“I can’t possibly count the number of people I have met over the years who’ve said, ‘You write like an old man,’” Jill Lepore says with a slight laugh. Those awkward exchanges suggest how gravitas in historical writing is typically associated with a “deeply analytical and rigorous prose style,” according to Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard University. “I love that persona, but there is another legitimate voice with which to write about the past.”
That voice is fiction. Blindspot: By a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise (Spiegel & Grau) is an entertaining new novel by Lepore and Jane Kamensky, a professor of American history at Brandeis University. Set in 1760s Boston, Blindspot evokes the rollicking bawdiness, humor, and wit of that turbulent era. The story concerns Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter who flees to Boston to escape debts at home. Seeking an apprentice, he takes on Fanny Easton, a disowned daughter from a prominent Boston family who is masquerading as a boy — a ruse that makes for some hilarious scenes. The narrative is propelled forward by a budding romance and a murder mystery, which plays out as the first stirrings of the looming revolution grip colonial Boston.
Kamensky, author of The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (Viking, 2008), and Lepore, author of the prize-winning Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf, 1998), have been friends since graduate school at Yale University. Blindspot, which was largely written through e-mail messages, is not their first collaboration. In 2000 they launched the online magazine Common-place, described by Lepore as an attempt to bridge the gap between scholarly and popular history. “Historians are pretty solitary creatures. So it was nice to be mad women in the attic together,” says Kamensky. “We laughed more in the writing of this book then I have ever done or will ever do writing nonfiction.”
“We tend to think that the seriousness of dramatic moments in the past means that everything was serious all the time, which is manifestly not true,” she says. Lepore traces some of the piety in historical writing to the 19th century, when much of America’s history was rewritten to conform to Victorian standards. Consider Benjamin Franklin, the subject — along with his sister Jane Mecom — of Lepore’s forthcoming book. In Franklin’s papers, he comes across as “very funny and very bawdy,” the historian says. But over the course of the 19th century, biographies of Franklin became, decade by decade, “tamer and tamer, and blander and blander.” A major part of Blindspot’s appeal is that it encapsulates what Lepore calls the “not always well-advised 10-penny wit” that characterized the culture of 18th-century America.
Both authors came to the novel steeped in the distinct rhythms and archaic words of the era. Fearing that a story written in that style would be unreadable, they adopted what Kamensky calls a “plausible simulacrum of 18th-century prose for a 21st-century ear.” For six months during the writing of the novel, Lepore walked to the Harvard campus each morning listening to an audio version of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman on her iPod. She says, “It got to a point that every e-mail I sent to Jane I wrote as Jameson.”
Lepore, who calls Blindspot a “wacky and unconventional thing to do,” points to a rich tradition of 18th-century writers — Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft — who used fiction as a way to get inside the lives of people on the margins of society. “They could write history about great men and great figures who left big trails of documents, but if they wanted to capture the experience of ordinary people — especially women — they needed to write fiction, which to them was another kind of history,” she says. Kamensky agrees. “Like any historian of the distant past, we have each had the experience many times of coming up against the limits of our evidence,” she says. “There are categories of humanity for whom it is hard to recover names, and impossible to recover consciousness. Writing Blindspot, the limits of the possible were not about the archive but about our imaginations.”
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As a boy, Adam Frank would climb onto the roof of his parents’ home in New Jersey to stare up at the night sky’s “indefinable beauty and perfection.” Now a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, Frank is similarly stirred by the “giddy vertigo of recursion relations in the mathematics of electromagnetic fields.” Such moments reveal “the world’s sacred character,” a “universe sensed beyond the senses,” he writes in The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate (University of California Press), an elegant reimagining of the relationship between science and spirituality.
Frank challenges the assumption that science and religion are implacable foes. The early practitioners of science in the 17th century, he writes, saw their desire to “know the world more fully as one dimension of their own spiritual ... sensitivities.” But by the late 19th century, the schism between science and religion was nearly complete. In 1875, John William Draper, an English chemist, published The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, which blamed the Roman Catholic Church for spearheading opposition to science. The book, a sensation, went through 50 reprintings and was translated into 10 languages. About 20 years later, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, made a similar argument in an influential two-volume work, A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom. Both books played a large role in shaping educated opinion in the West.
In our own time, discussions about religion and science tend to devolve into tired arguments about evolution and the veracity of Genesis. That tendency, Frank argues, fruitlessly pits the claims of science against the tenets of religious doctrine and “misses a deeper and more fecund relationship between science and spiritual endeavor.”
Science and religion spring from the ancient desire to understand our world — an urge Frank calls the “constant fire.” A moment of transcendent contemplation might lead to a religious life of study and prayer; or it might lead to a life dedicated to the study of the solar system or the human genome. The distinctions between those two paths are “less important than the imperative that precedes them,” Frank notes.
His effort to bridge the divide between the universes of science and religion does not entail giving any quarter to the anti-rational and anti-intellectual claims of Intelligent Design or New Age philosophy, which he says “represent a dangerous challenge to the very core of the scientific enterprise.” Neither school of thought presents a coherent or plausible explanation of the natural world.
But Frank also faults his fellow scientists for being too dismissive of spirituality’s relevance and potential, as if people’s desire to understand can be satiated any more satisfactorily by a theory of gravity than a passage of Scripture. “Science and spiritual endeavor are both gateways,” Frank writes. “Together they define what is best in us, and, if we can find the will and marshal the effort, they can guide our best efforts.”
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The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age (University of Chicago Press) is a testament to serendipity. Poking around the stacks of the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library, Neil Harris, a professor emeritus of history and art history at the university, noticed a few volumes with Chicagoan printed on their spines. Opening one of them, he was “startled to find it ablaze with glorious color covers, fanciful art, lots of cartoons, and a whole range of articles and reviews,” he writes in an introductory essay to this coffee-table sized anthology of works from The Chicagoan magazine.
Born in 1926 — “yelling lustily and quite red in the face,” according to The Chicagoan’s founding editorial — the magazine offered a mix of book, theater, and movie coverage, event listings, gossip, and (sympathetic) profiles. All were filtered through a highly localized — and often quite defensive — lens. One early advertisement proclaimed The Chicagoan the organ of the “cultural, civilized and vibrant Chicago which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Élysées.” As Harris notes, fulfilling that charge largely entailed ignoring the city’s foreign-born and African-American residents.
The Chicagoan, which began as a fortnightly and later became a monthly, struggled to establish itself on firm literary and financial ground. During its first year, the magazine appeared erratically on newsstands, and it wasn’t until Martin J. Quigley, a wealthy Midwesterner and budding publishing magnate, took over in 1927 that it began an eight-year run of continuous publication. Unabashedly modeled on The New Yorker, which was started in 1925, The Chicagoan appeared in a three-column format printed on coated paper. The magazine even called its regular collection of local vignettes and news items “Talk of the Town,” an overt nod to The New Yorker section of the same name. Perhaps out of embarrassment, that name was later dropped in favor of various substitutes.
Harris does a wonderful job of situating the magazine in the urban cacophony of 1920s Chicago, a city at the height of its power. Boasting a population that, he says, more than quintupled between 1870 and 1900, and doubled again by 1930, Chicago sprouted an impressively modern infrastructure, immense skyscrapers, an opera house, a planetarium, university campuses, and museums. During Prohibition the city acquired a well-deserved reputation for political corruption, bootlegging, and machine-gun-brandishing gangsters, none more notorious than Al Capone. Yet despite its often bloody exploits — or perhaps because of them — Chicago nurtured an impressive cadre of novelists, filmmakers, poets, playwrights, and journalists. Describing the city in 1920, H.L. Mencken wrote that it was “a place where the raw materials of civilization are received, sorted, baled, and reshipped.” That qualified as praise from the indefatigably cantankerous Mencken, who esteemed Chicago — if only for a moment — as “the literary capital of the United States.”
The editors of The Chicagoan were able to tap into the bustling local arts community at a time when various movements — Modernism, in particular — “challenged long-standing traditions of orthodoxy,” Harris writes. Their magazine’s striking visual style was most arrestingly on display in the 149 vibrant illustrations that graced its covers. (Dozens are reproduced in full color in the new book.) “The covers’ affectionate and sometimes satirical tone captured the city’s energy and ambitions,” Harris writes, “foregrounding new landscapes of leisure and pleasure and juxtaposing Chicago’s emerging skyline to its dramatically changing seasons.”
When subscribers received the April 1935 issue, there was no indication that it would be the last. All traces of the magazine quickly disappeared. A frustrated Harris reports that little archival material remains to reconstruct the publication’s history. Nevertheless, his lush tribute does a tremendous job capturing what he calls The Chicagoan’s “vision of metropolitan destiny.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 16, Page B14
