The Novelist Who Saw Middle America as It Really Was

Sinclair Lewis captured the narrow-mindedness and conformity of middle-class America in the first half of the 20th century. On the 100th anniversary of his best-selling novel “Babbitt,” Robert Gottlieb revisits Lewis’s life and career.

Sinclair Lewis in an undated photograph. Credit...Knopf 

 

By Robert Gottlieb The New York Times

This is the centenary year of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’s best — and most misunderstood — novel. He had written five inconsequential books that had received respectable if not excited attention. And in 1920 — at the age of 35 — he had written “Main Street,” the most sensationally successful novel of the century to date: hundreds of thousands of copies sold, and a title that came to stand for the values, both narrow-minded and wholesome, of what we now call Middle America.

The Pulitzer Prize jury chose it as the year’s best novel, but in a scandalous reversal of their decision, the prize’s trustees refused to approve the award and presented it instead to Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” A few years later, when the judges chose Lewis’s “Arrowsmith,” he refused to accept the prize — Sinclair Lewis had a thin skin. (Nothing ever changes: When in 1974 the jury unanimously chose Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the prize’s overseers again refused to certify the decision, using words like “turgid” and “obscene” to justify their action.)

At the time of their publication, both “Main Street” and “Babbitt” were generally thought of as satirical novels, America being the object of the satire. Both “Main Street”’s Gopher Prairie, the small town that is the stand-in for Sauk Centre, Minn., where Lewis grew up, and Zenith, the medium-size city where Babbitt conducts his prosperous realty business, are meticulously and convincingly anatomized: Lewis always got the details right.

The tremendous success of “Main Street,” and the strong reactions to it, by both its champions and detractors, suggest how close to the bone its truths struck; it was easier to dismiss it or to enjoy it as elitist, anti-American satire than to accept it as a disturbing vision of the realities of home. Lewis himself was clear about his feelings for Gopher Prairie: He recognized it, he deplored it and he loved it.

There was immense anticipation over what he would come up with next, and in 1922 came “Babbitt,” another big best seller whose satirical elements dominated the critical and popular reaction to it. George F. Babbitt — 46 years old, a conventional (conservative) husband, father, householder, golf player, Buick owner, clubman, churchgoer — is living the American dream. “To the eye,” we’re told, he’s “the perfect office-going executive — a well-fed man in a correct brown soft hat and frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good motor along a semi-suburban parkway.” And yet at odd moments he senses that something is missing, that he’s buried his early impulses toward a larger, more meaningful existence: In college he had aspired to becoming a lawyer defending the poor — even running for governor someday.

Instead, he has become an apostle of “Boosterism,” a loud, crass glorification of his middle-class way of life in Zenith, “the Zip City — Zeal, Zest and Zowie — 1,000,000 in 1935.” He cares, in a desultory way, for his bland wife, Myra, and their three children. He enjoys his success, his growing popularity in the local business world, his lunches at the Zenith Athletic Club, whose lobby “was Gothic, the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission and the reading-room Chinese Chippendale.” Babbitt is happily climbing. Yet, inexplicably, he has begun drifting away from his automatic conservatism, actually sympathizing with local strikers. To his wife: “Honest, do you think people would think I was too liberal if I just said the strikers were decent?” (Myra’s reply: “Of course they would. But don’t worry, dear; I know you don’t mean a word of it.”) As far as his Zenith world is concerned, though, this apostasy is the first step on the road to that ultimate evil — socialism!

And then he does the clichéd thing: has a fling with an appealing sophisticated widow whose unlikely name is Tanis Judique — where was Lewis’s editor? — and attaches himself to her coterie of cautiously bohemian friends. Whereupon he begins to suffer from the withdrawal of approval by his Athletic Club world. “The independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men’s cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.”

The crisis comes when Myra almost dies from acute appendicitis. Every afternoon for 17 days he visits her in the hospital, “and in their long talks they drifted back to intimacy.” He’s reunited with his old Zenith crowd, and within two weeks no one “was more violent regarding the … crimes of labor unions, the perils of immigration and the delights of golf, morality and bank accounts than was George F. Babbitt.” Babbitt has undergone and survived what we now recognize as his “midlife crisis,” but in 1922 nobody had ever heard of such a thing.

The Novelist Who Saw Middle America as It Really Was

Is Babbitt a comic character? A tragic character? Merely a stock character from what Lewis’s friend and mentor H.L. Mencken labeled “the booboisie”? The triumph of “Babbitt” is that we can’t confidently answer that question. The name Babbitt entered the language — a “Babbitt” was a ridiculous conformist living in a ridiculously small-minded world. Yet Lewis’s Babbitt is, finally, a man we care about — a character rather than a caricature — one of a small group of American fictional creations who, in the early years of the 20th century, stand in their very different ways as landmarks in the story of the social evolution of our country: Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Wharton’s Lily Bart, Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, with Gatsby on the horizon.

Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885. His father was a prominent doctor in Sauk Centre, a town of about 2,800 — read all about it in “Main Street.” Fred, the oldest of the doctor’s three sons, became a miller and was never of much consequence within the ambitious Lewis clan. Claude, next oldest, was of considerable consequence: He became a distinguished surgeon, admired and sought after well beyond the city of St. Cloud, where he spent his adult life. When Lewis was 62, he acknowledged that “for 60 years I have tried to impress my brother Claude.”

Sinclair Lewis was never really known as “Sinclair,” his middle name. He was Harry, later Hal, eventually “Red” to everyone who knew him. He was not a physically prepossessing young fellow. “He was nearly six feet tall before he was 16,” his magisterial biographer Mark Schorer writes, “with a short torso set on very long and spindly legs, and weighed only 120 pounds; lank and lean, but with a puffy, acne-ridden face (‘pimples,’ they said), big feet and hands, badly coordinated in his movements, everything about his body hanging and dangling and swinging and lunging and stumbling, and ice-blue eyes (astigmatic) rather protruding, all of this thatched with a carrot-colored wig.”

Nor did he have the happy normal outdoorsy boyhood — skating, swimming, duck-hunting — he later claimed to have had; Schorer makes that clear. “He was a queer boy with only one real friend in a town full of boys, laughed at by girls.” Sports? No. Dances? “As I cannot dance I just went along with Ma to look on.” But a lot of culture passed through town: military bands; the Ski-U-Mah Quartette; the Maharas Minstrels; the Schubert Symphony Club; the Casgrove Company performing with musical glasses, sleigh bells, mandolins and banjos; and itinerant theatrical events, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the Jolly Della Pringle Company.

Most important — crucial — there were books. His father had a modest library, and young Harry began acquiring books on his own. (His favorite writers as a boy were Dickens, Scott and Kipling, and he went on reading them throughout his life.) For years he was a rotten student, until late in high school he began to shine. He was a notorious cutup, a mimic and the proud author of “class yells”: “Cooma laca, booma laca,/Bow wow wow —/Chingalaca, chingalaca,/Chow, Chow, Chow.” He had crushes on one girl after another — sometimes two at the same time. He did domestic chores, he had summer jobs. And he submitted flowery poems to various magazines, all, of course, rejected. But he was also getting ready for college, having decided to try for Yale, and after spending some time at Oberlin to sharpen his skills, he was admitted there.

His career in New Haven was checkered. His only distinction was being published regularly in the Yale Literary Magazine, “The Lit” — romantic stories, more flowery poems. Girls? Gauche attempts. Friends? A few. Intimacies? Hardly. The esteemed educator William Lyon Phelps said of him, “He was not disliked in college, but was regarded with amiable tolerance as a freak.” His emotional state? As always, loneliness. Yet he was adventurous: one summer, work as a cattle feeder on a cattle steamer to England; one fall, steerage passage to Panama, in search of work there.

Then a few wander years — a well-known artists’ community in Carmel, a short stretch on a San Francisco newspaper, Upton Sinclair’s utopian colony in New Jersey. Finally, New York, where he lived in Greenwich Village and found sympathetic companions like Edna Ferber and Frances Perkins, who would go on to become F.D.R.’s famous secretary of labor. He was earning a few dollars by selling scraps of things to junky magazines and newspapers, and he was selling plots for stories to established writers: Jack London, for one, who in one transaction paid him $70 for 14 story ideas, and Albert Payson Terhune (“Lad: A Dog”) for another. And he had begun work on his first novel, “Our Mr. Wrenn.”

He was also edging his way into the publishing world, working most effectively for George Doran, who wrote about him: “Lewis pounded out on a typewriter the crispest of American staccato opinion and criticism, literally reams of publicity stunts. He was a dynamo of energy and freshness of thought.”

In 1912 he was working for a publisher whose offices were on Fourth Avenue, in the same building where Vogue had its offices, and late one evening he was coming downstairs in the freight elevator when in stepped a very pretty young woman who had also been working late. In his typical clumsy way, he managed to bump into her, scattering to the ground the work she was taking home with her. (“Meet cute,” Hollywood calls it.) Her name was Grace Livingstone Hegger, and she was a junior editor and writer at Vogue, elegantly dressed, with a kind of fancy accent that presumably came from her British parents and time she had spent in Europe while growing up. (Her brother did not have this accent.)

Lewis was madly in love, and wooed her ferociously with letters, notes, poems, jokes, the dedication to “Our Mr. Wrenn” and expeditions, including a picnic on the Palisades to which he brought lamb chops and canned peas that he cooked on a portable stove. Eventually Gracie, as he called her, succumbed to his unrelenting pressure and they were married in 1914 — he 29, she 26. She worked hard to sophisticate him, getting him out of his hideous cheap blue suits and into respectable tweeds, refining his Midwestern accent. For a few years they had fun together — roaming around the country in a Model T Ford, settling down in one place, then rushing off to another. And then the fun stopped.

But during these years Lewis’s career as a writer was advancing. More financially rewarding than the five early novels were the short stories he was churning out, conventional fare snapped up by commercial magazines, at least 20 of them by the popular and well-paying Saturday Evening Post.

We know a lot about the Lewis marriage because Gracie would write two books about it (and him), one a novel, the other a memoir. Both books are fond, outspoken and convincing. They’re convincing about him as a father (they had one boy, Wells, named after Lewis’s hero, H.G. Wells). When she gave birth, “Hal was infinitely tender toward me but his care was for me, the baby seemed not to exist for him.” They’re convincing about his sexuality: “He seemed unable to recognize that the sexual act was not important to him, that making love was rather a nuisance, and though he was essentially masculine and abnormalities of any kind were shocking to him, he could not supply the confident and robust elements which make for success in a love affair.” (The tell-all memoir wasn’t invented yesterday.) They’re convincing about their lives together: “Didn’t he — and I — live as much on the surface of life as did most of his characters, superbly as one heard and saw them but whose inwardness was unexplored?”

The tremendous success of “Main Street,” and the strong reactions to it, suggest how close to the bone its truths struck.

Of Lewis’s five early novels, “The Job” is the best, a persuasive account of how a poor but determined young woman prevails in the commercial real estate business, a book marred only by a preposterous romantic happy ending. Now, Lewis sensed, was the moment for him to focus on “Main Street,” the novel about small-town America that he had been considering and planning for years. And it, too, would be centered on a young woman: Its subtitle was “The Story of Carol Kennicott.” She’s a smart young professional librarian who’s brought to Gopher Prairie by her young doctor husband. At first she’s certain that she can help change things for the better — ameliorate the crudeness, the small-mindedness, the lack of culture, of beauty. When her efforts are defeated by the kind but impervious local citizenry, she leaves husband and town to find satisfying work and a finer way of life in the Big City.

Yes, this is a feminist story, but one with an inconclusive resolution: Soon enough, she’s back to husband and Gopher Prairie, mortified, but with a growing appreciation of the decencies of its people and the wholesomeness of its life. And despite the humiliating setback, Carol plows on, more tactfully than before, perhaps, but indefatigable. Was she meant to be taken as a high-minded emissary of enlightenment or was she as much an object of Lewis’s satire as Main Street itself? A century has gone by and we’re still not sure.

“Main Street,” published late in 1920, exploded on the consciousness of America. There had never been anything like its instant and sustained literary and commercial success. Within months its sales had rocketed past 150,000 (eventually it would sell in the millions), with praise from such sources as Britain’s leading novelist, John Galsworthy (“altogether a brilliant piece of work and characterization”), and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote to Lewis, “I want to tell you that ‘Main Street’ has displaced ‘Theron Ware’ in my favor as the best American novel.” “Main Street” was an Event, a Phenomenon — a triumph abroad as well. Sinclair Lewis had arrived!

In the 1920s he published not only “Main Street” and “Babbitt” but three other novels that won comparable acclaim: “Arrowsmith,” about an idealistic young doctor-scientist; “Elmer Gantry,” a scathing satirical account of evangelism and religion in America — the top fiction best seller of 1927; and “Dodsworth,” about a retired American businessman searching abroad for what he senses he’s missed out on in his life — to me, his best-written and most affecting book and, later, the basis of William Wyler’s brilliant film. (The maddening Mrs. Dodsworth owes much to Gracie, whom he was more or less amicably divorcing.) And then, in 1930, the crowning moment of his career: He became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he understood the implications: “This is the end of me,” his friend Lillian Gish reports him saying. “This is fatal. I cannot live up to it.”

Indeed, from this peak there was only one way to go: down. And down he went, although there was almost uninterrupted commercial success. The highlights were “Ann Vickers” — another account of a high-achieving woman and another novel undermined by its improbable last-minute romantic ending — and the far from subtle “It Can’t Happen Here,” a dystopian take on the career of the rabble-rousing demagogue Huey Long, effective propaganda but hardly Nobel Prize material.

The main event of the 1930s in the life of Sinclair Lewis was his marriage to the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson. They first encountered each other in 1927, at a journalists’ gathering in Berlin. She invited him to her birthday dinner the following night, at which he cornered her and asked her to marry him, and when she turned him down, swore to pursue her until she changed her mind. (That involved trailing her relentlessly around Europe. Arriving in Moscow, where she was covering the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was asked by reporters why he had come to Russia. “To see Dorothy,” he said.) When she finally said yes, they were married in London and spent their honeymoon touring England in an automobile trailer.

What was Dorothy Thompson like? A 1940 profile in The Saturday Evening Post said: “She is one of the most extroverted of humans, aggressively gregarious and tireless in debate. For combined intellectual, physical and emotional energy, she has no known equal, male or female.” She was also unflagging at her job, and her fame and influence grew as she used her journalist’s pulpit to try to awaken America to the growing dangers of fascism and Stalinism. She had interviewed Hitler before the Nazis took control and published a violent attack on him called “I Saw Hitler.” When he came to power, he expelled her from Germany — she had only a day or two to pick up and get out of town — creating a furor that elevated her from Star to Heroine.

Soon she began writing her syndicated column “On the Record,” which appeared twice a week for 22 years, earning her a national readership of 10 million people with her impassioned political views and her focus on women’s lives. (The famously witty Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay.”) She was also writing a column for Ladies’ Home Journal and whirling around the country on endless lecture tours. At the height of her fame, Time named her one of the two most admired women in America. The other was Eleanor Roosevelt.

She was also trying to be a wife and mother — she and Lewis had one son, Michael, an extraordinarily difficult child she both adored and couldn’t deal with. (She also adored Gracie’s son, Wells, and was devastated when he was killed by a sniper in France not long before the end of World War II.) Lewis was as terrible a father to Michael as he had been to Wells; Dorothy exhausted herself trying to get him to pay attention to the boy, but it never happened. There were two houses on the beautiful land the Lewises bought in Vermont. Momma and Poppa lived in one, and little Michael (plus nurse and attendants) lived in the other. When he was a child, Michael announced, “I think when I grow up I am going to kill my daddy.”

“This is the end of me,” Lewis said after winning the Nobel Prize. “I cannot live up to it.”

Meanwhile Lewis’s drinking grew worse and worse. It was now conceded by both husband and wife that he was an alcoholic. His behavior grew worse, too. When there were people around he would launch into brilliant, and endless, monologues, wielding his superb gift of mimicry — sometimes the speeches went on for an hour or more, until his audience fled, enraging him. When drunk (which was much of the time), he would insult people, abuse Dorothy, fire assistants, only to rehire them the next day with effusive apologies. (One of them was the young John Hersey, years before “Hiroshima,” who would later say, “I must have been too young to recognize the bitterness of an exhausted gift, and of course I was ignorant of the drinking history.”) He would also abuse students whom he had agreed to teach and people who had come to hear him speak. At a lecture at Wesleyan College, he asked the students, “How many of you want to write?” Most of them raised their hands. “Good,” he said. “Go home and write,” and he left the stage.

The Lewis marriage was eroding beyond repair. Dorothy drove him crazy with her incessant talk of the situation in Europe. (“If I ever divorce Dorothy, I’ll name Adolf Hitler as co-respondent.”) Whereas he would call her by his own name, while impersonating his father: “Harry Lewis! Harry Lewis! Get your lazy bones out of that chair and see to the wood! … How many times do I have to tell you? And it’s past 8 o’clock, Harry Lewis, do you hear me?” “When I first became Harry Lewis,” Dorothy was to recall, “I really did not know whether I was or not.”

Yet there were happy times in Vermont. Dorothy’s sister, Peggy, told their intimate friend the journalist Vincent Sheean that “she can remember hardly anything but gaiety and good will from all of those years.” And Dorothy’s diaries and letters to Red were filled with love, even passion. Dorothy and Red always did better with each other when they were apart.

One of their final engagements took place onscreen in the first of the famous Hepburn-Tracy marital comedies, “Woman of the Year,” which appeared in 1942. (It was an open secret that the Lewises were the originals.) But by 1981, when a musical based on the movie was a Broadway hit, people were interested only in its star, Lauren Bacall. No one by then was interested in Dorothy Thompson, or, for that matter, in Sinclair Lewis.

Their marriage was over long before they officially divorced. Lewis, who had always been drawn to the theater, was writing (bad) plays, and in 1939 he fell madly in love with an 18-year-old aspiring actress named Marcella Powers. (He was in his 50s.) Naturally she was flattered by this attention from a world-famous man, and she genuinely liked him, but she was wise enough — or wary enough — not to marry him. He plied her with gifts, paid her expenses, wrote plays for her, but she wanted to act, not be Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. It was all very public, and not very seemly. When Powers wouldn’t tag along with him on his travels, he would take her pleasant, passive mother in her place to look after him and provide some kind of undemanding companionship — anything rather than be alone. Eventually Powers married an appropriate young man, and Lewis behaved well, but he understood that his emotional life had ended. Along the way, he himself took up acting, performing such parts as the Stage Manager in “Our Town” and the George M. Cohan role in Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” in a variety of summer and regional theaters.

As for his later novels, they range from mediocre to terrible. Only two stand out in any way. The best-selling “Cass Timberlane” (1945) is about an attractive youngish judge who falls in love with the very young, exciting Jinny, who marries him, leaves him for a sexier man and returns to him repentant. Jinny, of course, is a fictionalized Marcella Powers, played in the hit MGM movie version by Lana Turner, opposite Spencer Tracy as the judge.

The other is the preposterous “Kingsblood Royal” (1947). Lewis, determined to strike a blow against racism, scoured the country interviewing Black Americans, from servants and manual laborers to ministers and educators. Then he invented a young, successful (and white) banker with a perfect wife and family, who somehow discovers that he is — are you ready? — one thirty-second “Negro.” He’s shocked, fascinated and determined: He must divulge this terrible secret to the world. You would have thought that a sophisticated postwar Midwestern city would absorb this “scandal” without a murmur, but no, his life is shattered. Fortunately, his wife is true blue and stands by him as he takes his place in the Black world. This farrago of nonsense was ridiculed by critics, yet was a considerable best seller, his last. Two feeble novels were to follow, but after a quarter of a century as America’s leading novelist, his effective career was over.

He was, at the end, the thing he had always most feared being: alone — and lonely.

His life petered out into a sad, isolated existence, this quintessential American dying in 1951 in a hospital outside Rome, with only an anonymous Franciscan nun in attendance. Despite his substantial achievements, he still saw himself as ugly and unlovable. And he was, at the end, the thing he had always most feared being: alone — and lonely.

It’s all too easy to focus on the peculiar and unpleasant aspects of Lewis’s life. Attention must also be paid to his remarkable capabilities and his large generosity. He never stopped encouraging and helping young writers: He just loved talent wherever he spotted it. He may well have been the most widely and deeply read person of his era — and what he read, he remembered. (He could, and did, spew forth pages of his favorite authors, Dickens above all others.) His superb Nobel Prize speech is mostly a paean to American writers, first and foremost Dreiser, with whom he had had a violent altercation but whom he now credited with liberating American writing from the gentilities of William Dean Howells. He also extols Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, Ring Lardner, Thomas Wolfe, O’Neill, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner, among others.

As for his writing, he was never a stylist. His books are almost without a voice of their own, lacking both power and lyricism. But they are superbly constructed, and they keep you reading. Certainly they are convincing in their presentation of the surface of things, and it is this all-consuming attention to the surfaces of American life that makes him unique in American letters.

From the start he was watching, absorbing, cataloging. His friend Anna Louise Strong, who later became America’s leading sympathizer with Communist China, wrote of him when he came to Seattle in 1916: “He showed me notebooks full of descriptions. He went, for instance, to the docks in Seattle and wrote down lists of what he saw … the size of packages, what was in them, how they were loaded or unloaded, where they came from, what everything looked like on those docks. … He did this everywhere he went, across the country.”

In a sketch of himself never published in America, he wrote, “My real traveling has been sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average Citizens of the United States.”

You could say that Sinclair Lewis spent his life taking an inventory of America.

 

 

    

What Joan Didion Saw

Her writing and thinking captured momentous change in American life—and in her own.

By Nathan Heller The New Yorker

Photograph © Brigitte Lacombe 

When Joan Didion died, on Thursday, at eighty-seven, she left behind sixteen books, seven films, one play, and an impulse to make sense of what remained. It was tempting to note that, like her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, whose passing shaped “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), she died during the Christmas holiday. It was easy to see, as she did in her daughter’s lethal illness that same season, larger gears at work. Didion was a pattern-seeker—a writer with an uncanny ability to scan a text, a folder of clippings, or an entire society and, like a genius eying figures, find the markers pointing out how the whole worked. Through her efforts, the craft of journalism changed. She helped expand the landscape of what matters on the page.

Though Didion spent half her life in New York (first as a junior editor at Vogue, then, in a later stint, as a short-statured lioness of letters), much of her best-known work was done in California, where she’d grown up in mid-century Sacramento. Her ominous, valley-flat style channelled the Pacific terrain, with its beauty and severity and restless turns. “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school,” she wrote in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” the essay that opened her first collection, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968). That book announced her subject—the long, crazed shadow of the frontier mentality—and her style, which carried across five novels and several screenplays, not least “A Star Is Born” (1976), which she co-wrote with Dunne. Today, readers know what’s meant by “Didionesque.”

Like most strong stylists, though, Didion worked up her craft as a sensitive reader of other masters. She had been an English student, at Berkeley, in the nineteen-fifties, a high point for the New Criticism and its close reading, and the approach became part of her lifelong methodology, applied equally to language she encountered as a reporter and to literary work. In a New Yorker essay about Hemingway, her early influence, she performed an unmatched reading of the beginning of “A Farewell to Arms,” noting how the sudden, pattern-breaking absence of a “the” before the third appearance of “leaves” casts “exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition.” It was characteristic of Didion to work this way, in the danger zone between sensibility and objectivity: to be receptive to a passing feeling, a change in cast, and then to bear down, with unsparing rigor, in the work of understanding why. 

What she came to understand was the vastest change that American society had seen in fifty years. Like many writers, Didion was on the spot in the late sixties, as the social fabric, the ideal of common institutions and of a shared society, came apart. Unlike many, she saw the long-term stakes of this rupture at a moment when most observers were fretting over whether to don love beads or to follow draft cards. Didion reported on the hippies—they’re the subject of the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which created a technique, later germane to her fiction, of telling a story through jagged juxtapositions that she called “flash cuts”—but recognized that what she saw in the Haight-Ashbury was less about them than about an “atomization” of communication and connection across America. It was a curiously durable insight for the period; it remains vivid and pressing today.

Didion often gets identified, along with Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and other snappy dressers, as part of the New Journalism, by which people usually mean long narrative reporting imprinted with a writer’s style and point of view. But her goal, in the best work, was never sensibility or affect. Early on, and again at the end of her life, Didion was known for her first-person writing, and subjective perception was always at the heart of her impulses as a reporter and as an essayist. (“Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me,” she once explained, in an interview with Hilton Als.)

Subjectivity was paramount, yet her thinking, as it developed in the pages of The New York Review of Books, was basically systemic: in “Miami” (1987), about the Cold War dialogue between the U.S. and the atomized powers of Latin America; in “Sentimental Journeys” (1991), about the Central Park jogger case, and the mythologies that eroded New York’s civil and economic structure; in “Where I Was From” (2003), about the governmental policies supporting California’s frontier image of itself. Her target was what she called sentimentality: the prefabricated story lines, or fairy tales, that spread within a culture and that cause society to rip apart. Didion started out a Goldwater Republican and ended up one of her cohort’s keenest champions of the social pact. She came to see that the way stories were told—an individualized project—had deep stakes for the societal whole.

Famous styles often make fossils of their practitioners. Didion’s work will last because it was the product of a restless mind. “In retrospect, we know how to write when we begin,” she once said. “What we learn from doing it is what writing was for.” How to put together a paragraph, whether to add a “the” or not: by the time you’re thirty, the sound of your best writing is already in your mind’s ear, and the hardest part is listening. What to do with those sentences, how to turn the craft of storytelling away from shared delusion, is the effort of a life. Many—most—writers never make it the full distance. Didion did. Her work was her own answer to the question of what writing and living are for. It ought to be ours, too. 

 My Penis, Myself

I didn’t need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me.

By Gabriel Mac New York Magazine



Photo: Dan Winters. Groomer: Green Dale Figueroa.

On the day I heard that my penis would be huge, I sobbed.

In the car outside the doctor’s office afterward, I bent my torso in half and bawled, my face against the dashboard, my boyfriend petting my back to console me but confused. Isn’t it good news that they can do it? — like: At all? And obviously, yes. It was. Growing up without one, I’d thought or maybe convinced myself that mine would grow in later — to the extent that when I see a woman in tight pants, I still often instinctively think, Where is her penis? — but my period at 12 aptly, agonizingly bled to death that increasingly implausible dream of reconciling with life, with God, that he wouldn’t make me like this and leave me like this forever. So the news, 28 years later, that the agony was going to be over — abundantly over — was a bit much to take in.

I fixated instead on the information that a pert little average-flaccid package was not an option for me. (If I even wanted that.) (And did I?) When I’d asked the surgeon how big my impending penis was going to be, he could only guess, pointing to the reusable water bottle in my hand, a metal cylinder nine inches in circumference: “Smaller than that.”

I was so different from everybody else already.

I was already always so different.

Phalloplasty in general, it was clear, was hard for people to accept. “Well, I will love you no matter what, sweetie,” a cis female best friend of mine said when I told her I was transitioning, years before — “as long as you don’t get a dick.” One flatly demanded, “Don’t get a dick.” It was, another transmasculine person I used to know said, disgusting, insane to want and to have a surgeon make a sensate phallus out of your arm or leg or somewhere and Frankenstitch it to your body, to go so far out of your way to opt in to a tool, perhaps the tool, of so much suffering. Most transmasculine people didn’t get one. The seminal print transmasc magazine was named after not getting one: Original Plumbing. I saw transmasculine support groups shut down and go silent more than once when someone brought up the procedure, and later, when I was that someone, I was twice invited to leave “with other people who might want to talk about that.” Whatever magical spectrum of unicorn gender expression was otherwise being embraced, it ended firmly before needing a socially, culturally, politically, historically, personally, emotionally, medically complicated dick.

But I did. And I couldn’t outrun it any longer. Literally: The day I gave in and admitted that for me it was penis or death came after a last-ditch bout of denial in which I drove 1,400 miles in three days only to have to acknowledge, devastated, at my destination that I couldn’t avoid it anymore.

So there I was then, finally, showing up to online specialized transmasculine support groups for people seeking or recovering from phallo, between hours spent hustling to call (six) surgeons’ offices about consults and my PCP’s office (19 times) for referrals and my insurance company (17 times — that I wrote down, anyway) for the necessary authorizations. And here they were, these trans and nonbinary people of many races and locations, coming together to try to hold one another’s questions and fears about which donor site on their body to use, and how the site had (or hadn’t) recovered, and how much sensation they had (“My whole dick feels like a giant clit!” one elated guy described his rare, very best-case outcome once to widened eyes all around), and what size testicle implants they got if they got testicles (which are optional) at all, and which surgeon they went to and when could you go back to work and who in the world took care of you, and did anybody else have this or that or a whole series of fistulas or strictures around their new urethral hookup that rerouted their pee and is also optional, and did anyone else just leave their urethra where it is? Once, a pre-op 52-year-old Black man who was struggling with money and his disability and insurance asked if having a penis was really going to make a difference, relieve any of this pain he was barely surviving, and I watched as the post-op group members calmly assured him that, yes, it would. If he could just hang on, hang on, hang in there.

“It gave me a little more hope,” he told me later, “to keep going.”

“I would rather have died on the table than not had the surgery,” one Korean American guy with great sweaters responded (and, like everybody here, gave me permission to repeat), to a chorus of nodding Zoom heads.

It has happened at least once that someone did die. I was fully ready to, by which I mean I’d just spent nearly the last of my savings, which I’d burned navigating the emotional-mental-social-medical-legal-extreme-marginalization mindfuck shitshow of transitioning, on a burial plot just in case. One of the nodding heads in the group belonged to a nonbinary white person who was still horizontal in recovery from having had, a week prior, the worst happen, which was that after their procedure, in which all the fat and skin had been stripped from their left forearm from wrist to nearly elbow, along with major nerves, an artery, and veins, and then shaped into a tube and connected, in careful layers, to skin and blood vessels and nerves in their pelvis, their new penis had failed.

It died. On them.

But here they were, already getting ready for their surgeons to harvest a whole other part of their body within the month with zero hesitation. Because those three days they’d had their penis, they said, before being rushed into an eight-hour surgery that couldn’t save it — the feeling of it, even just for one moment, even still bloody and painful and packed with stitches: worth it. And I understood that immediately when, after a yearlong surgery waiting list and a deep quarantine and an anguished prerequisite COVID test I would either pass or lose my date over, I woke up last December in a hospital bed and before even glancing toward my lap, the room spinning from anesthesia and my lungs partially collapsed from four and a half hours on surgical ventilation and hundreds — plural — of stitches and a 40-square-inch hole in my thigh where I’d been skinned down to the muscle, I could suddenly feel, in a way I could never have fathomed, that this was what being alive was.

Photo: Dan Winters

There’s a scene in Disney’s original Dumbo when the child elephant’s mom cradles him in her trunk and sings to him, exuding love. Quietly, but wholly. As a kid feeling utterly unheld by this world, I hated it.

As a grown man in a hospital bed, chest loosely draped with a gown in a low-lit December room, I looked down in the direction of a penis I’d assumed would be covered in bandages — but then there it just was. Laid out at an angle toward my left thigh, propped on a green cloth. And I, awed and heartful and weeping, sang that song to it.

Ba-by mine, la na na naaaaaaaaa.

I don’t know the words.

Baaaa-byyyy mine, na na na naaaaaaaa.

La, laaaaaa, la — na na na naaa,

La na na naa, baby of miiine.

While I’d been sleeping, two microsurgeons, a reconstructive urologist, a surgical fellow, and a surgical resident had, among other things, cut a seven-by-six-inch rectangle out of my right anterior lateral thigh. They’d taken all the skin and fat, plus one big nerve and some veins attached to the muscle, and connected the skin to itself in the shape of a phallus. Then they slipped the whole thing under two of my thigh muscles, pulled up out of the way with a steel retractor, dragged the phallus across my groin under the skin, and pulled it back out into the world through a hole cut in the skin over my pubic bone. They connected the new penis’s nerve to one of the nerve bundles in my native penis, which some people call a clitoris (embryologically, the cells are the same), which they’d cut free of its ligaments, then skinned, then tunneled up under the skin and out to the landing site of the new penis, the base of which they joined to the base of my pelvis, putting me all together with sutures, some finer than a human hair.

“That penis,” Dr. Bauback Safa, one of the microsurgeons, said when he came by after to see me — to see us — “looks perfect.”

He was talking mostly about blood flow. He did not mean that, with its fresh stitches and a round, bloody hole at the top where the skin would eventually close together, it would look like any other penis at the spa. But also, it was a lovely shape. Dr. Safa had correctly estimated that the width — which can be debulked with further surgery but is initially determined by skin and fat thickness — would land on the very but not spectacularly girth-y side. The length I had been able to pick. Each surgeon I’d consulted with had asked what I wanted, then nodded mildly and written it down, breezy as a waiter. My instinctive answer was long, even though I knew it would be that long all the time: While neophalluses can be implanted with erectile devices that change their stiffness, they do not change their size.

That penis,” the microsurgeon said when he came by after to see me — to see us — “looks perfect.

“That’s a lot of all-day D,” I’d said to the reconstructive urologist, Dr. Mang Chen, during our pre-op visit the week before. (He gave sort of a friendly, unfazed shrug.) I’d been saying it to myself, too, for months as I waited for my surgery date, wondering why I wanted so much, questioning if I should have less by some, by half, indeed like your average, unremarkable soft penis at the spa (listen: I’m Hungarian; I’m essentially made of hot springs). While the more common option of using flesh from forearms, which are generally slimmer, was barely viable in the case of my apparently bizarrely fatless ones, it was technically still possible, and though that site hadn’t felt right to me even before I was told it would make an appendage without any substance, I considered it anyway.

I second-guessed myself constantly. I’m asexual (yes, you can be asexual and have a boyfriend), and what that means for me is my penis was just for me. So what was even the point of having a lot of it? Was I greedy? Crazy? Weeks before my procedure, I got a block of clay and sat meditating and molding by feel, letting my body answer. The resulting phallus was the exact size I’d been requesting. For days, I lay on the floor on and off in the sunlight coming into my living room, asking my ancestors and transcestors for guidance. Some people might kill for this kind of access and choice. Certainly many, many, many, many people have died in the fight for it. One night, I woke up from a dead sleep, and all I heard was: Take the big dick.

So I did.

And it was perfect. Not in the way I’d been trying to be perfect most of my life — catalogue-ready, ideal to everyone else. It may not have looked perfect by the assessment of every San Franciscan in the gray-white city outside my hospital window, and it was clear to me that it was — that I was — distasteful to some of the hospital staff, even though, with the preponderance of phallo surgeons in the Bay Area, they see multiple new penises every single week. One of my surgeons asked me at some point if I’d want to follow up later with surgical girth reduction in case this here wondrous member we had conjured from fucking nothing into warm, space-displacing reality wasn’t yet the fit that would stop the deafening five-alarm bereavement scream that had ricocheted around my insides incessantly since birth.

But the screaming had stopped. In its absence, I couldn’t read or watch TV, which felt overstimulating and loud. I listened, still, to the quiet. Breathing.

For five days, I lay in a hospital bed without moving. No visitors: COVID. Every day, twice a day, someone came and injected anti-coagulating pig-intestine derivatives into my abdomen so I wouldn’t die from a blood clot, my belly becoming a graveyard of needle-punched bruises. Three times a day, I ate, increasingly impressed and concerned that none of it was exiting my colon. People intermittently emptied my giant catheter bag. Occasionally, a team came and jostled me onto my side for a bit to prevent bedsores, each time the pain like being stabbed everywhere at once despite the on-demand Dilaudid and consistent Oxy. And once an hour, to ensure the vessels were thriving, a nurse came and put a pencil-size Doppler rod to my penis to check its pulse, and we listened together to my blood coursing through it, an ultrasound-heartbeat swoosh.

It was alive.

Some people want it all

But I don’t! Want nothing at allll

I do know the words to this song.

If it ain’t you, ba-by

If I ain’t got you, ba-by

After my discharge, which included a grueling car ride wearing mesh hospital underwear packed full of gauze to keep my penis propped as close to perpendicular to my body as possible, I spent the first hour in bed singing top-volume falsetto Alicia Keys to my penis.

So you can imagine my heart-stopping horror when I woke up that very first night to find that my penis — propped and carefully angled so as not to kink or damage the blood vessels that had been relocated through my leg and groin to sustain it — was cold.

I pressed a finger to the skin and let go, watching the color return. It’s supposed to happen quickly — but, a brief document from the urologist’s office said, not too quickly. What was the right speed? I texted the microsurgeons’ director of transgender services, a nurse named Logan Berrian, but it was 1 a.m. I Googled frantically, though I was already well aware of the dearth of available useful information about phalloplasty. Was the room just cold? How cold was too cold for my penis at this stage in its life? Did I need to go to the emergency room back over the Bay Bridge in San Francisco? Have a surgeon awakened and brought in? My right leg was in a full brace from hip to shin because my blood vessels, unlike most people’s, had turned out to require deep dissection of my rectus femoris muscle to excavate, and moving around was slow, difficult, also scary, often bleeding-causing agony. I pressed a finger to the skin again. And again, watching. Blood was returning. Blood was flowing. I spent the next seven hours watching over it, as if it were a troubled newborn, making sure.

“It’s okay!” Berrian texted me back at 8 a.m. It’s only an emergency if it’s cold and the “color is changing to a white/blue/gray/purple.”

On discharge day five, I woke up with a six-square-inch pool of blood seeping through three layers of bandages from the donor site (“Fine, nothing unusual,” came the text back), which during surgery had been covered with thin skin shaved from my other thigh with an instrument like a motorized cheese slicer, then laid over and stitched into the edges around the exposed muscle of the donor hole. On day seven, blood soaked through two additional layers of bandages and another of gauze. (“Looks good,” the doctor said when I had my friend emergency-drive me back to the city.) Every morning, I got up, after trying to sleep perfectly still on my back with my penis propped and my hips and my legs aching fire, and hobbled with the help of a cane to the toilet, where I used one hand to keep my penis level and the other to reach over to the sink and fill a bowl with warm water, then slowly, gently wash my genitals. Still, my whole lap smelled unrecognizable, not-human seeming, like a cross between hospital air and a livestock barn. (“Everyone freaks out about that,” a different nurse said over the phone, laughing a little, when I asked if I was okay.) For more than 30 days, my donor thigh oozed fibrinous fluid from wet holes, which became big, open red gashes where the skin graft hadn’t taken. (“It’ll close. It’s just like any other wound,” said Dr. Andrew Watt, the other microsurgeon, at my fourth weekly post-op appointment — to which I’d responded, “Is it?”) My other leg, the one the graft had been taken from, had dried blood always flaking from the sometimes burning, four-by-seven-inch skinned site trying to regrow itself, and at some point my penis started to separate a bit from my body.

It was a tiny gap, the littlest hole, between the base and my pelvis at the underside where the stitches hadn’t closed, small compared with many people’s wound separation, as it’s called, which happens “90 percent of the time” and is self-resolving. But it was so distressing that I mostly just refused to look at or touch it for two weeks, the panic spreading harsh electricity through my whole torso, even worse and for much longer than the time I stood alone in my kitchen, hyperventilating, holding my penis level in one hand and my phone in the other as I Googled, “What does gangrene smell like?”

“The whole process is constant body horror,” Berrian said at one point — after he’d told me that the penis-tip discoloration I was worried about might just be sloughing tissue that’s dying off, which is also fine. And this was a recovery with no complications that required surgery. The overall proportion of phalloplasties that need surgical revision, while lower for some surgeons (including mine), is about one in two. The highest number of corrective follow-up surgeries needed by anyone I know personally is 12.

This is what some people do for their penises. And though phalloplasties that survive a couple of weeks tend to survive, period, through all manner of regular penis life and then some, I was hysterical over the possibility that mine wouldn’t. If it died, I felt certain, I would die. I had pushed myself up against the absolute limits of enduring life without it, and I wouldn’t go back to before.

I couldn’t go back to before.

One day, in that first week out of the hospital, I stood with my leg in a brace and my weight on a cane, thudding the tip of it rhythmically into the floor while listening to upbeat Billie Eilish. It was the closest thing to dancing I could do, but I understood then, for the first time, that what dancing is about is that Our. Bodies. Are. Spec. Tacular.

Another day, I lay on a couch staring into a shaft of sunlight coming through a window, listening to “Can’t Find My Way Home” on repeat, tears quietly streaming. The sensation was foreign so a little bit scary, but I think the feeling I was feeling was what people mean when they say calm.

At other moments, I was so overwhelmed by floods of repressed rage and grief that all I could do was open my mouth and start screaming.

When you release an animal you’ve been keeping too long in a cage, a therapist of mine used to say, it tends to emerge snarling. “It all comes swirling out after surgery,” oliver flowers, a caregiver with T4T Caregiving, an all-trans caregiving service, texted after I reached out one night in despair. Barely able to move, I tried breathwork and meditation and a soothing bedtime-story app before, out of desperation, I started making up lyrics to “The Sound of Silence” (Hello, penis, my new frieeennd), cry-singing out my struggle through an epic that ended up probably 17 verses long. “So many of us have had to put up walls of protection to get us to this point, then the intensity of the experience breaks it all down,” flowers said. I don’t use the words trauma or torture flippantly; I know from both. And you don’t escape four decades in a body that feels simultaneously dead and like an eternal wellspring of agony without either. “It’s just that we’ve had to hold in so much for so long — and this process frees us from that … but not before feeling it all.”

Around day 50, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought about killing myself. The first story I ever wrote — in my head, building chains of memorized sentences, same as I compose to this day — was about committing suicide by walking into the Atlantic Ocean. I hadn’t yet started kindergarten.

Able to move around a little better, I washed my bathroom sink. Not the whole bathroom — just the sink. And though I have always run a tight bathroom, I stood back and beamed at it, at myself, as though I’d just discovered penicillin. Almost every time I made myself a plate of food, though I’d been feeding myself (and sometimes additional adults/husbands) for decades, I said, often out loud, “I did that!” Everything was a miracle. Everything was different now that I lived this existence I’d been violently and thoroughly socialized to believe was an impossibility. At day 60, my open wounds finally, unimaginably, closed.

In the beginning, the nerve connection growing in slowly, I could feel my penis in my hand, as I incessantly had to hold it while limping around my apartment, or against my wrist as I hunched over to rest it there like some kind of penis sommelier, freeing my fingers. But it couldn’t feel me.

“I’m always bashing it into things,” I told someone early on. After it was healed enough that I could finally stop propping or holding it, I’d walk up to the kitchen sink to do dishes and bash my penis into the cupboard knob. Raising my hands to gesture while I talked, I’d drop them back into my lap and punch myself in the dick — which, before long, I definitely felt. For a while, I was most comfortable relatively nonconstricted (I see you, Jon Hamm), and I sent a barrage of texts to a guy I knew with similar endowments asking where he put his, spiraling about how I was never going to fit into any pants or underpants or, ultimately, society. One day, I rounded a tight corner into the tea aisle at the grocery store and, misjudging my proximity to a display table, knocked a wine bottle over with my dick, feeling a hot flush of embarrassment that I didn’t know the dimensions of my own body.

One night in the shower, though, my right thigh, finally in one piece but still unfamiliar, caught my attention. I had a (trans) friend who said once that his reaction to seeing thigh phalloplasty scars was “That’s a nice penis. But look at your leg.” I looked down at it: a raw, raging pink rectangle, scaly from the hole-punching machine they’d fed the skin graft through, flesh made mesh to cover the exposed muscle, and another long line of scar like railroad track angling toward my groin. And it struck me, immediately and only, as another incredibly specific thing I got to love about myself, and I collapsed into the wall, sobbing.

It’s interesting to see how you’re different,” a friend of mine said ten months after the surgery, when I went to visit him.

It was possible, of course, that I was going to wake up different—in a bad way. Some of the best men I know don’t have penises, and plenty who do are hardly role models. I’ve been on the abuse/harassment/condescension/denigration/objectification/crimes end of enough penis-havers to have worried about it, however far back in my consciousness. I had a partner once who terrorized me about his sexual “needs,” and some time before starting to transition, I spent an afternoon on mushrooms crying against his dick, silently telling it I knew it wasn’t its fault. It was probable I was going to wake up more me. And I feared, from my most scared place, that would mean more harmful.

“There’s a gentleness,” my friend said about me now. “It was always there,” he added, having known me for many years. “It just wasn’t … first.”

No. It wasn’t. But when penis is self, as penis is a gift to self, it’s a gift, too, to others.

A few months prior, I’d sat on the couch with my boyfriend having a contentious and difficult conversation. At any other point in my adulthood, I would have shut down hard with defensiveness. That day, though, even still healing, wounded and broken and terrified that my leg would never really work again, I stayed soft and open and kind.

You, he said, eyes wide, are being so generous.

I was surprised too. As a child growing up in the Midwest in the 1980s, I never could have known, but somehow must have believed, that there was a way a man could, even frightened and unsure, stay grounded in love for himself. No matter how unexpected or unaccepted that self was.

A few years ago, a year after I started transitioning, I sat at a red light in my car, which I was getting ready to sell, and thought suddenly, What kind of a man doesn’t have a car? A belief I didn’t even know I’d absorbed from somewhere (an early episode of The Love Connection, I am almost positive) was floating around my consciousness, wreaking insufficiency. A year after that, I joined a gym, wondering if now that I was teeming with testosterone, I might enjoy gym workouts (answer: no. Every few minutes, the personal trainer I signed up with directed me to do an exercise, and every time, I thought, Why? Why would I do that?). One day, after my trainer had me pick up some dumbbells, I expressed doubts that I’d be able to press them. “You picked ’em up, you gotta put ’em up,” he said so automatically that I asked, “Is that what masculinity is?” (He laughed, surprised, before responding, “I guess so!”) Allegedly, masculinity isn’t the sound of my voice, because though its pitch (130 hertz, whatever that means) is “within the normal male range” (whatever that means), the overall effect, an actual medical doctor told me once, is female because I talk like such a girl.

It’s not a penis that makes someone a man, either. And a vagina does not make a woman. Most people who are having phalloplasty, though, do get their vaginas removed during the procedure. Broadly, I get it: I could not have gotten my boobs cut off fast enough, and I spent weeks before my 2019 hysterectomy up late in bed, hot and sleepless, fantasizing about the moment the medical-waste-disposal team at UC San Francisco would batch-incinerate my uterus, which swirled with dysphoria like nausea from the depths of my soul. But just as you might feel an automatic no if a doctor offered to cut one of your healthy arms off for you, when I thought about cauterizing, excising, and sewing closed my vagina, my whole body cringed: wrong.

“Do you have to get rid of your vagina?” I’d asked the first phalloplasty recipient I’d ever met when he came over to my house for macaroni and cheese one night before my first consult. He’d generously offered to share his surgery experience, and I’d maybe surprised myself by asking but definitely surprised myself with my response when he said no: I involuntarily fist-pumped.

Using plastic-surgery methods that were developed because so many people’s faces were blown off during the First World War, the first phalloplasty was performed in the 1930s. A couple of decades later, trans-surgery centers started opening at several American universities. But in the ’80s, most of the university surgery centers closed or went private, and by 2000, the going rate for a phalloplasty was $80,000, cash only. Those surgeons often held “a very rigid view of what our transition should be,” says trans elder, activist, and policy consultant Jamison Green; they aimed to make good, regular straights out of us, and it was known in the community that if you weren’t one, you’d better lie about it. They excluded people who had given birth because real men, Green says, “wouldn’t let themselves have kids.” One transmasculine pioneer, Lou Sullivan, wrote long letters to Stanford’s clinic for rejecting him because he was gay.

“I’ve been trying to just live without a penis for a very, very long time,” I wrote in a journal after my first consult in early 2020. “No one’s holding me back but me.” But that cliché isn’t true, is it? That’s a survival adaptation of the oppressed: to take on responsibility for their own suffering so they don’t give up against impossible odds or lash out in ways that further endanger them. The midwestern state I grew up in still explicitly excludes trans health care from state insurance coverage. This year, more than 100 bills in 35 states targeted trans people’s access to civil and medical rights. In 2020, to get phalloplasty covered in the great(est) state of California, which has legally mandated state trans health coverage since just 2013, in addition to the usual bullshit of spending a part-time job’s worth of hours and energy getting and then wrangling insurance and doctors’ offices and prerequisites, I needed letters from three separate medical professionals, not counting my three world-class surgeons, declaring that I wasn’t insane. Currently, there are only about a dozen phalloplasty teams in the whole country — mine started putting their world-class skills to phalloplasty use partly because they could get paid for it by insurance — and up until recently there was still at least one surgeon who wouldn’t allow patients to keep their vaginas, not because it was medically impossible but because he didn’t think it was right to have both.

“The pain is not just that I’ve been ignoring myself but that I still am,” my journal entry continues. But it isn’t true, either, that the attempt to erase my existence originated with me. One day, lying on my couch in quarantine before surgery, I watched a Ben Stiller–Eddie Murphy movie recommended by HBO Max — until the point when, apropos of absolutely nothing, a character makes a joke about a real-life trans guy who, in real life, was brutally raped and shot to death. Shortly after that, Hulu recommended a Keanu Reeves–Winona Ryder movie from 2018, in which Reeves’s character says trans people are deluded untouchables. While I was recovering, I watched a Jennifer Lopez rom-com from the same year, happily zoned out like a normal person until 29 minutes in, when she does a bit where she tells a guy someone is trans(masculine); the joke is that the guy used to have sex with that trans person, and now that he knows he fucked one, he is disgusted.

Months later, this latter scene popped into my head while I was making hummus and made me cry. I get messages like this in some form every day. In a break from working on this story, I turned on a hotel TV, and within minutes Chandler on Friends was saying he finds his transfeminine parent revolting. This is a recurring feature of this show, which I watched all through my teens. Seven months into recovery then, I felt, like all the other times, the knife of it through the center of my chest: You are not welcome here.

As I had with my penis length, I second-guessed my “unique surgical goals” (Okay but what if I did just let them sew up my vagina?) from the moment I knew they were possible, but the morning I walked into the hospital, I trusted my instincts. If there was anything I had learned in transitioning, it was that what was right for me was rarely what, according to my patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, capitalist acculturation, “made sense” — which, obviously, could only be to live as a sexually available cute-lady vessel capable of carrying white babies. It’s impossible to articulate and maybe even to know exactly why my vagina is integral to my power and my personhood. “I cannot wait to be more masculine so I can be more feminine,” I used to write in journals as I started transitioning and realized, though I didn’t quite understand why, that was what I needed.

An intuitive once told me that in a past life I was a priestess. Whatever it is that made me this, given, finally, the remarkable chance to embody it, which technically has been available since decades before I was born, I stopped withholding myself from myself, even if much of the world is aligned against who that is.

I’ve never seen or heard of a book or show character or even another person who is an asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina. But after I got out of the hospital, standing in the bathroom washing my hands, with most of my body, much less my genitalia, well outside the mirror’s frame, I looked up and suddenly, for the first time in my life, recognized my own face.

Not everyone does. Sometimes I get misgendered — sometimes even by people who are trying their best. Just last week, someone at the photo shoot for this article misgendered me repeatedly, not noticing at first, then, after I’d corrected him, cursing himself, apologizing sincerely. I took a moment outside, letting the loneliness sink in. Only days prior, I had been misgendered and responded, in a hard-dying habit, by blaming myself — if only my voice were deeper; if only I were less femme — instead of the systems that had worked to erase me and people like me for centuries.

This time, I refused to internalize it. There isn’t, I breathed deep, anything wrong with me. I got myself ready and walked on set and stood, nearly nude, compassionate and angry and proud. Whatever was happening around me, I was centered, in my body and in the shots I could see on the monitor, beautiful, accurate — perfect. Days before my penis’s first birthday, the warmth and weight of it lay against my vulva, each supporting the other, holding me.

Five Lingering Questions About ‘The Beatles: Get Back’

 Five Lingering Questions About ‘The Beatles: Get Back’

Nearly three weeks after the docuseries’ release, there are a few things we can’t shake: What did ‘Get Back’ teach us about the Beatles? And should we lament the band’s breakup?

By Ben Lindbergh  The Ringer

I’ve had a hard time putting The Beatles: Get Back behind me, and not only because it’s eight hours long. Almost three weeks after the docuseries’ debut on Disney+, a piece of me is still stuck in 1969. Get Back’s got a hold on me partly because the Beatles, in addition to having many other virtues, were a really great hang. Their charisma and rapport can’t be separated from their recordings—the former influenced the latter—but their appealing (if partly performative) public personas have almost as much to do with their undimmed legend as with the music they made. When soon-to-be Beatles manager Brian Epstein watched the band perform for the first time in 1961, he was struck not just by their appearance and sound but by their sense of humor and “personal charm.” Even though the band was approaching the precipice when it made Let It Be, Get Back is bursting with Beatles allure. (Note: I know some of you must be sick of hearing and reading about the Beatles by now. Give it a few centuries for the fuss to die down.)

The intimate nature of the three-act epic, which director Peter Jackson presents without the distancing effects of 50-years-later talking heads or narration, deepened my parasocial bond with a band that broke up long before I was born. Watching Get Back is a passable facsimile of sitting in a studio with an engaging group of friends who happen to be some of the best songwriters ever. Spend enough time bathed in the incandescent creativity at the nexus of ’60s culture, and the present can’t help but seem drab by comparison. To trot out an overused expression, The Beatles: Get Back is a vibe, one that’s difficult to forget and impossible to replicate in real life.

I’m also still savoring Get Back because I’m worried that I’ll never see something quite like it again—not just about the Beatles but about anything. In an era when most media is instantly accessible, popular IP is endlessly recycled, and virtually every archive has been picked clean—when every album from rock’s heyday, including Let It Be, has been reissued and remastered and adorned with demos and rarities as many times as Baby Boomers’ checkbooks will bear—Get Back is a rare rich and untapped treasure. Watching it is like discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, except instead of snippets of text on brittle parchment, it’s crystal-clear audio and video that looks like it could’ve been captured last week. Get Back’s fidelity is deceptive—it took years of painstaking work with proprietary technology to make the decades drop away—yet it still seems miraculous that most of this footage sat almost unseen until now. This is the world’s most celebrated band in one of its most momentous months, extracted from amber and brought back to life (in a nonthreatening way).

And so, instead of consigning Get Back to my towering pile of completed content, I keep turning it over in my mind. I’m left with some silly, inconsequential questions, such as: Should I be eating more toast? And: If the Beatles hadn’t voluntarily left the rooftop, would those beleaguered bobbies still be awkwardly waiting for them to stop playing? Or: Which was original documentarian Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s worst suggestion of a venue for a rock concert, an orphanage or a children’s hospital? But the docuseries stirs thoughts about some more substantial subjects, too. So before we close the book on the Beatles—until their inevitable next revival—let’s consider five lingering questions prompted by Get Back.

What did Get Back teach us about the Beatles?

If there’s anyone in the world who wouldn’t have stood to learn a lot about the Beatles from Get Back, it’s Mark Lewisohn. Lewisohn, a leading Beatleologist, is the author of a shelfful of books about the band, including The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and The Beatles: All These Years, an in-progress, three-volume, comprehensive chronicle that makes Jackson look like a dilettante. Yet even Lewisohn had his eyes opened.

“No one knows everything about anything,” he says via email. “Even in this instance, where I’d listened to close-on 100 hours of the audio spools from the month, I knew that seeing the footage in Get Back was going to tell me a huge amount. If anything, I underestimated that. It’s nothing less than the Beatles education primer, ultimately instructive to me and anyone else who really wants to see and hear who they were and how they worked. Get Back provides an immeasurable contribution to our understanding of what made the Beatles so remarkable.”

Like everyone else alive (including, probably, Paul and Ringo), I know less about the Beatles than Lewisohn, and I found Get Back revealing in some respects too. Just not necessarily in the way that much of the prerelease hype promised.

Much of the coverage that set the scene for Get Back focused on the series’ potential to reshape the public’s long-standing conception of the sessions that led to Let It Be and the Beatles’ breakup in general. The former members of the Beatles had helped create that impression by slagging the sessions and the resulting documentary for half a century or so; in 1970, John called making the movie “hell” and “six weeks of misery,” and early this year, Ringo dismissed the doc as a “very narrow” view with “no joy in it.” Get Back contradicts the idea that the sessions were a depressing slog. Then again, so does Let It Be, which is available in various formats via Archive.org. Although Let It Be features a couple of the contentious exchanges that show up again in Get Back, Ringo’s review doesn’t really ring true. Lindsay-Hogg’s response to Ringo is right: There’s plenty of levity, ridiculous voicework, and productive collaboration in Let It Be, and its balance between tension and silliness, fractures and affection, doesn’t strike me as meaningfully different. As Jackson acknowledged, Get Back is in some respects actually a “lot tougher movie than Let It Be,” which didn’t even note that George had briefly left the band.

Lewisohn says that Get Back is “honest” and “maintained maximum integrity,” which suggests that Jackson didn’t distort what went on (even though Paul, Ringo, and the widows of John and George served as producers). For all its cinema-verité trappings, Get Back is still a work created by practiced performers who knew they were being observed, so what we see might not accurately reflect the way the Beatles experienced the sessions. Outwardly, though, they appeared to have a lot of love (or at least cheerful tolerance) left for one another, and despite their growing grudges, they were still largely working well as a band. The idea that Let It Be was an unrelenting downer was mostly a myth born of negativity bias, the mid-breakup context in which the original documentary came out, and the inaccessibility of the original print over the intervening years.

Whether or not Get Back corrects a real record (as opposed to a vaguely and selectively remembered record), it’s still a useful counterpoint to people printing the legend. By the time the band convened at Twickenham, most of its members had been close companions and collaborators for more than a decade. They’d endured the crucible of Beatlemania together, matured together, and made amazing art together. Theirs wasn’t a bond that could be broken overnight—or ever, really. Yes, there were years of estrangement, diss tracks, and sniping in the press, but most of the Beatles still socialized and recorded with one another both immediately and long after the breakup, and even Lennon and McCartney eventually reconciled to some extent. As bad blood between former bandmates goes, the Beatles don’t really rank with Simon & Garfunkel or Waters and Gilmour.

If anything, Get Back reinforced my preexisting impressions of the understandable strains that would soon splinter the group, a natural death caused by outgrowing a group formed when they were no-name teens: John’s drug use and devotion to Yoko; George’s frustration with being underestimated as a songwriter; Paul’s sometimes domineering attempts to keep the trains running. The movie isn’t a definitive document of the Beatles’ breakup, because the band’s relational low point didn’t come during the sessions that produced Let It Be. The Beatles made another album after that—Abbey Road followed Let It Be but preceded it in stores—and until their business differences drove them apart, they intended to make more. In early ’69, the worst was still ahead, foreshadowed in Get Back by John Lennon’s fateful infatuation with Allen Klein. Ultimately, though, it’s much more rewarding to analyze how the Beatles blossomed and why they burned as brightly as they did during their decade of continual reinvention than it is to obsess over why they weren’t partners for life. (Nothing drives home how quickly the Beatles remade music than to hear them revisit their oldies as if they were artifacts of an ancient time, less than six years after recording Please Please Me.)

Fortunately, Get Back is much more than a ticktock of the band’s decline. It’s an extended, singular look at the act of creation—both the magical moments when inspiration strikes, and the more tedious stick-rubbing sessions when those tenuous sparks are fanned into flames. The series brings the Beatles’ late-’60s creative process to the screen in a much more nuanced and compelling package than the 80-minute Let It Be, which lacks Get Back’s narrative structure, riveting visuals, and carefully cleaned-up dialogue. It doesn’t really write a new story so much as it enriches and adds depth to an old one, the ending of which the world has been hearing for years. But well worn as these songs are, it’s still wondrous to see them be born.

Get Back showed me how memories are made. It reminded me that history is haphazard, and that the lyrics and tracklists and performances that seem preordained to those who came along later were actually in flux up until the second they were set in stone. (As George says, “You just go into something and it does it itself. Whatever it’s gonna be, it becomes that.”) It emphasized that the Beatles weren’t ahead of their time only as music makers but also as multimedia artists who made their mark from fashion and album art to movies. (Although they thought they were shooting a more conventional TV special and documentary, the Beatles composing and recording an album on camera was essentially reality TV before An American Family, or streaming 40-plus years before Twitch.) And it also drove home how aware at least some of the Beatles were of where they had been, where they were going, and how they would probably be remembered long after the fact. The interpersonal problems that fans and scholars still debate today aren’t subtext in Get Back; they’re discussed by the band in real time. But even though the Beatles were aware of what was pulling them apart, they couldn’t undo the damage. Life can be cruel like that.

Who looks the best in Get Back?

That’s easy: George, when he wore this pink suit.

But I’m not talking about who had the best outfit. Which Beatle’s stock climbed the most because this footage finally came to light?

It could be a coincidence, but Get Back’s biggest Beatle beneficiaries are the two who survived to see it. I wrote last week about how Get Back boosts Paul: He has the most luscious hair, the most ambitious vision, the most indomitable work ethic, and most of Let It Be’s best songs. It’s not surprising that Paul is pumped about Get Back, because it’s helped him walk back a PR misstep he made in 1970 that helped create a lasting perception that he’d broken up the band. In reality, he was the last to leave and the most committed to keeping the group together. Get Back makes clear that while Paul’s controlling tendencies were pissing off George and John, they were also the impetus for the Beatles to be where they were, making music and movies for us to enjoy. And no, he wasn’t looking at Yoko when he was singing “Get Back.”

And then there’s Ringo, the Magic Christian star, who quietly conveys why he was the missing piece that put the group over the top. As Linda McCartney observed, he was the easiest Beatle to be around: the oldest, the most mellow, and the quickest with comic relief. Some people might find it humbling or maddening to be the mere mortal plunking out the chords to “Taking a Trip to Carolina” while your pals are composing “Something” and “Let It Be.” That disparity in songwriting skill didn’t seem to bother Ringo, who was happy to be in a beloved band and to make its music better. He showed up on time, open to input and prepared to play. And when he wasn’t catching some shut-eye or passing some gas, he was working out the chords to “Octopus’s Garden” (with a little help from his friends). Ringo was the glue guy and an invaluable buffer between the more combative Beatles. The way he took his band’s drama in stride helps explain why he looks about 60 at age 81.

Is Get Back the ideal length?

When Let It Be… Naked came out in 2003, it was accompanied by a 22-minute bonus disk called Fly on the Wall, which cut together assorted studio chatter and excerpts of songs from the Let It Be sessions. I found Fly on the Wall so seductive that I tracked down the Beatles bootleg Thirty Days, a 17-disc collection of the “best” of the same sessions. Twenty-two minutes wasn’t nearly enough, but as it turned out, 17 discs (and 18-plus hours) was way more than I needed. Is eight hours the sweet spot?

Jackson was the one with unfettered access to almost 60 hours of video and more than twice as much audio, so he has the best sense of the directorial roads not taken. On the one hand, anything Beatles-related is historically significant, so it must have been difficult to stick most of the footage back in the vault. On the other hand, Jackson isn’t known for his economical editing, so whatever he couldn’t find room for must have been boring or redundant indeed.

Jackson is ultra-enthused about all things Beatles, and it’s clear that he made Get Back with fellow Fab heads in mind. Beatles fans are a big demographic, but there’s still a significant barrier to entry here. Some people aren’t willing to watch eight hours of anything. Others would be down for a standard-length doc about the Beatles but would balk at devoting a third of a day to the making of a middling album (by Beatles standards). And even as a Jacksonian Beatles obsessive, I’ll admit that a trim here or there could have kept my mind from wandering. Look, I like “Don’t Let Me Down,” but I know how it goes. (Given that approximately 18 takes of that song survived, I’d love to know what wound up in the digital trash bin.)

This sounds like a stretch, but all in all, I’d argue that eight hours isn’t far from the optimal length. An eight-hour run time makes Get Back an event, a gourmet meal to be digested and discussed over several sittings. It’s long enough to include the unproductive days that provide a more complete picture of the Beatles’ time at Twickenham, and it’s long enough for viewers to feel like they’ve taken a trip and been immersed in a milieu. The length also sets it apart in a saturated Beatles nostalgia market: There’s no shortage of regular-length movies about the Beatles already out there if that’s what you want, and it would have done a disservice to those with bottomless Beatles appetites to bury much more of this gold again. Plus, once you’re seven hours in, what’s another hour? Heck, who am I kidding: I’d watch the extended edition and re-live it in VR.

Would Get Back’s format fit anything else?

Get Back is a testament to the brilliance of the Beatles. But its message is more universal than that: Music is amazing. No, that’s not news. But I can’t recall a more persuasive illustration of what makes music special than this series.

I’m sure you remember the moment when McCartney starts strumming, borrows a line fragment from Harrison’s “Sour Milk Sea,” and suddenly finds himself singing the song that would soon be “Get Back.” It’s the most jaw-dropping documentary moment since Robert Durst’s faux confession in The Jinx, though this one is as thrilling as that one was chilling.

Even among the songs on Let It Be, an album slapped together quickly, “Get Back” is a bit of an outlier. Although the movie makes it sound as if the Beatles were starting from scratch, many of the songs that ended up on the album (or on Abbey Road) had been bouncing around their brains for months or years. But when Paul played “Get Back,” he really did do it live. It’s the clearest look at music history happening in the studio since Bruce Dickinson demanded more cowbell.

Granted, it’s not as if you or I could make cranking out a hit look as effortless; this is Paul McCartney, whose combination of genius and practice helped him write timeless songs in his sleep. (“I had one this morning,” he says before playing the complete melody of “The Back Seat of My Car.”) So yes, the Beatles set a high bar. But bands will be formed because someone saw Paul write “Get Back” or Harrison stroll in and announce that he wrote “I Me Mine” or “Old Brown Shoe” overnight. You can’t write a book or make a feature film or (probably) program a game by yourself in one night. But if you’re diligent, talented, and lucky, you can write a song on the spot that people won’t stop singing for 50-plus years.

Which work of art do you wish you could watch springing into existence, the way we can lurk in Let It Be’s delivery room? Even if every artist had hired a Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the Get Back model wouldn’t work for everything. You could film a novelist in the midst of a masterpiece, but it wouldn’t be fun to watch someone sit silently and type. The magic of making music, as depicted in Get Back, is that it’s an intoxicating, spontaneous spectator sport: You can see and hear it happening, whether it’s Paul (“Tucson, Arizona!”) or George (“Attracts me like no other lover!”) fumbling for a line or the whole band trying out a faster tempo for “Get Back.”

Watching Bob Ross paint can be calming, but I don’t know whether one could make a compelling equivalent of Get Back—a chronicle of creation that speaks for itself—about any other kind of art. There’s already too much TV to keep up with, and a lot of documentaries are too long as it is. But here’s hoping more bands will keep their cameras on when they’re working, just in case inspiration strikes.

Should we lament that the Beatles broke up?

Sometimes it seems as if the Beatles never called it quits. Get Back is the latest in a long line of recent reasons to re-celebrate them: The Beatles Anthology, or 1, or Love, or The Beatles: Rock Band, or their catalog gracing music streaming services, or Yesterday. Yet even though they’re inescapable, Get Back is bittersweet—not only because it documents the Beatles getting very near the end of their formal alliance but because it’s a portrait of four spiritual siblings on the verge of falling out of friendship, at least for a while. It’s hard to hear McCartney tell Lennon, “Probably when we’re all very old, we’ll all agree with each other, and we’ll all sing together,” and not regret that he and Lennon would (almost) never sing together again after the Beatles broke up, or that Lennon didn’t get to grow old at all. It’s also hard to hear the Beatles run through inchoate or nearly fully formed versions of future solo songs such as “Gimme Some Truth,” “Jealous Guy,” “All Things Must Pass,” “Another Day,” and “The Back Seat of My Car” without dreaming about the Beatles albums that could’ve been. Combine the highlights of the albums that John, George, and Paul put out in ’70 and ’71 alone and you’d have the makings of the best Beatles album ever (if not the top two).

I’d rather dwell on what we gained than what we lost. Here’s my more positive take: I don’t think we missed out on much music because the Beatles broke up. If the band had stayed together for a few more years, they would have separated themselves even further from their closest competitors in the musical career rankings. But it’s not as though the Beatles could be much better regarded than they already are. Say the group had mended fences, stuck it out for five years, and kept recording at something close to their previous pace. They might have had six or seven solid albums in them after Abbey Road. Individually, though, the ex-Beatles made roughly 13 albums over that period that I would classify as good to great. (Your mileage may vary.) I’d argue that the pressure to succeed as solo artists and the urge to one-up each other contributed to that productivity. Even if the average quality of those solo albums is lower than the average quality of the hypothetical Beatles albums would have been, it’s hard for me to imagine the Beatles together making much more good music during that span than the ex-Beatles did on their own.

The fact that the Beatles got together during their formative years as musicians made it possible for them to reach the heights that they did. But by ’69, they were mostly writing separately. (In Get Back, some of their songs improve with input or significant contributions from others, but most are fairly fully formed when they’re introduced to the group.) On top of that, they all sang their own songs. Granted, it would have been nice to hear what the other Beatles brought to the others’ solo songs, but although the Beatles had a distinctive sound, the absence of that sound was arguably less costly and transformative than, say, the Stones or The Who splitting up at the same time would have been for early-’70s Jagger, Richards, or Townshend solo songs. The Beatles together would have written some music that never actually came to be. But would Beatle John have felt free to record the screams and confessional lyrics of Plastic Ono Band? Would Beatle Paul have brought the band to Scotland to preserve the pastoral beauty of Ram? Would Beatle George have convinced John and Paul to make room for every strong song from All Things Must Pass?

More broadly, would it have been better if the Beatles had plateaued, slumped, and fallen out of favor in the ’70s or ’80s, as most of their peers (and their own solo output) did, instead of ending on an ever-evolving upswing? Could there have been a more appropriate ending than “The End”? There may be a better Beatles timeline than this one in the musical multiverse, but as McCartney once sang, “This wasn’t bad, so a much better place would have to be special. No need to be sad.” Especially not now that whenever we want, we can time travel back to where the Beatles once belonged.