ANTICIPATING THE NEXT CHAPTER

Dear readers,

I was recently accepted into the publishing course at Columbia University in New York City, where I will be moving in June to pursue my literary dreams. At this point, I think it is time to step away from the blog and diversify my reading material in preparation for this exciting new adventure. It is also time to thank everyone whose comments and encouragements made this project a rewarding experience and a source of personal pride. I can't wait to begin what I suspect will be the main trajectory of my life. Here's to many more years of reading, writing, and discussing!

Best,

Kathryn

THE QUEEN MOST LIKELY TO DAZZLE, DANCE, THEN DISAPPEAR

Young and Damned and Fair by Gareth Russell - Simon & Schuster (2016)

I don’t exactly envy any of Henry VIII’s six wives, but which do I pity the most? The first two unfortunate women bound in matrimony to the ‘English Nero’—Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn—were certainly dragged through the mud (both their names associated with the icky crime of incest) but they at least triumphed in their own steadfast beliefs. Both Catherine and Anne used their positions within the Henrician court to promote diverging religious doctrines (Anne’s devout Protestantism is too often overlooked) and in their own ways, they altered the power structures within England and its relationship to the outside world. Both women were slandered and scapegoated, but we also remember them for their resiliency and determination, and both can be viewed, to a certain extent, as martyrs. We might not agree with everything they did, but we must acknowledge their bravery in refusing to kowtow to Henry Tudor and his obnoxious entourage of codpiece-wearing wingmen. Then we have Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr, both of whom were so innocuous and benign that they have been largely (and mercifully) forgotten. Anne of Cleves was ugly and smelly and Henry swept her under the proverbial carpet by calling her his ‘sister’ and setting her up in a posh estate in the English countryside. Catherine Parr appeared too late on the scene to develop a memorable personality of her own, and her marriage to Henry mostly involved maternal care during his final, tortuous years. These two women outlived the infamous spouse they shared and enjoyed quiet, comfortable retirements. And we certainly can’t single out Jane Seymour, that angelic ideal of female subservience, for our deepest degree of pity. Even though she died in childbirth, Jane was by far the most loved of Henry’s wives and the only one to deliver him a son and heir. 

So who does that leave? Catherine Howard. Her reputation was systematically destroyed in a manner similar to Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon—with an emphasis on sexual deviance and moral impurity. And yet she lacked her predecessors’ strength of character. The historical records do not suggest that she nurtured any strong cultural values, religious beliefs, or political agendas. She was as passive and unconcerned as Catherine Parr and Anne of Cleves, but she was not granted their relative anonymity. She was a flighty and uncertain individual who was condemned as a treacherous harlot—an accusation even more painful for its assumption of a fortitude she lacked. The swift downfall of Catherine Howard makes modern historians uneasy because she was undoubtedly guilty of her crimes, but the extent to which she was thrust into a life she was unprepared for cannot be denied. Every other one of Henry VIII’s wives had extensive exposure to courtly intrigues prior to their royal marriage. On the other hand, Catherine Howard was uneducated, naive, and spent only eight months at court before Henry set his sights upon her. She is seen by many as a victim of a complex social apparatus she could not understand. Thus, even her guilt attains a sheen of innocence. 

In his biography, Young and Damned and Fair, Gareth Russell offers a sensitive and thorough account of Catherine Howard’s brief life. He recognizes the extent to which Henry’s fifth wife was manipulated by members of her own family and the courtiers in her midst, without losing sight of her own complicity. The portrait that emerges is one of a woman who knew what she wanted and followed her heart, but sadly was unable to understand that a queen of England could never enjoy such freedom. She seemed not to realize that her every action was scrutinized and catalogued by friends and enemies to whom she was no more than a pawn in a indecipherable game of power. Writes Russell:

…the interpretation of Anne Boleyn’s downfall as one in which a powerful but divisive queen consort was harried to her death with maximum speed, minimum honesty, and determined hatred has no bearing on her cousin’s fate five years later. What happened to Catherine Howard was monstrous and it struck many of her contemporaries as unnecessary, but it was not a lynching. The Queen was toppled by a combination of bad luck, poor decisions, and the Henrician state’s determination to punish those who had failed its king. A modern study of Henry’s marriages offered the conclusion that if “ever a butterfly was broken on the wheel, it must surely have been Catherine Howard,” and in the sense that the wheel in question was her husband’s government, then there was an inexorable quality about the way it turned to crush Catherine after November 2, 1541.

This was the date that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer left a note for Henry VIII in Hampton Court’s Chapel Royal, detailing the evidence of Catherine’s ‘dissolute living’ both before and after her marriage to the King of England. And once the seed of doubt was planted in Henry’s bloated, histrionic head, Catherine’s fate was all but certain. Whether or not she escaped with her neck intact, Catherine’s reign as Queen was finished the moment her absolute fidelity was brought into question. Henry was both insanely jealous and easily convinced. The men he trusted—Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Cranmer—all knew that the easiest way to oust a queen who failed to serve their own political aspirations was to play upon Henry’s paranoia and obvious desperation for a legitimate male heir. The atmosphere in Hampton Court was charged with fear and paranoia, a condition that did not escape the notice of visiting dignitaries like Eustace Chapuys. Writes Russell of one such horrified guest: 

In the descent into the chaos described by the Prince of Salerno, the office had already seen one queen banished into internal exile after twenty-three years of marriage, a second publicly butchered on charges that would have raised eyebrows at the court of Agrippina, a third who lay dying while her husband debated whether to cancel his hunting trip to Escher, and a fourth who had been metaphorically stripped bare before the public as every fold, sag, and blemish was discussed in excruciating detail to justify why she was too grotesque to please her husband. Just over a year later, the Privy Council claimed that everyone expected Catherine to succeed where the others had failed because “after sundry troubles in marriage,” Henry had found in her “a Jewel for womanhood.”

In the prevailing pop-culture interpretation of events (I’m looking at you Showtime), Catherine Howard is groomed by her step-grandmother and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, in order to seduce the aging king and secure the future prosperity of the Howard dynasty. Her subsequent downfall is thus seen to be the result of Howard enemies whispering lies into the ear of the monarch. In this version of the tale, both Catherine and Henry are preyed upon by warring tribal clans and have little agency themselves. There are two problems with this assumption, as Gareth Russell makes clear. First,

If the Howards had wanted to entice Henry VIII, they would not have chosen Catherine. She was damaged goods. Had they been as Machiavellian as the usual presentation of them suggests, at some point in the vetting process either the Dowager Duchess or the Countess of Bridgewater could have pointed out that elevating Catherine would put them all at risk in the long run. Rather, the King’s infatuation seems to have caught them all off-guard, and while her family then played the hand dealt to them—they would have been foolish not to—that is not the same thing as stacking the deck. 

The second reason we cannot see Catherine as merely an innocent victim of court machinations is because she did in fact commit the crimes she was accused of. Or, perhaps, we can say that she was a victim of court politics but not of false prosecution. There is, after all, incontrovertible proof that she was romantically involved with at least two men besides her husband, one of whom she met in secret during the course of her marriage. The real tragedy of Catherine Howard’s brief marriage to Henry VIII is that neither she nor her husband seemed to understand what they were getting themselves into. Catherine operated under the illusion that she could continue to live her life as an anonymous maid, and Henry continued to entertain the disastrous belief that the pure and sexless vessel he fantasized about might actually exist in the real world. In fact, Henry VIII’s ridiculous expectations for his queen (encouraged, no doubt, by groveling courtiers) are really to blame for the death of Catherine Howard. He wanted her to be beautiful but not desired. He wanted to see evidence of her infatuation with his royal person, but otherwise to be completely devoid of a sexuality. He wanted her to be pure but also to produce an heir to the throne. Writes Russell, 

Capable of parroting, expanding, or critiquing another’s thoughts, but incapable of developing many that were uniquely his, Henry VIII was intellectually skilled, but not brilliant. In itself, that is hardly a great failing or even an insult, but it became a problem because Henry failed to recognize his own limitations. Throughout his life, the majority of Henry’s troubles were caused by the fact that he constantly overestimated himself.

On the other hand,

…Catherine’s childhood and adolescence at Horsham and Lambeth were to shape her subsequent career in predominantly negative ways. Her education had rendered her poised, elegant, and immaculately mannered, with a talent for music and dancing that equipped her to succeed at court with a King who loved the former and had once excelled at the latter, but it also left her woefully unprepared for a position that required her to psychologically distance herself from her daily companions. Her youthful romances and easy dominance of her friends at Horsham gave her a taste for gossip and backstairs intrigue which she never had a chance to grow out of. The examples of her friends’ behavior and the extent to which she had escaped censure at Chesworth and Lambeth had also desensitized her to the opprobrium that such behavior could elicit in other environments. 

  

So why should we pity the fifth wife of Henry VIII? Not because she was an innocent victim of malicious prosecution. Nor because she was used in a callous attempt to boost the fortunes of scavenging courtiers. We should lament the death of Catherine Howard because she did not know what it meant to be a queen. The other five wives knew the risks and the rewards they were signing themselves up for. They knew they would be required to navigate the treacherous waters of espionage and hypocrisy, and that they very well might lose their heads in the process. Catherine Howard never received the education that would prepare her for a life among those whose true intentions were never clear or innocent. She trusted too easily and she gave too much away. She was, at the time of her death, still very much a child. This is the tragedy that lies at the heart of Gareth Russell’s phenomenal book, Young and Damned and Fair. And despite the impressive amount research crammed into Russell’s text, his thesis is not difficult to find—it’s right there in the title. 

London Economic review

Simon & Schuster author profile

THE PHOTOGRAPHER MOST LIKELY TO CAPTURE THE SPARK

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan - Mariner Books (2013)

Haunting. That’s the best word to describe the photographs taken by Edward Curtis. Like many an artist before him (and many an artist to come), his single-minded pursuit of an unattainable goal cost him greatly in the domestic sphere, forced him to spend much of his precious time groveling at the feet of creditors and investors, and ultimately led to a lonely death in a squalid, unassuming apartment deep in the urban wasteland of Los Angeles. It has never been easy to be ahead of one’s time. Curtis, who was as much an anthropologist as he was a photographer, fell off the cultural radar years before his actual death. But his service to the native people of America, his ability to capture the ferocious pride and dignity of a battered population facing extinction, and his determination to document their lives as honestly and authentically as he could, deserves recognition—even if it’s belated. In his beautifully written biography, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Timothy Egan lays bare the life of an artist. Curtis’ story is sometimes a painful one: he never made a dime from his Magnum Opus twenty volume series, The North American Indian, and was eventually forced to sell the copyright to pay off his debts; his marriage collapsed in a messy divorce and the spiteful destruction of priceless works of art; he could never obtain enough funding to support his ambitious projects. Most painful of all, the subject he sought to capture was quickly disappearing, as Native Americans in the late nineteenth-century were forced to choose between starvation and forced assimilation. Edward Curtis died a bitter and neglected man. But then you see the pictures, and you realize that somehow, despite the incredible resistance and racism Curtis faced on a daily basis, he found a way to make both himself and his subjects immortal. He captured the spark that lives in human eyes, the light that refuses to be extinguished, even under the most unendurable and oppressive of circumstances. 

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author who excels in writing about downtrodden Americans. His 2006 book about those who lived through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In both this book and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Egan displays a talent for writing about unfortunate people in a manner that does not render them insubstantial. His characters may be sick and starving, but they face the future with the grim obstinance of seasoned survivors. In fact, it is quite possible that Egan was drawn to Curtis because both men refused to see their subjects as helpless victims—and themselves as white saviors. The Native Americans captured by Curtis in his portraits are charismatic, multidimensional, and self-assured. There is certainly evidence of suffering and weariness in the lined faces and melancholy eyes, but there is confidence and determination as well. Curtis’ first Native American photographs were of ‘Princess Angeline,’ the eldest daughter of Chief Seattle. Writes Egan: 

The portrait of the princess was magnificent…[but] the picture was not what he’d had in mind when he first spied Angeline against the Puget Sound. Over the following weeks Curtis returned to Shantytown. He saw Angeline in the mudflat, stooped and dark-cloaked, shovel in hand—the clam digger in her element. This was more like what he had seen in a flash that day on the shore. The sitting portrait was fine, but he was drawn to something more natural. Angeline had to fit her background, and that could never be the studio on Second Avenue. Nor was he interested in the image of the shrew, the hag, the crone…No frowning, vanquished Indians here. No starving, bedraggled aborigines. No warriors. They were neither threats nor objects of pity. The subsistence life was front and center, an ageless figure digging for food in front of a tranquil bay, with a distant island and benign clouds in the background, no sign of a city at all. No face was visible either—just the hunched-over silhouette. Through his camera, Curtis gave the backbreaking work, which he never considered anything but lowly, a noble patina. 

This first encounter with Princess Angeline determined the course of Curtis’ life. He spent the next three decades working on one of the most comprehensive anthropological projects ever undertaken. Funded by J.P Morgan and encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, Curtis photographed more than eighty North American tribes, descending deep into canyons and battling icy Arctic storms to obtain his material. The finished project would be twenty volumes in length, cost roughly $5,000 per subscription, and document everything from hunting methods to spiritual dances. If Curtis had managed to photograph every Native tribe in America, that would have been impressive enough. And yet he went further. Writes Egan: 

He would embark on a massive undertaking…a plan to photograph all intact Indian communities left in North America, to capture the essence of their lives before that essence disappeared…it was an impossibly grandiose idea, and he was vague on the specifics of how to pay for it, how inclusive it would be, how long it would take and how he would present the finished product. What’s more, after recording the songs of the Sun Dance, Curtis further expanded his scope and ambition: he would try to be a keeper of secrets—not just a photographer, but a stenographer of the Great Mystery. And did Edward Curtis, with his sixth-grade education, really expect to perform the multiple roles of ethnographer, anthropologist and historian? He did. What Curtis lacked in credentials, he made up for in confidence—the personality trait that had led him to Angeline’s shack and Rainier’s summit. 

By the time Curtis sent volume XX off to the printers, he had amassed more than 40,000 photographs and 10,000 audio recordings. He had also composed a ‘picture opera’ in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic and created the world’s first feature-length documentary film. In fact, Curtis’ achievements in film have only recently come to light due to a 1914 legal dispute that suppressed the film upon its initial release. Nonetheless, historians are now able to view this remarkable production from a novice director whose values and inclinations were notably more progressive than those of his audience. Writes Egan of In the Land of the Head Hunters:

Curtis would use an all-Indian cast, all Kwakiutl, not a single Italian in face paint on a Hollywood back lot. He would shoot on location. He would make sure that every prop used, every costume worn, was authentic. The artwork, the houses, the totems, the dugout canoes, the masks, the weapons—all would be made by Kwakiutl hands. He would record native music and get musicians to play it. In essence, the film was a grand expansion of his still pictures and written narratives. 

Many modern readers, myself included, might take issue with Curtis’ unrelenting pursuit of ‘authenticity.’ He often asked his subjects to remove the jeans and t-shirts they wore on a day-to-day basis in order to don ceremonial costumes that were seldom used. He posed them in natural settings that were discreetly cleared of modern objects and machinery. It is undoubtedly problematic for a white man to insist that Native Americans going about their daily lives are in any way ‘inauthentic,’ or that they should not adapt in order to survive. In many ways, Edward Curtis aimed to preserve the ‘Noble Savage’ and elevate him above his fallen brothers—the ‘pure’ native who is doomed to disappear (an extinction that is somehow romantic) being evidently more valuable than the native who would betray his tribe in order to blend into the dominant culture. Writes Egan:

This kind of framing presented a people inseparable from an unspoiled world—just as Curtis had outlined in 1905. If, back at the government food clinic in town, an image of short-haired men in overalls lining up for powdered milk was more representative of modern Indian life, Curtis wasn’t interested. Would an Irishman in a hamlet on the Dingle Peninsula prefer to be shown trailing sheep or getting a care package from America? The question answered itself. Curtis was a documentarian only of a certain kind of life.

Limited and controversial as his perspective may have been, Edward Curtis’ vast accumulation of data cannot be discredited. Whether or not we choose to applaud his methods, the fact is that without Curtis’ energy and ambition, much of the information we have on Native Americans would be lost. Perhaps the best evidence of Curtis’ lasting contribution can be found in the tribes he visited. Writes Egan: 

After purchasing an original edition of Volume XII, devoted entirely to the Hopi, that tribe used the book to build and solidify its teachings, traditions, and language. The Hopi found the alphabet and the accompanying song lyrics crucial tools in teaching words that nearly disappeared. When [Egan] visited them in the summer of 2011, tribal leaders talked about an ongoing renaissance of the old ways: in schools, among community groups, on websites and through social networks, and said that nearly half of all members of the Hopi Nation in Arizona can now speak some of the language.

And then there are the pictures. Edward Curtis took some truly breathtaking photographs that feel imbued with the spirit of his subjects. They are, for the most part, quiet and observational—as though Curtis himself were invisible. Posed as they undoubtedly were, it is equally clear that a certain degree of intimacy and friendship existed between Curtis and the natives he encountered. His portraits of Geronimo and Chief Joseph are some of the most iconic images in the world, but his scenes of domestic life are just as poignant. In Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Timothy Egan sees Curtis’ life work as it was meant to be seen—as an attempt to celebrate something beautiful and spiritual and precarious. Suffice it to say, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my own coffee-table collection next week—a condensed volume of ‘one hundred masterworks.’ 

NYT book review

Author website

THE COMPOSER MOST LIKELY TO ENTOMB HIMSELF IN MUSIC

Johannes Brahms: A Biography by Jan Swafford - Vintage Books (1999)

Seconding the opinion of absolutely no one, I would like to state for the record that my favorite movie is Fantasia 2000. Admittedly, my loyalty to what can charitably be termed an ‘uneven’ performance has something to do with nostalgia—my grandmother’s VHS collection consisted of nothing but Disney and Michael Flatley: Lord of the Dance—but I think there may be something else fueling my prolonged fascination with malicious mop buckets and sultry hippopotami. Despite my background in English literature and my acknowledged enthusiasm for ‘hundred dollar words,’ a part of me secretly agrees with Victorian art critic Walter Pater’s claim that “all art aspires towards the condition of music.” Instrumental music is fertilizer for the imaginative mind. A screaming violin, a ponderous oboe, an impish flute; these instruments and the sounds they produce can initiate mental journeys that vary greatly person to person—a kind of Goosebumps ‘choose your own adventure’ for the intellectually refined. Classical music allows access to an internal world that is always present, but often ignored whenever daily concerns and obligations demand attention. At its best, symphonic music provides a more direct channel to the human heart than any other medium. Although I will always chase after the fleeting pleasure released upon discovery of the perfect sentence—the spine-tingling sensation I enjoy when I light upon the right word—I know that language is limited, especially when it is called upon to articulate complex human emotions like desire, pain, and guilt. Our words will never be specific enough to convey the depth of our emotional responses, and part of the latent anxiety we must cope with on a daily basis has to do with convincing ourselves that the people we love know what we mean when we say that we feel ‘sad’ or ‘happy.’ The fact that love and pain are subjective causes endless frustration because there is no way to prove that we are being understood on a fundamental level. When we listen to classical music, when we willingly enter a realm that is mostly inexplicable and does not try to be otherwise, we feel, for a brief moment, that at least one other person in the universe has felt what we feel. The relief that floods my body whenever I realize that a composer has captured the violent ambiguities of my own emotions, and has further provided me with evidence of a kindred spirit, cannot be replicated in books or paintings or films. Sound flows in a primordial vein that predates any attempt to communicate via visual representation in words and symbols. It doesn’t happen often, but this ‘pure’ reaction to symphonic music cannot be understated. When I listen to a perfectly composed piece of classical music, I no longer feel that I am alone.

Johannes Brahms: A Biography by Jan Swafford is both a biography and an introduction to musical theory. Having enjoyed classical music all my life, it is somewhat astonishing that I have never really noticed or understood the mechanical side of composition. Johannes Brahms, more than any other composer, embodied what it meant to create during a time of transition—at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Modern era. He felt the urgency of one whose values and contributions are relegated to the past before his own demise. He was as calculating and formulaic as Bach and Haydn, and probably more so than mischievous Mozart and temperamental Beethoven. He scorned Liszt and and his progressive New German School, but respected and admired Wagner, who actively sought the annihilation of beauty and harmony in instrumental music. Brahms extolled the old forms, but he made them his own, and he broke them down in ways less violent, but no more revolutionary, than the politically verbose modernists ruling Vienna. Writes Swafford:

Brahms was born into the atmosphere of German Romanticism and, laboring in a long period of sporadically interrupted but still unprecedented peace and prosperity across Europe, turned that spirit to his own eclectic and history-haunted purposes—his singular integration of conservative and progressive, Classical and Romantic, atavistic and prophetic. By the night of his last concert in the Musikverein, history appeared already to have rushed past Brahms and left him at once victorious and irrelevant, stranded on his lonely promontory. In that year approaching the last turn of the century before the millennium, Europe was falling toward unimaginable catastrophe, and the arts toward the corollary of Romanticism: the ferment and fever called Modernism. 

Like many artists before him, Brahms was obsessed with fate and the immortality of his music. He could sense that the Classical era was coming to an end and was desperate to preserve his name alongside those of Bach and Beethoven. Thus, he strove to eliminate the man behind the music. He burned letters, censored biographies, and destroyed any piece of music that did not live up to his own expectations. He aimed to be as ‘pure’ in the historical record as the pieces lauded by Walter Pater in his critical essays. Despite the examples set by Beethoven and Mozart, both of whom led scandalous and highly-publicized lives, Brahms firmly believed that a true artist was one who existed only within the realm of his music. A true artist never created anything less than perfect. He never degraded himself with fleshy infatuations or monetary concerns. He sacrificed all earthly comforts to become a slave to the engine of artistic creation. Thus, writes Swafford, 

…his story has remained shrouded, his art hard to place, his influence ambiguous, his persona indistinct. At the same time his music, which unites magisterial perfection with lyrical warmth, a monumental style with whispering intimacy, [lies] in the hearts of listeners everywhere…It was not because he cared nothing for history that Brahms attempted to obliterate the record of his life. It was very much the reverse: he was in awe of history. To a degree perhaps beyond any composer up to his time—and like most to come—he was obsessed by the past. 

Besides an intimate psychological profile of Brahms the man and the crumbling Austrian Empire as a whole, Swafford also takes care to demonstrate the breadth of Brahms’ contributions as a composer. This is what makes Johannes Brahms: A Biography both an interactive educational text, and an innovative treatment of biography as a genre. Swafford’s account is roughly chronological, but he somehow manages to intersperse lessons on musical theory throughout his text. As Johannes Brahms gains in experience; as he forms relationships with artists such as Robert Schumann, Antonin Dvorák, and Joseph Joachim; as he confronts the oncoming storm of Wagner and the New Germans; Swafford demonstrates the effects these diverse influences had on his music. Thus, although Brahms was careful to erase the details of his life, we can learn something about him by examining his compositions alongside the contextual circumstances in which they were created. In other words, by dissecting the volatile artistic and social disturbances reverberating in late nineteenth-century Vienna, in reading the letters his contemporaries wrote to each other about Brahms, we can begin to form a hazy outline of his person. This is perhaps why Swafford spends so much time scrutinizing the technical aspects of each piece—Brahms’ treatment of counterpoint, harmony, and symphonic resolution. Writing about his pieces and the conditions under which they were written is, in many ways, the best way to write about Brahms. Describing the monumental Third Symphony, Swafford Writes: 

The very idea of ending a heroic, monumental work like this might have seemed unthinkable if Brahms had not done it here, with incomparable grace. Fragments of melody from the whole symphony seem to gather until they return us to where we began: with the opening melody of the work, Schumann’s theme. Now, though, it is resolved into its true nature as a conclusion, in a gentle F major that flutters downward to its resolution, and slips into silence. The winds that began the symphony by stepping away from stability into uncertainty now end the piece in a pure, long-sustained F major chord. It is the transformation of Schumann’s theme from searching and heroic, major wrenched to minor, to the peaceful valediction that is the abstract but no less moving “meaning” of this symphony.

Swafford’s obvious enthusiasm, and the admirable care he bestows upon each movement and measure, makes it easy to follow along on Spotify. In fact, one of the reasons it took me so long to finish this biography is because I stopped to listen to each piece Swafford describes in order to make the most of his analysis. In the process, I found that I was learning just as much about composition as I was about the life of Johannes Brahms. I finished this masterful text with a greater appreciation for the artists who manage to bring together numerous instruments and melodies into a nuanced and stratified whole. Johannes Brahms: A Biography is by no means an easy book to read—it is probably the most challenging biography I’ve read since embarking upon this project last Fall. But the rewards are great. I hear classical music differently now, and I love it more than ever. It touches me on a deeper level now because I understand the cost in mental labor it demands for its existence. Jan Swafford, whose accolades as a writer are surpassed only by his accomplishments as a composer, is a man who knows the role that music can play in nurturing and healing the human soul. Listen to the Third Symphony in F major—you won’t regret it. 

Jan Swafford's website

NYT book review

Classical.net book review

Third Symphony in F major (3rd movement-poco allegretto)

Hungarian Dance 5

THE SPY MOST LIKELY TO RAISE QUESTIONS OF CULPABILITY

The Man With the Poison Gun by Serhii Plokhy - Basic Books (2016)

There are two things I will never tire of watching: movies from the James Bond franchise, and episodes of Law & Order (I am perhaps the only person alive who prefers the original series over SVU). Like millions of viewers before me, I am drawn to the dark, illusory world of covert ops and international espionage like Gollum to his ‘precious.’ There is just something so thrilling and romantic about the notion of having a secret identity, slipping in and out of different personas, and infiltrating the inner nexus of a foreign governmental body. 007 is a master of reinvention, and if I were really honest with myself, I would have to admit that I envy his freedom from domestic obligations. My enduring love of Law & Order comes from a different corner of my psyche. I love the games of strategy, the risks and maneuvers, and above all the rhetoric of a courtroom drama. Some of the most ‘boring’ episodes of Law & Order are also my favorites. I don’t care much for high-speed chases or hostage situations. I love when criminals are apprehended early and the lawyers spend the rest of the episode delicately testing moral and legal boundaries, calling upon all the subtle permutations of the law. Because the law is undeniably malleable, and each new case widens the gap for new lines of inquiry and new questions which demand that we reflect upon what it means to be an individual within a society. The ruling in a single case can set the precedent for dozens of others and can impact the social milieu in which we exist. This does not always end well, but it is nevertheless fascinating to witness legal experts page through the same catalogue of rules and examples in order to argue opposing conclusions. The fact that someone can win an argument even when the court of public opinion is against them is one of the key differences between criminal justice in a democracy, and criminal justice in a totalitarian regime in which subjective opinions matter more than facts and logic. 

I could rant forever but TL;DR I am a sucker for well-dressed undercover agents and clever lawyers. 

The Man With the Poison Gun by Serhii Plokhy satisfied both of my narrative appetites. It is also well-supported enough to exist somewhat above the level of an actual Ian Fleming adventure. It is nonfiction that reads like fiction. The first half of the book, which documents the conversion of Bogdan Stashinsky from a Ukrainian revolutionary to a KGB assassin, is just as suspenseful and ludicrous as any Cold War mass-market paperback. The assassination by Stashinsky of a top Ukrainian leader, for example, involves multiple identities, a weapon concealed in a tin of sausages, and a gun that fires vaporized poison. In fact, most of the orders sent to Stashinsky from the Kremlin would be hilarious if they weren’t so deadly. Plokhy cleverly recycles all the effective literary devices from fiction in his biography. Thus, two characters might be introduced with full back stories in the early chapters, only to be merged into a single double-agent later on. Whereas many biographers would choose to clear up any identity confusion in the beginning, Plokhy lets his characters grow and expand significantly before ripping off their masks. Character information is distributed strategically rather than all at once, infusing what might otherwise have been a straightforward biography with a sense of mystery. More than once, the reader is left in the same state of disbelief and betrayal that one feels when Vesper Lynd stabs Bond, James Bond, in the back. In fact, Plokhy himself encourages the reader to participate in a bit of vicarious sleuthing with his journalistic manner of narration. Concluding his preface with what can only be termed ‘linguistic bait,’ Plokhy writes:

Most of what we know today about Bogdan Stashinsky, his crime, and his punishment comes from the testimony that he gave at his trial in Karlsruhe, Germany, in October 1962. We can now supplement that data with information from recently declassified files of the Central Intelligence Agency; KGB and Polish security archives; and memoirs and interviews of former KGB officers. The study of graveyard records in a Berlin suburb made it possible to corroborate parts of the story originally told by Stashinsky, and my interview with a former head of the South African police allowed me to trace the former Soviet assassin to that country. He is probably still living there, always looking over his shoulder, aware that the old habits of the KGB die hard, if at all.

This whodunit tone is all the more impressive considering Plokhy’s standing as a reputable historian. His published books (more than ten of them) have been translated into numerous languages, won countless awards reserved for Eastern European scholarship, and earned him a position as the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Plokhy is, furthermore, prolific in his country of birth and has done much to support Ukrainian writers of fiction and nonfiction alike. 

The second half of The Man With the Poison Gun is concerned with Stashinsky’s defection, trial, and subsequent disappearance. Having murdered two high-profile Ukrainian nationalists, Stashinsky fell in love with an East German woman and became gradually disenchanted with the ideals of a Soviet Empire. The two main sections of Plokhy’s book (conversion and trial) are neatly joined by Stashinsky’s stressful flight from Moscow to West Berlin. His defection and cooperation with the CIA became a turning point in the Cold War and a powerful blow to the reputation of the Russian elite. The trial section of The Man With the Poison Gun is written in a different tone—and progresses at a different pace—than the first chapters. In this section, Plokhy is chronological to the extreme, as if he were the court stenographer present at Stashinsky’s trial. There is very little ornamentation. Plokhy’s tone is dry and factual, reflecting the new legal setting of his narrative. The second half of his book takes place almost entirely in a courtroom that Plokhy brings to life in exacting detail. I do not know which half of the narrative I prefer, but I am thoroughly impressed by Plokhy’s ability to sew them together into a seamless whole. This transition is at least partly facilitated by a series of questions raised at the end of the first half of the book, which later become the key points in the 1962 court case. Plokhy first aligns his readers with the wary CIA agents who handle Stashinsky’s defection, and then with the witnesses in the courtroom attempting to locate the truth amidst all the illusions. Writes Plokhy:

Bogdan Stashinsky was flown to Frankfurt on August 13, 1961, while Inge [his wife] was interrogated separately by the West German authorities…The first of the many problems that the CIA interrogators faced in dealing with Stashinsky’s testimony, both in Berlin and then at the CIA interrogation center in Frankfurt, was that they could not establish his identity. The many documents he produced had three different names on them: Bogdan Stashinsky, Joseph Lehmann, and Aleksandr Krylov. The CIA Officers did not know which of them, if any, was authentic. The CIA also had no way to verify Stashinsky’s career with the KGB, or his surprisingly candid claims that he had killed Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet. Besides, no one thought that Rebet had been assassinated, and what Stashinsky was telling the interrogators about Bandera ran counter to all the evidence they had collected so far and all the theories developed on the basis of it. The documents assembled in the CIA’s Bandera file suggested that he had been poisoned by someone close to him, not by a lone killer wandering the streets of Munich with a strange tube in his pocket. 

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that courtroom (and Plokhy almost makes it so). Not only was the identity of the accused uncertain, so was his admission of guilt. After weeks of examining the evidence, both the defense and the prosecution were confident in their determination that Bogdan Stashinsky had in fact carried out the assassinations. But who should be held responsible? Should the burden of guilt be placed upon the shoulders of the man with the gun, or did it belong within the inner sanctum of the Kremlin? Was it even possible to prosecute a nebulous political organism that routinely flouted the rules of international diplomacy to eliminate traitors and enemies abroad? After weeks of debate, Bogdan Stashinsky was given eight years penal service for two murders. He was convicted as an ‘accessory’ to a crime committed by Soviet Russia—a mere tool in the hands of a powerful ideological monster. The repercussions were inevitable. Writes Plokhy:

Since the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, the West German courts had universally rejected the argument that Nazi perpetrators had simply followed orders. Now the Federal Criminal court and then the High Court, which approved its ruling, were dramatically reversing that policy. Both courts rejected the “acting under duress of orders” defense in the  Stashinsky case, but the ruling opened new avenues for the defense of Nazi criminals, as they could now claim that they had only been accessories to murder, while the main perpetrators, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and other top officials of the Third Reich, were long gone.

Cases like Bogdan Stashinsky’s are, of course, never simple. Stashinsky’s repeated assertions that he was forced to join the KGB to protect his family (his sister was a Ukrainian revolutionary), that he carried out his assignments under duress, and that he was brainwashed by the zealots of communism are not exactly excuses for murder, but they do warrant a degree of empathy. At the very least, the reader must pause to consider what he or she might do in a similar situation. And if we decide that the legal cost of an acquittal—in new opportunities for incarcerated felons—is too great, then aren’t we in danger of buying into the same ‘greater good’ mentality used to justify the original crimes? In other words, is there a difference between a Nazi who thinks ‘if I spare one Jew, the rest will demand mercy, so I should kill them all,’ and the judge who thinks ‘if I pardon one assassin, the rest will claim victimhood, so I should convict them all’? Perhaps the more important question is how do we find the words to explain the difference (and I think there is one) in a manner that is legally unassailable? How do we translate what we know to be true in our souls into real sentences that clarify rather than confuse? In The Man With the Poison Gun Serhii Plokhy touches upon these questions while all the while reminding readers that biographies can be thrilling, suspenseful, and fun.  

Chicago Tribune review

Serhii Plokhy's Harvard University profile

THE AMERICAN MOST LIKELY TO CRAFT HIS OWN NATIONALITY

How the World Moves by Peter Nabokov - Penguin Books (2016)

I would like to think that I benefitted from a fairly progressive upbringing. My teachers always encouraged me to ask questions, pursue alternative viewpoints, and listen to the marginalized voices drowned out by the bullhorn of Western narcissism. My parents pushed me to unearth the foundations beneath every accepted narrative, every assumption, every story that concluded with a straightforward confrontation between good and evil. But there are certainly gaps in my knowledge. After reading How the World Moves by Peter Nabokov, I realize how little I know about the country I am proud to call my home. I am not dense enough to believe that North America rose out of the sea like some biblical Atlantis, custom-made to accommodate the battered victims of European religious strife. The modern world did not pop into being as the first white man’s boot touched down upon Plymouth Rock. But I am ashamed to admit that I know very little about the pre-puritan history of the ‘New World.’ The fact that I still think of Native Americans (Indians? American Indians?) as a homogenous mass—a bastardized conglomerate of many distinct tribal units—is rather alarming. I am embarrassed to say that as a relatively enlightened twenty-four year old woman with a receptive heart and an inquisitive mind, the names that I remember most easily are those of Pocahontas and Sacagawea—both of whom have been reduced in the established narrative to harmless feminine ideals of ‘noble’ savagery that mainly exist to compliment and assist masculine Western progress. It is high time to fill in the gaps.

How the World Moves is about a single Pueblo family and their attempts to juggle Native expectations and Western opportunities. Raised in the isolated New Mexican mesa community of Acoma, Edward Proctor Hunt embodied what it means to be a cultural hybrid. Born in 1861, Hunt coexisted, from the start, as a member of one of the oldest nations on earth, as well as one of the newest. His ancestors could trace their roots back to Pueblo villages pre-dating the birth of Christ. Their communal identity was strengthened by a set of complex creation myths, a pantheon of minor deities, and a deeply-entrenched respect for nature. They had survived wars against neighboring tribes, the aggressive and racist policies of the Catholic Spaniards, and the exploitive and inhumane ones of the later Americans. They watched as their lands were settled by white men and their children were carted off to Christian boarding schools. The fact that Acoma culture remained relatively intact for so long is partly explained by its geographical isolation atop a rocky outcrop. It is also due to an ingrained wariness and a refusal to speak about their beliefs and rituals with outsiders. But by the time Edward Proctor Hunt came into the world, things had already begun to change. Writes Nabokov: 

Edward’s life span [covered] the period of the greatest displacement of indigenous peoples in world history. During this time many millions of tribespeople and peasant villagers were thrown on the road, uprooted by war, famine, greed, genocide, or extreme prejudice. The story behind the Hunt family’s hegira is akin to that of refugees in general who must face anguishing decisions about staying put or reaching out for more survivable and successful futures. Many strike hard bargains between tradition and progress and wind up fending for themselves through all manner of diasporas, both external and internal. Their stories are a defining aspect of our human experience, as thousands of premodern communities produced postmodern families like the Hunts.

How does one choose between individual survival and cultural preservation? Which among us has been asked whether we would prefer to abandon our community or die a slow death in obscure and unseen poverty? If a boy watches his homeland shrink, year by year, overtaken by men who wield superior weapons and technology, can his embrace of modernity really be considered a betrayal? These are difficult questions and there will never be easy answers. Was Edward Hunt a sellout? And when exactly did his betrayal occur? Most would argue that his willingness to perform in traveling shows as a kind of whooping, scalp-snatching ‘every-Indian’ character was the point of no return. But perhaps the Acoma elders would suggest that Edward Hunt severed ties the moment he agreed to share tribal secrets and myths with the esteemed anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institute. Because if knowledge is power, the Acoma Indians’ refusal to share their worldview was itself an act of resistance. As if to say, you can take our land, you can call us primitive, but you will never infiltrate the intimate spaces of our minds. Edward Hunt let the white man in. After centuries of oppression, manipulation, and criminal neglect, it was impossible for the Acoma elders to understand how one of their own could trust the duplicitous motives of an outsider. Writes Nabokov:

The target of this adulation hardly knew what hit them. First came the question of how to decipher the ravenous curiosity that energized these eager white faces. It was such an about-face from even a generation before, when disdain, even disgust, for Indian religion, social practices, and pace of life was palpable. What range of desires lay behind this new scrutiny, and why were they being questioned about beliefs and practices these whites once found so abhorrent? 

The problem facing Edward Hunt is the same problem that many ethnic ‘minorities’ come to face. White people often take individualism for granted. I am not expected to live my life in opposition to harmful racial stereotypes, so I enjoy greater freedom to make mistakes and act selfishly. I try to make my friends and parents proud, but that’s as far as it goes. I do not have to answer to a larger community fighting for recognition and respect. There is no room for selfish behavior, for individual desire, when one is expected to redeem the status of an entire race. That is why it is so difficult to make a conclusive statement as to the contradictory character of Edward Hunt and his adaptive clan. Writes Nabokov:

They delivered the thrills of seeing costumed and war-painted Indians in the flesh (especially those attired like fearsome Plains Indian warriors) with the sense that audiences were also being educated in their tribal backgrounds. Here were Indians who seemed incontrovertibly Indian but whom outsiders felt good being around. The fortuitous combination of their handsome looks and unique life experiences made them perfect mediators for all the contradictory ideas and symbolism that swirled around the paradoxical images of the Indian—as savage and noble, solid friend and frightening foe, enemy other and congenial ally, rapist and spiritualist, border-town drunk and wilderness mentor.

As problematic as the Hunt family’s simplified and flattened performances may have been, they were at least celebratory in tone. Despite the fact that Indians were (and are) considered to be more or less interchangeable, their accumulated dances, songs, and crafts were deemed worthy of preservation. There were also spiritual lessons to be learned from the Indians, along with a more symbiotic relationship with nature. Were the Hunts, whose insider knowledge did afford them at least a bit of authenticity, truly any worse than the affluent white Bohemians who turned native culture into a doomed and dying fetish? In other words, if the above quotation makes you feel uncomfortable, how about the following?

The crocodile tears shed across America over the widespread lamentation that the country’s Indians were a “vanishing species” were in flood as the nation approached its new century [the twentieth]…Painters, sculptors, and photographers exploited the nation’s distress over the plight of the Indian by portraying broken warriors fading into sunsets, riding alongside train tracks or telegraph wires, or slumped over drooping horses…What no political or social forecasters were willing to admit was how this pathetic vision caused inner sighs of relief. If everyone remained patient, natural attrition and what some called “the normal replacement of one race by another” would solve the “Indian Problem” all by itself.

How The World Moves is full of passages like the one above. Peter Nabokov raises difficult questions, prods festering wounds, and bolsters his elegant prose with an impressive library of research. His role, of course, carries its own contradictions. How are we meant to feel about white anthropologists who claim to speak for their subjects? Isn’t Nabokov’s repeated assertion that Edward Hunt was ostracized for sharing tribal secrets with Western academics a bit hypocritical? Nabokov is, after all, himself a professor of American Indian Studies at UCLA, and his research relies on interviewing and observing Natives who might be punished for their collaboration. I’m not sure I know how I feel about these issues. On the one hand, I have an acknowledged appetite for information—I am fascinated by other cultures (past and present) and would like to learn as much as I can. On the other hand, I recognize that some knowledge is too sacred to be shared. Secrets, especially spiritual ones, belong to individuals and communities—they are not owed to some kind of nebulous Western knowledge bank. If not knowing something allows another culture to protect its dignity, then I think I am happy to remain in the dark. 

Penguin author profile

Oregonian Review

THE ART COLLECTOR MOST LIKELY TO FALL IN LOVE WITH A PAINTING

The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming - Scribner (2016)

The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming is, structurally speaking, one of the most innovative biographies I’ve ever read. In fact, I think ‘dual biography’ is probably a more appropriate term for this phenomenal text, as Cumming divides her attentions equally between two men who lived centuries—and worlds—apart. The first man will be easily recognizable to anyone who has ever studied the great masters of European painting. He is the esteemed Diego Velázquez, whose piercing portraits of Spanish nobles captured the melancholy twilight of a dynasty in decline. The second man will be recognizable to no one. He is John Snare, a nineteenth-century bookseller whose fascination with a single painting precipitated the spectacular ruin of his own reputation, business, and marriage. Having dedicated his life to the impassioned defense of a painting he knew in his heart to be a genuine Velázquez, after combing through the archives and chasing down every fragile lead, John Snare found himself spending his ‘golden’ years in relative anonymity, alone and impoverished in New York City, discredited by most experts in the field of fine arts and wanted by the Scottish authorities. His life is the nonfiction rendition of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. In the tragic figure of John Snare, Laura Cumming erects a monument to irrational obsession, material greed, and, ultimately, the supernatural power contained within a beautiful piece of art. One can visualize Snare as an elderly man, alone in his tiny dilapidated apartment on Broadway, holed up with his treasured painting and little else. After spending the first half of his life carefully establishing himself in the close-knit community of Reading, Snare died a slavish, Gollum-like creature, having lost his soul in the alluring painted gaze of the doomed Charles I of England. The inevitable fall began, as Cumming suggests, the moment Snare followed a whim to an obscure little auction and chanced to glance behind the filthy surface of a forgotten canvas. Fate looms large in the history of art, in the vaulted halls of our greatest museums, and in every chapter of The Vanishing Velázquez. Writes Cumming: 

For two centuries and more it has been confidently predicted that the small sum of Velázquez’s art would never increase, that no more paintings by him would now be found, that any lost paintings were permanently lost. But this has never been true. His pictures really have turned up again, tumbled in the tide of history, one by one, discovered in the most unlikely places…For Velázquez’s portraits, so miraculously empathetic and precise, so unmistakable and inimitable, as it seems, keep on being mistaken and overlooked. Perhaps something in his exceptionally enigmatic way of painting has veiled these works; something in their mystery and modesty—from the self-effacing brushwork to the absence of a signature—has obscured them. They depend upon the kindness of strangers to an unusual degree; they need people to find and to save them.

The fact that a middling merchant of no great worth happened to be one of these ‘saviors’ is further evidence of fate’s naughty disposition. When I think about all the times I have walked by framed portraits in thrift shops without a second glance, it makes John Snare’s perseverance all the more impressive. It can be difficult, after all, to trust the authenticity of a work of art that hasn’t been given the curator’s seal of approval. Uneducated as he might have been in the history and composition of fine art, John Snare’s eye was discerning enough to rummage through a collection of soiled and neglected doodles and pick out a masterpiece. Or so he would claim as he spent the remainder of his life defending ‘his picture.’ The portrait having since mysteriously disappeared once again, neither Cumming nor her readers can make any headway in determining whether or not Snare actually possessed a genuine Velázquez. But that is beside the point. The point is Snare’s singular devotion, which reads rather like a Tolstoy love story. Writes Cumming: 

We say that works of art can change our lives, an optimistic piety that generally refers to the moral or spiritual uplift of painting, and the way it may improve its audience. But art has other powers to alter our existence. The moment he bought the portrait of Prince Charles, Snare’s life changed direction. It was a lost work, disregarded, on its way to the oblivion from which he saved it in 1845. It was an object that he would be forced to defend from danger and theft, that took him from small-town provincial life to the most fashionable streets of London and New York, and from obscurity to newspaper fame; a painting he would take with him wherever he went, that came to mean more to him than anything in the world, more than his family, his home, and himself, that would lead to exile, a lonely death in a cold-water tenement and an unmarked grave in New York: the painting that would ruin his life.  

Cumming is a master of nonfiction ‘storytelling.’ Part of the reason her book is so easy to read—and so lauded by critics—is because it contains all the decadence and decay of a Victorian novel. John Snare finds himself drawn into the glittering world of transient wealth just like Dorian Gray and Jay Gatsby. Like Theodore Decker and his painted finch, by the time John Snare realizes the price of his obsession, he is already estranged from the ordinary life he might once have led. Falling in love with a work of art is ultimately a lonely experience because it happens so rarely and is not easily understood by those who have never swooned over brushstrokes. Cumming bridges the gulf by writing about Velázquez’s style in almost erotic terms. By doing so, she encourages readers to identify with Snare’s feelings, even if the object of desire remains intangible. Writes Cumming:

Everything he did was original, and in every genre. His landscapes are unprecedented; his still lifes almost sacramental; his fables are real and human. He invented a new kind of pictorial space and a new kind of picture in which consciousness flows in both directions. His portraits are not just the living, breathing likeness, but the seeing, feeling being in the very moment of life and thought, Nobody has ever surpassed his way of making pictures that seem to represent the experience—the immediacy—of seeing in themselves. He is the taciturn revolutionary among them all.

This description of a style of painting is almost hot-and-heavy. Through her heightened vocabulary and the rapid, tumbling urgency of her sentences, Cumming comes across just as enamored as Snare must have been. This is not entirely surprising—Cumming is a notable art critic and wrote an equally breathless book on self-portraits in 2009. The means by which a single annotated fragment in a dusty record caught her attention and dragged her off on the same hopeless mission as John Snare himself is a testament to the allure of Velázquez. In fact, Cumming found herself following in the literal footsteps of Snare in her pursuit of the lost painting, coming up against the same obstacles and frustrations, unearthing the same hilariously-named participants like characters out of Beatrix Potter, traveling great distances to interview senile eyewitnesses, and ending up with the same unanswered questions and the realization that she will likely never know the truth about the vanished masterpiece. Part of the anxiety felt by Cumming, Snare, and modern readers alike, has to do with the desire to see something that survives only in description. The limitations of words in the communication of art is an underlying theme trickling quietly beneath Cumming’s narrative, and it is what makes her writing both entertaining and frustratingly inconclusive. 

Velázquez is known in the art world for his ability to draw observers into the scenes he depicts. Thus, the relationship between inanimate painting and animate human being is more reciprocal than in most situations. In fact, Cumming might argue that Velázquez’s best canvases engage in a certain amount of seduction.The artist,

…invents a new kind of art: the painting as living theater, a performance that extends out into our world and gives a part to each and every one of us, embracing every single viewer. For anyone who stands before Las Meninas now, held fast by the eyes of these lost children and servants, is positioned exactly where the people of the past once stood. This is part of the picture’s content. It elects you to the company of all who have ever seen it, from the little princess and her maids, who must have rushed around to see themselves the moment Velázquez finished, to the king and queen who appear in miniature in that glimmering mirror at the back…The picture turns the world upside down, so that citizens may take the place of kings, and kings may be tiny compared to children.

Can John Snare be blamed for his downfall? Laura Cumming seems to think that falling in love is inevitable for anyone who stands before a genuine Velázquez. The Spanish master was just that good. It is impressive that Cumming’s biography remains so balanced even while one of her protagonists soars towards the heavens of artistic immortality, and the other plummets into obscurity. Their narrative trajectories may spin off in opposite directions, but the reader feels for and appreciates both untouchable Velázquez and forgettable John Snare. This is, perhaps, Cumming’s greatest accomplishment in The Vanishing Velázquez. 

NYT book review

Guardian Review