligent score.
The opera calls for a fairly large cast, and Salz-
burg’s was lled with good singers—and good
singing actors, brilliantly directed. This was a
genuine piece of lyric theater. The orchestra in the
pit was the Klangforum Wien, ably conducted
by Maxime Pascal, a Frenchman.
Three Sisters was staged in the Felsenreit-
schule, whose stage is narrow in depth and very
wide. It is a vast horizontal space, a vast strip.
Evgeny Titov, the stage director, made excellent
use of it. (He was born in Soviet Kazakhstan in
1980.) The production was ever interesting to
look at. It was surreal, grotesque, eerie, riotous.
Light and shadow were striking, all through the
opera. (The light design was handled by Urs
Schönebaum.) Seldom have I seen an opera
production so eective.
“Nordlinger is a conservative,” people say (not
without reason). “Nordlinger is a traditionalist,
an anti-modernist.” Frankly, I like to think I’m
an “appropriate-ist.” I think a production ought
to be appropriate to the opera being performed.
At the Salzburg Festival this year, there was a
Handel opera (Giulio Cesare) and a Donizetti op-
era (Maria Stuarda). In reviews online, I knocked
the production of each—because the one did
not serve Handel’s opera of antiquity, and the
other did not serve Donizetti’s Tudor opera (in
my judgment). But Evgeny Titov’s production?
It t the opera by Péter Eötvös like a glove. It
was utterly consonant with it.
I like to quote Frank Lloyd Wright: “A build-
ing ought to be a grace to its environment, not
a disgrace.” So it is with opera productions.
In the Great Festival Hall was a concert by
Utopia, the orchestra founded in 2022 by Teo-
dor Currentzis. Utopia is composed of players
om some thirty countries. Currentzis is a
Greek Russian conductor, wizardly and indi-
vidualistic (and not to everyone’s taste). He
was duly on the podium for this concert. The
rst item on the program was a Shostakovich
piano concerto—No. 2, in F.
This is less popular, or less equently pro-
grammed, than the Shostakovich Piano Concer-
to No. 1. Why, I don’t know. A great recording
of No. 2 was made by Yem Bronfman, with
the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka
Salonen. Bronfman once told me that orchestras
seldom request the second concerto. If they
want Shostakovich, they want the rst.
The soloist with Utopia and Currentzis
was Alexander Melnikov, a Soviet-born pia-
nist who studied in Moscow with a legendary
teacher: Lev Naumov. Shostakovich’s second
concerto ought to have a number of charac-
teristics, including military precision, melting
lyricism, and electricity. Melnikov was never
less than competent—but I could have used
more of what makes this concerto lovable.
He played an encore, a piece introduced
to many of us by Vladimir Horowitz: Scri-
abin’s Poème, Op. 32, No. 1. Melnikov rendered
it expertly.
Aer intermission, Maestro Currentzis con-
ducted the Utopians in a Mahler symphony:
No. 4 in G, sometimes known as Mahler’s
“Mozart symphony,” for it has an air of the
Classical. Under the baton of Currentzis—
or rather, under his hands, because he goes
without a baton—every part was clear. All
parts were in balance. Moreover, Currentzis
communed with Mahler, reecting his spirit.
(Mahler was “wizardly and individualistic”
himself—also “not to everyone’s taste.”) Cur
-
Music
49The New Criterion October 2025
rentzis is a shape-shier, conforming his body
to the music, able to represent it physically,
somehow. His orchestras respond.
Members of his orchestras stand while
playing—excepting cellists and a few others.
Does this make a dierence? Well, here’s a
dierence, possibly: I think I hear the wood-
wind solos better. These players sing or pipe
more directly to you.
Mahler’s nal movement involves a soprano,
and on this night she was Regula Mühlemann,
om Switzerland. She sang purely and natural-
ly. Nothing kills this music faster than fussiness
or preciousness. In some spots, Currentzis con-
ducted his soprano, about two feet away om
her. “That’s got to be disconcerting,” I thought.
Yet Ms. Mühlemann seemed imperturbable.
Aer the symphony, and aer curtain calls,
it was clear that there would be an encore.
And the soprano was still standing there. What
would the encore be? In an orchestral arrange-
ment, it was “Morgen!”
The Felsenreitschule saw a Mozart evening:
a show, a pastiche, called Zaide, or the Path
of Light. At the center was Zaide, Mozart’s
Singspiel om 1780 (never nished). Filling
out the show were excerpts om the cantata
Davide penitente and the incidental music to
Thamos, King of Egypt, along with other bits
of Mozart. Did this cobbling together add
up to a coherent opera, or “show,” as I have
called it? It did, yes.
Zaide, or the Path of Light is the brainchild
of Raphaël Pichon, the French countertenor-
turned-conductor. In 2006, he founded Pyg-
malion, consisting of a choir and an orchestra.
These were onstage for the show—yes, the
orchestra was onstage too, not in a pit. Mr. Pi-
chon conducted. And he had with him some
of his favorite soloists.
These included his wife, the soprano Sa-
bine Devielhe. Another Frenchwoman was
the mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre (whose
father is Italian). One of the tenors was
Julian Prégardien, a German (despite that
French-looking last name). He is the son of
the aforementioned Christoph. Also in the
Mozart cast was Johannes Martin Kränzle,
the veteran German baritone.
Mmes Devielhe and Desandre share the
quality of immaculateness. Each is abundantly
musical too. The sheer control that Devielhe
exhibits is remarkable. Prégardien (either of
them, actually) is ever dependable. Kränzle is
canny, in his singing and his acting: a thorough
stage professional.
Upon the Felsenreitschule’s stage, the or-
chestra played crisply and lyrically. The chorus
was similarly capable. Mr. Pichon has made
a contribution to the world, with this com-
pany. Act
I
of his show—and Mozart’s—ends
with a chorus om Davide penitente: “Chi in
Dio solo spera.” To have this C-major sacred
music pouring into one’s ears was simply an
overwhelming experience.
The Vienna Philharmonic has developed
a signicant relationship with our Yannick
Nézet-Séguin—I say “our” because Nézet-
Séguin is the music director of the Metropoli-
tan Opera (and we at The New Criterion, like
the Met, are in New York). But he is also the
music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
And of the Orchestre Métropolitain in his
native Montreal. Last March, Nézet-Séguin
led the Vienna Phil in concerts in Califor-
nia, followed by concerts in Vienna itself.
In 2023, he led the orchestra in one of its
signature events: the Sommernachtskonzert—
Summer Night Concert—on the grounds of
the Schönbrunn Palace. This coming Janu-
ary 1, he will lead the orchestra in another of
its signature events: the New Year’s concert.
At the Salzburg Festival this year, he con-
ducted the orchestra in an all-Wagner concert,
beginning with the Prelude to Lohengrin. That
was followed by the Siegied Idyll, a birthday
present om the composer to his wife, pre-
miered in their home on Christmas morning,
1870. (Cosima’s birthday was December 24,
so maybe her husband was a little late.) The
concert was capped—dominated—by Act
I
of
Die Walküre, the second Ring opera.
The rapport between Nézet-Séguin and the
Vienna Philharmonic is obvious. “He could
be with us steadily for the next thirty years,” a
member of the orchestra told me. “He could
be a major gure in our history.” You heard
it here rst.
The New Criterion October 202550
The media
Of man & manners
by James Bowman
O Sean Charles Dunn, O Sean Charles Dunn,
How mad I was, sad when you hurled that bun!
Your eshly made sandwich just missed a cop’s gob,
And now I hear tell that you’re out of a job.
—with apologies to Sir John Betjeman and
“A Subaltern’s Love Song”
Here’s how it begins, I think. Not with the
sandwich-throwing Sean Charles Dunn, nec-
essarily, but with a lot of people just like him
om three generations of politically concerned
youth in America.
Imagine that you are a young man om
a loving home and good family, brought up
to be well-mannered, always considerate of
others, respectful to your elders and author-
ity gures—someone who would no more
think of screaming obscenities at strangers in
the street than he would of shooting them.
Your parents are proud of having raised a
ne young man like you, but they also have
sent you to college under the mistaken im-
pression that college is a place to be educated,
rather than radicalized.
I should have mentioned that, while you are
at college being radicalized, the worst thing
that has ever happened in the world has, er,
happened. Or so your radical professors and
your radical iends all seem to believe. It
doesn’t really matter what it is—war in Viet-
nam or Iraq or Gaza; global warming, global
cooling, or climate change; the election of
Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or Donald
Trump; or just some random instance of rac-
ism or sexism or Islamophobia—so long as
everybody you know agrees that it is the worst
thing that has ever happened in the world and
that right-thinking people, like you, must do
something about it. Especially you.
So then you get into a late-night dorm-
room discussion with a few of your radical
iends about what ought to be the something
that you must do. Someone suggests that you
scream “F*** you! You f***ing fascists!” at
strangers in the street—strangers who may
be seen as obliquely responsible for the worst
thing that has ever happened in the world, if
only because they won’t let you do something
to stop it om happening.
Perhaps you still have the nerve to reply
that that’s not how your loving parents taught
you to behave in public, and couldn’t you do
something more, well, more well-mannered
instead? It is at this point, however, that some-
one hurls at you the killer argument with the
force of a Subway sandwich. “What?” she says
(I think of the someone as a she, since you
are likely to nd it particularly shaming for a
female thus to question your manhood). “I
can’t believe that you’re comparing [insert name
of the worst thing that has ever happened in
the world here] to a mere breach of decorum,
a triing lapse into bad manners!”
Clearly, there’s no comeback to this. You
can only patiently await the next opportunity
to scream “F*** you! You f***ing fascists” at
strangers in the street—preferably strangers
who don’t want you to do something to stop the
worst thing that has ever happened in the world
om happening. If the stranger in the street is
The media
51The New Criterion October 2025
an authority gure and you happen to have a
Subway sandwich in your hand, you might also
think to hurl it at him. So much the better for
you and your radical iends—and the worse
for the stranger.
As I say, I don’t know that this is exactly how
Sean Charles Dunn came to nd himself on
the wrong side of the law—and the sandwich.
As a thirty-seven-year-old Air Force veteran
he had probably not seen the inside of a col-
lege dormitory for some time—though not so
long as you might suppose om his LinkedIn
prole, which lists his academic career at
James Madison University as having begun
in 1991, when he would have been four years
old. But that kind of humiliation does tend
to stay with you.
If that is not an accurate account of how
Sean Charles Dunn came to believe that it
was acceptable to protest against the worst
thing that ever happened in the world with
bad—let’s face it, actually pretty appalling—
manners, it is an accurate account of how I
came to believe the opposite. Several worst
things that have ever happened in the world
have come and gone since my college days
during the famously “immoral” Vietnam War,
but the breakdown in manners appears to be
here to stay. That seems to me a sound reason
for believing that bad manners are even worse
than the worst thing that has ever happened
in the world. In any case, they appear to be
more irremediable.
And then there’s the quality of those other
worst things in the world to consider. Once,
I seem to remember, it was one’s president
sending troops to Vietnam—not to mention
his potentially sending one to Vietnam—to
ght a ruthless Communist enemy bent, as
many supposed at the time, on taking over
the world and turning it into a vast prison
camp for well-mannered sons and daughters
of the bourgeoisie. Pretty bad, I think you
will agree.
But what got Sean Charles Dunn’s dander
up was the president’s sending troops to the
federal District of Columbia—his own back-
yard, as it were—to help the police suppress
crime there. Either Mr. Dunn had decided
that he was pro-crime, which I doubt, or he
simply forgot everything he ever knew about
good manners, consideration for others, and
respect for duly constituted authority (of
which, as a Department of Justice employee,
he was himself a representative) over a mere
jurisdictional dispute sure to be resolved by
the courts without any need for gratuitous
sandwich-chucking on his part.
What kind of worst thing that has ever
happened in the world is that? You might
almost think that Sean Charles Dunn, like
so many Democrats these days, was simply
“acting out” (as they say of young children
who have yet to learn their manners) or going
through the revolutionary motions to im-
press that long-remembered chick back in
the dorm room for want of anything better
to do. Or maybe the chick in the dorm was
Christina Cauterucci of Slate, whose article
about the incident was headlined “A Hero
Threw a Hero: Sometimes the only way to
ght fascism is with a $5 footlong.”
We should all be grateful, I suppose, that
ours is one of those times when a man can be
a hero simply by throwing a sandwich at a cop
and so avoiding all the more sanguinary ways
of ghting fascism—which were once a big
part of why people thought fascism needed to
be fought in the rst place. If the fascist threat
can now be cononted with mere ying cold
cuts, the very least you can say about it is that
it can’t be anything like the threat it used to be.
But then we knew that already, didn’t we?
“Fascism,” as I have had occasion to mention
before (see, for example, “Faux fascisti” in The
New Criterion of December 2025), has now
been dened down to mean, at convenience,
any locally unwelcome eort to enforce laws
of long standing, written by democratically
elected governments.
That the new federal presence in the fed-
eral city is unwelcome, we have the word of
The New York Times, which praised Mr. Dunn
indirectly—without mentioning his name—
by making out that he has already become a
legendary hero to the simple folk of Wash-
ington, D.C., perhaps like Paul Bunyan or
Johnny Appleseed. “A former Justice De-
partment employee who threw a sandwich
52
The media
The New Criterion October 2025
at a federal agent,” wrote Clyde McGrady,
Bernard Mokam, and Pooja Salhotra for the
Times, “has become a folk hero, his image
lighting up the cityscape.”
Dimly aware, perhaps, of the absurdity of
any such concept of heroism, Messrs. Clyde
and Bernard and Ms. Pooja attempted to lend
credence to the belief that providing some ex-
tra crime-ghters for our nation’s capital is not
entirely unadjacent to the worst thing that
has ever happened in the world by citing the
alleged unanimity (or something not entirely
unadjacent to unanimity) of the local popula-
tion against the beefed-up federal presence:
To those who have never lived in the 68 square
miles of Washington, the nation’s capital can
seem to lack an authentic residential and cultural
identity. Transient populations come and go with
alternating administrations. . . . But the recent
deployment of hundreds of oen masked fed-
eral agents and hundreds more National Guard
troops have brought many Washingtonians a
sense of shared purpose: outrage. “We are not
against ghting crime,” said Tony Guardad, a
49-year-old construction worker, who empha-
sized that he is not against the police. “But we
are against boots on the street, and we don’t want
to feel like we are in North Korea.”
Yet neither Mr. Clyde nor Mr. Bernard nor
Ms. Pooja thought to ask Tony, whom they
met at a protest against said deployment, if he
felt like he was in North Korea when Joe Biden
brought twenty thousand National Guards-
men to Washington to make sure that his in-
auguration and rst months in oce were all
smooth sailing and untroubled by protestors
like himself.
But the mask slips a little further down in
the piece when, in response to a remark by
the White House deputy chief of sta Ste-
phen Miller that the protestors “were ‘elderly
white hippies’ standing in the way of law en-
forcement ocers protecting a majority Black
city,” the Times authors point out that owing
to gentrication (not to mention expansion
of the federal government) in recent years,
whites are almost as numerous as blacks in
the capital today—as if that were a reason for
unconcern about crime in the remaining black
neighborhoods of the city.
This leads on to the following interesting
observation:
And because of its unique concentration of politi-
cal think tanks, union headquarters, nonprot
organizations, lobbying outts and international
development banks, Washington is full of people
with plenty of experience organizing and generat-
ing outrage. To be sure, many Washingtonians
have been going about their business without
taking to the streets. Nadine Seiler, a 60-year-old
activist om Waldorf, Md., lamented the “per-
petually low turnout” at protests, reecting the
desire of protest organizers to always want more
participants. “Whether it’s fear or something else,
people are just not coming out in the numbers
we need them to,” she said.
So much for the portrait of a city united in
outrage against the alleged fascist in the White
House—or in admiration for its sandwich-
lobbing folk hero. For the media themselves
are and of course long have been among the
many Washingtonians “with plenty of experi-
ence organizing and generating outrage”—
mainly by persuading generation aer gen-
eration of callow and historically ignorant
youths that the latest scandal to roll o the
media assembly line is the worst thing that
has ever happened in the world and requires
their instant attention.
Meanwhile, some pretty awful things con-
tinue to happen with alarming regularity,
even if they don’t measure up to the media’s
exacting standards for bringing “outrage”
into the streets. Towards the end of August, a
twenty-three-year-old “transgender” individual
murdered two young children and wounded
many others during Mass at the Annunciation
Catholic School in Minneapolis before killing
himself. (I forbear to name the murderer in
keeping with my usual practice.)
By now the media’s response to events like
these has almost become Pavlovian: blame the
guns rather than the man who used them.
But this time, though guns were mentioned,
there was more concern to warn o anyone
The media
53The New Criterion October 2025
who might be tempted to blame the shooter’s
“gender” confusion. “The right-wing uproar
over Ms. ______’s gender identity,” wrote Talya
Minsberg, Amy Harmon, and Aric Toler for
The New York Times,
echoed the politicized reaction to a 2023 mass
shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville,
which was carried out by a former student whom
the police said was transgender. In a news con-
ference, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, a
Democrat, urged the public to avoid scapegoat-
ing transgender people in the wake of the tragedy.
“I’ve heard a whole lot of hate directed at our
trans community,” he said. “Anybody that is us-
ing this as an opportunity to villainize our trans
community—or any other community out there—
has lost their sense of common humanity.”
Judging by the list of grievances and ha-
treds found among the shooter’s literary
remains—a list obviously intended to be
found and published to memorialize the
event—it was she/he who had lost his sense
of common humanity. There was hatred for
what we used to think of as “normality” in
every line, yet it was those who noticed this
and made some kind of connection to the
killer’s most salient form of abnormality be-
fore the killings who were censured for “ha-
tred.” “We should not be operating out of a
place of hate for anyone,” continued Mayor
Frey; “we should be operating out of a place
of love for our kids. . . . Kids died today. This
needs to be about them.”
This sounded oddly like a plea for good
manners and forbearance aimed at those who
might otherwise be disposed to rage against
anyone whom they saw as an apologist for
a murderer of children. It reminded me of
those Britons, of whom there are still a great
many in the media and the government, whose
own outrage is directed not at the immigrant
gangs of child rapists in several northern cities,
but rather at those who are outraged by such
gangs and by the tolerance shown to them by
the country’s excessively well-mannered “hate”
monitors, who seem to have taken the place
of its police force.
There, too, our “common humanity” has
taken a back seat to the consideration due,
according to the long-dominant canons of
identity politics, to those who would deny
it. The notionally oppressed, including “our
trans community,” are excused the mannerly
behavior expected of their notional oppres-
sors. Can anyone wonder if such indulgence
extended to the outrage of the proudly abnor-
mal against the normal—or what used to be as
normal as children at prayer—sometimes leads
to results like the Minneapolis child murders?
More oen, of course, it leads only to Sean
the sandwich slinger (say that three times
quickly) and his historically confused notions
about what “fascism” is. Him we can laugh at,
with the laughter that comes, as so much of
laughter does come, om an incongruity be-
tween his view of himself in something like the
heroic mold tted for him by Christina Cau-
terucci and the view of him as a self-deluded
buoon taken by normal people.
I can’t help wondering, however, why reali-
ties that appear so exigent in the late-night
dorm rooms of the world, whether gura-
tive or actual, continue to appear so to some
people even aer their exposure to the light
of day reveals them, and those who cling to
them, to be so ridiculous? Are the readers
of Slate and the rest of the le-wing media,
in other words, genuine believers in Sean
Charles Dunn’s heroism and the fascist men-
ace he purports to oppose, or are they only
pretending to believe, out of the le-wing
equivalent of good manners and respect for
the party line?
We may never know. But what anyone may
know is that the federal police and National
Guard presence in the District of Columbia
is only one of several indications of President
Trump’s political genius in always manag-
ing to put the Democrats, as Reince Priebus
said on the This Week roundtable, “on
the wrong side of normal.” Admittedly, they
make it easy for him, but even they must
see, sooner or later, that if they want to win
elections the wrong side of normal is not a
place they want to be.
The New Criterion October 202554
Books
Club country
by Simon Heer
I have never understood the fascination Lon-
don clubs hold for many people who are not
members of them, and who oen would not
want to be. What do they imagine goes on in
them? Is the country run om inside them?
Perhaps it was, once—Harold Macmillan, the
prime minister of the United Kingdom om
1957 to 1963, was a member of six—but those
days have long gone. Were the country’s pres-
ent prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, taken to
White’s as a guest, someone would doubt-
less nd a horsewhip and give him what was
coming to him—on the steps of the club, of
course, avoiding the vulgarity of doing it on
the premises. His ame-haired former deputy
Angela Rayner—reported recently to have be-
come a particular favorite of His Majesty the
King—would not even be allowed through the
ont door, as White’s excludes women (save
for the late Queen Elizabeth II, who was once
admitted for a ninetieth-birthday party the club
threw in her honor). Perhaps it is the knowl-
edge of such eccentricities that keeps the torch
of fascination burning.
I must declare an interest. I have, for lon-
ger than I care to remember, been a member
of three of the venerable establishments (the
Beefsteak, the Garrick, and Pratt’s) featured in
two books about London clubs recently pub-
lished: the coee-table tome The London Club:
Architecture, Interiors, Art, by Andrew Jones
and Laura Hodgson, which contains many
handsome color pictures of the clubs, their
interiors, and their treasures; and Seth Alexan-
der Thévoz’s London Clubland: A Companion
for the Curious, which claims to tell you how
these places operate. The former is a serious
work and will be of interest not merely to
those who obsess about clubs, but also to those
with a deep interest in interior decoration.
The latter appears to be a collection of gos-
sip and tittle-tattle, and of what we English
cynics tend to call “statements of the bleeding
obvious,” such as “all clubs will require you
to have an existing member act as a proposer
(and the vast majority will insist on a seconder
as well).” Thévoz also gives an extensive list
of the various “types” or “personalities” one
tends to nd in a London club, but then the
same list might be drawn up about any oce
or, indeed, any penal establishment. Speaking
of penal establishments, Jones and Hodgson
quote a bylaw of the Academy Club, a par-
ticularly ne, bohemian Soho establishment
with no pretensions and all the better for it,
that “members who have the misfortune to
be sent to prison” would not be expected to
pay their subscriptions while incarcerated, and
that their unused portions om the year for
which they had paid would be credited to them
once released.
One perhaps best gets the measure of
Thévoz’s book om its inclusion of a section
called “Clubs that Stephen Fry has apologised
1 The London Club: Architecture, Interiors, Art, by An-
drew Jones and Laura Hodgson; Art Books, 288
pages, $75.
London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious, by
Seth Alexander Thévoz; Robinson, 488 pages, $30.
Books
55The New Criterion October 2025
to for taking drugs in” (there follows a list
of twenty-three, cribbed om Fry’s memoirs,
including, oddly, the House of Commons and
the House of Lords, which one supposes are
clubs under a certain denition of the term).
Those who regard clubland as a spectator sport
will nd this book, with its wide-ranging para-
graphs on aspects of clubland culture and its
invaluable section on “how to join” (om
which the above detail about needing a pro-
poser is extracted), absolutely indispensable.
The rest of the human race, which I am sure
includes almost every reader of this review,
need not bother.
The beautifully produced book by Jones and
Hodgson is a dierent matter. It states quite
clearly, early on, that it is not concerned with
the politics of clubs, about which one never
used to hear anything but about which one
now hears rather too much. It seems, how-
ever, that there may have been some sort of
inclusivity drive when it came to deciding
which institutions should or should not be
included. All the great West End staples, famil-
iar to our fathers, grandfathers, and possibly
great-grandfathers, are here, with the glaring
exception of the Oxford and Cambridge Club.
It stands in Pall Mall near the end of a ne line
of buildings that begins with the Athenaeum
and continues through the Reform, the Travel-
lers, and the Royal Automobile Club, ending
with the newer operation 67 Pall Mall, once
a branch of the snooty bank Hambros and
built by Lutyens. The poor old O&C has a
magnicent clubhouse, designed by Sir Robert
Smirke, and would certainly have merited in-
clusion; one can only assume that its guardians
would not let a photographer in, a happier
explanation than that the authors simply for-
got it existed. Some clubs have unfortunate
and oen unfair reputations: the O&C, I was
told decades ago when still an undergradu-
ate at the latter university, was a club people
who hadn’t a hope of getting into one of the
grander establishments joined, and the label
appears to have stuck.
This brings us to a thorny question: what
criteria were used by Jones and Hodgson to
choose which clubs would feature? There is
also a matter they quite correctly ignore but
which Thévoz, with an element of mischief,
oen alludes to, which is that some clubs are
better than others. The book of photographs
not only includes many of the “new clubs”
(though not all: where is Robin Birley’s sump-
tuous 5 Hertford Street, when his Oswald’s
is included?), which is fair enough, but also
roams to the inner suburbs to include institu-
tions obviously deeply popular with fashion-
able types but of which this old walrus had
never heard—the Mildmay, so far out in North
London as to be on the wrong side of the
Balls Pond Road, but older than some “tra-
ditional” West End clubs, or the much more
recent Upstairs at the Department Store,
which does just what it says on the label and
occupies the top oor of a former emporium
in the now impossibly trendy South Lon-
don neighborhood of Brixton. One wonders
also why one of London’s oldest clubs—the
Marylebone Cricket Club, founded in 1787
and of which I also have the honor to be a
member—is not included. Perhaps the authors
were under the impression that it oered no
club facilities except in the cricket season, or
when a match is being played, but it functions
all the year round, and the pavilion at Lord’s
Cricket Ground, dating om the late 1880s,
is not only one of the nest clubhouses in
London but is also packed with astonishingly
rare artifacts and memorabilia. And St John’s
Wood, where Lord’s is located, is nearer the
beating heart of the metropolis than some of
the establishments they write about, and in
an area where you are probably less likely to
have a knife pulled on you by a brigand who
wants your Rolex.
As well as the high quality of the photo-
graphs and the clever use of anecdote to make
each chapter interesting—such as the story
of the Mildmay Club, which put together a
“Chums’ Battalion” in the Great War, having
a charming contemporary war memorial on
which the glorious dead are described, with
magnicent understatement, as having “gone
west”—Jones and Hodgson’s book includes
several short thematic chapters on club silver,
club furniture, and club lavatories (which they,
perpetuating the ancient British tradition that
56
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various bodily functions need to be treated
as an object of coy humor, call “club loos”).
I am glad they included the lavatories at the
Beefsteak and a photograph of how they are
plastered with facsimiles of the candidates’
book pages of famous hopefuls om the past,
some (if you will forgive the phrase) absolute
stinkers. They did not see, or chose not to in-
clude, the urinals at the Garrick, over which
hangs a newspaper cartoon about a man who
has chosen to identify as a woman, but who
changes back into his pin-striped suit to attend
the club, which he has waited for years to join.
Now that the Garrick admits women, such
subterfuge is unnecessary.
That brings us to the matter of how easy, or
dicult, it is to get into clubs. Some are so des-
perate for members that they have hardly any
waiting list and, provided one has a suitable
proposer and seconder and enough others are
prepared to sign one’s page in the candidates’
book, one can get in within weeks. Others
are far more selective, because the prestige of
belonging remains high. For that reason, as
Thévoz correctly says, there are what he calls
“vetting” committees—known in the better
sort of club as the “candidates’ committee”—in
some clubs that ensure the reputation of the
club is not about to be hijacked, compromised,
or diluted by its association with a charlatan
or a blackguard. As he also says, some get in
nonetheless, with the membership repenting
when they have.
There is also a rash of clubs—let us call them
private members’ clubs rather than gentle-
men’s clubs—that have sprung up in recent
years, oen in the more expensive parts of
London. They are overtly commercial, rather
than formed as upper-middle-class coopera-
tives for the mutual benet of well-to-do types
when at leisure. In such establishments the
main criterion for entry is whether the appli-
cant can aord a hey annual subscription and
an even heier entrance fee. Some Londoners
are members of both sorts of club. One is not
supposed to talk, let alone do, business in the
more traditional London club, whereas the
private members’ club exists principally for that
purpose. If, as Jones and Hodgson say, the tra-
ditional club was oen tted out and furnished
as a home away om home, private members’
clubs oen resemble what those familiar with
such things describe as an Arabian brothel of
the highest order. Of course, nothing of that
sort goes on in such places, I am sure, but if
you are securing a business deal and want to
impress a potential client, and the rules and
customs of your traditional club won’t allow
such things within their walls, these new in-
stitutions are tailor-made for you.
As both books make clear, clubs come and
go. Many in London have had all sorts of clubs
amalgamated into them; the dependent rela-
tive clubs usually lose their identity, but one or
two have not. The Flyshers’ is a geographical
subset of the Savile, for example, occupying a
part of its building. Some clubs change their
nature aer amalgamations: the Oxford and
Cambridge has long since stopped recruiting
only om those two universities. At least one
major London club, with august premises, is
known to be in serious nancial straits. As in
the swinging 1960s, when unfashionability hit
clubland so hard that waiting lists for most of
them evaporated, times for many clubs are get-
ting rather hard again. This is as much because
of fashion as because so many young people
have so little disposable income, thanks to the
catastrophic eects of this and the last British
government’s economic policies.
I suspect that anyone reading Jones and
Hodgson’s book in another quarter of a cen-
tury will nd himself looking at a useful his-
torical document, while the jokes in Thévoz’s
book may by then have worn thin, or simply
become incomprehensible. I presume that
most of the great clubs will have survived,
thanks not least to the sensible idea of their
admitting women (and while some will dig in
their heels, most may end up nding the need
overwhelming, purely for reasons of contin-
ued solvency). But doubtless one or two will
have vanished, or have been merged into one
another. The recent start-ups all seem linked to
some zeitgeist or another—the accumulation
in a particular locale of enough like-minded
people, or sometimes of people desperate to
be like-minded, or of a cast of mind—that
their survival may be more precarious once
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57The New Criterion October 2025
the initial vogue passes. Aer all, as Jones and
Hodgson note, the Junior Constitutional Club
was founded in 1887; by 1890 it had ten thou-
sand members; by 1903 it was extinct. Being
a junior constitutionalist clearly went rapidly
out of fashion. These achingly hip new clubs,
in converted pubs and decaying townhouses,
will not all last the course. But at least when
they have vanished into history along with so
many others, some charming photographs of
them will remain.
Caught in the vortex
James King
Our Little Gang”:
The Lives of the Vorticists.
Reaktion Books, 248 pages, $45
reviewed by D. J. Taylor
Technically speaking, the art movement
known as Vorticism lasted a bare three years
(1911–14), until the Great War undermined its
social basis and scattered its personnel to the
four winds. Conversely, its aershocks rumbled
away for decades, and several of its key players
and scene-swellers forged respectable careers
in the aermath. Ezra Pound’s later achieve-
ments (and failings) are well chronicled, and
Wyndham Lewis was still making a nuisance of
himself deep into the 1950s. Anthony Powell,
fetched up on the sta of the post-war Times
Literary Supplement, remembered the occasion
on which Lewis, having led a sparkling four-
thousand-word comment piece, was presented
with a few triing editorial adjustments. The
corking row that followed may have been a bad
case of perfectionism run riot, but it is just as
liable to have stemmed om Lewis’s lifelong
delight in causing trouble for its own sake.
Or perhaps, in the end, the two tendencies
are simply inseparable, a consequence of the
kind of person Lewis was and the kind of art-
ist, or rather the kind of artistic personality,
he imagined himself to be. One of the fascina-
tions of James King’s “Our Little Gang” lies
in these questions of denition, distinction,
and aliation, in trying to establish what the
people featured in it thought of themselves,
each other, and, above all, the art they aspired
to practice. Unsurprisingly, the author spends
a fair amount of this evenhanded study trying
to establish what Vorticism—a term that only
began to surface in magazine reviews when
the movement was about to expire—actually
means. To some Great War–era critics, it was
merely a kind of jazzed-up Cubism. There is
talk of “a form of abstraction that was dis-
tinct om all the other manifestations on the
Continent” and the “still centre” that suppos-
edly lay at the heart of souped-up Vorticist
patternings. Almost all Vorticist works, King
insists, “can be linked to a similar methodol-
ogy whereby elements of representation are
merged with abstraction.”
All this led not only to some well-advertised
procedural tensions but also to some very
mixed artistic results, born of what the critic
Karin Orchard, quoted in King’s introduction,
calls “the constantly shiing to-and-o strug-
gles for predominance between abstraction and
illustration, between pure form and literal rep-
resentation.” Rarely, it might be said, and even
allowing for the hothouse atmosphere of early
twentieth-century art, has a group of artists
been quite so exercised by sheer technique and
quite so suborned by some of its demands. As
for the artists themselves, King concentrates
on seven: Lewis (1882–1957), Edward Wads-
worth (1889–1949), Jessica Dismorr (1885–
1939), Helen Saunders (1885–1963), William
Roberts (1895–1980), Henry Gaudier-Brzeska
(1891–1915), and David Bomberg (1890–1957),
with occasional walk-ons by such sympathiz-
ers, latecomers, and ame-drawn moths as
C. R. W. Nevinson, Frederick Etchells, and
Vanessa Bell. Dismorr and Saunders’s all-but-
starring roles are especially welcome in light
of Lewis’s trademarked misogyny.
Meanwhile, the demographic patterns—
always worth investigating when groups of
artists are involved—turn out to be unexpect-
edly catholic. Lewis was born on the paternal
yacht and educated at Rugby, and Wadsworth
was the child of wealthy mill owners, but
Gaudier’s father was a French artisan, Rob-
erts a child of the London backstreets, and
Bomberg raised in grinding Midlands poverty.
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As ever, the Edwardian social bonds are much
less constraining than orthodoxy always paints
them, and you are struck by the (relative) ease
by which humbly born creative types, cheered
on by talent-spotters and helping hands, could
make their way through a sharply stratied
world. Roberts’s abilities were noted by his
East End schoolteachers; by the age of twelve
he was allowed to miss ordinary classes to at-
tend art lessons elsewhere. The teenaged Bom-
berg, always hard up and then employed as
an apprentice chromolithographer, was found
sketching at the Victoria & Albert Museum
by John Singer Sargent, thereby nessing an
entry into the Slade School of Art.
The Slade, along with its principal assis-
tant director Henry Tonks, features largely in
King’s early chapters. Six of the seven chief
Vorticists—the exception was Gaudier—spent
time there; all of them worked at one time
or another at Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops
until the inevitable clash of wills between Fry
and Lewis. Disagreement, whether personal,
collective, or conceptual, is a feature of “Our
Little Gang” and plays a key role in occasion-
ally making the Vorticists look like a kind of
amalgam of every art movement that has ever
lived compressed and at the same time exag-
gerated into caricature. There are the spats and
the excommunications; there is the jostling
for precedence, mostly between Lewis and
Nevinson; there are the lunatic international
sponsors (in this case the Italian futurist Mari-
netti); there is the eye-catching publicist who
seeks to use the movement for his own ends
(Pound). We have the zealous patron (the
New York lawyer John Quinn); the charis-
matic theoretician (T. E. Hulme); and, above
all, the characteristic scent of high ideals col-
liding with mundane impulse, deviousness,
and (occasionally) straightforward treachery.
It’s no surprise to discover that most of the
treachery can be traced back to Lewis. King’s
scrupulous preamble quickly alights on one
of the chief problems facing any chronicler of
the Vorticists, which is the diculty of keeping
Lewis away om pole position. King concedes
that there are “good reasons” for allowing
Lewis the pas. These include his leadership
abilities and “his considerable skills as an art-
ist.” Unhappily, this focus
results in a story about one person who con-
trolled a group of his colleagues rather than,
more accurately, a narrative about a group whose
members had very dierent personalities, aims
and ways of making art.
This is true, but it is a fact that almost any
collective action in which the Vorticists were
engaged seems to nd a charger-bestriding
Lewis waving his saber in the ont rank. It
was Lewis, aer all, who founded the move-
ment’s magazine Blast (an unfortunate choice,
the critic J. C. Squire maintained, as one of the
word’s dictionary denitions was “a atulent
disease of sheep”). And it was Lewis, albeit
with nancial assistance, who attempted to
establish what he intended as its operational
headquarters, the provocatively titled Rebel
Art Centre, in the spring of 1914.
The brief history of the Rebel Art Centre
(two oors of a four-story house at 38 Great
Ormond Street, London) gives a good idea
of both the Vorticists’ abundant potential and
their considerable administrative shortcom-
ings. The idea, which came om Lewis’s iend
Kate Lechmere, appealed to him largely as a
means of annoying Roger Fry, sure to be en-
raged by the existence of a rival design house.
The space, its rent underwritten by Lechmere,
was described by one visitor as “a Catholicism
of Heresies,” although gender equality was in
short supply. Lechmere, on whom the task
of organizing tea parties devolved, revenged
herself by patronizing the female Saunders and
Dismorr and (unfairly) characterizing them
as “little lap-dogs who wanted to be Lewis’s
slaves and do everything for him.” The trickle
of visitors included a lady pornographer who
would only show Lewis her drawings behind
closed doors. Within three months the Rebel
Art Centre was closed, aer Lechmere, already
disillusioned by Lewis’s suspicion that she was
involved with Nevinson, ran out of money.
Among many A-grade illustrations, King
prints an atmospheric photo of Cuthbert
Hamilton, Wadsworth, Nevinson, and Lewis
hanging Wadsworth’s Caprice. It is an authentic
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59The New Criterion October 2025
document om the pre-1914 London art-world
scene—the faces at once earnest, combative,
and collusive—and something similar was un
-
doubtedly being replicated all over the central
postal districts. This was a crowded market-
place, whose contending—though sometimes
only narrowly distinguishable—forces are
nicely suggested by a paragraph describing a
Vorticist exhibition at the Brighton “Cubist
Room” at the end of 1913. The show was la-
beled “The Camden Group and Others,” but
the Camden Group barely existed, having
only just merged with the 19 Fitzroy Group.
A later sit-down brought the foundation of the
London Group, which just for good measure
included another cadre called the Cumberland
Market Group, while the catalogue claimed
that “Cubism meets Impressionism, [and]
Futurism and Sickertism join hands and are
not ashamed.”
What distinguished Lewis’s “Others” om
this endless series of recalibrations? As nearly
always happens when a “movement” stumbles
hastily into life, some of the art is very good and
some of it a lot less so. Most of the drawbacks
have to do with form—not so much form’s limi-
tations, but the relentlessness with which it is
pursued. Vanessa Bell’s Couple Dancing, a panel
design om 1913 showing what looks like a cou-
ple of cockroaches queerly entwined, is scarcely
even an exercise in technique. Jessica Dismorr’s
sketch of Isadora Duncan, meanwhile, which
appeared in John Middleton Murry and Mi-
chael Sadleir’s magazine Rhythm, combines
an almost Beardsley-esque backdrop with an
imaginative use of space. Powell’s complaint
about Lewis, that he lacked “empathy” and did
not know what other people were like, might
have been expressly minted to cover Lewis’s
Smiling Woman Ascending the Stair, a charcoal
and gouache portrait om 1911–12, in which a
female gure (modeled by Lechmere), essen-
tially a sinister assemblage of planes with the
gure grimacing rather than smiling, reveals
several of Lewis’s best qualities—counterpoint,
angularity, decisiveness, love of the grotesque—
with not very much in the way of feeling.
Curiously—or maybe not so curiously—the
Great War, in which Lewis, Nevinson, Roberts,
and Bomberg served as war artists (Gaudier,
who enlisted in the French Army, died at the
ont in 1915), smoothed over some of these im-
perfections. It would be dicult to complain,
as critics had done of early Vorticist material,
that Bomberg’s Sappers at Work: Canadian
Tunnelling Company (1918–19), Nevinson’s
linocut On the Way to the Trenches (1915), or
Roberts’s The First Gas Attack at Ypres (1919)
were linoleum designs or “theatrical jugglings
with space.” The Roberts piece is a miasma
of pattern and activity in which the human
gures practically oat above the lines of gun
carriages. The Nevinson, too, though im-
mensely stylized, is full of furious energy, the
faces always discernible amid the overall mo-
saic along with a terric sense—to reduce war
artistry to its elementals—of something going
on. Ocially the Vorticists were of two minds
about industrialization, but Wadsworth’s lino-
cut War-Engine (1915), which appeared in the
second number of Blast, shows how quickly
they took to portraying machinery.
James King turns a sympathetic and well-
informed eye on all of this and is always in-
teresting on individual works. If he has a faint
weakness, it is for sometimes expecting a little
too much om his subject matter. Thus Dis-
morr’s bleak Portrait of a Young Girl can “be read
as a statement about how women were enclosed
in the patriarchy”; equally, it could just be a
portrait of a young girl gathered up in a gloom
that has nothing to do with her oppression by
men. The same goes for his reading of Etchells’s
Progression (also om the second issue of Blast),
the eastward slide of whose geometric forms
into right-margin blackness “might be a depic-
tion of Europe’s slow march to the Great War.”
To balance the Vorticists’ undeniable interest
in allegory is the thought that it might simply
be a geometrical experiment.
In the end, though, you are led back to some
of the questions posed by King’s attempts to
dene Vorticism. There are times, as in the
war pictures, when the anxieties produced by
these collisions between the abstract and the
real bring exceptionally good results, and there
are times when the whole thing dris away
into sheer sedulousness and you agree with the
anonymous Times critic who, on visiting the
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Omega Workshops in July 1913, declared that
“Only an artist with very great ability can com
-
bine the amount of representation common
in most patterns with a ne abstract design.”
The lesson of “Our Little Gang” would seem
to be that technique can take you too far. Or
sometimes, as quite a bit of the art on display
here might suggest, not far enough.
Arch Duke
Vernon Duke,
edited by Boris Dralyuk
Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems.
Paul Dry Books, 534 pages, $35
reviewed by Adam Kirsch
I
f the Bolshevik Revolution never happened,
the world would be better o in countless
ways, but the American songbook would be
missing a few of its most elegant tunes. That’s
because “April in Paris,” “Autumn in New
York,” and “I Like the Likes of You,” among
dozens of other songs, were written by Ver-
non Duke, and if not for the revolution, Duke
would never have existed. The man behind the
nom de plume would have remained in Russia,
composing the classical music he was trained
to write at the Kyiv Conservatory, under the
name he was born with—Vladimir Dukelsky.
Would that unlived life have been richer in
musical achievement? The question haunts Pass-
port to Paris, Duke’s classic 1955 memoir, which
has now been reissued by Paul Dry Books. Duke
the Tin Pan Alley songsmith never entirely sub-
merged Dukelsky the Russian modernist; he
continued to write music under both names
for decades. Yet he notes with some resentment
that Gershwin, Bernstein, and Weill managed
to do the same without “infuriating . . . musical
people” the way he did.
The reason is that those composers devel-
oped a consistent style that spanned high and
low: Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is recogniz-
ably the work of the same man who wrote
“The Man I Love.” For Duke, however, the
two genres were entirely separate. “There isn’t
a note of jazz in my serious music, and there
are no symphonic overtones to my musical
comedy output,” he writes deantly.
Was this simply versatility, as he believed,
or a kind of schizophrenia, as journalists im-
plied when they nicknamed him “the Jekyll and
Hyde of Music”? Or was it something even
worse—a prostitution of his musical gis, as
his iend Sergei Prokoev implied when he
called himself an “honest composer” and Duke
a “full-edged cocotte”?
Today, the idea of an artist selling out has
a dated sound, like worrying about having
an Oedipus complex. In our musical culture,
both eclecticism and populism are badges of
honor. A composer like Nico Muhly alternates
between writing operas for the Met and per-
forming with Björk, and each form of prestige
reinforces the other.
But Duke lived in a dierent artistic world,
and while he declares that he doesn’t care what
“the critical boys” have to say about his dual
career, Passport to Paris can’t leave the subject
alone. Even the title seems to have something
to prove. Almost all of Duke’s professional life
was spent in London and New York, where
he wrote songs for musicals and revues. But
Paris was the scene of his greatest artistic coup,
in 1924, when Serge Diaghilev commissioned
him to write a score for the Ballets Russes.
At the age of twenty-one, Dukelsky was
suddenly a peer of Stravinsky and Prokoev,
the most famous Russian composers. It was
an unforgettable high: Diaghilev
talked soly and earnestly about my talent, the
future before me, the task he was entrusting me
with and his hope that I would fulll his expecta-
tions: I was so dazed and drunk with the Martinis,
the champagne and my crashing, complete suc-
cess, that I only understand half of what Sergei
Pavlovitch said, but loved every word of it.
Alas, it couldn’t last. Dukelsky’s Zephyr and
Flora premiered the next year, to mildly posi-
tive reviews, and Diaghilev never asked him
for another score. Serge Koussevitzky, another
leading light of the Russian musical diaspora,
championed his work for a time, performing
his First Symphony in Paris in 1928. But as
Duke says plainly enough, it was simply too
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61The New Criterion October 2025
dicult to make a living as a full-time com-
poser of art music—especially, perhaps, for a
penniless refugee who enjoyed parties, good
food, and sharp clothes.
Money was never supposed to be a prob-
lem for Vladimir Dukelsky. He was born in
1903 into a haut bourgeois Russian family with
connections to the aristocracy; his ancestors
included Lithuanians, Georgians, and Aus-
trians, but no Jews, as many in Tin Pan Alley
later assumed. He was nine years old when his
father died, of heart disease, and was raised
by a beautiful, indulgent mother, who took
Vladimir and his younger brother Alexis to
the opera and encouraged his aesthetic inter-
ests. There were summer visits to the dachas
of wealthy relatives, where meals began with
“four tables of hors d’oeuvres wheeled in by
as many white-gloved footmen.”
Though “no wunderkind,” Vladimir was
precociously interested in music; by age
three he was “cover[ing] page aer page of
fat copybooks with . . . dots and dashes that
I imagined to be musical notes.” At twelve he
got himself expelled om school by circulating
a caricature of his Russian-literature teacher “in
a rapt embrace with the schoolgirl popularly
considered his pet.” It was part of a deliberate
plan, or so he claims in retrospect: his mother
now had no choice but to let him enroll at the
Kyiv Conservatory, where could study with
the composer Reinhold Glière.
By that time the Great War had been rag-
ing for a year, but it seems to have made little
dierence to the Dukelskys. If Duke reected,
then or later, on the contrast between his lot
and the miserable penury of the vast majority
of Russians, which fueled the rise of Commu-
nism, he gives no indication in Passport to Paris.
But when revolution and civil war came in
1917, even aesthetes weren’t spared. The con-
servatory got a visit om an armed commissar,
who gave the students two weeks to produce an
opera celebrating “our beloved Soviet govern-
ment and our noble leader comrade Trotsky.”
“The silence that ensued,” Duke recalls, “was
quite the gloomiest in my experience.” It was
impossible to refuse the command, and he
contributed three propagandistic arias. But
he found a way to avoid attending the perfor-
mance: his mother gave him a “potent sedative”
on opening night and he spent the next three
days sick in bed. Still, the Dukelskys were in
no position to refuse the payment that arrived
soon aer: two big bags of our, which must
have tasted better than caviar at a time of wide-
spread hunger.
In 1920 the family ed Kyiv for Odessa, then
under the control of the Whites. When the city
fell to the Red Army, they boarded a rickety
ship for Constantinople. It was while living in
the Turkish capital as a refugee, surviving with
help om the Red Cross, that Duke had his
rst brush with American popular music. At
a “cabaret artistique” called The Black Rose,
which doubled as a brothel and drug den, he
heard “Swanee,” “by a man improbably styled
Geo. Gerswhin.” The song thrilled him with
“the bold sweep of the tune, its rhythmic esh-
ness and, especially, its syncopated gait.”
He couldn’t have imagined that, just a year
later, Gershwin would become a close iend.
But aer the Dukelskys arrived at Ellis Island
in 1921, Vladimir began to make musical con-
nections in New York and soon met him at a
concert. Gershwin was ve years older, with far
less musical education and far more experience
in the music business, and he encouraged the
newcomer to “try to write some real popular
tunes—and don’t be scared about going low-
brow. They will open you up!” A few years
later, it was Gershwin who suggested the pen
name Vernon Duke, which appeared on his
rst published song, “Try a Little Kiss.” In 1939
he adopted it as his legal name.
By then, being Vernon Duke was a full-time
job. In 1929 he le Europe and Diaghilev
behind to rejoin his mother in New York, and
at this point, about halfway through, Passport
to Paris loses much of its charm, turning into
a catalogue of mostly forgotten songs, shows,
and celebrities. Duke’s biggest Broadway hit
was Cabin in the Sky, a 1940 show starring
Ethel Waters, whose “opening night was
one of those gladsome, shining things we
always pray for, but so seldom get.” It was
followed by a series of discouraging misses.
Aer World War II, Duke went back to Paris
for a few years, then returned to the United
62
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The New Criterion October 2025
States and nally settled in southern Cali-
fornia, where he spent his last two decades.
This new edition of Passport to Paris includes as
an epilogue about twenty poems Duke wrote
in this last phase, translated by Boris Dralyuk,
who also contributes a new introduction.
Dralyuk, an excellent poet who was born in
the Soviet Union in the 1980s and emigrated
to Los Angeles, has translated several Russian
émigré poets who followed a similar trajectory
in the early twentieth century. (His essay on
one of them, Alexander Voloshin, appeared
in The New Criterion in April 2023.)
Duke’s poems are vignettes of midcentury
Los Angeles, sometimes satirical—in “Whis-
ky a Go Go,” girls at the famous rock-and-
roll club wear their hair in “hives devoid of
bees”—but more oen gently perplexed. How
did he get om Imperial Russia to Malibu,
“humid, agrant—/ a plated slice of canta-
loupe?” It wasn’t the life of high culture that
the striving Duke had been born for, but he
seems content to have ended up at the Los
Angeles Farmer’s Market, where
There is no perfume, no thick fog—
all is so obvious, so plain,
and tuneful without any music:
a purely thoughtless tenderness,
uncomplicated happiness—
and that, my dear, will do for us.
A worldwide war
Rick Atkinson
The Fate of the Day:
The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga
to Charleston, 1777–1780.
Crown, 880 pages, $42
reviewed by Jeremy Black
Rick Atkinson’s choice to end The Fate of the
Day, the second volume of his Revolution Tril-
ogy, with the Patriot surrender of Charleston
in 1780, their largest loss of troops during the
war, is both wise and arresting. This is narrative
history in the grand style, with both sweep and
apt pen portraits. That moment underlined
the diculty of the task facing the Patriots,
and Atkinson’s choice of it as a breaking point
prepares the reader for the drama of the next
volume to come, with Yorktown to serve a
counterpoint to Charleston.
Throughout this book, Atkinson also man-
ages well the bringing together of a number of
strands. In contrast with some past treatments,
due agency is here given to France, and the
war outside North America receives attention.
Indeed, linked to both, there is an understand-
ing of the problems the British faced when it
came to their priorities.
This is all to the good, and Atkinson also
gives the reader a skillful discussion of battles.
He manages well a very wide range of sources,
primary as well as secondary, and presents an
interleaving of episodes and themes, with good
maps and welcome illustrations—including
helpfully noting in some cases when much
later paintings have been used, although that
is not done for all illustrations.
There is a good deal here to appreciate, in-
deed enjoy, and the work will have a large read-
ership. That of course means that the reviewer
should face the task, one that so many dodge,
of also drawing attention to possibly less happy
aspects. There are two major ones. Atkinson is
well aware of them, so we are talking about a
matter of emphasis rather than omission, al-
though, of course, the rst can rank as a form of
the second. First, the American Revolution was
a civil war, not only in the British Empire and
in British North America, but also within the
Thirteen Colonies. This was not a case of “the
Americans,” the term employed by Atkinson
for the ghters who were against the “loyalists”
(note the absence of a capital), but of Patriots
versus Loyalists, both also competing for the
support of the many who were neutral or only
very moderately committed. All of these inhab-
itants of the Thirteen Colonies can be called
Americans if such a term is to be employed.
To annex the term for the Patriots is to adopt
a misleading teleology.
The treatment of nation-building presents a
similar teleological issue, as does the gure of
George Washington. A country was created,
and Washington’s abilities were to be appreci-
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63The New Criterion October 2025
ated. Yet both were somewhat unclear at the
juncture treated by the book. The brave hopes
of 1775 and 1776 seemed tarnished and tenta-
tive by 1780. The war appeared to be moving
toward an impasse, with the Patriot cause de-
pendent on an unreliable France and a hostile
Spain, while discontent was increasing in the
Continental Army. The strategic acumen of the
Patriots was always unclear, and if in 1778 an
alliance with France might have appeared to
provide the solution, this was the France that
had been routed in North America in 1758–60
and, with its ally Spain, had been heavily de-
feated in the Caribbean in 1762.
It is easy, using the phrase of the “War of
American Independence” or the “American
Revolution,” to focus on the struggle in North
America. Notably, a treatment of two events
in 1778—the Battle of Monmouth Court
House on June 28 and the British capture of
Savannah on December 29—can bind these
disparate episodes into a common narrative
and analysis of the struggle, and help us to
consider the French entry into the war as an
adjunct and a contributing factor. This then
becomes a context within which subsequent
French operations can be considered as well
as those involving Spain and the Dutch, once
they joined in the war, in 1779 and 1780 respec-
tively. From such a perspective, the Spanish
and the Dutch can be presented as having
joined the war on the Patriot side, whereas,
instead, they had done so on behalf of France,
as was demonstrated by both the warfare and
politics of the struggle.
The standard American view of these alli-
ances is a seriously misleading account, for
the purposes of the French, the Spanish, and
the Dutch were not focused on helping the
Patriots. The importance to the American Rev-
olution of the entry of other powers hinged
in large part on the British reaction, and, to a
considerable degree, this moved maneuvers in
the Thirteen Colonies into a secondary sphere.
For France, the Caribbean was the prime locus
of operation in the Western Hemisphere, as
it also was for Spain. Both powers had been
defeated there by the British in the Seven Years’
War, and each was eager to reverse this defeat,
which did not appear immutable and, indeed,
was not so. It was the Napoleonic Wars, in-
stead, that were decisive to this process, and,
even then, it was unclear what would have
happened had Britain been still le to ght
alone against France om 1812.
The Caribbean oered wealth in the shape
of plantation goods that were readily acces-
sible, and, with their economies, governance,
and defense dependent on port capitals, the
islands were particularly vulnerable to naval
action. Furthermore, attack was the best form
of defense, as rival bases were in close proxim-
ity. Compared to this, the value of operating
on the American continent was more limited
and the likely cost of doing so rather than act-
ing in the Caribbean was greater. Conversely,
the Caribbean posed serious hazards in the
shape of disease and hurricanes, more so than
in the Southern colonies, while the density of
fortications in the Caribbean was far greater
than in America, as was their strength.
The Jacobites, whom France had supported
om 1689 to 1759 when at war with Britain,
had failed to restore the Stuart monarchy. They
lacked strategic depth because they did not
control any of the British Isles. In contrast,
like Scotland when it had been independent
and a French ally om the thirteenth to the
sixteenth centuries, the American Patriots had
an element of strategic depth, even though it
was unclear what this would mean in practice.
In the event, the strategic depth provided them
with durability and entailed, om the French
perspective, a sustained diversion of British
resources, both army and navy.
As in the 1730s and the early 1750s, France
and Spain had put a major eort into devel-
oping their navies, and, as a result, Britain
had lost its relative degree of naval superiority.
That helped ensure that, for all great powers
involved, the naval dimension would be fore-
most in any conict with Britain. This factor
was accentuated by the slowness of the Brit-
ish to mobilize their navy and by the degree
to which Britain in 1778–83 was faced by a
French–Spanish closeness greater than in the
later stages of the Seven Years’ War. France
and Spain would naturally try to play to what
was their advantage. This was an even greater
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factor because neither power was also at war
with another state, whereas both had been so
during the Seven Years’ War, with France ght-
ing Prussia (as well as resisting British coastal
attacks that were not a factor in 1778–83) and
Spain ghting Portugal.
There is therefore a choice to be made by
commentators. On the one hand, a historian
can concentrate on the war in the Thirteen
Colonies, which arguably oers a misleading
account of British priorities and general signi-
cance. On the other, the historian may try to
address the global dimension adequately. In a
story that stretches, however, om the Indian
Ocean via the Mediterranean and the English
Channel to the Caribbean, this latter option
risks leaving the Thirteen Colonies as not quite
an aerthought but still as a bit player in a
wider struggle. Americans, understandably,
are generally not inclined to this view, and
the major signicance for later global history
of American independence encourages a focus
on the war in the Thirteen Colonies.
Yet that is to anticipate the future, both
the result of the conict in 1783 and this later
signicance, notably aer the challenge of the
Civil War of 1861–65 had been overcome and
the American economy had grown rapidly.
Prior to the rise of America, in practice, it was
the ability of Britain to survive France and
its allies om 1778 to 1815 that was of greater
importance for world history. Rather than de-
termining the agenda, the Patriots/Americans
operated in the shadow of these assaults by
France and its allies. Indeed, French military
performances helped the Patriots win inde-
pendence (1783) but also created a spur for
the purchase of Louisiana (1803). Due to the
Anglo-French struggle, the French were unable
to protect New Orleans adequately and also
needed America’s purchase money for Louisi-
ana. America, in contrast, was in no position to
force them to sell it. The new American nation
also was somewhat insulated om a less than
outstanding war record against Britain in the
War of 1812 (1812–15). At the same time, it can
be pointed out that France became willing to
commit in 1778 in part due to the signs of Pa-
triot resilience. This approach is very comforting
to American perspectives of the war, with the
news of Saratoga and Germantown apparently
helping prompt French moves and the debate
over which was most signicant. Reasons can
be found for both, with Germantown showing
doggedness and a taking of the initiative aer
the loss of Philadelphia.
Yet that view gives the Patriots too much agen-
cy, for they were not to the fore in French policy-
making. Thus, the inuential French foreign
minister Charles, Count of Vergennes, sought
British cooperation against the partitioning
powers in Eastern Europe, notably Russia.
There is an analogy to ideas today. Vergennes—
who had served at Constantinople, the capital
of the Ottoman Empire, and was, as a result,
particularly concerned about Russia—thought
that a weakened Britain would be more likely
to follow the French lead against Russia. Sepa-
rately, the French in 1778 were immediately chal-
lenged by the outbreak of war between their ally
Austria and Prussia. In the event, the French
focused on war with Britain, thwarting British
hopes that the Patriots would be le exposed
and therefore seek reconciliation. Yet the Pa-
triots joined an alliance that was even weaker
than that with which Madison was to align in
1812–14, which launched unsuccessful invasions
of Canada only to nd Napoleon lost in 1812,
1813, and 1814. Had the Bourbon invasion plan
of 1779 against southern England and, crucially,
the major naval base of Portsmouth succeeded,
then the Patriot strategy of an alliance with
France would have seemed more appropriate.
But it did not. Moreover, like Lincoln in 1864,
George III’s proxy Lord North won the election
of 1780, so Britain appeared unlikely to collapse
om within. Atkinson has a very ne passage
on the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, but
these were no prototype for those in Paris in
1789. Indeed it was the absence of a revolution
in the British center of power that created a
grave strategic problem for the Patriot resistance
movements in North America. The Patriots had
to try to encourage a change of heart in London.
They could not dictate one. Precisely because
Atkinson focuses on the narrative approach, he
cannot stop for a lengthy analysis of capabilities
and options, but, absent that, his treatment of
strategies is necessarily incomplete.
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65The New Criterion October 2025
That judgment might appear harsh, but that
is not my intention. Atkinson oers the best
narrative of the war that is available. He moves
the reader om one war to another. The 1777
campaign, one of drama in the North and the
Middle Colonies, was the last in which the Patri-
ots fought alone. That in 1780 saw far less con-
sequential campaigning in the Middle Colonies,
let alone the North. Instead, the geography,
alignments, and issues of the conict were cen-
tered in the South. Furthermore, the Patriots
did not ght alone. Not only was Britain also
at war with France and Spain, but, in addition
and dierently signicant, those powers had
forces ghting Britain in North America.
Atkinson deserves much praise for his ac-
count. If it has deciencies, well, no one can
get right a conict that provides national myth
as well as civil war, quest for liberty as well as
rebellion for self-interest, epic in the sun and
savagery in the shadows.
Better & better
Cynthia Ozick
In a Yellow Wood:
Selected Stories and Essays.
Everyman’s Library, 712 pages, $40
reviewed by Sunil Iyengar
A. J. Liebling famously boasted that he could
write better than anyone who wrote faster,
and faster than anyone who wrote better. A
similar formulation occurred to me when
reading the new Everyman’s Library selec-
tion of Cynthia Ozick’s stories and essays,
In a Yellow Wood. Of the ninety-seven-year-
old Ozick, it may be said that she has writ-
ten ction better than most living essayists
and written essays better than most living
ction-writers.
In a short introduction, Ozick muses on the
mutually reinforcing nature of these two gis,
but without much prot. Along the way, she
takes a swipe at autoction, representing the
genre as “the obliteration of character.” The re-
sult, she suggests, is to rob ction-writing of
what Susan Sontag hailed as its chief reward: “a
way of being in the world, of paying attention
to the world, without imprisoning yourself in
yourself.” It should come as no surprise that
solipsism of any kind is absent om Ozick’s
stories, which thrive at the border of plausibil-
ity and in which constructs such as character
and identity become miraculously uid and
adaptive. More striking is how, even in au-
tobiographical essays such as “A Drug Store
Eden” and “Washington Square, 1946,” not to
mention numerous reections on her favorite
writers, she is able to assume a discrete liter-
ary persona—a genial and sympathetic narra-
tor—who is ever present in the background, but
who possesses her subjects so intimately that the
reader oen has the sensation of encountering
familiar details of history and biography for
the rst time, as if Ozick had invented them.
In the book’s closing entry, “She: Portrait
of the Essay as a Warm Body,” Ozick again
worries over genre distinctions:
Though I have been intent on distinguishing
the marrow of the essay om the marrow of
ction, I confess I have been trying all along,
in a subliminal way, to speak of the essay as if
it—or she—were a character in a novel or a play:
moody, ckle, given on a whim to changing her
clothes, or the subject; sometimes obstinate, with
a mind of her own; or hazy and light; never
predictable. I mean for her to be dressed—and
addressed—as we would Becky Sharp, or Oph-
elia, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Mrs. Ramsay, or
Mrs. Wilcox, or even Hester Prynne.
To some, her personication of the essay
form may seem old-fashioned. Alternatively,
the cast of canonical heroines to which es-
says are compared may appear limiting. Yet, in
practice, Ozick’s essays are never more expan-
sive—more distinctive—than when treating
character. In “Dostoevsky’s Unabomber,” she
links the protagonist of Crime and Punishment
to the handiwork of Theodore Kaczynski, but
not before hopping two or three continents.
“Raskolnikov lives on,” she writes.
For seventy years he was victorious in Russia.
And even now, aer the death of the Soviet
66
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The New Criterion October 2025
Union, auguring no one knows what, his re-
tributive gure roves the earth. If he is currently
mute in Russia, he remains restive in Northern
Ireland, and loud in the Middle East; he has mi-
grated to America. He survives in the violence of
humanitarian visionaries who would seize their
utopias via ax, Molotov cocktail, or innocent-
looking packages sent through the mail.
With the same brisk authority, in “Who Owns
Anne Frank?” Ozick telescopes the sordid deal-
ings over the diary’s theatricalization, involv-
ing the Chicago-born novelist Meyer Levin,
the scriptwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert
Hackett, and Lillian Hellman. In the end, she
acclaims Miep Gies, who found the diary aer
the Franks were rooted out of hiding, as the
“uncommon heroine of this story”—but it is
an homage that leads to a heresy:
one can imagine a still more salvational outcome;
Anne Frank’s diary burned, vanished, lost—saved
om a world that made of it all things, some of
them true, while oating lightly over the heavier
truth of named and inhabited evil.
Other character proles that grant Ozick
license to make sweeping but seductive claims
about literary history are essays on Virginia
and Leonard Woolf, Helen Keller and An-
nie Sullivan, Saul Bellow, and T. S. Eliot. In
the case of the last, she ends with a lament
not only for the “reactionary Eliot” (the
author of The Idea of a Christian Society)—an
aspect of the poet that, she says, society has an
“unsparing obligation to disclaim”—but also
for the New Criticism–era “belief that poetry
can be redemptive, the conviction that his-
tory underlies poetry.” By way of saluting the
doctrine of close reading in the age of Eliot,
she quotes “The Dry Salvages” (om Four
Quartets), “We had the experience but missed
the meaning,” and adds: “For the generation
for whom Eliot was once a god (my own),
the truth is that we had the experience and
were irradiated by the meaning.” (The essay
in question, “T. S. Eliot at 101,” was published
in The New Yorker in 1989 and the subject of
a strident response by Hilton Kramer in The
New Criterion of February 1990, followed by
an exchange of letters by the two authors in
the April 1990 issue.)
If Eliot indeed was once her god, then two
lines om The Waste Land may have inspired
Ozick when she began writing ction in the
1950s. One imagines her cutting them out and
pinning them over her desk. They are: “You!
hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon
ère!” (Eliot’s appropriation of Baudelaire)
and “Who is the third who walks always be-
side you?” Both lines invoke a spectral other,
an eerie parallelism also at work in Ozick’s fa-
bles of neuroses, literary ambition, philology,
and fakery. “The Biographer’s Hat,” “Virility,”
“The Bloodline of the Alkanas,” and—argu-
ably the best of the lot—“Dictation” all chip at
the façade of authorship, of literary celebrity,
and promote a ghostwriter as the central char-
acter. “Dictation,” unlike the other three, is
ee of any strain of magical realism. Instead,
Ozick serves a confection about Henry James
and Joseph Conrad—or, rather, their female
secretaries, who plot to interpolate passages
om each author into the manuscripts of
the other.
In an essay not included here, Ozick has
written: “No one is more alive than Henry
James, or more likely to sustain literary im-
mortality. He is among the angels, as he
meant to be.” In her stories and essays alike,
she oen exhibits what Eliot himself called—
in lauding the Master—a mind so pure that no
idea can violate it. Her stories may have the
imsiest of pretexts, but the characters and
their rich interior lives carry the day. Here,
as with her essays, one refers not solely to
literary characters in the sense of protagonists,
but also to the presiding narrator. Ozick’s
utter immersion in her données, the elaborate
intellectual history she provides for each of
her creations, is what urges us on. Her autho-
rial condence is breathtaking: not only does
she indulge in the storyteller’s prerogative
to deceive the reader; she vests her charac-
ters with extraordinary feats of duplicity. In
“What Happened to the Baby?” the loss of a
child causes a wife to sabotage her husband’s
attempts to create a universal language for
humankind. Another story, “At Fumicaro,”
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67The New Criterion October 2025
holds in exquisite balance the attitudes of
tenderness and self-deception that a travel-
ing American adopts in his relations with an
Italian chambermaid.
Roughly half the stories explore, rearm,
or challenge the cohesion of Jewish identity—
but, even here, the prospect of a shadow life
or alternative reality (reminiscent of Conrad’s
theme in “The Secret Sharer”) is never far o.
They include “A Mercenary,” “The Conversion
of the Jews,” and “The Story of My Family.”
The last weaves allusions to Stoic philosophers
and papal history into the harrowing account
of the six-year-old Eduardo Mortaro’s kidnap-
ping om his Jewish family in Bologna in 1858,
and his forced conversion to Catholicism.
Notably absent om this collection is her
most venerated story, “The Shawl,” which
she developed into a novel and then a play,
directed by Sidney Lumet. Although the
Holocaust is addressed briey in the story
“Levitation,” it’s probable that “The Shawl”
was omitted because it would have burned a
hole through this volume, which, despite its
gallery of tragedies and travesties, retains an
aura of lightness, of Ozick’s lively and intel-
ligent wit. Whether intended or not, the eect
is to heighten our appreciation of Ozick as
not only a great Jewish American writer, but
also an outstanding prose stylist and a literary
classic, no matter which topics or themes she
chose. Undoubtedly her next stop will be the
Library of America.
Bosh, not Blake
Philip Hoare
William Blake and the Sea Monsters
of Love.
Pegasus Books, 464 pages, $29.95
reviewed by Nicholas Shrimpton
A
re the commentators on Hamlet really mad,”
Oscar Wilde is supposed to have asked. “Or
are they only pretending to be?” Though Wil-
liam Blake’s life was troubled by occasional
episodes of mental illness (probably what we
now call bipolar disorder), his work is lucidly
conceived, robustly argued, and demandingly
sane. The commentators on it, unfortunately,
have equently been downright crazy. Philip
Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of
Love is yet another example of that unfortunate
tendency: amateurish, irresponsibly subjective,
and at times seriously misleading.
In his prefatory remarks to the work, Hoare
tells us that, “I didn’t know anything about
Blake. So I started to write this book.” And
on the nal page he states, endearingly but
also self-protectively, that, “I still know noth-
ing about him.” As this suggests, the book
is only incidentally a study of Blake—or, for
that matter, of sea monsters, though Blake’s
work is combed for the (very occasional) ref-
erences to them and the presence of whale
oil and whalebones in late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century London (for use in
lamps and corsets) is duly noted. Rather, it is
a book about Philip Hoare and an exercise in
that odd mode known as creative or narra-
tive nonction. The spindly progeny of such
sprawlingly encyclopedic modernist texts as
Pound’s Cantos, David Jones’s Anathemata,
and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and given a
questionable prestige by the work of W. G.
Sebald, narrative nonction can also be seen,
less indulgently, as a convenient alternative for
people who would like to write a novel or a
treatise but cannot think of a plot or an argu-
ment. Here it is the excuse for a catalogue of
Hoare’s private enthusiasms. With the imsy
justication that they either admired Blake
or in some way resembled him, Hoare writes
about (inter alia) Derek Jarman, Paul Nash,
Oscar Wilde, Algernon Blackwood, W. Gra-
ham Robertson, Humphrey Jennings, John
Ruskin, John Milton, William Butler Yeats,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Samuel Palmer,
Eileen Agar, Iris Murdoch, Francis Bacon,
John Banting, Brian Howard, Nancy Cunard,
Michael Wishart, James Joyce, Lawrence of
Arabia, Henry Scott Tuke, Herman Melville,
and David Bowie. Blake, in eect, joins the
other pinups on Hoare’s personal noticeboard.
Along the way, Blake himself is handled
rather carelessly. There is the schoolboy error
of referring to his great book of lyric poems as
“
68
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“Songs of Innocence and Experience” (it should,
of course, be “and of Experience”). There is a
good deal of insidious misquotation, chiey in
the form of the silent combination of sentences
om dierent parts of Blake’s work into sup-
posedly continuous text. There is some serious
misinformation: it is not true that for Blake
“Avebury and nearby Stonehenge were the
building blocks of a new Jerusalem” and ab-
surd (or at least an absurd oversimplication)
to suggest that this profoundly religious artist
“does not believe in God.” Other writers are
mistreated too. Swinburne was not “one of
the members of the Golden Dawn.” Hobbes
did not see “our lives as solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short” (that was in the state of
nature, before the advent of civil society).
And, just in case you were dissatised with
Milton’s great description of the fall of the
rebel angels in the rst book of Paradise Lost,
Hoare rewrites it for you:
Satan and his bad angels have been ung out of
heaven for defying God. It’s a hard rain for their
leader, aka Lucifer: bright star of the morning,
now become the Prince of Darkness. He and
his cohorts have been thrown over the crystal
battlements, as though through the plate-glass
window of a Manhattan apartment.
Thanks all the same, but I think I’d rather
stick with Milton.
Even more annoying than such simple
blunders is the deliberate revival of ancient
errors. Hoare knows that the silly claim that
Blake was Irish, promulgated by Yeats in the
1890s, is false. But he likes it, so does “not
necessarily believe it to be untrue”—this is the
“my truth” doctrine popular among the woke.
Most gratingly for me, he repeats, without
qualication, the old libel that Ruskin “cut
up one of only two surviving coloured copies
of Blake’s Jerusalem.” This was a speculation
advanced by Geoey Keynes in 1921 in re-
sponse to the temporary deposit in the British
Museum Print Room of “some exquisitely
coloured agments evidently cut om leaves
of a copy of Jerusalem.” Returning to the topic
in 1949, Keynes rst stated that “the late James
Tregaskis” had told him in 1920 that he had
sold a colored copy of Jerusalem to Ruskin
“about 1885” and then said that “Mr. Arthur
Severn, the owner of Ruskin’s library” had
a “distinct recollection” of such a book and
“believed Ruskin cut it up.” Everything about
this claim is wrong. Blake himself, in a let-
ter written shortly before his death, said that
there was only one complete colored copy of
Jerusalem (“One I have Finish’d”). Tregaskis
did not become a bookseller until 1890, when
he retired om his previous career as a printer
and joined the antiquarian-book business that
his wife had inherited in 1886. Arthur Severn’s
only signicant involvement with Ruskin’s
library, which his wife had inherited, was the
discreet sale of valuable items om it to fund
his expensive lifestyle. There is no mention of
a copy of Jerusalem in Ruskin’s letters and dia-
ries, or in the eight surviving catalogues (made
at dierent dates) of his library, nor is there
any record of dealings with Tregaskis—Ruskin
bought his books om Quaritch, Sotheran’s,
and Ellis & White. And when, in 1958, Ker-
rison Preston examined the “exquisitely
coloured agments” (now in the National
Gallery of Australia), he found that they were
proofs, used as sketches for the subsequent
painting of the colored copy and printed on
the verso of trial proofs for Blake’s earlier
poem Europe. What good is done by putting
a long-debunked misconception like this back
into circulation I cannot see.
A
s such carelessness might lead one to expect,
Hoare’s responses to Blake’s work are wildly
ecstatic rather than accurately observant. Here
he is looking at some of the Large Color Prints
in Tate Britain’s store:
The cumulative eect of the three pictures in
ont of me is dumbfounding, hypnotic. They
exceed anything else. . . .
Un-two-dimensional, physical, emotional,
they are active evocations of his hand, his sense
of discretion and grace, of immaculate compo-
sition and spiritual wealth. A man who never
lacked life. Even his movement, the way he held
himself, is echoed in these kinetic records of his
nervous system. . . . Their surface is everything,
so is their depth: I want to dive in.
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69The New Criterion October 2025
Here, a little later, he is inspecting the two
copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience
in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge:
I feel like a detective who’s lost the plot. The
wanting, the withholding. I can’t contain myself.
I whimper like a dog. With the evidence in ont
of me, I can see how it was done. The layers of
meaning and love.
Or, in summary: “You get more for your
money with Blake. He’s the Willy Wonka of
art, your golden ticket to other worlds.”
The polite term for writing like this is “af-
fective criticism,” though a better descrip-
tion might be (in Bentham’s famous phrase)
nonsense on stilts. If such passages mean
anything at all, they are less praise of Blake
than a self-congratulatory paean to the ex-
quisite sensibility and daring right-on-ness of
their author.
The paradoxical consequence of such an
approach to Blake is the inadvertent reintro-
duction of the charge of insanity made by his
early critics—though with the qualities then
condemned as mad now praised as valuable
(“a golden ticket to other worlds,” “kinetic
records of his nervous system”). Was Blake
irrational? He did, of course, attack “Rea-
son”—or, more precisely, the predominance
of rationality in the Age of Reason. But he did
so in order to demand its recombination with
the other modes of apprehension: emotion,
physical sensation, and imagination. There
are, and should be, “Four Zoas,” not just one
or even three, and Blake’s own work reects
that integration.
His great series of relief-etched illuminated
books began, in 1788, with an imaginatively
illustrated but rationally argued discussion of
the Lockean or empiricist proposition that
man “is only a natural organ subject to Sense.”
Though There Is No Natural Religion will end
with an assertion of the “Poetic or Prophetic”
faculty, it arrives at that conclusion by a pro-
cess of lucid argument. The Songs of Innocence
and of Experience have a similar intellectual
rigor, despite their outward appearance as a
pretty booklet of amusing verse for children.
As their subtitle declares (“Shewing the Two
Contrary States of the Human Soul”), this is
an account of two alternative philosophical
theories. One of them, “Innocence,” is the
pre-Enlightenment, characteristically religious
way of understanding the world, based in
Blake’s case (as for many other people) on
the “Prophetic” revelations of divine truth
found in the Bible. The other, “Experience,”
is the empirical “philosophy of experience”
formulated by John Locke and given power
and prestige by experimental science and En-
lightenment skepticism. Between 1789 and the
mid-1790s, Blake was briey a convert to the
worldview of experience. Thereaer he re-
verted to his earlier, religious understanding
but without, in the process, suppressing his
“Experience” poems or losing interest in the
dialectical relationship between alternative
philosophical views of the world.
Why, then, are his later poems so dicult to
understand? Is this not evidence of a retreat
om rationality? The answer, once again, is a
severely intellectual one. Blake had absorbed
the argument, rst made by Robert Lowth
in 1741, that the Prophetic Books of the Old
Testament were a better model than Homer
or Virgil for modern epic poetry. Blake would
have discussed this theory, during the three
years he spent at Felpham, with his fellow poet
William Hayley (dismissed by Hoare, in the
conventional way, as a pompous philistine)
and used it for the composition of Milton and
Jerusalem. These poems are meant to resemble
the Book of Isaiah or Book of Ezekiel and
deliberately adopt their qualities of indirec-
tion and obscurity. Hoare refers several times
to the lecture on Blake that James Joyce gave
in Trieste in March 1912. It is a pity that he
seems not to have noticed Joyce’s shrewd point
that Blake “unites keenness of intellect with
mystical feeling.”
Instead, we get Blake as Willy Wonka and
several hundred pages of whimsical rambling
on the theme of a “continuum of queerness,
threaded through countercultural time.” There
will be many books on Blake in the next two
years as we approach (in 2027) the bicentenary
of his death, and this may not even be the
worst of them. Poor Blake.
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All coherence gone
Terry Eagleton
Modernism: A Literature in Crisis.
Yale University Press, 208 pages, $26
reviewed by Paul Dean
And new philosophy calls all in doubt . . .
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”
So wrote John Donne in 1611. He was think-
ing of Kepler and Galileo; what might he have
said of Rutherford and Einstein? The lines re-
mind us that every age has its modernism. The
quarrel between the ancients and the moderns
goes back at least to the High Middle Ages.
Modernism is continually being redened
as society seeks to discern its special cultural
characteristics in contradistinction, though not
necessarily in total opposition, to preceding
modes. In Modernism: A Literature in Crisis,
Terry Eagleton’s latest book (his forty-seventh
by my count, although I may have missed one
or two along the way), the modernism of the
twentieth century is taken as lasting roughly
om 1910 to 1947, but Eagleton is, of course,
aware that there are other possibilities, and
that it was not only literature that was in crisis
during those years.
In the rst of his four chapters, he discusses
various attempts to dene modernism. There
are modernisms of every stamp, including the
political (of which more later). About the only
thing there can’t be is a classical modernism—
unless one contrasts that with postmodernism,
or even more modern modernism. Ultimately,
Eagleton decides, the term may be so vague
as to be useless, “a name to which any phase
of history can lay claim.” Yet some controlling
idea is needed, and, “though every age is mod-
ern, not every age lives its experience in these
terms.” However many precursors they had,
the early twentieth-century modernists knew
themselves to be modern, and said so, usually
proudly, oen loudly, and sometimes violently.
The movement that Eagleton sets up in con-
trast to modernism is classical realism, which
believes in the coherence of the self, the dis-
covery of truth through reason, the existence
of an ultimate metaphysical order, the reliability
of language to communicate meaning, and the
validity of mimetic forms of artistic representa-
tion. Modernism rejects such concepts and the
absolutes that underpin them. In some of its
manifestations, it refuses to say that one work
of art is better than another, which is a stroke of
luck for a large number of works of art. Modern-
ism also rejects idealist philosophy and norma-
tive ethics. Its intellectual guides are Friedrich
Nietzsche and the man Eagleton calls “the n-
est of all theorists of modernism” but about
whom others may have slightly less positive
views, Theodor Adorno. Modernism was less
inuenced by theory in Britain than in Germany
or Russia, owing to the famous British distaste
for abstract thought, although the country has
welcomed postmodernism unresistingly (wit-
ness the acclaim surrounding the more abstruse
and tendentious of Eagleton’s books).
Eagleton’s most interesting chapter is on
modernism and language. Its title, “Words
and Things,” echoes that of a book by Ernst
Gellner published in 1959, which was an attack
on the then-fashionable linguistic philosophy
deriving om the later work of Wittgenstein.
Although Eagleton doesn’t mention this move-
ment, it contributed to the erosion of trust in
the referentiality of language (including the
language of criticism), which is a prominent
aspect of modernism. If it is possible to give
a coherent account of the world, language
can reect that in its rhetorical, grammati-
cal, and syntactical structures. Metaphysical,
logical, and linguistic order can interlock. If,
however, meaning collapses, the result will
be “a crisis of representation” in which lan-
guage may collapse too. As Eagleton puts it,
“modernism is the moment when literature
comes to be about words,” just as in the other
arts the medium is its own subject, running
the risk of sterile narcissism. Language may
either become alien to everyday usage or be-
come deliberately senseless. In either case the
result is the creation of an elite om which
ordinary readers, spectators, or listeners feel
excluded, with the result that they will develop
a counterculture of their own. Eagleton notes
that, chronologically, “modernism and mass
culture were twinned at birth,” the appetite for
daily, weekly, and Sunday newspapers boom-
“
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71The New Criterion October 2025
ing in the years before World War I. The cul-
tural gap has grown ever wider subsequently.
At one extreme, deriving om the aesthetic
movement of the 1890s, modernist art becomes
a kind of secular religion with the artist as its
priest. Literature becomes self-consciously dif-
cult, reveling in its obscurity. This approach is
exemplied by Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, who
all reect cultural disintegration in dierent
ways; by Proust, Henry James, and Virginia
Woolf, who push the expressive functions of
language to their uttermost; and by Beckett,
“the most everyday of extremists” as Eagleton
calls him, who strips language to the bone but
nonetheless writes prose of extreme complexity.
For all their obscurity, these writers still be-
lieve language has a function. As Eagleton drily
says, “an author who truly despairs of language
stops being an author.” The alternative, one
would have thought (hoped), would be to
say nothing (as advised by Wittgenstein at the
end of the Tractatus), but for many this was
asking too much. At the other end of the scale,
then, we have, to use Eagleton’s third-chapter
title, the death of art, exemplied by Dadaism,
the deliberate rejection of sense—“anti-art” as
Hans Richter termed it. Dadaism is one of a
clutch of movements that wobbled along the
tightrope between ivolity and triviality, mak-
ing a virtue of their own absurdities. There was
an adolescent need to shock. Probably the best
thing Dadaism did was to provoke an internal
split that led André Breton and Louis Aragon
to develop Surrealism, a movement that can
claim a greater degree of intellectual integrity
and aesthetic worth.
The death of art was hastened, in some cas-
es, by its association with political movements
whether of the Right or the Le. Communism
and Fascism have both had their modernist
adherents. The Soviet Union in the 1920s was
home to the Institute of Artistic Culture, the
Le Front in the Arts (there was no Right
Back, alas), and the Institute for the Scientic
Organization of Work and the Mechaniza-
tion of Man. Membership in the Union of
Soviet Writers became compulsory in 1930. In
Germany, there was a brief cultural owering
under the Weimar Republic before the rise of
the Nazis, “for whom,” Eagleton reminds us,
“all modernist art was Bolshevik art.” But ex-
tremes meet, and under Hitler as under Stalin
mass production and the collective replaced
individual creativity and personal vision, both
seen as dangerous aberrations.
“The political record of modernism as a
whole is fairly dire,” Eagleton admits, and he
poses a key question: “What are we to make
of the fact that some of the nest literary work
of the twentieth century stems om the reac-
tionary end of the political spectrum?” He cites
Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, and Wynd-
ham Lewis. In opposition to them he names
Wilde, Joyce, Yeats (with reservations), Sean
O’Casey, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein
(I continue to be mystied as to why anyone
thinks Gertrude Stein is worth reading, and for
what it’s worth her politics, if le-wing, were
idiosyncratic: she endorsed Hitler for the Nobel
Peace Prize and was keen on Marshal Pétain).
Eagleton might have added E. M. Forster. His
need to wrestle with his conscience about the
fact that some indisputably great artists have
held dierent opinions om his own is very tell-
ing. It is all too easy to fall into making simple
alignments between political allegiance and ar-
tistic merit, and to endorse only what atters
our own views. To do so is to engage in the very
propaganda against which we are protesting.
Eagleton’s book is sprightly, pugnacious,
and thought-provoking. It largely avoids the
enfant terrible manner that has made some of
his work tiresome in the past. The guided-
tour method means that passages of close
analysis are regrettably rare, the best being
the pages on Conrad’s The Secret Agent and on
Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Chandos Letter.”
References to the visual arts are few, and to
music almost nonexistent. (Christopher But-
ler’s Early Modernism: Literature, Music and
Painting in Europe 1900–1916, om 1994, is an
excellent corrective.) Although, arguably, the
founding fathers of modernism are Darwin,
Marx, Freud, and Einstein, Eagleton pres-
ents the movement as born om the rubble
of World War I, when so much that seemed
permanent in society, politics, and culture had
been destroyed. The movement was granted
a brief twenty years before everything was
72
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The New Criterion October 2025
thrown into the cauldron again by Hitler. In
that time, it produced not only some of the
enduring masterpieces of the last century but
also a great deal that was silly, pretentious,
and of minimal artistic value. In both those
respects, of course, modernism is still with us.
Scout troupe
Hanna Diamond
Josephine Baker’s Secret War:
The Aican American Star Who Fought
for France and Freedom.
Yale University Press, 352 pages, $35
reviewed by Paul Devlin
Hanna Diamond’s Josephine Baker’s Secret
War is an enthralling story of World War II
espionage, especially in the rst half (of the
war and the book). The title alludes to the
1948 book La guerre secrète de Joséphine Baker,
by the French spy Jacques Abtey—Baker’s
“handler” (Diamond’s term) and partner in
high adventure. Abtey’s book was never trans-
lated into English, so the allusion does not
risk confusion. Diamond oers a professional
historical narrative, using Abtey’s historically
shaky book as one source among many. Baker’s
contributions to the war eort on behalf of
France have long been recognized: she received
the Légion d’honneur in 1961 and in 2021 was
given a tomb in the Panthéon (a process called
Panthéonisation) on the order of Emmanuel
Macron. But Diamond has provided the most
complete historical study, which is sure to be
denitive, and in the process has uncovered
much about Baker’s activities unknown or
undetailed until now.
Baker and Abtey engaged in numerous
important missions across North Aica and
elsewhere in the early years of the war. This
was not a matter of passing along whispers in
nightclubs—Baker provided cover for Abtey
(“a slippery, maverick gure”) on serious spy
missions. They traipsed together with Baker’s
menagerie of animals, ostensibly en route to
performances, which enabled Abtey to pass
intelligence to the British in the uncertain,
tumultuous days of mid-1940. Readers im-
pressed and charmed by their gallant team-
work, recounted with aplomb in the early
chapters, will be disappointed to hear that
they fell out aer the war over the question
of book royalties.
Diamond is a professor of history at Cardi
University. She is the author of two previous
books on wartime France and as such was ide-
ally situated to write this book, knowing how
to nd and evaluate pertinent sources. She has
consulted French military and diplomatic ar-
chives, as well as local archives in France, Baker
archives at Yale and Stanford, black American
newspapers (which closely followed Baker’s
tours and movements), and Noël Coward’s
archive and that of other prominent gures
in Baker’s orbit. Diamond appears to have
le no stone unturned. She is a strong writer
with an eye for detail and the capacity to turn
complicated sources into a readable narrative.
A good example of the sort of unpublicized,
uncredited accomplishment that Diamond
has discovered is Baker’s key role in the Allied
invasion of North Aica, which, she notes,
neither Abtey nor Baker (in autobiographies)
acknowledged. She quotes the 1951 account of
Paul Jensen, an ocer in the American counter-
intelligence corps, who noted that Baker “was
our No. 1 contact in Morocco,” supporting the
mission “at great risk to her own life.” Diamond
writes that
Baker provided Jensen with the names of Nazi
espionage agents in hiding, who could have in-
cited an armed revolt among the Arabs against
the exposed southern ank of American troops.
Baker’s intelligence led to the capture of hun-
dreds of enemy agents.
At the same time, Diamond has a tendency
not to introduce quotations, sometimes re-
producing long sentences without indicating
who is speaking, instead pointing the reader
to an endnote. For instance, describing events
of early 1941, Diamond writes,
Baker le Algiers for Casablanca, reassuring her
iends that she and Abtey would send through
visas allowing them to join the pair in Morocco.
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73The New Criterion October 2025
She insisted on travelling with a bevy of creatures
in tow, asserting that this was necessary, since
“Josephine without her animals would imme-
diately look suspicious.”
The reader is pointed to an endnote, and the
source for the quotation is Baker herself. This
kind of thing does not diminish the book, but
it is a quirk nonetheless.
Baker was born in St. Louis in 1906 and
found her way to France as an entertainer
in the 1920s. France made her a superstar.
Diamond does not dwell on Baker’s early life,
and rightly so, as it’s available elsewhere. She
does cover Baker’s rise to fame and fortune
in France, as it helps establish her intense,
personal connection to her adopted coun-
try. Baker had briey returned to the United
States in 1936, aer a decade in France, to
headline a reboot of the Ziegfeld Follies,
which opped. She doesn’t seem to have had
a thought of returning stateside in France’s
darkest hour—she was utterly committed to
doing what she could, especially before the
American entry to the war, when the future
of France looked particularly grim.
While Diamond’s book does not dwell on
questions of identity, it nevertheless provides
much food for thought on the topic. A name
that does not appear in the book is that of
Pablo Picasso, who also adopted France as
his home (and had a harder time doing so
than Baker). Tracing Baker’s wartime move-
ments would yield an incomprehensible map
of crisscrossing lines, while Picasso remained
in Paris. An interesting comparative study
might be made of Baker, Picasso, and shiing
national identities within the ame of the war.
At a gala in 1943 in Algiers to raise money for
the Free French forces, Baker gave an emo-
tional performance for Charles de Gaulle and
other important gures in attendance. De
Gaulle had previously given Baker a small
gold Cross of Lorraine. As Diamond writes:
At the culmination of her performance, as she
sang the French national anthem, a huge trico-
lour ag with a 6-metre-wide Cross of Lorraine
on it dropped down dramatically behind her.
Diamond notes that Baker had the ag made
just for the occasion by local Algerian seam-
stresses. There’s something about this moment
that exemplies Baker’s deep love for France
and showbusiness.
Years later, Baker’s war record was be-
smirched by Walter Winchell, who was ir-
ritated with her advocacy for American civil
rights. Winchell’s attacks did not hold sway
in France, but Diamond’s book is a welcome
correction to them. Baker later gained more
notoriety for adopting a group of children of
various ethnic backgrounds, which she called
her “rainbow family.” One of these children,
Jean-Claude Baker, became a New York restau-
rateur and character/raconteur, opening Chez
Josephine in 1986, which is still in business.
Compromise morals
Peter Charles Hoer
Three Speeches That Saved the Union:
Clay, Calhoun, Webster, and the Crisis
of 1850.
New York University Press, 248 pages, $32
reviewed by Marc M. Arkin
In 1846, lured by the call of Manifest Des-
tiny, the United States was preparing to in-
vade Mexico. The prospect of Mexico’s vast
unsettled lands rekindled the conict over the
expansion of slavery that had been smoldering
just beneath the surface of American politics
since the Compromise of 1820. Better known
as the Missouri Compromise, that arrange-
ment bought a temporary truce between the
sections by excluding slavery om land north
of 3630' in territory acquired by the Loui-
siana Purchase and maintaining the balance
of power between slave and ee states in the
Senate by admitting Maine and Missouri to
the Union at the same time.
The opening salvo in the renewed con-
ontation came during a routine debate over
military appropriations when David Wilmot,
a Democratic backbencher om Pennsylvania,
rose om his seat and introduced an amend-
ment to the pending bill requiring
74
Books
The New Criterion October 2025
that as an express and fundamental condition of
the acquisition of any territory om the Republic
of Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary ser-
vitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.
The so-called Wilmot Proviso passed the
House through a coalition of Northern
Democrats and Northern Whigs over the
united opposition of Southerners om both
parties. The proviso was then defeated in the
now Southern-dominated Senate, again along
sectional lines. “As if by magic,” one Boston
newspaper announced, the proviso “brought
to a head the great question that is about to
divide the American people.”
The lands eventually ceded by Mexico
in 1848 at the end of the war—most of the
Southwest as well as the Republics of Califor-
nia and Texas—presented the raw materials of
eight new states as well as parts of several oth-
ers. Many Americans believed the question of
slavery was moot because the climate and ter-
rain in the West were unsuited to plantation
agriculture. But, for Southerners, slavery was
more than an economic system; it was a point
of honor in a culture based on honor. As one
Alabaman wrote, “When the war worn soldier
returns to his home, is he to be told that he
cannot carry his property to the country won
with his blood?” Death would be preferable
to such “social and sectional degradation.”
“Property” in this context encompassed slaves.
Both sections recognized that permitting or
excluding slavery throughout the territory
would give the other side dominance in the
national government for generations to come.
And, as a practical matter, slaveholders feared
that a patchwork of slave and ee states would
prove an irresistible enticement to their hu-
man property to run away.
Two years later, as California and Texas
were on the verge of entering the Union and
a newly founded Free Soil Party was roiling
the political waters, the crisis reached the boil-
ing point. Driven by sectional rivalries, the
House took three weeks and sixty-ve ballots
to choose a speaker. Talk of disunion circu-
lated openly. Members carried rearms in the
Capitol. Southerners readied plans for a July
convention in Nashville to “devise and adopt
some mode of resistance to northern aggres-
sion.” Behind the scenes, Kentucky’s Senator
Henry Clay was devising yet another plan to
buy o the South just as he had in 1820 and
in the Nullication Crisis of 1833.
The plan resulted in one of the most sig-
nicant oratorical displays in the history of
the Senate. Although the legislative wrangling
lasted a full six months, the main events took
place over a month in the winter of 1850 with
three speeches supporting Clay’s plan. The
protagonists—Henry Clay, John Calhoun,
and Daniel Webster—had dominated Ameri-
can public life for decades. All three had been
born during the American Revolution and
had devoted their careers to preserving its
legacy. Clay and Webster were nationalists
for whom the Union itself was sacred; Cal-
houn was a sectionalist who argued that the
Union could only survive if the North and
South shared power equally. The preserva-
tion of slavery was his nonnegotiable demand.
The speeches also marked the end of an era.
Within two years all three speakers were dead.
The mechanics of the compromise fell to a
new generation of leaders.
I
n his most recent book, Peter Charles Hof-
fer, Distinguished Research Professor at the
University of Georgia, sets out to examine
this crucial Senate exchange in what he de-
scribes as a new format, presenting his schol-
arly version of the texts of the three speeches
interleaved paragraph by paragraph with his
own “running commentary.” Hoer’s aim is
to provide the reader with the historical con-
text of the speeches and their references as
well as with the opportunity to appreciate
the nature and importance of rhetoric in the
antebellum republic.
Rhetoric was an art cultivated by ambi-
tious men, particularly advocates and politi-
cians, since classical times. All three speakers
were lawyers and, as Hoer repeatedly states,
therefore skilled in persuasion. They believed
that carefully chosen words could sway their
hearers and, hopefully in this case, lead to a
resolution that would preserve the Union. Of
course, as we all know, they did not save the
Union, but “Three Speeches That Postponed
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75The New Criterion October 2025
the Civil War” has far less cachet than the
book’s actual title, Three Speeches that Saved
the Union: Clay, Calhoun, Webster and the
Crisis of 1850.
One might ask: why this particular project
at this particular time? Professor Hoer can-
not resist observing:
As in 1850, “the hour seems very dark indeed”
as topics of sectional character dominate the
public conversation. Our national legislature is
once again marked by political party animosity,
so erce that Congress periodically teeters on
unworkability, the nation’s bills may go unpaid,
and members of Congress routinely behave in
uncivil conduct . . . . History, it would seem,
does repeat itself, unless we are wise enough to
learn its lessons.
Pace Professor Hoer, the question is how to
read the entrails.
On February 5, Clay opened the drama by
presenting eight resolutions to the Senate. The
rst six were grouped in pairs, each oering a
concession to both sections. The rst would
admit California as a ee state and organize
the rest of the Mexican cession without any
restriction on the subject of slavery. The second
oered to settle the boundary dispute between
Texas and New Mexico in favor of the latter
while having the federal government assume
the debts, largely held by Southerners, con-
tracted by slaveholding Texas while it was a
republic. The third pair called for the abolition
of the slave trade in the District of Columbia,
long an abolitionist demand, but guaranteed
the existence of slavery itself in the capital.
The nal pair tilted entirely toward the South,
denying Congress power over the interstate
slave trade and strengthening the law that en-
abled slaveholders to recapture fugitives who
had ed to ee territory. Clay spoke without
notes for two days, exhausting both speaker
and hearers alike. His style was orotund and
prolix, full of informal asides that today would
be called “inside baseball,” conrming his sta-
tus as the ultimate insider.
The next act fell to Calhoun. On March 4,
gaunt and near death, he was carried into the
Senate chamber on a chaise wrapped in an-
nels, too weak om consumption to deliver
the speech himself. (James Mason of Virginia
delivered it on his behalf; Calhoun died at
month’s end.) In straightforward form and
blunt language, Calhoun staked out his ground.
He warned that the only way to preserve the
Union was to accede to the South’s demands,
blaming the crisis on Northern agitation of
the slavery question and Northern aggression
against Southern interests. It was a distillation
of his long-held positions, including that slav-
ery was a positive good for slaveholder and
enslaved alike.
The March 7 closing argument fell to Daniel
Webster, the famed New England statesman
and advocate. Webster had opposed the Mexi-
can War, in which he lost his only son, and
voted in favor of the Wilmot Proviso. By the
end of his speech his reputation as a staunch
antislavery man was in tatters. He famously
began, in lines memorized by generations of
American schoolchildren, “I wish to speak
today, not as a Massachusetts man, not as a
Northern man, but as an American. I speak
today for the preservation of the Union. Hear
me for my cause.” Webster then methodically
threaded his way through the elements of a
compromise that he, like Clay, hoped would
save the Union.
Urging his fellow Northerners not to bait
the South and warning disunionists that se-
cession would bring “convulsion,” he picked
away at the state settlements. Nature would
exclude slavery om New Mexico even if it
entered the Union as a slave state; California
by agreement must be a ee state; the pre-
existing rights of Texas would be violated if
slavery were excluded om her territory. It was
a closely argued courtroom performance, lucid
and full of memorable turns, even theatrics.
Perhaps most important, Webster agreed with
Clay that a stronger fugitive-slave law, better to
protect Southerners’ interests in their human
property, was crucial to preserving the Union.
Despite the best of intentions, that concession
arguably paved the way for the Civil War.
Professor Hoer seems torn as he assesses
the signicance of these speeches, paragraph
by paragraph. He badly wants to align him-
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Books
The New Criterion October 2025
self with recent scholarship arguing that the
Civil War was not inevitable, that by a proper
mix of persuasion, compromise measures, and
restraint war could have been avoided. But
everything in his commentary points the other
way: so long as the North opposed slavery
and the South embraced it, the gap between
the two was unbridgeable. As Lincoln said in
another memorable piece of antebellum ora-
tory, “A house divided against itself cannot
stand. . . . [T]his government cannot endure
permanently, half slave, and half ee.”
More unfortunate, Hoer’s chosen format
gives neither history nor oratory its due. In-
stead, the running commentary distracts the
reader om the texts, breaking the ow that
the speakers sought so hard to create. Much of
Hoer’s commentary is itself hard to follow.
There are jarring references to twenty-rst-
century popular culture and lapses in both
ordinary grammar and legal analysis. For ex-
ample, it seems anachronistic repeatedly to call
Webster an “originalist,” since that term did not
come into currency until the last quarter of the
twentieth century. Webster doubtless felt bound
by the legacy of the founding generation, but
not by “the original public meaning” of the
Constitution as, say, Justice Scalia did. Simi-
larly, it seems odd to nd a historian of Hoer’s
eminence so lackadaisical in his treatment of
Southern antislavery sentiment at the time of
the founding, a point that Webster emphasized
in trying to draw the sections together.
Perhaps the moral of this story lies just outside
Professor Hoer’s ame—and well beyond the
knowledge of his subjects. The Fugitive Slave
Act of 1850, which was key to the Compromise
of 1850, turned even moderate Northern opin-
ion against the South. The act brought down
the full weight of the federal government on
the side of slaveholders. Under its provisions,
black people who had been living in the North
for years—some of them legally ee—were
seized and sent into slavery, eectively unable
to challenge their rendition under the terms
of the act. Aer witnessing the 1854 return
to slavery of the fugitive Anthony Burns,
marched in chains by federal ocers down
to Boston Harbor, Amos Adams Lawrence
spoke for many when he wrote, “We went
to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative
compromise Union Whigs and woke up stark
mad abolitionists.” Although Professor Hoer
provides the reader with the raw materials that
led to the Compromise of 1850, he does not
reect on the irony that in attempting to save
the Union, the compromisers sowed the seeds
of its dissolution. How do we draw history’s
lesson om that?
77The New Criterion October 2025
Notebook
Honeymoon behind the Iron Curtain
by Jacob Howland
Aer my wife and I were married in June
1981, we wanted to travel somewhere that nei-
ther of us had previously visited. We decided
to spend our honeymoon in some of the so-
called People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe:
the Soviet satellites of Yugoslavia, Romania,
Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. (We couldn’t
get visas for Poland.) Though they were all in
the grip of the Soviet empire, these countries,
or at least their main cities, varied widely in
aspect and mood. Belgrade’s brutalist architec-
ture and leaded-gasoline fumes oppressed the
soul. Budapest seemed vibrant and happy, while
Prague lay miserable in its late-medieval beauty.
I recently found the handwritten journal I
kept of our honeymoon in those days before
laptops and cellphones. As a twenty-one-year-
old newlywed, I knew little about the physical,
moral, and political destruction wrought by
Communism. The journal makes it clear that
I didn’t fully appreciate the burdens borne by
the people we met, or the courage of those
who refused to conceal them. But my memo-
ries of our journey behind the Iron Curtain
outlived the world we traveled through and
helped to form the philosophical and religious
sensibility of my adult life.
Our trip started in Vienna, where we visited
the Judenplatz and Judengasse, names for van-
ished people om a vanished world. We saw
no Jews on Jew Lane, despite a lone synagogue
and community center. There was a colossal
World War II monument with a triumphal
arch built by the Soviets in 1945, when they
were still our wartime ally and occupied a por-
tion of the city. The Soviets le in 1955, in ex-
change for Austrian neutrality in the Cold War,
which spared Vienna the fate of East Berlin
but gave the city a vacant indeterminacy. The
gray imperial buildings near our hotel anked
deserted squares and avenues, and an eerie si-
lence hung over the city at night. But there was
culture! We attended an expensive, mediocre
piano concert of Liszt, Chopin, and Dvořák.
I don’t recall any other war memorials, as if
the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria
in March 1938, had never happened.
The public memory of the past was more
evident in Yugoslavia than in Austria, though
in ten years the county itself was to become a
memory. The train to Zagreb, a pleasant city
of churches and winding cobblestone streets
teeming with children, passed by a hillside
on which stones arranged in massive letters
spelled : the name of Yugoslavia’s for-
mer president, who had died a year earlier. We
were seated next to an old lady in a babushka,
who wept when she told us that the Nazis
had murdered her sons and wept again when
I asked which side she would support in a
war between the United States and the
(“Neither one”). She and I conversed in Ger-
man, a language spoken throughout Central
Europe by people old enough to have learned
it during years of occupation or imprisonment.
The next stop was Sarajevo, where blue-
eyed, red-haired Muslims prayed at the
mosque and steep green hills owed with
cataracts of garbage dumped om the neigh-
borhoods above. In a synagogue that had been
78
Notebook
The New Criterion October 2025
turned into a museum, a huge, leather-bound
book on the bimah—the altar where the Torah
was once read—listed the names of thousands
of local Jews slaughtered during the Holo-
caust. We noticed the minaret directly outside
our hotel window only when it jolted us into
wakefulness with the call to morning prayer.
The orange juice at breakfast was bitter with
crushed seeds.
Our bus to Dubrovnik was delayed for
hours; inquiries were futile. Accustomed to
life in a society where workers had incentives
to do their jobs, I didn’t understand why
the agents at the ticket windows couldn’t be
bothered to acknowledge our presence. Ev-
erywhere we went, people used side hustles
to make ends meet. The bus driver refused to
let us stow our backpacks; we had to buy two
extra tickets for them to ride in the seats. We
journeyed for nine hours through arid, rocky
hills until we reached Dubrovnik, whose white
medieval walls shone in the sun above the
aquamarine waters of the Adriatic.
Going to Romania required a bus to Belgrade
to catch the train. Our bus stopped equently
as it wound through lush mountain forests,
picking up mud-caked farmers carrying agri-
cultural implements. At one point the driver
accepted a package that lay in the aisle beside
him for a few miles: a eshly dressed whole
mutton wrapped in thick brown paper. Our
brief time in Belgrade was enlivened by the
game of soccer we played in a park with pre-
teen boys who kissed my wife every time a goal
was scored. Years later, when those nice boys
had become young men, I wondered whether
any of them could possibly have participated in
the terrible crimes committed by the Serbian
armed forces under Slobodan Milošević.
On the train to Bucharest, the police
checked identity papers several times, as
happened whenever we approached a bor-
der in Eastern Europe. In the atlands of
southern Romania, we passed endless elds
of sunowers rooted in rich black earth and
oil derricks pumping liquid gold. Where did
that wealth go? A passenger wrote down the
name of President Ceaușescu, and tried to
tell us something about the Communist ruler
that we couldn’t follow. He then tore up the
paper and threw it out the window. Another
man incautiously praised the United States for
boycotting the 1980 Moscow Summer Olym-
pics, while a third, evidently determined not
to miss a single word, watched him with an
expression of intense concentration. Was he
an agent of the secret police?
The television in our hotel room in Bu-
charest had two channels. One featured peas-
ant women dancing in traditional Romanian
dress, the other tractors harvesting wheat.
The owners of the house where we’d stayed
in Dubrovnik had watched the American tele-
vision show Dallas in the evening, but any
Western show in impoverished, oppressed
Romania would have been an undesirable
provocation. When we went out to nd food,
we saw a long line of people waiting to buy
milk and a butcher shop with a single fat-
lled sausage; otherwise, the stainless-steel
shelves were empty. The National Museum
was ringed by guards with submachine guns,
the galleries hung with paintings by Madame
Ceaușescu. They featured faces with black
discs in place of eyes, like Little Orphan An-
nie. We encountered no other visitors that
day. Aerwards, it was a relief to nd a leafy
neighborhood with quaint homes and onion-
domed churches, a remnant of an older world.
When I returned to Romania in 1997 to
speak at the University of Bucharest, I looked
for that neighborhood, but it had vanished.
It had survived a major earthquake, but the
Ceaușescus, coveting the solid ground on
which it stood, had bulldozed it to build a
palace of almost four million square feet. The
guide who gave me a tour spoke only about
how many rooms and gold xtures the build-
ing contained, as if historical amnesia had been
preserved along with the absurd Communist
palace om the days of People’s Democracies.
But there was another buried piece of Bu-
charest that I discovered on my second visit.
The city had once been home, I was told, to
something like thirty synagogues; the Com-
munists tore down all but two. In 1997, one
was still open for services; the other had been
converted into a museum of the Romanian
Holocaust. I visited the synagogue one morn-
Notebook
79The New Criterion October 2025
ing and was served vodka and cake. The doz-
en people I met there and over lunch at the
Jewish community center, where an old man
took uneaten rolls om the tables and tucked
them into his briefcase, were all Holocaust
survivors: men in their seventies and eighties.
At the Holocaust museum, my guide—also
a survivor—shocked me when he remarked,
“Aber der Antonescu war ein guter Mann”—
Antonescu (the prime minster during World
War II, who was executed aer the war for
overseeing the murder of hundreds of thou-
sands of Romanian Jews) was a good man.
How so? Because, he explained with a deadpan
expression, in Poland they killed all the Jews,
in Romania only half.
Aer Romania, Hungary felt like a Western
country. Budapest featured an excellent art
museum, buses we rode for ee (we never
gured out how to buy tickets, but no one
checked for them anyway), and bustling mar-
kets full of uits, spices, and owers. Yet the
shadow of World War II hung over the city,
as did the overlapping shadow of Commu-
nism. We saw buildings scarred by the spray
of automatic weapons; were those om the
war, or the brutal Soviet suppression of the
Hungarian uprising in 1956?
On the train to Prague, I spoke—again in
German—with a Soviet national who’d fought
in World War II. He was one of 5.7 million
Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands,
of whom 3.3 million were executed or killed
by starvation and disease while in the custody
of the
SS
. When he returned om the concen-
tration camp to the in 1945, he was sent
to the Gulag, where he was imprisoned until
1954—standard practice, as Stalin thought no
good soldier would have surrendered. “Every
day,” he said, “like [Solzhenitsyn’s] One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: unthinkable, but
these things pass.”
This former prisoner warned us that
Czechoslovakia suered om excessive adher-
ence to “the Party,” and our experience con-
rmed this. The failure of the Prague Spring of
1968, crushed by Warsaw Pact forces equipped
with Soviet weapons, still bent the people’s
backs. The Czech border was heavily guarded,
and the train om Budapest stopped half a
dozen times so that police could examine the
passengers’ papers. We arrived in Prague aer
midnight and went directly to the address in
our guidebook but found no hotel. The pro-
prietor at the next hotel we came across told us
“There are no rooms in Prague.” This proved
to be a cruel joke. The next day, we went to an
empty restaurant where some waiters grudg-
ingly served us and then immediately tried to
take our plates away. Soldiers goose-stepped
around the government oces. Prague’s fa-
mous old buildings were hidden behind scaf-
folding, but no one was working on them.
Everyone in the city seemed unhappy, and in
a mood to make us feel that way, too.
One day we passed a crowd in ont of a
shop window where a black-and-white televi-
sion was broadcasting the wedding of Prince
Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. People
watched with rapt attention, but their faces
masked what they thought and felt about those
fairy-tale images. Immured within the brutal
and arbitrary constructions of history, did they
see a promise or a taunt, or something else
entirely, in those images? But walls fall and life
goes on, and today no Czech citizen under the
age of forty recalls those bad years.
N
ow I see that our honeymoon was all about
remembering and forgetting: how those two
actions are sometimes necessary, yet impos-
sible, and what they cost, and give us in re-
turn. In Vienna, bad conscience attempted
to consign the past to oblivion but produced
an inhuman coldness that brought that very
past to mind. The people we met in Eastern
Europe couldn’t forget what they’d suered
during the war, or were now suering under
the Communists. They seemed eager to pour
out things long stored in their hearts, as one
sometimes does with strangers one will never
see again. The old Yugoslav woman on the
train to Zagreb tried, for the thousandth time,
to unburden herself of a sorrow she’d borne for
half her life. The gray-haired man who’d been
imprisoned in German and Soviet camps had
long ago put aside any attempt to wring mean-
ing out of his suering and wanted to impart
some hard, even philosophical truths to a so
and inexperienced American couple. That the
80
Notebook
The New Criterion October 2025
Czechs were brimming with bitterness sug-
gests they were not completely resigned to
their fate but harbored some buried, yet still
living, hope. Perhaps the young man on the
train to Bucharest, the one who supported the
American boycott of the Olympics, did too. Or
perhaps a desperate longing for liberty simply
overpowered his instinct for self-preservation.
The suering and yearning of these men and
women are worth remembering, because the
past is never past even if it is forgotten, and
because we are in danger of losing the taste for
liberty long before we are irrevocably deprived
of it. The Fascists and Communists used fear
and distrust to isolate and control people, and
there’s plenty of both in our society. But de-
criminalized drugs and addictive digital feeds
achieve the same ends, only more eectively.
Lotus eaters are more compliant than popula-
tions ruled by force: housed in their private or
virtual realities, they don’t miss the ee and
unmediated relationships they’ve lost. We risk
being cut o om meaningful human connec-
tion more completely than the people behind
the Iron Curtain ever were. And it is real human
meaning—communicated face-to-face, not in
spite of the dierences that separated us om
those people, but because of them—that abides
in my memory of our honeymoon.
The treasure of memory is not an inert pos-
session. The Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld
calls memory a “living and eervescent reser-
voir,” and over the years I’ve glimpsed silvery
ashes of new meaning darting in its depths.
In 1981, my relationship to Judaism extended
little beyond my early life, when I wore a
yarmulke and drank sweet wine at my grand-
parents’ Passover Seders. It seems to me now
that I was drawn to the empty Jewish quarters
and synagogues of Central and Eastern Eu-
rope as by the invisible hands of my maternal
grandfather, pulling his little grandson toward
a ghost-crowded shul to say a commemora-
tive prayer for his own long-deceased father.
By the time I returned to Bucharest in 1997,
seeds of awareness, planted in childhood and
watered during our honeymoon, had begun
to sprout: I’d joined a synagogue and learned
to sing some prayers in Hebrew. I later wrote
a book on the Talmud and published articles
about Soviet literature and the experience of
intellectuals at Auschwitz.
Appelfeld’s native tongue was German,
but he wrote in Hebrew, an old-new lan-
guage suited to his lifelong exploration of
the new meaning of old experiences. Human
life springs om the ambiguous and inde-
terminate past, spurred by memory. Perhaps
this is why we were so moved by Prague’s
ancient Jewish cemetery, where dark, densely
packed gravestones sprouted om the earth
at all angles, like some sort of wild and stub-
born crabgrass.
Forthcoming in The New Criterion:
Classics gone crazy by Victor Davis Hanson
Peking Lear by Anthony Daniels
Mies van der Rohe & history by J. Duncan Berry
Good genes by David Dubal
Stefan Zweig’s twentieth century by Mark Falco
