New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Thomas Mann: New Ways to Spoil Your Children

Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was obvious from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three — the barely tolerated ones — were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone… the other three children stared in horror, and my father said sententiously with emphasis: “One should get the children used to injustice early.”’

Some things ran in the family. Homosexuality, for instance. Thomas himself was gay most of the time, as his diaries make clear. So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed suicide, as did his sons Klaus and Michael, as did the second wife of his brother Heinrich. Also, gerontophilia. Bruno Walter was almost as old as Erika’s father when she had an affair with him; and in 1939 Elisabeth married the literary critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who was thirty-six years her senior.

And then there is the small matter of incest. Much interest in this was fuelled by incidents in Thomas Mann’s own work. In her useful and sympathetic book about the Mann family, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain, Andrea Weiss writes: ‘Just how much Katia and Klaus Pringsheim loved each other was the subject of public gossip and private distress, especially when Thomas Mann, married to Katia for only a few months, used his wife’s relationship with her brother as the basis for one of his novellas.’ The novella, The Blood of the Walsungs, dealt with the incestuous relationship between a twin brother and sister; Katia’s father attempted to have the story suppressed.

Such rumours also existed about Erika and Klaus, much encouraged by Klaus’s play on the subject, The Siblings, and made their way into Gestapo reports when the siblings went into exile and FBI reports about them once they arrived in America. (In the mid-1920s Klaus helped to keep things in the family by having an affair with Erika’s first husband, Gustaf Gründgens.) In his novel The Volcano, Klaus allowed the character based on his sister to marry the character based on his father. In Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner, the hero, Pope Gregorius, marries his mother — who is also his father’s sister.

In his diaries Thomas Mann explored his own sexual interest in Klaus: ‘Am enraptured with Eissi,’ he wrote in 1920, when Klaus was fourteen (Eissi was his nickname), ‘terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son… It seems I am once and for all done with women?… Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’. He used some of this same language to describe Jacob’s interest in the young Joseph in Joseph and His Brothers, and in the novella Disorder and Early Sorrow, written when Elisabeth was seven, the relationship between the bookish father and his young daughter, clearly based on Mann’s relationship with Elisabeth, is heated and fervid enough to make any reader marvel at what a wonderfully daring imagination the old magician was in possession of.

By the time Hitler came to power in 1933 Thomas Mann, at fifty-eight, was in possession not only of this daring imagination but of the Nobel Prize, which he had received in 1929. He lived in a large and beautiful house in Munich and owned an idyllic summer house on the Baltic that he had built three years earlier — a house subsequently requisitioned by Goering. Mann had a reputation as the most serious-minded and respectable German alive. He enjoyed his fame and his family, his bourgeois comforts and his mornings alone in his study writing essays and fiction. The Manns lived well, their son Golo later wrote, thanks to the Nobel Prize and the tremendous earnings of The Magic Mountain. They took trips, they ate and drank well, and two large cars stood in the garage: an open American car and a German limousine. When they went to the theatre, the chauffeur waited in the lobby with their fur coats at the end of the performance. This style of life, which they went to no trouble to conceal, made their growing number of political enemies hate them all the more.

Thomas Mann was unprepared for exile. In a letter, he wrote: ‘I am too good a German, too closely involved with the cultural traditions and language of my country for the prospect of a yearlong or perhaps life-long exile not to have a hard, ominous meaning for me.’ He was so unprepared that, on leaving the country less than a month after Hitler became chancellor, he failed to take his diaries and the pages of the novel he was working on. Publication of the diaries would have considerably dampened the warm welcome he was to receive in America.

By 1933 Erika and Klaus Mann were famous too. Thomas Mann had not encouraged Klaus to become a writer, noting in his diary that his fourteen-year-old son’s intention to send stories to magazines was ‘a folly from which he must be dissuaded’. As adolescents, Erika and Klaus wrote plays and stories. While still teenagers, they made their way to Berlin, where Erika was determined to become a famous actress and Klaus a famous writer. As soon as he began to publish essays and stories, Klaus traded on his father’s fame with a mixture of brazenness and unease. A cartoon appeared in a satirical magazine showing him in short pants next to his father. The caption read: ‘I am told, Papa, that the son of a genius is never a genius himself. Therefore, you can’t be a genius!’ Bertolt Brecht wrote: ‘The whole world knows Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. By the way, who is Thomas Mann?’ When The Magic Mountain appeared in 1924, Thomas Mann wrote in his son’s copy: ‘To my respected colleague — his promising father.’ Klaus was foolish enough to show it to a friend and it was quoted regularly in the press. Klaus, as he entered his twenties, was both a wunderkind and a joke.

Thomas Mann, unlike his son, was an immensely complex figure, conservative in his manners and ambiguous in his politics and, for many years, in his German nationalism. He could have been a senator and businessman like his father had it not been for something rich and almost hidden in his nature that set him apart. It was not merely a hidden sexuality, or something inherited from his slightly daft mother, but an imaginative energy and dark daring that, combined with an astonishing steely ambition and solidity, enabled him to produce Buddenbrooks when he was twenty-five.

Klaus was always simpler to read. He was fluid and generous and flighty. He kept nothing in reserve, and this, despite his obvious literary talent, made him melancholy. His father’s deep, almost obsessive interest in death was entertained and kept at bay because Thomas Mann placed it at the service of his work; a sense of doom and disease filled the pages and the spirit of the characters in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and many of Mann’s best stories. Mann comes to us a writer of many layers and guises. Much can be read into his work, and it is easy to understand the interest of scholars in finding a key to his peculiar artistic systems and to hidden aspects of his life. He had to be careful, once he arrived in the United States, about his sexuality and his shifting relationship with aspects of Germany that, after 1933, had become deeply unsavoury and shameful. In Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann (2003), Michael Maar argued, however, that Mann was, for much of his life, especially with his family, his friends, and in his work, unusually open about his sexuality.

Instead, searching for secret elements in his fiction, Maar insisted that one theme impelled and nourished Mann’s imagination more than any other. He found image after image from the beginning to the end of his work of murder, blood, knives and sexual pleasure. He suggested that this was the key to Mann’s work and perhaps to his life. ‘We can venture,’ he wrote, ‘the thought experiment that if Thomas Mann had committed an actual crime and sought to give an account of it in his fiction, the work would not have taken a different form than it actually has.’ He suggests — almost convincingly — that in Naples, in the mid-1890s, when he was a very young man, Thomas Mann did something, or witnessed something, or was closely implicated in something that involved sex and murder. And that what he did, or what he witnessed, both maimed and energized him and made its way into what he wrote over sixty years. It hardly matters whether Maar’s hypotheses are true or not. What is more interesting is the way Mann’s work continues to be examined and reread, as though the key to it remains in some furtive, cloaked part of his dark and exotic psychosexual being. ‘It is as well,’ Mann wrote in Death in Venice, ‘that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not its origins.’

Klaus, on the other hand, had no secret crimes, real or imaginary, on his conscience; instead of writing about death as his father did, he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit. As early as 1932 he wrote in his diary that he had thought about suicide. In February 1933 he wrote: ‘In the mornings, nothing but the wish to die. When I calculate what I have to lose, it seems negligible. No chance of a really happy relationship. Probably no chance of literary fame in the near future… Death can only be regarded as deliverance.’ What makes Klaus a subject of great fascination in Germany now, however, is not his dance with death but rather that he saw the rise of Fascism more clearly and presciently than his father did and bravely set about opposing it in every way he could while also managing to take drugs and have lots of sex. As the prevaricating father struggled with ambiguities, both political and sexual, he made masterpieces from the fight. The son was a simpler soul, more open about his sexuality, more certain of his beliefs. Out of that he made a few almost interesting books.

At the end of 1924 Klaus Mann wrote Anja and Esther, a play about a neurotic quartet of four boys and girls who were in love with each other. The following year he was approached by the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who wanted to direct the play with himself in one of the male roles, Klaus in the other; Erika Mann and Pamela Wedekind, the daughter of the playwright Frank Wedekind, would be the two young women. The ambitious Gründgens had a reputation in Hamburg but not in Berlin. At one point, as they worked on the play, Klaus planned to marry Pamela, with whom Erika fell in love, while Erika arranged to marry Gustaf, with whom Klaus began an affair. At Erika and Gustaf’s wedding reception, Erika noted that her mother’s brother was, as she wrote to Pamela, ‘flirting with Gustaf’. The honeymoon was spent in a hotel where Erika and Pamela had stayed not long before as man and wife (Pamela had checked in dressed as a man).

Anja and Esther, which opened in Hamburg in October 1925, attracted vast amounts of publicity, partly because of its scandalous content and partly because it starred three children of two famous writers. One magazine put them on the cover, cropping out Gründgens’s face, emphasizing his status as outsider amid all this fame. His marriage to Erika ended soon after it began. ‘A cynical explanation,’ Weiss writes, ‘would point out that Erika’s theatrical career had flourished to the point where she no longer needed Gustaf as stepping-stone; that Gustaf had finally realized his marriage to Erika would not bestow on him her father’s impeccable social credentials.’

Pamela Wedekind married a man old enough to be her father, and the foursome returned to being the twosome of Erika and Klaus Mann. Although Erika played the part of Queen Elisabeth in Schiller’s Don Carlos at the State Theatre in Munich, she longed for greater excitement. And since Klaus was bored and his next play a flop, they decided to go to America, where they were ready to have their genius fully recognized. To amuse themselves, they told the US press that they were twins and thus began the American myth of ‘The Literary Mann Twins’. They went on a tour of the country. ‘Whenever they were stuck for funds,’ Weiss writes, ‘Klaus would write articles and Erika would write letters to organizations, seeking lecture engagements. They often arrived in town with no change in their pockets.’ Soon, they decided to tour the world. They stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for more than six weeks — ‘kept in that luxurious prison by the evil spell of our unpaid bill’ — and, on being rescued by their father’s publisher, agreed to write a book about their travels as a way of paying him back.

They returned to Germany in 1928 and over the next five years wrote articles and books and made outrageous statements; they travelled, they had many lovers. Erika worked in the theatre and appeared in films, Klaus wrote more plays. In other words, they took full advantage of the freedoms offered by the Weimar Republic. For many in the Nazi Party, they were the epitome of all that was wrong with Germany. And their mother’s Jewish background didn’t endear them to the National Socialists either. Despite the fact that they often seemed in these years to be the silliest pair of people alive, they came nonchalantly and almost naturally to believe that their right to freedom and fun and half-baked opinions was something worth preserving. It was their silliness that made them serious. Once the right to go on being silly was threatened, they would respond with considerable urgency and earnestness.

Erika took almost no direct interest in politics until, in January 1932, she was asked to read a poem by Victor Hugo to a women’s pacifist group. As she stood on the stage she was shouted down, one young Brownshirt screaming: ‘You are a criminal… Jewish traitress! International agitator!’ She later wrote: ‘In the hall, everything became a mad scramble. The Stormtroopers attacked the audience with their chairs, shouting themselves into paroxysms of anger and fury.’ The Nazi newspaper later called her ‘a flatfooted peace hyena’ with ‘no human physiognomy’; she didn’t increase her popularity with the party by suing for damages and winning. ‘I realised,’ she later wrote, ‘that my experience had nothing to do with politics — it was more than politics. It touched at the very foundation of my — of our — of the existence of all.’

That winter, Erika, now out of work and living in her parents’ house, conceived the idea of starting a cabaret in Munich. Her father came up with the title. The Peppermill opened on New Year’s Day 1933. It ran for two months next door to the local Nazi headquarters, and, since it was so successful, was preparing to move to a larger theatre when the Reichstag went up in flames. Erika and Klaus were on a skiing holiday while the new theatre was being decorated and arrived back in Munich to be warned by the family chauffeur, himself a party member, that they were in danger. Later, Klaus wrote that the chauffeur ‘had been a Nazi spy throughout the four or five years he lived with us… But this time he had failed in his duty, out of sympathy, I suppose. For he knew what would happen to us if he informed his Nazi employers of our arrival in town.’

Erika and Klaus made contact with their parents, who were in Switzerland, and warned them not to return to Munich. As soon as she could, Erika drove over the border to Switzerland, where she began to prepare her parents for the idea that they were going to lose everything that they owned in Germany, including not only their houses and cars, but the manuscripts of Thomas Mann’s books and such invaluable sources as Katia’s letters to her husband from the sanatorium in Davos.

Klaus didn’t travel with his sister. Instead, he took the night train to Paris. The day he arrived, he wrote in his diary: ‘Feeling of loneliness always, whenever SHE isn’t there.’ The ‘she’ was Erika. And Erika, it seemed, was now ready to transfer her loyalty from her brother to her father. She began by returning to Munich, putting herself in some danger, once she discovered that a section of Mann’s novel-in-progress, Joseph and His Brothers, had been left behind. She sneaked back into the family home and, without turning on the lights, found the handwritten manuscript on her father’s desk. Hiding it among the tools under the seat of her car, she made her way once more across the border. (It isn’t clear why Mann didn’t ask his daughter to take his diaries too. Eventually, he sent Golo a key to the safe where they were, imploring him not to read them. ‘My fears,’ he wrote in his diary when their arrival was delayed, ‘revolve first and foremost almost exclusively around this threat to my life’s secrets. They are deeply serious. The consequences could be terrible, even fatal.’)

Erika had a strength of will that Klaus lacked, an urge to look after others, a need, which was often irritating, to put her considerable physical and emotional energies to use. Until this point, the siblings had been inseparable, Klaus constantly falling in love with Erika’s friends. With the shock of exile, Erika for much of the time left Klaus unprotected. Her attention was now directed at political action, at her own survival and at ensuring the happiness and comfort of her father. Her bossiness and her ability to organize things meant that she thrived in exile. Klaus, on the other hand, drifted. In July 1933 he wrote in his diary: ‘Thought about how sad I am to be alone… Erika has Therese [the actress Therese Giehse, who worked with Erika on The Peppermill]… By the rules of our bond, I too should be permitted to seek relationships elsewhere. I reflect on all the failed or half-failed attempts.’ He was living on money sent to him by his mother. In October he wrote: ‘Hope to receive November money — I am not, like my sister, able to manage without it, on the contrary — alas.’

It was clear that Klaus couldn’t go back to Germany. He thus had nothing to lose by denouncing the Nazi regime and saw it as the duty of all writers to do what they could to undermine Hitler. ‘Neither pleasure nor pain,’ he wrote, ‘ever makes me forget the inexorable gravity of the situation and the weight of my responsibility. Every anti-Fascist German writer must exert his whole strength today to the very utmost, and I know that, for particular reasons, I am under an especially great obligation.’ He decided to publish, from Amsterdam, a monthly literary journal, Die Sammlung, and began to ask the main German writers for contributions. He knew what he wanted to achieve. The problem was that his father, now in the South of France, was considerably more ambivalent about his duties.

Some of this arose from Mann’s fears of losing his readers in Germany and having his assets confiscated. But it also had to do with an old argument about Germany that Mann had had with his brother Heinrich. In August 1914 Mann was enthusiastic about the war. He wrote to a friend: ‘One feels that everything will have to be new after this profound, violent anguish and that the German soul will emerge stronger, prouder, freer, happier from it. So be it.’ Heinrich believed from the beginning that Germany would lose. In an essay written in 1915, ostensibly about Zola, he launched an attack on his brother:

By that time Mann had ceased work on The Magic Mountain and begun writing a reply to his brother, called Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. It was six hundred pages long. Golo remembered him writing it:

Even as late as March 1920 Mann was unrepentant. ‘Heinrich’s position,’ he wrote, ‘no matter how splendid it appears at the moment, is basically already undermined by events and experiences. His orientation towards the West, his worship of the French, his Wilsonism etc are antiquated and withered.’

In his biography of Mann, published in 1999, Hermann Kurzke traces the ironies, the contradictions and the changes of opinion in Mann’s politics between 1918 and 1922, when, in a speech called ‘The German Republic’, he seemed to recant. Kurzke writes that Mann, in these years, developed friendships, some of them close, with figures such as Ernst Bertram, Elisabeth Mann’s godfather, who later became supporters of the Nazis or fellow-travellers with the regime. Kurzke is cautious, however, about making too much of this:

In May 1933, when ‘un-German’ books were being burned, Heinrich Mann’s were on the bonfire. Thomas Mann’s were not. He was still being protected by Bertram, among others. But his main protection was his own silence. When the first issue of Die Sammlung appeared, it had a provocative essay by Heinrich Mann and an editorial by Klaus: ‘The true, valid German literature… cannot remain silent before the degradation of its people and the outrage it perpetrates on itself… A literary periodical is not a political periodical… Nevertheless, today it will have a political mission. Its position must be unequivocal.’

Goebbels, in retaliation, stripped Heinrich of his citizenship, and the following year Klaus, too, was declared stateless. In 1935, five days after her marriage to W. H. Auden, her second husband, Erika was also stripped of her citizenship. (Auden seemed to get infinite amusement from his relationship with the Manns. ‘What else are buggers for?’ he replied when asked why he had married the soon-to-be-stateless Erika. ‘I didn’t see her till the ceremony and perhaps I shall never see her again,’ he wrote to Stephen Spender. ‘Who’s the most boring German writer? My father-in-law.’ He said about Klaus: ‘For an author, sons are an embarrassment, as if characters in his novel had come to life.’)

Thomas Mann confined his views on what was happening in Germany to his diary. On 10 April 1933 he wrote:

On 20 April he wrote:

While it is important to read these musings as musings, they were of a type that Heinrich Mann never went in for, nor did Erika and nor did Klaus; they were certainly not shared with Thomas Mann’s wife and were never aired in public; they were countered by such remarks as: ‘Anti-Semitism is the disgrace of any educated and culturally engaged person.’

When Mann found that his name was first on the list of future contributors to Die Sammlung, he wrote in his diary that ‘Klaus has played a trick on us by including Heinrich’s article in the first issue.’ When a German trade magazine reprinted an official warning to booksellers not to stock books by anyone associated with Die Sammlung, Mann sent them a telegram that was widely reproduced in Germany: ‘Can only confirm that the character of the first issue of Die Sammlung does not correspond to its original programme.’ He had openly repudiated his son’s magazine. The following month Mann moved to a large three-storey villa in Switzerland and Erika opened The Peppermill in Zurich. Klaus was on his own in Amsterdam. ‘Long letter from the Magician’ — his father — ‘the most humiliating sensation… Sorrow and confusion,’ he wrote in his diary. He was taking heroin and morphine, and wrote in his diary about longing for death.

Thomas Mann continued to be published in Germany until 1936. When Bermann Fischer, his German publisher, was denounced by exiles as a Jewish protégé of Goebbels, Mann’s fervent public defence of him was too much for Erika. She wrote to her father:

More than sixty years later Elisabeth remembered the confrontation. Erika, she said,

Klaus sent his father a telegram beseeching him to make a statement in solidarity with the émigré writers. Katia, in the meantime, tried to dissuade Erika from breaking with her father, telling her that, aside from Elisabeth and Katia herself, she was ‘the only person on whom Z.’s heart really hangs, and your letter hurt deeply and made him ill.’ Z. is der Zauberer, ‘the magician’.

Thomas Mann replied to Erika asking for time to consider what she had said. This caused Erika to become even angrier. She blamed her father for doing more harm to Klaus in the row over Die Sammlung than the Nazis had ever done. Her mother had had enough and began a draft of an open letter under the name of Thomas Mann. While mild in its tone, it was his first public statement from exile against the Nazis. Once he had released it, he wrote to a friend: ‘I am finally saving my soul.’ He was immediately notified that his honorary doctorate from Bonn University had been rescinded. He, his wife and their four younger children lost their German citizenship.

While all this was going on, Klaus was working on the novel for which he is best known, Mephisto, which was published in Amsterdam in 1936. It deals, in a way that is almost open, with Klaus’s former lover and brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens, and his rise to power as an actor in Nazi Germany. Although it has its dramatic moments, some of it is very badly written. The narrative regularly gets carried away in its efforts to portray the Nazis as pure evil and the actor Hendrik Höfgen as ambitious, flawed, sexually perverse, a man ready to sell his soul while tempting others to do the same.

Some of the writing, in its flatness and exaggeration, would have made Thomas Mann wince. But one section of the book must have hurt him more than any number of threatening letters from Erika. Klaus, it seems to me, managed to include aspects of his father in the character of Höfgen. This is something that Mann in his diaries and his letters, as published in English, makes no mention of, and I can find no reference to it in the many biographies of Mann. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Klaus used a small part of his father in his attempt to dramatize political treachery for the sake of artistic success.

In Mephisto, Hendrik marries Barbara Bruckner, a version of Erika, whose father is also a version of Thomas Mann. Hendrik’s new father-in-law was ‘a scholar and thinker who was not only one of the most eminent and talked about figures on the European literary scene but also one of the most influential in political circles’. The actor’s father-in-law is referred to throughout as ‘the privy councillor’, or the ‘Geheimrat’, a term used in the Mann family to describe not Thomas Mann, but Mann’s own father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim.

When Thomas Mann, an awkward, ambitious young man from the Baltic, married Katia Pringsheim, he was no less intimidated by the cultural sophistication and general social confidence of Katia’s family than Hendrik Höfgen was by the family of Barbara Bruckner in Mephisto. (Golo remembers his father saying of Katia’s family: ‘They have never liked me, nor I them.’) In some passages, the novel seems to be merging the relationship between the provincial actor Gründgens and the Manns with the relationship between Thomas Mann and the Pringsheims. In that sense Thomas Mann appears hidden in the character of Höfgen, both of them marrying above their station, both later selling their soul, or refusing to speak out, for the sake of continued or greater fame as artists. Klaus, who wasn’t generally given to subtlety, is subtle about this particular trick, but it wouldn’t have escaped the attention of the old magician that his son, by using the word ‘Geheimrat’ so often to describe Höfgen’s father-in-law, was comparing his father to an artist who had famously sold his soul. Seven years later, Mann would begin his own book on the same subject, the magisterial Doctor Faustus.

In September 1936, Erika and Klaus moved from Europe to the United States, where Erika began an affair with a German doctor who was staying at her hotel. According to Sybille Bedford, she ‘went off women, she really became interested in men, she went off with people’s husbands even’. Klaus had an affair with an American dancer. The Peppermill was to be performed in New York with its European cast. Although the lyrics had been translated into English, some by Auden, the show was a disaster and soon taken off.

Very quickly Erika learned enough English to begin giving lectures all over the US. When Klaus’s visa ran out he returned to Europe, staying with his parents in Switzerland, amazed to find that, without consulting him, his father had founded his own bimonthly journal for German émigrés and appointed an editor. Klaus wrote in his diary: ‘I perceive, again, very strongly and not without bitterness, Z.’s complete coldness to me… His universal lack of interest in people is here especially intensified.’ It’s clear from Erika’s letters that Klaus was taking a great deal of heroin.

In March 1937 the entire Mann family, including Heinrich, was granted Czechoslovak citizenship. Klaus could now travel to Budapest to seek treatment for his heroin addiction, treatment which did not fully work. Six months later he returned to the US and to Erika, who took him with her on what became joint lecture tours. Their titles included ‘What Price Peace?’, ‘What Does the Youth of Europe Believe in Today?’ and ‘Our Father and His Work’. They wrote two books together.

Soon, Thomas and Katia Mann arrived in America as well, and, with their fourteen suitcases in tow, began to tour the country too. When Klaus published a new novel, his father wrote to say that he’d admired it, adding that when he first saw it he ‘secretly had the wicked intention’ of not reading it through but ‘just looking into’ it. Of the letters he received from his father about his work, Klaus noted in his diary: ‘He writes to complete strangers just as pleasantly. A mixture of highest intelligence, almost charitable courtesy — and ice coldness. This is especially accentuated when it concerns me.’ In 1939, Mann published Lotte in Weimar, in which Goethe’s son is introduced as follows: ‘August is his son; and to the father’s mind the boy’s existence exhausted itself in that fact.’ He added: ‘To be the son of a great man is a high fortune, a considerable advantage. But it is likewise an oppressive burden, a permanent derogation of one’s ego.’ The great man settled in Princeton, where he had Bruno Walter and Einstein for neighbours.

In 1938 Klaus and Erika reported on the Spanish Civil War which had broken out in 1936. Erika wrote School for Barbarians, a book on the Nazi education system; it sold 40,000 copies in the US in the first three months after publication. Erika slowly became one of the most successful and highly paid women lecturers in the country. Both she and Klaus believed passionately that America should straightaway enter the war and were appalled by the attitude of Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who had left England and thus avoided active involvement in the war. In his diary, Klaus recognized in Auden ‘the cold charms’ of Gustaf Gründgens, but he refused to be seduced by them. When he saw the ménage that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his Uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel.

Isherwood, who was in the habit of thinking well of people, thought Klaus ‘without vanity or self-consciousness’; ‘his great charm,’ Isherwood said, ‘lay in this openness, this eager, unaffected approach.’ Others didn’t share his view. Glenway Wescott called Klaus a ‘tragic twerp’; Janet Flanner thought he was pathetically dominated by Erika, who flew to Europe in 1940 to work as a war correspondent for the BBC, leaving Klaus in New York feeling ‘envy and anxiety’ and resenting the fact that his sister had once again left him behind. He would continue to be supported financially by his parents. When a New York editor informed Auden and Kallman that he would soon be publishing Klaus’s autobiography, they fell around laughing and said: ‘What will you call it? The Invisible Man? The Subordinate Klaus?’

Klaus’s autobiography was called The Turning Point. It was an exercise in tact. He couldn’t attack his father openly, since he was living off him financially and operating in the US in his father’s shadow, a shadow that was both protective and damaging. In his autobiography he took every opportunity to single out and praise his Uncle Heinrich rather than his father, but was careful not to write about his father in the same wounded tone he used in his diaries. The account in the book of his father hollering from the window on seeing his son leaving home — ‘Good luck, my son! And come home when you are wretched and forlorn’ — reads like pure mythology, or a sad joke. When he wrote to Klaus about the book, Mann told him he had absolutely no memory of ever saying that.

In Klaus’s version of the early years in exile when his father would not denounce the regime, he exalted Heinrich for being ‘the first to receive the enviable distinction’ of getting on Goebbels’s blacklist. His uncle, he wrote, ‘had left Berlin soon after the Reichstag Fire and, once in France, lost no time in raising his voice to arraign and ridicule the brown canaille… Heinrich Mann — a man in his early sixties at the beginning of his exile — experienced something like a second youth.’ He himself, he wrote, was on Goebbels’s second list and Erika on the third. When he came to write about Die Sammlung, he mentioned that it was produced under the sponsorship of ‘André Gide, Heinrich Mann and Aldous Huxley’. There was no mention of his father.

‘As for our father,’ he finally wrote, the Nazis, ‘still afraid of public opinion abroad’, were more ‘reluctant’ to place him on a blacklist: ‘At this point his works were not officially banned; although as far back as 1933, to ask openly for a book by Thomas Mann in a German bookstore was a risky thing to do. For his feelings towards Nazism were generally known, and were emphasised, furthermore, by his refusal to return to Munich.’ When Klaus mentioned ‘the inevitable clash’ between his father and the Nazis, he neglected to say that it didn’t take place until 1936. He described the immense comfort and ease of his father’s early exile in Switzerland without any appearance of irony. By the time the book appeared, Thomas Mann had reinvented himself as the most vocal and serious opponent of the Nazis among the German exiles in the United States. It must have pleased him that Klaus had done nothing to damage his new position. He wrote him a bland and affectionate letter: ‘It is an unusually charming, kind, sensitive, clever and honestly personal book.’ The poet Muriel Rukeyser remembered Klaus frantically waiting for this letter, tearing it open when it came and reading it ‘in a moving, suspended moment of all the mixed feeling that can be found in the autobiography itself’.

In these years Klaus, without Erika, grew increasingly unhappy and went on taking drugs and falling unsuitably in love. The FBI was on his case, having been told that both he and Erika were Communists. ‘When Fascism spread across Europe,’ Weiss writes, ‘the FBI expended considerable time and resources harassing two of the strongest and most dedicated advocates for liberal democracy, both of whom had great respect for the government of the United States.’ Erika and Klaus were guilty, it seemed, not only of ‘premature’ anti-Fascism but of ‘having affairs together’. It was reported that ‘many queer-looking people’ could be seen going into Klaus’s hotel room in New York, as indeed they could. Klaus remarked in his diary that he liked ‘porters, waiters, liftboys and so on, white or black. Almost all are agreeable to me. I could sleep with all of them.’ Sybille Bedford recalled that what attracted Klaus ‘were the professional louts’.

During this period, Erika grew closer to her father but, as Weiss writes, ‘Klaus’s estrangement from the Magician did not ameliorate with the reconciliation of their political differences; it was always about something deeper. The sacred bond the siblings shared since childhood, forged in resistance to Thomas Mann and all he represented, no longer could sustain itself with the same passionate intensity.’

After Pearl Harbor, Klaus decided to join the US Army. The FBI reported that his first physical examination revealed a ‘syphilitic condition’ and ‘13 arsenical and 39 heavy metal injections’. He was rejected a number of times, partly because of his homosexuality, and then finally accepted in December 1942. When he was posted to the Mediterranean, Erika remarked that for the first time since their childhood he was almost happy. His parents came to see him off. He wrote in his diary: ‘At our farewell, Z. embraced me, something that had never happened before.’

Klaus arrived in Germany the day after the surrender. He had believed that ‘when the Dictator has vanished — and only then, will it again be possible… to live in Germany, without fear and without shame.’ He now knew that wasn’t true. On 16 May 1945, he wrote to his father:

When he revisited the shell of the family home in Munich, Klaus discovered that it had been used as a Lebensborn during the war, an Aryan knocking-shop, ‘a place where racially qualified young men and equally well-bred young women collaborated in the interest of the German nation… Many fine babies were begotten and born in this house.’ When he interviewed Richard Strauss for the army magazine Stars and Stripes, Strauss praised Hans Frank, who ran Auschwitz, since Frank, unlike Hitler, ‘really appreciated my music’. Klaus met Heinrich’s first wife, who had been released from Terezín, and their daughter, who had also been imprisoned. He didn’t believe that ordinary Germans were ignorant of what happened in the concentration camps. He wrote that he felt ‘a stranger in my former fatherland’.

Erika arrived in Germany four months after Klaus. She wrote: ‘The Germans, as you know, are hopeless. In their hearts, self-deception and dishonesty, arrogance and docility, shrewdness and stupidity are repulsively mingled and combined.’ Bedford said of her: ‘Erika could hate, and she hated the Germans. You see, Erika was a fairly violent character. At one point during the war, she propagated that every German should be castrated. And vengeance — Klaus wasn’t like that at all. Erika was very unforgiving.’

On her arrival in Munich, she registered a claim on the old family house, something that poor impractical Klaus had neglected to do. Her other task was to report on the Nuremberg Trials. She was the only one of the journalists allowed into the hotel where the Nazi leaders were being held. She let them know who she was. ‘To think that that woman has been in my room,’ Julius Streicher remarked. Goering had something more interesting to say. He explained that ‘had he been in charge of the “Mann case”, he would have handled it differently… Surely a German of the stature of Thomas Mann could have been adapted to the Third Reich.’ Erika reported that ‘when a slight thunderstorm had frightened Göring into an equally slight heart attack, the creator of the Blitz was given a mattress for his cot, and breakfast in bed.’ When she visited Hans Frank and Ribbentrop, ‘the Butcher of Poland was reading the Bible to the ex-champagne salesman’.

Erika and Klaus were increasingly at sea in the new Germany. Klaus began to work in films, collaborating briefly and painfully with Roberto Rossellini. Someone who worked with him in these years said: ‘He was a restless man. He had so many ideas and so much energy… I don’t think he could sit still for two minutes. He had a cigarette perpetually in his mouth and was in constant movement. You could feel the vibrations of his energy.’

It should have been possible for Klaus’s books, especially Mephisto and The Turning Point, which had been published during his exile, to begin appearing in the new Germany. But the new Germany was strange. Gustaf Gründgens was back on the stage, as popular and successful as he had been when he had Goering to protect him. Weiss reports that having with difficulty secured a ticket for a sold-out performance, Klaus ‘was speechless to discover that Gründgens, stepping onto the stage during the first act, received a show-stopping standing ovation’.

In response he wrote an article suggesting that Emmy Sonnemann, the actress who married Goering, should also have her career revived. ‘Perhaps someone gassed at Auschwitz,’ he wrote, ‘left behind some stage piece in which the esteemed woman could make her second debut. The good woman surely knew nothing about Auschwitz — and besides, what does art have to do with politics?’ When the German edition of The Turning Point appeared in 1952, Gründgens demanded that sections of the book that damaged his reputation be removed. They were. Mephisto appeared in German in 1956 but only in the GDR: no West German publisher would touch it, even after Gründgens’s suicide in 1963. Erika brought the case to the West German Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of suppressing the book, preserving Gründgens’s posthumous reputation. After a long wait, a paperback version finally appeared in West Germany in 1981, as well as a film adaptation.

In 1946, as his ex-lover and current nemesis was being applauded on the stage, Klaus decided to return to America for an extended visit. Since he had nowhere else to go, he planned to make his way to Los Angeles, where his parents were installed in a large and splendid house in Pacific Palisades; but his father had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was being operated on in Chicago. Erika flew from Nuremberg to be with her father. She never again left his side. For the next nine years she was Mann’s secretary and chief confidante. Just as she and Klaus had once been inseparable, now she and her father were never apart. Years later, Elisabeth Mann remembered:

Among other tasks, Erika set about cutting the final manuscript of Doctor Faustus by forty pages; her father believed she had improved the book.

Klaus wrote to his mother suggesting that a cottage be found for him near his parents’ home and since he could not drive, he would also need ‘an old Ford and a young driver… The driver must also be able to cook a bit and have a pleasant appearance.’ His mother replied immediately. ‘A house to rent and a car and a driver who can cook, who also was attractive! With a lot of luck, one can get a room from upwards of one hundred dollars… This is democracy!’ Klaus arrived in Los Angeles at the end of July but was back in New York by the early autumn. He was once more in exile, this time from his family as well as his country. He had lost his sister to his father and had used up his mother’s patience. In 1948 he said: ‘It is only the parts of my life in which she [Erika] shares that have substance and reality for me.’

Klaus now moved between New York, Paris, Zurich, Vienna and Amsterdam. When he returned once more to Los Angeles, his parents asked him to leave after a month as other siblings and cousins were coming to stay. Klaus, with Erika’s help, found a place nearby. Six days after moving in, he attempted suicide by slitting his wrists, taking pills and turning on the gas. He was hospitalized and the incident was reported in the press. His father didn’t visit. Mann wrote to a friend: ‘My two sisters committed suicide, and Klaus has much of the elder sister in him. The impulse is present in him, and all the circumstances favour it — the one exception being that he has a parental home on which he can always rely.’ His mother, when she heard the news, is reported (by Elisabeth) to have snapped: ‘If he wanted to kill himself, why didn’t he do it properly?’ Erika wrote to a friend: ‘As you may have read, Klaus — my closest brother — tried to do away with himself which was not only a nasty shock but also involved a great deal of time-devouring trouble.’ On 1 January 1949 Klaus wrote in his diary: ‘I do not wish to survive this year.’ In April, in Cannes, he received a letter from a West German publisher to say that Mephisto couldn’t appear ‘because Mr Gründgens plays a very important role here’. The following month he succeeded in killing himself. He was forty-two.

Mann was in Stockholm with Katia and Erika when he heard the news. ‘My inward sympathy,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘with the mother’s heart and with E. He should not have done this to them… The hurtful, ugly, cruel inconsideration and irresponsibility.’ He wrote to Heinrich: ‘His case is so very strange and painful, such skill, charm, cosmopolitanism, and in his heart a death-wish.’ He wrote to Hermann Hesse: ‘This interrupted life lies heavily on my mind and grieves me. My relationship with him was difficult and not free of guilt. My life put his in a shadow right from the beginning.’ He decided not to attend his son’s funeral or interrupt his lecture tour. Of all the family, only Michael, the youngest sibling, on tour with the San Francisco Symphony, attended the funeral; he played a largo on his viola as the coffin was lowered into the ground.

Later, Elisabeth would say of Erika: ‘When Klaus died, she was totally, totally heartbroken — I mean that was unbearable for her, that loss. That hit her harder than anything else in her life.’ Erika returned with her parents to the US and sought citizenship only to find that she was once more under investigation by the FBI. By 1950 there was even a move to deport her for being a Communist. Before it went any further, she decided to leave, taking her parents with her. They had become close enough for her father to write in his diary about his concern for Erika: ‘she could so easily follow her brother. Certainly she does not want to live any longer than us.’ They sold the house in Pacific Palisades in June 1952 and moved to Switzerland. Thomas Mann died three years later at the age of eighty.

Erika fought with her other siblings; she and Elisabeth didn’t speak for a decade. In 1961 her mother wrote to her brother: ‘What is ruining… my old age, is the more than unfriendly relationship of all my children towards the good, fat, eldest.’ Erika was busy editing a three-volume edition of her father’s letters, fighting the case for Klaus’s book in the West German courts, and battling with her first husband after all these years. When two German newspapers insinuated that she had had an incestuous relationship with Klaus, she sued and won. She died in 1969 at the age of sixty-three, leaving some of her assets to Auden, whom she had not seen for years.

Her mother lived until 1980. Monika, whose husband drowned in front of her when their ship crossing the Atlantic was torpedoed in 1940, moved to Capri in 1953 and died in 1992. Golo, who returned to Germany in the late 1950s and became a historian, died in 1994. Michael committed suicide in 1977. This left Elisabeth, who lived until 2002. She devoted most of her life to the study and protection of the ocean. In her later years, she made herself available to interviewers and biographers. In a series of television drama-documentaries made for German television about the family, she appeared as a figure of calm and melancholy wisdom. (‘When you get past the age of 30,’ she had told Golo, ‘you should stop blaming your parents for what you are.’) There was a strange, dry, serene resignation about her appearance as she returned to the places where the Manns had lived, commenting to the camera on the damage that had been done with a sort of acceptance and a sense that nothing had escaped her.

Borges: A Father in His Shadow

On 9 March 1951 Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later, Vidia, in a letter to the entire family, wrote: ‘I hope Pa does write, even five hundred words a day. He should begin a novel. He should realise that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one — one of phoney sophistication.’ Soon, his father wrote again to say that he had in fact started to write five hundred words a day. ‘Let me see how well the resolve works out,’ he wrote. ‘Even now I have not settled the question whether I should work on an autobiographical novel or whether I should exhume Gurudeva.’ Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales had been privately published in Port of Spain in 1943. It would be Seepersad Naipaul’s only book. He died in 1953 at the age of forty-seven.

For writers and artists whose fathers dabbled in art and failed there seems always to be a peculiar intensity in their levels of ambition and determination. It is as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V. S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household.

Jorge Luis Borges was in Majorca in 1919, writing his first poems as his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was working on his only novel, which, like Seepersad Naipaul’s book, was printed privately. (Borges’s mother later told Bioy Casares that she had spent her life with ‘dos locos’, two madmen — her husband and her son.) The novel, called El Caudillo, published in 1921 when the author was forty-seven and his son twenty-two, was not a success. Seventeen years later, as his health was failing, Borges Senior suggested that his son rewrite the book, making clear that Jorge Luis, or Georgie as he was known in his family, had been consulted during its composition. ‘I put many metaphors in to please you,’ he told his son, asking him to ‘rewrite the novel in a straightforward way, with all the fine writing and purple patches left out’.

The longest work of fiction Jorge Luis Borges ever produced was quite short: a mere fourteen pages. It was called ‘The Congress’ and first published in 1971, although it had been on his mind for many years. Edwin Williamson, in his biography of Borges, writes about the parallels between the story and El Caudillo. Borges sought in his story, according to Williamson, not only to mirror the novel his father wrote but also ‘to transcend it… The basic structure and plot of the two works are identical: there is a powerful chieftain poised between civilisation and barbarism.’ There are many other close connections between the plots of the two stories.

Thus the literary legacy handed to Borges was clear: he would have to fulfil ‘the literary destiny’ that his father ‘had been denied’, as Williamson puts it. The ironies and absurdities of this were not lost on him. In the months after his father’s death he wrote one of his great serious spoofs, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, a meditation, using a straight face and no ‘fine writing’ or ‘purple patches’, on the idea of rewriting as an inspired enterprise, and on the concept of the writer as a force of culture imprisoned by language and time to such an extent that plagiarism becomes innovation, and reading itself a form of literary experiment.

It may also not have been lost on Borges, and it is not lost on the reader, that ‘The Congress’ is not only a version of El Caudillo but a parody of Borges’s earlier work, playing with all his old tricks, using a deadpan narrative, full of recondite facts and obscure references, to coax a shadow universe into pure existence. It was obviously written by someone who had read Borges. By 1971, however, Borges was clearly not himself. In ‘Borges and I’, he wrote:

With Borges it is always dangerous to infer that biographical material — his love life, his jobs or his relationship with friends or family — inspired the tone and content of certain works. Although there may be ample evidence for such a reading, especially in his poems, there is a real possibility that the books he read mattered much more to Borges than the events of his life. Six months before his father’s death, Williamson points out, Borges wrote a book review for an Argentine magazine that is much more likely to have offered the inspiration for ‘Pierre Menard’ than his father’s vain request. The book was Paul Valéry’s Introduction à la poétique. Williamson writes: ‘The same text, according to Borges, could mean different things to different readers in different periods, and he quoted a line from a poem by Cervantes to show that a reader in the 20th century would derive a different sense from the very same words.’ Borges wrote: ‘Time — a friend to Cervantes — has corrected the proofs for him.’

While his father’s example offered him a bookish future and literary ambitions, Borges’s mother’s legacy was more ambiguous and difficult and perhaps more powerful. She was acutely conscious of her family’s history and status in Argentina. She was pure criollo, of Spanish descent born in South America, descended from the early settlers, men involved in the creation of an independent Argentina. Her grandfather led the cavalry charge at the battle of Junín in 1824, the second last battle in the liberation of South America. Later, after the battle of Ayacucho, he was promoted to the rank of colonel by Simón Bolívar. The heroic deeds done by members of her family made her proud, and she spoke of them constantly.

From his mother, Borges heard a great deal about old glories and fame that had faded, with the implication that he somehow could restore the family to its former level of importance. ‘As most of my people had been soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.’ Yet the presence of his ancestors’ swords in the house and their lives as men of action obsessed him all his life. He wrote about knife fights and daggers and swords with a relish that only the truly sedentary can feel: ‘In a desk drawer, among rough drafts and letters, the dagger endlessly dreams its simple tiger’s dream, and, grasping it, the hand comes alive because the metal comes alive, sensing in every touch the killer for whom it was wrought.’

Borges’s grandfather on his father’s side was also a colonel who fought in battles. He married an Englishwoman, Fanny Haslam, leaving her a widow with two sons three years after their marriage, when he was shot in one of the many internal feuds that beset Argentine affairs. (‘The bullet which shot dead Francisco Borges’ is mentioned in ‘Things’, one of Borges’s best poems.) Fanny and her sons spoke English at home; Fanny ran the household as though they were in England. Borges was attached to his grandmother; her version of England was as influential as his mother’s account of the family’s former splendour. Fanny travelled to Europe with the Borges family and lived close to them in Buenos Aires until her death in 1935, at the age of ninety-three.

The Buenos Aires that Borges loved and celebrated was not the new, rich city teeming with immigrants from the south of Italy or from Galicia. It was the old city of the criollos that his mother had known, and the area around Palermo in the north of the city, down on its luck, where his father built a house beside Fanny Haslam’s house and where Jorge Luis and his sister, Norah, were brought up. Close to Palermo was open countryside. A city both half imagined and half built (‘Only one thing was missing — the street had no other side’) replaced in Borges’s imagination ‘the greedy streets/jostling with crowds and traffic’. He and his sister did not play with children who were rough. Since his mother had contempt for the new rich of the city and no time for the new immigrants, it was easier to keep the children secluded.

Borges was taught to read Spanish by his mother and English by his grandmother. Later, an English tutor was employed. Once Borges could read he was free, even though he was sickly and solitary. ‘If I were asked to name the chief event in my life,’ he wrote, ‘I should say my father’s library.’ He did not go to school until he was eleven. He must have been a strange sight, small, bookish, precocious, full of stories about heroic ancestors. He was bullied by other boys from the beginning until he was withdrawn from the school. ‘One of his recurrent nightmares as an adult,’ Williamson writes, ‘was of being tormented by dwarfs and little boys.’ Three years later he was sent to secondary school, but not for long. In 1913 his father decided to take the family to Europe the following year and educate the children in Geneva, where he could be treated by a famous doctor for an eye disease from which he suffered.

Thus, early in 1914, the Borges family rented out their property in Buenos Aires and began wandering in Europe. Like the James family, they would be dragged by a restless father from city to city, from hotel to rented quarters. As with William and Henry James, this life apart from his peers would be the making of Borges as an artist, though it would mean that his life, when he later returned to Argentina, would be more complicated. Once more, school in Europe was a nightmare since he did not speak the same language as his classmates; once more, as his ability to read French improved, he found that the only comfort available was in books. He read Carlyle in English, and soon began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he began a friendship with someone his own age, Maurice Abramowicz, who also loved books and poetry. It was the first of many such sustaining literary friendships.

The Borges family spent the war years in Switzerland; once the war was over they moved to Spain: first to Barcelona, then to Majorca, then to Seville and Madrid. Jorge Luis was writing poetry and allying himself with any young Spanish avant-garde writers he could find. The group with which he became involved in Seville and Madrid was called the Ultraísta movement. They were close in aims and style to the Imagists, and influenced by the work and personalities of Apollinaire and Marinetti. Borges loved staying up all night talking books and poetry, sitting in cafés and walking the streets. Madrid, where the family stayed for two months, was a perfect site for this; Borges got to know many of the leading young Spanish poets there. When he left Madrid to go back to Majorca with his family, he had young literary men in Madrid and in Geneva to write to regularly, sending new poems and letters of hope and despair about the work he was attempting. ‘I lack a goal,’ he wrote to Abramowicz, ‘or rather I have too many goals before me. I think I’m sunk, and won’t be able to salvage more than two or three metaphors from the wreckage.’

In 1921, after an absence of seven years, the family returned to Buenos Aires. Borges had very little formal education, no qualifications and no friends. He walked the streets of the Palermo district where he had grown up, and then began to explore other parts of the city, until the city itself became the subject of his first book of poems:

He was an exile in his own country. He wrote to a friend in Spain: ‘Don’t abandon me in this exile of mine, which is overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and by decorative young ladies.’ Once more, however, he found a kindred spirit, a friend of his father’s called Macedonio Fernández, who met with friends on a Saturday night in a café to discuss matters such as ‘the uses of metaphor or the inexistence of the self’. In these first months in Buenos Aires, as his father promised and then postponed a return to Europe, Borges also began to write philosophical essays with titles like ‘The Nothingness of Personality’ and ‘The Blue Sky Is Sky and Is Blue’. Soon, he became involved in a number of literary magazines.

In July 1923 the Borges family, complete with Fanny Haslam, set sail for Europe again, spending a year wandering in England, France, Switzerland and the Iberian Peninsula. Borges renewed friendships in Madrid. Williamson in his biography is ‘virtually certain’ that Borges met Lorca on this visit, but it is absolutely certain in any case that he read Lorca’s work and paid real attention to his efforts at blending folk poetry with the most modern techniques.

What Lorca was doing became for Borges and his friends in Argentina, as it would for writers in every country on the periphery, a working-out of a serious dilemma: whether to adopt a full European Modernist identity or to describe Argentina (or Trinidad, or Ireland) in all its colour and exotic variety to the world. If the second choice were to be taken in Argentina, there was a useful example: a long narrative poem, using a great deal of dialect, by José Hernández called El Gaucho Martín Fierro, the first part of which was published in 1872. The poem quickly became immensely popular, its six-line ballad-like stanzas glorifying the life of the Argentine pampas and the rough, brave cowboys who inhabited them. The poem was published in English in a translation by Walter Owen in 1935:

‘The figure of the gaucho,’ Williamson writes, ‘thus came to embody the unresolved question of national identity, a question that would gnaw away at the Argentine conscience and would resurface periodically in a violent impulse to hold onto or to retrieve some vital essence that might be lost as Argentina acquired the trappings of a modern nation.’ Indeed, Hernández’s impulse in writing the first part of the poem was to protest against Argentina turning its back on its heritage and becoming unduly modern and civilized.

In a lecture he gave in Buenos Aires in 1950 about gaucho literature, Borges very cleverly ducked the choice between Martín Fierro and a pure European example. He pointed out that the richness of gaucho literature in Argentina arose not from the gaucho’s isolation but from the close relationship many of the gaucho writers had with the literary world of Buenos Aires. ‘Gaucho poetry,’ he wrote, ‘is a perhaps unique fusion between the city spirit and rural forms.’ The following year, in a brilliant and wise lecture called ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, he returned to the subject, pointing out that El Gaucho Martín Fierro and other poems by Hernández’s contemporaries did not come direct from an oral tradition, but were highly wrought literary artefacts. ‘I believe that Martín Fierro,’ he wrote, ‘is the most lasting work we Argentines have written; I also believe, with equal intensity, that we cannot take Martín Fierro to be, as has sometimes been said, our Bible, our canonical book.’ His argument was with critics who suggested that ‘the lexicon, techniques and subject-matter of gauchesco poetry should enlighten the contemporary writer, and are a point of departure and perhaps an archetype’. He attacked the idea that ‘Argentine poetry must abound in Argentine differential traits and in Argentine local colour’.

Borges admired Martín Fierro, then, for its self-conscious manipulation of language and for its hybrid nature. In 1924 he read Joyce’s Ulysses and found a template for what he would view as the role of peripheral societies in the creation of literature. Of Irish writers he wrote:

This was written in 1951, when most of Borges’s great work had been done, but as early as 1925 he was arguing the case for a new and strange cosmopolitanism that would also make a hero of the local: ‘Already Buenos Aires, more than a city, is a country, and one must find the poetry and the music and the painting and the religion and the metaphysics that will do justice to its grandeur. That is the extent of my hope, which invites us all to be gods and to work towards its incarnation.’ Over the next few years, as he wrote a short biography of a minor poet of the city’s suburbs, he would refine this view; he would come to see both his city and his country as places of estrangement and their legacy as thin; he would accept a need to create a universe in their stead and find a language precise enough to re-create the essential contours of that new world.

In 1951, to illustrate his point, he described his story ‘Death and the Compass’, composed nine years earlier, as

In the early 1930s Borges began to consider what could be done in fiction. ‘He was proposing an aesthetics of radical mistrust,’ Williamson writes. ‘His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author’s ability to generate “poetic faith” in his reader.’ Fiction, Borges believed, did not hold up a mirror to reality, instead it became ‘an autonomous sphere of corroborations, omens and monuments’.

In 1931 the magazine Sur was launched by Victoria Ocampo, a member of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Argentina, a woman ‘easily dictatorial and excessively bossy’ in Borges’s words. She would play a significant role in winning him fame as a writer. Borges continued to write essays and reviews and to take part in literary faction fighting. In 1933 he found his first real job, working on the literary supplement of a daily paper. Here he wrote a number of fictionalized biographies and some fables; he assembled them in his first book of fiction, A Universal History of Infamy, which was published in April 1935; by the end of the year it had sold thirty-seven copies. Borges had placed himself in what was for him a fortunate position of having no world to describe, except an invented one, and no audience to speak of, allowing him the luxury to address his fictions to one or two of his friends. The world could, if it pleased, listen in, but it would take time.

Bioy Casares, the reader who would matter most to Borges, came, like Ocampo, from the higher reaches of Argentine society. Ocampo introduced them in 1932, when Bioy was eighteen and Borges thirty-two. Borges’s mother must have been pleased at his friendship with this scion of the cattle-ranching oligarchy whose father was a cabinet minister and whose family owned one of the most prominent dairy businesses in the country. Bioy was handsome, self-confident and well read. He would come to have what was perhaps the largest personal library in all of South America. He also owned an estate in the country where Borges spent some time in 1935. Both men loved recondite references, strange books, literary jokes. Bioy, like Borges, had no illusions about his fellow countrymen’s interest in serious literature, but he had many other illusions and he sought now with his new friend to put them into print.

After Borges lost his job at the literary supplement, he began his career as a librarian in January 1938 in a working-class district on the other side of Buenos Aires. It was ignominious. There were so few books in the library that they did not need anyone to catalogue them; fifty people were doing a job that a third of them could have easily done. When Borges attempted to do some work, he was taken aside and told that he would ruin it for the rest of them. His colleagues had no interest in books. Borges did his day’s work in an hour. The pay was miserable. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, he wrote: ‘Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears.’ He kept sane by doing translations, including a selection of Kafka’s stories. Soon after he started his work in the library his father died.

Over the next two years Borges published some of his best fiction. ‘Pierre Menard’ appeared in Sur in May 1939, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ a year later. In between, he wrote ‘The Library of Babel’. In December 1940 Sur published ‘The Circular Ruins’ and the following month ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, and ‘A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain’ three months later. These were among the stories gathered into a book, The Garden of Forking Paths, which Sur published at the end of 1941. While the author’s friends viewed this as a significant literary event, it failed to win any of the National Awards for Literature, the judges deeming it inappropriate to recommend to the Argentine people ‘an exotic and decadent work’ that followed ‘certain deviant tendencies of contemporary English literature’, hovering ‘between the tale of fantasy, a pretentious and recondite erudition, and detective fiction’.

The eight stories that make up the sixty pages of The Garden of Forking Paths represent Borges’s best work. For any biographer an exhumation and an autopsy of the years during which they were composed is a great challenge. It is hard to allow for the possibility that nothing, nothing at all, caused these to come into being. Borges did not keep diaries or write many letters; in interviews done years later he tended to be vague and misleading.

It is possible that certain things that happened in 1939 and 1940 mattered. His translating Kafka, for example; his having a magazine at his disposal with an imperious editor and an international circulation; his father’s death; his dreadful job with seven or eight hours a day free to do nothing; his reading of Dante while travelling on the tram to and from work — or perhaps more importantly his claim to have done so; the outbreak of war and his deep opposition to the Nazi and Peronist regimes; his rejection by a woman with whom he had fallen in love; his need to amuse and impress Bioy Casares. Any biographer has to take these into account, and Williamson does so. He gives, however, an extraordinary emphasis in his book to Borges’s relationship with a number of women, suggesting that these doomed and deeply unhappy relationships were fundamental to Borges’s work.

Borges, it is true, spent much of his life hanging out with women who would neither sleep with him nor marry him. The advantage for any biographer is that if you throw a stone in Buenos Aires you are likely to hit one of these women or their many descendants, or indeed their volumes of memoir.

The story begins in Geneva where, it is said, Borges Senior asked his son, then aged nineteen, if he had ever slept with a woman. When Borges said no, his father arranged ‘to help the youth negotiate the usual rites of passage to manhood’, as Williamson puts it, by giving him the address of a brothel and telling him that ‘a woman would be waiting there’ at an appointed time. It was, of course, a disaster. Borges Junior was shocked at the idea that he was sharing a woman with his father. Afterwards, according to Williamson, the adolescent Borges was taken to see a doctor who recommended a change of climate and fresh air and exercise. Williamson’s footnote for this points us to page 50 of María Esther Vázquez’s Borges: Esplendor y Derrota (1996). Vázquez had known Borges well, but this is no excuse for her account of the aftermath of his visit to the brothel: ‘He had such a terrible crisis that he cried for three successive days; he did not eat nor sleep… he only cried.’ She goes on: ‘With the stoicism of a monk, this healthy young man seemed to give up the necessities of the body to find in literature the only source of satisfaction and enjoyment.’

Even had Vázquez written that Borges cried for merely two days and then rose on the third, I would not believe a word of it. Nor do I believe the account in James Woodall’s life of Borges, also published in 1996: ‘What happened is a matter for speculation. It seems probable that Georgie’s virginity ended with the predictable fumbling and rush of any inexperienced teenage male, though he was especially horrified at the loss of physical self-possession at the moment of climax.’ Woodall points then to a reference to this disastrous sexual initiation in Borges’s story ‘The Other’, published in 1975. Borges, in the story, meets his double and tells him: ‘Nor have I forgotten a certain afternoon in a second-floor apartment on the Plaza Dubourg.’ His double corrects him: ‘Dufour.’ And he accepts the correction. Woodall quotes an earlier biographer who has, in his wisdom, pinpointed the place of assignation nominated by Borges Senior as the rue Général Dufour in Geneva.

It really is possible that all of this is rubbish, that, despite the breathless accounts by a number of his women friends who fell for the story, Borges’s father never sent him to a brothel at all and that something much less dramatic — his first reading of Whitman, for example — happened on the Plaza, or rue, Dufour. Or else Borges put the name in for no reason, just as he briefly allowed in the same story American bank-notes to carry a date.

We do have real evidence, however, that Borges went to brothels in Majorca in 1921. His literary group used to meet in a brothel, or what innocent young men might have thought was a brothel. Borges wrote to the writer Guillermo de Torre, who would marry Norah in 1928, about ‘feeling up the breasts or thighs of the smiling, uncomprehending girls’. And in a letter to Abramowicz, he wrote:

He also wrote about his love for a prostitute called Luz: ‘I tell you, I really loved that Luz: she was so playful with me and behaved with such ingenuous indecency. She was like a cathedral and also like a bitch.’

While it is possible that some of this is true, it reads more like boasting and is treated with caution by Williamson. Nonetheless, Borges himself, the arch-priest of pure invention trading as deep research, would surely have been appalled at the inability of Vázquez, Woodall, Williamson and many more who have not yet written their books to create at least the illusion of verisimilitude in their statements and assertions about his early sex life.

Williamson, however, follows every lead. Each intellectual woman who rejected Borges is given star treatment, and he cleverly finds clues in the poems and stories. Borges, during all this time, was living with his mother and going slowly blind. One evening, when he was out with one of his women friends, Estela Canto (who, in her book Borges a contraluz, would propagate the story of Borges and the brothel), Canto overheard him calling his mother on the telephone: ‘Yes, yes, Mother… Yes… from here we’ll be going to the Ambassador… Yes, Mother. Estela Canto… Yes, Mother.’ He was forty-five years old. Williamson lists many of the other women with whom Borges was in love. For their names alone they deserve to be remembered: Norah Lange, Haydée Lange, Marta Mosquera Eastman, Susana Bombal, Esther Zemborain de Torres Duggan, Pippina Diehl de Moreno Hueyo, Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich, Ema Risso Platero, Silvina Bullrich, Delia Ingenieros, to name but a few. Williamson’s analysis of Borges’s ‘single, involuntary criterion’ in choosing these women is interesting. ‘He fell for women who would be unacceptable to Mother, either because they came from an inferior social class or because they did not meet the high standards of respectability required by Doña Leonor.’

By the late 1950s, Borges was blind. Doña Leonor became, Williamson writes, ‘her son’s secretary and business manager, his general guide and protector, and she had gathered about her a circle of well-bred ladies who fussed over Georgie and acted as an admiring chorus to his every success and distinction’. One visitor remembered the maid asking Doña Leonor if she should pour some wine for Borges and the mother answering: ‘El niño no toma vino’ (‘niño here can mean both ‘boy’ and ‘heir’). By this time Borges’s work was winning attention in Europe, and he was being invited to lecture at universities in the United States. Some of the time his mother, now almost ninety, accompanied him.

Borges dreamed of marriage, of getting away from her. She helped him by suggesting a woman whom he had known years earlier, now widowed. She was called Elsa Astete. While Borges’s mother liked her for her deference, nobody else did. She was not smart or high enough on the social scale for Bioy or his wife. Other friends of Borges thought her ‘frumpish, provincial and rather plain’. They were married in 1967. The marriage was not a success.

Once more, Borges was luckier in his friendships than in his loves. In 1967, in the United States, he met the translator and writer Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in his mid-thirties. Over the next few years, having moved to Buenos Aires, di Giovanni co-ordinated the translation of Borges’s poetry into English, using some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the New Yorker. All of this is vividly described in The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His Work, which di Giovanni published in 2003.

When Borges wanted to leave his wife, di Giovanni masterminded his departure. Since there was no divorce in Argentina in 1970, they had to move with care. Elsa had no clue that he was going to leave her. ‘That chill grey winter’s morning,’ di Giovanni wrote,

Elsa was at home making puchero, a stew. She had asked Borges as he went out the door what he wanted for lunch. ‘What pained me most,’ she said in an interview in 1993, ‘was that when Borges asked for puchero, he already knew that he would not be coming back.’

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Jorge Luis Borges and Bioy Casares joined Marcel Proust and Lillian Hellman to become a distinguished band of writers whose maids wrote books about them. Bioy’s maid Jovina got in first; her book, Los Bioy, which is a wonderful account of half a century of service, appeared in 2002. It is clear that she felt affection for Bioy and his wife; despite her best intentions, however, she managed to portray them as capricious and mad and permanently horny, a wealthy pair of monsters, like two figures in an early Polanski film. Then in 2004 came Epifanía Uveda de Robledo, or Fanny, Borges’s maid. She had revenge on her mind, for the slights inflicted on her by Borges’s mother and the injuries, real or imaginary, inflicted by Maria Kodama, whom Borges married some months before his death. Fanny managed also in El Señor Borges to make her master seem like a saint and herself a reticent and faithful maid for whom one could, in all conscience, write a glowing reference.

In 1939 Bioy Casares married Silvina Ocampo, the sister of Victoria Ocampo. Silvina was twelve years older than him. Jovina came to work for them ten years later and stayed with them until the death of Bioy in 1999. Bioy loved women. He told Jovina: ‘I have a defect, Jovina, a great weakness. I love women so much that if a broomstick dressed up as a woman, I would follow that broomstick.’ Jovina realized that his marriage did not prevent him from broomsticking to his heart’s content on a daily basis, usually in the afternoon: he played tennis in the morning, and in the evening wrote his books and had supper with his wife and Borges. When, after supper, he and Borges collaborated on their books, Jovina noticed that they roared with laughter.

Bioy made no bones about his affairs. One day, for example, he arrived home with a baby, who was thereafter brought up in his household as his daughter. Later, other fruits of his great sexual energy would emerge. Silvina believed that Jovina had powers and every time she sent one of her manuscripts or a manuscript by Bioy to the publishers she would make Jovina touch the pages to give them luck. Silvina depended on Jovina for the smallest things and demanded that her food be personally served by Jovina or she would not eat it. (Similarly, Borges’s mother would ring for the maid in the middle of the night and explain that she merely wanted to see her.) When Bioy was in hospital he insisted that his meals be cooked and carried to the hospital by Jovina. He was, however, embarrassed at leaving the food the hospital provided, and suggested to Jovina that she could solve the problem by eating this food herself on her visits.

Jovina had to keep at bay the many women who wished to sleep with Bioy, including at times Elena, the wife of Octavio Paz, who had a long affair with him.

While Jovina wrote with relish and love and understanding of her employers’ madnesses and foibles, Fanny, Borges’s maid, wrote in some bitterness. Having worked for the family for more than thirty-five years, she was left homeless and almost penniless on Borges’s death. Compared to the Bioys’ household, where it was all go, Leonor Borges maintained a very respectable and stolid home life for herself and her son. The Borges’ apartment was tiny — the Bioys’ had twenty-two rooms — yet Fanny was forced to wear a uniform and cut her hair short; there was never a radio or a television in the apartment. Borges, she notes, was an obedient son. Every time he came home from somewhere he would go to his mother’s bedroom and tell her what he had done. Then he would undress for bed and find Fanny and put out his hand and receive two sweets. He did this, according to Fanny, all his life.

Borges was much tortured, according to Fanny, by the possibility of winning the Nobel Prize. On the day of the announcement journalists would queue outside his door. This would happen year after year.

Fanny’s book really comes into its own when Borges gets married. Borges the bachelor was dressed by Fanny every morning. ‘I dressed him entirely, including learning to make the knot of his tie. I put on his clothes, his socks, his shoes, his trousers, everything. Absolutely everything.’ The wife, however, told Fanny that every morning she opened a drawer and told Borges to dress himself. One day, as a result, he appeared with two odd shoes. The wife also forbade his old nightgown that went down to his ankles and made him wear pyjamas.

Fanny blames his mother for the wedding: ‘Doña Leonor was a good woman, but very authoritarian. It was the mother and the sister who arranged the wedding because he never said anything, never knew anything… They bought the furniture, they bought the apartment.’ The son, however, now sixty-eight years old, did not want to sleep with his new wife, and demanded that his old single bed be brought to the new apartment. On the wedding night his mother suggested that he and Elsa go to a hotel, but Borges wanted to sleep in his own bed and his mother had to accompany Elsa to the bus stop and send her home. In the morning when Fanny woke Borges she asked him how he had slept on his wedding night. He looked at her and smiled and said: ‘I dreamed all night that I was hanging out of a tram.’

Maria Kodama, who features in the second half of Fanny’s book, was born in 1937, the daughter of a German mother and a Japanese father. She appeared first in Borges’s circle in the mid-1960s, attending his classes on Anglo-Saxon at the National Library in Buenos Aires. She gave off an aura of reticence, mystery and self-possession. Fanny remembered her coming to the Borges apartment with other students:

In 1971, after the break-up of his marriage, Borges travelled to Iceland, where he found Kodama waiting for him. It was here, it seems, that they became lovers. Back home, however, Borges returned to live with his mother, now ninety-five, and Fanny. Leonor did not die until 1975, when she was ninety-nine. She was buried with the rest of her ancestors in the family vault in the Recoleta cemetery, where Borges himself would be expected to lie when his time came.

After his mother’s death, Borges travelled with Kodama, but in Buenos Aires he did not let his sister or the maid or his closest friends know the truth of their relationship. Much that is cruel and unusual has been written about Kodama, but Williamson in his biography is not keen to add to these comments. He recognizes that for the last fifteen years of Borges’s life, this was his closest and happiest relationship.

On 28 August 1979 Borges changed his will. Previously, he had left his estate to his sister and his two nephews; now, he left it to Kodama. He also left Fanny half of whatever money he had in his bank accounts, but later, in 1985, deleted this clause, leaving her very little. This obviously reflected his irritation at Fanny’s disapproval of Kodama.

In the years between the death of his mother and his own death, Borges and Kodama seemed to be on a permanent book tour and appeared to derive nothing but pleasure from it. By the end of 1985, however, it was clear to Borges that he was dying. He wished to go back to Europe, but kept this a secret from many friends and from his sister. In the middle of December, he and Kodama arrived in Geneva. Kodama, in an interview in 1999, told Williamson:

Works of genius come from strange sources. It is unimaginable that Borges or Bioy or Silvina Ocampo could have produced social realism in which domestic life would appear as a feature. All three created work that was playful, self-referential, that invented its own world partly because the world outside was not of much interest to them. It could be argued that Borges’s fiction and poetry were essentially apolitical, that he was more interested in literature than life and that his work is all the better for this. But it is difficult for any writer in an unstable, emerging or peripheral country, no matter how enigmatic or strange the work, to remain outside politics.

It is also possible to argue that Borges’s writing was indeed political, that he himself was a political activist all his life, that his lack of interest as an artist in the world outside the book arose from his and his mother’s dislike of the dominant elements in Argentine society, that his style and his system developed not despite Argentine society but because of it.

Yet Borges’s politics were not simple. In 1928, for example, he supported Hipólito Irigoyen of the Radical Party for the presidency, not merely because Borges’s grandfather had been a friend of the party’s founder, but because Irigoyen was more moderate in his nationalism and more open to democracy than his opponents. Borges wrote a manifesto in favour of Irigoyen, and signed a letter to the newspaper supporting him. Two years after Irigoyen’s victory, when the military took over, Borges wrote to a friend in Brazil: ‘We have sacrificed Myth for the sake of realism… Now we have independence under martial law, a sycophantic press, the perpetual wrangling of the left-wingers, and the fiction that the former dotty administration was “cruel and tyrannical”.’

The fact that his hero had been deserted by the people of Buenos Aires, who had ransacked Irigoyen’s house, helped Borges to get over his idealization of the city. In 1931 he wrote a savage attack on his country in an essay, ‘Our Inabilities’. He attacked the ‘pompous self-valorisation of the place our country occupies among the other nations’ and ‘the unrestrainable delight in failure’. Finally, he wrote, ‘a poverty of imagination defines our place in death.’ The old world of the criollo, so longed for by Borges’s mother, could only be found, he said, in the northern provinces of Uruguay.

In 1934 Borges wrote the preface to a poem celebrating a failed armed uprising, which he called ‘a patriotic uprising’, by militant members of the Radical Party. Yet, while some of his friends supported the reduction of Argentina’s economic dependence on Britain, Borges understood that this would move them slowly towards a sort of Argentine nationalism bordering on fascism. His own views on what Argentina might become were outlined in 1928 and reiterated in a radio broadcast in 1936:

In this speech, Borges wrote the death sentence for his family’s sense of power and entitlement in Argentina.

As the 1930s went on and writers took sides, Borges moved sideways. There is no evidence that he even attended the PEN International Congress in Buenos Aires in September 1936, in which political division was the main feature. Instead, Borges and Bioy set up a magazine called Destiempo, whose title indicated, Bioy said, ‘our wish to have nothing to do with the superstitions of the age’.

Borges felt a very deep attachment to an old and unsullied Argentina, but understood, as the 1930s went on, that such an attachment could lead easily to a native fascism. He wrote a number of trenchant attacks on Hitler’s regime in Germany. He wrote in support of a cultural openness, an Argentine cosmopolitanism, but grew to believe, with some justification, that he and a few friends carried this banner alone. He ceased to believe in the city or its people, he believed that the pampas and the gauchos were sour jokes, he hated the government and he grew at times to distrust history, including his own. The way was open for him to write a fiction that would be distinguished by its pure determination to leave most things out.

The possibility that Borges would have a quiet life, writing his stories, seeing his women, pleasing and annoying his mother, supping with Bioy and working in the library, came to an end in February 1946 with the election of Perón, whom Borges had vehemently opposed. Borges’s name was on a list of 2,000 state employees who, for one reason or another, were to be dismissed. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, Borges wrote about what happened: ‘I was honoured with the news that I had been “promoted” out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets.’ When he asked why, he was told (he claims): ‘You were on the side of the Allies — what do you expect?’

Williamson rightly deals with Borges’s version of this story with suspicion. He argues convincingly that Perón himself would not have even known about such a low-level dismissal, that the job inspecting the ‘poultry and rabbits’ was probably invented by Borges. He writes that Borges’s being moved rather than completely dismissed was done as a favour to him, and that he was probably, in fact, appointed an inspector at the Department of Beekeeping: that is, apiculture rather than aviculture (poultry). But the latter job was too good a story even for the Peronist press, who gloated.

A crowded dinner was given in Borges’s honour by his supporters. His speech against Perón was read out: ‘Dictatorships breed oppression; dictatorships breed servility; dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy… Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the many duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro… that individualism is an old Argentine virtue?’ One of the younger writers at the dinner recalled that Borges at this time was regarded ‘as a sort of anti-Perón’.

After a few months out of a job, Borges began to work as a teacher of literature, travelling through Argentina to give lectures:

While Borges gave lectures, his mother, at the thought of Perón in the Casa Rosada, the president’s house, went mad. ‘The Peronist threat to the constitution,’ Williamson writes, ‘brought out a latent, ancestral heroism in this formidable woman.’ In September 1948, at the age of seventy-two, she joined a demonstration against Perón. When the police came, a few ladies, including Doña Leonor and her daughter, stood their ground and were arrested. They were sentenced to thirty days in jail; Leonor, because of her age, was allowed to spend a month under house arrest, but Norah spent a month in jail in the company of prostitutes.

In 1950, when Perón had effectively made himself president for life, Borges agreed reluctantly to become president of the Argentine Society of Writers. ‘I tried to think as little as possible about politics,’ he wrote.

‘In every lecture I gave, I would always express my views against the government,’ Borges wrote. ‘Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside the doors of the Society of Writers.’ After the death of Eva Perón in 1952, when Borges refused to put up a portrait of Perón and his dead wife on the walls of the society’s premises, the society was closed.

After the fall of Perón in 1955, Borges wrote: ‘I remember the joy we felt; I remember that at that moment no one thought about themselves: their only thought was that the patria had been saved.’ Within weeks, with the help of Victoria Ocampo, among others, he was appointed director of the National Library. Doña Leonor was delighted; the family was being restored to a position of importance.

The fall of Perón represented a problem for his opponents. It was clear that in any free election he would win, with considerable support from the trade unions and the city’s poor. Nonetheless, he was a demagogue who behaved like a dictator. He was replaced by the military, themselves representatives of an old oligarchy. Borges supported the new regime wholeheartedly as they banned the Peronist party, including banners, symbols and music. When a further military coup, led by men who wished to allow free elections, was put down, the government, ignoring the sentences handed down by a military tribunal, executed thirty-two of the rebels by firing squad.

Elections were held, with Perón and his party banned. Perón ordered his supporters to return blank ballot papers and these numbered more than the votes for the legal parties. Borges and Bioy drew up a manifesto to support the government. Borges wrote that Argentina was rapidly recovering its health, ‘but there still remain many recalcitrant patients who refuse to get better and who resist revolutionary therapy. We shall have to persist with the treatment, increasing the dose of democracy for the more rebellious to see if they can be cured once and for all.’ Borges, for his support, was rewarded with the Chair of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, he gives a funny, folksy version of the reason for his appointment: ‘Other candidates had sent in painstaking lists of their translations, papers, lectures and other achievements. I limited myself to the following statement: “Quite unwittingly, I have been qualifying myself for this position throughout my life.” My plain approach gained the day.’ This is rubbish. He got the job because of his support for the regime. His mother, who had conspired to get it for him, had thus further reason for joy.

Other writers, who were as anti-Peronist as Borges, were appalled by the new government and Borges’s blanket support for it. These included Ernesto Sabato. Borges’s predicament is put succinctly by Williamson: ‘How do you create a democracy when the largest sector of the electorate will elect a totalitarian leader who is ideologically opposed to liberal democracy?’ In 1963, as Perón increased his influence, and new elections were called, Borges left the Radical Party and joined the Conservatives, believing them to have better anti-Peronist credentials. He allowed them to hold a reception to announce his membership, at which he made a speech.

The spectre of Perón continued to haunt Argentina. In 1973 his party, once more legalized, won the election, which paved the way for his return. Borges told an Italian newspaper that those who voted for Perón were ‘six million idiots’. He was now too famous to be fired from his job and was told that he could remain without interference. He resigned, however, in October 1973. Nine months later, Perón died, to be replaced by his widow, Isabelita.

Borges had lost his arch-enemy. He had no one now to denounce except the people. ‘Our country,’ he said in 1975, ‘is going through a moral crisis. We have taken to worshipping luxury, money and other myths and dogmas. I think ours is a venal country.’ Around this time Naipaul came to Argentina to cast his cold eye on Borges and his country. He made many sweeping statements, including the following two marvellous sentences: ‘There is no history in Argentina. There are no archives; there are only graffiti, polemics and school lessons.’ Perón, Borges told Naipaul, ‘represented the scum of the earth’.

‘For the contemplation of his country’s history,’ Naipaul wrote, ‘Borges substitutes ancestor worship.’ But in the second half of the 1970s, as the Peronists developed a terrorist army, a new breed of army general emerged in control of the country. The myth of a military splendour that had created Argentina, and the sense of glamorous lone knife-fighters, both of which had nourished Borges’s work, became a pale parody of what was really happening in the streets of his city. ‘Perhaps, then,’ Naipaul wrote, ‘parallel with the vision of art, there has developed, in Borges, a subsidiary vision, however unacknowledged, of reality. And now, at any rate, the real world can no longer be denied.’

The real world came to Borges in the guise of the young men who visited his apartment to read to him. Buenos Aires is now full of them. The best account of that experience is by Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading (1996) and With Borges (2004):

Paul Theroux in The Old Patagonian Express (1979) remembered reading Kipling ballads to the blind old man, being stopped after every few stanzas as Borges exclaimed how beautiful they were, his favourite being ‘The Ballad of East and West’. Evita, he told Theroux, was ‘a common prostitute’, as the writer, taking a more benign view than Naipaul, went back to see him again and again.

In 1976 Isabelita Perón’s government was replaced by a military dictatorship, the most murderous regime in Argentine history. As in 1955, Borges was so pleased at the end of the Peronist regime that he was happy to support the new one. He had lunch with General Videla and thanked him ‘for what he had done for the patria, having saved it from chaos, from the abject state we were in, and, above all, from idiocy’. This support was noted by Chile; Pinochet offered him an Order of Merit, which he accepted. He then agreed, against the advice of his friends, to visit Chile to accept an honorary doctorate. He attended a private dinner with Pinochet. He made a mad speech praising the sword of his ancestors and the sword that was ‘drawing the Argentine republic out of the quagmire’. This would not have helped him to win the Nobel Prize for which he was heavily tipped that year.

Nor would his remarks on a visit to Spain in 1976 have done him much good. He called Videla’s regime ‘a government of soldiers, of gentlemen, of decent people’. He declared his admiration for what General Franco had done in Spain. He then, sounding like Salvador Dalí, made rude remarks about Lorca:

Like a good number of Argentines, Borges discovered the truth of what was happening when he was outside Argentina. In Spain in 1980, where he received the Cervantes Prize, the highest honour that can be given to a writer in the Spanish language, he indicated a change of heart about the regime. While he had refused to support the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were the first to protest openly about the disappearances, he soon began to relent. Later, in Argentina, he was visited by a woman from an old Buenos Aires family who told him that her daughter had disappeared. He told her ‘he lived a very insulated life because he was blind and could not read the newspapers’, but that he believed her story. When she brought a friend whose daughter had also disappeared, Borges decided to sign a petition calling on the government to provide information on the fate of the disappeared. He persuaded Bioy to sign also. In a dispute between Argentina and Chile over islands in the Beagle Channel, he supported Chile. Nonetheless, Borges’s new dislike of the regime was not unequivocal. Even by the end of 1981 he would say: ‘I think this government is a necessary evil because democracy would give us another Frondizi’ — one of the leaders of the Radical Party in the 1950s — ‘or at worst another Perón.’

Once the Falklands War was over — he had described it as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ — he could no longer maintain the view that the military government was a necessary evil. He revised his position.

In the end, when the election was won by Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Party in 1983, Borges said: ‘We had emerged from a nightmare, and that collective act of faith was what could save us all.’

For 1984 and 1985, however, Argentina was forced to relive the nightmare, first through the commission of inquiry into the disappearances chaired by Ernesto Sabato, which reported in December 1984, and then by the trial of the generals, with evidence given by the relatives of the disappeared and by those who were tortured. Borges attended this trial in July 1985 and heard evidence of torture. He expressed his horror to reporters afterwards and in an open letter to a newspaper.

It must have occurred to him that his own earlier support for the generals was well remembered. As Alfonsín’s position slowly weakened in 1985, Borges realized that one or other of the parties he now hated — the Peronists or the military — would retake power in Argentina. On 16 October, in an interview with a Swiss journalist, he expressed the wish to become a Swiss citizen and to die in Switzerland. In the new will in which he disinherited Fanny, he also left his sister his share in the family tomb in the Recoleta cemetery where his mother was buried.

His final journey to Europe with Maria Kodama would become controversial in Argentina. Fanny insisted he did not wish to leave: ‘Of one thing I am sure: Señor Borges did not want to go, but he did not have sufficient energy to oppose whoever brought him. He said to me in a half-broken voice: “Fanny, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go.”’

This, considering the evidence, seems unlikely. His going alone to Europe with Kodama knowing that he would not return to Argentina seems to have been a deliberate act. In a late poem, ‘The Web’, he began:

After the Falklands War he had also written a poem, ‘The Confederates’, in favour of Switzerland, praising its ‘tower of reason and firm faith’ where different races and religions and languages had ‘resolved to forget their differences and accentuate their affinities’. He made it the title poem of his last book of verse.

On 26 April, while in Geneva, Borges and Maria Kodama were married by proxy in Paraguay. He died in Geneva on 14 June. He is buried close to John Calvin in the Cimetière de Pleinpalais, also known as the Cemetery of the Kings, close to the old city in Geneva. It is a calm, unostentatious cemetery, with single graves mostly of famous people, the very opposite in tone to the Recoleta in Buenos Aires in which baroque and gothic-windowed family vaults do battle with the rococo and the overadorned. Borges’s gravestone was clearly designed by Kodama with references and images that mattered to them both in their relationship. In death, his grave did not make him an Argentine hero, but rather the husband of a woman he had loved for the last fifteen years of his life. After Borges’s death, Kodama did not make many friends among his family and associates. Both Norah Borges’s sons and Fanny sought to have the revised will thrown out, but they lost. Kodama runs Borges’s estate.

In 1999 Kodama told Edwin Williamson that Borges was fully aware of the political import of his dying in Geneva and his wishing to be buried there. ‘You see,’ Borges had told her, ‘I’ve become a kind of myth, and whenever the issue arises of my being buried over here, people may recall the book I have written, The Confederates, and they’ll think about it, people will come here and ask themselves: why? That will be my small contribution to changing the world.’

In Buenos Aires, Norah Borges made a statement: ‘I have heard through the newspapers that my brother has died in Geneva, far from us and from many friends, of a terrible illness that we did not know he had. I am surprised that his last wish was to be buried there, he always wanted to be with his ancestors and with our mother in the Recoleta.’

While Kodama suggested that Borges’s reasons for dying in Geneva were essentially political and public, there were also private reasons. Borges spoke a great deal about his father in the last weeks. His father had taken him to this city at the age of fifteen in an effort to civilize him, to remove him from the world of his ancestors to a place where the shadows were more complex and rich, from a place, run by his mother, where battles were glorified, to a place, run by his father, where poetry would matter and becoming a writer could be a real vocation. His father, Borges had written, ‘was such a modest man that he would have liked being invisible’. Now, in the weeks before his death, Borges wrote to the Spanish news agency EFE asking to be left alone: ‘I am a free man. I have decided to stay in Geneva, because I associate Geneva with the happiest days of my life… I think it strange that someone should not understand and respect this decision by a man who, like a certain character of Wells’s, has resolved to be an invisible man.’

Hart Crane: Escape from Home

There are certain single volumes of American poetry, some of them first books or early books, that carry with them a special and spiritual power; they seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to have been written from an enormous private or artistic need. The poems are full of a primal sense of voice, and the aura of the voice in the rhythms of the poem suggests a relentless desire not to make easy peace with the reader. If some of these poems have the tone of prayers, they are not prayers of comfort or of supplication as much as urgent laments or cries from the depths where the language has been held much against its will or has broken free, and now demands to be heard.

Such tones can be found in the very opening lines of the first poem in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song (1995):

Or Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (1992):

Or the first lines of ‘Epistle’, the first poem of Li-Young Lee’s first book, Rose (1986):

In ‘General Aims and Theories’, written in 1925, Hart Crane tried to outline his sense of where this tone, so apparent in his own work, came from: ‘I am concerned,’ he wrote,

As is clear from his early letters, Crane as a reader set about preparing himself with enormous zeal and moral seriousness to become that ‘potential factor’. Despite his provincial background and his problems with his parents, and then partly because of them, he found a tone and a poetic diction that matched a sensibility that was both visionary and deeply rooted in the real. In his poems he worked a gnarled, edgy sound against the singing line; he played a language dense with metaphor and suggestion against images and rhythms of pure soaring beauty. His syntax had something hard and glittering in it, utterly surprising. In his best poems he managed to make the rhythms — the hidden nervous system in the words and between the words — so interesting, intense and effortless that they command attention and emotional response despite their verbal density, basic difficulty and what Crane himself called ‘tangential slants, interwoven symbolisms’.

Even though most of his poems were written when he was in his twenties — he was born in 1899 and committed suicide in 1932 — there is a definite sense from the few essays that Crane wrote and from the selection of his richly interesting correspondence now collected with his poems in a single volume that he had put considerable thought into his literary heritage and viewed his place in it with passionate sophistication. In 1926, in a letter to the editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe, replying to her complaints about obscurity in his poem ‘At Melville’s Tomb’, Crane set down his defence of his poetry and offered one of his most detailed and useful explanations of what his lines actually meant, while making it clear that their meaning, while concrete and direct, was a dull business indeed compared to what we might call their force. The first stanza reads:

‘Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else),’ Monroe wrote. Crane in his reply admitted that:

as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem.

In his next paragraph he emphasized, however, that there was nothing aleatory in his method. ‘This may sound,’ he wrote,

He then took Monroe through some lines of the poem, including ‘The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath/An embassy.’ ‘Dice bequeath an embassy,’ he wrote,

Monroe had commented as well on the opening of the last stanza:

‘Nor do compass, quadrant and sextant,’ she wrote, ‘contrive tides, they merely record them, I believe.’

‘Hasn’t it often occurred,’ Crane replied,

In the same letter, he quoted from Blake and T. S. Eliot to show how the language of the poetry he wrote and admired did not simply ignore logic, it sought to find a logic deeply embedded in metaphor and suggestion. This poetry, he made clear, did not follow the lazy path dictated by the unconscious, or allow the outlandish or the merely associative to triumph, but was deliberate and exact, even though it belonged ‘to another order of experience than science’. He worked towards both ‘great vividness and accuracy of statement’, even if it might seem to some, including Monroe, that the vivid triumphed over the accurate.

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio, where his father owned a factory that made syrup, and later founded the Crane Chocolate Company, which manufactured candy. (His father invented the type of candy known as Life Savers.) The relationship between Crane’s parents was often difficult, with many separations and reconciliations; Crane at the age of nine was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Belden Hart, to whom he became very close. He shared a certain emotional instability with his mother, who joined the Christian Scientists. At sixteen he attempted suicide on the Isle of Pines off Cuba, a property owned by his mother’s family.

From an early age Crane expressed his interest in becoming a poet. At seventeen, he published his first poem in a magazine. Entitled ‘C 33’, it was about the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde:

That same year, when he submitted poems to the magazine Others he was told by William Carlos Williams that they were ‘damn good stuff’.

Part of the reason for Crane’s supreme self-confidence and precocious ambition arose from the fact that his enthusiasm for writing was not watered down by much formal education. His reading became a way of escaping from the war between his parents. In his youth he found the poets he was looking for in the same way as rushing water will find a steep incline. He read Shakespeare, Drayton, Donne, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Whitman, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Eliot with delight, and also the work of the Jacobean dramatists. And in the same years he could also list the poets whose work he disliked; they included Milton, Byron, Tennyson and Amy Lowell.

In 1917 his mother suggested that he drop the ‘Harold’ when he published his poems: ‘In signing your name to your contributions & later to your books do you intend to ignore your mother’s side of the house entirely… How would “Hart Crane” be?’ His father disapproved of his interest in becoming a writer: ‘Poetry is alright; your chosen vocation is alright, but when you are living in New York and spending $2 a week for tutoring [in French], out of an allowance of $25, it is not alright; it isn’t as things should be.’

In his late teens and early twenties Crane moved between New York and Cleveland, getting intermittent support, financial and emotional, from one or the other of his parents, and making literary friends, including Sherwood Anderson, whom he admired, and later Allen Tate, Waldo Frank and Eugene O’Neill, and meeting editors wherever he could. He had a number of homosexual love affairs. He read Dostoevsky with considerable interest, and ‘that delightful Moby Dick’, and then a smuggled copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, writing to a friend: ‘He is the one above all others I should like to talk to.’ Eventually, having worked at odd jobs and published poems in magazines, he went to work for his father’s company. But relations were difficult and Crane severed contact with his father for more than two years. He began working as an advertising copywriter the following year and held jobs in advertising agencies in Cleveland and New York between periods that he devoted to either writing or drinking or both.

Among poets and readers of poetry, Crane established a reputation as the most promising poet of his generation. In 1925, after his father refused to give him an allowance, the millionaire Otto Kahn gave him $2,000 to work on his long, ambitious poem The Bridge. In December 1926 his first book of poems, White Buildings, was published. His drinking increased, as did his erratic wandering and his constant difficulties with his parents. Like most young men of his age he wanted love from his mother and money from his father. Neither parent felt fully able to satisfy his needs, but by doing so sporadically, they seemed instead to magnify certain vulnerabilities in him.

In December 1928 Crane travelled to Europe, seeing Robert Graves and Laura Riding in London and André Gide and Gertrude Stein in Paris. He continued working on The Bridge, which was published in a limited edition in Paris in 1930 and subsequently in a trade edition in New York. He moved to New York, where he wore out his welcome in a number of friends’ houses, then back to Cleveland, and then travelled to Mexico in 1931. He was still drinking. On 27 April 1932, while returning to the United States from Mexico aboard the Orizaba, he jumped from the deck and drowned. His myth as the poète maudit, the doomed, wild, homosexual genius, America’s Rimbaud, had begun; his very name was a warning to the young about the dangers and the delights of poetry. It was a myth that even the seriousness and the immense slow force of his poems and the studious tone of many of his letters would do little to dispel.

In April 1917 Crane wrote to his father of his great ambition: ‘I shall really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America if I am enabled to devote enough time to my art.’ The poetry he intended to write was to be highly wrought and full of self-conscious and hard-won artistry. Although there are times in his work when a word or a phrase seems chosen at random, selected for its sound as much as its sense, his letters emphasize that he was not interested in a dream language or summoning his phrases at random from the well of the unconscious. In January 1921 he wrote to a friend about the Dadaist movement: ‘I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four winds, the six senses and plum pudding.’ And two weeks later he wrote to another friend: ‘There is little to be gained in any art, so far as I can see, except with much conscious effort.’ Later that year, he wrote again: ‘I admit to a slight leaning toward the esoteric, and am perhaps not to be taken seriously. I am fond of things of great fragility, and also and especially of the kind of poetry John Donne represents, a dark musky, brooding, speculative vintage, at once sensual and spiritual, and singing the beauty of experience rather than innocence.’

The following year he wrote to Allen Tate: ‘Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!’ In these letters from 1922, as he worked on his poem ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’, he wrote to friends of the sheer effort each line took and the burden of symbolic meaning he was asking the words to carry. ‘What made the first part of my poem so good,’ he wrote, ‘was the extreme amount of time, work and thought put on it.’ In a letter to Waldo Frank in February 1923, he tried to indicate his intentions: ‘Part I starts out from the quotidian, rises to evocation, ecstasy and statement. The whole poem is a kind of fusion of our own time with the past. Almost every symbol of current significance is matched by a correlative, suggested or actually stated, “of ancient days”.’

In an earlier letter, he made clear also that the second part of the poem was ‘a jazz roof garden description in amazing language’:

For anyone in those years writing poems that attempted to fuse deliberate and difficult structure with phrases filled with allusion and symbolic meaning, using rhythms that sought to seduce the reader with a mixture of the subtle and the strident, it was obvious that T. S. Eliot was an example to be welcomed and watched. Crane read The Waste Land as soon as it appeared. He was alert to the power of Eliot’s influence and also to his own need both to absorb and to evade it. ‘There is no one writing in English who can command so much respect, to my mind, as Eliot,’ he wrote. ‘However, I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction… I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in the time of Blake.’

The letters suggest that the poems Crane wrote came only with enormous concentration at times when he managed to make a densely packed music in his poetry that matched or impelled his complex aims in meaning and structure. His work did not come with the same effortless grace with which the poems of William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens, two poets whom he admired, seemed to come, and which allowed them to hold down jobs with ease and have what appeared, on the surface at least, a calm domestic life. The life Crane lived when he was not writing was troubled and messy, as his biographers have described.

For this reason, it is useful to have more than 500 pages of Crane’s selected letters in the same volume as the poems that were published in his lifetime and the unpublished poems. The picture of the poet here is rather less alarming than the one that appears in the biographies. He seems at times almost dull, often thoughtful and responsible, and quite bookish. If his life in the letters is colourful, then the colour comes from the naked quality of Crane’s ambition and the complex sensibility he exposed to his correspondents. His letters also throw real and sensuous light on the actual poems themselves as they were being written. Indeed, when he was not writing to his immediate family, Crane was writing almost exclusively to friends who were poets or who cared about poetry.

Early in 1923 he wrote to a friend about his plans for The Bridge:

Early the following year in New York, Crane met and fell in love with Emil Opffer, three years his senior, who worked in the merchant marine. Opffer found him lodgings at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn in a house inhabited by Opffer’s father, who was a newspaper editor, and other bohemians and artists. (John Dos Passos lived in the building for a while.) Crane wrote to his mother and grandmother about his new quarters: ‘Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the statue of Liberty, way down the harbor, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right!’ It was as though he had walked into his own poem. ‘I think,’ he wrote to Waldo Frank, ‘the sea has thrown itself upon me and been answered, at least in part, and I believe I am a little changed — not essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has asked a question and been answered.’ Again he wrote to his mother and grandmother about the view:

He confided to his mother about the poems he was writing:

In 1925 Crane moved home to Cleveland for a time and then to Patterson in upstate New York, where he shared a farmhouse with Allen Tate and Tate’s wife Caroline Gordon before he fell out with them with much bitter correspondence and recrimination, some of which reads like high comedy. He desperately needed somewhere to work on his long poem before the money Otto Kahn had given him ran out. And just as his move to Brooklyn seemed to come as a piece of almost uncanny good fortune, allowing him to inhabit parts of the poem as he conceived of them, now he made another move that was to provide him with images, metaphors and suggestions fully matching the grandeur of his design. He had appealed to his mother to allow him to go to her property on the Isle of Pines, where he had not been since he was sixteen. She was at first uneasy about the idea, feeling, among other things, that he would disturb the housekeeper, but soon she relented. In early May 1926 Crane voyaged towards the scenes of some of the later sections of The Bridge.

Slowly, in what seemed like an undiscovered country waiting for its Columbus, he began to work, reading, planning his poem further, and then writing:

He worked on some of the earlier as well as the later sections, including ‘Atlantis’. He wrote to a friend in New York: ‘I’ve been having a great time reading Atlantis in America, the last book out on the subject, and full of exciting suggestions. Putting it back for 40 or 50 thousand years, it’s easy to believe that a continent existed in mid-Atlantic waters and that the Antilles and West Indies are but salient peaks of its surface.’

In August 1926 he wrote to Waldo Frank: ‘I have never been able to live completely in my work before. Now it is to learn a great deal. To handle the beautiful skeins of this myth of America — to realize suddenly, as I seem to, how much of the past is living under only slightly altered forms, even in machinery and such-like, is extremely exciting.’

He sent the sections of The Bridge as he finished them to editors and friends. On 22 July he sent Marianne Moore his poem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’ for The Dial (which she accepted); it would be the prologue for his long poem. Two days later he wrote to Waldo Frank: ‘That little prelude, by the way, I think to be almost the best thing I’ve ever written, something steady and uncompromising about it.’ Its last two stanzas read:

Crane was well aware that an epic poem could not be written in America in the 1920s. Such a poem would, he knew, because of its very ambition, be doomed to failure or something close to failure. This idea seemed, most of the time, to excite him. He was, it is important to remember, a poet in his twenties. At times he saw that the symbols would not carry the weight he gave them. ‘The bridge,’ he wrote to Waldo Frank in June 1926, ‘as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economical approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks.’

But in other letters, including ones to Frank, and especially one written fifteen months later to his patron Otto Kahn that set out the grand design of the poem, he seemed to feel no doubt about the importance of his project. ‘The Aeneid was not written in two years,’ he wrote to Kahn, ‘nor in four, and in more than one sense I feel justified in comparing the historic and cultural scope of The Bridge to that great work. It is at least a symphony with an epic theme, and a work of considerable profundity and inspiration.’

Like many young poets, he wrote home once his first book had appeared wondering what they would make of it. He wrote to his mother: ‘I’m very much amused at what you say about the interest in my book out there in Cleveland. Wait until they see it, and try to read it! I may be wrong, but I think they will eventually express considerable consternation.’

His father was not impressed. As late as 1928, when The Bridge was almost finished, he suggested that his son learn a trade. But Crane was still adding to his store, discovering, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins early in 1928. ‘It is a revelation to me — of unrealized possibilities,’ he wrote to Yvor Winters, who seemed to admire his work, and with whom he had a fascinating correspondence until Winters reviewed The Bridge harshly, thus ending what had been a close literary friendship.

Crane seemed to derive energy and immense pleasure from travel. His letters from France and Mexico are filled with delight, even though it is clear that he was drinking a great deal in Mexico. It was there in 1932 that he broke rank, as he put it, with the ‘brotherhood’, and began an affair with Peggy Cowley, who was in the midst of a divorce from Malcolm Cowley. ‘I think it has done me considerable good,’ he wrote. ‘The old beauty still claims me, however, and my eyes roam as much as ever. I doubt if I’ll ever change very fundamentally.’

Once The Bridge was finished and published, Crane continued working on a number of shorter poems, including ‘The Broken Tower’:

In Mexico he had been on a Guggenheim fellowship that ended on 31 March 1932, when he said to a friend, ‘I’m just plain Hart Crane again.’ He was unsure whether he wanted to remain in Mexico or return to the United States. The problem, as before, was money, and this problem now became more severe when he learned that his inheritance from his father’s estate would be much less than he had expected, not enough to live on. His stepmother wrote to him on 12 April:

Crane was drinking wildly and behaving erratically but still spoke of plans for future work. It was clear because of the freedom he had won during his travels and his high ambition as a poet and also because of his constant drinking that he was in no state to go back to New York and work again in advertising, or make his living in any way. He spoke of suicide and, it was reported, made a number of wills. Eventually, it was decided that he and Peggy Cowley would sail back to the United States on the Orizaba from Veracruz. After a stop in Havana, it seems that Crane was badly beaten up on the ship in the early hours of 27 April. One of his fellow passengers, Gertrude Berg, saw that ‘he had a black eye and looked generally battered’.

Close to noon that day he appeared on deck. ‘He walked to the railing,’ Berg remembered,

Although lifeboats were lowered, there were no further sightings of the poet. One of the most brilliant first acts in American literature had come to an end.

Tennessee Williams and the Ghost of Rose

Although Henry James’s sister, Alice, was five years his junior, they were the closest among the five James siblings. In her biography of Alice James, Jean Strouse has written:

As a way of escape Henry James found his ‘safe inner world’ through reading and writing; this was not available in the same way to Alice. Henry created a vast imaginative terrain that he inhabited with considerable determination, independence and strength of will; his only sister, on the other hand, became a reverse image of him — she was a weak patient, dependent on others, suffering from ailments not easy to name and impossible to cure. Henry James did not keep a personal diary and nowhere set down his dreams and fears, but it is clear from his letters about her, especially when she arrived in England in 1884 and after her death eight years later, that Alice’s fate and her suffering preoccupied him a great deal while he also worked hard and managed a varied and busy social life.

Just as it is possible to read the character of Rosie Muniment, the witty invalid, in The Princess Casamassima as a version of Alice James, we can also read the children Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw, written three years after Alice’s death, as versions of the two James siblings, Henry and Alice, who both lived unmarried and in exile in England, oddly abandoned and orphaned and, in certain ways, emotionally unprotected. In February 1895 James wrote in his notebook the idea of a

Although he never wrote this story, the notebook entry is fascinating for anyone interested in James’s nonchalant masculinity and Alice’s neurotic inertia, as it is for anyone looking at the richly complex emotional and creative life of Henry James and the diaries and letters of his sister Alice.

In his Memoirs, Tennessee Williams, a writer both homosexual and hypochondriac who also devoted fierce energy to his work while his only sister suffered from a mysterious mental illness, wrote about his relationship to his sister Rose:

Henry James and Tennessee Williams each marvelled at his sister’s own prose style in diaries and letters. Alice’s diary, James wrote, ‘is heroic in its individuality… and the beauty and eloquence with which she often expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour, constitute… a new claim for the family renown. This last element — her style, her power to write — are indeed to me a delight.’

Williams in his Memoirs quoted from Rose’s letters: ‘I remember one that began with this phrase: “Today the sun came up like a five-dollar gold piece!” Or another in which she wrote: “Today we drove in town and I purchased Palmolive shampoo for my crowning glory.”’

In his two best early plays, Williams dramatized relations between siblings, one of them watchful, the other damaged and insecure; each contains a key moment in which the weaker sibling loses her moorings. In The Glass Menagerie (1944) Laura’s brother writes poems, admires the work of D. H. Lawrence and works in a shoe warehouse, as Williams did, while Laura herself is, like Rose and indeed like Williams himself, immensely fragile and sexually insecure. (The mother in the play was, according to Williams’s younger brother, so accurately based on their mother that she could have sued.) In the play, Laura is psychologically broken by the visit of one gentleman caller; in life, Rose’s troubles began when she was abandoned by her ambitious boyfriend after her father had lost part of his ear in a fight at an all-night poker game, thus ruining his chance of further professional advancement. ‘Her heart broke, then,’ Williams wrote, ‘and it was after that that the mysterious stomach trouble began.’

As he worked on A Streetcar Named Desire, which was produced in 1947, Williams was living in New Orleans with his boyfriend Pancho Rodriguez. In his notebook he wrote about the difference between them: ‘He is incapable of reason. Violence belongs to his nature as completely as it is abhorrent to mine.’ According to a friend, ‘Tennessee behaved very badly toward Pancho, and he did so by using Pancho for real-life scenes which he created — and then transformed them into moments of A Streetcar Named Desire.’ Thus Pancho, rough, less educated than Williams, became Stanley to Williams’s Stella. The drama begins when Stella’s unstable sister comes to New Orleans and has, eventually, to be taken away. Some of the most fruitful moments in Williams’s work came when he found metaphors in drama for what had really happened to him and his sister Rose.

Williams in his art thus gave shape to his life, or to the parts of it that really interested him. The other sources for his life that he left have to be read judiciously. His impressionistic book Memoirs, for example, which he wrote in 1975 at the age of sixty-four, in the words of his biographer Donald Spoto, ‘conceals more than it shares, misrepresents more than it documents, omits major events, confuses dates and… tells virtually nothing about the playwright’s career’. Williams’s letters as source material are more useful, but they tended to be written to amuse and suit their recipients. Thus his notebooks, which he kept, mostly in diary form, between 1936 and 1958 and again briefly between 1979 and 1981, and which have been edited and annotated with fastidious care by Margaret Bradham Thornton, are the best guide we have to his life and his moods. About many aspects of him, this new volume is invaluable.

The entries we have begin when Williams was twenty-five and living with his family, struggling under considerable pressures to find a voice as a poet, short story writer and playwright. These pressures might explain the tone of self-obsession, self-pity and despair. The entries seem to have been written at night and he himself became alert to their morbid self-indulgence, quoting Nietzsche: ‘Do not let the evening be judge of the day.’ While he was trying to impress everyone in his creative work, in these pages he wished to impress no one and thus could be brutally honest about his own failings. It is interesting that when he found success and fame the tone did not change much, even when he had many lovers, enough money to travel and lots of friends and admirers. He still, when he came to write in his notebooks, felt at times sorry for himself but at other times something more interesting and convincing, a huge unease about being in the world at all, which nothing, no matter how thrilling, could lift or cure.

There is never a moment in his notebooks when he congratulates himself on mastering the structure of a new play or creating a new and memorable character or on that precise day writing a speech that worked wonders. Only a few times did he write about technical problems. (His observation that ‘the tragedy of a poet writing drama is that when he writes well — from the dramaturgic technical pt. of view he is often writing badly’ stands out in this book.) He did not jot down ideas as they came to him, as Henry James did, so we do not see in these pages the growth of his most important plays from a single entry. Instead, Williams noted what he was creating as a burden or a dull fact, including scenes he was rewriting or demands from directors and producers. Often, on rereading work in progress, he noted its badness. Precisely how his creative process operated he kept to himself. Instead, he wrote about who had irritated him or pleased him during the day, or how nervous he felt, how many pills he took or how much alcohol he consumed, or how many lengths of the pool he swam. He noted his fears and dreams.

It is strange how out of all of this mostly inchoate and random writing, a sense of a personal vision emerges that would make its way into the very core of Williams’s main characters and scenes. These entries capture an authentic voice, an artist alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish. Many of his most whining entries were written on the very days when he was producing his most glittering work. His whining was not a game or done for effect; it seems, indeed, a rare example of whining both sincere and heartfelt. Even when he was at his most successful, he could, for example, write: ‘Today the dreaded occasion of reading over the work and the (almost but never quite) expected fit of revulsion.’ Tennessee Williams meant business when he whined. And thus somehow he managed to connect his own dark and obsessive complaints about his works and days, his own dread of life, to his characters and their fate. These notebooks, precisely because they were not intentionally created as raw material for work, now seem to be the rock on which his creations, sparkling and vivid versions of himself, were built.

In the early years he was coy about sex. In a diary entry for 1979 he disclosed: ‘Such was the Puritanism imposed by Edwina [his mother] that I did not masturbate till the age of Twenty-Six, then not with my hands but by rubbing my groin against my bed-sheets, while recalling the incredible grace and beauty of a boy-diver plunging naked from the high board in the swimmingpool of Washington U. in Saint Louis.’ The work he produced seemed almost part of a self-disgust, or a desperate need to overcome it, an aspect of pure frustration with himself and his circumstances. On 15 April 1936, for example, he wrote:

The feeling of uselessness arose sometimes from his fears about his masculinity, the sense that he was a sissy, a guy without guts, as much as from his judgements on the badness of his work. Two weeks after the entry quoted above, he wrote: ‘I must remember that my ancestors fought the Indians! No, I must remember that I am a man — when all is said and done — and not a snivelling baby.’ And then on 8 May: ‘If only I could realize I am not 2 persons. I am only one. There is no sense in this division. An enemy inside myself! How absurd!’ Later that year, it struck him about Shakespeare: ‘I bet he was a guy that had plenty of guts. No damn sissy.’ The following year, he wrote: ‘But if I were God I would feel a little bit sorry for Tom [Tennessee] Williams once in a while — he doesn’t have a very gay easy time of it and he does have guts of a sort even though he is a stinking sissy!’

In the middle of all of this Williams was capable of what one presumes — it is hard to know — was irony, even self-mockery, when in April 1940 in New York he noticed the war: ‘Tonight Germany seized Denmark and war was declared by Norway — but infinitely more important is the fact that my play will be discussed and perhaps a decision rendered by the Theatre Guild.’

As he moved away from home, Williams fell in love a number of times, first with a Canadian, Kip Kiernan, then with Pancho Rodriguez, and then Frank Merlo, with whom he lived for many years, but this did not prevent him from having many casual lovers, often one or two a day wherever he went. On 27 June 1941, he wrote: ‘I am fatigued, I am dull, I am bitter at heart. But I do not suffer much. I have diverted myself with the most extraordinary amount of sexual license I have ever indulged in.’

This sexual licence, however, was accompanied by strange moments of unease about his sexuality and about homosexuality in general. When in 1941 a friend suggested that homosexuals should be exterminated at twenty-five ‘for the good of society’, Williams wondered:

And sex itself much of the time, despite the energy he put into it, disappointed him. On 16 September 1941, he wrote, for example: ‘The cold and beautiful bodies of the young! They spread themselves out like a banquet table, you dine voraciously and afterwards it is like you had eaten nothing but air.’

As he got older and began to travel, especially in Italy and Spain where he went every summer, he paid for sex, but this did not seem to make him happy either, especially afterwards. In Rome in July 1955 he wrote:

Because of his bad eyesight, Williams did not serve in the Second World War and it is an aspect of his honesty as well as his self-obsession that the war engaged him very little. In January 1942 he wrote:

He had, as he said, a way of reducing or indeed elevating everything to the personal. In a letter to Elia Kazan about Nixon in August 1952, for example: ‘He looks like the gradeschool bully that used to wait for me behind a broken fence and twist my ear to make me say obscene things.’

What impinged on Williams’s life as much as his work, as is clear from these pages, was his family. His father appeared in the early entries as a threat and a nuisance, ‘a dormant volcano’; his younger brother Dakin hardly at all; his mother Edwina surprisingly little. But his maternal grandparents, whom he loved, were invoked regularly. His grandmother, also called Rose, was, he wrote in 1941, ‘a miracle of gentleness. A faded golden rose in fading sunlight. The finest thing in my life.’ And the fate of his sister Rose troubled him year after year, flitting through his waking life and his dreams. As he worked with fierce determination on his plays, as he travelled the world like a maniac, as he sought new sexual partners, as he drank and took pills and went to parties, there was always the sense, made clear in many notebook entries, that he was in flight from what was done to his sister. He lived in the shadow of her suffering and there were times when he seemed to seek pleasure and experience enough for two of them.

Rose was sixteen months older than Williams; as children, they were very close. She saw her first psychiatrist when she was twenty-one. In 1937 she was diagnosed with dementia praecox, an early term for schizophrenia. In 1943 she underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy. In notes made in 1979 Williams wrote that his mother ‘approved for my sister to have one of the first pre-frontal lobotomies performed in the States because she was shocked by Rose’s tastefully phrased but explicit disclosures of masturbation practised with Candles stolen from the Chapel, at All Saints in Vicksburg’. Rose lived in institutions from 1943 for the rest of her life.

As Margaret Bradham Thornton makes clear in her copious annotations to these diaries — each right-hand page of Williams’s entries is faced by a left-hand page of informative notes — Rose appeared in various guises in many of Williams’s plays, poems and stories. Her life as it made its way into his imagination is central to his work.

In October 1936 Williams first noted a problem with Rose: ‘The house is wretched. Rose is on one of her neurotic sprees — fancies herself an invalid — talks in a silly dying-off way — trails around the house in negligees. Disgusting.’ Three years later, when the seriousness of her condition was fully clear, Williams wrote an emendation to this: ‘God forgive me for this!’ In January 1937 Williams’s mother wrote to her parents about Rose’s breakdown and her ‘raving on the subject of “sex”… and I was ashamed for Dakin and Tom to hear her the other night’. The same day Williams wrote in his notebook: ‘Tragedy. I write that word knowing the full meaning of it. We have had no deaths in our family but slowly by degrees something was happening much uglier and more terrible than death. Now we are forced to see it, know it. The thought is an aching numbness — a horror!’

By May, when Rose had been moved to an institution, Williams’s mother wrote to her parents once more: ‘Tom and I went out to see Rose Sunday… The visit made Tom ill so I can’t take him to see her again. I can’t have two of them there!’ In September that year, having seen Rose, Williams wrote: ‘No, I haven’t forgotten poor Rose — I beg whatever power there is to save her and spare her from suffering.’ The following year, he saw her again: ‘She is like a person half-asleep now — quiet, gentle and thank God — not in any way revolting like so many of the others — She sat with us in a bright sunny room full of flowers — said “yes” to all our questions — looked puzzled, searching for something — sometimes her eyes filled with tears — (So did mine).’

In August 1939 Rose’s medical report read: ‘Does no work. Manifests delusion of persecution. Smiles and laughs when telling of person plotting to kill her. Talk free and irrelevant. Admits auditory hallucinations. Quiet on the ward. Masturbates frequently. Also expresses various somatic delusions, all of which she explains on a sexual basis. Memory for remote past is nil. Appetite good. Well nourished.’

Four months later when Williams had made another visit, he wrote: ‘Visited Rose at sanitarium — horrible, horrible! Her talk was so obscene — she laughed and spoke continual obscenities — Mother insisted I go in, though I dreaded it and wanted to go out and stay outside. We talked to the Doctor afterwards — a cold, unsympathetic young man — he said her condition was so hopeless that we could only expect a progressive deterioration.’

In March 1943, when Rose had a lobotomy, Williams wrote: ‘A cord breaking. 1000 miles away. Rose. Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain. Me. Here. Smoking. My father, mean as a devil, snoring 1000 miles away.’

Rose came to him in dreams in which his identity and hers seemed confused. In December 1948, while crossing the Atlantic, he noted:

Four years later in Spain he noted another dream: ‘I’ve dreamed of my sister, seeing her in a cream colored lace dress which I had forgotten. In the dream a lady who looked like my sister wore it — then I had it on and then I was struggling to sit down between two tables and was wedged so tightly between them I couldn’t breathe.’

In later years he saw more of his sister, writing in 1979 in Key West:

Part of the reason for Williams’s obsession with his sister was his feeling that he, too, could easily have followed her into a mental institution. ‘The shadow of what happened to Rose’ haunted him in the years of his success and in subsequent years when the plays he wrote did not find large audiences or win much praise and he was addicted to various drugs and to alcohol. As early as his visit to her in 1939 he saw the danger for himself, as his mother had two years earlier. He wrote: ‘It was a horrible ordeal. Especially since I fear that end for myself.’ The artist Vassilis Voglis, a friend of Williams’s, told his biographer Donald Spoto: ‘He was devoted to Rose, but in a way she was an extension of himself. He could have had the lobotomy. He felt the outsider, marred in some way. He really cared for her, and perhaps he never really cared for anyone else in his life, ever. And I think he knew it.’

In 1973, speaking of his play Out Cry, he said:

In his notebooks for 1957, Williams noted that he was ‘stealing a week between New York and the “retreat”… at Stockbridge, assuming I do go there’. He wrote to his mother:

The following year, he wrote to Elia Kazan:

In 1969, a period not covered in the notebooks, Williams was confined to a mental hospital in Saint Louis by his brother where he stayed for three dreadful months.

Williams managed in his best work to harness that shadow of madness that lay over him and that fell on his sister. He made it appear almost normal, an unsettled striving within the soul, a brave dreaming up of the more wondrous parts of the self. He made its roots seem common to us all. But then, as he must have seen it develop in Rose, he dramatized its growth into a sort of poisonous power that slowly overcame and undid his characters.

It is remarkable in the notebooks how little credit he gave himself for his own genius at handling and shaping this material, his skills at catching patterns of speech and building dramatic structure, his astonishing sympathy for powerless dreamers especially when they came dressed up and ready to kill or were full of hidden erotic hope. As his own power waned, he did not, as other dramatists did, spend time overseeing new productions of old work. It was part of his unresolved innocence, his own nature as a dreamer, that he went on writing, despite the fact that most of his work after The Night of the Iguana in 1961 seemed to fail; it had been a great struggle to start, and now, as the last miserable pages of his notebooks make clear, it was too much of a struggle to stop. He knew that the creation of his characters was what had justified his life. As he came close to the end he wrote: ‘Did I die by my own hand or was I destroyed slowly and brutally by a conspiratorial group? There is probably no clear cut answer… Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all, but if I hadn’t, a number of my created beings would have been denied their passionate existence.’

John Cheever: New Ways to Make Your Family’s Life a Misery

One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way. In the pages that follow he is both a mythical hero of the suburbs and a holy fool; he is both a legend in his own dreams and a ridiculous figure, a character whose reality is evoked by the close detail with which his world is described, but who is also a victim of his own imaginings. There is a realism in the way the detail and the characters are evoked that forces the reader to believe that this is actually happening — that Neddy is really swimming home, pool by pool — but there is also something else going on that makes us wonder if the story is a metaphor for something, or a parable. It ends with Neddy’s arrival home to find his house dark and its doors locked. ‘He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.’

Cheever’s journals for the months before he wrote the story included an entry that dealt with his increasing ambition and fame: ‘I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.’ Soon afterwards, he wrote about something that might have prevented this actually happening: about a secret life that gave him creative energy and filled him with suburban shame. On the one hand, he wanted to be a happily married man and a devoted father, the man whom his friends and readers believed him to be. ‘It is my wife’s body that I most wish to gentle, it is into her that I most wish to pour myself,’ he wrote. But, on the other hand, his thoughts had a habit of turning, as they did in that same diary entry, to his sexual interest in men, this time to a male figure he had seen by a swimming pool. ‘His soft gaze follows me, settles on me, and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch.’ He thought about having sex in the shower with the young man; he contemplated ‘the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation’. But then he realized that he was, in fact, a respectable married man with three children who dreamed of having his face on a stamp. ‘But then there are the spiritual facts: my high esteem for the world, the knowledge that it is not in me to lead a double life, my love of perseverance, a passionate wish to honour the vows I’ve made to my wife and children.’ Nonetheless, he was intrigued by the urge, which his creation Neddy Merrill would soon also feel,

Thus ‘The Swimmer’, read in tandem with Cheever’s journals, becomes a version of the writer’s dream and then his nightmare. His dream was that he should have ‘breached this contract years ago and run off with some healthy-minded beauty’, his nightmare that he would come home to an empty house, that he would, because of instincts he barely understood and deeply despised, lose the domestic life he craved and the people he most loved. He wrote in his journals that he was locked into ‘the toleration of an intolerable marriage’. Soon after his account of the man he had seen by the pool, he wrote of being with his younger son, Federico: ‘I have no freedom from him. Never having known the love of a father has forced me into a love so engulfing and passionate that there is no margin of choice.’

He filled his journals with images of love for those around him and longing for domestic harmony, and then broke the harmony with images of despair, often caused by hangovers (he drank vast quantities, often starting in the morning), and of hate, usually for his wife (who for much of the time they were married did not speak to him, often with good reason). Few images of happiness or ease were allowed to stand. In 1963, for example, he registered a memory from childhood of being at the beach with his parents and his older brother, Fred, and then returning home.

The tone in Cheever’s journals was usually self-pitying and humourless. In the stories, however, he could turn domestic despair into comedy and then back again, often in a single phrase. Neddy in ‘The Swimmer’, for example, Cheever wrote, ‘might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one’. Or in ‘The Country Husband’, as the children are bickering in their father’s presence before their mother enters to announce that supper is ready in their nice suburban house, Cheever risks a phrase that makes you unsure whether to laugh or cry: ‘She strikes a match and lights the six candles in this vale of tears.’

For Cheever, the house, the simple suburban house, was a sort of hell. Yet this was where he lived, and the idea of losing it, or being left alone in it, was a further depth of hell that he dreaded. In his journal for 1963 he brooded over this:

Cheever had another problem besides his fear that his secret sexuality would be discovered and that he would lose the cocoon of domestic life that left him so blissfully unhappy. He was a snob. He believed that he was a Cheever and that this meant something, that he belonged in some way to American grandeur. Thus his social status in the suburbs mattered to him, as did material wealth and its trappings, even when he did not have them. The decline in fortune suffered by his parents and the drunken antics of his brother, their letting the family name down, filled him with as much shame as his own sexuality or his own drinking. In company he could be suave and charming, but the minute he was alone and putting pen to paper, this shame and its attendant dramas would make its way into his fiction and his journals in guises both comic and maudlin. He was aware, as were others, of his ‘cultivated accent’ — his daughter, Susan, reported her friends asking if he was English or something — and noted that he should be careful with it. ‘When this gets into my prose, my prose is at its worst.’

The first Cheever in America was Ezekiel, who was headmaster of the Boston Latin School from 1671 to 1708, and the author of a book on Latin that was the standard textbook in the United States for more than a century. On his mother’s side, Cheever claimed to be descended from Sir Percy Devereaux, a mayor of Windsor: indeed, his mother kept a picture of Windsor Castle on her wall. But this was nonsense; he had no such ancestor. When Cheever’s family wanted to mock him, they referred to him as the Lost Earl of Devereaux. His mother was a nurse; he gave some of her characteristics, such as her interest in organizing others, to Honora Wapshot in his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle. Like Coverly Wapshot, Cheever blamed his mother for handing on some of her worst anxieties to him. His father was a shoe salesman.

In his early forties, after winning an O. Henry Award, Cheever went to see his mother. He reported the following exchange: ‘I read in the newspaper that you won a prize.’ ‘Yes, mother, I didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t terribly important to me.’ ‘No, it wasn’t to me either.’ In the Wapshot novels, everybody loves Coverly’s older brother, Moses, but ‘everybody did not love Coverly’. So, too, everyone loved Fred, John Cheever’s older brother, who was born in 1905, but everybody did not love John, who was born in 1912. By the time his mother was pregnant with him, indeed, the marriage was under so much strain that Cheever’s father invited an abortionist to dinner. As Blake Bailey writes in his biography: ‘It was a story that haunted Cheever the rest of his life… Not surprisingly, he saw fit to blame his mother for having the bad taste to tell him of the episode.’

The family was affluent at first, living in a large house in Quincy, Massachusetts, but by the 1920s, as the Depression came to New England, Cheever’s father’s business failed and he began crying at the breakfast table. Fred was the strong one and excelled at sport whereas John was weak and prone to illness.Fred defended him, however, punching an Irishman who said that his little brother looked like a girl when he skated. Cheever opened his story ‘The National Pastime’: ‘To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.’ His uncle, when he saw him, said: ‘Well, I guess you could play tennis.’ Cheever covered his tracks by hating tennis all his life and developing an elaborate and conspicuous interest in sport, including baseball. ‘He flung himself into icy pools and skated with a masculine swagger,’ Bailey writes. While Fred was away at college, John also developed an interest in other pastimes, such as attending ‘a penis-measuring contest, followed by an orgy’ and soon learning to masturbate with a boy called Fax Ogden. ‘Rainy days were best of all,’ Bailey writes, ‘as the two boys could stay in bed and practise, indefatigably, their favourite pastime.’ Cheever wrote in an unpublished memoir that ‘when one bed got gummed up we used to move to another’.

Cheever was good at blaming people; so skilled did he become at it that he sometimes went as far as blaming himself. Since he never had a job or went out much, and mainly saw his family and his family only, he specialized in blaming them. He blamed his father and his brother for not playing ball with him when he was small. He blamed his father for losing his money, his brother for leaving home. He blamed his mother for many things, but principally for opening a giftshop to keep the family going and making a success of it. Once she opened the shop, Cheever wrote, ‘I was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role, but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely: “Is there something I can do for you?”’ The vulgarity of it all was an ‘abysmal humiliation’ for him. When he read Freud, Cheever also discovered that his family was a ‘virtual paradigm for “that chain of relationships” (weak father, dominant mother) “that usually produces a male homosexual”’. Thus they didn’t just make him poor, they made him queer, and he spent the rest of his life resenting them.

Since home did not suit his tastes, Cheever invented an alternative and much grander home — the artists’ retreat at Yaddo in upstate New York, where he first went when he was twenty-two. He seems to have enjoyed himself immensely there over the years. ‘It’s the only place I’ve ever felt at home,’ he said. In 1977 he reminisced: ‘I have been sucked by Ned [Rorem] and others in almost every room and tried unsuccessfully to mount a young man on the bridge between the lakes.’ Soon, despite this, or because of it, he became a favourite of Mrs Ames, who ran the place, and of the servants, who called him Lord Fauntleroy. (‘Only dogs, servants and children know who the real aristocrats are,’ he liked to say.) One of his happiest memories was returning to Yaddo and overhearing the parlourmaid say: ‘Master John is back!’

Cheever’s early stories deal with the nuclear family as a crucible of tension and betrayal; his families drink together and manage to cause each other nothing but pain. He became a master of the single, searing image of pure desolation in the midst of the trappings of good cheer and middle-class comfort. Because of his drinking habits and also because his talent seemed to focus best on the small moment of intense truth, he had real difficulty writing his first two novels. When he was forty, he gave 100 pages of a novel to the editor who had commissioned it to be told that they were worthless, that he should give up writing and look for another way of making a living. Although The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964) were well received and have their comic moments, there is something unfocused about the narratives and sketchy about the characters. As he came to the end of The Wapshot Scandal he wrote in his journal: ‘I cannot resolve the book because I have been irresolute about my own affairs.’

This is an interesting understatement, but it was maybe as far as he could go. And it is a fascinating idea that his talent could thrive using the sharp system of the story, but he struggled so much with the novels simply because there were vast areas of himself that he could not use as a basis for a character dramatized over time. In his stories he could create a tragic, trapped individual in a single scene or moment; he had a deep knowledge of what that was like. In his two Wapshot novels, using broad strokes, he managed merely a comic family down on their luck.

The problem was partly his intense inhabiting of the domestic sphere and the suburban landscape, as though this were a way of shutting out the wider world, and partly his refusal even to recognize his own homosexuality as anything other than a dark hidden area of the self that could not be explored. ‘For Cheever it would always be one thing to have sex with a man,’ Bailey writes, ‘another to spend the night with him. The latter was a taboo he would rarely if ever violate until a ripe old age.’ In his journals he wrote: ‘If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.’ One of his best friends in his twenties was Malcolm Cowley, through whom he had briefly met Hart Crane. (It was Cowley’s wife that had been on the ship with Crane when he committed suicide in 1932.) A homosexual lifestyle, Cowley had warned Cheever, ‘could only end with drunkenness and ghastly suicide’. As one of Cheever’s colleagues in the Signal Corps in the Second World War remarked: ‘He wanted to be accepted as a New England gentleman and New England gentlemen aren’t gay. Back then you have no idea of the opprobrium. Even in the Signal Corps, even in the film and theatre world, you were a second-class citizen if you were gay, and Cheever did not want to be that.’

By the time he joined the Signal Corps, Cheever was married and his wife was pregnant. In 1952, in one of the earliest entries in his journal, Cheever wrote:

Later, Mary Cheever would report that she knew that there was something wrong with the sexual aspects of her marriage. ‘I sensed that he wasn’t entirely masculine.’ When asked if she discussed it with Cheever, she said: ‘Oh Lord, no. Oh Lord, no. He was terrified of it himself.’

Cheever didn’t like homosexuals. ‘Their funny clothes and their peculiar smells and airs and scraps of French’ struck him as ‘an obscenity and a threat’. Having struggled to remain monogamous (and heterosexual) for almost twenty years, he noticed a change coming. When he saw Gore Vidal on TV in the early 1960s he thought him ‘personable and intelligent’ and then wrote: ‘I think that he is either not a fairy or that perhaps we have reached a point where men of this persuasion are not forced into attitudes of bitterness, rancour and despair.’ Soon afterwards, Cheever noted more men of his persuasion in a diner. ‘I think there is a fag beside me at the lunch counter,’ he wrote. ‘He drums his nails impatiently and who but a fag would do this?’ He prayed for the surf to wash such people away. In 1960, nineteen years after his marriage, he spent a night with Calvin Kentfield, a writer he had met at Yaddo a decade earlier. He noted in his journal:

In 1964 Cheever invited the writer Paul Moor, who was a fan of his work, up to his hotel room in Berlin. ‘I think he was or may be a homosexual,’ he wrote to a friend about Moor. ‘This would account for the funny shoes and the tight pants and I thought his voice a note or two too deep.’ Later he wrote in a letter: ‘I would like to live in a world in which there are no homosexuals but I suppose Paradise is thronged with them.’ Cheever at this stage was fifty-two. Most of his observations about homosexuals are unusual perhaps in that he wrote them down and then did not want them destroyed after he died. But they were not unusual as ways for a married man who was gay to keep the world at arm’s length by pretending, even if just as a brief respite, that other homosexuals were queer, while he just happened to like having sex with men. (Even in his late sixties Cheever barely tolerated this aspect of himself, and did not tolerate it at all in others. When an old friend confided that he, too, had had gay encounters, Cheever wrote in his journal: ‘I decided, before he had completed the sentence, that I would never see him again as a friend and I never did.’)

Just as it is important to place Cheever’s diaries and what would later become known as his self-loathing in its historical context, it might also help if we did the same with his drinking. But even in the context of the time, he was drinking a lot. Bailey reports on his moods and phases as a drunk:

In the late 1950s, his brother Fred had to be hospitalized for ‘alcoholic malnutrition’. ‘Alarmed that his brother’s fate could prove to be his own,’ Bailey writes, ‘John pored over his journal and was appalled by the obviously “progressive” nature of his disease.’ He looked up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Later, he wrote in his journals: ‘Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.’

‘My God, the suburbs!’ Cheever wrote in 1960. ‘They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in The New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.’ By this time he had been living in the suburbs for almost a decade, having moved in 1951 to Scarborough (with his wife, his daughter, Susan, born in 1943, and son Ben, born in 1948) and then in 1961 to a large house in Ossining, where he was to live for the rest of his life. His third child, Federico, was born in 1957 in Rome, during a family sojourn there paid for by MGM’s purchase of the rights to one of his stories for $25,000.

Cheever’s relationship with his children was very close and mostly difficult, partly because he had nothing much to do all day except lounge around looking at them in a state of half-inebriation and total dissatisfaction. Towards the end of his life, he told colleagues that once, after a row with his wife, he woke to find a message written in lipstick by his daughter on the bathroom mirror: ‘Dere daddy, don’t leave us.’ When it was pointed out that such a scene occurs in his story ‘The Chimera’, with the same misspelling, Cheever replied: ‘Everything I write is autobiographical.’ But this was not so. Like a lot of writers, everything he wrote had a basis in autobiography and another in wishful or dreamy thinking. His daughter later denied that the scene took place: ‘I know how to spell,’ Susan Cheever said, ‘and I think what we wanted was for him to leave us. One thing about my father was he was always there, you could not get rid of him. He worked at home, he ate at home, he drank at home. So “don’t leave us”? That was never the fear.’

‘Cheever,’ Bailey writes, ‘loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl”.’ As she was growing up, her father was a nightmare. ‘I defied my father’s fantasies,’ she wrote in her memoir, Home before Dark. ‘As an adolescent I was dumpy, plagued by acne, slumped over, and alternately shy and aggressive, and my lank straight brown hair was always in my eyes.’ When she invited boyfriends home, Cheever was not helpful. ‘He liked to invite my boyfriends off with him to go scything in the meadow or work on a felled tree with the chainsaw or clear some brush out behind the pine trees. I don’t know what happened out there, but they always came back in a rage.’ With his older son, he was almost worse. Ben, Bailey writes, was

Cheever picked on one of his son’s friends whom he thought was effeminate. The boy, he wrote, ‘often stands with both hands on his hips in an attitude that I was told, when I was a boy, was the sign of a congenital queer… He is attached securely to my son and I do not like him.’

Cheever’s view of other writers was not sweet either. He wrote to a friend about John Updike: ‘I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company. I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.’ (Updike, when he read this remark in Cheever’s published letters in 1994, returned the compliment, when he described his feelings about Cheever’s drinking: ‘I felt badly because it was as though a natural resource was being wasted. Although the covetousness in me, and stony heart, kind of rejoiced to see one less writer to compete with.’) In 1965 Cheever (who, unlike some of his fellow writers, was not boycotting the White House) managed to heckle Updike as he read a story at a reception there. ‘The arrogance of Updike goes back to the fact that he does not consider me a peer,’ he wrote in his journals, bitterly noting that Updike considered Salinger a peer.

Out of all this hate and resentment and foolishness, two figures escaped. One was Cheever’s younger son, Federico, and the other was Saul Bellow. Cheever seems to have liked both of them; or both of them had worked out a way to evade the daily spite he directed at all others, including his editor at the New Yorker, William Maxwell, who, he noted, bored him stiff. Federico got on with his father by not taking him seriously, by becoming his kid brother rather than his son, and then slowly becoming his father’s protector. ‘More and more,’ Bailey writes, ‘Federico had become the father and John the wayward boy: the latter had to be told not to swim naked in other people’s pools, not to use the chainsaw when drunk — on and on — while the former patiently absorbed the insults Cheever inflicted on whosoever presumed to look after him.’

When Cheever met Bellow in the early 1950s he felt an instant rapport with him. ‘I do not have it in me to wish him bad luck: I do not have it in me to be his acolyte,’ he wrote. ‘I loved him,’ Bellow said in return, and added that Cheever had not tried Yankee condescension on him. ‘It fell to John to resolve these differences [of background]. He did it without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place.’

When she read that Cheever said of Bellow, ‘we share not only our love of women but a fondness for the rain’, Mary Cheever remarked: ‘They were both women haters.’ Certainly, most of the time, Cheever hated his wife. As the position of women in America began to change, and Mary Cheever developed independent views and ambitions, her husband’s temper was not improved. ‘Educating an unintellectual woman,’ he remarked, ‘is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. She cannot add a column of figures or make a bed but she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while the dinner burns.’ His hatred for his wife disfigured some of his stories, including ‘An Educated American Woman’ (1963) and ‘The Ocean’ (1964). (He conceded that his depiction of ‘predatory women’ was a ‘serious weakness’ in his work.) ‘An Educated American Woman’ is perhaps the best account we have of how frightened American men were by the possibility that their wives would be anything other than little homemakers.

Just as the position of women was changing in America, so, too, the prejudice against homosexuals was fading. While Cheever was threatened by the former, it was obvious that the latter would have a profound effect on him once he left his own house in Ossining and took a look at the world. In 1973, when he began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he had T. C. Boyle, Ron Hansen and Allan Gurganus as students. Not only were these talented young writers, but one of them — Gurganus — was extremely handsome (as the photograph included in Bailey’s biography makes abundantly clear) and, as Bailey puts it, ‘quite insouciantly gay’. As Cheever admired Gurganus’s work (and introduced him to Maxwell, who published one of his stories), he presumed that Gurganus would return the compliment by sleeping with him, despite the fact that he was almost fifteen years older than Gurganus’s father. Some of his letters to Gurganus were playful, including the one where he asked (in return for the Maxwell introduction) for some favours. ‘All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football.’ Gurganus let him know as sweetly as he could that while he liked him, he did not want to sleep with him. ‘How dare he refuse me in favour of some dimwitted major in decorative arts,’ Cheever wrote. He asked Gurganus to consider whether such figures ‘appreciate the excellence of your character and the fineness of your mind’.

What Cheever was really looking for, as Gurganus put it, was ‘somebody who was literary, intelligent, attractive and manly, but gay on a technicality’. Early in 1977, at the University of Utah, he met Max Zimmer, a PhD candidate in his early thirties, who had been brought up as a Mormon. As Cheever felt ‘a profound stirring of love’ and came on to Max, Max felt ‘confusion and revulsion’. That spring Cheever noted:

In fact, he hoped not quite a lot of the time. And his hoping not was generally improved by sending Zimmer’s work too to the New Yorker.

Since Cheever took the view that sexual stimulation could improve his eyesight, part of Max’s function, once their affair began, was to offer the same comfort as a good pair of spectacles might have. (When driving at night, Cheever used to ask his wife to fondle his penis ‘to a bone’.) ‘Whenever Max submitted a manuscript,’ Bailey writes, ‘Cheever would first insist that the young man help “clear [his] vision” with a handjob.’ Then (as Max noted in his journal) Cheever would ‘take my story upstairs and come back down with a remote look of consternation on his face and with criticisms so remote they only increase my confusion’.

Max, who was confused, as they say, rather than actually gay, was uneasy and guilty in the Cheever household.

In her memoir, Susan Cheever wrote about the view the family took of Max’s presence.

In 1975, at the age of sixty-three, after a drunken term spent teaching at Boston University, Cheever stopped drinking. A year later, he finished his novel Falconer. Susan Cheever describes that year:

When the book was published, Cheever was on the cover of Newsweek with the caption: ‘A Great American Novel’. The book was number one on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks. In 1979 Cheever’s collected Stories won a Pulitzer Prize and wide critical acclaim.

Falconer arose from the clash between the two most significant buildings in the town of Ossining: Cheever’s suburban home, which was for him and his family often like a prison, and Sing Sing. In the early 1970s, when he had exhausted himself by drinking and had also exhausted himself writing slack stories on the subject of the deep despair and the minor travails inherent in American East Coast suburban life, Cheever was invited to teach at Sing Sing, where he befriended one of the prisoners. He saw a great deal of this man when he was released. ‘Almost every set piece in Falconer,’ Bailey writes, ‘almost every detail… appears somewhere in Cheever’s journal entries about Sing Sing, based on information he’d extracted from inmates.’ The novel, which is short, has a relentlessness in tone, a gravity and seriousness, which is unlike anything else Cheever wrote. It is as though the book were not merely a strained metaphor for all the anguish Cheever felt and caused in his life, but an exploration and recognition of that anguish, presented in a style that was factual but also heightened and controlled and then filled with suffering. The style is risky in the way it allows bald statement to brush against an overall vision that is like something from the Psalms. The sense of violence, hatred, pain and deep alienation is offered raw; beside this, love, or something like love, comes as dark redemption or another form of power. In the middle somewhere are the grim ordinariness of prison life and some brilliant sex scenes. If you ignore the upbeat, cheesy ending, Falconer is the best Russian novel in the English language.

Cheever’s journals for the months when he worked on his masterpiece are fascinating. He understood that even the smallest experience, such as a wait at an airport, can become something much larger in the imagination. ‘On the question of crypto-autobiography,’ he wrote,

In the next entry, he ends with a remark that is one of the few endearing remarks in his journals and should be the motto of every writer alive: ‘All right, I want something beautiful, and it will be done by June.’

Cheever enjoyed being famous and dry for the last few years of his life. Since there was something petulant and childish about him when he was a drunk, now merely the child remained. Susan wrote about these years, as he basked in late success.

Federico, whose remarks on his father are notable for their wisdom and general good humour, has the best line on his father’s fame: ‘When you’re a musician, people can ask you to play, and when you’re a movie star, people can ask for your autograph, but what does it mean to be a famous writer? Well, you get to say pompous things. You get to talk about aesthetics and things like that. That’s the goodies you get.’

As he made an effort to repair the damage he had done to his family, Cheever was aware that his journals, 4,000 pages of them, lay in a drawer like a lovely toy time bomb. Two weeks before he died he phoned his son Ben: ‘What I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters. I thought I’d tell you that, because sooner or later somebody’s going to tell you and I’d just as soon it came from me.’ Ben wrote that he was ‘forgiving’. ‘But mostly I was just bewildered, and I remember now that my reply came almost as a whisper: “I don’t mind, Daddy, if you don’t mind.”’ After his death, when Susan read the diaries, needing to flesh things out for her memoir, she was pretty surprised by the general tone and content, and ‘not only’, as Bailey writes, ‘because of the gloomy, relentless sexual stuff’. The New Yorker and Knopf paid $1.2 million for the rights to publish the diaries and they appeared in 1991. Mary Cheever, who had stayed with him until the end, did not read them. ‘I didn’t have any strong feelings about whether they were published or not. I can’t read them. Snatches of them I’ve read, but I can’t sit down and read that stuff. It isn’t my life at all. It’s him, it’s all him. It’s all inside him.’

Baldwin and ‘the American Confusion’

In December 1962 The New York Times asked some of the year’s best-selling authors to write a piece describing ‘what they believe there is about their book or the climate of the times that has made [their book] so popular’. In reply, Vance Packard, for example, explained that his book The Pyramid Climbers had been successful because, he believed, ‘there is a growing uneasiness among Americans about the terms of their existence, and many tell me that I often articulate their own apprehensions’. Patrick Dennis, author of Genius, wrote: ‘I can’t imagine what it is that makes my books sell and any author who claims to know is a fool or a liar or both.’ This did not deter Allen Drury, whose book A Shade of Difference was on the list. ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘those readers who like what I have to say like it because it is honest, well-expressed and pertinent to the world in which we live.’

James Baldwin’s Another Country had also been a best-seller, and Baldwin used the occasion to position himself ambiguously in two of the central pantheons of American beauty. ‘I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire,’ he wrote,

Baldwin was claiming for his prose style and the structure of his novels something of the heightened, melancholy beauty of Davis and Charles; he was suggesting that the rhythms of his own diction took their bearings from the solitary pain, the uncompromising glamour that these two American musicians offered the world. But just in case anyone reading him wanted thus to place him as a primitive, a writer who did not plan his work but merely let it soar, a writer not steeped in a writerly tradition, Baldwin needed to invoke as well the high priest of American refinement, an author known not for his passion, however pitched, but for the rigour of his controlling imagination.

Baldwin the best-seller in 1962 wanted to have it both ways. This need was first of all a way of unloosening him from any easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist that he carried in his temperament a sense of James’s interest in consciousness as something glittering and also as something hidden and secretive, a concern with language as both mask and pure revelation. But Baldwin also had a fascination with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence. The list of what had made him such an interesting stylist would be long. Over the years he would vary its ingredients. Sometimes, he would do so to distract the reader from his own artistry and sophistication; other times, he would do so because he liked the list for its sound and variation, as in the list he provided in Notes of a Native Son: ‘The King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech — and something of Dickens’s love for bravura.’ But the style itself did not come simply; it could not be easily defined because it varied and shifted. It had real bravura moments, like a set of famous riffs, or an encore, such as this passage in part 1 of Another Country when Rufus and Vivaldo arrive at Benno’s Bar in the Village:

It is easy to sense in this passage the rhythms of jazz, but also of the prose writers of an earlier generation, the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby, the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises. Baldwin was not afraid of repetition (‘some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women’), or setting up patterns of beat and sound (note the constant use of ‘were’), or using punctuation with care and control (note the comma before ‘when they got home’; note the semicolon after ‘rolled through the bar’), and then striking home with a phrase or an observation utterly surprising, and full of delight (note ‘gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity’ or ‘pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt’).

While Baldwin was in full possession of this bravura tone, he was also able to write quiet and effective and emotionally charged sentences. The sixty-one words in the opening paragraph of Go Tell It on the Mountain have only one word — the first — with more than three syllables and forty-one words with only one syllable.

This style seems closer to Hemingway than to jazz or James; it suggests that Baldwin was as comfortable with the tradition he inherited from a generation of writers most of whom were at the height of their fame as he was starting to write. No young writers ever wish to give too much credit to the writers who could have been their father. They prefer to pay homage to grandfathers or to painters or musicians or ballet dancers or acrobats. It is one way of killing your father, to pretend that he made no difference to you while watching his cadences like a hawk.

So, too, in Baldwin’s short stories this plain opening style had not an ounce of James or of jazz. ‘The Rockpile’ opens: ‘Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile.’ ‘The Outing’ opens: ‘Each summer the church gave an outing.’ ‘Sonny’s Blues’ opens: ‘I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work.’

Between the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953 and the volume of stories Going to Meet the Man in 1965, Baldwin wrote a piece for The New York Times that set about openly killing some of his literary fathers. In January 1962 he wrote:

Having made clear, in grudging tone, his immense respect for these writers, Baldwin proceeded to demolish them.

Having also demolished Faulkner (‘such indefensibly muddy work as “Intruder in the Dust” or “Requiem for a Nun”‘) and ‘the later development’ of Dos Passos (‘if one can call it that’) and Fitzgerald (‘there is no longer anything to say about Fitzgerald’), Baldwin considered the matter of America itself as a realm of failed imaginations.

Baldwin, in his attempt to establish a context for his own work, now invoked the spirit of Henry James by taking the unusual step of claiming James as a novelist who dealt with the matter of failed masculinity in America. In The Ambassadors, Baldwin wrote,

Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel in America because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, a poison that began in the individual spirit and only made its way then into politics. His political writing remains as raw and vivid as his fiction because he believed that social reform could not occur through legislation alone but through a reimagining of the private realm. Thus, for Baldwin, an examination of the individual soul as dramatized in fiction had immense power. It was, in the end, he saw, a matter of love, and he was not afraid to use the word. In his 1962 New York Times article he wrote:

Before he began to publish fiction, Baldwin was a reviewer with attitude, a writer with a high sense of aesthetic grandeur, an Edmund Wilson with real poison in his pen. In the New Leader in December 1947, for example, the twenty-three-year-old Baldwin employed a triple negative to take a swipe at Erskine Caldwell’s The Sure Hand of God: ‘Certainly there is nothing in the book which would not justify the suspicion that Mr Caldwell was concerned with nothing more momentous than getting rid of some of the paper he had lying about the house, resurrecting several of the tired types on which he first made his reputation, and (incidentally) making a few dollars on the deal.’ Earlier that same year, he took on Maxim Gorky: ‘Gorky, not in the habit of describing intermediate colors, even when he suspected their existence, has in Mother written a Russian battle hymn which history has so summarily dated that we are almost unwilling to credit it with any reality.’ Gorky, he went on, ‘was the foremost exponent of the maxim that “art is the weapon of the working class.” He is also, probably, the major example of the invalidity of such a doctrine. (It is rather like saying that art is the weapon of the American housewife.)’

Moving from Russia with careful, youthful deliberation and delight, Baldwin in August 1948 did something close to many serious novelists’ hearts. He took on a popular writer much praised for his terse style and pace, in this case poor James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Baldwin considered Cain’s body of work: ‘Not only did he have nothing to say,’ he wrote,

In January 1949 in an essay in Commentary, Baldwin formulated what would become his characteristic battle cry, which would so puzzle and irritate white liberals and reformers in the 1960s when they found they had reason to listen to him — the problem in America, he believed, lay in each individual American soul, black as much as white; and the black population was not seeking equality with a white world that had so significantly failed to understand itself, let alone those whom it had oppressed. ‘In a very real sense,’ he wrote in that essay,

In March 1950 Baldwin published a short story in Commentary called ‘Death of a Prophet’, which he did not collect in Going to Meet the Man. It was, as far as I can make out, his second piece of published fiction. The first — also published in Commentary, in October 1948 — called ‘Previous Condition’, was included in Going to Meet the Man and contained a few of the elements that went into Another Country. It is easy to see why Baldwin did not want to publish ‘Death of a Prophet’ in a collection, as it too obviously contained the seeds of Go Tell It on the Mountain, being the story of a boy in Harlem whose father was a preacher. The subject of a father and his son, Baldwin knew, was an interesting one. In 1967, in a review in the New York Review of Books, he wrote: ‘The father–son relationship is one of the most crucial and dangerous on earth, and to pretend that it can be otherwise really amounts to an exceedingly dangerous heresy.’

Although the story of the father and son told in ‘Death of a Prophet’ and Go Tell It on the Mountain was, to a large extent, his own story, recounted also in some autobiographical essays, Baldwin understood that the tension between the generations of men was a quintessential American story. It was, he believed, not only what set America apart, but what disfigured his country — the shame, the lack of pride sons in a society moving onwards and upwards felt at their fathers.

Thus his work in his fiction, and even in a novel like Another Country, notable for the absence of fathers, dealt with a most public and pressing matter in the most private and personal way. In an essay in 1964 Baldwin formulated the theory of this:

The writing in ‘Death of a Prophet’ is high-toned, almost overwrought at times, but pitched with zeal and serious ambition and great tenderness. The story is what Baldwin himself called in a review in the New Leader in September 1947 ‘a study of human helplessness’; it sees the character of Johnnie, whose father is dying, and who has become a stranger in his father’s eyes, not ‘in relation to oppression’, as Baldwin put it in another piece on Gorky in 1947, but in relation to the character’s own fear and inadequacy. Baldwin, even as he began, and despite his deep awareness of the relationship between the political and the personal, was determined that his characters should not be confined by a narrow political agenda; he sought to ensure that the behaviour and the failure of his characters should be seen first as particular and private and then only as part of some general malaise that took its bearings from the Fall of Man as much as the creation of slavery, and emphatically not from a predetermined role as black men oppressed by bad laws. He also wanted to follow the example of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose novels and stories he reviewed in January 1948; he wanted to write, as Baldwin put it, ‘superbly well’ and know that this would be, as with Stevenson, ‘the most enduring delight’. Baldwin wished to create and live as an American and as a man, and had much to say about the state of his nation and about its masculinity. (In April 1966 he wrote: ‘Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man.’) He was helped by his insistence that he did not belong to anyone’s margin and his ability in the same moment to take possession of the margin when it suited his purpose. He relished the ambiguity of his position and was skilled at covering his tracks.

When it came to the matter of boxing, for example, a subject that would thrill many of his heterosexual colleagues, he claimed to know nothing. Instead, using the full force of his homosexuality, he wrote beautifully about Floyd Patterson and his fight with Sonny Liston in 1963, studying the state of the two men’s souls and the intricacies of their auras with an erotic intensity. Of Patterson, he wrote:

Of Liston, Baldwin wrote:

But in those same years he also spoke and wrote as though he were a founding father, in an unassailable position in his country, one of its central voices. In The New York Times in 1959 he wrote:

In the same year, in reply to a question about whether the 1950s as a decade ‘makes special demands on you as a writer’, he adopted one of his best tones, lofty and idealistic and filled with candour, while remaining sharp and direct and challenging: ‘But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject — his key and ours to his achievement.’ Henry James would have been proud of him.

(The pride worked both ways. In Playboy in 1964 Baldwin managed to commandeer James as a member of his tribe, as someone who did not, as the vast majority of Americans did, spend his life ‘in flight from death’. He compared a passage from a letter James wrote to a friend who had lost her husband — ‘Sorrow wears and uses us but we wear and use it too, and it is blind. Whereas we, after a manner, see’ — with these lines from Bessie Smith:

Once more James would have been proud, although it should be added that in his lifetime or in the years after his death he and his followers were not ever fully aware that what he was really doing was singing the blues.)

In 1959 also, in a paper called ‘Mass Culture and the Creative Artist’ given to a symposium, Baldwin concluded:

He was, in these years, moving himself carefully to the centre of the debate, refusing a role, offered to him always, as spokesman for a minority, to be listened to only when that minority grew restive or dangerous or newsworthy.

During the 1960s, the voice Baldwin used in his journalism grew less ambiguous, however, more strident, especially when he was addressing a black audience. In a speech he gave to the Student Co-ordinating Committee in November 1963, after the Kennedy assassination, for example, he began:

Two years later, in an angry essay about black history, he saw no possibility of change, merely excuses for change.

At other times, he seemed to be amusing himself by preaching to the white population, insisting that whites, in fact, were the group most in need of freedom from tyranny. In 1961 he wrote:

In Playboy in January 1964 he wrote: ‘What I’m much more concerned about is what white Americans have done to themselves; what has been done to me is irrelevant because there is nothing more you can do to me. But, in doing it, you’ve done something to yourself. In evading my humanity, you have done something to your own humanity.’

In an essay called ‘The White Problem’, also published in 1964, he sneered at the icons of white America, insisting that the difference between white and black in America was close to the difference between foolishness and seriousness, childhood and maturity:

In another essay from 1964, ‘Color and American Civilization’, he had more fun at the expense of the neuroses suffered by his white brothers and sisters:

Five years later, writing in The New York Times, he was at his most eloquent, insisting once more that the black population’s burden in the United States could not be changed by legislation but only by something more far-reaching in its implications — the total conversion of the white population, whose moral degeneration and distance from themselves he judged to be abject. ‘I will state flatly,’ he wrote,

In his fiction, Baldwin sought a new freedom, a freedom to create characters as he pleased. His black characters did not have to be filled with stoical virtue to be destroyed by white forces. His novel Giovanni’s Room did not even have any black characters at all. Nor did his gay characters have their destiny worked out for them by history; he made them too interesting for that. In his journalism he sought to rewrite history before paying attention to politics. In an address to Harlem teachers in October 1963, he said:

By 1979 his version of American history had become more alarmed. In an article for the Los Angeles Times, he wrote:

In that article he called the Civil Rights Movement ‘the latest slave rebellion’.

Five years later in an article for Essence, he continued to muse on the idea of American history and genocide:

Reading his speeches and his journalism, it is, most of the time, easy to imagine, twenty years after his death, how he would respond to contemporary events. Hardly anything that has happened since 1987 would have surprised him. In 1979 he wrote: ‘If they couldn’t deal with my father, how are they going to deal with the people in the streets of Tehran? I could have told them, if they had asked.’ It would be easy to put Baghdad or Basra in that sentence. In 1964 he wrote: ‘People who do not know who they are privately, accept, as we have accepted for nearly fifteen years, the fantastic disaster which we call American politics and which we call American foreign policy, and the incoherence of the one is an exact reflection of the incoherence of the other.’ It would be merely necessary now to change the dates. He would not have been surprised by the counting of votes in Florida; he would not have been shocked by Abu Ghraib; he would not have been shocked by New Orleans. He would have known each time what to say. On 9/11, however, it is harder to be sure of his response, except to suspect that the soaring pity he was capable of could have been matched by the calm eloquent wisdom that was, most of the time, his hallmark. But it is hard also not to remember what he told William Styron in 1960 when Styron and his friends asked him what was going to happen now. ‘Jimmy’s face would become a mask of imperturbable certitude,’ Styron wrote. ‘ “Baby, burn” he would say softly and glare back with vast glowering eyes, “yes, baby, I mean burn. We will burn your cities down.’ ”

Reading his speeches and journalism now, there seems only one fresh hell that has happened in his country that he did not foresee and that would have shocked him deeply. And this is the huge and merciless increase in the prison population, especially of young black males. He saw the context for it, however, and made his own position very clear in his 1964 Playboy article:

He did not see the full implications of this, and so in the same year he wrote something that seems naïve now, perhaps the only truly naïve observation he ever made: ‘There is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course.’ And fifteen years later, in the Los Angeles Times, he ended his article on a note of pure optimism:

The cards were shuffled all right; and the idea that there was a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison became a joker; the game included the possibility of ‘three strikes and you’re out’, with all the mindlessness and lack of compassion that that implied. At the end of 2005, there were close to 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state or local jails in the United States. Three thousand one hundred and forty-five black men out of every 100,000 lived as sentenced prisoners, compared to 471 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males; this compares to an estimated 3,000 out of every 100,000 members of the population of Russia who were in jail during Stalin’s reign. As of 2006, seven million people in the United States were behind bars, on probation or on parole. The United States has 5 per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of its prisoners, 737 per 100,000 compared to 100 in Australia and 59 in Norway and 37 in Japan and 29 in Iceland and India. England and Wales, with roughly the same crime rate as the United States, have 149 per 100,000 in prison. A report from the Justice Department estimated that 12 per cent of American black men in their twenties and early thirties are in jail now, compared to 1.6 per cent of white males of the same age group. The general prison numbers in the United States have doubled since 1990.

In his address to Harlem schoolteachers in 1963, Baldwin set the context for crime among young black men. He wrote about every street boy’s relationship to the law.

It seems sad, almost strange, reading his work now, even when its tone was calm and ambiguous and measured, but especially as he grew angry and strident, to realize that, in the twenty years after James Baldwin’s death, brand-new structures made of concrete have gone up all over America with laws to match, and in those buildings much of the beauty he wrote about, and many of the dreams his friends had, lie incarcerated. Baldwin’s legacy is to help us understand how something has happened that even he could not have imagined.

Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers

It seemed important, as both men set about making their marks on the world, for them to establish before anything else that their stories began when their fathers died and that they set out alone without a father’s shadow or a father’s permission. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955, begins: ‘On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died.’ Baldwin was almost nineteen at the time. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, begins also with the death of his father: ‘A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.’

Both men quickly then established their own actual distance from their fathers, which made their grief sharper and more lonely, but also emphasized to the reader that they had a right to speak with authority, to offer this version of themselves partly because they themselves, through force of will and a steely sense of character, had invented the voice they were now using, had not been trained by any other man to be the figure they had become. ‘I had not known my father very well,’ Baldwin wrote. ‘We got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.’

Of his father, Barack Obama wrote: ‘At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told.’ Both men then, using photographs and memories, commented on their fathers’ blackness. In both cases it seemed important to state or suggest that the father was more black than the son. Baldwin wrote that there was something buried in his father that had lent him his ‘tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think — he was very black — with his blackness and his beauty.’

When Obama was a child, he wrote, ‘my father looked nothing like the people around me in that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk’.

In both cases too, the writers sought to make clear that their fathers’ pasts were not their own pasts, but the past as a different country, a country they did not share. ‘He was of the first generation of free men,’ Baldwin wrote. ‘He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the Old Country.’ Obama’s father was from a place even more distant: ‘He was an African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego.’

Although Obama mentions in passing in Dreams from My Father that he had read Baldwin when he was a young community activist in Chicago, there is no hint in the book that he modelled his own story in any way on Baldwin’s work. In their versions of who they became in America and how, there are considerable similarities and shared moments not because Obama was using Baldwin as a template or an example, but because the same hurdles and similar circumstances and the same moments of truth actually occurred almost naturally for both of them.

Baldwin and Obama, although in different ways, experienced the church and intense religious feeling as key elements in their lives. They both travelled and discovered while abroad, almost as a shock, an essential American identity for themselves while in the company of non-Americans who were black. They both came to see, in a time of political division, some shared values with the other side. They both used eloquence with an exquisite, religious fervour.

As Northerners, they both were shocked by the South. They both had to face up to the anger, the rage, that lay within them, and everyone like them, as a way of taking the poison out of themselves. It is almost as though, in their search for power — Baldwin becoming the finest American prose stylist of his generation, Obama the President of the United States — they would both have to gain wisdom, both bitter and sweet, at the same fount, since no other fount was available. Their story is in some ways the same story because it could hardly have been otherwise.

In the essay ‘Notes of a Native Son’, James Baldwin wrote about rage: ‘There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood — one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.’ In his speech on race in March 2008, Barack Obama, in tones more measured, more patient, but no less urgent, dealt with the same issues as they were experienced more than fifty years after Baldwin’s essay appeared:

In his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, Baldwin wrote with remarkable eloquence about the power of prayer and preaching for an otherwise powerless community, the sense of time spent in church as a time filled with soaring possibilities in contrast to the bitter world outside. It was as though that very bitterness offered the congregation a unique insight into the suffering of Christ and made the congregation for that time of prayer and preaching a chosen people whose spiritual exaltation, in all its fiery rhetoric and colourful abandon, could never be experienced by white people.

Baldwin matched his novel with an essay, ‘Down at the Cross’, published in 1962, where he wrote about his own conversion as an adolescent filled with doubts and fears and ambitions and a sharp sense of exclusion:

Baldwin emphasized that because black suffering had been transformed so secretly and so completely by black religious leaders into spiritual suffering, what happened in black churches would have to be fully understood, dramatized and explained before any solution would be possible. His first novel and his essay ‘Down at the Cross’ sought to let white America into the secret that was Sunday for the black community:

Out of oppression then came a freedom that only the church could offer and that gave the church a special, defining power for black communities, which was both beyond politics and deeply political, a power the Catholic Church in Poland and Ireland would also have. ‘Perhaps we were, all of us,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.’

In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama described finding religion in Chicago, hearing about the history of the black church in America, the ‘history of slave religion… Africans who, newly landed on hostile shores, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas — survival, and freedom, and hope’. He described attending a sermon given by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago:

The sermons heard in those churches preached not only about eternal life and the ethereal life of the soul, but about the sufferings of the soul on this earth, in this America, and the emotions to which this suffering gave rise, including despair and anger. In March 2008 Obama would try to explain that anger as one of the many essential parts of the religious services that black people had been attending all of their lives, the services that Baldwin had dramatized and described, and that the white majority had been excluded from. ‘The fact,’ Obama said,

Obama’s church was like the one that Baldwin described in Go Tell It on the Mountain, a place where ‘all the men seemed mighty’, that ‘rocked with the Power of God’, that offered the community a sort of nobility and unity and sense of transcendence not available elsewhere. ‘That has been my experience at Trinity,’ Obama said in March 2008.

Baldwin was a child preacher, and that tone never left his system, just as it is part of the rhetoric he came to use later on. Since both men made clear that the church was not a place where arguments were held, but rather where souls were lifted up by grace as much as by language, where voices rose not in reason but in pure denial of reason for the sake of salvation, then to isolate some of Reverend Wright’s views as expressed in his sermons and ask Obama to distance himself from them was to miss the point.

Had their ambitions been less focused and their personalities less complex, Baldwin and Obama could easily have become pastors, preachers, leaders of black churches. But for both of them there was a shadow, a sense of an elsewhere that would form them and make them, eventually, more interested in leading America itself, or as much of it as would follow, than merely leading their own race in America. Both of them would discover their essential Americanness outside America, Baldwin in France, the home of some of his literary ancestors, Obama in Kenya, the home of his father.

There is a peculiar intensity in the quality of their engagement with these foreign countries. Indeed, there are very few American writers born in the twentieth century whose level of involvement with another country equals Baldwin’s with France; and it is impossible to think of another American politician who has been involved in the life of another country as Obama has been with Kenya.

Baldwin and Obama did not just observe these countries, finding out much about foreign morals, manners and social problems. What is crucial in both cases is that what they most fruitfully observed in the end was themselves. What they found within themselves changed them profoundly and made them different from everyone else around them; what they found gave these two fatherless men, already possessed of an eloquence that came from a source hidden from most Americans, a new power and a freedom and a sense of a destiny to fulfil.

Baldwin moved to Paris in November 1948 when he was twenty-four. ‘I left America,’ he wrote in 1959, ‘because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here… I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.’ In these years it occurred to him that while he was a stranger in Europe, he was not, as he had supposed, such a stranger in his own country. In one essay, describing life in a Swiss village, he wrote:

In his introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, published in 1961, Baldwin wrote of his stay in France: ‘The question of who I was had at last become a personal question.’ In one of the essays in that book he described attending the Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956 and finding an enormous gap between himself and the writers who had come from Africa and the Caribbean:

Baldwin summed up the result of his experience in France: ‘I found myself, willy-nilly, alchemized into an American the moment I touched French soil.’

The realization that he was an American, albeit one who came into being through alchemy, had a profound impact on Baldwin not only as a political thinker and essayist, but as an artist. It allowed him to write two masterpieces — Giovanni’s Room and Another Country — in which the souls of white people are examined with sympathy and tenderness; it allowed him to formulate a credo, as an artist who wrote also about black people, that their fate should not be predetermined by their colour but by the intimate spaces hidden in their souls. Our failure to love with due care became his subject; his genius was to spread that failure wide, make it an existential problem, almost a religious one. It also allowed him to realize that the history of black America belonged to whites as much as to blacks and that the ‘black-white experience [in America] may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.’

Thus when William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967 and was attacked by African-American critics for stealing the voice of a slave for his fiction, he was defended by Baldwin: ‘He has begun the common history — ours.’ Later, Baldwin told the Paris Review: ‘I admired him for confronting it, and the result… He writes out of reasons similar to mine — about something that hurt him and frightened him.’

Although there are moments in Baldwin’s speeches and writings that are angrier and more sectarian than the main body of his writing, his work seems astonishingly wise and forgiving, constantly ready to include the other side, insisting that the complex fate of being an American involved America in its both rich and hidden diversity and its both gnarled and noble history. It appears that such wisdom and sense of forgiveness came from how he lived, from his walking the streets of European cities knowing that he was not at home and slowly realizing where home was. Home, oddly enough, was the United States.

On his first trip to Kenya, before he went to Harvard Law School, Barack Obama, who was twenty-seven, sensed his father’s ghostly presence in the streets of Nairobi:

In these chapters of his autobiography, as Obama attempted to understand his Kenyan heritage, there is a sharp feeling that this was an interlude in the life of an earnest American, at times a form of tourism, at other times a serious effort to resolve the most complex matters of identity and selfhood. There is a moment when he sat by the graves of his ancestors and wept:

This passage displays the difference between Baldwin’s sensibility and that of Obama. Whereas Baldwin sought to make distinctions, Obama always wants to make connections; his urge is to close circles even when they don’t need to be closed or the closure is too neat to be fully trusted. Whereas Baldwin longed to disturb the peace, create untidy truths, Obama was slowly becoming a politician.

Despite his best effort to reconcile his own life at home with that of his Kenyan father, the chapters about Kenya in Dreams from My Father show Obama puzzled and ill at ease. Later, in his book The Audacity of Hope, he moved closer to the truth when he described his wife’s admission on a flight back from Kenya to Chicago that ‘she was looking forward to getting home. “I never realized just how American I was,” she said. She hadn’t realized just how free she was — or how much she cherished that freedom.’

Just as Obama, in his increasing urge to inspire, a necessary aspect of his calling perhaps, often seeks a rhetoric free of bitterness and high on healing, Baldwin, in his urge to speak difficult truths, to tell white people what they least wished to hear, sometimes moved towards a tone that was almost shrill. In his great good humour, however, he would perhaps enjoy more than anyone else reading this passage now from an essay written by him in 1965:

Obama, running for President forty-three years later, just three years too late to fulfil what Robert Kennedy saw as conceivable, and Baldwin saw as far too late, ends Dreams from My Father with the phrase, ‘I felt like the luckiest man alive.’ Later, when he won his first election to the US Senate, he wrote: ‘Still, there was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune. I was an outlier, a freak; to political insiders, my victory proved nothing.’

Similarly, Baldwin in 1985 wrote about his own unique position and attitude in the formative years in Greenwich Village: ‘there were very few black people in the Village in those years, and of that handful, I was decidedly the most improbable.’ More than twenty years earlier he had written: ‘To become a Negro man, let alone a Negro artist, one had to make oneself up as one went along… My revenge, I decided very early, would be to achieve a power which outlasts kingdoms.’

Both men set about establishing their authority by exploring themselves and how they came to make it up as they went along, as much as by exploring the world around them. In Obama’s own mixed background he saw America; out of his own success, he saw hope and a new set of values. Out of his own childhood Baldwin produced a number of enduring literary masterpieces and out of his efforts to make sense of his own complex, playful personality and his own unique place in history he produced some of the best essays written in the twentieth century. Reading these essays and Obama’s speeches, especially the ones that are filled with inspiration but short on policy, one is struck by the connection between them, two men remaking the world against all the odds in their own likeness, not afraid to ask, when faced with the future of America as represented by its children, using Baldwin’s wonderful phrase, questions that are alien to most politicians: ‘What will happen to all that beauty?’