The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 9

We can change a face, change a gender, change a race, change a voice; produce the true illusion of someone speaking words they never spoke; sell tickets for events at which dead people will sing and dance for our delectation. Why, it’s almost as if we were alive to see them do it. What can we not do? Tell Sophocles (“What a wonder is man”) the news. Maria Callas? Elvis Presley? Freddie Mercury? Vera Lynn? Vera Imago? Straight up? With a twist? Genetically enhanced? Coming right up. Nothing is real and—pace John Lennon—everything to get hung about.

We do have books, important books that would actually bring us close to important people, but now these hem-of-the-garment books have come upon hard times; they are discredited, almost exploded: John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, so mysteriously stuffed with the speech of men long dead, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (which lives by its “Sir” and dies by its “Sir”), Coleridge’s Table Talk, Gustav Janouch’s spurious Conversations with Kafka, Hitler’s (God save us) Tischgespräche. (Meanwhile, in what’s derisorily known as the real world, we have politicians’ and diplomats’ memoirs, written supposedly—legendarily—between dinner and bath time; with an FBI-approved, legally satisfying memory of once-seen documents; with the benefit of shorthand or without. The first draft of history. Ahem. Ahem ahem.) Now that we’ve had it with uncomplicated greatness, just give us our supernatural machinery. What a poor, gaslighted, meme-riddled, spook-spooked species we are. We can no longer count to three, but by golly you should see our numerology. I don’t know what we should be more ashamed of: our stupid credulity or our oh-so-clever suspicion.

A strange time to publish—strange time to publish anything—a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (or should that be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann?), in six hundred static, major-key pages that can easily feel like twice as many. The big man, himself by now somewhat fallen on hard times, recorded by the little acolyte. The little acolyte, known for nothing else, just for talking to the big man, bringing him out, leading him on. Eckermann, see also Goethe. There is nothing particularly documentary or authentic-seeming or intimate about these conversations. There is a single moment when I felt close to the way Goethe might have spoken, when he says, or “says”: “And yet, how much do I really get done? If I’m very lucky, I can produce a page of writing, but normally it’s only as much as would fit under your hand—and even less if I’m in an unproductive mood.” That “as much as would fit under your hand” has a flash of immediacy, of practicality, of the power of that hand.