Ex Libris

Enduring classics speak not only to the circumstances of the day in which they were written but across the decades or centuries—uncannily anticipating our own experiences and world today. Such is the case of Albert Camus’s startlingly resonant 1947 novel The Plague (La Peste), a novel that can be read, in Camus’s own words, as both a tale about an epidemic and as an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France and a “prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no matter where.”

Camus was a dedicated member of the Resistance, who believed there was a moral imperative to stand up to the Nazi occupation of France. Inspired in part by his reading of Moby-Dick, he wanted to investigate the metaphysical problem of evil, and his novel chronicles how various characters react to the sudden arrival of plague in Oran, crashing down on their heads as if “from a blue sky.” He described the arc of the pandemic—from denial to fear and perseverance—with what many contemporary readers will recognize as remarkable verisimilitude: government efforts to downplay the threat giving way to mounting deaths and a quarantine; a shared sense of isolation vying with a “sense of injustice” kindled by profiteering and confusion; and for the poor, further deprivation. He described worries about medical supplies, the daily hunt for food, and the growing feelings of futility among “people marking time.”

The duration and monotony of a quarantine, Camus wrote, has a way of turning people into “sleepwalkers” who dope “themselves with work” or who find the heightened emotions of the first weeks devolving into despondency and detachment, numbed by the arithmetic of death. For those who lived through a pestilence, he observed, the “grim days of plague” feel like “the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing” crushing everything in its path.

Like members of the Resistance, Camus’s narrator Dr. Rieux believes that “the habit of despair is worse than despair itself” and argues that the town’s residents must not succumb to feelings of numbness and resignation. They must recognize the plague for what it is and dismiss the reflexive notion that such a catastrophe is “unthinkable” in a modern, supposedly advanced society like theirs.

Dr. Rieux knew “there must be no bowing down” to the plague—no compromise with evil, no resignation to fate. He identified with victims of the plague—“there was not one of their anxieties in which he did not share, no predicament of theirs that was not his.” And he knew the “essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying.”

In the end, The Plague emerges as a testament to the dedication of individuals like Dr. Rieux and a group of volunteers who risk their lives to help victims of the plague. Dr. Rieux insists there is nothing heroic about his work—it is simply “a matter of common decency,” which in his case consists of doing his job.

It’s this sense of individual responsibility, combined with his feelings of solidarity with others, that enables Dr. Rieux to hold fast to two not entirely contradictory truths: the understanding that we must remain ever vigilant because “the plague bacillus,” like the poison of fascism or tyranny, “never dies or disappears,” and the optimistic belief that “what we learn in time of pestilence” is “that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

THE PASSAGE OF POWER

The Years of Lyndon Johnson

(2012)

Robert A. Caro

Robert A. Caro has said that he was not really interested in writing biographies; he was interested in writing “studies in political power.” This was true not only of his monumental first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, but also of the project that has consumed more than four decades of his life: the voluminous and so far unfinished portrait of the thirty-sixth president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

As of 2019, Caro was still at work on the fifth—and presumably final—volume of that biography dealing with LBJ’s disastrous handling of the war in Vietnam. In the meantime, volume 4, The Passage of Power, stands as a model of the art of biography, showcasing all of Caro’s talents as a writer: his instinctive sense of narrative, his ability to help readers feel history in the making, and his gift for situating events within the context of their times.

The volume starts with Johnson’s being catapulted into the White House in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It’s an extraordinarily dramatic—and pivotal—moment in American history, and Caro conveys, on a visceral level, the magnitude of the challenges LBJ faced on entering the White House.

Caro observes that Johnson first had to instill confidence in a confused and grieving nation, and he needed to give the world—in the midst of a cold war that had turned dangerously hot with the Cuban missile crisis—a sense of continuity. To do so, he had to persuade key Kennedy administration members to stay on and to rally behind him. And he had to take on his many doubters, including liberals who questioned his commitment to civil rights and southerners who sought to block his social initiatives.

Johnson’s knowledge of the tactical and strategic levers he could press; his personal relationships with Congressional power brokers; and his bare-knuckled willingness to bully, cajole, horse-trade, whatever it took to get what he wanted—these were the qualities, Caro observes, that enabled LBJ to overcome “congressional resistance and the power of the South” that had stood “in the path of social justice for a century.”

Caro gives us an intimate understanding of how Johnson used the crisis of Kennedy’s death and his own political acumen to push through Congress his predecessor’s stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation and to lay the groundwork for his own revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro also uses his accumulated knowledge of Johnson’s personality—his insecurities, his fear of failure, his need to pander to superiors and dominate his inferiors—to examine the role that character plays in politics and policy making.

Johnson emerges as both a Shakespearean personage—with epic ambitions and epic flaws—and a more human-scale puzzle: needy, deceitful, brilliant, cruel, vulgar, idealistic, boastful, self-pitying, and blessed with such titanic energy that Abe Fortas once remarked, “The guy’s just got extra glands.” He was a man driven by a colossal ego and by a genuine sense of compassion for the powerless and the poor that had been forged by his own childhood. He was a man who, in the weeks and months after the assassination of JFK, was able to overcome his own weaknesses and baser instincts—in Caro’s words, not for long but “long enough”—to act in a fashion that was “a triumph not only of genius but of will.”

PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS

The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage

(1981)

Stanley Cavell

This book will change how you watch Hollywood romantic comedies. It will make you see the Shakespearean underpinnings of such delightful screwball comedies as The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, and The Lady Eve and more recent romantic comedies like Crazy Rich Asians. It will also leave you with a new understanding of some of the classic tropes found in comedy across the centuries—like its use of crisis (the same sort of event that serves as a catalyst for disaster in tragedy) as a spur to the resolution of confusion and misunderstanding.

Hollywood’s brightest comedies from the 1930s and 1940s not only featured spirited heroines, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Rosalind, but also fast, witty exchanges between men and women that recall the animated banter in Much Ado About Nothing. The narrative movement in these films from conflict to confusion to eventual reconciliation parallels, in many ways, the structure of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, and in Pursuits of Happiness, the scholar Stanley Cavell used Northrop Frye’s famous studies of the playwright’s work to bolster his own arguments. Noting that Frye “calls particular attention to the special nature of the forgiving and forgetting” asked for at the end of traditional comedies, Cavell points out that Bringing Up Baby and Adam’s Rib also conclude explicitly with requests for grace, and The Awful Truth and The Philadelphia Story do so symbolically.

Even the retreat to what Frye called “the green world” (a place where the rules of day-to-day life are suspended) that takes place in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has its counterpart in these Hollywood comedies. As Cavell cleverly notes, Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Adam’s Rib, and The Lady Eve all feature sequences in a distant place where perspective and renewal can be achieved—a setting, in these films, that usually turns out to be Connecticut.

Cavell, a philosopher who taught for decades at Harvard University, can be pretentious and heavy-handed: he analyzes Frank Capra in terms of Kant, compares Leo McCarey with Nietzsche, and brings up Locke’s Second Treatise of Government in a discussion of His Girl Friday. But please persevere—even if that means skimming over some of the denser passages in this book. Cavell provides a hilarious explication of the copious double entendres in Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby and a provocative examination of the meaning of songs in The Lady Eve, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. More important, he encourages us to appreciate the complexity of these great Hollywood films, and their delightful reinvention of comedic premises and techniques pioneered centuries ago by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?

A Memoir

(2014)

Roz Chast

Roz Chast’s people are worriers. They worry that they are too angry or too wimpy, too pushy or too passive or too passive-aggressive. They are afraid of driving, and afraid of chickens. They worry about Ebola turning up on West Eighty-Third Street in Manhattan.

Her cartoons—most of which have appeared in The New Yorker over the past several decades—capture the absurdities of contemporary life, the insecurities, neuroses, existential anxieties, and narcissistic complaints of the sorts of city dwellers made nervous by shopping malls and the great outdoors.

Though Chast writes as both a satirist and a social anthropologist, her work has long evinced an autobiographical impulse, drawing upon her experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother. And in her 2014 book, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, she tackled the subject of her parents—and her own efforts to help them navigate the jagged shoals of old age and ill health—with humor and raw candor. Her fondness for the exclamatory (expressed in capital letters, underlined words, and multiple exclamation points) is cranked up several notches here, and her familiar, scribbly people go from looking merely frazzled and put-upon to looking like the shrieking figure in Munch’s Scream—panicked and terrified as they see the abyss of loss and mortality looming just up the road.

Though Chast writes as both a satirist and a social anthropologist, her work has long evinced an autobiographical impulse, drawing upon her experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother.

Chast’s descriptions of her parents are so sharply detailed that we instantly feel we’ve known them—as neighbors or family—for decades: her bossy, impossibly stubborn mother, Elizabeth, and her gentle, worrywart father, George, a couple who were in the same fifth-grade class and who, “aside from WWII, work, illness, and going to the bathroom,” still did “everything together.”

For decades, George and Elizabeth continued to live in Brooklyn (“Not the Brooklyn of artists or hipsters,” but “the Brooklyn of people who have been left behind by everything and everyone”) in the same apartment where the author grew up. The “to do” list of her childhood and adolescence, she recalls, included exhortations like “Avoid contact with other children” (because they might have germs), “Look up symptom in Merck Manual,” and “Do not die.”

After marrying and moving to Connecticut, Chast says she spent the 1990s avoiding Brooklyn. She began to realize, however, that her parents “were slowly leaving the sphere of TV commercial old age” (“SPRY! TOTALLY INDEPENDENT! JUST LIKE A NORMAL ADULT, BUT WITH SILVER HAIR!!!”) and moving into “the part of old age that was scarier” and harder to talk about.

Chast pulls no punches here. She chronicles her father’s habit of chain-worrying, and her mother’s bad temper and insistence on stocking up on useless bargains (like quintuple-queen-sized lobster bisque stockings because they’re 80 percent off) while scrimping on necessities like a safe, reliable new space heater. She writes about moving her mother and father out of their home of forty-eight years, and about the decades of stuff left behind in their apartment—geologic layers of unopened mail, take-out menus, old books, old clothes, old Life magazines, empty Styrofoam egg cartons, antique appliances, and equally ancient Band-Aid boxes and jar lids. And she also chronicles her own flailing efforts to deal with the situation—her acute feelings of anxiety, worry, frustration, and sense of being completely overwhelmed.

Chast’s drawings, photos, and text all come together to create a powerful collage memorial to her parents. Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, this book helps stretch the definition of the so-called graphic novel and underscores the possibilities of that genre as an innovative platform for autobiography and urgent, complex storytelling.

BOOKS BY BRUCE CHATWIN

IN PATAGONIA (1977)

WHAT AM I DOING HERE (1989)

Writers of books, Bruce Chatwin observed in a posthumously published essay, fall into two categories: “the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move.” Among the members of the first category, he counted “Flaubert and Tolstoy labouring in their libraries; Zola with a suit of armour alongside his desk; Poe in his cottage; Proust in the cork-lined room.” Among the movers, he named “Melville, who was ‘undone’ by his gentlemanly establishment in Massachusetts, or Hemingway, Gogol or Dostoyevsky whose lives, whether from choice or necessity, were a headlong round of hotels and rented rooms—and, in the case of the last, a Siberian prison.”

Chatwin, of course, belongs firmly in the movers category.

He recalls he grew up with wanderlust in his DNA. His grandmother’s cousin Charley, who became British consul in Punta Arenas, Chile, was shipwrecked at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan in 1898; his uncle Geoffrey was an Arabist and desert traveler who received a golden headdress from Emir Faisal, and his uncle Humphrey came to a “sad end in Africa.”

With his father away in the navy, young Bruce spent his childhood drifting about England with his mother, staying with assorted relatives and friends. He later became a devoted “addict of atlases” and after leaving a promising job at Sotheby’s, he decided to hit the road himself as a journalist.

His first book, In Patagonia, was a sensation. Its fragmented narrative, its lapidary prose, its mapping of a landscape that was as much a place in the writer’s imagination as a set of coordinates on the globe—these qualities helped expand the boundaries of travel writing and revitalize the genre. The book’s opening would be widely admired and cited: how a strange piece of leathery animal skin in his grandmother’s cabinet—what he thought of as “a piece of brontosaurus” that had been found in Patagonia by his grandmother’s cousin—lodged itself in young Bruce’s mind, igniting a fascination with that distant land and a determination to one day journey there.

Chatwin’s keen eye for the magical, the incongruous, and the exotic are also showcased in the profiles, essays, and travel pieces collected in What Am I Doing Here. Even the flimsier entries in this volume showcase Chatwin’s gift of observation and his assurance in writing about anything—from Russian avant-garde art to survival tactics in the third world to rivalries in the world of high fashion. His best pieces read like small, perfectly shaped fictions peopled with startling characters. We meet the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam complaining about the lack of grand writers in Russia and asking Chatwin to please bring her some “real TRASH” to read, and Diana Vreeland sipping vodka and mistaking “Wales” for “whales.”

André Malraux, sitting on the edge of his chair and wearing “a light brown jacket with lapels like butterfly wings,” is described as a “talented young esthete who transformed himself into a great man.” And Werner Herzog comes across as “a compendium of contradictions: immensely tough yet vulnerable, affectionate and remote, austere and sensual, not particularly well adjusted to the strains of everyday life but functioning efficiently under extreme conditions.”

The less famous people in this volume are just as vividly portrayed: “a tall, almost skeletal, German mathematician and geographer” who has spent half of her seventy-two years in the Peruvian desert surveying the archaeological phenomenon known as the Nazca lines; a scrawny Tibetan smuggler doggedly embarking on a journey that will lead him across two glaciers and up a nineteen-thousand-foot pass; a botanist and explorer who likes to play Caruso records for mountain villagers in China.

Chatwin clearly felt an affinity with these solitary adventurers who left civilization behind for the outer limits of the world. Indeed his own life was animated by the fiercely held belief he shared with the Sherpas of Tibet, who are “compulsive travelers” and who mark their tracks with cairns and prayer flags, “reminding you that Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.”

His first book, IN PATAGONIA, was a sensation. Its collage-like narrative, its lapidary prose, its mapping of a landscape that was as much a place in the writer’s imagination as a set of coordinates on the globe—these qualities helped expand the boundaries of travel writing and revitalize the genre.

THE SLEEPWALKERS

How Europe Went to War in 1914

(2012)

Christopher Clark

World War I was a cataclysm that resulted in twenty million military and civilian deaths and the wounding of twenty-one million. It helped catalyze the Russian Revolution, set the stage for the rise of Nazism and World War II, and planted the seeds of many of today’s intractable conflicts in the Middle East. And as Paul Fussell observed in his brilliant 1975 book, The Great War and Modern Memory, the brutalities of trench warfare would send shock waves throughout European culture, effectively shredding the old order and giving birth to modernism and its discontents.

“I shall never be able to understand how it happened,” the writer Rebecca West later said of World War I. How did the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the presumptive heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914, push a peaceful Europe into war, and how did that war snowball into a conflagration that would consume the Continent and reconfigure the world?

Such questions are especially timely today, given the myriad ways in which the pre–World War I era resembles our own: it, too, was a time when globalization and new technologies like the telephone were creating seismic changes, and those changes, in turn, were fueling a growing populism. Right-wing, nationalistic movements were on the rise, and larger geopolitical shifts were threatening the stability of the world order.

“What must strike any twenty-first-century reader who follows the course of the summer crisis of 1914 is its raw modernity,” the historian Christopher Clark writes in his compelling book The Sleepwalkers. An “extra-territorial” terrorist organization—built around “a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge”—was behind the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Clark writes, and the path to war was fueled by the dynamics of a complex landscape that featured “declining empires and rising powers”—a landscape not unlike the one we inhabit today.

Clark writes with thoughtful authority, judiciously sifting through the massive amount of information on the war, focusing on how (not why) decisions were reached and how various roads to peace or compromise were closed off. He does not try to assign blame for the war, and says there are no single smoking guns that can explain what happened. Instead, he argues that “the outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors” in different countries—decisions that were often based on misunderstandings, fragmentary or incomplete information, and the ideological and partisan positions of leading political actors.

Clark, who teaches at the University of Cambridge, uses his easy familiarity with European history to examine how each of the principal players in the rush to war—Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Britain, Serbia—had long-standing preconceptions and suspicions about their rivals (and allies) that had been shaped by history and cultural traditions. He goes on to analyze how those reflexive attitudes could lead to bad decision making and how partisan domestic politics (like lobbying from nationalist pressure groups within each country) sometimes resulted in clashes among different factions of a country’s foreign policy machinery.

Clark is also adept at drawing portraits of individual players in the buildup to war. Like the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, who ensured that British policy “focused primarily on the ‘German threat’ ” and who tried to shield “the policy-making process from the scrutiny of unfriendly eyes.” And the erratic Wilhelm II, the German kaiser, who often “bypassed his responsible ministers by consulting with ‘favorites,’ encouraged factional strife” within his own government, and expounded views at odds with prevailing policy.

All these factors contributed to what Clark describes as the “ambient confusion” that swirled across the Continent in the days leading up to war—a war, in his words, that the European nations stumbled into, like sleepwalkers: “watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”

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