Giving him his due

Claire Lowdon on why we should still read John Updike

CLAIRE LOWDON

In the opening scene of Rabbit, Run (1960), John Updike’s second published novel, the twenty-six-year-old Harry Angstrom – aka Rabbit – joins some children playing basketball around a telephone pole. One of the boys is very good.

He’s a natural. The way he moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell. The way he waits before he moves. With luck he’ll become in time a crack athlete in the high school; Rabbit knows the way. You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can’t see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free. You’re out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them. They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him. Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county; in basketball in his junior year he set a B-league scoring record that in his senior year he broke with a record that was not broken until four years later.

Are the kids reading John Updike now? Or is he, like his most famous creation, “just one more piece of the sky of adults”? For “adults”, in 2019, read Dead White Males – or, as David Foster Wallace put it in one of the most (mis)quoted reviews of Updike ever, Great Male Narcissists. Wallace was writing in 1997, when Mailer, Roth and Updike, his central trio of GMNs, were “in their senescence”. Surprisingly, Saul Bellow didn’t make the cut. Bellow’s heavily autobiographical fiction surely meets Wallace’s criteria for the GMNs: “radical self-absorption, and … uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters”.

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In 2019 we have lots of things to say about autobiography and self-absorption, but string them together and you get some very snarly knicker elastic indeed. Is self-absorbed fiction always narcissistic, or only if it’s written by a straight white male? What if it’s autofiction? Does that make it ok? What are the alternatives? If a writer ventures outside their own socio-cultural sphere, is that praiseworthy empathy or problematic cultural appropriation? Is Karl Ove Knausgaard more self- absorbed than Rachel Cusk? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Bellow’s current status may give us a clue to Updike’s imminent fate. Less than fifteen years after his death, the Nobel laureate is not only little read but frequently reviled as an exemplar of toxic, entitled masculinity. Reactions to the second volume of Zachary Leader’s anxiously judicious biography focused on Bellow’s own deathbed question, Was I a man or a jerk? Often, the conclusion was that, thanks to the five wives, the affairs, and that bit in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, he was emphatically a jerk.

Updike’s final wife count stood at a modest two, though he surely rivalled Bellow on the affairs front. And it is not hard to imagine that he and Roth will be next in the dock. Literature’s cold cases have been relatively unsensational – no Saviles or Weinsteins unearthed as yet. But plenty of people (Bellow, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, etc) have been tried and found guilty of failing to live the unblemished lives we increasingly require from our writers and role models.

Updike, then Roth, then … Martin Amis? Ian McEwan? (McEwan, I suspect, will be hard to frame, though a review of Machines Like Me did finger him as a perp of the ultimate middle-class writerly crime – mentioning wine too often.) The tide is undeniably on its way out, sucking at the shins of Jonathans Franzen and Safran Foer, authors who didn’t get the memo, and persist in writing big, confident novels full of sex and thinly veiled autobiography. Updike hasn’t gone the way of Bellow quite yet, but Wallace’s essay of 1997 clapped a tag around his ankle that’s proven hard to shake. “Just a penis with a thesaurus”: the unforgettable soundbite is often wrongly attributed to Wallace himself. In fact the piece is much cleverer than that. Wallace provides a damning series of “actual-trust me-quotations” from anonymous female sources, while declaring himself “one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans”. His review mingles valid criticism of the novel in question (Updike’s Toward the End of Time, 1997) with baser critical practices. At its climax, he provides “hard statistical evidence” in the form of a page tally. Sample: “Total number of pages about Mexico’s repossession of the American Southwest: 0.1; Total number of pages about Ben Turnbull’s penis and his various feelings about it: 7.5”. And this is the review’s sanctimonious New Sincerity judgement on the protagonist: “Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole”.

The implication of the “statistical evidence” is that the book should have contained more about Mexico’s repossession of the American Southwest and less about penises. This breaches the first of Updike’s own elegant rules for reviewing, as stated in the introduction to his prose collection Picked-Up Pieces (1975): “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt”. But 2019 wants to know why we should play by Updike’s rules. Increasingly, fiction is judged on content over style. Updike chooses to write about an asshole with a penis: if you don’t want to read a book about assholes with penises, then Updike has written a bad book.

What will today’s reader make of the contents of the Library of America’s reissue of Updike’s first four novels, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965)? By today’s standards, there are certainly things to object to, and in the interests of full disclosure I’m going to list some of the most incriminating moments here. Think of me as a very honest estate agent, pointing out the cracks and damp patches so that you know exactly what it is you’re getting into. Because Updike’s apartment in the many-windowed House of Fiction is a beautiful place, and it would be a great shame if people stopped hanging out there altogether.

When we reread Rabbit, Run today, with almost 2020 vision, the novel’s assumptions about men and women leap out at us. Rabbit is relieved when he discovers his date Ruth is a few months younger than him: “you can’t be master, quite, of a woman who’s older”. When Ruth goes to the bathroom after sex, having not used contraception, at Rabbit’s insistence, he is disgusted: “There’s that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men’s dirt – insulting, really”. Rabbit’s more general assessment of women is that “you keep bumping against them, because they want different things; they’re a different race. The good ones develop give”.

In the National Book Award-winning The Centaur, Updike’s mythologically infused portrait of a father–son relationship in small-town Pennsylvania, the section that will give modern readers the most trouble is the framing device. The novel is partially narrated by the son as he looks back on his childhood and recounts his memories to his girlfriend, who is black. “Hey. Listen. Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you, I want to have a wised-up shoe-polish face taut as a drum at the cheekbones and wear great opaque anonymous making sunglasses at three a.m. in a dim lavender cellar and forget everything but the crooning behind my ribs”.

In Of the Farm, a counterpart to The Centaur in that it focuses on a mother–son relationship, it is the gender politics, again, that feel outdated. The narrator Joey looks at his mother and his second wife Peggy: “I noted with pride that both women were tall, sizeable. It seemed a sign of some wealth that I could afford to snub them”. Peggy has his number, telling him, “Oh, I think you do like [the farm]. You like it the same way you like me. It’s something big you can show off”. But Joey remains unrepentant: “I was touched by this humble conception of herself, so disillusioned and so nearly true”.

There are plenty of things I could say in “defence” of these awkward moments. First, they are all thought or spoken by Updike’s characters, not by him. (Counter-objection: Updike is closely aligned with his own protagonists. “As Updike regularly told interviewers”, notes Adam Begley in his biography of 2014, “Harry Angstrom is a portrait of the author in straitened circumstances”. Wallace goes too far, however, when he claims that Updike’s protagonists are “basically all the same guy”, equating Rabbit Angstrom with Richard Maple.)

Second, Updike himself balances the male gaze with powerful moments of insight into the female perspective. After church in Of the Farm, Joey tells the local minister that his sermon was excellent – a sermon that opines that “Woman … was put on earth to help Man do his work”. In the car home, his mother delivers her laconic verdict: “It seems to me that whenever a man begins to talk that way, he’s trying to excuse himself from some woman’s pain”. In Rabbit, Run, there are the two Joycean, grammar-lite soliloquies. One for Rabbit’s wife Janet, one for his mistress Ruth, both impressively accurate on the psychological qualia of sex for straight women. (Counter-objection: the vast majority of Updike’s writing is still focalized for male characters. When my all-female book group read the author’s “Maples” stories, as collected in Your Lover Just Called (1980), the main criticism was the “one-sidedness” of the approach – the fact that none of the stories was told from Joan Maple’s point of view.)

I could go on – or, indeed, start to counter those counter-objections. But this piece is already date-stamped enough. In the third episode of the charming podcast “Medieval History for Pleasure and Profit”, Alice Rio and Alice Taylor give a surprising response to a listener’s question, “how badly did it smell, really?” They point out how relative smell is – how a medieval person travelling forward in time to today would be overwhelmed by the stench of petrol fumes, which we mostly don’t notice. The things we smell in Updike’s work, or Bellow’s, are as indicative of our own time as of theirs. And times change very quickly. Readers in their early thirties might consider themselves woke millennials – but how many of them, in their schooldays, used the word “gay” as a general pejorative? Leader’s biography of Bellow relates how his final novel, Ravelstein (2000), a roman-à-clef, landed Bellow in trouble for implying that Allan Bloom (the real-life model for Ravelstein) was homosexual and died of AIDS. From the vantage point of a scant two decades, the squeamishness of this critical response already looks quaint. Who knows – in another two decades, 2019’s heated discussions about race and gender may look equally quaint. The atrocities we’re unconsciously committing in our novels today are probably something to do with the environment. All those casual plane journeys in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy! The takeaway coffee cups in Knausgaard!

If we lift our muzzles from the scent trail of sexism in Updike’s early work and look around, we find ourselves standing firmly in the past. This for me was one of two great surprises on recently reading Updike’s debut, The Poorhouse Fair. The novel was published in 1959, when Updike was twenty-six. Like Toward the End of Time, it’s actually set about twenty years in the future. By the time Updike wrote the introduction to the 1977 Knopf reissue of the novel, included in the Appendix of the new Library of America edition, most of the novel’s “predictions” had already been invalidated. For the modern reader, it’s about as futuristic as Adam Bede is historical, ie not at all. The “futuristic” elements barely register, apart from as odd inaccuracies – one character notes how “of the three presidents assassinated, all were Republican”.

What you notice instead is how long ago it all seems. We think of Updike as a fairly modern, fairly suburban novelist, a frequenter of golf clubs and diners. But John Hook, the key protagonist of The Poorhouse Fair, is ninety-four, with memories stretching back to the nineteenth century. Updike was born in 1932, and his maternal grandparents shared the family home. It sounds obvious but it’s still worth stating: Updike was well acquainted with the generation born around the time of the American Civil War.

The second astounding thing about The Poorhouse Fair is what an unusual debut it is. In fact, Updike had started with something much more conventional, the unpublished novel “Home”: in Begley’s paraphrase, “the Olinger chronicles presented as a continuous narrative stretching from his mother’s teenage years to his own”. When “Home” was rejected by publishers, Updike set to work on something defiantly different. Set in a poorhouse – an old people’s home in today’s money – The Poorhouse Fair was intended by Updike as “a deliberate anti-Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Its vision of the future is not an imminent dystopia, but just more of the same. “As in our mundane reality, it is others that die, while an attenuated silly sort of life bubbles decadently on.” Thus The Poorhouse Fair is both a surprisingly modest starting point and an extremely ambitious one: a twenty-six-year-old imagining himself into the mind of a ninety-four-year-old! Updike also inhabits the consciousnesses of various other residents, as well as Conner, the young, harried prefect, Ted, the even younger delivery boy, and several visitors to the poorhouse’s annual fair.

Read as a debut it is deeply impressive, and it’s exciting to watch Updike honing the lyrical descriptive gifts that characterize and enrich his later work. (“The boys kept edging one behind the other, like a deck of two cards shuffling itself.”) But you wouldn’t press The Poorhouse Fair on anyone, or rush to reread it. The major problems are overstuffed sentences and a formal shapelessness, a lack of focus, which Updike attempts to justify in the 1977 introduction. There, he quotes a sentence from the novel’s opening page. “In the cool wash of early sun the individual strands of osier compounding the chairs stood out sharply; arched like separate serpents springing up and turning again into the knit of the wickerwork.” This, he tells us, is the novel’s pattern and import: “Life goes on; stray strands are tucked back … All is flux; nothing lastingly matters”. The great French braid of the generations, from the Civil War through Rabbit’s 1959 to 2019. (2019: one year shy of Updike’s dystopia in Toward the End of Time, which has not yet quite come about, because true to Updike’s earlier prediction, an attenuated silly sort of life has just bubbled decadently on.)

Throughout his work, Updike is fascinated by time, hyper-conscious of that generational flux. “In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinions and even into those of our grandfathers.” This observation from The Poorhouse Fair is echoed in the lovely short story “Plumbing” (1971), which concludes with the plumber trying to persuade the narrator to replace a section of furred-up pipe. “Replace it now, you’ll never have to worry with it again. It’ll outlast your time here.” In the final paragraph, the narrator watches the plumber and muses:

My time, his time. His eyes open wide in the unspeaking presences of corrosion and flow. We push out through the bulkhead; a blinding piece of sky slides into place above us, fitted with temporary, timeless clouds. All around us, we are outlasted.

With that in mind, let’s take the long view on Updike. The major problems in his early work do not include the male gaze. More troublesome are those overstuffed sentences, which appear throughout these novels, most persistently in The Poorhouse Fair. Even in the comparatively pared-back Of the Farm, we encounter this:

Downstairs, on the tawny kitchen floorboards scuffed and scored by dog claws, there lay, like a papery golden mat spread before the front door that gazed with its single large pane through the grape arbor toward the meadow, a rhomboid of sun mottled with the slightly shivering shadows of grape leaves.

It should be said, though, that this oubliette of a sentence is immediately followed by a beautifully formulated observation on a par with “temporary, timeless clouds”: “This patch of sun had been here, just this shape, twenty years ago, morning after morning”.

Clouds: in early Updike, if you see them coming, run for cover. He is capable, from the start, of hitting the bullseye with a word or two: the “heavy oblong” of a catfish in The Poorhouse Fair; a sinkful of “bloated” shirts in Rabbit, Run; a “mane of weeds” in the centre of a little-travelled road in The Centaur; a bat like “a speck of pain” in Of the Farm. But, clouds seem to provoke a particular descriptive pomposity in Updike. This example from Of the Farm is typical: “Shapelessly being burned away, the clouds had the persistence of a dull ache, and collectively seemed a ruined strategy, a confusedly ebbing life”.

Then there’s Updike’s great, oft-acknowledged debt to Joyce. Nothing wrong with learning – or borrowing – from a master, but in The Centaur his devotion gets him into trouble. In Ulysses, you have to go searching for the Homeric parallels, which are there to provoke the author’s invention, not to provide meaning. The Centaur takes another classical myth – the sacrifice of Chiron the Centaur for the sake of Prometheus. Chiron is represented by George Caldwell, Prometheus by his son Peter. Neatly, the gods in Updike’s refiguring are teachers, with Zimmerman (Zeus) in charge. But the mythological index at the back, listing over forty figures from Greek mythology with page numbers corresponding to their referents, feels overdone, too nerdy.

In the mythological sections of the novel, everything is coloured by the challenge Updike has set himself, which seems restrictive rather than generative, as in Joyce. This is a description of the “Zeus”, the school principal: “the unbalance of his face seemed that of a proud pregnant cloud tugged by a wind high in heaven”. There is something faintly naff here, like an over-themed party. The novel is leavened by “straight” sections – a description of a chaotic family breakfast in the Caldwells’ freezing farmhouse, Peter’s car rides around Olinger with his father – and it is here that the writing comes alive, and you understand better why The Centaur won a National Book Award. As a whole, it feels disjointed – a problem that Updike addressed in his acceptance speech for the award. “The shape of the book formally approximates, for me, the very mixed and somewhat antic experience it was trying to convey. The book as well as the hero is a centaur.” Too clever by half: I’ll take the realist half, and pass on the myth.

Rabbit, Run and Of the Farm are the most successful novels in this volume, and they both suffer from the same forgivable problem. Both achieve Updike’s noble stated intention – “to give the mundane its beautiful due”. In Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom runs out on his stifling marriage and stays away for two months, during which time he lives with Ruth, a sort of prostitute, does some gardening for a rich old lady called Mrs Smith, and plays golf with the Reverend Eccles, who’s trying to save his soul. In Of the Farm, thirty-something Joey takes his new, second wife and her eleven-year-old son to visit Joey’s widowed mother on the farm where he grew up. They stay for the weekend and Joey mows the meadow, while the two women negotiate their new relationship.

Into these modest narratives, Updike introduces moments of high drama that sit uneasily with all that masterly mundanity. The contrast is most pronounced in Rabbit, Run, where the tragic event at the end of the novel unbalances the whole – much as “done because we are too menny” does in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. In fact, in Rabbit, Run, Updike builds up to the drunken Janice’s accidental drowning of her baby with great care; but in the aftermath, the response is warped to serve the novel’s theme of the rabbit escaping the constricting hutch of his life. Rabbit, implausibly, takes all the blame on himself – until the funeral, where he blurts out that it was Janice who killed their daughter and runs away again. Of the Farm is much more continent, but there’s still a slight loss of nerve during some of the confrontations between the characters, which are heightened just out of the range of plausibility. It seems unlikely, for example, that Peggy would accuse her new mother-in-law of “throwing a sulk and worrying your son”.

Why “loss of nerve”? Because Updike doesn’t need any of this; he can describe Nelson and Billy, two toddlers fighting over a toy, and hold his readers rapt. “Nelson’s face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, ‘Pilly have – Pilly – ’ But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief’s chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground.” The Reverend Eccles tells Billy to give it back. “Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate’s head.” (My italics).

Updike is also a poet of domestic mess, omnipresent in life yet so often absent in art. In the Wallace Collection there is a masterpiece by the Dutch artist Esaias Boursse, “Interior with Woman Cooking” – a quietly radical painting that makes mess its chief subject. You can’t see the woman’s face, or much of her baby, covered in its filthy blankets. Again and again, Updike provides the modern equivalent. From Rabbit, Run:

On the bureau there is a square glass ashtray and a pair of fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous numbers and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of sandalwood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas.

In David Foster Wallace’s page count, the category that racks up far and away the most hits – eighty-six – is “Total number of pages about flora around Turnbull’s home, plus fauna, weather and how his ocean view looks in different seasons”. Wallace clearly sees this as wasted space, but that depends – as it always does – on the quality of the writing. And one reason to read and reread Updike is that he is one of the great nature writers. In Of the Farm, there’s the unforgettable extended riff as Joey mows the meadow and compares the landscape to Peggy’s body. Or how about Rabbit at his gardening job?

Daffodils and narcissi unpack their trumpets … the shaggy golden suds of bloomy forsythia glow through the smoke that fogs the garden … He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions …

The implication here and elsewhere – that the “it” Rabbit is running towards throughout the novel may be nothing more or less than the procreative urge – suggests a possible influence in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The US ban on Lawrence’s novel (published by Knopf, as Updike was) was lifted in 1959; Updike wrote Rabbit, Run the same year, in just nine months, and made alterations to the novel’s most explicit scenes on the advice of Knopf’s legal experts.

The sex in Rabbit, Run and throughout Updike’s work is occasionally overdone but mostly very good and very brave – brave not because it’s explicit, but because the author is unafraid to broadcast the full spectrum of human response, which includes less noble, less palatable impulses. I can’t agree with Nicholson Baker in the otherwise wacky and wonderful U&I (1991) when he criticizes Updike for this description of the narrator’s wife at the end of the short story “Wife- wooing”: “Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage”. Baker thinks this is “inexcusably brutal”: “I couldn’t imagine Updike’s real, nonfictional wife reading that paragraph and not being made very unhappy”. But what Updike is noticing, brilliantly, is that people don’t look the same – or the same to us – all the time, and that our attraction to them ebbs and flows. Updike’s genius, his gift to us, was his commitment to setting such insights down, the courage to draw directly from life. The gaze in “Wife-wooing” is the dispassionate gaze of a true writer. Not a narcissist, not a phallocrat: someone equal to capturing the multifaceted truth.

As a woman, I’d rather be looked at by Updike than lectured at by Wallace. And as a reader, I’ll take any number of ill-judged mythological parallels and over-ambitious sentences for the generous quantities of “rich life-cake”, in Bellow’s phrase, that Updike serves up. To return, briefly, to basketball and Rabbit: “When he was hot he could see the separate threads wound into the strings looping the hoop”. That’s true of Updike, too. When he’s hot, you can see it all, as if you were right there in 1959 or 63 or 65 – when Updike was still just thirty-three. He wrote those four novels in just six years. Like Rabbit, he might only be B-league when you set him next to Joyce. But B-league is very rare. We don’t get many writers who can play at Updike’s level. It’s possible – easy, even – to make a case against anyone’s work. Updike’s “phallocracy”. Updike’s verbosity. The real question is how good are the good bits: in this case, more than good enough.

Perhaps you’re still unconvinced; perhaps you’re operating a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the Great Male Narcissists. Of course, you can take him or leave him. But if you walk away, you’ll be missing out. The same applies to Bellow. They might not be perfect representatives of the way we’d like to live now. But they’re part of where we’ve come from – and we’re lucky to have their virtuosic accounts of what it was like to live then.

From The Centaur:

I had been admiring a section of lavender shadow under the walnut tree in my painting of the old yard. I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife, one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art. For it is at about that age, isn’t it, that it sinks in upon us that things do, if not die, certainly change, wiggle, slide, retreat, and, like the dabs of sunlight on the bricks under a grape arbor on a breezy June day, shuffle out of all identity?

John Updike has fixed innumerable seconds for us – and what could be more enduringly modern than that?

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Measure

Measure

Carrying a Single Life: On Literature and Translation

Carrying a Single Life: On Literature and Translation

Teju Cole

Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman ImagesA reproduction of a scene from an ancient Greek vase depicting the flight from Troy, with Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back, nineteenth century

The English word translation comes from the Middle English, which originates from the Anglo-French translater. That in turn descends from the Latin translatus: trans, across or over, and latus, which is the past participle of ferre, to carry, related to the English word “ferry.” The translator, then, is the ferry operator, carrying meaning from words on that shore to words on this shore.

Every work of translation carries a text into the literature of another language. Fortunate to have had my work translated into many languages, I am now present as an author in the literature of each of those languages. Dany Laferrière, in his 2008 novel I Am a Japanese Writer, expresses this slightly strange notion more beautifully than I can: 

When, years later I myself became a writer and was asked, “Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a Francophone writer?” I would always answer that I took the nationality of my reader, which means that when a Japanese reader reads my books, I immediately became a Japanese writer.

Much is found in translation. There’s the extraordinary pleasure of having readers in languages I don’t know. But there’s also the way translation makes visible some new aspect of the original text, some influence I didn’t realize it had absorbed. When I think about the Italian translation of my work, I can feel the presence of Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, unnerved and delighted that I mysteriously now share their readership. When I’m translated into Turkish, it is Nâzım Hikmet’s political melancholy I think of. Maybe those who like his work will, reading me in Turkish, find something to like in mine as well? In German, perhaps even more than English, I sense the hovering presences of writers who shaped my sensibility—writers like Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, and W.G. Sebald, among many others. Thanks to translation, I become a German writer.

I trust my translators utterly. Their task is to take my work to a new cohort of my true readers, the same way translation makes me a true reader of Wisława Szymborska, even though I know no Polish, and of Svetlana Alexievich, even though I know no Russian.

Gioia Guerzoni, who has translated four of my books into Italian so far, has worked hard to bring my prose into a polished but idiomatic Italian. Recently, she was translating an essay of mine, “On the Blackness of the Panther,” which ranged on various matters, from race, the color black, and colonialism, to panthers, the history of zoos, and Rainer Maria Rilke. It wasn’t an easy text to translate. In particular, the word “blackness” in my title was a challenge. To translate that word, Gioia considered nerezza or negritudine, both of which suggest “negritude.” But neither quite evoked the layered effect that “blackness” had in my original title. She needed a word that was about race but also about the color black. The word she was looking for couldn’t be oscurità (“darkness”), which went too far in the optical direction, omitting racial connotations. So she invented a word: nerità. Thus, the title became: “La nerità della pantera.” It worked. The word was taken up in reviews, and even adopted by a dictionary. It was a word Italian needed, and it was a word the Italian language—the Italian of Dante and Morante and Ferrante—received through my translator.

Translation, after all, is literary analysis mixed with sympathy, a matter for the brain as well as the heart. My German translator, Christine Richter-Nilsson, and I discussed the epigraph to my novel Open City, the very first line in the book. It reads, in English, “Death is a perfection of the eye.” The literal translation, the one Google Translate might serve up, would be something like “Tod ist eine Perfektion des Auges.” But Christine sensed that this rendering would equate “death” with “perfection of the eye,” rather than understanding that death was being proposed as the route to a kind of visionary fullness. So she first thought of “Vollendung,” which describes a finished state of fullness; then she thought further, and landed on “Vervollkommnung.” Vervollkommnung is a noun that embeds the verb “kommen,” and with that verb, the idea that something is changing and coming into a state of perfection. That was the word she needed.

Christine also knew that what I was calling the eye in my epigraph was not a physical organ (“das Auge”), it was the faculty of vision itself. But I didn’t write “seeing,” so “des Sehens” would not quite have worked. In conversation with my German editor, she decided on something that evoked both the organ and its ability: der Blick. So, after careful consideration, her translation of “Death is a perfection of the eye” was “Der Tod ist eine Vervollkommnung des Blickes.” And that was just the first sentence.

*

A young woman from Bonn named Pia Klemp is currently facing a long-drawn-out legal battle in Italy. Klemp, a former marine biologist, is accused of rescuing people in the Mediterranean in 2017. If the case comes to trial, as seems likely, she and nine others in the humanitarian group she works with face enormous fines or even up to twenty years in prison for aiding illegal immigration. (Klemp’s plight is strikingly similar to that of another young German woman, Carola Rackete, who was arrested in Italy this week for captaining another rescue boat.) Klemp is unrepentant. She knows that the law is not the highest calling. As captain of a converted fishing boat named Iuventa, she had rescued endangered vessels carrying migrants that had been launched from Libya. The precious human lives were ferried over to the Italian island of Lampedusa. The question Klemp and her colleagues pose is this: Do we believe that the people on those endangered boats on the Mediterranean are human in precisely the same way we are human?

When I visited Sicily a couple of years ago and watched a boat of rescued people with bewildered faces come to shore, there was only one possible answer to that question. And yet we are surrounded by commentary that tempts us to answer it wrongly, or that makes us think our comfort and convenience are more important than human life.

Because Pia Klemp’s holy labor takes place on water, it reminds me of an earlier struggle. In 1943, the Danes received word that the Nazis planned to deport Danish Jews. And so, surreptitiously, at great personal risk, the fishermen of north Zealand began to ferry small groups of Danish Jews across to neutral Sweden. This went on, every day, for three weeks, until more than 7,000 people, the majority of Denmark’s Jewish population, had been taken to safety.

Currently in my own country, hundreds of people die on the border in the name of national security. Children are separated from their parents and thrown in cages. A few years ago, I visited No Más Muertes (No More Deaths), a humanitarian organization in Arizona that provides aid to travelers by leaving water, blankets, and canned food at strategic points in the Sonoran Desert. These are activities that the US government has declared illegal. The organization also conducts searches for missing migrants, and often locates the bodies of those who have died of hunger or thirst in the desert.

A young geographer named Scott Warren, working with No Más Muertes and other groups, has sought to help travelers cross safely. He provides water and, when possible, shelter. For this holy labor, Warren was arrested and charged last year with harboring migrants. Although the case against him recently ended in a mistrial, the US Attorney’s Office in Arizona is seeking a retrial. Warren is far from the only No Más Muertes volunteer to have been arrested as part of the government’s war on those who offer life-saving help to our fellow citizens.

Can we draw a link between the intricate and often modest work of writers and translators, and the bold and costly actions of people like Pia Klemp and Scott Warren? Is the work of literature connected to the risks some people undertake to save others? I believe so—because acts of language can themselves be acts of courage, just as both literature and activism alert us to the arbitrary and essentially conventional nature of borders. I think of Edwidge Danticat’s words in her book Create Dangerously:

Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone’s life.

And I think of a friend of mine, a filmmaker and professor from Turkey who signed a letter in 2016 condemning the slaughter of Kurds by the Turkish state and calling for a cessation of violence. She was one of more than 1,100 signatories from universities and colleges in Turkey. In response, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government initiated investigations of every Turkish signatory, accusing them all of terrorism. Most, my friend included, now face long trials and prison sentences. Many have been fired from their jobs or hounded by pro-government students. Some have already been jailed.

My friend and the other academics were carrying their fellow citizens. With the stroke of a pen, they attempted to carry them across the desert of indifference, over the waters of persecution. For this, they face consequences similar to those faced by Pia Klemp and Scott Warren: public disrepute, impoverishment, prison time. My friend finds herself in great danger for her stand, and so now it is her turn to be ferried to greater safety, because she did the right thing, and we must, too.

*

I am struck by a small terracotta sculpture made in the fourth century BCE in Etruria (in what is central Italy today). It depicts two figures, a younger man carrying an older man on his back. It is in fact a representation of Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, out of the burning ruins of Troy. The story is recounted by Virgil in The Aeneid, and is part of the origin myth of the Roman people. This little sculpture has tremendous affective charge because almost none of us can imagine having to physically carry our own fathers. Support him, yes, in his old age. Actually carry him on your back, no. Impossible to imagine, except in the most wretched emergency.

The little Etruscan object is strikingly similar to a famous vignette from the fresco in the Vatican showing the Fire in the Borgo. That fresco, painted in the early sixteenth century by Raphael or, more likely, Giulio Romano, also shows a young man bearing an old man on his back.

A few years ago, I came across a photojournalist’s image of a pair of refugees. I couldn’t identify the photographer, but one of the men in the picture is named in the caption as Dakhil Naso. The man he is carrying is his father. They are Yazidis, in flight on foot from ISIS, on their way to Kurdistan. They’ve been on the move for days, and all you can see behind them is desert. It is a piteous sight; the old man, dressed in white, is on the verge of exhaustion, and the young man, wearing a red football jersey, hardly looks stronger. How far have they come already? How much farther do they have to travel? Why have we allowed this to happen to our fellow citizens?

I call these people our fellow citizens—following a usage by the Israeli-American scholar Ariella Azoulay—because I truly believe that is what they are: citizenship has nothing to do with what papers one has or doesn’t have. We all live and die under essentially similar sovereign arrangements, are all subject to the same international banking system, the same alliances among rich nations. We are all citizens under these inescapable powers, but not all of us have our citizenship rights recognized.

*

How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn’t really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Sometimes, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there.

What we can go to literature for is both larger and smaller than any cliché about how it makes us more empathetic. Literature does not stop the persecution of humans or the prosecution of humanitarians. It does not stop bombs. It does not, no matter how finely wrought, change the minds of the little fascists who once more threaten to overrun the West. So what is it good for—all this effort, this labor, this sweating over the right word, the correct translation?

I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time. Perhaps at 4 AM when you get out of bed and pull a book of poetry from the shelf. Perhaps over a week in summer when you’re absorbed in a great novel. Something deeply personal happens there, something both tonic and sustaining.

When I describe literature’s effect in these terms, I speak stubbornly in the singular. But I also know I am not alone in the world, and that none of us is. In a speech Albert Camus gave in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1957, he described the collective value of our seemingly disconnected lives:

Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.

And this ever-expanding power of a single life brings to mind a thought that has echoed through the ages. We find it for instance in a codex of the Mishnah written in Parma in the mid-thirteenth century: “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” Exactly the same thought is expressed in Surah Five of the Qur’an.

Contrary to the general noise of the culture around us, writing has reminded me in some modest but essential way of things that people don’t want to be reminded of. Inside this modest thing called literature, I have found reminders to myself to negate frontiers and carry others across, and reminders of others who carry me, too. Imagine being in an emergency: a house on fire, a sinking boat, a court case, an endless trek, a changed planet. In such an emergency, you can no longer think only of yourself. You have to carry someone else, you have to be carried by someone else.

何为图片编辑？

何为图片编辑？

文 | 戴维·卡帕尼

译 | 刘姮妤

对于某些摄影师，图片编辑是重中之重，是彰显“功夫”之处，是喜悦之源泉。也有人认为，图片编辑是次要的，让人困扰，招致痛苦。然而，除非是无须与其他照片关联的单张作品，否则迟早都需要编辑。即便摄影师不编辑，其他人也要做这件事，任何摄影画册都被编辑过。

20世纪20年代，随着出版和大众影业的日渐繁荣，编辑于视觉文化产业而言至关重要，所有图片都需要编辑。编辑这个职业迅速在各领域专业化，包括杂志、书籍出版、电影制作和艺术史，不同媒介编辑的标准各异。主流媒体和电影业建立相关规范，但先锋派拒绝如此，他们打破规范，想在社会、图片以及两者之间另作选择。在此背景下，新型摄影画册应运而生，它们注重图片编辑，不再只是个人照片的收集。

乔治·皮特（George Peet）、米诺·怀特（Minor White）为庆典展览编辑照片，1972年

如今来看，出版于两次世界大战之间的摄影画册不过尔尔，但在当时非同寻常，它们大多属于图片编辑实验范畴。新媒体时代的视觉初级读本，如弗朗兹·罗（Franz Roh）和扬·奇肖尔德（Jan Tschichold）的《照片—眼睛》（Photo-Eye, Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind & Co., 1929）、拉斯洛·莫霍利-纳吉（László Moholy-Nagy）的《绘画、摄影、电影》（Painting, Photography, Film, Bauhaus Bücher 8, Al-bert Langen Verlag, 1925）和《60张照片》（60 Photos, Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1930）、形式自由的画册，如莫伊·弗（Moi Ver）的《巴黎》（Paris, Editions Jeanne Walter, 1931）和杰曼·克鲁尔（Germaine Krull）未经装订的作品集《金属》（Métal, Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1928），沃克·埃文斯（Walker Evans）开创性的《美国影像》（American Photographs, Museum of Modern Art, 1938)，以上画册均采用蒙太奇手法以反权威、反规范，这种方式促使观众主动思考，而非被动接受没有起伏的照片流。这些画册也是对现代公民日常图景的回应：图片爆炸式增长、愈加碎片化，甚至过载。(这看似是我们在如今——2018年所面临的问题，实际上，我们已然经历将近一个世纪的图片过量、碎片化以及过载。)

摄影师没能如电影制作人和电影评论家们那样提出诸多复杂的剪辑理论。比如，没有能与20世纪20年代苏联谢尔盖·爱森斯坦（Sergei Eisenstein）、列夫·库里肖夫（Lev Kuleshov）和吉加·维尔托夫（Dziga Vertov）等人提出的蒙太奇理论媲美的摄影编辑理论。[清一色的男性，除了女主角伊丽莎白·斯维洛娃（Elizaveta Svilova），她剪辑并出演了维尔托夫1929年的电影《持摄影机的人》（Man with a Movie Camera），这是一部所有电影剪辑师和图片编辑必看的电影。

《照片—眼睛》

《巴黎》

《美国影像》

《持摄影机的人》

令人震惊的是，上世纪杰出的图片编辑——《图片邮报》（Picture Post）和《利力浦特》（Lilliput）杂志的斯特凡·洛兰特（Stefan Lorant）、《生活》（Life）杂志的约翰·莫里斯（John G. Morris）、罗伯特·德尔皮尔（Robert Delpire）等，仅举几例——鲜有谈及或写下任何有关工作方法的真知灼见。

艺术史学家阿比·瓦尔堡（Aby Warburg）和安德烈·马尔罗（André Malraux）二人例外，他们不太关注摄影本身，但关注摄影如何再现以及不同艺术形式如何在页面排布。瓦尔堡独到的编辑方法——在墙上铺满图片以寻找多维主题和灵感——影响至今。

莎拉·克尼尔曼（Sara Knelman）将把马尔罗精彩而丰富的艺术复制品手工书收入《摄影书评论》（The PhotoBook Review，https://aperture.org/pbr/）2019年春季刊第16期。插画艺术史书很少被认为是“摄影书”，但它们应该被纳入该范畴。

《摄影书评论》（The PhotoBook Review）2019年春季刊第16期

凯斯·史密斯（Keith Smith）也举足轻重，他于1984年出版的《视觉书籍的结构》（Structure of the Visual Book）是为数不多仍在持续探究图片关系的研究之一。本期也收录了光圈（Aperture）杂志编辑莱斯利·马丁（Lesley Martin）和史密斯的对谈。

当一张照片被放在另一张照片旁，或者跨页放置，有可能表达出所想吗？图片编辑有理论、假设、不成文的规定可循吗？抑或只是个人偏好？编辑面对不同的题材，比如，报纸、杂志头版和艺术家画册，其角色和工作是否有显著变化？再者，编辑风格能如签名般被识别吗？抑或其在编辑结束之际便已消失不见？编辑知道他们为何选取此种编排方式而非其他吗？他们能清晰地表达出来吗？编辑过程可以被分类和命名吗？

莱斯利·马丁，编辑赞内勒·穆霍利（Zanele Muholi）作品《桑尼亚马·恩戈尼亚马，黑狮万岁》（Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness，Aperture，2018)

《视觉书籍的结构》

在20世纪六七十年代，图片编辑似乎有章可依。结构主义、符号学以及法国、英国学院派对修辞学的复兴改变了人们对文化的思考方式。语言研究方法应用于图片研究，其结果极具启发性，特别是罗兰·巴特（Roland Barthes）早期的摄影写作和朱迪斯·威廉森（Judith Williamson）1978年的《广告解码》（Decoding Advertisements）。

复杂的叙事结构理论成为理解民间故事和好莱坞电影的方法。静态照片的编排似乎没那么耐看，自摄影尝试采用线性叙事和图片并置（两种方式都很老旧）之后，任何理论都不再奏效。这并没有阻止图片编辑的发展。相反，20世纪六七十年代见证了实验性编辑法的第二次扩张，其影响至今未减，比如，汉斯-彼得·费德曼（Hans-Peter Feldmann）、玛莎·罗斯勒（Martha Rosler）、艾伦·塞库拉（Allan Sekula）、爱德华·鲁沙（Edward Ruscha）或约翰·鲍德萨里（John Baldessari）的各种出版物。但与此同时，摄影在很大程度上是基于可复制的单幅照片才得以进入博物馆，而非作品的主体，这明显阻碍了对图像边界的批判性讨论。

爱德华·鲁沙、罗伯特·劳森伯格等人的作品，1965—1970年

更深层的问题在于，大多数照片组合更接近诗歌，而非散文。它们在表达一切的同时亦宣示了二者的差距、间接性和谜团。照片不善解释，亦不擅争论。与之相反，图像组合富有暗示性，其章节停顿之处不如电影和文学流畅。单张图片无法打破彼此间本质的隔离状态，其独特性及其在作品整体所扮演的角色之间，总有一种关乎美学、认知和智性的张力，亦即图片编辑的挑战和乐趣所及其难以分析解释之处。一般而言，言说暧昧不明之物，越具体越好。由此，很难有理论无所不包。

如今，图像之排列组合范围广泛，尤其是书籍装帧。摄影书已成为很多摄影师全面表达其视觉艺术的空间载体，各种形式层出不穷。为何？这是一个奇异而绝望的时代，无从知道何种形式最奏效，何种形式最能表达时代的不确定性。

此外，所谓的主流照片编辑规范早已荡然无存，远非几十年来一直占主导的通俗杂志—图片故事的编辑规范。如今，无须打破成规。即便有主流，也是突变式的。其中，日常的图片顺序由意识形态、个人偏好、品味和商业算法而非图片编辑所决定，遑论创造性或批判性思维。一旦寻得图片之间互有关联的迹象，便通过出版的形式锁定其顺序，任何一本摄影书皆是如此。看似一劳永逸，实则是一次小小的反抗。

Diary James Wood

Even at a place like Eton, it didn’t seem likely that anyone in my year would actually become prime minister. At school, everyone is ‘ambitious’, everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the Etonian’s uncanny ability to soften entitlement with charm. Mostly, he was defined by negatives: he wasn’t an intellectual or scholar, a rebel, a musician, a school journalist or writer, even a sportsman. He wasn’t obviously political. He belonged to a social crowd that didn’t intersect much with mine: Home Counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved – the customary expensive vagueness – ‘in finance’, a grand house I could only imagine and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else, fraternised masonically in the holidays, took one another’s sisters to parties in Sussex and to hunt balls in Gloucestershire, and dressed like their fathers, in clothes that looked inherited even when purchased just the other day at New & Lingwood.

My own background was different. In my last year at the school, I wrote an anti-Thatcher screed in the school magazine, and a journalist from the Sun ambushed me in the street. Where did I live, what did my parents do? I saw his frustration when I told him that my father was a lecturer at Durham University, my mother a schoolteacher. ‘That doesn’t sound very establishment … You don’t have a relative in Maggie Thatcher’s cabinet?’ It was 1984. He was after political disgrace, looking for a turncoat Hurd, a Pym, a Raison, a Jopling. What was a Wood? We had no family connections, to Eton or anywhere else much. The only reason I was at the school was my mother’s madly aspirant zeal, her Scottish petit-bourgeois tirelessness. My older brother and I were both effectively scholarship boys. He was the real thing, a King’s Scholar (three years ahead of Boris Johnson); in my case, when my parents demonstrated financial need, the school eventually helped out with a bursary.

I was lucky – my religious parents would have insisted on ‘blessed’ – and savoured that luck, grateful to be at such a school, though often keen to set fire to it. Of course I wasn’t lucky – in the sense of being fortunate – like the born Etonian, and in time, once I had worked out the codes of this strange world, that difference would become not excruciating but a source of strength. The born Etonian was at one with his heritage. The quickest way to ascertain a boy’s natural Etonianness was to find out if his father had gone there. Plenty had. Then I would start my plebeian social arithmetic. If his father went there, then thirty or so years earlier his grandparents had had the money to send his father there. So his grandfather was probably an old Etonian. Which meant that sixty or so years earlier his great-grandparents had had enough money … It was dizzying, climbing backwards along the branches of these golden family trees.

It was unimaginable to me, the quickly privileged descendant of schoolteachers and shopkeepers, that these Etonians had been privileged for so long that the precise origins of their fortune could no longer be located. What amazing security: to have always been well-off probably suggested that one would always be well-off. The future would look comfortingly like the past. Amusingly, David Cameron is often described as being ‘upper-middle-class’, but the originary arithmetic doesn’t lie. His father went to Eton, as did his grandfather. And on his mother’s perhaps fancier side, his grandfather went to Eton, and his great-grandfather also went there, and his great-great-grandfather, and actually his great-great-great-grandfather did, too … I think we can bump him out of the middle classes.

Getting the hang of this place entailed subterfuge, vigilance, mimicry – a stealthy adventure I often enjoyed. The accent obviously had to be improved, and any lingering Durham commonness rubbed out. My father would have to be promoted from senior lecturer to professor, and my mother’s job mystified out of existence. My parents’ shameful first names, Dennis and Sheila (furry dice hanging in a Ford Cortina), could obviously never be uttered. Thank God my brother was called Angus – a bit Scottish maybe, but weren’t there plenty of posh Scots? That my parents were teetotal Christians was also unutterable. I would need better clothes; how could I get cheap shoes that looked expensive?

This labour of inclusion, like some journey of immigration, was a matter of working out hints and barely visible laws, fitting in quietly without drawing attention to oneself. The task mainly involved studying networks. How did everything connect? Surely it did in some way? Certain areas of London, certain prep schools, London shops (Harrods, for some reason, was considered a bit ‘common’, while Harvey Nichols was not), certain sports, clothes, even brands of aftershave: they all signified. There were ‘distinguished’ surnames everywhere, and one had to catch up with a celebrity that everyone else had already divined: Fiennes, Bingham (Lord Lucan’s son), Vestey, Wellesley, Sainsbury. There were copious numbers of double-barrelled names: Fearnley-Whittingstall, Austen-Leigh, Scrase-Dickins, the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I assumed he was related to the auctioneers. Glyndebourne meant nothing to me, but my parents explained what it was. So: these were ‘the Christies who owned Glyndebourne’, and perhaps only mildly related to the more famous Christies who auctioned things? Families had major and minor branches – and even the minor branches were major.

Of course there were subgroups and cliques. The largest faultline, really, was intelligence. The boys whose fathers and grandfathers had been to Eton, who inherited the school like an old watch or a family farm, didn’t have to use their brains, even if they had them. Those who had arrived more precipitously at this grand place – via academic or music scholarships, pushy middle-class parents, raw social experiments of one kind or another – had to live on their wits. King’s Scholars, who had won their scholarships by competitive exam, were set apart, herded into their own house and sartorially marked off with short black gowns, giving their closed world the aspect of a curious social laboratory. I always felt a bit sorry for my brother when I caught sight of him running towards lessons, clutching his ‘K.S.’ gown to his sides like a bird holding in its wings, a clever animal in an alien habitat.

By and large, these scholars were middle-class or upper-middle-class, the children of academics, doctors, self-made businessmen. If they were posh, they were interestingly so, like the brilliant mathematician and future Fields medalist Timothy Gowers, whose father was a composer and whose great-great-grandfather had been a famous neurologist. Or they came from bohemian and eccentric families, like Boris Johnson, perhaps with a hint of social arrivisme. Johnson, by the way, looked pretty much the same at 15 as he does at 55, and was a familiar sight as he charged and flapped his way around the college lanes. The bigfoot stoop (he was known as ‘the Yeti’), the bumbling confidence, the skimmed-milk pallor, the berserk hair, the alarming air of imminent self-harm, which gave the impression that he had been freshly released from some protective institution: all was already in place.

Over the years, I’ve resisted writing about Eton, for the usual reasons but mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity. All three modes are unwarranted, as far as I’m concerned. I have largely happy memories of the school and eventually flourished there much as my socially avaricious mum hoped I would. But complaint doesn’t have to be merely self-interested. In 1984 I couldn’t have predicted that politics in the early 21st century would be so contaminated by my schoolfellows. Cameron became prime minister in 2010, and British life began to resemble a set-up from a Johnny English comedy – soon the prime minister, the mayor of London and the archbishop of Canterbury were all old Etonians. (Simon can’t possibly be the double agent, Rowan Atkinson says in Johnny English Reborn, because ‘Simon went to Eton’ – a nice joke since Dominic West, the actor playing Simon, also went to Eton.) Suddenly we were back in the 1960s, when the Conservative Party, looking around for a successor to the old Etonian Harold Macmillan, chose between two other Etonians, Lord Hailsham and Alec Douglas-Home. How had this happened?

Much worse was to come. Cameron tossed the rotten bouquet of a referendum to the nation. Seemingly, it was done lightly – politics as one of his careless posh parties. On the eve of Brexit, here was Boris Johnson, flamboyantly convictionless, writing pro and anti pieces for the Daily Telegraph, essentially back at school again – a place he never left – as if winging an end of year exam or Classics prize. And lo, with his arched clown eyebrows, and clad in that ever so slightly vulgar double-breasted suit – surely an Ealing comedy idea of an English gent? – came Jacob Rees-Mogg. Him! Like Johnson, Rees-Mogg appeared unchanged from schooldays. He was four years below me, notorious as soon as he arrived, because he never seemed young. He wandered around the school gazing blandly at people through his windscreen spectacles and clutching a gigantic briefcase, in which, it was rumoured, resided his ‘stocks and shares’. He was one of those boys – already playing the markets at 13.

But I’m the one who feels 13 again. After years of living in the United States, I’ve become unused to seeing lots of Etonians gathered in one place. And there are so many of them, all involved in varying degrees of Brexit: Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg; Zac Goldsmith and Jesse Norman; Alexander Nix, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; Nigel Oakes, the founder of its sinister parent company, SCL; Kwasi Kwarteng, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and a King’s Scholar at Eton, who went on to Cambridge and Harvard and eventually became under-secretary of state at the Department for Exiting the European Union. Even the ranks of decency are stocked by old Etonians: Oliver Letwin, Rory Stewart and Hugo Dixon, editor in chief of the useful anti-Brexit website InFacts. (I remember Dixon, a King’s Scholar: skinny, super-bright, otherworldly.)

I feel 13 again because the old questions reassert themselves. How did these people get here? What connects them? I thought I had learned something about networks, and now I realise I know rather little. What do these people have in common? Is it enough to reply, ‘Well, Eton of course,’ and be done with it? In Heroic Failure, Fintan O’Toole diagnoses in the Brexit worldview a combination of Thatcherite lust for economic deregulation and postwar nostalgia for lost imperial might. To summarise this worldview: we were ‘great’ when we had an empire. We won the Second World War and yet the loser, Germany, got all the benefits: moral authority, economic power and eventually effective sovereignty. Only by tearing ourselves away from the overweening and expansionist EU and ‘going it alone’ can we rediscover the fighting spirit that won the war in the first place. Brexit will be our second Reformation. Make Britain Great Again. All set to the Dad’s Army tune: ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Juncker?’

Binding together these two impulses, conservative economic purism and imperial nostalgia, is the conviction that for decades – the Thatcher period aside – Britain has merely been managing its decline, and is increasingly content to do so. The phrase appears in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s galumphing book The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain, which reads like a collection of recycled Eton essays originally done in detention as punishment. Unlike contemporary politicians, none of these titans, Rees-Mogg tells us, was ‘managing the decline of Britain’. They were imbued with a ferocious work ethic, and ‘a practical patriotism’. They had the good sense to believe that it was ‘reasonable to export’ British civilisation ‘to other countries to remove such hardships as exist there’. Thatcher, he thinks, was a titanic Victorian of that sort. Since her departure, ‘the forces of stagnation, trepidation and hesitation have returned.’

Back in 2012, a bunch of proto-Brexiteers – Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss – slapdashed a manifesto together called Britannia Unchained, the gist of which is that the British have become squalid, lazy gits, getting fat and studying useless subjects like psychology and desiring only to be footballers or pop stars. If we emulated serious, dynamic countries like India, China and Israel, where the best young people go into technology or the sciences, we might kickstart the dodgy old British Leyland engine that is our current economic motor. These MPs share Rees-Mogg’s interpretation of recent history. Under Thatcher there was dynamism, but since the financial crisis ‘a spirit of decline has returned.’ In 1950 we were richer than France or West Germany. No more. And note the post-imperial retrospect: ‘Britain once ruled the empire on which the sun never set. Now it can barely keep England and Scotland together.’

The ‘decline’ theme is continued in Boris Johnson’s jaunty, florid book about Churchill, who, as Johnson sees it, became increasingly irrelevant during the Second World War, after America entered it, and especially afterwards – when Britain started decommissioning its imperial holdings. This chapter is entitled ‘The Giant of the Shrunken Island’. Churchill here performs as an early, greater version of Thatcher, a politician who by raw willpower could buoy Britain’s waning self-confidence: ‘By sheer force of personality he asserted his right to equality in the conference chamber … As long as Churchill had to be given honour and respect, the same could be said for Britain and the empire; or so he imagined.’

What did Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg learn at Eton? Many things, as befits a complex institution that has produced Keynes and Huxley and Orwell. But two powerful memories seem pertinent at present. Near the end of our time at school, we were addressed by the headmaster (this is my memory, but it may have been some other senior member of staff). It was, I guess, an informal version of a commencement address, a send-off with valedictory ethics. The headmaster, a thoughtful Scot, instructed us in how we should comport ourselves in the world. The Etonian, he said, is one who can go into any room, mingle with any social group, be at ease and put others at their ease. (Not a bad model for the aspirant politicians in the room.) The Etonian is marked by his air of ‘effortless superiority’. The phrase was already commonplace at the school, appealed to and sometimes mocked. The headmaster, as I recall, invoked it in a cautionary spirit. He meant: you have been told that this is your strength, but don’t let it become your weakness. ‘Effortless superiority’ was the ethos, the ideal you aspired to – charmed confidence balanced by strategic noblesse oblige. If you aren’t forever performing your superiority but are elegantly obscuring it, you don’t alienate those many people who are suspicious of your privilege. We were told to be wary of misusing our superiority, but we were not told we didn’t have it. The instruction, even when well intentioned, depended on this modification – and so its perpetuation was guaranteed.

The second memory is better grounded. First-year boys were taught by generalist teachers, usually classicists, who instructed us in English, Latin and history. For history, we were given Heaven’s Command, the first volume of Jan Morris’s trilogy about the rise and fall of the British Empire, along with extracts from the other two volumes. The trilogy is a lush, romantic account of the enormous, bloody, dust-filled adventure of empire. Morris – who as James Morris had fought in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers during the Second World War – describes military expeditions, noble defeats and brutal victories with the same rousing relish. It was a good book to give to dreaming 13-year-old boys.

But now I wonder at the school’s reflexive turn towards Britain’s imperial past, and its choice of this glitteringly nostalgic text. Morris doesn’t exactly hide the racism and genocidal violence of the imperial enterprise, but they’re somehow swept up in the sheer mad gusto of the narrative. Take the battle of Omdurman, the infamous rout of 1898, enacted as revenge for the death of General Gordon, when Kitchener’s troops killed at least ten thousand Sudanese soldiers, with the loss of only 48 Britons. Morris tells us that the Mahdist army was efficiently annihilated (‘It all went like very slow clockwork’), but says nothing about the grotesque disparities of dead, swiftly moving to a set-piece description of the battle’s aftermath: the British on the banks of the Nile, triumphantly raising the Union Jack, two of Kitchener’s gunboats moored at the bank; the many ‘celebrities of Empire’ present in the crowd (a young Douglas Haig, a young Winston Churchill) and, at the head of his men, ‘ramrod stiff’, Kitchener himself: ‘As the solemn men’s voices sang the old words of “Abide with Me” … to the uncertain harmonies of a Sudanese band, a tear was seen to roll down [his] brown and flinchless cheek.’

Sven Lindqvist, in his 1992 book about the genocidal roots of European colonialism, Exterminate All the Brutes, describes the battle of Omdurman from the other side: ‘At the battle of Omdurman, the entire Sudanese army was annihilated without once having got their enemy within gunshot.’ He goes on to describe the rapid advance of 19th-century European armaments, in particular the machine gun, and the advantage in extermination that these new weapons afforded. He quotes Churchill’s account of the battle: ‘Of course we should win. Of course we should mow them down.’

Morris ends her trilogy with another set-piece requiem, which serves as an echo of that early scene on the banks of the Nile. It is January 1965, and Churchill, the great lion of empire, is being laid to rest. It is also the funeral of the imperial project: ‘For the last time the world watched a British imperial spectacle.’ The impossible pageant has come to an end: Morris’s final volume is entitled Farewell the Trumpets. Each moment is finely embossed on the page: Big Ben silenced, the guns going off in Hyde Park, the river launch carrying the statesman’s coffin up the Thames as the cranes on the riverside wharfs dip in salute; dignitaries and politicians from all over the world gathering to pay their last respects to the defender of liberty. But the words that are designed to sear the damp British postwar heart are these: ‘A hundred nations were represented there, and twenty of them had once been ruled from this very capital.’

I read those words when I was 13 and have never forgotten them: propaganda has such supple power. What a sentence. And what an idea! History ended in 1965. I read those words, and so did David Cameron, and so – I’m sure – did Jacob Rees-Mogg, who triples down on this sickly imperial nostalgia in his recent book, telling us in his acknowledgments, amid nods towards patient wife and beneficent nanny, that ‘it was Heaven’s Command by Jan Morris that sparked my interest in history, and learning about Gordon and Sleeman aged 14 has influenced two chapters in this book.’ I’m not sure if Boris Johnson read Morris’s words, but I note that his book about Churchill effectively ends (there is an unimportant coda) where Morris ends her history: we are at the great man’s funeral once again, with the description of the cranes bowing ‘in salute’ as the barge passed. Meaningful British history – a time when Britain still counted for something – is shutting down. Glamour has given way to gloom:

An estimated 300,000 people filed past his coffin as it lay in state in Westminster Hall – the first such lying-in-state to be accorded a commoner since the Duke of Wellington. You can see them in the footage – the Britain of my parents’ generation: old men with sunken chaps and trilby hats, women with heavy coats and headscarves; but also young men in drainpipe trousers, and women with short skirts and mascara and peroxide hair and red lipstick; people crying, staring, holding up their primitive cameras.

These are the school memories I’ve been revisiting while the Brexit madness has been escalating – a madness casually instituted, secretly engineered and noisily bolstered by a cabal of old Etonians born between 1962 and 1975, the year we joined the Common Market. ‘Effortless superiority’, and the generations of entitlement that bred this relaxed mantra, may go some way towards explaining the peculiar lightness of being that characterised Cameron’s conduct throughout: the decision to hold the referendum, the unpressed rhythm of the referendum campaign, and then his apparently easy abandonment of political responsibility as he hummed his way off the podium after issuing his resignation. It may go more of the way towards explaining Boris Johnson’s astonishing ethical irresponsibility around language. At the end of March, in the week we were supposed to leave the EU, Johnson was in public conversation with Charles Moore, the old Etonian former editor of the Daily Telegraph, and … well, you know how one old Etonian gets in the presence of another. ‘This was the Friday,’ Johnson lamented, ‘when Charles Moore’s retainers were meant to be weaving through the moonlit lanes of Sussex, half blind with scrumpy, singing Brexit shanties at the tops of their voices and beating the hedgerows with staves.’

‘They were GIANTS in those days,’ Michael Kidson, one of Cameron’s teachers at Eton, used to intone about the Victorians. And we are just dwarves on a shrunken island? I was born in the year Churchill died; Johnson a year before, Cameron a year later, and Rees-Mogg in 1969. We all grew up with the idea that ‘everything had changed’ after the war, though where the authors of Britannia Unchained see fatalism, I am inclined to see realism. As a generation, we understood that, if we weren’t exactly managing decline, we would certainly not be pioneers of expansion. We inhabited a different world from that of our parents and grandparents.

One understands how a certain version of history – romantic, nostalgic, privileged, fretful about lost power and sovereignty – might shape a political worldview. It is a politics of chronic belatedness, in which the only way to move forward is by harking back. But what does talk of ‘decline’ really mean for these conspirators of Brexit? It is invoked and inveighed against, but it is, in the end, weightless political rhetoric. There are no fundamental political differences between Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg, because they belong to the same world. A world of extreme wealth where there has never been any decline for them. They are secure as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were before them. Once that security may have come from land; now it comes from hedge funds and shipping fortunes and extracurricular salaries (‘chicken-feed’, Johnson said of the £250,000 a year he was paid to write a column). Whatever happens in the next thirty or forty years, post-Brexit, isn’t going to affect them. Privilege is like an unwritten constitution: you can never lose what you never have to find.

But what about everyone else? In his acknowledgments for The Churchill Factor,Johnson thanks his old school chum Hugo Dixon, even though the two are, presumably, political opponents: ‘I wrote one chapter in the Greek home of Churchill’s great-grandson Hugo Dixon.’ Well, lucky Boris. And even luckier Hugo. A connection is being signalled, a lifelong link that transcends piffling political difference. The words of ‘The Eton Boating Song’ waft over the Thames towards me. It is a fine June afternoon, and the fours and eights plash by, as the lucky, lucky boys sing their words of golden captivity: ‘But we’ll row for ever/… And nothing in life shall sever/The chain that is round us now.’