“I have long felt the need of someone to take hold where I begin to fall down. I know of course that no one can breathe the breath of life into a dead thing, but I have more favorable reviews, letters, etc. on all my work than most writers collect in a lifetime, yet something has been lacking. Either through laziness, lack of technique, skill or whatnot, I’m aways failing by a hair.”

These were the words of Jay Sigmund, a successful Grand Rapids, Iowa, insurance executive by day—and poet and writer in his spare time. Sigmund was explaining his writing struggles in one of several letters he mailed to Betty Smith in 1936-1937. Smith would become famous for her bestselling novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943.

But at the time, Smith was a Yale Drama School-educated, struggling playwright, and single mother of two, living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Works Projects Administration had assigned her to work as a play reader for the Federal Theatre Project. Both writers were in difficult stretches of their lives—yet holding fast to their writing ambitions; both would gain substantially from the connection they forged.

There was good reason for Sigmund to feel comfortable revealing his insecurities to Smith, for she had disclosed her own rejections and jilted dreams: “Like you, I have been disappointed so many times, as far as writing is concerned” Smith wrote to Sigmund, “So many times, has a book, or a play come right up to the verge of success and then dropped through the vagaries of producer or publisher. So I shall hope for everything… and expect nothing. I have found this to be a good working philosophy.”

In the same letter, in place of a curriculum vitae, she recounted the major chapters of her life: her education and jobs­­­—even an explanation of her husband’s livelihood. In the next paragraph, Smith added, “I no longer have a husband. The above material was given so that there would be no break in the, I suppose, story of my life.”

These facts of her life included financial struggles. The primary caregiver and provider for her daughters, Smith was constantly seeking paid work. She was upfront with Sigmund about her methods: “I earn perhaps five hundred dollars a year by a six week’s concerted drive of writing for the pulp magazines, mostly confession and love story magazines. I only do this when I need money terribly.” For the same reason, Smith had placed an advertisement in Writer’s Digest announcing her editing services.

Sigmund had seen the ad, and it had rekindled his hope in a writing dream. He’d already realized a few of his writing dreams, having published his poetry and some short fiction, both of which caught the attention of famous writers, including Carl Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson. But with Smith, Sigmund ventured into new territory: playwriting.

Their initial correspondence has the fumbling feeling of first dates. “I saw your little ad in the Writer’s Digest,” Sigmund wrote in his first letter. “I do not know whether you will be interested any in me or whether you have something that will interest me but as a starting place I am submitting three one-act play manuscripts so that you can judge whether or not there is any meeting of minds of the service you have to offer.”

Practical and frank in her correspondence, Smith wasn’t one to waste her time or money. “I received your three plays by mail and what is it you wish me to do with them?” she wrote to Sigmund. Explaining her menu of services and fees, Smith told him, “I shall not do anything with your plays until I hear from you. Let me know whether you want them criticized or returned and if the latter, please send postage.”

Sigmund mailed his $2.00 along with his request for which of the plays he wanted Smith to read.

Surprising herself and Sigmund, Smith enjoyed his script more than she expected. It was a “natural comedy,” Smith assured Sigmund. She explained that “the play has its faults but they are so minor, merely little odds and ends of technique. The main thing; the thing that cannot be taught is there.” Smith made Sigmund an unusual offer “which might not meet your approval.” What she really wanted, she wrote, was to collaborate with him, “that is to take your play and re-write it as co-author rather than hired writer.” Smith believed that after revising his draft, she could sell it by drawing on her playwriting connections. They would share the proceeds, fifty-fifty.

The offer delighted Sigmund. What had felt like a dead-end in playwriting, now seemed like it just might sail through. In his response, typed on his Cedar Rapids Life Insurance Company stationary, Sigmund disclosed more about his situation: “You may guess that my role has been a rather lonely one. From the letterhead you can see that I am a business man, but I have been writing poetry and short stories for years and have published several volumes of each.”

Sigmund’s life was not actually lonely in the conventional way. That is to say that he led an entirely conventional life: married with children and a profession in which he excelled. Sigmund was fully engaged in the civic and cultural life of Cedar Rapids; he was a friend to painter Grant Wood and to poet Paul Engle, who would establish the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. But Sigmund had difficulty when he reached the revising stage of a piece. And until Smith’s services, Sigmund had not known where to find the support he needed.

Perhaps his relationship with Smith was helped by its epistolary nature. Sigmund never had to watch the expression on Smith’s face as she read his work or as she told him her feelings about his writing. Sigmund felt free within the confessional of their correspondence to reveal, for instance, that “If I had a little more faith in my work and would get a little more wrought up over failure it would probably be a good thing, but I’ve had so much joy in my work that nothing else mattered much.” Now, Sigmund admitted to Smith, he was more interested in publication, because he was beginning to think about “permanent preservation” for some of his writings. With Smith’s co-authorship, Sigmund was able to sell a few of his plays.

Less than six months later, Sigmund would accidentally kill himself during a hunting trip.

Sigmund’s son wrote to Betty after his father’s death, not realizing it would be “the hardest letter which I should be called on to write,” for Smith was “so very kind to my father, and helped him so much in his hobby of writing.” Sigmund Jr. asked Smith, “Can you realize the importance which he placed in your kind judgment, and also the fine spirit of cooperation which you lent to make his writing life easier?” The “fine spirit of cooperation” is not usually what writers are known for contributing to the world, but it likely made a big difference in the lives of these two writers.

Sigmund and Smith never met in-person. But their exchanges benefited both writers: Smith revised Sigmund’s plays and helped him sell a few; Smith received much-needed income. Her confidence was bolstered, too. Here was a male writer, a decade older than Smith, who had already achieved success in other genres, trying to find his way in playwriting. Both writers were a little less lonely for the correspondence. Both received some of the feedback for which they hungered, but was so difficult to find.

A few years after Sigmund’s death, Smith began drafting A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, the novel which ultimately brought Smith fortune and fame and allowed her to establish herself as a writer. Although she was proud of having supported her daughters and herself through her writing even before she sold the novel, Smith had spent those years struggling. “I’d be so glad to concentrate all my abilities, experiences and education on one thing,” she explained to Sigmund in 1937 of her desire to focus on one major writing project “I work hard at even these odds and ends and it would be nice work hard for some one purpose.”

In her late forties as her first novel was about to be published, Smith seemed to be looking out onto the horizon of possibilities. Playwrighting had been the great dream of Smith’s life for so long—and she had been relatively successful, at least in terms of selling plays and winning prizes. But the money was not sufficient to keep her from feeling like she was always scrambling for work. Novels seemed to offer a more secure path. They would remain her primary genre, with three more following A Tree Grows.

When publication of A Tree Grows was imminent, but her publishers were contemplating a delay, Smith urged them to move as quickly as possible and to enter her novel in the appropriate prizes. “With so many good men writers tied up in in the War,” Smith pointed out, “I’d never again have so good a chance in competition.” Timing was crucial. Smith was determined not to lose her chance. As she explained to Harper & Row: “I’d like to have the beginnings of an established place in American novel writing so that I could sail on or I’d like to know definitely otherwise so that I could then console myself with a four hundred dollar a week movie job.” Hollywood was calling. But Smith viewed film writing jobs as a second choice.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was a way for Smith to finally declare herself a particular kind of writer: a novelist. But it wasn’t only that. It was her chance to make something of herself after so many years of feeling she was not fully succeeding. A few years earlier, in Jay Sigmund, Smith had caught a reflection of herself, and it wasn’t entirely flattering: a middle-aged writer still trying to really make it. Sigmund had written to her that he knew what it felt like to be a writer always failing by a hair. And Smith had understood him. But she did not want to live there anymore. And the possibility of sailing on into her future as a novelist was now so close at hand, she could practically touch it. Having helped another writer up, it was easier to believe she could lift herself up, too.

In November 1960, a traveler of ambiguous origin, brown-skinned but not African, arrived in Mali. Issued in Tunis two years earlier, his passport identified him as a doctor born in 1925 in Tunisia, height: 165 cm, color of hair: black, color of eyes: black.

The pages were covered with stamps from Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Guinea, Italy. The name on the passport, a gift from the government of Libya, was Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a nom de guerre. The psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was not from Tunisia but from Martinique. He had not come to Mali to do medical work: he was part of a commando unit.

It had been a long journey by car from the Liberian capital of Monrovia: more than twelve hundred miles through tropical forest, savanna, and desert, and the eight-man team still had far to go. From the journal he kept, it’s clear that Fanon was mesmerized by the landscape. “This part of the Sahara is not monotonous,” he writes. “Even the sky up there is constantly changing. Some days ago, we saw a sunset that turned the robe of the sky a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red the eye encounters.” His entries move freely between rousing expressions of hope and somber reminders of the obstacles facing African liberation struggles. “A continent is on the move and Europe is languorously asleep,” he writes. “Fifteen years ago it was Asia that was stirring. Today 650 million Chinese, calm possessors of an immense secret, are building a world entirely on their own. The giving birth to a world.” And now an “Africa to come” could well emerge from the convulsions of anti-colonial revolution.

Yet “the specter of the West,” he warns, is “everywhere present and active.” His friend Félix-Roland Moumié, a revolutionary from Cameroon, had just been poisoned by the French secret service, and Fanon himself had narrowly escaped an attempt on his life on a visit to Rome. Meanwhile, a new superpower, the United States, had “plunged in everywhere, dollars in the vanguard, with [Louis] Armstrong as herald and Black American diplomats, scholarships, the emissaries of the Voice of America.”

Yet in the long run, Fanon believed, the African continent would have to reckon with threats more crippling than colonialism. On the one hand, Africa’s independence had come too late: rebuilding and giving a sense of direction to societies traumatized by colonial rule—societies that had long been forced to take orders from others and to see themselves through the eyes of their masters—would not be easy.

On the other hand, independence had come too early, empowering the continent’s narcissistic “national middle classes” who “suddenly develop great appetites.” He writes: “The deeper I enter into the cultures and political circles the surer I am that the great danger for Africa is the absence of ideology.”

Fanon recorded these impressions in a blue Ghana School Teachers Book No. 3 that he had picked up in Accra. It is now stored at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, a research library housed in a former monastery in Normandy that sheltered partisan fighters during the Second World War. To take it in one’s hands sixty years later and leaf through the pages is to inspect the thoughts of a dying man: Fanon did not yet know he had leukemia, or that his life would end in 1961 in a hospital in Maryland, in the heart of the American empire he despised. On the road in West Africa, he was open, thoughtful, and intrigued by the continent from which his ancestors had been carried on slave ships to the French colony of Martinique.

In Mali he imagined himself home, among his Black brothers, yet he remained a stranger. He had come as an undercover agent of a neighboring country in what he called “White Africa”: Algeria, then in the seventh year of its liberation struggle against French rule. The aim of his reconnaissance mission was to make contact with the desert tribes and open a southern front on Algeria’s border with Mali so that arms and ammunitions could be moved from the Malian capital of Bamako through the Sahara to the rebels of the Front de libération nationale (FLN).

The head of Fanon’s commando unit was a major in the FLN’s military wing, the Armée de libération nationale (ALN). He was a “funny chap” who went by the name of Chawki: “small, lean, with the implacable eyes of an old maquis fighter.” Fanon was impressed by the “intelligence and clarity of his ideas” and his knowledge of the Sahara, a “world in which Chawki moves with the boldness and the perspicacity of a great strategist.” Chawki, he tells us, spent two years studying in France but returned to Algeria to work his father’s land. When the war of liberation launched by the FLN began on November 1, 1954, he “took down his hunting rifle from its hook and joined the brothers.”

Not long after, Fanon, too, had joined “the brothers.” From 1955 until his expulsion from Algeria two years later, he had given sanctuary to rebels at the psychiatric hospital he directed in Blida-Joinville, just outside Algiers. He had provided them with medical care and taken every possible risk short of joining the maquisards in the mountains—his first impulse when the revolution broke out. No one believed more fervently in the rebels than the man from Martinique. He had gone on to join the FLN in exile in Tunis, identifying himself as an Algerian and preaching the cause of Algerian independence throughout Africa. Every word that he wrote paid tribute to the Algerian struggle.

But he could never really become an Algerian; he did not even speak Arabic or Berber (Amazigh), the languages of Algeria’s indigenous peoples. In his work as a psychiatrist, he often had to depend on interpreters. Algeria remained permanently out of reach for him, an elusive object of love, as it was for so many other foreigners who had been seduced by it—not least the European settlers who began arriving in the 1830s. He would be, at most, an adopted brother, dreaming of a fraternity that would transcend tribe, race, and nation: the kind of arrangement that France promised him as a young man and that had led him to join the war against the Axis powers.

France betrayed its promise, but even as he turned violently against the colonial motherland, Fanon remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution, hoping that they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World. He was a “Black Jacobin,” as the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James described Toussaint Louverture in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution.

Nearly six decades after the loss of Algeria, France still hasn’t forgiven Fanon’s “treason”: a recent proposal to name a street after him in Bordeaux was struck down. Never mind that Fanon had bled for France as a young man, then fought for Algeria’s independence in defense of classical republican principles, or that his writing continues to speak to the predicament of many young French citizens of Black and Arab descent who have been made to feel like strangers in their own country.

In 1908, Georg Simmel, a German Jewish sociologist, published an essay called “The Stranger.” The stranger, he writes, “is not a wanderer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today—and stays.” This was Fanon’s experience throughout his life: as a soldier in the French army, as a West Indian medical student in Lyon, as a Black Frenchman, and as a non-Muslim in the Algerian resistance to France. Simmel suggests that even as the stranger arouses suspicion, he benefits from a peculiar epistemological privilege since “he is offered revelations, confessions otherwise carefully hidden from any more organically embedded persons.”

Listening to such confessions was Fanon’s trade as a psychiatrist, and it was in doing so that he decided to throw himself into the independence struggle, even to become Algerian, as if a commitment to his patients’ care and recovery required an even more radical kind of solidarity, a marriage to the people he had come to love.

The twentieth century was, of course, full of foreign-born revolutionaries, radical strangers drawn to distant lands upon which they projected their hopes and fantasies. Yet Fanon was unusual, and much more than a sympathetic fellow traveler. He would eventually become the FLN’s roving ambassador in Africa—his complexion a decided asset for a North African movement seeking support from its sub-Saharan cousins—and acquire a reputation as the FLN’s “chief theoretician.”

This he was not. It would have been highly surprising if such an intensely nationalistic movement had chosen a foreigner as its theoretician. Fanon’s task was mostly limited to communicating aims and decisions that others had formulated. But he interpreted Algeria’s liberation struggle in a manner that helped transform it into a global symbol of resistance to domination. And he did so in the language of the profession he practiced, and at the same time radically reimagined: psychiatry.

Before he was a revolutionary, Fanon was a psychiatrist, and his thinking about society took shape within spaces of confinement: hospitals, asylums, clinics, and the prison house of race, which—as a Black man—he experienced throughout his life.

Fanon was not a modest man. He struck some of his contemporaries as vain, arrogant, even hotheaded. Yet to his patients he could hardly have been humbler.

What he saw in their faces, and in their physical and psychological distress, were people who had been deprived of freedom and forcibly alienated from themselves, from their ability to come to grips with reality and act upon it independently. Some of them were mentally ill (in French, aliénés); others were immigrant workers or colonized Algerians who suffered from hunger, poor housing, racism, and violence; still others suffered from performing the dirty work of colonial repression. (Fanon treated French soldiers who had tortured Algerian suspects, and wrote with remarkable lucidity and compassion about their traumas.) What they shared was an invisible, lacerating anguish inscribed in the psyche, immobilizing both body and soul. This anguish, for Fanon, was a kind of dissident knowledge: a counternarrative to the triumphal story that the West told about itself.

In a 1945 essay on Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy, Ralph Ellison observed that racial oppression begins “in the shadow of infancy where environment and consciousness are so darkly intertwined as to require the skills of a psychoanalyst to define their point of juncture.” Fanon was a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst, but he read deeply in the literature of psychoanalysis.

His first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), published in 1952, when he was twenty-seven, was an attempt to reveal the shadow that racial oppression cast across the lives of Black people. In his later writings on Algeria and the Third World, he powerfully evoked the dream life of societies disfigured by racism and colonial subjugation.

“History,” in the words of the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, “is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” Fanon had a rare gift for expressing the hurts that history had caused in the lives of Black and colonized peoples, because he felt those hurts with almost unbearable intensity himself. Few writers have captured so vividly the lived experience of racism and colonial domination, the fury it creates in the minds of the oppressed—or the sense of alienation and powerlessness that it engenders.

To be a Black person in a white majority society, he writes in one of his bleakest passages, was to feel trapped in “a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a new departure can emerge.”

Yet Fanon himself had a fervent belief in new departures. In his writing, as well as in his work as a doctor and a revolutionary, he remained defiantly hopeful that the colonized victims of the West—the “wretched of the earth,” he called them—could inaugurate a new era in which they would be free not only of foreign rule but also of forced assimilation to the values and languages of their oppressors. But first they had to be willing to fight for their freedom. He meant this literally. Fanon believed in the regenerative potential of violence.

Armed struggle was not simply a response to the violence of colonialism; it was, in his view, a kind of medicine, rekindling a sense of power and self-mastery. By striking back against their oppressors, the colonized overcame the passivity and self-hatred induced by colonial confinement, cast off the masks of obedience they had been forced to wear, and were reborn, psychologically, as free men and women.

But, as he knew, masks are easier to put on than to cast off. Like any struggle to exorcise history’s ghosts and wipe the slate clean, Fanon’s was often a confrontation with impossibility, with the limits to his visionary desires. Much of the power of his writing resides in the tension, which he never quite resolved, between his work as a doctor and his obligations as a militant, between his commitment to healing and his belief in violence.

Fanon made his case for violence in his final work, Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), published just before his death in December 1961. The aura that still surrounds him today owes much to this book, the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and one of the great manifestos of the modern age. In his preface, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “the Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice.” An exaggeration, to be sure, and an inadvertently patronizing one: Fanon’s voice was one among many in the colonized world, which had no shortage of writers and spokespeople.

Yet the electrifying impact of Fanon’s book on the imagination of writers, intellectuals, and insurgents in the Third World can hardly be overestimated. A few years after Fanon’s death, Orlando Patterson—a radical young Jamaican writer who would later become a distinguished sociologist of slavery—described The Wretched of the Earth as “the heart and soul of a movement, written, as it could only have been written, by one who fully participated in it.”

The Wretched of the Earth was required reading for revolutionaries in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s. It was translated widely and cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran. From the perspective of his readers in national liberation movements, Fanon understood not only the strategic necessity of violence but also its psychological necessity. And he understood this because he was both a psychiatrist and a colonized Black man.

Some readers in the West have expressed horror at Fanon’s defense of violence, accusing him of being an apologist for terrorism—and there is much to contest. Yet Fanon’s writings on the subject are easily misunderstood or caricatured. As he repeatedly pointed out, colonial regimes, such as French-ruled Algeria, were themselves founded upon violence: the conquest of the indigenous populations; the theft of their land; the denigration of their cultures, languages, and religions.

The violence of the colonized was a counter-violence, embraced after other, more peaceful forms of opposition had proved impotent. However gruesome it sometimes was, it could never match the violence of colonial armies, with their bombs, torture centers, and “relocation” camps.

Readers with an intimate experience of oppression and cruelty have often responded sympathetically to Fanon’s insistence on the psychological value of violence for the colonized. In a 1969 essay, the philosopher Jean Améry, a veteran of the Belgian anti-fascist resistance and a Holocaust survivor, wrote that Fanon described a world that he knew very well from his time in Auschwitz. What Fanon understood, Améry argued, was that the violence of the oppressed is “an affirmation of dignity,” opening onto a “historical and human future.”

That Fanon, who never belonged anywhere in his lifetime, has been claimed by so many as a revolutionary brother—indeed, as a universal prophet of liberation—is an achievement he might have savored.

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Excerpted from The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan. Copyright © 2024 by Adam Shatz. All rights reserved.

I first read Virginia Woolf’s novels in the early 1980s as a visiting undergraduate at the University of Sussex, its campus nestled in the South Downs just seven miles from Monks House, Woolf’s country home in Rodmell village. Since then, I have been fascinated by her pacifism, and by the veterans, shell-shocked soldiers, and war dead who haunt her books.

In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I am drawn not to the tinselly Clarissa, but to the brain-fissured Septimus Warren Smith. Each time I read To the Lighthouse (1927) I am once again shocked by World War I encap­sulated in square brackets. In Jacob’s Room (1922), it is the dismay of a mother cradling an empty pair of her dead son’s shoes that chokes me up. Writing about the Dreadnought hoax seemed the natural extension of my long admiration for Woolf, the pacifist.

The Dreadnought hoax took place on a cloudy afternoon in early February 1910. Woolf—then the unmarried 28-year-old aspiring novelist Virginia Stephen—joined her brother and friends in a practical joke on the British Navy. Putting on blackface makeup and theatrical costumes, they went aboard the nation’s most famous battleship, the H.M.S. Dreadnought, posing as African princes.

Incredibly, they got away with it. When the story of the stunt was leaked to the press, it made headlines around the world for weeks, embarrassed the Royal Navy, and even provoked heated discussions in parliament. Exactly what the hoax meant has been debated ever since.

When I first read about the Dreadnought prank in the waning decades of the twentieth century, it was celebrated as Woolf’s cheeky act of defiance targeting militarism, empire, and patriarchy, a perfect skewering of war mongers and their war machines. It seems impossible to believe now, but there was little concern that the young Virginia Woolf boarded the formidable warship wearing blackface make-up as she masqueraded as an African prince, an act of unthinkable offensiveness. The past, they say, is a foreign country. What they don’t tell you is how even your own past can feel like a bewildering, inexplicable land.

After the racial reckoning of the last twenty years, it is impossible to look at the hoax as merely an audacious pacifist prank. No serious writer can ignore the racist attitudes at its core.

Once I realized that I needed to see Woolf’s life afresh, to reimagine it in the context of Black British history, my view opened to a host of extraordinary individuals invisible to traditional approaches. I found that Woolf’s Bloomsbury neighbor­hood was home to many Black people, some of whom would go on to play crucial roles in the dismantling of empire. I discovered that her personal history was intimately connected to a nineteenth-century Ethiopian prince ripped from his homeland by a British general and brought to England to live out what would be a short, unhappy life.

I also realized that her blackface masquerade linked her to the exploits of a Jamaican swindler who impersonated African royalty and became something of a folk hero. As I spent time exploring the rich world of Jamaicans living in early twentieth-century London, I also understood that the redoubtable Caribbean writer Una Marson’s play London Calling was, in fact, a rewriting of the Dreadnought stunt as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist comedy. As I researched, I saw that telling the story of the hoax was inseparable from talking about the lives of Black people in Britain.

As I worked, I found a wealth of materials describing the prank, includ­ing naval memoranda, newspaper stories, interviews, photographs, telegrams, letters, and memoirs. There were innumerable retell­ings in newspapers, popular maga­zines, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and all manner of blogs and podcasts. The practical joke even played a bit part in an episode of the hit televi­sion show Downton Abbey. It seemed as if nothing could be easier than to describe what had taken place.

And yet, once I started digging into the historical documents, I discovered that nearly every account I had read about the hoax was wrong including, amazingly enough, Woolf’s own. Since 1910, writers—even those who were there—have miscon­strued the most basic facts: the day it occurred, who was being impersonated, even the top-secret status of the Dreadnought.

There were times writing this book when no one could have been more afraid of Virginia Woolf than I was. As I reread her diaries, I delighted in her wit and thrilled at her brilliant insights even as I winced at her easy racist remarks, her cruel caricatures of her friends, and her sense of superiority over the people who had been so shortsighted as to be born into a lower class. Rereading her nov­els, some dazzled me all over again. Others put me to sleep.

Returning to her biography, I pitied her for the bereavements that darkened her youth, cringed as she covered her face with burnt cork, admired her work ethic in the face of recurring mental illness, envied her easy entrée into the literary world, and mourned her early death by her own hand. I thought about our desire as readers to place our literary heroes on pedestals because their books have moved us with their beauty and wisdom. We don’t seem to know how to deal with the lives and the works of writers who are at once revolutionary and deeply flawed.

Some people may argue that they should be discarded altogether. But if we do that, we lose the les­sons that past lives offer. Could looking closely at the Dreadnought hoax, I wondered, and the stories we have been spinning about it for over a hundred years, tell us not only about this iconic writer and her world, but also about ourselves?

If Virginia Woolf had not put a stone in her coat pocket and walked into the Ouse on 28 March 1941 when she was 59 years old, it is possible she might have altered her bigoted ideas about race. In one of her last book reviews, she observed that even people of “genius and learning” have difficulty swimming against the current of their times. And while their genius and learning may “come downstream untouched,” as she put it, it soon becomes obvious that the social conventions which dictated their lives are “obsolete and ridiculous.”

Just as Woolf predicted, her talent, intelligence, and sensitivity have sailed downstream to us intact, and the racist conventions that bound and blinded her look obsolete, hateful, and absurd. Had she lived into her sixties, seventies, or eighties, would she have seen their absurdity, too? We will never know, of course. Death has made her unchangeable.

Yet Virginia Woolf’s writing can still be alive to us, revealing as it so often does that lives are a messy, confusing miasma of emotion and reason swirling around together and apart, blinding us, holding us back, or thrusting us forward toward our blunders and our triumphs.

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Adapted from The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax by Danell Jones and published by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. in the UK and Oxford University Press in the US © Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale 2023. Used by permission. All rights reserved. 

It’s like a novel, Mary McCarthy observed of the completed edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt and McCarthy had clashed in 1945 when they first met at a New York party hosted by Partisan Review’s Philip Rahv, McCarthy’s ex-lover. Another fierce wit who rarely suffered fools gladly, McCarthy, when they were introduced, made a sarcastic quip about Hitler’s unpopularity in Paris.

Arendt, exhausted from work and war and grieving her dead, exploded with uncharacteristic and dramatic self-importance: How can you say such a thing in front of me—a victim of Hitler, a person who has been in a concentration camp! They met again a few years later, realized that they actually rather liked one another, exchanged apologies, and then, soon after, the first of many books.

McCarthy sent Arendt her crisp, slim, satirical roman-à-clef on self-important American intellectuals, The Oasis (1949). Arendt upped the stakes of their early friendship considerably by reciprocating with the neither crisp nor slim The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“Dear Hannah,” begins the first letter McCarthy wrote in their long, intimate, correspondence, “I’ve read your book, absorbed, for the past two weeks, in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line in the grocery store. It seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work . . . and also engrossing and fascinating in the way that a novel is: i.e., that it says something on nearly every page that is novel, that one could not have anticipated from what went before but that one then recognizes as inevitable and foreshadowed by the underlying plot of ideas.”

A book that is engrossing enough to read in the bath has to have a considerable pull and The Origins of Totalitarianism is indeed grimly compelling. Arendt depicts a society of lonely, atomized, lifeless people, one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals, characterized by hatred, fear, organized terror, mass death, and unspeakable suffering. This is a world of science-fiction-level horror; utterly alien, incredible and outrageous.

Yet as the story of how this hell came to plant itself on earth unfolds, as McCarthy says, you get a growing and uncomfortable sense that there was something inevitable about it all. I think this is partly because while the history described in the book is extreme, Arendt’s underlying “plot of ideas” feels familiar. The Origins of Totalitarianism reads like a good novel because it reveals to the reader some experience that they already know, but thanks to its pages can now understand. That is also what can make it as terrifying to read in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

This is the story of how millions of twentieth-century Europeans willingly came to live in a murderous ideological fiction. Get rid of the epic fantasy that the totalitarian masses were driven by some common purpose, a great and unified idealistic commitment to a bold, passionate, but unfortunately evil, idea. Ditch, too, the gothic horror of cunning and mesmerizing leaders and their dull, stupid, and gullible enablers. The history that Arendt chronicles in the final section of her book, “Totalitarianism,” is both more prosaic and tawdrier, which is also why it’s familiar.

There were several auguries that foreshadowed the development of totalitarianism. There were racism and imperialism, as we have seen. There were mobs and nationalism in France, pre-Nazi Germany, and Austria. Demagogues whipped up emotions across the continent and authoritarians promised to resolve things for ordinary people in Portugal, Hungary, and Poland. There was fascism in Spain and Italy, which was violent and nasty, but not the total attack on politics itself which came with totalitarian regimes. Across the globe, there were totalitarian movements that gathered up the moment’s dark discontent by giving the appearance of unstoppable momentum, but which could be stopped where there was sufficient political room for resistance.

The starting point for all these phenomena in Europe was the uprooting of people that had come with capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, and revolution. The end point for totalitarian regimes was to make human superfluousness a permanent condition for absolute rule. The anonymity of modern life discovered its denouement in a political system in which human beings ceased to matter at all.

In Western Europe, social disintegration had undermined the promises of liberal democracies before they really got started. Previously, the sense of belonging to a class or group had disguised the fact that very little genuine representative democratic activity had been occurring, despite the opening up of the franchise and political emancipation across the continent.

For a while, people could afford to be disinterested in national politics because they got their sense of social worth from somewhere else. When the promise of social respect and self-determination that had motivated the fathers of Hannah Arendt and Adolf Eichmann began to crumble under economic chaos and war in the first decades of the century, just how vacant contemporary politics really was became visible.

Democracy’s dirty secret was out, which was that, in Arendt’s words, democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. Bluntly put, a small number of people had governed largely for their own self-interest. When it became clear that political parties were not doing what they advertised and representing the interests of particular groups or classes, a vacuum opened up at the center of political power. A different kind of anti-democratic politics began to emerge. At its heart was a terrifying negative solidarity of the formerly indifferent and inarticulate. The dull gray masses which popular imagination associates with twentieth-century totalitarian rule were never really unified, Arendt tells us. Mass movements were created out of isolated loners and democracy’s losers.

That was what happened in Western Europe. To make totalitarianism possible in the Soviet Union, Stalin had to re-create the social atomization that historical circumstances had gifted the Nazis in Germany. The Russian Revolution had already disposed of one centralized, unaccountable, despotic rule: Stalin had to invent a new one. Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the new government, believed that strengthening social groups and organizations was the best way of protecting the revolution, so he (briefly) encouraged trade unions and promoted the consciousness of cultural and historical differences among the Soviet countries.

Stalin, who assumed leadership in 1924, Bolshevized the revolution’s communal political structures and replaced them with his infamous centralized party bureaucracy whose tendencies toward Russification, Arendt noted, were not too different from those of the Czarist regime. The liquidation of classes, property owners, and the bourgeoisie, then the peasants, swiftly followed. Hannah Arendt would have probably viewed the Russification that began again under Putin in the first decades of the twenty-first century as less of a plot twist than an unimaginative repetition.

In novels, there is often a moment when characters realize they have been living in a dream (or nightmare), when scales fall from their eyes and a new direction is taken. This happens in plots from history too, but it usually takes longer, and the moment of realization is nearly always too late. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented, Arendt wrote of the interwar period. Every event had the finality of a last judgment . . . that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.

The First World War, mass unemployment, inflation, civil war, revolution, pogroms, mass deportations, and mass migration; instead of producing a reality check, the more extreme the circumstances became, the more reality spun out of reach. Artists and writers creatively thrilled to the futility of it all. In nightclubs and bars, people sang of hopelessness with a tired joy. And the more estranged people became, the more resentment seeped into everyday life. Nothing, wrote Arendt, perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than a vague pervasive hatred of everyone and everything.

Directionless hate was a political opportunity. Rabble-rousers and demagogues stepped into the gap left by democratic failure, paving the way for the big men who became such lethal clichés in what followed. The topsy-turvy logic of totalitarian thinking began to take shape. In Europe and America, wealthy elites conspired with ideologues to try and persuade the miserable and disenfranchised that civil society and the institutions of law and democracy were the real enemy. “Truth,” they said, was whatever the “hypocritical” liberal and bourgeois political and social classes wanted hidden—the global elites, the bankers, the Jews, the citizens of nowhere.

Conspiracy theories proliferated because they offered a coherence and a consistency that was lacking in the real world. The most famous conspiracy theory of all, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, vividly detailing a Jewish plot for world domination, first emerged in Russia in 1902. After the revolution, anti-communist exiles brought the document with them to the West where it began to circulate. The fact that it was revealed to be fraudulent in 1921 did not stop Hitler and Goebbels from championing it as evidence of a Communist-Jewish threat later.

In the United States, Henry Ford published and distributed over 500,000 copies of the Protocols, which were also discussed on national radio by Father Coughlin, the anti-semitic leader of the National Union for Social Justice. The current American right-wing movement QAnon developed its own version of the Protocols in 2017. America, they claimed, was being run by a cabal of satanic pedophile cannibals, funded by Jewish financiers.

The extreme ridiculousness of these conspiracies is very much the point. They are designed to appeal to people for whom democratic discourse has failed, people who are not only disinterested in conventional politics but often violently opposed to them. Totalitarian propaganda doesn’t follow the usual rules of political persuasion and refutation, but makes a show of standing outside of traditional party politics.

The ideologues of the 1930s presented political debate as originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources—in race, class, myth, and historical destiny. Their fights, as Arendt put it, were framed as being beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. Twenty-first-century propagandists similarly pitch their battles as epic and existential. Race and historical destiny remain popular themes; so, too, are gender absolutism, sexuality, the family, God, and a vague but passionately hawked “greatness.”

This kind of “politics” is meant to be mad because the madder the theory, the more distant from a commonly despised reality it is possible to become. The masses’ escape from reality, Hannah Arendt observed in a sentence that rears up from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.

Nazi and Bolshevik propagandists quickly mastered the art of turning coincidences into plots and making the conspiracies seem real. Random events were interpreted as portents and confirmations. But while they temporarily gave the illusion of coherence, the storytelling and lies did not end the chaos; enemies and their plots had to be constantly invented. There were never enough of them. It was exhausting (it is exhausting).

Far from unifying isolated, scared, and angry people into a great nation or redemptive movement, the reality of having to live with multiple lies made the situation more chaotic. More fictions, more hate, and bigger lies were always needed. It became so difficult to distinguish fact from fiction that entire populations gave up trying. The experience of a trembling, wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality, Arendt wrote in the 1960s, is among the most common and most vivid experiences of totalitarian rule.

The same complex reality that made people susceptible to propaganda also made them cynical. Amidst the swirl of fictions, plots, fake news, lies, and super lies, people were prepared to believe the incredible—the reliable cunning and malfeasance of class and race enemies—while keeping some shred of human dignity intact by telling themselves that they knew it was just lies and politics all along. The cynics were not the clever people and the masses were not stupid. So far from reality had everyone traveled that none of it really mattered, even as the flags grew bigger and the demands for oaths of allegiance became even more outrageous.

Cynicism turned out to be one of totalitarianism’s most fatal characteristics and may yet become one of its most enduring legacies. The men who administered Hitler’s and Stalin’s policies did not necessarily believe in racism or socialism, Jewish conspiracies or class enemies, any more than many of the GOP believed that Donald Trump won the 2020 election or the Russian high command thought that the Jewish-Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was a Nazi.

But they did—and do—all believe in one thing: human omnipotence and, perhaps most especially, although Arendt does not make the connection, male omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible, she concluded. And it was.

The gulags and the Nazi death camps were where the brute reality of all this fiction-making was finally played out. The camps served no purpose, Arendt said, other than to demonstrate the truth of totalitarianism’s most outrageous claim: that human beings were now superfluous. “For what purpose, may I ask, do the gas chambers exist?,” the French survivor David Rousset recalled the question being asked in the death camps. “For what purpose were you born?” was the answer.

Beyond the capacities of human comprehension, Arendt wrote in a review of an early account of the death camps. In the archives you can see on her typescript how she’s returned the carriage of her typewriter back over the words and then struck down hard on the underline key: Beyond the capacities of human comprehension. They had all died together; children, men, women, the dying, and the newborn, like cattle, like matter into the darkest deepest abyss of primal equality, like cattle, like matter, things. When she used the image of Hell in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she later insisted, she did not mean this allegorically but literally.

Mary McCarthy had one criticism of her new friend’s book. How did it all actually work? Did Hitler and Stalin have some all-powerful insight that allowed them to manipulate others to join their insane plots? Were they the demon heirs of Plato’s philosopher who left the cave of shadows, stared at the sun, and then returned to rule based on his superior knowledge of reality? Who writes the plots of totalitarianism, Hannah? she asked.

Nobody was Arendt’s answer. This is why totalitarianism was profoundly anti-political: in the end, there were no opinions, no debates, no agency, no . . . people. Political principles had been replaced by pure ideology. You want people to stop starving? Stalin asked in 1932. Then the counter-revolutionary Ukrainian peasants need to starve—the logic of the man-made famine known as the Holodomor that killed millions.

You think the world is run by unaccountable financial organizations? Hitler asked. Then you must work with us to eliminate the Jews. You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet, was how Arendt put it. You didn’t even need Hitler or Stalin to follow this logic. They had succeeded, she added, in contaminating their subjects with the specifically totalitarian virus. The plots had started to reproduce themselves.

Mary McCarthy wasn’t only worried about the plots of totalitarianism. I suspect she was also alluding to Arendt’s own compelling, maybe too compelling, “underlying plot of ideas.” Both Karl Jaspers and later the French political philosopher Claude Lefort pointed out that in telling the story of totalitarianism, Arendt’s own arguments sometimes came dangerously close to reproducing the logic she was describing, leaving no space for an alternative anti-totalitarian history of resistance and contestation.

In fairness, Arendt would go on to write some of that history in On Revolution, but there is a claustrophobia about The Origins of Totalitarianism, an awful inevitability about events as they are retold, and you could (as political scientists have) describe Arendt’s genius for plotting as the book’s flaw. It is a very driven book about a very driven historical phenomenon.

But you could also (as I do) read Arendt as giving brilliant expression to a sense of powerless vertigo in a world that seems to be in the grip of a relentlessly awful plot. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented, she wrote. Many observing world events between the election of Donald Trump in America in 2016 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would have understood exactly what she meant.

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Excerpted from WE ARE FREE TO CHANGE THE WORLD copyright © 2024 by Lyndsey Stonebridge. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Featured image: L.M. Palomares

By the time Javier Cercas left Spain in the summer of 1987 for a teaching gig at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he still wasn’t sure what kind of writer he wanted to be. The generic eclecticism of his soon-to-be published first book, the short story collection The Motive, now looked to him more like literary indecisiveness. What path should he take next: push the limits of genre fiction, as he did with noir in one of the stories, or stick instead to a more traditional mode, as he did with the epistolary in another of the stories? Or should he follow the path set out by the final story of the collection and see what more he could do with a new kind of self-reflexive writing that, at that time, was all the rage in Spain?

The new kind of writing is what we now call “metafiction.” By the 1980s, it had blanketed all corners of the global literary world. From Borges to Calvino, Lessing to Kundera, established and emerging writers found ever new ways of foregrounding the artifice of fiction. In Spain, writers of the stature of Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Martín Gaite, and Juan Marsé had published major works underscoring this artificiality, often featuring scenes in which readers witness the writing of the very book they are reading.

Cercas decided to go down that last path. Metafiction, after all, was the genre of his early idols in American literature: Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John Barth. Already in the short story collection, Cercas had adopted and challenged Barth’s concepts of “antinovel” and the “literature of exhaustion.” Perhaps seeing this particular form of postmodernism in its native habitat could help him make metafiction his own as well as make sense of the country where he would spend the next couple of years.

In 1989, upon returning to Spain, Cercas published his second book, The Tenant, a campus novel set at the University of Texas, Austin. The novel, which tells the story of a professor who gradually becomes academically, socially, and romantically overshadowed by a new colleague, followed the metafictional script to a T: the novel opens and closes with the exact same lines, making the story, the dream, and the self-reflective literary device come, literally, full circle. Cercas’s programmatic embrace of metafiction, however, was a literary failure. As he later admitted to the journalist Lorena Maldonado, “I wanted to be a postmodern writer, if possible, a postmodern North American writer. But then I went to live in the U.S. and discovered something, which was that I was Spanish.”

In 2001, everything changed. Cercas exploded onto the literary scene with his novel Soldiers of Salamis, which sold more than a million copies worldwide, won numerous awards, and was quickly turned into a major film. The novel, which tells the story of how a journalist named Javier Cercas finds an anonymous Republican soldier who spared the life of the fascist ideologue during the Spanish Civil War, swapped the university campus for the reporting trip. But the metafiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved Escheresque circularity but rather something much more directly self-referential. Cercas had inserted himself—name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofiction, and it can be found everywhere in contemporary fiction. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest names in literature today: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson. The list of practitioners is long. Autofiction describes fictional writing in which the author, narrator, and protagonist share a name, many biographical details, or, most often, both. It is frequently seen as the fictional corollary to memoir, and thus as a genre of “life writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Knausgaardian novella-length digressions that give rhythm to the mundane chores of daily life, others favor the vibes of the Nelsonian graduate school theory classroom, replete with sex, gender, and philosophy. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the self.

Not so for Cercas. His autofictional novels deal with a different kind of intimacy: the intimacy of how to report a newspaper opinion column. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair op-ed writer, opinion journalism, like its newsroom corollary, relies a great deal on facts and, often, on first-hand reporting. Opinion writers might report on the history of feminism or the history of their own family. But the best report all the same. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in a newsroom write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which opinion journalists avow the persuasive techniques they use in their own writing. Op-ed writing, after all, doesn’t just identify a problem, it proposes a solution.

Over the next two decades, Cercas would use autofiction to explore the craft of opinion journalism. In novels from Soldiers of Salamis to The Anatomy of a Moment (2009), The Impostor (2014), and Lord of All the Dead (2017), readers encounter a shadow narrative of the journalistic process, which finds Cercas, the protagonist, investigating major historical events and figures, from the Spanish Civil War and the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s and ’80s to the lives of fascist writers, famous politicians, and notorious fabulists. Readers follow Cercas as he conducts interviews, uncovers documents, reviews footage, visits sites, and works with various kinds of sources. The findings often appear in the novels themselves, sometimes in the form of excerpts, whole articles reproduced verbatim, or even book-length investigations.

Cercas’s autofiction diagnosed a number of problems across contemporary Spanish society. But one stood out among the rest: the problem how to understand someone’s political ideology when it doesn’t align with their personality. In Soldiers of Salamis, the worldview of Cercas, the protagonist, gets scrambled when he researches the story of the fascist ideologue Rafael Sánchez Mazas, who, it turns out, was far more interested in writing literature than propaganda.

In The Anatomy of a Moment, which tells the story of how three of Spain’s most important politicians dealt with an attempted coup d’état on February 23, 1981, ideological commitments go out the window once the health of Spanish citizens and Spanish democracy is put on the line. Similar moments occur in The Impostor, which profiles a left-wing figure who is revealed to have fabricated his internment in a Nazi concentration camp, as well as in Lord of All the Dead, where Cercas, the protagonist, uncovers the fascist history of his relative before throwing into doubt the extent to which words on paper entail enthusiasm in person.

If the problem was how to understand the disconnect between political ideology and personal identity, these novels, like many opinion columns, also proposed a solution. The solution, for Cercas, was that ideological commitments didn’t actually exist and, thus, neither did the disconnect between one’s political ideology and personal identity. Whatever apparent tension might exist could be explained away by assuming that people are never as deeply committed to political ideas as one might think. Sánchez Mazas was merely a “false Falangist.” As for the three politicians: “Only irreconcilable enemies could reconcile the irreconcilable Spain of Franco.” And “the ultimate enigma of [Enric] Marco,” the fabulist, “is his absolute normality; also his absolute exceptionality.” As it turns out, people who apparently have strong political commitments don’t, deep down, actually have any. Politics in the end is always downstream of personality.

These were bold arguments about major political figures. Why would Cercas want to couch them in autofiction, or in fiction at all? Part of the answer has to do with the medium. Autofiction is a genre that, by definition, blurs the fiction-nonfiction divide. As such, if used correctly, it can have its cake and eat it too. Autofictional writers who write about contemporary politics can make claims on current events in a way that, say, a romance novelist cannot. This is because the blurring of fiction and nonfiction often persuades readers into giving their writing a certain nonfictional legitimacy that would not be afforded to writers whose work is squarely in the fictional realm.

More generally, fiction has a shelf-life that often exceeds that of nonfiction, especially the argumentative, short-form kind, such as an op-ed. This means that it can also reach a much wider and more diverse audience, potentially persuading far more people than a self-selecting newspaper or magazine could. Lastly, autofiction is fiction, after all. Despite their authoritative voice in the eyes of readers, writers of autofiction can hide behind the fact that what they’ve written is fiction. As the famous Hollywood disclaimer reads, “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In this way, bold arguments such as Cercas’s never need to face the music.

The other part of the answer has to do with Cercas’s stature as a novelist intellectual, that is, as a novelist who opines in the public sphere through both fiction and nonfiction writing. In Cercas’s case, that nonfiction writing has taken the form of an op-ed column, which he began writing in 1998 for El País, Spain’s paper of record, and has continued to this day. The figure of the novelist intellectual presents a dilemma: how do we deal with a writer whose work appears to simultaneously occupy the realms of fiction and nonfiction? Novelist intellectuals upset the typical understanding of the public sphere, which purports to be a nonfictional arena in which claims and arguments can be evaluated according to intellectual standards that most often hew to norms in journalism and the academy.

These standards, however, might neuter the unique contribution novelist intellectuals bring to public debate, namely, their access to certain forms of truth and thought through fiction that remain inaccessible to nonfiction. With Cercas, the dilemma is double: not only does he mix fiction and nonfiction in his persona as a novelist intellectual, but his chosen genre of fiction—autofiction—has a particular knack for blurring the fiction-nonfiction divide.

For nearly twenty years, Cercas took advantage of these dilemmas, developing his signature form of autofiction without the self. Ambivalences, contradictions, and other wrinkles in the historical record were what motivated his autofiction, licensing his reinvestigation of them in fictional form. The upshot was massive. Since the publication of Soldados de Salamina in 2001, Cercas has become one of the most well-known columnists in Spain, opining on all matters of Spanish history and politics. He has also become one of the figures of Spanish literature and most well-known Spanish intellectuals outside of Spain, making his name through profiles, op-eds, and interviews at places such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Yet Cercas has never let go of journalistic and historical authority in his fiction. In fact, he has often doubled down on it with the publication of each new novel. The author of autofiction that attempts to intervene in the public debates of our time, Cercas has never been satisfied with writing the kind of fiction that claims to be cordoned off from the world it examines.

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Adapted from The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain by Bécquer Seguín. Copyright © 2024. Available from Harvard University Press.

If we were to trace the lineage of our existence, how far would we go? Would we venture countless years beyond our first humanoid ancestors? How deep into the earth’s life would we be willing to travel, and what insights would emerge from such an exploration?

Engaging with the words of the American essayist Lewis Thomas is no simple task. To step into his universe is to shed preconceived notions of ourselves, our existence and our world and be prepared to confront more questions than answers as we come out on the other side.

“I go back, and so do you, like it or not, to a single Ur-ancestor,” Thomas writes in his book The Fragile Species, “whose remains are on display in rocks dated approximately 3.7 thousand million years ago, born a billion or so years after the Earth itself took shape and began cooling down. That first of the line, our n-granduncle, was unmistakably a bacterial cell.” This idea—that we come from very modest beginnings—appears throughout his writing to remind us over and over that humans, like all animals, plants, even bacteria, are related, having emerged from one cell in the primeval seas.

Thomas began his writing career in earnest in the early 1970s, carving a special place for himself in the golden era of contemplation in this speculative and inquiring manner. After or alongside other thinkers of the time—Buckminster Fuller, Peter Singer, Robert Ornstein and Gregory Bateson—Thomas, too, was driven by utopian ideals of perfection, tempered by humane concerns with vulnerability. He was a biologist, immunologist and pathologist of great repute and would later come to also be known as a writer of great repute.

He set out to demystify the seemingly arcane world of science with the magic wand of poetic utterance. Having lived through two World Wars and a Cold War, he must have thought the worst was behind him. “Get us through the next few years… safely out of this century…and then watch what we can do,” he wrote. But here we are, well into the 21st century, caught between digital isolation and demagogic collectivism, on the verge of a looming threat of war and climate breakdown.

A seemingly paradoxical coupling of anxiety and hope is the cornerstone of Thomas’s writing: the former a catalyst for the latter. Today, it is this sense of hope and optimism that can light our future path. So too can his consistent message that humans must inevitably coexist, mirroring the interconnected nature of all species on Earth. Some of the science may now feel outdated, but his writing remains a valuable resource for understanding the human adventure and what we may yet need to do to correct course if we want to survive and survive well.

*

Science and humanities are not separate entities, as we are made to believe. Both are an exploration of what makes us human, even though they may take circuitous paths to arrive at the same questions. Thomas, the ‘Poet Laureate of 20th Century Medical Science’ (1989 Albert Lasker Public Service Award citation) seamlessly fused both realms. “Thomas was as likely in print as on the wards to pair epiphany (à la James Joyce) with entropy (à la the second law of thermo-dynamics, or ∆ S > q/T)” wrote his contemporary, Gerald Weissman, a scientist and writer himself. Thomas, according to Weissman, was convinced that medicine was like grammar, “a hybrid of science and art united by syntax.”

Thomas’ literary career began in 1970 after he delivered the keynote address at a conference on inflammation held in Brook Lodge, Michigan. The talk was scintillating and devoid of the often dense and dull voice that permeates academic spaces; characterized instead by elegant and witty prose—a style that would later define him.

Thomas’s speech was published as a pamphlet and soon after, his old friend, Franz Ingelfinger, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, invited him to write a monthly column “in the same general style”. The terms were attractive: one essay a month on any topic. He would not be paid but was promised that nobody would edit his writing.

This was just a few years after the iconic photograph of Earth rising on the horizon above the moon’s surface captivated the world’s imagination. Much like the way the image permanently altered people’s perspective of our home planet, Thomas’s column ‘Notes of a Biology Watcher’ also elevated readers’ consciousness regarding our place in the vast expanse of the universe.

At the time of Ingelfinger’s offer, Thomas had published about 200 academic papers and some “occasional light verse.” “Good bad verse was what I was pretty good at,” he wrote in his memoir. Eventually, he would go on to publish five essay collections (The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher; The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher; Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; Et Cetera Et Cetera: Notes of a Word Watcher and The Fragile Species), a memoir (The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher) and a slim collection of poetry (Could I Ask You Something?).

At first, Thomas wrote, by his own admission, “several dreadful essays which I could not bring myself to read.” So, he ditched his initial method of grouping thoughts in a sequential order. Instead, he took to writing fast and freely at night, sometimes after deadline, without outline, form, or method. Within six months, he published six essays on cells, moon germs, symbiosis, and his beloved planet Earth. They received widespread admiration and support for their brevity, accessibility and quiet wisdom, even as he himself viewed his writing as “writing for fun.”

Thomas opens his very first essay “The Lives of a Cell”—later the title of his collection of essays which would win the National Book Prize—meditating on humans as transitory beings and the need for interconnectedness, the leitmotifs of his oeuvre. “We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. He sits in the topmost tiers of polymer, glass, and steel, dangling his pulsing legs, surveying at a distance the writhing life of the planet.

In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds. But it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia…Man is embedded in nature.”

And because man is embedded in nature, he must engage in dynamic self-organizing systems and natural world symbiosis. “We are not the masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as dependent on the rest of life as are the leaves or midges or fish… the earth is a loosely formed, spherical organism, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.”

While Thomas’ writing quickly rose to acclaim in the scientific and medical community, it was a letter he received—“the nicest letter”—from the writer Joyce Carol Oates that shone a light on him as a substantial literary figure. Oates circulated Thomas’ writing among students to teach the “art of the essay.” She taught his theories “not because they sound revolutionary, but because they are new, novel and seemingly objective explications of what has always been known, though expressed in different terms,” she later wrote in the New York Times.

Inspired by his hero Montaigne, Thomas was a master of the literary essay. No metaphor was out of reach for him, no connection too wild. The sky, for instance, is a “gleaming membrane,” elsewhere it is a “wide-open country, irresistible for exploration;” the earth is “most like a single cell;” language, once it comes alive, “behaves like an active, motile organism;” and an active field of science is like “an immense intellectual anthill; the individual almost vanishes into the mass of minds tumbling over each other, carrying information from place to place, passing it around at the speed of light.”

*

Born on the cusp of the First World War in 1913 in Flushing, New York, to a father who was a surgeon and family doctor and mother a trained nurse, Thomas grew up saturated in the world of science and medicine. All through his childhood, he accompanied his father on house calls. This was the early 20th century, when a medical professional’s job was mostly to comfort the ill and the dying, not to change the course of their illnesses.

From his father he learnt that most illnesses tended to kill some patients and spare others, and if the one spared had a doctor by their side, the patient became convinced the doctor “saved” them. In his memoir, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher, Thomas recalls his father telling him he should be careful never to believe this of himself were he to take up the profession.

Perhaps it is why he wore his erudition lightly and sprinkled it with wit and humour. He never claimed to know all the answers as he invited his readers to stretch their understanding of mysterious events, right from within the tiny nucleus of an atom, all the way to the ungraspable surprises of the distant cosmos.

To read a Lewis Thomas essay is to watch fireworks light up a dark night. Take for instance his essay whimsically titled “Comprehending my Cat Jeoffry.” He begins with a meditation on how the more we learn about nature, “the more we seem to distance ourselves from the rest of life, as though we were separate creatures, so different from other irrelevant occupants of the biosphere as to have arrived from another galaxy.”

Swiftly, he shifts his mind to the etymology of the word “nature” rooted in the Indo-European language of perhaps 35,000 years ago, moving to the Greek and Latin, and wondering how the long memory of such a word could lose its meaning. He then makes an astonishing leap: “What is going on in the minds of… our nonhuman relatives in the biosphere?” From there, he reflects on bacteria, antibiotics, the defensive maneuvers of certain cricket and moth species to evade bats. Finally, he comes to his protagonist—“a small Abyssinian cat, a creature of elegance, grace, and poise, a piece of moving sculpture, and a total mystery.”

Brimming with wonder, he then delivers a most feline sentence about his feline friend: “Just as he is able to hear sounds that I cannot hear, and smell important things of which I am unaware, and suddenly leap like a crazed gymnast from chair to chair, upstairs and downstairs through the house, flawless in every movement and searching for something he never finds, he has periods of long meditation on matters that I know nothing about.”

The allure of Thomas’ writing lies in the philosophical dimension he weaves into the fabric of scientific inquiry. Consider this, a possible nod to the Ship of Theseus thought experiment: “There are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish totally into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again.”

*

Optimism can come across as twee if overdone. But in Thomas’ hands it is a stethoscope with which he probes the human condition unfolding in the theatre of a grand production. He is not ignorant of the “aggression, grabbiness and terrorism” in nature; he just chooses to highlight the synergy and co-operation instead.

Insects to him are not merely parasites or spreaders of disease or afflictions. They are “indispensable sources of food for aerial and aquatic life, carriers of heredity for plants and technical assistants in the recycling of forest life.” Microbes are friendly and amiable. “We are symbionts, my mitochondria and I, bound together for the advance of the biosphere, living together in harmony, maybe even affection. For sure, I am fond of my microbial engines, and I assume they are pleased by the work they do for me.”

Equally a proponent of altruism in nature, Thomas invites us to take inspiration from ants, bees and termites in how they live as a homogenous unit in their hives, nests and termitaria. The novelist John Updike scoffed at this very “altruistic view of nature” but admired his “shimmering vision of hope.”

Thomas saw us humans a “fragile species, still new to the earth here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured,” therefore still finding our way. Towards the end of his life, however, Thomas’ Panglossian optimism did seem to falter. He became haunted by the seemingly limitless ability of man to self-destruct, and destruct others in thermo-nuclear warfare. Even though trillions of other species before us lived in collaboration, he wrote that humans were the “anomalies of the moment, the self-conscious children at the edge of the crowd, unsure of our place, unwilling to join up.”

Long before the term Anthropocene was popularized, he defined it lucidly: “We have grown into everywhere, spreading like a new growth over the entire surface, touching and affecting every other kind of life, incorporating ourselves. The earth risks being eutrophied by us. We are now the dominant feature of our own environment.”

For a moment, he even yielded to the temptation of believing that our maturity as a species had peaked, putting us at the risk of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, “radioactive at that.” This could be reversed, he seemed to say, if we let go of our arrogance, and accepted that our existence on earth was a mere accident, a consequence of “pure luck, indeterminate and intentionless,” that there would always exist “imponderable puzzles of cosmology,” that had it not been for one DNA mutation after another paving the way to our current state, “we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”

*

What if we took a moment to look at the earth from the moon, as only a handful before us have done? What if we stretched the moment to encompass geological time? The seas would not always be seas, the mountains not always mountains. We would see giant land masses, slowly drifting away from each other on their crustal plates to form continents. Like most of the planetary inhabitants, humans would appear and vanish in the blink of an eye. And then, facing the immensity of that which we cannot grasp, we would perhaps acknowledge our place in the world.

If lucky, we might also glimpse Thomas’ vision of the world: “Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development…the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.”

“In the early sixties in the Washington bureau of the Times, the period around 9:00 pm used to be known as the Maggie Higgins Hour… Her frequently exclusive stories obviously had to be checked out, and the Maggie Higgins Hour arrived when the bureau phone would start ringing with calls from New York on the latest Higgins headlines, just out in the Herald Trib. Could the bureau match?”
–­Tom Wicker, On Press
*

On December 12, 1960, a banner headline on the front page of the Herald Tribune announced Maggie Higgins’s latest exclusive: “Kennedy Sr. Tells of His Family.” Much to the consternation of her competitors, the ubiquitous Higgins had somehow managed to establish herself as an insider in the new Kennedy administration, and she had been rewarded with a long, intimate interview with the controversial patriarch of the president-­elect’s sprawling Irish Catholic family. The subhead of her story read, “He Urged His Son to Run for President? Nonsense.”

Her exclusive was picked up by the Washington Star, and the AP, and was quoted in the daily papers and the nightly news broadcasts. When calls poured in from reporters at other publications wanting to know how Higgins scored her sit-­down with Joe Kennedy just one month after his son’s election, she sounded smug, explaining that she had pitched the story while at the family’s Hyannis Port compound along with a handful of other correspondents “personally known to the president.” Tidbits from the interview continued to circulate for days afterward, including the tycoon’s insistence that there was “absolutely no truth” to rumors that he planned to be the power behind the throne, and was hunting for a house in Washington and would soon be taking up residence near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A week earlier, when Jack Kennedy ignited a firestorm by nominating his brother for attorney general, Maggie devoted an entire column to pushing Bobby for the post. In “His Brother’s Keeper,” she reported that the thirty-­five-­year-­old Democratic campaign manager, who had contributed greatly to JFK’s victory, was sensitive to the charges of nepotism, but the president-elect would not be deterred from giving him the job, and they hoped the public would come to see it as a well-­deserved reward. Before the column came out, she sent Bobby a draft, along with a note that conveys how involved she had become in helping to advance his political fortunes:

Bobby:

I left many details about you out because your situation is so uncertain even though the observations your father made about you are my sentiments exactly. But just wait. One day I’m going to blow the myth about the “ruthless” Bobby Kennedy so high it will never be put back together again. I hope this article is satisfactory. I tried to lay to rest the old bogey about your father manipulating the white house and it was easy to do because any first-­hand observer can see this is utterly contrary to the truth.

I’ll call or perhaps you could call me at North 7 7070.

All the best,
Maggie

Bobby sent a handwritten reply: “Your article was certainly most kind—­and most appreciated.” He added that he and Ethel were “looking forward to seeing you next Saturday,” a reference to baby Linda Hall’s christening day. At the church, the new priest who had taken over the parish declined to let Ruth Montgomery serve as godmother. Bobby and Ethel Kennedy offered to stand in, and they became Linda’s official godparents.

By the time the new administration was being sworn in, Maggie was at the forefront of Washington social life. When the Women’s National Press Club gave a reception for the new members of the president’s cabinet on January 21, 1961, she introduced the new attorney general, who, in typical Kennedy fashion, was half an hour late for the party in his honor. Waving away his apologies, Maggie took the breathless Ethel by the arm and steered the couple into the ballroom, presiding over a private party for all the guests who stayed.

Maggie continued to help burnish the Kennedy image. She penned a glowing profile of the family matriarch, Rose Kennedy, for McCall’s. The magazine was so pleased it put Maggie on a $1,000 monthly retainer. She followed up with another puff piece. Packed with admiring quotes from Kennedy cronies, “The Private World of Robert and Ethel Kennedy” underscored her own position as a trusted friend and member of the clan.

She and Peter Lisagor teamed up to write a flattering profile of Tish Baldrige, who had been appointed Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary, and another gauzy feature about the Kennedys’ new style of entertaining, “RSVP—­The White House,” detailing the scandalous changes the young, modern president and his wife were introducing to the “forbidding, museum-­like atmosphere of the White House,” including a switch from the torturous white tie and tails to black tie at formal affairs, and abandoning the traditional receiving line.

Maggie’s enviable access was observed up close by Jim O’Donnell, who left journalism to join the Kennedy administration in 1960. “Jack always cultivated newspapermen, he brain-­picked, which I think a good politician should do,” he said, noting that Kennedy had a dozen or so favorites among the press corps, including Higgins, Lisagor, Lippmann, Cronkite, and Elie Abel of the Times. The president valued Maggie for her candor—­she could be counted on to tell it like it was, with no sugarcoating. “Kennedy would call her, much more often than he called me. He was much closer to her. She was a power in the press those days.”

Once, after she had written a piece that angered Kennedy, he expressed his disappointment in her. As she related the conversation to O’Donnell later in the day, the president had complained, “Marguerite, I thought you were a friend of mine. You could at least have called me up. You’re going out with this thing. It’s critical. You could have called me up.”

“But Jack, it was eleven in the evening,” she had protested, trying to explain that she was on deadline and unable to put in a call to his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, at such a late hour.

“Look, I don’t care what time of day or night,” Kennedy had said. “If you’re going to be on the front page of the Herald Tribune with something that concerns my government, you can roll me out at three in the morning. I’ll only be angry if you didn’t check it. Because (a) you got it wrong, and (b) I could have given you some added information.”

O’Donnell marveled at Maggie’s relationship with the president, whom she called “Jack,” something he could never bring himself to do. “She had a really fine relationship with President Kennedy,” he said, adding unprompted that their after-­hours contact was strictly “platonic.” For a reporter to be given the president’s private number was incredible, he added; “she could literally call him at midnight and get through.”

The lure of the Kennedys was irresistible, and not just for Maggie. Many journalists shared her exhilaration at the arrival of the New Frontiersmen, who seemed so bright, energetic, and full of ideas. “Few presidents ever had a more adoring press corps,” observed Lippmann biographer Ronald Steel, who detailed the conversion of the Trib’s influential political columnist into “one of the shining ornaments of the Kennedy administration.”

Even in this period of adulation, friendly columnists and correspondents did not suspend all critical judgment. Ben Bradlee, who went on to become a legendary editor of the Washington Post, wrote about the excitement and fascination of unexpectedly having a friend elected president, but he noted, “For a newspaperman it is all that, plus confusing: are you a friend, or are you a reporter? You have to redefine ‘friend’ and redefine ‘reporter’ over and over again, before reaching any kind of comfort level.” There is a line reporters know they should not cross. It is a boundary that denotes separate and distinct professional agendas, distance, and if not impartiality then at least some semblance of neutrality. During the first weeks after Kennedy was elected, Bradlee admitted that he often found it difficult to toe that line, and it took time before he “got it right.”

Maggie waltzed across the line without missing a beat. There is no sign she experienced so much as a twinge of ethical queasiness about her overfamiliarity with the first family. The more time she spent as a special columnist, the less attention she paid to the ordinary rules of journalism. Confident she could negotiate what Bradlee called the “complicated perimeters of friendship,” and the conflict between the private and public spheres, she ignored all the textbook warnings about compromising relationships.

As she morphed from foreign correspondent to Cold War pundit and anticommunist crusader, she became increasingly partisan. She saw herself as an advocate, identifying areas of instability, advancing her interpretation of events, and recommending courses of action. Promoting the Kennedys—­their policies, their appointees, their cult of personality—­was all of a piece with her worldview; she was their emissary, and they were part of her larger cause. The martial sentiment of the president’s inaugural address was music to her ears, and she liked his public pronouncements on combating communism. Even though they sometimes differed on issues, there was a shared sense that this was their generation’s turn to lead, and the beginning of a new period of global commitment.

Maggie and the Kennedys were made for each other. The brothers shared her insatiable appetite for news and political gossip, and they enjoyed the lively give-­and-­take of journalistic shoptalk, the no-­holds-­barred, who’s-­in-­who’s-­out roundup of state officials, politicians, reporters, friends, enemies, and acquaintances. For her, the Kennedys were the holy grail of sources—­the highest of high-­placed authorities—­providing unparalleled access, allowing her to be first with the news and the most complete with the background and context of events. Her files during this period are crammed full of correspondence with Bobby, including notes, telegrams, call slips, meeting dates, and dinner plans. She was a regular recipient of RFK’s leaks, and reciprocated with stories he found useful.

She also wrote regularly to Jack, her easy rapport with him evident in the telegram she sent after he clinched the nomination at the Los Angeles convention on July 15, 1960:

CONGRATULATIONS ON NOMINATION, LAST NIGHT’S SPEECH, AND, IN FACT, ON PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING STOP HOPE YOU WILL TIDY UP SUCH MATTERS AS THE CONGO, CUBA, ETC, SO I CAN ATTEND NEXT CONVENTION STOP WISH I’D BEEN THERE.

Kennedy wrote back a week later, noting that the “chaotic last hours” at the Biltmore had prevented him from responding that night. “I, of course, regret that you were left behind on the war fronts of the Congo and Cuba,” he added. “I shall, however, do my best to provide a breathing spell in the summer of 1964.”

Maggie had missed the convention because she was stuck in Washington writing a series of articles about the Congo, and the future of the new African states, sixteen independent nations that had just been admitted to the United Nations. In one of her better recent scoops, “Summer Scandal,” she reported that the NATO base in Greece was being used as a stopover for Russia’s Ilyushin planes, which were being sent “to win friends and influence the Congolese on communism’s behalf.”

In March of 1961, when trouble erupted in the Belgian Congo Republic, Maggie jumped on a plane to cover the hostilities. The page-­one headline was classic Higgins: “Congolese Hostile to U.N., but Welcome an American.” The American was Maggie, of course. Her story opened in familiar dramatic style with her arrival in Leopoldville:

As we stepped out of the tiny blue and white Cub plane that had flown us across the river at Brazzaville, a helmeted Congolese soldier, complete with paratroop boots and grenades on his belt, waved a burp gun somewhat indecisively in our direction.

“Go back,” he said. “We don’t want any more United Nations people here.”

“Pay no attention,” said an Air France hostess, who was armed with only a pert blue uniform and an air of supreme confidence.

Readers who plowed on would learn that Congolese president Joseph Kasavubu’s government had tried to topple the communist-­backed rebel leader Antoine Gizenga by cutting off supplies to his regime in Stanleyville. European civilians were fleeing across the border and the province was beset by violence. Maggie scored a world beat by being the first reporter to send word from Leopoldville of the arrival of Indian combat troops. She did it by locating the only open wireless circuit in the republic, and punching out her own story on the teletype machine in the communications center. A week later, she pinned down Gizenga for an hour-­long talk in his house in Stanleyville. The interview made even bigger news: he told her that unless the Western powers officially recognized him by April 15, he would expel British, French, and U.S. consuls from his city. More headlines followed, and more Higgins fanfare.

Newsweek reported that in the space of two weeks, Maggie, showing a touch of her old “fire-­horse flamboyance,” had filed two world exclusives to the Herald Tribune. Making her entrance in a posy-­printed dress in place of her usual fatigues, and gobbling anti-­dysentery pills, Higgins had apparently refused to take no for an answer when the media-­shy Gizenga turned down her interview request. The fact that no Trib correspondent had been in Stanleyville since 1877, when the famed reporter and explorer Henry Morton Stanley visited the spot after tracking down the long-­lost Dr. David Livingstone, made her scoop all the more newsworthy.

“Is it courage, initiative, or sheer blind luck that gives Marguerite Higgins her exclusive stories from the Congo?” Newsweek asked rhetorically. “Her envious male colleagues, who have been there for months, have good reason to debate this stickler.”

Not wanting to lose her momentum, Maggie planned to fly to Vienna to cover Kennedy’s first meeting with Khrushchev, a superpower conference to be held in June. When Donovan told her he was sending their White House correspondent, David Wise, Maggie was livid. Ignoring his objections, she took leave and paid her own way, later claiming it was for a freelance piece.

Donovan’s patience had been tried past endurance. He told the higher-­ups he was tired of being saddled with the “care and feeding” of Higgins. She answered to no one. Every assignment became a test of wills. She was obstinate, obsessive, and impossible to control. Maggie, in turn, complained of being “frozen out” and threatened to resign. Tittle-­tattle about the bureau squabbling made the columns and added to her growing reputation as a diva. But the bottom line was that her name was an asset to the paper. Donovan had little choice but to put up with her.

On the second day of the Vienna summit, Kennedy and Khrushchev got around to the subject of Berlin and the ongoing debate over reunification. Khrushchev, who had little respect for the inexperienced young president, demanded a peace treaty and recognition for East Germany. Berlin needed to become a strictly neutral city, and the Western powers would have access to the city only with East German permission. Kennedy was amazed. He maintained the Western powers had every right to be in Berlin, having defeated Germany in the Second World War. He declared that the national security of the U.S. was directly linked to that of Berlin. Khrushchev exploded, banging his fist on the table, and said, “I want peace, but if you want war that is your problem.” The meeting ended ominously, with the Soviet leader insisting his decision to sign a peace treaty with East Germany in six months was irrevocable. The president responded, “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.”

__________________________________

Excerpted from Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins by Jennet Conant. Copyright © 2023. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.

In the summer of 1854, a purposeful and unusual-looking traveler arrived in Broadway in Worcestershire in west central England, with an overnight bag full of manuscripts. He was Constantine Simonides, a Greek who claimed to have lived among the monks of Mount Athos, and he certainly looked the part.

There are descriptions and several early photographs, showing him as swarthy and with glossy black hair thrust to one side and usually a great unkempt dense beard like an Orthodox priest. He was quite short but with a large head and exceptionally high forehead, of the kind which in popular myth denotes intelligence. He had prominent dark eyebrows and deep-set clever and piercing eyes—“a face not easily forgotten,” as was remarked. He was restless and voluble, as unceasing as the Ancient Mariner but usually in Greek. He looked as though he slept in his clothes, which were always black.

In a rural Cotswold market town of the 19th century, as unlike the dusty and sun-baked landscape of Mount Athos as is possible to imagine, Simonides must have attracted some attention. He was here to see Sir Thomas Phillipps, baronet, of Middle Hill, Broadway, who had invited him to stay the night.

Phillipps had a part in Chapter 7 of my book and stalked many times in and out of Chapter 8, like the wicked fairy, forever enthralling and provoking Sir Frederic Madden in London. Now it is time to visit him at home, which not so many of the manuscripts fraternity ever did. It is about three miles from the high street in Broadway out to Middle Hill. You turn south along Church Street, which quickly becomes Snowshill Road through the countryside, bringing you eventually to the medieval church of St Eadburgha, where Sir Thomas Phillipps himself is now buried. There is a place to leave the car.

Immediately opposite, on the left (or east) side of the road, are the stone pillars and old iron gates of what was formerly the main entrance into the long drive up to Middle Hill, with a Victorian gatekeeper’s lodge, whose current resident, pottering in his garden, kindly gave me directions and reminiscences of long ago. The way is now a public footpath called Coneygree Lane, rising steeply behind the lodge up through the woods eventually to the gothic folly of Broadway Tower at the very top of the hill. The track is rutted and muddy and it must have been a very steep ascent for visitors such as Simonides in a horse-drawn cab, or maybe he walked up on foot with his bag.

After about ten minutes the path branches out diagonally across a field with spectacular views of the green valley below, and from here, instead of climbing further, the old drive once turned right, as the man below had explained, now leading through a gate and past a couple of new cottages, to Middle Hill itself.

It is a fine large and square 18th-century Cotswold stone house of two principal storeys with further attic windows above, added since the time of Phillipps. The old main entrance is in front of you from that direction, under a stone porch with three arches. I have been inside only once, many years ago. Visitors today reach the house up a modern drive further along Snowshill Road, more suitable for cars, and Middle Hill is now so thoroughly and comfortably modernized that it is hard to envisage today what Simonides would have experienced in 1854, stepping through the porch from the summer sunshine into a dimly lit house which was a packed and airless mausoleum of medieval manuscripts.

Thomas Phillipps was the illegitimate and only son of a very successful calico manufacturer in Manchester. His father had purchased Middle Hill in 1794, and Thomas was brought up here, without knowing his mother. An isolated and friendless childhood may have been what started Robert Cotton on the companionship of manuscripts, and Phillipps too as a solitary teenager was already spending beyond his allowance on the acquisition of books and manuscripts about local history and topography. His father died in 1818, leaving him a considerable income but an entailed estate, one which could not be sold.

The following year, Thomas married well, and his wife’s obliging family was able to secure a convenient baronetcy for him. The new Sir Thomas then embarked on a lifetime of self-importance and unmerited hauteur. Like King Lear, he had three daughters, whom he bullied and taunted with ever-changing hints of eventual inheritances.

All in all, Phillipps was not a very agreeable man, selfish, ill-tempered, grossly bigoted (notably towards Catholics), mean with money, litigious, and living forever in debt and on credit, as his dragon’s hoard of manuscripts at Middle Hill grew from a merely vast private library into the absurd, with thousands upon thousands of volumes crammed into every room, including corridors, staircases and bedrooms, often in tottering piles leaving almost no floorspace for access between them or filling wooden boxes stacked to the ceilings. The quantities of manuscripts simply astounded anyone who saw inside the house.

Of Phillipps’s passion and obsession, there is no doubt. Madden frequently described it as bordering on insanity. For this reason, I expect I would have enjoyed an evening with Phillipps (as Madden often did), as long as I was neither Catholic nor a tradesman and did not stay too long. His range of acquisition and interest was all-encompassing, extending with little discrimination from precious codices of late Antiquity right through to worthless manuscript papers of his own time. Many items were dirty and in poor condition, and Phillipps did not waste money on beautiful bindings or expensive repairs. The Abbé Rive would have been appalled.

Like the British Museum, Phillipps was actively seeking out manuscripts of every nationality, and he benefited greatly from the dispersals following the French Revolution and the political turmoil of continental Europe in the 19th century. All foreign languages were included, although Phillipps himself read only Latin and Greek, neither especially well. Whenever possible, he bought in bulk. (He could have been a candidate for the Oppenheim manuscripts in Hebrew, even knowing he could never read them.)

He kept a printing press on an upper floor of that neo-gothic tower at the top of Broadway Hill, part of the estate, where his harassed servants were made to print out numbered lists of the relentless purchases as they came in. A small oblong printed label with the number was then pasted to the spine of each book for identification.

By the time of his death, Phillipps had perhaps as many as 60,000 manuscripts, documents as well as codices. Madden was right that they would one day all be scattered. There is hardly a rare-book library in the world today without at least one or two manuscripts that were formerly crammed into Middle Hill or into the even larger Thirlestaine House in Cheltenham, where Phillipps later moved.

The collection took almost a hundred years to sift and disperse, beginning with a first auction in 1886, and I myself was initially employed by Sotheby’s in 1975 for the principal purpose of cataloguing the very last installments of manuscripts still being brought out in boxfuls from the Phillipps trove.

At the time of the visits by Constantine Simonides, Sir Thomas Phillipps was in his early sixties. His first wife died young and he had remarried. The childless and long-suffering second Lady Phillipps memorably claimed to have been “booked out of one wing and ratted out of the other.” Photographs of Phillipps at this period show an upright unsmiling man with greying hair, soon to be white, slightly overlapping the tops of his ears. He had a straight nose and thick mustache.

In pictures, at least, Phillipps appears carefully dressed in long dark jacket and white wing collar. Guests without business to transact testified to his courteous manners, but booksellers, competitors and most of his family despaired of his miserliness and single-minded obsession.

We are about to witness what was probably the third visit of Simonides to the baronet’s house. On the first occasion, in 1853, the previous summer, Simonides had brought to Broadway a bundle of manuscript scrolls comprising short texts by the early Greek poet Hesiod, supposed to be of very ancient date, including the celebrated Works and Days on the origins of agriculture and labour, composed around 700 BC.

There were ten narrow strips of seemingly old parchment, written on both sides in Greek, each about 10½ by 2 inches, attached together at the top onto a thin metal bar. Phillipps was sufficiently beguiled by the item to buy it. He had his printing press run off copies of a lithographed facsimile of its first lines of text, in a combination of large square Greek letters and a very strange-looking script resembling the spider-footprints of modern shorthand.

When the manuscript eventually emerged from the Phillipps collection for resale at Sotheby’s in 1972, it was obvious to 20th-century eyes that the writing was an utter fabrication of no antiquity whatsoever. Phillipps had struggled to read it, not surprisingly, and, in a bizarre inversion of reality, Simonides then offered his skills as a palaeographer to transcribe the Hesiod neatly for Phillipps for an additional fee of £150 (Phillipps countered with £25 for a partial transcription). Simonides assured him that the manuscript included at least one unknown work of Hesiod.

Phillipps had been to Rugby School and Oxford and this was exactly the bait to captivate a 19th-century Englishman drilled in the classics. All manuscript collectors are familiar with puzzled inquiries from unbookish neighbors as to what possible value there can be in gathering old books, and to have been able to announce the discovery of a lost classical text would have vindicated the entire library.

Later in 1853, Simonides had delivered five more scrolls of Greek texts to Middle Hill, comprising supposed works of Phocylides and Pythagoras and three Byzantine imperial documents. The receipt survives among Phillipps’s papers now in the Bodleian. Again, Phillipps agreed in principle to buy the items if Simonides could make transcriptions for him. In May the following year, Phillipps proudly showed these startling acquisitions to Madden in the British Museum. He, in turn, recorded in his journal:

I did not hesitate a moment to declare my opinion, that these were all by the same hand and gross forgeries; and I was grieved, but not surprised to hear Sir T. P. declare that in his opinion they were genuine (!) and probably relics of the Alexandrian library!!! Of course, although I did not express it to him, I feel the profoundest contempt for his opinion. In October last, when he wrote to me on the subject, I warned him against the purchase, but in vain. The vanity of possessing such rarities (supposing them to be genuine) has sufficed to counterbalance any doubts; and having paid a large price for these worthless specimens of modern knavery, of course Sir T. the more obstinately will defend their authenticity!

More was to come. Simonides had been hinting that he had a treasure greater than all these, nothing less than a classical manuscript of the Iliad of Homer. This was principally why Simonides was now returning to Middle Hill on 11 August 1854. By chance, we have a quite detailed record of the encounter because another visitor at that same time was the German map historian Johann Georg Kohl (1808–78), who was studying items in Phillipps’s collection for his own researches and described the event in his volumes of reminiscences, published in Hanover in 1868. “Among the other guests . . .”, Kohl recalled, “there was a Greek, whose name at that time was unfamiliar to me, but who had already made himself well enough known in the literary world. He . . . had brought with him various vellum rolls and pigskin volumes and like a pedlar had spread out his wares on the carpet, table and chairs.”

The most important of these was the promised Homer. Kohl recalled it as “a small, thin, closely written, tightly wound, long roll of vellum which the Greek declared was the most valuable thing he had at the moment to offer.” It comprised the whole of the first three books of the Iliad written in a script so microscopic that it all fitted onto both sides of a single scroll about 21½ inches long by about 2¼ wide, “so small,” wrote Phillipps later, “as not to be read without a magnifying glass.”

Everything about it was eccentric, including the layout, which opened with a kind of pictographic design of a Greek temple formed of lines of tiny script. The left-hand edge of the whole scroll was written vertically with one letter below another, creating a cascade of letters right down the scroll and then all the way back up to the top again and then down to the bottom once more, and so on, in what is known as boustrophedon, meaning resemblance to the path of an ox plough, back and forth, or, in this case, up and down.

It is a rare format known in archaic inscriptions on stone and pottery from the probable time of Homer himself, but then unprecedented in any surviving manuscript. It seemed a plausible indication of extreme antiquity. The text continued into the right-hand column in normal horizontal lines, as densely compacted as the grooves on a gramophone record. “Our conversation throughout the day turned on this remarkable object, and in the evening as well,” wrote Kohl.

These discussions must have been complicated. Simonides knew some English, more than he pretended (as subsequent events showed), and Kohl and Phillipps had some classical Greek, which they were mostly obliged to write down to be comprehensible by the other. Where had Simonides found the Homer? “The Man is so mysterious about his acquisition of these MSS.,” Phillipps wrote later in his printed catalogue; “a straight-forward honest person would state at once, with all candor, where he had obtained it, & how.” In another memorandum to himself, kept with the Hesiod, Phillipps recorded, “He told me that that he was Cousin to one of the Abbots of a Monastery on Mount Athos; that the MSS he brought were either found in a Monastery on Mount Athos or in Egypt.”

Several years later, Simonides modified this story to furnish further information. In 1859 a strange little book appeared by one Charles Stewart, A Biographical Memoir of Constantine Simonides, Dr. ph., of Stageira, with a Brief Defence of the Authenticity of His Manuscripts, published in London, printed in Brighton. The author is not clearly identifiable and the name was probably fictitious, but it may not be coincidence that it is a homonym of the Young Pretender and shares the initials of Constantine Simonides.

Phillipps, doubtless rightly, assumed that the book was really or mostly by Simonides himself, and certainly its careless orthography suggests material transmitted by dictation. In the Memoir, Simonides now seemed to remember that the abbot on Athos was his Uncle Benedict, that the manuscripts had been part of a library brought from Constantinople or Egypt by Saint Paul of Xeropotamou, son of the emperor Michael Kuropalatos (a real person, emperor 811–13), and that they had been hidden by the Orthodox monks beneath the ruins of a monastery on Mount Athos to save them from the Latinizers, or Roman Church, during the time of the Crusades.

The Memoir recounts that Simonides had acquired the manuscripts from his uncle when he was living on Athos and removed them on a private ship to Syme on 29 August 1840, three months after Benedict’s death. Detail was wanted: here it is, and the late Benedict could no longer confirm or refute it.

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From The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts.  by Christopher de Hamel. Used with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Press. Copyright © 2023 by Christopher de Hamel

In his memoir Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov reflected: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds.”

The furor over Lolita may have died down, but this confes­sion still has the power to shock. Did the man just say he doesn’t like music? That’s not a matter of preference, such as not caring for sports or pets; it’s a pathological condition.

Accordingly, it’s been given one of those Greek-derived diag­nostic labels that allow us to imagine we’ve established a scientific truth rather than merely invented a term: “musical anhedonia.”

And it gets worse: you might have “congenital amusia” (no laughing matter). That’s when, “despite the universality of music,” you find yourself in that “minority of individuals” who, accord­ing to The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain, “present with very specific musical deficits that cannot be attributed to a gen­eral auditory dysfunction, intellectual disability, or a lack of mu­sical exposure.”†

In other words, there are people who don’t get on with music even though they’re not deaf, stupid or ignorant.

Musical anhedonics are thought to account for up to 5 percent of the world’s population. (But how could neuroscientists pos­sibly know that? And if it’s true, that would be…erm…almost four hundred million people!)

The syndrome is often discussed in the same articles that pon­der the mysteries of autism. The subtext is that normal people feel and react in certain ways (e.g. laughing at the “right” mo­ments, getting chills when they hear “sublime” sounds), and that abnormal people—the autists, the anhedonics—don’t.

As someone who is “on the spectrum,” I do understand what it’s like to have a brain that functions differently from other peo­ple’s. Does this mean that something has “gone wrong” with me? Respect for neurodivergence is all very well, but not all differences are desirable. There is such a thing as a glitch on the human assembly line—glitches that result in serious problems like blindness, paralysis, missing limbs, intellectual impairment.

Yet I’m also mindful that notions of normalcy are used by dominant social groups to maintain control and to organize systems in ways that suit them. Historically, it’s a scarily short time ago that homosexuality was classified a disease and femi­nism was seen as a disorder that might require surgery. How judgmentally normative is a “normal” relationship with music?

Strikingly, a “musical anhedonic” who offered himself for study at Boston’s Northeastern University told one of the pro­fessors that admitting to not liking music was rather like coming out as gay. The “problem” was not his relationship with music per se, but his relationship with the normal people who couldn’t tolerate him being different. The researchers didn’t seem very interested in this social alarm bell. Instead, they used biomedical imaging to study the auditory regions of his cerebrum.

Another thing the researchers do is measure what happens to the tiny hairs on an anhedonic’s arm, noting when those der­mal filaments fail to respond as they should. I can’t help won­dering what would happen if you were someone who hadn’t yet discovered the music you could love. What if your soul was holding out for sub-Saharan Gnawa or ancient Tuscan dances, which you weren’t destined to hear until years later, and instead the researchers played you Bach and The Beatles and U2 and Charlie Parker and Van Halen and finally Whitney Houston, and then pronounced you as malfunctioning because your arm hairs didn’t budge during “I Will Always Love You”?

*

What intrigues me about musical anhedonia, and the 5 percent of the human population who supposedly suffer from it, is the possibility—indeed, the likelihood—that 5 percent is an under­estimate. I strongly suspect there are a lot more than four hun­dred million people out there who would rather opt out.

The analogy with coming out as gay is useful here. We know there are lots of homosexuals around, because faking one’s sex­uality is so difficult to sustain. Gay people who try to live as straights keep colliding with their desires, over and over, and those collisions have consequences, whereas the absence of a love for music can be much more easily managed. The music lovers assume you’re no different from them and, to keep the peace, you let them believe that. You learn to talk the talk of music-love.

In private, you’re free to do without the stuff, and doing without it doesn’t hurt. In public, you will often be assailed by those unwanted sounds, but, as one anhedonic put it (uncon­sciously echoing Nabokov), “music sits in an odd spot halfway between boring and distracting.”

Being bored or distracted is hardly hellish torture. You could cope with it all your life and never shed a tear or cause a scene.

*

The real problem, then, is other people.

In our society it is considered shameful not to appreciate music. By “our society,” I mean those who regard themselves as part of Culture, an amorphous elite anyone can join. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, noble Lorenzo mistrusts “the man that hath no music in himself,” the man who is not “moved with concord of sweet sounds,”  while Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “without music, life would be a mistake.”

Closer to our own age, Billy Joel described music as “an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by. No matter what culture you’re from, everyone loves music.”

The trouble with these declarations of art’s universal appeal is that they are made by artists, and they resonate with the people who already like art, or who trust Billy Joel to know an explosive expression of humanity when he sees one. The self-appointed elite speak for us all, and never hear the silence from those who don’t share their values.

How many humans feel that without music, life would be a mistake? Not as many as Friedrich, Will and Billy would like to think. A Melody Maker journalist once declared that listening to Björk was “as essential as breathing,” but biological and histori­cal evidence suggests that breathing is of unrivaled importance, followed by eating, drinking and sleeping.

*

I don’t doubt that for some listeners, music delivers profound, transcendent experiences. It does it for me, and probably for you, too.

But music is also tremendously overhyped. Every day, heaps and heaps of superlatives are shoveled onto it by people who, in truth, did not feel what their words tell you they felt. They heard a record/went to a concert and had a pleasant time, whereupon they tell you that their mind exploded into a million iridescent fragments, propelled around the cosmos on waves of dervish ec­stasy. Or they declare that they would rather gnaw off their own arm than have to listen to a certain song again. Really? Their own arm? Gnawed off? Music, even more than the visual arts or Literature, seems to give people a license to bullshit.

No journalist would dare to say that if you don’t love model trains, T. S. Eliot, jogging or Star Wars, you must be clinically dead. They feel free to say it about your failure to adore their favorite sounds.

This book will not add more hype to the landfill. Let’s look at the world as it really works. Music has its place, and for many people that place is small.

I’m not referring to the 5 percent, or whatever the number is, who are willing to let scientists study their arm hairs to es­tablish the severity of their musical anhedonia.

No, this is about the ordinary folks who wish the restaurant wouldn’t play music while they’re eating, the person who hates the way her flatmate switches the radio on as soon as she wakes up, the person who nods with feigned approval when his pals enthuse about a forthcoming concert that he has not the faint­est desire to attend, the tourists who return from an overseas adventure unable to recall anything they heard, the driver who has the car radio tuned to talk shows and the news, the rambler who explores the woods all day, feeling no need for any musi­cal accompaniment to that activity.

It’s about the unlucky souls who write in to online commu­nities like Mumsnet and Quora, shyly confessing that music does little or nothing for them, only to be shamed and over­whelmed by their music-worshipping peers who rave like a cho­rus of Lorenzos.

*

A lifetime of listening to how people relate to music has taught me that the love of music for its own sake is comparable to the love of cooking, gardening, antique furniture, animals, poetry and so on. Some people have it; a lot don’t.

And why should they? Our society’s sonic saturation is quite a recent development and may prove to be an abortive detour in human evolution. Our species managed to thrive through millions of years without multinational entertainment corpora­tions, YouTube and Spotify. In the distant past, there was simply a lot less music around. Music had its appointed role in rituals and ceremonies. It was an occasional treat, an occasional obliga­tion, a banquet once in a while; it was not a constant feed. Some people no doubt sang as they worked. Others were content with the rhythm of their carpentry, or walked to the well in silence, hearing only the tread of their feet on the earth and the sloshing of their bucket. Unaccompanied silence was normal.

Capitalism has changed that landscape. What were once lux­uries are now considered basics, what was once communal is now atomized, what was once functional is now a superfluous add-on, and what were once deliberate commitments are now barely noticed ephemera supplied through invisible pipelines from everywhere and nowhere. There’s a glut of artistic product. We have the fruits of our civilization coming out of our ears. It’s not even a matter of seeking them out anymore, of foraging for the good stuff. Art is in the air, plentiful as oxygen, and we are under pressure to inhale deeply.

*

Just because there’s an excess of art, however, doesn’t mean everyone is lovin’ it.

A few people love music, yes.

Others quite enjoy it in certain moods.

Others can take or leave it.

Others would rather leave it.

Yet everybody wants to be accepted as a member of society. And our society has decided that not caring for music is unac­ceptable.

How to get around that?

*

“I read this scary statistic from America,” Peter Gabriel told Roll­ing Stone in 1987, just after So had hit pay dirt, “that the average album is played 1.2 times. It’s an impulse buy, or something to impress a girlfriend, part of the artillery with which you an­nounce yourself to the world.”

For someone like Gabriel, an artist to the marrow, that statistic must indeed have been scary. But it is probably true. The major­ity of people have little use for music purely as an aesthetic prop­osition. But they do need to bond with their friends, colleagues, neighbors and anyone else who might require impressing.

Almost every product in the capitalist marketplace is adver­tised in the same way—by telling the purchaser that if they have this thing, they will appear to be a particular sort of person in the eyes of others (and thereby in their own eyes as well). Music is as much a part of this artillery as clothing, gadgets, decor, books, hairstyle and so on.

What happened to Peter Gabriel, when he finally hit the “big time” in America, was that his album So was selected by the then-dominant culture as an object that sophisticated, up-to-date people should own. So, So was bought by millions of people.

I’m confident that if I played each of those millions of people the first thirty seconds of the opening track, “Red Rain,” the vast majority of them would be stumped as to what album it was from, or even if they’d ever heard it before. They would rec­ognize “Sledgehammer” because it was programmed for “high rotation” on the radio and is still played on oldies stations today. This means that even if they haven’t played their own copy for years (which will almost certainly be the case), they will have heard it more recently at the supermarket or in the car or while having a pee in a restaurant loo.

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Excerpted from Listen: On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber © 2023 by Michel Faber, used with permission from HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life and career bounced between success and setbacks like the alternating current of major and minor keys in a Mozart symphony. He was born in 1896, the brink of a new century. Just as his life bridged two centuries, so does his work have a Janus-like aspect, looking back to the Romantic lyricism and epic dreams of nineteenth-century America and forward to the syncopated jazz of the twentieth. “My whole theory of writing,” he said, “I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

How magnificently, if posthumously, he fulfilled that ideal. His fleeting literary fortunes—a dozen years of commercial and literary success followed by distractions and disappointments—ended in 1940 with a fatal heart attack at the age of forty-four. He was then hard at work on The Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel he hoped would restore his faded reputation. At the time of his death his books were not, as is so often claimed, out of print with Scribners, his publisher. The truth is even sadder: They were all in stock at our warehouse and listed in our catalog, but no one was buying them.

When Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, first approached the Princeton University Library and offered to donate her late father’s papers she was turned down. It couldn’t be the repository, the librarian said, for every failed alumnus author’s papers. Fortunately she gave them a second chance, several years later, to reconsider.

Today those archives are the most avidly consulted holdings of the library by scholars who come there, as if on pilgrimage, from all over the world. More copies of Fitzgerald’s books are now sold each fortnight than the entire cumulative sale in his lifetime. His novels and stories are studied in high schools and colleges across the country—indeed around the world.

I was the fourth Charles to be involved in publishing his works ever since my great-grandfather signed him up at the prodding of his young editor of genius Max Perkins in 1919. But three generations and namesakes later (ours is a redundant family) I am struck by the realization that mine was the first generation—of no doubt as many to come—to have been introduced to this author’s work in a classroom.

My grandfather, Fitzgerald’s contemporary and friend as well as publisher, died on the eve of the critical reappraisal and the ensuing revival of his works that gained momentum in the 1950s and has continued in full force down to the present. It was my father who presided over that literary apotheosis unprecedented in American letters.

There is something magical about Fitzgerald. Much has been written—and dramatized—about the Jazz Age personas of Scott and Zelda. But the real magic lies embedded in the prose, and reveals itself in his amazing range and versatility. Each novel or story partakes of its creator’s poetic imagination, his dramatic vision, his painstaking (if virtuoso and seemingly effortless) craftsmanship. Each bears Fitzgerald’s hallmark: the indelible stamp of grace. He is my literary candidate to stand beside the demigods Bernini, Rubens, and Mozart as artists of divine transfigurations.

The key to Fitzgerald’s enduring enchantment lies, I submit, in the power of his romantic imagination to transfigure his characters and settings—as well as in the very shape and sound of his prose. There is a sacramental quality, one that did not wane along with formal observance of his Roman Catholic faith. I say “sacramental” because Fitzgerald’s words transform their external geography as thoroughly as the realm within. The ultimate effect, once the initial reverberations of imagery and language have subsided, transcends the bounds of fiction. I can testify from firsthand experience.

From his earliest days, Scott wanted nothing more than to be a writer: “The first help I ever had in writing was from my father, who read an utterly imitative Sherlock Holmes story of mine and pretended to like it.” It was his first appearance in print, at age thirteen. Here’s the chilling dénouement (which proves that writers are made, not born):

“I forgot Mrs. Raymond,” screamed Syrel, “where is she?”

“She is out of your power forever,” said the young man.

Syrel brushed past him and, with Smidy and I following, burst open the door of the room at the head of the stairs. We rushed in. On the floor lay a woman, and as soon as I touched her heart I knew she was beyond the doctor’s skill.

“She has taken poison,” I said. Syrel looked around; the young man had gone. And we stood there aghast in the presence of death.

No surprise that he next took to writing plays, one a summer, for a local dramatics group. At Princeton, he wrote musical comedies for the Triangle Club before he flunked out (chemistry was the culprit), joined the army, and wrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which was eventually adapted to the stage as a musical under the title The Underclassman.

“Start out with an individual and you find that you have created a type—start out with a type and you find that you have created nothing.” Fitzgerald started out with himself—a good choice. “A writer wastes nothing,” he said, and he proved it by mining his early years at St. Paul and Princeton to forge his early stories, poems, and dramatic skits into that witty autobiographical novel that launched his fame.

Fitzgerald’s first novel was turned down twice by my great-grandfather. But he refused to give up. Years later writing to his daughter, Fitzgerald offered the following advice: “Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. . . . Nobody became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before.”

A couple of years later, he added some more technical advice: “All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move.” Unlike his brisk prose, I did not move; I stayed on at Princeton for two more degrees, leaving the university only when there were no more to be had, but not before I had the pleasure of teaching undergraduates. Since my field was art history, the next transition—into the family publishing business—was abrupt, but once again facilitated by Fitzgerald.

Ensconced at Max Perkins’s old desk at Scribners (which I was given because the senior editor complained that it ran her stockings) I dreamed up as my first book project in 1975 a revival of Fitzgerald’s obscure and star-crossed play The Vegetable; or from President to postman, which featured a presidential impeachment too true to be good: the play had opened—and closed—in 1922 at Nixon’s Apollo Theater in Atlantic City.

My post-Watergate project not only justified repeated revisits to the Princeton University Library for research in the Scribner and Fitzgerald archives—the mecca for Fitzgerald scholars—but, more important, brought me into a happy working relationship with his daughter, Scottie. The play was republished during the election year of 1976 and featured as a presidential address a confection of mixed metaphors.

Fitzgerald considered his year and a half spent on The Vegetable a complete waste, but I disagree, for he followed it with a new novel written with all the economy and tight structure of a successful play—The Great Gatsby. Both The Vegetable and Gatsby shared the theme of the American Dream (first as a spoof for a comedy, finally as the leitmotif of a lyric novel). I don’t think there has ever been a more elusive, mysterious, intriguing character than Gatsby. He’s pure fiction—and pure Fitzgerald: the hopeful, romantic outsider looking in.

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

Who cares how James Gatz became Jay Gatsby, bootlegger or worse? Who would not want to be in such a presence? But it was years later when I met President Clinton that those sentences came to life and recorded my experience of mortal, if presidential, charisma that I could never have imagined outside the bounds of fiction. Clinton made Gatsby real. Or perhaps Gatsby prefigured Clinton?

Fitzgerald wanted his book to be a “consciously artistic achievement. . . . I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned”— and he succeeded in spades. He later said that what he cut out of it, “both physically and emotionally, would make another novel.”

In his first letter to Perkins—summer of 1922—about his “new” novel, Fitzgerald wrote that it would “concern less superlative beauties than I run to usually” and “would center on a smaller period of time.” He was to change the period and locale as he began writing (it was originally set in the Midwest and New York around 1885), but he never abandoned his determination to limit the time frame and thus give a sharper focus to his plot and characters than he had done in his earlier two novels.

And this, I believe, was the result of his failed attempt at being a Broadway playwright. The special demands imposed by a play—a short work defined by acts and scenes, limited in time and setting—proved an ideal exercise in literary craftsmanship, which the young novelist sharpened through the long series of revisions while the play was in rehearsal.

From Fitzgerald’s long lost first draft of 1923 only a fragment survives in the form of the short story “Absolution” and two handwritten pages I discovered over four decades ago in a rare bookshop here in New York. They reveal that Fitzgerald had already settled on the essential plot and locale of the final version, but the story was told in the third person. The next year he wrote to Perkins that he was now working on a “new angle.” I’m sure he meant through the eyes of his inspired narrator Nick Carraway. (It’s worth streaming the famous Robert Redford film just to hear Sam Waterston tell the story—a generation before his fame in Law & Order.)

While writing an introduction to a new 1979 paperback edition of Gatsby, I decided to revive the original jacket—it is now an icon of the Jazz Age. Twenty years later it was enlarged, at my suggestion, into a huge poster for John Harbison’s opera The Great Gatsby at the Met. When Matthew Bruccoli discovered Cugat’s preliminary sketches for the Gatsby dust jacket in a country shop, serendipity allowed me at last to merge art history and literature. I’m a Gemini. For this once, thanks to Fitzgerald, my dual careers came into sync.

Francis Cugat is not a household name. Born in Spain on my birthday in 1893, he died in Connecticut on my dad’s birthday in 1981. He was a set designer for Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood and decades later a consultant to Technicolor on films including The Quiet Man and The Cain Mutiny. He is better known as the brother of bandleader Xavier Cugat. He designed only one jacket for Scribners, and did not continue in that line of work. Yet his painting is the most celebrated—and widely disseminated— jacket art in twentieth-century American literature, and perhaps of all time.

After decades of oblivion, and several million copies later, like the novel it embellishes, this Art Deco tour de force has established itself as a classic of graphic art. At the same time, it represents a unique form of “collaboration” between author and jacket artist. Under normal circumstances, the artist illustrates a scene or motif conceived by the author; he lifts, as it were, his image from a page of the book. In this instance, however, the artist’s image preceded the finished manuscript and Fitzgerald actually maintained that he had “written it into” his book.

Cugat’s small masterpiece is not illustrative, but symbolic, iconic. The sad, hypnotic, heavily outlined eyes of a woman beam like headlights through a cobalt night sky. Below, on earth, brightly colored lights blaze before a metropolitan skyline. Cugat’s carnival imagery is especially intriguing in view of Fitzgerald’s pervasive use of light motifs throughout his novel, specifically in metaphors for the latter-day Trimalchio, whose parties were illuminated by “enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden.” Nick sees “the whole corner of the peninsula . . . blazing with light” from Gatsby’s house, “lit from tower to cellar.” When he tells Gatsby that his place “looks like the World’s Fair,” Gatsby proposes that they “go to Coney Island.”

Fitzgerald had already introduced this symbolism in his story “Absolution,” originally intended as a prologue to the novel. At the end of the story, a priest encourages the boy who eventually developed into Jay Gatsby to go see an amusement park, “a thing like a fair only much more glittering” with “a big wheel made of lights turning in the air.” But “don’t get too close,” he cautions, “because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.”

Daisy’s face, says Nick, was “sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth.” In Cugat’s final painting, her celestial eyes enclose reclining nudes and her streaming tear is green—like the light “that burns all night” at the end of her dock, reflected in the water of the sound that separates her from Gatsby. What Fitzgerald drew directly from Cugat’s art and “wrote into” the novel must ultimately remain an open question, though I believe the best candidate is not the famous billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg but rather Nick’s image of Daisy, at the end of chapter 4, as “the girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” of New York at night.

The reflected lights and ghosts of Gatsby—whether votive or festive—still transfigure Gatsby’s Island, where my family and I were transplanted in the mid-1980s after several generations on the mainland side of the Hudson River. From our new vantage point, I cannot look out over the sound without smiling at Fitzgerald’s description: “the most domesticated body of saltwater in the western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.”

There is no longer a dock at the beach in Lattingtown, and, as the crow flies, we are in fact several miles east of East Egg. But occasionally I catch a glimpse of a green light reflected in the water, and each time I drive through the Valley of Ashes (now the site of the Citi Field stadium) and approach the twinkling Manhattan skyline, I feel very much at home. The novel has made me a native.

One wise college professor told us that the ultimate function of art is to reconcile us to life. Fitzgerald’s prose is life enhancing; its evocative power endures. That is why I have no doubt he should be beaming still—from the other side of Paradise.

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Excerpted from Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing by Charles Scribner III. Copyright © 2023. Available from Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.