How to use this Page

“The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman… In Catholic doctrine, divine revelation did not end with the scriptures, but continued from age to age through the medium of the Church, to which, therefore, it was the duty of the individual to submit his private opinions. Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. If men differed in their interpretation, there was no divinely appointed authority to decide the dispute. In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God.

The effects of this change were momentous. Truth was no longer to be ascertained by consulting authority, but by inward meditation. There was a tendency, quickly developed, toward anarchism in politics, and, in religion, toward mysticism, which had always fitted with difficulty into the framework of Catholic orthodoxy. There came to be not one Protestantism, but a multitude of sects; not one philosophy opposed to scholasticism, but as many as there were philosophers; not, as in the thirteenth century, one Emperor opposed to the Pope, but a large number of heretical kings. The result, as thought in literature, was a continually deepening subjectivism, operating at first as a wholesome liberation from spiritual slavery, but advancing steadily toward a personal isolation inimical to social sanity.

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of everyday common sense.”

– Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“Lost things have their own special category. So long as they’re lost, and felt to be lost, they belong to the imagination and live more vividly than before. They make a mystery.” — Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk.

Birkerts’ best personal essays are steeped in an anxious nostalgia that is, in intensity if not in focus, all too familiar to me.

“The Pump You Pump the Water From,” on his wistfulness for the writing processes of his younger days, is online at the Los Angeles Review of Books. If you like it, pick up The Other Walk, and read that, too.

“For the young — and especially the young writer — memory and imagination are quite distinct, and of different categories. In a typical first novel, there will be moments of unmediated memory (typically, that unforgettable sexual embarrassment), moments where the imagination has worked to transfigure a memory (perhaps that chapter in which the protagonist learns some lesson about life, whereas in the original the novelist-to-be failed to learn anything), and moments when, to the writer’s astonishment, the imagination catches a sudden upcurrent and the weightless, wonderful soaring that is the basis for the fiction delightingly happens.

These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer’s world than he or she cares to admit (a common error among those who anatomize fiction) but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself comes to seem much closer to an act of imagination than ever before. My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth.”

– Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
 

Previously:

Fiction and autobiography edition, featuring Somerset Maugham, Alexander Chee, Joan Didion, Jean Rhys, and Graham Greene, and semi-estranged half-sisters AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble

“Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that, looking back, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.” — Somerset Maugham (in video above)

“I sat down to write a conventionally autobiographical novel. I wrote 135 pages, sent it to my agent at the time and she said, You know, the writing is beautiful, but probably no one is going to believe this much bad stuff happens to one person… I went to Aristotle’s Poetics, for his rules for the structuring of tragedies, and proceeded to alter my book from there, erasing the way it resembled my life and making something more and more fictional as time went on. So it’s as if I erased the core of my life and left the details to help convince, inserting an impostor who resembles me into the scene.” — Alexander Chee, on writing Edinburgh

“There was a certain tendency to read Play It As It Lays as an autobiographical novel, I suppose because I lived out here and looked skinny in photographs and nobody knew anything else about me. Actually, the only thing Maria and I have in common is an occasional inflection, which I picked up from her — not vice versa — when I was writing the book. I like Maria a lot. Maria was very strong, very tough.” — Joan Didion

“When I think about it, if I had to choose, I’d rather be happy than write. You see, there’s very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes. I think it was Somerset Maugham who said that if you ‘write out’ a thing… it doesn’t trouble you so much. You may be left with a vague melancholy, but at least it’s not misery — I suppose it’s like a Catholic going to confession, or like psychoanalysis.” — Jean Rhys

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” — Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (his most autobiographical novel)

“I know at least one suicide and one attempted suicide caused by people having been put into novels. I know writers to whom I don’t tell personal things – which is hard, as these writers are always the most interested in what one has to tell. All writing is an exercise of power and special pleading – telling something your own way, in a version that satisfies you. Others must see it differently. As I get older I increasingly understand that the liveliest characters – made up with the most freedom – are combinations of many, many people, real and fictive, alive and dead, known and unknown. I really don’t like the idea of ‘basing’ a character on someone, and these days I don’t like the idea of going into the mind of the real unknown dead. I am also afraid of the increasing appearance of ‘faction’ — mixtures of biography and fiction, journalism and invention. It feels like the appropriation of others’ lives and privacy.” — AS Byatt

“Interviewer: ‘Can you describe the process of transforming material into fiction?’ Drabble: ‘Not sticking too closely to the accidental and circu

“Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” I asked my friend Alex Chee in email this weekend, after reading a new story of his that powerfully evokes the kind of moony, depressive, sickeningly self-reflective state I’ve been in. “Because the end of this novel is completely kicking my ass. I hate what I’m learning about myself as I write it, but the dissociated part of me is fascinated that I’m learning so much about myself by writing something that is not literally about me at all.”

He replied:

I think we do. In true first person, definitely. God knows it was why writing Edinburgh was hell. When someone asked me if I wanted to work on a screenplay for it I thought ‘Not for anything in the world.’ But also, for writers, there’s a book that makes you as you make it. And in the writing of it, you learn to master both yourself and the book in a way you never have to again.

What comes to mind is advice Annie Dillard gave us, to think of yourself as going down in an old-fashioned diving bell [see above], a thread of air connecting you back to yourself. And when you must, to return to the surface. To treat an engagement with that work like deep sea diving. She meant for essays, memoir, but I found it applies to first person autobiographical fiction, too.

I guess one reason Alex and I are so fascinated by Jean Rhys is that she struggled with the same problems. But see Toni Morrison’s stern warning about writing from anything but the cold, cold brain.

Debate and discussion — but not attacks — are welcome in the comments below.

Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark,[1] dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on.

It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two groups; if pressed I’d say it’s an affinity of perspective — a morbid fixation on the absurdities of human existence — combined with precision, bluntness, and humor.

Of late, E.B. White has joined the second group. I’ve been making my way through One Man’s Meat — a collection of essays about leaving New York City for his Maine farm — and I particularly enjoyed this bit from an essay on his failed efforts to raise turkeys for money:

[T]here is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

I’ve previously mentioned this great aside, in the same vein, from his Paris Review interview:

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer — he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive for him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.

I guess the reason writers have to clear the decks is that they never know when the “moments of sustained creation” will come, and they have to be sitting in front of the page, waiting for them — and pushing through the others.

Which is to say (and to remind myself) that I’m still finishing my novel and, apart from the day job, doing very little else. Last week’s posting flare-up was an anomaly.
 

See (and hear) also: a 1942 interview with White on One Man’s Meat, rare recordings of the author reading from Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, and his response to a fan who wanted to visit him at his farm: “Thank you for your note about the possibility of a visit. Figure it out. There’s only one of me and ten thousand of you. Please don’t come.”

1. Twain for his essays, de Vries for The Blood of the Lamb, and Spark for everything. ↩

Lorin Stein’s first issue of The Paris Review is, like the beautifully redesigned website and the books he’s edited, elegant, edgy, and surprising, an unusual but cohesive mix of writing characterized by intelligence, precision and, frequently, humor.

As Stein observes in his Editor’s Note, by the time The Paris Review was founded in 1953, critics had already “been lamenting the Death of the Novel, and fiction in general, since the end of World War II.” The magazine sought to — and did — prove them wrong “not by argument, but by example,” finding and publishing “not things they considered competent, or merely worthy, but things they actually loved.” Because Stein has always done the same, he and the editorial team he’s assembled are a natural fit.

The issue includes an interview with the great Norman Rush, who discusses his early experimental efforts and the evolution of his writing process and invites his wife Elsa into the conversation as he reveals how deeply involved, on myriad levels, she is in his work. “[H]er patience with my arcane fiction was part of a greater patience, over a sort of battle we waged for years,” he says. “Some couples don’t ask much of one another after they’ve worked out the fundamentals of jobs and children. Some live separate intellectual and cultural lives, and survive, but the most intense, most fulfilling marriages need, I think, to struggle toward some kind of ideological convergence.”

Rush’s sentiments about the difficulty and sorrow of endings — “Dostoyevsky died still intending to write another volume of The Brothers Karamazov. It’s like a knife in my heart that he didn’t.” — find a partial echo in the Michel Houellebecq interview: “the last pages of The Brothers Karamazov: not only can I not read them without crying, I can’t even think of them without crying.”

Sam Lipsyte always makes me cackle, and his new story, “The Worm in Philly,” is my favorite so far (though I have yet to get to The Ask). If you’re unsure whether to read Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary, the delightful “Ten Stories From Flaubert” will stoke your appetite. And April Ayers Lawson’s “Virgin,” a fascinating and nuanced portrait of frustrated male desire, is as frankly sexual in its way as any of Mary Gaitskill’s work, and somehow also — I know this sounds paradoxical — sort of old-fashioned in its restraint.

But it was John Jeremiah Sullivan’s affectionate reminiscence of the Southern writer Andrew Lytle that made me tear up on the subway and almost miss my stop. Born in Kentucky and raised in Indiana, Sullivan knows and masterfully, self-mockingly evokes the problem of the semi-Southerner, of growing up a Yankee and being “aware of a nowhereness to my life … a physical ache.” By the time he enrolled at the University of the South, he says, “Merely to hear the word Faulkner at night brought forth gusty emotions.”

Excerpting Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking at length in any discussion thereof is both crucial and inadequate: crucial because nothing anyone could say about it would be as entertaining as the text itself, and inadequate because the only way to convey how consistently funny it is would be to reproduce the book verbatim.

In their persistent humor and charm and their seeming effortlessness, these essays remind me of the best of Twain’s.
 

You may have come across a condensed version of Amis’ hangover recovery advice in the Daily Mail a couple years ago. I enjoyed it at the time, but now, having read that section of the book in full, I’m aghast that so much was lost in the cutting. Couldn’t the editors have omitted some of the day’s news instead?

Amis advocates a two-pronged approach to hangover recovery: the physical, and the metaphysical. The third step in his treatment of the metaphysical hangover (M.H.) entails embarking on either the M.H. Literature Course or the M.H. Music Course, or, if necessary, both in succession. “The structure of both Courses … rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.”

Amis’ Rx for hangover reading:

Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lose, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick someone less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A.E. Housman and/or R.S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick F

I’ve been gearing up for Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark biography by revisiting (and reading more of) her own fiction, which was evidently treated as unsaleable for much of her career. In 1999, she told Janice Galloway:

“I used to be sold the idea that what I was writing was some little cult and people wouldn’t buy the things. Publishers used to go on that way until I just got rid of them.”

“How?”

“I got new publishers.”

Here, for no particular reason except that I’m caught up in scrutinizing her work, are the first sentences of nine of her twenty-two books:

The Comforters: “On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother’s voice below.”

Memento Mori: “Dame Lettie Colston refilled her fountain pen and continued her letter: ‘One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk & smog & get into the clear crystal.’”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: “The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be taken away.”

The Girls of Slender Means: “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.”

The Driver’s Seat: “And the material doesn’t stain,” the salesgirl says.

Loitering with Intent: “One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not yet been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me.”

The Only Problem: “He was driving along the road in France from St. Dié to Nancy in the district of Meurthe; it was straight and almost white, through thick woods of fir and birch.”

A Far Cry from Kensington: “So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence.”

The Finishing School: “You begin,” he said, “by setting your scene. You have to see your scene, either in reality or in imagination.”

Iris Murdoch’s novels were deeply informed — if not consciously shaped by — her readings in philosophy. Walker Percy found a theoretical framework for his fiction in Kierkegaard, who also influenced Kafka.

And Donald Barthelme urged his students to choose their “literary fathers” carefully, and to be well-versed in philosophy. Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s biography, suggests that reading Beckett and the existentialists gave Barthelme confidence that the kind of stories he wanted to write were possible.

Don dropped by Guy’s Newsstand…. and found a copy of Theatre Arts. In it was Waiting for Godot. He stood there and read the whole thing.

That evening, when he took Helen out to dinner, he brought the magazine with him. She had already read the play. “I found it exciting but did not see the implications for Don,” she says. “He was deeply moved and ecstatic about the language…. Each time we were in a bookstore after this, Don looked for work by Beckett and immediately read whatever he found. It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.” It would be heavily ironic, and he could “use his wit and intellect in a way that would satisfy him.”

Of course, Don’s breakthrough wasn’t that easy. “The problem is … to do something that’s credible after Beckett, as Beckett had to do something that was credible after Joyce,” he said years later.

Initially, though, the excitement! Waiting for Godot showed Don that philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on. By stripping away fiction’s stock devices, Beckett focused on consciousness. He could animate the intentionality at the heart of awareness….

[H]is discovery of Beckett and his philosophical studies were guiding him away from vague attempts at an “unlove” story. He was forming a firmer aesthetic. He grounded his magazine editing in philosophy, too, especially in existentialism as it evolved under John Paul Sartre.

I’m fascinated and inspired by this interconnectedness, but also a little wary of it. Whenever I feel philosophical or political axe-grinding creeping into my fiction, I think of Jimmy Chen’s succinct dismissal of novels whose didactic agendas overshadow their artistic ones (though I do love Brave New World — or did, the last time I read it). Your comments are welcome.
 

See also Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics, in which she imagines Socrates saying “In philosophy, if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace, you aren’t moving at all”; In defense of Big Ideas in fiction; and Wolcott on Barthelme.

I don’t measure fiction by the same aesthetic metrics as James Wood, but any impassioned Wood critique is far superior to a hundred polite hand-clappings. And it’s especially interesting to see him building in the latest New Yorker on the grudgingly admiring essay on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (”a very good novel, almost too good a novel”) that appeared in The Irresponsible Self, and extending some of the theses he began to formulate in his review of Elizabeth Costello.

In Coetzee’s novels, Wood observes, “emotions like shame, guilt, and disgrace surge beyond rational discussion.” Placing Diary of a Bad Year in the larger context of the Nobel laureate’s body of work, he argues that “Coetzee has always been an intensely metaphysical novelist, and in recent years the religious coloration of his metaphysics has become more pronounced.”

The pieties of current criticism are supposed to forbid one to inquire about Coetzee’s relation to this strain of theology. We are warned that it is naïve to confuse author and character, even when — especially when — that character is also a novelist. But if Coetzee’s novels deflect such inquiries, they also invite them, not least because of the provoking extremity, even irrationality, of their ideas. In the last entry of this novel, “On Dostoevsky,” Señor C writes:

I read again last night the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter in which Ivan hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created, and found myself sobbing uncontrollably.

It is not the force of Ivan’s reasoning, he says, that carries him along but “the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world.” We can hear the same note of personal anguish in Coetzee’s fiction, even as that fiction insists that it is offering not a confession but only the staging of a confession. His books make all the right postmodern noises, but their energy lies in their besotted relationship to an older, Dostoyevskian tradition, in which we feel the desperate impress of the confessing author, however recessed and veiled.

I’ve yet to get my hands on a copy of Diary of a Bad Year, but Wood’s critique puts me in mind of Peter Brooks’ Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, the most useful work of criticism I own, and the only one I revisit annually.

The book bears an approving dust jacket blurb from J.M. Coetzee, and cites him throughout. Here’s a passage Brooks quotes from “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky“:

The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself. The analysis of the fate of confession that I have traced in three novels by Dostoevsky indicates how skeptical Dostoevsky was, and why he was skeptical, about the variety of secular confession that Rousseau and, before him, Montaigne attempt. Because of the nature of consciousness, Dostoevsky indicates, the self cannot tell the truth to itself and come to rest without the possibility of self-deception. True confession does not come from the sterile monologue of the self or from the dialogue of the self with its own self-doubt, but … from faith and grace.

The image is of Dostoyevsky’s notes for chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov.

I couldn’t tell who the kids across the aisle were laughing at on the subway the other night, until I remembered that the cover is affixed upside-down to my copy of Angela Carter’s Wise Children. I must have looked like a madwoman, hiding behind it, reading so intently.

In honor of the forthcoming Wise Children reissue, and while we’re on the subject of the long train commute, here’s a little gentrification rant from the novel’s opening:

Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction, thus: The rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops while sounds of marital violence, breaking glass and drunked song echoed around and it was cold and dark and smelled of fish and chips. But you can’t trust things to stay the same. There’s been a diaspora of the affluent, they jumped into their diesel Saabs and dispersed throughout the city. You’d never believe the price of a house round here, these days. And what does the robin do then, poor thing?

Bugger the robin! What would have become of us if Grandma hadn’t left us this house?

When I asked Alex Ross if I could excerpt the epilogue (below) of his eloquent and persuasive The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, he surprised me by saying it was the section he reworked the most. The conclusion follows so perfectly from the history and arguments that precede it, I imagined him sitting down and dashing the finale off in an afternoon. But of course, this is what good writers do: they go over their arguments until the effort doesn’t show.

If you’d like to win a copy of

Extremes become their opposites in time. Schoenberg’s scandal-making chords, totems of the Viennese artist in revolt against bourgeois society, seep into Hollywood thrillers and postwar jazz. The supercompact twelve-tone material of Webern’s Piano Variations mutates over a generation or two into La Monte Young’s Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. Morton Feldman’s indeterminate notation leads circuitously to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” Steve Reich’s gradual process infiltrates chart-topping albums by the bands Talking Heads and U2. There is no escaping the interconnectedness of musical experience, even if composers try to barricade themselves against the outer world or to control the reception of their work. Music history is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the impulse to pit classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense. Young composers have grown up with pop music ringing in their ears, and they make use of it or ignore it as the occasion demands. They are seeking the middle group between the life of the mind and the noise of the street. Likewise, some of the liveliest reactions to twentieth-century and contemporary classical music have come from the pop arena, roughly defined. The microtonal tunings of Sonic Youth, the opulent harmonic designs of Radiohead, the fractured, fast-shifting time signatures of math rock and intelligent dance music, the elegaic orchestral arrangments that underpin songs by Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom: all these carry on the long-running conversation between classical and popular traditions.

Björk is a modern pop artist deeply affected by the twentieth-century classical repertory that she absorbed in music school — Stockhausen’s electronic pieces, the organ music of Messiaen, the spiritual minimalism of Arvo Pärt. If you were to listen blind to Björk’s “An Echo, A Stain,” in which the singer declaims fragmentary melodies against a soft cluster of choral voices, and then move on to Osvaldo Golijov’s song cycle Ayre, where pulsating dance beats underpin multi-ethnic songs of Moorish Spain, you might conclude that Björk’s was the classical composition and Golijov’s was something else. One possible destination for twenty-first-century music is a final “great fusion”: intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speaking more or less the same language.

Sterner spirits will undoubtedly continue to insist on fundamental differences in musical vocabulary, attaching themselves to the venerable orchestral and operatic traditions of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras or the now equally venerable practices of twentieth-century modernism. Already in the first years of the new century composers have produced works of monumental character that invite comparison to the symphonies of Mahler and the operas of Strauss. Thomas Adés’s The Tempest, first heard at Covent Garden in 2004, shows that a composer can still write a grand opera of ornate design and airy power in an atomizing digital age. The following year saw the premiere of John Adam’s Doctor Atomic, an opera about the testing of the first atomic bomb. Holding his lyricism in reserve, Adams marshals a ghoulish army of twentieth-century styles to summon the awe and dread of the atomic morning. Georg Friedrich Haas’s sixty-five-minute ensemblie piece in vain may mark a new departure in Austro-German music, joining spectral harmony to a vast Brucknerian structure.

If twenty-first-century composition appears to have a split personality — sometimes intent on embracing everything, sometimes longing to be lost to the world — its ambivalence is nothing new. The debate over the merits of engagement and withdrawal has gone on for centuries. In the fourteenth century, Ars Nova composers engendered controversy by inserting secular tunes into the Mass Ordinary. Around 1600, Monteverdi’s forcefully melodic style sounded crude and libertine to adherents of rule-bound Renaissance polyphony. In nineteenth-century Vienna, the extroverted brilliance of Rossini’s comic operas was judged against the inward enigmas of Beethoven’s late quartets. Composition only gains power from failing to decide the eternal dispute. In a decentered culture, it has the chance to play a kind of godfather role, able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything in the past.

Composers may never match their popular counterparts in instant impact, but, in the freedom of their solitude, they can communicate experiences of singular intensity. Unfolding large forms, engaging the complex forces, traversing the spectrum from noise to silence, they show the way to what Claude Debussy once called the “imaginary country, that’s to say one that can’t be found on the map.”

American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes is a fun book to have on hand under any circumstances. But if you’re going to prepare turkey tomorrow, it could be a crucial resource.

Thanksgiving, for reasons I won’t bore you with here, was my least favorite day of the entire year growing up. I lay awake worrying about it months in advance. But one year I somehow escaped my parents and their acrimonious festivities and celebrated the holiday with a Cuban friend’s family.

Que rico, people. Gone were the foul sweet potatoes with marshmallow, the “ambrosia” (has there ever been a more misleadingly-named dish?), the squash cooked to the point of disintegration, and the turkey tough enough to be the remains of last year’s carcass.

There were frijoles negros and maduros — comfort food to any Miamian, regardless of ethnicity — and piles and piles of other appetizers and treats. And then there was the bird, succulent and garlicky, with a little hint of citrus. I can’t even begin to tell you how the Cuban roast turkey dwarfs its Anglo counterpart.
 

The secret is the mojo. And in the updated edition of American Food Writing, writer Ana Menéndez supplements a delightful essay about her Cuban family’s first Miami Thanksgivings with a recipe for this magical marinade. Here’s an excerpt from her piece:

[C]hange, always inevitable and irrevocable, came gradually. As usual, it was prefigured by food. One year someone brought a pumpkin pie from Publix. It was pronounced inedible. But a wall had been breached. Cranberry sauce followed. I myself introduced a stuffing recipe (albeit composed of figs and prosciutto) that to my current dismay became a classic. Soon began the rumblings about pork being unhealthy. And besides, the family was shrinking…. A whole pig seemed suddenly an embarrassing extravagance, a desperate and futile grasping after the old days.

And so came the turkey. I don’t remember when exactly. I do recall that at the time, I had been mildly relieved. I had already begun to develop an annoyance with my family’s narrow culinary tastes — which to me signaled a more generalized lack of curiosity about the wider world. I had not yet discovered M.F.K. Fisher, and at any rate, I wasn’t old enough to understand that a hungry man has no reason to play games with his palate. I remember that soon after the first turkey appeared, there was much confusion over how to cook this new beast. The problem was eventually resolved by treating the bird exactly as if it were a pig. In went the garlic and the sour orange, the night-long mojo bath. When this didn’t seem quite enough to rid the poor turkey of its inherent blandness, someone came up with the idea of poking small incisions right into the meat and stuffing them with slivered garlic. Disaster, in this way, was mostly averted. And to compliment the cook one said, “This tastes just like roast pork.”

I’m trying not to go anywhere, drink too much, or read any books until I get past that deadline later this month, but a copy of Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic just arrived, and I made the mistake of opening it.

It’s hard to put down a novel that starts like this:

They drove a green rented car into central New York State to find me living wild in my apartment. Wearing shattered glasses and my hair a giant cauliflower-shaped afro on my head. I was three hundred and fifteen pounds. I was a mess, but the house was clean. They knocked and when I opened the front door there were three archangels on my stoop. My sister rubbed my ear when I cried. She whispered, — Why don’t you go put on clothes?

My family took me home to Queens and kept me in the basement. When I tried to go outside alone, they discouraged it. My sister led me by the hand when walking to the supermarket. Mom cut my meat at the dinner table. They treated me like what some still refer to as a Mongoloid. A few days of this is tenderness, but two weeks seems more like punishment. The spirit of blame stooped in a corner.

Their concern was wonderful, but the condescension was deadly. And surprising. Before opening the front door to them I really thought my life was full of pepper.

Three weeks after coming back to Rosedale I cooked a big, red breakfast for my family just to prove that I could. Not only to them, but to myself. It was September 25, 1995. I remember certain dates to organize and understand my disaster. Without them my mind is a mass grave.

It was a red breakfast because I added ketchup to the eggs when scrambling them. And to the bacon as it curled in the pan. Call me tasteless, but ketchup is the only seasoning I need.

I was so nervous that I even dressed up that morning. This bright purple suit that was loose on me and hid my tits. Made me look like a two-hundred-fifty-pound man.

Our oven was so hot I had to watch I didn’t sweat into the food. Wiped my forehead with my tie. I pulled butter from the fridge to set next to a plate of toast and if this didn’t make them happy then I was out of ideas.

But they didn’t appear. I waited a long time….

They’d hid in the bathroom. Mom leaned against the sink while Grandma rested on the toilet and my sister, Nabisase, sat on the rim of the tub. Three versions of the same woman — past, present and future — huddled in one room. With the door partway shut I was unseen and apart from them.

Mom whispered, –We should go to him.

– Yes. Grandma agreed, but they stayed there.

My family was afraid of me.
 

I expected more sympathy, actually, because I wasn’t the first one in my bloodline to go zipper-lidded. You should’ve seen when my mother tobogganed naked through Flushing Meadow Park in 1983. Four police carried her to the hospital wrapped in their jackets. Parents on the hill thought Mom was a hump-starved fiend out to abduct their children. Her illness often made her frenzied sexually. Whenever she relapsed the woman was an open womb, but Haldol had stabilized Mom’s mind for years.

There was my Uncle Isaac, too, who walked from New York to the Canadian border in 1986, and emptied out his brain pan with a rifle. So when they discovered me in that Ithaca apartment Mom and Grandma recognized the situation. Their boy had become a narwhal.

At the end of his novel, LaValle offers this explanation of the title:

An ecstatic is a term once used in places as diverse as seventeenth-century London and nineteenth-century Bengal to describe people whose actions were impossible to understand. The average person saw a man or woman who suddenly spoke gibberish or refused to bathe; a person they knew became a stranger. Seemingly overnight. Some saw these transformed people as possessed, or touched by God. Calling them ecstatics was a way to explain the unexplainable. Now, it seems likely that many of the ecstatics were mentally ill. I learned this curious history long before I finished my novel, but in the way it intertwined religious faith, the human need to know the unknowable, and mentall illness, it fit….

I’m going to have to force myself to put The Ecstatic to the side for a while, because it sounds like there could be too much overlap of with the concerns of my own book, and I don’t want to steal ideas.
 

(I should mention that LaValle is a friend of a friend, and someone to whom I once spent an hour evangelizing about The End of the Affair, but it was only recently, when I happened across his comments on Kenzaburo Oe’s 1958 novella “Prize Stock,” collected in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, that I realized I had to read his fiction.)

The Paris Review Interviews Volume II appears later this month. I’m already dog-earing my copy, so you should probably brace for an onslaught of excerpts.

What separates the best of these interviews from your average author chat is that the conversations take place in person, over days or months or years. The interviewer and writer stake out positions. They return time and again, like old friends (or enemies), to debates and ideas they know well. The final interviews, culled from all of this material, are a kind of fiction. All the clichés and plot summaries and daft or lecherous remarks stay in the cutting room, and we are able to continue believing that the authors we revere are effortlessly wise and entertaining.
 

I haven’t read García Márquez in well over a decade. (Back then I got two-and-a-half novels in before the rhapsody faded.) But I was encouraged to learn of his preoccupation with getting the very beginning of his novels just right.

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least, in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That’s why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again.

Inspiration is when you find the right theme, one that you really like; that makes the work much easier. Intuition, which is also fundamental to wriing fiction, is a special quality that helps you to decipher what is real without needing scientific knowledge or any other special kind of learning. The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It’s a way of having experience without having to struggle through it. For a novelist, intuition is essential. Basically it’s contrary to intellectualism, which is probably the thing that I detest most in the world — in the sense that the real world is turned into a kind of immovable theory. Intuition had the advantage that either it is, or it isn’t.

One of my favorite law school classes was a legal history seminar that explored the influence of Methodism and other early Evangelical sects on the development of our legal system. Although I grew up in a whacked-out fundamentalist household, I didn’t fully understand the roots of Evangelical Christianity until I took that class. Good thing, I thought then, that we now understand the importance of separation between church and state.

I’ve just started to read D. Michael Lindsay’s Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. The introduction provides both a good explanation of what an Evangelical is — they’re not all holy rollers like the dude with his arms up in the Economist photo (above) — and a depressing look at how fully some of their most extreme representatives have infiltrated our political system and other institutions of power. I’m posting the intro here with permission.

Atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza in one of Manhattan’s most celebrated ballrooms, media mogul Rupert Murdoch stepped up to a microphone. It was September 2004, and gathered before him was a Who’s Who of the New York publishing elite. “When an author sells a million copies of his book, we think he’s a genius. When he sells twenty million, we say we’re the geniuses.”

Murdoch was introducing Rick Warren, a folksy Southern Baptist preacher from suburban southern California. As head of the media conglomerate that published Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life, Murdoch had much to smile about. The book had become the bestselling work of nonfiction in history (other than the Bible) and had been translated into more than fifty different languages. Long before this, Warren had made a name for himself in evangelical circles. An earlier book, The Purpose-Driven Church, had sold a million copies, and over the years thousands of pastors had attended conferences to hear Warren and his staff talk about their approach to church growth.

That evening Warren had invited several of his friends from California to the party, and a handful of fellow evangelicals from the East Coast were in attendance as well. This was Warren’s “coming out” party — a recognition that he was now part of the nation’s elite. As I spoke to Warren’s wife, Kay, she casually mentioned that she had met Dan Rather’s wife the night before for dinner. During the party I spotted several Fortune 500 CEOs around the room. Warren was now not just a religious leader but a public leader, endowed with responsibility and influence far beyond the evangelical world.

The mood was festive and lively, but the two groups didn’t mix all that well. I was there at the invitation of a friend who knew I was doing research on America’s leadership and evangelicals. I introduced myself to an editor from another publishing house. Upon hearing that I was from Princeton, she assumed I was part of the publishing crowd. “Do you know any of these evangelicals that are here? I’m dying to meet one,” she asked.

“I do,” I replied, and then introduced her to an evangelical friend who was standing nearby. Mark, a successful businessman, had lived in New York for quite some time. He, like her, had graduated from Yale, so I used that as a point of connection when introducing the two. As I turned to continue mingling, I heard her ask: “Are there many evangelicals at Yale these days?”

It’s a good question. Evangelicals are the most discussed but least understood group in America today. National surveys show that their numbers have not grown dramatically in recent decades, but over that same time they have become significantly more prominent. Everything from presidential campaigns to student groups in the Ivy League has been linked to rising evangelical influence. Social groups can gain power in a variety of ways — by voting a candidate into the Oval Office, by assuming leadership of powerful corporations, or by shaping mainstream media. Evangelicals have done them all since the late 1970s, and the change has been extraordinary. But no one has explained what these developments mean — for the evangelical movement or for America.

Much of the twentieth century was spent disentangling religion from public life. Commerce and piety were once seen as complements to one another. But that connection dissolved with the rise of modern corporations, as the personal was divorced from the professional. Americans embraced pluralism in the workplace, public schools, and civic life, and these institutions worked to minimize sectarian differences among workers and citizens. In the process, religion lost some of its influence, becoming just one of many sources for individual and national identity. Gradually, religion was relegated to the private, personal sphere.

Yet even as this arrangement finally became taken for granted in many quarters of American life, opposing perspectives were emerging. In the 1970s, conservative Christians, many of whom had sequestered themselves in a distinct subculture, began returning to the cultural mainstream. Initially, they met with only limited success, and many observers ignored their entrepreneurial creativity and strong resolve to change America. Also, few connected evangelicals’ activism in politics with activism in other spheres, even though evangelicals regard these as more important.

Theirs is an ambitious agenda: to bring Christian principles to bear on a range of social issues. It is a vision for moral leadership, a form of public influence that is shaped by ethics and faith while also being powerful and respected. In truth, their vision is much less — and at the same time significantly more — than skeptics and critics think. To the extent that the activities of evangelical leaders point to a cohesive vision, it is not a political or cultural agenda but one grounded in religious commitment. Fundamentally, evangelicals feel compelled to share with others what they believe is the best way to make peace with God. For them, one’s relationship with the divine is primary; all other issues are secondary. This is not new, and, in fact, it is a much smaller vision for society, one that involves changing one person at a time. What is unique to the current moment is the number of high-ranking leaders who have experienced that change themselves, either before they rose to power or while in public leadership. For many of them, the evangelical imperative to bring faith into every sphere of one’s life means that they cannot expunge faith from the way they lead, as some would prefer. In this way, the evangelical vision is sweeping and significantly more comprehensive than outside observers realize. This is much more than a campaign to win the White House or a call for Hollywood to produce family-friendly entertainment. It is a way of life that has gripped the hearts and minds of leaders around the country, and it is not likely to go away anytime soon.

It is not every day that a media mogul throws a party for a Southern Baptist preacher, but things like that have been happening more and more. Harvard Divinity School, not always the most welcoming place for evangelicals, now has an endowed chair in evangelical theological studies. Every person who has been elected president of the United States since 1976 has been affiliated with evangelicalism in one way or another. Evangelicals have been the driving force behind debates over abortion, same-sex marriage, and foreign affairs. Indeed, they are prominent in virtually every aspect of American life today. How have evangelicals — long lodged in their own subculture and shunned by the mainstream — achieved significant power in such a short time? That is the question this book seeks to answer.
 

What’s an Evangelical?

There are many streams of religious tradition that flow into contemporary American evangelicalism, and those who call themselves evangelicals belong to a wide variety of Protestant denominations — and many to no denomination at all. Even some Catholics consider themselves evangelical. Despite these various tributaries and the different ways evangelicalism has been defined, there is a remarkable consensus among evangelicals about the Bible, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, evangelism, Christian living, and the church. Evangelicals are Christians who hold a particular regard for the Bible, embrace a personal relationship with God through a “conversion” to Jesus Christ, and seek to lead others on a similar spiritual journey. I define an evangelical as someone who believes (1) that the Bible is the supreme authority for religious belief and practice, (2) that he or she has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and (3) that one should take a transforming, activist approach to faith.

Evangelicalism is not just a set of beliefs; it is also a social movement and an all-encompassing identity. Because evangelicals must consciously choose their faith — ”accepting” Jesus, in the evangelical vernacular — they often have a stronger attachment to faith than people who simply inherit their parents’ religion. Within many evangelical congregations, when a person converts, he or she is asked to make a profession of faith that refers to Jesus as “Lord of my life,” and the minister often responds by challenging the new believer to dedicate every part of his or her life to God. In other words, evangelicalism is a religious identity but also much more: Evangelicals must live out their faith every moment of their lives, not just on Sunday morning. Typically, this includes talking with others about one’s faith — ”witnessing” — but it also includes things like feeding the hungry and caring for the sick.

As America has become more religiously diverse, evangelicals have begun acting on their faith in more public ways. Evangelicals see the world largely in terms of good and evil and believe that one overcomes evil through spiritual discipline — praying, studying scripture, and the like. This is what fuels their moral conviction and moves them to action. The current public activism of evangelicals is not unlike evangelicalism of previous generations. A desire to reform society spurred evangelical political involvement in the nineteenth century, and we will see several examples from the twentieth century in the chapters ahead. As one senior White House staffer put it, for him it is where “you get your moral passion furnished, your depth of commitment, because you think it’s true and right.”

Evangelicalism also encourages spiritual improvisation and individualism. Evangelicals are urged to “work out their faith” (as stated in Philippians 2), which typically entails regular spiritual disciplines like worship, prayer, and Bible study. The individualistic component of evangelicalism is important because it allows very different ways of acting on one’s faith. It is why evangelicals can, in good conscience, arrive at very different opinions about how to act on one’s faith even though they may rely on the same interpretation of the Bible and share religious convictions and sensibilities. (In this book, I use “convictions” to refer to norms, reasoning, and ideology — matters of belief. “Sensibilities” refers to matters of religious practice — routines, demeanor, perceptions, and way of life.) Also, evangelicalism does not have a religious hierarchy, which permits believers the freedom to disagree with their pastors and, on occasion, church teaching.

Evangelicals further believe that they hold a responsibility to care for society. This notion of being entrusted with a mandate to work for the “common good” is seen as a covenant between God and His people. In the Bible, this covenant referred to an arrangement with the Jews, but evangelicals — along with most other Christians — believe the New Testament extended that covenant to them. This provides evangelicals with hope and encouragement to persevere in trying to overcome evil. Things may be wrong in the world, but they, working with God, can set the world aright.

These beliefs have been critical to evangelicalism’s success as a social movement. While evangelicals hold many different opinions, they have remained remarkably united in their campaign to interject moral convictions into American public life. They aim for their leaders to exercise “moral leadership” informed by faith and are guided by a particular moral vision of the way things ought to be.

Movements depend upon more than individuals; they need resources like money and power, and these resources are usually channeled through organizations. American evangelicalism has spawned a large number of voluntary associations and organizations, ranging from publishing houses to educational institutions to social service agencies. These organizations serve as the movement’s skeleton, connected by ligaments of social networks that join leaders in common cause. Through these networks evangelicals can talk about their public activism, which both mobilizes people to act and maintains momentum once their work has begun. We will look at these institutional and expressive dimensions of American evangelicalism and how they have contributed to the movement’s forward momentum. The goal of this movement — as in any movement — is to advance: to secure legitimacy and then to achieve shared objectives.
 

American Evangelicalism: A Short History

In the nineteenth century, American evangelicalism was so influential that, in the words of one historian, “it was virtually a religious establishment.” Conservative Protestants populated the faculties of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Evangelicals were also active in politics, helping to drive the temperance and women’s suffrage movements as they had done decades earlier with abolitionism. But forces soon began to emerge to challenge the evangelical establishment, first in the academy and then in wider society. At places like Harvard, higher biblical criticism and scientific naturalism put evangelical intellectuals to the test. At the same time, strictly nonsectarian institutions such as Johns Hopkins University were established. Evangelical dominance was also threatened demographically, as waves of new immigrants began to reach American shores. Roman Catholics and Jews emigrated from eastern and southern Europe, making America much more religiously diverse. Urbanization and industrialization posed novel challenges to the existing welfare infrastructure. Soon, religious bodies were no longer able to meet the growing need for social services, and the federal government and expanding corporations were called upon to provide them.

Nonetheless, in the early twentieth century theological conservatives fought for the continued relevance of their faith. The turning point came at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Though they won in court, “fundamentalists,” as they were called by then, were ridiculed in the national media as reactionary and anti-intellectual. As a result, they set aside many of their goals for transforming society and turned their energies inward toward their own religious communities. In what has been called the “Great Reversal,” they withdrew into pessimism and separatism. Although they continued to generate new organizations, they separated from the cultural mainstream and maintained strong boundaries between themselves and wider society. Dancing, smoking, wearing makeup, and playing cards were deemed improper, and a legalistic attention to avoiding them became hallmarks of fundamentalism.

In 1942, the Reverend Harold J. Ockenga of Boston’s Park Street Congregational Church convened a group of religious leaders for a meeting. These “neo-evangelical” leaders, including Billy Graham, wanted to enter the public square again without abandoning their religious identity. They also sought to recover the tradition of rigorous intellectual inquiry wedded to a religious worldview. They founded the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and the modern evangelical movement was born.

In 1946, Carl F. H. Henry, one of the architects of modern evangelicalism, published Remaking the Modern Mind. In it, he advocated a resurrection of a faith that could “do battle in the world of ideas.” A year later, in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947), Henry urged fellow evangelicals to engage pressing social concerns like race, class, and war and leave aside internal debates over doctrinal minutiae. Repudiating the fundamentalist model of religious separatism, the NAE allowed denominations that were already part of the liberal Federal Council of Churches to join their association as well. These evangelical leaders established institutions and networks that could sustain their lofty vision. When they founded their flagship magazine, Christianity Today, in 1956, they housed it not in some suburban enclave but in an office suite overlooking the White House.

While they were committed to engaging with society, evangelicals were relatively minor players among the powerful social actors of the 1960s and early 1970s. Some evangelicals became part of a loose network of political conservatives that emerged in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 failed presidential bid. At the same time, a group of progressive evangelicals launched a news journal called The Post-American, which urged fellow believers to mobilize for social action. Jane Fonda and Malcolm X grabbed headlines much more frequently than Billy Graham or his contemporaries did. Nonetheless, Graham continued to maintain strong relations with public leaders like Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Nixon, in fact, invited Graham to be the inaugural preacher at the weekly White House church service he established.

With America’s bicentennial in 1976, evangelicals saw an opportunity to renew their commitment to public affairs, and as they saw it, “at age two hundred, the nation sought more than improvement; it longed to be born again.” That year was a turning point for American evangelicalism. First-generation leaders — like Graham and Ockenga — began to give way to new leadership. It was dubbed the “year of the evangelical” as Time and Newsweek published cover stories on the emergence of a publicly oriented form of evangelicalism. Since that time, evangelicals have become even more prominent. From the White House to Wall Street, from Hollywood to Harvard, evangelicals today can be found in practically every center of elite power and influence. When Newsweek ran its story on evangelicals in 1976, one individual — Jimmy Carter — figured prominently. When Time ran a similar cover story in 2005, the magazine profiled twenty-five leaders — and, as this book will show, they could have chosen hundreds more.
 

Looking at Leadership

At its core, this is a book about leadership and power. It explores the subject by looking at some of the most important people in the country and examining what drives them. Though most of us know that there are growing numbers of evangelicals in leadership today, we know virtually nothing about them. Information on evangelicalism as practiced by the masses is plentiful and accessible, but the same is not true for leaders. National surveys do not interview enough of them to draw general conclusions, and most empirical studies have not examined their religious lives. When religion is considered, it is seen only as one box to be checked and has been glaringly omitted from discussions about the personal side of public leadership. Is religion playing a greater role in public life?

To find out, I tried to interview as many evangelicals in leadership positions as I could find. There are two kinds of leaders who are evangelical: those who lead institutions within the evangelical movement — also referred to as movement leaders — and public leaders from government, business, and culture. Altogether, I spoke to 360 of them, making this the most comprehensive examination of faith in the lives of leaders alive today.

The movement leaders I interviewed included pastors at large churches, college and seminary presidents, and heads of evangelical organizations. The public leaders each held at least one leadership position of societal prominence between 1976 and 2006. They include two former presidents of the United States as well as two dozen cabinet secretaries and senior White House staffers. There are representatives from each of the five administrations in office during that time, with a significant number coming from the administration of George W. Bush. This is due, no doubt, to the prominence of evangelicals there, but it also reflects the time at which the interviews were conducted. While in office, officials are more readily available and responsive to interview requests.

From the business community, there were over one hundred chairmen, chief executives, presidents, or senior executives at large firms (both public and private), from fifteen different industries, forty-two Fortune 500 companies, and six members of the Forbes 400 wealthiest families. The leaders I interviewed were alumni, faculty, and administrators from 159 educational institutions, including every major university in the country. And there were leaders from television, film, journalism, and the visual and performing arts, as well as selected nonprofit organizations and professional sports.

This is a relatively homogeneous crowd. While the evangelical movement can include a variety of people, its leadership — like that of most social movements — does not reflect that diversity. Their ages ranged from thirty-two to ninety-three, with the average age being fifty-four. Practically all were married with between two and three children. White evangelicalism is still largely separate from the black church, and almost all of the leaders I interviewed are white. Just 10 percent of the public leaders I interviewed are women, underscoring the dominance of men in America’s elite ranks. These include women who have held senior positions in government (such as Karen Hughes), business (such as Borders president Tami Heim and Enron executive and “whistle-blower” Sherron Watkins), and culture (like Kathie Lee Gifford and actress Nancy Stafford). This percentage is not dramatically different from the percentage of women in Congress or the percentage of women who are corporate officers, but it is much lower than the percentage of women in the U.S. labor force and even those who fill MBA slots at top schools.

In other words, women in elite circles are still few and far between, but there are some important differences between women in general and women within the evangelical world. Gayle Miller is a good example. The former president of Anne Klein II, Miller spent her working lifetime in the world of retail fashion. When we met for her interview in Los Angeles, she spoke at length of the challenges she faced at the start of her career in the 1950s: “No one wanted to give us credit, no one wanted to sell us fabric. [The thinking was] ‘How can two dumb blondes make this on their own?”’ In the end, of course, she did make it, becoming head of the country’s market leader for professional women’s attire. During the course of her career, she turned away from her Mormon background and became a charismatic Christian through the Vineyard Church. Over the years, she has joined the boards of evangelical organizations, often serving as the lone female director. On several occasions, she encountered an evangelical bias against women, especially as she sought to recruit more women to boards or as speakers for various programs. She told me, “When I would say something like, ‘You know, women are very good organizers and speakers, and we also know how to talk to people of power,’ [the men] would just laugh.” Asked if evangelical women sense the exclusion at these various groups, she responded, “Sense it? They might as well have a sign out on the [door].” Several of the women I interviewed, like Miller, did not have children of their own, and they said that gave them more time for work. Among those with children, all said their husbands shared equally in family duties, something that is not true of most evangelicals or of most men in this country. In fact, many women executives said their husbands serve as primary caregivers for their children. Marjorie Dorr, president of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, whose husband stayed home for seven years with their sons, told me, “You can’t do this without that [kind of support].” In similar fashion, Tami Heim’s husband stayed home to take care of their daughter and her aging mother — who was suffering from Alzheimer’s — while Heim traveled the globe as president of Borders. As she began to rise within the organization, Heim’s husband quit his job as a research scientist at Eli Lilly and became the family “anchor.”

As much as these women appreciate the egalitarian perspectives of their husbands, all of them talked about their family situation with a tinge of regret. Marjorie Dorr hates that she doesn’t get home until eight at night because it makes her feel like she is avoiding family responsibilities. Karen Hughes, counselor to President George W. Bush, shocked the political establishment when she resigned to spend more time with her teenage son. “I felt like I was … shirking my obligations as his mom,” Hughes told me when we met. “When I worked in the Texas governor’s office, I had a very busy job and a very big job. But … the White House is different … It’s pretty constant and frenetic. And it is hard to balance [work and family there] … I found … that I was torn all the time. I felt like I wasn’t really able to have time for my true priorities.” She returned to Washington in 2005 after her son went away to college.

The tension between professional obligations and family expectations, grueling for all women, seems especially so for evangelical women. Some observers, especially feminists — even evangelical feminists — were “mad,” Hughes said to me, when she left her powerful position in the Bush White House “because they thought that it … made it look as if women couldn’t get to the top without leaving it all for their family.” Hughes said her evangelical faith did not compel her return to Texas; if anything, she felt that it sustained her as she tried to balance work and family. Nevertheless, even though most of their own families do not exhibit the patriarchal tendencies typical of American evangelicalism, these leaders feel torn between family desires and professional ambition. From talking with many female leaders, it is obvious that the evangelical community does not support them enough in juggling these competing demands, a topic to which we will return later.

The vast majority of the evangelicals I interviewed are Protestant, and most are involved in some type of faith-based small group. They are not particularly loyal to a single congregation or even a single denomination. Almost three in five have switched congregations and denominations more than once, and the figure is even higher (80 percent) among younger leaders. Surprisingly, more than half of all leaders talked about embracing the evangelical approach to faith — ”deciding to follow Jesus,” in evangelical parlance — after high school. Evangelicalism’s most prolific pollster, George Barna, has found that “if people do not embrace Jesus Christ as their Savior before they reach their teenage years, the chance of their doing so at all is slim.” This suggests that American leaders’ spiritual journeys are noticeably different from those of the general population. Faith is important to them, but they often embrace it later in life.

What does the typical evangelical public leader look like? Meet William Inboden. Educated at Stanford before earning a PhD in history at Yale, Inboden is like many other leaders I interviewed. He held several influential positions before assuming his current role at the National Security Council and was a primary author of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, legislation that reflected growing evangelical activism in foreign affairs. As Inboden has worked into the upper echelons of government, he has not jettisoned his evangelical convictions; in fact, he regards them as deeply enmeshed in his work. He told me, “My work and [professional] gifts are a stewardship from God to be used for his glory … [It requires] me to act with honor and integrity and to love those whom I work with as [ones] created in the image of God.” Like others I interviewed, Inboden embraces an irenic, ecumenical spirit that has emerged in recent years among Protestants and Catholics, and he believes there is an “imperative” that he share his faith with others. Inboden has also been involved with various networks of influential evangelicals, groups that have helped advance his own career. To support his studies at Yale, he received a Harvey Fellowship, which is a scholarship for talented evangelical graduate students. And while in Washington he has participated in evangelical groups like Faith and Law and Civitas. Inboden’s vision is shared by many I interviewed: an evangelical engagement with the political, intellectual, and cultural currents of the day in such a way that people of faith not only “follow the culture [but actually] shape it.” That, in brief, is a snapshot of evangelical leaders today and what they hope to accomplish from within the halls of power.

Since 1976, hundreds of evangelicals like Inboden have risen to positions of public influence. But they have not done so by chance. The rise of evangelicalism is the result of the efforts of a select group of leaders seeking to implement their vision of moral leadership. They have founded organizations, formed social networks, exercised what I call “convening power,” and drawn upon formal and informal positions of authority to advance the movement. Sociologist Randall Collins has argued that recognition and acclaim are bestowed upon leaders and ideas through structured, status oriented networks. Over the last three decades, the legitimacy that has come to the evangelical movement has come through the political, corporate, and cultural leaders who were willing to publicly associate with it. Evangelicalism, with its history of spanning denominational boundaries, is well suited to help evangelicals build connections with important leaders and prestigious institutions. They have formed alliances with diverse groups, giving the movement additional cachet and power in surprising ways. Leaders are often at the vanguard of a movement, and this book shows how evangelicals endowed with public responsibility have been at the forefront of social change over the last thirty years. By building networks of powerful people, they have introduced evangelicalism into the higher circles of American life. The moral leadership they practice certainly grows out of their evangelical convictions, but it also reflects the privileges they enjoy and the power they wield. Indeed, their leadership is an extension of — not a departure from — the elite social worlds they inhabit.

As I left the News Corp party that Rupert Murdoch threw back in 2004, I was handed a gift package with a note from Rick Warren inside. It read:

Thank you for honoring me with your presence this evening. No one is more amazed than I am with the Purpose Driven Life phenomenon. Who could have predicted it would make publishing history? It’s both astonishing and humbling. Because you are a leader that has expressed some interest in living with purpose, I’d like to invite you to be part of a very exclusive group. Each Thursday morning I lead an international study by conference call for influential leaders. It is a by invitation only group that has included some of the best known leaders in entertainment, business, politics, education, sports, media and the military. It is quite a mix of people, with the only common denominator being people of influence who have a desire to live with more purpose in their lives. If you are interested in listening in on one of these calls, just email [me] and I’ll send you the details.

Last month I took some time away from the site to deal with various things, including possible eye surgery.*

While worrying about everything that was piling up — all the books I’d never get to and the email I couldn’t answer — I pulled Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem from the shelf and rediscovered her essay “On Self-Respect.”

Every writer with a day job and guilt issues should read this part toward the end:

If we do not respect ourselves … we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Hellen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous…

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something so small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — their lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

* Since then I’ve met with four doctors, one of whom alerted me to some medicines and less invasive options I hadn’t known about. I’m not particularly interested in having my skull tampered with when something else might work, so for now there will be no cutting. But thanks for all your well-wishes.

A couple weekends ago I was still struggling with that essay about my ex-boyfriend. I’ve tried to write about our relationship many times over the years, in at least five or six completely different ways, and I was starting to worry that this was just the latest abortive attempt when my friend Phil sat me down and told me to strip away the distance. He told me to make those years exactly as fucked-up on paper as they actually were in life.

I was annoyed. Easy for him to say, I thought. This is my fucking life, and my fucking essay, and I’ll write it the way I want.

But once the three-year-old in me quieted down, I tried following his advice. Now I’m putting the finishing touches on something that I’m not sure anyone related to me by blood or marriage should ever read.
 

Apart from Phil’s advice, it helped to hear Joshua Ferris read from his New Stories from the South contribution at McNally Robinson last week. “Ghost Town Choir” is funny, but, like his novel, it’s also sad, and true. I admired the piece when I read it in the anthology, but hearing it out loud, I was struck by Ferris’ deft interweaving of first-person narration with the most natural dialogue.

The action transpires in a trailer park following a break-up. I’ll include an excerpt here, from the perspective of a young boy whose mom has split with her boyfriend. As you’re reading, be sure to pause in your head every time someone speaks.

When I got home she was pulling up the kitchen floor. She had on her tool belt, and about a hundred tools were everywhere except for in her tool belt, and her bangs were sticking to her forehead like how they do when she cleans. About half the floor had been peeled away. “Mom, what are you doing?” “What does it look like?” she asked, without looking up. “Okay, but why?” “Because it’s brown,” she said. I didn’t understand. She looked up finally and swept her hand across the trailer. “Just look around you, Bob,” she said. “Everything’s so fucking brown. Aren’t you sick of it?” I didn’t know what she meant other than the TV and the lamps. And the fridge was brown. And the carpet. I guess I never noticed before how much brown we had with us in that trailer. “How come you don’t like brown?” I asked. Then she pulled up the floor really hard with some kind of gripper tool. Her face was scrunched up from it. That strip tore like saltwater taffy all the way across the floor to the carpet. Then she breathed.

“Brown,” she said, leaning back on her knees, “is the color of men.” She started to count off on her fingers again. “Brown smiles, because their teeth are brown. Brown mustaches from their tobacco. Brown penises swinging all over the place, standing up to say hi under the brown sheets. I’m sick of those fucking sheets, too,” she said. “They’re going. We’re starting all over again at the Wal-Mart.”

I went out to play in my fort, and when I came home, she had painted some of the house. I went in for some bologna, and my hand came back all cold and wet and white. She was at the kitchen sink, cleaning off the paintbrushes. “Oh, Bob, she said, “I just finished with that. Now look what you’ve done.” “Mom,” I said. “You painted the fridge?” She took one of the paintbrushes and smoothed out the handle of the fridge where my handprint was. “Why’d you paint the fridge?” I asked. “Weren’t you sick of putting your food in a cold turd?” she asked. “Don’t you want a fridge that’s white, like in the commericials?” I looked at it up close. It looked dirty still because the brown showed through the new paint. “Don’t you ever just get sick of your old life?” she asked me. “Don’t you ever want change? Even if it’s just a color? Just some stupid change?”

Image of Gainesville’s Hidden Village Apartments found here.

Being prone to depressive episodes and obsessive, cyclical thinking, I have found that focusing too intently — by which I really mean, too emotionally — on the book I’m writing jeopardizes my mental equilibrium.

It also clouds my prose and diverts the path of my action, and causes my characters to become inert and maudlin and spend several paragraphs contemplating the existential significance of a dog turd or shriveled cherry blossom. I dread rereading the latter parts of the draft I wrote two summers ago, because I distinctly remember one such cherry blossom digression.
 

I’m sure I’ll never manage to eradicate all melodrama from my writing process, but I got a (slightly grim) laugh out of Toni Morrison’s wise counsel in the last few paragraphs of her 1993 Paris Review interview:

Interviewer: Do you ever write out of anger or any other emotion?

Morrison: No. Anger is a very intense but tiny emotion, you know. It doesn’t last. It doesn’t produce anything. It’s not creative… at least not for me. I mean these books can take at least three years!

Interviewer: That is a long time to be angry.

Morrison: Yes. I don’t trust that stuff anyway. I don’t like those little quick emotions, like, I’m lonely, ohhh, God… I don’t like those emotions as fuel. I mean, I have them, but –

Interviewer: — they’re not a good muse?

Morrison: No, and if it’s not your brain thinking cold, cold thoughts, which you can dress in any kind of mood, then it’s nothing. It has to be a cold, cold thought. I mean cold, or cool at least. Your brain. That’s all there is.

Sex-trade-positive arguments aren’t unique to the Postfeminist era, however passionately two decades’ worth of women’s studies professors may wish to lay claim to them.

More than a hundred years ago, in 1900, the Everleigh sisters founded a high-class brothel with the aim of elevating the industry in Chicago. They believed prostitution was a viable career, one as worthy of respect as stenography or sewing. But the wives — and Evangelicals — of the city disagreed. And eleven years after opening its doors, the Everleigh Club disbanded amidst “white slave trade” panic.

My friend Karen Abbott’s Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul tracks the rise and downfall of the notorious whorehouse. This excerpt, “Knowing Your Balzac,” appears with permission of the publisher.

Pulled or prompted, men came to the Everleigh Club. They came to see the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, inspired by Madam Babe Connors’s place in St. Louis, with a floor made entirely of reflective glass. In Minna’s eyes, this parlor paid bawdy tribute to Honoré de Balzac’s The Magic Skin — a mirror with numerous facets, each depicting a world. They came to hear the Club’s string orchestras — the only bordello in the Levee featuring three — and its professor, Vanderpool Vanderpool, whose repertoire included a chipper rendition of “Stay in Your Own Back Yard,” one of the most popular tunes of the era…

They came to see the thirty boudoirs, each with a mirrored ceiling and marble inlaid brass bed, a private bathroom with a tub laced in gold detailing, imported oil paintings, and hidden buttons that rang for champagne. They came to eat in the glorious Pullman Buffet, gorging on southern cuisine and the creations of the Club’s nationally renowned head chef. On any given night, the menu’s specials might offer

ENTREES
supreme of guinea-fowl
pheasant
capon
broiled squab
roasted turkey, duck and goose

SIDES
au gratin cauliflower
spinach cups with creamed peas
parmesan potato cubes
pear salad with sweet dressing
stuffed cucumber salad
carrots (candied or plain)
browned sweet potatoes

Minna’s favorite boys dined again after midnight on a feast of fried oysters, Welsh rarebit, deviled crabs, lobster, caviar — unadorned save for a dash of lemon juice — and scrambled eggs with bacon. For special occasions — a courtesan’s engagement, a birthday, the reappearance of a long-lost Everleigh Club client — Minna ordered the team of chefs to double the usual menu. The madam believed any event that diverted the course of a normal day was a valid excuse to host an epicurean free-for-all. They came to see the library, filled floor to ceiling with classics in literature and poetry and philosophy, and the art room, housing a few bona fide masterworks and a reproduction of Bernini’s famous Apollo and Daphne, which the sisters had failed to find in America. After learning that the original statue was at the Villa Borghese in Rome, Minna sent an artist to capture its image. She was haunted by how the exquisite nymph’s hands flowered into the branches of a laurel tree just as the god of light reaches for her. A gorgeous piece, but she admired the statue mostly for the questions it posed about clients: Why did men who had everything worth having patronize the Everleigh Club? And what if the thing they desired most in this world simply vanished?
 

They came to see the ballroom, with its towering water fountain, parquet floor arranged in intricate mosaic patterns, and ceiling that dripped crystal chandeliers. They came to see the little oddities that made the Club like no place else in the world: gilded fishbowls, eighteen-karat-gold spittoons that cost $650 each, and the Everleighs’ signature trinket — a fountain that, at regular intervals, fired a jet of perfume into the thickly incensed air. “By comparison,” wrote Herbert Asbury, “the celebrated Mahogany Hall of Washington, the famous Clark Street house of Carrie Watson, and the finest brothels in New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans were squalid hovels fit only for the amorous frolics of chimpanzees.”

They came to see the soundproof reception parlors, twelve in all. The Copper Room featured walls paneled with hammered brass; the Silver Room gleamed sterling; the Blue Room offered cerulean leather pillows stamped with images of Gibson girls; the furniture in the Gold Room was encrusted with gilt. And a visitor mustn’t forget the Red Room and Rose Room and Green Room, all done in monochromatic splendor.

They came to see the Moorish Room, featuring the obligatory Turkish corner, complete with overstuffed couches and rich, sweeping draperies; and the Japanese Parlor, with its ornately carved teakwood chair resting upon a dais, a gold silk canopy hovering above. (The Tribune noted that the Japanese Parlor was “a harlot’s dream of what a Japanese palace might look like inside.”) In the Egyptian Room, a full-size effigy of Cleopatra kept a solemn eye on the proceedings. The Chinese Room, entirely different from the ambiguously named Oriental Room, offered packages of tiny firecrackers and a huge brass beaker in which to shoot them — where else but at the Everleigh Club could a man indulge his adult and childish impulses?

“Next week,” Minna often joked, “we are contemplating putting in a box of sand for the kiddies.”
 

Ada, especially, grew obsessed with the Club’s maintenance. On the rare occasions when she joined Minna in the parlors, she spent half her time wiping smudges from the mirrors, straightening the oil paintings, checking the gold piano for unsightly water marks. “It was a happy day,” she said, “when we conceived the idea of using rubber washers from Mason jars on the bottoms of the glasses.”

The gold piano, Ada hinted, had become the love of her life — even when one client vied valiantly for the title. A man, whose name Ada never revealed (sex, both sisters agreed, was a subject best confined to business), visited often and confessed he was wild about the elder Everleigh. Ada’s admirer brought her flowers — a gesture, wrote Charles Washburn, akin to “bringing a glass of water to a lake” — and presented her with a three-carat diamond ring, which she accepted gratefully, though her jewelry collection included, among other pricey baubles, a necklace worth more than $100,000. He sent her candy, composed love notes, watched her as if she might vanish should he even briefly avert his eyes.

But her paramour’s business called for him to relocate to New York. He wrote to Ada, inviting her to join him, promising marriage. Ada was tempted — it sounded like quite the adventure. She replied to his letter, but kept postponing the trip. The man wrote again and again, pleading his case, and finally involved a newspaper reporter who happened to be a mutual friend. Ada’s lover sent the journalist a copy of her letter and asked what he could do to win her over. The reporter rushed to the Club to put in a word for his friend.

“Your letter to him plainly indicates how you feel” he said. “I never read such a charming note. It’s literature; it’s sentimental — it’s everything. What’s the matter with you?”

Still, Ada couldn’t bring herself to go. Minna had her theories as to why: Perhaps, after the antics and glamour of the Club, her sister would be bored to pieces stuck in a marriage?

That wasn’t it, Ada said.

The reporter ventured an opinion. “Maybe you didn’t care to leave your sister?”

Ada turned to Minna, and the sisters shared a wordless exchange. The reporter had come too close to the truth, an unacceptable prospect to two women who believed facts could be rewritten and improved upon. Ada’s tone lightened, and she gave an answer that sounded like something the very sister in question might say.

“I don’t think it was entirely that,” she quipped. “My sweetheart took a terrible dislike to our gold piano. He said it was feverish and unbecoming. I couldn’t forgive him for that. I would have sacrificed my diamonds, anything, but not the gold piano.”

To keep the piano shining, the mirrored walls intact, the rugs clean, and the perfume jets shooting, the sisters allotted $18,000 per year in renovations. It would be worth it, they reasoned, when patrons returned as eager to see the updated décor as the new selection of girls. It was time for the Gold Room, Minna’s and Ada’s favorite, to be entirely redone in gold leaf. A team of laborers replaced the gilt on everything from the goldfish bowls to the spittoons. It looked stunning, Minna thought, the whole room glittering from corner to corner, but that night a guest accidentally smeared a panel. The metal was still soft, and the man left a clear imprint. This wouldn’t do, and Minna couldn’t wait until next year’s renovation to have it fixed. She called in a dauber right away.

“Come, I’ll show you where a man put his hand last night,” she said, leading the handyman upstairs.

He hesitated and seemed nervous. It occurred to Minna what he was thinking, but she didn’t rush to clarify. Why ruin what was sure to be a perfectly good punch line?

“If it’s all the same to you,” he replied after a moment, “I’d rather have a glass of beer.”
 

Literary sensations like Ring Lardner, George Ade, Percy Hammond, Edgar Lee Masters, and Theodore Dreiser came and listened to stunning creatures recite poetry classics. “Until at last, serene and proud, in all the splendour of her light,” the Everleigh butterflies murmured in between sips of champagne, “she walks the terraces of cloud, supreme as Empress of the Night.” The Club entertained sports icons like James J. Corbett and Stanley Ketchel and, on one fateful night, Jack Johnson; theater celebrities like John Barrymore; a circus star named the Great Fearlesso; and gambling virtuosos, most notably “Bet a Million” Gates, who enjoyed good luck among the harlots even as he ridiculed their attempts at sophisticated discourse. “That,” he joked to the sisters, “is educating the wrong end of a whore.” Pioneers of the automobile industry came. The production of “horseless carriages” had evolved considerably since two models — the prototype Morrison electric and a gasoline-powered car from Germany — were exhibited, with little fanfare, at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1895, the Chicago Times-Herald sponsored a round-trip race from Chicago to Evanston, and two cars finished despite the foot of snow that buried the metropolitan area. No mere publicity stunt, the race launched Chicago’s auto-manufacturing industry.

Within five years, 22 local companies began building and selling horseless carriages, and by the century’s turn, 377 of them vied for space on the city’s clogged streets. The ensuing chaos — collisions with wagons, lax enforcement, arbitrary traffic signals and laws — failed to dampen the public’s enthusiasm for cars, in Chicago or elsewhere. Crowds cheered as New York drivers raced thirty miles through the streets from Kingsbridge to Irvington-on-Hudson, north of the city; and in Detroit, a man named Ransom E. Olds invented an assembly line to churn out hundreds of his Curved Dash Oldsmobiles, sold to eager consumers for $650 each. Bicycles were passé, but cars signified money, modernity, and romance. Every man sang the new hit song “Come Away with Me, Lucille, in My Merry Oldsmobile” even if he couldn’t afford to own one.

Chicago hosted its first major auto show in July 1900, five months after the Club’s grand opening. After the presentations at the official Coliseum headquarters, the men retired en masse to the Everleigh Club. They were welcome anytime — manufacturers were known to spare no expense when wooing important dealers — but Minna and Ada, for the next eleven years, always designated one “Automobile Night” during the week of the show. Companies were welcome to set up corporate and expense accounts at the brothel for their employees. A man gained admittance only by flashing an official exhibitor’s badge and was treated to a lavish feast at the Pullman Buffet, a bottle of wine, and a trip up the mahogany staircase.
Wealthy ranchers came to the Club from the Southwest; bankers and Broadway troupes sojourned from the East Coast; congressional committees indulged during breaks from the capital; and on March 3, 1902, royalty visited from overseas.
 

Prince Henry of Prussia had arrived in New York harbor in the dwindling days of February to accept a yacht built for his brother Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany, and to present the United States with his own gift, a statue of Frederick the Great. Prominent Americans viewed the prince’s trip as an opportunity to showcase the country’s brightest thinkers and shrewdest capitalists, and to flex its developing imperial muscle. The United States now claimed Hawaii and Puerto Rico as territories and prepared to trade with a newly autonomous Cuba. With the eyes of the world poised to judge Prince Henry’s reception, America would spare no expense. “England’s only chance to get even,” joked the Chicago Daily News, “is to send us over a live prince as soon as we have recovered from Prince Henry.”

The prince spent a few days in New York. He attended a fête in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and lunched at Sherry’s with J. P. Morgan, Adolphus Busch, Charles Schwab, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison.

Debate raged in the Second City, meanwhile, over an appropriate itinerary for Prince Henry. Chicago’s twenty-thousand-plus German immigrants planned to line a brilliantly lit Michigan Avenue and roar as the prince traveled past, on his way to an elaborate banquet at the Auditorium Hotel. There he would dine with 165 “representative men” of Chicago, including J. Ogden Armour, Potter Palmer, Oscar Mayer, Marshall Field Jr., and Mayor Carter Harrison II. The planning committees also approved a choral festival at the First Regiment Armory, a tour of Marshall Field’s department store, a trip to Lincoln’s grave, another stop at the Auditorium Hotel for a grand ball, and a lunch and reception at the Germania Club. The visit, all told,
would cost the city $75,000.

But the committee nixed a tour of the gory Union Stock Yards (”Prince Henry probably will brush the committee aside and visit the Stock Yards anyhow,” the Daily News sniffed. “He will want to learn how Europe feeds its armies and navies”) and remained ambivalent on whether visiting royalty should enjoy the “old feudal privilege” of kissing Chicago’s debutantes. “It won’t hurt the prince,” one committeeman argued, “to get a taste of real American hero worship.”

If Prince Henry did kiss the debutantes, he never told.

The sight Prince Henry most desired to see, however, was neither discussed by the planning committee nor detailed in the press. Such discretion benefited the Everleigh sisters, who in anticipation of the prince’s arrival at the Club on midnight, March 3, were in the midst of frenzied planning. None of the Everleigh butterflies had heard of Prince Henry of Prussia before he announced his intention to visit, so the sisters prepared lessons — not about the German royal family (who cared?), but about how to entertain them properly.

Minna stood in front of her thirty courtesans, arms waving, a conductor nearing crescendo, and told them how it would be done. Prince Henry, she announced, was the sort of man who knew exactly what he wanted. So as Everleigh girls their job was to give him something he’d never even considered.

They would enact a mythological celebration centered around Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, agriculture, fertility of nature, and — closest to Minna’s heart — the patron god of the Greek stage. She’d contacted an old friend from her theater days and ordered real fawnskin outfits for them to wear, with nothing — that’s right, nothing — underneath. No petticoats, no stockings, no corsets. Not even shoes — at least not right away. Come now, they had to begin practicing. The ritual was complex, commemorating the dismemberment of Zeus’s infant son at the hands of the Titans. There would be a cloth bull and some raw meat involved.
 

Around midnight on March 3, Prince Henry and his party rang the Club’s bell. A tall man, the prince had an unruly sprig of a beard and skin like a cracked egg. High, shiny black boots hugged his legs, making his pants bunch out in tufts over his knees. The members of his entourage wore sweeping capes and frowns that stretched to their necks. Expressions improved markedly once Minna greeted her boys and escorted them to the Pullman Buffet for dinner. At 1:30 a.m., Minna came to round everyone up, telling the girls the show was about to start—touch up their makeup one last time and don’t forget they weren’t to wear shoes. The harlots yanked pins from their hair and shook it out, slicing strands with their fingers, the messier the better. They rushed down the spiral staircase and into the parlor, where they found Prince Henry and his entourage at a long table. The girls whooped and swirled in circles, kicking, backs arching like drawn bows. The decisive clang of cymbals punctuated every move. One girl thrashed her way across the room, heading directly for Prince Henry, and just as she reached him she leapt, turned a half circle in midair, and landed on his lap, latching on to his neck. The others followed suit, and soon every man at the table was grappling with an Everleigh butterfly. Minna dimmed the lights, the signal for the second act of the show. In rehearsals she’d used real torches but found that they’d “smoked up the room,” so she’d decided to improvise during the real event.

A servant wheeled a bull made entirely of cloth into the room. The girls raced toward the structure, punching its head and biting its hide, spitting white flurries of cotton. Minna watched, nodding with approval. It was perfect, she thought. This was exactly how the infant Dionysus-Zagreus had been killed. For sound effects, a male butler bellowed each time a mouth clamped down on the bull. Then Minna pointed a finger, and servants fetched platters piled with uncooked sirloin. For ten minutes, the harlots tore into the raw strips, ripping the meat with feral bites, their faces stained with pink slashes of animal blood. The Germans loved it.

When the platters were empty, Minna threw on the lights. She would now take their visitors for a grand tour of the Club. The harlots trooped back upstairs, changed from their fawnskins into evening gowns, pinned up their hair, wiped the blood from their cheeks. A few girls brought dignitaries to their boudoirs, eager to display other talents besides playacting Greek mythology, and hurried downstairs to join the champagne toast when their guests were satisfied.

Minna instructed everyone to raise their glasses, toasting the kaiser in absentia and the prince in the flesh (although the kaiser, after learning of his brother’s visit to the Club, cast a mild insult by asking the vintage of the wine served). She was delighted when the prince returned the favor, comparing Chicago with Berlin, pointing out the American city’s ever growing German population. He called his new friends, Minna and Ada Everleigh, “fräuleins.” Ada, who never drank beer, showed her respect by gulping down a tall mug of pilsner.

Minna then ordered the table cleared. She had one more surprise.

Two butlers helped Vidette, the best dancer among the Everleigh butterflies, up to the mahogany surface. The orchestra struck up “The Blue Danube,” and the harlot kicked again and again, her feet flying higher each time, legs meeting and parting like a pair of scissors possessed. In the middle of her routine, one high-heeled silver slipper launched from her foot, sailed across the room, and collided with a glass of champagne. Some of the liquid spilled into the shoe, and a nearby man named Adolph scooped it up.

“Boot liquor,” he called, raising the slipper high. “The darling mustn’t get her feet wet.”

Without further comment, he tilted back his head, drained the champagne from the shoe, and tossed it back to its owner.

“On with the dance!” someone yelled.

“Nix,” said another guest. “Off with a slipper.” He lifted a harlot’s leg, resting it against his waist, and removed her shoe. “Why should Adolph have all the fun?” he added. “This is everybody’s party.”

Prince Henry’s entire entourage rose, yanked a slipper from the nearest girl, and held it aloft. Waiters scuttled about, hurriedly filling each shoe with champagne.

“To the prince.”

“To the kaiser.”

“To beautiful women the world over.”

Prince Henry of Prussia departed Chicago by 2:00 p.m. the following afternoon, but his slipper sipping began a trend that long outlasted his visit. “In New York millionaires were soon doing it publicly,” wrote Charles Washburn. “At home parties husbands were doing it, in back rooms, grocery clerks were doing it — in fact, everybody was doing it… it made a more lasting impression on a girl than carrying her picture in a watch.”
 

While the Everleighs made special accommodations for European royalty, they also welcomed those from the opposite end of the social scale. Madams couldn’t be part of the underworld and entirely exclude the underworld — thieves, kidnappers, burglars, safecrackers. The sisters knew, from their own history, that those who subverted the official rules often created better ones, that the right sorts of lies could become the bones of truth. They believed there were two types of men, “depraved blue nosers and regular fellows.” If a member of the former group lodged a complaint, Ada was summoned to smooth things over. “There, there,” she soothed, blaming the trouble on the heat, on an inferior grade of champagne, on a girl’s lack of refinement — never on the client himself. Minna handled the bruisers, the visitors who would sooner throw a punch than notice the label on a bottle of wine. “What kind of a man are you?” she’d chide. “Brace up, pardner, you’re not that sort, and we are sure you can lick any man in the house.” Then she would convince him, discreetly but firmly, that he didn’t want to. Minna’s men, just like most of her butterflies, were products of the lower classes and also considered on a case-by-case basis. Clarence Clay was one hoodlum who made the cut. A thief with impeccable manners, Clarence would dart down to the Cort Theater near Randolph Street, crack open a safe, pillage the contents, and return to the Everleigh Club as if he’d slipped away to use the bathroom. Minna always knew what Clarence was up to but never betrayed him. He was amiable, never hurt anyone, and spent plenty of money.

The Everleighs had to be mindful, too, of criminals among the ranks of their courtesans — some of whom weren’t as harmless as Clarence. “Honesty is its own reward,” Minna told her girls, and in her own interpretation of the concept, she meant her words sincerely. “Never have any black marks on your record. What would your future husband say if he suspected you had mistreated a man? Keep on being good girls, even if it hurts.” The sporting life wasn’t shameful, Minna emphasized, but some of the people attached to the business were. Vic Shaw, for one — no doubt livid that Prince Henry steered clear of her house during his tour — interfered with Everleigh courtesans at every opportunity, encouraging them into “vicious pathways.”

A harlot named Daisy took such a detour, sneaking a notorious bank robber — one who had not been approved by Minna — through the Club’s doors. He carried two fat satchels and checked them with a servant. Daisy escorted the robber upstairs to her boudoir and commented, casually, that she had never seen a thousand-dollar note before.

“Send for either one of the two satchels checked downstairs and I’ll show you,” said the thief, perched halfway up on his elbows. “They’re filled with big bills.”

Daisy pushed the intercom button in her room and asked a servant to fetch the bags. The servant surmised what was happening and decided this was a situation that called for Miss Minna. Together they climbed the stairs to Daisy’s room.

Minna flung open the door and saw the thief prone on the bed. Daisy was removing a container of powder from her dresser. “Excuse Daisy for a few minutes, please,” Minna said, sighing.

Daisy stepped out into the hallway.

“No knockout powders in this house, you know that,” Minna whispered in the harlot’s ear. “And I’ll give you ten minutes to get your friend off the premises. We do not cater to his kind. He’s nervous and suspicious. He’ll go quietly. Tell him anything.”

The thief took his satchels of cash and left. Daisy disappeared. She didn’t report for work that week, or take dinner in the Pullman Buffet, or tell the servants which gowns to clean. Minna and Ada wondered, between themselves, if the girl had met a bad end with her bad man. They never heard from her again, but they did get news about the bank robber. He was found in a Levee alley, not far from the Everleigh Club, his skull lopsided, his forehead frayed open like the petals of a flower. A few hard blows from a hammer.

No one paid much attention to the murder, but the cops came to the Club and sat in the parlor. Could the sisters offer any insights into the case?

Minna shrugged. “I do not know,” she said, “of any hardware dealers among our patrons.”
 

The Everleighs were relieved that whatever transpired between Daisy and her robber had done so outside of the Club. No gossip for the sisters’ enemies to gather and collect, or false footnotes to ink beside their venerable name. But two madams couldn’t guard all four corners of every parlor, and Daisy wasn’t the only harlot tempted by vicious pathways. Some butterflies were limited simply by their inferior bloodlines and coarse histories; Longfellow’s poetry would never mean more than a stream of memorized words.

Myrtle, from Iowa, whose rear end was “of the slapping kind,” as one man put it, was common in every way but her looks. She loved to show off her gun collection. Any john who was lucky enough to climb the stairs with her heard about which trinket she’d bought in which pawnshop, how much it had cost, how pretty she looked cocking it.

“I think I’d be the happiest girl in town if I could find a diamond-studded revolver,” she told one wealthy customer, and he promptly had one made for her.

One night, Myrtle decided to have a showdown among her most devoted admirers. She ordered them to choose a gun from a secret drawer in her boudoir and then meet her downstairs, in the Gold Room.

Myrtle shook her bottom one last time, for emphasis, before lounging on a chaise.

“Fight over me, boys,” she teased. “I love it.”

Growls and threats and curses gathered in an angry chorus and filtered down the hallway, attracting Minna’s attention. The men were a fumbling knot of gray silk and derby hats. Something gleamed silver, quick flashes that played hide-and-seek amid the vortex of bodies. Minna had to look twice to be sure. Revolvers — two, three, four, five of them.

Her body tightened; a muffled pounding filled her ears. She flung a hand and found the light switch and made the room black.

“Gentlemen,” she cried into the dark, “you are in the most notorious whorehouse in America.” This was no time to measure words. “How would it look to your relatives and friends to see your names splashed across the front pages tomorrow morning?”

After turning up the lights, she gathered Myrtle’s guns one by one. The men bade one another a good evening and left, properly, through the front door.
 

After Myrtle’s antics in the Gold Room, the sisters, understandably, became wary of guns. When trouble came, as the sisters feared it would, it didn’t knock at the mahogany doors. Instead it waited, lying dormant inside heads and silent inside mouths until it passed, undetected, into the Club. And then it was too late. On May 25, 1903, a balmy spring night, a woman named Helen Hahn went out driving with Larry Curtis, a bookmaker and investor. Earlier that day, Curtis had a streak of luck at the racetrack, winning $4,500,and Helen was helping him celebrate. A stenographer at the Chicago Opera House, she lived in a modest home on the northwest side, and was curious about the way life moved outside of her own. “As we were returning toward town,” Helen said, “I spoke of the fascination slumming had for me.” Curtis asked her if she might like to see some of the parlor houses along the Levee, perhaps a certain place in particular — “one of the most gorgeous establishments that ever prospered in a red-light district.” Within minutes they arrived at the Everleigh Club, and navigated clusters of laughing couples until they reached the Japanese Parlor. Corks popped in quick succession, a muted series of fireworks. Roving plumes of incense smelled by turns musky and sweet. “I found myself in a close little room, luxuriously furnished,” Helen later said, “with colored servants going softly to and fro. There was music coming through the palms which hid what I afterward learned was the ballroom, and everything was much different than I expected… Suddenly the sliding door between the two rooms was thrown open and a man in evening dress entered.”

Later, on the police record and in newspaper reports, the man’s name would be given as William H. Robinson. Levee gossips whispered that he was from Chicago and the son of a well-known millionaire — so well-known that during his foray into the Levee district, he announced he was “traveling incognito” under a pseudonym.

Whatever his real name — and the Everleigh sisters, of course, would never say — Robinson had started the evening accompanied by a friend and two showgirls. After dinner, the foursome ventured to the Everleigh Club.

The sisters were busier than ever. Six months earlier, final renovations within the “New Annex” at 2133 were completed. The additional parlors, boudoirs, alcoves, music and dining rooms generated more traffic, but with it came a greater potential for trouble. Neither Minna nor Ada was near the Japanese Parlor when Robinson pulled open the sliding door. No one to suggest to Robinson that he shoot off firecrackers instead of his mouth, no one to remind Curtis that he wasn’t the sort to respond.

“I was sitting at the piano,” Helen said, “but just drumming with the soft pedal on, and not playing so it could be heard out of the room,” when Robinson lurched in and said something “ugly” about her, so ugly that she turned her head and pretended not to hear.

“[Curtis] sprang up as the man entered,” Helen continued, “but he was so startled by the man’s remarks that he did not say a word for half a minute. The intruder started for me and I turned around. The first thing I saw was a revolver and an instant later it went off.” Curtis looked at the gun in his hand as if he’d never seen it before, a strange and sudden appendage, smoke curling up from the barrel.

Elsewhere in the Everleigh Club, its proprietors froze in midstep and quieted in midsentence, and then rushed toward the aftermath of a sound they never wanted to hear.

Robinson lay on the floor of the Japanese Parlor, unconscious. A ring of blood bloomed above his heart. A young woman sat at the piano nearby, weeping meekly into her palms. The sisters arranged for Robinson’s transportation to People’s Hospital on Archer Avenue and told a group of courtesans to summon the 22nd Street police. Two detectives stopped Curtis from making a getaway in a closed carriage.

Robinson’s heart was spared, but the bullet embedded between his ribs, possibly puncturing a lung. He was revived and his wounds dressed. The following morning, he told police he was “too weak” to proceed with prosecution.

It was a lucky break for the sisters, and not the only one. Scandal, especially one involving gunshots and a millionaire’s son, could dull the shine of a high-class resort, dilute all their talk of decency and uplift. Their journalist friends reported the story — they had to — but kept the coverage shallow and benign. Salacious mentions of “wild midnight orgies” in a “resort of considerable notoriety” didn’t hurt the situation, and the Everleighs were not asked to comment at all. Hinky Dink Kenna was a doll, furnishing $1,200 for Curtis’s bond. The two showgirls who had accompanied Robinson were fired, and his friend vanished altogether. Helen Hahn threatened to kill herself until learning that Robinson survived, then returned to her quiet life as a stenographer. Her urge to go slumming was sated for good.

Robinson became incognito once again. “The police,” the Daily News pointed out, “show little interest in the case.”

But one person in particular was very interested. Ten houses north on Dearborn Street, Vic Shaw asked discreet questions and took careful notes, built a cache of possibility in her mind. She wouldn’t confront the Everleighs directly — “Silence,” she often said, “is louder than a brass band” — and she hoped her quiet skulked behind those sisters all day long, seeped into their dreams. Next time a millionaire playboy met with trouble in the Levee, Vic Shaw would collect all the words she had stored up, and set them into motion.

Edward P. Jones initially declined the invitation to edit the forthcoming New Stories From the South 2007, but accepted upon remembering how heartened he’d been by the inclusion of one of his own stories in a prior year. I read his introduction shortly before heading down South and have been thinking about it on my travels. Here’s an excerpt:

Hither and yon, they still debate whether Washington, D.C. — where I was born and came to know what is true and what is not so true — is a part of the South. It might well be that that debate is why I have never stood up straight and asserted that I was a bona fide son of the South. I’m in the room, but I’ll stand in the corner for the evening, if it’s all the same to you. And that is another reason I first said no to choosing the stories for this book.

Still, so much is about the heart, wherein the soul dwells, and so maybe my heart, when all the standing in the corner is done, doesn’t care if Washington is north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. The heart knows enough to make me create a character who is called upon to assert, with great authority, that the South is “the worst mama in the world … and it’s the best mama in the world.” The heart knows that just about every adult — starting with my mother — who had an important part in my life before I turned eighteen was born and raised in the South. They — the great majority of them black and descendants of slaves — came to Washington with a culture unappreciated until you go out into the world and look back to see what went into making you a full human being. A culture defined by big things, by small things. By food (from greens to pigs’ feet and tails to black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day). By superstition (resting your clasped hands on the top of your head shortens your mother’s days on this Earth; “my word is my word until I die”). By speech (”fetch”; “yonder”; “a month of Sundays” — and a phrase my mother was particularly fond of using: There were, she would say, so many awful problems in the world that could be cured by people simply doing the correct and proper thing, “but that would be too much like right”).

Black people passed this culture onto me, but once I discovered Southern literature I learned that much of it was shared by whites, whether they wanted to admit it or not. I read Richard Wright and Truman Capote and Wendell Berry and Erskine Caldwell and a whole mess of other writers and came upon white people who, in their way, were also just trying to make it to the next day. Dear Lord, reach down and gimme and hand here. Those fictional white people lived in a world that was not alien to me. And yet growing up in D.C., I had known no Southern whites, except for the ones on television. As I read, I felt I knew far more about that world of people than I did about those people who lived in cities in the North, who lived, as I did in D.C., with concrete and noisy neighbords above and below and a sense that the horizon stopped at the top of the tallest building. It does not matter where Washington fits on the map; I was of the South because that was what I inherited.

While in Square Books earlier this week, I picked up the reissued edition of Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Jones wrote this introduction, too, and it’s a gorgeous meditation on first reading the book in 1965 and then returning to it years later as if “reading one’s journal that had not been opened for ages”:

The Signet paperback copies of Black Boy that the teacher, Charlotte Crawford, distributed to her 10th graders in September 1965 had white covers with a large, rather abstract black fist dead in the center of those covers. Fist as in black power, I suppose, though none of her students had ever uttered those words. We were fifteen and sixteen years old, and we were new to high school, as Miss Crawford was new to teaching. The Negro students in that D.C. classroom had none of the consciousness that children of the same color and ages in the civil rights turmoil of Mississippi or Alabama or South Carolina might have had. The riots in Washington, D.C., after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., were still a long time in the future…

The book was brand-new and it smelled new. Miss Crawford’s class had some twenty Negro children, and of the problems we had, poverty was perhaps foremost for most of us. A condition we did not have a name for yet. Some of Miss Crawford’s students wanted to know if we could keep the books — for we could count all day and night the things that were tenuous in our lives. The teacher said they were ours to keep, and I have mine to this day. The cover is creased, the pages are dog-eared, for I acquired the book before I knew how precious pages were. There are no underlined sentences. There are no notes in the margins. I had not learned that one could and should do those things; but even if I had known to do them, I would have been too amazed, too absorbed to stop. The only record I have of what I experienced as I read is the book itself and what is left of my memory. That edition of Black Boywith its red border was to be only the fourth book I ever read in my life…

It is only in rereading Black Boy — and in reading for the first time the Chicago section of the book that was not in my Signet edition — that I see much of what held me some thirty years earlier. Wright was living a southern life I knew in the city: one of constant moving from one slum to another — the heart wears itself out in having to pick itself up and make a new home so often.

Poor Billy Faulkner. From Carolyn Porter’s forthcoming William Faulkner, the latest installment in Oxford University Press’ Lives & Legacies series:

While Murry Falkner was a figure of weakness in his first son’s eyes, his wife Maud was the opposite. On her kitchen wall hung a sign saying “Never explain. Never complain” (a Victorian maxim traceable to the British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli). However disappointed she was in her husband and her marriage, she was determined to raise her sons according to her own lights, her oldest son in particular. For example, having observed that Billy was not going to be as tall as her younger boys, Maud bought him a kind of corset (a canvas vest that laced up in the back and held the shoulders back) at age thirteen and forced him to wear it for almost two years so that he would stand as straight and upright as possible, as his great-grandfather was reputed to have done. (She apparently succeeded; many would notice Faulkner’s markedly erect posture throughout his life.) Faulkner neither explained nor complained, apparently, even though the brace precluded his playing baseball, among other athletic endeavors he enjoyed…. His cousin, Sally Murry, a partial model for the adventurous little girl Caddy Compson, was similarly cursed at this time, but she so despised the corset that she got her friends to untie it. [Emphasis added.]

Many of the essays in Michael Bierut’s Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design originally appeared at Design Observer, the group blog he co-edits.

The book opens with a cautionary piece, “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content,” that should be required reading for the practitioner of any art who believes it should be practiced and considered in a vacuum. To tide you over until you can track down the whole essay, here’s a passage cobbled together from the opening and closing paragraphs.

I write for a blog called Design Observer. Usually my co-editors and I write about design. Sometimes, we don’t. Sometimes, for instance, we write about politics. Whenever this happens, in come the commenters: “What does this have to do with design? If you have a political agenda please keep it the other pages. I am not sure of your leaning but I come here for design.”

I come here for design. It happens every time the subject strays beyond fonts and layout software. (”Obscure references … trying to impress each other… please, can we start talking some sense?”) In these cases, our visitors react like diners who just got served penne alla vodka in a Mexican restaurant: it’s not the kind of dish they came for, and they doubt the proprietors have the expertise to serve it up….

[T]he great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can’t get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be.

The first two chapters of Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale are so bitchily insightful on the hypocrisies of literary culture that, if you’re a writer, your loved ones might want to hide out somewhere else while you’re reading it, lest you follow them around the house, cackling over and orating your favorite parts.

Scandal erupted in bookish London when the novel appeared in 1930. It was believed to include flimsily veiled portraits of Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy. Maugham wrote a letter to Walpole, claiming, “I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you. He is made up of a dozen people.” After the fellow writer’s death, though, he admitted that Walpole was the model.
 

The story opens as the narrator, a novelist, arrives home to discover that a far more famous writer — one whose career was set into motion with a modicum of talent and a great deal of transparent yet somehow decorous striving — has left a message for him. To his landlady’s disappointment, our hero declines to return the call right away. No one, he reflects,

could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody’s lips, but no one could more genially turn a cold shoulder on him when idleness, failure, or someone else’s success had cast a shade on his notoriety. The writer has his ups and downs, and I was but too conscious that at the moment I was not in the public eye…

I had watched with admiration [Alroy Kear’s] rise in the world of letters. His career might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily does of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when he first read that Thomas Carlyle in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word (and of late the critics have been doing it with agreeable frequency) he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle. No one who for years had observed his indefatigable industry could deny that at all events he deserved to be a genius.

All of Maugham’s fiction has at least some autobiographical component. Not long ago I came across a fascinating audio recording of remarks he made on the subject at seventy.

In one way and another I have used in my writings pretty well everything that has happened to me in the course of my life. Sometimes an experience of my own has provided me with an idea, and I’ve just had to invent the incidents to illustrate it, but more often I’ve taken people whom I’ve known, either slightly or intimately, and used them as a foundation for the characters of my own invention. To tell you the truth, fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.