Carol Bergman

What Photographs Can Do

 

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. -Susan Sontag, On Photography

 

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away. -Eudora Welty

 

It's easy to like Jeff Kraus when you first meet him. He wears a ponytail, his features are soft, and his smile welcoming. And even though he lives at the end of a hidden, almost secret driveway, his house is light-filled and open. One of the pre-eminent collectors of antique photography, I had originally met him during a pandemic walk as we shouted our hellos from opposite sides of the road. He was sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife, Jo Ann. And, one day, as I was walking with my friend, Helene, who knows everyone in town and insisted on an introduction, we stopped to talk. Jeff's voice and gestures seemed familiar; I suddenly realized that I know his brother. Over these past difficult months, we continued to talk now and again, and got to know each other, as one does in passing.

 

I had studied the history of photography in graduate school and when Jeff told me about his collection, I couldn't wait to see it. We agreed that a post-pandemic visit to his house would be a day of celebration. Fully vaccinated, we made the plan. And there he was, and there I was, and there Jo Ann was, all of us unmasked.

 

I brought my two precious daguerreotypes with me to begin our conversation. Jeff opened them with the precision of a surgeon, his hands as long-fingered and elegant as an artist's. Separating the plated image from the matting and the case, both of which are significant to a collector, appraiser, or curator, he began to talk. Underneath the image there is often a browned piece of paper, he explained, which can sometimes identify the sitter or the photographer. More research then has to be done. "Circa 1850," Jeff said, about halfway through the daguerreotypes' 1840-1860  lifespan. 1850. Now that was a year, the year of the Fugitive Slave Act, ten years prior to the Civil War. My imagination and curiosity clicked. Who were these people who sat for their photograph, a vice-like device holding their heads still for the long minutes it took to achieve an exposure?

 

We moved on to his formidable collection filling drawers and blanketing the walls. It includes daguerreotypes in various sizes, tintypes, ambrotypes, cartes de visite, and stereoviews.

 

I was curious about his collecting impulse as my father was also a collector, albeit of paintings. Is it obsession, passion, greed? Is it a way to enter into a past life, a past world, to document historical moments, continue the process of gathering history into accessible stories? I suppose the answers are different for everyone. But what most collectors seem to have in common is the origin story of their collecting; it often begins by accident.

 

In Jeff's case, his father owned an antiquarian book selling business when he was growing up. Like all kids, he hung out, and was also asked to help out. If photographs arrived in the boxes of books, he asked if he could take them home. That was  the beginning of his fascination, and his personal collection, which continued during his years as an Executive Director of an HIV/AIDS service organization. Retired, he has been able to devote himself full-time to his avocation. He buys and sells, lends items from his collection to museums and film companies, and keeps a well-written blog.

 

I could have stayed for hours asking questions and perusing numerous files of photographs, each with its singular back story, all of them portals into another time and place. Historians savor such collections as amplifications of the written record; they "read" a photograph's nuances. But what if that historical record disappears? How will scholarship change, how has it already changed now that we only save our writing and photos to the cloud—or  hardware—that  soon becomes obsolete? How will historians retrieve our past?

 

I asked Jeff this question in a follow-up email; it's been troubling me for years. His answer was not consoling: "It will be basically unretrievable," he wrote. "History will be written as it was before the advent of photography. Whatever degree of objectivity we think exists will diminish, although of course photography is not objective, either in intent or content." 

 

I hope he is wrong, that a technology will surface to ensure that our private collections—manuscripts, emails, photographs—are available to future historians to document, interpret and reinterpret our lives.

 

 

 Jeff Kraus has two websites. For sale items, click here:  www.antiquephotographics.com 

 

 To view his personal collection, click here:  Jeffrey Kraus's collection site

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maids, Mothers, Partners & Wives

 

 

During the last two years the wealthiest 14 Americans saw their wealth increase by $157 billion. This is truly unbelievable. This $157 billion INCREASE in wealth among 14 individuals is more wealth that is owned, collectively, by 130 million Americans. This country does not survive morally, economically or politically when so few have so much, and so many have so little."

-Senator Bernie Sanders

 

 

When I was a child, I never did my own laundry and my doctor mother never did our laundry, never mind my stepfather. No, we had maids to do the laundry. Once or twice I descended in the elevator to the basement of our well-appointed Manhattan apartment building to "help" do the laundry.  It was hot down there and the smell of sweat mingled with bleach was overwhelming. I was the only kid and it was weird, though at the time I felt more fascinated than weird. The maids were chattering to each other as they worked and they were laughing. Some were Black and some were white, some were Russian and some were from the Caribbean; it made no difference, they were maids. Yes, perhaps, in retrospect I understand that the white maids were more privileged, by virtue of being white, and their children probably had a better education and more opportunity than the children of the Black maids, but none of this made any difference to me because I was only in the basement as a voyeur, to be entertained. "I helped Lucille do the laundry," I told my mother. Which was not true, of course. I suppose I folded a towel or two, but mostly I just stood and gaped. These people were so different from anything I had experienced in my day to day life. They seemed happy, somehow. Or connected. Yes, in retrospect, that was the energy: shared labor, a feeling of connectedness, one I envied, and still do today, though even that observation feels condescending. If there was grievance, I would not have decoded a grievance; I did not have the education, as yet, or the tools.

 

In other words, most of my life I have owned thoroughbred horses, metaphorically speaking, but now I am riding on a donkey. (I thank Orhan Pamuk, another privileged writer, albeit Turkish, for  that image.) Not only am I maid-less these days, I don't have a washer and dryer in my new gorgeous apartment.  I take my laundry to one of three local laundromats where I mingle with what my class-caste-conscious European parents would call the hoi polloi. And let me tell you, Dear Reader, it is illuminating and humbling.  

 

Fortunately, I'm a curious journalist and I have an open, friendly face, I have been told, so people tell me stories, ask me questions about this and that, and complain. I am empathetic, but always at an emotional distance. Even today, as I write, I set myself apart and above. If someone at the laundromat talks to me, I am interested, but also wary. I think to myself, if only one or two of my rich friends could see this, then they would understand what the politicians mean when they refer to "The Great Divide."

 

***

 

My encounter this week was typical: I was shoving my clothes into a machine when a white  woman with blonde frizzy hair started to talk to me. She hadn't realized that $10 is charged to the credit card even though the machine costs $4.75.  Eventually, the excess money is refunded, but not right away. "I now have zero balance in my bank account," she said. "I'm wiped out."

 

Was she asking for money? Was this a scam? Was she a professional grifter? Had she targeted me? No way to know and not important to this story. It was my own hesitation, more than her demanding presence that upset me. I shook my head, commiserated, and finished loading up the machine. By the time I had decided to retrieve some of my stashed meter quarters from my car to give to her, she was gone.

 

Then. as I was stuffing my bag with dry laundry, I saw her again. She was steps away doing the same, and my goodness did she have a load of laundry.

 

"I'm going to get my kids to fold this when I get home. I've had enough of this place," she said, in the same exasperated voice she'd had when she first approached me.

 

Nothing in the past half hour or so had alleviated her distress.

 

"How many kids do you have?" I asked, patiently.

 

"Three. And my mother has dementia, she's in Florida, and I have to get down there to take care of her.  I'm fifty-eight and I feel like I'm seventy. What about you?"

 

"One kid, no mom any more, just me and my husband, small load. He's usually with me to help but is working today."

 

I didn't mention my age. She looked older than her years, older than me.

 

We started to laugh about my husband usually being with me. It was also the contrast between us, the serendipity of our meeting that amused and drew us together into an instant pod: mothers, wives, children. The domestic work that has to get done, the domestic work that in poor families is still relegated to the over-worked, exhausted, overwhelmed trying-to make-ends-meet women in this town, and everywhere.

 

Juneteenth in New Paltz, NY

 

 

When we know and accept the unvarnished truth — in all of its complexity, conflict and context — it can change how we view things, including ourselves.

 

    -Kevin Young, the NY Times, June 18, 2021. Mr. Young is the Andrew W. Mellon director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

 

The choice of slavery was deliberate, and that reality is hard to square with a desire to present a pristine and heroic origin story about the settlement of Texas…Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self; telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in.

 

      -Harvard Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, from her book, "On Juneteenth"

 

 

 

Soon after I arrived in New Paltz, NY, in the spring of 2018, I heard about a great upheaval on the SUNY (State University of New York) campus just down the road from where we had rented an apartment. Why were the Black students so upset about the names on their dormitory complexes? What was going on?

 

I decided to find out. After all, I was now a citizen of this town, albeit a citizen journalist with research and interviewing skills. It didn't take long to discover that the town so many have called "charming," "idyllic" and "liberal," is a monument to the Dutch, English and French Huguenot slave-owning settlers. The 17th and 18th century stone houses they built are extant, the slave dwellings unmarked by any accurate signage. And the dormitories were named after French Huguenot families; their descendants still live in the town. After a whole year of testimony, these dormitories were renamed, and I wrote an article for The Poughkeepsie Journal.

 

Then the pandemic hit and the process of re-constituting the narrative history of New Paltz slowed. Nonetheless, various re-interpretation projects proceeded at Historic Huguenot Street, in the Village by the Historic Preservation Commission, and with the tenacious work of Town Historian, Susan Stessin-Cohn, who had, among other finds, unearthed a Poor House under the Ulster County Fair Grounds; she commissioned a statue to memorialize it.

 

But questions remain about the slaves in New Paltz, their owners, and the emancipated slaves—where they went, how they fared. Why did so many end their lives in the Poor House? Where are their descendants today? Is there any evidence of Jim Crow laws, Black Codes, segregated schools, indentured servitude, rape, or lynching? Why is this idyllic, liberal town so white? How do we approach the lacunas and myths in local history today? How do we shift and amplify the narrative? What is our responsibility as citizens and neighbors?  How do we move forward?

 

These are some of the questions I am pondering as I plan a series of restorative justice workshops—to begin in the Fall—at  the Unison Arts Center in New Paltz. I'll be speaking there tomorrow night as they launch their "Prejudice Project." Dear Reader, I hope  if you are local, you will join me:  

 

https://www.unisonarts.org/prejudice-project

 

 

 

Coda

 

I had read online about an observation that women were remaining pregnant longer during the pandemic. The theory was that we were holding our babies inside because of anxiety about safe delivery and the hazardous and uncertain state of the world.  

 

- Lucy Jones, in The American Scholar

 

I lost a good friend this year and when he was gone and our writing connection was mentioned twice during the memorial, a trip to the city just for the memorial, I began thinking about endings and decided that this blog book/or book blog (I never could decide) was coming to an end also. I tried to write an ending, but then I decided there was more to say and it was a false ending like the false ending in a movie that tries to intensify the suspense and keeps us engaged and watching until the final credits. But then, if we were fortunate and willing, we were vaccinated, and with new guidelines from the CDC, we began to enjoy an unanticipated freedom.

 

The weeks were fuller and passed more quickly as we started to visit with one another and participated in activities that had been on hiatus. I made dates with friends for lunch and coffee and we sat face to face and talked, words spilling out of unmasked mouths like a rush of fresh spring water. We had been living in a desert and we were parched. So all this was changing, shifting, bringing us back to ourselves, our colleagues, our families, our friends. And for those who had lost loved ones, a slower respectful mournful hesitant reopening, each at their own pace, each in their own time.

 

Until the pandemic began in March of 2020, writing and the writing life had been the subject of this Authors Guild hosted blog; I began it in 2008. It's a good discipline for a writer, much like a weekly column in a newspaper, and I have always enjoyed it. Like other published work, it has led me to people and places I would not have experienced otherwise. Then the pandemic descended, and like many artists, I felt compelled to witness and then document my observations and experience. I created a dedicated blog called Virus Without Borders, and Chloe Annetts, my talented daughter, offered to design the site. It was up and running for a few weeks when it got badly hacked. The text appeared in Turkish, or Russian, and everyone's email addresses on Mail Chimp was more than likely stolen. It would have been too expensive and time consuming to fix, so I sent out a notice to my subscribers suggesting they change their passwords quickly, and started using the Authors Guild site for Virus Without Borders. The IT back-up staff at the Guild are efficient and competent. Whenever anything goes wrong, they take care of it right away. The blog has been running smoothly, and will continue, but it won't be Virus Without Borders after today.

 

My city writers group meets this week, still virtually, and I have asked them to read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast for our warm-up discussion. I have an old Penguin copy published  posthumously in 1964 from notebooks and an original manuscript by his fourth wife, Mary, and criticized in later years for what she edited out. One of Hemingway's sons, Sean, published another version in 2009. But the original is still a very good book, especially for writers. I read from it this morning, its pages brown and brittle. I must have bought it when I lived in London; it has traveled far, and often. I could not part with this copy when I moved back to the United States.

 

Hemingway's sentences are inspiring. He used a device called parataxis, the atomization of action: and then and then and then. I was also reminded that he stopped writing when he knew where he was going to begin the next day. That is a valuable practice, one that resonates as I write this Coda which also invites renewal, change, a turning of the page, another path forward into my work. Dear Reader, it's time for me to move on: a short story idea and a series of restorative justice workshops both require my full attention.

 

A few final words: Our interconnectedness this past difficult year has been sustaining and life affirming for me and I hope that it continues, that we will never forget the reality of our interdependence—local , national and global. Please stay in touch on FB, Twitter, or this Authors Guild site, and rest assured that I will always reply to comments on my posts, personal emails, texts and phone messages.

 

All very best, as ever,

Carol

 

 

 

 

Studying German in a Plague Year

 

 

History exists in a constant state of revision as we learn more about the present and the world that preceded it.

 

                             -Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker

 

 

I was listening to a NY Times Daily podcast by a Berlin based reporter who spoke perfect English, but I also was understanding all the background German before it was translated. I know that we've all changed immeasurably during this past year, but I could not account for this epiphany, if that is what it was. I took a deep breath. It was hard to believe what was happening. What was happening?

 

There was a time when my brain and my heart would have shut down at the sound of German, or a German accent. I wrote about this sensory/cognitive dissonance in my 1999 memoir, Searching for Fritzi. As I was working on that book, I took a German language course at NYU because I truly wanted to "get over" this block, especially when encountering a young German or a young Austrian.

 

On the first day of class, when everyone stated why they wanted to learn German, I was mesmerized by everyone's stability and common sense. One person was an opera singer, another a business woman traveling frequently to Germany, another had a German boyfriend. My blood pressure was rising as I anticipated what I could say: "Most of my family were murdered in the Holocaust and I have a block…" My voice trailed away. The class and the professor went quiet. No euphemisms such as "perished" in that sentence; I'd long before abandoned any softening words. Then, at the break—it was summer, I remember—the professor, aus Salzburg, came up to me as I was munching on a peach and perusing a bulletin board. I was in a fugue state, very distressed, not really concentrating on the notices. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, ever so gently, "Are you okay?" and I answered, "No, absolutely not, but I will try to stay." And that's what I did: I stayed. When the draft of my memoir was finished, I sent it to this wonderful woman and we met for lunch. But I haven't studied German since.

 

Then came Covid, a surfeit of time, classes online, apps, more French, my second language since High School, amplified when I was living in London and traveling to France. I had never thought about German, or wanted to think about German and when I traveled to Germany I often wanted to leave as soon as I got there.

 

And then, suddenly, years later, in the midst of a plague year—is there a connection I wonder—I decide to study German, my parents' Mother Tongue. They spoke it all the time to each other, but never to their children, not unusual in an immigrant or refugee family.  

 

I remember my erudite lawyer stepfather trying to convince me that Goethe, Heine, and Kafka should be read in the original. He had these books on his shelf if I ever wanted to study German and borrow them, he said. I never paid attention though I did read those classics in translation.

 

So, it's time, perhaps even past time, to take advantage of this gift: German is in my ear, it belongs to me and my heritage as much as the genocide.

 

A couple of terms ago, I had a young German in my NYU class. He traveled back to Germany to be with his family during the pandemic, but we've kept in touch. I can't wait to tell him my good news, to greet him in German, and perhaps generate a sentence or two.

 

Conversations With Anti-Vaxxers

 

 

Nobody is voiceless.  There are only people whose voices are not heard.

 

-Margaret Reukel, "Late Migrations"

 

 

I suppose it is a progressive writer's prerogative to assume she has the right, even the mandate, to tell the stories of the voiceless under-educated, semi-literate populace. Of course, in this assumption there is unacknowledged condescension and judgment. A friend of mine on a diet regimen said to me the other day, "I no longer judge anyone who obviously needs to lose weight. I need to lose weight." There is a lot of wisdom in that decision. And if we apply this wisdom to the anti-vaxxers, we may get to a place in our body politic we have not as yet imagined.

 

So, with this approach in mind, I decided to do some anecdotal reporting in my small town. I began at one of my local laundromats, owned by Yusef, an entrepreneurial Palestinian-American. All through the height of Covid, he provided pick-up, delivery and curbside. There are benches and chairs outside, a working bathroom, and helpful attendants during the weekdays who I started to talk to after I was vaccinated. One is vaccinated, two are not vaccinated. One has an autoimmune disease and her doctor is worried she might have an adverse reaction, the other is pregnant, working flat out, because she has to, until delivery day. "I don't want to take any chances," she said. Therefore, we can't exactly say that these two hard-working women, who haven't had the luxury of not working despite their exposure to Covid during the height of the pandemic, are "anti" anything. They have both made personal, informed decisions. And they both are still wearing their masks, as am I in certain situations.

 

A laundromat is a shared communal space, a level playing field; you need to be here, and I need to be here. And though I usually read one of my door-stop books —this  month, Louis Menand's, "The Free World"—or  answer some emails, I also like to chat to people I wouldn't meet in my everyday professorial life. Most customers are not reading books—they are watching the TV, or talking on their cell phones, or folding their laundry with care. One day I noticed a very large woman with lots of tattoos. She'd been outside smoking, and then she was next to me as I was loading a machine and she was unloading a machine.

 

"So how are you doing?" I asked.

 

"Fine, nearly done with this machine if you'd like it."

 

"Great, that size is the one I need. This one is too small. Family good?"

 

"Yeah, we are okay."

 

"Vaccinated?"

 

"No, scared of needles."

 

"Oh, sorry to hear that. I have a friend who is scared of needles. They put him on a gurney, and before he knew it, he'd had a shot."

 

"Oh, so in case he fainted, he was already lying down."

 

"Exactly. And they turned his head away."

 

Laughter.

 

"I guess I should get a shot. I've got a weak chest."

 

"That sounds like a good idea."

 

Anti-vaxxers. They may well be friends, family, colleagues, or neighbors. They are not monolithic, and  hard as it may be for those of us who have been vaccinated, they deserve our consideration, compassion and respect.

 

That said, no one in my immediate circle has hesitated to get a vaccine, or refused to get a vaccine, or doesn't "believe," in a vaccine, or thinks there is a chip that will be injected into their bodies. So I am fortunate, privileged in fact, to have a body of knowledge that allows me to think clearly about my choices. The confusion and conspiracy theories that abound are a consequence of an educational system that has never accommodated the egregious divides in the United States between class and caste.

 

 

 

 

Ceasefire

 

 

 

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion, too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace…

 

-John Lennon

 

Dedicated to all children growing up in war zones.

 

 

 

Malak Mattar, my young friend in Gaza, put up this FB post today: "I survived. I'm officially a four Israeli attack survivor by the age of 21."  But is this Le Fin, the end of this horror movie? Probably not.  Geopolitics, realpolitik, real lives underneath those falling bombs and rockets. Children in Palestine and in Israel and in Afghanistan growing up in war zones, suffering from PTSD, learning to hate, dreaming of escape or revenge. And what about the soldiers and flyers and bombers, what about their PTSD as they become yet more efficient killing machines?

 

Did the bombing in Gaza wipe out Covid? Of course not. But now that there is a ceasefire, the humanitarian agencies can get back in to do their work: house the homeless, provide medical assistance, vaccinate, even set up temporary schools and play spaces for the children.

 

I spoke to MacKay Wolff, a former relief worker for UNRWA, the UN agency set up in 1948 to serve  the Palestinians –and  Jews—displaced  by the war against the British colonial regime. "I hope they are using the 80 schools UNRWA set up as shelters," MacKay told me before the ceasefire. UN workers are tasked with protection—of everyone—to treat all those in need equally. It is not always easy, but that is what they are trained to do.

 

Gaza is flat, and unlike Israel, has no bomb shelters, my Palestinain friend Ahmad told me.  I had not realized that the terrain was indefensible, and was shocked to hear there are no shelters. In that case, I hope the Israelis are not bombing the schools, I thought. Did I say that thought aloud? I'm not sure. I was feeling distressed that day, and so was Ahmad. I knew that my Israeli cousins were safe, or safe enough, in shelters.

 

MacKay had written a story for my book, "Another Day in Paradise," about his posting in the West Bank during the first intifada. How many years ago was that? Too many. There are now 5.6 million Palestinians—the original refugees and their descendants—registered with the UN agency. How many refugees? Too many.

 

Strange that this very week the citizens of New York State began navigating without masks, enjoying freedom of movement and a renewed sense of safety. Most of us—if we have not lost a loved one, or our jobs, or have long term effects of Covid—are feeling positive, even euphoric, about our survival. I wish the same for Malak, her family, and all her wonderful activist friends. May they live in peace.

 

Cri de Coeur

 

 

…any man's death diminishes me, because I

am involved in Mankinde,

 and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls

It tolls for thee.

-John Donne

 

Bombardments and rampaging mobs in Israel and Palestine. And how desperately sad this is. Just over a year ago these adversaries who, in truth, are cousins, all children of the desert, were cooperating. The UN had reminded Israel that they are the occupying power and have responsibility. They had done well with the pandemic, but Gaza and the West Bank were rabid with Covid, aid and vaccine distribution was necessary, obligatory. Now the cooperation is over, and all medical aid has stopped.

 

It began with threatened evictions of an already displaced refugee population in East Jerusalem, police actions, retaliatory actions and more reactions, escalation to war. It has to stop. Finalement, as the French say, it has to stop. An intervention is needed, and very soon, someone as adept as John Kerry, a skilled diplomat and humanitarian; he did wonders as a mediator in Northern Ireland.

 

To understand we must return to an historical timeline and our interpretation and telling of this timeline will depend upon our point of view, our politics. So let me make mine clear: I am a descendant of Holocaust refugees and survivors, a secular non-observant American Jew, and I am not a Zionist. So I say, with a note of sarcasm, even contempt, bless the imperialist enterprise dating back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and the pursuant scramble for spheres of influence. Bless the Brits and their mandate, the displacement of the Palestinian people, their cynical promise to the desperate Jews for Britain's own oil-greedy, strategic, geopolitical benefit, a sordid history. Dear reader, if I am getting some of the timeline wrong, forgive me. I have family in Israel, dear Palestinian friends here in the US. I want them to know: this writer is paying attention.

 

Every so often, I receive a Facebook message from a desperate person who is a friend of a friend living in the underdeveloped world. This week it was from a young woman in Gaza, a friend of Malak Mattar, the twenty-something artist I have written about before. Another of her images graces this post; her work is as powerful as Picasso's Guernica or Diego's murals. She was studying in Istanbul and returned to her family in Gaza in time for this new war. Together with other activists, she has started a Go Fund Me for the children of Gaza. I have not been able to corroborate their bona fides, as yet, so will not post the link here, but hope to do so soon. Needless to say, it's difficult to stay in touch, internet service in and out. 

 

In the meantime, these hashtags:

 

#GazaUnderAttack   #endtheoccupation #savethechildren #truthandreconciliation  #twostatesolution

 

 

Get Away

 

 

The world was ever,

 elsewhere

…no

way where we were

was there

 

-from "The Long Song," Nathaniel Mackey

 

 

  

 

A dear friend died this week. It wasn't a Covid related death, except it was. The facility where he had been living for a while had so much Covid these past months that his family could not get in to see him enough. Isn't it time to rethink how we "house" the sick and the elderly? And because it's no wonder that a virus can spread like a wild fire in multi-generational households and communities—slums and close-to habitations, institutions, all of the residents and workers at risk—it leaves me wondering what's best in the long term for our survival, and the survival of the planet. In it together? Only partially so.

 

60 Minutes on Sunday had an item on the flight to Mars, a mini helicopter hovering over the surface searching for boulders that might contain fossils of living or once living organisms. It's breathtaking, this achievement, this get away to another planet. It takes our minds off what we need to do here. Between my lines there's also the worry: If we ever do get there to form a "colony," will we replicate the insane violence, war, and callous disregard for our environment we have managed to perfect here on Planet Earth? Will Mars become a war zone?  According to the Council on Foreign Relations, there are twenty-five wars raging on our planet as I write. Yet, we carry on creating havoc in the world, letting ships carrying desperate migrants flounder at sea, selling arms to militant nations, spilling sewage into our rivers. And what's this about not sharing vaccination patents? Really? Do the words "global pandemic" register? In another time, Dr. Jonas Salk released the patent of the polio vaccine, no discussion.

 

Post-vaccination, I've started to hear friends, colleagues, students, and family mumbling and grumbling about the need, the absolute necessity, of getting away. How awful has it been for most of us? Really, how awful has it been? If we haven't had Covid, or we are not mourning a loved one who has died of Covid, how awful has it been? The answer is rhetorical, in part—not that awful compared to many others. Scary enough, awkward, too, as we navigated the logistics of everyday life, I'll concede that. But if we've had food in the house, a job, access to medical care? Not that awful.  Most people I know have survived very well indeed. Cooking fancy NY Times recipes: that's a luxury of the privileged few. Selling a home for a gazillion dollars when others are living in dire poverty? Not that awful. Having the technology to Facetime and Zoom? Not that awful. Silver linings? Plenty of them. I even took care of my tooth ache. My dentist had outstanding protocol and expensive protective equipment. Thank you. Apart from the medical necessity, it was a place to go, someone to talk to, and something to do. Dentists talk a lot. Don't they know we can't answer? Usually I mind not being able to answer. Not this time.

 

Missing people was the worst for me, not being able to touch and hug, enjoy micro-connections with strangers, but travel, no, I didn't miss that. I was already upstate when the lockdown in New York City started. I didn't need to get away, and I don't need to get away now; I am away. All I have to do is step outside the door and breathe.

 

 

Writers and the Writing Life in a Plague Year

 

 

 

Removing a published book from circulation because of the authors' conduct and resulting adverse public opinion against the author or the subject, no matter how strong and justified, contradicts important principles of free speech and open discourse.

 

                               -The Authors Guild

 

 

I'm about 200 pages into Blake Bailey's mesmerizing, beautifully written biography of Philip Roth. Withdrawn from distribution because of some horrendous allegations, it is already a collectible. And if, heaven forfend, the allegations are true, Blake Bailey's publishing career is over. Worse, much of Roth's archive has been sequestered until 2050—a contractual arrangement between Roth and Bailey—which means that no other biographer—perhaps even a female biographer (and wouldn't that be interesting) will be able to access them until then.

 

Many men of Roth's generation, coming of age before the women's movement, are notably stunted in their relationships with women. They still use foul language, or stare and glare, or have expectations of a woman's role. This is a given. So, when two guys get together and schmooze, who knows how they'll boast, make up stories, smear the women who have hurt them, distort their own emotions because they cannot express them clearly. Bailey wanted Roth to feel safe enough to give him access to everything—his papers, his tapes, his drafts, so he probably let Roth rip. And if Bailey, too, had some shame about past behavior, it's interesting to wonder if he shared any of it with Roth, or remained silent. I am sure that neither Roth nor Bailey anticipated that a Roth biography would be silenced.

 

Philip Roth had a strong social conscience. His masterwork, The Plot Against America foretold the Trump presidency and the political and social tensions that have followed in the public sphere. I think he would have been heartbroken that his biographer has been cast out by his publisher and his agent without his day in court. I am almost certain he would have spoken out for him fiercely, as I am today. I had thought we were all innocent until proven guilty. I was wrong.

  

Cancel culture, denouncement, unproven allegation and accusation, is every writer's—indeed, every American's—nemesis, or should be. We do not live in China, we do not live in Russia. This is, ostensibly, a country with a free press absent the pressure of the marketplace. And that's a big statement. "The business of America is business,"  someone said as advertising chatter started to permeate the radio air waves back in the 1920's. The FDA regulated that chatter for a while—a certain amount of ad minutes per hour—now it is totally deregulated. But that's radio. What about books, newspapers and magazines? Deliver the reader to the consumer is the mantra. Unless a publication is privately funded, or grant funded, there is no immunity from economic pressure. More so now during the pandemic as companies fail, falter or consolidate.

 

As it happens, Roth wrote a book called Nemesis, one of his best as it is not over-written or adolescent in its sexual longings; it's a mature book about a polio epidemic. Indeed, he wrote many fine books, and many not so fine books, using the events and people in his life as inspiration, and creating a narrative persona that was very close to his own. It's an unusual body of work spanning many years. Like Roth himself, it evolved.

 

My sense thus far in my reading of the biography is that Bailey understood Roth, without judgment, which is why, in my estimation, he was chosen as an "authorized," biographer, not that "authorized" means that much these days. But the two writers' affinity is unmistakable, despite the age difference. Although he did a lot of interviewing, Bailey lets Roth and his work speak without much direct questioning in the text, a bit like a cinema verité movie without an interlocutor. Perhaps this was not the best decision in the current circumstances, as it leaves the biographer open to accusations of misogynist complicity. But it's the narrative device Bailey chose to tell Roth's story, and it is successful. I can't put the book down. What a shame that others may not get to read it. Will it become contraband like Henry Miller's  Tropic of Cancer, smuggled into the United States in the dead of night? That is what happens when a book goes underground: it becomes samizdat as in the days of Soviet repression and censorship.

 

It is a "complex fate" to be an American, Henry James said, from the vantage of  a life abroad where—as a gay man—he  felt emancipated from the Puritanical persecuting spirit. Many Americans have suffered from this persecuting spirit—think of the Salem witch trials, or the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lives and reputations have been destroyed needlessly. And they are still being destroyed today.