Beacon Broadside

Remembering Al Young

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution tells the story of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who participated in such key events of the American Revolution as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party. Hewes story might have been lost to history if not for his longevity and the historical mood of the 1830's. When the Tea Party became a leading symbol of the Revolutionary era fifty years after the actual event, this 'common man' in his nineties was 'discovered' and celebrated in Boston as a national hero. Hewes story continues to inspire and instruct today, thanks to the work of one historian. 

Alfred F. Young, author of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party as well as many other works, died on November 6. He was a man beloved for his warmth and good nature and respected for his scholarship. When his wife, Marilyn, sent an email to her late husband's contact list, including Beacon editor Gayatri Patnaik, many responded to the news with memories of the man and his work. Gayatri sent an email to Marilyn:

"I’ve been an executive editor at Beacon Press for ten years and had the very good fortune to know Al. I’ve been reading all the emails from his friends and colleagues over the past few days and am struck, though not surprised, at the many people he touched. I myself was always humbled when I interacted with him, not because of his legacy as a historian but also by his generosity and kindness." 

Thinking that the thoughts of his colleagues and friends would be a fitting tribute to a man much admired here at Beacon Press, we've asked their permission to share what we publish here today. 

We'll begin with an email Young received before his death but never read, as it arrived in the final days of his illness. It is from Geoffrey Charles Peart, a descendent of George Robert Twelves Hewes, the subject of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party. 

Dear Dr. Young,
In doing some research on my family history, I came across your book on George Robert Twelves Hewes. I am a direct descendant of his by way of his son George Robert Twelves Fifteen Hewes. I was fascinated to read your account, and see in print the same stories my grandmother (born 1907) told me as a child.

While all letters and documentation I have are in relation to his descendants living in Michigan, we do have a portrait at home that family tradition holds is of G. R. T. Hewes. Below I have attached a scanned version. Should you have any questions, I would be more than happy to share what I have.

Thank you for the wonderful book!

Geoffrey Charles Peart

Portrait of George Robert Twelve Hewes

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It has been deeply moving to read the tributes about Al Young so many historians and comrades--especially from the many younger scholars for whom he was an inspiration and to whom he gave encouragement and support. He and I were roughly of the same generation--he was a few years older than I--and our work on popular and artisanal resistance movements and their connection with festivity took place at the same time: his in revolutionary America, mine in early modern France. We didn't know each other then, but I recognized him as a co-conspirator, and I'm sure he felt the same about me. It was thrilling to meet him in later years. And also so get to know his daughter Liz Young, who has carried on his tradition in another field. His legacy is a rich one.

Natalie Zemon Davis, Professor of History, University of Toronto 

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This is incredibly sad news. Al was ahead of his time in so many ways, showing us how to mobilize the new social history to uncover political dynamics, how to get at the politics of memory--and above all, how to do our work with generosity, as part of a collective. I will miss him.

Reeve Huston, Associate Professor of History, Duke University

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Al leaves a grand legacy as an inspired scholar, a person of principles, and a prince of a man. He took history seriously and presenting it to the public even more seriously.

Terry J. Fife (co-author with Alfred Young and Mary E. Janzen of We the People)

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As an NIU colleague for years I can add that there was no truer friend, no stauncher fighter for what was right, no better model of what a senior colleague should be and stand for, or forhow a committed scholar, sensing the right moment, could literally change the way man, many thousands of others understood their citizenship, their country, and their world.

Mary Furner, Professor UCSB Department of History

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Very sad. He was a great scholar and elegant stylist but also a model of modesty. I counted him as a friend and mentor and mourn his passing. The world's a much smaller place.

Bruce Laurie, Professor Emeritus, UMass Amherst Department of History

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Al was hugely important to my own development, from when he first noticed me in 1973 onwards. We all stood in his shadow one way or another. He was a scholar, a gentleman, and a total mensch.

Ed Countryman, University Distinguished Professor, Southern Methodist University Department of History 

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Al befriended me when I was working as an administrative assistant in the Newberry Library. He took me seriously, although I was a young graduate student, and he has been a mentor, ally, and friend ever since. I admired his work tremendously. But I admired him as a person even more. And I will miss him.

Laura Edwards, Professor of History, Duke University

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From Ray Raphael, author of A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence and Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past and coeditor of Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation.

About six years ago, Al approached me with an idea: since people love to digest history in the form of biography, shouldn't there be a book featuring biographical essays of radicals of the Revolutionary Era?

Good idea, I responded. Then I continued to pump him with questions for my own work-in-progress.

A few weeks later, he mentioned his idea again, then again and again for perhaps a year, until he finally asked outright if I would be interested in working with him on such a project. I had been blind, I realized; he had been asking me all along, but I hadn't taken his hints. At a younger age, he would have charged into this on his own, but now he sought company.

I had two books in the works, but I could hardly say no. Gary Nash signed on as well, and for three years or so, the three of us tried to fulfill Al's vision. Truly, Revolutionary Founders was his book.

Al was my teacher years before he knew I existed. When I started studying people's history of the American Revolution in the mid-90s, I gleaned onto the classic collection of essays he had published in 1976 that gave the field definition, and I used the long historiographic essay he had just published as my starting roadmap. I didn't yet know him when he blurbed my first Am Rev book, The People's History of the American Revolution, but after that I introduced myself by email and phone, and from that moment onward, he was my constant advisor. Whenever I had any question, I turned to Al first, and he would rattle off, from the top of his head, a readings list I should pursue.

And now I would be working side-by-side with a mentor! It was a thrilling prospect, but Al proved to be a tough taskmaster. Email followed email, five or six per day at times, and in the course of the project, a thousand at least. He was direct and spoke his mind, relentless and demanding in his pursuit of historical truth, but he could be curt. Intermittently we quibbled over this or that. At one low ebb, when the tone seemed to turn a bit sour, I headed East with a mission: to meet Al in person. Never have I lived with someone so long and so intensely without meeting him first.

Durham, NC, the fall of 2009: Al and I hit it off famously, working together for three days, tidying up this essay and that, jamming on the intro, talking shop. Through work was how Al related most deeply, as musicians do with their music. I was face to face with a dedicated, highly effective, rigorous historian and a truly wonderful man; these went hand-in-hand. That visit was a gift; especially now, I am thankful for it. In point of fact, who among us does not owe Al great thanks? He defined who we are, collectively and to some extent individually. 

Staughton, in his Nov. 9 email tribute, says Al was "a product of the Popular Front atmosphere of the late 1930s," and he suggests that Al was somehow locked within that framework, promoting "the people" without fully embracing the African American and Native American experiences. That's not how I saw him. Al grew with the times and in fact he helped the times grow with him. He saw the Revolution as a complex affair in which there were many renditions of "the people." In our book, he insisted on including women, blacks, and Native Americans and felt uncomfortable to the end with not featuring such groups more; unfortunately, a central essay on the black experience was never completed.

Al was a true scholar, open to fully honest discussion. Once, on the phone, I confessed that in two footnotes to People's History, I had taken him to task on points in his Hewes essay. Had he noticed these? "Of course," he responded. "That's what most attracted me to you. You took me seriously." 

And he took me seriously, critiquing my work as only a master can. In an early draft for Revolutionary Founders, I had presented a tolerably good essay on Timothy Bigelow, a radical leader from Worcester who happened to be a blacksmith. Not strong enough, said Al. You need to bring out the blacksmith thing, that is crucial. Here, in fact, is an email on the subject I just retrieved from June 25, 2009, when Al was 84 and still, as you see, at the top of his game. I'll let him have the last word so we can see him in process, tireless, determined, and exacting. It’s a primary source, presented exactly as written. This was vintage Al as I knew him: supreme clarity of mind but working quickly, with his typing fingers not always up to the pace.

To explain why a blacksmith might have a following: Of all the artisans he is the one most essential to farmers and townspeople. They need him to shoe their oxen and horses, to mend their tools. He might make other household ironware too.

He is the one artisans who people would visit and have to stay a while while he shod their horses or repaired a pitchfork.

Only other comparable figure might be the miller but farmers would bring him their grains at infrequent intervals.

He is also a craftstmen whose work you could evaluate yourself and know whether he was a good man.

So it not just men talked as men will do as you say. He was familiar to many people; they knew him; they had confidence in him.

Would the Brit iron policies have been a felt grievance. Interesting question. Do you have a source saying it was.

The iron act of 1750 forbade colonists to erect any new slitting mills.[ not quite sure distinction from a forge]

And the importation of raw iron from the colopnies was encouraged. But says Merrill Jensen"the act did not serve either puroose. There was a staedy increase in iron production, but mostof it was used in the colony where it was produced... or shipped to other colonies where it was made into finished iron products by locval artisans'... colonial governors closed their eyes to the the fact of 'local slitting mills]

Jensen ed Colonial Engkish Histirical D ocuments   ed Jensen NY Ocford 1955. Jensen is even handed about these matters.

Do you have any other evidence?  My guess is the average blacksmith had all he could do managing  the damnds of local farmers.

BUT the boycot movement was accompanied by a buy American movement, big in Mass. with a long list of p;ropducts colonists were encouraged to buy from amer manufacturers.   I wrote in my mechanics essay as I recall that the prospect of of increasing Amer manufactures was an appeal to artisans rather than saying the restrictions were a felt grievance. A distinction. The visio of the prospects for Amer manufactures was an appeal ti many artisans.  Wteher you can say this for Bigelow.I dont know

Al

That's Al for you. I mourn him and miss him.

 

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Read more about Al Young: 

Al Young's essay "The People and the Patriots" in the Boston Review, November/December 2011

Josh Brown at the American Social History Project's Now and Then blog

Chris Cantwell at the Newberry blog

Ann M. Little at Historiann

Benjamin Carp at Common-Place

Gregory Nobles at the NYU Press blog

J. L. Bell's Boston 1775 blog: "Alfred F. Young: A Giant of a Historian"

Adrienne Rich: 1929-2012

The poet Adrienne Rich died yesterday at the age of 82. We ran this post in 2007 for Jewish Book Month, looking at her poetry through the lens of her Jewish identity. The author is Stephen Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf). We republish it today in memory of Rich and her transformative, challenging, and courageous body of work. 

Photo by Robert Giard

You can find Adrienne Rich in anthologies of Jewish American poetry, but most of her many admirers do not think of her first (if at all) as a Jewish poet: they think of her as a feminist poet, as a political poet, as a GLBT activist, as a talented artificer in traditional metrical forms (during the 1950s) as a maker of  harshly original free verse (during the 1960s), as a woman who challenged herself to overcome "the fact of being separate" (as she put it in the early 1970s) in order to speak to and about other people's needs. Though Rich's father was Jewish (as was her late husband), she did not identify herself with any religion for most of her writing life: in high school, she recalled, "I am quite sure I was seen as Jewish (with a reassuringly gentile mother) in that double vision that bigotry allows." Her ambitious, assimilationist father, however, "did not give me the choice to be a Jew."

Rich's 1982 essay "Split at the Root," from which those sentences come, describes her long-delayed decision to call herself Jewish in print. If you read Rich's poem "Jerusalem" (1966) you will see her view religious heritage as an excuse for violence and a trap: "What I dream of the city," she writes, "is how hard it is to leave." An even earlier poem, "At the Jewish New Year," insisted on Rosh Hashanah that "this day is merely one/ Of thirty in September," and that "whatever we strain to forget/ Our memory must be long": "we" here means not Jews but assimilated Jews, Jews who want to distance themselves (but cannot distance themselves enough) from their shared religious past. [Ed's note: The New Yorker has unlocked this poem in their archives.]

Rich's later poems, by contrast, show her reclaiming Judaism as something to which she says she might want to belong. These poems often address the Baltimore family in which she grew up. "Grandmothers" (1980), for example, pays belated tribute to Hattie Rice Rich, the poet's father's mother, whose "sweetness of soul was a mystery to me," but in Rich's youth "a convenience for everyone": "you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg," "took the street-car downtown shopping/ endlessly for your son's whims, the whims of genius," and "All through World War Two the forbidden word/ Jewish was barely uttered in your son's house."

Rich is a poet of confrontation, one whose imagination flares at shows of defiant strength, and in this poem she can defy her Jewish father by acknowledging, as he did not want to acknowledge, the hard and quiet work done by her grandmother in bringing him up, work that Arnold Rich (in his daughter's telling) overlooked.  Rich has two grandmothers, but "Grandmothers" has three parts: one part for her maternal grandmother, who "married straight out of the convent school," one part for Hattie Rice Rich, Arnold's mother, and one part for Adrienne herself, entitled "Granddaughter," in which she describes herself as "born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind," and newly interested in "'blood,' the all-powerful awful theme."

By "blood" Rich means, here, not the shedding of blood (as she did in "Jerusalem") but the lines of descent, the passing down of habits and beliefs (accompanied, in this instance, by passed-down genes), which enable Rich, the daughter of a Jew and a non-Jew, to call herself Jewish, and to explore, in middle age, the aspects of Judaism that said the most to her. And that is what she did in the book she wrote after finishing "Grandmothers," the book she would call Your Native Land, Your Life.  That book includes Rich's most accomplished poem on a Jewish theme, "Yom Kippur 1984," named for the day of fasting, self-examination and repentance that occurs near, but not at, the start of each Jewish year.

"Yom Kippur, 1984" explores the twinned Jewish obligations—especially relevant on Yom Kippur— to consider one's own life, to reflect on one's actions inwardly, as an individual, and the obligation—for observant Jews, a matter of Jewish law; for Rich, perhaps, a matter of ethics—to be with other Jews at certain times (Jewish law requires a minyan, at least ten Jews praying together, before certain prayers can be said). "Yom Kippur, 1984" begins:

What is a Jew in solitude?
What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

[Read the full poem at the Poetry Foundation website.]

Rich sees Jewish affiliation, the decision to call oneself a Jew, as one example among many of protective solidarity: "the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew/ the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be/ a woman's footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman's god."  She then admits, vexing herself, that "I also love separateness." Like almost all poets, she needs some time alone, unhindered by what other people expect her to say, whether in a synagogue or at a dinner table. Can she identify herself with a group—with Jews, for example—and still preserve the solitude, the distance from expectations, which all poets need?  The poem ends not by answering but by repeating the question, and asking what it would mean in a just world, a world in which we no longer wanted group identifications—religions, nations, labels of many kinds—for mutual protection, and could no longer use them to keep other people away.

Not coincidentally Rich uses very long, end-stopped lines for this poem: she has said that she associates these lines not just with the poetry of the Hebrew Bible but with Walt Whitman, that great poet of connections among Americans, and with Robinson Jeffers, the Californian poet of American misanthropy and solitude. Neither Whitman nor Jeffers were Jewish, but Rich, here, says that she is: she takes a Jewish occasion to reconsider the choices she has made—about where to live, how to spend her time and energy, how to write—and in doing so identifies her own poetic practice with a kind of ethically oriented self-examination we might think of as Jewish too.  On Yom Kippur Jews are asked to consider the previous year as a series of acts and decisions taken or declined; the Kol Nidre prayer, in which we ask divine forgiveness for obligations that we could not have carried out, is part of the service, but so too is the reminder that if we owe something to another human being, we must fulfill our obligation to that human being, not to a divine substitute.

Rich has used her Jewish material here to think both about family and about herself alone, to think both about solitude and about obligation. She will choose solitary reflection over participation in rituals and social occasions that seem to her false or oppressive (that's one reason she famously refused to accept the National Medal for the Arts). And yet her temperament has always drawn her also to shared tasks, to the ways in which people can work together to improve their lot. That is the Jewish mitzvah of tikkun olam, often and rightly invoked as a religious justification for political activism, and it is one of the ways that Rich, "split at the root" and alert to her contradictions, finds herself, still, writing Jewish books.

Was Christopher Hitchens Religious?

The Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell is Minister Emerita of the First Unitarian Church of Portland, Oregon, and is the subject of the documentary film, "Raw Faith." She is the author of several books, and edited four volumes for Beacon Press, including Breaking Free: Women of Spirit at Midlife and Beyond.  

Less than a year before his death, I interviewed Christopher Hitchens for Portland Monthly magazine. I didn't want to do the interview. As I told editor Randy Gragg, "I don't like Christopher Hitchens. He is rude. He is a bully. So why should I help get his work before more people?" But Randy prevailed upon me. After all, Hitchens would be giving a lecture -- about God, of course -- in my hometown of Portland soon, and people would be passionately interested. I agreed to do the interview, and I'm so glad I did.

I knew that my job in approaching the interview was to not get hooked by Hitchens' jabs at Christianity, or at me, for that matter. I had my list of questions all ready to go. During the interview, I had the feeling that I was encountering a "bad boy," a playful persona honed to perfection, one that he was totally conscious of and used brilliantly for PR purposes. I also sensed underneath the persona a deeply wounded, angry child. I don't know where that anger came from, but it was a given from which he moved, and then used his brilliant intellect to focus, parse and dissect. No one could encounter that extraordinary mind without marveling. That day Hitchens simply spoke in whole paragraphs of perfectly constructed concepts, consistently, for more than an hour.

After his lecture on Jan. 5, a small group of us were invited to have dinner with Hitchens. There were several of us clergy present, including Marcus Borg, the internationally known Jesus scholar; plus Andrew Proctor, the head of Portland Arts and Lectures; Emily Harris, local radio personality; and of course Randy Gragg. Hitchens was known for his ability to drink great quantities of alcohol and never lose his sharp edge, a capacity in full flower that evening. He downed one glass of red wine after the next, hardly pausing except to ramble on, and managed to insult, in particular, the clergy. An African-American minister mentioned how much gospel music meant to him, and in response Hitchens quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley, and then told the minister that the words of Shelley were much more meaningful than "that gospel stuff." Marcus Borg attempted to speak of his devotional life, but Hitchens would have none of it. Borg left the dinner early, with a kind but oblique remark to Hitchens: "Whatever you are doing, you do it quite well."

I tried to encourage Hitchens to pause from time to time and listen to what others around the table were saying, but I was largely unsuccessful, as you might imagine: He charged on ahead, totally dominating the conversation. I was one of the last ones to leave the dinner, and found myself on the sidewalk in the dark night, still talking with Christopher, who still held a glass of red wine in his hand. Unaccountably, I felt a clean, clear sense of affection for him. I know in my own life the anger that is always there, waiting to be tapped. I know that this rage has its uses, to counter ignorance and injustice, and I know it sometimes bullies and hurts.

The interview itself revealed a surprisingly religious Christopher Hitchens. He ended up using words like numinous and transcendent and soul. He said, "I can write and I can talk, and sometimes when I'm doing either of these things, I realize that I've written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn't absolutely know I had in me until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it. There is a sense that it wasn't all done by my hand." A bit later he added, "Everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there's more to life than just matter." At the end of the interview, I told Hitchens, "I would love to have you in my church because you're so eloquent, and, I believe some of your impulses -- excuse me for saying so -- are religious in the way I am religious." And Hitchens responded, "I'm touched that you say, as others have that I've missed my vocation. But I would not be able to be this way if I were wearing robes or claiming authority that was other than human. That's a distinction that matters to me very much."

Hitchens did not miss his vocation. He has done more than most anyone to focus popular attention on the egregious dimensions of religion. He just wanted the world, and all its people, to be pure. Unfortunately, we are not. Hence, the impulse for religion.

Read the printed interview, or hear the entire audio interview: Questions of Faith

Photo by Andrew Rusk on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

In Memoriam: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a courageous leader of the civil rights movement, died today at the age of 89. You can read his obituary at the New York Times or at the Washington Post. In Rev. Shuttlesworth's memory, we share the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

There was one threat to the reign of white supremacy in Birmingham. As an outgrowth of the Montgomery bus boycott, protest movements had sprung up in numerous cities across the South. In Birmingham, one of the nation's most courageous freedom fighters, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, had organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights---A.C.H.R.--in the spring of 1956. Shuttlesworth, a wiry, energetic, and indomitable man, had set out to change Birmingham and to end for all time the terrorist, racist rule of Bull Connor.

Why We Can't Wait (p 52)

Fred Shuttlesworth leads Birmingham marchers in prayer before their arrest. (Joe Chapman)

At an organizing meeting at Harry Belafonte's apartment in New York City, Shuttlesworth and King spoke to supporters of the situation in Birmingham, and of the risks faced by those willing to take action:

Shuttlesworth, wearing the scars of earlier battles, brought a sense of the danger as well as the earnestness of our crusade into that peaceful New York living room. Although many of those present had worked with S.C.L.C. in the past, there was a silence almost like the shock of a fresh discovery when Shuttlesworth said, "You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live."

Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr. (p 60)

When Science Fiction Changed: Joanna Russ, In Memoriam

Stephen Burt is the author Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, as well as several other books of poetry and criticism. He writes about poetry, contemporary literature, graphic novels, and science fiction for The New York Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation and The Believer, among others. He is Professor of English at Harvard University, where he teaches a very popular course on science fiction. 

When science fiction changed, Joanna Russ—as much as any writer— changed it; and when society changed— becoming less sexist, more open to women's ambitions, more open to women who love women, though there is still so very far to go—Russ's work played no small part. Russ, who died last month at age 74, began publishing sf fifty years ago. She made a name among science fiction fans for her unconventional, violent heroine Alyx and for more than two decades of strong short stories, among them the often reprinted "When It Changed" and the perfectly wrought medieval tale "Souls." Russ had a long career as an academic, at Cornell University, the University of Washington and elsewhere; she earned prominence, too, as a feminist critic, taking on topics within and outside genre fiction, most notably in How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) a classic statement to set beside the only slightly earlier feminist prose of Kate Millett, Sandra Gilbert, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Adrienne Rich.

But Russ will long and rightly be identified with her third novel, The Female Man. Completed in 1971, not published till 1975, and recognized immediately as coruscating feminist polemic, it's also a rapid, compelling work of sf, an intricate metafiction, and a good read. In that book, "Joanna," identified with the author, meets three versions of herself, brought together by interdimensional time travel. Jeannine Dadier hails from an alternate America where the Great Depression continues to the present day (i.e. 1969); opportunities for women there (at least, for women like Jeannine) seem even more circumscribed, sex roles more hypocritical and constricting, than in the real United States. Janet Evason (the "son" means "daughter") visits them both from a far future culture called Whileaway, an efficient, appealing single-sex society whose philosophy and biotech Janet describes. She introduces herself with a sentence that identified the book as science fiction at the time: "My mother's name was Eva, my other mother's name Alicia; I am Janet Evason." She continues: "When I was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf alone, on North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle."

Whileaway is hardly the first single-sex feminist utopia, but it's crisply described, with little sentimentality, wry summary ("They work too much. They are incredibly tidy"), and vivid set scenes. Janet's remembered adventures back on Whileaway make a neat contrast with the bitter satire, self-referential devices, bleakly essayistic fragments, and inset playlets (drawn from Eric Berne's Games People Play) that show up the sexist effects, not only of malign individuals, but of American habits, assumptions, and institutions, in 1969, 1975, and still today. The narrator tells us that she has become a man (thus the title) in the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir's "One is not born a woman, but becomes one": to assume a position of power, to speak for oneself, to create new worlds, Joanna must therefore become something else.

Science fiction delivers a promise and a warning. It also delivers hope: depicting imagined futures, events and characters not possible here and now, sf says that things can and will be otherwise—that what we have seen already is not all there is. That's what Janet said, with uncommon force, in 1975: not just that women can hunt and fight duels and explore the Arctic and be the government, but also that women can love other women, raise children with other women, and experience sexual pleasure without men. While in Joanna's time, Janet falls hard for Laura, a disaffected teenager who likes to imagine that she's Genghis Khan, enjoys mathematics, and needs to be saved from false consciousness: "I'm a victim of penis envy (said Laura) so I can't ever be happy or lead a normal life." While Laura, slowly, awakens, Jeannine flounders, caught between two wrong-choice guys. Jeannine, like Joanna, could benefit from a loud, strong, well-organized feminist movement (not that Jeannine's world is likely to see one), but she could also benefit from a "Whileawayan communications device": "'I found it on Janet's bed,' said Jeannine, still whispering... 'I can't figure out what it is. You hold it by the handle and if you move this switch it buzzes on one end, though I don't see why, and another switch makes this piece move up and down.'"

The Female Man is funny, terse, eclectic, self-conscious and thoughtful, as well as angry-- it has a lot to be angry about. "Mothers have to sacrifice themselves to their children, both male and female," one of Russ's narrators explains, "so that the children will be happy when they grow up; though the mothers themselves were once children and were sacrified to in order that they might grow up and sacrifice... and when their daughters grow up, they will be mothers and they will have to sacrifice, so that you begin to wonder whether the whole thing isn't a plot to make the world safe for (male) children. But motherhood is sacred and mustn't be talked about." Russ stood out, and still stands out today, as a fiction writer willing to own her anger, brusquely or at length, directly or sarcastically; a talented prose stylist willing to stand for (without confining herself to) a cause. She later resolved, in a letter her critics quote, "I will not trust anyone who isn't angry": it's a distrust that The Female Man recommends.

But to praise The Female Man (as political work and as writing) this way is to make the book sound too much like an essay: it's also a novel, with a brisk plot and a moral conundrum near the end. I said that Joanna has three alter egos, but for most of the book we see just two. The last one shows up more than halfway through: Jael Reasoner, "a specialist in disguises," comes from a world where Manlanders and Womanlanders have long been at war. She also has retractable claws, like the superhero Wolverine. Jael's world and life, though intermittently thrilling, turn out to be as grotesque and appalling as Janet and Whileaway are appealing; are the two worlds secretly interdependent? Does Jael need Janet's help—and does Whileaway require Jael's? What should Joanna do? The Female Man finally goes beyond pastel, peaceable single-sex utopias, beyond the hopeful prescriptions of liberal feminism, into a far harsher place. "Rape is one of the Christian mysteries," one of her narrators (but which one?) decides; in consequence, she has to commit a murder—"with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul." It may be that the replacement of a patriarchal culture, a rape culture, by something more friendly to women requires some sort of Fanonian, empowering, retributive time of violence.

Or it may not be. "I don't like didactic nightmares," one of Russ's narrators also admits. The Female Man almost becomes a didactic nightmare, just as it almost becomes a programmatic utopia; but it is neither—it's a taut and memorable invention that the future is going to continue to read, not just as a document (though it is one) of 1970s radical feminism, a fiction of lesbian liberation, a milestone in sf, but as a successful experiment in narration, a forceful political novel that (like all the best political novels) holds questions that won't go away.

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow: The Murder of a Peacemaker

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Juliano Mer-Khamis was assassinated in the Jenin refugee camp on April 4, 2011.

The 52-year-old radical filmmaker, actor and director was shot five times by a masked gunman outside The Freedom Theatre, in the West Bank town once better known for its suicide bombers than for theater. In the refugee camp, Mer-Khamis's murder triggered two things: quiet outrage and just plain quiet. His drama productions and classes provide an oxygen-rich outlet for many children in the traumatized camp, but have badly upset conservative elements.

Mer-Khamis, who was half-Arab and half-Jewish by birth, was a provocateur and challenger, and knew the risks. Practically foretelling his own murder he once remarked that after all his work it would be a shame to die from a Palestinian bullet. He told Israel's Army Radio in 2009 that he was "one hundred percent Palestinian and one hundred percent Jewish". The comment reflected the tightrope nature of his bold cross-cultural ventures: To be one-hundred percent anything in Israel or occupied Palestine invites criticism or opprobrium; to boast a two-hundred percent identity is confrontational.

Yet confrontational, in the sense of demanding unfettered thought and expression, is what Mer-Khamis was all about. Plays such as Animal Farm and The Lieutenant of Inishmore may have opened young minds in Jenin but they also brought arson, broken windows, death threats and schedule postponements.

Juliano's mother, Arna Mer, laid the foundations. A Zionist who fought in the Palmach and later married a Palestinian Christian, Arna was as tough and colorful as Jerusalem stone, and devoted her later years to working for the rights of Palestinians under occupation. I wrote about Arna and her original drama group, and reactionary undercurrents in Jenin in April 2009.

The original theater was destroyed by Israeli forces in 2002, perhaps the most violent year of the second intifada. Juliano later made the documentary Arna's Children. You can read more about Arna and her life here.

Was Juliano too provocative? The answer can depend on the audience. Animal Farm, where children play the role of pigs, certainly was too much for some in a long-isolated town where drama and music schools are regarded as suspicious and subversive. Having children wear pig masks, and implying criticism of leaders – men, whose worldview is tightly bound with the concept of honor – is asking for trouble head-on.

What else? Adnan Hindi, the head of the camp's Popular Committee, has taken a hard line in the past about music performances. The Guardian reported Hindi's reaction to the murder and about a leaflet that circulated in the camp justifying it, as intolerant and backward-looking as the language was.

A couple days after the murder, Palestinian Authority (PA) police arrested a suspect. That news immediately degenerated into a Palestinian slanging match over whether the then-suspect was a member of Hamas (the ruling party in Gaza) or had connections to Fatah (the predominant party in the West Bank). The suspect apparently was later released.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (of Fatah) then took an unusual step to set things right and paper over the political chasm, by announcing that both Mer-Khamis and Vittorio Arrigoni, the Italian peace activist who was abducted and killed in Gaza by a Salafist group in mid-April, would be awarded the Medal of Jerusalem.

"The assassination of the two activists does not reflect the traditions, habits and morals of the Palestinian people and all humans," Abbas said. I won't quibble with the president over whether assassination is a human tradition: The award was a small step reflecting Abbas's opposition to violence and another attempt to heal the destructive Hamas-Fatah quarrel.

I asked some friends about Mer-Khamis, and about what the theater means for Jenin.

"I know we have some crazy people among us who do not think right," a longtime Palestinian friend in Jenin told me.

"What I am sure of is this [murder] did not happen in our name as Palestinians and did not happen in the name of Islam. What Juliano did for Jenin camp was great, what he did for the children was great, and when he was killed [it] was a sad day for everyone who knew him. . . . Whoever killed Juliano and the Italian should be punished, and anyone behind them should be stopped . . . they are not working to the benefit of Palestine; on the contrary they . . . help the Israeli occupation, to make our picture darker in front of the world."

Juliano's plan to stage a controversial German play about teenage sexuality may have been the last straw in a society where dancing, or even the appearance of girls and boys on the same stage, is likely to be condemned as prurient.

Reconciliation attempts sometimes forge unexpected alliances. Zakaria Zubeidi, a close friend of Mer-Khamis and co-founder of The Freedom Theatre, is a former member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and was long on Israel's most-wanted list. Depressingly, Zubeidi was quoted as saying that "there will be no forgiveness" for Juliano's killers. Despite Zubeidi's current peace credentials, "no forgiveness" sounds rather fatwa-like. Hopefully the pronouncement will not be part of the cycle of retribution. (In a sidebar to the murder of Arrigoni in Gaza, Hamas exacted punishment on the Italian's killers in distinctive fashion.)

An old friend who knows Jenin well and has more than twenty years experience as an observer in the Middle East said that Juliano could have been more accommodating to Jenin cultural and religious customs. "Children in the camp certainly benefited from the theater," he said. "But Jenin was slowly, slowly recovering from the total disaster of 2002, and Juliano had served in the IDF [the Israel Defense Forces], and was a Jew and an Israeli. As the wound [of the intifada] was slowly healing, it might not have been the best time and place to implement such extreme things. I can understand that it created a lot of tension in people's minds."

This friend, a skilled negotiator, is habitually cautious and patient about trying to shift people's positions. "[The traditional Muslim view] is the fact on the ground, and if you want to change things you have to get people's trust, and then when the time is right you can introduce Western thinking and modern ideas. And you have to earn the trust of the whole society – not just the children, but the parents and the elders".

Someone else remarked that it was a shame that Mer-Khamis, who was passionately of both communities, was never fully accepted by either. His mother, equally passionate for justice and freedom, would have understood. When Arna died in 1995, some Israelis vehemently opposed her burial in Israel, and she was at last laid to rest at the Ramot Menashe kibbutz. Some photos of her son's funeral, in the same kibbutz, are here, and there are numerous tributes on Facebook.

Finally, I asked an Israeli friend, a former army officer and a conciliation expert, to assess Juliano's work. "He was a very unusual bird – for us and [for] them. I believe he came up too early. But this is the only way changes can be done, and someone pays the bill [for all] of us."

What happens to the theater without Juliano? The theater coordinator, Rawand Arkavi, told the Guardian: "We were cautious before but now we don't care if they shoot all of us. We will keep the theatre going". My Palestinian friend echoed the determination: "The time of fear is gone".

In Memoriam: Theodore Michael Dracos

Today's post is from Alexis Rizzuto, an editor at Beacon Press.

We at Beacon would like to commemorate the passing of one of our environmental authors, Theodore Michael Dracos (Ted in his by-line, Theo to friends). His book, Biocidal: Confronting the Poisonous Legacy of PCBs, first came to us in 2008 but went to another press. Nonetheless, I kept the manuscript and used it frequently as a reference to better understand the workings of toxic chemicals in our ecosystems and in our bodies. I also kept in touch with Theo. When the book came back on the market, I was glad to be able to bring it on to Beacon's list.

Theo was passionate about getting the word out about PCBs, these synthetic chemicals that can now be found in everything from fish to frogs, eels to eagles, orcas to Inuits. They have been found in every human ever tested, in our blood and even in breast milk, threatening us at our most vulnerable stages of development. One of the most fascinating scientific pieces he wrote was a clear explanation of epigenetics—the study of how toxins can cause changes on a genetic level, changes that actually become inheritable.

Keenly aware of the destruction wreaked by the largely unregulated release of industrial chemicals into our biosphere, Theo could easily have become hopeless. Indeed, in our correspondence we'd often share the latest news on the role of chemicals in such abominations as the collapse of bee colonies, the spread of a communicable cancer in Tasmanian devils, the ongoing decimation of America's bat population, a rash of beak deformities in Alaska's birds. It was after that last blow that I shared with him a quote from Aldo Leopold: "One of the penalties of an ecological education is living alone in a world of wounds." To that, Theo added, "and a world of beauty."

I agreed, though I told him that I sometimes find it hard to see past the wounds. His response is one I return to whenever the latest environmental degradation leaves me dispirited:

"That's not good about the wounds getting in the way of the beauty. Jung said, 'Life is brutal and beautiful.' It seems to me that the only way to counteract the brutality and suffering is to concentrate on the beauty at every chance."

And he did, sending me photos of the bluebells on his rural West Texas property, and telling me of the family of mountain lions that had taken up residence nearby.

The fight against PCBs and other toxic chemicals goes on, as does their destructive work. But when I get overwhelmed by the wounds, I think of Theo's ability to appreciate the glories that remain. Thanks, friend.

Photo of Theo Dracos by Joel Rodgers.

A Tribute to John Hay (1915-2011)

The naturalist and writer John Hay, whom Annie Dillard called, "One of the world's handful of very great nature writers," died February 26 at the age of 95. Beacon Press published three of Hay's books: In the Company of Light, A Beginner's Faith in Things Unseen, and a 40th anniversary edition of his first book, The Run. Hay was the author of eighteen books over a career that spanned half a century. He was co-founder of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and spent much of his life in Brewster, MA, where he eventually acquired 50 acres of land which is now under conservation protection. He was also the subject of David Gessner's book The Prophet of Dry Hill. 

David Gessner is also the author of Soaring with Fidel, Sick of Nature, and The Return of the Osprey. Gessner's next book, My Green Manifesto, will be published by Milkweed Editions this summer. He blogs at Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour.

The great writer, John Hay, died on Saturday in Bremen, Maine. I have not yet had time to organize my thoughts but here are some sentences adapted from my book about John:

If you were to suggest to the fishermen and carpenters who had lived down the street from John Hay that he was one of the great artists and original thinkers of the latter part of the 20th century you could forgive them if they rolled their eyes. The old guy in the baseball cap, baggy khakis, and flannel shirt who grumbled about traffic and tourists didn’t exactly look the part of environmental prophet. Just another salty Cape Cod crank.

On the other hand, while he lived on Dry Hill more than a few neighbors penetrated his disguise. I once had a conversation with his gardener, Jess, who off-handedly mentioned John’s work.

“I didn’t know he was a writer at first, and I’m glad,” Jess said. “If I knew how brilliant he was I wouldn’t have been able to talk to him.”

Jess’s opinion is more or less in line with that of environmental critics. The editors ofThe Norton Book of Nature Writingcall John Hay “one of the most innovative and daring of contemporary writers in the genre.” James Dickey, the poet and author ofDeliverance, went a little further: “If all of humanity were to read Mr. Hay’s work, it is not unlikely that Darwin and St. Francis of Assisi would come back and join hands.”

No matter that the octogenarians who frequent the East Dennis post office, where John used to mail his packages, might frown at the sight of those two dead men holding hands, and no matter that not quite all of humanity has read John Hay’s work. The point is that the old man who lived up on Dry Hill had, unbeknownst to most of his neighbors, played a significant role in the development of American environmental thought and literature.

Another thing the neighbors didn’t know was that John Hay was born a child of privilege in 1915, and grew up roaming the wilds of Manhattan. The names of his predecessors were sprinkled, not just through the society pages, but through the history books. For instance, his grandfather, with whom he shared his name, was an elegant diplomat, and popular poet, who served as Lincoln’s personal secretary during the civil war and, forty years later, as Secretary of State under Teddy Roosevelt. A refined, charming and dapper little man-- he stood 5’2″-- John Milton Hay had been equally at ease while negotiating for the Panama Canal as when composing a sonnet. Near the end of his life, Hay’s wit and elegance served as subtle counterpoints to Roosevelt’s brash boisterousness.

The diplomat’s son, Clarence Hay, worked as a curator of archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Throughout John’s childhood Clarence was often heading down for archaeological expeditions to the Yucatan, and John grew up fascinated by the Mayan artifacts his father brought home, and by the paintings of birds and the stuffed snowy owl in the hallways of the Hays’ summer home in Lake Sunapee. The Sunapee land had been purchased by his famous grandfather, and it was in the woods around that New Hampshire lake that John first experienced the mystery of nature. He would later write that those days were his earliest glimpse behind the veil at another type of life, a wild life different from the proper one he’d learned in the city. In Sunapee he piloted the lake in the houseboat he made, with his pet goat and airedale as first mates, and he camped along the shore and stared up at the stars, and listened to Indian stories. At night he read J. Fenimore Cooper and heard rumors of wolves, and in this time before television, his love of books grew, rivalling his love of the woods. “We didn’t have radio for a long time and obviously we didn’t have television,” he said once. “So I read a great deal. It was books, books, books.” John was shipped off to prep school as a young man, and later to Harvard. His love of books deepened, especially of poetry, while he almost failed math. He was a dreamy adolescent, nicknamed “Foggy Hay” at school. It would come as a surprise to everyone in the Hay family when John eventually ended up writing about science.

John would write in the environmental tradition of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, of course, was the fountainhead of this tradition, and it would be hyperbolic to suggest that John was as original and germinative as his great predecessor. But John both preserved and expanded Thoreauvian thought. He was both a radical and a traditionalist, going back to old ways, grounded ways, but simultaneously, using empathy to throw himself into new worlds beyond the human world.

And just as important, to me at least, was that John lived a life that kept time with a different type of clock. A life in tune with more elemental movements and ritual, a life of ceremony. I now live a thousand miles away from Cape Cod, on the edge of a city full of strip malls and Southern accents. But I also still live on the edge of the ocean, a place that, if not my home beach, is a beach nonetheless. It is in the ocean that I see possibilities and can begin to imagine making a life here. Every day I try to get out to the edge of the sea, confident that this will change my life in ways I can’t quite put into words. In spring and fall I watch the migrations, hoping these movements will become part of me, part of my blood. I hope to follow the year’s journey, absorbing its rhythms. I dream of living an elemental life.

Most often I fail.

Gessner and Hay at the herring run.

But I try. And while the concept of learning from elders is hopelessly outdated, I am happy to have had a predecessor, an exemplar, someone who walked out ahead to show me it can be done. Not a perfect character-- hardly. But someone who had made a journey out of his time on earth. Someone who had, in his own words, tried to “go farther afield, from one man’s center.”

* * *

“People connect to the land as their imaginations allow,” writes William Least Heat Moon. John’s imagination allowed for no less than a lifelong, passionate love affair with the world. When I think of John now, with some distance, I no longer shy away from calling him a “prophet.” Granted prophecy is a big word, a grand archaic word that understandably scares people off. But it is also, I’ve come to believe, the right word. Here is a man who had his vision and then spent his life trying to articulate that vision. Part of that articulation was attempting to convince people that the things they valued were not the things of greatest value, that there was a whole secret life available to them if they only re-ordered their priorities. In this sense John fit all three major definitions of a prophet: he had had his divine vision, he was a leader of a movement, and he presented a vision of the future.

That vision–of cancerous development and growth, of the disregard for and uprooting of local people, animals, and places–was, like most prophetic visions, somewhat apocalyptic. This is nothing new. Apocalyptic language has always been a tool of the prophets: descriptions of the apocalypse were made in hopes of preventing it. “We create images of doom to avert doom,” wrote Lawrence Buell, “that is the strategy of the jeremiad.” Or, as E.B. White put it: “A seer a day keeps Armageddon away.” Of course foresight– that isvision--is the prophet’s first tool and John began issuing warnings about the world before anyone knew what the hell “ecology” was. This half-blind old man saw clearly both where we had come from and where we were going, and he didn’t like it one bit.

Like the biblical prophets, John Hay went to his hill to find his vision, and, sure enough, certain universal truths were revealed to him on his mountaintop. And like the prophets he tried to deliver this unwavering vision to an often unbelieving and uninterested public. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” said Thoreau. John believed that the best human lives are those connected to wildness on an intimate and daily basis, and that this basis affects human lives in ways they can’t understand or explain. Was it any surprise that wild animals had larger brains–and more creative responses to the world–than their domestic cousins?

John had spent a lifetime fighting to both live inside and preserve that wildness, and it was often a depressing fight. He watched the things he loved about Cape Cod be defiled, and watched the rest of the country head in the same direction. Though people paid lip service to loving nature, they just didn’t seem to take its destructionpersonallyenough. Worse John had been consistently ignored and misunderstood, labelled impractical and airy and snobbish. This hurt, but it didn’t stop him. He had, in fact, become more and more passionate in his belief in the wild.

Jeremiah, for one, knew the impossibility of trying to deliver a message of cataclysm in an affluent time and, like John, was often greeted with some variant of the question “What’s the fuss?” Trying to describe just what the fuss was was central to John’s life work. Jeremiah himself had been labeled a traitor, and there was no doubt there were some people these days who would label John as un-American for his consistent belief that less was better than more. But even those not inclined to thinking in terms of the apocalypse couldn’t help but see that something close to cataclysmic seemed to be coming: world-wide extinctions, global warming, rampant habitat loss. To change any of that John believed we had to first enact the most rigorous transformation of all: changing our own minds.

* * *

John Hay's studio.

John’s ideas, I believe now, were–andare–subtly radical. Primary among these ideas, the one imbedded everywhere in his work, is the notion that human beings may not be so central to the world after all. There are human consequences, of course, to seeing the world as more than human-centered. These involve radical shifts in what one values in this life. If what truly matters is respecting the earth and preserving the diversity of ecosystems, then it follows that traditional ways of seeing land for what one can “get” from it are discarded.

These ideas are of course antithetical to a culture that always keeps half an eye cocked toward the mirror; to a people who spend their time primping and fixing their hair. For fifty years John insisted that we should be looking, not in the mirror, but out and through the window. By focusing always inward and seeing the outer world only through our own inner constructs, the eyes are kept prisoner to the brain. And, as it turns out, the brain is a lonely place. By never making the leap out of self we are left isolated, cold and blind. But ultimately, if we follow our better instincts, we can climb right out the window, and it is there–outside of ourselves–that we will find things that will expand our definitions of ourselves.

Unlike most of us, John spent his days training himself to look outward. In fact it is this outward focus, this still-active love affair with the world not the self, that most defined John Hay.

“Strange to have come through the whole century and find that the most interesting thing is the birds,” John said to me during our very first walk together. “Or maybe it’s just the human mind is more interesting when focusing on something other than itself.”

In this insistence on looking outward John Hay ran entirely against the prevailing culture. He didn’t believe that salvation of the self was to be found within the self. In fact he saw this proposition, one of our culture’s central tenets, as essentially neurotic and crippling. “The answers to life can’t be found by trying to solve things in our brains,” he said, “But by stepping out of our brains entirely.” We can expand ourselves only by looking outward toward the source, toward the mystery, and by joining the ritual of the natural year we can join that mystery. The good news is that the reflections we see of ourselves in our beloved places will be cleaner ones than the ones we see in a mirror. By focusing inward without reference to the world we make islands of ourselves, but by looking outward we re-invent and expand ourselves. I had come to John Hay to write a book about him, not to seek “lessons.” But if there is one thing I took with me from his home on Dry Hill it is this: inwardness only means so much. What we need to learn is to get out of our own way. Yes, inward tunnelling counts for something and something important, but there is so much more outside. If we look for it we will find that there is a whole world waiting for us. And it is in that world that we, not seeking it, will find a sort of salvation.

Read John Hay's Obituary on Wicked Local.