Category: Reviews

For millions of people in the Americas, our Indigenous heritage is something tinged with mystery. We look into a mirror and believe we see the Mayan, the Aztec, or the Apache in our faces. The hint of a high cheekbone; the very loud and obvious statement of our cinnamon or copper skin. We sense a native great-great-grandparent in our squat or long torsos, in the shape of our eyes, in our gait, and in the emotions and the spirits that drift over us at times of joy and loss. But the particulars of our Indigeneity, the weighty and grounded facts of it, have been erased from our history.

In my Guatemalan-immigrant childhood, the great Mayan jungle city of Tikal was a symbol of the civilization in our blood. Despite the humility of our present in seventies Los Angeles—my mother was a store cashier, my father a parking-lot valet—we were once an empire. My father suggested that a personal, familial greatness was there in our Mayan heritage, waiting to reawaken. I could not trace who my Mayan forebears were, exactly. But I knew the Maya were in me because I was a guatemalteco; or, in the hyphenated ethnic nomenclature of the time, a “Guatemalan-American.” Only now do I realize how deeply fraught the idea of being “Guatemalan” truly is. “Guatemala” is a way of glossing over the cultural collisions and the racial violence that produced a country centered in the mountain jungles and river valleys where Mayan peoples ruled themselves until Europeans came.

Men of Maize is Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias more than likely had some Indigenous ancestors, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr. President) sent the future author’s father and family into an internal exile in the Mayan‑centric world of provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deep into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.

In the 1920s, Asturias left for Paris to study. Soon he would become a member of a generation of Latin American thinkers influenced by the Eurocentric aesthetics and worldviews of the time: modernism, surrealism, socialism. In his own artistic practice, these ideas would fuse with the Indigenous spirituality and consciousness of the Americas. The life stories and the mythology of common Mayan and “mixed” folk of Guatemala would appear in his work, and influence it, again and again. In Men of Maize, he rejected the superficiality and sentimentality to be found in so many works about Indigenous cultures written by outsiders. The Mayan families in the novel are not hapless, helpless victims living out one tragedy after another in the face of the relentless march of modernity. Instead, in a frenzy of surreal stories and images, their ghosts and folktales and visions take over the narrative. Darkness comes streaming out of an anthill. A postman transforms into a coyote. Fire sweeps across the corn‑covered landscape, both as a tool of ruthless capitalism and as an agent of peasant retribution. In this fashion, Asturias reimagined the birth of Guatemala as a mad, disorderly event that unleashed countless personal and familial passions: betrayal, mourning, love, loyalty, and revenge.

It’s more than a little ironic that winning the Nobel Prize in 1967 made Asturias a symbol of national pride in Guatemala. By then, the writer had fled the country to escape the military dictatorship brought to power in a 1954 CIA‑backed coup. In the decades that followed, Guatemala’s elites assimilated Mayan Indigeneity into a soft‑focus narrative about the country’s national identity. Guatemala’s tourism ministry, Inguat, produced countless posters for airports and travel agencies depicting Mayan temples and stelae, and Indigenous women dressed in traditional textiles. In this “official” story, the nation’s Indigeneity was something colorful and harmless, a commodity to market to cash‑spending Europeans and norteamericanos.

My parents were in their mid‑twenties and living in Los Angeles when Asturias won the Nobel. For my father, especially, the writer’s triumph became yet another symbol of our inherent Guatemalan greatness. When we drove through Mexico on a family trip to Guatemala a few years later, he stopped somewhere along the way and bought several of his books. I remember, vividly, the beautiful woodcuts of their paperback covers, produced by the Argentine publisher Losada. On the cover for Hombres de maíz, a yellow face with enormous eyes stared out from behind black cornstalks. But I could not read that book, or any of the other Asturias books my father brought home. They were in Spanish, a language that was slowly dying in my U.S.‑educated brain.

When I returned to Guatemala in the eighties as a college educated, Spanish‑fluent adult, I mimicked Asturias’s artistic practice and began to collect the oral histories of my relatives. (Asturias’s first book, Legends of Guatemala, begins with the epigraph “For my mother, who used to tell me stories.”) I had my first grown‑up conversations with my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother, both people of striking Indigenous features. My grandfather had been born in Tecpán, Guatemala, a center of the Kaqchikel Maya; and my grandmother was from Huehuetenango, the capital of Guatemala’s Mayan north‑west frontier, the city and nearby villages home to the Mam, K’iche’, and other peoples. I asked them both the question so many young Latino people want to ask their elders: What are we? To what tribe or nation do we belong? Both answered: “No, we’re Spanish.” We were not Indian, they insisted, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

At the end of the twentieth century, it was still taboo for a person of “mixed” heritage to embrace their Mayan identity. Among the “Ladinos” (as the mixed population of Guatemala call themselves), Indigeneity remained associated with backwardness and passivity. “Indio” was an insult equivalent to “stupid.” These racist ideas endured despite all the books Asturias had written. Despite Mulata de Tal and Leyendas de Guatemala. Despite Men of Maize. Despite the shining gold medal handed to him by the Swedish Academy.

Four years after his father’s Nobel, Rodrigo Asturias, the novelist’s oldest son, founded a leftist guerrilla movement. He took as a nom de guerre the name of a character from the opening chapter of Men of Maize: Gaspar Ilom, the leader who resists the encroachment of outsiders on Indigenous lands. In the seventies and eighties, the Gaspar Ilom who was inspired by a fictional character built a real‑life army whose ranks grew to include legions of Mayan fighters. On the same trip to Guatemala on which I pressed my grandparents about our Indigenous heritage, I traveled through the countryside and saw bombed bridges and rebel  graffiti—the calling cards of that largely Indigenous guerrilla army. What I saw inspired a scene in my first novel, The Tattooed Soldier, a book that tackled the legacy of the genocidal war that the Guatemalan government launched against a Mayan rebellion.

When I finally read Men of Maize, I saw echoes of my family story in every chapter. My grandfather had told me of a days‑long walk he undertook as a young man, sleeping in the town squares with other travelers along the way. In Asturias’s novel I read of “rivulets of local folk” on the highways, “their bedding stored away in cane baskets” so that they, too, could sleep along the road. Asturias describes a shaman’s ritual to induce “spider‑spells” that involves the sprinkling of red pinole powder, flour, and tortilla crumbs on a straw mat; I have a vague memory of being a boy and my mother taking me to see a woman doing something very similar. Soon I understood that our family’s Indigeneity was not a great black hole of mystery, but rather something alive and very real inside of me. In my memories, in our way of being.

Men of Maize describes the birth of a new people. Or, put another way, it describes the journey of an ancient people into a new age. A time when they don Western clothes and marvel at the miraculous interventions of their non‑Western deities in a Spanish‑speaking world. When they live and mix with German and Chinese immigrants and Americans and assorted other “whites,” and when they have adventures alongside these new peoples. In villages and towns that are as Mayan as they are European, in the hills and jungles and valleys of a country called Guatemala. I can see now what Asturias discovered a century ago: that “Guatemala” is a synonym for mixing.

From the foreword to Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias, to be published by Penguin Classics in September.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a novelist, and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Our Migrant Souls, the New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, and The Barbarian Nurseries. 

This review of George Hoyningen-Huene: Photography, Fashion, Film by Susanna Brown (ed.) appears in the July/August 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Is a model a mannequin, a statue or a living thing? For the early 20th-century fashion photographer, this was a burning question (and not just because the studio lights were so hot). The model was, herself, a relatively new invention, the flesh and blood embodiment of the replica women who went before her: the miniature 18th-century dolls in their miniature example gowns sent out to prospective customers; the usefully proportioned dressmakers’ busts that aided tailoring; the wax dummies with glass eyes and human hair displayed in shop windows. The fashion show, popularised around the turn of the century by designers including Charles Frederick Worth, Lady Duff-Gordon and Paul Poiret, required her ambulatory services as she strolled, drifted and turned, animating the clothing she wore.

Where the fashion show might have encouraged the model to move, the photographer beckoned her back towards stasis. (Early fashion photography could only move as fast as the technology – confined to the tripod within the studio, gestures had to be held for as long as it took the camera to blink.) As the fashion magazine – another fin-de-siècle invention, with American Vogue founded in 1892 – slowly made the move from illustration to photography, the display of clothes on the printed page became an experimental arena. Photographers including Adolph de Meyer and Edward Steichen laid the groundwork for a new visual language that combined the illustrative and the theatrical. Meyer’s chosen women were hazily lit society queens; Steichen, a modernist who took over Meyer’s position as chief Vogue photographer in 1923, favoured sultry, cinematic gloss. At first glance George Hoyningen-Huene is a photographer of the statue school. There is one right there on the cover of Thames & Hudson’s lavish new book about him. Taken in 1934, it features Catharina ‘Toto’ Koopman, a Dutch-Javanese model with a marvellously storied life (her CV included stints as a Chanel model, an Allied spy during the Second World War and a successful London gallerist). She is wearing a crisp, sinuous dress by French label Augustabernard. Toto’s face is perfectly lit in profile, her limbs throwing back long shadows. The pose suggests motion, one leg poised for the next step, but the effect is one of absolute stillness. If a skilled carving asks us to marvel at its uncanny mimicry of textures and movements – a muscle flexed, a skirt draped – then a photo like this achieves the opposite, reducing the human body to a glorious display of frozen solidity.

Reflections…, Miss Hubbell (1930), George Hoyningen-Huene. © The George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

Digging into his background, one can see why Hoyningen-Huene might like an ice queen. Born in 1900 in tsarist St Petersburg to a Baltic baron father and American mother, he spent his childhood in what he described as ‘a world of Emperors, Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses, nobility, militarism, authoritarianism, high-principled duty and incredible emotional tension […] a world of sacred things, of ikons and incense.’ Later, as revolution brewed, the family fled the country, first to England and then to France.

In Paris, Hoyningen-Huene landed in the midst of a creative and cultural explosion, a much-mythologised period in which France became, in the words of the composer Virgil Thomson, ‘a miracle spot like ancient Greece’. Hoyningen-Huene slipped comfortably into a social and professional network of Russian émigrés, American expats and artists drawn from across Europe, assembling the kind of contacts book that yielded an endless supply of models, subjects, creative collaborators and prospective employers, soon including French Vogue and Vanity Fair. He was aided by friends such as Man Ray, who taught him some of the rudiments of photography. In 1924 the pair collaborated on a fashion portfolio.

Man Ray, steeped in Surrealism, was a mannequin man through and through. The body was something to be segmented, distorted, upended, solarised; models’ faces interchangeable with masks, their eyes dripping perfect glass tears. The cynic might call it the ultimate form of objectification, the apologist (myself among them) drawn to the eerie fun of doubling and visual deception. Although Hoyningen-Huene photographed actual mannequins several times, his early vision was distinctly neoclassical – a mode that worked especially well in the 1930s, Madeleine Vionnet’s bias-cut gowns and Cristóbal Balenciaga’s bulbous, swooping silhouettes equally at home under stage lighting that picked out every drape and cheekbone, juxtaposed against the prop columns and blocks that Hoyningen-Huene favoured. There is an untouchable quality to the women who wear these elaborate designs, an enjoyably bitchy froideur that could not be sustained in quite the same way once Hoyningen-Huene made the move into colour. Even his erotic portraits of men, including his lover, friend and fellow photographer Horst P. Horst, are successful relics of a monochrome age – though these Olympians, muscles rippling, are not as remote as those still, self-contained women who graced Vogue and later Harper’s Bazaar.

Porch of the Maidens, Erechtheion, Athens, Greece (1939), George Hoyningen-Huene. © © The George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

This book, edited by Susanna Brown, is clever and illuminating, with chapters by different writers devoted to the many and varied stages in Hoyningen-Huene’s life, all the way to a final act as a film colourist consultant in Los Angeles, where he died as a naturalised US citizen in 1968. Much of his architectural and travel photography restates his preoccupation with ancient forms – the line from the caryatids atop the Acropolis to his models draped in silk and jewels clear.

Fashion has always naively maintained an obsession with ‘timelessness,’ as though there could be some pure, unchanging definition of beauty not subject to societal tastes and neuroses. But a statue woman is as much a commodity as the mannequin woman, the fashion photograph borrowing from portraiture and fine art but ultimately separate given its commercial undertones – the fantasy always for sale.

George Hoyningen-Huene: Photography, Fashion, Film by Susanna Brown (ed.) is published by Thames and Hudson.

From the July/August 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

To pick up from last time, most of the seventy-one contributors to the 2024 Whitney Biennial have a room to themselves. It gives them space like a solo exhibition, yet it also turns almost everything into an installation.

Rooms to the side for new media punctuate the flow. Isaac Julien begins his with a wall of mirrors, before a quiet narrative set on several screens. It tracks a silent conversation between past and present African American sculpture and an intellectual founder of the Harlem Renaissance. One might have wandered into a maze, where the only way out is to sit still.

Speaking of permeability, they also bleed into one another. Each floor of the 2022 Biennial had its own character. This one has instead a continuous flow. One can step from Suzanne Jackson, whose layered paint and gel become their own armature, to a different kind of hanging, by ektor garcia in cotton and lace. It is only a step from there to tatami mats and film stained with color by Lotus L. Kang, like Mark Rothko set free from the walls. Karyn Olivier leaves more clothing in a circle on the floor, as a pile of trash or a place of rest.

One might turn from testimonies to abortion by Carmen Winant, more than twenty-five hundred of them, to pregnancy and motherhood for Julia Phillips. You may remember her ceramic hips when you come to body casts from Jes Fan or a bronze liver from K. R. M. Mooney. Nor is it far from Westin’s smoked glass to a Lakota tent from Cannupa Hanska Luger—it, too, inverted and suspended overhead. It is Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure, because her entire “world is upside down.” Draped pillars from Dala Nasser in Lebanon stand beside four Daughters from Rose B. Simpson in New Mexico. They could be a single cross-cultural installation.

Out on a terrace, Torkwase Dyson arranges massive geometry in black as a “playground.” Tony Smith and Minimalism meet African American art now. A floor above, Kiyan Williams fashions a reproduction of the White House from black soil. It tilts badly, just as Luger’s tipi is inverted. A wall of amber from Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio stands just inside. I mistook them for work of the same artist.

Old media like painting and drawing are rare but worth regarding. Mary Lucier marks a calendar with the many deaths of colleagues and friends. Phillips recovers memory from “conception drawings” in vegetable oil and oil pastel. Mavis Pusey in 1970 took her active geometry from an ever-changing New York, but it looks more like prewar abstraction. Mary Lovelace O’Neal may have been thinking of blackness, but she rides a blue whale in wave upon wave of paint. Jackson is still very much a painter.

If you forget that, you have bought into a stunning but heavy-handed biennial. It has older artists, like Lucier, Jackson, and Harmony Hammond, all born in 1944, and Lovelace O’Neal, born in 1942, although a generation or two goes largely missing along the way. Hammond, too, works between weaving and abstraction, like Minimalism brought to feminist life. Pusey, like Jackson a black artist, died in 2018. You might not know it, though, in a show that wants desperately to be current. Oh, and did I mention politics, for next time I focus on that and and its reliance on light, sound, and video?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on.

“Are you having an affair with ——?” Someone had put the question to me the day before the party, and the word affair had rung so hollow that when I answered in the negative it didn’t even feel like a lie. I was mostly struck by the use of the word itself, which gave the whole thing a certain sophistication. But still, I chafed. “Why are you asking?” “I wouldn’t care if you were.” “Why would you?” “I said I wouldn’t.” In those days, I would snap at questions or laugh them off. How badly I must have wanted to be found out.

Back then—all of us in grad school—we met weekly for dinner. It began as a way of observing Shabbat as my roommate rediscovered his Judaism, or rediscovered himself in relation to Judaism, or else rediscovered everything, concluding that within the world as it existed there was no way to disentangle himself from his religion. I am not Jewish but Catholic, by then more or less totally lapsed, and while spending most of my time around this brilliant, intense religious seeker certainly shunted me along toward my own reckoning with faith, what these dinners really inspired in me was a taste for dinners. But then, maybe there was something irrepressibly if obliquely religious about even this. Around a ruined table, confessions can be offered or extracted at will, friendships forged and sundered, and the truth, or what you believe to be the truth, can be loudly declared only to be shrugged off the next morning as drunken enthusiasm. You can fake it, and have it count, or you can mean it, and have it not count.

The Friday gatherings soon swelled to two-part binges: the first, small group who came early to eat matzo soup and drink blessed wine; the second, smoke-filled blowouts with whoever happened to drop by, filling our large apartment and terrorizing our anonymous neighbors with late-night shouting, nearly everyone disastrously drunk by the end. The first group would remain secretly intact throughout the second half of the party even if we dispersed physically among the larger party, silently faithful to the privacy we had shared before everyone else had arrived. I prided myself on always remembering to turn on a lamp when I went to bed, so that my roommate could read on Sabbath morning as I slept off the hangovers to which he seemed miraculously immune.

Before long, it became clear that we needed a change. Our time together was coming to an end—graduations, far-flung fellowships, simple drifting were all in the offing—and the intimacy that inner circle had known at the beginning of the year was fading amid the revelry. We needed a dinner, with just a few of us, to restore the center that increasingly failed to hold. So, one Saturday, once Shabbos was out, we met at a different apartment to find one another again.

It was a mess from the start. In my memory, the air was stifling. Something on the stove had burned, or else it was just one of those nights when spring is wearing out and summer makes an early appearance, impatient to oppress. There were seven or eight of us. Some arrived early, some late, and it was immediately apparent that each of us had a different idea of what this meeting of the inner circle would be. One or two wanted quiet conversation, didn’t even plan to drink (well, drink much). Another pair brought drugs. Curiously, someone else brought cigars, I think, though not enough for everyone; they went unsmoked.

—— and I had spent the hour before the dinner in a terrible argument about nothing, probably because we couldn’t admit to what we wanted, and wouldn’t even know how to get it if we could—how do you put an end something that barely exists? And how do you start something, knowing it will have to end almost at once? And there we were, and no one knew, or no one admitted to knowing, and the deception filled up the spaces between the tectonic plates of incongruous desires and expectations, and before long I was sure that everyone felt lied to, even if they didn’t understand why.

I was doing the lying, so I felt responsible. I overcompensated by spouting off, holding forth, cracking jokes in general and at others’ expense. A few played along, but the tension mounted. I noticed sidelong glances, backhanded remarks, pointed silences. Finally, one friend leaned across the table, looked at me steadily, and said in a calm, firm voice: “You need to stop talking. For five minutes, just stop talking.”

That was the end of the evening’s politeness. I shouted with forced laughter that I wanted to talk for every minute that remained in the night. She shouted that I was taking up all the air in the room. Of course she was right, though she was wrong in the sense that talking was hardly the source of the trouble.

The night we had hoped for was pretty much over following this exchange, though everyone stayed until the small hours, feeling restless and unnerved and increasingly sloppy, trying half-heartedly to regain the high spirits that had never been there to begin with. By the next day, the catastrophe of the dinner was a laughable mystery, except to —— and me, who both knew, or felt we knew, the source of the tension that sent us out onto the porch for slightly shaking cigarettes, or into the kitchen for ill-advised refills, or else simply into the bathroom for a quiet breather. I swear I remember someone returning to the table wiping tears from their eyes.

Years have passed between then and now. Everyone’s over it. Still, when I think back on that time, I think of that dinner, when I wanted intimacy, would have settled for confrontation, and could only offer evasion. I want to know: Why all the deception, the withholding? Now all I see is time squandered.

Recently, I reunited with a friend who had been at the dinner, and we were able to speak honestly, admitting to everything. “You were such a mess back then,” she said, and for the briefest moment, I felt relief. Somehow, despite all my efforts to keep things hidden, something of myself had slipped through and made itself known to someone else. Then she said, “But we were so young. It doesn’t matter,” and wiped it all away. The person I had been, who had for that moment become solid, legible, irrefutably there, vanished, once again a blank space of wind and passing weather.

Jack Hanson is associate editor of  The Yale Review and a lecturer in English at Yale. He lives in New York.

From the June 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

On 2 November 1918, with the war nearing its conclusion and the German Empire close to collapse, the art historian Aby Warburg was pacing his home in Hamburg, gun in hand, threatening to kill his wife and children. Although his doctors blamed the disastrous political situation, Warburg for many years had been battling with chronic anxiety, first diagnosed as ‘neurasthenia’ and later schizophrenia. For the next six years he would be treated for psychosis in various hospitals and asylums. His case was considered hopeless, yet Warburg did recover.

The eldest son of a powerful banking family, he rejected that path, instead choosing to pursue an academic career. He studied at universities in Bonn, Munich and Strasbourg, and amassed an internationally significant collection of rare books. After returning home in 1924, he went back to work as director of his library – the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg – and embarked on one of the most original art historical projects of the 20th century: the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Comprised of photographs attached to large wooden panels, the atlas connected artworks with similar poses and gestures across time and space. With each panel organised around a theme, viewers could trace the afterlife of antiquity through specific motifs repeated by later artists.

It has been more than 50 years since Ernst Gombrich’s ‘intellectual biography’ of Warburg was published, and Hans C. Hönes’s Tangled Paths is a necessary, serious and intellectually provocative contribution to our understanding of a man whose work has only increased in influence since the turn of the century. In 1999 the Getty Research Institute produced a translation of Warburg’s collected writings (first published in 1932, three years after his death). The greater availability of his work, combined with influential studies such as Georges Didi-Huberman’s L’image survivante (2002), led to a renewal of interest in the scholar and a wave of research focused on alternatives to organising art history according to linear chronology.

Hönes’s book concentrates on placing Warburg’s life and work in the intellectual context of the late 19th century and the professional networks of the early 20th. Interestingly, this means that he characterises Warburg as a ‘minor figure’, marginal to the main debates in the rapidly evolving discipline of art history. Warburg’s own legacy was sustained principally through his library, transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933 to escape Nazi Germany, and surviving as the Warburg Institute. Its building in Bloomsbury will complete a major two-year renovation this summer, meaning Hönes’s book appears at an appropriate moment.

For Warburg, research was a therapeutic tool, swinging between theoretical speculation and intense empirical investigation. His doctoral thesis, published in 1893, rejected aesthetic criticism and the contemporary cult of Botticelli. Instead, he regarded the artist as merely a ‘pliable’ and ‘unthinking’ conductor of literary sources and classical motifs. In Warburg’s analysis, form is discussed only when it is ‘iconographically remarkable’, and what appeared noteworthy in the Primavera or Birth of Venus were ‘accessories such as locks of hair or billowing drapery’, the ‘intensification of outward movement’ being the true sign of antique influence. While travelling in the south-western United States in 1895 and 1896, Warburg began developing theories of symbolism and witnessed Native American ritual dances. These ideas and experiences would re-emerge many years later in a lecture he delivered while a psychiatric patient at Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen. In October 1897, Warburg and his wife Mary moved to Florence, where he would continue his archival research, resulting in some of his best known articles such as that based on his discovery of the will of the banker Francesco Sassetti.

Warburg repeatedly turned down professional opportunities at a range of universities, revealing in the process his deep insecurities and fear of public scrutiny. He did maintain a close relationship with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (founded in 1897), and was a member of the organising committee for the biennial International Congress for Art History, being instrumental in taking the tenth congress to Rome in 1912. It was here that Warburg delivered his lecture on the ‘iconology’ of the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara. Yet only within the context of his own library could Warburg’s ideas be fully developed. These were realised in his multidimensional Bilderatlas, the images of which, Warburg believed, illustrated our ‘attempt to absorb pre-coined expressive values by means of the representation of life in motion’.

Warburg was given to repeated autobiographical reflection, what Hönes calls ‘a constant wish to join the dots of his life, and to evoke a logical coherence in a life and career’, and the current book does much to clarify the scholar’s somewhat tortured intellectual journey. Emerging at points also is the personality of Warburg himself, in all its grandiosity, arrogance, snobbery, and self-pitying delusion. Hönes does not dwell excessively on his personal life, making fleeting reference to Warburg’s fraught relationship with his brothers, his feelings of resentment towards his wife and children, his affairs and domestic violence. Nor does the book contain many lengthy quotations, the author preferring paraphrase and summary, meaning the reader is kept at arms-length from the sources themselves and especially the complexity of Warburg’s literary style. The content of his letters and diaries is only ever half-glimpsed, which can be occasionally frustrating.

Warburg, we are told, placed great ethical importance on the work of the historian, insisting that the ‘voices from the past’ should speak for themselves and perform their own Eigenbeleuchtung, or self-illumination. Hönes takes a different approach, and it may be that another biography of Warburg is needed in future, one more sensitive and receptive to the emotional and psychological life of its subject, to reveal this aspect of the man himself.

Tangled Paths: A Life of Aby Warburg by Hans C. Hönes is published by Reaktion.

From the June 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “learned to use a gun at eleven, got his first motorcycle at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, started studying medicine at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero once wrote. Fogwill was born outside Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived until 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a young man, but it wasn’t until 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, after he’d lost the fortune he made in advertising, that his story “Muchacha Punk” won a prestigious writing contest and his literary career took off. In 1982, he wrote his most famous novel, Los pichiciegos. Set during the Falklands War and published while the conflict was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of war, a kind of Slaughterhouse-Five for Argentina, was an immediate sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the military dictatorship. A writer of short stories, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish more than twenty books across a thirty-year career.

Drawing on his background in advertising, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, just so, like Prince or Madonna—into a brand. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing both the military dictatorship and what he called the “horror show” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “almost alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable body of work, an idea, an inimitable way of being, and above all, an ethics.” Known as a generous friend and mentor, he guided younger writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira.

Like his persona, Fogwill’s writing is provocative and irreverent. He absorbed the different strands of the Argentine tradition and produced a literature that defies classification: a literature of ideas and the body, the political and the personal, the ordinary and the ineffable. Nimbly traversing form and genre, he employs myriad styles while maintaining a singular and inimitable sensibility.

Nowhere is this gift more apparent than in his short stories, which range from metafictional parody to drug-fueled delirium, from realism to political satire to forays into genre, from hedonistic escapades to deeply personal explorations of music and art. Despite their density of thought and narrative complexity, his stories are never a slog. At times his prose is euphoric and propulsive; at others, subtle and restrained. Fogwill is interested in the manipulations of social, political, and economic constructs; in the fraught relationship between words and things, between meaning and experience; in the body, the sensorium, and desire; in altered states, dreams, and memory. Humorous and unsettling, acerbic and contemplative, his stories explore the randomness of life and the ways in which meaning rises out of incoherence, revealing itself in flashes, in fragments, in ephemeral moments.

“Muchacha Punk,” the story that launched Fogwill’s literary career, is ostensibly the picaresque tale of the one-night stand an Argentine traveler has with a British “punk girl.” “What’s interesting about this story,” the protagonist states at the outset, “is ‘I slept with’ the punk girl.” And on the surface, that is essentially the plot: a chance encounter on a cold winter night in London, a mutual attraction, an amorous adventure. But what unfolds on the page is far more intricate, evolving into a story that deconstructs itself as it is being written, a story about class and the politics of language, about cultural collision and historical contingency where, against the backdrop of a brewing conflict between Argentina and the UK, a night in the life of one man brings the zeitgeist of a decade into focus.

In “Help a él,” his parodic homage and anagrammatic inversion of Borges’s canonical “El Aleph,” Fogwill reframes the encounter with the fantastical, all-seeing orb of Borges as a psychotropic and erotic episode. While both stories are, ultimately, about loss, about the death of a beloved, “Help a él” manages to bring the cerebral Borgesian experience into the realm of the corporeal and libidinal. Where Borges’s “instrument” allows his protagonist to gain access to the infinite and to thereby hear again the “irretrievable voice” of his lost love, the “syrup” that Fogwill’s protagonist imbibes actuates an intensely lubricious reunion where hallucination, oneiric fantasy, and memory meld together. Like Borges, Fogwill layers in metafictional references; like Borges, Fogwill pokes fun at the figure of the writer and the literary endeavor, but by making transcendence less a matter of knowledge, by taking it out of the library and the labyrinth and grounding it in bodily pleasure, he brings the Borgesian—and by extension, the Argentine—tradition into conversation with a more contemporary cosmology.

Stories like “Japonés” and “Passengers on the Night Train” showcase Fogwill’s chameleonic virtuosity, how he could adapt and eschew genre conventions to create taut, suspenseful narratives while maintaining his poet’s attention to language, his wry humor, and his ludic sensibility. In “Japonés,” Fogwill’s hypnotic prose and detailed knowledge of sailing create an immediacy that put the reader aboard the boat where the narrative takes place, setting up a turn that comes out of nowhere and transforms a tale of adventure and camaraderie into something like a ghost story. “Passengers on the Night Train,” which appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, is a ghost story of a different order, a master class in pacing and perspective, where the vicissitudes of trauma and memory are refracted to disquieting effect through a series of inexplicable events in a small town.

“Day’s Residues,” meanwhile, puts us inside the frayed nerves and disoriented sensory experience of a man at the tail end of a days-long cocaine binge. As the story unfolds, the borders between reality, dream, and hallucination become increasingly porous. Scenarios and characters recur, overlap, and are reconfigured. The overall effect is that the story itself—in its rhythm, its structure, in the way it agitates one’s nerve endings—mimics the movement of a dream. But the unstable narrative footing also occasions moments of poetic lucidity. For Fogwill, dreams are “a dark dissolution” wherein “consciousness breaks down slowly, sloughing off its useless artifice”; a bodiless state wherein the palimpsests of waking life accumulate without meaning and the veil of language drops, revealing things “in their full being.” Dreaming is both the structure and substance of the story, making for an experience of reading that is simultaneously dread-inducing and stimulating, disconcerting and epiphanic and entirely unforgettable.

A prodigy and a polymath, a singer and a sailor, a lover of art, music, tobacco, fast cars, and public outbursts, Fogwill was a brilliant and subversive writer, a larger-than-life figure, Argentina’s quintessential poète maudit. His influence is pervasive and enduring in Spain and Latin America. Although those of us in the Anglophone world might be a little late to the party, here’s hoping his singular body of work finds a foothold here. His writing demands our attention.

Will Vanderhyden is an award-winning translator of Spanish literature.

From the May 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

There aren’t too many round museums out there – it’s not easy to hang paintings on curved walls. But maybe there should be more. The two most conspicuous examples in the United States, the Guggenheim in New York and the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C., are also intriguing places to see modern art, their centripetal spatial dynamics imparting a certain force to the viewing experience. As it happens, they also share a history. In 1962 it was an exhibition of modern sculpture from the collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, arranged along Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous spiral ramp at the Guggenheim, that brought the art-loving mining magnate to public attention.

Hirshhorn had emigrated from Latvia to the United States at the age of six; by 16 he was working on Wall Street as a stockbroker. Canny investments, especially in Canadian mineral rights, gave him the means to assemble one of the era’s great collections, ranging from 19th-century American painters – Thomas Eakins among them – to emerging talents such as Willem de Kooning. Unusually for a private collector, he had a particular interest in sculpture, and was friendly with such figures as Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti. After the Guggenheim’s presentation of these holdings, he was avidly courted by S. Dillon Ripley, then secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Hirshhorn soon agreed to donate his holdings to the government, along with an endowment for a new museum. Reputedly, he liked the idea that a poor Jewish kid could grow up to have his name on the National Mall.

When the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opened, in 1974, it was the first modernist building on the otherwise neoclassical National Mall, predating I.M. Pei’s East Building for the National Gallery of Art by four years. That alone would have made it controversial, but the design by Gordon Bunshaft, of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, made it positively shocking. Set atop four massive piers is an enormous drum, 231 feet in diameter; the Guggenheim’s main spiral could fit neatly into the central courtyard. The building was sometimes compared to a UFO coming in for a landing, and more frequently to a fortress, with its horizontal window akin to the firing slot of a gun turret. ‘Not a particularly friendly comment,’ as critic Paul Goldberger noted, ‘but then, this is not a particularly friendly building.’

That may be so, but thanks to its location on the Mall, the Hirshhorn is actually far more public-facing than any of its peers. It is one of very few major art museums in the country, and the only one devoted to modern and contemporary art, that is entirely free. It is also visited by a genuine cross-section of the public – more than 700,000 of them last year. If any US institution has the chance to bring new audiences to its subject, it is this one. And if its founding collection, typical of its time, focused almost exclusively on white men, today its programme is as diverse as America itself.

This transformation is the subject of the Hirshhorn’s current survey exhibition, ‘Revolutions’, held on the occasion of the museum’s 50th anniversary (until 20 April 2025). More than 200 works are included, many from the founding collection, punctuated by recent acquisitions of contemporary art. It’s a show about then and now, and continuities and disjunctions across time. That theme is announced in no uncertain terms on the opening wall, where a typically ravishing society portrait by John Singer Sargent – among the oldest works in the collection – is hung alongside a sensitive depiction of a Black woman in a cobalt blue dress, painted by the Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo in 2020. More than a century separates these two pictures. Yet they share a typology, and a conviction that a single artwork can conjure something larger than itself.

Actually, 2024 is a double anniversary at the Hirshhorn. Melissa Chiu is marking her tenth year as director, having arrived in 2014 from her previous position at the Asia Society in New York City. Despite having to navigate the fathomless sublime that is the Smithsonian bureaucracy, as well a nearly two-year closure during the pandemic and the perpetually turbulent politics of Washington D.C., she can claim a formidable list of accomplishments. Annual attendance has doubled, as has the size of the board of trustees. The museum entrance has been beautifully redesigned by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto – an imaginative choice, given that he is best known as a photographer. In an age of generally underperforming museum apps, a mobile guide called Hirshhorn Eye (‘Hi’ for short), introduced in 2018, impresses for its ease of use and depth of content. And that collection has grown and diversified considerably, most recently through a gift of 141 contemporary Chinese photographs from the New York-based collector Larry Warsh, recently on view in the exhibition ‘A Window Suddenly Opens’.

On the Wall Series: Guangzhou 1 (2002–03), Weng Fen. © the artist

If one had to point to a project that has most defined Chiu’s directorship, though, it would unquestionably be ‘Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors’, presented to rhapsodic public response in 2017. The exhibition was such a runaway success that it is hard to recall a time when these mirrored environments were considered marginal to Kusama’s practice – a kitschy extension of her earlier maximalist abstraction. The Hirshhorn revised that script, presenting six of the chambers to show the full range of Kusama’s effects. In short order, the show became the hottest ticket in town and a citadel of avant-garde seriousness found itself one of the most Instagrammed places on earth.

The Kusama effect remains controversial. Quite apart from the social mediatisation of high culture (a ship that has definitely sailed), there is the more fundamental issue of whether immersive spectacle is a good thing for museums, or whether that sort of thing would be better left to Hollywood. Chiu professes herself agnostic on this question, but makes a point that can easily be lost in the debate: the real institutional impact of ‘Infinity Mirrors’ came only in the long term. ‘They came for Kusama,’ she says, ‘and stayed for Duchamp’.

A principle of ‘radical accessibility’, therefore, has animated the Hirshhorn throughout Chiu’s directorship. One of the first projects she green-lighted was ‘Processions’, a four-part collaboration with the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates. The first of the events was particularly memorable. Titled ‘The Runners’, it was held in September 2016, in conjunction with the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Student athletes from Howard University circumnavigated the museum’s ring-shaped, third-floor galleries at a brisk jog, with Gates and his fellow Black Monks of Mississippi providing gospel-inflected song in accompaniment. The performance was moving in all senses of the word. An improvised activation of a normally contemplative space, it could also be read in emotional terms, as disturbing, hopeful, or both – what were these young Black people running from, or towards?

Installation view of Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe (2018) by Yayoi Kusama at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2022. Photo: Matailong Du; courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro, London/Venice; © the artist

Gates’s activation of the galleries also confirmed something that Chiu and her curators had already been thinking: the Hirshhorn’s most effective projects, whether inside the building or out, exploit its unusually forceful architecture rather than fighting or simply disregarding it. That had been true of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s epic projection on to the building in 1988, one of the most famous public artworks of its day (the project was restaged by the Hirshhorn on its 30th anniversary), and it had again been true in 2011, when 102 of Andy Warhol’s Shadows paintings – his late, great, statement on mortality – were presented in an uninterrupted sequence around the gallery, inescapable as death itself. Circular thinking is also crucial to Mark Bradford’s Pickett’s Charge, commissioned by the Hirshhorn in 2017, and by any standard one of the most consequential American works of the 21st century. Much could (and has) been said about this monumental cycle of eight paintings. They curve around the third-floor gallery walls in the manner of a 19th-century cyclorama, which is no coincidence, as they were inspired by one that depicted the same event – the failed Confederate assault that marked the turning point of the Battle of Gettysburg and arguably the whole American Civil War – completed by the French artist Paul Philippoteaux in 1883.

Bradford responded not just to the enormity of Philippoteaux’s cyclorama – 13m tall, it is now preserved at the Gettysburg National Military Park – but also its almost cinematic fusion of fact and fiction. Using his signature technique, he layered printouts of its scenes together with rope, paper and paint, then selectively peeled back through the morass. The result is a distressed and disjunctive surface, a deconstructivist equivalent to Maya Lin’s famously mute Vietnam War Memorial, just a short, reflective walk away along the National Mall. As an endless topology of torn narrative, it is a perfect metaphor for American history, and given the Civil War’s centrality to ongoing conflicts about race, regional identity and competing ideals of freedom, also a powerful statement on the present day.

One question Chiu must get a lot – I certainly wanted to know – is how long Bradford’s masterwork will remain in place. At least for now, it is impossible to imagine it being removed; it would be like the Reina Sofía taking down Guernica. (The museum has two other long-term, site-specific installations, by Laurie Anderson and Barbara Kruger.) This raises an interesting question: how long is ‘the now’? On its 50th birthday, the Hirshhorn is responsible for about twice as much art history as it was when it was founded. Many of the works in ‘Revolutions’, which once seemed so radical, now feel remote, and require careful explanation so that visitors can understand their significance. How should a museum devoted to contemporaneity, like the Hirshhorn, steward artworks that become historical the moment they’re installed? How can it plan for the long term while still being responsive to the moment?

Installation view of Pickett’s Charge (2017) by Mark Bradford at the Hirshhorn Museum. Photo: Cathy Carver; courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

There’s no simple answer to these questions. To the extent that Chiu has one, it is to expand the theatre of operations. At the outset of a planned revitalisation of the building and its campus – a project that has been jointly awarded to SOM (Bunshaft’s firm) and Selldorf Architects – the Swiss artist Nicolas Party covered the necessary scaffolding with a huge mural, depicting faces peering out from behind colourful curtains. Hiroshi Sugimoto has been invited to extend his earlier work at the museum entrance, now advising on the layout of the surrounding sculpture garden. One working principle of this development is to position more audience-friendly works at the garden’s perimeter, with more challenging abstract sculpture closer to the centre.

At the same time, the Hirshhorn has involved itself in less conventional undertakings, including a reality TV show. The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, jointly produced with MTV and Smithsonian Channel, aired last year to an audience of millions. As is usually the case, there wasn’t much actual reality involved; the proceedings were hardly an accurate representation of how artists work (the seven contestants were asked to respond to a variety of set briefs in a limited time, and were then judged by a panel of art world celebrities). It was good fun though, and excellent promotion, with the Hirshhorn featured throughout and Chiu herself gamely appearing on screen – such is the job description of the 21st-century museum director.

Another, far more serious outside-the-walls initiative came about in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in 2020. This horrific incident prompted all public-facing American institutions, museums included, to clarify their commitments to racial justice. Few found a response appropriate to these charged circumstances. The Hirshhorn was an exception, partnering with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and 11 other institutions around the world to organise a free, 48-hour streaming of Arthur Jafa’s indelible Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), a hard-hitting video work about racial violence in the United States. At a time when the Smithsonian was still closed due to Covid restrictions, it was the very definition of ‘radical accessibility’: not just a gesture, but a real service to the general public, transmitted through the medium of art.

Fifty years in, the Hirshhorn has reimagined itself in ways that its founders could scarcely have anticipated. Today it is not just a museum, but a performance stage, a broadcaster and, at times, a public sculpture. Chiu is not alone in exploring such roles for her institution; a flexibility of approach has become almost obligatory in the 21st century. But there is something special about the way the Hirshhorn is doing it. It’s all too easy to think that cross-disciplinarity is inherently progressive, but both infrastructure and expertise are real and it’s unlikely that the public is always better served when its museums also try to be theatres and cinemas. Chiu and her team approach this seemingly forbidding building as a place to drop ideas into the world, allowing them to ripple outward. What will the next decade, and the next half century, bring to the Hirshhorn? It’s impossible to say. But right now, this is one museum that’s definitely on a roll.

‘Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960’ is at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., until 20 April 2025.

From the May 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

To pick up from last time on New York summer sculpture, Huma Bhabha may seem a strange choice for Brooklyn Bridge Park, overlooking the New York harbor and a gateway to the New World. This artist looks out on nothing but the pitiless depths of the human heart.

She has an uneasy relationship with a park’s natural growth as well. The Pakistani American called a solo show “Unnatural Histories” and appeared among others in “After Nature,” and the work itself has an unnatural darkness. She carves four plinths from cork before casting them in bronze—and their heads from skulls. She sets them in a secluded lawn, facing one another or looking within.

Unless, that is, they are staring down the viewer, through next May 9. For all her pretension, she is not turning away. The carvings bring fullness to their bodies and the spirit life at their base. Their title, Before the End, quotes a medieval writer’s apocalyptic visions, but eternity has already arrived. Bhabha brought her strange beings to the Met roof in 2018, and the whole point could be the interplay of weekend pleasures and spiritual aspirations. Were the four mythic women not so far apart, one could almost call them a community.

Jorge Otero-Pailos has modern sculpture tied up in knots. His welded steel on Park Avenue’s median strip looks back to David Smith in its industrial materials and sharp edges, like farm equipment no longer able to produce anything but art. Still, his spikes and coils have a clear sense of direction, at facing ends of a block and a mile north—perhaps an artifact of its original site in Oslo. The Spanish artist invites viewers to start crossing the street only to stop dead in the middle, through October 31. Most artists would bring more than three works, to fill more of the avenue, but Otero-Pailos sticks to such classy neighbors as the Seagram Building and Park Avenue Armory. Call it classicism run wild.

Further up the avenue, is that a totem, the old staple of public sculpture? A block further, is that one huge roll of toilet paper? But no, both are used tires. Betsabeé Romero embellishes the first with traditional Mexican garments, the second with gold and silver leaf. A third sculpture, a tire alone, bears images that I can only guess are ancient warriors or gods. They may respect their ancestry, but, they are begging to hit the road.

Only someone with a lot of nerve could welcome summer two years running with a bright pink tree bare of leaves—or only an artist. Pamela Rosenkranz is both, and she names her construction on the spur of the High Line Old Tree at that. If it seems as confrontational as the 2022 pretend drone airplane by Sam Durant, it is a lot more colorful, through fall. Besides, now it has company, in an entire Secondary Forest four blocks away, through next March. Giulia Cenci populates it poignantly, with figures in melted down scrap metal, the trees their skin and bones. They do not look sad, though, and one could almost call it a park.

Also on the High Line, Kapwani Kiwanga adds a single fern, in shifting colors behind dichroic glass. The tall glass and steel case has a beauty of its own, though October 31. After so much artistry, it seems downright peevish for a ballerina to take her curtain call, roses in hand through November 30, for Karon Davis. The act continues with an entire rock band from Cosima von Bonin, through August 31, of six smiling fish. Lily van der Stokker adds to the cutes with a billboard reading THANK YOU DARLiNG through November. If you, like the artist, find this a feminist statement, you are only taking the bait—and I pick up the tour next time in Socrates Sculpture Park and beyond.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

From Sample Trees, a portfolio by Ben Lerner and Thomas Demand in The Paris Review issue no. 212 (Spring 2015).

When asked if there was “a close intimacy” between him and his sister, André Weil replied, “Very much so. My sister as a child always followed me, and my grandmother, who liked to drop into German occasionally, used to say that she was a veritable Kopiermaschine.” Biographers have emphasized—overly so, according to André Weil—the episode described by his sister in a May 1942 letter to Father Perrin, known as her “Spiritual Autobiography”: “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair which come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.”

The largest part of the known correspondence between Simone and André Weil dates from the period when André was imprisoned for being absent without leave from his military duties; he was held first in Le Havre, then Rouen, from February to early May 1940. These circumstances gave Simone Weil an opportunity to explore scientific, and particularly mathematical, questions that were significant to her. In particular, one must note the importance given to the crisis of incommensurables in her correspondence. The reason this moment in the history of thought plays a central role at this point in Simone Weil’s reflection on science is well defined by André Weil in a letter dated March 28, 1940: “A proportion is what is named; the fact that there are relations that aren’t nameable (and nameable is a relation between whole numbers), that there have been λόγοι ἄλόγοι, the word itself is so deeply moving that I can’t believe that in a period so essentially dramatic … such an extraordinary event could have been seen as a mere scientific discovery … what you say about proportion suggests that, at the beginnings of Greek thought, there was such an intense feeling of the disproportion between thought and world (and, as you say, between man and God) that they had to build a bridge over this abyss at all costs. That they thought they found it … in mathematics is nothing if not credible.”

The crisis of reason that Simone Weil apprehended in contemporary physics led her to revisit the birth of the scientific spirit. The relationship between this crisis of science as a crisis of reason and her interest in the question of incommensurables is clear. Rationalizing irrationals was at the heart of the mathematical problem of incommensurables. According to Simone Weil’s interpretation, the same difficulty was encountered in her day with quantum theory (see her study “Classical Science and After,” as well as the article “Reflections on Quantum Theory”). How do we rationalize what appears—according to her interpretation—to be an “irrational” of this theory, in particular its uses of discontinuity and probability, notions on which the new physics rested? Could the crisis of reason, which is also a crisis of the notion of truth in contemporary physics, cause the same mental aberrations as the one produced by incommensurability, an aberration that led the Sophists to be skeptical of Logos and truth? Simone Weil’s references to Plato and her constant appeal to a new Eudoxus represent a desire to escape the skepticism of a new sophistry. She would write to her brother: “The popularization of this discovery casts discredit upon the notion of truth that has lasted to this day; it … contributed to the appearance of the idea that one can equally well demonstrate two contradictory theories; the Sophists spread this point of view among the masses, along with knowledge of an inferior quality, exclusively aimed at the conquest of power.” This marriage of a purely operative and combinatory science with the quest for power is what Simone Weil feared.

—Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux

Saturday [February 1940]

Dear André,

I see that for the moment your morale is good. I hope this will last. Your letter brought us considerable comfort. You ask us for many details; it’s not very easy. I don’t really know what to tell you about myself; my life is currently devoid of any memorable events. I wrote an article comparing politics in ancient Rome to the events of our era for Les nouveaux cahiers [The new notebooks]; I found singular analogies, but I think I already told you about it last winter. Only the first part of the article could be published; it’s such a shame. In the course of the preparatory reading I did, I discovered someone admirable: it’s Theodoric, the one who has his sepulcher in Ravenna. Procopius, who was in the camp opposed to him, said that during his entire reign he only committed one injustice, and that he died of sorrow over it. His letters (Theodoric’s) are delightful. Aside from that there’s an article by me on the Iliad awaiting publication by the N.R.F. I don’t know what will come of it. It contains bits of translation in which I was able, for certain lines, to keep the exact order of the words; in any case I was always able to translate line by line, I mean to have one line (of irregular length) of the French text correspond to each line of verse. If you know bits of the Iliad by heart, you could try to translate them; when you use a method like this one, it often takes a half hour or more to finish a line. It’s also excellent for forming style. Translating Keats into French (in French verse, for example) must also be a fun exercise. I’ve never tried.

A good occupation when one has too much time would also be to think of a way to let laypeople such as myself glimpse what exactly the interest and significance of your work is. For even supposing that it’s absolutely impossible, as you maintain, the fact of trying surely would not be without benefit to you. The benefit would be, I think, considerable. And even if you don’t succeed in formulating something I can understand, I think I would glimpse enough for it to be extremely interesting to me. Especially since I am less interested in mathematics than in mathematicians, as with every other field.

To come back to me, lastly, to make use of those moments when my capacity for work is weak (they are frequent), I’ve started studying Babylonian. I have a selection of Assyro-Babylonian texts, with the text transcribed in Latin characters, and the translation opposite, line by line; I’m playing around with making a juxtalinear translation without a grammar or a dictionary. In this way, I made the acquaintance of a certain Gilgamesh, the hero of an epic translated from the Sumerian. Friendship is its driving spirit; Gilgamesh loses his friend and immediately starts fearing death and running through the desert looking for eternal life, but he doesn’t find it. Later, he evokes his dead friend’s shadow, which gives him not very comforting information about existence beyond the grave. I read a few words lines of it to Evelyne, who has already retained a few words of Babylonian from it. As language and as poetry, it’s far from being as good as Homeric Greek. Egyptian would be more interesting, but it’s too hard.

See you soon, I hope. I hope we’ll be able to bring you books. Do you want Retz’s Memoirs and Pepys’s Diary? I deeply hope we’ll be able to see each other tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, since it’s impossible for us to trade places, which would be my deepest desire.

Simone

[February 1940]

Dear André,

We still need to wait a little, it appears, before we have the authorization to see you as much as we would like. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but write. But I hope that with some paper and books now, you aren’t bored, and that you exercise to keep in good shape.

Who knows, maybe you’ll discover some fascinating things? But here’s another distraction, now that you have leisure time. I don’t remember if I told you about this in the letter I wrote you from Le Havre, and that you must have received by now, but never mind. It would be to look for a way to make commoners (me, for example) appreciate the value of your current research. I’m sure this would be a very good exercise for you. What do you risk? You don’t risk wasting your time, since you have time to waste. It’s all fine and dandy for you to make fun of people like one of my former friends at rue d’Ulm who philosophize about mathematics without knowing anything about it, but perhaps it’s the mathematicians themselves who should try to do this work. Not like your friend Claude, of course. Not like the hero of Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece when he meditates on painting. But maybe there’s a way for one to become aware of what one is doing, and the value in what one is doing. And if one becomes aware of it, it must be possible to let nonspecialists at least get a glimpse of it. What would it cost you to try? I would be fascinated.

I think you were already no longer in Paris when I managed to get a copy of the book on Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics. I don’t know if I wrote you that I was able to get it. I want to write to the author about a question he leaves unresolved, that of the means by which the Egyptians were able, with a geometry he considers extremely crude and empirical, to find a remarkably accurate approximation of π, that is to say surface area of the circle = (8/9d)^2. This seems quite easy to imagine, if one assumes the methods are very crude. If the circumscribed square is divided into eighty-one little squares, one can consider that the circle’s surface area can be found by subtracting three of these squares from each corner, plus the approximate sum of three half-squares.

There’s a truly delightful Babylonian problem. One is given the dimensions of a canal to be dug, a worker’s daily output in volume of earth displaced, and the sum of workdays and workers. One must find the number of workdays and that of workers. I wonder what students’ parents would say if an exam today included a problem formulated in similar terms? It would be fun to try it. Strange people, those Babylonians. Personally, I don’t much like this abstract thinking. The Sumerians must have been a lot more congenial. First of all, they’re the ones who invented all the Mesopotamian myths, and myths are far more interesting than algebra. But you, you must be directly descended from the Babylonians. As for me, I do think that God, as the Pythagoreans put it, is ever a geometer—but not an algebraist. Be that as it may, I was pleased, when I read the last letter I received from you, to see that you denied being a member of the abstract school.

I remember that at Chançay or Dieu-le fit [sic] you said that these studies of Egypt and Babylon cast doubt on the role heretofore attributed to the Greeks as creators in the discipline of mathematics. On the contrary, I think that so far (subject to later discoveries) they provide a confirmation of this role. The Babylonians appear to have focused on abstract exercises concerning numbers, the Egyptians to have proceeded in a completely empirical manner—The application of a rational method to concrete problems and to the study of nature seems to have been specific to the Greeks. (It’s true that one would need to know Babylonian astronomy to be able to judge.) What is singular is that the Greeks must have known Babylonian algebra, and yet one doesn’t find a trace of it in them before Diophantus (who lived, if I’m not mistaken, in the fourth century A.D.). The Pythagoreans’ algebraic geometry is something else entirely. Religious conceptions must be behind this; apparently the Pythagoreans’ secret religion made use of geometry, and not algebra. If the Roman empire hadn’t destroyed all the esoteric cults, maybe we would understand something about these enigmas.

I think I told you that I published half a study comparing ancient Rome to certain contemporary phenomena in Les nouveaux cahiers. The second part was deeply appreciated by those who had the opportunity to read it, but their numbers were very limited. The first part got me a letter that gave us a good laugh and which I’ll copy for you here:

Madam,

Reduced to immobility and not knowing “who” I could consult, I turn to you to inform me: Who are you? An article in the January 1st issue of Les nouveaux cahiers is behind this question.

Sincerely,

The signature is unknown to me. Your mother thinks it’s someone burning with a desire to avenge the Romans, and that “reduced to immobility” means: If I wasn’t reduced to immobility, I would show you. … On the off chance, I didn’t reply. I wanted to reply: And you, sir?—or else: sum qui sum—or to send a photo of myself—or a copy of my identity card. But it still seemed preferable to me to save twenty sous. He will never know who I am. The question is formulated in a truly admirable manner.

I’m only telling you about things of no interest, but I don’t find “cast-iron prose” at the tip of my pen every day.

Thank you for saying that the future needs me, but, as I see it, it doesn’t need me any more than I need it. If only I had a time-travel machine, I wouldn’t point it at the future, I would point it at the past. And I wouldn’t even stop at the Greeks, I would go at least as far as the Aegeo-Cretan era. But the mere thought takes effect on me as a mirage would on a man lost in the desert. It makes me thirsty. It’s better not to think about it, since we’re confined on this tiny planet and it will only become big, fertile, and varied again, as it once was, long after us—if it ever does again.

In the meantime, enjoy Aeschylus and the Sanskrit texts, which I hope you will soon receive.

Simone

[March 1940]

My dear brother,

I’m sending back your dedication in a slightly modified version. You’ll notice the reasons for the modifications yourself, I think. Most are prompted by concerns with logic and style, and especially the concern with preserving the unity of tone. I’m inclined to entirely cut the metaphor about sowing, wheat, etc., because it’s really not in the Louis XIII style of the whole thing, and the contrast is damaging. (Furthermore, the term plowing in this metaphor couldn’t be more unsuitable, for obvious reasons.) I slightly modified the terms of the temple metaphor, primarily for the same reason (to avoid a break in the unity of tone), and also to attenuate it and make it a little vaguer; it would prob ably be disagreeable for É[lie] Cartan, and in every respect inappropriate, for it to be written in such a way as to suggest an opposition between him, alone on one side, and everyone else on the other. In the last line, I changed one word, because your lawyer absolutely advises against leaving the one you used. Overall, I thought it wise to change a few nuances of detail that could lead ill-intentioned people to doubt whether you’re seriously expressing what you think.

Now just use these suggestions as you please, and send Henri Cartan the definitive text you’ve settled on.

I think it’s better to give up on the: “To Monsieur Monsieur …” One reader in a hundred might know this was the custom in the seventeenth century, and even he won’t think it’s serious.

We’ve given the proofs to the publisher. He’s asking for the dedication as soon as possible, of course.

I’m pleased to see that reading my friend Retz has given you a taste for that period’s style. It is infinitely superior, in my view, to that of the second half of the seventeenth century.

Fraternally,
Simone

[March 1940]

My dear brother,

Whatever you say about it, “some disquiet,” works very nicely. But discussing details of style in writing would be long and tiresome. I think your text has now reached the state of perfection, if as Valéry puts it perfection is defined by the exhaustion of the desire to modify.

How could you take my coadjutor for a Neapolitan! What blasphemy! Has anyone ever come out of there, in terms of political geniuses, other than low schemers? Doesn’t he exude Florence from every pore? And don’t you remember the Gondi Palace, in Florence, on Piazza della Signoria, set back on the left when one looks at the palace della Signoria? It isn’t adorned with much, but is most beautiful. I suppose the Neapolitan abbot you speak of is Abbot Galiani; all I’ve read by him are excerpts of letters, but I’m quite sure he had very little in common with Retz. In Mme d’Épinay’s entourage, there were only frivolous, skeptical people with low souls. While my coadjutor was first and foremost an honest man and a great soul, though that is somewhat hidden beneath the heap of adroitly intertwined intrigues. Today he might give the impression of a traitor, because in that happy period there were no political parties, and loyalty to an abstract idea, even a religious one, would have seemed utter foolishness. One was loyal to living human beings to whom one was bound by friendship, by commitments made, by the duty of protection or obedience, or by esteem. In that sense, the concern for loyalty and honor dominates all my coadjutor’s intrigues. The concern for public good also dominates them. The sense of everything he did was a desperate attempt to destroy Richelieu’s work; when he was defeated, something perished for all time. The beginning of the seventeenth century was, in France, Spain, and England, something extraordinarily luminous; an undefinable inspiration reached its peak here and perished all of a sudden, never to reappear. Personally, with the exception of Racine, I don’t esteem anything that came after 1660 (to the present day) as much as what came before. I’m not including Corneille, for whom I don’t have much esteem in any respect. But have I told you about Théophile?

Les astres dont la bienveillance
Se sent forcer de ta vaillance
Sont apprêtés pour t’accueillir;
Déjà leur splendeur t’environne;
Dieu comme fleurs les vient cueillir
Pour t’en donner une couronne
Qui ne pourra jamais vieillir.
(Ode à Guillaume d’Orange)

[The stars whose benevolence
Feels strengthened by your valor
Are ready to welcome you;
Already their splendor surrounds you;
God picks them like flowers
To give you a crown of them
That will never age.]

And this, on the civil war of 1620 (in which Richelieu was on the rebel side, by the way)

La campagne était allumée
L’air gros de bruit et de fumée,
Le ciel confus de nos débats,
Le jour triste de notre gloire,
Et le sang fit rougir la Loire
De la honte de vos combats.

[The countryside was burning
The air thick with noise and smoke,
The sky chaotic with our disputes,
The day sorrowful with our glory,
And blood made the Loire blush
With shame for our battles.]

And doesn’t this seem like the best of Valéry?

Je sentis mon sang se geler
Et comme autour de moi voler
L’ombre de ma douleur future.

[I felt my blood freeze
And as if around me there flew
The shadow of my future pain.]

He too had that sense of friendship and that generosity of soul that hasn’t been seen since that period. He wrote to Balzac: “What acquires me friends and the envious is simply the easiness of my morals, an incorruptible loyalty and the open profession I make to love perfectly those who are without fraud and cowardice.”

Naturally, he was made to suffer horribly and die prematurely. If he’d had a little baseness in his soul, he could have lived to a ripe old age, and would perhaps be regarded today as one of the two or three greatest French poets. Personally, I see Villon, Maurice Scève, him, and Racine as above all the others, and by far.

I’m not sure that the discovery of incommensurables is a sufficient explanation for the Greeks’ obstinate refusal of algebra. They must have known Babylonian algebra from the beginning. Tradition holds that Pythagoras traveled to Babylon to study there. Naturally, they transposed this algebra into geometry, long before Apollonius. Transpositions of this kind found in Apollonius probably concern quadratic equations; those of the second degree could all be solved once the properties of the triangle inscribed in the semicircle were known, a discovery attributed to Pythagoras.

(This way one finds two quantities of which either the sum and product are known, or the difference and product.) But the singular thing is that this transposition of algebra into geometry seems not to be a side issue, but the very mainspring of geometric invention throughout the history of Greek geometry.

The legend concerning Thales’s discovery of the similarity of triangles (when a man’s shadow is equal to the man, the pyramid’s shadow is equal to the pyramid) relates this discovery to the problem of a proportion whose term is unknown.

We know nothing of the following discovery, by Pythagoras, of the properties of the right triangle. But here is my hypothesis, which is certainly in keeping with the spirit of Pythagorean research. It is that this discovery comes from the problem of finding the mean proportional of two known quantities. Two similar triangles having two noncorresponding equal sides represent a proportion with three terms:

If the two extremes are constructed on a single straight line, the figure becomes a right triangle (since the angle between a and b becomes a straight angle, half of which is a right angle). The right triangle’s essential property is that it is formed by the juxtaposition of two triangles similar to it and to each other. I think that Pythagoras discovered this property first. The right triangle also provides the solution to the opposite problem: if the mean proportional and the sum or difference of the extremes are known, find the extremes.

As for conics and their properties, the inventor in this case is said to be Plato’s student Menaechmus, one of the two geometers who solved the problem of doubling the cube posed by Apollo. (The other is Archytas; he solved it with the torus.) Menaechmus solved this problem with conics (two parabolas, or a parabola and a hyperbola). So, it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that he invented them for this purpose. And the problem of doubling the cube comes down to finding two mean proportionals between two known quantities.

It’s easy to imagine the process of the discovery. For the cone consists of a circle of variable diameter, and the parabola provides the series of all the mean proportionals between a fixed term and a variable one.

So, there is a continuous series of problems: a proportion with four terms of which one unknown— a geometric progression with three terms of which the middle term is unknown—a progression with four terms of which the two middle terms are unknown.

Just as the right triangle’s properties made it possible to solve second-degree problems, those of the conics made it possible to solve those of the third and fourth.

Note that while we solve the equations by supposing that the expressions √,∛, etc., have meaning, the Greeks gave them a meaning before tackling the equations of corresponding degree.

Also note that the assimilation of the unknown to a variable goes back at least as far as Menaechmus, if not further. One can hardly suppose that the Babylonians, with their numerical equations, had this notion. The fifth-century Greeks had the notion of function and of representing functions by lines. The story of Menaechmus gives the impression that for them curves were a means of studying functions, rather than an object of study in their own right.

In all this, one sees progress whose continuity is never interrupted by the crisis of incommensurables. To be sure, there was a crisis of incommensurables, and its impact was immense. The popularization of this discovery cast discredit on the notion of truth that endures to this day; it brought about, or at least contributed to bringing about the idea that one can equally demonstrate two contradictory theories; the Sophists spread this point of view among the masses, along with knowledge of an inferior quality, exclusively aimed at the conquest of power; starting in the late fifth century, it resulted in the demagogy and imperialism from which it is inseparable, with consequences that ruined Hellenic civilization; it is through this process (to which other factors such as the Greco-Persian Wars naturally contributed) that Roman weapons were finally able to kill Greece, without any possible resurrection. My conclusion is that the gods were right to have the Pythagorean guilty of divulging the discovery of incommensurables perish in a shipwreck.

But I don’t think there was a crisis among the geometers and philosophers. Pythagoreanism was ruined (insofar as it was) by something entirely different, namely the mass massacre of Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia. In fact the star pentagon, which represents a relation between incommensurables (the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio), was one of the Pythagoreans’ symbols. But Archytas (one of the survivors) was a great geometer, and he was the teacher of Eudoxus, who is responsible for the theory of real numbers, the notion of limit, and the notion of integration as described in Euclid. There is nothing to suggest that when the Pythagoreans spoke of numbers, they only meant whole numbers. On the contrary, by saying that justice, etc., etc., are numbers, they made clear, it seems to me, that they were using this word to refer to any kind of proportion. They were certainly capable of conceiving of real numbers.

In my opinion, the essential point of the discovery of incommensurables lies outside of geometry. It consists of the fact that certain problems concerning numbers can sometimes have a solution and sometimes be insoluble; for example, that of a mean proportional between two given numbers. That alone suffices to prove that the number in the narrow sense of the word is not the key to every thing. Now, when was this realized? I don’t know if there is any information about this. In any case, it was possible to realize it before geometry; one merely needed to make a special study of problems of proportion. And in that case the geometric process to find mean proportionals (height of the right triangle) would immediately have appeared, as soon as it was discovered, as not being subject to any similar limitation. So much so that one can wonder if the Greeks might have studied the triangle to find proportions expressible other wise than in whole numbers, and if consequently they might have conceived of the line as a function from the start, as they later did with the parabola. One can find objections to this theory, but in my opinion they fall flat if one remembers the role secrecy played among Greek thinkers and their custom of only diffusing by distorting. The fact that Eudoxus is the creator of a perfect and completed theory of real numbers in no way rules out that the geometers could have glimpsed this notion from the beginning and constantly strived to grasp it.

One might ask oneself why the Greeks were so committed to the study of proportion. It’s certainly a question of religious preoccupation, and consequently (since we’re talking about Greece) a partially aesthetic one. The link between mathematical preoccupations on the one hand and philosophical-religious ones on the other, a link that is historically known to have existed in Pythagoras’s era, certainly goes back much further than that. For Plato is a traditionalist to the extreme and often says, “the ancients who were so much closer to the light than we are …” (obviously alluding to an Antiquity far more remote than that of Pythagoras); furthermore, he posted “No one enters here who is not a geometer” at the door of the Academy and said, “God is ever a geometer.” The two attitudes would be contradictory—which cannot be—if the preoccupations from which Greek geometry arose (if not the geometry itself) didn’t date back to early Antiquity; one can suppose that they come either from the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece, or from Egypt, or both. Furthermore, orphism (which has this dual origin) was such an inspiration to Pythagoreanism and Platonism (which are practically equivalent) that one can wonder if Pythagoras and Plato did much more than comment on it. Thales was almost certainly initiated into Greek and Egyptian mysteries, and was consequently steeped, from a philosophical and religious perspective, in an atmosphere similar to that of Pythagoreanism.

I therefore think that the notion of proportion had been since quite a remote Antiquity the object of a meditation that constituted one of the processes for purifying the soul, perhaps the principal process. There can be no doubt that this notion was at the center of the Greeks’ aesthetics, geometry, and philosophy.

The Greeks’ originality in terms of mathematics isn’t, as I see it, their refusal to accept approximation. There is no approximation in the Babylonian problems, and for a very simple reason: it’s because they are constructed from the solutions. Thus there are dozens (or hundreds, I don’t remember) of fourth-degree problems with two unknowns that all have the same solution. This shows that the Babylonians were only interested in the method, and not in solving problems actually posed. Likewise, in the problem of the canal I mentioned to you, the sum of workers and workdays is obviously never given. They enjoyed supposing unknown what is given, and known what is not. It’s a game, obviously, that does the greatest honor to their conception of “disinterested research” (did they have scholarships and medals to stimulate them?). But it’s only a game.

This game must have seemed profane to the Greeks, or even impious; other wise why wouldn’t they have translated the algebra treatises that must have existed in Babylonian at the same time that they transposed them into geometry? Diophantus’s work could have been written many centuries earlier. But the Greeks did not see any value in a method of reasoning for its own sake, they valued it insofar as it allowed the effective study of concrete problems; not that they were avid for technical applications, but because their sole object was to conceive more and more clearly of an identity of structure between the human mind and the universe. Purity of soul was their only concern; “imitating God” was its secret; the study of mathematics helped to imitate God insofar as one saw the universe as subject to mathematical laws, which made the geometer an imitator of the supreme legislator. It’s clear that the Babylonians’ mathematical games, where the solution was given before the data, were useless to this end. What was needed was data actually provided by the world or action on the world; so what was needed was to find ratios that did not require the problems to be artificially prepared to “come out right,” as is the case with whole numbers.

It’s for the Greeks that mathematics was truly an art. Its purpose was the same as the purpose of their art, namely to make perceptible a kinship between the human mind and the universe, to make the world appear as “the city of all rational beings.” And it was really made of solid matter, matter that existed, like that of all the arts without exception, in the physical sense of the word; this matter was space actually given, imposed as a de facto condition to all of man’s actions. Their geometry was a science of nature; their physics (I’m thinking of the Pythagoreans’ music, and especially of Archimedes’ mechanics and his study of floating bodies) was a geometry in which the hypotheses were presented as postulates.

I fear that today it is rather toward the Babylonian conception that we’re moving, in other words playing games rather than making art. I wonder how many mathematicians today see mathematics as a process aimed at purifying the soul and “imitating God”? What’s more, it seems to me that the matter is lacking. There is a lot of axiomatics, which seems to be closer to the Greeks, but aren’t the axioms largely chosen at will? You speak of “solid matter,” but isn’t this matter essentially formed by the entirety of mathematical work accomplished to this day? In that case, current mathematics would be a screen between man and the universe (and consequently between man and God, as understood by the Greeks) instead of putting them in contact. But perhaps I’m disparaging it.

Speaking of the Greeks, have you heard of a certain Autran, who has just published a book about Homer? He has put forward a sensational theory, namely that the Lycians and the Phoenicians of the second millennium B.C. were Dravidians. His arguments, which are philological, do not appear to be unworthy of interest, as much as one can judge without knowing the Dravidian languages and the inscriptions he quotes. But the theory is most appealing— too appealing, even—in that it gives an extremely simple explanation of the analogies between Greek and Indian thought. Climate might be sufficient explanation for the differences. Be that as it may, how could one help feeling nostalgic for an era in which the same thought was found everywhere, among all the peoples, in all the countries, where ideas circulated over a prodigious expanse, and in which one enjoyed all the riches of diversity? Today, as under the Roman Empire, uniformity has descended upon every thing, erasing all the traditions, and at the same time ideas have practically stopped circulating. Well! Perhaps in a thousand years it will be a bit better.

Fraternally,
Simone

Translated from the French by Nicholas Elliot.

From A Life in Letters, edited by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux in collaboration with Marie-Noëlle Chenavier-Jullien, Annette Devaux, and Olivier Rey and translated by Nicholas Elliot, to be published this month by the Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist, widely considered one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century.

Robert Chenavier is president of the Association for the Study of Simone Weil’s Thought and the author of four books, most recently Simone Weil, une Juive antisémite?

André A. Devaux (1921–2017) was a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Nicholas Elliott is a writer and translator based in New York City. He has worked extensively in theatre in New York and France, is a contributing editor for film at BOMB magazine, and was the American correspondent for the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma from 2009 to 2020.

From the March 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Helen, Lady Hamlyn CBE is, among many other things, a collector of buildings. More precisely, a collector of remarkable buildings – houses, chateaux, forts and palaces that tend to be either radically new or exceedingly old. ‘It breaks my heart to see a really wonderful building in a state of disrepair,’ she confesses as she describes some of her myriad rescue projects. Several have involved ruins on the brink of collapse. All have not only been carefully coaxed back to life but also, if domestic spaces, gloriously rehabilitated by the addition of works of art.

Yet Hamlyn does not regard herself as an art collector per se. ‘I only buy for a specific building and a specific place,’ she says. There is no compulsive buying here, nor the presumption that some tempting piece will eventually find a home. ‘I do know exactly what I am looking for and then I go out and find it. If you look, you find,’ she says. Her attitude is hardly a surprise, for Hamlyn is one of the world’s doers rather than dreamers. She has often achieved what others considered impossible. Her charitable trust – a 50th birthday present from her late husband, the publisher Paul Hamlyn – is currently involved in some 32 projects, ranging across medicine, arts and culture, education and welfare. As the philanthropist prepares to celebrate her 90th birthday this month, her energy and commitment seem barely diminished.

Her greeting is warm as she rises to meet me from her perch on the arm of a comfortable chair, taking my hand in both of hers. A fire is blazing, the February rain forgotten, as we settle in to talk houses, art, design and a life well lived. ‘I was always pretty headstrong, I am sorry to say,’ she begins. ‘When you are young, you don’t really appreciate what your parents do for you,’ she adds, evidently musing on her mother who was left a widow when Helen was eight and her sister Margie – the potter Margaret O’Rorke – was four. One of the best things they did was to send their daughters to a progressive coeducational school. St Christopher School, Letchworth obviously got something right: ‘It never occurred to me that there might be limitations attached to being a girl.’

Her school years were, inadvertently, responsible for kindling a passion for old houses. After her knee was smashed by a rounders ball when she was 11, she underwent two operations and long recuperation. The only thing to read in the hospital was Country Life, a magazine known for its articles on historic houses and their contents, the pages preceding them advertising hardly less desirable properties for sale. ‘By the end, I think I had decided that I preferred French chateaux to Elizabethan houses.’

Her mother, Constance Jones, despatched her daughters to the continent as soon as she could after the end of the war. ‘I was sent to stay with families in France, ostensibly to learn French, which I never have,’ she laughs. ‘I speak bad French quite well.’ What astounded the young Helen were the glamorous women she saw dressed in the fabulous Dior ‘New Look’, costumes with cinched waists and very full skirts. After years of uniforms, restrictions and shortages, these clothes exuded femininity, opulence and opportunity. ‘I learnt in France that if you were bright, you made sure you were pretty, whereas in England if you were bright, you were called a bluestocking, wore glasses and looked serious,’ she says. ‘By the time I was 14, I had decided that I wanted to show that women in Britain could be pretty and intelligent.’ She was already making her own clothes, as she had been taught to do by her mother – needs must in a time of war.

Jones considered herself one of the last suffragettes and expected her daughter to go to university. ‘Mummy was incandescent when I said I wanted to go to art school to study fashion. As far as she was concerned, it was hardly better than going on the streets.’ Star that her mother was, however, she found out that the Royal College of Art (RCA), where Madge Garland was inventing formal fashion education, was the best place to study. After a foundation year, she was allowed on to the post-graduate course aged just 17. Her mother insisted that she stay at the Women’s University Settlement, which enabled the educated young to help women and children in deprived areas of London. There her social conscience was born.

At the RCA, she met the remarkable art historian and textile designer Bernard Nevill. ‘Somehow, we became best friends. He introduced me to colour, to textiles, to a more expansive way of thinking, even though we never liked the same things.’ Unlike the incorrigible magpie Nevill, she favoured ‘clean, simple spaces where you can actually see and enjoy what you have got.’ Hamlyn has always held the RCA dear. Such is her admiration for her alma mater that she later endowed the institution with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and a chair of design.

She had completed her first renovation before graduating: a little mews house off Eaton Square bought by her mother. Her precocity – or pure chutzpah – led her to apply for the role of designer at Cresta Silks when she was 21. The company, founded by Tom Heron in 1929, had employed artists as designers from the first – not least Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Heron’s son, Patrick. ‘I was told very firmly that I was far too young. Yet six months later, I was invited back and told that they would give me a try. I was there for 15 years. It was the best job anyone could have had. Not only did I design the clothes, but I also chose the materials, and I learnt a little bit about business.’

That year, she married a young architect, Patrick Guest, and the couple began travelling around Europe. ‘I was always fascinated by very early buildings, and l loved the simplicity and purity of Romanesque churches and early chateaux. They became a sort of obsession. I never thought I would have a chance to do it, but I think my dream was to restore a French chateau.’

Instead, she bought a farmhouse in Gloucestershire – a ruin, of course. ‘I realised then that it was stone that I cared about, so I decided we had to move north.’ Here she found an abandoned farmhouse and asked its owner if she could buy it. The delighted famer sold it for £1,500 with five acres thrown in. She then sought out Mary Bellis, the leading dealer in oak furniture and myriad other early objects, who became something of a mentor.

The first of hundreds of acquisitions of early vernacular oak was a pew end – which she still owns – originally from a church in rural France, marking the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic. The second was an Elizabethan bed, one of many pieces Bellis had originally supplied to the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst to furnish St Donat’s Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan. Hamlyn bought it on the never-never for £350. They had to take the staircase out to get it upstairs. Guest kept the house – and bed – when the couple parted company a few years later.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and that was filled by The Old House at Whichwood in Warwickshire. Her second husband, Paul Hamlyn, was not enamoured of her beloved medieval house, where nettles once met the thatched roof, and which was cold and damp even after its renovations. ‘I remember walking around the village in tears, saying it was [either] “my new husband or my house”,’ she laughs. Her ingenious strategy was to ask some of his top American publisher friends to come and stay. They loved it, of course, and central heating was duly installed. The Hamlyns later exchanged The Old House for the largely Carolean Edgeworth Manor in Gloucestershire, so that there would be more space for Paul’s two teenaged children.

Tapestry depicting scenes from the life of Aeneas, South Netherlands, c. 1510–20. Photo: courtesy Bonhams

‘Eventually I managed to persuade Paul to come to Burgundy, which was my favourite part of France,’ she continues. In the mid 1980s, they started looking for a chateau she could restore. They alighted on the 13th-century Château de Bagnols, which boasts immense 15thcentury towers and the largest Gothic fireplace in France. ‘Ruin was hardly the word,’ says its former chatelaine. ‘There was no roof. It had 22 rooms with Renaissance and later painted rooms, mostly covered with panelling and wallpaper, and trees growing in the outbuildings.’ It took the architect Tom Wilson and some 400 specialist craftsmen four hard years to restore it under her direction, not least given the complications of its listing as a Monument Historique Classé. In 2006, the achievement was acknowledged by the French government, which conferred upon her a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. By then, Bagnols had been turned into a luxury hotel. Helen Hamlyn had scoured Europe and America for its contents – extraordinarily, one tapestry bought in New York turned out to have once hung in the chateau.

It does not take long to realise that all of Hamlyn’s houses, past and present, are characterised by a near absence of paintings. Rather, they reveal her penchant for sculpture, screens and textiles. In the period iterations, almost every wall carries a tapestry, every floor a classic carpet, while beds, chairs and sofas offer an opportunity for historic needlework, velvets or silks. Even after reupholstering on an epic scale, a substantial number of textiles remained: a collection that she recently sold.

Tapestries are a particular passion of Hamlyn’s. One, which once hung at the culmination of the long reception hall at Edgeworth Manor, is a particularly complex mythological and allegorical work featuring scenes from the life of the Trojan hero Aeneas, woven in the Southern Netherlands around 1510–20. At the centre, Aeneas is being shown the temple of Apollo, inside of which stands a sculpture of the armoured god himself. He is shown bearing the wings by which Daedalus escaped from Crete and which he then dedicated to Apollo after his safe arrival in Cumae. The tapestry came from the collection of Baron Gustave de Rothschild at the Château Beychevelle.

The atrium pool with a Roman mosaic in Lady Hamlyn’s former home in the Chilterns, designed by architect Robin Partington

The classical world came to the fore in her 21st-century creation, an extraordinary glass curve of a house sunk beneath a meadow in the Chilterns, created for the Hamlyns by the architect Robin Partington. Its atrium pool held a Roman mosaic of the sea nymph Thetis. ‘I try to make every house of mine feel a different world,’ she says. ‘If you are privileged to have more than one house, why would you want them all to look the same?’

In her London house, tapestries were forsaken for Japanese screens. ‘I think they are unutterably beautiful,’ she says, describing how wonderful it is to wake up in any season to cherry blossom and a bubbling waterfall. In her late twenties, visiting the United States for the first time, she had had a fateful encounter with Japanese art in the Art Institute of Chicago: ‘It knocked me out.’ Later she travelled to Japan and found herself entranced by the spare aesthetic and clean lines of Japanese interiors. She began helping the Parisian dealer Jean-Michel Beurdeley organise international exhibitions of Japanese works of art. When it came to Japanese screens, she was – perhaps inevitably – her own best client. One, a Momoyama period eight-fold screen decorated with calligraphy and 18 figures against a gold background, may be one of a pair representing the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry.

Eight-panel screen, Japan, Momoyama period, calligraphy attr. Hon’ami Koetsu, painting attr. Tosa Mitsunori. Photo: Angela Moore

Her interest in Asian art did not stop at screens, nor in Japan. ‘I am very, very interested in representing different cultures through sculpture,’ she continued. ‘They mean far more to me than pictures.’ China prevails here in her London home, represented by the likes of an elegant, greenish-grey limestone figure of a standing Bodhisattva from the Sui dynasty (581–618) and a Jin-Yuan period (1127–1368) head from a large Buddhist figure, bearing traces of its original polychrome. It is placed so it can be seen from almost every angle.

That said, nothing matches the scale of a monumental Buddha, depicted lying down to die under a sal tree. Behind this compelling figure from 17th-century Ayutthaya, Thailand, hangs a much later Indian painted wooden panel. When Hamlyn visited the caves in Ellora and Ajanta during a trip to India, she was astounded to find exactly this Buddhist imagery carved in stone behind a reclining Buddha. The spirituality of such pieces is palpable, and a comfort after the death of her husband in 2001. The weathered ironwood hampatong figures from Borneo that line her conservatory were spirit figures made to protect and honour ancestors. Today, they are regarded by Hamlyn as guardians and friends.

Helen Hamlyn in the conservatory of her London homee beside an ironwood hampatong, an anthropomorphic ancestral or guardian Dayak figure from Borneo. Photo: Angela Moore

India has a special place in Hamlyn’s heart. She describes her first visit as ‘a life-changing experience’. With the help of art historian Shobita Punja, a dear friend and one of her trustees, the Helen Hamlyn Trust has supported many philanthropic projects across the country, not least among them important works to improve the World Heritage Site of Khajuraho, Jaisalmer Fort and the Ahhichatragarh Fort at Nagaur. ‘I fell in love with Nagaur,’ says Hamlyn. ‘I told the Maharaja of Jodhpur that I would help restore the complex provided we had a festival to celebrate, once the work was completed.’ Thus the Sacred Spirit Festival Nagaur was born – it is now an annual event. Helen Hamlyn also took on the 16th-century fort at Reis Magos, Goa’s most important historic fort. A government minister asked her why, as no one would go to see it. ‘We [now] have over 900 visitors every Sunday and hundreds on weekdays,’ she says triumphantly.

Chittoor Kottaram, a royal residence in Kerala, was a personal project, its restoration and refurbishment completed by a generous sprinkling of Indian works of art. After a while, she turned it into a hotel. As Hamlyn remarks, with characteristic generosity: ‘There was no point in me doing it, if nobody else can enjoy it.’

From the March 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

8.5.24 — The Seeds of New York

In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”

But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of.

Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events pressed in on his imagination.

Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately connected to the destiny of his country. He lacked the guile and watchfulness that might have tempted him to keep clear of what was happening in America; the ruthlessness he had displayed in going to live in Paris and publishing Giovanni’s Room was no use to him later as the battle for civil rights grew more fraught. It was inevitable that someone with Baldwin’s curiosity and moral seriousness would want to become involved, and inevitable that someone with his sensitivity and temperament would find what was happening all-absorbing.

Baldwin’s influence arose from his books and his speeches, and from the tone he developed in essays and television appearances, a tone that took its bearings from his own experience in the pulpit. Instead of demanding reform or legislation, Baldwin grew more interested in the soul’s dark, intimate spaces and the importance of the personal and the private.

In 1959, in reply to a question about whether the fifties as a decade “makes special demands on you as a writer,” Baldwin adopted his best style, lofty and idealistic and candid, while remaining sharp, direct, and challenging: “But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement.”

Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his white novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel, because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, as his fellow citizens suffered from a poison that began in the individual spirit and then made its way into politics. And his political writing remains as intense and vivid as his fiction, because he believed that social reform could not occur through legislation alone but required a reimagining of the private realm. Thus, for Baldwin, an examination of the individual soul as dramatized in fiction had immense power.

***

Baldwin’s reputation as a novelist and essayist rests mainly on the work he did in the decade before 1963, a decade in which he was passionately industrious. The year 1963 seems to have been a watershed for him. He wrote hardly any fiction in that year. It was a time in which “the condition of truth” could not be achieved by solitude or by silence or by slow work on a novel.

Baldwin began the year by going on a lecture tour for the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. In the first few days of January, he met James Meredith, the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi despite being denied admission by the state’s governor. Meredith noted how quiet Baldwin was, but he was also amused by Baldwin’s version of the dance known as the twist.

Also in January of 1963, Baldwin met Medgar Evers. They began to travel together in Mississippi, investigating the murder of a Black man and visiting the sort of churches that Baldwin’s stepfather, the model for the Gabriel of Go Tell It on the Mountain, would have preached in.

When Baldwin returned to New York, where he lived in a two-room walkup on West Eighteenth Street, he became involved, with Lorraine Hansberry and others, in various protests. He also had a busy social life. His biographer David Leeming writes: “He still had the ‘poor boy’s’ fascination with the rich and famous … and they were just as fascinated by him. He found it difficult to refuse their frequent invitations. In short, the work was not getting done.”

In the spring of 1963, to find peace, Baldwin traveled to Turkey, which had become one of his havens.

In May 1963, back in the U.S., Baldwin spoke in nine cities on the West Coast over ten days, earning around five hundred dollars a speech, all of which went to CORE. In that month, his face appeared on the cover of the mainstream magazine Time. Three days later, when a friend gave a party for him at a restaurant in Haight-Ashbury, “literally hundreds of people struggled at the windows … to get a glimpse of him,” Leeming reports.

Two days later, Baldwin was in Connecticut, and then, on two hours’ sleep, he went to New York for a meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. On May 12, Baldwin had wired Kennedy, blaming the federal government for failing to protect nonviolent protestors who had been beaten by police in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, on May 24, Baldwin and other activists, including Hansberry, Lena Horne, and Harry Belafonte, met Robert Kennedy at his home. The meeting went nowhere. Its main result was to increase the FBI’s interest in Baldwin.

In this same year—1963—as Baldwin made speeches, attended meetings, and stayed up late, he had many plans for work, including a book on the FBI. James Campbell writes in his biography: “Baldwin never produced his threatened work on the FBI, but he had, as usual, a multitude of other plans in mind, including the slave novel—now retitled ‘Tomorrow Brought Us Rain’—a screen treatment of Another Country, a musical version of Othello, a play called ‘The 121st Day of Sodom,’ which [Ingmar] Bergman intended to produce in Stockholm, and a text for a book of photographs by … Richard Avedon.”

Baldwin worked on the Avedon text after the assassination of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. It has all the hallmarks of his best writing: the high tone taken from the Bible, from the sermon, from Henry James, and from a set of beliefs that belonged fundamentally to Baldwin himself and gave him his signature voice: “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.”

In August, Baldwin flew some members of his family to Puerto Rico to celebrate his birthday. Then he went to Paris, where he led five hundred people in a protest to the U.S. embassy, returning to the U.S. in time for the March on Washington at the end of the month. In September he went to Selma to work on voter registration. The following month he went to Canada. In December, he traveled to Africa to celebrate the independence of Kenya.

When Baldwin was asked how and where he had written his play Blues for Mr. Charlie, he replied: “On pads in planes, trains, gas stations—all sorts of places. With a pen or a pencil. … This is a hand-written play.” It was the only writing he completed in 1963.

***

Part of James Baldwin’s fame arose from his skill as a television performer. On camera, he used clear, well-made sentences. At times, he spoke like a trained orator, channeling his views into sharp wit, fresh insight, irony, with impressive verbal command. What he displayed was an intelligence that could quickly become grounded and combative and political once the television lights were on.

In some early appearances such as one on The Dick Cavett Show with the Yale philosopher Paul Weiss, Baldwin’s arguments were too complex for the short time he had been allotted. Because his delivery was slightly halting—he was articulate in bursts—he was too easy to interrupt, and he was always at his best when he could speak without interruption. It was as though he was sometimes too thoughtful for television.

This, of course, also gave him an edge. It meant that he was not mimicking politicians or TV regulars. He sought to challenge, and to set about thinking aloud. There were moments when he loved a simple question so that the answer could be ruminative and complicated. He used a context such as a talk show to state the most difficult truths in a style that belonged to the sermon or the seminar more naturally than the television studio.

He knew how to slow down, so that the camera lingered on his face as he prepared himself to say something difficult. He had a way, when he was about to offer an opinion that might seem extreme or unpalatable to his host or his audience, to hesitate, to let the camera see him thinking, and then to return to fluency.

At times, Baldwin’s manner in television interviews and in public debates could be scathing and indignant. But he could also be calm and self-possessed. In a 1963 debate in Florida, for example, even though his fellow panelists were hostile, Baldwin remained polite. He was ready to talk about the private life, the creation of the self, in a way that no one could argue with, since he himself had set the tone and the terms. He was also ready to make clear that the lives of white people, too, had been maimed by segregation. But what was most notable is how he moved his face towards the light, how he spoke with authority, and how at home he seemed to be in a television studio.

There were times when Baldwin appeared like a method actor playing out the part of thoughtfulness, working out as the camera rolled how a man considering things carefully might appear.

While he could be provocative, he was also measured. He exuded a sort of melancholy wisdom. At times, he managed to sound optimistic, especially in a panel discussion in August 1963, at the time of the March on Washington, when he was in the company of Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, and Charlton Heston.

When Lionel Trilling wrote of the “extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives” and wondered how Baldwin might find “the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer,” Trilling was still in a world where it was presumed that writers should be quiet and stay home. And Trilling was not alone in believing that Baldwin was destroying his talent by going on television, writing articles, giving speeches, and being distracted by whatever was happening on the street.

But Baldwin belongs to a group of writers, born in the twenties and early thirties, who wrote both fiction and essays with a similar zeal and ambition; they did not see nonfiction as a lesser form or reporting as a lesser task. It was not easy to make a judgment on whether they were mainly novelists or, more likely, essayists who happened to write fiction. Also, it was often hard to make a judgment on what constituted their best work.

For example: Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night and his Miami and the Siege of Chicago, both works of imaginative and original political reporting, may equal his best novel, The Executioner’s Song. So, too, V. S. Naipaul’s long essay on the dictatorship in Argentina, “The Return of Eva Perón,” and his autobiographical essay Finding the Center may match in power his novels A House for Mr. Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album may be better than her novels A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy.

These writers—Baldwin, Mailer, Naipaul, Didion—traveled, took an interest in life, and accepted commissions from editors. And all four understood that if writing is a display of personality, then their literary personality was, no matter what form they used, lavish enough to blur the distinction between reportage and high literary fiction.

But there were also times when all four of them took on too much; their interest in a subject was sometimes not equaled by their account of it. Baldwin’s book on the child murders that occurred between 1979 and 1981 in Atlanta, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, is slack and rambling; Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself and Marilyn: A Biography are not quite readable now, their egotism bloated and out of control; Naipaul’s travel books often present someone too mean and irascible, more interested in showing off his own crankiness than in exploring the world outside. And Joan Didion’s book Salvador might have been helped by more research.

What is fascinating about Baldwin’s occasional journalism and speechmaking is how uneven it is, and how rapidly this can give way to insights and sharp analysis and then a glorious, sweeping, seemingly effortless final set of statements and assertions.

While he worked fast on these stray pieces for magazines, Baldwin refused to settle for a simplified version of his own oppression. Instead, he combined irony and urgency in the same thought, seeking a manner that took its bearings from somewhere high above us, perhaps even from his own unique access to the word of the Lord.

“In a very real sense,” he wrote, “the Negro problem has become anachronistic; we ourselves are the only problem, it is our hearts only that we must search.”

In “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” a New York Times Book Review article from January 14, 1962, when others might have been concerned about the police or about housing, Baldwin wrote about private loneliness as though it were the most pressing problem facing Americans: “The loneliness of those cities described in [the work of John] Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before; and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved … The trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us.”

Sometimes, in his journalism and in his speeches, Baldwin was amusing himself. He took words such as equality or identity and concepts such as whiteness and examined them with a mixture of mischief and a sort of Swiftian contempt.

For example, in an address to Harlem teachers in October 1963, he sought to explode the myth of the original, heroic, white settlers in America: “What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go some place else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower.”

In an essay called “The White Problem,” published in 1964, Baldwin wrote scornfully about the vast difference between the white and black American celebrities. He wrote, “Doris Day and Gary Cooper: two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles. And there never has been in this country any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.”

He sought to elevate what was complex, multifarious, intricate. In 1966, he wrote: “Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man.”

Since he had it in for easy and fixed categories, he was bound eventually to become eloquent about how his society dealt with the idea of men and masculinity.

In the early sixties, Baldwin spoke in an interview with Mademoiselle magazine about sexuality in his customarily challenging tone: “American males are the only people I’ve ever encountered in the world who are willing to go on the needle before they go to bed with each other.”

While early in his career Baldwin did not speak directly about his own sexuality, others were ready to offer hints and innuendos. A 1963 Time magazine profile, for example, described Baldwin as a “nervous, slight, almost fragile figure, filled with frets and fears. He is effeminate in manner, drinks considerably, smokes cigarettes in chains.”

When Lionel Trilling worried about Baldwin’s “extravagant publicness,” the implications of the word extravagant would not have been lost on many readers. And when Norman Mailer wrote of Baldwin that “even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume,” he would not have been easily misunderstood. Also, the extensive FBI file on James Baldwin includes the sentence: “It has been heard that Baldwin may be a homosexual and he appeared as if he may be one.”

Baldwin, in his own writings, was often careful. He liked complex connections, strange distinctions, ambiguous implications. Thus, even in a time when gay identity was becoming easier to denote or define, Baldwin resisted the very concept of gay and straight, even male and female, insisting in an essay in 1985 that “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”

Religious elements in the civil rights movement were suspicious of both Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, a prominent organizer and activist who was close to Martin Luther King Jr. While King was not personally bothered by Rustin’s homosexuality, some of his colleagues were. One of them suggested that Baldwin and Bayard “were better qualified to lead a homosexual movement than a civil rights movement.” Baldwin’s homosexuality may have been one of the reasons why he was not invited to speak at the March on Washington in 1963.

It would have been easy then for Baldwin to have gone into exile, disillusioned and sad, to have written his memoirs and become nostalgic about the glory days of the civil rights movement. Indeed, he was planning to write a book about the murdered leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.

But this is not what happened. As the sixties went on, Baldwin became energized and excited by the Black Panthers, whose leaders he first met in San Francisco late in 1967. The three leaders—Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and (despite their antipathies) Eldridge Cleaver—were, David Leeming writes, “as far as Baldwin was concerned, the future of the civil rights movement. … Baldwin admired the radicals; he saw them as part of the larger ‘project’ of which the old civil rights movement had been only a stage.” Baldwin wrote a preface to one of Seale’s books and supported Newton when, soon after their first meeting, he was arrested and imprisoned.

He also became more militant in his television interviews. For example, in an interview with Dick Cavett aired on June 16, 1969, he said: “If we were white, if we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. Martin would be a hero for you and not be a threat, Malcolm X might still be alive. Everyone is very proud of brave little Israel, a state against which I have nothing—I don’t want to be misinterpreted, I am not an anti-Semite. But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles or the Irish or any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of [him] so there won’t be any more like him.”

***

Two weeks before he died, the poet W. B. Yeats wrote a poem called “Cuchulain Comforted,” which began with a series of statements free of metaphor. The poem was written in terza rima, a form that was new for Yeats. Unusually, this poem did not need many drafts. It seems to have come to him easily, as if naturally. In earlier Yeats poems and plays, Cuchulain, a figure from Irish mythology, had appeared as the implacable, solitary, and violent hero, prepared for solo combat, free of fear. Now he has “six mortal wounds” and is attended by figures, Shrouds, who encourage him to join them in the act of sewing rather than fighting. They let him know that they themselves are not among the heroic dead but are “Convicted cowards all by kindred slain // Or driven from home and left to die in fear.”

Thus, at the very end of his life, Yeats created an image that seemed the very opposite of what had often given vigor to his own imagination. His heroic figure has now been gentled; his fierce and solitary warrior has joined others in the act of sewing; instead of the company of brave men, Cuchulain seems content to rest finally among cowards.

This poem is not a culminating statement for Yeats, but a contradictory one; it is not a crowning version of a familiar poetic form, but an experiment in a form—terza rima—associated most with Dante. Instead of attempting to sum up, it is as though Yeats wished to release fresh energy by repudiating, by beginning again, by offering his hero a set of images alien to him, which served all the more to make the hero more unsettled, more ambiguous.

How fascinating to see a writer abandon bold self-assertion and, however briefly, find a tone that is compassionate and genial and tender.

There was, however, no such moment in Baldwin. From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed—to be moved from the narrow confines of the public realm back towards the unsettled (and unbounded) space of the self, the questing, uneasy spirit.

Adapted from On James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín, now available from Brandeis University Press.

Colm Tóibín’s most recent book is The Magician. He was interviewed by Belinda McKeon in issue no. 242 of The Paris Review.