Enemies, a love story

Can you continue a friendship with someone whose politics you find immoral or unethical?

Around fifteen years ago, lonely and insecure, going through a divorce while trying to find my intellectual footing as a critic and biographer, I received an unexpected gift: an invitation to join the New York Institute for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary group of academics, writers, and artists who gather regularly for a lunch meeting featuring a speaker on some topic of interest. At a time when I was sometimes too depressed to feed myself, the lunches were both consoling and intimidating: they offered good food and good company, even if I was often too shy to speak to the people at my table.

The Institute was then run by former New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler; regular attendees included Vivian Gornick, Art Spiegelman, and Janet Malcolm. Malcolm once rendered me tongue-tied simply by addressing me by name. (She knew my name!) When I eventually worked up the courage to tell her I was researching a biography of Shirley Jackson, she gave me a fantastic anecdote that ended up in the book.

Last week, Robert Boyers spoke at the Institute about Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag and George Steiner, his new memoir of his friendships with perhaps the two greatest critics of the last fifty years. It’s perhaps misleading to present them as a pair: as the memoir makes clear, the two were often at odds and hardly spoke to one another. Sontag may now be nearly as well known for her fits of irascibility as for her iconoclastic essays, and Boyers has no shortage of stories to tell about her bad behavior. Steiner, who was always more of a celebrity in Europe, comes across as a bit stodgy in comparison, though Boyers’s description of the Shakespeare course he taught at the University of Geneva—one play per semester, studied in intense detail in weekly meetings open to the public and attended by hundreds of people from all walks of life—gives a sense of what an extraordinary speaker he must have been.

Robert Boyers and Susan Sontag in 1994, from the book.

The conversation was lively, with many in the audience sharing their own stories of death-by-Sontag. One professor had once suggested to a mutual friend that she speak at a conference they were organizing, and the friend offered her phone number. When she answered, the professor introduced himself and said their friend had told him to call. The line went silent. “He GAVE you this NUMBER?” she thundered before hanging up.

But in general, there was a nostalgic breeze in the air. Boyers, whose trademark gray ponytail now clings precariously to his head, spoke proudly of his own expertise and authority based on being “on the job for some fifty-odd years” as editor of Salmagundi, a small but prestigious literary magazine. “It’s the kind of book you could never write about people who are alive,” he commented, before adding slyly, “Well, you could.” But you couldn’t, largely because they no longer exist. Boyers based his memoir on decades of letters exchanged with both his subjects as well as transcripts from academic symposia for which he brought together thinkers from all over the world to discuss intellectual questions. (I was fortunate to attend one in 2013 on the subject of irony.) But today’s intellectuals trade barbs on Twitter; at conferences, they network rather than brainstorm. In his own newsletter, Garth Greenwell called Maestros & Monsters “a rousing vindication of an intellectual culture almost entirely vanished now.” One of the few places I know of where it remains, in fact, is the room where Boyers spoke.

A Republic of Letters

Some will say good riddance to that intellectual culture: it was too white, too conservative in many ways, too exclusivist in its zeal to preserve its benefits for an elite few. All this is true. But as I reflected on what would be lost when Boyers and others of his generation are no longer with us, what kept returning to my mind was their gift for friendship and the singular value they placed on cultivating it.

I first came to know Boyers through another friend, the film critic Stanley Kauffmann, to whom I become close (as many younger staffers did) during my years at The New Republic. A fantastic connoisseur of film, books, music, food and drink, and people, nothing pleased him more than introducing people to each other. “You ought to know So-and-so,” he would say of some person of great distinction whom you would never dare to approach. When the introduction was made, it invariably took place beneath a hailstorm of blush-inducing praise. Stanley’s gift for friendship was such that even now, more than ten years after his death, there are certain people—including Boyers—whom I can’t think of without also thinking of him.

In his talk, Boyers mentioned that his friendship with Steiner endured even though they seriously disagreed on the Vietnam War, which Steiner supported and Boyers protested. One audience member pushed back on him for this. How could he justify maintaining their friendship in the face of ethical qualms about Steiner’s ideas? What if a friend’s politics seem not just wrong but immoral? “Certain kinds of admiration make it possible not just to tolerate but also to like people whose morality you don’t admire,” Boyers answered, adding that Steiner hadn’t been as passionate about the war as he was; his support for it was “complicated,” while Boyers’s opposition was not. They “navigated around that,” he explained.

George Steiner in the 1980s, in a photo from Salmagundi..

It was a good answer, but it didn't entirely satisfy me. On the most controversial subjects, liberal and progressive intellectuals now seem to value unity more than diversity of opinion. We saw this regarding Trump, starting with the run-up to the 2016 election and continuing into the present, and we see it again now with Israel’s war in Gaza. Especially on these subjects, it’s common for those in opposition to claim their position is uncomplicated—simply the obvious stance that anyone with a moral compass would take—while supporters justify themselves with caveats. One activist writer I follow recently expressed wonder at how anyone could call “an active genocide that has already killed over 30,000 people a ‘complicated situation.’” (I follow many people with whom I don’t agree on everything; for the record, I don’t believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.) Meanwhile, my Israeli friends tie themselves into knots to express both their contempt for Netanyahu’s government and their desperation for the safe return of the hostages held by Hamas since October 7.

All liberals and progressives agree that some positions are simply right or wrong: Nazism, for instance. But I wonder if for some of us it’s become too easy to shunt ideas into that “uncomplicated” category, which has the effect of both stifling debate and drawing lines in the sand. You’re either with us or against us; there’s no room for nuance or gradations of opinion. I can hear some readers’ fury already: how can you talk about nuance when there’s a genocide going on! But that’s precisely my point. If we demonize the other side rather than at least try to understand their position, the result is an illiberal culture. And perhaps it’s best to err on the side of openness to debate rather than its opposite.

Sontag herself was well known for changing her mind. In an early essay, she praised Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as a masterpiece of aesthetics; by the 1970s, in her essay “Fascinating Fascism,” she had come to regard its dangers as more important. Our own thinking may evolve in ways that we never anticipated.

In addition to debate, many intellectuals of Boyers’ generation prized generosity: the willingness to believe what is best about a person or an idea. In his memoir, Boyers criticizes the critic James Wood for writing an essay on Steiner that focused on his flaws rather than consider what made him great. (Not to worry: they quickly resolved their differences and are now—of course—friends.) Listening to him speak about his own disagreement with Steiner, I wondered if the fact that someone cares about ideas might be more important than the specific ideas a person embraces, since such a person by definition will be open to debate and discussion—and may ultimately adopt a different position. By contrast, identity politics is largely an instinctual response, drawing lines based on tribalism or emotion rather than reason.

What I’m reading

This brings me back to the Israeli/Palestinian reading group begun in this space a few months ago with Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail and now continuing with David Grossman’s To the End of the Land. The goal is to examine the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through the lens of literature.

I admit I was initially reluctant to approach this novel based on its plot: an Israeli mother whose son is serving in the IDF journeys on foot through the country, hoping to avoid the dreaded knock of the “notifiers” who will inform her of his death. Ever since I’ve become a parent, I’ve found stories about a child’s death excruciating. But now I’ve finally gotten into the novel, and it’s as extraordinary as everyone says. I’m struck not only by Grossman’s inhabiting of this complex character but also by his kaleidoscopic depiction of contemporary Israeli society and its engagement with Palestinians—which is, frankly, not optimistic. I know some of you are reading along or have read this one already; if you’ve been hesitant, please give it a try! I’ll post a discussion thread next week.

One tip: if you’re finding this book (or any other) hard to begin, can I suggest listening to it? I borrowed an audio version from the library and have been listening to it on my daily walks with my dog. I don’t usually listen to literary fiction, but there’s a lot of dialogue in the first section and I was immediately drawn in. During a busy period in which I’ve had a lot of travel and not a lot of reading time, this audiobook has been an unexpected pleasure. My only complaint is with the narrator, who unfortunately mangles the pronunciations of many Israeli names and places.

Where I’ll be

On Tuesday, March 5, I’m speaking at a Zoom event celebrating Jeremy Eichler’s book Time’s Echo, which recently won the National Jewish Book Award. It’s a gorgeously conceived and written book that traces questions related to the memory of World War II, particularly the Holocaust, via several composers who lived and worked during those years. Eichler writes about music as an “unconscious chronicle” of history, a kind of invisible monument to the culture from which it sprang, and he demonstrates the centrality of Jewish composers and performers to the larger classical music canon, particularly in Germany. The event, appropriately, is titled “What Music Remembers”; register for free here.