The Paris Review's Blog, page 119

Four Memories of Giancarlo DiTrapano

Giancarlo DiTrapano, the fearless founder, publisher, and editor of Tyrant Books, died this past week at the age of forty-seven. Fiercely independent and loyal to his writers through and through, he was an irreplaceable presence in the literary world, a one-man powerhouse of the avant-garde. With New York Tyrant magazine, he championed rising talents such as Rachel B. Glaser and Brandon Hobson, and his record with Tyrant was astounding: over the course of a little more than a decade, he published Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life, an omnibus of Garielle Lutz’s short stories, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life (an excerpt from which appeared in the Fall 2014 issue and received the 2015 Plimpton Prize), and plenty of other strange, deeply felt, highly original books. His work was far from finished. In the months preceding his death, he had been cementing plans to launch a new press. Below, four of his writers and friends (with DiTrapano, there was little distinction) remember his generosity, dark sense of humor, and commitment to literature.

Giancarlo DiTrapano. Photo courtesy of Chelsea Hodson / MORS TUA VITA MEA Workshop.

I was at a reading, looking at a novel for sale on a folding table. A guy walked to my side and said what’s up. I said I wanted to buy the novel but had spent all my money on beer. “Take it,” he said. Looked like somebody I’d work construction with. “Take it.” He put the book in my hand. This was the publisher of the book, Giancarlo DiTrapano. An open person, a kind person. He’d just give a stranger something, no reason. I knew him only five years. Gone way, way, way too soon. Can’t think of anybody cooler. Was more alive than anybody else I knew.

I’ve always admired people who dream to do something and then seemingly before they’ve even woken up from the dream, there they are in the midst of it. At a kitchen table in a cramped apartment, launching something beautiful. That’s what he did. There’s a lot of talk about being “punk rock,” about being an individual—how is it even possible to walk one’s own path, by one’s own standards? I don’t know. But all you’d have to do is look at my shelf of releases from Tyrant Books. There they are, twenty of them in a row. Open any one. You can see the answer in there. Authors he deeply loved. Telling stories they had to tell. Each author could explain how passionate Giancarlo was. How when he believed in someone, in something, it was almost impossible to change his mind. You might get in a blowout fight over what the book needed, but in the end, what was birthed into the world was right, was beloved. Was real. Didn’t come out of a boardroom. The opposite. He rooted for the underdog. He helped the underdog come up into brighter light.

How to explain? Here’s something: most people think of Twitter as a wasteland. But Giancarlo loved it because it was raw language. People being themselves, saying too much, free and loose, with too much blood and guts. And that’s how he discovered many artists. One of the nicest stories I heard was him talking about getting the manuscript for the excellent novel Welfare, by Steve Anwyll. An unsolicited DM asking if Giancarlo wanted to read the manuscript came in to his Twitter. Sure, send it. Gian opened the file in bed around midnight and kept reading and reading and couldn’t pull his eyes off. The sun came up. He finished the book and wrote an email to Steve and said he wanted to publish it. That’s all it was. No middle man. No overly careful, calculated consideration. Let’s do this. Let’s go. This must come into the world.

I wish everybody who reads this remembrance could become more like that. What do you want to see come into the world? How can you bring it into the world today, even just a little bit? There’s much more to say about Gian—he was hilarious, playful, a hero of mine, a friend, always a prince to me, even when he should have screamed. One time I was waiting for him on a street corner, expecting him to come up one way when he came around the other and pantomimed shooting me to death with a hundred bullets. “Got ya, sucker.” Yeah, you did. Rest in peace, Gian. Much respect to you, much love.

 

Bud Smith is a writer from Jersey City, New Jersey. His short story “Violets” appeared in the Summer 2020 issue.

*

On December 25, 2020, Gian tweeted a quote from Pope Francis: “The son of God was born an outcast to tell us that every outcast is a child of God.” Unlike so many, Gian actually treated outcasts like children of God. He loved them. His heart was bigger than any one person could contain; it overflowed out of him, into everyone he knew, and into the books he published. His ability to recognize something intangible in me and so many others, something that could be nourished and turned into literature, was truly rare. Through our years of constantly ripping on each other, Gian loved, encouraged, and kept me, giving me the confidence and space to grow. He essentially threw me the keys to New York Tyrant magazine, and he did the same when I wanted to start editing books. The only time I asked him for help with editing something, he said, “You already know what to do.”

I’ve joked that even after his death, Gian has still managed to saddle me with a bunch of underpaid work. I wish he were around so I could tell him how much I want to kill him. Gian was one of the few people who you could never go too far with; I trusted him in this emotional, intimate way. Almost immediately after he died, I kept thinking of dark jokes about it that I wished I could tell him. This, maybe most of all, is what I’ll miss. Gian was my friend.

 

Jordan Castro is the author of The Novelist (forthcoming June 2022 from Soft Skull) and the editor of Pets: An Anthology (Tyrant, 2020) and New York Tyrant magazine.

*

We ate French onion soup at the Odeon last week. We laughed about how years ago I’d tweeted a picture of a book of my tweets my friend had printed, and pretended Tyrant published it. It was a joke, but he DMed and asked who had really published it. This guy I’d idolized for years was in my DMs. Twitter was magic and so was he. He asked if I had a book. So of course I said yes I’ll send it right over. I rushed to the library at 2 A.M. and started writing this book just for him. Years later … it was done, he read it, and we were at the Odeon eating French onion soup, laughing. I keep listening to these WhatsApp voice memos he sent me while tripping on acid. God, he had the best voice and he said the best stuff. We talked about everything and nothing, it was so exciting, really magic—that’s the only word that comes to mind when I talk about him—like that first DM, so quick and so exciting. Everything he said made me want to start a book. So I did, because he asked.

 

Honor Levy graduated from Bennington College in 2020. Her first novel was set to be published by DiTrapano’s new press.

*

Gian was my editor, publisher, friend, uncle, dad, damn spiritual guide. He lived to tend—dump gasoline onto—the eternal flame. I loved him for that.

 

Sean Thor Conroe is an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia University. His first novel, FUCCBOI, was slated for release by DiTrapano’s new press.

Redux: A Man Says Yes without Knowing

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.

Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of Poets at Work, our latest anthology of interviews. Read on for work by three of the writers included in the book: Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Ishmael Reed’s poem “The Diabetic Dreams of Cake,” and Pablo Neruda’s poem “Emerging.” You can also read Paris Review poetry editor Vijay Seshadri’s introduction to the book on the Daily.

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.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27
Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981)

I can write prose on a typewriter. Not poetry. Nobody can read my writing so I write letters on it. And I’ve finally trained myself so I can write prose on it and then correct a great deal. But for poetry I use a pen. About halfway through sometimes I’ll type out a few lines to see how they look.

 

Floor of the New York Stock Exchange, 1963. Photo: Thomas J. O’Halloran. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Diabetic Dreams of Cake
By Ishmael Reed
Issue no. 218 (Fall 2016)

“Wall Street says that cake sales are low”
Or to put it bluntly
“Cake is fizz”
So why is a diabetic dreaming of cake
Asked to leave a temple
Because he didn’t know that rice cakes
Were sacrament?
(He managed to jam some into his pockets)
He dreamed that Mount Diablo was a Devil’s food cake
He began to munch it down until his path was
Interrupted by his Pancreas
The Pancreas had sticklike arms and legs
It was frowning
It put up a hand and beckoned him to halt
He pushed aside the Pancreas and finished his
Meal …

 

Photo: Dinesh Valke. CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Emerging
By Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid
Issue no. 57 (Spring 1974)

A man says yes without knowing
how to decide even what the question is,
and is caught up, and then is carried along
and never again escapes from his own cocoon;
and that’s how we are, forever falling
into the deep well of other beings;
and one thread wraps itself around our necks,
another entwines a foot, and then it is impossible,
impossible to move except in the well —
nobody can rescue us from other people …

 

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 Tarot Is a Chameleon

Leonora Carrington, Playing Tarot, ca. 1995, graphite and gouache on paper, 22 x 36 1/4″. Private collection. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, New York.

“With a mysterious smile on her lips,” writes the Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, “the painter whispered to me, ‘What you just dictated to me is the secret. As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it. That tarot is a chameleon.’ ”

This comes from Jodorowsky’s The Book of Tarot; the painter in question is Leonora Carrington, the British-born, Mexico City–based surrealist famed in life and death as much for her strange, entrancing writings as for her visual art. And this quote appears in another book, Fulgur Press’s The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, which reproduces her newly discovered illustration of the Major Arcana. The tarot is a chameleon, yes, but as Carrington’s vision of it shows, so, too, is it a chance for both the imposition and the abandonment of narrative; in Carrington’s hands, as with her fiction, there is an embrace of the illogical, the fictive, the dream.

 

Leonora Carrington, The Fool, oil on board, ca. 1955, 6 1/4 x 5 1/2″. Private collection. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, New York.

 

Here, the Fool, the beginning of the deck. Card zero. The man strides forward, stick in hand, into the unknown. Some tarot readers call the arc of the Major Arcana the Fool’s Journey, the deck itself the story of this man’s path through life, a metaphor for the human condition. The palette is blue, verging on turquoise; some kind of animal—a dog? a goat?—runs beside the man, nipping at his thigh. In Carrington’s fiction, too, the animal and the human are always interacting in strange ways that blur the boundaries between the two. “Her dressing gown was made of live bats,” goes a line in her short story “The House of Fear,” while in “Cast Down by Sadness,” a character proclaims, “I have a dress made entirely of the heads of cats.” In “As They Rode along the Edge,” a woman makes love to a handsome, doomed boar underneath a mountain of cats. Upon giving birth to “seven little boars,” she keeps the one that most resembles its late father and kills the others, boiling them “for herself and the cats, as a funeral feast.”

The tarot demands a similar sense of porousness. Technically, you’re not supposed to purchase a deck for yourself; to prime your new cards, you’re meant to sleep with them near or under your pillow, a way for the dreamstuff in your head to leak out onto all seventy-eight cards. The tarot consists of two kinds of cards, the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. Think of the Major in terms of Jungian archetypes, big energies, figures borrowed from and repeated in mythoi the world over. The Minor, made up of four decks—Cups, Wands, Pentacles, and Swords, possibly cribbed from a Renaissance Italian card game—can be thought of as lower echoes of the same forces embodied by the Major Arcana. I’ve bought all my own decks, which is perhaps unlucky, but I’ve been in the mood to take fate into my own hands. This is what it feels like when I read for friends, like I’m shuffling fates—like Clotho spinning her thread. “Use this as a guide,” I warn them. “It’s just a tool, a method of clarification. You still have free will.”

Carrington was well aware of the power of one’s free will. She took her fate in her own hands when, at the age of twenty, she ran off with the artist Max Ernst, abandoning the life laid out for her by her wealthy family. “There’s no proper ending to this story,” concludes another of her tales, this one from the early fifties. “There’s no ending because the episode is true, because all the people are still alive, and everyone is following his destiny.”

The element of choice is there also in her version of the Lovers, that shadowy second meaning so often willfully overlooked by those intent on seeking love. A male figure stands between two women; a sharp-edged, faceless Cupid—love is blind, after all—readies his decision-making bow. The Lovers—the card of Gemini, the two-faced twins—can be a card of passionate, heady partnership, of complementary energies and attraction in all its forms, but rarely is it a card of total devotion. Love and sex do not always square with commitment and longevity, and this is part of the slipperiness of the Lovers: the card of love, the card of decisions, the possibility of paths diverging.

Carrington’s Hanged Man is one of the loveliest versions I’ve seen, all purple and gold, with its odd message of surrender. The Hanged Man is also a card of crossroads, of biding one’s time; it pictures a man strung up by his heels and hung upside down, as was once done to traitors in Renaissance Italy. The pittura infamante, they called it: a “defaming portrait” of a thief, a fraud, a swindler. But I’ve also read of the card’s association with Odin, that mysterious Viking god who hung himself upside down from a tree for three days in order to gain wisdom. Animal or human sacrifices made in Odin’s honor were also strung up from trees, in groups of nine, swaying in ghostly sacred groves. Or maybe it’s a portrait of Judas, betrayer of Christ. In Carrington’s version, the hanged man stares out calmly, a slight smile on his face. It is a card of thresholds, of doorways, of change in the air—but not yet. It is a card of holding off decisions, letting time decide what it will.

The Hanged Man always makes my mind drift to Hecate, the Greek goddess of crossroads; also, the moon. Also, the Moon—that is, the card marked number eighteen in the deck. Carrington’s rendition of the Moon is silvery and dominated by twos: two towers that look like the upright, not-yet-fallen version of the Tower, the card of destruction and necessary change; two dogs, howling; two pincers of a scorpion—Scorpio?—raised at the two points of the crescent moon as it combines with a full circle. Something strange happens whenever there’s a full moon, a kinetic energy in the air. We all know but can’t explain it. Yesterday morning, a friend told me she’d just realized what day it was that she’d gotten into a big fight with her partner last month. She had checked her journal and her calendar. She couldn’t believe it. The full moon.

 

Leonora Carrington, The Moon, ca. 1955, oil and silver leaf on board, 6 1/4 x 5 1/2″. Private collection. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, New York.

 

Writing, like tarot, like painting, is an attempt to impose order on what is fundamentally without order. Yet even the results of these transformations, these transubstantiations, this alchemy of changing thought into a more concrete form of expression, cannot fully escape their origins. Freudian slips, puns, free associations, automatic writing, automatic drawing—the unconscious rears its head. And so, too, with a tarot reading must one piece together a story from the symbols presented. The most famous type of tarot spread, the Celtic Cross, offers past, present, the immediate future, one’s motivations, the motivations of another, and the final outcome, its ten cards resembling nothing so much as the structure of fiction.

I pulled a tarot card just before I wrote this paragraph. I wanted some kind of answer, though the question was abstract, something along the lines of, What should I know to end this essay? After shuffling, when it felt right—you just know—I pulled the Three of Swords and breathed in sharply. This is not a card that appears in Carrington’s tarot—it’s from the Minor Arcana—but the second card I pulled as a clarifier, the Star, is.

The Three of Swords is a card, quite literally, of endings. It’s most often associated with the end of a romantic relationship, a betrayal of some sort, and in its traditional imagery, three swords pierce a heart. It is not a particularly happy card. But the Star, often associated with Aquarius, provides a message of hope. In Carrington’s gold-and-blue imagining of it, a woman pours two jugs of water into the ground; it’s beautiful, but it’s also a little odd. In combination, the message of these two cards is clear, isn’t it? Time to finish the damn essay. And with that—finis.

 

Rhian Sasseen is the engagement editor of The Paris Review. Her work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Literary Hub, The Nation, and more.

The Making of Billy Wilder

Portrait of young “Billie” Wilder, ca. 1926. Courtesy of the Film Archiv Austria.

Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known—and widely published, in Berlin and Vienna—as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Kraków, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the y, as did her intense, infectious love for all things American. “Billie was her American boy,” insists Ed Sikov in On Sunset Boulevard, his definitive biography of the internationally acclaimed writer and director.

Wilder spent the first years of his life in Kraków, where his father, the Galician-born Max (né Hersch Mendel), had started his career in the restaurant world as a waiter and then, after Billie’s birth, as the manager of a small chain of railway cafés along the Vienna-to-Lemberg line. When this gambit lost steam, Max opened a hotel and restaurant known as Hotel City in the heart of Kraków, not far from the Wawel Castle. A hyperactive child, known for flitting about with bursts of speed and energy, Billie was prone to troublemaking: he developed an early habit of swiping tips left on the tables at his father’s hotel restaurant and for snookering unsuspecting guests at the pool table. After all, he was the rightful bearer of a last name that conjures up, in both German and English, a devilish assortment of idiomatic expressions suggestive of a feral beast, a wild man, even a lunatic. “Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder,” his second wife, Audrey, once remarked, “he behaved like Billy Wilder.”

The Wilder family soon moved to Vienna, where assimilated Jews of their ilk could better pursue their dreams of upward mobility. They lived in an apartment in the city’s First District, the hub of culture and commerce, just across the Danube from the Leopoldstadt, the neighborhood known for its unusually high concentration of recently arrived Jews from Galicia and other regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the monarchy collapsed, after World War I, the Wilders were considered to be subjects of Poland and, despite repeated efforts, were unable to attain Austrian citizenship. Billie attended secondary school in the city’s Eighth District, in the so-called Josefstadt, but his focus was often elsewhere. Across the street from his school was a tawdry “hotel by the hour” called the Stadion; he liked to watch for hours on end as patrons went in and out, trying to imagine the kinds of human transactions taking place inside. He also spent long hours in the dark catching matinees at the Urania, the Rotenturm Kino, and other cherished Viennese movie houses. Any chance to take in a picture show, to watch a boxing match, or to land a seat in a card game was a welcome chance for young Billie.

Although Wilder père had other plans for his son—a respectable, stable career in the law, an exalted path for good Jewish boys of interwar Vienna—Billie was drawn, almost habitually, to the seductive world of urban and popular culture and to the stories generated and told from within it. “I just fought with my father to become a lawyer,” he recounted for the filmmaker Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Wilder: “That I didn’t want to do, and I saved myself, by having become a newspaperman, a reporter, very badly paid.” As he explains a bit further in the same interview, “I started out with crossword puzzles, and I signed them.” (Toward the end of his life, after having racked up six Academy Awards, Wilder told his German biographer that it wasn’t so much the awards he was most proud of, but rather that his name had appeared twice in the New York Times crossword puzzle: “once 17 across and once 21 down.”)

 

Crossword puzzle by Billie Wilder, Die Bühne, 1925.

 

In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1924, at a mere eighteen years of age and fresh out of gymnasium (high school), with diploma in hand, Billie wrote to the editorial staff at Die Bühne, one of the two local tabloids that were part of the media empire belonging to a shifty Hungarian émigré named Imre Békessy, to ask how he might go about becoming a journalist, maybe even a foreign correspondent. Somewhat naively, he thought this could be his ticket to America. He received an answer, not the one he was hoping for, explaining that without complete command of English he wouldn’t stand a chance.

Never one to give up, Billie paid a visit to the office one day early in the new year and, exploiting his outsize gift of gab, managed to talk his way in. In subsequent interviews, he liked to tell of how he landed his first job at Die Bühne by walking in on the paper’s chief theater critic, a certain Herr Doktor Liebstöckl, having sex with his secretary one Saturday afternoon. “You’re lucky I was working overtime today,” he purportedly told Billie. (It’s hard not to think of the cast of characters that emerge from the pages of his later screenplays—the sex-starved men in his American directorial debut, The Major and the Minor [1942], or in Love in the Afternoon [1957] or The Apartment [1960]—who bear a strong family resemblance to Herr Liebstöckl.) Soon he was schmoozing with journalists, poets, actors, the theater people who trained with Max Reinhardt, and the coffeehouse wits who gathered at Vienna’s Café Herrenhof. There he met the writers Alfred Polgar and Joseph Roth, a young Hungarian stage actor named László Löwenstein (later known to the world as Peter Lorre), and the critic and aphorist Anton Kuh. “Billie is by profession a keeper of alibis,” observed Kuh with a good bit of sarcasm. “Wherever something is going on, he has an alibi. He was born into the world with an alibi, according to which Billie wasn’t even present when it occurred.”

The Viennese journalistic scene at the time was anything but dull, and Billie bore witness, alibi or no alibi, to the contemporary debates, sex, and violence that occurred in his midst. He carried with him a visiting card with his name (“Billie S. Wilder”) emblazoned upon it, and underneath it the name of the other Békessy tabloid, Die Stunde, to which he contributed crossword puzzles, short features, movie reviews, and profiles. Around the time he was filing his freelance pieces at a rapid clip, a fiery feud was taking place between Békessy and Karl Kraus, the acid-tongued don of Viennese letters, editor and founder of Die Fackel (The Torch), who was determined to drive the Hungarian “scoundrel” out of the city and banish him once and for all from the world of journalism. To add to this volatile climate, just months after Billie began working for the tabloid, one of Die Stunde’s most famous writers, the Viennese novelist Hugo Bettauer, author of the best-selling novel Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews, 1922), was gunned down by a proto-Nazi thug.

“I was brash, bursting with assertiveness, had a talent for exaggeration,” Wilder told his German biographer Hellmuth Karasek, “and was convinced that in the shortest span of time I’d learn to ask shameless questions without restraint.” He was right, and soon gained precious access to everyone from international movie stars like Asta Nielsen and Adolphe Menjou to the royal celebrity Prince of Wales (Edward VIII)—to whom he devoted two separate pieces—and the American heir and newspaper magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. “In a single morning,” he boasted in a 1963 interview with Playboy’s Richard Gehman, speaking of his earliest days as a journalist in Vienna, “I interviewed Sigmund Freud, his colleague Alfred Adler, the playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, and the composer Richard Strauss. In one morning.” And while there may not be any extant articles to corroborate such audacious claims, he did manage to interview the world-famous British female dance troupe the Tiller Girls, whose arrival at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station in April 1926 the nineteen-year-old Billie happily chronicled for Die Bühne. A mere two months later he got his big break, when the American jazz orchestra leader Paul Whiteman paid a visit to Vienna. There’s a wonderful photograph of Billie in a snap-brim hat, hands resting casually in his suit-jacket pockets, a cocksure grin on his face, standing just behind Whiteman, as if to ingratiate himself as deeply as possible; after publishing a successful interview and profile in Die Stunde, he was invited to tag along for the Berlin leg of the tour.

 

Billie Wilder, second from right, with Paul Whiteman and his band, 1926.

 

In his conversations with Cameron Crowe, Wilder describes visiting Whiteman at his hotel in Vienna after the interview he conducted with him. “In my broken English, I told him that I was anxious to see him perform. And Whiteman told me, ‘If you’re eager to hear me, to hear the big band, you can come with me to Berlin.’ He paid for my trip, for a week there or something. And I accepted it. And I packed up my things, and I never went back to Vienna. I wrote the piece about Whiteman for the paper in Vienna. And then I was a newspaperman for a paper in Berlin.” Serving as something of a press agent and tour guide—a role he’d play once more when the American filmmaker Allan Dwan would spend his honeymoon in Berlin and, among other things, would introduce Billie to the joys of the dry martini—Wilder reviewed Whiteman’s German premiere at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, which took place before an audience of thousands. “The ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ a composition that created quite a stir over in the States,” he writes, “is an experiment in exploiting the rhythms of American folk music. When Whiteman plays it, it is a great piece of artistry. He has to do encores again and again. The normally standoffish people of Berlin are singing his praises. People stay on in the theater half an hour after the concert.”

Often referred to as Chicago on the Spree, as Mark Twain once dubbed it, Berlin in the mid-1920s had a certain New World waft to it. A cresting wave of Amerikanismus—a seemingly bottomless love of dancing the Charleston, of cocktail bars and race cars, and a world-renowned nightlife that glimmered amid a sea of neon advertisements—had swept across the city and pervaded its urban air. It proved to be a perfect training ground for Billie’s ultimate migration to America, and a place that afforded him a freedom that he hadn’t felt in Vienna. As the film scholar Gerd Gemünden has remarked in his illuminating study of Wilder’s American career, “the American-influenced metropolis of Berlin gave Wilder the chance to reinvent himself.”

During his time in Berlin, Wilder had a number of mentors who helped guide his career. First among them was the Prague-born writer and critic Egon Erwin Kisch, one of the leading newspapermen of continental Europe, who was known to hold court at his table—the “Tisch von Kisch,” as it was called—at the Romanisches Café on Kurfürstendamm, a favorite haunt among Weimar-era writers, artists, and entertainers. (Wilder would hatch the idea for the film Menschen am Sonntag [People on Sunday, 1930]—on café napkins, the story goes—at the Romanisches a handful of years later.) Kisch not only read drafts of Wilder’s early freelance assignments in Berlin, offering line edits and friendly encouragement, but helped him procure a furnished apartment just underneath him in the Wilmersdorf section of the city. A well-traveled veteran journalist, Kisch had long fashioned himself as Der rasende Reporter (The Racing Reporter), the title he gave to the collection of journalistic writings he published in Berlin in 1925, serving as an inspiration and role model for Billie (a caricature of Wilder from the period encapsulates that very spirit).

“His reporting was built like a good movie script,” Wilder later remarked of Kisch. “It was classically organized in three acts and was never boring for the reader.” In an article on the German book market, published in 1930 in the literary magazine Der Querschnitt, he makes special reference to Kisch’s Paradies Amerika (Paradise America, 1929), perhaps a conscious nod to the nascent Americanophilia that was already blossoming inside him.

Among the best-known dispatches of the dozens that Billie published during his extended stint as a freelance reporter was his four-part series for the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (B. Z.), later reprinted in Die Bühne, on his experiences working as a dancer for hire at the posh Eden Hotel. The piece bore an epigraph from yet another of his Berlin mentors, the writer Alfred Henschke, who published under the nom de plume Klabund and was married to the prominent cabaret and theater actress Carola Neher. In it, Klabund advises young writers, gesturing toward the contemporary aesthetic trend of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), to write about events as they really occurred: “The only thing that still interests us today about literature is the raw materials it’s made of: life, actuality, reality.” Since it’s Wilder, of course, the truth is mixed with a healthy dose of droll, martini-dry humor and a touch of unavoidable poetic license as he recounts the gritty details of his trade: the wealthy ladies of leisure who seek his services, the jealous husbands who glare at him, and the grueling hours of labor on the dance floor. “I wasn’t the best dancer,” he later said of this period, “but I had the best dialogue.”

Early on in the same piece, he includes a review of his performance attributed to the hotel management that in many way serves as an apt summation of his whole career: “Herr Wilder knew how to adapt to the fussiest audiences in every way in his capacity as a dancer. He achieved success in his position and always adhered to the interests of the establishment.” He put the skills he acquired on the dance floor to continued use on the page and on the screen, always pleasing his audience and ensuring his path to success. “I say to myself: I’m a fool,” he writes in a moment of intense self-awareness. “Sleepless nights, misgivings, doubts? The revolving door has thrust me into despair, that’s for sure. Outside it is winter, friends from the Romanisches Café, all with colds, are debating sympathy and poverty, and, just like me, yesterday, have no idea where to spend the night. I, however, am a dancer. The big wide world will wrap its arms around me.”

 

Title page of the four-part article “Herr Ober, bitte einen Tänzer!”—in which Wilder describes his days as a hotel dancer for hire—from its reprint in Die Bühne (June 2, 1927).

 

An ideal match for Billie arrived when, in 1928, the Ullstein publishing house, publisher of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, introduced a new afternoon Boulevard-Zeitung, an illustrated paper aimed at a young readership and bearing a title that would speak directly to them and to Wilder: Tempo. “It was a tabloid,” remarked the historian Peter Gay in his early study of the “German-Jewish Spirit” of the city, “racy in tone, visual in appeal, designed to please the Berliner who ran as he read.” The Berliners, however, quickly adopted another name for it: they called it Die jüdische Hast, or “Jewish Haste.” Billie, an inveterate pacer and man on the move, was a good fit for Tempo and vice versa (it was in its pages that he introduced Berliners to the short-lived independent production company Filmstudio 1929 and the young cineastes, including Wilder himself, behind its creation).

In 1928, after serving as an uncredited ghostwriter on a number of screenplays, Billie earned a solo writing credit for a picture that had more than a slight autobiographical bearing on its author. It was called Der Teufelsreporter (Hell of a Reporter), though it also bore the subtitle Im Nebel der Großstadt (In the Fog of the Metropolis), and was directed by Ernst Laemmle, nephew of Universal boss Carl Laemmle. Set in contemporary Berlin, it tells the story of the titular character, a frenetic newspaperman played by the American actor Eddie Polo, a former circus star, who works at a city tabloid—called Rapid, in explicit homage—and whose chief attributes are immediately traceable to Wilder himself. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, young Billie even has a brief appearance in the film, dressed just like the other reporters in his midst. “He performs this cameo,” write the German film scholars Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen, “as if to prove who the true Teufelsreporter is.” In addition to asserting a deeper connection to the city and to American-style tabloid journalism, Der Teufelsreporter lays a foundation for other hard-boiled newspapermen in Wilder’s Hollywood repertoire, from Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in Ace in the Hole (1951) to Walter Burns (Walter Matthau) in The Front Page (1974).

Further affinities between Wilder’s Weimar-era writings and his later film work abound. For example, in “Berlin Rendezvous,” an article he published in the Berliner Börsen Courier in early 1927, he writes about the favored meeting spots within the city, including the oversize clock, called the Normaluhr, at the Berlin Zoo railway station. Two years later, when writing his script for Menschen am Sonntag, he located the pivotal rendezvous between two of his amateur protagonists, Wolfgang von Waltershausen and Christl Ehlers, at precisely the same spot. For the same script, he crafted the character of Wolfgang, a traveling wine salesman and playboy, as a seeming wish-fulfillment fantasy of his own exploits as a dancer for hire. Likewise, in his early account of the Tiller Girls arriving by train in Vienna, there’s more than a mere germ of Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, the all-girl band in Some Like It Hot (1959); there’s even a Miss Harvey (“the shepherdess of these little sheep”), anticipating the character of Sweet Sue herself. In a short comic piece on casting, Billie pays tribute to the director Ernst Lubitsch, a future mentor in Hollywood (many years later, Wilder’s office in Beverly Hills featured a mounted plaque designed by Saul Bass with the words HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT? emblazoned on it). Finally, in his 1929 profile of Erich von Stroheim, in Der Querschnitt, among the many things young Billie highlights is Gloria Swanson’s performance in Stroheim’s late silent, Queen Kelly (1929). It was the first flicker of the inspired idea to cast Swanson and Stroheim as a pair of crusty, vaguely twisted emissaries from the lost world of silent cinema in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

*

By the time Wilder boarded a British ocean liner, the SS Aquitania, bound for America in January 1934, he’d managed to acquire a few more screen credits and a little more experience in show business, but very little of the English language (he purportedly packed secondhand copies of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in his suitcase). He had gone from a salaried screenwriter at UFA in Berlin to an unemployed refugee in Paris to an American transplant with twenty dollars and a hundred English words in his possession. “He paced his way across the Atlantic,” remarks Sikov. And soon he’d pace his way onto the lots of MGM, Paramount, and other major film studios, joining an illustrious group of Middle European refugees who would forever change the face of Hollywood.

Wilder’s acclaimed work in Hollywood, as a screenwriter and director, is in many ways an outgrowth of his stint as a reporter in interwar Vienna and Weimar Berlin. His is a raconteur’s cinema, long on smart, snappy dialogue, short on visual acrobatics. “For Wilder the former journalist, words have a special, almost material quality,” comments the German critic Claudius Seidl. “Words are what give his films their buoyancy, elegance, and their characteristic shape, since words can fly faster, glide more elegantly, can spin more than any camera.” Wilder’s deep-seated attachment to the principal tools of his trade as a writer is recognizable throughout his filmic career. He even provided an apt coda, uttered by none other than fading silent screen star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard, when she learns that Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a writer: “words, words, more words!”

 

Wilder, at center, with Peter Lorre and other Middle European refugees in Hollywood.

 

Noah Isenberg is the George Christian Centennial Professor and chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. The author, most recently, of We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W. W. Norton, 2017), he is currently completing a book on Some Like It Hot. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Bookforum, The New York Review Daily, and The New York Times Book Review, among other outlets.

Excerpted from Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches for Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna , edited by Noah Isenberg and translated by Shelley Frisch, published later this month by Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2021 by Noah Isenberg.

Staff Picks: Bars, Balzac, and Buses

Vanessa Springora. Photo courtesy of HarperVia.

“For many years I paced around my cage, my dreams filled with murder and revenge,” writes Vanessa Springora toward the beginning of her book Consent (translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer), which details the abusive relationship she endured at the age of fourteen with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, then fifty. “Until the day when the solution finally presented itself to me, like something that was completely obvious: Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?” Consent is that elegantly laid trap, a memoir that asks sharp questions about desire, literature, and a culture that fetishizes female youth and inexperience over female art. Springora is merciless in her portrayal of how easily Matzneff—referred to in the book only as “G.M.”—was able to prey upon her and other young girls and boys in plain sight, how he used her letters and likeness in his work without her consent and wrote celebrated paeans to sex tourism with children in the Philippines and affairs with barely teenage girls in Paris. It’s immensely upsetting to read about how seemingly every adult in Springora’s life turned a blind eye to all of this (at one point, a doctor snips Springora’s hymen to allow Maztneff to penetrate her; the philosopher Emil Cioran tells a crying Springora that it is an “honor” to have been chosen by Matzneff), but there are also moments of real catharsis as she grows older and begins to analyze what happened. In the end, Consent is as much an indictment of how writing and literature—from fairy tales to love letters to classic works like Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet—can betray girls and women as it is a cool-eyed deconstruction of a particular moment in time. —Rhian Sasseen 

“I was not a man,” says the narrator of the first story in Lucy Ives’s Cosmogony. “I was … but a human girl,” says another, who is twenty-nine. And then, a few stories into the collection: “I am one of the animals. I live among the other human animals and am one of them. Nothing animal is outlandish to me.” This last bit is a sensible rule for writing honestly about what humans do to one another—and particularly to women. Stated outright, it has the ring of a catechism one wants to believe and repeats to oneself to avoid losing it when humans behave shockingly or when the grotesqueries of late capitalism and failed “women’s liberation, so called” become particularly visible (say, as a yellow-eyed, horned demon whose immortality transcends any particular age). That’s what the narrators in Cosmogony are dealing with. Their stories acknowledge that yes, things that seem awful are only human, but also, knowing this intellectually doesn’t really make it any easier emotionally. What does make it bearable—for this reader—is a beautifully honed sense of the absurd, which kept me smiling throughout much of this collection. —Jane Breakell

 

Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson in Detroiters. Photo: Comedy Central.

 

At the end of even the most deflating of days, I can always count on Detroiters to make me hoot and howl like a resident of the Saint Louis Zoo’s Primate House. The show, which ran for two seasons on Comedy Central, is at once a pitch-perfect send-up of the advertising world and a deeply silly ode to friendship. Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson star as Sam and Tim, two best friends who own a Motor City ad agency together. The commercials they trade in are of the variety one misses in the streaming age: low-budget, poorly acted, stupidly ambitious local spots that are bereft of good taste yet full of a genuine humanity that Ogilvy and all the rest could never hope to achieve. They compose jingles for an ethically dubious wig company; they persuade charmless car dealers to act in their own ads. Holding everything together is some of the sharpest and most unexpected comedy writing I’ve encountered in years. But the central appeal of the show lies in the chemistry between Richardson and Robinson. Richardson plays a total sweetheart, almost a fuller rendition of his role as the lovable Richard on Veep; meanwhile, Robinson applies a sort of Nicolas Cage maximalism to his performance, delivering each line with a peculiar emphasis, turning red in the face, bulging his eyes, and straining his voice into a cartoonish yell. Together, they form one of the great comedic duos of our time, gleefully bolting from one joke to the next and throwing their bodies into every bit. Can you blame me for sounding like such an animal? —Brian Ransom

Over on Twitter, Alex Dimitrov is writing a poem that never ends. “Love” started as a poem in The American Poetry Review and is featured in Dimitrov’s latest collection, Love and Other Poems, which was published by Copper Canyon Press earlier this year. But Dimitrov continues to expand the poem, writing it “in real time, 1 tweet a day.” Each line (each tweet?) names one thing the speaker loves: “I love gas stations & how they give you that feeling you’re just passing through” (January 12); “I love thinking of what I would do with freedom” (February 18); “I love frivolity, excess & not going home” (March 23). Friends, bars, astrology (Dimitrov is, after all, one half of Astro Poets), parties, New York, and the moon all abound. The list is ongoing, expansive, and, if the contemplation in Dimitrov’s personal Twitter bio holds true—“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,” he writes, directing folks over to his infinite poem—never-ending. This, the idea of a poem that goes on forever, is perhaps what speaks to me the most. The project’s form necessarily points to abundance; if the poem is endless, so, too, are the various possibilities of love. The old adage might go, “The more you give, the more you receive,” but in Dimitrov’s work, the more one loves, the more there is to love, and the more there is to love, the more love there is to be given. And on and on and on, one tweet at a time, maybe, hopefully, forever. —Mira Braneck

If you’ve traveled any distance on any form of public transportation, even once, you may already have some sense of the existential surrealism driving Paul Kirchner’s The Bus. If you have never been bused, then buckle up. A troublingly smart comic strip, The Bus runs its route on a Möbius strip with stops along the avenue of the absurd. A man exits the bus, walks down the block, and enters his home only to realize he has just boarded the bus. A bus appears on a barren expanse where more buses begin to converge and tesselate until their roofs combine to create a barren expanse on which a bus appears. The Bus is not afraid to ask the big questions: “Free will or predestination? Spiritual quest or self-delusion? Individual rights or societal needs? Inevitable conflict or eventual cooperation? Crosstown at 34th St. or uptown to 168th?” In return we might ask: What is it about the bus that moves us? From Frida Kahlo’s The Bus to Sartre’s linguistically confounding seat on the tramway to Ken Kesey’s Further to J. K. Rowling’s Knight Bus, there seems to be something magical about this everyday method of mass transit that continues to inspire. Originally published in Heavy Metal magazine between 1978 and 1985 and revived in 2013, Kirchner’s The Bus is now available in two anthologies from Éditions Tanibis. Is it too much to ask for an omnibus? —Christopher Notarnicola

 

From Paul Kirchner’s The Bus. Image courtesy of the author.

A Continuous Musical Delight

Published earlier this week, Poets at Work is the latest release from Paris Review Editions, the book imprint of The Paris Review. The anthology gathers thirteen Art of Poetry interviews from the magazine’s nearly seven decades of history. In the book’s preface, which appears below, The Paris Review’s poetry editor, Vijay Seshadri, explains the process by which he selected this baker’s dozen, as well as the particular pleasures of the magazine’s Writers at Work interview series.

The Paris Review’s first Art of Poetry interview was with T. S. Eliot, and was published in issue no. 21, Spring–Summer 1959. As the magazine had been publishing interviews since its inception, in 1953, transforming in the process a commonplace American journalistic feature into something like an art form, it isn’t unreasonable to ask why it took so long to get around to a poet. (Robert Penn Warren had been interviewed, but about his fiction, and an early attempt to corral Robert Frost had failed.) Poets sensitive about the prerogatives of their art should be reassured, though, just by the nature of the Paris Review interview itself—a natural-seeming object that is actually delicate and labor intensive and involves the intersection of many serendipitous elements, not the least of which is the rare sympathy between interviewer and subject that brings a conversation to life. Also, along with the usual chances and mischances of publishing, when it came to a magazine that saw itself as canonical (in an era when there was such a thing as the canonical) and at the same time improvisational, secular, hip, casual, and cosmopolitan, editorial choices must have been made under multiplying, contradictory pressures.

Whatever the reasons, once the interviews of poets got going, they sprinted along, energized perhaps by the editors’ coming to recognize that poets are very good at talking about themselves. The resulting hundred-plus conversations from which this selection was made are rich and various, and so satisfying across the board that choosing just a baker’s dozen was an excruciating job. Even limiting the set to poets born before the historical watershed of World War II left over sixty to choose from—interviews with fathers of civilizations (Frost, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, W. H. Auden), poets unfairly neglected or forgotten (Conrad Aiken, Charles Tomlinson, May Sarton, Amy Clampitt, John Hall Wheelock, Karl Shapiro), masters outside the anglophone tradition (George Seferis, Yevgeny Yevtushenko), and several of the most celebrated poets of the Silent Generation (Seamus Heaney, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright).

None of the poets inside the parentheses above are included in this anthology. Given their stature, and that of others who aren’t included, it’s probably important to clarify if possible why the thirteen here and not others. Some of these choices derive from the information, the news, in the interviews. Some derive from an acknowledgment of history and a recognition of its complicated, sometimes tragic relationship with literature. Some take advantage of the small license anthologists have to reflect their own experience. Ezra Pound was the poet I chose first—for his central importance to the poetry of his time and ours, for the large historical stage he sought, and also for the compelling, sometimes maddening quality of the interview. Pound seemed to be entangled historically with Yehuda Amichai—whose work I happen to love, and whose interview is as compelling as Pound’s. Apart from his importance to poetry, the tremendous romance of Pablo Neruda’s life seemed to make his presence necessary. Nothing could ever keep me from putting Elizabeth Bishop in an anthology, given the opportunity. It seemed to make sense, then, to also include Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore, because apart from their grandeur as poets and the value of their conversations, Bishop’s life as a writer was tangled up with theirs. (I kept going back and forth between Moore and Anne Sexton, opposites as poets and people; I would have liked to include both for the contrast alone.) Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery have been major facts of the literary landscape of the past fifty years, and were major facts for me in my early years as a poet. I met Ishmael Reed, a grand literary presence in the Bay Area of the seventies, when I was twenty years old.

If these reasons are more psychological than logical, that seems unavoidable to me. A hundred educated readers confronting the problem of making this anthology would come up with a hundred different solutions. It hardly seems to matter. Even the most perverse-seeming selection wouldn’t be egregious. The intersections and interweavings, the similarities and intriguing contrasts among these poets and among their conversations are endless.

Almost as important as purely literary considerations was a broad interest in the ways these poets played with and against the genre of the Paris Review interview itself—a format as much dramatic and musical as journalistic, with its mise-en-scène, its careful give-and-take, its back-and-forth, its rhythmic movements and countermovements, its subtle editorial shaping. Goethe said that the string quartet is like a rational conversation among four people. A Paris Review interview, a rational conversation on its surface, is like a violin sonata with keyboard accompaniment by the interviewer, or a cabaret act with a singer backed up by a piano. Sometimes, as in Wallace Shawn’s interview with Mark Strand, it turns into a full-blown violin/viola duo. People interested in learning about the poets here will find literary history, literary insight, gossip, humor, perspective, universal and particular knowledge. People who already know the poets, and know the way their poems and lives intersect, will experience, along with the pleasure of revisiting their knowledge, a continuous musical delight.

 

Vijay Seshadri is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

Poets at Work is on sale now.

Poets on Couches: Cheswayo Mphanza Reads Gerald Stern

 

National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems  that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

“Leaving Another Kingdom”
by Gerald Stern
Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983)

I think this year I’ll wait for the white lilacs
before I get too sad.
I’ll let the daffodils go, flower by flower,
and the blue squill go, and the primroses.
Levine will be here by then,
waving fountain pens, carrying rolled-up posters
of Ike Williams and King Levinsky.
He will be reaching into his breast pocket
for maps of grim Toledo
showing the downtown grilles and the bus stations.
He and I together
will get on our hands and knees
on the warm ground
in the muddy roses
under the thorn tree.
We will walk the mile to my graveyard
without one word of regret,
two rich poets
going over the past a little,
changing a thing or two,
making a few connections,
doing it all with balance,
stopping along the way to pet a wolf,
slowing down at the locks,
giving each other lectures on early technology,
mentioning eels and snakes,
touching a little on our two cities,
cursing our Henrys a little,
his Ford, my Frick,
being almost human about it, almost decent,
sliding over the stones to reach the island.
throwing spears on the way,
staring for twenty minutes at two robins
starting a life together in rural Pennsylvania,
kicking a heavy tire, square and monstrous,
huge and soggy, maybe a 49 Hudson,
maybe a 40 Packard, maybe a Buick
with mohair seats and silken cords
and tiny panes of glass—both of us seeing
the same car, each of us driving
our own brick road, both of us whistling
the same idiotic songs, the tops of trees flying,
houses sailing along, the way they did then,
both of us walking down to the end of the island
so we could put our feet in the water, so I could
show him where the current starts, so we could
look for bottles and worn-out rubbers, Trojans
full of holes, the guarantee run out—
love gone slack and love gone flat—
a few feet away from New Jersey near the stones
that look like large white turtles guarding the entrance
to the dangerous channel where those lovers—Tristan
and his Isolt, Troilus and you know who,
came roaring by on inner tubes, their faces
wet with happiness, the shrieks and sighs
left up the river somewhere, now their fingers
trailing through the wake, now their arms out
to keep themselves from falling, now in the slow part
past the turtles and into the bend, we sitting there
putting on our shoes, he with Nikes,
me with Georgia loggers, standing up
and smelling the river, walking single file
until we reach the pebbles, singing in French
all the way back, losing the robins forever,
losing the Buick, walking into the water,
leaving another island, leaving another
retreat, leaving another kingdom.

 

Cheswayo Mphanza’s debut poetry collection is The Rinehart Frames (University of Nebraska Press). His poems “Frame Six” and “At David Livingstone’s Statue” appeared in the Fall 2020 issue.

What Is There to Celebrate? An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard.

Hanif Abdurraqib spent the winter shoveling. In Columbus, Ohio, his hometown, he often found himself spending hours clearing the snow from his driveway, only for it to start back up again as soon as he was done. Sometimes, his neighbor would be out there, too, and as they braced themselves for the cold and the work ahead of them, they’d exchange a smirk, a raised eyebrow, and a nod, as if to say, Ain’t this some shit. Abdurraqib laughs as he offers this anecdote, not just because it’s funny but because of the simple, effervescent joy that bubbles up from beneath interactions like this—when you’re with your people, and things do not have to be explained, or even spoken, to be understood.

But how do you put these moments into language? In part, this is the project of A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib’s new collection of essays on the history of Black performance in the U.S. It’s Whitney and Michael, minstrelsy and blackface, school dances and sports games, Soul Train and a spades table, and so many other cultural artifacts held beneath a loving microscope for Abdurraqib’s careful examination. A practiced author, poet, and critic with books such as Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019) and They Can’t Kill Us until They Kill Us (2017) under his belt, Abdurraqib is in complete control here, balancing the personal and the public as he explores the legacy, the nuance, and sometimes, yes, the shame of Black performance while surrendering even himself to scrutiny—the limits of his past self, the limits of all this loving.

When we spoke on the phone earlier this year, we discussed optimism, gratitude, and grace, I was reminded of the Lucille Clifton poem that goes, “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” I thought of it again as I reread the book’s final essay, in which Abdurraqib writes, “Isn’t that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t?”

Although Abdurraqib admits to feeling cynical sometimes, A Little Devil in America is a testament to still being here, still finding moments to celebrate despite everything else. If you were to transform a head nod into something that could be held within the pages of a book, it would look like this. If you were to tell someone you loved them, you missed them, and you were happy to know them, you would hope it sounded like this. There is no exaggerated sentimentality, but there is—even in the middle of mourning—music, and even dancing.

INTERVIEWER

In A Little Devil in America, you celebrate the joy of Black performance, but you don’t shy away from its difficult history. Can you talk a little about that?

ABDURRAQIB

When I was first writing the book, I spent a lot of time in the midst of minstrelsy and blackface. Much of that is still in the finished book, but the original drafts were anchored by it. I don’t want to disparage my past books, obviously, but I do think it was a different type of thrill to spend time deep in the archives of performances that I perhaps would have once seen as only shameful or only frustrating to witness. To add humanity and illuminate some corners of those felt really good. In the accounts I read, minstrel performers often talked about how the stage, in a way, was pulling them closer to a type of freedom they otherwise would not have been able to access. And that kind of reframed my thinking around shame and survival—making something out of what they had at the time in order to ascend to heights that they were denied at every other turn. Which doesn’t mean that I’m, like, coming out in favor of minstrel shows, but it was important to recontextualize, to think about what it was like to be a person who had been enslaved, or had a relative who had been enslaved, and possessed very few resources to perform in a way that provided power to the people.

INTERVIEWER

You spend time with so many different performances and types of performance, both public and private. How did your definition of performance evolve, especially in regards to how it’s embedded in the Black community?

ABDURRAQIB

As someone who came up performing in multiple ways—as a high school athlete, as a drama-club member, as a poet who reads things onstage—I wanted to step back and ask myself what I believed the fullest and richest interpretations of Black performance to be and, through those interpretations, how I could celebrate it. Thinking, for instance, about the game of spades as a type of performance brings me closer to a desire to celebrate it or to name the pleasure that comes out of both witnessing and being immersed in it. I love when someone breaks out some new house rules that’s just, like, their shit, and I’m always like, Oh yeah, I know what’s going on. And that, too, is the performance within the performance. Even if I don’t know what the fuck is going on, I’m still going to pretend. And I would prefer that, to fake it until I make it, to being on the outside of the experience—even if that outside is still loving, even if it’s people whom I love and who love me, I still want to be in that fold. Because I know in that fold there’s an affection that cannot be duplicated.

INTERVIEWER

So do you write to the inside or the outside? Is there an imagined audience, and if so, how do you bring them into these more esoteric moments without compromising the intimacy?

ABDURRAQIB

I think a lot about what will serve the people who not only know what I’m attempting to do but also don’t need an explanation. There’s something really celebratory about coming to the page and knowing that you’re in conversation with someone who trusts you, who understands that you do not need to be walked through something that you lived, and who isn’t trying to waste your time. Now, there are some things I don’t mind building scaffolding around for the sake of historical context, but I’m not going to explain the rules of spades or a certain dance move when I can paint a picture of a time or a person. Like, to describe Don Cornelius—in voice, in stature, in elegance—does a greater service to a reader than explaining what Soul Train is. It’s in service of people who have an understanding of where I am trying to take them, who, instead of looking for explanation, are perhaps looking for an image that will enliven their memory of something or someone. And as a writer, I think my voice can be a lot more playful when I feel like I’m in a conversation with people who know what I’m talking about. I can write as though I’m in the room and we’re laughing across the table. And that is what I wanted to replicate—the feeling of being in a room with my people, going back and forth over something inconsequential that to us, in that moment, means the world.

INTERVIEWER

Can communities, even if they’re of affection and love, sometimes be alienating?

ABDURRAQIB

Alienation is a harsh word, but I don’t mind being on the outside of a community that I would hinder with my presence. Sometimes—for me, at least—the best move is to move, to be out of the way. And to be frank, there are some groups and communities that I am not equipped to be a part of or don’t want to be a part of, because community to me has always felt, and still feels, like a very intentional project of care and of holding your people close.

There’s a self-awareness that I strive for, perhaps in understanding what I can offer to whom and when I can offer it. Other than that, sometimes the best thing to do is to stay on the outside of something. There’s an idea of performance as a barrier to keep out those who perhaps do not understand every mode of interaction and are not required to, and I think the approach to the book was similar. I could only write about the portions of performance, and the witnessing of performance, as I saw it. So I never wanted to come across as an expert, but I did want to present myself as someone who had been thinking a lot about performance and survival through different generations.

INTERVIEWER

Still, with all the eras and generations the book spans, so much of it feels rooted in your own adolescence. You give a lot of grace to that period, that stumbling process of figuring out what you liked and what you were like, especially when both might have been flawed.

ABDURRAQIB

I really revel in the opportunity to go back and say, Well, I was wrong about this, but I was wrong about it due to a set of circumstances. Sometimes not even saying, I did the best with the tools I had at the time, but instead saying, The tools I had at the time were faulty, and I didn’t do the best with them, but now I’m interested in reformatting that something from the past mentally, without stripping myself of what it did mean to me when I first encountered it. For example, I don’t really feel the way about Michael Jackson that I did when he died. But in the book, I write about his death and his funeral because of what that moment did to propel my thinking about death and funerals. I’m never beholden to anything I believed once. Instead, I feel more beholden to the search for new information and then an adjustment based off of that information. But I certainly don’t feel beholden to like, Well, I believed this or felt this once, so I have to carry it with me for the rest of my life or I have to feel bad about it. I think in between there lies a more interesting examination—why I believed something. And if I measure that up against what I believe now, what can be exhumed from that? Which is more worthwhile than just wagging my finger at my past self.

INTERVIEWER

What about the stakes of performance and representation right now in media and culture?

ABDURRAQIB

My big thought always is that whatever representation is or could be, if it is not serving the eventual liberation of and ability for Black folks to determine their own paths, then I don’t know if it’s really useful. The politics of representation—I mean, particularly literally in politics—has so often stifled progress. I’ve seen it stifle progress for people who are on the ground working, for people who have been organizing in their communities for decades, for generations of people who have been uplifting Black folks in their communities. My hope is that people continue to resist being satisfied by the optics of representation, and always return to the work. Because there’s always going to be more work to be done.

I’m someone who has organized his community and continues to and will continue to, and I think one thing that’s helped me is being in contact with folks who are already on the ground here and continually asking what the people here need and how I can be of service to empowering and liberating these folks. I’m proud of this book, and I love this book, but me writing a book doesn’t do anything material in terms of broad-strokes liberation or the people I care about, particularly here in Columbus, but also nationally, globally. I’m not trying to disparage the work I did—I’m very proud of it—but I’m trying to separate the work I do as a person who creates things from the work I am striving to do that will hopefully outlive whatever I produce on the page.

INTERVIEWER

In one of the sections about Whitney Houston, you write, “No matter how much our people love us, they can’t protect us.” So what can we do? What can love do?

ABDURRAQIB

Well, I try to be very thoughtful about the limits of love and the limits of excitement and the limits of my own curiosities, too. And the limits of what I believe freedom to be. In some ways, this is because I am admittedly too cynical, though I don’t believe myself to be pessimistic. I often run up against understanding the limits of how far a love for any people and any people’s love for themselves can carry them. I do think love can carry us very far, but we all come up against our individual limits—limits that have been heightened by the past eleven or twelve months in particular. At the end of last summer, I think those limits were stretched beyond even what many people thought they could be because we were operating in a country that, by design, is not built to reciprocate whatever love is poured into it. And even if the love is not poured, even if that love is withheld, the country can still punish at a level that does not match the withholding, that is significantly more severe than the withholding—on a community level but also on a very individual level.

So much of my investment in the celebratory nature of the book, or in the hope that the majority of the book is celebratory, was trying to come to terms with the limits of my affections, and writing with the understanding that—this does feel very cynical to say—I don’t want to take for granted the pleasureful curiosity I have, because it’s not promised, it’s not guaranteed. I saw the way the world and the country were just grinding away at the people I love, and continue to grind away at the people I love, and in my brain and in my heart, I am always in celebration of what my people have done and can do, but I worry that I will one day run out of language for that excitement. I’m not near that now, but I worry that due to the exhaustion of having to endure, witness, and be a party to a struggle braided with a history that existed before I was born and will exist likely after I’m gone … I just don’t want to take celebration for granted when I can still summon it. And I don’t want to take these small moments of pleasure that spill over beyond the rage or beyond grief or beyond mourning for granted as long as I can still articulate and illuminate them with some type of beauty. And that’s what the pursuit of this book was. And again, understanding that it’s not going to save anyone or change the materials of the machinery that many people I love are still caught in actually opened me up to more effusive joy and a broad-reaching understanding of celebration and the nuances of small movements.

INTERVIEWER

You say you feel cynical, but the book does such a good job of being celebratory and feeling so generous and thoughtful. Where do you find that celebration?

ABDURRAQIB

There’s a cautious optimism, almost. I don’t call myself a pessimist only because I grew up around so many people who found optimism when there was none to be found. It was important for me to write about Ellen Armstrong and her well-known trick where a coin materializes from behind the ear of an eager bystander. It was particularly important to me that she was doing this trick for Black folks, and for poor Black folks, who didn’t have a lot of money, and making them feel as though they were walking around holding more than they ever knew they had.

I grew up with people who I watched make things materialize out of thin air when it felt like things were dire, and almost certainly they were. And I’m not talking about the kind of empty but true sentiment of, Well, at least you have your health. I mean in a very specific and material way. Like the lights go out because the electric bill can’t be paid, but this means we can break out the candles and hear a good story from someone, this means we can convene and connect with an ancestor through storytelling. That to me feels like optimism, or optimism materializing out of a situation that is dire. I see it reflected in some of my actual behaviors now. And to be clear, I’m not an optimist—I’m just not a pessimist. I’m somewhere in between. I live alone, and I’m taking to the winter pandemic months with less enthusiasm than the warmer months, but I’m still finding small pleasures that don’t divorce me from the treacherous nature of the lived moment, ones that get me from one breathing exercise to the next. I need that propulsion, but I never want to be so optimistic that I am detached from the reality of a situation

INTERVIEWER

How do you balance optimism with cynicism—especially now, in the wake of the past year?

ABDURRAQIB

The book went through a lot of changes. There was a draft that I thought was too centered on whiteness, and there was a draft that was just steeped in grief—and I’ve already written a book that has a lot of grief in it. Obviously, the book was finished by the time the uprisings began last year, but toward the end of last summer, I was in the streets with folks, and at the end of one night—and this was a night when the cops were out beating people’s asses as they had been all summer—someone got out a radio and just set it down on the street and started playing music. And almost like clockwork, like a ripple effect, a couple folks started dancing, a couple more folks started dancing, and a circle formed. And then it became a whole thing. And this was at the end of the night, right? This was after people had to flush out folks’ eyes from tear gas, and after people had to put coats over those who were trying to protect their faces. And there was still energy after that, after the grief and after the weight of having to be out, the energy to feel something moving us toward celebration. Even though the casual bystander who maybe doesn’t know the intricacies of Black celebration might have looked at us like, What is there to celebrate? It felt steeped in tragedy, of course, but it felt in some way like home. Because without even speaking, someone brought out music, and that was the cue. People just started dancing and formed a circle to protect the people dancing. That is a perfect example of what does not need to be spoken or explained. And through that, through the withholding of explanation, there is a pleasure that exists, I think, just for us.

 

Langa Chinyoka is a writer living in New York City.

Redux: Her Perfume, Hermit-Wild

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.

Ha Jin. Photo: © Dorothy Greco.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re using our olfactory senses. Read on for Ha Jin’s Art of Fiction interview, Fleur Jaeggy’s story “Agnes,” and May Swenson’s poem “Daffodildo.”

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.

 

Ha Jin, The Art of Fiction No. 202
Issue no. 191 (Winter 2009)

INTERVIEWER

What do you remember most about your arrival in the United States?

JIN

There was a chemical smell here. It was very alien, very overwhelming. Also a lot of people wore perfume. I know a woman who came here from China and said she couldn’t stop vomiting.

 

Photo: Sam Hood. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Agnes
By Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff
Issue no. 220 (Spring 2017)

Often, when I left the office, I’d go into some shops. I looked at everything meticulously. The small bottles of perfume, the jewelry. The cameras. I felt like stealing. For her.

 

Photo: Willem van de Poll. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Daffodildo
By May Swenson
Issue no. 127 (Summer 1993)

 A daffodil from Emily’s lot
I lay beside her headstone
on the first day of May.
I brought
another with me, threaded
through my buttonhole, the spawn
of ancestor she planted
where, today,
I trod her lawn.
A yellow small decanter
of her perfume, hermit-wild
and without a stopper,
next to her stone I filed
to give her back her property—
it’s well it cannot spill.
Lolling on my jacket,
Emily’s other daffodil …

 

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Walking Liberia with Graham Greene

Photo: Lucy Scholes.

In 1935, Graham Greene spent four weeks trekking three hundred fifty miles through the then-unmapped interior of Liberia. As he explains in the book he subsequently published about the experience, Journey without Maps (1936), he wasn’t interested in the Africa already known to white men; instead, he was looking for “a quality of darkness … of the inexplicable.” In short, a journey into his own heart of darkness, to rival that of Conrad’s famous novel. As such, he knew that his recollections—“memories chiefly of rats, of frustration, and of a deeper boredom on the long forest trek than I had ever experienced before,” as he recalls in Ways of Escape (1980), his second volume of autobiography—weren’t enough. What he wrote instead was an account of this “slow footsore journey” in parallel with that of a psychological excursion, deep into the recesses of his own mind. Rather ironically, though, in 1938, his traveling companion published her own record of their expedition, and it was precisely the kind of account—what he’d looked down on as “the triviality of a personal diary”—that Graham himself had taken such pains to avoid.

Even if you’ve read Journey without Maps, you might struggle to remember Graham’s co-traveler. Understandably so, since she’s mentioned only a handful of times, and always only in passing. It’s easy to forget she’s there at all. But she was: his cousin, twenty-three-year-old Barbara Greene, who’d gamely agreed to accompany him after one too many glasses of champagne at a family wedding. “Liberia, wherever it was, had a jaunty sound about it,” she endearingly recalls. “Liberia! The more I said it to myself the more I liked it. Life was good and very cheerful. Yes, of course I would go to Liberia.” Such innocent, rose-tinted enthusiasm obviously doesn’t last, but as she goes on to explain, “By the time I had found out what I had let myself in for it was too late to turn back.”

Originally published as Land Benighted, it’s the later edition—published in 1981, with the catchier title Too Late to Turn Back and a new foreword by the author, as well as an introduction by the acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux—that’s probably better known. Even so, it’s been out of print now for nearly forty years, something that most likely wouldn’t upset Graham: although Barbara proved “as good a companion as the circumstances allowed,” where she did “disappoint” him, he admits in Ways of Escape, was in writing her book.

Fans of Graham’s work will undoubtedly claim that Barbara’s book is the less impressive of the two—the poor relative, if you’ll indulge me—but I’m not quite so sure. Too Late to Turn Back has its own merits and charms, and Barbara’s writing is not without flair. Had Graham not documented the journey himself—indeed, had he been just an ordinary Englishman abroad—Too Late to Turn Back could absolutely have stood alone as an illuminating and informative account of this tour through unknown territory. That it also provides an intimate observation of one of the most famous British writers of the twentieth century is the icing on the cake. As Theroux wrote in 1981: “What might have seemed trivial or unimportant about Too Late to Turn Back in the Thirties, now—over forty years later—is like treasure. What if Waugh had had such a companion in Abyssinia, or Peter Fleming’s cousin had accompanied him to Manchuria? What if Kinglake, or Doughty, or Waterton had had a reliable witness to their miseries and splendours? We would not have thought less of these men, but we would have known much more of them.”

*

Although first cousins, Graham and Barbara were not especially close. As she amiably explained in the foreword to her book’s 1981 edition, “He was trying to persuade someone, anyone, to go with him, and only after everyone else had refused did he ask me.” As in the book proper, she’s extremely self-effacing, recalling that the morning after they’d made their grand plans, and with their champagne hangovers now kicking in, both had regrets: “Graham because his heart sank at the thought of having to be responsible for a young girl he hardly knew.” That Barbara turned out to be a more spirited and obliging companion than her cousin could have dared to hope for must have come as a welcome surprise, but to begin with, there’s a certain wariness on both sides.

On their arrival in Sierra Leone’s Freetown, she jots down her general impressions of Graham in her diary. “His brain frightened me,” she begins. “It was sharp and clear and cruel. I admired him for being unsentimental, but ‘always remember to rely on yourself,’ I noted. ‘If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.’ ” Luckily, no such instance came to pass, but it is telling that in Ways of Escape Graham readily admits to having been all the more surprised by Barbara’s book because he “hadn’t even realised that she was making notes,” so focused had he been on his own.

“For some reason he had a permanently shaky hand, so I hoped that we would not meet any wild beasts on our trip,” Barbara writes. She continues:

I had never shot anything in my life, and my cousin would undoubtably miss anything he aimed at. Physically he did not look strong. He seemed somewhat vague and unpractical, and later I was continually astonished at his efficiency and the care he devoted to every little detail. Apart from the three or four people he was really fond of, I felt that the rest of humanity was to him like a heap of insects that he liked to examine, as a scientist might examine his specimens, coldly and clearly. He was always polite. He had a remarkable sense of humour and held few things too sacred to be laughed at. I suppose at that time I had a very conventional little mind, for I remember he was continually tearing down ideas I had always believed in, and I was left to build them up anew. It was stimulating and exciting, and I wrote down that he was the best kind of companion one could have for a trip of this kind. I was learning far more than he realised.

Such behind-the-scenes insights into Graham’s state of mind continue, often set up in contrast to her own breezier attitude. For example, she notes that while she had packed the entertaining stories of Saki and Somerset Maugham, he was lugging The Anatomy of Melancholy through the jungle. But she’s also a wonderful source of more lighthearted tidbits. Take their habit of handily resetting their watches—which were continually stopping—to cocktail hour: “I don’t think it’s too early to have a drink, do you? Let’s put our watches at six o’clock.” (I’d be keen to find out exactly how much whiskey they packed, since both books are literally sloshing with the stuff.) Or the delight with which they indulge in spoonfuls of golden syrup—having suddenly “developed a startling love of sweet things”—as their rations grow increasingly meager, Graham dreaming all the while of steak-and-kidney pudding. And although their companionship is remarkably placid, Barbara finds herself strangely fixated on Graham’s socks, which, not held up by garters, annoyingly fall in “little round wrinkles, like an old concertina” round his ankles. He, she later learns, is equally perturbed by her horrendous hiking shorts, the unflattering shape and cut of which are “almost more than he could stand.”

On a more serious note, she also records the manner with which Graham deals with the local men. Despite having been told by various white people in Freetown that the locals will respect nothing but “a yelling voice and a heavy hand,” Barbara reports that Graham instead “treated them exactly as if they were white men from our own country.” (Given the ingrained racism of the day, I doubt that this is quite true—not least because she then goes on to describe him as acting like a “benevolent father” toward them—but he would appear significantly less draconian than some.) Most valuable of all, though, is Barbara’s recollection of just how very ill Graham becomes toward the end of the trip. The twitching nerve that she notices over his right eye whenever he’s ailing starts going like the clappers, his face is gray, and for a while, at least, he seems to be propelling himself by means of “will-power” alone. His eventual collapse—which he glosses over in Journey without Maps, by means of the dismissive section heading “A Touch of Fever”—leaves Barbara absolutely convinced that he’s dying: “I never doubted it for a minute … He looked like a dead man already.” Struggling as she is with extreme exhaustion herself, she’s able to focus on only “the practical side of it all,” becoming fixated on the particular problem of not having any candles to burn in the event of her Catholic cousin’s death. “I could not remember why I should burn candles,” she writes, “but I felt vaguely that his soul would find no peace if I could not do that for him. All night I was troubled by this thought. It seemed to be desperately important.”

This episode sums up Barbara’s character and attitude in more ways than one. Overall, reviewers praised her “pluck” and sense of adventure, her book thus presumably appealing to readers who had gobbled up E. Arnot Robertson’s best-selling novel Four Frightened People (1931), another story of the wild and thrilling adventures of two young English cousins (and which, coincidentally, Barbara reads during the voyage out to Africa). In that book, Judy Corder, a twenty-six-year-old doctor, her cousin Stewart, and two other English passengers flee the boat on which they’re traveling through Malay to Singapore because of an outbreak of bubonic plague, only to then be confronted with the dangers of the jungle instead. For her part, Barbara does warn readers that despite all the talk of wild animals and cannibals then still associated with Liberia, those hoping for a “roaring lion type of adventure” might be disappointed since her and Graham’s capers “were more amusing than frightening, and good luck dogged our footsteps most of the time.”

She might not have been relating an excursion to rival Judy’s—which involves deadly snake bites, tropical storms, and poison dart–armed natives—but nevertheless, Barbara can write, and what her tale lacks in thrills she makes up for in the sharpness of her observations. If Graham’s book is a journey into the dark interior of his mind, Barbara’s is the lighter counterbalance. Not only are her descriptions more grounded in the cousins’ bodily experiences, but she brings an altogether different point of view to proceedings. Describing an especially hard uphill slog, for example, she likens herself to “some poor creature in a Walt Disney film, wending a heartbreakingly cruel way up a twisty, winding road to the wicked castle lying high up on the mountainside” It’s an image that works rather well, perhaps precisely because one could never imagine reading it in Graham’s account.

*

Barbara’s adventurous streak continued long after she’d left the Liberian jungle. Shortly after her return to England, she followed another cousin, Graham’s brother Hugh, abroad to Berlin, where he was a foreign correspondent. There she fell in love with a German diplomat, Count Rudolf Strachwitz. Increasing political tensions scuppered their plans to marry, but Barbara stood her ground, remaining in Germany rather than fleeing for the safety of Britain during World War II. According to her obituary in the Guardian, which ran in 1991, when she died at age eighty-four, “a large circle of loyal friends (many of them later involved in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler) did much to protect her, but her life was precarious.” Her every move was watched by the Gestapo—their suspicions having been further fueled by her association with Bishop Preysing, an outspoken critic of Nazism, from whom she received instruction after she converted to Catholicism (once again following in the footsteps of Graham)—and the only work she could find was as a cleaning lady.

She and Rudolf did manage to marry in the spring of 1943; she became Countess Strachwitz, but he lost his job at the Foreign Office. He was then called up, leaving Barbara pregnant and alone in Berlin as the Russian army advanced on the city. Like many others, she fled west; she suffered a miscarriage in the process. While Rudolf was taken prisoner by the Americans, she sought refuge in Liechtenstein (Prince Franz Joseph II’s sister was married to Rudolf’s younger brother), and her sojourn there later inspired her second book, Liechtenstein: Valley of Peace (1967), a warm and sympathetic sketch of the tiny country and its people.

For a long time neither husband nor wife knew if the other was still alive, but they were eventually reunited in 1946, and two years later they emigrated to Argentina, where Rudolf got a job teaching economics (a subject in which he held a doctorate) at the University of Mendoza. They went on to have two children, moving to Berchtesgaden, the picturesque town in the Bavarian Alps that had once been the site of Hitler’s infamous Eagle’s Nest retreat, on the occasion of Rudolf’s retirement, and Barbara published her third book, an anthology of prayers. When Rudolf died, in 1969, she moved to Gozo, a small island of the Maltese archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea, where she dedicated much of her time to caring for disabled people. Frustratingly, despite such an eventful life, Too Late to Turn Back was the only volume of memoir she published—fittingly so, perhaps, since as the Guardian obituary closes, “She declined to write her autobiography; she lived for today and tomorrow, but never for yesterday.”

 

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.