Jane Mayer's The Dark Side is a meticulously researched indictment of the Bush administration's flawed and lawless response to the 9/11 attacks. Cobbled together from a series of long articles that first appeared in The New Yorker, Mayer's book charts the rapid manner in which a small coterie of figures aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney used the attack to enlarge the powers of the presidency.
Mayer's recounts the surprising hurry in which so many of the important policy decisions were made in the wake of 9/11. These were major changes, unprecedented steps, made with little or no debate. Most were made by a small group of largely unelected officials who formed an unofficial inter-agency group called "the war council." This group included Cheney, his aide David Addington, John Yoo (a deputy chief at DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel), William Haynes (the Chief Counsel at the Department of Defense), assistant White House Counsel Tim Flanigan, and his boss Alberto Gonzales. Mayer likens this five man group to "a high-school clique, some of the members played squash and racquetball together and took secret trips together, while mocking those they excluded as "soft and leakers to the press"(66).
The big decision made early on was to treat Al Qaeda as a military problem rather than a matter of criminal justice. Within a week of the attack, the Justice department was effectively sidelined; because "the Department of Defense had no military plan for defeating Al Qada in Afghanistan"(33), the CIA was given the primary responsibility for crafting the initial response. CIA director George Tenent along with the CIA's Center for Counter Terrorism (CTC)Chief Cofer Black needed to spend little time or effort convincing Bush to grant the Agency a long-held wishlist. Within a week, Black managed to get presidential approval for "the inauguration of secret paramilitrary death squads" who would have the authority on Tenent's orders to carry out assassinations in 80 countries(39). In addition, a presidential finding gave "blanket authority ot Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how"(39).
Prodded by the war council, Bush handed over the bulk of the nation's response to the Agency despite its dismal record dealing with Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Mayer details how the Agency failed to adequately notify the FBI that two future 9/11 terrorists had entered the United States sometime in 2000; according to the CIA's IG "fifty or sixty individuals within the CIA knew that two Al Qaeda suspects had come to America-but no one officially notified the FBI about this"(16). Although whole virtual unit had been assigned to keep track of the terrorist group Al Qaeda, the Agency did not have a single spy within the terrorist organization. Often, one hears how America was simply unaware of the threat posed by Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Mayers makes it clear: the Agency was well aware of the threat posed by Al Qaeda but was unable to head it off.
Moreover, the Agency was poorly prepared to carry out the new tasks which they'd asked for and had suddenly assigned to them. The CIA was almost completely lacking in operations muscle at the time; "the [CIA's] Special Activities Division...[a] small paramilitary unit...consisted mostly of inactive vertans of the military's Special Forces"(40). They lacked interrogators with any experience or skill. According to "a former CIA operative involved at the time...'They invented the program of interrogation with people who had no understanding of Al Qaeda or the Arab world'"(144). Worse, according to Mayer, "The CIA knew even less about running prisons than it did about hostile interrogations"(145).
Some claim that there was a pre- and post-9/11 mentality; many argue, we failed to deal with the threat before the attack because we were too concerned with playing by the rules. The Bush administration quickly corrected this over-attention to the rules, and ended up basically throwing away the rule book and writing a new one to their wishes. Specifically, OLC deputy chief attorney John Yoo proved repeatedly instrumental in writing a new rule book for the Bush administration to use in its war on terror. Young, ambitious, bright and highly partisan, Yoo had his fingerprints on nearly all the important legal memos that the Bush administration used to step outside the established laws governing the treatment and handling of detainees.
According to Mayer, the OLC "plays a unique role in the federal government...
iss[uing] opinions that are legally binding on the rest of the executive branch...if the OLC says a previously outlawed practice...is legal, it is nearly impossible to prosecute U.S. officials who followed that advice on good faith." Jack Goldsmith, who became OLC head in 2003, maintains the office controls "'one of the most momentous, and dangerous powers in the government: the power to dispense get-out-of-jail-free cards'"(65).
The OLC under Yoo wrote the Bush administration a lot of get-out-of-jail-free cards. A November 6, 2001 memo authorized the president to establish military commissions and first suggested that detainees picked up in the administration's "war on terror" were not covered by the Geneva Convention. Early in 2002, a series of legal memos took the suggestion further and "enshrined the political position already expressed by Cheney, advising the President that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions or other customary international laws in handling detainees in the war on terror"(121). Supposedly prompted by the expressed needs of the CIA, in August of 2002, the OLC authorized brutal interrogation techniques by redefining what was meant by the word torture. Yoo offered the Defense Department a similar memo in March of 2003.
Mayer does a good job of bringing together and concisely recounting the most egregious and revolting abuse and torture that took place. What she documents is but a part of what went on. We are likely to never know but a part of the administrations application of a torture policy; in possible violation of the law,the CIA destroyed hundreds of hours of video-taped interrogations during which extreme measure were used.
Worse than torture, in at least a couple of cases, the CIA tortured and killed innocent men. Mayer tells the story of Khaled el-Masri a German national who was picked up, sent to a CIA black site and subjected to inhumane treatment. When it became clear that he was not involved with Al Qaeda, the agency simply "dropped him near the border with Serbia and Macedonia...[and] told to start walking and not look back."
Villains abound in this story. Mayers also offers plenty of often quixotic, conflicted heroes. Navy chief counsel Albert Mora began to suspect abusive treatment of detainees at Guantanamo in the Fall of 2002 and pushed hard to get the Department of Defense to adhere to a humane detainee policy. Eventually, he was presented with a Yoo legal memo and told to hush and ultimately policy was issued without his input.
Jack Goldsmith replaced Jay Bybee as the head of the OLC, in October of 2003. Immediately, Gonzales asked him to provide a legal ruling allowing the CIA to render detainees captured in Iraq. Recognizing that these individuals were covered under the Genevea Conventions, Goldsmith declined, earning the dismay of the war council. A staunch conservative, the more he learned, the more Goldsmith grew disillusioned with the Bush approach. Shortly after taking office and looking over the detainne/enhanced interrogation opinions the OLC had rendered in the previous couple years, Goldsmith grew "increasingly alarmed" by what he was reading. Goldsmith attempted to gradually overturn these opinions and rewrite the law governing these matters. He did so despite worrying that doing so seriously impaired his office's authority. Nevertheless, he proceeded by first reversing the opinions Yoo had provided The DoD.
Asked to review CIA Inspector General Helgerson's internal review the CIA's detention program, he was provided with all the gruesome details of that thread of the Bush team's war on terror. Appalled as he was, again Goldsmith was reluctant to pull Yoo's authorizing opinion of August 2002 until it leaked to the press in June of 2004. Apparently, he did so to the considerable consternation of the White House apparently. According to Mayer, Goldsmith and ally James Comey (deputy attorney general) "were both so paranoid by then about the powerful backlash they had provoked inside the administration that they actually thought they might be in physical danger"(294). Ultimately, burned out, Goldsmith withdrew the memo and resigned without putting anything in its place.
The task of possibly writing a more humane policy fell to interim OLC chief Dan Levin. Levin was another Republican conservative whose time within the Bush administration proved scarring. He went to great lengths to create a solid opinion, even subjecting himself to stress positions and water-boarding in hopes of determining whether or not these practices amounted to torture. Levin apparently discovered that waterboarding "could definitely be classified as illegal torture unless, in his view, it was strictly limited in terms of tiem and severity and was closely monitored in a very professional way"(299).
Mayer has done a lot of the reporting on this book. However, at points, it often devolves into long recaps of others' work. For instance, at one point, page after page of Mayer's narrative is almost exclusively based on Bob Woodard's Bush at War. Like Woodard, Mayer uses a large number of unnamed sources. At some level one must trust her. However, in her defense, books like this rely on such sources by necessity. In addition, the book has been out a while and nobody has come forwarded to dispute her account.
The Dark Side is best seen as a laudable work of synthesis. While likely a rough draft on history,it is essential reading and a strong polemic that challenges the reader to make a stand. It reminds us of what we purport to stand for and in lawyerly like fashion accuses the Bush administration of trampling on these principles in a fashion befitting an enemy of our republic. In an epilogue proceeding her afterword, she quotes an incident from the papers of Dr. James McHenry, a delegate to the Federal Convention of 1787. Apparently a lady asked Benjamin Frnaklin "'Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy,'" to which he replied "'A republic...if you can keep it'"(327).
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Eiffel's Tower
Before it became a symbol of the city itself, the Eiffel Tower, or La Tour en Fer de Trois Cents Metres as it originally was known, was a controversial architectural curiosity. Selected to be the centerpiece for the 1889 World's Fair, it was initially derided as ugly, anti-French, and useless.
Fittingly, the critical tides turned once the fair opened and the public flocked to this monument designed to celebrate the power and ingenuity of the French Republic; "Eiffel would say proudly, 'We gave the monarchies the spectacle of democracy happy by virtue of its own effort'"(155). Jill Jonnes' Eiffel's Tower attempts to capture the time and place that gave birth to what is, once robbed of its familiarity, a strange creation.
Defending it from early critics, Eiffel argued "'the tower will have its own beauty'"(27). "Noticeably touchy on the subject of its practical purpose(21), he maintained that in building the "'tallest edifice ever raised by man....there is an attraction and a charm inherent in the colossal...it will show that we are not simply an amusing people, but also a country of engineers and and builders who are called upon all over the world to construct'"(27). Some lambasted it as ugly, dismissed it as "'an inartistic...scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron'"(16). It drew inevitable comparison through allusion to the Tower of Babel: the correspondent for the London Telegraph referred to it as "Eiffel's Tower of Babel...a gigantic monument [that] strikes you as being one of the most daring attempts since Biblical days"(42); tone-deaf to hubris, a French champion of the Tower, Le Figaro's editor Albert Wolff admired the audacity of its conception, the mathematical precision of its execution...at once graceful and imposing, having naught in common with that tower of Babel, which, if it ever did exist, rose no higher than a fifth story window"(46). A French mathematician declared the design fundamentally flawed and predicted the tower would collapse.
While often thought of as an art object, the Tower was and is a remarkable feat of engineering. Nearly doubling the height of the Washington Monument, "'there was virtually no experience in structural history from which Eiffel could draw other than a series of high piers that his own firm had designed earlier for railway bridges'"(32). For the tower to reach to a thousand feet, the surface of the first platform of the tower, at a height of approximately 180 feet, had to be precisely flat. To achieve this, Eiffel constructed a unique system of sandboxes along and hydraulic jacks under the towers four legs, allowing them to adjust the height of each leg to a millemetre. Likewise, rivet holes on the towers many arches and braces had to be accurately placed to "one-tenth of a millimeter'"(42). Then, there was the engineering difficultires arising from Eiffel's insistence that the cars run up the legs of the tower, rather than up the side.
Once completed, the public loved it, visiting it in droves. Eiffel was "deluged with all sorts of letters,"(152) including one from a woman who "spending one night" on the tower. It would eventually attract 12,000 visitors a day. Jonnes is quick to compare this to Edison's phonograph that attracted "tens of thousands" daily and the Wild West show that attracted thirty thousand people a day (138). The press gushed over it. Journalist after journalist climbed to its top and enthused over the novelty of the experience. Jonnes relies a bit heavily on newspaper accounts.
While centered on the tower, Jonnes' intends her book as a history of the Tower's particular moment. She attempts this by writing of the various legendary figures who crossed paths under the large shadow cast by the Tower. These figures include: the painters Paul Gaugin and James McNeill Whistler who exhibited at the fair, Thomas Edison who introduced his phonograph at it, New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennet who chronicled it for Americans present and at home, and Wild Bill Cody and Annie Oakley who were part of Cody's Wild West Extravaganza playing in a field nearby. Each of these lines is full of interesting facts and colorful incidents and Jonnes does an admirable job of weaving them together while staying focused on the Tower.
Yet, one is left wondering at the end of the book exactly what Jonnes was after. While her account is entertaining, it is hard to grasp the whole she was after by choosing the characters and story threads she weaves together here: what was it about this moment that made it unique or admirable or distinctly and uniquely fascinating? Perhaps she's content to simply lay out the evidence and let it speak as it will to the reader.
At one point, Jonnes defines the moment of The Universal Exposition as pivotal by borrowing the assessment of the Vicomte de Vogue, "'In this monumental chaos which has arisen in the Camp de Mars, in these edifices of iron and of decorated tile, in the machinery which obeys a new dynamic power, in these encampments of men of every race, above all, in the new ways of thinking which suggest new ways of living, are to be seen the lineaments of a civilization which is as yet only outline, the promise of the world which will be tomorrow'"(261).
This is a diverting book. The Universal Exposition was devoted to spectacle and the book follows suit. It presents a parade of arresting images and intriguing scenes without probing too deeply into any one. What to make of Edison crossing paths with Souix cheiftains and warriors at the top of the Eiffel Tower? Paul Guagin at Wild Bill Cody's Wild West Show? The odd little apartment Eiffel built himself at the top of the tower? The visit of American minister Whitelaw Reid to Cody's Souix warriors in hopes of finagling their names on a treaty deeding away yet more of their land? The glittering banquet Le Figaro held for Edison attended by: The Bey of Tunis, "'the famous toreadors Garcia and Valentin,'"Buffalo Bill, Jules Massenet, Prince Roland Bonaparte, "'trailed by a procession of Foreign Ministers, French generals, and various exponentnts of Art and literature'"(226). Talk about your twelve days of Christmas guest list.
And, finally, this story for all those who ever had a bad boss. The tyrannical Herald editor James Gordon Bennett was aboard his yacht playing chicken with an American navy cruiser till his editor who happened to be aboard took control and steered Gordon's yacht out of harm's way. Bennett was unforgiving; initially "he had deposited his managing editor on a desolate island," left some food, "before steaming off"(74). Other guests aboard convinced him to go back and save the poor managing editor, who was subsequently fired(74).
Monday, July 27, 2009
Kate Walbert's "A Short History of Women"
The title of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, uses the term "history", suggesting a fact-baseed, chronologically sequential overview of the public achievements of woman in the abstract. While focused on the idea this type of history, this story collection is a fiction that underlines the fictional aspects of history. It points to the uses, distortions, gaps and weaknesses of traditional history.
Walbert's use of history in her title evokes Dicken's and Fielding's use of the term in the subtitles of certain of their novels. Walbert's is a history of individuals, five generations of the women in a family. Their lives span from just a little before the start of the twentieth century to just past the advent of the twenty-first. The stories captures what history hasn't captured, what it can't capture: what goes on in homes, the days of maids, mothers and children, the emotional lives of individuals and the complex relationships they give rise to.
Walbert's elliptical and non-sequential story-telling here suggests connections between the little vignettes and memories that comprise the "stories." Conversely, the juxtaposition of women and periods draws attention to the disconnects between. In doing so, Walbert questions History's tendency to connect and relate events and personages through cause and effect; in contrast, her stories tell histories, present lives, marked by disconnection and miscommunication. For Walbert's characters, the past is always present and impacting on the present; ghosts appear in these tales. Yet, change is a constant and comes about, and most often thanks to disaster rather than any heroic, calculated action of the characters. The ghosts are figments of the present as much as figures from the past.
Walbert traces the matriarchal descent of the Townsend-Barret-Deel family across the Twentieth century. While the period is lauded as marking significant advances in the rights, roles and aspirations of women, the women in this book experience a more ambiguous progress.
Chronologically, the family history recounted here begins with Dorothy Townesend, a society lady and radical suffragette who undertakes a hunger strike on behalf of women's rights ostensibly. She succeeds and, without Walbert supplying much in the how why, enters into the history books of Walbert's fictional world albeit as a footnote. Somehow or other, she goes from being a much criticized figure whose protest is derided and ignored to the point where she ends up posthumously on a postage stamp. The last woman we encounter briefly, in a recreation of Dorothy's great-great-granddaughter's social networking page. Between these figures, we encounter Evelyn, Dorothy's daughter, who rises from the ruin that her mother's death immediately imposed on the family and goes off to study mathematics at Columbia. She's followed by her niece Dorothy Townesend Barret, an affluent, American suburban housewife in the fifties who late in her life, inspired by the figure of her grandmother Dorothy, takes off on a quixotic protest against the second Iraq war. Her daughters Caroline Deel and Elizabeth Barret, born in 1956 and 1963 respectively, follow; Both their tales suggest the greater opportunities afforded them come accompanied with old frustrations. Finally, the anonymity and sterile social networking page of Caroline's daughter, Dora Barret-Deel.
Regardless of their era, the women seem often isolated; all express a desire to relate to others more honestly; all sense they've been marginalized. They wish to "do something" with their lives, to make a mark in the world; explaining her arrest at Dover AFB, Dorothy Barret tells her daughter "I am just trying to Do Something." her histrionic cri-de-coeur gets little response from her daughter who is busy "looking for dinner inspiration, for anything other than pasta"(45). Dorothy Barret's daughter end up questioning whether the compulsion to do something isn't just another product of an essentialist notion of womanhood. They fear they've bought into the demands and expectation that a stereotype imposes on its victims and are forever locks blocked from their true selves, their personhood or self.
Regardless of "the something" they decide upon, all experience a regret and worry when looking back. Or as the late twentieth century Caroline corrects herself: "regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You've done it wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly"(222). "What is a woman to do?" is the central and unfair question that plagues Walbert's women. Although remembered as a "can-do" woman during "her time with the children," Dorothy Barret ends up afterward feels desperately compelled to "Do Something"(45).
One might say this is a matriarchal history; it is focused on the women as the family line descends. While not all the generations are connected via a mother-daughter connection, the issue of motherhood is central. Dorothy Barret asks: "Why couldn't she just be [a mother]?...It is apparently all that they ever need"(49). Yet, it fails to answer as a way of life for the women. For obvious reasons: children grow up and leave. Of course, the book presents a parade of men who would like the women in their life to simply mother them, but this is more a horrifying than a satisfying prospect.
A servant finds Dorothy Townsend outdoors weeping, "holding up the dead branch" and complaining that "'I didn't sign on for this....For you, for us. The children and you and me. We're a team, aren't we? A music hall show. It's all so bloody predictable'"(74). Yet, conscious of an obligation to her children, she's filled with self-loathing when she tries to reconcile her desire to starve herself to further the cause. She confesses, "it is brutal, unimaginable, to think of what she is doing, what she has already done to the children, to think of what the children may grow into, given her absence, given their father's absence." Yet, her guilt doesn't stop her. Ultimately, she rather cavalierly decides to "speak to Alexandra [her best friend] about it, propose explicit instruction on what should come next"(69). The family maid is left to break the news to her children, Dorothy dead and her mother indisposed by Dorothy's death.
Of course, motherhood in Dorothy Townsend's time and social place differs from the hyper, overly attentive and anxiety ridden versions we encounter when Dorothy's great-grandaughter takes her daughter on a play date to a posh apartment high-rise on the west side of Manhattan. While Dorothy Townsend clearly loves her children, she seems to spend a good deal less time with them than their maid and nurse do. Ironically, Dorothy's concern over the plight of women never seems to take in the plight of the serving women in her house.
While Dorothy loves her children in an abstract way, her yearning to make a mark on history eclipses any desire she has to be a mother. Yet, While clearly attached to her ideals and eager to affect change, Walbert's close rendering of Dorothy's interior life provides a glimpse into the tangle of motives driving her decision and casts shadows on any simple reading of Dorothy Townesend as a hero. While eager for change, she doesn't have a clear idea of what she's after. She's not a calculating sort. She recalls her decision being the product of "a magical intuition." Hearkening back to the origins of an action that will make her a historical figure, she questions the foundations of "her idea, her better idea-and isn't this the way of intuition? The hunch more formed than one fully understands? The outcome set? Something will happen, she thinks"(31).
Although read by later generations as an act of heroism, Walberts rendering of the months preceding it makes Dorothy's self-starvation seem as much an act of suicide as a brave political statement. Expected to fill a mother/wife role for which she feels ill-suited, Dorothy comes across as depressed and distracted rather than engaged and angry. Of course, a fine line lies between the political and the personal. The depression and boredom fueling Dorothy's decision has a political as well as personal aspect.
Dorothy's stab at change enters history rather silently. Dorothy's mother warns her: "'Nobody is paying a damn bit of attention'"(4). Yet, people are paying attention. She garners an obituary in The Times , "though her pursuit of dying has been kept-given an edict from the editors-between the lines....on the advice from certain persons familiar with the hysterical and copycat tendencies of the Women's Social and Political Union, and of the precedence of the war news above all else"(78-79). Between the lines, many of her contemporaries know what she's done. Evelyn's teacher Father Flanigan tells Evelyn he admired her mother; "he had read all about her in the papers-between the lines, he says, where the news is: a real hero she was"(12).
Regardless of whose featured in them, the stories are not ordered in strict chronological order. When it comes to establishing the truths of history, the ordering of voices is as important as the selection. Preceding her famous mother's reflections on her final days, Evelyn's account has little time for Dorothy as heroine. Early on, Evelyn strives to see her mother's willed death as a noble gesture on behalf of women, a gift of sorts, most especially to her as Dorothy's daughter. But, she's never given much of a chance to claim or name the act herself. Instead, she's silenced by her Godmother, Dorothy's best friend and fellow radical Alexandra. Evelyn recalls her mother telling her, "I'm dying for you." However, doubt is cast on this memory of Evelyn's by her godmother Alexandra who claims, "No, she would never have said such an thing and besides, she was delirious and spoke stuff and nonsense"(12).
Despite the readings of others, Evelyn's resentment and hurt ultimately preclude her from turning her mother into her hero. For Evelyn, Dorothy's not the history-maker but the mother who abandoned her. In a heavy-handed scene, Evelyn encounters her mother's ghost in the lobby of Barnard college. Her daughter sees her as "pale, beautiful, raven-haired, they would have called her, had she been a heroine though she was not, I could have told her; neither then nor now-not to me, not to anyone. No one will remember you, I want to say to her. No one. But I don't have the heart"(94).
While she can't say deny her mother face to face, Evelyn does break all connection to Dorothy, denying their relation when pacifists question her aboard a boat to America. She resolves, "I'll start from nothing...I am now no one's daughter"(90). She maintains the disconnection to the end. When her niece sends her queries as to Dorothy, she refuses to answer them.
Of course her desire to sever the connection can never be achieved. Her mother forged her, if by indirection. She granted Evelyn tremendous freedom while alive and with her death forced her to make her own way or sink. After her grandmother sends her to school and her godmother moves suddenly to Argentina, Evelyn's virtually free of family and the control it exerts over women of her time and place. Yet, as one might expect, this freedom, offered thoughtlessly and by indirection hardly constitutes care or inspires love. Evelyn expresses her resentment of the hurt her mother caused her by resolving to forget her mother.
Yet, like the family silver that bypasses generations, Dorothy's legend survives Evelyn's willful neglect. Decades later, her granddaughter, Dorothy Barret, discovers her. When her last child leaves for college and the "hours pooled at her feet like water," Dorothy Barret "researched her the history, her history, as best she could"(130).
While Father Flanigan can read between the lines of Dorothy's obituary, what lies beyond the facts that history records has faded considerably by the time Dorothy comes to it. Dorothy Barret is left with lines from newspapers, a stamp bearing "an engraving of a woman she had never met nor heard much of,"(130), and sundry paper records. With a handful of facts, the granddaughter has a hard time connecting to her grandmother in any particular fashion. From the stamp, grandmother Dorothy "looks like any of those turn-of-the-century types in profile, the hair piled high on her head in a pompadour, the collar, the eyebrows thick and arched, and the long nose and the slight downward curve of her mouth"(131). A fairly devoted and attentive mother herself, she puzzles out "the reason [her grandmother] chose to starve herself" and admits that grandmother Dorothy "remains a great mystery to me. She had two children she would leave as orphans." And, adds in what seems envy, Dorothy observes "[my grandmother] was, from all indications, engaged in a love affair. She was respected, brilliant."(133) From her discontented granddaughter's perspective, Dorothy the suffragette, living at a time when women's choices were much more circumscribed, appears to have lived a fuller life than her own.
While repeatedly citing her as an inspiration, Dorothy's picture of her grandmother is a less than whole one. It is clearly an image forged out of need and desire; the reader has the privilege of seeing how crucial parts are missing. Dorothy paints her picture of her grandmother from footnotes. She believes that footnotes are where women like her grandmother live. In a presentation on Florence Nightengale, she dedicates a portion to her grandmother, who she groups with "those other women whose names you wouldn't know, women who came and went" women such as "their antecedent Florence [Nightengale]"(130). In the end, Dorothy Barret will satisfy the gaps in what she knows of her grandmother by focusing on the much better documented life of Nightengale. And, with some warrant; in an earlier story, Dorothy Townsend and her friend Alexandra spend an evening with a "plate of sweets before them and a copy of Florence Nightingale's "Cassandra"; these days they might read it aloud just to hear her words in their voices"(63).
Unlike her illustrious grandmother, Dorothy Barret gained satisfaction and felt most authentic as a mother but seems unable or unwilling to accept her feeling and experience as legitimate and worthy. After her children grow up and leave the nest, she's left adrift and seeking meaning. In the words of her clingy husband, she becomes preoccupied by "the ever-constant Dorothy question...'What shall I do?' she wailed-the 'shall' alerting him to the fact that she had become... the on-the-stage Dorothy, the one who saw herself in epic terms"(120). Seeking to imitate her original Grandmother and her dramatic end, Dorothy Barret begins to protest the Iraq War by attempting to photographing the return of dead soldiers to Dover Air Force Base.
Dorothy Barret fails to ever become fully engaged in the protest she undertakes to photograph caskets returning from The Iraq War. "What I'm trying to do is to aim for something real" she explains to her daughter in recounting her eventual arrest. Her arrest proves an anti-climax, lacking in drama and emotion. It is not the original act of self-expression she hoped for. She admits, "Here the two of us...the all of us: the soldiers, the protestor, we're all from a scene already enacted"(44).
Dorothy only discontinues her protest when it begins to appear a derivative and shopworn act chosen in a desperate bid to do something "historic" and brave. She realizes that it's not the war itself but her unresolved and unspoken grief for her son James, who died from Leukemia some years before, thats been driving her, supplying her with whatever emotion she's brought to the act of protest. She acknowledges turning the soldiers at Dover into straw villains that she'd set up to complete the drama she'd set out on. She asks,"what had she planned, anyway? To whom would she have shown her pictures? Charles? Liz and Caroline?"(50).
Tossing aside her original intent, Dorothy ends up doing something much more original and true to herself and her grief: she comes to the guard tower at Dover with a desire to know the soldier she'd previously vilified. Dorothy decides, "She wants to know where he's from, what he studied in school. She's interested in his early artwork, she could tell him. Elementary. Preschool even. Did he begin with circles? Those circles!" She yearns to comfort him in a maternal fashion: "Don't despair, she could tell him. It happens to everyone"(51). Dorothy Barret's yearning fantasy to mother the soldiers may be an expression of power. Her emotion is a reverse mirror image of the resentment/revulsion her grandmother feels when confronted by the grown men in her life who wish to and manage to stay boys and who seek women to mother them.
Darwin and his theory of Evolution reoccur in the stories; much like History, Evolution seeks to answer how and why things came to be and change. Thinking through the expression of symbols and motifs, Walbert weaves her stories together through the recurring use of shapes, figures, scenes and gestures.
Walbert makes frequent reference to lines. Comically, Dorothy Townesend's great-grandson James tells his mother Dorothy Barrett, "'You're an original, Mom. I've meant to tell you,'" and she replies, "'From a long line darling'"(48). When it comes time to defend her trespassing at Dover Air Force Base to capture the return of U.S. service casualties, she defends herself to her daughter Caroline by invoking her Grandmother; "Caroline speaks of Responsibility and Reputation and Appropriate Behavior," Dorothy asks, "'And what of history?'....'Lineage?'"(41).
As she indicates in other stories, line morphs. Dorothy Trevor Townesend knows "the arc of [her former lover's] life from the papers." But what is the arc of a life? Walbert asks as much by having Dorothy afterward recall having once "watched as [William] pushed a child on the Hyde Park swings"(70).
For Walbert, lines seem a less than truthful figure of history; her history is marked by discontinuity. Repeatedly, we encounter breakdowns in these stories; between mothers and daughters, men and women, opportunity and realization. Most profoundly, the characters share a sort of isolation from each other, despite their desire and wish for connection.
Similarly, Walbert meditates on history as a circle through numerous allusions to circles throughout the stories. Dorothy Townsend at Oxford experiences a group of Anarchists, "a crowlike flock of young men sitting circled around a tall leader"(55). Dorothy chooses to find "a chair outside the circle"(55). Her sitting outside this circle of men may be an expression of well-founded fear. Throughout her life, Dorothy recalls a schoolgirl friend Hilde who is gang-raped; a group of boys come out of nowhere and "They gathered round. Hilde had something they wanted. They wanted that, they told her...Hilde disappears within the team of them, swallowed whole"(66).
Real and metaphoric Birds fly through Walbert's stories . Early on, after her mother's death, Evelyn's ambivalent feelings are captured in a scene where she releases the drawing-room canary from its cage. She "opened the little latch that so many times I had been tempted to open before...I let the door swing open, the canary with its seed eyes and thorn beak stunned by fresh air...the little door swings open on its tiny brass hinges but the bird does not move nor sing nor ungrip its maddeningly rigid claws from its swing, its hanging perch." She eventually reacts, "idiot bird, an idiot canary, a birdbrain, an imbecile....I must turn the cage upside down and shake the cage again and again...I pull it out, yank it out and it bites the skin of my thumb, the tight skin there, and that hurts so much I fling it off toward the tree"(15).
Walbert again uses birds to muse on issues of freedom at various points. Amusingly, looking for an Oxford gathering of spiritualists, Dorothy the elder wanders into a meeting of "the Anarchists-a crowlike flock of young men sitting circled around a tall leader"(55). While starving to death, Dorothy despairingly notes how outside church bells "are always ringing. And always the rooks rest in the rookery or wheel above the steeple. It might be the end of th war or the beginning. The battles have been won or lost but soon they will be starting again, so much still to be discussed with Mr. Darwin"(66).
Walbert's use of history in her title evokes Dicken's and Fielding's use of the term in the subtitles of certain of their novels. Walbert's is a history of individuals, five generations of the women in a family. Their lives span from just a little before the start of the twentieth century to just past the advent of the twenty-first. The stories captures what history hasn't captured, what it can't capture: what goes on in homes, the days of maids, mothers and children, the emotional lives of individuals and the complex relationships they give rise to.
Walbert's elliptical and non-sequential story-telling here suggests connections between the little vignettes and memories that comprise the "stories." Conversely, the juxtaposition of women and periods draws attention to the disconnects between. In doing so, Walbert questions History's tendency to connect and relate events and personages through cause and effect; in contrast, her stories tell histories, present lives, marked by disconnection and miscommunication. For Walbert's characters, the past is always present and impacting on the present; ghosts appear in these tales. Yet, change is a constant and comes about, and most often thanks to disaster rather than any heroic, calculated action of the characters. The ghosts are figments of the present as much as figures from the past.
Walbert traces the matriarchal descent of the Townsend-Barret-Deel family across the Twentieth century. While the period is lauded as marking significant advances in the rights, roles and aspirations of women, the women in this book experience a more ambiguous progress.
Chronologically, the family history recounted here begins with Dorothy Townesend, a society lady and radical suffragette who undertakes a hunger strike on behalf of women's rights ostensibly. She succeeds and, without Walbert supplying much in the how why, enters into the history books of Walbert's fictional world albeit as a footnote. Somehow or other, she goes from being a much criticized figure whose protest is derided and ignored to the point where she ends up posthumously on a postage stamp. The last woman we encounter briefly, in a recreation of Dorothy's great-great-granddaughter's social networking page. Between these figures, we encounter Evelyn, Dorothy's daughter, who rises from the ruin that her mother's death immediately imposed on the family and goes off to study mathematics at Columbia. She's followed by her niece Dorothy Townesend Barret, an affluent, American suburban housewife in the fifties who late in her life, inspired by the figure of her grandmother Dorothy, takes off on a quixotic protest against the second Iraq war. Her daughters Caroline Deel and Elizabeth Barret, born in 1956 and 1963 respectively, follow; Both their tales suggest the greater opportunities afforded them come accompanied with old frustrations. Finally, the anonymity and sterile social networking page of Caroline's daughter, Dora Barret-Deel.
Regardless of their era, the women seem often isolated; all express a desire to relate to others more honestly; all sense they've been marginalized. They wish to "do something" with their lives, to make a mark in the world; explaining her arrest at Dover AFB, Dorothy Barret tells her daughter "I am just trying to Do Something." her histrionic cri-de-coeur gets little response from her daughter who is busy "looking for dinner inspiration, for anything other than pasta"(45). Dorothy Barret's daughter end up questioning whether the compulsion to do something isn't just another product of an essentialist notion of womanhood. They fear they've bought into the demands and expectation that a stereotype imposes on its victims and are forever locks blocked from their true selves, their personhood or self.
Regardless of "the something" they decide upon, all experience a regret and worry when looking back. Or as the late twentieth century Caroline corrects herself: "regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You've done it wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly"(222). "What is a woman to do?" is the central and unfair question that plagues Walbert's women. Although remembered as a "can-do" woman during "her time with the children," Dorothy Barret ends up afterward feels desperately compelled to "Do Something"(45).
One might say this is a matriarchal history; it is focused on the women as the family line descends. While not all the generations are connected via a mother-daughter connection, the issue of motherhood is central. Dorothy Barret asks: "Why couldn't she just be [a mother]?...It is apparently all that they ever need"(49). Yet, it fails to answer as a way of life for the women. For obvious reasons: children grow up and leave. Of course, the book presents a parade of men who would like the women in their life to simply mother them, but this is more a horrifying than a satisfying prospect.
A servant finds Dorothy Townsend outdoors weeping, "holding up the dead branch" and complaining that "'I didn't sign on for this....For you, for us. The children and you and me. We're a team, aren't we? A music hall show. It's all so bloody predictable'"(74). Yet, conscious of an obligation to her children, she's filled with self-loathing when she tries to reconcile her desire to starve herself to further the cause. She confesses, "it is brutal, unimaginable, to think of what she is doing, what she has already done to the children, to think of what the children may grow into, given her absence, given their father's absence." Yet, her guilt doesn't stop her. Ultimately, she rather cavalierly decides to "speak to Alexandra [her best friend] about it, propose explicit instruction on what should come next"(69). The family maid is left to break the news to her children, Dorothy dead and her mother indisposed by Dorothy's death.
Of course, motherhood in Dorothy Townsend's time and social place differs from the hyper, overly attentive and anxiety ridden versions we encounter when Dorothy's great-grandaughter takes her daughter on a play date to a posh apartment high-rise on the west side of Manhattan. While Dorothy Townsend clearly loves her children, she seems to spend a good deal less time with them than their maid and nurse do. Ironically, Dorothy's concern over the plight of women never seems to take in the plight of the serving women in her house.
While Dorothy loves her children in an abstract way, her yearning to make a mark on history eclipses any desire she has to be a mother. Yet, While clearly attached to her ideals and eager to affect change, Walbert's close rendering of Dorothy's interior life provides a glimpse into the tangle of motives driving her decision and casts shadows on any simple reading of Dorothy Townesend as a hero. While eager for change, she doesn't have a clear idea of what she's after. She's not a calculating sort. She recalls her decision being the product of "a magical intuition." Hearkening back to the origins of an action that will make her a historical figure, she questions the foundations of "her idea, her better idea-and isn't this the way of intuition? The hunch more formed than one fully understands? The outcome set? Something will happen, she thinks"(31).
Although read by later generations as an act of heroism, Walberts rendering of the months preceding it makes Dorothy's self-starvation seem as much an act of suicide as a brave political statement. Expected to fill a mother/wife role for which she feels ill-suited, Dorothy comes across as depressed and distracted rather than engaged and angry. Of course, a fine line lies between the political and the personal. The depression and boredom fueling Dorothy's decision has a political as well as personal aspect.
Dorothy's stab at change enters history rather silently. Dorothy's mother warns her: "'Nobody is paying a damn bit of attention'"(4). Yet, people are paying attention. She garners an obituary in The Times , "though her pursuit of dying has been kept-given an edict from the editors-between the lines....on the advice from certain persons familiar with the hysterical and copycat tendencies of the Women's Social and Political Union, and of the precedence of the war news above all else"(78-79). Between the lines, many of her contemporaries know what she's done. Evelyn's teacher Father Flanigan tells Evelyn he admired her mother; "he had read all about her in the papers-between the lines, he says, where the news is: a real hero she was"(12).
Regardless of whose featured in them, the stories are not ordered in strict chronological order. When it comes to establishing the truths of history, the ordering of voices is as important as the selection. Preceding her famous mother's reflections on her final days, Evelyn's account has little time for Dorothy as heroine. Early on, Evelyn strives to see her mother's willed death as a noble gesture on behalf of women, a gift of sorts, most especially to her as Dorothy's daughter. But, she's never given much of a chance to claim or name the act herself. Instead, she's silenced by her Godmother, Dorothy's best friend and fellow radical Alexandra. Evelyn recalls her mother telling her, "I'm dying for you." However, doubt is cast on this memory of Evelyn's by her godmother Alexandra who claims, "No, she would never have said such an thing and besides, she was delirious and spoke stuff and nonsense"(12).
Despite the readings of others, Evelyn's resentment and hurt ultimately preclude her from turning her mother into her hero. For Evelyn, Dorothy's not the history-maker but the mother who abandoned her. In a heavy-handed scene, Evelyn encounters her mother's ghost in the lobby of Barnard college. Her daughter sees her as "pale, beautiful, raven-haired, they would have called her, had she been a heroine though she was not, I could have told her; neither then nor now-not to me, not to anyone. No one will remember you, I want to say to her. No one. But I don't have the heart"(94).
While she can't say deny her mother face to face, Evelyn does break all connection to Dorothy, denying their relation when pacifists question her aboard a boat to America. She resolves, "I'll start from nothing...I am now no one's daughter"(90). She maintains the disconnection to the end. When her niece sends her queries as to Dorothy, she refuses to answer them.
Of course her desire to sever the connection can never be achieved. Her mother forged her, if by indirection. She granted Evelyn tremendous freedom while alive and with her death forced her to make her own way or sink. After her grandmother sends her to school and her godmother moves suddenly to Argentina, Evelyn's virtually free of family and the control it exerts over women of her time and place. Yet, as one might expect, this freedom, offered thoughtlessly and by indirection hardly constitutes care or inspires love. Evelyn expresses her resentment of the hurt her mother caused her by resolving to forget her mother.
Yet, like the family silver that bypasses generations, Dorothy's legend survives Evelyn's willful neglect. Decades later, her granddaughter, Dorothy Barret, discovers her. When her last child leaves for college and the "hours pooled at her feet like water," Dorothy Barret "researched her the history, her history, as best she could"(130).
While Father Flanigan can read between the lines of Dorothy's obituary, what lies beyond the facts that history records has faded considerably by the time Dorothy comes to it. Dorothy Barret is left with lines from newspapers, a stamp bearing "an engraving of a woman she had never met nor heard much of,"(130), and sundry paper records. With a handful of facts, the granddaughter has a hard time connecting to her grandmother in any particular fashion. From the stamp, grandmother Dorothy "looks like any of those turn-of-the-century types in profile, the hair piled high on her head in a pompadour, the collar, the eyebrows thick and arched, and the long nose and the slight downward curve of her mouth"(131). A fairly devoted and attentive mother herself, she puzzles out "the reason [her grandmother] chose to starve herself" and admits that grandmother Dorothy "remains a great mystery to me. She had two children she would leave as orphans." And, adds in what seems envy, Dorothy observes "[my grandmother] was, from all indications, engaged in a love affair. She was respected, brilliant."(133) From her discontented granddaughter's perspective, Dorothy the suffragette, living at a time when women's choices were much more circumscribed, appears to have lived a fuller life than her own.
While repeatedly citing her as an inspiration, Dorothy's picture of her grandmother is a less than whole one. It is clearly an image forged out of need and desire; the reader has the privilege of seeing how crucial parts are missing. Dorothy paints her picture of her grandmother from footnotes. She believes that footnotes are where women like her grandmother live. In a presentation on Florence Nightengale, she dedicates a portion to her grandmother, who she groups with "those other women whose names you wouldn't know, women who came and went" women such as "their antecedent Florence [Nightengale]"(130). In the end, Dorothy Barret will satisfy the gaps in what she knows of her grandmother by focusing on the much better documented life of Nightengale. And, with some warrant; in an earlier story, Dorothy Townsend and her friend Alexandra spend an evening with a "plate of sweets before them and a copy of Florence Nightingale's "Cassandra"; these days they might read it aloud just to hear her words in their voices"(63).
Unlike her illustrious grandmother, Dorothy Barret gained satisfaction and felt most authentic as a mother but seems unable or unwilling to accept her feeling and experience as legitimate and worthy. After her children grow up and leave the nest, she's left adrift and seeking meaning. In the words of her clingy husband, she becomes preoccupied by "the ever-constant Dorothy question...'What shall I do?' she wailed-the 'shall' alerting him to the fact that she had become... the on-the-stage Dorothy, the one who saw herself in epic terms"(120). Seeking to imitate her original Grandmother and her dramatic end, Dorothy Barret begins to protest the Iraq War by attempting to photographing the return of dead soldiers to Dover Air Force Base.
Dorothy Barret fails to ever become fully engaged in the protest she undertakes to photograph caskets returning from The Iraq War. "What I'm trying to do is to aim for something real" she explains to her daughter in recounting her eventual arrest. Her arrest proves an anti-climax, lacking in drama and emotion. It is not the original act of self-expression she hoped for. She admits, "Here the two of us...the all of us: the soldiers, the protestor, we're all from a scene already enacted"(44).
Dorothy only discontinues her protest when it begins to appear a derivative and shopworn act chosen in a desperate bid to do something "historic" and brave. She realizes that it's not the war itself but her unresolved and unspoken grief for her son James, who died from Leukemia some years before, thats been driving her, supplying her with whatever emotion she's brought to the act of protest. She acknowledges turning the soldiers at Dover into straw villains that she'd set up to complete the drama she'd set out on. She asks,"what had she planned, anyway? To whom would she have shown her pictures? Charles? Liz and Caroline?"(50).
Tossing aside her original intent, Dorothy ends up doing something much more original and true to herself and her grief: she comes to the guard tower at Dover with a desire to know the soldier she'd previously vilified. Dorothy decides, "She wants to know where he's from, what he studied in school. She's interested in his early artwork, she could tell him. Elementary. Preschool even. Did he begin with circles? Those circles!" She yearns to comfort him in a maternal fashion: "Don't despair, she could tell him. It happens to everyone"(51). Dorothy Barret's yearning fantasy to mother the soldiers may be an expression of power. Her emotion is a reverse mirror image of the resentment/revulsion her grandmother feels when confronted by the grown men in her life who wish to and manage to stay boys and who seek women to mother them.
Darwin and his theory of Evolution reoccur in the stories; much like History, Evolution seeks to answer how and why things came to be and change. Thinking through the expression of symbols and motifs, Walbert weaves her stories together through the recurring use of shapes, figures, scenes and gestures.
Walbert makes frequent reference to lines. Comically, Dorothy Townesend's great-grandson James tells his mother Dorothy Barrett, "'You're an original, Mom. I've meant to tell you,'" and she replies, "'From a long line darling'"(48). When it comes time to defend her trespassing at Dover Air Force Base to capture the return of U.S. service casualties, she defends herself to her daughter Caroline by invoking her Grandmother; "Caroline speaks of Responsibility and Reputation and Appropriate Behavior," Dorothy asks, "'And what of history?'....'Lineage?'"(41).
As she indicates in other stories, line morphs. Dorothy Trevor Townesend knows "the arc of [her former lover's] life from the papers." But what is the arc of a life? Walbert asks as much by having Dorothy afterward recall having once "watched as [William] pushed a child on the Hyde Park swings"(70).
For Walbert, lines seem a less than truthful figure of history; her history is marked by discontinuity. Repeatedly, we encounter breakdowns in these stories; between mothers and daughters, men and women, opportunity and realization. Most profoundly, the characters share a sort of isolation from each other, despite their desire and wish for connection.
Similarly, Walbert meditates on history as a circle through numerous allusions to circles throughout the stories. Dorothy Townsend at Oxford experiences a group of Anarchists, "a crowlike flock of young men sitting circled around a tall leader"(55). Dorothy chooses to find "a chair outside the circle"(55). Her sitting outside this circle of men may be an expression of well-founded fear. Throughout her life, Dorothy recalls a schoolgirl friend Hilde who is gang-raped; a group of boys come out of nowhere and "They gathered round. Hilde had something they wanted. They wanted that, they told her...Hilde disappears within the team of them, swallowed whole"(66).
Real and metaphoric Birds fly through Walbert's stories . Early on, after her mother's death, Evelyn's ambivalent feelings are captured in a scene where she releases the drawing-room canary from its cage. She "opened the little latch that so many times I had been tempted to open before...I let the door swing open, the canary with its seed eyes and thorn beak stunned by fresh air...the little door swings open on its tiny brass hinges but the bird does not move nor sing nor ungrip its maddeningly rigid claws from its swing, its hanging perch." She eventually reacts, "idiot bird, an idiot canary, a birdbrain, an imbecile....I must turn the cage upside down and shake the cage again and again...I pull it out, yank it out and it bites the skin of my thumb, the tight skin there, and that hurts so much I fling it off toward the tree"(15).
Walbert again uses birds to muse on issues of freedom at various points. Amusingly, looking for an Oxford gathering of spiritualists, Dorothy the elder wanders into a meeting of "the Anarchists-a crowlike flock of young men sitting circled around a tall leader"(55). While starving to death, Dorothy despairingly notes how outside church bells "are always ringing. And always the rooks rest in the rookery or wheel above the steeple. It might be the end of th war or the beginning. The battles have been won or lost but soon they will be starting again, so much still to be discussed with Mr. Darwin"(66).
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