Newark in the Grip

Before Salk's wondrous vaccine reached American schoolkids in the early 1960s, my parents worried about polio. 

A lot.

In the summers, it was everywhere.

Historian Richard Rhodes describes it thus:

"Polio was a plague. One day you had a headache and an hour later you were paralyzed. Parents waited fearfully every summer to see if it would strike. One case turned up and then another. The count began to climb. The city closed the swimming pools and we all stayed home, cooped indoors, shunning other children. Summer seemed like winter then."

The late Philip Roth vivified those days in his brief, heartbreaking 2010 novel Nemesis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

It's July 1944. Polio is raging. A playground director, Bucky Cantor, faces a dilemma: should he quit his job and flee for the safety of a kids' summer camp in the Poconos, or should he tough it out in "equatorial" Newark? 

In his inimitable way, Roth shows how an earnest boy comes to grips with history and loses out.

Nemesis is a book about an epidemic; and also about youth, family, decency, religion, sex, love, hope, death, despair and destiny.

In 2010, Roth told NPR host Terry Gross the book began as he brainstormed ideas for a topic:

"I began, as I sometimes do with a book, jotting down on a yellow legal pad all of the historical events that I've lived through that I've not dealt with in fiction. When I came to polio, it was a great revelation to me. I never thought of it before as a subject. And then I remembered how frightening it was and how deadly it was and I thought, 'OK, try to write a book about polio.'"

It's Roth's final novel. And one of his finest.

Jack London's Nightmare

All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. 

— Jack London

In Seattle's Left Bank Books a few years ago, I bought a novel by one of my favorite writers, the left-leaning nihilist and dog-loving Jack London. I took my copy of The Scarlet Plague around the corner and into the Pike Place Starbucks, where I sat on a stool and read the whole of the 60-page book.

First published in 1912, The Scarlet Plague, focusing as it does on man's craven response to pandemic, remains one of modern literature's finest examples of post-apocalyptic storytelling.

Set in a ruined California, the tale takes place 60 years after the 2013 outbreak the "Red Death," a mysterious virus that depopulates the world. 

Jim Smith, an eye-witness to the pandemic, recounts to his grandsons how people were gripped by ancestral fear.

"We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past,” he tells them. But panic set in when everyone realized “the astonishing quickness with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human body it entered."

Smith describes how the virus infects:

“The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase. Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the face and body. Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and heart-beat, and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came out. Usually, they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of the rash. But these convulsions did not last long and were not very severe. The heels became numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when the numbness reached as high as his heart he died.”

Victims' corpses rot instantly, spewing the virus into the air. Pandemonium erupts and terrified citizens flee for safety:

“Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the salmon-run you have seen on the Sacramento river, pouring out of the cities by millions, madly over the country, in vain attempt to escape the ubiquitous death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even the airships of the rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses, carried the germs.”

Jim himself panics:

“I caught up my handbag and fled. The sights in the streets were terrible. One stumbled on bodies everywhere. Some were not yet dead. And even as you looked, you saw men sink down with the death fastened upon them. There were numerous fires burning in Berkeley, while Oakland and San Francisco were apparently being swept by vast conflagrations. The smoke of the burning filled the heavens, so that the midday was as a gloomy twilight, and, in the shifts of wind, sometimes the sun shone through dimly, a dull red orb. Truly, my grandsons, it was like the last days of the end of the world."

While you're self-quarantined, mix yourself a Bloody Mary and read The Scarlet Plague.

You'll also enjoy the CDC's review of Jack London's remarkable—and nightmarish—story.

Stay well!

Song and Dance

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass;
it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

― Vivian Greene

When students at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts demanded tuition refunds this week, insisting online classes aren't satisfactory, Dean Allyson Green responded by sending them a video of herself dancing.

According to The New York Post, the students claimed classes hosted on Zoom "are not worth the school’s $58,000-a-year tuition."

Green notified students by email they would not receive a refund, attaching the curious video.

She told The Post, "What I meant to demonstrate is my certainty that even with the unprecedented hardships of social distancing and remotely-held classes, it is still possible for the Tisch community to make art together."

Encore

Yippee! I've sold two paintings. 

And launched an "encore" career.

I'm heartened as well to learn "it takes only a few people to make a career," according to New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz.

It takes as few people as 12:

• One dealer who pushes your work and "who’ll be honest with you about your crappy or great art."
  

• Six collectors. "Even if you have only six collectors, that’s enough for you to make enough money to have enough time to make your work."
  
  
• Three critics "who seem to get what you’re doing."
  
  
• Two curators "who would put you in shows from time to time."

"Surely your crappy art can fake out 12 stupid people," Saltz says. "I’ve seen it done with only three or four supporters. I’ve seen it done with one!"

It doesn't take a village to succeed.

At Jasper Johns' very first show, the Museum of Modern Art bought three of his works. The artist also landed on the cover of ARTnews.

Elizabeth Peyton’s breakthrough show took place in an empty room in the Chelsea Hotel, where visitors could see 21 of her charcoal-and-ink drawings. 

"According to the hotel ledger, only 38 people saw the show after the opening,'" Saltz says.

"It doesn’t take much."

Today Peyton's works sell for a million dollars. 

Painting by Bob James

Silent Killers

Al Wesch (left) was one of 25,000 soldiers stationed at Camp Dix in 1918.

While serving his country during World War I, my grandfather was deployed to Manhattan from nearby Camp Dix, New Jersey, to aid in removing the bodies of Spanish flu victims from the city's hospitals.

Unbeknown to his commander, Major General Hugh Scott, the men of Camp Dix were spreading the deadly disease to New Yorkers.

Between 1918 and 1919, the Spanish flu killed 675,000 Americans. 

Soldiers like my grandfather were the first to come down with the disease, and the chief carriers of the Spanish flu nationwide.

Soldiers at Camp Dix gargle with salt water to prevent Spanish flu, September 1918. Find more photos here.