The Paris Review's Blog, page 103

Motherhood at the End of the World

Ray Hennessy, Mother Bird Protecting Her Young, 2016, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the run-up to Thanksgiving last year, you learned a whitewashed story at school about how the first peoples of this land were happy to give their sacred spaces to the consumptive force of European men in the name of civilization and progress. You came home from school and unzipped your backpack, revealing with artistic pride a picture book you had colored and stapled yourself. Your kindergarten teacher had asked you to color in a little Native American girl, then a Native American boy, followed by a pilgrim girl and boy, each one garbed in their traditional attire. I admired the craft of your book, a swell of parental pride coursing through me as I witnessed the evidence of my progeny doing and making things in the world beyond me. And I relished that you had colored all four children Brown like you.

As you flipped through the pages of your book, you narrated a sad story about how much the pilgrims had suffered when they arrived on this land. I felt a surge in my body, an immediate, unstoppable need to explain the other forms of suffering elided by this disturbingly singular narrative. I described some of the impacts of this arrival on Indigenous peoples—the European theft of their autonomies, cultures, languages, and lands. I explained that colonial practices dramatically changed how humans live in relation to this land. And I told you that this historical moment of colonial contact was crucial to understanding how we arrived at the global ecological crisis we face today. I will never forget the way you looked at me then, your head slightly tilted to one side, your eyes wide in bewilderment. We were sitting on the landing at the top of the apartment stairs, the contents of your backpack scattered around us. “This is not what my teacher told us,” you said with unmistakable agitation. I knew that for the first time you were confronting the existence of conflicting worldviews, a vital gulf between your formal education and your maternal one. “That’s okay,” I said. “My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.” I pressed on to explain that history is a story based on a version of the past. “Can you hear the word story in history?” I asked. You nodded slowly, a little body in deep rumination. “These stories need to be told from the perspectives of those who have been most damaged by history. These other stories,” I said, “can teach us how to keep living.”

From the onset of your public education, you have been learning what it means to be American through a manicured version of history that keeps European whiteness at its center. This form of education willfully forgets the lives that were destroyed, the bodies that were brutalized, and the cultures and traditions that were abolished or displaced to establish that center space. It tells you a singular and continuous narrative of Western capitalist expansion, obscuring the bleak fact that much of what we call “progress” has been a direct and unrelenting line to the wholesale destruction of the earth. Against this obliterating narrative, I glean from the fragments in an attempt to teach us otherwise. I scramble to harvest alternative histories omitted by the textbooks, the histories of those who have faced annihilation and lived toward survival. Learning to mother at the end of the world is an infinite toggle between wanting to make you feel safe and needing you to know that the earth and its inhabitants are facing a catastrophic crisis. This morning, you went off to school to learn discipline, to hone your reading and writing skills, to study official state history. I am at my desk sipping tea, turning over words. The birds are chirping outside my window. You, me, the birds. We are all creatures living as though we have a future, as though tomorrow will continue to resemble today. Meanwhile, plans are being devised to drive the marketplace forward when the earth’s nonrenewable resources are exhausted. Scientists and businessmen are plotting to colonize the moon in a relentless drive to create an alternative human habitat when this one can no longer foster us. There is no consideration of ceasing extraction, only a maniacal mission to discover other worlds to plunder.

When the earth is rendered uninhabitable, when extractive capitalism leads to wholesale ecological collapse, we will not be chosen for this new other-planetary world. We, along with nearly everyone else, will be left in ecological destruction to scavenge what we can from the wreckage, or to perish. The truth is I am glad not to be among the chosen ones. I know in my body the cost of “discovering new worlds,” the brutal violence that accompanies the colonial mission. No, I do not want to leave this planet. What I want is another world. And when I say another world, I mean this one, toppled and reborn.

Another Thanksgiving is upon us, and this year you inform me that your first-grade class will soon be studying Pocahontas. You ask me earnestly whether we might watch the Disney movie together. Intuiting my hesitation, you add that Pocahontas comes from the land near where we now live, and that she is a super important person. I concede to your request, knowing you will see this film sooner or later, and finding myself oddly curious about how Disney has rendered this history.

In preparation for our date, we slice apples, pour chamomile tea, and fill bowls with popcorn before climbing into my bed to watch. Early in the film, you declare that Pocahontas reminds you of yourself, and I ask you how you see a resemblance. Eager to keep your attention on the movie, you briefly list her kindness and her connection with nature. Then, in a fabulous offhanded gesture that makes me laugh, you add that Pocahontas’s hair, which is long, immaculate, and shining black, is quite similar to your own short, ever-disheveled, and unmistakably brown hair.

Moments later—on the heels of your declarative affiliation with Pocahontas—you say, for the first time in your life, “I wish I was white.” I hit the space bar on the laptop to pause the film. I feel like I’m sliding through time, careening into transmutation. Thirty-five years ago, I, too, was a little girl wishing for whiteness. I am astonished by the twinning, even though I know intellectually that a childhood wish for whiteness is as mundane as it is predictable. Still, in that split second I want to look into your eyes, our eyes, and say, “I have always loved you, little misfit.”

Instead, I ask an inane question: Why do you feel this way? You respond without hesitation, bluntly, “Because I want to be one of the good guys.” I remind you that the only expressly “bad guy” we’ve seen so far in the film is the white Ratcliffe. But I know you are intuiting and absorbing the representation of the “savage” that the film propagates, and so while there is one “bad” white man in this narrative, the “uncivilized” ways of the Indigenous peoples of this film are presented as the real problem. In other words, you are reading the film through its own disturbing lens: the white man is fundamentally good if we can just beat off the one bad seed, and the Indigenous peoples are inherently misguided and belligerent, even while we are given permission to love the girl who dared to love a white man.

How to explain all this to you? How to say in simple terms that we are steeped in layers of ideology that make up a collective sense of goodness, beauty, and civility? To explain that these dominant narratives come to inform, if not dictate, what we desire and how we live our most intimate lives. I cannot shield you from these structures of belief or their profound and abiding effects on you. But I can complicate and unearth them with you. Indeed, my role as your mother may be nothing more than an endless task of reading narratives against the grain, of resisting the mainstream’s consumptive ease.

When the film is done, we turn out the lights to fall asleep together and our ritual unfolds. I whisper, “I love you for always. You’re my favorite thing.” You respond, “Tell me a story, Amma.” Then, often together, we say, “Once upon a time, a long, long time ago…” I break into a fantastical story that you expect me, night after night, to invent for you on the spot.

“Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a magical little girl—”

You interrupt me promptly and insist, “No! Not magical, Amma!”

So, I begin again. “There was an ordinary little girl…”

And then, frustrated with my easy adjectival foreclosures, you interrupt to assert that I should “not make the story so obvious…”

Who is the teacher and who is the student in this elementary pedagogy? In the end, it is you who schools me—to always complicate the story, to never prescribe, never reduce. There is infinite promise in this teaching. I hold the lesson in my body.

On the sixth day of a nine-day work trip—the longest period I have been away from you—I FaceTime home and find you deeply engaged in an act of fruit sculpting. You tell me you are making a Powhatan village. The Powhatan people are represented by banana slices, and apple skins make up their shelters. Off to the side of the village, you have crafted colonial ships by slicing kiwis in half, gutting their insides, and attaching the skins to the little fruit boats to serve as sails. You have created rough waters out of banana peels, and a wall of carved-apple manatees that surrounds the kiwi ships on three sides.

“What’s happening in this scene?” I ask.

“The rough waters and manatees are pushing the Europeans back home,” you reply earnestly.

I am blown away to witness this art-making against the state, this anticolonial fruit installation that is also a fantasy of organically reversing history. What I love most is that in your historical revisioning, you move us beyond the subjugated histories of Indigenous resistance to colonial force. Instead, you turn your attention to the sea, letting it emerge as an actor in the opposition to the colonial mission. Your artwork veers me away from the anthropocentric position, carefully and imaginatively invoking what the earth itself might desire.

Last year, as we walked to school hand in hand through the lush green streets of Richmond, Virginia, you asked me with stark curiosity whether you would have been a slave had you lived here in another time. The question did not come as an absolute surprise, because I knew you had been studying Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson in kindergarten. Only months into your formal education, and you were already immersed in a top-down history that tells you Black folks became free through the noble gestures of white presidential slave owners. This history slyly refuses to include the resistance from below that has always made freedom possible. It is a history that will not tell you how hard and through what means Black and Brown people have fought to be free, how crushing the blows of European “progress” have been to those subjected to its force.

Your question was hard for me to answer because its limbs extended in so many directions, because it required not a single answer, not a reductive no or yes, but a careful inventory of moving bodies. Some of those bodies came with colonial minds, some were “discovered” here and brutally eradicated or displaced, some were captured from elsewhere and forced across the ocean, and others came from distant lands to save or improve their lives. At its root, your question was a way of asking where your body fits into the racial economy of this nation. And the answer to that question must necessarily be a dynamic one.

I tightened my grip on your hand, slowed our pace, and drew you close. I told you that people like us did not live here during the time of slavery. But already I was wondering about the words I used—people like us. Who was this us I had summoned to make sense of things for you? At the time, I had undoubtedly meant those critically impacted by the force and manipulation of British colonialism in India. But my utterance also implicated the Jews who were exterminated and those who narrowly escaped the Nazi camps. Our blood is laced with modern histories of unbelievable violence. It is a strange and hybrid brew that you will feel in your body across your life, as I have always felt it in mine.

Our particular histories are those of imperial conquest, mass extermination, and nearly unimaginable forms of racial and religious violence. But here in America, it is toward the local histories of genocide, slavery, forced religious and cultural conversion, and internment that we must reach in solidarity. Each of us who emerges from the subjugated ends of history, who stands outside whiteness but is also saturated by its power, shares something not only at the surface of our bodies but also deep within them.

I am writing to you, and to future you. I am writing to the six-year-old girl you are now, the one who both insists on her unequivocal need for my body and loves to perform her independence from me.

You slide your hands along my skin, expressing your endless love for my body as you lock your arms around my waist. I am busy with some task—an email, the groceries, a lecture that needs to be written—and when I try to unlatch, you strike a dramatic tone and declare, “But I need your body to live!” We both laugh, understanding that in this fantasy you are a helpless infant and I a gigantic breast, the wellspring of your survival. You have outgrown my womb and my milk, but my body remains your target. A deeply desired dwelling place, a fantasy of origin and endless return.

Yet in the social world, you are all independence and moxie, a creature that appears to have sprung autonomously, fully formed. You toddled, then dashed, now saunter into social spaces and make your presence known. At the farmers market, you help the farmers organize and sell their produce. At the grocery, you join your “coworkers,” chatting with the employees as you help bag groceries or work the customer service desk. You don’t always mind your parents nearby but make clear your strong preference that we kick back at a distance, let you navigate your own social relations. You both need me to live and love to not need me at all.

I am writing also to the becoming-being that you are, the one who will face a world in ruin and undoubtedly wonder over my place in all this destruction.

Over half a century ago, James Baldwin repeatedly wrote and tore up drafts of a letter penned to his nephew and namesake until he was able to articulate the plain, pitiless fact that the younger James would face profound struggle for no other reason but the fact of his Blackness. More recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates followed Baldwin to elucidate for his son the brutal truth of state violence inflicted against Black bodies. It is no coincidence that both Baldwin and Coates have felt an urgency to write to fifteen-year-old boys tipping into manhood, their Black paternal mouths spilling with revolutionary promise as they equip their boys to face a criminal justice system designed to exploit and devour them.

I write to you with a different urgency. I write not with the immediate fear that you will be gunned down by police in the streets, or that you will be metabolized by the prison industrial complex, but with an adjacent set of fears about being a Brown girl in a country that thinks and feels race through a sharp binary. I write with an impossible desire to prepare you for political and ecological catastrophe. I write because the burden of history—the indispensable need to keep us all from coming apart—keeps falling on the shoulders of girls and women of color. I write because, as mother and daughter, we are unmistakably entwined, and because I know—which is to say I feel in the most microbial registers of my body—that the shape of our entwinement will need to be radically reformed as we fight global patriarchy, extractive capitalism, and indiscriminate planetary destruction.

 

Julietta Singh is a writer and academic whose work engages the enduring effects of colonization, current ecological crisis, and queer-feminist futures. She is the author of two previous books: No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018) and Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2018). She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her child and her best friend. 

Used by permission from The Breaks: An Essay (Coffee House Press, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Julietta Singh.

Redux: Knowing It Would End

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.

Toni Morrison, ca. 2008. Photo: Angela Radulescu.

This week at The Paris Review, as summer winds down, we’re thinking about endings. Read on for Toni Morrison’s Art of Fiction interview, Steven Millhauser’s short story “Flying Carpets,” and Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Impermanence.”

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. Or, take advantage of this last week of our summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99.

 

Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134
Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993)

INTERVIEWER

What about plot? Do you always know where you’re going? Would you write the end before you got there?

MORRISON

When I really know what it is about, then I can write that end scene. I wrote the end of Beloved about a quarter of the way in. I wrote the end of Jazz very early and the end of Song of Solomon very early on. What I really want is for the plot to be how it happened. It is like a detective story in a sense. You know who is dead and you want to find out who did it.

 

Photo: Doug Coldwell. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Flying Carpets
By Steven Millhauser
Issue no. 145 (Winter 1997)

In the long summers of my childhood, games flared up suddenly, burned to a brightness, and vanished forever. The summers were so long that they gradually grew longer than the whole year, they stretched out slowly beyond the edges of our lives, but at every moment of their vastness they were drawing to an end, for that’s what summers mostly did: they taunted us with endings, marched always into the long shadow thrown backward by the end of vacation.

 

Photo: Aaron Burden. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Impermanence
By Alex Dimitrov
Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

The first ending. And knowing it would end
I wanted another. Lover, summer,
pen with which to write it all down.
The first disappointment. Which is not
remembered but lives in the body.
And how familiar it became …

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 ($50 off the regular price!).

The Madame Bovary of North-East London

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Photo: Lucy Scholes.

In the final months of 1922, people all across the United Kingdom were gripped by a cause célèbre. In the early hours of October 4, Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, and his wife, Edith, a twenty-eight-year-old bookkeeper and buyer for a millinery business, were making their way home after a trip to the theater in the West End. About a hundred yards from their house in Ilford, a lower-middle-class suburb in North-East London, a man suddenly appeared, stabbed Percy multiple times in the face, neck, and body, and then raced off into the night. Percy died almost instantly. Reporting on the event the following day, the Times declared that the details were still “a mystery,” and that the police were waiting for Edith to recover enough to be able to “give a coherent account of the incidents preceding her husband’s death.” Then, only twenty-four hours later, the case took an unexpected twist when the police announced that they’d charged two persons: Edith and a twenty-year-old ship’s steward named Frederick Bywaters, who had for a short time been the Thompsons’ lodger.

Edith and Bywaters had been conducting an illicit affair for the previous eighteen months. Their correspondence, written while Bywaters was away at sea, had been found by the police and was being used as evidence for the prosecution. By the time the trial began—two months later, on December 6, at the Old Bailey—much of the content of these letters was already all over the press. Every day the court’s public gallery was packed. The enterprising unemployed began queuing outside as early as 4 A.M., selling their spots to those with money in their pockets who arrived later in the day. For those unable to afford these escalating prices—in his book Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, René Weis reports that by the final day of the trial a seat in the gallery was going for more than the average weekly wage—the Times reproduced verbatim transcripts from each day’s proceedings. On Monday, December 11, the jury announced their verdict: both defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. As he was removed from the dock, Bywaters was still protesting that Edith was innocent, as he had done throughout the trial—a refrain that she herself loudly took up as the reality of her fate sunk in. Sobbing and screaming, she was half dragged, half carried back to the cells to await her execution.

That it was Bywaters who’d attacked Percy was never really in doubt. The question at the heart of the trial, and the reason it had captured the public’s attention, regarded Edith’s involvement in the murder. The case against her rested on the seventy-odd letters she had exchanged with Bywaters. They weren’t just proof of the affair; they also revealed that Edith had purchased abortifacients to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy—two factors that, given the social mores of the era, couldn’t have been any more damning. The judge presiding over the trial exhorted that “right-minded persons” should be “filled with disgust” by the shameless content of Edith’s missives. Further, the letters were used as evidence of incitement to murder. In them Edith talks about wanting to rid herself of Percy so that she and Bywaters could be together. “Yesterday I met a woman who had lost 3 husbands in eleven yars [sic] and not thro [sic] the war, 2 were drowned and one committed suicide and some people I know cant [sic] lose one. How unfair everything is,” she writes to him on November 18, 1921. In subsequent dispatches she also claims to have fed Percy ground-up glass, and to have tried to poison him. Yet no evidence of any such attempts on his life was found during the postmortem, thus supporting Bywaters’s argument that they were “mere melodrama,” conjured up by Edith’s overactive imagination, all part of her notion of the affair as a grand romance. The jury, however, didn’t believe him. Instead, Edith was painted as a deadly femme fatale, earning her the nickname “the Madame Bovary of North-East London.”

In 1934, the popular novelist, playwright, and criminologist Fryn Tennyson Jesse published A Pin to See the Peepshow, a novel inspired by the case. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the TLS’s reviewer, Orlo Williams, draws a direct line between Flaubert’s passionate, unfulfilled provincial doctor’s wife and Jesse’s Julia Almond, her fictionalized Edith Thompson. “It is a theme that can never grow old, and to take it up is an enterprising calling for every gift at a novelist’s command,” Williams writes, praising the “bravery and distinction” with which Jesse carries it off. Significantly, though, Jesse’s heroine is categorically not a murderer; she’s just a frivolous suburban wife whose romantic fantasies ultimately cost her her life.

*

Jesse—whose great-uncle was the famous Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson—was thirty-four years old at the time of the trial. Like others across the country, she was riveted—so much so, in fact, that she saved all the material she could find relating to the case, including myriad newspaper reports. As her biographer Joanna Colenbrander details in A Portrait of Fryn, the harshness of the verdict had “shocked” her greatly. Already the author of two novels, a volume of short stories, a collection of poems, and a large body of journalism (including her work as an intrepid war reporter in France for the Daily Mail during World War I), Jesse hadn’t yet turned her formidable talents to criminology, but this was a field in which she soon became a recognized expert.

In 1924 she published Murder and its Motives, in which she classifies six key motivations for this heinous crime—murder for gain, murder for revenge, murder for elimination, murder from jealousy, murder from lust for killing, and murder from conviction—and illustrates each with a notable real-life case study. The book was a great success. “It has been observed, with some truth, that everyone loves a good murder,” reads the opening line, something that the Daily Telegraph’s review picks up:

The intensity of public interest in the leading cases of the past two or three years is eloquent proof that the love of a ‘good murder’ was never more keen than it is today. Moreover, the increasing attention paid by the newspapers to what is known professionally as ‘distinguished crime’ renders more easy the intimate study by the man on the street of the reasons underlying the taking of life.

The reviewer then goes on to praise Jesse’s “acute analysis of criminal psychology,” which, they argue, is impressive enough to override any “surprise” the reader might experience on discovering that a woman—shock horror!—had seen fit to concern herself with such unsavory subject matter. The editor James Hodge so admired the book that he asked Jesse to join his roster of introducers for the Notable British Trials series, which had been published by William Hodge and Company since 1905 and was a great favorite with readers keen for every salacious detail of the most notorious criminal cases of the day. Colenbrander notes that Hodge’s original letter was addressed “Dear Mr Jesse,” which provides further proof of just how daring Jesse’s interest in crime was. Not that Hodge’s later discovery of Jesse’s sex put him off. “By the clarity and pungent humour of her style,” explains Colenbrander, “Fryn established herself as one of James Hodge’s favourite contributors.” She went on to write introductions to six volumes in the series.

As such, by the time she wrote A Pin to See the Peepshow, Jesse had already proven herself a dab hand at dissecting criminal proceedings, which makes it all the more intriguing that the trial takes up a mere quarter of the novel. Instead, her focus is firmly on her tragic heroine—Julia was the book’s original title—both in terms of her particular individual psychology and the impact that broader conventions regarding her gender and class had on her fate. Colenbrander quotes a letter Jesse wrote to her Paris agent explaining that the novel is the story of “the life of an over-emotional, under-educated, suburban London girl, who had no more idea of murder than the unfortunate Mrs Thompson had.”

Her origins may be humble—her father is “only a clerk”—but even as a schoolgirl, Julia firmly believes that’s she’s meant for bigger and better things. When we first meet her, she’s an impressionable teenager lost in “her own secret life,” an imaginary world “woven purely of reminiscences of novels and her own desires.” At school, she’s bored by Shakespeare, but at home she’s enchanted by the wild romantic story of Lorna Doone, and she spends hours daydreaming about being whisked away by a handsome Prince Charming. Later, as a young working woman, she gets a job at an elegant West End couturier called L’Etrangère, and shortly thereafter begins a romance with an attractive young man named Alfie. Tragically, as with so many of his generation, he’s killed in World War I.

Time passes, and although Julia’s career is going from strength to strength as she works her way up the ranks at L’Etrangère, she’s still dealing with disappointments on the domestic front. Following the death of her father, she and her mother have to share their home with Julia’s aunt, uncle, and cousin in order to make ends meet. Thus, when an older man—a recently widowed family friend named Herbert—starts to court her, Julia is swept up by his attentions and impetuously agrees to marry him. In his dashing wartime uniform, he appeals to the “dreaming Julia,” the woman “who had been loved by Lewis Waller, and an Italian prince, and Lord Kitchener, and Dennis Eadie, and by a wonderful warrior yet unmet.” Her illusions are shattered, however, when Herbert returns from the war and transforms back into the same ordinary gentleman’s outfitters’ employee he was before he went away, “only older, balder, fatter, duller.” During his absence, Julia relished her independence, but now she’s expected to be a devoted wife, always eager to please. Her discovery—that “a man didn’t necessarily give a woman the sensations she craved, although he attained them for himself”—is yet another blow to her rich fantasy life.

Though tame by today’s standards, Julia’s subsequent reactions against the tyranny of convention—she refuses to give up her job, insisting on earning her own money; seeks out a backstreet abortionist rather than have Herbert’s child; and takes a younger lover (Leo Carr, the Frederick Bywaters character)—are, by those of the period, her class, and her sex, scandalous. Like Emma Bovary before her, she has no particular feminist agenda; she’s not at all interested in the women’s suffrage movement. Her rebellion is couched purely in terms of her romantic expectations. Unfortunately, her refusal to conform has tragic consequences. Although she plays no part in the scuffle that occurs late one night between her lover and her husband—in the course of which Herbert meets his death—and she has no prior warning of Leo’s decision to confront his rival, she finds herself charged with murder, vilified as a predatory older woman with dangerously loose morals, in exactly the same way that Edith was in real life.

*

“I am not, and never have been, a feminist or any other sort of an ‘ist’,” writes Jesse in her first volume of belles lettres, The Sword of Deborah: First-Hand Impressions of the British Women’s Army in France, “never having been able to divide humanity into two different classes labelled ‘men’ and ‘women.’” All the same, and as Colenbrander illustrates, Jesse was absolutely someone who spent her life “speaking up for women,” and firmly believed in their rights. Indeed, the jacket flap of The Sword of Deborah carries this message from the author:

It appears to me that people should still be told about the women workers of the war and what they did, even now when we are all struggling back into our chiffons—perhaps more now than ever. For we should not forget, and how should we remember if we have never known.

Jesse demonstrated a radical degree of independence throughout her life, both financially and otherwise. She married late, when she was thirty, and it was anything but a traditional union, not least because as per her husband’s wishes, they kept the marriage a secret for the first three years, which gave rise to a rather unusual situation in which he treated his wife as his mistress, and his mistress—with whom he’d already fathered a child—as his wife. But Jesse’s views on both marriage and motherhood were advanced for the era. “The very idea that a woman should remain married, or submit to bearing children, to a man she did not love, was shocking and repugnant to her,” Colenbrander writes. Jesse believed that “divorce should be at least as easy for a wife as for a husband; [and that] abortion should be at her discretion and made safe.” These, of course, were exactly the issues at stake in the abasement of Edith Thompson. She was condemned for adultery and for terminating a pregnancy she did not want. There was no actual evidence to prove that she’d had a hand in her husband’s murder, and both she and Bywaters continually proclaimed her innocence, yet still the jury found her guilty. But where the gatekeepers at the time saw a woman who was a menace to society and an aberration to her sex, Jesse saw a misunderstood victim.

She was not the only one to believe that a miscarriage of justice had occurred—various journalists expressed concern at the time of the trial and the execution—but she was the first person to explore the perfect storm of events that culminated in Edith’s untimely death, and to empathetically portray this woman—or a woman very like her—with deep understanding and compassion. Julia isn’t always very nice. She’s vain, narcissistic, and conceited, but she’s also trapped in a marriage she no longer wants to be in. The upper-class women she encounters at L’Etrangère live by different rules: they can take lovers, discreetly, with an ease that’s completely unavailable to the lower-middle-class Julia. And as for her vivid fantasy life, well, Jesse expertly illustrates that this is in large part a product of a society that imposes unfair limitations on young women. Many writers have turned their attentions to the abuses in this criminal case—including Edgar Lustgarten in Verdict in Dispute and Lewis Broad in The Innocence of Edith Thompson: A Study in Old Bailey Justice—but despite its relatively early publication, A Pin to See the Peepshow’s take on the story puts it on par with more recent works, namely Weis’s aforementioned Criminal Justice and Laura Thompson’s Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders, a feminist reading of the case that argues that Edith was the victim of a “gendered” trial swayed by a climate of prejudice against female sexuality.

One of the most accomplished elements of the novel is the way in which Jesse conjures up the desperation and claustrophobia that her misjudged heroine feels as the net tightens around her. Julia’s breakdown in the dock when the sentence is passed makes for brutal reading. As the judge’s voice—“in the same calm, unemotional tone he had used throughout”—rings out across the courtroom, she experiences the moment as if she’s descending into a nightmare: “Julia heard her own voice screaming: ‘But I didn’t know. I didn’t know!’ and then the people closed about her and she was taken away.” But as powerful as this is, it’s nothing compared to the horror of the hours running up to her execution. Her mind rendered “mercifully numb” and her body moving “slowly and draggingly” due to the quantity of sedatives she’s already been given, Julia’s taken from her usual cell to another, at the end of a long corridor:

Then she saw at the far end of the cell another door, a small, arched door, painted green, and in a flash it came upon her where she was. It was through that door that she would have to pass tomorrow morning, twelve hours from now … only twelve hours from now.

Then she screamed and fought, and went mad, and tried to climb up the green wall, scrabbling at it with her nails, but she felt arms all about her, holding her down. She went on screaming; somebody had shut the cell door, and it seemed full of people. Then there came the prick in her arm, and fight and scream as she would, she felt a dullness coming over her legs and arms, and her head fell forward.

They laid her on the bed, and arranged the blankets over her. She mustn’t go to sleep—she mustn’t. She was losing precious time. She must talk to them, explain how it had all happened. Surely she could show them that they mustn’t do this dreadful thing?

The “writing acquires an extraordinary power as the narrative nears its conclusion,” writes the novelist Sarah Waters. “Jesse wants us to be unable to look away from it—as if, as members of the society in whose name she is being destroyed, we have a duty to bear witness to her destruction, a duty to watch.” In Waters’s own novel, The Paying Guests, which is loosely inspired by the Thompson and Bywaters case, she gives the story a radical revisionist twist. Not only does she substitute a lesbian romance for a heterosexual one, but The Paying Guests goes one step further in that it also rewrites the traditional rules of female sexual transgression that called for the transgressor’s punishment. Waters’s lovers, Lilian and Frances, narrowly escape the hangman’s noose, and as the novel draws to a close, we leave them together and free. Poor Julia receives no such reprieve. Just like the real-life Edith, she’s hanged at Holloway Prison. A Pin to See the Peepshow is not just a gripping story with an unforgettable heroine at its heart; it’s also an important record of the appalling misogyny and prejudice fostered by the early-twentieth-century British judiciary establishment.

 

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the NYR Daily, the Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of Re-Covered.

Tree Time

Livingston, Neem Tree Crow, 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At first it was the underwear. I wanted to become a tree because trees did not wear bras.

Then it had to do with the specter of violence. I loved the way in which trees coped with dark and lonely places while sunlessness decided curfew hours for me. I liked, too, how trees thrived on things that were still freely available—water, air, and sunlight; and no mortgage in spite of their lifelong occupation of land.

My amorphous fancies about trees began to coalesce when I entered middle age and began to weigh the benefits of a freelancer’s life against that of a salaried professional. An epiphany wrapped me like a tendril—were trees freelancers or salaried employees? A tree was a daily wage laborer, its life of work bound to the cycle of sunlight. Holidays, vacations, weekends, the salaried life, pension, loans—all of these were recent inventions, nothing more than consolations offered to employees like myself.

So, when I look back at the reasons for my disaffection with being human, and my desire to become a tree, I can see that at root lay the feeling that I was being bulldozed by time. As I removed my watch from my wrist, and clocks from my walls, I realized that all my flaws—and this I now discover I share with many others—came from my failure to be a good slave to time. I began envying the tree, its disobedience to human time. All around me were estate developers sending their fleets of workers to construct skyscrapers to tight schedules.The trees they planted in the gated communities annoyed them—they would grow at their natural pace. It was impossible to rush plants, to tell a tree to “hurry up.” In envy, in admiration and with ambition, I began to call that pace “tree time.” (Was it this that Salvador Dalí wanted to invoke when he placed so many of his melting clocks on trees in his paintings?)

I was tired of speed. I wanted to live to tree time. This I felt most excruciatingly during examination hall invigilation, while keeping guard over the exhausted faces of my students, their having to condense a year into a few hours, the learning acquired at different times of the day and in different places cramped into a few hours of writing time. That was how one passed examinations, got degrees and jobs, measured success. A tree did not stay up all night to become a successful examinee the next morning. Plant life, in spite of its various genres of seasonal flowers and fruits, did not—could not—do that. One can’t tinker with the timing of a yawn, one cannot play with tree time.

I began by abandoning newspapers, news television, and news suppliers. These capsules of heightened and condensed time had come to divide our attention, splintered our life into bullets. Plants were not newsmakers because they could not cause coups or wars. Plants were not news consumers because their world remained unaffected by changes in governments and results of cricket matches. Apart from the weather—not its forecast, mind you, that comedy show on television—the plant world was indifferent to every occurrence, man-made or natural, outside the locality of its amphitheater. The day’s work anesthetized me, left me incompetent to deal with humans, their order and orders. Talk, the incessant word-by-word relay of the goings-on, always and inevitably of humans, on the earth, in the air, under water, generated a claustrophobia in me that is difficult to explain—I am daughter to a man who is a news junkie, who watches the same piece of news on the state-sponsored Doordarshan channel in Bangla, Hindi, and then Urdu. I found myself in a world where being a repository of news—as telegrams—turned one into a sort of activist. And all the news that mattered was, of course, almost exclusively bad news. This timbre of nervous energy that had turned the world into an apocalypse movie was the resident spirit of the newsroom—we were all doomed, all moving toward a terrifying end, we were all a part of the news. 

 The newspaper was the new holy book and the news reader the new priest. The unnatural rhythm of news, the panting pace at which it now moved, caused me breathlessness. I wanted to move out, out of this news as neighborhood. And so my attraction to the tree and its complete indifference to the hypnosis of news.

Once upon a time, I was certain, men and trees moved to the same rhythm, lived their lives to the same time. To gain an understanding of this concept that, of course, existed only in my imagination, I began planting saplings to mark births and beginnings. When my nephew was born five years ago, for instance, I planted a neem tree in our backyard. The little boy stands at three feet or so. The neem tree is taller than my husband, who is six feet tall. But before this there was the tree that is as old as my marriage. I did not plant it. The municipal corporation did, as part of its city greening project. It was just a happy happenstance, then, that the gulmohar tree, with its yellow flowers, came to be planted a few days before my wedding, and just opposite the room from where my married life would begin. It is now taller than our three-storied house, and it allows me to imagine an alternative version of my marriage as a tree, a life I might have lived had I allowed myself to live to tree time.

Allied to human notions of time is an overwhelming ageism. People have often told me—I refrain from using the word compliment because I cannot think of “youthful looks” as praise—that I looked young for my age. I found the words offensive and discriminatory: wasn’t every division of age—old, middle, the many varieties that came as prefix and critique—beautiful? One morning, when I received such a “compliment,” I couldn’t help wondering how a tree might have reacted. If I was a forty-year-old tree, would I not have felt insulted to be considered twenty on the basis of my appearance? Age, I was certain, was important to trees. The wrinkles on our face and neck, the accumulation of folds around hips and thighs had become embarrassing to humans. The age of trees was to be found in similar lines, in circles denoting lived years, in the girth of time that gave aged trees a kind of sober dignity. By looking at trees one could see that time was an obese creature. And that history, whether it was reflected in lines or folds, loose bark or skin, new colors or pigmentation, was a beautiful thing. Our lives in the industrial age, lived bizarrely as an approximation of machines, had made us think of age as ugly—in the way machines rusted, wasted, and gradually became ugly before they fell apart.

But how does one live to tree time in this deadlined world? I began by trying to dismantle the architecture of time units inside my head. It wasn’t completely a conscious effort, but the whole manner of our timekeeping begins to look silly when one asks a tree the question that inaugurates application forms and conversations: “When is your birthday?” I had taken information about my birthday off Facebook, for instance. I felt awkward when people asked me about my birth date. I also couldn’t understand why our culture, both social and bureaucratic, placed such great emphasis on the date of our arrival into the world. I knew no one who celebrated the birthdays of trees. I also found it difficult to picture trees celebrating death anniversaries. Wedding anniversaries would be a joke given the number of “marriages” a tree went through in its lifespan. What exactly was tree time then? I wandered aimlessly through philosophical discussions on time until it came to me one night, in my salty sleep: carpe diem, seize the moment, living in the present—that was tree time, a life without worries for the future or regret for the past. There’s sunlight: gulp, swallow, eat; there’s night: rest. And I began writing this to tree time, recording thoughts as they arrived, events as they occurred, and fighting insomnia and its derivative poetry like a good tree.

 

Sumana Roy is associate professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University in Haryana, India. She is the author of Missing, Out of Syllabus, and My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories.

Excerpted from  How I Became a Tree , by Sumana Roy © 2021. Reprinted with permission from Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Notes on Chuck Close in Rome

A page from Henri Cole’s 1995-96 notebook

In 1995, the poet Henri Cole traveled to Italy as the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature. While there, he spent time with the American painter and photographer Chuck Close, who died last week, aged eighty-one. Recently, Cole came across a notebook in which he had recorded his impressions.

I’ve just come from a little opening up on the fourth floor, and while the pastel landscapes were fine to look at, most remarkable was a brief conversation I had with the painter Chuck Close, who suddenly began speaking quite openly about his ailment or condition, the result, I believe, of a blood clot in his spine. He said he’s been in his present state for seven years, and that he only feels heat from his shoulders up. Pointing to his scalp, he said the only place he can perspire is through a small patch of skin on the left side of his head. When he is touched anywhere below his shoulders, what he feels is an icy cold. He is happiest in the sun in his bathing suit.

When he paints, he straps his brushes to his wrists. It is easier for him to paint than to draw, because he can paint with his arm out before him; to draw requires more mobility than he has. He talked with such candor that a small group of us was drawn to him. When a child toddled by and stared at him, he said children were always curious about him because they couldn’t understand why he was in a stroller. He said it was strange not to feel what he knows he’s supposed to feel, and then he asked me to touch his hand. His definition of pain has changed completely, he told me, since almost everything he feels is pain.  If there is a blessing in his condition, it is that it is not degenerative. It is hard to object to his smoking and drinking, seeing the pleasure he takes in them.

He said he was not a believer in the “adversity makes the artist stronger” theory, though it does seem that he is living proof of this. He said that when he started off painting, all his works were De Koonings. Later, once he’d developed his own style, he was able to return to the De Kooning palette, which he loves. He said that he was always subtly altering the variables in his paintings so that they’d evolve in some modest way. He said he did not prefer one or the other sort of artist; that is, one who was constantly remaking himself as opposed to one who was not. When I said that I did not really think of myself narrowly as a “gay poet,” he said he understood completely, because though he is a photorealist painter, he does not admire the work of other photorealists and believes this connection to be superficial.

***

He invited me to visit him in his studio overlooking Trastevere and when I arrived there was a violent rainstorm blowing water through the oversize windows. A big puddle grew at our feet. He sat in an armchair and spoke of the grid painting of his daughter, Maggie, in process on his easel. He said that painting the small grid squares was like playing golf and that each hole was about a par four or five, meaning that he usually needed to return that often with his brush to each grid to get it right. Of course, I thought of James Merrill calling poetry word golf—“in three lucky strokes of word golf LEAD/ Once again turns (LOAD, GOAD) to GOLD.”  Chuck also used the analogy of archeology, of digging deeper and deeper until the thing he sought emerged from the paint. When I suggested that his method of composition was rather like a poet’s—which is to say cumulative, word by word, line by line—he said he always felt he had more in common with writers than painters. And, indeed, his canvas was aslant on the easel, like a sheet of paper on a desk.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Blizzard, and a memoir, Orphic Paris. A selected sonnets is forthcoming.

Works by Chuck Close appeared in Issue no. 75 (Spring 1979) and Issue no. 207 (Winter 2013) of the Review.

The Review’s Review: A Germ of Rage

Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father, 1974, latex, plaster, wood, fabric, and red
light. Collection Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

The exhibition rooms on the second floor of the Jewish Museum are densely shadowed and cavernous, the scant light artificial and angular. In one, the mouth of a veined brown marble fireplace hangs open, eating air. It’s an apt setting for the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” which traces the artist’s fraught relationship to psychoanalysis, including her reactions to her own thirty-three years of treatment. Journal entries, dream fragments recorded on scraps of paper, fabric works, the iconic Passage Dangereux (1997), Destruction of the Father (1974), and Ventouse (Cupping Jar) (1990) constitute only a portion of the show. A cluster of Bourgeois’s writings speak to her relationship to sadism, fear, self-destruction. But I wasn’t surprised to find myself orbiting the texts swollen with guilt, anger: “A germ of rage cohabits like the germ of TB, it lives in you.” I could have spent an entire heliophobic day trying to make out Bourgeois’s handwritten notes, which slip between pictorial and linguistic representations just as fluidly as they shift from English to French. I’ll be back before September 12, when the show closes. —Jay Graham 

Many narratives of millennial “love,” if that’s the right word for it, depict a quest for a functional partner of similar class status with a good skincare regimen and perhaps a willingness to engage in light s/m just to make sure things aren’t completely bland, which they are. Blandness is not a vice that afflicts the characters in Matthew Gasda’s play Quartet, which is showing at Ty’s Loft, in Greenpoint, the next two Saturdays. (I saw it this past month at another loft, in TriBeCa.) Leave questions of likability and probity at the door: these people betray each other and themselves, and their betrayals are collaborative affairs fueled by alcohol, other intoxicants, and secrets past and present. The play is funny and caustic, it’s all in the lines, and the actors go for it like it was the seventies, though I don’t know if I would trust Mike Nichols with it. —Christian Lorentzen

 

Bertrand Russell. Photo: Anefo. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Self-help wasn’t yet a cultural fixture when Bertrand Russell published The Conquest of Happiness, in 1930. And in a way, it feels strange to classify the book in that genre, given that it’s written by a philosopher of mathematical logic who is best known for his Principia Mathematica, a book of formal proofs that Daniel Dennett has called “one of the most unreadable great books ever written.” But despite his technical genius, Russell believed that philosophy should, first and foremost, teach one how to live, and The Conquest of Happiness contains pragmatic advice that remains eminently useful. Burnout, he notes, stems not from overwork but from anxiety and indecision. Boredom is usually caused by excessive vanity and can be cured by taking interest in something outside of oneself. Since first reading the book earlier this year, I have thought often of his aphorisms on envy (“The sin against the Spirit consists of knowing a thing to be good and hating it because it is good”) and his observations on how an expansive perspective can alleviate trivial annoyances (the anger over a broken bootlace can be remedied, he argues, by reflecting “that in the history of the cosmos the event in question has no very great importance”). Intelligence does not always entail wisdom. To find both in a single mind is a rare gift. —Meghan O’Gieblyn

What are you doing this weekend? If you don’t have any plans, may I suggest you spend literally all of your waking hours binge-listening to two new jazz box sets, both of historical interest but for very different reasons? The first is Lee Morgan’s The Complete Live at the Lighthouse, which comprises twelve live sets of explosive but accessible jazz from 1970 by one of the stalwarts of the classic Blue Note sound. I’d always avoided Morgan’s albums, thinking them too light for my tastes; I now stand corrected. This music is relentless and edgy, a surprising mix of Morgan’s trademark sixties funk and something darker and more desperate. The band, which had been working together for a year or two, is at its peak, and this is a great opportunity to see what the multi-instrumentalist Bennie Maupin can really do if given free rein. The other box is Anthony Braxton’s Quartet (Standards) 2020, a record of a tour just before the pandemic in which the veteran avant-gardist took a group of edgy UK musicians on a jaunt around Europe, playing nothing but jazz standards but doing them his way, meaning with equal reverence and irreverence. This group tackles the Great American Songbook, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and even a bit of Paul Simon. This is an accessible pathway into Braxton’s expansive universe, and a parade of his sometimes stuttering, sometimes careening solos. There’s more than twenty hours of music between the two boxes, so your weekend should be covered. —Craig Morgan Teicher

When she was young, Natalia Ginzburg would repeat phrases to herself that she found particularly pleasing. “I dress in brown” was one such phrase, taken from Annie Vivanti’s The Devourers. Another was one of her own invention: “Isabella is leaving.” I found myself similarly drawn to a phrase in Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles): “When I lived with my family, we took no photos together.” —Robin Jones

 

Yu Miri. Photo courtesy of Tilted Axis Press and Riverhead Books.

 

Read Christian Lorentzen’s interview with Mike Edison and Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “Does Technology Have a Soul?”

The Shuffle and the Breath: On Charlie Watts

Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones during a concert at the Royal Lawn Tennis Stadium in Stockholm, 1965. Photo: Owe Wallin. © Tobias Rostlund / Alamy Stock Photo.

The drummer Charlie Watts died on Tuesday, aged eighty. Watts took up the drums as a child after cutting the neck off his banjo and converting it to a snare. Born in London during World War II, the son of a truck driver and a homemaker, he was a jazz aficionado from the age of twelve, and went to art school in his teens. In 1963, the Rolling Stones hired him away from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and Watts—cultivating a stoic demeanor and known for his refined fashion sense—remained a member of the band until his death. Mike Edison’s 2019 biography Sympathy for the Drummer is a work of music criticism in the spirit of Lester Bangs. Watts did not speak to Edison for the book, but after its initial publication he called the author and left him a message: “Hi, you don’t know me, my name is Charlie Watts, I want to thank you for writing this lovely book… and for having Charlie Parker on your voicemail…” Later they spoke, and Watts invited him to come see him when the Stones got back on tour. Unfortunately, the pandemic intervened and kept the band off the road. I spoke to Edison about Watts and the Stones on Thursday morning.

INTERVIEWER

What made you write a book about Charlie Watts?

MIKE EDISON

It took me forty-five years to write this book! In the interim I’ve written thirty-something other books. But when I started playing the drums when I was a kid, I knew this was a cypher I had to crack. Charlie Watts is so special, and so deceptively simple, I knew it wasn’t the kind of thing you can ever truly learn. It’s the kind of thing you have to live with—you have to breathe with it, you have to vibrate close to the frequency that he was working on. You know, you can go on YouTube and look up “How to play like Charlie Watts” and you will find almost nothing, because you can’t teach it. But search for “How to play like Rush” and you’ll find twelve thousand kids playing “Tom Sawyer” flawlessly in their bedrooms, because you can learn how to do that.

So, with Charlie Watts, listen to the hi-hats opening up in the weirdest places, the off-kilter rolls, an accent that in other hands would have been a mistake, things other people would never allow to make it onto a record. All those snare-drum riffs and tattoos he does at the beginning of songs where he’s speeding up to catch up with Keith—sometimes he even gets ahead of himself before Keith comes in. Some very professional drummers have told me they would get fired if they played like that, and they say that in awe. The sloppy-but-tight thing is what makes it work. So much of the personality of the Stones comes from the drummer—you know it’s the Stones from the snare drum, even before Mick Jagger starts his caterwauling.

INTERVIEWER

The Stones famously passed through different phases—R&B, psychedelia, blues rock, disco, reggae. How are those phases reflected in Charlie’s drumming?

MIKE EDISON

The stork didn’t deliver Charlie Watts to the Rolling Stones’ doorstep as a fully developed drummer. On the early records they’re basically a talented cover band. On “Satisfaction,” he opens up and starts stomping—that’s the beginning of punk rock, at least in any mainstream sense. It’s relentless and very aggressive, especially live. And that guy is not the same guy who’s playing on “Street Fighting Man” and “Gimme Shelter” a few years later, where there’s more nuance. “Rip This Joint,” which opens Exile on Main Street, is the fastest song in their whole catalog. It’s like a splatter painting. He’s gone from impressionism to extreme impressionism. The band has gone from playing songs to playing music. Charlie goes from just playing the drums to playing the band.

In the early seventies, the Stones are at their absolute pinnacle. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones, the document of their 1971–1972 tour, is the apex. It’s vicious. I sit and listen to it and reconsider everything I do. From there, it did roll off, there’s no question. As Keith said, Mick had “a ticket to Jetsville,” and was busy falling in love with himself for the twenty-fifth time. He wanted to hang out in Hollywood. Keith had a ticket to Dopesville, the opposite direction. They weren’t showing up for work at the same time, and Jimmy Miller, their great producer—it’s hard to hang around these guys and not pick up their bad habits. Goats Head Soup suffers for it, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll suffers. There’s a murkiness to the recordings. Goats Head Soup always sounds to me like there’s dirt on the needle.

INTERVIEWER

Didn’t they record that in the Caribbean?

MIKE EDISON

In Jamaica, because it was the only place Keith was allowed to go, drug addict and felon that he was. It was exciting because Dynamic Sound Studios, where they recorded most of The Harder They Come, was the O.G. reggae studio. Going to Kingston, Jamaica, was not like going to Switzerland or Paris.

INTERVIEWER

How does Charlie figure in the moves they made toward reggae and disco?

MIKE EDISON

Mick always wants to make the record he heard in the club the night before. He loves chasing trends, and that’s where they always step in it, like trying to copy the Beatles on Satanic Majesties Request, trying to be au courant or some goddamn thing. But what people may not know is that Charlie loved dance music, too. He would go with Mick to discotheques in Munich. He loved the Sound of Philadelphia, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, all of that. He loved Motown. And you can hear how good he is at playing it, not just on “Miss You” but on all the disco songs on Emotional Rescue, too. The drums sound so sharp. This is all part of Charlie’s evolution. They’d always been making dance music, it just wasn’t called “disco” yet, things like “Fingerprint File” or “Hot Stuff.” The big mystery is how they managed to put over “Miss You” at a time when rock ’n’ roll fans were screaming, “Disco sucks!” For them to make a dance record was on brand, the Stones were all about great Black music, but it just happened to be at the same time when the Kinks and Pink Floyd had copped the disco beat, because that was what some suit told them they had to do to stay in business. That big hi-hat swoop of Charlie’s is what seals it for the Stones disco records. He knew how to do it right.

As a reggae player, Charlie doesn’t really do the one-drop thing. It’s reggae-like—if you listen to “Cherry Oh Baby” on Black and Blue, he is really teasing all around it but the groove is still very deep. Black and Blue, that’s a very underrated record. There are some great songs like “Hand of Fate” but a lot of it is just jams, like “Hey Negrita” or “Crazy Mama.” It’s not overproduced. It’s just guys playing together.

INTERVIEWER

They were auditioning guitar players. Did you ever hear that Neil Young said he felt disappointed that he wasn’t asked to try out?

MIKE EDISON

I had not heard that! I always thought Johnny Thunders would have been good for that role, but maybe two junkies in the same band wouldn’t have been a such good idea. Ronnie Wood seems like the right guy, right? You know, by Some Girls, a gauntlet had been thrown down by the Sex Pistols and others. And if you listen to that record, especially “Respectable” and “When the Whip Comes Down,” they’re playing some very convincing punk rock, but if you unfurl it, it’s all just country riffs. That tour was fantastic because it was the last time they felt like they had something to prove—they really did not like being called old men. Remember, they were in their thirties! But no one could yet imagine a sixty-year-old Bruce Springsteen coming down the road. The 1978 Stones tour was brutal, they just said, Fuck you. After that things became more corporate.

INTERVIEWER

Is there any redeeming the Stones’ output after Tattoo You in 1981? Millennial fans seem to have rehabilitated all of Bob Dylan’s late work, whereas there was a time when everything he did after Blood on the Tracks and Desire was considered dreck.

MIKE EDISON

No, no, no, no, no. Bob Dylan lost his way in the eighties, but the solo acoustic records of the early nineties got him back to his roots, which is a music-industry cliché but true in his case, and much of what he’s done since has been great.

INTERVIEWER

Can the same be said of any late Stones record?

MIKE EDISON

The last great Stones song is “Had It with You,” on Dirty Work, generally considered their worst record. “Had It with You” is just nasty, primitive and raw, no bass, grinding drums, Mick pouring out the anger, the great trash cymbal Charlie Watts plays—it’s really mean and it’s sleazy. It’s punk rock.

INTERVIEWER

Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon? I’ll put my cards on the table, I think Bridges to Babylon, from 1997, is a really good record.

MIKE EDISON

You can always find a moment, and largely because of Charlie. If you notice, over the years, he keeps getting louder in the mix. From Tattoo You on, the snare drum starts to sound like a machine gun. It really becomes their signature sound, and they knew it.

INTERVIEWER

What about Charlie’s solo records where he returned to jazz?

MIKE EDISON

Charlie was the only one of the Stones who made perfectly lovely solo records that were beyond criticism. He was just pursuing his passion, and it was beautiful. Nobody’s going to confuse the Charlie Watts Quintet with Charlie Parker’s band or the Max Roach Quintet, but I saw him on tour and he had the biggest smile on his face, like the Cheshire cat. It took over the stage. But you know, even with a pretty good Keith record, you still wish you were listening to the Stones. When Mick started making his own records, Keith said, “Fuck off, disco boy. You’re really gonna go play with the Schmuck and Balls Band when you could play with the Stones? If you wanna make an album of Irish ballads with Liberace, do it, but if you wanna make a lousy rock record, do it with the Stones.”

What’s shocking, the last surprising thing, was the Stones’ blues record from 2016, Blue & Lonesome. I expected something kind of droll, maybe I would play it a few times—but then I found myself playing it over and over again. Charlie’s shuffles are impenetrable, and so hard to play. That’s the genius of Charlie, and it goes back to when Brian Jones and Keith Richards sat him down in the early sixties and said, Listen to Jimmy Reed, you gotta learn this. They made him internalize it. It is repetitive, it is a tempo that almost drags but somehow never does. There’s that extra breath between things, and it is so hard to play. This is the reason why most blues bands at the local bar suck. The Doors are like the worst thing imaginable. They’re a blues band that can’t play the blues. Despite all their bona fides and all the other things they might do well, their John Lee Hooker sucks, their Bo Diddley is craven, they ought to be arrested for their Howlin’ Wolf. They didn’t do their homework the way Charlie did. Somehow white guys got the idea that it was easy to play the blues, and it is not.

 

Christian Lorentzen lives in Brooklyn.

Freedom from Sugarcane Hell: An Interview with Vinod Busjeet

Photo: Sushant Sehgal.

I met Vinod Busjeet a few summers ago in Denver, where several of us writers of Indian origin found ourselves together in a workshop at the Lighthouse Lit Fest. I remember thinking his elegance and erudition were impressive. But what lingered in my mind was a detail from the work he had submitted to the class, the closing chapter of a bildungsroman, now published as Silent Winds, Dry Seas . The protagonist, Vishnu Bhushan, takes enormous pride in his delicate hands. A scholarship student from the island of Mauritius, off the coast of East Africa, he refuses a work-study job washing dishes in a Yale dining hall. Manual labor is abhorrent to him. At first, I found his fastidiousness comical. Then I realized that Vishnu dreads working with his hands because he fears it will bind him metaphorically to the servitude of his Indian ancestors on Mauritian sugar estates. “Sugarcane hell” is how one of Vishnu’s cousins, still tied to the land, describes the backbreaking labor of cutting woody stalks of cane.

Busjeet’s literary debut at the age of seventy-one is surprising. After leaving Mauritius to study in the U.S., he settled in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., and worked for the private-sector arm of the World Bank, where he focused on developing economies. Far from the corridors of power, his fictional alter ego, Vishnu, grows up in the conflicted world of midcentury Mauritius, part of a rambunctious, feuding clan rising out of poverty into small jobs. Descended from indentured laborers, they live in scruffy neighborhoods among the Creole descendants of enslaved people, escape into drink and the comfort of Hindu rituals, pinning their hopes on their children winning scholarships to study abroad.

Unfortunately, little fiction has been produced in English about Indian communities rooted in indenture, though V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant early novels of Trinidad stand out. The British devised this shadow form of slavery immediately after abolishing the African slave trade in 1833, in order to continue reaping profits from their plantations all over the world. More than a million dispossessed Indian villagers were shipped out to far-flung sugar colonies. Overwork and physical abuse crippled the lives of these men and women. Nearly half a million indentured workers landed in Mauritius, laboring for French Mauritian and British planters whose greed transformed the island into the world’s biggest sugar factory for a time. Busjeet’s novel offers a rare view of the society that evolved from this brutish system.

In May and June, Busjeet and I spoke by phone and exchanged emails about what it takes to reconstruct a faraway childhood, laugh off old pain, and reckon with the dark legacy of colonialism.

INTERVIEWER

You turned to writing after a long career in development banking. Did you ever think about becoming a writer early on?

BUSJEET

In Mauritius, writing was the last thing you’d think of doing. I went to what is considered the best high school there, Royal College, but I don’t recall anyone talking about embracing writing as a career. My father was literate—he knew Shakespeare—but my mother was basically illiterate. She had only two years of primary school. Then, in her old age, she started learning to read and write Hindi. The orientation was making a living, you know? If you were Franco-Mauritian, the world of business was yours. The Hindus, Muslims, and Creoles went into the liberal professions—doctor, engineer, lawyer. Writing was a kind of luxury. Most people I knew didn’t read for pleasure. They read for exams, and once exams were over, they didn’t read. The top writer in Mauritius at the time was a guy called Malcolm de Chazal. He was regarded as a madman.

INTERVIEWER

So once you began writing, you decided on an autobiographical novel?

BUSJEET

Silent Winds, Dry Seas started as a memoir. Then I realized fiction would allow for compression. I could cover a lot of events in one chapter. I could turn four cousins into one. And I could use my imagination to develop my characters. The story begins in 1949, the year of my birth, and ends with Mauritius’s independence, in 1968—and then there’s a last chapter in America. It’s a novel about family conflict—honor, khandan—and political conflict.

INTERVIEWER

What lay behind the impulse to write a memoir? What did you hope to memorialize about your life?

BUSJEET

I started looking at myself and trying to make sense of my life. That led me to think about Mauritian society and the relationships among the various groups in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. I go to Mauritius every eighteen months, and I realized there were parts of Mauritian history, namely the events leading to independence, that the younger generation is not familiar with. I would even say there is a desire to avoid confronting the ethnic riots that took place in 1965 and 1968. I can understand that because Mauritius is a multiracial country. There’s a fear of reopening old wounds. Sometimes you don’t want to confront the past, because what if it leads to people pointing fingers?

INTERVIEWER

Does that have to do with the historical relationship between indentured laborers and formerly enslaved people? After emancipation, the Franco-Mauritians and others who owned the plantations replaced enslaved people with indentured laborers from India. Was indenture slavery by another name?

BUSJEET

Indenture was a form of slavery, but there was a major difference. Enslaved people were deprived of their identity. They were not free to practice their religion, which was called superstition or sorcery by slave owners and the Catholic Church. They could not keep their languages or names. Their owners sometimes gave them horrible names to humiliate them. Mauritian slave owners appear to have been vicious in this regard. The enslaved people lost knowledge of their origins, their cultural memories. Indian indentured laborers were allowed to keep their names and traditions. They had the option of returning to India at the end of their five-year contract. Most stayed on in Mauritius, which suggests conditions there were probably better than back in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.

In the fifties, when I was growing up, most of the Creoles identified with French culture rather than African culture. They shared a common Catholic identity with Franco-Mauritians. During the independence movement, the Creoles did not support independence, while the descendants of Indian indentured laborers did. The anti-independence party, financed by Franco-Mauritian sugar barons, raised the fear of Hindu hegemony among the Creole and Muslim minorities. They would say, “If Mauritius gets independence, you Creole guys will be forced to wear the dhoti.” The dhoti became the symbol of Hindu domination. That was the propaganda of the opposition.

There’s a chapter in the book called “Tamasha” that explores the conflict between Creoles and Hindus. They both feel their ethnic and religious identity threatened. Then the orator Harold Walter says to them, “You should unite, you Creoles and Hindus, because you are brothers in suffering.”

INTERVIEWER

When you were growing up, what did you know about your ancestors who were brought over from India to work in the cane fields?

BUSJEET

My parents would talk about them in very general terms. They could never describe specific things except about their own parents. But the British kept good archives. You can google them now. On my father’s side, I have my great-great-grandfather’s immigration number. I know that he had a mark on the back of his right shoulder. I know the name of his father. I know he came in March 1853 at the age of seventeen. I know the name of his village, the zillah, the pargana, the port of origin, the ship he was on, the ship number, the date of arrival. I can give all that to you now. I can do the same on my mother’s side.

INTERVIEWER

They probably didn’t know what they were getting into.

BUSJEET

They were people who were escaping something—punishment or oppression. But probably this guy at seventeen wanted some adventure. That’s possible, too. People were told various stories. Some say the ancestors were told, If you go to Mauritius and clear the stones from the field, you’ll find gold underneath.

Most Mauritians don’t know what led their ancestors to leave India, but they believe some kind of deception was involved. I know the dates when mine came, but no one knows what their motivations were. I know this guy arrived in Mauritius on March 29, 1853. He was sent to work in a sugar factory three days later.

INTERVIEWER

You don’t know which sugar factory? Or what happened to him after that?

BUSJEET

No.

INTERVIEWER

In the novel, Vishnu occasionally interacts with his Creole neighbors, but we see almost nothing of white Franco-Mauritians. Why is that?

BUSJEET

They live in the mansions. I refer to the white community as “hermetically closed.” There are two groups, the “ti blanc” and the “grand blanc.” “Ti” is a diminutive for “petit.” The “ti blanc” is the less well-to-do white guy. He works overseeing a sugarcane factory. He is not considered blue-blooded enough to enter the Dodo Club. The others—we don’t know anything about their lives. Well, we know they have yachts. They can go overseas every year. They have a lavish lifestyle—let’s put it that way. The fact that they control the economy creates some resentment and problems. But they are the community that has been there the longest. There were no indigenous people in Mauritius.

INTERVIEWER

Although England ruled Mauritius for more than a hundred fifty years, a strong French influence seems to prevail. It’s not like Naipaul’s Trinidad, which bears the imprint of British colonial culture.

BUSJEET

The British fought the French over Mauritius, because whoever controlled the island controlled the strategic trade route to India. When Britain took over, in 1810, they agreed to respect the Code Napoléon and the French language. The education system is bilingual, English and French. Our language at home is Kreol, which is French mixed with Indian and Arabic words. The culture is French and Indian, rather than British and Indian. I still listen to French radio, read Le Monde and Le Figaro.

There are world-class Mauritian writers in the French-speaking world, like Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Nathacha Appanah, and Ananda Devi, a novelist whose books are taught in French universities. And then there’s Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a Mauritian of French origin, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

INTERVIEWER

You apprenticed for a number of years with Edward P. Jones in his undergraduate writing classes. What was that like?

BUSJEET

I live in D.C. and he teaches creative writing at George Washington University. If you’re a neighbor of GW and over sixty, you can audit courses for sixty-five dollars a semester. Initially, he was not keen on me attending the class. “I’ve had very bad experiences with auditors,” he told me. But then he saw that I was writing about people descended from indentured laborers who were not so different from the characters he’s written about. He could see I’m not the son of a maharaja. He had some empathy for me.

Over time, I workshopped the whole novel in his classes. It was an opportunity to work with a master. And being with undergraduates gave me a feel for what young people read and how they think.

INTERVIEWER

How did you find your way back imaginatively to your childhood? What was involved in resurrecting that past? You were writing from a distance of ten thousand miles and half a century.

BUSJEET

Over the years, whenever I had some free time, I would write down incidents I remembered. My memory isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good. Also, whenever I went back to Mauritius, I would talk to my classmates and members of my family, and memories would come back. My classmates tend to reminisce about the same things over and over again—the experiences we shared. Maybe that’s part of getting older.

I brought back all my high school copybooks and reread all my literature essays. I was trying to see what life was like in those days. In fact, I’m in my office now, and I’m looking at those copybooks in a corner. That’s a kind of record.

INTERVIEWER

What did writing from this vantage point reveal to you about your beginnings?

BUSJEET

We tend to romanticize our childhoods. In fact, mine wasn’t that romantic. It was tough living in Mauritius in those days. When I was growing up, I didn’t think about how socially repressive Mauritian society is. You are subject to a lot of pressure in terms of how you behave, who you talk to, who you associate with. In the Hindu community there’s a strict moral code, and if you break that code, there are consequences. There are families where, if the woman commits adultery, she will become an outcast, even to her own parents. A bit like Puritan society in the U.S. The Creole community is different. But Hindus tend to associate with Hindus, and Creoles with Creoles. Although where I lived was primarily a Creole town, because my father was a schoolteacher there. In the past, the towns and cities were more Creole and the countryside Hindu and Muslim.

INTERVIEWER

I was wondering about the titles you’ve given the chapters in your novel. They’re mostly fun and lighthearted, like “A Haircut on the Beach” or “The Incident at Madame Lolo,” and yet painful, brutal conflicts occur in these pages. Was it your intention to soften the harshness of your characters’ experiences with a sense of whimsy?

BUSJEET

Maybe it enables you to deal with such darkness. You need to have the ability to laugh at it and laugh at yourself as well. Otherwise it’s too hard to cope. You could say it’s a kind of defense mechanism.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve also done something playful and inventive by inserting a poem between each of the chapters, which I haven’t seen before in a novel. Why did you decide to do that?

BUSJEET

A poem’s a very compressed way of saying a lot of things. If you take my poem “The Man with the Glass Eye,” you could write it out as a story. But a poem allows you to cover as much ground in a single page. I inserted the poems partly to provide continuity. I wrote them parallel to the story, but I didn’t have an outline of which poem I’d put where. Later, I thought about how they would fit in.

There’s a poem, “Reincarnation,” where Vishnu’s father and mother pass by a coffin shop and his mother asks his father if he wants to be buried in a dhoti. He says, “No, in my suit and tie.” And she says, “But you got married in a dhoti.” And he says, “Okay, bury me in a dhoti but lay my suit next to me. If I wake up, I’ll put it on.”

This comes right after an incident where a Creole guy puts on a dhoti on Independence Day. This actually happened, by the way, in front of my house. He wore a dhoti in a Creole neighborhood, which was essentially anti-independence, and he came to our place and said, “Namaste.” He was a strong guy and people respected him. The poem gave me a way to contrast the two men and say what a great attitude they both had. The Creole man, whom you would not expect to wear a dhoti, wears a dhoti. And the Hindu man likes to wear a suit. I wanted to reaffirm that Hindus in Mauritius are quite Westernized—while keeping their religion, they have not clung to all traditions.

INTERVIEWER

A lot of the drama in the novel is generated by family disputes Vishnu witnesses as a child and, later, as an adolescent, takes sides in. What did you intend to express about the family through these various conflicts?

BUSJEET

I wanted to explore gender roles, for one thing. Mauritius is a patriarchal society, and it’s very clear that in most Mauritian Hindu families, women do not have power. Women suffer. They’re expected to be like Sita, the shadow of their husbands.

INTERVIEWER

One of the more disturbing family conflicts involves Vishnu’s cousin Shankar, whose relationship with his father is that of a servant to a master. The father coerces Shankar into cultivating sugarcane on his plot of land despite Shankar’s hatred of the work and his ambition to go to England to study nursing. But Shankar remains trapped working in his father’s fields, which he calls “sugarcane hell.” The dream of escape is shared by many characters in this story.

BUSJEET

Because of the conditions on sugarcane plantations, the goal of a lot of Mauritians was to get a white-collar job in an office. You wanted to become an accountant, a civil servant. If you were on the lower rungs of the ladder, you wanted economic opportunity. In the sixties, opportunities in Mauritius were very limited. Shankar’s father says, “All those people who’ve gone to do nursing, have they come back?” Nobody has come back. My wife, for instance, went to England to study nursing because that was an opportunity to go abroad. It was an opportunity to make a life for yourself. Emigration. What are the forces that push a person to emigrate? The story of Vishnu is a story of emigration.

 

Parul Kapur Hinzen is a fiction writer and journalist whose critical writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal Europe, Slate, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Atlanta and is working on a novel about love and corruption in the aftermath of India’s devastating 1947 Partition.

Turning Sixty

Geburtstags-Stilleben, Series 296, 1910, Oilette postcard depicting a birthday cake, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I was very blue for the weeks running up to my sixtieth. I suppose I was triste. I couldn’t explain to myself why I was so low. When I wasn’t researching and writing or sorting out my daughter’s university accommodation, I trawled the flea markets and vintage shops collecting stuff for my unreal estate in the Mediterranean. So far, I had found a pair of wooden slatted blinds, two linen tablecloths, a copper frying pan, six small coffee cups, and a watering can made from tin with a long spout. I was collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made. In a way, these objects resembled the early drafts of a novel.

*

I was thinking about existence. And what it added up to. Had I done okay? Who was doing the judging? Had there been enough happy years, had there been enough love and loving? Were my own books, the ones I had written, good enough? What was the point of anything? Had I reached out enough to others? Was I really happy to live alone? Why was I so preoccupied with the fantasy of various unattainable houses and why was I still searching for a missing female character? If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page? There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own. Does she scoop them up and ride the high horse with them? Do they scoop her up and take over the reins? Did that feel true? I hoped so. My fifties had been a time of change and turbulence, energetic and exciting. A time of self-respect and perhaps a sort of homecoming. So there you are! Where have you been all these years?

Winter had truly arrived in Paris. When I made my way to the exit from the Métro, a cold wind came in from the Seine and blew the hairpins out of my updo. I had to find sturdier pins. Or perhaps I should live with the curls and have my hair down for a while. There were days writing in my apartment when I realized something was wrong with my hands. They were so cold that my fingers had gone numb, even though the heating was on full. I could not get warm and worst of all my local swimming pool was closed down for repairs.

One of my colleagues knew I was melancholy. She took me out to dinner on the condition that I taste something entirely new. We made a date and two days later we sat in a café on rue des Abbesses and I cracked into my first sea urchin. It was like eating the reproductive organs of an alien. Strangely enough, it was a poke of life and I began to enjoy the harsh winter, its sharp nudge on my cheeks. My melancholy was lifting. I’m not sure it was all due to the urchin, but it was true that I felt most alive in the sea.

Something incredible happened. Another of my colleagues, Emeka Ogbu, a visual artist and a DJ from Lagos, thought it would be a good idea if I invited some friends to dance to his music in the nightclub Silencio, where he soon had a gig, for my birthday. Silencio was a semiprivate club for performers and artists, a place to meet and exchange ideas. Every room was designed by David Lynch, one of the film directors who had most inspired my approach to fiction. I took Emeka up on his offer and began to put together the guest list.

*

My daughters couldn’t believe their mother was so cool as to be partying at Silencio. They arrived in Paris on the eve of my birthday and their gift to me was an ice cream maker. A state-of-the-art ice cream machine. I told them I would churn now for many years. When I heard that Helena had gone to Zurich to spend time with my best male friend, I decided to delete them both from my guest list and invite Nadia instead. All the same, he had heard whispers about the ice cream machine and sent a friend to deliver a box of guavas via the concierge to my empty nest.

“Yes,” I said to my daughters, “I am going to make us the exact same guava ice cream I tasted in India.” Every time I looked at them, I couldn’t get over their beauty. When I told that to my daughters, the oldest said, “Actually, I think guavas are quite ugly,” and I replied, “No, not the guavas, I mean you.” They both agreed that all mothers think their children are beautiful, and gave me an update on the banana tree.

Perhaps I did not have one foot in Death Boulevard after all. Silencio had the perfect atmosphere for my sixtieth. Its design was mysterious, glamorous, a dimly lit inward world tucked into this world, and it was part of the history of cinema. There was even a smoking room, and this chamber in which one could fume was designed to resemble a forest of mirrors. There were nooks and crannies to have conversations and there was the adrenaline of the dance floor itself. Emeka’s playlist drew us all in and then it sent us crazy. Every now and again I would look at him up on the stage, headphones over his ears, his arms in the air, our arms in the air. He gave us energy and conquered the room.

We all cooled off at 4 A.M. on the banks of the Seine. It was tempting to take off my sweat-drenched clothes and dive in, but Nadia told me, “No, do not so much as dip your feet in the Seine, she has things to do. She is on her way to the English Channel, where she will flow into the sea at Le Havre.” I was not sure what she was going on about, except that perhaps she was talking about herself. Nadia was going to flow away from her husband. Yes, my best male friend was doing his best to lose his third wife, who was planning to free herself in Le Havre, or wherever.

It was slightly dizzying being a sixty-year-old female character. Perhaps a character is someone who is not quite herself. I think that is what is meant when someone in life is described as being “a bit of a character.”

As the winter melted into spring, I found myself very homesick for my friends in England and Ireland. I was missing the trees and plants and flowers in my local parks and the dignity of speaking a language I understood. At the same time, as Brexit raged, I wondered what it would take to leave Britain and live elsewhere.

I reread Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and began to understand the magnitude of his exile from Prague to Paris, the huge endeavor of learning another language and actually thinking in that language when alone in the bath. Kundera had claimed his French identity. He described himself as a French-Czech novelist. It was a shock to realize all over again that I was part of the trail of writers who had made the long journey from their country of birth to somewhere else.

 

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and widely translated. The author of highly praised novels, including three Booker-nominated titles, The Man Who Saw Everything, Hot Milk, and Swimming Home, the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka, and two parts of her working autobiography, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, she lives in London. Levy is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Excerpted from Real Estate. Copyright Deborah Levy, 2021. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury. 

A Swift Arrow’s Flight

Sigrid Nunez. Photo: © Marion Ettlinger.

Certain books—the best ones—feel ordained, their creation inevitable, their nonexistence unimaginable. If the path to that existence was imperiled, the inevitable quality is only enhanced: the indispensable book exists not despite but because of those obstacles. Sigrid Nunez’s 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God, suggests, with its title, haphazard travel, and in fact the book did follow a halting and elliptical path to existence. But the book is no feather. It sails to its mark like an arrow, laying bare an untold past at the same time as it lays out a suddenly imaginable future. The book is both arrival and departure, for both author and readers.

Sigrid Nunez is the sort of writer who is always going to say it better than the rest of us; better than me, at least. Already I find that, at the end of many months’ rumination and many hours’ active struggle I have, with my very first complete paragraph above on the subject of Sigrid Nunez, plagiarized her. Rummaging the drawers of expression in hopes of finding something adequate to the immediacy and power that so startled me the first time I ever encountered her work, I’ve grabbed hold of what turns out to be secondhand Sigrid, not even an accurate theft. In the fourth section, titled “Immigrant Love,” of this four-section book, Nunez writes:

The wish to be all body, the dream of a language of movement, pure in a way that speech (“the foe of mystery”—Mann) can never be pure—I would not have been the same lover if I had not danced. And it has been a real ambition of mine, thwarting other ambitions, coming between me and all other goals: to be a woman in love. In love lies the possibility not only of fulfillment but of adventure and risk, and for once I was not afraid—either to suffer or to make suffer. In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same, and I have flung myself from cliffs, I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin. [final emphasis mine]

At readers’ hearts, too, she has flung herself like a javelin. Now it’s all too clear to me that my derivative arrow sentence betrays the marks, or perhaps the puncture wounds, her work has made on me. It’s all there in the paragraph I’ve quoted: the incantatory rhythms making deft use of repetition and variation; the virtuosic accumulation of tension—the staccato interruptions of the em dash—that deft turn from the prepositional “woman in love” to the declarative “In love lies … ”; the refusal to so much as signal what might arrive next and the sly subversion of our stubbornly formed expectations; at last, the dazzling blow of revelation. “For once I was not afraid—either to suffer or to make suffer”—When has this person ever been afraid? we cry in a protest Nunez promptly meets, with the effect that our shock is redoubled for having been anticipated: “The words for love and suffering are the same, and I have flung myself from cliffs, I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” That “wish to be all body,” that “dream of a language of movement,” which is pure in the way that speech “can never be,” has in fact been realized in the very passage that declares such realization impossible. To the extent that the dazzling unpredictability of Nunez’s prose can ever be mapped—hence predicted—here is one facet: this realization, in language, of contradiction. Nunez’s sentences are very like the ballet she describes with such breathtaking, almost cruel fidelity: sentences that press tension on tension until they prize themselves open, while still maintaining such a purity of form as to seem at once both ravaged and intact. “Straining beauty,” her narrator thinks, on observing a bouquet of peonies in a state of “overbloom”: “They have turned themselves practically inside out … There seems to me something almost generous about this.” A better description of her writing won’t be found anywhere else.

*

A Feather on the Breath of God begins as a mystery story. The first of its four sections, “Chang,” seeks an Asian father who has not vanished so much as failed to appear—at least, to his white wife and mixed daughters. One of them—our narrator—assembles him from paltry scraps, not least her own blindness to him. He was an ethnic Chinese man from Panama. He never really learned English and was rarely heard speaking Chinese. Of a relationship to Spanish, speculation is not even possible. He had mothers in both countries or neither; was called Carlos, or Chang, maybe both; was taciturn to the point of resembling an idol of clay, and also loved singing along to Hank Williams. In other words, he is contradiction, incoherence, and loss, the sort of subject a lesser writer might find was no subject at all. But for Nunez, his very absence from her gaze is precisely the subject, and her portrait of this man who cannot be portrayed not only bodies forth his absence but the contending forces that have made him that way and even—finally—his irreducible self, though this can only be sensed through its residue. The man himself is long gone, the seeker too late.

I first read “Chang” in the early nineties while in graduate school. Only Nunez’s third publication of any kind (one predecessor was a story in Ellery Queen!), “Chang” had been accepted by The Threepenny Review in 1989 after Nunez’s friend Leonard Michaels showed it to Wendy Lesser, Threepenny’s editor. Two years later “Christa,” which would become the second part of A Feather on the Breath of God, was published in The Iowa Review, and another two years after that “Chang” was reprinted in the Asian American literature anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead, which was where I encountered it. I had joined an Asian American literature reading group that year, a time when it still seemed possible to master that subject and maybe even, by extension, one’s own subjectivity, in a single semester. For me everything about the group proceeded from or resulted in discomfort. I had joined the group hoping to alleviate discomfort and instead found myself uncomfortable in new ways I hadn’t thought of before. Everything I read seemed to be a worse fit than before I’d ventured onto hyphenated ground, worse than my blithe trespasses on Austenian estates or to the Ramsays’ lighthouse, which I’d made without a thought to my credentials. Then “Chang” shocked me with my own discomfort—it seemed to have eyes watching me from the page. Of the numerous very good books, stories, and plays the group read that semester I retained nothing but “Chang.” I snuck off to make a photocopy from the anthology, ancestor to the photocopy I have to this day. More than a quarter of a century later, at the end of an introductory fiction-writing class in which I taught “Chang” for at least the fiftieth time, one of my students approached me, near tears. She explained she was the daughter of immigrants, an Ecuadorean mother and a half-Chinese, half-Mexican father, reminiscent of the father in “Chang.” She wanted to thank me for assigning the story. She hadn’t known there was writing like this: writing that could make her feel seen.

If “Chang” is a mystery story of absence, “Christa” is a reckoning with presence—not only the outsize, operatic presence of Christa herself but the presence of all the ramifying complexities unleashed by “Chang” and “Christa” in tandem. In her life as a beginning author, Nunez had initially been content to publish “Chang” and “Christa” as two solo acts; in art as in life it was when the pair drew ineluctably together that the problems began. An early agent of Nunez’s sent the pair on submission as a novella-length book; the unanimously negative responses ranged from at best “a kind of pleading” that Nunez make both sections longer, to the sort of outright condemnation (“Horrible! Garbage! This is not a novel”) that would prompt most writers to throw in the towel. What none of the naysayers seem to have considered was that the pairing of “Chang” and “Christa” might be incomplete not because either of those pieces—each as perfect as anything that has ever been published—ought to be padded out further, but because the two pieces, set next to each other, reactively ignite the sort of fireworks that require a different and ample horizon against which to be seen. The Chang/Christa story so far—of origin and displacement, identity and erasure, of native land and native tongue and unrequited searching—has to move out of the past: into the present, and the body.

Nunez has said that after the widespread rejection of the Chang/Christa novella, she considered never folding the two pieces into a single book at all. We can be glad she changed her mind. “Chang” and “Christa” conjoined not only point forward to the thematic complexity Nunez achieves with all four parts of the book united but also to the unmistakable and indispensable voice that, after its perfection in this book, would go on to be resurrected in two (to date) brilliant descendants. Early in “Christa,” a seemingly throwaway joke belies all that A Feather on the Breath of God isn’t, and is:

One day I came home to find her with a copy of Lolita. The woman who lived downstairs had heard it was a good dirty book and had gone out and bought it. Disappointed, she passed it on to my mother. (“So, is it dirty?” “No, just a very silly book by a very clever man.”)

Like Nabokov, Nunez is a writer forged from conditions of exile, homeland loss, and language unease. Unlike Nabokov, Nunez persistently diminishes and complicates her own narrator’s authority, whether by her admission that she cannot see her subject clearly (Christa) or that, until his death, she never even tried (Chang); or by detailing, in all their unsustainable spuriousness, her justifications for the abusive culture of ballet, and the abusive acts of one beloved man. What sifts into the multitudinous and deliberate fissures in the novel’s narrative authority is empathetic identification: with the subject of inquiry, with the self, with the reader, with conditions of life that are far from unique to the immigrant, the unsheltered, or the dispossessed. It is ironic that our literary culture so elevates Nabokov as a writer of exile and loss, despite the enormous and damaging failures of his work to achieve empathetic identification, particularly with displaced and dispossessed women. When Nunez’s Christa—a European exile like Nabokov himself—dismisses Lolita as “a silly book by a clever man” (and in a parenthetical, no less!), the moment, like all moments in Nunez’s book, passes swiftly—Nunez never sets up a flagpole, never seeks to attract the label “clever” to herself—but even tossed off the reference is telling. Their similarities in subject highlight their stark difference in style: Nunez’s being so transparent, so attuned to the sound of voices other than her own, so uninterested in demonstrations of her own cleverness, that her own presence and project are consistently effaced in favor of the subject under consideration. That subject is not merely Christa but the defeated German nation of midcentury, and the indelible fairy tale of white supremacy, and the equally indelible and discredited gospel of European cultural superiority; not merely Chang but the existential conundrum of Asian “racial” identity, the untold losses of the Asian diaspora throughout the Americas, and the persistent emasculation of the Asian male—a racist tool forged so effectively by American society that it most easily comes to hand not to hostile strangers but to the man’s own family. Unlike the sort of writing that takes from its subject of consideration the opportunity to make a point, or move a plot, or—as especially in Nabokov’s case—showcase virtuosity, Nunez’s prose gives: a pure attention and illumination. Nunez’s writing bestows.

Nunez has described A Feather on the Breath of God as autofiction, a term that, she told me, she understands less with reference to such contemporaries as Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner than to forebears such as Rilke and Proust: “It’s always in the first person and the ‘I’ is the author … It’s recognizably Sigrid and her background, who’s always transparently engaged in writing this book you’re reading, in which ‘I’ am the consciousness and everything I observe is mine.” Nunez attributes many of the rejections of the early Chang/Christa submission to genre confusion provoked by this voice: “People said, What is this? Is it fiction, or a memoir? It can’t be both! It really seemed to throw people.” Hewing to that voice, Nunez not only finally completed the book that for me sits alongside Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus as one of the very few truly great debuts in American literary history, but also set the groundwork for 2018’s The Friend and its follow-up, 2020’s What Are You Going Through. “After I finished [The Friend] I realized how close that narrator is to the narrator of Feather: same consciousness, interest in reading, tendency to quote readings, solitariness. And as soon as I started writing What Are You Going Through I realized the great similarity between its narrator and that of The Friend.” The troubled and halting trajectory by which “Chang” and “Christa” became A Feather on the Breath of God had been a swift arrow’s flight all along—to our present moment, at which Nunez is finally gaining the wide readership she has always deserved, and to her work’s future. “When I finished The Friend I thought, ‘Oh look what I did, I went all the way back to my writerly roots!’” Nunez told me, laughing. “And this is where I’m staying— at least for now.”

 

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, received the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2019 she published her first book for children, Camp Tiger. She teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

This essay appears as the foreword to the reissue edition of Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God , out from Picador on August 31, 2021.