My Friend Walter Benjamin
Before I made Walter Benjamin's personal acquaintance, I saw him in the autumn of 1913 at a meeting that took…
Gershom Scholem 1981-12-01Before I made Walter Benjamin’s personal acquaintance, I saw him in the autumn of 1913 at a meeting that took place in a hall above the Cafe Tiergarten in Berlin. The meeting was held jointly by Young Judea, the Zionist youth organization to which I belonged, and the Youth Forum, a discussion group composed of members of the Youth Movement founded by the German educator Gustav Wyneken. Both organizations recruited their members from the upper terms of the Gymnasien in Berlin, and most of Wyneken’s followers also were Jews although they were Jews for whom the fact was of little or no practical significance.
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At that meeting about eighty young people had gathered to discuss their relationship to their Jewish and German heritages. Each side presented two or three speakers; the main spokesman of the Wyneken people was Walter Benjamin, who was rumored to be their most gifted intellect. He made a very tortuous speech in which he did not reject Zionism outright but somehow relegated it to a secondary position. I cannot recall the details of the talk, but I shall never forget his manner of presentation. Without looking at the audience, he delivered his absolutely letter-perfect speech with great intensity to an upper corner of the ceiling, at which he stared the whole time. I do not recall the rejoinder made by the Zionists.
The Youth Forum was a meeting place for secondary-school and university students who were particularly disappointed by the institutions of “higher learning” and who actually aimed for much more profound intellectual revolutions. It not only espoused the ideas of radical educational reform but also stood for an autonomous youth culture, with Gustav Wyneken’s recently published Youth Culture as its classic text. These ideas were propounded with much passion by the periodical Der Anfang (“The Beginning”). It was generally known that the most important essays were written by students like Benjamin, who wrote under the name Ardor. The Zionists, with their keen historical consciousness, had little use for the radically ahistorical stance of Der Anfang. The sociological orientation prevalent toddy in related undertakings of revolutionary youth was lacking in the groups around Der Anfang; “youth” as such seemed to constitute for them the guarantee of a new dawning of creation.
I did not know it when I first heard him speak, but Benjamin by that time already had participated in several intensive discussions about Zionism, both orally and in writing, in 1912 and 1913.
By the time I met him, all this was past history. The start of World War I had put an end to the activities of the Youth Movement. I was then in my first semester as a university student, taking courses in mathematics and philosophy, while outside the university I studied Hebrew and the sources of Jewish literature with at least as much intensity. At the end of June 1915 I heard a lecture by Kurt Hiller, whose book The Wisdom of Boredom I had read. Following in Nietzsche’s footsteps, so to speak, Hiller in his lecture vehemently denounced history as a force that was inimical to life and spirit alike. His argument seemed totally inadequate and wrongheaded to me. History? Nonsense! We live without history; what has all the rubbish of the millennia to do with us? We live with the generation that was born with us! Thus did I summarize the substance of Hiller’s talk in my diary. At the end of the lecture it was announced that there would be a discussion of Hiller’s remarks the following week. I went there, along with many other participants, and stood up to protest—albeit rather clumsily—against Hiller’s concept of history, thus incurring the displeasure of the chairman, a friend of Hiller’s. When I faltered at one point, he simply cut me off. Benjamin also made some remarks, and again I was struck by his characteristic way of speaking. In fact, those mannerisms probably arose because of his pronounced myopia, which made it difficult for him to focus on moving groups.
A few days later I entered the catalogue room of the university library and found myself face to face with Benjamin, who looked at me intently, as though trying to remember who I might be. He left the room then but came back a short while later, made a perfect bow before me, and asked whether I was the gentleman who had spoken at the Hiller discussion. I said I was. Well, he wanted to speak with me about the things I had said, and asked me for my address. On July 19, I received the following invitation: “Dear Sir—I should like to ask you to visit me this Thursday around 5:30.” Later I received a phone call changing the invitation to Wednesday.
Thus I visited Benjamin for the first time on July 21, 1915. He lived with his parents in the Grunewald section of Berlin, at Delbrückstrasse 23, on the corner of Jagowstrasse (today Richard-Strauss-Strasse). He had a large, very respectable room with many books, which struck me as a philosopher’s den. At once he proceeded in medias res. He told me that he occupied himself a great deal with the nature of the historical process and had also been reflecting on the philosophy of history; that is why my remarks had interested him. He asked me to explain to him what I had meant by my statements in opposition to Hiller. Thus we were soon discussing the things that especially concerned me in those years—namely, socialism and Zionism. At that time I had already been in the Zionist camp for four years, having been led there by my recognition of the self-deception practiced by my family and the circles in which they moved, as well as by my reading of several works on Jewish history, particularly Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews. In those days I read a great deal about socialism, historical materialism, and above all anarchism, with which I was most in sympathy.
I had undertaken to unite the two paths of socialism and Zionism in my own life and presented this quest to Benjamin, who admitted that both paths were viable. Of course, like every Zionist in those days, I also was influenced by Martin Buber, whose Three Addresses on Judaism (1911) played a large part in the intellectual world of Zionist youth—something I hardly can understand sixty years later. Even in our first conversation Benjamin expressed strong reservations about Buber, and so struck a very responsive chord in me, because I had been particularly outraged over the positive stance Buber and his main disciples had taken toward the war. Thus Benjamin and I inevitably came to discuss our attitudes toward the war. I told him I shared the viewpoint of Karl Liebknecht, who had voted in the Reichstag against war credits since the end of 1914. When Benjamin said that he fully shared this standpoint, I told him my own story. In February 1915, I had joined a group of like-minded members of Young Judea in writing a letter of protest against the inclusion of militant articles in the Jüdische Rundschau (Jewish Review), the organ of the Zionists in Germany. In our letter to the editor we had outlined our own position in regard to the war, but of course under the prevailing military censorship there was no chance that this attitude would be given public expression. Copies of this letter did circulate, however, and one came to the attention of several of my fellow students. They informed the administration, and I was forced to leave school a year before graduation. Since the beginning of that year I had joined my brother in attending the clandestine meetings that the Social Democratic pacifists held in a Neukölln restaurant: at these meetings, as I recall, the major leaders of the opposition reported on the domestic situation every two weeks.
Benjamin was extraordinarily taken with all this, and my reports interested him greatly. He was eager to be active at once in this opposition group in some way. I invited him to come to see me on the following day and said I would show him some of their publications, particularly the first (and only) issue of Die Internationale, the periodical edited by Rosa Luxemburg and August Thalhaimer; my brother and I had participated in its illegal dissemination. All in all, our first conversation that evening lasted more than three hours.
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The first thing that struck me about Benjamin—indeed it was characteristic of him all his life—was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment. If the two of us were alone, he would look me full in the face as he spoke. At other times, when he fixed his eyes on the most remote corner of the ceiling (which he often did, particularly when addressing a larger audience), he assumed a virtually magical appearance. This rigid stare contrasted sharply with his usual lively gestures.
I have already mentioned his appearance. No one would have called Benjamin handsome, but there was something impressive about him, with his unusually clear, high forehead. Over his forehead he had rather full, dark brown hair, which was slightly wavy and hard to manage; later it turned gray, but he kept it to his end. Benjamin had a beautiful voice, melodious and easily remembered. He was an excellent reader and read very effectively when his voice was calm. He was of medium height, very slender then and for some years to come, dressed with studied unobtrusiveness, and was usually bent slightly forward. I’ don’t think I ever saw him walk erect with his head held high. There was something unmistakable, deliberate, and groping about his walk, probably due at least in part to his nearsightedness. He did not like to walk fast, and it was not easy for me, who was much taller, had long legs, and took big, quick steps, to adapt to his gait when we were walking together. Very often he would stop and go on talking. He was easy to recognize from behind by his peculiar gait, which became even more pronounced over the years. Under his forehead one immediately noticed his strong eyeglasses, which he frequently would remove during a conversation, revealing a pair of striking, dark blue eyes. His nose was well proportioned, the lower part of his face still very gentle at that time, the mouth full and sensuous. In its as yet incomplete development the lower half of his face contrasted with the upper, which was severe and expressive. When he spoke, his face assumed a strangely reserved, somewhat inward expression. Except for the rather full mustache Benjamin invariably wore, his face was always clean shaven and slightly pink in color; otherwise his skin was absolutely white. His hands were beautiful, slender, and expressive. Taken as a whole, his physiognomy was definitely Jewish, but in a quiet, unobtrusive way, as it were.
From the first, Benjamin’s markedly courteous manner created a natural sense of distance and seemed to exact reciprocal behavior. This was especially difficult in my case, since by nature I tended to be anything but polite; I had been somewhat notorious since my youth because of my provocative deportment. Benjamin had nothing of the rough, flippant manner affected by most Berliners, which I had experienced often enough in my relations with childhood friends. He was probably the only person toward whom I was almost invariably polite. To be sure, in one sense I was his equal in my conversations with him. Benjamin chose his words carefully, but his speech was unpretentious and unostentatious; now and then he would lapse into the Berlin dialect with which he was not completely comfortable—not very convincingly and more by way of mimicry. He had been born and raised in the old western section of Berlin where the dialect had undergone corruption, whereas I came from Old Berlin, which meant that its dialect and mannerisms were natural to me. When we were not discussing philosophy or theology, I liked to slip into pure Berlinisch, which I knew better than he. To my surprise, Benjamin would listen attentively and with good humor. When it came to speaking High German, however, I was distinctly inferior. In the course of time his speech greatly influenced me, and I adopted a good number of his mannerisms. His highest praise in those years was the word ausserordentlich, “extraordinary,” which he always pronounced with a particular intonation. A favorite critical term was objektive Verlogenheit, “objective mendacity.” At that time he never used Jewish expressions, only later, under his wife Dora’s influence and mine, did he begin to employ them.
When I met Benjamin he had just turned twenty-three; I was seventeen and a half. His “profile” thus was naturally more developed than mine. I was pursuing a definite direction, whereas he had abandoned his path after the collapse of the Youth Movement, which had meant so much to him, and had not yet struck out on a new one. Neither of us knew clearly what our future would be. Despite all we shared in common, our social backgrounds were quite different. He came from an upper-middle-class family that had known periods of real wealth; I came from the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, which was then on the rise, and was well off but never wealthy. Though we may not have been fully conscious of it, our lives had taken an almost dramatically different course. It was normal enough that the sons of assimilated families should dedicate themselves to the German Free Students’ Association, the Youth Movement, and literary ambitions. But that such a son should devote himself passionately to the study of the Talmud even though he did not come from an Orthodox family, and should seek a way to Jewish substance and its historical development, was very unusual even among the Zionists, whose numbers in those years were anything but small.
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On Friday evening, August 15, Benjamin invited me for supper. He introduced me to his parents and his sister Dora, who was fifteen or sixteen years old at the time. Earlier he had told me that his relationship with his family was not a happy one. On a later occasion he introduced me to his brother George, who later became a physician and a very active Communist. I never exchanged more than a few polite phrases with him, however. Benjamin read to me four poems from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal in his translation and in Stefan George’s. He read very beautifully but not in the style of George’s disciples. In all four cases I thought his translations were George’s work; in two instances I was certain that Benjamin’s translation was better. I told him about my translation of the Song of Songs, the first version of which I was then preparing. He called his own work child’s play in comparison, saying mine was the more difficult undertaking by far.
The conversation then turned to the Bible. He showed me a translation from the 1830’s, edited by Leopold Zunz; he thought very highly of its style and said he often dipped into it. I told him that before visiting him I had attended the Friday evening service at the Alte Synagoge whose strictly Orthodox liturgy greatly attracted me. I related how I had learned Hebrew and was, in fact, still absorbed in its study. When he asked how many hours I had devoted to it, I replied that I had been studying ten to fifteen hours a week—there was no other way to do it. I told him that I was studying Talmud for two or three evening hours twice a week, and this interested him very much. He wanted to know how I was going about it; I tried to explain what I found so fascinating about the reading of talmudic discussions. At that particular time a group of six or eight of us were studying the tractate about the drafting of bills of divorcement. I explained to him what form such a halakhic discussion takes: the talmudic rabbis approach a subject from all sides, often on the basis of variously interpreted Bible passages. To my surprise Benjamin said, “It must be something like Simmel’s classes, then.” At that time I knew hardly any of Georg Simmel’s writings (Simmel himself had already left Berlin), and Benjamin’s remark stimulated me to read some of them; I did not like them nearly as well as the Talmud, to whose mode of thought they really were closely akin. I commended to Benjamin my teacher Isaac Bleichrode, the very pious, modest, and reclusive rabbi of a small private synagogue association in our neighborhood. This great-grandson of one of the last great Talmudists of Germany at the beginning of the 19th century had a great gift for interpreting a page of Talmud and teaching the Jewish tradition generally. Benjamin sighed and said, “If only there were something like that in philosophy.”
I vividly remember the night of October 20-21, preceding Benjamin’s reexamination for military service. At his request I kept him company until morning—first conversing for hours at the Neue Café des Western on Kurfürstendamm and then playing chess and cards in his room on Delbrückstrasse, while Benjamin consumed vast quantities of black coffee, a practice then followed by many young men prior to their military physicals. We were together from 9:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.
After that night, Benjamin was deferred for one year. I, who had just passed my final secondary-school examination as a special student before a special committee, expected to be called up for military service. As he had planned, Benjamin went to Munich at the end of October. For a long time I did not hear from him. He did not write me again until I had been declared unfit for service by a doctor shortly after my call-up; I had written him early in December about my release and the resumption of my studies. But Benjamin was very worried that the censors might open the mail and was afraid that I might be rash enough to make incriminating political statements. “There is no [censorship] between Berlin and Munich,” he wrote me, “yet every [underlined twice] bit of prudentia is indicated. I beg you to bear this in mind.”
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II
At the beginning of March 1916 Benjamin informed me that he would return around the fifteenth of the month and that we then could discuss in greater detail the questions I had raised in my letters about Plato (several of whose writings I was reading at the time) as well as the critical observations on mathematics that I had made.
I anticipated great things to come from these discussions and wrote in my diary: “When one has been reflecting about certain matters for a long time, one cannot help be uplifted by the prospect of such inspiring and reverent company. I cannot talk about these things with [Erich] Brauer or anyone else, for that matter; nor can I discuss my Zionist interests with the Zionists—a truly depressing fact for both parties. . . . Instead I have to go to the non-Zionist and non-mathematician Benjamin, who has sensibility where most of the others no longer respond.”
When I reflect on what it was we had in common after these first encounters, I can name a few things that should not be overlooked easily. I can describe them only in general terms as a resoluteness in pursuing our intellectual goals, rejection of our environment—which was basically the German-Jewish assimilated middle class—and a positive attitude toward metaphysics. We were proponents of radical demands. Actually, at the universities the two of us did not have any teachers in the real sense of the word, so we educated ourselves, each in a very different way. I cannot recall either of us ever speaking of our university teachers with enthusiasm, either then or later; if we had praise for any of them, they were eccentrics and outsiders—for example, one of Benjamin’s teachers, the philologist Ernst Lewy, and Gottlob Frege, whose course I took in Munich. We did not take the philosophy teachers very seriously; perhaps we were too presumptuous in this.
Associating with Benjamin was fraught with considerable difficulties, though on the surface these seemed insignificant in view of his consummate courtesy and willingness to listen. He always was surrounded by a wall of reserve, which could be recognized intuitively and was evident to another person even without Benjamin’s not infrequent efforts to make that area noticeable. These efforts consisted above all in a secretiveness bordering on eccentricity, a mystery-mongering that generally prevailed in everything relating to him personally, though it sometimes was breached unexpectedly by personal and confidential revelations.
There were primarily three difficult requirements. The first was respect for his solitude: this was easy to observe, for it was dictated by a natural sense of limits. I soon realized that he appreciated this respect, a sine qua non for associating with him, and that it heightened his trust. The observance of the second requirement was particularly easy for me: his utter aversion to discussing the political events of the day and occurrences of the war. The third requirement, that of overlooking his secretiveness, often demanded a real effort, because there was something surprising, even ludicrous, about such secretiveness in someone as sober, as melancholy as Benjamin. He did not like to give the names of friends and acquaintances if he could avoid it. When circumstances of his life were mentioned, there frequently was attached an urgent request for absolute secrecy; more often than not this made very little sense. Gradually, but even then only partially, this secretiveness (which by that time others had noticed as well) began to dissipate, and Benjamin began to speak of people without the accompanying stamp of anonymity, at least when he had initiated the discussion. It was in keeping with this aversion that he tried to keep his acquaintances separate; for a time this was more effective with me, who came from another environment—Zionist youth—than it was with those from the same sphere as he, namely members of the German-Jewish intelligentsia.
Added to this was the immediate impression of genius: the lucidity that often emerged from his obscure thinking; the vigor and acuity with which he experimented in conversation; and the unexpectedly serious manner, spiced with witty formulations, in which he would consider the things that were seething within me, as alien as my main concerns—the urgency of my Zionist convictions and the problems arising from my mathematical-philosophical studies—must have been to him. He was nevertheless a very good listener, though he himself liked to talk often and at length. He assumed that the person he was conversing with had a much higher level of education than was actually the case. Whenever I said that I was not acquainted with something, Benjamin went wide-eyed with astonishment. He asked very good and usually surprising questions. In 1915 he could not learn enough about Germany’s share in the outbreak of the war, so I obtained for him a few pamphlets that were being disseminated illegally by left-wing Social Democrats, which contained evidence of the warmongering attitude of Austria and Germany. Benjamin was by no means a “pacifist by conviction,” as he has been called. His refusal to have anything to do with this particular war did not stem from any pacifist ideology; that simply was not his style. Later we hardly discussed those things. Another thing that was striking about him was his extraordinary sensitivity to noise, which he often referred to as his “noise psychosis.” It really could disturb him. Once he wrote me: “Do other people manage to have peace and quiet? I’d like to know the answer to that.”
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I visited Benjamin only twice while he was in Munich. We spoke a great deal about Judaism, and for the first time the question arose whether it was one’s duty to go to Palestine. Benjamin criticized the “agricultural Zionism” that I championed, saying that Zionism would have to wean itself of three things: “the agricultural orientation, the racial ideology, and Briber’s ‘blood-and-experience’ arguments.” I agreed with him that not only agricultural workers or farmers should be permitted to go to Palestine, rather that it might be all right to have an entirely different occupation. At that time, and for the next seven years, I myself considered going there as a schoolteacher. In the face of Benjamin’s critique of Buber I praised the writings of the Zionist philosopher Ahad Ha’am (whom he had never heard of) and some of Ahad Ha’am’s essays on the nature of Judaism, which I lent him in a German-language selection toward the end of 1916. Most of all we discussed Buber, whom Benjamin criticized in sharp terms. He was not entirely unjustified when he told me in parting that if I should run into Buber I should hand him a barrel of tears in our names. He said that Buber personally had struck him as a man who lived in a permanent trance, somewhere very much removed from his own self, a “dual ego”; this state was shown most profoundly in an essay entitled “Das Gleichzeitige” (“The Simultaneous”), which had appeared in the Zeit-Echo. Benjamin was especially harsh in his rejection of the cult of “experience,” which was glorified in Buber’s writings of the time (particularly from 1910 to 1917). He said derisively that if Buber had his way, first of all one would have to ask every Jew, “Have you experienced Jewishness yet?”
Benjamin tried to induce me to work into an article I was writing a definite rejection of experience and Buber’s “experiencing” attitude. I actually did so in a later essay, as Benjamin had greatly impressed me in this matter. What I told him about Ahad Ha’am, on the other hand, especially his view of the role of righteousness in Judaism, made a great deal of sense to him. In this connection he defined righteousness as “the will to make the world the greatest good.” We argued about Buber from various points of view. Benjamin said that Buber represented feminine thinking. In contrast to the socialist Gustav Landauer, who once said the same thing about Buber in an essay by way of praise, Benjamin meant it as a condemnation. We also discussed the question of whether Zion was a metaphor; at that time I answered in the affirmative, for only God was not a metaphor, but Benjamin denied it, asserting—and thus leading us into a conversation about the prophets in the Bible—that if one recognized the authority of the Bible one must not use the prophets metaphorically. Finally we read together the speech of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, and Benjamin discussed the peculiar doubling of the Greek gods and the curious fact that so many ancient Greek deities (such as Ananke = Necessity) apparently can be transformed directly into an idea. Benjamin read some excerpts from a few pages he had written about Socrates (I made a copy for myself later), in which he propounded the thesis that Socrates was “Plato’s argument and shield against myth.”
On the next day the conversation turned to Hegel—our first discussion of Hegel that I can recall. Evidently Benjamin had read only a few things superficially and was no great admirer of Hegel at that time. As much as a year later he wrote me: “What I have read of Hegel thus far has definitely repelled me.” He called Hegel’s “mental physiognomy . . . that of an intellectual brute, a mystic of violence, the worst kind there is: but a mystic for all that.” Yet he came to Hegel’s defense when, during the same conversation, I made some presumptuous remarks about the speculative philosophy of nature, which greatly offended my mathematical soul even as it impressed my mystical soul.
During a discussion of whether Hegel had wished to deduce the world, we turned to mathematics, philosophy, and myth. Benjamin said he was still not sure what the purpose of philosophy was, as there was no need to discover “the meaning of the world”; it was already present in myth. Myth was everything; all else, including mathematics and philosophy, was only an obscuration, a glimmer that had arisen within it. I responded that in addition to myth there was mathematics—until the great differential equation had been found that would express the world, or, more probably, until it was proved that there could be no such equation. Then myth would be justified. Philosophy, I said, was nothing independent, and only religion broke through this world of myth. I denied that mathematics could be part of myth. Benjamin’s decided turn to the philosophic penetration of myth, which occupied him for so many years, beginning with his study of Hölderlin and probably for the rest of his life, was manifested here for the first time and left its mark on many of our conversations. In this connection, at this early date, Benjamin spoke of the difference between law and justice, calling law an order that could be established only in the world of myth. Four years later he elaborated on this idea in his essay, “Critique of Violence.”
Later I made a detailed, critical study of these conversations since, as I wrote at the time, “If I really want to go along with Benjamin, I shall have to make enormous revisions. My Zionism is too deeply anchored in me to be shaken by anything.” I also made this notation: “The word irgendwie [somehow] is the stamp of a point of view in the making. I never have heard anyone use this word more frequently than Benjamin.” Of course, everything we had been speaking about was closely bound up with his interest in the philosophy of history. We discussed that subject for a whole afternoon, in connection with a difficult remark of his to the effect that the succession of the years could be counted but not numbered. This led us to the significance of sequence, number, series, direction. Did time, which surely was a sequence, have direction as well? I said that we had no way of knowing that time does not behave like certain curves that demonstrate a steady sequence at every point but have at no single point a tangent, that is, a determinable direction. We discussed the question whether years, like numbers, are interchangeable, just as they are numerable. I still possess a record of that part of the conversation, having written in my diary: “Benjamin’s mind revolves, and will long continue to revolve, around the phenomenon of myth, which he approaches from the most diverse angles: from history, with romanticism as his point of departure; from literature, with Hölderlin as the point of departure; from religion, with Judaism as that point; and from law. If I ever have a philosophy of my own, he said to me, it somehow will be a philosophy of Judaism.”
Benjamin stayed in Munich until about December 20, 1916. There, under the Americanist Walter Lehmann, he had already started his studies of Mexican culture and the religion of the Mayas and Aztecs in the summer semester—studies closely connected with his mythological interests. In these lectures, which were attended by few people and by hardly any regular university students, Benjamin became acquainted with the memorable figure of the Spanish priest Bernardo Sahagún, to whom we owe so much of the preservation of the Maya and Aztec traditions. Benjamin had a brief encounter with Rilke in Munich between the middle of November and December. He was full of admiration as he told me about Rilke’s politeness—he whose mandarin courtesy constituted the utmost that I could imagine. Some time later, in Berlin, I saw Molino’s big Aztec-Spanish dictionary on Benjamin’s desk; he had bought it in order to learn the Aztec language, but he never carried out this project. Remembering Benjamin’s accounts of the atmosphere in the lectures, I was impelled to attend Lehmann’s course when I went to Munich in 1919. Under his direction I read Aztec religious hymns, and I can still recite many of them in the original.
In Munich, Benjamin could have met Franz Kafka, who gave a reading of his story “In the Penal Colony” there on November 10, 1916. Unfortunately Benjamin missed that opportunity, and I sometimes have speculated on what an encounter between these two men might have meant.
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Benjamin’s deep, inner relationship to things he owned—books, works of art, or handcrafted items often of rustic construction—was evident. For as long as I knew him, even during my last visit with him in Paris, he loved to display such objects, to put them into his visitors’ hands, as he mused over them aloud like a pianist improvising at the keyboard. During the months I am writing about I noticed on his desk a Bavarian blue glazed tile, depicting a three-headed Christ; he told me that its enigmatic design fascinated him. In time he gradually added to his collection various small figurines and pictures, mostly reproductions. Even then a print of Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar-piece hung on the wall of his study, where it would remain for many years to come. In 1913 as a student he had made a special trip to Colmar to see the original. His notes from those years often refer to the Isenheim panels; he was overwhelmed by what he called “das Ausdruckslose,” their quality of expressionlessness. In the 20’s he was apt to offer philosophical reflections as he brought forth a toy for his son. Once he brought along from Moscow a silver dagger over which he launched forth with reflections on terror that were only half ironic. In his room in Paris hung a tattoo artist’s large pattern sheet that he had acquired in Copenhagen. He was particularly proud of this item and regarded it on the same plane as children’s drawings and primitive art.
In those three months I did not see as much of Benjamin as would have been possible under normal circumstances. From early February on I had major family problems of my own, with the result that on March 1, 1917, I left my parents’ home for six months, found lodging with a Russian-Jewish friend in a boarding house on Uhlandstrasse that was inhabited almost exclusively by Russian Jews, and sought to earn a living by giving Hebrew lessons and translating a rather large book from Yiddish and Hebrew. In the meantime Benjamin informed me that he and Dora Pollak were going to be married, and they invited me—the only non-relative, as I recall—to the family celebration on Delbrückstrasse after the ceremony on April 16.
In the months preceding Benjamin’s marriage I occupied myself for some time with the attempt to translate into Hebrew portions of his study of language; this included motifs from our conversations very close to my heart. Benjamin insisted that I read the first pages of my translation to him and Dora so that he might hear how his sentences sounded in the Ursprache, as he put it half-jokingly. That period marked the beginning of his interest in Franz Joseph Molitor, the only serious German-language philosopher to study the Kabbalah, having devoted forty-five years to it. Between 1827 and 1857 Molitor published anonymously, as an introduction to a projected presentation of the Kabbalah, four volumes under the memorable title Philosophic der Geschichte oder Über die Tradition (“Philosophy of History, or On Tradition”). Although this Work quite groundlessly sought to give the Kabbalah a Christological orientation—its author belonged to the liberal wing of the German Catholics—the book is still worthy of attention. I had begun to read it early in 1915, and in our conversations I repeatedly alluded to it; I also told Benjamin that three volumes of the work still were available from the publisher. These were our first conversations on the Kabbalah; at that time I was still far from a study of its sources, but I already felt an obscure attraction to that world.1
During the period from summer 1916 to May 1918, our friendship was cemented steadily and without any setbacks reached its zenith after my arrival in Switzerland where he and Dora were living. After examining and rejecting all other possibilities, particularly that of taking a doctorate under the direction of Karl Joel in Basel, he had decided to work toward his degree in Bern, under Richard Herbertz who was a rather colorless man and for that very reason suited Benjamin. In the meantime I was studying mathematics and philosophy at Jena, where I worked very intensively, spent much time in reflection, and not only wrote Benjamin detailed reports about all that but also plied him with numerous questions. We urged our favorite books on each other. Benjamin not only wrote about such books but also repeatedly sent me lists of books; I tried to obtain them for him at a reduced rate through my father’s printing firm, which included a publishing house.
In November 1917, Benjamin sent me a copy of his notes on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, written that summer, which moved me as much as my response moved him. Owing, among other things, to his complete seclusion and the tenor of his utterances, Benjamin’s figure had assumed prophetic proportions in my eyes; this was given expression in letters I wrote at the time to contemporaries in my Zionist circle of friends, as well as in some notes I made. In March 1918, I wrote him a letter in which I compared the six years of his life from 1912 to 1918 with mine, whose focus I found in “learning”—in the specific sense that the word lernen has in Yiddish rather than in German linguistic usage. At the same time I sent him the new translation of the biblical Lamentations that Iliad made, in addition to writing a treatise entitled “Über Klage und Klagelied” (“On Laments and Lamentations”). For my birthday Walter and Dora gave me two photos of them in which he looked very serious and she beautiful. I conducted imaginary dialogues with these pictures in Jena, where they stood on my desk.
On January 14, 1918, I was reexamined and discharged from the army “permanently unfit for duty; not to be examined further.” This made it possible seriously to consider steps that would lead to my departure for Switzerland. Toward the end of April I received a passport for Switzerland on the strength of a certificate from the district medical officer.
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III
I arrived in Bern on the evening of May 4, 1918. Benjamin met me at the station, and we spent a few hours nearby in his apartment on Hallerstrasse. Thus began a long period of intensive companionship and joint studies as well as disturbances, reservations, and arguments.
A few weeks after my arrival, our relationship was subjected to heavy strains for the first time, and not for the only time that year. The expectations each of us had set up for this period, each from his own point of view, were excessive. I expected something prophetic of him, a figure that would be absolutely outstanding not only intellectually but morally as well. Above all, however, the basic reason for these tensions was not so much a conflict of ideas (as in our later conversations and letters about Benjamin’s turn to Marxism—which Benjamin was later to remember as “fiery arguments”) as it was our different characters. This expressed itself in our attitudes toward pragmatic questions concerning the conduct of one’s life and our attitudes toward the bourgeois world (money matters, attitudes toward our parental homes, relations with people, and the like). On a number of occasions there were stormy scenes that easily might have ended catastrophically without Dora’s loving intercession.
The conflict in which I found myself was a moral one. For me Benjamin’s ideas had a radiant moral aura about them; to the extent that I could intellectually empathize with them, they had a morality of their own, which was bound up with their relationship to the religious sphere that at that time was quite clearly and openly at the vanishing point of his thought. Juxtaposed with this, however, in Benjamin’s relationship to things of daily life there existed a strictly amoral element that I could not come to terms with, although he attempted to justify it by his contempt for the bourgeois world. Many of his and Dora’s reflections on such matters elicited my protest. Thus violent arguments were precipitated on a number of occasions, sometimes quite abruptly, in which we clashed because we made different moral decisions. There was about him an element of purity and absoluteness, a devotion to the spiritual like that of a scribe cast out into another world, who has set off in search of his “scripture.” It was a crisis for me when in close contact with him I had to recognize the limitations of this element. Benjamin’s life did not have that enormous measure of purity that distinguished his thought. I was too young, and it did not help to tell myself—as I often did—that the same thing could be said of all of us who were unable to extricate ourselves from entanglements in external circumstances and had to pay a price for the fact that, in the confusion of those years, we sought to leave inviolate for ourselves a realm that these circumstances could not penetrate.
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It began to be apparent to me that although Benjamin and Dora recognized the supremacy of the religious sphere of revelation (and for me this was still tantamount to the acceptance of the Ten Commandments as an absolute value in the moral world), they did not feel bound by it; rather, they undermined it dialectically, where their concrete relationship to the circumstances of their lives was concerned.
This was first revealed during a long conversation about the question to what extent we had a right to exploit our parents financially. Benjamin’s attitude toward the bourgeois world was so unscrupulous and had such nihilistic features that I was outraged. He recognized moral categories only in the sphere of living that he had fashioned about himself and in the intellectual world. Both of them reproached me for my naiveté, telling me that I let myself be dominated by my gestures and that I offended with an “outrageous wholesomeness” that I did not possess, but that possessed me. Benjamin declared that people like us had obligations only to our own kind and not to the rules of a society we repudiated. He said that my ideas of honesty—for example, where our parents’ demands were involved—should be rejected totally. Often I was utterly surprised to find a liberal dash of Nietzsche in his speeches. What was strange about all this was that such arguments, no matter how vehemently they were conducted, often ended with particular cordiality on Benjamin’s part. After one such tempest, both he and Dora were of an “almost heavenly kindness,” and when Benjamin saw me out, he clasped my hand for a long time and looked deep into my eyes. Did he feel that he had carried his heated formulations too far? Was it a desire not to lose the only human being other than Dora who was spiritually and physically close to him in those days?
In those years—between 1915 and at least 1927—the religious sphere assumed a central importance for Benjamin that was utterly removed from fundamental doubt. At its center was the concept of Lehre (teaching), which for him included the philosophical realm but definitely transcended it. In his early writings he reverted repeatedly to this concept, which he interpreted in the sense of the original meaning of the Hebrew torah as “instruction,” instruction not only about the true condition and way of man in the world but also about the transcausal connection of things and their rootedness in God. This had a great deal to do with his conception of tradition, which increasingly assumed a mystic note. Many of our conversations—more than may be perceived from his written notes—revolved about the connections between these two concepts. Religion, which is by no means limited to theology (as, for example, Hannah Arendt believed in writing about his later years), constituted a supreme order for him. In his conversations of the time he had no compunctions about speaking undisguisedly of God. Since we both believed in God, we never discussed His “existence.” God was real for Benjamin—from his earliest notes on philosophy to letters written in the heyday of the Youth Movement to his notes for his first projected thesis on the philosophy of language. Although in his Swiss period Benjamin spoke of philosophy mostly as the doctrine of intellectual classification, his definition, which I took clown at the time, extends into the religious sphere: “Philosophy is absolute experience, deduced in the systematic-symbolic context as language.” Thus it is a part of the “teaching.” The fact that he later abandoned this specifically religious terminology, although the theological sphere remained very close and alive to him, is not in contradiction to this.
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Some weeks we were together every day, at other times at least thrice weekly. Immediately after my arrival Benjamin and Dora suggested that because of housing conditions in the city I move to the little village of Muri, about a half-hour’s walk from the Kirchenfeld Bridge on the road to Thun, where they were about to take an apartment. We then lived out there until early August; my room was only two minutes from theirs, and so an extraordinarily active companionship developed.
My first days passed very intensively and festively. My arrival was celebrated by a festive meal two days later, at which Benjamin informed me that he would study Hebrew once he had passed his doctoral examination. Conversations in the field of Judaism, philosophy, and literature were of primary importance to us, and added to these were the reading of poems, the playing of games, or conversations between Dora and me in which she told me about her and Benjamin’s life before I had met them. Dora often went to bed early, and then Benjamin and I continued the conversation by ourselves. When we parted on May 10 he gave me the incomplete manuscript of his essay, “Metaphysics of Youth” (written 1913-14), which I copied out in longhand.
Right from the start we spoke a great deal about his “Program of Future Philosophy.” Benjamin discussed the scope of the concept of experience that was meant here; according to him, it encompassed man’s intellectual and psychological connection with the world, which takes place in the realms not yet penetrated by cognition. When I mentioned that consequently it was legitimate to include the mantic disciplines in this conception of experience, Benjamin responded with an extreme formulation: “A philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.” Such prophesying may be reprehensible, as in Judaism, but it must be recognized as possible from the connection of things. As a matter of fact, even his very late notes on occult experiences do not exclude such possibilities, though more implicitly. Benjamin’s sometimes lively interest in experiences with hashish is explainable from this perspective and definitely not from any supposed addiction to drugs, which was quite alien to him and has been imputed to him only in recent years.
In those days he also talked a lot about Nietzsche in his final period. Nietzsche was the only person who had seen historical experience in the 19th century, a time when people “experienced” only nature. Even Burckhardt skirted the historical ethic; his ethic was not the ethic of history but that of historiography, of humanism. At that time Benjamin’s statements on philosophy displayed a very clear tendency toward the systematic. Shortly after my arrival I made this notation: “He is sailing full speed into the system.” Sometimes he used the terms system and teaching almost interchangeably. His critical examination of the world of myth continued to belong in this realm, and so did his speculations on cosmogony and the prehistoric world of man. I frequently presented to him my ideas about Judaism and its fight against myth, something I had reflected on a great deal in the preceding eight months. Between mid-June and mid-August in particular we often spoke about these subjects. I suppose it was in those clays that we especially influenced each other. Benjamin read to me a lengthy note on dreams and clairvoyance, in which he tried to formulate the laws governing the world of premythical spectral phenomena. He distinguished between two historical ages of the spectral and the demonic that preceded the age of revelation (which I proposed calling the messianic age instead). Benjamin said the real content of myth was the enormous revolution that polemicized against the spectral and brought its age to an end. Even then he occupied himself with ideas about perception as a reading in the configurations of the surface, which is the way prehistoric man perceived the world around him, particularly the sky. This was the genesis of the reflections he made many years later in his essay, “Doctrine of Similar Things.” The origin of the constellations as configurations on the sky surface was, so he asserted, the beginning of reading and writing, and this coincided with the development of the mythic age. The constellations were to the mythic world what the revelation of Holy Writ was to be later.
In such endeavors the spectrum of the states between dreaming and waking fascinated him as much as the world of dreams itself. He once explained to me the law governing the interpretation of dreams he thought he had found, but rereading my notes on it shows me that I did not understand it. Although, as far as my own experience goes, he later refrained from interpreting dreams, at least explicitly, he continued to relate his dreams on frequent occasions and enjoyed broaching the subject of dream interpretation. I do not remember his ever contradicting my expression of profound disappointment at Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, contained in a letter I wrote him a few years later. In Muri he told of a dream he had had at Seeshaupt in the spring of 1916, three days before the suicide of his favorite aunt. He said this dream had greatly excited him, and he had spent hours in a futile quest to interpret it. “I was lying in a bed; my aunt and another person also lay there, but we did not mingle. People walking by outside were looking in through a window.” He said he did not realize until later that this had been a symbolic announcement of his aunt’s death. I do not recall whether he explicitly stated that one of the persons who looked in through the window was his aunt herself; that would have made his story plausible.
Another time, following a playfully heated conversation about a Flaubert-inspired “Encyclopedia of Nonsense,” he recounted a dream he had had the night before: “There were twenty people there, and in accordance with given subjects they had to line up by twos in order to act out the specific situation. In a magical way the intention made the appropriate garments materialize. Whoever was ready first set the tone for his partner, and whoever portrayed the subject best won the prize.” Benjamin said he really ought to have received the prize for “Rejection”; there he had been a little rotund Chinese in blue garments, and his obtrusive partner, who wanted something from him, had crawled up his back. Another couple had performed just as well, however, and so the prize was held over for the next subject, “Jealousy”: “I was the woman and lay stretched out on the floor. The man embraced me; I looked at him jealously from below and stuck my tongue out all the way.”
In those first weeks we had many more conversations lasting for hours, sometimes until after midnight. Among the things we read was the draft of a new ethics that Ludwig Strauss had sent to Benjamin and me in the form of handwritten copies, which we critically dissected. On a number of occasions Benjamin presented poems of his own, but he primarily read poems by Fritz Heinle, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and August Graf von Platen; about the last-named Benjamin said that he felt a kinship with him.
Like a considerable number of Jews of our generation before Hitler, we did not feel close to Heinrich Heine, and I cannot remember ever discussing Heine’s writings with him. Benjamin had read Heine’s “The Romantic School” while preparing his dissertation on the idea of art criticism in early romanticism, and he made deprecatory remarks about this work. In 1916, when I first heard of Karl Kraus, I had read his essay, “Heine and the Consequences”; Benjamin was as yet unacquainted with this work. At that time he was studying the prose writings of Friedrich Schlegel, who had always attracted him, in his poetic production as well; in the process he had encountered J. G. Fichte. Fichte, Kierkegaard, and Freud he numbered among the “Socratic people.” Much later, in a letter of January 1936 to a mutual friend, he wrote that in Fichte “the revolutionary spirit of the German bourgeoisie had transformed itself into the chrysalis from which the death’s-head moth of National Socialism later crawled.”
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Benjamin never developed a positive relationship to literary Expressionism as a movement, though the movement did originate in the pre-war years in a circle to which Benjamin was personally quite close. He had great admiration, however, for certain phases of the Expressionistic painting of Vasily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and Paul Klee. While still in Jena I had obtained for him Kandinsky’s “The Spiritual Element in Art”; evidently Benjamin was attracted particularly to the mystical elements of the theory contained therein. But he had little use for catchwords in general and was less attached to schools than to specific phenomena.
This period also marked the beginnings of Benjamin’s collection of old and rare children’s books. The collection was really launched by Dora’s enthusiasm for the genre. Dora also loved legends and fairy tales. She and Benjamin gave each other birthday presents of illustrated children’s books until at least 1923, the period of my close association with them, and they particularly hunted for editions in which the illustrations were hand-tinted. Benjamin showed me Johann Peter Lyser’s things with a delight in which the joy of discovery and pleasure at the artistic result were commingled closely. He loved to give little lectures on such books to Dora and me and to emphasize particularly the unexpected associations that these talks brought out in the texts.
Benjamin’s predilection for the imaginative world of associations, which was connected also with his profound interest and absorption in the world of the child—an interest that dated from the early years of his son Stefan—was also evident in his marked interest in the writings of insane persons. In Bern he already owned several works of this type. What primarily fascinated him about them was the architectonic (today one would call it the structural) element of their world systems. His interest was not pathologic-psychological but metaphysical in nature. I heard him discuss this on a number of occasions, although never in connection with the technique of psychoanalysis, with which he was at least acquainted through his study of the works of Freud and some of the latter’s earliest pupils. His relationship to painting, which I have mentioned already—it extended to include James Ensor long before his discovery by the Surrealists—probably belongs in this context also. He liked to visit exhibitions; this enhanced his great appreciation of art more than reproductions did. In Paris he led me, offering highly appreciative remarks along the way, to such places as the Cabinet des Illusions and also to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, whose unexpected juxtapositions of figures equally evoked his aesthetic-associative delight.
Not infrequently we spent our time together taking walks through old Bern, but more often stayed in his large study, where he had gradually assembled much of his library. But sometimes we also took longer trips, for instance a nocturnal hike from Thun to Interlaken in late May 1918. We walked in silence, and when we began to talk, Benjamin soon stopped, since he greatly favored such a change of pace during a conversation. Then we would go on walking as we discussed more or less unimportant things, whereupon we would fall silent and then turn to “essential things” again. This is when I first noticed Benjamin’s basic melancholy, the incipient depressive traits that later became more pronounced. (I never noticed anything manic about him.) At the same time I began to grow aware of the hysterical elements in Dora’s behavior, which were sometimes suddenly triggered by the most insignificant events. Often enough these tension-laden scenes left me overwhelmed and perplexed, like a man who has seen more than he cares to see.
I had told Benjamin a great deal about the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon, whom I had met in Berlin a few months before the Benjamins’ wedding. As nothing of Agnon had been translated into German, however, it was hard to convey an idea of this extraordinary human being and his writings to someone who did not know Hebrew. In the spring of 1918, a wonderful German translation of Agnon’s “The Legend of the Scribe” appeared in Der Jude; I had heard Agnon read it from the Hebrew manuscript in Berlin—an unforgettable experience. I still regard those pages as a high point in Hebrew literature. On a Friday evening in June, I read the translation to Walter and Dora. Benjamin was impressed profoundly, and in a long conversation he rated the first three-fourths of the work among the greatest things he had ever heard, though he raised vehement objections to the visionary ending. He said Agnon had no right to present a vision as the story’s crowning point, since it could not surpass the reality of the preceding portions. “If the story with this ending is perfect, then I don’t understand why there is a Bible. In that case we don’t need the Bible.” I made him a present of Agnon’s story, which I had had bound especially for this occasion.
Benjamin was not only a great metaphysician but also a great bibliophile. The enthusiasm with which he was capable of discussing bindings, paper, and typefaces in those years frequently got on my nerves. Today it is hard for me to reconstruct the impression I received then, but I saw an element of decadence in it. I made this note about it: “Great though [Benjamin’s] life may be in every sense—the only case, near to me of a life being led metaphysically—it nevertheless harbors elements of decadence to a fearful extent. The way one leads one’s life has certain hard-to-define bo lindanes, which decadence exceeds, and unfortunately this is definitely true in Walter’s case. I deny that metaphysically legitimate insights can arise from this way of evaluating books on the basis of their bindings and paper. Walter has a lot of illegitimate insights as well. There’s no way to change him. On the contrary: the only thing I have to guard against is the incursion of this sphere into my own through personal contact.”
Once the three of us had a long conversation about the Ten Commandments—Dora had asked whether one might transgress them—and the significance of the precepts of the Torah. I read them notes on the concept of justice as “action in deferment”: these evoked a strong reaction from Benjamin. They wanted to know why, despite my religious attitude, I did not adopt an Orthodox way of life—a step I have repeatedly considered and have always rejected with mounting determination. At that time I formulated my explanation something like this: for me that manner of life was connected with the concretization of the Torah in a false, premature sphere—as evidenced by the paradoxes of the tricks that become manifest in the process and that are necessarily inherent in such a false relationship. Something is wrong with the application; the orders clash. I said I had to maintain the anarchic suspension. Only later did my historical perspective change—in a direction that disposed of the problem, for my understanding of the sense in which one may speak of revelation had changed. At that time kabbalistic considerations hardly were involved, although I had begun to reflect on them from time to time.
_____________
The Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of Germany and Austria, as well as the ensuing pseudo-revolution, brought current political events into our conversation again for the first time since we had agreed on our attitude toward the war. Between November 9 and 11 we witnessed the general strike, which the Swiss government put down by force of arms, but it hardly engaged our attention, although we did concern ourselves more with the events in Russia and Germany. I was not deeply involved, however. In December I wrote to a friend: “Palestine certainly excites and interests me more than the German revolution.” In any case, we had discussions about dictatorship; I represented the more radical point of view and defended the idea of a dictatorship—which Benjamin then still completely rejected—provided that it was a “dictatorship of poverty,” which to me was not identical with a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” I would say that our sympathies were to a great extent with the Social Revolutionary party in Russia, which later was liquidated so bloodily by the Bolsheviks. We also discussed the question of republic and monarchy, and to my surprise Benjamin opposed my decision in principle in favor of the republic. According to him, such a decision could be made only in relative terms after weighing the prevailing circumstances, and even under present conditions a monarchy might be a legitimate and acceptable form of government.
Benjamin, when confronted with the question of political activity, declined to engage in such activity. The Munich Soviet Republic of April 1919 came into his purview only because Felix Noeggerath, whom he highly esteemed as a philosopher, was arrested for participating in it—something that greatly excited Benjamin. He regarded the Hungarian Soviet Republic as a childish aberration, and the only thing about it that touched him was the fate of Georg Lukács; at that time people (mistakenly) feared that he had been arrested and might be shot. In those days Benjamin, who had read only Lukács’s pre-Marxist writings, such as “The Metaphysics of Tragedy,” and “Theory of the Novel,” and thought very highly of them, still regarded the volume of Dostoevsky’s political writings as the most important modern political work that he knew.
Around the middle of May I informed Benjamin of my decision to make a radical change in my academic goal and to regard Jewish studies rather than mathematics as the focus of my future efforts. According to notes I made at the time, I had realized that “my true goal is not mathematics but to become a Jewish scholar, to be able to occupy myself truly and completely with Judaism; this would yield a great deal worth the effort. My passion simply lies with philosophy and Judaism, and for this I have a great need for philology.” I told Benjamin that I would seek to complete my mathematical studies, which I did (so that I might earn my bread as a teacher of mathematics in a school in Eretz Yisrael), but that I wanted to take my doctorate in Jewish studies. In those months I decided to tackle the study of kabbalistic literature and write a dissertation on the linguistic theory of the Kabbalah. For some time I had had some daring ideas on this subject, and I wanted to confirm or refute them in my dissertation. The combination of philosophy, mysticism, and philology on a Jewish theme stimulated all my aspirations. Benjamin reacted very enthusiastically to this decision.
In those months the tensions that had marked our relationship gradually and finally abated. On June 27, Benjamin passed his own examination summa cum lande, and that evening we celebrated. Dora was high-spirited and happy as a child, and we told one another nothing but meaningless-meaningful stories about Pappelsprapp, as Dora’s fantasy place was called. While Benjamin was preparing for his examination, on May 31 and June 1, he and I had hiked from Biel to Neuchâtel amid many conversations. We had a long discussion on whether his manner of living and mine were the same; he was convinced that they were and I denied it. We also talked a lot about politics and socialism, and expressed great reservations about socialism and the position of the individual if it was ever put into practice. To our way of thinking, theocratic anarchism was still the most sensible answer to politics. At that time I had written a long critique of Hapo’el halza’ir (“The Young Worker”), the Hebrew periodical of the Palestinian “people’s socialists,” and I had a gloomy presentiment concerning the fate of intellectuals under socialism. “In such an order the intellectual could be conceived of only as a madman”—this sentence in my diary entry of June 29, 1919 I reread with profound horror fifty-five years later.
1 See “How I Came to the Kabbalah,” by Gershom Scholem, COMMENTARY, May 1980—Ed.
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My Friend Walter Benjamin
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Hillary Clinton’s Bad Old Days
The Democratic front-runner is still intimately involved with conspiracy-theorist leftists
Joshua Muravchik 2016-03-17
aving tacked to the left in her contest with the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton will almost certainly tack back toward the center in the general-election campaign. She has executed this zigzag before. By this point, her true beliefs may be undiscoverable, perhaps even by her. But her apparent weakness for the counsel of unrepentant veterans of the 1960s New Left gives cause for wonder about the voices she would listen to and the direction she would steer once she reached the White House.
Clinton’s own ideological roots lie in that movement. When the president of Wellesley College yielded to the demand of protesting students that one of their number be added to the graduation program in 1969 to counterbalance the establishmentarian commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, Hillary Rodham was their choice. She delivered an address in which the core idea was this: “Our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”
She was chosen because she had already made a name as an activist, a trajectory that continued beyond Wellesley. Its highlights were recalled in 2008 by none other than Tom Hayden, who as one of the organizers of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Michigan was perhaps the preeminent founder of the New Left. Hayden, whose purpose was to retaliate against the Clinton campaign for circulating accounts of Barack Obama’s far-left associations, wrote:
She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations [at the Democratic National Convention]. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike against an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of [Black Panther] Bobby Seal during his murder trial in 1970….[A]fter Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists.”
It was widely reported that Clinton-family retainer Sidney Blumenthal had furnished the material on Obama’s past, making this a piquant clash. These two men—Hayden and Blumenthal—were New Leftists who had gone on to big careers more by obscuring than revising their youthful radical views. Now each was seeking to damage the other’s favored candidate by dishing on their radical pasts.
Of course, everything in Hayden’s Hillary history happened long ago, and her views, like those of most of us who were 1960s radicals of one stripe or another, have doubtless evolved. Yet in thousands of pages of writings and in countless spoken words since, she has failed to explain in what way they have changed. Instead, she has deliberately blurred the picture.
In Living History, an autobiography issued in anticipation of running for the presidency in 2004, she contrives to make herself seem to have been nothing but a spectator. She claims she went to the 1968 Chicago demonstration merely “to witness history.” She writes that she “moderated the mass meeting” where Yale students voted to join the strike and observed “how seriously my fellow students took” the issues—as if she herself had not been an advocate. She reports that “demonstrations broke out in and around campus” supporting the Black Panthers while she was at Yale, without offering a hint that she took part in any way. As for her summer at the Bay Area’s premier hard-left law firm, she acknowledges only working on a “child custody” case.
The First Lady’s leftish image was really defined by her curious dalliance with Michael Lerner, a fellow 1960s radical who had founded the Seattle Liberation Front. A demonstration the Front organized devolved into rioting, leading to Lerner’s prosecution in 1970 as one of the ‘Seattle Seven.’This evasiveness extended to her descriptions of the events themselves. No mention is made, for example, that the Panthers in the dock in New Haven were on trial for the torture and murder of one of their own (whom they suspected of being an informer), as if it all may have been a matter of government persecution. Regarding Vietnam, she portrays Yale’s chaplain William Sloane Coffin glowingly as having become a “national leader of the anti-war movement through his articulate moral critique” of America’s actions, but she omits mentioning that he traveled to Hanoi in solidarity with America’s enemy, a pitiless totalitarian regime. All this whitewashing and airbrushing prompts one to wonder whether she ever rethought her youthful radicalism or just left it behind because it was impractical or impolitic.
In 1992, when the Bill Clinton campaign sought and won my support as it wooed “Reagan Democrats” back to the fold, I asked Al Frum, then the head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, about Hillary’s leftward tug on her husband. He responded that to his surprise she was proving to be a “big help” in keeping the campaign in the middle of the road. So she may have been, but once ensconced in the White House, she emerged at once as being “solidly on the left of [the] administration’s ideological spectrum,” as the Nation noted enthusiastically. Her activities, especially her leading role in the unsuccessful effort to dramatically overall the health-care system, were widely seen as one source of the backlash that brought the Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 1994.
The First Lady’s leftish image was really defined by her curious dalliance with Michael Lerner, a fellow 1960s radical who had founded the Seattle Liberation Front. A demonstration the Front organized devolved into rioting, leading to Lerner’s prosecution in 1970 as one of the “Seattle Seven.” A decade later, he reinvented himself as a “psychotherapist,” creating the Institute for Labor and Mental Health. A decade or so after that, he announced that he had been ordained a rabbi, albeit without having attended any seminary. Rabbinic garb added bite to Lerner’s criticisms of Israel, which were constant and invariably extreme. It also enabled him to formulate a new patter about spirituality that grabbed Hillary’s attention.
Lerner’s spirituality did not signify an interest in man’s relation to the eternal. Instead it consisted of the same leftist causes he had long championed, wrapped in ponderous talk about “mov[ing] from an ethos of selfishness to an ethos of caring and community.” He called this the “politics of meaning.”
Hillary borrowed the phrase when she delivered a major speech in 1993 lamenting a “sleeping sickness of the soul” that she said was “at the root of America’s ills.” This necessitated “redefining who we are as human beings in the post-modern age.” Soon after, in greeting Lerner at a public event, she said, “Am I your mouthpiece or what?” When the speech evinced some ridicule—“what on earth does it mean?” asked the New Republic—Clinton conceded, “As Michael Lerner and I have discussed, we have to first create a language that would better communicate what we are trying to say.” So she had him to the White House for a skull session.
Much as Lerner reveled in press accounts describing him as Hillary’s “guru,” her “politics of meaning” speech echoed themes she had favored before ever encountering Lerner. As the late Michael Kelly pointed out in a stunning New York Times Magazine article, the speech tracked closely her 1969 Wellesley commencement address in which she spoke of “forg[ing] an identity in this particular age” by “coming to terms with our humanness.” Verily, the girl was mother to the woman. The 21-year-old was now 45, but the thoughts were the same.
After the Republican landslide in 1994, Bill Clinton moved sharply back toward the center, Hillary lowered her profile, and Lerner and his politics of meaning were no longer heard from in Washington. The result was a highly successful presidency, whose success is the core reason there may yet be a second Clinton presidency. The only real blemish on the first was the scandal of Bill’s various extramarital moments, which became the focus of an impeachment process. One consequence of this was to cement the role of Sidney Blumenthal as a key adviser to the Clintons, now especially to Hillary.
Blumenthal had been a member of the SDS. He began a career in journalism writing for “alternative” newspapers like the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix and radical magazines like the Nation and In These Times. He published an anthology that carried an introduction by Philip Agee, the CIA turncoat who declared himself a “communist” and turned his knowledge of America’s secrets over to Cuban intelligence. In the 1980s, Blumenthal began to contribute to mainstream publications and landed a position with the Washington Post, which then leaned more sharply leftward than it does today. Blumenthal’s beat was exposing the wrongdoing—real or invented—of conservatives. His contributions often appeared in its Style section, which suited his method—to besmirch his subject’s reputations rather than critiquing their ideas.
His schoolyard style was vividly displayed in a book he published at the time, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. I captured his Trump-like approach in a review in these pages:
He reports that Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, read two conservative classics in his freshman year in college, after which “his mind was set in a pattern that would never waver.”…The neoconservatives as a group embraced President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as “a way to compensate” for their failure to “broker the Jewish vote for Reagan” in 1984. Further, “a desire for vengeance” against the culture of the 1960’s “led some neoconservatives to feel a measure of vindication when John Lennon was killed” (though Blumenthal offers neither names nor specifics). William F. Buckley Jr. was inspired to launch National Review by an obsessional anti-Semite. Arthur Laffer is fat.
The other side of the coin of Blumenthal’s abusiveness toward ideological adversaries was his sycophancy toward liberals in power or with the potential to get there. NPR’s senior Washington editor Ron Elving has reported this history:
Blumenthal had generated controversy at the New Republic in 1984 with his enthusiastic coverage of…Democratic presidential hopeful…Gary Hart.
The Hart flirtation was soon surpassed by Blumenthal’s infatuation with Bill Clinton, whose 1992 campaign he praised for its potential to bring “epochal change.” . . . Even as the Clintons’ health care bill collapsed and the Republicans took over both the House and Senate in the elections of 1994, Blumenthal remained ardently supportive, touting his access and long interviews with the president.
By 1997, the year Bill Clinton’s second term began, Blumenthal dropped the second shoe, going to work as a White House aide. There he toiled, said the New York Times, as “speech-writer, in-house intellectual and press corps whisperer.” The “impeachment trial…solidified Blumenthal’s relationship with the Clintons,” CNN reported. “Blumenthal routinely provided [them] with information about their Republican opponents…and how to message against them.” It was not only politicians whom Sidney went after. His longtime friend and former fellow-leftist Christopher Hitchens wrote of their reunion in 1998 after an interregnum:
Where was my witty if sometimes cynical, clever if sometimes dogmatic, friend? In his place seemed to be someone who had gone to work for John Gotti. He talked coldly and intently of a lethal right-wing conspiracy that was slowly engulfing the capital. And he spoke, as if out of the side of a tough-guy mouth, about the women who were tools of the plot. Kathleen Willey, who had been interviewed on television the preceding weekend, was showing well in the polls, but that would soon be fixed….As for Monica Lewinsky, he painted her as a predatory and unstable stalker.
Blumenthal’s position as Clinton family consiglieri did not end when Bill left office. Instead, he took up his pen again, producing an 800-plus-page book, settling scores with the Clinton’s critics and detractors. Describing himself as the first family’s “good soldier” and “first knight,” he performed “acrobatic feats of protectiveness [that] are endless,” wrote New York Times book critic, Janet Maslin.
When President Obama named Hillary Clinton secretary of state, she wanted Blumenthal on her staff, but presidential aides vetoed the idea because of Blumenthal’s part in spreading derogatory information about Obama during the primaries. Blumenthal continued nonetheless to function as a confidant and adviser. In lieu of a government salary, he became a consultant to the Clinton Foundation and also to Media Matters, a “progressive media watchdog” Hillary Clinton helped found, and to its closely linked PAC, American Bridge.
According to news stories, his earnings from these positions exceeded what he would have drawn at State.
Mrs. Clinton’s recently released emails include hundreds from Blumenthal. As Politico’s Nahal Toosi put it, “Clinton received advice from many…but the quantity and audacity of the missives from Blumenthal…stand out.” Her address on this private server was reserved for top aides, close friends, high government officials, and former secretaries of state, denied even to most diplomatic and administration officials. When Blumenthal’s outsized presence in her inbox prompted questions from reporters, Clinton dismissed it, saying his were “unsolicited” messages, some of which she had “passed on.”
In truth she often replied to them with appreciation, occasionally asked Blumenthal for more on a subject, and at least once wrote that she was waiting for something he had promised. As the New York Times reported: “Mrs. Clinton…took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, often forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials…and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.”
The attention that Blumenthal’s messages attracted has been magnified by the ongoing controversy over the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which revolves in part around questions about whether Secretary Clinton had done everything she might have to prevent or stop it and whether she had subsequently misrepresented the attackers’ motives. As emails were released under judicial order, reporters were quick to notice that prior to the attack, Blumenthal sent her dozens of messages on Libya. By one journalist’s count, one-third of the released material pertaining to Libya came from Blumenthal, who had no known expertise on the subject.
Blumenthal, however, scarcely limited himself to Libya. The messages consisted mostly of articles he was forwarding, often prefaced with a brief comment. They touched on Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, North Korea, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Georgia, and the European Union, as well as various non-geographic topics. No other country received even a fraction of the attention he devoted to Libya, with one glaring exception: Israel. There was, however, a striking difference between Blumenthal’s Libya messages and those about Israel.
The former are long, detailed, and written in the style of intelligence reports. When called to testify to Congress, Blumenthal surprised listeners by saying he had not written them—and their substance and style confirmed this. Blumenthal, it turned out, was advising a business partnership aiming to secure contracts to provide humanitarian aid in Libya’s reconstruction. One of the partners, a retired U.S. intelligence officer, had authored the memos.
Although Blumenthal’s involvement in this venture created a conflict of interest regarding Libya, his emails do not seem designed to influence policy. They and most of those on other topics seem intended primarily to sustain his own value to Clinton by demonstrating his breadth of knowledge and range of contacts. In contrast, his communications about Israel clearly press a point of view about the country and its policies. They are unfailingly critical of Israel, blaming it for the absence of peace.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009 first publicly endorsed a two-state solution with Palestinians, Blumenthal wrote to Clinton that this was a “transparently false and hypocritical ploy” on which she should try to “catch” him. When the U.S. brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in 2012, he wrote: “Hope it holds….Bibi refuses a partner for peace, but has encouraged one for war.” When she prepared to speak before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he urged using the occasion to diminish AIPAC:
While praising AIPAC, remind it in as subtle but also direct a way as you can that it does not have a monopoly over American Jewish opinion….AIPAC itself has become an organ of the Israeli right, specifically Likud. By acknowledging J Street you give them legitimacy, credibility….Just by mentioning J Street in passing, AIPAC becomes a point on the spectrum, not the controller of the spectrum.
J Street is the counter-AIPAC, calling itself “pro-Israel,” but it devotes the lion’s share of its words and energy to harsh criticism of the Jewish state.
Among the articles Blumenthal transmitted was one by the UK’s Jeremy Greenstock arguing that Hamas sought peace and quoting approvingly a UN official who called Israel’s control of imports into Gaza “illegal, inhuman . . . insane . . . a medieval siege.” He sometimes sent articles by left-wing Israelis on various topics. One, by Gershon Baskin, condemned Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders. Another, by Yuri Avnery, claimed that “the cult of Masada is becoming dominant” in Israel. A third, by Avner Cohen, argued that Israel should join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and abandon its policy of “nuclear ambiguity.” Blumenthal added the comment that Israel’s policy “is itself the model for Iran.”
Blumenthal offered counsel on U.S. policy by paraphrasing a post by Pat Lang, a blogger whom he called a “friend.” Blumenthal wrote, “The U.S. must be insistent, especially with Israel, playing very firm and tough, or else the talks will collapse, which is likely the Israeli objective.” Another Lang blog that Blumenthal forwarded suggested that U.S. officials had fallen for Israeli “disinformation” in reporting that Syria had transferred Scud missiles to Hezbollah. When Clinton responded tersely, “skepticism not in order,” Blumenthal replied, implying that Israel was nonetheless the real villain. “Of course, if Bibi were to have engaged Syria in negotiations taking its previous gestures seriously,” this might not have happened, he said.
In a piece on Europe’s anti-immigrant parties, Max wrote: ‘The extreme right is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideas…a racist apartheid state.’ Clinton replied, ‘A very smart piece—as usual.’The author whose writing Blumenthal transmitted most often was his son, Max. Max Blumenthal first garnered public attention with Republican Gomorrah, a 2009 book that describes itself as “a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidness from the dark heart of the forces that now have a leash on the party.” Building on this, Max secured a post as senior writer for the “alternative” website AlterNet. When Sidney sent Clinton an advance copy of the epilogue of the paperback edition, she raved: “I loved the epilogue….He’s so good.”
In recent years, Max’s focus has been Israel, the subject of a half dozen of his articles forwarded by his father. Max is a mainstay of the fervently anti-Israel website, Mondoweiss, and the even more fervent Electronic Intifada, edited by Ali Abunimah, creator of the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) campaign. One gets a taste of Electronic Intifada from tweets by Abunimah and Rana Baker, listed on the masthead along with Max as members of the site’s “team.” When three Israeli teenagers disappeared in June 2014 (later to turn up murdered), Baker tweeted: “Wonderful wonderful news three settlers have been kidnapped.”
Max’s specialty is granular detail that gives his work a patina of authority even as the facts he conveys are often wrong. For example, Mondoweiss ran 2,000 words by Max and Philip Weiss debunking the accusation that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah voiced anti-Semitism. They detailed the sources scoured by Max. But Nasrallah’s own website carried an audio recording of him declaiming the most chilling of the words in question: “If [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
In 2013 Nation Books published Max’s, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. The Nation’s own columnist, Eric Alterman, a harsh critic of Israel’s, called it “shameful” and “awful,” saying “like a child’s fairy tale, each story he tells has the same repetitive narrative, with Israel, without exception, cast as the Big Bad Wolf.” In sum, he said, “this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”
Of course Sidney cannot be held accountable for Max’s writings, but of the articles Sidney forwarded to Clinton on the subject of Israel, he sent more by Max than by any other author. She never, as far as I can see, commented on Max’s articles that focused exclusively on Israel, but to ones devoted only partly to Israel she sometimes reacted with enthusiasm. In a piece on Europe’s anti-immigrant parties, Max wrote: “The extreme right is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideas…a racist apartheid state.” Clinton replied, “A very smart piece—as usual.” To another that referred to “the extensive history of Israeli and ultra-Zionist funding and promotion of Islamophobic propaganda in the United States,” she commented, “Your Max is a mitzvah.” To yet another that called the late Zionist blogger Rachel Abrams “an unabashed genocide enthusiast,” she blurted, “Max strikes again!”
The tone of goofy cheer indicates the level of solidarity and intimacy between Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal. In making a highly successful career near power, Blumenthal has never, to my knowledge, confronted his youthful radicalism to explain which, if any, of the ideas held then seem mistaken today and why. Far more consequentially, the same is true of Hillary Clinton, which is disquieting now that the presidency seems so readily within her grasp. The danger is not that she will reveal herself to be some kind of Manchurian Candidate once in office. Rather it is that, having forsaken radicalism merely out of concern for electability, she will continue to be credulous toward the counsel of the Michael Lerners and Sidney Blumenthals of the world.
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Matthew Continetti
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David Brooks
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Heather Mac Donald
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Seattle Protest Roasters
Review of "Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist" By Sunil Yapa
Fernanda Moore 2016-03-16
our Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, Sunil Yapa’s debut novel, takes place on the first day of the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. Fifty thousand demonstrators, some of them strange bedfellows indeed, surrounded the convention center where the WTO was scheduled to meet: “Teamsters and turtles” marched in solidarity with farmers, labor unionists, NGO workers, consumer-protection groups, and anarchists, among others. When an anarchist “black bloc” began smashing windows, the understaffed and underprepared Seattle police panicked. Within hours, the march turned from a mildly surreal spectacle into a violent showdown between protestors and police, who fired tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets into the crowds in a vain effort to disperse them. Hundreds of protestors were arrested; several WTO meetings were canceled or postponed. Property damage was tallied in the millions of dollars. The cops ran out of tear gas. The following day, Seattle’s mayor called in the National Guard.
Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
By Sunil Yapa view book
Yapa’s novel opens, fittingly, with a struck match. Victor, a homeless 19-year-old, “with his dark eyes and his thin shoulders and his cafecito con leche skin, wearing a pair of classic Air Jordans, the leather so white it glowed,” is getting high beside the tent he’s pitched below a freeway. Soon he’ll join the marching crowds—not to demonstrate (Victor claims he’s “absolutely allergic to belief”), but to sell weed to the protestors. Victor’s a messed-up kid—lonely, angry, tired, “his heart of hearts poisoned by a bitter, wounded hatred, a sickness of the soul.” Through his jaded eyes, we get our first glimpse of the WTO protestors.
They’re a motley bunch, chanting and singing and “popping out from every hole and door, waves of protestors sloshing in the streets, bright-eyed thousands appearing as if summoned.” At first, all Victor can do is gawk. Topless girls with duct tape across their nipples cry “Death to the police state.” There are “dreadlocked djinns dangling from the lampposts, cameras around their necks” and civil-rights lawyers in combat boots. Yuppies are “stomping into the dawn from their suburban warrens, from their gorgeous mansions that glittered fat on the Sound.” It’s a parade, Victor decides, a bizarre and trippy pageant, all these “sweet, round, high-fructose faces” glowing in solidarity. “Hey, man,” Victor says, sidling up to a hefty guy in a blue jacket—a union man, it turns out, marching right next to all the hippies and freaks. “You need any weed?”
But poor Victor has badly, and hilariously, misjudged the scene. Everyone he approaches—from the union guy to a geezer banging a goatskin drum—recoils, then tells him to get lost. “You guys are some pretty cool heads,” he says, rather desperately, to a pair of groovy-seeming baby boomers.
“Are you trying to sell me marijuana?” the husband snaps, before storming off to tattle to a cop. Even a “sexy undergrad” who plops down next to Victor wants nothing to do with his stash. “Look, you don’t understand. This is a drug-free area,” she tells him. “This is a protest march,” Victor counters, wearily exhaling smoke. “Where’d you hear that?” she says. “This isn’t a protest march. This is a direct action.” And with that, she plucks the joint from Victor’s lips and crushes it beneath her shoe.
It’s a great setup—amusing and revelatory all at once—and it cleverly shines light on both the privileged, fuddy-duddy protestors and the clueless, half-baked kid. Victor’s failed business venture nicely illuminates an interesting paradox: While the rich white folks protest corporate capitalism, the homeless black teenager—a budding entrepreneur!—is desperate for a sale.
In subsequent chapters, Yapa introduces six more narrators. Two are activists, three are cops, and one is the Sri Lankan delegate to the WTO. This should work beautifully—what better way to showcase the protests’ complexities and contradictions than to describe key issues from multiple vantage points across both sides? But hold on.
First we meet John Henry, a holier-than-thou career activist, “a man you could imagine in a dream of the Himalaya, high above the clouds.” (Actually, he’s from Detroit.) Once he was a storefront preacher; now he leads “a congregation in the streets” and spends a lot of time yammering about the beauty of struggle and how much he loves his people. John Henry’s girlfriend—a skinny, dreadlocked white woman named King—is another experienced dissident, “trained in the tactics, techniques, and philosophy of nonviolence.” Deep down, of course, she’s someone entirely different—a woman with a dark (but easy to guess) criminal secret, a violent temper, and a dangerous tendency toward rage.
The novel falls apart. Yapa’s writing turns mushy and sentimental, riddled with rhetorical questions. Everyone waxes moony and philosophical, and all the characters sound exactly the same.On the other side of the barricades, we get Officer Timothy Park—jumpy and hostile, his face disfigured by scars, the very model of a trigger-happy Bad Cop. Right away he gets in trouble for tangling with the protestors; a few pages later, to his partner Julia’s exasperation, he pepper sprays a carload of Quaker activists who give him a little lip. Julia, a tough-talking, gorgeous, Latina cliché (her steely demeanor, naturally, belies her tender and damaged heart) privately considers Park “as radioactive as a blast survivor”—which turns out to be exactly what he is. Park’s mental and physical scars date from the Oklahoma City bombing; Julia was traumatized by the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. They’re like a roll call of late-20th-century catastrophes.
Julia and Park report to Bill Bishop, chief of police, by all accounts a hell of a guy. A 30-year veteran of the force, Bishop favors community policing, opposes departmental racism, and cheerfully marches—though he’s straight—in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade. Naturally, he’s a secret sufferer, too. Ever since his beloved wife died and his troubled teenage stepson ran away, Yapa tells us, Bishop has had “a heart full of loss and a head full of doom.”
Yapa’s policemen and protestors lack Victor’s spark; they’re drab stereotypes with utterly predictable inner conflicts, artlessly deployed at intervals throughout the novel’s increasingly hackneyed plot. First Park, tipped off by the un-groovy boomers, confiscates Victor’s drug stash; then King and John Henry show up to save Victor from the Man. In a trice, formerly apolitical Victor morphs into a burgeoning activist. (He learned about the power of the people, it seems, by reading his beloved dead mother’s books.) When his new best friends need one more body for “lockdown,” Victor eagerly volunteers; after being chained to fellow protestors, he looks up to see a familiar uniformed man. Guess which police chief turns out to be his estranged stepfather?
As these and other coincidences pile up, the novel falls apart. Yapa’s writing turns mushy and sentimental, riddled with rhetorical questions (“Was there not a single word he could say that had not been emptied of value?”) and bogged down in treacly cliché. “Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.” That’s Victor, channeling Chief Bishop, though it’s often hard to sort out whose perspective the narrative is mired in. Everyone waxes moony and philosophical, and all the characters sound exactly the same.
Symbolic details are invariably overdetermined and overdone. Victor’s Air Jordans, for instance, stand for sweatshop labor, late-stage American capitalism, misplaced materialism, greediness, parental indulgence, and, finally, for fatherly love. We hear so much about fear and loss and loneliness and tears that we grow immune to their significance. Which is frustrating, since Yapa writes beautifully when he wants to. An extended digression describing the Sri Lankan civil war is vivid and convincing, and there are plenty of small moments (as when Yapa describes feuding protestors “yelling philosophies in each other’s faces”) that come across as perfectly apt. Taken together, these sections aren’t quite enough to save Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. But they certainly leave the reader curious about Yapa’s next novel.
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Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
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“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
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“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
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Don’t Forget Harry James
Giving a scorned musician his proper due
Terry Teachout 2016-03-16
ournalists are fond of marking centenaries, but no particular fuss was made over the occasion of Harry James’s birth 100 years ago this past March. To the extent that he is still remembered today, it is only for having set Frank Sinatra on the road to glory by hiring the young singer to perform with his big band in 1939. Yet James had once been famous enough in his own right for his picture to appear on the front page of the New York Times when he died in 1983, a fitting tribute to a trumpet-playing bandleader described in the paper’s obituary as “a major figure of the swing era” whose big band “remained popular for more than 40 years.”
That was, if anything, an understatement. No jazz instrumentalist has ever been more popular than James. Seventy of his records appeared on Billboard’s pop charts between 1939 and 1953. (The Rolling Stones, by contrast, have had 56 chart hits to date.) During that same time, he and his band were heard regularly on network radio and appeared in 10 feature films, including one with Betty Grable, the celebrated World War II pinup girl and the second of James’s three wives. Long after rock ’n’ roll had decisively supplanted golden-age pop as America’s preferred form of popular music, he managed to keep his band working, continuing to perform in public until nine days before his death.
Why, then, is James mostly forgotten? First, his popularity was and is off-putting to certain critics and jazz buffs, and the way in which he won it was even more offensive to them. As John S. Wilson explained in the Times obituary, James’s success “came only when he added to his repertory romantic ballads played with warm emotion and a vibrato so broad that at times it seemed almost comic.” Still, even at the height of his commercial success, he also played plenty of hard-core big-band jazz, and numerous other critics and scholars, including some who had no use for his schmaltzy hit records of “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” and “You Made Me Love You,” lauded him. Gunther Schuller, for one, called James “the most technically assured and prodigiously talented white trumpet player of the late Swing Era…possibly the most complete trumpet player who ever lived.”
No less troublesome, especially now that race-conscious jazz critics are on the lookout for egregious examples of “cultural appropriation,” was the fact that James was white. But the color of his skin did not prevent such illustrious black trumpeters as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clark Terry from admiring his technique and artistry. Louis Armstrong, on whom James initially modeled his playing, went so far as to praise him in characteristically pithy terms: “That white boy—he plays like a jig!”
One must dig more deeply to understand why James is so little remembered today, a venture aided by the existence of Peter J. Levinson’s Trumpet Blues (1999), a thoroughly researched biography that deals frankly with his squalid private life. A hard-drinking, philandering loner who abused his wives, ignored his children, and lost a fortune at the craps tables of the casinos that employed him, James died broke and unhappy. But he left behind ample evidence that he was a great jazzman who made self-destructive career choices, at least where his reputation was concerned.
AS THE SAYING goes, James was born in a trunk. His mother was an acrobat, and his father led a circus band that toured throughout the south. James’s father, himself an accomplished trumpeter, drilled the boy unstintingly in the hope that he would become a classical musician, and Harry developed into a budding young virtuoso with an impeccably polished technique and the iron-lipped stamina that comes from playing marches for circus acts.
But James had other plans. He fell in love with jazz after hearing Louis Armstrong’s early records, and when his family settled down in Texas in 1931, he started playing with local dance bands and working his way up the professional ladder. Benny Goodman, the most famous bandleader of the early swing era, heard and hired him six years later, and within a matter of months the 21-year-old James had become, after Goodman himself, the band’s best-known and most admired soloist.
James recorded extensively with Goodman in 1937 and 1938, and he can also be heard in off-the-air broadcasts of live performances that illustrate even more clearly what Zeke Zarchy, whom he replaced in Goodman’s trumpet section, later said about him: “Fire came out of that trumpet every time he picked up his horn. It was like a guy throwing a spear.” His sound was fat-toned and ferociously intense, and he played with a darting, daring agility worthy of Armstrong in his prime.
James had another spear in his capacious quiver. Like Armstrong, he was also a wholly idiomatic blues player, an accomplishment rare among white jazzmen of the ’30s that added emotional depth to a self-consciously flashy style. As he explained in a 1977 interview with Merv Griffin: “I was brought up in Texas with the blues. When I was 11 or 12 years old, down in what they call Barbecue Row, I used to sit in with the guys that had the broken bottlenecks on their guitars, playing the blues. That’s all we knew.”
James was determined to cover all the musical bases, and he did so with seeming effortlessness. Moreover, he always insisted that he performed sentimental ballads not for commercial reasons but solely because he liked doing so.In addition, he was a talented composer and arranger, a more than competent drummer and dancer, and a physically attractive man whose piercing blue eyes and slender build made him catnip to women—and therefore born to be a bandleader. In 1939 he went out on his own and spent the next two years struggling to find a distinctive ensemble voice. James’s goal was to lead “a band that really swings and that’s easy to dance to.” He also longed to feature himself on ballads, which Goodman had been unwilling to let him play.
Finally, in 1941, he turned the key of commercial success by hiring Helen Forrest, perhaps the most tasteful and expressive female singer of the big-band era, and adding a small string section to his otherwise conventional instrumental lineup. It was with this group that James recorded an unabashedly sentimental arrangement of “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It),” a 1913 ballad that had been revived four years earlier by Judy Garland. His instrumental version promptly became a million-selling hit, and he rode it to fame and fortune by recording a series of equally fulsome ballads featuring Forrest.
The jazz critic Dan Morgenstern has called “You Made Me Love You” “the record that the jazz critics never forgave Harry James for recording.” Their disdain, while excessive, is understandable: James played the song and others like it with a mile-wide vibrato that has been likened to that of an Italian tenor in full cry, cushioned by sugary violins. He also featured himself on light-classic arrangements like “Carnival of Venice” and “Flight of the Bumblebee” that showed off the spectacularly nimble technique he had acquired from countless hours of youthful practice. At the same time, though, he recorded any number of swinging vocal and instrumental sides, including “Crazy Rhythm,” “Jeffrie’s Blues,” “I’ve Heard That Song Before” (with Forrest), Duke Ellington’s “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and his own “Let Me Up,” all of which demonstrated his prowess as a jazzman.
The major labels stopped recording him in 1968, the same year in which he made his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and he soon came to be seen not as a still-vital soloist but as the leader of a nostalgia act.James was determined to cover all the musical bases, and he did so with seeming effortlessness. Moreover, he always insisted that he performed sentimental ballads not for commercial reasons but solely because he liked doing so: “I really get bugged about these people talking about commercial tunes…I don’t think we’ve ever recorded or played one tune that I didn’t particularly love to play. Otherwise, I wouldn’t play it.”
James maintained his popularity into the late ’40s, far longer than most of his contemporaries, but changing musical tastes ultimately forced him to disband his wartime orchestra and organize a smaller, stringless group. Nonplussed by the fast-growing popularity of solo singers like Sinatra, he briefly flirted (as did Benny Goodman) with big-band bebop in 1949, but quickly discovered that his fans were uninterested in hearing him perform harmonically complex up-tempo compositions. “It was a big mistake…playing music that was not fundamentally dance music in places where people came to dance,” he ruefully confessed.
After treading stylistic water for several years, James found a new path to popularity. Long a fervent admirer of the no-nonsense swing of Count Basie, he opted to emulate the smooth, streamlined approach of the “New Testament” band that Basie had put together in 1952. Basie’s new group played blues-oriented ensemble jazz with explosively wide dynamic contrasts. It was harmonically advanced but steered clear of the ultra-fast tempos and vertiginous chromaticism of the boppers. His 1957 album Wild About Harry, arranged and performed in this new style, immediately re-established him as a major voice.
James stuck closely to his neo-Basie approach for most of the rest of his life, leading a first-class group of crack instrumentalists (especially in the mid-’60s, when Buddy Rich played drums for him) and programming his hits of the ’40s alongside big-band versions of jazz compositions such as Miles Davis’s “Walkin’” and Horace Silver’s “Doodlin’.” Not only did he continue to solo with verve and authority, but he gradually expanded the parameters of his style, incorporating elements of the playing of such postwar bebop trumpeters as Clifford Brown without compromising his individuality.
Then his luck ran out. The major labels stopped recording him in 1968, the same year in which he made his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and he soon came to be seen not as a still-vital soloist but as the leader of a nostalgia act, playing a steadily narrowing repertoire of pop hits for senior citizens who longed to relive their youth. By the time he died in 1983, he had become a back number.
HOW COULD SO superlative a soloist and bandleader have fallen off the map of jazz? In retrospect, it seems clear that James’s key mistake with those writers who maintain and burnish the reputations of musicians was to present himself as a celebrity bandleader first and a jazz musician second.
Throughout his two-year tenure as a member of Benny Goodman’s troupe, he had recorded to unfailingly powerful effect as a small-group sideman with such distinguished swing-era contemporaries as Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Pete Johnson, and Red Norvo. But after he started his own band in 1939, James never again worked as anything other than a leader, nor did he perform in small groups save on rare occasions with studio-only combos whose members were drawn from the ranks of his own band. As a result, baby-boom jazz fans were largely unaware of his gifts as an improviser.
At the same time, James mostly limited his public appearances to ballrooms and casino lounges. It would not be until 1958 that his band would play a jazz club. Basie and Ellington performed both in nightclubs and in concert halls, and they made a point of recording frequently with small groups of various kinds as well as with their big bands. Because of this, they were seen as jazzmen first and foremost. And even after the center of gravity in jazz shifted from big bands to combos in the ’50s, no one was in doubt as to their continuing musical significance. Not so James, who clung stubbornly to his superannuated matinee-idol status until it was too late for him to remake his image along more modern lines.
James’s refusal to come to terms with his diminished place in the world of American pop culture likely had much to do with the emotional immaturity on which everyone who knew him remarked. Incapable of personal intimacy and embarrassed by his lack of formal education, he spent his free time chasing women, drinking to excess, and gambling away his hard-earned fortune. Such compulsive behavior is usually the mark of a deeply troubled person, and Helen Forrest, with whom James had a romantic relationship in the ’40s, believed that he was happy only when playing for an adoring crowd: “He was at peace, and he knew he was loved when he was playing the trumpet….He knew nobody could hurt him.”
It stands to reason that such a man would have found it inordinately difficult to settle for the limited amount of fame available to the postwar jazzman. But James’s unwillingness to face reality should not be allowed to obscure his musical stature. He was one of the foremost jazz trumpeters of the 20th century, and the groups that he led from 1957 to the end of the ’60s ranked among the very best in postwar big-band jazz. One can—and should—forgive a great many saccharine ballads in return for such consistent excellence.
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Max Boot
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Where Have All the Critics Gone?
Long time passing
Joseph Epstein 2016-03-16
ritics, like belly buttons, come in two kinds: innies and outies. The innies—critics, not navels— are appreciative, inclusive, always hoping for the best and, some might say, too often finding it. Those most likely to say so are the outies, who view themselves as guardians of culture, exclusive, permanently posted to make certain no second-rate goods get past the gate and into the citadel of superior art. The innies are hopeful, sympathetic to experiment, more than a touch nervous about the avant-garde marching past and leaving them behind. The outies are skeptical, culturally conservative, and tend to believe, with Paul Valéry, that everything changes but the avant-garde.
A critic is putatively an expert, responsible for knowing his subject thoroughly and deeply, whether it is music, literature, visual art, film, theatre, or any other art. This would include knowledge of its history, traditions, techniques, the conditions under which it has been made, and all else that is pertinent to rendering sound and useful judgment on discrete works of art in his field. Along with knowledge, which is available to all who search it out, the critic must also have authority, the power to convince—a power that has been available only to a few. Whence does such authority derive? Edmund Wilson, a dominant literary critic from the 1920s through the 1960s, places its source, one might say, authoritatively. “The implied position of people who know about literature (as is also the case with every other art),” Wilson wrote, “is simply that they know what they know, and that they are determined to impose their opinions by main force of eloquence or assertion on the people who do not know.”
“Those who cannot do, teach,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but he would never have said that those who cannot create art, criticize—for he himself, the leading playwright of his day, wrote strong theater and music criticism. One of the many accusations against critics is that they are frustrated artists. Not, as it turns out, true, or certainly not always. The best critics of poetry have been poets: in the modern age, these have included T. S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, W. H. Auden, and Randall Jarrell. Many other important critics have devoted themselves exclusively to criticism without, so far as one knows, ever attempting art: F. R. Leavis in literature, B. H. Haggin in music, Clement Greenberg in visual art, Robert Warshow in film.
The chief purpose of criticism, as T. S. Eliot formulated it, is “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” The able critic does this through comparison (with other works) and analysis (of the work at hand). When it comes to older works, the result usually leads to deflation or enhanced appreciation. If he is good at his task, the critic will have done an aesthetic service by instructing the rest of us, the incognescenti, in the intricacies and ultimate quality of the art we ourselves have already experienced or soon will.
The reviewer advises you on what to see, read, hear, or not to see, read, hear. The critic accounts for the aesthetic principles underlying his judgments and sets out the significance, or insignificance, of the work at hand.Then there is the more complicated matter of critics instructing artists. (Highly conscious artists, of course, are their own most stringent and best critics.) As men and women who have presumably trained themselves to see trees and forest both, critics can be helpful to artists in informing them where and how they have gone askew or cheering them on when they are doing important work? Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg not only wrote about the contemporary visual art of their day but also coached, for better or worse, many of the artists who produced it. In the best of all worlds, the relation between artists and critics is symbiotic, each helping the other. Most artists would of course prefer to have critics on their side, especially in those situations where criticism weighs in heavily on the commercial fate of the art in question. Without interesting art, of course, critics are out of business.
The one ticket to heaven critics may possess is acquired through their discovery of new art or promotion of neglected art. H. L. Mencken earns a ticket here for helping to establish and find a wider readership for the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather. Edmund Wilson was invaluable in his day for introducing readers, in his book Axel’s Castle, to the great modernist writers and through his reviews in the New Republic and later in the New Yorker to a wide range of works, foreign and domestic, they might never have discovered on their own. Wilson prided himself on what he called his efforts at international literary cross-pollination.
Critics can be immensely disputatious among themselves, and have over the years formed schools from which schisms and thereby further schools have resulted. “Criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity from which impostors can be readily ejected,” Eliot wrote, “is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.” Nor, usually, do they, ever.
A. O. Scott, one of the current movie reviewers of the New York Times, uses this Eliot quotation in the survey of the schools and fields of criticism that appears in his book Better Living Through Criticism.1 Note that I have called Scott a “reviewer” and not a “critic.” The reviewer advises you on what to see, read, hear, or not to see, read, hear. The critic accounts for the aesthetic principles underlying his judgments and sets out the significance, or insignificance, of the work at hand.
The distinction is a useful one, and it is noteworthy that Scott fails to explain the difference anywhere in his book. This is a mark of the work’s thinness, and how it inadvertently reveals the true condition of criticism in our time. Better Living Through Criticism is intended as an argument in favor of the enduring power of a great and noble form, but it is in some ways more akin to an obituary.
Not yet fifty, the son of academics, a Harvard magna cum laude, a former assistant to Robert Silvers, the founding editor of the New York Review of Books, A.O. Scott has the perfect resumé of the contemporary bien pensant. Scott is a writer in the glib school of New York Times critics begun by John Leonard and continued by Frank Rich. He is a man who refers to “late capitalism,” always a giveaway phrase for those who wish to make plain their progressivist credentials. (What, one wonders, is to follow late capitalism? Early Utopianism, perhaps; or, possibly, middle Gulag?) Contemporary glibness leaves its greasy prints nearly everywhere on his pages. He avails himself of the words “bullshit,” “sucked,” “punked.” In discussing Kant, he writes: “Having nothing better to do in the Prussian city of Königsberg, [Kant] set about investigating the nature of taste.” He refers to “the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin riffing on an aphorism of the pre-Socratic philosopher Antilochus.” At other times he can become grandiloquent. Apropos of John Ford’s movie The Searchers, he writes: “The mythology of The Searchers has grown more troubling and volatile over time, as it reveals the racial animus and patriarchal ideology, the violence and paranoia, woven into the nation’s deepest well-springs of identity.” Beware, I advise, white men calling other white men racist.
Scott also enjoys taking a refreshing dip in the bathwater of political correctness. He scores off Robert Warshow for his “unreflecting sexism” for using the word “man” instead of the more, as they now say, inclusive “persons,” though Warshow did so more than 60 years ago. He defends jazz, which he feels was insufficiently appreciated because it was the art of a minority group, when it needs no defense, and has always been an art with a small but devoted following, black and white. Elsewhere, siding with the young, he writes: “To look at the record of contempt for jazz, hip hop, disco, rock ‘n’ roll, video games, comic books, and even television and film is to witness learned and refined people making asses of themselves by embracing their own ignorance.”
Scott grew up reading, in the Village Voice and in Rolling Stone, “a great many reviews of things long before I saw them, and in a lot of cases reading the reviews of something I would never experience firsthand was a perfectly adequate substitute for the experience.” He read “Stanley Crouch on jazz, Robert Christigau and Ellen Willis on rock, J. Hoberman and Andrew Sarris on film, Peter Schjeldahl on art.” He was especially taken by a critic named C(ynthia). Carr, who wrote on avant-garde and underground theatre and performance art; what won him over to her was less her ideas than “the charisma of her voice.”
In Scott’s writing, one senses a man much worried about being thought out of it. This fear of not being au courant is a key element in his view of the role of the reviewer. Toward the end of his book he notes that “there is a moral danger—a danger to morale, and to decency—that many of us [reviewers] face as we age.” The danger turns out to be a lapse into nostalgia, a loss of youthful ideals, with a corresponding loss of critical energy. But, then, the kind of reviewer-critic Scott admires is one willing to make mistakes, and for whom one of the gravest mistakes is moderation. One has to imagine, say, Harold Bloom, but a Harold Bloom dragging in Emerson and Freud to write about comic books.
Like the A student he is, Scott brings in the usual suspects from the past on the subject of criticism: Johnson, Shelley, Wordsworth, Arnold, Pater, Wilde, Mencken, Orwell, Trilling, and the obligatory Walter Benjamin. No mention is made, however, of Randall Jarrell, who, as long ago as 1952, fourteen years before Scott was born, adumbrated Scott’s career in an essay called “This Age of Criticism.” Jarrell wrote: “These days, when an ambitious young intellectual finishes college, he buys himself a new typewriter [make that laptop], rents himself a room, and settles down to write…book reviews, long critical articles, explications.” Jarrell, a poet who was the best critic of poetry of his generation, adds: “No wonder poor poets became poor critics, and count themselves blest in the bargain; no wonder young intellectuals become critics before, and not after, they have failed as artists. And sometimes—who knows?—they might not have failed; besides, to have failed as an artist may be a more respectable and valuable thing.”
Does popular culture require study in universities? Wasn’t the movie Casablanca somehow more enjoyable before it was recognized, in film courses and else where, as a classic?When Jarrell wrote “This Age of Criticism,” critics were the dominant figures in American intellectual life. The leading intellectual journals of the time—Partisan Review, COMMENTARY, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Encounter in England—were filled with criticism. Of the now well-known New York Intellectuals, only three, Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz and Mary McCarthy, were imaginative writers, and the poems of Schwartz and the novels of McCarthy might never had got the attention they did without their criticism running, so to say, interference for them. The other New York Intellectuals—Warshow, Philip Rahv, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Clement and Martin Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, et alia—were critics; the young Norman Podhoretz started out as a literary critic. The universities harbored such critics as R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, Ian Watt, and Robert Heilman. Critics in that day were much esteemed; they were heroes of culture. With the blurring of high and popular culture, they could no longer be so. Better Living Through Criticism suggests, if only by omission, why this is so. T
he book is divided between chapters that are disquisitions on various aspects of the traditions of, and changes over the years in, criticism, and chapters that are set up as dialogues in which a Mister Interlocutor, as the old minstrel shows had it, asks the author questions about his own critical career. The book is meant to be a justification for criticism and an apologia pro vita sua of sorts for Scott’s choice of career.
What Better Living Through Criticism leaves out is the old but still essential distinction between highbrow and popular art. Since the time of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) critics of all arts were given their assignment, which was to discover and promulgate the glories of culture, which was itself “a study of perfection.” This same culture, according to Arnold, “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.” Under these marching orders, critics were to be simultaneously missionaries and propagandists. Theirs was a search and destroy mission. They were to search out all that qualified under the rubric “best that has been thought and known” and to destroy all that was pretentious, drivel, crap, which included all middlebrow and most popular culture.
Of course not all popular culture is drivel or crap. Lots of it gives pleasure without bringing corruption in its wake. Much of it informs us, in ways that high culture does not, about the way we live now, which was once the task of the novel. Yet does popular culture require study in universities? Does it require a corpus of criticism? Wasn’t the movie Casablanca somehow more enjoyable before it was recognized, in film courses and else where, as a classic? Why do I find it immensely appealing that the late Julius Epstein, who with his brother Philip wrote the screenplay for Casablanca, when complimented on the movie, replied, “Yes, it’s a pretty slick piece of shit.”
In an earlier day some believed that even attacking popular culture, which then often went by the name “kitsch,” wasn’t worth the time and energy put into it. Best to leave it alone altogether. Harold Rosenberg twitted (not, mind, tweeted) Dwight Macdonald for spending so much time writing about the movies. What Rosenberg thought of Robert Warshow’s interest in popular culture is not known. Warshow’s tactic was neither to attack nor exult in popular culture, but to explain its attractions. His two essays on why Americans were attracted to gangster and western movies are among the most brilliant things ever written on the movies and on popular culture generally.
Today the standard of highbrow culture has been worn away, almost to the point of threadbareness. For political reasons, universities no longer feel obligated to spread its gospel. Western culture—dead white males and all that—with its imperialist history has long been increasingly non grata in humanities departments. Everywhere pride of place has been given to the merely interesting—the study of gay and lesbian culture, of graphic novels and comic books, and more—over the deeply significant. Culture, as it is now understood in the university and elsewhere, is largely popular culture. That battle has, at least for now, been lost.
In “This Age of Criticism,” Jarrell was actually bemoaning the spread of criticism, which he felt was choking off the impulse to create stories, plays, and poems. He also felt critics were insufficiently adventurous, content to dwell lengthily on the same small body of classic works. His dream of repressing the field has come to be a reality.
And so we are left with A.O. Scott, whose key thesis is that criticism is “the art of the voice.” His own voice, in his reviews and in Better Living Through Criticism, is that of a man who vastly overestimates his own voice’s significance and charm. The Age of Criticism Randall Jarrell condemned is over and done with—but in a way he would not in the least have approved. Were he alive today, Jarrell might have to seek work reviewing video games.
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The School Runners
Review of "The Last Thousand" by Jeffrey Stern
Jonathan Foreman 2016-03-16
2015 exposé on the Buzzfeed website created a stir by savaging the notion that the massive expansion of education in Afghanistan has been one of the triumphs of the international military effort. It was titled “Ghost Students, Ghost Teachers, Ghost Schools.”
The Last Thousand
By Jeffrey E. Stern view book
“As the American mission faltered, U.S. officials repeatedly trumpeted impressive statistics— the number of schools built, girls enrolled, textbooks distributed, teachers trained, and dollars spent —to help justify the 13 years and more than 2,000 Americans killed since the United States invaded,” wrote a Pakistani-American journalist named Azmat Khan. The U.S. government’s claims are, Khan said, “massively exaggerated, riddled with ghost schools, teachers and students that exist only on paper.”
One-tenth of the schools that Buzzfeed’s employees claimed to have visited were not operating or had not been built. Some U.S.-funded schools lacked running water, toilets, or electricity. Others were not built to international construction standards. Teacher salaries, often U.S.-subsidized, were being paid to teachers at nonexistent schools. In some places local warlords had managed to divert U.S. aid into their own pockets.
The tone and presentation of the article leaves little doubt of its author’s conviction that 13 years of effort in Afghanistan, including the expenditure of 2,000 American lives and billions of dollars ($1 billion on education alone) were pointless and the entire intervention a horrendous mistake.
Unfortunately, it is all but certain that some of the gladdening numbers long cited by USAID and others are indeed inaccurate or misleading, especially given that they are based in large part on statistics supplied by various Afghan government ministries. The government of Afghanistan is neither good at, nor especially interested in, collecting accurate data. Here, as in all countries that receive massive amounts of overseas aid, local officials and NGOs have a tendency to tell foreign donors (and foreign reporters) what they think the latter want to hear. They are equally likely to exaggerate the effectiveness of a program or the desperate need for bigger, better intervention.
Moreover it would be remarkable if there weren’t legions of ghost teachers. No-show or nonexistent salaried employees are a problem in every Afghan government department. This is true even in the military: The NATO-led coalition battled for years to stop the practice whereby Afghan generals requested money to pay the salaries of units that existed only on paper. As for abandoned or incomplete school-construction projects, such things are par for the course not only in Afghanistan but everywhere in South Asia. India, Nepal, and Pakistan are littered with them. You don’t read about them much because no development effort has ever been put under the kind of (mostly hostile) scrutiny that has attended America’s attempt to drag Afghanistan into the modern era. Given the general record of all development aid over the past half century and the difficulty of getting anything done in a conflict-wrecked society like Afghanistan, it may well be the case that reconstruction efforts by the U.S. military and U.S. government in Afghanistan were relatively effective and efficient.
Despite all the money that may have been wasted or stolen, there really has been an astonishing education revolution in Afghanistan that is transforming the society. It is an undeniable fact that the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan has enabled the education of millions of children who would never have seen the inside of a school of any kind had it not been for the overthrow of the Taliban. The World Bank and UNICEF both estimate that at least 8 million Afghans are attending school. This means that even if a quarter of the children who are nominally enrolled in school aren’t getting any education at all, there are still 6 million other kids who are; in 2001 there were fewer than 1 million children in formal education, none of them female.
To get a sense of what education can achieve in Afghanistan, even in less than ideal circumstances, you can hardly do better than to read The Last Thousand, by the journalist and teacher Jeffrey E. Stern. It tells the extraordinary story of Marefat, a school on the outskirts of Kabul. Marefat (the Dari word means “knowledge” or “awareness”) was originally founded in a hut in a refugee camp in Pakistan. After the fall of the Taliban regime in November 2001, its founder, Aziz Royesh, brought the school to Afghanistan and set it up on a windblown patch of desert West of Kabul. By 2012, Teacher Aziz, as he is known to all, had enrolled a total of 4,000 pupils and was sending students to elite universities around the world, including Tufts, Brown, and Harvard.
The school primarily caters to the Hazara ethnic minority, of which Aziz (a former mujahideen fighter) is a member. As anyone who read The Kite Runner or saw the movie made from the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini knows, the Hazara have long been the victims of oppression by the majority Pashtuns and Tajiks. The Hazara (who account for about 10 percent of the Afghan population) bear a double ethnic burden. They are Shiites—heretics in the eyes of the Sunni majority of the country. And they look Asiatic. Indeed, they are widely but probably wrongly believed to be the descendants of Genghis Khan’s invaders.
The Last Thousand is a powerful and important book, especially in the way Stern conveys the sense of betrayal and the terror that many Afghans feel at the prospect of international abandonment.Hazara were traded as slaves until the early 20th century. As late as the 1970s, they were barred from government schools and jobs and banned from owning property in downtown Kabul. As if certain parallels to another oppressed minority weren’t strong enough, the Hazara are well known for their appetite for education and resented for their business success since the establishment of a democratic constitution, and they have enthusiastically worked with the international military coalition—all of which has made them particular targets of the Taliban.
From the start, Aziz was determined to give his students an education that would inoculate them against the sectarian and ethnic extremism that had destroyed his country. He taught them to question everything and happily educated both boys and girls, separating them only when pressure from conservative politicians put the school’s survival at risk. (When fathers balked at allowing their daughters to go to school, Aziz assured them that a literate girl would be more valuable in the marriage market.) Eventually the school also found itself educating some of the illiterate parents of its students and similarly changing the lives of other adult members of the school community.
The school’s stunning success in the face of enormous obstacles won it and its brave, resourceful founder affection as well as benefactors among the “Internationals”—the foreign civilian and military community in Afghanistan. When John R. Allen, the tough U.S. Marine general in command of all international forces in Afghanistan, finished his tour in February 2013, he personally donated enough money to the school to fund 25 scholarships. Thanks to reports about the school by a British journalist, a “Marefat Dinner” at London’s Connaught Hotel co-sponsored by Moet & Chandon raised $150,000 for the school in 2011. But by early 2013, Teacher Aziz was in despair for Marefat’s future, thanks to terrorist threats against the school and President Obama’s declaration that he would pull out half of America’s forces within a year regardless of the military and political situation in the country.
It’s a fascinating story. Which makes it a shame that much of it is told in a rather self-indulgent and mannered way. Stern’s prose tends to exude a world-weary smugness that can feel unearned, especially given some shallow or ill-informed observations on subjects such as Genghis Khan, Blitzkrieg, and the effect of Vietnam on current U.S. commanders, and his apparent ignorance of the role of sexual honor in Hazara culture.
Most exasperating, Stern patronizingly assumes an unlikely ignorance on the part of the reader. There are few newspaper subscribers who, after 15 years of front-page stories from Afghanistan, have not heard of the grand assemblies known as loya jirgas, or who don’t know that Talib literally means student. Yet Stern refers to the former as “Grand Meetings” and the latter as “Knowledge Seekers.” He also has his characters refer to Internationals as “the Outsiders,” even though any Afghan you are likely to meet knows perfectly well that the foreign presence comes in different and identifiable national and organizational flavors: Americans, NATO, the UN, the Red Cross, Englistanis (British), and so on. The same shtick apparently frees Stern from the obligation to specify an actual date on which an event occurred, or the actual name of a town or province.
Even so, The Last Thousand is a powerful and important book, especially in the way Stern conveys the sense of betrayal and the terror that many Afghans feel at the prospect of international abandonment. The Hazara children and staff at the Marefat school fear a prospective entente with the Taliban enthusiastically promoted by foreign-policy “realists” in the U.S. and UK. They correctly believe it would lead to cultural concessions that could radically diminish their safety and freedom—if not a complete surrender to murderous Pashtun racism and Sunni bigotry.
The book’s main characters are concerned by what seemed to be the imminent, complete departure of all foreign forces as part of the “zero option.” This option was seriously considered by the United States in 2013 and 2014 when then–President Karzai, in the middle of a bizarre descent into (hashish-fueled) paranoia and poisonous anti-Westernism, refused to sign a bilateral security agreement with the Western powers.
Aziz confessed to Stern (who was teaching English at the school) that he himself was in despair but was trying to hide his gloom from his pupils. He began to to urge his students, graduates, and protégés—especially the female ones—to be less vocal in their complaints about discrimination against Hazara, and he himself began controversially to cultivate unexpected allies such as the Pashtun presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani. But Marefat’s staff, students, and their parents had few illusions about the future. As one young girl said to Aziz: “If the Americans leave, we know there is no chance for us to continue our education.”
Although the future of Marefat and its Hazara pupils is uncertain, it is comforting that so much has already been achieved by the education revolution in Afghanistan. Assuming that the Taliban and its Pakistani government sponsors are not allowed to take over or prompt a collapse into civil war, this revolution may well have a tremendous and benign effect on the country’s future. After all, more than 70 percent of the Afghan population is under 25 and the median age is 17. Unlike their parents, these youths have grown up with television and radio (there are more than 90 TV stations and 174 FM radio stations), cellphones (there are at least 20 million mobile users), and even the Internet. Their horizons are wider than anything the leaders of the Taliban regime could even imagine.
As Stern relates in a hurried epilogue, the bilateral security agreement was finally signed in September 2014 after Karzai’s replacement by a new national unity government. There are still U.S. and other foreign troops in Afghanistan, even if not enough.
In Stern’s sympathetic portrayal of the Hazara and their predicament, it’s hard not to hear echoes of other persecuted minorities who put their trust in Western (and especially Anglo-Saxon) liberator-occupiers. The most recent example is the Montagnard hill tribes of Vietnam who fought alongside U.S. Special Forces and were brutally victimized by the victorious Stalinist regime after America pulled out of Indochina. Something similar happened to the Shan and Karen nations of Burma, who fought valiantly alongside the British during World War II but ever since have had to battle for survival against the majority Burmans who sided with the Japanese. In today’s Afghanistan, Gulbedin Hekmatyar, the Pakistan-backed Taliban leader, has overtly threatened the Hazara with something like the fate of the Harkis, the Algerians who fought with French during the war of independence between 1954 and 1962: At least 150,000 of the Harkis were slaughtered with the arrival of “peace.”
The Last Thousand should remind those who are “war-weary” in the U.S. (which really means being weary of reading about the war) that bringing the troops home is far from an unalloyed good. Having met the extraordinary Teacher Aziz and his brave staff and students through the eyes of Jeffrey Stern, and knowing the fate they could face at the hands of their enemies, one finds it hard to think of President Obama’s enthusiasm for withdrawal—an enthusiasm echoed distressingly by several candidates in the presidential race—as anything but thoughtless, heartless, trivial, and unworthy of America.
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