The tumultuous life of Stephen Sondheim

"Habib al-Alanan was the realization of our dreams as an ethnic minority who wants to develop Iran."

“"Listen in the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts."”

This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross.

Steven Sahnheim once described himself as an austere revolutionary.

His musicals, the music, the lyrics, the stories, were both more complex and more subtle than their predecessors. After Alan J. Lerner, who wrote the lyrics for My Fair Lady Brigadine and Camelot, saw Sahnheim's groundbreaking 1970 musical company, he broken to tears and told his wife, "My way of writing musicals is over." It's no exaggeration to say Sahnheim was a genius.

Geniuses are often complicated people with complicated personalities and Sahnheim was no exception. Perhaps the most difficult relationship in his life was with his mother,

“who could be cold and even verbally cruel.”

That seems to have influenced Sahnheim's personality in the themes of some of his shows. In the new books, Steven Sahnheim art isn't easy. My guest Daniel Oakrend offers insights into Sahnheim's life and music, based on access to his letters, archives, oral history, as well as the 36 hours of interviews that Merrill Seekrest did for her 1998 biography of him.

And Oakrend's own interviews with many people who knew him.

Oakrend has worked as a book and magazine editor and was the first public editor for the New York Times.

He's the author of previous books about prohibition, baseball, and how eugenics and bigotry shaped anti-immigration law.

“Steven Sahnheim got a start on Broadway writing lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story.”

He went on to write music and lyrics for such shows as a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Follies, Merrillie, we roll along, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the park with George into the woods and passion. Daniel Oakrend, welcome back to fresh air. It's great to have you back. I'm very happy to be here. I want to start with you choosing a song.

And I'd like it to be a song that you heard something new in as a result of all the research that you did for this New Sound Heimbook. Well, Epiphany, this horrifying and overwhelming song near the end of Sweeney Todd, I had listened to and been impressed by how many scores of time. But when I was doing the research and listening carefully, that's when I realized that everything we've

heard before in that show comes back in very brief snatches in that one song. It's all tied together in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why it's so effective. And this is a song where Sweeney Todd, who is seeking revenge against the judge that locked him up and then stole his wife and then is trying to marry Sweeney's daughter. Steels his wife. Well, he steals his wife and the scarards her and you know, wounds are permanently.

Yeah, yeah. And Sweeney ends up killing her because now she's homeless and has gone mad. And she's just like in his way. So yeah, anyhow, so here's the song and it's one of my very, very favorite of all, sometimes pieces. And this is my favorite show of his. And it's, it's a really, like his desire for revenge is just like overflowing. And he wants to, everybody's unworthy and they all deserve to die. That's the refrain. They all deserve to die.

So here it is. There's a hole in the world like a great act. And it's filled with people

who are filled with shit. I'm never going to the world and have it. It's, it's not for the song.

They all deserve to die. Tell your five pieces, tell your wife, because in all of the whole human race, this is love it. There are two kinds of men and only two. There's one thing put in his proper place and the one where this put in the other one's place. Look at me, Mrs. Love it, look at you. Oh, we all deserve to die. Tell your wife, Mrs. Love it, tell your wife, because the lives of the wicked should be made free for the rest of us.

Death will be a relief. We all deserve to die. And I'll never see your eye. No, I'll never.

about your book is that there's this recurring chord in Swiny Todd. That's a real horror movie, kind of chord, like old horror movie. And he knew that chord from a Bernard Hermann score from a

nineteen forty five film, Hangover Square. And so I went to that movie, which I've never seen,

but watched the scene where the concert pianist, who is having a breakdown and is murdering people, is at the piano playing this very dizzying piece and strikes that chord several times. It was a chord that the very young Steven Soundheim, he was a teenager heard and he just fell in love with that chord and he went back to see the movie again because he wanted to be able to retain that chord and be able to use it for his own purposes. Now he was not yet a composer at that point,

but he was an recipient composer. And in fact, that chord that he called the Hermann chord

“shows up in his work and shows up particularly in Swiny Todd. I believe three times.”

So that's just here a little bit of the music from the concert piece that's being played. It's with that chord in the Bernard Hermann score because the pianist is performing when he's having the breakdown and we hear that chord. So that was an excerpt where what Steven Soundheim called the Bernard Hermann chord is heard and it's from the movie Hangover Square. I think Soundheim had denied that Swiny Todd was about

revenge or his own desire for revenge and you found something in your research that relates to

that. Would you explain? Sure. In an interview that he gave to his first biographer Marocicress

back in 1996, Soundheim described the day that Judy Prince came over to hear some of the songs the beginning songs of Swiny Todd. She was his closest friend, his self-agnolaged muse and she often would do this. He would play them for her before anybody else. So she came over. He had told her before that that it was a horror show. It was going to be a, you know, a spine tinkler and so she comes over to his house and he plays a few of the first songs and she stops him, two songs into

it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with horror. This is the story of your life and as Soundheim

reported it, he said, it never occurred to me, but of course it is. Now in the secret book, we don't

“know what the story of his life is. But I was able to determine through a couple sources but”

primarily Judy Prince who never gave interviews that in fact it was about revenge. And you write that his psychiatrist Milton Horowitz wrote papers on revenge and on revenge and massacism and Horowitz connects revenge to deep loneliness and the need to connect which you can also relate to Soundheim. Yeah, there are two major arcs to his life. One is from absolute alienation to finally near the end of his life connection. The others from an ambivalence that could be crippling

at times to resolution, to knowing who he was and what he was capable of doing. But it took 50 years from him to move from one of those polls to the next one. So in terms of Sweeney being about revenge and people thinking that's autobiographical in some way, not the murder property, it just about revenge. Soundheim said the difference between Sweeney and me is that I turned it into art.

“I think that's a sentence that says a great deal about his entire career and his entire life.”

The through his music and his lyrics, he was able to express things that he could not for various forms of inhibition express otherwise. It was where if it's not autobiographical, obviously he's not

But the feelings expressed in those shows all come from inside of him. I think very, very clearly.

“And I think it's in a smaller way inside of all of us that we get angry that we want to get back”

at someone and we don't necessarily act on it. But it's just, I love that show so much and there's a part of me, I'm fairly inhibited myself, but there's a part of me that I suppress certain feelings and you just relate to all the feelings in that show. Absolutely. And it's the inhibitions that keep us from expressing those feelings, or something that was something that he attacked. And that's not a bad thing, necessarily. No, and if it's socially, it's a very good thing to do.

And sometimes when he was in a bad mood, he would let them out socially, but mostly it came through in his songs. And one of the things that's very important to know about song time,

“that enabled him to bring them out in his songs, those feelings, were the disenhibiting effects”

of alcohol and drugs. And alcohol particularly was something that he consumed in great quantities. His collaborators said, you know, didn't impair his ability to work, but he would drink all day long. Marijuana cocaine for a period, but mostly alcohol, great, great quantities of alcohol. The cabaret performer Michael Finstein reported about having his assistant call sound time, when sound time was coming to dinner at Finstein's house and ask if there was anything particularly

that he would like at dinner and sound time replied according to Finstein. vodka, vodka, and more vodka. And there are dozens of other incidents and moments where the alcohol is so visibly a tool that he uses to make it through his work and I think through his life. So I want to ask you about a letter, a letter that's very famous to sound time fans that, you know, you learned more about. Describe the letter as sound time described it and then describe the letter

that was actually written. This was a letter from his mother and they had a very complicated and very stressful relationship with each other, which will get into after we hear about the letter. In the late 1970s, his mother, known as Foxy, that was her nickname, wrote him a letter, the content of which he revealed an interview with the New York Times in 1994, in which he said,

“in the letter my mother said the only thing I regret in life is giving birth to you.”

Now, that's a kind of a powerful statement and that kind of explains the or at least measures, the intensity of his negative feelings about his mother. And it's a story that he from that point told over and over and over again. All of the songheads, as we sometimes are known as those people, really know everything about him or want to know everything about him. We all know this letter. He referred to it so frequently. I found, however, in the Mary Rogers papers, Mary Rogers was

his lifelong friend, daughter Richard Rogers. He sent her what he said was a copy of the letter.

He had written to his mother when he received that. And so letter in which he says, I never want

anything to do with you again. This is just the end of our relationship. But in that letter, which he represents to his oldest friend as the accurate version of a letter that he had sent in 1978, she doesn't say I regret giving birth to you. She says, the only guilt I have is giving birth to you. And there's a mile of distance between guilt and regret. There's two ways I can interpret guilt. One is that she knew she wasn't meant to be a mother

and she feels guilty that she was such a bad mother. But the more obvious interpretation is, she gave birth to a monster and she feels guilty about that. That she unleashed this miserable

person on the world. Oh, that's interesting. I go the opposite direction. I like the first,

your first version better. I don't see any evidence that she felt that she had unleashed a monster on the world, even in her bitterest expressions to him. So there's a song in company

the connection? Well, in fact, it is about his mother in a way. She was a socialite. She liked

“B. Ron famous people and she liked to eat nearly not every day but certainly every week at the”

21 club where all the stylish people of the era would go and she would go with friends who were in show business or not. These were the ladies who lunched. They were the subject of that song and they were the object of his distaste. I don't think that Sondheim was aiming at anybody else but his mother but he was thinking of this group of women when he wrote that carascading acidic and hilarious song. So let's hear it. This is ladies who lunch from his musical company.

Here's to the girls who stay smart are at their guests rushing to their classes in up to go art wishing it would pass. Another long exhausting day, another thousand dollars a matinee a pinter play perhaps a piece of Mars, alderick to death and one for Moller. Here's to the girls who play white. There was ladies who lunch from the Steven Sondheim musical company. So let's continue talking about the relationship between Sondheim and his mother.

Although they had a pretty toxic relationship much of the time, his mother was friends with Oscar Hammerstein's wife and Sondheim was friends with the Hammerstein's son. So when the Hammerstein's moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, his mother and Steven Sondheim moved nearby and Hammerstein became Sondheim's mentor. And Hammerstein wasn't mean to Sondheim but he could be very blunt in his

“heart. He was direct with them. I think that Oscar, as he must be known, Oscar was the”

most important male figure in his life. Oscar dies when Sondheim is just about 30. But for those

30 years, there was no one he was closer with and no one for whom he had more regard. And worth saying, he didn't have regard for Hammerstein's work as a lyricist even though Hammerstein was at that point, the most prominent and successful lyricist on Broadway. But as a nurturing personality, he valued him immensely. And part of the nurturing that Oscar brought to the relationship was to be frank with him so that when the young Steve is trying to write music or write a play,

Oscar would be very direct with him and said, "Sorry, this is no good. You're trying to pretend you're somebody other than you are. Write what you know, write what you think." And those were the lessons that Sondheim cherished for the rest of his life.

And one of the first things Sondheim showed Hammerstein once Sondheim was still pretty young.

Hammerstein's response to it was, "This is really terrible. I'm not saying you're not talented, you are, but this is terrible." Right. And Sondheim's glad for that. It's the same thing shows up when he's at college at Williams when he's studying music with the composer Milton Babet. He wants the criticism. He relishes the criticism. But that happened only in the intimacy of personal or professional relationships. Criticism from the outside, most creative people,

certainly most creative people in the theater that I know, are very wary of Larry of and this pleased by critics, but not to the degree that Steven Sondheim was. He despised critics. There

were exceptions, but mostly he demeaned critics. He, you know, his first music and lyrics show was

“the enormous success of something happened on the way to the forum. In 1962, I believe it was,”

recalling that experience of show that was a gigantic hit. He wrote to a friend to say how it was the most bitter experience that he had ever had as a composer, as a writer, or as a theater person. The critics took me out and they trounce me and dragged me through the mutton and they beat the hell out of me. And, in fact, if you go back and read the reviews of a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, there was one pan, the critic for the world telegram

and Sond, you know, really slashed it and demeaned it and said, you know, this would have been a lousy score in the 1930s. But other than that, it got good reviews. It got very positive

but his memory of the experience just two years later was one of being horribly mistreated by critics.

We need to take a shot break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Daniel O'Quranett, his new book is called Stephen Sondheim, Art isn't easy. We'll be right back. This is fresh air. On the next through line from NPR, the rupture between Iran and Israel, through the story of Jewish Iranians. How people are now here and was the realization of our dreams as an ethnic minority who wants to develop Iran. Listen in the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nesper, digital producer at Fresh Air, and this is Terry Gross,

host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter, and I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast. The newsletter includes all the week shows, staff recommendations, and Molly picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read. It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week, and exclusive. So subscribe at whuy.org/freshair, and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning. After Oscar Hammerstein died,

Sondheim collaborated for one show called Do I Hear a Walls, with Richard Rogers, who is Hammerstein's,

you know, a long time songwriting partner, with Rogers writing the music, and Hammerstein writing the lyrics. So I want to place something from Do I Hear a Walls, because just the whole idea of Sondheim and Richard Rogers collaborating is interesting. We should hear an example of the music. The only song that caught on from there was Do I Hear a Walls, which as I recall, I heard people do want like the

“yet Sullivan show and on the radio. Do you want to choose one? Yeah, I think your instinct is right.”

You know, we remember Do I Hear a Walls, because that song became a very big hit and was sung by many, many other positive singers of the era, and even since then, it was also a very this is not to demean Rogers at all. It was a great composer, but it was very much easy listening. It was something a kind of music that could be popular. Yeah, let's play it. Okay, here it is. And the singer is Elizabeth Allen.

Again, why is nobody dancing in the street? Can't they hear the beat? Magic on mystical miracle, can it be? Is it true? Things are impossibly miracle? Is it me? No, it's you. That was Elizabeth Allen singing the title song from the original cast recording Do I Hear a Walls, a collaboration between composer Richard Rogers and Steven Sahnheim wrote the lyrics. So I'm getting back to talking about Sahnheim's life. He knew he was gay, but you couldn't really

come out then, not even on Broadway. We're like so many of the directors and writers and composers

“were gay, and the audience as well, but you couldn't be out because that's how it was.”

So it seems to me from your book that he really tried to be straight because he just couldn't be out then. I think he gave it a shot. I think it wasn't that he made a valiant effort to do it, but let's see if this is a possibility. And he did not come out publicly, really, for well, it's the middle to light 70s. Not that anybody was asking that much in those days. Certainly, all the people who knew him and people in his social world, they knew he was gay. He knew

he was gay. He did not think it was a defining aspect of his life. He didn't want to be as it were a typecast. He wasn't a gay composer. He was a composer, and his private life was something

“completely separate. Did his attitude change when he found that person who became his spouse?”

Well, his attitude begins to change when he falls in love with a 21-year-old and sometimes at this point in his early 60s, an incipient or aspiring songwriter named Peter Jones.

his only unironic play. That's when he wrote his only unironic musical. That's the time that he wrote

“a show that was about exposing one's love. He had never done that before. Now, the characters and”

passion are heterosexual to man and a woman. But there's no question this came out of this changed experience of finding someone to fall in love with. He had had serial relationships with many, many men over the years, but this was the one that clicked. And then after that ran its course, although they remained friends. In the early 2000s, he met Jeff Romley,

whom he fell deeply in love with, as Romley did with him, Romley moved into his house,

and they spent the last 17 years of Stephen's sometimes life together. They got married four years before Sontheim died, and there was no effort of hiding that relationship. During that period, he wrote a song from, I think this is probably the final musical that was actually performed in his lifetime. Yeah. In his lifetime. Yeah. And it had several titles, but I think it's mostly

“known as Rojo. And the song I'm thinking of is the best thing that ever happened,”

which is I love this song. It's a duet. And I didn't realize until you wrote it that it

had become a standard song at gay wedding. But let's hear this song. I love, I always thought it. I never thought it would happen like this. Give us a kiss. We may just be the best thing that has happened to us. Kid on partner. Another moment like this may not happen to us. Partner love her. When all is set and done, I have to agree. You are the best thing that's happened to me. That was the best thing that ever happened from the Sontheim musical Rojo. And my guest is Daniel O'Crant, author of the new book, Stephen Sontheim art isn't easy. So Sontheim collaborated on several like

key musicals with Hal Prince. They had a pretty complicated relationship. And he also had a very complicated relationship with Leonard Burnstine. So let's focus on one of them. You can choose. Let's talk about Burnstine. When the two met, Sontheim was 25 and he came in to sort of audition as a lyricist for West Side Story. And Burnstine, who was at that time, the best known non-rock musician in America by far. Television star, music star. Burnstine immediately embraced him and hired him, along with his collaborators on the show to write the lyrics. For this very unlikely show about

street gangs in New York in the mid to late 1950s. And they were a great combination. There are

“problems with the show. They both would perceive in later years, but I think anybody who's familiar with the”

score of West Side Story would say that it was a success. And from that moment on, Sontheim became part of the Burnstine social world, which was the Red Hot Center of the Creative World of New York. In fact, a world that Sontheim would later parody our satirized, I should say, that he would satirize in merely week and roll along. But at that time, he was taken in. He was taken in by everybody who mattered in the world of music and theater and books and dance. And he became very close to the

Burnstine family. But over the years, what was a wonderful collaboration and a loving friendship turned a little bit into rivalry and then it's soured toward the end of Burnstine's life. My supposition, and it's only a supposition, is that at the time that Sontheim's reputation as a composer was rising and had reached nearly reached its peak, Burnstine's reputation as a composer was plummeting. And the relationship changed. One was now a musical success. The other was now

somebody who was having a very hard time holding things together, musically and in many other

about Swiny Todd. He said, "The music made me want to throw up in my galashes." See, I can't imagine that because it's such a brilliant musical, such a groundbreaking musical. And Sontheim didn't like Burnstine's

“mass, but... No one did. That's what I'm going to say. He was drawn by a lot of people and not”

liking it. Yeah. But with Swiny, I think Terry, there's misperception. I don't think what he said. It makes me want to throw up on my galashes. He was commenting on the music. I think he was commenting to some degree on the subject matter, but mostly on his envy for Steve's success. I think it was killing him. That Steve was having success doing something that he could no longer do. You're right in the book that Sontheim described his songwriting process, not the lyrics,

but the musical part. As being built around chords, that the first thing that comes to him

is the chords. And then he adds the melody around that. And some of his chords were so

“interesting. And I'm going to go back to Swiny Todd for this because at the beginning of the show,”

it opens with this like really chilling organ solo. And it's one crazy chord after another. Like each chord has such a kind of demonic sound to it. And it just keeps building and building. So let's just hear a little bit of that. So that's the opening music from Swiny Todd, his musical about revenge. That's inspired by sounds like it's inspired by horror films in part.

Yeah, it's an amazing piece of work. And of course, that theme returns throughout the show

behind other songs for different purposes, but it haunts the show. He said harmony was everything.

“If you don't have the harmony, forget about the rest of it. And so he would sit at the keyboard”

and he would just noodle around with his fingers. And he would find these harmonies that seem to fit, to fit the theme, the subject matter, and even most importantly, the character who is singing the song. If you're just joining us, my guest is Daniel O'Crent, he's the author of the new book, Steven Sontheim, Art isn't easy. We have to take a short break here, and then we'll be right back. This is fresh air. On the next through line from NPR, the rupture between Iran and Israel,

through the story of Jewish Iranians. Happy Iran was the realization of our dreams as an ethnic minority who wants to develop Iran. Listen in the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I want to end the musical part of our discussion with one of the two songs that we're played at Sontheim's Memorial Service. And there were songs that he felt very deeply about.

One of them was someone in a tree from Pacific overtures. I show that didn't do well, and I show that most people don't know as well as he shows that do do well. I don't know the score

that well myself, but he had told me one of the first times I interviewed him that someone in a tree

from Pacific overtures was his favorite of all the songs he wrote. And you write when listening back to that song, he'd frequently tear up. So I want to play that song, but I'd like you to set it up for us. Pacific overtures is set in the middle of the 19th century when I'm think of this as an idea for a Broadway musical. Let's do a Broadway musical about the opening of Japan to Western Commerce in the 1850s. I mean, it sounds ridiculous for musical. I haven't loved the show deeply.

It may be my favorite of all the Sontheim shows. And in this particular scene, the American Adboro has come ashore to negotiate with the Japanese authorities, negotiate with many ships and cannons right behind him. So it's not the easiest of negotiations. And in the song, a young boy is in a tree. He's the someone in the tree who is hearing little bits and pieces of the conversation.

hears going on may not be the whole story. It is about an outsider trying to get in. And I believe that that would be a very short version of much of Stephen Sontheim's life. Even though it is not necessarily a beloved song by Sontheim fans, I think they we admire it and treasure it because it was so important to him. His collaborator, John Wydeman,

who had never written a Broadway show before Pacific overtures. And then collaborated with him

on two other shows. He said to me when I interviewed him that Steve cried at the time he wrote it.

“But he was still crying about it 40 years later. There's something in that that you need to pay”

attention to. And I think that what I pay attention to is the outsider trying to be in. Okay, let's hear it. Tell him what I see. I am in the tree. I am ten. I am in a tree. I was younger than. In between the ears I can see. Tell me what I see.

I was only ten.

I see man and Latin. Some are old. Some chatting.

If it happened I was there. I saw everything. I was someone in the tree. Tell him what I see. Some of them have gold on their coats. One of them has gold. That was someone in a tree from the Stevensonheim musical Pacific overtures. My guest Daniel O'Crant is the author of the new book. Stevensonheim art isn't easy.

“You know, I think your book could have been called genius isn't easy. Instead of art isn't easy.”

Art isn't easy as a quote from Sunday in the park with George. One of the lyrics.

But there's so many geniuses in your book and they're all such complicated people.

I guess they are. I may have overcomplicated them because I do so much research. I go so deep and I find things that inevitably lead to complication. You could do it with my life. I'm very, very, very easily. But it is true that in the theater community I think it goes without saying that emotions are on the surface. And even if you're trying to hide the emotions, the fact that you're trying to hide

them are on the surface. It's a very volatile world. And so the people I'm writing about in this book, not just Soundheim but also Prince and Bernstein and so many others, not a lot of easy personalities. So you said that the sound time book is going to be your last book.

“How does it feel to have sound time be the last book you've been writing?”

What was great about the sound time project was I wasn't going to make any money from it. It's published by a University Press. It's on a relatively arcane subject. Something that did because I was interested. And I had been interested in sound time for most of my adult life. And now here was the opportunity presented to me. Go find out everything about somebody that you admire greatly. And that was a pleasure. And I'm pleased enough as I hope

you are Terry. I'm pleased enough with this one to think, okay, I've done enough. Well, Daniel O'Cran has been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. You love Soundheim's music as much as I do, so it's great to share this with you Terry. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Daniel O'Cran says the author of the new book, "Steven Soundheim Art isn't easy."

After we take a short break, Bookritic Marine Caragon will review a new novel that reimagines an infamous clash of cultures. This is fresh air. On the next through line from NPR, the rupture between Iran and Israel through the story of Jewish Iranians. How people are now here and was the realisation of our dreams as an ethnic minority who wants

to develop Iran? Listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Mexican novelist Alvaro Anriga reimagined the 1519 meeting of Spanish explorer Hernán Cortez

Anriga's latest novel called Now I Surrender also reimagines an infamous clash of cultures.

“Our Bookritic Marine Caragon has a review.”

Before the captivity narrative about a Mexican woman abducted by the Apache in the mid-1800s, before the storyline about Iranimos surrender, before the torrent of details about the life

and peoples on the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the US, there's this first sentence.

In the beginning, things appear. Writing is a defiant gesture. We've long since gotten used to, where there was nothing, somebody put something, and now everybody sees it. For example, the Prairie. That's the opening of Alvaro Enrique's new novel called Now I Surrender. The words are spoken by Enrique himself. He appears throughout the novel as a writer traveling

“on a road trip through the southwest with his family. They're visiting sites that tell the”

story of the Apache fight for survival. That Prospero-like opening gives readers fair warning about how defiantly challenging, occasionally overblown, and at times magical, this epic novel is going to be. In the self-conscious, hallucinatory tradition of historical novelists like E.L. Doctoro and Don Delilo. Enrique keeps intrusively reminding us that this overpacked tale of the past is something he's constructing, as much as resurrecting. And like his predecessors, Enrique subscribes

to a paranoid reading of history. As a character in Libra, Delilo's novel about the Kennedy assassination says, "This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they

“aren't telling us." There's so much that official history hasn't told us about how the West”

was won, that Enrique here works furiously to fill in some of the silences. The novels most

engrossing, if brutal storyline, follows a young Mexican woman named Camilla. We first see her running

into the prairie after an Apache raid wipes out everyone else, living on her elderly husband's ranch. To give you a sense of how immediate and visual Enrique's writing can be, here's the moment when the Apache catch up with Camilla. She didn't look back, but she clearly heard a group of horses breaking away from the herd of running cattle and swerving toward her. When the dust raised by the pounding of the horses hooves began to sting her eyes, she threw herself on the ground and curled into a ball,

hoping to be trampled to death. Then she was yanked up by her braids, her neck wrenched,

her legs kicking, her brown under skirts of flower in the wind. Camilla's abduction spurs a second

narrative featuring a rag-tag search party assembled under a lieutenant colonel of the Mexican Republic. The searchers ride far into the vast territory that was once known as Apache Maria. Enrique tells us this ancient homeland of the various Apache tribes vanished before our eyes, like cassette tapes or incandescent light bulbs. Where Sonora, Chihuahua, Arizona and New Mexico meet today, was an Atlantis and in between country, and straddling it where the Mexicans and

the Gringos, like two children, eyes shut their backs to each other. While the Apache's scuttled back and forth between their legs, not sure where to go with strangers bubbling up everywhere, filling their lands. The end game for the Apache began in March 1886 when their great leader and Shaman, Geronimo, surrendered with a small band of warriors to the U.S. Army. According to the official transcript of that moment, Geronimo said, "Once I moved like the wind, now I surrender to you,

and that is all." Enrique's novel, which takes its title from Geronimo's eloquent words, loses some vitality when it focuses on the story of his surrender and afterlife as a prisoner of war and a curiosity. Geronimo appeared, for instance, at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis,

with such unscentimental admiration about Apacheuria, perhaps recounting the story of Geronimo's

fall felt more like a writerly duty than a desire. Now, I surrender has been described as a revisionist

“or alternative Western, which it is. But given its scope, I think it might be more app to call it”

an expandable Western. There's room for everyone in this epic of conquest and eradication,

Native Americans, Mexicans, Gringo's formerly enslaved people, immigrants, and one lone writer,

namely trying to tell their stories before the curtain comes down on the whole enterprise. Marine Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Now I Surrender"

“by Alvaro Enrique. Tomorrow on fresh air, we'll talk about the latest developments in the war”

in Iran and its spread to other countries and the straight of her moves. Our guests will be

Karim Sajadpur, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He says, "President Trump was hoping things would work out like they did in Venezuela, where the vice president, Elsie Rodriguez, became president and his cooperating with Trump, but instead Trump may have produced another Kim Jong-un." I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews,

follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh air's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Philis Meyers and Rebuildenado Lauren Crenzel Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thia-Challa-Nur, Sizzan Ykundi, and Abelman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler.

“Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nespar. Remember to shore up, directs the show.”

Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. On the next through line from NPR, the rupture between Iran and Israel, through the story of Jewish Iranians. Happy to Iran was the realization of our dreams as an ethnic minority who wants to develop Iran. Listen in the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts.