Shomei Tomatsu has been called Japan’s pre-eminent photographer of the postwar era. In the Review’s November 6 issue, Ian Buruma reviews Chewing Gum and Chocolate, a compilation of Tomatsu’s photographs edited by Leo Rubinfien and John Junkerman. “Tomatsu’s pictures,” Buruma writes,

were taken after the Allied occupation of Japan (though not yet Okinawa) was long over. Japan became independent again after signing the Peace Treaty of San Francisco in 1951. But for many men of Tomatsu’s generation the occupation was never really over; it continued inside their heads. Occupation was the title he chose for the pictures he took around the US base towns in Japan and Okinawa. Tomatsu was fifteen when Japan was defeated and the US troops arrived, casually tossing sticks of gum and chocolates at the children running after their jeeps. The rampant conquerors, who could often buy the favors of local women with a pair of silk stockings or a Hershey bar, were for young Japanese men a source of deep humiliation. But they also came with jazz music, easy manners, cool clothes, a promise of democracy, and what seemed then like vast wealth.

Here Buruma presents a selection of Tomatsu’s photographs with commentary.

Chewing Gum and Chocolate is published by Aperture.

The post The Coca-Colonization of Japan appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Christopher Isherwood called it the Test. He was obsessed by the idea that men of his generation, born too late to have fought in the Great War, were never put to the test of manhood imposed on their fathers. Isherwood was ten in 1915 when his father, Frank Isherwood, a professional soldier, died in France. It affected him deeply. The test of manhood, for him, was more than trial by gunfire (he was in fact a pacifist); it was sexual as much as anything else. He liked to say that he had to prove himself by courting risk. Homosexuality was cast as a form of rebellion. Not that having sex with tough Berlin street boys was really comparable to facing German machine guns on the Somme, but there was a tenuous link, at least in Isherwood’s mind.

The Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, whose book won this year’s Booker Prize, was born sixteen years after the end of World War II, too long, perhaps, to be bothered by the Test. But his father was a POW forced to work on the Thai–Burma railroad. Few things could be more testing than that.

This so-called Death Railway was meant to send supplies and reinforcements to Japanese troops in occupied Burma from Malaya through Thailand. Japanese engineers had calculated that the mountainous terrain was so impenetrable that it would take at least five years to construct a railroad. The British before them had decided that it would be utterly impossible. But with more than 60,000 Allied POWs at their disposal, and many more Asian slave workers, Japanese military authorities decided that the job should be completed in eighteen months.

As a result of savage treatment by the Japanese and Korean guards, tropical diseases, starvation, and merciless hard labor, especially during the insane “speedo” (high-speed) campaign in 1943, more than 12,000 Westerners died, and possibly more than 100,000 Asians. Even though the first locomotive to run on the Death Railway is still proudly displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the souls of imperial Japanese soldiers are worshiped by Japanese nationalists, including the current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, the tracks were so shoddy that most of the railroad had to be rebuilt by the Thais after the war.

Working on the Death Railway was an experience that can scarcely be imagined. Yet that is precisely what Flanagan has tried to do: imagine it. More than that, he has sought to imagine what the POWs’ Japanese slave drivers did and thought as well.

The result is a novel that is sometimes almost unbearable to read, because of the horrors it describes. Just one example: an Australian POW named Darky Gardiner, falsely accused of slacking off at his job, is flogged half to death by Japanese guards and then drowns in the shit of a prisoners’ latrine. Flanagan’s book, too, deals with tests of manhood. In some ways, it is a study of Australian masculinity, and sex plays an important part in this. But the book offers a bleak vision of manhood; if anything, it is anti-macho.

Flanagan clearly admires the men who starved and slaved and died and suffered tortures in the fertile muck of the Thai jungle. But his novel is not a conventional tale of human triumph over adversity. What permeates the story is a sense of failure—notably to find meaning in the most extreme deprivations and in the rewards of life in peace. Our only hope of finding some sense in our lives, it seems, lies in art and literature. Flanagan, descended from a tough line of Irish convicts, is a proud son of Tasmania, a former penal colony whose men have no time for artsy stuff, but he is above all a very literary writer, indeed a rather delicate Australian poet in prose.

The main character in the novel, named Dorrigo Evans, a medical doctor who tries his best to pull the men under his charge through the atrocities of a slave labor camp, is said to be loosely based on a man who actually existed: Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, great sportsman, born leader, legendary hero of the Burma railroad, and a famous and much decorated public figure who did a great deal for the welfare of former POWs. If anyone had passed the test of manhood, it was Weary Dunlop.

But great heroes can also be great bores. In Dorrigo Evans, Flanagan has created a complicated, tormented character. He, too, behaved heroically during the war, and is celebrated for his heroism. But his worldly success means little to him. If anything, the accolades of society accentuate the emptiness he feels inside. His marriage to a beautiful and loving woman named Ella feels dutiful. And none of the many women—mostly the wives of his colleagues—he takes to his bed can erase the memory of an abandoned pre-war love affair with his uncle Keith’s wife Amy, Evans’s only brush with real human passion.

Books are in fact his main love. “He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book.” Fatally wounded, long after the war, in a banal car crash, he lies in his hospital bed whispering the words of Tennyson’s poem Ulysses: “To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/Of all the western stars until I die.” The nurses think he is raving. In fact, the poem is entirely apt. Dorrigo’s odyssey, filled with many sirens to tempt him, is finally over. What gave his journey its sense was not coming home to worldly success and the family hearth, but the trials along the way. But these only find their meaning, or resolution, in words, literary words, poetry.

To some men who have fought in war, the rest of their life often feels insipid. Nothing can live up to the intensity of comradeship in the face of violent death. For a man who has experienced combat, it can be rather a jolt to shuffle around a suburban supermarket shopping for groceries. Survivors of murderous camps, who have no reason to feel any nostalgia, sometimes find it hard to make much sense of their subsequent lives. Entire nations can stay obsessed for a long time with the experience of recent wars, which are often richly mythologized, because nothing so dramatic occurred before or since.

In Flanagan’s novel a POW named Jimmy Bigelow, who was in the Burma railroad camp with Evans, rebuilds his postwar life more successfully than many. For him the war “had been an interruption to the real world and a real life.” But even he can’t escape from his memories in the end. He gets married, has children, then grandchildren, and then

the slow decline, and the war came to him more and more and the other ninety years of his life slowly dissolved. In the end he thought and spoke of little else—because, he came to think, little else had ever happened.

Evans, and one assumes Flanagan too, is not romantic about war. He doesn’t believe that suffering is a kind of grace that lends virtue to the sufferers. Indeed, Evans “hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves.” Virtue, he believed, was just “vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.”

There is an element of masculine posturing in this: a man’s got to do what he’s got to do, and all that. But Evans doesn’t think of his wartime behavior as virtuous. The Japanese in Flanagan’s novel are not demons, and the Aussies, including Evans, are far from being saints. They cheat on their friends, steal their last scraps of food, and ignore some other poor bastard who has collapsed facedown into the blood-soaked mud. But Evans still cares for his men, even though he can’t save most of them. They are sick, starving wrecks, forced to work day and night building a railway in the jungle by Japanese officers who are bound to a lunatic schedule and don’t care how many POWs die in the process. Evans knows that the slaves have to stick together, for “if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.”

It is this feeling of solidarity, perhaps, and the heightened sense of life when it can be taken away at any moment, by disease, hunger, or the relentless blows of a Japanese whip, that are hard to recapture when “normal” life resumes. Here again, Flanagan adds a literary element to his hero’s alienation from the postwar world. Evans

felt the withering of something, the way the risk was increasingly evaluated and, as much as possible, eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more moving than the reading of poetry.

The correlation between poetry and taking risks is unusual. But it makes total sense in Flanagan’s work, which deals in such a literary way with trials of manhood.

What makes the novel especially interesting is that the Japanese, however cruel in their wartime behavior, are not depicted simply as the evil foils of Australian decency. Their views on the world, religious faith, patriotism, or warrior codes are very different, to be sure. If Flanagan can be faulted on his description of Japanese soldiers, it is that they fall a little bit too neatly into the patterns of unquestioned emperor worship and perverted samurai ethics. There is no doubt that Japanese soldiers were indoctrinated with the notion that surrender was so dishonorable that enemy POWs could be treated with total contempt. Western men, especially tall men, were sometimes deliberately humiliated in front of local people to show who was boss in Asia now. More often, however, Malays, Chinese, and other Asians were treated worse.

But torturing people to death, a specialty of the dreaded Japanese military police, or Kempeitai, was hardly a samurai tradition. And in fact, in previous wars, such as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japanese soldiers had treated their prisoners with considerable respect. But the Imperial Japanese army in the 1940s was a far more brutal and less disciplined outfit than in 1905. Flanagan’s masterstroke is to show how the thought processes of Japanese, such as the cruel camp commandant Major Nakamura, despite his horrific indoctrination, could still run oddly parallel to those of a man like Evans.

Nakamura, too, in his moments of despair, when his military masters force him to demand the utterly impossible from his POW slaves and the camp he runs turns into a human slaughterhouse, finds meaning in poetry. His superior, Colonel Kota, is a specialist in cutting prisoners’ heads off with his samurai sword. Unlike Nakamura, who needs stimulant drugs to keep going, Kota actually relishes his murderous task. One day they have a conversation about the camp, the railroad, and the war. It’s not just about the war, says Nakamura: “It’s about the Europeans learning that they are not the superior race.” Kota adds, “And us learning that we are.” After a moment of silent contemplation, Kota recites a poem:

Even in Kyoto
when I hear the cuckoo
I long for Kyoto.

Basho, Nakamura said.

Basho’s most famous work, a poetic travel journal written in the late seventeenth century, was called The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The Burma railway was meant to help Japanese troops reach all the way to India, which would then be liberated from the British. In Nakamura’s view, “the Japanese spirit is now itself the railway, and the railway the Japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the beauty and wisdom of Basho to the larger world.”

I’m not sure how convincing this really is. The camp commander’s poetic metaphors tell us more about Flanagan’s aestheticism, perhaps, than about the thinking of wartime Japanese soldiers. But it is a nice conceit. The superiority of Japan, the nobility of its war, and the terrible sacrifices it demanded, including the necessity to drive foreign POWs to their deaths, are expressed in the condensed words of a seventeenth-century haiku poet.

Again, Nakamura is not an evil man. After the war, he is kindly, even rather meek. Precisely because he isn’t a monster, he had to justify monstrous orders by infusing them with a bogus nobility. He tried think of himself as a noble man, because he managed to overcome his revulsion against torturing slave workers in the name of a higher cause. But then he finds it as hard as his victims to deal with life when the war is over. For there was precious little left in postwar Japan of the ideals of emperor worship and warrior codes for which this simple engineer was transformed into a killer.

After the war, he is given a job at the Japan Blood Bank by his old superior on the Death Railway, Colonel Kota, who just happens to be part of this organization, which was in reality founded by a former war criminal responsible for gruesome germ warfare experiments in Manchuria. Such a coincidence is of course possible, but perhaps a little too contrived. As is the side story of Kota being preserved as a kind of mummy after his death, so that his daughter can collect his welfare checks. By his bedside lies a copy of Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. A dry blade of grass marks the page where it says: “Days and months are travellers of eternity. So too the years that pass by.”

This, too, is not impossible to imagine. But Flanagan has a tendency to work his narrative a little too hard to make a philosophical point, often expressed in poetic language.

Flanagan’s literary technique reflects his concern with poetry. He uses poetic images that recur, rather like a leitmotif, in the novel. One them is dust motes dancing in the light, ephemeral and random like so much in life. Evans’s loveless marriage leaves him with a feeling “as baffling as a million dancing and meaningless dust motes.” A letter from his wife reaches him in the POW camp, normally a precious sign of love and life to be treasured. But her words “kept scattering and rising off the page as dust motes, more and more dust motes bouncing off one another….”

Years after the war, he suddenly spots his pre-war lover, Amy, walking across Sydney Harbour Bridge. He lets her pass him by unnoticed. The people around him, going hither and thither, are like “wild flying particles in the light, lost long ago, as he knew everything now was lost….”

Poetic metaphors apply to the Japanese guards as well. On a trip to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido to visit a wartime comrade, Nakamura sees ice sculptures being constructed along the road from the airport, images of Godzilla, Giant Robo, and other monsters. The memories of wartime atrocities come back to him as he listens to his friend talking; they are like the ice monsters, frozen in time, but ever ready to pounce on him.

The wintry vision that Flanagan offers his readers is also somewhat akin to a traditional Japanese sensibility, derived from Buddhism, of the fleeting and illusionary nature of life. The belief that all is just an illusion is not without its comforts, for it helps us to survive the unbearable. This point is beautifully made in Flanagan’s descriptions of the POW camp in Thailand.

Evans runs a tiny operating theater in the camp, where he tries as best he can, with primitive instruments contrived from stolen bottles, tubes, and knives, to patch up the broken bodies of men who are almost sure to die anyway. He knows it is “a triumph of magical thinking,” but as he explains to one of his orderlies: “It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible…. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time.”

At times, illusions offer an escape from sights and feelings that are simply too painful to endure. When the men are forced by the Japanese to watch as Darky Gardiner is beaten to a pulp with bamboo poles, the fruity smell of the jungle reminds some of them of sherry and family Christmas lunches:

And though they would carry the memory of Darky’s beating to their own deaths six days or seventy years later, at the time the event seemed no more within their control, and therefore no more in their consciousness, than a rock falling or a storm breaking. It simply was, and it was best dealt with by finding other things to think of.

In the end everything passes, even memories. The sites of the Burma railroad, where so many men died horribly, are now a tourist destination, recommended by guides as a place to see in Thailand. Souvenir stalls now stand where prisoners were once flogged to death. Nakamura is tormented by a conflict between the idea of himself as an honorable man who did his imperial duty and those ice monsters that haunt him. So “with the same iron will that had served him so well in the Siamese jungle…he resolved that he must henceforth conceive of his life’s work as that of a good man.”

That, too, is a way of forgetting, a willful illusion, probably the preferred method of more than a few former torturers, not only in Japan. Yet some Japanese have chosen the harder road of trying not to forget. One of them, a man named Sato, tells Nakamura a gruesome story, based on something that actually happened, about live vivisections performed by Japanese doctors on captured American airmen. Nakamura does not want to hear such stories and henceforth dodges Sato’s company.

Dorrigo Evans doesn’t quite forget his past. But he is anguished by the emptiness of the present: “He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.” Only poetry offers him some sort of redemption. A delegation of Japanese women comes to visit him in Tasmania to apologize for what was done during the war by their fellow countrymen. As a token of their contrition they present Evans with a book of Japanese death poems, which he gratefully receives, since he believes that “books had an aura that protected him….”

One poem strikes him with peculiar force, a haiku written on his deathbed by the eighteenth-century poet Shisui. The entire poem consists of one character, a circle, “a contained void, an endless mystery, lengthless breadth, the great wheel, eternal return: the circle—antithesis of the line.”

It is only on his own deathbed that Evans discovers one more layer to Shisui’s one-character poem, the imperative to move forward regardless, follow one’s illusions, and so to carry on the circle of life. His last words are: “Advance forward gentlemen. Charge the windowsill.”

The novel doesn’t end with these last words, however. There is a kind of coda in the form of a flashback. Soon after Darky Gardiner has drowned in the latrine, Evans receives a letter from his wife, Ella, giving him the sad, but false, news that Amy has died in a tragic accident. Once more the image of flying particles is conjured up. Evans stares helplessly into the flame of a kerosene lamp:

He looked at the light, at the smuts. As though there were two worlds. This world and a hidden world that was a real world of wild, flying particles spinning, shimmering, randomly bouncing off each other, and new worlds coming into being in consequence.

He picks up a book, a romance of true love. But the final pages are missing, presumably ripped out by another prisoner to use in the latrine. He puts the book down, and walks out into the darkness to relieve himself in the bamboo urinal. On his way back to his hut, he notices, half hidden in the black mud, a crimson flower. He shines his lantern on “the small miracle,” bows in the pouring rain, straightens up, and “continued on his way.”

It is an arresting, if somewhat mawkish image, this crimson flower in the mud. But it is entirely in keeping with an extraordinary novel that is never sentimental about war, let alone about tests of manhood, but a little bit about poetry.

The post The Worst Railroad Job appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

“The conventional opinion about Egon Schiele’s 1915 portrait of his wife Edith,” writes Ian Buruma in the Review’s April 2 issue, “is that it betrays his romantic disappointment. His wife may have represented domestic calm, a point of stability in respectable Viennese society, and so forth, but she wasn’t sexy like his mistress Wally. So how does the apparently wholesome innocence of Edith’s portrait fit into Schiele’s oeuvre? Is it just an expression of conjugal assurance and erotic disappointment? Or is there more to it? I think there is. Looked at more closely, the picture still reveals Schiele’s fascination with the very Viennese entanglement of sex and death.” We present below a series of Schiele’s paintings of Edith, Wally, and himself, with commentary drawn from Buruma’s piece.

There she is, a gawky red-haired figure squeezed into a milky background, her slim hands clutching a multicolored striped dress, made by herself out of curtain material, her white shoes turned slightly inward, her wide blue eyes peering with childlike innocence from a pale-skinned face. The impression is of a doll-like creature, stiff, timid, not entirely in control of her own limbs. Edith’s helplessness could well have been part of her erotic attraction for Schiele: the shy bourgeoise who could be shaped by the older, more experienced artist.

Schiele’s mistress and model, the free-spirited Wally Neuzil, looking at the viewer anything but innocently with her legs drawn up, as though waiting to be penetrated. Despite all his bohemian airs, Schiele did not regard her as a suitable wife. Himself the son of a humble stationmaster (who had been driven mad by syphilis at an early age), Schiele wanted to combine his artistic explorations of dark sexuality with the bourgeois comforts of settled domesticity. For this he needed a bourgeois wife.

Edith insisted that Wally should disappear from their lives, which she did with surprisingly good grace. How painful this was to both of them is revealed here: the man, resembling the artist, is holding on to the half-dressed woman, whose hands are clasped behind his back as though for the last time. The sepulchral brownish colors and shroudlike bed sheets set the tone. Both people look absolutely miserable.

Many of Schiele’s human figures, not just Edith, have a puppetlike quality, including nude drawings of himself. In Self-Portrait with Arm Twisted Above Head (1910), shown at the Neue Galerie, Schiele is contorted like a marionette. The puppet can represent many things. One of these is the human body as something to be manipulated at will.

But then the doll-like quality about figures in Schiele’s paintings does not mean the absence of life. In 1915, the year he married Edith, Schiele began painting Mother and Two Children III. The mother, as in his earlier treatments of this theme, looks dead or close to death, her eyes hollow and unseeing in a sickly gray face. The two children, both modeled after Schiele’s own nephew, Toni, have the rosy cheeks and healthy tints of rude health. They are dressed, like Edith, in bright multicolored clothes. And yet, again like Edith, they have the stiffness of marionettes, waiting to be animated by a master.

“Egon Schiele: Portraits” is on view at the Neue Galerie through April 20.

The post The Mistress and the Marionette appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The Thai government has never been fond of The King and I, the popular 1951 musical about an English schoolteacher’s tutoring of a nineteenth-century Thai king, now being revived on Broadway. It banned the movie of The King and I in 1956, and the remake, with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat, in 1999. There is little chance that any version of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical would pass the Thai censors today. Various reasons have been given: the story is historically inaccurate, the portrayal of the king as a comic figure, absurdly keen to show off that he is not a barbarian in Western eyes, is disrespectful, Jodie Foster’s Anna eclipsed the king on publicity posters, and so on.

The Thai authorities appear to be making a category mistake. Of course, the story is inaccurate. In the musical, the King of Siam, a child-like tyrant, is instructed by the apparently very English Anna Leonowens, in modern European ways, which cause him much “bafflement.” (The Japanese actor Ken Watanabe plays the king in the current production with great comic timing and panache; Kelli O’Hara as Anna crackles with hopeless desire.) In the process, he becomes less of a tyrant, almost docile. The story is actually a reversal of the usual Orientalist trope—Antony and Cleopatra, say—where the sultry Oriental female corrupts the virile Western male. Here the sexy and very masculine king falls under the spell of the prim European schoolmarm.

This is fantasy. The real King Mongkut, on whom the musical is based, was not a strutting Oriental sex symbol, but a scholarly old gentleman with an excellent command of Latin and several European languages. One of the most torrid scenes in the musical shows him about to crack a long whip across the back of Tuptim, his Burmese slave girl, for attempting to elope with her lover. In fact, King Mongkut, now known in Thailand as Rama IV, tried to improve the social status of women.

A keen astronomer and an expert in geography, the actual king was probably also far less baffled by Western scientific discoveries than was the musical monarch. And the influence of Anna on the Siamese court, not to mention her simmering romance with the king, has probably been vastly exaggerated, not least by the historical Anna Leonowens herself, in her memoir, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870)—which became the main source for the fanciful 1944 novel by Margaret Landon on which the musical is based. And, by the way, she was not a Welshwoman, as she claimed, but a Eurasian born in India who spent almost her entire life in one colony or another.

Nonetheless, the musical is more than a brilliant piece of froth. It dramatizes something historically profound about nineteenth-century Siam (the country was officially renamed Thailand by a military regime in 1948). The only two Asian countries to escape from being colonized by a Western nation were Siam and Japan. They achieved this through a combination of geographical luck, shrewd diplomacy, and what has been called “protection by mimicry.” The only way to keep Western powers at bay was to modernize as quickly as possible along Western lines. King Mongkut, portrayed in a famous photograph with his son and successor, Prince Chulalongkorn, in the full pomp of a European-style naval uniform, was not just interested in modern science—and European manners and institutions—out of curiosity. He saw it as his nation’s best defense against Western predators. That is one reason why he invited Anna Leonowens to teach English at his royal court.

But the impact of radical transformation in Siam, as well as in Japan under the Meiji Emperor, was cushioned by the deliberate reinforcement of traditional continuity. In Siam this was based on the twin institutions of royalty and Buddhism. No matter how much the elites mimicked the dress and manners of Westerners, deference to these updated and even invented traditions offered a sense of social coherence and national identity.

Often, of course, the twin tracks of modernization and tradition collided: science with religion, liberty with deference, Western education with Siamese customs. This is the stuff from which the drama of The King and I was made. The king wants Anna to help make his country modern, yet he behaves like a typical Oriental despot. Hence Anna’s outburst in her famous song, “Shall I Tell You What I Think of You”:

Everybody’s always bowing to the King
Everybody has to grovel to the King
By your Buddha you are blessed
By your ladies you’re caressed
But the one who loves you best is the King

All that bowing and kowtowing
To remind you of your royalty
I find a most disgusting exhibition

It is clear from her memoir that the actual Anna did feel rather this way. This doesn’t mean, however, that groveling to absolute monarchs is an essential part of Thai culture. Much of the kowtowing had disappeared from Thai life in the first half of the twentieth century. When he became king in 1868, Chulalongkorn abolished the custom of crawling at the monarch’s feet during audiences. A military coup in 1932 ended the absolute powers of the king.

In fact, the awesome authority and reverential treatment of the King Bhumibol, the current Thai monarch, who was crowned in 1950, is largely a modern reinvention. At first, King Bhumibol had only limited authority. But after a military coup in 1957, led by General Sarit Dhanarajata, just a few years after the premiere of The King and I on Broadway, Bhumibol’s court began to play a much more central role in Thai life, and such customs as making people crawl in the royal presence were revived. Historians are divided over the question about whether the main actor in this revival was General Sarit or the king himself. In any case, monarchy and the Buddhist faith were strengthened in part to counter the influence of communism.

Far from being a purely Asian reaction to modern influences from the West, this was a policy encouraged by the US. The monarchy of the jazz-loving King Bhumibol echoes in many ways the nineteenth-century mixture of Westernization and invented tradition. Even as US military bases during the Vietnam War injected a crass form of American culture into Thai society, symbolized by the raucous girly bars that made Bangkok a favorite sexual tourist destination, the very aspects of Thai tradition deplored by Anna Leonowens, in life and fiction, were consciously reimposed: harsh laws on lèse majesté became an important tool in putting down political dissent.

These efforts have only become more pronounced today. King Bhumibol is old and in bad health. His son and likely successor, Prince Vajiralongkorn, is unpopular. The current military regime, which deposed the democratically elected Yingluck Shinawatra in a coup d’etat last year, might not want to give up power until the next monarch succeeds. That more people than ever are arrested for lèse majesté is a sign of considerable nervousness about how this will be managed.

Ironically, given the current situation in Thailand, The King and I ends, a little abruptly, with the king’s death. The last scene is touching, with the king, on his deathbed, giving his blessing to the enlightened ways he learned from his English governess. His son, Chulalongkorn, vows to abolish kowtowing at the royal court. Anna promises to stay on to guide the new king, while kneeling at the feet of the old one.

It is all wildly implausible (the real Anna was actually in England when the king died), but terrific theater, and a tribute in a way to the humanity of Siam. One cannot help feeling that the Thai authorities have a problem with the story, not because the revered monarch is portrayed as a primitive fool, but because in today’s light he is actually way too modern.

The King and I is playing at Lincoln Center through January 3, 2016.

The post Thailand’s Banned ‘King’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Kafka on the Shore at Lincoln Center in July—a surreal play that mixes slices of contemporary Japanese life with a ghostly spirit world, based on the 2002 novel by Haruki Murakami—was a brilliant example of Japan’s modern theater tradition. The words “modern” and “tradition” may appear contradictory, but in this case they are not. Since the 1960s, Japanese playwrights and theater directors have, in many variations, developed a style that is new and yet derived from an unmistakably Japanese idiom.

Murakami deliberately avoids allusions in his novels to traditional Japanese culture. In tune with modern Japan, most references are Western: jazz music, fast food, Hollywood movies, and so on. Kafka on the Shore splices two tenuously linked stories together: about a young man who runs away from his father’s home in search of his lost mother and sister, and about an older shell-shocked eccentric who tracks down lost cats for a living. Ninagawa’s stage adaptation of the novel is a collage of modern, neon-lit, commercialized, glitzy Japan, haunted by dark, mostly unspoken memories of World War II, including the atom bomb, shown in what looks like a stylized advertising logo.

The play’s main characters—the young drifter, the old cat-catcher, a transgender librarian, and a woman who may or may not be the young man’s long lost mother—all seem traumatized, people who no longer know who they are. This may have something to do with the catastrophic war, or possibly with the helter-skelter Westernization of Japan since the late nineteenth century.

But even without traditional references, the production—perhaps more than Murakami’s novel—is still unmistakably Japanese: stylized, poetic, comical, violent, full of spectacular effects, and often exquisitely beautiful to look at. The setting jumps at lightning speed from a bus station, to a library, to a sleazy bar area. Various characters emerge and disappear, like memories or scenes from a dream, in an assortment of moving transparent boxes.

Ninagawa borrows some elements from traditional Japanese theater: one of the most moving scenes echoes Noh, including the typical trilling sound of a bamboo flute. But he avoids the common trap of pastiche, either of Japanese tradition or the Western avant-garde. Instead, he manages to enrich both. (If the production has a flaw, it has more to do with Murakami than Ninagawa. Especially in the second half, the play gets verbose, full of rather otiose profundities about the meaning of life, or death. A pair of scissors would have done the text much good.)

This theatrical style, refined by Ninagawa, took quite a long time to develop. When Japan decided in the 1860s that wholesale Westernization was the only way to avoid being dominated by Western powers, traditional artistic forms, such as Noh or Kabuki, quickly hardened into an official museum-like art, still fascinating but stuck in an increasingly remote past. The first efforts to create a modern Japanese theater did away with those stylized, often fantastical genres. European plays were performed in an attempt to be realistic, with Japanese actors wearing blond wigs and even with long Caucasian noses stuck onto their faces. Gradually the “new theater,” as it was called, tackled more Japanese subjects, often with a left-wing political slant. The extraordinary richness of classic Japanese cinema developed from this.

In the 1960s, however, Japanese directors, who often wrote their own plays, broke away from naturalism to develop a type of theater that had the original rebellious spirit and dynamism of Kabuki without adopting its forms. Figures like Shūji Terayama (1935-1983), a poet and filmmaker, as well as the leader of his own theater troupe, were deeply aware of the Western avant-garde, and sometimes influenced by it, but their main inspiration was Japanese low-life: fairground entertainers, striptease dancers, whores and gangsters, as well as comic book characters, advertising jingles, pop music, and so on. Turning against the stilted classical tradition, as well as highbrow Western theater, they loved what Japanese call “the reek of mud.”

Some of these new theater troupes performed around the country in circus tents, or in the streets, like travelling players used to do. Their plays were never realistic, either in the manner of performance or narrative style. The plots were like lurid dreams, frequently featuring characters in search of themselves, or perhaps of their culture. Some directors, such as Jūrō Kara, were deliberately outrageous; others, like Tadashi Suzuki, the son of a Noh actor, were more intellectual. But all of them tried to reconnect with a Japanese theatrical spirit by digging under the many layers of twentieth-century Westernization.

Ninagawa, who began his career in the same fizzing period as Kara and Terayama, directing various theater troupes of his own, was asked in 1974 by one of the major Japanese entertainment companies to direct Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on a commercial stage. But he didn’t lose his radical edge. Even with Western plays, he adapted and further perfected the exuberant manner of new Japanese theater for the mainstream stage. Although slicker than the rough and tumble of Kara’s plays, or Terayama’s surreal fairground fantasies, the production of Kafka on the Shore retains the wild visual imagination of the underground theater at its best. The sudden downpour of fish from the sky could have been in one of Kara’s productions.

Ninagawa’s freshness is remarkable. For the danger in Japanese culture is that methods, once they are established by great masters, get endlessly imitated by acolytes and become mannered. This has happened to certain forms of modern dance, as well as theatrical styles that were once new. One way he has avoided this trap is through his eclecticism. Ninagawa does not write his own plays. His art is to take a wide variety of works and reimagine them in his peculiar way. His 1996 production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with an ancient Japanese rock garden being transformed into the forest filled with spirits dressed in kimono, is considered even by some British cognoscenti to be one of the most original interpretations ever staged. He has also tackled ancient Greek tragedies, Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, as well as plays by such Japanese playwrights as Kara and Terayama.

Still, it would be a mistake to put too much stress on Ninagawa’s nationality. Though his talent is rooted in a great Japanese tradition, his art, like Murakami’s, has a universal appeal. If there is a pantheon of modern theatrical gods that includes Peter Brook, Peter Stein, Robert Wilson, or Ariane Mnouchkine, Yukio Ninagawa is right up there with them.

The post A Downpour of Fish: Murakami on Stage appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new movie, Mountains May Depart, begins with a disco dance in a bleak mining town to the sounds of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys. It is the lunar New Year, 1999. Outside, the end of the millennium is celebrated in a more traditional style with exploding firecrackers and dragon dances. China’s breakneck transition from Chairman Mao’s impoverished, isolated, regimented hecatomb to a world of disco music, mobile phones, German cars, Cantonese pop, and vast individual wealth is as explosive as those firecrackers shattering the cold air of the northern plains, where Jia himself was born.

One of the explosions in Mountains May Depart starts with the main character, Tao (played by Jia’s wife and frequent collaborator, Zhao Tao), a bouncy young woman caught in a love triangle, walking along the local river, which is still beautiful but would soon be threatened by a gigantic dam. Suddenly we hear the roar of a light aircraft streaking over her head before crashing in a ball of fire, rather like those earlier fireworks. Tao seems unfazed. She simply walks on. The crash appears to have no particular significance. It has nothing to do with the story of a provincial woman and her two suitors. If the crash is a metaphor for China’s madcap development, it is not emphasized.

Jia has an instinctive feel for China’s shifting rural and urban landscape, so brilliantly expressed in earlier films, like A Touch of Sin (2013). He is superb at catching the changing moods of his country in poetic, frequently wordless, and often absurd images. These scenes are not conventionally beautiful, let alone pretty: he can make industrial smoke stacks, a provincial railway station, or a coalmine, look stunning. Jia has done for Chinese film what Alain Resnais or Robert Bresson did for French cinema, with their genius for the quiet transcendent moment (think of the dying donkey in Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar). Jia does not bang his points home, any more than they did. Yet the scene of the plane crash as Tao walks by is unforgettable.

Mountains May Depart divides Tao’s life—and by extension the life of China—into three episodes. The first part of the movie is set in 1999, the second in 2014, and the third in 2025, this time in Australia. In the first part, we meet Tao, whose family runs an appliance store, and the two local men, Jinsheng and Liangzi, who are courting her. They represent different faces of modern China. Liangzi is a man rooted in his rural community, a miner traditional in his habits; we see him praying to a folk deity in front of a family altar. Jinsheng is all get-up-and-go, a showy entrepreneur, impatient to grab the new riches available in post-Mao China. He buys a bright red European car before he can even drive it properly. He buys the local coal mine where Liangzhi works, and fires him when Liangzhi refuses to stay away from Tao. But he wants more, and more, and more.

Jinsheng’s aspirations to join the “elite” seem slightly absurd to Tao, but eventually she chooses him to be her husband. They have a child. He insists that the boy should be named Dollar, after all the dollars his father will make.

In the second part, fifteen years later, Tao and Jinsheng are divorced. Jinsheng has now moved to Shanghai, where Dollar attends the International School. Still in her hometown, which she will never leave, Tao has lost custody of the child. Liangzi, the rejected suitor, has moved to a different town, where he falls seriously ill, without enough money to pay for proper medical care. Swallowing his pride, he turns to Tao for help.

If the heady atmosphere of 1999 is expressed in the catchy Pet Shop Boys’ tune, the more melancholy, even disillusioned air of 2014 is conveyed by a sentimental Cantonese pop song, first heard years earlier on a cassette tape in Tao’s family store. The song is repeated when Tao and Dollar sit side by side on a slow train back to his father’s home in Shanghai. Dollar has visited his mother to attend his grandfather’s funeral. The provincial town where he was born is alien to him now after the metropolitan luster of Shanghai. Tao knows that she will probably never see her son again. Their bond, not yet grasped by the young boy, is illustrated by the kind of wordless scene in which Jia excels. They sit together, silently, sharing the earphones plugged into an iPod. A close-up of Tao’s face shows you all you need to know about loss and motherly love.

The third part of the film, set in Melbourne among Chinese expatriates and shifting mostly to English, is the least satisfying. Jinsheng, now named “Peter,” is a bitter man, bored with his wealth, uprooted, with no real purpose, barking in his regional Chinese dialect at Dollar, who is about to go to college. Dollar can barely speak Chinese any more. He can do anything he likes, but doesn’t really know what he wants. China is a strange country to him now. But he isn’t at home in Australia either. He no longer wishes to live with his father. But he doesn’t want to go to college. The only way he can tell his father is through his Chinese teacher, a divorcee from Hong Kong, who translates for him. His father screams at him: “Freedom is bullshit!”

The intimacy Dollar had once unconsciously enjoyed with his mother is strangely reenacted with the teacher from Hong Kong. While driving together through bland Australian suburbs, she plays a CD of a Cantonese pop song. Dollar has a sense of déjà vu, but doesn’t know why. They end up in a hotel, sleeping together, talking about his lost mother in China, and hers in Toronto, about loneliness, and the need to forget the past. The teacher encourages Dollar to return to China and visit his mother. She is on the verge of buying airline tickets for the two of them. But he cannot bring himself to go. The past is a lost country.

Some of the absurdist, seemingly meaningless images that we see in the first two episodes come back: a Chinese man carrying a traditional halberd, like an actor from a Chinese opera who has lost his way. The sense of dislocation is clear. And yet the third part of the triptych doesn’t quite work. Now that the script is in English, the film becomes oddly wordy. Clunky statements about life abound: “The hardest thing about love is caring,” and so on.

At the end of the movie, we see Tao once again, an old lady now, living alone, cutting up meat in her kitchen to stuff into her famous dumplings, as she had done before, first for her two boyfriends, and then for Dollar in 2014. She steps outside into the snow, to the river, now dammed up, and begins to dance, on her own, snow falling all around her, to the sounds of “Go West,” as the town pagoda looms up behind her.

It is a wonderful image that reminded me of many Japanese films made during Japan’s fizzing economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s, films like Shohei Imamura’s Insect Woman. No matter how much the world changes, women are survivors, their vitality undiminished, even as everything else, including the men who depend on their love, come crashing down around them.

Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart is showing at Film Society Lincoln Center through February 27.

The post Lost in China’s Exploding Future appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

1.

Brussels has frequently had a bad press. Already in the 1860s, Baudelaire, who fled there from the French censors, called the Belgian capital “a ghost town, a mummy of a town, it smells of death, the Middle Ages, and tombs.” To a growing number of Europeans, “Brussels” is a byword for bureaucratic bullying by the so-called Eurocrats.

Donald Trump called Brussels a “hellhole.” Perhaps he was thinking, if that is the right word, of Molenbeek. Densely populated by immigrants, mostly from North Africa, this district has become a symbol of seething European jihadism. Last year’s mass murders in Paris were apparently plotted there; the number of young men and women (around a hundred) who have left Molenbeek to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq is relatively high.

Still, much of the negative reputation of Brussels is undeserved and overblown. Brussels is not a dangerous city—not even Molenbeek, which is shabby, sullen (unemployment 30 percent), socially cut off, but not especially menacing. Many non-Muslim hipsters live there as well. Parts of Brussels are actually quite beautiful. The city has many fine examples of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, as well as the more famous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century gold-gabled buildings on the magnificent Grand Place.

But Brussels is indeed rather chaotic, a political mess of nineteen different municipal districts, each with its own public authorities competing for funds, with an uncoordinated police force prone to conspicuous failures, and different political parties, linked to different language groups, operating their own more or less corrupt systems of patronage. Brussels, which has its own government, is mostly Francophone, but it is also the capital of Dutch-speaking Flanders and the capital of the European Union, whose own “Quartier Européen” is almost like a separate city within the city.

But this political fragmentation, and the consequent lack of strong central control, are also why modern Brussels has been a haven for dissidents, misfits, bohemians, and refugees of one kind or another. Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto there, after he was kicked out of France in 1845. Baudelaire came to Brussels because he could express himself more freely than in Paris, even to pour vitriol onto his city of refuge. It is still one of the freest, most ethnically mixed cities in Europe.

For much of its history, Brussels was occupied by oppressive empires: the Spanish Habsburgs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Austria in the eighteenth century (after France’s Louis XIV had laid waste to the city in 1695), and France from 1795 until 1815, after which it became part of the Netherlands. Belgium became an independent kingdom only in 1830 (under King Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a German, of course), after a combined rebellion of French-speaking socialists and Flemish Catholics against the Protestant Dutch king. Apart from their hatred of the Dutch, these groups had very little in common; they still don’t.

Five years ago, Belgium established a peculiar record in being the only democracy to go without an elected government for more than a year (589 days, to be exact). The Francophone parties couldn’t come to an agreement with the Flemish to form a national government. But this was, as it were, in character. For the Belgian identity always was rather shaky. People felt an allegiance to their language community, to their region, to their church, or to political patrons—socialists in industrial and now rusting postindustrial Wallonia, and liberals, Christian Democrats, or Flemish nationalists in the north. Even imperial conquest was not always a strictly national enterprise: in the nineteenth century, the Congo belonged to King Leopold II alone.

Brussels, that magnificent repository of history, with its Renaissance guild houses and nineteenth-century palaces built on fortunes made in the Congo, is the capital of Belgium, but few Belgians take much pride in it, in the way the French are proud of Paris, or the British of London. Flemish politicians and businessmen prefer to live in Antwerp or Ghent. To many Belgians, Brussels is a strange city of immigrants, refugees, and foreign grandees. It is still a capital in search of a nation. And if you include the EU, it is also a capital in search of an empire, or a federal state, or whatever it is that Europe is destined to become.

This peculiarly open-ended status can be disconcerting. And the lack of central coordination and control, on a municipal, national, and European level, may account for a sense of drift, unaccountability, and disorder. Perhaps the disaffection and extremism in Molenbeek are partly the result of this, as is the seeming paralysis of the EU in the face of financial crises and migrants streaming across Europe’s porous borders. The problems of Belgium and the EU overlap. But if Brussels is the symbol of dysfunction, its lack of a clear identity, its fragmentation, and its flexibility also offer a sense of freedom and possibility. The EU, and perhaps Belgium too, are still experiments, and that might be their greatest strength.

2.

Last year I lived for a month in the Stevinstraat, or the rue Stevin (every street in Brussels is named in Dutch as well as French). A ten-minute walk in each direction from my apartment revealed the different states of Brussels, Belgium, and the EU. The architecture is telling.

Just to the south, in the European Quarter, is the gigantic Berlaymont, headquarters of the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, which proposes and enforces EU laws. Built in the 1960s and renovated in the 1990s, after the building was found to be full of asbestos, the Berlaymont is grandiose but devoid of any character, a steel and glass expression of great power, but without any cultural, historical, or aesthetic appeal. Once in a while, I noticed Chinese tourists gazing at the building in wonder and taking selfies in front of the stark little monument to Robert Schuman, one of postwar Europe’s founding fathers.

Even more hideous is the Justus Lipsius building, completed in 1995 by a pan-European consortium of architects and engineers. This piece of modernist brutality houses the Council of the European Union. Government ministers from the twenty-eight EU member states meet there to haggle over and vote on laws and budgets. The presidency of the council rotates every six months between the different member states.

A different institution altogether, and probably the most powerful in the EU, is the European Council, consisting of the government leaders of EU states. They have also been meeting regularly at the Justus Lipsius building. It was the setting last July of the sometimes acrimonious negotiations over debt with the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras. This year the council is supposed to be moving into a giant egg encased in a glass box called Bloc A, another grand modernist construction that is more imposing than attractive. Then there is the most gigantic building complex of all, called the Espace Léopold, which includes a dome resembling the Tower of Babel in Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting. (Bruegel died in Brussels.) The EU parliament, which moves back and forth once a month between Brussels and Strasbourg at vast expense, in order to keep France happy, has to pass the laws initiated by the commission. And the president of the commission now has to be backed by the largest party in the parliament.

Both monumental and abstract, all these buildings in the European Quarter seem designed to impress the citizens with the grandeur of a great empire. The EU does in fact have great economic muscle. Collectively, it has a bigger economy than China or the US. But unlike great empires in the past, the EU institutions in Brussels have almost no political power, since there is no United States of Europe to project it. The eurozone of nineteen countries has a common currency. And the European Central Bank in Frankfurt has the authority to set monetary policies and, within limits, bail countries out if they cannot pay their debts. But there is no collective defense force or collective foreign policy. This might possibly account for the grandiosity of the EU’s institutional buildings: an attempt to look mightier than it really is.

The same might be said about the Royal Palace, where the king of Belgium receives guests, built not far from the European Quarter on the site of older palaces. It is an absurdly lavish building in the neoclassical style, grander even than Buckingham Palace. The Mirror Room with its marble and copper walls was intended to evoke the atmosphere of the Congo. The ceiling is covered with the shiny green wing cases of 1.4 million Thai jewel beetles. Versailles was the inspiration for the Grand Hall, where royal banquets are held under giant chandeliers. Leopold II was responsible for much of this, as though he wished to puff up his chest to his more powerful neighbors, especially France.

But the most peculiar manifestation of Brussels puffery can be reached in a five-minute walk from the Berlaymont. The Parc du Cinquantenaire, or Jubilee Park, was laid out in 1880 to mark fifty years of Belgian independence with a National Exhibition showing off the young state’s industrial and imperial prowess. This, again, was an initiative of Leopold II. Looming over the park is a huge triumphal arch, erected in 1905, clearly inspired by Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, only much bigger.

Near the arch is the Monument to Belgian Pioneers in the Congo, finished in 1921. A series of friezes and reliefs celebrates the benefits of Belgian rule in Africa. Naked Africans can be seen kneeling in gratitude at the feet of a white-bearded patriarch—probably Leopold II himself—sitting on a throne. The following words are engraved in stone: “I have embarked on the great work in the Congo/to further the cause of civilization/and the welfare of Belgium. Leopold II 3 June 1906.” King Leopold’s enterprise may have cost the lives of more than ten million people in the Congo.

Walking past these various buildings and monuments shouting for attention, it is hard to suppress the thought that Brussels and the EU were made for each other: fat and pompous, and more than a little overbearing. But another ten-minute walk, this time in the northern direction from the rue Stevin, past the splendid Art Nouveau townhouses on the Square Marie-Louise, where wealthy Belgians and Eurocrats live, shows a different side of Brussels. There, in the scruffy nineteenth-century streets of the Schaerbeek quarter, is one of the city’s typical immigrant areas: halal butchers, Turkish restaurants, teashops filled with bearded men smoking water pipes, and housewives in headscarves. As is true in Molenbeek, more than half the population here was born in another country, mostly Turkey in this case. Part of the area is known as Petite Anatolie.

One of the reasons given for the radicalization of youth in Molenbeek is the isolation of immigrant communities. Africans live among Africans, Moroccans among Moroccans, Turks among Turks, and so forth. The more or less benign neglect of a weak state is said to make the feeling of segregation worse. Unlike in Paris, however, most immigrants live right in the center of the city, in very close proximity to other communities. The rue Dansaert, one of the plushest shopping streets of Brussels, leads right into Molenbeek; the distance from an expensive Italian fashion boutique to a café filled with unemployed Muslim men is less than a few hundred yards. And even a cursory visitor to an area like Schaerbeek will soon notice that ethnic relations in Brussels are more complex and interrelated than they might seem at first sight.

Adjacent to Schaerbeek is another municipality called Saint Joost-ten-Noode, which contains a mix of local hipsters and immigrants. One day I walked into the attractive neobaroque church of Saint Joost. The number of active Christians is dwindling in Belgium, as it is in most parts of Europe. But I found some believers inside, kneeling in their wooden pews. Most were elderly, and looked to be from different ethnic origins. Some were white. The priest, a tall black man in a green and white cassock, delivered his sermon in a thick African accent.

3.

When I arrived in Brussels in the fall of 2015, the sense of crisis was palpable. And this was before armored vehicles appeared in the streets in a rather futile show of strength after the killings in Paris. Not long ago, EU officials and their boosters in the media tended to speak triumphantly of “Europe” as a beacon of peace, freedom, and democracy, a model for the rest of world. The rhetoric was now distinctly downbeat.

I attended a dinner party in an elegant apartment on the Boulevard Winston Churchill. My fellow guests were all connected to the EU in one capacity or another. One spoke openly about the possibility of the euro crashing. Another mentioned the increasingly bad image of the European Commission, as an undemocratic, semi-authoritarian body. Parts of it should probably be dismantled, he suggested. At an EU conference held in one of those magnificent palaces left behind by the Belgian Empire, the Dutch vice-president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, warned that if Europe didn’t solve the refugee crisis soon, the EU could easily fall apart.

At a lavish banquet following yet another EU conference in the same gilded palace, I listened to a speech by Étienne Davignon. If anyone personifies the grand European “project,” it is Davignon. This aristocratic Belgian businessman, banker, diplomat, former commissioner, and now president of a think tank called Friends of Europe operates precisely where Belgian and EU elites overlap: on the summit of big money and lofty ideals. Davignon is, in a sense, the unofficial king of Brussels. In the past, he could be counted on to hold forth about the glories of a united Europe. Now he struck a more defensive note; he was sick and tired, he said, of European despondency: “We have lost pride in what we have done.”

It sounded to me as though Brussels triumphalism was turning into a lament. In a way, this was refreshing. Many observers have described the dangers faced by Europe, not least George Soros in these pages. One of the most cogent thinkers about the EU is Luuk van Middelaar, a historian educated in Holland and France, and now based in Brussels. His articles frequently appear in France, as well as his native Holland. As a former member of the cabinet of the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy, the first president of the European Council, van Middelaar knows the EU from the inside out. He sees the problem of Europe mainly as a political crisis.

In the beginning, the conception of European unity, first as the Coal and Steel Community of six nations, and then as the European Economic Community, was deliberately apolitical, or in van Middelaar’s words, a “dedramatisation of European politics.” The distant goal of technocratic founding fathers, such as Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, might have been a United States of Europe, but peaceful relations between the European nations, which had just emerged from a catastrophic war, needed to be secured first by pooling such economic resources as coal and steel. European institutions were constructed to transcend national politics. Peace and prosperity would come from economic cooperation and negotiation. Consensus would be reached by responsible leaders out of public sight.

The founding fathers were, however, more than dry technocrats. There was a moral, even quasi-religious dimension to the postwar European ideal, a whiff of the Holy Roman Empire; most of the leading figures in the unification of Europe—Konrad Adenauer, Schuman, Alcide De Gaspari, Paul-Henri Spaak—were Roman Catholics.

The French intellectual Julien Benda was not. But he still had a vision. “Europe,” he wrote in a fascinating essay on European unification, published in 1933, “won’t be the result of a simple economic, or political transformation. It will not really exist without adopting a system of moral and aesthetic values, the exaltation of a certain way of thinking and feeling….” But Benda also believed that the idea of Europe should remain utterly rational, abstract, devoid of any national or tribal sentiments. And French, in his view the most rational language, should be the common means of pan-European communication. It is this rationalist, abstract, deliberately deracinated quality, exemplified by the main EU buildings in Brussels, that would prove to be an obstacle once it became necessary to claim the loyalty of the citizens in twenty-eight different nation-states.

The flaws in the founding fathers’ construction, as van Middelaar sees it, became evident once Britain joined in 1973, and even more so after the end of the cold war in the early 1990s. Problems related to climate change, security, immigration, and a common currency demand political solutions. Bureaucratic tinkering, financial planning, and institution-building are no longer enough. To play a part commensurate with its economic power, Europe needs common policies that are democratically legitimate.

But there lies the nub of the European problem: how to give the EU a strong political identity without undermining the legitimacy of national governments. Many commentators, including George Soros, Paul Krugman, and Jürgen Habermas, have criticized the way austerity policies have been imposed on highly indebted European countries, particularly Greece. This was done against the wishes of Greek voters and their democratically elected government. But is it even possible to create democratic European institutions without creating a European superstate?

Habermas, for one, has stuck his neck out on this issue. As an old German leftist who grew up under Nazi rule, he is deeply critical of Germany’s dominant power; it was, after all, Angela Merkel’s government that pushed austerity on Greece. He believes that the only rational solution to the EU’s “democratic deficit” is to create what he calls a “more integrated democratic core Europe.” The eurozone, at the very least, should go ahead and, in the words of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, form “an ever closer union.” But how?

Thomas Piketty has argued in these pages that there should be a new and separate eurozone parliament made up of members of national parliaments, proportionate to the size of each country’s population. And national parliaments should have the right to vote on a common eurozone corporate tax. Among other things, this would have the merit of making Germany less dominant, for its representatives could be outvoted by those from other nations. But how can Germans, or indeed other Europeans, even just the ones inside the eurozone, be persuaded to do this?

Habermas thinks that European solidarity must start with the intelligentsia. A cosmopolitan European public must be shaped by news media that transcend national concerns and focus on European affairs. Citizens should vote for pan-European parties. The European Parliament must have more powers to determine the European future. A European constitution must become the primary source of pan-European patriotism. These are the essential conditions to forge a Europe that is not dominated by bankers, corporate interests, or the German government.

The logic of these positions is impeccable. But human society is not always logical. The thinking of Habermas suffers from the same abstraction as the essay by Julien Benda. Cosmopolitanism, however laudable, is not the direction in which most European voters are moving, and neither is constitutional patriotism. Van Middelaar has a more multidimensional view of European politics. Direct political participation in democratic elections is what he calls the Greek model, which in his view is not sufficient. Citizens also need the Roman model: the state as a source of material benefits. And the German model: the imaginary community of shared historical and cultural values. The process of these models together creating a European polity will be hard and long, but van Middelaar still believes that it is possible. He thinks that muddling through, without a clear blueprint, but taking all three models into account, remains the best option for the European experiment.

Common enemies can help to forge political cohesion: that is how Belgians became Belgians, after all—their common opposition to Dutch rule. But so, perhaps, does the challenge of common crises. European leaders disagree fiercely about the ways to respond to financial disasters in Greece, or the arrival of refugees and migrants, or indeed the prospect of Britain leaving the EU. To some observers, these conflicts are harbingers of a European implosion.

This could have happened on February 19, during a marathon summit in Brussels. Prime Minister Cameron did extract some concessions for the UK: a cut in work benefits for EU migrants in Britain, and a promise to protect the interests of countries outside the eurozone. Still, if British voters elect to leave the EU in a forthcoming referendum, possibly inviting other countries to follow suit, the Union could slowly come apart.

But there is room for a more optimistic view. European journalists, commentators, businessmen, and politicians are at least talking about the same things. There is much anxiety about how to deal with the vast current arrival of refugees from Syria, and even more the possibility of mass migration from Africa. There is no agreement on how to defend Europe’s external borders; but at least citizens are reminded that these common borders exist. Open conflicts between political players may eventually tear the EU apart, but the opposite is also possible. Conflict, like a common conversation, is an essential ingredient of a democratic political community. Whatever happens from now on, the days of quiet consensus hammered out in opaque meetings deep inside the glass and steel palaces of the European Quarter are surely over.

4.

Since October 7, 2014, Belgium has had a new federal government. It is a center-right coalition, led by the New Flemish Alliance (N–VA). The Francophones are represented by the conservative Mouvement Réformateur (MR). So far, the government has continued to hold power. But it is a fragile construction. Francophone and Dutch-speaking Belgians are drifting ever further apart; they don’t read one another’s press or watch the same TV. More and more well-educated Flemish cannot or will not speak French. Nationalists in the N–VA openly support the ideal of Flemish independence. Each region, including the small German-speaking area around Liège, as well as Brussels, has its own government, and cooperation between them is often faulty.

All that Belgians have in common—and this may be more than it sounds—is a monarchy and a national soccer team, the Red Devils. As in the case of the EU, Belgium seems constantly to be on the brink of falling apart. And yet it has not. One of the reasons is Brussels. No one, certainly not the Francophone population, but not even the Flemish nationalists, wants to give it up. They may not love their capital city, but Brussels still represents something more than the nation’s increasingly separate parts. Brussels makes all Belgians feel bigger, less provincial, more able to face the wider world, than they would otherwise.

A similar view of Brussels is still held by most Europeans, even a large number of British subjects, who just might vote to keep Britain in the EU. Few people like “Brussels,” but equally few really want to do without it. Much will depend, for this to continue, on the way the EU responds to the crises at hand. If the past is any indication, Europe might yet again muddle through, slowly, painfully, but still intact enough to carry on the experiment.

It might. But it would be foolish to bank on it. Brussels has seen many empires come and go. The pomposity of official Brussels, national and European, is offset by a healthy dose of rebellion and skepticism. The most famous symbol of the city is not the Royal Palace, let alone the Berlaymont, but the small seventeenth-century bronze figure of Manneken Pis, the Little Pisser. There are several legends about this naked little boy urinating. Perhaps he is the two-year-old Duke Godfrey III of Leuven, peeing on his enemies during a battle in 1142. Or he might be the boy who pissed on the bomb fuses about to be set off by foreign troops trying to take the city in the fourteenth century. But whoever he is, the urge to piss on power-hungry interlopers does not strike me as a bad one.

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In The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma writes, “The exhibition, organized together with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is full of wonders, and has a far more serious purpose than some French critics have acknowledged. It is fascinating to see, for example, how the image of prostitutes changed, not just from artist to artist, but in the course of time. The show is not just about art, but an absorbing illustration of social history.”

For more information, visit musee-orsay.fr.

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In the NYR Daily, Ian Buruma writes, “Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new movie, Mountains May Depart, begins with a disco dance in a bleak mining town to the sounds of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys. It is the lunar New Year, 1999. Outside, the end of the millennium is celebrated in a more traditional style with exploding firecrackers and dragon dances. China’s breakneck transition from Chairman Mao’s impoverished, isolated, regimented hecatomb to a world of disco music, mobile phones, German cars, Cantonese pop, and vast individual wealth is as explosive as those firecrackers shattering the cold air of the northern plains, where Jia himself was born.”

For more information, visit kinolorber.com.

The post Mountains May Depart appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, the American academic Deborah E. Lipstadt called David Irving, a British amateur historian, “one of the most dangerous spokesmen for Holocaust denial.” I had observed Irving a year or so before Lipstadt’s book came out, addressing a neo-Nazi rally in the dreary east German town of Halle. He cut an odd figure, in his fawn trench coat, bellowing in accented German to a rowdy crowd of skinheads raising their arms in a Nazi salute. In 1996, he decided to sue Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel, on the grounds that her accusation damaged his career as the serious historian that he claimed to be.

Irving had gone around Europe and the US telling sympathetic audiences that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, and Hitler had no genocidal intent. He even disrupted one of Lipstadt’s seminars, offering $1,000 to anyone who could show that Hitler had known about any plan for mass murder. Those who believed in this, he said in one 1991 speech, were, “Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars—or the ASSHOLs.”

Under British law, the defendant in a libel case has to prove that her assertion is true. So to win, Lipstadt’s lawyers had to prove in court that the mass murder of Jews by gas, and other means, was not just an assertion, but a fact. Not only that, but also that Irving had willfully denied the truth to promote his racist and anti-Semitic arguments.

Directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare, the new film Denial is the story of the trial, which took place in London in 2000. I was there on one of the most dramatic days, when the historian Richard Evans, as a witness for the defense, made mincemeat of Irving’s contention that Himmler had wanted to save the German Jews from deportation. This didn’t stop Irving from grandstanding to a claque of leather-clad men and blowsy blonde women who looked on adoringly from the visitors’ benches, as he turned with a wink and a meaty raised thumb whenever he thought he had landed a point in his favor.

Courtroom drama has a rich cinematic tradition in Britain and the US—not least because the Anglo-American jury system turns the courtroom into a kind of theater, with lawyers having to persuade ordinary citizens by putting on a good show. Irving versus Lipstadt was unusual in that her legal team decided to dispense with such theatricals: no jury, just a judge; no emotional scenes on the witness stand, just dry facts, designed to bury Irving in his own lies.

This might have been a problem for a movie. Arguments are not inherently dramatic. But the title, Denial, is not only about Irving’s views on the Holocaust. Irving, played in the movie by the excellent Timothy Spall, is a showman, who would have humiliated witnesses if they had been called and who would have held Lipstadt up to ridicule. Lipstadt, played by the equally superb Rachel Weisz, is not averse to playing to the gallery herself, albeit mostly in academic fora. In the trial, she had wanted to confront Irving directly and give Holocaust survivors a platform to have their testimonies heard.

It was with a great deal of heartburn, therefore, that she finally agreed to her legal team’s insistence that she keep her mouth shut during the trial and not subject survivors to Irving’s intimidation. This was her form of denial. Her barrister, Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson), and solicitor, Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), would run the show. She would just have to trust them.

Such is the central drama in David Hare’s script. Rampton and Julius saw the trial in legal terms. Their job was to find the best strategy to win the case. This clashed with Lipstadt’s view of herself as a spokeswoman for her people, called to keep the memory of Jewish suffering alive.

The best scenes in the movie focus on this conflict. At the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, for example, we see Lipstadt praying in front of the ruins of the gas chamber, while Rampton is making careful notes and asking awkward questions about the exact procedures of mass murder. She is paying her respects to the dead. He is doing forensic work. On the “sacred” spot of the killing, cool analysis and a search for legal proof look like disrespect to her.  

When Rampton, a decent, wine-loving, Mozart-adoring Scot, has to break the news to Deborah Lipstadt, a feisty New Yorker, in a Krakow bar, that she will need to remain silent during the trial, she takes it as an insult—to her, and to the Jewish people.

All this is shown with great delicacy. The scenes of the trial itself are equally riveting. Hare was careful to stick to the exact words uttered by Rampton, Irving, the academic witnesses, and the owlish Justice Gray (Alex Jennings). The atmosphere in the courtroom is exactly as I remember it: Irving blustering and bluffing, Rampton cool and deadly, and the onlookers a weird mixture of louche Irving worshippers and anguished Jewish survivors.  

The weakness of the film lies in the two protagonists, despite some brilliant acting. No attempt was made to flesh out the character of David Irving. This was apparently deliberate, as Hare himself has stated: “The film is not about Irving’s psychology. He is seen almost exclusively from Deborah’s point of view, so I have no right to speculate or try to explain Irving.”

But this is a limitation as far as the film is concerned. Irving is portrayed by Spall as a somewhat mad English gent, with an ingratiating manner and a fanatical stare. In reality, Irving is more of a bruiser, a vulgar bully who came from what George Orwell called the lower upper-middle-class, that is to say, not petty bourgeois, but not upper-class either. His father was a naval officer. Irving likes to come across as a plummy upper-class toff while being consumed with hatred for people who might be considered to be his social or intellectual betters. At the trial this was especially visible during his exchanges with Richard Evans, not a man from the upper-class either, but a genuine intellectual who later became the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Neither man could even look the other in the eye.

Lipstadt’s point of view, not just of Irving, but also of herself, is taken too much at face value. She is an admirable scholar and a brave woman. Her victory in the trial was not only richly deserved, but essential to show up Holocaust denial as the anti-Semitic propaganda that it is. But there is something histrionic about the view of her as a fighter for her people. Over and over we see her jogging past the statue of Queen Boadicea on the Embankment in London, and after her victory in court she looks up in a kind of rapture to the bronze impression of this Celtic rebel against the Romans in AD 61 as a fellow leader of resistance. The overt parallel drawn between a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta and the image of a heroine revived in the nineteenth century to glorify Queen Victoria might seem a little strained. And the musical score to accompany this peculiar form of heroine worship is suited better to patriotic schlock like Chariots of Fire than to a courtroom drama about the Holocaust.

There was no need for this. There is more than enough drama in a classic story of hubris and nemesis, of a menacing British racist who tried to stifle his critic and failed. Not that Irving would admit this. In a television interview after the trial, partly reenacted in the film, Irving is asked whether he will now finally stop denying the Holocaust. His answer: “Good Lord, no.”

Mick Jackson’s Denial opens in New York City and Los Angeles on September 30.

The post Auschwitz on Trial: The Bully and the Witness appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The exterior of Reading Prison in Berkshire, formerly known as Reading Gaol, where Oscar Wilde spent almost two years in confinement between 1895 and 1897, is impressive in a grandiose Victorian, mock-Medieval-Tudor-Gothic way. Designed by George Gilbert Scott and William Moffatt in the 1840s, the prison was made to look like a grand fortress inspired by Warwick Castle, built in the eleventh century.

When Wilde was a prisoner there, as punishment for having had sex with men (“gross public indecency”), Reading Gaol was still run according to the then-modern principles pioneered at Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Inmates were locked up for twenty-three hours a day in complete solitary confinement. Even when exercising in the yard or attending services in the chapel, they were isolated from one another in boxes and made to wear hoods. Strict silence was enforced. The guards covered their shoes in felt to make sure every sign of life was muffled. Designed to make criminals reflect and repent, this regime in fact drove many of them insane.

Gilbert Scott was known for his Gothic Revival style in churches and cathedrals. Providing an aesthetically pleasing façade to a place of harsh punishment might seem like an odd perversity, also seen in some Nazi concentration camps: the words on the gate of Buchenwald, Jedem das Seine (To each his own), were designed by a prisoner named Franz Ehrlich, a Bauhaus architect and designer. But these Nazi embellishments were a form of sarcasm to torment their victims further. This was surely not the intention of Scott and Moffatt. Victorian prisons, like railway stations (another Scott specialty), were designed to project the power of civic institutions.

The artistic concept behind “Inside,” the art and literature exhibition inside Reading Prison, is neither pompous nor of course mocking, but a mournful celebration of Wilde and an aesthetic protest against human cruelty and bigotry. Prison destroyed Wilde’s life. The show is a kind of redemption.

Artworks are displayed inside the cells of the building, which was still a functioning prison until 2013. They range from Nan Goldin’s photographs of a young gay German man to an art installation by Steve McQueen meant to convey colonial oppression. A gold-plated mosquito net draped over a bunk bed is explained in the helpful guide as a token of spiritual escape from a confined space. There are texts and recorded readings by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, the novelist Gillian Slovo, and others. And there are public readings every Sunday by different people of De Profundis, written by Wilde in the last months of his incarceration in this terrifying place.

It was the turn of Ralph Fiennes to read on the day I attended. Dressed simply in blue denim, Fiennes read in a modest, dignified manner that brought out the best in the sometimes histrionic and deeply religious document. De Profundis is a strange essay, composed as a letter to Wilde’s rather odious lover Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”). It had to take that form, because prisoners were only allowed to write letters. Although marred by self-pity and self-aggrandizing passages comparing the tormented artist to Jesus Christ, it was nonetheless deeply moving to hear Wilde’s words read out loud in the former chapel of the prison where he suffered so much.

Wilde was in fact already a broken man when he arrived in Reading in 1895. The worst time of his imprisonment came in the first few months in London, first in Pentonville and then Wandsworth prison. Sleepless nights on a wooden plank, awful sanitary conditions, and barely edible food wrecked his health. He lost twenty-eight pounds in three months. And months of isolation, with nothing but the Bible to read, and the forced task of picking tar from used rope, which left his fingers blackened and bloody, drove him half mad. While being transferred to Reading, Wilde, shackled and dressed in prison garb, was spat upon at Clapham Common station when he was recognized by a jeering mob.

The governor of Reading Gaol for the first eight months of his time there was Henry B. Isaacson, described by Wilde as a “mulberry-faced dictator” and a “bloated Jew.” Not actually Jewish at all, despite the name, Isaacson did at least absolve Wilde from hard labor, for which he was deemed unfit. Isaacson’s successor, Major J.O. Nelson, was less of a martinet, and allowed Wilde, who was put in charge of the prison library, to receive books from outside. Some of the titles are displayed in the current show, among them Christian histories, Walter Pater’s essays on art, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and poetry by Dante, Wordsworth, and Keats.

Wilde’s old prison cell, C.2.2, is like all the others that line the three tiers of Reading Prison: small and narrow with cream brick walls, a steel toilet bowl, and two bunk beds. The barred window is too high to see anything but what Wilde later described in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” as that “little tent of blue/we prisoners called the sky.” There is no art in C.2.2., just a small bouquet of dried flowers on the metal table fastened to the wall.

The artworks in the other cells are of varying quality. Among the strongest displays are a video by Wolfgang Tillmans of the outside seen through a prison window and distorted self-portraits reflected in a dark mirror inside a prison cell. Paintings of Wilde, Bosie, and Jean Genet by Marlene Dumas are unremarkable. Nan Goldin’s photographs and edited film clips of an old production of Wilde’s Salome are interesting. And Robert Gober’s sculptures of a man’s suit and a woman’s torso opening up to show images of water are very fine.

But none of these works is quite as moving as the written words, Wilde’s own of course, but also those of Ai, Slovo, Wainaina, Tahmima Anam, and others, echoing De Profundis in various personal ways. In a letter to his two-year-old son, Ai describes in chilling detail his own imprisonment in China. Wainana has written a letter to his deceased mother about coming out as a gay man in Kenya, where homosexuality is still a crime. Slovo’s letter is addressed to her mother, who was murdered by the South African secret service.

For me, however, even these extraordinary letters were less poignant than the fragments of graffiti and other marks of life left behind in the cells by recent inmates. A sign can still be seen outside one cell that reads, in prison langue de bois: “Occupants are to be placed on report if graffitti [sic] has occurred during occupation.” Nonetheless, among some obscene texts, there remain flashes of real wit on the walls. One former inmate scribbled the words “room service” next to the bell installed to call a guard. There are pathetic diaries marking lost time. Little has changed since Wilde wrote: “And that each day is like a year,/a year whose days are long.”

Then there are the dried bits of toothpaste once used to glue pictures to the thick stone walls. Prison authorities did their very best to erase all this (just one series of pinups stuck under a shelf seems to have been overlooked). But that makes these small tokens all the more affecting. The walls are like a palimpsest; human presence can never be erased entirely.

Indeed, if I came away from the show with one overriding impression, it was that the prison itself revealed the limits of conceptual art. The artistic images are fine. But the photographs of nineteenth-century prisoners, including some terrified-looking children, holding up their hands blackened by the tar and bituman they had to pick from ropes, seemed to me infinitely stronger.

Oscar Wilde, incidentally, showed his humanity by protesting about the treatment of these half-starved children, one of them arrested for poaching a rabbit, after a guard was fired for offering sweet biscuits to a hungry child. The only reason there is no photo of Wilde himself is that he was no longer considered a danger to society, and so there was no need for his image to be recorded.

In a way, the prison is the chief exhibit in this fascinating show. Behind the readers of De Profundis in the old chapel stands an art installation by the French artist Jean-Michel Pancin. The exact contours of Wilde’s cell are poured in concrete with the original white door placed in front. But actually being in the real cell was, to me, a more intense experience than seeing this installation. You cannot feel what Wilde must have felt, but his words resonate more deeply:

Each narrow cell in which we dwel
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.

The post Oscar Wilde’s ‘Living Death’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

One of the oddities about Guy Burgess, the most colorful of the so-called Cambridge spies, was that in his usual state of extreme slovenliness, with food stains all over his rumpled suits and the stink of raw garlic and alcohol permanently on his breath, he always insisted on wearing his Old Etonian tie. He wore it in protest marches as a student at Cambridge; as a government official and BBC program director, trawling in his spare time for rough trade in the bars and public toilets of London; and even among the comrades in Moscow, after he exiled himself there in 1951. It is an oddity, because old boys of the most privileged private boarding school in England don’t normally advertise their status in this manner. The superiority of Old Etonians is taken for granted: they know who is who. To wear the light blue and black OE tie is, not to put too fine a point on it, really not done.

Like his choice of buying a secondhand gold Rolls-Royce, there was something distinctly vulgar about this flaunting of the old school tie. Indeed, not being quite a proper gentleman, despite his elite education at Lockers Park prep school and Eton, and membership in the finest London clubs, was something most people who disliked Burgess held against him. Joseph Alsop disapproved when they met at the British embassy in Washington in 1940 because Burgess neglected to wear socks. When the Foreign Office decided—bizarrely, considering Burgess’s reputation as a sloppy, indiscreet, anti-American lush—to send him to the Washington embassy after the war, one British diplomat objected: “We can’t have that man. He has filthy fingernails.” Maurice Bowra, warden of Wadham College, Oxford, put it a little more graphically: “Shit in his fingernails and cock-cheese behind his ears.”¹

And yet it is a common claim that Burgess’s career as a Soviet mole inside the British establishment was an abject example of class privilege. Burgess, like his fellow spies Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and Donald Maclean, was barely vetted before getting sensitive jobs in the British government or the intelligence services, despite many examples of appalling behavior, a history of left-wing activism at university, and several instances of drunken boasting of being a Russian spy. The right connections, a discreet word in the appropriate ear, lots of charm when it was needed—these were enough to shield even the decidedly louche Burgess from serious scrutiny.

There has been a great deal of speculation about why the Cambridge spies, all of them children of privilege, embarked on their lives as Soviet agents. This question has spawned a literary cottage industry, a bit like the obsession with the Mitfords or the Bloomsbury group, and mainly for the same reason. When Burgess was living out the latter years of his life in Moscow, he said that the thing he missed most about London was gossip. As he put it to the actress Coral Browne, who visited him there: “The comrades, tho’ splendid in every way of course, don’t gossip in quite the same way about quite the same people and subjects.” All accounts of the Cambridge spies are heavily larded with gossip, about high life and low, hence their enduring fascination in Britain.

Many books have appeared on Philby over the years.² There is at least one biography of Donald Maclean and a superb study of Anthony Blunt.³ Now, rather late in the game, there are suddenly two big biographies of Guy Burgess. The same juicy anecdotes can be found in both books. And both are excellent reads. The authors of Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone have found a bit more material in the archives, but for anyone who is not a true fanatic on the subject, reading just one of the two books should suffice.

Like Andrew Lownie, author of Stalin’s Englishman, I think Eton might well have had much to do with Burgess’s decision to be a spy, not because the school is a natural breeding ground for traitors, but because it instills an exaggerated sense of entitlement, which can spoil certain men for the rest of their lives. In his part memoir, Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly, who was at Eton before Burgess, described the various hierarchies at the school perfectly. He developed a theory that

the experiences undergone by the boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development…. Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over.

The pinnacle of social success at Eton was to be elected to an elite group known as Pop. Members of this exalted society could lord it over the other boys, wear multicolored waistcoats, and walk arm in arm. Once a person had risen to this vertiginous height, everything after was bound to disappoint. Cyril Connolly was made a member because he was witty. Guy Burgess desperately wished to become a member, but failed. He was in fact a clever student, admired for his brilliant talk, spiced with amusing mimicry, and already marked by bolshie ideas. But a contemporary at Eton recalled that when “it came to getting Guy in [to Pop], I discovered to my surprise how unpopular he was. People just didn’t like him.”

It must have rankled deeply. Afterward Burgess made sure to get into every exclusive club or society that lay on his way. He made it his business to know everyone who mattered, from Victor Rothschild to Winston Churchill, and if he didn’t he would pretend that he did. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Burgess joined the posh Pitt Club, and was keen to associate with fellow Old Etonians. Again, there were hurdles. According to another OE and fellow Cambridge student, he was shunned because “my lot generally regarded him as a conceited unreliable shit.”

But not everyone thought so. Burgess did succeed in being elected to the secretive student society called the Apostles. His sponsor was the art historian Anthony Blunt, another brilliant public schoolboy with rebellious left-wing ideas. Blunt, who was said to have had an affair with Burgess, “became fascinated by the liveliness and quality of his mind and the range of his interests.” Old members of the Apostles, known as “angels,” included E.M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. Arcane rituals, a peculiar jargon, and clever philosophical discourse gave Apostles a sense of being in a choice brotherhood elevated far above the common herd. The prevailing Apostolic ethos in the early 1930s overlapped with the Bloomsbury set’s: sexual honesty, friendship, and a keen appreciation of beauty. Homosexuality, at a time when it was still a criminal offense, was not only tolerated but rather cultivated as a form of love superior to common bourgeois breeding.

Lownie writes that it is “perhaps not surprising that the Apostles should prove to be so open to communist infiltration.” It is true that Burgess and Blunt brought in fellow sympathizers. There also seems to be evidence that the Soviet secret service targeted gay recruits in Britain, because they tended to form cagey social networks through necessity. But the claim that the Homintern (a term attributed to Maurice Bowra) was the key to British membership in the Comintern is probably an overstatement. Most of the spies were not gay. And Burgess, for one, never made a secret of his sexuality; quite the contrary, in fact.

This never seemed to have unduly bothered his British superiors, who had often gone to the same school or university as he had. When Brian Urquhart, the distinguished UN official and frequent contributor to these pages, once complained of Burgess’s appearance at a UN meeting in Paris, when he turned up “drunk and heavily painted and powdered for a night on the town,” Sir Alexander Cadogan (Eton and Oxford) replied that the Foreign Office traditionally tolerated “innocent eccentricity.”

Steven Runciman, the historian who befriended Burgess at Cambridge, found that “communism sat very strangely on [Burgess]. But one didn’t take it very seriously.” It is easy to underrate the attraction of Marxist ideology for men of Burgess’s generation. The Great Depression and the bumbling response of Western governments to the rise of fascism had seriously undermined confidence in capitalism and liberal democracy. The brutality of Stalin and his purges do not seem to have fazed the Cambridge spies. Goronwy Rees, a university contemporary, whom Burgess had tried to recruit without success, said about his friend that “it was as if his communism formed a closed intellectual system which had nothing to do with what actually went on in the socialist fatherland.” Communism was thought to be the only serious antidote to fascism. Class guilt might have had a part. In the words of Purvis and Hulbert, authors of the second book under review: “Communism seemed the answer to the challenge for those who were ‘lost’ and for the rich idealist young it provided some form of remission from the economic sins of their families.”

Marxism, then, was in the air, especially at Cambridge. To be on the far left was also a way for high-minded young people to distinguish themselves from the conventional mainstream and feel morally righteous about it, a superior form of épater les bourgeois.

The previous generation of aesthetes and “bright young things” had reacted to the horrors of World War I by affecting a deliberate air of decadence and frivolousness. Burgess was not immune to such pleasures. There he was in Salzburg in 1937, dressed up in lederhosen, being chased around the table with a purple whip by Brian Howard, the most dissolute of the aesthetes. A fellow Communist at Trinity College, the splendidly named Francis Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, observed that Burgess “liked breaking things. He was very irresponsible.” But he was also funny, “a kind of court jester.” A peculiar rootlessness and lack of morals, as well as a surplus of mental and physical energy, meant that he “had a need to commit himself to something.”

Burgess’s commitment to communism gave him a moral anchor, something to live for, even as he tuft-hunted the high-born, seduced truck drivers and boy scouts by the dozen (most memorably in Cologne, after Hitler came to power, in the company of a sadomasochistic French political operator), and regularly drank himself into a stupor. His recruiter to the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB, in the mid-1930s, an Austrian Comintern agent named Arnold Deutsch, known as “Otto” to his contacts, understood Burgess’s yearnings well. In a psychological profile, quoted by Lownie, he wrote that Burgess

became [a homosexual] at Eton, where he grew up in an atmosphere of cynicism, opulence, hypocrisy and superficiality. As he is very clever and well educated, the Party was for him a saviour. It gave him above all an opportunity to satisfy his intellectual needs.

This sounds accurate, but the same might have been said about many privileged young people of Burgess’s age, homosexual or not. Only a tiny number of them became Stalin’s secret agents. Again, Deutsch, referring not only to Burgess this time, had a plausible explanation. He listed three attributes of a successful spy: class resentment, a love of secrecy, and a yearning to belong.⁴ Burgess’s tendencies appear to have matched all three: a lifelong outsider who tried to be on the inside, keen to flaunt his status even as he sought to undermine the very establishment from which it derived. Lownie writes:

You don’t want to betray if you belong. It is all relative, but Burgess never felt he belonged…. At Lockers Park the fathers seemed more distinguished, at Eton he resented his failure to make Pop, at Cambridge the Etonians didn’t want anything to do with him, in the Foreign Office he wasn’t taken as seriously as he would have liked. Small slights grew into larger resentments and betrayal was an easy revenge. Espionage was simply another instrument in his social revolt, another gesture of self-assertion.

John le Carré, a British spy himself for a short time, once described the secret service as a kind of masonry, an exclusive club for loners. One way of looking at the Cambridge spy ring is as the most exclusive and secretive club of all.

What made Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, whose Huguenot ancestors arrived in England in the sixteenth century, feel like an outsider? Why the resentment? As so often in England, class is the most obvious place to look for an answer. His father, Commander Malcolm Burgess, was a naval officer who felt that his promise was never quite fulfilled. There had been disputes with superior officers. The highest ranks remained out of reach. He retired early. Possibly some of his resentment carried over to his son. When Guy was only thirteen, his father died of a heart attack while making love to his wife. Guy claimed to have found his mother pinned down under the commander’s body just after it happened.

Other notorious British misfits who kicked at the upper classes to which they aspired had a similar background. David Irving, the Holocaust-denying amateur historian, had a father of the same rank. The Royal Navy is of course a deeply stratified institution within a deeply stratified society. To be a commander is to be an officer, but not a flag officer. In civilian terms, the family would probably have been classified as lower-upper-middle-class, in the words of George Orwell, who was at Eton with Cyril Connolly. It is a tricky stratum to belong to: its members are not grand enough to feel easily accepted by the upper class and anxious about sliding down into the middle class. A defensive snobbery can be one consequence, or a desire to undercut the society that caused so much unease by embracing revolutionary ideas. Or both.

In any case, because of their education, oddballs like Burgess or Philby, whose father St. John Philby was an anti-Semitic Arabist suspected of Nazi sympathies, were perfectly placed to infiltrate the British establishment, as they could so easily pass as fully fledged members of it. Burgess had it both ways: lunch at Chartwell with Churchill, drinks at White’s or the Reform, late nights at the Gargoyle Club with Harold Nicolson and Laurence Olivier, a Rolls at his disposal, and working for the Communist revolution all the while.

After joining the BBC in 1936, Burgess was recruited by an MI6 officer named David Footman to investigate Communist activities inside the BBC, as well as the universities. He was even encouraged to study Marxist theory to make his Communist sympathies look more plausible. All the while, Burgess was turning over secret information he got from Footman to his real masters in Moscow. Footman never suspected anything, because of his “class blinkers,” as Burgess explained to his Soviet contacts. People like him were “beyond suspicion.”

Cool operators such as Philby or Blunt were usually assumed to have been more effective spies than the outlandish Burgess. But the two biographies offer a different picture. In 1938, Burgess was the first of the Cambridge spies to secure a full-time job in British intelligence. After resigning from the BBC, he joined Section D of MI6, in charge of covert anti-Nazi propaganda abroad. And it was Burgess who helped get Philby into MI6 soon after that. Exactly what information Burgess passed on to the Soviets is still not fully known. But he was in MI6 at a sensitive time, when alliances against Nazi Germany were being considered. Burgess reported to the Russians that the British thought Hitler could be defeated without an alliance with Stalin. In August 1939, Russia signed a nonaggression pact with Germany.

In that same year, Blunt was withdrawn from an intelligence course because his Communist sympathies at Cambridge became known. Nevertheless, Burgess managed through his connections to smooth the way for his friend to join MI5, the domestic secret service.

In 1943, Burgess was offered yet another sensitive job, in the news department of the Foreign Office, where he had access to diplomatic cables and secret documents that he passed on to Moscow. But if the Cambridge spies were beyond suspicion in London, perhaps for the reasons Burgess alleged, the same was not always true in Moscow. They were handing over so much material to the NKVD that the Russians at first suspected a double cross. They simply could not believe that the British were naive enough to let so many men with known Communist sympathies worm their ways into the heart of British intelligence.

According to his Soviet minder after the war, Burgess was in fact a highly efficient spy. Burgess, said Yuri Modin, “was punctual to a fault, took all the customary precautions and again and again gave proof of his excellent memory.” On the British side, however, Burgess’s behavior was often egregious: he was frequently turning up late, or not at all, at the office, padding his expenses, getting wildly drunk, insulting people for no reason, and bragging in pubs about being a spy. This was another reason for Soviet distrust. How on earth could the British tolerate such a man?

In fact they did not always tolerate him. He was thrown out of his department at the Foreign Office just after the war because, in the words of a colleague, he was “lazy, careless, unpunctual and a slob.” People in MI6 had wanted to get rid of him because of some wild indiscretions. And he was called home from the Washington embassy after launching into drunken public diatribes against the Americans and offending important contacts. But he always landed on his feet, protected by one senior figure or another, and was never suspected of being a spy.

The authors of The Spy Who Knew Everyone conclude that Burgess used his indiscretions deliberately as a brilliant smokescreen. A messy drunk spouting Soviet propaganda in public couldn’t possibly have been a spy for the Russians. Like Steven Runciman at Cambridge, no one took him seriously enough to suspect such a thing. By hiding in full sight, Burgess might have pulled off an extraordinary stunt. But if that is so, then why did he continue to behave in precisely the same way in Moscow? Isn’t it more likely that his drunken buffoonery and sexual recklessness were part of his ostentatious, devil-may-care sense of entitlement? Why not appear at an embassy party without socks, or take off his shirt in the middle of a dinner party, or bring a rent boy to a gathering of grandees? Screw them.

There was, however, an ideological hard core in Burgess that made him more than a debauched class rebel. His Marxism was rather abstract perhaps. His contacts with members of the actual working class, apart from bedding them, seem to have been limited. And Russia, however much he idealized the Soviet system, left him cold on his first visit in 1934 and became loathsome after he was compelled to live there. But Marxism agreed with him, because Burgess believed in unstoppable historical forces and had an unsentimental view of power. Growing up in the twilight of the British Empire, he was keenly aware that British power was waning, and like many Englishmen of his generation he deeply resented American dominance.

Antifascism was no longer an excuse for supporting the Soviet Union after Hitler’s defeat, which is why Blunt seemed to have lost his enthusiasm for spying. But not Burgess. He believed that with the rise of new postwar empires, one had to choose the Soviet Union or the US. The possibility of a united Europe he dismissed. And without its empire Britain was washed up. He must have known about Stalin’s purges, but they didn’t seem to matter. So he stuck to the Soviet Union, in Lownie’s words, as “a perverted form of imperialism.” Having seen the death of one empire, he “decided to attach himself to another.” But he always insisted that he was a British Communist. When he prepared to accompany Maclean on his way to Moscow in 1951, Burgess packed a tweed suit, a dinner jacket, and the collected works of Jane Austen.

There is some mystery about why Burgess went all the way to Russia with Maclean. After all, it was Maclean who had been unmasked, not Burgess. Once there, it was probably impossible to go back. The Soviets would not have wanted him to. And although the British never had solid evidence against him, they too did everything to stop his return to London. There had been enough scandals already.

And so Burgess lived out the last dozen years of his life in relative comfort—a nice apartment in Moscow, a dacha, evenings at the Bolshoi, and an accordion-playing lover named Tolya—and in a more or less permanent state of misery. He desperately missed the country he had betrayed. Shunned by the British embassy, he latched onto visitors from England for gossip from home. People who met him in Moscow remember Burgess as a rather pathetic figure, a drunken relic of the 1930s, playing the same Jack Buchanan songs over and over in his apartment filled with British periodicals, hunting prints, and a chest of drawers filled with Old Etonian ties.

The post The Weird Success of Guy Burgess appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Martin Scorsese’s beautiful new movie, Silence, based on Endō Shūsaku’s novel, begins and ends in the same way: a dark screen filled with the noise of summer on the rural coast of southwestern Japan, cicadas rasping, waves crashing, thunderclaps exploding, and rain lashing the rocks.

In between is played out, for almost three hours, the harrowing story of two young Portuguese Jesuit missionaries on a clandestine search for another priest who is rumored to have renounced his faith after torture and to be living as a Japanese Buddhist. The tale, based on historical events, is set in the 1640s. Half a century before, the Shogun Hideyoshi, who unified Japan after years of violent conflict between regional warlords, had embarked on a merciless campaign to get rid of Christianity by expelling foreign priests and forcing Japanese Christians, concentrated mostly in the regions around Nagasaki, to give up their faith by stamping on images of Christ and the Virgin. Those who refused were subjected to a variety of hideous tortures: scalded in sulphurous hot springs, burned at the stake, crucified, drowned at sea, or suspended upside down over pits filled with excrement until death, often slow in coming, ended their torment.

After hiding in rural hovels as underground priests, the two missionaries, Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garupe (Adam Driver), are arrested by a cunning old magistrate named Inoue (Ogata Issey), together with a number of devout villagers who cling to the foreign priests as their only salvation. Quite aware that public martyrdom had strengthened the hidden devotion of Japanese Christians, Inoue insists that the priests lead their flock in trampling on a tablet bearing the image of Christ. “Just a formality,” the smooth Japanese interpreter calls this.

If the priests refuse to profane the symbol of their faith, the poor villagers will be tortured to death. Father Garupe is drowned at sea along with a number of his followers. Father Rodrigues perseveres. This sets up the dilemma that is at the heart of Silence. Must the Japanese peasants be sacrificed for the sake of the purity of their priest’s devotion? Or should the priest stamp his foot on an engraving of Christ, defiling what he holds most sacred in order to save them? After he finally submits in the early hours of the morning, we hear a cock crowing.

The sounds of nature at the beginning and end of the film are almost deafening, but the silence of the title refers to the muteness of God, who allows the suffering of his followers to go on. In the words of Father Rodrigues (in Endō’s novel), after Father Garupe is drowned with the villagers:

The rain falls unceasingly on the sea. And the sea which killed them surges on uncannily—in silence…. Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God…the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.¹

God’s silence, the silence that tests the faith of even the most devout, is a familiar lament, often invoked by survivors of concentration camps and other places of horror. But nature plays a deeper part in the story. Various characters, such as the ruthless magistrate Inoue, but also Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), the priest who apostatized and became a Buddhist, refer to Japan as a swamp. In Inoue’s words to Father Rodrigues:

A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed. As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign country its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and no bud appears.

Some of these words reappear faithfully in Scorsese’s movie, where part of the story, as in the novel, is told in the form of letters written by Rodrigues to his superior in Macau. But the brilliance of the film lies in the way Scorsese visualizes the story. Silence has the look of great religious art, the chiaroscuro of torches and moonlight, the terrifying beauty of blood and violence redeemed by spirituality. Like Caravaggio, Scorsese, a former altar boy who once wanted to be a priest, has the uncanny ability to inject the spirit of the gospels into the most sordid of situations, from the mean streets of New York to the torture pits of seventeenth-century Japan. He manages to make an execution, with the severed head leaving a trail of blood on the sandy ground, look sensuous.

It is interesting to compare Scorsese’s movie to an earlier film of Silence, directed in 1971 by Shinoda Masahiro. Shinoda’s film, with a gorgeous score by Takemitsu Toru, is lovely to look at but in a different, more Japanese way. Shot by Miyagawa Kazuo, who also filmed some of Mizoguchi Kenji’s masterpieces, Shinoda’s film is a highly aesthetic celebration of natural beauty, contrasted with human cruelty. What it lacks is Scorsese’s religious sensibility.

Indeed, aesthetically, the savagery of Japanese torture found its match in the morbidity of Catholic piety. After Christians died on the cross in Nagasaki—a scene not shown in the movie—Japanese believers would rush to soak their handkerchiefs in the blood of the martyrs. Some of these bloody bits of cloth are still lovingly displayed in a museum run by Jesuits in that city.

Scorsese has told interviewers that Endō’s novel spoke to him from the moment he first read it in 1989.² One can see why. Endō’s main theme is religious doubt. But it is the doubt of a man steeped in Christianity. Endō converted as a child, for the sake of his Catholic mother. The notion of Japan as a swamp that sucks in all imported ideas and transforms them into something almost unrecognizable is Endō’s, though he put the words in the mouths of both Inoue, the ferocious enemy of the Christians, and of Father Ferreira, the apostate priest.

Father Ferreira, portrayed with deep pathos by Neeson as a weathered man who renounced his faith without ever really losing it, is sent by the Japanese authorities to convince Rodrigues to follow his example and spare the peasants by denying Christ. Ferreira, too, like Inoue, claims that the tree of Christianity cannot grow in Japanese soil. When the younger priest protests and says that before the shogun’s crackdown, there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese Christians, Ferreira replies that they may look like Christians, but that is an illusion. Not the Son of God, but the sun is their God. Rodrigues continues to protest, pointing to the peasants who are willing to die for their faith. And Fereirra says that it is not for their faith that they are dying, but for their priest, Rodrigues himself. The Japanese, he says, “are not able to think of God completely divorced from man; the Japanese cannot think of an existence that transcends the human.”

These words are taken directly from the novel. They reflect Endō’s own doubts about the chances of his faith to take root in his native land. But he never gave up hope before he died in 1996. He once wrote that Catholicism is like a symphony: “And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan’s mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly that part is—that is what I want to find out.”

These concerns are reflected in Scorsese’s movie. But his own preoccupations are less with the specific conditions of the Catholic faith in a non-Western culture like Japan’s than with another aspect of the story: the dilemma of a man who has to do good for others by transgressing the rules of his religion. From the point of view of their church, Ferreira and Rodrigues are traitors. They end their days working for the Japanese authorities in Nagasaki, sifting through the cargo of every foreign ship to make sure no Christian images are smuggled into the country. But their apostasy has saved lives. In the last image of the movie, before the screen goes black in a cacophony of natural sounds, we see the body of Rodrigues being consumed by flames at his funeral, his hands clutching a tiny wood carving of the crucifixion—a hopeful detail that is not in the book, nor in Shinoda’s film, which ends with the apostate priest in bed with the Japanese widow he was told to marry—as though sex were the swamp that sinks him.

Sinners and traitors haunt Scorsese’s work, from Charlie, the young mafia hood in Mean Streets (1973) who fails to look out for his childhood friend Johnny Boy, to Jesus Christ himself in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), where he is depicted not only as a collaborator with the Romans against his own people but as a man who is tempted by the devil to come down from the cross and live in sin with Mary Magdalene. Even the underrated movie The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) can be read as an allegory of the attempted (but failed) redemption of a sinner in the great tradition of American hubris.

There is another important character in Silence, apart from the missionaries and their persecutors. Before embarking on their secret mission to Japan, Rodrigues and Garupe pick up in Macau a wretched Japanese peasant named Kichijiro (Kubozuka Yōsuke) to be their guide. Kichijiro is the Judas figure in the story. At first he denies being a Christian, but in fact he was a believer who, to save his skin, had trampled on Christ or the Virgin many times before. Over and over he betrays the priests, for money and survival. And over and over he begs Rodrigues to hear his confession, so his sins can be absolved. Kichijiro is a weak man living in dangerous times. He does what he has to do to scrape through but feels guilty about it. For both Endō and Scorsese, he is perhaps the most human character in the story, the one closest to most of us.

Not least of Scorsese’s achievements is his remarkably realistic recreation of seventeenth-century Japan. The squalid little villages, as well as Nagasaki, where Father Rodrigues is led, Christ-like, through the teeming streets by his jailers to be gawped at in wonder and disgust, look entirely credible. So do the scenes set inside a Buddhist temple or the slums of Macau. All this was shot in a studio and on locations in Taiwan—Japan being too expensive.

Since Silence is a drama and not a history lesson, the reasons for the persecution of Christians are hinted at without being spelled out. Hideyoshi, the shogun who started it, was known to be a harsh ruler, given to fits of paranoia; he laid to waste much of Korea in the 1590s. But there were grounds for his distrust of Christian missionaries, whom at first he had actually welcomed for their useful knowledge of the outside world.

Missionary work in the sixteenth century—begun by Francis Xavier, who believed that the Japanese were the Asians most amenable to religious conversion—had in fact been quite successful, first among the upper classes, to whom Jesuits were naturally drawn, and later among the poor as well (not least because their conversion was forced on them by their feudal rulers). But the foreign faith came with other things as well, such as guns and trading in slaves. Missionaries sided with certain warlords against others and supplied them with necessary arms. And they insisted not only on building churches, which the authorities allowed, but also on destroying Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Shortly before Hideyoshi decided to crack down, a foolish Portuguese bragged openly that the Christian mission was only a first step to colonizing Japan.³

So Hideyoshi’s misgivings were not really so irrational. The extraordinary cruelty of the punishments meted out to priests and their flock, so graphically shown in the movie, was real. And the viewer of Silence might be forgiven for assuming that the suffering of Japanese Christians was mostly the result of a fatal cultural clash. Indeed, Endō himself might have seen it that way: the universal truth of Christianity clashing with the traditions and customs of a peculiar indigenous culture.

The Christian faith arrived in premodern Asia with claims of a superior culture as well, since it emanated from countries that prided themselves on their economic wealth and scientific progress. As Matteo Ricci, the great Italian missionary, had taught astronomy in sixteenth-century China, Ferreira in Silence imparts the same science to the Japanese. One of the most implacable enemies of the Christians was Hideyoshi’s private physician, who resented the influence of more advanced medical practices from Europe.

But this view of a universalistic, modern, more scientific West crashing into a less evolved culture given to shocking displays of cruelty would be quite misleading. One of the most interesting Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century was Father Louis Fróis, who was still in Japan when Hideyoshi started his bloody purges. He witnessed, and described in lurid detail, the crucifixion of twenty-six foreign and Japanese Christians in Nagasaki in 1597. His mission was of course to save Japanese souls, but he was a remarkably curious man who learned to speak fluent Japanese, studied Buddhism (in order to refute it more effectively), compiled a Japanese–Portuguese dictionary, and wrote extensively about Japanese history, art, and customs.

His letters from Japan make extraordinary reading now, for even this erudite, open-minded scholar sounds a bit like an orthodox Muslim today commenting on the decadent West. The first thing to know about Japan, he wrote, is that everything is utterly different from other countries. Women, for example, are still free to marry even if they lose their virginity. Not only that, but unlike in Europe, women are quite free to get divorced if they choose. Young Japanese women are also free to leave their houses and walk about town, without the permission of their parents. Most shocking of all, Japanese don’t object to a woman getting an abortion.

Fróis was so startled by all these signs of social license that he might have exaggerated the freedom of Japanese women somewhat. But the main difference between his Catholic morality and that of most Japanese lay in what Father Ferreira told Rodrigues, namely that nothing in Japan transcends the human. The notion of original sin was, and still is, alien. Japanese have an idea of the sacred, and Buddhism, imported from China and Korea, has its own forms of the otherworldly. But what is most sacred in Japan is nature itself. Spinoza’s view that God is nature would have been readily understood by a seventeenth-century Japanese, and the same is true today.

This perspective lifts Silence from its period interest. For in some ways the Japan of almost four hundred years ago was close enough to today’s secular West to make the issues raised in the story oddly relevant. The real drama of Silence is not the clash between different sets of gods, but between believers in an absolute metaphysical truth and people whose concerns are confined to this world. Inoue, the inquisitor, is not defending a Buddhist or Shinto doctrine against the Christians. He is a political figure who uses terror to protect the interests of the social order he serves. When the Japanese interpreter calls stepping on an image of Christ a “formality,” that is precisely what it is to him.

Of course, formality is not meaningless in Japan. On the contrary, it means a great deal, but rarely in a metaphysical way. Forms are designed to order the world of flesh and blood, not one that only exists in the spirit. That is why Japan offers such a formidable challenge to the Christian imagination. Endō tried in his life and work to find some way to reconcile his religious beliefs with his culture. But the struggle to reconcile spirit with the flesh, to find deeper meaning in the lives of sinners, is a more powerful one. It inspired Endō to write a great novel, and Scorsese to make a great film.

The post Japan: Beautiful, Savage, Mute appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

To the Editors:

It is surprising that Ian Buruma, who has contributed so much to our appreciation of Japan, makes the error of calling Toyotomi Hideyoshi the shogun [“Japan: Beautiful, Savage, Mute,” NYR, February 9]. As much as he desired that title, his lack of Minamoto ancestry was against him, despite his powerful position. He was awarded the title of kampaku (imperial regent) by the imperial court and, when he passed that title on to his heir, he took the title of taiko (retired regent). It was not until 1603, some years after Hideyoshi’s death, that Tokugawa Ieyasu was granted the title of shogun (the short form of the title meaning something like “barbarian-suppressing generalissimo”).

Gerald E. Kadish
Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus of History
Binghamton University
Binghamton, New York

Ian Buruma replies:

Professor Kadish is of course absolutely right, and I thank him for correcting this careless mistake.

The post He Wasn’t the Shogun appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Lusting after pretty teenage boys was not considered shameful in premodern Japan. Experienced older women did it. Young women did too. Older men indulged in it (as long as the boys were passive sexual partners). Adultery was not permitted, on the other hand, and it was unseemly for grown men to love other grown men. But the love of older men for young boys, a practice called shudo, literally “the way of boy love,” was considered, especially during the eighteenth century, and notably among samurai, to be a mark of erotic discernment.

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), the great literary chronicler of the demimonde in Osaka and Kyoto, wrote a famous book called The Great Mirror of Male Love, in which he celebrated shudo:

Even if the woman were a beauty of gentle disposition and the youth a repulsive pug-nosed fellow, it is a sacrilege to speak of female love in the same breath with boy love. A woman’s heart can be likened to the wisteria vine: though bearing lovely blossoms, it is twisted and bent. A youth may have a thorn or two, but he is like the first plum blossom of the new year exuding an indescribable fragrance. The only sensible choice is to dispense with women and turn instead to men.^*

There is no evidence that Saikaku himself preferred men to women. The contrary seems to have been true. He adored his wife so much that he decided to become a lay monk after her death. But to Japanese of his time sexual preference was fluid, more a matter of taste than of fixed identity. A cultivated gentleman could fall for the beauty of youths, even as he pursued young women with equal fervor. There were men, of course, who only liked males. They were known as onnagirai, “men who don’t like women.”

So the choice of beautiful youths, or wakashu, as the theme for an exhibition of Edo Period (1603–1868) art was inspired. For it tells us much, not only about the social mores of premodern Japan, but also about its aesthetic values. Shudo was as much a matter of artistic refinement, even connoisseurship, as of erotic fulfillment. A literary expert on this topic, Inagaki Taruho, wrote a famous book, published in 1973, entitled The Aesthetics of Boy Love. He explains, among other things, that only “members of a privileged class can understand the delights of boy love.” Cultivation of this taste demands a certain degree of leisure and sophistication. The difference between boys and girls, he writes, is that girls mature into attractive women, whereas the peculiarly intense beauty of a boy withers as swiftly as the cherry blossom: “Once the youth becomes a young man, and smells of penis, it is all over.”

This is not just the eccentric view of a lecherous old man. Inagaki was seventy-two when he wrote his book. He was simply expressing an ancient Japanese idea of beauty. The cult of the cherry blossom, beauty on the cusp of ripening and then inevitable decay, the melancholy poetry of evanescence, goes back many centuries. It was perverted in the last years of World War II when students from the best universities were sent to their deaths as kamikaze pilots. They were sometimes known as cherry blossoms.

The greatest classic of Japanese literature, Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, is a kind of monument to the ideal of young male splendor. Murasaki was an eleventh-century aristocratic lady and not a practitioner of shudo, of course. But it is remarkable how the extraordinary beauty of the young Shining Prince is described more effusively, in more flowery terms, than the charms of the many women and girls he seduced. He was

such an attractive figure that the other men felt a desire to see him as a woman. He was so beautiful that pairing him with the very finest of the ladies at the court would fail to do him justice.

In many prints on display at the Japan Society, the wakashu are almost impossible to distinguish in dress and deportment from the female beauties in the same pictures. An exquisite woodcut by Utamaro, for example, shows an elegant woman gazing up adoringly at a young samurai. Despite his two swords, he looks like a young woman himself. What gives him away as a youth is the shaved spot on the crown of his head between his forelocks and the elaborately arranged hairdo on the back and sides. After coming of age at eighteen or nineteen, the forelocks would be cut off and the pate clean-shaven.

Age in the cult of young beauty is important, but in fact not crucial. Sometimes adult men would adopt the looks and mannerisms of wakashu. In her introduction to the exhibition catalog, Asato Ikeda points out that wakashu “was a gender role—not a fixed biological category—that was performed.” She is quite right to emphasize performance, since the “third gender” was an essential aspect not only of samurai romances, but also of brothel life and theatrical spectacle. The performances of prostitutes and actors were intimately linked in Kabuki. Many erudite critical reviews in the Edo Period assessed the merits of both.

The earliest Kabuki performances occurred in the first years of the seventeenth century, when a female Shinto shrine attendant named O-Kuni staged lewd song and dance numbers on the riverside in Kyoto, often related to stories from the nearby brothel districts. O-Kuni liked to get up in male drag. The female performers were also sexually available for a fee. In an effort to crack down on prostitution, women were banned from the theater in 1629, to be replaced by wakashu actors playing the roles of women or of young boys in romantic trysts with older men. But since they were no less in demand for sexual favors, they were duly banned from the stage in 1652. The wakashu were replaced by men, some of whom specialized in female roles, the onnagata. Many famous onnagata—such as Anegawa Chiyosaburo, shown in a 1735 print by Okumura Toshinobu—started their careers as boy prostitutes.

Cross-dressing has a long tradition in Japan, not just among men, but among women too, ranging from O-Kuni in the seventeenth century to the all-female Takarazuka revue in our own time, whose remarkable renditions of such chestnuts as Gone with the Wind or Madame Butterfly still attract millions of mostly very young female fans. One picture in the show, painted on silk by a nineteenth-century artist named Kaian, portrays five young people dancing, some wearing swords, some with forelocks but no swords. Only one dancer is clearly identifiable as a man. All the others are ambiguous (see illustration on page 30).

Female prostitutes would sometimes pose as wakashu to titillate their clients. In a 1767 print by Harunobu we see two pretty young women, one with a letter in her hand and the other clutching a three-stringed samisen. Some scholars maintain that they are actually male prostitutes.

Many of the prints in the show are of wakashu striking elegant poses, attracting the attention of experienced courtesans. There are some lovely pictures of onnagata, and of the pleasure districts in Edo. One of my favorite woodcuts is by Utamaro, made around 1801, showing a wakashu dreaming of sleeping with a famous high-class courtesan (the dream is revealed in a cartoon-like bubble over his head), while a young woman solicitously wraps a jacket around his shoulders lest he catch a cold (see illustration on page 29).

In some pictures, we see the wakashu seducing women or young girls. But mostly these girlish boys are the objects of desire rather than the initiators. A print from the 1790s, attributed to the Utamaro school, shows an older woman pouncing on a boy who looks quite disconcerted. In erotic prints, known as shunga, the wakashu are often depicted as more feminine than their female partners. A lovely illustration by Kitao Shigemasa from an eighteenth-century storybook shows a young woman stroking a wakashu’s erect penis. She appears to be coaxing him: “Listen to what I’m saying! Here, here!” Whereupon the boy replies: “I just can’t do that kind of thing.” The woman: “Come on! You are such a tease!”

One might easily get the impression from the pictures on display—though less so from the catalog—that the taste for boys was largely a heterosexual affair. There are indeed echoes of the female fascination for androgynous boys in contemporary culture. The cross-dressing stars of the Takarazuka, many of whom by the way are far from straight, are an obvious example (although boys are not exactly their cup of tea). But there is also a remarkable genre of manga, or comic books, read almost exclusively by teenage girls and featuring romances between beautiful young boys. These are not a modern version of shunga. The stories are more like the chaste romantic fantasies of girls who like to dream about boys, but would be frightened of anything carnal. Some Western movie stars and rock singers have had astonishing success in Japan by appealing to the starry-eyed yearning for androgyny. David Bowie was one. So was the Austrian film actor Helmut Berger; he had a huge young female following in Japan long after his fame faded in the West.

Nonetheless, the impression that wakashu were mostly the objects of heterosexual desire in the Edo Period would be quite false. So why are there no shunga of homosexual acts in the exhibition? There are some famous ones, such as Male Love Actors Without Their Make-up, designed by Kitao Shigemasa in the 1770s, of an older man having sex with a young onnagata, while a female attendant splashes cold water on them to cool the senior figure’s ardor. Or Games with Young Men: Fragrant Pillow (1675), by Moronobu, featuring another love scene with a young actor, accompanied by a blind samisen player. The catalog contains some shunga of male couplings, though far fewer than heterosexual ones.

The prints are from a collection in the Royal Ontario Museum. The reason why shunga, especially homoerotic ones, are almost entirely absent from the exhibition is explained by one of the curators in the catalog: “In consideration of the Canadian child pornography law, and in consultation with managers at the museum, I had to make the difficult decision to exclude explicitly sexual images (shunga) of wakashu from the exhibition.” In fact, Canadian law bans

a photographic, film, video or other visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means,

(i) that shows a person who is or is depicted as being under the age of eighteen years and is engaged in or is depicted as engaged in explicit sexual activity, or

(ii) the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a sexual organ or the anal region of a person under the age of eighteen years….

So caution is probably in order. Still, it is hard to imagine how anyone could be corrupted or encouraged to abuse minors by seeing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese woodcuts of wakashu and their patrons. In any case, leaving homosexual pictures out, while showing women swooning over or lunging at teenage boys, seriously distorts the history of the third gender. After all, shudo was at the heart of the wakashu aesthetic. It cannot be understood without paying particular attention to boy love.

The romantic ideal of adult men loving young boys had a lot to do with the samurai ethos of the time. As is often the case in warrior castes, women were held in a certain degree of contempt. They were necessary for procreation, of course, and many warriors no doubt found them sexually attractive. But relationships between men were held in far higher esteem. Romantic notions of self-sacrifice, brotherhood, comradeship, and so on were reserved for men. Mutual devotion between older and younger men was the highest form of samurai bonding. In the eighteenth century, when Japan was unified, isolated from much of the rest of the world, and at peace, warrior values had no more practical use. So they became a form of artistry. And that included the cult of the wakashu.

In fact, of course, the taste for boys was not always as pure or refined as Saikaku makes it out to be in his Great Mirror of Male Love. Saikaku takes male romance to extremes. In one story, the older man scoops up water from a river and drinks it, because he has seen his young lover spit in it. In another, a young samurai commits suicide after he tortured his lover to death in a fit of jealousy.

In real life, boy love was usually considerably less romantic. Brothels in Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka catered to men who liked boys. The boys were frequently sold to the brothels when they were children. Some rose to eminence in the “floating world” of commercial pleasure. A print designed by Masanobu in the 1740s shows a male prostitute in a female kimono standing on the tatami floor of a tea house, while a graceful courtesan plays on a samisen and a male client hovers behind a screen. The prostitute’s kimono is decorated with a pattern of lotus roots, perhaps, as the catalog explains, “to suggest the purity of his thoughts rising above the foulness of his profession.”

Perhaps this is true. If so, it is a fine illustration of the way extraordinary refinement can coexist with a basically sordid enterprise. We live in very different times. Boy love still exists, of course, but it is no longer cloaked, even in Japan (pace Inagaki Taruho), with the poetic sentiments of shudo. In most cultures sex with minors is frowned upon. In the West, it is entirely taboo. This is progress. Whether we really need to be shielded from viewing works of erotic art made three centuries ago is, however, open to question.

The post The ‘Indescribable Fragrance’ of Youths appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Bob Silvers, my friend and the editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, shortly after completing the April 6 issue. Together with Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, he founded the Review in 1963; for fifty-four years he was either co-editor with Barbara or, after her death in 2006, editor of the Review. Bob worked almost to the very end of his life, which would be no surprise to those who knew him well, including those who have written these brief memoirs.

—Rea Hederman

ELAINE BLAIR

Until I arrived at the Review as an editorial assistant, I had never met anyone who so rarely engaged in idle pleasantries as Bob. His daily language was pared down, accurate, and sincere. I found his example revelatory, and I would ponder his usage and elisions like a giddy college freshman. Bob would never, for instance, wish us a good weekend. Presumably he had no particular investment in the quality of our weekends, and possibly he didn’t even know when his assistants’ weekends were, since we took turns working Saturday and Sunday shifts with him.

But was he also, I wondered, rejecting the implied value of a good weekend? Is the goal of leisure time pleasure? Edification? Novel experience? If we couldn’t settle on criteria, we couldn’t possibly arrive at a valuation, in which case why bother asking on Monday morning how someone’s weekend had been? The rest of us walked around in a fever of sentimentality and superstition, it suddenly seemed to me, sloppily wishing each other good days and good trips and merriment at Christmas. But Bob said only as much as he meant. When I left the office after a night shift of taking dictation, sending out books, going over a manuscript with him, he said, “Thanks a lot!” And it felt like a lot.

Still, it was hard to get used to a professional relationship that was, by design, largely impersonal. There were four of us assistants and we were supposed to be nearly interchangeable extensions of Bob himself, the extra hands he needed to manage so big a job. Usually only Bob communicated directly with contributors, and when we worked on a manuscript he carefully went over every one of our suggestions or marginal notes. We rarely spoke to him about anything that wasn’t directly relevant to Review pieces. This too seemed to me tied up with Bob’s stringent rejection of linguistic and sentimental cliché, including the commonplaces of workplace relationships. Bob did not take us under his wing. He was not our mentor. He did not believe in us. These were impossibilities because the Review’s lexicon did not allow for them. They may not, in any case, be the best measures of a boss’s generosity.

I don’t remember exactly what Bob said when I gave him an essay I had written on spec and asked if he would consider it for the magazine, but I remember that the look on his face suggested that I’d ruined his afternoon. I’m sure that if I hadn’t worked in the office and had simply sent him the piece, he would have rejected it. But I was there, in person, so he gave the piece his attention and a few weeks later handed me something of rare value: an unsparingly marked-up text.

IAN BURUMA

My first communication from Bob arrived by telex in Hong Kong, I think sometime in 1984. It read simply: “When can we expect Keene?” On a visit to New York, I had foolishly blurted out the idea of writing about Donald Keene’s enormous two-volume opus on modern Japanese literature, about which my knowledge was not nearly sufficient to write a serious essay.

But my fit of bluff in Bob’s office had piqued his interest. He had wanted something on Japan. The piece was deemed adequate enough for publication (“very fresh” might have been his scribbled note of encouragement). After that it was “on we go, old boy,” his usual phrase as soon as another piece had been printed. And what a journey it has been.

My life as a writer owes everything to Bob’s editorship. He had too much respect for writers he trusted to wish to change their individual styles. In this respect he was quite different from many editors, especially in the US, who see the words delivered by their contributors as raw material to, as one distinguished editor once put it to me, as though I should be grateful, “get [his] teeth into.”

Bob’s teeth marks never showed. But he had an infallible eye for loose thinking. His brilliance lay in his sense of clarity. He made you think harder. There was no room in his “paper” for fuzziness or vague abstractions. He wanted examples, descriptions, and concrete thoughts. And because he was the ideal reader you most wanted to please, you gradually learned how to express yourself better.

Some people liked to mock Bob’s mid-Atlantic drawl, which owed something to Oxford High Table talk, Plimptonian (as in George) classiness, and Long Island lockjaw. But this was not a mere affectation. Bob was that rare person: an American who loved France as dearly as he loved England, if not more so. The University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and the best of liberal Oxford philosophers shaped his intellectual life. His clarity came from French thinking as well as Anglo-Saxon empiricism. But he remained deeply committed to the country of his birth. And I don’t just mean the Metropolitan Opera or the Ivy League schools. One of his fondest memories, which he would rehearse when he felt most relaxed, was to have been the only white soldier in an all-black military unit being trained somewhere in the American Deep South.

To me, Bob represented the best of a civilization that was rooted in the Enlightenment. But part of that liberal humanist tradition is openness to other civilizations, hence Bob’s thirst for knowledge about China, Japan, the Middle East, or indeed anywhere that was of interest.

Susan Sontag’s definition of an intellectual as someone who is interested in everything is perhaps an exaggeration. No one can be equally interested in everything, but Bob came damned close.

The idea of civilization that Bob personified is now under siege, not least in the countries that he was most closely associated with. We have lost him just when he was most needed. Our tribute must be to defend what he stood for. On we go. We owe it to him.

DAVID COLE

The package came unannounced, via Federal Express, with two books and a handwritten note: “We wondered if you’d be interested in reviewing these books for us. Bob.” That was thirteen years ago. I’ve been contributing frequently to The New York Review of Books ever since. And that means every word I’ve written—on legal subjects spanning terrorism, crime, gay rights, affirmative action, freedom of speech and religion, and the laws of war—has been handled with exquisite care, obsessive attention, and quiet grace by Bob Silvers. I’ve spent my life teaching and litigating these issues; Bob, who went to three semesters of law school in the late 1940s before deciding he wanted to be an editor, understood them as well as or better than I did.

But that was the least of it. Bob did the same with every article in every issue—on subjects as diverse as opera, history, poetry, education, contemporary politics, jazz, psychology, television, religion, film, medicine, the environment, art, fiction, and drama. From 1963 until 2006, he shared the responsibilities with Barbara Epstein. When she died, Bob never replaced her; he just added her writers to his plate.

To attend to every article in even a single issue of the Review would be a stunning achievement. Bob did it for decades (with help from a small group of extremely talented, devoted, and self-effacing editorial assistants and senior editors). If my experience is any guide, each article went through as many as five or six rounds. What this prodigious production meant was that, even in his seventies and eighties, Bob practically lived at the Review. He was seventy-four when I began working with him. He’d call with an urgent and always perceptive thought about a piece, usually at an inconvenient hour; I always took the call. I’m a morning person, but I had many conversations with him well after 11:00 PM on a weekend evening—from his office.

If Bob was willing to work around the clock on every piece he published, how could I say no to a phone call at an odd hour? He’d inevitably raise a question I hadn’t considered or had thought I could finesse. “Well, I just think the reader will want to know…,” he’d say. And he was always right. When the conversation was done, Bob would just hang up. Never a good-bye. The first five or six times, the abruptness took me aback, so out of keeping with his gentle manners and grace in every other respect. But one soon learned that it was nothing personal; he was just too busy. On to the next galley.

Bob was a consummate generalist, conversant in virtually all fields. He eschewed jargon and the language of specialists, and pushed his writers to say things as simply and clearly as possible, without in any way reducing the sophistication of the thought. Most of his writers had spent decades toiling away in the depths of their fields; Bob ensured that we communicated in ways that those not so steeped would understand. He was a master at the art of translation.

Bob was celebrated, justly, for the publication he fashioned. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2013—a man the Review did not hesitate to criticize. But he never seemed to care much about the accolades; to Bob, they were almost a distraction from the work. The only reward he really seemed to prize was the appearance, every two weeks, of the “paper” itself. The New York Review will go on; it will be Bob’s legacy. A week before he died, even as he was confined to his apartment, he e-mailed me with an idea for a new piece. Fittingly, I suppose, he went out without a good-bye, working on the next galley.

MARK DANNER

I began working for Bob Silvers in September 1981, when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college. I was one of three assistants, informally known to contributors as elves and—to us—as slaves. Because of Bob’s astonishing appetite for work, New York Review assistants had two shifts, nine to five and two to ten. I quickly came to prefer the late shift, though this meant in practice that one often worked until eleven or twelve or even later.

The workspace was what is customarily referred to as Dickensian: towering piles of books on his large desk and our much smaller ones, which had a disconcerting habit of toppling over catastrophically at inopportune moments, heaps of manuscripts everywhere, clouds of cigarillo smoke. (Bob at that time was a chain smoker.) As an assistant I would sit behind my small piles of books, place his endless stream of phone calls to writers (“Can you hold for Robert Silvers?”), and listen for the sound of a manuscript or a book or a set of galleys landing in Bob’s outbox. Galleys—this was pre-Internet—had to be sent off by mail, FedEx, or carrier pigeon to wherever in the world the writer was hiding.

Heavily edited manuscripts had to be retyped: a delight for me because it meant deciphering Bob’s handwriting and marveling at the way he transmuted dross into gold, with nary a trace of his own voice trespassing into the piece. He was an arch ventriloquist, able to adopt the tone of any given writer: the artist as editor. The editor as artist. Manuscripts would be worked on, sometimes extensively, retyped, then set in galleys and mailed off to Berkeley, Chicago, Lucca, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge. Even on pieces he had largely rewritten, Bob would scrawl his typical note: “Dear So and So, Great thanks for your strong piece. You’ll see we have made a few small suggestions. Please let’s have changes soon. Best, Bob.” I would marvel that the authors of pieces that had been substantially rewritten would often call and profess themselves astonished that “Bob hasn’t changed a thing!”

During those long evenings Bob had a way of sensing when you were getting ready, however surreptitiously, to slip out the door. He would begin piling material into the outbox: letters to post, galleys to send, books to mail, manuscripts to type. The hours would pass: eleven, midnight, one AM. Again and again the assistant struggling to leave would be forced to shrug off his or her coat and sit back down at the typewriter. Bob fought against being alone—for he knew that soon he inevitably would be.

If one stayed late enough there was a special bonus: at a certain moment he would leap up from his chair and charge into the publisher’s office next door, and in a few minutes one would hear this somewhat gruff and imperious boss chuckling and joking and mumbling endearments. He was calling his lady love, who was just then rising in Lausanne. The sound of his voice at these moments—animated and happy, distracted for once from the piles of manuscripts and the towers of books—was enough to make up for the late hour and the terrors of the brimming outbox. He taught me, beyond editing and writing and so much else, the necessity of devotion.

JOAN DIDION

When I heard that Bob had died, I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my world. I was unprepared for it. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t, because it seemed impossible. People like Bob don’t die; we need them too much.

Bob always shaped how I thought. I had no opinion I did not run by him first. “New York: Sentimental Journeys” (1991), on the Central Park jogger case, was far and away the hardest piece I ever worked on for this reason. Bob from the beginning knew what the piece had to be—he knew before I did—and he pushed me until I got it there. He knew exactly how dangerous the subject was, and his reaction to this danger was to make it more dangerous. His idea from the first was to get it right, to make it perfect, regardless of whatever negative reaction it might elicit in the city at that moment. When I first turned it in to him, it was clearly too long. His solution was to insist I go further. This meant making it longer. If that piece succeeds at all, it succeeds because he gave me permission to finish it.

I loved having dinner with him. We would go to the Knickerbocker Club on 62nd Street and eat Dover sole and sautéed vegetables and talk about what we needed from each other. From me, he needed a willingness to work, and from him, I needed work to do. He understood this as the fair exchange that it was.

After my husband John died, when my daughter Quintana was very sick, Bob grasped my situation, and blessedly kept me writing—on the Bush administration, on euthanasia. He intuited that I would either work or I would die. He was among the few who understood this.

I knew in 1973 how important he was to my work. I didn’t know how important he was to me personally until much later. In the last few years, our friendship was closer than it had ever been, and I thought about him every day. I wished I could have seen him more, but I knew he needed to keep working.

An editorial note from Bob would open up new possibilities both in a piece and in life itself. What could have been an empty place suddenly flooded with light and understanding.

I will always need Bob.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

It was my great and improbable good fortune to work for Bob in two capacities—once as his assistant in around 1973, and decades later as a contributor. One could say I hardly knew him, yet these experiences and the line between them are etched about as deeply as any marks in the person I feel to be myself.

Having several assistants at a time was indispensable to Bob. Tensions ran high and spilled over largely on us, so through the years Bob inevitably had many assistants, of whom I was almost certainly the worst.

I remember magic personalities orbiting the office, electric excitement and glamour. People who encountered Bob only in his later years might be surprised to learn that when my boyfriend first met him, he said, “But he makes Cary Grant look like a knobbly old turnip!” What I don’t remember is what we assistants actually did, other than wade despairingly through a loam of books, papers, and cigarette ash, and rush off to the post office at all hours.

My first day, Bob asked me to take a letter. After what seemed many hours of rhetorical sublimity declaimed in his startlingly patrician accent, Bob said, “All right, read it back, please, uh…”(What was my name?)

I was clutching pages of incomprehensible scrawl. “Gosh,” I said, “that’s the hard part, Bob.”

One’s hair really can stand on end, I learned in the frozen silence. Bob produced a brief, grim chuckle. “That’s the hard part, Bob. That’s the hard part, Bob…” he echoed, apparently in sheer incredulity.

Bob was severe, Bob was exacting, Bob was irascible—oh, why did he not fire me that day, or on any of the following days, during which I demonstrated equal incompetence, often sobbing? To escape I had to quit.

Many years passed. I was out of town, but a large package found me, bearing the familiar return address. Not possible, not possible…I quaked for a few days before opening it to find a book by a favorite writer of mine, Péter Nádas.

I wrote to Bob, saying that I was overextended as it was, and explaining the many reasons I was unqualified to write about the book. Bob wrote back immediately—countering, with immense charm, each of my points.

He remembered my name now! That note, plus irrepressible vanity on my part, equaled the French Horn of Destiny.

Well, that was the only book ever written that could tempt me to write a review, I thought—until a second one arrived, and the process was repeated, almost exactly.

It seems that Bob had an uncanny, almost diabolical, insight into what book would be irresistible to whom. But also irresistible, it turned out, was the prospect of working on another piece for him. His inexhaustible appetite for exploring the wide world was alloyed with a fastidiousness regarding detail. He attuned himself astonishingly to one’s purposes, and his delight in a finished piece was thrilling.

One feels profound gratitude to someone who wants one to accomplish something that’s apparently beyond one’s reach and who makes it possible to do so. And Bob’s conviction that the smallest elements of expression are the foundation of rigorous thought—that rigorous thought lights up the world—permeated the magazine, issue after issue. The world is in crisis; the loss of such intellectual finesse, curiosity, and force, of such wide-ranging vigilance, is a crisis on its own.

JASON EPSTEIN

When Elizabeth Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, Barbara, and I conceived what would become The New York Review of Books during the newspaper strike of 1962–1963, we knew that our dear friend Bob was the only possible editor. Bob, then a brilliant young Harper’s editor, had recently commissioned Lizzie to write an essay on the decline of serious criticism in America, in which she savaged the dismal Sunday book reviews for their “flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself.”

It was with Lizzie’s Harper’s article in mind that the four of us saw the opportunity wordlessly presented by the strike: either create the kind of review that she had envisioned or forever stop complaining. There was no middle ground, no escape, and therefore no discussion. The opportunity—indeed the obligation—had arrived of its own volition. There was no ignoring it. Bob was born to edit the review that Lizzie’s piece demanded. I called him the following day and, to our delight, he immediately accepted. He then called Barbara and asked her to be his co-editor.

That all this came together seems in retrospect to have been a miracle. The first issue achieved just the quality of gravitas and fluency we hoped for. No reader could fail to see the point of our project. What we could not have imagined at the time was the utter greatness of Bob’s achievement over fifty-four years, and the kindness and fairness that accompanied his profound wisdom. Bob was a man for the ages.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

We are just sitting down to Christmas lunch in London when the telephone rings: “It’s Bob. We have a dangling modifier on galley D4.” FedEx packages appeared at the remotest croft, island refuge, or East European enclave. The New York Review would always get through.

Bob Silvers was the greatest editor I have ever worked with, and part of his secret was in that D4. First there was a package, usually containing the proof copy of a book and, folded inside it, the unmistakable double-spaced typewritten letter with its famous “we hope that something might be done.” (I remember Zoë Heller joking that she would try this courtly formula when asking her children to tidy their rooms: “We hope that something might be done.”) You could not plead other commitments, because he would give you all the time you needed. There followed more packages, faxes, and e-mails, full of supporting material. When you sent him the article, on which you had sometimes worked for months, you would receive a swift response, usually containing the locution “great thanks,” and a small selection from his personal sushi tray of adjectives to describe the piece (“strong,” “important”).

But then came the marked-up text, with his characteristic scrawl on the margins of galley proofs. His essential questions were also the simplest: What do you mean? What do you really want to say? These comments were written on successive galley proofs—D4 meaning the fourth page of the fourth or D set of galleys. Loving this attritional improvement, I once got to an F galley.

In my mind’s eye, I see Bob forever picking up, perusing, and then casting aside a set of galleys. That casting aside was important, because when he came back to the D galley for the nth time, he would see something afresh. Along the way, there were wonderful long telephone conversations, drawing on his extraordinary range of knowledge and reference. I look back through the online list of my contributions over thirty-three years, and I can remember our long-distance exchanges on almost every one.

I think too of our many meetings, in Budapest, Oslo, Paris, or London, dinners in the New York apartment, lunches in the Japanese restaurant below the office: Bob always in his dark blue suit, alight with geniality, laughter, enthusiasm, and a glint of quiet steeliness. Yet even at the height of his reputation and powers, he also had an endearing touch of vulnerability.

He was never earnest but always serious. His support for dissident intellectuals everywhere was steadfast: Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Nadine Gordimer, Fang Lizhi, to name but a few. Shaped by his experience in Paris during the early years of the cold war, Bob represented the values of the transatlantic West at its best. His was a self-confident but also a self-critical liberalism. The more the Review criticized the dark sides of American policy (in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and elsewhere), the more it enhanced American soft power. Despite several brave attempts, no one has ever made a successful pan-European literary review, and so The New York Review remains the nearest thing we Europeans have to one—a common intellectual reference point from Lisbon to Tallin, and from Athens to Edinburgh.

When I wrote about fifty years of The New York Review in these pages in 2013, I reflected on how this liberal, transatlantic West was already under challenge from many sides. There is bitter irony in the fact that Bob has died just as an antiliberal counterrevolution, already manifest in Moscow, Beijing, Istanbul, and Budapest, is threatening the three Western heartlands he knew and loved best: Britain, with Brexit, France, with the rise of Marine Le Pen, and the United States, with you-know-who. We need his spirit more than ever, and we shall keep its flame burning.

ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO

When in 1998 John Paul II became the first pope to visit Cuba, Bob immediately agreed that I should go. Of course there was never any money for travel, but he scraped something together. I joined a cheap package tour of Catholic pilgrims at a travel agency in Mexico and happily wrote two stories from that trip: one about the pope’s visit and a later one about Fidel Castro, whose infirmities were just beginning to show (although he would hold on to power for another ten years).

Even as we were closing the pope story Bob was on the phone about another one. Shouldn’t I be doing something about human rights on the island? My back stiffened. I dislike categories in general because they narrow down reality, and “human rights,” I said, was one that in Cuba led readers and writers right back to a useless cold war understanding of a Latin American country.

Bob was having none of that. How could we run two stories on a country that had lived under the systematic repression of thought and expression for decades, and not mention it? I grumbled and fought; the summer heat was approaching, I had no sources, a rumor was going about that everyone’s go-to human rights victim was now suspect, and, ultimately, I hated the very idea. Not knowing of Bob’s ties to that institution, I said the whole thing sounded like something worthy of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well, dearie, Bob said (dearie, unlike kiddo, was in Bobspeak a term not of affection but of annoyance), one’s thoughts go back to those poor men, the writers and the thinkers and those who simply wish to remain apart, held in dark, dank cells for years and years. One’s thoughts go back and linger there with them, and one can’t help wondering, is there something to be done? Are we not obliged to address their situation in some small way?

The argument went on for days. The pope story ran, the Fidel story went into galleys, and Bob wouldn’t give up. In the end, it became a question of being unspeakably rude to him or saying yes, and so I went and reported and wrote the story I should have volunteered for in the first place. Indeed, the situation of dozens of men (men only, at that point) held in prison on absurd charges, in obscene conditions, was intolerable. I was embarrassed for myself and both appalled and fascinated by what I saw. How could we not address, in some small way, the situation of people laboring under such injustice? Bob made his writers better writers by pushing them to think better.

SUE HALPERN

Nine days before she died, I turned in my last piece for Barbara Epstein, which, as one of “Barbara’s writers,” I assumed would be my last for The New York Review. I knew there was little chance she would read it, and even less chance it would be published, but it felt imperative to see through that final collaboration, ignoring the reality at hand and offering up a little normalcy. For months she edited manuscripts while hooked up to the chemo machine, so I could also imagine her, pen in hand, wrestling with words till the very end.

A few weeks later, the phone rang. It was Robert Silvers. “We’ll be sending galleys of your [fill in the blank with an adjective of high praise] article soon.” We talked briefly about the piece, and at length about Barbara, whom we both loved dearly. “What would you like to do next?” Bob asked before we hung up. And with that, I was one of “Bob’s writers,” too.

Packages of books began to arrive unbidden. Tucked inside would be a brief, telegraphic message, something on the order of “see what you can do.” I confess that I was not always happy to find these leaning up against the front door, and I would give them a wide berth for days, knowing that once I tore open the FedEx envelope, I’d be working like mad to master the subject at hand. But I also knew that before long Bob would be calling to wonder if I’d gotten those books, and when I might have something for him. He was wily like that.

I loved talking with Bob. On the phone, for sure, when I could always count on him to leave me with some insight or something to think about, but even more sitting knee-to-knee on the office couch, where somehow, always, we would make each other laugh. The truest thing I know about Bob was expressed in that sound: his delight in the world. If I had to pick a single word to describe him, it would not be brilliant, or driven, or perspicacious, or courtly, or generous, or honest, or curious, or kind, or polymathic, or good—all of which apply—it would be “delighted.” Just look at his eyes in any picture and there it is.

A while ago, a writer with a number of best sellers to her name got in touch after getting her first Review assignment, to ask what she needed to know in order to write for Bob. I was stymied at first, and then realized why: one didn’t write for Bob. One wrote for oneself, and for the reader, and Bob was there to ensure that—to paraphrase (and contradict) T.S. Eliot—every raid on the inarticulate did not end in the general mess of imprecision of feeling. His goal was not to insert himself and his point of view into a piece, but rather to enable the writer to make an argument with clarity and disposition. He trusted his writers to say what they needed to say and they, in turn, trusted him to help them do so. He knew their capacities. Sometimes he knew them better than they did themselves.

“All right, kiddo,” he said, signing off, the last time we spoke. In that conversation he happened to mention that the medications he’d been taking were not working. Honestly, he seemed more concerned about Trump’s immigration policy. He suggested, in his offhand way, that I might read a certain article in Foreign Policy. It was something to think about. So I did.

JENNIFER HOMANS

I always thought of Bob as a brilliant man, all mind. This could be disconcerting, and there was a moment when I thought of him as strangely impersonal and detached. It was 2008 and my late husband Tony Judt had just been diagnosed with ALS and had written to Bob explaining his dire situation. Tony had been writing for Bob for nearly two decades. Before Bob, Tony had been an accomplished historian of Europe. Almost immediately though, Bob pushed him to expand his range and began sending him books on American foreign policy, Primo Levi, Jean Genet, Israel-Palestine, and, later, the Bush years, the Iraq war, and more. He pushed Tony’s writing too. Pre-Bob the writing was academic; post-Bob, there was a sea change and Tony’s prose became lighter, clearer, “strong,” as Bob liked to say.

Bob had become a constant presence in our lives. Which is why I was so shocked when he responded to Tony’s helpless note with a few breezy lines: We’ll be in touch soon! Weeks passed. Then he came for a visit. Tony was feeling low that day, sitting wan and pale in the back room in his corner chair. I felt like I had been living with Bob for years, but in fact he had never been to our apartment. He wafted cheerfully into the room in his suit and scarf, bringing the news of the world with him. After some very British-sounding abstractions about how tough life could be, they immediately switched to politics, and I remember Tony struggling to keep up or care. He was just too sick. It seemed an impossible situation, these two men, all mind, one rapidly losing his body, and neither knowing quite what to say.

What happened next changed my view of Bob, but also of Tony. By then, Tony was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, writing only with the help of an assistant or whoever was there to be his hands at the keyboard. He started composing pieces at night in his head and reciting them in the morning. He sent one to Bob, who immediately published it. They were back in touch. There would be a series, it was a project, and Bob was right there. But these were not the usual pieces on books and politics; they were deeply personal reflections and memories. Soon after, Bob told me the essays made him think of Central European writers and a memoir form he hadn’t seen for some time. He and Tony had found a common language.

When Bob turned eighty in 2009, Tony composed a note, knowing he would die soon:

More seriously, and I know that I have to stand in line to say this, you will always be an extraordinary editor—by far the best I have ever known and, it seems fair to assert, by far the best there is. You surely do not need me to tell you about the place that the NYR holds in the hearts and minds (sorry!) of hundreds of thousands of readers from Berkeley to Beijing. And, of course, above all, you are a legend in your own time zone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work with you and I look forward to many more conversations and galleys….

Affectionately,
Tony

Bob wrote back with his preternatural restraint:

I just read your words here and wanted to tell you how much they meant to me. Every good thing to you both.

My best,
Bob

Tony forwarded me the response with a brief message:

I think this is the closest I have ever seen Bob get to being moved. I am so pleased I wrote it. Love, T

When Tony died, Bob was still there. Upon the publication of Thinking the Twentieth Century, Tony’s last book, written with Tim Snyder, I called Bob: I don’t know if I can do it, but will you help me if I write something? He said yes, please try. When he received my text, Bob focused on certain emotional words, encouraging me to rein in the feeling, take out the fleshy excess, leave only the bones. I fought for the flesh but he called again and again, telling me how much stronger it would be if understated. I was still in grief: it felt horrible, let it be horrible. But he was looking for a kind of poise. Distance and reflection, even in the face of disaster.

Bob had a classical mind, I think. Disciplined, spare, all emotion distilled. In late December when his partner Grace died, I wrote him a note of condolence. He had always said that she was “marvelous,” “quite a gal,” and she was often tucked somewhere into his notes about the work: “I’m in Switzerland with Grace.” “Grace sends love.” When he got my note, he wrote back as he did to so many with a rare show of raw emotion: “I am nowhere without Grace.” It is often said that people die the way they live, and his death made him come clear in my mind. He died with the woman he loved. Without her he was nowhere. It was poetic, understated, a life well lived. His absence is difficult to accept. He was always there and now he is not.

MARK LILLA

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of soul.

—Robert Musil

It’s a romantic dogma, rooted in God knows what gnostic heresy, that the world is divided into those who think and those who feel. The Mirror and the Lamp, the Dynamo and the Virgin. And that this is how it should be. Tell a romantic you understand him and you have pronounced a death sentence. It means his wings have been clipped and his soul has begun its descent. Oh, Lord, please let me be misunderstood. What keeps him airborne is the conviction that those are philistines pounding the pavement below.

Countless little magazines and literary reviews have been conceived as a refuge from the crowd, a perch for Icarus. The New York Review was meant to be different. Frustrated by the lazy gentility of American book reviewing and its detachment from wider intellectual and cultural currents, the editors invented a genre for what they hoped would be a new audience. The digressive review-essay style that became the paper’s trademark presumed that a writer could bring intellect to matters of soul without violating either, and that there was an audience for such writing. From the start, the Review was a democratic, pedagogical project.

This I knew when I began writing for Bob Silvers back in the 1990s. What I didn’t know was that the pedagogy was intended for the author as well. Bob was a teacher, one of the greatest I have ever encountered. Many stories have been told of his legendary interventionism—the late-night calls about an obscure sentence, the flood of packages, faxes, and later e-mails with suggested reading, not always to the point but welcome as signs of his enthusiasm. Profiles by journalists could make him appear an endearing fussbudget. But nothing I have read asks the only pertinent question: Why did he take the trouble? Why bother? After all, people now consume so much “content,” so fast, that they don’t notice. Errors in print can be fixed online instantaneously. And besides, we’re all publishers now, so who needs a superego?

What the journalists missed, but his writers knew, is that the process of endless refinement was the point. Bob at work on a manuscript resembled nothing so much as a Jesuit spiritual adviser, minus the collar, helping the novice refine his raw inner awareness. It was a vocation, in the strict sense, an expression of magnanimity. He was determined to see that a book got the appreciation and criticism it deserved. But even more, it seemed to me, he wanted the writer to understand himself better than he already did. You say this, and you’re on to something, but what does it really mean? What are you trying to say? Bob had a profound abhorrence of vagueness. It was the cardinal sin because it was cowardly, a self-evasion. More than once I wanted to tear the hairshirt off. Icarus, c’est moi. He never permitted it because he was more loyal to me than I was to myself.

In reading the Review, you always learn something. In writing for Bob, you became something. It was a gift none of us really deserved. But what gift ever is? That’s what makes it a gift.

JANET MALCOLM

“What are you working on?”
“I’m writing a piece for Bob.”

This exchange, often heard around the city, will be heard no more. Now we will have to write for an imaginary Bob—though on some level we were always writing for an imaginary Bob. He was our literary conscience. He was the figure looking over our shoulders as we wrote, holding us to a rare standard. When you wrote “for Bob” you felt the pressure of a demand to be interesting. You do not bore a genius. You do as good an impersonation as you can of someone worthy of his attention.

The imaginary Bob appealed to the better parts of our writing natures, to our capacity for audacity and unpredictability; and, of course, he couldn’t always rouse them. But the best pieces in the magazine had a shimmer that came from outside of themselves. As one read them a sense of Bob came into the room.

His actual interventions in the manuscripts I submitted usually had to do with questions of fact. He wanted to know more about something, or he wanted something added that he knew should be there. He was after the truth of things, which begins with the facts of things. He seemed to know more facts than anyone else in the world did and to understand their power. In today’s new order of untruthfulness (do you remember the good old order of mere truthiness?) his legacy has a moral significance beyond description.

FINTAN O’TOOLE

The great editor is a chimerical creature, combining contrary qualities in one mind: assertive and self-effacing, commanding and sensitive, infinitely curious and sharply focused, patient and fearfully demanding, wide-angle and close-up. Robert Silvers was the greatest editor of our time because he managed these contradictions with a seemingly effortless elegance. He was able, somehow, to show his writers only the gentler sides—the civility, the patience, the infinite care for the smallest details of an essay. Their other sides—the unbending standards of excellence, the phenomenal drive, the larger mission of which your own piece was but a tiny part—were never explicitly expressed. They did not have to be: writers—and more importantly readers—could never miss the force of their steadfast presence.

The thing that everyone privileged enough to write for Robert Silvers will remember is the mystery of the Federal Express packet of books that would arrive every so often. Mysterious because you had no idea what you were going to get. Sometimes it would be stuff that you more or less knew about; sometimes not. Bob did not believe in comfort zones. In any other editor this might have been eccentric, even perverse. But with Bob it was a deeply serious act of faith. He believed that there is such a thing as the general reader, that public life depends on the existence of a common space in which ideas can be shared, absorbed, mulled over, kicked around. And if there is the general reader, there must also be the general writer. If you were lucky enough to write for The New York Review, you had to be prepared to share what you knew or thought without arrogance or condescension. Sometimes you had to go further and share what you didn’t know until Bob’s quiet demands sent you off to learn it.

What he was doing in this was holding a crucial middle ground. He understood better than anyone else that the public realm has to fight for its existence against two equally great dangers. One is the culture of self-enclosed, technocratic expertise, the hiving off of intellectual life into increasingly minute specializations and increasingly impenetrable professional dialects. The other is the insistence—so much in the ascendant now—that there is no expertise at all, that scholarship and rigor and evidence are the mere playthings of elitist eggheads. Bob’s great gift to civic life was the living demonstration in every issue of the Review that these impostors could be treated with equal—and magnificent—contempt. He held open the space for that great republican virtue: common curiosity. He made this fierce effort seem so natural that it is only in his absence that we realize how hard it is to do and how much it counts.

I always come back in thinking about Bob to his imperturbable courtesy. His good manners were not mere mannerisms. They said something. They were a constant reminder to the rest of us that we owed readers the same consideration—to think things through as best we could, to avoid shortcuts and lazy assumptions, to write as well as we could manage. And to remember that it all matters, that the life of a great journal is part of the life of democracy itself. We know better than we have ever known how boorishness and vulgarity pollute public life. Robert Silvers showed us better than any other editor how courtesy and care sustain it.

DARRYL PINCKNEY

For the longest time I called him Mr. Silvers. A couple of Elizabeth Hardwick’s other former students were his editorial assistants and I hung around the office while still an undergraduate. After college, I got temporary work in the mailroom of the Review. Then one day a parcel arrived at my apartment, a book and a letter from Robert Silvers. Maybe he used that phrase—to see what can be done. I’d never had a conversation of any kind with him before. I’d been introduced, but after that he lived in his own world in the office. Barbara Epstein in those early years wouldn’t talk to me any more than she had to. When it came time to discuss the piece, he was pleasant, talked easily of Jimmy Baldwin, and knew more about my subject than I expected him to. Professor Hardwick—not yet Lizzie to me—had been through the piece before I walked it in, so there was not too much of a painful nature left to say.

I’d sat down scared out of my head and I stood up still scared stupid and down through the next forty years I never, I mean never, got over being scared of him. James Fenton, my partner, could talk with him at length, but in a social setting, I had to let him turn away after two minutes or so. Mr. Silvers, back when, had among his assistants a smart, poised girl who was sometimes absent for elegant reasons. I became her substitute and so spent some hours with him, listening to him talk to others. One New Year’s Eve about nine o’clock I asked him if it would be OK if I went off. He said yes, but it would also be OK if I wanted to stay.

I also remember his tyranny in the office. It was tiresome for Barbara, because she grew up with a father who yelled. I’d gone from Mr. Silvers’s office to the typesetting studio to sitting outside Barbara’s office door and the hardest thing about being her assistant was learning, firstly, that you could not protect her from him, and, secondly, that she didn’t need anyone’s protection. Their battles were over a writer’s argument, a writer’s prose. The Review’s style emerged from Bob and Barbara’s clashes that, looking back, obscured how similar in sensibility they actually were. For me, it was part of the emotional chaos and intellectual thrill of the place. A cool friend who also worked at the Review had to warn me to chill the Review snob act a bit when we were hanging out downtown. The best thing about the Review was some of the people in the office, the friends you made, young writers whose work you fell for. And, yes, there was the education you got or made up for just by reading it.

There’s the first word and then there’s the last word, but even Edmund Wilson was dumb once, Lizzie said. Bob and Grace really loved her, and that was my bond with Bob, love for Elizabeth Hardwick and her love for The New York Review of Books, which, she said more than once, had saved her life.

YASMINE EL RASHIDI

When Bob took an interest in my world, he quite literally opened the world to me. Our relationship began with the Egyptian uprising of 2011, and in a conversation over those initial weeks that extended across months, into years, I lived and thought through with him the most profound experience of my life.

Bob gave me a sense of value as a writer—in the attention he offered, and in the trust. When he asked if something might be done about the Egyptian presidential election, he delighted in a piece that instead examined the particularities of the Egyptian bureaucracy. He sent clips, books, letters, offering you things to think about—consider—but in the end, he was genuinely interested in what as a writer you came back with, in content, voice, form. The Review quickly became my writing home, and Bob my measure, my guide. There was no other reader. He was the one who mattered most.

Bob cared about his writers—not just the legendary ones. He cared about our well-being, our safety, even our personal lives. After sharing an experience I had with Egyptian security that particularly rattled me, his concern grew, and he often called to ask if I felt safe, if I needed anything. He suggested ways I might tell the story, even perhaps “a short story” for the “paper” instead.

He stood by us, too. One of my last pieces for him, about the violent clashes between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood that followed the fall of President Mohamed Morsi’s government in the summer of 2013, generated an avalanche of controversy. Bob had pushed, respectfully, through a rigorous process of checking facts and statements to verify the position my reporting had led me to take—one that ran contrary to that of almost every major international news organization—and once the piece had gone to press, he was unflinching in his support. I heard of the critical and questioning letters from others, never him. He only ever thanked me for writing it.

Bob always seemed immensely pleased to see you. He made you feel as if there was nothing more thrilling—marvelous—in that moment than your company. He had an energy, enthusiasm, and buoyancy that were infectious, and he was magnanimous in every way. When I suggested that I might need some time away from Cairo, he did everything to support and make that possible, helping my passage to New York. And when I shared with him my struggle to write a nonfiction book on Egypt, he gently prodded, asking questions to coax out of me thoughts on the story I wanted to tell. He was the first to suggest that fiction might be the form for me. This was a measure of his openness—his understanding and care and sense of his writers beyond the scope of what was considered their realm; it was also part of why and how he came to be their friend as well.

Over the past two and a half years, as I worked on a piece for him from and about Cairo, we had lunches and exchanged e-mails and letters and occasionally the phone would ring. I walked the streets of my city thinking about everything with him in mind. He seemed unwavering in his patience and encouragement, still completely engaged and enthusiastic about the project twenty-eight months later. A couple of months before he died, in a letter about a novel he was sending me for review, he added a postscript about my “Notes”—as we had tentatively entitled the piece—suggesting that it “need not be conclusive.” In his absence, I feel a void, a sense of disorientation, the knowledge that my “Notes” will never, without his eyes, feel either conclusive or complete.

NATHANIEL RICH

Sharpening pencils, fetching dry cleaning, taking dictation, dodging sharpened pencils thrown at your head—life as Bob’s editorial assistant was unglamorous and often had little to do with editing. It took time to win his trust. As a new assistant, weeks removed from college graduation, I longed for an editorial assignment, the ultimate test of a staffer’s mettle. Bob only handed over essays that he had grown sick of trying to wrestle into coherence. These forsaken manuscripts sat on a corner of his desk, often buried under books, languishing for months if not years—the pariahs of the editorial roster. Bob rarely gave up on them but the presence of this pile was a constant affront, a black mark on an otherwise undefeated record.

My moment finally arrived several months into the job, when he lifted a manuscript from the pariah pile and called my name—itself a minor milestone in an assistant’s life, the direct address. My excitement curdled to dread when I saw the piece: a British lord’s assessment of a Nobel laureate’s monograph about economic modeling. I could not imagine an essay I was less suited to work on. I had defiantly avoided taking a single economics course in college and could not begin to understand any of the technical words the author used, let alone his argument. Ashamed, I admitted as much to Bob.

“Nonsense!” he said.

He explained that my ignorance of the subject, on the contrary, made me an ideal reader for the piece. He leapt from his chair and scanned the shelves behind his desk, where he kept his reference books. Down tumbled The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, Barron’s Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms, An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics, and a half-dozen other volumes, landing with thuds on his desk. All the definitions I needed could be found in these books, he said, before launching into a brief lecture on growth theory. My job, he explained, was to translate the piece into language that even a person as ignorant of economic theory as I was could understand.

This was my introduction to one of the central tenets of Bob’s editorial philosophy. Good writing is capable of bringing to life even the most arcane subjects. Big ideas demand vivid prose. Academic jargon is fatal, as are stock expressions, terms of art, empty metaphors. Dead language not only obscures the ideas it means to describe. It blocks original thinking. Many writers will say that Bob brought out their best prose. He did more than that. He brought out their highest thoughts.

Clarity of prose leads to clarity of mind. And without clarity of mind, moral clarity is impossible. I forgot what Bob taught me about economics but I’ll never forget that.

INGRID D. ROWLAND

After any phone conversation, Bob Silvers hung up with a distinctive, resonant klunk—he was done, he was satisfied, and it was time to get back to work. He called The New York Review “our little paper.” His was certainly an editorial “we”—and who, among editors, had more right to that regal pronoun?—but more importantly, that “we” reflected his sense that the paper truly belonged to all of us: readers, writers, editors, printers, publishers, the people who run newsstands in Athens and Rome and all the other surprising corners of the world where The New York Review has become part of life. Pondered quietly, hotly argued, it outlives the paper on which it is printed through memories of words, phrases, readings, experiences, through conversations between people who have connected with one another because of its existence.

And Bob, like an orchestra conductor or a theatrical director, could fixate obsessively on the tiniest detail of phrasing or punctuation without ever losing his grasp of the whole enterprise. In many ways, “our little paper” is a fluid, ephemeral enterprise, writ on water, as Keats might say, but what does water do? When drop meets drop, the two merge to create a rivulet, a stream, the Amazon. Water moves forever onward, bound for the sea—except when it leaps, on clouds, straight into the sky. However fleeting an article, an issue, or a reader’s reverie may be in itself, the momentum they create, like the momentum of water, is relentless. Bob’s great gift was the ability to guide that momentum in every direction, into the desert, into the darkness, into the light. He lived, ultimately, for love and beauty, and he followed them into that good night.

ZADIE SMITH

A writer friend asked me: What was it about Bob? The edit? Or the commission? Another writer present—who also wrote for Bob—laughed at the word “commission,” and I realized I found it strange, too. Bob didn’t commission as much as elicit, a word whose Latin root means “to draw out by trickery or magic.” He was an expert eliciter. The very first time I wrote for him was because I made the mistake of saying, during the course of a casual conversation, “Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about Kafka.” Kafka! He said the name back to me as if I had just mentioned the very latest literary sensation. “Well, why don’t we see if something can’t be done about that?”

A fairly recent book about Kafka soon arrived at my door, then several others. Then articles and notes and more books. This was disarming. My experience writing for editors up to that point had been confined to British newspapers where the emphasis was upon speed, topicality, and personal alignment with the subject. There’s nothing a British editor likes more than sending out a recent novel about the Berlin Wall to a writer who only last year wrote a novel about the Berlin Wall.

I wrote on Kafka, it ran, we were off. Many more pieces on even less likely subjects followed. Bob gave a lot of freedom to his writers, but the way he handled pieces was the opposite of a free-for-all. It’s a combination difficult to describe. The things you could get away with at the Review you could never get away with elsewhere: Bob wasn’t a grammar weenie; he didn’t rule out the personal or obscenity. He prized rationality and clarity but not at the expense of passion. He taught you not to speak vaguely of “historical context,” or indeed overuse “vaguely,” or suggest that two things were “inextricably entwined.”

But it was more than that. He valued individual sensibilities, more than any editor I ever knew. Though often accused of relying on too small a circle of contributors, it cannot be said that his paper suffered from a uniformity of tone. To read it cover-to-cover was to experience stylistic whiplash, from the conversational to the drily academic, from aggressive provocation to the intimate or dreamily philosophic. Bob’s “paper” was a very broad church with a narrow entrance marked: if it’s good.

I don’t know if he ever realized how little I’d known or understood in the beginning. Didn’t know my favorite Sontag essays came out of this “paper,” or that Bob had edited Baldwin, or known Lowell intimately, or helped edit the early Paris Review. We’d had lunch quite a few times before I learned he was a Jewish boy from Long Island rather than the Bostonian wasp that—from his fancy suits and frequent references to Lowell—I had somehow imagined he was. But being very stupid about lots of things was not a disqualifying trait in Bob’s mind: like an indulgent parent he focused on your peculiar strengths. He was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least if it came at the price of a readable sentence.

His greatest pleasure was those people who approached his own intellectual ambidexterity: a doctor with a fancy prose style, say, or a president who understood and appreciated poetry. When considering such people he would get a very merry look in his eye—since he is not editing this piece let’s call it a “glint”—and say, “Well, now, he’s really a sort of genius you know, a genius! Ha! Ha!” Always the happy laugh at the end. Other people’s genius aroused no envy in him; it was only ever a source of delight.

About the rest of us he had a clear eye. She’s a bit weak on Iraq but absolutely marvelous on Alexander Pope. He knows everything about the theater but nothing at all about politics. This is presumably what allowed him to decide, very early on, that he wasn’t a writer himself, though I always found it hard to believe: the way he edited was effectively writing. It was like having a second architect appear during construction, suggesting a west wing here or a second floor. You could get a bit petulant about it. Have you considered x? is not always what you want to hear when you’ve just written two thousand words on y. But he was always right.

“Will Bob be there? I owe him a piece.” An anxious query tacked onto many an RSVP for a New York literary party. But even if you didn’t owe him you had to be careful: in company Bob was like a shark in a shoal, trawling for pieces, waiting for unsuspecting writers to drunkenly let slip that they were interested in Sibelius or Croatia or had a theory about Philip Glass. Sometimes the process of eliciting could feel a little like entrapment. Not because he was strict with a deadline, but because to agree to write something for Bob was to know there was no way you’d be phoning it in, you’d be holding yourself to the highest standard—his.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of Bob’s legacy is the generations of editorial assistants he spread abroad. Whenever I am being particularly astutely edited elsewhere it usually turns out that the red pen belongs to an ex-assistant of Bob’s. Thank God—I always need the help. Many of Bob’s writers were Nobel Prize winners, true geniuses, all-rounders of the C.P. Snow variety. They would have written brilliantly anywhere. But there were others, like me, from whom Bob not only elicited work, but helped directly to improve, educate, and form. I loved him for it and I’ll miss writing for him so much.

Additional remembrances of Robert Silvers by more than sixty New York Review contributors and friends can be found at nybooks.com/rbs.

The post Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

French schoolchildren used to be taught that they were descended from the Gauls, a tribe that emerged around the fifth century BC. It is a common conceit of nineteenth-century nationalism that citizens of modern nation-states can trace their national origins back to a remote past. Not so long ago, a Japanese professor maintained that “Japanese values” were already in evidence more than ten thousand years ago among the Jomon period hunter-gatherers.

Much of this is nonsense. But the Chinese at least have a better claim than most people of being heirs to a unified culture that began roughly in the third century BC. This idea forms the basis of the fascinating exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Qin and Han dynasty artifacts. Almost all the objects lay buried for many centuries in tombs. That is why we can see perfectly preserved lacquer ware from a burial site in Sichuan, richly colored textiles from the far west of China, the body of Dou Wan, wife of Prince Jing, encased in a suit made of jade, and much more. And all these are more than two thousand years old.

In 221 BC, the Qin conquered six other kingdoms in what is now geographically a part of China. Under the first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi—reviled in Chinese history as a tyrant, but much admired by the no less brutal Mao Zedong—the Chinese language was unified in a common writing system. A common currency was introduced, as well as a system of weights and measures. Central power was exercised through an elaborate bureaucracy. The First Emperor also mobilized hundreds of thousands of slave workers and convicts to build roads, waterways, and, most famously, parts of what came to be known as the Great Wall.

The Han dynasty that toppled the Qin in 206 BC was in many ways more humane. Whereas the First Emperor allegedly buried Confucian scholars alive after burning their books, because, rather like Chairman Mao, he wished to start his reign on a clean slate and couldn’t tolerate dissent, Confucianism became the state ideology under the Han emperors. Rare stone tablets from the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25-220), engraved with texts from Confucian classics, that once stood in front of a lecture hall, were excavated in the 1980s, and are now on show at the Met.

Zhixin Jason Sun, who curated the exhibition, writes in the catalogue that the dominance of Confucian thought “undoubtedly struck a heavy blow against intellectual development, and, consequently, had a lasting negative effect over the next two millennia.” This is one of the clichés of leftist Chinese propaganda. Confucianism, revised endlessly by scholarship over the last two thousand years, is too diverse a philosophy to lend itself to such a sweeping statement. The least one can say is that from the beginning Confucian ideas constituted a secular attempt to devise a moral political order. That it was often used—and still is—as a doctrine of bureaucratic oppression should not obscure its remarkably enlightened origins. Contrary to what the current Communist Party, or indeed the likes of Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean prime minister, have made of it, an important strand of Confucianism, developed by the fourth-century philosopher Mencius, holds that people have the right to rebel against an unjust ruler.

Even though certain aspects of Chinese civilization, such as the uniform written language, do indeed go all the way back to the First Emperor of Qin, it is highly unlikely that most people living under his rule, or indeed in later dynasties, thought of themselves as “Chinese” in the same way citizens of the PRC or Taiwan, or in the global Chinese diaspora, do now. Still, the exhibition reminded me of an experience I had a few decades ago, when I visited the Chinese galleries at the British Museum in London after seeing a show of Russian Orthodox art. It felt like coming back to a familiar world of plain humanity, after being immersed in sacred images meant to awe the viewer in a display of religious power. And there is something rather Chinese about that.

What is striking even of the artifacts produced under the despotic Qin emperor is how down to earth many of them are. The soldiers in his terracotta army, protecting the emperor in his tomb, are not stylized figures, or symbols of otherworldly power, but individual human beings sculpted with a remarkable sense of realism. “Down to earth” is of course a relative concept, since the bulk of the objects on display were dug up from the tombs of aristocrats, whose lives would have had very little in common with the peasants who provided them with their food, dug the canals, served in the imperial armies, and built the first bits of the Great Wall.

It would also be a mistake to forget how different people in the distant (or even the not so distant) past were to most of us in the way they saw the world. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese who could afford to think about such things at all were obsessed with notions of immortality and the afterlife. That is why we can still enjoy the glories of the terracotta soldiers in the Qin Emperor’s vast tomb that was a microcosm of life on earth. There were sculptures of pet animals too, and dancers and acrobats to entertain him, and model palaces, parks, and pavilions. Rivers of mercury wended their way through mountain ranges of bronze. And the bones of his concubines, sacrificed to comfort their ruler in the afterlife, were found inside the tomb as well.

From the First Emperor’s tomb to funerals in our own time, the traditional Chinese view of the afterlife is hardly any different from life on earth. People are still buried with paper money and model cars, as well as food. The superbly crafted Han dynasty bronze bowls, wine vessels, and lamps, and the exquisite red and black lacquer food containers, would have been of practical use to the deceased if they had indeed lived on as people believed they would. In life after death, the Chinese grandees were still expected to take delight in the beauties of nature, splendid animals, good food and fine wines, as well as graceful dancers and bed companions. Having been beautifully preserved underground for thousands of years, these objects delight us still.

One of the attractive qualities of Qin and Han culture, shared by the arts of many later eras, is their cosmopolitanism. Chinese artisans and their patrons loved to adopt and adapt designs and shapes imported from Iran, India, Central Asia, and perhaps even ancient Greece. Golden ornaments with horse motifs that predate the Qin dynasty show the influence of Scythian designs. Gold beads excavated from Han tombs are worked with fine filigree that suggests Persian or Bactrian origins. Even during periods of oppressive central control, China was never really closed to outside influences.

This high level of sophistication creates the illusion that if we were to meet a cultivated Chinese of the second century BC at a dinner party today, we would have much to talk about. It is easy to forget that the past remains another country. But perhaps it isn’t a complete illusion. Despite periods of horrendous violence, savage wars, and cruel oppression, something of the humanist spirit of ancient China has survived. In another thousand years, if mankind is still around, Chairman Mao’s attempt to stamp it out will look like a tiny blip in Chinese history. There is consolation in that.

“Age of Empires: Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 16.

The post The Earthy Glories of Ancient China appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Of all the masters of the woodblock print in the Edo Period, Utamaro has the most colorful reputation. Hokusai was perhaps the greatest draughtsman, Hiroshige excelled in landscapes, and Kuniyoshi had the wildest theatrical flair. Utamaro (1753–1806) was the lover of women.

Not only did he create extraordinary prints and paintings of female beauties, often high-class prostitutes, but he was also, it was said, a great habitué of the brothels in Edo himself. Prostitutes, even at the top end of the market, no longer have any of the glamor associated with their trade in eighteenth-century Japan, but “Utamaro” is the name of a large number of massage parlors that still dot the areas where famous pleasure districts once used to be. Even in Utamaro’s time, the glamor of prostitutes was largely a fantasy promoted in guidebooks and prints. He made a living providing pictures of the “floating world” of commercial sex, commissioned by publishers who were paid by the brothel owners.

Three remarkable paintings by Utamaro set in different red light districts in Edo are the main attraction of “Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered,” a fascinating exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. The last time all three were seen together was in the late 1880s in Paris. The Japanese dealer Hayashi Tadamasa kept the earliest (between 1780 and 1790) and best one for himself. It is called Moon at Shinagawa (1788–1790), and shows an elegant teahouse with a view of the sea. A number of finely dressed “courtesans” are seen playing musical instruments, reading poems, and bringing out dainty dishes. This painting was acquired by Charles Lang Freer in 1903 and is now part of the Freer/Sackler collection.

Cherry Blossoms in Yoshiwara (1792–1794), a gaudier picture of women singing and dancing in a typical teahouse/brothel with cherry blossom trees in full bloom outside, was sold to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1950s. But the whereabouts of the third picture was a mystery until it suddenly turned up at the Okada Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, in 2014. Snow at Fukagawa (1802–1806), a little clumsily touched up recently by a Chinese restorer, again shows a tableau of women engaged in various activities—playing the three-stringed samisen, carrying bedding, drinking—associated with a house of pleasure.

In all three pictures, there is an almost total absence of men. These are women on display for the eyes of men, no doubt, advertisements for the sexual trade that played such an important part in the merchant culture of the Edo Period (1603–1868). Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusements of varying degrees of sophistication acted out in a narrow and interconnected world of brothels and Kabuki theaters. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening to the authorities than political activity. (Utamaro was arrested once, not for his pornographic prints, but for depicting samurai grandees, which was forbidden.) And the roles played by the women in this world, especially the high-class ones, were hardly less stylized and artificial than those performed at the Kabuki.

Utamaro’s personal reputation as a ladies’ man may be as imaginary as the sexual games acted out in the brothels. Very little is known about his life. It is known that he trained as an apprentice to an artist named Toriyama Sekien, who switched from the austere art of the Kano School to making prints of ogres and other fantastical figures in illustrated books.

The legend of Utamaro as a demon of art, as well as an erotic connoisseur, began early on, but was later burnished in a movie by the great director Mizoguchi Kenji, entitled Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), which was based on a novel of the same title. The portrayal of the artist probably owes more to the way Mizoguchi saw himself than to historical accuracy.

The exotic image of traditional Japan as a kind of paradise of sexual refinement, which was already the product of a fantasy world promoted by artists like Utamaro, appealed to sophisticated collectors, writers, and artists in late-nineteenth-century Paris. The pleasure world of the Edo Period was seen as an elegant and sensuous antidote to the ugliness of the industrial age. And the same was true in Japan.

At first, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the Japanese were eager to modernize along Western lines, the hedonism of Floating World prints, and the wilder shores of Kabuki, were considered rather shameful. Soon, however, the popular theatrical genres and sensual entertainments of the past calcified in the culture of geisha and in classical Japanese theater, shorn of its wild inventiveness. But the art of Utamaro still retains the old spirit, which now evokes feelings of nostalgia.

The three paintings at the Sackler are unsigned and their provenance is cloudy. They may not be entirely the work of Utamaro. Some experts even claim that one or two of them are not by Utamaro at all. Another mystery lies in their odd sizes, much too big to be hung in a traditional Japanese alcove, or even on the walls of a Japanese house. Yet the subject matter would seem rather unsuitable for display in a temple. Many a fake Utamaro was made for the Western market, hungry for Japanese exotica. But these pictures seem too fine for that.

There are other items in the Sackler show that are well worth studying, especially a number of beautiful prints and illustrated books by Utamaro and others. At the very end of the exhibition there is a large color photograph of a brothel in Tokyo, probably taken at the end of the nineteenth century. We see several rows of what look like very young girls waiting behind wooden bars to be selected by clients passing by. They were virtually enslaved by their employers. Most died of disease in their twenties. It is a reminder that the highest artistic achievements sometimes emerge from the most squalid circumstances.

“Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered” is at the Sackler Gallery through July 9.

The post Myth-Maker of the Brothel appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

1.

The main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a “citadel of boredom.” But there were moments of drama: Hermann Göring under cross-examination running rings around the chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, for example. Jackson’s opening statement, however, provided the trial’s most famous words:

We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.

How well humanity lived up to these words, after a good number of bloody conflicts involving some of the same powers that sat in judgment on the Nazi leaders, is the subject of The Memory of Justice, the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is considered by its director, Marcel Ophuls, to be his best—even better, perhaps, than his more famous The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the Nazi occupation of France, the Vichy government, and the French Resistance.

Near the beginning of The Memory of Justice, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin declares that the barbarism of Nazi Germany can only be seen as a universal moral catastrophe: “I proceed from the assumption that every human being is guilty.” The fact that it happened in Germany, he says, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen elsewhere. This statement comes just after we have seen the Nazi leaders, one after the other, declare their innocence in the Nuremberg courtroom.

We also hear a former French paratrooper recall how the French in Algeria systematically tortured and murdered men, women, and children. There are gruesome images of the Vietnam War. And Telford Taylor, US counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg, wonders how any of us would cope with the “degeneration of standards under pressures.” Later in the film, Taylor says that his views on Americans and American history have changed more than his views on the Germans whom he once judged.

Such juxtapositions are enough to send some people into a fury. The art critic Harold Rosenberg accused Ophuls in these pages of being “lured…into a near-nihilistic bog in which no one is guilty, because all are guilty and there is no one who is morally qualified to judge.”¹ Ophuls, according to Rosenberg, “trivialized” the Nazi crimes and “diluted” the moral awfulness of the death camps.

This is to misunderstand what Ophuls was up to. The film never suggests that Auschwitz and the My Lai massacre, or French torture prisons in Algiers, are equivalent, let alone that the Vietnam War was a criminal enterprise on the same level as the Holocaust. Nor does Ophuls doubt that the judgment on Göring and his gang at Nuremberg was justified. Ophuls himself was a refugee from the Nazis, forced to leave Germany in 1933, and to flee again when France was invaded in 1940. Instead he tries, dispassionately and sometimes with touches of sardonic humor, to complicate the problem of moral judgment. What makes human beings who are normally unexceptional commit atrocities under abnormal circumstances? What if such crimes are committed by our fellow citizens in the name of our own country? How does our commitment to justice appear today in the light of the judgments at Nuremberg? Will the memory of justice, as Plato assumed, make us strive to do better?

Ophuls does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us to look in the mirror.

It is true that Ophuls does not interview former Nazis, such as Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, as a prosecutor. His role is not to indict, but to understand better what motivates such men, especially men (and women) who seem otherwise quite civilized. For this, too, Rosenberg condemned him, arguing that he should have balanced the views voiced by these criminals with those of their victims, for otherwise viewers might give the old rogues the benefit of the doubt.

There seems to be little danger of that. Consider Dönitz, for example, who makes the bizarre statement that he could not have been anti-Semitic, since he never discriminated against Jews in the German navy, forgetting for a moment that there were no known Jews in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. When Ophuls asks him whether he really believes that there was no connection between his ferociously anti-Semitic speeches and the fate of the Jews under the government he served, the admiral’s tight little mouth twitches alarmingly before denying everything in the harsh yelp of a cornered dog. This speaks for itself, and needs no “balancing” by another voice.

Ophuls is a superb interviewer, polite, cool, and relentless. His tone is often skeptical, but never moralistic or aggressive. This allows him to get people to say things they may not have divulged to a more confrontational interlocutor. Albert Speer was responsible for, among other things, the ghastly fate of countless slave laborers pulled from concentration camps to work in German armaments factories. Responding to Ophuls’s quiet probing, this most slippery of customers speaks at length about the moral blindness and criminal opportunism that came from his ruthless ambition. Unlike most Germans of his generation, Speer believed that the Nuremberg trials were justified. But then, he could be said to have got off rather lightly with a prison sentence rather than being hanged.

Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.” In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.

Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

2.

Far from being a moral nihilist who trivialized the Nazi crimes, Ophuls was so committed to his examination of guilt and justice that The Memory of Justice had a narrow escape from oblivion. The companies that commissioned it, including the BBC, did not like the rough cut. They thought it was far too long. Since the film was to be based on Telford Taylor’s book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970), they wanted more on the Vietnam War and less on Nuremberg. Rejection only made Ophuls, who never took kindly to being told what to do by the men in suits, stick more stubbornly to his own vision. He was less interested in a specifically American tragedy, or indeed a German tragedy, than in man’s descent into barbarousness, wherever or whenever it happens.

Ophuls was locked out of the cutting room in London. The producers put together a shorter version of the film, with a different spin, which was sold to ZDF television in Germany. Ophuls then traveled all over Europe to save his own version. A German court stopped ZDF from showing the shorter one. The original edit was smuggled to the US, where a private screening reduced Mike Nichols to tears. Hamilton Fish, later a well-known publisher, managed to persuade a group of investors to buy the original movie back and Paramount to distribute it. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, and then in New York and on college campuses, as well as on television in many countries. But for the cussed perseverance of Ophuls and the help of his American backers, The Memory of Justice would never have been seen. In Fish’s words, “You needed his type of personality to make such a film. He took history on personally.”

After its initial run, however, the movie disappeared. Contracts on archival rights ran out. The film stock was in danger of deteriorating. And so a documentary masterpiece could easily have been lost if Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation had not stepped in with Paramount to put it all back together again, a labor that took ten years and was completed in 2015.

Much has changed, of course, since 1976. Germany is a different country now, geographically, politically, and culturally. When Ophuls talked to Dönitz, the West German establishment was still riddled with former Nazis. Most of the wartime generation masked their dirty secrets with evasions or shabby justifications. The history of the Third Reich, in the words of Eugen Kogon, a Holocaust survivor and the first German historian to write about the camps, was still “the corpse in the cellar.”

Quite ordinary people, like the smiling man encountered by Ophuls in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, still remembered the Third Reich with great fondness as an orderly time when people knew how to behave and there was “no problem of crime.” Ophuls happened to meet this friendly burgher while he was trying to track down a female doctor who had been convicted at Nuremberg for murdering children in concentration camps by injecting oil into their veins, to name just one of her grisly experiments. After she was released from prison in 1952, she continued for a time to practice as a family doctor. She was, it appears, well respected, even friendly.

When Ophuls finally managed to find her, she very politely declined to be interviewed, since she was in poor health. Another former concentration camp doctor, Gerhard Rose, did agree to talk, however, but only to deny any guilt, claiming that his medical experiments (infecting victims with malaria, for example) served a humanitarian purpose, and that the US Army performed experiments too. Ophuls observes, quite rightly, that American experiments were hardly conducted under the kind of circumstances prevailing in Dachau and Buchenwald. But the hypocrisy of the Western Allies in this matter might have been better illustrated by pointing out that German and Japanese doctors who committed even worse crimes than Dr. Rose were protected by the US government because their knowledge might come in handy during the cold war.²

Perhaps the most disturbing interview in the movie is not with an unrepentant Nazi or a war criminal, but with the gentlemanly and highly esteemed lawyer Otto Kranzbühler. A navy judge during the war, Kranzbühler was defense counsel for Admiral Dönitz at Nuremberg, where he cut a dashing figure in his navy uniform. He later had a successful career as a corporate lawyer, after defending the likes of Alfried Krupp against accusations of having exploited slave labor. Kranzbühler never justified Nazism. But when asked by Ophuls whether he had discussed his own part in the Third Reich with his children, he replied that he had come up with a formula to make them understand: if you were ignorant of what went on, you were a fool; if you knew, but looked the other way, you were a coward; if you knew, and took part, you were a criminal. Were his children reassured? Kranzbühler: “My children didn’t recognize their father in any of the above.”

It was a brilliant evasion. But Kranzbühler was no more evasive than the French prosecutor at Nuremberg, the equally urbane Edgar Faure, who had been a member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Ophuls asked him about French war crimes during the Algerian War of Independence, when torture was systematically applied, civilians were massacred, and prisoners were thrown out of helicopters, a practice that later became widespread under South American military regimes. “Well,” said Faure, “events do get out of hand. But you can’t really criticize politicians who have the difficult task of running the government.” Edgar Faure was prime minister of France during part of that war.

The 1970s were a critical time in Germany. There were still people, like the son of the former Waffen SS officer interviewed by Ophuls, who believed that the Nazi death camps were a lie, and it was the Americans who built the gas chambers in concentration camps. But the postwar generation had begun to question their parents amid the student revolts of the 1960s. Just a year after The Memory of Justice was completed, radicalism in Germany turned toxic, when members of the Red Army Faction murdered bankers, kidnapped industrialists, and hijacked planes, all in the name of antifascism, as though to make up for their parents’ complicity with the Nazis.

German families were torn apart by memories of the war. Ophuls includes his own not uncomplicated family in the film. His German wife, Regine, the daughter of a Wehrmacht veteran, speaks openly to American students about her own childhood under the Nazis. One of their teenaged daughters talks about the need to come to terms with the past, even though their mother finds seventeen a little too young to be confronted with images of concentration camps. Then Regine says something personal that cuts to the core of her husband’s life and work. She wishes sometimes that Ophuls would make films that were not about such dark matters. What kind of films? he asks. Lubitsch films, she replies, or My Fair Lady all over again. We then hear Cyd Charisse singing “New Sun in the Sky” from The Band Wagon (1953), while watching Ophuls in a car on his way to find the doctor who murdered children in concentration camps.

This is typical of the Ophuls touch, show tunes evoking happier times overlapping with memories of horror. The motive is not to pile on cheap irony, but to bring in a note of autobiography. His father was Max Ophuls, the great director of Liebelei (1933), La Ronde (1950), and Lola Montès (1955). Max was one of the geniuses of the exile cinema. Memories of a sweeter life in imperial Vienna or nineteenth-century France are darkened in his films by a sense of betrayal and perverse sexuality.

Nostalgia for better days haunted his son, who spent his youth on the run from terror with a father whose genius he always felt he couldn’t live up to. He would have loved to direct movies like La Ronde. Instead he made great documentary films about the past that won’t let him go, about Vichy France, or Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Lyon, or Nuremberg. The true horror stories are mixed in all his work, as in a collage, with songs from pre-war Berlin music halls and Hollywood movies.

One of the most unforgettable examples of the Ophuls touch is a scene in a film that has almost never been viewed (another bitter fight with producers). November Days (1991) is about the fall of the Berlin wall. One of the people he interviews is Markus Wolf, the former East German spy chief, whose father, the Communist writer Friedrich Wolf, had known Max Ophuls in pre-war Berlin. While Markus dodges every question about his past with blatant lies, we hear music from one of Max’s movies slowly swell on the soundtrack as Marcel thinks out loud to himself how lucky he was that his father decided to move west instead of east.

3.

In the second half of The Memory of Justice, the focus shifts from east to west, as it were, from Germany to France and the US. Daniel Ellsberg, speaking of Vietnam, says that “this war will cause us to be monstrous.” We hear stories from men who were there of American soldiers murdering civilians in cold blood. We hear a Vietnam veteran talk about being told to shut up by his superiors when he reports a massacre of civilians ordered by his commanding officer. We hear Ellsberg say that no one higher than a lieutenant was ever convicted for the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in My Lai.

On the French side, stories about summary executions and the use of torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962) are followed by a crucial question put by Ophuls to Edgar Faure, the former Nuremberg prosecutor and later prime minister of France: Did he, Edgar Faure, think the French would have accepted an international commission that would judge, on the basis of Nuremberg, what the French did in Algeria? No, said Faure, after a pensive suck on his pipe, since one cannot compare the invasion of another country to the actions taken by a sovereign state in its own colony.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, speaking to Ophuls in his elegant country house in Sussex, remembers how much his American colleagues had believed in justice and the rule of law. Like other British officials at the time, he took a more cynical view: “All law is created by the victors for the vanquished.” What mattered in his opinion, however, was not who made the laws, but whether the principles were right. About this he had little doubt.

Looking back, Otto Kranzbühler shared Shawcross’s memory of American idealism. But he believed that as a model for the future, Nuremberg had been a failure. The trial, as he saw it, presupposed a united world community in which wars would be a thing of the past. This illusion did not last long.

In fact, the trial was tainted from the beginning, not only because among the men who judged the Nazi leaders were Soviet veterans of Stalin’s bloody show trials, but also because Allied war crimes could not even be mentioned. A former British officer involved in the wartime bomber command had no doubt that the destruction of Dresden was a war crime.

If The Memory of Justice has a weakness, it is that this second half of the film, concentrating on French and American war crimes, is not quite as gripping as the first half about the German legacy of Nuremberg. Perhaps Ophuls’s heart was not in it to the same extent. Or perhaps no matter what one thinks of My Lai or Algiers, they are overshadowed by the sheer scale and savagery of the Nazi crimes.

Then again, pace Rosenberg, Ophuls doesn’t suggest that they are equivalent. What is comparable is the way people look away from, or justify, or deny what is done in their name, or under their watch. The wife of a US marine who died in Vietnam, living in a house stuffed with flags and military memorabilia, simply refuses to entertain the idea that her country could ever do anything wrong. More interesting, and perhaps more damning, is the statement by John Kenneth Galbraith, an impeccably liberal former diplomat and economist. His view of the Vietnam War, he tells Ophuls, had been entirely practical, without any consideration of moral implications.

Vietnam was not the Eastern Front in 1943. My Lai was not Auschwitz. And Galbraith was certainly no Albert Speer. Nevertheless, this technocratic view of violent conflict is precisely what leads many people so far astray under a criminal regime. In the film, Ellsberg describes the tunnel vision of Speer as “controlled stupidity,” the refusal to see the consequences of what one does and stands for.

This brings to mind another brilliant documentary about controlled stupidity, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War (2003), featuring Robert McNamara, the technocrat behind the annihilation of Japanese cities in World War II and the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. To him, the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians was a mathematical problem. Only many years later did he admit that if the US had lost World War II, he could certainly have been indicted as a war criminal.

Even more chilling is another documentary by Morris, which received less attention than The Fog of War. In The Unknown Known (2013), we see Donald Rumsfeld, another gentlemanly technocrat, shrug his shoulders about Vietnam, commenting that “sometimes things just don’t work out.” When, as the result of another war in which he was even more intimately involved, Baghdad was convulsed in anarchic violence, he notoriously remarked that “stuff happens.” This is what Hannah Arendt called a “criminal lack of imagination.”

Perhaps the US in 1945 set its ideals too high. But it is a tragedy that the same country that believed in international law, and did so much to establish the norms of justice, has done so little to live up to them. The US is not even a signatory to the International Criminal Court, a flawed institution like the Nuremberg tribunal, but a necessary step in the right direction. No one can hold the greatest military power on earth accountable for what it does, not for torture rooms in Abu Ghraib, not for locking people up indefinitely without trial, not for murdering civilians with drones.

For Germans living under the Third Reich it was risky to imagine too well what their rulers were doing. To protest was positively dangerous. This is not yet true for those of us living in the age of Trump, when the president of the US openly condones torture and applauds thugs for beating up people at his rallies. We need films like this masterpiece by Ophuls more than ever to remind us of what happens when even the memories of justice fade away.

The post Fools, Cowards, or Criminals? appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait:

I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time…. Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.

Most people can come up with a decent photograph once in a while, which will look like millions of other photographs. Only the greatest photographers can be easily identified by a unique personal style. Moriyama is one of them. There are some recurring images, in different settings, in color and black-and-white, many of which appear in the three books under review: the grainy close-up of a torn pornographic film poster on a peeling wall; a woman’s legs in mesh tights picked out in a crowded street; a filth-strewn back alley crisscrossed with electric wires; a blown-up newspaper photograph; net curtains in a cheap hotel room; a dilapidated old bar with broken neon lights. Moriyama has an exact eye for the textures of urban life, often decaying, ephemeral, sadly alluring in their temporary shine. In his photographs even inanimate objects, such as pipelines or motorcycle engines, have a vaguely anthropomorphic air about them; they look sexy.

The art of the ephemeral, the melancholy of the fleeting moment, has a long history in Japanese art, but Moriyama has focused his sensibility not on such traditional clichés as the cherry blossom (although in fact he has done that too), but on the commercialized, Americanized, plastic-fantastic, sometimes violent, sometimes erotic surfaces of the modern city. Christopher Isherwood once said about Los Angeles, the city he made his own:

What was there, on this shore, a hundred years ago? Practically nothing. And which, of all these flimsy structures, will be standing a hundred years from now? Probably not a single one. Well, I like that thought. It is bracingly realistic. In such surroundings, it is easier to remember and accept the fact that you won’t be here, either.

The urban sprawl of Southern California, with its billboards, strip malls, and pastiche architecture offering dreams of other places, has been a kind of model for postwar Japanese cities, which often look like much denser versions of Los Angeles. Not only was Tokyo almost entirely destroyed twice in the twentieth century—the first time by a firestorm following the terrible earthquake of 1923 and the second time by B-29 bombers in 1945, when much of the city went up in flames once more—but after the war it was rebuilt very fast in a nationwide scramble for economic revival under American tutelage. To find elements of traditional beauty in modern Tokyo or Osaka, where Moriyama grew up, you have to look very carefully around all the modern mess. The art of Moriyama is to ignore those pretty bits and make the messy look beautiful.

Moriyama is not the only artist to work that vein. Reveling in the dirt of postwar urban life has been the mark of many Japanese filmmakers, dancers, novelists, manga artists, and photographers. Moriyama has collaborated with several of them, such as the playwright, poet, and film director Terayama Shūji and the Butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, both of whom used the Tokyo streets as the backdrop of their performances, which were photographed in the 1960s by the young Moriyama.

A huge influence on Moriyama in those days was the photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei, who was eight years older (Moriyama was born in 1938). Tōmatsu’s attitude toward what the Americans had wrought in Japan, during the military occupation but also during the period that followed, when American-style commercial culture wiped out much of what was left of Japanese tradition, was a combination of rage and fascination. This, too, was rather typical of Japanese artists of his generation.

Tōmatsu’s angry enchantment resulted in an extraordinary series of photographs, all in black-and-white, made in and around US military bases in Okinawa and other parts of Japan. There is hostility in his pictures of GIs snarling at the camera or wrapping their meaty arms around petite Japanese bar hostesses, or of massive B-52 bombers flying low over rice paddies as they come roaring into Misawa or Kadena Air Base. But the Coca-Cola culture and the neon-lit bars and the large foreigners in jeeps with money to burn had a glamorous appeal too. Many Japanese men of Tōmatsu’s age felt humiliated by the overpowering presence of alien victors on their soil and envious at the same time of their free and easy ways, their wealth, their sharp uniforms and cool aviator shades. The occupation also contained the possibilities of greater freedom.

There is less evidence of anger than of fascination in Moriyama’s photographs, some of them taken around the same US bases. Like many other Japanese, he was influenced by Americans whose art was an expression of rebellion against the conventional values of their own culture. The filmmaker Oshima Nagisa, for example, was a fierce critic of US political influence on postwar Japan, yet he was bowled over by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Moriyama was a passionate reader of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But his real hero was the American photographer William Klein, whose book on New York, published in 1956, was a revelation: the in-your-face close-ups of city crowds, the edginess, the violent allure, the high contrast, tilted angles, and rough, grainy texture.

Moriyama was shocked by Klein’s pictures of street kids pointing a gun at the camera, brightly lit cinema marquees, dead stares of people in the subway, and so on. “Klein’s images,” Moriyama later recalled, “made me realize the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art.” In 1961, Klein came to photograph Tokyo in the same free, kinetic manner, poking his camera into bathhouses, subways, hair salons, and squalid back streets—all the things Japanese officials desperately keen to show their country off to its best advantage would have liked to hide from foreign eyes, and all the things young photographers like Moriyama found immensely stimulating. One of the most stunning photographs taken by Klein was of Hijikata’s half-naked Butoh dance troupe striking weird poses in a rainy Tokyo alley. On the right you can just see the veteran dancer Ohno Kazuo in drag.

That same year, Moriyama was assisting Hosoe Eikoh on a famous book of photographs of the writer Mishima Yukio, posing naked or dressed in nothing but a loincloth, together with some of Hijikata’s dancers. Not long after that, Moriyama struck out on his own, roaming the streets of Shinjuku, an area of Tokyo that combined the seediness of Times Square in the 1960s and the avant-garde glamor of downtown New York in the 1970s. It was there, around the exit of the teeming railway station, that underground theater troupes performed and anti–Vietnam War demonstrators gathered. Shinjuku had department stores and cinemas, but also warrens of tiny streets lined with bars that once had been brothels.

Prowling the streets of Shinjuku’s Kabukicho, a dense cluster of alleys with bars, strip clubs, massage parlors, comedy clubs, jazz coffee shops, and short-time hotels, Moriyama photographed details that echoed Klein’s work but showed different aesthetic preoccupations. Klein was interested in faces and crowds and the way people move their bodies. Moriyama—and here Warhol was also an influence—was interested in the dreams that cities sell: posters, neon signs, newspapers, clothes, porn magazines, and movies. He has described Shinjuku “as a giant stage backdrop, sometimes as an expanded gekiga [illustrated story], an eternal shantytown…. Mysteriously, there is no sense of time: almost no trace of the passing of time can be found here, the time that every city experiences in its own way.”

What traces history had left in this modern labyrinth were not in buildings but in facsimiles of the past, which Moriyama often photographed: television shows glimpsed in shop windows, advertising using traditional images, close-ups of movie screens. There was only one instance when a historic time was fixed in Shinjuku, according to Moriyama, and that was when “Shinjuku was radiantly radical at the end of the 1960s, a single occasion which caused October 21, 1968 to be inscribed in its annals. All time before and after this date has completely disappeared from its history.”

This is a slight exaggeration. October 21, 1968, is when Shinjuku erupted in student riots on International Anti-War Day. Such violent demonstrations have not been repeated since, but even that date is now largely forgotten. In 1968, Moriyama was part of a group of “engaged” young photographers involved in a short-lived magazine called Provoke, whose aim was to express social and political protest. It included figures like Taki Kōji and Nakahira Takuma, who photographed student demonstrations from the point of view of active supporters. A handsome book, entitled Provoke—which was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in early 2017—shows the work of all these photographers, including Moriyama. Some of the interviews are as illuminating as the pictures.

Moriyama was not as political as his colleagues. Once, after being dragged along to a student demo, he quickly made his escape. Moriyama remembered: “When we were doing Provoke, after midnight Taki Kōji and Nakahira would gather people, and they would all talk politics. I wasn’t interested in the discussion at all, so I would be in the darkroom or in a bar in Shinjuku, drinking.”

Moriyama did some of his best work at that time. His finest book, in my view, is his first, Nippon Gekijo Shashincho (Japan: A Photo Theater), published in 1968. This beautifully designed volume contains wonderful photographs of actors in a backstreet theater, performing as heroes and villains in versions of old kabuki plays. You can almost smell their greasepaint and the cheap rice crackers noisily consumed by the plebeian audience. He also included pictures of actors in Terayama’s underground theater group, Tenjō Sajiki, looking more like carnival freaks: a fat lady, a midget, mustachioed men in drag. The famous stray dog is in this collection too. There are some pictures of rain-streaked, neon-lit Shinjuku streets at night, and a gritty photo of plump country girls strutting as American-style majorettes.

As was true in many parts of the world, sexual liberation and political protest were part of the same culture in 1960s Japan. Moriyama was drawn to the former. His most memorable work for Provoke was a series of blurred photographs of his sexual encounter with a woman in a hotel room: the naked woman on all fours, the same woman clutching the sheets, hiding her face, or taking a shower. This was the kind of thing that Araki Nobuyoshi, in a far raunchier fashion, would turn into his trademark some years later. Araki’s chronicles of Shinjuku nightlife, and his own sexual predilections, made him a world-famous photographer. But at the time, he was still working for an advertising agency, eyeing the Provoke group with a sense of envy: “I was especially jealous of Mr. Moriyama’s love affairs in the second issue.”

But the eroticism in Moriyama’s photographs is more often voyeuristic than participatory. Apart from women’s legs, glimpsed on subway cars, in crowds, and so on, a recurring obsession is with women’s lips, glossy, pouting, usually shot in extreme close-up, seen on a billboard, on a TV commercial, or in a magazine. The sexualization of life in postwar Japan, in visual media, was partly commercial, a way to draw people to buy products, and partly, in the hands of artists, a form of protest against bourgeois respectability and conventional mores. Some of the radical political activists who had hoped for a revolution in the 1960s turned to making pornographic films, sometimes with a political pretense, when the revolution failed to materialize.

Moriyama was never a pornographer. But he was part of the protest generation. What Japanese artists in the 1960s and 1970s protested against, apart from the Vietnam War, was not so much “US imperialism” or Westernization per se as the primness of official Japanese culture, which aimed to gain the respect of the outside world by mimicking Western high culture in a stultifying way. One of the reasons Butoh dancers, photographers, writers, and filmmakers turned to eroticism was that they meant to strip the prissy Western veneer off contemporary Japanese culture. They tried to find a way back to something essentially Japanese by probing into the earthiest, darkest, most primitive features of life. Words like dorokusai (stinking of earth) or dochaku (native) were commonly used. This often involved reviving some of the least respectable aspects of Japanese culture. Araki, for example, compared himself to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century erotic woodblock print artists, who depicted prostitutes having sex with their clients.

Moriyama also got caught up for a time in this quest for the muddy and the native. In the early 1970s, he decided to abandon Tokyo and started photographing rural scenes, Shinto shrines, and even cherry blossoms, in an attempt to find some semblance of the “authentic” Japanese spirit: “I wanted my heart and soul to ‘return home.’” These were not conventional photos of Japanese tradition. The cherry blossoms are hidden in a gloomy murk; the temples and shrines are made to look almost grotesque; and even in rural Japan, Moriyama’s eye is more easily drawn to tawdry bars and shabby hotel rooms than to the bucolic life. What he caught in these pictures, collected in a book called Tales of Tono (1976),^* were the ghostly images of Japanese tradition, not the glossy idealized culture promoted by Japanese tourist bureaus or depicted by more conventional photographers.

This essay into the native spirit did not last long. Or perhaps a better way of putting this is to say that Moriyama found more of that spirit in the seediness of Tokyo’s backstreets. In one of these streets, somewhere in Shinjuku, he opened a gallery and photography workshop in 1976. As an aspiring photographer myself, I met him there once or twice. I cannot remember much of what he told us in the workshop. Not a great deal, I suspect. He was a shy man with long hair and a slight nervous tic, not given to talk. We did establish a certain rapport over a shared love for the more squalid areas of Osaka. And he spoke a great deal about his enthusiasm for William Klein.

When in 2012 the Tate Gallery in London staged a big exhibition of Klein’s work together with Moriyama’s, the latter took this as a singular honor. I am sure the sentiment was heartfelt. But of the two photographers, it was Moriyama who really stood out in the show. Klein may have been the greater innovator, at least in the 1950s. But he didn’t sustain his high standard. After the series of books he did of great cities—New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Rome—he tried to reinvent himself, rather like Robert Frank, in more experimental work, some of it in cinema. His films were rarely as interesting as those early pictures, though; and where he does go back to his original style—the crowds, the close-ups, and so on—the photos look like tired imitations of what was fresh once.

Moriyama never really departed from his urban, sensual obsessions. Like many Japanese artists, he didn’t try so much to reinvent himself—a Western modernist idea that never quite caught on in Japan—as to refine a style he had come to as a young man. When artists become commercially successful, there is great pressure to repeat their success over and over and produce too many books. This has happened to a number of photographers, by no means all Japanese. Moriyama probably does publish too much. But the quality and interest of his work has rarely wilted.

This may have something to do with the nature of his imagination. The worldwide fame of Araki has led to commissions to photograph outside Japan. Surrounded by an entourage of assistants, he tries to replicate his street photography in such varied locales as Venice, Paris, and New York. It rarely works. In the way that George Grosz needed the stimulation of Weimar Berlin and couldn’t repeat his earlier success in New York, Araki needs to be in his own Tokyo milieu. But Moriyama, like Grosz’s contemporary Max Beckmann, lives more inside his own head. That is why, again like Beckmann, he can work anywhere.

Whether he is in Shinjuku, downtown Los Angeles, Honolulu, or Antwerp, Moriyama’s eye is drawn to the same things: the sinuous tubes, the women’s legs, the glossy lips, the shiny motorbikes, the rain-soaked streets, the advertising. But he finds new and interesting ways to photograph them. Two recent books, Daidō Moriyama: Record and Daido Tokyo, show some of his best contemporary work. It looks a little more polished. But the artificial garishness that marked his earlier black-and-white pictures is just as effectively rendered, if not more so, in color. Moriyama doesn’t need Tokyo to give us his vision of modern urban life, of the marks human beings have made on the world. These are often lurid, ugly, aggressive, and destructive. But they can also contain a perverse kind of beauty. It takes a great artist like Moriyama to make us see it.

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