Even Anger Against Injustice Makes the Voice Go Hoarse

City of disorder

Memorial to the officers slain in the 1981 Brinks robbery, Nyack, NY

The other day I drove a fairly long distance to my old homeplace, New York City, to say farewell to a lifelong friend moving to the west coast. I used to think of the city as a kind of palimpsest for my life and millions of others, but now it’s just a place churning with its own meaning, not any that I might fancifully overlay upon it. The grid of the city’s streets may have once offered countless channels for my own grief and revelation, but it has also done so for innumerable others, going back to the time when those streets were Lenape hunting trails. For me, now, New York is just a big city for which my nostalgia has turned insubstantial and dissipated, and which most of my people have left.

Approaching the city, I had Heine’s words, set to Schumann’s music, in my head:

During lockdown I went down a kind of rabbit hole, reading a number of books about radicalism in the the 1960s and 1970s. This Covid reading list enabled me, while driving to New York, to point out to my children various landmarks of failed revolution: the spot near the western end of the Tappan Zee Bridge where the ragtag fringes of the Weather Underground gunned down two cops in 1981; the building in which the Black Liberation Army, responsible for breaking Assata Shakur out of prison, used an apartment as a weapons cache and safe house. Placing this template over the metropolitan topography made my own personal memories seem both more distant and less significant.

Assata Shakur (b. Joanne Chesimard) addressing a rally, New York City, early 1970s

My recent re-reading of Laurie Colwin — whose writing, though it never acknowledges this fraught historical background, occurred simultaneously with it — struck me for the geographical and temporal proximity of her characters to the real-life upheaval. Colwin may have handed out sandwiches at the revolution, but she eventually donned her Miss Bergdorf dress again and started publishing short stories in magazines like Cosmopolitan and the New Yorker.

A Laurie Colwin novel excerpt advertised on the cover of British edition of Cosmopolitan, 1976.

Last year, astonishingly, the New Yorker published a newly-found Colwin story, the lovely Evensong, in which Colwin’s customary wit and melancholy mix with questions of family and faith. Evensong was published alongside an interview with RF Jurjevics, Colwin’s child (formerly her daughter, Rosa). Here is an excerpt, with the interviewer’s questions in bold text:

In “Evensong,” a woman strikes up an affair with her neighbor and begins to attend services at a nearby seminary, despite being Jewish. Did Colwin often think in terms of the sacred and the profane, as she does here?

The scenes in the chapel with Louis are, I think, less about the contrast of sacred versus profane than about the shock of witnessing the kind of commitment and unwavering belief so familiar to the devout and so alien to the narrator. The irony of attending church services as a Jewish person, and doing so with an illicit beau, reads as both funny and profoundly painful (a Colwin specialty), but I think this exists as a background dichotomy, rather than as something central.

Laurie was fascinated with religion. Our apartment was as it is in the story—right across from the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. The seminary is as she described it, a lush campus reminiscent of an old English garden, which once occupied an entire city block. (Parcels were later sold off after the Chelsea neighborhood was made into a playground for the extremely wealthy.) Laurie deeply loved liturgical music, and would regularly go across the street to hear the choir in the dark and solemnly beautiful seminary chapel.

Toward the end of her life, Laurie (a “watered-down Jew” herself) began taking Hebrew classes at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Gramercy. I recently found a class notebook of hers, the first few pages filled with handwritten pronunciation guides and basic vocabulary. But it was Catholicism that particularly intrigued Laurie, who, like the narrator of “Evensong,” was drawn to the ideas of faith and ritual but was not a believer herself. The order, the detail, and the sacrifice required of the religious was something she wanted badly to understand.

The Close at General Theological Seminary in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

I wonder if the chaos of the freedom, so construed, that Colwin encountered at Columbia turned her towards the search for an order that could both contain and constrain it. Adultery, a frequent subject of her novels and short stories, is anarchy on a personal level, and her characters struggle not only to make sense of it (the adultery in her work often appears unsought, leaving the participants stricken and bemused), but to fatalistically accommodate it without destroying everything around them. This ethos of wringing order out of chaos, even if the order itself is unstable and deeply imperfect, also informs Colwin’s food writing. As she writes in the essay “Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir”:

Every once in a while, an execrable meal drags on way past the closing times of most pizzerias. You straggle home starving, exhausted, abused in body and spirit. You wonder why you have been given such a miserable dinner . . . [but] you are the better for your horrible meal: fortified, uplifted, and ready to face the myriad surprises and challenges in this most interesting and amazing of all possible worlds.

In fact, I’m sure that aesthetic order of this kind is so important that one must to try to maintain it in spite of whatever chaos might be going on around one. In the 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIII exhorted: “Everyone should put his hand to the work which falls to his share, and that at once and straightway, lest the evil which is already so great become through delay absolutely beyond remedy.”

Bertolt Brecht

And even Bertolt Brecht, who would surely have disagreed with both Laurie Colwin and Pope Leo XIII on most things, begged future generations to forgive his own revolutionary fervor in the 1939 poem “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”:

I came into the cities in a time of disorder
As hunger reigned.
I came among men in a time of turmoil
And I rose up with them.
And so passed
The time given to me on earth.

. . . And yet we knew:
Even the hatred of squalor
Distorts one’s features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow hoarse. We
Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness
Could not ourselves be gentle.

But you, when at last the time comes
That man can aid his fellow man,
Should think upon us
With leniency.

The line that haunts me most in Brecht’s poem is “and yet we knew.” His generation of revolutionaries knew that their anger, even if righteous, undermined everything beautiful and worth fighting for, but they allowed it to guide their actions anyway. How much different would this world be if not just Brecht and his cohort, but even the insignificant people, those called by Assata Shakur’s fellow Black Panther Bobby Seale “the lumpen proletarian politically unaware brothers in the streets,” had turned away from anger, righteous or not, towards the restraint suggested by Laurie Colwin or Pope Leo XIII as an antidote, even if that restraint feels far less transcendent than anger?

Incidentally, Brecht abandoned his fruitful early collaboration with Kurt Weill because of the latter’s lack of political commitment, and went on to establish a long partnership with the composer Hanns Eisler, who, as a refugee from the Nazis in Los Angeles, wrote the first book on film scoring. Eisler later went back to the newly-formed German Democratic Republic, for which he composed the national anthem. Eisler’s brother Gerhart was the Comintern’s representative to the United States, and a personal friend of my grandmother Josephine Nordstrand; my mother reminisced about Gerhart’s visits to her house when she was a child. Gerhart also decamped to the GDR, where he became Propaganda Minister.

East German National Anthem (music by Hanns Eisler)