Xenophobia--then and now

There are many good reasons to read B. A. Shapiro’s new novel, The Muralist, but the compelling tale of xenophobic backlash to immigrants is the most timely.

Just as irrational hysteria today grips too many Americans who want to close the borders to Syrian refugees (even stop the orphans, cries Chris Christie!)—and, per Donald Trump—even bar anyone of the Islamic faith—in the days before the United States entered World War II, a vicious policy blocked immigration of Jews who were suffering under Nazi subjugation.

In June 1940, a memo from Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long advised: “ We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls, to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”

This proposal, cruel and probably illegal, was never countermanded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Because of this policy, which blocked the valid entry of German and French Jews into the United States, some experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of Jews perished in concentration camps.

It is this historical context in which Shapiro’s fictional tale is embedded. Her novel also intertwines the story of abstract expressionists, early in their careers—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner—who are moving from more realistic work required for WPA mural assignments to a more emotional form of painting. The novel’s fictional protagonist, Alizee Benoit, belongs to this group of muralists, showing leadership as she evolves from a muralist to a more symbolic painter.

Alizee also has another mission. She becomes active in efforts to promote immigration of French and German Jews to America, including many in her own family. Her efforts bring her in contact with Eleanor Roosevelt, who is sympathetic to the cause, but ultimately unsuccessful in influencing her husband to support expanded legal immigration.  

The novel toggles back and forth between 1939-40 and 2015, where Danielle, an art historian with a major auction house and the great-niece of Alizee, is drawn into the mystery of her paintings and also her disappearance in 1940. What happened to this enigmatic muralist? Did an anti-Semitiic cabal do away with her? Danielle’s determination to pursue the mystery leads eventually to France and a wholly unexpected conclusion, both poignant and satisfying.

The novel effectively blends fact and fiction and is, at its heart, a good read. But the parallels with today’s attitudes towards “the other” will resonate long after the pleasure of the story fades.

William Zinsser RIP: 1922-2015

I was never taught how to write. Like most people, I suppose, I just wrote. Despite degrees in English literature and journalism, I never had a class in creative writing. I had a certain facility, but mostly, I bumbled along, teaching myself.

At some point, I discovered William Strunk and E. B. White’s classic, The Elements of Style, and fell under the spell of their good sense and clear instructions. I followed their advice to emphasize verbs, choose the active voice over the passive, and, most important,  “omit needless words.”

Soon after, I found On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser. Happy day! If Strunk and White were my avuncular, slightly old-fashioned guides, Zinsser was a wry graduate advisor, the kind of teacher you want to spend hours talking with at a coffee shop. Or pub.

In fact, Zinsser taught a popular writing class at Yale, and his talks there were the basis for On Writing Well. First published in 1976, the book has gone through numerous editions and sold more than 1.5 million copies.

A 2013 profile of Zinsser in The New York Times described the book’s impact:

In newsrooms, publishing houses, and wherever the labor centers on honing sentences and paragraphs, you are almost certain to find among the reference works a classic guide to nonfiction writing called “On Writing Well,” by Mr. Zinsser. Sometimes all you have to say is: Hand me the Zinsser.”

I have certainly reached for “the Zinsser” over the years of my own writing and teaching. His classic advice—“get rid of clutter,” “Beware…the long word that’s no better than the short word”—does not dim with time.

Zinsser wrote about usage, simplicity, unity—and he encouraged writers to be authentic and reveal themselves and their enthusiasms. From the personal transaction “at the heart of all good nonfiction,” he wrote, come two important qualities: humanity and warmth. “Good writing,” he said, has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks…[but] a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.”

Not least, like the good writer he was, Zinsser doesn’t just tell—he shows. Two facing pages reproduce the final manuscript of his book, showing dozens of his editing marks, all in the service of making the writing tighter. And this was his fourth or fifth draft. Instructive and humbling.

Through his long career as a journalist, teacher, film critic, editor, and writer, Zinsser honed his own writing skills and coached countless others. Even at the age of 90, two years before his death, and blind from glaucoma, he continued to coach writers, the famous and not so famous. He listened as students read their work in progress, helping them “organize their thoughts by condensing, reducing—learning what not to include,” said The New York Times article.

Zinsser ended one chapter in On Writing Well with the rhetorical question—“Can  [principles of writing] be taught?”

“Maybe not,” he answers his question. “But most of them can be learned.”

I keep learning. Hand me the Zinsser!

A question of identity

Who are you—really?

Is your name your identity? You have a passport, a driver’s license, a Social Security card, credit and bank cards—all attesting to who you are.

But what if all those tokens of identity are stolen? What if you are trapped in a chaotic foreign city and have no proof of your identity—and no money?

That’s the situation in which the unnamed protagonist in Vendela Vida’s novel, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, finds herself. The young American woman arrives in Casablanca, fleeing from some unspecified trauma, and checks into a shabby hotel. Almost immediately, someone steals her backpack, which contains her passport and all other other items of identity and credit.

The woman is exhausted, incredulous, defeated. The hotel staff and local police chief claim to want to help—but are they really in on the theft? The American Embassy is no help, either; a staffperson there suspects her of fraud. In this world of shifting alliances, our heroine grows paranoid, afraid to trust anyone.

And she is alone, without money, without any way of proving that she is who she says she is. So she makes some bad decisions. Or maybe they aren’t bad—maybe, born out of desperation, they are creative choices. As opportunities arise, she creates new identities, and, chameleon-like, begins to inhabit them fully.

Suspense and wry humor mark Vida’s novel. Initially, I was distracted by her use of the second person (“you”) to signify the woman’s first-person point of view (example: “You awake to knocking. You look at the pillow…”), but I got used to it after the first 20 pages or so. By then, I was completely immersed in the twisting, perilous path of this stranger in a strange land.

Day-by-day--a reader's delight

If you’re an avid reader, you no doubt have lists of books-to-be-read and stacks of books you bought or were given but still haven’t cracked open. So, it’s not as if you don’t have anything to read.

But what if you’re restless or just want a fresh jolt to guide you to a book you want right now?

I highly recommend Hallie Ephron’s compact guide, The Bibliophile’s Devotional. Each day of the year has a page that introduces you to something wonderful to read—mostly fiction, some classics, some contemporary; a little nonfiction; and even a couple of poetry suggestions. Each entry begins with the book’s first line, then includes a summary, and ends with a line from a review or quote about the book.

For example, take today (June 9). We read the enticing first line of O Pioneers! by Willa Cather:

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover,  anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.

Ephron succinctly describes the 1913 novel, deftly capturing its portrait of immigrants making their way in a harsh new land. The entry ends with a quote from Katherine Anne Porter in a review lauding Cather as having “clearness, warmth of feeling, a sense of the artist who could be trusted…”

Each day’s entry is equally delectable, inviting the reader to consider choosing that book to read—or re-read—that very day. Or soon.

There’s an art to summarizing the essence of a book in a few sentences, and Ephron has mastered that art. What a wonderful way to start every day, exploring possible new reading.

I bought this book for myself the year it was published (2009) and started every morning by reading the day’s passage. I recently came across my little book and was reminded of what a gem it is—and I’m going to re-read it, day by day, beginning tomorrow.

A note: The Bibliophile’s Devotional is available on Amazon, but recent reviewers note that the Kindle version has faults. It may be a better bet to try to find it at a second-hand store or library book sale. It is worth the hunt.

Euphoria

What a wonderful book Lily King has given us. You could almost say that I am euphoric over it.

My dictionary defines euphoria as “a feeling of great happiness and wellbeing.” Nell Stone, the novel’s protagonist, an anthropologist working in New Guinea in the 1930s, describes it as a turning point, a transcendent moment in her field research:

It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly, it falls within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment, the place feel entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.

I think this passage perfectly captures the sense of professional joy that Nell—a stand-in for anthropologist Margaret Mead—feels. As imagined by author Lily King, Nell/Margaret is a gifted anthropologist, gracious and easy with the native people she lives among, a skilled listener, a demon worker, and brilliant at making connections, seeing patterns of culture. King brings alive the quotidian details of field work, the hardships, and the frustrations—as well as the thrilling breakthroughs. Almost immediately, the reader is immersed in the world of the Sepik River tribes and the anthropologists who try to understand their lives.

At one level, Euphoria is a great love story, a triangle with tensions intensified by the claustrophobic environment in which three anthropologists work. The tale is based on a period in Mead’s life when she was doing fieldwork with her second husband, Reo Fortune (Schuyler Fenwick, or Fen, in the novel). The couple developed a professional and personal relationship with English anthropologist Gregory Bateson (Bankson in the book).

Fen is brash, confident, desperate to make a scientific breakthrough and thus a name for himself. Jealous of his  wife’s success in the field, he treats her badly and, eventually, pushes way beyond professional boundaries in his quest to win fame.

Nell, gifted and hardworking, yearns for a kindred spirit and someone who cares for her. Bankson meets both those needs, and, inevitably, they are drawn together.

The story’s ending is not unexpected, yet the real-life ending is more felicitous. (Not to throw in a spoiler, but it is well known that Mead did divorce Fortune and marry Bateson.)

Euphoria is meticulously researched, and King is clear about what specifics are fictional. But she surely has captured the essence of this period in Mead’s life. Mead’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, herself an anthropologist, says that her parents “[fell] in love in an intense fever of conversation and theory building near the shores of the Sepik River in New Guinea.” In her book, With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, she says that the three anthropologists “talked for hundreds of hours” in the claustrophobic space of an eight-square foot “mosquito room,”  adding, “It is hard to visualize the kind of feverish atmosphere that must have characterized that interval.”

But King does visualize the claustrophobia, the intensity, the tensions. With language spare and affecting, she brings us readers into a world where brilliant social scientists strive to make sense of the societies they were observing—and to make sense of their own tangled relationships.

Euphoria works on so many levels. Reading it really does evoke “a feeling of happiness and wellbeing.”

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Apologies for letting this blog lapse for so long. A pile-up of life events kept me preoccupied this winter and spring. But I’m re-energized, and new posts are in the pipeline

—Katie Baer