Today's Wisdom - IKEA, Einstein and a Mad King

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. As George Orwell once put it, "good prose is like a window pane" — today we look through three of them. Today's wisdom explores:

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Henry Miller finished Tropic of Cancer in Paris in 1934 after several years of living in the city in conditions that could generously be described as voluntary poverty, sleeping on friends' floors, eating when people took him in, and writing with an urgency that suggested a man who had decided he had nothing left to lose. The book he produced bore almost no resemblance to anything being published in English at the time. It had no conventional plot, no redemptive arc, and no interest whatsoever in the moral frameworks that governed what respectable literature was permitted to depict. It was instead a raw, funny, frequently obscene account of Miller's life among expatriate artists, sex workers, and petty criminals in Depression-era Paris, written in a voice so nakedly personal that the distinction between author and narrator barely existed. Anaïs Nin, who was Miller's lover at the time and who lent him the money to publish it, wrote in her diary that reading the manuscript felt like watching someone commit an act of literary violence against every convention she had been taught to respect. The French publisher Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press agreed to publish it, partly out of genuine admiration and partly because books too scandalous for the English-speaking world had become something of a commercial specialty for him. It sold steadily in Paris for years, purchased largely by American tourists who tucked copies into their luggage and smuggled them home, where the book was entirely illegal.

The United States Customs Service seized Tropic of Cancer at the border for twenty-seven years. Britain and Australia maintained their own bans with similar determination, and the book occupied an unusual cultural position throughout the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as a work that serious literary figures including George Orwell, who called it the most important book published in the twentieth century up to that point, and Edmund Wilson considered genuinely significant, while the legal systems of three English-speaking countries treated it as straightforward pornography with no redeeming value. The situation changed in 1959 when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roth v. United States that obscenity was not protected speech but established a test requiring that a work be evaluated as a whole rather than by its most explicit passages, and that it be found to lack any serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value before it could be banned. Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, who had already published D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover using the new legal framework, decided that Tropic of Cancer met the standard for protection and published it in America in 1961, pricing it deliberately low at ninety-five cents to ensure it reached the widest possible audience rather than remaining a luxury item for the cultural elite.

What followed was a legal battle of a scale that even Rosset had not fully anticipated. More than sixty simultaneous obscenity prosecutions were launched across twenty-one states, with local prosecutors competing to demonstrate their communities' standards were more stringent than the federal courts were requiring them to be. Booksellers were arrested, copies were seized from shops, and Grove Press found itself financing legal defenses in dozens of jurisdictions simultaneously while the book sold in enormous quantities, the prosecutions functioning as advertisement in a way the publishers had perhaps calculated on. The cases worked their way through the courts until 1964, when the Supreme Court ruled in Grove Press v. Gerstein that Tropic of Cancer was constitutionally protected, a decision that effectively established that literary merit could shield a work from obscenity prosecution regardless of its explicit content. The ruling permanently altered the landscape of American publishing, clearing the legal path for works including William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and eventually for the frank sexual content that became standard in literary fiction through the following decades. Miller himself, who had been living in California in comfortable semi-obscurity while the trials unfolded, expressed satisfaction at the outcome but noted with characteristic detachment that the America his book had finally been allowed to enter was, in most ways that mattered to him, considerably less interesting than the Paris he had written about thirty years earlier.

[Add image here — suggested: Henry Miller in Paris, 1930s]

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In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered.

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New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century was unlike any other city in America, and possibly unlike any other city in the world. It was a place where French and Spanish colonial architecture sat alongside African rhythms and Caribbean religious practice, where the Catholic tradition of accepting public celebration had produced a street culture of parades, brass bands, and communal gathering that the Protestant cities further north had never developed in quite the same way. The city's peculiar history had also created a social class found almost nowhere else in the American South, the free people of color, a community of mixed African and European heritage who had enjoyed legal freedoms under French and Spanish colonial rule and maintained their own cultural institutions, schools, and musical traditions well into the American period. It was in the collision between these communities, in the dance halls and brothels of a neighborhood called Storyville, in the African-American church, in the street parades behind brass bands, and in the open-air gatherings at a place called Congo Square where enslaved Africans had been permitted to maintain their musical and cultural practices, that jazz assembled itself from pieces no single community owned entirely.

The music that emerged from New Orleans in the first decade of the twentieth century was not invented by any single person, though the mythology that grew around it later tried hard to find one. It was a synthesis, built from the blues that had developed across the Mississippi Delta, the ragtime piano music that Scott Joplin had formalized in the 1890s, the European harmonic structures and brass band traditions that had filtered through the city's creole community, and the call-and-response patterns of African musical tradition that had survived the Middle Passage and continued evolving through generations of American slavery. The earliest jazz musicians, figures including Buddy Bolden, whose band was playing a recognizable form of the music as early as 1897, Jelly Roll Morton, who later claimed to have invented jazz entirely on his own, and the cornetist King Oliver, were improvising within a musical conversation that had been building for decades. What jazz added to that conversation was the principle of improvisation as a central structural feature rather than an occasional ornament, the idea that a musician's individual voice in real time was as important as the composed melody it was departing from and returning to.

The story of jazz leaving New Orleans is inseparable from one of the most significant demographic events in twentieth century American history. When Storyville was shut down by the United States Navy Department in 1917, concerned about the effect of the district on sailors from a nearby naval base, the musicians who had made their living in its dance halls and clubs found themselves without a primary employer. They moved, following the broader Great Migration of African Americans northward, carrying their music to Chicago, Kansas City, and New York. Louis Armstrong, who had grown up absorbing everything the New Orleans scene had to offer, arrived in Chicago in 1922 at the invitation of King Oliver and within a few years had transformed jazz from a collective, ensemble-driven music into something that could carry a soloist's individual personality as its primary expressive vehicle. His recordings from the late 1920s with his Hot Five and Hot Seven groups are still studied by musicians nearly a century later as among the most complete demonstrations of what jazz improvisation could do at its highest level. The music that had assembled itself in the bars and back streets of a peculiar port city became, over the following decades, America's most original cultural export, the first genuinely American art form, and the foundation on which almost everything in popular music that came after it was built.

[Add image here — suggested: New Orleans jazz street scene or Louis Armstrong]

For most of human history, rubber existed only as a curiosity. Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin had been harvesting the white sap of the Hevea brasiliensis tree for centuries, using it to waterproof clothing and make balls for ceremonial games, but the material had a fundamental problem: it melted in heat and cracked in cold, making it almost useless as an industrial material. That changed in 1839 when an American inventor named Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped a mixture of rubber and sulfur onto a hot stove and discovered that the resulting material was stable, elastic, and resistant to both temperature extremes. The process, called vulcanization, transformed rubber overnight from a botanical curiosity into one of the most strategically important materials on Earth. Within decades it was everywhere, in the gaskets and seals of industrial machinery, in telegraph cable insulation, in waterproof clothing, and then, as the bicycle and automobile arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, in the pneumatic tires that made both machines actually usable. The modern world, as it took shape between 1880 and 1920, was in significant ways held together by rubber, and almost all of it came from a single region of the Brazilian Amazon.

What followed in the Amazon was one of the most brutal economic booms in recorded history. The rubber barons who controlled the trade built personal fortunes of staggering size, constructing opera houses in jungle cities, sending their laundry to Europe to be cleaned, and presiding over a labor system that bore no meaningful distinction from slavery. The city of Manaus, deep in the Brazilian interior and accessible only by river, became improbably one of the wealthiest cities in South America, its Teatro Amazonas opera house completed in 1896 at a cost that would translate to tens of millions of dollars today, its streets among the first in Brazil to have electric trams. The rubber was harvested by a workforce of indigenous Amazonians and indebted migrants from Brazil's drought-stricken northeast, held in place through a system of debt bondage called aviamento that ensured workers could never earn enough to leave. Historians estimate that the indigenous population of the Putumayo region alone fell by around 90 percent during the rubber boom years, through a combination of murder, disease, forced labor, and the systematic destruction of communities that refused to participate. Roger Casement, the British diplomat who investigated and documented the atrocities in 1910, compared what he found to the worst abuses of the Belgian Congo, a comparison that gave some indication of the scale of what was happening in a jungle that most of the world was not paying attention to.

The boom ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the cause was a single act of biological theft. In 1876, an English botanist named Henry Wickham had collected around 70,000 rubber tree seeds from the Brazilian Amazon and smuggled them to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, an act the Brazilians have never entirely forgiven. The seeds were cultivated, the resulting plants shipped to British colonies in Southeast Asia, and by the 1910s the plantation rubber industry of Malaya and Ceylon was producing rubber at a fraction of the cost of wild Amazon extraction, with a consistency and volume that the jungle harvest could never match. Brazilian rubber, which had dominated the global market completely, collapsed within a decade, the opera houses fell silent, and the jungle began slowly reclaiming the extraction paths that had been cut through it. What the rubber boom left behind was a template for what economists call a resource curse, the pattern by which sudden natural wealth flows outward to distant markets and upward to a tiny elite while the people and landscapes that produce it are left damaged in ways that outlast the boom by generations, a pattern the Amazon has had to relearn, with different resources and different actors, several times since.

[Add image here — suggested: Teatro Amazonas opera house, Manaus, Brazil]

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