Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. —Albert Schweitzer

I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially. —E. B. White

The Environmental Protection Agency was launched in the United States on December 2, 1970. The legislation came after over a decade of increasing alarm over environmental degradation, the most resounding of those alarms being Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring. Carson’s specific focus was pesticide, but as evidenced by the quotations prefacing her book, above, her wider environmental goal was to emphasize the need for stewardship principles and the regulatory muscle to pursue them.

When he was appointed the first administrator of the EPA, William D. Ruckelshaus endorsed those stewardship principles by declaring that “the technology which has bulldozed its way across the environment must now be employed to remove impurities from the air, to restore vitality to our rivers and streams, to recycle the waste that is the ugly by-product of our prosperity.” Today, many environmentalists feel that Carson’s legacy and the mandate Ruckelshaus envisioned for the EPA are in peril. Shortly after Scott Pruitt took over at the EPA this spring, the Trump administration rescinded the Clean Air Plan and the Clean Power Plan — the CPP about-turn symbolically announced in the Rachel Carson Green Room at the EPA offices.

When recently announcing a decision not to ban the agricultural pesticide chlorpyrifos, Pruitt said that the EPA is “returning to using sound science in decision-making, rather than predetermined results.” In Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake, Kathryn Miles notes that many scientists and environmentalists regard such comments by Pruitt as the new guiding principle at the EPA, one that turns a deaf ear to scientific alarm bells. In her chapter on fracking, Miles notes how “energy companies continue to bank on the opportunities that a lack of specific correlation or scientific certainty affords,” and how many scientists — the passage below is based on comments by the geologist Todd Halihan, a fracking specialist — feel silenced and discredited:

He says a lack of total certainty never used to be a sticking point when it came to making safe choices based on the best science. We’re always going to have some inherent uncertainty when it comes to induced seismicity, he says: “That’s how this problem works. We have variabilities concerning wells, concerning pressure, concerning emerging science about faults.” That’s nothing all that novel, he says. Instead, what is new is what we do with that uncertainty. “We used to believe that a perspective of uncertainty would be a reason to slow down something. Now uncertainty is being used to avoid things.”

In Toxin Toxout, their sequel to Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Bruce Lourie and Rick Smith focus on the protectionism that individuals might practice to save both themselves and the environment from “the so-familiar, so surprisingly toxic icons of our global consumer culture.” The danger lies not with the individual products, many of which contain toxins at levels believed to be safe, but with the cumulative effect:

Significantly, an increasing number of studies are now indicating that the extent to which people can withstand the toxic chemical cocktail we are all exposed to is highly variable and at least partly based on their genetic makeup. But do you want to play that kind of Russian roulette?

In No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, Colin Beavan offers a more radical approach to environmental health — not purging your toxins but, as described in his chapter “How a Schlub Like Me Gets Mixed Up in a Stunt Like This,” taking a scalpel to your entire lifestyle:

For one year, my wife, baby daughter, and I, while residing in the middle of New York City, attempted to live without making any net impact on the environment. Ultimately, this meant we did our best to create no trash (so no take-out food), cause no carbon dioxide emissions (so no driving or flying), pour no toxins in the water (so no laundry detergent), buy no produce from distant lands (so no New Zealand fruit). Not to mention: no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no buying anything new . . .

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Beethoven was the first great Romantic composer, and if you listen closely you can hear the moment he launched a new era in music. It occurs about a minute into the third movement of his Symphony No. 3, Eroica. After ninety-two bars of indeterminate pianissimo throat clearing, the orchestra suddenly scales upward and erupts in a giddy, triumphant, onrushing scherzo: horns at full cry, timpani shaking the floor, strings bowing furiously. A wonderful video clip from 1978 shows an excited Leonard Bernstein making one of his famous “Lenny leaps” in anticipation of the momentous downbeat. This was not another conventional parlor entertainment of the Classical era — of harmless amusements and polite applause. This unprecedented scale and intensity was something new: music to make you laugh through tears, link arms with your brethren, and face the future with new hope. Beethoven the humanist had arrived.

The Eroica revolutionized music. It elevated symphonies to the prime medium for composers’ most important ideas. Orchestras became larger and symphonies longer and denser. (The first movement of the Eroica is longer than many Classical symphonies in their entirety.) Composers had the space to unspool an idea fully, facing the challenge of unifying a work’s longer movements with common themes. Symphonies also became weightier cultural milestones, imbued with lofty purpose. For example, the eminent scholar Lewis Lockwood writes that with the Eroica‘s second movement, “Beethoven introduces death and commemoration into the genre of the symphony for the first time.” The British writer James Hamilton-Paterson contends that the Eroica replaced the “civilized gaiety” of the Classical Viennese tradition with “a narrative of high ethical struggle that ended in triumph.”

Beethoven’s Eroica, by Hamilton-Paterson, is the latest in a fine trend of recent books giving biographical treatment to canonical musical works. Titles have appeared on Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s cello suites, Shostakovich’s string quartets, and Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise. Hamilton-Paterson, a British novelist known for his inventiveness and wit, offers an illuminating tour through the cultural, historical, and musical journey of Beethoven’s Third. The book is restrained in its enthusiasm and limited in scope, and Hamilton-Paterson necessarily lacks the expert perspective of scholars like Lockwood or Scott Burnham. Yet fans of this symphony will appreciate the book’s astute commentary and lavish illustrations.

Eroica translates to “hero,” and the original hero Beethoven had in mind was of course Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven composed the symphony mainly in 1803, but between then and its 1805 premiere, Napoleon cast off his egalitarian robes and named himself dictator. When Beethoven learned of this treachery he famously ripped the title page in half and scratched out the words “intitolata Bonaparte” so heavily that he tore holes in the paper. It is now generally accepted that, whatever his original intentions, Beethoven’s symphony ultimately embodied the spirit not of any individual hero but of the hero as an abstract ideal.

Or perhaps the hero was Beethoven himself? He composed the Eroica after the greatest personal and spiritual crisis of his life. In October 1802 he finally came to terms with being alone and losing his hearing, drafting the Heiligenstadt Testament, an anguished document combining elements of suicide note, last will, and artistic manifesto. In it he grappled with ending his life but vowed to carry on only in order to continue his work. Composed the following spring, the Eroica may represent his own personal triumph over unimaginable adversity. Its final movement presents variations on a theme Beethoven recycled from his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. Hamilton-Paterson points out that “the Promethean myth of the eternally suffering hero” must have resonated with the much-put-upon composer.

Hamilton-Paterson writes that the Eroica was “the nineteenth century’s first major avant-garde work: one that severely challenged both performers and its audiences.” Yet his book never quite fleshes out this key point. It is often remarked that the Third was much longer than other contemporary symphonies. On its face this seems a superficial accomplishment. But length afforded greater space for development: the music was richer and more complex than what had come before. Audacious writing for various instruments filled the score; for instance, the cellos — rarely before that point a melodic instrument — carried the main theme from the opening bars. Rhythmic innovations, especially the use of syncopation, kept listeners off balance. Beethoven toyed with motifs and ideas, exploring them in various keys and with different instrumentations, forestalling their ultimate “true” announcement and thereby enriching that moment considerably. Boston University professor Jan Swafford explains in his biography Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph that in the Third, Beethoven

wants his exposition restless and searching, so its themes need to be fragmentary, incomplete, constantly in flux. From the first airing of the Hero theme forward, each idea will start decisively and then drift, avoiding a sense of closure or clear formal articulation. Everything points forward rather than feeling like an arrival.

The result is a work of unprecedented ambition, radical and bold yet marvelously clear. The world had never heard anything like it.

Some audiences were more prescient than others about the Eroica. One early listener whom Beethoven treated to a piano rendition predicted that “heaven and earth will tremble when it is performed.” Yet other critics derided it as “odd and harsh” and even “morally depraved.” They soon came around. The symphony heralded the beginning of Beethoven’s extraordinary middle period, which included the Emperor Piano Concerto, the Appassionata and Waldstein piano sonatas, and the incomparable Fifth Symphony. Each built on the Eroica. At a stroke, Beethoven had torn away the old conventions and brought music into a new century. His Third Symphony is now over 200 years old. It still sounds like the future.

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Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

In this episode, a pair of conversations that are all about invention, and about the lies that reveal the truth. First, Kevin Young joins Bill Tipper for a conversation about America’s love affair with frauds and his new book Bunk: the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News. Then, the Pulitzer-winning writer Jeffrey Eugenides walks with us through the stories in his new collection Fresh Complaint and reveals the places where fragments of his own experience took on strange new life in his fictional creations.

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Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue’s gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers—from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution.

Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of “truthiness” where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.

Click here to see all books by Kevin Young.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times. The stories in “Fresh Complaint” explore equally rich­­––­­and intriguing­­––territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.

Click here to see all books by Jeffrey Eugenides.

 

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

Author photo of Kevin Young (c) Melanie Dunea.

Author photo of Jeffrey Eugenides (c) Marco Anelli.

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In November 1996, a young writer named William Blacker, planning to travel to the wilds of northern Romania, wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor for advice. Fermor, then in his seventies, replied:

Dear William — if I may make so bold —
I can’t think of anything more exciting than your imminent prospect — and well done starting in winter. (a) You have the whole world to yourself, and (b) inhabitants never take summer visitors seriously. Winter is a sort of Rite of Passage. Do take down any songs or sayings, above all descantice — spells, incantations, invocations, etc. I bet Maramures is full of them. Also, as much wolf and bear lore as possible — and remember, never drink rainwater that has collected in a bear’s footprint, however thirsty.

This jaunty note, now published in Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters, edited by Adam Sisman, conveys so much of the “old boy,” as he himself might have put it: the generosity and enthusiasm, the arcane knowledge and irresistible wit. Fermor had by then been traveling and writing for almost six decades, and the letters gathered here span seventy peripatetic years, from 1940 to 2010. By turns gossipy, lyrical, profound, and dazzling, they carry Fermor’s voice so clearly that we seem to hear him speaking as we read. Not that we hear everything. Fermor admits to pruning his correspondence (“lots of things not for strangers’ eyes”), and Sisman has excised the more quotidian passages. Yet no letter seems incomplete. And thanks to Sisman’s astute selection and fine introductory notes, the volume’s gradually darkening mood seems to mirror Fermor’s ultimate journey from youthful exuberance to aged decline.

He began traveling in 1933 at the age of eighteen by walking from England to Constantinople, a trek that took a year and produced a trilogy — A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and The Broken Road (2003) — that remains one of the treasures of English travel writing. Never mind that The Broken Road was unfinished at Fermor’s death in 2011 (procrastination was a lifelong affliction) or that he inserted episodes from the 1980s into his odyssey of the 1930s (an “extremely immoral procedure” charmingly justified in a letter to a Hungarian scholar). Fermor’s true sleight-of-hand is his seemingly effortless ability to conjure up a place or person with astonishing clarity — a hillside at dawn, a garrulous stranger — while simultaneously revealing a world that is centuries deep. The breadth of his scholarship, so airily present and matched only by his curiosity, compresses time. In a 1948 letter to his then-lover Joan Rayner, for example, Fermor writes, “I knew a very old woman in Athens whose father had been alive when a Stylite was living on top of one of the pillars of Olympian Zeus.” (The Stylites being ancient monastic penitents.)

No penitent himself, Fermor occasionally retreated to monasteries to write, and that otherworld is as powerfully evoked in these letters as it was in his short book A Time to Keep Silence, published in 1957. Two masterworks followed: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966), which chronicle Fermor’s travels in Greece, the country where he spent most of his life. And where he fought. Operating undercover alongside Cretan partisans during the Nazi occupation, Fermor’s most famous mission was the abduction of General Heinrich Kriepe, with whom Fermor was reunited in 1972 for a Greek TV documentary. “Tremendous singing, and lyre-playing and Cretan dancing,” after the filming, Fermor writes to a comrade’s widow, “all ending up pretty tight, and many tears being shed for old times’ sake…After all, the old boy hadn’t managed to do any harm in Crete before his capture and I always liked him… ”

He likes most people. In Northern Ireland in 1972 he spends a pleasant hour or so drinking with an Irish Republican Army spokesman (“Three dull thuds, two streets away, of exploding bombs”) before returning to “Blighty” for a weekend at Chatsworth, seat of Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.   One of the Mitford sisters, “Debo,” was a lifelong friend, (their correspondence was published in 2008), and of her homey palace Fermor writes, “it’s wonderful what forgotten knitting and a couple of seed catalogues will do for a bust of Diocletian.” His world in such moments is English to the core, with a hint of P. G. Wodehouse: all weekend larks and biffing off to the country. Indeed, many of Fermor’s acquaintances could be characters out of Thank You, Jeeves: Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, fourteenth Baron Berners; Lady Dorothy “Coote” Lygon, daughter of the seventh Earl Beauchamp, and so on. There’s Miss Crowe, a relic of British rule on Corfu, pacing her terrace, ” . . . stick in hand, only slightly stooping, and followed by a rippling wake of old and half-blind dogs.” There’s Lady Wentworth, granddaughter of Lord Byron, sporting “a gigantic and very disheveled auburn wig that looked as though made of strands from her stallions’ tails” and occupying a manor “as untidy as a barn — trunks trussed, and excitingly labelled ‘LD BYRON’S papers . . . in chalk.”

But the writer and the man revealed in these letters is no Bertie Wooster-ish dilettante. Though “never less than two years overdue” finishing a book, Fermor, we learn here, took his craft, if not himself, seriously; in one letter he identifies his literary flaws and in another speculates how screenwriting for a 1958 John Huston film might instill “lessons about concision and dexterity.” And while expert at “high-class cadging” of Italian villas and the like, he detests anything “smart” — the “revolting” Côte d’Azur, for example — and observes, after an evening on an Onassis yacht, that there is “something colossally depressing about contact with the very rich.” Fermor cannot be corralled, either by class or by place. Throughout his life, and throughout these letters, he strays. Into love affairs and across borders, enraptured by the ancient and the natural world — even when mortality looms. “We walked in the fields yesterday where we slid on the hayrick twenty years ago,” he writes in 1975 to Alexander Fielding, a constant friend since wartime. Joan Rayner, his wife and strength, drops dead in 2003 — “no pain, thank heavens, except for survivors” — and Fermor will live eight more years. In a 1948 letter to Joan, he had described waking from sleep “as easily and inevitably as the faint touch of the keel on the sand of the opposite bank.” Across the final page, that image seems to shimmer.

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