I’m Sorry You Got Mad, written by Kyle Lukoff and illustrated by Julie Kwon

A picture-book apology triumph! The story — told entirely in handwritten notes passed by a little boy, a teacher, and a little girl — is best for kids age 4–8. Could this be the youngest intended audience ever for a fully epistolary novel? Could be!

The first spread shows a seething little boy hurling a piece of paper that says SORRY on it into a trash can. The second spread shows the kid, still steaming, slumped furiously at his classroom desk with his eyes narrowed and his arms crossed, surrounded by an abused, crumbly eraser and a bunch of crumpled pieces of paper. An all-caps note on lined paper hovering above his head reads “SORRY, ZOE. —JACK.”

Now we know the main character’s name is Jack and it sure seems as if he’s being forced to apologize. The book’s artist, Julie Kwon, is amazing at physically depicting RAGE. We see Jack rabidly (and apparently LOUDLY) sharpening a pencil while other kids look on in alarm. And we see Jack following the instructions on the whiteboard to PAINT YOUR FEELINGS, as he furiously Pollocks all over his paper and spatters a fellow student.

 

 

Rage-sharpening.

Today let’s look at a B+ apology and see how it could have been an A apology.

The Portland Art Museum in Oregon recently tweeted this statement:

Our first reaction: Booting an indigenous woman wearing an indigenous child-carrier from your museum’s show of indigenous art is a BAD LOOK…but this is a decent apology.

Let’s run it by our 6.5 elements of a good apology, shall we?

The museum’s statement uses the word “apologize” (#1) rather than “regret.” (That’s good! An apology should focus on the feelings of the person harmed; “regret” instead focuses on the feelings of the person/museum that did the harming.) The statement also names the offense (#2). It shows understanding of why what the museum employee did was wrong (#3). It doesn’t make excuses (#4). It discusses what steps are being taken to ensure that this won’t happen again (#5). Reaching out to the woman who was ejected from the museum was the right thing to do; we presume this involved making an offer of repair (#6).

And we’d like to think that listening (#6.5) is ongoing.

Because it sounds like some things still need to be addressed.

What’s missing? According to other sources (aka the woman who was thrown out), the museum staffer didn’t merely cite the no-backpacks policy. The staffer told the mother that the carrier was unsafe for the baby as well as for the art. (Way to blithely insult traditional Karuk child-wearing garb!) She told the mother to “cool down, take a deep breath” when the mother objected to this treatment and noted white institutions’ history of racism. The staffer then observed, “cool item, though” to the mother (immediately after telling her that her carrier was dangerous for her baby—condescending much?). The museum’s apology should have acknowledged that the staffer’s words and attitude — not just her actions — were wrong.

Further, while a no-backpacks policy is common in the museum world and makes good sense (people with overstuffed backpacks frequently bonk other people and things, displaying zero clue about how far they’re intruding into the space of others — ask Snarly, an NYC subway rider, how she knows this), it seems that at the Portland Art Museum, at least, the backpack policy is selectively enforced. A Portland community group called Revolution Rising tweeted a photo of Oregon’s former governor, Kate Brown, visiting the museum with a backpack on, and noted the sheer number of social media images of museum visitors wearing backpacks. In a truly thorough apology, the museum should have noted that the rules were being selectively enforced.

Finally, people deserve to know whether the staffer was disciplined. The public does not need to know this person’s name, but they do have the right to expect that she experienced consequences for her actions. According to The Oregonian, the museum has declined to say whether she was reprimanded. That’s unfortunate.

All this said: The museum is doing a lot of things right. Reviewing backpack policies and acknowledging the racism involved in kicking this woman out are both excellent steps. It’s important for us to point out when people and institutions do things right, as well as when they do things wrong. Encouraging them when they get a lot of the way there helps them do still better moving forward.

We’ve seen museums worldwide start to wrestle with their shameful histories, confronting how they’ve treated indigenous people, enslaved people, and conquered people. Meaningful education—for museums and for the public—comes from listening to folks who were previously treated as voiceless primitives or sources of treasure with no rights to their own heritage. Plenty of work remains to be done, as this apology shows. It’s not everything we’d wish. But kudos to the Portland Museum for a good apology…along with the hope that they’ll turn it into an excellent one.

SorryWatch recently saw a delightful gallery show called “Mistakes Were Made.” In it, artist Jennifer Dalton explores her interest in the faux-sincerity and sameness of bad public apologies.

The show is at a tiny gallery called Mother-in-Law’s in Germantown, NY. A line of commercially sold apology-themed doormats (“the house was clean yesterday; sorry you missed it!” and “sorry if you trip over my weiner,” with a silhouette of a dachshund) leads to the door of a cabin set up like a Hallmark store. The interior brims with apology-related tchotchkes like “totes sorry” tote bags and “I’m sorry about this mug; it doesn’t fix any real problems” mugs. A millennial pink wall (its own design cliché!) sports multiple signs quoting snippets of real celebrity apologies (including those of Jeffrey Toobin, Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong, and Kevin Spacey); SorryWatch had (bitter) fun trying to remember who said what.

Which sticker is more YOU?

The signs are rendered in the faux-authentic, not-actually-handcrafted style of wooden home-décor signs often seen in lake houses and beach-town cottages. These plaques spout ubiquitous, cheesy, “live, laugh, love”-style phrases (see also: “but first, coffee,” “this kitchen is for dancing” and “it’s wine o’clock”—all those links lead to TikToks mocking the aesthetic) rendered in fake-intimate swooping “bridesmaid” script and a few equally affected, boxy, faux-industrial fonts.

Why was Dalton interested in (to quote Mother-in-Law’s press release), “the faux artisanal aesthetic of a product that has ‘handmade’ printed on its packaging meets the ersatz sincerity and false warmth of words composed by professional crisis managers”?

Dalton told SorryWatch, “I need to go in towards the thing that bothers me. And this aesthetic has been really bothering me! This rustic wood thing in your airbnb that someone bought at Michael’s feels of a piece with the fake-sentimentality of the horrible, looping wedding font. It’s this sanctioned way for any sentiment to look cute. And I was thinking about why I hated the font so much, and then there was the fakeness and sameness of public apologies. This ‘we need to be authentic and our true self’ thing, but it’s all the same. I’m interested in faux sincerity in both form and content.”

Guess who? It’s Bill Clinton!

In addition to the signs, Dalton installed a giant, working gumball machine filled with dozens of plastic bubbles. Some of the bubbles contain Hershey kisses; some contain rubber bracelets with “it’s not you, it’s me” inscribed on them; others contain rubber bracelets saying “it’s not me, it’s you.” And one bubble contained something else. “I put one heartfelt, handwritten apology from me in there,” she said. “I can’t see it now, but I think I would have heard if someone had gotten it.” One woman fed quarter after quarter into the machine, hoping for a bracelet but getting Kisses.

You pays your money and you takes your chance

SorryWatch purchased several greeting cards depicting the signs in the gallery. Several of the designs were sold out, including “There are actions and behaviors in my past that were hurtful.” (That was Former Virginia governor Ralph Northam apologizing for doing blackface—he survived the scandal, as did Louis CK, also represented in the show; Dalton was once a big Louis CK fan. Like SorryWatch, Dalton observes that “cancellation” tends to be a talking point rather than an actuality when one is a powerful man.)

This project, Dalton notes, is a little different from her usual work. “It’s a little less quasi-scientific,” she said. “I usually go into counting things, statistics.” (One of her past projects was called “What Does an Artist Look Like?” a decade-long experiment in which Dalton took every photograph of every type of artist published in the New Yorker and ranked each photo on a scale of “genius” to “pinup”—“because I feel that’s the axis they fall on: either you’re hunched over a stack of books with a cigarette or you’re tits-up in the bath,” she observed drily. “This drove me up a tree.”)

“People think the show is all about ‘#MeToo,’ but it’s not,” Dalton continued. “There are apologies here for all kinds of offenses.” SorryWatch leaves it to you to discuss why there are so many more terrible public apologies from men.

However, not all the apologies in the show are terrible. Amid all the foulness is a cabinet of glowing glass candles, each printed with a quote from an apology Dalton felt was good. These include “Without qualification or excuse, I apologize for the harm I caused” (Elizabeth Warren, apologizing for having identified as Native American) and “If you lie to yourself, you can lie to everybody” (TV writer/producer Dan Harmon, apologizing for sexually harassing a former employee).

The show closes on August 21, the day after SorryWatch is finally publishing this post (after visiting at the end of July—we’re sorry!). But Dalton is hoping to continue and expand on the project. “I feel this could be the beginning of delving deeper into the way I work statistically,” she said. “I’m going to count up all the cards and see which ones sold the best and see if I can draw conclusions. And ultimately what I’d love to do is categorize the different apologies by the mechanisms behind them— the passive tense, the self-wallowing—and graph them. I’d like to ramp it up and do a visual schematic where you can see the different fake apology strategies.”

Artist with gallery visitors

Snarly and Sumac are both drawn to kintsugi, in which broken ceramics are repaired in a way that the cracks are still visible. The fixed piece feels like a new, quirky, precious thing! To us, that’s a wonderful metaphor for apology. A good apology doesn’t pretend that the harm never happened. It doesn’t try to hide anything. It doesn’t rush to say, “let’s move on.” It takes time and attention to mend a fissure, but the result can be stronger, more individualized, and more exquisite than the original.

Kintsugi artist Naoko Fukumaru, whose pieces Snarly has long admired online, kindly consented to chat with SorryWatch about her work. Born in Kyoto, Naoko graduated from West Dean College in Chichester, England in 2000 with a masters in Ceramics and Glass Conservation and Restoration. She worked in traditional, invisible restoration for over two decades, helping to repair Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the Tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt, Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, paintings by Caravaggio, murals by Diego Rivera and Yoko Ono, and Greek and Roman works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. In the last few years, however, she’s focused on kintsugi. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

SW: First, what is Kintsugi?

NF: It is the art of golden joinery. In Japan, we have been restoring ceramics and celebrating imperfection this way for over 500 years. People think kintsugi is glued with gold, but it’s not. Only the surface of the kintsugi has gold. It uses urushi lacquer, which is made from a kind of tree sap and can conserve things longer because it’s a protective material with antibacterial properties. It can stand heat and cold and acid and alkaline. It takes up to four weeks to cure. Our modern world is very speedy, with everything moving so fast. Instant glue, instant food, fast Internet. But kintsugi requires patience.

SW: What drew you to this practice?

NF: I am from a third-generation antique auction family. When I was a little child, I was always going to my father’s company because there were so many wonderful, mysterious objects. One day he was teaching me how to make a special box. I thought I did well but when he lifted the box my knot came apart and the plate inside smashed on the floor. I was very upset. But he didn’t blame me because he knew I did my best.

Many years later, when I started studying conservation of ceramics, he sent me a box with that plate inside. He said, ‘Use it as practice.’ I said, ‘I remember this plate!’ He had kept it for years and years. First, I restored the plate with hidden restoration, which I was learning, and then again later, with kintsugi. I think, “I don’t want to hide my mistakes because my father didn’t blame me, and he kept it, and sent it to me!” The story continues and continues.

When I was in school in England, my father told me for the first time that my great-grandfather went with a wheelbarrow to people’s houses receiving broken items. He was ashamed that his grandfather was a garbageman. But I was amazed when he told me this! I sometimes use a wheelbarrow in my work too.

SW: Why are you more drawn to damaged ceramics than other kinds of antiques?

NF: Compared to a painting, which we hang on a wall and look at, ceramics are something we use every day. We drink, we eat, we touch. It’s like family or a friend. And when it breaks, we are so sad — it’s like we broke a friend or family. I want to restore not only the physical ceramics, but also the hearts of people, because they get so broken. I also come back to my childhood, to my father rescuing broken ceramics; we used them every day at home. I grew up eating off beautiful ceramics with chips and cracks. I was fed baby food from broken Imari ceramics!

I’m not interested in complete ceramics. Everyone can appreciate complete ceramics! But if something is broken, people think it’s useless, the end of life. I love to put my love and care into something broken. I witness the process, and I witness people saying, ‘This is more beautiful than before.’ People ask for my work for apologies. I make people happier in the way that apologies do.

SW: You sent me a beautiful article you wrote for a local magazine in which you said, “Because Kintsugi does not hide damages, we can accept our mistakes and imperfections. People can overcome their traumas and sufferings when they realize they can find beauty in imperfection. Kintsugi teaches us how to forgive ourselves and others and how to make a better world by applying the Kintsugi philosophy to everyday life.”

NF: Broken ceramics are often the result of our mistakes. Kintsugi can switch negative feelings about mistakes to positive. When we say sorry —and not fake sorry! really deep sorry, from the heart! — we thank the mistake because it can make our relationship become much stronger.

SW: I love “we thank the mistake.” You also said, “Sometimes I metamorphose from a Kintsugi artist into a ceramic therapist transforming trauma into beauty with Kintsugi.”

NF: People are traumatized often, coming to me: “This was my great-grandfather’s; this was a family treasure…” and they’re nearly crying. And when I fix it, they say this is magic!

Witnessing transformation and overcoming trauma is healing for me. Damage and breaking things, it’s normal. Everyone has trauma. People try to pretend they’re OK — there’s so much pressure on us to pretend we are OK! — or pretend nothing happened, but we can find beauty in what is broken. It’s not just overcoming; it’s making beauty from how we’re hurt or different. We can apply kintsugi in our lives, asking, ‘how can I make this relationship stronger? How can I apologize?’

SW: It’s also important to note that some things can’t be fixed. We talk about this at SorryWatch – the pressure to forgive can be so harmful. Not everything is forgivable. Has kintsugi helped you think about when something can be fixed and when it can’t, in life as well as in art?

NF: I tried for 20 years to fix my relationship. I lived with domestic violence. A year after I arrived in Canada, I was evacuated to a women’s shelter. But I’m not regretting. I did my best. I have two children. That makes things harder. What I would really regret is if I never tried.

SW: You recently had a huge kintsugi exhibit called “Imperfect Offerings.”

NF: In the summer of 2021, at Richmond Art Gallery, I created the largest Kintsugi exhibition ever in North America. There were over 200 works, some traditional ceramics but some very different works using local materials from where I live. Sea urchins from the Okeover Inlet, barnacles and blackberry thorns from Divers Rock in Lund, crab shells from Thunder Bay, forest mushrooms, a rock from Gibsons Beach, an egg from Save-On-Foods.

SW: These works are so beautiful, but I see a lot of humor there too.

NF: Yes! Humor is so important!

SW: Tell SorryWatch readers the cat story!

NF: The story is that my friend found a sea urchin shell in the ocean, and it was broken in three pieces, and I asked to use it for a kintsugi experiment, the first time I tried using kintsugi with natural materials. He said yes, so I brought the three pieces home and put them on my shelf. During the night my two cats decided to eat them. In the morning, I found fragments all over on the floor and some parts were missing. Because they ate them. I was very sad. But after I started applying kintsugi I found they were more beautiful, and I could apply stitching work to the missing part they ate, and we can see the beautiful structure inside because parts are missing.” That is my collaboration with cats. If they didn’t eat it, the piece wouldn’t have become that beautiful.

SW: You actually asked the first question in this interview, not me. You asked how to say my name and what it means. I told you that “Marjorie” literally means “pearl” – originally from the Hebrew Margalit. But I think your name is much more meaningful.

NF: My first name, “Naoko”: “Nao” means cure, heal, fix, restore, and “ko” means child or woman. My last name, “Fukumaru”: Fuku” means good fortune and “maru” means circle. I am a woman who restores good fortune to the world. I want to continue to connect fragments, people, and the world.

…how about some more book-related apologies?

As you probably know, apology fans have been raving about Reading In A Bar guy, aka New Jersey food & culture writer Jeremy Schneider, who infuriated Twitter with 15 simple words: “Please know, if you’re someone who brings a book to a bar…no one likes you.”

After three days of objections, venom, and general mockery — including feedback from bartenders saying that they DO SO like bar-readers, who they count among their easiest customers — Schneider revisited his tweet.

His thread begins here:

After three days of reflecting on this tweet and an evening spent reading at a bar, I have some thoughts.

— Jeremy Schneider (@J_Schneider) February 9, 2022

And it’s good! Schneider names the offense, makes it clear he understands why it offended, notes that he was wrong. He tells us he tried reading at the bar himself, thus putting himself in the shoes of those he peeved. He notes his own bias — he had a friend who ostentatiously read at a bar to pick up girls — and acknowledged that this colored his perspective. He listened to people (not said, but probably mostly women) who said they read at bars so as not to be hit on.

Schneider’s tweets do not constitute the greatest apology in the universe in part because he doesn’t explicitly point out the gender imbalances at play. He also makes the thread a little too much about HIM. But it intrigues us that so many people sent us his apology. Sometimes it’s hard to know why online mishegas gets traction, but we suspect that people loved this apology because it was funny as well as self-abasing, explicit, and rare in its I WAS WRONG-ness. It was relatively short, simple but satisfying.

It is, however, not the best apology for being a douche about other people’s reading habits. That honor goes to comedian Paul Scheer, who in 2018 tweeted mockingly about the genre of hockey-focused romance novels. Scheer discovered that Romance Twitter is not to be fucked with. But instead of reacting with a hat trick of defensiveness, bluster, and “get a sense of humor, embarrassingly horny ladies,” he reacted thoughtfully AND with real humor. He researched hockey romance, bought one by the author whose book he’d mocked (tweeting a picture of the receipt), and live-tweeted his enthusiastic reading of it. Alas, the resultant thread has since been deleted, but we covered the whole delightful saga when it happened.

Again, the man did the thing he’d initially sneered at. His apology consciously brought attention and praise to the female-coded activity he’d been snotty about. He provided major compensatory entertainment to romance-novel readers. He apologized to the author as well as to the public. The apology ticked all six (and a half) SorryWatch good-apology boxes:

1. Say you’re sorry
2. For what you did (NAME IT)
3. Show why you understand it was bad
4. Don’t make excuses
5. Say why it won’t happen again.

6. Offer to make up for it.

AND 6.5. LISTEN.

Paul Scheer is not as famous a writer as John Steinbeck, but he is better at saying he’s sorry. Steinbeck, who unaccountably did not write any hockey romances, apologized back in the day for his breakout 1935 novel Tortilla Flat. (Pause to shout out Providence, RI’s 48-year-old Mexican party bar Tortilla Flats, and pour one out for the West Village’s late, lamented 35-year-old dive bar Tortilla Flats, which closed in 2018.) (Why are the bars named Tortilla Flats when the book is Tortilla Flat? We do not know. We are but a humble apology blog.)

“’Thou knowest not what bitches women are,’ Danny said wisely.”

Snarly read Tortilla Flat for this post; she had not read Steinbeck since “The Pearl” and “The Red Pony” in junior high and The Grapes of Wrath in high school. (Perhaps she will go read East of Eden at a bar.) Tortilla Flat is not great. It is very dated, very white dude. It romanticizes young, physical, ambiguously ethnic men drinking, stealing, and … Snarly was going to say “whoring” but we don’t even know enough about the women in this book to know if they’re professionals or enthusiastic amateurs. They are all either sluts or mothers, except for that one who is both. Some even get to have names! Also, “Jew” is used as both a verb and a noun, and the book’s Chinese character is named Chin Kee.

Steinbeck clearly loved his swarthy, indolent, hard-drinking “paisanos” (they are “a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and assorted Caucasian bloods,” he informs us helpfully) and their tight but not at all homoerotic friendships. They’re supposedly based loosely on the Knights of the Round Table. Steinbeck got upset when he felt his heroes were being condescended to. Alas, he did not entirely understand by whom. In an introduction to a reprint of the book in 1937, he wrote:

When this book was written, it did not occur to me that paisanos were curious or quaint, dispossessed or underdoggish. They are people whom I know and like, people who merge successfully with their habitat. Had I known that these stories and these people would be considered quaint, I think I never should have have written them…I wrote these stories because they were true stories and because I liked them. But literary slummers have taken these people up with the vulgarity of duchesses who are amused and sorry for a peasantry. These stories are out, and I cannot recall them. But I shall never again subject to the vulgar touch of the decent these good people of laughter and kindness, of honest lusts and direct eyes, of courtesy beyond politeness. If I have done them harm by telling a few of their stories, I am sorry. It will not happen again.

 Steinbeck apologizes, but he blames readers (“literary slummers”!) for misunderstanding his work and being patronizing about the paisanos’ crystalline purity (their “honest lusts and direct eyes”!). This is the equivalent of a comedian apologizing for the fact that audiences do not “get” his edgy humor. Steinbeck pulls a literal “sorry if.” Then he flounces metaphorically out of the room; NO MORE PAISANO STORIES FOR YOU! Steinbeck himself is actually blameless; he has only told a few of the paisanos’ stories. (Why, he is not even a novelist! He is but these people’s amanuensis! He is only presenting them in their own words, as they are! ¡Claro que sí!) Sure, “merge successfully with their habitat” sounds a little Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a little dehumanizing, but that’s on you, duchess. (Oh, hey, another gendered term.)

Let’s end this post on a hopeful note, with an unabashedly good literary apology. Author Alex Gino apologized for the title of their bestselling middle-grade novel George, the story of a 10-year-old kid who everyone thinks is a boy but isn’t. (It’s delightful, by the way. Funny, sweet, not didactic.) In the book, the main character Melissa wants to play Charlotte in the class production of Charlotte’s Web, but her teacher says she can’t because she’s a boy. Can Melissa and her best friend Kelly make everyone understand who Melissa really is? (Guess.)

Gino had titled their manuscript Girl George. But their publisher, Scholastic, felt that today’s kids wouldn’t get the reference to gender-bending glam rocker Boy George. And conventional wisdom has it that one-word titles sell. Gino’s rock-star editor, David Levithan (who is an acclaimed queer young adult author in his spare time), also pointed out that the word “girl” in the title might keep boys from reading the book. “The concern wasn’t just that boys would self-censor,” Gino wrote on their blog in 2018, “but that adult gatekeepers wouldn’t give boys a chance to make that decision in the first place. Aha, I thought, sneaky feminism. My favorite!”

Indeed, conventional wisdom says that boys will not read books about girls, but girls will read books about boys. This may be why there are so many more kids’ books with boy protagonists than girl protagonists. Boys are not encouraged to read about girls…even when they want to. Conventional wisdom is not wise about everything.

Gino wasn’t thrilled about the title change, but they were a first-time author; they didn’t feel comfortable pushing back. Once the book became a huge hit, though, the title kept weighing on them. Their apology, like the book, is written in kid-friendly language:

I made a mistake when I named my first published middle grade novel. A big mistake. I used a name for my main character that she doesn’t like for herself (i.e. George, the title of the book) instead of her actual name. My main character’s name is Melissa, and I apologize to her, to the larger trans community, and to all of my readers for the error. I’m sorry.

 

She is not real, so I can’t hurt her feelings, but the title of my book makes it seem as though it is ever okay to use an old name for a person when they have provided you with a different name that works better for them. I want to be clear – it isn’t.

 

I know. The cover is beautiful. Iconic, even. But here’s the thing: so many transgender people have been told that we are beautiful/handsome as a reason not to transition, myself included. We are told that we will mar something special, as though looking pleasant to others is more important than being ourselves. As if it’s not more important than seeing who’s really there, scars and all.

Gino went on to explain that when they began writing their manuscript in 2003, “the idea that a trans kid would be listened to and allowed to be themselves was mostly an impossible dream for most of us.” (Today, many folks are more understanding, accepting, and embracing of trans kids. But as trans kids become more visible and accepted, other folks try to push them back. Snarly herself could be put in jail if she lived in Texas, fwiw.) In the time leading up to publication, Gino didn’t understand just how big a problem the new title was. Now they did.

Using the hashtag #SharpieActivism, Gino suggested that the book’s readers change the title themselves, adding:

I can’t change the system, but I can change my actions. I can’t change every cover, but I can change mine. And you can change yours too. (Note: I can only endorse fixing copies you own.)

 

So maybe part of the process of reading Melissa’s Story (for now, at least) is to get to the end and fix the title yourself. Call it interactive reading. Heck, when you give Melissa’s Story as a gift, include a permanent marker.

 

So fix your copy! Do it up! Creativity is queer!

Amended cover by an 8th grader

Gino shared images of reader-revamped covers on their blog. Community is powerful! Scholastic paid attention. And in October 2018, the publisher officially renamed the book Melissa. On the Scholastic web site, there are now downloadable covers and stickers that readers can use to revamp their existing copies. Newer copies have the newer title. The book is findable in library catalogues under both its former and current names.

Yay, another bookcentric apology that ticks all the SorryWatch boxes! May there be many more.

There’s a letter from Edgar Allan Poe, now in the collection of the University of Virginia, which contains an evasive little apology. The 1842 letter is to J and HG Langley, publishers of the Democratic Review, for whom he’d written before.

Poe, a Baltimore resident, had apparently done the writerly thing of Going To New York To Meet People in Publishing, and also met up with his lawyer/poet friend Wallace, as you will see.

Here’s the letter, transcribed by Sumac after peering at photos on the Internet:

Gentlemen,

Enclosed I have the honor to send you an article which I should be pleased if you would accept for the “Democratic Review”. I am desperately pushed for money; and, in the event of Mr O’Sullivan’s liking the “Landscape-Garden”, I would take it as an especial favor if you would mail me the amount due for it, so as to reach me here by the 21st, in which day I shall need it. Can you possibly oblige me in this? If you accept the paper I presume you will allow me your usual term, whatever that is for similar contributions – but I set no price – leaving all to your own liberality….

 

Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behavior while in N. York? You must have conceived a queer idea of me — but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying. The Review of Dawes which I offered you was [deficient?] in a 1/2 page of commencement, which I had written to supersede the old beginning, which gave the article the character of a general and introspective view. No wonder you did not take it – I should have been very much mortified if you [had?]. I hope to see you at some future time, under better auspices.

In the meantime I remain

Yours very truly,

E.A. Poe

It’s not clear if leaving off the beginning of the “Review of Dawes” (a poet) was because Poe was drunk, or if he didn’t explain it at the time because he was drunk, or maybe it fell on the floor and bourbon made the ink run, and maybe Poe didn’t just didn’t remember. Maybe it was a simple oversight that could happen to the most sober and meticulous writer. The Democratic Review didn’t take “Landscape-Garden,” but Poe sold it to the Ladies’ Companion.

Not a great apology. He’s honest about his drunkenness, but blames it on Wallace. Poets, right? Nope, SorryWatch knows fine poets who don’t get smashed when they meet with publishers. But whatever the Langleys thought of Poe’s “behavior while in N. York,” that should’ve been irrelevant to whether they wanted to run “Landscape-Garden.” It’s not like he worked in their office….

The Raving

Once upon a pubcrawl cheery, as I networked, kinda bleary,

Over many a minty julep Wallace made the barkeep pour –

As I pitched, me so needy, wanting payment dreadful speedy,

I saw wealthy eyebrows raising, raising as I drank one more.

“Just – I need the bucks,” I muttered, sucking daring from one more,

“Only that, and nothing more.”

Langley told me, “Listen, Eddie – my, this bourbon’s rather heady –

“Your writing is so dark – so edgy! – that we always ask for more

“We’ll look at your m.s., baby, if it’s good we’ll run it maybe —

“You might want to cut back drinking, stinking writers are a bore –

“A Review of Dawes?” he murmured, blinking as I downed one more –

“Could be fun, if nothing more.

“Hear me out, Al, Eddie, honey, yes I know you need the money,

“Write us some poems! Put a bird in! Say, bourbon costs less at the store –

“If you don’t slow down, you’ll be sorry – here, eat some calamari –

“Verse with dead girls, verse with birds, words to chill us to the core,

“Publish that we would,” he gabbled, “Love your work, I underscore!

“But a staff job? Nevermore!”

When you think of that night, be merciful.

It was recently discovered that the late author Roald Dahl’s family had added a note to his web site. It was hidden, as Washington Post’s Ron Charles noted, “like a Golden Ticket hidden inside a Wonka Bar.” (The note took Snarly seven minutes to find, even though she was looking for it — it’s in a small box midway down the “About Us” page.)

It reads as follows:

Apology by Mr. Harry Wormwood.

This is a bad apology. First of all, we cannot apologize for others’ conduct, only for our own. The Dahl family could have apologized for profiting from their antisemitic relative’s work, but they have no standing to apologize for that relative’s views. Especially since they distance themselves from his unpleasantness even as they hand-wring over it; see the phrases “incomprehensible to us” and “stand in marked contrast to the man we knew.” Well, bully for you, Dahl family! It’s perfectly LOVELY that Roald was perfectly lovely to you! Hitler was perfectly lovely to his German Shepherd, Blondi!

Speaking of Hitler, Dahl once said in an interview, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity…even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” Well then! He also railed against “those powerful American Jewish bankers.” called the American government “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions,” and said that Jews owned the media.

The note doesn’t say, thankfully, that the family had no idea Dahl held these views, which were pretty common knowledge. (Snarly is still horrified that around two years ago, she met a nice woman at a family concert with a lovely daughter named Matilda, and blurted, “Oh, we almost named my second kid Matilda! But then we didn’t because Roald Dahl was a horrible antisemite!” The nice woman blanched, Snarly stammered for a bit about how Matilda was still a beautiful name and a great literary character, and then Snarly slunk off to the bar.)

Dahl, who was in constant pain from a war injury and had a life filled with tragedies (WHICH IS NOT AN EXCUSE), including losing a child to measles before there was a vaccine, having another child seriously hurt and left with brain damage after a car accident, and coping with the severe stroke of his wife Patricia Neal (who called him “Roald the Rotten”), was unpleasant in a multitude of ways. He was repeatedly unfaithful in marriage, screamed at his loved ones (his granddaughter Sophie referred to him as “a difficult man…roaring around the house), and oh yes, originally wrote the Oompa Loompas as near-naked Black pygmy savages imported from Africa to work in the chocolate factory. When the NAACP threatened to boycott the impending movie, Dahl called this “real Nazi stuff.” (Why, it was cancel culture! And just as in most cases of cancel culture, Dahl was not actually cancelled!) The Oompa Loompas turned tangerine; the movie went on; the Dahl estate still rakes in a ton of money.)

The Dahl family’s apology refers to “prejudiced remarks” but doesn’t say what they were. This minimizes them and dulls their impact. Saying “that’s not the man we knew!” is not only weaselly (Patricia Neal and Sylvie Dahl clearly knew that man), but also hurtful, because it implies that someone who could be lovely can’t also be vicious. An honest apology could have said that Dahl was a complicated, sometimes loathsome man capable of creating wonderful stories. Even children can understand complexity and darkness. (Hence the popularity of Dahl’s work. The Witches and James and the Giant Peach in particular are full of loss, fury, bleakness and terror.) A toothless statement like “We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words” is dismaying. First, because it is an awkwardly written sentence. This is an ironic bummer given that it’s about the power of words. Second, because the statement says nothing. How does Dahl’s “absolute worst” remind us of the impact of words if you won’t tell us what those words were?

The Dahls can’t apologize for Roald’s words, but they can apologize for profiting from them. Donate some of that shmoney to organizations that combat antisemitism and prejudice. Remedy the fact that no one from the family reached out to any Jewish organizations before publishing their pallid statement.

The family is clearly charitable, though Snarly had trouble figuring out exactly what the existing Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity does: it solicits donations for its work involving children’s nurses, but what does that mean? Drilling down several levels into the RoaldDahl.com site shows that the charity has funded 79 pediatric nurses in the UK. Which is great! Snarly could not find an accounting for precisely how the money is spent, but it surely exists off the site. (We are an apology site, not Charity Navigator.)

There is also a prominently touted “Marvellous Nurse Inventing Room,” funding research projects pitched by nurses. Also cool!

But the Room ran from 2014-1017, even though the web site design makes this look like an ongoing project. Again, Snarly is unclear on how much money it gave away. (Even the Executive Summary doesn’t say.) So it would be good to be more transparent, and to expand the charity’s range of causes and recipients in a way that’s relevant to this apology.

SO! Back to SorryWatch’s rules! 1. Use the word “sorry” or “apologize” (the Dahls did, yay!). 2. Say specifically what you’re sorry for. (Nope. Say the words, even if they’re horrifying. Because they’re horrifying. As the BFG put it, “Don’t gobblefunk around with words.”) 3. Show you understand why you’re apologizing. (Nope. They didn’t understand that they have to apologize for themselves, not for Dahl.) 4. Don’t make excuses. (OK! We’ll give them this one!) 5. Fix things moving forward. (Nope.) 6. Make reparations. (Nope.)

All this said, we’d argue that no one should feel guilty to continue loving Dahl’s books. Just own the nuance. Don’t dismiss the artist’s badness as irrelevant. Matilda is still awesome, even if her creator wasn’t.

“It was her turn now to become a heroine.”

Hi! It turns out that redesigning a site that was built in 2012 and looked it is no small feat! All hail Leha at Web People Media.

Also, an announcement: There will be a SorryWatch book!

Look for it in the winter of 2022. (Publication date pushed back because of this farshtunkiner plague.)

If you’ve been reading us for a while, heeeeeeey. We’re so happy to see you again. If you’re new, welcome. Here’s a little intro to who we are: SorryWatch is Susan McCarthy (aka Sumac, aka Chief San Francisco Correspondent) and Marjorie Ingall (aka Snarly, aka Chief NYC Correspondent). We post about apologies – in the news, in literature, in history, in pop culture, you name it — and about apology research. We do quickie apology analysis on our Twitter and FB and more in-depth work here. We try hard to share good apologies as well as crappy ones, though the crappy ones always get more traffic. It’s important to us not to just be a force of snark in a world that already snarks too much. Good apologies – and even flawed but well-intentioned apologies – are worth celebrating. They’re an essential part of creating a world we want to live in.

Enough administrivia! Let us today examine a nuance-y literary apology for antisemitism that expresses itself in actions more than in words. Snarly learned about it via the snappy and edifying new feminist pop history, Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency by Bea Koch, co-proprietress of the delightful bookstore The Ripped Bodice (which Snarly raved about in Tablet Magazine, wearing her day-job hat).

Friends, this apology story has everything! A super-famous British lady novelist who was the most commercially successful writer of her time! An American fangirl who helped establish progressive education in the United States! A 127-year epistolary relationship! A romance novel brimming with villainy, families in turmoil, attempted kidnappings, double-crosses, a hero’s journey, a hot Jewess!

Have I made you horny (to know more)?

Young Rachel Mordecai (later Lazarus), superfan of mega-author Maria Edgeworth, sent a letter in 1815 to her problematic fave, asking why Edgeworth kept writing “mean, avaricious and unprincipled” Jewish characters (in 1800’s Castle Rackrent, 1801’s Belinda and Moral Tales for Children, and 1812’s The Absentee):

Relying on the good sense and candour of Miss Edgeworth, I would ask, how can it be that she who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice in the minds of youth! Can my allusion be mistaken? It is to the species of character which where a Jew is introduced is invariably attached to him. Can it be believed that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled? Forbid it, mercy.

Maria and her father, her frequent collaborator, both responded. Their letters were “kind and conciliatory,” Bea Koch tells us, “thanking Rachel for writing and promising amends.” But Maria wants to apologize publicly as well. “She tells Rachel she is writing a new book to make up for her past mistakes and asks if she might send a copy to her for her perusal when it’s done.”

And in 1817 Maria Edgeworth published Harrington. Its preface noted that it was written in response to “an extremely well written letter” from one of her American readers, “a Jewish lady, complaining of the illiberality with which the Jewish nation had been treated in some of Miss Edgeworth’s works.”

:In the book, the eponymous hero, “a recovering anti-Semite,” grows up, goes out in the world, and learns that his family and culture are sadly ignorant and hateful about Jews. The novel opens when the narrator is six, clinging to the stair rails, resisting going to bed. His nanny tells him, “If you don’t come quietly this minute, Master Harrington, I’ll call to Simon the Jew there and he shall come up and carry you away with in his great bag.”

I was struck with terror —my hands let go their grasp — and I suffered myself to be carried off as quietly as my maid could desire…The threat of ‘Simon the Jew’ was for some time afterwards used upon every occasion to reduce me to passive obedience; and when by frequent repetition this threat had lost somewhat of its power, she proceeded to tell me, in a mysterious tone, stories of Jews who had been known to steal poor children for the purpose of killing, crucifying, and sacrificing them at their secret feasts and midnight abominations. The less I understood, the more I believed.

One such story (“horrible! most horrible!”) was about a Jew in Paris who lived in a dark alley and sold…pork pies. Riiiiiiight.

But it was found out at last that the pies were not pork — they were made of the flesh of little children. His wife used to stand at the door of her den to watch for little children, and, as they were passing, would tempt them in with cakes and sweetmeats. There was a trap-door in the cellar, and the children were dragged down; and — Oh! How my blood ran cold [at] the terrible trap-door!

Harrington grows up, goes out into the world, and starts to see how despicably actual Jews are treated. He also falls in love with a young woman named Berenice Montenero, the daughter of a cultured, art-loving, gentlemanly Spanish-born Jewish merchant. He realizes that:

[N]ot only in the old story books, where the Jews are sure to be wicked as the bad fairies, or bad genii, or allegorical personifications of the devils and the vices…but in almost every work of fiction I found them represented as hateful beings; nay, even in modern tales of very late years…I have met with books by authors professing candour and toleration – books written expressly for the rising generation, called, if I mistake not, Moral Tales for Young People; and even in these, wherever the Jews are introduced, I find that they are invariably represented as beings of a mean, avaricious, unprincipled, treacherous character.

Guess who wrote the actual book Moral Tales for Young People, published in 1801? That’s right, Maria Edgeworth! Self-own! Fourth-wall break!

Harrington’s parents are horrified by his intention to marry “that Jewess,” but grudgingly come around when the wealthy and good-hearted Mr. Montenero bails the family out of a financial jam. And then, surprise ending! It turns out that Berenice isn’t a Jew after all! “Her mother was a Christian,” Mr. Montenero big-reveals, “daughter of an English gentleman, of good family, who accompanied one of your ambassadors to Spain,” and in accordance with “my promise to Mrs. Montenero, Berenice has been bred in her faith – a Christian – a Protestant . . . an English Protestant.” Yay?

Basically, the novel posits that Jews are good because at their core, they’re Christians, morally or figuratively. One scholar noted that Edgeworth “never fully abandons the Shylockian myth employed in her works prior to Harrington..Although the Christianization of the Jew promotes tolerance, it does not encourage the social integration of the Judeo-racial other.”

Critics of the time weren’t impressed either. Flawless perfect-Christian characters are dull, even when they’re Jews. Blackwood’s magazine said drily, “We regret, for the sake of this oppressed and injured people, that [Edgeworth’s] zeal has in this case rather outrun her judgment; and that, by representing all her Jewish characters as too uniformly perfect, she has thrown a degree of suspicion over her whole.”

When Edgeworth sent Lazarus the novel, the latter wrote back with thanks and praise (Edgeworth had even cribbed a paragraph from Rachel’s letter in defense of Jews and stuck it in the book!), but also with a pointed critique:

It is impossible to feel otherwise than gratified by the confidence so strongly, yet so delicately manifested, by the insertion of a passage from the letter in which I had endeavored to give an idea of [Jews’] general standing in this country. Let me therefore, without dwelling longer on its many excellences, confess with frankness that in one event I was disappointed. Berenice was not a Jewess.

Edgeworth did not write back. A four-year silence between the two ensued. Awkward!

Eventually, though, they resumed their correspondence, and the Lazarus and Edgeworth families went on to correspond for 127 years.

I do wish I knew which of the two women reached out to renew their letter-writing first. Did Edgeworth apologize for hurting Lazarus? If so, was it a pro forma apology? Did she ever come to understand exactly how and why she’d offended? Or was it Lazarus, the party with less status, who apologized for offending Edgeworth with her criticism? Or maybe neither of them mentioned Lazarus’s response to Harrington and they both pretended it hadn’t happened? This is a non-apology technique in many relationships, particularly familial ones: Don’t apologize, but also don’t acknowledge the fight. And be especially polite or kind after a moment of criticism or rage in lieu of saying the words “I’m sorry.”

Perhaps the answer to this question is discoverable, but the scholarly book of Edgeworth and Lazarus’s correspondence published in 1977 costs like $900 on Amazon and I can’t read the non-circulating copy at the NYPL because Covid.

Regardless, on one level it doesn’t matter: Lazarus clearly decided she wanted a rapprochement with Edgeworth. She was the wronged party, in that Edgeworth stopped speaking to her for telling the truth (after soliciting a response! Edgeworth just didn’t like what she heard!). If the wronged party forgives, we observers, even 203 years in the SURELY more enlightened future, don’t get to tell her she’s wrong. We can acknowledge the antisemitism of Edgeworth’s work without saying Lazarus was wrong to forgive. Humans are complex!

An aside: Edgeworth’s (failed) literary apology reminds me very much of a similar but somewhat more successful literary apology we covered a while back: Charles Dickens’ apology to Eliza Davies for his wildly problematic portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist. After Eliza, a Jewess, read the book, she wrote to Charles (an acquaintance) saying, essentially, CHUCKIE, NO!

At first Charles responded with defensiveness, as so many of us do when called out. He pompously tells Eliza he didn’t respond to her for a while because he gets TONS of fan mail. TONS. Then he says he LOVES Jews! Yay, Jews! “Fagin the Jew” is called that “not because of his religion, but because of his race”! (Sure, Chuck.) Why, he notes, once he even wrote a thing about how the Jews used to be oppressed! (Operative words: “used to be.”)

It is often impossible for me by any means to keep pace with my correspondents…But surely no sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe – firstly, that all the rest of the wicked dramatis personae are Christians; and secondly, that he is called “ The Jew”, not because of his religion, but because of his race…I have no feeling towards the Jewish people but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public, or in private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I ever had with them. And in my Child’s History of England I have lost no opportunity of setting forth their cruel persecution in old times.

But apparently Eliza’s words sank in. Because when Oliver Twist was reprinted, Dickens made some significant changes in the text. He cut approximately 180 references to “Fagin the Jew” (changing them to just “Fagin” or “he” or “him”). Better. But Fagin is still an antisemitic stereotype: greedy, miserly, opportunistic, alien, suck-uppy and big-nosed. (Some literary critics argue that Oliver Twist is actually an indictment of “good Christians” who aren’t, a condemnation of a purportedly Christian society that doesn’t take care of its children and poor people, and Fagin the Jew, who happens to be the most vivid character, is also its most truthful, throwing the hypocrisy of the Christians into sharp relief. Could be. But that doesn’t excuse the portrayal of the single Jew in the text.)

Like Edgeworth, Dickens plopped a good Jew into his next novel as a form of atonement. Our Mutual Friend (1865) features the saintly (as it were) Mr. Riah. Critics noted that like Mr. Montenegro, he was boring as hell. (I paraphrase.)

Dickens’s novelistic apology was somewhat more successful than Edgeworth’s, though. After all, Riah doesn’t turn out to be a Christian. But is a mediocre apology better than none at all? Does it matter if the person apologizing means well, even if they screw it up? If Lazarus and Davies accepted the apology, we are not entitled to say they’re wrong. But we don’t have to forgive Dickens ourselves. We are all – not just Davies and Lazarus, and not even just Jews — hurt by bias and prejudice in our culture and literature.

It’s also our call whether we want to say a particular artist was “a product of his time” and automatically forgive his offenses, or whether we use the phrase “product of his time” without the accompanying forgiveness but while continuing to read (or listen to, or look at) the work in question, or whether we point out that not every artist of that particular time was a hate-y schmuck so why excuse this hate-y schmuck. We are entitled to choose on a case-by-case basis to engage with problematic art and artists (antisemitic racist Rudyard Kipling seems to have fallen out of general favor, while antisemitic racist Roald Dahl has not) and we are entitled to be inconsistent. We may decide our limited energies are better served by working to include diverse and less-heard authors on our bookshelves and in classrooms.

Behold an illustration from the brilliant Catherine Newman‘s forthcoming children’s book (for kids 10 to 14), How to Be a Person: 65 Hugely Useful, Super-Important Skills to Learn Before You’re Grown Up. The book is basically a funny and readable graphic novel-style list of instructions on how to be a mensch (and not incidentally, how to be proud of yourself and get others to like you out there in the big world). Comes out in March, 2020. Pre-order at your local indie bookshop or online at Indie Bound, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

Illustration by Debbie Fong. I like the glass manatee.

Why is this a good apology? It uses the word “sorry,” it takes responsibility, it shows understanding of the impact of the offense, it emphasizes the feelings of the person of the apologizee rather than the apologizer. (In other words, it’s not one of those “I suck, I feel so so terrible, I hate myself, I’m a bad person” apologies that are more about the emotional state of the speaker than the listener and practically beg the listener to reassure the speaker that they’re still a good person.) And this apology clearly went well! Mom is pleased! However, if you know your mother’s gonna be really upset — unlike this Not a Regular Mom, a Cool Mom — you still have to apologize.

For this to be a truly great apology, the kid would have to offer to pay to replace the cost of the manatee either through their savings or by docking their allowance.  If the manatee is irreplaceable or if the mom actually did hate the manatee (Snarly would very much like a glass manatee, but chacun à son goût, she she said Frenchily) and the kid is quite sure of the mom’s taste, they could buy a replacement objet on their own.

SorryWatch, which collectively has four children (all older than the target audience but IT IS NEVER TOO LATE), looks forward to reading the whole book.