Stig Dagerman was a literary phenomenon who took his own life when he was 31. A hundred years after his birth, a writer goes in search of his typewriter to make sense of his life and enduring legacy

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I first came across Stig Dagerman and his books sometime in the first months of 2011, in the foreign language section at Dussmann’s bookstore, on the Friedriechstrasse, shortly after moving to Berlin. The city lent itself to long conversations about history and politics, and I read voraciously on subjects I had seldom thought about while trying to understand the country I was living in. I visited Dussmann often and my purchases were aspirational and chaotic. The title German Autumn, with the black and white photo of a bombed-out building on the cover, promised to fill a sliver of my quickly expanding ignorance. I assumed the author was German: Dagerman. He was Swedish, and his reportage through the rubble of 1946 Germany was written with uncompromising clarity and sensitivity that stuck with me.

While still in Berlin I read his novel A Burnt Child, and though I don’t remember why, I finished the last pages while pacing frantically outside the door of our apartment on the Köpenickerstrasse in the middle of the night. I remember that my postscript to that book was a plunge into the internet to learn more about this man, his life, and how he’d come to write like this. I got the usual synopsis, vague or prudent, on his precocity and tragedy, which I would come to know by heart. I stumbled on the name of a daughter and found her on Facebook. There was no mistake possible: one of her most recent posts featured a photo –in black and white, like all photos of him ever taken– with a message on mental health, the consequences of depression, and the help her father never received. Eventually, I wrote to her; she never answered. It was a message of gratitude, the type of zealous letter you write when still full of the voice that accompanied you while reading, still in a daze from the book you’d swear you’re the first to ever discover quite like that.

Over the next years, I’d look for him while perusing books, and even got lucky a couple of times, in the south of France and, of all places, Tucson, Arizona. Over time, I accumulated his works and testimonies the world over that spoke of this literary comet, of greatness interrupted. The enduring power of his story was such that in his 2008 Nobel Prize acceptance speech French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio spoke at length about Dagerman’s role in his own life: “Stig Dagerman’s little sentence is still echoing in my memory, and for this reason I want to read it and re-read it, to fill myself with it. There is a note of despair in his words, and something triumphant at the same time, because it is in bitterness that we can find the grain of truth that each of us seeks. ”

Ultimately I placed him on the vague shelf of themes to delve into and maybe write about one day.

In May 2019 I had been in Washington DC for three months, and the city felt more lonely than any I’d lived in, so I signed up for countless newsletters of embassies and cultural centers that animate the capital, to somehow fill my time. That’s how I read about an event at the Alliance Française called Digging Deep Into the Shadows: film screening & book talk, on Friday, May 10^th, featuring a movie based on the play “Marty’s Shadow,” by Stig Dagerman. It would be followed by a Q&A with Lo Dagerman and Nancy Pick, co-authors of The Writer and the Refugee, the book on the story that had inspired the play. I went, stayed throughout, didn’t ask any questions but walked up to Lo Dagerman at the end. I remembered her father’s work vividly enough to have her share her email address and take a signed copy of her book home.

I didn’t read The Writer and the Refugee until late September 2021, when the madness of the pandemic and the presidential election were receding; things felt possible again and so did writing for pleasure. I finished the book on the 21^st, and wrote to Lo Dagerman a week later:

I have recently read your book, and it reminded me why Stig resonated so much when I first read him a decade ago. I’m grateful for the light it shone on the person he was and where his work arose from.

I’m writing to you because I know you do much to promote Stig’s work, and as a journalist, I’d like to explore writing about him. I would love to talk if you ever have time. There are facets of the search for a parent, through his work, that touched me quite personally. 

From Lo’s book, it was the recounting of her search for her father that compelled me, more so than the story behind the play he wrote in the 1940s. An image in particular from the book’s beginning needled me:

“It doesn’t start with the typewriter, of course, but one day it appears. On my desk. Black and exotic in my little girl’s pastel-painted bedroom. It has Continental written on the front in faded gold lettering, and a hardtop hood that allows it to travel. My mother has put it there. I know that. I also know that it belonged to my father. Stig.

Who died, and whom I cannot remember at all.”

We met on October 20 in Georgetown, and though I intended to write about something entirely different, in reviewing the transcript I realize I returned to that typewriter at various points, asking her about that scene when she was a child, why her mother placed it there, in her room, and what became of the heirloom.

As with many stories that we’re drawn to, but can’t fully pin down, latching on stubbornly to an instinctive thread helps to stave off immobility. So I researched the typewriter, found out it had been purchased in 1946, and had cost 382 Swedish Kronen, along with various mentions of it in essays and remembrances on Stig Dagerman.

The sound of the typewriter, its staccato, its tonality, like heavy rain on a tin roof, that distinctive cackling like no other, was something that kept recurring whenever I read or mentioned the object in conversation. It was an unmistakable sound for generations, inseparable from an era not far gone, and now a figment of the past. It’s a sound I realized I had grown up listening to as a child.

In February I wrote to the Kungliga biblioteket, the National Library of Sweden, to find out about the typewriter’s final resting place. I’d already located its whereabouts in the library’s storage: reference code: SE S-HS Acc2019 / 42. Its terms of access: Produced for special purposes only. In storage, the reference collection stated, it occupies precisely 1.6 feet on the shelf. I got an answer in early March:

Thank you for your question. The typewriter was donated to the National Library of Sweden in 2019 by Stig Dagermansällskapet (Stig Dagerman Society). It is a part of the manuscript collection and only leaves the stacks on special occasions. Prior to that, the typewriter was in the care of the Stig Dagerman Society. Unfortunately, the Stig Dagerman Society was disbanded in 2019. At that point, Bengt Söderhäll was its chairman. If you want to find out more about how it was used by the Society I suggest that you try to get in contact with Söderhäll.

That week, I kept on pulling the thread, trying to find out about the object itself. Yes, a typewriter, but what type? I found there was a whole museum on the subject in Germany, in the city of Bayreuth, and contacted its director in my faltering German. He passed on my request and the images I’d shared of it, to an in-house expert. He answered on March 9.

Thank you very much for your message.

From the pictures, I would identify the typewriter as the “Continental 350” series produced for export.

This type is known as a “cheap” model without a moveable paper stop and without sheet support.

These typewriters had been produced from 1937 to ca. 1948. The price was around 185.00 German Reichsmark.

Even if this typewriter did not have special advantages it can be considered as a technical upper-class product.

The producer was the company Wanderer Werke (formerly company name Winklhofer & Jaenicke) located in the city of Chemnitz, Saxonia.

Kind regards

Günter Pschibl

Deutsches Schreibmaschinenmuseum Bayreuth

At the same time, following the National Library’s suggestion, I asked Lo Dagerman if she knew Bengt Söderhäll. She did, and they were friends. His answer took one month, and by then he was in Naples and occupied with the planning of the Stig Dagerman Prize, which I was to learn was given yearly since 1996 “to a person who, or an organization that, in the spirit of Stig Dagerman, supports the significance and availability of the ‘free word’ (freedom of speech), promotes empathy and inter-cultural understanding.” The first awardee was posthumous: a 14-year-old killed by racists.

A back and forth ensued until he gave me the date and time: April 27^th, 10 am Swedish time, or four in the morning on the East Coast. When asking for final confirmation the day prior, he wrote:

I will be awake after a müsli breakfast. I hope you can stay awake.

Looking forward to our talk,

Best,

Bengt

We spoke until dawn in the District of Columbia, and morning in Bengt’s home in Älvkarleby, a municipality a couple of hours north of Stockholm. I’d heard the name before and asked: it was only two miles “at bird’s flight” across the river Dalälven from the farm where Dagerman was born.

Bengt Söderhäll, I came to learn, had had the typewriter in his possession for a quarter of a century, and his reminiscences of it were like those of a fond friend. Together they had traveled across Sweden and touched many people over time.

Through the narrow gravitational pull of that single artifact, scenes started to coalesce: the visit from Dagerman’s widow, its role in a movie, and as the centerpiece of the museum on an island. How it had brought three generations together once. The pursuit of that old contraption, strange as it may have seemed, had led me to images I would never have found otherwise.

A device that symbolized all that persisted from that abridged life.

I. Journalists Are Always Late

News of Stig Dagerman’s suicide spread on the afternoon of November 4, 1954. From his suburban home in Enebyberg word came of the tragic end, at barely 31, of Sweden’s leading postwar literary light. A shock proportional to his reputation: “Everyone was talking about Dagerman; he was the genius of the decade,” remembers writer Per Olov Enquist in an essay. Or as Lo Dagerman writes:

“My father, the literary genius.

A sensation at age 22 with his first novel, ‘The Snake.’

A famous journalist at 23, whose book on postwar Germany, ‘German Autumn,’ becomes a classic.

Popularized through his occasional poems commenting on contemporary affairs.

The author of  ‘To Kill a Child,’ one of the most-read short stories ever written in Swedish.

The originator of a powerful body of work, feverishly produced over a scant few years, ranging from fiction, journalism, essays and drama to satirical verse and poetry.

A leader among his generation of Swedish writers.

And then: Dies young at age 31. Tragically.

‘The Nordic Rimbaud,’ as the French later would refer to him.

My father—the mythical author.”

Hence his death, that November night, was assured the front-page for the following day—with one notable exception.

“As the facts circulated throughout the city’s press, the irony of fate was that Arbetaren was the only one to ignore it: everyone thought that Stig’s old newspaper already knew what had happened. This explains why, while all the other Stockholm dailies were announcing his death, on Friday morning, the issue I’d been editing during the night featured, in its usual place, his daily bulletin,” wrote journalist Mauritz Edstrom.

So it was that Arbetaren, the very paper Dagerman had joined at twenty, where he’d once been editor, where still wrote a daily column which he’d dutifully sent before ending his own life, ran his final piece, entitled “Beware of Dogs,” instead of their collaborator’s obituary. It ensured he did not fully overshadow his writing.

It’s an outcome that fitted Dagerman’s self-effacement, as well as his definition of the profession: “Journalism is the art of arriving too late as early as possible.”

He’d coined that phrase in a letter to his colleague Werner Aspenstrom, sent from Munich in 1946 while covering the devastation of postwar Germany for the Swedish daily Expressen. Stationed in the Allied Press hotel, Dagerman had soon grown wary of the role expected of correspondents—“They think that a small hunger strike is more interesting than the hunger of multitudes. While hunger-riots are sensational, hunger itself is not sensational, and what poverty-stricken and bitter people here think becomes interesting to them only when poverty and bitterness break out in a catastrophe.”

Steve Hartman, his translator, recounts how Dagerman was advised by a fellow journalist “with the best of intentions and for the sake of objectivity to read German newspapers instead of looking in German dwellings or sniffing German cooking pots.” The news was the Nuremberg trials, and rightly so, but Dagerman sought stories amidst the ruins of the bombed-out cities of the former Reich, chose to report from the cellars and meet those who dwelled there, to reflect on suffering and hate and culpability. He denounced both the mistakes of the Allies and the German politicians alike; the growing class divides amidst the destruction, and the selfishness of those it had spared.

“When every available consolation has been exhausted a new one must be invented even if it is absurd. In German cities, it often happens that people ask the stranger to confirm that their city is the most burnt, devastated, and razed in the whole of Germany. It is not a matter of finding consolation in the midst of affliction—affliction itself has become a consolation. The same people become discouraged if you tell them that you have seen worse things in other places. We have no right to say that: every German city is the worse there is when you have to live in it,” he wrote in German Autumn, his collected reportages.

Dagerman was only 23 and knew German through his first wife, Annemarie Götze, the daughter of German anarcho-syndicalist political refugees. They had married in wartime, to afford her the protection of a Swedish passport. Now, having written his first novel, The Snake, to critical acclaim the year prior, he’d purchased his own typewriter for 382 Kronen and moved on from his editorial role at Arbetaren to become a full-time reporter and writer. From then until his last, through the initial rush, the ultimate wane, all his writing arose and fell from that single instrument which inaugurated a new life full of promise.

II. A Father’s Heirloom

Lo Dagerman lost her father a month shy of her third birthday. She was the only child of his second marriage to the actress Anita Björk. It was from her that she received a belated inheritance five years later: his typewriter, left on the childhood desk.

It is a gift heavy with significance, which Lo recounts in her book from the perspective of the child she was then. “At eight years of age, things are simple. There is a typewriter that calls out to be typed on. So I learn how to peck on it using only my index fingers—still to this day the way I type.”

At first, she follows in his stead and the keys can be heard again, spelling the altogether different tune of a child’s deadlines: poems and rhymes for birthdays, Mother’s Day, and Christmas alike. She knows her father was a writer, and a famous one at that, though this is a mere fact, like that of his absence.

In her hands, it is at first a toy, a gift from the land of adults which children yearn to reach by counting half-years that will age them quicker, as if standing on the tiptoes of months. The childish age that seeks to forego all that is childish.

“I loved it, any kid would, because it’s an adult thing,” she tells me. “I was brought into adult complexities pretty early by my mother. I didn’t feel scared by that, I felt honored. Kids love when they are talked to not as little children, but as though they understand.”

Time brings greater awareness of just what she had inherited, a name, a past, a parent’s unwelcome fame.

“It was something that was always there because he died so shockingly, there were reverberations through Swedish society. People really remembered this writer because of his shocking death. So therefore, as a child growing up, or starting to attend school, people would know. They would ask ‘Are you related to?’ That would be a very, very common question.”

A famous father can be a minefield when you struggle to define who you are, or when he’s on the curriculum in high school and everyone reads his story To Kill a Child. But Lo doesn’t remember being in class that day, or reading his words, “It’s not true that time heals all wounds. Time does not heal the wounds of a dead child.”

Then there is the growing sense of expectation, that foreign weight that alienates you from yourself. “People know about your parents, and they look at you in a certain mind that maybe, you know, you would have some talent in this way or another. Or not.”

The symbol of it is the typewriter, her mother’s gift, laced with the risk of disappointment. “I think she was desperate to try to see in this child, something of Stig’s. There was, I’m sure, a hope, somewhere along the line that this child would carry some of this genius, have inherited some of this,” she says. “I carry with me my mother’s grief. Even if I don’t remember Stig, I grew up in a home with that grief, and it colored my life.”

Hers is a father she cannot evoke but that people measure her by. The steadfast leftist voice that denounced injustice, went against the grain and spurred debates with the belief “that solidarity, sympathy, and love are humanity’s last clean shirts.” When she is 17, Lo is asked to write a political article and dutifully obliges. “It was a dud. They had thought that maybe I would have something, but I didn’t,” she says. “It was pretty clear that that was not going anywhere. You could even see it as ending this period of the goddamn typewriter: ‘You gave this to me, this is what came out. Now you do whatever you want with it. But this is it, this is what I could do, and not more.’”

Lo will recount her estrangement from the heirloom half a century later:

“Even in my early teens, I write on the typewriter. For a brief moment in time, it is a tool for expressing my budding individuality and sense of identity. Then one day I set it aside, not to be used except for the most mundane of tasks. The typewriter is no longer a plaything, a tantalizing tool for reflection or free-roaming imagination. Instead, it has morphed into something entirely different. Something that brings intimidating performance demands.”

“‘Ah, Stig Dagerman’s daughter—do you also write?’ Hell no.”

So the typewriter falls silent again, waiting to be given new meaning. For Lo freedom and pressure meet on the keys, and in her adolescence the latter prevails. In that, she inversely reflects her father, who went from bliss to anguish on the typewriter as his career progressed.

There was more of the former leading to his time as a youthful correspondent, when, the summer before going to Germany, he holed himself up on Kymmendö Island, in the Stockholm archipelago, in the writing cabin built by the author August Strindberg. There, over the course of a summer, he writes Island of the Doomed, the story of a group of shipwrecks on a waterless island populated by giant lizards and blind birds. It’s one of the happiest times in his life.

It reads: “Another mooring rope had been cut, and now he could rise up like a balloon into silence and solitude. His limbs were filled with painful desire; as noted, he thought his paralysis had eased and suddenly found himself running. He felt as if he were swishing through the morning, his feet were like typewriter keys striking the unwritten sand, which had so often been rinsed by the waves.”

That summer Dagerman is one with his writing, as Lo explains to me. “It’s all documented in brain chemistry, it’s called flow. We are separated from ourselves; you just wander the moment, a pleasurable experience that becomes almost addictive. That’s where we want to be. He described it to a friend saying that he had never felt so happy as when writing that book. He felt like he didn’t write it, but that God did it for him, because it was automatic writing.”

But writing giveth and it taketh away, and after the astonishing output of four books in three years—a haul of two novels, a book apiece of non-fiction and short stories, and his first play—there comes what seems a natural lull. Yet Dagerman resents meeting the stubborn blank page. Seasons follow one another and are altogether different: the resounding success of German Autumn calls for a sequel, French Spring, with the opposite outcome.

“After Germany, the joy of writing was gone,” he would later write to his publisher, reflecting on the years that followed. “The foolish year in France may have been devastating. Roaming in solitude from place to place with a journalistic imperative in the backseat and a typewriter in my suitcase that ultimately grew so heavy with failure that I could hardly lift it.”

He is commissioned to write a dozen articles, of which he will struggle to produce less than half. His French is poor, the subject hard: France is victorious and decades from questioning its role in the war. He detests Paris, “A gigantic heap of historical souvenirs and luxury restaurants, agreeable for millionaires and alcoholics.”

“It’s a disaster,” as Lo puts it succinctly, and the lowest point of his first bout of writer’s block throughout 1947 and into 1948. With debts and guilt increasing he has to resort to pleading with Expressen to release him from his engagement, and somehow pay back the advance.

“Weary and unhappy I crisscrossed the French countryside without being able to work, unable to establish the necessary contacts, and constantly feeling an unbearable pressure at what was expected of me back in Sweden. (…) Perhaps I made of the success of the journey—and rightly so—a matter of prestige, but, all things considered, it might be more reasonable to put mental health before prestige,” he writes to his editor Ragnar Svanström, on July 4, 1948.

From his time “screaming in the Parisian desert” one notable encounter remains. It is at the heart of Lo Dagerman’s and Nancy Pick’s The Writer and the Refugee. Dagerman is the writer; Etta Federn is the refugee, a fascinating Jewish intellectual who is Pick’s relative. She is also a practitioner of palmistry, divination by reading the lines on the hand. The book uncovers the foresight of what she foresaw in those of the young Swede:

Paris, February 5, 1948

Analysis of Stig Dagerman’s hands by Etta Federn (extracts).

“The first impression given by these hands is that of a great timidity, whose origin can be found in an unhappy childhood. Unusually sensitive to suffering… 

These hands are as passionate as they are controlled. The subject’s passions are rarely unbridled, but they seem to always incite him to burn. The subject will not undertake anything that cannot be done passionately.

The subject’s evolution is marked by great inner and external crises, by upheavals begun by momentum followed by a great leap. 

It is remarkable that the subject’s combative spirit utterly fails him when it comes to his emotional life, he then needs to be taken in hand, he is then incapable of fighting, or even of asking or begging for help. From his first failure, he closes painfully on himself like a withering iris.

The subject is capable of feeling great suffering but derives no bitterness from it

Dagerman has had his crisis, now comes his great leap. Forced to produce something that will provide financial compensation for his failure, he turns to the isolation that served him so well in the summer of 46’. Not quite an island this time, but a peninsula, that of Quiberon, in Bretagne, in the village of Kerné, on the edge of the country, “in great loneliness in a locked room in a sleeping French village, with a continent between the writer and those he was betraying,” he’ll later write.

A single photo survives of his time there, facing his typewriter, the sheet of paper on which he’s typing bent backward, while he hunches forward, surrounded by papers and a plate on a narrow table, turning his back to a narrow bed strewn with clothing and more papers. There are various photos of Stig working, over the years, and in them, he often smiles coyly or looks warily at the camera. His fingers are always outstretched, awkwardly suspending writing for the image of writing, eager to lose himself again once the photo is taken. In the shot from Kerné he does not look away from the typewriter, his body is slightly askew as if mirroring the movement of the typewriter along the phrase. It is the portrait of a man absorbed by the page.

If writing has stuttered in France throughout the winter and spring, the extreme opposite occurs in Kerné. An entire novel is written in scarcely six weeks, and the result, A Burnt Child, is perhaps his masterpiece.

“A moment ago, there was fire. Now the tepid ashes warm our feet. A moment ago, there was blinding light. But now a blessed twilight cools our eyes. Everything is calm again. The volcano is slumbering. Even our poor nerves are slumbering. We are not happy but feel momentary peace. We have just witnessed our life’s desert in all its terrifying grandeur, and now the desert is blooming. The oases are few and far between, but they do exist. And although the desert is vast, we know that the greatest deserts hold the most oases. But to discover this, we have to pay dearly. The price is volcanic eruption. Costly, but nothing less destructive exists. Therefore, we ought to bless the volcanoes, thank them because their light is dazzling and their fire scorching. Thank them for blinding us, because only when we are blind can we gain full sight. And thank them for burning us, because only as burnt children can we give others our warmth.” 

That summer he discovers that being on the brink releases him, exorcises doubts and guilt, wrings catharsis from the jaws of hopelessness. It’s a pattern he will come to repeat in his work, and later in his dealings with death.

He wrote: “The important thing for me is that when the inevitable failure comes, it hits me not like pain but as liberation because it also provides me the courage to escape into creativity and the art of writing. In the summer of 1948, I was aimlessly traveling from place to place in northern France, dragging with me a weighty writing assignment for a Swedish publication: a series of articles about French farmers. But the whole country lay closed as a clam to me and I possessed no knife. My saving grace became an escape into A Burnt Child, into the writing of a novel where, for as long as it lasted, I was unavailable to shame and discouragement.”

III. The Typewriter’s Keeper

Seventeen years later, in Älvkarleby, a boy is breathlessly reading A Burnt Child. That is no figure of speech: something in the novel asphyxiates him, the character who is his namesake, the muddied secrets that belie the prose’s cold clarity, and speak to queries that age is putting before him. His name is Bengt Söderhäll.

“I began to read A Burnt Child when I was 14. We lived in a little flat on top of the public library, so I wouldn’t even put on shoes when I went down. I read the bookshelves from left to right. The librarians were kind because I was allowed to also read adult books, books for grownups. So I read a lot of writers, but when I read A Burnt Child, I had to stop. Because the young man in the novel is also called Bengt. And when you’re that age, and adolescence is not too far away, and the line you are going to follow is getting problematic…and the question in that novel: Who is that? Who is mom? Who am I the child of?” Bengt says. He has spent the first part of his life in an orphanage, and something in the absences Dagerman has put in his novel resonates beyond what he can bear.

“So I stopped reading. I remember I just walked out into the forest to get some oxygen. I was almost being suffocated.” He’ll finish it only much later, but that first encounter with Dagerman will change him, “This is my personal history that I’m trying to puzzle together. And it’s mixed with Dagerman.”

Another scene cements the writer in his memory. It’s the image of his mother, fragile of health but steady in reading, listening to the radio while Bengt looked on. “And always, when there was something on about Stig Dagerman, she kind of nodded and looked a bit sad. And at the same time, happy, that a writer like him had lived.”

In time Bengt became a teacher and Dagerman was something he taught and discussed with friends. One day his musings about creating a Stig Dagerman Society made it into the local paper. Eventually, in 1987, he founded a library with his friend Urban Forsgren, dedicated to the author’s work. The Society had become a reality. This time it made national news.

“Two or three days later, the phone began to ring, ‘Could you please come and give a lecture about Dagerman?’ The first two, three years we spun around Sweden and talked about Dagerman at schools, high schools, to unions of all sorts and women’s organizations.”

Then, on the nearby island of Laxön, once a restricted military area, buildings became available for public use. The budding Society was offered a space. It opened in 1992. For the next 25 years, it would be known as the Dagerman Room, a one-room museum where the flotsam and the valuables of a literary career and two marriages converged. Thousands would visit yearly.

“From the beginning, it was an interest in the texts by Dagerman, that was my interest, to read for yourself and make your decision on what is good, what is bad, and what you know,” Bengt tells me.” But it became life and letters. It was letters from the beginning, only letters, but it became more and more life.”

On the haven of an island—which he’d been prone to seek—a composite of Dagerman’s various writing rooms started to come together. Each donation recreated his study, as if frozen in time, its pieces reuniting as they had once been when the author perused that book cupboard or consulted this encyclopedia. All that was missing was for the typewriter to regain its place on the old desk.

Then one day in spring the phone rang. “I would like to come up to the room. I have a few things, a few items that I’m bringing. Can we meet on Friday?” On the line was Anita Björk, Dagerman’s widow and one of Sweden’s most celebrated actresses, famous for her role in Miss Julie, which had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1951. That Friday Anita Björk, who was nearing 70, got in her old-fashioned Volkswagen and made the two-hour from Stockholm to Älvkarleby bringing with her a large plastic bag.

“She came in there, sat down, and we talked. We had met before, we didn’t know each other that well, but enough. And she put this big bag against the desk,” Bengt remembers. “Then she took out a few things. And there was this fantastic machine, on which Dagerman wrote most of what he wrote, this typewriter, a traveler’s typewriter.” By then she’d preserved the memento for nearly four decades.

It was after she parted with his instrument that Anita asked to visit his grave. It had been moved posthumously in the 1960s from Stockholm, where they’d lived together, to his birthplace. Spring had reached the cemetery, and from the branches overhead tree sap had dripped on his gravestone. Anita went to her car and got a brush. “She came back and I fetched water and then we were laying on our knees taking away stains from Dagerman’s grave,” Bengt remembers. “Then we took a big bucket of water and threw it over it and it was like silvery granite afterward. To me, it’s such a beautiful memory. She was one of our most famous actresses. She was our Greta Garbo. She had that shimmering around her. And she was lying on her knees, cleaning her husband’s grave.”

They had been married for only a year. They had both been 31. Here was the gravestone of a man so young it was already older than he’d become, as his widow looked on, perhaps reading his poem carved in stone: To die is to travel / ever so briefly / from tree branch / to solid ground.

IV. Return to Älvkarleby

In 2016 Lo Dagerman returned to her past, to her father’s roots, to grasp his absence from the starting point. She flew from her home in the United States to Sweden, then drove north to Älvkarleby as her mother had done with the typewriter one spring, along the road lined with trees that winds through the village, passing her father’s old school, the church and the cemetery where he is buried, and onto the farm where he was born in 1923. She knew Stig had left her there one summer in childhood in the care of an aunt. Recollections of that time had started to swell since she had first approached his writing.

“This was a part of my heritage, of my history, that I hadn’t really looked at closely. And then when I read him, there is a whole world that opens up; there are my own memories of this. It puts a part of my life together, in a sense,” she tells me. “As I approached this material, I was able to open to what happened to him—in ways that bring grief and sorrow—to what happened to my mother and my father.”

It had been a long journey to meet him on the page—to reconcile with a heritage that had once been unbearable—of which visiting Älvkarleby was a stage a lifetime in the making. Lo doesn’t remember having read her father in high school when it was compulsory, and in a sense, she feels she never quite did until she was in her thirties. It was the age by which she had outlived Stig.

“Turning 31, there was a feeling of ‘okay. I made it, kind of.’ I waited a long time. The time was right. I was able to handle it emotionally,” she tells me. By then, she has made a life on another continent, she is married, has two children, and is a counselor with studies in psychology. “I can start to look at this because I can see that my own life has taken and served a trajectory.”

She started with his short fiction, of which the best is often set in that land of childhood in the countryside, the town, and its surroundings. Discovering it was a preface to rediscovering Älvkarleby.

“When I’m reading these stories, I have pictures in my head of the aunts, of the farm, of the people there, and of my grandfather,” Lo tells me. “All of that comes alive when I read them. It’s my own history that’s starting to be revealed.”

Dagerman had travelled the world but his hometown was never far from his inspiration. His characters often drew on the rural people he’d known, whether on the farm or uneasily transplanted to the city. There, too, return is both a desire and a reckoning. He may have left the farm but it never left his writing.

It was never more the case than in 1949, a carbon copy of the struggles he’d staved off with the marathon writing of A Burnt Child the year prior. “After having again failed to fulfill a writing job, needing desperately to find an idea to stave off editors and creditors, what saved him was the fertile terrain of his childhood memories,” Lo recounts.

When this latest crisis loomed, Dagerman returned to Älvkarleby.

He writes in an essay: “I found myself on an ocean liner crowded with refugees destined for Australia. My assignment was to get in as close contact as possible with the passengers to gather material for the setting and story of a film. This was a task that seemed simple enough for the first three days, but that after two weeks exposed the entire width of its impossibility. Art is among other things a form of freedom created by distance. But a ship is a prison surrounded by water. You cannot live tied to your subject matter and at the same time exploit it.”

“I finally gave up the script idea and fled into the writing of a novel. I traveled by a clipper across the Pacific Ocean in the company of a wool trader from Lille. In just five days, I would be forced to account for my expensive failure. So it was necessary for me to quickly mount a defense to help me through the difficult time that lay ahead. But the immediate task was to come up with a name for the defense,” or to put it concretely, a title for a new novel.

One morning during a stop in Fiji, in a setting as foreign to him as could be, he cut himself while shaving and remembered a scene from his childhood on the farm. He was the furthest he’d ever been from it, yet now it came to him, a plot developing on the journey to Honolulu, then San Francisco. By the time he arrived in Stockholm to face the music, he had brought back from Australia a rural Swedish narrative. He had, once again, repeated the formula of writing wrested from the brink of failure.

The title of the novel was to be Wedding Worries, and it would be the reason for Lo’s return to Älvkarleby decades later. By then she had not only reconciled with her inheritance, and read her father, but also found a way to make it her own whilst sharing it with others. It was while co-translating the novel that Lo decided to set out on her trip. “I sought to have insight into Stig, on my family and the place where he grew up. I visited the farm with the second story that had been added, walked by the barns and stables, breathed the air and plunged into the river below. Here I could see them all and hear them,” she writes. “For me, it’s a way to get closer to my father. I meet the menagerie of characters from his childhood, described and embellished with such love. It makes me think of the meaning of their acts, all the while hearing Stig’s tender and insisting voice.”

Translating is the way Lo says she truly reads, when she has to retain each part, when she internalizes the words to make them her own in her adopted language across the Atlantic.

“No matter the work,” she writes, “every time I enter a text and make it my own—word by word, one image after another—we find each other, Stig and I.”

Stig Dagerman was born at 11:30 on the night of October 5, 1923, in Älvkarleby, at the farm of his paternal grandparents. It was raining when they sent for the midwife. His parents, Helmer Jansson and Helga Andersson were not married, nor would they be. She left the farm two months later. Her son, from stories heard, describes it like this: “On New Year’s Day she went to the station with a small bag in one hand. She said nothing, but simply walked out of their lives. The snow whirled the old year away. She never came back.”

Stig would not meet her until he was 19, on his initiative. He was left in the care of his paternal grandparents.

There was no Dagerman then. Until the age of four, the boy was called Stig Halvard Andersson. In 1927 his father acknowledged him: he became Stig Halvard Jansson. His third name, the one he chose, the name that history retains, was one of his first creations.

The genealogy of it is painful; it blends the distance from his father, the absence of his mother, a litany of loss, and the need to write.

It happened in the 1940s; Stig was studying at the university in Stockholm when he received news that his grandfather had been murdered. It was nighttime on the farm and he’d gone out to the paddock to see the horses. Not long afterward he was heard screaming. He managed to stumble to the gate before collapsing, with seventeen stab wounds. A local madman was the culprit.

“The evening I heard about the murder I went to the city library and tried to write a poem to the dead man’s memory. Nothing came of it but a few pitiful lines, which I tore in shame. But out of that shame, out of that impotence and grief, something was born—something which I believe was the desire to become a writer; that is to say, to be able to tell of what it is to mourn, to have been loved, to have been left lonely.”

His grandmother would die of shock a week later. He kept writing.

“In school competitions, I had better luck, and in my graduation year I won a week’s holiday in the mountains, with a short story. But that trip ended in tragedy: I lost a very good friend and roommate in an avalanche. When I came back I knew beyond all doubt what I must be. I must be a writer. And I knew what I must write: the book of my dead.”

Dagerman was born then, a surname derived from the word “Dager,” “daylight” in Swedish. It was to be more than a pen name, or a pseudonym. He renamed himself in adolescence, in writing, and loss, and from then lived as, wrote as, and would pass on the surname Dagerman to his children.

Dagerman never did write the “book of his dead,” but in a way his daughter has. It is the book of her dead, of him.

It tells of a typewriter left on her childhood desk, of writing and of ceasing to write, because of him. But to the reader it’s all a matter of time—a lifetime—because by now it’s her that we’re reading to know him.

“Other than when I was typing as a kid, I hadn’t really been writing. I had been writing papers for university courses, and a thesis, but I hadn’t been writing,” she tells me. “And when we wrote that book, Nancy and I, I felt the joy of the writing. And it was that joy that also connected with him, although I couldn’t say that I experienced what he experienced when he said he was communicating with God. But I had a sense of flow, where you’re completely absorbed in the process, obsessed by the process, and that, I believe, is something that he yearned for, wanted, and thrived on. And hated when it was gone. I appreciated being able to touch base with that.”

Lo Dagerman could finally write: “His shadow also brings me peace.”

V. Our Need for Consolation

At the Gothenburg Book Fair, over the years, a man would approach Bengt Söderhall, always with the same query: “Did you bring the typewriter?” Then, being shown to it, he’d ask, “Can I sit there for a minute?”

“He could sit for half an hour, just like a meditation, in front of the typewriter, with his hands almost touching the letters,” Bengt recalls. “We have a lot of stories like that around this typewriter.”

Here Bengt stresses that he has no such “fetishistic ideas.” His work, however, bears resemblance to a pilgrimage: every year, for 22 years, he rented a van, loaded it with the Dagerman Room, and drove 342 miles to Gothenburg to install it at the city’s book fair. He would lay rugs on the floor, install the furniture, and recreate the ambiance of a room in the 1940s or 50s. The typewriter was the showpiece. Visitors would wander, stop out of curiosity, and he’d witness Dagerman’s enduring clout.

“A lot of people, ordinary people, but also writers, when they understood it was Dagerman’s typewriter, would say ‘Can I touch it?’ To me it’s kind of…” he says barely reserving his judgment.

Bengt respects the writer, and his writing, to a fault: they changed his life. He can do without the myth that surrounds him.

“Sometimes, with Dagerman, the shimmering is a big bit like James Dean: the young who died too early. The shimmering is so strong, that you forget to analyze what it really was what he did. I mean, you shouldn’t put Dagerman on a pedestal, you should remain in the spirit of Stig Dagerman, which is to look straight into the eyes.”

The myth itself, the myth of himself, in his lifetime, is part of what stifled Dagerman.

At the age of 26, the count read: six books, four plays, and hundreds of poems and articles. He has long been considered a prodigy and evokes epithets like “the Nordic Rimbaud,” a fatal simile with another writer whose precocity prefaced silence.

Dagerman will describe the crushing weight of expectation and self-doubt three years later, in a brief text titled Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable:

“We all have our masters. I am such a slave to my talent that I dare not use it for fear of discovering that it has been lost. I am such a slave to my reputation that I hardly dare write a line for fear of damaging it. When depression finally sets in, I become a slave to that as well. My greatest ambition becomes to hold on to it; my greatest desire becomes to feel that my only worth lies in what I fear that I have lost: the ability to squeeze beauty out of my despair, anxiety, and failings.”

It is not a lack of ideas that afflicts the young writer. From 1949 onwards, there are plans for as many as six new novels, “But he, who had once been so prolific, now found himself incapable of completing anything more than isolated chapters,” writes his friend Michael Meyer. In Swedish, writer’s block is called “writer’s cramp,” a stifling feeling you cannot shake off.

He’d grown used to bringing back writing from the brink, to feeling the edge of the precipice to spur him into a creative frenzy. After multiple blundered attempts on his own life, Dagerman committed himself to observation in a psychiatric hospital. Two years earlier, in A Burnt Child, he’d written about the main character’s botched suicide that reconciles him with the world.

The year 1950 held the extremes he’d lived out on the page. It had brought love, as Dagerman fell head over heals for Anita Björk, and with it came the hope of a new life, a new home in Enebyberg, and soon the beginning of a family; it had brought depression, the guilt that came with a painful divorce, and the feeling that writing had abandoned him.

The following year, he writes to Anita Björk, already pregnant with Lo: “It is a terrible experience, which I know you will be spared, to feel oneself disintegrate and sink when one is praying to be allowed to grow and climb. Now that the choice has finally come between living like a pariah and dying wretchedly, I must choose as I have done, because I believe that a bad person’s death makes the world a better place. God grant that our child may be like you. I have loved you, and will do so for as long as I am allowed to. Forgive me, but please believe me. Stig.” The letter was never sent. Meyer writes that it was found torn into small pieces.

When Dagerman finally finishes a piece it comes from an improbable source. The prompt is a request from the editors of Husmodern—housewife, in Swedish. The magazine’s title speaks for itself. He is to write something on the art of living for the magazine’s readers. Dagerman, fresh from slashing his veins and turning on the gas, gives them a harrowing and moving seven-page essay that matches anything he’s ever written: Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable. To Husmodern’s credit, they run with it.

It reads: “I have no belief and because of that I can never be a happy man. Because happy men should never fear that their lives drift meaninglessly toward the certainty of death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth from where I can attract a god’s attention. Nor have I inherited the skeptic’s well-hidden rage, the rationalist’s barren mind, or the atheist’s burning innocence. But I would not dare to cast a stone at those who believe in what I doubt, much less at those who idolize doubt as if that too were not surrounded by darkness. That stone would strike me instead, for there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable.”

The essay seeks to discover a reason to live, amidst the ubiquity of its opposite. “I can free myself even from the power of death. True enough I cannot escape the thought, much less escape the fact that death stalks my every move. But I can diminish its menace to nothing by refusing to pin my life down to such precarious footholds as time and glory.” The reasons exist, yet frail, as a match’s flame, blown out by the same breath that would speak them.

Perhaps the final hope of the text lies in the very act of its writing, for an author who, alone every night before his typewriter, lost faith in words that gave him meaning.

From its inauspicious beginnings, the text enjoys an eventful afterlife he’ll never witness, it becomes popular abroad, is set to music in France, inspires a choreography in England, theater in Portugal, and six decades after being written catches the eye of a young director. His name is Dan Levy Dagerman, the grandson the author never met. Suddenly, the typewriter is cast in the starring part in the role of Stig Dagerman’s typewriter, opposite Swedish film star Stellan Skarsgård in the short film Our Need for Consolation.

Bengt brings the typewriter down to Stockholm for the occasion, and Lo Dagerman has it cleaned and repaired, then searches for near-extinct ink ribbons that will allow it to type again. It’s as good as new for its big break.

“The typewriter in the film and someone is typing on it, and the text of Our Need for Consolation comes out as Stellan Skarsgård reads it,” Bengt says.

“Dan had a really hard time. He felt very moved by the text, but…it was a difficult time for him to work with a text like that, in retrospect,” Lo says. “The piece itself has a turning point, where Stig writes about ‘the miracle of liberation.’ Dan wanted in his film to emphasize it, so that it would stand out. It was, of course, hard for Stig to hold on to the ‘miracle’ but it is the memory of it that infuses hope and a will to live. Dan stayed true to the text.”

It’s the closest thing to Dagerman family reunion. Despite Lo Dagerman not remembering her father, and her son Dan being born decades after his death, three generations converge around that typewriter, brought together by his creations: his writing, and pseudonym that became a surname.

VI. Endings

The Dagerman room closed its doors in 2019, the casualty of island weather. Cold and humidity were eating away at the old 1940s Arbetaren and Dagerman’s words were fading. The pieces that the museum had brought together were dispersed again. Some went to the local library, others came home with Bengt. There was the large book cupboard too large for relatives to claim, and the traveling typewriter as well.

“I had the typewriter in our house and I was somewhat nervous,” Bengt says. “I couldn’t protect it if there was a fire or anything, or it could be stolen. I mean, an item like that…”

While finding a more permanent home for it, he settled for some improvised camouflage. His safe was too small to hold the typewriter, so he hid it behind it, then both behind a large desk, with an additional layer of old clothes nearby to dissuade anyone from looking closer. “It was impossible for any thief to guess that there was something valuable there.”

Bengt still took it out sometimes, to take it to lectures, or show it to a curious guest. What he never did while for the time he kept it, he assures me, neither at his home nor before, in all the many years it was in his care—despite being a writer himself—was to type on the typewriter.

“Sometimes I thought it would be nice to write something on it, but I never did that,” he explains. “Because it was Dagerman’s, not mine.”

When asked if he’s ever missed the typewriter after they parted, Bengt only says “In a way.” Then he’ll admit he yearns for writing on typewriters. It’s something only those who ever used one could attest to, that feeling it left on the fingers.

“The typewriter is more of an instrument than a computer. You touch the computer with the skin, but a typewriter is a physical object with another concentration of feelings of tactility,” Bengt explains. And he remembers when he was young and would type away to the sound he made, “like heavy rain on a tin roof.”

It’s the sound Michael Meyer recounts on his visits to Anita and Stig in their home in Enebyberg. “It struck two and I would totter upstairs to my guest room. Even then he did not always go to bed. Sometimes he would climb the extra flight to his study in a small tower which rose above the house, and I would fall asleep to the sound of his typewriter.”

They had spoken late into the night, discussing theater, literature, and the state of the world as one does at that age. They had even discussed sports once Anita had gone to bed. Dagerman was a delight to talk with, joyful and impulsive in English, which he spoke well. And yet it was 1953, and the next year would be his last.

“This typewriter, alas, now held a very different significance for him from what it had symbolized when I had first seen him in 1948,” Meyer writes. “The tappings of the typewriter which penetrated from his room in the tower to my small guest room below were the efforts of a man to overcome a paralysis; a paralysis from he was never to escape.”

And yet he’d been charming all night. Keys might not sound different when they give us purpose and when they drive us to despair. The sound of Dagerman at his typewriter would have been the same as anyone else, give or take the speed at which they typed. And yet, with Dagerman, what you heard was the sound of him alive.

There would be one last flare on the keys, the prologue to a fifth novel. It was a door half-opened and soon slammed shut. Anita Björk recounts it in a talk: “I followed Stig’s struggle to write at close range. He stayed up late at night, sitting at his typewriter—each morning only to tear up the pages he had written. But one night in the early part of 1954, he woke me up carrying a tray with tea and lit candles. He had finished the first chapter of a major novel he was planning. I listened as he read a piece titled A Thousand Years with God in his tense voice filled with anticipation (….) Afterward, as Stig finished reading, we were both overcome by emotion. We were struck by the extraordinary reach of the piece, and by the possibility that now, finally, Stig might have broken through his own silence.”

“Everybody is saying that piece signals a whole new beginning,” Lo says. “It’s a remarkable piece. It’s nothing like what he has written before. It’s a whole new thing. He was on to something.”

It would remain a prologue, as expectations and debts converged around a depleted vocation. For a time too brief a man wrote on this typewriter, in so doing he achieved a joy such that he felt god was typing for him. Then he lost it. He ceased to be able to write, then gradually, to be able to live.

“There are many culprits, but a main one is that the publishing company at the time, they are demanding of him to write a novel a year. And he can’t do that, particularly not when he’s trying to find his passion again.” Lo tells me. “What Stig needed was a moratorium. There was a kind of naive ignorance on all sides, probably my mother as well, the expectation that this could just happen like that: now you sit in your tower and write.”

Meyer again recounts this ambivalence, the outward appearance, the expectations, making you oblivious to warning signs. “Anita Björk and Stig Dagerman were deeply and mutually in love; and whenever I saw him, during the summer of 1953, he seemed calm and content,” he writes, then adds, “He had dark moods, which I never saw; often he felt the overpowering need to be alone, and would get out of bed in the middle of the night, take the car from the garage and drive for hours into the night, as though he longed to enter the darkness and be swallowed up in it.”

Then one day he ceased to go out. He would still get in his car, still, turn the engine on, and then wait until the last moment in the garage. It was the first garage he’d ever had, an advantage of the move to Enebyberg with Anita. It was a long way from the house; some 50 feet to stumble back from afterward, after every curtailed attempt. He called it “death played in the garage,” a strange game in the night. “He was a gambler that needed to deal with death to exalt the price of life,” Olof Lagercrantz writes in his biography of Dagerman.

“He was obsessed with it,” Lo tells me. “Sometime in ‘53 or ‘54 that idea occurs to him. He has tried gas before, so he understands it. That last fall is when I think my mother and friends around him understand that it was serious. And there are all sorts of interventions that are tried to but that don’t work.”

“Somehow my life has come to a standstill, and I don’t know how I’ll be able to revive it. I can’t do anything anymore: can’t write; can’t laugh; can’t speak; can’t read. I feel like I’m outside the whole game. When I’m with people, I have to force myself to listen to what they are saying in order to smile at the right moments,” he writes in a letter to a friend days before he falls silent.

Alone in the garage, behind the wheel, Dagerman lets the engine run until the last moment. Then he turns it off, crawls out, and staggers back to his house. It’s salvation from the brink once and again, and like rehearsals in the theater he adored. “He’d grown used to grazing his own death. Suicide was part of his life, so to speak, rather than of his death”, writes his translator Carl Gustaf Bjurström.

The final rehearsal occurred around 2 am, on November 4, 1954.

As on other nights, the engine of the car was turned off, likewise, the open door, though now it remained ajar. This time he was still inside with the carbon monoxide.

Thereafter, there remains the typewriter. In 2019 Bengt and Lo discussed what to do with this obsolete machine that had been an instrument of work, a childhood toy, a suffocating heirloom, an actress in a short film, and the centerpiece of a nomadic museum. It would travel no more. Bengt took it to its final home.

“I wrote a letter to the National Library, saying ‘We have Dagerman’s typewriter, maybe we could donate it.’ I had a response within a quarter of an hour! From the chief librarian! I took the train to Stockholm and when I got there they almost bowed to me, because it was so special. There it can be shown and talked about. So now it’s safe, forever I hope.”

VII. Typewriter

Six months after speaking to Bengt, and no closer to writing this story, I was visiting a colleague in Prague when he suggested going to the secondhand bookstores. Writing was much of our conversation that day, and while he shared his latest project I admitted to the odd research I’d been conducting for longer than I cared to acknowledge. After all, the typewriter was neither a Steinway nor a Stradivarius, just a cheap model of an outdated instrument. It should have disappeared, like its obsolete twentieth-century brethren; gone the way of the zeppelins and gramophones to an afterlife or rust. Still, it endured.

Journalists of a certain generation, when I had told them about it, had reminisced about the rat–tat–tat of the newsroom, the clacking so different from typing on the present keyboards. And I remembered waking up to that same sound in my childhood home, one of my oldest memories. Those typewriters had stopped working, left in a pile hidden behind the sofa, never to be replaced by computers. Some people fall silent, some people choose to fade, and it is their choice, though we might feel we aren’t quite enough for them to remain.

Maybe I wanted to disprove that was all there was to be said. To gather proof of the infinite ramifications of what continues to touch people, even despite ourselves.

We had reached the bookstore and were perusing old paperbacks in a basement when I found it. It’s the sort of thing that happens when you’ve been immersed in a story for so long. I waited until the seller had his back turned to examine it, let my hands hover over the keys, and even allowed myself a brief tap. It was a portable Continental typewriter, the same as Dagerman’s. You wouldn’t have thought it memorable.

*

Adapted from “The Unlikely Posthumous Life of a Prodigy’s Typewriter” by Diego Courchay, published in The Delacorte Review

There has always been a gap between the English-language author Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish writer who published under at least three pseudonyms: Yitskhok Bashevis, Yitskhok Varshavski, and D. Segal. The publication of Singer’s wartime writings presents one of the first attempts to close that gap. Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945, the first of three volumes, covers the period between his first appearance as Yitskhok Varshavski in the Forverts—the world’s largest and most influential Yiddish daily—just months before the outbreak of World War II until the end of 1945, when Singer started publishing the Yiddish original of his first major literary memorial to the life of Jews in Poland, The Family Moskat. While the average Yiddish reader of the Forverts may not have known that Yitskhok Varshavski was Yitskhok Bashevis—the younger brother of Yiddish writers Esther Kreitman and Israel Joshua Singer—it is possible to imagine that same reader wondering about the identity of this “Isaac from Warsaw.” Whoever he was, he had a lot of opinions about the situation of the Jews in both Europe and the United States, before and during World War II, as well as the future of Jewish life in America. He was an unknown entity, but anyone reading his work could tell that he was deeply invested in his topic.

Singer’s writing during the period of World War II developed considerably, from pieces on various Jewish customs followed by Jews being targeted in Europe, to questions of how the Jewish spirit would survive the war. During those years, his own life also underwent radical changes. In 1939, his mother and younger brother, who remained in Poland after he and his older siblings had left, were sent by the Soviets in cattle cars to Jambyl, Kazakhstan, where they later died of illness and starvation, likely around 1942. His older sister survived the Nazi blitzes of London with her son, Maurice, and was struggling with mental health aggravated by the trauma of war. And his older brother, who had helped him immigrate to the United States and supported him during his first years, died of a heart attack in early 1944. His ex-lover, Runia Pontsh—who had given birth to Singer’s only son, Israel Zamir, in 1929—was expelled from the USSR by the Soviets and, after a sojourn in Istanbul, Turkey, settled in Palestine in 1938, where a few years later Zamir became a young member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa. Singer himself, in 1940, married a German-Jewish refugee, Alma Wassermann, who had fled with her husband and children from Munich, and who, after meeting him at a Catskills summer resort, began an affair that led to leaving her husband and starting a new life with the unknown Yiddish writer. In 1943, he became a citizen of the United States, solidifying his commitment to finding a path in literature as an American writer.

He wanted to get it all on record—not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that he realized was taking place at that very moment.

This biographical background is helpful in understanding the intensity of Singer’s writing during this time. The topics, while covering various aspects of Yiddish culture and Jewish life, are all infused with his personal perspective and experience at the time they were written. This makes his wartime writing fundamentally different from almost everything published to date—nearly thirty books for adults and more than fifteen for children in English translation alone. It opens a new phase in the translation and publication of Singer’s writing, exposing an immediacy and rawness that were, during his lifetime, mediated by the length of time that passed between the writing and translation of a given piece, as well as editorial and cultural concerns reflecting his contemporary American context. The gap between Singer’s Yiddish and English publications, which greatly influenced his decisions, is partly lifted, offering readers more direct access to his perspective on life in the old country from which he came, and the new country where he settled.

One of the most important aspects of this access is the chronological order in which the pieces have been organized. It is the usual practice, for authors who write in the language of the country in which they live, to publish their work in the order that it is written. But as an emigrant writer first publishing in Yiddish and much later translating his work into English, American readers were less often able to engage with Singer’s work chronologically. His first short story collection, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), featured stories that were published, in order of appearance, in 1945, 1957, 1945, 1956, 1956, 1945, 1956, 1943, 1932, 1956, and 1943. Anyone trying to get a sense of Singer’s development as a writer from the arc of the stories as they appeared in the collection would go dizzy bouncing back and forth between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s, making a pit stop in the early 1930s, all without an inkling of what he wrote in between. This non-sequentiality lent a sense of mystery to Singer’s writing. But it did little to offer readers a coherent view of the author’s artistic vision.

Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt takes the opposite approach, following the order in which each article appeared in the Forverts. This offers readers a sense of how Singer’s thinking developed over time while grounding each one in its immediate context. The twenty-five pieces included in this volume were selected from a pool of over one hundred and fifty potential articles. These numbers make it clear that the selection is representative rather than comprehensive—an embarrassment of riches. 

The articles vary across several themes connected to Jewish life and Yiddish culture, including history, customs, the influence of particular individuals, social tendencies, and critiques of the moment in which Singer was living and writing. The themes that emerge most tangibly during this period are the anger and anxiety that Singer felt over the apparent indifference of the Jewish sphere—including in the Yiddish world—over the cultural treasures that were in the process of being lost during World War II. Understanding his literary mission in the years during and after the Holocaust involves a reading of those concerns that he articulated during the time that it was actually taking place. It is no surprise, reading these pieces, that his first literary project after the end of the war was to write The Family Moskat, an epic novel about Jewish life in Poland. For him, Jewish life in the old country was not an abstract idea. It was a visceral loss, not only of the environment in which he grew up, but also of the two figures most directly associated with his own personal upbringing: his mother, who spent the most time raising him, and his older brother, who, in many senses, was the closest figure he had to a father.

These circumstances imbue Singer’s wartime writing with an intensely urgent tone. Singer did not have time to waste in writing the articles that he published during this period. He wanted to get it all on record—not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that he realized was taking place at that very moment. Knowing that a whole world, a whole way of life, a whole cultural treasure bound up with Yiddish and Yiddishkayt—knowing they were all going up in flames before his very eyes—this knowledge was crushing for Singer. It also drove him to put pen to paper and write.

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From Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt, The War Years, 1939-1945. Edited and translated by David Stromberg. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from White Goat Press. 

The beautiful word “Shenandoah,” of unknown Native American origin, stands for a river and an opulently green valley. Willa Cather’s Virginia forebears on both sides had been there for four generations. Winchester township, seat of Frederick County, lies along the old turnpike between North and South and repeatedly changed hands in the course of the Civil War. Willa’s grandfather William Cather, of Welsh ancestry, had stayed resolutely Unionist. Her mother’s people, the Boaks, were secessionists. Her uncle William Seibert Boak had died of his wounds at Manassas. Willa’s mother, Virginia Boak Cather, revered the memory of this nineteen-year-old, her favorite brother, and kept his saber and Confederate flag with her always.

In Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), Cather’s final novel, published seven years prior to her death, she re-created the antebellum world of her grandparents. The setting is Back Creek, where her mother’s people, the Boaks (Blakes in the novel), had been long settled. The year of the novel is 1856. Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, a dropsical invalid, fears that her husband, Henry, is on the verge of having an affair with their “half-caste” housemaid, Nancy, and wishes to sell the girl. Sapphira’s adult daughter—the warmhearted heroine of this otherwise chilly book—arranges for Nancy to escape across the Potomac and on to Canada via the underground railroad.

There is substance to Toni Morrison’s objection that the novel submits its Black heroine to the white gaze of the Colberts; she is understood only from without. Yet in the end it is she, the slave girl, and Till, her mother—subject to the barbarity of the peculiar institution—who emerge as the only unmarred persons in the book. The moral mutilation of having owned chattel persists among the whites, an indelible sin. In the epilogue Nancy returns decades later to visit her former owners. Just such a visitation was among Willa’s earliest memories. It is as though she had all along been treasuring it up for last. “In this book my end was my beginning,” she wrote to Alexander Woollcott. What she knew during the first nine years of life was Back Creek and its environs and nothing beyond. The return of Nancy must have seemed to the little girl a visionary event.

Edith Lewis felt Sapphira had been catalyzed by the deaths of Charles Cather, her father, and, three years later, her mother, Virginia Boak Cather. In relative old age Willa brought all powers to bear on her remotest family recollections, the scenes of early childhood. The valley of the Shenandoah, little on her mind for decades, grew luminous.

Lands west of the Missouri were a strong lure for Virginians in the aftermath of the Civil War. Congress had passed the Homestead Act in 1862; if you were white and male there was land for the taking. As Woodress writes: “A man could plow a straight furrow as far as the horizon, and the rich top soil was said to be twelve feet deep.” This idealism would come up against the unforgiving reality of heat waves cooking the corn in its tassel, grasshopper invasions, howling winters—and the fundamental obduracy of a wild soil never before tilled, shaggy with the high red grass that covered plains as yet unbroken by any plow. Such had been the immemorial homeland of the hunting-and-gathering Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and other Indigenous nations. Such was the original West the first homesteaders came to. Its stubbornness was a trick nature played on the first settlers (some of whom gave up and went back to where they’d come from, or died by suicide, like Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia’s father, in My Ántonia). Here is how Alexandra Bergson puts it in O Pioneers!: “The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right: and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep.” The sea of grass that had covered for numberless ages the landmass from the Missouri to the Rockies became in the course of several decades a breadbasket to the world.

Cather was not slow to note the compensations of the fierce new land: flower-laden springtimes and, above all, brilliant crisp autumns. “In the newest part of the New World,” she wrote in her essay on Nebraska, “autumn is the season of beauty and sentiment, as spring is in the Old World.” By 1882, the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad was running between Chicago and Denver. Red Cloud was a division point along the line, with its newspapers, banks, stores and hotels, smithy and mill. In Webster County, by the time of Willa’s arrival in 1882, there were more immigrants than native stock. She heard a variety of languages and seems to have embraced the confusion almost immediately. After all, she was an immigrant too, and suddenly a member of a minority: the Anglo-Saxon homesteaders.

In the course of the first year on the Divide—as the high ground between the Republican and the Little Blue Rivers and between the Little Blue and the Platte are known—she thought she’d die of homesickness for northern Virginia with its rolling hills and temperate weather. She and the new land— “as naked as the back of your hand”—had it out before she came to love it. Then the desert place became home.

The babel of Scandinavians and Central Europeans and Frenchmen and more captivated her. In this unlikely place she became a citizen of the world. She would say in a 1913 interview: “We had very few American neighbors. They were mostly Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians. I liked them from the first and they made up for what I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women; they understood my homesickness and were kind to me…These old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talked more freely to a child than to grown people…I have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt…as if I had got inside another person’s skin.”

Farm life in rural Webster County did not suit Charles Cather, and after eighteen months he moved his family from the Divide to Red Cloud proper. Having raised sheep in Virginia, he seemed to have found raising hogs and cattle and breaking the soil in Nebraska more than he could handle. In Red Cloud he established a farm loan, insurance, and real-estate concern and made a go of it. That was the autumn of 1884, the year Willa turned eleven. The town would be transubstantiated into Hanover in O Pioneers!, Moonstone in The Song of the Lark, Black Hawk in My Ántonia, Frankfort in One of Ours, Sweet Water in A Lost Lady, and Haverford in Lucy Gayheart. Thus Cather kept faith with the genius loci of her youth.

Her parents purchased a story-and-a-half frame house on the southwest corner of Third and Cedar, and crowded their growing family of children—Willa, Roscoe, Douglass, Elsie—and Mrs. Cather’s mother, and a servant girl, into it. Three more children, John, Jessica, and James, were shortly to follow.

The children slept dormitory-style in the narrow upstairs until Willa, as eldest, got a room of her own—one corner of the L-shaped attic. This became her sanctuary, her solitary reprieve from gregarious family existence. “One realizes,” she writes, “that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net, which circumstances and his own affections have woven around him. One realizes human relations are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time running away from them.” These extraordinary insights are from Cather’s admiring essay on Katherine Mansfield—with whom she shared a desire to capture definitively the way of life of the childhood place (in Mansfield’s case New Zealand) that neither could wait to escape.

The elder personalities of Red Cloud proved nearly as influential on her as family. There was, for example, the Englishman William Ducker, outwardly a failure, who clerked in his prosperous brother’s dry goods store and in the evenings read Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and Anacreon with Willa. She would arrive at the University of Nebraska with a solid grounding in classical languages. Ducker was an amateur scientist as well, with a laboratory fitted up at home. Willa assisted him at his experiments. He was her first encounter with a freethinker and set the pattern for her own intellectual outlook. Edith Lewis reports that one afternoon “she was accompanying him home, and he said to her ‘It’s just as if the lights were going out, Willie.’ After she left him a child came running to call her back. She found Mr. Ducker dead, a copy of the Iliad lying open on the floor beside him.”

There was Dr. Robert Damerell, a local physician who took Willa along on his rounds. Present at the amputation of a young boy’s leg, she was proudly unfazed. It was in these years that she announced her ambition to be a doctor.

And there was Norwegian-born Julia Miner, mother of the Miner sisters. The Miners would be among Willa’s lifelong friends. Mrs. Miner was musically gifted and gave Willa her thrilling first exposure to music. Mrs. Miner would be the prototype for Mrs. Harling in My Ántonia: “Her rapid foot- steps shook her own floor and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the everyday occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings’. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was like a revolution.”

Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School in June 1890. She came first in a class of three and accordingly delivered the valedictory address. Her spirited theme was “Investigation versus Superstition.” She hailed the former and damned the latter. “Since investigation,” she declared, “first led man forth on that great search for truth which has prompted all his progress, superstition—, the stern Pharaoh of his former bondage—, has followed him, retarding every step of the advancement.” For its framing of large concepts, its intellectual assurance, its sheer élan, the address would be extraordinary as a college valedictory. In one as young as Willa, here only sixteen, it is unnerving: “There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation,” she declared to her audience, “a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.”

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Excerpted from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor. Copyright © 2023. Published by arrangement with Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

I first heard of Willa Cather as a teenage bookseller in North Denver, at a new, used, rare, and antiquarian bookshop that had once been a mechanic’s garage. At the bookstore, there was an entire section of Cather’s famous works, which I had labeled meticulously with colored markers on scraps of printer paper. I don’t remember hearing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Instead, I sold heaps of used copies of O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and occasionally The Song of the Lark. Years later as an English major, I would hear these books re- ferred to as “the Nebraska Trilogy,” and despite my father being born and raised in Omaha, I still found them to be of little interest based on the pastoral covers with their willowy fonts and watercolor prairies. Perhaps in that unconscious way we often do, I decided that Cather, as a white woman writer of the Midwest, was simply not for me: a Colorado Chicana, a mixed person of Filipino, Indigenous, and Euro-pean ancestry, a young woman trying and often failing to find herself in the pages of books. What could Cather and I possibly have in common? A lot, I was to find out.

After my first book, Sabrina & Corina, was published in 2019, I traveled throughout the United States reading from my short stories and discussing some of my ancestors’ origins in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I was also at work on my novel, Woman of Light, a reimagining of the lives of my ancestors between 1868 and 1934 and based on our family oral tradition. When crafting the official synopsis for Sabrina & Corina, my publisher settled on the term Indigenous Latinas to describe the cultural identity of my characters in hopes of distilling some sense of their and my deeply complex history. Despite these attempts, I still encountered an abundance of confusion from readers outside of my own culture and region who could not fathom my ancestors’ existence in the American Southwest before the founding of the country. We have always resided in these lands north of the current US-Mexico border, my own roots extending to Pueblos of northern New Mexico. This is where we are from, El Norte, which is also the setting of Willa Cather’s ninth novel, the masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop.

While it is set shortly after the Mexican-American War, Death Comes for the Archbishop opens far from the American Southwest. Cather briefly transports us to Rome in 1848, where three cardinals and a missionary bishop dine in the lush gardens of a villa overlooking the ancient city. On my first book tour, I would mention this time in American his- tory. While many readers in my own region were familiar with the Mexican-American War and the resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the majority of people I met outside the Southwest were unfamiliar with how this conflict shaped the fate of millions. It seemed surprising to many audiences when I told them that California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming had once been Mexico, and before 1821 a territory of Spain, and before that and forever and always it is Native land. There is a saying, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us,” which I used time and time again to help illustrate the geopolitical forces that had shaped my family’s destiny. Despite these efforts, I came home from my first book tour exhausted and made lonely by the sheer amount of historical explanation.

I was living in my former childhood bedroom when I first spotted Death Comes for the Archbishop. While writing late one night, my gaze wandered toward the bookshelf and landed upon a cover illustration of an old adobe church in the desert, red mountains in the distance, and an endless blue sky. What, I thought, is that? Outside was my parents’ neighborhood, dark with early Colorado fall. I stood from my lap- top, drifting toward the book, and then held it for a long while. It was as if the novel and I had made eye contact, a hold- ing of one’s gaze. It was a meeting, I decided, destined to be.

I read Death Comes for the Archbishop in a few days. I carried it with me to waiting rooms and in long lines at the post office. While I was used to scrolling the shallows of Instagram in the spare moments of my day, Death Comes for the Archbishop held my attention with Cather’s magnificent descriptions of the American Southwest and close psychological observations of religious figures I had often thought were narratively off-limits: priests. The novel reminded me of my insatiable childhood reading habits—the all-nighters locked in a bathroom, the only place where I could keep a light on without detection in a household of seven children. Cather had awoken in me a type of pleasure-reading that over the years had eroded with deadlines, assignments, and the long list of reasons why we do not read out of desire but instead out of duty.

Soon after reading the novel, I spoke at a college in Winter Park, Florida. A student asked what I had been reading lately. Emphatically, I spurted out, “Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. I’ve never seen the history of my ancestors glimpsed this way before in a novel. It’s not from our perspective or anything like that, but there we are, alongside these priests in the lands of my ancestors.” Afterward, the poet Billy Collins surprised me at my book signing table. We had met briefly years earlier in Key West, and I wasn’t sure if he remembered me, but he did, and, more important, he also had been reading Death Comes for the Archbishop. I can’t remember exactly what he had said, but there was a sense of shared discovery of greatness. “It’s wonderful,” I had said. “I hope more people read it.” It became a mission of mine that day, a project of sorts. I wanted my readers to read Cather. It was as simple as that. I had been startled into attention at seeing my own history on the page.

The prologue for Death Comes for the Archbishop feels like the narrative equivalent of eavesdropping on a nearby table at a lightly populated restaurant. There is little context, some guiding dates and descriptions of the men and their at- tire. Cather is not overly generous in her atmospheric details. She is a stylist who at least in her age predates Hemingway in her proclivity toward sparsity. “But is not realism,” Cather wrote in her 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé,” “more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague definition of the sympathy and candor with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?”

They were talking business: had met, indeed, to discuss an anticipated appeal from the Provincial Council at Baltimore for the founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in New Mexico—a part of North America recently annexed to the United States. This new territory was vague to all of them, even to the missionary Bishop. The Italian and French Cardinals spoke of it as Le Mexique, and the Spanish host referred to it as “New Spain.”

Within the prologue, Cather mentions the physical realm: the stars coming out at night, the garden and hills, glasses of wine emptied and refilled, but the focal point is the tenor of the conversation. There is a land newly acquired by the Americans through force of war, there are some “thirty In- dian nations . . . each with its own customs and languages,” and there are also the “Mexicans, a naturally devout people.”

Us, I thought. She is describing us.

This feeling of recognition, of being glimpsed at the periphery of a great American writer’s consciousness, was not an experience accustomed to me. It had occurred more directly in the pages of Rudolfo Anaya and Arturo Islas, but their seminal works are set well into the twentieth century. Entering the world of Death Comes for the Archbishop was perhaps the first time I felt the narrative universe of my family’s oral tradition converging with the novel form. Is this what it feels like, I had thought, to read as the majority? To see yourself and your history in books nearly every time you crack open a spine?

It wasn’t a perfect match, as I would discover throughout the course of reading the novel. Cather was not necessarily my literary ancestor. She was closer to something like a neighbor, my fellow literary countryman.

Willa Cather was born in 1873 into a landowning family in Virginia and was the eldest of seven children. Her family moved to Nebraska when Willa was nine years old, eventually settling in Red Cloud, a railroad town and farming community in the rolling prairie of Pawnee lands. She was a precocious child who delighted in literature and art. In the relatively crammed house she shared with her family and an intellectually disabled domestic worker named Margie Anderson, Willa was allowed her own sanctuary in the either frigid or blazingly hot attic, a small nook formed into a bed- room and covered in wallpaper of her choosing. Her ambition was not yet to become an author. She wanted to be a surgeon, but it was a profession reserved at the time for men. As a teenager, Willa arrived at the University of Nebraska with short hair and dressed in masculine clothing, preferring the name William. In fact, one of her mentors, Sarah Orne Jewett, later criticized Cather for her tendency to write fiction from male perspectives, labeling it a form of masquerade. Despite these outward influences pushing Cather toward a life of more commonplace femininity, the young writer sought work in the predominantly male world of publishing. She began her writing life with essays and reviews in Nebraska, which led to an editorial job in Pittsburgh and eventually New York City, where she worked as managing editor of McClure’s, one of the most successful literary magazines of its time. During these formative years, Cather also met her lifelong romantic partner, Edith Lewis, who would first ac- company her to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915, a trip that would later prove monumental in its influence.

Death Comes for the Archbishop at its heart is an adventure tale inspired by the real lives of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and his vicar, Father Joseph Machebeuf. Following two French missionary priests, distinct in their complementary personalities, there’s reserved Father Jean Marie Latour and outgoing Father Joseph Vaillant. They journey throughout the American Southwest, the farthest reaches of the Santa Fe Trail, as power moves from the Mexican diocese in Durango to that of the recently arrived Americans in Santa Fe. The priests seek to spread the faith and build a cathedral in the desert while the land transitions, from one nation to another, with Old World European ideals butting against a newly asserted American dominance, but there is a deeper, more com- plicated cultural undercurrent to nearly every chapter of the novel. Throughout the novel, the narrative again rests at the junction of French, Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Middle Eastern, a cultural tapestry born out of layered conquest. In the chapter “A Bell and a Miracle,” this convergence is exemplified in the pleasant music of the Angelus bell.

“[T]he inscription [on the bell] is in Spanish…It must have been brought up from Mexico City in an ox-cart…and the silver of the Spaniards was really Moorish, was it not?… The Spaniards knew nothing about working silver except as they learned it from the Moors…The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors.” 

While reading the novel, I found myself asking how Cather knew such depth of nuanced information about the American Southwest. Cather, who so often wrote of the Midwest and its European immigrant communities, had a fascination with the region, the Southwest first appearing in her work in 1909 with the short story “The Enchanted Bluff.” The region would emerge again in her writing in The Song of the Lark (1915), The Professor’s House (1925), and, of course, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). We currently exist in a time when writers are asked to almost exclusively write of our own experiences. This made me wonder: how had Cather embodied characters and landscapes so different from her own? She was a meticulous observer, I came to realize, of both human psychology and place. Take, for example, Father Latour’s journey to Santa Fe with his Navajo guide Eusabio and a pack mule. Latour is struck with splendor at the sight.

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

A voracious tourist, Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912 on a trip to see her brother in Winslow, Arizona. During that trip, Cather wrote a friend, “The West always paralyzes me a little . . . I always feel afraid of losing something, and I don’t in the least know what it is.”4 Unlike Cather, I cannot recall my first experiences with the land—it is the mode of my existence. Born in a Denver hospital, I must have been only days old when I was first carried beneath that vast and brilliant blue sky. I cannot recall feeling a sense of loss or fear at the landscape in the way Cather could coming to the West at nine years old. Instead, I feel wholeness. I am of this place, and despite these differences in our backgrounds and perceptions, Death Comes for the Archbishop still amazes me with its enlivened depictions of landscape.

Rather than a mere backdrop, the physical lands of the novel are imbued with emotional resonance. Upon looking back at Santa Fe, Father Vaillant takes in the sight of the town “rosy in the morning light, the mountain behind it, and the hills close about it like two encircling arms.” The desert wind does not simply blow across the earth but makes “a hollow sound as it sucked down through the deep arroyo.” Cather insisted that words like arroyo and adobe were not altered for translated editions of the novel. There is no other way to say it, she insisted. In a letter to Knopf, objecting to errors in the French translation, Cather wrote, “How can one paraphrase a landscape which one has never seen?” But alongside the priests’ deep reverence for the land, they often reveal a sense of terror and incomprehensibility. It is a place that feels to them so featureless it is “crowded with features.”5 In one of the most affecting passages of the novel, “Snake Root,” a Pecos Pueblo man named Jacinto seeks shelter in an underground cave with Father Latour during a great and blinding snowstorm. The cavern is described as lofty and gothic, almost chapel-like. It is a moment charged with mystery and Father Latour’s fear at the unknowns of ancient custom and beliefs that predate Christianity on the continent.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
“It is terrible,” he said at last, as he rose.

Terror, it should be said, does enter the narrative on more than one occasion. There is confusion about the landscape, fear of starvation and thirst, violence and massacres, villains of the highest Western order. In a novel that is woven with episodic moments of significance, the harrowing scene of a Mexican woman named Magdalena and her serial killer American husband reverberates long after one has finished reading the book. Near the village of Mora, the priests find themselves traveling into the night as their mules wither with exhaustion. They come upon a “wretched” adobe house where an American stranger appears at the door, inviting them to stay the night. Inside they find a home where dirty clothes and wet socks hang from chairs, and in that dark space she appears: Magdalena, a woman who at first the priests assume is “half-witted” with a “stupid face.” It is not surprising to read such frankly racist depictions of Mexican women in a novel written by a white writer in the 1920s, but what is surprising is what happens next. Magdalena, without utter- ing a sound, warns the priests that her husband will in fact kill them in the night.

Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger she pointed them away, away!—two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat—and vanished. The doorway was empty; the two priests stood staring at it, speechless. That flash of electric passion had been so swift, the warning it communicated so vivid and definite, that they were struck dumb.
Father Joseph was the first to find his tongue. “There is no doubt of her meaning. Your pistol is loaded, Jean?” 

There is a tension throughout the narrative of what can be conveyed through language and what cannot. Magdalena, who at first is reduced by the priests to shorthand, a stereotype of intellectual ineptitude, proves to be a savior. I couldn’t help but wonder if Magdalena was somehow related to the many women of my community and family history, Mexican- American women who have fallen victim to brutalization at the hands of white American men.

When I learned that I had the opportunity to write this introduction, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to visit Red Cloud, Ne- braska, Willa Cather’s foundational home. Throughout my childhood, my family drove the long stretch of I-80 across Nebraska to visit our grandparents in Omaha. My father was born there, and my mother was relocated by her single mother in the 1970s to Grand Island. Our family in Nebraska, besides being Catholic, was not the same as my vast Chicano and Filipino side in Denver. For one, they are white, of Polish and German descent. What I knew of Catholicism is that it was one of the major roots to my family tree of several ethnicities and ancestries. Save for a Jewish maternal grandmother raised in a Catholic orphanage, of my varied ancestors their great commonality was religion.

In Nebraska, my ancestors were bakers and salesmen, and the cultural mode of the family was much more distant and silent than that of my maternal side. I can define this relation- ship through a prominent childhood memory. It is of my father standing in the driveway of his parents’ west Omaha home. He is saying goodbye to my grandfather, who is dying slowly of Parkinson’s disease. It is late November, and that flat world is cast in a great gray screen. The two men do not em- brace and there is no laughter or declarations of affection. My father does not utter, “I love you, Dad,” and his father does not utter, “I love you, Son.” They discreetly shake hands and that is that, and we are on our way, back home to Colorado.

While I was in Red Cloud, it was early summer and I was taken by the prairie scenery, the endless green and the way the wind rippled across the high grass. Birds lifted into flight and the town itself felt charged with stories. I stayed the night in the Cathers’ summer house and walked the hardwood floors, imagining a young Willa visiting her family on trips home from her busy life in New York City. Before leaving town, I made it a point to stop at Mr. Shimerda’s suicide grave from My Ántonia, but I never made it. A tornado warning came over the radio and the air turned acrid and grim. I raced along county roads, hoping to avoid the storm, and as I charged out of Red Cloud, I couldn’t help but notice that the sand hills oddly reminded me of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. When I arrived to meet my parents later that night, I asked my father, “How did your people, my people, arrive in Nebraska?”

My American story and the history of my ancestors is one of convergence. It does not begin in 1776. Our stories start elsewhere, in the center of our world. Death Comes for the Archbishop speaks to the idea of nation building. How are a people formed? Who gives us our common stories and how do those tales permeate into the collective? Perhaps it is through missionary priests, or a public school system, media, literature, art, but there is a guiding mythology that is curated to fit the needs of the nation. As a Chicana of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, defining my cultural heritage and the historical framework that created a person like me often proves difficult. Death Comes for the Arch- bishop made an aspect of my own history tangible through story. I have been confounded for much of my life by the American desire to place identity neatly into one box. I have been asked to narrow my cultural heritage, to make things easier, streamlined, avoidant. One of the most surprising aspects of Death Comes for the Archbishop is the way that Cather seems to predict the emergence of future generations born out of convergence. That shared glance, the acknowledgment of something destined to be. It’s as if the furthest reaches of the Cather imagination are somehow, nearly one hundred years later, meeting with my own.

Now it is with great pleasure that I invite you, dear reader, into the Southwest lands of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Perhaps this novel will teach you something new about human nature and the layered conquest of our nation, who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t, but more than anything I hope this masterpiece informs a deeper understanding of yourself and of your own history. But if not, Death Comes for the Archbishop is still one heck of an adventure, a novel that has endured for a century, and in a hundred more years, I would wager that Father Latour and Father Vaillant are still riding their mules throughout the imaginations of readers across the globe, even in the most desolate of deserts.

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A new introduction by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.  From Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright © 2023 by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

Shakespeare’s First Folio Title Page

Shakespeare’s First Folio Table of Contents

Shakespeare’s First Folio — The Tempest

Shakespeare’s First Folio — The Tempest (page 2)

Shakespeare’s First Folio — Henry V

Shakespeare’s First Folio — Romeo & Juliet

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Images © The British Library Board, excerpted with permission from Shakespeare’s First Folio: 400th Anniversary Facsimile Edition: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published According to the Original Copies, published by Rizzoli in the USA and The British Library Publishing in the United Kingdom.

The first glimpse of a new, American approach to Austen appeared without fanfare in the reference volume A Brief Handbook of English Authors (1883/4), compiled by Oscar Fay Adams (1855–1919). In its entirety, Adams’s entry for Austen reads:

Austen, Jane. 1775–1817. Novelist. Author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Emma, The Watsons, and Lady Susan. These novels are examples of the finest literary art, and have delighted cultured minds for almost three generations. Her character-drawing is strong and realistic. See Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1863. See Jane Austen and Her Works by Sarah Tytler (pub. 1881). Pub. Har. Por. Lit. Rou.

Adams’s expertise in Austen is evident in his lists of both primary and secondary works. Her uncompleted, manuscript novels The Watsons and Lady Susan had just been published in America in 1882. Up to date too was Tytler’s Jane Austen and Her Works, the first book on Austen by a fellow woman writer: the Scottish novelist Henrietta Keddie, writing under a pseudonym. Though less current, Adams’s inclusion of the February 1863 Atlantic Monthly article is a telling choice as well. Rather than recommending one of the many recent periodical pieces on Austen, Adams instead reached back two decades to Mrs. R. C. Waterston’s essay “Jane Austen,” a heartfelt appreciation that incorporated details from Waterston’s correspondence with and visit to Austen’s oldest surviving brother, Admiral Sir Francis W. Austen.

Who was this Oscar Fay Adams, who united knowledge about Austen with enthusiasm? When A Brief Handbook of English Authors, his first book, was released, Adams was supporting himself as a schoolteacher in Erie, Pennsylvania, while beginning to publish short fiction and poetry in periodicals. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1855, Adams was educated as a teacher at the New Jersey State Normal School, now The College of New Jersey: a far cry from prestigious universities such as Harvard, at which George Pellew wrote his doctoral dissertation on Austen in 1883, the same year that Adams was finishing his Handbook. Later in the 1880s, Adams moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he made the acquaintance of authors and scholars more distinguished than himself, many of whom were featured in the same “Literary Boston” article from which this chapter’s frontispiece portrait of him is reprinted. He joined the Boston Authors Club, which was founded in 1886, served for many years as the organization’s secretary, and bequeathed a selection of his literary manuscripts to the Club upon his death in 1919. Included in that bequest was Adams’s prized possession: a 1796 Austen letter given to him by the author’s great-nephew, Edward, Lord Brabourne.

Few documents concerning the genesis of Adams’s writings on Austen have survived, and still fewer that shed light on his life. In 1928, his sister, Emma L. Adams, presented to the American Antiquarian Society his scrapbook of newspaper clippings and a folder of letters received by him. These never-before-consulted archival materials illuminate the reception of Adams’s critical edition of Austen, Chapters from Jane Austen (1888/9), as well as the preparation and reception of his biography, The Story of Jane Austen’s Life (1891, 1896/7). That Adams, who never married, sought and found emotional intimacy with men is suggested by a series of twelve candid letters that he wrote to the poet and biographer George Edward Woodberry. Certainly, Adams’s respectful treatment in his biography of Austen’s status as a single woman indicates that he was not hemmed in by conventional thinking about gender or marriage.

As Austen’s first critical editor, in Chapters from Jane Austen, and her first critical biographer, in The Story of Jane Austen’s Life, Adams inaugurated the discipline of Austen scholarship. What’s more, he wrote informatively and clearly about Austen’s novels and life, and he went to great lengths to include contemporary photographs of Austen-related sites in the second edition of his biography. By doing so, Adams encouraged and equipped a new generation of readers, including but not limited to Americans, to cultivate their own appreciation of Austen’s works. Thus Adams stands too as the founder of what we would now call public humanities writing on Austen. All these extraordinary contributions he made with the credential only of his teaching degree, and without any academic affiliation at all.

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The significance of Adams’s Chapters from Jane Austen, which was published by Lee and Shepard of Boston, has been entirely overlooked. Of this pioneering edition of Austen for American readers, the bibliographer David Gilson comments only that “[t]he editor gives for each novel a list of characters and the text of selected chapters, with connecting summary.” In fact, Adams acted as Austen’s earliest critical editor. He collated published versions of her novels in order to present an accurate text. He synthesized existing criticism on Austen in his forty-page Introduction and listed his sources in the first-ever bibliography of works on Austen. Finally, Adams created thoughtful explanatory footnotes for Austen’s novels intended especially for American readers.

The disregard for Chapters from Jane Austen doubtless stems in large part from its packaging and marketing as a book for children. Its title page proclaims that the volume is part of the “Cambridge Series of English Classics.” According to WorldCat, only one other book appeared in this series: Readings from the Waverly Novels (1889), which presented “Sir Walter Scott for young people edited for school and home use by Albert Blaisdell, A. M.” Blaisdell, the author of several textbooks on literature and health, stated in his Preface that he aimed to “foster a taste for good literature” among “pupils in our schools.” He did not annotate his chosen excerpts from Scott’s novels, judging that “[t]he selections speak for themselves.”

Adams’s Preface to Chapters from Jane Austen makes plain that he envisioned a very different audience and purpose for his volume than did Blaisdell. “The student of literature needs no introduction to Jane Austen,” Adams declares, since:

he has long since learned to know and to admire her. But to the general reader hers is not the familiar name one could wish it to be; or, if familiar, it is only as a name, it is to be feared. The purpose of the present volume is to supply such information concerning Miss Austen and her works as shall enable the ordinary reader to feel that he knows at least more of her than her name, and is in a position to form for himself an intelligent appreciation of her genius.

In other words, Adams designed Chapters from Jane Austen not for schoolchildren but for a “general” and “ordinary” reader who has a mind of his [sic] own—and who might well be prejudiced against Austen. Pragmatically, Adams acknowledges that some might use Chapters from Jane Austen only to gain “the satisfaction of knowing who Jane Austen was, and what she accomplished.” He expresses his hope, however, that many more “may be led to examine the novels in their entirety.”

In keeping with his goal of helping each reader “form for himself an intelligent appreciation” of Austen, Adams presents Austen’s six novels in the order of their composition, as then understood: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. He precedes each excerpt from a novel with the work’s dates of writing, revision, and publication. Furthermore, Adams presents extensive excerpts from commentary on Austen’s novels. He states that he has chosen his “introductory matter . . . from the mass of material relating to Jane Austen, mainly with a view to present what was freshest and unhackneyed; and, in the cases of Mrs. Thackeray-Ritchie and Miss Keddie, with the purpose also of showing the estimate placed upon Miss Austen by novelists of her own sex.”  Well beyond mere suggestions for further reading, which Blaisdell provided for Scott’s novels, Adams supplied what he termed a “partial bibliography.” He included therein full citations for J. E. Austen- Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870, 1871), Lord Brabourne’s 1884 edition of Austen’s letters, Tytler’s Jane Austen and Her Works, and Pellew’s Jane Austen’s Novels, plus briefer citations for several dozen reviews and articles from British and American periodicals (365–6).

Both Adams’s selections from criticism and his bibliography were groundbreaking. True, J. E. Austen-Leigh had assembled praise for Austen’s works in his Memoir, even adding “Opinion of American readers” to his second edition, as I noted in Reading Austen in America. In a biography by a proud family member addressed primarily to an English audience, however, such passages serve a very different function than they do in Adams’s introduction to Austen’s novels for American readers. By carefully sifting through observations on Austen and preparing a detailed bibliography, Adams enabled not only enjoyment of Austen’s works but also serious study of them.

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Excerpted from A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist by Juliette Wells. Copyright (c) 2023 Bloomsbury. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

When she was in high school in the early 1950’s, Joanna Russ (1930–2011) read Mark Twain’s short story  “A Medieval Romance,” about a duke without a male heir who brings his daughter up to fill the role, hiding her gender from all. Things get complicated when the duke’s niece falls in love with his “son,” threatening to reveal her true identity and upset the succession. Russ, who would go on to become a groundbreaking queer feminist science fiction author, recalled that Twain’s story became “an extremely important part of my fantasy life.” In college, however, Russ struggled to reconcile that fantasy life with the heteronormative expectations around her. Those feelings “didn’t count, except in my own inner world in which I could not only love women but also fly, ride the lightning, be Alexander the Great, live forever, etc.” Eventually Russ would find a way to channel that disjunction into a remarkable body of literature, including the revolutionary novel The Female Man (1975).

That novel and a selection of other novels and stories by Russ have now been collected and reissued by the Library of America. Not long ago, I sat down with the volume’s editor, Nicole Rudick, to talk about Russ’s life, work, and her reputation as one of the fiercest critics ever to write about science fiction.

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Jon Michaud: How did you discover Russ’s work and what were your first impressions?

Nicole Rudick: The first thing I read of hers was The Female Man. My husband was reading a ton of science fiction and when he finished the novel he said, “You should read this.” It was incredible to me that this book existed and I had never heard of it. I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t more widely known, because it’s just astonishing, in subject and style, and it still feels so urgent, even though it was written fifty years ago. It’s not a utopia, but when Russ writes about women’s freedom on the women-only Whileaway, I was nearly in tears. After that, we tracked down all of her books, which were a little hard to find, because they’re all out of print.

JM: How did this anthology come about? Why did you think this was a good time to relaunch Russ to the world?

NR: It seemed obvious to me that her work should be back in print. The Library of America had done a number of Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick anthologies. They had also published Octavia Butler’s work and had done the first volume of The Future is Female. So they had a recent history of publishing the work of science fiction writers. It seemed obvious that Russ should be among them. She’s essential to the history of the genre, and I wanted to see her alongside those writers. I pitched it to the LoA, and they said yes, pretty much immediately.

I was eager to see it published in-series, in one of those beautiful black covers, because her work deserves to sit alongside Le Guin, Dick, and Butler in a place of importance. And not just among the science fiction writers but in relation to significant literary writers in general. So then it became a matter of making a volume that could be priced in such a way that people who didn’t know her would feel comfortable picking it up. Too many pages and the volume becomes more expensive. Once we had a page range, it became a matter of selecting work that would put her best foot forward—which novels and stories best exemplified her talents and the variety of work she had written.

I knew we had to put all of the Alyx stories in, which had never all been collected before. [Samuel R.] “Chip” Delany is Russ’s biggest fan and was her longtime friend—they met in 1966. I got to tell him that I was doing this Russ volume, and he was over the moon. He insisted that we put in “A Game of Vlet,” which had never been published with the other Alyx stories, so now we have her early fantasy stories, starring Alyx, all in one place. The Female Man had to be in there and We Who Are About To…, a novel I really love, because it starts off like a typical science fiction story—a crash landing on a desolate planet—but turns into a completely different kind of book in the second half, a story about a solitary woman who is coming to terms with her past, her present, and her future and her place in society. Then On Strike Against God, which is a realist novel about a woman realizing she’s a lesbian. It’s taken very much from Russ’s own life. The two other stories are “When it Changed,” which was her breakthrough short story, just before The Female Man, and “Souls,” a gorgeous story about an abbey invaded by Norsemen. There’s a bit of a surprise at the end, which I won’t spoil.

This volume doesn’t represent her voluminous nonfiction feminist writing and criticism. She also wrote a children’s book, Kittattiny, which l read to my daughter and we both love.

JM: Let’s talk about Russ’s development as a writer. She grew up in New York, went to Cornell. She studied with Nabokov, correct?

NR: True, though I think it’s a little overstated. She studied with him in her last year at Cornell and dedicated “Picnic on Paradise” to him and to S.J. Perelman, but I think she came to feel a little silly about that. She named them both as stylistic influences, and she and Nabokov certainly share a metafictional approach, but she talked a lot more throughout her life about George Bernard Shaw.

She grew up loving science, and was a top 10 finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1953. She graduated high school early, and then went to Cornell and switched over to literature. She said that she came out to herself as a lesbian privately when she was a kid and went right back in because she had no models. She didn’t feel that it was real, that it could be done. And that continued at Cornell, where things were pretty traditional in terms of gender roles. And then she went to Yale and studied playwriting but found that she was not very good at it. When she returned to New York, she worked odd jobs, did some theater work, and made some adaptations for radio at WBAI. She was also writing stories and publishing them in little journals and SF magazines.

In the late 60s, she started writing stories about Alyx. She said it was the hardest thing she ever did in her life, to conceive of a tough, independent female protagonist and get it on the page. Feminism was not widespread in the United States at that moment and Russ wasn’t involved in consciousness-raising groups or anything like that, so it was a solitary time to be writing these sorts of things. But they did well. Picnic in Paradise, her novella about Alyx, won a Nebula Award. And then in ‘67, she was back at Cornell, as a teacher, and in ‘69, there was a colloquium on women in the United States organized by the university in the intercession period—Betty Friedan and Kate Millett and a bunch of other panelists talking about sexuality, race, and why women see each other the way that they do. They approached these issues as social problems, not individual problems. Russ was there, and her description of it is so funny—“Marriages broke up; people screamed at each other who had been friends for years…. The skies flew open.” A wave of feminism washed over Cornell, and she sat down and wrote “When it Changed” in the weeks afterwards. Six months later, she saw a novel in the story and wrote The Female Man. But she couldn’t find a publisher. She wanted it published by a trade press and they all rejected it. The excuses were like, “There’s more feminism than science fiction”—that from Viking Press. A lot of women editors were baffled by it and turned it down. It finally got bought by Frederick Pohl [at Bantam Books] in 1975.

JM: What was the reception for The Female Man when it was published?

NR: A lot of people loved it. Over ten years, it ended up selling 500,000 copies. But plenty of others took issue with it. They thought it was angry, too political, that there was too much message. There were also complaints about the way it was written, that it was too hard to follow. There hadn’t been anything like it before in science fiction, and the novel is quite pointed in its feminism and critique of social systems. Some people were not ready for it. I imagine that even now there are people who will think it’s too much. Russ is so no-nonsense, so unabashed about writing how and what she wants to write. I’m trying to avoid using words like “aggressive” and “angry”—she was aggressive and angry and she had every reason to be angry, but these are terms that she gets saddled with, without also acknowledging that she was acid and brilliant and funny and playful.

JM: How were Russ’s relations with her peers—the New Wave writers of the 1960s who were showcased in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions anthology?

NR: The key American figures of that group are Russ, Delany, Le Guin, James Tiptree, Tom Disch, and Dick, though they weren’t all doing the same sort of things. She and Disch were friendly, but she and Dick didn’t always see eye to eye. Russ met Delany very early and they remained friends for the rest of her life. He admired her writing from the start and published her in Quark, the anthology he edited with Marilyn Hacker. Delany and Russ were correspondents for decades, and their letters to one another are prolific and deeply intellectual and opinionated. They write at length about science, literature, life and what they are thinking, doing, and reading. Sometimes Russ will take him to task for what she sees as mistakes, and Delany is very forgiving of her when she is angry with him—more so than anybody else.

JM: Delany, too, was an outsider from the mainstream of science fiction. He was black and gay. That must have helped them to establish a bond.

NR: They were the intellectuals. And she was so insistent about her opinions and, later, about her needs as a disabled person that I think she felt herself a bit on the outside. She was a woman writing science fiction, a feminist, a disabled person, and a lesbian. She wrote work that didn’t always fit easily into one genre or another, and she introduced feminist criticism to SF. All of this puts her in a pretty unique position. She was also tough on people and demanding, so perhaps not always very likable.

JM: Russ was critical of Le Guin, wasn’t she?

NR: Russ’s issue with Le Guin, put simply, is that Le Guin was one of the best known women writing science fiction and she was not dealing with feminism or the subject of women in a way that Russ felt she should be. Russ felt that Le Guin had an obligation, as a prominent woman of science fiction, to address these issues. Le Guin has written herself that she was late to do so. The best known point of contact for their disagreement is Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, where she used male pronouns to refer to androgynous characters, and Russ called her out publicly.

Russ would write bitterly about Le Guin in her private letters. But it’s important to recognize that they were coming at science fiction from very different backgrounds and with very different aims. There are people who prefer one over the other, but you can love both quite easily. And I do. There are fundamental differences in what they were after. It’s a gross simplification, but Le Guin is sociological, and Russ is political. Russ believed that there was no separation between politics and life and that invented worlds should not be escapes from reality. But there are moments in her letters where she admits that she admires things about Le Guin—she once called it “disappointed adoration.” When Russ’s physical problems made it impossible for her to keep writing, she wrote to a friend that she was envious of Le Guin because she was still writing away. It’s a much more complex relationship than I think is understood.

JM: We’ve talked about Le Guin, and we’ve talked about Delany. Another important figure is James Tiptree, who also had a long correspondence with Russ. Did Russ know that Tiptree was actually a woman?

NR: No. Nobody did. Tiptree wrote a beautiful letter to Russ, revealing herself to be Alice Sheldon—I remember Julie Phillips reproducing part of it in her biography of Tiptree. She wrote to apologize for the deception, and she feared that she was going to lose all of her friends. Russ didn’t care about the Tiptree business, which is lovely. They stayed correspondents for years, and Tiptree was admiring of Russ’s anger but also felt burned by it. Tiptree was writing to Le Guin at the same time, and they complained to each other about that aspect of Russ sometimes. I think Tiptree was a bit closer with Le Guin than with Russ, and you can see Tiptree in the middle when Russ complains to her about Le Guin. And Russ was a sort of intermediary between Tiptree and Delany.

JM: Talk a little bit more about Russ as a critic. Why is she so important and what’s her legacy as a critic?

NR: As I said, she introduced feminist critique to science fiction. It provided a new way to look at what was happening in SF stories—not only to assess contemporary work but to think about the history of the genre, what had been written, what had gotten published, how it was read and received. And that was essential because the way women were portrayed in literature, and by extension the way they were treated in life, had to change. She called people out quite boldly. Her later book How to Suppress Women’s Writing is a damning collection of the various ways women and their writing have been dismissed over time. That book, too, was rejected numerous times, also by women. One editor said she heard “this particular whine” often. But Russ was very vocal about the idea that if you can’t imagine in science fiction a world where women are equal, then how can you do it in real life? She also critiqued writing for its stylistic and conceptual flaws. Her critical writing is of a piece with her fiction in that she didn’t mince words. She could be really brutal in her criticism. But I think by calling people out she made people aware of their attitudes and biases.

JM: Is there an example of a book or a writer that she called out?

NR: “Robert Silverberg is a sossidge-factory trying to become an artist.” That’s one she ended up apologizing for much later, and it’s pretty extreme. A lot of people took issue with her reviews, but she wasn’t often wrong.

JM: You’ve already talked a little bit about Russ’s queer identity and that she struggled with it. She was actually married for a while, yes?

NR: A very short marriage. She got married because that’s what people did.

JM: She was struggling against expectations as a person and she was also struggling against expectations as a science fiction writer, right? She has a lot of genre elements in her work, but she deploys them in unconventional ways. Was there a kind of liberation on the page where she could do whatever she wanted, a liberation that she perhaps didn’t find in her life?

NR: Yes, there was liberation, and she was also thinking on the page. There’s so much thinking in We Who Are About To…  and The Female Man. Both deal, in different ways, with open-ended questions: What is the best way to live? How do we reconcile our needs and selves with a society that refuses to fully recognize us? She didn’t have the answers herself. Even after she was known to be a lesbian, she could still be cagey about it. Her sexuality was complicated. She did have mostly relationships with women, but occasionally there was a man.

JM: Who, among today’s writers, would you say is indebted to Russ’s work?

NR: That’s a good question and hard to answer because Russ has been under the radar for so long. I think she has been an influence on Carmen Maria Machado, Nisi Shawl, and Stephanie Burt, and during her own lifetime, she had fans in Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Joan Acocella, and Dale Spender. I should mention, too, that she taught writing and literature at the university level for decades and lectured at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. I don’t think we have a sense of how influential she may have been.

JM: Is it true that Russ was also a practitioner of fanfiction?

NR: Oh yes. “Kirk/Spock” slash fic. In the early 80s, a friend of hers passed along some K/S someone else had written, and Russ was immediately into it. K/S was mostly written by women, and it told stories about romantic and/or sexual relationships between Kirk and Spock. It was appealing both as a vision of a romantic relationship between equals and as pornography for women. Russ loved it and started writing it and published a handful of stories in zines. It’s kind of amazing—she gets the characters right, despite the change in situation. And it makes sense within her larger body of work. She wanted to see what it would look like and know how it would feel to experience a caring and equal sexual relationship.

JM: What resources are available for readers who want to learn more about Russ’s life?

NR: There isn’t much. Gwyneth Jones wrote a critical work called Joanna Russ about Russ’s writing that incorporates some of her biography. And Farah Mendelsohn has edited On Joanna Russ, a collection of essays in which different writers address various aspects of her career and writing. I think there’s some research going on in France right now on Russ, but there is as yet no major biography. But I can’t imagine a better subject.

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Nicole Rudick is the author of What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Siglio, 2022). Her criticism has been published most recently in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Apollo, and she has been an editor at The Paris Review, Bookforum, and Artforum.

Before invading Ukraine, Russia’s President Putin laid out his justification for military action in long, angry speeches. Among false claims about Ukrainian atrocities against Russians and his well-worn lament about encroaching Western influence, he invoked a past “since time immemorial” when the people living within what he considers the artificially drawn borders of Ukraine “called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.” Seven months into the invasion, after some 13 million Ukrainians had been displaced and thousands of civilians and military personnel killed, the Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, blessed Putin’s war. “Sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins,” Kirill said. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, long under the Moscow Patriarchate’s jurisdiction, declared independence, part of a major schism in the Orthodox church.

As the war stretched on, I read from the writings of a 17th Century Russian archpriest named Avvakum, who lived during another time of great upheaval in the Russian Orthodox church. In 1652 a newly installed patriarch in Moscow, Nikon, enacted a litany of reforms. Many seem trivial in retrospect: how many fingers should be used to cross oneself, pronouncing Hallelujah three times instead of two during service, allowing parishioners to bow rather than prostrate themselves. Nikon also made uniform ecclesiastical books and aligned them more closely to their Greek counterparts.

The idea was to centralize and standardize Russian liturgical practices while bringing them closer to the Greek rituals from which they originated. It was also a power-seeking move, for Nikon personally and for the Church more broadly. Nikon wanted the Church to be as powerful as the Tsar. For Avvakum, and his followers, the reforms were, in his words, “venom” that brought Russia one step closer to the Antichrist. Though the Tsar seemed to initially harbor warm feelings for the rising archpriest, Avvakum’s stubborn and public resistance to the changes was chaotic and untenable. The conflict between reformers and Old Believers, as Avvakum’s followers came to be known, led to a major Schism in the Church and Tsar Alexey banished the archpriest to Siberia.

It was there that he wrote his autobiography, The Life Written by Himself. The Life is sodden with suffering. Avvakum describes an official who “raged savagely” against him: he rushed into Avvakum’s house, “and having beaten me he gnawed the fingers of my hand with his teeth like a dog. And when his throat filled with blood, he loosed my hand from his teeth, and leaving me he went home.” Avvakum wrapped his hand and went to Vespers, only to be attacked by the same official once more, this time with a pistol. Another official threw him from a ship into the Volga River when Avvakum refused to bless his son, who had a “lechery-loving countenance.” Reassigned to a new parish, his new subjects rioted. Some 1,500 of them dragged Avvakum out into the street to beat him with clubs and stove hooks, howling, “Kill the crook, the son of a whore, and we’ll pitch his carcass in the ditch for the dogs!”

I initially picked up The Life around 2015, as research for what became my debut novel, Lost Believers. Like Avvakum, a main character in my book is an Old Believer. Since their emergence as a sect, Old Believers have been persecuted in Russia for maintaining ancient liturgical rituals. The archpriest, who paid with his life for fighting the reforms, was a hero to his people. On my first reading, his autobiography struck me as bombastic, almost gothic.

The Life was unusual for its time. Avvakum’s account was written under his name, rather than anonymously, and in Russian vernacular—perhaps so more people could read his story, or perhaps, as some scholars have suggested, because of his limited education. Whatever the reason, the result is a voicey, colorful text: “The rigid norms of the Church language had long had a leveling effect on individual style, reflecting the value placed on Truth expressed rather than on authorial individuality and originality,” writes translator Kenneth N. Brostrom. Avvakum’s text had authorial individuality and originality in buckets. In other words, the unyieldingly conservative priest was an innovator in his writing.

In Siberia, Avvakum snuck his papers out of his cell. After a lengthy and degrading imprisonment, he was burned at the stake in 1682. The Life circulated among Old Believers until a historian published it in the mid 1800s and it found a wider audience. Today, The Life is considered the first instance of Russian literature. According to Brostrom, it influenced Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Goncharov, and Grashin. It is also, perhaps, one of the first Russian accounts from a political prisoner of imprisonment, a notoriously thriving genre (see: Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Maria Alyokhina’s Riot Days.)

I read Avvakum because I wanted to understand faith. I was writing about devout Old Believers in my novel, but for me religiosity was a conceptually incomprehensible organizing principle for one’s life. I grew up in the Soviet Union and, though I left in the second grade, I had absorbed a godless education: despite the fact that it was my family’s Jewishness that allowed us to emigrate to the United States, we led stubbornly secular lives. Passovers at my aunt’s house transpired without a single mention of God. My mom sent me and my brother to an Orthodox Jewish camp that gave us scholarships and it didn’t occur to her to not pack us ham sandwiches.

It is family lore that upon arrival in the U.S. my mother, in an effort to embrace the freedom of her new homeland, asked whether we’d like to attend a religious institution and, if so, which one. We could choose from a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. The results were unanimous: none of the above. But I’d remained curious and confused about the mix of casualness and fervor around religion in the U.S., particularly Christianity. Whenever I saw a guy on a busy corner preaching for hours on the weekend, my first thought was always: but does he really believe? What does that feel like?

This question became more pressing as I began my novel. I thought the Old Believers must have really believed. They were tormented by the state, so much so that at times they resorted to isolation in increasingly peripheral parts of Russia or abroad, and, in the past, even communal self-immolation. I wanted to be able to understand those actions as reasonable, at least in that historical context, to understand the importance of preserving the use of two fingers during prayer, rather than three. And so, I turned to literature.

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Nevertheless, my first attempt at The Life was a slog. Avvakum described so many miracles—the pistol that didn’t fire and the mob that didn’t kill him, “lunatics” returned to health, tongues regrowing after excision—and though this made sense as a hagiography, as a narrative it felt frantic and removed from real human lives, which are rarely shaped by miracle after miracle. His motivation—to preserve old traditions in the face of basic amendments—was bewildering. Enough! I thought.

Avvakum did not enjoy the suffering he endured in his various posts or in Siberia, either – he complained about it quite a bit – but his faith gave him a buoyancy, an assuredness that it was not for naught. The only moment in the memoir where he questions himself occurs while journeying back to Moscow from his first stint in Siberia, when he encounters the mountains:

Along their summits are halls and turrets, gates and pillars, stone walls and courtyards, all made by God. Onions grow there and garlic, bigger than the Romanov onion and uncommonly sweet. Hemp grows there too in the care of God, and in the courtyards are beautiful flowers, most colorful and good-smelling. There’s no end to the birds, to the geese and swans – like snow they swim on the lake.

Avvakum despairs that God has made all this for people, and yet man does not acknowledge it as a miracle. Perhaps it is time to give up and think about his family, he thinks, rather than proselytize. “What shall I do?” he asks himself, and his wife. “Preach the Word of God or hide out somewhere?” It’s moving and human. More of that, I thought. But his wife assures him hiding out is not an option, and he resumes his preaching against the reforms.

When my parents decided to leave the Soviet Union, they came to the opposite conclusion: save the family, don’t try to convince the state of its wrongdoing. They didn’t have any faith, of course – in a god, in a just state. I wondered: did faith just mean endurance? How did that help me understand Old Believers, and the characters in my novel?

*

Through contemporary historical texts, I learned that Old Believers were adaptable people who established communities that survive and practice today in New Jersey, Oregon, Alaska and, of course, different parts of Russia. These insights helped me build my characters. But my questions about faith—What is it? How does it feel? —remained an open inquiry, and I returned to The Life once more, years later. Books can hold particular meanings when read in a specific time and place, and on my second reading, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raged on, I gleaned a different history.

The Old Believers in Avvakum’s time thought that Russia was the third Rome, after the fall of ancient Rome and Constantinople, and as such would lead the world to salvation. At one point, Avvakum is questioned by a council of Patriarchs about why he refuses to accept the reforms. “Teachers of Christendom!” he exclaims. “Rome fell long ago and lies never to rise…. By the grace of God, we have autocracy. In our Russia before Nikon the Apostate, the Orthodox faith of devout princes and tsars was always pure and spotless, and the Church was not mutinous.”

Russia’s self-image as savior survived the Schism. It is a perpetually expansionist nation and has been so in various forms since before the Schism; its imperialism remains deeply intertwined with its Orthodoxy, even as both have evolved. There was just a brief break in the link between church and state, when the Soviet Union was ruled by officially atheist regimes (and killed thousands of clergy). But the Russian Orthodox Church came roaring back after the USSR’s dissolution. Indeed, Orthodox institutions throughout ex-Soviet states, including in Ukraine, continued to answer to the Russian Orthodox Church. The church was a way for Russia to maintain cultural influence and promote the idea of Slavic unity in the face of growing nationalist movements in post-Soviet nations, even as the Russian State lost its grip on those nations.

Ukraine had three Orthodox arms, two of which were subservient to Russia. Since invasions started, in 2014, both have declared independence from Moscow, angering Putin. This schism makes sense to me – how can one worship at a church that condones the killing of your people? Indeed, I thought, one could ask the same question in Avvakum’s time. Faith, back then, however it felt, seemed beside the point, though I’m sure Avvakum would disagree.

The Life no longer felt dated and unapproachable to me—instead, it was too present. Why do historic Russian texts always feel so pressing, so current? As if time there is on a slow loop, washing upon that land over and over with the same stories, just like Avvakum’s endless parade of abuse. These days, a miracle wouldn’t be so bad.

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Irina Zhorov’s novel Lost Believers is available from Scribner.

“People believe what they want to believe,” wrote David Cornwell to one of his lovers. “ALWAYS.” He was referring to the “revelation” that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. “No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.”

When he wrote that people believed what they wanted to believe about Greene, he might just as well have been writing about himself. People were willing to believe almost anything about him, even if he denied it (especially if he denied it)—for example, that he had once been earmarked as a possible future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more popularly known as MI6). According to David, the Chief himself, Sir Dick White, had told him in a farewell interview that he was highly thought of within the Service; and that, had he remained, he might have been a candidate for the “top job” in due course. This is a suggestion that one former MI6 officer, with a long and distinguished career behind him, described to me as “ridiculous.” Even without the benefit of inside intelligence, the idea that anyone with less than four years’ experience in any organization could be considered as a candidate to run it in due course is, to say the least, unlikely. Yet this is what David wanted us to believe. Perhaps he believed it himself.

The secret history of David’s career in the intelligence services is that it was uneventful. “The trouble with David,” observed one MI6 contemporary who served with him, “is that he was never involved in a successful operation.”

Following his induction into MI6, and after undergoing training at Fort Monckton near Portsmouth, David was posted to Bonn, capital of what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, where he would serve out his short career, until the worldwide success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold enabled him to retire and write full time. (For his last few months with the Service he relocated to the consulate at Hamburg, in an attempt to avoid the limelight.) According to a colleague who worked alongside him, there was not much for him to do in Bonn. He was working under diplomatic cover, notionally as a Second Secretary: attending press conferences and receptions with other diplomats, politicians and journalists, and escorting German politicians on visits to Britain and British politicians on visits to Germany.

David’s covert role had originated in British concerns about a possible neo-Nazi revival. His perfect German allowed him to pass as a native, and he was tasked with detecting and investigating potential Nazi cells or organizations, and with recruiting German sleepers who would join such groupings in order to provide information on them. This had to be kept “ultra secret,” particularly from their German hosts, because British officials could not be seen to be interfering in German politics. But in reality there was little to do, since the feared neo-Nazi revival never materialized. Parties of the far right failed to gain mass support, and at their rallies neo-Nazis were often outnumbered by the police. David attended a few gatherings of former U-boat crews in bierkellers, but these were more sentimental than sinister. “I think David was absolutely bored stiff,” wrote his Bonn colleague. The most valuable outcome of his three years in Bonn was the material it provided for his novel A Small Town in Germany (1968), which imagined such an extreme right-wing revival occurring in the near future.

He seems to have had more fun in his earlier career with MI5. Intelligence officers in the security service were permitted to carry out acts normally regarded as criminal: breaking and entering, burgling and bugging; as well as clandestine surveillance and “tailing.” This appealed to David’s boyish instincts. “Hell, Jack, we’re licensed crooks, that’s all I’m saying,” admits one of his characters, a CIA agent, in A Perfect Spy.

David had been an undergraduate at Oxford when he was recruited by MI5 as an asset by Vivian Green, the chaplain of his college and eventually one of the models for his most celebrated character, George Smiley. David was asked to befriend left-wing students and report on what they did. This involved an uncomfortable degree of pretense, getting close to likely undergraduates in order to win their confidence. On at least one occasion he searched a friend’s rooms while he was out. He also attended meetings of left-wing societies and travelled down to London to join the sparse audiences at showings of worthy films screened at the Soviet Embassy. He was trailing his coat, hoping to attract the attention of a Soviet talent-spotter; and for a while he was courted by a “Cultural Secretary” who then suddenly dropped him, perhaps smelling a rat.

His father’s bankruptcy in 1954 compelled David to leave Oxford at the end of his second year, but he was able to return twelve months later when MI5 offered to pay his costs, funding him covertly through the local authority. In his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel David let drop that he had been inducted into MI5 in 1956, the year that he left Oxford to become a schoolmaster at Eton, at the age of twenty-five. Assuming this date to be accurate, it indicates that he knew he was destined for MI5 throughout the two years he spent teaching. Such deferred entry was not unusual; the Service liked recruits to have some experience of the world before joining.

David claimed that I had given an incomplete account of his covert work in my biography, though he declined to elaborate. He referred to the promises he made to his old German contacts, as well as to the Official Secrets Act. “I am bound, legally and morally, not to reveal the nature of my work in SIS,” he wrote to me at one point. His overt role required him to cultivate German politicians and journalists, and it seems possible that he gathered intelligence as a by-product: especially on left-leaning politicians who might be suspected of having contact with figures in the East. It would have been understandable if he preferred not to admit that he had been spying on close friends—for example, on a prominent West German politician who would become godfather to one of his own sons. While refusing to be drawn, he was willing to concede that his covert role was “negligible:” he did not run agents into East Germany and never ventured there undercover himself. His penetration of the Eastern bloc was limited to a few excursions into East Berlin, each lasting no longer than a few hours, of the type available to any tourist at the time. Whatever some readers might come to believe, he was no George Smiley.

*

Working in the intelligence services often involves pretending to be something other than what you really are; and pretending to be doing something other than what you are really doing. To paraphrase a line of David’s, spying is lying.

“I’m a liar,” he told two private detectives whom he had hired to investigate his life, at a time when he was contemplating some form of autobiography. “Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.” I spent many hours interviewing David, and while he was apparently open with me on most subjects, I quickly learned not to rely on anything he said. When he complained, as he did more than once, that I didn’t always trust what he told me, I quoted his own words back at him.

Often, I am convinced, he was not trying to deceive me, but was confident in the truth of the story he was telling. On one occasion, when I was able to demonstrate to him that something he had just told me was false, he seemed genuinely unnerved. I came to appreciate that these two tendencies were consistent. He was a performer, who so inhabited each role he played that he believed it to be real. This was a valuable quality in someone who lied for a living.

David was always fascinated by Kim Philby, the Soviet double agent who penetrated so deep into MI6 that (unlike David) he was for a while a serious candidate to become its chief when the post next became vacant. David’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) relates the hunt for a mole who has burrowed deep into the heart of British intelligence, just as Philby had done.

David claimed a personal affinity with Philby: like him, he had a monster for a father; like him, he had served his time in institutions from which he had become alienated. “I felt I knew him too well,” he wrote, in an introduction to an edition of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Philby was his “secret sharer,” who had done what David himself might have done, what Magnus Pym in fact does in A Perfect Spy. For Kim, as for David, “women were his secret audience.”

He used them like he used society: he performed, danced, phantasized with them, begged their approbation, used them as a response for his histrionic talents, as a consolation for a manhood haunted by his father’s ghost. When they came too close, he punished them or sent them away….

In the mid-1980s David would tell Sue Dawson—a member of his own “secret audience”—that Philby had “haunted my entire career.” Over a boozy and flirtatious lunch he had told her the colorful story of how he had learned of Philby’s defection, while still serving with MI6 himself, stationed in Bonn. One night in January 1963, as duty officer, he had decoded a message to the effect that an officer of the Service in Beirut had suddenly gone missing. To his rapt audience over lunch, he re-enacted his own astonished reaction as the identity of the defector had become apparent: “Christ!—It’s Kim!”

Towards the end of his life David would claim that he had been “blown” by Philby: that Philby had revealed to his Soviet handlers that David was an MI6 officer. How David knew this, he did not say. Had it not been for Philby, he implied, he might have remained within MI6, maybe even risen to the top. In a television interview given to Channel 4 News in 2010, David stated that his “betrayal” by Philby was one reason why he had avoided meeting him on his visit to the Soviet union in 1987.

By this late stage of his career David was widely regarded as a sage, his pronouncements accepted without question. But there are grounds for doubt, at least on matters concerning Philby. For one thing, it seems extremely unlikely that Philby would have been aware of David’s existence when he defected in January 1963. Philby had resigned from MI6 almost ten years before David joined; and though he continued to be funded by the Service as a source while working as a journalist in Beirut, he had remained under suspicion. It was therefore inconceivable that he would have access to the names of new recruits at such a time. Though it was theoretically possible that Philby could have come across David’s name as a lowly informant to the Berne SIS station in the late 1940s and have thought this information worth transmitting to his Soviet handler, this is so unlikely as to stretch the bounds of credulity. The head of the Berne station at the time, Nicholas Elliott, was a close friend of Philby’s; nevertheless he would not have been so unprofessional as to share the names of his informants, not even with his chum Kim. Nor was there any conceivable motive for him to have done so.

It is impossible to prove a negative; but it is difficult to credit David’s claim that he was “blown” by Philby. The likely truth is more banal: that he blew his own cover, in the early 1980s, when he finally admitted what had long been suspected, that he had been a spy. (John le Carré’s cover had been blown much earlier, in January 1964, when the Sunday Times “Atticus” column revealed that the name was a pseudonym for an unknown civil servant called David Cornwell.)

David’s anecdote of learning about Philby’s defection as a young duty officer does not ring true. In the early 1960s Englishmen of his class addressed even close colleagues by their surnames. Would he really have exclaimed “It’s Kim!” about a man whom he had never met?

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Excerpted from The Secret Life of John Le Carré by Adam Sisman. Copyright © 2023. Available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

This: the suffering, the grit and hardship of everyday life, never once appeared in Balanchine’s dances. It did not interest him—it was pedestrian, a degradation of the human body and spirit. Even the dead bodies in his ballets were set against a backdrop of eternity and had a sense of spirituality and redemption that elevated the body out of the ordinary—dead bodies, yes, but really dead souls. These were bodies purified and transfigured by the disciplined practices of ballet. And if loss was a theme in his dances, so were love and full-fleshed joy. He made many gorgeously costumed ballets that built to a crescendo with colorful kaleidoscope patterns of dancers synchronizing ever more complicated and demanding rhythms. These were fantastic entertainments that lifted audiences into the great good humor of being alive. He saw himself as a musician and theater man, a traveling ballet master, and he had worked in great opera houses and touring troupes, from the Russian czar’s Mariinsky Theater of his training and youth to the Paris Opera, Broadway, Hollywood, and his own New York City Ballet (NYCB), which he cofounded in 1948. He said he was a showman, and like the old commedia dell’arte performers, he reinvented himself many times. He seemed ageless. For his dancers, even at the end of his life, “Mr B.” was a god and they surrendered their own young lives for a chance to dance his glorious ballets.

There was some part of him that did not think of himself as mortal at all. “I am not a male….I am water and air and I am servant.” Or “I am a cloud in trousers,” he said, a phrase borrowed from a poem he had learned early in life by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Some of the dancers who knew him best secretly called him “the breath,” another word for spirit, really. What this suggested, and it was a central theme of his life, was that he felt like a man with two bodies and he lived in them both simultaneously, with at times heartbreaking personal consequences. The first was the trousers—the earthly man delighted by sensual feelings and desires, who loved good food, fine wine, beautiful women. He devoted his life to dancing and everyone said that in rehearsals, even in his old age, he was more physically animated, expressive, and alive than any of his astonishingly athletic and youthful performers. The cloud or breath was something else, and he saw it as the source of his gift. It wasn’t mind, exactly. It was more a physical inwardness, and at moments he could appear strangely detached, almost androgynous or asexual, like an angel who knows everything but feels nothing. A “servant” bearing dances to the gods. An airy floating spirit, elusive at times, even to himself.

He lived through his dancers. He was not like Mozart or Einstein or Picasso, working alone to change the way people hear or think or see. He needed dancers and a whole theatrical enterprise, but dancers above all. His gift didn’t exist without them, and the most disoriented moments of his life were those when he found himself alone and unattached to dancers. He had to have them, and he gathered them and shaped them, making his own paints and pigments from their flesh and blood, meticulously reading and sculpting their minds and bodies. Making dances was personal, psychological, intimate even—they liked to say he knew them better than they knew themselves—and because women were his primary material, and because he was a man who loved women, sensuality and love were always a part of it.

For a genius, Balanchine felt small. “Maloross,” he called himself because he felt undersized, and as a child in Russia they had called him “the rat” for his persistent facial tic, a kind of nervous sniffing and twitching under the right eye as he spoke, almost like a visual stutter. He sketched himself in child-like drawings at the end of letters he wrote to lovers as a tiny mouse in the company of a large female cat that he fed and nurtured. In his mind’s eye, he was that man-mouse, “mighty mouse!”—a flourish at the bottom of the page, and he didn’t imagine himself as particularly attractive, though women found him sexy. The mouse was like the cloud or the breath—something a bit secret in their midst—a watcher scurrying around in his mind preparing great delicacies for his dancers and audiences to enjoy.

In reality, he was not small at all but physically quite average: average height, average weight, average proportions. He had fine, dark features—“I am Georgian,” he liked to say—and his Caucasian roots were visible in his dark, almond-shaped eyes, pensive and inward in portraits but lit and expressive in life. His forehead was high, and he had a delicate but large straightedge nose (“Bigger is better”) that became his signature feature in the sketches of his face in profile that he used to sign letters. Only his hands were fleshy and muscular, perhaps from playing the piano, which he did almost daily for most of his life. He liked to work with his hands—cooking, but also carpentry and gardening. He could be found at the local market carefully touching and testing for firm cucumbers or the perfect tomato. Smells mattered, and once he could afford it, perfumes were a routine purchase for the women dancers he admired (a different scent for each).

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Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans has been shortlisted for the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

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Appearances mattered too and he had a dandy’s interest in clothing and dress. Pictures from his St. Petersburg youth show him with a dramatic flair, hair slicked back in a Byronesque sweep with dark eye makeup to emphasize the point. Later, in Europe, he favored Italian suits and bow ties or colorful foulards, and he loved his American Western-style shirts with string ties and a turquoise flourish. In the studio it was a simple shirt, neat slacks, and flexible jazz or street shoes, and everyone remembers how he would roll up his sleeves as he entered the room, a sign that the work was about to begin. He took a personal interest in costume design and could be seen bent lovingly over a swath of fabric or absorbed in adjusting a headdress, and he always insisted on the finest materials for his dancers.

These sensual delights came against a backdrop of hardship and privation. He had experienced cold and starvation as a child in revolutionary Russia, his skin covered with pus-filled boils from malnutrition. The fear of gnawing hunger and the acrid smell of dead bodies piled in the streets in those early years never really left him. He had a weakened constitution. He was struck with tuberculosis (TB) as a young man, and soon after his arrival in the United States in 1933, he suffered mysterious epileptic-like fits and recurrences of TB, leaving him with a collapsed lung and narrowing left chest. Hardly a year passed when he was not suffering or seeking medical help for some real or imagined ailment—another source, perhaps, of his feeling small and vulnerable, but also part of his enormous stamina and determination to enjoy life’s pleasures and, above all, to make his dancers perform to their very fullest. “What’s the matter with now?” he would say. “You might be dead tomorrow!”

*

But really, it was all something of a secret. How Balanchine made his extraordinary dances and how the New York City Ballet had come to be—nobody quite knew and nobody could quite say. In the early 1960s, Balanchine wrote an unusually terse letter to his associate Betty Cage asking her to please turn down a request to write his biography by a journalist he didn’t particularly like. If he “wants to know about my inspiration, or who is my Muse,” Balanchine wrote, “then he will never know that. Because I won’t tell him, and it is not going to be written enywhere, for anybody to know.” There was something urgent in the secrecy, and Balanchine built walls around his gift and walls around his company, as if there were some kind of magic spell that might be broken by exposure. By the time he died, the company was not just a company; it was a kind of secret society, a utopian community with its own elaborate rituals and taboos, and they were all members, monks and angels, mute scribes and devotees of Balanchine’s art. Family secrets were never divulged, not because they were ugly or incriminating, though some were, but because the secret was part of the power, it was part of what they were all doing there together. If they knew, he once said, they would think I was crazy. Other than the dancers, Lincoln Kirstein—brilliant, huge, troubled, mad, loyal Lincoln— was the only one who understood, and they didn’t talk about it either.

Americans like to see Balanchine in their own twentieth-century light. Wasn’t he making ballet modern, abstract, twelve-tone, and progressive, and weren’t his dances icons of speed and urban accomplishment, ornaments to freedom and innovation? The State Department sent the company out on Cold War tours, and Balanchine went—“I am an American”—but the sight of Communism sickened him more than they could imagine. Russia was probably the deepest disappointment he had ever known. He had seen and suffered the way Communism could turn words and reason to wood, and he had set his own path away from the materialist Bolshevik Revolution that had violently interrupted his childhood and seduced his native land. And so there he was in New York City, quietly building a village of angels and erecting a music-filled monument to faith and unreason, to body and beauty. It was his own counterrevolutionary world of the spirit, an alternate vision of the twentieth century.

Balanchine himself was a kind of secret too. Restraint and civility were his natural disposition, and he was a deeply private man. The mask came naturally, at birth perhaps, but was fixed over years of history and experience. As he built the NYCB up around himself, he withdrew more and more inside. No drama, no tempers, no pretense, a simple craftsman at work daily. Even his use of language was secretive. He was a sophisticated linguist and spoke Russian, German, French, and English. He loved wordplay and puns and wrote limericks (many of them erotic) and romantic song lyrics. Yet although he lived in the United States for fifty years, he spoke a strange pidgin English that was extremely expressive but impossible to pin down in its winding syntax. It was brilliant but eccentric, hidden, foreign, part of the mask, and also a way of still being Russian—not Soviet but his own Russia, of his own making. He wasn’t an intellectual, W. H. Auden had rightly observed, but something more—“a man who understands everything.” “I have been alive for a long time,” Balanchine would later say, and he did know a lot, read a lot, but he held all of that to himself and dispensed it patiently in thin streams to reporters or dancers or curious outsiders who blankly ignored his digressions into the finer points of fairies or the afterlife. He conserved: energy, temper, ideas— concentrated them in an increasingly dense and secret inner world that had fewer and fewer outlets as he aged. By the end the only real problem he faced was the one he and his dancers had made together: how to live in the real world when the unreal world of the stage was so much more alive?

He didn’t think about it much. He focused on music, the grounding and “floor” of his life and dances. He read books. He played the piano. He absorbed. He cooked. He gardened. He liked carpentry. He ironed his own shirts and could be seen through the window of his apartment in the early morning hours with a towel around his waist, ironing alone. He washed cars. And he made ballets. The rest was left unspoken. It is all in the dances, he said. But it wasn’t, quite.

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Excerpted from Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans. Copyright © 2023. Available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.