The Paris Review's Blog, page 129

Beatlemania in Yugoslavia

Photo: United Press International. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most popular boy in my freshman class in high school was a certain Zoran. He was neither especially good-looking nor especially smart. But he had that special “something.” He had long hair. Not really long, just a bit over his ears. It was called “bitlsica” (the Beatles cut) and was modeled, of course, after the four band members of the Beatles. The year was 1964 and it was not a look commonly seen in our country. Teachers did not approve of it because it was considered to be a Western craze; parents did not like it either; and even some of the boys in the class bullied Zoran. I guess they were just jealous that he had the eye of all the girls. Zoran did not care much about what the old people thought, he was playing his electric guitar in a garage band and this was how a guitar player should look.

We were all fifteen then. The Beatles look and Beatles music were our thing.

We could listen to “our” kind of music on the radio. The radio was a magical source of music at a time when most households did not have a record player, that expensive and cumbersome machine for listening to vinyl. I remember that there was a daily program on Radio Zagreb from noon to one called “Listeners’ Choice,” which we always listened to and that’s where I heard the Beatles for the first time. Or we would listen to the legendary Radio Luxembourg, which used to air the latest hits. Later, starting in 1968, every Monday evening Radio Belgrade devoted its so-called “First Program” to rock ’n’ roll music in Yugoslavia.

This new band on the British and world music scene became a way of communicating, of being one with the world, while at the same time it gave us a sense of individualism, of looking different from our parents. It was more than a style of music, it was a style of life. We saw the photos of John, George, Paul, and Ringo in our daily press and on our TV screens. Of course, the phenomenon of a bunch of screaming teenage girls, running after the Beatles wherever they went, was depicted as scandalous and decadent, as the mass hysteria of kids. Perhaps it even was. But such popularity for a band of musicians—Beatlemania, as it was known—was novel to us. We congregated en masse only when we had to—for some state holiday, standing and listening to endless speeches. Or for a soccer match. Big rock concerts had not yet arrived in our neck of the woods.

Soon, however, all the boys were wearing their hair longer, thinking it would make the girls run after them like with the Beatles. In the provinces young men were even beaten up for having long hair and had it forcibly cut off. But that lasted for only a short time, because by the seventies, when I went to college, the fashion and the music had become unstoppable: to be in, a boy had to have long hair, and we girls had to have skirts short enough to wear as a mini, introduced to the world by the British designer Mary Quant around the same time. These skirts were indeed mini, causing our parents much more of a headache than a boy’s long hair. It was only when I had a daughter of my own that I could understand their fears. Like many a parent, my father believed that if girls dressed that way, they were more likely to expose themselves to sexual violence and therefore he strictly forbade me from wearing a mini. The problem was easily solved in Yugoslavia, like elsewhere in the world I guess; I would hide my miniskirt in my school bag and change into it later. We wore proper-length skirts to school but the mini was obligatory for going out, to a party or the movies.

It is interesting, if not paradoxical, that most such rock ’n’ roll musicians, or rockers (as they were called), were the sons of army officers, of the ruling class, the so-called red bourgeoisie. Perhaps they were more privileged and could afford musical instruments and vinyl, travel and be better informed. On the other hand, long hair and foreign music were a clear sign of rebellion against a father’s authority. One’s look was not as innocent as before—it became a statement.

For us it was perhaps the first notion that fashion could also be a sign of rebellion. For quite a while, long hair was considered if not a political provocation then at least a bad influence. However, as one’s look—that is, fashion—was the only sign of “deviation,” it was not seen as a threat to the system. Many youngsters in miniskirts and with bitlsica haircuts soon became members of the Communist Party. By the end of the sixties the musical Hair was staged in Belgrade, the first time ever in a Communist country. Deep Purple gave a concert in 1975 and the Rolling Stones in 1976. The explosion of local bands playing Yu-rock, as the local variety of rock ‘n’ roll was known, was inevitable.

But at the time when I first heard the Beatles, there were no cafés, no clubs, no places for us teenagers to meet, other than dance halls. I had my parents’ permission to go because the dancing was organized by the school and it was considered to be more of a dance school, not really an occasion for entertainment. It was a sad place, with benches lined up along one wall, and it was obvious that the dance hall also served as a venue for gymnastic and ballet exercises, Ping-Pong competitions, and occasional amateur recital performances. The smell of sweat and floor polish hung in the air. It wasn’t much fun sitting there with your back to the cold wall, listening to the crackling sound of vinyl records, under the watchful eye of a teacher worried that we might misbehave in some way, dance too close perhaps. The dancers among us were very few; we did not feel confident enough in our bodies to follow the steps of the waltz or tango; and they didn’t play rock music or the twist there. It was some time before rock ’n’ roll took over the dance halls, clubs, and private parties, allowing our bodies to move in a different way to a very different kind of beat.

One of the important elements in embracing Anglo-Saxon music, first and foremost rock ’n’ roll, was the language. By the age of fifteen, kids in Yugoslavia would have learned basic English at school. A foreign language was obligatory and usually the choice was among English, German, and French. In my generation, only a very few chose German, it clashed with what we learned in history class about the role of Fascist Germany during World War II. The French group was even smaller; the biggest was English. Some elementary schools had Russian as a subject, but even fewer kids studied that. As TV sets, those bulky boxes with small black-and-white screens, increasingly entered our homes, we were able to watch movies in the original, with subtitles in Serbo-Croatian, as the language was called back then. It was the same when we went to the cinema; all films were shown in their original language and the vast majority were Hollywood movies. This enabled us to get used to the sound of English—although with American pronunciation—and to expand our vocabulary. I remember the good feeling it gave us to listen to and understand the words of Beatles songs. It gave us a sense of self-confidence, even pride. The same was true of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, or rock ’n’ roll in general for those born just a few years before me. But for some reason, for my generation the music of the Beatles, and also the Rolling Stones, meant more. Maybe because it appeared just when we were growing up and we considered it our own. They were exciting in another way, too, even if the lyrics were banal and the melody rather simple, like “She loves me, yeah, yeah” or “I can’t get no satisfaction.” It was a distinctive sound that called for a different kind of dancing. It felt like a sudden rush of excitement filling your whole body, almost like a fever: it made you want to move your limbs.

Perhaps its biggest value was that it was so very different from what we in my country listened to in the sixties. There, music festivals were the most popular way of presenting light music, popular with the wider public. The singers were our first glimpse of stardom, they were our first celebrities. I still remember their names: Ivo Robić, Zdenka Vučković, Vice Vukov, Tereza Kesovija. A music festival was a big event, especially the one in Opatija, a small seaside resort that had been very fashionable among nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian nobility. At the time when Croatia was a part of that empire, it was known as Abbazia. The festival there started in 1958, organized by Yugoslav Radio and Television, a state institution, and was broadcast live.

I think that the most important thing about the Beatles for us growing up at that time was that their music was the exact opposite of the dominant festival music we were used to. Not so much in terms of musical style (some of their melodies could pass for a schlager, or light dancing melody), but rather because it became inseparable from their look and the way they played, creating what became their own specific style.

Now it seems as bizarre to be able to listen to the Beatles parallel with the festival in Opatija, as it was to watch Mickey Mouse cartoons or the movie Casablanca in the land of comrade Tito. The mixture of the two worlds colored my generation forever, in both good ways and bad. Good, because we enjoyed greater freedoms than our neighbors; bad, because we were sufficiently satisfied with these freedoms not to see beyond them, not to demand more, not to stand up and create a democratic political opposition when it was needed in the late eighties. While the whole of Europe celebrated the 1989 collapse of Communism, Yugoslavia was the only European state sliding toward breakup and war.

 

Slavenka Drakulić was born in Croatia in 1949. The author of several works of nonfiction and novels, she has written for the New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and numerous publications around the world.

From Café Europa Revisited , by Slavenka Drakulić, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Slavenka Drakulić.

Re-Covered: Bette Howland

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

When I began writing this column two years ago, I initially restricted myself to discussing only titles that were out of print. But over the past year, as publishers continue to increase their efforts to resurrect lost classics, I’ve begun including pieces about previously neglected books that have been rediscovered and repackaged for a new generation. There are many success stories: the unexpected triumph of the Vintage Classics edition of John Williams’s Stoner, a book that sold less than two thousand copies when it was first published in 1965 before falling swiftly out of print, but as a reprint went on to become the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013; or Lucia Berlin’s unforeseen posthumous literary stardom in 2015 after her selected short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (edited by Stephen Emerson for Farrar, Straus and Giroux), became a New York Times best seller. But there’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland.

Howland was a working-class Jewish writer from Chicago who in a single prolific decade published three books—a memoir, W-3 (1974), and two short-story collections Blue in Chicago (1978) and Things to Come and Go: Three Stories (1983)—and won both Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, then all but disappeared from view. She resurfaced briefly, sixteen years later, in 1999, with the publication of what would be her final work, the novella-length story “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” in TriQuarterly, but it garnered scant attention. If it hadn’t been for an editor’s fortuitous discovery in a secondhand bookshop shortly before Howland died in 2017, at the age of eighty, hardly anyone would have been familiar with her name, or her incredible work.

In 2015, only two years before Howland’s death, Brigid Hughes, the editor and publisher of A Public Space, found a copy of W-3 in the $1 cart at Manhattan’s Housing Works Bookstore. Swiftly realizing that she’d stumbled across a forgotten but major talent, Hughes got hold of secondhand copies of Howland’s other books, and then set out to track down the woman herself. “Thirty years after Bette Howland received a MacArthur Fellowship, her books are out of print and her whereabouts unknown,” Hughes wrote later that year, introducing a portfolio of Howland’s writing that she’d painstakingly put together for issue no. 23 of A Public Space. “A search for her name in the public records yields little. But it does lead to a son, who holds the key to a safe-deposit box in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Inside are unpublished stories, a lost essay, and a trove of letters from a dear friend named Saul.” Included in this portfolio was an excerpt from W-3; two stories, “A Visit” and “Blue in Chicago”; the aforementioned lost essay, “The American Heroine,” on Edna Pontellier, the doomed heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening; letters from a forty-year correspondence with Howland’s friend Saul (as in Saul Bellow), whom Howland first met in 1961 at a writer’s conference on Staten Island; and an essay by Howland’s son, Jacob, which ends with the searing image of his mother as she was then, suffering from MS and dementia:

The carpet around her easy chair is littered with unfinished manuscripts, words struck through in her shaky hand. I read aloud to her, often from her own writing. While we can no longer discuss the meaning of her stories, this activity pleases us both.

As astonishing as all this was, it was only the beginning of Hughes’s commitment to restoring Howland’s rightful place in the literary canon. In early 2019, A Public Space launched their publishing imprint with Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage—a collection that brought together the work from Blue in Chicago and the eponymous novella-length story. (This past summer, the volume was published by Picador in the UK under the title Blue in Chicago.) This month they’re republishing the book that both launched Howland’s lauded career and first captured Hughes’s attention, W-3.

*

Originally published in 1974, when Howland was thirty-seven, W-3 is one hell of a debut. It takes its title not from the IRS form, but rather from the psychiatric ward at the Chicago hospital where Howland was confined following a suicide attempt in 1968. She was a thirty-one-year-old single mother of two at the time, trying to write—“she labored at her typewriter day and night” is how Jacob remembers his mother’s endeavors—while also supporting herself and her sons by working part-time as a city librarian and as an editor for the University of Chicago Press. “The neighborhood we lived in then—Hyde Park, long before gentrification—was chaotic and dangerous,” Jacob continues. “I remember standing at the window one very cold winter’s day, six floors up, looking west, over miles and miles of slums, and above the rooftops, as Saul Bellow puts it, ‘the dragging smoke which rises with difficulty in zero weather.’ The memory captures for me, and perhaps for my mother as well, the indescribable, metaphysical bleakness of life in Chicago.” This bleakness was mounting in Howland’s life, along with her ongoing struggle to make ends meet—she often threw the bills she received directly into the trash, Jacob recalls—and her frustration and despair about her unmet literary aspirations. So much so that one afternoon, while staying in Bellow’s apartment (he was overseas at the time), she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.

Howland woke up in intensive care, with, as she writes in W-3, her mother whispering “You are reborn!” into her ear. A few days later Howland was transferred to a different ward, where, still deemed a potential risk to herself, private nurses kept an eye on her round the clock: “Here I sipped yellow chicken broth and peed warm yellow pee into chilly bedpans—an improvement over being fed through needles and drained through tubes.” From there, she was then transferred to W-3.

Regular readers of this column might be reminded of one of the books I wrote about last month, Tove Ditlevsen’s The Faces (1968). It, too, began with the narrator’s hospitalization following a suicide attempt by overdose. I found myself thinking about other titles from the same period that draw on the author’s experience of being institutionalized: Ann Quin’s unfinished novel, The Unmapped Country (which she was working on at the time of her suicide in 1973) is set in a psychiatric institution where a woman named Sandra is being treated following a breakdown; Penelope Mortimer’s daring Long Distance (1974) is a fragmentary and hallucinatory account of an unnamed female protagonist’s desperate journey through an unspecified establishment that’s part Yaddo (where Mortimer wrote the book), part hospital. Ditlevsen, Quin, and Mortimer all prioritize the interior experiences of their fictional alter egos. As such, one comes away from each novel with the strong sense of a protagonist imprisoned more inside her own troubled mind than within an institution.

Howland takes a different approach. She provides her readers with the necessary details of her situation, but she has little interest in using the book to excavate the trauma that led her to this point. She remains acutely aware that, regardless of the specifics, hers is not a singular story—“Histories like mine, of long debilitating illness, vague recurrent symptoms, hospitalizations, were common enough on W-3; these things go together.” Or, as she writes early in the book: “[I] hated giving any account of myself. I was sick to death of the facts of my life.” Instead, W-3 is a riveting portrait of a community, that of the ward and its inhabitants, and a startlingly clear-eyed one at that.

In it, as in Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Howland’s lodestars are place and character. She’s a writer interested in real life—“the old continuous struggle, the day-to-day hand-to-mouth existence,” as she describes it in “To the Country”—and real people. Whether she’s describing a large family party, the whimsies of a bunch of vacationers, life in a branch of the public library, or the comings and goings of a Chicago courtroom, the best pieces in Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage offer us evocative portraits of various urban communities. Howland was clear that she’d gone to “a hell of a lot of trouble—no one will ever know how much—to work with the facts,” and thus didn’t want her stories reviewed as fiction.

The lonely, the old, the ill, and the suffering; these are the people Howland writes about. Take the “cornered creature” that is a bitter, angry woman in “To the Country”: “A husband dead, a son killed in the war, the children too much for her, the mother disappointed—a life of constant self-reproach. She was beside herself, leading a manless, unconsoled existence. The fear, the loneliness, managing alone. And of course pride.” The description cuts exceedingly close to the bone. “Now I was a ‘divorcée’ with two small children. I had good reason to appreciate what that lurid word really meant,” Howland confesses in W-3. “I knew that benighted condition. A dingy flat, crummy job, constant money worries. Everything you earn goes to doctors and baby-sitters. Then the baby’s got a runny nose, the sitter doesn’t show, you can’t go to work. A life full of reproaches, self-hatred; a woman supporting a manless (unconsoled) existence, beside herself with fear, worry, managing alone.”

Just as in her shorter work, in W-3 Howland hones in on the individuals around her, with a keen eye for the link between their physical bearing and the emotional turmoil beneath the surface. Take the perfect precision of her sketch of Trudy, one of the most memorable figures on the ward, who’s supposed to be in isolation, but keeps appearing, like a “cuckoo,” in everyone else’s room: “She perambulated down the corridors lashed to her intravenous stand—bandages, pajama strings loosened and streaming—looking like a sort of injured parade float.” But in the end, Howland always pulls back for the panoramic shot. Just as in “Twenty-Sixth and California,” when she explains that the courtroom about which she’s writing is an environment where there’s “something more powerful than individual feeling,” life on W-3 is all about the community as a whole.

*

One quickly comes to understand that this is the only way Howland could have written about this particular experience. It’s not that she refuses to share the more intimate details of her own suffering, it’s that she lives in a world—both within the hospital and outside its walls—in which pain is prevalent enough to make it unremarkable. Her account of looking out the window, watching her two small sons, standing side by side and holding hands, on the sidewalk far below—“neater and cleaner than I was used to seeing them”—is heartbreaking. They’re too young to be allowed to visit her, so seeing them like this is her only choice. Howland’s mother is taking them back to Florida until Howland is well enough to look after them again. Howland shouts down at them, and in response, they crane their little heads up toward the sound of her voice, but the building has too many windows. “I knew they’d never seen me,” Howland writes. “They must be wondering now if they ever would. It was a terrible thing I had done to them. And I felt like a ghost.” This horrifying clarity, admitted wholly without self-pity, is the captivating tone that Howland takes throughout W-3.

This is not to say that her mind is not grievously unsettled—she recalls the ward’s television as a source of jarring, discordant images that must, she thinks, “have been a reflection of my own mental condition”—but any such confusion is absent in her prose. She does not dwell on what led her to this point—the suicidal thoughts that she “dragged … around like a weight,” the inevitable prescription of sleeping pills—or the struggle that still lies ahead of her. We are given the occasional flash of insight, such as in her description of the uncomfortable kinship she felt with a fellow patient named Gerda, a woman with what Howland describes as a “forcefield” that both attracted and repulsed her. “I had good reason to be repelled by Gerda,” she finally explains, in what’s almost an addendum at the end of the chapter, “she was my depression, the bottom of it—crossing the deeps, the rolling dark, that still lay ahead of me.” This, however, is not the story Howland’s telling here. She’s smart enough to know the difference between her own story and the story of the hospital. When it comes to life on W-3, there’s nothing intimate or private about it. “We spent all the rest of our time being a ‘community,’ talking about the ‘community,’ conceding its claims,” Howland explains, one-to-one therapy sessions regularly being in short supply. “When would we get a chance to talk about ourselves? To be ourselves? Whoever that might be?”

Much of the power and poignancy of W-3 lies in its contradictions. It offers us a portal to a particular time and place, yet the compassion and truthfulness that underlies the writing renders it timeless, as urgent a read now as when it was first written nearly half a century ago. It’s all the more important a book because of what it meant to Howland herself. In this, it reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald’s wonderful Booker Prize–winning novel, Offshore (1979), about a bunch of bedraggled misfits living on houseboats on London’s Battersea Reach in the sixties. The inspiration was Fitzgerald’s own experience of living on an aging wooden barge named Grace, during one of the very lowest points in a life full of trials and tribulations, a period that drew to a close when Grace sank, leaving the already struggling Fitzgerald and her family homeless and bereft of their worldly possessions. Offshore, as Fitzgerald’s biographer Hermione Lee puts it, was “salvaged from personal anguish.” Fitzgerald turned an experience that would have been the breaking of most of us into one of the greatest artistic achievements of her life, and with W-3, Howland does the same. As Hughes so movingly explains: “The book itself would be [Howland’s] salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave.”

 

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here . 

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 LitHub, among other publications. 

Inside the Order Is Always Something Wild

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tie the Temptress to the Trojan, 2018. Collection of Michael Bertrand, Toronto. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

We stand before each other and look. Who are you? What do we see in each other? Perhaps our eyes meet this first time. Perhaps we tilt to the side, resist directness. We make a first assessment. Then we keep looking, and more is revealed in every glance, tilt, moment, and we come deeper into knowing.

Each Lynette Yiadom-Boakye painting is like looking into a story or an entire life. They call to mind vignette collections such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings (1964), wherein poems like “Mr Bleaney” imagine all that is behind the faces of the sometimes lonely people we see in our day to day, if we pause to look and consider. There are entire lives inside one frame, one poem, entire souls and stories inside the singletons and groups in these paintings.

The poem that most richly reminds me of the human worlds Yiadom-Boakye creates is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Bean Eaters” of 1960:

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.

Dinner is a casual affair.

Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,

Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.

Two who have lived their day,

But keep on putting on their clothes

And putting things away.

And remembering …

Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,

As they lean over the beans in their rented back room

that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,

tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Brooks paints a first portrait of “this old yellow pair,” and we observe them in their intimate space. As in Yiadom-Boakye’s work, we have been invited into the middle of an intimacy, an interior moment. In the last stanza, propelled by the phrase “And remembering”—pressed forward by the ellipses—Brooks takes us to a blossoming interior world “full of beans and receipts and dolls and cloths, / tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.” Specific, minute, infinite details live behind the tableaux. So, too, in these paintings, where complex selves full of memories, stories, places, intimacies, and intricacies seem to live inside the depth of the frames.

 

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Condor and the Mole, 2011. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

 

Yiadom-Boakye’s evocative titles—her poet’s hand—set us off course into the elliptical of complicated lives. For a portrait we might expect a single name, answering who it is or what is the archetype. Instead, the painting that could be described as “Young Man in Blue” is named the enigmatic Fiscal Playsuit. A painting that might simply be named “Funeral” is, more richly, Diplomacy II, for of course funerals and death rituals are the ultimate site of cultural conflict. The painting makes that visible. “Three Figures at the Beach”? Hard Wet Epic. “Woman with Red Background”? Geranium Love Sonnet. “Man in Red Robe”? Ah, Any Number of Preoccupations. And what might we imagine when we look at a painting that is called, not “Man in Pink Tie with Three Men” but rather, An Education? Who is learning; who is teaching; who is learning what? The exercise is exhilarating, finding all that her titles evoke beneath the paintings, the not-visible and unspoken inside the depths.

Yiadom-Boakye is herself a poet and says she paints what she cannot write and writes what she cannot paint. I feel the limitations of words daily, and the limitation of the shapes that writing seems sometimes to offer. I wish I had more expressive latitude and invention when I face the page and experience what Audre Lorde describes: “Some words / bedevil me.”

 

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, To Improvise a Mountain, 2018. Private collection. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Photo: Marcus Leith.

 

But wrestling to make even an imperfect poem gets the poet closer to the self and thus to others, through the darkness. Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings reveal how the oblique angles of the self and meaning touch where human exchange is imminent. This poem of mine stands to face these paintings, at an angle. It begins as a portrait (after Yiadom-Boakye) of my late grandmother, and then imagines her in a place she never was: a poetry workshop.

Wenonah Bond Logan at the Poetry Workshop

Her verse is unsentimental and formal.

Her poem is perfectly typed on bond.

At the bottom she’s signed her name in curly script.

She waits her turn, accepts constructive criticism.

Her lines are well-turned, but what is imagined

is somewhere deep in the mangrove roots

that float in the brackish water beneath

her stanzas, oscillate, shimmy.

There is no first-person in her poems,

no evidence who the words came from.

The words are Latinate. There is order.

There is beauty. Not wild beauty but beauty

like a well-made bed, a cup of coffee

creamed to the same shade as her skin, a tea

sandwich with the crusts cut off, a cardigan

folded neatly with tissue paper. Yes,

these things are beautiful. The other part lives

neither in poems nor in her ablutions.

It wishes to wear shantung. It does not

wear a girdle, nor own hair rollers nor

rain bonnet, nor furniture on casters,

does not keep records on index cards.

Even when invisible it is there.

Inside the order is always something wild.

Is what the poem or the painting gives us the surface fantasy or fact? Known or imagined? Does it matter as long as the work of art takes us to somewhere human and true?

*

With any writer or painter of the African diaspora, I think the ocean is somewhere in their work, even if it is not a subject. The ocean is the bottom, the urtext, ground zero, the things that we crossed with something to carry, the void across which we have made something new despite the odds. It is the darkness wherein we perished, the nightmare from which we have not yet awakened. If a subject or not, the ocean, the middle passage, that blackness, is always there, I feel. These paintings (I wrote “these poems” at first!) are not history-minded, so they are not of the ocean in that regard. They are of the ocean in her deep understanding of darkness, danger, mystery, and color.

When I think about the ocean and its traces in Yiadom-Boakye’s work, it is in her understanding of color. The ocean, in its depths, is so, so dark. Her atmospheres are ocean dark. She is an oceanic painter. The impenetrable dark, the depths, all that water holds is mirrored in all her paint holds. The paradoxically full darkness of her paintings makes you look harder to see if you are missing something. What is hiding within the saturated depths?

 

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Passion Like No Other, 2012. Collection Lonti Ebers. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

 

And then, like waves that lift us and reveal color, so, too, flashes of color in the skirts of these paintings show themselves, and this is extraordinary. So the impassable is in fact revelatory. There is something beneath. It is light, color, surprise. Revelation. Color, flashes of color, are not necessarily more telling or informational than the dark in her paintings.

And I think of the deep understanding of human exchange, as well as all we never understand about each other. No matter how deep our intimacy, we are still vastly unknowable to each other. I have wished, with loved ones, to be inside of them, to know all that they think, to possess their memories, to see through their eyes. I have wished to step into their pelts and walk as they do. I have wished sometimes to grab them with my teeth by the scruffs of their necks—children, lovers, the best of friends—and carry them to the cave of mutual understanding. Intimacy is that animal and intense. The fascination as well as the vexation of intimacy is that we can never, truly, know each other completely.

 

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Citrine by the Ounce, 2014. Private collection. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

 

Yet the light that insists its way through darkness is our human bond. Lucille Clifton: “the light insists on itself in the world.” It is miraculous, given all that shrouds us, that we come close together as often as we do. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings believe in and make available that indelible truth. We may sometimes struggle to see each other, to come near each other. We may stand in close proximity and look directly at each other, as her paintings invite, but it takes several passes, several exchanges, the passage of time, to actually see and know each other more deeply.

These paintings make you want to stand in front of them again and again and return to the souls residing within. The bottomlessness of these paintings is like the bottomlessness of intimacy.

 

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 8am Cadiz, 2017. Baltimore Museum of Art; purchase with the exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

 

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, educator, memoirist, and cultural advocate who has served as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018 and is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Excerpted from Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night (eds. Isabella Maidment & Andrea Schlieker, Tate/D.A.P., 2020). “Inside the Order Is Always Something Wild,” © Elizabeth Alexander 2020. “The Bean Eaters,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, which is quoted in the excerpt, is reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.

Reality Is Plasticine

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

My memory of my childhood is a black hole, save for the moments and ages marked by revelations and miracles. Take age six for instance, the year I learned to call things that are not (yet) as though they are (already.) It’s a biblical lesson, this, and my brothers were born from inside it, after years of waiting. Leaning on those words from the mouth of my mother, I prayed nightly for twin siblings, and soon started to talk about them like I knew them already. In a sense, I did. One, because they were real before their bodies were formed, and two, because my requests were already cool wax on the inside of God’s ear. I was taught things about holding hope unswervingly, about manifesting with laser focus, and the veracity of those lessons raised the hairs on the back of my neck even when there was no one there. I sealed prayers with amens and had them delivered swiftly; fleshed wishes out in my heart that stumbled into my life, already breathing. The pattern begins in my first name, directly translated to mean “it is not hard for God to do.” As in, nothing is. That name leads my head. My family took my dreams seriously, because God put the future behind my eyes often, but when the seeing got too heavy, I gave one of my many eyes back to God—the one that got visions, that put the weight of knowing on me—saying, This one is too much. Age thirteen, I believe, the year I learned that God understands consent, that They will never force anything on me for the sake of it.

The spiritual controls the physical, so everything breathes there before it ever lands here. I’ve never lost this lesson, which is also an inheritance, as in drooling through the genetic code. A gift, as in given freely. I did hide it though, so as not to look unhinged. For a long time, there was nothing I wanted more than to be normal, to be as a person should, to be young, to unknow things. It still takes work to release the weight of normal, of should.

Time isn’t real, that’s true, but years are time capsules in a sense. This year just gone shook the ground, took people in numbing numbers and cost some of us more than others, because nothing is equal. At points, I experienced consistent blocks of happiness, despite the world. A big part of that was made possible by safety and the privilege of a home with a roof and walls that disconnected me from nearly everything, but the other part was a dogged refusal to believe the world I want to see isn’t born yet. It is. That’s not hope; it’s faith, which Hebrews 11 defines as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Twenty-twenty turned me six again, treating stories like my life, the future like the present, the present like the past; stacking surreal on top of real, time on top of time. I don’t know what it looks like from the outside. But it feels a lot like peace if you’re wearing my skin.

I’ve been wearing my skin.

*

Tourmaline’s essay last summer taught me about freedom dreaming. The concept itself wasn’t new to me—I know the world I want to see: I’ve scattered its particulars across art mediums; unfurled it irreversibly from inside my life—but the name was, the intent was. As a child, I had plenty practice not just shrinking the world, but replacing it, too. When there was chaos outside the house, I turned our home into a world. When there was shouting outside my room, I turned my room into Mars. When there was a heaving abomination in my bed, I turned my senses into the universe. I could deaden the rest of existence on cue, unreal everything but the chords in a song or the pages of a book or the colors in a painting. I could tumble out of the world at will, sit beside myself and hold my little holy hand. It was called absent-mindedness by surrounding adults. They were wrong about that. I was only breathing. Only freedom dreaming. Only making my now-present life.

I’ve always experienced time through what I now refer to as the timestack. Future on the past on the present. Ice, water, gas—all a matter of matter, depending. But last year, time happened inside Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory: hot iron melting on concrete, minutes leaking into the ground, the hands of time frozen in the faces of three clocks. Wasn’t that the first lesson that we all learned when the world shut down in March? Time is not real, urgency is fiction, whatever we’ve been told must be done right now can wait. We were all surprised. But I did spend some time noticing what people were surprised by. It was all different things. Some people were surprised by the fact that the world could stop; others by the fact that the world is cruel and governments are merciless; others by how little control they actually had; some by how ruthlessly death could sweep through a world that’s expected to keep spinning. I’d learned some of these things the hard way and it didn’t just break my mind, it ended the world for me, so I don’t blame anyone who shattered under the weight. It’s just—it’s not the first time. The roots of right now have wildly consistent roots.

Standing at the edge of 2019, facing last year, I had resolved to let myself eat joy. I’d already died enough and I owed myself the stillness I’d gathered, the peace I’d reaped. When the year started to unfold, a friend and I talked about how we weren’t mind-blown by any of the violence per se, just by the staggering scale; by the world’s resilience and consistent bounce back (what will be enough to make it stop?); just by the fact that the younger versions of us who had been scolded for preferring stories to real life had been right all along about reality being bendable.

I think we’re all seeing the need for reinvention, for newness, for a new world, but how do we get there? What I keep telling myself and everyone I love is that the world before this pause was imagined. The world we will have after is currently being imagined. We are all part of that work. It’s a message I hope we keep passing on and on and on, because it has sturdy composition, is made out of way more than thin air. I know from my own personal life that there’s a jarring quake that comes with losing the lens through which you’ve always seen the world. It’s a heartbreak. A loss. Only, not of a person; of the entire way you understand seeing. There’s a scintillating quiet that follows. You can’t turn or run from it; you have to make something else, or it’ll be made for you. It’s up to you, says the glowing instruction, choose the life and lens you can survive.

*

This is one of the most liberating adult lessons, isn’t it: that point when you see that everything that was insisted upon, passed down to you as an inflexible rule, was made up. For me, in real time, learning this looked like hacking my own past to find me at five, seven, ten years old. As always, upside down in a song, backflipping into a painting, teleporting into a film, gathering my pieces one by one—especially the ones I’d been told made me too strange for the world. I’ve been growing younger on purpose because I have the most to teach me about how to keep alive in the wake of an evaporating reality, how to make edible joy from scratch, how to make friends inside a doll house, a vacation out of a train set, a safe house out of Lego blocks. A younger me has things to teach me about faith, about believing the yet unseen. I’ve been sitting next to her a lot.

I told her a secret recently. I told her that sometimes I worry adulthood is a long process of making unstomachable things liveable-with in order to keep being okay, because those mental not-okays? Loneliest place in the body, loneliest place in the world. I told her that there have been days when my own resilience disgusted me to the point of tears; that I don’t always understand what’s happening around me or how people keep going but I do the smile and laugh anyway because it works.

She had things to tell me about history. “It’s flat and boring and I don’t trust it,” she said. “I prefer storybooks. They’re more real.”

I agree with her. They’re more real. Aren’t the most dangerous facts just stories no one will ever tell you the real moral of?

I don’t hide darkness from her because she knows about it, so I told her things about watching the Nigerian government’s hand strike out people’s names from an event we all saw; how they gaslit us so bad we had to tell each other repeatedly: We saw that, it happened. And that sometimes we doubted our own eyes, our voices shaking with unbelief. I told her that they shot people and lied about it; that during protests, people who were fighting for justice tried to erase others because they didn’t like how they looked or how they loved; that I saw the largest congregation of hope Nigeria has seen since independence and then watched the government scatter it with bullets.

Her eyes watered. She asked, “Why would they do that? Don’t these people think? They never know what they’re doing!”

I told her it’s become louder than ever that they do think, that they know exactly what they’re doing and why. Even disasters have design. I told her I distrust history now more than ever, because how much of it has always been gaslighting and ruthless curating? How much of what we believe was decided for us? I explained to her that we are always living in each other’s collective imagination. We can only be free to the extent to which we, or people who love us, can see.

When I asked what she was reading, she told me Malorie Blackman. She asked what I’ve been up to, what we ended up becoming, if she would really be needing maths, if we did everything on time. I told her to forget the math and hold on to the stories, that there are no clocks in my house, that we live a life where we get to move by the senses—rain sounds in the bedroom all through harmattan, night on repeat between the walls while the sun hangs high outside. I told her that when I couldn’t see my way into the life I wanted, I wrote it down, I vision-boarded it using photographs and films and paintings like she taught me. Her mouth slackened as I told her how many hours I spent looking at Manuja Waldia’s paintings three years ago when I lost my head, because the paintings showed me beautiful people around a stunning table, all fed and loved and chosen and happy—that’s what I had needed the most. I told her that in my home, in the space where I live, I have that dining table now; that it became real because I saw it in color; that it took me a long time to accept our inability to tell the difference, but that she was right, the table inside a painting is as real as the table inside your house. I told her that sometimes I can see her running through Paul Davey’s universes showing girls like her in the thick of glorious adventures, and that really, truly, what makes all of this freedom dreaming worth it is that we are not the first or only. We’re part of an ever-growing congregation of people who see better with us, whose dreaming touches our dreaming, whose doing touches our doing.

The day slides off and I show her the girls in Ojima Abalaka’s illustrations and how worthy they look just resting. Then we spend hours dancing to Afrobeats inside Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s The Hours behind You painting. She dances, and so do I, in dizzying circles.

“Is this real?” she asks, sweat leaking onto the back of our matching white dresses, even though outside this work I hardly wear dresses and only wear black.

“Reality is plasticine,” I tell her. “Nothing is real. Everything is real. We can go everywhere.”

“Now you think about this question instead and answer: What is freedom?”

She pauses to take it in. “This?” she answers, finally.

“This,” I say.

*

What’s there to do with the surreality of everything? Who knows. Sometimes, I come up for air in the middle of a month I can’t recall and there is an expanse on either side: time like an endless body of water, wave after wave after wave. The more stillness is required of us—the more my schedule bends like hot rubber, the more silence fills the space between my ears, the higher the numbers and warnings and unrelenting griefs—the less and more sure I am about where the shore of my self is. Sometimes my couch levitates and I’m suddenly on a cloud at two in the afternoon. Sometimes I don’t use my voice for long enough to forget I ever had one. There is so much to feel I need to sort through my own head to find what’s mine. But maybe the places I go are what’s mine. Maybe my thousand unrealities and addresses are what’s mine. Maybe my unrootedness is what’s mine. The truth is: to survive the world and what it does, I do not live in it. I live inside the apartment I love, which might as well be anywhere, inside the love I’m choosing, inside God, inside art, inside music, behind the motherboard in my phone, trying to keep in touch across distance despite my own exhaustion. Everything is fiction. That fact shifted the floor from under me before it showed me the and: everything is fiction and all of my fictions can be made tangible. It all already exists. Love for myself is protecting my imagination from their facts and their set-in-stone. It’s protecting my world from the world, feeding it fat with faith, giving it my trust for dessert. All I know for sure these days is this: Nothing is real. Everything is real. We can go anywhere.

 

Eloghosa Osunde is a writer and visual artist. Her debut work of fiction will be published by Riverhead Books in 2021.

 

Redux: All of This Was Out of Season

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.

Boris Pasternak. Portrait: Auenkoff, 1960.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re looking out the window to the snow and cold outside. Read on for Boris Pasternak’s Art of Fiction interview, Annie Proulx’s story “The Wamsutter Wolf,” and Donika Kelly’s poem “Dear—.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!).

 

Boris Pasternak, The Art of Fiction No. 25

Issue no. 24 (Summer–Fall 1960)

I remember coming to Pasternak’s house from the railroad station at dusk, taking a shortcut I had learned near the cemetery. Suddenly the wind grew very strong; a snowstorm was beginning. I could see snow flying in great round waves past the station’s distant lights. It grew dark very quickly; I had difficulty walking against the wind. I knew this to be customary Russian winter weather, but it was the first real metol—snowstorm—I had seen. It recalled poems by Pushkin and Blok, and it brought to mind Pasternak’s early poems, and the snowstorms of Doctor Zhivago. To be in his house a few minutes later, and to hear his elliptical sentences so much like his verse, seemed strange.

 

Photo: Wilson Bentley. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Wamsutter Wolf

By Annie Proulx

Issue no. 171 (Fall 2004)

Within a mile or two of crossing the Wyoming line it began to snow—sparse, dry flakes. The map showed a gravel road cutting west in the vicinity of Tie Siding and he watched for it. He thought he must have missed it, pulled into a ranch road to turn around and then saw it was the one he wanted. He could see it snaking west, the distant Medicine Bows, where the snow was falling heavily, almost obscured.

The road was rough with stiff ruts left by hunters’ trucks, but passable. Despite the snow the surface was dry and his Jeep raised a pillar of chill yellow dust that mixed with the flakes and hung in the air for minutes.

 

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

 

Dear—

By Donika Kelly

Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

… Look: all of this was out of season, the doe

tossed on the roadside, the melted snow—

even me, standing over the carcass,

and why? The crow long gone now, and what

marked the line between winter and spring?

 

And to read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives. Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!).

What Writers and Editors Do

Photo: © BillionPhotos.com / Adobe Stock.

The work of the literary editor is conducted in a kind of shadow, cast by the name of the author. A few editors have stepped out of that shadow, becoming perhaps more infamous than famous, for the labels “editor” and “famous” seem like a contradiction in terms, essentially incompatible. An example is Gordon Lish, who became known in the literary world as “Captain Fiction” and whose authors included Raymond Carver. Another is Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose epithet was the “Editor of Genius.” One of the most celebrated editing jobs ever done was carried out by Ezra Pound, not in any formal capacity, but as a friend, his ruthless hand paring down an early version of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into the form in which we know it today. Gordon Lish’s editing was quite as unconstrained and uncompromising, the style we think of as Carver’s being in fact Lish’s work. Carver himself was rather ambivalent about it, though it unquestionably established his name as a writer. This became apparent when Carver’s own manuscript was published after his death, his stories there being quite differently ample and expansive, barely recognizable. There is little doubt that the editor’s Carver was better than Carver’s Carver, and how must that have made the author feel as he stood in the spotlight to receive his accolades, hailed as the great new name of American literature? The example is interesting, for the job of the editor is to exert influence, not for his own good, nor necessarily for the author’s, but for that of the book, and if we can suggest that Lish went too far, we must also ask in relation to what? After all, the book was certainly the better for it. Were the wounded feelings of its author more important? Without Lish, Carver’s books would have been poorer and he would have been a reasonably good writer rather than a brilliant one. This raises the question of what a writer is, and where the boundaries run between the author, the book, and the surrounding world.

America has a tradition of strong editors, though the issue is not specifically American. I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know, too, of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything.

Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself—in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said and done disappears without trace. Had Lish not gone as far as he did, everything in Carver’s texts would have been attributed unequivocally to Carver, the way all novels, short stories, and poetry collections are attributed unequivocally to the writer. To understand what goes on in this shadowland, we could ask ourselves: What would the books have been like without their editors? In my own case, the answer is simple: there would have been no books. I would not have been a writer. This is not to say that my editor writes my books for me, but that his thoughts, input, and insights are imperative to their being written. These thoughts, this input, and these insights are particular to me and my writing process; when he is editing the work of other authors, what he gives them is something particular to their work. The job of editor is therefore ideally undefined and open, dependent on each individual writer’s needs, expectations, talent, and integrity, and it is first and foremost based on trust, hinging much more on personal qualities and human understanding than on formal literary competence.

I remember a time in my late twenties when I was working for a literary magazine, we had commissioned a contribution from an established poet, and I was given the job of taking care of it. I read the poem and responded with a few comments, some suggestions as to minor changes, and a tentative inquiry as to whether the poem might be developed a bit further in the same direction. The reply that came back can be summed up in a single question: “Who are you?” In fact, there may well have been an undertone in that reply warranting an even more forceful wording: “Who the hell are you?” I was vexed by this, my comments had been cautious and, as far as I could see, justified. It was how I was used to commenting on the works-in-progress of my writer friends. Surely a poet of such experience and standing could relate more professionally to their own writing?

But the reaction wasn’t about the poem. It was about a faceless editor wanting to change the poem, which I guessed was being construed as an attack. As if there was something wrong with the poem and this faceless young male academic thought he knew what was needed to fix it. Objectively, I think my comments were on the right track, but when it comes to writing there is no such thing as objective, it’s all about the person writing and the person reading. If I had met this poet a few times, if we had been able to gain an impression of each other, perhaps get an idea as to each other’s literary preferences, I think my comments might have been taken differently, perhaps even prompted changes to the work, though not necessarily in the way I had envisaged.

The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination—and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective norm. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor.

That the books that come out of this are treated in almost exactly the opposite way in literary criticism, which is very much about weights and measures and comparisons to other books, can often throw an author into shock and is something one never quite gets used to. It feels almost as if there are different books, one belonging to the editor, another to the critic, and for the author this can be difficult; should he or she listen to his or her editor, who will invariably say that critics don’t know what they’re talking about, that they are insensitive and stupid, driven by their own agendas, and so on, or to the judgement of the critics?

Erlend Loe exploits the comedy that lies in the difference between the work of editors and critics in his most recent novel, Vareopptelling (Stocktaking), which opens with an editor phoning an aging poet and telling her how great the reviews of her latest collection have been, everything he says being more or less veiled with the intention of shielding her from the reality of the matter, after which she embarks on a personal crusade to erase the discrepancy between her own perception of the book and that of the critics. It’s funny because it’s recognizable, the editor’s attempts to deal with poor reviews, as well as the thoughts of vengeance they can give rise to in the mind of the author, it strikes a chord. Even a writer like Stieg Larsson, who made a name for himself with his very first book and was canonized in his own lifetime, lets the poorer reviews get to him, he can’t let go of them, including in his collection of poems Natta de mina (Goodnight My Dear Ones), a grotesque fantasy in which a named critic is mutilated. And Paul Auster, a world-renowned author one would think to have been so acclaimed in his time that poor reviews would be like water off a duck’s back, expends a great deal of emotional energy in his recently published correspondence with J. M. Coetzee reacting to James Wood’s critiques of his books in The New Yorker, not with arguments, but with descriptions of what it feels like—which is like being mugged in broad daylight.

This is so because writing and publishing a book is to lay some part of oneself bare, in such a way as to be utterly defenseless, and allow oneself to be judged by someone with nothing at risk. An editor who also works as a critic, which is to say interpreting and passing judgments on quality—and yes, they exist—serves literature poorly, since interpretation and judgment wrap up a work as if for good, whereas what they should be doing is keeping it open as long as possible. For literature is always something that is becoming, in the making, whereas the forms in which it appears are something that is, they exist already. And since the art is to force oneself beyond what is and into what is becoming—which is alive and essentially unknown to us until we get there—then only those who don’t know how to write can write, only those who can’t write a novel can write a novel. From this it follows that the role of the editor can’t be about knowing either, for in these processes knowledge is sabotage.

Now we are far from the classic editor, the fifty-six-year-old man in tweed, bent over the manuscript, pencil in hand, and are approaching my own editor, whose pencil never appears before a date has been set for publication and the services of a proofreader engaged to go through the final manuscript. What his work until then involves I can’t say with any certainty, other than that we talk quite a lot. These discussions take place during all stages of the writing, from before a single word has been put to paper and only a vague idea exists as to what area of reality the novel is to explore, until the book has been published and the various ways in which it has been received call for endless and occasionally crisis-bound conferences with a person who knows how much has been invested in it and has invested so much in it himself.

Although this has been going on for seventeen years, during which time we have published a total of eight novels and sat for countless hours talking on the phone or in conference rooms and offices, and have gone through thousands of manuscript pages, I am still unable to say “this is what he does,” “this is how he works,” “this is how he thinks.” Of course, this has to do with me never being able to really see others, the fact that I’m so involved in myself that I never quite manage to get beyond that, but that’s not the only reason. It has to do with his way of working, too, which is not about remoteness, the famous view from without, but about nearness, the view from within, which is more difficult to see and define. What we stand above is easy to see, what we stand below is easy to see, and what we stand beside is easy to see, but what we stand in the middle of is not.

When I was writing my autobiographical novel My Struggle there were three people in particular to whom I found it difficult to give shape, difficult to give voice. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I could neither hear nor see them. I knew who they were to me, but it was almost impossible to give that awareness form. One of these people was my mother, one was my wife, one was my editor. What could these three very different people have in common that meant they were stuck in the shadows of my writer’s mind? In a way, the people they were went without saying, they didn’t need me to speak for them, they spoke for themselves. For an author, this is interesting: writing is about giving form to something, constructing something, familiar or unfamiliar, by means of language. Usually, this is easier the more unfamiliar the object: a cow wandering through a poor street in India is easy to depict, whereas a man watching TV in his apartment is not. Nearly all literature is about conflicts, which have their root in differences, the unlike breaking out of the like and only then allowing itself to be captured. Sameness residing in sameness, which is to say harmony, is almost impossible to make into anything. And this is where my mother, my wife, and my editor come in, for what roles do they play in my life? They give, demanding nothing, or very little, in return. To see such a person, who gives without making demands, is hard indeed. Demands have outline, but the absence of demands? Such absence is nothing, it is without shape, yet at the same time significant, and quite fundamental in everything that is human.

We see and talk about everything that works loose and tears itself away, never about what comes to us. This is true in the greater perspective and true in the smaller perspective. My father took something from me, I competed with my brother, this is easy for me to see and write about, but my mother gave me something, and this is difficult for me to see and write about. What did she give me? I’m not sure exactly. My editor, what does he give me? Suggestions as to books I should read? Yes, but many other people do that as well. An understanding of what I’m doing? Yes, but I have that myself, and if it isn’t complete, there are many other people I know who could fill in the gaps. Inspiration? Certainly, but I get that opening almost any book about art.

All this is important, but it isn’t what is significant. What is significant is a feeling, something vague and elusive, perhaps best captured in the word trust. I have absolute trust in him. With absolutely everything I write, even the smallest newspaper article, he has to read it before I can publish it anywhere. This is something on which I’m totally reliant and at the same time take for granted. It’s not a function, it’s not something anyone else can do, because it’s not about the role of editor, it’s about him, the person he is. And that’s what the role of editor is for me.

*

There are many conceptions about writing. One of the most common is that it’s a lonely business, something writers do on their own. I can’t see myself in that. On the contrary, in all the years I’ve been making my living as a writer I’ve been dependent on the help of others in order to write. When I was writing My Struggle, I read every word of it out loud to a friend, Geir Angell Øygarden, I called him on the phone every single day and read him what I had written, some five thousand pages in total. Why? Because someone had to tell me it was good enough, that was one thing, but also what it actually was that I was doing, and, importantly, what it might become, in what directions I could proceed. I needed his thoughts, they came together with mine but from a completely different place, and this was essential; because I was writing about myself I desperately needed that view from outside, which in this case was not simply a view but a whole outlook, which I made my own in the novel. Those conversations formed a space, and I think all books exist within such a space, either very obviously (as in my case) or less so, for instance when what surrounds them is the literature an author reads during the writing process, or has read before it starts. Even though I knew nothing about this when I began to write at the age of eighteen, I still set up those kinds of spaces; it was as if the need itself made it happen. The actual act of writing still took place in solitude, but everything that surrounded it, which after all was what was important, had to do with other people. When I was nineteen, for instance, studying literature at the university in Bergen, I met Espen Stueland. He was writing, I was writing, we became friends, and he shared with me everything he could think and read, everything he had thought and read. He introduced me to books by Ole Robert Sunde, Tor Ulven, Claude Simon, Gunnar Ekelöf, Osip Mandelstam, Samuel Beckett, to pick out just a few of the many names that swirled in the air at that time. We read each other’s texts, and his critiques, as sincere as they were severe, encouraged me to rewrite or toss. But even when I tossed what I had written, I was stirred, because through Espen I had suddenly come to a place where literature mattered, and was perhaps what mattered most of all, a place where it was impossible to bluff, impossible to cheat, impossible to be half-hearted in anything we read or wrote: it was all or nothing. Espen soon debuted with the poetry collection Sakte dans ut av brennende hus (Serene Dance Out of a Burning House) and uprooted to Oslo, got involved with Vagant, and shared that with me, too, introducing me to the writers and critics he met in that connection. I stayed behind in Bergen, and there I met another student who wrote, his name was Tore Renberg, we, too, became friends, and he shared with me everything he could think and read, everything he had thought and read. Tore’s literary preferences were different from Espen’s, but included many of the same authors: Tor Ulven was impossible to ignore for any student of literature in the early nineties, Ole Robert Sunde likewise, and Samuel Beckett was everywhere. But the writers Tore was most immersed in at that time were Eldrid Lunden (whose work I had never read), Tarjei Vesaas, and Sigbjørn Obstfelder. We, too, read each other’s texts, and in a very short space of time he wrote a collection of short prose pieces that got accepted for publication, the title was Sovende flokke (Sleeping Tangle), and, like Espen, he, too, uprooted to Oslo, debuted, and soon after became involved with Vagant.

When all of this was going on, when I was sitting around in cafés with Tore or Espen, talking about literature or music or football, the three of us having in common the fact that we wrote and wanted to be writers, it was nothing. None of us knew how things were going to pan out, we barely knew what we were doing. Were we doing anything at all? Weren’t we just idling away our time, doing nothing other than following our own inclinations? It was all without shape, as yet undefined, and if reading Tor Ulven, for instance, pointed forward in time to a future Tor Ulven influence in our generation’s literature, which is now incontestable, we were oblivious to it then, for we were no generation, we represented nothing, and what we were doing stayed between us and had no audience, the very thought was absurd. It was as local as you can get, the coffee was lukewarm, the rain came down outside, and if I needed a piss I could wait out of politeness. But writing this now I sense it transforming from nothing into something, an era is committed to writing, a milieu emerges, a history unfolds. And yes, seen from where we are now, Espen forty-two years old and a father of two, Tore forty-one and a father of two, I myself forty-four and a father of three, middle-aged men the three of us, authors of a sizable number of books, essays, and articles, a straight line seems to go from all our get-togethers and discussions back then to where we are now, authors of our generation.

As such, history always lies, it turns what was inconsistent, all over the place, perhaps even meaningless, into something consistent, systematic, and meaningful. The situations and events that occurred, the people who were there, and the discussions between them were of course real, it is not the case that writing about something is the same as lying or distorting, but the moment that reality is written down it is given a form that is basically abiding and unalterable, which pins it down in a certain way, whereas what was significant about it was that it was all over the place and could not be pinned down at all. To write about a situation is to take out part of its potential, at the same time as its remaining potential disappears into the shadows of the unsaid, the unthought, and the unwritten, in the valley of opportunities lost.

But anyway, there I was in Bergen, twenty-six years old. My two best (and only) friends had achieved the only thing I really wanted to do in life, they had made their literary debuts and moved to Oslo, to the very center of Norwegian literary life. It felt like they had abandoned me, and if they were unaware of exactly how jealous I was, they must surely have had an inkling, or at least should have had, the three of us had shared the same lives, young aspiring writers, shared the same ambition, to become authors, we had shared all our reading experiences, everything we learned, and they had succeeded—Tore spectacularly so, receiving that year’s Best New Writer Award—whereas I had failed and was left behind in Bergen, with what amounted to nothing, because unlike Espen and Tore I couldn’t write, in the sense that nothing came out when I sat down at the computer, not a sentence, not a word, I was completely empty. I told myself the ambition of writing, or the belief that I actually could do it, was self-delusion, a deception. Tore had it in him, Espen had it in him, I didn’t. What I did then was go back to studying. Within a year, I did a subsidiary course in art history and began majoring in literature. I was going to write about literature instead. But then something totally unexpected happened. An editor called me up asking if I could come in for a chat, he had read a short story of mine and wanted to discuss it with me.

Nowadays, this is a fairly normal way of going about things. Back then, in the early nineties, it wasn’t. For anyone harboring ambitions of becoming an author in the late eighties and early nineties the way to do it was this: you wrote a book and submitted it to a publishing house, after which you waited a month or two before receiving a reply in the post, very likely a rejection, which could fall into one of several categories; it could be a standard rejection, which was a bad sign, it meant the manuscript came across so weak it hadn’t been worth the effort to give it an individual assessment. If, on the other hand, it was accompanied by a reader’s assessment, then it was a notch up, even if that assessment happened to be negative, since it meant someone at least had seen enough merit in the work to commission an external reader to read it and make an appraisal. That appraisal might conclude with something to the effect that the author showed promise, but that the present manuscript could not be recommended for publication, or—oh, joy!—that they would like to read it again in revised form. But because that revision had to be done by the author alone, with at best a couple of vague suggestions to go by, it, too, normally ended up in a rejection. Only very, very seldom did it happen that a manuscript was accepted as it stood—I remember hearing at the time that it was one in a hundred.

Because of the distance between author and publisher, so great it amounted to an abyss, a lot depended on capturing the attention of this mysterious and unapproachable reader from the outset. A strong title, in an eye-catching font (if memory serves me right, you could buy sheets of lettering back then, before we got word processors, in Gothic style, for instance, and stick them on), without typos or scribblings-out, a meticulously worded accompanying letter. I remember a piece of advice to us from Øystein Lønn when I was at the Writing Academy: Put your best parts first, no matter how little it says about the text overall, put the best parts first. It was all about getting read, about making sure whoever was charged with sifting through new manuscripts at the publishing house didn’t just toss yours aside, but was intrigued enough to read on.

The first novel I submitted as a manuscript, it must have been in 1989, drew a standard rejection of no more than a few lines, the publishers had read the manuscript with interest, which was good, but they wouldn’t be publishing it. Still, this was nothing compared to Tore, who not without pride had told me he’d been turned down eighteen times. He was nineteen years old. But when he debuted, it happened in a different way altogether. He had not submitted a manuscript to a publishing house, the way generations of budding Norwegian authors all the way back to Hamsun had done before him, no, in his case the publishing house had called him. He had written some reviews in Morgenbladet and Vinduet, and one morning the phone rang and it was a man presenting himself as an editor at the Tiden publishing house, wondering if Tore would like to be a reader for him. Tore accepted gladly, though not without mentioning that he was a writer himself. The editor, who had suspected as much, duly offered to have a look at his work.

That was how Tore was taken on by Tiden and became an author. The year after, he was asked by them to edit an anthology of so-called new voices in Norwegian literature and asked me if I happened to have anything he could use. I did. Tucked away in an attempt at a novel about a slave ship that was basically lifted in its entirety from an existing nonfiction book I’d found was a story I sent to Tore and which, perhaps because my envy, which he must surely have sensed, made him feel sorry for me, he published. It wasn’t a very good story, but it did mean that I, too, received a phone call from the same editor, and a few weeks later was seated in his office in Oslo’s Operapassasjen, casting stolen glances at the piles of manuscripts there in case they might reveal something significant to me while he was out getting us coffee. When he came back, we talked a bit, or he did mostly, and then I was back in the street again. It was hardly anything to speak of, but it was enough, for when I left there it was with the feeling of having been seen.

Oh, how fragile these things are. It’s hard to describe that this vague feeling of having been seen, of someone showing faith, was enough for me to start work on a new novel, one in which I went much further than I had before. Was it because of him, that editor? Let me put it like this: had he not asked me to come and see him, I would never have started writing again, at least not in the same way. When I sent him the first beginnings of this new novel, I was ashamed and felt like a dog. Now surely I had let him down, abused his trust, ruined everything. One part in particular felt shaming: at one point, my main character goes into a phone booth on the Torgallmenningen in Bergen, from where he makes a phone call to his ten-year-old self. It was so stupid!

A few weeks passed and then the editor called me. He liked what he had read, especially the part where the main character phones back to his own childhood, that was really good! And he said something else, too: Henrik keeps repeating a thought, something about in the world, out of the world, in the world, out of the world. That sounds like a title, don’t you think? Out of the world?

These two comments were decisive, and they steered the rest of the writing until the novel was finished. Movement from one time to another, or from one place to another, by means of a metaphor or simile, often something concrete like that phone booth, runs through the entire novel and is its way of thinking, all times and all places held within a single consciousness. And the title he gave me, Out of the World, steered its complex of themes in much the same way.

The next time I met the editor from Tiden, he asked me if I wanted to sign the contract there and then or wait until we were closer to publication. I nearly passed out. Up until that point I had looked on this as a test, something that might lead on to something else. He wanted to publish it! Not until years later did it dawn on me that he hadn’t considered the manuscript to be even remotely good enough at that point, but that his suggestion had been all about instilling in me a sense of confidence and belief, and the feeling that a novel was something that was within my grasp. In other words, he manipulated me. It was like what a magazine editor did with Hunter S. Thompson one time. Thompson had been commissioned to make a trip and write about what he saw, but after he got home he found himself unable to muster a word, he was completely blocked. The editor called him up and asked him to jot down some notes just to give the magazine some sort of idea as to what the piece would be about. Thompson obliged, only for the editor to call him again a few weeks later, letting him know that his notes had gone to press. They were the piece. And that, I think, is often the way we get to what it’s all about. If we strive to go there, we block, for there are so many expectations, so many demands and misconceptions that it’s almost impossible to find a way. But if we don’t know, if we think we’re doing something else instead, as if in preparation for the real thing, then the real thing, which requires a form of unfetteredness, comes into being.

*

Another conception about writing, at least as common as that of the writer being on his own, is that writing is craft. I can’t see myself in that either, again I find it to be quite the opposite. Writing is about breaking down what you can do and what you’ve learned, something that would be inconceivable to a craftsman, a cabinetmaker for instance, who can’t possibly start from scratch every time. That doesn’t mean a cabinetmaker isn’t creative, can’t work out new solutions to old problems, and I assume, too, that a cabinetmaker is best when he or she isn’t thinking about what they do, but simply doing it, much as a driver is best when the skills he or she has acquired, the craft of driving, are not reflected on, but simply performed. This is how it is with musicians, too; the technique or craft is something so well mastered that the musician’s awareness of it is not a conscious awareness, and the music becomes art only in the flow. A soccer player who has to think about how to control the ball, who asks himself whether it’s best to swerve right or left to get past his opponent, who wonders what to do then if he does get past him, pass the ball left or right, or try a shot, will be a poor one. What the musician, the cabinetmaker, and the soccer player have in common is that they have practiced their techniques for hours and hours on end, until they belong to the body and have become like a reflex, selfless and natural. This same kind of state applies to writing, too, and it is just as coveted—I once read an interview with the British author Ian McEwan in which he spoke about the selfless state into which the act of writing could transport him, and how that selflessness, which occurred only very seldom, felt like the very apex of the writing process. But unlike the other activities just mentioned, there is actually nothing to practice in writing, no techniques to be endlessly repeated until learned—what would they be? A dramatic turning point approached again and again? A certain way of describing a face or personality? No, writing cannot be practiced in that sense, it can never be reduced to exercises, it can only ever be the real thing, what it is in itself, because writing is about getting to the core, something that can be done only once, in that one way, which can never be repeated, because if you repeat it then you are no longer at the core but at something false that merely resembles. So what writing is about, more than anything else, is not practicing, but failing. Failing, not succeeding, not being able to make it work, failing, failing, failing—but not in order to get to the core at some future time, that would be half-hearted, and the half-hearted is the antithesis of writing, no, failing must come from risking everything, in all earnestness, with the utmost of effort. Failing to get the ball properly under control on the football pitch can be annoying, but it doesn’t hurt. Failing in literature hurts, if it doesn’t then it’s an exercise and can lead nowhere. In other words, in order to write you must trick yourself, you must believe that this time I’m onto something, no matter how worthless it might turn out to be. In that process, everything is uncertain, everything is fluid, and even if that shining state of selflessness should occur, it doesn’t have to mean that what you write has any value, possesses any kind of quality—after all, those who most often vanish into the selfless state are children.

Failing on your own is fine for a while, but only up to a point, since failing in literature is no fun, failing there is failing for real, and when you are surrounded by friends and family with jobs to go to or studies to pursue it becomes increasingly hard to defend writing, to keep it up as something meaningful when the results fail to materialize, which in this case means having your work accepted by a publisher. Failing in one’s writing under those conditions is also to fail socially. Everyone knows the type, the guy who cagily says, “I write.” After ten years of that, is there anyone left who still believes in him? After twenty years? Certainly not the writer himself. By then, writing has become a shameful business, a stigma almost. If he’s to go on, he must trick himself, which will become increasingly difficult, until eventually he realizes that it’s true, he has failed.

A published writer has a different social aspect entirely. But the writing is the same. For a while it will be quite as unsuccessful. This is where the editor comes in. The job is to support the author, which in many instances means tricking the author, telling him or her that this is really good, keep going. Recently, I spoke to a Swedish editor who said this was perhaps the hardest part of the job, because the author often suspects that what he or she is doing probably isn’t that good, at the same time as he or she needs to hear how good it is. The author needs that lie and must overcome the suspicion of it being just that, a lie, must deceive himself or herself into believing it. That same Swedish editor always instructs his writers to note down what he says as they go through the manuscript. If they don’t, all they remember are the negative points. He can heap praise on a text and go into detail about how good it is in this or another passage, and even then the only thing that sticks in the mind of the author are his suggestions as to changes. And why do things have to be changed? Because they aren’t good enough, the text is a failure, a mistake.

This is where it hangs in the balance, where everything is at stake. For what is “good” exactly? In the literary world, much is about originality, finding an individual voice, uncovering what until now has been unseen—these are the ideals. Against this stands the concept of quality, the basis of all appraisal, and of any canonization. For when originality, individual voice, and the unseen come together there is nothing with which it can be compared. There is no unequivocal way of saying that something is “good.” When the book is there, with the publisher’s logo on the cover, that in itself is a stamp of quality: a large number of people with fine literary credentials, working in a well-reputed institution, have declared that this is literature, that this book is of value. To give a book that stamp of quality is a risky business. That is, if it’s similar to another book already recognized as good, then the risk is small, but if it’s not, if it’s something apart, then publishing the work and thereby declaring it to be a work of quality takes guts. There’s often a lack of intrepidness in the publishing world, there being so much esteem to be lost, an editor who puts out, let’s say, five books one after another, each of which is slaughtered by the critics, each of which moreover fails to sell, will be pushed toward the safe choice, toward what is acknowledged to be the norm, and will reject that which involves risk. I’m not saying this because I think Norway is teeming with yet undiscovered literary geniuses unable to find outlets for their work, but because whether an editor is good or bad has so much to do with being intrepid. I know of books later canonized that were rejected by one publisher after another as manuscripts, for the simple reason that they resemble very little else, works fully in keeping with the prevailing literary ideal, but which in their fullest consequence required courage to publish. I have worked on manuscripts from first-time writers myself as an adviser and know how difficult it can be to judge quality on one’s own, without the bound book in one’s hand to testify that the criteria have been met. Is it good enough? What is good enough? And if it isn’t good enough, is there anything in it that can become good enough? And if it happens to be very good, then there is nothing to which one can turn for comparison, one is left to one’s own judgment—and is that good enough?

—Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel, Out of the World, won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004, and his second novel, A Time for Everything, was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle: Book One, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. Book One was a New Yorker Book of the Year, and Book Two was listed among the Wall Street Journal’s 2013 Books of the Year.

Martin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ida Jessen, Peter Høeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Pia Juul. In 2012, he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize. In 2019. Aitken received the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Love, by Hanne Ørstavik.

From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s  In the Land of the Cyclops , translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, published by Archipelago Books.

My Gender Is Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen at their apartment in Moscow in the early nineties © Igor Stomakhin

Masha Gessen is a bilingual writer, activist, and keen observer of—actually, that isn’t what this is about. Masha Gessen is hot. “I know,” you’re saying, “I have eyes.” No, but bear with me. Other people in this world are hot. Alexander Skarsgård is a tall drink of water, but I’m not moved to write home about it. Masha Gessen’s sex appeal is meaningful to me, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about (when I’m not thinking about dying from COVID-19).

My relationship to my own gender is fluid and has been since before there was the language to name it. A recent shift in theater culture has yielded a new beginning ritual for rehearsals: the moment we go in a circle and say our pronouns. I’m always rendered silent by what feels to me the sheer impossibility of the task. “She/ her” is not entirely right. “He/ him” is not either. And “they/ them” hasn’t yet felt like my answer, although I respect those who claim it (among them, Masha Gessen). Presented with options, unsure what feels less wrong, I say nothing. Some days, it feels like I don’t have a gender at all; other days, that the English language is inherently so binary in its approach that I’m using the wrong tool to solve the question. When I look at Masha Gessen, living a life of black turtlenecks, wide-ranging intellect, and gender-fluid beauty, their presence feels like sheer aesthetic triumph.

A friend of mine has departed from pronoun-related language to describe their own gender. “My gender is orange,” they said once. “My gender is chrome.” When I tried making my own list I was surprised by how quickly I knew the answers. My gender is denim, my gender is The Doubtful Guest, my gender is sunflower yellow. My gender is that photo of Masha Gessen lying on a couch, smoking languidly, giving you a look of intense expectation: Now what?

This image of Masha Gessen exists in stark contrast to the hopeless banality of the gender binary, because Masha Gessen has both repurposed and transcended that binary. Now they’re just getting on with being fabulous. In my imagined life of aspirational glamour, Masha is forever standing in front of floor-to-ceiling windows, giving you a look that says “… I wrote a book about totalitarianism?” whenever you want to ask silly questions about how they identify. Masha Gessen rocks a blazer like nobody else and has three kids and a partner whose facial symmetry is astonishing; they don’t have time to explain they/them pronouns.

I’m always filled with relief when I see queer people in their forties, fifties, and beyond, people who have survived the chaotic murk of their twenties and thirties and are forging lives on their own terms. I’m filled with relief when I see anybody doing this, honestly, because I have so little optimism about my future, in particular, or our collective shared future, in general. To see these images is to be invited to a larger imagining than the one our culture most often provides. TV and film are still rife with stories in which queer people suffer rejection, violence, self-hatred, and the hatred of others. I am so hungry to witness queer health and success. And you know what? Cheeky queer glamour as well.

These days, we’re constantly being reminded that photographs aren’t the whole story. Whatever fabulous quarantine life you’re seeing on Instagram doesn’t mean that everyone except for you has achieved happiness. (This is particularly helpful when I see a quarantine feed that, for example, appears to take place on a Greek island where calm and beauty reign.) Yes, pictures are nothing but symbols, but this potent symbolism is what I can’t stop thinking about. How can you imagine a future for yourself until you see another person having it, someone who shares some deeply felt aspect of yourself? As Masha Gessen writes in their essay “To Be, or Not to Be”: “Choices we make about inhabiting new landscapes (or changed bodies) demand an imagination.”

I’ve begun to realize that choosing a future is about choosing more and more daring acts of imagination. It is pure faith, maybe, that the right words will come last; that what arrives first will be fantasies and dreams, inchoate but powerful. But what is faith, if not instinct plus hope? My gender is the Six of Swords. My gender is fill-in-the-blank. My gender is Masha Gessen.

 

Jen Silverman is a New York–based writer and playwright. She is the author of the story collection The Island Dwellers (2018). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, and The Baffler, among others. Her plays include Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties, The Moors, The Roommate, and Witch. Her debut novel, We Play Ourselves, will be published by Random House in February. 

On One-On-One

In his new column, Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot.

Still from Love & Basketball © 2000 Alliance Films

ONE

Before any of this unfolds, I must first be honest. Before I can talk romantically about the way a basketball hoop, ornamented by a clean net, glows even as a starless nighttime empties its dark pockets over a cracked court. Before I can talk about the way when a well-worn ball begins to lose its grip it spins wildly in your palm, but is still the ball you have known and therefore you must care for, as you would an elder who whispers the secrets of past and future worlds into your ear. Before that, it must be said that you, reading this now, from whatever cavern you are riding out this ongoing symphony of storms, could beat me in a game of one-on-one if the opportunity arose. If you have ever made two shots in a row on any court anywhere. If you have known, by the sweetness left on your fingers, that a shot was going in before it reached the rim. If you have talked some shit that you could back up, even one single time. I want it to be known that I am getting too old to not surrender to the truth, and I know I am no good in one-on-one. It is not my game and has never been, though it isn’t for a lack of trying. Depending on the day, I might give you some thrilling competition. I don’t want to oversell myself, but I also would never ask you to take it easy on me. That’s a fine line to walk. One that requires an opponent at least a little curious about mercy, as I am sometimes.

Here’s what I will say, for the sake of whatever confidence I still carry around: there are some very strict circumstances that might allow me to take a game off of you, and they would all have to work in my favor. Let’s say we were playing first to five, and let’s say I get the ball first. Let’s say whoever makes a shot gets the ball back, as it should be. Let’s say that I’m feeling good and hit a few long jump shots over your hand, which is maybe skeptically outstretched on the first two shots, but then urgently outstretched on the last one. And then we’ll say that you are a smart enough defender to push up on me and take my jump shot away. I’ve still got enough of a first step to get by you once for a layup, probably. And then, finally, let’s say you are the easily discouraged type. Who, down 4-0, might throw in the towel, ease back and go through the motions. I could steal a winning bucket. But that’s never how it goes, is it? It’s always a game to ten, at least. I’m always finished before we even begin.

It was the held-over bitterness of this knowledge that likely animated my distaste for the iconic ending to Love & Basketball when I first saw it, tucked underneath a blanket on a high school Friday night in the crowded basement of a girl I’d gotten a crush on. Quincy and Monica, lifelong neighbors, rivals, once romantic partners, play one-on-one. By the film’s final act, the two haven’t spoken since their breakup in college four years ago. Quincy is back home, recovering from an ACL tear. Monica, upon visiting him in the hospital, finds out he’s engaged. This sets up the grand emotional collision two weeks before Quincy’s wedding.

It has to be said now that I have great affection for Love & Basketball and all of its romantic movie clichés. It was, when I first saw it, one of the first times I’d seen those clichés played out with a Black cast. Black characters playing a sport I loved, complicated Black families with complications that were not all that close to my own interfamily complications, but were familiar enough. In retrospect, I appreciate that the clichés were given room to flourish here, as they were in all of the mostly white teen rom-coms of the era. We are to believe, somehow, that Monica (Sanaa Lathan) is not attractive, but could be, if she would just do something with her hair. We get that scene—packaged within a school dance, of course—where Monica “becomes” beautiful, her beauty pulled to the surface by the hands of her sister, accented by the pearls her mother places around her neck.

In traditional rom-com fashion, the relationship begins to shatter in a manner that seems like it could be worked out with middle-school-level communication. When we reach the end of the film, with the one-on-one matchup looming, we haven’t been shown Monica longing for Quincy through the intervening years, but, rewatching now, I realize we didn’t need that. The longing was there, in Monica’s reaction when Quincy’s fiancée is revealed.

And with this understanding, we arrive at the closing moment. The two crawl out of their old childhood windows, and meet in the grass between the houses where they first fell in love. There, Monica proclaims she’ll play Quincy one-on-one, for his heart. Quincy, annoyed and exasperated (and, it must be said, still with an injured knee) agrees to play. Quincy wins, 5-4.

This is where I would have liked the film to end, back in my youthful bitterness. Not out of cruelty or out of spite, but because it seemed to me that if this were the ending, they’d both get what they deserved. Both of them, equally unsatisfied with whatever their future holds, would regret hanging their emotional fates on a shaky rim, on a bad knee, on an outdoor court governed by cracks and wind and poor lighting.

I watched Love & Basketball again for the first time in years before writing this. And I have become more romantic with age, it seems. If not age, then with the ache of loss, of wanting to return to a moment I once turned away from. And so, I am more forgiving (welcoming, even) of the moment after the game, when Quincy calls out, when Monica turns back.

TWO

But do not ever get it twisted. There are ways I am dangerous on a basketball court, though they are sneaky ways. Nothing that will keep you up at night, but enough to give you constant headaches on the floor. For all the poor decision-making ability in my actual, real life, I was blessed with elite sports decision-making skills. I am a well-above-average passer. I can thread the ball through a space you don’t even know is there. I am lethal as the ball handler in a pick-and-roll, especially if the pick setter times their peeling off from the defender at just the right moment to create a small stitch of chaos, which the two of us might be able to fashion into something beautiful. You certainly do not want to catch me below the foul line in a game where I have any more than two teammates, with enough options to leave you wondering if you should defend the rim or look out for the pass. I have a floater I can get off even over the highest-reaching fingertips, and it goes in enough times for me to think highly of it. Yes, it is true that I am a horrendously streaky shooter, but in the rare hours that are my hours, if I make two in a row, I’m probably going to make a third and there ain’t much that can be done to stop it. I have an intimate relationship with my own many insecurities, and so you can believe that I will be able to spot yours. Even if I can’t make you pay for them, I can see them. And some might say that type of seeing is dangerous.

The problem with most (to all) of these skills is that they don’t serve me much in a one-on-one game. They all rely on the presence of teammates. And even then, very specific teammates. I always played best with athletic bigs who relentlessly ran at the rim, eager to receive a pass in motion, who loved the physicality of setting hard screens. All of my weaknesses are illuminated by isolation. There are hoopers who have the natural ability and body type to play defense, and they don’t have to try very hard to get by. There are those who work hard on defense to make up for their size deficiency. I do not have the size, body type, or natural ability to play defense, nor do I work hard at it. I know how this sounds, but I have just never been all that interested in it. I can go through the motions, and get in the way for long enough to present an average challenge, but not to actually stop anyone. But, more than anything, the issue is that I cannot create my own shot.

Once, early on, a poetry mentor told me that I needed to identify what I was good at, and that I needed to do it on my own. To not only know how to celebrate myself and my writing, but to be aware of when I’m turning away from a signature move in favor of something else. To also revel in that turning away. I was told I would know what I was good at when I started thinking about the things I relied on to get to the exit point of a poem I was wrestling with. A finishing move I’d attempt to deploy, even if the work itself wasn’t finished.

Basketball is like this, too. Good players, even decent players, have at least one move that they know will bail them out of a bad situation. If the double-team is coming and the shot clock is winding down, Damian Lillard or James Harden might do a dribble step back into just enough room to heave a desperate three-pointer. On the courts I grew up on, Lorenzo shot fadeaways from the post. Kenny, more athletic than anyone around him, just jumped into the air and figured it out while cradled by the breeze.

This is the part I never figured out. It’s a part of one-on-one that is vital if you are forced to pick up your dribble in the midst of ferocious defending. Alone, I have no exits. I have nothing with which I can beat back the dilemma of having to be responsible for my own escape. With no one around, and the forest growing longer and darker than it seemed, I build myself a house with no doors, no windows.

THREE

At the start of MC Lyte’s “Lyte As a Rock,” Milk Dee asks, “Do you understand the metaphoric phrase ‘Lyte as a Rock?’ It’s explaining, how heavy the young lady is.” He asks this as high school Monica comes into frame in the film’s second act, fiery and dominant on the court for Crenshaw High. I love the entirety of Lyte As a Rock, both the album and the song. But I especially love its opening question, which depends on interpretation. When I was young, I’d hear the song from my brother’s stereo or from the backseat of his car, and I certainly did not understand the phrase as anything but a feeling. Something so immense that it left an absence in the stomach where something else arose—sometimes sinister, sometimes beautiful. Like waking from a dream where I’d imagined I was falling.

Lyte as a father looking a son in the eye and lying about the women he’s been sneaking out of the house to see for years. Lyte as a mother’s hand across her grown daughter’s face, and lyte as the years of rage behind the hand as it cleaves the air. Lyte as dancing with one person while locking eyes with another. Dangerous looking, again. Looking that unlocks a hunger that could be chased for months, for years. I’ve fallen for the trick of this specific feeling. The movies have convinced me that falling in love is something grand, something other than a series of clumsy and/or awkward missteps, and I have often failed to be aware of its pawing at my doorstep. As Quincy was, and then wasn’t, and then was again.

FOUR

Of course, when I was young, I was in love with everyone. Or willing to fall in love with everyone. There was no complication or tension to it. It was a ruthless pursuit of feeling, and nothing else. Nothing that ever needed to be weighed or acted on. Once I arrived at the glittering, irresistible emotion, I simply settled into it, stagnant, uneager to act.

Because of this, I did not (and likely still do not fully) understand the complications that come with loving someone for a long time. Or wanting someone to love you for a long time. What might arise when the person you’ve fought against desiring finally comes to you in a nighttime that cradles your past and present, and says, This is it. It’s now, or else.

And so, of course, I was young and annoyed when they played for his heart. And now, I know. The heart is always being played for. The heart is always playing itself. The game within the game—Quincy angry, and then hesitant, and then ferocious, and then forgiving. The heart can be a Rubik’s Cube that doesn’t need any help twisting itself into misalignment.

Watching the film as a teenager, I joked that if the outcome never mattered, why would they even play the game? But I was considering it merely from a standpoint of the game’s mechanics. The effort I wouldn’t want to exert, or the shots I’d never be able to get off, even if I tried. I didn’t consider what I do now: the buying of time, where confusion turns into a commitment, where hesitation becomes taking the leap that once seemed equal parts inevitable and impossible.

GAME POINT

In most sports movies, no one can actually play the sport. This leaps out most aggressively for a viewer if it is a sport they know, play, love. My football-player pals would groan about a tackler’s form while watching the montage of big hits in the football films of our youth. I had a pal who played baseball, and he’d complain about finger placement on a ball’s seams as the camera zoomed in on a pitcher’s hand.

Basketball films get a lot wrong when it comes to the mechanics of the game itself. A big part of this is because, like most sports films, the actual playing of the sport is secondary (at best) to the larger narrative arc. Love & Basketball is a bit better than most films in its on-court depictions of the game, in that Quincy and Monica’s shooting forms and defensive stances look realistic enough to be possible. But I always watch the defenders. The actors who might simply be extras, or who might be real athletes, instructed by a director to sell the abilities of the film’s main character. Defenders lunge at shadows, are in the air before a pump fake is even fully executed, jump to block shots while drifting backward. I peep this because I understand the motions. It would be comical if I didn’t. Defense is solely an act, a willingness to be fooled.

But what Love & Basketball gets right is the truth of competitive basketball as an act of physical intimacy. One-on-one matchups, entirely isolated or within a game, are intense moments of connection. Tiny feuds that are not without touch and therefore become intimate whether the dueling parties like it or not. In practice at USC, Monica attempts to shake free from her rival. The camera slows down and zooms in close. They pull at each other’s jerseys, grab at each other’s arms. They collide, separate, and collide again.

When I play, I sweat. I sweat through my shirt with a ferocity and generosity that means my sweat might become yours during our tangling, and yours might become a part of mine. It would be easy to compare this intimacy to a fight, to the moment afterward when you assess the blood staining a shoe or a pair of pants, the damage, mapping out your wounds. But I think of it instead like dancing. Specifically, dancing in a packed and enthusiastic space, the point when you drift from whomever you came with and just find someone who is doing their best to mirror your energy. Sweat evenly exchanged, and it is clumsy, until it isn’t.

The final one-on-one scene in Love & Basketball gets this right, too. The point when the game decidedly gets serious. Trash talk replaced by silence, which is then replaced by slow, heavy, methodical breathing. A person leaning their weight against the sturdy tower of another’s body. Toward the end, when the legs have given whatever it is they could give, there is the turn. To stay upright, or to grab onto the waist of someone you are too tired to keep chasing. Now, tell me again about the distance between competition and romance, between rage and necessity. Tell me the exact point where the distance collapses and everything blurs, for a moment, before something new comes into focus.

 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.  

The Art of Distance No. 39

Adolf Kaufmann, Sonnenuntergang in Winterlandschaft (Sunset in Winter Landscape), n.d., oil on canvas, 29 x 39 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Happy New Year! This note is both a hello and a goodbye, in some manner. After an eventful nine months of The Art of Distance—thirty-nine installments, to be exact—we’ve decided to retire this Monday fixture. That’s not because we’re not still socially distanced (we are, and are still working from bedroom desks and dining room tables), or because we’re ready to show the lower halves of our faces in public (we’re not, and are still masked and glad, at least, for the winter windscreen), but because while we’ve had a good run, we are eager to try some new things in this new year. The Art of Distance was always meant to be a temporary endeavor, and we are grateful that it could offer a literary context—as well as some inspiration, some entertainment, and some comfort—to readers around the globe through a tumultuous time.

We are still fine-tuning some exciting new features, but for those who have an Art of Distance–size hole in their inboxes, I have a few recommendations:

For treasures from the vault, subscribe to the Redux, which unlocks pieces from the magazine archive every Sunday.
Need some poems? We have a daily email for that.
Sign up for the Weekly to get a digest of the best of the Daily, delivered every Friday.
And don’t forget Announcements! You’ll be the first to hear about new issues, special events, and more.

And because I can’t quite let go of thinking of a literary context for our week ahead, I’ll leave you with a Cynthia Cruz poem, “January,” which appeared in the Spring 2004 issue:

A California of snow and the surprise

Of illness. I throned myself in the white

Noise of its silence and watched as the world

Fell away. All the silver flickerings of possibility

Going out like the sound of horse hooves

Clicking into the distance. It is almost the end

Of the world. Anesthesia of medicine, and me,

Beneath its warm bell of milk. My girlhood was

Microscopic: a locked window overlooking the

Sea. An atlas of the disaster: an unlit hall and

A shift in the waves of the field. Blue bedside

Porcelain. Michelle, my little sister, silent as

A weed. I took all the things I loved and

Smashed them one by one.

Stay safe out there, and thanks for reading with us. Please keep in touch!

—Emily Nemens, Editor

The Myth of Self-Reliance

We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday!

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman before the Rising Sun, 1818

There’s a treacherously placed bookstore in my neighborhood. To go almost anywhere from my apartment, I have to pass Walden Pond Books, and it’s next door to my usual coffee shop, so even if I didn’t decide to go in on the first pass, I probably will on the second. Many of the references in my own book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, are ones that I encountered here, in books like Braiding Sweetgrass, Spell of the Sensuous, and The Genius of Birds. The influence is so strong that when I see my book at Walden Pond, I think of it as a mushroom that grew in the store.

This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as an English major, I was quickly drawn into his writing about time and perception: nature was a “mutable cloud, which is always and never the same,” and the task was to “[detect] through the fly, through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species, through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.” There was an acid-trip quality to it that I both recognized and admired.

Reading Emerson’s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I asked, “Have you ever read a book that made you feel, like, drunk?” Emerson’s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly, chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson’s Essays has only one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: “It seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude”). After that, I lost my bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling, hunched over, my face too close to the page.

I had been primed for Emerson’s vision of transcendence. A month earlier, I’d taken my yearly trip to the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, just north of Monterey, California. My ostensible purpose was to see the migrating shorebirds—including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a little of the transcendental—but it was also just to recover and hear myself think. I had never been much of a public person, and I’d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity.

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