Alexander Nemerov is the author most recently of The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s (Princeton, 2023), a series of tales each centering on a visionary experience in the last years of America as a heavily forested land. Praised by Annie Proulx (“deeply beautiful,” “astonishingly tender,” “one of the richest books ever to come my way”) and Edmund de Waal (“moving and shocking and beautiful, an extraordinary achievement”), The Forest conjures a lost world of shade and sun. Nemerov’s previous book, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, was short-listed for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography. He teaches art history at Stanford University.
My father was there, the photograph says to me directly. But he was also not there. Not only not visible in the photograph—which, taken from the wing, shows no hunched shoulder or flying cap to indicate the person pressing the firing button—but not there at all. Concentrating, yes; in fear for his life, yes. Supremely there, of course, while the shipboard German gunners sprayed flak at him and he dropped his powerful twin-engine airplane into a dive. But also absent, in a reverie.