The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

• Episode 13: Nicholas Boggs on James Baldwin

  “They were against all categories,” says Nicholas Boggs of James Baldwin and the men he loved in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. As Yoran Cazac put it, they were ‘eating the same substance,’ and they happened to be of different nationalities and races and even sexualities. I appreciate that they had these complicated relationships where they saw each other across difference for who they were and what they shared. It’s what sustained Baldwin. It’s what enabled him to write. It’s what he wrote about.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The episode follows James Baldwin on his transatlantic commutes, introducing listeners to four formative—and transformative—friendships with “crazy outsiders” that sustained Baldwin and that organize this new biography. We meet painter Beauford Delaney, the “spiritual father” and artistic mentor Baldwin found in Greenwich Village. In post-war Paris, we meet Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss émigré who would become Baldwin’s lover, muse, and lifelong friend. We meet Engin Cezzar, the “blood brother” who created for Baldwin a home in Istanbul. Finally, Boggs introduces us to Yoran Cazac, the French painter with whom Baldwin collaborated on his “child’s story for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs helped bring back into print. Along the way, Boggs and Hohn dwell on the meaning of love in Baldwin’s life and work, and on his yearning for a home “by the side of the mountain, on the edge of the sea.” Hohn and Boggs also spend time with Otto Friedrich, who befriended Baldwin during his Paris years and would become Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. The episode concludes with a selection of entries about Baldwin from the journal Friedrich kept in 1949

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• Episode 12: James Marcus on Emerson and Melville

  “In this part of the essay, Emerson is talking about walking a lot, you know, sort of walking through nature, taking a stroll,” says James Marcus in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “He has this rather sublime experience, and he describes it in this way: ‘Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am a part or particle of God.’ Now, I mean, that is lofty stuff, and it can edge over into silliness. In a way, if you picture it, it starts to be silly and that is why Christopher Cranch’s cartoon is hilarious, because a literalization of it is kind of ridiculous, in a way. Part of the thing I love about Emerson is that he wasn’t afraid to seem silly in his eagerness to render the experience. What he's talking about—if you get away from the actual image of an eyeball with a top hat on—is a kind of ecstatic merger with the universe, where the walls drop, the boundaries drop, the currents of the universe move through you. If you look at it that way, he’s talking about a classic ecstatic experience.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with writer and biographer James Marcus about his book Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s sense of self was, Marcus says, “kaleidoscopic,” and so is this episode, presenting not one Emerson but many: Emerson the public intellectual who cherished the privacy of his study, Emerson the lapsed minister who left the church but continued to preach on the lyceum circuit, Emerson the initially reluctant but eventually ardent abolitionist, Emerson the Swedenborgian mystic, Emerson the loner who deeply loved his friends Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau, Emerson the son estranged from his father, Emerson the father undone by grief for his dead son, and, finally, Emerson the volunteer firefighter. Marcus and Hohn also go searching for Emersonian influences in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby Dick. But they spend most of the conversation with the essayist from Concord, that artisan of indelible sentences, whom Melville once compared to a great philosophical whale who could dive “five miles or more,” sounding the depths.

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• Episode 11: Matthew Hollis on "The Seafarer"

  “This is a sea that will take your life,” says Matthew Hollis in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “This is the cruel sea. This is the hard sea. And it takes extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realize in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within as well. It’s one of the things that makes this poem so compelling, it seems to me, because it does have ideas about moral choices, and it does have ideas about belonging that seem as important today as they were then. One of the great things that strikes me with the great parts of the Anglo-Saxon opus is how modern it feels—or rather, to put it a different way, how timeless the cares and concerns and worries of human beings can be. Some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making a good life or the life of right choosing, are issues that trouble us in exactly the same way, or challenge us in exactly the same way, as they did this sailor.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with poet Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the world from which this mysterious tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem emerged, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists. Into the conversation the episode weaves audio samples from different translations and different recordings, including one made by Lewis Lapham, another by Ezra Pound, and a third by Matthew Hollis himself.

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• Episode 10: "Loomings," with Francine Prose

  “Well, I mean for starters it still is the greatest first sentence ever,” says Francine Prose in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I mean, three words. A three-word first sentence. I think if you were to ask a kind of range of readers, ‘Can you think of a first sentence?’ You know, you probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, and the best of times,’ and people would get it backwards. But then you get ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Because it establishes this kind of—you know, so much of the book is about authority. About authority, and the lack of authority, and what authority is, and who has it, and what you do with it. And that sentence is just pure authority. Pure narrative authority. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Bingo. It’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to call you Ishmael.’” This week on the podcast, the Quarterly’s editor-at-large Francine Prose returns for an in-depth conversation with Donovan Hohn about Moby Dick’s first chapter, “Loomings.” They consider the meanings of the verb to loom, whether Ishmael is likeable or funny, whether the American sermon influenced Melville’s oratorical prose, why the antebellum religious press condemned the novel, and what the best medicine might be for “the universal thump.” Earlier episodes in this series: Episode 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn and Episode 8 with Wyatt Mason.

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• Episode 9: Roger Berkowitz

  “In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny,” says Roger Berkowitz in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people as long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different. It tries to get inside your head, and make you, and make everyone, believe. And it has secret police, and snitches, and surveillance. And it tries to fully organize society. It’s the most organized and successful attack on freedom that one can imagine. And so for Arendt, you can’t just be an individual and sit in jail and be free if you’re going to protect yourselves from the dangers of totalitarianism and the end of constitutional, free government, which is what she’s worried about. You need to act politically, and you need to act politically with a certain amount of power.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn sits down for a conversation with Roger Berkowitz, writer, scholar, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. They discuss the life and work of Hannah Arendt and two essays that share a name, “Civil Disobedience”—one by Arendt, the other by Thoreau, both recently collected in a volume that Berkowitz edited and introduced. Their conversation touches broadly on the works of the two writers, on their differences and disagreements, on the political tumults that inspired their famous essays, and on the lessons to be learned from them in the present day.

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