The Paris Review's Blog, page 114

The Horror of Good Behaviour

Molly Keane. Photo: © D. Donahue.

“All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon St. Charles, the tall, bosomy antiheroine of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, minutes after killing her mother. “I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.”

As a narrator, Aroon is a monster of repression, revealing things she herself does not know on every page. Take this first scene, in which she—well, murder is such an ugly word. Let’s just say the book opens with Aroon speeding her invalid mother’s twilight years to their inevitable conclusion with the aid of an indigestible rabbit mousse. When, afterward, she orders the housekeeper to save the leftovers for lunch—mustn’t waste!—we know, even if she doesn’t, that this act of symbolic cannibalism is meant to perfect her revenge. But revenge for what?

To answer that question, Keane takes us back to Aroon’s origins in Temple Alice, the Anglo-Irish “big house” where she was born. It is a world of horses and hounds and endless gin cocktails, actively hostile to the inner life; a world where a child caught reading a book is admonished and sent back outside. Bodies and their functions are taboo, as are excessive feelings of any kind. Grief, in particular, is forbidden.

Aroon is cursed from the start with an ordinary need for love and a body out of sync with the 1920s fetish for slim, boyish figures. Starved for affection from her philandering father and chilly, distant mother (“She had had us and she longed to forget the horror of it once and for all”), she yearns to be “a small cherished person” but is referred to instead as “massive.” Deprived of food, comfort, and love, instead of shrinking, she grows.

So do her blind spots. To solve the whydunit of Good Behaviour, the reader must penetrate its narrator’s protective shell of denial, divining the truth through odd silences and peculiar lapses in the narrative point of view. The most notable of these is a long digression about Aroon’s plump, sentimental governess, Mrs. Brock. Layering Aroon’s past and present points of view with those of characters who haven’t yet been introduced, Keane masterfully reveals the coexistence in Aroon of deep, instinctual knowledge and willful ignorance. After all, she must know enough to know what she must not let herself know. Mrs. Brock’s fate acquires a mythic significance, a prime example of bad behavior brutally punished.

Aroon’s desperation to avoid that fate leads her from cringe comedy to what I can only call cringe tragedy. Good behavior requires lying, and the more Aroon lies to herself, the more she is lied to by others, often with sociopathic callousness. Thus are monsters born.

But then, in a world where “one did not quite admit the possibility of cowardice even in young children,” sociopathic callousness is the very definition of good behavior. Throughout the book, everything from crushing debt to unrequited love to the sudden deaths of loved ones is shaken off and never spoken of again: “We had behaved beautifully. No pain lasts.”

*

Molly Keane’s life was defined by precisely the kind of good behavior that Good Behaviour skewers. Born Mary Nesta Skrine in 1904, a daughter of the fading Anglo-Irish gentry, Keane was a moody, red-haired child with a rebellious streak; the cook called her “that right red rip.” She longed for affection from her chilly, withdrawn mother, a celebrated poet of sentimental verse, but struggled to embody her Victorian ideals of modesty and composure. Due to Mrs. Skrine’s ruthless economies, Ballyrankin, the family estate in County Wexford, was always kept cold and uncomfortable, the food downright nasty. There was no money for new clothes; Molly’s older sister Susan was sent to a coming-out ball in a tennis dress.

This vision of landed wealth crumbling into poverty forms the backdrop of Keane’s books. Thanks in part to the increasing gains of the Irish independence movement, the colonial Anglo-Irish class was in steep decline by the time she began to write. The Irish War of Independence raged during her teenage years, though you’d never know it from reading most of her novels; in her last year at boarding school, Ballyrankin was burned to the ground by armed insurgents. One of the gunmen dragged armchairs out onto the lawn so the family could sit and watch.

Through it all, the Anglo-Irish kept up their foxhunting and their lawn tennis. Keane was no exception. Her first taste of social life came at her cousins’ house, where she was sent while a new house was being built near the charred ruins of the old one. Once back at Ballyrankin, however, she contracted a mysterious illness that her biographer, her daughter Sally Phipps, suggests may have been psychosomatic. She wrote her first novel at seventeen while sick in bed, either to deal with unspeakable loss or, as Keane herself always maintained, to supplement her dress allowance. She must have seen some adorable clothes at her cousins’ house.

Either way, this was the start of a long career. The Knight of Cheerful Countenance was published by William Collins, Sons, in 1926, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell—a name Keane saw on a pub sign—because being an author wasn’t good behavior, especially for a woman. If anyone found out, she later said, she would have been considered “brainy.” In her twenties she wrote Young Entry (1928), Taking Chances (1929), Mad Puppetstown (1931), and Conversation Piece (1932), all witty horse-and-hound romances chronicling a dying way of life. Her sixth novel, Devoted Ladies (1934), features gay and lesbian characters modeled after the theater types she’d met at the home of her bisexual friend John Perry, and it marks a major break from her earlier novels, heralding a more mature phase. The next three books show Keane stretching herself in style and experimenting with darker subjects: Full House (1935) introduces the first of many monstrous mothers; The Rising Tide (1937), her best novel barring Good Behaviour, is an acid melodrama about a widow clinging to her Edwardian youth; and Two Days in Aragon (1941) takes on the Irish War of Independence, house-burning and all.

Widows and spinsters had always appeared as minor characters in her books—marriageable men were thin on the ground after World War I—but in this new phase of her career, when Molly was an unmarried woman in her thirties, they took center stage. Keane’s fascination with these “excellent women,” who were expected to toil socially while suppressing all private feeling, aligns her with Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the other British grandes dames of spinster lit—many of whom were themselves spinsters and widows.

Molly’s happy marriage in 1939 to the much younger Robert (“Bobbie”) Keane saved her from the former fate but not the latter. Bobbie had been barred from serving in World War II due to a stammer, only to die in 1946 of a blood clot after a minor surgery when the couple was in London. Doctors did not know then that patients should be encouraged to get up and walk after surgery. This absurdly preventable tragedy left Keane with two daughters to raise alone in a society where grief was considered the worst behavior of all. Shocked and in something of a stupor, she went lamp shopping with a friend upon hearing the news, not bothering to learn where he would be buried. She died not knowing.

After Bobbie’s death Molly’s attention, divided between novels and the stage ever since the surprise success of her play Spring Meeting (1938), cowritten with John Perry, turned almost entirely to theater. She needed money, and perhaps the brooding, melancholic tendency that came out in her novels felt too dangerous. In a culture where grief was the ultimate taboo, widows were supposed to glitter. Her next two novels, both adapted from her plays, have very little interiority to them. Her hit play Treasure Hunt (1952) was the most sparkling story she’d ever written. But eventually the stage failed her, too. In 1961, an ill-conceived sequel to Spring Meeting flopped, pilloried in the press by critics sick of elegant drawing-room comedies. The theater critic Kenneth Tynan claimed he could hear the audience neighing.

Keane stopped working and threw herself into domestic hobbies. “My writing is dated,” she said. “This is the end and there is nothing I can do.”

For years she had expressed the unspeakable in her writing, caricaturing her acquaintances to sell out the secrets of her class. Her witty, melancholic books had chronicled their abortions and suicides and affairs, their neglected children and abused elders, their inadmissible loneliness and the shameful, ever-present fear of being killed on a horse. She had done it all under a pseudonym. But the best behavior of all is silence.

*

Good Behaviour didn’t break the silence so much as bring it to the page. A narrator in denial; a style purged of description; a plot never spelled out; a love that dares not speak its name. Its satire a blade sharpened nearly to transparency, Good Behaviour was Keane at her keenest.

Keane’s publisher of nearly fifty years rejected it, saying it was too nasty and suggesting she write at least one “nice” character. She refused. It sat in a drawer for years until her friend the actor Peggy Ashcroft read it during a visit and urged Keane to try again. Published to instant acclaim in 1981, it was nominated for the Booker Prize but lost to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. She was nearly eighty years old. It was her first book published under her real name.

Keane was severely disappointed by the loss (which she shared with Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing). Once more, she had been judged obsolete; Rushdie’s boisterous postcolonial novel of India must have felt very new next to Keane’s satire of a long-dead ruling class. And yet there is something undeniably modern about Good Behaviour. If it’s too quaint to be new, it’s too cruel to be old. Perhaps the perfect time to read it is now, in a global pandemic, when time feels stopped, present and past atrocities knit together on a single stitch. Fueled by an undercurrent of rage yet as taut and crisp and tidy on the surface as a perfectly turned Sally Lunn cake, Good Behaviour is as delectable a horror story as you are likely to encounter. Enjoy every crumb. Mustn’t waste.

 

Amy Gentry is the author of the novels Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and, most recently, Bad Habits. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Chicago and lives in Austin, Texas.

Excerpted from the introduction to Good Behaviour, by Molly Keane, published this week by New York Review Books. Copyright © 2021 by Amy Gentry.

Redux: The Vagaries of Taste Might Swerve

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.

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Ishamel Reed.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re in the library stacks. Read on for Ishmael Reed’s Art of Poetry interview, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s short story “Two Sisters,” and Tom Disch’s poem “The Library of America.”

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, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

 

Ishmael Reed, The Art of Poetry No. 100
Issue no. 218 (Fall 2016)

When I came back to Buffalo, I dropped out of school. I was seventeen. My plan was to stay home and read plays but my mother said, You’ve got to get a job, so I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold. I had never seen a black guy that could do this. When I was a child, I thought literature was written by lords and knights and stuff. You know, these people living in these great estates wearing beautiful clothes. Baldwin showed me something different. Then I discovered Dante, man. That really turned me on. My parents thought I had lost my mind.

 

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Furniture for libraries from the Cornell University Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Two Sisters
By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Anna Friedrich
Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

The girls could barely wait to go outside. They had a slice of bread, drank a cup of hot water with last year’s mint, and quickly left the building, missing the teenagers. Now there was the problem of transportation. In their prev­ious life, bus drivers didn’t ask the old biddies for tickets, and the ticket collectors avoided them like radiation. The sisters decided to walk to the library, to exchange books. It was still very early and they sat in the park among pigeons and park workers, waiting for the library to open. Then it occurred to Rita that they were supposed to be in school! The librarian would probably wonder why the girls were roaming the streets instead of being in a classroom.

 

Furniture for libraries from the Cornell University Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Library of America
By Tom Disch
Issue no. 158 (Spring-Summer 2001)

It’s like heaven: you’ve got to die
To get there. And you can’t be sure.
The publisher might go out of business.
Or you yourself might not be good enough.
The vagaries of taste might swerve.
Suddenly, leaving you disaudienced.

Marquand. Aiken. cummings. Mailer.
What are their chances now, which once
Loomed so large? Ubi sunt, as they say
In France, while their language
Expires. It’s sad, this transience
We share, but look on the bright side …

 

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America’s Dead Souls

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Engraving from Gustave Doré’s 1861 illustration of Dante’s Inferno. Scanned, postprocessed, and uploaded by Karl Hahn. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is money to be made off the dead. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace. I had already read War and Peace. It ruined my life. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time.

I wish I would have been more cautious in picking a book. Every time I read one of the Russian greats my life transforms into an eerie mirror of the work. I had already experienced a year of obsessive relationship analysis (Anna Karenina), six months beneath the thumb of a powerful boss whose political maneuvers were far reaching and whose requests quickly spiraled into the hellish and fantastic (The Master and Margarita), a week on the run with a depressive whose obsessive psychosis ended in a prison sentence (Crime and Punishment), a much-too-long friendship with a man whose preoccupations with his father were borderline incestuous (Fathers and Sons), and, after I finished War and Peace, years stuck in sprawling disillusionment that, unlike many characters in the novel, I have yet to overcome. Had I not learned my lesson? I wasn’t keen to fall into the trap of Russian literature again.

But, I reasoned, what could possibly happen to me while I read about Chichikov? Good, bumbling Chichikov, who purchased dead serfs in order to turn a profit. A man whose harmless scheming and bribing promised quick prosperity. We were in the middle of a pandemic. What relevance could this bourgeois con artist possibly have to my life?

Sound logic, I thought. Surely, surrealism is safe. Except shortly after I picked up Dead Souls, my mother died a gruesome, absurd death, and I quickly found that the surrealism of Gogol was not so surreal after all. Chichikov knew more of life’s truths than I did: no matter how poor, there is money to be made from the dead. The poor are worth more dead than alive.

At the end of her life my mother made less than $10,000 a year. Suffering from debilitating depression while caring for her aging parents, she found herself chronically unemployed, undermedicated, and overstressed. In our final phone call, as we navigated her looming eviction, she asked me, rhetorically: “Why are these people harassing me? What good does it do them?” I didn’t have an answer for her. Or I did, but it felt obvious and stupid to say out loud. They wanted money. Everybody wants money. The people in power don’t care if we live or die, as long as they get paid. My last correspondence with my mom was a $2,500 money order (two and a half months of my pay), which I hoped would buy me time to cobble together a more sustainable plan.

Her chronic delinquency with bills was publicly searchable in government databases and thus acted as a beacon to financial predators. She owed everyone. Or at least that’s what the letters said. They bombarded her daily with phone calls, notices, emails. The IRS garnished her wages for back taxes calculated from a years-old misfiling they refused to correct. And then, through a series of absurd events that would make even Gogol shudder, she died, and I inherited it all.

Well, not all of it. I didn’t inherit the assets. She didn’t leave a will, which meant the state of Tennessee inherited her house. What I inherited was her debt.

I suddenly found myself looking down a double-barreled future of doom and despair. The hospital where my mother died claimed I owed them more than a quarter of a million dollars. Wells Fargo held me responsible for a house I no longer had legal claim to. Creditors and housing developers knew about my mom’s death before my extended family did. I was a few months away from turning twenty-six. Two days after she died they began calling me.

There are horror stories online about the profit trap of dying youngish, poorish, without health care or a will. I invite you to read them. I hadn’t read any at the time. My only familiarity with the subject was the old saying about the IRS, which I now know can be applied to America’s debt-for-profit system writ large: they go after the poor because the rich have money to fight back.

Dead Souls is often called a masterpiece of bleak and comedic surrealism. Its publication in 1842 marked a noted departure from Gogol’s earlier work, which is widely considered to be the foundation of Russian literary realism. I get why Dead Souls is classified as surreal. But I personally disagree. In a world where one day of lost wages can compound into houselessness, the lives of the poor will always look surreal to the middle class and the wealthy.

From my vantage point, the only parts of Dead Souls that seem to be rooted in something other than realism are the moments when Chichikov imagines the lives of the souls he’s collected. He can’t seem to stop himself from reading a name and wondering about that person’s existence:

When afterwards he glanced at the lists, at the peasants who really had once been peasants, had worked, ploughed, got drunk, been drivers, cheated their masters, or were perhaps simply good peasants, a strange feeling which he could not comprehend took possession of him. Each list had an individual character, and through it the peasants themselves have an individual character too.

If only the con artists and thieves of America’s upper classes would wonder about the dead they’ve profited from. There are endless articles on why America has failed to curb the pandemic. The truth is simple. People profit from our death. Foreclosure companies, debt collectors, real estate agents, news corporations, health care tycoons, senators, and presidents, to name a few. After my mom’s death I found myself locked into a dentist chair, comforting the assistant of my dental hygienist. She wore a hazmat suit. In her plastic safety helmet, she sobbed through a panic attack. I weakly patted her gloved hand. Her father had died unexpectedly several months ago. She couldn’t prove he didn’t owe the debts they claimed he owed. She tried to tell the collectors her story (her father left no paperwork or will, he had died horribly and abruptly, she couldn’t afford to pay). Only one collector took pity on her. He explained it just wasn’t good business to believe her. If his firm believed every story they were told they would be poor men indeed.

What did I tell her to do? I told her to do what I did. Pretend you’re rich. Hire a lawyer. Open a credit card, if you have to. A meager amount of wealth will insulate you from a lifetime of woe, exactly as it was designed to. All my lawyer had to do was send a memo on official letterhead and my mother’s debts in death dropped 90 percent. More than a quarter of a million dollars was erased in an instant—an accounting that five weeks of my pleading, bargaining, reasoning, denying, uploading, scanning, begging, faxing, and crying had not been able to extract.

Professionalism and bureaucracy shield contemporary death-for-profit workers, administrators, and executives so that they may staff cruel systems without experiencing feelings of culpability, not to mention empathy or curiosity. Yet I still find myself hoping at least one of those infinite bureaucrats saw my mother’s name on a list and, like Chichikov, took a moment to reflect upon her humanity. Should they have struggled with where to begin, I would have offered this as a starting point: Her humor and her rage were unmatched. In the evenings, against the setting Tennessee sun, she liked to drink red can Cokes in the garden while snuffing cigarettes out against the yard’s ant colonies. She could reckon with anyone just by looking them in the eye. Men were terrified of her, rightfully so. She was sweet. In the last week of her life, when she couldn’t understand where she was or who she was talking to, she greeted everyone the same: “Hi, pal. Hope you’re doing okay. When can you come pick me up?”

 

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she taught in the undergraduate creative writing department as a teaching fellow. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and she now brings the strange to life at Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, Molly is at work on a novel about the inherent absurdity of debt. This is her first publication.

Staff Picks: Jungles, Journeys, and Jealousy

Rachel Cusk. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz.

There is a Joni Mitchell live album called Miles of Aisles, recorded while she was on tour in 1974. Caught on the recording is her response—in a slightly Dylan-esque posture—to the crowd’s wild chanting for a particular number. She complains that other artists don’t have to deal with this kind of crap: “Nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ ” I think she’s wrong, though. The anticipation for Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Second Place, has been as close to feverish as we get in certain circles, and it is in part because Cusk answers the call to “paint a Starry Night again” so well. Much has been said in the past weeks about what we particularly want from Cusk and why. In fact, if you are a person who reads The Paris Review’s staff picks, you have likely read two or three meditations on the subject. Whatever it is we want from her, Second Place delivers in spades. And with the dynamism of a truly great writer, the novel seems written just for the spring of 2021 but was actually inspired by the memoir of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a patron who played host to D. H. Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, in 1932. In Second Place, it is late spring on the English coast. Our narrator and her second husband invite a world-famous artist—now out of fashion—to use the second place on their property. He ends up arriving with a youngish woman of no defined role or position. If the opposition of these two relationships didn’t create enough refraction, our narrator’s daughter from a previous marriage and the daughter’s boyfriend come to stay as well. Cusk gives us three “stages of women,” leaving hints of female truths I’ll carry for the rest of my life, and no small amount of lush, threatening scenery. The Starry Night, I learned recently, was not universally loved at first. Only with the dedication of Van Gogh’s sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who peddled his troubled genius to the world, did we end up with refrigerator magnets and mouse pads. Although it’s in every job description, creativity is hard to see and harder to live with. We are taught to want it and fear it in equal measure. Among many other things, Cusk shows us this in Second Place, and I hope she never does it quite the same way again. —Julia Berick 

Molly Bolt is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. A bit of a wild card, whip smart, unbelievably driven, and an all-around badass, she’s the star of Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown’s queer coming-of-age novel. Originally published in 1973, Rubyfruit Jungle follows Molly from her poverty-stricken childhood in Pennsylvania and Florida to her young adulthood in New York City, where she sleeps with a parade of women and works her way through NYU with the goal of becoming a film director. The book is, in a lot of ways, a product of its time; in other ways, it’s very much ahead of the curve. All anyone expects of Molly is marriage, despite the fact that she has absolutely no interest in men. She adamantly refuses to get hitched and become a “breeder”; she’d much rather “be arrested for throwing an orgy at ninety-nine.” Molly’s hilarious—I mean laugh-out-loud funny. And while the book gives her the space to feel down and angry at the homophobia she faces and the poverty she experiences, she always soldiers on. She’s driven by her ambition to make her movies, even if she has to fight until she’s fifty. “But if it takes that long then watch out world,” she says, “because I’m going to be the hottest fifty-year-old this side of the Mississippi.” —Mira Braneck

 

Cheswayo Mphanza. Photo: Azeez Alayah. Courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.

 

I often find myself a little jealous of photographers and filmmakers, and the immediacy of the images that constitute their art. Part of the appeal of writing can be how not immediate it is, how it requires narrative explanation in order to set a scene or argue an idea, but some days I wish I were wielding a camera, not a pen. A line from Cheswayo Mphanza’s poem “Notes toward a Biography of Henry Tayali”—which appears in his debut collection, The Rinehart Frames—perfectly illustrates the conundrum: “Photography is best for its simple truth: thought is brief, whereas the image is absolute.” Somehow, in poems that borrow techniques from Abbas Kiarostami’s film 24 Frames, Mphanza fuses word and image in such a way that it feels as though I am reading a photograph. And when he explores the disparities of language, history, colonialism, and power, in poems like “Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Scene Descriptions” (“Sinking back into bed where he learns making love is immigrating to someone. A citizen who feigns to be a refugee under the tender weight of skin and its nudging”), this technique is used to its fullest, resulting in some of the most memorable lines in the book. “My dreams are becoming more cinematic,” notes the first line of “Frame Ten”—and the same could be said of this collection, too. —Rhian Sasseen

Readers of the Daily might be familiar with Barrett Swanson’s “Political Fictions: Unraveling America at a West Wing Fan Convention” or “For Whom Is the Water Park Fun?,” both of which are now collected in his debut essay collection, Lost in Summerland. My own introduction to Swanson’s exquisite prose and equally impressive examination of place was the book’s opening essay, “Notes from a Last Man,” which initially had me worried: the piece is set in my native Fort Lauderdale, Florida, an easy target for any visitor keen on mocking the coastal extravagance of a subtropical economy dependent largely upon the merrymaking tactics of tourism. But when the essay juxtaposed the lyrics of “patron saint of Miami pop” Pitbull with the post–Franco-Prussian War writing of Friedrich Nietzsche and the hedonistic absurdity and “older American ethos” of a cruise line’s television advertisement, all in the context of Swanson’s own general sadness and anxiety, I felt that, and I realized that his writing is not at all interested in mockery, but in camaraderie. The brilliance of these essays is their ability to illuminate the personal through the critical, the political, and the unflinching specifics of place while shining a light into that seemingly distant ideal—the universal. The closing essay, “Church Not Made with Hands,” builds ideas of faith and communion into an enchantingly hopeful description of marriage, and I can’t help but think of the promise we all make every time we choose to open a book, “vowing to see the world not through the myopia of I, but the panorama of us.” —Christopher Notarnicola

In honor of the latest installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words, “Cooking with Sigrid Undset,” I would like to offer another extraordinary way into the work of the Nobel-winning Norwegian novelist. I wish I could say the family copy of Kristin Lavransdatter is a treasured possession and favorite read-aloud book in our home, but in fact the mammoth tome lives on a secret shelf under our coffee table, where our puppy is unable to fulfill her urgent desire to chew on it. No, my family loves Undset because she is the inspiration for one of our favorite animated short films, Torill Kove’s The Danish Poet. Although this adorable and deeply moving cartoon, narrated by the legendary Liv Ullmann, won an Academy Award, it’s got the terrifying word poet in the title, so I fear many have ignored it. I’d like to remedy that situation right now. The Danish Poet follows said poet on a journey to love and literary inspiration, traveling by boat between Denmark and Norway and through the pages of Kristin Lavransdatter. The film involves outlandishly long hair, missed connections, a credible examination of where people come from, and the story of two unlikely pairs of lovers. I entreat you to watch it now—I promise you fifteen minutes of screen time you won’t regret. It’s kid friendly but adult sophisticated, and it holds a spot on my short list of Best Things Ever. I hope you feel the same way. —Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Still from Torill Kove’s The Danish Poet, 2006.

Cooking with Sigrid Undset

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for virtual Undset-themed drinks on Friday, June 4, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

The most common food in the medieval historical romance Kristin Lavransdatter, written by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), is oatmeal porridge, a dish I made elaborate perfection of during my children’s early years. The porridges in Undset’s book are good and nourishing but plain (though in one scene, a young Kristin eats hers with “thick cream” off her father’s spoon). Mine, on the other hand, were ridiculous. I blitzed half the oats in the baby-food blender before cooking. I tried different combinations of milk and water. I made fruit puree swirls. I had a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, and an office job, to which I fled every day in great relief to get a moment to myself and then struggled not to leak breast milk on my work clothes. My husband was unhelpful with the children. Childless people found my travails boring and embarrassing. I’d never thought being a woman mattered much, but suddenly it seemed to. I was miserable, and perfecting the oatmeal made me feel better.

Kristin Lavransdatter, which unfolds over the course of three volumes—The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross—is a woman’s story. It’s also a gripping read and an impressive feat of historical re-creation, which helped Undset win the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. The epic’s structural and textual allusions are so numerous that, as the professor Sherrill Harbison dryly remarks in her introduction to The Cross, they “show no signs of being exhausted by scholars.” (She also—correctly, I feel—thinks the book is overlooked.) When writing Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset drew from sagas, ballads, Scandinavian oral tradition, and medieval texts of all types, notably the allegory Le roman de la rose, to tell the tale of a woman in the early fourteenth century, a time when society was changing for women, who takes her newish right to consent to her own marriage a step further and demands her own choice of husband. Not accidentally, Undset was writing in the 1920s, another time of rapid social change.

 

Beef brisket, ready to be “boiled” like they did in the Middle Ages. (I cheated a little and stewed it.) Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The story follows Kristin, daughter of Lavrans, from childhood to death. Lavrans is a salt-of-the-earth Norwegian, “a strong and courageous man, but a peaceful soul, honest and calm, humble in conduct but courtly in bearing, a remarkably capable farmer and a great hunter.” As the treasured offspring of this strong and good man, Kristin is herself strong and good, and destined to carry on her family’s legacy of virtue. But in the book’s first section, Lavrans takes her up to the mountain pastures with a handful of children and servants to see to some land-management tasks. The group eats lunch outdoors amid the dazzling mountain views—“soft bread and thin lefse, butter and cheese, pork and wind-dried reindeer meat, lard, boiled beef brisket, two large kegs of German ale, and a small jug of mead.” Lavrans gives Kristin “all the ale she could drink, along with frequent sips of mead” and says: “God’s gifts will do you good, not harm, all you who are still growing. The ale will give you sweet red blood and make you sleep well.” The whole party falls asleep in the midday sunshine. Kristin, unaccustomed to drinking, wakes up with a headache and a dry mouth and accidentally wanders off down the wooded slope, where she is first captivated by her reflection in a stream and then sees an apparition, a woman with “a pale face,” “flowing, flaxen hair,” and “full breasts,” which are “covered with brooches and gleaming necklaces.” Kristin flees in terror, but the damage has been done.

The woman is an elf maiden. In Norwegian folklore, Harbison writes, the elf maiden represents “abduction and erotic abandon; her mischief is to lure young girls into the mountain for orgies with the mountain king.” Later, it will be Kristin’s fate to defy the counsel of her wise and good father, the values of her community, and the expectations of her religion, and reject an eminently appropriate betrothed, Simon Darre, for a different man, Erlend Nikulausson, with whom she falls in wild, besotted, sexual love. The reflection in the water is a reference to the myth of Narcissus, an inspiration for Le roman de la rose, which is about a dreamer who falls in love with a beautiful rose at the bottom of a pool but is eventually persuaded to make the more “responsible” choice: to marry a woman and reproduce. Throughout the entirety of Kristin Lavransdatter, the title character struggles with her decision to choose Erlend, herself, and her passion over her community’s values—which are also, with anguish, her own values. The motifs of Narcissus, the elf maiden, and the mountain king continue to appear.

 

Every year, Kristin’s father brings home “wonderful gifts—cloth from abroad for her bridal chest, figs, raisins, and gingerbread from Oslo.” I made the gingerbread. Above, some ingredients for it. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Familiarity with the source material invaluably deepens one’s appreciation of the book’s themes, making Harbison’s introduction to The Cross required reading. She explains that even the idea of romantic love the way Kristin experiences it was relatively new in the fourteenth century. Romantic, or courtly, love was “invented by poets in France in the twelfth century” and represented an advance in the status of women, because suddenly they were deemed worthy of inspiring heights of passion. (Prior to this, sex with women was considered a troublesome and low occupation that kept men from their real work.) Courtly love, though, wasn’t quite the same as how we view romance today—it claimed the highest status for doomed, forbidden, secret passions, usually between people who were married, but not to each other. The beautiful, unattainable rose at the bottom of the pool in Le roman de la rose is evocative of this kind of love. In an echo of its symbolism, Kristin and Erlend’s first outing together is in a rose garden.

Le roman de la rose, however, is a bifurcated text. The first part, extolling the values of courtly love, was written by one author; the second, a palinode in which that form of love is rejected, was written by a different author forty-five years later. In the intervening time, Harbison explains, Christian tradition had caught up to the newfound concepts of romance and erotic love and tried to tame their antisocial tendencies by suggesting that such feelings had their proper place—between married men and women, for the ultimate goal of procreation. Erotic abandon became merely an inferior echo of divine love.

Undset’s genius, to my mind, was first in what Harbison calls her “brutal realism.” Kristin is pregnant even before her wedding, and then nearly continually for the duration of The Wife, eventually bearing seven sons. Childbirth, nursing, and the mind- and body-destroying state of near-constant pregnancy are realistically portrayed. Undset is realistic about human nature as well: the lives depicted in Kristin Lavransdatter are recognizable to us even today despite the book’s convincingly medieval setting. Isn’t it still true that forbidden passion is the most electrifying? Could the first writers about romance have been more right than we are now? And isn’t it also true that marriage and wild, erotic love are not states that easily coexist, and that the former is a harnessing of the latter in the service of property, social stability, and procreation, just as the medieval church encouraged? Kristin and Erlend’s relationship, founded on erotic love, never goes quite right after their marriage. The elf maiden and Narcissus motifs appear again in the third volume when Erlend tries to convince Kristin to abandon their (nearly grown) children and live on a mountain farm with him, clearly demonstrating a conflict between family life and sexuality.

 

Gingerbread dough. Be aware that you need time to chill this before you roll it out. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Undset was an outlier in her times, with views that would be even less popular today. Kristin’s struggle is not for sexual freedom, or for the ability to assert her selfhood or rights in the feminist sense, but for virtue and God. What’s interesting to me is that this does not mean condemning sexuality but instead fully engaging with its harsh and exhilarating demands. Kristin’s passion for Erlend is one of her life’s animating forces. It is not wrong; it participates in the divine. But it hurts other people and causes scandals, troubles, complications, and hardships that are indelible on Kristin’s conscience. It also, in a way, both enriches and hurts her, with all those babies.

Undset became a Catholic shortly after Kristin Lavransdatter was published, another choice that made her unpopular with her literary peers. But she called herself a “pagan Catholic” and rejected the puritanical antisex form of Catholicism, which she thought was especially prevalent in America. The church, as Undset writes it, helps Kristin navigate the painful contradictions between her competing values.

In my own form of conflicting values, I have never really accustomed myself to the loss of self inflicted by motherhood—it’s worth it, but it’s hard, always. Nor have I ever found the combination of sexuality and committed relationships to be easy. Undset’s vision is consoling in its suggestion that such struggle with our embodied fates is not a failure but a form of success. “However impatient, stubborn, and rebellious Kristin has been,” Harbison writes, on her deathbed “she suddenly understands that full engagement in her earthly marriage has indelibly marked her as God’s own.” (I’d take “marriage” in this case to mean the wider sense of whatever we choose to commit ourselves to, another person or not.) Embodiment can take all forms these days. Reproduction—or the decision not to reproduce—can happen in any combination of people, single or attached, in any gender, but we all have our own forms of embodied struggle, and they rarely correspond with what they’re “supposed” to be. Undset’s brutal realism was to admit it, and then to offer a church that admitted it, too, and helped. I’m not sure that church ever existed—being narrowly proscriptive of sexuality and condemning in a variety of ways is more what we’ve come to expect—but I wish it did. It would have been a miracle to me, in the perfect-oatmeal years, to feel less alone.

 

My beef stew was inspired by a scene in a hospice garden, where “in the noonday sun there was a hot, spicy fragrance of dill and celery, onions and roses, southernwood and wallflowers.” The rose petals smell like “wine and apples.” Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

I did not make that oatmeal for my Undset-inspired feast (and I hope none of you ever do either—the blender step is really unnecessary). Instead, I turned to the other foods available in Kristin Lavransdatter, simple dishes like the “boiled beef brisket” mentioned above and “soft barley bread.” The only dessert mentioned is “gingerbread from Oslo,” and it appears twice, so I made that, too, shaped with a fancy rolling pin whose effect looks Scandinavian to me. The food descriptions are light on seasoning and details (possibly because there wasn’t much seasoning in fourteenth-century Norway), but I learned many interesting things about dining traditions. In one long passage, Kristin explains an old style of table that could be easily folded and removed so that the extended household could sleep on the floor of the hall. In another, Erlend instructs her to scatter “juniper and flowers” on the floor, place “the best cushions on the benches,” and cover the table with a linen cloth. When styling my food, I spread dried grasses and flowers on the table to evoke this spirit. I also cheated and added the garden and orchard ingredients mentioned in the rose-garden scene—one of the book’s loveliest—to my beef brisket: dill and celery, onions and cherries.

Everywhere there was food in medieval Norway, there was drink, and often many kinds on the same table—wines and meads, ales strong and weak. The ensuing drunkenness is another aspect of the books’ harsh realism and another example of the dual nature of God’s gifts. My spirits consultant, Hank Zona, found me not just meads but a mead trend, which serendipitously reflects both Kristin Lavransdatter’s pagan Catholic spirituality and some of our more modern struggles to live virtuously and situate ourselves in our wider human community. First, I spoke to a home mead maker named Eileen Coles, whom I met through the Norwegian immigrant community in Brooklyn. Coles brews mead as a sacred beverage in the Heathen tradition. (Heathen is a designation for the pre-Christian Scandinavian and Northern European religion.) Coles noted that mead is found worldwide, “wherever one would find beehives, in places as far-flung as India, Ethiopia, and China,” but that it and beer are more prevalent in Northern Europe because of the climate. Since grapes don’t grow well in the cold, “people made do with what was available—grains, herbs, and honey.”

 

Mead was a sacred beverage in the old Scandinavian religion and a popular one in Kristin Lavransdatter. These are from Melovino, in New Jersey, and Enlightenment Wines, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

For those of us who can’t make our mead at home, Zona suggests two commercial mead makers: Melovino (a name that contains the Latin words for “honey” and “wine”) in Vauxhall, New Jersey, and Enlightenment Wines, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Sergio Moutela, the owner of Melovino, started out as a home brewer; he became interested in mead because it was something of a crossover from his Portuguese immigrant family’s home winemaking tradition. From Melovino, Zona and I chose two bottles: Au Contraire, a purist sip of  “just vinified honey and no flavorings,” Zona says; and Once Bitten Twice Dry, a mead-cider co-ferment made from local apples. Our meads from Enlightenment are the St. Crimson—a “dry black mead” made from local black currants and honey, spontaneously fermented in oak barrels for more than a year—and Nought, a dry mead from raw wildflower honey, also spontaneously fermented (which means using the natural organisms present in the honey to start the fermentation process). Enlightenment mead maker Raphael Lyon also emphasized that while it’s accurate to connect mead to a Northern European tradition, that’s not the whole story: the beverage is an ancient and global tradition. His method, which uses only local ingredients he finds in New York State, connects him to that wider community. “When you look at mead making, everybody does it differently wherever they are,” he said, “but you also do it in the same way, which is that people are using what grows locally.”

The black currant mead in particular suited my beef stew. In order to determine this, my photographer and I liberally tasted all four, discovering for ourselves that mead’s high alcohol content and the additional sugar from the honey make it, as Coles said, “a sippin’ beverage.” We got drunk. Unlike Kristin, we did not fall asleep afterward on a mountainside or wake up to be lured away by elf maidens—unless, in the greater sense, that comes with embodiment and has already happened to us all.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Medieval Barley Bread

Adapted from Medieval-Recipes.com.

4 tsp yeast
1/3 cup brown ale
12 oz bread flour
12 oz barley flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups warm water
2 tsp honey

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Preheat the oven to 450.

Combine the yeast, ale, warm water, and honey in the bowl of a stand mixer, and let sit for five minutes, until the yeast is bubbly. If the mixture doesn’t puff up, the yeast is dead, and you’ll need to start again with different yeast.

While the yeast is proofing, mix together the bread flour, barley flour, and salt in a large bowl. Once the yeast has become bubbly, add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, and mix with the dough attachment. If it’s not coming together, add more warm water a little bit at a time until you have a coherent dough.

Grease a large bowl with some neutral oil. Place the dough inside, cover, and set aside in a warm place to rise until it doubles in volume (check after half an hour). Once the dough has risen, punch it down, shape it, and put it in the cooking vessel to rise again. (A three-and-a-half-quart Dutch oven or nine-by-four-inch loaf pan would work.)

Once the dough has risen, place in the preheated oven, and bake for forty-five minutes to an hour, until the top is golden and the bottom makes a hollow sound when you knock on it.

Serve with butter.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Beef Stew with Dill and Cherries

a pound of beef brisket, cut into three-quarter-inch chunks
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)
2 tbs flour
1 tbs butter
2 tbs neutral-tasting oil
a small onion, chopped
a rib of celery, chopped
1 1/2 cups stock or water
1/4 cup black currant mead (optional)
1/8 tsp celery seeds
1/3 cup dried cherries
1/2 cup dill, minced

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Liberally salt and pepper the brisket. Place the chunks of meat into a gallon freezer bag, add flour, and shake until the meat is evenly coated.

Put a three-and-a-half-quart Dutch oven over medium-high heat, and add the butter and oil. When the butter has melted and the foam has subsided, add about half the brisket, spaced well apart so the meat will brown instead of steam. Fry until the meat is well browned on all sides. Remove the first batch of meat, and brown the second batch. Remove and reserve.

Take the pan off the heat so it cools down a bit, and turn the heat down to low. After a few minutes, return the pan to the heat, add the onions and celery, and cook until the vegetables are wilted.

Return the meat to the pan, along with the stock, celery seeds, and black currant mead (if you’re using it). Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook, covered, for an hour. Remove the lid, and cook for forty-five minutes more, until the brisket is tender. Add the cherries in the last five minutes of cooking time and the dill at the very end. Taste for seasoning.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Gingerbread from Oslo

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen.

3 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
3/4 tsp salt
a stick of butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
an egg
1/2 cup molasses

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, and salt in a large bowl, and set aside. Beat butter and brown sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until fluffy. Mix in egg and molasses. Add flour mixture, mixing on low until just combined. Divide dough in half, and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate until medium-firm, about an hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough until it’s a quarter of an inch thick. I rolled mine a second time with a special rolling pin to make a pattern, but you could also use cutters to make shapes of your choice. Spread two inches apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper, and refrigerate again, about fifteen minutes. Bake cookies until crisp but not dark, about twelve to fourteen minutes. Let cool on wire racks.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Wine!

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona on Friday, June 4, at 6 P.M. for virtual Undset-themed drinks on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. We will discuss food and drink in Undset’s work. Special guest Raphael Lyon from Enlightenment Wines will join us.

The meads seen in the story are Au Contraire and Once Bitten Twice Dry, from Melovino, and St. Crimson and Nought, from Enlightenment Wines. Most can be ordered through the mead makers’ websites. If you don’t have a mead on hand, bring wine or ale—or all three, the way they did in Kristin Lavransdattar. Anyone who would like more specific advice on choosing a beverage for the tasting can email us (hank@thegrapesunwrapped.com).

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

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

Know Thyself

Frank Markham Skipworth, The Mirror, 1911. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When I was first beginning to teach, in graduate school, a friend of mine with more experience in the classroom told me about a study she’d come across. I can’t say whether this study actually exists. I’ve never looked for it, and it strikes me now as one of those well-traveled anecdotes that’s been passed from hand to hand, accumulating more baggage along the way, like blockchain. The study, she told me, found that students who were asked to evaluate their instructor five seconds into the first class of the semester gave more or less the same rating as they did at the end of the term. The instructor who was liked upon entering the room was still liked three months later. The instructor who appeared severe had not managed to change any minds.

Despite its implicit fatalism, my friend claimed that she found the study’s conclusion solacing. Once you accepted that your character was immediately transparent, there was no pressure to keep up appearances. If I felt nervous about how I was coming off throughout the semester, she advised, I should remember that the students’ minds were already made up. They’d had me figured out before I’d placed my supplies on the desk the first day, and nothing I could do would change it.

This is among the more deranged bits of advice I have received in my life. More than once, her words have popped into my head as I’ve approached a lectern or shaken someone’s hand for the first time. What is it that others discern so conclusively in those five seconds? It seemed to me a parable about the limits of self-knowledge. We spend our lives trying to figure out what kind of person we are, but others can understand us, in our entirety, at a glance.

Our identity “is implicit in everything we say and do,” writes Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, but we cannot see it ourselves. “On the contrary, it is more than likely that the ‘who,’ which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.”

The daimon—literally, “fate”—was a guardian spirit randomly assigned to a person at birth. If you were considered a blessed person, then your daimon was believed to be good. If you were mischievous, cowardly, or evil, this, too, was the fault of your guiding spirit. I imagine them like gargoyles, perched on the shoulders of their assigned humans (it’s hard for the English speaker not to think of the derivative demon). We cannot see our own daimon, but we occasionally catch glimpses. Most of us have heard ourselves described in terms that are fundamentally alien to our self-image. (“You’re always so earnest,” says the overly candid friend.) Camus once described such moments as encounters with the absurd: “The stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in the mirror, the familiar yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs.”

Mirrors, photographs, recordings—these technologies promise to reveal the daimon, to show us the self that others see. But how many of us can bear the evidence? A year or so ago, a well-known actor stormed out of a radio studio when a clip from one of his films was played during the interview, so intensely did he loathe the sound of his recorded voice. The story, which went viral for a day or two, could have easily been dismissed as another case of male egotism. Instead everyone decided, in that occult manner by which consensus coalesces online, to forgive him. Mental health was a common defense. I think we recognized his disgust all too well.

There is no alienation more profound than alienation from one’s voice, longtime synecdoche for the soul. More than once, after public speaking, I have been told that my voice is “soothing,” or some adjective to that effect. Those who said it earnestly believed, I think, that they were delivering a compliment, as though it were not common knowledge that good speakers are, first and foremost, dynamic. The self I knew was certain of her ideals and enthusiastic about her convictions, so how could my voice signal otherwise? But whenever I listened to recordings of myself, I could hear it: a flatness, feathered around the edges. And despite attempts to be more animated, I cannot seem to change it.

For the Greeks, character was fate. The command of the Delphic oracle—“Know thyself”—was not a mandate to plumb the soul but rather to accept the role that nature had assigned you, like an actor accepting a role in the theater. It’s not the kind of advice you hear very often in modern America, but fatalism, as my friend noted, has comforts of its own. When Virginia Woolf became consumed with jealousy over hearing another writer praised, she did not rush upstairs to her desk to try to do better. She walked for hours across the marsh muttering to herself, “I am I.”

*

Everyone believes they are the foremost authority on their own soul. For millennia, philosophers have argued otherwise. Plotinus was the first to point out that self-knowledge entails a weird self-doubling. If we are able to know ourselves, who is doing the knowing? And what is it, exactly, that is known? Schopenhauer called this predicament Weltknoten, the “world knot,” a paradox that many modern philosophers have solved by eliminating, wholesale, the interior view. The self is a bourgeois construct, a grammatical mistake, a software program designed to model potential actions and assess their survival payoffs.

It’s an unnerving thought for anyone, though especially for those of us who feel most ourselves when alone. When I was younger, my sense of self appeared most clearly when I was cloistered from the world and then disappeared the moment I was forced to interact with others. I left every social event haunted by my daimon, which was always saying things I did not mean, laughing at jokes I did not find funny, contributing to gossip about people I had nothing against. I always resolved to stop, to do better, but my actions appeared truly possessed, governed by a biological autopilot I was powerless to override.

If a soul exists only in private, can it be said to exist at all?

Like many people who become writers, I believed the page offered a way out, a loophole in the world knot. It was only there, with work and deliberation, that the soul became flesh and I could speak in a voice I recognized as my own. The self could in fact be doubled into object and observer, persona and author. Wasn’t this philosophically profound? Consciousness could be dismissed as an illusion, but words on paper could not. And where had those words originated if not from the self I alone knew best?

But I am no longer so naive. Language, while you’re working with it, is fluid and supple, tempting you to believe it can preserve the living, breathing soul. Return years later to something you wrote, though, and you will find in place of your reflection the stony grimace of the gargoyle. All your vanities and self-delusions, everything you were blind to—it’s all right there for the world to see. A writer friend of mine put it this way: “I can tell, of course, that I’m the one who wrote it, the way I can recognize my voice in recordings. But it’s not me.”

Writing is no longer considered a technology, but in its early days, it, too, was criticized for distorting a person’s image. The problem, Socrates complains in Plato’s Phaedrus, is that consciousness dies the moment it hits the page. Ask the written words a question, and they will not answer. “They go on telling just the same thing forever.”

*

What we want is to see the self objectively—not from any particular view but from a perspective that is neutral, impartial, and eternal. This is why we invented God, the original view from nowhere, a consciousness floating high in the ether, untainted by the spatial and temporal, capable of seeing the entire world sub specie aeternitatis.

Today we would say “at scale.” Algorithms, like the gods of ages past, know us objectively because they see the world in petabytes, from heights we cannot even fathom, and also because they think only in math, which has no opinions (or so it’s believed). But what do they have to say about us? So little of it is revelatory.

This product, the algorithms claim, was purchased by “people like you.”

“Since you like dark indie comedies … ”

The contemporary experience of the absurd: to see oneself as the machines do, as a faceless member of a data set, the soul reduced to the crude language of consumer categories. But quarreling with predictive analytics is as futile as arguing with fate. The numbers don’t lie. I did watch those movies.

We take consolation in the belief that we can still control our digital image. The teenager creating her first profile must experience the same thrill of possibility I felt putting pen to page: here is a medium—information! form without substance!—that can transmit and preserve the immaterial soul. But when she scrolls through her posts years later, won’t she, too, find that her self has solidified, that the idol has betrayed her? Words, once they leave the mind, become part of the material, mechanical world: they keep saying the same things.

Marshall McLuhan once pointed out that the myth of Narcissus is frequently misinterpreted. It is not love that causes the youth to stare at his image, but profound alienation. The point of the myth is that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” Stare too long at the objectivized self and you will become the dead matter you behold. The alienation will eventually subside, and you will begin to identify so fully with the daimon that the interior self disappears.

Several years ago, during a season when I was doing a number of podcasts and radio appearances, I began to hear my true voice, the one from the recordings, instead of the voice in my head. The shift was decisive—it never shifted back. I can no longer remember my private voice, or rather I can remember it vaguely, like the voice of a loved one who has died. The actor who stormed out of the studio was trying to avoid this fate, clinging to his private image, closing his ears against all evidence to the contrary. How many celebrities have the same resolve? You can stand beside the public self for only so long, a custodian to a statue, before the alienation becomes intolerable and you resolve to inhabit the detestable monument. Guy de Maupassant ate lunch every day at a restaurant inside the Eiffel Tower, despite not liking the food. It was the only place in Paris, he said, where he didn’t have to look at it.

*

In college, I became friends with a woman I deeply admired who possessed many of the qualities I’d always reviled in myself. On her, they did not look like faults. She was soft-spoken but not timid, methodical but not rigid. When she showed up to class in mismatched clothes, without having brushed her hair, it was not evidence of carelessness but a sign of how serious she was. I doubt that I wore the same qualities as well as she did, but she changed the way I thought about them.

Aristotle taught that knowledge of self could be found through knowledge of the other. We understand what it means to be noble and honest because we see and admire these qualities in our friends. We recognize that our own actions are vile only when we see someone else doing the same. One of his followers put it this way: “So as when we want to see our own face, we see it by looking in a mirror, similarly when we wish to know ourselves, we can do so by looking at a friend, for a friend, as we say, is another self.”

The drama of self-knowledge is often presented as a war between subjective and objective, an eternal tension between the first person and the omniscient third. We hunt for the perfectly neutral reflection, listen for our souls in the echo traveling down our communications channels. But a medium is only a medium if there is someone on the other end. A blank page is no more a mirror than an algorithm is. Consciousness can be reflected only by another consciousness.

Christ believed we saw faults in others that we remained blind to in ourselves: you criticize the splinter in your brother’s eye while ignoring the log in your own. But are we not also more ready to forgive others their faults than we are to forgive ourselves our own? A common tactic in therapy is to ask the patient to comfort herself as though she were another person, in some cases a child. It is within this space of intersubjectivity that it becomes possible to see oneself clearly and experience compassion.

Simone Weil: “I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”

If the writing process offers any glimmers of enlightenment, it stems from the effort to see yourself through the eyes of the reader, to put yourself in her place and read your words as though they were the words of another. Writing is not a reflection of the self but its transmutation. The act requires externalizing the contents of one’s mind into a new form that can be seen and understood by someone else. There is no other avenue to self-knowledge.

The novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein argues that writing is an act of self-recognition, but one that requires two parties. “This very private, personal, particular chunk of one’s inner life must be turned, in the process of its objectification, into something that will be receptive to reciprocal influxes from the inner lives of readers.”

I suppose that is what I am doing now—what I have been doing for most of my life: sending my daimon out into the world so that you can see it, so that I can, too.

 

Meghan O’Gieblyn’s book God Human Animal Machine will be published by Doubleday in August.

More Pain Than Anyone Should Be Expected to Bear

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

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Photo: Lucy Scholes.

I first came across the poet and short story writer Frances Bellerby’s fiction when I was working on my Ph.D. My subject was sibling relationships in mid-twentieth-century British literature, and some dusty avenue of research led me to Bellerby—a name I had not come across before and haven’t since, bar this article on the treasure trove that is the Neglected Books website—quite a few of whose short stories feature brother-and-sister pairs. Ultimately, I didn’t reference her work in my finished thesis, but neither did I forget some of the haunting images therein. Two children in the gloaming, the descending darkness bringing with it a premonition of war. The strange out-of-body experience of a child—a reaction to witnessing a horrible accident—that momentarily renders her unable to identify the scratched and bloody hand in front of her as her own, caught on blackberry brambles. Or simply the tableau of a cozy drawing room on a winter’s evening, seen through the eyes of a child for whom it’s usually out of bounds, a fire roaring in the grate, the heavy curtains drawn against the cold night outside, and a striking blue vase filled with brilliant bronze chrysanthemums.

Returning to Bellerby’s stories this year, I was relieved to discover that they’re every bit as remarkable as I’d remembered. All the more so, in fact, when I learned how the death of her beloved brother, Jack—killed, age eighteen, in World War I—influenced much of what she wrote. Sadly, Jack’s death was only the first in a series of tragedies that blighted a life marked by considerably more pain and suffering—both physical and psychological—than anyone should be expected to bear, let alone spin into accomplished, poignant writing. As fellow poet Charles Causley wrote on the occasion of Bellerby’s death, in 1975, she was “a true original.”

Bellerby was born in Bristol in 1899. Her childhood was dominated by the socialist mission work of her father, the Reverend F. Talbot Parker. He, his wife, and their two children lived among the city’s very poorest residents, where the Reverend felt his work was most needed. It was a spartan, isolated existence marked by self-sacrifice, the psychological effects of which reached far beyond Bellerby’s youth. She married John Rotherford Bellerby, an economist-turned-activist, in 1929, though the couple separated after a decade or so. From then on, Bellerby lived alone—initially at Plash Mill, a thatched cottage on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall that inspired much of her poetry, imbuing her work with that “powerful sense of place” Causley so admired. Following serious illness—she was diagnosed with cancer in both breasts, treated with a grueling thrice-weekly course of radiation only to be told it had been unsuccessful and she had only months left to live, before being saved by a double mastectomy—she relocated to Devon in the early fifties, where she lived until her death. Bellerby had no children, though whether from choice or circumstance, it’s unclear. Her unpublished notebooks hint that she suffered gynecological complications as a consequence of a freak accident in June 1930 that, in her own words, “ruined my adult life”: a back injury sustained from an awkward fall that left her crippled. From this point on, pain was her ever-present companion. Add to this, if you can imagine it, the mental anguish caused by first her brother’s death and, later,  in 1932, her mother’s suicide, after which Bellerby wrote, “I suffered and broke and died with her.”

Bellerby’s first published work appeared in the Bristol Times and Mirror in the early twenties. In 1927, she took a staff job as the drama critic in the paper’s London office, though her tenure there was short-lived. She published Shadowy Bricks, an educational tract written in the guise of a novel set in a fictional rural progressive school, in 1932. Not long before, Bellerby’s husband had founded The Neighbours, a small volunteer organization for general social welfare—“one of the many idealistic though highly theoretical attempts at that time by middle-class intellectuals to awake a social conscience at the plight of the poor,” explains Bellerby’s editor Robert Gittings in his introduction to the 1986 Enitharmon Press edition of her Selected Poems—and he harnessed her literary talents in service of spreading the word about their cause. Of Shadowy Bricks, the TLS’s critic noted that if it hadn’t been for the Bishop of Liverpool’s enlightening introduction, “we might have read on some considerable way before realizing that we were being instructed.”

Although her first collection of short stories, Come to an End, was published in 1939, it wasn’t until she’d separated from her husband that Bellerby began producing her best work. According to Gittings, she “never considered herself a novelist”; nevertheless, it was the favorable reviews and sales of Hath the Rain a Father? (1946)—a novel that draws heavily on her childhood, in particular her relationship with her father—that encouraged her to publish her first collection of verse, Plash Mill (1947).

Bellerby remains best known—if remembered at all—for her poetry, of which she published three further volumes, as well as two more short story collections: The Acorn and the Cup (1948) and A Breathless Child (1952). Copies of these are relatively hard to find, so I had to content myself with reading the Enitharmon Press edition of Selected Stories (1986), chosen and edited by Jeremy Hooker. When one surveys the breadth of her career in this single volume, what stands out is the guile and grace with which she depicts a child’s-eye view of the world. “It has always seemed to me much stranger that we should forget than we should remember, early childhood,” Causley reports Bellerby once remarking. Not that these are stories of innocent childhood idylls. On the contrary, death is ever present, a curtain that’s about to fall, smashing the known world to smithereens in the process. She pinpoints the true terror of such moments so precisely, preserving, as if in aspic, that second in which everything changes and nothing is ever the same again. This, perhaps, is what helps her avoid any sentimentality; as another critic in the TLS praised, “she keeps a certain healthy core of hardness and objective observation in her writing.”

*

One of the most memorable and dazzling examples of this destruction is “The Cut Finger,” a story in which five-year-old Judith has her worldview rearranged twice over. The first instance deals in wonderment and joy; the second, devastation and despair. The story opens with Judith’s mother asking whether she’d enjoy a winter trip to the coast—Judith’s ailing father needs the sea air. The child replies in the affirmative, calm almost to the point of disinterest, but really, she’s “astounded and overwhelmed” by what’s more a revelation than an invitation:

It was too new to be accepted with equanimity, too far outside her experience actual or imaginative. It had never been realised by Judith that the seaside continued beyond the golden stretch of summer holidays. Yet now all in a moment she had to grasp that it was possible to go there when tangerines, tinsel and holly were still realities.

The second of these Damascene moments occurs once the family is ensconced in their new lodgings. Sent outside one afternoon to play alone in the garden, Judith accidentally cuts her finger. Tiptoeing into the still house, she spies her father resting on the sofa in the sitting room. “Poor Daddy,” she thinks innocently, as she climbs the stairs in search of her mother, “he must be tired for he wasn’t even reading.” But awaiting her aloft is a scene that destroys “the whole familiar world and scattered in ruthless confusion all her trusted values”: her mother, “face downwards, crying … ” This ellipsis marks a rending in the fabric of Judith’s world. She creeps away, back into the now twilit garden, skulking like a wounded animal, replaying the “appalling” scene: “This cherishing omnipotence writhing face-downwards on a bed, sobbing into the pillow—so that the whole world, yes, the whole established world, had been blown sky-high and come hurtling down in fragments anyhow, anywhere.” That these two opposing moments bookend the story provides a formal elegance that further elevates the power of the piece, but Bellerby often uses elusive but integral structural mechanisms to convey meaning in her stories. “Her verse demonstrates, to a remarkable degree, the closeness of the observer to the observed. With great subtlety, experience is seen to be freshly re-created, renewed, and transmitted unerringly to the reader,” wrote Causley—praise that also applies to her prose.

In both “Pre-War” and “The Carol,” for example, a carefully positioned em dash signifies a sudden dissolution of life itself. In the former, twelve-year-old Roger and his nine-year-old sister, Anne, climb up onto the roof of their house, where he affixes a flag-flying toy soldier to the stones, under which he carves their initials and the date: 1/1/11. “I’m going to leave something here that’ll stay for ever,” he tells Anne. “Years and years on other people will be living here, another vicar of this parish and his wife and their sons and daughters, and one of the sons, perhaps with a kid sister, will climb up here like we have, perhaps on some New Year’s Day, and then he’ll find—this!” The prospect of this unspecified future in which she and her brother play no part suddenly overwhelms Anne, and like the little girl blackberrying in “Poor Martha”—a scene from which I described at the beginning of this essay—she, too, endures a strange sense of physical dislocation. “Down there all was just as usual,” she thinks looking out around them, “but up here nothing was as usual, nothing at all—”

Meanwhile, in “The Carol,” a young man seemingly visiting his childhood home after some unspecified absence is suddenly confronted by his own death. As he mooches about his bedroom, whistling the same carol that’s been stuck in his head for years, his eye is caught by a snapshot in which he’s wearing a uniform: “Noticing written words at the foot of the photograph, he read: ‘Killed in Action at Givenchy, Aged 18, August 8th, 1915.’ This gave him a tremendous shock—” This revelation is immediately followed by a line break, the tumbling final sentence of the story suddenly switching to the point of view of his grieving mother:

So when his mother, hearing, as she often did, the softly whistled carol, ran upstairs and opened the door to look in, the room was, as usual, empty.

*

The date of the boy’s death matches that of Bellerby’s brother, Jack. Impatient to do his bit, Jack had enlisted at eighteen—though gave his age as twenty-two—and was blown to pieces only months later. Before he left for France, he apparently told his father that he knew he would be killed, but that it was a better fate than returning maimed. As Gittings explains, Bellerby “always regarded this death ‘which I saw through tears, as absolute perfection’ in the light of a triumphant fulfilment of his own wish.” Not that this offered her any comfort. Instead, she describes Jack’s death as having broken her and her parents’ lives apart, a view she reiterates in the story “Winter Evening,” in which a woman, thinking back long after the fact, declares that the war “splintered her brittle world.” With this knowledge in mind, the fear expressed by the sister in “Pre-War” becomes uncannily prophetic; the absence she visualizes is that of her brother’s impending death.

In Women’s Fiction and the Great War (1997), Nathalie Blondel argues that Bellerby spent the rest of her life replaying this grief in her fiction. “People live double lives” in Bellerby’s stories, Blondel explains: they exist in the land of the living while also “dwelling in memories of the dead.” Like Sabine Coelsch-Foisner—who, in her chapter on women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth-century in The British and Irish Short Story (2008), argues that “Bellerby’s stories typically convey a halt in the continuum of life and verge on the unspeakable”—Blondel highlights how Bellerby demonstrates this linguistically: “the estrangement of the bereaved from the world of the living is imaged through their estrangement from language itself.”

The impact of her brother’s death manifests most explicitly in these stories that make direct reference to the war, but grief filters into many of the other pieces, too: “Come to an End,” in which a father struggles to tell his son that the boy’s little sister has been killed in an accident, or “Such an Experienced House,” another unexpected ghost story, in which a musically gifted child creeps downstairs one night to find out who’s playing the piano so beautifully, only to be confronted with an apparition of herself at the keys. As Hooker makes clear, Bellerby’s stories are, “in many cases, fictional transformations and projections of the experiences which shaped her life.” He goes further, arguing that she’s “a haunting writer because she herself was haunted by what she had suffered and seen, and sought to understand,” something that also helps to explain her interest in phantasmagoria.

Bellerby is one of the six women short story writers that Coelsch-Foisner discusses, but she’s the only one whose work is out of print today. The rest—Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen—aren’t just discussed in academic volumes like that in which Coelsch-Foisner’s chapter appears, they’re some of the most famous white women writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Bellerby, meanwhile, is all but unknown. She didn’t publish prolifically like Woolf or Townsend Warner; nor did she move in the right literary circles, like Bowen; nor still, burn briefly but brightly, like Mansfield. In many ways, Rhys is her nearest counterpart. Not only did both women live in relative anonymity and isolation—and, even more of a coincidence, not that far from each other, first in Cornwall and then in Devon—the two were also unhappy and desperately lonely. “Desolate. Desolate. Desolate. Frightened, broken, alone,” reads a heartbreaking entry in one of Bellerby’s notebooks from the sixties, when circulatory trouble left her further incapacitated and in additional pain. The difference, of course, is that Rhys was plucked from obscurity and given the chance at a blazing second act: despite her ongoing battle with alcoholism, she published her best and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966, after a hefty twenty-seven-year silence. Bellerby, meanwhile, enjoyed no such late-in-life rejuvenation. As happens with many writers, she faded away, and so did her work. Yet her resilience—although not such a flashy story—deserves our acknowledgement and admiration. She continued to write and publish poetry until the bitter end. Gittings writes that a newly printed copy of Bellerby’s final volume, First-Known and Other Poems—which was dedicated to her long-dead mother—was put into its author’s hands only two days before she died.

 

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.

Redux: Have No Mercy, Gardener

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.

Penelope Lively.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re out in the garden. Read on for Penelope Lively’s Art of Fiction interview, Diane Williams’s short story “Garden Magic,” and Allison Funk’s poem “On Pruning.”

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, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

 

Penelope Lively, The Art of Fiction No. 241
Issue no. 226 (Fall 2018)

If I hadn’t got a book on the go, I don’t know what I’d be doing. Even during the times I’m not actually writing, I’m going over it in my mind, when I’m gardening or the like, wondering whether I’m getting such-and-such a character right or whether there’s a problem here or there.

 

Photo: SKsiddhartthan. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Garden Magic
By Diane Williams
Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)

I am in a room with … I am in a room where decisions are unlikely to be thought out, where I lack strong enough character and vital drive to take my dark thoughts and plant them at the right time like spring bulbs.

 

1897 illustrated seed catalogue. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

On Pruning
By Allison Funk
Issue no. 152 (Fall 1999)

Cut it way back.
Do not be afraid to pinch the first,
the only blossom. The berry cannot thrive
in freedom. Have no mercy,

gardener. Train the tree to a leader
crowned by the uppermost bud.
Make ten o’clock your angle
for the outstretched limbs
of the apple. Prune
when the knife is sharp,
taking care that the scar be neat.
To share the surgeon’s belief in healing,
you must trust what has been taken from you
is a blessing …

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

The Joys and Sorrows of Aunthood

In Lee Lai’s debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit , a queer couple navigates personal and familial struggles between joyful and imaginative playdates with their six-year-old niece, Nessie. Through black-and-gray illustrations, Lai captures the complex emotional tenor of Bron and Ray’s relationship with Nessie, their respective sisters, and each other. In the excerpt below, an afternoon with Nessie’s fun aunts is cut short by a phone call. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist and illustrator living in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal), Quebec. Her short story comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Lifted Brow, and Everyday Feminism.

From Stone Fruit , by Lee Lai, published this week by Fantagraphics Books. Copyright © Lee Lai. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

Climbing Desolation Peak

Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength , follows the artist through a lifetime of fitness and exercise. These memories and musings are interspersed with transcendentalists, Romantics, Eastern philosophers, and other literary figures who shed light on our obsession with transformation and transcendence. In the excerpt below, Bechdel follows in Jack Kerouac’s footsteps up the Matterhorn, only to find the hike to be far more difficult than expected, and with surprising lessons in store. 

 

 

 

 

Alison Bechdel’s cult following for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her best-selling memoirs, Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Her many honors include being named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont.

Excerpted from  The Secret to Superhuman Strength , by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2021 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of HMH Books & Media. All rights reserved.