Matt Bai
Penguin Books ($16)

by Bob Hussey

For nearly a century, Americans have wrangled over the proper role of government. In the 1930s, Roosevelt successfully argued that government should protect citizens from the excesses of unregulated capitalism. In the ’60s Lyndon Johnson expanded government’s role to promote racial equality and provide access to health care for the elderly and poor. Since the election of 1980, the prevailing argument has centered on Ronald Reagan’s vision of limited government and lower taxes.

With the Reagan Revolution now largely discredited by the failures of the Bush administration, what new argument about government will drive American politics? New York Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai thought he spied it among the billionaires and bloggers trying to build a new progressive movement. Bai’s new book, The Argument, chronicles his attempt to understand these new progressives and the ideas that motivate them.

Shortly after the defeat of John Kerry in 2004, a group of billionaires came together to form the Democracy Alliance. Led by the likes of George Soros and Hollywood producer Norman Lear, the new group hoped to finance the creation of the same type of advocacy groups and think tanks that Conservatives have funded for decades. But their efforts quickly descended into petty squabbles concerning the structure of the Alliance and its mission. Underlying this bickering is the fact that the billionaires had no common philosophy to provide a framework for their movement.

The bloggers seem even less interested in framing a cohesive argument, bringing an almost religious fervor to their daily war of words with George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans. Bai joins Markos Moulitsis Zúniga, founder of the blog Daily Kos, and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com on a book tour that calls to mind Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. At each stop on their tour, Markos and Jerome are feted like royalty by the Democratic establishment, even though most of the old politicos don’t know quite what to make of the bloggers.

What becomes clear from reading The Argument is that these new progressives have no new argument to make to voters. Rather, they pledge allegiance to programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Affirmative Action—programs that represent the high points of 20th-century liberalism. Their blind adherence to these old programs makes the consideration of any new ideas heresy.

By the end of The Argument, one is left wondering whether new ideas about government have any place in the age of the perpetual campaign. When the business of governing takes a back seat to currying favor with voters or raising funds, new ideas run the risk of upsetting fragile coalitions, scaring voters, and leaving a candidate open to attack. Until the American people refocus on the hard choices and often-boring details of governing, reporters like Bai will exhaust themselves in a futile search for new arguments about how we govern ourselves.

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Carl Oglesby
Scribner ($25)

by Robert Zaller

At least since the Civil War, each American generation has forged the narrative of itself on the field of social struggle. After the Abolitionists came the Populists and the Progressives, to be followed by the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s. Whether it was agrarian reform or trust-busting, the social plight of the Great Depression or the agony of Vietnam, young Americans found in the various crises of our wayward republic a challenge to renew the nation’s promise. Those who love social justice will not necessarily lie in honored graves, but, as Kenneth Rexroth said in his wonderful elegy, “For Eli Jacobsen,”

It is
Good to be brave—nothing is
Better. Food tastes better. Wine
Is more brilliant. Girls are more
Beautiful. The sky is bluer
For the brave—for the brave and
Happy comrades and for the
Lonely brave retreating warriors.

These thoughts came to me in reading Carl Oglesby’s memoir, Ravens in the Storm, because the present American generation is the first that has known no battle and will remember no song. Cycles of American radicalism have come in thirty-year waves so regularly and for so long that they seemed part of the pulse of our democracy, but no longer. The last one was due in the 1990s, but we got instead the Harding-esque era of peace and prosperity the Clintons were recently so eager to dial up again. The Iraq war brought protesters back briefly into the streets, but they vanished with the first shock of combat. These were not the Armies of the Night.

Oglesby grew up in a similarly lobotomized time, the 1950s, and the early ’60s found him employed as a tech editor for defense contractors, first at Goodyear and then at Bendix. But he was also living in liberal Ann Arbor, and trying to establish himself as a playwright. His after-hours friends introduced him to Students for a Democratic Society. Within a few months he found himself deeply immersed in the antiwar movement, and within a year—having resigned his job, alienated his South Carolina family, and taken his own family from split-level to crash pad—he was president of SDS itself.

Oglesby tells this story rather impressionistically, but it is evident that the war awoke a latent social conscience and galvanized his formidable political and organizational skills. His theatrical bent made him a compelling orator as well. A little older than most of his colleagues in the New Left, he was soon its precocious elder statesman. (The New Left did not kid when it said not to trust anyone over thirty; the only old Lefty who played any significant role in its ranks was Dave Dellinger, and he was more activist than leader.)

The war was both the life and death of SDS, and of the larger, inchoate political force to which it gave birth and which had no other name but the Movement. Oglesby himself was critical in the transformation of SDS, a mildly reformist student group at first confined to community organizing, into a self-proclaimed revolutionary vanguard whose goal was nothing less than confronting the military-industrial complex, restructuring American life, and deimperializing American foreign policy. With a bit of poetic license (including lengthy conversations reconstructed from memory), Oglesby recreates the headlong excitement of the moment, in which even the Movement’s ostensible leaders were often largely bystanders as it grew exponentially, outstripping any capacity to organize or direct its protean energies.

The Movement’s fuel was the war, complicated by feminism and by the Black Power activism that had arisen from the civil rights movement. All of this, together with a rich pharmacopeia, blended uncertainly into something called the Counterculture, the communal lifestyle that opposed itself to bourgeois mores as much as to the war. To their often aghast (and occasionally seduced) elders, the children of the ’60s seemed a generation run amok. To those children, however, it was Cold War society itself that had run off the rails, with its militarized economy, its brutal repression of Third World resistance to the capitalist order, and its gaming of nuclear confrontation.

SDS tried to maintain itself as a focal point amid the chaos, but it was torn apart by the same forces that were driving the Movement as a whole toward destruction. Oglesby’s testimony is invaluable, and at times unbearably sad. A born tactician, he understood that building bridges to a wider antiwar community, including business leaders and even oppositional forces with the government, was essential if the Movement was not to marginalize itself and succumb to its own messianic impulses. To his younger colleagues, this was retrograde liberalism, and made Oglesby personally suspect. Hadn’t he worked for defense contractors, and enjoyed a security clearance? Might he not, in fact, be a government plant? In a scene worthy of a Stalinist show trial, Oglesby found himself confronted at the SDS national meeting in Austin in 1969, and essentially purged for his deviations from ‘Marxism-Leninism.’

At that point, SDS, or at least its most radical faction, the Weathermen, was ready to take the tragic plunge into violence. There is a certain point at which paranoia becomes normative thinking, and Oglesby, reflecting on the fact that both the Weathermen and the FBI operation that infiltrated the Movement, Cointelpro, were both products of the year 1968, wonders whether they might have been “in some way connected.” He does not appear to see the irony of this conspiratorial style of thinking, which was precisely what had indicted him in Austin. Thus did the Revolution devour its young.

Oglesby seems to be a fundamentally irenic man, and he is charitable even in personal disagreement. But his judgment of SDS’ fatal turn is untempered by the years: “They produced a theater of the absurd and called it the revolution.” There is harsh truth in this, but it begs a larger strategic—and moral—question. Oglesby concedes that SDS had written off mass demonstrations as a viable antiwar tactic even before the March on the Pentagon in October 1967, and that it had come to an impasse in its efforts to confront the war. The Tet Offensive, Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent withdrawal of his presidential candidacy, and the campaign of Robert Kennedy seemed to offer some hope of movement through conventional politics, and this is the course Oglesby favored. But Kennedy’s assassination dashed these hopes, and left the Movement without a plausible alternative to violence or quietism. Either way lay defeat, a defeat so severe that it produced a forty-year conservative backlash, and a lost generation on the left.

Recently I saw on my campus a group of students behind a small sign that read ‘SDS’. Could these be the first of the new ravens? For surely we are in a storm.

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George Fredrickson
Harvard University Press ($19.95)

by Spencer Dew

The cottage industry of books on Abraham Lincoln represents both a process of national hagiography and the impulse to deconstruct the myth of Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator. George Fredrickson, pioneer of the comparative method of historical study, aims in this slim book for a middle ground between those who hold to a vision of Lincoln as a saintly anti-slavery advocate (albeit one who bided his time, waiting for the perfect political moment to champion emancipation) and those who argue that Lincoln was, as many of his statements seem to indicate, a racist. Fredrickson, who died this February at the age of 73, offers a close reading not only of Lincoln’s speeches, letters, voting record, and personal, off-record moments, but also of the wider cultural contexts in which he lived, from poverty in the slave state of Kentucky (a poverty blamed on the economics of slavery, which Lincoln felt made small farming impossible for non-wealthy whites) to success as a lawyer in the “free” (but virtually black-free, due to various legal measures designed to keep free blacks out) state of Illinois and, ultimately, to leader of a fracturing Union in D.C. Fredrickson’s most useful skill for this study, however, is his nuanced understanding of “racism” itself, the subject to which he devoted his entire career, as represented in such pioneering works as White Supremacy (1981), which traced parallel ideologies and systems of legal discrimination in South Africa and the United States, and Racism: A Short Introduction (2002), which presented a richly textured view of racialist theory and racism via examination of Nazi practice, apartheid, and Jim Crow.

Racism, Fredrickson argues in Big Enough to be Inconsistent, is “an imprecise umbrella term.” Indeed, there are “a spectrum of attitudes that might legitimately be labeled ‘racist,’ ranging from genocidal hatred of ‘the other’ to mere conformity to the practices of a racially stratified society.” Locating Lincoln along this spectrum, Fredrickson argues that, prior to 1860 at least, he was at once “genuinely antislavery” and “a white supremacist. . . of a relatively passive or reactive kind,” though Fredrickson goes on to consider whether or not Lincoln’s views on race might have changed during the war years.

The perennial problem for historical study of individuals, especially such a consummate politician as Lincoln, is that the line between sincerity and strategic dissembling in speeches and letters can never be fully drawn. Lincoln surely pandered to the public in his words and, moreover, compromised certain personal beliefs and desires for the overriding priority of national stability in a time of crisis. The value of Fredrickson’s study, however, goes beyond that of adding nuance to understandings of Lincoln. This book, through its engagement with the complicated tensions around race at the time of the Civil War, also offers a valuable insight into the continuing history of racism and the racial divide in American today. The legacy of slavery and segregation still characterizes our society, occasionally dominating headlines but far more frequently remaining a ubiquitous subtext in private conversations and national discourse. The noble goal of Fredrickson’s career was bringing such tension, and its ugly, tangled history, to the surface, so that we, his readers, can continue to repair our divided house. Fredrick Douglas, as early as 1876, observed that there were two ways to view Lincoln when it came to issues of race, and Fredrickson evokes these words as if to apply them to the nation as a whole. On the one hand, we are “tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” too slow and too blind to the continuing cancerous of racism and all its subtle manifestations. Yet we are also, as a nation, “swift, zealous, radical, and determined,” and it is to this optimism for harmony and reconciliation that Fredrickson’s important body of work testifies.

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Norman Mailer
New York Review Books ($14.95)

by C. Natale Peditto

Reading the fortieth anniversary reissue of Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, we recognize a writer at the peak of his literary and journalistic talents. This was a period in Mailer’s career that included the remarkably wrought Armies of the Night, which earned both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; both books remain to this day preeminent, although unorthodox, examples of the New Journalism style. What Mailer accomplished in these titles was to put himself, the author, in direct relationship to the events he was reporting—a third-person observer and simultaneous participant dedicated to revealing the public psyche while unraveling his own tangled motivations and ideology. In Armies of the Night, as the novelist and historian, he writes in measured prose with acuity and strength; in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, as “the reporter,” he is caught up in the pathos of the event.

The 1968 conventions occurred during a historically momentous year of protests and demonstrations, nationally and internationally. In the United States, Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination precipitated riots in over sixty cities around the country; that same month students took over Columbia University campus, and in June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Politically, the Vietnam War augured defeat for the Democrats under President Johnson’s leadership. The Republicans, meeting in Miami Beach, all but staked their future on Richard Nixon—the “new Nixon,” that is, in reference to whom Mailer commented, “America is the land which worships the Great Comeback”; yet in Machiavellian terms he also noted “there had never been anyone in American life so resolutely phony as Richard Nixon, nor anyone so transcendentally successful by such means.” Despite hopeless attempts by the liberal wing of the party to nominate Governor Rockefeller as a way of reclaiming the American electorate, the conservatives prevailed and subsequently claimed the future of the Republican Party. It was the predicable outcome of a lackluster and very conventional convention. Other than the Nixonettes, appareled in their boater hats and modestly clean-cut, down-home outfits, cheerleading, “Nixon’s the one!” (a catch-all phrase that would return to haunt Nixon during the Watergate scandal), much of the convention today is absent from popular memory.

The Chicago convention, on the other hand, evokes remarkable images in the historical consciousness of the nation. Mailer’s reporting from within the confining space of the Chicago Amphitheatre and on the streets and in the bars of the city, as well as from the safety of his hotel room in the Hilton, high above the crowds, is always salient. His analyses and insights tend to revolve around a dominant conceit: “Politics is property” (105), attributed to the liberal New York columnist and delegate Murray Kempton. Mailer makes the metaphor his own, even before crediting its source, harshly critiquing the idealistic supporters of Eugene McCarthy who opposed the corrupt but time-tested political pragmatics that involved “sensuous worlds of corruption, promiscuity, fingers in the take, political alliances forged by fires of booze, and that sense of property (my italics) which is the fundament of all political relations.”

Politics as property is a compelling trope that Mailer uses to maximum effect throughout the Chicago section of the book. McCarthy’s people in their liberal suburban, anti-hippy “clean for Gene” appearance depressed Mailer; Bobby Kennedy was the author’s choice candidate, noting the Kennedys’ “magical” appeal and encouraged by Bobby’s political coming-of-age, “his admixture of idealism plus willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overlords of corruption.”

Further references to political property are abundant in Mailer’s analysis; the hierarchy of the political machine dictates “the meanest ward-heeler in the cheapest block of Chicago has his piece.” Mailer is Machiavellian in his discursive style if not in the philosophy of his political prescriptions: “A politician picks and chooses among moral properties”; “politics as concrete negotiable power”; “the true political animal is cautious”; and finally, “the last property of political property is ego.” From a literary point of view, Mailer manages to exhaust his operative conceit.

Mailer indulges in rampart hyperbole, yet his version of events is much more factual when he’s reporting on what transpires on the convention floor and in the delegate caucuses, or when describing the great assembly of anti-war demonstrators in the parks and on the streets of Chicago, which at one point he joins as a speaker. Mayor Richard Daley was the powerful overseer of the main action, from the seating arrangements and control of media and delegate access to the convention hall, to directing orders to the police department to attack the demonstrators. According to Mailer, Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s constituency, of which Daley was a part, consisted of the Mafia and the trade unions at its base. Mailer tells us, “The Mafia loved Humphrey.” While the doves and left wing of the party were confined to the rear bleachers, Daley was down front, holding the floor for the preordained nominee, along with a crew of “hecklers, fixers, flunkies and musclemen. . . . guys with eyes like drills.” But despite Daley’s forceful control, Mailer could assert that it was “the wildest Democratic convention in decades.”

Which brings us to the bloody five-day battle in the streets of Chicago that the nation witnessed on their TV sets. For Mailer, it was a reflection of what was occurring on the convention floor—the older established order in direct conflict with the New Left tilt of the Democratic party, represented in the streets by the young activists of SDS and the Yippies, dedicated to poetry, street theatre and the satiric nomination of a pig for President. Mailer describes the Socialist faction as ideological and confrontational, while injecting a note of ridicule in his view of the Yippies who shunned power for a “politics of ecstasy,” but not without some admiration for their Dionysian music and “tribal unity.” Allen Ginsberg’s great voice of poetry, hoping to appease the beast of violence with a group Om-chant, as Mailer sadly reports, was raw and strained by the tear gas that pervaded the city.

Mailer claims not to be a revolutionary despite his established alliances with the protesters and the persuasive draw of their cause. Confessing a certain closet conservatism, he fears losing his livelihood and life style if the hippy revolution prevails. As a reporter he is off-duty at critical moments, self-consciously arguing his own duplicity behind a drink, and then has to rely on dispatches from various news sources, which he quotes at length, to describe the scenes at the barricades. He can easily envision a final scenario of martial law as the police and National Guard assert their dominance and the call for law and order invades the majority of Americans’ perception of the events. What survives the failure of people power is a crude existential cynicism, Mailer urging “let patriotism and the fix cohabit” and suggesting the idealists depart and leave the pickings to the political gang.

What Americans witnessed that August week in 1968 climaxed on the convention floor as Senator Abe Ribicoff took the podium to nominate George McGovern, the other peace candidate who would return in four years as the Party’s nominee. Ribicoff pointed to “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” confronting Mayor Daley’s shameful abuse of power by alluding to the Nazi Party. Seated down front, Daley rose to his feet along with his goons and shouted to the patrician senator to go fuck himself.

Conventions today are well-scripted and organized down to the smallest detail, the party “brand” set before the public as part of a mass media marketing campaign. Spontaneous demonstrations seem to be a part of the political past. We purposefully demean the “old school” politics that Daley represented as unfair and dirty—indicating an unhygienic and unhealthy mix of cigarettes and booze, cigar-smoking little cheeses pulling strings in the back rooms and making deals with the machine bosses, out of the spotlight of the media. Yet these were the dirty details that intrigued Mailer. Significantly, he opened his report on the Democratic convention with one of the most graphically vivid and visceral descriptions of the Chicago slaughterhouses—an extended description that rivals Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The way he evokes the smell of death in the air of Chicago that late August is alone worth the price of the read.

The penultimate chapter of Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer’s gossiping with the journalists at the bar as they pronounce their cynical assessments about the future of American politics, is a last call for the author to self-reflect among the petty Mafia in the cocktail lounge, regarding organized crime as the alternative to the military-industrial corporations (“if one had to choose between the Maf running America and the military-industrial complex, where was one to choose?”) and expressions of bad faith when faced with the writer’s bitter task of completing his assignment. These are the final notes of Chicago’s brutal night song, a confrontation with the local police that almost puts Mailer in their clutches for a beating or arrest, or both. Mailer’s parting shot, “we will be fighting for forty years,” is prescient enough and ample reason to take him at his word.

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Zander Brietzke
University of Alabama Press ($39.95)

by Justin Maxwell

This strong critical work by Columbia University Professor Zander Brietzke comprehensively and concretely parses out the idiomatic values of drama and film to show the former’s continued relevance in modern culture, while honoring the latter. Brietzke’s prose conveys his complex ideas in an articulate, accessible format; he offers intellectual depth without the linguistic miasma that often clouds academic writing. Starting with a solid premise that “the best theater is theatrical; the best film is cinematic. By that, I simply mean that a theatrical event is suited for the theater and should be seen upon a stage,” Brietzke goes on to build a worthwhile argument about the fundamental differences between the nature of the two mediums. He usefully elucidates the differences between “simultaneity” and “sequence,” noting that events on stage happen simultaneously as the audience sees things all at once, and their eyes are drawn around the stage or left free to roam, whereas film takes place in sequence, literally one frame after another, edited together to create a controlled series of images. Brietzke’s points about simultaneity and sequence lead him to explore a larger idea of spectacle, which he claims fills the whole dramatic space in a way that film can’t. This idea of spectacle replaces, for Brietzke, much of the nebulous language that has been used in an attempt to validate drama and differentiate it from celluloid. As he says, “it is very difficult to know what ‘chemistry,’ ‘magic,’ and ‘special quality’ are, and yet the theater world is filled with such empty medieval rhetoric.”

The fundamental argument of the text is hearty reading, and takes up the first two chapters of the book. Beyond these chapters the emphasis changes from offering a well-reasoned (albeit abstract) thesis to exploring concrete manifestations of the three aforementioned ideas. Each of Brietzke’s subsequent ten chapters takes on a different playwright whose stage work also exists on film. The writing is lively and thorough: each chapter uses different internal structures, sometimes ranging over an author’s oeuvre, such as the chapter on August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, sometimes focusing on a single work, such as the chapter on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This keeps the book from plodding along or becoming dryly formulaic. Unfortunately, because Brietzke is pointing out different manifestations of the same core concepts, once he’s convinced the reader of their veracity whatever else comes after that point makes the book feel excessive. This tautological approach is perhaps a necessary evil, since the author can’t know where any given reader might be won over. Consequently, American Drama in the Age of Film is a valuable and insightful book but one that some readers may not need to read in its entirety, despite its accessibility.

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Peter Thomson
Oxford University Press ($29.95)

by Eliza Murphy

“Yikes!” is evidently an insufficient response to discovering that the deepest lake in the world, known also to be the purest, is undergoing alarming biochemical shifts in response to human activities. Perhaps “Bloody Hell” will suffice. This is Siberia after all, the nether regions of Russia, and Lake Baikal—home to miniature, pollution filtering shrimp (epischura), the world’s only fresh water seal (the nerpa), and the hardy people who live on its shores—is under siege.

Author Peter Thomson invited his younger brother to join him on a journey half way around the world to see this ecological wonder. As hard as Thomson tries to portray the lake as a miraculous entity capable of healing from a variety of assaults, the verdict is still out on its ability to absorb warming temperatures in a climate so cold that the locals take pride in their skillful adaptation to the frigidity. Some believe that the way to solve any assaults to the lake, the most obvious culprit being the paper mill with its toxic effluents, will be through economic development. Never mind the high concentrations of industrial pollutants stowing away in the blubber of the nerpas, who dine on the epischura that gobble up PCBs, dioxin, and any number of waste products generated by transforming trees into paper products.

Thomson, a veteran environmental journalist, admits that he wants “to believe that this remote place is different,” that “Baikal might somehow manage to elude the corrosive influence of civilization.” Seeking one place on earth imbued with that vanishing essence, hope, he leaves Boston an idealist, attempting to sublimate the “cold-eyed realist” he confesses that he is. Along the way he encounters all sorts of people, iconic architecture, a frustrating bureaucratic machine, some desultory meals, at least one exquisite meal, and dreary landscapes that the realist in him cannot help but describe in detail. Such details might threaten the narrative if Thomson weren’t willing to acknowledge the anxiety this trip provoked in him.

Hope arose for Thomson in the form of his guide, Andrei, who although initially aloof, softens one night and divulges his vision of a trail similar to the Appalachian Trail. Exposed to travelers attempting to leave behind as small a footprint as possible, Andrei absorbs and passes on valuable ways to do so. The exchange takes root in Thomson, who returns on another trip to help build that trail, a gesture significant both for the ground level engagement with an enigmatic location as well as the completion of a personal odyssey for the author.

A skilled science writer, Thomson shares the perplexing and not altogether uplifting news of the lake’s health, presenting an even-handed portrayal of a natural wonder that is as imperiled as every other place on earth. Unafraid to share the tediousness and vexation, beauty and hideousness that travel sometimes entails, he recounts not only the vast physical terrain he traversed, but also intimate personal details that echo the scale of the geography he and his kid brother covered via planes, trains, and a cargo ship across the Pacific. The result is a strong book that is as much about the sacredness we carry with us as it is about a “sacred sea.”

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Robert D. Romanyshyn
Spring Journal Books ($24.95)

by Joel Weishaus

In a 2005 interview with Dolores E. Brien, Robert Romanyshyn said: “As a phenomenologist, I start with the notion that soul reveals and conceals itself in and through the landscapes of experience we build individually and collectively. A person says whom he or she is, for example, in the clothes that are worn, in the books that are read, in the ways in which the house is furnished and made into some kind of home.” He goes on to explain that “the same is true on a collective level… a fourteenth century Gothic church sets in stone the psychological spirit of the age in a way which is radically different from a Renaissance church.”

This phenomenologist is also a post-Jungian, that cabal of therapists and scholars whose work extends C.G. Jung’s psychology into everyday life, facing the Gods with the audacity to address them as symptoms of the psyche’s metabolism, and casting Jung’s insights into this century’s aporia. Romanyshyn’s vision is also philosophical, leading him to where words slip away from their referent. “Green!,” he exclaims, is “a word that is an insult to the richness that surrounds me.” However his is not a deconstructive critique, nor an anthropocentric one. He asserts, rather, that the production of meaning is like an alchemical process that raises one’s awareness to “an internal imperative that is more about the work than it is about me.”

A Core Faculty Member in Clinical Psychology and Depth Psychotherapy at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Romanyshyn has written a pedagogy with much larger applications in The Wounded Researcher. Anyone who reads more than a few pages of this book is by default someone interested in doing “re-search,” as Romanyshyn describes “the unfinished business in the soul of the work, the unsaid weight of history in the work that waits to be said.” Artists, for example, are familiar with the call to create a work “beyond reason,” a call from one’s soul, to contribute to the world something that has never existed before.

The Wounded Researcher is also a book of grieving, a word that made a place for itself in Romanyshyn’s vocabulary after the sudden death of his first wife, to whom he had been married for 25 years. In a dream he had a few days after her death, a longer version of which can be found in his 1999 book, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation, he is at a party at a friend’s house where he sees his wife flowing through a room of guests “as if not weighted down by gravity.” Awake, he writes, “This is her place, and in it I seem to have become invisible, as if I were the one who has died.” Gravity, gravitas, grieving, elegiac mourning, “a sweetly bitter quality that comes from yearning for something that, while never attained, is always with us.”

It is better not to do research methodologically, which Romanyshyn claims has been holding psychology, for one, hostage, but with a poetics; this “does not mean that research is poetry,” but that a researcher is attuned to “the gap between conscious and unconscious, which is bridged by the symbol as the expression of the transcendent function.” This gap, the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal region mapped by the French philosopher and scholar of Sufism and Iranian Shi’ism, Henri Corbin, is “intermediate between sense and intellect and that mediates between them.”

Meaning is born where we are unbalanced. Here the abyss opens, and “to descend into that abyss requires a different way of seeing and knowing.” An imaginal approach to research also includes “former ways of knowing,” such as alchemy, astrology, and I-Ching. It seems to me that the spirit of this work is more European than American, more life-affirming than wealth-gathering, more Eros than Logos; mysterious rather than pragmatic, it dissolves fundamentalism into a Cloud of Unknowing.

Some of the most lyrical moments in The Wounded Researcher are found in Romanyshyn’s generous quotations from and discussion of the problems his students had finding a path into their dissertations. For example, an Iranian student, Kiyanoosh Shamlu, wanted to explore the work of the 12th-century Iranian intellectual Sohrevardi, and how “an ancient Islamic tradition and the modern Western one of Jungian psychology converge and diverge in their understanding and treatment of imagination and its relation to the imaginal world.”

During the initial stages of his work, Kiyanoosh had a series of significant dreams. In the first, “he is in a very dark forest, where he is running away from an old man who is chasing him.” In the second, “he finds himself on the top of a mountain with a book that has no writing in it.” In the third, “he is riding in the sky on the back of an enormous bird while looking down on a green landscape that has no discernable figures or objects.” Kiyanoosh could make no sense of these dreams, until he came across them in Sohrevardi’s “descriptions of the soul’s spiritual journeys of descent from and return to the imaginal world.”

Kiyanoosh went on to explore “an unacknowledged metaphysics,” in which “the imaginal world is not so much an underworld as the epiphany of an other world, which. . . Jung himself was struggling to understand.” Romanyshyn goes on to say that Kiyannoosh’s experience indicates that dreams “may know more about the work than the conscious researcher does.” It is not so much that Romanyshyn opens new territory by suggesting this, but in the context of the book it becomes the long-nosed pliers in the toolbox of the researcher who has soul in mind.

This toolbox also includes elegiac writing, where “a researcher dwells among the ruins because he or she knows that it is in the ruins that the living spirit of the work waits to be remembered.” It is a style of writing that “resurrects the dead and transforms them, as well as our relationship to them.” Also discussed at length is what Romanyshyn calls “alchemical hermeneutics,” a process that “keeps stirring the work so that what would become coagulated dissolves.” There is also “creative repetition,” which is “like falling in love again with the work, coming under its spell, being claimed again by it. Creative repetition is a return to the romance of the beginning.”

Nowhere is the romance of the beginning more lovingly handled than in his discussion of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Romanyshyn suggests that this myth “is the archetypal background for how research becomes psychological,” as it is “about this process of losing and finding, about this work of transformation in which the other becomes a psychological reality, a matter of soul.” The part of the myth that most intrigues him—and that has also cast its spell over many other writers, from Virgil and Ovid to Rainer Maria Rilke—is when Orpheus travels to Hades to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. There he is granted his wish, but only if he doesn’t look back (an echo between Greek and Hebrew mythologies). As in so much mythology, of course, he violates this proviso. “Orpheus had to look back, “ writes Romanyshyn, “because the underworld is Eurydice’s place, and being there, not only is she freed from being Orpheus’s possession, she is also freed into herself.”

In his poem, “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” Rilke dwells on this pivotal moment:

She was already loosened like long hair,
given out like fallen rain,
shared out like a hundredfold supply.

She was already root.

This calls to mind Denise Levertov’s poem, “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”:

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.

When we love into our roots there is no turning back, though there can a turning away—as when, in Rilke’s poem, Eurydice’s guide, “Hermes says, ‘with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around—,’ Rilke says, ‘she could not understand, and softly answered / Who?’”

“Who! Just this one word,” Romanyshyn writes, “which the poet italicizes! We are meant to notice something here, some fundamental change not only in Eurydice but also between her and Orpheus.” In other words, this change in direction is possible only when one in the couple lets go, as in Romanyshyn’s dream of his departed wife, to whom he had become invisible. In that dream, if he had tried to speak to her, had said to her, “Don’t you remember me, your husband?” I think she would have replied, “Who?”

Adding the dimension of dreams, along with “metaphoric sensibility,” “creative repetition,” “alchemical hermeneutics,” and many other techniques that are valuable to the process of research in every discipline, this seminal book is also a primer for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

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Alexandra Fuller
Penguin ($23.95)

by Kevin Carollo

“There is a magic place . . . ”
—TV ad for Wyoming tourism

Alexandra Fuller’s third nonfiction work tells the story of a young man who grew up, lived, and suddenly died on the oil patch in western Wyoming. The British-born, Rhodesian/Zimbabwean-raised author of the fine memoirs Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat has outdone herself with The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, a heartbreaking narrative about the American families who give their lives to feed our addiction to oil. There are great high plains winds and the lilt of Rocky Mountain English to go with the great greed, love, and loss in this Wild West tale, and even knowing what’s going to happen in the end cannot keep a cowboy from crying through the final pages. This is both a harsh American Western and a vital work of world literature, and it should win every major award out there.

Written by a self-proclaimed “liberal redneck” (Fuller currently lives in Wyoming), Legend embodies all the contradictions of a frontier narrative. For example, even people from Wyoming do not exactly settle down there, but travel to where the oil is. Oil, on the other hand, remains the one constant, a 24-7 reality in a West that has grown considerably less wild since drilling began: “the endlessness of the plains’ open abundance is an illusion. Nearly all the plains are already swallowed up, paved over, plowed under, flattened, hardened, drilled. You can drive across what’s left of what is wild in an afternoon or less.”

Unlike the recent film There Will Be Blood, which seems rather invested in humanizing the Devil in the shape of an enterprising oil baron (played, of course, by the impossible-to-dislike Daniel Day Lewis), Fuller is interested in telling the humble story of the Bryant family, who have built an honest life around the shady vagaries of oil production for generations. They are soft-spoken, good folk who deserve more than donuts and some cant about the importance of safety on the job.

As a period piece, There Will Be Blood also implies that the precarious nature of drilling belongs to the preceding century, when crude oil was extracted by cruder technology. The reality is much starker: Colton is one of at least eighty-nine people who died in the Interior West between 2000 and 2006 (thirty-five in Montana alone).* The railing that might have saved Colton’s life would have cost the drilling company Patterson-UTI Energy all of two thousand dollars. Instead, they were fined seven thousand dollars for his death in 2006—the same year parent company Ultra Petroleum boasted revenues of $592.7 million. It hurts to do the math, but the bottom line is clear. Safety on the patch means one thing and one thing only: the security of big oil’s profits regardless of the human costs.

The June 2008 issue of National Geographic takes a different approach by equating intensified oil production in Western Siberia with modernity. Environmental and structural problems are glossed over in order to justify the short-term benefits of the region’s explosive “cash crop.” People around the world appear to agree: we cannot not exploit the questionable boon of black gold. Incidentally, Wyoming is the home state of the term “Gillette syndrome,” a term coined by psychologist ElDean Kohrs to explain the consequences of an energy boomtown, which “experiences an increase in crime, drug use, alcoholism, violence, and cost of living, and a decrease in just about everything good except, arguably, money.” The Legend of Colton H. Bryant does not indict the hard laborers who take pride in their work, nor does it exculpate the modern-day robber barons that own the means of production and ultimately care very little about maintaining a high quality of life for their workers.

Fuller clearly wanted to write a different kind of nonfiction work than her first two, and she has succeeded beyond our wildest, most American dreams. Nevertheless, readers will recognize her intense reckoning with the recent past from Don’t Let’s and Scribbling in this book, which doesn’t feature her at all. As with her first two books, Legend does not offer us some kind of impossible reconciliation or absolution, but rather something readers might not expect: a profound identification with the Bryant family, and, yes, a hopeful sort of pride in perhaps one day becoming American like them.

That said, the old saw ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ goes double for The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, which depicts a cowboy, lasso in hand and back to the camera, amidst a blur of horses. Maybe this will sell more books, just as the Wyoming tourist board must evoke a sanitized version of the Wild West to encourage visitors to its magical state. There are some horses in Legend, to be sure, as well as rodeos and Mountain Dew, but without an oil rig looming in the background, one wonders what the book designers were thinking. Inside, however, one finds a gut-wrenchingly beautiful narrative that will make both Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck turn over in their graves—this time with immense pride.

*Drilling has not become safer the last couple of years in the Interior West. On May 15, 2008, a Montana man fell to his death working on the western North Dakota oil patch, the eleventh such death in ten years. Owned by Cyclone Drilling of Gillette, Wyoming, this particular rig pumps out the crude for the Houston-based Murex. This most recent tragedy highlights the national scope of oil interests in the region, as well as intimates the national response necessary to force oil companies to move beyond what Fuller describes as “safety, safety, safety, have a doughnut. Safety, safety, safety, now go out there and get as much gas out of the ground as quickly as you can.”

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Richard Bruce Nugent
Da Capo Press ($18)

by Douglas Messerli

If you prefer the pious potboilers of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to the irreverent interrogations of Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed, better skip Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentlemen Jigger, a fiction—written in the 1930s, but published here for the first time—which even in its title hints at its “incorrect” attitudes (the title, Thomas Wirth notes in his Introduction, “is a sardonic riff on an old racist ditty: ‘Looky, looky, Gentleman Jigger—half white and half nigger.’”) And Nugent, through his witty alter ego Stuartt Brennan, uses the “N” word enough, as did Whoopi Goldberg recently on the television show “The View,” to draw tears of frustration not only from Elizabeth Hasselbeck (a fellow panelist on that show who, after hearing Goldberg’s outburst, began to cry) but from any well-meaning correctionist.¹

Nugent, the bad boy provocateur of the Harlem Renaissance, dared to speak out in the late 1920s not only about racist attitudes against darker-skinned blacks within the African American community, but also about that community’s prejudices against homosexuality. Along with younger black figures Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston (Nugent, Thurman, Hughes, and Cullen all being gay or bisexual), Nugent challenged readers through the publication of the journal FIRE!! to consider their brothers and sisters less as part of an essentialist community and more as often eccentric and contradictory individuals. Meant to shock, Nugent’s contribution was a drug-induced dream story, “Smoke, Lillies and Jade!” about an encounter with the narrator and a male Hispanic pickup who he calls Beauty.

A son of a noted Washington, D.C. family (his mother was a Bruce), Nugent was so light-skinned that when he first arrived in New York he lived for a few days in a whites-only hotel, and apparently, when he was first introduced to the dark complexioned Thurman, he excused himself, confused over his own racist feelings, an event presented in this passage in Gentlemen Jigger:

It was just as Stuartt was succumbing to the invitation of the food that Tony pointed to the table and said, “There is Raymond Pelman.”
It was a distinctly unpleasant shock—so unpleasant that Stuartt lost all desire for food. Silent and empty-handed, he followed Tony to Pelman’s table. So this was the brilliant Raymond Pelman—the Negro from whom he had expected so much. This little black man with the charming smile and sneering nose, with sparkling, shifting eyes and an unpleasant laugh.
Stuartt decided that Pelman was not to be trusted. He was too black. Stuartt had been taught by precept not to trust black people—that they were evil. And Stuartt was the totality of his chauvinistic upbringing.
. . . Stuartt felt decidedly uncomfortable in his presence. So, after a polite ten minutes of torture, he took his leave.

Returning to Thurman later, Nugent apologized for his behavior, and soon after the two became close friends, sharing a room in what they proclaimed Niggeratti Manor, a rooming house owned by businesswoman Iolanthe Sydney, who charged many of the Harlem writers and artists little or no rent.

From the beginning Nugent, like his character Stuartt in this roman à clef fiction, was an absolute charmer—he had previously worked for Buster Keaton and Rudolf Valentino—and was blessed with an intelligence and wit that, when combined with Thurman’s own brilliant patter, thoroughly entertained and educated their frequent visitors. Indeed, the first half of Gentlemen Jigger consists of many of their witty conversations and descriptions of their frequent and sometimes outrageous parties, replete with pretty boys, beautiful women, and plenty of gin. The characters Nugent presents—most of them fairly recognizable to anyone acquainted with the artists, dancers, and writers of the day, the central ones of whom are Rusty (Wallace Thurman) and his boyfriend, a white Canadian nicknamed Bum; the beautiful Myra (presumably Zora Neale Hurston); her lover the Jesus-look-alike Aeon (represented as Stuartt’s brother, but in actuality probably a mix of Claude McKay and Jean Toomer); the noted white writer, photographer, and sponsor of Black writers and artists Serge Von Vertner (Carl Van Vechten); and Tony (Langston Hughes)—attend to the conversations of the duo, intelligently responding and debating with them. Some of these discussions are just witty riffs on sexuality and drinking. On their way to a picnic, Myra and Aeon are unexpectedly met by Stuartt and Rusty:

“We are cupids—thoughtfully, one of each color, one in each of your honors. Every young and beautiful love should have its quota of obstacles and chaperones. Consider us the more evil of these.”
“Did you bring the gin?” Rusty asked. “I see Myra brought our lunch.”
“I brought ‘green dawns’ after seeing what you were bringing to read aloud.” Stuartt turned toward Aeon and Myra. “Firbank and Proust,” he explained. “Dawns are wonderful,” he continued without pause. “One part absinthe, one part alcohol, tinted with crème de menthe and sparkled with lime and fizzy water—cool as lemonade and potent as—”
“Let’s leave sex out of it,” breathed Rusty, “particularly such gutter and dialect as is mouthed by juveniles.”
“Oh, what you said!” Stuartt chattered as he poured several cups of the incredible pastel drink from a mammoth Thermos. After handing one to each of them, he took another and started to the forward part of the bus, saying over his shoulder, “Oats for the uniformed horse—he looks unhappy.” A few moments later he could be seen offering it to the bus driver.

But in the majority of these intellectualized Bouvard and Pecuchet-like interchanges, they are painfully self-aware in their conversations of the political and racial issues surrounding their lives. In their first conversation with Bum, for example, when Thurman’s Canadian friend admits that he has no knowledge at all about the Harlem Renaissance, he is “lectured” by the two:

“First of all, Bum, I suppose you have never known a Negro before. That’s the usual defense. And you expected to find us more or less uncivilized denizens of some great jungle city, believing in witch doctors and black magic and all that. Well, you’re right. Or maybe you’ve read Harriet Beecher Stowe and feel sorry for us. Do. Or Octavius Roy Cohen and are amused, or Seabrook and are afraid. You know, Rusty, it really is too bad we aren’t more different. What a disappointment we must be.”
Rusty synchronized into the routine. “Well what can you expect. A group of people surrounded for a hundred years or so by a culture foreign to them. How long can you expect it to remain foreign?”

Later in the book, among several long comic dialogues, Stuartt takes issue with the group’s praise of fellow artist Howard (likely Aaron Douglas), dismissing their comments that Howard’s work is “essentially African” by noting the absurdity of describing anything as “African” and brilliantly expounding on the vital differences between a “Gabun full figure,” and art from Sudan, Congo, or by a Benin native. Like a true didact Stuartt explores the complexity of this issue, remarking to Rusty, “Remember these things. . . if ever The Bookman wants an article on Negro art.” In this sense, Nugent’s fiction is less a recounting of the lives of him and his friends, and more a complex discussion of various issues involving art, race, and sex.

Accordingly, for some readers Nugent’s dialogic writing will seem like a bumpy, baggy affair, with what critic Northrup Frye has described in his Anatomy of Fiction as “violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative.” Indeed, the editor of the Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader characterized Wallace Thurman’s fiction, Infants of the Spring—a work written at the same time as Nugent’s which often incorporates scenes similar to Gentleman Jigger (in a biopic about Nugent, Brother to Brother, friends even accuse Thurman of copying from Nugent’s manuscript)—in terms that might equally apply to Nugent’s writing: “The novel was melodramatic and much too didactic, its talkative characters caricatures.”

As Frye warns, however, in works such as Nugent’s (and Thurman’s) “the appearance of carelessness reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction.” For both of these fictions are anatomies, not novels, a satiric form of fiction that “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.” The major figures in such works are represented as “pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts”—all of which might describe Stuartt and Rusty (or Paul and Raymond in Thurman’s work)—who suffer the disease of the intellect. Here the country weekends of Thomas Love Peacock, Aldous Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis, where the pedant captures the attention of his guests over drinks and long dinners, is replaced by the raucous celebrations at Niggerati manor and dinner at Devores.

Another structural aspect of anatomies is the tendency, as in Petronius’s Satyricon, to gather together individuals representing all social classes and/or to represent the pedant-hero undergoing a voyage that includes both the upper echelons of society and the underworld. It should come as no surprise, accordingly, that after Stuartt’s encounter with the Harlem underworld—ending, as it does in Thurman’s book, with dispersal and disillusionment—the second half of Gentleman Jigger takes us through another kind of underworld, the Mafia, in which low-class figures live aside the wealthiest classes of U.S. society.

The Stuartt we encounter in part two, now living in Greenwich Village, is almost a new being; he has grown his hair long, and, as Bum describes him, “the kid sparkles.” Whereas in the first half of the fiction Stuartt presented himself as a knowing wit, here we see him admitting to Ray, a young handsome Italian vaguely connected with the mob, that he has never had a gay sexual experience before. His clumsy attempts at love are met with a feeling from Ray that he needs to protect and educate the innocent neophyte. This new Stuartt, moreover, although still very much a philosophus gloriosus, is far more modest and honest in expressing his ideas. In Niggerati manor he lived without a job in utter poverty; now he is selling his art, and his apartment has become a meeting place for Village artists, young hoodlums, and visiting art patrons—the perfect location, of course, for his further musings on various subjects, sacred and profane.

So fabulous are the characters in this section that it becomes hard to tell whether or not Nugent is still writing a roman à clef or has abandoned it for pure fantasy. If the events are accurate, as Wirth suggests, we must rewrite the annals of gay history to include noted Mafia members. But in another sense, it makes no difference, since the overriding structure of the book continues to be the form of the anatomy.

After his affair with Ray, Stuartt moves up the Mafia social ladder by taking up with “the biggest shot known to Ray,” Frank Andrenopolis, the so-called “Artichoke King,” (a character likely based on mobster Ciro Terranova, who controlled much of New York before “Lucky” Luciano). Although generally heterosexual, Frank, who has been turned into the police by his moll, casually begins a sexual relationship with Stuartt that only enhances the young artist’s reputation. On a trip to Chicago, the two encounter the big mob leader, Orini (based on Luciano), to whom Stuartt takes an immediate disliking; offended, Orini drives Stuartt to his lakeside mansion, undetermined whether to beat him or make love. Playing dangerously with Orini’s notions of manhood, Stuartt escapes the beating, and woos the mobster into bed. Stuartt also attracts the attention of Bebe, Orini’s mistress, and threatens to sign her and himself as dance performers at a local club, unless Orini is willing to buy her out of the contract.

Next door to Orini’s mansion Stuartt encounters the socialite Wayne Traveller (probably based on Grace Marr, with whom Nugent formed a platonic relationship and later married); she further promotes Stuartt’s career. More success follows, as Stuartt, presumed to be white, does the costumes for a musical (in real life, Nugent had a non-speaking role in Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy) and dances in a film with Bebe. In the midst of these joyous activities, however, a young boy enters the theater asking for donations for the Scottsboro Boys, and Stuartt, requesting his weekly payment, hands over the check for $3,000. Later, queried by a gossip columnist who finds his gesture a strange one, Stuartt answers: “I can’t see why it’s so funny, though. No one seems to think it strange if a Jew helps a Jew. But it’s news if a Negro helps a Negro, I suppose—.”

With that, Stuartt’s career comes shattering down upon him, as racism wins the day. Unlike Thurman’s novel, however, in which the Nugent character Paul Arabian commits suicide, Nugent turns the tables, so to speak, in his own fiction. To buy him out of his contracts, he is paid $100,000—the amount he has previously told Orini he would need to survive for the rest of his life!

So too did Nugent prevail, outliving most of the figures of the Harlem Renaissance. And while the character Nugent in the biopic Brother to Brother is presented as being homeless, in reality the artist lived out his life modestly in Hoboken, continuing to meet with the board of the Harlem Cultural Council, an organization he helped found years before. Yet there is still something terribly sad about this satiric masterpiece and Nugent’s own life, for in the end his is a story about intelligent, loving, and beautifully youthful individuals trying to survive in a world of general stupidity and hate.

¹The discussion on “The View” about the “N” word is far more relevant to the issues above than one might imagine. This discussion, brought about by Jesse Jackson’s use of the word over what he thought was a closed mike, led Goldberg to argue that white people’s use of that word meant something far different that its use in the black community, where its hateful meanings had been transformed into something that was used in different contexts—perhaps akin to the gay community’s reclamation of the word “queer.” At the time of Nugent’s novel, the white author (and long time friend to many Harlem Renaissance writers) Carl Van Vechten had just published his view of Harlem in Nigger Heaven; upon publication of the novel many of Van Vechten’s friends, black and white, were outraged and hurt. Nugent’s use of the word in Gentlemen Jigger also makes his friends quite uncomfortable, although they recognize that he is being a provocateur.

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