Mirror, Mirror

Liber Amoris: or, The New Pygmalion, by William Hazlitt (1823).
The hilariously squalid (and strangely affecting) record of the great nineteenth-century critic's erotic obsession with his landlady's daughter. Mother and daughter conspired to milk him for everything they could get. No one has written better about falling catastrophically in love with someone you know is completely unworthy of you.

A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin, by Bianca Lamblin (1996).
A Jamesian parable set among Left Bank glitterati. Though not ostensibly written "out of revenge or retaliation," Lamblin's book is in fact a sapphic J'accuse! directed at Simone de Beauvoir. In the late 1930s, when Lamblin was a mixed-up lycée student, the Turbaned One seduced her ("both intellectually and sexually") and then handed her off—with breathtaking nonchalance—to her lover Sartre. He was just as vile, and not much to look at either. Quel bordel!

A Madman's Manifesto, by August Strindberg (1895). Strindberg intended this scabrous roman à clef about his tormented marriage to the actress and feminist Siri von Essen to serve as a suicide note. He got cold feet about killing himself but decided to humiliate her anyway by publishing this devil's banquet of unseemly allegations. (He accused Von Essen of promiscuity, drunkenness, and lesbianism.) A more loathsome yet absorbing example of misogynistic dementia would be hard to find.

Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper, by Art and Laurie Pepper (1979).
An American genius going down the toilet. Some think Pepper the greatest jazz saxophonist after Charlie Parker. His chronicle (dictated to his last wife) of thievery, heroin addiction, balling dumb chicks, and serving five years in San Quentin is a rhapsodic riff on self-destruction. It is also one of the greatest, saddest autobiographies ever written.

Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche, by Ben Macintyre (1992).
The intrepid Macintyre took a boat trip into the Paraguayan jungle in 1991 in search of the surviving inhabi-tants of Nueva Germania—an abortive "Aryan" colony founded in the late nineteenth century by the ghastly Elisabeth Nietzsche, racist sister of the philosopher. He found a weird village of unreconstructed white supremacists—inbred, half mad, many of them still speaking a kind of zombie German—and heard some curious and frightening stories about Josef Mengele. A true-life Heart of Darkness.

If Trump were right to blame all of his problems on messaging, perhaps the smooth-talking businessman could solve them. But he’s not.

Watching Anthony Scaramucci’s formal introduction as White House communications director on Friday, it was clear why President Trump wanted him for the gig.

Even though he’s never worked as a spokesman for anyone other than himself (and a great spokesman he was, bringing wide renown to an underachieving hedge fund), Scaramucci looked at home behind the lectern in the White House Briefing Room. Moreover, he was everything that Sean Spicer—the long-suffering press secretary who announced his resignation today—was not.

Where Spicer was nervous, tentative, and likely to stumble over his words, Scaramucci was smooth, relaxed, and confident. Where Spicer’s suits were often ill-fitting, Scaramucci was sharply tailored. Where Spicer was a career cog in the Republican machine, Scaramucci is a swaggering New Yorker who speaks in the same clunky business pidgin as the president and can drop names nearly as prodigiously too. (Goldman Sachs, Yankees president Randy Levine, and Harvard Law School were a few of Scaramucci’s mentions during his brief spell at the mic.) Where Spicer’s professions of praise for the president always seemed mousy, pleading, perhaps a little browbeaten, Scaramucci brought the sincere sycophancy that comes from truly adoring Donald Trump. When did Spicer ever say he “loves” the president?