Bluesky

Basement Books

In “Construction Follies,” Kate Wagner aims harsh scorn at two of the University of Chicago’s most significant recent initiatives in the arts and humanities [November 2025]. While we appreciate The Nation’s engagement with the humanities, we wish to clarify several points.

Mansueto Library and the Logan Center for the Arts were deeply informed by guidance from UChicago faculty and students, including many in the arts and humanities. Of the many uninformed statements in the piece (no, the university has not lost money on crypto), we were particularly surprised by the suggestion that the library is inaccessible and “little more than something interesting to look at.”

Mansueto shares an entrance with Regenstein Library, which allows public access to 5 million volumes on open shelves. The browsable collection in Regenstein is larger than that of most university libraries, though it constitutes a fraction of the 13.5 million print and digital volumes in UChicago’s library system. Mansueto and Regenstein are visited more than 1.1 mil­lion times annually, drawing global academic visitors for their unique collections, especially in the humanities.

When Mansueto Library opened in 2011, universities worldwide had long since started sending collections to off-site storage, usually taking days to deliver books to borrowers. In contrast, UChicago expanded collection storage on campus. Mansueto provides high-­density storage in ideal preservation conditions, delivering books to patrons in minutes. The airy top level houses a conservation facility and a beloved reading room used by hundreds daily. In our view, this makes the library highly suited to its function, visually interesting, and a cherished facility for humanities research.

Torsten ReimerUniversity Librarian and Dean of the University Library,University of Chicago 

Kate Wagner Replies

My piece did not intend to disparage the library system at the University of Chicago, which I have used to great delight, having lectured there. But it is inaccessible on three points. (1) The books, of course, are inaccessible for browsing by design. I understand this choice, but I don’t have to like it. (2) The building is inaccessible as a public space, as it has no on-street access. (3) The process of visiting the library as a layperson is arduous, though this is typical of university libraries. Differences about accessibility aside, my ire was directed solely toward the administration, which has undertaken many expensive building projects—of which Mansueto was one of very few necessities—while defunding the humanities and deferring maintenance necessary to bring the school’s quad up to contemporary standards.

The fact of the matter is, the university is in massive debt. Some of this is construction debt, but much of it comes from overleveraged financial plays that have not panned out (such as a very real foray into cryptocurrency). When the university’s board behaves in financially negligent or reckless ways, the humanities bear the cuts—God forbid anyone touch the business school. Walking by such expensive and frivolous buildings as Campus North (as good a signifier as any of the university as luxury) and the Rubenstein Forum (a gargantuan monument to the administration itself), one cannot help but become indignant, even enraged. At the end of the day, architecture is about money and power and about who has it and who doesn’t. At the University of Chicago, those dichotomies are very much clear.

Kate Wagnerchicago, il

Reading Pirandello

Re “Luigi Pirandello’s Broken Men,” by Gus O’Connor [TheNation.com, December 2, 2025]: As a translator of Luigi Pirandello’s One, None, and a Hundred Grand, I was very sorry to see Gus O’Connor reduce the Nobel laureate to a fascist. It’s inarguable that at one time Pirandello was a supporter of fascism—though within a few years he’d torn up his party membership card, under the nose of a high-ranking official. One, None, and a Hundred Grand itself begins with a nose—a “defective” one, with a pronounced rightward lean. Rightward asymmetry is a hard-to-misunderstand metaphor for the political currents that would lead Europe into madness and mass murder; and for the narrator, Vitangelo Maggot, this nose-realization sets in motion a quest to “coax forth the many Maggots living inside my closest companions, and destroy them one by one.” It’s Gogol meets P.G. Wodehouse, and offers readers comic scenes equal to the very best of the latter author’s work. And much as Wodehouse is still widely read and adored in England, despite his own putative fascism, Pirandello holds a place of primacy in contemporary Italian hearts. He is only a “half-forgotten castaway of European letters” for non-Italian readers.

Given the opportunity to address O’Connor’s accusation from a century’s distance, I would turn to this passage from the novel:

We do something. We sincerely believe we have the whole of our being in the act. But, unfortunately, we realize it’s not so, and that the act is actually always and only being committed by a single actor from our legion of selves, an actor whose actions might result, through some pitiful twist of fate, in our being trussed up and hung, and here is my point: once we realize that all of our selves are not in a given act, it would therefore be an atrocious injustice to judge us on any one act alone, to hold us accountable, trussed up and hung from the gallows, our whole existence summed up in a moment.

We start screaming, “But I’m this guy, that guy, and another guy, too!” So many unimplicated in the act performed by the one, all completely, or almost completely, uninvolved. And not only that, but, what’s more, that self, and the specific circumstances in which his act were performed, which were reality in that one moment and, perforce, precipitated the performance, disappeared entirely a short while later; but the memory of the act remains, incised upon our consciousness, like an anguished and confused dream. Another self, ten others, so many others, who form our self or the person we might be, come forward one by one inside of us and ask how we were able to do such a thing; and we no longer know how to explain.

It’s a disservice to English language readers, and a missed opportunity for these readers to understand Pirandello’s legion of Italian ones, to represent him solely through a single, misbegotten political act.

Sean Wilseybrooklyn, ny

Gus O’Connor seems to be attempting a retroactive “canceling” of Pirandello using the erroneous assertion that the writer’s decline in popularity in North America is largely because “Pirandello was a fascist.” To begin with, Pirandello’s plays remain widely read and are recognized (especially Six Characters in a Search of an Author) as among the most significant of the 20th century. As for his fiction, to credit its neglect even partly to his politics as opposed to poor translations and shifting taste is unconvincing (if only Americans were that historically literate!). O’Connor then claims that “fascistic qualities are not incidental to Pirandello’s work but rather inherent in it.” While the fascist secret police themselves came to the opposite opinion, we should recognize that O’Connor is assuming the same role: litmus-testing literature for ideology and suppressing or punishing writers accordingly.

O’Connor’s statements could be brushed aside as mere virtue-signaling if they didn’t already surface in Internet searches on Pirandello, crowding out the vast literature on exactly this topic. Thus the importance of a response. The implication that readers should not read Pirandello because of his “fascism” would be more fruitful if inverted. The complexity of cultural, political, and personal factors involved in Pirandello’s relation to fascism are a reason to read him, especially in the US today with a president who has adopted much of Mussolini’s playbook: invocation of a glorious past, scapegoating, attacking opponents, misinformation, tariffs, improvisational leadership, gerrymandering, demagoguery, and seizing other countries’ land.

Teddy Jeffersonnew york, ny

The writer is a translator and director of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me, a historical consultant for the documentaries of the Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi (Sotto le nuvole, Notturno, In viaggio), and the author of One Inch Leather: 14 Stories.

While reading O’Connor’s review of Pirandello’s One, None, and a Hundred Grand, I found it impossible to make sense of the fact that a journalist could write about Pirandello so dismissively, and with such a narrow lens. I thought he was talking about Mein Kampf.

The review largely ignores Pirandello’s book and Sean Wilsey’s translation, and reveals O’Connor’s indifference to literary matters. Why give so much of the magazine’s limited review space to someone who dismisses Pirandello’s literary greatness and reduces his life to fascist violence? This is what I wonder. In 1986, on the 50th anniversary of Pirandello’s death, Leonardo Sciascia, a writer and thinker at the moral center of Italian culture, said that Pirandello was a “literary father” to him, adding that the truth in Pirandello lay in the absurdity of the human condition, in the pain of living.

Pirandello, it is true, joined the Fascist Party (in 1924), and at first saw (like many) in Mussolini a figure who could bring Italy out of the total chaos of the post-unification period. But above all, he saw in him the possibility of realizing his own dream as a playwright and philologist, namely to create a national state theater with government funding. This dream was dashed by the Duce. And that is why Pirandello distanced himself from the fascist regime. In his speech on receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, he snubbed the regime, offering no praise for Mussolini, contrary to all expectations.

The relationship between Pirandello and fascism was complex. The bias of this article is truly outrageous. As a result your readers have been deprived of context regarding one of the greatest authors in the history of Western theater. An author loved by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and Giovanni Verga, to name but a few. What a pity!

Alessio Bordonibrooklyn, ny

Alessio Bordoni is an instructor at Comunità Linguistica in New York City.

Gus O’Connor Replies

In June 1926, Pirandello had this to say to a journalist: “I am a fascist. And not a recent one: I have been a fascist for thirty years.” And when he won the Nobel Prize in 1934, just two years before his death, Pirandello donated his gold medal to the Italian government to be melted down for a colonial war effort in Ethiopia. To claim, as Mr. Wilsey does, that Pirandello’s fealty to fascism was a “single, misbegotten political act” is to misrepresent and oversimplify his decades-long relationship with those politics. And to use Vitangelo’s rightward-leaning nose as evidence of a grand critique of the fascist regime is tenuous, at best. Pirandello did tear up his party card in a fit of rage; though I have found no mention of noses in the historical record. What’s more, this incident occurred two years after the novel had already been serialized, a novel that was the product of a decade of writing. Even if Pirandello tore up the card “under the nose” of the party official, I see no connection between those two noses, unless Pirandello had the prescience to predict that he would have a nose-related outburst two years, if not a decade, into the future. In the novel, Vitangelo’s friend frets over a twitch in his left eye; might that be a critique of the fickle, twitchy left?

This is not to say Pirandello was only a fascist; I respectfully object to Mr. Bordoni’s assertion that I “reduce” the life of a Nobel laureate to “fascist violence” or party membership. The entire point of the essay, in fact, was to reckon with those lively antagonisms of Pirandello’s work—his politics and his proto-existentialism—and to hold those antagonisms together in concert. Further, the novel in question was written and published at the height of Pirandello’s devotion to fascism and so doubly merits such a reading.

I don’t doubt that Pirandello sits deep within the chamber of many “contemporary Italian hearts.” Yet the essay is not concerned with those hearts; it asks, rather, why Pirandello’s readership abroad, particularly in North America, has dwindled. And it uses the occasion of Wilsey’s excellent(!) translation, in North America, to pursue that question. Mr. Jefferson’s accusation that I attempt a retroactive “canceling” of Pirandello is absurd—barely worthy of rebuttal. American readers of this essay may well be interested in what Pirandello has to offer, and I don’t hesitate to suggest what remains exciting and illuminating about his work. The hope for my essay was to spur further interest in this complicated figure, not to dissuade potential readers from engaging with him at all. The true “pity,” the true “missed opportunity,” the true “disservice” to those readers would have meant shying away from the facts—flattering or unflattering—of Pirandello’s life, his politics, and his art.

Gus O’Connornew york, ny