Three decades later, as I could not possibly have imagined in 1975, I found myself in Didion’s Manhattan living room, interviewing her for The Washington Post.

I was an aging rookie on the Post’s book beat, which I’d recently been asked to take over. I was also quietly terrified, as I would be many times when talking with writers I admired. Fear isn’t a bad thing for a reporter. It forces you to prepare and keeps you alert. But in retrospect, I put this interview in a category of its own.

That’s because preparing to talk with Didion — though I was scarcely conscious of this at the time — taught me how to think about my job.

Didion had just published The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of the sudden death of her husband and the simultaneous, life-threatening illness of their only child. I had read the book in galleys and found it remarkable. “Are you going to talk to her?” an editor asked, and I quickly said yes. But I had not thought the assignment through. The real question, I soon realized, was what we were going to talk about. Here was a writer, after all, who had just put everything she knew about death and grief into print.

What was I supposed to do–ask her how she felt?

Didion (at right) is a tiny woman in the best of times. In the fall of 2005, she couldn’t have weighed much more than her age, which was 70. Her daughter, Quintana, had died that August, after Didion had finished the book, and we sat down to talk just a few days after the memorial service. “Many people have said to me: You don’t have to promote this,” she told me, but “if I didn’t do it, it still wouldn’t bring her back.”

Late in the interview I managed a few questions about the memorial. She’d been touched, she said, when her brother handed her a handkerchief, because Didions normally avoid displays of emotion (“It was so sweet, you know? We don’t usually hand each other handkerchiefs”). But mostly, I went with the plan I’d worked out. I stuck to questions about writing — about Didion’s experience of creating this particular book, and about how it had differed, or not, from the writing she had done before.

Here’s some of what I learned:

She has never written from outlines, but she would sometimes think as much as 30 pages ahead. Not this time. “It didn’t feel like writing,” she said. “Writing to me is really hard. And I just sort of sat down and wrote this — or typed it.” She knew she wanted to come back to key scenes over and over, foregrounding different details to evoke the obsessive nature of her grief. She sensed that a crisis in her daughter’s illness would form a “movement” that would fall a certain distance into the narrative. That was it.

Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a writer, had drilled into her the need for a “billboard” — a short passage, early in your story, that tells readers what it will be about. So when the time came, she typed one in. It mentions marriage, children, illness, memory, and disorienting grief, and it includes the best description I’ve seen of Didion’s pre-Magical Thinking literary persona. “As a writer, even as a child,” she writes, “I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.”

Polished withholding, she had discovered, wasn’t enough for her anymore. But in talking to Didion, the most surprising thing I learned was that her writing had begun to change with her previous book.

Where I Was From was mainly a reported meditation on the nature of California. “But there were memoir aspects to it,” Didion said, especially near the end, where she wrote about her mother’s death. That part of the book was “the most open emotionally” she had ever been in her writing: “I mean open emotionally in the sense that something just occurs to you and you write it down, which is not my normal mode.”

Talking about writing, we both managed to keep our composure for an hour and a half. When the interview was over, Didion walked me politely to the door. She looked relieved to move on to her next task.

My own relief came from finding a story that could be more than a close-up of grief.

I spent four years on the book beat, and looking back — I took early retirement from the Post last summer — I’m still amazed and grateful for what it permitted me to do. An obsessive reader since childhood, I got paid to read mostly excellent books and have extended conversations with their smart and interesting authors. And if those conversations threatened to become problematic for any reason, all I had to do was remember the Didion Rule:

When in doubt, ask writers about writing.

It sounds childishly simple, and perhaps it is. But it helped me avoid (mostly, not always) the more formulaic book beat stories: how Writer A struggled and struggled and finally made it big, for instance, or how cleverly Writer B’s new novel was being marketed, or what a buzz Writer C’s advance had caused (“My God, they paid a million bucks for that? They’ll never make it back”).

I’d fallen for the struggle narrative right away, as it happened. A month into the beat, I wrote it about Michael Cunningham. The story line was accurate enough: The author of The Hours had struggled plenty, writing badly for a decade, he said, as he labored to produce “the kind of stories that would be published to wide acclaim. They tended to be about bad marriages in Connecticut, about which I knew nothing at all.”

The best part of the interview, however, came when Cunningham talked about the genre origins (ghost stories, thrillers, science fiction) of his new book, Specimen Days. I shortchanged this. In the process, I produced a piece that inspired a headline writer to call it “Success Story.” Oh, great, I thought. I’ve written that one now–would I end up writing it again and again?

Not with the Didion Rule in place.

I would find myself, instead, asking Dave Eggers and the former Sudanese “Lost Boy” Valentino Achak Deng how their break-the-mold collaboration had worked. Eggers signed on to help Deng tell his story, it turned out, after a woman who worked with the Lost Boys called out of the blue and asked him to. He ended up writing What Is the What as fiction because, among other reasons, he didn’t want his Well-Known-Young-American-Writer voice to intrude on Deng’s, which it had started to do when he had tried a biographical approach.

Or I’d find myself being set straight by Art Spiegelman about the nature of graphic novels. I had tossed out a widely held theory that Maus had succeeded because, unlike Spiegelman’s earlier experiments with comics, it satisfied the universal craving for narrative. True, but way too simple, Spiegelman said, jumping up from a chair in his Soho studio to pull a copy of his masterpiece off a shelf. He then walked me patiently through it, highlighting the hidden (to my eyes, at least) artistic dialogue between visuals and words.

Once, when Margaret Atwood (at left) came through Washington, I bought her a glass of lemonade and watched her draw waves in the air to illustrate the differences among literary forms. “The wavelengths of a poem are very short,” she said, chopping a hand quickly up and down. “You’re looking at the patterns of syllables, and how consistent they are with other syllables a little further down, and words and rhythms.” The wavelengths of a novel are long, like a tidal wave’s, so “if you put the pistol on page 30, you’re probably going to see it again on page 162 and then it goes off on page 415 — kaboom.” As for the short story, which was what I’d come to ask about, “the wavelengths are in between those two forms, and you can get a very condensed amount of power into that, of a different kind.”

Call it Atwood’s First Law of Literature: “It’s just a question of wavelength, how far away the bits of it are from the other bits.”

Four years of interviews produced more high points than I can list. There was Chinua Achebe, remembering how, as a shy boy in colonial Nigeria who didn’t know that Africans could be writers, he still asked enough questions about Igbo customs to fill the “mental notebook” that would help him write Things Fall Apart (“It was the main preparation for my mission, which I didn’t know was a mission”). There was Jane Smiley, lamenting the technical difficulties of fictional sex (“There’s a lot of problems with making it central, and one of them is that it’s boring”). There was Junot Diaz, talking about why he didn’t translate the Spanish passages or explain the references to Galactus the planet-eater in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

“There’s always a space in every immigrant’s life which is reserved for what you don’t understand,” Diaz said. He wanted all his readers to share, “in one place or another, this moment of unintelligibility.”

For Diaz and many others I interviewed, the question of how they wrote linked directly to the question of why they became writers in the first place. Diaz turned to reading and then writing as a way to address the troubling space between his Dominican childhood and his New Jersey youth. He was drawn to newspaper classified pages, he said, as “a window into a world I had no access to,” and one day he came across an ad that changed his life. Responding to it, he made repeated four-mile trips with a shopping cart to collect 500 free books an elderly woman hadn’t wanted to throw away.

Marilynne Robinson confronted a different kind of cultural border — and she defined herself as a writer by refusing to cross.

I had read Robinson’s Gilead shortly before starting the book beat. She sounded like no one else, but I couldn’t say why. In September 2008, as she was publishing Home, I went to Iowa City to find out.

Robinson talked about growing up in Idaho, in “quite an unpopulated place” near Lake Pend Oreille. She would sometimes sleep on an open porch at her grandparents’ house where “there was nothing around us but mountains and woods. Nothing. No other sound, no other light, nothing. The way that mountains sound in a wind, you know, it’s impossible not to feel that you are surrounded by deeply living things.” She later wove that feeling into her first novel, Housekeeping.

In this wild isolation, Robinson read whatever she could get her hands on, including Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare and Poe. “You can’t believe how much Poe poetry I can recite to this day,” she said, then demonstrated with the opening lines of “Alone”:

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from the common spring.

Heading east to Pembroke College, she found that her classmates had no notion of the West, let alone a sense of its living landscape. She went through a period of reading modern novels that came highly recommended, but disliked the staleness of their language and “the thinness of how human characters were represented.” When she started a novel of her own, she filled her prose with extended metaphors, mindful of the figurative language of “Emerson and Thoreau and people like that.” It was “very ornate, by the standards of that moment,” she said, and she doubted it would be published.

Housekeeping is now an American classic. Yet there wouldn’t be another Robinson novel for 23 years.

Why? Well, there was motherhood, divorce, teaching and some heavily researched nonfiction. Most important, though, was Robinson’s refusal to cross the border between her sense of who she was and contemporary culture. She didn’t want to recycle her Housekeeping voice, but she didn’t want to enlist in the 20th century, either. So she set out to read herself out of modernity. “I read about the Albigensians, everything in the world,” she said, “simply to create another sort of ecology in my brain.” She read the theology of John Calvin. She read about abolitionism in Iowa. One day, while trying to write something else, she found herself channeling the voice of an old Congregational minister. He became the narrator of Gilead.

Home followed Gilead by four years. Set in the same Iowa town at the same time in the 1950s, it features many of the same characters, though its point of view, themes and plot are new. I loved it. Yet I couldn’t help asking how Robinson had managed to write this one so fast.

Once again, she declined to see as others saw.

“I write novels quickly,” she said. “I’m not supposed to write novels quickly, but I do.”

When your job is talking to writers, people who care about books quite naturally have questions. One I’ve been asked a number of times is: Who was your toughest interview? Usually I duck it. Many interviews were tough, I say, because I never lost the feeling that at any moment, someone like John Banville, Toni Morrison or Michael Ondaatje could expose me as an ill-prepared literary fraud. Yet the toughest interviews, in that sense, were often the most rewarding. Fear is good.

Sometimes, though, I mention Kurt Vonnegut or Philip Roth.

I interviewed Vonnegut a few weeks before I met Didion, but the talk-about-writing insight wouldn’t have done me any good. The reason is simple and sad. At 82, the author of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five had long since said everything he had to say about his best work — books that could make you laugh and shake your fist at the same time, especially if you were part of a generation beginning to see that no, it really did not make sense to bomb the Vietnamese in order to save them. Vonnegut had written all those books by the time he was 55, he said, and “my life is essentially a garage sale now of stuff I wrote a long time ago,” including the pastiche of speeches and short articles he was supposed to be promoting.

He couldn’t have been nicer or more generous, but he didn’t try to hide his belief that he had lived long enough.

Vonnegut’s mother killed herself in 1943. A year later, as a German prisoner of war, he survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden by huddling in an underground meat locker as tens of thousands of civilians burned to death. Where he most wanted to be now, he said, was home, by which he meant “Indianapolis when I was 9 years old, and you can’t go back there. But I had a mother and a father, a big sister, a big brother, a dog, a cat — and yeah, that’s where I’d like to go.”

The afternoon’s sole upbeat moment came when I mentioned a passage in Slaughterhouse-Five that describes the Dresden bombing as if it were unfolding in reverse. Planes fly backwards over the flaming city. They suck bombs back inside bomb bays and return to England. The bombs go back to bomb factories and all the airmen become school kids again.

“Oh, I’ve made a recording of that,” Vonnegut said. He dug out a CD, hit the play button and grinned. Out floated his alternate reality, set to jazz.

The winner in the “toughest interview” sweepstakes, however, has to be Philip Roth, seen by many as America’s best living novelist.

Roth (at right) started things off by imposing the Didion Rule preemptively: he said he would discuss only his writing and would answer no questions about his personal life. Fine. Yet in Roth’s case, this created a major hurdle, because, as his readers know, he is an exceptionally brazen alchemist of the personal into the fictional. For that matter, so is his chief fictional alter ego, the Roth-like novelist Nathan Zuckerman — though both writers are prone to arguing the point.

“Life and art are distinct,” Roth has Zuckerman say in one novel. “[W]hat could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everybody.”

I wasn’t infuriated, but I was certainly perplexed. I was supposed to be talking with Roth about the recently-issued third volume of his collected works. That volume included his 1974 novel My Life as a Man, an act of imagination in which a writer named Peter Tarnopol — whose spectacularly failed first marriage looks a great deal like Roth’s own — struggles to exorcise it. In the process, Tarnopol creates a character named Nathan Zuckerman, who writes his own variations on the marital train wreck.

How, exactly, were we supposed to discuss this without getting personal?

I tried. It mostly didn’t work. Asked why he had used Tarnopol and Zuckerman to play with the fact-fiction divide, Roth objected to the question. “I’m not playing with it. I don’t care to play,” he said. “This man is trying to transform his experience into fiction. He imagines it once, he imagines it twice and says: ‘The hell with it, here’s the straight story.’ As simple as that.”

Not to me, unfortunately. Still trying, I brought up yet another version of the marriage narrative — nonfiction, this time — which Roth included in a not-much-noticed 1988 autobiography called The Facts. That didn’t get me very far, either.

He really didn’t remember The Facts, Roth said.

I’m making this all sound worse than it really was. Despite the obvious frustrations, I had a great time talking with Roth. A few months later, he won the PEN/Faulkner award. When I phoned to talk about that, he surprised me by saying, “I liked what you wrote.”

So did I. But if you’re interested in learning about Philip Roth, it’s not the first thing I would recommend. Better you should stick with The Facts.

Pay particular attention to the beginning and the end, which Roth added because he was dissatisfied with the autobiographical core. The beginning takes the form of a letter from Roth to Nathan Zuckerman explaining what he was trying to do and asking if the result is good enough to see the light of day. The end, which takes up 35 pages, is Zuckerman’s scathing reply. “Don’t publish,” he tells Roth, before itemizing the evasions, distortions and concealments he thinks his creator would never permit himself in a work of fiction.

They’re brilliant, those 35 pages – and they’ll tell you more about writers and writing than even the best interview can do.

Photo credits: Everett Collection (Joan Didion);  Vanwaffle/Creative Commons (Margaret Atwood); Wolf Gang/Creative Commons (Philip Roth).

***Click here to read “Unrippable” by Ralph Lombreglia.***

Q: The main character in your story, Willow Tyvek, first says that one should never paint a house while also serving as its occupant’s therapist. But then she makes a complete turnaround, striking a deal with businessman Vernon DeCloud to do exactly that in exchange for $200,000 and an apartment in his divided mansion. What is the risk in combining house painting and behavioral therapy? What accounts for Willow’s decision?

A: It’s the narrator, by the way, who concludes the first section of the story by saying, “And under no circumstances did you render both services to the same client.” Yes, it’s the narrator speaking while residing inside Willow’s head, and thus speaking for her; but still there’s that crucial little bit of distance and difference. Anyway, the reason for what you call “a complete turnaround” is to have a story. Willow ends up doing the very thing that one does not do, and this is the main comic irony of the whole piece, the story’s ironic reversal. I realize I’m treading on dangerous ground here, talking about irony, because irony has a bad name these days (actually, it’s had a bad name for at least the last 20 years). Irony’s bad name is a symptom of the mortal blow we’ve managed to strike against literacy in general. Apparently, it is now understood to be synonymous with “sarcasm,” and therefore a cruel, dark, and insincere posture. I don’t agree with the equation. I remember trying, many years ago, to make this point to the late David Foster Wallace, who was railing against irony in a discussion session after a public reading he had given. (It was my only in-person encounter with DFW, who struck me as a perfectly decent, intellectually honest person, and whose writing, at its best, is brilliant.) Wallace was associating irony with David Letterman, as I recall. I said to him that to be ironic was not to be “sardonic,” for example. He agreed, and wondered if we needed a new word to capture a new shade of meaning particular to our moment in history. “Sardony,” he suggested. I let the point drop that evening, but in fact I don’t think we need a new word. I think we need to reclaim the proper meaning of the perfectly good word we already have—irony—which used to be considered not a literary failing but rather one of the hallmarks of serious literature. Shakespeare, for example, was a very ironic guy.

Q: There is something out of the ordinary about the relationship Willow has with Vernon DeCloud. The narrator likens his effect on her to that of a “witch or a warlock whose mind slapped onto your mind like a blood-sucking leech.” Though Willow is ostensibly his therapist, it is Vern who helps her to confront her fear of heights. Does this also have something to do with her ultimate decision to go back on her oath of never rendering both behavioral therapy and house painting services to the same client?

A: Yes, the answer is yes. I’d like to believe that all the elements of this story converge in the ironic reversal I mentioned above. Willow and Vern were destined to meet and blend their lives, and I am the inventor of their destiny. This is the third short story I’ve written (going back to the early 1990s) in which Vernon DeCloud appears, and in each case he is a strange man who meets other strange people with whom he has some strange connection. These facts recently led my 18-year-old daughter to conclude that I am Vernon DeCloud. I replied that she was correct, but I pointed out that I am also Willow Tyvek, which seemed to surprise her. I think it was Goethe who said that all of an author’s characters are actually the author, which suggests that fiction writers write fiction in order to meet themselves. That makes sense to me.

Q: Your story seems to take place in the present. Willow, for example, is an independent woman searching for her identity, making dramatic career changes (I have this idea that people of the past stuck with one career throughout life, whereas the people of today are all over the place), dealing with the evolution of painting supplies into cheaply made products, and the bother of cell phones and caller-ID. Did you make it a point to bring modernity into the story, or was it more out of instinct or habit?

A: If we’re looking for evidence that the story takes place in the present, the flashback set in a hardware warehouse-store resembling Home Depot is probably conclusive. “People of the past” is a pretty big category that presumably includes Buddha and Jesus, both of whom had major career changes. So I guess there’s no simple answer to that one. Anyway, to your question, I do think that setting short stories in the present moment is both an instinct and a habit of mine, and it’s interesting that you phrase it that way. I have written some fiction set in the future, but I’ve only contemplated writing fiction set in the past. If I thought I could do it, I’d probably write something about Jesus—the real Jesus, I mean—but it’s already been done by a brilliant writer named Jim Crace in a novel called Quarantine, which everyone should immediately go out and read.

Q: How exactly did you come up with the idea to write a story about a woman who is both a house painter and a behavioral therapist? Which career do you feel Willow identifies with more? What did you intend to suggest by ending the story with Vern’s comment, “Yes, but especially the money”?

A: I came up with the idea by meeting her, roughly 23 years ago. In real life she was a landscape designer, not a housepainter—a landscape designer known to have a genius for helping people suffering from intractable behavioral problems. Sometimes, when landscape design was slow, and if she felt like it, she would accept tough therapeutic assignments, just like Willow. When I met her, she was working as a bookkeeper, oddly enough, but that’s a good example of the way that fiction edits while life does not. Having Willow be a bookkeeper as well as a painter and a therapist would have been gratuitous and distracting, which art should never be and which life always is. I believe that Willow enjoys both of her occupations equally well but in different ways for different reasons. And yes, the last words of the story mean something (see final answer). Let me add that although it took me 23 years to get around to writing the story, at least I finally did it, which I believe Willow would applaud. And when you think about it, 23 years isn’t bad in the grand scheme of things.

Q: Did you research house painting for the piece? Have you personally compared the stability of wood and aluminum ladders? You are known as an optimist when it comes to technology. How do you feel about the advent of the Kindle and other e-reader devices? Are they changing literature, or perhaps even hurting it?

A: Yes, I did quite a bit of hands-on research for the story, though I did it when I was about 16 years old, working on construction sites alongside the very same old-world Italian painters with whom Willow later worked. (As I’ve said above: Willow Tyvek, c’est moi.) The old Italians told me all those things about wooden and aluminum ladders, the same things they told Willow decades later. Will I ever read a book on a Kindle? If Amazon ever designs a better Kindle, I might. Just yesterday, on the subway, I was reading Madame Bovary on my mobile phone, and that’s no joke. We don’t need electronic technology to help us damage literature and ourselves; we’re doing a fine job on our own with a much older instrument, about which Vern has the last word in the story.

I never expected to write about cancer—I have a Ph.D. in American history, and mostly write about 20th century politics and culture. But in April 2007, I had stomach pains, so I saw a gastroenterologist, who said I was probably fine but ordered up a CT scan as a precaution. I did the scan a few days later and learned that I had appendicitis. The doctor instructed me to walk to a nearby emergency room in Washington and hand my films to a surgeon who would be waiting to meet with me. I told my parents: nothing to worry about; it’s just appendicitis.

The surgeon grabbed my films, and came into the room where I sat with my parents and told us that there were actually “two findings”—appendicitis, which I was fighting off, and a tennis-ball-size tumor in my pancreas. The surgeon couldn’t tell us what kind of tumor it was, but he said it was likely some type of pancreatic cancer. That was late on a Friday. On Monday, we consulted a second surgeon, who said it was definitely a tumor, and it’s either sarcoma (a death sentence); adenocarcinoma, with a five-year survival rate of five percent; or an islet-cell tumor. When my Mom said we should hope for an islet-cell, he said, yes, but there’s not much chemo or radiation to treat islet-cells—they will also kill you.

I couldn’t believe it. I was 37. I felt like a dead man walking. My grandparents had all lived into their late 70s and 80s and one had died at 94, and none of them had died from cancer. Deep in the back of my mind, I thought, This is absurd. It’s the 21st century, and modern medicine is telling me that I’m going to die before I turn 38 because doctors have few good tools to attack my tumor.

Well, I got really lucky. My parents’ neighbor called a doctor she knew, and he helped get us an appointment with the most experienced pancreatic cancer surgeon in the world, Dr. John Cameron at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Cameron spent a minute with my films, asked if I had lost lots of weight recently (the answer was “no”), and flat-out declared: “You’re going to live a long life.” My Mom, with my Dad right there, told Dr. Cameron: “I love you.”

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To read Matthew Dallek’s Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore, his reconsideration of Ronald Reagan’s reputation, click here.

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I had major surgery at Hopkins—I had an islet-cell tumor, which was encapsulated, and when islet-cells are removed before spreading, there is a very good chance of a cure. Dr. Cameron removed 40 percent of my pancreas, my spleen, and my appendix for good measure. While I was recuperating in the hospital for six nights after my surgery, I realized just how fortunate I had been. One of my neighbors down the hall was a man in his 50s, also recovering from pancreatic surgery. He routinely lapped me when I walked the corridors. I was so ill I could barely walk, yet every time he passed me, this man told me to keep going. He assured me that I’d be passing him very soon. I later learned that he had adenocarcinoma of the pancreas and that his doctors hadn’t been able to remove all of the cancer. I never learned his name, and I have no idea whether he’s even alive today. He was a nice man, incredibly brave, and he really encouraged me. So although I didn’t know him, I was inspired to tell my story in the hopes that in the coming years the investment in cancer research will be worthy of his courage and his humanity.

I want to make a few points about the barriers to securing federal funding and the opportunities for lobbying. First, I want to describe what in my view are the greatest hurdles standing in the way of federal funding for cancer research. The media, I think, do a very poor job of educating and serving the public about cancer issues. The media tend to cover cancer when it strikes a celebrity. The problem is that the coverage is all human interest, and sometimes assumes the character of a death watch. I heard a cable news anchor, who lost a sister-in-law to breast cancer, explain how her producers almost never wanted to do stories related to cancer unless a celebrity was involved. Thus, TV, radio, newspapers, and blogs all fail to focus on substantive issues in cancer research including the lack of funding for research, the dilemmas of making decisions after a diagnosis, new frontiers in cancer science, and so on.

Second, politicians don’t want to be associated with a failed war against an intractable disease. The wars on poverty, drugs, and illegal immigration have all been largely discredited as ineffectual. President Johnson’s Great Society programs helped lower the poverty rate from 22 percent to 12 percent during the 1960s, but critics have successfully portrayed them as little more than government handouts, which has had a chilling effect on similar campaigns. In the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan’s admonishment to America’s youth to “just say no” to drugs became grist for late-night comedians.

At the same time, while they volunteer, do amazing work giving their time and pouring themselves into this life-and-death cause, generally speaking, cancer survivors, their families, and the medical community break into sub-groups focused on individual types of cancer. This has been crucial in making strides for, say, breast cancer research. But my sense is that unlike the AIDS community, which created a major movement to fight the virus, the “cancer community” lacks a cohesive political movement. When I attended a breast cancer symposium of the nation’s top researchers, surgeons, activists, and drug makers, somebody said the meeting was the first time they had all been in the same room. This was in October 2007.

Let me tick off some other barriers to progress that make it more difficult to secure a reliable stream of federal funding for cancer research. At Hopkins, Dr. Anirban Maitra, a brilliant, young pancreatic cancer scientist, told me that he devotes insane amounts of time applying for every grant under the sun. His lab just doesn’t have the resources it needs—it lacks the long-term financial stability—that is required to focus like a laser on his research. As a patient, that’s really depressing. Another incredibly smart and creative scientist there, Dr. Scott Kern, said that the National Institutes of Health—“the only large and renewable funding source for nearly all biomedical funding”—“rarely” funds research that “is truly novel and on the cutting edge” because the large review panels are unfamiliar with the proposed strategy and tend to fund projects that are “standard and well-defined,” where “the risk is low and so may be the impact of the work.” There is a “herd mentality” that undermines cancer research, and so a shift in outlook, approach, and culture is required in order to achieve breakthroughs.

The federal government spends billions to take humans into space and on building weapons—and an estimated $60 billion on the U.S. intelligence budget. Relatively speaking, cancer research is a low priority. The paltry level of funding creates intolerable situations. A friend of mine is enrolled in a vaccine trial at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Led by Dr. Elizabeth Mittendorf, the trial is designed to prevent a recurrence of breast cancer. But the trial is mostly dependent on private funding, so my friend is trying to raise tens of thousands of dollars on her own to keep the trial alive. That’s just crazy, and it’s wrong.

But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the challenges are so massive that they can’t be overcome. I’m actually quite optimistic, and I want to tell you why and share a few brief thoughts on how you might lobby the media and elected officials and their staffs to deliver on the promise of greater federal funding.

Cancer research is an issue that resonates profoundly, without regard to party affiliation. It frightens, maims, and kills Democrats and Republicans alike. To cite just a few members of Congress who have cancer: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has brain cancer, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has twice survived Hodgkin’s disease. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) share the distinction of having survived prostate cancer. In the House, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) has undergone seven major surgeries in the past year because she not only had breast cancer but also has the BRCA-2 gene—putting her at increased risk for developing ovarian and other cancers. Her colleagues Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) and Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) are also among the cancer survivors serving in the House.

Think back to the 2008 presidential campaign. John Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, announced that her breast cancer had spread to her bones. Obama’s mother died from ovarian cancer at age 53. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is a prostate cancer survivor, while John McCain and Fred Thompson successfully battled skin cancer and lymphoma, respectively. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s wife had spinal cancer when she was 19.

I’d come armed with those stories; when members of Congress and our president have a personal stake in something, they respond. After 9/11, there was a strong push to establish the Transportation Security Administration to provide federal protection at U.S. airports; members of Congress felt vulnerable because they fly commercial all the time. If they are reminded just how vulnerable they are to this disease, they will be more likely to respond favorably.

One popular refrain lawmakers have is that Issue X or Issue Y is not a partisan issue; it’s an “American issue.” When it comes to cancer research, it’s actually true. Conservative Republicans like Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a melanoma survivor, strongly support cancer research. On the campaign trail in 2007, Brownback called cancer “the leading cause of fear in America today.” It’s a great line; steal it. In his February address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama talked about “seeking a cure for cancer in our time.” His budget proposal includes doubling the funding for cancer research over five years.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike should rush to support that reasonable goal and all of the benefits that might flow from achieving it. On ideological grounds, liberal Democrats should unanimously show their support for a federal institute that conducts research, distributes grants, and supports doctors whose clinical trials and laboratory research will save countless lives.

But Republicans should also be able to rally around the idea that the National Cancer Institute isn’t just a Big Government bureaucracy stifling economic innovation and the private enterprise system. On the contrary, NCI distributes grants to researchers employed at private medical institutions and leading hospitals. It makes the United States more competitive on a global scale in the areas of science, medicine, and cancer research. And it deepens a public-private partnership that, whatever its flaws, has led to innovation, strengthened the scientific marketplace of ideas, and helped the American people live healthier lives.

All of these arguments are worth making as you lobby for more funding. Find a few examples and show your audience that federal support for cancer research has actually already saved tens of thousands of lives. Connect NIH funding to drugs that can cure childhood leukemia, to colonoscopies, to the development of the CT scans that helped save my life. Thus, if politicians want to save lives, a doubling of the federal cancer research budget over five years is the minimum that ought to be done.

There’s an economic argument as well. Dr. Mittendorf of the Anderson Cancer Center says: “a permanent one percent reduction in mortality from cancer has a present value to current and future generations of Americans of nearly $500 billion. If a cure were feasible, that would be worth about $50 trillion.” Want to cut health care costs? Invest in cancer research. Want to ensure a stronger, healthier workforce? Invest in cancer research. Want to make strides against cancer as scientists have done against HIV/AIDs and heart disease in recent decades? Invest more money in the NCI. In short, remind congressional staff that there’s major bang for the buck in cancer research.

I’m a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center. BPC was founded in 2007 by former Senate Majority Leaders Robert Dole, Tom Daschle, Howard Baker, and George Mitchell. It seeks to promote bipartisan policy solutions to energy, healthcare, and other national challenges, and some of my colleagues are working on a plan that Dole, Daschle, and Baker can all support to provide universal access to healthcare, which, of course, would save the lives of people with cancer. Some of you are Democrats, and some of you are Republicans or Independents. The issue of federal funding for cancer research is and must be a bipartisan issue that can win almost unanimous support from lawmakers.

In the end, a responsible national policy would make fighting the disease a policy priority because cancer causes far more deaths and anxiety in America than terrorism. A credible policy would call for a doubling of federal funding for cancer research with the twin goals of furthering basic research, as well as research on particular kinds of cancer. It would reverse the cuts to NCI’s budget in recent years.

When a close friend of mine started a job at The Washington Post, he looked around and concluded that resources were scarce, and that he was working in a dying industry. The world we need to envision is just the opposite of that one. This world has a massive pot of federal funding available for cancer researchers. Federal funding draws thousands of younger research scientists into the field, spurs creativity, and provides stability. It offers scientists the freedom to tackle one of the most complicated medical challenges known to humans. It will propel a sense within the profession of forward motion, of excitement, of the possibility of scientific progress. It can cement a belief that cancer research is among the hottest growth industries in the country. Maybe I’m being naïve. But I do think the moment is ripe, despite massive budget deficits: the president promised to double federal funding during the campaign. Congress is increasingly receptive to this cause—especially if you can make the economic argument. So keep up the pressure because if you do that, people will one day have a lot more hope and a lot less fear than they currently have whenever a doctor walks into a room and tells them, “Sorry, you have cancer.”

Writers have responded to the loss of John Updike with a wave of meditations and remembrances. In his Editor’s Note for our Spring 2009 issue, Robert Wilson shared his own take on Updike’s legacy. Now, in honor of his 77th birthday on March 18th, we’ve gathered excerpts from just a few of the thoughtful and thought-provoking essays that we have found on blogs scattered throughout the web, with links back to the full posts:

“My first encounter with Updike’s poetry followed a schooling in Gerald Manley Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden-knotty and highbrow, easy to revere, hard to love. Updike’s clear-cut Americana was a splash of cold water in the face: look! A poet can be accessible and intelligent, effortless and meaningful.”
-John Keenan, on the “Books Blog” hosted by The Guardian

“If Christians are tempted to take offence at Updike’s explicit (at times almost pornographic) portrayal of sex, we should remember that the relation between God and the human body is a central tenet of Christian faith. It’s no accident that the sex-obsessed Updike is wiser than so many theologians when he describes Christ’s resurrection in these terms….”
-Ben Myers, on his blog “Faith and Theology”

“As I made my way through Updike’s novels and short stories, I encountered again and again places as drab and commonplace as those I inhabited, yet rendered with a voice both lyrical and knowing. Updike created worlds that were perfectly ordinary and charged with meaning, and, in fleeting moments, with beauty. His was an exquisite sensibility at home in the mundane, a position that struck me, in my early adulthood, with existential force. He demonstrated you could gaze upon your suburban cul-de-sac with the eyes of Henry James. No one else I’ve ever read could yoke together erudition and domesticity like Updike. His form of sophistication was much more accessible than Bellow’s, more contemporary and broader-minded than Hemingway’s. Updike’s was the first adult view of the world I encountered that I could make my own.”
-Richard Prouty, on his blog “One Way Street”

Please share your thoughts on John Updike’s life and works using the “comments” function below. If you would like to read “Nessus at Noon,” which is only available through the print edition of our Winter 2009 issue, you can order a single copy by contacting us at scholar@pbk.org.

Franklin went to Paris in l776 not on a lark, or to cement his reputation as a rake, but on a crucial mission. When he crossed the ocean that November he did so for the seventh time in his life—and for the first time as a traitor. Months earlier he had signed the Declaration of Independence; had he been captured at sea he would have been hanged in London (so the British Ambassador to France made clear when he heard of Franklin’s unexpected arrival). To the Englishman’s mind the 70-year-old American—widely referred to as “the chief of the rebels” or as “General Franklin” was dangerous. The British Ambassador regretted that some English frigate had not met and dispensed with him on the high seas.

The ambassador was not alone in his surprise at hearing that the famous American had washed up on French shores. Franklin met with an electrifying welcome—he was the best-known American in the world, largely on account of his scientific work—but no one could say with any authority what exactly he was doing in France. The theories were multiple. Franklin had come for his health, the climate of France being gentler than that of America. He had come to supply his grandsons with a European education. He had come to see his works published. It was equally asserted that Franklin had sailed as a fugitive, having quarreled with Congress; in order to protest his countrymen’s decision to reconcile with England; to discuss a commercial treaty with France; to sue for peace with the British; to secure his bank account; to ensure that future American generations would be “Frenchified.” The Portuguese ambassador reported on Franklin’s plans to retire to a Swiss chateau with his immense fortune. The Saxon ambassador stubbornly refused to believe that “the chief of the rebels” could conceivably even be in France at all. According to the Sardinian envoy, Franklin had fled America with his family and fortune, having deluded his countrymen with the false promise of a foreign mission. Everyone waited breathlessly for the great man to divulge his plans.

Those were perfectly simple. Congress had declared independence in large part so as to attract a foreign partner in the American rebellion. For a long time that assembly discussed which should come first, the requests for foreign assistance or the formal break with Great Britain. The best orator in Congress argued that a declaration of independence was a necessary step for securing that aid; in that light the document was drafted as an SOS. In l776 the colonies were without munitions, money, credit, common cause. They knew, however, who their friends were, or at least who England’s enemies were. France figured at the top of that list. And in fact—unbeknownst to Franklin, or to any American—the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been studying an American revolt far longer than the colonies had even considered one. Striking at an established power through the Achilles heel of her far-off colonies was standard operating procedure at the time; France felt that Britain had done so in the 1760s, when Corsica had rebelled. And it is vital to remember that in the 18th-century hallways of power—which is to say in the European Courts—the American colonies were about as large, about as real, and about as important, as the French island of Corsica. Most Frenchmen had trouble locating the Americas on the globe. It was equally possible that they bordered Turkey or were part of India. The average Frenchman was uncertain as to what language was spoken there. It was not unusual for a French volunteer to expect to be greeted on arrival in the New World by panthers.

It was Franklin, from France, who more than anyone helped to put those colonies on the map. Fortunately, he waltzed into a Paris that was already on many levels ripe with Enlightenment ideals, and he had on his side immense fame and prestige. He appeared, as well, as something that the French had themselves invented, in sense and sensibility a joint production of Voltaire and Rousseau. Nothing could have been more appealing. Nor could anything have worked more potently in Franklin’s favor, as he was up against almost insuperable odds.

That British Ambassador was a charismatic and indefatigable man, the favorite of most French society women; he could not speak more loudly, or more eloquently, of the deceits Dr. Franklin was spreading about the colonies, and about how the gullible French were eating them up. Advertising revolution in a monarchy is a sticky business, to say the least. Franklin could not be openly welcomed by the ministers at Versailles, who were as eager to preserve a cordial public relationship with England as they were covertly to undermine that nation. And Franklin was encircled by spies, French spies followed by English spies, all of them marvelously deft reporters; there was no keyhole in France too small for them to slip through. Routinely they pilfered locked drawers and dove into closets. They stumbled over each other. Early on, one agent purloined Franklin’s mail while it was in transit with a fellow agent’s wife. As much as Franklin was a man of universal ideas, he was also a man of a very different universe; he could have had no idea of how to enter a French drawing room or hold his glass or arrange his sword. And his French was, to say the least, rudimentary. Franklin gives great hope to those of us who speak that language imperfectly. On the page he veered from the clumsy to the chimerical. He acknowledged that a man plunging into a language not his own automatically sacrifices half his intelligence. And he simultaneously established an enduring truism of French life. His was the brand of freestyle French permitted only to those of exceptional talent who, attempting to clamp their jaws around that language, are understood—regardless of the results and by virtue of their audible disregard for their inhibitions—to be acknowledging with every mutilated syllable the superiority of France.

(Let me insert here the results of Franklin’s posthumous report card. It was offered up in the l950s by a tough 20th-century grader, Cornell University’s Morris Bishop. And it is nothing to brag about. Franklin took home a hard-earned A- in oral comprehension, a B- in spoken French, and a downright F for his written skills. That failing grade came with the caveat that Franklin’s error-riddled compositions were, however, utterly clear. In a nutshell, that was also why they were not French.)

What Franklin did within the limitations was dazzling, however. Essentially he ignored them. He forged ahead, in fractured French, indifferent to the informers, oblivious—in a sort of Mr. Magoo way—to the social gaffes, seemingly oblivious, too, to the impossible odds his countrymen faced across the ocean. His arrival in Paris coincided with news of General Washington’s late August defeat at Long Island. Franklin shrugged that report off as insignificant. Everywhere he went he carried the same message. Long Island afforded the British no strategic advantage. They would need an army of 200,000 men to subjugate a people so attached to their freedom. Short of that, the war would stretch on for a decade. The American army was in fine shape and lacked for nothing. It was repositioning itself and would fight on indefinitely; by spring it would number 80,000 expertly trained men. The farther the British troops penetrated the continent, Franklin warned, the more resistance they would encounter. None of this was true, of course; there was no gunpowder to speak of in the American colonies, and Washington commanded something closer to 14,000 men. “I have helped them here to recover their spirits a little,” Franklin assumed Congress the morning after—unknown to anyone in Europe—Washington scrambled to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, and days after Congress had fled to Baltimore, to hold sessions in a deserted tavern.

In other words, Franklin fought a war of disinformation with very little help from the New World. Congressional dispatches were intercepted more often than not (a complete set of them can be read today either in the British Library or in the French State Department archives), which meant that Franklin was generally starved for news. For the first year he heard almost nothing from Congress; what he did hear was by no means uplifting. He engaged in a war of propaganda in which his very person qualified as a weapon. The French press was tightly controlled by the state. Fortunately that state—in the form of the French foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes—had every interest in helping Franklin, more so than even Franklin suspected. For his own political reasons Vergennes was intent on an American war, but he had plenty of enemies, too, and needed to justify the project to his king. It was one thing to insult the British in America. It was another thing to back a losing side.

For his first, nerve-racking 18 months abroad, Franklin therefore played a waiting game. Fortunately, he was an old man, who had come finally to embrace patience, who felt he had already proved himself, who was not, like his colleagues, burning with ambition. By nature too he was a good bluffer. Alone among the Americans in Paris he felt that time was on the colonies’ side.

Only in the fall of 1777 did Franklin’s nerves begin to fray. On the afternoon of September 7, he received a visit from a French officer who spoke fluent English and who qualified as one of the more prominent eccentrics in Europe. Franklin had been warned against the very charming Count de Lauraguais; he had a loose tongue and an idiosyncratic mind, enough so to have seen the inside of nearly every prison in France. Lauraguais also had reasons to ingratiate himself with Vergennes, and so reported to the French Minister every syllable of his conversation with the American envoy. After several glasses of wine, Franklin unburdened himself, with much emotion: “There is nothing better to do here than drink,” he lamented. “How can we fool ourselves that France might understand America better than Britain? How can we fool ourselves that a monarchy will help republicans, revolted against their monarch? How can your ministers believe what they cannot understand?” France wanted to crush her old rival, but would do nothing to help America do so. He was heartsick. He sorely regretted his failure to interest Versailles in an alliance, which would have been so much to the good of both countries. And while he understood that France feared for her colonies if America succeeded too well, he believed France could delay but by no means prevent that success.

He did not sound like the serene, unflappable Franklin of legend. At the same time, he made no public concession to despair. It was as essential that he appear buoyant in Paris as it was essential that he convince Vergennes that the Americans were perilously close to sinking. The papers constantly reported him in good spirits, despite the news that the British occupied Philadelphia. He was colorful in his pronouncements. Philadelphia, he insisted, would prove a grave for the British troops. Washington would blockade the roads; the Delaware would freeze; the British army would be cut off from its own ships.

As authentic as it may have been, his bad mood made for good strategy. It could be dilated upon, or dismissed, at will. Which is precisely what Franklin did with it, throughout a long, bleak season that came to a dramatic end on December 4. That Thursday morning an American messenger galloped into Franklin’s courtyard. He had left the colonies only a month earlier. He had not alighted from his horse when Franklin called out to him, “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?” “Yes, sir,” replied the young officer, at which Franklin turned in defeat, his hands clasped behind his back. “But, sir, I have greater news than that,” the messenger called to Franklin’s back, “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war!”

From that point the race was on for a treaty. The French and British fell all over themselves trying to secure Franklin’s favor. The British were intent on a reconciliation and peace, the French on an alliance and war. Franklin made child’s play of everyone’s best efforts. The French won out; a treaty of alliance was signed promptly, so promptly that France went ahead without the consent of her ally. Spain would enter the contest only later, but without making any commitment to American independence. It was agreed among the ministers at Versailles that they had done something extraordinary. They had thrown over their closest ally for a new and unproved one, on which none of them had set eyes. They had entered into a treaty, in defiance of a power with whom they were not at war, for the sake of creating a republic that might one day devour Europe. They could well be creating a monster. The decision was an arduous one, but, sighed the French Prime Minister, Franklin had skillfully led them all by the nose.

All of that history can be read today, by the way, in the French State Department archives, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the Quai d’Orsay. There are four pertinent series of documents, which break down roughly as follows: the American series includes the materials intercepted on their way to and from Franklin; the English series reveals what the French wanted the British to think; the Spanish series what the French really thought; the Mémoirs et Documents series what the French ministers discussed among themselves. And then there are the spy reports. The beauty of a world before e-mail and telephones is that everything—and I mean everything, including each dinner invitation and report on Franklin’s groceries—is on paper. As for what crossed Franklin’s desk, that material is two and a half times as great as all the paper we have today for the rest of his life. As far as I can tell, the British (and French) spies who surrounded Franklin were paid by the word; nothing was too trival to be reported, including the state of Dr. Franklin’s laundry or the size of his vegetable delivery.

From the middle of 1778 on, Franklin’s job consisted not in soliciting secret aid for America but in sustaining an alliance that was ill-advised and, in the end, ruinously expensive for France. It also consisted of fending off a most extraordinary number of callers and correspondents: the mail arrived in torrents; the visitors were unceasing, as were the solicitations of those who wanted to fight in America. A dazzling array of benevolent souls could supply top-quality blankets, shoes, beer, folding tables, playing cards, healing powders, at attractive prices. For every Frenchman who hoped to open a sugar refinery in Philadelphia or a glass manufactory in Virginia, there was another who was running away from his multiple wives, or who inquired if it were true that vast tracts of land in America were being distributed for free. They were followed by the industrious souls who had devised the means to blow up Gibraltar, a method to transform ordinary table salt into saltpeter, liquids that could fireproof wood. Most of Europe looked upon Franklin’s home as a kind of political shrine; every hard-luck story in Europe came his way, along with volumes of unsolicited advice.

If in the Philadelphia of his youth Franklin had recognized the value of seeming to work hard, in Paris, at age 70, he quickly mastered the essential French art of accomplishing much while appearing to accomplish little. Industry and efficiency were still foreign concepts in the Old World, calibrated in glory and style. (The French foreign minister was so irritated by his own reputation as a hard worker that when one of his aides calculated that he put in 11-hour days, he insisted that the aide scale back the figure. Vergennes did not want to appear a drone, which he was.) Few were aware of the actual drudgery Franklin faced daily, and to which he often devoted several hours in the middle of the night. The paperwork alone was appalling. At no time did he appear to bend under his burden, however, just as he never offended his hosts by arriving punctually, as did his countrymen. He now lived in a world in which tardiness practically constituted an art form. Rarely has a man so capably adapted to the rules of a foreign world, while at the same time playing that world to the benefit of his own. Franklin was a man of protean imagination and of multiple disguises, but in France the role he played was that of himself.

That strategy worked very well on the French, who were charmed by Franklin’s ease of manner. His friends admired his most French of abilities: “At whatever moment you called,” remembered a young neighbor who did so regularly, “he always made himself available.” His door was open. Dr. Franklin, the eminent scientist, who would spend much of the year apologizing for the dilatoriness of his correspondence, always had an hour for you. The approach—and there is no question it had something to do as well with Franklin’s age, and his insufficient secretarial help—did not impress his colleagues. Until the arrival of Thomas Jefferson in 1784, Franklin distinguished himself by getting along with only one of his American colleagues. With most, his relations were downright poisonous. And with no one did his approach to his desk—and his endless attentions to the French, who were of course bankrolling our revolution—sit more poorly than with Franklin’s intermittent colleague, John Adams.
To a great extent the difference was one of styles. Born 12 miles from each other, hard-driving, book-loving, middle-class sons of Massachusetts, staunch patriots both, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin had recourse to two very different vocabularies in France. That idiomatic divide was on display on December 4, 1778, when the commissioners met at the home they shared to discuss their next appeal to Vergennes. Without France’s help, America could not meet the interest expense on her loans. Adams was eager to press for a more robust naval commitment, which Franklin was loathe to do; he was all too well aware that the French Navy had had its share of embarrassments in the American contest. Her first efforts had not met with stellar success. Adams had no qualms about open French wounds. He sounded a theme that would resonate with him: he was never to recognize American indebtedness to France, where Franklin subscribed to the school of the great aphorist, La Bruyère, who held that “there is no excess in the world so commendable as excessive gratitude.” Surely, Adams insisted, France could bear a reminder that it was in her best interest to support the United States? And surely Franklin did not intend to ask her to do so purely “as a matter of mere grace?” Adams was altogether unimpressed by America’s ally, which, as he put it, “did not treat us with any confidence, nor give us any effectual assistance.”

Franklin violently disagreed. He would entertain no such reproof. France had acted impeccably, opening her coffers and providing a fleet. That fleet, countered Adams, had been useless, the subsidies pitiful. If the French had meant for their ships to be effective, they would not have wasted six weeks readying them in Toulon, in the south. A fleet from France’s west coast could have reached America in that time. Again Franklin objected. Toulon had been chosen expressly to conceal their fleet’s destination. At any other port the British would have guessed their designs and intercepted the ships immediately. Franklin’s colleagues protested that the British had not been fooled for a minute. It was time to remind the French that immediate aid to America was the sound basis of their foreign policy. Franklin flinched from Adams’s highhandedness, insisting they postpone any decision until he could impress upon his colleagues the wisdom of a more graceful approach. He was adamant that they should ask a favor first. Ultimatums could wait until later. (In this case Adams prevailed. The document made a succinct case for a powerful fleet to be sent to America. Vergennes, the French foreign minister, ignored it.) And the tension between Adams and Franklin only grew, fed by Franklin’s celebrity in France, and, relatedly, by his embrace of America’s benefactors.

Perhaps its clearest manifestation was in the two men’s approach to the French language. The divide disguised a more essential truth. One man was trying very hard, while the other did not appear to be trying at all. In broad outline this was to be a contest between the classic overachiever and the classic underachiever. Eight days after his arrival in Paris, Adams registered his disillusionment at the state of Franklin’s French, which he had assumed was fluent. He was startled to note that his colleague’s grammar was inexact, even more surprised to hear Franklin confess, when queried, that he paid no attention to the stuff. That invited some sleuthing on Adams’s part: “His pronunciation too, upon which the French gentlemen and ladies compliment him, and which he seems to think is pretty well, I am sure is very far from being exact.” It is difficult to read in that line which was the greater offense: Franklin’s inadequacy; the high marks French society bestowed on this teacher’s pet; or Franklin’s seeming obliviousness to the preferential treatment. In settling the matter, Adams could not always procure the satisfaction he came increasingly to crave. After the winter of 1778, he began to collect the compliments he received at his colleague’s expense. He was delighted to hear a friend contradicted over a 1779 dinner table, when that friend asserted that Franklin spoke excellent French. He did nothing of the sort, protested a diplomat. Days later that diplomat further endeared himself by elaborating on the subject, to Adams: “You speak slowly and with difficulty, like a man who searches for his words; but you don’t sin against pronunciation. You pronounce well. You do so far better than Mr. Franklin. He is painful to listen to.” The triumph was short-lived. The diplomat’s secretary reminded Adams, as Adams often needed to be reminded, of the uses of flattery. The straight-shooting secretary then leveled with Adams. Both Adams and Franklin spoke French badly.

By the summer of 1782, when the two men were, along with several colleagues, to negotiate a peace together, Adams’s distaste had grown to a blistering contempt. Back in America there was some question as to how Adams would comport himself. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “He hates Franklin, he hates John Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English.” With whom would he side? Adams in fact handled himself brilliantly in the course of that negotiation, as did Franklin. In September 1783 they would together sign the peace that recognized America’s existence. But in the course of that year they could not have differed more greatly on the subject of American foreign policy, or how the war had been won. Franklin had a very good idea of his colleague’s sentiments, as well as a job to do. And the two were very much at odds. At the time of that negotiation, America was, as ever, entirely without funds. If the war were to be continued, it would be so at the expense of France. Were peace achieved, only France could enable Congress to discharge the army. Franklin was back at Versailles in January, having squeezed six million livres out of Vergennes. He was astonished by his success and, too, a little on the defensive. France could not meet its own expenses, he reminded Congress, “yet it has advanced six millions to save the credit of ours.” He allowed himself a few diatribes on “the ravings of a certain mischievous madman here against France and its ministers, which I hear of every day.” He hoped Adams’s words would not be given any weight in America. He said nothing to Congress of the personal assaults, which he acknowledged only privately, to a fellow peace commissioner: “I hear frequently of his ravings against M. de Vergennes and me whom he suspects of plots against him which have no existence but in his own troubled imagination. I take no notice, and we are civil when we meet.”

Meanwhile Adams sputtered on. And when John Adams sputtered, he rose to heights of incomparable eloquence. To his mind Franklin was nothing other than the love child of Machiavelli and the Jesuits, the greatest imposter on earth since Mahomet. He was an insidious man, and impossible to supplant. For both reasons Adams could only wish with all his heart that Franklin was already out of office, repenting for his sins, and preparing for the next world. In truth Franklin was by no means without fault when it came to his colleagues—he was secretive, he was peremptory, he was maddeningly vague—but there is no question that his approach to France was what stuck in Adams’s craw. (There also seems to me little question that Franklin incited his straight-backed colleague a little. There are a number of conversations that read to me like Adams-baiting.) Franklin also happened to be the only American envoy whom—both before and after the alliance—the French both liked and trusted. Nothing could have been more critical to our Revolution than that affection; every other American envoy who approached Versailles bungled along the way. Franklin was inventing the foreign service out of whole cloth. And he was, as we know from so many other realms, a brilliant inventor.

Franklin had the confident man’s ease about affecting subservience; he made it his business to acknowledge publicly the gratitude he genuinely felt. Without French aid the revolution would quite simply have collapsed. The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French; the surrender at Yorktown had been to troops that were equal parts French and American, all of them protected by a French fleet. It was essential to Franklin to advertise the fact that America was a country that did not forget its benefactors. It took its friendships seriously.

By contrast, Adams was entirely of the conviction that America owed France nothing. That power, he felt, had acted out of self-interest. It had essentially bought Franklin’s devotion with flattery. Even while the two men regularly socialized and collaborated, they had lost all respect for each other. Franklin’s famous formulation on Adams went that his colleague “is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” It was an appraisal on which no one has improved. It was also temperate in comparison with Adams’s of him: “If I were in Congress, and this gentleman and the marble Mercury in the garden of Versailles were in nomination for an embassy, I would not hesitate to give my vote for the statue, upon the principle that it would do no harm.”

In Adams’s defense, I want to say this: not all of the qualities we associate with Franklin were on display in Paris, partly because those qualities are ones he put forth in his autobiography as ones we should aspire to—not qualities he himself necessarily possessed. And so the man who extolled order and sincerity was slovenly with his papers in Paris. He was misleading with his colleagues. He was in no way a master of detail. The man who sat on every committee in colonial America turned out to be a lousy team player, and an abysmal administrator; the prolific Franklin was, in France, a poor correspondent. Though he thought of himself as the soul of benevolence, he could be arrogant, insolent, vain. And as easygoing as he feigned to be, he was spiteful, a champion grudge holder, something of a dictator with his own children.

As early as 1783 Franklin begged to be recalled to America. He did so repeatedly, and as the years dragged by without a response from Congress, he began to despair. The request was finally granted in 1785; he sailed from France in July. He was nearly 80 when he set eyes for the first time on the country that had not existed on his departure, and which he had done so much to create. He had been gone for nine years; a certain Rip Van Winkle air clung to him. The disorientation was profound. He was able to recognize friends only by their voices. The American language had evolved since his departure. Philadelphia was a teeming metropolis.

Even before he had made that trip, Franklin had become painfully aware that he had been forgotten in his native country. He had asked for Congress to recognize his grandson, who had served as his secretary since his arrival. Over and over they had failed to do so. Franklin was cut to the quick, as he told anyone who would listen, many times over and many more times than was wise. “I flattered myself vainly that the Congress would be pleased with the opportunity I gave them of showing their approbation for my services,” he lamented. “But I suppose the present members hardly know me or that I have performed any.” For the first time that fall, just before his return, he had referred to himself as being “in exile.”

And the most famous American in the world had changed, too, in his Parisian years. The perfume of the Old World clung to him still; there would be no reward, no settling of accounts, nor even a syllable of gratitude for what he had done for his country. By the end of 1788 he was reduced to petitioning the government for some recognition of his services, an indignity no other Founding Father would suffer. He was understandably hurt: For good reason Franklin considered the French posting the most taxing assignment of his life. He had never worked so hard in any capacity. He knew Congress had generously compensated several of his colleagues for their European tours, in one case for a tour that had consisted of little more than obstructing each one of Franklin’s efforts. The nature of Franklin’s errand had something to do with Congressional ingratitude; he was associated in many minds with the dependent chapter of American independence. Some assumed the worst of any envoy to an overdressed, highly mannered European court; old enemies whispered that Franklin had profited handsomely from his French stay and had helped himself to government funds. It was true as well that Franklin belonged to a different generation; most of the members of Congress knew him by reputation, but not personally. For having extracted the equivalent of $13 billion dollars today and the bulk of the gunpowder used in the Revolution, Franklin went to his grave without any thanks whatever from Congress. In the end his greatest mission proved very costly to him.

It could be said that he did himself few favors. He never finished his autobiography, despite the advice of French friends, who pestered him to do so, reminding him that it was essential he offer up his version of his life. The Paris years were left to a more eloquent man, better at finishing books than was Franklin. And that man was John Adams. He alone wrote about Franklin in Paris; it is his French Franklin that has survived. And while it was true that Franklin was a flirt, Adams turned him into a womanizer. Sixteen years after Franklin’s death Adams was still setting the record straight about how much he had accomplished in Paris, and how obstructionist, indolent, and dissipated his senior colleague had been. He ranted most of all about Franklin’s secrecy, cunning, and silence, the very qualities, of course, that made Franklin America’s greatest diplomat and were so vital in winning us our independence.

I come here to accept the George Washington Book Prize with gratitude, but also, I must admit, with some surprise, even a little wonder. The prize is meant to recognize the year’s best books on “the nation’s founding era, and especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.” I rolled this over in my mind: “the nation’s founding era”—founding, founding era, founding fathers….The previous recipients of the George Washington Book Prize were all about founding fathers of one kind or another: Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton, Stacey Schiff on Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Rappleye on the Brown family (founders of Brown University). All fine books, about people of privilege and power.

I am keenly aware how different is this book from the ones that have been chosen in the past. It is about poor sailors and more, about even poorer slaves, the people who suffered the stench and terror of the slave ship. It about what one group of people is willing to do to another for money, but it is also about the determined resistance of those down below, below decks in this case.

As I pondered the generosity of this award, I thought about the term, “to found.” Right there in the Oxford English Dictionary is its meaning: “marking the establishment of something”; something “originated or created.” This meaning came into existence around 1900. The founding fathers established, originated, created the nation.

But then I found an older meaning, from the early fourteenth century. To found: “To lay the base” of something, to create a substructure, to set, fix, or build on a firm ground or base. And then an even older one, from around 1290: “To build for the first time; to begin the building of, be the first builder.”

This immediately reminded me of a poem by Bertolt Brecht entitled “A Worker Reads History.”

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with the name of kings.
But was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

Who built America? People who came over on the slave ships, and their offspring built a lot of it. More pertinently to us on this evening, who built Mount Vernon? Who built the other grand plantations? The books are filled with the names of presidents. But was it presidents who cleared the land, built the manor, farmed the land? In this expanded, more generous definition, the people aboard the slave ship were founders indeed.

This afternoon I took a walk along the Potomac. I tried to imagine how this place would have looked two and a half centuries ago to the men, women, and children who had crossed the Atlantic in a slave ship, who still had the motion of the “great water,” as they called it, inside their bodies, when they stepped onto the wharf five thousand miles from their African homes.

Many of them would have known riverine systems in Africa, but none like Chesapeake Bay. The plant life would have been strange to them; everything would have smelled different. The sounds, including the birdsong, would have been unfamiliar. All of these things would have been perceived in that heightened state in which fear sharpens the senses. They would soon be put to work, and they would make this place their own. They would become the plantation’s hewers of wood and drawers of water. The work they did is all around us.

Let me return now to the other criterion of the George Washington Book Prize, that the book should contribute to the public understanding of the nation’s founding era. One of my main purposes in writing this book was to contribute to public understanding, to public debate, to remember and discuss a profound but painful part of our past. We now have a great and ironic discrepancy about this country’s history. Over the past generation, scholars have probably learned more, and written more, about the history of slavery and the struggle against slavery than any other subject. This is work of exceptional quality, written by people such as my friends here this evening, Ira Berlin and Maurice Jackson.

And yet the American public does not know most of this history. Most people would not even know that this year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by the United States government. After a robust discussion in Great Britain in 2007 (their bicentennial), we have been mostly silent. It is a shame. Worse, it is a perpetuation of injustice.

The slave ship is a ghost ship, sailing around the edges of our consciousness. We pretend it is not there, but it haunts us. It also challenges us: a telling test of any society that considers itself to be a democracy is its ability to face the dark pages of its history. Do we dare in this post-9/11 age to look back on the terror that was instrumental to the making of America?

George Washington struggled with slavery. Do we struggle with its legacy? What are the costs if we do not? I think we have a moral accounting ahead of us. Justice and a more humane future demand it.

My book is about the people who made George Washington possible. It is about the people who made the nation, and much of its wealth, possible. As you leave here tonight I would ask you to pause, look around, and think of the ghosts on this beautiful landscape. I would like to think that this prize honors them too.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution, one of my favorite movies, the young protagonist, Fabrizio—he’s in his early twenties—is torn between the doctrinaire Marxism he’s vowed to commit his life to—the revolution he professes to believe in with all his heart and soul—and the bourgeois pleasures that, presumably, the revolution is meant to put an end to. He’s so serious-minded—that is, he takes himself so seriously—that he can’t just admit that, like most of us, he’s easily seduced by sensual delights and youthful frivolities, which his sober politics are too narrow to permit. But he loves arguing about American movies over coffee with his (non-Marxist) friends and the bustling squares and antique architecture of Parma, where he grew up in a very comfortable home, and going to the opera with his family in the magnificent opera house that was built for the kind of people he’s not supposed to approve of. Truth be told, Fabrizio is a terrible fraud. And if he weren’t, if he were really as pure of mind and straight of purpose as he wants to believe he is, then we wouldn’t identify with him, and we wouldn’t sympathize with him.

The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgement that we’re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It’s the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov’s stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter’s Tale. It’s the art of surprise, which can only come from the unpredictable—and what I mean by “unpredictable” isn’t the preposterous (like the twists in M. Night Shmalayan’s movies) but the turn you don’t expect just because it’s so true to life, and life is never predictable, yet when you see it or hear it you think, “Of course.” At the end of Philip Kaufman’s movie of the Milan Kundera novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example: the married couple, Tomas and Tereza, having fought their essential differences (his lightness, her heaviness; his taste for sexual variety, her fidelity; his longing for freedom, her tendency to feel unmoored unless she’s in her native country) as well as chafing against the oppressiveness of the Communist régime in Czechoslovakia, recapture their romance long after fate has stranded them far from their sophisticated urban lives, and, in a provincial inn, dancing together and making love, they experience a night of true happiness. Suddenly they’re so light their lives are weightless, and then, on a road made dangerous by the morning fog, they have a car accident. Kaufman shoots it as in a shaft of light; Tereza and Tomas simply disappear—as if their lives had grown so light that they could just vanish. What happens to them that day is sad for their friends, certainly, for us, undoubtedly, but not for them, who have never felt so unfettered, or so much in love. The double perspective, the double tone, the affirmation that life has as many layers as the French pastry I treasured when I was a child, the improbably airy mille feuille (the name means, literally, a thousand leaves)—that, as Virginia Woolf wrote in To the Lighthouse, “nothing is just one thing”—that’s what I cherish most in the arts.

At the other end of the spectrum is the kind of art that sermonizes, that reduces life to definitives and platitudes, that claims to know precisely how everyone should have acted—and I believe that it’s thoroughly, inherently false. When it comes in the form of drama, it generally wins the Pulitzer Prize or the Tony Award or both, like Angels in America, where the playwright, Tony Kushner, tells us in no uncertain terms which characters we’re allowed to like and where the ones we’re not allowed to like are summarily punished; or like John Patrick Shanley’s misnamed Doubt, which in fact doesn’t have a moment’s doubt about the guilt of the priest suspected by the protagonist (a tough-minded nun) of molesting a middle-school boy. When it comes in the form of a movie, it often wins the Oscar, like Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, whose sour depiction of life in the suburbs bears no resemblance to the memories of anyone I know (including myself) who grew up in one, or Crash, which purports to build a case for the inherent racism of Americans based on a series of incidents almost all of which defy our experience of the way people actually behave in contemporary America. These movies practice a kind of Q.E.D. (quod est demonstrandum) logic. We all know deep down we’re racists, but no one likes to admit it, so when a “daring” filmmaker like Paul Haggis has the “courage” to announce it, we’re cued not to check his evidence to see if it holds water (would a white L.A. cop in 2005 practically rape a middle-class black woman in front of her husband and then get away with it right under the nose of a black supervisor?) but to read it as a confirmation of what we already believe. We all know, don’t we, that the suburbs are full of materialistic, duplicitous men and women who lead miserable, dead-ended lives, so we accept the characters in American Beauty, even though they conduct themselves in ways that contradict everything we know about the way their supposed real-life counterparts behave; we accept as some kind of deeper truth the executives who take jobs at McDonald’s and work out naked in their garage, the histrionic wives whose sex lives are impeded by fears of staining the furniture, the teenage girls who fall in love with their stalkers. That “deeper truth” may be trite, but these movies congratulate us for recognizing it and for being serious enough people to swallow it whole.

Yeats said that art is forgiveness for sin. I think what he meant was that art has to be generous. It’s always easy for us to look down from a great height on the characters in a work of fiction or a movie or a play and pass judgment on them—especially since most of the fiction we read and the plays we attend and, God knows, the movies we see give us points for doing just that. But just as “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance,” to quote Prospero in The Tempest, so it’s more difficult, more challenging and far more rewarding to see the humanity in a character who commits the kind of offenses that we may hope we wouldn’t commit but in truth know ourselves to be fully capable of. If we embrace these characters—Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, whose addiction to morphine puts her out of the emotional reach of her husband and her sons, or Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, whose terror of death drives her into the arms of teenage boys (“The opposite is desire. So how could you wonder? How could you possibly wonder?”)—we embrace them wholeheartedly, with a kind of moral depth that allows us to transcend the conventional and the small-minded. We love Hamlet, but, it seems to me, we love him more because we see him not only at his best (when he tells Horatio, in the serenity of acceptance, “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” or when he exchanges forgiveness with Laertes, the brother of the woman he loved and whose heart he shattered) but also at his worst (when he bullies his mother and brings her to tears, or when he hesitates to kill Claudius at his prayers because, not content with taking revenge for his father’s murder, he wants to send his uncle’s soul to hell). We never stop loving Othello, even when he lets Iago persuade him to kill the infinitely sweet Desdemona, who lives only for him; we never stop loving him because his unreasoning jealousy lives side by side with a love so intense that, inevitably, when he finds he’s been gulled, all he can do is to destroy himself. And we never stop loving him because we know him—we are him (there but for the grace of God…).

And that’s the secret, isn’t it? Bad writers and directors of the kind I’ve alluded to always want to offer us the easy way out—the lie that we’re superior to the characters on the stage or the screen; put another way, they create false, two-dimensional characters we can only feel superior to. It’s the genuine artists who bind us to great sinners like Lear and Othello—or more likely, in modern art, to petty sinners, who throw their lives away for pride or spite or else carelessly, without thinking about it, and then realize, too late, what they’ve done. We find them in Chekhov’s plays, which have unhappy endings, and in Paul Mazursky’s movies, which, through the melancholy and the resignation, somehow discover happy endings (Blume in Love) or at least mixed ones (Enemies, A Love Story). (To my mind Mazursky, of all American filmmakers, comes closest to Chekhov.) These characters’ moment of consciousness—what Aristotle called the anagnorisis—is what makes them tragic, or, more often in modern works, tragicomic. My three favorite short stories share that moment of consciousness: Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” and—my favorite of favorites—James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Perhaps I lean most toward “The Dead” because Joyce is kinder to Gabriel Conroy than Tolstoy is to Ilyich or James to Marcher: he doesn’t just give him an epiphany; he lets him have it while there’s still some chance that it can do him some good, before he’s on his deathbed (like Ilyich) or at the grave of the woman whose love might have redeemed him (like Marcher). Now I’m going to show you the seed of that epiphany—in John Huston’s exquisite movie version of Joyce’s story. For those of you who don’t know the story, let me set the scene. At the annual New Year’s dinner party given by his aunts and cousin, Gabriel is swept up in one folly of self-involvement after another—a quarrel with a colleague whose playful tone he completely misreads, a toast he makes (it’s his annual contribution to the occasion) that is so formal and intellectualized that it doesn’t come close to touching the true kindness and graciousness of his hosts (and yet, in their generosity and unquestioning love for Gabriel, they accept it as if it were the warm tribute he ought to have made). But no folly is greater in Gabriel than the proprietary pride with which he approaches his wife Gretta. He’s booked a hotel room for the night and anticipates making love to her. But all evening she seems remote from him. At first he doesn’t realize it, because he’s so caught up in his own concerns; he doesn’t see that she’s being swept away from him, into some painful and poignant memory. Finally one of the other guests, a celebrated tenor who’s trying to impress a young woman he’s squiring, sings a ballad to her. His voice comes wafting out of some upstairs room, but the tune arrests Gretta on the stairs and stirs her so profoundly that Gabriel, watching her from below, suddenly understands that there’s an invisible wall between them.

What happens after this scene is that they go to the hotel, and there Gretta tells Gabriel about a boy, Michael Furey, who loved her more than his life and then died. It happened when she was a schoolgirl, long before she ever knew Gabriel. Gretta cries herself to sleep remembering this old love, and Gabriel moves, in a breathtaking arc, from bitterness and resentment at being closed out of the grand passion of her life, to an acceptance—the first he’s ever felt—that he belongs to something greater than himself, to a commonality that includes everyone he’s known, both the living and the dead. But let me talk a little about the scene I showed you, which precedes Gabriel’s epiphany and which is, for me, as beautiful and as moving as any scene I know, in fiction or in film. (Those of us who love both understand how rare a gift it is to discover a movie that can match the experience of a great book or story; The Dead is, in my estimation, the best movie anyone has ever made of a great piece of fiction.) Huston, capturing Joyce, portrays (through Donal McCann’s expressive silence) Gabriel’s recognition that he can have no access to Gretta’s private thoughts and memories; he fooled himself into thinking she was his, but truthfully she’s as distant from him as those delicate women in Vermeer paintings who are clearly caught in the vortex of some emotion but are so veiled—cobwebbed—by the artist’s brushstrokes that we can’t get at them, and we can only guess what that emotion is. Until Gretta tells the story of Michael Furey in that hotel room, we have no way of getting at how the song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” makes her feel. But if we don’t know what she’s thinking about, Anjelica Huston—one of those performers (as Pauline Kael wrote of Katharine Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey into Night) who makes you understand why the phrase “divine” used to be appended to the names of certain actresses—illuminates the ineffable quality of that private reminiscence, while her transported paralysis on the stairway recalls the power of music to return the ghosts of our dead.

My student Nick Coccoma, who graduated last spring but is here this afternoon (and who is largely responsible for my giving this lecture), focused his Honors thesis on the intersection of drama and philosophy. He began it by talking about the recent Broadway revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night, starring Vanessa Redgrave, which shook him to his roots. For Nick, the emotional transportation that great art affords us is both a moral demand—great art calls us to be moved to tears—and evidence of a moral dimension. Now, by “moral” he doesn’t mean “pedantic”—drama that teaches us little lessons that most of us know before we walk into the theater. What Nick’s getting at—if he will permit me to offer my own gloss on his thesis—is that the artist’s creation of emotion out of the raw material of experience is a moral act because it puts us in touch with what makes us human. I’ve spent my career as a critic trying to put in words the emotions that the art I love calls up—the art of the playwright (Chekhov pinpointing the heartbreak of each of the Three Sisters as they sit together at the end of the play and listen to the army march away), of the filmmaker (Robert Altman’s gossamer visuals capturing the sadness of McCabe’s final hours in the snowy Western town that is the setting of McCabe and Mrs. Miller), of the actor (Lillian Gish as Lucy in D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, spinning around and around in her closet in terror as her vengeful father splinters the locked door with his axe). I’ve spent my time as a director trying to work out, always with wonderful, open-hearted actors, how to shape those emotions, often (no surprise) in the kind of poetic, emotionally knotted texts that have always drawn me as a critic—plays by Chekhov and Tennessee Williams and John Guare. And I’ve spent my best hours in the classroom, or so it seems to me, framing those emotions with my students, so that we can look together at how playwrights and filmmakers achieve them.

This is really going to embarrass him, but the papers Nick wrote for my American Drama class used to make me cry because he was so good at replicating the emotions in the plays he loves, and so there I was, face to face with them again, just as we are when we see a good production of a great play. The cheap ironic pose of much contemporary art and entertainment teaches us to be cynical when we’re confronted with pure emotion, and the cheap sentimentality of much of what we see debases our responses, so we find it easier to cry at a phony melodrama like Million Dollar Baby than at a Greek tragedy or the moment in The Tempest when the fairy sprite Ariel teaches the mortal Prospero how to be human. But education in the arts has the potential to restore the thrill of genuine emotion—I absolutely believe it does, or I wouldn’t have become a teacher of theater and film. And so I say, without hesitation, that an artist’s (and particular a dramatic artist’s) ability to accomplish the lyrical evocation of a complex emotion as Huston did in that scene from The Dead is the zenith of his or her art. And, applauding that feat, which still, after all these years of going to the theater and the movies, has the power to fill me with wonder, let me show you another scene I love.

That was, of course, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the eleventh-hour pas de deux from Swing Time, “Never Gonna Dance.” When the number comes up, they’re about to part, for reasons that don’t make any sense—she’s just learned he’s engaged to another girl and she doesn’t realize that he isn’t in love with her; her pride and her hurt feelings have gotten in the way so she can’t see what’s so obvious to us. “Does she dance very beautifully, the girl you’re in love with?” Rogers asks Astaire. “Yes, very,” he replies, clearly referring to Rogers. “The girl you’re engaged to,” she clarifies. “I don’t care,” he says. “I’ve danced with you. I’m never gonna dance again.” And after he serenades her (this lovely song is by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields), they move into a sort of “anti-dance” that articulates what the dance critic Arlene Croce calls “the hunger of blocked desire”—two spirits drawn magnetically into an expression of both their need for each other and their inability to act on that need, as if they’ve become a pair of marionettes driven on a magnificent current of emotion, with their hearts working the strings, in a dance that is the embodiment of romantic anguish.

I don’t know how I could possibly improve on Astaire and Rogers, so I’m not going to show you anything else. But perhaps I can give you a short list of some of the instances of high feeling in movies I most cherish, since movies are, after all, the medium I’ve spent the most time writing about and talking about. I recall Marlon Brando in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, wiping the undertaker’s make-up off the corpse of his wife and giving voice to the bloody mess of feelings that her suicide has churned up in him. The way the restless energy of twelve-year-old Frankie (played by twenty-six-year-old Julie Harris), the heroine of Fred Zinnemann’s film of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, whirling around the kitchen of her small-town Southern home on a close summer evening, suddenly deflates as the housekeeper, Berenice (Ethel Waters), rocks her in her mammoth arms and, singing the spiritual “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” brings her momentary respite from the burgeoning adolescent agonies the girl is enslaved to but hasn’t begun to comprehend. The memory that assails Michael (Al Pacino) at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II, after he’s sent his brother Fredo to his death, of one of the last times his family was whole before it was torn apart—though we see the seeds of destruction are already in place, so turning back time just augments the pain of the tragedy, for Michael and for us—just as returning to her tenth birthday brings dead Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town no consolation for the loss of the people she loves. Montgomery Clift as Robert E. Lee Prewitt in Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, blowing “Taps” on his bugle in honor of his murdered comrade (Frank Sinatra). Hannah (Florence Patterson) in Gillian Armstrong’s film of Little Women, crushing rose petals over Beth’s bed after she’s died, and pausing to scatter some over her beloved dolls. The end of Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu, the last of his Apu Trilogy, when the sudden sight of the child he abandoned carries Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) past his grief for the wife who died in childbirth, to forgiveness for the boy, forgiveness for himself, and an affirmation of the ineffable bond between father and son—there, on a deserted beach, at what could be the end of the world but unexpectedly seems like its beginning. And another deserted-beach scene: Alec (Kelly Reno) in Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, offering a gift of leaves to The Black, the splendiferous Arab horse that rescued him in a fire at sea and then again from a cobra on this island off the North African coast: the boy holds out the leaves, the horse nuzzles them, the boy pulls back his hand, the horse retreats and then charges back, and the delicate courtship dance between boy and animal crescendos into a mystical melding of the two forms, silhouetted against the twilight horizon, as The Black, in an act both of noblesse oblige and of friendship, permits Alec to ride on his back. When artists conjure up moments such as these, we can truly say the muse sits on their shoulders. When we are in their thrall, they pass the cup to us and for a while they make us their kindred spirits.

Just as the bell rang for the first round and the two men on television walked grimly toward each other, a man behind us in the bar said with a smile in his voice Ten bucks on the bald guy and we turned and there to our absolute astonishment was Marvelous Marvin Hagler, still gleamingly bald, still looking like a hawk, and still staring up at Thomas Hearns with a distaste so evident we felt like buying it a beer.

He sat down with us and told us about the fight. I hit him first, he said. I hit him as hard as I could and then hit him harder. I had enough of him and his people. His people whooping up before the fight, banging on the walls and all. I went right at him and hit him hard. He didn’t run. Thought he would run but he didn’t. He hit me hard too. So there was a war. I tried to stay low. He started running. He cut me. I finally got him in the corner and hit him hard a while. I wanted to punch right through his chest. Second round more war. Hit him hard with a left and he staggered. Switched hands to lead with my right. I kept bleeding. Got him on the ropes at the end and pounded his ass. Third round he just ran. Referee called time to check my cuts but let me go and I nailed Tommy good. That was that. Hit Man, my ass. Destruct and destroy.

I quit two years later, he continued. People think I quit because of the last fight with Leonard but that’s not why. It was just time. Fighting is a way to get somewhere and I finally got there. I would have fought one more time just to hit that bastard hard but he ran. For a long time I was mad that he ran but then one day suddenly I wasn’t mad anymore. I was up here in the mountains that day just walking along. Just suddenly didn’t have the mad anymore. Great day. So every time I am back in the States I try to come up in the mountains for a while. Just walk around breathing, man, stop in here for a glass of good wine. Good wine’s where it’s at. Learned that for sure in Italy. Time for me to get moving, man. Pleasure to meet you guys. Nobody took my offer for 10 bucks on the bald guy. You guys know your fighters, I see. Sweet science, my ass. It’s who wants it more. I wanted it more. Everybody thinks they know why, me hiding under the bed as a kid in the riots and all, slicker fighters getting more ink and all, but it wasn’t any of that. It’s just who you are at the time, you know? That’s who I was once. Don’t know that guy now. Hell of a fighter, though, wasn’t he? Damn right he was.

(For Adam Goodheart)

I. I begin and end with the great poem of Walt Whitman. It seems we all commence then exit there. Everyone but Walt Whitman himself, reported dead since 1892, who—with less than five years’ schooling, without ‘background’, without European travel, without Latin, without Harvard, without sponsorship, with only his looks and body and mind and his rankling faith in, of all things, Us—found a way to forever-after begin and begin and begin.

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet
Needed most, I bring
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made.
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.
A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you—ye untold latencies—will thrill to every page.

Truth is, Walt stalked these very halls before we did, before this was the National Portrait Gallery. He came only when needed, when sick people lined these corridors. Let me show you. I bring a new kind of portrait to this hall of portraiture.

Baudelaire wrote in 1846: “A portrait is a model complicated by an artist.” Many a poor painting and studio photo tried capturing our highly pictorial friend, Walt Whitman. It seems HE preempted all visual invention. That beard, the head massively seaworthy as Neptune’s, a tendency to have himself photographed about as often as most men get haircuts. Those self-consciously unstructured workmen’s clothes, chosen by a closet dandy. With characteristic grace, he usually found something to praise in each bad picture of him.

Today we speak of the poet’s only painted portrait that convinces us we’re really with him. It shoehorns us into conversation at the front-side of his wheelchair. He is sixty-nine, half paralyzed but this picture flatters us into thinking we’ve just somehow made him laugh. Fact is, the portrait most resembles the poet in its being so invitational. The picture becomes, in the end, Whitman’s collaboration. With us. And, of course, the painter.

Thomas Eakins started this work in November of 1886 and finished it only the following April. Had Whitman’s health permitted, there would surely be many other Eakins likenesses of Walt. The old man was dying. Soon he could not even ‘sit’, couldn’t remain propped upright up for the countless hours Eakins always required. So the young painter hurried home, bringing his camera. A good thing. Thomas Hardy proved as great a poet as novelist; and Eakins was our first brilliant American artist equally expressive with a camera and a brush.

This oil portrait braids the sagas of two hypersensitive self-described ‘toughs’: Walt Whitman very much of bustling muscular Brooklyn-New York, and Thomas Eakins, a definite if parlor-averse Philadelphian. A couple of American pioneers, the John Muir of literature and at least the Kit Carson of 19th century Main Line aesthetics!

Of all the portraits depicting our nation’s outsized Gandolphian wizards, I have fixed on this one for the simplest reason: I love the work of both the sitter and the artist. Their efforts go on changing and enlarging my own efforts. Respect and awe leading to love—surely that’s at least the beginning of an understanding?

Thomas Eakins began this work in November of 1886 and finished it only the following April. Had Whitman’s health permitted, there would surely be many other Eakins’ likenesses of him. Whitman was dying. Soon the old man could not even remain propped upright up for the countless hours Eakins always required. So the young painter hurried home, bringing his camera. A good thing. Thomas Hardy proved as great a poet as novelist; and Eakins, the first great American artist equally expressive with a camera and a brush.

This oil portrait braids the sagas of two self-described toughs: Walt Whitman very much of Brooklyn-New York and Thomas Eakins, a definite Philadelphian. A couple of American pioneers, the John Muir of literature and at least the Kit Carson of 19th century Main Line aesthetics! Of all the portraits depicting our nation’s outsized Gandolphian wizards, I have fixed on this one for the simplest reason: I love the work of both sitter and artist. Their efforts go on changing and enlarging my own efforts. Respect and awe leading to love—surely that’s at least the beginning of an understanding?

Alexandre Dumas suggested, “Every great general should be followed clear to death’s door by a historian…or at least a novelist.”—Thanks a lot, Alex.

We storytellers do have our place, our merits. If sometimes over-generous with slapdash color, if too entranced by detail, if preoccupied with our fictional characters’ most heroic contradictions, we can at least claim empathy. I, for instance, went to the very art school that hired then sacked Eakins. I know how to prime then stretch a canvas; too few art historians do.

Imagine setting up as a literary critic before learning how to read. Don’t laugh! I can name several such culprits at the “Washington Post.” You see, I know Eakins and Whitman as fellow makers of things beautiful and ugly. I share with them the toil then joy of building things (this altar to them, for instance, constructed, as you will see, in your very presence).

Like them I know the long waits that finally allow artistry’s lurching advances noticed too seldom by anyone past an audience of one, or two, three. See, Tom and Walt and I, we’re manual laborers. Criticism wears a white collar. It is management. And us barbaric mugs and yawps? the color of our collars runs a deep flag-blue. Eakins and Whitman loved depicting workers because, as Americans, they worked so damn hard themselves.

I propose to tell the tale of each artist as they’re best shown in the creation of one portrait. It became an image they both endorsed then came to warmly admire. Whitman, like Gertrude Stein studying Picasso’s future-tense image of herself, resisted it at first; but eventually Walt found the picture `became’ him. “I’m IN it like molasses is in its jug”, the old man said. Eakins, on completing the picture, handed it free-of-charge to the not-rich poet. But Eakins, being a great tease, concurrently announced he’d expected to get half and now needed to know which fifty-percent Walt would like. Whitman, who enjoyed this sort of teasing joke, (that would drive me crazy) answered, “Whatever’s left over”. The bard would subsequently hang this work in his simple home’s front-hall, beside a gas-light to make nighttime viewing easier.

These two renegades, so alike in their solitary bravery, were instructively different in temperament, social class, psychic methodology. There is, in their collaboration, something as catalytic as instructive. Hailing from different father-son generations, they first viewed each other with a becoming wariness. Whitman was at the end of writing poetry, though great prose would be forthcoming. The poet was so celebrated, uninvited company arrived daily, much of it onerous. And yet he seemed, in his decrepitude, to sit awaiting some long postponed news of himself. In the end, it was brought him by his apostles’ one Doubting Thomas. Among his late-life coterie, the most swart, gifted and secretive would be Tom Eakins. About the treacheries of being depicted, Whitman had written:

That shadow, my likeness, that goes to and fro, seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering;
How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits;
How often I question and doubt whether that is really me;
—But in these, and among my lovers, and caroling my songs,
O I never doubt whether that is really me.

One of the Whitman’s ten thousand paradoxes: how he seemed born fully certain of his identity while remaining—within such bracketing confidence—so permeable and adaptable, so utterly solicitous. Even near age seventy, he sought daily amendments to his own Constitution. (That Eakins’ painted and photographic portraits would amend the poet’s legend would be not surprise an artist so gifted. But that Eakins might also engage and expand the Poet personally—emotionally, this might have startled the solitary and prideful young painter.)

The oil portrait marks the very start of this pair’s intense five-year friendship, ended only by Whitman’s death. The painting proved to them their match had been fated. When one artist, using his best skill, portrays another and then makes a gift of the surface itself, something surpassing even art can spring into play. No money ever changed hands. Such barter seems downright anti-Capitalist! I will attempt to trace what sixty-nine year old Whitman gained from forty-four year old Eakins; and especially all that the darkling, troubled Eakins absorbed from this most communicably useful of our nation’s sages.

II. Parker Brothers should produce a parlor game: Match the greatest writer of each period with that moment’s superior painter. I mean the one likeliest to save the ever-changing animation of a living literary genius.

If only Holbein, say, had depicted young Will Shakespeare at the gates of The Globe. What if Willem de Kooning had hired to model for his brilliant “Woman # 1” an undraped Marilyn Monroe? Some kind of miracle resulted when John Singer Sargent, one sort of genius, painted Robert Louis Stevenson, another sort that Sargent clearly, in and out of paint, adored—saving forever.

In the case of Emily Dickinson, the agoraphobic counterweight to Whitman’s cosmos-hopping self, HER two daguerreotypes were surely forced upon her by bossy dad at gunpoint. But she might’ve agreed to let another recluse paint certain lightning-lit dreamscapes glimpsed only in her poems; I would give that task to the master of sundown, Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Imagine you are commissioned to pick one portrait from this hall of thousands. Imagine trying to tell the story of America through a single picture. The history of this building, now the National Portrait Gallery, can help you choose. When Pierre L’Enfant designed the capitol’s street plan, he drew at this very sight a “Church of the Republic”. He proposed it as a secular shrine dedicated to national heroes; it would be based on Rome’s Pantheon with its roof open to the air, a temple offered all those Gods not named, a loophole honoring exceptions. But, this being our America, so huge a structure, started in 1836 and finished 31 years later, instead became the Temple of Patents. A shrine limited to only human ideas, to only moneymaking latencies, all registered, all named.

There’s a story in this. Are you with me?

To obtain a patent today, you need only send a CD-rom supporting your application. But mid-nineteenth century, every would-be inventor had to also deliver his working-model, the prototype then called “an exhibit”, and to this very building.

These were displayed behind glass along the third-story galleries. Inventors naturally picked the nation’s finest craftsmen to build then paint their exhibits. So easy to picture, behind glass upstairs, a Santa’s workshop of beautifully-wrought 1860’s laundry-wringers, smelting ovens.

These remained stalled right there in place during the national emergency, our Civil War. Washington, having no military hospital, would eventually pitch the tents of fifty-six. So, a wing of this building got pressed into service as barracks, as wounded soldiers’ ward and, inevitably, as morgue.

Soon, cots of wounded Federal soldiers were being pushed against glass protecting industrial inventions halted mid-application (unless the patents involved weaponry.) Today I am able as a fiction writer to enjamb these American devices meant to insure our nation’s industrial future against the broken bodies of those boys sent out to defend the futures of these very inventions.

Only the strongest of wounded soldiers even survived the trip by horse-cart, train, then stretcher to this polished hall. How odd it must’ve been to pass out among battle’s smoke and mud, to wake alone into this civic space of the Ionic order.

Surgeons, about to suture shut a solider, wet catgut with their own spittle; they sharpened scalpels on boot-soles. Even the best hospitals proved disorganized, foul-smelling places. Strangers roamed freely, seeking wounded sons and brothers. Tricksters sometimes chose the single richest-looking boy in any ward, hoping for a brief friendship then a significant legacy. Rebel sufferers were not a high-priority. And, among visiting-hours’ throng of saints and opportunists, you could have met upstairs a man as noticeable as he was unsalaried. White bearded prematurely, wearing a maroon suit he favored, the gent greeted all, carrying slung across one shoulder his sack of treats. You’d surely recall him—his being six feet tall, two hundred pounds easy, the very picture of rosy health.

He distributed little presents to successive boys. From his bag appeared apples, candies, notepaper, newly polished coins of the sort meant to please young kids. This fellow, known to nurses, wandered, joking, paying rapt attention to one boy at a time, cot-to-cot, joshing-coddling, man to boy. His effect seemed to quicken those recovering, to soothe those adrift between worlds.

If patent-exhibits under glass seemed huge man-sized toys, this hearty visitor in red was the one Santa big enough to pass such toys to the deserving. He’d been hired by no one and yet seemed welcome by all. He’d first come to the city seeking his own wounded brother, George Washington Whitman. And, once Soldier George returned to battle, (and what would be a long prosperous life) Walt stayed on. He chose to remain in the Capitol till the war burned out. Three smoky years of it remained.

(I myself only came to recognize Whitman as I visited the wards of another emergency, that first wave of AIDS in New York. I got to know his frustration in trying to help kids whose families had, on purpose or not, lost track of them. I soon felt I’d patented the sad trick of cheering youngsters who knew themselves doomed. Doomed by certain scissoring forces of history past their control or understanding. On a subway bound to St. Vincent’s Hospital—I found a much-thumbed paperback called “Leaves of Grass”. It became for me, among my boys, in my own ward of lost causes, inspiration as essential as food. About to leave my apartment, exhausted into seeming senility, I had to say aloud, “The keys? Keys. The wallet? Wallet. The book? The Book.”)

Part of Whitman’s originality was how—too old to be drafted himself—he simply took a train to where he might best help. Never middle-class, always nine-to-five averse, a bachelor by virtue of his inclination and artistry, he found he could be useful. So he simply came where he was needed.

The middle-aged Melville was off visiting camps, writing poems. Louisa Mae Alcott worked as a nurse till typhoid fever sent her home. Hawthorne then preferred Rome. Where were Henry and William James? Where was Thomas Eakins? Their wealthy fathers stood ready to pay the fee that kept a smart boy home. But Whitman, poor? right here, pitching in. How literal. How sad, really. How brave and great an American artist! What a patriot to shame so many so-called patriots of today!

Buying boys milk out of his own scant pocket-change, writing their letters home, coming in mornings then again at night after working his hours at a paymaster’s desk. Walt would sometimes stay the night beside some patient especially in need. Then he’d walk, without having slept, directly back to his day-job; he’d leave hospitals like the one upstairs. Many times during such strolls early and late, he’d see President Lincoln out and about, under-guarded, unwisely, we now know.

Summers, Lincoln commuted from the Old Soldiers’ Home three miles out into the countryside. Always awake with the town’s many roosters, these two amazing-looking men had developed a nodding acquaintance. But Whitman would never have intruded on the public privacy of that only other genius then breathing the miasmal air of the Potomac basin. They both lived to serve.

Behold! I do not give lectures, or a little charity;
When I give, I give myself….

To any one dying—thither I speed, and twist the knob of the door;
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed;
Let the physician and the priest go home.

I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will.
O despairer, here is my neck;
By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me.

I dilate you with tremendous breath— I buoy you up;
Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,
Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.

Sleep! I and they keep guard all night;
Not doubt—not decease, shall dare to lay finger upon you;

I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself;

And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.

But no good deed goes unpunished. Certainly not to that low-cost cure called Walt Whitman, compensating for Mediaeval medicine and modern weaponry with his own charm certifiable, with his Brooklyn-ese bass-baritone, his little jokes and vast eyes—not quite Confederate-gray nor Federal-blue but some treatied shade between.

He visited, by his count, ten thousand boys and men over three years, two visits a day. All tent-hospitals soon half-expected him. Of course, he chose as his favorite the most dangerous and odiferous, set beside an open sewer: Amory Square, located under what is presently the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Whitman remarked to a friend, “People (say) to me, Walt, you are doing miracles for those fellows. I wasn’t, I was…doing miracles for myself.”

The white beard, the jovial manner, the sack of treats, the Saint Nicholas-likeness all were part of his visible and conscious magic. Whitman’s power comes in part from having been born with nothing past his appearance, his wit and hopes. Poverty seemed to free him to explore, exploit the strengths at hand. (For the rest of us at times, does not the Middle-class itself seem a ball and chain binding our either ankle from birth?) How could any citizen arriving so disenfranchised believe his very nation to possess a greatness surpassing that of any God? Walt could claim nothing else! Like the young Dickens, he’d been sent out to work almost as soon as he could walk well enough to get hired as anybody’s ‘messenger’. Dickens’ fossil-fuel rage derived from this early injustice, the death-sentence issued such a vulnerable soul. But Whitman simply viewed it as his main chance, Raw Opportunity.

At home, Whitman slept in a bed alongside his profoundly retarded brother, a likely Down Syndrome sufferer. This unfortunate, if allowed into an unlocked kitchen, ate himself into unconsciousness whenever possible. Other siblings would die in charity mad houses, would marry working prostitutes. Whitman, like his spirit-brother William Blake, had fetched up in a tiny house overrun with hungry children, with just one book at its center. A black Bible. And these two outsider-artists’ simple first belief? The goal must be to write another, newer, Bible. And you know? they did it.

Walt, my fellow blue-collared laborer of the word, started as a reporter, first trying on a white collar. He then attempted teaching. But, by the time his self-made personally-financed and handset book appeared, Whitman had shed like snake’s skin the trappings of Profession. He had banished even his own given name from the title page. Now that’s democracy! Walt once considered dividing his New Bible into 365 poems to make it easier for year round-meditation; he wanted it printed a size convenient to fit the pocket of every workingman and woman on earth. Whitman’s inheritance had been his mind, physique and strength. The War would cost him those.

He’d caught some fear or pestilence from all his boy-soldiers. Whitman guessed that, while helping with an amputation, he’d taken on some lethal toxin. It robbed him of the Health that had been his very Harvard.

What exactly claimed him? Was it some sympathetic post-traumatic-stress times ten-thousand? Or was this just a matter of a man getting old, and all at once? His had been a rugged constitution, (how perfect an American word for his precious health!). Whitman sacrificed that to the War. A slower assassination than Lincoln’s—but one, in the end, just as certain.

So, today, not to a hospital, but to this National Pantheon to all Gods as yet Unnoted, to this building where his portrait and manuscripts now hold pride of place, am I wrong to feel a little proud for the simple right to honor this man who nursed and praised the best in endless others, many as yet unborn?

College English classes still swear Mark Twain got Vernacular American Speech into Literature, early-admission. May I point out “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was published thirty years AFTER “Leaves of Grass”? Let us now praise famous men. If Tom Eakins was always a fine deep Schuylkill-filled pond apart, Walt Whitman is still the Mississippi of American letters. His life teaches, providing the high levee overlooking his coursing work. From Walt all blessings flow. He remains—and this is crucial to our understanding his radical originality, his force of prophecy—not simply the Father of American Letters, but its Mother, too.

III. Now at this time, 1877, over a decade after Appomattox had settled everything and nothing, with Walt infirm and living by choice in working-class New Jersey, there dwelt not far across the river, a privileged black-eyed young painter of exceptional power and a lean wolf’s solitary disposition. Trained in Paris, claiming to believe that America’s Art School models should pose nude, he—in the presence of female students—plucked from a male model, the loincloth he felt that only Adam’s shame and William Penn’s crisp linen had placed there. And verily, for that, (and hidden darker deeds) this young artist, shamed by his hometown, lost his way, fell apart, set down his brushes and, verily, lived just then in particular need of a mother (his had gone crazy then died) and even a new father.

One of Tom’s former students brought him across the river to meet the famous broken old man. Eakins, this troubled, had forsaken his usually rigorous painting schedule; portrait commissions eluded him; he did not like to leave his family home. The aged poet being more famous than he might’ve hurt Tom’s feelings along with so much else. Eakins came unwillingly. Still living with his parents plus a young wife, the prodigy had never really taken care of anybody, least of all himself. His father, though a drawing master, could claim a genius for investing. Tom existed mostly on his Dad’s unlikely money and could therefore take certain so-called principled stands, ones that’d cost him all three jobs. Though gifted in certain lavish ways the old poet was, the boy’s relation with his own talent often felt as overmatched and adversarial as the wrestling-boxing matches he loved to paint.

Many people are talented. Far fewer are talented at being talented. Whitman, spared the parlor gallantries of someone merely Philadelphian and middle-class, shepherded his own work with an avid patience, a simplicity of purpose that seems egotistic only to those born sponsored. We now know the first rave newspaper reviews of his own poem were often anonymously submitted by an admiring journalist named Walt Whitman.

Eakins forever sought official praise as if to compensate for some inherent canyon of self-doubt. Though lionized by his students, family and wife, Tom lived a frenzy of work fueled by lifelong rage at being overlooked. He seemed so unlike the Whitman who might’ve been portraying his own easeful genius while looking overhead:

I do not wish the constellations any nearer.
They are very well where they are.

Eakins, starved for all the notice he surely deserved, sabotaged his own devotees. Tom turned up at a ceremony to receive a gold medal; he was wearing biking togs at the podium where he called the judges crazy for choosing him; Tom then announced he would be pedaling right to the Mint to trade this medallion in for cash, to have it melted down. And yet he wondered: Why so little acclaim? Why no job? Why fewer and fewer sitters? Why such time on his hands? Why NOT come to Camden and meet the old crank?—Great decisions are made so casually, you know?

A student of Eakins’ had also befriended the now-paralyzed old bard. This friend guessed that Tom needed to know an artist, even a genius, who could live in his own skin and who owned a house. The mutual pal had just helped buy Walt a horse and cart so the old guy might be taken out, shown the picturesque sights of Camden proper. And so Eakins, shamefaced, ‘cut’ on Chestnut and Walnut Streets, accurately accused of requiring his students to strip then pose for photos, guilty of at least sleeping naked with his grown sister and maybe driving a young niece to suicide, this skulker—so good at painting disappointed-looking people left alone among parlor shadows—now climbed stairs toward the presence of a sun-god in senescence.

Walt Whitman, fatherly yet mothering, was ever the solar center of orbiting disciples, many kind unpaid boys who wrote down all his said, then dealt with each morning’s chamber pot. Walt still trusted his own first impressions. But, even containing multitudes, this most genial of geniuses, on first sight, did not like the Eakins boy, no, not the least little bit. Walt soon pronounced the painter: “careless, negligent, indifferent, quiet.” Elsewhere he referred to Tom as “sick, rundown, and out of sorts.” But Eakins had his reasons, having lately suffered what we’d call a breakdown.

He had just returned from a so-called “Camp Cure” advocated by Teddy Roosevelt. Many young men bought their way out of Civil War service. Eakins’s father, no advocate of Lincoln, paid a scant twenty-five bucks to keep Tom home. Later as the North ran out of bodies to get shot it, this fee rose to three hundred and, by Gettysburg, a cool thousand. Not surprising, many of these boys post-Appomattox went directly West. Fellows felt a need to `rough it’ out of self-defense, (and in a zone conveniently cleared of even the last renegade Comanche.) Tom Eakins had brought home from the Dakota Territory tailor-made buckskins and, not one, but two live ponies.

But he told no charming cowboy tales during that first Camden visit. He must’ve sensed he’d made a poor impression. He came back, of course; they always do. “Blank canvas tucked under one arm…” “to have a whack” at painting Whitman. Tom’s pushiness now somehow began to amuse Walt. Here the poet was, being asked to “sit”! Well, paralyzed in a wheelchair, what the hell else could he do?

And so it started, something started. It is hard to say how much they talked at first. A stroke victim will nod off on you in a sunny silent room, and the first oil sketch Eakins did of Whitman shows a godly if tipsy King Lear, solidly endearingly asleep. Already we get hints of brushwork far freer than anything earlier. It’s as if, feeling safe here in working-man’s Camden, glad not to be employed by some society-lady paying a commission, hanging out for hours with a man whose work he knew and, unusual for Tom, respected some, the painter could take new chances.

He’d studied three years in Paris with Gerome, a stunning technician whose depicted middle-eastern slave markets were then admired. Of course in another Arrondisement of the intellect, Manet and Cezanne were breaking up the picture plane with a new sense of what Einstein was about to call relativity.

But, hey, Tom had come straight home from Paris and this, after all, was nonetheless New Jersey. Not yet ready yet for experiments in multiple points-of-view, not when Tom taught Academy students a precise unvarying perspective, the laws of retinal deception. Even so, in this amazing foot-square oil sketch, am I wrong to sense, awakened in the gloomy Eakins by a sleeping Whitman, some new sense of disruptive possibility? This would be one of only two portraits done this winter by a boy once famously prolific. Fired, shamed, the painter must have felt safer here. Compared to artistic-society Philadelphia, Camden might be the Dakota Territory. In Walt’s lair, Tom felt un-extradictable. Since the painter worked very very slowly, many sittings would be required. We know he made these stretch from winter into spring.

After enough ferry rides, an unlikely sympathy spun out, slow. Whitman soon called Tom “Eakins”; Eakins spoke to “Whitman”; they were manual labors and admired each other’s hands. Whitman was an easy man to think you knew. Eakins stayed intentionally impossible to ever second-guess. He had married his most gifted female-student and at once ceased to encourage her prize-winning work. She would cease her own painting during those decades she made his soup. Susan Eakins sadly admitted wearing costumey fabrics in hopes he might ask her to pose again. And she would cheerfully resume her own talented painting almost the day he died.

Tom’s picture of Walt’s solar disposition clocks its power, even in how the frozen orbiting planet, circling the sun times enough, begins to actually thaw itself. Even the remaining radiance of a terribly sick old man put out immense if groggy wattage. One poet described this decrepit Whitman as “down to his last disguise.” (When Walt did die, the autopsy would prove he should’ve been dead a decade back. But he’d held on like some old turtle squinting up at noon, saying what he thought, enjoying whoever climbed the stairs, accepting the acceptance that his poem still teaches, if only we could hear it.)

The men’s times alone together regularized, half-pleased as the old one dozed or scintillated, as the Young Turk painted. Walt felt un-pressured to say those wise or witty things expected by a silent partner painting, not at an easel, but more often on the floor. This contact would engender something new. Not simply a few paintings then a final loving series of portrait photographs. No, a thorny sort of friendship formed. It must be remembered that Whitman’s favorite company had always been the half-articulate drivers of horse-drawn New York conveyances, the soldiers whose language often grew smeared by fever, constricted by pain. Pure Ralph Waldo articulation had never been a requirement for Walt. And it is likely that the hours of posing passed in amiable, interpretable silence. Whitman’s torrents of written language mislead us into thinking him the perpetual toastmaster toper, like some Dylan Thomas, forever bellowing forth Performance. Instead contemporaries often recalled his deep skills at listening. Eakins kept similarly still, a man of Quaker temperament, living on a first-name-basis with silence itself. The lack of these men’s transcribed conversations must reflect as much about concord as distrust. Theirs became a union that, for Whitman’s five remaining years, proved a therapeutic bonus. The time in Camden seemed to calm, buttress, feed the angular anti-social Eakins. How these two beloved outcasts came to first respect then even like each other remains a mystery tale itself. The affection still plain in Eakins’ final image of Whitman, suggests this picture to be the end product of a long friendship, not that connection’s very start.

IV. We are all assigned one beginner-family. And, if allowed long enough lives, we get to then invent 30 or so other little tribes—each benefiting from the negative example of that first!

Whitman was always finding adoptive sons (to sponsor, admire and, when possible, if possible, more). We’ve already seen him audition and then sort of love (at considerable cost to himself) ten thousand fellows, pretty or not. His mentoring young men often served as prelude to Walt’s falling romantically in love with them. (The Horatio Alger School of Dating: rescue a ragamuffin, bathe, then dress , then feed him till he’s thankful, ready enough).

Here I must note the comedy of how many male Whitman biographers would, till lately, simply not cede the poet any true romantic life at all. Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life, published in 1980, effectively asserts that Whitman had only strong parental-feelings for those boys he helped. It insists that Walt preferred women, but was shy. The last line of Kaplan’s book states Whitman died “an old man who never married and had no heart’s companion now except his books…” Except his books? No wife? (Look, if heterosexual suburban marriage is the sole key to happiness then folks really should figure how to make it look like more fun!) How is it possible, after years of reading “Leaves of Grass”, after living with its author’s many passionate often-heartbroken love letters to boys, that a sentient writer can pronounce this genius erotically-disinterested?

Listen: Calling Walt Whitman “asexual” is like calling Mozart “tone-deaf”!

Whitman forever attracted idealistic and talented young men, most straight—some, actually, Oscar Wilde. (But with Walt paralyzed in a wheelchair, what difference did his central erotic wish really make?) Tom Eakins had affectionately signed both portraits he painted of his own father “The Son of Benjamin Eakins did this.” Whitman needed sons and Tom Eakins, a bad boy of prodigious talent and concomitant mischief, just then required all the good dads that he could get. He’d probably come to Camden in search of a contact or a subject but what he needed most was a confessor and a friend and—ultimately—the model of how to live with and for and by one’s own burdensome if privileged talent.

The poet and the painter had begun warily enough, first viewing each other as ‘characters’, then exceptions and finally fellow travelers.

Charles Dickens wrote about Philadelphia in 1841, “It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular…after walking about it for an hour or two…thoughts of making a large fortune by speculations in corn, came over me involuntarily.”

Eakins was every inch the product of his town. Like all smart American provincials, he did and actually did not believe New York City existed.

Whitman’s favorite painter was Jean-Francois Millet, with his sentimentalized religious gleaners and nursing mothers. Eakins’ view of this Frenchman, also beloved by Van Gogh, is not recorded but can be easily guessed. Thomas Eakins, though not born a Quaker, married in a Friends ceremony at a meetinghouse. Like so many Philadelphians he seemed aware of being monitored by William Penn, still taking names from atop City Hall. In the long wait to hear the unmediated voice of a personal God, Tom still seemed waiting. Children of the day were drilled to remain “seen but not heard.” Such an aversion to noisy display for its own sake, such a drive toward silence and plainness, set Eakins work apart. He seemed allergic not just to Europe’s artifice but the fripperies of even, say, Boston! We must recall another brilliant Pennsylvania painter, the devout Quaker, Edward Hicks, praying for heavenly forgiveness while admitting he enjoyed far too much the act of painting spots upon the leopards in his many ‘Peaceable Kingdoms.’ What a merciless God we create for ourselves! Why? Self-disgust maybe.

But Whitman’s spirit? born unteachable, blessedly pagan, pre-Christian, boastfully ‘barbaric.’ Eakins’ own brimstone inheritance suspected all pleasure, seemed born trapped in the fist of an angry employer God.

If Whitman fathered forth the melting-pot dynamism of Manhattan-Brooklyn, Eakins seems as private, Protestant and publicity-averse as a certain kind of exclusive cerebral chamber-music-at-home Philadelphia. If Whitman erred always on the side of forgiveness and inclusion, right up to subsuming and embodying all of humanity himself, Eakins despised any notion of ‘common man’s good sense’; add to that his disdain for dandified airs amongst those society-folks rich enough to commission him to paint their likenesses, at bargain prices.

While studying abroad, Eakins was drawn to Velasquez’s directness and elegance, for reasons of pilgrim austerity. (Velasquez’s position as court painter seems to have escaped our young puritan’s attention.) During his studies in Paris, a letter home tells us as much about this young man’s wit as his appetite for superior renunciation. If Whitman sometimes sounded like an ancient oracular baby, all sensation and orotund acceptance, Eakins remained, for life, an eye-roller roughly 13 years old.

O what satisfaction it gave me to see the good Spanish work so…strong so reasonable so free from every affectation….I have always hated (Rubens’) work….Rubens is the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived. His men are twisted to pieces. His modeling is always crooked and dropsical and no marking is ever in its right place or anything like what he sees in nature, his people never have bones, his color is dashing and flashy, his people must all be in the most violent action, must use the strength of Hercules if a little watch is to be wound up … everything must be making a noise and tumbling about. His pictures always put me in mind of chamber pots and I would not be sorry if they were all burnt.

Welcome to Oliver Cromwell land, ladies and gents. First prize, one day in Philadelphia. Second prize, three days there.

Might not the puritan art-student’s charges against Rubens’ teeming energy and moiling crowded sensuality, be leveled at Whitman’s writing, too?

For Whitman, nakedness brings forth the pleasure of a bared body out-of-doors in wind and water. Eakins annexes it to acts of ritual unveilings, occasions for odd aggressions in the name of progress, science. “Teacher of Anatomy to Artists” can offer many side-room occasions for the instructive flashing of a seasoned naturist.

Thomas Eakins’ brilliance had been conspicuous in childhood. His high school tried to make him that institution’s drawing teacher the year he graduated. An only son, Tom’s parents doted on him and, in the home full of paint and ink and vellum, his abilities were found, tested, daily expanded. Great expectations plagued him all his life; and he had not the benefit of Whitman’s curious void, allowing the poet to be everything or, like most of his many siblings, nothing at all.

Whitman’s ruddy childhood was spent on a Long Island still largely wooded and his poetry forever benefited from first daily pantheistic beach hikes. Pallid Eakins is preeminently a city-boy, kept too long at piano lessons. But his outdoor subjects, his high-noon glorification of baseball, hunting, rowing, set a new standard for rigor and a sort of manly joy in American art.

It’s no surprise that Eakins considered Winslow Homer, war correspondent sketch-artist, outdoorsman, bachelor crank, his only peer and competitor. Living at home for life can impede any male’s sense of masculinity—but add to this confinement his father’s buying him out of armed service; add to this how high fever from malaria left a young Eakins sterile for life. His work, so full of melancholic women lost to reveries in carved side chairs, is a sad search for daylight, frontier, the viably Male.

Although best known for portraits, Eakins repeatedly painted the Biglin Brothers, the most famous rowers of a time when that sport was at its zenith. Then you could drink, swim, row in any American river without contracting instant tetanus. Eakins’ portraying these national idols was both an act of hero-worship and a bid for wider public attention.

The current equivalent might be some young artist’s making an art-film based on a French Open showdown between Federer and Nadal. Though Eakins professed never to expect public acclaim (seeing how little he thought of the public) this, of course, was a lie, if one most forgivable. Though the painter sneered at Whitman’s worship of the common man, it is touching to find that, before his brilliant Gross Clinic was shown, (only to be promptly banished to a back-hall’s first-aid station) the artist had quietly copyrighted that image. The young painter was that sure his picture would become a national icon seen on calendars and schoolbooks. It would make his fortune. It did not. He hailed from a social-class musical, intellectual, often fiscally-marginal but highly idealistic. Such households embraced Darwin’s 1860’s theories when period papers still abounded only with monkey jokes. Philadelphia was a great medical nexus and, given his family’s deep respect for science, two of Eakin’s masterworks celebrate surgeons as the true pioneers of American promise. (If Eakins’ work makes good use of excellent science, Whitman proves alchemical in its supernal use of junk science—mesmerism, phrenology, fads that announced all bodies “electric”. Every fad and patented scheme became the poet’s latest university and feeding lot).

Eakins, under the guise of respectable research and liberated thinking, made a cult of bad manners, and bad for anywhere, not just Philadelphia. His students were expected to pose nude for him. (Sometimes one feels there are nearly as many photos of Eakins haplessly unappealingly naked as there are of Walt Whitman consciously and raffishly clothed!) Eakins assumed his male pupils would strip before taking wrestling holds or going skinny-dipping in artful clusters. (I can imagine his calling, “Boys, Swimming-Hole-Attendance Will Be Taken Only AFTER the Camera Arrives!”).

And how did Eakins thank his goose-fleshed disciples? By making each nude boy so recognizable in the buff that—when the final work was shown at the Academy—every model’s sweetheart, parents, fellow student and teacher, identified the poor fellow front-wards and backwards, coming-going.

“Swimming” remains one of the nation’s great emblems of innocence. But the un-ease its bare skin created can be amusingly traced in its subsequent name-changes. Eakins, ever desirous of action, awarded it the verb “Swimming”. (Though only his own figure and his dog’s—Harry, a setter, a male, thankfully—are actually doing that.) The picture was next consecrated, factually if less actively, “The Swimmers”; till, to make it more sentimental, it was termed “The Swimming Hole”; at last becoming “The Old Swimming Hole”—descending from the noon-shine on bare white bottoms into the sun-screening shade of national cliché.

Whitman liked to drink water from the pitcher not the glass. He loved raw oysters and red beef, and usually kept flowers in his upstairs office sickroom. He adored champagne. His sunny chamber’s floor was, in some places, layered a yard-deep with unanswered correspondence, earlier drafts of his great ongoing poem. Emerson’s original letter of endorsement was, one day, found among the litter.

Certainly the poet’s magnificent mane, his Lear-like exile, would speak to any painter’s sense of subject. Now Tom Eakins’ rough manners, his cowboy-isms newly acquired in the Dakota Territory, his rank presumption and strong sense of self, had become an entertaining fixture on Mickle Street, Camden. Common interests? off-color stories, the cold comfort of being unfairly overlooked by the stuffy clueless prize-givers, a joy known only to outlaws hiding out together. “Wanted” men, or were they? Whitman asked for repetition of a tale about Eakins, finding a bracelet on a supposedly-nude female model, then throwing it to the floor.

I always wondered why Eakins, clearly the greatest technical painter of his generation, received no commissions beyond the banks of the Schuylkill River. I just learn he, in fact, was hired to paint a sitting President. I offer this tale to show you how discredited was the Eakins, forty-four, who arrived at Whitman’s sickroom-parlor. I hint that Tom seemed a somewhat different man five seasons later when he would at last participate in the great poet’s funeral.

For a portraitist of any day, being invited to paint a serving president is a coup waiting to happen. Sargent depicted one vigorous monolithic Teddy Roosevelt. And a band of Philadelphians backed Eakins to memorialize, for their club’s gallery of Presidents, no less than Rutherford B. Hayes. Now Presidents, no matter how ignored they’ll be by future history, always seem busy men. And most painters, admitted to their presence, make the most of the little time allotted. (Think of Whitman’s distant nods of blessing to a Lincoln unapproachable). But Eakins showed no such due-deference. He had only been charged to complete a small picture showing just the Presidential head and shoulders. But Tom’s enlarging demands preceded him by mail:

If (Hayes) is disposed…for a full-sized portrait I would undertake it with equal spirit. A hand takes as long to paint as a head nearly and a man’s hand no more looks like another man’s hand than his head looks like another. So if the President chose to give me the time necessary to copy his head and each of his two hands (for I would not be inclined to slight them) … it would seem a pity not to have the rest of him when I know how to paint the whole figure. The price…can remain the same as you mentioned.

Eakins would grouse that, instead of freezing in his presence, the great man had spun his desk-chair, answered letters, in other words, Rutherford Hayes MOVED. By the end, Eakins depicted the now-full-length President dressed like a clerk, holding a lead pencil, “garbed in his old alpaca office coat.” Hayes’ painted alcoholic flush stood at odds with his own pledge never to touch liquor while in office. That hardly mattered since critics remarked little actual resemblance. One critic noted Eakins had followed Rembrandt’s “most extreme theories of chiaroscuro” placing the figure in a very dark office “with one ray of light striking his right temple from behind.”

The portrait was hung at the commissioning Club, which almost immediately removed it, shipping it—with Philadelphia tact—direct to the Hayes White House. There, it surely suffered some form of artistic capital punishment, a latter-day beheading. The work disappeared, presumably the day its murky beet-red subject confronted this, a spurned portraitist’s revenge.

Eakins’ own sympathy toward Whitman’s image must therefore be seen in context of all he did to President Hayes, and vice versa, of course, vice versa.

Eakin’s portraits involved so many sittings—over thirty, and of two to three hours’ duration—at least one lady explain she must quit coming herself but would, if he liked, send her maid. As sitter and invalid, Whitman was always in one place, a sitting duck, ever ready for new Eakins stories, always offering a plate of oysters, some ale brought in a tin bucket from the tavern down the street. Traubel, Whitman’s amanuensis-secretary, proved welcoming at the very time Eakins was now being snubbed directly along the corridors and sidewalks of the City of Brotherly Love. Rumors of incest darkened the already-blotted reputation of this man who photographed and stubbornly painted the prettiest boys from some of the best families on the Main Line and usually in the altogether. No wonder Eakins loved working-class Camden! No wonder he forgave the scent of the fertilizer factory already in service when Whitman bought this house. And why? because he liked a pretty tree growing out front. Oh the innocence of a first-time home-buyer in his late sixties!

No surprise that, by the end, these two men had eventually become each other’s liveliest defenders. And all their shared silence, grown toward a manly deference, went direct into the work of art. After months of one fellow’s painting and the other’s modeling, they came even to somewhat echo each other, in the way shipmates do. Eakins even grew convinced of Whitman’s dubious knowledge of great painting. And Walt seemed sold on Eakins’ directness as something new in American art, a clarity to match his own. “A force of nature,” Walt passed along to the artist a compliment most often offered only him. Whitman might have spoken another self-portrait in saying: “I never knew of but one artist, and that’s Tom Eakins, who could resist the temptation to see what they think ought to be rather than what is.”

Eakins’ biographers all chronicle a different man; his champions disagree not only on his motivations but also on many of his crucial dates. I have never seen such contention among the votives of a single figure: and this itself offers the best portrait of Thomas Eakins. One thinks of Edward Hopper’s wife, Jo, assessing her husband’s art and life: “Talking to Eddy is like dropping a stone down a well and never hearing it hit bottom.”

Eakins seems to have willfully obscured his past, leaving no autobiography longer than the four line-statements required for certain catalogues. In this he could not be more unlike Whitman, whose every poem aggregates to a found single ever-evolving nine-edition work one might call…well, a song of myself.

Eakins was strictly a man for prose. When the occasion required, he could write lucent, perspectival, truly ‘worked up’ sentences. Till fired from the Academy, he had been composing a Drawing Manual soon abandoned. This work was only published three years ago. It proves to be a book of great, strict elegance. In one passage actually written while Tom was painting Whitman, am I wrong to hear an echo of the painter’s great gray champion?

I start with a moment from Walt’s “A Song for Occupations” then will lift my hand when—as proof of fusion and affection—Eakins’ tone goes gently to work over Walt’s.

Whitman:

Have you reckon’d that the landscape took substance and form that it might be painted in a picture?
Or men and Women that they might be written of, and songs sung?

Or the attraction of gravity, and the great laws and
Harmonious combinations and the fluids of the air, as subject for the savants?…

Or the stars to be put in constellations and named fancy names?

Eakins:

“Every one must have noticed on the sides of boats and wharves or rocks, when the sun is shining and the water in motion, never ending processions of bright points and lines, the lines twisting into various shapes, now going slowly or in a stately manner; then dancing and interweaving in violent fashion.

These points and lines are the reflections of the sun from the concave parts of the waves acting toward the sun as concave mirrors, focusing his rays now here, now there…There is so much beauty in reflections that it is generally worthwhile to try to get them right…

Finally, the painting before us, gives eloquent testimony to a tonic directness, a humanity rarely glimpsed in Eakins’ commissioned portraits. Eakins would hand Whitman the picture, free of charge. What this image finally offers us is an added clarity, a double portrait: in it we feel the act of two minds communing—one old man mid-conversation lost in the enjoyment of a deep and listening force, marveling at a gifted youngster in early mid-career. We are privy to the joy one huge talent takes in another of comparable size, deep maleness, shared nationality.

After finishing the portrait, Eakins would never hold another job. He’d take on fewer commissions. Those portraits he chose to paint of non-paying friends are usually far better than his society subjects. Eakins would depart his time with Whitman among the poet’s apostles (though one, Saint Peter-like, silent about his enthusiasm until tested).

If such as Tom could ever be called happy, that seemed to come in his later years, once free of the paranoia-producing hometown institutions that’d always seemed to him his one likely forum for respect and discourse.

When Whitman finally died, among those first notified by his secretary-friend Traubel, was Eakins himself. He and a former student, Charles Murray, came a final time to 328 Mickle Street. They’d arrived equipped to make Walt’s plaster death mask. Afterwards, the loyal secretary-disciple surveyed the old man’s body. He noted how, though the snowy drift of beard had been caked and disarrayed by Eakins’ work, there was no more damage than a slight reddening at the bridge of Walt’s nose. Such care had Tom taken. Whitman had requested that his young painter-friend be pallbearer at the funeral attended by thousands.

Before Eakins himself died in 1916, he would find a curious truce, if not actual peace. Freer of fretting over lack of acclaim, he did what artists do, Tom simply worked to work and let the art take care of itself. If plaudits came late he wisely enjoyed what there were of them. Not from New York, of course. Surely not from Philadelphia whose hostesses he’d aged in oil paint, whose sons, and a stray daughter or two, he’d first stripped then photographed then painted. Too much.

But, if a final show in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, seemed far from the Paris where he’d studied as a whippersnapper; even if one of the other featured artists proved to be a Miss Nevins who, this being Pennsylvania dairy country, was famous for her sculpture in butter; despite all these parochial qualifications, Eakins found his “Agnew Clinic” masterwork dignifying the very cover of the commemorative booklet. At last. Something to take home, (though his father was now dead, too.)

Maestro Tom Eakins attended with Murray, his beloved handsome male student, to squire him around, (the loyal woebegone wife left home). The Philadelphian was received like the great artist he had been all along. And the now bear-like Eakins accepted this with a simple grandeur almost, could we say,…Whitmanesque? Had Tom learned a little something from those five years of silence, communion, raw oysters and champagne in the simple frame house near Camden’s most stinkily profitable fertilizer plant?

Near the end of Eakins’ life, when prizes started finding him at last, he spoke of a national art. Ever his own man, but does not his vocabulary begin to sound all but Whitman’s own? “It would be far better for American art students…to study their own country and portray its life and types….Of course, it is well to go abroad and see the works of the older masters, but Americans must branch out into their own fields… They must strike out of themselves….”

How reassuring from the cool-to-cold Eakins, this final grace-note of public idealism! Even the poetry of ‘strike out of themselves’—with its faint echo of baseball’s three tries you’re done, re-sounds for us the echoed voice, the chambered nautilus, of Whitman. Walt’s has become, at last, the public voice of that very private Thomas Eakins. Walt’s voice out-lives and out-diversifies any mere death-date. Just as his face remains vivid, breathing, saved and shaped for us, by one great, dark, always-American painter.

I believe the sick old poet, through compliments, through the simple faith of posing, transfused some essential laurel-wreath faith that helped make the last half of Eakins’ under-loved career feel both more possible and necessary. Whitman would say of Eakins’ portrait, “It is not perfect but it comes nearest being me.” (It) “faces the worst as well as the best…” Whitman claimed to see in the image “an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king.”

Walt, ever the teacher, had done far more than LIVE an outward example for the detached and tight-lipped Eakins. He literally forced the younger man into a rare instance of public speaking. And it’s here we’ll end. Imagine that Christ, in the Garden, had coerced a cowardly Peter to acknowledge Him.

We are at Whitman’s seventy-second birthday banquet, his last real outing. Champagne galore and far more male than female guests. The Master has been rolled in after the food is served, too weak to sit up for the whole event but wheeled aloft to hear tonight’s testimonials. By now, most everybody present except the waiters have stood and offered loud or tearful tributes. Whitman can already count fan-mail from Sojourner Truth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and a mash-note from Bram Stoker.

But, as the praise-songs fade, there’s still one opinion he needs, and in a public setting. Though it’s his party, though speechifying ebbs without Walt’s having spoken once past nodding at those few lines of praise he can accept, he now stirs. The Bard begins to look around. Could a certain young painter possibly be present without feeling stirred to say a word or two in favor of his friend? Painful. Why does that certain portraitist—long vouched for, posed for—now fail to pipe up?

Howard Traubel, Walt’s faithful secretary, forever taking notes, describes the how the old man squints around, seeking a last required Amen:

“And Eakins,” Whitman finally says, “What of Tom Eakins? He is here.—Haven’t you something to say to us, Eaaaa-kins?”

Silence. Then a Quaker answer. “I am not a speaker.”

“So much the better—you are more likely to SAAAY something.”

And so, thus bullied-honored into public conversation yet again, thus offered his master’s final lesson that this poet sees the painter has a quiet soul set alongside his far-more-evident talent, Eakins is forced to rise. Knowing he is licked, outranked by grace, Tom states to the assembly simply this: How it has been hard, “painting the picture of Mr. Whitman. I began in the usual way, but soon found that the ordinary methods wouldn’t do—that technique, rules and traditions would have to be thrown aside, that before all else, he was to be treated…as a MAN.”

Blessed moment in a single human’s life! And, incidentally, blessed in American art! Eakins, had once tried to wrestle onto canvas the entire body of a hyperactive Rutherford B. Hayes. But with Walt so stilled, the artist focused tactful only on the half-blind Homeric head. Ignored below, the paralytic body, serving now only as feeding stem to that great skull, with its utopian vision of nationhood, cooperation, even friendship.

Eakins’s canvas preserves the man’s charm, the twinkling eyes, the talkative listener that silent Whitman always was. One young society girl that the painter portrayed had begged him after long-posing, “Please, sir, make me a little pretty.” (Sadly, Tom instead made her look like a shaved Afghan hound.) But to Whitman, Eakins granted exactly that. One critic complained this picture resembled “A summer-stock Falstaff.” But if Eakins would later photograph Whitman, showing the ancient one as actually looked now, Tom painted the old man as Walt wanted to remember looking.—Unusual mercy, Thomas Eakins.

Some are born loving. Others learn it late. And, I say, thank God for that.

I began and now end with the great fathering-mother poem called Walt Whitman. So did American literature and so will much of future conscious life:

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and everyone good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself.
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me the children and the beggeters of children.

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

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To view the print version of The Mystery of Ales published in the Summer 2007 issue, click here.
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Nearly 60 years ago, Alger Hiss, a former high official in the U. S. State Department, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison on the grounds that he had lied about his role in a Soviet spy ring prior to World War II. The Hiss case became the most controversial spy story of the Cold War — and for good reason. As the distinguished historian Walter LaFeber once observed, “It was the Hiss trial, among other [events] that triggered the McCarthy era.”¹ For many conservatives, the Hiss case confirmed the specter of Soviet infiltration at the highest levels of American government. The case also catapulted an obscure California congressman, Richard M. Nixon, onto the national scene. Nixon championed the allegations against Hiss and in 1950 was elected to the U.S. Senate, largely based on the notoriety he had acquired from the case.

Even today, the Hiss affair remains a painful metaphor for the marginalization of left-wing New Dealers by anti-Communist crusaders, the weakness of the American Left for the last half century, and the less-than-courageous performance of American liberals during two generations of conservative ascendancy.

Although Hiss insisted on his innocence until his death in 1996, many Cold War historians, and perhaps most notably Allen Weinstein in his 1978 book, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, have firmly concluded that Hiss was part of a clandestine Communist cell from 1935 onward and that he passed information to the Soviet Union from late 1936 to early 1938 through an underground Communist courier named Whittaker Chambers. Most historians have conceded the argument to Weinstein (who is today the Archivist of the United States). They have done so, however, not because the evidence against Hiss is clear and definitive, but because the evidence box — filled as it is with a morass of circumstantial detail — leaves them the easy option of finding him guilty of some form of espionage activity during his murky relationship with Chambers.

To a few skeptics, however, this muddled spy case will remain an open question until the Russian archives disgorge incontrovertible proof that Hiss was or was not a conscious agent. Despite continuing claims that documents U.S. researchers obtained from the Russian archives in the early- tomid-1990s represent a “massive documentation of the guilt”² of Alger Hiss, not a single document with his name or that of Whittaker Chambers has ever been produced from the publicly accessible Russian archives. To be sure, there are a few references to Hiss in Soviet-era documents that have been leaked to Allen Weinstein and his Russian co-author, Alexander Vassiliev. But in their book The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev leave the impression that Hiss is repeatedly mentioned in Soviet-era documents. But their narrative of Hiss’s espionage in the 1930s is heavily referenced to Weinstein’s Perjury. And when they quote from three 1945 KGB documents describing a Soviet source at the U.S. Department of State, they substitute Hiss’s name in brackets for “Ales,” the cover name for an American working for the Soviets. They do the same thing when quoting from a Soviet intelligence cable dated March 30, 1945, decrypted and released by the U.S. government under the National Security Agency’s Venona program. Weinstein and Vassiliev did get exclusive access to a crop of documents from the KGB archive. But references to Alger Hiss in those documents boil down to only five pages from a single SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) file.³

The Hiss case has also become a litmus test of what is considered to be legitimate Cold War historiography. Since the late 1970s, historians and journalists who remain agnostics on the question of Hiss’s guilt invite ridicule — or condemnation.⁴ The consensus historians — led by Weinstein — have largely succeeded in making Hiss’s guilt a piece of the conventional wisdom.

We do not propose to address the larger question of whether Hiss was guilty or innocent of espionage, but rather to explore whether he fits the profile of the Soviet asset hidden behind the cover name Ales (pronounced in Russian as A´-les).

Historians of the craft of intelligence recognize that assigning identities to code names more than 50 years after the fact is fraught with peril. It is difficult at best to translate from one language and culture to another, particularly when dealing with partially decrypted documents. Other imponderables include the ambiguities surrounding witting and unwitting sources and, most obviously, the incentives for intelligence officers to exaggerate the value of both their information and their sources. All of this is to say that we are aware that, like others before us, we tread on thin ice. Still, we have found evidence to suggest that Hiss could not have been Ales, and that an alternative candidate exists.

THE VENONA PUZZLE

Until the mid-1990s, Weinstein and other historians accepted Chambers’s assertions that Hiss’s associations with the Soviets were confined to the period of 1934–38. But when the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) declassified the Venona documents, students of the case claimed that Hiss may have continued his presumed espionage into the World War II years. The documents are a collection of intercepted and fragmentary decrypted cables between Moscow and its overseas intelligence outposts (most prominently New York and Washington, D.C.) that produced hundreds of cryptonyms for agents, assets, contacts, or targets of Soviet intelligence. They also included many names of unsuspecting Americans whom Soviet intelligence operatives discussed, targeted, or merely mentioned. Alger Hiss’s name turned up in this second group.

In a fragment of a decrypted GRU⁵ (Russian military intelligence) New York-to-Moscow cable of September 28, 1943, a New York station chief of the Soviet military intelligence — GRU — (whom the Russians referred to as “rezident”) called “Molier”⁶ reported to his Moscow director that “the NEIGHBOR” (in this case, a resident or operative from the NKGB — as the KGB was then called — Foreign Intelligence) mentioned an official “from the State Department by the name of HISS [iv].”

Footnote iv to the cable comes from the NSA, which explains that by the time they gave up on trying to decrypt it in August of 1969, the FBI and NSA had only one candidate for “HISS.” Normally, these Russian-language cables use the Cyrillic alphabet, but here Hiss is spelled out in the Latin alphabet, perhaps indicating that the name was unfamiliar to the sender. At the time the cable was written, Alger Hiss was an assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department Political Advisor in Charge of Far Eastern Affairs.

Could a person openly named in such a message be an agent of that service at the time the message was written or at any previous time? Not according to Lt. Gen. Vitaly Pavlov, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer who had supervised intelligence operations focused on the United States beginning in late 1938. When interviewed in 2002, Pavlov firmly stated that no one openly named in the Venona cables could have been an agent.⁷ Why was he so sure? “Had he ever been an agent, the service would have his code name in the system.” Three years later, this opinion was upheld by another Russian intelligence professional, Maj. Gen. Julius Kobyakov.⁸ After reading the Sept. 28 Venona cable, Kobyakov told us that had Alger Hiss been an agent, “it would be very unusual to put a true name in a cable: speaking about one of their assets, normally, they would use a code name.”

This Venona message openly using the name Hiss has been lost in a heated, decade-long discussion of yet another Venona cable, N 1822, sent from Washington, D.C., to Moscow, originating from the NKGB intelligence station in the Soviet Embassy. Dated March 30, 1945, the cable describes a Soviet agent who had the code name Ales. The NSA released its English translation of the cable in 1996 with a footnote saying that Ales was “probably” Alger Hiss. Here is the full text of cable N 1822 as released in 1996:

From: Washington
To: Moscow
No. 1822

30 March 1945

Further to our telegram No. 283 [a]. As a result of “[D%A.’s]” [i] chat with “ALES,” [ii] the following has been ascertained:

1. ALES has been working with the NEIGHBORS [SOSEDI] [iii] continuously since 1935.

2. For some years past he has been the leader of a small group of the NEIGHBORS’ probationers [STAZhERY], for the most part consisting of his relations.

3. The group and ALES himself work on obtaining military information only. Materials on the “BANK” [iv] allegedly interest the NEIGHBORS very little and he does not produce them regularly.

4. All the last few years ALES has been working with “Pol’” [v] who also meets other members of the group occasionally.

5. Recently ALES and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations.

6. After the YaLTA Conference, when he had gone on to MOSCOW, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade VYShINSKIJ) allegedly got in touch with ALES and at the behest of the Military NEIGHBORS passed on to him their gratitude and so on.

No. 431 Vadim [vi]⁹

NSA translators released the cable with the following notes:

Notes: [a] Not available.

Comments:

[i]: “A.” seems the most likely garble here although “A.” has not been confirmed elsewhere in the WASHINGTON traffic.

[ii] ALES: Probably Alger HISS.

[iii] SOSEDI: Members of another Soviet Intelligence organization, here probably the GRU.

[iv] BANK: The U.S. State Department.

[v] POL’: i.e. “PAUL”, unidentified cover name.

[vi] VADIM: Aantolij Borisovich GROMOV, MGB resident in WASHINGTON. 8 August 1969

According to FBI historian John F. Fox,¹⁰ the identification of Ales as Alger Hiss in Venona 1822 dates back to a May 15, 1950, FBI memorandum from Alan Belmont, head of the FBI espionage section.¹¹ “It would appear likely,” the 1950 memo surmised, “that this individual [Ales] is Alger Hiss in view of the fact that he was in the State Department and the information from Chambers indicated that his wife, Priscilla, was active in Soviet espionage and he also had a brother, Donald, in the State Department.”¹² In Fox’s opinion, “Why Hiss is connected with this message is unsurprising. Each of these clues as well as the mention of ALES’s connection to the Yalta Conference and a trip to Moscow afterwards each fits what was known about Hiss.” However, Fox concedes that “Hiss, of course, had been convicted of perjury less than six months before,” and this fact would have immediately occurred to the FBI team working on the Venona project.¹³

Those officials privy to the Venona intercept seem to have conducted, at best, a cursory investigation of Ales’s identity. Hiss seemed to fill the bill. Even so, in the same May 15 memo, the FBI noted that “an attempt is being made by analysis of the available information to verify this identification.”¹⁴ Even three years after Hiss’s conviction in 1950, the FBI was still conducting interviews about Ales — suggesting that the bureau had doubts.

The bureau’s agents questioned Averell Harriman, George Kennan, and John F. Melby, all Moscow-stationed diplomats who were involved with a 1945 Moscow visit by Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and his party after the Yalta Conference. Years later Melby revealed: “I would get visits from the FBI asking me what Alger Hiss had been up to, and had he gone secretly to see so-and-so and so-and-so, in the Kremlin. All I’d say was, ‘As far as I know, he didn’t do anything differently from anybody else in the party.’ If he did see anybody, I was not aware of it, and actually, Alger was staying at Spaso¹⁵ with us, along with Stettinius and others. If he did see anybody, which I’ve always doubted very seriously, I didn’t know anything about it. So after a while the FBI got tired of coming and seeing me on that old chestnut.”¹⁶

Melby was clear that the FBI questioned him “after the trial and after he [Hiss] had been convicted.”¹⁷The timing of FBI visits with Melby and the particular questions they asked him indicate that the bureau had in mind the clues contained in Venona 1822. They had similar questions for Kennan on April 8, 1953. And on May 12, 1953, they interviewed Ambassador Harriman and his daughter, Mrs. Mortimer, who had also flown back to Moscow after the Yalta conference. None of those interviewed was able to tell the FBI anything definitive. Clearly, the bureau’s identification of Ales as Hiss was never more than tentative.

Yet almost half a century later, when the FBI’s May 15, 1950, memo was released to the U.S. Senate Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, no mention was made of the FBI’s initial and continuing doubts. Appendix A of what has become known as the Moynihan Commission Report¹⁸said that “a Soviet cable of March 30, 1945, identified an agent, code-name ALES, as having attended the Yalta Conference of February 1945. He had then journeyed to Moscow where, according to the cable, he and his colleagues were ‘awarded Soviet decorations.’ This could only be Alger Hiss, Deputy Director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs; the other three State Department officials in the delegation from Yalta to Moscow are beyond suspicion.” A footnote specified that “the three others from the State Department in the U.S. delegation were Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Secretary of State; H. Freeman Matthews, Director of the Office of European Affairs; and Wilder Foote, Assistant to the Secretary of State.”

Ever since, Ales’s identity as Alger Hiss has become a mantra for longtime believers in Hiss’s guilt. Today, NSA historian Robert L. Benson goes so far as to say that the word “probably” should be dropped in the NSA’s tentative identification of Ales.¹⁹ In his view, there can no longer be any question that Hiss engaged in wartime spying on behalf of the Soviet Union and that he is the Ales described in Venona 1822.

At first glance, this reasoning appears to be straightforward and logical. But a closer reading of Venona 1822 raises numerous questions:

• Ales had been working with the GRU since 1935; Chambers specifically said that Hiss had no GRU connections before 1937.
• Ales was the leader of a small group “mainly consisting of his relatives.” Hiss, his critics have assumed, in accordance with the FBI’s May 1950 memo, was “working” with his wife, Priscilla, and his brother Donald — although no one has ever lodged any espionage allegations against Donald, and the FBI itself said charges that he was a member of the Communist Party were unsubstantiated. Neither has any evidence surfaced that Priscilla was a Communist Party member.²⁰
• Ales provided his Soviet handlers with “military information only.” Here the evidence pointing to Hiss is at best ambiguous, if not exculpatory. It would be illogical to use a State Department career diplomat with a legal background for obtaining information that would not normally come his way — and at the same time to underuse him for getting the diplomatic information he would encounter naturally. Attempts to prove that Hiss was Ales by pointing out that by 1944–45 he was privy to information on military matters seem to disregard this elementary logic of intelligence tradecraft.²¹
• Finally, and most important, Venona 1822 reports that “after the Yalta conference already in Moscow Ales was allegedly contacted by a very important Soviet official. (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade Vyshinskij and on instruction of military neighbors passed onto him their gratitude and so on.”

Those who believe Hiss is Ales argue that this clue is the clincher: Ales attended the Yalta conference in February 1945 — and so did Hiss. Ales left Yalta and flew to Moscow where the Soviet Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs (NKID) Andrei Vyshinsky ostensibly conveyed “their gratitude and so on.” Like Ales, Hiss left the Yalta Conference and flew with Secretary of State Stettinius to Moscow, where he remained for two days. On the evening of February 13, 1945, Hiss accompanied Stettinius to a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi; he and Stettinius’s party sat in the central box of the Bolshoi with Vyshinsky — who presumably seized this occasion, perhaps during an intermission, to take Hiss aside for a moment and express his “gratitude.” Case closed. Ales was Hiss.

But after months of digging in both the American and Russian archives, we have discovered new evidence that demonstrates conclusively the falsity of this damning scenario. Hiss was not Ales. The historians who have maintained that he was Ales turned an assumption and a few clues into a conclusion without bothering to determine if Hiss actually fit the profile of Ales — or asking whether a better candidate for Ales existed.

THE SECOND GORSKY CABLE

We have discovered that Hiss had a firm alibi. We know this from a relatively recent discovery, a Soviet-era cable that sheds new light on the clues to Ales’s identity given in Venona 1822. This new evidence surfaced during a libel suit filed in London by Vassiliev, Weinstein’s Russian collaborator on The Haunted Wood. In 2003, Vassiliev lost his suit against the publisher of the late lawyer and longtime Hiss defender John Lowenthal, but in the course of the trial, he introduced numerous notes he had taken on Soviet-era documents that he was allowed to read (but not copy) in the archives of the SVR.²² One of these documents was a March 5, 1945, cable signed “Vadim,” written to his colleagues in Moscow. Vadim is known to have been Anatoly Gorsky, the NKGB’s station chief in Washington, D.C., who operated under the cover name Anatoly Gromov and the cover position of the first secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Gorsky would also be the author, almost a month later, of Venona 1822.²³

For historians, the discovery of the Russian text of a cable preceding the decryption of Venona 1822 opened a new field of opportunity: to crosscheck the Venona decryption and identification against a Russian clear text from the coded cable traffic from World War II.²⁴ Such an occurrence is the dream of any espionage historian — and a nightmare for any espionage professional. Allen Weinstein had access to Vassiliev’s notes on the March 5, 1945, Gorsky cable, but he cited only a small portion of it in The Haunted Wood. Vassiliev’s notes on the cable, originally written in Russian, read:

p.88²⁵
C/c²⁶ from Vadim, 5 March 45

Wants to be included into the Sov. delegation at San Francisco conference. However, can’t leave the outpost [tochka] on [in the care of] any other operative. He wants — on [to leave it in the care of] the “Son” (Garanin F.A., transferred from Cuba to Washington as Soviet Embassy attaché.²⁷)

After the conference Vadim wants to come to Moscow to report in person.

Special attention — to “Ales”. Was at Yalta conference, then left for Mexico-City [and] has not yet come back. Our only key to him –“Ruble’”²⁸ “Ruble” himself travels on business (Italy) — [it is] difficult to run [supervise] ‘Ales’ through him.

“²⁹We have talked about ‘Ales’ with ‘Rubl’ several times.
As we have already written, ‘Rouble’ gives to ‘Ales’ an exceptionally good political reference as to the Communist Party³⁰ member. ‘Ruble’ reports that ‘Ales’ [is] a strong, determined man with a firm and resolute character, [he] is fully aware that he is a Communist, [and] is underground — with all the resulting consequences. Unfortunately, he probably understands the rules of security [‘conspiratsiju’] in his own way as [do] all local Communists.

As we have already reported to you, ‘Ales’³¹

that was connected with the neighbors. After the loss of contact with ‘Carl’,
‘Ruble’’
declined [to come in contact], when
’Ales’ came in contact with ‘Pol.’³²
He [‘Ales’] himself told about this to ‘Ruble’’
a year and a half ago, when he was inviting the latter to meet with ‘Pol’ to continue the work.”

“Ruble” may talk to “Ales” about reestablishing
the work. If he [e.g. ‘Ales’] would not like [working] with “Rouble”,
it is possible [to work] with us.

p.89 There is one unclear circumstance. About six months ago, “Ales” told “Ruble” that he had met a Russian person (he did not give his name) who immediately asked him to write a small memo about one issue. “Ales” asked for “Ruble”’s opinion as to what he should do. “Ruble” declined from giving a direct answer, saying that “Ales” could act at his own discretion.

“Ales” should be approached by a Sov. [Soviet] representative. Either one of the Center’s operatives, or “Sergey”³³, or me, “Vadim”. Most convenient — [to do this] at the conf-ce [conference] in S.-F. [San Francisco]. After 2–3 meetings, depending on how “Ales” behaves, we may be able to come down to business, referring to the password, or to “Ruble”, or [referring] just to the progressiveness of “Ales”.

The important clue here is Gorsky’s placing Ales at Yalta — and asserting that as of March 5 he was still in Mexico City attending the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace. After flying from Yalta to Moscow, Alger Hiss had indeed accompanied Secretary Stettinius to the Mexico City conference, arriving on February 20.³⁴ But Stettinius had asked Hiss to organize the San Francisco conference to found the United Nations. The conference was scheduled to open on April 25, and there was a lot of work to be done. So, less than two days after arriving in Mexico City, Hiss was ordered to fly home on the secretary’s airplane.³⁵

FOOTNOTES

¹ Walter LaFeber, The Washington Post, 12/7/1996.

² John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr. In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003, p. 141.

³ pp. 23, 22, 24, 25, 51 in the order they appear in the book of SVR file 36857, vol. 1.

⁴ For a full-blown polemical attack along these lines, see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Op.Cit.

⁵ Russian abbreviation standing for the Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie — Chief Intelligence Directorate.

⁶ Molier [MOL’ER] was the code name of Pavel Melkishev, GRU resident in 1941–45 who operated under the cover of New York Vice Consul and later Acting Consul General Pavel Mikhailov.

⁷ Interview with Lt. Gen. Vitaly G. Pavlov, Moscow, May 7, 2002. (Interview conducted in Russian)

⁸ Interview with Maj. Gen. Julius Kobyakov, Washington, D.C., March, 2005 (Interview conducted in English.)

⁹ In October 2005, the NSA reluctantly released its Russian language decrypt of this cable, thus allowing scholars to parse the translation of this critical document from the Russian into English. (It is important to understand that due to the uncertainties of the decrypt process it is quite possible that inaccuracies have crept into the language. Here is a description of the encoding-encryption process: 1) the plain text is encoded with the current code book; 2) the encoded result is then encrypted with the use of one-time pads—resulting in groups of 5-digit numbers; 3) before sending the cable, these groups are transformed into 5-letter groups, using the Telegraph Table. On the receiving side, the decoding-decryption process would be reversed, with a possibility of differences and shades in meaning cropping up between Russian texts as composed by Russian operatives and Russian decrypts in the Venona files.) The released Russian decrypt differed in several respects from the English translation released in 1996. First, showed that the initial decrypt had no “A” for an unidentified individual who provided details on the “Ales” background, for in place of “[D%A.’s]” the Russian decrypt displayed [p ya]—two letters of the Cyrillic alphabet with “ya” designate the last letter of the Cyrillic alphabet transcribed with two sounds, when “A” is the first letter transcribed as [a]. Second, the Russian decrypt has left no grounds for any speculations that “Paul” in the 1996 translation might be Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, who was identified by the Venona translators as the NKGB group leader “Pal.” Moreover, the French-style spelling of “Paul” as “Pol’” suggests that “Pol’” was someone on the military intelligence line, due to the Venona pattern of using French cover names during that period (Molier, Ruan, Orlean, Leon, among others). Third, the release of the Russian transcript put an end to any linguistic controversies around the word “relations,” which in Russian turned out to be rodstvenniki–that is, blood relatives; as well as to who in fact went to Moscow after the Yalta conference (Ales or Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vyshinsky, since it was clear that Ales “had gone to Moscow” “after the Yalta Conference.” Fourth, the Russian decrypt described the Soviet who “thanked” Ales as “ochen’ otvetstvennyi rabotnik” (a very responsible worker), which in Soviet jargon stood for a “very important employee” or “official” who might be taken as high as Vyshinsky, and it might designate a person of a lower rank, since in the Soviet hierarchy a designation of otvetstvennyi rabotnik was rather encompassing.

¹⁰ John F. Fox, Jr., FBI Historian, >In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence. Presented at the 2005 Symposium on Cryptologic History 10/27/2005.0

¹¹ Belmont to Ladd, Subject: Espionage, May 15, 1950. FBI FOIA. In fact, according to John F. Fox, the memo was written by Robert Lamphere who had been the FBI man on Venona project since spring 1948.

¹² FBI, Mr. Belmont to Mr. Ladd, May 15, 1950, Subject: Espionage.

¹³ John F. Fox, Jr., Op. Cit. presentation at the 2005 Symposium on Cryptologic History, 10/27/2005.

¹⁴ Belmont to Ladd, Op. Cit.

¹⁵ Spaso House, Moscow official residence of U.S. ambassadors.

¹⁶ ACCINELLI: But when did the FBI question you about his activities?
MELBY: Oh, long after. It was after the trial and after he had been convicted.
ACCINELLI: Oh, really?
MELBY: They didn’t come see me about him really before the trial or anything like that, no. [See Oral History Interview with John F. Melby, U.S. Foreign Service Officer, 1937-55, November 14, 1986, by Robert Accinelli, Harry S. Truman Library.]

¹⁷ Oral History Interview with John F. Melby, Op. Cit.

¹⁸ Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, 1997, Senate Document 105-2, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York, Chairman.

¹⁹ Kai Bird interview with Robert Benson, 10/27/2005.

²⁰ A FBI report to J. E. Hoover in January 1952 characterized “the unsubstantiated allegations of Whittaker Chambers that the subject [Donald Hiss] was a member of the ?ommunist Party underground unit” as “the preeminent charges.” “There are no specific allegations regarding the subject’s Communist Party membership and no specific indications that he has been active since the period encompassing CHAMBER’s allegations. There has been no allegation of espionage at any time. <…> no additional security investigation is contemplated at this time.” [SAC, WFO to Director, FBI. Subject Donald Hiss, 29/1/52. Subject Donald Hiss, File #101-4300, p. 40, FBI FOIA] As to Priscilla Hiss, there has been no independent evidence to support Chambers’ allegations.

²¹ Eduard Mark, “Who Was ‘Venona’s’ ‘Ales’? Cryptanalysis and the Hiss Case,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 18, No. 3, Autumn, 2003, p. 50.

²² Russian abbreviation for Foreign Intelligence Service [Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki], formerly KGB foreign intelligence.

²³ Conceivably, the March 5, 1945, Gorsky cable is the elusive “cable no. 283” referred to at the beginning of Venona No. 1822

²⁴ A third Gorksy cable about “Ales,’”dated April 2, 1945, is also known to exist, although so far only in an excerpted English translation. It offers less precisely dated—and thus more indirect—information about “Ales” than Gorsky’s March 5, 1945, cable, and is discussed on a later page of this essay.

²⁵ Vassiliev’s pagination from the source file.

²⁶ Coded cable.

²⁷ According to the Russian Foreign Ministry’s records, as of June 1945 Garanin was Head of the Consular Department of Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. [AVPR, Fund 192, description 12, Por. 88, file 32, p. 129; also in descr. 12, Por. 84, file 1, pp. 66, 87].

²⁸ “Ruble” [“Rubl’”] cryptonym appearing in Venona decrypted cable traffic; tentatively identified by Venona decryptors as probably Harry Glasser, Keynsian economist and Department of Treasury official.

²⁹ Hereinafter quotation marks in the beginning and at the end of paragraphs were probably used by Vassiliev to show that he was quoting verbatim from the files.

³⁰ In Venona cables, Communist Party membership appears under the cover word of “zemlyak” (plural: “zemlyaki”; feminine: “zemlyachka”), which was translated by the NSA as “fellowcountryman,” although a better translation would be “compatriot.” This open use of “Communist Party” is very unusual, for Communist Party membership was indicated by a cover word even in Soviet diplomatic and party correspondence of the 1930s to 1950s.

³¹ This is the end of the page designated since the London libel trial as Jury Bundle, p.309C. There is a gap between “Ales” on p. 309C and the first word on p. 309B— “that.” Most probably, this gap is due to improper scanning of page 309C. It is noteworthy that in the Russian notes “that” is written in the feminine gender suggesting that a missing noun might be “group,” which in Russian is also feminine.

³² Unidentified code name. Also referred to in Venona March 30, 1945 cable; not identified by Venona decryptors. Another appearance of “Pol’” is in GRU Stockholm to Moscow #4052, 25 Dec. 1944.

³³ Code name of Vladimir Sergeevich Pravdin, NKVD station chief and operative in NYC.

³⁴ “I telephoned Mr. Alger Hiss at Mexico City.…” Memorandum of Conversation, Mr. Alger Hiss, Mr. Grew, Mr. Stettinius, Feb. 20, 1945, Folder: “Memos of Conversation,” NARA, RG 59, Alger Hiss Files 1940–1946, Subject Files OSPA, Box 8, NA, College Park, MD.

³⁵ “Mr. Hiss’ return to Washington in the Secretary’s plane now makes it feasible for Miss Maylot to go when the plane returns.…” State Dept. memo from Mr. Sandifer to Mr. Watson, Feb. 24, 1945, RG 59, Decimal Files, 710 Conference W and PW/2-2445, FIS.