Utopia, Abandoned Ivrea was once a model for workers’ rights and progressive design.

Utopia, Abandoned

By Nikil Saval NY TIMES

The Italian town Ivrea was once a model for workers’ rights and progressive design. Now, it’s both a cautionary tale and evidence of a grand experiment in making labor humane.

Image

The La Serra Complex in Ivrea, Italy, designed by Iginio Cappai and Pietro Mainardis, opened in 1976; it was a social gathering space for Olivetti employees that included a hotel and movie theater.CreditCreditNick Ballón

IN THE 1950'S, the small town of Ivrea, which is about an hour’s train ride north of Turin, became the site of an unheralded experiment in living and working. Olivetti, a renowned designer and manufacturer of typewriters and accounting machines, decided to provide for its employees through retirement. They were given the opportunity to take classes at an on-site sale and trade school; their lunchtime hours would be filled with speeches or performances from visiting dignitaries (actors, musicians, poets); and they would receive a substantial pension upon retirement. They would be housed, if they liked, in Olivetti-constructed modern homes and apartments. Their children would receive free day care, and expecting mothers would be granted 10 months maternity leave. July would be a time of holiday, so that workers with homes in the surrounding countryside could tend to small farms — it was important to the company that workers not feel a division between city and country. Italy’s best Modernist architects would be hired to design in the Modernist style: Factories, canteens, offices and study areas would be airy palaces of glass curtain walls, flat concrete roofs and glazed brick tile. It would be a model for the nation, and for the world.

All of this was the initiative of Adriano Olivetti, who had inherited the company from his father, Camillo, who founded it in the early 20th century. Adriano, born in 1901, was a businessman of unusually wide learning, with strong inclinations toward humanism. He was a self-taught student of city planning, and he read extensively the architectural and urbanist literature of the day. He hired famous designers to work on his products, making some of them, such as the 1949 Lettera 22 typewriter and the 1958 Elea 9003 mainframe computer, into icons of design. Olivetti was a devout Christian and a socialist, but he was distant from the two main political parties, the Christian Democrats and the Communists, that occupied these poles in midcentury Italy. Instead, in 1946, he formed his own political party, Il Movimento Comunità, which was intended to shift power to the diverse social bases and competences of a broadly conceived community, away from the patronage and bureaucracy encouraged by Italy’s political parties, thereby charting a new course for not only the country but for the entire modern age. Though it was a failure, his ideas of increased welfare provision became more common and acceptable in Italian politics.

Today, the infrastructure the company built might sound like the standard “company town,” such as 19th-century Pullman, Ill., built by the Pullman railway company, but Olivetti was in fact different. In America, company towns first arose as a result of low-wage workers lacking both rights and basic amenities like transportation. The more dependent an employee was on the company he worked for, the more control the company had: Complacent workers whose boss is also their landlord don’t strike or ask for sick leave or better health care — or so the logic went. This era of company towns in America was effectively ushered out by modernity, as labor rights increased thanks to New Deal domestic policies — and also because, in some instances, workers began striking when employers attempted to evict them from company housing. The rise of mass transport also made proximity to the workplace less of an essential need.

In Europe, however, the company town had its roots in the model estates of the Victorian era, where wealthy landowners housed workers and caretakers in paltry accommodations. At the dawn of the 20th century, and in a rapidly industrializing Italy especially, the fortunes of various small towns were, and for the most part remain, inextricably linked to private companies. The main draw of Rosignano Solvay, established in 1912 in southern Tuscany, for instance, is its beautiful white sand beaches, the blanching of the sand a result of toxic chemical waste from the still-operational Solvay plant, which gave the town its name. Colleferro, a dreary town just outside of Rome built around a munitions factory that closed in 1968, has been plagued for the last 70 years by occasional explosions. (There are still company towns in Italy — the designer Brunello Cucinelli has spent the last 30 years restoring the Umbrian hamlet of Solomeo to serve as his eponymous company’s headquarters, and Diego Della Valle, C.E.O. of the fashion brand Tod’s Group, relies on local craftsmen from Casette d’Ete, a region on the country’s east coast, where his company’s main factory is located.) But many of the best-known towns that orbit around a single industry or company can seem decidedly un-Italian: There is no ancient architecture or grand cultural tradition because much of what remains of their history is contained almost exclusively within the 20th century. The people who still live in these towns are often descendants of the original company workers that inhabited them, even though the company has long since packed up and left. But Olivetti is unique among these places; for a time, it was likely the most progressive and successful company town anywhere in the world, existing not for the sake of control or convenience but rather representing a new and short-lived kind of corporate idealism, in which business, politics, architecture and the daily life of the company’s employees all informed one another.

Image

The interior of the former La Serra Complex.CreditNick Ballón

Image

Olivetti’s 1932 MPI typewriter.CreditNick Ballón

In 1960, Adriano died, and the company — already saddled with its ill-advised acquisition of the American typewriter company Underwood — went into a crisis. Adriano’s brother, Roberto, took over but lacked Adriano’s sense of vision. Twenty-eight years later, Carlo De Benedetti, a figure imbued with the ethos of a corporate raider, began to streamline Olivetti, shedding its socialist impulses in a bid to compete in the computer age. His efforts failed. By the 1980s, Olivetti had become subject to the same global headwinds as many manufacturers, and the company foundered. In the early 2000s, it was merged with a telecom giant. At its peak in the 1970s, the company had 73,283 workers worldwide; today, it has around 400. But it’s the surrounding town that has been affected most deeply. Ivrea today has a population of 24,000, having lost a quarter of its residents since the 1980s. The average age is 48.

In 2018, UNESCO declared Ivrea a World Heritage site; the effect has so far, for better or for worse, been unnoticeable. (“UNESCO’s ‘World Heritage’ listing is the kiss of death,” the acerbic Italian critic Marco D’Eramo wrote in a 2014 article for New Left Review. “Once the label is affixed, the city’s life is snuffed out; it is ready for taxidermy.”) Arriving by commuter rail from Turin, one would have no idea that one was in a former capital of industrial design. An eerie spellbound nothingness prevails. Except for a set of fading explanatory placards along the town’s main road, there are few signs pointing to the landmark buildings — a housing project designed by Marcello Nizzoli, the lead designer of the Lettera 22; the Olivetti Research Center, designed by the architect Eduardo Vittoria, where the Elea computer was conceptualized — once renowned as much for their design as for the part they played in a munificent private welfare state. Only one of the office buildings is still in use. A former factory has been converted into a gym. Many of the remaining dozen or so structures are empty, speechless monuments to an aborted utopia.

Image 

The interior of the town nursery.CreditNick Ballón

FROM ABOVE, IVREA is an hourglass, cinched in the middle where it is crossed by the Dora Baltea river. The northern side is the historic center, with the usual array of squeezed cobblestoned streets issuing into breathable piazzas. The southern side, with the buildings located at distances best traversed by automobile, sometimes set back from the Via Jervis and fronted by useless ceremonial greenery, is where the city’s decrepit industrial and managerial heritage lies. Via Jervis is the chief artery. It is a name that feels strange to say in Italian, though it is dedicated to the partisan Guglielmo “Willy” Jervis, who was captured by fascists in 1944 and executed by firing squad. To walk it, as I did from my guest home in an adjoining town, is to experience the desolation of an idea that has gone to seed. An office building from the 1980s looks faded and unremarkable without the hum of activity that must have once surrounded it. Tennis courts are covered with weeds.

Ivrea had been a settlement since the fifth century B.C., and under the Roman Republic it went by the name of Eporedia. But it came into greater prominence during the Renaissance, when it fell under the sway of the Turin-based House of Savoy. A sterling example of this past lingers in the convent of San Bernardino, with its excellent frescoes of the life of Christ completed around 1490 by the minor Italian artist Giovanni Martino Spanzotti. It was to this convent that Camillo Olivetti, born and raised in the surrounding Alpine foothills that are visible from nearly anywhere in the town, moved his family when he established his typewriter company in a still-standing brick building. If you stand in front of the tan stucco of San Bernardino, you stare directly at the once-modern exteriors of Olivetti, whose glass exteriors were meant to exude the future and reflect the past.

In contemporary Ivrea, however, it is hard to imagine the bustle of the recent past. A former employee, Enrico Capellaro, who had started in manufacturing in the 1950s before working his way up to management, described his daily routine as fairly relaxed: Renowned Italian actors like Vittorio Gassman and comedians came through at lunchtime. New books and magazines could be consulted at the 30,000-volume library (which was open to all Ivreans). A Pullman bus would drive through town at midday, carrying workers home for lunch, if they wanted. The Social Services Building, built of sandy concrete and organized entirely around repeating hexagonal shapes, from spindly columns to large rooms, was across from the main factory buildings and was where the company offered health care to its workers.

For a time, Ivrea was likely the most progressive and successful company town in the world, representing a new and short-lived kind of corporate idealism.

Two major additions to the red brick building, built between 1939 and 1949, look like perfect representations of a moment in architectural thought: The first is a long, low-slung block threaded with ribbon windows; the second, known as Ico Centrale, is a fully glazed, curtain-walled facade, shielded from the light by Corbusier-style brises-soleil. A third building, also covered with a slick glass-skinned facade, now houses a nursing school. The others are empty, filled with the detritus of companies past, having only recently been acquired by a developer who is attempting to secure contracts for new firms while preserving the buildings. These are glorious, light-filled spaces, unsung monuments to the rationalist, functionalist architecture that dominated progressive thinking in the midcentury. On the southern side of Ico Centrale, a perpendicular bend causes two portions of the building to face and reflect each other — the implicit idea being that employees on either side would have the opportunity to see each other in their daily work, and, even more implicitly, that the company was open and transparent to itself and the world.

Olivetti also built housing and hotels, two of which are the most strange and wonderful buildings in any city. The West Residential Center, popularly known as the Talponia, is a crescent-shaped block built into a hillside. Its roof is paved and walkable, its facade entirely glass, articulated into rectangles by dark gray metal framing. Originally intended for short business stays, it projects a spirit of efficiency, with modular furniture and bedrooms separated only by curtains. The Hotel La Serra, outside the main center, was built in the 1970s and betrays the influence of postmodernism. Composed of an irregular series of stacked, graduated floors, it is meant to look like a typewriter, but from the inside, the rooms feel like the tightly constructed cabin of a ship, with oval porthole-like windows and a secret armoire holding a vanity mirror, whose curved doors open perfectly into the concave surrounding space.

It makes sense that Olivetti would be a symbol of historic pride. As a principal player in the 20th-century “miracle,” when Italy climbed out of the depths of fascism and the catastrophe of World War II to become the eighth largest economy in the world, it is essential to Italian identity. The nostalgia for this time in Ivrea can be intense. Stefano Sertoli, the recently elected mayor, mentioned how often he came across people with an incredibly precise recall for eras and moments in company history. Some 1,900 residents of the city are recipients of the spille d’oro, or “gold pins,” which represent 25 years of continuous service to the company. The legacy of Olivetti is, he said, “un patrimonio pazzesco” — an insanely rich heritage.

Image

The exterior of the La Serra complex.CreditNick Ballón

IF AMERICAN COMPANY TOWNS were tied to private industry’s desire to quell progressive movements, in Italy, the company town was just as influenced by the rise of fascism. Sabaudia, a coastal town near Rome, was created in 1933 as a result of orders from Benito Mussolini, who transported the urban poor from Rome to the coast in order to drain the surrounding malaria-infested marshlands. Monfalcone, near the border of Slovenia, became a part of Italy only after World War I but was soon converted into an important shipbuilding outpost by the fascist regime. Many of these towns began a slow decline in business and population following World War II, though it’s no accident that the best of Ivrea as imagined by Olivetti emerged as a postwar phenomenon, a place in direct ideological opposition to Mussolini’s government. If most company towns, both in Europe and America, were paternalistic in the extreme — some of them going so far as to pay workers with “company scrip,” which could only be used at company-owned stores — this was not the intention in Ivrea, thanks in no small part to Adriano, who combined in his person the grandiose impulses of a humanitarian, the self-obsession of an entrepreneur and the sententiousness of a rich autodidact. Inducted into an already successful company, he also, crucially, had experience working in a factory. Unlike the mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor from a generation earlier, who also came into factory life from an elite background but drew the conclusion that work needed to be rationalized within an inch of its life — leading to his concept of “scientific management” — Adriano arrived at a factory and experienced the full spectrum of alienation. He would later testify to knowing “the awful monotony and the weight of repeating actions ad infinitum, on a drill or a press.” His experience led him to the realization that “it was necessary to set man free from this degrading slavery.” Gastone Garziera, an engineer who had worked on computing and electronics in the 1960s and ’70s, recalled Adriano Olivetti’s “desire to lighten in any way possible” the burden of work.

Adriano returned to Italy to take up the mantle of the family firm; he became president in 1938. He was committed to Modernism — not just as an architectural and aesthetic phenomenon but as a political program. Though he joined the Fascist Party during the years of Mussolini, he eventually sought to make contacts with Americans and supported the resistance, for which he was arrested. Adriano makes an indelible character in the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s marvelous “Family Lexicon” (1963), a memoiristic novel of life in Turin during the two World Wars:

He was fat and pale and his uniform fit badly over his round, fat shoulders. I’ve never seen anyone wear that gray-green outfit with a pistol at the waist more awkwardly and less martially than him. He had a pronounced melancholic air about him, which was perhaps because he didn’t like being a soldier in the least. He was shy and quiet, but when he did speak he talked for a long time in a low voice and said confusing and enigmatic things while staring off into space with his small blue eyes, at once cold and dreamy.

This implicitly self-regarding personality expressed itself in the spirit of the company he led and in the products they created. As with the Bauhaus, the short-lived but highly influential German school of design, there was an attempt to unify aesthetically the entire production, from the products themselves to the advertisements for them, but with a markedly stronger emphasis on rendering the work environment itself a humane one. (The influence of the Bauhaus was in some cases direct: Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky, an alumnus of the Bauhaus, designed a new typewriter for Olivetti, the Studio 42, and consulted on the construction of the new headquarters. Herbert Bayer, one of his instructors, designed company advertisements.) Olivetti wanted to build, as the modernist architecture critic Mario Labó wrote, “a place of work ruled by progress, guided by justice, and fired by the light of beauty.” Workers became part of the management of the company through a system of co-determination, and thus helped build the welfare institutions that catered to them.

Image

Housing from 1956 in the neighborhood called Canton Vesco, in central Ivrea.CreditNick Ballón

Image

The entrance to another housing complex, Edificio 18, built in 1954 by Marcello Nizzoli.CreditNick Ballón

In these years, Olivetti produced several of the products that brought it world renown. The lightweight and (relatively) portable Lettera 22, one of the most beautiful and functional machines ever made, became a popular typewriter for business as well as private use. Its baby blue coloration and the light, springy action of its rounded keys were part of the transformation from a typewriter as a loud, mechanical object for processing business to one that lent itself to contemplative, private writing. (It was the favorite of many American writers, including Thomas Pynchon, Sylvia Plath, Gore Vidal.) A couple of decades later, in 1968, and with the help of the designer Ettore Sottsass Jr., Olivetti would produce the apotheosis of the typewriter-for-pleasure, the Valentine, a lollipop of a machine, the high point of Pop Art in design. Advertisements for the Valentine showed its users taking the typewriter to the beach.

But by the ’70s, people were moving from typewriters to electronic devices, and though the company had created what is considered the first personal computer, the P101, the company’s success on this front had stalled. Some observers attribute Olivetti’s downfall less to company failings than to nefarious plotting by foreign powers. Mario Tchou, Olivetti’s brilliant chief computer programmer, died in a car accident, and Olivetti’s last independent president, Carlo De Benedetti, suggested that it was widely believed among Olivettians that “he had been killed by forces connected to American secret agents.” Garziera also vouched that the Americans were suspicious of computing advances falling into the hands of a country that was perpetually on the verge of Communism. And in 2019’s “The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti,” the journalist Meryle Secrest advances a circumstantial version of the same theory (without, it must be admitted, confirming it). Whatever the reasons, the failure to achieve results in computing doomed the company, and — at least for the near term — Ivrea with it.

Image

The former Sertec building, designed by Ezio Sagrelli and built in 1968, which held Olivetti’s engineering offices.CreditNick Ballón

HOW DOES A company town reinvent itself once the company leaves town? In some respects, Ivrea reflects broader trends in Italy, rather than circumstances unique to itself. Changes in technology may have made Olivetti obsolete, but the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and ’60s peaked around 1970 anyway, when Fiat’s production headquarters, in nearby Turin, became one of the largest car factories in Europe (and during which time Olivetti was still one of the most successful manufacturers of typewriters and other business machines in the world). This growth was helped by a mass migration of workers from the country’s impoverished south to the heavily industrialized northwest. But as the ’70s turned into the ’80s, Turin, Ivrea and other cities and towns that had grown rapidly after World War II fell victim to the same economic trends that would stunt the growth of American manufacturing towns across the Rust Belt: Recurring recessions meant that costs were cut across all industries, labor was outsourced to cheaper countries and companies like Fiat and Olivetti began laying off thousands of workers, plunging the very concept of the company town into an existential crisis. There are, according to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, some 2,500 rural Italian towns that are nearly abandoned and depopulated, half-empty monuments to departed industry. Others, like Ivrea, are more of a nostalgic time capsule, less a ruin than a shell of the past trying to find ways to bring back their old glory.

As major companies shrank in size or merged with larger corporations (Fiat now owns Chrysler), their corporate paternalism faded from view, replaced by more immediate economic concerns. This would end Olivetti’s well-intentioned experiment in humane labor. Now, as is the case in so many small municipalities in Italy and elsewhere in the world, Ivrea has experienced an alarming turn in its politics. After decades of center-left rule — including a stint by Adriano himself as mayor — last year the leadership shifted to the right, with a new government affiliated with the anti-immigrant party La Lega. I spoke with the new mayor, Sertoli, who had been part of the effort to secure UNESCO recognition for the city. He talked vaguely of the need to “bring back excellence” to the city, but also noted it was problematic that so many of Olivetti’s structures were in various private hands. The current holder of the Brick Factory building is Icona, a coalition attempting to redevelop the original Olivetti buildings in the hope of returning industry and innovation to the area. Icona’s slogan is “The Future Is Back Home.” The atrium connecting the Brick Factory to the others still has a mosaic tile statue of Camillo Olivetti.

Image

The West Residential Center, popularly known as the Talponia.CreditNick Ballón

Image

The interior of the Hotel La Serra, in Ivrea, an Italian company town run in its prime by the Olivetti typewriter manufacturer.CreditNick Ballón

Other efforts at reviving Ivrea don’t take their cues from Olivetti at all. Gianmario Pilo, a book marketer in Turin whose father worked at the company for 35 years, has started a literary festival, La Grande Invasione, with the aim of jump-starting the cultural life of the town and encouraging younger residents to stay. He spoke about how his parents were always passionate readers, partly because of the company’s efforts to inculcate culture in its workers’ lives.

The extraordinary achievement of Olivetti is also part of what overwhelms and partly vitiates the lives that have come after it. The afterglow that still hovers over Ivrea is that of young Adriano in “Family Lexicon”: dreamy, speaking at once to everyone and no one, quietly saying “enigmatic things.” It may be the best example in history of a city organized around a single company and its vision, in which some profits were reinvested into the life of the company’s workers and the surrounding community. At its best, the spirit of reinvestment can be given back, if perhaps never again at the level it once had. When I asked Pilo why he pursued his desires in Ivrea, he said simply that it was to “give back to the city that had gifted me a happy childhood and adolescence.” The children of Olivetti may yet restore the ideas that still whistle down the quiet streets of the town it once dominated.

'Sydney Rittenberg Long Time China advocate and business adviser'

'Sydney Rittenberg Long Time China advocate and business adviser'

By Robert D. McFadden NY Times

Sidney Rittenberg, an American soldier-linguist who stayed in China for 35 years after World War II as an adviser and political prisoner of the Communist Revolution, and later made millions as a counselor of Western capitalists exploiting booming Chinese markets, died on Saturday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 98.

The family confirmed the death in a statement.

In a saga of Kafkaesque twists, Mr. Rittenberg was a dedicated aide to Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai as a party propagandist known across China by his Mandarin name, Li Dunbai — the mysterious foreigner in Mao’s government. But he ran afoul of Mao’s suspicions, offended Mao’s wife and spent 16 years in prison, falsely accused of espionage and counterrevolutionary plotting.

In the United States after his release, he used his extensive knowledge and contacts in China to build his own capitalist empire, advising corporate leaders, including Bill Gates of Microsoft and the computer magnate Michael S. Dell, on how to cash in on China’s vast growing economy. Still welcome in China, he took entrepreneurs on guided tours, introducing them to the country’s movers and shakers.

“His compelling tale can perhaps best be understood as a story, writ small, of modern-day China itself,” the author Gary Rivlin wrote in The New York Times in 2004. “His metamorphosis from isolated expatriate to high-priced global go-between mirrors the country’s own shift — from a closed-door Communist state to a freewheeling moneymaking society, with a new class of entrepreneurs who dream the same dreams that dance in the heads of people in places like Silicon Valley.”

The rebel scion of a prominent Charleston, S.C., family, Mr. Rittenberg, who joined and quit the American Communist Party, arrived in China as an Army private just as World War II ended.

He was fluent in Chinese, was committed to Marxist-Leninist ideals, was aware of the rampant corruption in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and was determined to take part in momentous historical changes.

For most of his time in China, from 1945 to 1980, he was an intimate of the Communist Party’s top leaders, whom he sought out in their mountain sanctuary, a guerrilla camp in Yan’an, by trekking 45 days on foot. He played gin rummy and argued dogma with Mao, talked for days about the United States and philosophy with Zhou, danced with Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and got to know Mao’s inner circle, including Liu Shaoqi, the third-ranking leader. They all watched Laurel and Hardy movies together.

Mr. Rittenberg joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1946. He became an English-language translator of news dispatches for the party’s propaganda arm and an interpreter of Chinese for communiqués and contacts with international leaders. He traveled with Mao and the Red Army and witnessed events of the civil war that led to the Communist victory in 1949, and to the formation of Mao’s Beijing government, the People’s Republic of China.

Despite his growing status, Mr. Rittenberg was incarcerated twice on trumped-up charges. After the Communists took power in China, the Soviet leader Josef Stalin charged in a communiqué to Mao that Mr. Rittenberg was a secret American agent sent to undermine the revolution. Without trial, he was held for six years in solitary confinement.

Cleared of the bogus spy charges and released in 1955, he resumed his status in privileged upper echelons of the party. He was named to a high post in China’s Broadcast Administration, and later became a director of Radio Beijing, which regularly denounced the United States. He also wrote for the controlled New China News Agency, and was a liaison to foreign journalists and dignitaries. He sometimes broadcast propaganda himself, anonymously in English with a soft South Carolina drawl.

Image Mr. Rittenberg and his wife, Wang Yulin, in Manhattan in 1979. Credit Edward Hausner/The New York Times

He was well paid and lived with his third wife, Wang Yulin, and their three daughters and son in a Beijing suite luxurious even by Western standards, filled with priceless Ming dynasty antiques. (He had previously been married to an American who divorced him when he left for China, and to Wei Lin, a Chinese state radio announcer who, as a gesture of solidarity with the party, divorced him after he was accused of espionage.)

He is survived by his wife and children, Xiaoqin (Jenny), Xiaodong (Toni), Xiaoxiang (Sunny) and Xiaoming (Sidney Jr.), and four grandchildren.

Mr. Rittenberg was an avid propagandist during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a campaign from 1958 to 1961 to transform China from an agrarian economy to a collectivized, industrialized society. The campaign, which banned private farming and enforced edicts with indoctrination and forced labor, was a disaster, causing widespread famine and tens of millions of deaths.

He was even more directly involved in the early stages of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a decade-long purge of “bourgeois” intellectuals, party officials and others suspected of anti-Maoist thought. Starting in 1966, thousands of young Red Guards persecuted millions with imprisonment, torture, public humiliation and property seizures in struggles to create a Maoist cult of personality.

Mr. Rittenberg joined the Red Guards in denouncing what they called “establishment” bureaucrats and haranguing the masses. His speeches and news conferences were published in the Red Guard newspapers. One famous picture from the era shows Mao autographing Mr. Rittenberg’s copy of his “Little Red Book” of sayings. Another shows Mr. Rittenberg on a speaker’s platform, holding the book up and exhorting crowds in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to defend Mao’s thoughts.

Soon after the pictures were taken, Mr. Rittenberg was himself denounced by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, ostensibly for attending a secret meeting to plot the government’s overthrow. In 1968, he was imprisoned, again without a hearing, this time for a decade in solitary confinement in a dark cell 7 paces long and 3½ paces wide. His wife was sent to a labor camp, his children to live with relatives.

During Mr. Rittenberg’s second imprisonment, the Cultural Revolution left the country in chaos, Mao’s health began to fail and the so-called Gang of Four — Mao’s wife and three other leaders — assumed greater power. China’s Communist Party became what Mr. Rittenberg called a “shadow” of its old self.

“The spirit was gone, the party became a mere machine for exercising power over the government and the people,” Mr. Rittenberg told The Financial Times in 2012. “Official corruption and careerism, rare before the Cultural Revolution, now become prevalent and systemic.”

Released in 1977 after Mao died and Jiang Qing was arrested, Mr. Rittenberg emerged from prison disillusioned with Communism. He returned to the United States in 1979 for a three-month visit that he portrayed as a “vacation,” to see relatives, to lecture and, apparently, to quietly discuss his repatriation with the Carter administration. He returned to China, his status undiminished, and was named to an important academic post.

But he quickly left China again for what he said would be a five-month visit to America. His wife went with him, and it turned out to be a permanent move, with the children joining them later and assuming American names and citizenship. He had kept his own American citizenship, and he soon settled into a new life. His return was widely publicized. He went on television and radio talk shows, lectured and was featured in newspapers and magazines.

His welcome by American officials raised suspicions that he had been a C.I.A. agent all along, but he scoffed at the idea, and no proof was ever offered. He was still welcome in China, however, and he and his wife for several years made a living conducting tours of China for Americans.

Then, in a breakthrough, the chairman of ComputerLand hired Mr. Rittenberg to help him establish ties to a visiting high-level delegation of Chinese business leaders, and to provide guidance for marketing American products and services in China. He knew many Chinese business and government leaders, and understood the bureaucracy well enough to advise clients about traps and shortcuts.

Image

Mr. Rittenberg studying Chinese at Stanford during World War II.CreditPersonal Collection of Sidney Rittenberg

He founded Rittenberg & Associates, a consulting firm for American companies doing business in China. He joined the Chinese studies faculty at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and wrote about China’s markets for the Strategic News Service, a weekly business digest. Mr. Gates and Mr. Dell were readers.

Over the years, his services were engaged by hundreds of venture capitalists and American companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Prudential Insurance, Polaroid and Levi Strauss. He made a half-dozen business trips to China annually, and kept an apartment in Beijing.

“He may have been a card-carrying Communist, but he’s also very much a capitalist,” David Shrigley, a former Intel executive, told The Times in 2004. He said Mr. Rittenberg helped Intel open a semiconductor plant in China in the 1990s. “He understands what’s really going on in a very nuanced way that proved tremendously valuable to us.”

A modernizing China wanted the business, and officials commended Americans for hiring what they called friends of the People’s Republic as advisers. And it was a windfall for the Rittenbergs, who bought a home on Fox Island, Wash., overlooking Puget Sound, a condo in Bellevue, Wash., and a home in Scottsdale, Ariz. Mike Wallace of CBS and the Rev. Billy Graham were among their friends.

In a reflective interview with The Financial Times in 2013, Mr. Rittenberg voiced regret over his support for Mao, calling him “a great historic leader and a great historic criminal,” and expressing dismay over his own role in the Cultural Revolution.

“I took part in victimizing innocent, good people,” he said. “It was institutionalized bullying and scapegoating, and I couldn’t see it because everything about the regime was good for me and I felt I was part of a movement for human progress, freedom and happiness. I wasn’t feeling what happened to other people. It’s a kind of corruption, exactly the kind of corruption that ruins the whole thing.”

Sidney Rittenberg was born in Charleston, S.C., on Aug. 14, 1921. His father, Sidney, was president of the Charleston City Council and his grandfather had been a prominent South Carolina legislator. His mother was the daughter of a Russian immigrant. After graduating from the Porter Military Academy in Charleston in 1937, he turned down a scholarship to Princeton to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1941.

He joined the American Communist Party in 1940, drawn by its platform of free speech, racial equality and roots in the labor movement. Without giving up his Communist ideals, he acceded to a party request and resigned in 1942 when he was drafted by the Army in World War II.

Recognizing his talent for languages — he had learned French and Latin in prep school and excelled in German at Chapel Hill — the Army sent him to its language school at Stanford University. He was fluent in Chinese by 1945, when he arrived in Kunming, China, as a linguist for the Judge Advocate General.

Discharged in 1946, he joined a United Nations relief agency in Shanghai, where he met Communists who urged him to join their movement. His trek to Yan’an, and his long association with Mao, ensued.

His life was chronicled in a documentary, “The Revolutionary” (2012), by Irv Drasnin, Don Sellers and Lucy Ostrander, and his memoir, “The Man Who Stayed Behind” (1993), written with Amanda Bennett, a former correspondent in China for The Wall Street Journal.

“I had been right to help those who were working for a new China,” he said in the memoir. “I had been dead wrong, however, in accepting the party as the embodiment of truth and in giving to the party uncritical and unquestioning loyalty.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

Back Story to the Charge That Jews Have a Dual Loyalty

The Toxic Back Story to the Charge That Jews Have a Dual Loyalty

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis NY Times

WASHINGTON — When President Trump said this week that American Jews who chose to vote for Democrats were being disloyal, he was flirting with a notion that has fueled anti-Semitism for generations and has been at the root of some of the most brutal violence inflicted upon Jews in their history.

The accusation that Jews have a “dual loyalty” — that they are not to be trusted because their true allegiance is to their religion, rather than to the country in which they live — dates back thousands of years. It animated the Nazis in 1930s Germany, when they accused Jewish people of being traitors and used charges of disloyalty to justify their arrests, persecutions and mass killings.

After the founding of Israel, the charge was that Jews were more loyal to Israel, the Jewish state, than to their own countries. The smear persists in various forms to this day: It is a common refrain of white supremacists who claim there is a secret plot orchestrated by Jews to replace white people through mass migration and racial integration.

“The Jews have been a persistent minority for thousands of years, living in exile, living in diasporas, and the Jews have been made convenient scapegoats for various purposes,’’ said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. “That’s why they often call anti-Semitism the oldest hatred.”

A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump drew a barrage of criticismfrom Jewish organizations and anti-hate groups when he said, as he assailed a pair of Democratic congresswomen who are harshly critical of Israel, that Jews who vote for Democrats show “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” On Wednesday, as he retweeted a conspiracy theoristsaying that Jews in Israel loved the president “like he’s the king of Israel,” Mr. Trump used the same language, telling reporters that “if you want to vote Democrat, you are being very disloyal to Jewish people and very disloyal to Israel.”

A look at the long and ugly history of the dual loyalty canard helps explain why Jewish leaders and anti-hate groups have reacted so strongly to Mr. Trump’s comments.

“This has got a very bad, toxic back story to it,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East peace negotiator who served in administrations of both political parties. “The words ‘disloyalty’ or ‘dual loyalty’ cannot appear within the same sentence as the words ‘Jews’ or ‘American Jews’ without legitimately raising the question of whether or not what is intended is to level that pernicious charge.”

How the Charge Was Born

As far back as the Middle Ages, Jews were tagged in their communities as inherently untrustworthy and suspect, incapable of being loyal to their ruler because of their ties to other Jews around the world. They were also viewed as a threat to the church because of their religious beliefs.

Christian leaders promoted the idea that Jews crucified Jesus Christ, and several myths took hold about Jewish people, including the so-called blood libel, a myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children in rituals. Those slanders fueled riots against Jews, sometimes referred to as pogroms.

A Stereotype Festers and Flourishes

Later, as Jews settled throughout Europe, their loyalty was often in question. When Napoleon emancipated the Jews in France after the revolution, he said he would grant them full equality if they would reaffirm that they were subject to French law and would no longer consider themselves “a nation within a nation.” Jews agreed.

But the suspicions festered. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French military captain who was Jewish, was falsely accused of passing military secrets to the Germans and was convicted in a French military court.

“People were willing to believe it, even though the evidence from the very outset was shaky, because it made sense to them,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University. “They had been so exposed to this stereotype, it had become so much the pivot point and the central element of anti-Semitism that Jews have other loyalties, that it seemed like it must be true, and they were ready to believe the worst.”

Professor Lipstadt said that was why when the Nazis began denigrating Jews, falsely accusing them of having betrayed their country and undermined its security, people were willing to believe it.

“The dual loyalty canard that has plagued Jews is the fertile soil in which centuries of these stereotypes have taken root and grown,” she said.

Stalin played on the same notion in 1946 during a speech in Moscow attacking Jewish writers as “rootless cosmopolitans” who were not fully loyal to the Soviet Union.

Nation vs. Religion

One reason that Jews have struggled to shake accusations of having dual loyalty is rooted in their own history. For centuries, Jews were regarded as a nation with their own distinct culture and laws, rather than merely a religious group.

“The tension within Judaism is, are we a people, a nation, a tribe, a religion?” said Steven R. Weisman, the author of “The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion” and a former New York Times reporter. “Jews have been uncomfortable seeing themselves as a people — even the ‘chosen people’ — and through various episodes throughout history, worked to show that they were just as patriotic and loyal as anyone else.”

During the Civil War, for instance, Mr. Weisman said, Jews joined the military in disproportionate numbers on both sides, in part to demonstrate their devotion to their country in the face of stereotypes that their allegiances were suspect.

As recently as 2000, when former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman became the first Jewish person to run for vice president, he faced questions about how his religion might affect his policy positions and leadership.

Trump Stirs the Pot

This week was not the first time that Mr. Trump has appeared to question Jews’ loyalties. This past spring, speaking to American Jews at an event sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition, he referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as “your prime minister.”

His comments this week were meant to target Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both Democrats and outspoken critics of Israel who have both made their own remarks appearing to question Jews’ loyalty.

Ms. Omar apologized in February for saying that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins baby,” a reference to hundred-dollar bills, but then ignited further controversy when she argued that she was being tagged as anti-Semitic merely for criticizing Israel.

"I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” Ms. Omar said then.

Ms. Tlaib was roundly criticized in January for saying that lawmakers supporting a Republican bill protecting states and cities that sever ties with companies boycotting Israel “forgot what country they represent.”

She later said she was referring to senators, not Jewish people.

Thrills of Charles Bukowski

The Transgressive Thrills of Charles Bukowski

The captain of a low-life odyssey, Bukowski accomplished something rare: he produced a large, completely distinctive, widely beloved body of work.

By Adam Kirsch

Reprinted August 16th 2019 to Mark Mr. Bukowski 99th Birthday

In the third edition of “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,” in which poets appear in order of birth, the class of 1920 fields a strong team, including Howard Nemerov and Amy Clampitt. If you were to browse the poetry section of any large bookstore, you would probably find a book or two by each of those critically esteemed, prize-winning poets. Nowhere to be found in the canonizing Norton anthology, however, is the man who occupies the most shelf space of any American poet: Charles Bukowski. Bukowski’s books make up a burly phalanx, with their stark covers and long, lurid titles: “Love Is a Dog from Hell”; “Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.” They give the impression of an aloof, possibly belligerent empire in the middle of the republic of letters.

Bukowski himself, and his many, many readers, would not have it any other way. John Martin, the founder of Black Sparrow Press, who was responsible for launching Bukowski’s career, has explained that “he is not a mainstream author and he will never have a mainstream public.” This is an odd thing to say about a poet who has sold millions of books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages—a commercial success of a kind hardly known in American poetry since the pre-modernist days of popular balladeers like Edgar A. Guest. Yet the sense of not being part of the mainstream, at least as the Norton anthology and most other authorities define it, is integral to Bukowski’s appeal. He is one of those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill.

Fittingly, for a poet whose reputation was made in ephemeral underground journals, it is on the Internet that the Bukowski cult finds its most florid expression. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to him, not just in America but in Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden, where one fan writes that, after reading him for the first time, “I felt there was a soul-mate in Mr. Bukowski.” Such claims to intimacy are standard among Bukowski’s admirers. On Amazon.com, the reader reviews of his books sound like a cross between love letters and revival-meeting testimonials: “This is the one that speaks to me to the point where each time I read certain pages, I cry”; “This book is one of the most influential books of poetry in my life”; or, most revealing of all, “I hate poetry, but I love Buk’s poems.”

Today’s fans can no longer call up Bukowski on the phone or drop in on him at home in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life. But before his death, from leukemia, in 1994, they could and did, with a regularity that the poet found flattering, if tiresome. As he told an interviewer in 1981, “I get many letters in the mail about my writing, and they say: ‘Bukowski, you are so fucked up and you still survive. I decided not to kill myself.’ . . . So in a way I save people. . . . Not that I want to save them: I have no desire to save anybody. . . . So these are my readers, you see? They buy my books—the defeated, the demented and the damned—and I am proud of it.”

This mixture of boast and complaint exactly mirrors the coyness of Bukowski’s poetry, which is at once misanthropic and comradely, aggressively vulgar and clandestinely sensitive. The readers who love him, and believe that he would love them in return, know how to look past the bluster of poems like “splashing”:

dumb,

Jesus Christ,

some people are so dumb

you can hear them

splashing around in their dumbness. . . .

I want to

run and hide

I want to

escape their engulfing

nullity.

Bukowski’s fans realize that “some people,” like E. E. Cummings’s “mostpeople,” or J. D. Salinger’s hated “phonies,” are never us, always them—those not perceptive enough to understand our merit, or our favorite author’s. This is a typically adolescent emotion, and it is no coincidence that all three of these writers exert a special power over teen-agers. With all three, too, there is the sense that if the misanthrope could know us as we really are he would welcome our pilgrimage; as Holden Caulfield says, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Similarly, Bukowski might declare his contempt for humanity, and his alarm at its constant invasions of his privacy—“I have never welcomed the ring of a / telephone,” he writes in “the telephone”—yet he titles another poem with his telephone number, “462-0614,” and issues what sounds like an open invitation:

I don’t write out of knowledge.

when the phone rings

I too would like to hear words

that might ease

some of this.

that’s why my number’s

listed.

This sort of cri de coeur is not what first comes to mind when the name Charles Bukowski is mentioned. In the course of some fifty books, he transformed himself into a mythic roughneck, a figure out of a tall tale—brawler, gambler, companion of bums and whores, boozehound with an oceanic thirst. (This legend gained still wider exposure with the 1987 movie “Barfly,” in which a version of Bukowski is portrayed by Mickey Rourke.) In his heavily autobiographical novels and some of his poems, he gave this alter ego the transparent pseudonym Hank Chinaski—Bukowski’s full name was Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., and he was known to friends as Hank—but since he almost always wrote in the first person, the line between Chinaski the character and Bukowski the man is blurred. This blurring is, in fact, the secret of Bukowski’s appeal: he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.

Bukowski’s poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal artifacts but as ongoing installments in the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book or a movie serial. They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof. Bukowski’s free verse is really a series of declarative sentences broken up into a long, narrow column, the short lines giving an impression of speed and terseness even when the language is sentimental or clichéd. The effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start telling his life story:

I was the mean and

crazy white

guy, full of humor, laughter

and gamble.

I was shacked with a

silken-legged

beauty.

I drank and fought all

night,

was the terror of the

local bars.

These lines are from “then and now,” a poem in the latest collection of Bukowski’s work, “Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems” (Ecco; $27.50). Death has not put a dent in Bukowski’s productivity; this is his ninth posthumous book of poems, and there are more to come. Nor has it changed his style: these “new poems” are just like the old poems, perhaps a shade more repetitive, but not immediately recognizable as second-rate work or leftovers.

An uncannily prolific afterlife was something that Bukowski counted on. As early as 1970, he wrote to his editor, “just think, someday after I’m dead and they start going for my poems and stories, you will have a hundred stories and a thousand poems on hand. you just don’t know how lucky you are, babe.” In the next quarter century, the surplus grew, thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool black air”: 

“now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch, I bang it.”

Alcohol was the fuel, as it was often the subject, of these poetic explosions: “I don’t think I have written a poem when I was completely sober,” he told one interviewer. And he rejected on principle the notion of poetry as a craft, a matter of labor and revision. Against the metaphors prevailing in the New Critical atmosphere of the nineteen-fifties, when he started writing in earnest—the Well Wrought Urns and the Verbal Icons—Bukowski posed his own, entirely characteristic image for writing: “it has to come out like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.”

That kind of grossness is a large part of Bukowski’s appeal. His own life, as it appears in the poems, at least, is a teen-age boy’s fantasy of adulthood, in which there’s no one to make you clean up your room, or get out of bed in the morning, or stop drinking before you pass out. Yet, crucial to the myth, slobbery and drunkenness only increase Bukowski’s appeal to women:

you’re a beast, she said

your big white belly

and those hairy feet.

you never cut your nails. . . .

beast beast beast,

she kissed me,

what do you want for breakfast?

Such poems offer the same kind of vicarious wish fulfillment that differently inclined readers might find in spy novels or gangster movies, with their parodies of unbound masculinity. (In one poem, Bukowski acknowledges this affinity, boasting: “don’t believe the gossip: / Bogie’s not dead.”) And Bukowski is best read as a very skillful genre writer. He bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or Ayn Rand to philosophy—a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the real thing. He has two of the supreme merits of genre writing, consistency and abundance: once you have been enticed into Bukowski’s world, you have the comfort of knowing that you won’t have to leave it anytime soon, since there will always be another book to read.

The pleasures offered by Bukowski’s work are more quickly exhausted than the questions raised by his life, and the way he transformed that life into something like art. The crucial episodes in his biography are reworked again and again in his poems and novels, so that any reader quickly learns the broad outlines of his story. In “Slouching Toward Nirvana,” for instance, the poem “clothes cost money” recounts Bukowski’s childhood memory of a classmate called Hofstetter, who would get beaten up on the way home from school every day, only to be berated by his mother: “you’ve ruined your clothes again! / don’t you know that clothes cost money?” This is nearly identical to an episode from Bukowski’s novel about his childhood, “Ham on Rye,” where the hapless boy is called David: 

“David! Look at your knickers and shirt! . . . Why do you do this to your clothes?”

In both versions of the story, what matters is the brutality of children and the cruel indifference of parents; and these seem to have been the major themes of Bukowski’s own childhood. Born in Germany to an American-serviceman father and a German mother, Bukowski moved at the age of three to Los Angeles. The Depression, which shadowed his whole adolescence, affected him primarily through his father, who took out his frustrations on his wife and son. Bukowski describes terrible beatings, sadistically inflicted for minor transgressions like missing a blade of grass when he mowed the lawn. When Bukowski reached adolescence and broke out in a world-class case of acne, he saw it as a symptom of his helpless suffering: “The poisoned life had finally exploded out of me. There they were—all the withheld screams—spouting out in another form.”

This disfigurement helped to make Bukowski a surly, friendless teen-ager. But there was another element in his isolation, one that he dwells on much less often—an innate sensitivity and intelligence, which led to the first stirrings of literary ambition. This is a standard element in the biography of most poets, but it fits awkwardly with the myth of Bukowski the tough, who constantly proclaims his contempt for mere bookishness. “Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me,” he told one interviewer. “That upper-crust shit bored me. I couldn’t relate to it.” The promise of his books is that they detour around emasculated, fussy artistry—“We’re all tired of the turned subtle phrase and the riddle in the middle of the line,” he declared to another interviewer—and plunge deep into life itself.

Yet Bukowski also admitted, on other occasions, to having been a very bookish youth: “Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four I must have read a whole library.” In his letters (four volumes of which have been published so far), he shows that he is conversant with the entire range of modern fiction and poetry. He parodies Eliot (“Bukowski’s old, Bukowski’s old / he wears the bottoms of his beercans / rolled”), drops references to Mann (in “Slouching Toward Nirvana,” there is a poem titled “disorder and early sorrow”), debates the relative merits of Turgenev and Tolstoy (he prefers the former). Most surprisingly, he admires the New Critics, whose aesthetics of complexity and impersonality he so gleefully violated. “I know that the Kenyon Review is supposed to be our enemy,” he wrote to a friend in 1961, “but the articles are, in most cases, sound, and I would almost say, poetic and vibrant.”

In fact, Bukowski started out in eager pursuit of conventional literary success. He attended Los Angeles City College, where he took a creative-writing class, and wrote furiously, as he wryly recalls in

“the burning of the dream”:

and I wrote from 3 to

5 short stories a week

and they all came

back

from The New Yorker, Harper’s,

The Atlantic Monthly.

In his poverty and dedication, and, especially, in his low-rent Los Angeles milieu, the young Bukowski strongly resembles Arturo Bandini, the hero of John Fante’s minor classic “Ask the Dust”; the book, which Bukowski accidentally discovered in the stacks of the Los Angeles Central Library, made a huge impression on him. (Decades later, when Bukowski was famous and Fante forgotten, his advocacy led Black Sparrow Press to bring Fante’s work back into print.) During the war, when he was classified 4-F for psychological reasons, Bukowski travelled around the country on almost no money, working menial jobs and staying in flophouses—but always writing. He even scored a considerable success in 1946, when he was published in the literary magazine Portfolio, alongside Henry Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Yet after that, so the legend goes, Bukowski gave up writing completely, and became a full-time drunk. For the next decade, he bummed his way across America, eventually washing up in Los Angeles once again; he boozed, whored, fought, spent time on factory floors and in jails. He frequently recalled one Philadelphia bar, in particular, where he would sit from 5 a.m. to 2 a.m., earning free drinks by allowing the bartender to beat him up for the entertainment of the crowd. This low-life odyssey is to Bukowski’s poetry what Melville’s South Sea journeys were to his fiction: an inexhaustible store of adventure and anecdote, and a badge of authenticity.

After being hospitalized, in 1955, with a nearly fatal illness, Bukowski returned to writing, but in a new spirit. His focus was now on poetry, instead of short stories, and he sent his work to underground journals with names like Coffin, Grist, and Ole. These, and not the glossy weeklies, were the right venues for his new work, which boasted a proletarian grittiness: “After losing a week’s pay in four hours it is very difficult to come to your room and face the typewriter and fabricate a lot of lacy bullshit.”

Once Bukowski returned to his vocation, success arrived slowly but surely. He became well known among readers of little magazines, and published a series of chapbooks and limited editions. Yet, as his reputation grew, he was still stuck working as a postal clerk, a job whose indignities he detailed in his first novel, “Post Office.” The real breakthrough in his career as a writer came in 1970, when John Martin agreed to pay him a monthly stipend of a hundred dollars in return for the right to publish his work through Black Sparrow Press. This arrangement was a gamble for both publisher and author, but it proved tremendously successful: by the time Bukowski died, his monthly payment had risen to seven thousand dollars and he had nineteen titles in print.

The deal can also be seen, however, as a sign of Bukowski’s lack of literary confidence. Instead of offering his publisher each book as he finished it, Bukowski simply sent all his work to Martin, who then selected the contents of the new volume. “He didn’t even know what I was going to put in,” Martin is quoted as saying in the 1998 biography “Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life,” by Howard Sounes. “He didn’t care.” It sounds less like modern publishing, with authors and editors and agents all defending their own interests, than like the quasi-feudal relationship that John Clare, the archetypal nineteenth-century “peasant poet,” had with his publishers. Clare, too, sent off all his writing to his editor—John Taylor, of Taylor & Hessey—and received a regular allowance in return, a sign of the parties’ profound imbalance in social status and worldly savvy. But, while Clare and Taylor eventually had the bitter falling-out one might expect from such an arrangement, Bukowski and Martin remained close, trusting partners to the end. Black Sparrow continued to publish Bukowski until Martin retired, in 2002; the Bukowski catalogue was then sold to Ecco, itself a formerly independent house that is now part of HarperCollins. (The ironic result is that Bukowski, the ultimate underground poet, is now published by Rupert Murdoch.)

It is not just in his business dealings that Bukowski gives the impression of insecurity—of feeling, as he once wrote to a friend, not “so much like a writer as . . . like somebody who has slipped one past.” The same sense emerges, more damagingly, in his defensive scorn for complexity and difficulty, as if these literary values were a trick played by effete professors on honest, hardworking readers. “What’s easy is good and what’s hard is a pain in the ass,” Bukowski declared to one correspondent; or, again, “Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing too. I don’t try, I just type.”

Just typing allowed Bukowski to accomplish a great deal. He became wealthy and famous, a friend of celebrities like Sean Penn and Madonna, the subject of biographies and documentaries. In his late poems, his delight in driving a BMW and hobnobbing with Norman Mailer is so genuine that it becomes infectious. His escape from poverty and menial labor, solely through the passion and popularity of his writing, is like a fairy tale. “I laid down my guts,” as he put it, “and the gods finally answered.” In a literary sense, too, Bukowski accomplished something rare: he produced a large, completely distinctive, widely beloved body of work, something that few poets today even dream of. It is a testament to Bukowski’s genuine popularity that, at a time when most poetry books can’t be given away, his are perennially ranked among the most frequently stolen titles in bookstores.

Yet Bukowski and his work also have the pathos of missed possibilities. He occasionally took pains to align himself with a coherent literary tradition, writing about his admiration for Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, Céline, and Camus—the classics of modern alienation, the biographers of the underground man. He was especially fond of Hamsun’s “Hunger,” the story of a young writer demented by poverty and ambition. And Bukowski came much closer to this experience than almost any other American poet. There is every reason to believe that “a note upon starvation

” a poem in the new collection, was written from experience:

about the fourth day

you begin to feel almost intoxicated

panic subsides

one sleeps well:

12 to 14 hours,

and most unusual

one continues to defecate.

the vision grows more acute

everything is seen with a new clarity.

Yet the contrast with Hamsun reveals just how conventional a writer Bukowski remained. There is nothing in his work even remotely like the episode in “Hunger” where the starving hero, having encountered an old man on a park bench, starts to make up fantastic lies about his landlord: that his name is J. A. Happolati, that he has invented an electric prayer book, that he was once the Prime Minister of Persia. The old man patiently accepts all of these outrageous stories, and even asks polite questions about them, sending the narrator into a rage: “ ‘Goddamnit, man, I suppose you think I’ve been sitting here stuffing you full of lies?’ I shouted, completely out of my mind. ‘I’ll bet you never believed there was a man with the name Happolati. . . . The way you have treated me is something I am not used to, I will tell you flatly, and I won’t take it, so help me God!’ ”

The comic fury of this episode does seem to take us to the edge of insanity: Hamsun, like Dostoyevsky, shows that the most frightening symptom of madness is the immolation of self-esteem, the urge to humiliate oneself at the same time as one humiliates everyone else. And this is the risk that Bukowski never takes. Even at his most unheroic, he is the hero of his stories and poems, always demanding the reader’s covert approval. That is why he is so easy to love, especially for novice readers with little experience of the genuine challenges of poetry; and why, for more demanding readers, he remains so hard to admire. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 14, 2005, issue, with the headline “Smashed.”

          Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and author