The Paris Review's Blog, page 102

The Review’s Review: A Happy Pig

Dev Patel in David Lowery’s The Green Knight, 2021. Photo: Eric Zachanowich. Courtesy of A24 Films.

The Green Knight offers all the thrilling props a Camelot geek could want: deep-hooded cloaks and pointy headdresses, thatch-roofed hovels and dim stone halls, blue rune tattoos and prayers to the Virgin Mary that seem awfully close to goddess worship. There is wattle, there is daub, and there is an enviable tunic bedazzled in silver votives. Together, all of it forms a dreamlike reflection of a fraught relationship between Christian and Celtic moralities, human beings and the rest of nature. Fans of Loreena McKennitt, Thomas Hardy, and William Cronon, this one’s for you. —Jane Breakell 

At a farmers’ market in Saugerties, New York, we bought a pork chop that browned heroically over coals and achieved glory when basted with Dijon mustard in the final minutes of cooking. While the chop rested and we opened another bottle of wine, I thought of Nose to Tail Eating—surely Britain’s most influential contemporary cookbook—and of my introduction to its author, Fergus Henderson, in the pages of Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour, twenty years ago. Specifically, I reflected on a statement of Henderson’s, uttered as he and Bourdain contemplated a carefully roasted pig’s head, and felt sure the same was true on our own plate: “This was a happy pig.” —Robin Jones

 

Midori Hirano. Photo: Markus Wambsganss. Courtesy of Hirano.

 

Mirrors in Mirrors, the 2019 album by the Kyoto-born, Berlin-based classical composer and musician Midori Hirano, has been a frequent source of sound in my household as of late. With its combination of piano, synths, and the occasional recording of rain, it’s the perfect blend of the organic and the electronic for these early autumn days that are slowly turning dreary. —Rhian Sasseen

With his new album For George Lewis | Autoschediasms, Tyshawn Sorey cements his identity as a major composer of contemporary classical music, though jazz—or at least its improvisatory ethos—is ever audible in the periphery. Inspired equally by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn, the three pieces that make up this double-disc release billow and convulse, shudder and unfurl. In the hour-long “For George Lewis,” dedicated to one of Sorey’s mentors, passages of astonishing beauty rise out of slowly droning musical landscapes—the last five minutes are absolutely transcendent. The two included versions of “Autoschediasms,” one of which was conducted virtually over video chat during the pandemic, are musical collages that survey Sorey’s ever-expanding sound world. This music demands, and generously repays, concentration. —Craig Morgan Teicher

Sixty-four pages into her 1950 debut novel, Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith offers this gem about the menacing, moneyed, lantern-jawed man-child Charles Anthony Bruno: “He remembered one brilliant and powerful thought that had come to him last night watching a televised shuffleboard game: the way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.” Delivered just as Bruno is hurtling toward fate, this pair of sentences displays the type of characterization at which Highsmith excels: economically and empathetically revealing the misery that bubbles within even the most contemptible of men. —Brian Ransom

 

Patricia Highsmith on the television program After Dark, 1988. Photo: Open Media Ltd. CC BY-SA 3.0, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

Fourteenth and Jackson

David Corby, The Tribune Building. Oakland California. Taken from the City Center complex, 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

When I talk to people in the city about whether they come to Oakland, be it 2007 or 2019, the answer is a resounding “never,” followed by redundant stories of car break-ins and not wanting to take BART at night. No matter how many East Bay, Marin and Contra Costa County, or Central Valley residents head through the Transbay tunnel or across the Golden Gate or Bay Bridge every day to San Francisco, going to Oakland is a seemingly annual trip for city dwellers, who usually make the pilgrimage for city-sponsored art crawls or like-minded Fox Theater concerts or, at one time, a Warriors game. The lack of streetlights and noticeable foot traffic for years made people fear downtown Oakland compared to the more geographically concentrated city by the bay. Despite the similar amount of crime in the two cities, it’s Oakland where everyone assumes they’ll be shot on sight or that the ghost of Huey Newton will greet them at the Twelfth Street BART with a shotgun and a toll for Whites Only.

Downtown Oakland is changing in many ways, but my habits on Fourteenth and Jackson aren’t one of them. A smoke by Lake Merritt and some quarter snacks from the bodega next to the Ruby Room lead to nuggets from the fast-food dispensary next to my old building, Peralta Apartments on Thirteenth and Jackson. Eating and smoking under the ground-floor tree, three floors below the apartment that housed me, my books, my desk, my box spring, and mattress twice the box spring’s size beginning in June 2007, a year after I graduated from UC Berkeley a few BART stops away.

Downtown was feared when I first moved to the East Bay in 2002. It was the small businesses of Seventeenth Street’s previously tree-lined lane between Franklin and Webster and Chinatown that held up downtown for years, most of the money leaving around 2 P.M. when the business class went home early. Vacant lots and dilapidated car repair shops dotted Telegraph across from the Oakland Black Box, where I first performed poetry in the Town as a teenager.

From my window, I’d look west toward Broadway across the mostly empty parking lot housing the USPS trucks across the street from the downtown post office on the Alice Street side of the lot. A shin-high ledge lined the lot where the local derelicts would sip and smoke atop the white streaks of goose and egret shit dropped from trees housing entire aviaries downtown. At night the sound of the birds mating and fighting fills the blocks up and down Oak near the Eleventh Street tunnel and the Oakland Museum all the way up to Fourteenth Street. It’s from this third-floor window that I spotted an old couch—an abandoned brown, leather, three-seater beaut lurking by the hardware emporium on Alice and Twelfth—that my roommate and I dragged a few blocks, then up a couple flights to my four-hundred-and-change room inside apartment 310.

We inherited the three-bedroom apartment from college friends, all of us previous undergraduate co-opers used to one another’s habits. In common was our shared home state and the unspoken boundaries of our debauchery. Hourly San Francisco Financial District temp wages fueled our livelihoods. I subsisted on fast food and the taco truck on the other side of the lake, skateboarding across a preconstruction Fourteenth Street with potholes and graveled nascent bike lanes before ollieing up as thick a sidewalk as I would have wallriding Rome’s Colosseum, let alone East Oakland’s Coliseum. Lake Merritt’s sidewalk was getting paved, signs of gentrification slowly emerging with the economy plummeting as quickly as full-time job prospects. I’d sit on my board on the east side of the lake or on the white benches on East Eighteenth if they weren’t covered with too much bird shit, smashing carne asada quesadillas and Mexican Coca-Colas, not knowing that in 2019 I’d propose to my wife on the side of the lake closest to the now-renovated Fourteenth Street.

The bodega heads knew us so well we got free bottles on our birthdays on the way out of the bar next door. We knew the bartenders and when they worked. If we didn’t have to work for the day, we were at the lake, or lurking in Chinatown, or just home, in my case, writing a play with a faint chance of production. Folks enjoyed being over. Odd watch parties for Warriors games. We hosted a viewing party when Caltrans shut down the eastern expanse of the Bay Bridge, building the temporary S-shaped, slow-speed detour at the westbound entrance of Treasure Island that fascinated us Los Angeles freeway-series transplants. Odd now, weighing that era of barely making the four-hundred-dollar rent against being the bottom-rung gentrifiers of our time, if only for having college degrees, but we awoke to the reality of the recession—no jobs, no future—every day for what would be years.

This intersection was flooded with rage in the wake of Oscar Grant III’s murder by BART police on New Year’s Day 2009. Mayor Ron Dellums nonviolently parted a sea of protestors here on Fourteenth and Jackson before addressing a crowd rightfully demanding justice for the unarmed, handcuffed, and executed man shot and killed on the southbound Fruitvale Station platform in East Oakland. As the protests turned into minor riots, the owner of the Ruby Room bar, synonymous with the Oakland-based motorcycle club East Bay Rats, stood outside his bar, shotgun in hand, ready for the type of looting that generally occurred a few blocks west. The night of the marches, I demonstrated with coworkers-slash-activists, friends who taught youth by day and risked arrest at night. I turned around and saw some friends being arrested and others fleeing east toward the lake, rendezvousing near the then-standing Merchants Parking toward Webster. I fled to Berkeley just before the calls poured in on my thick flip phone about a police car aflame on my corner, assuredly the same cop I’d seen in my rearview.

*

The day before I leave Oakland for practically anywhere that isn’t San Francisco or Berkeley, my anxiety propels me downtown toward Lake Merritt, a type of travel anxiety pushing me straight to the axis of both the city and my life circumnavigating it, reconnecting through physical proximity to something tangible and memorable before anything, everything, goes astray the moment I cross the Altamont Pass. Amid work, the sardined commutes, the constant reports of realtors’ dollars flooding lobbying campaigns throughout the state, solace meets resistance when I’m standing around downtown and bearing witness, remembering and documenting the befores and my place within its breathing afters.

If the Bay Area is a microcosm, six figures and stock options will become the base level for surviving in America. The kind of anxiety my wife and I shared the night news broke of the Sears building being sold to Uber—we were either so shocked or so drunk that we still can’t remember the name of the bar where we were.

I channeled this worry into a script for a short film, Payday, about a day in the life of an aspiring Oakland artist trying to get a major grant check during the day and go on a date at night. Half the reason I wrote this was to get an establishing shot from behind the characters showing the whole scene in the park—the dragon swing set, the basketball courts and constant pickup games, downtown Oakland’s skyline, the playground—with the Tribune Tower perfectly placed in the background.

Before the script was even done, I got the shot without actors in place, two Chinatown locals instead sitting on the red metal and curved-back benches in the corner facing the dragon. I heard the Merchants parking lot was being destroyed for a new development that will become the tallest Oakland has seen. I didn’t know that it’d be an even closer city-block-sized development that’d jeopardize the shot, even when I was recording background audio near the sign explaining the history of the dragon boat, the sound of basketballs, kids playfully screaming in multiple languages, the AC Transit stop on the corner and its multiple necessary lines to East Oakland, the sounds of the Town playing in the new shadows of skyscraper investments.

Maybe it’s for the best. Who am I in the grand scheme of things? These words will never re-create the Oakland reflected in the swish of Hammer’s parachute pants or the dread of Loma Prieta’s tremors. I still feel scorn watching the Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts murals get covered by new developments, even though city funding was allocated for the murals’ creation.

How can I tell you how much an intersection means to me—Warriors victories and simultaneous unspoken citywide agreements to protest here, memories of friends getting arrested and fights ensuing and tear gas being thrown—without sounding pedantic, soapbox driven, as if having an opinion is the equivalent of publicly bearing a contagious disease, a cog in the path to your next call?

In the final weeks of 2019, these memories whirl around me as cars maintain their evergreen multiple-file entry lines into the fast-food drive-thru before noon. The last Raiders home game ever starts in about an hour, the franchise having decided to leave Oakland again, this time for a massive new Las Vegas arena.

The Coliseum’s packed with silver and black every year. Imagine a masquerade ball from hell sponsored by Bud Light and soundtracked by Too Short. But also imagine a tailgate bigger than most city swap meets, where friends from across state and family lines set up shop, shoot the dozens, and truly find community in the middle of a parking lot where season ticket passes are handed down to next of kin.

What will the internally displaced Raider Nation do now every Sunday morning before 1 P.M. kickoff?

Is the Oakland Coliseum the next space to disappear?

Visions and thoughts of the future swirl before me, the honks of impatient horns blaring nearby at the automated fast food beeline. And I’m still here, somewhat sober and still eating too many fries in the developing shade of a new six-story building that’s replacing the root-bursting dead asphalt that housed those derelicts, the bird shit, the mail trucks, the “empty” fluid spaces increasingly disappearing in downtown Oakland.

Still—What do I fear forgetting? Fear losing? The ability to walk around the lake and point to my former roof and say, “Every day I’d start the day there”? Is Lake Merritt the last thing I want to see, ever? As if having this choice is something life and Oakland permit.

I’ve lived in the East Bay for more than half my life. I’ve stubbornly believed Oakland was the only city that made me want to be myself. It wasn’t until 2019 that I questioned that belief. And reaffirmed my answer.

And why a place, and not a person, a scent, a touch, a song, knowing full well the lake, too, is man-made? I wonder if I’m mistaking these walls and Lake Merritt and Chinatown’s alleys and the subway elevating toward Fruitvale for the smiles, sweat, laughter, drink orders, inside jokes, and apartment buzzer numbers of old friends now breathing and living on other sides of this still-spinning axis. For the hope that the faces that are still here will not just remain but flourish. This persistent fear, acceptance, and forecast of change guides my fingers to the shutter button and pen, documenting all the same. It is December 2019 in the city of Oakland, my habits are not changing, and I no longer live in the downtown Oakland of 2007 or in the downtown deemed Uptown or Oakland Central. Why yell at people on the train when I can show them a hi-res still image of that unobstructed angle of the Tribune Tower and, in an all-caps Sharpie caption, scream, DOES ANYONE ELSE MISS THOSE RED LETTERS IN OAKLAND’S SKYLINE, TOO?

 

José Vadi is an award-winning essayist, poet, playwright, and film producer. Vadi received the San Francisco Foundation’s Shenson Performing Arts Award for his debut play, a eulogy for three, produced by Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Word Project. He is the author of SoMa Lurk, a collection of photos and poems published by Project Kalahati / Pro Arts Commons. His work has been featured by the PBS NewsHour, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Daily Beast, while his writing has appeared in Catapult, McSweeney’s, New Life Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and Pop-Up Magazine.

Copyright © 2021 by José Vadi, from  Inter State . Excerpted by permission of Soft Skull Press. 

Tolstoy’s Uncommon Sense and Common Nonsense

Aleksey Kivshenko, watercolor illustration of Alexander I and Napoleon meeting in Tilsit in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 1893. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Once upon a time, five people with strong opinions were invited to view an old tree and offer their thoughts.

The first one said: “I’m a big-picture person. At first glance, I can say this tree is too big for its own good. We need to lop some limbs off.”

The second one said: “It’s not the architecture of the tree that bothers me but the parts that make up the whole. Anywhere I direct my attention, I can see ten or twenty imperfect leaves.”

The third one said: “This tree is much too old to be relevant. Its life began when the world was wrong in many ways: patriarchal, despotic, undemocratic. Why should we care about something growing out of that history?”

The fourth one said: “The world is still wrong in many ways. A tree like this does little to solve the political, socioeconomic, and environmental issues of today.”

The fifth one said: “I am not a tree person. Roses and nightingales are worthy subjects of my attention, and I consider it an insult to my talent to be asked to look at a tree.”

Anytime one talks about War and Peace, one is reminded of the tree’s critics. Fortunately, a majestic tree has no need for a defender.

*

Our literary litmus paper is made, at least partially, by the impressions and memories of our senses. If a book were full of details never seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt by us, we might be more mystified than a goose or a cockapoo would feel when confronted with our literature, which to them must be outlandishly vague. Yet greedy readers—I count myself as one—crave more than a confirmation of experience: we want writers to articulate that for which we haven’t yet found our own words, we want our senses to be made uncommon.

Books that I feel drawn to and reread, War and Peace among them, are full of uncommon sense and common nonsense. (Uncommon nonsense makes exhilarating literature, too, in Lewis Carroll’s case, but uncommon nonsense does better to stay uncommon: in less skillful hands, it becomes caprice or parody.)

One imagines that Tolstoy did not seek to write about uncommon sense. He simply presented the world, and the world, looked at closely, is often extraordinary. A line I never tire of in War and Peace: “The transparent sounds of hooves rang out on the planks of the bridge.”

Colors are regularly described as “muted” or “loud,” but sounds that are transparent make a reader pause. The ringing hooves take me back to my early childhood in Beijing, where cars were scarce, and flatbed horse trailers passed in the street, carrying coal, lumber, produce, and sometimes people huddled together. Forty years later, I can still hear those horses walking down the narrow path outside our apartment on winter mornings as I lay awake, the sky dark but for a thin patch of paleness in the east, a predawn color called yu du bai (fish-belly white) in Mandarin. And there—when the outdoor and indoor were visible with shapes but not colors, when the tip of my nose turned cold if I let my head surface from the burrow between the quilt and the pillow (the heating in the building was turned on only from 7 P.M. to midnight), when, contrary to reality yet common to children’s perception, the world was still new and I was old enough for everything—there went the tapping of the hooves, clippity-clop, clippity-clop, a sound like no other, metallic, clear, yet without any harsh or sharp edge. Transparent—yes, and tangible.

“One who sees so much and so well does not need to invent; one who observes imaginatively does not need creative imagination,” Stefan Zweig said of Tolstoy. One who sees so much and observes imaginatively also makes the best demand of his readers: to read unhurriedly as one must live unhurriedly, with imagination, which is akin to reverie.

*

Although moments of uncommon sense abound in War and Peace, they are no more than the grace notes in the novel. Tolstoy’s interests were in humans and their limitations, in nations and their histories. Readers, whether they are reading during the Stalingrad battles (Vasily Grossman), or in a cramped high school dorm in Beijing in the eighties (a friend of mine), or, as during A Public Space’s first Tolstoy Together group, at the beginning of a pandemic (three thousand readers from around the globe, many under lockdown), must have no difficulty finding their worlds reflected in War and Peace: the man-made and natural catastrophes; the egomanias and incapacities in those designers of national and international schemes; the boundless human indifference; the inevitable human kindness; deceptions and strivings in marriages and in families; friendships and loves lost and found. The most absurd element of human absurdity, ironically, is that the absurdity is one of the most universal features—it would be a truly strange world if our absurdities turned out to be rare and unique. What binds people to one another more sturdily than our common nonsense? Even the Greek gods would have been forgotten had they been sensible.

“Anna Mikhailovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess was also weeping. They wept because they were friends; and because they were kind; and because they, who had been friends since childhood, were concerned with such a mean subject—money; and because their youth was gone.”

Tears in literature do not necessarily move the readers as they move their shedders. If I am asked to name five unforgettable scenes in all the books I have read that involve a character’s tears, I may be able to offer only one example: the passage featuring Anna Mikhailovna and Countess Rostova is one of the moments in War and Peace I often reread. Their tears touch me because they are secondary characters in a book with more than five hundred characters; because neither of them is quite sympathetic—they can be called selfish, snobbish, calculating, manipulative, vain, and they do not hesitate to mistreat and abuse people of lesser power or status; because they are mothers, and they interfere with their children’s lives in the name of love; because life cares little about their love for their children—Anna Mikhailovna, widowed, has nothing to rely on to advance her son’s career but her cunning, and Countess Rostova’s many children have been taken by death too soon; because they are lifelong friends; because their friendship, destined to be lifelong, is cut short not by one or the other’s death but by their pride, pettiness, and vindictiveness, by injuries caused by minor conflicts, by what is not in their control—the mean subject of money, the cruelty of war, the inadequate solace of peace.

And their tears stay with me because they are presented as who they are, with none of their traits amplified into an identity and their persons restructured around their identities. They are limited and yet expansive, superficial and yet complex, flawed and yet—at this one moment, when they embrace each other and weep, when the best qualities in one friend meet the best in the other—perfect.

*

What about common sense? Common sense in history, in philosophy, in religion, in the collective endeavor of human beings—isn’t that what Tolstoy tried so hard to instill in his words? And yet I like to think that common sense is something I achieve for myself, after wading through uncommon sense and common nonsense. And I have not found a better book for that purpose than War and Peace. I don’t imagine myself into any one of the characters, but I measure myself beside the characters: my conceit and aspiration against Andrei’s, my clumsiness and bafflement against Pierre’s, my youthful zeal and shame against Nikolai’s, my blind willfulness against Natasha’s, my sorrow against many mothers’ sorrows, my daydreaming against Mlle Bourienne’s. Fallibility is shared by all the characters; Tolstoy himself, too, was fallible. And that, I imagine, is the common sense I have come to for myself, through reading War and Peace, through living and remembering: fallibility is the only reliable factor in my life; fallibility is in everything I do.

Common sense—common to whom, you may ask. Not to those critics of the magnificent tree, certainly, but luckily, this is not a book for them.

 

Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.

© Yiyun Li, 2021, excerpted from Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace , published September 14 by A Public Space Books. Reprinted with the permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.

Jim Jarmusch’s Collages

From Some Collages, by Jim Jarmusch, published by Anthology Editions.

Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces. And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into “Andy Warhol.”

Personalities can transfer their qualities to other modes of life, and you are invited to imagine the results of the ensuing cognitive dissonance. When there is little discernible personality, or when parties have abandoned their personalities in favor of a position—political or legal or corporate or academic—they simply become their blather. You imagine that those thumbprints of text, sitting above shoulders, are excerpts from an endless gray ribbon of rhetoric that unspools continuously. And then there are those humans whose heads are empty, the same color as the mount. Since some are villains and some are heroes, that does not seem to carry a moral implication. Maybe they represent all those who suffer from stomach troubles.

Jarmusch’s canvases are tiny, but they encompass at least two hundred years of news, culture, and entertainment. Anything in our collective memory can be reconfigured at will. A line of jokers headed by Claude Monet step out in minidresses printed with the faces of the 1968 U.S. presidential candidates, simply because they can. The mood might be postapocalyptic; history is over and it is now time to swap out its parts, looking for a better fit. We can run rampant all over the stage of what used to be called civilization. At last even ciphers and smiley faces and cocker spaniels can become celebrated heroes and beauties!

The modest proportions of Jarmusch’s collages also make them pass for news, in the old sense: murky little gray pictures on some inner page of the newspaper, where the photography conveys not so much a slice of life as a sense of ritual. Under those circumstances, if a sufficient number of men in suits are crowded together it really doesn’t matter to your scanning eye whether they are legislators or mafiosi—they are enacting importance, and they do so every day regardless of the weather. Seeing Jarmusch’s collages is like flipping through the Daily Bugle and suddenly realizing that the paper has been taken over by pranksters who are giving you the real news: those figures might wear suits but they are actually cocker spaniels! Your vision has been corrected. You are no longer semiconsciously scanning now, but sitting upright and paying attention. The world reveals itself for what it really is.

—Luc Sante

From Some Collages, by Jim Jarmusch, published by Anthology Editions.

 

From Some Collages, by Jim Jarmusch, published by Anthology Editions.

 

From Some Collages, by Jim Jarmusch, published by Anthology Editions.

 

From Some Collages, by Jim Jarmusch, published by Anthology Editions.

 

Luc Sante’s books include Low Life, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, and Maybe the People Would Be the Times. He teaches at Bard College.

Jim Jarmusch is a film director, writer, musician, producer, and artist. A prominent figure in independent cinema, his notable films include Stranger than Paradise (1984), Down By Law (1986), Dead Man (1999), Broken Flowers (2005), and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). Some Collages is his first book of collage artwork.

An excerpt from Some Collages , by Jim Jarmusch, published by Anthology Editions. Jarmusch will also present his first solo show of these collages at James Fuentes Gallery, September 29 through October 31, 2021.

They Really Lose: An Interview with Atticus Lish

Atticus Lish in Lexington, Ky., on Sunday, May 30, 2021. Credit: Ryan Hermens

I have recommended Atticus Lish’s first novel to more people than any other book. Beautiful without being sentimental, brutal without being cruel, Preparation for the Next Life (2014) is a love story between Zou Lei, an undocumented half-Uighur, half–Han Chinese woman, and Brad Skinner, an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD. “He gets it,” I told fellow New Yorkers: the Jackson Heights bars; the Flushing food stalls; the long walks through outer Queens, past housing projects and storefront mosques and cash-and-carries, all the way to the gas stations and football fields of Long Island. Everyone I pestered into reading the novel was bowled over, from jaded graduate students and sore-eyed copy editors to my mother and my grappling coach.

They’d ask, Who is this man threading a romance through descriptions of ICE detention centers and sidewalk Falun Gong demonstrations? I would say what I had gleaned from interviews and articles. He’s the son of prominent editor Gordon Lish; a Harvard dropout who worked in security and telemarketing and taught English in China for a spell; a former Marine who fought two professional mixed martial arts bouts; a novelist who, after five years of dogged work in isolation, published his debut with the independent press Tyrant Books at age forty-three.

One thing I hadn’t known was that when Lish was fifteen, his mother was diagnosed with ALS. His experience caring for her provided the foundation for his new novel, The War for Gloria . (“A lot of the book is autobiographical,” Lish told me, “although it’s disguised.”) Gloria Goltz is a hippieish, anarchist-curious daughter of Springfield, Massachusetts, living in and around Boston. Her ambition to condemn the world through her writing—“a single scream of rage against the patriarchy”—is frustrated, before being foreclosed entirely by ALS. The novel then follows her son, Corey, who cares for Gloria as her condition worsens and she starts needing assistance to eat and even to breathe. Corey drops out of high school and works construction and odd jobs while fighting with everyone and anyone—strangers, friends, MMA opponents, and his itinerant father, Leonard, an MIT security guard prone to grandiose intellectual claims and seething misogyny.

Lish, who is Gen X, insisted to me that he hadn’t set out to write about men my age, and yet The War for Gloria is the finest novel about American millennial masculinity I’ve ever read. It details the particular ways in which young men have initiated themselves into violence from the George W. Bush years onward. There are pampered collegiate Übermensches-in-training, devouring Nietzsche and physics textbooks and piles of chicken as they grow their muscles and self-importance and stoke their rage at women. There are contractors with negative bank accounts and an “I don’t give a fuck” mantra, wanting nothing but to prove themselves in combat on the street or in the cage or in actual war. Then there are those left in their wake, unhappy onlookers to these men’s obsessive quests to overcome all weakness.

When I spoke to Lish on the phone, I was in New York with a cold, and he was in Pasadena, having moved there in July. We talked on September 1, two days after the last American troop in Afghanistan boarded a C-17 cargo plane departing Kabul, and this country ended its longest war.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing The War for Gloria?

LISH

I started working on it right after Preparation for the Next Life came out. If I have my dates right, late 2014. I had finished the first novel the year before, so the whole time I had been wondering what I was going to write next. Preparation came out. I didn’t have an agent. I was contacted by Amanda Urban, and then I did have an agent and that changed my life completely. I had a real moment where I said, This is the brass ring. You have to grab it! I asked myself, What was close to the bone still? It was my mother’s death. She died of ALS. I had a direction for the next book.

INTERVIEWER

It’s quite the follow-up. I think you grabbed the ring. Did you write the novel in New York?

LISH

Most of the time writing the book was in Brooklyn. That was about four years. The first thing I did, my wife and I went out to the cemetery near my house and looked for headstones. I saw the last name Agoglia, and that’s how I got the last name for the villain. Leonard Agoglia. That was pretty early in 2015. But the book didn’t really come together until I moved to Kentucky in 2019.

INTERVIEWER

What happened in Kentucky?

LISH

I don’t think it’s related to anything geographic. There was nothing magical in itself about Kentucky that provided the missing link. It took me so darn long to go down all the blind alleys and figure out what the story should be. A long, long time to see the light with this one. I’ll tell you what the big problem of the book was—I ended up writing two books that were stuck together from the beginning. One was a family romance, the other was a crime story that was parasitizing the book you now have. It was an insane labor trying to integrate the two. Last summer, both my editor and my agent said, Look, you’ve got something here, but you’ve told the wrong story. Leonard is monstrous, but you’ve turned him into a monster. You’ve told the story where he’s Hannibal Lecter. You need to address that. I realized it was time for me to cut off the parasite. At that point, I went up to Massachusetts. There’s a moving company up there called Viking Moving. I worked with them in 2004, the best job I ever had. My boss and friend Paul Webster, he and his right-hand man Taran O’Leary put me up in a moving warehouse in West Concord. They gave me a job, and during that time I rewrote the last third of the book and got rid of all the things that were extraneous.

INTERVIEWER

I’d almost expect there to be a bit in the novel about moving companies. There’s so much description of manual labor as Corey is trying to support himself and his mother. He works the trades, but also just miscellaneous gig work—tin knocking, fiberglassing boats, putting together Ikea furniture.

LISH

Doing this, I worked on a tugboat docked in Red Hook and operated by a guy named Matt Perricone. I was a deckhand for him, I got my maritime PSA license. Shout-out, too, to my brother-in-law Tom. He’s an HVAC worker and took me around his sites. I just wrote what I saw.

INTERVIEWER

After the first novel, I thought of you as primarily a New Yorker, so I have to ask, Do you actually like Boston?

LISH

It’s been a second home to me. I went to Phillips Academy, and Harvard right after that. I dropped out of Harvard, but Massachusetts was where I spent most of my time. After I got out of the Marines in 1997 my wife and I stayed in Boston for another spell, and returned a few years later. Writing this book I kept taking the bus from New York up to Boston.

INTERVIEWER

I think it shows, though all I know of the area is from films, really. I laughed when one character describes another as Good Will Hunting, but I guess Bostonians watch Boston movies, too.

LISH

Hollywood does the accent so horribly. Mystic River, oh man. That’s painful. You know what I like from Boston? The Car Talk guys, I love them. I really like it there, though. I ran into some guys wearing Red Sox jerseys in Cleveland and I was fist bumping the whole table, saying, “Hey man, I left my heart in Massachusetts!”

INTERVIEWER

What were you doing in Cleveland?

LISH

I was at the Jake Paul vs. Tyron Woodley fights. I’m covering them for Harper’s. The fight of the night in my opinion was Serrano vs. Mercado—you know, Serrano is billed as one of the greatest female boxers of all time. It was great, it was a great night.

INTERVIEWER

Man, Woodley! As a mixed martial arts fan, it was sad to see him lose to a YouTuber, but I’m glad he got paid. Did you talk to Jake Paul? What was he like?

LISH

I didn’t know much about Jake Paul, and I didn’t know exactly what to ask him. I was just getting into the story. Interviewing is a tough job! It’s very hard to know anyone. I feel like I’m up on who he is after the week in Cleveland, but even so, you can know somebody for thirty years and they can still be mysterious.

INTERVIEWER

It’s funny to think that you’re my Jake Paul in this interview. Are you training at all yourself right now?

LISH

After my fortunes changed from the last book, the first thing I did was say, I’m going to give myself a big present. I’m going to go and sign up at a martial arts gym. I’d been longing to do that. I went to Radical MMA in Manhattan. It was great, that’s a good gym. The thing was, as much fun as I was having, I became aware after a couple of months that too much of my emotional energy was going into martial arts. I became concerned I was fighting the wrong battle. I said, Listen, you’re not Rickson Gracie, you’re not going to make your mark on history in the cage. You’re a middle-aged writer. So I sacrificed that. Believe me, I missed training, but I felt it was necessary and I devoted myself completely to the book.

INTERVIEWER

You fought some in the early 2000s, right? I can’t think of many athletes writing novels about their sport. There’s something strenuous and horrifying and beautiful about training and fighting, and the passages about Corey going through all of that really sing.

LISH

A lot of this was drawn from my training. I would stick my head in at different places when the spirit moved me and do a month here or there. While writing I went up to see a couple of fights, Cage Wars in Albany and Combat Zone in Rockingham Park. I should say this—Corey’s fight with a fighter called Jack, that’s a real fight. A guy named Victor Hunsaker, he trained at the Shark Tank under Eddie Millis in Rancho Cucamonga. I rolled with Victor a bit, and in 2000 I actually warmed him up for this fight at a promotion out by Palm Springs called King of the Cage. It was incredibly dramatic, a one-round fight. An incredible display of Victor’s heart. He just barely did it, but he did it, right before the bell.

INTERVIEWER

I was going to ask if that fight was taken from your own career.

LISH

It was a way, way, way more violent fight than I ever had. I have to tell you, another one of the inspirations was a guy you may have heard of, Mac Danzig.

INTERVIEWER

Of course, the winner of The Ultimate Fighter.

LISH

I crossed paths with him back in 2000 in Rico Chiapparelli’s R.A.W. gym in El Segundo. Mac came with a bunch of guys from Pittsburgh. He was a very impressive guy to me at the time. It must have been 2007, I was watching a DVD of The Ultimate Fighter’s sixth season I had rented from Blockbuster. It was amazing for me to see him show up. I was like, Oh my God, I was in the same gym as that guy. And when he wins The Ultimate Fighter, he says something like, “I want to dedicate this fight to my mom, it’s her birthday today, my mom Gayle.” That gave me the scene where Corey says, “I want to dedicate this fight to my mother, Gloria.” Even the choice of the name Gloria was inspired by Mac’s mom. Gayle started me thinking about names beginning with a G.

INTERVIEWER

You must have felt elated seeing a gym-mate win.

LISH

No, for me it was the idea of a son fighting for his mom. That was really why I wrote the book. I saw that with Mac. It’s funny, I just heard somebody say, “Moms are sacred.” We basically all know this—or we’re a little bit like Norman Bates and we know it too much.

INTERVIEWER

Corey’s not only fighting for his mother, though, right? Or, he’s trying to fight for his mother, but he’s also learning how to be aggressive for its own sake, or for all the reasons young men teach themselves aggression. He’s practicing this constant stonewalling, these maneuvers you describe and name like the deadpan and the front-off. I definitely taught myself those growing up.

LISH

The stuff about being tough, I guess it did come from me as a kid. I started realizing a bit behind the curve that I wanted to toughen up. I didn’t have brothers, I didn’t do competitive sports. I wasn’t in school fights. I was pampered, I was a soft young child. At a certain point, you hit adolescence and there’s a competition for status with the other fellas. You want to look good for girls and all that. It hit me kind of flat-footed. I didn’t know how to talk the talk and walk the walk. I overcompensated for not being tough enough. I was being antisocial. I tended to be a loner. I didn’t have pals usually. I felt like I had to stick up more for myself or something. It’s not an attractive quality, I overdid it a bit.

INTERVIEWER

I can’t imagine how much angrier I would have been at that age if my mother had had ALS.

LISH

I don’t know. I felt bad for my mother, obviously.

INTERVIEWER

It seems connected? In the book, at least, Gloria is losing bodily control in ways that no amount of discipline will really put off. At the same time, Corey is this adolescent trying to care for his mother and desperately seeking his own discipline, whether that’s becoming a stable provider or a fighter. But he gets angrier and angrier, even as he’s disgusted with his own temper. It feels yoked together.

LISH

If nothing else, it happened all at the same time. I guess you can say that. That’s what it is to turn thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. It all starts hitting. You have to deal with it all. You find out people die. You find out people want to take things away from you and you have to compete with them. You have to learn to make your way and ideally you learn to strike a balance. Being fierce when you have to be, but not being a savage, destructive person. One of the big factors driving me writing the book is guilt. I didn’t have that balance. I overcompensated, which basically means you turn into a little delinquent shit. When you’re a little shit at a time when your family needs you to pitch in, you carry that guilt around with you for the rest of your life. My mother died alone in a hospital bed without me by her side. That’s something that I’ll never forget, and I can’t forgive myself for.

INTERVIEWER

You couldn’t be there because of how you were behaving?

LISH

Well, I was in a war with my father. We were fighting while she was in the hospital, up until the day she died. We had cops coming to our house. We had court. We had a dirty fight between a father and a son raging around a woman who’s already facing hell. Lou Gehrig’s, it’s twenty-four hours, high intensity. The patients can’t really do anything for themselves. The care-taking is still vivid for me years later. What I learned from being a kid is, if you don’t get your shit together, the woman in your life is going to pay. You have to be a man because there are women—not just women, vulnerable people, and they depend on you. Sometimes you do have to fight with people. If you’re a fucking wet noodle, you can’t defend the people who need it. On the other hand, if you’re an absolute madman or a destructive delinquent or all you care about is your pride, that’s not good either.

INTERVIEWER

The balance that Corey strikes, it seems both similar and dissimilar to what you’re describing. I’m curious about how you were able to distance yourself from something so close to the bone, as you say, while writing the novel.

LISH

The time came when I had to separate from the book. It had to stop being a part of me, so it’s no longer just how I feel about it, it’s about how someone else would look at it aesthetically. It’s important to get to detachment. It took me a while, but it was a relief when it happened. It was a much greater satisfaction to try and sing a song that sounds beautiful and coherent to the person listening than to just have my say.

INTERVIEWER

I wanted to ask about the ending, with Corey enlisting in the Navy. The war in Afghanistan just ended this week, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Skinner, the Iraq War veteran in Preparation. You see how badly things turn out for veterans in that novel, and reading The War for Gloria, you see how bad things may have been before they became veterans. I was wondering whether you essentially wrote a book about why men enlist. Did you always know the novel was going to culminate with enlistment?

LISH

I knew the ending early in the writing. I wrote it in 2016, before I left New York. You really hit the nail on the head with that question. This book is psychologically a prequel to Preparation For The Next Life. Preparation is basically like, I’m a guy, you touch my woman, I’m going to murder you. The War for Gloria is how a guy might start thinking that way. Why would you think that you have to be able to take on anybody and to do anything? It’s because you might have seen something bad happen to your mother, both because other people are no good and because of your own failures. Because you become obsessed with self-improvement and courage and feel that you have to enlist.

INTERVIEWER

You enlisted in the Marines. Were you figuring out how you ended up making that choice?

LISH

This is one hundred percent me. I’ll tell you straight out, I probably shouldn’t say this publicly but I’ll say it: I did think for a minute that I should do something physical to my father. I definitely thought about it. I definitely thought—look, I definitely owned a baseball bat. And I thought about that. And then I thought about all the guys, all the people, the young people, who hurt a parent, and wind up in jail, and they’re doubly lost. They lose. They really lose. They’re still losing to that parent if they sit in jail, even if they put that parent in the ground. I mean, you know there was a case called the Menendez brothers, I don’t know the details of the case exactly, it doesn’t even matter—I thought of them. I thought, Don’t be that. I picked up Rogue Warrior, which was on a bookshelf in Barnes and Noble in 1992 or 1993, and read about Richard Marcinko having the adventure of his life in the Navy SEALs, and the next year I enlisted in the Marines. I said, I don’t want to sit here in a basement in Queens, New York, and have my big move be doing something that destroys my life after all this. No. I said, I’m going to sign up. I said, I’m going to be all I can be. Like the Army ad. That’s one hundred percent the choice.

Matthew Shen Goodman is a writer and a senior editor at Triple Canopy.

Read Atticus Lish’s story Jimmy in Issue no. 210 (Fall 2014).

Redux: Not an After-School Special

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

John McPhee, ca. 2009. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Office of Communications.

This week at The Paris Review, it’s back to school. Read on for John McPhee’s Art of Nonfiction interview, Shanteka Sigers’s short story “A Way with Bea,” and Melanie Rehak’s poem “Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

 

John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3
Issue no. 192 (Spring 2010)

Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write.

 

Photo: Fortepan / Urbán Tamás. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

A Way with Bea
By Shanteka Sigers
Issue no. 234 (Fall 2020)

The Teacher puts down her fork and stares at her husband. A worn white tablecloth edged in lace tries to put her in the spirit of their honeymoon. But it is hard to remember the man who grinned at her across lopsided wooden tables in tiny restaurants in the Caribbean while looking at him here with his mouth only half lifted in a smirk. She leans back, withdrawing from him. “I am aware that teaching is not going to be like a made-for-TV movie or an after-school special, and fuck you,” says the Teacher.

 

Photo: Simon Bastien. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts
By Melanie Rehak
Issue no. 165 (Spring 2003)

The addition of solitude untrammeled,
one and more and more but always
the inner life astray,
that equation incompatibly private.

The errors unrepenting that will not
come out right.

Tautology, tautology. What I’ve said
in argument cannot be taken away.
I’ve emptied my pockets of change …

 

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The Review’s Review: Social Media in Reverse

Still from Season 3 of Caveh Zahedi’s The Show about the Show. Courtesy of Zahedi.

Many artists are in some sense cannibals, but the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi takes it further than most. The initial premise of his brilliantly deranged series The Show about the Show was that each episode would be about the making of the one before it (so Episode 1 follows Zahedi’s travails in selling the show’s pilot, Episode 2 reveals what went wrong behind the scenes of Episode 1, and so on). When a moment hadn’t been caught on camera, he’d ask everyone to re-create it; if someone refused to repeat the embarrassing thing they’d said, he’d cast an actor to play them instead. The recursive formula broke down with Season 2, which focuses on the demise of Zahedi’s marriage, thanks to his maniacal exploitation of it during Season 1 (the divorce negotiations required that he replace his children with animations on The Show). It’s all fascinating to watch—like social media in reverse, where everything a normal person wants to hide is on seemingly unfiltered display. Zahedi now has nine days left on Kickstarter to raise enough money to finish seasons 3 and 4, and for ten thousand dollars, he’s prepared to make a short film about you; viewers of the first two seasons might feel we’d pay nearly that much to stay off-screen. —Lidija Haas 

If you’re like me, then you’ve been obsessively awaiting the follow-up to Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut, Pond, since 2016. At long last, her second novel, Checkout 19, has arrived in the United Kingdom, and I abandoned my paper preferences to devour it the only way I could stateside: via PDF. A roaming literary history of the writer as a young woman, Checkout 19 follows its narrator through the books she consumes and people she meets, adding a ravenous appetite for stories to the intense solitude first seen in Pond. Anaïs Nin, Clarice Lispector, and Ann Quin in particular influence the resulting work, but Bennett’s talent is entirely her own. “Yes, we liked one book now and one book then,” Bennett writes in the opening section of Checkout 19. I can now confidently say I like two. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford

 

Twyla Tharp putting her hair up with dancers. Photo: Herbert Migdoll. Courtesy of THIRTEEN.

 

I received a compliment the other day on my ability to transition from bathing suit to streetwear in plain sight. I explained that I had acquired the skill dancing through adolescence, spending all that time in changing rooms embarrassed of a changing body. Watching the PBS documentary American Masters: Twyla Moves, I was reminded of what I had gained and lost by dancing through puberty. Maybe no one is more in love with the line between what is awkward and what is graceful than Twyla Tharp, who has been dancing and choreographing for nearly all her eighty years and has carried on, recently, through Zoom. From avant-garde to Broadway, Tharp has remained loyal to the authenticity of movement through an incredibly productive and varied career. Of course she made me miss the Marley, but her drive transcends dance, making the documentary a kind of hip pep talk for everybody. —Julia Berick

When I finished listening to Axel Kacoutié’s How to Remember for the first time, I was slack-jawed. I don’t know if I have ever heard something like it. This audio poem is a stunning meditation and, even more, completely immersive. Audio from the poet’s home tapes cuts to a soft piano playing, crashing ocean waves, and the chatter of passersby as Kacoutié mulls over his identity. I often find myself thinking of this line: “You are not this terrible thing that needs to be grateful for being here.” Luscious sonic scenes lift you to someplace special—the inside of Kacoutié’s mind. It’s audio art at its finest and a poetic experience that isn’t to be missed. —Lauren Williams

I’ve been rereading Daphne du Maurier’s short stories. I had forgotten just how intensely creepy and odd they are. The very best among them truly feel like the product of a slightly unhinged mind—and indeed, those included in her excellent 1959 collection The Breaking Point were written during a period of great mental distress as she perched on the knife-edge of a nervous breakdown. But I’ve been especially captivated by “The Birds,” which originally appeared in the 1952 collection The Apple Tree. Set in rural Cornwall in the middle of a cruel and cold “black winter,” the story couldn’t be further from the Technicolor Californian landscape of Hitchcock’s famous film adaptation. Also, the hypothesis put forward in the story—that the feathered creatures’ violent behavior has been brought on by a change in weather systems—just screams contemporary cli-fi. —Lucy Scholes

 

Photo: Ben van Meerendonk / AHF, collectie IISG, Amsterdam. CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Read “The Madame Bovary of North-East London,” the latest installment of Lucy Scholes’s column Re-Covered.

Cooking with Aglaja Veteranyi

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s 1989 novel about a family of circus performers, was one of my favorite books in college. I’d memorized the opening lines, in which Al Binewski extols his wife’s grace in biting off chicken heads, and used to get drunk and murmur them to boys at parties:

“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’”

This worked as a seduction technique—a testament either to the popularity of Geek Love or the ease of college hookups.

Today, Geek Love’s portrayal of people with physical disabilities might provoke unease. The main character, Olympia, was “an albino hunchback dwarf,” her brother Arturo the Aqua Boy had flippers for hands and feet, and her daughter Miranda did well as a fetish stripper, thanks to her arousing little tail. Al and Lil had deliberately bred their children so as to enhance their carnival act. But what I remember most about the book is that from Al’s first mythologizing words, Dunn showed that she understood trauma and celebrated difference. She suggested that—no matter how much damage we might sustain—familial love, safety, and acceptance was possible.

 

Stuffed peppers and grape leaves is a classic Romanian dish. I foraged the fresh leaves from a street near my parents’ house. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

That Dunn never wrote another novel was one of my early literary sorrows. (I checked on her for decades. Surely she wanted to write more; she had so many fans.) So I was particularly intrigued when a bookseller at Malvern Books in Austin, Texas, insisted I read Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, by Aglaja Veteranyi (1962–2002), a novel likewise narrated by a daughter of circus performers—with the crucial distinction that Veteranyi’s tale is autobiographical. Born in Romania in 1962, Veteranyi left with her family in 1967 after the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu came to power. According to an afterword by Vincent Kling, the novel’s translator, they escaped “lethal poverty and a reign of terror” and were granted asylum in Switzerland. They started touring with their circus act; their home began and ended at their trailer door. Kling writes that the family suffered discrimination: though they were not of Romani origin, “their wandering life made them outcasts indistinguishable from Gypsies and subjected them to even greater instability.”

Veteranyi’s novel begins when the unnamed narrator is very young. The mother’s act is to hang by her long, “steel” hair. The father is “a clown, an acrobat and a crook.” The child narrator, who often breaks up the narrative with statements in all caps, writes about how her fragile family is held together by their cultural traditions. Early on she offers a long list of “MY FAVORITE THINGS TO EAT,” most of them Romanian specialties: polenta with salt and butter; chicken soup; cotton candy; pork in garlic-flavored aspic; stuffed peppers with sour cream and polenta; “funeral farina cake decorated with those colorful candies called Smarties”; grape leaves stuffed with meat. She tells us that her mother prefers to buy her chickens live, and that when staying in a hotel she “slaughters the chicken in the bathtub,” while the family makes enough noise to cover the sound. The narrator adds: “CHICKENS HAVE AN INTERNATIONAL SQUAWK WHEN THEY’RE BEING SLAUGHTERED; WE UNDERSTAND THEM WHEREVER WE ARE.”

 

The recipe for the funeral “farina” cake asked for shortbread or graham crackers. I used my favorite substitute, digestive biscuits. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The family feels fortunate not to be in Romania, where relatives stand in line all night long for basic foodstuffs, and “even the children have rotten teeth, because their bodies suck out all the vitamins.” But their new surroundings are isolating and sometimes dangerous, and things soon deteriorate inside the home as well. The father has an incestuous relationship with the narrator’s older half-sister, and, it’s implied, with the narrator, too. The caring mother who got up early to slaughter chickens now abandons her daughter, then reclaims her when she is thirteen so as to pimp her out in a burlesque cabaret. (To protect her, the mother suggests she wear a merkin, since she’s too young to perform naked. “It looks real. And I feel dressed,” the narrator notes.)

During such traumatic moments, the narrator starts to visualize a child cooking in a pot of polenta, focusing on how much it hurts the child, in order “to calm me down.” These visualizations become “THE STORY OF THE CHILD WHO’S COOKING IN POLENTA,” a ritual shared with her sister—they find relief this way, as traumatized people sometimes can, expressing and working through their real pain via the imaginary pain of the child in the story. For the reader, though, the child cooking in the polenta is the narrator herself, and the polenta—mamaliga, or “mama’s food,” in Romanian—represents both her abusive mother and their lost motherland.

 

The fresh grape leaves get blanched in salted boiling water and then dried on a rack. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

In the book’s later chapters, it becomes clear that the narrator’s upbringing has left her with no way out. The self formed by her family and her trauma is her only self, and she cannot renounce it. Nor can she live with it. Social worker types and relatives who have achieved bourgeois stability approach her with opportunities to join them, and possibly to heal, yet the reader understands that in doing so the narrator would lose the only thing she has. In real life, Veteranyi achieved considerable success as a writer, and her work has received still more posthumous acclaim, but in his afterword, Kling writes that she “felt she could not have remained human if she’d needed to accommodate herself to any typical way of life or career path.” In 2002, Veteranyi drowned herself in Lake Zurich.

I had serious reservations about cooking from Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, even though its pages were full of the Romanian foods of the author’s childhood. I share Veteranyi’s sense that food and mothering are inextricable, and this was lethal mamaliga, too sad to re-create. Yet the narrator’s insistence on food seemed like an invitation, and the Austin bookseller, a reader of my column, really wanted me to cook from it. I wondered if I could transform the polenta. The answer (as with any healing project) was, Only incrementally.

 

“The word ‘polenta,’ taken from Italian, is in Romanian mamaliga, meaning something like ‘mother’s home cooking’,” the book’s translator explains. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

There were difficulties from the start. Despite its reputation for having everything, the internet doesn’t, and the few Romanian recipes I could find were lacking in detail. I have experience with the adjacent Black Sea cuisines of Bulgaria and the Caucasus, so I felt confident that I could make mamaliga, and also peppers and grape leaves stuffed with meat and topped with sour cream. But “pork in garlic-flavored aspic” was a challenge. Meats in aspic are a Russian tradition that can be delicious in the right hands. The Romanian recipes I found called for a pig’s foot, and flavored the meat and stock mainly with parsnip and raw garlic. It sounded risky, and the recipes were silent on many aspects of technique, especially how I might clarify the stock so that it wouldn’t be a murky gray color when it solidified. I’ve seen and eaten beautiful aspics but have never made one. The Romanian funeral “farina” cake was easy to track down, and also recognizable from other regional cuisines. It’s essentially a sweetened wheat berry porridge, similar to one eaten on New Year’s Eve in the Ukraine, but shaped and decorated with crushed cookies. I’ve made the Ukrainian version before, and was dubious that it could be anyone’s favorite food.

 

A trick to the stuffed peppers is putting a huge amount of chopped herbs in the meat mixture. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

My mamaliga and stuffed peppers and grape leaves were very good—any competent cook can make that dish—but the cake and the aspic were so inedible that I haven’t included the recipe for the latter. In an attempt to make cooking with a pig’s foot more appetizing, I got a wonderful trotter from my local all-natural, head-to-tail butcher. It cooked so cleanly that there was hardly any scum to skim from the surface of the broth, but even after six hours of simmering, I was left with a mess of tendon and bone from which it was nearly impossible to pick any edible meat. (A friend instructed me to look for the delicious knuckle meat. I couldn’t find it.) I tried to compensate by adding fancy vegetables, but wasn’t sure how to flavor or cook them, and ended up with vegetables that were undercooked, bland, and, in the case of the parsnip, slimy. The stock tasted okay (prior to the addition of raw garlic) but my attempts to clarify it with an egg white made a huge, disgusting mess, and created no discernible clarity. I poured it all into a bowl and it set, but then fell apart when I tried to cut it. The raw-garlic reek in my refrigerator persisted for several days.

The “farina” cake was a simpler failure. You mix cooked wheat berries with ground walnuts and sugar, form the mass—that part worked surprisingly well—and then top it with crushed shortbread or graham crackers and Smarties. I amped up the sugar and the spicing but still wound up with something that tasted like pasty oatmeal. I also discovered only after the fact that Smarties in Europe are more like M&Ms, so my choice of the American version was laughably wrong.

 

Pork in garlic-flavored aspic: Don’t try this at home. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

When it was all done, I had two possible conclusions. One was that aspics and farina cake must be Romanian-grandmother cooking of the type that cannot be successful without a lifetime’s experience. That’s plausible enough. The other sprang from observing, during my research, that many of the dishes were for special occasions—the cake was for funerals; the aspic was for Christmas. Perhaps Veteranyi’s mother didn’t cook these things, and the narrator’s list of favorite foods, rather than a taste memory, was an immigrant’s romanticized notion of the lost country. That felt closer to the truth, because I defy even a steel-haired woman to a boil up a Christmas aspic in a hotel room. Somehow, I can’t help suspecting that if our narrator had had a mother who could do that—and would do it because it was her daughter’s favorite dish—the whole story might have turned out differently.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Mamaliga

1 2/3 cups coarse cornmeal
4 1/4 cups water
1 tsp salt
feta cheese (for garnish)
paprika (for garnish)
parsley, chopped (for garnish)
fried egg (for garnish, optional)
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Pour the water into a large pot. Heat the water, but don’t bring to a boil (this helps prevent the formation of lumps). Add the salt. Turn up the heat, and slowly add the cornmeal while stirring or whisking. Whisk until the liquid is incorporated and the polenta gets thick and starts to bubble. When that happens, turn down to a simmer and cover, leaving the lid just a crack open. Cook for thirty to forty minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve hot, seasoned with salt and pepper and garnished with feta, paprika, parsley, and a fried egg.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Stuffed Peppers and Grape Leaves

(Adapted from The Bossy Kitchen)

6 fresh grape leaves
1/2 lb ground pork
1/2 lb ground beef
an egg
1/4 cup uncooked white rice
a bunch of fresh dill, chopped
a bunch of fresh parsley, chopped
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
6 Cubanelle or bell peppers
an 800-gram can of tomato puree
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground pepper
1/2 tsp dried thyme
dill (to garnish)
sour cream (to serve)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Preheat the oven to 350.

Prepare the grape leaves. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Plunge the leaves in the water, and cook until tender, two to three minutes. Drain, rinse with cold water, and spread out to dry.

Make the meat filling. Combine pork, beef, egg, uncooked white rice, chopped dill, chopped parsley, and salt, and mix using your hands until the mass is sticky and homogenous.

Cut the tops off the peppers, and remove any seeds. Fill the pepper shells with the meat mixture. At the center of each grape leaf, place about two tablespoons of the meat filling, in a one-inch-by-two-inch cigar shape. Fold over the top and bottom of the leaf, and then fold over the two sides to make a packet.

Pour the tomato puree into a baking dish just large enough to accommodate the peppers, and season with salt, pepper, and dried thyme. Arrange the peppers in the dish, topped with the grape leaves. Cover and cook in the preheated oven for an hour. After an hour, take the dish out of the oven, remove the cover, and return the dish to the oven for an additional thirty to forty-five minutes, until the peppers are golden on top and the sauce has reduced slightly.

Serve topped with chopped dill and sour cream.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Funeral Cake

1 cup whole wheat berries
1 tbsp vanilla
zest of an orange
zest of a lemon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups walnuts, toasted and ground
10 digestive biscuits or graham crackers, blitzed into crumbs
powdered sugar (for garnish)
cocoa powder (for garnish)
M&Ms (for garnish)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Rinse wheat berries in cold water. Bring three cups of cold water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add wheat berries, vanilla, orange zest, lemon zest, salt, and cinnamon. Turn heat down to a simmer, cover, and cook until the berries are tender, around twenty-five minutes, or longer for a softer texture. Drain and cool.

Add sugar and walnuts to the wheat berry mixture. Turn the mass out onto a platter and shape, using wet hands so the mixture doesn’t stick. Coat with crumbs and powdered sugar. If desired, use a stencil to decorate the top of the cake with a cross made out of cocoa powder. Garnish creatively with M&Ms (or Smarties if you’re in Europe or Canada).

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

Walking with Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir, via Wikimedia Commons.

Such an odd thing, packing a rucksack. It’s an act of austerity that liberates even as it frustrates. For every item to earn its place on my puny shoulders, it must be life-preserving in some way. I limit myself to 26.5 pounds, casting out the frivolous, the inessential. I check weather forecasts, tear spines from books, put things in—paints, camera lenses, walnuts—then throw them out. Every time I toss away an item, I feel a swift stab of anxiety followed by a ripple of lightness. So that even as I shunt the pack onto my back, I experience a sense of weightlessness. I have become disencumbered. Free. My life whittled down to the bone.

*

Simone de Beauvoir’s rucksack invariably contained a candle, an alarm clock, a copy of the local Guide Bleu, a Michelin map, and a felt-covered water bottle filled with red wine. She hadn’t always walked with a rucksack: when she arrived in Marseilles, age twenty-three, to take up her first teaching post, she’d walked with a basket. It was here, among the mountains, valleys, and cliffs of Provence, that a passion for solitary rambles and “communion with nature” first took hold of her. “I derived a satisfaction I had never known in all the rush and bustle of my Paris life,” she wrote in her memoir.

But the funny thing is, no one thinks of Beauvoir as a backpacking hillwalker. We think of her sitting in smoky Paris cafes, a string of pearls at her neck, a chic turban wrapped around her head, Jean-Paul Sartre philosophizing at her side.

This is not my Simone de Beauvoir. My Beauvoir—the version I unearth from her letters, memoirs, journals, and books, and in whose footsteps I walk—is a compelling, courageous, often reckless hiker. A lover of bare hills, forests, mountain ranges. A woman who walks as audaciously and rigorously as she thinks. A woman who shows us how walking can return us to our bodies. A woman who is nothing to do with Jean-Paul Sartre.

*

This is not to say that Beauvoir wasn’t the quintessentially Parisian woman she appeared to be. She loved the city of her birth—its libraries, bookshops, cafes, jazz clubs, and apricot cocktails. But, like so many of us, she needed both urban and wild in her divided life.

Beauvoir never made grandiose claims about her walking. “I’m not doing much thinking, I’m blissful,” she wrote to Sartre from one lengthy, mountainous hike. From the Italian Alps, she declared she “had not a thought in [her] head apart from flowers and beasts and stony tracks and wide horizons, the pleasurable sensation of possessing legs and lungs and a stomach.”

It seems to me that feeling bliss and pleasure is a compelling enough reason for walking. And when I began researching her, I was convinced that Beauvoir walked only for this reason—to rest her febrile brain, to distract herself from the metaphysical anxieties that threatened to engulf her. By the time I’d finished my investigations, I’d come to a different conclusion altogether. Her walking was infinitely more complicated than I’d ever imagined.

*

Before she reached Marseilles with its miles and miles of hiking trails, Beauvoir had been suffering acutely from an onslaught of confused, oscillating emotions. Riven with uncontrollable desire, unsure who she was, unable to write, desperately in love with the philandering Sartre but simultaneously needing to pull away from his influence, Beauvoir needed resetting. “I would like to learn how to be alone again,” she confided to her notebook.

The hills and calanques around Marseilles provided Beauvoir with much-needed solitude. And her vigorous walking enabled her to march her emotional, hormonal, and metaphysical confusion into order, purging herself of her previous turmoil and exorcising the sexual urges that had been plaguing her to the point of distraction.

Every Thursday and Sunday she left her house at dawn, returning only after darkness. In an old dress and espadrilles, with a basket of buns and bananas over her arm, Beauvoir climbed every local peak and crossed every canyon. She refused to wear the “semi-official rig of rucksack, studded shoes … and windcheater.” She refused to accompany her fellow teachers or join a hiking club. Alone, she walked through dense mists and along lonely ridgelines, bracing herself against the unruly mistral wind, the stinging rain, and the scorching sun: “At first I limited myself to some five or six hours’ walking; then I chose routes that would take nine to ten hours; in time I was doing over twenty-five miles a day.”

Her walks were plotted with military precision. She taught herself to map-read and navigate, meticulously planning every route. They became “expeditions,” each one “a work of art in itself.” Beauvoir devotes pages of her memoir to these “fanatical walking trips,” explaining that they preserved her “from boredom, regret, and several sorts of depression.” Time in nature, she added, gave her a “greater familiarity with myself.”

*

As a child, Beauvoir had spent long, carefree holidays at the rural home of her grandparents. Here she had everything denied her in Paris: freedom, privacy, space, and nature. At the age of thirteen her love of nature took on “an almost mystical fervour,” dramatically expanding her world: “I was no longer a vacant mind, an abstracted gaze, but the turbulent fragrance of the waving grain, the intimate smell of the heather moors, the dense heat of noon or the shiver of twilight; I was heavy; yet I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds.” Here, she felt the luminous presence of God. And the more she pressed herself to the grass and the earth, the closer she felt to him.

*

Back in her parents’ choked, balcony-less, toilet-less apartment, Beauvoir wasn’t allowed to run or jump. She shared a room that was so tiny she and her sister had to take it in turns to stand between the two beds. Under the gimlet eye of her devoutly Catholic mother, her “wretched carcase” began an increasingly sedentary existence, buried more and more deeply in books and study. She developed an alarming and uncontrollable facial tic, while her awkward body spilled into lumps, bulges, and blotches. Her father pronounced her “ugly.”

At her Catholic girls’ school, Beauvoir was intellectually brilliant but “entirely friendless,” taunted for her make-do, ill-fitting clothes. At home she was vigilantly watched over by her mother, who opened her post, listened at her door, and banned all reading material she considered inappropriate. Merely reading about the stifling conditions of Beauvoir’s Parisian upbringing makes me feel short of breath, as if a huge boulder is being lowered onto my chest.

Hardly surprising that she developed “a great longing for freedom,” or that the prospect of “liberty and physical pleasure” dazzled her. Hardly surprising that her life became an obsessive quest for freedom.  Or that travel, walking, and backpacking—surely the most emancipating of all experiences—became such a significant part of her life.

*

In the two years before she discovered hiking, Beauvoir’s world had turned on its axis. She had begun an intense love affair with Jean-Paul Sartre, “the genius who opened the world to me,” who turned her life “upside down, inside out.” The affair swept both of them away, as much for its sexual energy as its intellectual vigor.

Except that Sartre had a rapacious sexual appetite and a gluttonous need for beautiful young women. He suggested an open relationship: honesty was more important than fidelity in his existentialist world. Beauvoir agreed, thrilled by the affront to conventional bourgeois values their “pact” represented. And unaware of how much emotional tumult—anguish, jealousy, fear—Sartre’s philandering would cause her.

As if emotional tumult weren’t enough, a horrified Beauvoir also found herself in the merciless grip of physical desire. Having “surrendered” her virginity to Sartre “with glad abandon,” she was now racked by her own bodily needs, which presented as “actual pain,” “torture,” “agony.” She was seized with shame, repulsed by her “physical appetites” that cried out for anyone, regardless. Even the brush of an anonymous hand on the bus sparked fierce sexual urges that she felt unable to master.

At first she regarded her emotions and urges as mere weaknesses, and tried to will them away. Her attempts at subjugation failed. She became a mess, so swamped with emotional pain she repeatedly drank herself into sobbing oblivion. Her love for Sartre was unconditional, and the jealousy that gripped her was, Beauvoir said, “the most unpleasant emotion that had ever laid hold on me.”

Crushed between jealousy and thwarted desire, Beauvoir was rescued by her twice-weekly rural walks: “I … subdued my rebellious body, and was physically at peace once more,” she explained.

*

On my first day in the calanques around Marseille, I spend an hour scrambling in and out of bleached-white inlets and peering into turquoise water so clear I can see the limestone rocks on the seabed. On slender crescents of sand, oiled bodies soak up the year’s last rays of sunshine.

I slip inland to the scrubby woodlands where it feels more authentically Beauvoir, not only because it’s deserted but because she often professed her love of trees and woodland. In her memoir she described standing motionless “day after day … for hours at the foot of a tree.” But trees don’t occupy my thoughts for long, because I’ve read something else about Beauvoir that is gnawing away at me. She was always the last chosen for any team game or sporting contest at school, and considered herself without grace or athletic ability. “I couldn’t do anything with my body,” she wrote in despair. “I couldn’t even swim or ride a bicycle.” Reading this had thrown me back to a similarly scarring experience, one I thought I’d buried but now blasts from my memory as brightly saturated as if it were yesterday.

When I arrived at secondary school, I couldn’t swim or ride a bicycle either. Worse, I’d never played a game of netball or hockey, never kicked, batted, or thrown a ball. In my first games lesson, a tennis racket was thrust into my hand. I struggled agonizingly with it, watching it leap and dance, like a cat struggling to escape. A ball was flung at me. I chased after it, trying to scoop it onto the strings of my racket. In a single feline movement, both ball and racket escaped, skittering across the court. Miss Monk blew furiously into her tin whistle, instructed the girls to form a circle round me, and demanded that I “serve the ball.” Hot and confused, I tossed and swung. The ball sailed out of the court. Miss Monk, her face shut-tight and red with outrage, screamed at me: “That is exactly how not to serve.” For years, I was the example of how not to catch, how not to throw, how not to sidestep.

Being singled out as physically incompetent, weak, and flawed at the very time I was going through the disorienting years of puberty altered the relationship I had with my body. Our bodies are the prism through which we experience the world: from then on I felt as if my control over life was tenuous and frail, that I would never be fully independent. Somehow, my own body had betrayed me.

*

When I took up hiking—in my early twenties, the same age that Beauvoir began distance walking—it was a profoundly affirmative experience, reconnecting me with a body that had become little more than a source of shame and indignity. Suddenly I could outwalk other people. My legs ceased being flimsy and unreliable. They became a ferocious pair of pistons, and a source of deep inner pride. I couldn’t catch a ball, but I could walk—for hours and hours. Slowly I realized that my body needn’t be an ungovernable lump of fat and bone. It could become. Emboldened, I learned to ski, to swim, to hold a tennis racket. I ran. I lifted weights. My body was me. The world began to feel different. And for the first time, I liked who I was.

Beauvoir went through a similar journey, ignited by a throwaway comment from an early crush: “How fast you walk! I love that,” he told her. Beauvoir began to see herself as a walker, “just like a man.” From here it was a short step to strenuous hiking. Scrambling, climbing, jumping, and lugging a heavy backpack were a means of obliterating the clumsy, gawky girl Beauvoir had been. Week by week, she began the process of reconstructing herself as physically strong, athletic, graceful. Climbing requires strength, agility, and balance, while hiking for hour upon hour requires exceptional physical and mental stamina. Beauvoir had these in spades. No wonder she bragged about her walking feats. Walking through spaces usually possessed by men was proof of her own physical presence, proof of her autonomy and resilience. But it was also proof that she could recast herself. Later, she wrote of her time in Marseilles, “I felt a certain self-satisfaction … I no longer despised myself.”

 

Annabel Abbs is the author of Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women. She writes regularly for a wide range of newspapers and magazines and lives in London, with her husband and four children. Her novels, The Joyce Girl and Frieda, were published to great acclaim.

Excerpted from Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women , by Annabel Abbs. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright © 2021 Annabel Abbs.

Sister Sauce

In Off Menu, Edward White serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

Albina Becevello.

During a life of astonishing incident and variety, Gabriele D’Annunzio inhabited many guises. In the twenty years before World War I he established himself as a giant of Italian culture: an epochal writer often known simply as “the Poet” in Italy, a nationalist proselytizer, a storied lothario, and a daring aviator of spellbinding charisma. When the war came, D’Annunzio transformed himself into a soldier and a statesman who presaged the rise of Mussolini and the aesthetics of Fascism. A “poet, seducer and prophet of war” is how his biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett describes him, “an urbane socialite and man of letters,” as well as “a frenzied demagogue” who was “as ruthless and selfish as a baby.”

His life intersected with many famous and infamous people, such as his sometime lover and muse Eleonora Duse, one of the most acclaimed actors of her day. But away from the excitement, scandal, and infamy that defined D’Annunzio’s public existence, one curious relationship ran like a steel girder through the last twenty-three years of his life: that with his cook, a much younger woman named Albina Becevello, about whom little is known other than her cooking. At a time when certain thinkers—inspired, to some degree, by D’Annunzio’s ideas about aestheticism, technology, and national identity—were advocating a complete revolution in Italian cuisine, Becevello nourished and indulged her employer with recipes that would have been familiar to the people of the Italian Peninsula even before the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century.

Becevello was not a pioneering chef, but one who catered perfectly to her audience. As the authors Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani detail in their book about Becevello, D’Annunzio’s mania for eggs—he would routinely eat five a day—meant his cook became a brilliant exponent of frittata, the Italian variant of the omelet. Often Becevello could send him into raptures with an even more simple creation, such as her re-creation of the egg-and-anchovy dish he remembered from his childhood. “Albina, be praised forever and ever,” he once wrote her, “shine forever in the Constellation of the Egg and the Nebula of the Anchovy! Amen.” Santeroni and Miliani suggest that the relationship between Becevello and D’Annunzio gives the lie to the Poet’s reputation for misogyny. That seems a stretch, to put it kindly. But they’re surely correct in saying that through Becevello and her traditional cooking—her risotto alla Milanese and her spaghetti alla chitarra—a real human emerges beneath the layers of obnoxious and grandiloquent mythmaking in which D’Annunzio swaddled himself for the half-century that he occupied a central place in Italian public life.

*

Albina Becevello was in her early twenties when she first cooked for D’Annunzio. From 1910 the Poet lived as a sybaritic celebrity in Paris but returned to his homeland to support its entry into World War I, a conflict he saw as an unprecedented national opportunity. To him, the carnage wrought by modern warfare was a chance to destroy, cleanse, and rejuvenate. Only in slaughter, he believed, could Italy claim its glorious destiny.

D’Annunzio settled in Venice, where he rented the Casetta Rossa, a property belonging to Prince Fritz Hohenlohe of Austria. With the house came a small domestic staff, including the young woman who ran the kitchen. Where Becevello had learned her craft is unknown, but she would surely have picked up the rudiments of the local cuisine—characterized by risotto, polenta, and radicchio—from the sharecropping family who raised her from the age of eight in the countryside surrounding Treviso, not far from Venice. Considering how dedicated D’Annunzio was to the indulgence of the senses, he was surprisingly ambivalent about food. Immaculate in dress and manners, he found the physical process of eating messy; he considered it “humiliating to fill the sad sack,” he said, though he had no qualms about sating his other bodily appetites. Often, he would forego meals, and claimed to prefer dining alone, though that may have been due to pain or embarrassment caused by his appalling teeth. Yet food—its flavors, colors, and aromas—could excite him as much as any artwork. The event of dining could likewise stimulate him, if only because it gave him a captive audience, and Becevello became a vital element in D’Annunzio’s political and personal life, catering for the guests who flowed through the Casetta Rossa.

During the war years D’Annunzio crafted a distinct public reputation as a warrior-poet, and found ever more exhibitionist ways to champion the nationalist cause, culminating in a highly publicized flight over Vienna in 1918, when he dropped thousands of leaflets urging the Viennese to surrender. Because D’Annunzio had seen the war as a chance for national glory, he was enraged when Italy—despite being among the victorious Allied powers—was prevented from acquiring the city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) by the terms drawn up at the Paris Peace Conference. In September 1919, D’Annunzio defied the Paris settlement by leading two thousand soldiers into Fiume, seizing control of the city, and setting himself up as its dictator. For fourteen months Fiume was like nowhere else on earth, a place that attracted artists, radicals, and outsiders of all sorts. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—the founder of the futurist movement of artists and thinkers, heavily influenced by D’Annunzio’s veneration of speed and violence—was thrilled by Fiume, as was a young Mussolini; many of D’Annunzio’s political ideas and his flamboyant, theatrical style of leadership, complete with Roman salutes, black uniforms, and rabble-rousing oratory, laid the groundwork for the Fascist surge that was soon to come.

When D’Annunzio was driven out of Fiume, on Christmas of 1920, he returned to Italy and looked on as Mussolini—whom D’Annunzio apparently considered to be an ill-educated vulgarian—established himself as Italy’s dominant political force. After suffering serious injury from being pushed out of a window—possibly by one of Mussolini’s supporters—the Poet withdrew to the banks of Lake Garda, where he created the Vittoriale degli italiani, a vast estate that was to be his home for the rest of his life. Here, D’Annunzio built a magical kingdom all his own, insulated from the daily realities of Mussolini’s Italy, where he could further his mythology and leave future generations of Italians with a physical monument to himself.

Albina Becevello was integral to the project; she cooked not only for D’Annunzio but for all twenty-five people who lived on the estate. As with every other inch of the Vittoriale, Becevello’s kitchen was carefully designed, with the contemporary abutting the traditional: modern refrigeration devices were placed next to tools for making pasta native to the Abruzzo region, D’Annunzio’s childhood home. Much of the food that Becevello prepared in this space evoked the Abruzzo—pecorino cheese, cured meats, and many cakes and desserts—but she refrained from making the region’s famous meatballs, which D’Annunzio dismissed as “Abruzzo bullets.”

When D’Annunzio was entertaining, Becevello’s creations were served in the “Cheli Room,” a lavish dining room of gold and red, named after his pet tortoise. When Cheli died from overindulging in tube roses, D’Annunzio had a bronze cast of him made and fixed to the end of the dining table—a warning to guests about the perils of gluttony. However, much of Becevello’s work was not designed to impress guests but to salve and fuel D’Annunzio as he wrote, made new plans for the Vittoriale, and conducted his sexual adventures. Frequently, Becevello would be called upon at short notice late at night or early in the morning to make a plate of eggs for D’Annunzio and something for a woman he had shared his bed with.

In 2015, Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani published a book about the tranche of notes and letters that D’Annunzio sent to Becevello during the course of their long association. What emerges is a fascinating insight into the domestic routines of a highly unusual man, and a portrait of a unique, peculiarly intimate relationship. As Santeroni and Miliani note, despite D’Annunzio being nearly twenty years Becevello’s senior, the relationship between them sometimes appeared more like son and mother than boss and employee, something the authors put down to D’Annunzio’s endless search for a mother figure and his associating food with maternal love. He would sprinkle his messages to her with words and phrases from their native dialects (Venetian and Abruzzese), and had numerous pet names for her that were both jocular and respectful: “Sister Gluttony,” “Sister Sauce,” “Sister of the Plenary Indulgences.” Santeroni and Miliani agree with Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the foundation that now looks after Vittoriale, that Becevello was one of the few women in D’Annunzio’s life with whom he didn’t try to have sex. Indeed, it seems that she was granted a great deal more respect than other women on his domestic staff, whom he harassed and mistreated. As Lucy Hughes-Hallett reveals in her biography, D’Annunzio said that he considered a maid who brought him the meals that Becevello cooked to be no more to him than “a piece of furniture, a cupboard on feet.”

As Santeroni and Miliani show, D’Annunzio often issued Becevello strangely specific instructions. Sometimes he wanted ribs beaten “thinner than a banana peel” with a stone pestle. Out of the blue, he once insisted that “from now on, every day, between three and four in the afternoon, you must be ready to prepare me cold veal with or without sauce.” If fresh meat proved hard to come by on any given day, he instructed Becevello to buy a live calf, slaughter and butcher it herself, and freeze whatever wasn’t used. This is the D’Annunzio that’s familiar to us: impulsive, demanding, egocentric. But Santeroni and Miliani’s study offers a glimpse of a much less recognizable man who was capable of empathy, compassion, and thoughtfulness. According to the notes he sent Becevello, he sometimes insisted that she prolong her vacations because she seemed tired, and very frequently he gave her cash bonuses, as well as substantial sums of money to send to her disabled brother. Perhaps it was gratitude for service, and her ability to coat him in nostalgia and home comforts; perhaps, in his solipsistic way, he saw in her creative talent and hard-earned skill something that he recognized as true artistry, and therefore deserving of a respect he withheld from other servants.

By and large, the fare that D’Annunzio required of Becevello was rooted in the nineteenth century in which he had been raised. “I have a sudden passion for can-nel-lo-ni,” he wrote Becevello one evening. “You must have cannelloni ready at any time of the day and night. cannelloni! cannelloni!” Not all of his contemporaries shared his passion for the traditional taste of Italy; at a time when Fascism threatened to transform Europe, certain of those in his circle wanted to turn Italian cuisine on its head. In the thirties, Marinetti, the leader of the futurist movement who had been so excited by D’Annunzio’s Fiume escapade, published his half-joking ideas for futurist cooking and eating, which advocated radical new flavor combinations and the use of poetry, music, colored lighting, and perfume in the dining experience. “Until now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats or oxen,” proclaimed Marinetti. “Now with the Futurists the first human way of eating is born.” He foresaw a time when most nutrition would be consumed in the form of pills and powders, freeing up time for people to study, create, and think. The few mealtimes that remained would be opportunities to stimulate the senses and inflame passions, by making them multisensory experiences. The interior of the Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate), a futurist restaurant that Marinetti helped to establish in Turin in 1931, was intended to resemble a submarine, but decorated with aluminum (then an excitingly futuristic material), bright columns of color, and large eyes painted on the walls. When the food came, diners received small portions of various strange-sounding dishes such as chicken stuffed with zabaglione (similar to eggnog) and topped with silver confetti, and an orange risotto named the Roar of Ascent.

Marinetti’s ideas, collated in The Futurist Cookbook, have been described by one scholar as “a serious joke” intended to rile and provoke. He certainly provoked a strong response to his call for the abolition of pasta, which he argued kept Italians trapped in a sluggish, premodern existence. Marinetti viewed gastronomy as a vehicle for making a new breed of Italians to inhabit what was still a young country. As he saw it, pasta was the coddling embrace of tradition in carbohydrate form. “Men think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink,” he averred. Replacing the thick beige ribbons of pappardelle with small mouthfuls of “Alaskan salmon in the rays of the sun with Mars sauce,“ or “Polyrhythmic Salad,” which diners would eat with one hand while simultaneously turning the crank on a music box with the other, would help to create lithe bodies and alert minds, all the better to pursue national glory.

Mussolini’s regime was no less committed to fashioning new Italians, but it drew a direct link between traditional cooking and national identity, a scheme supported by popular magazines such as La cucina Italiana, established in 1929 and still going to this day. One could see Becevello in her kitchen at the Vittoriale as a fusion of these two visions: a domestic cook working in the established Italian tradition for a novel, very modern cause, and the provider of comfort food to a Modernist aesthete who entertained in the louche splendor of the Cheli Room.

*

As Mussolini grew ever closer with Hitler in the early thirties, D’Annunzio wrote to the Duce expressing his disgust for the German chancellor. However, when Italy invaded Ethiopia, in 1935, D’Annunzio was so delighted that he sent Mussolini the gift of a sword adorned with a depiction of Fiume. Despite his misgivings about Nazi Germany, D’Annunzio still believed Italy’s rightful destiny lay in war, conquest, and imperial expansion. He died at the age of seventy-four in 1938, before these ideas reaped their bitter fruits. Marinetti, committed to the priapic madness of futurism and Fascism until the last, died in 1944, at the age of sixty-seven, having served a stint on the Eastern Front a couple of years earlier.

Following the Poet’s death, Becevello, then in her fifties, returned to the Veneto and her family. If she was hoping for a comfortable early retirement, she was to be cruelly disappointed. Santeroni and Milaini tell us that her brother had squandered all the money D’Annunzio sent him over the years, leaving Becevello with a great financial burden. Santeroni and Miliani don’t know quite how her final days played out, but she died in poverty in 1940, at the age of fifty-six.

At the Vittoriale—now open to the public as a museum to D’Annunzio’s life and work—traces of Becevello live on, though, as always, one must look through the lens of the Poet to glimpse them. The Cheli Room, with its bronze cast of D’Annunzio’s beloved tortoise, looks as it would have just before an epicurean evening ninety years ago, ready to receive some of D’Annunzio’s favorites: lean slices of cold partridge, perhaps, or a rose risotto, followed by budino al cioccolato, a delicious Italian chocolate pudding.

Many of the dishes she cooked are still with us, of course, but in restaurants across the world they share space with elements of Marinetti’s futurist food revolution. His prescriptions for treating cooking and eating as a multisensory art foreshadowed the nouvelle cuisine that developed after World War II. Heston Blumenthal is the best known of a generation of celebrity chefs who have brought Marinetti’s ideas about eating into the mainstream. His recipes for bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge could have been taken from Marinetti’s manifesto, as could his dishes that come served with atomizers, dry ice, and soundscapes—but these are the lauded dishes that have earned him Michelin stars and great commercial success. Albina Becevello had neither of those. But she did add a unique texture to one of the most consequential lives of the twentieth century. Thanks to Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani, perhaps in time Becevello will be remembered not simply as the hidden woman who cooked for D’Annunzio, but as a culinary artist in her own right.

 

For further reading, the author recommends the following:

La cuoca di d’Annunzio: I biglietti del Vate a “Suor Intingola.” Cibi, menù, desideri e inappetenze al Vittoriale, Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani (in Italian)The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, Lucy Hughes-HallettThe Futurist Cookbook, Filippo Tommaso MarinettiCrucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924, Charles Emmerson

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. His latest book, The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense, was published earlier this year by W. W. Norton. Read earlier installments of Off Menu.