The Serial-Killer Detector

By Alec Wilkinson The New Yorker

A former journalist, equipped with an algorithm and the largest collection of murder records in the country, finds patterns in crime.

Hargrove estimates that two thousand serial killers are at large in the U.S.Illustration by Harry Campbell

Thomas Hargrove is a homicide archivist. For the past seven years, he has been collecting municipal records of murders, and he now has the largest catalogue of killings in the country—751,785 murders carried out since 1976, which is roughly twenty-seven thousand more than appear in F.B.I. files. 

States are supposed to report murders to the Department of Justice, but some report inaccurately, or fail to report altogether, and Hargrove has sued some of these states to obtain their records. Using computer code he wrote, he searches his archive for statistical anomalies among the more ordinary murders resulting from lovers’ triangles, gang fights, robberies, or brawls. Each year, about five thousand people kill someone and don’t get caught, and a percentage of these men and women have undoubtedly killed more than once. Hargrove intends to find them with his code, which he sometimes calls a serial-killer detector.

Hargrove created the code, which operates as a simple algorithm, in 2010, when he was a reporter for the now defunct Scripps Howard news service. The algorithm forms the basis of the Murder Accountability Project (map), a nonprofit that consists of Hargrove—who is retired—a database, a Web site, and a board of nine members, who include former detectives, homicide scholars, and a forensic psychiatrist. By a process of data aggregating, the algorithm gathers killings that are related by method, place, and time, and by the victim’s sex. It also considers whether the rate of unsolved murders in a city is notable, since an uncaught serial killer upends a police department’s percentages. Statistically, a town with a serial killer in its midst looks lawless.

In August of 2010, Hargrove noticed a pattern of murders in Lake County, Indiana, which includes the city of Gary. Between 1980 and 2008, fifteen women had been strangled. Many of the bodies had been found in vacant houses. Hargrove wrote to the Gary police, describing the murders and including a spreadsheet of their circumstances. “Could these cases reflect the activity of one or more serial killers in your area?” he asked.

The police department rebuffed him; a lieutenant replied that there were no unsolved serial killings in Gary. (The Department of Justice advises police departments to tell citizens when a serial killer is at large, but some places keep the information secret.) Hargrove was indignant. “I left messages for months,” he said. “I sent registered letters to the chief of police and the mayor.” Eventually, he heard from a deputy coroner, who had also started to suspect that there was a serial killer in Gary. She had tried to speak with the police, but they had refused her. After reviewing Hargrove’s cases, she added three more victims to his list.

Four years later, the police in Hammond, a town next to Gary, got a call about a disturbance at a Motel 6, where they found a dead woman in a bathtub. Her name was Afrikka Hardy, and she was nineteen years old. “They make an arrest of a guy named Darren Vann, and, as so often happens in these cases, he says, ‘You got me,’ ” Hargrove said. “Over several days, he takes police to abandoned buildings where they recover the bodies of six women, all of them strangled, just like the pattern we were seeing in the algorithm.” Vann had killed his first woman in the early nineties. In 2009, he went to jail for rape, and the killings stopped. When he got out, in 2013, Hargrove said, “he picked up where he’d left off.”

Researchers study serial killers as if they were specimens of natural history. One of the most comprehensive catalogues is the Radford Serial Killer Data Base, which has nearly five thousand entries from around the world—the bulk of them from the United States—and was started twenty-five years ago by Michael Aamodt, a professor emeritus at Radford University, in Virginia. According to the database, American serial killers are ten times more likely to be male than female. Ray Copeland, who was seventy-five when he was arrested, killed at least five drifters on his farm in Missouri late in the last century, and is the oldest serial killer in the database. The youngest is Robert Dale Segee, who grew up in Portland, Maine, and, in 1938, at the age of eight, is thought to have killed a girl with a rock. Segee’s father often punished him by holding his fingers over a candle flame, and Segee became an arsonist. After starting a fire, he sometimes saw visions of a crimson man with fangs and claws, and flames coming out of his head. In June of 1944, when Segee was fourteen, he got a job with the Ringling Brothers circus. The next month, the circus tent caught fire, and a hundred and sixty-eight people were killed. In 1950, after being arrested for a different fire, Segee confessed to setting the tent ablaze, but years later he withdrew his confession, saying that he had been mad when he made it.

Serial killers are not usually particularly bright, having an average I.Q. of 94.5, according to the database. They divide into types. Those who feel bound to rid the world of people they regard as immoral or undesirable—such as drug addicts, immigrants, or promiscuous women—are called missionaries. Black widows kill men, usually to inherit money or to claim insurance; bluebeards kill women, either for money or as an assertion of power. A nurse who kills patients is called an angel of death. A troller meets a victim by chance, and a trapper either observes his victims or works at a place, such as a hospital, where his victims come to him.

The F.B.I. believes that less than one per cent of the killings each year are carried out by serial killers, but Hargrove thinks that the percentage is higher, and that there are probably around two thousand serial killers at large in the U.S. “How do I know?” he said. “A few years ago, I got some people at the F.B.I. to run the question of how many murders in their records are unsolved but have been linked through DNA.” The answer was about fourteen hundred, slightly more than two per cent of the murders in the files they consulted. “Those are just the cases they were able to lock down with DNA,” Hargrove said. “And killers don’t always leave DNA—it’s a gift when you get it. So two per cent is a floor, not a ceiling.”

Hargrove is sixty-one. He is tall and slender, with a white beard and a skeptical regard. He lives with his wife and son in Alexandria, Virginia, and walks eight miles a day, to Mount Vernon or along the Potomac, while listening to recordings of books—usually mystery novels. He was born in Manhattan, but his parents moved to Yorktown, in Westchester County, when he was a boy. “I lived near Riverside Drive until I was four,” he said. “Then one day I showed my mom what I learned on the playground, which is that you can make a switchblade out of Popsicle sticks, and next thing I knew I was living in Yorktown.”

Hargrove’s father wrote technical manuals on how to use mechanical calculators, and when Hargrove went to college, at the University of Missouri, he studied computational journalism and public opinion. He learned practices such as random-digit-dialling theory, which is used to conduct polls, and he was influenced by “Precision Journalism,” a book by Philip Meyer that encourages journalists to learn survey methods from social science. After graduating, in 1977, he was hired by the Birmingham Post-Herald, in Alabama, with the understanding that he would conduct polls and do whatever else the paper needed. As it turned out, the paper needed a crime reporter. In 1978, Hargrove saw his first man die, the owner of a convenience store who had been shot during a robbery. He reported on a riot that began after police officers shot a sixteen-year-old African-American girl. Once, arriving at a standoff, he was shot at with a rifle by a drunk on a water tower. The bullet hit the gravel near his feet and made a sound that “was not quite a plink.” He also covered the execution of a man named John Lewis Evans, the first inmate put to death in Alabama after a Supreme Court abrogation of capital punishment in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. “They electrocuted people in Alabama in an electric chair called the Yellow Mama, because it was painted bright yellow,” Hargrove said. “Enough time had passed since the last execution that no one remembered how to do it. The first time, too much current went through too small a conduit, so everything caught fire. Everyone was crying, and I had trouble sleeping for days after.”

In 1990, Hargrove moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Scripps Howard, where, he said, “my primary purpose was to use numbers to shock people.” Studying the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File—“where we will all end up one day,” Hargrove said—he noticed that some people were included for a given year and dropped a few years later: people who had mistakenly been declared dead. From interviews, he learned that these people often have their bank accounts suddenly frozen, can’t get credit cards or mortgages, and are refused jobs because they fail background checks. Comparing a list of federal grants for at-risk kids in inner-city schools against Census Bureau Zip Codes, he found that two-thirds of the grants were actually going to schools in the suburbs. “He did all this through really clever logic and programming,” Isaac Wolf, a former journalist who had a desk near Hargrove’s, told me. “A combination of resourceful thinking and an innovative approach to collecting and analyzing data through shoe-leather work.”

In 2004, Hargrove was assigned a story about prostitution. To learn which cities enforced laws against the practice and which didn’t, he requested a copy of the Uniform Crime Report, an annual compilation published by the F.B.I., and received a CD containing the most recent report, from 2002. “Along with it, at no extra cost, was something that said ‘S.H.R. 2002,’ ” he said. It was the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Report, which includes all the murders reported to the Bureau, listing the age, race, sex, and ethnicity of the victim, along with the method and circumstances of the killing. As Hargrove looked through it, “the first thing I thought was, I wonder if it’s possible to teach a computer to spot serial victims.” Hargrove said that for six years he told each of his editors at Scripps Howard that he wanted to find serial killers using a computer, and the response was always, “You’re kidding, right?”

In 2007, Hargrove did an investigation into SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, after wondering why, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s infant-mortality records, so many more babies in Florida died from accidental suffocation than did babies in California, even though California had many more babies. During the following year, Hargrove interviewed coroners and pathologists around the country. “A growing number of them began saying, ‘To be honest, I might get in trouble for saying this, but sids doesn’t exist as such,’ ” he said. Hargrove concluded that sids wasn’t a diagnosis or a mysterious disease but the result of people putting babies in their cribs in such a way that they suffocated during sleep. Florida tended to attribute these deaths to accidental suffocation, California to sids. In the aftermath of his story, the C.D.C. created the Sudden Unexpected Infant Death Case Registry to evaluate each death. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey senator, met with Hargrove and then introduced the Sudden Death Data Enhancement and Awareness Act, which President Obama signed in 2014. After the sids story, Hargrove’s stock rose “insanely high in the newsroom,” he said. He told his boss that he still wanted to try to teach a computer to detect serial killers, and this time his boss said, “You’ve got a year.”

Hargrove began by requesting homicide reports from 1980 to 2008; they included more than five hundred thousand murders. At the start, he knew “what the computer didn’t know,” he said. “I could see the victims in the data.” He began trying to write an algorithm that could return the victims of a convicted killer. As a test case, he chose Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who, starting in the early eighties, murdered at least forty-eight women in Seattle, and left them beside the Green River. Above his desk, Hargrove taped a mugshot of Ridgway in which he looks tired and sullen. Underneath it, he wrote, “What do serial victims look like statistically?”

Creating the algorithm was laborious work. “He would write some code, and it would run through what seemed like an endless collection of records,” Isaac Wolf told me. “And we did not have expensive computer equipment, so it would run for days. It was sort of jerry-rigged, Scotch-Taped. He was always tinkering.”

“As soon as it clusters into a cultural bubble, it’s done.”

Ridgway was eventually identified by DNA and was arrested in 2001, as he was leaving his job at a Kenworth truck plant, where he had worked as a painter for thirty-two years. He told the police that strangling women was his actual career. “Choking is what I did, and I was pretty good at it,” he said. Ridgway’s wife—his third—was astonished to find out what he had done. They had met at a Parents Without Partners gathering and had been married for seventeen years. She said that he had always treated her like a newlywed. Ridgway had considered killing his first two wives but decided that he was too likely to get caught. Mostly, he killed prostitutes, and, if he killed one who had money on her, he regarded it as his payment for killing her.

Hargrove began each day with a review of what had failed the day before. He sorted the homicides by type, since he had been told that serial killers often strangle or bludgeon their victims, apparently because they prefer to prolong the encounter. He selected for women, because the F.B.I. said that seventy per cent of serial-killer victims are female. Each test took a day. He had no idea if anything would work. For a while, the only promising variable seemed to be “failure to solve.” “After a hundred things that didn’t work, that worked a little bit,” Hargrove said, holding his right thumb and forefinger close together. “I started making the terms more specific, looking at a group of factors—women, weapon, age, and location.”

With those terms, the algorithm organized the killings into approximately ten thousand groups. One might be: Boston, women, fifteen to nineteen years old, and handguns. Another might be: New Orleans, women, twenty to fifty, and strangulation. Since “failure to solve” had produced results, even if feeble, Hargrove told the computer to notify him of places where solution rates were unusually low. Seattle came in third, with most of the victims women whose cause of death was unknown—unknown because the bodies had been left outside and sufficient time had passed that the coroners could no longer determine how they had died. The computer, Hargrove knew, had finally seen Ridgway’s victims.

By reading meaning into the geography of victims and their killers, Hargrove is unwittingly invoking a discipline called geographic profiling, which is exemplified in the work of Kim Rossmo, a former policeman who is now a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. In 1991, Rossmo was on a train in Japan when he came up with an equation that can be used to predict where a serial killer lives, based on factors such as where the crimes were committed and where the bodies were found. As a New York City homicide detective told me, “Serial killers tend to stick to a killing field. They’re hunting for prey in a concentrated area, which can be defined and examined.” Usually, the hunting ground will be far enough from their homes to conceal where they live, but not so far that the landscape is unfamiliar. The farther criminals travel, the less likely they are to act, a phenomenon that criminologists call distance decay.

Rossmo has used geographic profiling to track terrorists—he studied where they lived, where they stored weapons, and the locations of the phone booths they used to make calls—and to identify places where epidemics began. He also worked with zoologists, to examine the hunting patterns of white sharks. Recently, Rossmo studied where the street artist Banksy left his early work, and found evidence to support the British Daily Mail’s assertion, made in 2008 but never corroborated, that Banksy is a middle-aged man from Bristol, England, named Robin Gunningham.

“In a murder investigation, when you step away from the Hollywood mystique, it’s about information,” Rossmo told me. “In any serial-murder case, the police are going to have thousands and thousands, even tens of thousands, of suspects.” In the Green River case, the police had eighteen thousand names. “So where do you start? We know quite a lot about the journey to a crime. By noting where killings took place or the bodies were discovered, you can actually create probability distributions.” In his book “Geographic Profiling,” Rossmo notes research that found, among other things, that right-handed criminals tend to turn left when fleeing but throw away evidence to the right, and that most criminals, when hiding in buildings, stay near the outside walls.

Using computers to find killers has historical precedent. Eric Witzig, a retired homicide detective and a former F.B.I. intelligence analyst who is on map’s board, worked on the F.B.I.’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, vicap, which was started by a Los Angeles homicide detective named Pierce Brooks. Witzig told me how, in the fifties, Brooks worked on the case of Harvey Glatman, who became known as the Lonely Hearts Killer. Glatman was a radio-and-TV repairman and an amateur photographer who would invite young women to model for him, saying that the photographs were for detective magazines. He would tie his victim up for the shoot, and then never remove the bonds. “The victim, a young woman, was not just tied up, but the turns of the bindings were sharp and precise, indicating that the offender took a lot of pleasure in it,” Witzig said.

Brooks started to research the way that some killers seemed to commit the same crime repeatedly. He began putting all his murder records onto three-by-five cards, and after becoming interested in computers in the late nineteen-fifties he asked the L.A. police department to buy him one. He was told that it was too expensive. In 1983, he presented the idea of a homicide-tracking computer database to Congress, after which the F.B.I. offered him a job at Quantico and bought him the equipment to start vicap. The program was meant to be an accessory to investigations, but detectives didn’t take to it. “The first and maybe main problem was the original vicap reporting form,” Witzig said. Brooks wanted to record every element of a homicide and, as a result, there were more than a hundred and fifty questions. “Of course, there was user resistance,” Witzig said. “No one wanted to do more paperwork.” He added that the program had “some of the brightest law-enforcement deep thinkers in the world involved, but we exist at map because they failed.”

Map has its own limitations. Since the algorithm relies on place as a search term, it is blind to killers who are nomadic over any range greater than adjacent counties. There is also a species of false positive that Hargrove calls the Flint effect: some cities, such as Flint, Michigan, are so delinquent in solving murders that they look as if they were beset by serial killers.

Someone versed in statistics can run the algorithm, which appears on map’s Web site. The rest of us, who might, for example, wish to know how many killings are unsolved where we live, can use the site’s “search cases” function. Deborah Smith, who lives in New Orleans, is a hobby map searcher and a forum moderator on Websleuths, an online watering hole for amateur detectives. “I keep spreadsheets of murdered and missing women around the country, with statistics, and I highlight murders that I think might be related,” she told me. “I have them for nearly every state, and that comes from map. If I have a killer, like, say, Israel Keys, who was in Seattle about fifteen years ago, I’ll look up murders in Seattle and parts of Alaska, because he lived there, too, and see if there were any the police might have overlooked.” She added, “map is just extremely, extremely useful for that. There isn’t really anything else like it.”

map’s board hasn’t determined what to do with the algorithm’s findings, however, and the question presents moral and practical difficulties for Hargrove. “We have to figure out our rules of engagement,” he told me. “Under what scenario do we start calling police?” A few months ago, Hargrove informed the Cleveland police that there appeared to be about sixty murders, all of women, that might involve a serial killer, or, from the range of methods, perhaps even three serial killers. Twelve of the women had convictions for prostitution, and their bodies were found in two distinct geographic clusters. Hargrove can’t say anything about his exchange with the Cleveland police, because map’s rules dictate that such communications are privileged. The police wrote me that, as a result of Hargrove’s analysis, “a small taskforce is being considered to look at several unsolved homicides.” The head of the department’s special-investigations bureau, James McPike, told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, of map, “We’re going to be working with the group to help us identify what we might be able to do.”

Hargrove is pleased about the investigation but he also worries that something may go awry. “What if they arrest the wrong guy, and he sues?” he asked. “I contacted a bunch of police departments in 2010, when I was a reporter, because I wanted to see if the algorithm worked. Now I know it works—there’s no question in my mind. In certain places, we can say, ‘These victims have an elevated probability of having a common killer.’ In 2010, though, I had a big media company behind me, with lawyers and media insurance. Now I’m a guy with a nonprofit that has fourteen hundred dollars in the bank and a board of nine directors and no insurance.”

One of map’s most public benefits has been making people aware of how few murders in America are solved. In 1965, a killing led to an arrest more than ninety-two per cent of the time. In 2016, the number was slightly less than sixty per cent, which was the lowest rate since records started being kept. Los Angeles had the best rate of solution, seventy-three per cent, and Detroit the worst, fourteen per cent. As Enzo Yaksic, a map board member and the director of the Northeastern University Atypical Homicide Research Group, told me, the project “demonstrates that there’s a whole population of unapprehended killers that are clearly out there.”

Another of map’s board members, Michael Arntfield, is a professor at the University of Western Ontario, where he runs a cold-case society. It is focussing on the largest finding of the algorithm, a collection of a hundred unsolved murders of women in the Atlanta area over forty years. Most of the victims were African-American, and all were strangled. From the Atlanta police, Arntfield got names for forty-four of the women, and has been learning more about them. (Studying the backgrounds of murder victims in the hope of discovering how they met their killers is a discipline called victimology.) Arntfield and his colleagues separated the victims into two groups: a small group of older women, who were killed in their homes, and a larger group of young women, many of whom may have been prostitutes. From newspaper accounts, Arntfield has found two men who have committed crimes with strikingly similar attributes, both of whom are already in prison. Adam Lee, the head of Atlanta’s Major Crime Section, which includes homicide, told me that the police haven’t yet linked these murders to a particular killer, but he said that he considers map a useful tool and is “very interested in sitting down with Arntfield.”

Hargrove told me he hopes that eventually detectives will begin to use the algorithm to connect cases themselves, and that map will help solve a murder. Meanwhile, he is considering creating a companion site that tracks arson, and has begun compiling data on fires, though he hasn’t had time to post it yet. “There’s a link between serial arson and serial killings,” he said. “A lot of guys start out burning things.”

We were walking in Alexandria by the river, along Hargrove’s usual route, and he said, “Our primary purpose is to gather as many records as possible.” He paused. “It’s seductive how powerful these records are, though. Just through looking, you can spot serial killers. In various places over various years, you can see that something god-awful has happened.” ♦

Right Side of History

The Danger of Knowing You’re on the ‘Right Side of History’

By 

Andrew Sullivan New York Magazine

Many Democrats found ways to defend the indefensible because the cause demanded it. Photo: New York Daily News Archive/NY Daily News via Getty Images

I have to say I was deeply moved by the New York Times op-ed yesterday by an evangelical law professor from Alabama. The piece, by the wonderfully named William S. Brewbaker III, moved me because it was the first genuinely Christian thing I’ve heard an evangelical say about the Roy Moore scandal. It did more than renounce the tribalism that has led so many alleged Christians to back Moore; it presented Christianity, properly understood, as the core alternative to tribalism, as one way out of tribalism’s dead end. Brewbaker’s critical and deeply evangelical point:

To begin with, sin is a problem from which no one is exempt. If God’s love required the suffering and death of the Son of God in order to redeem us, we should not underestimate the consequences of sin in our own lives. The world is not divided into “good people” and “bad people”; to quote St. Paul, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Or, as the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”

It is thus wrong to attack one’s critics, as Mr. Moore did recently on Twitter, as “the forces of evil” and attribute their questions about serious allegations to “a spiritual battle.”

This is not just an evangelical truth. It is deeply embedded in all of Christianity. No party, no cause, no struggle, however worthy, is ever free from evil. No earthly cause is entirely good. And to believe with absolute certainty that you are on “the right side of history,” or on the right side of a battle between “good and evil,” is a dangerous and seductive form of idolatry. It flatters yourself. And it will lead you inevitably to lose your moral bearings because soon, you will find yourself doing and justifying things that are evil solely because they advance the cause of the “good.” These compromises can start as minor and forgivable trade-offs; but they compound over time. In the Catholic church, the conviction that the institution could do no wrong, that its reputation must endure because it represented the right side in the struggle against evil … led to the mass rape of children and teens.

The religious right’s embrace of Trump is of a similar trope. It is not some kind of aberration in the transformation of a faith into a worldly and political cause, it is its logical consequence. The Christian right’s support for a sociopathic, cruel, and vulgar pagan was inevitable, in other words, from the moment the Moral Majority was born. If politics is fused with religion, and if your opponents are deemed evil, then almost anything can be justified to defeat them. Sooner or later, you’l find yourself defending the molestation of a minor. Which is why I have long refused to call this political movement Christian, but Christianist. It is not about faith; it is about power.

But evangelical Republicans are not, of course, the only group susceptible to such corruption. Democrats are human as well, as we have so abundantly discovered. Many of them have also made their political struggle into a secular form of religion, and found myriad ways to defend the indefensible because the cause demanded it. I vividly remember Gloria Steinem’s op-ed defending Bill Clinton’s sex abuse at the time (she still refuses to disown it). I remember how many wanted to conflate sexual abuse with private consensual sex. I also recall a bizarre very-Washington lunch in that period when, for some reason, I was seated next to Barbra Streisand (my first and thankfully last encounter with the singer). I mentioned Paula Jones’s lawsuit — which I’d just defended in the pages of The New Republic — just to see what she’d say. Streisand’s lip curled. “Ugh,” she scoffed. “She’s a little kurva.” I later discovered that this means “whore,” “bitch,” or “slut.” And that was by no means an unusual Democratic response of the time.

And so the other op-ed I was impressed by this week was Michelle Goldberg’s beginning of a reckoning with the toxic legacy of the Clintons. In the age of Weinstein and Trump, Spacey and Moore, it has suddenly dawned on many that Bill Clinton’s history is, well, “problematic.” Goldberg is particularly troubled (and rightly so) by the case of Juanita Broaddrick. Broaddrick claims she was callously raped by Bill Clinton many moons ago, and her story was at first repressed by NBC (until after the Senate vote to acquit Clinton) and then dismissed or forgotten by the mainstream media. Eighteen years later, Goldberg now believes Broaddrick’s core story. Here’s the nub of the encounter in a hotel room. First he kisses her and is rebuffed; then:

“[H]e tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip … He starts to, um, bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen but he wouldn’t listen to me. … It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘Please stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip. … When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says ‘You better get some ice on that.’ And he turned and went out the door.”

Hard to get that phrase out of your mind once you’ve heard it, isn’t it?

Three weeks later, Broaddrick attended a small fundraiser for the Clintons. She said she was too ashamed to grapple with what happened, and felt guilty for letting Clinton meet her in her hotel room in the first place — classic patterns of a sexual victim. A friend of hers had picked up the Clintons at the airport and Hillary Clinton had asked her friend if Broaddrick would be at the event. Broaddrick recounted that, at the fundraiser, Hillary sought her out, took her hand and said, “I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate what you do for him.” When Broaddrick removed her hand, Clinton held on to it, looked her right in the face, and reiterated: “Do you understand? Everything that you do.” Broaddrick had no doubt in her mind what Hillary was conveying to her. She was thanking her for staying silent.

I believe Broaddrick on this part of the story as well. Goldberg, tellingly, doesn’t. As soon as Broaddrick’s story starts to impose on today’s tribal loyalties, and possibly impugn Hillary, it loses credibility. Suddenly, Broaddrick’s account is “wildly unlikely.” Broaddrick was obviously misreading Hillary’s remark, Goldberg speculates. “Most reporting about the Clinton marriage shows Bill going to great lengths to hide his betrayals.” On the question of Bill Clinton’s decades-long history of sexual abuse, Goldberg implies, Hillary Clinton had absolutely no idea what was going on.

And yet this is what Goldberg also believes about Hillary Clinton: that she’s an intelligent, shrewd political operator; a woman who pioneered the notion of a First Lady as co-president; someone intimately involved in every aspect of her husband’s career and campaigns; supremely attuned to what her enemies could use against her; a wife whose televised defense of her husband’s account of his sexual past in the primary season saved his career; a master of detail and strategy; worldly because she had to be. And yet at the same time, Goldberg believes that Hillary knew nothing about her political partner’s history of abusing, harassing, and exploiting women, was for decades a staggering naïf, and not an equal partner, was kept out of the information loop all along, and shocked, shocked, every time one of these bizarre accusations emerged. Well, I guess that’s possible. Just “wildly unlikely.”

There’s another thing we know about Hillary Clinton. She believed her whole life that she was on the side of the good, that her cause was just, that politics had to be dirty at times, but that advancing legislation to support women, and becoming the first woman president would make it all worthwhile. She was always for women, remember, for their dignity and equality. She was a feminist pioneer. She sacrificed so much for women and children, faced down such constant misogyny, and yet persisted through sexist hell. Her devoted followers believe all of that. It was the core message of her campaign last year. But the “line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.” Even your idol’s. Perhaps especially your idol’s.

There is a moment here. No party is immune from evil; no tribe has a monopoly of good. If these bipartisan sex-abuse revelations can begin to undermine the tribalism that so poisons our public life, to reveal that beneath the tribes, we are all flawed and human, they may not only be a long-overdue turning point for women. They may be a watershed for all of us.

Rethinking Civilization

I’ve been reading one of those rare books that really changes your worldview — or somehow crystallizes where your mind has been trending. It’s called Against the Grain, an account of the emergence of the earliest states in human civilization, around 6,000 years ago. James C. Scott, of Yale, summarizes and synthesizes much of what we have discovered in the past 20 years about this period, as humans slowly transitioned from our hunter-gatherer tribes into the earliest agricultural settlements.

The usual narrative is that this was progress, the use of intelligence to finally better our lot, leading to writing and culture and politics and what we call civilization. But that drastically misreads much of the evidence. It’s increasingly clear that the shift toward “sedentism,” settling down in one place to grow crops and fence off animals, was a disaster for human beings. Our health declined sharply; our average height diminished; our diet worsened. The immense variety of the meat and berries and vegetation that had long provided us with a healthy diet became suddenly constrained to far fewer wheats and grains. A less diverse source of food made us more vulnerable to famines, when harvests failed; and the first devastating epidemics emerged, caused by the crowding of humans and animals into spaces they had not evolved to live in, and a mixing of populations once kept apart.

And the evidence shows that most humans at the time were understandably unimpressed. The persistence of hunter-gatherer communities throughout the early state era — and their healthier, more leisurely, and just as intelligent lives — made many suspicious of the new way of life. They weren’t starving; their hunting techniques required sophisticated skills, planning, and coordination; they had far more time to goof off than their successors, who found themselves pressed into monotonous drudgery on the same strips of land.

But for a few, the new order gave them extraordinary power. Control the territory and you control a lot. And so civilization begins with exploitation, hierarchy, and control. The relative egalitarianism and intergenerational communities of human society for over 190,000 years slowly attenuated. Slavery soon emerged as a way to maximize labor and power. Walls were built around these settlements not to keep “barbarians” out but to keep the enslaved or controlled inside. The deeper you read into the book, and mull its research, the harder it is to ignore the possibility that modern civilization has, in one respect, been a gigantic, species-level mistake, a bid for power and mastery over nature and other human beings that has led to stunning achievements, but also untold misery and suffering.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, as the final ratchet in this bid for earthly mastery unfolds, we also see how this process has not just ended in collective unhappiness, but is now destroying the very environment which created us. The sixth mass extinction we humans are even now accelerating — along with the brutality with which we treat so many of God’s creatures — surely forces us to reckon with this deep and long view. It resonates with the story of Genesis, of course, the myth by which humans, once blessed by their environment, and engaged in a balanced and mutually beneficial relationship with nature and each other, decided to bite the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, causing the Fall. We have some deep specieswide awareness of something we once lost, an awareness of an ancient Faustian bargain with power that has come back to haunt us, and terrorize most other life-forms on the earth.

This is not reversible. It’s where we are. But its logic of domination, exploitation, and power is still resistible. This, it seems to me, is one way of understanding the shift in human consciousness that Jesus of Nazareth revealed. We may not be able to undo this in reality — for power exists, knowledge is out of the bottle, and, in much more recent time, the vast machine of global capitalism has an unstoppable, destructive momentum of its own. But we can begin to undo this logic of mastery in our minds and souls. We can seek to give up power and wealth if we want; we can temper our intellect’s power with moral humility; we can see through the delusions that the world has created and which have not made us any happier at all.

And we can rejoin nature as equals, not masters. It so happened that this week I also stumbled across this letter by the Trappist monk,Thomas Merton to Rachel Carson, after her seminal environmental tract, Silent Spring, on Maria Popova’s wonderful site, Brain Pickings. Merton saw that our environmental crisis cannot be seen in isolation. It is a symptom of something deeper and more rotten:

[Silent Spring] is perhaps much more timely even than you or I realize. Though you are treating of just one aspect, and a rather detailed aspect, of our technological civilization, you are, perhaps without altogether realizing, contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization … Your book makes it clear to me that there is a consistent pattern running through everything that we do, through every aspect of our culture, our thought, our economy, our whole way of life … It is now the most vitally important thing for all of us, however we may be concerned with our society, to try to arrive at a clear, cogent statement of our ills, so that we may begin to correct them. Otherwise, our efforts will be directed to purely superficial symptoms only, and perhaps not even at things related directly to the illness. On the contrary, it seems that our remedies are instinctively those which aggravate the sickness: the remedies are expressions of the sickness itself.

I would almost dare to say that the sickness is perhaps a very real and very dreadful hatred of life as such, of course subconscious, buried under our pitiful and superficial optimism about ourselves and our affluent society. But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of “plenty” and “happiness,” and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself. In order to “survive,” we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends.

The key is perspective: seeing our lives through our real history, which is at least 200,000 years, not 2,000 or even 6,000. Only then can we see how aberrant and reckless our little slice of human history is. Only then can we see our way to overcoming and surviving it, if that is still possible. Only then can we begin the process of healing our species and world from this self-inflicted wound.

Happy Thanksgiving. See you the Friday after.

Frequent Gunfire What was it like to be Ernest Hemingway?

By John Banville The Nation

The vigorously kicked-up dust has long since settled, and one wonders anew what all the fuss was about. 

He sent himself to Paris in the 1920s, which was the place to be just then. He shrewdly latched on to a lot of influential literary people and later learned how to be a celebrity by associating with stars of the screen and the corrida. He wrote a clutch of good stories and a handful of novels ranging from fresh and original through mediocre to abysmally bad—although the posthumously published The Garden of Eden is nearly very good, in its weird way. He mythologized himself as the Great American Novelist, despite the fact that none of his novels is set in America (except To Have and Have Not, a minor work) and he was arguably at his best in the medium of the short story. Later in life, he blundered into depression, alcoholism, paranoia, and manic delusion, and killed himself. At best, much of his life was only of passing notoriety—or so one would have thought—and yet the legend lives on, as tenacious as ever. How to account for it?

Perhaps a man possessed of an ego the size of a hot-air balloon could only subsist within a myth. To keep himself airborne required so much huffing and puffing that inevitably he ran out of breath. He was jealous, insecure, treacherous to his friends, and merciless toward his promoters—no good turn, no matter how good it was, went unpunished—and although he overestimated his talent, he also largely wasted it, which was precisely the charge he had laid against his old pal F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, with The Great Gatsby, surely did write if not the then at least a great American novel. On the evidence of his letters and conversations as reported by Mary Dearborn in her new biography, he was also a racist, an unrelenting anti-Semite, and a homophobe, and while pretending to treasure women, he despised, feared, and failed utterly to understand them.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A BIOGRAPHY

By Mary V. Dearborn

The term “literary lion” could have been invented for him, but he ended up in old age pacing the cage of his collapsing self-regard in ever more desperate circles. He—the real he—would have been the perfect subject for one of his own novels, only he would have heroicized and sentimentalized his image to such a degree that the fictional self-portrait would have turned out a travesty. And yet, for all that, there was a touch of the tragic to Ernest Hemingway that was almost ennobling, and his end was painfully sad.

Mary Dearborn, who has written biographies of Peggy Guggenheim, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer—no shrinking violets, they—tells us that when she began to consider undertaking a life of Hemingway, she asked herself the question of “whether a woman could bring something to the subject that previous biographers had not.” Then it occurred to her that perhaps “what I did not bring in tow” was precisely what fitted her for the task. “I have no investment in the Hemingway legend,” Dearborn explains. “I think we should look away from what feeds into the legend and consider what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer.” A fine program for a biographer; the trouble is, behind the legend lay resentment and jealousy, meanness of spirit, writerly irresolution, and, more often than not, artistic failure—though the public of his time, avid for colorfully embroidered tales of derring-do, whether on the battlefield, on the hunting ground, or at the writing desk, refused to acknowledge it. The people’s Papa was beyond reproach.

In her prologue, Dearborn recounts how, after a panel discussion on Hemingway’s work in a New York City library in the 1990s, a professor and critic who she recognized, “a burly man with a peppery crew cut” whose specialty was American literature in the Jazz Age, stood up to announce that “Hemingway made it possible for me to do what I do.” Afterward, she thought about the matter and came to the conclusion that the peppery professor had been

talking about whether writing was an acceptable occupation for a man, both on his terms and the world’s. Hemingway, not only in his 

extraliterary pursuits as a marlin fisherman, a big game hunter, a boxer, and a bullfight aficionado but also in his capacity as an icon of American popular culture, was the very personification of virility—and he was a writer. Any taint of femininity or aestheticism attached to writing had been wiped clean.

The insight is accurate, and it highlights one of the more malign aspects of Hemingway’s legacy to American literature. By endlessly trumpeting the fact that one could be a writer and literary artist and at the same time preserve one’s he-manhood, he goaded numerous male writers who came after him into baring their chests and swinging their fists and downing oceans of alcohol to show that they also could be tough guys.

It was a lot of nonsense, of course, but the damage was done. Look at the all-too-obvious example of Mailer, of whose growing reputation the aging Hemingway was sullenly jealous, referring to him sarcastically as the “Brooklyn Tolstoy.” Mailer at his best was a very good writer, especially when he was writing journalism, yet in his Oedipal struggle with Papa, he chose to cast himself in the role of a Jewish fighting Irishman: getting into drunken brawls at parties, stabbing his wife, championing the cause of an unregenerate convicted murderer, and making a fool of himself by running a loud and farcical campaign for New York City mayor.

Dearborn notes that Mailer considered Hemingway “easily America’s greatest living writer,” but he also asked readers to consider how “silly” A Farewell to Arms and Death in the Afternoon would be if “written by a man who was five-four, wore glasses, spoke in a shrill voice, and was a physical coward.” Apart from the absurdity of such a proposition—did not a little man of the type Mailer describes write In Cold Blood?—the obvious point is that those two novels, despite many fine qualities, were silly, as even some of Hemingway’s acolytes will acknowledge. With its starkly described battle scenes and buttoned-down prose style, A Farewell to Arms must have seemed revolutionary in its day, but the love affair between its hero, Frederic Henry, and the nurse Catherine Barkley is deeply embarrassing, despite the author’s attempts at tough-minded tenderness and a stoicism that keeps dissolving in heroically withheld tears. As Dearborn puts it, for all that Hemingway bragged about “getting past such old, hollow terms (and concepts) as ‘valor’ and ‘glory’ in pared-down, minimal language, A Farewell to Arms was a highly romantic war novel.” Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that its author saw the book as, and probably believed it to be, something entirely other.

Looking back at the critical reception of Hemingway’s novels at the time of their publication, one is baffled by the almost universal enthusiasm with which they were received by reviewers. Even such a finely discriminating assessor as Edmund Wilson was sometimes taken in by the fake machismo—mind you, is there such a thing as authentic machismo?—and saccharine emotionalism behind the tight-lipped tone of so much of Hemingway’s writing. Wilson considered The Sun Also Rises to be the “best novel by one of my generation”—a generation, it should be noted, that included Fitzgerald—and he praised the “barometric accuracy” of A Farewell to Arms, although, to be fair, he did worry a little about what Dearborn describes as the “sentimentality he saw lurking in Hemingway’s work.” As she uses it here, “lurking” is a charitable word; a miasma of sentimentality hovers over everything Hemingway produced.

One suspects that the image of himself that Hemingway forged—surely the aptest word in the context—is founded in the history of his remarkable and remarkably troubled family. He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, a middle-class child in a solidly middle-class milieu. He grew up strong, handsome, attractive, and troubled. His parents were entirely mismatched—dominant mother, diffident father—and he was still squabbling with his siblings, especially his sister Marcelline, well into adulthood. His lifelong fascination with gender identity probably sprang in part from the fact that when Ernest and Marcelline were toddlers, their mother, Grace, would dress them in matching outfits, sometimes as boys, sometimes as girls.

Of Grace Hemingway, it is an understatement to say that she was larger than life. “She had a generous, expansive, and loving nature,” Dearborn asserts, and “her energy was inexhaustible,” but surely she must have been for much of the time an unsustainable burden upon those around her. Grace was a singer who had her debut at Madison Square Garden under the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, and, although she never made it as a diva, she worked diligently at her music, composing songs and taking on well-paying pupils. Dearborn writes:

Later in life, when her voice had deteriorated to the extent that she could no longer give lessons, she took up art and taught that instead, as well as enjoying brisk sales of her paintings. She designed and built furniture. Later still, she had a lucrative career lecturing on such topics as Boccaccio, Aristophanes, Dante and Euripides, and wrote poetry as well.

Hemingway famously defined courage as the ability to sustain grace under pressure; the condition of much of his own early life must have been, rather, pressure under Grace.

His father, Clarence, known as Ed, was an obstetrician; he was either fatally weak or an example of the enlightened modern man, depending on how you look at it. Ed largely assumed the role of homemaker, since, as his youngest daughter said, “My mother was exempt from household chores, because she must have time to practice her music.” It was Ed who did the cooking, being particularly fond of baking, and he was “famous for his doughnuts.” Fizzing with ambition, testosterone, and the urge to violence—“I like to shoot a rifle and I like to kill”—Ernest must have felt ambivalent, to say the least, before the spectacle of his father in an apron, with flour on his hands, busy over the stove. But Ed Hemingway was a man of the outdoors also, an enthusiastic hunter and fisherman and handy with a rifle, even if, here again, it was Grace who elbowed her way forward for the young Ernest. Dearborn writes, with shaky grammar: “As a little baby, his mother said, she held him in her left arm while she shot a pistol with her right, Ernest shouting with delight at every report.”

The world of the Hemingways rattled with frequent gunfire, and it is no coincidence that Ernest’s life should have been rounded with the awful symmetry of Ed Hemingway’s suicide—he shot himself with the pistol his father had carried in the Civil War—and his own death decades later, on the morning of July 2, 1961, when he put both barrels of a shotgun to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Yet it would be wrong to concentrate overmuch on the tragic aspects of the Hemingway story. As Dearborn reminds us, in the early years of his adulthood, he was a golden youth in a golden time. Postwar Paris, as he portrayed it lovingly but not always accurately in A Moveable Feast, was a dawning place in which it was bliss to be alive, and more blissful still to be a young literary star trailing clouds of war-wounded glory in his wake. Or as Sherwood Anderson more plainly put it, “Mr. Hemingway is young, strong, full of laughter, and he can write.” He was also newly married, to Hadley Richardson, a handsome, motherly woman nearly eight years his senior, from whom he eventually would part, but whose memory he would honor for the rest of his life.

Hemingway’s women were a decidedly mixed bunch. Hadley, whom he wrote about with a palpable ache of nostalgia in A Moveable Feast, was the most sensible and supportive of the lot, and certainly the one who understood him most clearly, in all his strengths and his more numerous weaknesses. Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife, was the classic spoiled little rich girl, though she had a clever and perceptive side to her. Martha Gellhorn, who brazenly stole him from under Pauline’s nose, was the hard-bitten woman journalist typical of the interwar years—think of Lee Miller, Lillian Ross, Dorothy Parker—and the one who made him most proud of possessing her, as he imagined he did. His last wife, Mary Welsh, is something of an enigma, being at once a hunting companion and a player with him of those erotic games—mostly centered on exchanging sexual identities, and his obsession with hair—in which he indulged with the highest seriousness. In The Garden of Eden, Hemingway writes with unexpected candor, though in fictional terms, of his strong hair fetish—he found the short hairstyles especially exciting—and what Dearborn identifies as his “ambivalence about and fascination with gender roles and sexuality, and a lifelong tendency towards androgyny.”

There is also the abiding question as to the possibility of a homosexual element to his nature—the question, simply, as to whether he might have been gay. Dearborn is adamant on this, stating flatly on the first page of her book: “The short answer is no.” But in areas as delicate as this, short answers are often inadequate to the occasion. There is, for example, the matter of Jim Gamble, a Red Cross captain 12 years older than Ernest, with whom, at the close of the First World War, he spent a holiday week in Taormina, Sicily, that left him with vivid memories. Dearborn, in this instance keeping firmly to her seat on the fence, notes that “some scholars have speculated that the two enjoyed a homosexual relationship during this time.” Certainly, in a letter to Gamble in 1919, Hemingway writes with humid wistfulness of “old Taormina by moonlight and you and me, a little illuminated some times, but always just pleasantly so, strolling through that great old place….”

And then there was the seemingly telling remark by one of Hemingway’s lovers—Agnes von Kurowsky, who nursed him in the hospital during the First World War and became the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms—to Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s first biographer: “You know how [Ernest] was. Men loved him. You know what I mean.” How much are we to make of such an innuendo, and is Dearborn being disingenuous recording it while yet withholding judgment on its significance? Hemingway would not have been the first red-blooded heterosexual to stray in youth from the straight and narrow sexual path. None of this would much matter, of course, if Hemingway had not flaunted his manly sexuality to an almost risible degree—a skeptical Zelda Fitzgerald remarked, “Nobody is as male as all that”—as he went about manufacturing the myth of himself.

A large component of that myth was Hemingway’s enthusiasm for slaughtering animals large and small, from harmless game birds to lions, tigers, and elephants. The hunt, for him, was closely allied to warfare and to bullfighting, and to the two combined; as he remarked gleefully to a friend, speaking of the bullfight, “It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing to happen to you.” He occupied many a ringside seat, not only at bullfights but in battles too, but that he was courageous is beyond doubt, even if he saw no more than a fraction of the fighting he claimed to have done in various theaters of war.

Hemingway was famously injury-prone, but few of his injuries were come by in combat—as Dearborn wittily but witheringly notes, “If there is such a thing as a professional soldier, Ernest was a professional veteran.” The plain fact is that, away from the battlefield, he was naturally clumsy, and had an unfortunate tendency to fall down and bang his head against hard surfaces.

The mishaps were not all of his own making. Dearborn gives a lively account—indeed, her book, at more than 600 pages of narrative, is lively and briskly entertaining throughout—of the famous air crash in Uganda in 1954, when the pilot lost control of the plane and had to make an emergency landing. The Hemingways escaped relatively unscathed, though the New York Daily Mirror, in its January 25 issue, reported them dead. Later on the same trip, they were involved in a much more serious airplane accident, which left Hemingway with, as Dearborn writes, “his fifth major concussion and probably the worst of any of them…. Ernest awakened the next morning to see that a wound in his scalp behind his right ear had leaked a clear liquid—cerebral fluid—on the pillow.”

The successive physical injuries Hemingway suffered—it is striking how many of the photographs taken of Hemingway throughout his life show him with his head swathed in bandages—must have contributed to his steady decline, physical and mental, in the latter half of the 1950s. In these years, he was drinking quantities of alcohol that would have killed any ordinary person—he would start his day with a quart or two of beer before breakfast, and later move on to frozen daiquiris and jugs of iced martinis—and he was also taking what amounted to a pharmacopoeia of serious prescription drugs.

In 1961, the year of his death, Hemingway had been diagnosed as suffering from hemochromatosis, probably inherited from his father; the disease, which leads to an excessive buildup of iron in the body, causes physical and psychological disorders. The deterioration in Hemingway’s health was unstoppable. As the end approached, his life must have been well-nigh intolerable, and one cannot but admire his tenacity in holding on, and pity him both for his physical afflictions and his mental anguish.

Family life, too, was a torment. His son Greg took merciless revenge on Hemingway for what he saw as his ill treatment. Addressing his father as “Ernestine”—Greg was himself a cross-dresser—and calling him a “gin-soaked abusive monster,” the son wrote that “when it’s all added up, papa it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons—Hadley, Pauline, Mary, Patrick, and possibly myself.” Nor did Greg stop there:

You’ll never write that great novel because you’re a sick man—sick in the head and too fucking proud and scared to admit it. In spite of the critics, that last one was as sickly a bucket of sentimental slop as was ever scrubbed off a barroom floor.

If by “that last one” Greg meant The Old Man and the Sea—Dearborn does not cite the date of Greg’s letter—one might want to employ more temperate language to describe that final novel but still concur with his assessment of the book, even though it helped win Hemingway the Nobel Prize.

What was it like to be Ernest Hemingway? For all the worldly success, the adulation and adventuring, the boozing and braggadocio, the fact that his sense of himself was cocked on a hair trigger must have kept him in a permanent state of terror until he could take it no longer and put that shotgun to his head. He kept up the facade of the hairy-chested artist for as long as he was able, but at the last, even golden youths lose their glister and must come to dust. Perhaps there are still burly types out there who take comfort and encouragement from the example of a life lived to the full, in the world and in the study, and if so, good luck to them. Their exemplar was less fortunate than they.