The Paris Review's Blog, page 107

Procrastination, Pressure, and Poetry: An Interview with Kendra Allen

Photo: Clara Lee Allen. Photo and cover courtesy of Ecco.

Kendra Allen told me that when she feels stuck writing, she starts hitting the space bar to get things going again. This refusal to get bogged down by hesitancy or fear translates into her writing, which has a sonorous and raw vulnerability. Allen sees herself less as a capital-W Writer and more as a person in the world, using language to work out how she feels about family, death, and pop music. Our conversation took place on a phone call between New York City and Dallas on a July afternoon. Allen’s energy is infectious even from a distance, rigorously turning over ideas with me about everything from lyrics to reincarnation.

Fittingly, the word essay—to try, to ascertain, to weigh—originates not with formal constraints of prose but with experiments in ideas. Kendra Allen’s 2019 essay collection, When You Learn the Alphabet, is a fearless attempt by Allen to weigh her themes—family, inheritance, identity. Her debut poetry collection, The Collection Plate, published earlier this month by Ecco, revisits much from the essay collection but also moves into territory farther afield. Some of the most ambitious and captivating poems in the book are from a series based on Lonnie Johnson and the invention of the Super Soaker. Sometimes a poem, with its title politely positioned in the header position, won’t get started until the very bottom of the page. Rereading those poems now, I feel the weight of that space and am right there with Allen, mind whirring brightly as she taps the space bar, waiting for the words to come.

INTERVIEWER

You recently wrote a recommendation of theMIND’s album Don’t Let It Go to Your Head for The Paris Review Daily. In the recommendation, you mention that you had just met a deadline for your manuscript, and then you listened to the album and had a moment of thinking, Now I need to rewrite everything. How often is music this essential to your writing?

ALLEN

I literally would not be writing anything if I was not obsessed with reading lyrics. I think that’s what sparked my interest in creative writing. So many of my greatest memories are me in the car listening to a specific song or me buying a CD and just replaying it over and over and over. The artist I wrote about, theMIND, has a song called “Atlas Complex,” and I was thinking about the line where he says, “I told you everything, gave you everything, you always wanted me naked, and now I’m telling everything, I’m changing everything, I hope this honesty saves us.” I would hear something like that, and I would want to write it. I would create prompts out of song lyrics. So music has sustained me with something to write about. I can always find a line in any song and make a prompt out of it and apply it to my own life.

INTERVIEWER

The recommendation also mentions that you finished your manuscript at 2 A.M. Are you a procrastinator?

ALLEN

Oh, a hundred percent. I’m procrastinating as we speak. As soon as you called, I was procrastinating. I’m not a writer who can set a certain time every single day when I’m going to sit down and write ten pages. That’s just not how I’m wired. I need pressure or I won’t do anything. I will sit at the computer and have intentions of opening up the document, but then I will look at emails. I’ll get on YouTube. I’ll try to read a book. I procrastinate on reading, too. I’ll try to read, and I’ll just get distracted. I’m not the kind of person who has to go outside and clear their mind to do things. I’m more likely to sit in a room and drive myself crazy until I’m stressed out to the point where I’m like hours away from my deadline. And then I just pump it out. I need stress. That’s weird. I need to work on that. I don’t know why I need stress.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do a lot of revision, or does what comes out feel like the finished product?

ALLEN

Oh no. Never the finished product. I’m a big, big revisor. My revision process is more eliminating than adding things. I think with my first drafts it’s kind of just whatever comes out of my head. It’s not supposed to be good. When I get to that fourth or fifth draft, I can sort of see whatever I’m working on shaping itself and revealing itself to me. A lot of times when it reveals itself, I’m taking things out instead of adding in because I don’t need to say everything I’ve ever thought about what I’m writing. I’m learning that as I go. So when I’m revising, I’m saying, Is this necessary? Is this three essays in one essay, and what do I need to take out? Or is this poem just trying to sound cooler or smarter than what it is? When I see the bare bones of the piece, I’m like, I could have said this in maybe three or four sentences instead of three pages.

I have a better time revising poetry than I do with essays. I feel like having fun when I’m writing poems. Not in the first draft, but when it reveals itself, poetry gets to be fun. But with an essay, I put so much pressure on myself because it’s so many words and it kind of throws me off. And so I just have to strip everything away.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work from notes?

ALLEN

When I have something good, yeah. I realized there’s a pattern. Like, all of my stuff that I think is good—not good to the public but good to me—has been the product of me waking up at 2 A.M., writing a sentence down, going back to sleep, waking up forty-five minutes later, writing a hundred sentences down, going back to sleep, and then sort of copying and pasting it all into a Word document at a later date. Like, a way later date. And it’s been like that since I started taking writing seriously. That has been my main process.

INTERVIEWER

The Collection Plate is a perfect title for a collection of poetry. I want to hear you talk a little bit about what the image of a collection plate means to you.

ALLEN

I grew up in my great-uncle’s Baptist church, so I was thinking about the things that we are given and that we give away. I’ve seen people take things out of actual collection plates in church. [Laughs] With this collection I also wanted to think about water and what it takes away from us. So I was just thinking about things that water has taken out of and from me, whether that’s tears or sweat or spit.

I’m a person who will pick a title and try to write a complete thing around it just because I don’t want to change it. I feel married to it. It’s so crazy! [Laughs] With The Collection Plate, I started with the title and was like, This encapsulates the whole aura of where I’m at mentally right now, and I just wanted to write around it.

INTERVIEWER

When you say it captures where you were mentally, do you mean that you felt a lot of giving or taking from the poems?

ALLEN

I wrote most of the first drafts of these poems in 2019, and that was just not a good year for me. There was a heaviness on me, and I turned to poetry. I couldn’t write essays. My mind wouldn’t allow me to do it, and so I turned to poetry not thinking that what I was writing was going to be a book. I was just doing it because I couldn’t write essays. Sometimes with essay writing I feel like it’s a lot of overexplaining. Like with detail. Well, that makes no sense—the point of writing is to have detail. But during that specific moment when I was just solely writing poems, I didn’t want to do the essay thing anymore. I was like, Okay, I tried it out, and I tried to take risks, and I’ll come back to it later. What can I do with poetry that I haven’t discovered before? I wouldn’t define myself as a poet because I don’t know enough about poetry. I didn’t take classes on it. I’ve been in poetry workshops, but I don’t know a lot about structure and all the names of the different forms and things like that.

So I was going into writing poetry with a clean slate, and I think that served me because I didn’t have so many rules set in place. I could go to the page and think with my poems. When I was writing, I wasn’t thinking, I want to structure it this way. It just comes up. It does the work for itself if you put the work in, if that makes sense. Like, if I’m talking about a swimming pool, I’m not going into it trying to form a structure where it looks similar to the lanes of an Olympic pool. It just sort of came out like that and I wasn’t really aware of it. But I think now I’m at a point where I don’t want to keep doing things by accident. I want to do them on purpose.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think, in a way, poetry is nonfiction?

ALLEN

I think poetry is fiction and nonfiction. I think we assume it’s nonfiction. But some of the poets I’m obsessed with, a lot of their stuff is not even happening in their lives. It’s just imaginative. It’s blending truth with fiction and creating new worlds. A lot of my poetry is personal, and so I’m like, Oh, everybody’s just writing about what’s happening to them, their lives. But what could happen if we did this, or what shouldn’t have happened, or how can we do it differently?

I think with poetry, it’s easier—it’s not easier—but it’s like, I think that’s when it sort of shifts from truth to like this fantastic imaginative world that doesn’t lend itself to one genre. If that makes sense. And it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not at that point. It’s just about the feeling of it.

INTERVIEWER

Is intuition a large part of how you like to do things? Like you said, you’re not coming to a poem with a form in mind, a sonnet or whatever, but rather feeling your way as you go?

ALLEN

If I’m assigned an essay to write, it’s very hard for me. That’s when the procrastination comes in and I’m just sitting there for three days straight with three words on the page because it’s just not clicking for me. If it feels forced, that’s what causes me to hit the space bar, that’s what causes me to sort of break a line or a sentence up in a random spot and try to create a double meaning. But music is involved in that, too. I listen to a lot of rap, and I’m always thinking of rappers I love who do double entendres and things like that.

INTERVIEWER

In both When You Learn the Alphabet and The Collection Plate, one of the main themes you like to return to is your family. What keeps drawing you back to them as subject matter?

ALLEN

I think it’s because my family members are like characters. Literally, I’ve always said if my family got a TV show, TV would shut down, and not in a good way. As in, we can’t have nobody on TV no more because this is crazy. This is wild.

My family is just full of stories that nobody got to tell. And you could see that weight of not being heard or not being seen. I didn’t really learn that until I got past twenty-five. A light went on and it was like, Okay, we’re all a part of one another. There’s so much to talk about, and it’s not being talked about, and I always want my family to see themselves in my work. If my auntie reads something, I want her to be like, I’m glad you said that because I’ve been trying to tell people and they weren’t listening. Or my granny, who was like, Thank you for telling a part of my story. It makes me feel like the stuff I reveal about myself is worth it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that’s connected to being raised in a religious and spiritual environment, where there’s so much storytelling? I’m thinking of the family superstition about death coming in threes, which comes up in your essays and in your poetry.

ALLEN

I grew up in a very spiritual, religious place, but I didn’t feel that spiritual or religious in it. I think that’s why I lean so much on trying to unpack it now. For example, my mama told me people die in threes, three people at a time, and I would just take it. Then I’ve seen it happen, and then I’ve seen it happen again. I just became very content with the concept of death. Me and my mom always talk about death. We talk about our own deaths. That’s when I feel the most in tune with my spirituality. I think about endings all the time in my work. Like, I could write the ending, but I don’t even know how it’s going to start. I just know how it’s going to end.

I will probably always write about the same thing, a subject, until I figure it out clearly for myself, because I’m not going to want to talk about something else, not when I haven’t even figured this out. I don’t care if it takes me writing three more books about the same thing. I promise I won’t make it boring, but until I can figure something out, that’s always going to be what I go back to and lean on.

 

Lauren Kane is the assistant editor of The Paris Review.

Read Kendra Allen’s poem “The Super Sadness! Feels Like Anger, Which Feels Like,” which appeared in the Spring 2021 issue.

& Other Stories

In Eloghosa Osunde’s column Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses.

Eloghosa Osunde, At the Beach in Your Dream, 2020, mixed media.

If you really think about it, we were all raised inside a giant dictionary. Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions. Who is normal? What is beauty? Who is a criminal? What is a woman? What is a man? What is good love? What is sex? What is fair? Who is holy? What is evil? The more you agree with the definitions you’ve been given, the more you belong. The more you belong, the farther away you are from punishment. And you want to be safe in this scary place, don’t you? So you do what you’re supposed to do, and you avoid what leads to suffering. You don’t want to be lonely either, do you, so you believe the rule: there’s nothing but nothing for you outside the defined lines. You’re told this from when you’re little, that your questions will put you in trouble, that you are and will always be too small to challenge a meaning. You’re just one person and this is how it works: society decides, you obey. But is that true? Seeing as many of us are alive on the outskirts of definitions, seeing as that’s the address that saved some of our lives, the place where we watch our safeties spring out of the ground, it’s clear that whatever was defined can be redefined. Whatever was written by a person for a people, can be edited by a person or a people. We’re proof. What is society, anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We have always made it up.

Art making is my strongest argument for redefinition, because nothing shows you the lie of impossibility and the multiplicity of worlds better than a body of work standing where once there was nothing. You don’t know how to turn Something into Something Else? Listen to what a remix does to a song: how in African Lady, an ADM remix, TMXO lays Masego’s music over a Lagbaja sample, rubbing two worlds against each other until they spark a three-minute-fifty-seconds long fire. Listen to the Red Hot + Riot album made in honor of Fela’s music and enter the rooms that appear when Meshell Ndegeocello, Manu Dibango, Sade Adu, Kelis, Common, Tony Allen, and D’Angelo are invited to the same house party. Or watch Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and notice the world you hold too tight become subsumed in an alternate reality, another now. Watch the Greek film Dogtooth and remember how you were taught to see; see how every manipulation has its genesis in language, how language reshapes the cornea and whatever stands before it. Read The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and register what feels familiar about the premise; where have you seen that before? It’s strange, isn’t it, to know that what we remember is also a collaboration. Find all five remixes to Rema’s “Dumebi” [Vandalized, Major Lazer, Henry Fong, Becky G, Matoma]. All these unalike branches, growing out of the same tree. You think language is set in stone? Listen to a Nigerian talk a person to the fringes of their own English using pidgin—a genius composition. Strict binaries and genre are real until you watch DJ Moma play a New York club or DJ Aye play a Lagos night. Technically a thing like that should be impossible—continents ejecting you onto the same dance floor, that voice meeting this synth, the low wail of a bass guitar free-falling through the deep grunt of an ancient drum: jazz meets Afrobeats meets house meets alternative meets grime meets highlife meets soukous—but there you are, all of a sudden, thinking, Wait, who said these things can’t belong together?

*

Two months ago, when a fraction of my chosen family and I gathered to talk about the things we’re often discouraged from saying in public, one of us named that space—my living room couch—The Womb. I didn’t ask why because I didn’t need to; I know Whose it was. It fit. We all belonged inside it in a way that everything outside my door claims is impossible. It makes sense to me to miss being carried in safewater, it makes sense to me to feel yourself being (re)made, (re)gaining realness—later and now and before, all at once. Womb is a word that made me wince for a long time. That time includes now, and the reasons are still just mine. But a word means one thing until it gets a chance to mean another. The promise of being born again appealed to me for a reason, after all. That February in twenty-fourteen, the church didn’t even have to try hard. Said once as a promise, and I was already on my knees saying Yes Please, Yes. So, in the dark of The Womb, there were stories shared over palm wine and smoke that are still behind my ribs. Everyone was truth telling and the room shimmered with an earned sweetness. In response to one of those stories, we shuffled truth about our shadows, about the darker parts of ourselves we’d folded away for at least two and a half decades because it was that urgent to be A Good Person. We admitted the reasons we all fight so hard for the word Good, the reason we answer when it is called and try to claim it like a name, how frightened we are of Bad. I’m trying something new: asking myself if the choice I want to make is matched with a consequence I can live with, instead of if it’s good or bad. We talked more about how much we tuck in, how even in grief, there is a correct way to feel the weight, there are feelings we’re still not allowed to admit having. But not-allowed means hiding, even from yourself; and hiding is exactly why Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom insisted on disassembling me recently. A humbling feeling, being turned inside out like that. Also a kind of kindness. “You know when a story sees the things you’ve been hiding from yourself?” Yeah, that. This time, nothing was off the table, not even when it started shaking; not even when one leg fell off. So in response to “Wait, are we allowed to say these things out loud?” I said, “Well, here we are.” I can’t vouch for anywhere else in the world, but where I live, the only commandment is that there are no commandments. Be true, is the only rule. Put the lie on that rack, take off the uniform they insist you wear when you’re outside—and just be true. This is not always a beautiful or weightless thing. When you ask for truth, sometimes heavy things get said. Heavy things got said. So two weeks after The Womb had closed and we’d all been born again, in response to: “Do you ever get lonely?” (living differently, living outside, fashioning a life), I played Obongjayar’s “Carry Come Carry Go” to the person who asked this in my car. Even now, recalling it, I can see the road get stretched insanely by the hook. The answer is that feverish bridge; the answer is the way he moves on the track; it isn’t just what is said, it’s in how it’s shivered onto the beat, almost wept. The answer to what helps and holds me, what restores me to myself is also inside sound: “Good” by Sutra, “Get Free” by Mereba, “Bordeaux” by SuperJazzClub, “Ngeke Balunge” by Mafikizolo, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, “Unspoken Word” by the Soil. More, more.                                  

*

There are multiple exits out of what is often referred to as Real Life on a daily basis, if you’re really paying attention. You probably fall in and out of your life regularly: between deep belly laughs at the dining table, or in clubs, bass beating against the small of your back. You do it when you’re watching a film that sucks you in or reading a book that pulls you deep into the corridor on the inside of your body, because imagination is a place. Distraction is a place. But you come back to, crawl right into the present so quickly, so casually that it’s hard to know what you’ve just done. Some of us have been there longer than others. I would know, having dissociated for years at a stretch, consistently moving at at least zero point zero two seconds ahead of myself, always catching up. I come to when I catch it, because I need me. Plus, you’re meant to snap out of stories and realms that are too fleshed out, too fantasy seeming, because people who believe stories and alternate realities too much and for too long see things that are not there, see things others can’t see, are called insane. Well, I used to fear that word until I was that. Until people I love were that and my love still met them there. Now I can’t care. There are a thousand reals vibrating in formation at any given moment and I’m open to many. We choose what we plug in to. The rest is the rest.

Words have synonyms and antonyms, for depth of meaning, yes—the meaning of a word thickens next to its partner or companion, its opposite or opponent, because just like you, language needs company. But my favorite thing about language is that it responds to how it’s used. It can be anything, really: from a cave or an obstacle to the bridge between lives, the road between worlds. Redefinition is relocation. It’s why the easiest way to get Somewhere Else is to name it like something real. I was raised to worry about right or wrong. I cared until I was labeled wrong and did not die. So I tell myself: don’t worry about being good; just be as intentional about destruction as you are about creation. Do not create anyone, do not destroy anyone. Understand this and no need to run: nothing on the inside of you can swallow you from there if you keep an eye on it. Keep an eye on it. Anyone can change. Forgive your fumbling. People who don’t change don’t change because they trust the dark label like they would a name. Only your name is your name. When people tell you a word can only mean one thing, they are telling you—subtly, too—that change is impossible. It’s not true. Destroy that idea. Create another truth. A word can mean something new because language is still and always being made. It’s why you can take a word like Vagabond—weaponized by the law of your land in real time— name your work after it and still be here. It’s a kind of rhythm making, this; the synthesis of your internal soundtrack. Another word that might fit here is: chaos. And another: freeing. You are free.

Forgive yourself for acting like you’ve never met yourself. Forgive yourself for sweating in the pursuit of importance, of acceptance. Forgive yourself for growing spikes when ashamed. Forgive your stubbornness. Forgive yourself for being more willing to die than fight, then forgive the defeats you stacked up inside. Forgive you for how tired you are. Forgive you for not knowing better. Then for knowing better and not yet being able to do better. For your hiding and running, for the suffocating disguises. For the secrets you still keep from you. For the times you unbecame yourself for someone else—a partner, a parent—because you were trying to become real, desirable, a shame to lose. Forgive you for the size of your love (you needn’t repent). Forgive you for the hands (they weren’t even yours). Forgive you for believing in anything that called you forbidden, for kneeling before whatever tagged you a sin. Forgive you for deceiving your head, for thinking the lie made you matter, more solid, more indestructible. Forgive you for breaking your heart, for lashing out, for falling apart, for losing your mind. You are here now. Let this matter more. A different now is close enough to exhale on you.

*

What does fiction do for me? It allows me to see what has been made, just as it is. It reminds me that if there are seven billion of us, there are seven billion ways to experience the world, seven billion valid iterations. The systems do what the systems do, and the kindest thing I can think to do for anyone I love is to follow them to the end of their desire, is to go with them to the beginning of their imagination—that place where I wish turns into I want. I listen to my loved ones when they say: I wish this was a world in which I could decide not to have kids. I wish I could decide not to get married. I wish this world was kinder to queer people. I wish we’d all take friendships more seriously. I wish this world was fair to neurodivergent people. I wish. I wish. There’s so much I still wish for, too, but also so much I have now only because someone stayed with me past a question mark. What would you be like if you had room? I try to ask that often. When they start describing it—I’d live with my friends; I’d treat my partner more kindly because I’ll at least be allowed to love them; I’d just not get married; I’d just be an aunty or uncle instead of trying to be a parent; I’d share resources with people around me; I’d put way less emphasis on money and more on community building—I watch what dawns on all of us. Maybe it’s not possible for us to have everything right here right now, the world being what it is, but it’s not true that we can’t get closer to what we want. It’s not true that none of it is accessible. Your hope is the perfect size, so no point waiting, sometimes. Because what is society anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We make it up.

It’s hard to remember this, because some feelings are so particular, so precise that you think no one will ever know what it feels like under your skin; but there’s a song for every feeling and a story for every situation for a reason. It’s how we get through. Maybe your life tells you that you’re right about being unseeable at the moment. Maybe that’s what you found to be true with people. Good thing stories can go everywhere then. Wasn’t it a book that reminded me recently that I have the spine it takes to stand up to my life? This life is massive, and of course. Massive and on course. It was a song that reminded me, too, some nights ago what a privilege it is that what I call family without flinching is a fiction I made; that there is a group of people who bear the truest witness of my life; that I get to live out the impossible. It’s only because of stories and music and art and love that I’m able to remind me how free I am to act in favor of myself and how free I am to not. I’m free to reach for more and I’m free to not. When I put it that way, I know what I choose.

*

One of the first definitions I remember learning is from primary school. “Culture,” the teacher said, “is a way of life.” We repeated it after her; a simple sentence. As long as we’re alive, there’ll be other ways of life being made as we breathe. Some of them can be ours. It’ll just require us to take what we see and want and wish for seriously. If I say that I am free to dream and I’ve dreamed a world with decentralized power, a much slower pace, more kindness, a timeline in which people can fall apart and hibernate, where rest isn’t a luxury, where gender is an abundant harvest instead of two darkly rigid lanes, where sanity is not the measure of worth, where no one is an outcast and we’re all responsible for each other, where friendships can survive mistakes and tension, where thick love is commonplace, where I can hold my love close no matter the skin they’re in, then I’m free to test run that way of life on myself and my relationships. I’m free to do it now, because now’s when I’m alive. That won’t always be true, but I’m here now and that hereness is sometimes a vehicle, sometimes a tool.

We were all raised in a giant dictionary, yes, and we’re more able to move out if we can find somewhere else to go: a where, a how, and a who to be with there. We find somewhere elses by making up and living out freeing fictions—even in small clusters. When we ground our faiths in the right not-yet-reals, when we look at the nonlinearity of time, we see how right here the future has been since yesterday, how we’re always practicing it in fractions now. Aliveness has always been a staring contest between us and time. We know that. No one blinks with you when you do. We know that. It’s costly, this, always—a life has to be—but what I know for sure is this: there are always other words and other definitions, always other worlds and other locations. To know this is to see this, too: we can grow the spines we need to stand up for our lives.

 

Eloghosa Osunde is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Her debut work of fiction, Vagabonds! , will be published by Riverhead Books in March 2022.

Thunder Moon

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Good Shepherd, 1902–03, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 36 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tootsie Roll Tom showed up at all the Little League games in the town where I grew up. Soccer games, too. He kept Tootsie Rolls in his pockets and in a small canvas satchel he wore on his shoulder. He arrived on his bicycle and kids surrounded him as he pulled the Tootsie Rolls from his pockets and his pouch and placed the candy in their eager palms. He was well loved in the town. In the town there was also a psychiatric hospital, formerly known as an insane asylum. My mom called it the loony bin, and she was not the only one. The rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom lived there. He lived there but was not secured to a bed in a room with bars on the windows; he was allowed to ride his bicycle around the town, and wave at everyone he saw, and give candy to the children who crowded around him like hungry, happy little goslings. He had an open, friendly face. He was not too tall and he wore his socks pulled up. The town honored him with a day named after him, embodying a spirit of warmth, welcome, and generosity that the town fathers and mothers wanted to celebrate. The state shuttered the psychiatric hospital almost two decades ago (where did the patients go?) and a redevelopment project might turn the asylum to condos. The rumor was—I heard it in middle school from one of the older middle schoolers—the rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom was in the institution, if he was, because he had raped his mother.

It’s rumored that emergency rooms and psychiatric wards are more active at the full moon. It’s rumored that crime spikes. It’s rumored that people get a little crazed and don’t know what to do with their bodies. You’ve heard these rumors. From bartenders and nurses and nursery school teachers. Maybe you’ve felt it your very self. I saw a neighbor on the street and asked how she was doing. “It’s the full moon, you know,” she said, “so I feel completely demented.” It made news that a town in England put more cops on patrol on full moons. Sylvia Plath knew: the moon “drags the sea after it like a dark crime.”

Of all months, I suspect July, with its thick sour heat, its stewy dead light, must have the most crime, and the full moon in July, the big Thunder Moon, must be one of the crimiest times of the year. Sticky-thighed July, when walls of heat press in, shortening tempers, contorting perspective, squeezing the pouches that hold the dark urges where pressure builds like a blister until dark ashy oozings seep from apertures otherwise pinched. July is the month that crouches behind a tree in the dark, having soaked for a year in sour milk, all its flesh molded and rotting. It waits for you to pass by the tree then pushes itself against you, its slick, rotting skin on your skin. No knives, no guns, just a stinking all-wrongness and you can’t get the smell off.

But I was wrong. There’s no crime spike in July. Different kinds of crimes across seasons, yes: crimes to bodies in summer, crimes to objects in winter. And more dangerous times of day exist: keep your wits with you between 11 P.M. and midnight. But July is no safer or more dangerous than any other month. And as for the moon having any impact at all on criminality, on lunacy, on any sort of behavioral erratics: there’s no correlation.

I sat in the kitchen of my father and stepmother’s house recently and when my stepmother walked into the room I told her that it turns out it’s a myth that the moon effects anything.

“Not homicide?” she said. She knew the rumors.

“No correlation.”

“Emergency room visits?”

“No correlation.”

“Suicide?”

“No correlation.”

“More babies born?”

“No correlation.”

“Really?”

“This is what I’m reading.”

Psychiatrists, scientists, criminologists, in study after study, say the full moon has no bearing on behavior or human biology. They talk of “illusory correlation,” the perception of an association that does not, in fact, exist. You feel a little strange on the full moon? Emotions a little churnier? You’re a little more excitable? Lustier? Sleepless? Altered in a way you can’t quite put words to? It’s argued that you feel all those things at other moments in the month but take note of the full moon because full moons are memorable, and then make a mistaken connection. I hated learning this. One argument suggested that horror movies are part of what’s tricked us into thinking the full moon affects us. But, I want to say, but hang on—couldn’t it be argued that horror movies don’t make us feel spooky about the moon, the full moon makes us feel spooky, so directors represent this shared ancient experience of mystery? Couldn’t that be it? What do I know?

As I repeated “no correlation” in the kitchen, a child tantrum began to thunder through my mind, a bashing frustration and disappointment. This can’t be right, I thought. We go untouched by lunar forces? I want there to be correlation, my mind whined. The feeling came from a young place, and it was strong.

But why? What was it that made me so mad?

I do not want to be soft-minded or irrational, pursue Dark Aged­–ignorance, be any sort of woo-woo New Age mush head. I do not know my moon sign. I own a Tarot deck but do not know how to read the cards. I don’t know much about prayer, though I have aimed begging attention at thunderstorms to come, please come, break this heat, rip it open. I believe, in some ferocious kid place, that there’s a lot on this earth and beyond it that we don’t understand. No correlation? Maybe, instead, the more honest: we don’t know, we have not figured a way to measure, or to say. “Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?” Bram Stoker asks. “It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” Stephen Jay Gould had a name for this, when scientists interpret an absence of discernible change as no data, leaving significant signals from nature unseen, unreported, ignored. He called it Cordelia’s Dilemma, after the daughter in Shakespeare’s King Lear, who, when asked to profess her love for her father, knows there are no words to adequately express certain things, and so stays quiet: “My love’s more ponderous than my tongue.” Not no love, but no words for it. Not no data, not no correlation. More: we haven’t found a way to quantify, we don’t have the words, there’s information in the silence. As Clarice Lispector says, “Truth is always an interior and inexplicable contact.”

And to come up against it poses risks. The mystics, visionaries, poets, artists—they press open doors, travel dark tunnels, look into the caves and bring back what they find, and sometimes, as a result, end up secured to a bed in a room with bars on the window. Sebald writes of touring a house that gave him the sense that he had once lived there: “But thoughts of this kind are dispelled as speedily as they appear. At all events, I did not pursue them in the years that have passed since then, perhaps because it is not possible to pursue them without losing one’s sanity.” Travel certain paths of thought too far, there’s no coming back.

But some of what we’re talking about exists at a place beyond thought. Our minds are made for detecting patterns, our bodies built to sense when the cords of correlation begin to glow, radiant and pulsing, between one thing and another and another. We look for signals, and it can be a perilous search, to be unhooked from the grounding laws to reach a place carried by much larger forces, out and up to where it’s all just one big glow.

In another kitchen, not long ago, a friend and I talked of a musician who’d been found dead a few years back.

“How’d he die?” I asked.

My friend stood by the stove, cooking sausage and red peppers in a screaming hot pan. He turned away from the stove and looked at me hard. “How’d he die?” he repeated. “He died of what everyone dies of. He died the way I’m gonna die and the way you’re gonna die. He died of death.” Sausage fat leaped from the pan. “People are asking how people died so they can feel safer. Oh, he died of overdose? Oh, he died of his liver exploding? Oh, he died from a mountain lion eating him? So they can feel, that’s not gonna be me. Not you? Well I got bad news. You, too, buster. How’d he die?” he shook his head and turned back to the pan. “He died of death, just like you will.”

Lay it on me. Thunder it right into my face.

Turns out my friend didn’t know how the musician died, so he gave a loud speech instead. But the truth he told was bigger. Some rumors are rumors. Clouds hold no weight. Some correlations are illusory. And sometimes the facts are inadequate.

We are in the thick of summer now. I place my mind in January and November. But July’s not all bad—I eat peaches, spit cherry pits into my palm, feel luck when I see a shooting star or firefly—and all moons are good moons. July’s seems to have a different texture, not chalk or concrete or glassy pear, but waxy, sweet, like nougat, like taffy. A piece of it placed on your palm, twist the ends to open the wrapper, a quiet glow, a chewy treat, a dark sweetness down your throat, a little like love on your tongue, and with it, the illusion, the precious illusion, that there’s no reason to be scared.

 

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Summer Solstice. Her previous columns for the Daily are Winter Solstice, Sky Gazing, Summer Solstice, Senses of Dawn, and Novemberance.

Remember Me and You

Lizzy Stewart’s debut graphic novel, It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be, reimagines visual storytelling through a series of interconnected vignettes that each employ a unique illustrative style. From black-and-white sketches to full-color drawings, Stewart’s stories are linked by feelings of uncertainty and acceptance as friends and strangers alike confront the many ways in which expectations rarely match up with reality. In the below excerpt, two longtime friends meet up and recall the simple pleasures of their adolescence.

 

Lizzy Stewart is an illustrator and author based in London. She has written and illustrated books for children as well as countless comics and zines. She teaches illustration at Goldsmiths University and has also taught courses at the Tate and on behalf of the National Portrait Gallery. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Central St Martins.From It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be, by Lizzy Stewart, published July 27, 2021, by Fantagraphics Books. Copyright © Lizzy Stewart. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

Redux: Mouth Is Boss

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.

Robert Pinsky.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about mouths and the breath. Read on for Robert Pinsky’s Art of Poetry interview, Shruti Swamy’s short story “A House Is a Body,” and Helena Kaminski’s poem “Face.”

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, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 (that’s $50 in savings!).

 

Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76
Issue no. 144 (Fall 1997)

In Poetry and the World, I wrote: “Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.” A couple of friends who read it in draft said, Well, Robert, you know … dancing is probably more bodily than poetry. But I stubbornly left the passage that way without quite having worked out why I wanted to say it like that. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. After a while, I realized that for me the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth. That is, poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem—a body, and not necessarily the body of the artist or an expert as in dance.

 

 

A House Is a Body
By Shruti Swamy
Issue no. 225 (Summer 2018)

As he was speaking last night, she could hear the water in his mouth—his spit—she could hear the sounds of the mouth that happened around the words, of the lips opening and closing, of the tongue sliding, and occasionally the click of teeth. Under the sound of the words was the sound of breath, the breath that carried those words, so at first it was difficult to hear them, the words, and when she did hear them there was so much space around them she thought, Well, I’m okay. But later, only a little later, she realized that it had been shock. She had not let the words into her body. It was as though she had placed a pill on her tongue, could feel the weight of it there, but could not yet taste it. Alone, in the almost empty house—for it had been late at night, and the girl was sleeping—his words began to enter her: she tasted them, she felt the burning of their swallow, she felt them come into her bloodstream. She stood in front of the mirror. He had changed her, she wanted to see it. Her features were the same, but they had a different meaning now, she looked older and sour, and she saw the lines on either side of her mouth and traced them with her finger. The lines of her mother, her mother’s sourness. Oh God.

 

 

Face
By Helena Kaminski
Issue no. 118 (Spring 1991)

… Was mouth good or pretty
Bad? Was it

Don’t remember.

Mouth, like Fidel
Spoke for five hours.

It’s late.
It’s very late.

Damn it.
Who’s in charge?

Lip lies back
Along the face,
Dazed body at the beach
On its pale towel.

Why aren’t they
Where could

Ask mouth.
Mouth is boss.

 

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The Mournfulness of Cities

Edward Hopper, Hotel Window, 1955, oil on canvas, 40 x 55″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes. What’s mourned is hard to say. Not that the mourner needs to know. It seems so basic. One refers to certain Edward Hopper paintings—people gazing out of windows right at sunset or late at night. They’ve no idea. I don’t suppose that sort of gaze is even possible except within the city. You can hear the lonely saxophone-on-fire-escape (in principle, the instrument may vary) cry through Gershwin. Aaron Copland. You remember Sonny Rollins on the bridge (the structure varies, too, of course). So what in the world is that about? That there should be a characteristic thread of melody, a certain sort of mood to sound its way through all that lofty, sooty jumble to convey so clear and, as it seems, eternal a sense of loss and resignation. How in the world do you get “eternal” out of “saxophone” and “fire escape”? It doesn’t make much sense. That it should get to you—to me at least—more sharply, deeply, sadly than the ancient, naturally mournful, not to say eternal, sound of breath through reed or bamboo flute.

Not too many years ago, as I began to wonder about the mournfulness of cities—its expression in this way—I brought a recording of Aaron Copland’s Quiet City concert piece to my then-girlfriend Nancy’s house on a chilly winter evening. She had friends or family staying, so we slept in the front bedroom, which, because of its exposure or some problem with the heater, was quite cold. So I remember all the quilts and blankets and huddling up together as if desperate in some Lower East Side tenement and listening to this music break our hearts about ourselves, our struggling immigrant immersion and confusion in this terrible complexity. The lonely verticality of life. And why should sadness sound so sweet? I guess the sweetness is the resignation part.

I’d like to set up an experiment to chart the sadness—try to find out where it comes from, where it goes—to trace it, in that melody (whichever variation) as it threads across Manhattan from the Lower East Side straight across the river, more or less west, into the suburbs of New Jersey and whatever lies beyond. This would require, I’m guessing, maybe a hundred saxophonists stationed along the route on tops of buildings, water towers, farther out on people’s porches (with permission), empty parking lots, at intervals determined by the limits of their mutual audibility under variable conditions in the middle of the night, so each would strain a bit to pick it up and pass it on in step until they’re going all at once and all strung out along this fraying thread of melody for hours, with relievers in reserve. There’s bound to be some drifting in and out of phase, attenuation of the tempo, of the sadness for that matter, of the waveform, what I think of as the waveform of the whole thing as it comes across the river losing amplitude and sharpness, rounding, flattening, and diffusing into neighborhoods where maybe it just sort of washes over people staying up to hear it or, awakened, wondering what is that out there so faint and faintly echoed, faintly sad but not so sad that you can’t close your eyes again and drift right back to sleep.

It isn’t possible to hear it all at once. You have to track the propagation. All those saxophones receiving and repeating and coordinating, maybe, for an interval or two before the melody escapes itself to separate into these brief, discrete, coherent moments out of sync with one another, coming and going, reconnecting, fading out and in again along the line in ways that someone from an upper-story window at a distance might be able to appreciate, able to pick up, who knows, ten or twenty instruments way out there faintly gathering, shifting in and out of phase along a one- or two-mile stretch. And I imagine it would be all up and down like that—that long, sad train of thought disintegrating, recomposing here and there all night in waves and waves of waves until the players, one by one, begin to give it up toward dawn like crickets gradually flickering out.

In order to chart the whole thing as intended, though, we will need a car, someone to drive it slowly along the route with the windows down while someone else—me, I suppose—deflects a pen along some sort of moving scroll, perhaps a foot wide and a hundred feet long, that has been prepared with a single complex line of reference along the top, a kind of open silhouette, a structural cross section through the route, with key points noted, from the seismic verticalities of Manhattan through the quieter inflections of New Jersey and those ancient tract-house neighborhoods and finally going flat (as I imagine, having no idea what’s out there) into what? Savannah, maybe? Or some open field with the final saxophonist all alone out there in the grass.

So, as this scroll is turned within its windowed box on a pair of rollers—either motorized and GPS-controlled or simply cranked by someone trained to keep it all coordinated—I attempt to get myself into a Zen-like state of mind and let my deeper instincts twitch the pen, a red one, down or up to chart the mournfulness, its zigzag fluctuations in that thin melodic line as followed out into the night. Of course, there’s nothing scientific involved. No rigor here at all. It’s more like dowsing. I’ll be predisposed to chart my expectation—which is that the overall profile of the sadness will reflect (as a mirror image) that of the city as it tails off into Jersey and the suburbs and beyond. But who knows? There might be anomalous fluctuations. I might find myself sufficiently detached and unselfconscious in the process, weirdly neutral in the weirdness of the thing, that I allow my hand to twitch in unexpected ways at unexpected thumpings of my heart, the red line suddenly reversing, say, toward joy, then spiking down again, and wildly back and forth at certain places. Alleys, vacant lots—the intermittent reassertion of that flat and grassy emptiness where joy and sorrow first arose and, still, may tend to flip-flop, switch polarities. Though, surely, it’s inevitable that sadness and its reference, as we travel farther west, will flatten out, go parallel and possibly merge.

What have we got, then, when it’s done? When we roll it out? A line of history, I think. I’d like to think. From left to right, from west to east, from out in the flatlands, in the field with that last saxophone where the lines of the world and our feelings about it probably coincide, back there before the Neolithic; on up into those New Jersey tract-house neighborhoods where the lines diverge and consciousness of a sad and workmanlike sort arises faintly in the sedentary morning, every morning, people waking up into it just like history; up the line, the double line now, toward increasing complication and divergence, over the river (under the river—haven’t figured that part out) into those terribly vertical regions where we find ourselves with saxophones on fire escapes, in Edward Hopper paintings, lost, heartbroken, fully distinct, alone at last.

 

David Searcy is the author of Shame and Wonder, Ordinary Horror, and Last Things, and the recipient of a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Dallas and Corsicana, Texas.

From the book The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World , by David Searcy. Copyright © 2021 by David Searcy. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Read David Searcy’s essay, “Still Life Painting,” which appeared in the Fall 2014 issue.

Staff Picks: Bowling, Borges, and Bad People

Becka Mara McKay. Photo courtesy of McKay.

Becka Mara McKay once asked me to make a list of things one would never find in a poem, the lesson being that an exploration of lawn mower parts or the muscles used while bowling or natural marble patterns might yield some wonderful language, and if we’re not putting wonderful language in poetry, then where will all this wonderful language end up? A lot of wonderful language has found its way into McKay’s latest collection, The Little Book of No Consolation, which is structured around seldom-used terms such as scorse, inhabitiveness, wood want, and donkey’s breakfast. In “from the Dictionary of Misremembered English” she writes, “I can only bless you once, says the Angel / of Syntax, who believes we are born among / words the way birds are born among wings.” These poems investigate the layered intricacies of language itself as much as they plumb the depths of their subject matters, which tend toward the intersection of the animal, the translatable, and the mysteries of faith, locked together like calcite crystals in mizzi stone, expertly sawn, sanded, and polished to a mirror finish. —Christopher Notarnicola 

The music of the now ninety-seven-year-old Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, some of which is captured on the compilation Éthiopiques 21: Ethiopia Song (Piano Solo), feels light but not frivolous—like floating on a very deep ocean. Despite the wimple she wears on the cover of Éthiopiques 21, I didn’t know she was a nun until recently, when I came across the BBC Radio 4 documentary “The Honky Tonk Nun.” That the music is supported by deep spiritual devotion is no surprise. While honky-tonk isn’t mentioned in the radio piece (and is not a descriptor I’d apply to Guèbrou’s work), sixth-century liturgical chants, Western classical, and Ethiopian pop are. Born into privilege and classically trained in Switzerland and Cairo, Guèbrou was living in Addis Ababa before something “broke my music life,” as she says in the documentary, and she left for a mountain monastery to become a nun. In her life story and under her fingers, seemingly disparate currents meet. It is difficult to find her records these days, but Éthiopiques 21 is on Spotify. Thank god. —Jane Breakell

 

Kim Minhee in The Woman Who Ran. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

 

I adore the work of the Korean director Hong Sang-soo, whose films have sometimes been compared to those of Éric Rohmer, and Hong’s latest, The Woman Who Ran, is no exception. Starring his frequent collaborator Kim Minhee as Gamhee, a seemingly content married woman, The Woman Who Ran is a film about crossroads and the taut, tense moments of contemplation that occur before a major life decision. The plot is simple: Gamhee visits three female friends—two on purpose, one by accident—and discusses her relationship with her husband; over the course of the film, it becomes clear that she is thinking of leaving him. In the five years of their marriage, she is quick to point out, she and her husband have—until now—never spent a day apart. Her friends are uneasy when they hear this, and each of them—a divorced woman now living with another woman who is referred to only as a “roommate,” though there are hints of intimacy beyond that; a single woman caught up in many complicated love affairs, including one with a very young poet and another with a not-quite-divorced architect; and an old friend from Gamhee’s past now married to a famous writer who himself may also once have had a relationship with Gamhee—seem to offer an example of the independence that is missing from Gamhee’s life. Gamhee lodges no major complaints over the course of this movie, no major decisions are made, and yet this is a film that feels like holding one’s breath: though it’s not clear what exact shape her decision will take, it is obvious that an unstoppable force is now making its way toward an immovable object—action will occur. For those of us living in New York, The Woman Who Ran is currently playing at Lincoln Center. —Rhian Sasseen

The topic of the female antihero came up recently in a discussion I was having over a game of pool (where else?). The subject is vast, but I encountered last night a remarkable species of the genus in Chloe Wilson’s short story “Hold Your Fire,” which appears in the most recent issue of Granta. An engineer for a military arms dealer feeds her general state of low-grade rage with resentment of her milquetoast, IBS-riddled husband and fierce protection of her son (whom she also sort of resents) against the powers that be at his sensitive, alternative-style private day care. Like all the best antiheroes, her charm comes from our realization that she is a bad person, unworthy of sympathy, and yet … by the story’s twisted, triumphant ending, she’s somehow won it anyway. —Lauren Kane

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground has sat undisturbed on my bookcase since its publication five years ago. It was recommended to me by a pal whose taste I trust, and was reviewed very favorably at the time of publication, but I failed to pick it up until this week. Framed as a missing-person noir set in Latin America, the book follows a nameless detective through a nameless city as he hunts for Carlos, a young man who disappeared in the middle of a family gathering. An actor gives evidence to the detective in place of the missing man’s mother—she is too distressed to talk. Many more actors take the place of the missing man’s colleagues—they are considered by the employer more authentic, more efficient than the workers themselves. Minute biological evidence of the missing man is everywhere, and forensic investigation reveals he had an infection not only of his skin but of his thoughts: “His gut fermented anxiety, paranoia.” Nature hums in the background and air, but while unreality spirals in all directions, everything is presented as fact. Drawing comparisons to works by Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard, it’s a bonkers wee book. Such fun. —Robin Jones

 

Martin MacInnes.

Cooking with Mikhail Sholokhov

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Today, the Eat Your Words kitchen plunges into controversy with Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984), the Russian known as Joseph Stalin’s favorite writer, whose greatest work is And Quiet Flows the Don. This book—if it can be called a book, and not an item of propaganda, or possibly a plagiarism, or at least a contested territory—was published in serial format from 1925 to 1932, and then was completed with a final volume in 1940. In the end it comprised four “books” concerning a cast of characters based in the Don Cossack region of Russia (now in Ukraine), set in a time period starting around 1912, before the outbreak of World War I, and continuing through the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Sholokhov was known as “the Red Tolstoy,” and people often love the book for its qualities as a historical epic. When I first read it, while living in Moscow in my twenties, I found it useful in bringing the complex politics and military phases of the era to life. But the qualities that have brought me back over the years are the same ones that made the novel such a sensation in its time: the freshness and vividness of its portrayal of village life.

The first section of And Quiet Flows the Don is unforgettable in this sense. It centers on the Melekhov family, known in their village as Turks because the main patriarch’s mother was a Turkish woman brought home by the patriarch’s father as a plunder of war (and later accused of witchcraft and beaten to death by the other villagers). The patriarch, Pantelimon, has a son, Gregor, who develops a passion for Aksinia, his neighbor’s wife, and she for him. This passion arises against the unhappily married Aksinia’s will. The book declares: “Without consciously desiring it, resisting the feeling with all her might, she noticed that on Sundays and week-days she was attiring herself more carefully. Making pretexts to herself, she sought to place herself more frequently in his path. She was happy to find Gregor’s black eyes caressing her heavily and rapturously.”

The feelings are recognizable to anyone who has ever had a forbidden passion, but the details are enchantingly particular. One evening Gregor and Aksinia are thrown together while Gregor’s father takes advantage of a thunderstorm to go out fishing with nets (the fish are afraid of thunder and cluster by the banks). On the way home, Aksinia gets cold, so Gregor suggests they stop to shelter in the past year’s haystack, which is warm “like a stove” in the middle. Most modern readers, like me, wouldn’t have known that old haystacks are warm inside. The hay smells “warm and rotten,” yet Gregor, lying next to Aksinia within it, notices the “tender, agitating” scent that comes from her hair. “Your hair smells like henbane—you know, the white flower,” he says, before trying to kiss her. Aksinia escapes and jumps out of the haystack. We’re told that as she stands, adjusting her kerchief, steam rises from her wet clothes and now-warm body in the cold air. All of these tiny, sensual details bring the scene to life. There’s a wild folk beauty to the Russian-Ukrainian countryside that’s all its own—and is visible to this day—and the book captures it.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Sholokhov was a daring, handsome teenager, a non-Cossack Russian from the Don Cossack region who struck out for Moscow in 1922 when he was seventeen years old, after some local trouble cut short his career prospects. There he began writing formulaic communist short stories of the “boy writes letters to Lenin’s photo” variety. It paid better than factory work, and he liked the glamour of it. He wore a Cossack hat and jacket, making his provincial background part of his persona, and allowed people to think he’d run off to fight in the Red Army when he was only thirteen. In 1928, when he was twenty-three, he began publishing And Quiet Flows the Don in serial format, and the work became an immediate sensation, making its author a Soviet celebrity. However, many people at the time felt that the precision and depth of the book’s portrayal of Cossack life, its emotional maturity, and its grasp of wartime events could not have come from a young writer who hadn’t had such life experiences. Moreover, Sholokhov’s lackluster previously published fiction showed no inkling of the talents of this writer. Accusations quickly began to circulate that Sholokhov had found a manuscript written by a deceased White Army officer and passed it off as his own.

To this day, the matter remains unresolved. Shortly after the publication of the first two volumes of And Quiet Flows the Don, a commission led by the writer Alexander Serafimovich concluded that the allegations of plagiarism did not hold up. And in 2007, the statistician Nils Lid Hjort performed an analysis of Sholokhov’s prose and concluded that “the sentence length data speak very strongly in Sholokhov’s favour.” A cache of manuscripts discovered in the eighties has also been used to prove that Sholokhov was the book’s sole author. On the other side, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published a cogent takedown of Sholokhov in the sixties, currently available in translation behind the paywall at the Times Literary Supplement. The most current Sholokhov biography, Stalin’s Scribe, by Brian J. Boeck, concludes more or less what I’ve always believed, which is that Sholokhov found a cache of source material, including the unfinished manuscript about the Melekhov family, and turned it into a final work that became more his own in the later volumes. To me it seems clear that the book’s later character development, and the incorporation of the political material, is the work of a less skilled writer.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Plagiarism is a terrible crime, but many writers might almost sympathize with Sholokhov. Many of us would be tempted by the possession of a manuscript of surpassing beauty, written by a dead man, which could be polished up and made one’s own. Many writers might also pity him for his success, for once he started the book, he had to finish it. Conditions for that could not have been more terrible. His story concerned highly political recent history and was being published during a time of massive upheaval and increasing censorship of the arts. Even before writers were being sent to concentration camps, they were under pressure to represent an ever-changing party line. Sholokhov needed to glorify Soviet history by making Gregor Melekhov into a Bolshevik, and to portray without nuance the White Russian side, which most Cossacks fought for in the Civil War, as pure evil, despite that this ran against the thrust of the found material. He was enough of a writer to know that to transform his characters too dramatically would be to murder them. And he had real sympathy for the Cossacks and the rural people of his region. Ongoing installations of the book were increasingly dangerous attempts to thread the needle, with occasional insertions of political rants to correct ideological “mistakes” from previous chapters.

For a writer to get it all right politically in the Stalin era was impossible. In 1931, Sholokhov was summoned in disgrace to discuss his plot with the writer Maxim Gorky, whom Stalin’s Scribe describes as the Soviet Union’s unofficial literary ombudsman. Sholokhov had moved from Moscow back to the Don region after the first plagiarism scandal, and the long trip to the capital with his fate in the balance was by all accounts excruciating. When Sholokhov walked in to Gorky’s Moscow mansion, he discovered that the audience was actually with Stalin, who had, like everyone else, loved the book’s early chapters and was concerned about its political direction. In a most unlikely turn of events, Sholokhov argued successfully for his nuanced plot and charmed the dictator. Perhaps one provincial fabulist recognized another. Sholokhov was given Stalin’s personal phone number and tasked with carrying out Stalin’s vision for Russian literature. A more terrible bridegroom can hardly be imagined, and again, one almost sympathizes.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Conditions worsened in Russia in the thirties as the communist government turned against successful small farmers. At the time, to most observers—including Sholokhov—these seemed like excesses or outrages. The violence was later revealed to be a deliberate program, endorsed by Stalin, in order to force people onto collective farms. The historical tragedy of this is well known. Numbers vary, but at least four million people starved to death in Ukraine in the years 1932 to 1933 as a result of these destructive policies. Sholokhov put himself at political risk to help people, and was personally able to secure aid for his region, but work on his manuscript ground to a halt. In a detail that horrifies me, he was then tasked by Stalin to write a triumphant fictional account of collectivization, which resulted in the first volume of the novel Virgin Soil Upturned, published in 1935. To be forced to positively fictionalize a holocaust seems like a punishment a thousandfold for any writer’s sins. If Sholokhov felt that way, we can’t know. He became a serious alcoholic, but in the Russia of that time, this wasn’t uncommon.

Sholokhov survived the purges of the thirties, in legend and perhaps in truth because And Quiet Flows the Don was not finished and Stalin wanted to see how it ended. His personal survival must have felt like a mixed blessing when all around him people were being arrested and tortured, including his two best friends, who were local officials caught up in the purges. Again using his pull with Stalin, Sholokhov fought for these two men and managed eventually to free them, but his complicity with the regime must have been felt. The scene where one of Sholokhov’s trembling, tortured, prematurely aged best friends is united with the writer beneath the watchful eye of the secret police is among the biography’s most poignant and chilling. Sholokhov eventually finished his book in 1940, during World War II, and carried on as a respected, if never prolific, literary figure, even winning the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature (the most contested award in the history of the prize, according to Stalin’s Scribe).

Sholokhov’s career was a tragedy, and his book is a cautionary tale on how ideology ruins art. Yet I return occasionally to And Quiet Flows the Don for the manifest beauty and authenticity at its core. It evokes for me a very particular Russia, whose closeness to the village was something I felt strongly while living in Moscow in the nineties. To my American eyes back then it was striking to see old women standing in the metro underpasses selling gnarled vegetables from their gardens, potatoes covered with black earth, bunches of dried dill flowers for pickling. There were two currencies circulating—an old hyperinflated one and a new adjusted one—and people remembered times of recent hunger. My urban landlady spent the summers on a plot of land outside the city, subsistence farming without indoor plumbing to lay up food for the winter.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The food this peasant connectivity produces is distinctive and amazing: pickles, infusions of fresh fruit and herbs, infused vodkas, fermented drinks made from crusts of old bread (kvass), a prevalence of fresh and aged dairy products from homes that own cows or goats, and simple creations with seasonal fruit and vegetables wrapped in pancakes (blini). These are the foods of And Quiet Flows the Don, where all soup is cabbage soup, a house’s kitchen is described as smelling of “fresh kvass, harness, and the warmth of human bodies,” and an anteroom reeks of “dogs and vinegar.” The book brings the agricultural countryside to life with simple, homely things like sunflowers, sour cherries, apricots, sorrel, rye, oats, curd cake, cold borscht, and kefir.

I am married to a Russian and have a deep background in this kind of cooking. I made a feast for a peasant celebration, drawing on foods mentioned in the book and making reference to my archive of Ukrainian cookbooks, purchased long ago in Kiev. For a few dishes I used Bonnie Frumkin Morales’s beautiful cookbook Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking, which offers the kind of retro-upscale spin on tradition you’d find today in fashionable Moscow restaurants. This was the source for my vodka infusion with cocoa nibs, which I used to make White Russians as a nod to the likely author of the original manuscript. From Kachka I also took a bright green tarragon drink that is inflected with the Central Asian influences of the Don region, and a kompot drink of summer fruit using sour cherries and apricots. To me kompot seems like an ingenious peasant way of doing something new with seasonal abundance.

If the thrifty technique of turning extra bits of things into delicious liquids is emblematic of this kind of cooking, nothing is more emblematic than kvass, which I have made before but never really understood. To the Western palate a “fermented bread drink” is weird. Kvass is a fairly simple preparation that can be made in a day, or overnight. You take slices of rye bread, dry them out, toast them, and then soak them in water for a few hours. Strain, add sugar and yeast and a few raisins, set in a warm place, and in no time you’ll have a dry, bubbly, very lightly alcoholic drink. These days it’s usually made with store-bought bread, but no village woman in the early twentieth century would have done that, so I made my own, working off a recipe developed for a previous column. The resulting kvass was a revelation. I’ve been craving more ever since. For my menu, I took it a step further and made a kvass-based okroshka, the most iconic cold soup in a culture of iconic cold soups. This is a dish to truly befuddle the Western palate: cubes of radish, cucumber, ham, and potato floating in an ice-cold bath of kvass and topped with sour cream and dill. I’ve rarely felt so wildly enthusiastic about a dish as I did about my okroshka. And one out of five dinner party guests agreed with me. (That might sound like poor numbers, but considering the dish’s unfamiliarity, I believe it was a triumph.)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

For my main course I needed to use millet and cabbage, two ingredients mentioned frequently in And Quiet Flows the Don, and I found a recipe for millet-stuffed cabbage in my Ukrainian cookbook. This dish is an example of the elaborate technique that traditional countryside cooks would use to transform simple ingredients. I first washed the millet, then toasted it, then cooked it in chicken stock, then sautéed it in a mixture of onions and carrots, producing a fresh, light, pleasingly salty mixture to be used as stuffing. It was only when I moved on to the next step that I realized that unlike most stuffed-cabbage preparations, which wrap a filling in a precooked cabbage leaf, this beauty was supposed to be stuffed whole. I steamed the cabbage, then carefully prized it open like a giant flower, stuffed it, folded it back up, roasted it, stewed it (I’m not sure this step was necessary, but the cookbook instructed me to do so), then cut it into wedges and served it topped with fresh parsley and sour cream. The resulting crispy green confection was truly a showstopper.

When Gregor comes home from the war, his relatives rush to feed him “some pancakes,” which surely would have meant blini. These are lacy, paper-thin crepes about six inches in diameter (not the bite-size thick pancakes called blini in America). To make them properly has been a lifelong quest of mine, one I’ve also written about in a previous column. Blini can be folded into quarters and topped with caviar, or stuffed with all kinds of things—potato, mushroom, ground meat. Usually the sweet versions incorporate some mixture of fruit and farmer cheese (tvorog). In this case I opted for seasonal simplicity and stuffed mine with fresh strawberries topped with whipped cream. Blini, made right, are so good that they really need no enhancement.

It was enormously fun to whip these blini out perfectly, just like a Russian grandma, and to stuff the cabbage, and to concoct all my liquids. My guests thought the feast was colorful, intoxicating, and impressive. I hadn’t consciously set out to mimic the great joy of the novel, which is the surprise of the authentically local and particular, but that is how it turned out. And this gave me another insight: The cooking process for these columns often contains an element of the unexpected, wherein the meal seems to summon the spirit of the author, who then takes over my kitchen regardless of my intentions. In this case the menu was so bright, herbaceous, and abundant that the author summoned seemed not to be a man who’d lived through famines and the Stalin era but someone from a simpler time, perhaps a White Russian officer fighting in the war, away from home and longing for the food of his countryside. I summoned someone, but I don’t think it was Sholokhov.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Tarragon Soda

Adapted from Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking. This recipe should be started the night before you plan to serve. 

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
large handful of fresh tarragon, chopped, both leaves and stems
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
6 cups club soda
a few drops of green food coloring, optional

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Combine the sugar and water in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil. Stir to dissolve any remaining granules of sugar. Remove from heat. Let cool to room temperature, and add the tarragon. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, strain through a fine mesh strainer. and reserve the syrup. In a pitcher, combine syrup, lemon juice, and club soda, and stir gently. The “authentic” version of this drink is always dyed bright green with food coloring, so add some if you like.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Summer Kompot

Adapted from Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking. This recipe should be made the night before you plan to serve. 

a pint of sour cherries, pitted
1 cup of pitted and sliced apricots
a pint of strawberries, washed and sliced
3/4 cup sugar
6 cups water

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Place the fruits, sugar, and water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, and stir to dissolve the sugar. Reduce heat to a simmer, and simmer until the fruits soften and release their flavors, up to five minutes. Cool completely, and then refrigerate overnight. To serve, ladle both the liquid and the fruit pieces into glasses or mugs, and serve with a spoon.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

White Russian with Cacao-Nib Vodka

Adapted from Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking. This recipe should be started a week before you plan to serve.

2 tbs cacao nibs
1 750-ml bottle of vodka
1 tbs simple syrup
1 1/2 oz cacao-nib vodka
3/4 oz coffee liqueur
1/2 oz simple syrup
2 oz heavy cream

To make the vodka, preheat your oven to 375. Place the nibs on a rimmed baking sheet, and toast for five minutes (they’ll begin to smell delicious). Remove from the oven and let cool slightly, then place them in a quart-size mason jar. Add the vodka and the simple syrup, cover, and let steep for a week in a dark, cool place.

To make the White Russian, pour the vodka, coffee liqueur, and simple syrup into an ice-filled glass, stir for five seconds, and strain into the glass you plan to use. Add more ice, and top with heavy cream. Taste for strength and sweetness, and adjust as desired.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Okroshka

Adapted from Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking. This recipe should be started forty-eight hours before you plan to serve—or longer if you make your own bread.

To make the kvass:  

3/4 lb dark Russian bread (see “Cooking with Varlam Shalamov,” or use store-bought variety)
3 quarts of water, divided
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 1/4 tsp yeast
2 dozen raisins

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Preheat your oven to 350. Cut the bread in quarter-inch slices, and lay them out on a rimmed baking sheet. Toast in the oven until they’re completely dry and have a little bit of color (but are not burnt), about twenty minutes.

When the bread is toasted, place it in a large heatproof bowl or pot. Bring a quart and a half of water to a boil, and pour the water over the bread. Let the mixture steep for an hour, and then strain, keeping both the bread and the water. Set aside the first steeping of water, and place the soggy bread back in the bowl. Bring another quart and a half of water to a boil, pour the water over the bread, and let the mixture steep another hour. Using a fine-mesh strainer, strain and discard the bread. Combine the steeped waters in a large container.

Add the sugar and yeast to the strained liquid, and stir to dissolve. Taste the liquid so you have a baseline to gauge the fermentation, then place a cheesecloth or a clean dishtowel over the top. Let the mixture sit at room temperature for eight to ten hours, until it becomes slightly fizzy and less sweet (as the sugars are eaten by the yeast). It can sit out longer if you would like the finished product to be more dry than sweet. Continue to taste periodically until it gets to the desired flavor.

Add the raisins, cover, and transfer to the refrigerator. Chill thoroughly, popping the lid a few times to remove the pressure from residual fermentation.

To make the salad mixture: 

a large Yukon Gold potato, cut into a 1/3 inch dice
1/2 lb good quality ham, cubed in a 1/3 inch dice
4 mild “breakfast” radishes, cubed in a 1/4 inch dice
2 cucumbers, peeled and cut into a 1/3 inch dice
3 large hardboiled eggs, chopped finely
1/2 cup sunflower sprouts (optional)
1/2 cup sliced scallions (reserve some for garnish)
1/2 cup finely minced dill  (reserve some for garnish)
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp lemon zest
1/4 tsp salt
black pepper to taste

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Place the potato in a small pot, and add water to cover by an inch or two. Bring to a boil over high heat, and then reduce to a simmer. Cook until the potato is tender when pierced with a knife, just a few minutes. Drain, and let the potato cool to room temperature.

In a large bowl mix together the cooked potato, ham, radishes, cucumbers, chopped egg, sunflower sprouts, scallions, and dill. Set aside and chill. In a small bowl, mix together the sour cream, lemon juice, lemon zest, salt, and pepper. Stir to combine.

To serve, place three quarters of a cup of the salad mixture in each bowl. Add a cup of kvass and a dollop of the sour cream mixture, and garnish with reserved scallions and dill.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Cabbage with Millet Stuffing

Adapted from The Best of Ukrainian Cuisine.

a green or white cabbage
1 tbs vinegar
1/2 cup millet, washed and dried
1 1/2 cups water
4 carrots, sliced in coins
2 parsley roots, cubed (substitute fennel if you can’t find parsley root)
a large onion, chopped
3 tbs melted butter (or lard)
an egg, hardboiled and diced
1/2 cup chicken stock or water
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup chopped parsley
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Preheat the oven to 350.

Wash and core cabbage. Place cabbage in a pot of boiling salted water with a tablespoon of vinegar. Cook for ten minutes until crisp-tender. Set aside to cool.

Toast millet in a dry skillet until starting to turn golden. Pour millet into a small saucepan, add a cup of water or chicken stock, cover, and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer, and cook until the millet is tender and the liquid is absorbed, about fifteen minutes.

Sauté onions on low heat until browned. Add carrots and parsley roots, and cook until tender. Turn off heat, and allow to cool slightly. Add millet and hardboiled egg, and mix thoroughly. Salt and pepper liberally.

Open out the leaves of the cabbage, and stuff the mixture between them as thoroughly as possible. Close the cabbage back up as best you can, topping with a few coins of carrot. Place the cabbage in a roasting pan, pour over the melted butter, and bake for twenty to thirty minutes until cabbage turns golden. Remove, transfer carefully to a large pot, add a half cup of chicken stock or other liquid, cover, and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer, and stew, covered, an additional thirty minutes. To serve, cut into wedges, pour over sour cream, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and season with salt and pepper.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Strawberry Blini  

1 recipe Russian blini (see “Cooking with the Strugatsky Brothers”)
a quart of fresh strawberries, sliced
1/4 cup sugar, or to taste
1 tsp lemon juice
2 cups heavy cream
2 tbs sugar, or to taste

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Combine the strawberries with a quarter cup of sugar and a teaspoon of lemon juice, and let sit at room temperature until the berries soften and begin to release their juices, about fifteen minutes.

Whip the cream until it forms soft peaks. Add two tablespoons of sugar, and stir to combine. Taste, and adjust for sweetness.

Place a premade blini open on a plate. Lay about a third of a cup of strawberries in the center, in a vertical line, leaving room to fold over both the sides and the ends. Fold over the sides, then the ends, to make a packet, then flip it over so the seams are underneath. Repeat, serving two or three blini per guest. Top with whipped cream and extra strawberries if you have them. Serve immediately.

 

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

Unbearable Reading: An Interview with Anuk Arudpragasam

Photo: Ruvin De Silva. Courtesy of Hogarth Books.

It is no exaggeration to call Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel absolutely devastating. The Story of a Brief Marriage depicts Dinesh, a sixteen-year-old Tamil man—and yes, at sixteen Dinesh is in many ways a man, forced into a premature adulthood—in a refugee camp toward the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. Though Arudpragasam’s second book is more removed from the bodily experience of violence as portrayed in his first, the war still hangs heavy over the scope of the new novel. A Passage North, an excerpt from which appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of this magazine, follows Krishan, a Tamil man who grew up outside of the war zone, as he makes his way north from Colombo to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker. It is an incredibly introspective work. Through the particularities of Krishan’s experience and inner life, Arudpragasam seamlessly unfurls ruminations on intimacy, trauma, and the passage of time.

The contemplative nature of A Passage North makes sense—Arudpragasam wrote the novel while studying for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University. While the war and its legacy are central to his work—they are “an obsession,” he says, and he looks forward to the day that he can write about something else—so, too, are the realms of literature and ideas. This came through in our lengthy conversation, which lasted nearly two hours. Arudpragasam jumps from novels to the politics of caste to philosophy to Sanskrit poetry to Tamil-language writing and back again with ease, drawing on stories, texts, and cultural history to illustrate his thinking.

There are currently about three million Sri Lankan Tamils, Arudpragasam told me, nearly half of whom live outside of the country. Arudpragasam is part of this diaspora. When we spoke over Zoom in early May, he was in Paris, where he is working on his third novel during a yearlong fellowship with the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. At the time of our conversation, the anniversary of the end of the war—a day that Arudpragasam, along with the rest of the Tamil community, commemorates each year—was fast approaching. Although he claims to be an impatient reader and writer both, Arudpragasam strikes me as patient, generous, and, above all, thoughtful, choosing his words carefully and often taking time to cultivate an idea. What resulted was the following much-abridged conversation, in which we discuss his work, influences, and process.

INTERVIEWER

What was your entry into writing fiction?

ARUDPRAGASAM

I didn’t come from a book-reading household, so my entry into books was arbitrary. It happened to be through philosophy books that I found at a bookshop close to my house. The first book I read was Plato’s Republic. Then it was Descartes’s Meditations and a book of lecture notes of Wittgenstein’s called The Blue Book. I tried to read Aristotle’s Ethics, but I stopped that after a while. I read a lot of philosophy when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, before I went to university. That was my entry into literature—I only really started reading fiction when I was in college. There was one book in particular, The Man without Qualities, by Robert Musil—he actually had a Ph.D. in philosophy. He has these long, digressive, essayistic sections in his book, which I haven’t read since I was twenty, so I don’t know how I’d feel about it now. At the time I was very moved by the way he places philosophical questioning and response in a kind of living, bodily situation. Philosophical problems arise in lived context, in response to real situations, and in philosophy, academically, you don’t really ask or answer questions in that way. But I read that book, and it showed me that there was a place in fiction and novels for a lot of what interested me about philosophy. Actually placing these things in their lived context charges philosophy in a way that simply discussing them abstractly does not. So I read that book, and I decided that I would like to write fiction, that I wanted to be the kind of person who could write a book like that.

INTERVIEWER

I definitely see that in both your books, but particularly in the new one, A Passage North— Krishan’s very particular lived experience leads to these larger contemplations. Was that the intent?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Yeah, but it’s not like I thought to myself, I’m going to fill this book with philosophical discussions. It’s just what I wrote, because it’s what I’m interested in. And because I came to fiction writing in this way, there are certain aspects of novel writing that I don’t pay as much attention to, or give as much time to.

INTERVIEWER

What are some aspects of novel writing that you don’t pay as much attention to?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Story. Creating a well-rounded character. Setting. Dialogue. Historical context. I try to pay attention to these things—I do try—but they’re always afterthoughts. A lot of these other things accumulate, they find their place through a process of accretion, and they’re deposited in different waves each time I go through the text. Sometimes things occur to me, and I’m like, Oh, I can just add this. I write over drafts. There’s no first draft—I have a little center here or a little center there, and then I just go over it, and each time I do, more material accumulates until I find a way to connect those islands into something. I have in my mind that the reader expects the character to be believable or the story to be interesting. I have this little voice in my head that says I need to try—but those elements of novel writing are not what I am interested in.

INTERVIEWER

I had a really great professor who said first draft is intuition, second is intellect. So on your intuitive draft, those elements don’t necessarily come through, but on your intellectual rewriting, they start to come about. Why do you go back and add in those elements, if they don’t interest you?

ARUDPRAGASAM

There’s this Buddhist poet, a Sanskrit poet, from, like, the first century. I think his name is Ashvaghosha. In relation to his work, I heard this idea that poetry is supposed to be beautiful, and it’s supposed to be pleasant to hear, because of its aural qualities, and actually, in this sense, poetry is dealing with illusory matters. In a way, it’s appealing to things that distract from what for Buddhists would be the bitter truth of life. And so these poets were called upon to justify why they use poetry—which is, in a way, antithetical to the Buddhist idea that life is suffering—to convey the truth of the Buddha. And the justification that was given was that these poems about the Buddha’s life or about episodes from his life should be understood like pills, like the sugarcoating on the top of a bitter pill, that allows something to be taken in. That feels very simplistic, in some sense, but—

INTERVIEWER

I don’t think so.

ARUDPRAGASAM

I know that people want to read certain things. One has unbearable reading experiences, right? I remember reading my favorite text of Robert Musil’s, a short novella called The Perfect Thing of Love. It’s forty pages, but it’s extremely dense. It’s a nightmare to read, actually—I start with this reverence, every time, and then slowly it becomes unbearable. I’ve read it a couple of times, but I’ve also failed to finish it multiple times. For somebody who I know is a wise person from whom I have something to learn, I’m willing to read an unbearable text. But we don’t live in a literary context, a literary culture, where unbearable reading, or reading that one has to struggle through, is tolerated. Have you read this book by Thomas Bernhard, Extinction?

INTERVIEWER

I haven’t.

ARUDPRAGASAM

This is another unbearable book. The outside world in Extinction is like scenery, it’s like a backdrop in the theater, where it’s so obvious that you’re not supposed to pay attention to it—it’s really just there so that what is happening in the foreground can happen. I wanted to write a book like that, one that involved sustained engagement with a single consciousness at a kind of intense level. I tried very hard, and I couldn’t do it in a way that anybody who wanted to read my writing or any friends of mine were willing to tolerate. In fact, I couldn’t do it in a way that I could tolerate. I had difficulty following this ideal, and slowly, over the course of years, the world began to seep more into the novel.

INTERVIEWER

I was struck by the referential nature of this book, and the role that other texts play. Krishan finds a great deal of affective and emotional resonances in texts that are, at first glance, unrelated to the events of his life. I was wondering if that’s similar at all to your reading experience.

ARUDPRAGASAM

I think a lot through texts. I often refer to a line or a passage or a moment as a way to explain to somebody how I’m feeling or to refer to something I want to communicate. These moments expand my memory of life. They’re like faint memories that I can always use to compare to my present experience.

INTERVIEWER

This insertion of other texts is so well done. The digressions always make their way around to these very cohesive moments of understanding—it said a lot to me about Krishan, and his reading life.

ARUDPRAGASAM

I’m glad you said that, that you feel they were incorporated well—this was a big struggle. Although I do feel a little bit more lukewarm about it now, I did learn a lot about incorporating other materials into my texts through this process. I was interested in the question of tradition, like literary heritage and canonicity. And as an English-language writer, I was trying to think of other canons with which I might align myself. But the truth is that reading in South Asia is a highly elite activity. Most people have historically been prevented from learning how to read, learning how to write, as part of the caste system—something that continues to this day. Our literary tradition—especially in Sanskrit—is intimately tied to the caste system, and therefore it’s not a tradition that anybody who has been oppressed by the caste system or anybody who doesn’t identify with it can easily affiliate themselves with. As I understood more—this comes from a period of time where I was trying to learn about non-Western traditions that I might lay claim to—it turned out that I don’t want to lay claim to these texts, because of the way in which they’re located in caste. If I was now interested in canonicity, it would have less to do with a South Asian canon than specifically a Tamil canon.

INTERVIEWER

There’s no dialogue in this new book. Did that come about organically? Or was it a conscious craft choice from the start?

ARUDPRAGASAM

I was aware from the start that the text was not going to have dialogue. There are two things I could give you as an explanation for that. One is that the question of why I am writing in English is always there for me. Rather, I mean that the issue of my not writing in Tamil is always present, and I think that makes especially salient the absurdity of putting English words into Tamil mouths. All the conversations in A Passage North are in Tamil—except for the ones that Anjum has with Krishan, every other relationship occurs in Tamil. What I simply chose to do is no dialogue, or to report the dialogue. So one thing I could say is that I avoid doing it because I don’t want to be engaging in ventriloquism. The other reason I might give, or I might have given at some point in the past, has to do with simply not being interested in what people say to each other. I no longer believe that, though. There are moments of conversation in which people reveal themselves, and they’re often moments that have a kind of confessional quality, in which a truth is spoken. It’s not so much about a truth being spoken but about a conversation that takes place in the mode of speaking the truth. That occurs very rarely between people, and often requires different kinds of conditions, a different kind of extremity. So much of conversation is about eliding certain things, posturing in certain ways, concealing various things, manipulating another person a certain way, angling of certain kinds. And I don’t have the patience as a writer to look for the truth of a person in the silences or the gaps or the contradictions. That requires a lot of patience that, unfortunately, I don’t have.

INTERVIEWER

You’re an impatient writer, you would say?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER

How so? Aside from not writing dialogue.

ARUDPRAGASAM

See, I read for very specific reasons—I read to know how things are, like in the way that one would read the Bible. It’s as if I view books as spaces in which only certain kinds of moods are to be inhabited. I am very petty, for example—I can be very small-minded, and I have small-minded and petty friends as well. It’s not that I avoid pettiness, or judge people for pettiness, but it’s something that I will not accept in a book. Maybe it has to do with coming from a context in which books are not readily available and when you see a book, you believe it’s something that has to be valued. And, therefore, if somebody’s an author, they cannot be light-hearted or flippant people, they cannot be petty. For whatever reason, the object of a book is very important to me, and for me it’s not a place to be light-hearted. I’m very impatient about any book I read or any book I write getting to the question of what life is like and not tarrying on more frivolous matters.

INTERVIEWER

Does that make you an impatient reader or an impatient writer?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Both, I would say.

INTERVIEWER

I want to ask about the notion of different worlds in your work. The idea comes up in a variety of ways—politically, with Anjum, the activist, and with the Tamil Tigers and their vision for an independent state. Intimately within the bounds of Anjum and Krishan’s relationship. Even in terms of the self, with Rani’s grief and the worlds that we create within the self to tolerate the unbearable present. And then your story in the Summer issue is called “So Many Different Worlds.”

ARUDPRAGASAM

Right.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a sort of centrality in your work, this idea of different worlds. Would you say that’s true?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Yeah. Totally … Your question made me a little sad.

INTERVIEWER

Why?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Because it’s true. The present is, in some way, lacking for all of these characters. There’s this absence in the present and this kind of yearning for something. One way to put this interest in other worlds is in terms of a desire to be elsewhere. Because when you talk about an interest in other worlds, you’re not talking about an interest in something specifically. We’re not talking about something we necessarily know exists out there, but rather something that is missing from where one is, something that leads one to feel that maybe somewhere else would be better, even if we don’t know what it is. This desire to be elsewhere has to do with the sense that the present moment is unsatisfying, that there’s something missing from the present—which we are always actually in, we never are able to leave it. Of course there are moments in which the present does seem sufficient, a precious few moments. When does the present seem sufficient? When you’re really tired and you get to rest. When you’re listening to music. When you are feeling joyful. But these are exceptional moments, I think, and I always wonder what would make the present more inhabitable, other than the prospect of something in the future. I mean, with Krishan—there’s this thing at the end where he’s always staying up late, because he feels that something should come.

INTERVIEWER

Which Dinesh did as well, right, in The Story of a Brief Marriage?

ARUDPRAGASAM

Yeah, definitely. When I wrote that in my first novel, I was like, This is not Dinesh. Dinesh doesn’t give a fuck about staying up late—he has other problems! What I usually do when I see this kind of infelicity is that I simply delete it. But there are always certain little signatures that are not visible to anybody except me, generally. I just know that this is me putting something from my bourgeois life into the text, and it doesn’t matter because other people won’t realize it. Sometimes I might even make a historical inaccuracy—I might describe the sound of a bomb in one way, and I might learn over the course of writing subsequently that that bomb actually sounds different. I won’t make the correction, because I want there to be some kind of mark that I, in my subject position, wrote this book. These are the psychological and the class conditions that make it the case that it’s impossible to hold me to a high level of truth or accuracy. So let there be error, and let the error also be subtle enough that nobody complains when they read. This was one of those points, but I kept it, and then when I wrote this book, the same line came, and I knew that it was in the previous book as well—but I was like, Nobody is going to read these like that! And if they do, let them realize! That’s what I did—I used the exact same thing.

INTERVIEWER

Dinesh’s immediate experience of war is the core of your first book, whereas in A Passage North, the story is more removed from that firsthand experience. What brought about this shift?

ARUDPRAGASAM

For Tamils, specifically Sri Lankan Tamils in my generation, the end of the war is a watershed event. It’s something that is branded into our consciousness. And many Tamils, especially young Tamils outside the war zone, obsessed over what happened. My obsession expressed itself in the form of a book. Somebody else’s obsession manifested in the form of setting themselves on fire in front of the UN building. For a lot of people, this obsession is obviously not such a healthy obsession. None of us will ever be able to forget the war, it will shape and mark us for the rest of our lives, but it has been important for me to move away from its immediacy, to move away from imagining it, from confronting this violence so directly. And this is what I try to do. I look forward to the day when I will be able to write about something else, but it wasn’t the case with my first novel, and it certainly wasn’t the case with this novel—even though I didn’t mean for A Passage North to be about the genocide. The subject came up in small moments over the course of writing an entirely different novel, almost like Freudian slips. I realized that there were so many of these kinds of slips taking place that I clearly hadn’t left the matter behind, although one thing I was very clear to do was to describe no violence in this book. I’ve been trying to move away from it, and this third book that I’m writing takes place in Toronto and New York and Paris among the diaspora, so it will be even more removed form the subject of violence.

INTERVIEWER

Are you ready to say anything else about your new book yet?

ARUDPRAGASAM

I look at every novel I write as a kind of apprenticeship, and I have told myself that there are certain things or gaps in my ability that I need to fill. I have tried to make changes with regard to what we were talking about, where I describe the external world as a kind of scenery in my second novel. This has to do with having characters in a world that is active, and that is teeming and in which things are happening, and above all in which interaction between different people is occurring. In my first two novels, I had this conviction that if you want to know the truth of a person, you must see them when they are alone—that in these moments of solitude, when they’re uninterrupted from outside impositions, a person lets out their real face. Therefore, to capture the truth of a person, and their stance toward the world, you have to write about them when they are alone. In this new novel I’m writing, I’m more interested in the truth or the revelation that is made possible in the presence of others. It sees the possibility of truth in relationships, and it focuses more on the individual in communication or in communion of some kind with others, rather than with the individual in solitude.

 

Mira Braneck is a writer from New Jersey.

Re-Covered: Barbara Comyns

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

Photo: Lucy Scholes.

When I’m asked how I first became interested in out-of-print and forgotten books, my answer is always the same: it all began with Barbara Comyns. Eight years ago, Virago reissued three of the midcentury British writer’s novels—Sisters by a River (1947), Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), and The Vet’s Daughter (1959)—on their Modern Classics list, and I was immediately and utterly smitten by her singular voice. With her way of combining elements of social realism, replete with Dickensian touches, with all manner of macabre gothic tropes dark enough to have been taken out of the original Grimm’s fairy tales, Comyns was quite unlike anyone I’d ever read. Angela Carter is the only writer who comes close, but Comyns’s work has none of the same feminist underpinning. I wrote a short rave review of the 2013 Virago editions for the Observer, and then I began tracking down copies of Comyns’s eight other works, only two of which were then also in print: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954), which had been reissued in the U.S. by Dorothy, a publishing project, in 2010, and The Juniper Tree (1985), which appeared as a Capuchin Classic in the UK the following year. I also began learning what I could about Comyns’s life, keen as I was to find out as much as possible about the woman behind these weird and wonderful books.

Tantalizing tidbits were scattered both in the various introductions that had been written by her admirers and friends over the years and in the novels themselves, since Comyns often fictionalized her own life. As a child, she and her siblings had been left to run wild in the hands of inattentive governesses. Comyns’s parents—a deaf and disinterested mother and a violent, alcoholic father—were too consumed with their own sparring to pay their children much attention. Comyns documents this in her debut, Sisters by a River, a book she wrote to entertain her own children when she worked as a cook and housekeeper during World War II; it was initially serialized in Lilliput magazine under the title “The Novel Nobody Will Publish.” As a young woman, she showed considerable talent as a painter; she trained at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and exhibited with the London Group. Later in life, she supported herself and her family by doing a variety of jobs that included modeling, selling antiques and classic cars, renovating houses, and breeding poodles. Perhaps most intriguing of all, though, was her connection to the infamous MI6 double agent Kim Philby, who was a colleague of Comyns’s second husband, Richard Comyns Carr, in Whitehall, and in whose Snowdonia cottage the newlyweds spent their honeymoon in 1945. Ultimately, though, rather than satisfying my curiosity, these enticing snippets of what came across as an extremely eclectic and often precarious life left me with more questions than answers.

Luckily, the task I’d set myself was greatly assisted by the generosity of Comyns’s granddaughter, Nuria, who in 2014 hosted me for a week at her and her husband’s home in Shropshire, where she let me read the diaries that Comyns kept from the mid-’60s, along with other archive material. I wrote about that week, and what I discovered, in a 2016 essay for Emily Books. Until recently, my piece was the most detailed account of Comyns’s life and work available, though I’m thrilled to report that the British academic and writer Avril Horner has recently completed a full-length biography of Comyns, a taste of which can be found in this fascinating essay, published earlier this year in the Times Literary Supplement, about Comyns’s forty-year friendship and correspondence with Graham Greene.

Because Comyns was the very first neglected writer whose work got under my skin, and in light of the fact that four of her novels have been reissued in the past year—including A Touch of Mistletoe (1967), published this week by Daunt Books—it seemed only fitting that I should write about at least one of her books in this column. Rather foolishly, I also thought this would be a relatively easy assignment. Here was a writer about whom I knew more than most people, and whose work I’d read on multiple occasions. This would be a breeze! Yet, as I discovered when I actually sat down to write, not only did I want to avoid simply regurgitating what I’d written about Comyns in the past but, more crucially, as I found myself listing just how many of her works are currently in print—eight of the eleven titles she wrote, and with six different publishers—I suddenly wasn’t sure whether she even strictly qualified as a neglected author anymore.

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In this column, the same question comes up over and over again: If the book under consideration is so good, how did it ever fall out of print? Yet, when it came to Comyns, I found myself preoccupied by a different question entirely: What does a book or an author being “rediscovered” actually look like? Some kind of critical championing is often the starting point, but republication is the holy grail. Take Kathryn Schulz writing about William Melvin Kelley in The New Yorker, for example, which then sparked a bidding war between publishers eager to reprint his work. Or Brigid Hughes, editor of A Public Space, rediscovering and then reissuing Bette Howland’s work. Or even my own championing, this past year, of Kay Dick’s forgotten dystopian masterpiece, They, which was simultaneously rediscovered by the literary agent Becky Brown and is now being brought back into print next year.

Comyns—whose first novel was published in 1947, and whose last appeared in 1989—won accolades throughout her career, and beyond. Writing about The Vet’s Daughter, Greene—who, as Horner elucidates, both acted as a mentor for Comyns and “advanced her career whenever he could”—applauded her “strange offbeat talent … and that innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrence.” Anthony Burgess, meanwhile, was equally impressed: “Let us make no bones about it: Barbara Comyns is one of our most original talents.” And Margaret Drabble, Alan Hollinghurst, Maggie O’Farrell, and Helen Oyeyemi are just some of the other writers who’ve more recently sung her praises. “The mildly mystical approach to her subject, with its overtones of inescapable gloom, is expressed in final form in language so precise and economical,” wrote Caroline Moorehead of The Vet’s Daughter in the Times in 1981, “so pared down of all unnecessary words that it conveys a sensation of truth.” This was the first of Comyns’s titles that Virago republished in the eighties. She was the perfect fit for the publisher’s new but rapidly expanding Modern Classics list, which rescued women writers from obscurity, and for each of the five more Comyns reissues subsequently added to the list, similar laudatory reviews followed. Since then, each and every reissue of one of Comyns’s novels has heralded a joyous resurgence of interest in her work. I myself confidently declared her “a neglected genius” in 2013; three years later, given further room to elaborate in my Emily Books piece, I called her “a writer lost in time … ripe for rediscovery.” Did it surprise me to see this exact same phrase—“ripe for rediscovery”—used in the headline above the excellent appreciation of Comyns’s life and work by Lynn Barber in the Telegraph earlier this year? No, not really. As Barber herself perceptively points out, there’s a distinct pattern to Comyns’s career, one that began while she was alive and has continued since her death: “acclaim, followed by neglect, followed by revival.”

Charting Comyns’s trajectory over the course of the past eight years, I noted her star waxing and waning in line with the reappearance of various new editions. The 2013 Viragos were followed by two new NYRB Classics in the U.S.: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, in 2015, and The Juniper Tree, in 2018. “Barbara Comyns’s writing is in the middle of a resurgence,” wrote Michael T. Fournier in his review of the latter for the Chicago Review of Books. Here we go again, I thought. She seemed to me like an author forever poised on the cusp of definitive rediscovery—whatever that even means—someone who never quite reached escape velocity. But now I think I had it all wrong. The current Comyns “revival”—as Horner, Barber, and the writer Christopher Shrimpton have all termed it—is just further evidence of the enduring appeal of her work. It doesn’t really matter that we’ve been here before. What matters is that Comyns is still being republished, critics are still writing about how brilliant her novels are, and—most importantly of all—these novels are still finding new readers.

*

For those of us who’ve been fans for a while, Comyns is a writer one never tires of revisiting. “I have read it many times,” the novelist Sarah Waters reports of The Vet’s Daughter, a brilliantly haunting tale of grisly horrors set in Edwardian Battersea that’s also surprisingly insightful about the psychological mechanisms of post-traumatic stress disorder, “and with every re-read I marvel again at its many qualities—its darkness, its strangeness, its humour, its sadness, its startling images and twists of phrase.” But all the more significantly, Comyns’s books continue to resonate with new generations of readers. “The particulars of Sophia’s delivery are outdated,” writes Emily Gould in her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, Comyns’s loosely autobiographical tale of marriage and motherhood while living on the breadline in bohemian London in the thirties, which contains some famously graphic descriptions of childbirth, “but the feelings she describes—of shame, helplessness, and terror, wonder at her baby countered by fear for his life—are still far too common in life, and far too rare in literature.” Most recently, Daunt Books declared Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead—a ghoulish, blood-soaked tale about an outbreak of ergot poisoning in a small village that drives many of its inhabitants mad, and was considered, on its initial publication, to be so disturbing it was actually banned in Ireland under the Censorship of Publications Act—a “twisted pandemic parable,” recognizing that the hysterical fear of contagion amplified therein with such horrifyingly excellent affect makes it especially evocative for readers today. “Perhaps she is currently enjoying a revival because her work speaks more clearly to readers now than it did in the mid-twentieth century,” suggests Horner in her TLS essay, citing Comyns’s originality in exploring “the horrors of grinding poverty and emotional cruelty while celebrating the beauty and the comic incongruities of life.” Comyns’s books are also timely because in many ways they’re ultimately oddly timeless. As Sadie Stein observes in her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of The Juniper Tree, despite the occasional reference to contemporary life, ultimately the world of the novel is one “outside normal time … and governed by the arbitrary laws of fairy tales”—something that could be said of many of Comyns’s novels, and was echoed by Marina Warner. “In spite of the lovingly detailed suburban ambience, interiors, gardens and clothes,” she wrote of The Juniper Tree in her New York Times review of the book, “the atmosphere feels torqued beyond time and history into a fairy tale theater of desire and wan hope.”

But more than all this, the story of Comyns’s ongoing success also has things to tell us about the growing visibility of rediscovered classics and neglected books. That Observer review I wrote in 2013 afforded me a mere four hundred words to write about all three novels, and I had to pitch hard for those four hundred words. This isn’t to chastise my editor—I’m grateful they saw fit to give me any words at all! It’s long been notoriously difficult to find review space for reissues, regardless of the quality of the work in question. Yet this is something that, over the past few years, finally seems to be changing. Where once reissues were rarely found outside the remit of a notable classics imprint or the more esoteric lists of the smallest of independent publishers, these days they’re becoming increasingly popular. And many publishers are treating these reissues as they would standard front-list titles. At Daunt Books, Comyns’s novels sit alongside other reissues—Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), for example, and Raymond Kennedy’s Ride a Cockhorse (1991)—but also the latest from fresh talents such as Brandon Taylor and Amina Cain. Meanwhile, Faber has recently released new editions of Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball (1964) and Beryl Gilroy’s groundbreaking memoir Black Teacher (1976) with just as much fanfare as the publisher affords any of its living authors.

Just as more and more publishers have added Comyns to their lists, more and more people are recognizing the value of reanimating titles from the past. Reissues are taking up more space—on the shelves of bookstores, in review pages, and in readers’ lives. Had someone told me back in 2013 that six years later, I’d be writing a monthly column about out-of-print and forgotten books and I’d regularly see rediscovered books being afforded the same review space as their front-list counterparts, I’m not sure I would have believed it. I probably also wouldn’t have trusted anyone who told me those 2013 Virago editions weren’t Comyns’s last shot at fame. Obviously only time can tell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I found myself writing about her all over again in another eight years. But then again, maybe I’ll leave it to someone else next time. Comyns has preoccupied my attention for the best part of a decade. I finally understand her story as one of success. And if I’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s that there are plenty of other writers out there who deserve a revival or two of their own.

 

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.