Questioning

in which we see a teacher annoyed by students with minds of their own

The Secret Life of Teaching, #3

By Horace Dewey

The following piece has been published at the History News Network website.

Late November: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A few years ago, I teamed up with two colleagues in the English and Ethics departments to team-teach this Humanities course built around the theme of freedom. The course is divided into six units, each juxtaposing freedom with another concept that exists in some tension with it. So, for example, we open the school year with freedom and tolerance, in which we read The Scarlet Letter and study literal and metaphorical witch-hunts (like McCarthyism, allegorized in The Crucible, or the AIDS crisis, as depicted in Angels in America). Huck Finn is embedded in the transition between freedom/independence (the American Revolution, Transcendentalism, adolescent development) and freedom/slavery (Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Phillis Wheatley, the Civil War). In every unit we juxtapose the literary and historical material with philosophy (Aristotle’s notion of slavery) and modern-day analogies (is modern-day sweatshop labor simply slavery by another name?).

It was a real challenge to get this course off the ground, and it took a couple of years of tinkering to get it right. Now it hums along, and there are times when I find it a little boring. When you do the same book year after year, you tend to get lazy; I haven’t actually re-read Huck in years. I’ve got a well-annotated copy I review as we get underway for about a two-week stretch of classes, and I’m probably one of the few people who uses SparkNotes for its supposed purpose: as a means to review the book (as opposed to a substitute for reading it). Actually, my main source of preparation for class, adopted at the urging of my tech-savvy colleage, is the online forum in which students are required to post passages they find interesting and to explain why. I’ll pluck out something I think has possibilities for close reading, or note if there’s a passage that seems to get multiple takers.

I’ve also got a few set pieces that I know from experience will generate a good conversation. One, of course, is the famous passage in Chapter 31, in which an anguished Huck, is torn between returning lost (human) property to its legal owner versus helping that property find his freedom. He finally decides on the latter: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he says, ripping up the note he’d written disclosing the location of the escaped slave Jim.

So it is that when I walk in to the classroom for what will be my fourth discussion of Huck Finn on a chilly but brilliant autumnal day I’m a little rusty but ready to improvise. I’ve got to pocket Chapter 31, because it will be awhile before we get there. So instead I’ll ask the students to summarize the novel through the first eight chapters, which is a relatively easy point of entry as well as a device to jog my memory. So gang,” I ask, raising a steaming paper cup of coffee to my lips, “who is Huckleberry Finn?”

I sip in silence. Damn. This is a misfire: I intended a kid to say something like, “He’s a boy from Missouri who’s running away from his father and traveling with an escaped slave.” But it seems my query has been interpreted more interpretively and thus   difficult to answer, as if I’m expecting something like, “He’s an empathic pragmatist in a morally corrupt social milieu.” I put my cup down on my desk, wait a beat, and say, “He’s a very blank person who blanks. Go ahead in fill in those blanks.”

Still nothing. And then Alba Montanez—decent student though her last essay was all over the place—blurts out, “He’s obsessed with death.”

I think: Blech.

I say: “Interesting, Alba. Can you elaborate a bit?”

Kim Anders—volleyball team, got a 92 on the last test, litigated another three points out of me—says, “Yes! I was thinking the same thing!”

What wavelength are these kids on? “OK,” I say. “But why?”

Kim continues her interruption of Alba. “Well, his mother is dead, right? That’s like the first thing we’re told.”

“Yes, we’re told that. But where do you get the idea of this death fixation?” I know I sound little impatient, but I think it’s a fair question, and I think in any case that I can get away with posing it, even with some irritation, to Kim.

But it’s Alba jumps back in. “It says right here on page six that the widow read to him about Moses. ‘She let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care about him; because I don’t take no stock in dead people.’”

“Hmmm. So the fact that he’s talking about a dead person—says he doesn’t care about dead people—is evidence of an obsession.” I make this a statement, not a question. I’m hoping I can gently jog her out of what I regard as a foolish assertion.

Instead, Alba says “Exactly.” I’m about to argue the point but stop myself. “What do the rest of you think? Do you agree with Alba and Kim that Huck has a death fixation?

I scan the faces in the room. Steven Gridley is looking out the window. Tommy Giddens is whispering to Zak Pacek. Tara Millberg is staring at her laptop. Evelyn WuWong is looking at me expectantly. She’s paying attention but clearly has no intention of jumping into the fray.

Tara, who has permission to take notes with the laptop but in all likelihood has been shopping for shoes, looks up. “He’s just so, what’s the word . . . you know when you’re just only reacting to what other people do—”

“Passive?”

“Yeah, passive.  Like he’s so obsessed with what Tom Sawyer thinks.”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with being obsessed with death?”

“I dunno. It’s just, like, he’s not living. It’s almost like he’s a zombie.”

There’s something incongruous about Tara Millberg—lustrous hair, ruddy cheeks, fingernail polish that picks up the accents on her wool sweater—talking about death. It seems so remote that she can barely talk about it coherently. And yet she’s not entirely wrong. And, sure as she sitting there, death, like that character in the Emily Dickinson poem, will be coming by to claim her. For the first time, I’m curious about what will happen in the meantime.

“I’m a little confused,” I say, returning my gaze to Alba. “How can you be obsessed with death at the same moment you’re saying you don’t put no stock in dead people? Isn’t that a contradiction?”

Alba narrows her eyes, taking the question in. Is she going to be able to parry it? If she doesn’t, maybe I can steer this conversation back on course—or, maybe more accurately, out of the gate. I’m thinking the opening of Chapter 4, in which Huck talks about his schooling (he could “spell, and read, and write just a little, and say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five”). Can’t go wrong talking about education with high school kids.

But now it’s Sam Stevens—Dad writes for the Times, apparently he’s a good guitar player—who enters the fray. “What’s with the staging his death thing?”

“Staging his death thing?”

“Yeah. When his dad starts beating him. He makes it look like he’s been killed.”

“Right. That’s how he makes his escape. It’s a means to an end. Doesn’t mean he’s obsessed with death, does it?”

“Kinda weird, if you ask me.”

 I guess I did ask. Maybe these kids are on to something.

“I think Huck is depressed.” This from Dana Weiss. Figures. It’s not the first time I’ve heard therapy-speak from her. I remember her once referring to Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter as having low self-esteem. Tell me Mom isn’t a psychotherapist.

“Depressed, huh?”

“Yeah. I think so. I actually read ahead a little bit to the whole Grangerfords and Sherpherdsons clan war thing. That whole part about Emmeline Grangerford. After she dies Huck seems really upset. It’s interesting after the whole Moses thing Alba just read. It’s like this is the first time he allows himself to really grieve. And then he says something like ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”

I’m a little stunned by this insight. My memory of the book is sketchy, but I know what Dana is talking about.

“Thanks a lot for giving the plot away!” Kim exclaims.

I’m about to try to explain to Kim that it’s not that big a deal when suddenly the fire alarm goes off. Damn. I remember the assistant principal telling me yesterday we’re behind on the quota that the state mandates. “Oh!” Dana says, genuinely upset. Steven Gridley looks like he’s just received a get-out-of-jail card. As per our protocol, we file out of the room and out of the building silently.

Shivering on the sidewalk, waiting for the all-clear, an essay question begins to take shape: Some observers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (wink, wink) say that the Huck Finn we meet at the start of the story is suffering from depression, and in particular an obsession with death. Do you agree? If not, why not? If so, explain why—and where, if anywhere, you think that begins to change. In what ways would you say his state of mind is shaped by his historical circumstances? Be sure to use evidence from the novel to support your thesis. Gonna have to think about the depression thing—how to define it. Then again, let’s see if any of them do it. I’m always talking about defining your terms. Maybe a few of them will.

“Two down, six to go,” my colleague Eddie Vinateri says of the fire drills as we get the signal to head back into the building. After a pause, he gestures toward my clutch of returning students, a few of whom have, unaccountably, taken the book out with them. “How’s Humanities going?”

“Good,” I say. “The class teaches itself.”

A Place in Time (VI--final)

This is the final installment of a series of posts on regionalism in U.S. history. (Previous posts below.)

What does all this talk of regional identity  mean for you? That of course depends at least a bit on who “you” are, i.e. where you’re coming from in some literal or figurative way. (I, for my part, am the grandson of an Italian immigrant whose extended family, much of it Irish, is almost exclusively Mid-Atlantic by birth. But by marriage, education, and temperament, I am decidedly a Yankee in cultural affiliation.) Insofar as these regional themes I’m talking about have any reality, they include plenty of exceptions. You can find Chinese food in Tulsa (maybe not good Chinese food), and hear good bluegrass music in Manhattan (maybe not real bluegrass). Even overwhelmingly Republican Texas has Democratic pockets – which may soon become more than pockets as the racial complexion of the state changes. There are plenty of reasons, and ways, the nation-state will hold. Like our motto says, e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”).

On the other hand, there’s no reason to think the borders of the United States will remain permanent. Considered solely as a matter of topography, there’s nothing particularly cohesive about a stretch of continent that’s marked by large stretches of forest, plains, desert, and mountains, and which over the course of the last few thousand years has been the home of a wide variety of peoples who interacted with each other was well as lived in relative isolation. And many of our state boundaries – consider the rectangles that constitute the Dakotas, for example – are really matters of fictive convenience. Should the pressures, internal or external, become great enough, different pieces of the nation could break off or recombine in ways that are hard to foresee, but not exactly random, either.

Does that thought sadden you? At times it saddens me, though I’ll confess I find myself exasperated enough with the kinds of things I hear or see coming out of South Carolina and find myself thinking our lives would be a lot easier if we went our separate ways. I get annoyed at the way Idahoans complain about the intrusiveness of the federal government, even as they depend on it for the roads, jobs, and markets that keep it afloat. In recent years I’ve heard secessionist noise coming out of Texas, to which I feel inclined to say, “erring sisters, go in peace,” especially since I regard the circumstances by which Texas entered the Union to be highly dubious. On the other hand, I’m not sure any of the rest of the nation was much, if any, less so as a matter of moral legitimacy.

The real point of this particular conversation is less about making predictions or arguing for the value of one part of the country over the other than it is asking you to consider what you consider important about your national identity. What do you think it means to be an American? Is it a landscape, a set of habits, or a series of ideas? Are the things you value rooted more in one part of the continent than another? How bad would you feel if some part of it were to break off? And lastly, and more importantly: where – and how – do you want to live? If you’re lucky, you may have some choice in the matter. Try and exercise it wisely.

Sensing the future

The following is the catalog copy for my forthcoming book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, slated for publication by Oxford University Press in late 2012
 

How do perceptions of the past—not just of particular events, but of the trajectory of history as a whole—shape our experience of the world? To answer this (and other) questions, Jim Cullen looks closely at the work of what might be considered an unlikely source of historical insight—the work of six major Hollywood stars. Indeed, Cullen offers a fascinating portrait of pivotal movements that have shaped our history as reflected in the work of Clint Eastwood, Daniel Day-Lewis (at left, made up as Abraham Lincoln for his forthcoming performance in Team of Rivals), Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and Jodie Foster. By focusing on the career choices made by these powerful actors, all of whom have the rare ability to put their personal stamp on their work, Cullen reveals a discrete set of historical narratives, including a surprising strain of Jeffersonian communitarianism that runs through Eastwood’s work, a sense of how the frontier shaped American character as reflected in the roles chosen by Day-Lewis, the Lincoln-styled belief in institutions and the power of ordinary people that runs through the films of Tom Hanks (like Jimmy Stewart before him), and the history of liberal feminism of the last century captured in the movies of Meryl Streep. That these historical patterns emerge in the work of these six artists—almost certainly unintentionally--sheds much light on the way that, for all of us, historical forces can shape our understanding of the world without our being aware of them.

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, and other books. Cullen is also a book review editor at the History News Network. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Left-Handed Complement

In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt explores the unconscious basis of morality

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site. 

This book, the product of a powerful mind, integrates cutting-edge research from the disciplines of biology, psychology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and other fields. It attempts to answer a deceptively simple question: How do people determine what is right, and how are we to understand the differences between them? Haidt's answer is that morality is largely a function of processes autonomous of conscious tho
ught. To use a metaphor in a book chock full of mnemonic devices, our minds are like elephants on which reason is the rider -- but that the rider serves the elephant, not the other way around. And that we cannot really begin to have a meaningful political discourse until we recognize that the basis of our disagreements are never really about formal logic.

Haidt's assertion that explicit arguments are literally rationalizations for our deepest instincts has become something of a truism in recent neurological research (and a basis of his last book, The Happiness Hypothesis). But this observation is merely the point of departure in The Righteous Mind. It turns out that Haidt's real agenda is to deconstruct the liberal secular disposition that he's clearly calculating is the default setting for readers of his work. This deconstruction involves pointing out the striking degree of parochialism on the part of those who consider themselves enlightened. He notes that most of the people who design social science assessments, along with the volunteers who participate in them, are WEIRD -- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic -- and that such people are in fact a tiny minority of the global population. Gaining critical distance on this subset, which he acquired by spending time in India, has helped him to understand the world beyond the elite institutions (Penn, Chicago, the University of Virginia) where he has done most of his work.

From there, Haidt goes on to posit that morality consists of a series of discrete sensors akin to the way those on our tongues determine our sense of taste. They are spectra of care/harm; liberty/oppression; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation. Liberals, he notes, have a very high degree of sensitivity to care criteria, along with aversion to oppression and and an emphasis on fairness (typically defined in terms of equality). Conservatives, by contrast, are not devoid of such sensors; they too wish to avoid harm, oppression and unfairness, though they tend to cast averting such evils in terms of freedom from rather than freedom to, and to define fairness in terms of proportionality rather than equality. But the important point for Haidt is that conservatives, like people in much of the rest of the world, have a much wider basis of morality than liberals do: they value concepts like patriotism and a sense of the holy in ways that liberals stint if not actually dismiss. Liberals have a blind spot whereby they simply don't recognize, much less engage such criteria, one reason why in surveys conservatives tend to do a much better job of describing liberals than liberals do conservatives. (This is a point that has been made a number of times, but the empirical basis of Haidt's research can be found on his website, YourMorals.org.)

Why does this matter? It matters, he says, because biology says it does. Haidt slices through the age-old Gordian knot of nature vs. nurture by jumping on the au courant bandwagon that our brains are not hard-wired, but rather pre-wired. Biology is not destiny, exactly: any number of programs can be downloaded, depending on environmental availability. But not an infinite number. And all of us come equipped with outlets for inputs like a sense of the sacred, whether or not they get filled. Haidt is less interested in whether God actually exists than what he regards as a powerful predilection to behave as if there is one (or 600). He makes a kind of neurological Pascal's Wager: we're better off believing.

And this matters, in turn, because one of the things human beings most certainly are is social beings. Haidt regards the concept of rational self-interest as misleading, not so much because there isn't such a thing, or because that he wants to affirm the reality of altruism, but because humans, liberal mythology notwithstanding, are not simply collections of individuals, but part of larger social organisms that belong to, and behave, in terms of a hive, at least some of the time. Insofar as there is such a thing as altruism, he casts it in terms of Darwinian group selection. Which is to say that altruism is real -- but inevitably circumscribed. We can act on behalf of causes larger than ourselves, but there are strict limits on how far that can go. We will die for God or country. We will not for socialized health care or an abstract sense of a global community. And those of us who really are passionate about such things have little hope of convincing our fellow citizens that such causes matter unless they're able to cast them broader moral terms than relying solely on caring or fairness. One is reminded here of the late Christopher Lasch, who in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), anticipated many of these arguments. As Lasch reminded us in that book, it was the Reverend Martin Luther King who scored the greatest successes in the Civil Rights Movement, a movement that was most successful when its resources and aspirations were understood in terms of (evangelical) religion.

The Righteous Mind is a very carefully constructed book; Haidt ends each chapter by summing up his main points as part of a larger strategy to construct as sturdy an empirical edifice as he possibly can. As his tower gets higher, one nevertheless becomes increasingly aware of its wobbliness: scientific findings -- especially social science findings -- are changing all the time; one generation's insight becomes the next generation's fallacy. And while few of us are in a position to credibly vet the methodology of what seem to be rather cleverly designed surveys, it seems impossible not to think that the wording of a question here or a protocol there wouldn't lead in another direction.

What's really troubling, though, is how emphatically Haidt seems to stint the role of rational discourse in the making and changing of individual minds -- a bit odd, actually, given that this is a densely reasoned piece of writing. He mentions a few times that such discourse can matter in some situations, but he spends little time showing where and how. It's enough to make one think that there's another dissertation on the horizon by a graduate student who takes this vague sense of unease and fashions it into a form of neo-rationalism for the post-Obama era. Surely someone will posit a compelling Darwinian story about how a capacity for persuasion is more than a mere appendix in the lottery of natural selection.

Still, it's no mean praise to say The Righteous Mind is a book written in good faith. It deserves to be read and discussed widely.

Shades of Brown

In Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, Andrew Nagorski observes Germany through a red-white-and-blue lens

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site. 

Hitlerland: a term coined in the Berlin-based 1930s by International News Service writer Pierre John Huss to describe Nazi Germany. Huss. Huss, who later worked as one of the so-called "Murrow's Boys" assembled by the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, interviewed Adolf Hitler multiple times. William Shirer, who also knew a thing or two about Germany in the '30s, described Huss as "slick, debonair, and ambitious." Some of Huss's peers grumbled at the time that he was a little to close the Nazi regime, which may or may not have been true. But as Andrew Nagorski makes clear in this often absorbing book, there were many Americans in Germany at the time who were open in their admiration of it, along with those who were confused, afraid, and angry about it.

In Hitlerland, former Newsweek journalist Andrew Nagorski finds a clever way to tell a familiar story. He's gathered up dozens of sources from Americans who lived, worked, or simply passed through Germany in the two decades following the Great War and sketched a compelling composite portrait. Among the most durable and informed observers we meet are Truman Smith, a military attaché to the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Hearst correspondent Karl Henry von Wiegand, and Chicago Tribune reporter (and later radio correspondent) Sigrid Schultz. More familiar names include future television broadcaster Howard K. Smith, future CIA director Richard Helms, and celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Lindbergh, of course, later became infamous for his isolationism, widely viewed as Naziphilia by another name. In Hitlerland, however, we meet him and his also famous wife Anne in their first visit to Germany before his viewed solidified. Ironically, Lindbergh's VIP tour of state-of-the-art German aviation yielded information that proved to be of considerable value to the American government. The far more repugnant figure in Hitlerland is Ernst "Putzi" Hafstaengl the half-German/half-American Harvard graduate who worked for a time as Hitler's propagandist before being dumped by the Fuhrer. In one of the more dramatic moments in the book, young Hitler takes refuge in the immediate aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 with Hafstaengl's wife, Helen, in their Bavarian home. Hitler was reputedly infatuated with Helen, who talked him out of possibly killing himself as authorities closed in to arrest him. It's hard to know how serious Hitler's suicide threat was, but it's sobering to consider that an American woman's woman intervention may have been the last best chance to prevent the Holocaust.

There are lots of vivid cameo appearances in Hitlerland, too: Jesse Owens, Josephine Baker, Philip Johnson, and a callow young John F. Kennedy wander through, their opinions perhaps inevitably filtered through their individual circumstances. Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis are initially charmed by what the see, but are increasingly troubled. So is U.S. Ambassador William Dodd, whose story is chronicled in Erik Larson's recently published bestseller In the Garden of Beasts. Dodd's daughter daughter Martha starts out enchanted by the regime but then trades her loyalty to the comparably dubious Russia of Josef Stalin. 

If there's a problem with Hitlerland, it's that the trajectory of his story -- which features the usual "highlights" of the failed coup attempt, Hitler's ascension to power, the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallacht, and the outbreak of war -- is little different than any number of other accounts of the period. As a group, Americans, Jewish or not, prove no more or less prescient than any number of other people at the time, German or not. Nagorski usefully emphasizes that the impact of war in Germany was felt forcefully and negatively even in the early, triumphant months of 1940 and 1941, and the pace of the narrative picks up steam as he does. We also view the hugely influential Soviet diplomat George Kennan during what for him was a brief but irritating stint in Germany, trying to corral an unruly clutch of American correspondents temporarily interred by the German government, pending an exchange following its declaration of war on the United States. But interpretively speaking, the book tells us little we didn't already know about the tenor of the Nazi regime. Certainly, Hitler is as magnetic, repellent, and inscrutable as ever.

Hitlerland is nevertheless a well conceived, crafted, and executed story. Casual as well as informed World War II buffs will savor it.

Tricky Dick fictions

In his new novel Watergate, Thomas Mallon bends reality to make it true

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.  

Even when it was as fresh as as the latest edition of a newspaper, Watergate was complicated. Yes, the essence of the story -- failed attempt to break into the opposition's headquarters leads to cover-up and eventual resignation of a president -- is clear enough. But the cast of characters in the saga is enormous, and the various contexts for the story include the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Vietnam War, and an entirely separate scandal involving the Vice-President, among others. The saga has been widely dissected, beginning of course with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men (1974), the movie of the same year that followed two years later, and countless subsequent accounts that stretch from the journalism of Jonathan Schell to the the multi-volume biography of Stephen Ambrose to the biopic of Oliver Stone (in which Anthony Hopkins does a pretty good Richard Nixon). Should you ever wish to wade into the that water, there's plenty of people waiting to guide you.

Thomas Mallon's novelistic foray into Watergate is distinctive for a number of reasons. The first is that it's relatively demanding.  The cast of characters runs for four pages of the print edition (9 on my Kindle). The second is that aspects of this story are clearly -- and not so clearly -- fictional. Wait, I said to myself: did Pat Nixon really have an affair? (This is the first I heard of it.) There's a part of the story that shows the president's secretary, Rose Mary Woods erasing the famous 18 minutes of subpoenaed tapes in which Nixon reputedly discussed Watergate. We actually "hear" those missing minutes, which of course must be fabricated. But much of what's rendered in the novel is factual. We also get interior monologues from a variety of characters, including Nixon himself, which we might safely consider fictive until one considers that Woodward has made a career of writing non-fiction books in such a stream-of-consciousness manner without leaving any fingerprints in the form of quotation marks.

None of this is to suggest that there's anything specifically wrong or even all that unusual in what is now a well-established genre of historical fiction -- one in which Mallon is a master (I simply loved his 1995 novel Henry and Clara, which looks at the Lincoln assassination from the standpoint of a pair of minor characters in the tragedy). But more so than other works of its kind, Watergate requires a degree of mental energy and occasional recourse to Wikipedia.

Which is not to say it is without its rewards. By this point, calling Nixon a crook is shooting fish in a barrel; at the same time, the hatred Nixon aroused seems heartless in retrospect (more recent Republican presidents may well have deserved worse). Mallon steers around these poles, emphasizing the degree to which even the principals in this story operated under a cloud of ignorance, even confusion. Woodward and Bernstein are in the background, as are the protesters who can be heard in the distance. The principal voice of a critic we hear is that of Elliot Richardson, the liberal Republican and multi-cabinet officer who hoped to benefit from Nixon's fall, as both Nixon and he expected he would, much to the former's chagrin. This of course proves to be one more illusion. (Elliot who?)

If there's any one voice that serves as a protagonist, it's Fred LaRue, who, appropriately, was a mysterious figure at the time -- a man without title, salary or listing in the White House directory, but who was close to the planning of the burglary and served as a bagman to buy the silence of those arrested in its aftermath, among them E. Howard Hunt, who also figures prominently here. A wry Mississippian, he's given a backstory here involving a long lost love who helps him try to come to terms with his role in the shooting of his father many years previously.

But it's the women who make Watergate a distinctive piece of storytelling. They are, as a group, as incisive and ruthless as any of their male counterparts. That goes for Woods, typically depicted as a hapless apologist for the president, as well as Pat Nixon, who memorably recalls Dwight Eisenhower as "cheerful as Popsicle and just as cold." Hunt's wife Dorothy is portrayed as playing hardball with more verve than anyone in the White House. But the shameless scene stealer here, as she was in real life, is the octogenarian (who turns nonagenarian) Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of TR best remembered for her epigram, "If you haven't anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." Mallon depicts her as having an unusually close relationship with Nixon, rooted in a favor Nixon once did for her. In an ironic twist of the historical record, Mallon turns Longworth's well-known disgust with Nixon's invocation of TR in his resignation speech and makes it an inside joke. As Longworth well understands, she's a tragic figure in her inability to forge her fiery intelligence into much more than rapier-sharp sarcasm. But she understands Watergate better than most, and confers what comes off as a prescient benediction of sorts on Nixon.

There were times when I felt Watergate sagged, and that its sculpted omissions deprived it of a bit of narrative oxygen. But this is nevertheless the work of a writer at the height of his powers, conferring truths about the past that transcend mere factual accuracy. I suspect it will take its place of one of the truly useful accounts of the event.

From Russia, with Love

Master biographer Robert K. Massie triumphs again with Catherine the Great

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.  


As someone with little knowledge of 18th century Russian history, I picked up (or more accurately, I downloaded) this sizable book for two reasons. The first is that I wanted to experience the work of a master popular historian at the height of his (octogenarian) powers. The second is that I wanted to gain a better grasp of American history by having a fuller sense of global context. I was rewarded on both counts.

Robert K. Massie first rose to fame a half-century ago on the basis of his Pulitzer-Prize winning dual biography Nicholas and Alexandra (1966), the basis of a successful 1971 movie. Amid other projects, he followed it up with a biography of Peter the Great in 1980. He has now filled in an important piece of the Romanov dynasty with Catherine the Great, who does indeed come off impressively in an account luxuriant with period detail.

As befitting his role of biographer writing for a general audience, Massie focuses a great deal on the circumstances of Catherine's personal life: her origins as a lowly German princess; a childhood at the hands of a passive father and pushy, ambitious mother; a painful (and probably sexless) marriage to Peter III, which ended with a palace coup that placed her on the throne; and a 34-year reign in which she collected a series of courtiers who provided her with advice and companionship (not necessarily in that order).

Given my lack of knowledge of European court politics, I found some surprising currents running through this story. The first was the relative strength of women in 18th century ruling elites. Catherine's own mentor was the Empress Elizabeth, a formidable figure in her own right who survived considerable palace intrigue to rule Russia for two decades. One of Catherine's rivals was Maria Theresa, the wily ruler of the vast Hapsburg dominions. Women, even royal women,  had all kinds of disadvantages in eighteenth century European politics, but their success showed what was possible. At the same time, it's striking to consider that no woman ruled either empire after their deaths.

Catherine governed Russia as an enlightened despot -- enlightened in some literal sense, in that she enjoyed a lively correspondence with figures like Voltaire, Diderot, and other intellectual giants of the age. But the Cossack uprising known as Pugachev's Rebellion in 1773-74, combined with the French Revolution 15 years later, cooled her republican sensibilities. She nevertheless launched an ambitious attempt to reform Russia's legal code and made an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to improve the status of serfs in the empire. Which is a second surprise: the degree to which even an autocrat could find herself shackled by public opinion and powerful minority constituencies, limits Catherine acutely perceived. Yet she was also the beneficiary of such forces, and exploited them to good effect. The sincerity of devotion to her adopted country and Orthodox faith was evident to all those who knew her, and played a significant role in the willingness of key players in the Romanov regime to dump her husband in her favor.

Though it's a secondary theme of the book, Massie also makes clear that Catherine's reign coincided with a significant expansion of the Russian empire, both in terms of territory (at the expense of the Turks and Poles), as well as its prestige in European and even global affairs. King George III earnestly sought, without avail, Catherine's military assistance in quelling the American Revolution, and she later hired naval John Paul Jones to serve as an admiral on the Black Sea. Navigating her way through alliances with Prussia, Austria, England, she succeeded established a long-sought warm water port for the empire thanks to the efforts of her adviser and paramour Grigory Potemkin. Massie assertively debunks the belief that Potemkin's rapid development of the region was merely cosmetic, as the commonly used phrase "Potemkin Village" suggests.

I lived with Catherine the Great very comfortably over a period of weeks. Both subject and author are inspiring in the strength of their work ethic and longevity. We should all be so talented and fortunate.

Unmastered narrative

In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes shows how the past is subject to change

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.  

This novella tells an extraordinary story about a very ordinary man. The Sense of an Ending won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for any number of literary reasons. But one of its most distinctive attributes is its power as a meditation on the way memory is a form of personal historiography. Our master narratives of ourselves change in light our changing circumstances -- and, every once in a while, when previously unknown information about the past prompts (sometimes painful) revisionism.

Tony Webster is a late middle-aged man: recently retired, not-so recently divorced, with a grown daughter and young grandchildren. In measured prose, he tells the reader the story of his life. Most of his tale is dominated by his youth as schoolboy with a group of three other chums in postwar England and in chronicling his first serious romance. These two strands intertwine briefly in early adulthood. That chapter of his life ends unhappily, but he gets on with it and decades later looks back with satisfaction on a career as an arts administrator and an ex-wife with whom he remains on friendly terms. Then, most unexpectedly, he is informed of a small bequest and the existence of a document that he is apparently meant to see but which is also being withheld from him. Disoriented by this set of events, Webster re-opens old relationships that shake loose the cobwebs of his memory. It's hard to be more specific than this without ruining the distinctly low-key but undeniable suspense of the story.

Barnes, who writes crime fiction under the name of Dan Kavanagh, crafts beautiful sentences and shows a deft sense of pacing. If the conclusion is not altogether satisfying, it has an aesthetic as well as mimetic coherence. Indeed the very title of the book suggests both vagueness and a kind of logic. As Barnes himself has said in a recent interview, "Life is not a detective novel." And histories, he might have added, are made to be broken.

Foul ball

In Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love, Dave Zirin declares a team of plutocrats out of bounds

The following review was posted today the Books page of the History News Network site.  

Complaints about the state of spectator sports has become a virtual subgenre of journalism. Negligence and harassment by organizations like the NCAA; self-indulgent (and sometimes felonious) athletes; boorish behavior by fans: one can barely get through a broadcast, sports section, or website without encountering jeremiads in some form. In Bad Sports, journalist and radio host Dave Zirin points his finger at the owners of ball clubs in a variety of sports. First and foremost, he asserts, it's their excessive behavior that has been corroding love of the game.

Zirin's chief complaint is the way these avowed corporate enterprises get subsidies from taxpayers in building facilities and running teams, with little if any sense of public obligation or reciprocation. He argues that these arrangements never pay municipalities back, in that the jobs they create are menial, fleeting, and that new stadiums rarely attract enough visitors to amortize public investment. What makes matters worse, he says, are the way many owners then use their athletic platform as a means to promote religious, political, and other agendas.

The core Bad Sports, which was first published in 2010 and has been reissued in a new edition by the New Press, consists of a series of portraits of corporate malefactors:  George Steinbrenner's New York Yankees; Clay Bennett's Seattle Supersonics/Oklahoma City Thunder; Dan Snyder's Washington Redskins, et. al. These profiles in avarice use local journalism and other sources to credibly document many varieties of sordid behavior. Zirin reports that he sought interviews with all his subjects, but was almost always turned down.

While it's not hard to see why -- these people have good reasons for wanting to avoid close attention --  Zirin undermines his case somewhat in his tone. An aggrieved populism dominates. "We are owed plenty by the athletic industrial complex," he asserts in the introduction. "We are owed loyalty. We are owed a return on our massive civic investment. And more than anything, we should raise our fists to the owner's box and say we are owed a little bit of goddamn respect." But the best way to demonstrate one's feelings about an $8 beer is by simply refusing to buy one. Or a ticket, for that matter. And while it's ultimately impossible to feel much sympathy for these people even when Zirin is piling it on, one has to wonder why greedy athletes, corrupt government officials, or craven fans get a pass from his fury. He's a left-wing Rush Limbaugh, preaching to the converted.

Zirin does point to an intriguing alternative, however: he wants more teams to be publicly owned, like the Green Bay Packers. He mentions the the Green Bay model throughout the book, and comes back to it in his conclusion. But one wishes he spent more time in talking about how -- or whether -- it could be generalized. Would the Packers model work in larger and more economically stratified cities? What would the implications be for drafting and signing players?  What kind of legal and political challenges could be mounted to the National Football League monopoly? Perhaps there's another book there.

In the meantime, Bad Sports functions as a lean, mean indictment. Just make sure you have plenty of antacid tablets on hand.

The souls of Streep

The following post is the last in a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

In the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, Amy Adams is Julie Powell, a young arrival in 2002 Queens who decides to launch a blog in which she writes about preparing all 524 of Julia Child’s 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. Her story alternates with that of Streep as Child in the 1950s, and the series of events that culminate in the publication of that book. Julie Powell is pleased by the increasingly positive attention she gets for her work, which will result in her own book (and, eventually, a movie). But toward the end of the film she learns from a reporter that Julia Child herself is contemptuous and dismissive Powell, though we never learn exactly what she said or even whether Child actually ever read her blog. Julie is crushed to conclude that the will not only never meet her now 90 year-old inspiration, but will never get her approval, either. “The one in your head is the one that matters,” her husband consoles her.

As someone who has spent time writing about famous people he’s never met, I’ll confess that this scene had some personal resonance for me. Analyzing the careers of celebrities evokes a range of emotions, among them admiration, longing, distaste, and shame (can’t you generate your own material rather than relying on somebody else’s?). Notwithstanding the rejection I’ve experienced, and the fear of it that has prevented me from pursuing the people I’ve been writing about in this book, I have nevertheless soldiered on in the belief that it’s the work—their work, and the work I’ve done to build on it in this modest way—that finally matters, if for no other reason than keeping me out of any number of forms of trouble. There are, after all, worse ways of spending time than in the virtual company of movie stars.

But one of the things I’ve learned from Meryl Streep is that her work is not finally about her, or about me. Instead, it’s really about other people. The great paradox of actors is that by embodying fictive people they enliven real ones. In her 1998 appearance on the TV program Inside the Actor’s Studio, Streep explained this with spontaneity that’s worth quoting at some length:

I was thinking about applying to law school and thinking that acting is a stupid way to make a living, that it doesn’t do any good in the world. But I think it does, I think it does, there’s a great worth in it. And the worth is in listening to people who maybe don’t even exist or who are voices in your past and through you come through the work and you give them to other people. I think that giving voice to characters who have no other voice is the great worth of what we do. So much of acting is vanity. I mean, this [appearing on the show] feels so great to come here and sit here and have everybody clap. But the real thing that makes me feel so good is when I know I’ve said something for a soul, when I’ve presented a soul.

            In terms of the overarching argument that frames this book, I would describe Meryl Streep’s historiographic vision as that of a progressive feminist. I say that because the arc, the non-straight but clear line that runs through her work, is one in which the lives of women have gradually improved.  They get more power over control of the terms in their lives, power that begins at home but eventually moves outside the home. That power has precedents in the past in the lives of those who illuminated the way, but most of it is something whose emergence she charts in the history of our time. To a great degree, this realized dream is a substantively American one, grounded in aspirations that transcend gender. But realized dreams are also surprisingly complicated ones, with unexpected consequences, ambiguities, and unfinished work.

As her comments also suggest, Streep’s historiographic vision has a powerful moral component, and a belief in a living connection that binds people across time and space that she describes in terms of the transcendent term “soul.” Sister Aloysius would probably not approve of this use of the word. But Streep blessed her anyway.

---

Opting for illusions

In The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits, law professor Kent Greenfield asserts that too many liberties get taken with our notions of freedom

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.  
 

Some readers have compared this book to the work of Malcolm Gladwell. It's not hard to see why; the core strategy of Gladwell mega-bestsellers such as The Tipping Point -- arrestingly simple assertion illustrated with anecdotal information from a variety of fields -- is very much in evidence here. But in an important sense, The Myth of Choice, which is about as well-written as anything in Gladwell's entertaining oeuvre, proves to be a more satisfying experience. That's because the illustrations are enlisted in the service in a more focused world view: that the libertarian cast of our sociopolitical discourse is at best misguided and at worst plays into the hands of those who manipulate our false sense of sovereignty in the service of their often pernicious agendas.

It's apparent that Kent Greenfield's life experiences have served him well. Born in small-town Kentucky, the son of a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher, he went to Brown and clerked for Supreme Court justice David Souter before taking a position at Boston College Law School. Each of these elements -- plain-spoken eloquence, intellectual rigor, a methodical cast of mind, flinty New England skepticism -- blend in his first-person voice. He writes as engagingly about a childhood contest of wills with an elementary school teacher as he does in parsing legal opinions. This is a book that can be read in a single sitting -- but also dispensed as bite-sized assignments in any number of humanities or social science courses.

Greenfield begins by noting that the notion of free choice is essentially the default setting in American society. If there's one thing everyone from left wing social activists to conservative evangelicals can agree on, it's an emphasis on agency as principle, goal, and/or reality. Sometimes choice is framed in terms of freedom; other times it's in the name of personal responsibility (with a subtext of cost). But even when two or more sides disagree on an issue, the underlying assumption is often that people can -- or, if not, should be able -- to choose.

The problem, Greenfield says, is that choice isn't always that simple. For one thing, the very meaning of choice can be subjective: one man's "option" is another woman's "necessity." For another, "free" choice often has hidden costs, like environmental clean-up, that are displaced onto others. Sometimes choice can be overwhelming, particularly when presented with incomplete information, as is often the case. Other times choice is relatively meaningless, particularly when the options are (literally or figuratively) unappetizing.

Yet even when choice is perceived to be genuine, there are all kinds of influences that militate against it. Greenfield writes individual chapters on the way biology, culture, market forces, and relations of power all shape the parameters of choice in ways we underestimate, assuming we're conscious of them at all. At the same time, there are people who are quite shrewd about such matters who perform their calculations as finely as as a casino owner playing the gambler. So it is that our propensity for salt, sex, and personal distinction lead us down the path of least resistance, which is not always in our best interest as we ourselves would define them.

Greenfield's real animus though, is against those who invoke personal responsibility as a stalking horse for what turns out to be the opposite: freedom from responsibility. A staunch defender of the Obama administration's health care reforms, he asks how anyone can plausibly invoke the right to opt out of buying an insurance policy given the likelihood that insolvency would be the result of any serious uninsured illness, thus imposing the cost on someone else. He emphasizes the human price on those told to deny any and all altruistic instincts, arguing that the avowedly uninsured deny choice to those told not to avert human suffering. He also foregrounds the imposition on those who have the misfortune of witnessing the gruesome consequences that can result from someone not wearing a motorcycle helmet, for example.

A compendium of recent scholarship that ranges from psychologist Daniel Gilbert to progressives like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, The Myth of Choice is an unabashed document of the contemporary left. As such it invites disagreement, principally from the direction of wondering how much confidence Greenfield can really have that one can check one's impulses, change habits, and consider context, or whether the very attempt to control environmental factors won't breed new forms of coercion. But even critics will find his argument as among the best of its kind. For all its iconoclasm, this is a book of the zeitgeist, and deserves to be read, now and later, as an expression of it.

Catastrophic speculation

In The Fear Index, Robert Harris explores the volatility of the present instead of his customary time travels to the past

The following review was posted recently the Books page of the History News Network site. 

As  a writer of historical fiction, Robert Harris has few peers in the range of settings for his novels, his skill in evoking an era, or in maintaining a strong narrative pace. Yet whether the story in question has been one of ancient Rome or the alternative history of Nazi Europe in the 1960s, there is an important recurring theme in his work: a fascination with power and hubris it breeds. This fascination has taken readers into realms that include cryptography, engineering, and the profession of ghostwriting. As befitting a writer of thrillers, his protagonists, who work in the shadow of figures that range from Cicero to Stalin, typically find themselves in a race against time. But time -- its sheer implacability, and the way it transcends even the most complacent or colossal human will -- is, thankfully, power's great adversary.

In The Fear Index, Harris locates these themes in a the contemporary world of finance. His protagonist this time is an American physicist, Alexander Hoffman, whose frustrated career ambitions on the Texas super collider project in Texas in the 1990s and with the European particle accelerator (CERN) the following decade, lead him to become a so-called "quant" who has developed an apparently infallible financial algorithm. At the start of this one-day account of his life, Hoffman, who now lives in Geneva with a British wife and as well a Brit business partner, is preparing a presentation to bring a few deep-pocketed investors to his firm. But his apparently serene existence gets thrown into turmoil when he finds an intruder in his high-tech home in the middle of the night, an event which sends him into a cascading series of crises.

That's because, much to Hoffman's own amazement, he has an unknown enemy with astounding powers to subvert even the most impregnable security. Unless, of course, that enemy is himself: Hoffman is forced to question his sanity, and as this story proceeds, you find yourself (along with his wife, that partner and other characters, among them one of those stolid police investigators who always seem to be on hand in these stories) questioning it even more than he does. Meanwhile, his computer program continues its uncanny, inexorable work, taking frighteningly aggressive positions on world markets as those markets become increasingly unstable.

To some extent, Harris hints at where this is all going on the basis of his chapter epigraphs alone, which begin with a passage from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and is followed by a series of quotes from the works of Charles Darwin. Harris speaks through Hoffman in a little set piece in which he explains how we once thought computers (in the form of robots) would take over menial work, whereas we lean on them to calculate (and execute) that which we are incapable of mastering intellectually ourselves. Interestingly, while we experience the story chiefly through Hoffman's point of view, Harris destabilizes our confidence in him -- we come to understand that he's got an Asperger-like personality in the best of times -- even as we find our suspicions falling on other main characters. We eventually come to understand what's actually happening to Hoffman in a big final production (Hollywood, anyone?) that nevertheless avoids tying all the loose ends together.

In short, The Fear Index is a thoroughly conventional thriller that's highly adaptive to an airport environment. But it's a literate, thought-provoking book. It doesn't quite rank as high as Fatherland (1992) or Pompeii (2005) in the Harris canon. But there are few better companions for time travel -- even when, as in this case, that travel takes place in millionths of a second.

A good review

In Life Itself, Roger Ebert surveys a career in the movies

The following review was posted recently the Books page of the History News Network site.  

At one point in this memoir, longtime film critic Roger Ebert describes taking an undergraduate class at University of Illinois on the fiction of Willa Cather and being arrested by Cather's prose, which he describes "as clear as running water." Yes, I said aloud: that captures exactly what I've always so liked about Ebert. There's an artlessness to his criticism that could only be honed by decades of newspaper work. I admired Pauline Kael for her inimitable voice -- not that she's lacked imitators -- and the way I found her taste unpredictable. (I'd often try and guess in advance whether she was going to like a movie before I read her review, and as often as not was wrong.) I'm less interested in trying to guess with Ebert than just to hear what he has to say in that sensible, fair voice of his. I think of his plain-spoken sensibility as quintessentially Midwestern by way of Chicago, land of Royko, Terkel and Eppie Lederer, a.k.a. Ann Landers, three of many Windy City scribes who make appearances on these pages. (There are some amusing Ann Landers stories here, including one about Ebert, a recovering alcoholic, trying to take her to an AA meeting and being rebuffed by the participants. Ebert also used her as a prop in trying to pick up the woman who became his wife.)

As regular readers of his work are aware, Ebert has been struggling with various forms of cancer for a decade now, and has undergone surgery that has left him unable to eat, drink, or speak. But, he explains, this involuntary silence seems to have triggered a flood of memory, leading him to start an autobiographical blog that resulted in this book. It does indeed read like an untrammeled river of prose; as an affectionate but frank Maureen Dowd complained in her review, "The effervescent Ebert doesn’t realize ... that for an autobiography, he doesn’t need to include the names of every childhood friend, parish priest, funeral attendee, and even his phone number when he was a boy."

There is, however, a user-friendliness in the structure of Life Itself that comes straight from the Ebert reviewing playbook; I came to think of it as The Roger Ebert Companion, skipping essay-length chapters that I didn't find particularly compelling and savoring others, like his chapters on John Wayne and Martin Scorsese, that were deeply satisfying. Not all of the good parts were about the movie business. I found his evocation of an ordinary Midwestern childhood vivid and moving, and was fascinated by his early newspaper days at the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert began there in 1967 and thus experienced the earthy working-class tinged culture of journalism before it got streamlined and professionalized in the closing decades of the last century.

Now Ebert himself is an emblem of a vanishing world. He was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize (in 1975) and has churned out reviews with astonishing consistency for forty years. At the same time, Ebert also symbolizes the transformation of journalistic culture. His longtime friendly crosstown rivalry with Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune led to a highly successful syndicated TV show under various names in the eighties and nineties before Siskel's death in 1999 (it continues to run in shifting permutations without him). Ebert's been around long enough to become a brand in his own right, and is now a cottage industry that includes book publishing and a robust online presence. He emphasizes that for all his setbacks of recent years he enjoys reasonably good health -- thanks in no small measure to his wife, Chaz -- and it's clear he intends to ply his trade for some time to come.

It's a good thing: we're not going to get anyone else like him. The days of the professional reviewer seem numbered in a fractured media culture where everybody's an expert and nobody can really expect to make a living as a critic. It seems increasingly exotic to imagine a time when Hollywood studios made it easy for journalists to go behind the camera and when stars would speak their minds without a publicist present. The old order had its corruptions (Kael, we now know, could be shameless in conferring or withholding favor). But Ebert's unselfconscious simplicity describing the old days engenders confidence in an essential decency that has remained intact through thick and thin. Call this one thumbs up.

Habit of authority

After a string of light roles, Streep became a prying nun -- and took her vision of feminism to a new level


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Most of Streep's movies in the last decade amount to liberal feminist fantasies, in that the women in question have remunerative, prestigious, and emotionally rewarding careers. This is also true of Julie & Julia, which projects such a vision back in time, depicting the happily married Julia Child’s successful quest to find a professional calling (though grieves at her inability to bear a child). In an interesting variation on this idea, Streep plays a wealthy woman with no obvious paid employment but who works as a patron of the arts and as a mentor to a troubled Chinese astronomy graduate student in the little-seen Dark Matter (2008), whose release was delayed by a year because its plot resembled the circumstances surrounding the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007. 

It’s in this context that Streep’s performance as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the authoritarian nun of Doubt (2008) is so important. John Patrick Shanley wrote and directed this adaptation of his 2004 play about a 1960s priest (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who may or may not be a pedophile, the principal of the parochial school (Streep) who’s convinced that he is, and the young nun (Amy Adams, who appeared with Streep in Julie & Julia) who’s unsure. Shanley’s exquisitely calibrated screenplay is constructed in such a way that it’s impossible to say with any certainty whether Sister Aloysius’s conduct in her pursuit of the priest, which is both intense and ethically ambiguous, is justified. For our purposes, what matters is that we’re dealing with a working-class woman—something we know solely on the basis of her thick Bronx accent—who holds an important job that’s not merely a career, but a vocation. She wields real power, and does so through a series of techniques that include intimidation, passive-aggressive behavior, and a supple command of bureaucratic machinery.  Sister Aloysius is thus a walking illustration of the maxim that it’s women, not men, who actually run the Roman Catholic Church.

Run, but not rule. As she herself states plainly early in the movie, the man she suspects is her superior. She regards his boss as incompetent at best, and suspects his former one is covering for him. To make matters worse, the mother (Viola Davis) of the African American child (Joseph Foster) that Sister Alyosius fears is a victim of the priest believes that even if the allegations are true, this form of abuse is a balm given the physical abuse he endures at the hands of his father, at a school that represents real opportunity for the boy’s future. Sister Aloysius then resorts to great cunning by fabricating a conversation with another nun, and blackmailing the priest into resigning. (Naturally, he’s kicked upstairs.)

It is possible to finish watching Doubt and conclude that in overstepping her occupational boundaries, ignoring the wishes of a mother who believes she is acting in her child’s best interests, and committing what she herself considers a mortal sin, Sister Aloysius is guilty of creating a deeply tragic outcome. This is all the more so given that for most of the movie, the evidence for her suspicions against the priest amount to little more than an observation that he fails to trim his fingernails. But it’s not credibly possible to finish watching Doubt and fail to see that Sister Aloysius is a deeply committed woman who is willing to make grave personal sacrifices in order to do what she believes is right. Nor, given the recent history of the Church, is it possible not to see real prescience on the part of a woman who tried to prevent a great moral evil that was perpetrated by generations of men who failed to exercise their unchecked authority in a responsible matter. Meryl Streep’s feminist vision is bigger than that of wealthy white women who want a well-appointed home, regular orgasms, and glamorous careers. It’s one in which all women, and thus all men, have a stake.

Next: the final installment in the Streep series -- and the "Sensing the Past" series

'Hours' of 'Adaptation'

In 2002, Streep embarked on a stretch of remarkable creativity and productivity with a pair of innovative projects


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Though Dancing and Lughnasa and Music of the Heart represent important statements in the evolution of Streep’s cinematic feminism, both were small independent films with miniscule grosses compared with big-budget behemoths of the time like Armageddon (1998) or the The Matrix (1999). Moreover, Music of the Heart was followed by the longest interregnum in Streep’s career: it would be three full years before she appeared in a starring role. (She did have a voice cameo as a blue fairy in Steven Spielberg’s completion of the posthumous Stanley Kubric project A.I. [Articifical Intelligence] in 2001.) Streep’s youngest children were nine and thirteen in 2000, which may have played a role in this slowed output. They probably also played a role in her subsequent decisions to appear in small roles as the comically hapless Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and to provide the imperious voice of the Ant Queen in The Ant Bully (2006). She also had a very funny cameo as herself—as a not very good actress—in the sublimely silly Farrelly Brothers film Stuck on You (2003).

But what might be termed the Meryl Streep renaissance—one defined not in talent but in terms of her artistic profile—began at the end of 2002 with her appearance in two other movies, both involving the portrayal of literary figures. The first of these, Adaptation, is a singular work in Streep’s corpus. Adaptation represented a collaboration between two of the most inventive figures in modern Hollywood: screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. The two teamed up in 1999 for the weirdly brilliant Being John Malkovich, in which a series of characters manage to enter a portal in the famed actor’s brain and experience reality through his eyes. Adaptation, which is about Kauffman’s difficulty in trying to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s 1998 non-fiction book The Orchid Thief for the big screen, actually begins with scenes on the set of Being John Malkovich. It also involves Kaufman’s relationship with his socially tone deaf twin brother Donald, who decides he, too, wants to write a screenplay—and does so successfully even as Charlie struggles. Ultimately the two brothers would get the writing credit for Adaptation, and be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But Donald Kaufman is not actually a real person; for the first time in history, a wholly fictional, as opposed to pseudonymous, character was nominated for an Oscar (the award went to Richard Harwood for The Pianist).

Adaptation has a wonderful star-studded cast that includes Nicolas Cage as both Kaufmans; Chris Cooper, who won a supporting actor Academy Award for his portrayal of the actual Orchid Thief; and Brian Cox as the real life Robert McKee, the famed screenwriting teacher to whom both Kaufman brothers turn for help with their respective projects. Streep plays Orlean—or some facsimile of the actual person. Actually, it becomes increasingly clear as the story proceeds that Charlie Kaufman’s obsession with Orlean makes the portrayal of her that we see on screen increasingly suspect. For much of the movie, she’s a consummate professional, an intimidatingly competent member of the New York literati. Which is entirely credible. But Kaufman starts playing with her, incongruously scripting a sexual relationship with the repellent, if amusing, thief. (There’s a hilarious sequence of her getting high crushed orchid dust.) Indeed, her murderous behavior toward the end of the movie seems to come out of nowhere, its jarring character very much the point of the film’s postmodern sensibility. The meta-textual zaniness of Adaptation, the desire on a viewer’s part to see just how this crazy story will play out, gives it a freshness that’s extremely rare in mainstream Hollywood moviemaking (another Sony Pictures production, it was distributed by Columbia). And it’s especially refreshing to see Streep, a true blue-chip figure in the industry, lend her talents to such a project and take them to an entirely new level.

The same month Adaptation was appeared, Streep’s other film of 2002, The Hours, was also released. Though less so than Adaptation, The Hours, which David Hare adapted from Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel, has a literary/experimental air, which takes the form of a tripartite structure of single days in the lives of three women whose stories only converge at the end of the movie. One narrative involves Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, wearing a now legendary prosthetic nose), struggling with depression as she begins to conceive her 1925 masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway (originally titled “The Hours”). Another involves Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a 1950s housewife and mother of a young son in Los Angeles who is fighting off suicidal impulses, in part by reading Mrs. Dalloway. The third involves Clarissa Vaughn (Streep) a bisexual New York book editor in 2001 nursing a beloved old gay poet/novelist friend (Ed Harris) through the ravages of AIDS on the day in which she plans to throw him a party—plot elements that allude to Mrs. Dalloway, which is his nickname for Clarissa. He’s written a famous novel that features a thinly fictionalized version of his friend.

I regard Clarissa Vaughn as Streep’s most fully realized creation. She’s a devoted friend of Harris’s character; lover of a woman played Allison Janney; mother of a college-age daughter played by Claire Danes; and a literary professional who midwives writing into publication. This last role is more hinted at by devices like manuscripts on her desk than actually depicted. But love and work, art and life, are so thoroughly fused that it seems misguided to insist on isolating the strands.

Which is not to say that Clarissa is a flawless person. She tends to live in the past, haunted by a romance with the poet that foundered on the vine of their youth. This is more than a strictly interior foible; it leads her to subtly neglect her relationship with Janney’s character, with whom Streep does some marvelously nuanced acting. Their alienation is subtle but palpable, conveyed most vividly in a scene in which they talk to each other from different rooms. Streep’s eyes betray impatience, and her voice is ever-so clipped in responding to Janney, who manages to inflect a slight air of aggrievement that seems justified, at least on the basis of the errands she’s running on behalf of a man she rightly senses is a rival with whom she cannot compete. Clarissa’s daughter is also impatient her mother’s lingering obsession with her former flame.  

Streep’s Clarissa is the only major character of The Hours who can be said to achieve anything resembling a happy ending, though it takes a suicide, one of two in the movie, for her to finally come to her senses, signaled by the great tenderness with which she gazes into Janney’s eyes at the end of the story. In large measure, that happiness can be viewed as a matter of historical circumstance: as a woman of the 21^st century, Clarissa has the capacity to achieve an integrated life of the kind that Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown can only dream of (albeit as very privileged people in terms of their class status). But having such a capacity is not synonymous with achieving it, and for Clarissa it’s a near thing. Michael Cunningham and David Hare created this character; Stephen Daldry, most of whose prior work was for the stage, directed it. But Meryl Streep is the figure who brings this Clarissa most fully to life, with a voice and gestures that are experienced as a gift.

---

Next: Streep as villain.