Archive for May, 2011

Arab Spring’s Lessons for Afghanistan (orig. pub. NY Post, 5/19/2011)

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/arab_spring_lessons_for_stan_qoVXqFqaBzhdTYCLzhw4ZN

Posted: 11:26 PM, May 18, 2011

KABUL

President Obama will speak today on new US policy toward the Muslim world in the wake of the Arab Spring. Let’s hope our nation’s Afghan strategists also note the big lesson of the Arab revolts — namely, that centralizing and concentrating power in undeveloped states increases their volatility, not their stability.

For decades, the United States opted against seeking to nurture robust civil societies and political dialogue in the Middle East — and we took the same approach in Afghanistan after 2001. Instead, we simply tried to identify and ally with “the right men.” But a key lesson of the Arab Spring is that massive, unmonitored aid to governments with undeveloped tribal cultures and no rule of law will produce — at best — horrendous corruption and public rage.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has become a monster — but we helped make him that. Many Afghan provincial governors are versions in miniature.

Small wonder that even an alternative that promises so little — the Taliban — appeals to many Afghan Pashtuns. In 2010, Afghan insurgents planted 14,661 IEDs, a 62 percent rise over 2009′s 7,228, which in turn was up 120 percent over 2008′s figure.

This suggests that the insurgency enjoys passive support: If you know your neighbors will report you or hate you for planting IEDs, you don’t do it, especially in a group society like this one. But the corrupt Afghan state — a product in good part of vast US aid — has left many ordinary Afghans at least willing to tolerate neighbors who support the insurgency.

We simply turned on the aid spigots in Kabul and looked the other way — as our taxpayers’ money nurtured a government culture of waste and dependency.

In the capital of Helmand province a few days ago, I saw a handful of men in the government “media center” who have little to do besides spend time on Facebook. (At least the Brits are paying for this, not us.) The governor’s chief of staff supervises 23 people, including two who just schedule meetings. Meanwhile, we’ve been paying Afghans to clean out their own irrigation canals — something they did unpaid for hundreds of years.

It’s tempting to blame Pakistan for the Afghan insurgency. And Pakistan’s support and safe haven for the insurgents is a big problem — but it’s not why the insurgents are fighting.

The war is being fought in the insular Pashtun belt, areas not used to strangers — much less strangers who search their houses and cars. Yet the troops and cops of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police are mainly northern and Dari-speaking — and so seen as irritating outsiders almost as much as we are.

In Zabul province, I found that 80 percent of the ANP didn’t even speak the local language, Pashtu — not great for community relations.

Under these circumstances, the bigger we make the ANA and ANP — and we’re spending $12 billion a year on them — the more insurgents enter the field to fight them.

So the current plan to grow the ANA and ANP to around a quarter million each is unwise. Those figures are larger than the army and gendarmarie of France, which is three times the size of Afghanistan (and self-financing, as Afghanistan is not). Armed strangers in such numbers will produce little besides more attacks.

It’s also true that the more American troops we send to Afghanistan, the more insurgents show up to fight them. If we cut our troop numbers, as President Obama has planned, we will see levels of violence fall. Let the Afghan Army step up to the plate. If they won’t fight for their country by now, they’re not going to fight in 2014, 2015, 2020, or 2050.

Finally, it’s way past time for Karzai to go. Replace him with a council or shura chosen by the current, elected Parliament who will guide the country.

An imperfect group of not very powerful Afghans with not very much money will do a much better job than one all-powerful, imperfect Afghan backed by unlimited American money.

The bigger we make the stakes — the centralized state with access to foreign money — the more corrupt Afghanistan will become. And the more corrupt Afghanistan’s government, the more passive and active support the insurgency will gather in the Pashtun belt.

What I Saw at the Revolution: With a Libyan Conservative in Free Benghazi

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

https://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-i-saw-revolution_561026.html

The Weekly Standard
May 23, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 34

Benghazi

“How are they going to get all these guns off the street?”

Mohamed El Senussi, a grand-nephew of Libya’s first and only king, may be the only Burkean conservative in Benghazi’s newly dubbed “Freedom Square.”

It’s April 8, our first day in Benghazi, and we’re walking around Free Libya’s ground zero, the square in front of the seaside courthouse, slightly dazed by the endless options before us. We catch a women’s demonstration, receive cappuccinos from an impromptu food stand that provides free sandwiches and drinks, pick up leaflets from booths representing a variety of newborn magazines (Libya may be the only country in the world where publishing is a growth industry), and shop at pushcarts cashing in on the local passion for the red, green, and black of the flag of Libyan independence on articles ranging from the expected buttons, baseball caps, and T-shirts to espresso cups, which make sense once you realize the average Libyan consumes 10 to 15 cups a day.

And, yes, maybe one in a hundred men is carrying an assault rifle. When Qaddafi’s forces abandoned Ben-ghazi after the massive demonstrations of February 17 and 18, they left a weapons stockpile open. They also freed the common criminals from the jail. Supposedly Qaddafi hoped citizens would use the weapons to kill each other. Under Qaddafi, of course, only the regime had guns. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

So far, social solidarity has triumphed. Ahmed Gebreel, the foreign policy adviser to Mustafa Abdul Jalil, one of the two chiefs of the Transitional National Council ruling Free Libya, tells me that ordinary crime is down. Essan Gheriani, a U.S.-educated psychologist in the revolution’s inner circle, says that once the fighting ends, people may be allowed to keep one weapon each, as long as it’s registered.

During our 16-day trip, El Senussi is just about the only one here, including foreign diplomats, who doesn’t give in to the euphoria that grips much of the population of eastern Libya. I drink the Kool-Aid. The atmosphere in Benghazi is electric, and I’ve never met so many people eager to take responsibility for their own lives and do something for their fellow citizens. Senator John McCain will say at a Benghazi press conference on April 22 that his 24 hours here has been “one of the most exciting and inspiring days of my life,” and I believe him. (I met the senator briefly through the thoughtfulness of his national security adviser, sometime Standard contributor Christian Brose.) But El Senussi is cautious, skeptical, worried about what comes next.

He hates Qaddafi—his family were the biggest losers from the 1969 coup in which Qaddafi and other junior military officers seized power from King Idris—but he is not a man of sudden enthusiasms.

A genial, cultivated, 55-year-old Cairene who wears elegant Western suits and sportswear, El Senussi was born in Benghazi and attended kindergarten here, but his father died when he was two, and his mother took him to Cairo. Over the decades of Qaddafi’s seemingly impregnable rule, El Senussi refused to take out Egyptian citizenship. He clings proudly to a weatherbeaten Egyptian travel document that states his nationality as Libyan.

Yet El Senussi was never involved with the ineffectual Libyan opposition parties that tried to overthrow Qaddafi from outside the country.

“My great-uncle, King Idris, said to me, ‘We Senussis should only live in Libya if the people want us there. Otherwise we should live in Saudi Arabia.’ ” And indeed, next to no resistance was put up even by King Idris’s circle when Qaddafi deposed him. But throughout a career devoted mainly to managing substantial family properties in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, El Senussi has watched Libyan politics with an eagle eye.

On a two-day road trip from Cairo, El Senussi and I talk about the Transitional National Council, the 31-member, self-appointed group of lawyers, former cabinet ministers, and military men who are governing Free Libya. The council originated in a group of Benghazi lawyers who were trying to unionize this winter. When one of their number, Fathi Terbel, was jailed by the Qaddafi government, they planned the tamest of responses, a standing protest on February 17 in front of the courthouse. Qaddafi’s forces responded immediately with lethal violence. By the end of the 18th, youthful protesters had turned the objective of the demonstrations to regime change. And Qaddafi’s forces fled—leaving the lawyers, much to their surprise, in control.

Time and again, when I interview Libyans about the situation, they return to the events of the revolution, recounting them as if they can’t quite believe what happened. Salwa Bugaighis, one of a few women on the council, told me, “On the 18th and 19th, people were just watching us demonstrate, though they came closer and closer. On the 21st, the army went over to our side.” She explained that now that the council is in touch with the United States, they are being asked for an almost daily schedule of what they will do post-regime change. The United States wants to avoid chaos. And the council wants to move toward a real government.

“We know it is not democracy. Nobody on this council will be in the next government,” she promised. Bugaighis explained that part of the reason for the power vacuum is that there were no political parties in Qaddafi’s Libya. Libya has barely any experience with multiparty politics—just one parliamentary election, in 1952. After the country gained its independence from Italy in 1951, it promptly got rid of parties on the ground that they would be de-stabilizing. After January 1952, the government nominated all candidates for the lower house of parliament.

Right now some members of the council are not publicly named, either because they are living in areas still controlled by Qaddafi or because their families are. But they have organized a Crisis Management Team, headed by Mahmoud Jibril, which will be the executive branch of this fledgling government, while Mustafa Abdul Jalil will be the equivalent of the head of parliament. Or something like that.

“Most of them have no experience with the outside world,” El Senussi says. “Sometimes their words touch your heart. Other times they make mistakes. It is not their fault.”

El Senussi worries about the writing of a constitution, to make sure that the newborn “Revolution of the 17th of February,” as it is known here, isn’t hijacked by a new strongman or by Islamists. A committee of the council is working on a constitution, but behind closed doors; El Senussi would like to see more transparency, both in this process and in general. Amina Megheirbi, a professor of English at Garyounis University, struck a common theme among the revolutionary activists I met, saying the Transitional National Council “is an emergency situation, not an ideal situation. Everybody wants to do it the right way.”

El Senussi wants to meet with the council to urge them to use Libya’s 1951 independence constitution—a United Nations-aided document—as the basis for a new constitution, minus the monarchy. Since “Libya is a creation of the U.N.,” he says, the council will have more chance of gaining international recognition and support if it works from a U.N.-approved document. Currently, only France, Italy, Qatar, Kuwait, Gambia, and the Maldives have recognized the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government of Libya, though John McCain has urged the United States to follow suit.

One of El Senussi’s cousins, Ahmed Zubair El Senussi, 77, is a council member representing the interests of political prisoners, of whom he was one for 31 years. But on the whole the Senussi family—which even today owns large amounts of land in Egypt, a charitable trust in Saudi Arabia, and had property returned to them in Benghazi a few years ago—has been sidelined in the dialogue on Libya’s future.

I first encountered El Senussi through his March 17 op-ed in the Washington Times, “The Libyan Tea Party.” He wrote of the inspiring bravery of the revolutionaries:

I’ve met young people in their teens and twenties who left behind comfortable lives in London and Manchester, England, to go to North Africa and fight for the liberation of our country. These young heroes are motivated by and have grown up accustomed to Western notions of freedom, equality and opportunity and want to be part of the movement that brings those universal values to Libya.

I wrote him at the email address listed about my plan to visit Libya, and El Senussi offered to take me with him on his next trip.

Speaking on the phone while I was in New York, El Senussi quickly volunteered that he does not want to revive Libya’s monarchy, which lasted only 18 years, from 1951 to 1969. (A London-based cousin, by contrast, also named Mohammed, is seeking to revive the monarchy and pretends to the title “crown prince.”) While the El Senussis have been prominent in Libya for 300 years, the roots of the monarchy are shallow. Idris was emir of Cyrenaica, or Eastern Libya, but fled to Cairo in 1922 when threatened by the Italian occupiers. He spent nearly 30 years in exile in Egypt prior to taking the throne at the age of 62. Idris is widely viewed as a pious, well-intentioned, but ineffective ruler who allowed his entourage to despoil Libya’s new oil wealth. (Some of the despoilers were El Senussi’s El Shalhi uncles on his mother’s side, he acknowledges. The El Shalhis are a prominent Berber clan originally from Algeria.)

El Senussi laments that his great-uncle’s role in the resistance to the Italian occupation has been slighted. “King Idris appointed Omar Mukhtar leader of the Senussi movement when he left for Egypt. He provided him with funding and arms from Egypt.” Mukhtar, a tribal sheikh who was captured by the Italians and executed in 1931, has been a national hero ever since, and the February 17 revolution has made a totem of his likeness. “What hurts me,” El Senussi comments, “is that there are no photographs of my great-uncle.”

But leaving aside his family, El Senussi hopes that his connections in the highest reaches of Egyptian society can be of use to the Transitional National Council. It was the Sadat family who invited the Senussis to live in Egypt after Qaddafi’s coup, and El Senussi is friends with Gamal Sadat, a former schoolmate, now the head of Etisalat, a mobile phone provider in Egypt. Egypt has not yet recognized the council, nor has it frozen Qaddafi’s assets. A large but uncertain number of Egyptians, many illegal, work in Libya, and in the areas under Qaddafi’s control, like Tripoli, they are de facto hostages.

Predictably, El Senussi is concerned about postrevolutionary Egypt, too. “I know that Egypt will not be a democracy. The population will be a hundred million in 10 or 15 years. What happened with Iraq and Kuwait can happen here.” And El Senussi worries not only about a possible land grab by Egypt but also about Libya’s borders with Sudan, Chad, Niger, Algeria, and Tunisia. None of these six neighbors, he points out, “is a democracy. All hold extremists. They are not going to sit still. They are going to try to destabilize us.”

El Senussi adds, “When Qaddafi falls, Libya needs both the U.N. and the United States to replay the role they played back in 1949 and in 1951, and Libyans should feel no shame in asking benevolent powers to please help us help ourselves.”

For the moment, we soak up the atmosphere of Freedom Square. I buy a handmade tricolor wristband for 70 cents. Mohamed is not the wristband type. But both of us are trying to decode what we’re seeing. Many of the women demonstrators are wearing the niqab (full-face veil) that marks them as fundamentalists, even though taking part in a march is a radical act for a woman in this traditional society. Are the funds from the sale of the tricolor buttons and hats going to the salesmen or the cause? Who is paying for our free coffee?

Revolutionary Benghazi is not, for the moment, very concerned about money. Hundreds of people are milling around; Garyounis University, Libya’s oldest and largest, closed on February 17, and few government workers are going to their offices. Their salaries are being advanced to them by the Transitional National Council even though the funds aren’t coming from Tripoli—but workers can withdraw only 200 dinars (about $140) a month. Since most Libyans work for the government, that’s a big blow to the local economy. Almost no shops or restaurants are open when we arrive, perhaps because few people have the money to patronize them, perhaps out of fear, though more opened every day of our stay. There are plenty of small groceries—many have cut prices to cost in the spirit of solidarity that has gripped the city—and on every block, shabby cafés offer the espresso that, along with cigarettes, fuels Benghazi’s population.

The schools are closed too; many teachers are on the endless committees that provide social services for displaced families, publish newspapers, make videos, or organize demonstrations. One women’s activist, Fairouz Naas, tells me that no one wants the schools to open until Qaddafi is gone. To resume normal life while Qaddafi is shelling civilians in Misurata and the Western Mountains and terrorizing Tripolitanians would be a betrayal of their fellow Libyans.

Normal life is indeed only slowly returning to Ben-ghazi. Qaddafi’s troops penetrated Benghazi on March 19 and 20, killing and wounding hundreds. Some people fled, but those who have returned from overseas or from Tripoli want to help to rebuild their society. Naas, a strikingly attractive forty-something mother of two, was an accounting professor in Tripoli until she and her family came here on February 20. Now she organizes demonstrations—and leads the women marchers, too.

Another activist, Iman Bugaighis, a professor of dentistry and the sister of Salwa, tells me that the Libyan people need to work on themselves. “We don’t know how to be democratic on the individual level. We will have a dictator if we don’t develop this.” Dr. Bugaighis is one of a handful of women, mainly from her prominent family, who were present at the demonstrations from the start.

While women received equal pay for equal work and entered the professions under Qaddafi’s bizarre brand of state socialism, they are by no means socially equal. In the small city of Tobruk, where we stopped on our drive from Egypt, the situation reminded me of Afghanistan, with next to no women on the street.

Nor is the town much more prosperous than an Afghan city. Indeed, in 1951, when Libya was granted its independence by the United Nations, the two countries were not so different.

Back then, Libya had barely a million citizens and combined “within the borders of one country virtually all the obstacles to development that can be found anywhere: geographic, economic, political, sociological, technological,” according to the economist appointed by the U.N. to plan Libya’s future, Benjamin Higgins. The country had a very high birth rate and an infant mortality rate of 50 percent in the first year of life. Ninety percent of Libyans were illiterate, and a per capita annual income of $25-$35 made Libya one of the world’s poorest countries.

Now, Benghazi, though it has obviously suffered from the neglect of a dictator who knew he was disliked here, is recognizably part of the modern world. Libya had an estimated per capita GDP of $13,800 in 2010, according to the CIA World Factbook, about $13,000 higher than Afghanistan’s. The Qaddafi regime is known for its neglect of statistics, and the number may be higher—especially counting the billions Qaddafi and his cronies stole.

Economically, eastern Libya is a mixed bag. The agricultural areas inland seem to be farmed using modern methods, the roads are good, and there are modern buildings everywhere. Yet the disrepair in the cities is shocking. There is a sense that civil society exists: There is a café life. People read for pleasure. They own laptops and check their email. Women drivers are legion (in part because public transport barely exists). Unlike in Afghanistan, I never have the sense that I’m doing anthropology fieldwork. That said, Kabul’s business life is far more vital than Benghazi’s—even if all the shuttered storefronts were open. The goods on offer in the clothing stores are no better than those found in Kabul, and the prices, oddly, are lower. It’s obvious that Qaddafi’s anticapitalist policies blighted his nation.

Today’s Benghazi is new to El Senussi, too. In early March he made his first trip to Libya since childhood. For three days, he visited old friends and relatives in Tobruk and Al Baydah, smaller cities between here and the Egyptian border. There, in its ancestral heartland, the Senussi family is still a big deal.

The Grand Senussi, Muhammad Ali Al Senussi (1787-1859)—a sayeed, or descendant of Muhammad—was originally from Algeria. He founded, and his son Mahdi expanded, a purist Sufi order that spanned North Africa. It began with a lodge in Al Baydah in 1842, and by 1911 there were over 100 lodges in Cyrenaica and the Sahara. Later they reached India and Saudi Arabia.

Now the lodges are gone, but the Senussis are still revered by the ikhwan or brothers of the Senussi Order—the descendants of the original followers—and the ikhwan “are very dear to us,” in my companion’s words. Idris was a grandchild of the Grand Senussi. Idris’s sister Fatima was El Senussi’s paternal grandmother. In Tobruk and Al Baydah, when El Senussi introduces himself, people show him deference. But in Benghazi, where a good percentage of the population comes from other parts of Libya, the Senussis are regarded with less awe.

Still, El Senussi displays a paternalistic concern for the young men wounded in the fighting, most of whom are from humble backgrounds very different from the demonstrators and videomakers and council lawyers. In Cairo, El Senussi took me to visit a recovering fighter who had traveled some 600 miles from the remote southeastern oasis town of Al Kufra to join the rebel army. He had severe burns on his hands and had lost two toes. A Libyan businessman was paying for the treatment of this young man and 14 others. El Senussi noted that until two months ago, this benefactor was a Qaddafi supporter who made millions through his connections.

“The council has to take care of our boys. This is a rich country. We can pay for it. We have to provide treatment for all of these guys.”

El Senussi’s concerns were seconded by a neurosurgeon I spoke with at Benghazi Medical Center, Talahma Imad. Part of a foreign team brought in to run this new hospital—he’s a Palestinian educated in Milan—he says flatly that Qaddafi “didn’t want highly qualified Libyans.” Hajer al Jahmi, 27, a third-year resident at Benghazi Medical Center, says that medical education was “completely corrupted” by the regime, with connections and politics trumping academic results. She cannot depend on Libyan-trained nurses even to do blood work.

Only eight war-wounded patients remain in intensive care at Benghazi Medical Center. Many have been discharged to outpatient care, while others were taken to Egypt, Qatar, or Turkey for treatment. Those in Qatar will have been very well cared for, according to Dr. Imad, but care can be spotty in Egypt or Turkey. He says he is in touch with the “highly competent” minister of health on the Transitional National Council, Dr. Bereket, about organizing a system for managing and eventually paying for the fighters’ and civilian victims’ care.

With his caution about human nature and his insistence on looking at the worst case rather than the best, El Senussi strikes me as someone who would be at home in America’s conservative conclaves. But it still stunned me when he volunteered, “I’ve been following George W. Bush since he was governor of Texas. That’s a strong man, I thought, and when he became president I told the Libyan opposition, Get on that train.”

Yet El Senussi is critical of the United States’ handling of the Lockerbie bombing tragedy. As we join a crowd watching Al Jazeera’s coverage of Qaddafi’s forces firing cluster bombs on the civilian population of Misurata, he comments, “If justice had been served at the time of the Lockerbie bombing, Qaddafi wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing today. Look at the deal they made with Al Megrahi. He was a fall guy.”

El Senussi is referring to the April 1999 agreement between Libya and the United States by which Libya turned over two suspects for trial in a neutral country. Only Al Megrahi was convicted.

“The message that the United States was sending is, If you have a lot of money you can blow up a civilian aircraft and get away with it. Qaddafi should have been put in criminal court for that. There should be a new investigation of the Pan Am bombing—Moussa Koussa [former Libyan foreign minister, now in exile] knows all about it. He was on a red list by the French for the UTA [airline] bombing.”

Over the course of my trip, it becomes clear just how little we in the West have known of Qaddafi’s destructiveness towards his own people. Essam Gheriani, who is married to council member Salwa Bugaighis, got a degree from Indiana University in psychology and returned to Benghazi in 1986 to help his widowed mother. He found an economy ruined by Qaddafi’s crackbrained theories. People who once had been upper-middle class would try to bring back a few bananas or tubes of toothpaste when they were lucky enough to go abroad. Some months after his return, he was watching TV one night when the regular program was preempted by a public hanging.

Amina Megheirbi, the professor of English, recalls seeing two students she knew from her undergraduate days at Garyounis hanged in public on April 7, 1977, the year after she graduated. A cousin of hers was sentenced to life in prison and amnestied in 1980. In the ’80s, she said, Qaddafi’s revolutionary committees took charge of the universities, with the power to fire professors. “They might do anything.”

The stakes will be high in Libya even after Qaddafi goes. “We have a mountain to climb,” says El Senussi. But I am betting on the optimists, like Professor Megheirbi. She points to the egalitarianism of Libyan culture. “Our society differs from other societies. Rich and poor, we live together, we love the same activities, we have friends from different classes. I lived in the Emirates and was surprised at how they behave with people of high status. We don’t have VIPs in Libya.”

The democracy activists I spoke with were hopeful not just for Libya, but for the whole Arab world. Dr. Bugaighis spoke for many when she said, “Now something has changed in us from inside. I don’t think there will be any more dictators in the Arab world.”

Bohemian Rhapsody (orig. published in The Weekly Standard, 4/18/2011)

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

Bohemian Rhapsody
A backward look at the Manhattan hipster life.
Ann Marlowe
April 18, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 30

Art and Madness
A Memoir of Lust Without Reason
by Anne Roiphe
Nan A. Talese, 240 pp., $24.95

Seventy-five-year-old Anne Roiphe’s short, incandescent fourth memoir doesn’t read like an older writer’s book, but it explores obsessively an archaic constellation of ideas: that there’s something special about artists and writers that excuses their moral lapses, especially in the arenas of alcoholism and adultery.

“I believed that I was going to be a muse to a man of great talent,” she intones, and she might as well be saying she dreamt of being a lady in waiting at the court of Louis XIV, it is so remote to the present day. “Alcohol was the lubricant of genius .  .  . the men needed to drink.” In sentences that alternate between Hemingwayesque brusqueness and Woolfian rhapsodies, Roiphe offers short set pieces anchored mainly in New York and the Hamptons from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. At the time, the United States still had a nearly official culture, with a hierarchy of writers (almost all white and male) whose relative rank order everyone knew. In Roiphe’s account, they partied furiously, often at the Sutton Place apartment of the Paris Review cofounder George Plimpton.

Maybe the nonstop drinking and adultery she participated in was possible because writing was a reasonably paid enterprise, or because many of the Paris Review crowd—Peter Matthiessen, Doc Humes, Plimpton himself—were trustafarians. Some were also highly productive; Roiphe has bested most by publishing three earlier memoirs as well as nine novels and six works of nonfiction, while raising three daughters.

I caught the end of the Paris Review parties in George Plimpton’s place in the late nineties. Coming from the indie rock scene, as I did, the substance abuse and sexual charge seemed mild. So did the intellectual stimulation and literacy level. But Roiphe has a skilled eye in evoking what were obviously the times of her young life, and whether or not it was any more exciting than literary life today, she makes it seem that way.

Art and Madness—a terrible title, at once pretentious and sententious—is also, more sadly, the story of Roiphe’s doomed starter marriage (1958-63) to a delusional alcoholic, Jack Richardson. Roiphe met Richardson at a Brearley dance at 15, re-met him at the West End Bar at 21 (she says she was 19 in the text, but it’s a mistake), and married him at 22. The second time they saw each other, Richardson asked her to buy a drink for him. While they were living together in Paris, he went out alone most nights, drinking and picking up hookers while she typed his manuscripts. And then, finally, he asked her to marry him. The reader can guess which way this is going, but Roiphe couldn’t:

My father gives Jack a few hundred dollars for a honeymoon. .  .  . But after lunch .  .  . Jack says he needs the money for a few nights on the town by himself. He needs to drink. I understand. He goes off alone on our honeymoon and I wait at the apartment. He comes back four days later.

Roiphe worked as a typist in the day to support Jack writing his first play, then typed it in the evening while he went out drinking. Roiphe, whose second husband was a psychoanalyst, is aware enough to say of her choices, “It has a name in the psychiatric manuals: masochism.” But she insists that was not all: “A passion that even as I know better, even as I now regret it, was not without its own grandeur.” We have only Roiphe’s word to take for Richardson being a brilliant writer, since no one today has heard of him. Roiphe doesn’t mention the irony, but the best way to turn up the right Jack Richardson on a search engine today is to couple his name with hers. And this is a man who vowed that, if he were not as famous as Keats by Keats’s age at death (25), he would kill himself.

Speaking of which, there is no bohemian poverty in this tale. Roiphe and Richardson were living on Park Avenue when she was 27, in an apartment bought by her rich mother. When Richardson needed more money for drinking than Roiphe’s meager salary as a receptionist allowed, he pawned her jewelry or she borrowed from her mother. The folie à deux that constituted this marriage might have ended even sooner without Roiphe’s family money, which she wrote about in her second memoir, the excellent 1185 Park Avenue. Roiphe is unflinching about her limitations: “I want a better world. I just want someone else to create it. .  .  . I had the morals of a four year old. .  .  . The man was a snake charmer and I was a snake.” She rationalized her many affairs with married men in the desperate interval between Richardson’s departure and her second marriage. Because her husband was compulsively unfaithful, she was freed not only from her marriage vows but from her obligation to respect others’ vows:

If other women had my husband, I too could do as I pleased. .  .  . In other words I was unmoored, uncertain and violated the only religious precept I really believed: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

She attributes her bad behavior to not knowing “whether it was better to snatch what sex one could from passersby or to remain faithful to a love and miss the party.” She never attributes it to the sense of artistic entitlement that the male writers she knew used to excuse their lapses—though she believed in this justification, too.

Roiphe found happiness with husband number two, Dr. Herman Roiphe, a much steadier model, who was 43 to her 31 when they wed and stayed married to her until he died 38 years later. (She wrote a memoir about that, too.) In the end, though, what haunts this book are not the wild parties and furtive adulteries but the unconsoled screams of the very young Emily Carter, Roiphe’s daughter by Richardson, wailing as her beautiful mother walks out the door, often on a foolish mission: “How hard it must be to be this child, whose mother is about to put her, still in her pajamas, in the car and race to the bus stop for a last goodbye.” Roiphe was going to say farewell to a visiting lover, the late Doc Humes, possibly as alcoholic and mentally ill as Richardson, and today nearly as obscure.

Roiphe’s first daughter is referred to only as “the baby” or “the child.” At the end, Roiphe mentions Carter’s struggles with drugs, her HIV-positive status, and her having become a writer, but still without naming her. Of course, Carter, a fixture of the East Village literary scene, may have requested this anonymity. (The other daughters are Katie, who wrote this book’s forward, and Becky, both from their mother’s second marriage.) And maybe the best commentary on the harrowing marriage that produced her comes from a 1998 interview with Carter. She is reflecting on her years as a stripper, but her words apply to the repetitions of her parents’ union, and her father’s alcoholism, as well:

If I were ruler of this, our darkly gleaming universe .  .  . I’d make it a felony to change any human interaction into something reeking of power and degradation. I’d make it illegal to turn your life into an endless behavioral reply, like a skipping record, of something that happened to you as a child.