Jessica Gross | Longreads | April 2016 | 23 minutes (5,803 words)

In 2012, Jillian Keenan came out as a spanking fetishist in a “Modern Love” essay for The New York Times. It marked the beginning of not only her involvement in the spanking community, but her freelance career as well. Since then, Keenan has written a series of controversial polemics—a case for legalizing polyamory, an argument that spanking is a sex act—as well as reported from countries across the globe.

In her new memoir, Sex With Shakespeare, Keenan examines her own relationships with both spanking and love through the lens of her longstanding obsession with Shakespeare. His characters, who appear in dialogue with Keenan, have as forceful a presence as the people in her life. I visited Keenan at her home in New York City, where we spoke about the difference between fetish and kink, her view of her fetish as innate, and her firm belief that spanking children is an act of sexual abuse.

This book struck me as such an empathetic text. I feel like sometimes, in our current cultural climate, there’s a lot of anger at and dismissal of anyone who’s ignorant about a topic, and I really appreciated that you treated the reader who didn’t know anything about fetishes with a lot of respect. Was that something you thought about as you were writing it? Or is that just how you feel, and it came out naturally as you were writing?

It’s not something I thought of consciously, but I’m thrilled to hear that’s what came across. I was conscious of the fact that, in my opinion, there’s nothing unique about the experience of feeling isolated. Whereas maybe most people don’t feel ashamed or isolated because they think about spanking all the time, I think that probably everyone has something in their lives—whether in their sex lives or in another part of their lives—that they feel insecure about or ashamed of or fearful about.

I didn’t want to act as if the experience of feeling lonely and ashamed is something that I needed to explain to people. I think that everyone already knows what that feels like. I was just trying to tell a story about the specifics of why I felt that way, and how I worked through it to the extent that I did.

Right. It also feels like part of your vision here is, “It’s okay that you don’t know, so I’m going to explain what a fetish is.” You offer an explanation of terms very early in the book, which is really inclusive. It’s as if this book is designed for people who don’t necessarily know anything about fetishes or BDSM or kink.

Or even for people within the communities. I think that if we had 10 members of the BDSM communities in this apartment, we’d probably have 11 different definitions for the terms that I use. I felt like I had to clarify what the terms mean to me, and the sense in which I would use them in the book, if only to have all my cards on the table. So I didn’t include this description only for people who might know nothing, but also for people who have very strong opinions about this. Because no two people have the same experience, of course.

One thing that surprised me, as someone who is outside of this community and doesn’t know a tremendous amount about it, was that, as you describe it, spanking is the paramount activity to you, whereas sex is kind of take-it-or-leave-it in comparison.

I think that one of the most common misconceptions about fetish is that it is merely a side dish to sex, and that sex is the ultimate goal. And while that may be true for some people, in the spanking fetishist community, the spanko community, most people who share my fetish feel the same way I do: sex is almost irrelevant.

There was a moment when I was hanging out with some friends of mine from the fetish community and we were talking about a spanking party we had gone to, because I’ve started attending these parties from time to time—

What is that like?

We just hang out with our friends; these parties are oftentimes very banal. I think people imagine leather clothing and, I don’t know, shocking things. But we just play board games and talk and it’s very normal—except someone’s getting beaten in the corner or in the other room.

Just like at a regular party, where people go hook up in the bathroom?

Yeah, but it’s not even like hooking up. It’s like a yoga party. Some people might be drinking wine and playing Scrabble, and then someone would be doing Downward Facing Dog in the corner.

Or, I think the best analogy I can think of is massage or dance. Dancing with a partner can be very erotic and very sexual. Or you and I could dance right now and it would be totally fun and platonic and we would just be dancing. Or like getting a massage: a massage can be foreplay and can lead to sex, or a massage can be something you do with a stranger, if you hire a professional masseur. So I think spanking is the same way. It can be erotic, but it also can be very, very platonic and physical.

But anyway, once, when I was hanging out with my friends, I kind of sheepishly mentioned that I had been scared to go to parties at first because I thought that even within my own fetish community, I was the unusually asexual one. I thought a party would be much more sexual, in the normative sense, than it turned out to be. Everyone else said that they had felt exactly the same way. It’s a sexuality party, but not a sex party.

Can you talk about how you came to know about and be involved in the spanking community? Did it all come about as a result of your “Modern Love” piece?

I had been aware of parties ever since I was a teenager. There’s a big party in Las Vegas that happens every year, and in college I would look at the website every once in a while and think, “Should I drive down?” I went to college in California, so it would have been possible. But I never went, because it was too freaking scary.

After the “Modern Love” piece ran, I thought, “Well, I’m out now, so I should go to a party.” So a couple weeks later, I got dressed up and I got cookies and I went down to the LGBT Center in Manhattan, which at the time was a space that hosted one of the bigger parties. I thought, “I’m going to do this. There’s no reason to be nervous. My cards are on the table; I’m out now.”

I got into the hallway and I couldn’t go inside. No matter how much I had prepped myself for the idea of going and just checking it out and chatting with some people, I hadn’t anticipated the slapping sounds I would hear coming from inside the room. There was something about that sound that was terrifying and paralytic and overwhelming, and I just stood in the lobby of the LGBT Center holding my cookies for about 40 minutes. And then I left.

So what do you think that was about?

I think there definitely is a difference between the idea of something and its reality. At that point, I didn’t have any other friends who were spanking fetishists. It would be months before I would make my first spanking fetishist friend, Cyan; I didn’t have a single other friend who was like me. I really wanted that, so I thought this party would be a place to meet some friends, and we could, I don’t know, compare notes about looking up these words in the dictionary and the weird things that we did when we were kids.

When I had imagined the party, I just imagined myself chatting and sharing the cookies that I brought and maybe having a glass of wine, although I have since learned that for good reason, they don’t serve alcohol at these types of parties. I knew in theory that people would be playing, but when I heard the sounds, it just was very, very overwhelming. It was way too much. I didn’t even try to go to a party again for about two years.

At that point, I thought, “Okay, I should suck it up and try again. This time, I know what sounds to expect, so maybe I won’t be freaked out.” I tweeted something to that effect and Abby, who is mentioned in the book, sent me an email offering to meet up at a bar just to chat sometime, and to take me to a party. It made it much easier to go to my first party, having a friend I’d met and gotten to know in a vanilla context. And I’ve since made some great friends in the community.

Has that made a big difference?

Yes. I think that it’s been good for me. I think it’s been good for my marriage. But at the same time, while I’m very grateful to have made friends in the community, I think having these friendships has also somewhat softened the intensity of all of this. When I was talking to Cyan, for example, it felt like this crazy thing. And my relationship with John [her first boyfriend, also a spanking fetishist] felt like this crazy miraculous coincidence.

When you think you’re the only one for so long, finding someone else who feels the same way about these things feels like this really sharp-edged surprise. And having a variety of friends in the community and knowing people all over the country and world who share this experience hasn’t decreased the value of that, but it’s decreased the scarcity, certainly. So now, if Abby and I want to talk about spanking, it no longer needs to be this stay-up-all-night-texting-about-it-until-dawn kind of thing.

Last year, I interviewed Rachel Hills, who argues in her book The Sex Myth that that we’ve gone from a culture that prizes virginity and purity, and shuns promiscuity, to the opposite end of the spectrum: the disdain is now directed toward people who have vanilla tastes or don’t sleep around. Being promiscuous or adventurous in bed—up to a point—is upheld. In your book, you write, “the term vanilla—the most common way to describe people who aren’t kinky—does not imply that a person is boring or conservative.” Doesn’t it, though, in our culture?

Certainly, there are people who use the term “vanilla” that way. But to my mind, vanilla just means a non-fetishist. Honestly—and I reserve the right to change my mind about this as time passes—I sometimes think that the difference between vanilla and non-vanilla is whether or not you think about sex when you masturbate. My impression is that the majority of people think about sex when they masturbate, so that would be the normative sexual identity. Whereas if you think about something other than sex, whether it’s spanking or rubber or tickling, you’re non-vanilla. Certainly many, many, many people in the BDSM communities would vehemently disagree with that definition. But I will say this: In the spanking community, at least, there are a number of partners, like [her husband] David, who identify as vanilla. I think when people hook up with one of us or marry one of us or get into a relationship with one of us, and really see what it is that we’re into, they realize that there is a difference between people for whom sex is the center of their sex lives and people for whom something other than sex is the center of their sex lives.

I can see how vanilla would be implied to be insulting. But if you think about it, there’s an implied insult in “straight.” If someone is straight, it almost implies that they’re boring: “You’re so straight, that’s so boring.” But nobody understands it that way, as far as I know—I’ve never personally met someone who understands “straight” to be insulting. They’re just like, “Yeah, straight, I’m into people of the opposite gender.” So I would like to see vanilla, or whatever term we land on, be understood that way. “Straight” is not boring, it’s just what you’re into. And “vanilla” isn’t boring, it’s just what you’re into.

In the book, you detail the distinction between what spanking means to vanilla people, and what it is to a fetishist to be spanked. This was surprising to me to read. I pictured that spanking fetishists just really enjoy a swat during sex, but as you describe it, that is the vanilla version, and not at all what you mean.

Right. I think a lot of people who perceive or use “vanilla” in a derogatory way imagine that vanilla is just missionary-style sex. Whereas as far as I’m concerned, someone can tie their partner up and have sex and, I don’t know, be wearing a Darth Vader costume, but if the sex is the point then, to my mind, that’s a category that I’m not in.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote an article for Slate saying that I understand my fetish to be my sexual orientation. When I go back and read that article now, I can see myself doing a little bit of rhetorical tap dancing. I argue that this is my sexual orientation in that it’s innate, unchosen and life-long, but I don’t want to be exclusive, because there’s some people for whom it is not innate and chosen and life-long, and I’m not trying to exclude them from the umbrella of kink. I’m not trying to exclude them from BDSM communities. If a woman discovers rope bondage in her forties and loves it, that’s fine.

I think my problem when I wrote that article was that I was using the term “kink” as a catchall. Now, as I’ve been talking to more people and gotten involved in the community and met more spanking fetishists, but also as I have made friends in the BDSM community, I’ve realized it would have been more useful in that article if I had separated the terms kink and fetish.

A kinky person is maybe that person who’s wearing the Darth Vader suit and tying up his partner and having sex, and that doesn’t necessarily have to be life-long. Whereas fetish—I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard from my friends about how early this starts. So I think it cannot be anything other than an orientation.

In the book, I mention that a friend of mine was dating a guy from the BDSM scene—not the spanking scene, just the BDSM scene. She once complained, “I need a real spanko spanking.” So the point of that comment, and the reason I included it and enjoyed it so much, is that the distinction is not necessarily between vanilla people and non-vanilla people. It’s that we all fall in different categories and there are ways that any subculture cannot necessarily and automatically understand another subculture. BDSM spankings are very different than the kinds of spankings that people in my scene give and what we’re into.

How so?

I’m going to get so much shit from people in the community, because you can’t make generalizations. But in my experience, people in the BDSM scene tend to enjoy eating from all parts of the buffet. They want a diverse and bountiful plate of food. Whereas people in my community have just parked at one station and are just eating that. We really like macaroni and cheese and we’ll eat macaroni and cheese until we are turning orange. The BDSM scene, in my experience, does tend to be more focused on sex.

In the book, you describe your belief that your fetish is innate, that it started very early in your childhood—before, in fact, a severe spanking you received from your mother. Can you talk about innateness versus causality, and why it’s so important to you to set the record straight that fetishes are not caused by trauma?

It is incredibly important to me to be clear about the fact that this fetish is not caused by childhood trauma. This is the knot that I tried to untie for about 20 years. There was a time that the psychoanalytic establishment believed that homosexuality was the symptom of some kind of underlying disease, and that it was a problem that therefore needed to be fixed. I think that is where we are right now with this fetish. I think the message that this sexuality or this identity—because, as I made clear, it’s not really about sex—is not the shards of something that broke, or the symptom of a disease. Because if fetishism was caused by childhood trauma, then it would be something that should be cured, that should be corrected, that should be fixed.

In my opinion, we do have a really serious disease in this country, in this world, which is the very common and institutionalized oppression of children. It’s remarkable to me that we have this social justice movement happening in certain circles, and certainly online, that is very focused on consent and human rights and all these buzz words and yet never, ever do I see the fact that there is one demographic that it is still perfectly legal to assault. If there were any other demographic where it was legal to beat them, I think that there would be an outcry.

But children do not have votes, they don’t have money, they don’t have Twitter accounts, for the most part, so they can’t complain, and nobody complains on their behalf. If it’s not okay to assault people on the basis of race or gender, why is it okay to assault on the basis of age? That is the problem. That is what needs to be fixed and corrected, not natural and healthy variations on the human sexual spectrum.

I think the best comparison that I have ever thought of is spousal rape. I find it very easy to imagine that when the debate about criminalizing spousal rape started, some people said, “What are you talking about? My husband has sex with me when I don’t want him to sometimes, but he’s my husband, it’s fine, it’s his right.” A few nights ago, I was tweeting about this, and someone that I respect a lot tweeted back that context matters, and that spankings in the context of parental discipline are not assaults. I could have very easily said, “Yeah, context matters. Non-consensual sex in the context of marriage isn’t rape.” I mean, you can do that for almost anything that is arguably a consent violation. “Non-consensual sex in the context of a date isn’t rape.”

You could make the argument that if context matters, then consent doesn’t. But obviously, I’m not of that opinion. I think that consent matters. Consent is complicated with the matter of children; you know children probably don’t consent to getting a vaccination, but I’m in favor of vaccinating children. Certainly, this is a very detailed and nuanced conversation. But I do think that when it comes to the issue of ripping off a child’s underwear and accessing a part of their body that is widely understood to be sexual, and violently causing blood to rush to their genitals as they scream in pain and fear, this seems pretty cut and dried to me. But the vast, vast majority of people in the world disagree, and as much as I would love to see this tide change, I suspect I will not live to see that.

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Can you describe the sexuality of spanking in a biological sense, in terms of the blood flow to the butt and the groin?

Right. So the common iliac artery splits. When someone’s getting a spanking, their butt turns red. That’s because blood is flowing down the common iliac artery to that region. But the other half of the artery goes to the genitals. So when blood is rushing to your butt, it’s also rushing to your genitals. This is why from time to time I and some of my friends can orgasm only from a spanking. It’s just because blood flow is happening there.

I got a really upsetting email from a mother once who was responding to an article I had written for Slate about how spanking children is sexually problematic. And I’ve got to give her credit, she did not approach me from a combative perspective. She emailed me and said, “I spank my children, but your article has given me pause.” The reason it gave her pause is because she had given her 11-year-old son a spanking and when he stood up, crying, she said that despite the fact that he was crying and clearly upset, he had an erection. An erection is blood flow. So if you’re causing blood to rush to one part, you’re causing blood to rush to the other part.

Also, studies have found that children who are spanked or hit regularly experience a surge of the sex hormone oxytocin when they sense danger. Oxytocin has been found to be a powerful painkiller, so it makes sense that if a child habitually expects physical pain when their parents are angry, then when their parents are angry, that sex hormone would surge.

People argue that you do other things with your butt. You sit on it. Well, you do other things with your penis and vagina, too. But they’re still sexual. Every time a friend is like, “No, butts aren’t sexual,” I want to say, “Then let me touch it right now. Get naked.” [She reaches out to graze my elbow] I just non-consensually touched your elbow and I feel like I did not sexually violate you. But I would not non-consensually touch your ass. And I think that most people understand the distinction between touching someone’s elbow and touching someone’s ass. Yet for some reason, when I have this conversation, they forget this distinction. And they suddenly think it’s totally out there and extreme for me to even suggest that butts are a sexual body part. What? So I think next time someone says that to me, I’m going to be like, “Prove it. Let’s tweet a picture of your non-sexual body part right now.” [Laughter] Possibly out there, there is someone for whom the elbow is a very sexual body part, and I should not non-consensually touch it. But I am in confident saying that that elbow fetishist is a minority of a minority of a minority. If you Google the word spanking, it’s pretty damn clear that this is not an unusual fetish or identity. So I think it’s really problematic that that so many parents spank their children.

That said, it obviously doesn’t cause this fetish. I have a lot of friends who are spanking fetishists like me and did all the same things that I did from as early an age—looking up words in the dictionary, obsessing about Boy by Roald Dahl—who were never spanked as children.

So the distinction you’re making is almost the reversal of the common understanding: rather than spanking causing a spanking fetish, it’s that someone might have been born with a spanking fetish, and so to spank them as a childhood punishment is sexual abuse.

Yes. One hundred percent yes. My earliest memories of eroticizing spanking are from age two or three. More and more, science agrees that a child’s sexual identity doesn’t just magically appear at age 18. I think that I was born with it. Children have emerging sexual identities, and it doesn’t matter that this is a minority identity or an uncommon one. If even one percent of children experience spanking as a sex act, then we as a culture are sexually violating too many children. I do understand that what I say in that chapter in particular will be very controversial.

Why is that controversial?

I’m going to get controversy from both sides, right? Some people are going to be outraged and appalled that I think that non-consensually inflicting an act of BDSM on a child is sexually inappropriate. Some people will find that claim to be outrageous. But on the other side of the spectrum, some people will be really outraged that I say in this chapter that my experience of sexual assault is relative and that sexual assault is a relative thing.

I had non-consensual sex once in the sense that a man held me down while I was crying and saying “I don’t want to have sex,” and had sex with me. To be clear, I was pissed off about this. It made me mad. But it absolutely did not traumatize me. I suppose technically this experience makes me a rape survivor. But I feel like it’s almost inconsiderate for me to identify as a rape survivor, because I don’t want to apply that term to what was a truly minor, minor experience in my life. I’ve been more upset about many, many, many other things in my life than I was about this experience of non-consensual sex.

Of course, this is not to say that other people should feel as I did. Of course they shouldn’t. Anyone who has something non-consensually done to them is entitled to react in the way that they react. But I’m entitled to my experience, too, and I’m entitled to the reaction that I had. And my reaction was just that it was not very upsetting for me because that’s not my sexuality. And so it didn’t really feel like a sexual violation. Whereas being spanked non-consensually did.

By your mother.

Yes. She’s the only person who has ever non-consensually spanked me, because I’ve been very lucky to meet friends and boyfriends and partners who have only hit me consensually. And that’s a totally different experience; it’s as different as sex and rape. So yes.

There’s nothing wrong with my sexual identity, but there are things that are very wrong with how we treat children in the world. And so I’m trying to flip the conversation.

I do wonder if there’s a little more gray area in your understanding of your fetish as innate. To reject the simple cause-and-effect storyline that being spanked caused you to crave spankings is one thing. But it strikes me that your fetish could have stemmed, at least in part, from your childhood and the way in which you were raised, and also be healthy and fine. In my view, everyone’s sexuality has something to do something with their relationship with their parents, and that doesn’t mean it’s wrong or needs to be fixed.

You write in the book, “The first person I loved was also the first person I feared.” You describe your mother as unpredictable, volatile. This is armchair psychoanalysis here, but I wondered if the appeal of rules and punishment in a sexual setting could have to do with the appeal of knowing exactly what is going to happen. Rules make this consensual punishment predictable and safe in a way that was not at all true of your relationship with your mother.

I think that what you’re saying is totally possible. Maybe it really is just as simple as that—

Or a combination of factors.

Exactly. Maybe when I say that I feel I was born this way, it’s just as simple as, I have an unusually high concentration of nerve endings in my butt. A friend once said, “Honestly, touching my butt is like touching my elbow. My butt, I get nothing there.” Whereas my butt—in the book I call it the big clitoris on the back of my pelvis. There are a lot of nerve endings back there. So maybe I have an unusually high number of nerve endings there, and then my fetish is sort of a complicated cocktail of my butt being erotic and wanting some predictability in my childhood. Maybe that is it.

But it really doesn’t matter. It was more important in my life to realize what didn’t cause it, which was childhood trauma. What did cause it, who knows. What does matter is that sexuality develops in children earlier than people want to admit and therefore I think we owe it to our children as a culture to have difficult and complicated conversations about consent and how we can and should extend consent rights in some contexts to children.

Early in the book, you write, “My commitments to peace, women’s rights, gender equality, and nonviolence seemed absurd alongside the dark and frightening underworld of my fetish.” Could just talk about how you resolved that?

Well, at the point that I felt that way, I still thought that something was wrong with me. Masochism was, and still is, listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so I essentially thought that I had a mental disorder. And it felt hypocritical to fantasize about being beaten and then profess these beliefs in gender equality and nonviolence.

But, of course, this was before I heard anyone ever talk about consent. It’s such a magical word; it really changes everything. Of course I’m allowed to believe in nonviolence and gender equality but then, you know, get spankings from my husband, in the same way that a woman who enjoys consensual sex is allowed to have a problem with non-consensual sex.

It seems so obvious now to say that consent changes everything. But when you are 21 years old and coming out of decades of shame and self-loathing and fear—it wasn’t obvious at the time. So it felt inconsistent, even though, of course, it wasn’t.

Throughout the book, you explain your relationships with spanking and love through your obsession with Shakespeare. You write yourself in literal conversation with the characters in these plays you know so intimately. How much of what you wanted to do was to make Shakespeare accessible, and how did you come to this style of…

Magical realism?

Yes, magical realism, exactly.

I think Shakespeare is super fun and entertaining. I think Shakespeare is like a soap opera. I mean, the stuff is juicy and sexy and violent and has ghosts and murderers. So it does bug me when I see Shakespeare portrayed by academics or critics as this kind of aloof, ivory-tower thing, because I don’t see Shakespeare that way. So if I accomplished ruffling Shakespeare’s hair a little bit in this book, I would certainly be delighted. Of course I don’t want to imply I think I’m the first or only person to embrace the sexual side of Shakespeare. I’m certainly not. And I’m certainly not even close to the first writer to want Shakespeare to be accessible and sexy and fun. But if I have been another in the long line of writers who tried to remind everyone how cool Shakespeare already is, then I would be delighted.

The magical realism thing happened pretty early on in the process. It was even in my book proposal. At some point, I realized that if I was going to be in conversation with these characters, I needed to be in conversation with these characters. I often find these characters just come to mind as a reference point in just this way.

I compare Shakespeare to the Bible a lot in that they’re both such rich texts. I think that in Shakespeare, people find what they’re looking for, just as everyone from very conservative religious people to very progressive, open-minded religious people can find evidence for their interpretation of the Bible in the text. If I wanted to write a book called, instead of Sex With Shakespeare, This Green Sofa With Shakespeare [gestures to the sofa we’re sitting on], I probably could have found enough material in the Shakespearean canon to write that book because that’s how rich the Shakespearean canon is. So characters come to mind in relation to everything, because everything is in Shakespeare. No matter what’s happening in my life, there’s something in Shakespeare that relates to it. Just like many people feel that no matter what’s happening in their life, there’s something in the Bible that relates to it.

These characters do feel like friends to me, and I interact with them the same way that I interact with friends. I turn to them sometimes when I’m lonely. I get mad at them sometimes, and I fight with them. And the characters, of course, as do all literary characters in all literature, grow and change as I grow and change. When I talk to Lady Macbeth now, we don’t have the same conversations that we did five years ago. I wanted to do justice to how meaningful these relationships are for me. And I felt that the best way to do that was to describe them the same way I describe [my best friend] Peng.

At the end of the book, you have a very sexy, graphic sex scene with one of Shakespeare’s characters. Did that feel like a natural and necessary place to go, or did you have any conflicts about taking it that far?

I’ll tell you the truth. People will probably make assumptions when they hear this, but every once in a while, when I’m writing, I black out. Not because of alcohol, I just black out. When I wrote that scene, David and I had just flown back from the Caucuses. I was super jet-lagged, so freaking tired. But I had plans to go with Peng to Escape The Room in midtown. I texted Peng, “I’m not coming. I’m just off a 12-hour flight, I need to crash, I can’t Escape the Room right now.” And she was like, “No, you get down here now.” She would have none of it.

The weather was nice, and I had a song that I wanted to listen to, so I just decided to walk. I don’t remember walking. All I know is when I got there I had a version of this scene tapped out in the notes section of my phone.

I’m always quite pleased with what I produce when I get into these rare moments of flow. It’s fun—it’s the only time I get to read my own writing as anyone else reads it, because I don’t remember producing it. When I read that scene, it really surprised me. I did not at all see that coming. Writing is very hard, but when these moments of flow happen, it’s really nice: I blink and then I have 20 pages. And I’m like, “Oh, shit, that’s awesome. I can go party.”

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Jessica Gross is a writer based in New York City.

If you visited a tech blog in the past two years, you will have undoubtedly noticed: no topic has been generating more buzz than non-real-reality (virtual, mixed, augmented—pick your flavor).

One of the more fascinating aspects of this tidal wave of excitement (and venture capital) is its obliviousness to its own history — a rich tradition of gamers, tech geeks, and scientists building and hyping virtual worlds. At Backchannel, a reprint of “Being in Nothingness” by John Perry Barlow, a seminal essay from 1990, shows the uncanny similarties between our current conversations and the obsession over “cyberspace” 30 years ago. It also brings home a crucial point: that cutting-edge technology is not only about slick, robot-filled futures; it’s fueled just as much by our undepletable nostalgic longings.

The list of possibilities is literally bounded only by the imagination. Working bodies for the damaged. Teleconferencing with body language. Virtual surgery. Hey, this is a practical thing to do!

And yet I suspect that something else altogether, something not so practical, is at the root of these yearnings. Why do we really want to develop Virtual Reality? There seems to be a flavor of longing here which I associate with the desire to converse with aliens or dolphins or the never-born.

On some level, I think we can now see the potential for technology, long about the business of making the metaphorical literal, of reversing the process and re-infecting ordinary reality with luminous magic.

Or maybe this is just another expression of what may be the third oldest human urge, the desire to have visions. Maybe we want to get high.

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Iconic punk progenitor Iggy Pop is touring through the US this spring, and I caught his show in Portland, Oregon last month. As a huge Iggy fan, this tour was no small deal to me. Iggy delivered. Despite new physical limitations, he gave everything his body could give, and the set list of new and old tunes like “Some Weird Sin” and “Repo Man” was a fan’s dream. Ticket prices were not.

Three months earlier, Iggy revealed that he’d recorded a new album in secret with musician Josh Homme. Stephen Colbert featured a debut live performance. The New York Times ran a story. It was savvy marketing. Named Post Pop Depression, the album has generated lots of excitement because it’s Iggy’s first since 2013, and because Iggy, as Homme said, “is the last one of the one-of-a-kinds.” The album even peaked at number one on the Billboard charts ─ Iggy’s first number-one album. But with concert tickets ranging from $50 to $125 (and as high as $400 on the secondary market), people were grumbling.

I get it. A hundred bucks is a lot to spend on the privilege of hearing something once. Part of the problem is what Iggy’s ticket price represents. For an artist who, in the Times‘ words, built his reputation with “blunt, forceful, noisy and unimpeachably redirect songs that he performed with a fearless disregard for self-preservation” and that left him “bruised, smeared or bloody,” $125 tickets seem very corporate-arena rock.

Even though Iggy’s tour isn’t marketed as a farewell, he’s at that age where any tour could be his last. His new album deals with the issues that arise at the end of a person’s career ─ in his words: “What happens after your years of service?” But some of us distrust parting gestures. The Who famously called their 1982 tour their farewell tour, only to tour again in 1989. They’ve even marketed their current 50th-anniversary celebration tour as their last.

Reunion tours have proven a lucrative trend, where influential short-lived ’90s bands put differences aside to play select cities. As Marc Spitz put it in his rich oral history of The Pixies: “Burying the hatchet has its material rewards.”

The Pixies’ 2004 reunion tour raked in over $14 million and helped other cult acts like Dinosaur .Jr, The Replacements, and Pavement generate the revenue in later life that they didn’t as young critical darlings. As the Pixies’ Black Francis rightly said: “It’s not to say it’s not about art, but we made that art fucking 20 years ago. So forget the fucking goddamn art. Now it’s time to talk about the money.”

But Iggy’s wasn’t a greatest hits tour or a ’90s nostalgia trip. Unlike others, he never went away. He’s consistently released new music since The Stooges’ debut in 1969, even when the music wasn’t consistently good. As Iggy told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001: “Listen, dude, I think I’ve done this for 30 years. The first 15 years were highly creative and featured a low discipline level. The second half has been a reverse. There was overall less striking creativity but more discipline.” Instead, Post Pop Depression is neatly marketed as an ephemeral, one-off collaboration set to detonate like a confidential transmission in a spy movie. If $100 tickets are cost-prohibitive, that’s part of the packaging.

Homme hints at the hidden PR value of scarcity in the Times when he says, “There won’t be hardly any shows, and they won’t be in big places, and you won’t be able to get a ticket. So almost everyone won’t see it. It will be like trying to catch smoke in your hands. And that makes it even better.” Sort of. Prohibitively expensive tickets aren’t better for fans who can’t afford to come.

And yet, I still attended. Maybe I’m a shill. Maybe the marketing is so effective it penetrated my cynical defenses. In February, my finger hovered over the “buy ticket” button as I weighed my options. In my mind, I finally committed $187 for two tickets thanks to my simple regret-management system. I asked myself: will I regret parting with my money more than I’ll regret not seeing Iggy forever? In the scales of financial and experiential cost, a big bill only stings temporarily, but the gaping hole of missing memories lasts a lifetime. Even if “one time/one tour” is branding, I still refused to miss it. Once in my life, I wanted to sing along to “Some Weird Sin” and “The Passenger” with hundreds of people. I wanted to see Iggy flail shirtless in front of me while slapping the audience’s hands, and my wife and I had a blast watching him do the weird thing he was born to do.

Fans buy more than tickets. We buy moments, experiences ─ if not bragging rights then inclusion, the sense that we lived something singular and were a part of some shared generational phenomenon: Woodstock, Monterrey, the first Lollapalooza (which I attended in 1991, by the way. Alert: I’m bragging, and I’m aging).

My decision was also personal. Here’s Iggy, this person who’s invigorated and accompanied me for so many years, and I want to share at least one night with him. Expensive or not, that experience is worth it. What else did I have to do on a Tuesday night? If you love Iggy Pop, or any band, and you have the means, I say go live it up for one night. Put your money where your music is and support the people whose art you consume, which in this case means helping an aging punk ease into a retirement he refuses to take.

Stories discussed:

• Iggy Pop and Josh Homme Team Up for ‘Post Pop Depression’ (Jon Pareles, The New York Times, Jan. 21, 2016)
• Life to the Pixies. (Mark Spitz, Spin, Sept., 2004)
• No, No, Nine-Ettes (James Wolcott, Vanity Fair, Aug., 2014)
• A New Model For Music: Big Bands, Big Brands (David Carr, The New York Times, Mar. 16, 2014)
• Our Fandom Could Be Your Life: How Fandom Became the Modern Cult (Jared Keller, Pacific Standard, Sept. 11, 2015)
• Is There Something Psychologically Unhealthy About Being a Fan? (Phoebe Reilly, Vulture, Oct. 16, 2012)
• Lollapalooza 1991: The Underground As a Community (Dennis Shin, PopMatters, Oct. 20, 2011)

Jenny Diski wrote 11 novels and seven non-fiction books. She wrote 150 articles and 65 blog posts for the London Review of Books. She wrote about drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll; she also wrote about animals and train travel. She wrote historical fiction and memoir, and essays about literature and fashion. She wrote about her family, her loves, and in the last two years since her cancer diagnosis, she wrote about the life she lived. She wrote herself until the very end.

Jenny Diski died this morning at the age of 68. Here are nine stories celebrating Diski and her work.

1. Jenny Diski’s End Notes (Giles Harvey, New York Times Magazine, June 2015)

Last July, when the English writer Jenny Diski was told she had inoperable lung cancer and, at best, another three years to live, she responded to the news characteristically — that is, in wry poor taste. “So,” she said, turning to her husband, the poet and academic Ian Patterson, “we’d better get cooking the meth.” The Poet — as Diski always refers to Patterson, with tender-ironic reserve, in her personal essays — was just about able to keep up his end of the morbid repartee that is the currency of their marriage: “This time we quit while the going’s good.” The oncologist and the nurse, apparently not watchers of “Breaking Bad,” looked on blankly.

2. Who’ll Be Last? (London Review of Books, November 2015)

People offer me things to live for. (Another TV quiz show?) ‘But what about the grandchildren. They’re worth living for, aren’t they? And family and friends?’ But finding what is good about life makes their loss all the more miserable, even if you know there will be no you to miss anything. In this long meantime, dying sooner rather than later can be upsetting. Additionally, how much do I want to be dependent on others for my everyday life or, indeed, for finding a reason to stay alive a little while longer? Missing a few months of feeling awful, being dead, versus not missing those months of feeling awful. Dead, at least theoretically, is the less painful of the two options, assuming that dead equals not being at all. Whatever terror there is lies in the present fear of dying, not so much of death. The stoics tell me that I’ve been ‘dead’ before, prior to my birth, and that was no hardship, was it? Back to Beckett, I think. So that’s how I am at the moment of writing this. But of course it’s more complicated than that, more complicated than is allowed by the linear business of writing one word, one sentence, one paragraph after another with the intention of being coherent.

3. What To Call Her? (London Review of Books, October 2014)

As with my cancer diagnosis, it’s hard to avoid thundering clichés when writing about the start of my relationship with Doris, and hard not to make it sound either Dickensian or uncannily close to the fairy tales we have in the back of our minds. ‘It’s like something out of a fairy story’ was a phrase people often said to me when they learned how I got to live with Doris. To which I would answer yes, or sort of, or say nothing at all. Or if I had the will, I would say something to the effect that the Cinderella fairy story of Doris and me was a rare instance of life after the ellipsis at the end of most fairy stories. And they lived happily ever after. People usually didn’t much like that answer, because it messed up the simplicity of the story, and reminded them that Doris was not a handsome prince, or I the foundling whose innate nobility was recognised by a prince of the true blood.

4. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? (London Review of Books, March 2015)

But I was that girl whose face was twisted into a snarl when the wind blew in my direction and fixed it that way. I left school with a small handful of O levels and no university education in prospect, made friends with the Covent Garden arty drug types, was living in a squat in Long Acre, and finally went into Ward 6 of the Maudsley Hospital. A friend of Doris’s who came to visit me there told me that she had washed her hands of me and expected that I would become a heroin addict, get pregnant and die an early death. I suppose there was a 50 per cent chance of each of those things happening to me. Or rather of doing those things to myself, compelled by my self-destructive nature, Doris would have said. The belligerent look barely had time to wash and brush up in readiness for hibernation when it rushed back to the face of its owner. You were very difficult, they tell me. You are very difficult, they say. It turned out that ‘doing what I was told’ was not so much following orders, it was some innate understanding of how the world was supposed to work and conforming to it, so as not to make trouble. By the time someone had to tell me what to do, it was already too late.

5. What Was Wrong With Everything Was People. (London Review of Books, June 2015)

My eyes were made of diamonds, not the glitzy sort that sparkled and shone, but the implacably black kind that knew the worth of concealed things (some called them ‘your coal-black eyes’). Those eyes radiated the truth of the matter to anyone who dared look at them. And the darkness drew in the world and showed me what the world could do and was doing. Those eyes picked out the lies, the faults, the vanity, the hypocrisy and put them in their mirrored compartments and twisted them like a kaleidoscope, not into shards of chaos pretending to make sense, but into the actual truth, all unknitted and unravelled into what the fuck was wrong with everything. And what was wrong with everything was people and their need to do all those things that made the world go round. The answer of course was that everyone told lies. All kinds, big, small, monumental, trivial, world-shattering, mind-shattering, hateful, loving lies. No one tells the truth – that is the privilege of 18-year-olds. No one knew it, but there was the reason for the belligerence on my face. It was the visual representation of the fact that they’d never get one over on me again.

With Doris were her friends, a couple dressed for a country cottage weekend out of Vogue. X and I watched and saw it all. Sometimes we lay on our beds and laughed. Sometimes they appalled us. We knew that we would become them, and that was one of the reasons for jumping out of windows.

6. On Knickers. (London Review of Books, October 2013)

Human beings have never been happy with what they’ve got. We reshape the world, construct machines and contraptions of every kind to alter and control it. We are proud of our innovative dissatisfaction, and quite begrudge the odd chimpanzee using a stick to pry around in termitaries. But while an orangutan might put a large leaf on her head for her amusement or to alleviate the boredom, we are the only ones who actually shape-shift through sleight of body. Until recently, the only way to make major alterations was to push or pull, squash, flatten or compress, lengthen, broaden or enlarge by means of concealed apparatus. Controlling the body is difficult. It requires carefully thought-out structures and appliances which take account of the fact that squeezing one bit will cause a bulge elsewhere, and that death can result from a too constricted ribcage. A degree of rigidity is required but so is pliability.

7. Seriously Uncool. (London Review of Books, March 2007)

A next book and a last book must be read in different ways, even if they are identical in content and in either case written in the shadow of a cancer that she surely knew was going to kill her sooner rather than later. None of these introductions to other people’s books, contingent newspaper articles and speeches written between 2001 and 2004 was intended as last words. Rieff is adamant about that. And to underline it he speaks of her ‘unalloyed fear of extinction – in no part of her, not even in the last agonised days of her ending, was there the slightest ambivalence, the slightest acceptance’. But it is very hard for the reader, knowing it to be her last, rather than her next book (and coming to it via Rieff’s elegiac foreword) not to see these writings as valedictory – a round-up of Sontag’s thought and work. We may know that death is always an arbitrary interruption of a life, but with us here and her not, and our narrative-hungry brains being what they are, we bind death to life by assuming a summation rather than allowing life to spill pointlessly over the edge into oblivion.

8. Jenny Diski Interview: ‘The Mediocrity of Fiction is Really to do with Feeling Cosy” (Robert Hanks, The Guardian, November 2015)

“People write to me sometimes, and they say that they know me. And of course I know they don’t know me … There is a need for readers to have a sort of personal relationship with writers, which is why you get so much shit” – she spits the word out – “about whether a book is good. Are the characters believable? Or is the plot good? The mediocrity of fiction is really to do with feeling cosy, and that you’ve got a nice friend sitting in your lap telling you a nice story. I’ve never been a nice friend sitting in anyone’s lap. I just wanted to write stuff down in shapes, really.”

9. The Sixties (Picador Books, 2009)

The past is always an idea which people have about it after the event. Those whose job it is to tell the story of the past in their own present call it history. To generations born later, receiving the recollections of their parents or grandparents, or reading the historians, the past is a story, a myth handily packaged into an era, bounded by a particular event—a war, a financial crisi, a reign, a decade, a century—anything that conveniently breaks the ongoing tick of time into a manageable narrative. Those people who were alive during the period in question, looking back, call it memory—memory being just another instance of the many ways in which we make stories.

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Haley Mlotek is a writer and editor based in New York.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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1. Madness

Eyal Press | The New Yorker | April 25, 2016 | 31 minutes (7,792 words)

In Florida prisons, mentally ill inmates are routinely tortured and killed by guards. Staff are often witnesses to the abuse but remain silent out of fear of retaliation, cooperating with security officials who they depend on for protection.

2. How a Son Survived Being Injected with HIV by His Father

Justin Heckert | GQ | April 28, 2016 | 21 minutes (5,424 words)

Twenty-four years ago, in an act of ghastly malice, a Missouri father plunged a needle filled with HIV-positive blood into his baby son’s vein. No one expected the son to live—but he thrived.

3. Uncanny Valley

Anna Weiner | n+1 | April 27, 2016 | 25 minutes (6,416 words)

Anna Wiener on the hollow promise of San Francisco's startup life. “'I just hope this is all worth it,' she spits in my direction. I know what she means — she’s talking about money — but I also know how much equity she has, and I’m confident that even in the best possible scenario, whatever she’s experiencing is definitely not."

4. 427: Ten Years Without Jen, Twenty-Six With

Matt Zoller Seitz | RogerEbert.com | April 25, 2016 | 14 minutes (3,619 words)

Seitz, on the 10th anniversary of the death of his wife, describes where's he's been and what he's learned.

5. The Faithful

Graciela Mochkofsky | California Sunday | April 28, 2016 | 29 minutes (7,275 words)

In Colombia, where a majority of people practice Catholicism, a small community goes on a difficult journey to convert to Orthodox Judaism.

“It’s really beautiful up there.” “Yeah, it’s, like, green.” “Really green.”

Ultimately, this is all I had to go on before I boarded a plane to Seattle last Saturday. Sure, my genius friend Josclin created an eight-page Google Document itinerary for our trip, I listened to a lot of Sleater-Kinney, and I’d oohed and ahhhed at Instagrammed pics of La Push, but none of that can replace actually being in a place.

Our trip took us to Tacoma, Olympia, Forks (TWILIGHT), La Push (and four beaches), Port Angeles (where we slept on a sailboat), the Hoh Rainforest (really green), and, finally, Seattle itself. I got home late Saturday night, jet lagged and eager to pore over every photo with my kind, exhausted parents, who picked me up from the airport.

Seattle was cool and sunny. The flowers were more vivid than anything I’d ever seen on the East Coast. I touched the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I slept on a goddamn sailboat. Washington, I love you. I really missed my cat and my boyfriend, but it was hard to say goodbye to the West Coast.

1. “What I Gained From Having a Miscarriage.” (Angela Garbes, The Stranger, April 2016)

Our first stop was Tacoma, and I lost it a little bit when I saw The Stranger in its newspaper box. “I’ve only read this online!!!!!” I shrieked at my friends. “It really is in print!!!!!” “My” issue featured a beautiful cover illustration of Prince and this astounding essay by Angela Garbes. I read it on the plane home.

2. “As Sales Boom, Pot Shops Have Become The New Face of Gentrification.” (Sara Bernard, Grist, April 2016)

Pair with coverage of the Uncle Ike’s protest from The Stranger and this essay from BuzzFeed: “How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America’s Weed Boom.”

3. “Women in the Trades.” (Susan Kelleher & Bettina Hansen, The Seattle Times, 2015)

A beautiful series of black-and-white photographs and mini-essays about women of industry who work in Seattle and beyond.

4. “Amazon is Killing My Sex Life.” (Tricia Romano, Dame Magazine, May 2014)

The skeleton of the Amazon Biosphere loomed over our bus as we slowed at an intersection. Amazon is everywhere in Seattle—including, of course, the antiseptic IRL Amazon Bookstore. Much has been written about the tech boom’s influence on Seattle, financially and culturally, but Dame Magazine has one of the funniest/darkest essays yet.

5. “National Parks are Used Mostly by Older White People. Here’s Why That Needs to Change.” (Lornet Turnbull, Yes! Magazine, April 2016)

National parks in the United States have been sites of oppression and segregation. Can we come to grips with their fraught history for the sake of conservation?
(I also recommend following Rahawa Haile on Twitter. She’s hiking the Appalachian Trail currently, and her insights and photos are lovely and important.)

6. “Can Kshama Sawant Build an Actual Socialist City in America?” (Sarah Jaffe, The Nation, June 2015)

Meet the highest-ranking Socialist government official in the United States. Spoiler alert: She’s in Washington.

Teffi | Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi | New York Review Books Classics | May 2016 | 39 minutes (10,692 words)

The essay below appears in the new collection Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, released this month for New York Review Books Classics. Teffi, whose real name was Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, was born in St. Petersburg in 1872 and went into exile in 1919, first in Istanbul, then in Paris. “Rasputin” was orginally published in Paris in 1924.  This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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This isn’t simply because he was so very famous. In my life I’ve met many famous people.

There are people who are remarkable because of their talent, intelligence or public standing, people whom you often meet and whom you know well. You have an accurate sense of what these people are like, but all the same they pass through your life in a blur, as if your psychic lens can never quite focus on them, and your memory of them always remains vague. There’s nothing you can say about them that everyone doesn’t already know. They were tall or they were short; they were married; they were affable or arrogant, unassuming or ambitious; they lived in some place or other and they saw a lot of so-and-so. The blurred negatives of the amateur photographer. You can look all you like, but you still don’t know whether you’re looking at a little girl or a ram.

The person I want to talk about flashed by in a mere two brief encounters. But how firmly and vividly his character is etched into my memory, as if with a fine needle.

And this isn’t simply because he was so very famous. In my life I’ve met many famous people, people who have truly earned their renown. Nor is it because he played such a tragic role in the fate of Russia. No. This man was unique, one of a kind, like a character out of a novel; he lived in legend, he died in legend, and his memory is cloaked in legend.

A semi-literate peasant and a counsellor to the Tsar, a hardened sinner and a man of prayer, a shape-shifter with the name of God on his lips.

They called him cunning. Was there really nothing to him but cunning?

I shall tell you about my two brief encounters with him.

So you really don’t understand? You don’t know who it is we can’t discuss over the telephone?

1

The end of a Petersburg winter. Neurasthenia.

Rather than starting a new day, morning merely continues the grey, long-drawn-out evening of the day before.

Through the plate glass of the large bay window I can see out onto the street, where a warrant officer is teaching new recruits to poke bayonets into a scarecrow. The recruits have grey, damp-chilled faces. A despondent-looking woman with a sack stops and stares at them.

What could be more dismal?

The telephone rings.

“Who is it?”

“Rozanov.”

In my surprise, I ask again. Yes, it’s Rozanov.

He is very cryptic. “Has Izmailov said anything to you? Has he invited you? Have you accepted?”

“No, I haven’t seen Izmailov and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So he hasn’t yet spoken to you. I can’t say anything over the telephone. But please, please do accept. If you don’t go, I won’t either.”

“For heaven’s sake, what are you talking about?”

“He’ll explain everything. It’s not something we can talk about on the telephone.”

There was a click on the line. We had been disconnected.

This was all very unexpected and strange. Vasily Rozanov was not someone I saw a lot of. Nor was Izmailov. And the combination of Rozanov and Izmailov also seemed odd. What was all this about? And why wouldn’t Rozanov go to some place unless I went too?

I rang the editorial department of the Stock Exchange Gazette, where Izmailov worked. It was too early; no one was there.

But I didn’t have to wait long. About two hours later Izmailov rang me.

“There is the possibility of a very interesting meeting… Unfortunately, there’s nothing more I can say over the telephone… Maybe you can guess?”

I most certainly could not guess. We agreed that he should come round and explain everything.

He arrived.

“Have you still not guessed who we’re talking about?”

Izmailov was thin, all in black, and in dark glasses; he looked as if he had been sketched in black ink. His voice was hollow. All rather weird and sinister.

Izmailov truly was weird. He lived in the grounds of the Smolensk cemetery, where his father had once been a priest. He practised black magic, loved telling stories about sorcery, and he knew charms and spells. Thin, pale and black, with a thin strip of bright red mouth, he looked like a vampire.

“So you really don’t understand?” he asked with a grin. “You don’t know who it is we can’t discuss over the telephone?”

“Kaiser Wilhelm perhaps?”

Izmailov looked through his dark glasses at the two doors into my study—and then, over his glasses, at me.

“Rasputin.”

“Ah!”

“Here in Petersburg there’s a publisher. Filippov—perhaps you’ve heard of him? No? Well, anyway, there is. Rasputin goes to see him quite often; he dines with him. For some reason he’s really quite friendly with him. Filippov also regularly entertains Manuilov, who has a certain reputation in literary circles. Do you know him?”

Manuilov was someone I had come across a few times. He was one of those “companion fish” that are part of the entourage of great writers or artistic figures. At one point he had worshipped Kuprin, then he had moved over to Leonid Andreyev. Then he had quietened down and seemed to disappear altogether. Now he had resurfaced.

“This Manuilov,” said Izmailov, “has suggested to Filippov that he should ask round some writers who’d like to get a glimpse of Rasputin. Just a few people, carefully chosen so there’s no one superfluous and no chance of any unpleasant surprises. Only recently a friend of mine happened to be in the company of Rasputin—and someone covertly took a photograph. Worse still—they sent this photograph to a magazine. ‘Rasputin,’ the caption read, ‘among his friends and admirers.’ But my friend is a prominent public figure; he’s a serious man, perfectly respectable. He can’t stand Rasputin and he feels he’ll never get over the disgrace of this photograph—of being immortalized amid this picturesque crowd. Which is why, to avoid any unpleasantness of this kind, I’ve made it a condition that there should be no superfluous guests. Filippov has given his promise, and this morning Manuilov came over and showed me the guest list. One of the writers is Rozanov, and Rozanov insists that you absolutely must be there. Without you, he says, the whole thing will be a waste of time. Evidently he has a plan of some kind.”

Teffi. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“What on earth can this plan be?” I asked. “Maybe I should stay at home. Although I would, I admit, be curious to get a glimpse of Rasputin.”

“Precisely. How could anyone not be curious? One wants to see for oneself whether he really is someone significant in his own right or whether he’s just a tool—someone being exploited by clever people for their own ends. Let’s take a chance and go. We won’t stay long and we’ll keep together. Like it or not, he’s someone who’ll be in the history books. If we miss this chance, we may never get another.”

“Just so long as he doesn’t think we’re trying to get something out of him.”

“I don’t think he will. The host has promised not to let on that we’re writers. Apparently Rasputin doesn’t like writers. He’s afraid of them. So no one will be telling him this little detail. This is in our interests too. We want Rasputin to feel completely at ease—as if among friends. Because if he feels he’s got to start posturing, the evening will be a complete waste of time. So, we’ll be going, will we? Tomorrow late—not before ten. Rasputin never turns up any earlier. If he’s held up at the palace and can’t come, Filippov promises to ring and let us all know.”

“This is all very strange. And I’ve never even met the host.”

“I don’t know him either, not personally—nor does Rozanov. But he’s someone well known. And he’s a perfectly decent fellow. So, we’re agreed: tomorrow at ten.

She had suddenly, shamelessly, lost all self-control at the mere mention of Rasputin.

2

I had glimpsed Rasputin once before. In a train. He must have been on his way east, to visit his home village in Siberia. He was in a first-class compartment. With his entourage: a little man who was something like a secretary to him, a woman of a certain age with her daughter, and Madame V——, a lady-in-waiting to the Tsaritsa.

It was very hot and the compartment doors were wide open. Rasputin was presiding over tea—with a tin teapot, dried bread rings and lumps of sugar on the side. He was wearing a pink calico smock over his trousers, wiping his forehead and neck with an embroidered towel and talking rather peevishly, with a broad Siberian accent.

“Dearie! Go and fetch us some more hot water! Hot water, I said, go and get us some. The tea’s right stewed but they didn’t even give us any hot water. And where is the strainer? Annushka, where’ve you gone and hidden the strainer? Annushka! The strainer—where is it? Oh, what a muddler you are!”

*

In the evening of the day Izmailov had come round—that is, the day before I was due to meet Rasputin—I went to a rather large dinner party at the home of some friends. The mirror above the dining-room fireplace was adorned with a sign that read: “In this house we do not talk about Rasputin.”

I’d seen signs like this in a number of other houses. But this time, because I was going to be seeing him the next day, there was no one in the world I wanted to talk about more than Rasputin. And so, slowly and loudly, I read out: “In this house we do not talk about Ras-pu-tin.”

Sitting diagonally across from me was a thin, tense, angular lady. She quickly looked round, glanced at me, then at the sign, then back at me again. As if she wanted to say something.

“Who’s that?” I asked my neighbour.

“Madame E——,” he replied. “She’s a lady-in-waiting. Daughter of the E——” He named someone then very well known. “Know who I mean?”

“Yes.”

After dinner this lady sat down beside me. I knew she’d been really wanting to talk to me—ever since I’d read out that sign. But all she could do was prattle in a scatterbrained way about literature. Clearly she didn’t know how to turn the conversation to the subject that interested her.

I decided to help her out.

“Have you seen the sign over the fireplace? Funny, isn’t it? The Bryanchaninovs have one just like it.”

She immediately came to life.

“Yes, indeed. I really don’t understand. Why shouldn’t we talk about Rasputin?”

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“Probably because people are talking about him too much. Everyone’s bored with the subject…”

“Bored?” She seemed almost scared. “How could anyone find him boring? You’re not going to say that, are you? Don’t you find Rasputin fascinating?”

“Have you ever met him?” I asked.

“Who? Him? You mean—Rasputin?”

And suddenly she was all fidgety and flustered. Gasping. Red blotches appeared on her thin, pale cheeks.

“Rasputin? Yes… a very little… a few times. He feels he absolutely has to get to know me. They say this will be very, very interesting. Do you know, when he stares at me, my heart begins to pound in the most alarming way… It’s astonishing. I’ve seen him three times, I think, at friends’. The last time he suddenly came right up close and said, ‘Why so shy, you little waif ? You be sure to come and see me—yes, mind you do!’ I was completely at a loss. I said I didn’t know, that I couldn’t… And then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You shall come. Understand? Yes, you absolutely shall!’ And the way he said ‘shall’ so commandingly, with such authority, it was as if this had already been decided on high and Rasputin was in the know. Do you understand what I mean? It was as if, to him, my fate were an open book. He sees it, he knows it. I’m sure you understand I would never call on him, but the lady whose house I met him at said I really must, that plenty of women of our station call on him, and that there’s nothing in the least untoward about it. But still… I… I shan’t…”

This “I shan’t” she almost squealed. She looked as if she were about to give a hysterical shriek and start weeping.

I could hardly believe it! A mild-mannered lady, mousy and thin, and she looked as if she were at least thirty-five. And yet she had suddenly, shamelessly, lost all self-control at the mere mention of Rasputin, that peasant in a pink calico smock whom I had heard ordering “Annushka” to look for the tea strainer…

The lady of the house came over to where we were sitting and asked us a question. And without replying, probably without even hearing her, Madame E—— got up and with a jerky, angular gait went over to the mirror to powder her nose.

These were strange times, and so no one was especially surprised.

3

All the next day I was unable to put this twitching, bewitched lady-in-waiting out of my mind.

It was unnerving and horrible.

The hysteria around the name of Rasputin was making me feel a kind of moral nausea.

I realized, of course, that a lot of the talk about him was petty, foolish invention, but nonetheless I felt there was something real behind all these tales, that they sprang from some weird, genuine, living source.

In the afternoon Izmailov rang again and confirmed the invitation. He promised that Rasputin would definitely be there. And he passed on a request from Rozanov that I should wear something “a bit glamorous”—so Rasputin would think he was just talking to an ordinary “laydee” and the thought that I might be a writer wouldn’t so much as enter his head.

This demand for “a bit of glamour” greatly amused me.

“Rozanov seems determined to cast me in the role of some biblical Judith or Delilah. I’ll make a hash of it, I’m afraid—I haven’t the talents of either an actor or an agent provocateur. All I’ll do is mess things up.”

“Let’s just play it by ear,” Izmailov said reassuringly. “Shall I send someone over to fetch you?”

I declined, as I was dining with friends, and was going to be dropped off after the meal.

That evening, as I was dressing, I tried to imagine a peasant’s idea of “a bit of glamour”. I put on a pair of gold shoes, and some gold rings and earrings. I’d have felt embarrassed to deck myself out any more flashily. It wasn’t as if I was going to be able to explain to all and sundry that this was glamour on demand!

At my friends’ dinner table, this time without any wiles on my part, the conversation turned to Rasputin. (People evidently had good reason to put injunctions up over their fireplaces.)

As always, there were stories about espionage, about Germans bribing Russian officials, about sums of money finding their way via the elder into particular pockets and about court intrigues, the threads of which were all in Rasputin’s hands.

Even the “black automobile” got linked with the name of Rasputin.

The “black automobile” remains a mystery to this day. Several nights running this car had roared across the Field of Mars, sped over the Palace Bridge and disappeared into the unknown. Shots had been fired from inside the car. Passers-by had been wounded.

“It’s Rasputin’s doing,” people were saying. “Who else?”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“He profits from everything black, evil and incomprehensible. Everything that sows discord and panic. And there’s nothing he can’t explain to his own advantage when he needs to.”

Empress Alexandra Feodorovna with Rasputin, her children and a governess. Via Wikimedia Commons.

These were strange conversations. But these were strange times, and so no one was especially surprised. Although the events soon to unfold swept the “black automobile” right out of our minds. All too soon we would have other things to think about.

But at the time, at dinner, we talked about all these things. First and foremost, people were astonished by Rasputin’s extraordinary brazenness. Razumov, who was then the director of the Department of Mines, indignantly related how one of his provincial officials had come to him with a request for a transfer. And to support his case, he had held out a piece of paper on which Rasputin—whom Razumov had never even met—had scrawled:

Dearie, do wot the barer asks and yul have no caws for regret.

Grigory.

“Can you imagine? The cheek of it! The brazen cheek of it! And there are a great many ministers who say they’ve received little notes like this. And all too many of them just do as he asks—though they don’t, of course, admit as much. I’ve even been told I was reckless to be getting so angry, because he would hear about it. It was vile. Can you imagine it? ‘Dearie’! As for the fine fellow who turned up with the note, I showed him what a ‘Dearie’ I can be! I’m told he flew down the stairs four at a time. And he had seemed like such a respectable man—as well as being a rather eminent engineer.”

“Yes,” said someone else, “I’ve heard about any number of these ‘Dearie’ recommendations, but this is the first time I’ve heard about one not being granted. People get all indignant, but they don’t feel able to refuse the man. ‘He’s vindictive,’ they say, ‘a vindictive peasant.’”

God Almighty! Do you really not know how to get a man to talk?

4

Sometime after ten o’clock I arrived at Filippov’s.

Our host greeted me in the hall. After saying in a friendly way that we’d already met once before, he showed me into his study.

“Your friends arrived some time ago.”

In the small, smoke-filled room were some half a dozen people.

Rozanov was looking bored and disgruntled. Izmailov appeared strained, as if trying to make out that everything was going fine when really it wasn’t.

Manuilov was standing close to the doorway, looking as if he felt entirely at home. Two or three people I didn’t know were sitting silently on the divan. And then there was Rasputin. Dressed in a black woollen Russian kaftan and tall patent leather boots, he was fidgeting anxiously, squirming about in his chair. One of his shoulders kept twitching.

Lean and wiry and rather tall, he had a straggly beard and a thin face that appeared to have been gathered up into a long fleshy nose. His close-set, prickly, glittering little eyes were peering out furtively from under strands of greasy hair. I think these eyes were grey. The way they glittered, it was hard to be sure. Restless eyes. Whenever he said something, he would look round the whole group, his eyes pricking each person in turn, as if to say, “Have I given you something to think about? Are you satisfied? Have I surprised you?”

I felt at once that he was rather preoccupied, confused, even embarrassed. He was posturing.

“Yes, yes,” he was saying. “I wish to go back as soon as possible, to Tobolsk. I wish to pray. My little village is a good place to pray. God hears people’s prayers there.”

And then he studied each of us in turn, his eyes keenly pricking each one of us from under his greasy locks.

“But here in your city nothing’s right. It’s not possible to pray in this city. It’s very hard when you can’t pray. Very hard.”

And again he looked round anxiously, right into everyone’s faces, right into their eyes.

We were introduced. As had been agreed, my fellow scribes did not let on who I really was.

He studied me, as if thinking, “Who is this woman?”

There was a general sense of both tedium and tension—not what we wanted at all. Something in Rasputin’s manner—maybe his general unease, maybe his concern about the impression his words were making—suggested that somehow he knew who we were. It seemed we might have been given away. Imagining himself to be surrounded by “enemies from the press”, Rasputin had assumed the posture of a man of prayer.

They say he really did have a great deal to put up with from journalists. The papers were always full of sly insinuations of every kind. After a few drinks with his cronies, Rasputin was supposed to have divulged interesting details about the personal lives of people in the very highest places. Whether this was true or just newspaper sensationalism, I don’t know. But I do know that there were two levels of security around Rasputin: one set of guards whom he knew about and who protected him from attempts on his life; another set whom he was supposed not to know about and who kept track of whom he was talking to and whether or not he was saying anything he shouldn’t. Just who was responsible for this second set of guards I can’t say for certain, but I suspect it was someone who wanted to undermine Rasputin’s credibility at court.

He had keen senses, and some animal instinct told him he was surrounded. Not knowing where the enemy lay, he was on the alert, his eyes quietly darting everywhere…

I was infected by my friends’ discomfort. It felt tedious and rather awkward to be sitting in the house of a stranger and listening to Rasputin straining to come out with spiritually edifying pronouncements that interested none of us. It was as if he were being tested and was afraid of failing.

I wanted to go home.

Rozanov got to his feet. He took me aside and whispered, “We’re banking on dinner. There’s still a chance of him opening up. Filippov and I have agreed that you must sit beside him. And we’ll be close by. You’ll get him talking. He’s not going to talk freely to us—he’s a ladies’ man. Get him to speak about the erotic. This could be really something—it’s a chance we must make the most of. We could end up having a most interesting conversation.”

Rozanov would happily discuss erotic matters with anyone under the sun, so it was hardly a surprise that he should be so eager to discuss them with Rasputin. After all, what didn’t they say about Rasputin? He was a hypnotist and a mesmerist, at once a flagellant and a lustful satyr, both a saint and a man possessed by demons.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”

Turning around, I encountered two eyes as sharp as needles. Our surreptitious conversation had obviously disturbed Rasputin.

With a twitch of the shoulder, he turned away.

We were invited to the table.

I was seated at one corner. To my left sat Rozanov and Izmailov. To my right, at the end of the table, Rasputin.

There turned out to be around a dozen other guests: an elderly lady with a self-important air (“She’s the one who goes everywhere with him,” someone whispered to me); a harassed-looking gentleman, who hurriedly got a beautiful young lady to sit on Rasputin’s right (this young lady was dressed to the nines—certainly more than “a bit glamorous”—but the look on her face was crushed and hopeless, quite out of keeping with her attire); and at the other end of the table were some strange-looking musicians, with a guitar, an accordion and a tambourine—as if this were a village wedding.

Filippov came over to us, pouring out wine and handing round hors d’oeuvres. In a low voice I asked about the beautiful lady and the musicians.

The musicians, it turned out, were a requirement—Grisha sometimes liked to get up and dance, and only what they played would do. They also played at the Yusupovs’.

“They’re very good. Quite unique. In a moment you’ll hear for yourself.” As for the beautiful lady, Filippov explained that her husband (the harassed-looking gentleman) was having a difficult time at work. It was an unpleasant and complicated situation that could only be sorted out with the help of the elder. And so this gentleman was seizing every possible opportunity to meet Rasputin, taking his wife along with him and seating her beside Rasputin in the hope that sooner or later he would take notice of her.

“He’s been trying for two months now, but Grisha acts as if he doesn’t even see them. He can be strange and obstinate.”

Rasputin was drinking a great deal and very quickly. Suddenly he leant towards me and whispered, “Why aren’t you drinking, eh? Drink. God will forgive you. Drink.”

“I don’t care for wine, that’s why I’m not drinking.”

He looked at me mistrustfully.

“Nonsense! Drink. I’m telling you: God will forgive you. He will forgive you. God will forgive you many things. Drink!”

“But I’m telling you I’d rather not. You don’t want me to force myself to drink, do you?”

“What’s he saying?” whispered Rozanov on my left. “Make him talk louder. Ask him again, to make him talk louder. Otherwise I can’t hear.”

“But it’s nothing interesting. He’s just trying to get me to drink.”

“Get him to talk about matters erotic. God Almighty! Do you really not know how to get a man to talk?”

This was beginning to seem funny.

“Stop going on at me! What am I? An agent provocateur? Anyway, why should I go to all this trouble for you?”

I turned away from Rozanov. Rasputin’s sharp, watchful eyes pricked into me.

“So you don’t want to drink? You are a stubborn one! I’m telling you to drink—and you won’t.”

And with a quick and obviously practised movement he quietly reached up and touched my shoulder. Like a hypnotist using touch to direct the current of his will. It was as deliberate as that.

From his intent look I could see he knew exactly what he was doing. And I remembered the lady-in-waiting and her hysterical babbling: And then he put his hand on my shoulder and said so commandingly, with such authority…

So it was like that, was it? Evidently Grisha had a set routine. Raising my eyebrows in surprise, I glanced at him and smiled coolly.

A spasm went through his shoulder and he let out a quiet moan. Quickly and angrily he turned away from me, as if once and for all. But a moment later he was leaning towards me again.

“You may be laughing,” he said, “but do you know what your eyes are saying? Your eyes are sad. Go on, you can tell me—is he making you suffer badly? Why don’t you say anything? Don’t you know we all love sweet tears, a woman’s sweet tears. Do you understand? I know everything.”

I was delighted for Rozanov. The conversation was evidently turning to matters erotic.

Caricature of Rasputin and the imperial couple. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“What is it you know?” I asked loudly, on purpose, so that Rasputin, too, would raise his voice, as people often unwittingly do.

Once again, though, he spoke very softly.

“I know how love can make one person force another to suffer. And I know how necessary it can be to make someone suffer. But I don’t want you to suffer. Understand?”

“I can’t hear a thing!” came Rozanov’s cross voice, from my left.

“Be patient!” I whispered.

Rasputin went on.

“What’s that ring on your hand? What stone is it?”

“It’s an amethyst.”

“Well, that’ll do. Hold your hand out to me under the table so no one can see. Then I’ll breathe on the ring and warm it… The breath of my soul will make you feel better.”

I passed him the ring.

“Oh, why did you have to take it off? That was for me to do. You don’t understand…”

But I had understood only too well. Which was why I’d taken it off myself.

Covering his mouth with his napkin, he breathed onto the ring and quietly slid it onto my finger.

“There. When you come and see me, I’ll tell you many things you don’t know.”

“But what if I don’t come?” I asked, once again remembering the hysterical lady-in-waiting.

Here he was, Rasputin in his element. The mysterious voice, the intense expression, the commanding words—all this was a tried and tested method. But if so, then it was all rather naive and straightforward. Or, perhaps, his fame as a sorcerer, soothsayer and favourite of the Tsar really did kindle within people a particular blend of curiosity and fear, a keen desire to participate in this weird mystery. It was like looking through a microscope at some species of beetle. I could see the monstrous hairy legs, the giant maw—but I knew it was really just a little insect.

“Not come to me? No, you shall come. You shall come to me.”

And again he quickly reached up and quietly touched my shoulder. I calmly moved aside and said, “No, I shan’t.”

And again a spasm went through his shoulder and he let out a low moan. Each time he sensed that his power, the current of his will, was not penetrating me and was meeting resistance, he experienced physical pain. (This was my impression at the time—and it was confirmed later.) And in this there was no pretence, as he was evidently trying to conceal both the spasms in his shoulder and his strange, low groan.

No, this was not a straightforward business at all. Howling inside him was a black beast… There was much we did not know.

In the style of the Song of Songs and obscurely amorous.

5

“Ask him about Vyrubova,” whispered Rozanov. “Ask him about everyone. Get him to tell you everything. And please get him to speak up.”

Rasputin gave Rozanov a sideways look from under his greasy locks.

“What’s that fellow whispering about?”

Rozanov held his glass out towards Rasputin and said, “I was wanting to clink glasses.”

Izmailov held his glass out, too.

Rasputin looked at them both warily, looked away, then looked back again.

Suddenly Izmailov asked, “Tell me, have you ever tried your hand at writing?”

Who, apart from a writer, would think to ask such a question?

“Now and again,” replied Rasputin without the least surprise. “Even quite a few times.”

And he beckoned to a young man sitting at the other end of the table.

“Dearie! Bring me the pages with my poems that you just tapped out on that little typing machine.”

“Dearie” darted off and came back with the pages.

Rasputin handed them around. Everyone reached out. There were a lot of these typed pages, enough for all of us. We began to read.

It turned out to be a prose poem, in the style of the Song of Songs and obscurely amorous. I can still remember the lines: “Fine and high are the mountains. But my love is higher and finer yet, because love is God.”

But that seems to have been the only passage that made any sense. Everything else was just a jumble of words.

As I was reading, the author kept looking around restlessly, trying to see what impression his work was making.

“Very good,” I said.

He brightened.

“Dearie! Give us a clean sheet, I’ll write something for her myself.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

I said.

He chewed for a long time on his pencil. Then, in a barely decipherable peasant scrawl, he wrote:

To Nadezhda

God is lov. Now lov. God wil forgiv yu.

Grigory

The basic pattern of Rasputin’s magic charms was clear enough: love, and God will forgive you.

But why should such an inoffensive maxim as this cause his ladies to collapse in fits of ecstasy? Why had that lady-in-waiting got into such a state?

This was no simple matter.

The palace evidently knew exactly where Rasputin was to be found. Probably, they always did.

6

I studied the awkwardly scrawled letters and the signature below: “Grigory”.

What power this signature held. I knew of a case where this scrawl of seven letters had recalled a man who had been sentenced to forced labour and was already on his way to Siberia.

And it seemed likely that this same signature could, just as easily, transport a man there…

“You should hang on to that autograph,” said Rozanov. “It’s quite something.”

It did in fact stay in my possession for a long time. In Paris, some six years ago, I found it in an old briefcase and gave it to J.W. Bienstock, the author of a book about Rasputin in French.

Rasputin really was only semi-literate; writing even a few words was hard work for him. This made me think of the forest-warden in our home village—the man whose job had been to catch poachers and supervise the spring floating of timber. I remembered the little bills he used to write: “Tren to dacha and bak fife ru” (five roubles).

Rasputin was also strikingly like this man in physical appearance. Perhaps that’s why his words and general presence failed to excite the least mystical awe in me. “God is love, you shall come” and so on. That “fife ru”, which I couldn’t get out of my head, was constantly in the way…

Suddenly our host came up, looking very concerned.

“The palace is on the line.”

Rasputin left the room.

The palace evidently knew exactly where Rasputin was to be found. Probably, they always did.

Via Wikimedia Commons.

Taking advantage of Rasputin’s absence, Rozanov began lecturing me, advising me how best to steer the conversation on to all kinds of interesting topics.

“And do please get him to talk about the Khlysts and their rites. Find out whether it’s all true, and if so, how it’s all organized and whether it’s possible, say, to attend.”

“Get him to invite you, and then you can bring us along, too.”

I agreed willingly. This truly would be interesting.

But Rasputin didn’t come back. Our host said he had been summoned urgently to Tsarskoye Selo —even though it was past midnight—but that, as he was leaving, Rasputin had asked him to tell me he would definitely be coming back.

“Don’t let her go,” said Filippov, repeating Rasputin’s words. “Have her wait for me. I’ll be back.”

Needless to say no one waited. Our group, at least, left as soon as we had finished eating.

He himself was being carried away by the very force he was trying to control.

7

Everyone I told about the evening showed a quite extraordinary degree of interest. They wanted to know the elder’s every word, and they wanted me to describe every detail of his appearance. Most of all, they wanted to know if they could get themselves invited to Filippov’s, too.

“What kind of impression did he make on you?”

“No very strong impression,” I replied. “But I can’t say I liked him.”

People were advising me to make the most of this connection. One never knows what the future holds in store, and Rasputin was certainly a force to be reckoned with. He toppled ministers and he shuffled courtiers as if they were a pack of cards. His displeasure was feared more than the wrath of the Tsar.

There was talk about clandestine German overtures being made via Rasputin to Alexandra Fyodorovna. With the help of prayer and hypnotic suggestion he was, apparently, directing our military strategy.

“Don’t go on the offensive before such and such a date—or the Tsarevich will be taken ill.”

Rasputin seemed to me to lack the steadiness needed to manage any kind of political strategy. He was too twitchy, too easily distracted, too confused in every way. Most likely he accepted bribes and got involved in plots and deals without really thinking things through or weighing up the consequences. He himself was being carried away by the very force he was trying to control. I don’t know what he was like at the beginning of his trajectory, but by the time I met him, he was already adrift. He had lost himself; it was as if he were being swept away by a whirlwind, by a tornado. As if in delirium, he kept repeating the words: “God… prayer… wine”. He was confused; he had no idea what he was doing. He was in torment, writhing about, throwing himself into his dancing with a despairing howl—as if to retrieve some treasure left behind in a burning house. This satanic dancing of his was something I witnessed later…

I was told he used to gather his society ladies together in a bathhouse and—“to break their pride and teach them humility”—make them bathe his feet. I don’t know whether this is true, but it’s not impossible. At that time, in that atmosphere of hysteria, even the most idiotic flight of fancy seemed plausible.

Was he really a mesmerist? I once spoke to someone who had seriously studied hypnotism, mesmerism and mind control.

I told him about that strange gesture of Rasputin’s, the way he would quickly reach out and touch someone and how a spasm would go through his shoulder when he felt his hypnotic command was meeting resistance.

“You really don’t know?” he asked in surprise. “Mesmerists always make that kind of physical contact. It’s how they transmit the current of their will. And when this current is blocked, then it rebounds upon the mesmerist. The more powerful a wave the mesmerist sends out, the more powerful the current that flows back. You say he was very persistent, which suggests he was using all his strength. That’s why the return current struck him with such force; that’s why he was writhing and moaning. It sounds as if he was suffering real pain as he struggled to control the backlash. Everything you describe is entirely typical.”

Rasputin leant over towards me: ‘I’ve missed you. I’ve been pining for you.’

8

Three or four days after this dinner, Izmailov rang me a second time.

“Filippov is begging us to have dinner with him again. Last time Rasputin had to leave almost straight away; he’d barely had time to look about him. This time Filippov assures us that it will all be a great deal more interesting.”

Apparently Manuilov had dropped in on Izmailov. He’d been very insistent (almost like some kind of impresario!) and had shown Izmailov the final guest list: all respectable people who knew how to behave. There was no need to worry.

“Just once more,” Izmailov said to me. “This time our conversation with him will be a lot more fruitful. Maybe we’ll get him to say something really interesting. He truly is someone out of the ordinary. Let’s go.”

I agreed.

This time I arrived later. Everyone had been at the table for some time.

There were many more people than the first time. All of the previous guests were there—as were the musicians. Rasputin was sitting in the same place. Everyone was talking politely, as if they were invited there regularly. No one was looking at Rasputin; it was as if his presence were of no consequence to them at all. And yet the truth was all too obvious: most of the guests did not know one another and, although they now seemed too timid to do anything at all, there was only one reason why they had come. They wanted to have a look at Rasputin, to find out about him, to talk to him.

Rasputin had removed his outer garment and was sitting in a stiff taffeta shirt, worn outside his trousers. It was a glaring pink, and it had an embroidered collar, buttoned on one side.

Advertisement for the American film Rasputin, the Black Monk (1917).  Via Wikimedia Commons.

His face was tense and tired; he looked ashen. His prickly eyes were deeply sunken. He’d all but turned his back on the lawyer’s glamorously dressed wife, who was again sitting next to him. My own place, on his other side, was still free.

“Ah! There she is,” he said with a sudden twitch. “Well, come and sit down. I’ve been waiting. Why did you run off last time? I came back—and where were you? Drink! What’s the matter? I’m telling you—drink! God will forgive you.”

Rozanov and Izmailov were also in the same places as before.

Rasputin leant over towards me.

“I’ve missed you. I’ve been pining for you.”

“Nonsense. You’re just saying that to be nice,” I said loudly. “Why don’t you tell me something interesting instead? Is it true you organize Khlyst rituals?”

“Khlyst rituals? Here? Here in the city?”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Who’s told you that?” he asked uneasily. “Who? Did he say he was there himself ? Did he see for himself ? Or just hear rumours?”

“I’m afraid I can’t remember who it was.”

“You can’t remember? My clever girl, why don’t you come along and see me? I’ll tell you many things you don’t know. You wouldn’t have English blood, would you?”

“No, I’m completely Russian.”

“There’s something English about your little face. I have a princess in Moscow and she has an English face, too. Yes, I’m going to drop everything and go to Moscow.”

“What about Vyrubova?” I asked, rather irrelevantly—for Rozanov’s sake.

“Vyrubova? No, not Vyrubova. She has a round face, not an English one. Vyrubova is my little one. I’ll tell you how it is: some of my flock are little ones and some are something else. I’m not going to lie to you, this is the truth.”

Suddenly Izmailov found his courage. “And… the Tsaritsa?” he asked in a choked voice. “Alexandra Fyodorovna?”

The boldness of the question rather alarmed me. But, to my surprise, Rasputin replied very calmly, “The Tsaritsa? She’s ailing. Her breast ails her. I lay my hand upon her and I pray. I pray well. And my prayer always makes her better. She’s ailing. I must pray for her and her little ones.” And then he muttered, “It’s bad… bad…”

“What’s bad?”

“No, it’s nothing… We must pray. They are good little ones…”

I recall reading in the newspapers, at the beginning of the revolution, about the “filthy correspondence between the elder and the depraved princesses”—correspondence that it was “quite inconceivable to publish”. Sometime later, however, these letters were published. And they went something like this: “Dear Grisha, please pray that I’ll be a good student.” “Dear Grisha, I’ve been a good girl all week long and obeyed Papa and Mama…”

“We must pray,” Rasputin went on muttering.

“Do you know Madame E——?” I asked.

“The one with the little pointed face? I think I’ve glimpsed her here and there. But it’s you I want to come along and see me. You’ll get to meet everyone and I’ll tell you all about them.”

“Why should I come along? It’ll only make them all cross.”

“Make who cross?”

“Your ladies. They don’t know me; I’m a complete stranger to them. They’re not going to be pleased to see me.”

“They wouldn’t dare!” He beat the table with his fist. “No, not in my house. In my house everyone is happy—God’s grace descends on everyone. If I say, ‘Bathe my feet!’, they’ll do as I say and then drink the water. In my house everything is godly. Obedience, grace, humility and love.”

“See? They bathe your feet. No, you’ll be better off without me.”

“You shall come. I’ll send for you.”

“Has everyone really come when you’ve sent for them?”

“No one’s refused yet.”

Was Rasputin the weaver of this web—or the one being caught in it? Who was betraying whom?

9

Apparently quite forgotten, the lawyer’s wife sitting on the other side of Rasputin was hungrily and tenaciously listening to our conversation.

From time to time, noticing me looking at her, she would give me an ingratiating smile. Her husband kept whispering to her and drinking to my health.

“You ought to invite the young lady to your right,” I said to Rasputin. “She’s lovely!”

Hearing my words, she looked up at me with frightened, grateful eyes. She even paled a little as she waited for his response. Rasputin glanced at her, quickly turned away and said loudly, “She’s a stupid bitch!”

Everyone pretended they hadn’t heard.

I turned to Rozanov.

“For the love of God,” he said, “get him to talk about the Khlysts. Try again.”

But I’d completely lost interest in talking to Rasputin. He seemed to be drunk. Our host kept coming up and pouring him wine, saying, “This is for you, Grisha. It’s your favourite.”

Rasputin kept drinking, jerking his head about, twitching and muttering something.

“I’m finding it very hard to talk to him,” I said to Rozanov. “Why don’t you and Izmailov try? Maybe we can all four of us have a conversation!”

“It won’t work. It’s a very intimate, mysterious subject. And he’s shown he trusts you…”

“What’s him over there whispering about?” interrupted Rasputin. “Him that writes for New Times?”

So much for our being incognito.

“What makes you think he’s a writer?” I asked. “Someone must have misinformed you… Before you know it, they’ll be saying I’m a writer, too.”

“I think they said you’re from the Russian Word,” he replied calmly. “But it’s all the same to me.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’m afraid I can’t remember,” he said, pointedly repeating my own words when he’d asked who had told me about the Khlysts.

He had clearly remembered my evasiveness, and now he was paying me back in kind: “I’m afraid I can’t remember!”

Who had given us away? Hadn’t we been promised complete anonymity? It was all very strange.

After all, it wasn’t as if we’d gone out of our way to meet the elder. We had been invited. We had been offered the opportunity to meet him and, what’s more, we’d been told to keep quiet about who we were because “Grisha doesn’t like journalists”— because he avoids talking to them and always does all he can to keep away from them.

Now it appeared that Rasputin knew very well who we were. And not only was he not avoiding us but he was even trying to draw us into a closer acquaintance.

Who was calling the shots? Had Manuilov orchestrated all this—for reasons we didn’t know? Or did the elder have some cunning scheme of his own? Or had someone just blurted out our real names by mistake?

It was all very insalubrious. What was truly going on was anyone’s guess.

And what did I know about all these dinner companions of ours? Which of them was from the secret police? Which would soon be sentenced to forced labour? Which might be a German agent? And which of them had lured us here? Which member of this upright company was hoping to use us for their own ends? Was Rasputin the weaver of this web—or the one being caught in it? Who was betraying whom?

“He knows who we are,” I whispered to Rozanov.

Rozanov looked at me in astonishment. He and Izmailov began whispering together.

Just then the musicians struck up. The accordion began a dance tune, the guitar twanged, the tambourine jingled. Rasputin leapt to his feet—so abruptly that he knocked his chair over. He darted off as if someone were calling to him. Once he was some way from the table (it was a large room), he suddenly began to skip and dance. He thrust a knee forward, shook his beard about and circled round and round. His face looked tense and bewildered. His movements were frenzied; he was always ahead of the music, as if unable to stop…

Everyone leapt up. They stood around him to watch. “Dearie”, the one who had gone to fetch the poems, turned pale. His eyes bulged. He squatted down on his haunches and began clapping his hands. “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Go! Go! Go!”

And no one was laughing. They watched as if in fear and— certainly—very, very seriously.

The spectacle was so weird, so wild, that it made you want to let out a howl and hurl yourself into the circle, to leap and whirl alongside him for as long as you had the strength.

The faces all around were looking ever paler, ever more intent. There was a charge in the air, as if everyone was expecting something… Any moment!

“How can anyone still doubt it?” said Rozanov from behind me. “He’s a Khlyst!”

Ecstatic ritual of Khlysts. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Rasputin was now leaping about like a goat. Mouth hanging open, skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, locks of hair whipping across the sunken sockets of his eyes, he was dreadful to behold. His pink shirt was billowing out behind him like a balloon.

“Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!” went “Dearie”, continuing to clap.

All of a sudden Rasputin stopped. Just like that. And the music broke off, as if that is what the musicians had intended all along.

Rasputin collapsed into an armchair and looked all around. His eyes were no longer pricking people; they seemed vacant, bewildered.

“Dearie” hastily gave him a glass of wine. I went through into the drawing room and told Izmailov I wanted to leave.

“Sit down for a moment and get your breath back,” Izmailov replied.

The air was stifling. It was making my heart pound and my hands tremble.

“No,” said Izmailov. “It’s not hot in here. It’s just your nerves.”

“Please, don’t go,” begged Rozanov. “Now you can get him to invite you to one of his rituals. There’ll be no difficulty now!”

By now most of the guests had come through and were sitting around the edges of the room, as if in anticipation of some sort of performance. The beautiful woman came in, too, her husband holding her by the arm. She was walking with her head bowed; I thought she was weeping.

I stood up.

“Don’t go,” said Rozanov.

I shook my head and went out towards the hall. Out of the dining room came Rasputin. Blocking my path, he took my elbow.

“Wait a moment and let me tell you something. And mind you listen well. You see how many people there are all around us? A lot of people, right? A lot of people—and no one at all. Just me and you—and no one else. There isn’t anyone else standing here, just me and you. And I’m saying to you: come to me! I’m pining for you to come. I’m pining so badly I could throw myself down on the ground before you!”

His shoulder went into spasms and he let out a moan.

And it was all so ludicrous, both the way we were standing in the middle of the room together and the painfully serious way he was speaking…

I had to do something to lighten the atmosphere.

Rozanov came up to us. Pretending he was just passing by, he pricked up his ears. I started to laugh. Pointing at him, I said to Rasputin, “But he won’t let me.”

“Don’t you listen to that degenerate—you come along. And don’t bring him with you, we can do without him. Rasputin may only be a peasant, but don’t you turn up your nose at him. For them I love I build stone palaces. Haven’t you heard?”

“No,” I replied, “I haven’t.”

“You’re lying, my clever girl, you have heard. I can build stone palaces. You’ll see. I can do many things. But for the love of God, just come to me, the sooner the better. We’ll pray together. Why wait? You see, everyone wants to kill me. As soon as I step outside, I look all around me: where are they, where are their ugly mugs? Yes, they want to kill me. Well, so what! The fools don’t understand who I am. A sorcerer? Maybe I am. They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me. But there’s one thing they don’t understand: if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia. Remember, my clever girl: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia. They’ll bury us together.”

He stood there in the middle of the room, thin and black—a gnarled tree, withered and scorched.

“And it will be the end of Russia… the end of Russia…”

With his trembling hand crooked upwards, he looked like Chaliapin singing the role of the miller in Dvořák’s Rusalka. At this moment he appeared dreadful and completely mad.

“Ah? Are you going? Well if you’re going, then go. But just you remember… Remember.”

*

As we made our way back from Filippov’s, Rozanov said that I really ought to go and visit Rasputin: if I refused an invitation coveted by so many, he would almost certainly find it suspicious.

“We’ll all go there together,” he assured me, “and we’ll leave together.”

I replied that there was something in the atmosphere around Rasputin I found deeply revolting. The grovelling, the collective hysteria—and at the same time the machinations of something dark, something very dark and beyond our knowledge. One could get sucked into this filthy mire—and never be able to climb out of it. It was revolting and joyless, and the revulsion I felt entirely negated any interest I might have in these people’s “weird mysteries”.

The pitiful, distressed face of the young woman who was being thrust so shamelessly by her lawyer husband at a drunken peasant—it was the stuff of nightmares, I was seeing it in my dreams. But he must have had many such women—women about whom he shouted, banging his fist on the table, that “they wouldn’t dare” and that they were “happy with everything”.

“It’s revolting,” I went on. “Truly horrifying! I’m frightened! And wasn’t it strange, later on, how insistent he was about my going to see him?”

“He’s not accustomed to rejection.”

“Well, my guess is that it’s all a lot simpler. I think it’s because of the Russian Word. He may make out that he doesn’t attach any significance to my work there, but you know as well as I do how afraid he is of the press and how he tries to ingratiate himself with it. Maybe he’s decided to lure me into becoming one of his myrrh-bearing women. So that I’ll write whatever he wants me to write, at his dictation. After all, he does all of his politicking through women. Just think what a trump card he would have in his hands. I think he’s got it all figured out very well indeed. He’s cunning.”

There will be no one there who shouldn’t be there.

10

Several days after this dinner I had a telephone call from a lady I knew. She reproached me for not coming to a party she had given the evening before and that I’d promised to attend.

I had completely forgotten about this party.

“Vyrubova was there,” said the lady. “She was waiting for you. She very much wants to meet you, and I had promised her you would be there. I’m terribly, terribly upset you couldn’t come.”

“Aha!” I thought. “Messages from the ‘other world’. What can she want of me?”

That she was a messenger from that “other world” I didn’t doubt for a moment. Two more days went by.

An old friend dropped in on me. She was very flustered.

“S—— is going to have a big party. She’s called round a couple of times in person, but you weren’t at home. She came to see me earlier today and made me promise to take you with me.”

I was rather surprised by S——’s persistence, as I didn’t know her so very well. She wasn’t hoping to get me to give some kind of a reading, was she? That was the last thing I wanted. I expressed my misgivings.

“Oh no,” my friend assured me. “I promise you that she has no hidden designs. S—— is simply very fond of you and would like to see you. Anyway, it should be a very enjoyable evening. There won’t be many guests, just friends, because they can’t put on grand balls now, not while we’re at war. That would be in poor taste. There will be no one there who shouldn’t be there—no one superfluous. They’re people who know how to give a good party.”

Who was that masked lady?

11

We arrived after eleven.

There were a lot of people. Among the tail coats and evening dresses were a number of figures in identical black or light-blue domino masks. They were the only ones in fancy dress; it was clear they had come as a group.

My friend took me by the arm and led me to our hostess: “Well, here she is. See? I’ve brought her with me.”

A Gypsy was singing in the large ballroom. Short and slight, she was wearing a high-necked dress of shining silk. Her head was thrown back and her dusky face an emblem of suffering as she sang the words:

In parting she said:
“Don’t you forget me in foreign lands…”

“Just wait a moment,” the hostess whispered to me. “She’s almost finished.”

And she went on standing beside me, evidently looking around for someone.

“Now we can go.”

She took my hand and led me across the ballroom, still looking.

Then we entered a small, dimly lit sitting room. There was no one there. The hostess seated me on a sofa. “I’ll be back in a moment. Please don’t go anywhere.”

She did indeed come back in a moment, together with a figure in a black mask.

“This mysterious figure will keep you entertained,” said S—— with a laugh. “Please wait for me here.”

The black figure sat down beside me and looked silently at me through narrow eye slits.

“You don’t know me,” it murmured at last, “but I desperately need to speak to you.”

It was not a voice I had heard before, but something about its intonations was familiar. It was the same quivering, hysterical tone in which that lady-in-waiting had spoken of Rasputin.

I peered at the woman sitting beside me. No, this wasn’t Madame E——. Madame E—— was petite. This lady was very tall. She spoke with a faint lisp, like all of our high society ladies who as children begin speaking English before Russian.

Rasputin with his followers in St. Petersburg. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“I know everything,” the unknown woman began edgily. “On Thursday you’re going to a certain house.”

“No,” I replied in surprise. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She grew terribly flustered. “Why don’t you tell me the truth? Why? I know everything.”

“Where is it you think I’m going?” I asked.

“There. His place.”

“I don’t understand a thing.”

“Do you mean to test me? All right, I’ll say it. On Thursday you’re going to… to… Rasputin’s.”

“What makes you think that? No one has asked me.”

The lady fell silent.

“You may not have received the invitation yet… but you soon will. It’s already been decided.”

“But why does this matter so much to you?” I asked. “Perhaps you could tell me your name?”

“I haven’t put on this idiotic mask only to go and tell you my name. And as far as you’re concerned, my name is of no importance. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that on Thursday you’re going to be there.”

“I have no intention of going to Rasputin’s,” I replied calmly. “Of that I can assure you.”

“Ah!”

She suddenly leant forward and, with hands tightly encased in black gloves, seized hold of my arm.

“No, you’re joking! You will be going! Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because it’s of no interest to me.”

“And you won’t change your mind?”

“No.”

Her shoulders began to tremble. I thought she was weeping.

“I thought you were someone sincere,” she whispered.

I was at a loss.

“What is it you want from me? Does it upset you that I won’t be going? I don’t understand a thing.”

She seized hold of my arm again.

“I implore you by everything you hold sacred—please refuse the invitation. We have to get him to cancel this evening. He mustn’t leave Tsarskoye on Thursday. We mustn’t let him—or something terrible will happen.”

She muttered something, her shoulders quivering.

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me,” I said. “But if it will make you feel any better, then please believe me: I give you my word of honour that I won’t go. In three days’ time I’m going to Moscow.”

Again her shoulders began to tremble, and again I thought she was weeping.

“Thank you, my dear one, thank you…”

She quickly bent over and kissed my hand.

Then she jumped up and left.

“No, that can’t have been Vyrubova,” I thought, remembering how Vyrubova had wanted to see me at that party I hadn’t gone to. “No, it wasn’t her. Vyrubova is quite plump, and anyway, she limps. It wasn’t her.”

I found our hostess.

“Who was that masked lady you just brought to me?”

The hostess seemed rather put out.

“How would I know? She was wearing a mask.”

While we were at dinner the masked figures seemed to disappear. Or perhaps they had all just taken off their fancy dress.

I spent a long time studying the faces I didn’t know, looking for the lips that had kissed my hand…

Sitting at the far end of the table were three musicians: guitar, accordion and tambourine. The very same three musicians. Rasputin’s musicians. Here was a link… a thread.

There on the interrogator’s desk, he could clearly see the guest list.

12

The next day Izmailov came over. He was terribly upset.

“Something awful has happened. Here. Read this.” And he handed me a newspaper.

In it I read that Rasputin had begun frequenting a literary circle where, over a bottle of wine, he would tell entertaining stories of all kinds about extremely high-ranking figures.

“And that’s not the worst of it,” said Izmailov. “Filippov came over today and said he’d had an unexpected summons from the secret police, who wanted to know just which literary figures had been to his house and precisely what Rasputin had talked about. Filippov was threatened with exile from Petersburg. But the most astonishing and horrible thing of all is that, there on the interrogator’s desk, he could clearly see the guest list, in Manuilov’s own hand.”

“You’re not saying Manuilov works for the secret police, are you?”

“There’s no knowing whether it was him or another of Filippov’s guests. In any case, we’ve got to be very careful. Even if they don’t interrogate us, they’ll be following us. No doubt about that. So if Rasputin writes to you or summons you by telephone, you’d better not respond. Although he doesn’t know your address, and he’s unlikely to have remembered your last name.”

“So much for the holy man’s mystical secrets! I feel sorry for Rozanov. What a dull, prosaic ending…”

When I ask, ‘Who’s calling?’ he says, ‘Rasputin’.

13

“Madam, some joker’s been telephoning. He’s rung twice, wanting to speak to you,” said my maid, laughing.

“What do you mean, ‘some joker’?”

“Well, when I ask, ‘Who’s calling?’ he says, ‘Rasputin’. It’s somebody playing the fool.”

“Listen, Ksyusha, if this man carries on playing the fool, be sure to tell him I’ve gone away, and for a long time. Understand?”

Remember me then! Remember me!

14

I soon left Petersburg. I never saw Rasputin again.

Later, when I read in the papers that his corpse had been burnt, the man I saw in my mind’s eye was that black, bent, terrible sorcerer:

“Burn me? Let them. But there’s one thing they don’t know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.”

“Remember me then! Remember me!”

I did.

1924
Translated by Anne Marie Jackson

* * *

Published by New York Review Books.
Copyright Original Russian text © by Agnès Szydlowski
Translation of “Rasputin” © 2014 by Anne Marie Jackson, first published in Subtly Worded (Pushkin Press, 2014).

The question of whether or not it’s appropriate to refer to Hillary Clinton as “Hillary” has been unresolved for at least a decade now. It’s offensive, argues Peggy Drexler. It’s fine, says Peter Beinart. It’s complicated, shrugs McClatchy DC.

Back in 2007, the Chicago Tribune’s public editor wondered whether use of the former first lady’s first name was overly familiar, even provocative: “Mrs. Clinton or Sen. Clinton or former First Lady Hillary Clinton are all proper ways to address or refer to her, but just plain Hillary is almost guaranteed to trigger a reaction.” Editor Jane Fritsch told him via email that she disliked the double-standard: “The simple fact is that Hillary Rodham Clinton is running in a field of men who are never referred to by their first names.”

In 2016, that is no longer quite true. The vast majority of our presidential candidates—and at one point, we seemed to have as many as Catholic saints, enough for each of them to have a calendar day—are still referred to by their last names. But Clinton’s only rival for the Democratic nomination goes by “Bernie.”

The upshot is that on the Republican side, the race was among several last names (Trump, Rubio, Cruz), and on the Democratic side, it remains between two first names (Hillary and Bernie).

Previous other Republican frontrunners were also known by their last names, including Dr. Ben Carson and Governor John Kasich. Carly Fiorina’s folk seemed split on the issue, as though they were unsure whether they needed to make their candidate seem more human: in a schizophrenic move, they distributed both “Cruz-Fiorina” and “Cruz-Carly” signs during that one exciting week after the Texas senator declared that the California exec would be his VP if he were elected and before the senator dropped out. Fiorina herself tried to make “Carly” happen, but the name never seemed to catch on, much like the candidate herself.

Jeb!, the only Republican who successfully marketed himself by a name that was not his last, did so to separate himself from the family on whose resources and connections he depended to fund his disastrous campaign.

Yet this end result was not foreordained. In previous years, Trump, for example, has been widely called “the Donald.” An official, popular Reddit campaign thread even uses that moniker in its address. However, like his competitors, the Donald chose to package himself as Trump.

Trump’s name became particularly relevant when comedian John Oliver started a popular movement to “make Donald Drumpf again.” Oliver claims “Drumpf” was Trump’s family’s name before Donald’s forebears changed it, believing—with, it seems, some justification—that the name “Trump” would go over better with Americans. Indeed, the name, with its associations of winning and power, has gone over well with large swaths of the population.

“Bernie,” by contrast, is less a winning, powerful name than an everyman moniker along the lines of Joe the Plumber. It complements Senator Sanders’ image as a rumpled populist who once eked out a living as “a shitty carpenter” and who still favors substance over style. As Politico put it in a lengthy profile:

The issues. The issues. Stick to the issues. The rich are too rich. Those with power have too much. The middle class is withering. Inequality is a crisis, and the system is rigged. With Sanders, what you see is what you get, insist the people who know him best — and that’s almost all you get.

In many ways, the profile makes clear, Sanders keeps constituents at arm’s length, remaining mum on his personal life. The use of a nickname like “Bernie” becomes necessary to create any sense of closeness.

Secretary Clinton’s campaign’s deliberate use of “Hillary” played a similar role in 2008 as part of a rebranding effort to reveal her more human side.

Clinton’s friends, all the thousands of them, have been saying for years that they wished people could see the Hillary They Knew, the person few get to see behind her public casing: the great boss, the chatty girlfriend, always the first to call when a parent dies or a baby is born. She possesses, they swear, that most cherished cachet among politicians — the sense of normalcy

Clinton and Sanders both have decades of public service behind them and serious cred as policy wonks. It makes sense that they need to cultivate more approachable personas. By contrast, Cruz, Rubio, and Trump put together had enough governing experience to fill a Dixie cup. Democrats may indeed be less formal, the kind of people who as students were more comfortable calling teachers by their first names. But perhaps the real distinction between them and their Republican opponents is that Cruz, Rubio, and Trump needed all the authority they could muster in order to be taken seriously as applicants for the most important job in the land.

* * *

Ester Bloom is a contributing writer to The Atlantic, and an editor at The Billfold.

Additional photos via Wikimedia Commons.

Stories Discussed
• “Bernie Sanders Has a Secret” (Michael Kruse, Politico, July 2015)
• “Re-Re-Re-Reintroducing Hillary Clinton” (Mark Leibovich, The New York Times Magazine, July 2015)

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

1. ‘You Want A Description Of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem

Harriet Ryan, Scott Glover, Lisa Girion | Los Angeles Times | May 5, 2016 | 27 minutes (6,778 words)

An investigation into America’s bestselling painkiller, Oxycontin. Reporters look through a trove of documents showing how the drugmaker Purdue Pharma’s deceptive marketing of Oxycontin has contributed to the prescription drug epidemic.

2. The Braves Play Taxpayers Better Than They Play Baseball

Ira Boudway, Kate Smith | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 27, 2016 | 13 minutes (3,337 words)

“If there’s one thing the Braves know how to do, it’s how to get money out of taxpayers.”

3. Who Do You Think You Are?

Jacqueline Rose | London Review of Books | May 2, 2016 | 55 minutes (13,971 words)

Rose’s essay goes deep on trans narratives.

4. California Notes

Joan Didion | New York Review of Books | May 4, 2016 | 9 minutes (2,491 words)

Didion’s thoughts about California from when she covered the Patty Hearst trial in 1976.

5. Cruising Through the End of the World

Eva Holland | Pacific Standard | May 2, 2016 | 20 minutes (5,000 words)

What happens when cruise ship tourism descends on the communities of the Northwest Passage?

My mom and I won’t be together on Mother’s Day this year. I’m in western New York for a friend’s wedding. She’s home in Maryland—relaxing, I hope, but more likely preparing for another week of teaching. We have a lot in common, especially our love of books and thrift stores. We carry our weight in the same parts of our bodies (sorry for mentioning it, Ma). We both have short hair. We have the same middle name and the same urge to overachieve.

One thing I admire about my mom is her fearlessness when it comes to starting over. A musician for decades, she went to graduate school (again!) in her 40s and became a children’s librarian. She parted ways with the church our family attended for a decade and found a new spiritual home, a church (coincidentally, I’m sure) two blocks from my own apartment. And she’s always down for trying interesting foods, new hobbies, new clothes or exciting hair colors—currently, she’s sporting a platinum pixie cut with lavender tips. She always surprises me. Our relationship isn’t always smooth, but it’s ours.

This week, I’ve collected stories about new moms, missing moms, dead moms and boomer moms, if only to demonstrate that there is no one way to have a mother or not have a mother. Some of us have toxic relationships with our moms and are better off—mentally, physically, spiritually—without them. Some of us have lost our moms to diseases, accidents, or time itself. And still others of us are becoming moms—every day, another Facebook friend announces she’s pregnant. Mother’s Day can be a day of meditation or just another Sunday. But I hope, truly, that it is a day of contentment, no matter how you celebrate.

(Past lists on this holiday include A Collection of Stories About Not Choosing Motherhood and Reading List: Mother’s Day.)

1. “It’s My First Mother Day As A Mom. Now What?” (Meaghan O’Connell, The Cut, May 2015)

Don’t get me wrong, the sentimentalization of motherhood as a stand-in for actually valuing and supporting mothers is horse shit. Give me free day care over flowers and a finger-painted card any day. But I am certainly going to milk this day for all it’s worth.

2.  “All the Absent Mothers.” (Antonio Aiello, LitHub, May 2015)

Before she falls asleep, Antonio Aiello’s 8-year-old daughter has a daydream she wants to share.

3. “Are We Destined to Become Our Mothers? A Scientific Investigation.” (Jessica Machado, Broadly, July 2015)

So all those cries of “You just don’t get meeee!” that you wailed during puberty weren’t completely unfounded–your mom might not have. But that’s probably because no one ever cared to “get” her, either. And likely, it wasn’t just her parents who dismissed her, but her boyfriends, husbands, bosses, pastors, peers, and general society. Yup, our problems with our moms partially stem from a long history of sexism.

4. “This is a Dead Mom Essay.” (Maddie Taterka, Autostraddle, February 2015)

Maddie Taterka was 16 years old when her mother died. When she finally decided to seek out other “dead mom” narratives, she finds solace in Wild and other works by Cheryl Strayed. Taterka has written a remarkable essay about how to come to uncomfortable terms with grief.

5. “The Lessons We’ve Learned From Our Boomer Moms.” (Anne Helen Peterson, BuzzFeed, April 2015)

How we see our moms versus how our moms see themselves, through stories that vary greatly across lines of race and age.

6. “Litany for My Mother’s Body.” (Goldberry Long, The Rumpus, May 2014)

An intimate essay that exemplifies the physicality of womanhood in general and motherhood in particular.

Jennifer Percy | Atlas Obscura | May 2016 | 17 minutes (4,132 words)

Our latest Exclusive is a new story by Jennifer Percy, author of the book Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

Thirty-five miles north of Mosul, Iraq, about an hour’s drive from Islamic State territory, was the Garden of Eden. I stood with my interpreter, Salar, a local Iraqi journalist. “See that smoke between the mountains,” Salar said, pointing in the distance. “It’s an oil fire.” The thick plume of smoke marked the entrance to the site. Flames burst from a pipe stuck deep in the earth beneath which lay 25 billion barrels of crude oil worth more than $1 trillion. “These oil explorers think about holy places,” he said. “The more oil, the holier the land.”

But this isn’t the only Garden of Eden. It’s not even the only Garden of Eden in Iraq’s Nineveh plains, the war-torn province through which I was traveling. According to coordinates rather confusingly supplied by the Book of Genesis, the garden was at the spot where one river split into four. Here’s Genesis 2.8-2.14:

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed…A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The thinking was, if you can pinpoint the four rivers—Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates—you can pinpoint paradise. The Tigris and Euphrates run from northern Iraq the length of the country before meeting in the south. No one knows for sure the location of the Pishon or Gihon rivers, except that they are in Havilah, and no one knows where Havilah is either. These are the two unknown rivers of paradise. Genesis refers to the land of Cush, thought to be Ethiopia, but the known rivers are not near Ethiopia. Others believe the rivers are in Azerbaijan, or point out that Jerusalem is home to the ancient Gihon Spring.

But the exact spot is contested. Believers have alternately placed the garden in Armenia, in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, and in Bahrain, where a lonely tree known as the Tree of Life grows by itself in a waterless desert. A Boston University president named William F. Warren claimed the location for Eden was at the North Pole. Christopher Columbus believed he had found it in Venezuela. In the book The Garden of Eden and the Flood, from 1900, J. C. Keener attempted to prove that the garden was situated in Charleston, South Carolina. Others contended it was in Somaliland near the Horn of Africa. Some thought it was submerged beneath the waters of the Persian Gulf. Dante believed Eden to have been a mountain on an island, without telling us which or where, except that it’s the place where he reunited with his love Beatrice.

The seekers of Pishon and Gihon date back at least as far as the Jewish historian Josephus, who in the 1st century A.D., when Christianity was first taking root in Iraq, associated the Garden of Eden with South Asia, writing, “a river runs toward India and falls into the sea, called by the Greeks the Ganges.” Josephus thought the Pishon the Ganges and the Gihon the Nile. Saint Augustine, the Church Father and bishop of Hippo, spent a great deal of time before his death considering the imaginary nature of Eden. In the Middle Ages, Eden was cherished as a real place on Earth, if only it could be found. The idea was abandoned once explorers made their way around the globe. There was no place for Eden on the modern map.

Even those who concede the mythological nature of the Garden of Eden still have the desire to locate it, as I did last May while driving to the frontline in northern Iraq. The mythologies of Christianity, Yazidism, and Islam crisscross the landscape, and I passed through two purported Edens in northern Iraq while a much larger Eden was being resurrected in the south, near Basra, at the meeting point of the Tigris and Euphrates. With one Eden, I learned of another. The stories of Eden multiplied endlessly. Each site wanted to own the Biblical narrative and the few tourists that managed to make their way there.

According to the Bible, God placed a flaming sword at the east side of the Garden so that no human could return to the earthly paradise from which he had cast out Adam and Eve. On the drive that day with Salar, the oil fire visible between two mountains, marked the Garden as designated by the Yazidis, a religious and ethnic minority little known outside the region until its persecution at the hands of the Islamic State.

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“Baba”, a Yezidi high priest, sits in his living room in Lalish. Photo by: Erin Trieb

The Yazidis’ Garden was at Lalish, a sprawling sanctuary in a lush valley. The valley runs east to west, as does the temple. Lalish is thought to be the place where Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, the man who established the main rules of Yazidism, retired with his disciples. After his death in 1162, the sanctuary grew up around his tomb and became a center of worship.

Here, Salar and I met our Garden of Eden tour guide, Luqman Mahood, who had a black mustache and wore a small turban high on his head like the shell of a hermit crab. He had gathered us from the scorching parking lot, escorted us past the armed guard in a wood shack, and brought us under the shade of a tree. He said he wouldn’t let us wander alone without his services but he was free of charge. “I’m a Muslim,” he said. “I speak every language, don’t worry about me, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, English.” He was barefoot and wore a brown jumpsuit tied tight around the waist. His mustache curled on the ends. He worked for a website run by the Lalish Media Network, a news site which also has a tourism component.

He told us the rules: You cannot wear shoes in the Garden of Eden and you cannot step in the places where the gods sit. You may eat chips from the snack shack but you cannot throw the bags on the ground. Use the designated wastebaskets. You may not venture deep into the secret tunnels beneath the earth but you may visit the public tunnels. We handed our shoes over to the owner of the snack shop. It was crowded with children and the ground strewn with trash. We stepped barefoot into the garden.

Lalish is a sprawling complex of shrines and mausoleums with no center. Vegetation curled around massive stone structures, and spring water pooled in underground caves. The Yazidis burned oil wicks around conical shrines that rose from the earth like stalagmites. Once a year, they light 365 candles, fueled by olive oil, to bring peace to the world. The flames had scorched the temple walls and black marks were everywhere. There was a room for religious men, a room for pilgrims, and a room of the holy bread.

In the hills, red poppies grew, Mahood said, from the blood of martyrs. The Yazidis set the poppies in the water they used to wash their hands and faces so that gods would recognize them.

We entered a cobblestone courtyard filled with mulberry trees believed to cure diseases. A tree flowered from the tomb of a saint. At the far end of the courtyard, we passed through a semicircular archway. The doorsteps were sprinkled with paper bank notes, Iraqi dinars for the fallen angel. Above it was a carving of two peacocks, and at their feet, two small lions.

The Yazidis kissed and touched a stone that spouted holy water. They believed the stone was a physical manifestation of the peacock angel. “And this,” he said, pointing to a symbol carved in the stone. “This represents the sun that becomes like a ring that covers four sides of the world, and this is Iraq and we believe angels are living here.”

“The Earth was all Yazidi in the beginning,” Mahood told us.

The Yazidi faith is neither Christian nor Muslim, but contains many elements familiar to both. Thousands of years ago God told one of his seven angels to visit Earth and stop its shaking. It was God’s fault. He’d been playing with a white pearl and when he tossed it into space, it broke, and shattered to form the planets and stars. The angel he chose was named Taus Melek, and on his way down to Earth he disguised himself as a giant peacock. The Earth he found was terribly ugly and filled with dreadful things like volcanoes and earthquakes. He began his work in in Iraq, letting his feathers color the world with plants and animals. But the peacock took advantage of his powers and tried to create his own kingdom at Lalish. God banished him to hell. But he cried for so long–so many thousands of years–that God forgave him.

Melek wandered until he met Adam, the first human. Adam didn’t have a soul.  Melek breathed life into him. Eve came into being. Before Adam and Eve reproduced, they attempted to bear children alone. They incubated their seeds in jars and when it was time to look, Eve’s jar was full of insects and rodents, but in Adam’s jar was a beautiful boy. This boy, called Shehid bin Jer or Son of Jar, grew up in the Garden of Eden and his descendants became the Yazidis.

The Yazidis believe Melek will come back to Earth as a peacock during a time of conflict. In spite of the rise of the Islamic State, the Yazidis hadn’t seen Melek yet.

Since Melek is a fallen angel, Iraqi Muslims often call Yazidis devil worshippers, an insult that contributes to their isolation and persecution.  

“Do you raise peacocks in Lalish?” I asked.

“Not literal ones,” Mahood said.

To the right of the archway, a black snake crawled up the wall. This was the portal of Deriye Kapi, translated as the “door of the door.” The vertical serpent was as tall as a man and thick as an arm. It’s not the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve, Mahood said, but a serpent that helped Noah. The Yazidis believe Noah’s ark was lifted and carried by the waters of the deluge to the top of Mount Sinjar where a rock burst a hole in the hull of the ark. The serpent curled up and plugged the leak.

Mahood said it was possible to imagine that the courtyard of the Sanctuary of Sheikh Adi symbolized paradise, in which the peacock and serpent stand next to the mulberry and vine, representing the tree of life.

The “door of the door” led to an assembly hall hung with chandeliers. A clump of rags marked the sarcophagus of Sheikh Adi, and down the hall was his mausoleum. Here, a narrow stairway led pilgrims to the spring of Zemzem. It rose from the middle of the room, flowed for several feet, and disappeared again underground. The water of the Zemzem, Mahood said, is magic. It assured eternal life.

Hundreds of refugees slept in the garden. In August 2014 , the Islamic State swept through Sinjar and slaughtered thousands of Yazidis, and displaced thousands more. The refugees were mostly women and children whose husbands had been killed by militants.

While I was there, several teenage girls fainted over and over again, perhaps symptoms of trauma. Beneath Lalish broken-hearted women made wishes for their massacred sons on colorful silk rags. To make a wish, you tie a knot, and when someone undoes the knot, the wish will come true. But the rags were knotted over and over as if diseased. Deeper inside the caves the Yazidis tossed the same silk rags on the remnants of a statue, trying to hit what might have been its head, another attempt at a wish. Above ground Prince Tahseen Said, world leader of the Yazidis, sat in a carpeted room alongside five tribal leaders from Sinjar. They were waiting for the ambassador from Canada to discuss the Yazidi genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State.

On the way out the tour guide gave us his contact details and hoped that anybody who was interested could arrange a tour. “Tell your friends in America,” he said, “to encourage them to visit one day.”

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A room in a Yezidi refugee home in Dohuk Photo by: Erin Trieb

It was morning, already 80 degrees, and road signs pointed toward the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul. A car stacked with plastic bags and tarps sped past us, perhaps a family returning to a ruined village to start life over again. Car parts, street signs, the clothes of refugees clotted the ditches in a moonscape of red dirt that broke into fields of wheat. This was the road to Mosul, on our way out of Lalish to our next piece of paradise, the possible location of the Assyrian Garden of Eden.

On the way we came upon a small city, drowning in sunlight, and next to it, the silhouette of a Ferris wheel. “That means there are Christians nearby,” Salar said. Salar, a Sunni Muslim, had his ideas about Christians. You knew you were approaching Christians, he said, if the road turned from dry and cracked to pristine and well tended. You knew you were approaching Christians if the meridians emptied of garbage. You knew you were approaching Christians if you saw well-dressed people who smelled nice.

For centuries the Christians of Northern Iraq have suffered persecution, and in June 2014 the Islamic State took Mosul and traveled east, conquering small Christian villages in the Nineveh plains. Saint Elijah’s, the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq, was destroyed by ISIS in late 2014, after 1,400 years on a nearby hillside, joining more than 100 razed religious sites across Iraq.

In the Koran, the Garden of Eden is both a beginning and an end. It is the location of the fall of man, and a garden in the afterlife. Eden looks back to paradise and forward to heaven. For groups like ISIS the past is a place of contentment. To get back there, to the beginning, they have tried to destroy monuments and ruins, and they’ve tried to erase the narratives they loathe.

In her documentary on the Assyrians, Mourning in the Garden of Eden, Gwendolyn Cates interviewed Shmael Nano, a member of the Assyrian Democratic Movement. “Under the ground we are in Assyria,” he said, “but on the ground in Kurdistan we are the indigenous people of this land and we are the remains of the people who lived here in the Garden of Eden.”

Nineveh is considered a sanctuary for Christians in Iraq and their numbers swell during times of persecution. The area was relatively peaceful until the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when extremists moved in and Assyrians became targets because they were seen, due to their Christian religion, as American allies.

In 2015, ISIS arrived, and Nineveh was emptied of Christians. But Kurdish pesh merga forces, with the help of the Americans, took back Christian villages, including Bakufa, 18 miles north of Mosul, and here a small group of fighters formed a militia called Dwekh Nawsha. It was established by the National Party of Assyrians on the 11th of August 2014. They made an outpost in the deserted village at a building that once belonged to a family of Christians now living in a caravan near the city of Dohuk.

One of the commanders was a deacon named Yusef. He preached at the Free Methodist church. “We are always having debates and arguments about Jesus Christ,” he said. The deacon had a gray mustache and dark hair, aviator glasses with a brown tint. We sat on ornate couches in a room with tiled floors. I told him about our visit to Lalish and asked whether he believed it to be the ancient location of the Garden of Eden. He told me the Garden absolutely was not at Lalish. “The Garden of Eden is here,” he told me. He pointed to the ground beneath our feet. “It’s everywhere but Lalish.”

“And the tree of life?” I asked.

“It’s here,” he said. He lifted his arms. “The tree of life. We don’t know where it is exactly but it’s very near here.”

For miles, there was nothing but desert and villages sacked by the Islamic State. For now, the Assyrian Eden remained very much in the mind of its dwindling believers without need for show. They had a border but it did not matter where it ended as long as it erased the borders of the Yazidis’ Lalish.

The Islamic State had dug trenches a mile away. We watched them with binoculars. When the crops burned it was hard to know if the smoke rose from rockets or brush. There had been mortars the night before.

The commander gave us a tour of the ruined village of Bakufa. “Just let me tell you a story,” he said. “Yesterday I spoke to a Yazidi who escaped ISIS and he told me they took 800 women and girls and separated them from the men. There was a husband who refused to leave wife and they started to kill this man. If any of the women cried the militants forced them to wear a suicide vest. If they cried, the vest would detonate.”

A soldier named Marcus said ISIS was a sign of the apocalypse coming. “Yeah, it’s near,” he said, “I don’t know when. People are hungry. People are at war. People hate each other. It’s not a normal life. The people. Just look at the people. Nobody loves one another. The Arabs will destroy Israel. All the world will atone for Israel. It’s in the Bible–the last book in the Bible–what’s the name in English? Revolution? Revelation?”

We followed Marcus to the nuns’ corridors and stepped into the church library. It was in ruins. The torn pages of Bibles and images of Jesus covered the floor. A bird had desecrated an image of Pope Francis’s face. Marcus picked up a Bible. He stood in front of a painting of Christ. The heart of Christ glowed like a light bulb.

“This is my paradise now,” he said.

* * *

Credit: Blake Olmstead/Atlas Obscura

The tree of knowledge, at least the one in the southern Iraqi village of Qurna, is leafless with long twisted branches and its trunk is encased in a shrine. Next to it, a sign reads: “On this holy spot where Tigris meet Euphrates this Holy Tree of our Father Adam grew symbolising the Garden of Eden on Earth. Abraham prayed here 2000 years BC.”

In 1914, the British tried to seize control of the city of Basra, and Qurna was one of the first conquered villages. British military commanders called it the “Garden of Hell.” According to Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s book Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, British riverboat captains, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, climbed Qurna’s tree of knowledge in 1919, but ended up cracking it in half. It had been dead for so long that it could not support their weight. Locals were furious, and nearly lynched them, but it later came out that the revered tree had only been planted a century or two before. By 1946, the Times of London reported that local authorities had planted a new one.

Archaeologist Juris Zarins, a Garden of Eden expert, places the location of Eden not in Qurna, but 200 miles south of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Sumer, an area now under the waters of the Persian Gulf. In his theory, the biblical Gihon River corresponds with the Iran’s Karun River, and the mysterious Pishon is the Wadi Batin river system, in Saudi Arabia. As for the story of Adam and Eve, Zarins sees it as an allegory about the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture.

Perhaps the best-known Garden of Eden in Iraq is also the most broken. It’s just southeast of Qurna, in Iraq’s ancient marshlands. The area itself was destroyed by Saddam in 1991, in an act of revenge against the native Ma’dan people, who participated in a Shiite rebellion against his regime. Reeds were burned with napalm. Canals drained the marsh water into the Persian Gulf. Where any water remained, it was poisoned with cyanide. Almost half a million marsh dwellers were displaced or killed.

Since 2001, an Iraqi-American named Azaam Alwash, alongside a number of scientists and engineers, has been attempting to resurrect the marshes, a project called “Eden Again.” Alwash grew up in Iraq but left in 1978 to study civil engineering in America. He married, had children, became a U.S. citizen. Months after the American invasion, the 45-year-old father of two returned to Iraq to visit the marshlands. He learned of their destruction at the hands of Saddam but wanted to see for himself. It was impossible to imagine: in one of the largest ecosystems on the planet, miles of fresh water had turned to desert.

For months, Alwash lived in a hotel in Basra, conjuring up ways to use his skills as an engineer to rebuild this lost Eden. It was a place he’d visited as a child and he longed to see the area restored. The war was still going on and machine gunfire let loose outside his window.

As the marshes evaporated, they left huge salt deposits. As a first step, Eden Again participants reconnected the land to the rivers so that just enough water would seep through to flush out the salt deposits. This took many years. As the riverbanks overflowed, nutrient rich sediments deposited in the marshlands and created the basis for new growth.

In 2015, Alwash flew over the marshes in a helicopter with the Illinois National Guard’s 106th Aviation Wing. The canals dug by Saddam’s troops twisted below. For a while, there was nothing but desert, but this broke to blue water blooming with reeds. That day Alwash entered the marsh by boat. The reeds grew high over his head, and when the stalks parted, he discovered that a family of Ma’dan had returned, building an island of reeds, living as they always had.

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A Dwekh Nawsha soldier in Bakufa shows his Christian tattoo. Photo by: Erin Trieb

I took a flight home out of Erbil, and on the ascent the plane started a controlled spiral, making big looping circles, gaining elevation until we were too high to target. It’s what the pilots do when they’re worried about missiles. There was no announcement; there was only Mosul, thousands of feet below, silent and the color of clay. We leveled and headed north, flying over Mt. Sinjar where ISIS massacred Yazidis.

Across the Turkish border, mountains piled atop each other, some barely powdered with snow. These were the Zagros Mountains, with their hidden blue lakes. In the distance I saw Mount Ararat, where the ark is said to have found rest when the floodwaters receded on the 17th day of the 17th month. These mountains are home to the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, and some of the Assyrians believed their paradise spread this far.

This Islamic State, though, believes Noah’s Ark rested on Mt. Judi, a smaller mountain at the crossroads of Turkey, Iraq and Syria, and not on Mt. Ararat. Whichever mountaintop it was, the place where the ark rested is referred to as “the place of descent,” and “descent” is a word that makes a lot of sense when thinking about Eden. Mythology is far more urgent for individuals in a time of war—when society sinks to chaos, it so happens that Eden is often found.

We aren’t supposed to go back to Eden, but we keep trying. ISIS has named the desert town of Dabiq, in Syria, as the staging ground for the apocalypse and the location of the final battle, as laid out in the Quran, that will usher jihadists into their own Eden.

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Editor: Reyhan Harmanci

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2016 | 15 minutes (3,709 words)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was Mark Haddon’s first novel, and the one that made him famous. Told from the perspective of an emotionally limited young man named Christopher, the book has sold millions of copies and is now being performed on Broadway. But Haddon was writing long before Curious Incident, including many books and picture books for children, and has been just as prolific since.

Haddon’s new short story collection The Pier Falls deals largely in darkness. The descriptions, soaked through with detail, often verge on the grotesque. In the title story, a pier collapses, bringing many lives with it, a process Haddon details with excruciating exactitude. In “Bunny,” we witness the effects of the protagonist’s obesity, while in “The Weir,” a newly separated middle-aged man saves a young woman from a suicide attempt, yielding an unlikely friendship. Haddon and I spoke by phone about the infusion of death and destruction in his work, his writing process, and his fascination with writing about fatally arrogant men.

Some of the material in The Pier Falls is so dark and full of really grisly detail. What was it like for you to write such dark material?

Hugely enjoyable. [Laughter] There are many kinds of dark, aren’t there? I don’t mind reading dark material, as long as it’s not manipulative or exploitative—I can’t read crime novels in which sexual threat against women, for example, is used as a way of driving the plot forward. Crime novels about psychopaths who are killing, torturing, eating small children—I hate that kind of stuff.

But the violence that I write about, there is something cathartic about it for me. In two of the stories, “The Pier Falls” and “Wodwo,” I took places from my childhood about which I had tried to write many times unsuccessfully, and I realized that I could find a way of writing about them if I performed an act of great violence upon them, and particularly upon the houses. The house in “Wodwo” is my parents’ house. This is a terrible thing to admit, but I know the life that goes with that house, with that milieu, and writing about that life can seem slightly self-satisfied. When I read novels about that kind of person, particularly set in the U.K., a little bit of me thinks, “How did you earn your place on the page? You haven’t suffered, you haven’t seen much of life. There are so many people deserving of voice who are not getting it.” And it took me a long time to realize that I can write about that milieu as long as I am [laughter] mistreating it very badly, as long as something burns down or as long as there is a shotgun fired. It’s a way of avoiding that sense of smugness and entitlement that comes of writing about those people and those places.

I wonder if it also just places distance between your presumably nice childhood in that house and the characters you’re writing about, making it more clearly an imaginative act.

Well, there are two aspects to this, which are intertwined. One is that you have to describe something with equal respect and reverence and detail on the page, whether you’re bringing it to life or destroying it. “The Pier Falls,” for example, comes from holidays I had as a child. And I try to write very respectfully and reverentially about that period and those holidays because it’s my past, it’s my sister’s past, it’s my grandparents’ past.

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But reverence is never a useful tool in writing. So I realized that in fact if I just knocked the pier down, I could still talk about those same details, which fascinate me and resonate with me and will stick with me forever. But I have to do it without any reverence whatsoever. And I realized that if you’re going to write about groups of people or places and you’ve got a choice between bringing them to life with reverence or destroying them with the same amount of detail, then why not go for destroying? Because ultimately, there is no narrative without death. It’s finitude which drives stories along. You get nothing on the page if you write about happiness.

This reminds me of something that you said in a 2004 Guardian piece, that the main difference between writing for kids and adults is death: “Not literal death, which has been dealt with even in picture books, such as John Burningham’s wonderful Granpa, but death’s smaller harbingers: illness, failure, loss, the irony that we have infinite dreams but find ourselves stuck in one body for one life.”

I got very tired over the years of reading short stories in which there wasn’t much narrative drive, stories which seemed like just moments, stories which seemed snipped out of larger narratives, stories often about things not happening rather than things happening. It took me a long time to articulate my dissatisfaction. And I think in the end it came down to the fact that so many short stories weren’t stories. They didn’t have that same voltage, that same engine driving them along. And every so often I’d come across stories which did have that driving force and I’d think, “Yes, this is the kind of story I do like.”

After you wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time, you were often asked about the background research you’d done for the story, and you always responded that you didn’t really do any. Is that standard for you? Could talk about any research you did for this book, if you did? Some of the details were so specific I couldn’t imagine you’d simply made them up, such as the performance of an appendectomy in one of the stories.

Oh, absolutely. I do quite a lot of lazy research. If you’re writing a historical novel or a novel set in 17th-century Japan, or in a country or a culture that you don’t know, you need to do research. But with most literary novels, if you do too much research, you feel you’ve made an investment and you have to make it pay off, so you end up putting that research into the novel. So too much research, I think, can sometimes sink a novel. In my experience, you need very little research to convince a reader that you know what you’re talking about, and once you’ve convinced a reader you know what you’re talking about, then you need to make it as light as possible.

So for my lazy research—in the case of that appendectomy—I used YouTube. If anyone has a particularly gruesome taste for these things, you can watch an appendectomy being carried out. One hospital actually has written out—for its junior doctors, I think—a very, very precise procedure for carrying out an appendectomy, should you ever want to do it at home.

I remember being bewildered, when Dave Eggers’ The Circle came out, by the outcry that he doesn’t know enough about social media or the tech landscape to write about it. I wondered, where is the room for imagination in there?

Well, I think there were two effects there. One is that however much research you do, when your book is read by experts in that field, many of them will be incensed simply because you’re trespassing on their front lawn. Whether you’ve got it right or wrong, they will feel that it belongs to them and they’ll make a fuss. We all do it, don’t we? When we see films or novels set in our hometown, we just love to point out how wrong everything is.

I think there’s another effect as well, that if you write a novel like The Circle in which the ideas are very important, where it’s less about character and human interaction and more about the future of that industry, then the details sit further in the foreground, don’t they? And you are much more susceptible to criticism. I do take your point that writers should be able to make things up, but if your novel is explicitly about what might happen to a certain industry [laughter], I think you might as well put a tin hat on straight off and wait for the flack to come in.

I see. Because it was polemical, too. Although your own experience would appear to contradict that, in a way. You’ve insisted that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time “is not a book about asperger’s. It’s a novel whose central character describes himself as ‘a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties.’ Indeed he never uses the words ‘asperger’s’ or ‘autism.’” And yet—despite the fact that, as you say, you did no research—it’s been used as a sort of handbook about autism spectrum disorders.

Yes, yes, I got away with that, didn’t I? Somehow, somehow, somehow.

Although it appears to irk you somewhat that it is being used in that way.

It’s very bizarre. It makes me feel very uneasy, in fact. Well, I think there are several sides to this. One is that all I set out to do was to write a book about a believable human being, and hopefully I did that. Only after that did people come along and add a diagnosis to this person, saying if this person were real and if this person were sent to a psychologist, this is the diagnosis they would get. But I wasn’t terribly interested in that when I was writing the book.

Also, Christopher is made up of lots of habits, opinions and quirks which I borrowed from people, none of whom had been labeled as having a disability. And everyone who reads the book, I think, recognizes a bit of themselves in him. So it wasn’t so much that I was intruding upon someone’s medical or psychiatric or psychological specialty as it was that I wrote a person who people recognize. I think if I had gone in trying to be diagnostic and medical about it, I’d have caused great offense and a lot of justifiable anger.

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In one passage in Curious Incident, Christopher asserts that everybody has special needs. Which made me curious, what you would define as your special needs?

Well, I’m going keep some of them quiet, okay, if that’s all right? [Laughter]

Yeah. [Laughter]

There’s an assumption that you will be completely open with an interviewer—and the interviewer will then go on to tell ten, fifty or a hundred thousand people. And I’m going to keep my cards close to my chest. I have special needs.

That’s completely fair. Several of your books feature fatally arrogant male characters, including Gavin and Edgar in this collection and, in a way, Dominic in The Red House. Could you talk about your attraction to writing about men like that?

I think it goes hand-in-hand with the real-life sense of repulsion. Maybe “repulsion” is too strong, because I am genuinely fascinated by everyone, including even repellent people. But I grew up and went to school with quite a few people like that, and I am very much not like that. I was sent away to a private boarding school for five years, which was in one sense a machine for creating that kind of person. So that’s always there in my background, this large shadow. I think I got out from under it, but I spent so much time with those people, it always fascinates me.

Why is that kind of education a hotbed for creating that sort of person?

I think it’s a traditional English public school education, isn’t it? They’ve been turning out men to run the empire for several hundred years. I suspect it’s slightly less true now, but I think the tradition is still there. If you’re in Britain, you only have to look at the present conservative government to see the products of that system—arrogant, insular men who lack the ability to empathize with people who do not have their wealth and power. Maybe the long-standing Tory government in this country has made me doubly fascinated.

Is there some satisfaction in bringing them to their downfall, in having some divine justice, in the stories? That doesn’t often happen in real life. Arrogance isn’t always fatal, it sometimes just lets you run the country, you know?

[Laughter] True. True. There is some satisfaction in that. There is also some structural fascination with characters who have a flaw which they do not recognize and which generates a kind of irony—in the old-fashioned, Sophoclean sense of irony where the audience knows that something is going to happen, but the main character doesn’t. That, itself, is another good narrative engine. Those characters have a semi-willful blindness which plays into your hand as a writer.

Plus, it allows the reader to be the smug one. As a reader, when I know something bad is going to happen, I feel pretty good about it.

As a reader, if you know anything which hasn’t been made explicit on the page, it’s a pleasure, isn’t it? When I’m teaching creative writing, I always say, “You’ve got to learn how to trust the reader.” Readers love working things out for themselves. On a simple level, readers need to be treated like adults. If you can avoid saying anything that you think most readers will get themselves, then you should do it. And if readers will interpret things in manifold different ways, you should let them do that as well. There is nothing worse than a writer having a palpable design upon us.

Although, funny enough, despite my fascination with arrogant, powerful men, I will say I like writing about women just as much; I possibly enjoy it more. The arrogant-and-powerful-men subject is lodged in my imagination forever because of where and when I grew up, I think, but I’m very pleased that a number of the stories actually do pass the Bechdel Test.

In The Red House, I loved writing Melissa and Daisy, two teenage girls. I don’t know any teenage girls at all. It was really rough to start with. But I think if it’s tough then you have to make the effort to bring someone to life for yourself, and if you’ve done that, the chances are you’ll bring them to life for a reader as well. And, to be honest, in real life I prefer the company of women to men on the whole.

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Why?

I can gossip, y’know? [Laughter] Man talk is quite often so tedious. I have good male friends and we have real conversations, but if I was offered the chance to spend the evening with a randomly selected group of men or a randomly selected group of women, I’d go for the women every time.

There are a lot of oppressed or unfairly subjugated female characters in your books. In “Wodwo,” for example, you reference “the person his mother might have been if she were not warped by the deforming gravity of the husband around whom she has orbited for nearly all her life.” Was that was a conscious moral argument you wanted to engage?

I think we all know people like don’t we? Particularly of that generation. It’s often a tragic situation, women of that age whose social outlook was extremely conservative and sort of threw in their lot with the patriarchy in general, and on the sort of strong man in particular, and became a housewife and a mother. The world changed around them and their daughters and their granddaughters suddenly had choices which in a way they had chosen not to have. And I think that’s a really, really sad and fascinating situation to think about someone being in.

In a recent Fresh Air interview, Terry Gross asked Jonathan Franzen if, when his writing is going well, it’s an escape from self or a means of getting deeper into the self. He replied, “I think it’s substantially an escape from self. I’m making up stories. It’s escape not just from myself. It’s escape from everything.” I wonder how you feel about that—do you have a similar sentiment?

When something becomes that large a part of your life, it performs many, many different functions. If it’s something you do every day, like exercise or going for a walk or eating—we can all come up with lots of different reasons for why we eat on different occasions. I think writing is like that. Different times, different periods in your life, it does different things.

Sometimes writing, for me, is all about challenge, it’s all about solving a problem. I’m writing about my childhood at the moment. So that’s about understanding who I am and who my family is. Perhaps the most regular motive I have for writing is that I feel profoundly uncomfortable if I don’t do it. Not writing is a very unpleasant experience. Quite often, writing is an unpleasant experience as well, but it’s better than not writing. It’s become such a part of who I am that I just have to do it.

What happens if you don’t write?

I’m like a dog in a hot car. I just feel wrong. I feel unfulfilled. I don’t really get satisfaction from the process of writing, I almost never get flow, unfortunately, although I do get flow when I’m painting or drawing. But try to write a thousand words a day. If I get to a thousand then I can stop doing it. I’m allowed to do the rest of the things in my life—I can go for a run, I can read a book, I can lie down with my eyes closed and that’s deeply pleasurable. If I get to the end of the day having written very little or not having written at all, I can’t switch off and I can’t go and do the other things because I have a feeling that something important remains undone.

Why do painting and drawing offer more flow?

Because they’re more physical, I think. Because they don’t involve language and words and cogitation. My writing accretes. I write a passage, then I add to it and edit and add to it and edit and add to it and edit. There is no initial explosion.

A few years ago, you said that when writing plays, “If you get it wrong then it hurts so much more than a bad review.” Could you talk about what it’s like to get reviews, especially now that you’re famous and everything you do is so public?

It depends what the review is like, doesn’t it?

I’m sure so. [Laughter]

In life, I dislike people disliking me, and I put a lot of effort into getting on well with people. And there is a parallel. If someone reads your book and says, “I really didn’t like this,” then that’s unpleasant. I wish I had the self-control not to read them, but I don’t have that self-control. And, in a way, you do want to read them, because just occasionally you do realize that you’ve got certain things wrong and you always have to be open to that.

I have had a few reviews which have been so spectacularly negative that I’ve become rather proud of them. There was a review of my poetry collection six or seven years ago which was so spectacularly, biliously, grandstanding negative I thought we should take phrases from it and put it on the front of the book.

If you read a bad review and you realize someone has misunderstood something or is more interested in how they sound, then it loses any traction. What’s always hurtful about a bad review is that little seed of possibility that they are right.

I’m curious to ask—especially having read The Red House, which features a character grappling with her newfound Christianity—about your own spiritual or religious background. I read somewhere that you were an atheist.

Well, I stopped being an ardent atheist, because most ardent atheists are not doing atheism any favors. I’m not Richard Dawkins, for example. But I strongly believe that. And I do believe that the physical world is so profoundly astonishing that it supplies all my conceivable hunger for both mystery and solutions. It was science which did that for me as a kid and which continues to do it.

As a child growing up in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, it was cosmology and particle physics which were the most exciting ideas in the world at the time—the physics of the very big and the very small. Now, it’s still those things, but the thing I find most exciting is cell biology. Absolutely gripping. And whereas popular science has managed to sell the excitement of physics to the general population, I think the general population is still unaware of how astonishing cell biology is.

What about it? Can you enlighten me?

The fact that we are made of billions upon billions upon billions of cells and that each cell is as sophisticated as a small city. I don’t mean that in any vague way; it really is. And we build these cells at the most astonishing speed. The speed and the size and the scale of what’s going on in the end of your finger is mindboggling.

Okay, here’s a fact that most people don’t know. Earth was covered in bacteria for billions of years. On one occasion, one occasion, one cell swallowed another and that internal cell became a nucleus and from that one event all complex human life evolved. You name it—bananas, cucumbers, algae, everything. We have one great grandparent. And it was this one cell. That’s astonishing in itself, but what’s also astonishing is that it should’ve only happened successfully once with trillions upon trillions of bacteria covering a planet for billions of years.

I don’t think people realize how relatively likely life is, but how astonishingly unlikely complex life is. We talk about life on other planets; we’ll find it, but it will be invisible. It will be bacteria. And the worldwide, newspaper-reading public will say, “That was not what we were waiting for.” To find animals on another planet would be almost unimaginable. It took so long for the unimaginable to happen here.

* * *

Jessica Gross is a writer based in New York City.

This Friday, May 13th, is the only “Friday the 13th” in 2016. To celebrate, here are three stories that explore myth and superstition, including the history and persistence of “sympathetic magic,” the sheer range of human superstitions, and the strange disappearance that coincided with an 11-year Stanley Cup drought for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

“Very Superstitious.” (Colin Dickey, Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer, 2012)

At Lapham’s Quarterly, Colin Dickey mines the history of “sympathetic magic” to uncover why superstitions persist to this day. “Even aware of the fallaciousness of such belief, Plato seemed hesitant to ignore it altogether, and the Laws goes on to advise that while white magic is perfectly acceptable, any professional diviner or prophet suspected of “doing mischief by the practice of spells, charms, incantations, or other such sorceries” be put to death, while an amateur practitioner should pay a fine.”

“How Superstition Works.” (Stuart Vyse, The Atlantic, October 22nd, 2013)

At The Atlantic, Stuart Vyse looks at superstition in politics, sports, education, and gambling in a post adapted from his book, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. “Some students used more common talismans, such as rabbit’s feet, dice, and coins, as well as teddy bears and other cuddly toys. In this category the Albases reported one particularly unusual case. A young male student would not take an exam unless he had “found” a coin, which he interpreted as a sign of good luck. As a result, he would search for a coin on the day of an exam, often wasting precious study time “scrounging around bus stops” until he was successful—even at the risk of being late to the exam.”

“Lost Leaf ‘Bashin’ Bill Barilko a Canadian Myth.” (Megan O’Toole, The National Post, September 3rd, 2011)

In 1951, Bill Barilko’s game-winning goal won the Toronto Maple Leafs the Stanley Cup. Later that summer, he disappeared — starting a Stanley Cup drought for the Leafs that went on for 11 years — ending only after they discovered Barilko’s body. The Leafs went on to win four of six Stanley cups from 1962 – 1967. The team hasn’t won hockey’s greatest trophy since. Read this intriguing story by Megan O’Toole at The National Post.

David Reid | The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia | Pantheon | March 2016 | 31 minutes (8,514 words)

The excerpt below is adapted from The Brazen Age, by David Reid, which examines the “extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950.” This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. 

* * *

Probably I was in the war.

—NORMAN MAILER, Barbary Shore (1951)

*

A hideous, inhuman city. But I know that one changes one’s mind.

In march 1946 the young French novelist and journalist Albert Camus traveled by freighter from Le Havre to New York, arriving in the first week of spring. Le Havre, the old port city at the mouth of the Seine, had almost been destroyed in a battle between its German occupiers and a British warship during the Normandy invasion; huge ruins ringed the harbor. In his travel journal Camus writes: “My last image of France is of destroyed buildings at the very edge of a wounded earth.”

At the age of thirty-two this Algerian Frenchman, who had been supporting himself with odd jobs when the war began, was about to become very famous. By 1948, he would become an international culture hero: author of The Stranger and The Plague, two of the most famous novels to come out of France in the forties, and of the lofty and astringent essays collected in The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus’s visit to the United States, sponsored by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs but involving no official duties, was timed to coincide with Alfred A. Knopf’s publication of The Stranger in a translation by Stuart Gilbert, the annotator of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the spring of 1946 France was exporting little to the United States except literature. Even most American readers with a particular interest in France knew of Camus, if at all, as a distant legend, editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat and an “existentialist.”

Reviewing The Stranger in the New Yorker, Edmund Wilson, usually omniscient, confessed that he knew absolutely nothing about existentialism except that it was enjoying a “furious vogue.” If there were rumored to be philosophical depths in this novel about the motiveless murder of an Arab on a North African beach, they frankly eluded him. For Wilson the book was nothing more than “a fairly clever feat”—the sort of thing that a skillful Hemingway imitator like James M. Cain had done as well or better in The Postman Always Rings Twice. America’s most admired literary critic also had his doubts about Franz Kafka, the writer of the moment, suspecting that the claims being made for the late Prague fabulist were exaggerated. But still, like almost everyone else, especially the young, in New York’s intellectual circles Wilson was intensely curious about what had been written and thought in occupied Europe, especially in France.

“Our generation had been brought up on the remembrance of the 1920s as the great golden age of the avant-garde, whose focal point had been Paris,” William Barrett writes in The Truants, his memoir of the New York intellectuals. “We expected history to repeat itself: as it had been after the First, so it would be after the Second World War.” The glamorous rumor of existentialism seemed to vindicate their expectations. Camus’s arrival was eagerly awaited not only by Partisan Review but also by the New Yorker, which put him in “The Talk of the Town,” and Vogue, which decided that his saturnine good looks resembled Humphrey Bogart’s.

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Although a brilliant travel writer, Camus was not a lucky traveler. When he was young and unknown, he blamed poverty for cramping his journeys, and when he was older and could afford more, he was a martyr to celebrity, always dreading its exposures and demands right up to the day he went to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. Travel made him anxious, which he concluded was the proper state for a traveler, and often physically sick. As he records in his diary, after a sociable crossing, he came down with the flu just in time to arrive in New York.

On March 27, around noon on a gray, windy day, as his ship entered the Narrows, his first glimpse of New York was of Coney Island, a dismal sight under a flat painted sky. In the distance, the skyscrapers of Manhattan rose out of the mist. “Deep down, I feel calm and indifferent, as I generally do in front of spectacles that don’t move me.” Anticlimactically, his ship rode at anchor for the night.

“Go to bed very late. Get up very early. We enter New York harbor. A terrific sight despite or because of the mist. The order, the strength, the economic power are there. The heart trembles in front of so much admirable inhumanity.”

“Order” manifested itself at once. At the dock, Camus found himself singled out for sustained scrutiny. “The immigration officer ends by excusing himself for having detained me for so long: ‘I was obliged to, but I can’t tell you why.’” The mystery was dispelled many years later. Alert to the left-wing politics of Combat, the FBI had opened a file on him, and passed on its suspicions to the Immigration Services.

Feeling weak from his flu, Camus was welcomed by two journalists from France and a man from the French consulate. The crowded streets alarmed him. His first impression of New York was of “a hideous, inhuman city. But I know that one changes one’s mind.” He did note the orderliness of things confirmed by how smoothly the traffic moved without policemen at intersections, and by the prim gloves worn by garbagemen. That night, crossing Broadway in a cab, his flu made worse by a bad hangover (he had stayed up drinking until four the night before), feeling “tired and feverish,” Camus was “stupefied by the circus of lights.”

* * *

What gods they are who fight endlessly and indecisively for New York is not for our knowledge.

Bright lights, big city had been the New York formula for a century. On his first visit, in 1842, Charles Dickens found the gaslights of lower Broadway as brilliant as those of London’s Piccadilly, but he also discovered New York could be a strangely dark and vacant place—catacombesque—and secretive, like the oysters that its citizens devoured in such prodigious quantities. The streets were often empty except for pigs that foraged at all hours. The slums, like the infamous Five Points, to whose low haunts the great man was escorted by two policemen, were as noisome as any in London.

In the 1870s and ’80s, gaslight began yielding to electricity. The Bowery, with its popular theaters, was the first district to be lit by Edison’s eerie new light, followed by the stretch of Broadway from Twenty-fourth Street to Twenty-sixth. A commercial visionary from Brooklyn named O. J. Gude seized on electricity for display advertising. In 1891 Madison Square was astonished by a giant sign advertising a Coney Island resort (“Manhattan Beach Swept by Ocean Breezes”). Verbally inventive too, Gude coined the phrase “Great White Way.” The most wondrous electric advertisement in New York was a fifty-foot pickle in green lightbulbs advertising Heinz’s “57 Varieties.” This “pioneer spectacle,” as Frederick Lewis Allen hails it in The Big Change, stood at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Twenty-third Street, since 1902 the site of the Flatiron Building. In 1913, Rupert Brooke came to marvel at the gaudiness of Times Square. At street level, the effect was disconcerting. “The merciless lights throw a mask of unradiant glare on the human beings in the streets, making each face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue.” Above, the street was filled with wonders. Brooke could not help noticing an advertisement starring two bodies electric, “a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear,” who boxed a round, vanished, reappeared, and fought again. “Night after night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and indecisively for New York is not for our knowledge.”

City lights were mostly white in the 1920s. “For anyone interested in period detail, there were almost no colored lights then,” Gore Vidal recalls in his essay “On Flying.” “So, on a hot, airless night in St. Louis, the city had a weird white arctic glow.” In the 1930s, the planners at the New Deal farm agencies expected an influx of urbanites to flee the stricken cities for a new life in the countryside: the prospective exurbanites were called “white-light refugees.” In time, of course, the refugees came, only the process was called suburbanization. Neon light, first imported from France before the First World War by a West Coast automobile dealer, Earle C. Anthony, remained unusual for a long time even in New York. Edwin Denby, the dance critic and poet, remembered “walking at night in Chelsea with Bill [de Kooning] during the depression, and his pointing out to me on the pavement the dispersed compositions—spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflections of neon-light—neon-signs were few then—and I remember the scale in the compositions was too big for me to see it.”

Throughout the Jazz Age and the Depression the white and manycolored lights of Broadway blazed, now concentrated in Times Square, where they advertised Four Roses whiskey, Camel cigarettes, Planters Peanuts (“A Bag a Day for More Pep”), Coca-Cola, the Astor Hotel. It took the blackouts during the war to dull the blaze, but by 1946 even the more prolonged dimout was becoming a distant memory. New York had resumed its old habits of brilliance.

“I am just coming out of five years of night,” says Camus in his journal, “and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot-high Camel billboard: a G.I. with his mouth wide-open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. Everything is yellow and red.”

Times Square, 1943. Via Wikimedia Commons.

* * *

To err is Truman.

V-J day, August 14, 1945, in New York City quickly turned into parties all over town and a crowd of two million milling in the vortex of Times Square, strangers embracing, couples just met exchanging fervent kisses, conga lines, bottles being passed, the bright lights restored, flags on Park Avenue, and Mayor La Guardia pleading after a while for some decorum. In New York, as elsewhere as Eric F. Goldman points up in The Crucial Decade, “Americans had quite a celebration and, yet, in a way, the celebration never really rang true. People were so gay, so determinedly gay.” After a few hours in some places, but two days and two nights in Manhattan, the crowd dispersed, to mixed auguries and with great expectations.

Popular memory of the “good war” long ago erased the thousands of work stoppages, including hate strikes; racial strife in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia; labor leader John L. Lewis’s brutal duel with Roosevelt, which Truman inherited; the congressional attack on the New Deal; Dewey’s Red baiting in the 1944 presidential election. There was no great opposition to the war, but rather a grim determination to see it won, which is why the handful of dissenters were mostly treated indulgently—at least as compared to the long prison sentences, mass repression, and mass deportations of the First World War.

Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945. Within the month, notional home-front “solidarity” dissolved into the largest strike wave in American history, albeit less bitter and revolutionary in temper than that of 1919. A half-million unionized workers, no longer restrained by no-strike clauses, had walked out of automobile factories, oil refineries, meatpacking factories, and other industries. A futile labor-management conference called in November by President Truman, including representatives of the AFL, the CIO, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the national Chamber of Commerce, adjourned in early December without agreeing on a single recommendation. By January 1946, the number of workers on strike numbered almost 2.2 million autoworkers, a comparable number of electrical workers, and 750,000 steelworkers. Altogether, almost 5 million workers, a tenth of the labor force, would walk off the job in the course of the year. What the nineteenth-century historian George Bancroft had called the feud between capitalist and laborer, “the house of Have and the house of Want,” which could not be completely quieted—not even in wartime—had resumed with a vengeance.

The great industrial unions, led by Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers, were demanding a pay increase on the order of 30 percent in hourly wages; this would compensate for the loss of overtime pay, as the workweek reverted from the forty-eight hours of wartime to the previous forty. Union leaders, “the new men of power,” as the brilliant young Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills called them, maintained that having prospered so mightily during the war, big business could easily absorb the cost and still make a decent profit. Higher wages would mean increased spending, which would translate into a prosperous nation and a richly deserved increase in the standard of living for American workers. To the contrary, retorted those represented by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the Chamber of Commerce, and other business organizations, corporations would be ruined if they agreed to these exorbitant demands, but they could agree to more reasonable ones only if wartime price controls were lifted. As the picket lines lengthened, Truman pursued a wayward course. Publicly supportive of the Office of Price Administration (OPA), he blurted out at a press conference that price controls in time of peace smacked of “police state methods.” Facing an unprecedented housing shortage, he threw out controls on building materials in October and then reinstated them in December; with the public impatiently demanding beefsteaks, meat rationing was dropped, reimposed, dropped again. By the end of his first turbulent year, Truman would intervene in a half-dozen major labor disputes, threaten to seize whole industries—the mines, the railroads—and draft their workers. “To err is Truman,” said the wits.

* * *

The Disaster Control Board… combed other city departments for amateurs who could run the trains.

The strike wave reached New York City on September 24, 1945, when fifteen thousand elevator operators and building maintenance workers walked off the job, shutting down thousands of businesses, including all those financial enterprises housed in skyscrapers. A sympathy strike by garment workers shut down that industry: a million and a half workers were off the job, either unable or unwilling to work. At issue was whether landlords would abide by contract recommendations drafted by the War Labor Board in Washington, DC. After five days, Governor Dewey intervened, persuading both sides to accept arbitration, which eventually went in the strikers’ favor. On October 1, stevedores on the Chelsea docks began a wildcat strike, joined by longshoremen, who for two weeks disregarded orders from their International Longshoremen’s Association’s president-for-life, Joseph P. Ryan, to return to work.

In February 1946 the city faced a strike by the tugboat men who steered the ocean liners and other big ships into port, but whose more essential work was to keep moving the barges that supplied New Yorkers with coal, fuel oil, and food. (The owners refused to arbitrate.) Declaring it was “the worst threat ever made to the city,” Mayor William O’Dwyer waited a week, then began shutting the city down: first lowering thermostats and dimming outdoor advertising lights, then closing schools, stores, museums, amusements, and bars. Policemen stood at the entrances to subway stations, telling would-be passengers to go home. On February 12, the Disaster Control Board was put in charge: an eighteen-hour ban on most uses of electrical power was decreed, gradually bringing the city to a standstill. “Until the strike was settled,” said Time, “the city was dead.”

It was, at least, becalmed, something that neither nature nor war had ever achieved. Reflecting the vagaries of historical witness, the day that Time reported as a slow-motion apocalypse—“industrial paralysis”— was a larky urban idyll according to the New Yorker. Admitting to “a great deal of nervousness everywhere,” “The Talk of the Town” joined up with a smiling, idle crowd which, “armed with infants, cameras, and portable radios, seemed to fill every nook and dingle of Central Park.” The weather was fine: “More like May. More like a feast day,” a peanut vendor told the New Yorker’s omniscient correspondent, who agreed. “We are all equally children excused from our chores. It was indeed, as the vendor had said, a feast day, the feast day of Blessed William the Impatient, and we spent it as if we were under the equivalent not of Martial Law but of Mardi Gras.”

On February 14, the tugboat operators agreed to arbitration, but within a week New York was confronted by the prospect of another major strike. Michael J. Quill, disapprovingly described in Time as “belligerent, Communist-line boss of the disaffected 110,000 Transport Workers Union, C.I.O.,” was threatening a walkout that would shut down subways, elevated railways, streetcars, and bus lines if the city sold back to a private utility the three power plants that employed union workers. “Red Mike,” who also served the public as a councilman from the Bronx, had given the city his demand for a two-dollar-a-day raise and exclusive bargaining rights for the city’s thirty-two thousand transit workers, with a deadline of midnight the next Tuesday to comply. Once again, “industrial paralysis” seemed to impend. “In desperation, the Disaster Control Board alerted police, combed other city departments for amateurs who could run the trains if ruthless Mike Quill should say strike.”

This crisis, too, passed; but the dramatic succession of threatened strikes and real walkouts, of emergency measures and disrupted routines—the darkened marquees in Times Square, the deserted docks, the silent shop floors and inaccessible skyscrapers, the policemen warning people to stay away from the city—all contributed to the “enveloping anxiety felt by millionaires and straphangers, poets and tabloid journalists alike,” said Time. Like a gigantic seismograph New York registered the shock when miners climbed out of the pits in West Virginia, when a national railroad strike loomed, when telephone operators nationwide walked off the job and pilots on transatlantic flights left their controls. There was no general strike in New York, as there was in Oakland, California, no blackout like Pittsburgh’s when the strikers shut down the power stations. But New York was peculiarly vulnerable to labor disruptions, as Joshua B. Freeman points out in Working-Class New York. After a century of organizing, there was scarcely a niche in the life of the city that was not unionized. The roll call was “Whitmanesque” in its sweep: every occupational group from transport workers and machinists to barbers and beauty culturists, funeral chauffeurs, screen publicists, sightseeing guides, and seltzer-water workers being represented. “In New York, the breadth and complexity of the labor movement gave it access to multiple pressure points capable of crippling the city.”

During the war, blue-collar workers had been lionized in movies, murals, music, and poster art (Ben Shahn’s most notably) for providing the muscle essential to victory. Most of the lionizing, however, had been done by government propagandists, left-wing artists, sympathetic Hollywoodians, or the trade-union movement itself. Salaried white-collar workers suspected that the proletarians were indecently prospering at their expense, and as the polls attested, the middle classes remained deeply suspicious of the trade unions, which now numbered 14.5 million workers, and indignant when they began demanding what seemed huge wage increases, upwards of 25 percent; not only their leaders but the rank-and-file of particular unions were suspected, not always wrongly, of consorting with gangsters and sympathizing with Communists.

Poster by Ben Shahn, 1946, for the Congress of Industrial Rights. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The wave rolled on, until one day in September there were forty strikes going on in New York, and it was impossible to cross Midtown without being interdicted by a picket line. Twelve thousand mutinous AFL truck drivers, joined in sympathy for another fifteen thousand drivers in New Jersey, threatened to deprive New Yorkers of cigarettes, candy, soap, razor blades, and anything else they ordinarily purchased over the counter; deliveries of food and drugs were promised by the union leaders, but the rank-and-file, which shouted down orders from their chief, Dan Tobin, to get back to work, would not supply chain stores, forcing A&P and Safeway to shut down. Newspapers shrank as the strike cut off supplies of newsprint: Hearst’s Daily Mirror dropped to eight pages, including two of essential comics. Even the Daily News, which had laid in a huge hoard of paper, was forced to drop department-store display advertising, along with the other eight dailies. But then, there was less on offer at Macy’s and Gimbels and Saks: a walkout by the United Parcel Service had interrupted deliveries. As Time summarized for the benefit of the hinterland: “New Yorkers had suffered since V-J Day from elevator tieups, two tugboat strikes that periled fuel and power supplies . . . a war of nerves over a subway standstill, and now this. They had learned two things: 1) how easily one union can put the brakes on the Big Town; 2) there was nothing they could do about it.”

The receding roar of the strike wave continued until 1949, but labor was deprived of some of its most potent weapons, including sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts, by the Taft-Hartley Act, which President Truman publicly denounced as the “slave labor act” but privately approved of. The feud between the houses of Want and Have was less embittered than in the nineteenth century and up to the thirties. The great strike wave of 1946 produced no Haymarket Affair, no Homestead, no Ludlow Massacre; no lynching, no plant occupations, no significant pitched battles with police. But in New York there was still power in a union.

All the more noticeable, then, was how conspicuous consumption and frank privilege were also making their comeback. Town cars (discreetly garaged during the war) and fancy dress reappeared. A season of “almost hysterical voracity,” vividly evoked in Frederic Prokosch’s novel The Idols of the Cave (1946), followed the peace: restaurants were thronged, theaters sold out weeks in advance, decent hotel rooms were objects of desire; the would-bes strained against the velvet ropes of El Morocco, the Stork Club, and “21.” “In other ways, too, the city’s atmosphere was changing. There was a growing stream of returning soldiers and sailors, with the flush of adventures still on them, and a rather ominous glint in their eyes.” In counterpart was the “wistful migration” of the wartime exiles and the officers and diplomats of Allied or occupied nations, whose presence had made wartime New York as cosmopolitan as it was ever to be. “An air of nostalgia, of coming disintegration pervaded the European cliques.”

As the months lengthened and people looked around, they wondered what had become of the new society, rebuilt on social-democratic lines, that so many had expected after the war, and that did seem to be materializing in England, where Labour ruled. “The Englishman who crosses the Atlantic today is no longer crossing from the Old World to the New,” the seasoned America watcher Beverley Nichols said a few years later in Uncle Samson, “he is crossing from the New World to the Old . . . Just as Park Avenue is now, in spirit, a million miles from Park Lane, so is Wall Street a million miles from Lombard Street.” In New York the people riding in the back of town cars were no longer saying, “Come the revolution . . .”

* * *

Why, after midnight, do so many Americans fight or weep?

Was New York ever more of a cynosure for brilliant foreign observers—continental, English, and even Asian—than during and after the war? Not since Tocqueville, Dickens, and Mrs. Trollope had visited in the 1830s and ’40s had so much alien intelligence been directed at New York’s buildings and manners and the physiognomy of its citizens. Here were the existentialists Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir; the English critics and novelists Cyril Connolly, V. S. Pritchett, Stephen Spender, and J. B. Priestley, who came to see and judge the postwar American scene and sometimes were taken around by such expatriate friends as Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, ex-Englishmen who were going native in, respectively, Los Angeles and New York. (Connolly compared the welcome he got from Auden to that of the town mouse condescending to the country mouse in the Disney cartoon.)

From Middle Europe, the future historian John Lukacs arrived as an unknown “displaced person” of twenty-two in 1946, having fled Budapest under the Soviets. A dockers’ strike on the East Coast diverted the Liberty Ship on which he had sailed from Bordeaux to Portland, Maine. Traveling down to the city, he experienced “the surprising and disconcerting impression that so many things in New York looked old.” The “shattering iron clangor” and catacomb depths of the subway were out of Kafka, not Piranesi; the “steely rows of windows” in office and industrial buildings recalled the “windrows” of Theodore Roosevelt’s teeth; the “Wurlitzer sounds and atmosphere” of the streets seemed from 1910 or 1920.

Places familiar from the movies or magazines—the Waldorf Astoria, Rockefeller Center, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street—looked exactly as he had expected, but he felt the people often looked older than their years. Americans clung to outmoded fashions like high-buttoned shoes and steel-rimmed spectacles (restored to fashion by John Lennon in the sixties, now superseded again by horn-rims) or were old-fashioned physical types, like the millionaires with “round Herbert Hoover faces” encountered in the expensive vicinity of the Waldorf. (Their archetype, the ex-president, who looked like Mr. Heinz Tomato of the advertisements, lived in the tower.) Bernard Baruch, the financial and political oracle (self-appointed), somehow resembled the Flatiron Building. Even in summertime American men kept on their hats and undershirts. American women typically wore longer skirts and primmer bathing suits than European women. “There were entire classes of American women who inclined to age more rapidly than their European contemporaries,” Lukacs recalls ungallantly. “This had nothing to do with cosmetics or even with their physical circumstances; it had probably much to do with their interior lives”—the failure, perhaps, of youthful dreams that turned fresh-faced girls into middle-aged women before they reached thirty.

Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that the salient fact about New York’s social geography was its tremendous linearity, “those endless ‘north– south’ highways,” the avenues, that demarcated the separate worlds of Park, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Avenues, and “the No Man’s Land of Tenth Avenue.” “The space, the great, empty space of the steppes and pampas, flows through New York’s arteries like a draught of cold air, separating one side from the other.” Beyond the Waldorf Astoria and the handsome facades of “smart” apartment buildings canopied in blue and white, he catches a glimpse of the Third Avenue Elevated, carrying from the Bowery a whiff of old-fashioned poverty. Unchanged in its tawdry essentials since Stephen Crane wrote An Experiment in Misery in 1898, the Bowery was a great magnet for philosophical Frenchmen like Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Albert Camus, who delighted in the “authenticity” of its flophouses and sleazy entertainments. “Nuit de Bowery,” Camus wrote in his travel journal. “Night on the Bowery, Poverty—and a European wants to say ‘Finally, reality.’ ” The elevated railroads and a place like the Bowery were “survivals,” “islands of resistance,” which the armies of progress had encircled and would overwhelm at leisure; though doomed to extinction, they were America’s true monuments. Let it be remembered that there were still horses drawing ice carts and milk wagons, tenements that Jacob Riis would have recognized with a shudder, and countless furnished rooms that might have housed Sister Carrie or Lily Bart on her way down. One of La Guardia’s last campaigns was banning pushcarts and putting grocery vendors into sanitary markets.

Cyril Connolly declared New York “the supreme metropolis of the present”—one of the most-quoted remarks ever about the city, but almost never in context. New York, as he said, would be the most beautiful city in the world if one never needed to descend below the fortieth floor; the light is southern, the vegetation and architecture northern, the sky the royal-blue velvet of Lisbon or Palermo. “A southern city, with a southern pullulation of life, yet with a northern winter imposing a control; the whole Nordic energy and sanity of living crisply enforcing its authority for three of the four seasons on the violet-airy babel of tongues and races; this tension gives New York its unique concentration and makes it the supreme metropolis of the present.” This ultramodern metropolis to which Connolly pays tribute is not as gone as the gaslight New York of O. Henry, but it is more than half-vanished:

[The] glitter of “21,” the old-world lethargy of the Lafayette, the hazy views of the East River or Central Park over tea in some apartment at the magic hour when the concrete icebergs suddenly flare up; the impressionist pictures in one house, the exotic trees or bamboo furniture in another, the chink of ‘old fashioneds’ with their little glass pestles, the divine glories—Egyptian, Etruscan, French—of the Metropolitan Museum, the felicitous contemporary assertion of the Museum of Modern Art, the snow, the sea-breezes, the late suppers, with the Partisans, the reelings-home down the black steam-spitting canyons, the Christmas trees lit up beside the liquorice ribbons of cars on Park Avenue, the Gotham Book Mart, the shabby coziness of the Village, all go to form an unforgettable picture of what a city ought to be: that is, continuously insolent and alive, a place where one can buy a book or meet a friend at any hour of the day or night . . .

Those secondhand-book stores that stayed open all night, like the one off Washington Square where Connolly bought a first edition of E. E. Cummings at two a.m., are as extinct as the particular fashionable Manhattan into which he was made welcome: a “concrete Capri” and “a noisily masculine society,” where wit and wisecracks flowered rather than art.

Another alert British observer, Cecil Beaton, found fashionable New York women to be “hard and awe-inspiring.” They had an “Indian elegance” that might be attributable to the rocky ground on which they flourished, displaying “legs, arms and hands of such attenuated grace; wrists and ankles so fine, that they are the most beautiful in the world.” In his view, it was the men who fell apart too young in America. “Few men over twenty-five are good-looking; often those most charming college boys with faces fit for a collar ‘ad,’ concave figures, heavy hands, fox-terrier behinds and disarming smiles, run to seed at a tragically early age, and become grey-haired, bloated and spoilt.” The generic American businessman, who was of course the generic American type, had a “foetus face.” The photographer suspected that the American’s bland features betrayed an empty soul: the man of letters more generously suggested that they masked a tragic sense of life. “Why, after midnight, do so many Americans fight or weep?” he asked. “Almost everyone hates his job. Psychiatrists of all schools are as common as monks in the Theibeid.”

Affluent New Yorkers seemed to lack a capacity for relaxation, from which followed the rigors of “leisure time” activities: golf, backgammon, bridge, plays, movies, sports, “culture,” not to mention the conspicuous consumption of whiskey and cocktails, which made the hangover one of the perils of the American scene. Cigarette smoke was another, but hardly anyone protested—certainly not Europeans, who smoked as much. From Voisin, the Colony, and Chambord (said to be the costliest restaurant on earth just after the war, with a typical dinner costing as much as twenty-five dollars) to Schrafft’s, to Woolworth’s and the humblest corner drugstore fountain, everybody smoked—big bankers, laborers, society women, Partisan Review intellectuals, movie stars, ribbon clerks—before, after, and often during meals, adding to the great pall hanging over New York in the forties; and every meal was drowned in ice water, which European visitors found extremely unhealthy.

Like its great singer Walt Whitman (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), New York contradicted itself: its multitude of observers contradicted one another. Was Manhattan remarkably clean, neat, and decorous, as Cecil Beaton maintained? Sartre was struck by the filth on the streets, the muddy, discarded newspapers blown by the wind and the “blackish snow” in winter: “this most modern of cities is also the dirtiest.” At least wherever the grid extended it was impossible to get lost (“One glance is enough for you to get your bearings; you are on the East Side, at the corner of 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue”). Beaton retorted it was all too easy to lose one’s way: street signs were few, entrances to the subway obscure, post offices unmarked, public lavatories invisible or nonexistent. Appurtenances like awnings, which in England actually signified something (a party, a wedding), in New York sheltered the entrances to grand hotels and flophouses alike.

Automat, Berenice Abbott. Via Flickr.

Or consider the Automat: “a high point of civilization,” according to Connolly, who was known as a gourmand, extolled for offering an endless selection of food for nickels and dimes: “strawberries in January, leberwurst on rye bread, a cut off the roast, huge oysters, a shrimp cocktail, or marshmallow cup-cake.” Switching for a moment to an American observer, the same cuisine was remembered at a distance of a quarter-century by Elizabeth Hardwick (in the forties, recently arrived from Lexington, Kentucky) for “its woeful, watery macaroni, its bready meat loaf, the cubicles of drying sandwiches; mud, glue and leather, from these textures you made your choice. The miseries of the deformed diners and their revolting habits; they were necessary, like a sewer, like the Bowery, Klein’s, 14th Street.” Thus, we are reminded that the past is not only another country, where things are done differently, as the novelist L. P. Hartley instructs us—it is also a matter of taste.

* * *

The most prodigious monument man has ever erected to himself.

Literally and figuratively, the atmosphere was supercharged: the traffic lights, which even dogs were said to heed, went straight from red to green. Simone de Beauvoir wrote of “something in New York that makes sleep useless.” And Sartre: “There is the wailing of the wind, the electric shocks I get each time I touch a doorbell or shake a friend’s hand, the cockroaches that scoot across my kitchen, the elevators that make me nauseous and the inexhaustible thirst that rages in me from morning till night. New York is a colonial city, an outpost. All the hostility and cruelty of Nature are present in this city, the most prodigious monument man has ever erected to himself.”

And yet postwar New York was a quieter and less changeable place than before or since. New Yorkers experienced nothing in these years like the usual incessant building up and tearing down, “the new landmarks crushing the old quite as violent children stamp on snails and caterpillars,” as Henry James put it in The American Scene (1907). It was quieter after the demolition of the elevated subways, the Els, beginning in 1930 and completed in the fifties.

The United Nations complex (1947–52) and, appropriately for a collectivist age, two giant housing blocks—Metropolitan Insurance’s Stuyvesant Town, which Lewis Mumford denounced as “the architecture of the Police State,” and the publicly funded Peter Cooper Village—comprised the most important additions to the cityscape in these years. The pace of commercial construction did not become energetic until around 1952, when Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House began the march of glass-walled postwar skyscrapers up Park Avenue in the same year that the United Nations complex was completed. Neither Lever House nor the Seagram Building (1958) contained more than a small fraction of the floor space of the Empire State or the Chrysler Building. It was not until Walter Gropius’s Pan Am Building in 1963 that a corporate monument imposed itself on the city like the Jazz Age behemoths or Rockefeller Center (1930–39) as an ensemble. Indeed, it is significant that rather than the Empire State or the Chrysler Building, it was the timeless-seeming, end-of-history architecture of Rockefeller Center—“Egyptian,” some said, although Cyril Connolly was reminded of Stonehenge—that seemed the high-rise most emblematic of the city. In the forties, New York was actually scaled down, as many old money-losing buildings of ten or twelve stories were pulled down and replaced with thrifty “taxpayers” of two or three, a sign of diminished expectations applauded by the New York Times and by Lewis Mumford in the New Yorker.

Rockefeller Center postcard. Via Flickr.

It was in the forties that New York began defining itself ever more as a constellation of self-contained urban enclaves, “an island of islands.” The housing shortage during and after the war, along with rent regulation (imposed by the state in 1947 after the OPA controls lapsed), eventually turning much of the housing market into a lottery, discouraged the old nomadism. Increasingly New Yorkers were apt to hive into particular neighborhoods and stay there. One thinks of Mrs. H. T. Miller in Truman Capote’s career-making story “Miriam”: “For several years, Mrs. H. T. Miller had lived alone in a pleasant apartment (two rooms with a kitchenette) in a remodeled brownstone. She was a widow: Mr. H. T. Miller had left a reasonable amount of insurance. Her interests were narrow, she had no friends to speak of, and she rarely journeyed farther than the corner grocery store.”

New York was showing its age. What old-fashioned relics the skyscrapers of the twenties appeared to a French visitor like Sartre, who had so admired American movies and American jazz, which now seemed to him to have outlived their future! “Far away I see the Empire State or the Chrysler Building reaching vainly toward the sky, and suddenly I think that New York is about to acquire a History and that it already possessed its ruins.”

Beneath the aging skyscrapers, most of the built city was still Walt Whitman’s “Babylonish brick-kiln,” not high but deep, not futuristic but fraying, and grimy beneath the glitter.

* * *

The heat closed in like a hand over a murder victim’s mouth, the city thrashed and twisted.

In Europe the winter of 1946–47 was the coldest in three hundred years, freezing and threatening to starve victors and vanquished alike; coal and foodstuffs were in shorter supply in London and Paris than during the worst of the war. There was snowfall in Saint-Tropez, and wolves were sighted on the road from Rome to Naples. The era of the Cold War began in a cold season.

New Yorkers were generally sheltered against the cold, but in summer, with home air-conditioning almost as rare as television before 1947, they sweltered in the most intense heat waves that anyone could remember. The eight million made their way to the Roxy, the Capitol, Radio City Music Hall, and the other giant movie palaces that had air-conditioning; or went to Coney Island, Brighton Beach, or Jones Beach, passing amid scenes unchanged since the turn of the century, but that would barely last out the decade: whole families spending the night on tenement roofs, small children wedged together on fire escapes, old people sitting up late on kitchen chairs by the stoop—the lost world that lives on vividly in Alfred Kazin’s memoirs and Helen Levitt’s photographs.

Truman Capote writes of a particular August day in 1946 when “the heat closed in like a hand over a murder victim’s mouth, the city thrashed and twisted.” Central Park was like a battlefield, whose “exhausted fatalities lay crumpled in the dead-still shade,” as documented by newspaper photographers. “At night, hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its brain and its central nerves, which sizzle like the inside of an electric-light bulb.”

“On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok.” The famous opening line of Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947) might have been inspired by the heat wave of the preceding year; it is definite that Bellow had never spent a sultry night in Bangkok, but from the next sentence it is obvious that he had read Spengler. “The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky.”

* * *

We all drank too much that winter… some to forget the neuroses acquired in the war just ended, others in anticipation of those expected from the next.

No one spoke, as Scott Fitzgerald had done after the First World War, of a generation waking up “to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” As a group, the veterans of the Second World War had fought, or been prepared to fight, to preserve a way of life which Fascists and Nazis had put in jeopardy and the empire of Japan under direct assault. On V-J Day, the armed forces of the United States, which had numbered fewer than Belgium’s five years before, had grown to 11,913,639. How to reassimilate so many millions of soldiers into American society and the economy was a question being pondered by the thoughtful long before the war was over in Europe; it became abruptly more urgent when the war in Asia and the Pacific ended so much sooner than most people expected.

The soldier’s homecoming was an event eagerly awaited; repeated twelve million times, it threatened to throw society into a profound crisis. How could their vast numbers be absorbed into the workforce in an economy that was no longer racing to fill military orders—even if all the women in heavy industry quit or were laid off, as mostly they were? The addition of twelve million veterans to the labor force might entirely disrupt the economy, plunging it into uncertainty, perhaps the renewed depression that almost everyone apprehended, and certainly labor strife. Many leftists and liberal New Dealers hoped that veterans might be organized as a powerful progressive force; many conservative politicians were fearful that they would succeed. If times were hard, would the soldier’s mood turn resentful, even mutinous? Women’s magazines like McCall’s warned veterans’ wives to be prepared for moodiness, which might last for weeks.

Journalists like the New York Times political correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick warned of the need for “psychic reconversion.” Writing from Rome in December 1944, McCormick had been struck by how shocked a group of visiting congressmen had been at the hardships of the Italian campaign, to which the GIs had become inured. “There is no getting away from the fact that millions of men in battle zones are leading abnormal lives in an abnormal world that comes in time to seem more normal than the one they have left,” she wrote. “War is a long exile in a strange world, and the future of America depends on the mood and spirit in which the exiles return.”

Thronged troopships steaming into New York Harbor punctuated that autumn. The Queen Mary, which along with Britain’s other great ocean liners, the Queen Elizabeth and the Aquitania, had been converted to American service during the war, delivered 14,526 uniformed Americans into New York Harbor, where they were met by a jubilant crowd of a quarter of a million. “Flags cracked and whipped in the jubilant wind everywhere, and ships’ whistles and horns brayed in the huge demented medley of war’s end—something furiously sad, angry, mute, and piteous was in the air, something pathetically happy too”: so Jack Kerouac recalls such occasions in The Town and the City. Later in the fall, as Truman was compelled to scale down the projected rate of discharges in line with available shipping, soldiers’ wives, along with their mothers and fathers, organized “Bring Back Daddy” clubs, which besieged the White House with baby booties and buried Congress in letters and telegrams of complaint. The soldiers gave vent to their impatience in massive demonstrations, from Berlin and Tokyo to London, Paris, and the Philippines—an ominous breakdown in discipline which Truman ordered Eisenhower to make his first order of business after his appointment as Army Chief of Staff. “The President worried aloud to his Cabinet that the ‘frenzied’ rate at which men were being discharged—he estimated about 650 an hour—was turning into a rout: it was ‘the disintegration of our armed forces.’” General Lewis B. Hershey, the head of Selective Service, indiscreetly ventured that if too many servicemen threatened to flood the job market, their enlistment could always be extended indefinitely, thus causing another furor.

The dead were coming home too. On October 25, 1946, Meyer Berger reported in The New York Times that the bodies of 6,248 Americans had arrived on USS Joseph V. Connolly. A single coffin was selected to represent them all in a service in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park after it was carried there in a procession escorted by six thousand past and present servicemen and attended by a crowd of four hundred thousand. In the Sheep Meadow, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy prayed over the coffin. A band from Fort Jay played “Taps.” “In a front row seat, a woman started up. She stretched out her arms and screamed the name ‘Johnny.’ ” Within a few days another death ship with its freight of several thousand coffins arrived at the Port of New York, but this time there was no procession, no service in the park.

USS Franklin D. Roosevelt leaving the Brooklyn Navy Yard, October 1945. Via Wikipedia.

Wherever you went, recalls the narrator of Merle Miller’s novel That Winter (1948), you saw “some of the fourteen million comrades—the word is not yet illegal, is it?—buddies, pals, former brothers-in-arms, easily identifiable, most of them, and not many were any longer wearing discharge buttons.” Regardless of how grateful they were to be home, many of them did cling to some totemic vestiges of their former service: a navy sweater or peacoat, a pair of khakis, a webbed belt, making identification easy. “After all, we had—all of us—won the great imperial war, and thanks to us, the whole world was briefly American”: Gore Vidal picked up the story fifty years later in Palimpsest.

Because fiction was still bringing the news in the forties, novels and short stories about the returning war veteran received much attention. Decently, these could only be written by one of the brotherhood. In the twenties, Edith Wharton—not only old but a woman—scandalized Hemingway and the rest of the “Lost Generation” by presuming to write a novel, A Son at the Front (1923), about their war. After the Second World War, civilians ceded the territory to such variously promising veteran-writers as Vidal, Vance Bourjaily, Merle Miller, and J. D. Salinger. And Norman Mailer, as he revealed in Advertisements for Myself, questioned the idea of writing about a war he had not been part of: “Was I to do the book of the returning veteran when I had lived like a mole writing and rewriting seven hundred pages in those fifteen months?” In Barbary Shore, he sidestepped the issue by depriving Mike Lovett of his past: he was “probably in the war.” Admirers of The Naked and the Dead were deeply disappointed by what looked suspiciously like a Marxist allegory, or rather an allegory about Marxism, set in a Brooklyn boardinghouse.

Merle Miller’s That Winter, on the other hand, was the returning-veteran novel that most exactly satisfied standard expectations: it was published in 1948, and immediately, as the novelist Alice Adams remembered many years later, it was the book “we were all reading.”

“We all drank too much that winter,” says the narrator, “some to forget the neuroses acquired in the war just ended, others in anticipation of those expected from the next, but most of us simply because we liked to drink too much.” For a generation, bookish youths had attempted to drink and talk like the characters in Hemingway’s novels: Miller’s novel flattered them that they had succeeded. The great sodality of ex-soldiers was drifting back into civilian life on a tide of alcohol, all the while exchanging arch, tight-lipped dialogue lifted from Jake Barnes’s fishing trip with Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises. “ ‘I find I no longer give a damn what’s happening in or to the world,’ he said. ‘Any special reason?’ ‘Not much. I decided when I got out I’d spend the rest of my life leading the inner life. Hear that inner life is a fine thing.’ ”

The narrator, Peter Anthony, is a young man from the provinces (Iowa was Miller’s home state). He has published a novel, and works at “the news magazine”—i.e., Time, the great devourer of talent. To comfort himself, he drinks a lot and is regularly joined in his alcoholic haze by his friends, casual acquaintances, and especially his two housemates in an apartment in Murray Hill, both former enlisted men like himself: Ted Hamilton, a futile rich boy, was a hero in the war (Omaha Beach), but is now bitter, sodden, and missing an arm; and Lew Cole, a young Jewish radio writer who is unhappily aware that anti-Semitism has not merely lingered but flourished as a result of the war.

Life at Time: “On the sixth day of the week, most men play, and on the seventh they rest and recover from hangover. But those of us who worked in that Park Avenue model of cold glass, colder steel, and rect lighting and soundproof offices and two-inch carpets did not play on the sixth day, and we did not rest on the seventh.” In other words, Time magazine closed on Mondays, so the real work of writing was done on Saturdays and Sundays, tight against deadline: “Each sentence in each of the stories must be polished, terse, brittle, and smart, and perfect for publication in the news magazine but for no other purpose whatsoever.”

Referring to such deeply unimaginative and deeply revealing fiction, Paul Fussell asks in Wartime: “What did people want to believe in the forties? What struck them as important?” Right off, he notes the huge moral significance attached to the choice of career; this was so to an extent that now appears either laughably naive or priggish—the idea of a calling or “true” vocation now seeming an ancient luxury, like traveling through life with a steamer trunk. That Winter was one of a number of popular novels—Fussell names Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters, Helen Haberman’s How About Tomorrow Morning?, and Herman Wouk’s Aurora Dawn—that “explore[d] the degree of dishonor attaching to ‘the parasitical professions’”: advertising, the vending of cosmetics, radio, low journalism, making a living by working for Henry Luce, even selling. (Death of a Salesman was the Broadway hit of 1949.)

Nowhere in That Winter appear the stoic, purposeful veterans, bursting with the optimism of “the greatest generation” mythologizing, whom memory welcomed home with parades and brass bands. His veterans are at loose ends even when they are fully employed; as a generation they have been maimed by the successive blows of the Depression and the war; many have made marriages they regret and fathered children they did not want. The wife of a sold-out novelist, Martha Westing, the lone sympathetic member of the older generation, remarks to Peter that the enraged, suicidal Ted was “like the rest of you, only more so.” What was it about his generation? “I tried to explain, but I’m not sure I succeeded,” Peter replies. “I talked about all the thousands, the tens of thousands, the millions of us who had been away for a while and had returned. Without any bands, without any committees of welcome, without banners. We hadn’t wanted these, we tried to think we hadn’t wanted anything; yet we had, and the difficulty was that we didn’t know what we wanted, and neither did anybody else. That was the difficulty.”

* * *

From the Book: The Brazen Age by David Reid
Copyright © 2016 by David Reid
Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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* * *

1. Private Schools, Painful Secrets

Jenn Abelson, Bella English, Jonathan Saltzman, and Todd Wallack | The Boston Globe | May 6, 2016 | 24 minutes (6,188  words)

From the Globe's Spotlight Team: An investigation into the sexual abuse of hundreds of students by private school staffers in New England spanning decades.

2. When Do You Give Up On Treating a Child With Cancer?

Melanie Thernstrom | The New York Times Magazine | May 12, 2016 | 15 minutes (3,862 words)

Two parents prepared for their son to die after he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Then something astonishing happened.

3. Walmart: Thousands of Police Calls. You Paid the Bill.

Zachary T. Sampson, Laura C. Morel, and Eli Murray | Tampa Bay Times | May 11, 2016 | 18 minutes (4,673 words)

"When it comes to calling the cops, Walmart is such an outlier compared with its competitors that experts criticized the corporate giant for shifting too much of its security burden onto taxpayers."

4. The Day We Discovered Our Parents Were Russian Spies

Shaun Walker | The Guardian | May 7, 2016 | 23 minutes (5,882 words)

Alex and Tim Foley, whose family's story partly inspired The Americans, grapple with their broken identities and their parents' lifetime of lies.

5. Remote Year Promised to Combine Work and Travel. Was It Too Good to Be True?

Erika Adams | Atlas Obscura | May 5, 2016 | 16 minutes (4,131 words)

A look at the failed promise of travel start-up Remote Year, and its world-traveling inaugural class.

I can see your future / there’s nobody around. 

It was a typically brutal Maryland summer, and I worked for a small music publishing company. I was often alone, collating or alphabetizing or organizing something, armed only with my iPod.  I alternated between Belle & Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit and Keane’s first two albums. When my workday was over I’d walk the half-mile to the church on Main Street where my mom was a secretary. Or I’d go to the local library, its silence so different from the tense quiet of the publishing office. With my soundtrack, these walks became existential adventures. Even now, as I hit play on “Another Sunny Day,” I am still walking down the sidewalk, my sternum swollen with something adjacent to love.

I like thinking about this time in my life. I think I am still looking for something that feels like those walks. They felt endlessly, stupidly romantic. I didn’t need anything except a charged battery. It’s unrealistic that my entire life should feel like a two-mile radius in the town where I had a dissatisfying part-time summer job. I think what I miss is a path with a destination. Then, I could take as long as I wanted on my walk or try a different route, but I knew where I was going. I don’t know where I’m going anymore. That’s what this part of my twenties is about, and that’s okay, but it’s deeply unsettling. I’m too anxious to take in the view or to consider an alternate path. I am desperate for news of the future.

1. “The Cat Psychic.” (Rachel Monroe, Hazlitt, May 2016)

When she returned from a month-long trip, Rachel Monroe’s cat, Musa, didn’t want to be near her anymore. He avoided their apartment and stayed outdoors for long stretches of time. Distraught, Monroe did something she never thought she’d do—she called a pet psychic to see if she could repair their relationship.

2. “Artisanal Futures.” (Claire Carusillo, Racked, January 2016)

Etsy is a boon to psychics with an internet connection. Interspersed with the results of her Etsy-produced readings, Claire Carusillo explores the legal ramifications of doing metaphysical business.

3. “Psychic in Reykjavik.” (Fatima Bhutto, Catapult, September 2015)

Everyone in Iceland has a medium. Fatima Bhutto spent her childhood entertaining charlatans. Water, meet oil.

4. “Fortunate One.” (Jaclyn Einis, Narratively, November 2012)

Janet Horton shucked her corporate life in favor of writing a novel. Then, as fate would have it, she became her main character.

5. “The Magnetic North.” (Courtney Stephens, The New Inquiry, May 2014)

An interview with Shane McCorristine, an expert in “occult geographies,”about the 19th century phenomenon of young, uneducated women traveling psychically to foreign countries, particularly on Arctic expeditions. One of my favorite quotes:

When “official” channels fail, people no longer recognize the barriers that exist between, say, the Admiralty and a psychic. This is not to say that families of the missing who use psychics are irrational, but to argue that the important thing is information, clues, hope. People will seek these things anywhere; it just so happens we decide that seeking them from “legitimate” authorities is normative.

6. “My Love Life According to Three (and a Half) New York Psychics.” (Chiara Atik, Refinery29, February 2015)

For all you skeptics, Chiara Atik is right there with you. Her tale of three psychics is hilarious:

“I feel like you’re four years behind in life — in EVERY respect,” she says, looking me unblinkingly in the eye. “Work, money, and relationships.”

At this point, I actually laugh out loud. It was such a startlingly terrible thing to say to a complete stranger. This woman doesn’t know my life. Would a woman who was four years behind romantically be moving in with her boyfriend?  Would a woman four years behind financially have gone to SoulCycle twice in the past month? I think not! Psychics are bullshit, I decide.

“You’re a writer, aren’t you.” she accuses, with enraging accuracy.

Sari Botton | Longreads | May 2016 | 21 minutes (5,211 words)

Initially, the twenty-story Manhattan office building threw me off. I had in my hand the address for a beth din, a rabbinic court, and had pictured a cluttered rabbi’s study in some old world synagogue—like the one in the divorce scene in Hester Street, the 1975 film about a Jewish immigrant couple at the turn of the twentieth century, starring a very young Carol Kane.

I rode the elevator up to find my ex-husband on a couch in the reception area—yes, this was the place—and settled in a full cushion’s distance from the person I’d once revolved my life around, the man whom I’d walked in seven symbolic circles around during our wedding ceremony, seven years before.

* * *

We’d been split up a full four years when my ex-husband called out of the blue and asked, too casually, “So…do you want a get?” As if we spoke regularly. As if he were asking, “So…do you want me to pick up a pizza on my way home?”

“Do I want a what?”

“You know,” he said. “A Jewish divorce.”

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what he was talking about; it was that I didn’t know why. What was the point? In the eyes of New York State we were already as divorced as two people could be. For a long time. I didn’t need to consult with any higher authority.

* * *

My get, or Orthodox Jewish divorce, took place in the fall of 1996. For going on two decades it’s held its place among my top ten personal anecdotes. It’s a funny, sort of heartwarming bit about how I inadvertently derived peace-of-mind and closure from a ritualistic tradition I would never have considered on my own, and had in fact resisted; about how two people, who’d split bitterly back when they were too young for anything resembling “conscious uncoupling,” finally got to tie up loose ends with a modicum of grace.

But there are also some less heartwarming aspects of the story. I used to leave those out. I’m not doing that anymore.

In the past few years, it’s become difficult to continue suppressing those elements. In some part, that has to do with my own belated, gradual awakenings, as I’ve pulled further away from the religion (and the suburban monoculture I grew up in, and my family), and grown more attuned to the ills of patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, and inequality of all stripes. Pushing me further in that direction has been a recent news story I’ve followed about some Hasidic rabbis in New York and New Jersey. From 2009 to 2013, they were part of a divorce coercion crime ring that was preying on women whose husbands refused to grant them a get, which is required for remarriage in the Orthodox community. The rabbis were convicted of kidnapping and torturing the men—a not-so-subtle means of persuading the husbands to change their minds, since the Torah doesn’t require them to provide that crucial document—and charging the wives as much as $70,000 to carry out the suffocation and other forms of abuse (cattle prodding was also alleged).

That story, while clearly far outside my experience as a secular Jew, cast a harsh light on Jewish laws regarding women’s rights and divorce. It also brought to mind those less heartwarming parts of my own get story, the parts that I used to skip past. Connecting those dots has ignited a long-suppressed rage, and marred what I’d long ago mentally edited into an endearing, benign memory.

* * *

My get ceremony itself took place inside a beth (pronounced bait, sometimes spelled beit) din, an interior room in that twenty-story New York City high rise, which my mind struggles to categorize: The walls are lined with leather-bound law books, some with Hebrew lettering along their spines. An open mahogany ark displays three or four silver-encased Torah scrolls. In front of it stands a low, semi-circular sort of judges’ bench, behind which sit five Hasidic rebbes in standard issue Office Depot swivel chairs. Law office? Court room? Sanctuary? All of the above.

After I’m invited to sit, the whole surreal production begins. First, each of the five rebbes interrogates us with the exact same questions: What is your name? Are there any other names that you go by? Are you choosing to divorce of your own free will? Are you pregnant? Next guy: What is your name? Are there any other names that you go by?… and so on, down the line.

They ask to speak to the person who officiated at our wedding. That happens to be my father. One of the rebbes dials my dad. Before asking anything about our wedding or marriage, he takes a moment, on speakerphone, to give my dad shit about not being religious enough.

This is totally mortifying. It’s also sort of satisfying.

* * *

I should back up here and explain a few things. Not only am I a secular Jew, I’m secular with a vengeance. That’s colored by a complicated relationship I have with religion, Judaism in particular—a relationship that gets progressively more difficult as I continue to belatedly “awaken”—because I’m the daughter of a clergyman.

Actually, that barely scratches the surface. More specifically and to the point: I am the religion-rejecting, Good-Girl-turned-“rebel,” black-sheep daughter of a cantor (think singing rabbi) in the watered-down Reform tradition…a man I love, but from whom I’ve been largely estranged for the past three years. (Oy.)

The conflicts behind that estrangement are the central conflicts of my life. They have consumed more psychotherapy hours than any other issues I’ve dealt with in my 50 years, and I will probably go to my grave still struggling with them.

They are many and varied, and too personal to go into here, but I’ll say this much about the conflicts relevant to my shifting perspective on my get: they are anchored to issues I have with a patriarchal belief system and tradition that’s been imposed on me—and with more of an emphasis on the patriarchy than on the beliefs and traditions.

My very own familial patriarch is professionally bound to that belief system, one that sanctions the diminishment of my power and self-determination, and to a culture that judges me—a parent-fearing Good Girl to the core no matter how many tattoos I get (I’m at two and holding)—as bad, or wrong, for the majority of my choices. Divorcing my Jewish husband (and being the one to initiate the proceedings). Marrying a non-Jew the second time around. Not having kids. Aborting the two accidentally conceived out of wedlock. Never going to synagogue or otherwise practicing Judaism. Choosing not to have one steady job. Committing the sin of lashon ha-ra by writing about my family. I’m a walking list of transgressions.

The religion/virtue connection trips me up because as a woman born in the sixties to parents who weren’t even vaguely counterculture, I’ve been conditioned to want to be recognized as  “good” by men in positions of authority, and to not question that authority. That’s always led me toward false niceness and agreeability, away from recognizing my real desires, and forming my own true opinions about, well, most things. It’s made it hard to keep it straight in my head that by my own definitions I am good. I strive to be an upstanding citizen—as simultaneously honest and kind as I can be; true to my word; hard-working; generous and loving toward the people who are generous and loving toward me. I do the best I can.

It hasn’t been easy for me to voice my arguments with Judaism, my choice to stand apart from it other than culturally, my identifying instead as an agnostic ethical humanist. Once I did, my father dismissed those positions as protracted adolescent rebellion, while also interpreting them as personal rejection and mortal insult. That has made me feel deeply sorry for him…and guilty…and angry, too. I get stuck in that vortex of conflicting, competing emotions and it shuts me down. In order to be a functional human being in the world, I need to keep a healthy distance.

Being anywhere near a synagogue instantly lands me back in that vortex, which is why, other than a few random family bar mitzvahs and weddings, I haven’t been to a service inside of one in maybe fifteen years.

* * *

I began questioning everything when I was 11, as one might after being forced to break up with the perfectly nice, cute, Puerto Rican boy in her sixth grade class who she was “going out with,” because he wasn’t Jewish. From then on, I continued to be skeptical and to have difficulty reconciling religious strictures and attitudes in Jewish-American culture that struck me as divisive—racist, sexist, classist—and hypocritical. For a long time, though, I didn’t strike out in any real way—other than announcing at 15, in the car on the way to Hebrew school, that, Oh, by the way, I’m not Jewish anymore. (Okay, maybe that qualifies as adolescent rebellion. But I was an adolescent then. At that age, it was practically my job as a clergy-kid to rebel.) After that, I resumed clinging to the role of good, dutiful daughter.

At 23, I added the role of good, dutiful suburban wife, the kind who goes with her husband to Friday night services, and there, like an automaton, joins the rest of the congregation in reciting the “responsive reading” in the prayer book, even though the words don’t resonate for her—especially the references to being “chosen.” It is our duty to praise the Lord of all things, who who separated us from the nations of the world and has given us responsibility unlike the other families of the earth. I never believed those words. I never liked those words. I said those words.

At our wedding, despite our both being Reform Jews, I willingly incorporated two Orthodox rituals I would never consider now: A bedeken, in which, before the wedding ceremony, my groom had to come unveil me (which means I first put a veil over my face) to make sure I was the right bride. This hearkens back to when the biblical Rachel’s father had pulled a fast one on Jacob and tricked him into marrying his less attractive daughter, Leah, first. And, under the chuppah, I walked around my groom in seven circles, symbolizing among other things that I was placing him at the center of my universe, all seven days of every week.

I look back and think, who was I? I was so deeply defined by my relationships to those two men, my father and my first husband, that I had little idea who I was outside of the roles of daughter and wife.

That is, until August of 1992 when, at almost 27, a series of events in my life woke me up, and I ended my three-year, fairly retrograde “starter marriage” to my college boyfriend. It was as if a new, 2.0 version of me was born—a more youthful, less stodgy urban version that strived, sometimes rather clumsily, to be independent, feminist, and, well, badass.

* * *

So, there I am four years later, at 31, in a room filled with Hasidic men and my ex-husband. I’m fresh off my first yom kippur—the fasting day of atonement and holiest day of the year—outside of a synagogue. (I spent it instead in the “sanctuary of the woods,” as I told my father, hiking and camping with my first non-Jewish boyfriend, an unreachable outdoorsy type ripped straight from the pages of Cowboys Are My Weakness.) I’m wearing the longest skirt I own, which still falls in the verboten zone above the knee, and opaque cotton tights that I’ve rationalized qualify as “modest” leg coverings. Underneath I’m sporting my newly minted navel ring, a near requisite among young East Village dwellers in the ‘90s who’d moved there to reinvent themselves.

“What’s a nice cantor like you doing at a Reform shul?” the head rabbi chides my father over speaker phone. He doesn’t seem to be joking.

The surreality of this scene never lets up. Arguably, it could be a hypnotic dream.

After they get whatever information they need from my dad, the rebbes hang up and begin ordering us around in clipped tones, without offering explanations for any of their commands—Go wait outside. Come back in. Bow your heads. While we bow our heads, they daven, chanting in Hebrew as they rock back and forth on their feet.

Finally, they instruct us in the OCD-tinged ways of handling the divorce decree they’ve drawn up for us in Hebrew: I’m told to hold my hands out—flat, not cupped!—and allow my ex-husband to lay the document upon them—You must not reach for it! From there, I’m directed to tuck the document under my left arm, walk to the door, tap the door, then make a u-turn back and return it to the table. Finally, one of the rebbes slashes the paper with a knife, and declares, “You are divorced!”

That brings us to the sweet redemption part of the story, where I stop internally rolling my eyes long enough to notice that something miraculous has happened. I feel different now. I feel free in a way I haven’t since I packed my bags and moved out of the home my ex and I shared, four years earlier. I realize I’ve received a great gift, and I’m filled with gratitude for it.

* * *

Sweet, right? Here’s a part that might make it seem less so.

Let’s go back to the prologue, when my ex-husband calls and suggests we pursue a legal/religious procedure that to me seems redundant and unnecessary. I politely decline, figuring that will be the end of that—although I’m not entirely sure, because this whole proposition seems fishy.

“But you’re the one who needs it,” he shoots back, his tone no longer so friendly.

“What?” I beg. “Why?”

He explains that a divorced Jewish woman needs this special decree drawn up by Orthodox rabbis if she wants to remarry someone religious enough to care, and to have kids who are considered Jewish—who can in turn marry other Jews when they grow up, and move to Israel with them if they want.

“Yeah, I don’t really see that being an issue,” I shoot back. I suspect then that the chance I might marry someone religious, or even Jewish, (or remarry at all) is slim to none, and my suspicion is right. Nine years later I’ll get remarried to Brian, an Irish and Italian self-described “recovering Catholic.”

My ex questions my judgment. (What is the Hebrew word for “mansplaining”?) And when that doesn’t work, he points out that according to Jewish law, or halacha, it is his prerogative as a man to decide whether or not to grant me a get. I should take him up on the offer because he doesn’t have to, but he is willing to do this just for me. Which is why, he argues from there, I should be the one to pay the ($800) bill.

I’m flabbergasted.

“No, thank you,” I say firmly. “I don’t need it.”

He offers to split the bill.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, but, no.”

That’s when he comes clean: He’s engaged, and his fiancé has insisted on the get as assurance that he’s truly ready to move on.

I feel sorry for him. I realize I have nothing to lose, and agree to take part—as long as he pays. Or she does.

* * *

I sort of knew this at the time, but it became eminently more clear to me after reading about the extorting, torturing rabbis: What my ex-husband said was true. Jewish law leaves it entirely up to men’s discretion whether to divorce, and only they can initiate proceedings. That rule was reflected in our ceremony—the bit about putting my hands out, flat, not cupped!, letting him place the decree on my hands without me reaching for it. That element of the ritual signifies that the husband is giving the get of his own free will; that it has been his decision. His wife is not taking it from him so much as she’s accepting it. Yuck.

When I tell certain people I have major issues with religion and Judaism, they immediately defend it, citing a certain beauty in its long-held traditions handed down from generation to generation. But the perpetuation of ancient traditions isn’t always beautiful or quaint, particularly when those traditions reinforce longstanding imbalances in power. Obviously, I’m suggesting this applies to Jewish divorce and the laws governing it, laws established quite some time ago—ostensibly by God, by way of Moses, in the Old Testament of the bible, aka the Torah. (See: Deuteronomy, 24: 1-4.)

Those laws had very little bearing on my non-religious life. But there are women in Orthodox communities who would like to end their marriages and move on with their lives, and can’t because their husbands exercise their supposed “God-given” right to refuse. The Hebrew term for such a woman is agunah, or “chained woman.” The plight of agunot (the plural form of the term) is the subject of “Women Unchained,” a 2011 documentary directed by Beverly Siegel and narrated by Mayim Bialik–which includes an interview with Rabbi Mendel Epstein, one of the rabbis convicted and imprisoned for extorting agunot and torturing their husbands.  It follows the stories of several modern-day women whose husbands have refused gets, and shows the hardships they and their children suffer for it.

They’re serious hardships. Agunot become outcasts in their communities. They can’t remarry and have their new marriages recognized by Jewish law. Their kids from future unrecognized marriages are labeled momzers, or bastards. If those children want to move to Israel, they are denied right of return unless they’re willing to submit to DNA testing to prove they’re of Jewish parentage. If those children want to marry in the Orthodox tradition, they can’t.

I had no idea that this was a current, often devastating issue before I began following the utterly insane story about the get coercion ring. When the story caught my attention, immediately my ex-husband’s argument of persuasion began to echo in my head—his “generous” offer to grant me a get, his contention that I should foot the bill because he didn’t have to. It hit me then that the bit of Jewish law he’d cited wasn’t only accurate; for some, it was still critically relevant and enforceable, and punishing.

What’s more, even in places where the law was no longer observed—among Reform Jews like us, for example—it had a lingering effect on power dynamics between men and women. It gave my not-especially-observant ex-husband the chutzpah to resort to a Torah-sanctioned power play. It gave him the impression that he was in a position of judgment, that he had more power than I did. And according to Jewish law, he did. God said so. He whispered it into his proxy Moses’s ear, thousands of years ago.

* * *

The case of the extorting, torturing rabbis is an extreme example of how Jewish law can leave agunot powerless and easily taken advantage of. But, I’ve learned, it’s hardly the only case.

“This is something that’s happening in every major Jewish community,” Rabbi Jeremy Stern, Executive Director of the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), a New York City-based nonprofit, told me. “It’s much more of an issue now than it was even fifty years ago, because divorce rates are higher. More divorces means more contentious divorces, and more recalcitrant husbands.”

Stern and ORA don’t take get refusal at all lightly. “We frame it as a form of domestic abuse,” he said. “It’s usually part of a system of control, and financial and psychological manipulation. It’s often the last form of abuse after a long history of it.”

He pointed out that while a man can argue against a wife’s divorce request in a beth din, if the court decides in her favor, he’s compelled to comply. “The Torah does not condone a man’s refusal to issue a get once a get is required.”

But not condoning isn’t the same as condemning. And there is no specified penalty for not complying. That lack of specificity in the law would seem to explain why rabbis might resort to vigilantism in enforcing it. It also bears noting that if a woman resists divorcing, all her husband needs is 100 signatures of men in the community supporting him in order to remarry.

Since its establishment in 2002, Stern’s organization has resolved 260 get disputes, never with violence, nor even the threat of it. However, he explained, violence in these matters is not a new thing.

“Years ago, in the shtetls of Europe, Jewish communities were able to inflict corporal punishment on men who wouldn’t grant their wives gets,” he said. “First the man would be ostracized. No one would do business with him. That was devastating. You had these small, cohesive communities, and that was really effective. If that didn’t work, a man could be beaten up by the rabbinic court. You break one leg, and before you break the second, he’s willing to comply.”

ORA’s approach is much more civil, but also sometimes comes down to ostracism. “We’ll start by taking the husband out for pizza or something,” Stern said. “We’ll tell him we sincerely want to resolve the case amicably.” If that doesn’t work, “we organize social pressure. We’ll speak with his family and friends and tell them. We’ll tell the people in his synagogue. We’ll stage a boycott of his business. If he has a religious employer, we’ll inform that employer.” Sometimes, they’ll organize a peaceful demonstration or rally outside his home or place of business.

ORA also tries to prevent get disputes by suggesting couples procure halachic prenuptial agreements, which dictate what will happen when one or both parties want to end the marriage. But pre-nups and pressure merely go around the problem.

“A pre-nup is a Band-Aid,” said Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, Executive Director of Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), which has many resources for agunot.  “We support the halachic pre-nup. My educated guess is that it helps in 90 percent of cases. But I don’t think it’s a solution.”

Weiss-Greenberg told me the problem with Jewish divorce begins with a problem in Jewish marriage. “Marriage has a power imbalance,” she told me. “An Orthodox wedding ceremony involves the husband acquiring the wife. It’s a business transaction. There’s an inherent inequality in it.” She’s referring specifically to the kiddushin part of the ceremony, during which, “the wife is generally ‘acquired’ when the ring is placed on her finger.”

In an April 17, 2014 article in The Atlantic about reinterpreting Jewish matrimonial law for feminists and couples in the LBGTQ community, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg writes: “There are myriad interpretations of any Jewish text, and many people argue that during the betrothal ceremony—known as kiddushin, nowadays part of the wedding itself—the groom is only acquiring his obligations to the bride, not the actual woman. But I, and plenty of scholars along with me, think that’s a pretty hard sell. The original second-century text draws parallels between the acquisition of a woman through marriage to the acquisition of slaves, animals, property, and land. And even understood in the most optimistic possible way, kiddushin is still a gendered ceremony with a heavy power dynamic that favors the husband.”

“The original second-century text…” That’s right, Jewish law is still rooted in the bible, a book of parables written thousands of years ago, allegedly by a male, patriarchal deity. Like any ancient scripture, it can be interpreted any number of ways. Observant feminist activists are pushing for interpretations that give women more power at the altar and at the beth din. That often means finding loopholes in the law.

“There are many loopholes,” said JOFA’s Weiss-Greenberg. “For example, you might find something wrong with one of the witnesses to the marriage, which would allow you to annul it. Some rabbinic courts are more or less likely to use loopholes.” She added that many are more inclined to use them for men’s interests than for women’s. JOFA suggests women hold the rabbinic courts accountable for these tendencies by posting online on the International Beit Din site about their experiences with each one.

In 2013, JOFA held a summit on the agunah problem at NYU. In a keynote address, attorney and author Alan Dershowitz addressed the selective use of loopholes and certain interpretations of Jewish law as they apply to divorce.

“It is immoral to keep a woman chained to a broken marriage, forbid her to remarry a man she loves, and if she does, creating a negative status, putting them into invidious situations,” he said. “This immoral situation has been brought about by halachic interpretations. These halachic interpretations were made by men, with little or no input by women in our society.”

He goes on to point out other laws for which rabbis have had no problem applying loopholes and interpreting the law to their liking: moving past the concept of an-eye-for-an-eye; allowing for the use of special elevators on the Sabbath; allowing for travel by boat on the Sabbath during the Holocaust.

“Jewish halacha has always adapted to new realities,” Dershowitz told me in an email. “It must now recognize complete equality between men and women in the context of divorce if it seeks to maintain legitimacy among people who cannot believe that their God intended women to remain chained in bondage.”

* * *

After our get ceremony, my ex asked me if I wanted to have lunch, and I agreed. Why not, I thought. I was buzzing with appreciation for how surprisingly good the experience had been for me.

When we were done eating, he got uncharacteristically quiet. I watched his face contort as he had a little internal conversation with himself and I figured, This is not going to be good.

Finally, he shrugged talmudically and then spoke. “I forgive you,” he said.

Oh, great. Just what I didn’t need: unsolicited forgiveness. Verbalized unsolicited forgiveness. I’m sorry, but, silently, inside your head, knock yourself out—play Oprah and absolve anyone you like of whatever you think they’ve done to you. But keep it to yourself, because verbalized unsolicited forgiveness isn’t forgiveness at all.  It’s an accusation. It’s staking a claim to both the moral high ground and the moral authority. Gee, I wonder where my ex would get the idea that he was in a position of authority…

“Oh, yeah, buddy? Well, I forgive you. How’s that feel?”

I didn’t actually say that, though. In my early thirties I hadn’t yet developed enough of a backbone, wasn’t yet confident enough in my convictions, to say anything even in the vicinity of that.

Also, I didn’t want to ruin what had so far been a surprisingly good day. So I held my tongue. After lunch, I walked outside into a bright, new day, thanked my ex, and restarted my life with what felt like a fresh, clean slate. But those three little hostile words–I forgive you— stuck with me, and have continued to piss me off ever since.

For the record, we’d both messed up in our marriage. We were young and stupid. I had no idea who I was when I promised myself to him. Toward the end, he’d spent four or five unaccounted-for hours with a flight attendant, and I’d gotten back at him by spending four or five unaccounted-for hours being consoled—horizontally—by a guy friend. We were even.

* * *

While some of what I’ve come to learn about Jewish divorce law  has soured me on my get experience, it hasn’t done so entirely. I’m still cognizant of the significant effect the ceremony had on me, and of its value. When we’d split at 27 and 28, my ex-husband and I didn’t have the tools or the grace to acknowledge in any meaningful way that our three-year marriage, our eight-year relationship, was ending. We were too immature, too worked up, too wounded. A conversation that had begun with me asking for just a little time apart had ended with him ramming his hand through a wall, and me leaving our apartment forever.

Four years later, with all that drama behind us, I found something mysteriously clarifying about standing together before a bunch of hardcore religious rebbes and ritually untying the knot we’d once so hopefully tied under a chuppah in the summer of 1989—going back the other way through the eye of the needle.

That speaks to a personal contradiction I have a hard time owning: for all my rejection of religion, I am still deeply moved by ritual, ceremony, and symbolism. It’s easier for me to embrace those of other origins, whether it’s dangling from my neck a gold charm in the shape of Ganesh, the Hindu god of removing obstacles, or chanting “Om” at the beginning and end of yoga class, or invoking the Law of Attraction at an annual “vision boarding” gathering inspired by The Secret. I have  no baggage attached to those, other than of the Jewish guilt variety omnipresent in my brain, demanding, Well, if you’re willing to believe in theirs, why can’t you believe in ours? I understand how, especially in times of uncertainty and powerlessness, it can be appealing to have a set of simple steps to follow, which promise to guide you out. I know that something very real can happen, at least internally, when you take part in a well-worn tradition. There’s something psychologically powerful in hitching your intentions to those of others who came before you, in the exact same manner they did.

In her Atlantic article, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg calls this “ritual alchemy.” “For those who believe, as I do, that rituals do things, there’s a certain alchemy to the fact that a dunk in the ritual bath can transform a non-Jew into a Jew, that lighting two candles can, palpably and viscerally, bring in the Sabbath.”

But what if you want to retain the ritual, yet lose the parts that are sexist, or otherwise problematic? Would the get ceremony have had any less profound an effect on me if, say, I had insisted on being allowed to cup my hands, or to reach them upward and grab the divorce decree? If instead of one document in his favor, there had been two of equal import, and we each were to hand one to the other? I’m inclined to think not.

But in Ruttenberg’s opinion, something gets lost in translation when we take too many liberties in adjusting ancient rituals to our liking. “There’s a certain danger to mucking around with the source code, with the ways in which a religious tradition has been refined over hundreds or even thousands of years to bring us as close as possible to the sacred,” she writes. “Taking ritual alchemy seriously means that it might not work to slap any old thing together in place of these ancient mechanisms for binding two people to each other.” I suppose that might also apply to the mechanisms for breaking the ties that bind.

* * *

Editor: Mark Armstrong: Fact-checker: Matthew Giles

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates.

* * *

When I was in college I was pretty good at gadding around (sorry to boast!), and spring was my very best time for this. I wasn’t the only one. I was talking about it with a friend I went to school with and he described it as the “spring-in-the-asparagus valley-insouciance.” We all had it. Or most of us—there may have been some people studying somewhere on campus. Then finals time would come and we’d run around in a panicked sleepless haze for a couple weeks. In my memories of these semesters it’s almost always 8:00 p.m., the sky’s purple, the air is frictionless, and there’s still plenty of time before it’s actually night, real study-time night. One spring a friend of mine had a paper due for her History of Israel class, and I have a vivid memory of standing with her in the kitchen of her dorm passing a carton of ice cream back and forth, in a place of such deep procrastinators’ panic that to this day “History of Israel” pops into my head whenever I’m agitated about a deadline. (And it wasn’t even my paper!)

This feeling—sleepless, buoyant—came back to mind last weekend when I went to the local university library to get some books for research. It was the weekend before finals, I realized as I was going through the stacks. All the tables were full of students with their laptops and earbuds and their joggling over-caffeinated sandaled feet. The school is UNC-Asheville—it’s small and liberal arts angled. My stepson graduated from there, and I once ran into him at the library during a similar spring week—before finals of his junior year—and he looked at the books I was holding and said, in a tone of infinite gloom and suspicion, “None of those books are on Dante, are they?” After this library visit, I stopped by a coffee shop near the campus, and there were more tablefuls of students there. At one, a group was talking in a desultory, elliptical way, and, as one of them departed, he turned to his friends and said, “I love you all” with a trailing wave of the hand, like he was heading off to save Mars.

The trip reminded me of a couple sections from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me where he describes his years at Howard University. The first section is about all the time he spent in the research library there. This passage is about many things, obviously, but one reason I love it is as a description of autodidactic delight/ intoxication in following one book to another and another and another. (The “you” addressed in the book is Coates’ son, so “your grandfather” is Coates’ father.)

I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grandfather once worked. Moorland held archives, papers, collections, and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works. I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention. I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling Brown. I remember that the key to all life lay in articulating the precise difference between “the Black Aesthetic” and “Negritude.” How, specifically, did Europe underdevelop Africa? I must know. And if the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs were alive today, would they live in Harlem? I had to inhale all the pages.

The second section describes what happened when spring came:

The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party. I remember those days like an OutKast song, painted in lust and joy. A baldhead in shades and a tank top stands across from Blackburn, the student center, with a long boa draping his muscular shoulders. A conscious woman, in stonewash with her dreads pulled back, is giving him the side-eye and laughing. I am standing outside the library debating the Republican takeover of Congress or the place of the Wu-Tang Club in the canon. A dude in a Tribe Vibe T-shirt walks up, gives a pound, and we talk about the black bacchanals of the season—Freaknik, Daytona, Virginia Beach—and we wonder if this is the year we make the trip. It isn’t. Because we have all we need out on the Yard.

Both sound really idyllic, don’t they? Also, it’s nice to know that as I type this, all the students I saw last weekend are, for better or worse, on the other side of their finals. “I love you all.”

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A manufacturing entrepreneur is jailed over toilet paper in his factory’s restrooms. An American attorney and figure in a once-thriving expat community in Caracas is killed in a violent robbery. There are so many stories of people trying to live amid Venezuela’s instability and chaos. Here are five.

1. “Venezuela Is Falling Apart.” (Moises Naim and Francisco Toro, The Atlantic, May 2016)

“What our country is going through is monstrously unique: It’s nothing less than the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States.” The day-to-day stories of Venezuelans reveal the collapse of the country on all fronts.

2. “Emptying the Tower of David, the World’s Tallest Ghetto.” (Boris Munoz, Vocativ, December 2014)

Boris Munoz reflects on the future of Venezuela as seen through the Tower of David, the infamous 28-story slum in Caracas that has long reflected the country’s hopes and failures.

3. “American John Pate Murdered in Venezuela as Violence Spikes.” (Jessica Weiss, Miami New Times, October 2015)

“Pate embodied an enduring belief in law and order in a country where many fear it no longer exists.” Jessica Weiss recounts the violent death of John Pate, an expatriate attorney who continued to live in and love Venezuela, despite the growing instability and violence in the country.

4. “Venezuela’s Dispossessed.” (Matthew Fishbane, Tablet, January 2012)

About half of Venezuela’s Jewish community fled the country under former president Hugo Chávez. Matthew Fishbane explores whether or not the other half will follow, and tells the stories of people who have found a sense of home and place in Venezuela over the decades.

5. “Slumlord.” (Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, January 2013)

“After nearly a generation, Chávez leaves his countrymen with many unanswered questions and only one certainty: the revolution that he tried to bring about never really took place. It began with Chávez, and with him, most likely, it will end.” In this 2013 piece, Anderson describes his time in Caracas, from exploring its invasores to spending time with Alexander (El Niño) Daza, the boss of the Tower of David.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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1. The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut

Grayson Schaffer | Outside Magazine | May 10, 2016 | 18 minutes (4,587 words)

Lhakpa Sherpa ​​has climbed Everest more than any other woman, but few people know her name. Part of the reason has been the media's legacy of diminishing the accomplishments of Sherpa climbers, but also: "since 2004, she has been too frightened to speak to reporters." That’s the year she says she was assaulted by her ex-husband, Everest summiter George Dijmarescu.

2. The False Promise of DNA Testing

Matthew Shaer | The Atlantic | May 17, 2016 | 25 minutes (6,401 words)

DNA typing has long been used as irrefutable proof of guilt or innocence in the criminal-justice system, but errors made in crime labs have many questioning its effectiveness.

3. The Long Rescue

Sonia Faleiro | Harper's | May 16, 2016 | 28 minutes (7,223 words)

A father goes to Nepal in search of his missing children, who have been kidnapped and forced into slave labor.

4. The Puzzle Solver

Tracie White | Stanford Medicine | May 17, 2016 | 15 minutes (3,931 words)

The story of one man's severe chronic fatigue syndrome and his father’s quest to decode the disease.

5. How One Fort McMurray Family Built a Dream and Watched it Burn

Katherine Laidlaw | The Walrus | May 17, 2016 | 13 minutes (3,250 words)

Now, after the fire, all that’s left of the Frigons’ dream house is the foundation blocks it once stood on, a pile of rubble, and the blue trampoline their kids used to jump on out back. From above, the damage left by the Beast—the nickname Fort McMurray fire chief Darby Allen has given to wildfire M-009—looks like a Rorschach test, with its blots and streaks of black. Officials say it’s burned more than 250,000 hectares now—three times the size of Calgary.