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Category Archives: The Lives of Others

April 6, 2018
The Lives of Others

The Bloody Family History of the Guillotine

By Edward White

In 1788, a French blacksmith named Mathurin Louschart was killed in his home by a single blow to the head. The act was committed in the blink of an eye, but the feud motivating it had festered for months. Earlier that year, the deeply conservative Mathurin had apparently taken offense at his son Jean’s newfangled ideas about liberty and equality. Jean was vocal about his beliefs, which were stoking the fires of radicalism throughout France. Not content with throwing his son out of the family home, Mathurin attempted to punish him further by arranging to marry Jean’s girlfriend, Helen. Helen’s family was only too pleased to palm off their daughter to a vaunted member of the community, but Helen herself despaired at the prospect of being wrenched from Jean and shackled to a brooding old ogre for the rest of her life. Jean hatched a plan: he arrived one night at his father’s house to rescue Helen and ride off into the egalitarian sunset. But Mathurin interrupted their escape, and a fight ensued. Jean lashed out with a hammer. It struck Mathurin flush on the forehead, and the old man died instantly.

Despite his protestations of self-defense, Jean was found guilty of murder and sentenced to be broken on the wheel. That punishment, in which the condemned was strapped faceup upon a large wheel and then had their bones broken, had been a common means of torture, execution, and humiliation throughout Europe for centuries. Some believe it was a thoroughly French invention, pioneered as early as the sixth century. If so, more than a thousand years of history came to an unexpected end the day that Jean approached his agonizing fate in Versailles. In the weeks after sentencing, Jean’s fate became a cause célèbre. Here, many felt, was a young man being punished not for an act of violence but for his political beliefs. As Jean made his way to the scaffold on the day of his execution, dozens of locals charged forward, seized him, and carried him to safety. The authorities were stunned, and the strength of public opinion moved King Louis XVI to issue Jean a royal pardon. Read More
March 2, 2018
The Lives of Others

The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus

By Edmund White

The history of the Byzantine Empire is threaded with dynastic clashes and family feuds. The Byzantines do not hold the same familiar spot in the Western imagination as their Roman forbears, but the narrative history of their scandals and intrigues is easily as compelling as the episodes Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio recorded of Caesar, Caligula, and Nero. For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.

Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political players, whether they were power-grabbing populists, slick backroom schemers, or principled reformers. It started with Empress Theodora, sometimes described as a kind of sixth-century Eva Perón, who interceded in a wave of riots that shook Constantinople, put an end to the fighting, won the adoration of the public, and saved her husband’s throne. Irene, an empress from the late eighth century, ruled for several years with a mixture of silky court diplomacy and unflinching ruthlessness—to maintain her grip on power, she ordered that her chief rival, who also happened to be her son, be blinded.

The princess Anna Komnene was another of these influential women. To Edward Gibbon, who framed her reputation for modern audiences with his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she was a Lady Macbeth character who attempted to bump off her brother so she could rule the empire through her husband. The plot failed, and Anna was forced to flee to a monastery, where she spent the rest of her life stewing with resentment and thwarted ambition. Gibbon dismissed Anna as vain, vengeful, dissembling, and reckless, the embodiment of a particular type of unpleasant Byzantine woman. But to a generation of historians currently revisiting her reputation, Anna Komnene is not a lethal Machiavel but a sparkling litterateur, one of the great figures of her age who exhibited something that one might call distinctly, beguilingly Byzantine: a flair for disruptive innovation while, paradoxically, striving to keep centuries of tradition alive. Read More
January 5, 2018
The Lives of Others

Arthur Cravan, the Original Troll

By Edward White

Arthur Cravan, the Dadaist poet-boxer, was neither a good poet nor a good boxer, but he was a legendary provocateur.

Hemingway, Mailer, and Scorsese: much great American art has been inspired by boxing. George Bellows’s may be the best. Between 1907 and 1909, Bellows created three paintings—Club Night, Stag at Sharkey’s, Both Members of This Club—that captured boxing’s glories and indignities. The sport provided a powerfully visceral metaphor for the American experience of the twentieth century.

But boxing also transfixed artists beyond American shores. Around the time Bellows created his triptych, a tranche of Europeans created sublime, radical work inspired by the sport. One of them was the Swiss enigma Arthur Cravan. Described by one critic as “a world tramp … a traverser of borders and resister of orders,” Cravan traveled the globe in the early 1900s by forging documents and assuming false identities, preening, harassing, and haranguing, as he went. He was hailed by André Breton as a pivotal precursor of Dadaism, and belonged to that category of floating prewar avant-gardists whose legacy resides more in their mode of living than their artistic creations. Indeed, he declared himself anti-art and avowed boxing to be the ultimate creative expression of the modern, American-tinged age. He’s often referred to as a “poet-boxer,” though he wasn’t especially accomplished as either; his real talent appears to have been making a spectacle of himself, in every sense. Read More
December 1, 2017
The Lives of Others

A Mother’s Ninth-Century Manual on How to Be a Man

By Edward White

Albert Edelfelt, Queen Blanche of Norway and Sweden with Prince (later King) Hacon, 1877.

Being a red-blooded, blue-blooded male in the Carolingian Empire was a risky business. Those who grew up in Western Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries were frequently exposed to extreme violence. One adolescent royal from the period was struck so hard in a play fight that, in the words of a contemporary account, his playmate’s sword “penetrated almost as far as the brain, reaching from his left temple to his right cheekbone.”

The only thing the Carolingians valued as much as ruthlessness on the battlefield was proficiency with Biblical text. William of Septimania appears to have had a thorough education in both. He was barely in his twenties when he seized control of Barcelona in 848, but he had already spent four years warring against the crown. The city had been the old stomping ground of his father, Bernard. Bernard was an important figure in the reign of Louis the Pious, the Carolingian emperor who ruled a great swathe of territory from what is now northern Spain to the Czech Republic. But in recent times Bernard had endured a spectacular fall, toppled by intrigue and machination that ended in his death and devastated his family. When still in his teens, William became determined to win the battles his father couldn’t. He joined a rebellion against the ruling dynasty that had once been as close as kin. Read More
November 3, 2017
The Lives of Others

The Hollywood Darling Who Tanked His Career to Combat Anti-Semitism

By Edward White

Ben Hecht

One December day in 1939, Frank Nugent, a film critic for the New York Times, took his seat at the premiere of Gone with the Wind and waited for the carnage to unfold. So long and overblown had the movie’s ad campaign been that Nugent was sure it was going to be a turkey. When that proved not to be the case, he was stunned. “We cannot get over the shock of not being disappointed,” he wrote in his review the next day.

In truth, Gone with the Wind had come perilously close to being just the kind of disaster Nugent had foreseen. Three weeks into shooting, the producers shut down production, fired the director, and hired Ben Hecht to rewrite the script. Hecht was known as the “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” for his ability to knock out clever, crowd-pleasing work in the time it takes most writers to sharpen their pencils. But this was a tall order even for him: he’d never read Margaret Mitchell’s novel and had just seven days to dismantle and rebuild an epic blockbuster. The fact that he did it—fueled, so he claimed, by nothing but bananas and salted peanuts—might seem evidence of his remarkable talent. Hecht himself cited it as proof of the rank absurdity of Hollywood. Despite authoring dozens of successful films and earning six Oscar nominations, he dismissed Hollywood as a “marzipan kingdom” populated by idiots, responsible for an “eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
Hecht gave that lacerating verdict in his autobiography, A Child of the Century (1953), listed by Time in 2011 as one of the hundred best works of nonfiction published since the magazine’s founding in 1923. Written in the rambunctiously opinionated style of Hecht’s hero, H. L. Mencken, the book deals with Hecht’s eclectic life as a literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He was intimidatingly prolific, and always provocative. His second novel, Fantazius Mallare (1922) landed him in court on an obscenity charge; a later novel, A Jew in Love (1931) had him labeled as a self-hating Jew. Hecht shrugged off the controversies; bigger strife lay ahead. Read More
October 6, 2017
The Lives of Others

The Short, Daring Life of Lilya Litvyak

By Edward White

Lilya Litvyak.

On June 22, 1941, the Third Reich launched its ill-fated invasion of Russia. It was pestilential in scale; more than three million Axis soldiers swarmed Russia’s borders in a matter of hours, overwhelming Soviet defenses. Hitler regarded the peoples of the Soviet Union to be a subhuman rabble against whom victory was inevitable. But the supposed Untermensch turned out to be ferocious opponents, hardened by decades of deprivation and fueled by an unbending love of country.

Among those supercharged patriots were eight hundred thousand women who volunteered for frontline action, in roles such as snipers, machine gunners, and tank drivers. Nearly two hundred thousand women served in air defense, including those who flew bombers and fighter planes in Air Group 122, at the time the world’s only all-female air-combat unit. It was established in the fall of 1941 by the twenty-nine-year-old navigator Marina Raskova. Thanks to a series of daring long-distance flights undertaken in the late 1930s, she was one of the most famous people in the Soviet Union, and a role model to millions of young women. Yet, Raskova’s reputation was to be surpassed by one of her students: the petite, baby-faced Lilya Litvyak, who became the world’s first female fighter ace, and is better known as the White Rose of Stalingrad. Read More