THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 73
BRIEFLY NOTED
Recasting the Vote, by Cathleen D. Cahill (North Carolina).
This spirited history situates the campaign for female suffrage
within the broader narrative of civil rights. In 1920, the Nine-
teenth Amendment gave the vote to white women but not to
millions of Black, Native American, Hispanic, and Chinese
women, many of whom were active in the cause. White suffrag-
ists were often quick to exclude their Black colleagues from
rallies, yet racism failed to stop women of color from using the
movement to amplify their voices, enriching it in the process.
Cahill’s widened focus links the battle for enfranchisement to
currents of exclusion and empowerment that continue to shape
the vote today.
What Becomes a Legend Most, by Philip Gefter (Harper). “ I
trust performances,” Richard Avedon wrote. “Stripping them
away doesn’t necessarily get you closer to anything.” This
biography explores the paradoxes of Avedon’s sixty-year ca-
reer as a fashion and portrait photographer. Avedon worried
that his commercial work would deny him artistic recogni-
tion, at a time when many did not consider photography a
real art. A control freak who became famous for capturing
spontaneity, he pushed boundaries with nude images of Ru-
dolf Nureyev, Allen Ginsberg, and members of Warhol’s Fac-
tory, while pursuing psychoanalysis—and two ill-fated mar-
riages—to suppress his homosexual desires. His stark style
made his images of models and celebrities iconic, but some
of his most moving portraits are of his dying father, whom
he felt he could never please.
The War of the Poor, by Éric Vuillard, translated from the
French by Mark Polizzotti (Other Press). This compact, artful
blend of history and fiction centers on the figure of Thomas
Müntzer, a Catholic priest from Saxony who, in 1524, led the
German Peasants’ War. Vuillard goes light on context, skip-
ping through time from one popular uprising to another in
cinematic bursts of image and action, and knitting things
together with a muscular, angry commentary on “the great
sophisms of power.” He never forces analogies with the pres-
ent, but the uprisings he describes feel like part of a war des-
tined to rage in any era beset by gross inequalities.
The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans (Riv-
erhead). In these six assured short stories and one novella,
women, mostly Black, undergo moments of trial and tran-
sition. Evans uses outré imaginative elements (a government
fact-checking agency called the Institute for Public History,
a death in an artistically rendered volcano) but grounds her
narratives in the familiar—family illnesses, fraught relation-
ships with exes, complicated reckonings with race. The title
novella, in which two Black women confront a historical
mystery in rural Wisconsin, and a story about a white col-
lege student facing consequences for wearing a bikini em-
blazoned with the Confederate flag offer particular insight
into the wearying, often violent effects of racism on the
minds and bodies of Black Americans.
who asked how he could still write in
German after the war. “In a foreign
tongue the poet lies.”
C
elan liked to quote the Russian poet
Osip Mandelstam’s description of a
poem as being like a message in a bottle,
tossed into the ocean and washed up on
the dunes many years later. A wanderer
happens upon it, opens it, and discovers
that it is addressed to its finder. Thus the
reader becomes its “secret addressee.”
Celan’s poetry, particularly in the early
volumes collected in “Memory Rose Into
Threshold Speech,” is written insistently
in search of a listener. Some of these
poems can be read as responses to such
writers as Kafka and Rilke, but often the
“you” to whom the poems speak has no
clear identity, and could be the reader, or
the poet himself. More than a dozen of
the poems in the book “Poppy and Mem-
ory” (1952), including the well-known
“Corona” and “Count the Almonds,” ad-
dress a lover, the Austrian poet Ingeborg
Bachmann. The relationship began in
Vienna in 1948 and continued for about
a year via mail, then picked up again for
a few more years in the late fifties. The
correspondence between the two poets,
published last year in an English trans-
lation by Wieland Hoban (Seagull), re-
veals that they shared an almost spiri-
tual connection that may have been
overwhelming to them both; passionate
exchanges are followed by brief, stutter-
ing lines or even by years of silence.
The Bachmann poems, deeply in-
flected by Surrealism, are among the
most moving of Celan’s early work.
Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt,
Austria, the daughter of a Nazi func-
tionary who served in Hitler’s Army.
She later recalled her teen-age years
reading forbidden authors—Baude-
laire, Zweig, Marx—while listening for
the whine of bombers. The contrast be-
tween their backgrounds was a source
of torment for Celan. Many of the love
poems contain images of violence, death,
or betrayal. “In the springs of your eyes/a
hanged man strangles the rope,” he writes
in “Praise of Distance.” The metaphor in
“Nightbeam” is equally macabre: “The
hair of my evening beloved burned most
brightly:/to her I sent the coffin made
of the lightest wood.” In another, he ad-
dresses her as “reaperess.” Bachmann an-
swered some of the lines with echoes in
