Ex Libris

In writing her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood decided she would include nothing in the novel “that had not already happened” somewhere, sometime in history, or any technology “not already available.” She extrapolated some of the trends she saw in the 1970s and early 1980s (like the rising fundamentalist movement in America), looked back at the seventeenth-century Puritans’ anti-women bias, and drew upon such historical horrors as the Nazis’ Lebensborn program and public executions in countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia to delineate the malign machinery of Gilead, the dystopian regime she imagined taking over the United States in some not-so-distant future.

When many of us first read The Handmaid’s Tale back in the 1980s, the events Atwood described as taking place in Gilead felt like the sort of alarming developments that could only happen in the distant past or in distant parts of the globe. By 2019, however, American news reports were filled with real-life images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred, and reports of accelerating climate change threatening life as we know it on the planet.

How did the United States with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees metamorphose, in The Handmaid’s Tale, into the authoritarian state of Gilead—a place where women are treated as “two-legged wombs”; where nonwhite residents and unbelievers (that is, Jews, Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, anyone who does not embrace the fundamentalist extremism of Gilead) are resettled, exiled, or disappeared; where the leadership deliberately uses gender, race, and class to divide the country? It started before ordinary citizens like herself were paying attention, Atwood’s heroine, Offred, remembers: “We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

“Nothing changes instantaneously,” she goes on. “In a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

In fact, the most chilling lines in The Handmaid’s Tale occur near the beginning of the novel. Offred and her shopping partner Ofglen are walking past the Wall—a landmark that once belonged to a famous university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that is now used by the rulers of Gilead to display the corpses of people executed as traitors. As she looks at six new bodies hanging there, Offred remembers the unnerving words of their warden Aunt Lydia: “ordinary,” she said, is “what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

Atwood’s Offred was not the ass-kicking leader of the resistance seen in seasons 2 and 3 of the Hulu television adaptation; she was not a rebel like her friend Moira and not an ideological feminist like her mother. If some readers found this Offred overly passive, her very ordinariness gave us an immediate understanding of how Gilead’s tyrannical rule affected people’s everyday lives.

In a 2017 essay, Atwood described writing Offred’s story in the tradition of “the literature of witness”—referring to those accounts left by people bearing witness to the calamities of history they’ve experienced firsthand: wars, atrocities, disasters, social upheavals, hinge moments in civilization. It’s a genre that includes the diary of Anne Frank, the writings of Primo Levi, the choral histories assembled by the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich from intensive interviews with Russians, remembering their daily lives during World War II, the Chernobyl accident, or the Afghanistan war. Agency and strength, Atwood seemed to be suggesting, do not require a heroine with the visionary gifts of Joan of Arc or the ninja skills of a Katniss Everdeen or Lisbeth Salander; there are other ways of defying tyranny, participating in the Resistance, or helping ensure the truth of the historical record.

The very act of writing or recording one’s experiences, Atwood argued, is “an act of hope.” Like messages placed in bottles tossed into the sea, witness testimonies count on someone, somewhere, being there to read their words—even if it’s the pompous, myopic Gileadean scholars who narrate the satiric epilogues to The Handmaid’s Tale and its 2019 sequel, The Testaments.

As Atwood no doubt knows, one of the definitions given by Bible dictionaries for “Gilead” is “hill of testimony.” And in testifying to what she has witnessed, Offred left behind an account that challenged official Gileadean narratives, and in doing so, she was standing up to the regime’s efforts to silence women by telling her own story in her own voice.

COLLECTED POEMS

W. H. Auden

In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, copies of W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” went viral by email and fax. The poem—which had originally been written in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II in Europe—was reprinted in newspapers, read on National Public Radio, and discussed online. After Donald Trump won the 2016 election and after his inauguration the following January, Auden’s poem was again widely shared and debated.

Auden, himself, had renounced the poem—and other early works that he had come to regard as glib or gauche or a vestige of his leftist youth. But the poem continues to resonate with readers because of its evocation of a dangerous moment in history. Auden writes of “waves of anger and fear” washing over the “darkened lands of the earth.” He writes of humanity’s tragic inability to learn from history—“the enlightenment driven away”—and how we seem fated to suffer “mismanagement and grief” over and over again. At the same time, echoing Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach,” Auden also looks for hope in the possibility of human connection and the urge to “show an affirming flame” in a world beleaguered by “negation and despair.”

Auden’s poems from the 1930s are concerned with the intersection of the public and the personal, and they also attest to his gifts as a kind of anthropologist—observing the worries and fears of people as the world headed off a cliff. The specter of fascism and the social ravages of the Great Depression rumble through many of these poems, which reverberate with apocalyptic premonitions, reminiscent of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (another widely shared poem on social media in the second decade of the millennium).

In his 1935 poem “To a Writer on His Birthday,” Auden writes of the wireless roaring “its warnings and its lies” and notes that even people in pretty seaside towns will soon be swept along “on the dangerous flood / Of history that never sleeps or dies.” In “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written shortly after the Munich Pact was signed in 1938, Auden wrote about how easy it is to turn away from other people’s suffering, how easily daily life can distract from catastrophe.

Auden moved to America in 1939, and his verse would grow increasingly focused on spiritual and emotional concerns. Though he contended that “poetry makes nothing happen,” his own verse would continue to bear witness to the “age of anxiety,” testifying to the possibilities and solace of art, even at a time when a nation feels “sequestered in its hate,” and “Intellectual disgrace/ stares from every human face, / And the seas of pity lie / Locked and frozen in each eye.”

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

(1985)

Russell Banks

Although Russell Banks’s epic novel Continental Drift was published back in 1985, it tells “an American story” that feels uncommonly current in the opening of the third decade of the twenty-first century. The novel reminds us of the power of the old American dream—namely, the possibility of beginning a new life in the New World, of reinventing oneself, tabula rasa. And it anticipates the growing tensions between refugees desperate to reach American shores to escape violence and despair at home and those working-class Americans who have found their own hopes of economic security and a brighter future for their children slipping out of reach.

The novel’s two central characters, Bob and Vanise, whose lives will violently collide, actually have a lot in common: both are disenfranchised and desperate, and determined to gamble everything on the chance of a better future.

Like many of Banks’s protagonists, Bob Dubois hails from a small New England working-class town; Banks describes him as “an ordinary man, a decent man, a common man.” At the age of thirty, he owns a run-down duplex, a thirteen-foot Boston whaler he built from a kit, and a battered Chevrolet station wagon. He owes the local savings and loan a little over twenty-two thousand dollars—for the house, the boat, and the car. “We have a good life,” his wife, Elaine, insists, but Bob feels increasingly frustrated and trapped; “nothing seems improved over yesterday,” and he’s begun to worry that he will never achieve even his most modest dreams.

One day, he abruptly moves his family to Florida, where he soon finds himself in business with his wheeler-dealer brother, Eddie, and with Avery, a disreputable childhood pal who’s been running drugs. For Banks’s characters, Florida is what California was for people in books by Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler—a ragged, dangerous place where people play loose and fast with the rules, a magnet for dreamers, hustlers, con men, and people with no place else to go. Here, the old pioneer spirit has devolved into a kind of me-first individualism, and nerve and hubris and good luck can make you rich. Bob, however, is caught in a downward spiral—living in a trailer park and bereft even of the job and house that had lent his life in New Hampshire a modicum of stability.

Desperate for money, Bob agrees to help ferry some Haitian refugees from the Bahamas to Miami, and his life is set on a collision course with that of a young Haitian woman named Vanise who’s set off for America with her infant child and a nephew, after their house was destroyed by a hurricane. She imagines that “everything will be different” in America, but instead she is cruelly abused by smugglers.

Banks not only gives the dovetailing stories of Vanise and Bob a terrible inevitability but also turns them into a dark story of our times.

BOOKS BY SAUL BELLOW

THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH (1953)

HERZOG (1964)

THE ACTUAL: A Novella (1997)

Saul Bellow’s most memorable novels are portraits of individuals trying to figure out their place in the world, what it means, as he wrote in Herzog, “to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes.”

Though Bellow’s heroes live mainly in the mid- to late twentieth century, their existential predicaments could not feel more timely today. Stuck in an American reality filled with calamities, con games, and cheap distractions, they struggle to find a balance between immersion in this “moronic inferno” and the more pristine realm of the self. Some of his “dangling men” suspect that all the “human nonsense” of daily life, from politics to business to romance, impedes their apprehension of the larger truths of the cosmos—“the axial lines” of “truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony.” But others are aware of the temptations of narcissism and isolation. Harry Trellman in The Actual, for instance, realizes that his judgmental intellect and craving for a higher life are the very things that have cut him off from humanity—and from love.

Readers all have their favorite Bellow novels. To me, the three that are marvels of storytelling and that most clearly embody his quintessential themes are The Adventures of Augie March, the 1953 picaresque novel that marked Bellow’s discovery of an exuberant voice that was all his own; Herzog, a remarkable portrait of one man’s midlife crisis and the human quest for meaning in an increasingly atomized age in which the old certainties of religion and ideology no longer hold; and The Actual, a late, elegiac, and very Jamesian tale about one man’s belated efforts to step out of his lifelong role as an observer and submerge himself in (or at least dip a toe into) reality.

Bellow’s heroes are first-class “noticers” who often feel overwhelmed by the “muchness” of the world and who wonder if their personal woes somehow hold a tiny mirror to the “big-scale insanities of the twentieth century.” They are overly aware of mortality, the Big Clock, constantly ticking away in the distance.

Writing in prose that shifts gears effortlessly between the ebullient and the depressive, Bellow vividly conjured the busy mental life of his heroes—men who live, quite willfully, in their heads—and their daily, creaturely existence, as well as their encounters with what he called “reality instructors”: assorted salesmen, con men, and fixers who goad his protagonists into a recognition of everyday life. In fact, Bellow’s novels attest to his ease in grappling with big, Russian-novel-like ideas while at the same time using his gift for streetwise portraiture and description to capture the “daily monkeyshines” of “the cheapies, the stingies, the hypochondriacs, the family bores, humanoids,” and barstool comedians who populate his hectic and captivating world.

THE IMAGE

A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

(1962)

Daniel J. Boorstin

Published in 1962, Daniel J. Boorstin’s book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America uncannily foresaw the reality-show world we inhabit in the Trump era. For that matter, the book anticipated the arrival of someone very much like Donald J. Trump himself: a celebrity known, in Boorstin’s words, for his “well-knownness,” a loudmouthed showman, skilled in little besides self-promotion and staging what Boorstin called “pseudo-events”—that is, contrived events meant to generate publicity and appeal to the hunger of audiences for spectacle and diversion.

Boorstin’s descriptions of the nineteenth-century impresario and circus showman P. T. Barnum—who ran a New York City museum of curiosities filled with hoaxes like a mermaid (which turned out to be the remains of a monkey stitched together with the tail of a fish)—will sound strangely familiar to contemporary readers: a self-proclaimed “prince of humbugs” whose “great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived” as long as it was being entertained.

In recounting how illusions were displacing knowledge, how advertising was taking the place of content, The Image would influence the work of myriad writers from French theorists like Baudrillard and Guy Debord to social critics like Neil Postman and Douglas Rushkoff. Decades before the rise of the internet, Boorstin envisaged the “thicket of unreality” that would increasingly come to surround us as fake news, conspiracy theories, and political propaganda proliferated over the World Wide Web.

Much the way that images were supplanting ideals, Boorstin wrote, the idea of “credibility” was replacing the idea of truth. People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.” And as verisimilitude increasingly replaced truth as a measurement, “the socially rewarded art” became “that of making things seem true.” No surprise then that the new masters of the universe in the early 1960s were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue. No surprise that the Republican strategist Lee Atwater, anticipating the age of Trump, would argue in the 1980s that “perception is reality” and his clients—and many GOP supporters—would buy it.

Decades before the rise of the internet, Boorstin envisaged the “thicket of unreality” that would increasingly come to surround us as fake news, conspiracy theories, and political propaganda proliferated over the World Wide Web.

FICCIONES

(1944; English translation, 1962)

Jorge Luis Borges

Edited by Anthony Kerrigan

Translated by Alastair Reid, Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple, and Ruthven Todd

Jorge Luis Borges’s magical tales are like M. C. Escher drawings—fascinating, enigmatic tableaux filled with labyrinths, mirrors, and mazes that reverberate with a sense of metaphysical mystery. The lines between the real and the imaginary blur together here, as do the lines between writer and reader, life and art.

Translated into English in 1962, Borges’s Ficciones presaged many of the postmodernist techniques that would be embraced by later generations of writers across the world. Some of his tales reinvented familiar genres like the detective story, turning them into philosophical meditations about time and the nature of cause and effect. Some gave us fantastical events and strange beings: transparent tigers, wizards who conjure up visions in a bowl of ink, an encyclopedia that chronicles imaginary worlds. Some seemed to foretell the dizzying world of the internet where we would be deluged with tidal waves of data and multiplying, multifarious possibilities.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” describes a novel that is a kind of hypertext—filled with forking paths and alternate futures that exist simultaneously. And “The Library of Babel” depicts the universe as an infinite library, containing all knowledge past and present. “Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, . . . the veridical account of your death.”

I had the opportunity to meet Borges in 1982, when he was giving a lecture at the New York Institute for the Humanities. He was a shy, fragile-seeming gentleman who said he couldn’t imagine himself living in a bookless world. “I need books,” he said. “They mean everything to me.”

The chief event in his life, he once wrote, was his father’s library, and in 1955, he was appointed director of Argentina’s National Library. As he grew increasingly blind, he relied on family, friends, and assistants to read aloud to him every day.

Among the authors Borges said he loved most were Kafka, H. G. Wells, and G. K. Chesterton, suggesting that he felt more of an affinity with storytellers who shared his own “amazement at things” than with so-called avant-garde writers and theorists.

When he began writing himself, his prose was baroque. Now, he said in 1982, “I try to write in very simple words. When I was young, I used to think the invention of metaphor was possible. Now I don’t except for very essential ones: stars and eyes, life and dreams, death and sleeping, time and the river.”

Having made a promise to his mother years earlier, he added that he has continued to say the Lord’s Prayer every night. “I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line, but being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God. This world is so strange, anything may happen or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, more futuristic kind of world. It makes me more tolerant.”

The Moth Presents

All These Wonders

True Stories About Facing the Unknown

(2017)

Edited by Catherine Burns

The storytelling phenomenon The Moth was founded in 1997 by the writer George Dawes Green; its name comes from his memories of growing up in St. Simons Island, Georgia, where neighbors would gather late at night on a friend’s porch to tell stories and drink bourbon as moths flew in through the broken screens and circled the porch light. The Moth went on to become a Peabody Award–winning radio show and has since grown into what its artistic director, Catherine Burns, calls “a modern storytelling movement” that has inspired “tens of thousands of shows worldwide in places as diverse as Tajikistan, Antarctica, and Birmingham, Alabama.”

Participants have included well-known authors like Richard Price, George Plimpton, Annie Proulx, and Christopher Hitchens and scores of people from every background imaginable—scientists, writers, teachers, soldiers, cowboys, comedians, and inventors, among myriad others. The stories are “true, as remembered by the storyteller,” and are performed live.

The forty-five stories collected in The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown translate remarkably well to the page. They are stories that chronicle the startling varieties and travails of human experience and the shared threads of love, loss, fear, and kindness that connect us. Some are urgent and raw. Some are elliptical and wry. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. And some are shattering in their sadness. But while the stories vary greatly in tone and voice, there is little sarcasm or snark. The emphasis is on communicating with the audience, with sharing an experience, a memory, a moment of grace.

Moth stories can be seen as part of the oral storytelling tradition dating back to Homer, but the personal nature of the tales—and their air of spontaneity—owes as much to stand-up comedy, blogging, talk-show anecdotes, and group therapy. They are not random reminiscences, however, but closely focused, finely tuned narratives that have the force of an epiphany, conveying with astonishing candor and fervor the familiar or the startling and the strange.

In “Unusual Normality,” Ishmael Beah—who lost his family to war in Sierra Leone and became a child soldier at age thirteen—relates how he was adopted by an American woman when he was seventeen and how he attempted to fit in at school in New York. For instance, he did not tell his new classmates why he was so adept at paintball: “I wanted to explain certain things, but I felt that if they knew about my background, they would no longer allow me to be a child. They would see me as an adult, and I worried that they would fear me.

“My silence allowed me to experience things, to participate in my childhood, to do things I hadn’t been able to do as a child.”

Other stories pivot around a relationship between two people: the scientist Christof Koch and his longtime collaborator Francis Crick (who together with James Watson discovered the structure of DNA); Stephanie Peirolo and her son RJ, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after his car was struck at a blind intersection; the actor John Turturro and his troubled brother Ralph, who lives at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens; Suzi Ronson, a hairdresser from a London suburb, who cut the young David Bowie’s hair, joined his tour, and went on to become a music producer.

One of the most moving tales is “Fog of Disbelief” by Carl Pillitteri, who was working as a field engineer on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station in Japan when a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the island in 2011, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl; it left some 18,490 people dead or missing and led to the evacuation of more than 300,000.

After checking on his crew and colleagues, Pillitteri became concerned about the older woman who ran the restaurant where he ate five or six times a week. He spoke no Japanese, she spoke no English, and he and his friends knew her, fondly, only as the “Chicken Lady.” The little building housing her restaurant was badly cracked by the quake, and she was nowhere to be found—even months later, when Pillitteri returned to the exclusion zone from America to look for her. Eventually, he enlisted the help of The Japan Times in tracking her down and learned that her name was Mrs. Owada.

Almost a year after the quake, he received a letter from her: “I have escaped from the disasters and have been doing fine every day. Pillitterisan, please take care of yourself. I know your work must be important. I hope you enjoy a happy life like you seemed to have when you came to my restaurant. Although I won’t be seeing you, I will always pray for the best for you.”

THE PLAGUE

(1947)

Albert Camus

Translated by Stuart Gilbert