Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol's Bond Was Fleeting. The Movie Live On.

Alice Sedgwick Wohl looks back on her sister’s fast rise alongside Pop Artist Andy Warhol.

Review by Paul Alexander, The Washington Post

August 16, 2022 at 9:25 a.m. EDT

From March 1965 until January 1966, New York City was beguiled by an unexpected “it” couple. Andy Warhol — effete, strange-looking with his pallid skin and silver wig — was emerging as the principal practitioner of Pop Art. Edie Sedgwick — waiflike, modern with her pixie haircut and hoop earrings — was described as a debutante, heiress and member of the Boston Brahmins (none of which was actually true).

During their time together in the spotlight, which started in earnest when they appeared at a preview of “Three Centuries of American Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and received more press attention than fellow attendee first lady Lady Bird Johnson, they dominated the Manhattan social scene. As Merv Griffin said of them when they appeared on his television show, “No party in New York is considered a success unless they are there.”

Although the pair made for glamorous pictures, their fame was based on more than media coverage. During those 10 months, Edie was an integral part of the experimental films Warhol was making. His films were often little more than unedited reproductions of everyday life, such as a person sleeping or people kissing, but those featuring Edie, particularly “Poor Little Rich Girl,” were real-life portraits of a beautiful and engaging subject. As Warhol later wrote, “The fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love.”

Their collaboration is the core of “As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy,” by Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Edie’s older sister. The book is a family memoir with Edie as a primary focus. Unflinching in its honesty, Wohl’s memoir provides a disquieting glimpse into one family in America’s privileged class, a family made worthy of examination because one of its members — whose presence lives on luminously in her films — remains a source of fascination more than 50 years after her death.

Edie’s parents, Alice de Forest and Francis (“Fuzzy”) Sedgwick, were warned by a psychiatrist not to have children. They had eight. Edie was the penultimate. By the time she was born, the family had left a mansion in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island for a ranch near Santa Barbara. When oil was discovered there, Fuzzy moved his brood to a larger ranch, Rancho La Laguna de San Francisco, where Edie spent her formative years. Her main activity was horseback riding.

As for Edie’s mother, Wohl declares, “I never saw my mother lift a finger except to saddle her horse.” She eschewed both housework and child-rearing. The father, a member of no fewer than seven private clubs, was an unapologetic racist who made sexual advances toward his daughters. “When Edie got to New York,” Wohl writes, “she told everybody she had been subjected to Fuzzy’s sexual advances from the age of seven.”

One day when Edie walked in on her father having sex with “a beautiful young wife we all knew,” he assaulted her and “called the doctor and said she was crazy.” Edie told her mother what happened, but, according to Wohl, “Mummy wouldn’t believe her … and after that she was kept in a darkened room half-drugged all the time.”

It’s not surprising that during her teenage years and early 20s, Edie suffered from bulimia, aborted an unwanted pregnancy (then illegal), and served stints at Silver Hill, a psychiatric hospital in New Canaan, Conn., and “the modern incarnation of the old Bloomingdale Insane Asylum” in White Plains, N.Y., where she received electroshock therapy treatments.

So, Edie was anything but an uncomplicated young woman when she was introduced to Warhol on March 26, 1965, at a party hosted by movie producer Lester Persky at his Central Park South penthouse. Warhol was smitten — “Ooooh, she’s so bee-you-ti-ful,” he cooed — and invited her to the Factory, his studio. Unfazed by his celebrity — Edie was dating Bob Dylan — she went the next day, and the pair began a collaboration that produced some of Warhol’s most memorable films, among them “Vinyl,” “Poor Little Rich Girl,” “Restaurant,” “Kitchen” and “Afternoon.”

One fact about “Afternoon” “makes me sad,” Wohl writes, explaining that “the third reel would have been the opening segment of ‘Chelsea Girls,’ the most successful of Warhol’s movies, only Edie had it taken out.” Under contract with Dylan’s agent, Edie believed that she was headed for Hollywood, so she wanted to reduce her participation in Warhol films. That explains why, going forward, she was willing to be a character in Warhol’s “a: a novel” — a book gleaned from events in the lives of various Warholites as recorded on 12 cassette tapes — but appeared in few films. The best was “Outer and Inner Space,” which, Wohl observes, “is a very great work of art, and it kills me that Edie had no idea what it meant to be its subject.” 

The zenith of the Warhol-Sedgwick alliance came on Oct. 8, 1965, the night they attended the opening of curator Sam Green’s Warhol retrospective in Philadelphia. A room that held 400 was descended upon by 4,000 excited fans eager to catch a glimpse of the couple. “Unbeknown to Edie and others present,” Wohl writes "— not even Andy could have sensed it — this was … the absolute high point of her life and the apotheosis of Edie Sedgwick.”

The collaboration ended in late January 1966 after a dinner at the Ginger Man in Manhattan. As Wohl describes the scene, Edie complained to Warhol, with everyone at the table watching, that he “wouldn’t let her get close to him, and suddenly she said she didn’t want him showing his films of her anymore because they made her look ridiculous.” Soon Dylan arrived, Edie left with him, and Warhol had little to do with her again.

Edie’s dream of a Hollywood career never materialized, and on Nov. 16, 1971, she died of a barbiturates overdose in California. What remains, Wohl observes in her sensitive, elegantly written memoir, is the work, the films themselves, which represent “the era of the image, which was just coming into being.”

She adds, “Andy anticipated it.” As, perhaps, in her own way, did Edie.

Paul Alexander has published eight books, including “Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy’s Millions.” He teaches at Hunter College.

"What Obama Means to Us Now" in "The Opinion Pages"

What Obama Means To Us Now

Written by Paul Alexander

June 9, 2022

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up near the city in the 1960s, the prime years of the Civil Rights Movement. I have memories of the bombing of the Sixteen Street Baptist Church when four little girls were killed as they attended Sunday School. I remember the Children’s Crusade. I remember the everyday marches and protests that came to define the city. When you grow up in Birmingham, particularly when I did, race is an ever-present presence in your life.

I address race in my new play, The Moons of Saturn, a family drama set in a town outside of Birmingham. The play takes place at a more recent pivotal moment in history — November 3, 4, and 5, 2008, which saw the first presidential victory of Barack Obama. The election stood as a stark counterpoint to the dark days of Jim Crow, yet, for all it said about America’s attempt to realize a more perfect union, the election also contained the seeds of the blowback we have come to experience of late — a resurgence of overt racism and a concerted attempt to undermine voting rights and social justice.

At a staged reading of my play in late April, the first time the script was read by actors to an audience, I was surprised by what turned out to be the play’s most emotional interlude. It was not the denouement sparked by an argument over bigotry or the family squabbles motived by envy or insecurity. It came instead from a simple, quiet scene when two characters sit in a car on Election Night and listen to a news report of the Obama victory broadcast over the radio. The heartfelt response of the characters, an older white woman who lived through the 1960s and a young African American man, spoke to what many Americans felt that night: bliss over what had just happened and hope for an even better future. I did not expect that moment to be the one in the play when I could hear members of the audience crying.

Of course, part of this sentiment is driven by Obama nostalgia, which turns out to be a real thing. That phenomenon was on full display two months ago when Obama returned to The White House to celebrate the passage, twelve years earlier, of the Affordable Care Act. The event in the East Room felt more like an exuberant campaign stop than a solemn ceremony to mark the anniversary of the passage of a piece of legislation. There were “good memories,” The Washington Postreported, “when the [Democratic] party had catapulted the country’s first Black president to the White House, an inspirational figure who enacted a universal health-care law” — and, by the way, who oversaw the nation’s recovery from the global financial meltdown of 2007 and 2008 and greenlit the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

But perhaps Obama’s most relevant achievement is this: he served as president for eight years with grace, competence, and dignity. He did not attempt to end democracy through insurgency as his successor would; he did not suffer from crippling low public support because he ran as a centrist but governed as a woke progressive out of step with the mainstream voter. Americans long for the leadership Obama displayed throughout his time in office; they remember fondly an administration that counted among its most newsworthy scandals the day the president showed up for work in a tan suit. How innocent it all seems now. If Barack Obama could run for president again today, he would win in a landslide.

We feel this way about Obama now, which provides an element of the pathos in The Moons of Saturn. “The joy and the pride,” one character, a young African American woman, says on Election Night, “I know that’s what I feel. Not sure I’ll ever feel the same way again, not exactly, not like I feel right now.” The yearning that we could feel that way again is what creates nostalgia — in this case nostalgia for a president we perhaps didn’t fully appreciate until after he was gone from office.

WRITTEN BY PAUL ALEXANDER

Paul Alexander is the author of numerous magazine articles and opinion pieces, eight books, and three plays. He often writes about American culture and politics.

Heather Clark's "Red Comet" is an exhaustively researched, often brilliant biography of Sylvia Plath

The Washington Post, October 28, 2020

Almost six decades after her death, Sylvia Plath stands as the most consequential poet of her generation. As a feminine voice, she dominates the 20th century the way Emily Dickinson did the century before. At the time of Plath’s death at age 30, critic A. Alvarez wrote, “The loss to literature is inestimable.” The years have proved him right.

Because of the importance of her work — her “Collected Poems” won the Pulitzer Prize and her novel, “The Bell Jar,” is a coming-of-age classic — and because of the sensational circumstances of her death, an extraordinary amount of attention has been paid to Plath in both the academic and mainstream press. So many biographies have appeared that Janet Malcolm produced “The Silent Woman” (1994), a study of Plath biography, with writers like “Bitter Fame” author Anne Stevenson suffering Malcolm’s brutal hit-and-run treatment.

Now, into the breach, comes Heather Clark’s “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” an exhaustively researched, frequently brilliant masterwork that stretches to 1,072 pages (including notes). It is an impressive achievement representing a prizeworthy contribution to literary scholarship and biographical journalism.

“Red Comet” thoroughly chronicles all stages of Plath’s life. An idyllic childhood on the Massachusetts coast near Boston was shattered by the early death of her father, Otto Plath, a biologist who misdiagnosed himself with cancer only to die of — as Clark reports finding in the death certificate — “diabetes mellitus and bronchial pneumonia, due to gangrene in the left foot.”

Plath’s now-single mother, Aurelia, moved with the children, Sylvia and Warren, to Wellesley, Mass., where Sylvia graduated from high school. Plath’s stellar academic career at Smith College, a school for women in Northampton, Mass, was marred in the summer of 1953 by an unsettling guest editorship at Mademoiselle that led to a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt. “I swallowed quantities [of sleeping pills] and blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness,” Plath wrote to a friend. These events later inspired “The Bell Jar.”

Plath’s marriage to poet Ted Hughes, whom she met while on a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University, produced two children (Frieda and Nicholas) and two historic bodies of work. But the marriage’s end caused a searingly intense unhappiness that ultimately consumed them both. The unraveling began in May 1962 in Devon, where the Hugheses were living in a thatched-roof country house. Assia Wevill, an aspiring poet, and her husband, David, a Canadian poet, who were subletting the Hugheses’ London flat, came for a visit. “Ted kissed me in the kitchen, and Sylvia saw it,” Clark quotes Assia as telling David. It was the start of an affair.

The following months saw Plath descend into despair as she endured what she viewed as Hughes’s continued betrayal. While still seeing Assia, he began dating Susan Alliston, also an aspiring poet. That Hughes was simultaneously pursuing two women known to Plath was a source of acute humiliation. A breaking point came in early 1963 when Plath learned that Assia was pregnant.

The cacophony of emotions generated by Hughes’s romantic entanglements were made worse by hardships resulting from the weather — the harshest winter to hit London in a century meant frozen pipes and no heat — and her medication, a cocktail of four drugs that made her more, not less, depressed.

Living again in London, her “madness” having returned, Plath decided to end her life. On the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, with her children secured in an upstairs bedroom, she sealed herself in the kitchen, lay on the floor, and turned on the gas in the oven. “As she died,” Clark writes, “the sun rose out the large window to her left, flooding the kitchen with light.”

Portions of “Red Comet” are deeply moving, but a tendency to downplay Hughes’s violence will likely attract critics. In May 1958, when Plath was teaching at Smith, she saw Hughes strolling on campus with a student. The ensuing altercation caused Plath to report in her journal that the fight left her with a strained thumb and Hughes with claw marks on his cheeks. “I remember,” Plath wrote, “hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room; instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars.” Clark writes of the passage: “Plath’s colon suggests that she ‘got hit’ by the ricocheting glass, not by Hughes” — a conclusion contrary to the one many other readers have reached. Another episode, which Plath described in no uncertain terms, occurred in February 1961, when Hughes beat Plath so severely she suffered a miscarriage. “Red Comet” reviews the evidence but offers an apologia from Frieda Hughes, who contends that “my father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was.”

On that point, one central question has loomed since Plath’s death: What role did Hughes play, intentionally or not, in her death? “Red Comet” reports what Hughes said on the matter. “No doubt where the blame lies,” Hughes wrote to a friend. “It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius,” Hughes said to Plath’s friend Elizabeth Compton, adding on another occasion, “I feel like a murderer.” To Aurelia Plath, Hughes wrote: “[I]f there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive.”

In a letter to the Observer newspaper (never mailed) that was meant to thank Plath’s friends and neighbors, Aurelia seemed to concur: “Those who systematically and deliberately destroyed her know who they are.”

Plath’s loss continues to resonate. “With each passing decade,” Clark concludes, “Sylvia Plath’s work seems more astonishing, and its achievements harder earned. . . . Let us not desert her.”

"Warhol" Paints the Pop Art Icon as the Most Influential Arts of the 20th Century

‘Warhol’ paints the Pop Art icon as the most influential artist of the 20th century

By Paul Alexander 

The Washington Post

April 17, 2020 at 11:51 a.m. EDT

“It’s looking more and more like Warhol has overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the twentieth century.” That’s the assessment of Blake Gopnik, a journalist and former art critic for The Washington Post, in “Warhol,” his impressive, sweeping biography of the artist.

Andy Warhol may have ended Abstract Expressionism when he launched Pop Art in the early 1960s, but, like Picasso, he also became a cultural figure. In his career, Warhol had a lasting effect on advertising, fashion, music, film, television and photography, all while achieving a level of renown far surpassing the 15 minutes of fame he predicted everyone would have. In “Warhol,” Gopnik chronicles the full scope of this career.

He was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, one of three sons of Slavic immigrants Andrej, a laborer, and Julia, a housekeeper. He was a frail boy after a bout of St. Vitus’ Dance, a neurological disorder, so he became a creature of his imagination, devouring novels and magazines and dreaming of Hollywood.

A gift for art landed him at Carnegie Institute of Technology. He nearly flunked out after his first year but won a reprieve: “I created a big scene and cried.”

After college, ambition drove him to New York. Tina Fredericks at Glamour magazine gave him his break, an opportunity he did not squander. Gigs at companies like Noonday Press, Bonwit Teller and I. Miller (for which he produced shoe drawings celebrated in the advertising industry) made him “piles of money,” Gopnik notes. He got his own place, eventually purchasing a Lexington Avenue townhouse.

As his commercial art business flourished, Warhol took up fine art, experimenting with the concrete image and the silk-screening process. Among his initial attempts was a series of paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans, which Henry Geldzahler, the art curator, called “the Nude Descending a Staircase of the Pop movement.” When Dennis Hopper, the actor and photographer, first saw one, he immediately understood the potential: “I started jumping up and down, saying, ‘That’s it! that’s it!’” he said. “That’s a return to reality.” Pop Art was born.

A Stable Gallery show featuring silk-screens of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Troy Donohue “established Warhol,” Gopnik argues, “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before.”

“Death and Disaster,” a masterwork, was followed by “Flowers” (paintings) and “Brillo Boxes” (sculpture), all produced in a new studio space, known as the Factory, the walls of which were covered in aluminum foil by Billy Name, the first of many Warhol acolytes.

Then, in 1965, Warhol announced his “retirement” from art to focus on movies. He had shot experimental films already, including “Sleep,” “Kiss” and “Empire,” an eight-hour black-and-white shot of the Empire State Building. Now he made “Poor Little Rich Girl” with Edie Sedgwick, his first “superstar.” Others followed: Brigid Berlin, Paul America and Viva, among others, appearing in films like “My Hustler,” “The Nude Restaurant” and the cult classic “The Chelsea Girls.”

Warhol managed the Velvet Underground, pairing the group with Nico to make a landmark rock album. He pioneered performance art with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event. Then, on June 3, 1968, he was shot by Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist and Factory hanger-on, in the throes of a psychotic breakdown. Gopnik’s account of the attempted murder is gripping: “The slug pierced Andy Warhol’s right side just under his arm and he began to bleed out.” Warhol flatlined at Columbus Hospital before doctors revived him.

He was never the same. “Andy died when Valerie Solanas shot him,” Gopnik quotes Taylor Mead, a Warhol superstar, as saying. “He’s just somebody to have at your dinner table now. Charming, but he’s the ghost of a genius.” Maybe, but during the 1970s — under the guidance of Fred Hughes, who ended up managing Warhol’s business life for more than 25 years — he built an empire.

Warhol made movies including “Flesh,” “Blue Movie” and “Lonesome Cowboys.” He returned to art, producing a series of paintings of the Chinese Communist Party chairman, Mao Zedong, and the masterwork “Shadows.” He also turned portraiture into a lucrative enterprise, starting with Happy Rockefeller and proceeding to an array of figures like Halston and Liza Minnelli. He founded Interview Magazine and bought a Montauk, N.Y., estate and a Rolls-Royce.

He also enjoyed his most successful personal relationship. Just before the shooting, he had hired Jed Johnson as an assistant; after the shooting, the two moved in together. “Over the next dozen years,” Gopnik writes, Johnson “came to fill the traditional role of devoted young spouse.” He decorated Warhol’s new townhouse on East 66th Street. Their eventual breakup left Warhol devastated, though few knew it. He was loath to express emotion. After his mother died in 1972, he neither attended her funeral nor announced her death. Anyone inquiring about her was told that she was shopping at Bloomingdale’s.

The 1980s were also productive — more art, collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, ventures into television, a new Factory — until he went to the hospital for gallbladder surgery and died of complications Feb. 22, 1987.

“The critical skepticism that Warhol lived with has evaporated in the years since his death,” Gopnik concludes. That clarity has afforded observers the chance to appraise Warhol objectively. He was America’s Picasso.

The Buffalo News, Monday, April 13, 2020

ANOTHER VOICE

History shows pandemic may propel Cuomo toward White House

By Another Voice Published 4:00 p.m. April 12, 2020

By Paul Alexander

History is on the side of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

After the stock market crash of 1929, President Herbert Hoover was reluctant to have the federal government intervene into what became the Great Depression. By 1932, conditions were so dire the public yearned for a leader who was willing to lead. The person they turned to was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York, who promised to unleash the full force of the federal government – what became the New Deal – to combat the financial crisis.

A similar dynamic is unfolding today. During January and February, President Trump refused to acknowledge the threat of the coronavirus, despite warnings made by his intelligence community and health officials. Even after he was forced to take the virus seriously in late March, he has remained hesitant to use the federal government. For the last three years, Trump has consistently made moves to weaken an array of federal agencies. Why would he now disregard his contempt for government?

In the absence of a federal response, governors have had to fill the leadership void. No one has done so better than Cuomo. His efforts to respond to the unfolding disaster in New York – through increased testing, a demand for social distancing and working from home, an expansion of medical equipment and treatment facilities – has been Herculean. His daily news conferences have been reassuring to the public.

Some Democrats now regret that Cuomo did not run for president. Joe Biden may currently lead the delegate count, but he has run the most lackluster campaign of any front-runner in modern presidential history.

Cuomo has made his share of gaffes as governor. With the Buffalo Billion, he squandered three quarters of a billion dollars of state taxpayer money on building Elon Musk a vast solar panel gigafactory in Buffalo that thus far has created fewer jobs than promised.

More recently, he has fought with the state’s utilities over proposed natural gas pipelines, showing a failure to understand warnings from utilities that they cannot meet future energy demands. Indeed, Cuomo’s ham-handedness reflects the fact that he is often seen as difficult to deal with.

These faults pale in light of a genuine crisis that is being mishandled by a president who believes that the private, not the public, sector is better equipped to handle almost any event, including a pandemic. But sometimes a disaster can be managed only with the use of the federal government – a fact Hoover was disinclined to embrace, which was why Roosevelt, promising federal intervention, defeated him in a landslide in 1932.

The country is going to need a new New Deal after 2020; many Democrats believe Cuomo is the New York governor to see that it gets done.

Paul Alexander, a political writer, is the author of books about John Kerry, John McCain and Karl Rove.

Violence Fuels Long Island Author's Debut Novel

Ani Katz grew up on the South Shore of Long Island and has set her debut novel "A Good Man" there.

By Paul Alexander Special to Newsday Updated February 1, 2020 6:00 AM

A GOOD MAN by Ani Katz (Penguin, 224 pp., $17)

In her debut novel “A Good Man,” Long Island native Ani Katz embraces Anton Chekhov’s theory of the unfired gun, which demands that a gun introduced in Chapter 1 must be fired by the book’s end. Katz’s weapon of choice is a billy club, introduced in her very first sentence. Purchased on eBay from “an amateur craftsman in War Eagle, Arkansas,” the club was “carved from Ozark red cedar” with “a nice old-fashioned look to it.”

Why was it bought? “For protection,” claims Thomas Martin, the novel’s I-narrator. “Psychological protection at least.” That’s an eerie detail, but Thomas has lived a life full of dark elements. Born and raised on Long Island, he endured a disturbing childhood dominated by a sinister father who struck him (once with a frying pan); sexually abused Thomas’ older sister, Eve; and generally wreaked havoc on his family, which also included Thomas’ pathologically passive-aggressive mother and his younger twin sisters who end up so emotionally damaged they never leave their mother’s highly questionable care. Thomas’ youth was also marked by two deaths — those of his father, who was drunk when he died in a car accident, and of Eve, so emotionally scarred by her father’s abuse that she jumped to her death from a window.

Katz’s portrayal of suburban life is relentlessly somber, which contrasts to the happy times Thomas spends in Brooklyn following college. There he begins his lucrative career as an ad agency man working for a Manhattan firm and meets Miriam, a beautiful Parisian visiting America whom he marries. “I called her Miri,” he reveals. “I was in love. We were in love.” And with the addition of a daughter, Ava, whom Thomas worships, the family ends up on Long Island, the site of Thomas’ disquieting youth.

But throughout the novel, action is haunted by its beginning — and the unused billy club. Odd mentions add to the unease. Reference is made to “Medea,” Euripides’ classic drama in which a mother murders her children.

At the novel’s conclusion Thomas devolves emotionally until he explodes in a bloody rampage. The billy club is finally used and Chekhov’s theory fulfilled. And what brought on Thomas’ catastrophic breakdown? He suffers a major setback at work when a client rejects a proposed project; then he loses his job when he is wrongly accused of sexual harassment by a co-worker whose advances he rejected. In other words, he encounters the sort of difficult life events the average person deals with as best he can without resorting to violence. Unfortunately, Thomas, his coping mechanisms presumably compromised by his unsettling childhood, lapses into a murderous rage.

In the end, the motivations for Thomas’ final actions are questionable if not incredulous. Katz seems more driven to master attention-grabbing prose that might appeal to the audience who bought “Gone Girl” than actually to delve into the human condition. Cynical and glib, “A Good Man” ultimately lacks the willingness to elucidate the despair it ostensibly endeavors to portray.

The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of Brooklyn

September 17, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post

Say the name Brooklyn these days, and many people think of Jay-Z or Barclays Center or, most often, skyrocketing real estate prices fueled by gentrification.

 But for 500 years now, Brooklyn has charted a rich history unique in the American experience. In “Brooklyn: The Once and Future City,” Thomas J. Campanella — an urban planner, professor at Cornell University and Brooklyn native — has produced a meticulously researched and information-filled chronicle of a place that, in its own way, defines New York City. “Without Brooklyn,” Campanella argues, “New York would never have become a great metropolis.”

 Certainly, few cities can boast of being the childhood residence of so many noteworthy figures. From Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer in literature to Shirley Chisholm and Bernie Sanders in politics to Aaron Copland and George and Ira Gershwin in music to Spike Lee and Barbra Streisand in Hollywood — all were raised in Brooklyn. Not every native loved growing up there. Henry Miller claimed he suffered “nothing but misery.” Truman Capote, a transplant to the borough, called it a “veritable veld of tawdriness.”

 Still, Brooklyn’s saga stretches back to the days when Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Henry Hudson, Campanella notes, “swung up the coast around Sandy Hook” as early as 1609. Keskachauge was settled in 1636; nine years later, Lady Deborah Moody, an Englishwoman who became America’s first female town planner, founded Gravesend . Then, in June 1776, near the start of the Revolutionary War, 130 British warships, “the largest projection of seaborne power . . . ever attempted by a European state,” made landfall. The ensuing Battle of Brooklyn, with George Washington commanding U.S. troops, became the largest single conflict in the Revolutionary War. That Washington lost the battle has “long been a hushed chapter in America’s founding story.”

 Over time, developments in Brooklyn mirrored the nation’s. “Slavery,” Campanella writes, “was an essential element of New York life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” Brooklyn was home to more slaves than any location in New York; between 1703 and 1790, its slave population quadrupled. But there were countervailing forces as well. The Lott House, among the oldest homes in New York state, located in Brooklyn, is believed to have been part of the Underground Railroad.

 Campanella documents more recent developments. Prospect Park, created by Frederick Law Olmsted , responsible for Manhattan’s Central Park, “is a masterpiece of landscape design.” Olmsted also designed Brooklyn’s parkways, broad tree-lined roads reminiscent of European thoroughfares, which would come to define the borough’s cityscape. Ocean Parkway featured the nation’s first dedicated bicycle lane in 1894. Other landmarks included Sheepshead Bay Race Track, Sheepshead Bay Motor Speedway and Coney Island, the entertainment destination on Brooklyn’s southern shore that, besides a public beach, featured in its heyday three amusement parks — Dreamland, Steeplechase Park and Luna Park.

 As home construction exploded over the last century or so, Brooklyn also became known for its builders. Lawrence “Lorry” Rukeyser (father of poet Muriel Rukeyser ) thrived until he ran into financial trouble. Some of his unfinished homes were acquired in bankruptcy by Fred C. Trump, the president’s father, who made a fortune not by relying on name licensing deals, as his son would, but on his considerable skills as a builder (some called him “the Henry Ford of housing”). Then there was William M. Calder, who, as a U.S. senator, created daylight saving time and divided the nation into standard time zones, and, as a developer, built thousands of homes in Brooklyn and helped bring the boardwalk to Coney Island.

 To be sure, Brooklyn has had missed opportunities. Jamaica Bay aspired to be a world-class harbor but could not be dredged enough to become a deepwater port and lost out to Newark. Floyd Bennett Field, an airport in southern Brooklyn, was set to be New York’s premier airport, but, because it was too difficult for the U.S. Post Office Department to transport mail there, never fulfilled its promise as a commercial aviation facility.

 Campanella notes that Brooklyn reached its “apogee of power and population during World War II,” thanks in part to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as the borough became “the largest war-staging base in the United States.” But the years from 1955 to 1970 were Brooklyn’s “most convulsive.” In 1955, the Brooklyn Eagle, the borough’s newspaper, ceased operation. Two years later, the Brooklyn Dodgers played their last game at Ebbets Field before moving to Los Angeles . In 1964, Steeplechase closed. Two years later, so did the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

 “By the mid-1970s,” Campanella observes, “Brooklyn had been brought to its knees.” Crime ran rampant, and the failure of public housing projects such as the Fort Greene Houses helped turn Brooklyn into a modern ghetto. The depth of its descent has made the borough’s recent revitalization — which has produced its own talisman in the Brooklyn hipster championing a new urban Bohemianism — all the more impressive. “Brooklyn has become both a product and a brand,” Campanella writes. “That brand has now spread around the world.”

The Once and Future City

Thomas J. Campanella

Princeton University. 552. $35

Recent Publications

Poet Stanley Plumly takes a lyrical look at John Constable and J.M.W. Turner

By Paul Alexander

August 21, 2018

Stanley Plumly was already a giant among poets by the time he decided, several years ago, to turn his attention to narrative nonfiction.

He began, understandably, with a poet: “Posthumous Keats” was a “personal” biography that grew out of Plumly’s decades-long obsession with John Keats. That same passion compelled his follow-up, “The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner With Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb.” Recounting in gripping detail the night Keats met William Wordsworth, the book won the Truman Capote Award.

Now, remaining in the Romantic era but branching out into the world of art, Plumly has written “Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime,” a dual portrait of British landscape painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. With a keen eye for artistic composition and in language that easily alternates between analytical and lyrical, Plumly explores the two artists’ canons through the prism of their lives, all the while asking: What makes their work unique and lasting?

“Elegy Landscapes” contains 41 incisive, engaging chapters that alternate between the painters. Plumly depicts Constable as a genius whose value went unrealized during his life. Born in rural England in 1776, the son of a merchant and landowner, Constable began painting in his 20s but had trouble selling his work — a curse he suffered throughout his career. To earn commissions, he painted portraits. One early subject was Maria Bicknell; she was 12, he 24. Years later, they fell in love and married despite her family’s disapproval of Constable’s financial prospects; he often lived on an allowance from his father. “My life is a struggle,” Constable wrote to a friend, “between ‘my social affections’ and ‘my love of art.’ ” The couple had seven children.

Constable also fell in love with “his father’s land and the land around it,” Plumly writes. Or as Constable put it: “Landscape is my mistress.” That love affair produced paintings such as “The Hay Wain,” his most famous picture, and “The Cornfield,” a late masterpiece — work that Plumly calls a “meditation on the pastoral.” As his popularity grew, largely after his death, Constable’s oeuvre was viewed with such distinction that the place where he grew up — his muse — became known as “Constable Country.”

Meanwhile, Plumly portrays Turner as a self-made man deeply conflicted over his success, “a wealthy man who hates spending money.” Born in poverty in London in 1775, Turner, the son of a barber, showed artistic brilliance at a young age. Throughout his career, his work sold well, earning him a handsome living. There were three women in his life — the widow Sarah Danby, with whom he had two daughters; her niece Hannah Danby; and the widow Sophia Booth — though he never married. After Turner’s mother was committed to the Bethlehem Hospital for the insane — Bedlam — where she would die, his father, Plumly writes, “moves in with his son and becomes odd jobber, art supplier, grocery shopper, canvas preparer, cheerleader, and total parent, mother as well as father.”

Turner was obsessive about his work. Plumly quotes a story Turner told (some believe hyperbolically) about his research for “Snow Storm,” a painting of a steamboat at sea during a storm: “I got sailors to lash me to the mast to observe [the storm]; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did.”

Although other masterworks — “A Skeleton Falling Off a Horse in Mid-Air,” “The Angel Standing in the Sun” — may have proved less perilous to create they share a common trait. Whereas Constable preferred the concrete image, Turner chose to depict the “essence” of a landscape over reproduction. Plumly notes that “over time, [Turner] develops ghostlier and ghostlier forms” to capture what Thomas Hardy saw as “the deeper reality underlying the scenic.”

Despite differences in their lives — “Turner’s growth as an artist seems to occur at the speed of ‘genius’ [while] Constable’s evolution is stubborn, slow going, and uncertain” — they had this similarity: Each suffered a death that had a lasting effect. For Constable, it was the death of Maria to consumption. “She is dying,” Plumly writes, “very slowly but relentlessly, and has been since who knows when, her late teens likely . . . on the same street where a very young Keats and his brothers have set up house . . . finally, Maria Constable passes.” For Turner, it was the death of his father, in 1829 — a loss that caused him to suffer bouts of depression for the rest of his life.

The painters also shared this: Their work aspires to, and at times achieves, “the sublime” — “a term,” Plumly once wrote in an essay, “of breathtaking, soaring, awe-inspiring fear and fascination, a traveling word evoking out-of-the-body.” The almost indescribable sense of grandeur, meant to inspire through beauty or magnitude, is why a work lasts. Wise in its knowledge of art, readable in its storytelling, “Elegy Landscapes” documents Constable and Turner on their quest to capture the intimate sublime.

Stanley Plumly will discuss “Elegy Landscapes” at Politics and Prose on Aug. 21 at 7 p.m.

Paul Alexander is the author of seven books, among them “Rough Magic” and “Salinger.” He teaches at Medgar Evers College and Hunter College in New York City.

Recent Publications

Sylvia Plath narrates her self-destruction

By Paul Alexander

The Washington Post

October 30, 2018

In the literary world, there have been writers who marry — Percy and Mary Shelley, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. But few, if any, literary couples are as well known for the end of their marriage as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. That’s because Plath used Hughes’s “desertion,” as she called it, as source material for poems in “Ariel,” the posthumous collection that made her one of the most widely read poets of the 20th century.

“The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2,” deftly edited by Plath authorities Karen V. Kukil and Peter K. Steinberg, serves as a chronicle of the Plath-Hughes marriage. “Volume 1,” published last year, covered Plath’s youth and education, concluding with her four-month courtship with Hughes, whom she met at Cambridge University in February 1956. Because Plath was an ardent letter writer, “Volume 2,” coming in at more than 1,000 pages, assiduously documents the joy and success of the marriage’s first six years and the anguish and drama of its final six months that resulted in Plath’s suicide one frigid morning in February 1963.

It started out so blissfully. During their first year of marriage, Plath often wrote to her mother about Hughes: “I really am convinced he is the only person in the world I could ever love.” And: “[I]t is simply impossible to describe how strong . . . and brilliant he is.” And: “My joy in Ted increases every day.” On their first anniversary: “I can’t actually remember what it was like not being married to Ted.” Two years later: “Ted & I are so happy, and healthy — our life together seems to be the whole foundation of my being.” She also gushed about his support during the birth of their daughter, Frieda, in 1960, and after Plath’s appendectomy a year later: “To see him come in at visiting hours . . . with his handsome kind smiling face is the most beautiful sight in the world.”

The enthusiasm continued, with some caveats. Plath told one friend that Hughes would “bash my head in” if she tried to “boss” him and mentioned “violent disagreements” to her mother and “rousing battles” to her brother, Warren. In late 1961, the couple bought Court Green, a sprawling thatched-roof house on a small estate in Devon, and settled in just in time for Plath to give birth to Nicholas in January 1962. The Hugheses had sublet their London flat to David and Assia Wevill, another literary couple (though less accomplished). After the Wevills visited in May 1962, Ted and Assia struck up an affair that Plath discovered in July, and Hughes left Court Green in August to live in London.

Then the fawning stopped. To her mother, Plath wrote: “I hate & despise [Ted]”; and because Hughes was “dangerously destructive . . . I feel both the children and I need protection from him, for now & forever.” She wrote a friend, Kathy Kane: “Ted has deserted us. . . . I can’t tell you the terrible sadistic footnotes, they are too involved and elaborate and poetic.” And to her psychiatrist, Ruth Barnhouse, she confessed: “I think I am dying. I am just desperate.”

Barnhouse had treated Plath at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., after Plath’s nervous breakdown and suicide attempt in 1953, an ordeal that was the basis of Plath’s autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar.”The two were regularly in touch for the next decade. The letters Plath wrote to Barnhouse would be her most revealing. When the existence of 14 surviving letters — long, detailed dispatches totaling about 18,000 words — was discovered last year, it warranted national media attention. Included in “Volume 2,” the letters, especially those written after the breakup, contain unsettling disclosures.

Hughes’s “lies are incredible & continuous,” she wrote, adding, “Any kind of caution or limit makes him murderous.” Indeed, Hughes could be violent. “Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage [in 1961]: the baby I lost was due to be born on his birthday. . . . He tells me now it was weakness that made him unable to tell me he did not want children.” She also wrote that Hughes hated their son, Nicholas. “He has never touched him since he was born, says he is ugly and a usurper.” Finally, Hughes wanted to be free of Plath. “He told me openly he wished me dead,” she wrote. “He was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!”

Plath’s next moves she carried out with the help of an attorney in London. The legal separation she insisted on in August and September — Hughes agreed to pay 1,000 pounds a year in maintenance — turned into a planned divorce by October. That month, she announced her intended divorce to her mother, friends and Barnhouse.

For years after Plath’s death, Hughes told friends that he and Plath were on the verge of reconciliation when she died. But Plath’s letters tell the opposite story. She was resolute in her decision to get a divorce. She was working with an attorney to make sure it happened. She was “ecstatic” that Hughes was gone. She also decided to move on from Court Green. She planned on relocating to Ireland, where she could recover in peace far from Hughes, but her mother lobbied against it and surreptitiously encouraged Plath’s friends to dissuade her.

It worked. In early November, Plath elected to move to London, not Ireland. It would be a fateful choice to relocate to 23 Fitzroy Rd. in December. Now that she was in the same city with Hughes, he was constantly dropping in, and she was continually learning, from him and friends, about his romantic exploits. Plath could not get on with her life. By Feb. 4, in the last letter she wrote to Barnhouse — and the last included in the new volume — she lamented the “return of my madness.” One week later, she killed herself by gassing herself in the kitchen oven. She was 30.

In often haunting detail, “The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2” documents the rise and fall of a literary marriage whose dissolution ended up destroying a genius.

Paul Alexander is the author of seven books, among them “Rough Magic” and “Salinger.” He teaches at Medgar Evers College and Hunter College in New York City.

THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH VOLUME 2

1956-1963

By Sylvia Plath. Edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

Harper. 1088 pp. $44.

Recent Publications

What Sylvia Plath’s letters reveal about the poet we thought we knew

By Paul Alexander

The Washington Post

October 18, 2017

Sylvia Plath may have died at the age of 30, but in her short life she produced an enormous body of writing. She wrote a radio play, a children's book, dozens of short stories, and numerous incidental pieces of journalism and memoir. She started two novels and published a third, "The Bell Jar," now regarded as a coming-of-age classic. She wrote more than 200 poems. Gathered into her "Collected Poems," which posthumously won a 1982 Pulitzer Prize , they showcased her as a master of the "confessional" style.

She also kept an extensive journal and carried on voluminous correspondence with a range of family members, friends and business contacts. It has fallen to Plath experts Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil to gather Plath's correspondence into "The Letters of Sylvia Plath," a collection so mammoth it will be published in two volumes. Volume 1, covering 1940 to 1956, is being released now. Volume 2, covering 1957 to 1963, will appear next October.

Often using vivid and compelling language, Plath addresses many topics in her letters — from politics and literature to her education and love life to her own unbridled literary ambitions and her plans to achieve them. The sheer quantity of the letters — Volume 1 runs to more than 1,300 pages — is as impressive as their quality. "I am in awe of her output," Frieda Hughes, her daughter, writes in a foreword, "and the way in which she recorded so much of her life so that it was not lost to us."

The letters begin in 1940, when Plath was 8, with notes to her parents, Otto and Aurelia. They go on to document her youth in Wellesley, a quaint town outside Boston where she grew up in a "cozy little 'matchbox.' " Tellingly, Plath almost never mentions the death in 1940 of her father, a highly regarded biologist and Boston University professor who misdiagnosed himself with cancer, refused treatment, and died from what turned out to be a treatable form of diabetes. "My father is dead now," Plath wrote as a teenager in a rare reference to him to a German pen pal, "so my mother teaches instead."

ADVERTISING

A vast number of the letters document her education at Smith College, where Plath excelled on a scholarship funded by Olive Higgins Prouty, the novelist who would serve as a sponsor and mentor for the rest of Plath's life. The litany of successes at Smith — studying with figures such as W.H. Auden, acceptances from publications such as the Nation and the Christian Science Monitor, a guest editorship at Mademoiselle — were eclipsed by what happened in the summer of 1953 when she was not accepted into Frank O'Connor's fiction class at Harvard University.

"I began to frequent the offices and couches of the local psychiatrists," Plath wrote to her friend Edward Cohen. "I underwent a rather brief and traumatic experience of badly-given shock treatments on an outpatient basis. Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide." She stole a bottle of 50 sleeping pills from her mother's safe, hid in the crawl space under the front porch of the family home and swallowed many of them. "I . . . blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion [but] I had stupidly taken too many pills, vomited them, and came to consciousness in the dark hell. . . . My brother finally heard my weak yells."

A stint at McLean Hospital was followed by her return to Smith to complete her degree. A Fulbright scholarship allowed her to study at Cambridge University. There, she met the man who would alter the direction of her life. Through her high school and college years, Plath had enjoyed romances with a variety of young men, but this time it was different.

In March 1956, Plath mentioned her new love interest to her mother for the first time: "Met, by the way, a brilliant ex-Cambridge poet at the wild St. Botolph's Review party last week; will probably never see him again (he works for J. Arthur Rank in London) but wrote my best poem about him afterwards: the only man I've met yet here who'd be strong enough to be equal with." In another letter she named him: "His name is Ted Hughes: he is tall, hulking, with rough brown hair, a large-cut face, hands like derricks, a voice more thundering and rich than Dylan Thomas."

[‘Ted Hughes’: A controversial biography shows the poet’s darker side]

Four months after meeting, Plath and Hughes were married in a secret ceremony in London — Plath feared losing her Fulbright — attended only by Plath's mother. Volume 1 ends with a decision by Plath to reveal her marriage so that Hughes could join her at Cambridge. Readers will have to wait a year for the letters that chronicle their marriage — one of the most discussed in literary history — the dissolution of which contributed to Plath's suicide in 1963.

Engaging and revealing, "The Letters of Sylvia Plath" offers a captivating look into the life and inner thinking of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. "Through the publication of her poems, prose, diaries, and now her collected letters," Frieda Hughes writes, "my mother continues to exist."

Paul Alexander is the author of, among other books, "Rough Magic," a biography of Sylvia Plath, and "Salinger," a biography of J.D. Salinger.

THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH

Volume 1: 1940-1956

By Sylvia Plath

Edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

Harper. 1,424 pp.