The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 24-year-old New Yorker, wants to shut the world out — by sedating herself into a near-constant slumber made possible by a cornucopia of prescription drugs. In various states of semi-consciousness, she begins “Sleepwalking, sleeptalking, sleep-online-chatting, sleepeating… sleepshopping on the computer and sleepordered Chinese delivery. I’d sleepsmoked. I’d sleeptexted and sleeptelephoned.” Her daily life revolves around sleeping as much as possible, and when she’s not sleeping, she’s pretty much obsessed with strategizing how to knock herself out for even longer the next time, constantly counting out her supply of pills.
Her behavior is so extreme — at one point, she seals her cell phone into a tupperware container, which she discovers floating in a pool of water in the tub the following morning — that a New York Times reviewer dubbed Moshfegh’s work an “antisocial” novel. Moshfegh, the author of Homesick for Another World and Eileen, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, has a knack for creating offbeat characters who don’t fit into neat categories. Like other women in Moshfegh’s stories, the heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation is unsettling. She is beautiful, thin, privileged — and deeply troubled. Read more…
Jacob Silverman | Longreads | July 2018 | 10 minutes (2,418 words)
Telegram, a messaging app with more than 200 million users, is a company known for its rakish independence. Pavel Durov, who created the app with his brother, Nikolai, is a 33-year old from St. Petersburg, Russia, with a taste for dark suits and tax-free municipalities. In 2006, he founded VKontakte (VK), Russia’s answer to Facebook, which quickly became the country’s largest social network and a target of its security services. Durov, who identifies as a “part-time troll” in his Twitter bio, earned a reputation as a sort of maverick entrepreneur, a persona that has come with both free-speech absolutism and immature antics. His most notorious stunt took place in May 2012, when he stood at his office window and tossed paper airplanes made of rubles down onto the street below. He later explained that he had been talking to a vice president at his company who had been awarded a large bonus, and when the VP said that he didn’t care about money, the two decided to throw cash out the window—until bystanders started fighting over the windfall.
In April 1877, the normally staid proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ annual meeting in Washington took a dramatic turn. For two weeks, members had listened to the nation’s most distinguished scientists speak on topics ranging from lunar theory to the structures of organic acids. Members enjoyed “Results of Deep Sea Dredging,” by the son of the recently deceased scientist Louis Agassiz. The Academy had invited G. K. Gilbert to deliver a paper, “On the Structure of the Henry Mountains,” so named in honor of the Academy’s president by Powell’s survey. On the final day, the geologists took the floor, whereupon erupted a furious discussion of the American West. The rub lay between those who studied the fossils and those who examined the rock strata, each drawing wildly different conclusions about the age of their subjects.
Such was the fervor of the discussion that the geologists soon jumped to their feet in animation and anger. “[W]hat they might do if they once went fairly on the rampage, it is impossible to say,” wrote one correspondent. Hayden rose to argue that no great degree of difference existed between the two sides, but others immediately shouted him down.
Yet while the rather scholarly debates over dating and provenance might animate the geologists, that day would be remembered not for these petty theatrics, but for an address Powell delivered. In it, the Major stepped away from the fields of geology and out of academic realms to address a topic that pressed right to the heart of American democracy. During the Townsend Hearings three years earlier, he had raised the issue of the West’s extreme aridity and the difficulty of irrigating much of it — but he had thought a lot more about it since then, and the map he now unrolled in front of America’s top scientists carried startling implications. He had bisected the map of the nation from Mexico to Canada with a vertical line rising from central Texas up through Kansas, east of Nebraska, and through Minnesota, roughly approximating the 100th meridian. At this line the arid West begins with startling consistency, the tall prairie grass cedes to short grass and less fertile soils. Trees appear rarely west of the line, except at high altitudes and in the Pacific Northwest, while forests dominate the east: The 100th meridian elegantly divides two separate lands, one composed of wide horizontal vistas, so much of the other defined by its vertical prospects.
The land west of the 100th meridian, Powell announced, could not support conventional agriculture. Surprise met this bold statement, for the line clearly indicated that much of the great plains — including all of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, plus Arizona and New Mexico — was essentially unfarmable. Here was the professor at his best: clear, authoritative, dramatic. He had everyone’s attention.
Powell had drawn an isohyet, a line connecting areas that experience equal volumes of annual rainfall. The relatively humid lands to the east of this line experience twenty or more inches of annual rainfall, the unquestionably arid lands to the west receiving less than that, except some narrow strips on the Pacific coast. The twenty-inch isohyet offered a valuable generalization — conventional agriculture simply could not work without twenty or more inches a year, unless supplemented by irrigation. Except for some lands offering timber or pasturage, the far greater part of the land west of the line was by itself essentially not farmable. Access to the transformative powers of water, not the availability of plots of land, proved a far more valuable commodity. By now, any land through which streams passed had all been acquired, some of these owners charging those less fortunate for irrigation water. “All the good public lands fit for settlement are sold,” Powell warned. “There is not left unsold in the whole United States land which a poor man could turn into a farm enough to make one average county in Wisconsin.”
Much of what Powell reported was not exactly new, but no one had presented the data so comprehensively and convincingly — and not anyone so famous as the Major. Few, of course, doubted the region’s aridity. But in one powerful moment, Powell had claimed that the nation’s traditional system of land use and development — and thus America’s present push west — simply would not work. The debate that Powell provoked that late April day drew immediate and blistering response. The land agent for the Northern Pacific Railway, itself the beneficiary of a government grant of nearly four million acres, hammered back at Powell’s “grave errors.” “[P]ractical farmers, by actual occupancy and cultivation, have demonstrated that a very considerable part of this ‘arid’ region, declared by Major Powell as ‘entirely unfit for use as farming lands,’ is, in fact, unexcelled for agricultural purposes.” Others responded similarly. Powell clearly had touched a raw nerve. Over the next several years, he would have much more to say on the matter, igniting a veritable firestorm. While the other surveyors limited themselves to covering as much ground as possible, Powell now wrestled with the startling implications for the ongoing development of the West — and what that meant for the American democracy he had fought so hard to save.
***
For most of the first half of the 19th century, eastern America’s conception of the western portion of North America could be spelled out in three words: Great American Desert. That originated during the Long Expedition of 1819, when President James Monroe directed his secretary of war to send Stephen H. Long of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers with a small complement of soldiers and civilian scientists on a western reconnaissance. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had just negotiated a treaty with Spain that ceded Florida to the United States and drew a border between the two countries running across the Sabine River in Texas, west along the Red and Arkansas rivers, and all the way to the Pacific. Eager to know more about the border and the new western territory, Monroe had the secretary of war direct Long to follow the Platte River up to the Rocky Mountains, then trace south and back east along the new border.
The energetic New Hampshire–born West Pointer envisioned himself the successor to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark — indeed, over the course of five expeditions, he would cover 26,000 miles, and mount the first steamboat exploration up the Missouri into Louisiana Purchase territory. His name would grace the peak that Powell was first to climb. On this expedition, Long split his group into two, sending one party along the Arkansas while he with the rest headed south to chart the Red River. Long’s men, often parched and starving, battled a violent hailstorm, sometimes resorted to eating their horses, and negotiated their way past a band of Kiowa-Apaches. But the maps they carried were so atrociously inaccurate that the river they followed for weeks was not the Red at all.
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Three years after Long’s party returned home, expedition member Edwin James published the three-volume Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains. Long’s ordeal imbued him with little affection for the “dreary plains” they had traversed. The Great Plains from Nebraska to Oklahoma he found were “wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture.” He added: “The traveler who shall at any time have traversed its desolate sands, will, we think, join us in the wish that this region may forever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, the jackall.” The accompanying map labeled the area a “Great Desert,” terminology that soon fully flowered into the “Great American Desert,” a colorful appellation that would stick to the indefinable sections of the West for the next generation. Long believed that this desert wilderness served as a natural limitation on American western settlement, acting as an important buffer against the Mexican, British, and Russians, who claimed the western lands beyond. That compelling assertion seemed to resonate in the public imagination, locking into place the notion of a vast desert dominating the nation’s western midsection. “When I was a schoolboy,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge in 1877, “my map of the United States showed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains a long and broad white blotch, upon which was printed in small capitals THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT — UNEXPLORED.
Even though some early trappers and mountain men had brought back word of a land often far from desertlike, the idea persisted. In 1844, when U.S. naval officer Charles Wilkes published his five-volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, it included a map of upper California. Inland from the well-detailed Pacific coast lay the Sierra Nevada, while the front range of the Rockies marked the map’s eastward extension. In between the ranges lay a vast, wedge-shaped blank space, without a single physical feature delineated. Unable to leave such a realm blank without remark, Wilkes had inserted a simple paragraph reading “This Plain is a waste of Sand. . . .” Like the sea monsters inhabiting the unknown sections of medieval maps, he — like Long — had condemned the entire region, the dead space not even worthy of a second look. Eleven years later, a Corps of Topographical Engineers map had sought to add additional detail, but could only insert a tenuous dotted line that indicated some cartographer’s wild guess about the Colorado River’s course.
Cracks started appearing in the notion of a Great American Desert during the early 1840s expeditions of Charles Frémont, son-in-law of that powerful advocate of Manifest Destiny, Senator Thomas Benton. With his backing, Frémont led both a four-month survey of the newly blazed Oregon Trail in 1841 and an audacious fourteen-month, 6,475-mile circuit of the West, beginning in 1843. Frémont’s subsequent reports combined a deft mix of hair-raising adventure with scientific discovery, thrilling its readers with images of guide Kit Carson and the so-called Pathfinder himself running up a flag atop a vertiginous Rocky Mountain peak. The maps accompanying the reports furnished emigrants with an accurate road map for the journeys that thousands would take west in the 1840s and 1850s. Frémont’s reports indicated that the intercontinental west certainly contained stretches of truly arid land, but that it was no unbroken Sahara. Yet even so, the pioneers and gold seekers understood that great opportunities lay not in this parched region, but beyond, at the end of the trails, in Oregon and California. Most of the West still remained no more than a place to get across.
In the late 1850s, a rather startling shift had turned the idea of the Great American Desert on its head. “These great Plains are not deserts,” wrote William Gilpin in a late 1857 edition of the National Intelligencer, “but the opposite, and are the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American Continent.” Gilpin, the electric-tongued son of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker paper merchant, would do more than any other single individual to persuade his fellow citizens that America’s great midsection was a garden only waiting to be plowed. Whereas the term Manifest Destiny had been coined as a justification for conquering great swaths of the continent at gunpoint, Gilpin transformed it into a more wholesome interpretation that pulled peoples across the nation. It also had the weight of the Enlightenment’s commandment, articulated by philosopher John Locke that God and reason commanded humans to subdue the earth and improve it. As Civil War soldiers returned home, all America could climb on board with Gilpin’s fantastical promises, any threatening idea of a great desert now disregarded. He had given America what it most wanted to hear: the promise that its growth was unlimited, its western lands a never-ending buffet of opportunity and growth, limited only by a lack of imagination and courage.
Gilpin had impressive credentials: Not only had he joined Frémont and Kit Carson on their expedition to Oregon in 1843, but as an army officer he had fought the Seminoles in Florida, served as a major in the First Missouri Volunteers during the Mexican War, and marched against the Comanche to keep the Santa Fe Trail open. A columnist for the Kansas City Star observed that “his enthusiasm over the future of the West was almost without limitation.” He became a disciple of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German geographer, who published the early volumes of his Cosmos in the late 1840s, elaborating the thesis that geography, climate, and biota incontrovertibly shaped the growth of human society. Gilpin pressed the Humboldtian idea that much of North America lay within an Isothermal Zodiac, a belt some thirty degrees wide running across the Northern Hemisphere, which contained climatic conditions ideal for human civilization to blossom. Herein lay the justification for Gilpin’s remarkable, if fanciful, theory that rationalized American exceptionalism. In three letters to the National Intelligencer in the late 1850s, later developed into an influential book, Gilpin outlined how North America’s convex shape had determined its grand destiny. The Mississippi Valley drained the bowl that was defined by the Appalachians to the east and the Sierra Nevada and Rockies to the west. By contrast, the Alps of Europe and the Himalayas of Asia rose in the center of their continents, forming insurmountable barriers to any continental unity. The geographical realities of Europe and Asia broke them up into small states and away from common centers, forcing upon them a history of unending warfare. North America, Gilpin grandly declaimed, had a national, unified personality. Thus endowed with a centripetal, unifying geography that encouraged a single language, the easy exchange of ideas, and favored the emergence of a continental power, North America stood ready to achieve world primacy.
Gilpin claimed that America would fulfill its destiny in the so-called Plateau of North America, the region between the main Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, “the most attractive, the most wonderful, and the most powerful department of their continent, of their country, and of the whole area of the globe.” Here Gilpin shone at his most incandescent, piling sheer fantasy built on pseudo-science and hope ever higher. As the war ended, most Americans had embraced the West as an untapped Eden, not as the barren edge bounding the American nation, but as the very place in which it would fulfill its national destiny.
Certainly, other forces supported such a change of heart about the West. The railroads — America’s most visible instrument of Manifest Destiny — adopted such sentiments with enthusiasm. To encourage the largely authentic, nation-building efforts of the railroad companies, the federal government bestowed vast swaths of public land abutting their tracks onto these rising great powers, many now laying track furiously across the continent. Their long-term interests hinged on the high value of the land they penetrated. The West as garden, rather than desert, suited their ambitions far better, and railroad publicists rolled out a relentless tide of promotional material. Utah was a promised land, proclaimed the Rio Grande and Western Railroad. “You can lay track through the Garden of Eden,” said Great Northern Railroad’s founder J. J. Hill, “[b]ut why bother if the only inhabitants are Adam and Eve?”
A new, supposedly scientific, idea arose to support the vision of productive dryland farming. The “rain follows the plow” theory became chaplain of the western movement. Simply cultivating the arid soil, this theory postulated, will bring about permanent changes in the local climate, turning it more humid and thus favorable to crops. The climatologist Cyrus Thomas, who had founded the Illinois Natural History Society that had given Powell his chance, became one of the theory’s strongest advocates. “Since the territory [of Colorado] has begun to be settled, towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and road made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture . . . ,” he wrote. “I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature.” Hayden, along with many other national personalities, endorsed this intoxicating, but deeply flawed theory.
In 1846, Gilpin addressed the U.S. Senate, asserting that “progress is God” and that the “destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to change darkness into light and confirm the destiny of the human race. . . . Divine task! Immortal mission!” Even at a time lit up by fiery eloquence, Gilpin stood out, his giddy pronouncements seismic in their appeal, emotionally resonate, wrapped in morality, and nationalistic in self-praise. Few could resist so powerful an appeal. And few did.
Gilpin and Powell had met at least once, in Denver City, on the Major’s first trip west in 1867. The ex-governor had probably waxed about the great promise of the West, perhaps even suggested that the Colorado River lay open to exploration. No record exists of their conversation, but Powell did not seek out his help or opinions after that. The Major found himself more comfortable with William Byers’s gritty practicality.
Indeed, Powell had no truck with the “rain follows the plow” theory. He believed that the Southwest was indeed a desert, one that could be cultivated, but only with the careful marshaling of the limited resource of water. Powell’s urging for caution solicited widespread groans and charges that he was backward-looking. That summer, he quietly ordered his senior investigators west to establish data on irrigation practices. Ostensibly traveling to northern Utah to classify land, Gilbert would examine Mormon water-delivery technology in the Great Salt Lake drainage area. Dutton would continue his geologic studies on the Colorado Plateau, but take some time off to survey irrigable lands in the Sevier River Valley and measure the river’s flow.
***
On March 8, 1878, Representative John Atkins of Tennessee, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, introduced a resolution that called for the secretary of the interior to submit a report summarizing the operations, expenses, and overlaps of the work conducted by geological and geographical surveys over the past ten years. During the consequent hearings, Wheeler, Hayden, and Powell testified about their surveys.
Powell’s young secretary would recall how Wheeler appeared dignified but aloof in his testimony. Hayden came on like a freight train, bitter and at length. He immodestly championed his work above the others and claimed that no duplication among the surveys had occurred. Once Hayden had finally finished his statement, the exhausted committee turned to Powell. In silence, the room of congressmen and a large assembled audience waited as Powell paced back and forth in the chamber, his stump clasped behind his back. All expected an impassioned speech denouncing Hayden’s claims one by one. But Powell ignored the earlier testimony. He gave a calm, even-keeled appraisal of his own work, applauded the achievements of the others, and then contended that much overlap between the surveys had occurred. Soon the entire committee was following his every word. “It was plain to see,” noted his assistant, “that the day was won.”
But even the ascendency he gained at the congressional hearings did not satisfy Powell. Never one to sit back, he prepared to make the riskiest, most brazen gamble of his career — even eclipsing the decision to run the Colorado. One of his greatest intrinsic strengths lay in realizing that opportunity so often arises out of good timing. The timing now — with the survey consolidation in full press and congressional discussion bubbling away— offered an optimal chance to take hold of the narrative and change its course. The report he would release was nothing less than explosive. He would reach far beyond his own survey work, indeed push so far beyond the bounds of a federal bureaucrat as to astound observers, seeming to shoulder the whole American experiment and bear it westward.
While Hayden and Wheeler conducted their fieldwork during the summer of 1877, Powell had stayed home, working assiduously on a document that built on the ideas he had presented to the National Academy of Sciences the year before. His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, delivered to Interior Secretary Schurz on April 1, 1878, would be monumental and astonishing, and, in the words of a respected mid-twentieth-century historian, “[o]ne of the most remarkable books ever written by an American.” Starting with Charles A. Schott’s meteorological observations, buttressed by Gilbert’s and Dutton’s ground measurements of water requirements necessary for irrigation, Powell presented a formal, prescriptive plan for developing the West. In this report he integrated a lifetime of thought and observation, ranging from his childhood experiences in the Wisconsin grain fields to his close study of Mormon irrigation techniques, and informed by the network of ancient Pueblo canals and customs of Mexican water sharing. The thousands of miles he had walked, ridden, and climbed in the West keenly but invisibly shaped the document. At its core lay the realization battered into him on his first journey down the Colorado about humanity’s impermanence in the face of geologic time and how the Earth remained in a continual state of flux. It was more manifesto than scientific report, many of its conclusions based on incomplete evidence, much of the data hardly better than educated guesses.
Yet the conclusions have since proved ecologically sound and indeed remarkably spot-on. The report opened with a lengthy appraisal of the topography of the American West, including estimates of the amount of potentially irrigable land, timberland, and pasturage, before launching into a full-frontal assault on the current land-grant system, still rooted in the 1862 Homestead Act’s stipulation that any American adult could receive 160 acres, contingent upon demonstrating an ability to live on the land and improve it. While that system might work well in Wisconsin or Illinois, Powell argued, the arid West could not successfully support 160-acre homesteading. Those westgoers flocking into the arid lands beyond the 100th meridian would see their dreams dashed by spindly crops. Powell had directly contradicted Gilpin’s soaring promises. America could not have everything it wanted.
Powell’s recommendations focused first on classifying lands, then directing their use accordingly: Low-lying lands near water that were west of the 100th meridian should be available in 80-acre lots, while water-limited areas should be parceled into 2,560-acre units for pasturage. High mountain tracts under an abundance of timber should be made available to lumbermen.
He did not deny that drylands could be redeemed, but the limiting factor, as he noted before, was water. Irrigation could “perennially yield bountiful crops,” but the West contained few small streams that could be diverted by canal to fields, and those available were already being exploited to the limit in Utah and Arizona. Such large rivers as the Colorado ran through deep chasms and hostile ground, mostly far from any potential cropland. Only “extensive and comprehensive” actions — dams and distribution systems — could deliver the water, and only those with the means to undertake the task — not individual farmers, being poor men — could pursue it. If not carefully planned, wrote Powell, the control of agriculture would fall into the hands of water companies owned by rich men, who would eventually use their considerable power to oppress the people. He painted a truth that still rankles many today who believe in the myth of the rugged, independent westerner. He asserted that the development of the western lands depended not so much on the individual landowner as on the interdiction of the federal government, the only entity that could survey and map the land, build dams and other reclamation projects, administer vast swaths of public lands, oversee federal land grants, and tackle the displacement of the indigenous peoples. The lone cowboy taming the land with lasso and fortitude may fit the myth of the West, but the reality was quite different. Put simply, the West’s aridity required that overall public interest trump that of the individual.
The man who had previously limited himself to describing the topographic and geologic formations of the western lands had now waded directly into populist politics, driven by isohyets and tables of rainfall-per-acre statistics. Powell believed that the very republican dream of the small farmer was at risk under the crushing power of monopolistic interest. Such resistance aligned with his core childhood beliefs. He had seen the local grain operator in Wisconsin abuse powerless farmers with impunity. The stakes, as he saw them, were of the highest order, threatening the country’s very fulfillment. With the Arid Lands report, Powell had taken on not only Hayden and his congressional supporters, Wheeler and the army but also the General Land Office, the railroads, and the likes of William Gilpin — an overwhelming front of entrenched beliefs, myths, and nation-building passion, the very patrimony of Manifest Destiny. He had taken a hard shot directly at virtually unchallengeable assumptions about the unlimited wealth of American resources and the bright future of the great West — and also at who would have access to whatever wealth the West had to offer.
Powell saw that arid cultures stood or fell — and mostly fell — not on their absolute amounts of water, but on how equitably political and economic systems divided limited resources — and could evolve in the face of climatic and societal changes. To Powell, the Homestead Act, which imposed an arbitrarily eastern 160-acre parcel regardless of topography, rainfall, nearness to water, altitude, and other critical factors, appeared the height of folly, the blind, reflexive policy of a nation with outsized optimism drunk on the seemingly infinite resources available to it. Above all, he argued that the nation’s trustees needed to listen to the land itself — and respond accordingly.
Two days after Powell submitted his Arid Lands report to Schurz, the interior secretary forwarded it along to the House, which ordered 1,800 copies printed. After exhausting that print run quickly, another 5,000 copies printed afterward disappeared equally fast.
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The Academy committee incorporated much of Powell’s report into their own, nevertheless watering it down considerably by passing over ethnology and his ideas about engineering the landscape. They recommended that the General Land Office’s surveyor generals, along with the three current federal surveys of Hayden, Wheeler, and Powell, be subsumed under two civilian-run agencies in the Interior Department. All land-measurement operation would fall under the Coast and Interior Survey, while all investigations of geology and natural resources, together with land classification, should fall under a new consolidated geological survey. It also recommended that the president appoint a blue-ribbon commission to investigate public-land laws in order to create a new land-parceling system in the arid West, where traditional homesteading was both impractical and undesirable.
On November 6, 1878, the entire Academy approved the report with only one dissenting vote, that of Marsh’s bitter rival Cope. Powell focused next on the congressional backlash that the Academy’s report would surely elicit. After all, it cut out the War Department—and diminished the power of the General Land Office’s sixteen surveyors general and their contractors. And then, of course, Hayden remained capable of hijacking all Powell’s work.
Powell launched a major lobbying effort, calling upon Newberry and Clarence King in late November to sway congressional opinion away from army management of the surveys. Ten days before the Academy presented its report to Congress on December 2, Powell decided not to seek the directorship of the new consolidated survey that Congress would most likely authorize. His deputy Clarence Dutton had written a friend ten days earlier with news that his boss “renounces all claim or desire or effort to be the head of a united survey.” A close observer much later wrote that “no one episode illustrates more strongly the character of the man—to pass voluntarily to another the cup of his own filling when it was at his very lips.”
Noble sentiments may have in fact prompted Powell to step aside, but sheer fatigue with the political infighting could also have played a factor. But Powell had also grown shrewd in politics, anticipating full well that as architect of the survey and land-office reform approach, he would feel the wrath of the vested interests. A general awareness that he was seeking to take the directorship might put the whole endeavor at risk. He now carried great ambitions for two mighty unfolding powers—the nation and science—but not comparable ambitions for his own wealth, power, or glory. When fame came, as it had with the descent of the Colorado, he would harness it to help overcome his next challenge, not to leverage into higher speaking fees, a larger house, or political office. His distaste for self-aggrandizement embodied the Wesleyan requirement of modesty. Work done was for God’s glory, not the individual’s. While Powell worshipped at a different altar, his work, not himself, remained the center of his life. But that did not mean he had stopped fighting to get someone installed to carry on the mission of science in good form.
In his eyes, Hayden had come to stand for the culture of Grant-era corruption after the war. Hayden’s often shoddy science, Powell believed, sent the interests of the United States squarely in a damaging direction. Hayden’s ascent to the position of senior federal scientist would doom land-grant reform. With his willingness to play up to senators and his suspect optimism about the unlimited possibilities of the West, Hayden stood flatly in the way of Powell’s struggle to open minds as to what the West actually offered. In this contest, Powell felt that nothing less than democracy lay on the line.
When Congressman James Garfield asked Powell’s opinion of Hayden’s integrity as a scientist, the Major responded blisteringly that Hayden was “a charlatan who has bought his way to fame.” He was a “wretched geologist” who “rambled aimlessly over a region big enough for an empire,” shamelessly attempting to catch the attention of “the wonder-loving populace.”
Nor had Hayden stood idly by when Congress called upon the National Academy for an opinion: “I presume some great plan will be proposed that will obliterate the present order of things,” Hayden wrote a friend, “unless all our friends take hold and help.” In another letter Hayden told Joseph Hooker that “Hon. Abram Hewitt is an enemy of mine. . . . We had a hard time this last session and came near being decapitated. . . . We had to cultivate the good will of over 300 members to counteract the vicious influence of the [Appropriations] Committee.” Hayden had lobbied members of the Academy to keep John Strong Newberry off the committee. Clarence King topped Powell’s list to run a consolidated survey.
King lived in New York, comfortable with seeking his own fortune and happily above the fray as Hayden, Wheeler, and Powell battled it out. He would do little to seek the directorship, but would be only too happy to accept it if offered. On the other side, Hayden launched a forceful letter-lobbying campaign. Unbeknownst to others, he had begun to suffer the effects of syphilis, very likely contracted from his frequenting of prostitutes. The disease, which would kill him nine years later, had already begun to cloud his judgment. His letter writing, however, appeared to be working. Again Powell countered with more lobbying of his own. In early January, Marsh received a letter from Clarence King, letting him know that King felt it was time to submit his credentials for the job.
Hayden still saw Powell as his major competitor, until when—in the middle of January—a friend notified him of Powell’s withdrawal; ten days later, Hayden wrote a friend that “all looks well now.” Of all the national surveyors, Hayden had published the most, had received more appropriations, and had more friends in Congress—and indeed had the bright feather of Yellowstone in his hat. The directorship was his to lose.
In late December, Powell had finished drafting the legislation that Schurz had requested to turn the Academy’s proposals into law. Powell cleverly tied three of the four proposals to appropriations bills, clearly intending to skirt the Public Lands Committee, crowded with western congressmen who would never allow such issues a hearing. Schurz forwarded them to John Atkins, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, as well as to Abram Hewitt, the committee’s most influential member. Both strongly supported the measures. Atkins waited until February 10 to open congressional discussion, whereupon several weeks of vigorous debate ensued. Powell kept at work behind the scenes as a very public debate churned over the role of the federal government in the still largely undefined areas of science. He detailed his staff to bring Garfield books from the Library of Congress so he could cogently draft his position against proposed changes by General Humphreys and the Topographical Engineers.
The former Kansas shoe merchant, Representative Dudley C. Haskell, scoffed at federal dollars going to scientists collecting “bugs and fossils” and creating “bright and beautiful topographical maps that are to be used in the libraries of the rich.” Why would Congress reach into public coffers to pay these dubious scientists exorbitant sums to study the public lands? Other opponents of the Academy’s plan argued that the western public domain embraced much fine agricultural land. The West, the Montana newspaperman Martin Maginnis joyfully expounded, “contains in its rich valleys, in its endless rolling pastures, in its rugged mineral-seamed mountains, traversed by thousands of streams clear as crystal and cold as melting snow, all the elements of comfort, happiness, and prosperity to millions of men.” One congressman after another fumed at anyone so fainthearted as to criticize the extraordinary promise of the West. The “genius of our people,” wrote Representative John H. Baker of Indiana, was that they were “bold, independent, self-reliant, full of energy and intelligence,” who “do not need to rely on the arm of a paternal government to carve out their won fortunes or to develop the undiscovered wealth of the mountains.” Then he came to his real point: “I do not want them in their anxiety to perpetuate those or any other scientific surveys to interfere with our settlers upon the frontier.”
With Powell’s finger marks all over the Academy recommendations—much clearly pulled from his Arid Lands report—he now came under direct fire. Thomas Patterson, a former trial lawyer from Colorado, rose to decry Powell as a dangerous revolutionary, “this charlatan in science and intermeddler in affairs of which he has no proper conception.” Atkins’s proposal, he continued, was the work of one man, and threatened the West and its landed interests with disaster. Should Congress enlarge the land grants for grazing, then baronial estates would soon crowd the plains, an aristocratic few owning lands sufficient for a European principality and crowding out the small farmer upon which the nation depended. Powell must have been galled when the floor debate took this particular twist, especially when he had so consciously dedicated his efforts toward supporting the interests of the small farmer and preventing the aggregation of land and power that Patterson railed against. Patterson himself would go on to buy the Rocky Mountain News, making it a bullhorn for labor rights and the taming of corporate overreach. Indeed both men did not diverge much in their views. But at the heart of the matter lay a considerable foundational debate about who should be shaping the development of agricultural America and how much the government and scientific elite should be involved.
On February 18, 1879, Representative Horace Page of California offered a compromise that agreed to the consolidation of the scientific surveys but made no mention of reforming the land-survey system. Representative Haskell read a letter from a National Academy scientist, which submitted that the Academy debate was actually far more divisive than the one dissenting vote might indicate. The congressman would not reveal the letter’s author, most probably E. D. Cope, the missive a ploy by Hayden’s people to sow doubt about the Academy’s recommendations.
Atkins amended Page’s compromise to include the creation of a commission to investigate the land-grant system. The measure passed 98 to 79. The approved Sundry Bill went to the Senate, where no discussion took place. In the Appropriations Committee, Hayden’s supporters weighed in strongly, the committee amending the bill so that the scientific surveys were consolidated under Hayden, even taking $20,000 from Powell to finish up his work and giving it to Hayden. The bill then passed to conference committee. When it emerged on March 3, the last day of the session, the Senate’s emendations placing Hayden in charge had been cut out, but so had the House reformers’ bid to place all the competing agencies under the Interior Department. The last-minute collection of appropriation bills to keep the government functioning passed and the 45th Congress closed.
Hayden may well have considered this outcome a victory, the Senate indicating its interest in his running the consolidated survey. All he needed now was to take the directorship. But he had not counted on Powell. The Major did not delay, writing at length to Atkins on March 4, pinning blame on Hayden for negatively influencing the tenor of the congressional discussion by raising false issues solely to advance himself personally. Powell then revealed his deepest concern: The appointment of Hayden would effectively end efforts to reform the system of land surveys. He asked Atkins to approach Schurz and President Hayes to obstruct Hayden’s bid and to sing the praises of King.
Two days later, Powell spoke with the president, Hayes questioning him in particular on Hayden’s methods of securing appropriations. Powell also wrote a lengthy letter to Garfield, furnishing him with a withering analysis of Hayden’s published work. He did not hold back, claiming that Hayden’s mind was utterly untrained and incoherent, leading him to fritter away federal money on work “intended purely for noise and show.” Powell also worked closely with O. C. Marsh, helping to coordinate the flow of letters in support of King. Marsh traveled to Washington and also met with the president.
Cope wrote Schurz in support of Hayden, claiming that “simply shameful” personal grudges had aroused the voices against his friend. As for King, Cope insinuated that his tenure in government service had been sullied by his taking fees from mining enterprises. But Cope’s letter could not stem the tide of questions raised against Hayden. King’s nomination was officially announced on March 20. “My blood was stirred,” wrote Hayden supporter and Brown University president Ezekiel G. Robinson, upon hearing the news. “There must have been some dexterous maneuvering to have brought about a change in the President’s mind.”
The Senate approved King’s nomination with the slightest opposition on April 3. Three days later Marsh wrote Powell, “Now that the battle is won we can go back to pure Science again,” then invited him and Gilbert to present papers to the upcoming National Academy annual meeting. When Powell told King he would be pleased to work for the new United States Geological Survey, King responded exuberantly. “I am more delighted than I can express. Hamlet with Hamlet left [out] is not to my taste. I am sure you will never regret your decision and for my part, it will be one of the greatest pleasures to forward your scientific work and to advance your personal interest.”
King did not last two years on the job.
Waiting in the wings would be John Wesley Powell, who would take over the directorship of the USGS, run it for 13 years, and fundamentally shape the role of science in the federal government.
Ryan Chapman | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,419 words)
Several of the sentences in Chelsea Hodson’s debut Tonight I’m Someone Else radiate with the epigrammatic wisdom of Kelly Link or Maggie Nelson. There’s just something about her lines — “How lovely to be young enough not to know any better” or “I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own” (both from “Simple Woman”) — that demands furious underlining and exclamation points in the margins.
These essays span the writer’s life in Tuscon, Los Angeles, and New York as she investigates what it means to have a body, to be an object, to run away, to look for answers in strangers, and to chase danger. As in, let’s tie a butcher knife to the ceiling fan and sit beneath it until someone gets hurt (“Near Miss”).
With praise from Miranda July and Amy Hempel, Tonight I’m Someone Else is a book that delights and disturbs and — in its deep dive into the performance of female identity — feels very now. Hodson is an essayist with one foot out the door, and she’s holding the keys to someone else’s car, asking if we want to drive into the ocean. Read more…
Curiosity in my regard, and there was a lot of it, didn’t only come from inside Mason Gross, for generally the kids were cool with whatever. Curiosity came from people of my generation in my soon to be former existence. They regarded my new life, my adventure, in the words of some, my “journey,” with envy and hesitation. They identified with my break for freedom but feared their academic or lawyerly selves had already quashed their inner Beyoncé. They wondered if they, too, could leave dutiful, controlled professional personas and fling themselves into a new, hyper-saturated, Technicolor — no, RBG color-coded — artistic life of creativity and apparent abandon. I had yearned like that before actually walking away. Professing admiration for my bravery, my friends asked how I did it and hoped I would send back a report.
Why do something different? Why start something new? Why did I do it? What made me think I could begin anew in an entirely different field from history, where, truth be told, I had made a pretty good reputation? Was it hard leaving a chaired professorship at Princeton? I didn’t think so. For a long time, my answers, even to myself, were simple — too simple by far.
I said, because I wanted to.
Because I could.
I knew from my mother I could do it.
My smart, small, intense, beautiful, disciplined little mother, Dona Irvin, administrator to author, held the key to my confidence. To a very great extent, she still does. The so much more of myself beyond my sex, race, and age that I cherish is rooted in my family, in my father the gregarious bohemian, who had taught me to draw decades ago, but even more, in my mother, who starting over at sixty-five, blossomed as an older woman, transforming herself into a creator in her own right after a lifetime as a shyly dutiful wife and mother. As an older woman, she cast off the strictures of a lifetime — well, some of them — and took to wearing red or white with her dark skin and taking the bus overnight to play slot machines in Reno.
My mother had never written a book before 65. She had started her career as a school administrator late, after the civil rights movement opened opportunities for an educated black woman, and she had grown professionally. She overcame crippling shyness whose stutter made the telephone her monster. At a liberating feminist retreat at Asilomar, near Monterey, she reclaimed her own name, Dona, after decades of letting other people correct her. Yes, people tried to correct her pronunciation of her own name and talk her into accepting the more easily recognizable “Donna.” At the Asilomar retreat, she put a stop to that and made people call her by her own name. And she started writing in earnest.
Always a terrific writer of letters and reports, she’d never attempted a book. After Asilomar, she found steel within to pull it off.
She devoted ten years to research and publishing her first book, The Unsung Heart of Black America, about the middle-class black people she knew as close, long-term friends in the United Methodist church we attended in the 1950s and early 1960s in Oakland, a work the fine and generous historian John Hope Franklin blurbed.
It took me years to sense the bravery, the sturdy determination her metamorphosis demanded, for she was tougher than I could see during her lifetime. I knew she delved deep to express herself with unadorned honesty. Hard for a woman. Doubly hard for a black woman. Triply hard for a black woman of a class and a generation never wanting to let them (meaning, mainly, white people) catch even a sidelong glimmering of your doubts.
Suppressing doubt and never washing dirty linen in public came naturally to my mother. A public that was black and wore the beloved faces of her friends awaited my mother’s writing as an upstanding black person. That public’s expectation of her as a black author discouraged her speaking as an individual whose identity exceeded race. She felt that pressure and wrote her first book as a black woman, never losing sight of race in America. Yet there was more to her.
It took her ten more years to write and publish her frank and funny memoir, I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old. Just pause for a moment and imagine the guts and good humor she needed to use that title, to admit to looking good, and to write the word “old” and apply it to herself.
I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old.
People used to say that to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me.
In her memoir, she went on to claim herself as a unique individual, racialized, but with much more to her than race. She wrote as a daughter of two parents in conflict on the most intimate level. The conflict stayed within the range of ordinary human misbehavior — the usual adultery and betrayal — but talking about that exceeded the vocabulary of race alone. Hard to do in the USA, because it’s hard to describe black humanity beyond race and so easy, practically an automatic response, to interpret a claim of individuality as treason to blackness. It’s as though individuality, the pride of white Americans, belongs only to them; as though a black woman speaking as an individual must be backing away from blackness. My mother had to find words to claim both uniqueness and blackness. But find those words she did. Dona was working on a website about vigorous old people of many races when she died at ninety-one, not at all ready to leave.
Looking at her, identifying with her when I was 64, I figured, hell, I could do that. I could do something new in the quarter-century or more still before me, even starting from close to scratch. My mother’s example made me think I could lay down one life and pick up a new one.
***
I had been a youthful artist, and for years I carried a sketchbook and drew all the time. I was still drawing when I lived in Ghana with my parents in the 1960s. These three drawings, pencil on paper, were in my sketchbooks there.
Ghana gave my Bay Area eyes, squinting into a bright blue sky, a whole new palette, a landscape and architecture and people in clothes and rioted textures and colors. Something grew on every surface: bushes, flowers, or mold, or all of it all at once. The California Bay Area that I had left was a beautiful, but a eucalyptus gray place, foggy in the morning, dryly sunny in the day, with mostly light-colored people.
In Ghana, I moved through a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheel hues. The dirt was red, the trees and grass blue-green. White buildings, red tiled roofs. Red-orange bougainvillea climbing whitewashed buildings and cascading over fences and walls, some topped with menacing shards of broken brown glass or black wrought-iron spikes testifying to class tensions that barricaded the wealthy against the grasping poor. Together, this colorful landscape and the very black people in white and spectacular clothing altered my vision of everyday life.
In Ghana, I taught French in the language school and gave the news in French on Ghana Radio for a year. I can still hear the drums
Boom boom boom BoomBoom
announcing “Ghana calling!” I began graduate study in pre-colonial African history at the Institute of African Studies before a coup d’état deposing Kwame Nkrumah ended his nascent African socialism and sent us Afro-Americans, including Maya Make (later Maya Angelou) to Egypt, to Europe, and for us Irvins, home to California.
I completed my MA in African history at UCLA, having previously discovered a love of history during my junior year abroad at the University of Bordeaux. After UCLA a year of rattlebrained, youthful follies too embarrassing to mention, I ended up at Harvard for a Ph.D. in history. I quit smoking. I wrote a dissertation that became my first book, published by — ahem — Alfred A. Knopf. Many books and professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton University followed.
I was a whiz kid, tenured and promoted at Penn in three years and promoted to full professor at Chapel Hill in another three. In the early days of my career, I never questioned my ability to do well in my field. I loved history, loved research, loved writing — I still love history, love research, love writing. I published books at a regular pace: Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976), The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979), Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1986), Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (1996), Southern History Across the Color Line (2002), Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (2006), and the Penguin Classic Editions of Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And there were fellowships (Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, &c.), scholarly societies (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Antiquarian Society, &c.), and honorary doctorates (Dartmouth, Yale, &c.).
I don’t want this to sound effortless, for it was all a lot of work, a hell of a lot of dedicated work. Good work, I mean, work that felt good to me, for writing history gave me enormous pleasure. If you want to see the whole panoply of achievement, check out my website, www.nellpainter.com or look at my Facebook page. Over the years, though, images made their way into my writing of history.
Visual art’s gravitational field had renewed its pull decades before my mother had reinvented herself as a writer. Still, I cannot shrug off my change of field as simply a matter of time. It took place step by step, as I was writing history.
My history writing tugged me toward art over the years. I used a photograph I had taken as the frontispiece of my second book, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, and I wrote about the photograph as a meaningful image, not merely an illustration. Then came the “Truth in Photographs” chapter in my fourth book, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol, on Truth’s self-fashioning through photographs. I spent hour after hour preparing that chapter in the abundance of Princeton’s Marquand Art History Library, where the art books fill four levels and you can sit comfortably for hours, with the history and theory of photography. In Marquand I learned the rhetoric of the image and critical seeing.
I illustrated Creating Black Americans with fine art. Though it’s a narrative history, Creating Black Americans gave me an introductory course in African American art history. There was, I discovered, more good art by black artists than I could ever cram into one book, even limiting the art to subjects bearing on history. None — okay, very few — of those artists figured in the art history I would study in art school.
The books I wrote weren’t art history, but each one took me beyond text into new visual archives. I loved working with images; I loved learning new history and new artists. This was not like my first undergraduate experience in art.
***
Back in the 1960s I had studied art at Berkeley, had been an art major and drawn a couple of covers for the campus humor magazine. My art major ended with a C in sculpture, a C I earned by not doing any work. Why should I have to work at sculpture, I reckoned like the kid I was, because talent should insure success. I saw talent as everything, therefore exerting myself would make no difference. What kind of reasoning is that? Dumb kid reasoning. I didn’t know how to work on learning sculpture, and I didn’t know any professional artists to show me a way. On the other hand, my academic family applauded my writing. There ended my story in art for decades. Except for occasional sketching and knitting, I put down the visual and wrote a very great deal of text. Eventually, my books returned me to art, and once back in images, I concluded, Yes, I think I could stay in the world of pictures. Let me test this out.
During my last year teaching at Princeton I took two introductory painting classes. Introductory painting came after my regular teaching and kept me in Princeton to 10 PM. After that, I’d get home to Newark in the middle of the night. My generous Princeton colleague Valerie Smith let me stay over at her house and sweetly bought one of my first drawings. At first, I didn’t know to photograph my work, so Valerie’s drawing has disappeared from my files. The office of another Princeton colleague, Edmund White, was next to my painting studio. He bought my very first painting, my attempt to depict a set-up in various surfaces and shades of red and yellow, shiny, matte, opaque and translucent, saturated and toned down. The reflective red hat contrasted with two drapes, one also reflective but mixed with blue, the other with a pattern that fractured in the folds of the cloth. The bright yellow shopping bag in front combined a shiny surface and a broken pattern.
In this first Princeton class I painted gray scales and figures and landscapes and learned light sources and perspective, as in two other early paintings. The gray scale began simply as that, a gray scale, where you alter hue and saturation between black and white. I liked that exercise and added mountains in the distance. It still looks like a gray scale, but with something else going on. The blue painting came from an exercise in creating depth through perspective, shadow, and luminosity. I made both these paintings on manufactured canvases 24 x 18”. I still have a whole pile of these canvases, which I consider beneath me now. My second Princeton painting class taught me how to make my own stretcher bars and to stretch and gesso my canvases, thoroughly enjoyable manual labor.
My Princeton painting classes took me to museums, to Philip Guston’s cadmium red, ivory black, and titanium white cigar-smoking Klansmen and John Currin’s skinny, huge breasted naked white women the color of supermarket peach flesh. I joined the throng of Guston admirers, but never acquired a taste for Currin’s virtuoso painting. I still stumble over his skinny, big-breasted women and wonder why his famously rendered Thanksgiving turkey is raw.
***
Even before art school and with what I look back on as incredible hubris, I toyed with the idea of myself as a professional artist, not a mere Sunday painter. I might want to go to art school, not just to undergraduate art school, but to graduate art school as well. I might want to work professionally. I might want to be as professional a painter as I was a historian. Well, within reason. Why would that pose a problem?
As I poke into the crevices of memory, I touch another motive for leaving history, a motive that wants to stay beneath the surface, pulling back into deeper obscurity like a darkness-dwelling troglobite I’m dragging into the light for you. It is not a nice feeling to acknowledge, but candor demands acknowledgment, for otherwise I just might have remained in the grooves of academe. For there was, as always, much more history yet for me to write. Any sentiment other than gratitude strikes me as most unbecoming in one whose achievements have been honored with a Princeton professorship, honorary doctorates from the Ivy League and beyond, and the presidencies of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. What could be more annoying (a word I learned to employ in art school) than a person of privilege whining about what hasn’t been bestowed? Nonetheless. Nonetheless, let me whine a little. There was some sour sense of limits reached, of disappointment over book prizes not won and books not reviewed. It was as though I had assumed I’d be exempt from the rules of the world, where people who looked like me or who didn’t fit an image of how they were supposed to be were never fully seen or acknowledged. For all my lovely recognition, I seemed not properly to fit in.
I’ve never been a black person easily captured in the idea of a black person—come to think of it, no one is. No person, no black or otherwise person fits a racial mold. The idea of a black person is a stereotype that shifts its shape in order never to fit anyone real. I’ve hardly suffered or overcome hardship, can’t talk ghetto, won’t don a mask of black authenticity or speak for black people as a whole. Too many disparate themes reside in me for coherent recognition: images, phrases, people, and things from the multiple worlds I live in and have lived in over many years of life. The freedom I treasure in art reminds me of walking in Bordeaux in the 1960s and inclining toward the study of history. My mother’s dismay at the appearance of aging triggers scattered associations, from the biography of a French theorist to older women artists. Driving down I-95 from Providence calls up a memory of skidding my beetle across a snow-covered bridge over the Connecticut River when I was a graduate student at Harvard. This jumble is not smooth, but its disorderliness is what makes me me.
When I sniveled to friends that I had never received a book prize of import, they pulled me up short, and not just by recalling my honors. They reminded me of the world we live in and the off-kilter nature of my writing. What on earth did I expect? I had enough, I really did have enough in many meanings of the word. Enough in hand, I left history, in the sense of no longer writing scholarly history books as I used to, with honor and fulfillment. History remains a part of me, naturally, and it remains in me even though my relation to history became uneasy in art school.
***
After my two toe-dipping Princeton painting classes, I took the summer drawing and painting marathon at the New York Studio School on 8th Street in Manhattan. The Studio School started at 9 a.m., ended at 6, with crits stretching past 9 p.m. Okay. For me that meant get up at 6 a.m. walk across the park, take Newark light rail to Newark Penn Station. New Jersey Transit to New York Penn Station, that hell of thank-you-for-your-patience dysfunction. The 2 or 3 subway downtown, get off at 4th Street, walk to 8th Street, and arrive before everyone else.
Then the pay-off. Stand up and draw and paint for eight hours. I loved it.
I L O V E D IT.
The paper, the charcoal, the canvas, the set-ups, the model, the space, the perspective, the shadows, the colors, the smell. Concentrating hard, I did it wrong, and I did it right. I painted a still life in red and blue that taught me that you can’t mix cerulean blue from ultramarine and white oil paints as they come from a tube. A figure painting asked for warm but light browns for skin and an indefinite darker shade for light skin in shadow. This shade has no name, so you mix it out of the leavings on your palette.
Here’s the best lesson of all from the Studio School marathon: Staple a 5’ x 4’ piece of tough watercolor paper to the wall; cover it with a charcoal drawing of the model in the set-up, the very best drawing you can make. Cover the entire paper. This takes hours standing up, drawing in the heat. Sweating. Now rub out your drawing with a chamois. Owwww!! All that work for nothing! Draw it again, only 10” to the right. Okay. Concentrate. Draw. Sweat. Fill up the paper. Rub it out. Erase it again? Yes. Rub it out. Draw the model and set-up 1/3 smaller. Draw draw draw. Rub it out. Again.
Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you’ve spent a long time drawing and sweating over. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.
I loved it. Even though I was the oldest by far, I stood up and painted right up until 6. Some of the kids came late, farted around, took two-hour lunch breaks, and left before dinner without washing their brushes. Crit came after dinner break. To accommodate Newark light rail’s evening schedule, I would leave crit around 9 PM. Start all over the next morning, five days a week. Okay, I could do it! Let’s go!
I applied to Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers with a portfolio of drawings and paintings from Princeton and the Studio School marathon. Rutgers admitted me. What a thrill! What an accomplishment! My knowing Friend Bill hinted later that undergraduate art school isn’t all that hard to get into. Be that as it may, my admission puffed me up as a worthy achievement. I affiliated with Douglass College, the (sort-of formerly) all-women’s college, for its feminist tradition, of course, also for its quiet.
***
In the summer before I started at Mason Gross, Dear Husband Glenn and I attended an art exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. You will only hear of Glenn occasionally, when absolutely necessary because Glenn doesn’t want a role in this story. We were together in Paris, where the Grand Palais had installed a huge show of stirring paintings, abstract and figurative, witty videos ironic and silly, sculpture bright and colorless, and perfectly gorgeous drawings: a feast for the eyes of color and movement and sound. Wait a minute. What in creation was spilling over several folding tables—used ball-point pens, foil, torn newspaper, doodles, bits of paper, the contents of a wastepaper basket held together with cardboard and brown packing tape. A shapeless mass of faded color and haphazard images. Too-muchness splayed out from one section to another without any composition, without coherent color that I could see, as though a drunken Do-It-Yourselfer had turned over his trash barrel in the lofty Grand Palais. Hunh? An art enigma. A mistake, surely. But what did I know? I did not know this was art.
This piece by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn had won the show’s first prize, and Hirschhorn was installation art’s shining international star. I hadn’t yet heard of installation art and didn’t know that in the twenty-first century this was more than any old art; it was good art, excellent art. The best art. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Walker Art Center, Hirschhorn had hit all The Art World’s high notes and strutted off with its prizes.[1] Clearly, this was art, and Hirschhorn was a major artist. Hirshhorn’s work raised the oldest questions in the world of art, questions that followed me for a very long time afterward. What counts as art? Who is an artist? Over the course of several years, I learned the answers. The hard way. In art school.
[1] By “The Art World” I mean the important museums and galleries that bestow visibility and money on selected artists, virtually all white men. Without caps, the world mans everything in and around art, regardless of sex and race and wealth and wide recognition.
Pamela Hansford Johnson, English novelist and critic, chatting to novelist Olivia Manning at a party given by the British PEN Club to celebrate the opening of the club's new headquarters in Chelsea. Original Publication: Picture Post - 4722 - People Who Write Your Books - pub. 1949 Original Publication: People Disc - HM0383 (Photo by Picture Post/Getty Images)
It’s going to take a lot of work to correct history so that it includes all the great women whose lives and work have been overlooked and obliterated by the patriarchy. But strides are being made! The New York Times is retroactively publishing obituaries of notable women and others who aren’t straight white men. And now The Paris Review, which had virtually erased one of its own women editors from its masthead, as A.N. Devers reported last December *, has launched something of a corrective: “Feminize Your Cannon,” a monthly series featuring “underrated and underread” female authors.
It took Manning until late in her career to achieve a level of real acclaim, perhaps because her stories drew on harsher aspects of real life and less likable women characters — aspects that might have been better appreciated if she were publishing now. Manning was so vocally dissatisfied with her career she was known as “Olivia Moaning.” A contemporary of Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis, she was outwardly jealous of their greater success and fame. She’d bristled at the idea that she’d be more successful posthumously, but that’s what came to pass.
Seven years after her death in 1980 at age seventy-two, the BBC aired Fortunes of War, a faithful seven-part adaptation of the Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy. Starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh and featuring multiple international locations, the series had the highest budget in BBC history. Masterpiece Theatre’s broadcast of the show in the U.S. prompted the New York Times to call Manning “the only English woman novelist to have painted a broad, compassionate and witty canvas of men and women at war that invites comparison with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.”
Manning would have been gratified to finally hear it—and then disappointed anew. Today those who have read Manning’s novels (usually only the trilogies, as most of the others are out of print) tend to admire them. But her place in the pantheon of important twentieth-century British novelists, even of rediscovered women authors such as Elizabeth Taylor and Rosamond Lehmann, is marginal and precarious. The scholar and critic Rohan Maitzen, when writing about Manning, found “that her name was wholly unfamiliar to two of my academic colleagues who are specialists in early 20th-century literature.” None of Manning’s work is available on Kindle.
“Not all writers of genius take the public by storm,” she writes in her introduction to a 1968 edition of Northanger Abbey. “Jane Austen in her lifetime was successful without being a sensation.” The self-consolation is touchingly evident.
In the mean time, Devers soldiers on in her efforts to make sure women authors are given their due and more widely read. She’s just successfully crowdfunded a new business, The Second Shelf, which will offer “rare books, modern first editions, manuscripts, & rediscovered works by women,” plus a quarterly publication.
One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s father had died the year before, and Hutchings was hoping to contact him. While they’d had some success with earlier sessions, Curran had grown tired of the game and had to be coaxed to play. This time, a message came over the board. It said: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come — Patience Worth my name.”
This moment was the start of a national phenomenon that would turn Curran into a celebrity. Patience Worth, the ghost who’d contacted them, said she was a Puritan who immigrated to America in the late 1600s. Through Curran, she would dictate an astounding 4 million words between 1913 and 1937, including six novels, two poetry collections, several plays, and volumes of witty repartee.
The work attracted national headlines, serious reviews, and a movie deal. Patience Worth’s poetry was published in the esteemed Braithwaite’s anthologies alongside writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1918, she was named an outstanding author by the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. Her novel, The Sorry Tale, was a bestseller with four printings. The New York Times said her poetry was a “high level of literary quality” with “flashes of genius.” Harper’s Magazine said that the “writings attributed to Patience Worth are exceptional.” The New Republic added: “That she is sensitive, witty, keenly metaphorical in her poetry and finely graphic in her drama, no one can deny.”
Literary Digest summed up the critical interest by writing: “It is difficult not to take Patience Worth seriously.” Read more…
One recent day, when it was raining and I was feeling particularly blue, I decided to visit my local bookstore. Though bookstores were once among my favorite places to spend time, ever since my own book was published eight months ago, trips into bookstores have mutated into sordid affairs. I’ll walk in the door, feign cool, casual, just your average browser, then drift over to the shelves in the way someone might sidle up to the bar with a good-looking mark in sight. I’m not really browsing, not just refilling my drink — I’m searching, quite shamefully, for my own book on the shelves.
When it’s there, with its beaming burnt-orange cover jammed somewhere near Norman Mailer, Stephane Mallarme, Katherine Mansfield, Javier Marías, I feel a blush of glee. But more often than not, it’s not on the shelves at all.
It turns out that just because you wrote a book doesn’t mean the bookstores will sell it. No matter what accolades my book has received, each visit to the bookstore feels a new test of my book’s worth — and my own.
That rainy day, I was sure that finding my book on the shelves would release me from my blueness. On the other hand, in the likely event that my book wasn’t there, I would have permission to sink lower, reclining into the indigo bleak. I stepped inside the store, delivering flecks of rain onto the floor. As I suspected — as I feared — my book was nowhere to be found. Read more…
You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.
You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.
But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)
Honoring Peter Mayer, founder of Overlook Press, one of “the stars of book publishing,” a person who trusted young staffers to take risks and break free of big publishing’s conventions as they learned the ropes, and who yelled a lot.
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