biography of a phantom book review

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BIOGRAPHY OF A PHANTOM

A robert johnson blues odyssey.

by Robert "Mack" McCormick ; edited by John W. Troutman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2023

A worthwhile investigation into a true legend of the blues.

A dogged researcher illuminates the mysteries and majesty of Robert Johnson.

McCormick (1930-2015), an influential musicologist and folklorist, was known for the massive archive he had assembled on seminal blues artists as well as his refusal to share so much of it. He dubbed his archive “the Monster,” and he struggled to tame it into book form, which makes this long-awaited publication a significant event in music scholarship. Edited by Troutman, a curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, this volume contains an early draft of the Johnson manuscript that the author had revised for decades and ultimately abandoned before his death, in addition to Troutman’s preface and afterword. It’s a highly readable account of his discoveries. When he began, McCormick had little useful information about his subject beyond the towns mentioned in Johnson’s recordings, which had been reissued to great acclaim. He proceeded through the Mississippi Delta area, knocking on doors and asking questions, a White outsider in predominantly Black communities. There were no photos of Johnson and almost no information on where he was born; nor was there agreement that his name was actually Robert Johnson. Still, McCormick pushed on, diligently recording his findings in text and photos. He describes how he shared the reissue of Johnson’s recordings with those who had heard the music in person, and he records eyewitness testimony from the night of his murder, likely poisoned by a man who had warned Johnson away from a woman. This edited version of the manuscript could stand on its own as a revelation, but the contextual material adds to the intrigue. Troutman interrogates some of McCormick’s methods while raising the larger issues of race and appropriation. “Rather than collaborate with living Black intellectuals to study Black music,” writes Troutman, many White collectors and writers “preferred to pursue…what they considered the authentic Black experience, the real , through their own, self-guided, personal quests of blues discovery.”

Pub Date: April 4, 2023

ISBN: 9781588347343

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Smithsonian Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

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WHAT THIS COMEDIAN SAID WILL SHOCK YOU

by Bill Maher ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2024

Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.

The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.

Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden —is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.

Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9781668051351

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

POLITICS | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

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Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey

CORRECTION: The review’s statements about Johnson’s death have been clarified.

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Biography of a phantom: by robert “mack” mccormick.

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It doesn’t help that editor John W. Troutman, who’s curator of music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is so openly dismissive of his literary charge. In a long introduction, Troutman takes aim at the “Blues Mafia” (is this Blues Mafia in the room with you?), made up of elite white researchers who made hay on their research and refused to invite others to join in their fun. In the article linked above, Gioia curtly debunks Troutman’s odd perception that there was this cabal of privileged blues researchers lording it over the riff-raff, when the truth was more that such investigators, while admittedly white, didn’t exactly profit from their obsession with the blues. Troutman in fact damns whole swaths of blues fans, relegating them to an “emergent audience of thousands of white progressive college students who could not get enough of such things.”

It’s ironic that in an afterword, Troutman continues his screed, attempting to be magnanimous while showing little self-awareness: “Moments in the book command great suspense; others convey extraordinary beauty. Some convey humility and self-reflection; others are laced with a sense of superiority and disdain.”

At any rate, what’s left of Phantom has been described as a great mystery novel, but in practice, it feels like an interrupted procedural. McCormick describes his research method and his travels throughout the South as he tries to pinpoint Johnson’s history. There are moments that feel like padding, as when he explains that in 1938, when Johnson died, “Civil war had been raging for two years in China.” There are moments that seem disingenuous; on the false alarms he frequently encountered that led him to the wrong Johnson, McCormick wrote, “Sometimes I felt like a trained seal that tooted horns and balanced a ball on the end of his nose.”

But when McCormick finally locates the source of the myth and finds himself around people who really knew the man, he seems genuinely excited: “The room was filled with a jovial, eager feeling and a sense of expectancy. These people had known Robert Johnson—or Robert Spencer, as they spoke of him—as only a boy and young man. He was part of their collective youth. They’d watched each other grow older, but his memory and music reminded them of their youth, of their dances and frolics and their early social life in the countryside.”

The search for Johnson’s murderer is somehow less satisfying, and considering the unwieldy nature of McCormick’s archive, it must not have been easy to wrangle anything at all out of what is reportedly an early manuscript. But Troutman again undermines the work by eliminating material based on conversations with Johnson’s surviving sisters, who were at first willing to speak with McCormick but then told their story to a researcher whom McCormick considered a bitter rival. It’s a whole other controversy in which McCormick did not act well, to the point where his obsession became unhealthy. Still, the controversy isn’t exactly settled by withholding information.

Who gets to tell Johnson’s story? Who gets to edit it? Biography of a Phantom is a story that blues fans have been waiting to read for decades, but for all its value as research and for all its literary trappings, it’s ultimately unsatisfying.

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Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey

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Book Review: Biography of A Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey by Robert “Mack” McCormick

By guest author perry aberli.

The classic bad joke starts with the line, “There’s good news and there’s bad news.” But it’s not funny when I cannot think of a better way to begin this. The good news? After almost 50 years, the work of Mack McCormick, Biography of A Phantom, has been released. The bad news? The very first page of the Editor’s Preface makes it clear that this is not a book about Robert Johnson, but:

An astonishing vantage point for considering the relationship between the material of the family of a renowned Black composer, singer, and instrumentalist who together experienced the trauma and terrorism of Jim Crow Mississippi; the manner by which a number of Johnson’s acquaintances, friends, and family, 30 years after the blues artist’s early death, were “discovered” by McCormick, a white Houston-based, self-taught folklorist and writer; the decision made by Johnson’s sisters, Carrie Thompson and Bessie Hines, to share details of Johnson’s life and more to McCormick and, then in consequence, and tragically for them all, the toll of their encounter (Phantom, p.vii). (I guess they don’t teach editors about run-on sentences anymore).

The editor, John W. Troutman, then advises the reader that, “Of course, while there are many phantoms in the book, Robert Johnson is not one of them.” (p. X). This is just the beginning of many retrojections of now known facts upon a search that was begun over 50 years ago.

For example, while we now have a glut of reissues of the complete Johnson body of music, multiple biographies, and photos; when McCormick began his search, the only available collection of Johnson’s song was the 1961 Columbia LP release, King of the Delta Blues Singers, (CL 1654). The LP was produced by Frank Driggs, who wrote the liner notes. “If you read the liner notes,” Driggs says, “you see next to nothing, because I just created a thing out of whole cloth when I wrote the notes because there was very little known about the guy.” (Robert Johnson at 100, Still Dispelling Myths, NPR Weekend Edition, May 6, 2011).

There were no photos; Johnson, at that time, was to those who listened to his music, a “phantom.” Troutman, it seems, would rather have the reader focus on the “phantoms” of racial terrorism, Jim Crow, power dynamics, theft, and cultural misappropriations which, he claims, are the tools and techniques of McCormick and other white field researchers of Blues.(He does, however, give Sam Charters a pass, citing Marybeth Hamilton’s characterization of Charters as exceptional within the Blues Mafia as an out-spoken advocate of studying the blues to expose entrenched social inequities and encourage support of the Civil Rights Movement (Notes: Editor’s Preface: ix, p. 197). Further examples can be seen in Troutman’s ceaseless criticism of McCormick for what is now called “cultural insensitivity.” He also accuses him of using the imbalance in power between the races to coerce those whom he questioned. And, while the accusations of theft and cultural appropriation could more fairly be placed at the feet of white musicians and Steve LaVere, the editor is more comfortable in heaping them upon McCormick.

So, what’s going on here? It seems that, not being content with castigating and attacking McCormick and the Blues Mafia, in the Preface and Afterword, Troutman feels he must point out the deft censorship and revision he exacted upon McCormick’s work. Indeed, we really don’t know how much of the draft work, which McCormick apparently showed to Peter Guralnick, has been excised. Guralnick notes, in his Searching for Robert Johnson, that the draft had a section on Johnson’s trip to record in San Antonio, and that “Even in outline, it seems a peculiar odyssey, and it makes up a substantial part of McCormick’s projected book.” (Searching for Robert Johnson), Little, Brown and Company, Kindle Edition (p. 34). None of those critical events in Johnson’s life and legacy appears in Phantom. Guralnick clearly was shown a draft of the book that included much more of McCormick’s than Troutman has chosen to share. In this instance, the question is: what was so culturally inappropriate about the trip to San Antonio and the recording session there that would lead Troutman to exclude it?

This book is a much better read if one skips the self-serving Editor’s Preface and begins with the work itself. McCormick clearly intended this work to be a book for the general public, wanting it to be a kind of mystery story.

McCormick is a captivating writer: in the 4 pages of introduction to his work, he has you spell-bound as he summarizes the story he is about to spin before us. At its best, Phantom engages you in a personal way; you almost feel as if you were on the road with McCormick. Even though you know the answers he was yet to, or would never find, you share in his frustrations and joys as he hits bland walls or finds open doors in his search. McCormick’s descriptions of his journey, the geography, and the people are well crafted. It is, like any good mystery, a real page turner. But it’s frustrating because we know that Troutman has decided not to tell the whole story or show us the long promised pictures. The image presented of Johnson is still blurry; he is still a “ciph

[Note: You can purchase this book from Cathead book store in Clarksdale, MS . The KCBS does not receive any compensation from your purchase.]

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Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey Hardcover – 12 May 2023

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While Johnson died before achieving widespread recognition, his music took on a life of its own and inspired future generations. Biography of a Phantom , filled with lush descriptive fieldwork and photographs, is an important historical object that deepens the understanding of a stellar musician.

• Print length 264 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Smithsonian Books
• Publication date 12 May 2023
• Dimensions 15.88 x 2.26 x 23.7 cm
• ISBN-10 1588347346
• ISBN-13 978-1588347343
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"At long last, a legendary manuscript sees the light of day. In the half century since Mack McCormick began his Biography of a Phantom, Robert Johnson has become much less phantom-like, with numerous books, articles, and films devoted to illuminating his life and legacy. It is instead McCormick who has become a mystery--and who is this book's most compelling revelation. Through Smithsonian historian John Troutman's editorial framing and McCormick's own narrative, we understand for the fi rst time the real life of a phantom, just not the one McCormick intended. -- PRESTON LAUTERBACH, author of The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Smithsonian Books (12 May 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1588347346
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1588347343
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.88 x 2.26 x 23.7 cm
• 160 in Rapper Biographies
• 201 in Blues Music
• 447 in Blues Musician Biographies

About the author

John william troutman.

John Troutman is curator of music and musical instruments at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. For a short biography and further information regarding his books and music, visit the author's website: http://www.johnwtroutman.com

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Biography of a Phantom Summary and Reviews

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Biography of a Phantom

A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey

by Robert 'Mack' McCormick

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Published Apr 2023 264 pages Genre: Biography/Memoir Publication Information

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Book summary.

The drama of In Cold Blood meets the stylings of a Coen brothers film in this long-lost manuscript from musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick, whose research on blues icon Robert Johnson's mysterious life and death became as much of a myth as the musician himself

When blues master Robert Johnson's little-known recordings were rereleased to great fanfare in the 1960s, little was known about his life, giving rise to legends that he gained success by selling his soul to the devil. Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey is musicologist Mack McCormick's all-consuming search, from the late 1960s until McCormick's death in 2015, to uncover Johnson's life story. McCormick spent decades reconstructing Johnson's mysterious life and developing theories about his untimely death at the age of 27, but never made public his discoveries. Biography of a Phantom publishes his compelling work for the first time, including 40 unseen black-and-white photographs documenting his search. While knocking on doors and sleuthing for Johnson's loved ones and friends, McCormick documents a Mississippi landscape ravaged by the racism of paternalistic white landowners and county sheriffs. An editor's preface and afterword from Smithsonian curator John W. Troutman provides context as well as troubling details about McCormick's own impact on Johnson's family and illuminates through McCormick's archive the complex legacy of white male enthusiasts assuming authority over Black people's stories and the history of the blues. While Johnson died before achieving widespread recognition, his music took on a life of its own and inspired future generations. Biography of a Phantom , filled with lush descriptive fieldwork and photographs, is an important historical object that deepens the understanding of a stellar musician.

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Reader reviews.

"This edited version of the manuscript could stand on its own as a revelation, but the contextual material adds to the intrigue... A worthwhile investigation into a true legend of the blues." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "This page-turner, crime-thrillerlike odyssey leads readers through the American South for details about the blues guitarist... McCormick conveys a wild enthusiasm for his research and the music of Robert Johnson that readers will find contagious." — Library Journal (starred review) "This volume is a significant contribution to scholarship on Black culture and the blues, told by a flawed man whose perseverance, patience, diligence, and methodical methods provide valuable insights into Robert Johnson and the milieu from which his music sprang." — Booklist "When in 1973 Mack McCormick first told me about Biography of a Phantom , he called his search for the facts of Robert Johnson's life 'a detective story,' and it is. But what McCormick really found and brought home is a gorgeous intimacy with Johnson's works and days, all culminating in a 1970 Mississippi listening party where people who knew Johnson more than thirty years before, who heard him play, who played their now long-gone Johnson 78s until they wore out, gather to hear King of the Delta Blues Singers. McCormick's research may have been superseded by other books; the spirit in his book, a thing in itself, has not been. Not even close." —Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music "One of the most coveted books in blues scholarship, Biography of a Phantom is truly a brilliant firsthand account by Mack McCormick. While it is a book about Robert Johnson, it is also a window into Mack's idiosyncratic method of folkloric research. In a world without reference books dedicated to the blues, one can't help but be drawn into Mack's search through a sea of small southern towns for a specter of a blues singer." —Dom Flemons, The American Songster "At long last, a legendary manuscript sees the light of day. In the half century since Mack McCormick began his Biography of a Phantom , Robert Johnson has become much less phantom-like, with numerous books, articles, and films devoted to illuminating his life and legacy. It is instead McCormick who has become a mystery—and who is this book's most compelling revelation. Through Smithsonian historian John Troutman's editorial framing and McCormick's own narrative, we understand for the first time the real life of a phantom, just not the one McCormick intended. —Preston Lauterbach, author of The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll

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Robert "Mack" McCormick (1930–2015) was an American musicologist and folklorist who researched the lives of blues musicians while supporting himself by writing, census taking, and in 1968 and 1971, working with musicians in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. John W. Troutman is curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

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Biography of a Phantom

A robert johnson blues odyssey, by robert mack mccormick, narrated by adam verner, this title was previously available on netgalley and is now archived., send netgalley books directly to your kindle or kindle app, to read on a kindle or kindle app, please add [email protected] as an approved email address to receive files in your amazon account. click here for step-by-step instructions., also find your kindle email address within your amazon account, and enter it here., listen to an audio excerpt, pub date apr 04 2023 | archive date apr 04 2023, tantor audio, biographies & memoirs | entertainment | nonfiction (adult).

Robert Mack McCormick

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When blues master Robert Johnson's recordings were rereleased to great fanfare in the 1960s, little was known about his life, giving rise to legends that he gained success by selling his soul to the...

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"This volume is a significant contribution to scholarship on Black culture and the blues, told by a  flawed man whose perseverance, patience, diligence, and methodical methods provide valuable insights into Robert Johnson and the milieu from which his music sprang." — Booklist

"One of the most coveted books in blues scholarship, Biography of a Phantom is truly a brilliant firsthand account by Mack McCormick. While it is a book about Robert Johnson, it is also a window into Mack’s idiosyncratic method of folkloric research. In a world without reference books dedicated to the blues, one can’t help but be drawn into Mack’s search through a sea of small southern towns for a specter of a blues singer." — Dom Flemons , The American Songster

"This volume is a significant contribution to scholarship on Black culture and the blues, told by a flawed man whose perseverance, patience, diligence, and methodical methods provide valuable...

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Who Was Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Really?

In “Once Upon a Time,” Elizabeth Beller examines the life and death of the woman who was best known for marrying John F. Kennedy Jr.

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ONCE UPON A TIME: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, by Elizabeth Beller

One of the many reasons to wish that Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were alive and well is that, without too much urging, she might have formed a sorority with Meghan Markle. They could have talked about what it’s like to be a woman thrust into a brutal family dynasty and a Hobbesian press ecosystem. Maybe they would have exchanged tips for dodging paparazzi. Maybe, over enough drinks, they would have asked each other if their husbands were worth all the trouble.

Sadly, we can only come at Bessette-Kennedy now through intermediaries. And none of them could be more ardent in their mission than Elizabeth Beller, whose unironically titled biography, “Once Upon a Time,” aims to make John F. Kennedy Jr.’s wife the princess she was meant to be. Squeezing bright memories from dozens of Bessette-Kennedy’s friends, acquaintances and family members, Beller lays down a yellow-brick road from her subject’s middle-class White Plains childhood to her tony Greenwich adolescence to her convivial semesters at Boston University to her V.I.P. sales job at Calvin Klein in New York.

Beller is there, too, when America’s most famous bachelor wandered in for a fitting. Boy and girl, helpless in their beauty, gazed upon each other. Boy asked for girl’s number. There followed “a haze of sultry dinners, dancing and walks.” But John F. Kennedy Jr. was in no hurry to settle down. He was on-and-off-dating a temperamental Hollywood actress, and even when he and Bessette-Kennedy did become an item, he didn’t introduce her to his mother, who then died before he could.

Their Georgia wedding was lovely, but the marriage was troubled. John’s energies were drawn away by the launch of George, his doomed magazine. His gregarious wife was a prisoner in her own home, thanks to an unhinged tabloid press. “If I don’t leave the house before 8 a.m.,” she told a friend, “they’re waiting for me. Every morning. They chase me down the street.”

The couple grew distant. They got into arguments. They went to couples therapy. But “Once Upon a Time” wants us to know that, through it all, they were meant to be. “They would love hard and they would fight hard,” one friend said, “but they were very much a couple.”

“They were soul mates,” Beller quotes George Plimpton as saying.

And through it all, apparently, Bessette-Kennedy never stopped being a golden girl. We’re told over and again how gorgeous and elegant she was, how smart and funny and kind. She loved kids, dogs, cats, old people. She had “abundant gifts to share.” She was “wild and vivid in a cautious and pale world.” She was “a revelation.”

The only remaining question: Why is this exercise in heroine worship emerging a full quarter-century after her death? Beller argues that Bessette-Kennedy’s legacy until now has been shaped by men, and she probably means one man in particular. Edward Klein’s 2003 pot-stirrer, “The Kennedy Curse,” helped cement the tabloid image of her as a difficult cokehead who showed up two hours late to her own wedding, severed a nerve in her husband’s wrist, fooled around with other men and, in one redolent phrase, snorted up with “a gaggle of gay fashionistas.”

Beller rebuts each charge as it comes, but with all respect to her advocacy, she seems to be litigating a case that has long since been settled out of court or, more poignantly, forgotten. What lingers, I fear, for anyone tasked with remembering Bessette-Kennedy’s name, is her haunting end: borne down in a Piper Saratoga six-seater piloted by her husband, with her sister at her side.

Ironic and fitting, then, that in recreating that fatal journey, Beller’s prose sparks to life. “They were flying through a darkness akin to that of a sensory-deprivation chamber, surface and sky indistinguishable. Only when John began to make multiple turns, climbing then descending, turning and descending again, might the sisters have noticed that it had been 20 minutes since they had seen the nebulous mainland lights, glimmering yet opaque.”

ONCE UPON A TIME : The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy | By Elizabeth Beller | Gallery | 352 pp. | $29.99

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June 20, 2024

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A ‘Life of Contradictions’

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B.R. Ambedkar, Delhi, India, May 1946; photograph by Margaret Bourke-White

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A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar

B.R. Ambedkar: The Man Who Gave Hope to India’s Dispossessed

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction

On January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula took his own life. A twenty-six-year-old Ph.D. student at the University of Hyderabad, he was a Dalit (the caste formerly called “untouchables”) and a member of the Ambedkar Students’ Association, which combats caste discrimination. The university had suspended his stipend following a complaint by the leader of the student wing of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) that Rohith had physically assaulted him. The suspension made him despondent and unable to make ends meet, leading to his death. Rohith left a poignant suicide note in which he wrote of his dashed hopes of becoming a science writer like Carl Sagan. But he also called his birth a fatal accident, a reminder that the caste system had determined his status as a Dalit for life.

The word “caste” ( jati in Hindi) is derived from casta , used by the Portuguese centuries ago to describe the divisions in Hindu society according to varna (literally translated as “color” but meaning “quality” or “value”). Ancient Sanskrit texts prescribed a four-varna social order: Brahmins (priests) at the top, followed by Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants and artisans), and Sudras (agricultural classes) in descending order of ritual purity. Hindu society actually consists of thousands of castes, each with its place in this hierarchy. There is also a fifth group, which is viewed as so impure as to be outside the varna order. These are the “untouchable” castes—Dalits, as we call them now. They perform jobs, such as manual scavenging and the disposal of dead animals, considered so unclean that the very sight of them is deemed polluting. 1

This ordering system is hereditary. Hindus are born into a caste and remain in it until death. Some castes belonging to the varna order have historically achieved mobility and moved to a higher varna by adopting “Sanskritizing” practices, like vegetarianism. But even this limited mobility is closed to “untouchable” castes, which remain stigmatized for generation after generation and find the doors of economic and social mobility shut tight.

Rohith’s suicide note sparked debates across India. How was such social inequality still practiced in the world’s largest democracy seventy years after independence from British rule? Attention turned to B.R. Ambedkar, not just because Rohith belonged to an organization bearing his name but also because Ambedkar, who died in 1956, has been increasingly recognized for his writings about caste as an entrenched instrument of social, economic, and religious domination in India. As he famously said in 1948, “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”

Now popularly addressed with the honorific Babasaheb, Ambedkar has long been known as a political leader of Dalits. He popularized the use of “Dalit”—meaning broken or scattered, first used in the nineteenth century by an anticaste reformer—as a term of dignity for “untouchables.” He is lauded as the chief draftsperson of the Indian constitution, which legally abolished untouchability. But few recognized him as a major thinker on the relationship between social and political democracy. This changed with the 1990s anticaste movement and the introduction of reserved slots for “backward castes”—the intermediate castes belonging to the Sudra varna—in public service jobs and universities. Political activists and academics turned to Ambedkar’s work to explain everyday discrimination against the lower castes, such as their relegation to menial jobs, humiliation in workplaces and housing, denial of entry into temples, separate wells in villages, and segregation from upper- and intermediate-caste neighborhoods. 2 His rediscovery as a political philosopher led to the publication in 2014 of a new edition of his book Annihilation of Caste (1936), with an introduction by Arundhati Roy. It dwelled on his clash with Mahatma Gandhi, who opposed his argument that caste was the social bedrock of Hinduism.

Caste remains a contentious subject, and scholars disagree on the institution’s nature and history. British colonialists interpreted it as evidence of Indian society’s basis in religion and its lack of a proper political sphere, which was filled by the colonial state. Marx adopted this view, writing that the subcontinent knew no real history until its conquest by Britain, only a succession of wars and emperors ruling over an unchanging and unresisting society. Colonial writing and practice drew on Brahminical texts to understand and rule India as a society organized by its predominant Hindu religion.

The French anthropologist Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) gave this understanding the imprimatur of scholarship by arguing that Homo hierarchicus , rather than the Western Homo aequalis , undergirded Indian society. Following Dumont, anthropologists studied castes and their hierarchical ordering according to the Brahminical principles of purity and pollution. It was not until 2001 that Nicholas Dirks persuasively argued that the British were crucial in institutionalizing caste as the essence of Indian society—though they did not invent it, they shaped caste as we know it today. 3 In place of a range of precolonial social orders based on a variety of factors, including political and economic power, society across India became defined by castes, with Brahmins at the top and Dalits at the bottom. 4

As a system of inequality, caste has met with criticism and protests for centuries. Today activists demanding the dismantling of caste privileges in employment, education, housing, economic mobility, and social respect come up against the Hindu nationalist BJP government led by Narendra Modi, which advocates ignoring caste difference in the interest of Hindu unity. The BJP is the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( RSS ), a paramilitary Hindu cultural organization that since its founding in 1925 has campaigned for an organicist Hindu unity, expressing admiration for the national unity model advanced by fascism and Nazism. 5 The RSS calls for reforming the most extreme aspects of caste, such as the practice of untouchability, but like most reformers, including Gandhi, does not challenge the four-varna order, regarding it as a divine organization of society in accordance with Hindu ideals. For the RSS , focusing on the differences in caste access to wealth and social status fractures the unity of Hindus; it instead calls upon castes to unite for a nation-state that guarantees Hindu supremacy. Accordingly the Modi government has systematically persecuted minority and Dalit activists as antinational elements. Hindu nationalist mobs have also assaulted and lynched Muslims, Christians, and Dalits.

Against this background of threats to democracy, Ambedkar acquires a new significance. The Indian politician Shashi Tharoor’s lucid biography is addressed to a general audience. But to appreciate the depth, complexity, nuances, and changes in the Dalit leader’s thought and politics, one should read A Part Apart by the journalist Ashok Gopal. He has pored over Ambedkar’s writings and speeches in English and Marathi, and the result is a stunning, comprehensive, and thoughtful account of Ambedkar and his times. The title is drawn from a comment Ambedkar made in 1939: “I am not a part of the whole, I am a part apart.”

What emerges in A Part Apart is a portrait of a minoritarian intellectual committed to building a society based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This entailed resolving the gap between the political principles set forth in the Indian constitution drafted and introduced in 1950 under his leadership, and the reality of social inequality. In an often-quoted speech before the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, he said:

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?

Gopal’s account meticulously charts Ambedkar’s attempts to grapple with this “life of contradictions.” First, he confronted anticolonial nationalism and clashed with Gandhi on whether caste inequality was intrinsically connected to Hinduism. Second, he engaged with constitutional democracy and developed his view of politics as an instrument of social change. Third, his concern with establishing the equality of all human beings is observable in his approach to religion and his eventual turn to Buddhism.

Ambedkar was born in 1891 in the British colonial cantonment town of Mhow, now in Madhya Pradesh in central India. He was the fourteenth and last child of a family belonging to the Dalit Mahar caste. The Mahars were not allowed to draw water from public wells; upper-caste Hindus considered even their shadow polluting. The British colonial army in which his father had served recognized military rank but not the practice of untouchability. This perhaps explains why Ambedkar did not have an entirely negative view of British rule. For him self-rule was not intrinsically better than foreign rule; what mattered more than freedom from colonial domination was freedom from upper-caste domination.

The colonial army offered a modern education to soldiers, even training and recruiting them as teachers. Ambedkar recalled that his father developed a zeal for education, ensuring that all his children learned to read and write. In 1904 the family moved to a two-room tenement in a working-class Mumbai neighborhood where Ambedkar continued his education. He graduated from Bombay University in 1912 and left the next year for Columbia University, supported by a scholarship from the ruler of the princely state of Baroda.

At Columbia, he studied economics, sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology. In 1915 he wrote a thesis for his MA in economics. While still working on his Columbia doctoral dissertation, he enrolled at the London School of Economics in 1916 for another MA in preparation for a second doctoral degree. He also enrolled in Gray’s Inn to become a barrister. He left for Mumbai a year later when his scholarship ran out, returning to London in 1920 to obtain an MS c (in economics) in 1921. He was called to the bar in 1922. A year later he submitted his dissertation and received a doctoral degree from the LSE . In 1927 he obtained his second doctorate in economics from Columbia.

By any standard, Ambedkar’s education was extraordinary, and even more so because of his stringent financial circumstances. In the years between his return to India and his Columbia doctorate, he started journals that launched his career as a public figure while teaching at a Mumbai college to support his family. In Gopal’s book he emerges as an intellectual intent on transforming Indian public discourse. This commitment came out of experiencing caste bigotry while growing up, such as being told to sit at the back of classrooms and being denied access to the water faucet unless a school employee opened it for him. Even his considerable academic achievements did not exempt him later from several humiliations, including being denied accommodations. In this respect, his time in the US and the UK provided a welcome relief.

New York also introduced Ambedkar to pragmatism, the philosophy of his teacher at Columbia, John Dewey. Several scholars have noted Dewey’s influence on his ideas on democracy and equality, 6 as did Ambedkar himself. (He was hoping to meet with his former teacher in 1952 when Columbia invited him to New York to accept an honorary degree, but Dewey died two days before his arrival.) The philosopher Scott R. Stroud’s The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is a magnificent study of Ambedkar’s complex engagement with Dewey’s ideas, which he reworked to address India’s specific political and social conditions. Stroud calls this creative use of Dewey’s philosophy Navayana pragmatism, named after Ambedkar’s Navayana, or “new vehicle” Buddhism.

Pragmatism’s impact on Ambedkar is evident in his 1919 memorandum to the Southborough Committee, appointed by the British government to consider the implementation of constitutional reforms. Ambedkar rejected the claim that Indians formed a community, which was the basis of the nationalist demand for political reforms. He cited a passage from Dewey’s Democracy and Education that the existence of a community required its members to be like-minded, with aims, aspirations, and beliefs in common. But while Dewey suggested that like-mindedness was fostered by communication, Ambedkar argued that in India it came from belonging to a single social group. And India had a multitude of these groups—castes—isolated from one another. With no communication or intermingling, Hindus formed a community only in relation to non-Hindus. Among themselves, caste-mindedness was more important than like-mindedness. Divided between “touchables” and “untouchables,” they could become one community only if they were thrown together into “associated living,” a concept from Dewey.

Above all, Ambedkar’s memorandum demanded an end to caste inequality. In 1924 he established an organization to represent and advocate for all Dalit castes with the slogan “Educate, Agitate and Organise,” which he drew from British socialists. This advocacy took on a sharper tone by 1927, when his organization arranged two conferences that catalyzed what came to be known as the Ambedkari chalval (Ambedkarite movement). The actions it took included Ambedkar and other Dalits drinking water from a public tank and symbolically burning the Manusmriti (the Hindu scripture authorizing caste hierarchy). The reaction of upper-caste Hindus was ferocious. Dalits were assaulted, and rituals to “purify” the “defiled” spaces were performed.

Ambedkar compared the second of these conferences to the French National Assembly in 1789 and their symbolic actions to the fall of the Bastille. For him the deliberate violation of caste taboos was an assertion of civil rights. He still spoke of Dalits as belonging to Hindu society but warned that if savarnas (castes belonging to the four varna s ) opposed change, Dalits would become non-Hindus. What angered him the most was the purification ceremonies, which he saw as an attack on the humanity and sanctity of the Dalit physical body.

Ambedkar’s demand for social justice put him at odds with the nationalist movement and eventually with Gandhi. In a 1920 editorial he acknowledged that Indians were denied self-development under the British Raj, but that the same could be said of Dalits under the “Brahmin raj.” He wrote that they had every right to ask, “What have you done to throw open the path of self-development for six crore [60 million] Untouchables in the country?” He described the Gandhi-led Indian National Congress as “political radicals and social Tories” whose “delicate gentility will neither bear the Englishman as superior nor will it brook the Untouchables as equal.”

Clearly the disagreements were deep. Gandhi, like other nationalists, believed that freedom from British rule was the primary goal and that Hindu society could address untouchability after independence had been achieved. Ambedkar, drawing on Dewey’s ideas on associated life, argued that India was not yet a nation and could not become one without addressing caste injustice. The purpose of politics, in his view, was to enact social change that Hindu society was too caste-ridden to accomplish on its own.

The conflict between the two men came to a head at the Round Table Conferences ( RTC ) in London, organized by the British to discuss political devolution. Several Congress Party leaders had denounced Ambedkar as a government puppet when he was appointed in 1927 as a nonelected representative of Dalits (whom the British called Depressed Classes) in the Bombay Legislative Council. Their criticism escalated at the second RTC when Ambedkar demanded that Dalits be granted separate constituencies to elect their own representatives to provincial legislatures. The Congress saw this as falling for the classic colonial ploy of divide and rule. It was willing to concede separate electorates for Muslims but not for Dalits. Gandhi was especially opposed to Ambedkar’s stand because he saw the Dalits, unlike Muslims, as part of Hindu society. He went on a fast to oppose the 1932 Communal Award, an electoral scheme announced by the British government that accepted separate representation for both Muslims and Dalits.

The standoff was resolved only after Ambedkar, Gandhi, and upper-caste leaders signed the Poona Pact that September. Ambedkar dropped his demand for separate electorates and accepted the principle of reserved seats for Dalits elected by joint electorates. From later writings by Ambedkar, in particular Annihilation of Caste and What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), the Poona Pact appears to have been a breaking point between the two men, a view that historians have accepted. But Gopal shows that the picture was more complicated in 1932.

Gandhi saw himself as a champion of Dalits, whom he called Harijans (“children of God”). He was loath to concede that they were outside Hinduism, like Muslims, and required separate representation. He wanted savarnas to abandon the practice of untouchability by a change of heart. Though Ambedkar appreciated Gandhi’s efforts, he wanted separate electorates because joint electorates for reserved seats meant that only those candidates acceptable to savarnas would win. But he signed the Poona Pact and accepted the outcome, even if it amounted to a concession.

This, Gopal argues, indicates that the Poona Pact was not a moment of irremediable split. With meticulous research, he shows that Ambedkar was satisfied with it. Though his attitude changed in his later writings, Gopal conclusively demonstrates that he initially regarded the pact’s achievements as substantial. He also believed that Gandhi’s commitment to eliminating untouchability was genuine, even as he disagreed with his methods. He wrote, “Gandhiji should be now called ‘our man,’ because he is now speaking our language and our thoughts.” This is at odds with Tharoor’s contention that ungenerosity toward Gandhi was one of Ambedkar’s flaws. If anything, it was Ambedkar who showed generosity and political flexibility.

But this amity barely lasted a year. There was a fundamental difference in their respective understandings of caste and its relationship to Hinduism. Gandhi regarded untouchability as an ugly corruption of a basically benign varna system. He called himself a “Harijan by choice” and turned his attention to uplifting Dalits rather than to the elimination of untouchability or any fundamental change in Hinduism. Ambedkar intensely disliked the “Harijan” moniker, believing it concealed the real cause of oppression, which was the Hindu varna system. At a conference in 1935 Ambedkar declared that though he was born a Hindu, he would not die as one. A year later he published Annihilation of Caste , the text of an undelivered speech, which argued that caste, along with social hierarchy and untouchability, was essential to Hinduism as a religion.

It was a stinging critique, one that Gandhi did not accept. Tharoor, who also wrote Why I Am a Hindu (2018), regards it as too sweeping, ignoring the religion’s plural traditions and closing the possibility of any rapprochement. But Tharoor fails to appreciate Ambedkar’s aim, which was to force Hindus to confront what their religion had wrought. Ambedkar wrote that Hindus treated Dalits horribly not because of some malice in their hearts but because they were religious and were simply following their scriptures. The problem was deep-rooted. At least slaves could hope for emancipation. But there was no hope for Dalits: it was the fatal accident of their birth.

If this religiously sanctioned system of inequality was resistant to emancipatory change, what could be done? This question opens the second theme in Ambedkar’s preoccupation with a “life of contradictions”: constitutional democracy and the use of politics to achieve social change. From the start of his public activities, he had used constitutional methods, submitting memoranda to various British committees to recommend reforms and participating in the RTC . Mindful of his standing as a Dalit leader, the Congress Party chose Ambedkar as the chair of the committee to draft the constitution of independent India, which affirmed equality irrespective of caste, religion, language, or birthplace. 7 Untouchability was abolished, and seats in the Parliament were reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (the official name for historically disadvantaged groups since 1935). Inspired by the Irish constitution, the Indian constitution also included a section called Directive Principles of State Policy, which outlined broad measures of social welfare. But these did not establish legally enforceable rights; the expectation was that constitutional guidance would result in policies that would realize the goals of equality and fraternity.

Ambedkar observed in 1949 that adopting constitutional democracy meant that “we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution.” Liberty, equality, and fraternity were to be instituted through constitutional means. Although he had used these tactics himself in the past, he now showed little patience for the “stampede” of civil disobedience, which he called a “grammar of anarchy.” Gopal does not provide any explanation for this apparent contradiction. We are left to conclude that Ambedkar was so convinced of Hindu society’s resistance to equality that he could place his faith only in the state to transform power relations.

Tharoor criticizes him for this “statism,” but it was born of Ambedkar’s experience of upper-caste resistance to fundamental change. Accordingly, he drafted a constitution that equipped the state with vast powers to carry out an expansive social project. The constitution granted fundamental rights, but it also included provisions under which the state could circumscribe them, unencumbered by substantive judicial scrutiny. 8 Ambedkar and other framers of the constitution had hoped that “constitutional morality” would guide state leaders in the future to use these provisions sparingly. But Indira Gandhi used them in 1975 to impose a national Emergency and suspend basic rights, and today the Modi government systematically deploys them to pursue critics and activists it calls “anti-national.”

Ambedkar was invited by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1950 to join his government as law minister, and he accepted. As minister, he introduced the Hindu Code Bill, which included women’s marriage and inheritance rights. The RSS and the Congress Party savarnas opposed it bitterly, especially as a Dalit was proposing a law involving Hindu women. Nehru dithered, the bill stalled, and Ambedkar resigned. He dabbled in politics for a time, though not very successfully. His last years were increasingly devoted to establishing colleges for Dalits, writing, and promoting Buddhism.

His interest in Buddhism developed out of his conviction that religion provided the “social conscience” without which any rights provided by law remained dead letters. Hinduism could not do this because of its commitment to caste. In his interpretation of Buddhism, called Navayana or Neo-Buddhism, Ambedkar believed he had found a religion for the modern age for three reasons: it upheld reason and experience over the divine word; its moral code recognized liberty, equality, and fraternity; and it refused to ennoble or sanctify poverty as a blessed state. Unlike traditional religions that were concerned with God, the soul, and rituals, Buddhism had no concept of God or the soul, and the Buddha shunned rituals, advocating an inclusive path of righteous and moral living. Ambedkar expressed these ideas in Buddha and His Dhamma , a posthumously published treatise on Buddha’s life and philosophy. On October 15, 1956, he took the oath to accept Buddhism in a public meeting with a mass of his followers. He died two months later on December 6, having fulfilled the pledge made in 1935 that he would not die a Hindu.

Although many Dalits did convert to Buddhism, most did not. In any case Ambedkar never clarified how conversion would address conditions of material deprivation and oppression by savarnas. Most Dalits remain poor. They work as agricultural laborers, perform menial jobs, and are housed in settlements separated from savarnas. The political theorist Gopal Guru, quoting V.S. Naipaul, suggests that Dalits continue to be treated as “walking carrion.” But Ambedkar did help raise Dalits’ consciousness of their rights. Thanks to Ambedkar, the overt practice of untouchability in public life is frowned upon. The constitutional abolition of untouchability and the provision for reserving positions have changed the political landscape. Democracy has helped members of intermediate and lower castes, including Dalits, climb the ladders of power in government. In many states, particularly in the south, this has resulted in more inclusive governance and welfare. But the Dalits’ share of wealth and access to professional careers remain minimal, and the experience of social indignity and humiliation persists.

Ambedkar’s ambition for achieving democracy as a daily practice of equality remains a distant goal, but these books establish the depth and ambition of his ideas and their global relevance. Theorists of democracy and those worried about its crisis around the world could learn from his idea of it as something that goes beyond procedural norms, as a dedication to the free and equal association of all human beings. His frequent invocation of the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity was not formulaic but purposeful. To realize this ambitious ideal, he wished to mobilize the combined forces of law, politics, the state, and religion as morality. Despite their differences, Ambedkar and Gandhi shared an understanding of the importance of conscience in effecting social change—realizing in practice what is written in law.

But there is little hope of this occurring under Modi, whose Hindu nationalist rhetoric has been amplified in the six-week national elections that end on June 1. Modi’s vitriolic anti-Muslim demagoguery hopes to unite Hindus as a solid voting bloc, but he maintains a deafening silence on Dalit demands for equality. To ensure victory, he imprisons opposition leaders. Political rivals are coerced into joining the BJP following raids on their homes by tax authorities. The BJP ’s election coffers are flush with corporate donations. Television networks and newspapers, controlled by friendly owners, regularly sing Modi’s praises and attack the opposition. Critical journalism has been forced to operate precariously on YouTube, in the face of government censorship and the BJP ’s army of social media bots.

Modi is leaving nothing to chance. The election results, to be announced on June 4, will determine if his government, in power since 2014, will secure a third term. Opposing the BJP is an alliance headed by the Congress Party, which led India to independence and ruled it for nearly sixty-five years. In its election manifesto it warns the country that the BJP is a danger to democracy and promises that it will undertake a caste census to determine the magnitude of economic and social inequality and introduce ameliorative policies. It thereby hopes to overcome Modi’s appeal to Hindu unity.

India’s democracy and Ambedkar’s vision of social equality are at stake as Indians vote. Meanwhile Rohith Vermula’s mother continues fighting to hold the authorities legally accountable for his death. 9 The election will have a significant impact on whether she will get a measure of justice for the young man who fought for Dalit rights and wrote poignantly about the “fatal accident” of his birth.

—May 23, 2024

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Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton, where he teaches the history of modern South Asia, colonialism, and postcolonial thought. His latest book is Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point. (June 2024)

See Ratik Asokan, “The Long Struggle of India’s Sanitation Workers,” nybooks.com, August 24, 2023.  ↩

See, for example, Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).  ↩

Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2001).   ↩

Divya Cherian’s Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2022) shows that a caste order that regarded both Dalits and Muslims as “untouchables” was taking shape even prior to British rule in an eighteenth-century regional state.   ↩

See Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (London: C. Hurst, 1996), pp. 32–33, 50–52.  ↩

See, among others, Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Rutgers University Press, 2003); Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013); and Anand Teltumbde, Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva (New Delhi: Navayana, 2018).  ↩

Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India (New Delhi: Vintage, 2020) suggests that Ambedkar was responsible for inserting justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity in the constitution’s preamble.  ↩

On Ambedkar’s involvement in and approach to constitution framing, see my Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 38–74, 377–378.  ↩

Deepa Dhanraj’s We Have Not Come Here to Die (2018) is a riveting documentary on the movement sparked by Rohith Vermula’s suicide and provides a poignant account of his mother’s fight for justice.  ↩

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A charming look at a reader’s many moods

Elisa Gabbert’s essays in “Any Person Is the Only Self” are brimming with pleasure and curiosity about a life with books.

Tell people you read and write for a living, and they picture a ghostly creature, an idea only incidentally appended to a body. What they often fail to understand is that the life of the mind is also a physical life — a life spent lugging irksomely heavy volumes around on the Metro and annotating their margins with a cramping hand. The poet, essayist and New York Times poetry columnist Elisa Gabbert is rare in grasping that reading is, in addition to a mental exercise, a movement performed in a particular place.

“If I remember anything about a book, I also remember where I read it — what room, what chair,” she writes in her charming new essay collection, “ Any Person Is the Only Self .” Writing, too, proves spatial: “I think essays, like buildings, need structure and mood. The first paragraph should function as a foyer or an antechamber, bringing you into the mood.”

The 16 delightfully digressive pieces in this collection are all moods that involve books in one way or another. But they are not just about the content of books, although they are about that, too: They are primarily about the acts of reading and writing, which are as much social and corporeal as cerebral.

In the first essay — the foyer — Gabbert writes about the shelf of newly returned books at her local library. “The books on that shelf weren’t being marketed to me,” she writes. “They weren’t omnipresent in my social media feeds. They were very often old and very often ugly. I came to think of that shelf as an escape from hype.” The haphazard selections on the shelf were also evidence of other people — the sort of invisible but palpable community of readers that she came to miss so sharply during the pandemic.

In another essay, she learns of a previously unpublished story by one of her favorite authors, Sylvia Plath, who makes frequent appearances throughout this book. Fearing that the story will disappoint her, Gabbert puts off reading it. As she waits, she grows “apprehensive, even frightened.”

There are writers who attempt to excise themselves from their writing, to foster an illusion of objectivity; thankfully, Gabbert is not one of them. On the contrary, her writing is full of intimacies, and her book is a work of embodied and experiential criticism, a record of its author’s shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life. In one piece, she rereads and reappraises books she first read as a teenager; in another, she and her friends form a “Stupid Classics Book Club,” to tackle “all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never had.”

Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic, and accordingly, her writing is not didactic; her essays revolve around images and recollections rather than arguments. In place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet’s perfected phrases and startling observations. “Parties are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically,” she writes in an essay about fictional depictions of parties. She describes the photos in a book by Rachael Ray documenting home-cooked meals — one of the volumes on the recently returned shelf — as “poignantly mediocre.” Remarking on a listicle of “Books to Read by Living Women (Instead of These 10 by Dead Men),” Gabbert wonders, “Since when is it poor form to die?”

“Any Person Is the Only Self” is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop. An academic text on architecture, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a rare memory disorder whose victims recall every aspect of their autobiographies in excruciatingly minute detail, “Madame Bovary,” YouTube videos about people who work as professional cuddlers, a psychological study about whether it is possible to be sane in an insane asylum — all these feature in Gabbert’s exuberant essays. She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity.

Perhaps because she is so indefatigably interested, she gravitates toward writers who see literature as a means of doubling life, allowing it to hold twice as much. Plath confessed in her journals that she wrote in an attempt to extend her biography beyond its biological terminus: “My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.” The very act of keeping a diary, then, splits the self in two.

Plath once insisted that bad things could never happen to her and her peers because “we’re different.” Gabbert asks “Different why?” and concludes that everyone is different: “We are we , not them. Any person is the only self.” But that “only” is, perhaps counterintuitively, not constrained or constricted. Walt Whitman famously wrote that his only self comprised “multitudes,” and Gabbert echoes him when she reflects, “If there is no one self, you can never be yourself, only one of your selves.” And indeed, she is loath to elevate any of her many selves over any of the others. When she rereads a book that she loved in her adolescence, she thinks she was right to love it back then. “That self only knew what she knew,” she writes. “That self wasn’t wrong .” Both her past self and her present self have an equal claim to being Elisa Gabbert, who is too fascinated by the world’s manifold riches to confine herself to a single, limited life.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”

Any Person Is the Only Self

By Elisa Gabbert

FSG Originals. 230 pp. $18, paperback.

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