New England Review

To Make Good Again

From Anne Raeff’s “To Make Good Again,” in the current issue:

Buch (Book) was my first word, according to my parents, though it probably was more like my first interesting word—third, at the earliest, after Mama and Papa. Whatever the first word, German was my first language, and I did not learn English until I went to preschool at the age of four. Still, I do not consider German my native tongue. English is the language I grew up in, went to school in; English is the language I write in.

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Café chats

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, physician, scientist, artist, and writer

From Benjamin Ehrlich’s translation of Café Chats by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, in the current issue:

Glory is nothing but delayed oblivion. . . .

 ••

. . . In the effort to defend ourselves against attacking microbes and perpetuate our existence, millions of our own cells (such as glandular, blood, and phagocytic corpuscles) must be destroyed continuously. Without noticing it, without even suspecting it, we are consuming our own bodies. . . . Thus, nothing seems more natural than death, given that we kill ourselves regularly. Yet, nevertheless . . .

••

Man, it has been said, is the favorite of Providence. It would be equally right to declare that he is the darling of microbes. Beginning at birth, his trajectory proves to be a mad dash across a battlefield, where missiles rain down from the sky. . . .

••

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Curators

Vollmer's Future Missionaries

In “Keeper of the Flame,” featured in the current issue, Matthew Vollmer takes a disturbing excursion:

My father glanced over his shoulder at me and emitted a wheeze-burst of laughter—an exhalation intended to express disbelief. He had led me to an underground vault containing the artifacts of the last century’s most brutal regime, and he now seemed downright giddy. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think or what to say. I found it difficult to process what any of this meant. That is, I didn’t know why it was here, how it had gotten from where it had been made to where it was now. Were we in the presence of some kind of monster? Or had he created this space for stuff he deemed historically significant, buried it in a moisture-controlled vault because he fancied himself one of history’s unbiased curators? Was this the product of an obsessive and sympathetic mind, one which interpreted the mainstream records of history as having been unduly cruel to the Third Reich, which had been a movement, in his eyes, about nationalism, about ancestors, about revering and honoring the past? I didn’t know. And, honestly, I was afraid to ask.

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Garbo contemplates a comeback

Bm garbo 2001

In the current issue, Robert B. Ray explains movie stardom as a perplexity in Hollywood’s attempt to mechanize its productions according to “Taylorist-Fordist models of rationalized production”:

When Garbo was contemplating a comeback, cameraman James Wong Howe was hired to do a screen test. When the actress arrived for the session, he was disappointed by how ordinary she looked, and surprised that she had brought with her neither make-up man nor hairdresser. “I had never photographed her,” Howe recalled, “I was frightened. This great lady!” What followed amounts to the crucial lesson:

When the camera started to turn…she listened to the grinding sound and her face changed, her expression, her whole emotional mood came to life and transformed her completely. It was incredible, wonderful…. She was like a horse on a track: nothing, and then the bell goes, and something happens. When the shot was over, she said simply, “Have you got enough?” And I said “Yes,” and very matter-of-factly she remarked, “Okay, I go home.” She did. And she was nothing again. (Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen, 92.)

Precisely because movie-star performance does not involve Taylor’s notion of skill, it cannot be standardized, and its “workers” cannot be easily replaced. Movie stardom amounts to a highly unusual task, unimagined by Taylor and unlike almost any other job in the world.

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