Marina Budhos's Blog, page 2

On Re-reading Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”

April 13th, 2017: Last night I taught Baldwin (which the students loved) and the last lines kept resonating as I drove home: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of […]

Election Time — Thoughts

It’s election time–an election like none other–and I’ve been joining the fray:

The Khan’s Real Triumph Over Trump (The Daily Beast)

Forget Donald Trump’s obnoxious response to the Khans and the dust up that created.  Their real accomplishment was to make ordinary Muslim Americans visible to the country.

When Donald Trump’s Assistant Cheated in my MFA Seminar (LitHub)

As the clanging theatrics of both conventions start to recede, it’s important to note that you can’t fake your story, even in the political sphere.

 

Normality Elusive In Fraught Times–Muslim Teenagers after Orlando

An article in the NY Times today about how the Orlando killings are again snatching away a sense of normality for Muslim teens during Ramadan, a time that should be reflective and celebratory.

Last year, during Ramadan, I spent a lot of time wandering the streets of Queens and Brooklyn for my new novel Watched.  And what I was so struck by–and what is lost in these polarizing times where Islam is equated with frightening headlines–is the way in which Islam, observance, is part of the fabric of life, a rhythm for one’s days.  I watched families hurry to pick up last groceries, stroll and linger on streets before and after prayers,  crowd around tables under the pale wash of florescent restaurant light for the Iftar, the evening meal.  Little children cupped in father’s arms; a man and his wife, their robes blazing white in the dark, rushed off a bus, across a busy avenue.  By one tiny mosque, where the women prayed, jammed next to one another in a narrow basement, prayers voiced in through speakers, little children set off tiny bang-snaps outside, annoying the adults who also forgave them.  It was such a New York, a Brooklyn scene: how many children have been doing that for generations on borough pavements?

Take a look at the beautiful slide show that captures some of this.

Kara Walker & The Real Sugar Links

On Kara Walker’s A Subtlety is a marvelous, yet maddening installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory.  Here’s why:

When I stepped inside the vast Domino Sugar Factory for the opening of Kara Walker’s installation, A Subtlety, I nearly wept.  For over a century, the iconic Domino Sugar Factory, which shut its doors a decade ago, has loomed on the Brooklyn waterfront, an enigmatic, forgotten carapace.  Now, with Walker’s sculpture, it is not just the doors of the factory that have reopened–we have also flung open our shared history of sugar.  It is a history I know well, for my own family traveled from northern India as indentured workers to work the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  My great-grandfather gave away his share of land in Uttar Pradesh to his two older brothers and set off to seek a new life in British Guiana, which rivaled Jamaica and Cuba as one of the largest sugar producers in the world.

The Walker exhibit is a tantalizing, but ultimately frustrating experience.  Most of the visitors milling around the massive, unsettling sculpture of an African woman come away intrigued and puzzled.  The installation is a huge white sphinx crouched in a pool of sugar, intentionally disturbing, with its assertive nipples, exaggerated haunches that conjure up the Hottentot Venus, and exposed, bulging vulva.  As an art object it is simultaneously sexual, submissive and powerful.

But what does this formidable goddess evoke and represent? Do visitors come away grasping the history on which this piece comments?  At best, they’re in on the latest, hip happening in this swath of neglected and fast gentrifying Williamsburg and duly snap photos with their I-phones.  That’s because the exhibit, which offers no curatorial materials or information about the factory, is a missed opportunity.  All the more a pity, since this is the perfect moment to reclaim that story, as New Yorkers.

Never before in the history of New York City have we had so many inhabitants who can trace their family origins to sugar.  Their forebearers slashed, cut and processed the cane that wound up in barges heading to the busy Brooklyn docks.  The factory’s revitalization is a moment of weighty and historical convergence for our city, as we can all realize how many of us New Yorkers are connected by sugar. It is also a chance to reconceive the history and most importantly, ways that New York City was part of a global—not just American–story of slavery.

The Domino Sugar Factory’s walls are redolent with this history, its walls smeared with sweet-smelling, sticky rivulets of molasses.  This is an especially powerful symbol when one realizes the single most important fact about sugar: unlike any other natural product, such as wheat, rice or corn, sugar cane cannot be stored.  It must be sent to a factory—immediately– within forty- eight hours of cutting.  So, behind the huge monolith of the Domino Refinery, imagine thousands and thousands of factories throughout the sugar lands.  They were known as the boiling houses, for the raw cane was crushed and boiled until that key moment of ‘striking’ when the pulp crystallizes and becomes the first raw granules.  These boiling houses were sheer furnaces of hell, with workers laboring round the clock around scalding pots and grinding machines.  So dangerous was the work that in some factories, a machete was kept nearby—if a worker’s arm was mauled in the rollers—they would simply lop the limb off and keep on going.

As Ms. Walker’s installation of a huge African woman makes clear, at the heart of the haunted story of sugar is the African diaspora who lived and died by sugar—12 million in all.  The submission of African women in particular undergirds this history: read the diary of plantation overseer Thomas Thistlewood, where he details the 138 slave women he raped on a Jamaican plantation.  Walker’s sculpture, which shimmers and rises from the gritty floor, is a return of the repressed—aggressive and playful at once, teasing out while reclaiming the stereotype of the sexualized black woman.

Here in the U.S., we are slow to understand the role of sugar in our history, a substance that has rightly been called ‘the oil of the 18th century’ driving our world economy, moving people across the globe, changing our very taste buds.  That’s because our story of slavery has always been told through the narrower lens of American slavery: tobacco and cotton.  In fact, only four percent of the slaves were sent to the United States to pick cotton.  The other 96 percent were sent to work the sugar lands such as Brazil and the West Indies.  American history, New York history, has long been tangled in this global story.

By the time this Domino factory opened on the Brooklyn waterfront in 1882, more and more of the sugar workers were not just Africans.  Once slavery was abolished in the British Empire, plantation owners brought in indentured workers from India—1.5 million would come to migrate to the West Indies, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Guyana.  In Hawaii, the rustling cane fields were filled with workers imported from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines—creating the polyglot multi-racial society where President Obama grew up.

Similarly, when my great-grandfather arrived in British Guiana, he worked as a sirdar, a driver, on a large plantation, and came to prosper by buying his own plots of land.  My other great-grandparents, kumaris, pottery makers, arrived as a family, with their two children and infant son, finishing out their indenture contract to open a local grocery store.  In the tiny village where my father grew up, near the rippling fields of green cane, and the humble bungalows of former indentured workers, he knew he must leave this plantation-dominated world, for there was no future there for him.   So he studied by a flickering kerosene lamp and set off, like his grandparents, to the next land of opportunity—the U.S.  It is a classic immigrants’ story, yet told through one substance, and over many continents.  It also reminds us that this substance, which wrought so much violence and tragedy, also propelled some toward opportunity and change.

My husband and I were inspired to write our book, “Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science,” because we realized it was not just I who had sugar in my family history—but he did too—on a completely different part of the globe.  His came via beet sugar—an aunt whose grandfather, a Russian serf, invented a process key to the success of beet sugar.  With this, he bought his freedom and became a very rich man.  In the 19th century, beet sugar—which is chemically identical to cane sugar—would come to rival cane sugar on the world market.  The Havemeyers, the wealthy New York family that owned the American Sugar Refining Company, and which operated the Domino Factory, wisely understood this and would come to invest in beet sugar in the West, to guarantee its supply to the Brooklyn factory.  Beet sugar, along with other new industrial processes originating in Europe—saccharine, margarine, yeast—would be the source of several Jewish family’s fortunes, such as the Kiev-based Brodskii family, who produced a quarter of Russia’s sugar in the late 19th century.

In its heyday, Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory came to supply two thirds of the nation’s refined sugar and much of the world’s sugar.  Today, Brooklyn is home to large groups of West Indians, who all trace their history and personal stories to those plantations which supplied the very sugar processed at the Domino factory.  Dominicans are our largest-growing immigrant group, with Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Haitians and Guyanese, who are the most likely immigrants to settle in New York City, not far behind.  We’ve long had a community of Puerto Ricans, which produced some of the best sugar during the peak years of cane production.  It’s the ancestors of these New Yorkers who toiled in the fields and factories that brought those sacks of raw sugar to our East River waterfront to be transformed to whitened crystals.

In England today, there has been a growing movement to illuminate the brutal history of sugar that lies behind its great family fortunes.  The famed Booker Literary Prize, for instance, comes from the Booker family, which for six generations, was involved in sugar growing.  When my father was growing up in the rich sugar growing area of Berbice, British Guiana, he used to say, “We all were owned by Booker.”  We New Yorkers, past and present, might say we all were owned by the Havemeyers—be it the Irish and German workers in the factory, or our more recent immigrants whose forbearers provided the raw material  for processing at this vast and profitable plant.  It is fitting that an art exhibit unpeels this story for us, given that the Havemeyers were enthusiastic collectors of art and their enormous collection is held at our most New York of institutions—the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Once again, the Domino Sugar factory is rising to symbolize another crucial moment in New York City’s history: the tension between runaway luxury development and affordable housing for the middle class.   Mayor DeBlasio, whose administration fought hard to ensure that the newly renovated factory will include middle class housing, also has a family connection to sugar—his wife Chirlane McCray is of Bajan and St. Lucian background.

Ironically, it is this development that threatens to obliterate the very history Walker’s installation so tantalizingly conjures up. Before the exhibit closes, the factory stripped of its smeared walls, its abandoned machinery and smokestacks to make way for shiny condos, we should pause to consider how to mark significance of this recovered site.  If Walker’s enigmatic piece is to have any impact, let us not efface this powerful history.  Why not retain some of the industrial artifacts and offer informational plaques? Bring school children—so many of whom can trace their own family history to sugar—to this factory to learn about this facet in American history and the development of the New York waterfront? This opening should not just be a one-time event—it should be a true opening, to continue this engagement with a history that involves so many of us, and a way to reconceive our understanding of slavery. In revitalizing this hulking waterfront icon for our future, it’s also time to reclaim New Yorkers’ own sweet and bitter sugar stories.

Lisa Jalowetz Aronson: The Door Opens

Lisa with Peter Lindenfeld at a show of Lore Lindenfeld’s work

I first met my future mother-in-law in 1996, when my boyfriend at the time, Marc Aronson, brought me to Westchester, where he was giving a talk on Edith Wharton to his mother’s book reading group, which was reading House of Mirth.  Marc and I had met many times over the years–I an all-in-black aspiring novelist, he an editor at Henry Holt–mostly at the home of Shashi and Minu Tharoor.  On one fateful occasion, we sat perched on a sofa and were soon immersed in  a conversation about Edith Wharton and Henry James.  Marc had recently finished his dissertation on William Crary Brownell, who edited both authors.  (I am a James fan; he a Wharton, and we still have not resolved the issue) At the time, I think Marc was surprised that he was talking to someone who not only knew all the works, but even cared!

What followed was a very Jamesian or Whartonesque courtship–take your pick–a long date at the Metropolitan Museum, where we both had wandered as children and now shared our favorite rooms, literary readings, strolls and high and low meals talking books in our beloved New York City; proffered and refused gifts and many, many conversations, heady and otherwise.  Over the course of that time, he mentioned his parents a few times–once at an Israeli restaurant in the East Village he said something about his parents ‘working in the theater.’  Then one evening, standing at the bar at Gramercy Tavern, after an event at the National Arts Club, he began to explain his fascination with Brownell, how he was drawn to figures who are on the borderline or cusp of cultural change, since of course, that was who his father, the set designer Boris Aronson, was.  At that moment, I thought to myself, “I will never be bored with this man.  I will always want to hear what he has to say,” and simply put–fell in love.

Shortly thereafter we rented a car and made our way up to Westchester, where I met his elegant, snowy-haired mother and her fellow book group.  Marc gave his talk and then we followed Lisa back to her home, across the river, in Nyack.  At the time, Lisa was about 75 years old, and she drove like a speed demon, swerving around the winding roads.  As we stepped up to the door, he paused, and said with a sigh, “Welcome to my family.  Welcome to the avant-garde.”

The door swung open.

And so it was.

For that door swinging open happened on many levels for me.  My life utterly changed.  Marc and I–like Lisa and Boris, though differently–became collaborators and deep friends in work, love and parenting.  Soon after he became my editor on a non-fiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers–an idea we dreamed up together and which set me on my path of writing young adult works about teenagers of multicultural backgrounds.  (I too would give a talk to that same book group–on Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse)  And we now are co-authors,  with a new work-in-progress on romance, artistic collaboration and war, about the photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro.  Throughout, our partnership has been graced by the light of Lisa, who taught me, by example, about the balance of art and life.  She never lost her sweet optimism and child-like curiosity, what one friend described as the spirit of “pre-Fascist Europe”–which carried through to her final days.

I hope to put into words more of the door that truly did swing open for me, onto the remarkable woman who became my mother-in-law.

Below is Lisa’s obituary, which I think may help explain what Marc meant and what I have come to understand and love.

Lisa Jalowetz Aronson

April 18, 1920-April 18, 2013

 

For over 35 years Lisa Jalowetz Aronson was part of the Broadway theater design team, with her husband Boris Aronson, garnering six Tony awards, for such iconic shows as “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Follies,” and others.  She also was the co-author, with Frank Rich, of The Theater Art of Boris Aronson.

Lisa herself came from an artistic family and her childhood home was a place where all forms of art were an integral part of life. She was born in Prague in 1920 where her father, the conductor Heinrich Jalowetz, was a close associate of members of the second Vienna school including Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg and he conducted several of the premieres of their music. Heinrich was brought to America by a patron of Schoenberg’s and headed the music department at Black Mountain College, which Lisa attended after she managed to escape from Nazi-controlled Vienna where she was studying art at a high school.

Her sister, the weaver Trude Guermonprez, studied at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Halle-Saale, Germany—noted for the many Bauhaus-trained artists on its faculty—and lived in open hiding, under a false identity, in Amsterdam during World War II, while her husband, the photographer Paul Guermonprez, was a leader in the Dutch Resistance until his execution by the Nazis.  Lisa and her sister were reunited after the war, when Trude was sponsored by Anni Albers to teach weaving at Black Mountain.  Lisa’s cousin, Willy Groag, with whom she grew up, was responsible for bringing out much of the art from the Terezin camp after World War II; her cousin Jacques Groag worked with the Viennese architect Adolf Loos and the philosopher-architect Ludwig Wittgenstein, before fleeing to England, where he and his wife re-established their artistic careers, and Jacqueline Groag became a well-known textile designer.

After graduating from Black Mountain Lisa Jalowetz came to New York where she sketched theater scenes for newspapers, worked with Erwin Piscator at the New School, and as an assistant to various set designers such as Jo Malzeiner, and then Boris Aronson.  They were married in 1945, and she was listed on every show he did after that, as Lisa Jalowetz, assistant to Mr. Aronson.  She and Boris first lived on the top floor of a Beaux Artes townhouse on Columbus Circle, which Boris would paint, and where Lisa recalled, after the theater let out, streams of hungry dancers and actors would come to their place to eat.  They then moved to an apartment overlooking Central Park where they did all their design work together in the front studio room.

Lisa had a singular gift for friendship, and remained close to childhood friends such as Margit Meissner, Black Mountain classmates such as Atti Gropius, the weaver Lore Lindenfeld, the poet Jane Mayhall, the artist Ruth Asawa, and the director and acting teacher John Stix, as well their theater colleagues such as Harold Prince, Al Hirschfield, Uta Hagen, and Lotte Lenya–and many, many others.  Yet Lisa was not one to rest in the past, nurturing new connections and daily rhythms through each phase of her life.  One ritual she and a few other dear friends used to do was to call each other up every time the full moon rose in the night sky.

She also provided resources for the German scholar Albrecht Pohlman for his biography of Trude and her husband the Dutch Resistance leader and publisher Paul Guermonprez, as well as a traveling exhibit of Boris’s theater art at the Katonah Art Museum and the Israel Museum, where the Boris and Lisa Aronson print collection is also housed.  She served on the Tony Nominating Committee from 1999-2001.  More recently, she helped with Boris’ Yiddish Theater art, which opened at the Ben Uri Museum in London on the day she died, April 18th, her 93rd birthday. Lisa died of respiratory failure at her home in Nyack, New York and is survived by her son, Marc, daughter-in-law Marina Budhos, and two grandsons, Sasha and Raphael.

We’re Ready for Immigration Reform: A Novelist’s Perspective

A new Op-Ed in the Huffington Post:

With the bipartisan proposal on immigration just announced, and President Obama’s speech on reform delivered recently, we’re all braced for the polarizing winds of anger to rage.

But that’s not what I’ve found. For several years, I have been talking about illegal immigrants, all over the country. Every time I finish my talk, I wait for a blast of hostility.

It never comes.

More …

When Do You Write: Guest Post at Anjali Enjeti’s Website

Nowadays I write when the saws aren’t whining downstairs or one of my boys isn’t tumbling into my study, complaining about his odious brother.  Seriously, right now—living through a kitchen renovation during the summer, my prime writing time—has been a huge challenge.  It’s discombobulated my otherwise pretty disciplined rhythm, which I established in graduate school years ago.  At that time, I felt so guilty about leaving a ‘real’ job, and living on the tiny scholarship, I felt I had to be at it, every morning.  I lived in a tiny studio, worked at the kitchen table and listened to the family next door in a gorgeous Victorian back down their driveway every morning, going off to the ‘real world’.  I remember feeling terribly deprived, sure I would never have such a life, and yet pure, Spartan.

More …

Mrs. Dalloway Then and Now

This appeared in the Patch:

When I was in college, I took a course taught by an erudite British poet and critic, Jon Stallworthy, who came to class in nubby wool sweaters, and assigned us to write an essay on “Why Mrs. Dalloway is a masterpiece.”

Moxie sophomore that I was, I decided to write a paper on why Mrs. Dalloway was not a masterpiece, and headed straight to the Graduate Library, where I spent hours digging up old reviews in English newspapers, panning Woolf’s novel, and building up my sure-fire case that the novel was ‘second rate’—not on the order of To the Lighthouse, certainly.  I was sure my professor would be impressed by my extraordinary, rebellious performance.

Not surprisingly, Professor Stallworthy was not amused.  Not only had I missed the beauty and genius of the novel, but he wrote sternly, “I’m not interested in what some critic decades ago said.  I want to know what you think.”

In fact, with my little sophomoric exercise, I had missed out on my own honest impressions.  Initially I was a little turned off by Mrs. Dalloway: how could I care about this upper class woman, and her desultory search for flowers?  Yet once I allowed myself to dive beneath the surface of the ordinary, to understand the deeper trembles of yearning, war, and desperation that coursed beneath, I found myself on a literary journey unlike any I’d taken before.  That was the lesson of Woolf’s writing—the profundity that can lie right beneath a woman’s life, in all its quotidian details; the intertwining of the domestic with the philosophical.  This is sometimes the subtle ambition that marks many women novelists—especially those mining the daily lives of their female characters.

In the end, Virginia Woolf became one of my favorite, all-time authors.  While at that library, I was able to actually touch one of the original Hogarth Press editions she and her husband Leonard produced, with its beautiful, swirling pattern Italian paper cover. And I still own my college paperback, marked and remarked with my urgent, serious notes.

But I also learned something else: to trust my own instincts about what I like and why.

Many years later, at a dinner of women authors, I met first-time novelist Anne Korkeakivi.  We chatted a bit about some overlapping interests–Anne lives in Geneva, for her husband is a human rights lawyer for the UN; I had grown up in a UN community among many children of diplomats and international mission employees, and, as an advocate for the International Baccalaureate in our schools, I was curious about her children’s experience at the IB school there.

And then I went home and bought and read her novel, An Unexpected Guest, and liked it a lot.  Its structure is clearly a peon to Mrs. Dalloway, for it takes place in one day, as a hostess, Clare, the American wife of a British diplomat, is preparing for an important dinner party when the past comes knocking.  In this case—unlike Clarissa’s Peter Walsh, who has returned from his career in the Indian Civil Service, this is the haunted, geo-political past of IRA terrorism. As in Mrs. Dalloway, we track Clare as she manages her menu, her staff, and some mysterious troubles with her teenage son.  And like Mrs. Dalloway, this is a deceptively quiet surface book, yet set in present day, post 9/11 Paris, with its high red-alert tensions.  Clare’s is a rarified world that might seem arch and retrograde, but as the novel notes:

“Living within the diplomatic world wasn’t just a matter of smiling, shaking hands, and wearing attractive clothing.  That’s what most outsiders didn’t realize, and that it was possible to take pride in the skill it required, even when it came to something as trivial as knowing how and when to do the place cards.  … With the emergence of instant global communications, some pundits had even begun to question the modern-day relevance of diplomats … If anything, today’s world required on-site national representatives more than ever.  She had seen firsthand how difficult relations had become with the French for Edward and his colleagues since Britain had joined the U.S. in invading Iraq.”

An Unexpected Guest is a patient book, impressively skillful for a first novel as Korkeakivi balances the artful arrangement of domestic life with the eruptive energy of past youthful passions, and the tension of present-day political fears.  And, to my surprise, about a third of the way through–that slow and careful build suddenly becomes a compelling page-turner that I stayed up late, racing to finish.

For this reason I’ve invited Anne to come read at our independent bookstore, Words, at a reading sponsored by GlobalSOMA on Friday, November 2nd, at 7:30.  Please do join us.

Remembering David Foster Wallace (briefly)

This was a piece I wrote for our local Patch in anticipation of an event with biographer D.T. Max:

In 1989, when I was still a novice writer, I spent the summer at Yaddo, the beautiful writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs.  It’s a fairly intimidating and luxurious atmosphere (butterballs served at dinner!) for any new writer still trying to get a handle on a first novel. One feels both anointed and yet hollow, inadequate.

It was there I met—among many other writers—David Foster Wallace.  Already, there was a bit of star aura around David—he was clearly brilliant, and his difficult, opaque and challenging first collection, The Broom of the System, had been published.  Downstairs in the main room of Yaddo’s Victorian house was the mail table—and it was hard not notice the big packages that came for David—from publishers, from Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown.  Wallace was starting to hum with a true career while many of us were simply in the shadows, figuring out who we were as writers or artists.

 

David was a funny mix of Midwestern earnest, well-brought up, polite, and yet sharply arrogant.  He kept his cards to his chest, though one could still see the whirring, ambitious calculations within.  Evenings, some of us would sit around the screened-in porch for long winding conversations about the state of contemporary fiction, and he would dominate, posing quizzical questions, conducting the conversation as if he were the professor.  (Flustering a few of the more insecure young writers)  I could clearly detect that he was a professor’s son, used to the analytic seminar, even in his slacker trademark bandana around his long hair.  Indeed David was not teaching creative writing as many of us were—he was headed for Harvard to study philosophy.

Over the course of the month, a small group of us hung around quite a bit, shooting pool in town, or joining him as he smoked a lot of pot in his attic room.  I once made the mistake of playing tennis with him—he was a ranked state player in high school—and embarrassing myself not just with the ball, but with some of the intellectual volleys, so shy was I at the time.

Lobbing the ball across the net, he asked me what I thought was the next frontier in fiction.  Since I was actually trying to wean myself of the intellectual pyrotechnics of experimental fiction, I mumbled something about ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ fiction and then felt completely tongue-tied and embarrassed.  Somehow, I managed to say, “You know it’s mostly about writing a story that really hits you.”

He paused on the court.  Something had clicked.  He said quietly, “Yes, there is that.  It’s hard to deliver that emotional knockout that gets you right here—“ He pointed to his chest.  “That is rare.”

David would go on to write Infinite Jest, a book that was a huge achievement; as much a literary opus as it was a massive cultural event.  He also battled with severe and profound depression.  Shortly after he left Yaddo, I’d heard from mutual acquaintances that he’d had a severe crack up, dropped out of Harvard, and was in an institution.  All that pot smoking masked his constant internal struggles with “the black hole with teeth.”

Over the next decades, Wallace moved toward the luminosity of the truly gifted and brilliant, the public.  A cultish fascination grew around his maximalist work.  Though I was not one of those who dared crack open the over a thousand-page-tome, David’s journalism and essays, which appeared on the pages of Harper’s, were among my favorite—funny, erudite, slangy, relaxed, genre-breaking cultural commentary, where his penchant for the extended, hilarious footnote became a genre unto itself.

To my surprise, many, many years later, the author DT Max contacted me in his research for the biography of Wallace, which began with a New Yorker article he wrote about the last days of Wallace’s life before he committed suicide in 2008.  I was surprised, as I was no more than a speck in the huge number of famous figures and dear friends who populated David’s life.  But it speaks to DT’s scrupulous sense of fine research that he reached out to everyone.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a kind book, for it takes up, with compassion and insight, the twin struggles of Wallace, the ambitious literary author and Wallace the person, battling severe depression.

 

 

What I’m Reading

A few days ago I finished D.T. Max’s Every Story is a Love Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.   The book is both eminently readable, a kind of psychological thriller of one brilliant author’s mind, his ouvre, and ultimate self-destruction.  At the same time, I found myself queasily putting it down for rest stops–perhaps because I knew David very slightly, from Yaddo, and thus his ghost brushed past on the page; perhaps because this was the first time I had read a biography of someone who is a contemporary.  The effect is oddly dizzying, even nauseating (is it nauseated? Wallace was a hard-ass on grammar and nausea was one of his pet peeves).  It’s like being in a Tilt-a-Whirl of one’s own times, lurching a bit too close to one’s cultural moments, veering away as we watch his particular struggles and demise.  In the end, the book is also terribly sad and moving.

***********

Throughout the summer I’ve been slowly making my way through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in preparation for our project on Robert Capa and Gerda Taro and the Spanish Civil War.  I’ve never been a great reader of Hemingway–he was most certainly the obligatory guy author for me back in high school, and I’ve never been a fan of minimalism.  Its language constraints irritate me; the dialogue at times seems peevishly forced.  Prior to beginning the novel, I read the two biographies of Martha Gelhorn–the second, which was unauthorized, provides a rather damning portrait of Hemingway the mean and vindictive ex-husband, so I was hardly inclined toward him as an author.

And yet, this is one of the most gorgeously seductive books I’ve read in a while.  Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls while married to Gelhorn, and still under the spell of the Spanish Civil War and its tragic aftermath.  To me, it is most certainly its greatest paen to this doomed war; it’s also, simply, a damn good war book, a damned good novel, as he would probably say.  The novel has this extraordinary taut control beneath the surface while Hemingway indulges in the wildest of poetic flights–as in the gypsy woman Pilar’s long soliloquy about the long and beautiful night she spent with Pablo in Valencia, during which she took the cold pitchers of beer and pressed them against his sweaty back (and which, as it turns out, never occured); or her sickening recounting of the brutal public executions of the Francoists in their village; or her troubled memory of her first love, a bullfighter, a story which is also an argument for her sixth sense capacity to ‘smell death’.  There is also Robert Jordan’s own inner flights–as in his fanciful imagining of bringing Maria to Madrid, where he will install her in a hotel, and he will reconvene with the wily and mysterious Russian agents who represent the hardboiled themes of  betrayal and counter-betrayal in a war where morality is swiftly muddied.  Hemingway breaks all the rules! (Exhilarating in our current hidebound MFA writing workshop world)  The novel is so rich, so dense in pockets of quietude and then slow and agonizing violence or near violence, that I find I can only read a few pages at a time so that I can let my mind sift and settle.

Recently also read–rather quickly–Junot Diaz’s latest collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her following the inimitable Yunior, one presumes a kind of autobiographical stand-in for the author.  Yunior’s blatant foul-mouthed, shilly-shallying treatment of women is at the center here, and yet each story is shrouded in such sadness that the tragic atmosphere undercuts the  jazzy, show-offy hip-hop over-brightness of his lines.

Next up, I think is Rushdie’s Joseph Anton and Zadie Smith’s NW.  (What a publishing season!)  Read an excerpt of the memoir in the New Yorker, and though it’s been ages since I’ve found myself sinking into Rushdie’s writing–each new book seemed to lure and then repel me away–I found this bit of the memoir utterly absorbing and painfully honest.  Perhaps too, like the David Foster Wallace biography, there is something riveting about reading of events one remembers keenly and acutely; when recent cultural history is now the subject of retrospective.  It’s like overturning a not quite seasoned garden bed–the roots and bulbs still fairly raw and evident and yet there are also sediments of understanding, starting to accrue.

Finally, a shout out to friends who have come out with books this fall: Jaime Manrique’s Cervantes Street; Yona McDonough’s A Wedding in Great Neck; and Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins.