Nonfiction Reviews

The Garden Against Time

In Search of a Common Paradise

Olivia Laing
W. W. Norton & Company ($27.99)

by Sarah Moorhouse

Writing and gardening have often been linked. We might think of the word “anthology,” which literally means—like the Latin word florilegium—a gathering of flowers. Both terms refer to collections of excerpts or extracts, an activity that was popular among readers during the Renaissance. Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, brings this historic practice to mind; a memoir-cum-history of gardening, it presents curating a space for plants as a creative process, one just as involved with the imagination as writing can be.

Examining numerous thinkers enthralled by gardens and gardening and forming a collection of ideas like an array of plants, Laing’s book is, as she declares, “a garden opened and spilling over.” Gardens, for her, are a site of radical possibility; her Instagram bio labels her as a “writer/gardener,” and this dual identity, which saw Laing drop out of an English Literature degree in her early twenties to train as an herbalist, is tied up with her environmentalism and fierce social conscience. As a child, Laing attended a convent school with a garden that provided her with a “sense of absolute, unquestioning belonging,” and through each subsequent garden she has tended, she has been attempting to recover and cultivate this feeling.

The Garden Against Time begins in 2020 when, after “a surge of good fortune,” Laing purchased and began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk. By laying down roots in its soil and watching green shoots spring up, she found hope amidst constant anxiety about the coronavirus pandemic and wider environmental disaster. While she claims that she “never saw the garden as a place to escape reality,” Laing rejoiced in how “the outside world receded” as she replaced doom-scrolling on her phone with weeding and sowing.

In some ways the book is an extended meditation on how this has always been the paradox of gardens; Laing argues that green spaces reflect the times they were created in, from the Garden of Eden and the grounds owned by eighteenth-century slave traders to the imaginative oasis that artist Derek Jarman cultivated while dying from AIDS in the late 1980s. That she attends to these sometimes troubled histories should be no surprise, for each of her previous books has expressed a thrumming dissatisfaction with the political status quo: for example, Laing’s 2018 novel Crudo is set against the backdrop of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election campaign, while her 2020 essay collection Funny Weather considers ways art can address social injustice. In this new volume, Laing describes how gardening became a “solace” and even a “compulsion” at a time when it felt that “everything I wanted to say sounded exactly like the sort of thing a person like me would say, a stupid liberal.”

Laing does occasionally veer close to sounding trite when waxing lyrical about gardens. When she declares that “the garden I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world,” the reader might struggle to take this at face value; Laing has experimented with rejecting private property (she spent part of her twenties living in a protest camp), but it’s hard to read the same degree of radical nonconformism into her embrace of gardening—one of the most conventional middle-class pursuits. Moreover, her garden is no cabbage-patch; in 2022, the British magazine House and Garden ran a feature on “Olivia Laing’s dream Suffolk home,” showcasing Laing’s resplendent property. When read alongside that article, Laing’s gushing descriptions of blooming hyacinths and hooded lilacs can’t help but seem a bit bourgeois.

Mostly, however, The Garden Against Time does not shy away from gardening’s association with class. Most notable is the tale of Iris Origo, an elegant landowner who used the gardens of her Tuscan villa to shelter refugees during World War II. Origo’s estate was transformed from a place that represented exclusivity to a site of protection and communal belonging, though eventually, both house and garden were requisitioned by the Germans. Upon the Allied victory, Origo’s garden was left “full of shell holes and trenches” and “covered in a foul litter of broken objects,” yet Origo noted after returning home that “there is still jasmine on the wall”; its classism shattered, the garden had become a site of both destruction and hope.

Laing’s own garden also offers her the context to explore a running drama between opposing forces. Engaged in a continuous battle against weeds, Laing is initially attached to the idea that her garden paradise cannot contain any destructive elements, declaring, “Eden was my intention.” Midway through the project, however, she changes tack: If she is to upend the paradigm whereby gardens denote exclusivity and escapism, then she cannot shut out pernicious elements, be they weeds, world events, or—increasingly—the impact of climate change, which manifests as droughts and extreme heat.

This brings Laing to the most important idea in the book: that in attempting to make things better, “we need to start from our contaminated present and not some future position of undiluted purity.” We can’t wait for fossil fuels to become obsolete before we address climate change in earnest, nor can we give up on being kind to one another during times of entrenched political divisions. Laing arrives at a criticism of Eden, blaming this archetypal garden for propagating an ideal of purity that is incompatible with sustainability, and explaining that “the fantasy of perpetual abundance” is Eden’s “more sinister legacy”:

So many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay, insisting on summer all the time. . . . To accept the presence of death in the garden is . . . to refuse an illusion of perpetual productivity . . . an illusion purchased at a heavy, soon unpayable cost.

Laing arrived at this realization during a drought in the summer of 2022, when it became clear that to water her plants, she would need to “disregard the consequences, the rivers that were drying up by the day.” Her garden, she saw, exists within the “contaminated present” and like everything we use, its materials have a hidden cost. By accepting “death in the garden,” however, Laing begins to formulate an alternative approach founded on a cyclical notion of time, whereby death is not the end point but is instead involved in various processes of renewal. Intriguingly, this echoes the case she makes for art as a mode of “resistance and repair” in Funny Weather.

But what might a garden founded on “resistance and repair” look like? Laing offers a clue in her descriptions of London after World War II, when wildflowers and plants sprang up from the city’s rubble. A public garden emerged that was beautiful for its incongruity as well as for the sense of shared possibility it represented, with the ruined city “mantled in gold and imperial purple, the ripe smell of buddleia mixing with the sourness of brick dust and mould on the air.” Laing sees this as a metaphor for other types of flourishing in post-war Britain, suggesting that through “housing, education, the welfare state . . . there was a brief vision of the nation as a collective garden, in which everyone could partake of the fruit.”

This is lofty stuff, but Laing’s enthusiasm for her subject is infectious, and she is convincing in her assertion that exposure to nature’s beauty is a right, not an indulgence. “Each garden run along these wilder, richer lines,” she urges us to recognize, “participates in a great network . . . sustaining and supporting life.” Laing gives these words weight by showing what happens when our contact with nature is taken away, suggesting that the Romantic poet John Clare’s descent into madness was exacerbated by his removal from the green spaces he so loved. During his confinement at Northampton General Lunatic Asylum between 1841 and his death in 1864, Clare would write on scraps of paper such messages as “where flowers are, God is, and I am free.” Laing, too, believes that freedom can be found in a garden.

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Arguing for a Better World

How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice

Arianne Shahvisi
Penguin Books ($20)

by Josh Steinbauer

Arianne Shahvisi is a Kurdish British professor of philosophy, and many of the essays in her new book Arguing For a Better World began as reflections on questions from her students. With extraordinary curiosity and conversational ease, she lays out her arguments in response. Shahvisi is not aiming to be objective or apolitical here: “I have tried to make my reasoning clear enough that those who disagree with me will at least see where we part ways.”

Early chapters like “Can You Be Racist to a White Person?” arrive where any progressive writer would, but with a noteworthy eloquence: “History breaks the symmetry between two otherwise comparable acts.” From there, the ethical inspections grow in complexity. In “Is It Sexist to Say ‘Men Are Trash?’” Shahvisi’s response is “When someone says ‘men are trash’ they connect sexual harassment to masculinity. That’s not an act of hate, it’s an act of illumination.” She takes the torch to the very concept of masculinity when she writes, “Toxic masculinity also implies the existence of a ‘healthy’ masculinity, when such a thing seems unlikely or even contradictory. Gender is itself a system of division and hierarchy. Finding ways to make it more palatable misses the deeper moral issues.”

Shahvisi layers a lot of historical research into her arguments. In a chapter about cancel culture, she makes a pit stop in the ancient city state of Athens, where every winter, residents could write the name of someone who’d caused offense onto a broken piece of clay pot. These shards were tallied, and the most disliked person was exiled for ten years. History shows us that even early forms of canceling were not about censorship, but rather “a powerful tool for discouraging assholery.”

The intersection of the personal and political is Shahvisi’s wheelhouse, and she engages it from an array of unlikely angles. In a chapter about individual responsibility within unjust systems, Shahvisi starts with a passage from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath about banks being monsters that men made but can’t control. She funnels that into a story about backyard bickering with her father over disposable plastic, and then pivots to U.K. medical devices produced using child labor in Pakistan. It’s all over the map (as issues related to globalization tend to be), but, like any skillful storyteller, Shahvisi is setting the stage.

When it comes to discussing environmental responsibility, the professor serves up Kant’s Categorical Imperative on the world’s dinner plate. Currently, about half the world’s land mass is used for agriculture. If the rest of the world ate like the average person from India, agriculture would only take up 22%. For the average U.K. resident’s diet, we’d need 95%. For the rest of the world to eat like an American—273 pounds of meat per year—we would need 137% of the world’s land mass for agriculture. This impossibility is the teachable moment of Kant’s universalizability principle: Americans cannot morally consume this much more than their share of the world’s resources.

Shahvisi is critical of capitalist solutions to global woes. When the market sees our desire for eco-friendly options, it cashes in with a retail markup; this sells a clear conscience to those who can afford it while pricing out the masses, functionally sidelining any meaningful solution. She eviscerates the hemming and hawing we do now over our personal carbon footprints, tracing it back to the oil company BP paying the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather to market the idea that individuals (rather than fossil fuel companies) should determine their own climate impact. When fossil fuel websites promote consumer carbon calculators, our society is simply gamifying a Choose Your Own Carbon Dystopia. It’s an update to the playbook that the plastics industry used decades ago to promote flimsy recycling programs as a way of shifting the cost and blame for environmental consequences onto consumers.

The author is pragmatic about how far individual responsibility will take us. Avoiding plastic grocery bags and straws is not going to save the planet: “A single drinking straw is, in fact, a literal drop in the ocean compared with, say, the 705,000 tons of plastic dumped in the sea every year by the fishing industry.” Global dilemmas require international government coordination. Shahvisi holds room for individual impact, but Arguing for a Better World illustrates that our choices are constrained by economic forces and our desires are manipulated by advertising, all without any sense of consequence.

Shahvisi does suggest some novel solutions. For example, she asks, what would it look like if the same level of scrutiny we apply to cigarettes was applied to other products? In the same way that health warnings are a mandatory portion of tobacco packaging, what if we learned, for example, that this pair of shoes or that pair of jeans was produced in a sweatshop where child workers are running machines on 11-hour shifts for less than their country’s minimum wage? It’s hard to say how much justice individual consumers might achieve this way, but the success of tobacco regulation is hard to ignore.

Essays about how to be in our present-day unjust world abound, but the guidance Shahvisi offers in Arguing for a Better World is a refreshing amalgam of progressive politics and professorial pondering. She reminds us that mistakes are unavoidable, and that our moral and political arguments require as much compassion as reason. As she states, “we are all fallible and unfinished, and need to be offered conditions under which learning is possible.”

Art courtesy of the reviewer, one in a series of renditions of writers alongside their words featured on his Instagram (@joshsteinbauer).

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Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Anna Funder
Knopf ($32)

by C.T. Wolf

George Orwell’s contributions are many—though he did not achieve them alone. As with many men, it was the women in his life that made his success possible. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who was married to the writer from 1936 until her death at age thirty-nine in 1945, did just that, even as it shrank her own horizons. What did it mean to be Orwell’s wife? Anna Funder’s new book unpicks this inquiry with precision, dexterity, and charm. Wifedom is not a biography, but instead an incisive investigation into “wifedom” and what it meant for Eileen, a poet with chronic illness, to inhabit the role of “Mrs. Orwell” until her dying day.

Eileen had what in her time was called uterine tumors, which caused vaginal bleeding, anemia, and crushing fatigue. Despite this, she was often the sole breadwinner for the couple, working full time outside the home so George could focus on his writing. She also was his typist, editor, and collaborator, using her poetic sensibility and humanist insight to help push George’s writing to new heights. Friends were in awe of his 1945 novel Animal Farm, both for its gemlike quality and in the departure it represented from his prior work. That was Eileen’s deft influence, as Funder lays out—one among many that have been carefully erased from the record of George’s life.

How were Eileen’s contributions made invisible, and by whom? Funder creates a hybrid narrative that craftily builds a multifactorial story. She lays out archival material, critically appraising letters and firsthand accounts of the couple by their friends and acquaintances, documents written both contemporaneously and later. At the core of the archival record are six letters written by Eileen to her best friend, Norah Symes Myles, discovered in 2005.

Funder looks closely at the ways language is used to erase women from historical records; she inspects Orwell’s own writing as well as the work of his biographers and overlays events that happened in the couple’s life with how those events are written about. For example, both Eileen and George went to Spain in the late 1930s to fight in the resistance, yet Eileen is entirely omitted from George’s account. Similarly, in Orwell’s first book Down and Out in Paris in London, his chronicle of living and working among the poor, he left out the wealthy aunt in Paris who offered him respite from his fieldwork. And pointing to the pernicious use of passive voice, Funder argues that many of Orwell’s biographers surgically erased Eileen as an active subject in George’s life.

In Wifedom, Funder brings some of the history to vivid life via speculation. She sees this not as writing fiction, however, but rather like “directing an actor on set.” Putting archival events mise en scène—the clinks of tea cups, the pangs of uterine cramps—allows the reader to become more intimately immersed in the world occupied by George and Eileen and to bear witness to the peculiar dynamic of their relationship. And in yet another writerly layer, Funder tells her own story of working through the project and what it has meant to her as a writer, wife, mother, and Orwell fan herself, wrestling with the complexities of gender, agency, and love as they relate to the craft:

As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me, as I say – out of envy. I would like a wife like Eileen, I think, and then I realise that to think like a writer is to think like a man. It is to look from his perspective at what he needed and see how he got it. But as a woman and a wife her life terrifies me. I see in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining her self, and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy, which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time are stolen. What did she give and what did it cost her? I find this question so chilling, coming out of twenty years of intense life-and-home-making, that I prefer to think it does not apply to me.

Grappling with this personal tension, Funder’s reflexivity helps breathe contemporary life and immediacy into the book.

One aspect missing from Wifedom is attention to Eileen’s experience of disability. In one of her last letters to George, Eileen debated the cost of her upcoming surgery, confessing to him: “what worries me . . . is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.” Perhaps she was just wanting comfort and reassurance from George (who was off in Europe leaving Eileen to handle, among other things, the adoption of their son). Or perhaps her feelings of guilt and shame for needing an expensive operation were a manifestation of internalized sexism and ableism. Regardless, Eileen’s health concerns were treated as hers and hers alone, while George’s tuberculosis was a family affair: Eileen enlisted her brother (a renowned thoracic surgeon) to ensure George received first-rate care, and the couple carted off to Morocco so George’s lungs could enjoy a dry winter; later, Eileen endured grueling, long train trips (after working all day) to visit him in a sanitarium, while she too was suffering from a disabling medical condition. Looking at Eileen’s life with an intersectional lens—how both sexism and disability worked to close in the horizons of her life —could have strengthened this already stellar book.

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The Private Life of Lord Byron

Antony Peattie
Unbound ($45)

by Allan Vorda

Previous biographies of Lord Byron, including Leslie Marchand’s three-volume set in 1957, have seemingly covered and dissected every inch of the English poet’s fascinating and mythical life, which ended when he was only thirty-six. In the introduction to The Private Life of Lord Byron, Antony Peattie tells us to expect something completely different.

Recent studies of Byron have focused on his bisexuality, but Peattie investigates “two other areas (which may be related to one another): his intermittent eating disorder and his obsession with fatherhood.” Peattie’s unique approach draws on less-studied biographical facts—for example, that Byron suffered from bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa: “Considering his diet, what he ate, what he didn’t eat, when and why, yields insights into Byron’s love life and his intentions in his masterpiece, Don Juan.” Peattie tracks some of the reasons why Byron dieted, including battles with his obese mother, a misshapen foot that required him to walk with a metal plate in his boot, a prescription from a physician for a daily diet of six biscuits and soda water, and his relentless romantic and sexual pursuits. 

Byron’s issues with his father were complicated. He rarely saw Captain “Mad Jack” Byron, who was often at sea; when on land, he was a womanizer and gambler. He left his wife and three-year-old Byron for France to escape creditors before dying at thirty-five. From a young age, Byron began to follow in his father’s footsteps; the same habits landed him similarly in debt. He felt he inherited his father’s traits and that he was “predestined to evil.” Part of this thinking was drilled into him by his mother, whose Scottish Calvinism endorsed “predestination, man’s innate depravity and his hereditary taint.” Byron also learned that his particular heritage included “a long tradition of dissipation, incest, rampant promiscuity, decadence, murder and unbridled debauchery.”

Some of those family prophecies came true; Peattie traces Byron’s wide range of trysts that gained him a kind of infamy. Byron’s first sexual experience was being seduced at age nine by his nanny; at Trinity College a decade later, he became involved with a younger student, John Edleston: “I certainly love him more than any human being, & neither time or Distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable Disposition.”

Edleston died at age twenty-two from consumption, and Byron’s sexual conquests quickly escalated. After graduating from Trinity, he did a Grand Tour of Europe, during which he had numerous affairs. Upon his return, he published two cantos of poetry, titled Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which sold out in three days. He was only twenty-four.

Once Byron achieved fame, his affairs were countless. There was Lady Caroline, who stated, famously, that Byron was “mad—bad—and dangerous to know”; his niece Mary Chaworth; his half-sister Augusta Leigh; Annabella Milbanke, whom he married and who bore his only legitimate child; Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, who bore his daughter; the Italian women Marianna Segati and Margarita Cogni; the nineteen-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli; the Maids of Athens (three sisters who were under the age of fifteen); fourteen-year-old Nicolo Giraud, whom Byron hired as an Italian tutor; and many others—and those are just the ones whose names we know. By the time Byron turned thirty, Peattie writes, the poet was “determined to make the most of his time for sex and for writing—the two activities were now closely linked in his mind.” Don Giovanni claimed 640 conquests; Byron is estimated to have had around one thousand sexual encounters.

Byron composed his epic poem Don Juan in Italy from 1819-24. Consisting of seventeen cantos and 1,950 stanzas, the mock epic poem shows Don Juan not as a womanizer, but as a sexual victim. When it was published, it was considered the greatest poem since Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In the final chapter in his life, Byron, wanting to achieve some glory like his hero Napoleon, decided to try to help the Greeks wrest their freedom from the Ottoman Empire. He went to Missolonghi to train some Christian Albanian troops and was ready to go into battle when he became ill. His doctor performed a blood-letting that he claimed “cured Byron’s ‘attack of epilepsy’ by drawing off ‘four pounds of blood’, half the total in his body.” During this time, Byron adhered to his strict diet, which compounded his illness, then decided to train his five hundred soldiers on horseback when he “was ‘caught in a shower.’” Byron came down with a cold and the doctor performed a second blood-letting, but after becoming delirious, Byron died on April 19, 1824 at age thirty-six.

Two congratulations must be given for The Private Life of Lord Byron. The first is to author Antony Peattie for offering such a unique insight into Byron’s life regarding his eating disorder—not to mention delving into numerous other aspects of the poet’s life from Satanism to Shelley, and discussing numerous poems and plays with aplomb. The other goes to British publisher Unbound for making the book such an extravagant and elegant production: Its 586 pages include amazing photographs, paintings, and sketches rendered in extraordinary color, and there is even an old-style ribbon bookmark sewn in. Everything is exquisite about this book.

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The Never End

The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm

John Reed
Palgrave Macmillan ($119.99)

by Zoe Berkovitz

“Orwell has come to an end,” John Reed tells us. He’s earned a say in the matter: His newest book, The Never End, collects twenty years of essays, long form pieces, and interviews that parse the complicated history and legacy of George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm.

Orwell’s classic allegory has been a syllabus staple for decades, but its popularity in schools, Reed points out, “is not by chance.” Having made a literary case that “revolution is doomed to fail,” Animal Farm became the “greatest success” of the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office (eventually to become MI6) and soon became a player in the CIA’s “cultural ‘Cold War’” with Russia, “the terminology of which was Orwell’s own coinage.”

Reed maintains that Orwell would have pushed back against readings of Animal Farm as broadly anti-revolutionary; in his refutations to similar interpretations of 1984, Orwell implied that his message was more anti-Stalinist than anything else. “Regardless,” Reed writes, “Orwell died, and the CIA and British Secret Service proceeded unimpeded, and the bargain sealed, alas, was a Faustian one … The Animal Farm of the CIA doesn’t apply to just the Russian revolution; it’s a parable, a ‘timeless’ parable, a ‘universal’ parable, about the dangers of systemic change.” Translations, global distribution, and film and television adaptations, funded by the IRD and CIA (and its Congress for Cultural Freedom, which deeply influenced “the course of US art and literature in the twentieth century”), spread the story of Napoleon, Old Major, and Snowball across much of the world. Talk about culture war: Reed calls Animal Farm “an educational missile aimed at any healthy impulse toward reform.”

Orwell died in 1950, just two years after Animal Farm was published, and his death at forty-six left a mine of questions for critics like Reed to consider—in part because propagandistic uses of Orwell’s writing began while Orwell was still alive and to some extent with his cooperation. Orwell produced enemies lists with the names of 135 “fellow travelers” for the IRD; “replete with vindictive inclusions,” the lists were part of ”a long and active exchange” with Orwell’s friend Celia Kirwan, an employee at the IRD (and a woman to whom he once proposed). Some of these names are still classified today—“one can surmise sensitive or embarrassing contents.”

As far as we know, the lists didn’t have serious consequences, but to Reed, that isn’t enough to let Orwell off the hook: “you took aim, but you might have missed.” In his diaries, Orwell wrote, “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters, so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.” Reed’s response: “A discerning understanding of propaganda begets accountability.” He has retorts for each kind of Orwell protector, including those who argue times were different: “Isn’t surviving historical context the challenge of literature? None of the 11-year-olds reading Animal Farm are reading it in historical context.”

Certain sections of The Never End focus on Reed’s research about the origins of Animal Farm. Orwell lifted the premise (and quite a bit more) from a Russian short story called “Animal Riot,” written around 1880 by the Russian historian Nikolai Kostomarov—however, his story of farm rebellion, as opposed to Orwell’s, ended in successful overthrow of the humans. Same beats, same referent, different agenda. Reed’s 2015 essay for Harper’s Magazine about the Animal Farm-“Animal Riot” connections comprises this book’s third chapter; in it, Reed makes an impeccable case. Reed also had “Animal Riot” translated into English, and that text is included in this volume. Yet for all the research that went into the Harper’s piece, the response defied his predictions: “It was news, but not heartbreak.” (An interesting aside to the Kostomarov plagiarism thread is that in his original preface to Animal Farm, Orwell does explain how he got the idea for the book—but the story he tells there is “a rehash of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s instigating event in Crime and Punishment.”)

The “Animal Riot” analysis is where Reed’s own fiction enters the conversation. During the weeks following 9/11, Reed wrote his novel Snowball’s Chance (Roof Books, 2002), an unofficial sequel in which Snowball, Animal Farm’s Trotskyish pig, returns to the farm and introduces capitalism to the animals in post-Soviet fashion; the fallout satirically mirrors the U.S. War on Terror. Reed’s novel came under legal threat from Orwell’s estate for copyright infringement, but U.S. parody law protected it. (It was also criticized publicly by Christopher Hitchens, who called Reed a ”Bin Ladenist.”) Revisiting Snowball’s Chance allows Reed to include a few critical essays about contemporary culture and politics that offer a break from Orwell studies without deviating too much off topic.

As The Never End covers twenty years of work, we get a variety of tones. In a 2011 essay originally published in The Rumpus, the invective hits a peak:          

Popular entertainment is a helpless, writhing, mega-maggot of selfish desire … Culture-at-large presumes that writing is torture, art is suffering, and artists are monstrous … in the service of denigrating creative living and creative thinking, which is the single alternative to a life of stultifying obedience.

By the time of the writing of The Never End, at least as regards Orwell, Reed’s mood is a little different. The Cold War is long over, and with it, the “paradigm” that helped Animal Farm proliferate. Reed points out that the nature of our warfare, both material and cultural, has changed, as has the nature of national borders; when Orwell’s fiction is applied to U.S.-China tensions, for example, “the corollaries are curiously hollow.” Reed argues that our newly assigned foe is not a Cold War-esque antagonist but a protracted symbol of “the America of the erstwhile confrontation … that is as absent as its imagined nemesis.”

Of course, Orwell’s work is a trove of such imperfect comparisons, and there is plenty more to be discovered that can shake up the picture, although “the tasks are infinite, and decrease in impact and importance into infinite pointlessness.” And if someone is to continue the project? Reed knows better than to be expectant: “People no longer doubt, and quite possibly don’t care, that George was the author of such toxic hypocrisy. Does that say as much about ourselves as it does about Orwell? It’s so easy to sympathize: he sold his soul.” At this point, Orwell’s reputation is unlikely to change, because the reasons he is admired sustain themselves:

Why are we still fond of Orwell? Maybe it’s that he was such a genuinely sincere propagandist. Maybe, where we once loved him despite the compact he made with the devil, we are now denizens of so broken an epoch that we love him because of it.

Conducted out of love or not, further research into Orwell the man will probably only go so far toward altering attitudes toward Orwell the symbol. For those interested in both, though, The Never End is essential, even as it asserts its own expiration. Reed writes in the final pages: “He is everywhere and nowhere to the degree that there is no Orwell—only a cascading attrition of citations, half-lies, and history receded, gone on the horizon.” A dim prognosis, but, in the spirit of George, a truthful one.

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Polymath

The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex

Eric Laursen
AK Press ($34)

by Richard Kostelanetz

As an independent scholar, Eric Laursen spent many years working on Polymath, a thick biography of the protean Alex Comfort (1920–2000), who became famous for his 1972 smash hit The Joy of Sex, an illustrated manual that sold millions of copies worldwide. But before this unexpected bout with celebrity, Comfort was a widely published poet, a novelist, a certified physician, a contributor to anarchist publications in both England and America, a research biologist, a pioneering influence on gerontology (the study of aging), a literary critic, a prolific book reviewer, and a popular BBC broadcaster, even though he spoke much faster than the typical on-air personality. (Bits of his fast-speaking for the Beeb can be heard on YouTube.)

Comfort was also a pacifist whom George Orwell famously dismissed as a Nazi dupe during World War II; their disagreement on the necessity of war was the subject of a 2018 book by Laursen, The Duty to Stand Aside. Courageously inventive as an activist, however, Comfort developed a precursor to pirate radio during the Suez Crisis of 1956. As Laursen tells it, “Working almost entirely in secret, with no collaborators, he broadcast a nightly radio message calling on listeners to protest the invasion and demand that Britain unilaterally scarp its nuclear arsenal.”

Essentially, Comfort was a respected public intellectual, moderately influential in a variety of fields, until he and a sympathetic publisher produced The Joy of Sex—“produced” because so slight was his input that the cover of the initial 1972 edition has it “edited by” him with his degrees of “M.B. and Ph. D.,” as though it were a medical book. Only later did Comfort claim authorial credit, which was given, though the reader can be grateful that the subtitle “A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking” replaced the one in Comfort’s original draft: “Cordon Bleu Lovemaking.”

Joy has three themes, two classic and the other fashionable. The first, reflecting Comfort’s libertarian anarchism, holds that no one has more authority than anyone else to tell you how to do sexual relations. The second, denying religious and other proscriptions, expands this legendary sentence: “Chastity is no more of a virtue than malnutrition.” The third, reflecting its era, opines that sex should be fun, even if “love” doesn’t accompany it. No previous book on the subject so successfully disseminated these themes.

To support his title of Polymath, Laursen intelligently surveys Comfort’s literary and scientific work that appeared in a few dozen books. As a critic, Laursen regards I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (Crown, 1979) as Comfort’s very best book. (Out of print, it can be hard to find in used bookstores and libraries, though scans of the complete text can be found on the internet.) Laursen also takes seriously Comfort’s poetry, though it had more presence in 1940s England than anywhere else or since.

For students of publishing, Polymath is useful for chronicling the calculation and career of a bestseller. Conversely, it documents the obstacles that Comfort encountered in publishing his other books, which, before and even after the success of Joy, appeared primarily from small literary presses, mostly now forgotten, and from specialized scientific outlets.

Comfort moved to Southern California in the wake of Joy, becoming a nouveau American millionaire celebrity. Whereas English media sought his advice on several subjects, here he was asked only about sex, to his annoyance. In Gay Talese’s 1981 book on sexuality in America, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Comfort is memorably portrayed as an overage visitor to swingers’ clubs; other commentators have described his schemes to minimize his personal income taxes. Uncomfortable in the U.S., Comfort moved with his second wife back to England, where he suffered the first of several debilitating strokes at seventy-one and died just after his eightieth birthday (it remains unfortunate that he didn’t get to test his gerontology ideas against his own eighties and nineties). Though he influenced many people in many ways, he did not have protégés; his sole heir and executor was his only son, the journalist Nicholas Comfort. But undoubtedly Alex Comfort led a unique and protean life that Laursen tells well in this nearly 800-page book—it is doubtful that anyone else will ever tell it better.

What some may find odd about Polymath is the absence of any acknowledgment of Comfort’s American analogue, the writer Paul Goodman (1911–1972), who resembled Comfort in many ways. Both were anarchists for life; both were published by Dwight Macdonald in his magazine Politics in the 1940s. Whereas Comfort worked in medicine, Goodman was an unlicensed psychotherapist who co-authored the substantial 1951 text Gestalt Therapy. Just as both published poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction, so both had many publishers, because their work was essentially noncommercial and their interests nonpredictable. Until Goodman published his popular Growing Up Absurd (Random House, 1960), likewise around the age of fifty, his books were little known, but after Absurd went into a second printing, Random House released books of Goodman’s poems, lectures, and much else (until he was dumped). They probably never met as Goodman was too indigent to travel to Europe, while Comfort didn’t often come to the U.S. until the mid-1970s. One radical move for a future writer would be a double consideration of Comfort and Goodman, literally parallel lives; the experience of one libertarian life would surely illuminate the other, even though they never collaborated.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Move Like Water

My Story of the Sea

Hannah Stowe
Tin House ($24.95)

by Elissa Greenwald

In her debut memoir Move Like Water, Hannah Stowe immerses readers in the world of the ocean. Early on, the Welsh author connects the constantly changing outer world of the ocean with her troubled inner one: “There was a current inside me. At times, it swept along straight and true, serene on the surface, but determinedly fast flowing. At others, the winds of life would turn against the tide . . . and I would rage, tempestuous.”

In the book’s opening chapter, Stowe tends to pile up phrases, with many sentences using five or more commas. While the lyrical style may lull the reader like waves, we start to long for events and characters that comprise a life, though we are given brief glimpses of the author’s mother (her parents are divorced) and companionable brother. Her mother, however, becomes more important as the book progresses; we learn it was she who both inspired Stowe’s artistic impulses and taught her how to swim, “moving with—moving like—the water.”

The book finds momentum in the second chapter when the author goes to sea, on a ship where “it was hard to tell the sea from the sky—the water was everywhere.” At sea, Stowe is continually off-balance, literally and metaphorically. In order to cook on shipboard, “You have to lash yourself to the stove, which swayed wildly on its gimbal, the pivoted support that allows it to swing with the motion of the boat.”

The dramatic action at sea brings the narrative to life. “In my roamings around the coast back home, I had moved through the landscape,” Stowe writes; “Now, the seascape built, fell, hurled, roared, and hurtled around me, dictating my movement with a Mephistophelian chaos.” There is no doubt that the ocean is Stowe’s true home: “I had found my north, the area of life into which I wanted to pour my passion.”

Stowe’s adventures at sea, where she crewed for scientific expeditions as far as Newfoundland, recede into memory after she suffers a surfing injury. Move Like Water here becomes a memoir of healing, both of body and mind. Comparing herself to Icarus for being dissatisfied with her life and always seeking new adventures, Stowe experiences recurring dreams in which she alternately becomes an albatross and a sea captain. Both dreams help her grow—the first through study of how the wanderings of the albatross resemble her own, and the second by inspiring her to buy her own boat.

The author’s rapturous descriptions of the sea and its inhabitants, from the lowly plankton to the lordly sperm whale, fulfill her goal to give the reader “an ocean to hold in your hands.” With a scientist’s perspective, a sea captain’s knowledge, and a poet’s soul, Stowe takes readers on a journey that enlists us in her project to preserve the ocean and its creatures.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

SMRTi

Nina Zivancevic
Spuyten Duyvil ($20)

by Jim Cohn

The title of Serbian-born poet Nina Zivancevic’s vivid travel memoir, SMRTi, comes from the Sanskrit—literally, “that which is remembered.” Historically, smrti refers to written Hindu texts composed by authors seeking an ever-evolving yet precise and compact prose form to capture the passing of essential facts, principles, instructions, and ideas from generation to generation. In Zivancevic’s hands, smrti is an ideal and flexible form to present memorable distillations from her sojourns to India, Egypt, Italy, Spain, England, Paris (her present-day home), Lima, and Peru over the period from 1990 to 2015.

Zivancevic is an intrepid, eclectic world navigator and chronicler. She applies her own extensive and unique knowledge of European intellectual and aesthetic movements as well as Beat Generation writers and poets in a style exemplary of the international post-beat avant-garde, alive and well today. Cornerstones to her sense of lineage and tradition include the Serbian poet Ljubomir Micić, founder of the avant-garde movement Zenitism; the raw and transgressive French writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud; the Belgium-born French writer and visual artist Henri Michaux; the Bulgarian-French philosopher, semiotician, and feminist Julia Kristeva; and two American poets associated with the Beat Generation, Ira Cohen and Allen Ginsberg.

As a writer who has lived an international life in the arts, Zivancevic describes how she approached the writing in SMRTi based on something Michaux said after his travels to India: “I was observing myself during my journey as if I would observe someone else who was observing the world with emotion, remembering an imaginary land.” But they have differing relationships to this “imaginary land”: Whereas Michaux believed that he did not “inhabit” the lands to which he traveled, that he “was not there” and “did not even visit it,” Zivancevic argues that she had “always lived there . . . I am a part of it, I was there even when I did not live in it.”

The writing in SMRTi is delightfully fresh as a result and gives space to unexpected scenes and commentaries. Steeped in the history and cultures of the places she visits, Zivancevic approaches the world as a multilingual surrealist poet or anthropologist might, with a distinct and inventive sense of detail and a mashup of intellectual and colloquial subject matter.

Zivancevic is also grounded in a Buddhist practitioner’s understanding of breath, which sustains the rhythm of her prose. The poems in SMRTi are sequenced from longest to shortest and give rise to a stylistically oblique autobiography, filled with slanted and implicit recounts of investigations into the memory of ex-lovers and the development of her own maternal sense.

Perhaps most importantly, Zivancevic’s travel writing is a welcome departure from the colonialist norm. Her travel-memoir language has little relation to any National Geographic documentary or hired tour mentality—the kind of habitual, dull bubble of travel where people never really leave their cultures behind while abroad. Citing the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, as the basis for her own way of being, she writes:

Italy, Serbia and India are not so different; at the same time they are just singular entities, as Deleuze would have explained when he was creating the notion of “singularity,” opposing the notion of “otherness” which purported the Euro-centrist theory. In other words, one should view the cultural differences not so much as the post-effect of “otherness” but as an act of exhibiting equal cultural entities. What follows is a possibility of observing all cultural singularities as equal participants in our mutual presence, rather than treating them as different relics of the past.

It is this egalitarian and transformative approach to otherness that contextualizes Zivancevic’s perspective throughout SMRTi as a series of memory-oriented and dream-connected aesthetic singularities. She writes about her travels to India: “I close my eyes . . . and for a second I fall asleep, float away, as if I am Sarasvati, the goddess of poetry, noise and music in person.” Such “invasive souvenirs” allow Zivancevic her the opportunity to notice “quick passing memories” or, in her words, “what’s the most important thing to remember while passing out.”

This line of thinking brings her back, while traveling to the south of India to attend a yoga retreat, to memories of Allen Ginsberg, with whom she studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, who also journaled about his travels to India. As she notes, “Ginsberg called this particular experience in poetry ‘the direct (subjective or objective) approach to an object,’” adding that Ginsberg got this notion from Ezra Pound, who decades earlier advocated this same poetics based not on the Western version of concept or “sentimentality of abstraction” but on “the direct observance of things, without a particular conceptualization.”

SMRTi thus not surprisingly operates with a vigorous dedication to William Carlos Williams’s poetics of “No ideas but in things.” Writing in this mode can lead to brilliant anthropological investigation; it can also work on an individual, psycho-emotional scale. Take this reflection about the deep south of India and its coconut trees:

In order to drink coconut milk you have to cut off almost half the coconut very fast. The movement has to be stable and rapid, and then only at that point you’d be able to get the sweetness of that milk. And so with our life, when we grow older and weary of it, we have to cut it off, throw the negative part out––so we can get deeper into something better.

Zivancevic’s chaotic coherence throughout SMRTi aligns masterfully with her own life changes, and her approach to change as the essence of travel is informative even in its most comic and distraught moments of revelry and remembrance. This philosophy is most apparent in her explorations of her dreams, especially her four major “karmic dreams.” In one of these dreams, Zivancevic describes an argument regarding the nature of feelings between German artist Joseph Beuys and “a French sociologist standing next to me” who responds to Beuys in this way:

“You probably imply here a certain anti-realism. Feeling defends itself by preventing itself from observing something which is unbearable, thus replacing it immediately by a certain illusion.“

“However, you must agree with me that the ‘feeling’ became immune from persuasion and the commercial propaganda imposed on it by that very man who creates perfect illusions but who does not accept the truth of a lie which reality feeds him.”

Dreams like these make Zivancevic question her reality as she travels in the south of India: “Am I dreaming all this, or am I really in a certain film, more precisely, am I in a film where I’m having a dream about cinematography”? Her cinematic dream continues, with scenes of the green fields of Lido changing into the “pavilion of ex-Yugoslavia,” land of her birth, where the subsequent history of civil wars “mingle with the stories of the killing of the population, torture and mutilation and all this repeated every ten minutes on the screen in an endless loop” like one may experience at any museum of fine art.

History as memory, as future, as travel, as illness, as dream, as museum installation—all these divagations allow the reader to realize that for Zivancevic, the ancient cults of the goddesses still exist, that they live in universes that thrive by a matriarchy we cannot apprehend. It is a universe in which parents and children appear in a story when their grandparents are still children themselves, or not yet born. In such a universe, it is possible to go, as Zivancevic did, “right back to the only landscape where I truly belonged, the country where any real family of mine lived––of poets, writers, philosophers and artists. And it is not important really where I live as long as these people are directly or indirectly in my company.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Growth

A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived

Karen DeBonis
Apprentice House Press ($19.99)

by Blair Glaser

In her memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, Karen DeBonis draws upon the various meanings of the word. When a mysterious set of behaviors—lack of focus, odd tics, and declining motor-skills—sprout up in her son Matthew, she must confront her people-pleasing nature and develop the assertiveness required to raise a special needs child in a broken healthcare system. As DeBonis registers the maddening helplessness of searching for what ails her firstborn, we spin with her through the revolving door of mother-shaming doctors, false diagnoses, ineffective treatment plans, and the well-meaning concern of friends and family.

DeBonis parents with the extreme patience of a Buddha, while peeling back the curtain on darker thoughts and feelings: her fear of making waves, her rage and its occasional outbursts, her coping mechanism of binge eating. Growth will especially speak to parents of special needs/chronically ill children, but it is, at its core, a woman’s story; many women will recognize themselves in the author’s struggle with her social programming to be “good,” underneath which—in her case—is genuine compassion. As Matthew’s illness isolates them both from friends and community, she writes, “I ached for his aloneness, knowing intimately the awfulness of it.”

Growth also holds up a mirror to the way patriarchal values operate in traditional marriages. DeBonis’s husband Michael is a loving partner and parent, but the author is often coaxing him into a greater level of concern and action on Matthew’s behalf. When they finally discover the cause of their son’s bizarre symptoms—the brain tumor of the subtitle—DeBonis criticizes herself for not working harder to find answers, but Michael wonders, “How did I not see it?” It is a question we’ve been wondering alongside him, and it validates DeBonis’s long held frustration of carrying the larger share of emotional labor.

DeBonis’s grounded perspective on personal growth helps readers see their own limitations with compassion. Directly after receiving the correct diagnoses, she experiences a seismic transformation when a new part of her she calls She-Bear emerges: “The boundaries of my body were unable to contain the force, so my legs and arms and head stretched and expanded to gigantic proportions. It wasn’t imagined. It was palpable in every cell of my growing body.” It’s one of those life-changing moments, and yet, DeBonis is honest about its fleeting nature: “My foray into assertiveness . . . turned out to be brief and subdued. My skills had not been honed for the long haul.”

In one particularly self-revealing chapter, “My Real, Messy Story,” DeBonis asks an existential question familiar to anyone who’s withstood long periods of crisis: “How does one reconcile such extremes of feeling, thinking and believing?” We find answers in the book’s main theme of self-acceptance. After what should have been life-changing surgery, Matthew’s handicaps do not vanish, and in order to thrive as an independent adult, he must finally come to terms with his disability and accept help from a government jobs program. DeBonis shares with us what she wishes she’d had the courage to say to the pediatrician who initially and repeatedly dismissed her concerns. This is the only time we lose an intimate connection with her, as she asks us to join her in self-recrimination. But at the chapter’s end, DeBonis offers forgiveness for her own—and by extension, our—shortcomings: “the baby steps I took were leaps of great distance.”

With exquisite vulnerability and awareness of interior dynamics, Growth anchors its suspense in a loving family who plays well, fights with and for each other, and ultimately grows together. Towards the end, the author’s parents exhibit polite passivity when a healthcare agency cancels an important appointment for her ailing mother. DeBonis finds their complacency—the very trait that shaped her good girl persona—unacceptable, and, in She Bear manner, swiftly and effectively advocates on their behalf. In this regard, Matthew’s tumor has spurred real change; readers would do well to conclude that though personal evolution can’t be rushed, it is entirely possible.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Lyric Essay as Resistance

Truth from the Margins

Edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold
Wayne State University Press ($24.99)

by Garin Cycholl

The personal essay continues to assume new ranges of shapes and impulses.  “Essay” turns as both verb and noun—a point of departure that ultimately takes as its subject that most fictional of all creations, an “I.”  Over recent decades, the hybrid that John D’Agata originally tabbed as “lyric essay” has offered writers new means of inhabiting that “I.”  As D’Agata put it in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay (Seneca Review Books, 2015), this genre’s “beautiful, gangly breadth” recenters or disrupts our place in the world. This dislocation is the starting point of The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins, a recent anthology edited by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold.

Rhetorically at play, the lyric essay offers a space between “telling” and “being told.”  As Bossiere views it, “To write from the margins is to write from the perspective of the whole—to see the world from both the margins and the center.” Somewhere between these spaces, an “I” emerges, as Trabold finds it, in “the road blocks and potholes and detours—those gaps, the words left unspoken on the page . . . as important as the essay’s destination.” These powerful essays recognize the fragmented subjectivities that develop within the fits and starts of language itself, stories caught in media res, and words truncated in speech and memory. On these pages, voices develop within a range of subjects—personal maelstrom and adopted celibacy, bodies redefined in the sharp barbs of racism or the ambiguities of gendered experience.  “I’s” stranded in time and memory, written into life via lyric essays, accrue towards “voice.”

The writers follow phantoms and rumors, hints of selves that have inhabited or passed through the world. They negotiate pages written across time. Molly McCully Brown addresses a series of fragments to “Dear Frances, Dear Franny, Dear F, Dear Sister, Dear Ghost.” In “Whens,” Chloe Garcia Roberts narrates her “own birth story . . . one that is not [her] mother’s to tell.” Jennifer Cheng writes, “I map the ghosts; the ghosts map me. . . . the strange ambiguous homesickness I have known in the hollow cavity of my stomach every now and then since childhood.” Lyric offers a means of approaching what can be described or named amidst that “ambiguity.” Within this split, Melissa Febos recognizes, “I have not only strayed from the self I was before, but been changed. . . . My past self is a stranger, an imposter who inhabited my life for two years.” The challenge is to give that self a “voice.” 

In a core essay, Danielle Geller engages Navajo words through a series of footnotes and recollections, attempting to find a way of speaking and writing a subjectivity shaped by language’s loss. Responding to a Navajo word for “Is it true?”, Geller writes, “The answer is, in many ways, unknowable. For our mothers, the surest protection from the past was to spin truths and falsehoods into one story, one thread, impossible to distinguish in the weave.” An “I” emerges from narrative’s warp and woof here, the threads left dangling or tugged into speaking.  In this piece’s exploration, sometimes the lyric is more attendant to silence than any “I” speaking in place. The lyric essay offers a space to explore these entangled truths. Shook loose, this collection’s voices haunt, know, and speak in their persistence.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023