In these pages Liston comes to life as a rounded character more fully than in anything I’ve read. We remember Liston as the terrifying hulk, the killer, the wordless monster of whom the young Clay should have been terrified and mysteriously was not. We remember the sportswriters of the time unanimously worrying that Clay might actually be grievously, perhaps even mortally, harmed in the fight. But Liston the human being has been a great dark absence, until now. In Remnick’s pages we see the damaged, inarticulate, ill-educated figure of the man, locked into his brutishness, managed by gangsters, his only language the language of his fists. It is a part of this book’s very considerable achievement that Liston becomes almost as sympathetic a figure as Clay: his tragic silence set against Ali’s heroic volubility, his doom and descent toward penury the counterbalance to Clay/Ali’s date with destiny.

  In the Cassius Clay we first got to know, there seemed to be an edge of madness, something genuinely unbalanced behind all that openmouthed shrieking, but again David Remnick takes us behind the façade and shows us how Ali used the ranting to psych himself up, to banish fear and the thought of defeat until victory was the only possibility, and also how calculated it was. He knew he was box office and his mouth brought in the dollars. But away from the cameras he was all professionalism. He worked and worked and worked. This too is an Ali we haven’t seen so clearly before, the nonstop training, the commitment, the hard graft: the man who reached the top because he knew what it took and put in the hours that were needed to turn talent into glory.

  It has been an age of great sportswriters and Remnick mentions several, but with this book he places himself alongside them—Plimpton, Talese, Mailer, and the rest. He takes pleasure in writing about the writing, showing the writers’ part in the creation of the myths of boxing, the heroes and villains, the rises and falls. And in his account of the two Ali–Liston fights, his own prose becomes supreme. He takes us into the meat of the contests as if he were right there in the ring, hearing the blows land, being drenched in sweat and blood, bringing it to us from the inside. It’s some of the best writing about combat I’ve ever read, and it makes you feel Ali’s arrival at the pinnacle, moment by moment—the dancing, Liston’s wild lunges swooshing through empty air, Ali’s blows thudding home, the shock of Liston refusing to rise from his stool (first fight) or from the canvas (second fight), the truth about the illegal stuff on Liston’s gloves that got into Ali’s eyes and half-blinded him (first fight) and about the “phantom punch” that ended it once and for all (second fight). And the young champion screaming at the great sportswriters who had written him off. “Eat your words! Eat your words!” In short: It’s a knockout.

  VERY WELL THEN I CONTRADICT MYSELF

  In Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers, the leading character, George Moore, a philosopher, says this: “Meeting a friend in a corridor, Wittgenstein said: ‘Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?’ His friend said, ‘Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going round the earth.’ To which the philosopher replied, ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?’ ” It’s a beautiful slow burn of a joke, the laughter building as the audience realizes that it would look exactly the same, because that, after all, is what is actually happening. This is the laughter of paradox, and without it literature, and life, would be grievously diminished; indeed, some critics have said that the connection between paradox and poetry is so intimate that they are the same thing.

  Paradox begins in the Bible, where the idea of the Virgin Birth embodies the paradoxical nature of faith, and continues to the present day, where the most cursory search of the literature of pop culture reveals analyses of the “Paradox of the Beatles” (which is that they were young rebels who quickly became establishment figures with MBEs), the “Paradox of Oprah Winfrey” (which is that while she intimately advises us on our lives, as if she were a close family member, she remains aloof, mysterious, and unknown), and the “Paradox of Eminem” (which is that he both is and is not the real Slim Shady).

  Don Quixote is a paradox on a broken-down horse, the knight errant whose wanderings undo the very idea of the knight errant, the chivalrous fool whose folly reveals the greater folly of the chivalric ideal. Borges’s detective Erik Lönnrot in his story “Death and the Compass” solves the riddle of a mysterious series of murders and works out the time and location of the next murder, only to discover, too late to save himself, that he is the intended victim and that the other crimes have been committed to bring him to the killing place. Oscar Wilde, who said he could resist anything except temptation, incarnates the paradoxes of hedonism. And in Joseph Heller’s novel Good as Gold, the character of the presidential aide Ralph Newsome, the embodiment of the dishonesties of politics, speaks entirely in oxymoronic sentences whose ends contradict their beginnings: “This President will back you all the way until he has to. We want to move ahead with this as speedily as possible, although we’ll have to go slowly. This President doesn’t want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them.”

  To my mind the most beautiful of paradoxes is the famous formulation found near the end of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself.

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  Human nature is contradictory, and the human self is a capacious and multiform thing. We can be, we are, many selves at once: We can be gentle with our children but harsh with our employees; we can love God but dislike human beings; we can fear for the environment and yet leave electric lights on when we leave the house; we can be peaceful souls who are driven, by our passion for a football team, to aggressive, sometimes even hooligan extremes. And no matter how strongly we may wish to defend the sovereignty of the individual self—an idea born in the Florentine Renaissance that may be Italy’s greatest gift to world civilization—that self is, in reality, simultaneously sovereign and invaded by other selves. It is at once autonomous and not autonomous. None of us comes into the world empty-handed. We carry with us the baggage of our inheritance, both biological and cultural, and that inheritance both limits and enables us, both cripples and liberates. We may think of ourselves as free to choose and morally responsible for our choices, and it is right that we should so understand ourselves, but the way in which we frame those choices, and indeed the particular choices we feel we have to make, are not only ours to determine.

  So we are paradoxical beings, both individual and social, both of our time and part of history’s flow. We are mortal but have, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, immortal longings in us; and contradiction is our lifeblood. There are great social benefits in such broad definitions of the self, for the more selves we find within ourselves, the easier it is to find common ground with other multiple, multitude-containing selves. We may have different religious beliefs but support the same team. Yet we live in an age in which we are urged to define ourselves more and more narrowly, to crush our own multidimensionality into the straitjacket of a one-dimensional national, ethnic, tribal, or religious identity. This, I have come to think, may be the evil from which flow all the other evils of our time. For when we succumb to this narrowing, when we allow ourselves to be simplified and become merely Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Hindus, then it becomes easy for us to see each other as adversaries, as one another’s Others, and the very points of the compass begin to quarrel, East and West collide, and North and South as well.

  Literature has never lost sight of what our quarrelsome world is trying to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradiction, and in our novels and poems we sing our human complexity, our ability to be, simultaneously, both yes and no, both this and that, without feeling the slightest discomfort. The Arabic equivalent of the formula “once upon a time” is kan ma kan, which translates “It was so, it was not so.” This great paradox lies at the heart of all fiction. Fiction is precisely that place where things are both so and not so, where worlds exist in which we can profoundly believe while also knowing that they do not, have not, and will never exist. And in our age of oversimplification, this beautiful complication has never been more important.

  TRUTH

  “What, art thou mad? Art thou mad?” Falstaff demands of Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. “Is not the truth the truth?” The joke is that he has been lying his head off, and the prince is in the process of exposing him as a liar.

  In a time like the present, when reality itself seems everywhere under attack, Falstaff’s duplicitous notion of the truth seems to be shared by many powerful leaders. In the three countries I’ve spent my life caring about—India, the UK, and the United States—self-serving falsehoods are regularly presented as facts, while more-reliable information is denigrated as “fake news.” However, the defenders of the real, attempting to dam the torrent of disinformation flooding over us all, often make the mistake of yearning for a golden age when truth was uncontested and universally accepted and of arguing that what we need is to return to that blissful consensus.

  The truth is that truth has always been a contested idea. As a student of history at Cambridge, I learned at an early age that some things were “basic facts,” that is, unarguable events—the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, and the American Declaration of Independence was made on July 4, 1776—but the creation of a historical fact was the result of a particular meaning being ascribed to an event. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon is a historical fact. But many other people have crossed that river, and their actions are not of interest to history. Those crossings are not, in this sense, facts. Also: The passage of time often changes the meaning of a fact. During the British Empire, the military revolt of 1857 was known as the “Indian Mutiny,” and as a mutiny is a rebellion against the authorities, that name, and therefore the meaning of that fact, placed the “mutinying” Indians in the wrong. Indian historians today refer to this event as the “Indian Uprising,” which makes it an entirely different sort of fact, which means a different thing.

  History is not written in stone. The past is constantly revised according to the attitudes of the present.

  There is, however, some truth in the idea that in the West in the nineteenth century there was a fairly widespread consensus about the nature of reality. The great novelists of that time—Flaubert, George Eliot, and so on—could assume that they and their readers, broadly speaking, agreed on the nature of the real, and the grand age of the realist novel was built on that foundation. But that consensus was built on a number of exclusions. It was almost wholly middle class and almost entirely white. The points of view of, for example, colonized peoples, or racial minorities—points of view from which the world looked very different than the bourgeois reality portrayed in, say, The Age of Innocence, or Middlemarch, or Madame Bovary—were largely erased from the narrative. The importance of great public matters was also often marginalized. In the entire oeuvre of Jane Austen, the Napoleonic Wars are barely mentioned; in the immense oeuvre of Charles Dickens, the existence of the British Empire is only glancingly recognized.

  In the twentieth century, under the pressure of enormous social changes, the nineteenth-century consensus was revealed as fragile; its view of reality began to look, one might say, fake. Some of the greatest literary artists sought to chronicle the changing reality by using the methods of the realist novel, as Thomas Mann did in Buddenbrooks or Junichiro Tanizaki in The Makioka Sisters; but gradually the realist novel seemed more and more problematic and writers from Franz Kafka to Ralph Ellison and Gabriel García Márquez, from Octavia Butler’s science fiction to Margaret Atwood’s nightmare dystopias, created stranger, more surreal texts, telling the truth by means of obvious untruth, creating a new kind of reality, as if by magic.

  I have argued for much of my life as a writer that the breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality and that the world can perhaps best be explained in terms of conflicting and often incompatible narratives. In Kashmir and in the Middle East, and in the battle between progressive America and Trumpistan, we see examples of such incompatibilities. I have also argued that the consequences of this new, argumentative, even polemical attitude to the real has such profound implications for literature that we can’t, or ought not to, pretend it isn’t there. I believe that the influence on public discourse of more, and more varied, voices has been a good thing, enriching our literatures and making more complex our understanding of the world.

  American literature, for example, now contains voices from everywhere—Junot Díaz, Yiyun Li, Nam Le, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, to name but a few. And a rising generation of African American writers in all forms—Tracy K. Smith, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward—offers its own multitudinous reality and makes it immensely influential.

  And yet I now face, as we all do, a genuine conundrum. How can we argue, on the one hand, that modern reality has become necessarily multidimensional, fractured and fragmented, and, on the other hand, that it is a very particular thing, an unarguable series of things that are so, which need to be defended against the attacks of, to be frank, the things that are not so, promulgated by, let’s say, the Modi administration in India, the Brexit crew in the UK, and the 45th president of the United States? How to combat the worst aspects of the Internet, that parallel universe in which important information and total garbage coexist, side by side, with, apparently, the same levels of authority, making it harder than ever for people to tell them apart? How to resist the erosion in public acceptance of even “basic facts,” scientific facts, evidence-supported facts, about the coronavirus, or climate change, or inoculations for children? How to combat the political demagoguery that seeks to do what authoritarians have always wanted—to undermine the public’s belief in evidence and to say to their electorates, in effect, “Believe nothing except me, for I am the truth”? What do we do about that? And what, specifically, might be the role of art, and the role of writers and the literary arts in particular?

  I don’t pretend to have a full answer. I do think that we need to recognize that any society’s idea of truth is always the product of an argument, and we need to get better at winning that argument. Democracy is not polite. It’s often a shouting match in a public square. We need to be involved in the argument if we are to have any chance of winning it (I can’t forget that just under half of all registered voters in the United States failed to show up at the polls in November 2016, including many of the young people who afterward marched passionately to protest the result). And as far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in the argument from evidence and to do what fiction has always been good at doing: to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature. Let’s start from there.

  In Germany after World War II, the authors of what was called Trümmerliteratur, “rubble literature,” felt the need to rebuild their language, poisoned by Nazism, as well as their country, which lay in ruins. They understood that reality, truth, needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, with new language, just as the bombed cities needed to be rebuilt. I think we can learn from their example. We stand once again, though for different reasons, in the midst of the rubble of the truth. And it is for us, writers, thinkers, journalists, philosophers, to undertake the task of rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality, their faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.

  COURAGE

  We find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage, the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures. A firefighter runs toward a burning building while others flee it: We readily salute his bravery, as we do that of servicemen returning from the battlefront, or men and women struggling to overcome debilitating illnesses or injuries.

  It’s harder for us to see politicians, with the exception of Nelson Mandela, as courageous these days. Perhaps we have seen too much, grown too cynical about the inevitable compromises of power. There are no Gandhis, no Lincolns anymore. One man’s hero (Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro) is another’s villain. We can no longer easily agree on what it means to be good, or principled, or brave. When political leaders do take courageous steps—as France’s then-president Nicolas Sarkozy did in Libya by intervening militarily to support the anti-Gadhafi uprising—there are as many who doubt as approve. Political courage, nowadays, is almost always ambiguous.