The Best American Essays 2016 Part 15

In a separate folder I discovered an honorable discharge from the army, evidence of a thing I had never quite believed: that my uncle served in World War II. I had heard his stories of raucous nights in the Officer's Club in London, where he played the piano, but I could never square those stories with my very nonmilitary sense of my uncle. But here it was, dated December 20, 1945, a "testimonial of honest and faithful service to this country." My uncle was twenty-one years old, not even finished growing, since the paper listed his height at five-nine, and I knew that he had six feet in his future. His weight was a scrawny 132 pounds. Under "Battles and Campaigns," the doc.u.ment listed "Northern France FO 105 WD 45," which, for all its gibberish, sounded a far cry from the drunken hijinks of that Officer's Club in London. Under "Wounds Received in Action," thankfully, "none."

But when I discovered an envelope marked "Army Pictures, World War 2," I found a version of my uncle that made more sense to me. The first photo captures a military version of the Island of Misfit Toys, six young men in full dress uniform, my uncle among them, all six radiating an awkwardness-let's put it plainly-a queerness, that I find immediately endearing. Having lived most of my life among boys and men like these, I recognize them immediately. These were not "the guys"; these were, rather, "those guys," men of questionable masculinity who found solace in their collective otherness. Their facial expressions range from pinched to goofy, their height from my uncle's five-nine to something more like the five-two of a man in the first row, who, according to my uncle's writing on the back, went by the nickname "Short Boy." My uncle is the most striking of the pack, his eyes meeting the camera with a quiet confidence. He's beautiful, in his way, and I'm unsettled by my attraction to him. But I'm particularly drawn to a man in the front row, the most misfitted of this misfit group. Bad hair, cheeks with more than a memory of baby fat, an attempt at manly seriousness that doesn't convince. He's adorable, like a teddy bear. His name is included in the caption on the back (I'll call him J.P.), and I wonder what he's thinking, what it feels like for him to be among these men.

Next I find a photo that looks like an outtake from the Gomer Pyle show, my uncle and two other men posed with helmets and rifles. They're holding the rifles at a forty-five-degree angle, and the middle man's helmet is askew. Their uniforms are too large, the pants bunching at the ankles. There's an attempt at masculine bravado, but it fails. These men should not have guns. They're not the gun type. There's another of my uncle with three men on a beach, either France or England. They're in bathing suits, shirtless, huddled together for the camera. My uncle's hand rests lightly on the shoulder of the homely man in front of him. There's a woman in the far background, half clad in a towel. The caption on the back reads, in my uncle's writing, "Beautiful, aren't we? Note the lady undressing behind us." And the thing is, they are beautiful, all pale, gangly limbs, exposed and vulnerable. And again, the thought hits me that these are my people. If I saw any of them on the street, I would look twice. I would risk a knowing glance.

And then I find the photo I'm looking for: my uncle, embracing another man. It's J.P. from the first picture, tucked under my uncle's arm, and he's wrapped my uncle in a teddy bear hug. My uncle's left arm draws J.P. to him, his right hand clasping J.P.'s wrist. There's no way to describe this other than romantic. This isn't the kind of physical contact that straight men love to perform, their heteros.e.xuality a.s.sured and thus unimpeachable. There's no irony here, no self-consciousness. There's only the comfort of the embrace, and a refusal to let go. I turn the picture over, hoping for a caption, but find only my uncle's last name.

The last picture I discover is different. It's of my uncle, shirtless, with another shirtless man in the background. A military tent stands behind them. I'm struck by my uncle's body language, and his facial expression. His head is c.o.c.ked to the side, like a puzzled dog. And there's something in his face that's not visible in the other pictures, something resistant, something unwelcoming. It's as if he wonders why he's being looked at, and wishes he weren't. I feel him looking back at me, wondering why I have him in my lens. And he's asking, What do you want from me? What is it you hope to find? I turn the photo over and find only the word CENSORED and some illegible scrawl.

We often think of the military as a bastion of antigay hostility, but this doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, as Allan Berube doc.u.ments in Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, the war offered gay men and lesbians both a visibility and a community they lacked in civilian life. As Berube writes, "The ma.s.sive mobilization for World War II relaxed social constraints of peacetime that had kept gay men and women unaware of themselves and each other, 'bringing out' many in the process." William Menninger, a psychiatric consultant to the military, called the wartime army "fundamentally a h.o.m.os.e.xual society," where men were thrown into close and intimate contact with one another in a s.p.a.ce almost completely devoid of women. And while the military worked hard, through psychological profiling, to weed out gay enlistees, both the urgency of the need and the crudeness of their instruments led to a ma.s.sive failure to ensure the military's heteros.e.xuality. In fact, something of the opposite happened. An alertness to h.o.m.os.e.xual stereotypes led in many cases not to dismissal but to a sort of segregation, where gay men were channeled into so-called appropriate occupations: the steno pool, clerical jobs, and, to a significant extent, musical and entertainment corps. This gender-inverted typecasting had the effect of creating, where none had existed, gay work cultures and communities. One begins to understand those pictures of my uncle with his posse of the slightly "off" men who had found each other and were relieved to have done so.

These newly formed gay cultures spilled into the cities surrounding army bases, where places like the Pepsi-Cola Servicemen's Canteen dormitory in San Francisco and the Seven Seas Locker Club in San Diego, along with YMCA hotels, became hotbeds of gay cruising and only slightly covert s.e.x. Given such opportunities, civilian life began to look much less attractive. As one GI said, "If I go home . . . how can I stay out all night or promote a serious affair? My parents would simply consider me something perverted and keep me in the house."

Of course, all this new freedom would lead to an inevitable backlash. With the return to civilian life of a newly visible gay culture, the genie had to be put back in the bottle. The decade after the war witnessed an increasing focus on s.e.x perverts and deviants, orchestrated through the federal government, the church, and the media. Returning to their small towns, their families, the eyes of their neighbors, what would happen to men like J.P.? What would happen to my uncle?

But then I remembered that my uncle didn't return to South Carolina after the war, but went to Miami instead, to attend college. Had his time in the war taught him the value of port cities with large military populations? Was he looking for a civilian version of the community he had found in the army? A small book of snapshots, dated 1949 and inscribed to my uncle, poked a few holes in this theory. Though there's the occasional photo of an extremely hunky undergrad, in most of these shots my uncle is surrounded by palm trees and bikinied women. The arms that had held J.P. only a year or two before now linger happily over female shoulders, sometimes two and three at a time. Tucked away at the very back, separated from the other photos by several blank sleeves, as though hidden, is a particularly incriminating shot. It's of my uncle and a girl. He has his arm around her shoulder, and he's holding her hand while he looks into her eyes. One wonders if this is the woman who sent him the snapshots, who wrote in the back, "I won't send you the rest of the pictures until I hear from you! So there."

Removed from the all-male context of those war photos, my uncle, in these Miami days, looks decidedly more manly, more heteros.e.xual. If the war photos reveal one face of the confirmed bachelor, these college shots reveal the other: the bachelor as a happy figure of heteros.e.xual excess and possibility.

And I'm reminded of similar photographic evidence from my own past, a picture that once made my parents very happy. I spent my junior year of college abroad, near London, and I was lucky to discover that a second or third cousin by marriage had a five-bedroom condo in Paris. He needed a house sitter for a few weeks around Christmas, and I leapt at the opportunity. Word soon got out that I had commodious digs in the City of Lights, and friends of mine from home and abroad descended, resulting in a Christmas feast of cheap wine and overcooked duck. My guests-some eight or ten-were all female, and when a photo of that Christmas dinner reached my parents, they must have celebrated. And I was happy to let them celebrate. I was still deeply in the closet-scared to death, in fact, of what I knew to be true about myself-and this picture of the promiscuous bachelor abroad was just what I needed to b.u.t.tress an increasingly shaky heteros.e.xual facade. It was also just what my parents were looking for. They captioned it "Mason and his Harem" and circulated it throughout the neighborhood.

We see in photographs what we want to see. When is a harem-on a beach or in a Parisian condo-the truth? And when is it a cover for a secret that's hiding in plain sight?

I knew my uncle as a deeply religious man. In this he resembled my mother, whose attempts to get me to go to church were heroic, if ultimately doomed to failure. I've never been a believer, and this was the source of great and increasing stress in my family. At some point my mother gave up on getting me to church, having grown tired, I imagine, of my postsermon critiques. (I once caught the minister in a misquotation of James Joyce.) But the concern for my everlasting soul lingered, emerging in quiet, if indirect, ways.

Only a few years before he died, my uncle mailed me a copy of Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days, the first in the blockbuster series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins doc.u.menting the rapture-that moment when Jesus returns and the saved ascend with him to heaven, leaving nonbelievers, Jews, and Muslims behind to fight various end-time skirmishes. This gift was astute on my uncle's part. He knew that I always had my head in a book, and what better way to save an intellectual's soul than through a novel? I read it immediately. It was fascinating, in the same way that the white supremacist literature I had made the subject of my first scholarly book was fascinating. It was a window into a mind-set that was repugnant to me but that I wanted to understand. Of course, it didn't have the effect my uncle had intended. Instead of pondering the state of my soul, I wondered why, when the believers were raptured, they left their outer garments behind but took their underwear with them. I wondered what it meant for my uncle to believe that when the rapture came, good people of other faiths would suffer the same fate as atheists. That, say, Gandhi and I, were we contemporaries, would both be doomed to h.e.l.l.

I never spoke with my uncle about this novel, and he never brought it up. This was the way with our family. We preferred indirection, anything that allowed us to avoid confrontation: a letter mailed rather than a phone called, a novel that appears with no accompanying message, or, in a more dramatic example, a message from the grave.

Just such a message came three days after my uncle's death-at his funeral service, in fact. I was seated down front in my uncle's church-a country church, farther out of town than the one I had stopped attending so many years back. I was there with my father, my brother and sister-in-law, perhaps my niece and nephew. Halfway through the preacher's sermon, I realized that his words were aimed at me-literally. He had found me in the second row and was looking directly at me. He made eye contact, and held it, as he talked about the tragic fate of the nonbeliever, and how easily that fate could be avoided, if only he surrendered his arrogance, his belief that he could think his way through the world. My uncle had spoken in his last days, the preacher said, of his faith in G.o.d, of his certainty of the life everlasting that awaited him. But he had also spoken of a heaviness of heart. He was worried, the preacher said, about those who lacked such certainty. He was distraught over the fate of people who weren't saved, the h.e.l.lfire that awaited them.

Although the preacher never mentioned my name, I'm sure that my uncle did, that my uncle's last wish was for this man of G.o.d to accomplish what all others had failed at: the salvation of his nephew, whom he loved.

And as the preacher was doing this work, his eyes on me and only me, I became angrier and angrier. How dare he use the occasion of my uncle's funeral to proselytize. How dare he intrude upon my grief to alert me to the dire state of my soul. And I worried, in the days that followed, that this anger would seep onto my uncle, that I would always resent him for such a cheap trick, the hijacking of his own funeral for one last attempt at my salvation.

But instead of anger toward my uncle, I felt sorrow, and this was much worse. For the first time, I tried to put myself in my uncle's place. I tried to imagine what it would feel like if you knew-knew, not merely believed-that someone you truly loved was doomed to the worst fate imaginable, everlasting torment. Because that's what my uncle knew, that someone he had known and loved since his first cry was d.a.m.ned. And knowing this must have killed him, in much crueler fashion than the congestive heart failure that merely took his life.

I looked for solace anywhere I could find it. I latched on to the fact that my uncle had never once said or implied that I was d.a.m.ned because I was gay. I was d.a.m.ned because I didn't accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. And while this may appear to be a distinction without a difference-I was d.a.m.ned either way-perhaps it meant that, in my uncle's eyes, my h.o.m.os.e.xuality wouldn't keep me from heaven. Maybe, then, he knew this about himself as well, that, whatever he may once have felt for J.P., this feeling could sit alongside his faith and not trouble it. Maybe he could be himself before the Lord, if not before the rest of us.

Or maybe there was no solace to be found. Maybe he was so worried about my soul because he still worried about his own. Did he carry with him, like a cancer, what he had once felt for that baby-faced soldier? Did my uncle worry that he too had committed crimes that would keep him from the kingdom of G.o.d?

In the years since my uncle's death, my life has come more and more to resemble his. And yet the commonality I now feel most urgently isn't the name we share, or even the presumed if unacknowledged bond of our h.o.m.os.e.xuality. Rather, it's our experience of being single. Like him, I'm a bachelor, and with the birth of my nephew, and then my niece, I became a bachelor uncle as well.

And what I've found is that history repeats itself. The silence of one generation carries over too easily to the next. I finally came out to my brother and sister-in-law ten years after my parents had asked me not to, but the topic has rarely come up again. In an email, my brother wrote that he doesn't approve of my "lifestyle," but he understands it. My sister-in-law has been better, inquiring once or twice over the years about my romantic life. As for my niece and nephew, we've never officially had "the conversation," though surely they know. How could they not, when the signs are so much more legible than they were in my uncle's day?

My niece and I, in particular, seem to have a tacit understanding. In a recent exchange of texts, she mentioned how much she liked Chick-fil-A. I told her I loved their chicken but hated their politics. She wrote, "Oh yeah, the whole h.o.m.ophobic thing. I'm weak, and eat there anyway. The fact that they're closed on Sundays is a b.u.mmer. I boycott them on Sundays." She continued, "My gay friends eat there too. I'll just a.s.sume it's okay." This casual reference to her gay friends from a girl raised in the same religious climate I fled so long ago-that's the most promising bit of indirection my family has ever produced.

But this indirection is possible only because I occupy the same position as my uncle: the mysteriously single adult. Absent the provocation of a shunned partner, why spoil Thanksgiving dinner with explicit declarations, with demands for respect? I dated off and on (more off than on), but I was never very good at it. Maybe I got too late a start, having been closeted in the years when you get your first practice in merging and compromise. Maybe my independence had become too entrenched, my autonomy too comfortable. Or maybe I simply never met the right guy in the right moment. Whatever the reason, the most I was able to muster with someone would be a few weeks, or, in a handful of cases, a few months.

Eventually, though, I came to appreciate the freedom and opportunity that a single life afforded. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. I loved not being responsible to another person. I came to cherish, even to h.o.a.rd, my time alone. A friend might ask what I was going to do on the weekend. "Sit quietly," I would say.

And then, just when I had everything figured out, I met R., and everything changed. My much-cherished private time felt like a waste of time. My quiet nights at home felt suddenly lonely. I fell quickly in love with R., and, remarkably, he fell in love with me. We made it almost three years, until a job took him to New York, and our attempts at a commuting relationship failed. He understood this failure sooner than I did, and when he ended things, I was devastated. And in the aftermath, I was adrift. I had forgotten how to be single. I had forgotten how to appreciate the advantages of an uncoupled life, the freedom, the comfort, the ease. And in those difficult days, I turned once again to my uncle's memory.

I remembered that question he had asked: Would you ever want to bring someone home to meet the family? And I heard again the longing in his voice, but now I was sure that the longing was on my behalf. Whatever he had missed, whatever he had given up, this was what he wanted for me. And I had failed him, had squandered the opportunities my proudly gay life afforded. Yes, I had met the person I wanted to bring home. I had met the person I wanted my family to know. But these things never happened, first because of my parents' prohibition against speech and proximity and my cowardly submission to it, and then simply because lost opportunities are lost forever.

After my mother died, and as my father was, some ten years later, making the moves I'm sure he wished he could have made earlier, he said, "Tell me about R." He knew of him only because I had stopped spending Christmas with my family. If R. wasn't welcome, I said, then neither was I. But after a couple of years of this, my father worked up his courage, and he broke his own rule. "Tell me about R." Not exactly an invitation to a homestay, but perhaps a prelude to it. Of course, R. and I had broken up not long before this, and, my heart broken, this was the last thing I wanted to talk about. Doors open, and then they shut again.

But in the years that followed, my father would occasionally summon his courage and ask me if I was seeing anybody. I appreciated his efforts-they had cost him a great deal, and were motivated only by love-but the answer was always no. I had settled back into my singledom, learned again to value its rhythms. I had created a life that felt full, one that could fairly be described as promiscuous, though the promiscuity was more social than s.e.xual. There are the friends I dine with, the friends I vacation with, and, yes, the friends I sleep with. And there are also those friends-a smaller number, surely-who provide that thing we hope to find in a lifelong partner: the ability to be my truest self, with no fear of abandonment. Call it a division of labor if you will, but that makes it sound like more work than it is. Maybe it's a division of love. It's what can happen in that s.p.a.ce outside, the s.p.a.ce my uncle inhabited.

In that respect, and despite whatever differences he felt between us, my life looks not unlike my uncle's. I've never been to war, and he never marched in a gay pride parade, but we've both been bachelors. In those days after his death, snooping through his photographs, I tried to turn my bachelor uncle into my gay uncle. At the time, that was what I needed: an antecedent, a version of myself that sat securely at the heart of our family. And there's a good chance I found it. I still think that photo of my uncle with J.P. tells the truth-or, at least, a truth. And I can't help but mourn the life he couldn't bring himself to live. I mourn his lost opportunities, his lost loves.

But then I catch myself. Would he want my pity any more than I want it from those who view my single life as half a life? Would he even recognize himself in the story I've made for him, the story of a gay man who kept his heart a secret? Would he reach across the silence, and the years, to claim me as one of his own, a queer misfit on that Island of Misfit Toys?

I'll never have the answers to these questions. So, not knowing in what ways he might claim me, I choose to claim him. For however much I needed a gay pride uncle, it was the closeted uncle whose example still guides me-the uncle who had, for over fifty years, and at whatever cost, carved out a s.p.a.ce of possibility, carved out a life. In a world where the social pressures toward coupling can feel even greater than the pressures toward heteros.e.xuality, I need his example, and his name, now more than ever.

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS.

Black and Blue and Blond.

FROM The Virginia Quarterly Review.

In 1517, Fray Bartolome de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines. To that odd variant on the species philanthropist we owe an infinitude of things.

-Jorge Luis Borges, "The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell"

But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.

-Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans.

Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you'd have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn't white clear through.

-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.

There is a millennia-old philosophical experiment that has perplexed minds as fine and diverse as those of Socrates, Plutarch, and John Locke. It's called Theseus's Paradox (or the Ship of Theseus), and the premise is this: The mythical founding-king of Athens kept a thirty-oar ship docked in the Athenian harbor. The vessel was preserved in a seaworthy state through the continual replacement of old timber planks with new ones, piecemeal, until the question inevitably arose: after all of the original planks have been replaced by new and different planks, is it still, in fact, the same ship?

For some time now, a recurring vision has put me in mind of Theseus and those shuffling pieces of wood. Only it's people I see and not boats: a lineage of people distending over time. At the end of the line, there is a teenage boy with fair skin and blond hair and probably light eyes, seated at a cafe table somewhere in Europe. It is fifty or sixty years into the future. And this boy, gathered with his friends, is glibly remarking-in the dispa.s.sionate tone of one of my old white Catholic-school cla.s.smates claiming to have Cherokee or Iroquois blood-that as improbable as it would seem to look at him, apparently he had black ancestors once upon a time in America. He says it all so matter-of-factly, with no visceral aspect to the telling. I imagine his friends' vague surprise, perhaps a raised eyebrow or two or perhaps not even that-and if I want to torture myself, I can detect an ironic smirk or giggle. Then, to my horror, I see the conversation grow not ugly or embittered or anything like that but simply pa.s.s on, giving way to other lesser matters, plans for the weekend or questions about the menu perhaps. And then it's over. Just like that, in one casual exchange, I see a history, a struggle, a whole vibrant and populated world collapse without a trace. I see an entirely different ship.

I met my wife in a bar off of the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad, in Paris. That was almost five years ago. At the time I was at the end of my twenties and in the middle of one of the only legitimate bachelor phases I've enjoyed as an adult. Otherwise, there had been a series of more or less monogamous relationships of varying lengths: a frivolous year surfing couches with a Gujarati girl from Toronto; a poignant stint in Buenos Aires with an elegant black girl from Virginia; eight perfect then imperfect and seemingly inexorable years with a Nigerian-Italian chef from uptown Manhattan (with an interlude of six intensely felt months in college with my French TA, an exchange student from Nancy); and four turbulent teenage years with my first love, someone LL Cool J could easily describe as an around-the-way girl, from Plainfield, New Jersey. But on that clear January night, in a warm bar overlooking the frigid ca.n.a.l, there was no one else, and I was accountable solely to myself.

Valentine came with a mutual friend, sat down catty-corner to me, and-who knows how these things actually work-something in her bearing triggered a powerful response. I found her insouciant pout and mane of curls flowing over the old fur coat she was bundled in exotic. We hardly spoke, but before I left, I gave her my email address on the chance she found herself in New York, where I was living at the time. Two months later, while there on a reporting a.s.signment, Valentine wrote me, and we met a few days later for a drink. That was when I discovered that she was funny and not really insouciant at all, just shy about her English. It turned out we had a lot in common. I saw her a second time a month later in New York and then again on a work trip to Paris two months after that. Summer had just begun, and we fell in love extremely fast. When it was time to go home, she asked me to change my itinerary and join her in Corsica for a week. I did, and when it was really time to leave, she promised to visit me that August in New York. A few days after she landed, I proposed on a rooftop in Brooklyn, overlooking the Empire State Building and the orange Manhattan sky.

In retrospect, it had been a very long time by then since I'd thought of myself as having any kind of type. It wasn't a conscious decision; it was simply the more I'd studied at large universities, the more I'd traveled and lived in big cities, the more women I'd encountered at home and away-which is just to say the more I'd ventured from my own backyard and projected myself into the world-the more I found myself unwilling to preemptively cordon off any of it. And yet-however naive this could seem now-I had somehow always also taken for granted that when the time came to have them, my children would, like me, be black.

A year ago to the day that I write this, Valentine's water broke after a late dinner. In a daze of elation, we did what we'd planned for weeks and woke our brother-in-law, who gamely drove us from our apartment in the northern ninth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt to the maternite, all the way on Paris's southern edge. At two in the morning we had the streets practically to ourselves, and the route he took-down the hill from our apartment, beneath the greened copper and gold of the opera house and through the splendor of the Louvre's courtyard, with its pyramids of gla.s.s and meticulous gardens, over the River Seine, with Notre Dame rising in the distance on one side and the Palais Royal and the Eiffel Tower shimmering on the other, and down the wide, leafy Boulevards Saint-Germain and Raspail, into Montparna.s.se, through that neon intersection of cafes from the pages of A Moveable Feast-was unspeakably gorgeous. I am not permanently awake to Paris's beauty or even its strangeness, but that night, watching the city flit by my window, it did strike me that such a place-both glorious and fundamentally not mine-would be my daughter's hometown.

Another twenty-four hours elapsed before Marlow arrived. When Valentine finally went into labor, even I was delirious with fatigue and not so much standing by her side as levitating there, sustained by raw emotion alone and thinking incoherently at best. On the fourth or fifth push, I caught a snippet of the doctor's rapid-fire French: "Something, something, something, tte doree . . ." It took a minute before my sluggish mind registered and sorted the sounds, and then it hit me that she was looking at my daughter's head and reporting back that it was blond. The rest is the usual blur. I caught sight of a tray of placenta, heard a brand-new scream, and nearly fainted. The nurses whisked away my daughter, the doctor saw to my wife, and I was left to wander the empty corridor until I found the men's room, where I shut myself and wept, like all the other newborns on the floor-a saline cascade of joy and exhaustion, terror and awe mingling together and flooding out of me in unremitting sobs. When, finally, I'd washed my face and returned to meet my beautiful, healthy child, she squinted open a pair of inky-blue irises that I knew even then would lighten considerably but never turn brown. For this precious little being grasping for milk and breath, I felt the first throb of what has been every minute since then the sincerest love I know. An hour or so after that, when Valentine and the baby were back in their room for the night, I fell into a taxi, my own eyes absentmindedly retracing that awfully pretty route. For the first time I can remember, I thought of Theseus's ship.

I realize now that this vision of the boy from the future I've had in my head for the past year traces itself much further back into the past. It must necessarily stretch back at least to 1971, in San Diego, where my father, who was-having been born in 1937 in Jim Crow Texas-the grandson of a woman wed to a man born before the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, met my mother, the native-Californian product of European immigrants from places as diverse as Austria-Hungary, Germany, England, and France. This unlikely courtship came all of four years after the Loving v. Virginia verdict repealed antimiscegenation laws throughout the country. In ways that are perhaps still impossible for me to fully appreciate, their romance amounted to a radical political act, though now, some four decades on, it seems a lot less like any form of defiance than like what all successful marriages fundamentally must be: the obvious and undeniable joining of two people who love and understand each other enormously.

But that's not the beginning either. This trajectory I now find myself on no more starts in San Diego than in Paris. Not since it is extremely safe to a.s.sume that my father, with his freckles, with his mother's Irish maiden name, and with his skin a shade of brown between polished teak and red clay, did not arrive from African sh.o.r.es alone. As James Baldwin, perspicacious as ever, noted of his travels around precisely the kind of segregated southern towns my father would instantly recognize as home, the line between "whites" and "coloreds" in America has always been traversed and logically imprecise: "The prohibition . . . of the social mingling [revealing] the extent of the s.e.xual amalgamation." There were (and still are) "girls the color of honey, men nearly the color of chalk, hair like silk, hair like cotton, hair like wire, eyes blue, gray, green, hazel, black, like the gypsy's, brown like the Arab's, narrow nostrils, thin, wide lips, thin lips, every conceivable variation struck along incredible gamuts." Indeed, to be black (or white) for any significant amount of time in America is fundamentally to occupy a position on the mongrel spectrum-strict binaries have always failed spectacularly to contain this elementary truth.

And yet in spite of that, I've spent the past year trying to think my way through the wholly absurd question of what it means for a person to be or not to be black. It's an existential Rubik's Cube I thought I'd solved and put away in childhood. My parents were never less than adamant on the point that both my older brother and I are black. And in the many ways simpler New Jersey world we grew up in-him in the seventies and eighties, me in the eighties and nineties-tended to receive us that way without significant protest, especially when it came to other blacks. This is probably because, on a certain level, every black American knows what, again, Baldwin knew: "Whatever he or anyone else may wish to believe . . . his ancestors are both white and black." Still, in the realm of lived experience, race is nothing if not an improvisational feat, and it would be in terribly bad faith to pretend there is not some fine, unspoken, and impossible-to-spell-out balance to all of this. And so I cannot help but wonder if indeed a threshold-the full consequences of which I may or may not even see in my own lifetime-has been crossed. (It's not a wholly academic exercise either, since my father was an only child and in the past year my brother married and had a daughter with a woman from West Siberia.) "Aw, son," Pappy chuckled warmly when he cradled Marlow in his arms the first time, "she's just a palomino!" There was-indeed, there still is-something so comforting to me in his brand of a.s.surance. It's certainly true that in his day and in his fading Texas lexicon, black people could be utterly unflappable when presented with all kinds of improbable melanges, employing a near infinitude of esoteric terms (not infrequently drawn from the world of horse breeding, which can sound jarring to the contemporary ear) to describe them. I myself had to whip out my iPhone and Google palomino ("a pale golden or tan-colored horse with a white mane and tail, originally bred in the southwestern U.S."), but I'd also grown up with other vocabulary, like high yellow and mulatto and, in my father's house if nowhere else, those now-anachronistic and loaded terms quadroon and octoroon.

What bizarre words these are. But what a perfectly simple reality they labor to conceal and contain. When you get all the way down to it, what all these elaborate, nebulous descriptors really signify is nothing more complicated than that in the not-so-distant past, if she did not willfully break from her family and try her luck at pa.s.sing for white (in the fashion of, say, the Creole author of Kafka Was the Rage, Anatole Broyard), Marlow, blue eyes and all, would have been disenfranchised and subjugated like all the rest of us-the wisdom, discipline, and brilliant style of American blackness would have been her birthright as well. And so there was for a long time something that could be understood as a more or less genuinely unified experience-not without its terrible hardships but conversely rife with profound satisfactions-which had nothing, or very close to nothing, to do with genetics. Indeed, even though the absurdity of race is always most pellucid at the margins, my daughter's case wouldn't even have been considered marginal in the former slave states, where theories about hypo-descent were most strictly observed and a person with as undetectable an amount as one-thirty-second "black blood" could be "legally" designated "colored." Which is only to say, despite all of the horrifically cruel implications of so-called one-drop laws, until relatively quite recently there was a s.p.a.ce reserved for someone like Marlow fully within the idea of what used to be called the American Negro.

But it is not hard to notice that the impulse toward unquestioning inclusiveness (as a fully justifiable and admirable reaction to exclusiveness) is going in an increasing number of precincts wherever it is terms like Negro go to retire. The reason has less to do with black people suddenly forgetting their paradoxical origins than with the idea of whiteness continually growing, however reluctantly, less exclusive. With greater than a third of the American population now reporting at least one family member of a different race, and with, since the year 2000, the option to select any combination of races on the census form, the very idea of black Americans as a fundamentally mulatto population is fraying at the seams.

Perhaps, then, mine is the last American generation for which the logic-and illogic-of racial cla.s.sifications could so easily contradict, or just gloss over, the physical protestations and nuances of the body and face. Which is one of the reasons it did initially take me by such surprise to find so many recessive traits flourishing in my daughter. I was being forced to confront a truth I had, if not forgotten, certainly lost sight of for some time: my daughter does not, as so many well-meaning strangers and friends tend to put it, just "get those big blue eyes" from her mother. But despite the length and narrowness of my own nose and the beige hue of my skin, I've always only been able to see in the mirror a black man meeting my gaze. One word I have never connected or been tempted to connect with myself is biracial. The same goes for its updated variant, multiracial. Growing up where and as I did, before the turn of the last century, it simply would not have occurred to me to refer to myself by either of those designations.

The first time I lived in France, some twelve years ago, to teach English in a depressed and depressing industrial town along the northern border with Belgium, I often went to kebab shops late at night in which I would sometimes be greeted in Arabic. Once the young Algerian behind the counter simply demanded of me, "Parle arabe! Parle arabe!" and all I could do was stare at him blankly. "But why did your parents not teach you to speak Arabic!" he implored me, first in a French I hardly followed and then in an exasperated and broken English.

"Because I'm American," I finally replied.

"Yes, but even in America," he pressed on, "why did they not teach you your language?"

"Because I'm not an Arab." I laughed uncomprehendingly, and for several beats he just looked at me.

"But your origins, what are your origins?"

"Black." I shrugged, and I can still see the look of supreme disbelief unspool on that man's face.

"But you are not black," he nearly screamed. "Michael Jordan is black!"

It was an astonishingly discomfiting experience, this failure of my ident.i.ty to register and, once registered, to be accepted, but one I gradually grew used to and now, after half a decade living in France, for better or worse have come to scarcely notice at all. Though it isn't just Arabs who mistake me for one of their own. Whites outside of the States are just as often oblivious to gradations of blackness. On my first trip to Paris as a student in a summer study-abroad program, some cla.s.smates and I bought ice cream behind Notre Dame. When we sat at a table on the river, a white American tourist who'd overheard us speaking confessed he was homesick and asked if he could join us. He was very friendly and younger than we were, and I can no longer recall the details of what he'd said, but very quickly he recounted an extremely off-color joke about blacks. When no one laughed and one of my friends explained his error to him, he blushed deeply, and said by way of excuse that he'd simply a.s.sumed I was Italian.

What these encounters and many others showed me in my early adulthood is something I should have known already but failed to fully grasp: like the adage about politics, all race is local. This makes perfect sense, of course, given the basic biological reality that there is no such thing, on any measurable scientific level, as distinct races of the species h.o.m.o sapiens. Rather, we all make, according to our own geographical and cultural orientations, inferences about people based on the loose interplay of physical traits, language, custom, and nationality, all of which necessarily lack any fixed or universal meaning. (To be sure, this is not just a black thing-for most of American history it was widely held that northern and southern Europeans const.i.tuted entirely separate races.) It is this fungible aspect of personal ident.i.ty that bestows such a liberating (and at turns oppressive) quality to travel. In the case of coming to France in particular, this very failure to be seen and interpreted as one would be back home was, of course, a major selling point in the previous century for a not insignificant number of American blacks, primarily GIs and artists but other types too, who found an incredible degree of freedom from racialized stigma in Paris. For many of these expatriates, it was not that the color of their skin went unnoticed; it didn't. It is instead that it carried a crucially different set of meanings and lacked others still. France long functioned as a haven for American black people-and has never been confused as such for African and Caribbean blacks-precisely because, unlike in the U.S., we've been understood here first and foremost as American and not as black.

In one of the more exceptional meditations on James Baldwin and his European years, "Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin's 'Stranger in the Village,'" the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole in The New Yorker retraces a 1951 trip the writer made to Leukerbad, Switzerland, a far-flung, then all-white locale in which that very same sense of dignity that Baldwin had discovered in Paris was not always extended to him. Specifically, Cole returns again and again to his essay's true theme, which is an exploration of the various yokes, both visible and unseen, that act upon black-looking "bodies" and therefore an awful lot of black psyches: Leukerbad gave Baldwin a way to think about white supremacy from its first principles. It was as though he found it in its simplest form there. The men who suggested that he learn to ski so that they might mock him, the villagers who accused him behind his back of being a firewood thief, the ones who wished to touch his hair and suggested that he grow it out and make himself a winter coat, and the children who "having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish" as he approached: Baldwin saw these as prototypes (preserved like coelacanths) of att.i.tudes that had evolved into the more intimate, intricate, familiar, and obscene American forms of white supremacy that he already knew so well.

Even as he rejects what he interprets as Baldwin's "self-abnegation" in the face of European high culture-"What he loves does not love him in return . . . This is where I part ways with Baldwin"-and as he evinces a seemingly fuller appreciation of the limitlessness of his own intellectual, artistic, and frankly human birthrights-"I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait"-Cole also repeatedly encases the entirety of the existential experience of blackness in the physical stigmas of an obviously black body. "To be black," he writes, "is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety. You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys."

My father would certainly recognize this feeling of restricted being-in-the-world, and it is what he vigilantly reared me to brace myself for, though it has hardly ever been more than vicariously mine. To my knowledge, I've never been followed in a store, people don't cross the street when I approach, and the sole instance I've ever been pulled over in a car, I was absolutely speeding. But then again there was that time, years ago in Munich, when I was inexplicably not allowed inside that same nightclub my Irish-American friend was made to feel more than welcome to enter. By orders of magnitude, I can grasp what it would mean to endure such slights daily and the doubt and sensitivity they would engender. And so although there has been some ambiguity attached to my own nonwhite body, what I am most certain about in all of this-and perhaps this is a source of paradoxical anxiety for me-is that there will not be any with regard to my daughter's. She will not be turned away from that door or others just like it. And so as she grows and looks at me and smiles, all the while remaining innocent of all of this, I am left with some questions and they are urgent ones: What, exactly, remains of the American Negro in my daughter? Is it nothing but an expression playing around the eyes, the slightest hint of lemon in the epidermis? Is it possible to have black consciousness in a body that does not in any way look black?

On this point, not only Cole but also the preponderance of contemporary commentators on the subject, who cloak so much of the messiness and contradiction of lived experience in neat critical-race jargon and theories of the constructed body, do not have answers for me. I find myself looking instead to the unorthodox, self-styled Negro thinkers of the twentieth century and today, whose insights into American life in so many ways remain prescient and unrivaled. I'm thinking specifically of Albert Murray, though I'm also thinking of Ralph Ellison and Stanley Crouch. I find myself returning over and over again, in particular, to Murray's masterpiece, the ingenious and criminally neglected 1970 collection of essays and flat-out good sense, The Omni-Americans, and also to Crouch's wonderful commentary on it in his own collection, Always in Pursuit. One of Murray's signature issues, which even today too often goes de-emphasized or unsaid, is the simple fact that race-though not racism-is at its core a form of "social science fiction," and that ident.i.ty, above all, is a matter of culture. For Murray, crucially, what we are really talking about is not even race at all but ethnicity. To be black, then, could never be merely a matter of possessing one kind of body versus another (as any Dravidian or Melanesian would know). What Murray understood is "exactly what Ellison had made clear before him," writes Crouch. "Polemical reductions, if believed and acted upon, were capable of draining away all of the human complexities and the cultural facts of American life, which were far different from the patterns and policies of prejudice." In other words, it would be insane to let one's own sense of self and history be determined by a nightclub bouncer or a beat cop.

Nonetheless, it's difficult to shake the sense that I have arrived at a certain bind, in many ways similar to the one familiar to secular Jews. The purpose of all these generations of struggle, I know, has always been the freedom to choose-and yet it is precisely this coveted autonomy that threatens now to annihilate the very ident.i.ty that won it in the first place.

From time to time, feelings something like panic creep in. On the one hand, there is the acute and very specific panic of wondering if I have indeed permanently altered the culture or "race" or ethnicity or, yes, the very physiognomy of an entire line of people, like a freight train slowly but irrevocably switching tracks. On the other, there is the subtler, lower-decibel, gnawing panic, which manifests as a plain awareness of the unearned advantage. It is impossible not to feel that. At a time when, despite all of the tremendous societal progress, blackness-certainly not always but especially at that vexed intersection with poverty or the cultural signifiers of such-is still subject to all manner of violation and disrespect; at a time when blacks continue to be stopped, frisked, stalked, hara.s.sed, choked out, and drilled with bullets in broad daylight and left in the street-what does it mean to have escaped a fate? Put baldly, what is proximity to whiteness worth and what does color cost? And the reverse?

These are questions I don't yet know how to answer. What I do know is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's dangerous a.s.sumptions about race, even as I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed. It is so much easier to sink deeper into a lukewarm bath than to stand up and walk away. But for my daughter's sake if not my own, I can't afford to linger any longer. Now if I find liberation in moments of doubt, it comes with the one movement I always end up having to make, indeed the only movement I can make-away from the abstract, general, and hypothetical and back into the jagged grain of the here and now, into the specificity of my love for my father, mother, brother, wife, and daughter, and into my sheer delight in their existence as distinct and irreplaceable people, not bodies or avatars or sites of racial characteristics and traits. With them, I am left with myself as the same, as a man and a human being who is free to choose and who has made choices and is ultimately fulfilled.

Yet I know that is also not enough. If the point is for everyone to build ships, set sail, and be free, if we are collectively ever going to solve this infinitely trickier paradox of racism in the absence of races, we are, all of us-black, white, and everything in between-going to have to do considerably more than contemplate facades. An entirely new framework must be built. This one's rotten to the core.

Contributors' Notes.

FRANCISCO CANTu served as a Border Patrol agent for the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012. A former Fulbright Fellow, he now holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Arizona. His essays and translations appear frequently in Guernica, and his work can also be found in Ploughshares, Orion, and Public Books, where he serves as a contributing editor. He is currently at work on a book about his time in the borderlands.

ALEXANDER CHEE is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is a recipient of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Amtrak. His essays and stories have appeared on NPR and in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, and Out, among other publications. Currently at work on a collection of essays, he lives in New York City.

CHARLES COMEY is a writer living in a little town in New Hampshire with his wife and two boys. He is a frequent contributor to The Point. Currently he is at work on his PhD at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, where he has been the recipient of a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Fellowship and the Wayne C. Booth Prize for Teaching. When he's done, he plans to transform his obscure academic labors into not-boring personal-philosophical nonfiction.

PAUL CRENSHAW's stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Essays, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review, and Brevity, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University. "Names" is one of a collection of essays on his time in the military in the early 1990s.

JAQUIRA DAZ is the recipient of a Kenyon Review Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Carl Djera.s.si Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Inst.i.tute for Creative Writing, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. She has received awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and elsewhere.

IRINA DUMITRESCU is a professor of medieval English literature at the University of Bonn. She recently edited a collection of essays on arts and humanities in crisis t.i.tled Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (2016). Her essays can be found in The Yale Review, The Southwest Review, Pet.i.ts Propos Culinaires, the Washington Post, and The Manifest-Station. She was nominated for an MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and has been supported by the Whiting Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

ELA HARRISON's poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in New England Review, The Georgia Review, Cirque Journal, and F Magazine. She also contributes articles on environmental and nutritional issues to online publications, including BeMore! Magazine. She holds advanced degrees in cla.s.sical literature and linguistics (from Oxford, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) and has always studied and worked with herbs. Originally from England and Israel, she has traveled widely and lived in places as diverse as Alaska and Hawaii. Harrison received her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in 2014. Now based in Tucson, Arizona, she translates (including a German encyclopedia project), writes, edits, provides health coaching, and makes herbal remedies and food for people on healing programs.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER is the New York Times best-selling author of War, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and A Death in Belmont. "The Bonds of Battle" grew into his most recent book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the doc.u.mentary Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. He went on to direct Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?, Korengal, and The Last Patrol. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS-Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism. Junger's essay "The Lion in Winter" was selected by Stephen Jay Gould for The Best American Essays 2002. He lives in New York City.

LAURA KIPNIS is a cultural critic and former video artist who writes frequently on s.e.xual politics, aesthetics, emotion, acting out, bad behavior, and various other crevices of the American psyche. She is the author of six books. The latest is Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation; previous t.i.tles include How to Become a Scandal and Against Love: A Polemic. The next (just finished!) is Stupid s.e.x/Higher Ed. She teaches filmmaking at Northwestern University and lives in New York and Chicago.

JORDAN KISNER has published essays in n+1, New York Magazine, The American Scholar, and elsewhere, and she is at work on a book inspired by "Thin Places." She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, where she teaches undergraduate writing.

AMITAVA k.u.mAR is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Lunch with a Bigot, A Matter of Rats, and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. He teaches English at Va.s.sar College and is currently writing a book about academic style with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship.

RICHARD M. LANGE's short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Cimarron Review, Mississippi Review, Ping Pong, Chicago Quarterly Review, Eclipse, Georgetown Review, and elsewhere, and two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A former copywriter for a major insurance company, he is working on a novel about the financial crisis. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

LEE MARTIN has published three memoirs: From Our House, Turning Bones, and Such a Life. He is also the author of four novels, including The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and, most recently, Late One Night. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper's Magazine, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.

LISA NIKOLIDAKIS's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Brevity, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Pa.s.sages North, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She has won an Orlando Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation for flash fiction and The Briar Cliff Review's annual contest for nonfiction. She currently teaches creative writing in the Midwest, has just completed a collection of short stories, and is working on an essay collection.

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. Her more than forty novels include them, which won the National Book Award in 1970, Wonderland, You Must Remember This, We Were the Mulvaneys, The Gravedigger's Daughter, and, in 2016, The Man Without a Shadow. She has received the President's Medal in the Humanities, a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and, most recently, the A.J. Liebling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. She teaches at Princeton University, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley, and is a founding editor of Ontario Review.

MARSHA POMERANTZ is the author of The Ill.u.s.trated Edge, a book of poems (2011). A second ma.n.u.script has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize but is still looking for a home. Her poems and essays have been published by Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois.com, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Parna.s.sus, PN Review, Raritan, Salamander, and others, and she has translated a novel, short stories, and poems from the Hebrew. She retired in 2013 as managing editor at the Harvard Art Museums.

JILL SISSON QUINN's essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, OnEarth, and many other magazines. She has received the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her essay "Sign Here if You Exist" was reprinted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011. Her first book, Deranged, was published in 2010. A regular commentator for Wisconsin Public Radio's Wisconsin Life series, she lives and writes in Scandinavia, Wisconsin.

JUSTIN PHILLIP REED is a South Carolina native and the author of A History of Flamboyance (2016). His first full-length book of poetry, Indecency, is forthcoming in 2018. His work has appeared-or soon will-in Boston Review, Callaloo, Catapult, Columbia Poetry Review, Eleven Eleven, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, PEN American, The Rumpus, Vinyl, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is the online editor for Tusculum Review.

Born in London in 1933, OLIVER SACKS was educated at The Queen's College, Oxford. After receiving his medical degree, Sacks continued his studies in the United States, specializing in neurology and moving to New York City. His first book, Migraine (1970), combined an authoritative medical and historical coverage of the condition with the experiences of his suffering patients. Sacks would return again and again to case studies, turning them into a provocative literary form. They provide the basis for two of his best-known books, Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). He wrote two memoirs, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) and On the Move: A Life, which was published shortly before he died in August 2015. "A General Feeling of Disorder" was one of his last essays.

KATHERINE E. STANDEFER won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She writes about the body, consent, and medical technology from Tucson, where she teaches intimate creative writing cla.s.ses that help people engage their experiences of s.e.xuality and illness on the page. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. A certified s.e.xologist, she also teaches in a pilot narrative medicine program at UA's College of Medicine. Her work has appeared most recently in Fourth Genre, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Cutbank, Essay Daily, and High Country News.

GEORGE STEINER, the winner of numerous international awards and for many years a book critic at The New Yorker, is the author of many books, including After Babel, Antigones, Language and Silence, Real Presences, and Extraterritorial. His fiction includes Proofs and Three Parables and The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.; he has also published two memoirs, Errata: An Examined Life and My Unwritten Books. A fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961, Steiner has taught at a number of universities and was a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Geneva between 1974 and 1994.