There was a period, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution, when the history of the Russian temperance movement became thoroughly intertwined with the history of Russian social reform in general. “The history of the Russian temperance movement” may sound like a world’s-shortest-book joke, but in fact it is the subject of the very readable book Alcoholic Empire: Vodka & Politics in Late Imperial Russia by Brown University professor Patricia Herlihy. Her thesis is that there’s a very simple reason why so many reformers allied themselves with the temperance movement: The campaign against alcoholism provided a convenient cover for other forms of political agitation, especially for causes that would have attracted the attention of the authorities if espoused on their own terms.

Campaigners for women’s suffrage, for example, could argue that women needed the vote because they were being victimized by their husbands’ excessive drinking and deserved some political power in order to fight back. Socialists could begin their soapbox speeches by saying that workers drank too much because they were oppressed and then have a pretext to spend the rest of the speech on the evils of capitalism, which of course was what they wanted to talk about in the first place. In cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, museums, libraries, and theaters obtained public funding by claiming that the root causes of alcoholism were boredom and illiteracy. In Moscow, employment agencies, soup kitchens, and hospitals for the indigent used the same tactic, claiming the root cause was poverty. Everyone in Russia from Nicholas II on down agreed that alcoholism was a serious national problem. That was why, as Herlihy puts it, “much could be said under cover of battling drunkenness,” including much that could not have been said otherwise.

I mention all this because something roughly analogous now seems to be true of American culture. Addiction recovery programs in general, and AA in particular, have become subjects of enormous interest even to people who have never walked the twelve steps. (In case it matters: I haven’t.) The religious novel is in eclipse, but the recovery memoir has never been more popular. Recovering addicts show up in high-brow shows like Enlightened, middle-brow shows like The West Wing, and low-brow shows like Prison Break, almost always portrayed sympathetically. When the writers of HBO’s Girls needed, for the purposes of their season 1 plot arc, to get across in a single revelation that the character Adam was not a thick-skulled hound dog but a decent guy with a complex inner life, all they had to do was reveal that he was in AA. Buzz Bissinger, in that weird article he wrote for GQ last week where he admits to spending $587,412.97 on clothes in the last two years, didn’t say “I use designer clothes to fill the emotional hole left by the collapse of my family” or “The sins I struggle with most are greed & vanity.” He said that he has a shopping addiction and that he’s going to meetings.

The language of recovery seems especially popular with those segments of the population where religion is weakest. Aaron Sorkin, who usually comes across like someone who thinks the plural of “Christian” is “lynch mob,” has been very open in his TV writing and his public statements about how much he esteems twelve-step programs. The people who call David Foster Wallace the voice of his generation are the same ones who make snide remarks about the Republican Party’s theocratic agenda. The irony is that the aspects of AA that seem to resonate with them are the things they hate about organized religion: the admission of powerlessness, the submission to authority, skepticism about the value of thinking for yourself, the rote repetition of phrases that to an outsider seem vapid, sentimental, or silly.

Sacrifice may be the clearest example of this hypocrisy. These days, if a man says he’s going to give up some activity because he’s worried it’s putting his salvation at risk, people will tell him to follow his bliss and stop being so uptight. (Perhaps you encountered comments like this during Lent.) Take the example of a woman who wonders whether she should go to the gym less frequently, for fear of indulging her tendency to vanity. Any east coast advice columnist would tell her that, if going to the gym every day makes her happy, she should keep doing it, and that she has a right to be proud of her appearance. But if she were to call her gym-going an addiction, the advice columnist’s answer would change. The connection doesn’t even have to be that direct. Once it becomes known that someone is in AA, then all kinds of sacrifices apart from not drinking become admirable rather than foolish or inexplicable. A man who drops his old good-time buddies when he finds God is sanctimonious; a man who drops them when he joins AA is just doing what it takes to stay sober.

In some ways, this widespread fascination with recovery is encouraging. If the young hip kids of today are willing to embrace David Foster Wallace’s famous Betty Crocker cake mix analogy for AA (“It didn’t matter one f—ckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like f—ing baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just followed the m—f—ing directions . . . a cake would result”), then they’re only a small step away from grasping Credo ut intelligam, I believe so that I might understand. If they feel the need to smuggle the language of religion into their moral universes under the cover of the twelve steps, then the absence of religion from their lives must, at some level, be bothering them acutely. It’s annoying that so many people are unable to talk about obedience, mortification, or the quiet heroism of everyday life except in the context of recovery from addiction, but at least these concepts still make sense to them.

The danger is that the gains made by recovery language will be seized by the other faction with an interest in framing everything as an addiction—psychologists and public-health professionals. Calling gluttony an addiction may help some dechurched people deal with their sins in a language that feels comfortable, but it also opens the door to people like Mayor Bloomberg who argue that New York City needs to ban fatty foods because people just can’t help themselves. It opens the door to psychologists who apply the word “addiction” (or “disorder”) to everything that doesn’t fit their prejudices, or who say that it’s irresponsible for someone with a problem to seek help from their priest or their sponsor instead of a professional.

Luckily, twelve-steppers and the medical establishment generally hate each other. The science-minded call the twelve steps irrational and untested, and recovery advocates respond that you can’t test an anonymous program, and that, in any case, there’s plenty of evidence that the program works if you work it. When that battle heats up—as I expect it will in the next decade, with, e.g., calls for rehab centers to be more strictly regulated and licensed—those of us who belong to a church (Sinners Anonymous?) shouldn’t stay neutral. Just as it was in imperial Russia, the battle against alcoholism is about a lot more than drink.

The biggest difference between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and David Foster Wallace is that by the time cardiomyopathy took Coleridge’s life in 1834, at the age of sixty-one, the consensus was that he had died too late. It’s not that no one engaged in rueful speculation about the masterpieces that would go unwritten, it was just that they’d done it years before, when it became clear that addiction and lack of professional discipline had made further serious literary output from Coleridge unlikely. He lost his gift for poetry a full thirty years before his death, and eventually lost his grip on prose too. At the end, the only role he seemed capable of playing was champion table-talker, holding court at the home of his caretakers, the Gillmans, for the benefit of whatever admirers, friends-of-friends, or tourists turned up to hear the great man monologize. Coleridge wanted to be a writer, and he ended up a sage and a celebrity.

That’s essentially the same failure Wallace faced, and it was an ironic failure for the same reason. Both men lived in times when literature was under pressure to set its sights lower—either from people like Wordsworth, who thought poetry should restrict itself to the language of the common man, or from cultural forces like television, which reduced art to entertainment—and both men took a more exalted view, loudly. They believed that literature can be genuinely transformative, that creating good art demands a high level of technical craftsmanship, and that these two things have something to do with each other. They were lonely voices speaking in defense of high standards. It was distressing to them that the public seemed more interested in the voice than the standards.

Of course, setting impossibly high standards and then giving up when you can’t meet them is something most addicts do (hence the corrective mantra “one day at a time”), and addiction is obviously the main point of similarity between DFW and STC. Coleridge began using laudanum—a mixture of opium and alcohol—in his teens and twenties, and after decades of binges and relapses he settled into a regular dosage sufficient to maintain his equilibrium, and the doctor with whom he lived kept him from exceeding it. It was almost like Wallace with his Nardil—and, in fact, after he hit middle age and moved in with the Gillmans, Coleridge only ever had really bad patches when he tried to get off the drug completely.

They were two great writers who were also famous addicts, and from that basic similarity flow many others:

There’s the physical resemblance, which is partly accidental and partly a result of alcoholism, the fleshy face especially.

There’s the long and embarrassing obsession with an unavailable woman (Sara Hutchinson/Mary Karr) whose fondness for the mad genius never quite turned to love, possibly because she realized the obsession wasn’t actually about her.

There’s the humiliating experience of hitting bottom, which happened to Wallace in Boston at 27 and to Coleridge in Scotland at 30. The whole Scotland trip was a nightmare—so much so that Coleridge was forced to abandon his traveling companions William and Dorothy Wordsworth because “I was so ill that I felt myself a burden on them”—but here is one representative night: After leaving the Wordsworths, Coleridge proceeded on his own, on foot, to a place called Fort William, where he collapsed at a public house in “an hysterical Fit with loud and long weeping . . . to the unutterable consternation and bebustlement of the Landlord, his Wife, children, & Servants.” At which point, in the words of his biographer, Coleridge was “overcome by diarrhoea,” possibly at a toilet and possibly not, he doesn’t say.

There’s the fascination with bureaucracy, a side-effect of the old addict’s (and, for that matter, writer’s) habit of fantasizing about what life as a normal person would’ve been like. Wallace described it as a feeling of “I’ve made a terrible mistake with my life, I need to be selling insurance in Oshkosh,” and it was a big part of his decision to make the IRS the subject of The Pale King. Coleridge actually got to be a government bureaucrat for a year: Soon after arriving in Malta in 1804—where he had gone for much the same reason Nicolas Cage’s character went to Las Vegas in 1995, namely to find an out of the way place to die—he was scooped up by the governor to be his secretary and second-in-command, in which position Coleridge proved surprisingly competent.

These sorts of biographical parallels are interesting, but not as interesting as the psychological ones. Any two addicts will see similarities in their life stories—that’s one of the reasons AA works. But with two writers, it’s less fruitful to look at the results of their addictions than at the mental quirks that produced the addiction. Part of this fruitfulness is just that a writer’s internal states are more well-documented, but equally important is the fact that, in each of these two cases, the writing and the addiction had their roots in the same internal sources, and in many ways proceeded along the same lines. (more…)

I lost my taste for rhapsodies to the power of reading—rhapsodies like Teju Cole’s—around the same time I became a halfway competent reader. It was two months into what would become a twelve-month period of unemployment, and I had come to realize that the reading style that got me through college and young adulthood was not suitable for reading several hours at a stretch—and it was desperately important that I be able to read for hours at a stretch, both because I wanted to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to read mountains of books and because I needed something to fill the long, dragging, structureless days. (Television made the time pass, but oh, the self-loathing after!) It took several rather humiliating weeks, and I am not sure I would have seen it through if circumstances hadn’t forced me to, but I gained conscious control over my distractibility, relieved my mental tonus, and became a decent reader.

The better I became at reading, the less I felt like talking about how much reading meant to me, which may be a natural side effect of coming to love something that previously you only wanted to love. I used to do quite a lot of that sort of book bragging, I’m sad to say, and I don’t suppose the victims of my tediousness will be much consoled to know that I believe those years of pretension were a necessary prelude to what followed. It was also around that time that I stopped thinking that whether a person read books was the most important thing about them, or the best indication of whether we would have anything in common or whether I would like them—all of which are things I believed back when reading was more of a tribal affiliation than a passion.

The thesis of Teju Cole’s New Yorker piece is that President Obama has undergone some kind of transformation from “an elegant and literary man” who relaxed with the poetry of Derek Walcott to someone who can order drone strikes. (The title of the piece is “A Reader’s War.”) The assumption here is that Obama was much of a reader in the first place, when really it’s more likely that he’s simply fluent in the language of intellectualism. It’s easy enough to mimic if you spend enough time with the right crowd. The president certainly seems like the sort of person who likes to read, but that’s not the same thing as being a reader. He has made excellent tactical use of the power that dropping semi-obscure book titles can exert—I saw many jaded, pox-on-both-your-parties libertarians swoon when, early in the 2008 campaign, Obama mentioned Hayek in a Time interview—but all that means is that he’s a smart politician.

The evidence Cole puts forward as proof that Obama is, or was, “a reader in chief” is rather flimsy. He says “a man who names among his favorite books Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon,’ Robinson’s ‘Gilead,’ and Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ is playing the game pretty seriously.” Cole really ought to have learned by now that 20 percent of people who list those three titles among their favorite books are (as he puts it) people “for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life,” and the other 80 percent are faking it.

Frankly this makes me wonder about Teju Cole, since an awareness of this 80 percent is one of the marks of literary maturity. He’s a novelist. Hasn’t he been approached by enough “fellow novelists” to know that nine out of ten are not the kindred spirits they claim to be? Hasn’t he personally wrestled with the temptation to just relax into his reputation as a literary person while letting the actual labor of literariness slide? Doesn’t he realize how many literary-minded people have taken that much, much easier route and never regretted it, or never realized it?

Whenever I read an article about the reading life at a site like the Millions or the Rumpus, I try to assume that what the author has written is the honest truth, though sometimes I end up doubting it. If they say that reading has helped them become better critical thinkers, I say: Okay, then I hope your political views aren’t a carbon copy of every other artsy Brooklynite’s. If they say writing has enhanced their empathy, I want to ask whether they can imagine themselves inside the head of someone who supports traditional marriage, or someone for whom “reading” means James Patterson and management books, or someone who doesn’t read. (Or someone with V.S. Naipaul’s politics, Teju.) You say reading has improved your own prose. Then how come your essay is so clumsily written?

Actually, I retract that last one, not only because it’s snarky but because I’m not sure it’s correct. Many people are at their most inarticulate precisely on the subject closest to their heart. When I was writing my senior thesis on Oscar Wilde, I asked my adviser whether I had to address “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” which I thought was not very Wildean and moreover not very good. He told me I could write about it or not, but that in general I should always pay close attention to little freak essays where an author departs from his usual subject matter and his usual standard of quality, because often it’s a sign that the author is being more honest and more vulnerable than usual.

Wilde really did think of himself as a socialist humanitarian—it was the secret of his private self-image—but when he tried to write about it, he couldn’t get enough distance to be clever about it. He couldn’t even come up with good arguments, maybe because he couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to believe in it. Even a genius like Wilde had to write where his ideas were, not where his heart was. (My adviser had other examples of this anomalous-essay-as-secret-decoder-ring phenomenon. I wish I could remember them.) Maybe overly ingenious testimonies to the importance of reading deserve as much skepticism as overly insistent ones.

The consensus rebuttal to the Teju Cole piece has been that he was wrong to assume that reading makes people more morally sensitive; the Nazis read Goethe, etc. I’m not sure what I think about that. The relationship between reading and conscience is complicated but they have something to do with each other, is my instinct. In any case, the population under examination here is not real lovers of books but vague fans of reading. Being well-read enough to bluff your way into a reputation for bookishness has many benefits—you have something to talk about with your friends, you feel a sense of belonging, often you meet attractive members of the opposite sex—but moral seriousness is not one of them.

Everyone forgets that Nathan Leopold died a free man. The first part of his story is familiar enough: He and Richard Loeb were two intellectually precocious teenagers from Chicago’s wealthy German Jewish elite, and they read too much Nietzsche and started thinking they were supermen. Loeb, the sociopath of the pair, fixed his heart on committing the perfect murder, so together they kidnapped and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. They were caught, tried, and would have been hanged if their defense attorney had not been the great Clarence Darrow, whose closing statement was such a triumph of courtroom rhetoric that the Cook County judge sentenced them to life in prison instead.

That, for most people, is when the curtain comes down. But the story of Leopold & Loeb didn’t end in a Chicago courtroom in 1924. It didn’t even end at the gates of Stateville Penitentiary in 1958, when Nathan Leopold was released on parole after serving thirty-three years, six months, and two days. (Loeb was slashed to death by a fellow inmate in 1936.) It ends in Puerto Rico in 1971, when Leopold died of a heart attack after thirteen years of freedom, most of which he spent doing hospital work in a little town called Castañer with the Church of the Brethren, a Mennonite-like Protestant sect. He also married a widowed florist named Trudi Feldman, to whom he’d been introduced at a friend’s Passover Seder.

In all its externals, Leopold’s life followed the arc of a basic redemption story. He felt remorse for what he had done, unlike Loeb, who only regretted that he had been caught. He devoted his time in prison to service. He reorganized the prison library, he participated in an experimental test of a new malaria drug as both a lab tech and a lab rat (the latter at some risk to himself), and when a young Italian man arrived at Stateville newly blind after a mishap during his last hold-up, Leopold learned Braille so he could teach the man to read. He expanded the course offerings at the Stateville prison school by writing stacks of new lesson plans and grading the papers himself.

He also began to pray. Leopold was Jewish, but he formed a friendship with the Catholic chaplain, Fr. Eligius Weir, a Franciscan. Weir was humble, personable, and also very brave—he once marched unarmed into the middle of a prison riot, against the advice of the frantic guards. He and Leopold had many long talks about repentance, and his Christian charity was a nicely symmetrical counterpoint to the other great influence on Leopold’s moral development, Clarence Darrow, a famous agnostic. Leopold credits Weir with teaching him to pray:

I think it might have been easier if I could have got it off my chest, could have shared it with someone, could have told someone how I felt. But there was no one on earth to whom I could tell it; there was only God. Father Weir had persuaded me to pray regularly, and since I started doing so some twenty or twenty-five years ago, the day has not passed that I have not prayed to God for the repose of Bobby Franks’s soul, for the assuaging of the grief of his parents, when they were alive, and for forgiveness for myself.

That quotation comes from Life Plus 99 Years, the prison memoir Leopold published shortly before the parole board approved his release. They had turned him down before, and his memoir was written partly to demonstrate his rehabilitation to the board and to drum up popular support for his cause. That may be one reason the book is not well regarded—who can trust what a man says when his freedom depends on saying the right things? Leopold intended to write a second, less propagandistic memoir, suggestively titled Reach for a Halo, but it was never completed.

Without Reach for a Halo, all we have to go on in evaluating Leopold’s post-rehabilitation mindset is his book, the testimony of his friends, a few news articles about his Puerto Rico days, and scraps of personal correspondence. They paint a mixed picture. Leopold admitted to friends that his service projects in prison were undertaken largely to stave off boredom. Even people who were fond of Leopold described him in his later years as prickly, arrogant, and irrationally hostile to authority. Visitors to his home were shocked to see that he kept a framed photograph of Richard Loeb in his bedroom. When a reporter asked his wife what she thought of the picture, and the adjacent one of Leopold’s high school girlfriend, she shrugged and said, “Nate wants it. They were part of his life. And let’s face it—Nate after all is complex.”

He never gave up the bad habit of being intellectually provocative for provocation’s sake, or taking unseemly delight in being shocking. That had been his greatest contribution to the folie à deux that got him into trouble in the first place. Leonard Lyons records this anecdote from 1963:

One night we dined with the Leopolds and one of the guests was a San Juan specialist in physical medicine. The doctor inquired about Leopold’s work as an X-ray laboratory technician, and they talked in professional terms. Then somehow the conversation veered to the news story about Sherri Finkbine, the mother who had flown to Scandinavia for an abortion because she feared that the thalidomide she had taken would produce a crippled child.

Leopold said she was absolutely right and argued for the futility of condemning an unborn infant to life as a cripple. The doctor was unconvinced.

“Don’t you believe in euthanasia?” Leopold asked.

“No, I believe in life,” the doctor said.

“But in this age of the bomb?” Leopold asked. “I wouldn’t want to survive.”

The doctor pointed to Leopold’s cigarette: “Then why do you smoke?”

Leopold leaned back in his chair. “Suppose I could live X number of years smoking,” he said, “and exist X number of years plus eight by not smoking. I prefer just X number of years.”

The doctor discussed the rate of increase in life-span. Once, he said, the life-span of man had been 33 years. Leopold’s comment was: “Christ died at thirty-three.”

But none of that proves his gestures of penance were all hollow. He had three job offers lined up when he applied for parole—translating memos for a friend’s import/export business, working as an X-ray technician on the West Coast, and the Puerto Rico job—and he chose the only one that would involve being surrounded by people of faith. Perhaps he had discovered in prison that he enjoyed the company of believers. He wrote to his lawyer of his admiration for the Church of the Brethren:

The pastor who preceded the present incumbent was a Puerto Rican, who spoke no word of English. And yet the young volunteers serving at the Brethren Service project attended every service . . . although they could not understand a word of what was said. Once I asked a young volunteer just why he sat through so many hours of a service he could not understand. Somewhat surprised by my question, the young man replied that he was bearing his witness. A wonderful concept, and one I have meditated upon a great deal in the years that I have passed since I asked the question.

The question of whether Leopold ever achieved redemption is ultimately God’s business and not ours, but if he did find God, then maybe Bobby Franks’s murder really does deserve to be called “the crime of the century.” We know that Leopold was seduced by Nietzsche and then saved from death by Clarence Darrow’s closing statement, and it’s possible that he found faith, in his own way, by the end. Damned by romantic nihilism, rescued by liberal humanitarianism, redeemed by belief—it certainly would have gratified Leopold’s outsize ego to learn that he could plausibly claim to have lived the 20th century in miniature.

Australia is an English-speaking country, technically, but as an American immigrant here I sometimes have trouble understanding the locals. (What’s a “galah”? Can you eat it for brekkie?) They, on the other hand, have almost no trouble understanding me, with all the American movies and TV that they watch. Just about any slang term I care to use, they’ve heard before.

But very occasionally I will be asked to translate an inadvertent Americanism, and this particular one stumped me. In a conversation about politics a friend asked me whether New England is as liberal as everyone says. He seemed to be picturing a population composed entirely of Harvard professors and Boston Unitarians. I told him about the Irish—he said he knew of them—and then I mentioned the “flinty New Englander” bloc.

“What does ‘flinty’ mean?”

“Oh. Flinty New Englanders are people who live in rural areas, sometimes on farms, spread out for optimal isolation. They’re taciturn, skeptical, and independent, they don’t have a problem with guns, and they don’t like outsiders. They also wear flannel, or they used to.”

“So like New England rednecks?”

“Not exactly. They’re seen as smart and wily, not stupid. They read books. Also, they’re haughty. Rednecks are just proud, which isn’t the same.”

“Is it a Puritan thing?”

“Sort of. They’re definitely austere. But a flinty New Englander would fool you—or make a fool out of you—if he saw an opportunity. Then he would tell his friends about it. Slowly. Without laughing once. A Puritan wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t think I get it.”

I ended up groping vainly for vivid hypotheticals. “He’s a guy who, if you offered him a cigarette, would shake his head, and then pull out one of his own of the same brand. And then not accept a light, either!” None of these seemed quite right, and I left feeling discouraged and just a bit homesick, despite being a Southerner myself.

I realize now, of course, that the answer was staring me in the face the whole time. To make my Aussie friend understand the definition of “flinty,” I could have just said, “You know the stereotype people have of Australians? Tan, outgoing, chatty, warm, fun, friendly? The opposite of that.”

I don’t know much about the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, except that I read somewhere that he gave his wife Nadezhda a pacifier and persuaded her to wear it around her neck on a string of pearls so that he could stick the pacifier in her mouth whenever she interrupted him, which apparently she did rather often. That factoid isn’t much in itself, but it was intriguing enough to inspire me to read Professor Alexis Klimoff’s article on Mandelstam in translation in the February issue of First Things (not online; you’ll have to subscribe). If any of you skipped that article because you hadn’t heard of Mandelstam, I urge you to reconsider.

The article “Sex in the Meritocracy,” which I wrote for the February issue of First Things, is now online:

When Yale first bowed to the spirit of meritocracy and began admitting large numbers of students from outside the New England upper class, it set in motion a nationwide arms race among high-achieving high school students. After fifty years of escalating competition, it is no longer enough to have an SAT score in the top 1 percent and a record of achievement in a single activity. To have a decent chance of being admitted to Yale, a student must be a top all-rounder: an academic star, a varsity athlete, a musical virtuoso, a community-service volunteer, and president of some extracurricular club. To have a better-than-even chance, he must be world-class or nationally ranked in one of these.

As a result, every admitted student believes he must be excellent at anything he tries. In the old Yale, campus culture developed from the upper-class traits that most students shared and the rest hoped to adopt. In the new, more diverse Yale, the only thing students share is ambition, and it determines attitudes toward grades (anything below an A-minus can be disputed with the professor), extracurriculars (hardly anyone spends four years in a club without achieving a leadership position), and even drugs. Instead of marijuana or cocaine, Yale’s pharmaceutical network now traffics mostly in Adderall, the wonder drug that, as one girl told me, “makes you want to work.” Surely this is the first generation of college students in which even the drug users are more interested in working hard than getting high.

The overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism.

It would be more accurate to say that Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress. Every amateur sonneteer secretly believes his verse to be as good as the United States poet laureate’s, and every undergraduate programmer suspects his code rivals the best in Silicon Valley. It’s not very different for Yale students to say that, if pornography is the gold standard of sexual prowess, then that is the standard to which they must aspire.

More, including some concrete suggestions on how the situation might be improved.

Student production of As You Like It, Kenya 1955

Harold Bloom happened to be at Cornell during one of the most famous student protests of the “canon wars,” one in which black students went en masse into the various campus libraries, pulled armfuls of books from the stacks, and threw them down on the circulation desks saying “These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.” Bloom spotted the collected poems of Keats in one young woman’s pile and asked her, “Are you quite sure that the poetry of John Keats is irrelevant to you? Have you read any of the poems of Keats?” She glared back and repeated, “These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.”

Not an appealing argument, but we should not let repulsion send us to the opposite extreme, which says that no one may ever plead indifference to a great book on cultural grounds. Some authors just don’t travel well. Usually it’s because their preoccupations are specific rather than universal—what it means to be an Englishman, what it means to be an empire, what it means to be a frontiersman or a pioneer. Put it this way: To Kill a Mockingbird may be set in the South, but it is about what it means to be a human being; Faulkner could have sent the Compsons to Outer Mongolia and the book would still have been about what it means to be Southern.

Which is fine—people with reasonably inquisitive minds are usually interested in learning about cultures other than their own, and people whose minds are not reasonably inquisitive should not enroll at Cornell. But I must admit that if Harold Bloom’s petulant young friend had disdained to read, say, Sir Henry Newbolt, I would not have been offended.

The trouble is figuring out which books will appeal across cultural boundaries. Philip Roth, Edith Wharton, and Louis Auchincloss could all be called regional authors, but I wouldn’t want to assume that their appeal is only regional. (Though Philip Roth obviously isn’t a hit in Sweden—yet.) It is difficult to predict whether a book will pall when it leaves its home borders. The only real way to know is to try it.

The novelist James Ngugi (who now goes by his Kikuyu name Ngugi wa Thiong’o) was educated in colonial Kenya, first at a mission school, then a village school, then a British-style boarding school for black students. His memoir of his schooldays, released two months ago, tells of his attempt to read every book in his boarding school library—not a strange ambition for a boy who would grow up to be a Nobel contender. Almost all of the books were written by white European authors. This alienated him in some cases, but by no means all:

Good: Three Men in a Boat; Wuthering Heights (“the winds of the Yorkshire moors reminded me of the frosty winds in Limuru in July”); Tolstoy’s childhood memoirs; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“recalls the magic of African oral tradition”); As You Like It (“I could not help comparing the pairs of exiles in Arden to my brother, Good Wallace,” who had run off to join the Mau Mau); Treasure Island; Sherlock Holmes; Robin Hood; the Grimms; Aesop; Hans Cristian Andersen.

Bad: King Solomon’s Mines (“could not stand without a savage Africa as the background”); With Clive in India; Biggles in Africa (though the other Biggles books were fine); any poem about flowers and seasons (“in Kenya there was sunshine and green life all year round, and flowers were never a thing of surprise”).

The breadth of his taste is probably disappointing to those who wish he had torn up his library card and proclaimed “These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.” It must also disappoint those who assume that the appeal of great books is always universal. I figured the nature poems of the Romantics would speak to anyone who had ever been outside, so his line about flowers being ho-hum to a Kenyan threw me a bit. But that’s the point—it’s very hard for an outsider to predict what will fall flat and what will resonate. (Three Men in a Boat?)

Later in life, Ngugi discovered socialism, embraced Marx and Fanon, and even spent time in the Soviet Union, and his politics forced him to give up some authors that had once been dear to him. He adored Conrad as a student—he wrote his university thesis on Lord Jim and Nostromo and revered Conrad as an example of what non-native speakers of English could do with the language—but he later disavowed him for being too cynical about revolutionary activity. That may well have been the honorable thing to do, if the cause was dear enough to him, but it must have been a sacrifice.

But the opinions in his memoir are those of a teenage boy, which makes them immature but also very honest. He was not thinking of politics, just whether or not a book spoke to him. There are two lessons to be drawn from this: that, contra the canon warriors, sometimes smart people should be taken at their word when they say that a great work of literature just doesn’t speak to their cultural experience; and that this often has very little to do with whether or not the author looks like them.

Aspiring writers are generally regarded as one of nature’s lower life forms, especially by established writers, most of whom seem to wonder whether the taxonomist who placed aspiring writers in phylum Chordata wasn’t perhaps claiming too much for them. From where they’re sitting, that’s an understandable view. Most aspiring writers are essentially symbiotic creatures whose interactions with the megafauna are of net benefit to the ecosystem, but there are some cases where the relationship looks more like parasite and host.

Still, I would not wish the following interaction on the lowest nematode worm. The boy in this story was granted an audience with Dostoevsky through the intervention of his father, a friend of Dostoevsky’s who wanted an expert opinion on whether his son had any literary talent. The boy, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, recalled the scene in his memoirs:

I remember the diminutive apartment in Kuznechny Alley with its low ceiling and cramped living room, piled with copies of The Brothers Karamazov, and the study, almost as narrow, in which Feodor Mikhailovich sat over galleys. Blushing, turning pale, stuttering, I read my childish, paltry verses. He listened silently, with impatient annoyance. We must have been disturbing him. “Weak, bad, worth nothing,” he said at last. “In order to write well, one must suffer, suffer!”

“No,” said my father, “let him not write any better, only let him not suffer.” I recall the pellucid and penetrating look of the pale blue eyes when Dostoevsky shook my hand. I never saw him again, and then very shortly learned that he had died.

Anton Chekhov was also approached by many aspiring writers, but unlike Dostoevsky, he always did his best to encourage them. If a manuscript showed the slightest bit of talent, he would write back with specific advice. This anecdote, from Memories of Chekhov, tells of one time his capacity for encouragement failed him, though his politeness did not. The narrator is a theatre director who put on some of Chekhov’s plays:

We had a stage worker N. who pretended that he was a leading actor of the Moscow Art Theatre. He also pretended that he was a great novelist. One day he asked me to give his manuscript to Chekhov for his opinion. I could not reject him, and so passed on the manuscript to Chekhov. A few days later, Chekhov returned the manuscript to me and said, “That novel by N.! Please, tell him that he should never write anything ever again.” Chekhov thought for a little while, and then asked me, “Please tell me, is this N. a woman, by any chance?”

“Why are you asking me this, Anton Pavlovich?”

“Women are hard working, and they can achieve anything with lots of work.”

“No, he is not a woman,” I replied.

“Then please tell him never ever to write anything else in the future.” Anton Pavlovich was right. When I read that lengthy manuscript by N., I was ashamed that I had passed it to Anton Pavlovich to read—it was complete nonsense.

Merezhkovsky later become a celebrated critic, and the delusional stagehand N. was never heard from again. But this should not be taken as proof of the superiority of Dostoevsky’s method over Chekhov’s.

“‘An epileptic chicken,’ is how the accused described Smerdyakov.”

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differentiated siblings who, after years out of contact with each other, convene at the family home for a slowly escalating mess made inevitable by their respective and collective dysfunctions, in which case that family is unhappy in the same way as the Karamazovs.

If the same family is subjected to a criminal prosecution after being set up by a conniving quasi-sibling, if the brothers keep trying to mooch money off the family, and if the eldest brother is brash, the middle one smart, and the youngest one saintly, then we have to consider the possibility that this family actually is the Karamazovs, even if they call themselves the Bluths and they appear in an early 2000s Fox sitcom and not a nineteenth-century Russian novel. In which case Mitch Hurwitz (who has a degree in theology from Georgetown) is Dostoevsky. That’s probably the most farfetched parallel in this comparison. The rest are uncanny.

Once you realize that Annyong is Smerdyakov, everything else falls into place. [If I need to declare a spoiler alert for a show that has been off the air for six years and a novel published in the 19th century, then for courtesy’s sake, here it is.] He exists at the fringes of a family full of awful people, sort of a member and sort of not. No one suspects him of being the one-man conspiracy behind the set-up that brings the family down, partly because no one is quite sure it was a set-up at all, since the criminal charge against the family is just the sort of thing they would have done, whether they actually committed this particular crime or not. Everyone thinks he’s a simpleton, which also deflects suspicion. And remember that “Smerdyakov” is not a surname so much as a nickname meaning “Smelly,” so in both cases our villain’s name is a bad joke.

“I didn’t kill him, alright? And don’t edit this for your broadcast so it looks like I’m screaming, ‘I killed Earl Milford!’”

Kitty is Katya, the woman who nurtures a grudge against the family despite (or because of) her romantic interest in two of its members, and who has in her possession evidence that would clinch the prosecution’s case if she chose to reveal it, which she may or may not do.

Lucille Austero is Lise, a woman with a medical problem that limits her mobility and who starts off making eyes at the youngest son, then successfully romances him, then reverses herself and decides she wants to do whatever she can to hurt the family.

Tobias is Rakitin, the man who manages to stay involved in everyone’s affairs despite the fact that no one likes or respects him, whose plan to enter a more romantic profession (acting/journalism) is universally regarded as both unrealistic and annoying, and whose eager embrace of fashionable ideas (self-esteem and herbal medicine/socialism and materialism) makes him look even more foolish than he otherwise would.

Uncle Oscar is Father Zosima, an unworldly man of great gentleness and inner peace who is more of a father to the youngest son than the family patriarch is. Phoenix is Moscow, where Michael/Ivan keeps trying to escape to. And Fyodor Pavlovich’s taverns are his Cornballer. Some of these parallels are less critically fruitful than others. (more…)