THE WOMAN MOST LIKELY TO OPERATE BEHIND THE SCENES

Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis by Catrine Clay - Harper (2016)

Writing about those who lived their lives in the spotlight is generally a straightforward pursuit. Their movements are relatively well-documented in letters and newspaper clippings, their accomplishments are recorded in official documents and placards, and some are even immortalized in paintings, poems, and songs. The ambitious scholar can usually dredge up quite a bit of material—albeit murky and decomposed—from various historical archives. There is, after all, a collective understanding that the details of certain lives are worth preserving. These are the lead characters in the drama of human existence. But how does one write about members of the supporting cast? How do we isolate and appreciate those who are seen most clearly in the reflected glow of their spouses, relatives, and acquaintances? It is a daunting task and one that most biographers would never choose to undertake. Catrine Clay gives it a valiant effort in her stunning biography, Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis. Although she is not entirely successful in her attempt, allowing her focus to drift at times to the more obvious subject, she does at least strive to pay due homage to a woman whose steadfast determination was just as vital to the legacy of Carl Jung as was his beautiful mind. 

Catrine Clay is no stranger to obscure subject matter. Her 2010 biography of Manchester United goalkeeper Bert Trautmann won a British Sports Book Award for Biography of the Year and was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Award. Unless you are an avid football fan, Bert Trautmann would probably not be considered a household name. On the other hand, Clay’s 2006 book, King, Kaiser, Tsar, is about King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II—three of the most recognizable (and ridiculed) men of their time. Clay’s genius in this case is deployed in illuminating the overlooked connections between the three rulers, thereby bringing perspective and clarity to wider international machinations. In Labyrinths Clay makes the most of both approaches: she chooses an obscure woman to focus on, and uses her subject to reveal the hidden influences behind the great figure of Carl Jung. This is a book about an unrecognized woman and her vicarious contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. The argument Clay puts forth is that Carl Jung would never have accomplished all that he accomplished without the steady, calming force of Emma Jung keeping him upright. 

Emma Jung was born to one of the wealthiest families in Sweden. She was loved by her parents and afforded every opportunity for happiness and success. When she met and married Carl Jung, the son of an impoverished pastor and a mentally-unstable mother, the circumstances of her life were dramatically altered. While working at a mental hospital in Zurich, Carl was required to live with his new wife among the troubled men and women he aimed to treat. Writes Clay, 

So began Emma’s new life as the wife of an Irrenarzt, living amongst hysterics, schizophrenics, catatonics, alcoholics, addicts, chronic neurotics and suicidal depressives—people who had lost their minds for one reason or another, and who spat and screamed and paced the wards, up and down, shouting obscenities, tearing at their hair, breaking the furniture.The contrast with her former life was complete. 

Everyone who met Emma Jung, including the many men and women who went on to define the field of psychoanalysis, were impressed by the graceful manner in which she endured. She stood by her charismatic, volatile husband as he travelled to meet intellectuals across the globe, uprooted their growing family multiple times, and carried on a number of hurtful extramarital affairs with analysts and patients alike. A modern woman might wonder why Emma Jung didn’t abandon her restless spouse the minute he tried to convince her that a longterm ménage à trois would be ‘healthy’ for their relationship. It can be easy to think of her as weak—another wife whose selfish complacency stands in the way of gender equality. But, as Catrine Clay makes clear, things were not so simple in the case of Emma Jung. To say that Emma allowed her husband to overrule and disrespect her is to ignore the unconventional aspects of her own character. As Clay suggests, 

Carl’s intuition told him that beneath her reticent, formal manner Emma was yearning for something less conventional, more intellectually satisfying, more adventurous—an outlet for her cleverness which she could not have if she married her haut-bourgeois beau. So he embarked on his campaign, bombarding her with letters filled with fascinating ideas about his favorite writers and philosophers, his love of mythology, his work, and he confided in her about his ambitions, his hopes and his fears. And he gave her lists of books to read for discussion next time they met. A seduction by intellect. 

What emerges in Labyrinths is not so much the unequal relationship between a dominant male personality and a submissive female one, but more the vacillating interactions between two expressions of the same personality. Emma Jung’s quiet, contemplative self is difficult to spy in the shadow cast by Carl’s exuberant, arrogant frame, but their private letters reveal a striking compatibility founded upon shared interests and desires. It is almost as though—to use the lens of psychoanalysis—Carl and Emma embodied a single mind of which Carl was the conscious, visible expression and Emma the hidden subconscious one. In fact, it was her role as an open receptacle for feelings and reflections that Clay considers to be…

…Emma’s strength: to be simple and honest in her approach, emphatic but not directive, helping people to find their own way, as she had hers. Or, to use the Jungian term: to individuate. 

Perhaps this is the greatest measure of Emma Jung’s particular strength—that she managed to keep her own interests in sight despite the domineering presence of her husband, that she never let his energy or volume make her feel like less of a person for being quiet and reserved. Emma’s confidence in her abilities as a psychoanalyst grew slowly over the course of their marriage, but she never evolved into the female version of her extroverted spouse. She managed to mature into an entirely different kind of doctor, with an entirely different method of treatment. In fact, many of the men and women who visited the Jung’s for treatment actually preferred Emma’s calm consistency to Carl’s eccentric fits of brilliance. In the end, they could choose the approach that suited them best. Clay writes of Emma’s transformation in the same manner with which Emma herself might describe it—as the kind of uneventful apotheosis that appears naturally at the end of a long period of hard work and perseverance:

She had taken her decisive step: to work as an analyst in her own right…as the years passed and she became increasingly involved in Carl’s work, she found she knew more about it than she realized…she was acquainted with many of the leading lights of psychoanalysis, including Professor Freud of Vienna, and she had met some forward-thinking women too—Hedwig Bleuler and Beatrice Hinkle among them—who had introduced her to new and challenging ideas about women in society. Encouraged by Carl, Emma had become the first president of the Psychological Club of Zurich, where she discovered she could hold her own and rise above the jealousies and rivalries which somehow always surrounded her husband.

Carl Jung was never a perfect husband. His desire to probe and stretch the limits of the mind, as well as the conventions of marriage, often had harmful consequences for Emma. He repeatedly ignored the feelings of his wife and children for the sake of scientific discovery. But Emma Jung’s story is by no means another narrative of female suffering and exploitation. Whether or not he was capable of respecting their marriage, Carl Jung certainly respected his wife’s intellect. If Clay’s account can be trusted, this mattered more to Emma Jung than the sanctity of her marital bed. Her mind was just as lofty and immortal as her husband’s, and her greatest achievement was becoming a respected analyst in her own right. In Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis, Catrine Clay presents a strangely harmonious relationship between two very different individuals. Although she may have been a member of the supporting cast, Emma Jung radiated with her own subtle glow—a light which both softened and enhanced the sputtering firecracker at her side.

Catrine Clay author profile

NYT book review

Guardian book review

THE PEASANT MOST LIKELY TO EVOLVE INTO A MANICHAEAN MESSIAH

Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith - Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2016)

*This post is dedicated to Karen, whose morbid fascination mirrors my own*

Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith is just under seven-hundred pages long. It is a veritable weapon. While I was reading this fantastically dark examination of the man blamed for the fall of the Romanovs, a single sentence kept rising to the surface of my subconscious: it was Kathryn, on the couch, with the biography…

Don’t let the considerable heft of this book intimidate you. The length of Smith’s narrative underscores the inexplicable nature of Rasputin, a man whose cultural immortality seems to feed upon prevailing anxieties. The arch of Rasputin’s life does not make sense, but that is exactly why he became the catalyst of revolution. It was his frustrating intangibility that undermined the authority of the last tsar. The people of Russia—peasants and nobles alike—simply could not understand why Nicholas and Alexandra clung to this filthy, hollow-eyed pilgrim while their empire crumbled around them. Why did the tsarina sacrifice her family and the respect of her people for such an odious creature? Over and over Smith describes deputations sent to the empress to beg her to abandon her ‘friend.’ Even when pornographic cartoons depicting Rasputin and the empress began to circulate, she refused to part with him. This narrative pattern makes for a slow and excruciating read, and leads the reader to the inevitable conclusion that this could have been avoided. This painful cycle of frustration also indicates that the length of Smith’s book was a deliberate (and intelligent) choice. Only by dragging his readers through seven-hundred pages of infuriating behavior and stubborn loyalty on the part of the Russian royals can Smith replicate in his readers the confusion and estrangement felt by the Russian people during the first two decades of the twentieth-century. We are aggravated and exhausted by the countless episodes of senseless obstinance, which could not be fully appreciated in a shorter text. Whether intentionally or not, Rasputin created a gulf between the tsar and his subjects; he became a symbol of imperial folly and a vicarious target at which to vent slanderous revolutionary sentiments. By choosing this mysterious figure over the people of Russia, Nicholas and Alexandra surrendered their power and allowed their reputations to plummet to earth and be dragged through the mud. Rasputin, by his proximity to the throne, revealed the Tzar to be a flawed and ordinary man, capable of sin and foolishness—a man who might be deposed without the certainty of divine punishment. 

Rasputin has always been an enigmatic figure. What many modern readers don’t realize is that he was as elusive during his life as he is today. He carried about him the stench of a corrupt immortality, a supernatural charge that distinguished him from the fleshy mortal beings of the earth. His enemies referred to him as the ‘Holy Devil’—an accurate summation of his conflicting characteristics. He was both irresistible and repulsive, and the people he came into contact with were either instantly intoxicated, or mystified by his power over their friends and family. Rasputin was a magnet, and his reputation changed dramatically depending on the ‘charge’ of each individual he encountered. Writes Smith, 

It was said that this man belonged to a bizarre religious sect that embraced the most wicked forms of sexual perversion, that he was a phony holy man who had duped the emperor and empress into embracing him as their spiritual leader, that he had taken over the Russian Orthodox Church and was bending it to his own immoral designs, that he was a filthy peasant who managed not only to worm his way into the palace, but through deceit and cunning was quickly becoming the true power behind the throne. This man, many were beginning to believe, presented a real danger to the church, to the monarchy, and even to Russia itself. 

Anyone who has ever fallen in love with the world constructed by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Blok will understand the draw of imperial Russia. The heady imagery that defines these narratives cannot be found in any other canon. Part of this has to do with climate—the harsh desolation of Siberia calls for a distinct vocabulary and tone. While previous monarchies (here I am thinking of France before 1789) may have exacerbated public grievances with extravagant displays of wealth, the sheer size of the Russian peasantry and the immeasurable material distance between the wealthy and the poor elevated the drama of the Russian experience to an unprecedented degree. St. Petersburg was an endless tapestry of juxtaposed images—beggars shuffling along in front of colossal palaces, rampant starvation alongside sumptuous feasts—each image so vivid and intense as to appear almost technicolor. The mass hysteria and paranoia saturating Russia at this time embellished ordinary men with mythic, quasi-religious attributes. Writes Smith, 

The life of Rasputin is one of the most remarkable in modern history. It reads like a dark fairy tale. An obscure, uneducated peasant from the wilds of Siberia receives a calling from God and sets out in search of the true faith, a journey that leads him across the vast expanse of Russia for many years before finally bringing him to the palace of the tsar. The royal family takes him in and is bewitched by his piety, his unerring insights into the human soul, and his simple peasant ways. Miraculously, he saves the life of the heir to the throne, but the presence of this outsider, and the influence he wields with the tsar and tsaritsa angers the great men of the realm and they lure him into a trap and kill him. Many believed that the holy peasant had foreseen his death and prophesied that should anything happen to him, the tsar would lose his throne. And so he does, and the kingdom he once ruled is plunged into unspeakable bloodletting and misery for years. 

The young heir Alexei suffered from hemophilia, a genetic disorder inherited from his maternal great-grandmother, Queen Victoria of England. Had he been born a century later, his mother and father might never have depended upon a dubious figure like Rasputin for help. However, at the time of Alexei’s birth, very little was known about the sinister disease plaguing the royal families of Europe—a disease kept alive by the accustomed practice of inbreeding. When the only son of the ruling tsar was diagnosed, panic descended upon the royal palace. Compounded with this was the sudden and disorienting spiritual crisis surging through Russia. Questions and insecurities abounded, and an equal number of prophets and messiahs appeared to provide answers and salvation. Smith contextualizes the bizarre faith of the Nicholas and Alexandra when he writes, 

The restless spiritual seeking of the fin de siècle was a pan-European phenomenon. Much of this can be explained by the declining influence of the church, and institutionalized religion in general, throughout the West, but there were other specific domestic factors that lent a greater urgency to this spiritual searching in Russia. Beginning with the end of serfdom in 1861 and stretching into the early years of the twentieth century, Russia, arguably more so than any of the countries of Europe, was experiencing rapid and profoundly unsettling change as a traditional, agricultural society tried to modernize practically overnight. Along with this enormous transformation, the shattering defeat in the Russo-Japanese War followed by the Revolution of 1905 that shook the old order to its foundations left Russians with an inescapable sense of alienation, foreboding, and imminent crisis. The old institutions, and the old beliefs that went with them, no longer seemed adequate to address the troubling questions of a new and, to many, uncertain and frightening world. 

Wealthy Russians and peasants alike were anxious for guidance in this strange and transient world. Many saviors presented themselves to the wandering masses, but it was their fate to be ridiculed as soon as they were admired. The Russian press, newly released from the oppressive fetters of censorship, dissected these hopeful apostles with vicious gossip and unrelenting scrutiny. The circle of notable Russians was relatively small, and the public took obsessive care to analyze and follow every outsider the nobility accepted into their exclusive ranks. Unfortunately, once the principal family in Russia embraced him as their own personal messiah, Rasputin stepped directly into the role of the despised ‘royal favorite.’ Describing a pattern that will be familiar to history buffs, Shakespeare enthusiasts, and Lord of the Rings fans everywhere, Smith defines the ‘favorite’ as:

The shadowy advisor with the ear of the ruler, often an outsider with no connections to the political-social elites and frequently with no official position, has been a reoccurring figure throughout history…Favorites were invariably perceived as cunning and manipulative, the wicked hidden hand behind the throne. Favorites were depicted as two-faced, deceitful, ambitious and obsequious in the self-abasing struggle for power…To insiders, their place alongside the ruler was seen as a usurpation of the proper state officials and institutions; to outsiders, the range of their power assumed fancifully grotesque proportions and every government mistake was laid at their feet.

By examining the root cause of anti-Rasputin hostility—the unconscious prejudices and jealousies fueling malicious gossip—Douglas Smith portrays his subject as a man demonized by those who thought a lowly peasant unworthy of acclaim, and harassed by a paranoid army of politicians, church fathers, and journalists determined to discredit him even if it meant fabricating evidence. The unfortunate truth is that we will never know whether Rasputin had one or two faces. He was, and continues to be, an enigmatic specter, crouching in the shadows behind the doomed throne of imperial Russia. Perhaps our continuing fascination is evidence that we too are guilty of heaping the sins of an entire establishment onto the back of a single man. Ambiguous in its conclusions, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, is an excellent investigation into the power of belief, and the danger of mass hysteria. 

Douglas Smith author website

Evening Standard Review

NYT book review

A BRIEF INTERMISSION

Dear readers, relatives, Mom...

I am taking a brief holiday from the blog this week--my first since embarking upon this rewarding project! It also seems like a wonderful opportunity to say thank you for the many stimulating conversations and words of encouragement and support, for which I am truly grateful. Next week, we will pick up once again with Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith. Rich in contrasting imagery--from the bleak planes of Siberia to the gilded extravagance of the Winter Palace--this colossal biography will satisfy anyone with an appetite for Imperial Russia and its accompanying themes of glamour, mysticism, tragedy and hysteria.

See you next week!


Kathryn

THE WOMAN MOST LIKELY TO TURN 'ONE MAN'S TRASH' INTO THE NEXT BIG THING

Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern by Francine Prose - Yale University Press (2015)

I absorb history like a parched sponge absorbs water. I spend roughly twenty hours per-week reading non-fiction accounts of historical events, jumping from Ancient Rome to Imperial Russia with minimal motion sickness. In my free time I watch sensationalized reenactments of past dynasties and social movements on tv. Even the most *liberal* interpretations (i.e. my personal favorite,The Borgias, starring Jeremy Irons) usually manage to toss some factual information in with all the bodice-ripping and bubonic plague. The truth of the matter is that even the most ‘boring’ and uneventful period in human history—take the Great Depression for example—can be rendered fascinating by a skilled and artful historian. When you read as much as I do, you tend to arrive at new texts with a fair amount of accumulated knowledge. Thus, most of the biographies I’ve read have embellished what I already know. This is endlessly rewarding for me, but I sometimes wonder whether the opinion of a less knowledgable critic would be more beneficial for my readers. Several of my favorite biographies would overwhelm and repel a reader who lacks a substantial foundation. It can sometimes be hard for me to distinguish the information contained within the pages of a single book, from all the scraps I’ve collected throughout my many years of scavenging. 

This week I decided to read about a subject I know very little about: modern art. I know even less about Peggy Guggenheim and her incredible collection of paintings and sculptures housed in Venice’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Francine Prose’s concise, intimate peek into the life of a passionate, erratic collector, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, was really my first foray into the world behind the canvas. Best known for her novels, The Glorious Ones, Household Saints, and Blue Angel, Prose writes with the tender sincerity of a fiction writer conceiving of a new character. Perhaps it is her humanity and compassion that led Prose to serve as the 2007 president of the PEN American Center—an organization dedicated to literary expression and the defense of free speech. 

If there is one thing to be said about modern art in general, it’s that it relies much more on context and an awareness of contemporary events than allegorical or religious depictions do. It is, of course, very easy to dismiss a canvas by Jackson Pollock as so many droplets and drizzles. But once you take the time to read about Pollock himself, the social climate that fertilized his particular brand of genius, and the challenges he faced as an artist and an individual, you begin to develop a soft spot for the gloopy chaos that defines his aesthetic. Understanding modern art is hard work and it takes much more than a trip to the museum and an extended staring contest with a canvas to appreciate its worth. Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow upon Prose’s charming portrait is that it makes me want to do the hard work. I want to walk into the MOMA or the Tate Modern armed with the knowledge I need to really read the stories condensed and simplified within the cryptic forms of the modern. It seems to me that modern art is, in many ways, a hieroglyphic mode of expression. Once you figure out a way to interpret the various symbols and motifs, a new world of emotions and revelations is available to you—much like what the Rosetta Stone did for our understanding of ancient Egypt. I don’t want to be just another complacent observer who would rather dismiss than discover. I want to learn the language. 

Peggy Guggenheim deserves to be remembered for her uncanny foresight. Writes Prose,

Among the artists represented in the collection that she began to assemble long before the significance and value of their work was widely or fully recognized are Picasso, Pollock, Brancusi, Arp, Braque, Calder, de Kooning, Rothko, Duchamp, Ernst, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Magritte, Miró, Mondrian, Man Ray, Henry Moore, and Francis Bacon.

Even to one with as little knowledge as I possess, this strikes me as a veritable pantheon of modern artists. If one person—let alone a woman—managed to amass a comparable collection of Renaissance works, she would be lauded as something of a deity. Instead, because of the controversial subject matter she was drawn to, Guggenheim was ridiculed and scorned her entire life. Prose suggests that she, 

…seems to have been born with, or developed early, the urge to unnerve, and this impulse or compulsion would serve her well as she devoted her life to showing art that was truly new and sometimes disturbing. Her idiosyncratic combination of outspokenness and reserve, of shyness and a craving for attention helped her broker the match between the world of twentieth-century art and the world of glamour, gossip, and media publicity. For better or worse, for better and worse, her tendency to mythologize herself and the artists she represented helped shape the contemporary art world, to turn artists into celebrities and socialites into art collectors.

Perhaps people resented her privileged upbringing in one of the wealthiest Manhattan clans. Perhaps her very public and very messy relationships made it difficult for people to take her seriously as an art critic. Perhaps her indifferent attitude towards her two children cost her society’s respect. Whatever the underlying reason, Prose is anxious to emphasize that Peggy Guggenheim was always a controversial woman and rarely made excuses for herself. She was flippant, she was flighty, she changed her mind too often, and she hurt the people she should have cherished. But there is no denying the impact she had on the world of modern art and the broader cult of artistic snobbery and eccentricity she and her fashionable friends turned into an international obsession. For those granted admission to Guggenheim’s exclusive social circle, the ability to shock was its own form of cultural currency. As Prose describes the 1938 International Exposition of Surrealism in Paris to which Guggenheim was invited, 

In the courtyard of the Galerie was Salvador Dalí’s Rainy Taxi, a black hansom cab in which a female mannequin, covered with live snails, sprawled amid the junglelike vegetation that clogged the rain-soaked windows. Lining the entrance to the exposition were fifteen mannequins decorated by the artist to represent the objects of their desire; the head of André Masson’s mannequin was encased in a birdcage housing a school of celluloid goldfish. The ceiling of the main room was lined by Duchamp with twelve hundred coal sacks, while the floor was covered with dead leaves, banked toward the center, where a brazier glowed. The smell of roasting coffee filled the air, as did the sound of maniacal laughter, which had been recorded at a mental asylum.

It is hard to read about this kind of senseless psychedelic melting-pot and remember that many of the artists involved—Duchamp, Giacometti, Ernst, Dalí—went on to become some of the most recognizable and critically esteemed figures of modern art. It is in extended descriptions like this that Prose really highlights Guggenheim’s admirable gift for spying the transcendent kernel at the heart of the ephemeral spectacle. Had I been present at the 1938 International Exposition of Surrealism, I might have dismissed the participating artists as a bunch of nutters. Although Prose is at times harshly critical of her subject’s impulsive personality, she recognizes Guggenheim’s contribution to the history of art and the art of history. Writes Prose, 

Peggy was neither the first nor the only person to introduce Surrealism to the United States; there had already been shows at the Museum of Modern Art and at private galleries. But she was very good at making sure that it was talked about by critics and seen by younger artists. She encouraged and showed the work of a new generation of Americans, and it is partly thanks to Peggy that American artists shook off the influence of Europe. One can only speculate about how different the history of modern art would have been had Peggy not commissioned Jackson Pollock to paint a mural for the hallway of her East Side apartment—a work that helped change the ways in which Pollock and his peers thought about painting.

Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern is by no means a testament to the rewards of all-consuming research, as many of the other biographies I’ve reported on have been. It is sometimes painfully clear that Francine Prose hasn’t quite mastered the mechanics of non-fiction writing. I take issue, for example, with her decision to refer to Peggy Guggenheim by her first name throughout the manuscript while her male associates are all given surnames. This condescending habit doesn’t do much to combat the assumption that Peggy was a vain and brainless socialite who could only be seen in the reflected light of her lovers. Conventionally, it’s evident to me that Prose is still miles behind the likes of Stacey Schiff and David McCullough. But the passion is there, as well as the unquenchable desire to educate and convert. With a little polishing (and a little more time spent reading past Pulitzer-winners) I have no doubt that Francine Prose could evolve into an esteemed biographer of modern artists—a kind of vicarious collector herself. 

The Guardian review

HarperCollins author profile

THE PLAYWRIGHT MOST LIKELY TO ARTICULATE PRESSING CULTURAL ANXIETIES

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro - Simon & Schuster (2016)

I am always hesitant to read literary works as windows into the authorial psyche. I find arguments for the sexual and political inclinations of authors based on textual evidence to be dubious at best, and they are often manipulated to confirm a conclusion established by the critic long before the examination even began. If, for example, one wants to prove that a particular author was a closeted homosexual, one tends to discard all evidence to the contrary and to read artistic productions as reflections of the artist himself. This kind of reading turns even the most imaginative piece into a sort of thinly-veiled autobiography, and in my opinion, underestimates the power of the creative intellect. Having written countless short stories and character meditations myself, I know it is possible to write about people other than myself—about people who are not merely vessels for my own desires and neurosis. One of the enduring hallmarks of the creative intellect is its ability to inhabit psyches that differ greatly from one another, and from that of the gestating furnace. Therefore I think it can be damaging and reductive to impose an author’s life upon his body of work. 

When I first read the description on the back cover of James Shapiro’s fabulous book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, I had some concerns. The blurb suggests that,

James Shapiro shows us how attuned Shakespeare was to the cultural and political conflicts of the times, and how the tragedies of the day—and some that struck more perilously close to home—were transformed into the theatrical masterpieces we know today.

The kind of literary deduction proposed by this statement filled me with alarm. But the book came highly recommended, and I was intrigued by the concept of a biography that focuses on a single year in its subject’s life—a year during which a belated burst of energy gave birth to such layered productions as King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. So I decided to give it a read. 

Within the first few chapters I realized that my fears would be unconfirmed. Shapiro seems to be just as sensitive to autobiographical over-reading as I am. In fact, he is careful to underscore his own limitations in the introduction to his book. Writes Shapiro, 

Having spent much of the past quarter century researching and writing about Shakespeare’s life, I’m painfully aware that many of the things I’d like to know about him—what his political views and religious beliefs were; whom he loved; how good a father, husband, and friend he was; what he did with his time when he wasn’t writing or acting—cannot be recovered. The possibility of writing that sort of biography died by the late seventeenth century, when the last of those who knew Shakespeare personally took their stories and secrets with them to the grave. Modern biographers who nonetheless speculate on such matters, or in the absence of archival evidence read the plays and poems as transparently autobiographical, inevitably end up revealing more about themselves than they do about Shakespeare. 

James Shapiro spends very little time discussing Shakespeare’s family and relationships. There simply is not enough surviving evidence to prove how Shakespeare felt about his wife, his peers, or the newly crowned King James. Thus, Shapiro wisely chooses to focus instead on how the plays of 1606 provide a gateway through which to consider the wider cultural anxieties of the time. The strength of Shakespeare’s legacy has long been attributed to his talents for poking and prodding the human psyche—for locating the fear beneath the fear. This is why many critics describe his productions as ‘timeless’; because the true subject—the one that is never articulated—can be found in every era and location; it is part of our biological composition. Writes Shapiro, 

The year 1606 would turn out to be a good one for Shakespeare and an awful one for England. This was no coincidence. Shakespeare, so gifted at understanding what preoccupied and troubled his audiences, was lucky to have begun his career during the increasingly fractured years of Elizabeth’s decline. His early work had delved especially deeply into the political and religious cracks that were exposed as a century of Tudor rule neared its end. But it would take some time for him to speak with the same acuity about the cultural fault lines emerging under the new and unfamiliar reign of the King of Scots. In the [final months of 1605], their contours were already becoming more sharply defined for him, and his steadier grasp of the forces shaping this extraordinary time would result in one his most inspired years. 

Some years seem to contain an almost surreal degree of misfortune (is anyone else feeling like 2016 might be one of them?). In November of the previous year, a group of Catholic sympathizers planned a mass assassination of the king and all the members of parliament by planting kegs of gunpowder beneath the epicenter of government. In the Summer of 1606 a record number of Londoners died in what turned out to be one of the deadliest plague seasons in recorded history. The tensions between English and Scottish, Catholic and Protestant were exacerbated under the leadership of James, who sought to incorporate them all under the symbolic image of his crown. In light of these fears—both rational and irrational—we begin to see just how contextualized King Lear and Macbeth truly were. The first—mediating on the disastrous outcome of a decision to divide a united kingdom, and the second—the imagined assassination of a Scottish King. The combination of Early Modern English and allegorical characters can make it difficult for modern audiences to understand what it must have felt like for King James to watch a play like Macbeth. Thus, it is only in studying the contexts in which they were written that we can begin to detect the differences between Shakespeare’s plays published before and after the ascension of King James. Writes Shapiro, 

Even as the buried shards of religious division once again rose to the surface, so too did political ones when King James again pressed parliament to secure a Union of Scotland and England. To James, this outcome had seemed inevitable: as the Kind of Scots who had inherited the English throne, he embodied in his own person the union of the kingdoms. But for his subjects on both sides of the border the increasingly bitter debate over Union raised troubling questions about what it really meant to be English or Scottish, or for that matter British, creating identity crises where none had been before. This too was grist for Shakespeare’s mill. Under Elizabeth he had written English history plays; in 1606 under James he would shift his attention to British ones in both King Lear and Macbeth. 

One of the common threads that links King Lear and Macbeth is a complex and inconclusive discussion of evil and human accountability. We are drawn like moths to title characters who both excite and repulse us. Are Lear and Macbeth perpetrators or victims? What role does the demonic play in the degeneration of their lives? To what degree can an individual influence the progression of fate? After the Gunpowder Plot—an event which was spoken about at the time in the same baffled vocabulary as the commentaries on 9/11—the need to dissect and discover the source of evil became something of a national obsession. Writes Shapiro, 

The Fifth of November, that “confection of all villainy,” gave those issues fresh relevance, for it had prompted not only Shakespeare but also everyone else in the land to confront questions they had never been forced to grapple with so deeply or desperately: How can ordinary people attempt such horrible and unthinkable crimes? In doing so, what kind of lies or stories must they tell themselves and others? Does this evil come from satanic forces or from within us? What binds us together—be it a family or a marriage or a country—and what can destroy these bonds? Recognizing the hunger for a play that probed the very questions that now haunted his world, Shakespeare began to read and think about Macbeth. 

In his meticulous examination of a single year in Shakespeare’s productive life, James Shapiro shows what a narrow perspective can do for literary analysis. There is much to be learned when we resist the urge to draw a line connecting every play The Bard wrote and instead explore a particular moment and the circumstances surrounding the production of a single play. I have read countless ‘definitive accounts’ on Shakespeare’s life, but Shapiro’s book contributed more to my understanding of Macbeth and King Lear than any of the thousand-page tomes. And it isn’t as if he is lacking information. Shapiro has been a professor of English Literature at Columbia and a renowned Shakespeare scholar since the 1980s. If he wanted to write another birth-to-death biography, he would have. In fact, it is Shapiro’s decision to carve a piece out of the middle of Shakespeare’s life and examine it in semi-isolated detail that I find so impressive. It could not have been easy to insist on fencing such an endless and fertile field of primary and secondary material. Perhaps it is this kind of willpower that has led Shapiro to so many accomplishments. Besides his position at Columbia, he has also taught as a Fulbright lecturer in Israel, served as the Sam Wanamaker Fellow at the Globe Theater in London, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Shapiro has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. In 2006, he won the Samuel Johnson Prize for 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare—a book that in many ways anticipated The Year of Lear. Shapiro has also written numerous periodicals for such publications as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Book Review, and The Daily Telegraph. 

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 is by no means an introductory text. If you aren’t already familiar with Shakespeare, you will not be able to make the most of what James Shapiro has to offer. The Year of Lear is written for the Shakespeare fanatic who wants to go a little deeper, who wants to reinsert Shakespeare into the social and political contexts which he sought to articulate. It is a refreshing argument against seeing Shakespeare as some sort of timeless cultural anomaly, and it is an acknowledgment that he might have been influenced by the changes taking place around him. Shapiro probably says it best when he writes,

…to draw Shakespeare out of the shadows demands considerable effort and imaginative labor, for we need to travel back in time four centuries and immerse ourselves in the hopes and fears of that moment; but the rewards are no less great, for that richness, in turn, allows us to see afresh the tragedies he forged in this tumultuous year. 

NYT book review

Washington Post Review

James Shapiro author website

THE LIBERTINE MOST LIKELY TO FALL IN LOVE

Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius by Laurence Bergreen - Simon & Schuster (2016)

How many times does the average person fall in love? Idealists and adherents of fate would argue that each person is allotted a single ‘true’ romantic experience, characterized by some kind of quasi-mystical fusion of complementary souls. The vast majority—those who roam the earth with their feet on the ground and their heads beneath the stratosphere—might logically suggest that the Average Joe will experience two or three relationships of significance over the course of his lifetime. When a person claims to have fallen in love five, six, or even ten times, the general consensus is that the quality of their affections is somehow diluted, and their amorous intentions attain a sinister and self-serving gloss. 

So what do we make of a man like Giacomo Casanova? Why do we tolerate—and sometimes endorse—a self-professed womanizer who bedded over one hundred women and contracted syphilis no less than eight times? Can we feel anything but disgust for a man who routinely seduced young girls, allowed his own illegitimate daughter to observe his carnal acts, and resorted to rape whenever his targets refused to satisfy his unquenchable lust? The answer, of course, is no. And one of the reasons I enjoyed reading Laurence Bergreen’s substantial biography, Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius, is because Bergreen never tries to soften or romanticize Casanova’s dubious aims or methods. The resulting figure is not one with whom we sympathize or identify—he is a fleshy parasite, so preoccupied with delusions of grandeur that he fails to acknowledge his own reputation as a lecherous swindler who uses sex and aggression to distract himself from the paucity of his own intelligence. During the seething heyday of the Enlightenment, while philosophers and writers like Rousseau and Voltaire were busy ascending the peaks of international celebrity, Casanova struggled to attain his own literary ambitions. His essays and pamphlets failed to bring him the adoration he desired. He was forced to admit that he might not be capable of the kind of dense existential reasoning that elevated the likes of Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and John Locke. Casanova simply wasn’t smart enough—but he could certainly seduce.

Perhaps this is why Bergreen’s biography reads something like an extended psychoanalytical study of a disturbed and displaced personality. Casanova’s failed attempts to make a name for himself—as a writer, politician and ambassador—are laid alongside an unembellished account of his sexual exploits. In fact, they seem to leapfrog over one another in what turns out to be a predictable pattern of disappointment and indulgence. Bergreen’s biography is fascinating because it is largely prophetic. We know, as we read, that Casanova will continue to seek love and fame throughout his life, the episodes and embarrassments becoming increasingly grotesque as he ages. We know that we are watching a slow and excruciating downfall, one that spans the entire European continent (and Great Britain) as Casanova is unceremoniously booted from country after country. We read Bergreen’s book with twisted delight, our faces plastered with the hellish grins of those who are witness to the extended torture of a despicable creature. Casanova’s story has all the hallmarks of an epic, tactile decline: Venetian decadence and decay; masks and disguises; diseased flesh and secret pregnancies; lies and staged deceptions; massive fortunes won and lost; elaborate escapes from prison; Freemasons and astrological mysticism; the seduction of virgins, nuns, duchesses, and castrated males; cloaks and daggers and poisons and gondolas. Bergreen understands the anxieties at the heart of such urgent melodrama—the palpitating physicality of sex and escape and reinvention. 

Unlike most of the other authors I’ve profiled, Laurence Bergreen does not focus on a single historical period or geographical region. He is not an expert on English history, or Chinese philosophy, or the American Revolution. He is, rather, an expert on individuals. He is a true biographer who does not abide by the arbitrary restraints of time and space. Perusing his catalogue of published works, it seems to me like Bergreen lights upon a figure who interests him, and then does all the necessary research to orient his subject within social and political contexts. This approach has led to an impressively diverse range of subjects—from Al Capone, to Irving Berlin, to Louis Armstrong, to Ferdinand Magellan—and also allows him to get to know his subjects on a personal level before locating them within the larger tapestry of world events. Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius is chronological and rarely deviates from the life of Giacomo Casanova. Bergreen does not allow himself to follow intriguing tangents. The end result is that while readers might want to know more about 18th-century Venice, they could not possibly want to know more about Casanova. Nearly every day of his life can be accounted for and there are few, if any, gaps in the historical record. This painstaking attention to detail is indicative of an author whose priorities lie with the individual, not the historical moment to which he belongs. The victories, the defeats, the long stretches of boredom and routine—all are purposely included in order to depict a life in full. One can only assume that this same compulsion is reflected in Bergreen’s frequent contributions to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Esquire. One can further deduce that Bergreen’s determination to leave no detail behind is what lead him to become a sought-after university lecturer, a judge for the National Book Awards (1995) and a judge for the PEN Nonfiction Award (1991). I can’t say for certain whether Bergreen’s method of research inspired NASA to recruit him as the keynote speaker for the administration’s fiftieth-anniversary event, but it probably didn’t hurt. 

Bergreen sums up our cultural attraction to Casanova in the introduction to his book. The Venetian’s scandalous memoirs serve as both a confession of his various sins, and a searing indictment of the archaic social order dismantling Italy. Writes Bergreen, 

He slept with one hundred and twenty-two women, by his count, and perhaps with a few men…Seeking revenge for his lack of status at birth, he embarked on a lifelong quest to right this wrong by putting himself out to stud. He would use sex as a weapon of class destruction, siring eight children out of wedlock, each with a different woman whom he refused to marry. At times he behaved like a cad, at other times like a genius, He was the archetypal bad boyfriend: irresistible, dangerous, amoral. Casanova wasn’t the only dedicated hedonist of his day nor the most brilliant literary figure, and certainly not the only rogue, but he was unique in playing all three roles to the hilt. 

Bergreen also attempts to flesh out Casanova’s reputation as a calculating sex mercenary by suggesting that the libertine was actually overwhelmed by his own romantic inclinations. Casanova wasn’t just an imaginative guy with an extraordinary libido; he was actually catapulted into deep, blinding love with more than half of his conquests. It is rather perplexing for a modern reader with a cynical disposition to calculate how many times Casanova claimed to have found ‘the one’. He seems to have been gifted (or burdened) with an overactive imagination which caused him to turn a friendly smile or a waft of perfume into the beginning of an epic romance. Writes Bergreen, 

…as a libertine, Freemason, epicurean, and devotee of the Kabbalah, he was always trying to burst the bounds of Venetian institutions to exalt the self—and one’s sexuality. He believed in everything that came his way: religion, philosophy, magic, science, and especially love. He spiked the Age of Enlightenment with sex, and more sex. He exploited women shamelessly. At the same time, he gave himself to the women he possessed. “I don’t conquer, I submit,” he explained. He exalted women beyond reason. Each love affair was, for him, a meeting of the mind and spirit, a glimpse of eternity and ecstasy.

Without excusing Casanova’s revolting behavior, Bergreen implies that the Venetian’s aims were strikingly aligned with those of the broader Enlightenment movement. Casanova approached each new sexual experience without prejudice, and ignored the constraints imposed by irrational laws of religion and custom. He refused to draw conclusions until he could explore each possibility with his own five senses. He made himself as receptive and open-minded as possible, because that—according to Enlightenment philosophy—was the only method by which to obtain new knowledge. Bergreen even writes about Casanova’s experiments using the same vocabulary one might use to describe the great heroes of the Enlightenment in pursuit of their various disciplines, 

So began his education in love and women. They were his shadow self, his “ruling passion.” He would dedicate his life to trying to understand everything about women. He would become a libertine. He would give free rein to his senses, suspend moral judgement, and indulge his appetites. To be a libertine was to stand apart from society, to refuse to accept definitions and restrictions. The child of two actors, two outcasts, he would spend his life as a performer on the world’s stage, trying on an endlessly changing array of roles and costumes, playing all the parts, villain and hero. His imagination would attempt to vanquish them all. 

At the end of the day, Giacomo Casanova was as hungry for knowledge as his sometime-nemesis Voltaire. His interests and experiments have been ignored partly because to discuss them would require an uncomfortable journey to the land of the Taboo. It is easier to diminish Casanova than to admit to an understanding of his passions and desires. It is a natural impulse to censor his frank declarations and scorn his amorous pursuits. Casanova took advantage of people, he manipulated and injured many vulnerable women. He deserves our ridicule—but not our dismissal. As Laurence Bergreen proves in his extraordinary biography Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius, there is still much to extract from an imperfect life. There is the restless energy of a man whose belief in personal liberty was repeatedly thwarted by an oppressive, blood-based regime. There is the lashing out of a frustrated and unappreciated intellect. There is the incredible capacity of the human being to rise, and fall, and rise again transformed. And there is the possibility of falling in love over, and over, and over again. These insights, captured within the pages of a scandalous memoir, deserve our attention—even if the confessor’s exploits do not. 

Kirk's review

Laurence Bergreen's author website

THE OUTCAST MOST LIKELY TO FOUND AN EMPIRE

Genghis Khan and the Quest for God by Jack Weatherford - Viking (2016)

Not many of us can claim to have established an empire. The few recognizable founders—Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great, Romulus of Rome—have come to occupy a rather ambiguous zone in the shared cultural memory. These myth-men, many of whom boasted of divine parentage and did nothing to disprove the wild speculations of their subjects, were paradoxically deified at the moment of their damnation. This is not a revolutionary concept. It is a recognized symptom of empire that these nebulous organisms glow brightest at the instant of collapse. From Shelley’s imagined encounter with the foot of Ozymandias, to the toppling of imperial statues in nineteenth-century Russia, the relationship between ostentatious external ornamentation and internal political decay has been well-established. In most cases, when the likeness of an emperor begins to proliferate in murals and statuary, his remaining years in power can be calculated on a single mutilated hand. 

This was not the case with Genghis Khan, a man who founded one of the most extensive, successful empires the world has ever seen, but who somehow manages to look awkward and oppressed beneath the heavy title of ‘emperor.’ In fact, the image of this robust, weathered warrior sitting immobile on a gilded throne and clutching a jewel-encrusted scepter is ridiculous to say the least. Genghis Khan was an entirely different kind of ruler. Ruthless as he undoubtedly was, he never succumbed to material gluttony and excess in the characteristic manner of emperors. Perhaps this is why he seems to roam the outskirts of the historical landscape, and why many historians choose to ignore his impressive conquests, rather than try to make sense of his unusual style of leadership. For if we acknowledge the relative success of a ruler who was neither extravagant nor particularly vain, it would become exceedingly difficult to excuse those behaviors in Western sovereigns whose various sins we overlook as inevitable byproducts of concentrated power. Genghis Khan’s mobile ‘palace’ of tents is an argument against the overwrought bedazzling of Versailles and the inherent evils it represents. In his remarkable book Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, Jack Weatherford presents the Mongol method of governance as a surprisingly grounded and rational alternative to despotic tyranny. By accepting diverse cultures and religions within his cosmopolitan empire, Genghis Khan and his descendants were able to conquer and control a vast portion of the globe stretching from China to Hungary, and from Russia to Afghanistan. 

Known for his 2004 New York Times bestseller Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford has long exhibited a profound interest in ‘peripheral’ empires and their methods of rule. In addition to three comprehensive accounts of the Mongol Empire, Weatherford has also explored the history of prominent Native American tribes and their contributions to global culture. His anthropological work has led to frequent appearances on The Today Show and All Things Considered. Weatherford is a regular contributor to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and National Geographic. In 2006, he was awarded the Order of the Polar Star—the most prestigious Mongolian honour bestowed upon foreigners. A former professor of anthropology at Macalaster College in Minnesota, Weatherford now lives part-time in Mongolia. He is just one of the many Western intellectuals whose disenchantment with a Eurocentric vision of the world has evolved into a fascination with Eastern cultures—especially those which have been silenced and erased by overzealous religious crusaders. 

From the earliest days of his youth, Genghis Khan was an unusual candidate for leadership. Ignored by his father and banished by his clan, Genghis Khan spent his formative years foraging for food with his mother on the side of a mountain. In spite of the hardships the future Khan encountered, Weatherford suggests that,

…the intimacy between the young boy and the mountain substituted for what he was missing from his male kinsmen, who had rejected him and left him to die. The mountain became his confidant and guide. He rarely trusted or confided in people and seldom seemed as much at home or as happy as he was on his beloved Burkhan Khaldun. The important principles of his life, and the important relationships, originated there on its slopes, in its forests, and under its shadow. 

The difficult circumstances of his youth, as well as their subsequent impact on his values and priorities as an adult, helped to distinguish Genghis Khan from other imperial rulers. He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and his humility enabled him to understand and appeal to the vast majority of his subjects on an unprecedented level. Thus it was that,

The Mongol Empire encompassed people from a greater diversity of faiths than that of any other empire in prior history. Never had one man ruled over followers of so many religions without belonging to one of them: Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Hindus, Jews, Christians, and animists of different types. Each of the major religions was divided into myriad competing, and often viciously warring, sects. Genghis Khan’s greatest struggle in life was not to conquer so many tribes, cities, and nations—that had come fairly easily to him—but to make them live together in a cohesive society under one government. 

Weatherford’s aim in Genghis Khan and the Quest for God is to establish that his subject was eager to understand and incorporate diverse philosophies and religious practices within his hybridized kingdom. He frequently invited religious leaders to his tent to teach him about their particular beliefs, and he organized conversations between them. He had no reservations about combining elements from different systems of belief and observing them side-by-side. Perhaps, as Weatherford suggests, Genghis Khan believed that all the religions he encountered were expressions of the same underlying power—a power he had first experienced in the natural sublimity of Burkhan Khaldun. Although the desire to engage and appease conflicting schools of religious thought might seem like an odd preoccupation to modern readers, Weatherford argues that,

Genghis Khan erupted into history in a century when gods flourished on Earth, when religion ruled the world. Sounds of the muezzin’s call to prayer, tolling church bells, chanting monks, and singing pilgrims filled the air across cities and villages from Japan in the Pacific to Ireland in the Atlantic. Ostentatious displays of religious piety dominated art, literature, architecture, and philosophy, whether at the Sung capital in China, the palace of the caliph in Baghdad, the papal throne in Rome, the court of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the fortress of the sultan in Delhi, of the mosques of Seville and Granada in Spain.

And from a political point of view,

Religion triumphed over secular life. Priests, lamas, monks, and mullahs controlled the calendar, set borders between rivals, and collected taxes. They operated judicial courts, staffed prisons, built universities, opened hospitals, and managed wineries, banks, brothels, and torture chambers. 

Genghis Khan spent a significant amount of his precious time mediating between warring religious factions. His efforts were not always successful, and the resulting conflicts must have been extremely frustrating. Nevertheless, his determination to bring about cooperation and meaningful deliberation between religious scholars led to the establishment of one of the most knowledgable and articulate imperial courts in history. Writes Weatherford, 

With each future victory on the battlefield, the number of scribes increased as men literate in other languages and cultural traditions were added to the administration. They grew from a simple corps of clerks into language schools that gathered clusters of intellectuals trained in philosophy and literature from rival religions and contrasting intellectual traditions. From this meager beginning would emerge a group of steppe scholars, a sort of new intelligentsia that would become increasingly important in the decades ahead. 

In contrast to the campy, rather dimwitted version of Genghis Khan popularized on the Western stage by nineteenth-century Orientalists, Weatherford portrays the founder of the Mongol empire as a compassionate, thoughtful ruler who nurtured a genuine desire to alleviate misunderstandings between religious groups. Weatherford’s examination of Genghis Khan—along with the lessons he distills from the progression of the Mongol’s life and empire—is particularly relevant at a time when religious persecution seems to be scaling new heights of violence and extremism. In fact, Genghis Khan’s informal tent meetings seem to preempt our own attempts at reconciliation. Weatherford’s elaboration of the challenges plaguing Genghis Khan will be painfully familiar to any modern reader. He writes, 

Rather than creating a spiritual utopia of art, compassion, and beauty, religion had saturated the world with resentment and hate. History’s earlier wars had been fought mostly for the simple human emotions of lust and greed, but the rise of the world religions had encouraged the hatred and killing of innocent people for no greater reason than that they worshipped God in another way. Religiously motivated or justified warfare posed the greatest threat to world peace and social stability. Wars in the name of competing gods now surpassed avarice, envy, and ethnicity as a source of violence, and these gods proved insatiable.

More than seven hundred years after Genghis Khan’s death, little progress has been made in pursuit of religious tolerance. Perhaps, as Jack Weatherford suggests in Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, it is time to shift our focus, and search for answers in the periphery. 

Jack Weatherford's Macalaster faculty page

NYT book review