Sweet Home Alabama

New Yorker Review

Harper Lee’s "Go Set a Watchman."

By Adam Gopnik

Set a Watchman" is an earlier novel, of mysterious provenance, set in the world of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Credit Illustration by John Gall The heavily hyped appearance of Harper Lee’s new or very old, or, anyway, indistinctly dated, novel, "Go Set a Watchman" (HarperCollins), reflects an ambitious publishing venture—complete with slow, striptease-style press leaks and first chapters and excited prepublication surmise—in which all the other apparatus of literature, reviewers included, is expected to serve, and has. Not since Hemingway’s estate sent down seemingly completed novels from on high, long after the author’s death, has a publisher gone about so coolly exploiting a much loved name with a product of such mysterious provenance. It may well be that what the procurers of the text have said about it—that it is an earlier novel set in the world of "To Kill a Mockingbird," only recently discovered, and published with the author’s enthusiastic assent—is so. But, if it is, the procurers seem oddly reluctant to be terribly exact about their accomplishment. The finished book that has now emerged, with a charming retro cover, showing a lonely engine on a twilight Alabama evening, has not a single prefatory sentence to explain its pedigree or its history or the strange circumstance that seems to have brought it to print after all this time, as though complete novels with beloved characters suddenly appeared from aging and reclusive and apparently ailing writers every week of the year. (This in a book that includes a fourteen-line note on the type.) And then the story that has been offered about it in the papers—a story that seems to change significantly as time goes by—presents certain difficulties to the reader’s understanding of the book.

The excitement is, in a way, a salute to America’s literary memory: in what is supposed to be an amnesiac society, the memory of a fifty-five-year-old novel burns so bright that an auxiliary volume is still a national event. Of course, the memory is assisted by the universal appearance of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in eighth-grade curricula, but most of what appears in eighth-grade curricula vanishes quickly from memory—has basic biology or beginning algebra ever held our minds as Scout and Atticus have? The reason for that extraordinary hold is made plain, at least, by the incidental beauties of the newly discovered book, which are real. Though "Watchman" is a failure as a novel (if "Mockingbird" did not exist, this book would never have been published, not now, as it was not then), it is still testimony to how appealing a writer Harper Lee can be. That appeal depends, as with certain other books of the time—"The Catcher in the Rye," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," "A Death in the Family"—on the intensity of the evocation of coming of age, and of the feel of streets and summers at that moment. Harper Lee did for Maycomb (her poeticized version of her home town, Monroeville, Alabama) what J. D. Salinger did for Central Park—made it a permanent amphitheatre of American adolescence. One realizes with a slight, shamed start that we would now condescend to this kind of effort as belonging merely to a Y.A., or young-adult, novel. It’s not that we don’t have books like it anymore; it’s that we segregate their shelving—both John Green and Judy Blume have kept alive the tender evocation of an adolescent world, but they have been relegated to a smaller, specialized niche.

Though the new book is, to be blunt, a string of clichés, some of them are clichés only because, in the half century since Lee’s generation introduced them, they’ve become clichés; taken on their own terms, they remain quite touching and beautiful. The evocation of Maycomb, with which the new book begins, and which recurs throughout its pages, is often magically alive. There is a little set piece about the arrival of a train at a flag stop that makes one feel nostalgic for one’s Southern childhood even if one never had a Southern childhood:

The countryside and the train had subsided to a gentle roll, and she could see nothing but pastureland and black cows from window to horizon. She wondered why she had never thought her country beautiful. . . . The train clacketed through pine forests and honked derisively at a gaily-painted bell funneled museum piece sidetracked in a clearing. It bore the sign of a lumber concern, and the Crescent Limited could have swallowed it whole with room to spare. Greenville, Evergreen, Maycomb Junction.

She had told the conductor not to forget to let her off, and because the conductor was an elderly man, she anticipated his joke. . . . Trains changed; conductors never did. Being funny at flag stops with young ladies was a mark of the profession, and Atticus, who could predict the actions of every conductor from New Orleans to Cincinnati, would be awaiting accordingly not six steps away from her point of debarkation.

The tone is right and lovely, and is just as right and lovely in other pastoral pieces, in the later pages (though almost exclusively flashbacks), about games played with the heroine’s brother, Jem, and the Truman Capote character, Dill. The other, less potent clichés are either the stage-dramatic clichés of the fifties—the kind of dramaturgy you find in an Elia Kazan movie, with neat "reveals" and passionate scenes in which people driven to a climax of anger suddenly tell one another long-buried secrets—or, more drearily, the clichéd rationales that liberal Southerners used for years to justify a social order that they knew to be unjust.

The story related is simple, and suspiciously self-referential—it’s difficult to credit that a first novel would so blithely assume so much familiarity with a cast of characters never before encountered. Scout, the child heroine of "Mockingbird," now mostly called by her proper name of Jean Louise, comes back to Maycomb from New York, where she is engaged in some undefined career-girl enterprise. For most of the first few chapters, she is fending off her lowborn but well-meaning suitor, Henry Clinton, and fighting with her tight-assed and conventional aunt Alexandra.

Jean Louise then discovers that her father, Atticus, her hero and as close to a perfectly honorable man as she can imagine—"Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch"—has joined one of the marginally respectable Citizens’ Councils, a kind of less covert version of the Klan. Shocked, she confronts him, and starts on a series of static and prosy debates—first with her uncle Jack (a "character" who combines odd scraps of nineteenth-century English literary and religious knowledge with a bachelor doctor’s existence) and then with Atticus himself—about integration, the N.A.A.C.P., the Tenth Amendment, and other fifties-era subjects, all offered mechanically as set pieces, accented with oaths and "Honey, use your head!"s to make them sound a little more like dialogue. When the action moves to these abstract arguments about civil rights, the book falls apart as art—partly because today it is impossible to find the anti-civil-rights arguments anything but creepy, but more because any novel that depends for its action on prosy debates about contemporary politics will fail. A screenplay-style reversal (Uncle Jack, it turns out, was in love with Jean Louise’s sainted, long-dead mother all along!) jolts the action toward the end, and then, as in another kind of fifties movie, Jean Louise is urged to Come Home to Make Things Better—you can’t create a new South by hanging up there among the Yankees!—and it seems that she does.

That Southernness, however much it is now the material of cliché, is still the most pleasing thing about the book—the kind of easy, Agee and McCullers Southernness (as against Tennessee Williams’s more Gothic version) that was as much a part of the postwar American novel as Jewishness, of which it was the alternative construction. Jews (in Bellow, Malamud, early Roth) were urban, worried, and compellingly neurotic; Southerners (in Capote, McCullers, Harper Lee) were rural, carefree, and absolutely crazy. As always with such things, neither construction makes sense unless you see the missing central panel that both are reacting to: the Wasp ascendancy, only just about to be called so—that average American whiteness from which Southern drinking and Jewish schmalz alike could seem welcome refuges.

The element that intrudes for us now on these Southern vistas—where are all the black people, and why are the few we see treated the way they are?—was certainly a vital part of the story, but it was only a part of the story. Reëxperiencing this kind of Southern eccentricity is to be reminded how persuasive and touching it could be. The Southern Pastoral, in which the children play barefoot in the pastures and the summer is always called summertime, remains one of our strongest forms:

　

Calpurnia had placed three tumblers and a big pitcher full of lemonade inside the door on the back porch, an arrangement to ensure their staying in the shade for at least five minutes. Lemonade in the middle of the morning was a daily occurrence in the summertime. They downed three glasses apiece and found the remainder of the morning lying emptily before them.

"Want to go out in Dobbs Pasture?" asked Dill.

No.

"How about let’s make a kite?" she said. "We can get some flour from Calpurnia . . ."

"Can’t fly a kite in the summertime," said Jem. "There’s not a breath of air blowing."

The thermometer on the back porch stood at ninety-two, the carhouse shimmered faintly in the distance, and the giant chinaberry trees were deadly still.

"I know what," said Dill. "Let’s have a revival."

The question is how to preserve this pastoral idyll, and that’s where things get sticky, in several senses. The view that both Uncle Jack and Atticus offer, and which Jean Louise/Lee doesn’t endorse but does take seriously, is that this superior civilization of the agrarian South is being stampeded by Yankee industrialists and the N.A.A.C.P.—all the Outside Agitators—into undue disorder. (One night, Henry Clinton and Jean Louise see a group of blacks driving a fast car, and Henry implies that this is what happens when you let the Supreme Court tell the South what to do.)

So the idea that Atticus, in this book, "becomes" the bigot he was not in "Mockingbird" entirely misses Harper Lee’s point—that this is exactly the kind of bigot that Atticus has been all along. The particular kind of racial rhetoric that Atticus embraces (and that he and Jean Louise are careful to distinguish from low-rent, white-trash bigotry) is a complex and, in its own estimation, "liberal" ideology: there is no contradiction between Atticus defending an innocent black man accused of rape in "Mockingbird" and Atticus mistrusting civil rights twenty years later. Both are part of a paternal effort to help a minority that, in this view, cannot yet entirely help itself.

Atticus is simply being faithful to one set of high ideals in the South of his time. "Jean Louise," Atticus says in the midst of their argument, "have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?" Not long afterward, he adds, "Jefferson believed full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man, that it was not something given lightly nor to be taken lightly. A man couldn’t vote simply because he was a man, in Jefferson’s eyes. He had to be a responsible man." Blacks are fully human, Atticus allows (nice of him), just not yet ready to vote. Elsewhere, Uncle Jack explains to Jean Louise the metaphysics of the Civil War, which supposedly had nothing to do with slavery or emancipation: didn’t she know "that this territory was a separate nation? No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing within a nation? A society highly paradoxical, with alarming inequities, but with the private honor of thousands of persons winking like lightning bugs through the night? . . . They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity."

These were the ideas of the Southern Agrarians—that extraordinarily accomplished and influential set of writers and critics who embraced the modernism of Yeats and Pound and Eliot, exactly because it seemed to them a protest against modernization of all types, while they dreamed of a reformed "organic" society in the South, with that "identity," that cult of "private honor," still accessible. (It is good to be reminded of a time when "identity politics" belonged to the right.) Writers like Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren—though deluded about the concentration-camp society of the prewar South as it really was—had a worked-out and potent ideology, and one readily assented to by people who should have known better. Had they foundered, as their white-supremacist successors do today, in cheap nostalgia, they would not have had much influence, but they made a brilliant marriage with modernism, and that gave them immense academic authority at a time when little magazines moved big boulders, or seemed to. Theirs was among the most powerful intellectual movements of the thirties and forties, along with, predictably, the companion Jewish one in New York.

And so beneath Atticus’s style of enlightenment is a kind of bigotry that could not recognize itself as such at the time. The historical and human fallacies of the Agrarian ideology hardly need to be rehearsed now, but it should be said that these views were not regarded as ridiculous by intellectuals at the time. Indeed, Jean Louise/Lee herself, though passionately opposed to what her uncle and her father are saying, nevertheless accepts the general terms of the debate as the right ones. Asked her response to "the Supreme Court decision"—one assumes that Brown v. Board is meant—she says that she thought, and still thinks, "Well sir, there they were, tellin’ us what to do again."

And it should also be said, out of human sympathy, that to demand that people reject their traditions and their understanding, however misconceived, of their own history—to insist that the Atticuses of this world go to reëducation camp—is foolish. The problem is not people who think wrong thoughts, since we all think what will, retrospectively, turn out to be wrong thoughts about something or other. The problem is people who give their implicit endorsement to violence or intolerance in the pursuit of wrong thoughts. And, as far as one can tell, Harper Lee never intends Atticus to be taken for that sort. Atticus’s central commitment is to the law, and that commitment is never questioned. We are meant to see Atticus as someone with skewed convictions about Jefferson, but not as someone who would participate in a cross burning or in fire-hosing protesters.

The Southern Agrarians—it was part of their complexity—didn’t see themselves as racists; quite the opposite. (Robert Penn Warren certainly more than made his peace with the civil-rights movement.) They saw themselves merely as cautious and watchfully conservative about the pace of change. That the pace of change had to be accelerated because it had been held back by terror for so long was not a truth that they wished to be told, or to see. Atticus’s attitude seems entirely authentic, his heroism and his prejudices, as so often with actual human beings, part of the same package. Credibility is the ethic of fiction, and he is a credible character.

In any case, as with most social upheavals that are allowed to work their way through a society, the things that Atticus and the Agrarians feared may have happened, but they didn’t happen because of the Supreme Court. Atticus and his friends vastly overestimated the power of liberal ideology and badly underestimated the power of their other enemy, capitalist commerce. The Monroeville Walmart Supercenter has doubtless altered Monroeville more than all the fiendish Yankee conspiracies to undermine the Tenth Amendment. Certainly the supremacists’ hysterical fears of anarchy, as much as the fondest hopes of civil-rights utopians, have been left unrealized. Hysteria about change is rarely earned by the change when it comes.

Yet here is where the questions of the book’s provenance begin to arise, and they, too, get a little sticky. The emotional force of "Watchman" depends entirely on the reader’s sharing Scout’s shock at the revelation of Atticus’s new friends and new affiliation, and, since Atticus is scarcely dramatized at all before his fall from grace, the reader already suspicious about the pedigree and the background of the book becomes doubly so. If you don’t know Atticus as a hero—and in this book you really don’t, except by assertion—why would you care that he seems to defect to villainy, however well he defends it? Taken as a composite from both books, Atticus may be a credible hero, but you have to read both books to know that. The charm of the flashbacks that ornament "Watchman" is real for those who know Jem and Dill and Cal from "Mockingbird"—but what effect could Lee have expected them to have on readers who don’t? Indeed, the book as a book barely makes sense if you don’t know "Mockingbird." If "Watchman" is a first novel, even in draft, it is unlike any first novel this reader is aware of: very short on the kind of autobiographical single-mindedness that first novels usually present, and which "Mockingbird" is filled with, and very long on the kind of discursive matter that novelists will take up when their opinions begin to count.

It is, I suppose, possible that Lee wrote it as we have it, and that her ingenious editor, setting an all-time record for editorial ingenuity, saw in a few paragraphs referring to the trial of a young black man the material for a masterpiece. But it would not be surprising if this novel turns out to be a revised version of an early draft, returned to later, with an eye to writing the "race novel" that elsewhere Harper Lee has mentioned as an ambition. (The manuscript might then have been put aside by the author as undramatic and too abstract.) It is sad, though, to think that the preoccupations of this book, however much they may intersect our own preoccupations of the moment, might eclipse her greater poetic talents, evident here, and so beautifully fulfilled in "To Kill a Mockingbird." There is a genuine dramatic climax, worthy of the writer’s gifts, offered and then evaded in "Watchman." In the book’s toughest scene, Scout goes to visit Calpurnia, the black woman who brought her and Jem up, with infinite-seeming love, after Atticus agreed to defend Cal’s grandson from a charge of manslaughter. Scout is heartbroken to find that her beloved mother figure is cautiously distanced from her:

"Cal," she cried, "Cal, Cal, Cal, what are you doing to me? What’s the matter? I’m your baby, have you forgotten me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?"

Calpurnia lifted her hands and brought them down softly on the arms of the rocker. Her face was a million tiny wrinkles, and her eyes were dim behind thick lenses.

"What are you all doing to us?" she said.

Then Scout asks, "Did you hate us?," and Calpurnia shakes her head no. This is credible. But the scene, and the book, would have been stronger if she hadn’t. ♦

Middle East | News Analysis

Obama’s Leap of Faith on Iran

By DAVID E. SANGER NY TIMES

VIENNA — In his opening to China more than 40 years ago, Richard M. Nixon made a huge Cold War gamble that he could forge a working relationship with a Communist country that had built a small arsenal of nuclear weapons and clearly had long-term ambitions for global power.

For President Obama, the deal struck Tuesday morning with Iran represents a similar leap of faith, a bet that by defusing the country’s nuclear threat — even if just for a decade or so — he and his successors would have the time and space to restructure one of the United States’ deepest adversarial relationships.

Mr. Obama will be long out of office before any reasonable assessment can be made as to whether that roll of the dice paid off. The best guess today, even among the most passionate supporters of the president’s Iran project, is that the judgment will be mixed.

Little in the deal announced on Tuesday eliminates Iran’s ability to become a threshold nuclear power eventually — it just delays the day. To Mr. Obama’s many critics, including Henry A. Kissinger, the architect of the China opening, that is a fatal flaw. It does nothing, Mr. Kissinger wrote recently with another former secretary of state, George P. Shultz, to change "three and a half decades of militant hostility to the West."

 

The president spoke on Tuesday about the agreement between Iran and world powers, saying it was a "comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that prevents it from obtaining a nuclear weapon."

Yet it is a start. Senior officials of two countries who barely spoke with each other for more than three decades have spent the past 20 months locked in hotel rooms, arguing about centrifuges but also learning how each perceives the other. Many who have jousted with Iran over the past decade see few better alternatives.

"The reality is that it is a painful agreement to make, but also necessary and wise," said R. Nicholas Burns, who drafted the first sanctions against Iran, passed in the United Nations Security Council in 2006 and 2007, when he was undersecretary of state for policy. "And we might think of it as just the end of the beginning of a long struggle to contain Iran. There will be other dramas ahead."　

Mr. Obama certainly signaled where he was going, starting with his first inaugural address. When he offered on that bitterly cold afternoon in January 2009 to "extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist," even to governments "who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent," there was little doubt that he had Iran’s leaders in mind.

At the time, it was also meant as a signal that the era of George W. Bush had ended, and that a renewed reliance on diplomacy had begun. But the reality once Mr. Obama took office was a little different.

Faced with a recalcitrant supreme leader in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Obama’s aides figured out how to impose the ultimate economic sanction — cutting off much of Iran’s oil revenue — as well as isolating it from global banking systems. They also deployed the world’s most sophisticated cyberweapon, later known as Stuxnet, to slow Iran’s nuclear progress.

And then they waited.

Now, six years later, after coaxing a new Iranian government into negotiations even many of Mr. Obama’s top aides predicted were doomed to failure, the outreach to Iran has morphed into a far more complex experiment in engagement than Mr. Obama’s previous two, first with Myanmar, then with Cuba.

Neither of those countries posed a significant threat to the United States’ interests, and there was little risk in ending sanctions. Iran is different.

Tehran’s nuclear program is just one of its instruments of power to destabilize the Middle East. And there is risk, especially in the next few years, that Iran’s generals will compensate for the loss of a nuclear program by stepping up their financing of Hezbollah and the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and by flexing their muscles in other conflicts across the region. They have already built up a talented "cybercorps" of their own and turned it on Saudi Arabia and, in more limited ways, the United States.

Within a year or so, they will have a new influx of cash to finance those efforts. Assuming Iran makes good on its promises to ship most of its nuclear fuel out of the country and to mothball nearly three-quarters of its centrifuges, its oil revenue will start to flow and its financial ties to the outside world will strengthen.

Mr. Obama is essentially betting that once sanctions have been lifted, Iran’s leaders will have no choice but to use much of the new money to better the lives of their long-suffering citizens. He has told his aides that he expects relatively little to be spent to finance terrorism or the emerging corps of Iranian cyberwarriors, a group now as elite as Iran’s nuclear scientists.

Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards generals, dedicated to preserving the principles of the 1979 revolution, are taking the other side of that bet: that they can use the money and legitimacy of the accord to advance their interests and to keep in check a young Iranian population that is clearly a lot less interested in next-generation centrifuges than it is in getting visas to visit and study in the West.

Then there is the question of whether the deal will eventually lead to some uneasy cooperation in those areas where American and Iranian interests overlap, starting with the battle against the Islamic State.

Yet, the chief goal was always to break away from "a spiral toward conflict," said Benjamin J. Rhodes, one of Mr. Obama’s deputy national security advisers, the architect of the outreach to Cuba and a central player for the past six years on Iran. "The president said many times he’s willing to step out of the rut of history."

In the wake of Nixon’s overture to China, Japan wondered if it would be cut adrift and Taiwan felt betrayed. Mr. Obama’s agreement with Iran may have unintended consequences as well. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia see a reconciliation as a threat. They fear that it will help Iran gain money, power and influence — and that it could be the opening wedge of a broader realignment of American interests in the region. For Mr. Obama and his successor, managing that fear may become as complex as managing Iran.

But no one in the White House expects that the Iranian government, having made the necessary nuclear concessions to get its accounts refilled and its oil flowing again, is really interested in a far broader relationship anytime soon.

"I wouldn’t bet on it," said one of the American negotiators who has spent the most time with the Iranian team. "This isn’t Cuba. You are not going to see embassies open for a long, long time."

Just days before the agreement was signed, there were ritual, if not especially energetic, "death to Israel" and "death to America" demonstrations, perhaps an offering to disappointed hard-liners.

In fact, anyone along for the ride during the 20 long months of these negotiations saw how deeply conflicted the Iranian leadership was about the entire enterprise. The American-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, spent as much time managing the hard-liners in his government as he did negotiating with Secretary of State John Kerry.

"Four decades ago, it was clear that Mao had made a fundamental decision about his strategic shift, and he opened relations with the United States after concluding that the Soviet Union was a fundamental challenge to both of them," said Karim Sadjadpour, who examines Iran policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "In Iran, there is hope for a strategic shift, but it will take years to know." And it may take a new supreme leader.

For Mr. Obama, the end of the negotiations with Iran signifies the beginning of a negotiation with Congress, which now has 60 days to approve or disapprove the arrangement. The numbers suggest Mr. Obama will prevail; if Congress rejects the Iran accord, he promised on Tuesday to veto the legislation, and he has enough Democrats to win that contest. Yet he clearly does not want the biggest diplomatic achievement of his presidency to turn into yet another political melodrama.

His desire, aides say, is to convince the country of his logic: While sanctions and sabotage brought Tehran to the table, more sanctions and more sabotage, Mr. Obama argues, would not force Tehran to scrap every one of its nuclear facilities. In fact, until Mr. Kerry and Wendy R. Sherman, his chief negotiator, struck an interim deal with the Iranians in late 2013 to allow the final negotiations to begin, every new round of sanctions was answered with an escalation in the size and aggressiveness of the Iranian program to enrich uranium.

"It’s a matter of pragmatism," William J. Burns, who conducted much of the secret diplomacy with Iran that began these talks when he served as Mr. Kerry’s deputy secretary of state, said recently. "A nuclear-armed Iran, or an Iranian nuclear program unconstrained by any serious long-term restrictions, multiplies exponentially the dangers in an already chaotic region."

Mr. Burns said he had no expectations of "any overnight transformation of Iranian behavior in the region, which is likely to threaten our interests and those of our friends for some time."

Chapter one

Go Set A Watchman

by Harper Lee

 
 

Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose.

Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair.

She was glad she had decided to go by train. Trains had changed since her childhood, and the novelty of the experience amused her: a fat genie of a porter materialized when she pressed a button on a wall; at her bidding a stainless steel washbasin popped out of another wall, and there was a john one could prop one’s feet on. She resolved not to be intimidated by several messages stenciled around her compartment – a roomette, they called it – but when she went to bed the night before, she succeeded in folding herself up into the wall because she had ignored an injunction to PULL THIS LEVER DOWN OVER BRACKETS, a situation remedied by the porter to her embarrassment, as her habit was to sleep only in pajama tops.

Luckily, he happened to be patrolling the corridor when the trap snapped shut with her in it: "I’ll get you out, Miss," he called in answer to her poundings from within. "No please," she said. "Just tell me how to get out." "I can do it with my back turned," he said, and did.

When she awoke that morning the train was switching and chugging in the Atlanta yards, but in obedience to another sign in her compartment she stayed in bed until College Park flashed by. When she dressed, she put on her Maycomb clothes: gray slacks, a black sleeveless blouse, white socks, and loafers. Although it was four hours away, she could hear her aunt’s sniff of disapproval.

When she was starting on her fourth cup of coffee the Crescent Limited honked like a giant goose at its northbound mate and rumbled across the Chattahoochee into Alabama.

The Chattahoochee is wide, flat, and muddy. It was low today; a yellow sandbar had reduced its flow to a trickle. Perhaps it sings in the wintertime, she thought: I do not remember a line of that poem. Piping down the valleys wild? No. Did he write to a waterfowl, or was it a waterfall?

She sternly repressed a tendency to boisterousness when she reflected that Sidney Lanier must have been somewhat like her long-departed cousin, Joshua Singleton St Clair, whose private literary preserves stretched from the Black Belt to Bayou La Batre. Jean Louise’s aunt often held up Cousin Joshua to her as a family example not lightly to be discountenanced: he was a splendid figure of a man, he was a poet, he was cut off in his prime, and Jean Louise would do well to remember that he was a credit to the family. His pictures did the family well – Cousin Joshua looked like a ratty Algernon Swinburne.

Jean Louise smiled to herself when she remembered her father telling her the rest of it. Cousin Joshua was cut off, all right, not by the hand of God but by Caesar’s hosts.

When at the University, Cousin Joshua studied too hard and thought too much; in fact, he read himself straight out of the nineteenth century. He affected an Inverness cape and wore jackboots he had a blacksmith make up from his own design. Cousin Joshua was frustrated by the authorities when he fired upon the president of the University, who in his opinion was little more than a sewage disposal expert. This was no doubt true, but an idle excuse for assault with a deadly weapon. After much passing around of money Cousin Joshua was moved across the tracks and placed in state accommodations for the irresponsible, where he remained for the rest of his days. They said he was reasonable in every respect until someone mentioned that president’s name, then his face would become distorted, he would assume a whooping crane attitude and hold it for eight hours or more, and nothing or nobody could make him lower his leg until he forgot about that man. On clear days Cousin Joshua read Greek, and he left a thin volume of verse printed privately by a firm in Tuscaloosa. The poetry was so ahead of its time no one has deciphered it yet, but Jean Louise’s aunt keeps it displayed casually and prominently on a table in the living-room.

Jean Louise laughed aloud, then looked around to see if anyone had heard her. Her father had a way of undermining his sister’s lectures on the innate superiority of any given Finch: he always told his daughter the rest of it, quietly and solemnly, but Jean Louise sometimes thought she detected an unmistakably profane glint in Atticus Finch’s eyes, or was it merely the light hitting his glasses? She never knew.

The countryside and the train had subsided to a gentle roll, and she could see nothing but pastureland and black cows from window to horizon. She wondered why she had never thought her country beautiful.

The station at Montgomery nestled in an elbow of the Alabama, and when she got off the train to stretch her legs, the returning familiar with its drabness, lights, and curious odors rose to meet her. There is something missing, she thought. Hotboxes, that’s it. A man goes along under the train with a crowbar. There is a clank and then s-sss-sss, white smoke comes up and you think you’re inside a chafing dish. These things run on oil now.

For no reason an ancient fear gnawed her. She had not been in this station for twenty years, but when she was a child and went to the capital with Atticus, she was terrified lest the swaying train plunge down the riverbank and drown them all. But when she boarded again for home, she forgot.

The train clacketed through pine forests and honked derisively at a gaily painted bell-funneled museum piece sidetracked in a clearing. It bore the sign of a lumber concern, and the Crescent Limited could have swallowed it whole with room to spare. Greenville, Evergreen, Maycomb Junction.

She had told the conductor not to forget to let her off, and because the conductor was an elderly man, she anticipated his joke: he would rush at Maycomb Junction like a bat out of hell and stop the train a quarter of a mile past the little station, then when he bade her goodbye he would say he was sorry, he almost forgot. Trains changed; conductors never did. Being funny at flag stops with young ladies was a mark of the profession, and Atticus, who could predict the actions of every conductor from New Orleans to Cincinnati, would be waiting accordingly not six steps away from her point of debarkation.

Home was Maycomb County, a gerrymander some seventy miles long and spreading thirty miles at its widest point, a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements the largest of which was Maycomb, the county seat. Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican. No trains went there – Maycomb Junction, a courtesy title, was located in Abbott County, twenty miles away. Bus service was erratic and seemed to go nowhere, but the Federal Government had forced a highway or two through the swamps, thus giving the citizens an opportunity for free egress. But few people took advantage of the roads, and why should they? If you did not want much, there was plenty.

The county and the town were named for a Colonel Mason Maycomb, a man whose misplaced self-confidence and overweening willfulness brought confusion and confoundment to all who rode with him in the Creek Indian Wars. The territory in which he operated was vaguely hilly in the north and flat in the south, on the fringes of the coastal plain. Colonel Maycomb, convinced that Indians hated to fight on flat land, scoured the northern reaches of the territory looking for them. When his general discovered that Maycomb was meandering in the hills while the Creeks were lurking in every pine thicket in the south, he dispatched a friendly Indian runner to Maycomb with the message, Move south, damn you. Maycomb was convinced this was a Creek plot to trap him (was there not a blue-eyed, red-headed devil leading them?), he made the friendly Indian runner his prisoner, and he moved farther north until his forces became hopelessly lost in the forest primeval, where they sat out the wars in considerable bewilderment.

After enough years had passed to convince Colonel Maycomb that the message might have been genuine after all, he began a purposeful march to the south, and on the way his troops encountered settlers moving inland, who told them the Indian Wars were about over. The troops and the settlers were friendly enough to become Jean Louise Finch’s ancestors, and Colonel Maycomb pressed on to what is now Mobile to make sure his exploits were given due credit. Recorded history’s version does not coincide with the truth, but these are the facts, because they were passed down by word of mouth through the years, and every Maycombian knows them.

"…get your bags, Miss," the porter said. Jean Louise followed him from the lounge car to her compartment. She took two dollars from her billfold: one for routine, one for releasing her last night. The train, of course, rushed like a bat out of hell past the station and came to a stop 440 yards beyond it. The conductor appeared, grinning, and said he was sorry, he almost forgot. Jean Louise grinned back and waited impatiently for the porter to put the yellow step in place. He handed her down and she gave him the two bills.

Her father was not waiting for her.

She looked up the track toward the station and saw a tall man standing on the tiny platform. He jumped down and ran to meet her.

He grabbed her in a bear hug, put her from him, kissed her hard on the mouth, then kissed her gently. "Not here, Hank," she murmured, much pleased.

"Hush, girl," he said, holding her face in place. "I’ll kiss you on the courthouse steps if I want to."

The possessor of the right to kiss her on the courthouse steps was Henry Clinton, her lifelong friend, her brother’s comrade, and if he kept on kissing her like that, her husband. Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her. Henry Clinton was Jean Louise’s own kind, and now she did not consider the dictum particularly harsh.

They walked arm-in-arm down the track to collect her suitcase. "How’s Atticus?" she said.

"His hands and shoulders are giving him fits today."

"He can’t drive when they’re like that, can he?"

Henry closed the fingers of his right hand halfway and said, "He can’t close them any more than this. Miss Alexandra has to tie his shoes and button his shirts when they’re like that. He can’t even hold a razor."

Jean Louise shook her head. She was too old to rail against the inequity of it, but too young to accept her father’s crippling disease without putting up some kind of fight. "Isn’t there anything they can do?"

"You know there isn’t," Henry said. "He takes seventy grains of aspirin a day and that’s all."

Henry picked up her heavy suitcase, and they walked back toward the car. She wondered how she would behave when her time came to hurt day in and day out. Hardly like Atticus: if you asked him how he was feeling he would tell you, but he never complained; his disposition remained the same, so in order to find out how he was feeling, you had to ask him.

The only way Henry found out about it was by accident. One day when they were in the records vault at the courthouse running a land title, Atticus hauled out a heavy mortgage book, turned stark white, and dropped it. "What’s the matter?" Henry had said. "Rheumatoid arthritis. Can you pick it up for me?" said Atticus. Henry asked him how long he’d had it; Atticus said six months. Did Jean Louise know it? No. Then he’d better tell her. "If you tell her she’ll be down here trying to nurse me. The only remedy for this is not to let it beat you." The subject was closed.

"Want to drive?" said Henry.

"Don’t be silly," she said. Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter; she fished with a pole. Her favorite game was golf because its essential principles consisted of a stick, a small ball, and a state of mind.

With green envy, she watched Henry’s effortless mastery of the automobile. Cars are his servants, she thought. "Power steering? Automatic transmission?" she said.

"You bet," he said.

"Well, what if everything shuts off and you don’t have any gears to shift. You’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t you?"

"But everything won’t shut off."

"How do you know?"

"That’s what faith is. Come here."

Faith in General Motors. She put her head on his shoulder. "Hank," she said presently. "What really happened?"

This was an old joke between them. A pink scar started under his right eye, hit the corner of his nose, and ran diagonally across his upper lip. Behind his lip were six false front teeth not even Jean Louise could induce him to take out and show her. He came home from the war with them. A German, more to express his displeasure at the end of the war than anything else, had bashed him in the face with a rifle butt. Jean Louise had chosen to think this a likely story: what with guns that shot over the horizon, B-17s, V-bombs, and the like, Henry had probably not been within spitting distance of the Germans.

"Okay, honey," he said. "We were down in a cellar in Berlin. Everybody had too much to drink and a fight started – you like to hear the believable, don’t you? Now will you marry me?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

"I want to be like Dr Schweitzer and play until I’m thirty."

"He played all right," said Henry grimly.

Jean Louise moved under his arm. "You know what I mean," she said.

"Yes."

There was no finer young man, said the people of Maycomb, than Henry Clinton. Jean Louise agreed. Henry was from the southern end of the county. His father had left his mother soon after Henry was born, and she worked night and day in her little crossroads store to send Henry through the Maycomb public schools. Henry, from the time he was twelve, boarded across the street from the Finch house, and this in itself put him on a higher plane: he was his own master, free from the authority of cooks, yardmen, and parents. He was also four years her senior, which made a difference then. He teased her; she adored him. When he was fourteen his mother died, leaving him next to nothing. Atticus Finch looked after what little money there was from the sale of the store – her funeral expenses took most of it – he secretly supplemented it with money of his own, and got Henry a job clerking in the Jitney Jungle after school. Henry graduated and went into the Army, and after the war he went to the University and studied law.

Just about that time, Jean Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one day, and after the nightmare of that was over, Atticus, who had always thought of leaving his practice to his son, looked around for another young man. It was natural for him to engage Henry, and in due course Henry became Atticus’s legman, his eyes, and his hands. Henry had always respected Atticus Finch; soon it melded to affection and Henry regarded him as a father.

He did not regard Jean Louise as a sister. In the years when he was away at the war and the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love. She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. She was afflicted with a restlessness of spirit he could not guess at, but he knew she was the one for him. He would protect her; he would marry her.

"Tired of New York?" he said.

"No."

"Give me a free hand for these two weeks and I’ll make you tired of it."

"Is that an improper suggestion?"

"Yes."

"Go to hell, then."

Henry stopped the car. He turned off the ignition switch, slewed around, and looked at her. She knew when he became serious about something: his crew cut bristled like an angry brush, his face colored, its scar reddened.

"Honey, do you want me to put it like a gentleman? Miss Jean Louise, I have now reached an economic status that can provide for the support of two. I, like Israel of Old, have labored seven years in the vineyards of the University and the pastures of your daddy’s office for you –"

"I’ll tell Atticus to make it seven more."

"Hateful."

"Besides," she said, "it was Jacob anyway. No, they were the same. They always changed their names every third verse. How’s Aunty?"

"You know good and well she’s been fine for thirty years. Don’t change the subject."

Jean Louise’s eyebrows flickered. "Henry," she said primly, "I’ll have an affair with you but I won’t marry you."

It was exactly right.

"Don’t be such a damn child, Jean Louise!" Henry sputtered, and forgetting the latest dispensations from General Motors, grabbed for a gearshift and stomped at a clutch. These denied him, he wrenched the ignition key violently, pressed some buttons, and the big car glided slowly and smoothly down the highway.

"Slow pickup, isn’t it?" she said. "No good for city driving." Henry glared at her. "What do you mean by that?"

In another minute this would become a quarrel. He was serious. She’d better make him furious, thus silent, so she could think about it.

"Where’d you get that appalling tie?" she said.

Now.

She was almost in love with him. No, that’s impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all.

She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way. The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for everybody. The hollering and the high-mindedness over, all that would be left would be another shabby little affair à la the Birmingham country club set, and a self-constructed private Gehenna with the latest Westinghouse appliances. Hank didn’t deserve that.

No. For the present she would pursue the stony path of spinsterhood. She set about restoring peace with honor:

"Honey, I’m sorry, truly sorry," she said, and she was.

"That’s okay," said Henry, and slapped her knee. "It’s just that I could kill you sometimes."

"I know I’m hateful."

Henry looked at her. "You’re an odd one, sweet. You can’t dissemble."

She looked at him. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, as a general rule, most women, before they’ve got ’em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful."

"Isn’t it fairer for a man to be able to see what he’s letting himself in for?"

"Yes, but don’t you see you’ll never catch a man that way?"

She bit her tongue on the obvious, and said, "How do I go about being an enchantress?"

Henry warmed to his subject. At thirty, he was an adviser. Maybe because he was a lawyer. "First," he said dispassionately, "hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him."

She smiled brilliantly and said, "Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said. You are the most perspicacious individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet five, and may I light your cigarette? How’s that?"

"Awful."

They were friends again.

Islamic Battalions, Stocked With Chechens, Aid Ukraine in War With Rebels

By ANDREW E. KRAMER NY TIMES

Members of a Chechen battalion fighting against Russian-backed rebels

in Lysychansk, Ukraine, in February. Credit Olya Engalycheva/Associated Press

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Wearing camouflage, with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard flowing over his chest and a bowie knife sheathed prominently in his belt, the man cut a fearsome figure in the nearly empty restaurant. Waiters hovered apprehensively near the kitchen, and try as he might, the man who calls himself "Muslim," a former Chechen warlord, could not wave them over for more tea.

Even for Ukrainians hardened by more than a year of war here against Russian-backed separatists, the appearance of Islamic combatants, mostly Chechens, in towns near the front lines comes as something of a surprise — and for many of the Ukrainians, a welcome one.

"We like to fight the Russians," said the Chechen, who refused to give his real name. "We always fight the Russians."

He commands one of three volunteer Islamic battalions out of about 30 volunteer units in total fighting now in eastern Ukraine. The Islamic battalions are deployed to the hottest zones, which is why the Chechen was here.

Fighting is intensifying around Mariupol, a strategic seaport and industrial hub that the separatists have long coveted. Monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe say they have seen steady nighttime shipments of Russian military equipment on a rail line north of here. Recently, the Ukrainian authorities released photos — which they said were taken by a drone flying north of the city — that showed a massing of heavy weapons, including tanks and howitzers, on the rebel side.

Anticipating an attack in the coming months, the Ukrainians are happy for all the help they can get.

As the Ukrainians see it, they are at a lopsided disadvantage against the separatists because Western governments have refused to provide the government forces with anything like the military support that the rebels have received from Russia. The army, corrupt and underfunded, has been largely ineffective. So the Ukrainians welcome backing from even Islamic militants from Chechnya.

"I am on this path for 24 years now," since the demise of the Soviet Union, the Chechen said in an interview. "The war for us never ended. We never ran from our war with Russia, and we never will."

Ukrainian commanders worry that separatist groups plan to capture access roads to Mariupol and lay siege to the city, which had a prewar population of about half a million. To counter that, the city has come to rely on an assortment of right-wing and Islamic militias for its defense.

The Chechen commands the Sheikh Mansur group, named for an 18th-century Chechen resistance figure. It is subordinate to the nationalist Right Sector, a Ukrainian militia.

Neither the Sheikh Mansur group nor Right Sector is incorporated into the formal police or military, and the Ukrainian authorities decline to say how many Chechens are fighting in eastern Ukraine. They are all unpaid.

Apart from an enemy, these groups do not have much in common with Ukrainians — or, for that matter, with Ukraine’s Western allies, including the United States.

Right Sector, for example, formed during last year’s street protests in Kiev from a half-dozen fringe Ukrainian nationalist groups like White Hammer and the Trident of Stepan Bandera. Another, the Azov group, is openly neo-Nazi, using the "Wolf’s Hook" symbol associated with the SS. Without addressing the issue of the Nazi symbol, the Chechen said he got along well with the nationalists because, like him, they loved their homeland and hated the Russians.

To try to bolster the abilities of the Ukrainian regular forces and reduce Kiev’s reliance on these quasilegal paramilitaries, the United States Army is training the Ukrainian national guard. The Americans are specifically prohibited from giving instruction to members of the Azov group.

Since the Afghan war of the 1980s, Moscow has accused the United States of encouraging Islamic militants to fight Russia along its vulnerable southern rim, a policy that could deftly solve two problems — containing Russia and distracting militants from the United States. The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has accused the Western-backed Georgian government of infiltrating Islamic radicals into the North Caucasus, though he has not offered proof.

In Ukraine, the Dzhokhar Dudayev and Sheikh Mansur units are mostly Chechen, but they include Muslims from other former Soviet areas, such as Uzbeks and Balkars. The third unit, Crimea, is predominantly Crimean Tatar. There is no indication of any United States involvement with the groups.

Along the front about seven miles to the east, the battalions career about in civilian cars, AK-47 rifles poking from the windows, while the regular army holds back in a secondary line of defensive trenches.

The Chechens, by all accounts, are valuable soldiers. Ukrainian commanders lionize their skills as scouts and snipers, saying they slip into no-man’s land to patrol and skirmish.

The Chechens are also renowned for their deft ambushes and raids. In the Chechen wars, insurgents had a policy of killing officers and contract soldiers who were taken prisoner, but conscripted soldiers were spared.

In Ukraine, the Chechens’ calls of "Allahu akbar," or God is great, are said to strike fear in the hearts of the Russians.

In the interview, the Chechen commander said his men liked to fight with little protective gear. "This is the way we look at it," he said. "We believe in God, so we don’t need armored vests."

In the interview at the restaurant, a steakhouse and favorite haunt of Right Sector, the Chechen said he was about 45, had fought against Russia in both Chechen wars and had seen a good deal of violence. When he talks about combat, his eyes grow dark and inscrutable.

For the Ukrainians, the decision to quietly open the front to figures like the Chechen — who are making their way here from Europe and Central Asia — has brought some battle-hardened men to their side. The Chechen had been living in France, and he founded the Chechen battalions last fall along with Isa Musayev, an émigré from Chechnya who had been living in Denmark.

Mr. Musayev, the Chechen said, had received approval from senior members of the Ukrainian government, but "there were no documents, nothing was written," he said, adding that Mr. Musayev was killed in fighting in February.

Though religious, the Chechen groups in eastern Ukraine are believed to adhere to a more nationalist strain of the Chechen separatist movement, according to Ekaterina Sikorianskaia, an expert on Chechnya with the International Crisis Group.

Not everyone is convinced. The French authorities, on edge over Islamic extremism in immigrant communities, detained two members of the Sheikh Mansur battalion this year on accusations of belonging to the extremist group Islamic State, the Chechen said. He denied that the two were members of the group.

"All of Europe is shaking with fear of the Russians," he said. "It’s beneficial for Europe that we fight here as volunteers. But not everybody understands."

Touchin’ Me, Touchin’ You

Manilow, Midler, Diamond, Streisand: The last days of the great American showpeople.

 

By Eric Hynes SLATE

Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, and Neil Diamond.

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Mark Davis, Kevin Winter, Jeff Fusco, and Stephen Lovekin from Getty Images.

The day of the last show in his "One Last Time" tour, Barry Manilo

w turned 72. "When my grandfather was this age, the best he could do was bring up phlegm," he said that night from behind a piano at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, doling out a canny folksiness that’s served him since the 1950s, when he was a skinny kid playing accordion favorites for his parents up the street in Williamsburg (which Barry correctly described as "now all fancy schmancy"). In many ways, Manilow is still playing that skinny kid, getting loving ovations simply for hitting high notes, and eliciting hoots and whistles from female fans for the kind of PG-rated come-ons that everyone always knew weren’t actionable. It’s all just a show. But what was once mere easy listening, an exemplar of irredeemable uncoolness, has taken on weight and poignancy with time. A once dominant, very American-melting-pot mode of popular entertainment is about to pass into history. These are the last days of the great American showpeople. How will we remember their bellow-to-the-rafters, bear-witness-to-my-talent era?

Twelve days after Manilow bowed out with a reprise of "Can’t Smile Without You," his onetime collaborator Bette Midler took the same stage at the Barclays. Three months prior it was Neil Diamond who came home to the venue, singing nostalgically about the "Brooklyn Roads" he grew up in—the same neighborhood (and high school, and showbiz dreams) that nurtured Barbra Streisand, who inaugurated the Barclays Center in 2012. Three of the four were born in Brooklyn (Midler was raised in Hawaii by New Jersey–born parents but moved to New York at the age of 19), all are Jewish, all were crucially born during the years of World War II, and all have been crowd-pleasing showpeople for half a century. With post–hip replacement Manilow being coy about future tours, the 73-year-old Streisand typically mum about public appearances, and the 74-year-old Diamond for the first time noncommittal about continuing his 45-plus years of road-hogging, their time of arena dominance is collectively winding down.

Forget the knee-jerk jokes and parodies, the gossipy tittering about face-lifts and remarriages. They once were among the biggest stars we had going. They dominated radio, Broadway, Hollywood, television, concert halls, and arenas. Fifty years later they still sell plenty of tickets and albums, and though their catalogs now litter dollar bins—throw a copy of The Rose in the air at your local used record store and you'll hit Streisand in that Superman T-shirt—it's only because of how many of their damn discs the public once consumed. They operated at the intersection of jazz-age piano bar crooning, variety show razzmatazz, mainstream AM pop, and Borscht Belt Yiddish theatrics. (All four did turns in the Catskills, with Diamond even signing his first ill-advised performance contract there during high school summer vacation.) And though they each adapted to trends in rock, folk, disco, and whatever other sounds they could craftily co-opt, it was always in opportunistic service of their own chart-topping agendas.

You can still picture each of these performers, even past 70, killing it at a youth talent show.

And they were never, ever cool. They weren’t disaffected rebels, weren’t looking to reshape the culture in their images, or start a movement. Well before they became stars, they had their sights set on the mainstream. Diamond churned out workaday pop songs for Tin Pan Alley, Manilow wrote fiendishly catchy commercial jingles for the likes of Coke and McDonald’s, Midler hoofed it in off-off-Broadway productions, and the teenaged Streisand auditioned her way onto stages and shows. They came of prominence as the 1960s counterculture subverted the aspirational middle-class, kids-of-immigrants-made-good culture of Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan—a culture that became square just as they hustled from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Los Angeles to break into it.

Except for Diamond, their peak stardom was sustained through polished recordings of others’ songs—the tried and true tactic of an earlier era, even as the singer-songwriters of the late 1960s and ’70s shifted the culture. They were fueled by chutzpah and hungry for approval. They looked, talked, and even flaunted their Jewishness (unlike Bob Dylan, née Zimmerman, Diamond even toyed with taking on a more Jewish-sounding name: Noah Kaminsky); instead of diluting it they poured it into the mainstream. All four of these famously Jewish artists recorded Christmas albums, and somehow nothing could have been more normal or banal.

You can still picture each of these performers, even past 70, killing it at a youth talent show. Midler’s bawdiness still seems somehow precocious, Diamond’s rock ’n’ roll still plays as charmingly second-hand, and Streisand and Manilow still bring the house down simply for hitting their notes. (Manilow even gets love for key changes.) At the Barclays, Manilow reminisced about how his grandfather gave him a standing ovation at his first appearance at Carnegie Hall, and throughout the show he and the enthusiastic audience were enacting an eerily similar, oddly satisfying exchange. Could you imagine a contemporary like Mick Jagger, or even fellow New Yorker Billy Joel—born six nonconformist boomer years after Manilow—milking the audience for head-pat approval?

So they were too available, too eager to please, too ambitious ever to achieve coolness. Yet although being uncool ensured constant critical scorn, it’s also been the key to their staying power. By never being in fashion, they never had to endure falling out of it. Neither did their fans. An unsexy truth about America in the ’60s and ’70s—a truth at the heart of Mad Men—is that many people, including many young people, didn’t partake of the counterculture. Diamond actually released a de facto PSA on the perils of pot mere months after the Summer of Love, which was around the same time that Manilow was composing commercial jingles for Coke and McDonald’s. Which made them safe ambassadors for a filtered version of the new freedoms, peddling hippiedom’s greatest hits (Streisand’s Stoney End) and dime-store self-actualization (Diamond’s "I Am … I Said") for the Ice Storm set. These are the people who made Manilow, who sang of loving and smiling and making it through the rain, into one of the top acts of the 1970s. Over the same period, they followed Barbra from Broadway to Hollywood, from Leonard Bernstein to Kris Kristofferson to Barry Gibb.

And sometimes they didn’t even bother evolving. Diamond’s one of the top live acts of all time despite a set list that’s scarcely changed since Reagan’s inauguration. At his Barclays show back in March, Diamond repeated the final verse and chorus of "Sweet Caroline" three straight times—not in response to spontaneous demand, but out of a well-practiced tradition of overkill. (He performs it the exact same way every night, with the same false attempts to stop after the first run-through and the same on-cue chants for more, more.) Reliability is a large part of the appeal. Everything else changes, everything else can let you down, but there’s always that leap-to-your-feet thrill of hearing the first few chords of your favorite song. Cool fades, but "Forever in Blue Jeans" is, well, forever.

Or that’s the illusion. Now that time has started to catch up to these performers, even their cheesiest ploys tend to take on a note of poignancy. And as this strand of showmanship fades along with them, the cheese feels less like pandering and more like craft—a kind of well-tuned showmanship that’s unique to this generation of performers. Consider Manilow’s between-song banter, which is as rehearsed and calibrated as his singing. Looking up to the nosebleed seats, he said, "I must look like a little dancing nose up there," with the next song’s ba-dum-dum-dah rising in response. As he doubtless had done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before, Barry invited a woman from the front row to dance with him for a crisp 20 seconds ("Everybody give a hand for Tara from Omaha!"), the star presenting himself as accessible but in control, and doing it flawlessly. The jokes, the interactivity, the self-deprecation—such stagecraft has been passed down among jazz joints and nightclubs; Ed Sullivan and Hee-Haw; Brooklyn and Branson, Missouri. It’s a tradition of execution, of notes and elements fitting into place, and much of its pleasure comes from everyone knowing (and exulting) in the pattern.

Some younger megastars have cannily borrowed from the big show playbook. Katy Perry's cartoonish sensuality and prop-heavy showmanship owe a heavy debt to Midler, as does Lady Gaga’s act, which recently has also veered into Manilow and Diamond-esque modulations between ballads and bombast. Both artists actively court women and gay men, loyal audiences that have been crucial to the older artists' longevity. While something of the showpeople’s aesthetic and energy may survive, there's no way of replicating a generation of performers who emerged in that particular time and place—midcentury overachievers raised on a blend of mainstream assimilationism and irrevocable urban ethnicity. What we saw in Manilow, Midler, Diamond, and Streisand wasn’t, for all of their polish, an affect. Their acts were their lives, created out of an intertwining of popular arts that made sense for the families and neighborhoods and historical era that they came from. Younger artists are smart to borrow from these forebears, especially if they’re aiming to stick around and keep their fans for a while. But there’s no way to manufacture the innately sincere approach to both talent and salesmanship of the showpeople.

What may truly be lost, or what may truly be fading, is a belief that talent wins out. That talent, delivered with a modicum of flair, might be enough. That with a voice like Streisand, the musicianship of Manilow, the songcraft of Diamond, or the singing-dancing–stand-up triple threat of Midler, you could reasonably expect to make it. It’s hard to imagine any of them achieving the same level of success in today’s world. Likely they’d be churning out hits for Pink or Kelly Clarkson, or enjoying runs on Broadway, collecting the occasional Tony and making a decent living. But forget The Way We Were, The Jazz Singer, or Beaches; forget the variety shows and the rhinestones, the SNL parodies. Maybe they’d captivate us for a season of The Voice or inspire a standing ovation from Howard Stern on America’s Got Talent (a word that now denotes a repository for marginal acts). But that’s Susan Boyle territory, not Hollywood superstardom. It’s certainly not 50 years of arena sellouts.

Yet there’s still some gas left in the tank. Streisand’s developing a Gypsy remake as a Hollywood swan song. Songwriting-wise, Diamond’s last decade has been more impressive than the prior three. In classic pull-back-from-the-precipice showmanship, Manilow hinted at the Barcalys show that the "One Last Time" tour might not be his one last time. Meanwhile at her own Brooklyn finale Monday night, Midler showed that she’s still got it, as they used to say. She paced, kicked, and cackled her way across the stage in a series of guises, including a leggy pink tunic and a shimmering red gown. She channeled Mae West for a sexed-up stand-up set heavy on Viagra references (could a popular star ever again imitate a prewar icon and assume we get the reference?), and gamely churned out topical groaners about Twitter and dick pics. "I’ve seen it all," she said, semiserious as always, but perhaps also more sincerely melancholic. "And what I remember I intend to repeat tonight."

Which is what she did, and what they all do. Midler sang the hits, sprinkled in a few of her less-famous favorites, and ended on arguably the biggest song that any of these showpeople ever recorded—that cover of a Lou Rawls tune that generations of grooms have guiltily danced with their mothers to on their wedding nights, and that Bette has sung nearly as often. Yet she cried as she dedicated the song to her fans, and of course she nailed it. And it doesn’t matter how rehearsed it all was. True showpeople develop a routine and practice to perfection, supplementing it with style and flashing "a beautiful smile to hide the pain." And they always, always finish strong.