The Paris Review's Blog, page 140

We Must Keep the Earth

In his new book Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land , N. Scott Momaday relays stories from his childhood, recounts Kiowa folktales, and entreats readers to take a deep interest in protecting and revering the natural world. An excerpt appears below.

N. Scott Momaday, Rock Tree.

I am an elder, and I keep the earth. When I was a boy I first became aware of the beautiful world in which I lived. It was a world of rich colors—red canyons and blue mesas, green fields and yellow-ocher sands, silver clouds, and mountains that changed from black to charcoal to purple and iron. It was a world of great distances. The sky was so deep that it had no end, and the air was run through with sparkling light. It was a world in which I was wholly alive. I knew even then that it was mine and that I would keep it forever in my heart. It was essential to my being. I touch pollen to my face. I wave cedar smoke upon my body. I am a Kiowa man. My Kiowa name is Tsoai-talee, “Rock Tree Boy.” These are the words of Tsoai-talee.

*

Near Cornfields I saw a hawk. At first it was nothing but a speck, almost still in the sky. But as I watched, it swung diagonally down until it took shape against a dark ridge, and I could see the sheen of its hackles and the pale underside of its wings. Its motion seemed slow as it leveled off and sailed in a straight line. I caught my breath and waited to see what I thought would be its steep ascent away from the land. But instead it dived down in a blur, a vertical streak like a bolt of lightning, to the ground. It struck down in a creosote bush. After a long moment in which there was a burst of commotion, the great bird beat upward, bearing the limp body of a rabbit in its talons. And it was again a mote that receded into nothing. I had seen a wild performance, I thought, something of the earth that inspired wonder and fear. I hold tight this vision.

*

The night the old man Dragonfly came to my grandfather’s house the moon was full. It rose like a great red planet above the black trees on the crooked creek. Then there came a flood of pewter light on the plain, and I could see the light ebb toward me like water, and I thought of rivers I had never seen, rising like ribbons of rain. And in the morning Dragonfly came from the house, his hair in braids and his face painted. He stood on a little mound of earth and faced east. Then he raised his arms and began to pray. His voice seemed to reach beyond itself, a long way on the land, and he prayed the sun up. The grasses glistened with dew, and a bird sang from the dawn. This happened a long time ago. I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there.

*

On the short-grass prairie where I was born, and where generations of my family were born before me, grasshoppers are innumerable in the summer. In the shimmering waves of August heat they make a dense green and yellow cloud above the red earth. It is slow in motion, and sometimes hesitant, like an ascending swarm, and it is irresistible. You walk along, and you are constantly struck by these bounding creatures. If you catch one and hold it close to your eyes, you see that it appears to be very old, as old as the earth itself, perhaps, and that its tenure is as original as your own.

*

I dream of Dragonfly, and always in my dreams I am young and he is old. When I see his face it is drawn and wrinkled, the face of a holy man, and there are faint stains of red and yellow paint on his cheeks and about the mouth, made from powdered berries and pollen. His hands have pronounced veins, and the fingers are long and bent from a lifetime of use. He is thin, and his skin is weathered, burned by the sun and wind. His voice, too, is thin, and his speech is carefully measured. He speaks of things that are the most important to him, spiritual things. He keeps the earth, and he has belonging in my dreams.

*

There was a tree at Rainy Mountain. It was Dragonfly’s tree. Beneath this tree Dragonfly spoke to Daw-kee, the Great Mystery. There the holy man was made holy. He was told that every day he must pray not only to witness the sun’s appearance, but indeed to raise the sun, to see to it that the sun was borne into the sky, that each day was made by the grace of Dragonfly’s words. This was a great responsibility, and Dragonfly carried it well. And at the holy tree he was told of the earth.

*

We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

*

 

N. Scott Momaday, Celebrant.

 

When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.

*

I am an elder, and I keep the earth. I am an elder, and I am a bear. When I was a child I was given a name, and in that name is the medicine of a bear. I speak to the bear in me:

Hold hard this infirmity.

It defines you. You are old.

Now fix yourself in summer,

In thickets of ripe berries,

And venture toward the ridge

Where you were born. Await there

The setting sun. Be alive

To that old conflagration

One more time. Mortality

Is your shadow and your shade.

Translate yourself to spirit;

Be present on your journey.

Keep to the trees and waters.

Be the singing of the soil.

*

The story from which my name comes is also the story of my seven sisters, who were borne into the sky and became the stars of the Big Dipper. The story is very important, for it relates us to the stars. It is a bridge between the earth and the heavens. There is no earth without the sun and moon. There is no earth without the stars. When we die, Dragonfly says, we go to the farther camps. Death is not the end of life. There is life in the farther camps. The stars are fires in the farther camps.

In the making of my song

There is a crystal wind

And the burnished dark of dusk

There is the memory of elders dancing

In firelight at Two Meadows

Where the reeds whisper

I sing and there is gladness in it

And laughter like the play of spinning leaves

I sing and I am gone from sorrow

To the farther camps

*

The waters tell of time. Always rivers run upon the earth and quench its thirst. Bright water carries our burdens across long distances. Without water we, and all that we know, would wither and die. We measure time by the flow of water as it passes us by. But in truth it is we who pass through time. Once I traveled on a great river though a canyon. The walls of the canyon were so old as to be timeless. There came a sunlit rain, and a double rainbow arched the river. There was mystery and meaning in my passage. I beheld things that others had beheld thousands of years ago. The earth is a place of wonder and beauty.

 

N. Scott Momaday was born in 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma. A poet, novelist, playwright, teacher, and painter, his accomplishments in literature, scholarship, and the arts have established him as an enduring American master. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn, a National Medal of Arts, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.

From Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land , by N. Scott Momaday, published this week by Harper. © 2020 by N. Scott Momaday.

Staff Picks: Witches, Glitches, and Governesses

Anne Serre. Photo: ©Sophie Bassouls/Leemage and New Directions Publishing.

Anne Serre’s The Governesses (translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson) is like someone else’s feverish vision, something you shouldn’t be seeing. The tightly crafted prose keeps the hallucinatory qualities in check, and Serre’s coy delivery means nothing is easy to pin down. Monsieur and Madame Austeur hired the three young governesses to enliven their home, but they have since become more than employees; not quite like family, they are mysteriously unshakable fixtures in the domestic realm. So much about this fairy tale of voyeurism moves in strange ways, the plot unfolding in little discrete episodes: the governesses hunting strangers, entertaining suitors, planning a party, teasing the old man across the street. The whole thing has a sense of humor about it, though it’s hard to be sure whom the joke is on. There are no real conflicts, and while you could easily sink your teeth into the nuanced presentations of gender and sexuality, the smooth structure also gives you permission to delight in this eerie novella as much as it delights in itself. —Lauren Kane 

I love a good spooky podcast. A couple of years ago, I was addicted to The Black Tapes, a sort of fictional cross between Serial and The X-Files. This year, I’ve started listening to Radio Rental, an anthology series from the creator of the true crime podcast Atlanta Monster. Radio Rental features Rainn Wilson as a man named Terry Carnation who owns a video rental store filled with a variety of mysterious tapes. (I’m sensing a theme in the world of scary podcasts.) Each tape features a real-life horror story or unsettling experience told by the person who lived it, culled from various internet forums. As a person who has spent a lot of time reading websites devoted to the paranormal, it’s fun to hear someone recount a tale I’ve already read on, say, the Glitch in the Matrix subreddit. Are these encounters real? Perhaps. If nothing else, Radio Rental offers an opportunity to experience digitally the old campfire favorite of telling ghost stories. And it wouldn’t be Halloween without a rewatch of “Anything Can Happen on Halloween,” as performed by Tim Curry in the bizarre 1986 adaptation of The Worst Witch, which my sister and I watched every single year of our childhoods. —Rhian Sasseen

 

Still from The Devil’s Backbone. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

 

In dire need of a spooky film for this week’s staff picks, I turned to Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (currently streaming on the Criterion Channel), his first feature to tackle the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Being a longtime fan of del Toro’s work, I came into this film expecting a traditional ghost story subverted, and I knew that just as he did in his masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro wouldn’t shy away from the brutality that stems from the scars of a civil war and the callous greed of fascism. But despite knowing what I was getting myself into, I was floored by the deftness with which The Devil’s Backbone weaves its plot. No image or symbol goes wasted. Even though the film takes place almost entirely in the middle of nowhere, it never forgets to demonstrate how the pressures of the Spanish Civil War haunt the country. When the question that lingers over the entire film—“What is a ghost?”—reappears at the very end, del Toro presents a number of answers. But the clearest answer in my mind, especially considering our current moment, is that history is a ghost. Its haunting isn’t necessarily good or bad but instead something we can learn from to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. I hope we can let ourselves be afraid for the right reasons. Ghosts may be scary, but fascism is scarier. —Carlos Zayas-Pons

Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread is fantastic in two senses: it is both a stunning achievement and a feat of fantasy. With an eye for strangeness and a skill for suspense, Oyeyemi has been called a modern Edgar Allan Poe, but her interest in fairy tales makes her work distinctly enchanting. And although Gingerbread is a take on “Hansel and Gretel,” it is not a mere reiteration of the familiar tale. The opening lines are almost a declaration of this: “Harriet Lee’s gingerbread is not comfort food. There’s no nostalgia baked into it, no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery.” Like the titular treat, Gingerbread is not an exercise in nostalgia; it feels more like a strange dream than a lilting story to send you off to bed. In the spooky spirit, I’ve spent the latter half of October sitting inside this novel. It is a dynamic, energetic read that demands your full participation: you must take its leaps and bounds yourself, feeling what the characters feel, seeing what they see, and experiencing everything as they do. What a delight, to almost smell the sweetness coming off the page. While ambitious and whimsical, the book remains grounded in its story of a mother and daughter who feel almost close enough to touch. Gingerbread is a masterful display of the fantastic, rooted in characters and themes that feel present and charming and real. —Langa Chinyoka

The Witch is a story about unmooring from authority, set amid the heavy skies, barren fields, and drab homespun of seventeenth-century New England. What could be spookier? A group of religious dissenters leaves the old country to live like apostles in the wilds of America. One man dissents from them and is banished from the settlement along with his wife and children. They creak off in an oxcart, tall hats swaying, and pursue the true Gospel from a dim thatch-roofed cabin at the edge of a very dark forest, into which an infant son disappears. Born into exile and thus unbaptized, he is presumed hellbound. Also missing: an heirloom silver cup, the last souvenir of home. Thomasin, the family’s teenage daughter, is blamed by her mother for both losses, and she spends much of the film trying to regain that parent’s favor—the only arbiter of goodness she has left, since England is practically papist, the elders in town are false, and she’s gone and called her father a hypocrite (thereby enacting a timeless teenage rite of passage). With hope of maternal approval fading, Thomasin finds herself alone in a lawless wilderness—which, as Mother well knows, is where the devil will tempt you. —Jane Breakell

 

Still from The Witch.

Cooking with Gabrielle Wittkop

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, November 13, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, or scroll down, or visit our events page.

Stuffing for a squab: pancetta, sage, and its own heart and liver. Photo: Erica MacLean.

On Halloween, when many people abandon themselves to the linked joys of sugar and horror, we more literary types decide to dine from transgressive fiction. I have at hand two books by the French writer Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002): Murder Most Serene (translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie) and The Necrophiliac (translated by Don Bapst). The former, set in Venice between 1766 and 1797, is a murder mystery in which the wives of a nobleman named Alvise Lanzi keep dying from poison. Perhaps the killer is his mother, Ottavia, whose basement cellar for Nebbiolo wine also hides “flasks and phials”; or it could be her cicisbeo, who is also a spy; or the maid, Rosetta Lupi, in her “apron edged with lace”; or Alvise’s jilted lover Marcia Zolpan, a “fine-looking girl” with “a very short neck.” It could even be Alvise himself. The setting is one of grotesque, end-of-empire decadence. Elaborate feasts are the norm. The other book, The Necrophiliac, is the diary of a man in Paris who, as the title suggests, has sex with the dead. It might be the most disgusting and challenging book in the alternative canon. We cannot understand Wittkop without it, but fortunately, in the parts I could bring myself to read, there wasn’t any food.

Wittkop is an elusive and legendary figure in European letters, but her work has been slow to appear in English. Biographical information about her in this language is scarce. She was born in Nantes, France, in 1920; she married a Nazi deserter named Justus in Paris during the occupation and later moved with him to Germany. In her afterword to Wittkop’s Exemplary Departures, the translator Annette David describes Justus as a “German essayist” and reveals that he was gay. Both Justus and Gabrielle died by suicide—separately, seventeen years apart—when faced with terminal illnesses. Gabrielle Wittkop wrote travelogues, arts coverage for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and novels that were popular in France and Germany. She was influenced by E. T. A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Miguel de Cervantes, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, though her first and foremost love was the Marquis de Sade. She must have seen horrors in occupied and postwar Paris, but we can only speculate on how they influenced her worldview. Her preoccupation with death began, she said, in childhood. The narrator of Murder Most Serene offers this justification: “Why this obstinate dwelling over a corpse’s pluck?… Simply because it is there inside us all, day and night.”

 

I used squid as a substitute for cuttlefish, a popular mollusk in Venice. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Transgressive writers tend to dwell on the connections between sex and death, beauty and decay, eroticism and horror. Wittkop is no exception. Her prose is stylized and exquisite no matter what she’s describing. A picnic lunch in Murder Most Serene begins, “Shelling her plate of slipper lobsters, Ottavia offers a wicked commentary in classical Greek on the filthy tales told her by an abbot, gorged like a sponge on the effluvia of the bathhouses.” Slipper lobsters (I googled them) are small, camel toe–looking crustaceans, now endangered but once a speciality of the Venetian lagoon. What is contained in “the effluvia of the bathhouses,” I can only imagine. The scene continues:

The party indulges in moleche, edible crabs that shed their shells when molting and are thrown alive into boiling oil. The party honors a Breganze Bianco with a fragrance of fresh hay and the color of buttercups … Mario Martinellei helps himself to more baby cuttlefish, and a Mezzetino cuts open the pate, which, disemboweled, spills forth its calf sweetbreads and kidneys in a thick vapor of entrails. Abandoning some chunk of half-nibbled carrion under a bush, green flies descend on the nectar. An Inferno of exceptional vintage, matured to the morbid sweetness of walnuts, accompanies buntings served with polenta, suckling lamb, and riso in cagnone. Reclining on one elbow, a Dottore declaims a sophism for public consumption, then whispers in the ear of a Colombina who lifts her mask to reveal the face of a very beautiful young man.

It’s a lot of fun.

 

Biscotti are referred to several times in Wittkop’s work. My favorite recipe uses vegetable oil and has a secret ingredient: self-rising flour. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The fun is maintained throughout the poisoning and death scenes. A woman on her descent toward eternity vomits “great lengths of silvery, acrid mucus.” An autopsy is performed. “Sawn open, the cranium is a casket like any other. The flesh is both flaccid and marmoreal, singularly compact and tight, like frozen fat.” A later wife goes out like this: “Each morning Rosetta administers a clyster to Teresa, who has always had a tendency to constipation. And though she suffers now from diarrhea the clysters are continued. On Sunday night, despite a high fever, she wishes to take her bath, and falls asleep in it. On Monday she is rather better, eats a lettuce soup and half a pigeon. That night she is gripped by a violent fever, vomits, and suffers alternate bouts of extreme cold and burning heat.” The careful description of symptoms runs on in this vein through the eighth day, when Teresa dies.

It’s baroque and wonderful, and I enjoy this vein of aestheticized gore—as many of us do, if we judge by our television programming—but I have never found transgression persuasive as theory. I comprehend the intellectual connection between sex and death, but on the daily, lived level where most of what matters takes place, the two experiences are pretty different—perhaps so different that they’re more meaningful when addressed as separate topics. Work like this also tends to claim that it will shock you out of your bourgeois preconceptions or, as Murder Most Serene’s introduction says of Wittkop’s novels, “invite us to jettison our moral baggage.” That seems incoherent in literary criticism, as it would be undesirable in life.

 

The pigeon that appears in Teresa’s death scene is probably a squab (young pigeon), like this one. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

And then I read The Necrophiliac (the parts of it I could bear) and decided that perhaps I’d just never read anything transgressive enough. In The Necrophiliac, Wittkop pushes the glee of horror and the choice of aesthetics over morality to the extreme. The protagonist’s descriptions of his many loves—“my boyfriends with anuses glacial as mint, my exquisite mistresses with gray marble bellies”—are so taboo that they actually made me giddy. Here is the comparatively mild beginning of one of his more acceptable relationships:

I celebrate the New Year in good company, that of a concierge from rue de Vaugirard, dead of an embolism. (I often learn this sort of detail during the course of a burial.) This little old woman is certainly no beauty, but she is extremely pleasant, light to carry, silent and supple, agreeable despite her eyes that have fallen back into her head like those of a doll. Her dentures have been removed, which causes her cheeks to sink in, but when I strip off her awful nylon blouse, she surprises me with the breasts of a young woman: firm, silky, absolutely intact—her New Year’s gift.

A translation of anything from this book into reality would, of course, be an atrocity. Nor could there be a made-for-TV version. As art, it’s defensible as freedom of expression, though I suspect its publishers would have trouble if anyone were paying attention. Moreover, “we can say it, so we should” is a thin justification. Yet I find the book intellectually and artistically fascinating, and I’m glad it exists. For me, the redeeming element of The Necrophiliac is that through extraordinarily skilled and beautiful writing, humor, daring, and glee, Wittkop seizes life from the jaws of death, pleasure from horror, and transforms her material into art. It couldn’t be done without her technical mastery, but she has done it, and it’s a kind of triumph.

Reading Murder Most Serene, I thought often of the human suffering Wittkop surely must have seen in Paris during and after World War II. How could anyone who lived through that possibly make light of death? It’s pure speculation, but after reading The Necrophiliac, I wonder if such work came about not despite but because of what she saw. Sometimes we appropriate horror to transform it, re-create things in our own words to make them safe, role-play trauma to rewrite it. Even Halloween has something of that spirit.

 

Lettuce soup is basically broth and lettuce blitzed with an immersion blender. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Thus inspired, I channeled the books’ sense of daring, thrills, decadence, and transgression when choosing my menu. I made the lettuce soup from the death scene in Murder Most Serene, mostly because “lettuce soup” sounded disgusting and I wanted to know if it could possibly be good. (No.) I researched all the items from the picnic scene above and discovered that cuttlefish are another lagoon speciality, buntings are ortolans, and riso in cagnone is a rice with cheese, similar to risotto. Cuttlefish were unavailable, so I opted for squid, a near cousin, and planned to clean it, remove the beak and bones, and stew it in its own ink. This was a challenge and thrill because I’m slightly squeamish when it comes to instructions like “make a firm cut directly beneath the eyeballs” and “sort through the innards to find the ink sac.”

Ortolans are a protected species, so I substituted a different little bird to top my polenta—the pigeon from the death scene (squab, very pricey at $25 a head from D’Artagnan). Following a Marcella Hazan recipe, I stuffed the squab with sage, pancetta, and its own heart and liver. Lastly, because there was a specific instruction to dip biscotti in the “warm, heavy amber of  Tuscan Vino Santo,” I made biscotti with the Italian flavorings of almond and blood orange. Biscotti recipes vary widely; mine is from an Egyptian cookbook, and I consider it to make perfect, foolproof, not-too-sweet, crunchy cookies, something I’ve been waiting to share.

 

Wine makes many appearances in Wittkop’s prose, as when “women gorged with venom burst like wineskins.” Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Wittkop was nearly as lavish with her descriptions of wine as she was with food and gore. Her references are period-authentic, too, according to my spirits collaborator, Hank Zona, and reflect the politics of the time. The “Inferno” wine mentioned in the picnic scene above comes from a subregion of the northernmost wine producing region in Italy, Valtellina, which in the late eighteenth century was still a part of the Venetian Empire. It is called Inferno because the job of growing its grapes on nearly vertical terraced vineyards is hellish. Inferno, made from Nebbiolo grapes, was the precise wine suggested by Wittkop to go with my squab-and-polenta dish, and its acidic bite and aroma of roses provided a needed counterbalance to the bird’s rich, livery flesh.

Later in the same scene, Wittkop mentions that “everyone holds to the ruby red Valpantena.” That’s a wine from a subregion of the larger region of Valpolicella, Zona explained. From a favorite biodynamic winemaker in Valpolicella, he suggested a light red that he thought would go well with my squid. This pairing was the surprise standout of the meal. The fresh squid was sweeter and more tender than any I’ve tasted, and the rich, unctuous black sauce, flavored with tomato paste and garlic, was magical with the acid and black-fruit flavor profile of the wine. Ideally, you eat this dish as a stew on day one, then toss the leftovers over pasta on day two.

 

Breaking down my own squid is something I’ll do again. There’s no comparison for freshness and flavor. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The squid success was all the more satisfying because I’d had some trepidation about cleaning it and getting the ink. In the end, the cleaning (and skinning and debeaking!) process was pretty easy, though I did have some misadventures with the ink sacs. The squid I bought in Chinatown during a trial run had sacs, but they seemed dried out by the time I tried to use them. The farmers market squid pictured in the photographs came whole and uncleaned, but both sacs were broken or empty. I ended up using canned cuttlefish ink as a backup, though I’ve read that it’s a faint imitation of the real thing. Overall, in fact, freshness is preferred with squid. The dish I loved on the day of the photo shoot made for some creepy, inky-black, tentacle-laden leftovers for the next day’s lunch. My slight revulsion felt appropriate to Wittkop, but the meal was even more unappealing after I warmed it up in the microwave.

Unlike her heroines, though, I’ll live and learn.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Lettuce Soup

Adapted from Leite’s Culinaria .

2 tbs butter

an onion, chopped

a medium potato, peeled and chopped

4 cups chicken or vegetable stock

salt and pepper (to taste)

a head of Bibb, Boston, or butter lettuce (5 cups)

1 cup fresh herbs (I used 3/4 parsley and 1/4 lovage)

fresh sunflowers or other cute shoots (for garnish)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Melt the butter. Add the onion, and sauté until glossy and translucent, around ten minutes. Stir in the potato, then cover and cook on medium-low for ten minutes, stirring from time to time so it doesn’t stick.

Add the stock, and season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, cover, and gently simmer until the potato is tender, about fifteen minutes. Add the lettuce and herbs to the pan, and cook until the lettuce has just wilted. Turn off the heat, and let cool slightly. Puree with an immersion blender.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Squid Cooked like Venetian Cuttlefish over Pasta

Adapted from Tina’s Table .

2 lbs uncleaned, 1 lb cleaned squid

olive oil

three cloves garlic (ideally black garlic, if you can find it)

1/2 cup white onion, chopped

1 tsp squid or cuttlefish ink (just in case)

3/4 cup white wine

1/2 tsp chicken Better Than Bouillon

1 tbs tomato paste

salt and pepper (to taste)

1 lb spaghetti, cooked and drained

1/4 cup parsley, finely chopped

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Clean and slice your squid following the method of your favorite online tutorial, reserving the ink sacs. (I especially enjoyed the soothing voice of the man on this one.)

In a medium saucepan, sauté the garlic and onion in a glug of olive oil for about three minutes until the onion is just translucent, then add the squid, and toss to combine. Add the squid ink (mash the sacs up with a spoon first if you’re using fresh ones; use about a teaspoon if you’ve opted for the canned variety). Toss to combine. Add the wine, bouillon, and tomato paste, and stir. Add more wine if you think you need more to cover the squid. Cover, turn the heat to medium-low, and cook at a simmer for twenty-five to forty minutes, checking regularly, until the squid is soft. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Toss with pasta and parsley to serve.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Pot-Roasted Squab with Polenta

Squab adapted from The Classic Italian Cookbook, by Marcella Hazan. Polenta adapted from How to Eat a Peach, by Diana Henry.

For the squab:

a squab

6 sage leaves

a strip of pancetta

salt and pepper (to taste)

1 tbs butter

1 tbs vegetable oil

1/2 cup white wine

For the polenta:

1/2 cup whole milk

1 cup water

1/2 tsp salt

scant 1/2 cup coarse cornmeal

2 tbs unsalted butter

3 tbs Parmesan cheese

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the squab, remove all the organs from the inside of the bird. Reserve the liver and heart, but discard the gizzard. Wash the squab in cold running water, and pat dry thoroughly inside and out. Stuff the cavity of the bird with two sage leaves, a strip of pancetta, the heart, and the liver. Season the outside of the bird liberally on all sides with salt and pepper.

In a pot just large enough to hold the squab, heat the butter and oil over medium-high heat. When the butter foam subsides, add the remaining sage leaves and then the squab. Brown the squab evenly on all sides. Add the wine. Turn the heat up to high, allowing the wine to boil briskly for thirty to forty seconds. While the wine is bubbling, turn and baste the squab, then lower the heat to medium-low and cover the pot. Turn the bird every fifteen minutes. It should be tender and done in an hour.

Transfer the squab to a warm dish. If you’re serving half a bird per person, halve it with a knife or poultry shears. Tip the pan and draw off most of the cooking fat with a spoon. Add two tablespoons of warm water, turn the heat to high, and scrape up any loose cooking residue in the pan while the water evaporates. To serve, place the squab on a bed of polenta, and drizzle with the sauce.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the polenta, put the milk in a large, heavy-based pan with the water and half a teaspoon of sea-salt flakes. Bring to a boil. Add the polenta, letting it run in thin streams through your fingers, whisking continuously. Stir for two minutes until it thickens.

Reduce the heat to your lowest setting and cook, mostly covered, for forty minutes, stirring every four to five minutes to prevent the polenta from sticking. When it’s done, it should be coming away from the sides of the pan. You might need to add more water; it shouldn’t get dry and stiff but should be thick and unctuous. Stir in the butter and Parmesan, tasting for seasoning.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Blood Orange Biscotti with Almonds 

Adapted from The Taste of Egypt , by Dyna Eldaief.

3 eggs

1/4 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp blood orange zest

3/8 cup vegetable oil, plus extra for greasing

1 1/2 cup flour

1 1/2 cup self-rising flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 cup milk

1/2 cup candied blood orange peel, chopped

1 cup slivered almonds, toasted

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Preheat the oven to 325. Place the eggs and vanilla in a large bowl, and beat together. Add the sugar, blood orange zest, and oil, and beat until well combined. Sift the flours, cinnamon, and baking powder together. Add the milk to the egg mixture, then add the flour slowly, stirring until still lumpy and just combined. Use only as much flour as required to make the dough just come together.

Lightly grease a baking tray with oil, and use a spoon to place two rectangular logs of dough, about three inches wide and an inch high, on the tray. Transfer to the oven, and bake for fifteen to twenty minutes, then remove. Cut the half-baked cookies into half-inch slices and place them on a baking tray lying on their sides. Reduce the oven temperature to 300, and bake for a further fifteen minutes. Turn off the oven, but leave the cookies in the oven to dry.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Wine!

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona on Friday, November 13, at 6 P.M. for a virtual literary wine tasting on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. We will be discussing the many wines mentioned in Wittkop’s work and how to pair them with food.

The wines seen in the story are Musella Valpolicella Superiore 2017, Nino Negri Inferno Valtellina Superiore 2017, and Felsina Vin Santo del Chianti Classico 2008. We encourage participants to source their own bottle and taste with us. Valpolicellas should be available in any good wine store; the designation “superiore” represents a higher quality. Particular bottles from the Musella biodynamic winery are available at some stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. To find a bottle similar to the Nino Negri Inferno, ask for a Nebbiolo from Lombardy or Piedmont, which should also be widely available. But first check if the store has an Inferno—it might. Vin Santo is a dessert wine and is more expensive at $30 to $50 a bottle, but it’s carried in all quality stores. Felsina is an excellent maker of Vin Santo at a mid-range price.

Anyone who would like more specific advice on how to find these wines near them can email us (hank@thegrapesunwrapped.com).

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

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

How Horror Transformed Comics

The History of EC Comics tells the story of one of the most infamous and influential forces in twentieth-century American pop culture. Founded in 1944, EC Comics quickly rose to prominence by serving up sharp, colorful, irresistible stories that filled an entire bingo card of genres, including romance, suspense, westerns, pirate tales, science fiction, adventure, and more. Perhaps most crucial to the company’s success, however, was its pivot to horror. In the following excerpt, Grant Geissman chronicles the origins of such gruesome, bone-chilling series as Tales from the Crypt and explores how the relationship between two key figures—the artist, writer, and editor Al Feldstein and the company’s publisher, Bill Gaines—acted as an engine that propelled EC Comics to the forefront of the industry.

Detail from the cover of Three Dimensional Tales from the Crypt of Terror No. 2, Spring 1954. Art by Al Feldstein. Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

With Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein both working and hanging out together, Feldstein had the boss’s ear. On their car rides to and from the office, Feldstein began to chide Gaines for playing follow-the-leader. “You’re taking Saddle Justice and turning it into Saddle Romances because Simon and Kirby came out with a romance book and it’s doing well,” the ever-ambitious Feldstein said to Gaines. “We’re gonna follow them and get clobbered when it collapses, just like the teenage books collapsed. Why don’t we make them follow us? Let’s start our own trend.”

Gaines and Feldstein had talked about the old radio dramas they had loved as kids, shows like Inner Sanctum, The Witch’s Tale, and Arch Oboler’s Lights Out. Inner Sanctum and The Witch’s Tale both featured hosts who introduced the tales—the former by “Raymond,” a spookily sardonic punster, and the latter by “Old Nancy,” a cackling witch. Feldstein recalled that as a kid he used to climb down the stairs to sneak a listen, and was happily terrified by them. Gaines had similar recollections. Feldstein kept pushing for that, and Gaines finally said, “Okay, we’ll try it.” This was, in fact, a somewhat similar concept to the one the artist Shelly Moldoff had pitched on the aborted Tales of the Supernatural comic. Gaines was apparently mum about the situation with Moldoff, and Feldstein later said that he knew nothing about it at the time.

 

An untrimmed press proof of Johnny Craig’s cover to Crime SuspenStories No. 3 (February–March 1951). Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

 

So with the December 1949–January 1950 issues of Crime Patrol (no. 15) and War against Crime! (no. 10), EC introduced what was billed on the covers as “an Illustrated Terror-Tale from the Crypt of Terror!” and “an Illustrated Terror-Tale from the Vault of Horror!” Feldstein wrote and illustrated both stories.

The story from the Crypt of Terror was hosted by The Crypt-Keeper, and the story from the Vault of Horror was hosted by The Vault-Keeper, both inspired by the hosts from the old radio shows. Hedging the bet, “The Crypt of Terror” appeared in the last position in Crime Patrol. (However, “The Vault of Horror” story occupied the first slot in War against Crime!) The covers of both comic books were done by Johnny Craig, who had done all of the previous covers for both titles.

 

Johnny Craig’s Christmas cover of The Vault of Horror No. 35, February– March 1954. Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

 

Gaines liked the experiment well enough, because the next issues of both books (Crime Patrol no. 16 and War against Crime! no. 11, both February–March 1950) contained further installments, with the stories in the same positions as before. Craig again contributed the cover art for both books.

Gaines and Feldstein liked doing these stories, and it did seem like they were onto something. Back then the wholesalers employed “road men,” guys who checked the newsstands to see how things were selling. When they sent back the “ten-day check-ups” indicating strong sales for the experimental issues of Crime Patrol and War against Crime!, Gaines and Feldstein went all in for horror. And a New Trend was ushered in at EC.

 

Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein in the EC office in late 1950, with a rack of their latest comic books. Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

 

With the seventeenth issue they changed Crime Patrol to The Crypt of Terror, and with the twelfth issue they changed War against Crime! to The Vault of Horror. Both comics were April–May 1950. A month later they changed Gunfighter to The Haunt of Fear. (They changed the title of The Crypt of Terror to Tales from the Crypt three issues later, after “the wholesalers made some noise,” according to Gaines.) All three books continued the numbering from the previous titles, Gaines’s usual ploy to avoid paying the fee for a second-class mailing permit on a new title. (He got away with this on the first two titles, but on The Haunt of Fear they had to change the numbering, starting with the fourth issue, and pay for a new permit.)

With the second issue of The Haunt of Fear (no. 16, July–August 1950), Gaines and Feldstein also added a third horror host, The Old Witch, and the unholy trio of hosts was complete. The Three GhouLunatics—as the three horror hosts came to be called—would appear at the beginning and end of each story and offer up punny, smart-alecky commentary. EC’s new horror comics were pretty much an instant hit with readers, and Gaines, Feldstein, and Craig all shared that enthusiasm. EC’s business manager, Frank D. Lee, was not as enthused. When asked how he liked a new cover or story, Lee responded, “I don’t like it.” Feldstein said that Lee was “pretty grumpy” about EC’s new comics and openly expressed his dislike for them. Lee wasn’t the only naysayer. Sol Cohen, who had been advising Gaines, declared “the ship is sinking,” and bailed sometime in 1949 for a position as a comic book editor at Avon.

 

Detail from the cover to The Vault of Horror No. 18, April–May 1951. Art by Johnny Craig. Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

 

Johnny Craig illustrated the covers for the first several issues of all three of the horror titles, and also illustrated the cover of every subsequent issue of The Vault of Horror. A fine—but very slow—craftsman, Craig told Roger Hill: “I was supposed to do three stories a month. I was lucky if I did one.”

Playing with the “A New Trend” blurbs on the covers of EC’s new comics, collectors began to refer to the comics published before that as “Pre-Trend” comics, and the term stuck. Not all that many Pre-Trend artists managed to jump into the New Trend. Graham Ingels continued to work on the company’s “love books,” but he soon turned out to be the quintessential horror artist. Bill Gaines said: “In the early days of EC we had Graham typecast into the western books, and when we started the love books we used him there for a few stories, but he didn’t seem to fit. When we started the horror titles, we didn’t use Graham because we thought he’d be good at it, we used him because whenever an artist came into the fold we had to use him for something. So we stuck him in the horror books, and it didn’t take us very long to realize what had happened—that Graham Ingels was ‘Mr. Horror’ himself.” Gaines and Feldstein started calling him “Ghastly Graham Ingels” in the letter columns in 1950, and the name stuck. Ingels started signing his work with the pen name “Ghastly,” and began specializing in what Bill Gaines’s biographer, Frank Jacobs, once famously referred to as “cadaverous inkings.” Ingels’s horror tableaux are fetid, swampy, decaying, and oozing, and when depicting a rotting, shambling corpse, he was second to none. As the horror comics developed, Ingels also became known for his interpretation of the grinning visage of The Old Witch.

 

Tales from the Crypt No. 28, February–March 1952. TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

 

Feldstein wrote (and drew) all of his earliest EC horror stories on his own, and the rest of the stories in the early horror comics came from outside scriptwriters like Gardner Fox and Ivan Klapper. Within a very short time Gaines started bringing in snippets of ideas to be fleshed out into complete stories. At the time, the perpetually chubby Gaines was taking a prescription appetite suppressant that contained Dexedrine, which affected his sleep. Gaines would stay up half the night reading pulps and collections of horror and science-fiction stories. He scribbled plot ideas on scraps of paper he called springboards, and brought them to Feldstein the next morning. (Gaines also worked with Johnny Craig on stories in a similar fashion.)

It was a frantic schedule. Four days a week, Gaines and Feldstein hammered out plot ideas from Gaines’s springboards, with Feldstein always mindful of which artist they were plotting the story for that day. If Feldstein didn’t think a particular plot could be made into a script that would fit a particular artist’s style, he would pass on it, and Gaines would have to pitch another idea. Gaines said: “Al and I would sit down, and I would have to sell Al on one of my springboards. That’s what it amounted to. After he had rejected the first thirty-three on general principles, he might show a little interest in number thirty-four. I’d then give him the hard sell and he’d get going. He’d run into the next room and start working out the plot.” Although many of these springboards were inspired by existing stories, the duo invariably changed and improved upon the plots, in some cases making a far better yarn than was told in the original source.

 

The cover of Tales from the Crypt No. 39. December 1953–January 1954. Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

 

Once they had set a plot, the two might work on some “fill,” fleshing out the plot a bit further. By then, it would usually be lunch time, and Gaines and Feldstein (and often Craig, along with any artists who might be in the office picking up or dropping off a job) would go to lunch at a nearby Italian place called Patrissy’s, where, Feldstein recalled, “we all got fat. They had great Italian food.” After lunch, Gaines would do paperwork and so forth, and Feldstein would write the actual story. (There was never a typed script; Feldstein would write the stories directly onto the art boards.) Gaines often had a nervous stomach at this point, because “I never knew if and when Al would come bursting back in and say ‘I can’t write that Goddamn plot!’ ” Then the pair would have to start the process all over again, because, said Gaines, “we must have a story by five o’clock.”

The horror stories Feldstein and Gaines came up with were all designed to have twisty, O. Henry–type endings, with the protagonist virtually always exacting a well-deserved measure of poetic justice against the antagonist, even if the protagonist had to somehow return as one of the walking dead to exact his revenge. This was Old Testament, an-eye-for-an-eye–style retribution, with the irony being that Gaines was an atheist. The EC horror stories were gory and many went way over the top, but this was fantasy, remember. Gaines said: “The old EC stories were largely sick humor. Almost every one of those horror stories was tongue-in-cheek. That stuff was strictly fantasy, and in the field of fantasy I’ll go as sick as you want. But if I see real blood, I’ll faint.”

 

The cover of one of the three issues of the Tales of Terror annuals, issued in 1951. Cover art by Al Feldstein. Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.

 

Grant Geissman is one of the world’s leading experts on EC Comics and Mad magazine, and the author and designer of four books on the subject. He is also an Emmy-nominated guitarist and composer who cowrote the music for the hit television series Two and a Half Men and Mike & Molly.

Excerpted from The History of EC Comics . Text copyright © 2020 by Grant Geissman. Published by TASCHEN.

The Corporate Feminism of NXIVM

Like everyone on Twitter, I have been transfixed by the HBO documentary series The Vow, about the self-improvement cult/pyramid scheme/sex trafficking ring known collectively as NXIVM. The organization’s leader, Keith Raniere, was found guilty on seven counts of racketeering and sex trafficking in 2019, and this week, on October 27, he was sentenced to a hundred and twenty years in prison. The most sensational headlines of the case are about the former teen actress Allison Mack’s involvement in a secret sadomasochistic group within NXIVM known as DOS (“dominus obsequious sororum,” a phrase in a language that could at best be described as Latin-esque that supposedly meant “lord over the obedient female companions”) in which she and other “masters” recruited other women as “slaves,” some of whom were made to have sex with Raniere. Grotesque details abound in this story, particularly of slaves being branded with a soldering iron near their crotches with a symbol containing both Mack’s and Raniere’s initials.

The Vow follows former high-ranking members within NXIVM as they leave the group. It also attempts to answer why anyone would be caught up in something so heinous, what the filmmakers call the love affair before the betrayal. I suppose that’s why the first episode seems oddly positive in its depiction of Executive Success Programs (ESP), the personal growth seminars that were most people’s entrees to NXIVM. Former members talk about being amazed by the “technology” that Raniere had invented to help them overcome their fears and limiting beliefs, and how happy they were to have found such a welcoming, understanding community.

This technology, in reality, is nothing more than a proprietary blend of therapeutic methods cribbed from cognitive behavioral therapy, Scientology, Ayn Rand’s theory of objectivism, multilevel marketing sales techniques, and, most notably, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which NXIVM’s cofounder, Nancy Salzman, was practicing when she met Raniere in 1998. NLP, a kind of hypnotherapy, has been derided as pseudoscience, and of course none of Raniere’s methods were, as he often bragged, “mathematically reproducible.” What is more telling is his reliance on Salzman to form the basis of his self-improvement regime. Members said Salzman “downloaded” information from Raniere in order to create ESP’s educational modules. If this is true, she seems to have extrapolated liberally from Raniere’s ideas in her creation of a practical curriculum. Unlike L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, Raniere has never written a NXIVM scripture or treatise or even workbook; he didn’t teach or manage money or answer emails. There were women for that.

In The Vow, Raniere appears as the laziest and least charismatic cult leader of all time. “What this show teaches me,” I told my husband midway through the first episode, “is that anyone can start a cult.” Raniere slept all day and spent all night either going on long walks or playing in the midnight NXIVM volleyball games he insisted on. He exercised control through the myth he created of himself, based on lies or half truths: he was the smartest man alive, with a 240 IQ, had taught himself calculus at the age of twelve, was a judo champion and a concert pianist. He had his acolytes disseminate this information about him to every recruit, so in person he could appear humble.

To the naked eye he seems remarkably stupid—the only books I can find plausible evidence that he has read are Atlas Shrugged and How to Win at Gambling, the latter of which he’s seen reading in a widely published and very weird picture, lying on a bed in his underwear. For years members of NXIVM videotaped, recorded, and transcribed everything he said, writing their own Gospel of Keith, but the philosophy we hear him drone on about in The Vow is full of anodyne platitudes, some of which seem to actually be taken from Hallmark cards. In one episode, a former girlfriend shows a card he once gave her for her birthday. “Dance like nobody’s watching. Sing like no one can hear you,” it says, perhaps the most overused inspirational cliché there is. “I think of you every time I read this,” Raniere wrote, with all sincerity.

What Raniere knew was mostly how to sell, having learned persuasion techniques as an Amway salesman in the eighties, and he pitched his contradictory, Randian idea of ethics to just the right people. (It is hard not to put scare quotes around ethics, just as it is hard not to put them around basically every word that Raniere twisted for his own purposes.) Since it was devised as an executive coaching program, riding a trend for such services in the late nineties, the ESP curriculum teaches its members that personal business success is the only thing that can create a happier, more peaceful world. “I pledge to ethically control as much of the money, wealth, and resources of the world as possible within my success plan,” members recited in their twelve-point mission statement. This was appealing to the organization’s entertainment industry recruits, who were often desperate for a formula for professional success, even as they said they came looking for personal fulfillment and a way to change the world. “I had some idea that I would become a famous actor and use my celebrity to help people,” says Sarah Edmondson, one of the former NXIVM executives featured in The Vow, echoing the wishful thinking of many people who were drawn to NXIVM. Theirs was a well-meaning selfishness that was validated by Raniere’s me-first humanitarianism.

This was even truer for the one-percenters who went through ESP. Sara and Clare Bronfman, the heiresses to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, bankrolled NXIVM for twenty years to a comically lavish degree: buying the organization a private jet, funding litigation against ex-members, covering sixty-five million dollars Raniere lost in the commodities market, buying an island in Fiji to use for retreats, and pulling strings with massive donations to convince the Dalai Lama to visit Albany in 2009. It seems that the most profound teaching Clare Bronfman gained from ESP was that her masses of wealth were not something to be ashamed of. “I thought that money made people bad,” Clare told Vanessa Grigoriadis in the New York Times magazine in 2018. “Money’s money. And people are people. So rich people can do good and bad, poor people can do good and bad.”

Raniere and NXIVM exercised a unique hold on its super-wealthy members by offering them teachings that were a mix of what they wanted to believe and what they most feared. Your money is a good thing, they were told, but you are blowing your chance to use it to help people. The only way they could do that, of course, was to give as much of it as possible to NXIVM. If you look closely, these ideas about privilege and complacency are laced through all of NXIVM’s teachings, including the way that women were recruited for DOS. As time went on, Raniere’s teachings became more misogynist, particularly in NXIVM’s women’s retreat, Jness, that started in 2006. There Raniere taught that women were naturally emotional, where men were rational; this difference made women dishonest, disloyal, unreliable, and lazy. Echoing sexists since Aristotle and before, Raniere continued to have zero original ideas. The other fundamental difference was that women were protected their whole lives, never facing humiliation or discomfort, thus making them rely on men instead of themselves. In this way, as Raniere and his lieutenants sought to break their female students with a form of tough love, they could claim they were doing it for the women’s own empowerment.

This reasoning is obviously completely false: humiliation is arguably a fact of life for women far more than it is for men, not least because our bodies are considered public property for anyone to ogle, touch, or comment on. But this story of a sheltered upbringing is true for some women, and I can imagine that for the child actors and heiresses in NXIVM, when Raniere derided women as “spoiled princesses,” it felt personal. “Coming from a family where I’ve never had to earn anything before in my life, [it] was a very, very moving experience,” Sara Bronfman said of being promoted in NXIVM in Forbes in 2003. “It was the first thing that I had earned on just my merits.” (Although Clare Bronfman has never disavowed Raniere, even after the revelations about DOS and her own conviction on crimes relating to NXIVM, there is no evidence the Bronfmans were involved with DOS.)

This is one answer to the question that plagues the conversation around DOS and NXIVM: how were over a hundred women convinced to join a secret organization where from the beginning they were called slaves, forced to collateralize their commitment with naked photos and secret confessions, and vowed loyalty to their masters for life? One answer is that many of these women had already internalized the belief that they were weak and spoiled, with no ability to work for anything. Their indoctrination at the Jness retreat would only have reinforced these beliefs. DOS was described as a “badass bitch boot camp” that would steel their commitments and help them achieve their goals, but more than that, they were told it was the only way they could help the cause of women, preventing nightmares like the election of Donald Trump from ever happening again. Yes, that’s right. This brutal sex cult, where young women were dogged by their masters to stay on starvation diets so they’d be more attractive to Raniere, was pitched as a sort of Pantsuit Nation, a secret group advancing the cause of feminism.

*

Raniere’s most persuasive evidence that his goal with NXIVM was to empower women, despite the despicably misogynist sentiments that came out of his mouth, were the women who ran every aspect of his business, from his cofounder, Nancy Salzman, on down. These women helped to sanitize his message and explain away misgivings students might have had, while also acting as his enforcers, particularly as the Bronfmans pursued legal vendettas against ex-members. It is significant that women recruited other women for DOS, since it would probably have been a much less appealing prospect had Raniere himself posed it to them. The women high up in NXIVM could make legitimate claims on empowerment, although they paid a high price for it: Raniere’s five codefendants, all of whom pled guilty rather than stand trial with him, were women.

Raniere’s female deputies were caught in the same bind as his hero, the author Ayn Rand. In her view, in order for women to be totally free, they had to devalue traditionally feminine work, communication, and ways of knowing, subjecting themselves to the punishing dominion of logic and ambition. As Sam Anderson wrote of Rand in New York Magazine in 2009, Rand saw herself as “a machine of pure reason, a free-market Spock” who claimed “that she could rationally explain every emotion she’d ever had.” This triumph of stereotypically masculine values seems to be linked directly with the emphasis both NXIVM and Rand put on the righteousness of achieving success within the capitalist system. If you believe that time is money, and money is necessary for doing good in the world, then it follows that emotions, instincts, and physical needs would be subordinated to a numb efficiency and all-consuming self-discipline and self-denial.

In this way, NXIVM was a distillation of all the failures and lies of corporate feminism. Often exemplified by Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, corporate feminism emphasizes the ingenuity required for an individual woman’s success in the workplace, instead of questioning the systemic barriers to women’s economic advancement and the unchecked nature of corporate power. One of the key aspects of the NXIVM story is how the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing when it came to the interlocking web of businesses that made up the NXIVM consortium, which was comprised of numerous companies including an acting studio and experimental preschool. This was for legal reasons, to ensure Raniere would be able to continue his work even if authorities shut down one of the organization’s branches. But it was also his way of hiding his worst abuses and beta-testing fringier ideas. He took a more overtly apocalyptic tone with his outreach in Mexico, where students were taught, according to the New York Times, “that Mr. Raniere had developed a sophisticated mathematical formula to predict that the world would end within 15 years.” When Salzman said at the first Jness retreat in 2006 that women were naturally monogamous while men were naturally polygamous, Susan Dones, who was at the time the head of NXIVM’s Seattle center, said she recognized that “they were introducing the idea of polygamy, but with a soft sell, laying the groundwork.”

In addition to the secrecy and confusion built into its arcane corporate structure, surely the self-interest the group preached kept members from asking questions about the way the organization was run. People who were trained to focus monomaniacally on their goals had little time to question the ethical pitfalls of pyramid selling, the organization’s regressive views of gender, and the exploitation of women Raniere was committing before their eyes. Salzman, Raniere’s closest deputy and collaborator, reportedly had no idea about DOS, even though her own daughter was one of Raniere’s first-line masters, as federal prosecutors described them in court. This blindness predictably had disastrous consequences for the organization’s most vulnerable targets. Some of Raniere’s trial’s most horrifying details came from the testimony of an anonymous Mexican member called Daniela, who moved to Albany when she was sixteen to work with NXIVM. She started having sex with Raniere when she was eighteen and facilitated Raniere’s sexual relationship with her underage sister, whom he called “the virgin Camilla.” At one point, Raniere convinced Daniela and her older sister, who was also sleeping with Raniere, to go to bed with him at the same time. Later, Raniere had Daniela’s parents confine her to her room for two years for what he called “an ethical breach”: her admission that she was attracted to a man other than him. All of this abuse was compounded by the fact that Raniere had helped Daniela enter the country illegally. “I was without a doubt a captive from a moment I was illegal in the country,” she said at trial.

It is no surprise that NXIVM’s Mexican members received its most extreme teachings and bore its most egregious violence. In all of the frenzied reporting on Mack’s involvement with DOS, many have missed that five of the eight first-line masters in DOS were Mexican. Despite the wealth of the Mexican contingent’s most high-profile members, which included the children of two Mexican presidents and the daughter of Mexico’s most powerful newspaper publisher, white supremacy and American chauvinism meant they had a subordinate position in the NXIVM power structure. All of this is intimately linked to the perverted corporate feminism the group preached, which held that the success of elite women would trickle down to more marginalized women, all the while ensuring that the opposite was true. Corporate feminism is one brand of white feminism, and they are both the close confreres of postfeminism, an enfeebled feminist marketing that gained ascendance in the nineties by emphasizing consumer freedom, lifestyle choice—especially the choice to conform to traditional gender norms—and success for women within a capitalist framework. It was in no way interested in the intersection of oppression, systemic change, or class critique, and was in fact designed to defang feminism as a radical political movement, distracting women with the attractive lie that what the feminist cause needed was more women making lots and lots of money and doing whatever the hell they wanted.

*

This is the way I’ve come to see the NXIVM story: as one of the horsemen of the broader postfeminist apocalypse, a sign of how far degraded feminist rhetoric has become. DOS was, for one thing, the horror-movie version of a multilevel marketing company, or MLMs, which have received more attention in recent years on social media, YouTube, and podcasts as fraudulent get-rich-quick schemes specifically targeting women. (I can picture the Blumhouse B movie about Tupperware sex parties now.) MLMs use individual salespeople to sell makeup, leggings, essential oils, and a million other consumer products directly to their friends and family for a small commission. The real money is not in selling but recruiting other salespeople who stand below you on the pyramid and will attract other recruits, all of whom will owe you commission. Raniere ran his first illegal pyramid scheme in the early nineties through his first MLM, Consumer’s Byline, and signed a consent order with the attorney general of New York to never run another multilevel marketing company. He broke this order almost immediately, starting an MLM called Innovative Network where members received discounts on “top-grade health products,” and, shortly after, in 1998, starting Executive Success Programs, where in order to move up the ranks, members had to aggressively recruit other students to take the ESP intensives, which were by invitation only. All of NXIVM’s programs were extortionately expensive, with five-day intensives costing between $2,000 and $10,000, and students were pressured constantly to re-up, often going deep into debt. The only exception to this was DOS, which was, at least on the face of it, free—members could join for the low, low cost of naked pictures and a lifetime vow of submission. But they were still expected to recruit their own slaves, preferably women who were young, thin, and single.

Raniere knew what he was doing when he used the MLM model for every venture he ever undertook, even enlisting a harem of sex slaves. Considering his beliefs about women, who could be surprised that he was drawn to an industry that targeted women’s vulnerabilities and subordinated them to the imperial apex of the pyramid scheme (him)? At least ninety-nine percent of MLM sellers lose money, but these companies still recruit with the promise that prospective salespeople can grow their own business in their spare time. This sales pitch is particularly attractive to women who have trouble working otherwise, often because they are taking care of children, and takes advantage of the kinship networks women build of friends, neighbors, and relatives. (Expect an avalanche of new MLM scams as the COVID-19 pandemic becomes a feminist nightmare, with 865,000 women dropping out of the workforce in September alone.) Just as Raniere did with DOS, these companies are sure to couch their predation in the language of feminism, marketing themselves as empowering a new class of #girlbosses, even as they prey on women’s economic precarity.

Raniere’s sentencing coincides with the entrance of another postfeminist horseman in the form of Amy Coney Barrett, the ultraconservative judge Donald Trump nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. She was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice on October 26, the apotheosis of Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign to reinvent the American judiciary as a conservative political engine. In her short time as an appeals court judge, Coney Barrett has argued for expanding gun rights and restricting abortion rights, couching all of her contradictory convictions in that great conservative judicial fantasy: total adherence to the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. Since the outset, when her law professor at Notre Dame secured her a clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia, Coney Barrett’s career has been paved by men who saw her as a useful political tool. In a profile in the New York Times, Elizabeth Dias writes how Coney Barrett benefitted from a Republican initiative “to cultivate female and minority candidates for the courts to help counter the perception that the party was interested mainly in promoting white men.” Trump had planned for years to nominate Coney Barrett in the event of Ginsburg’s death, setting up an obvious, if cheap, comparison between the two female judges. Democrats’ opposition to her nomination has of course been met with Republican whining about how women should support women, with the Republican senator Martha McSally saying, “You would normally have the feminists on the left lining up to defend her. So we’re asking, where are those women?”

As Ellen Willis wrote in 1979 about the pro-life movement, “Its need to wrap misogyny in the rhetoric of social conscience and even feminism is actually a perverse tribute to the women’s movement.” The same is true now: as Coney Barrett becomes the right’s greatest hope of overturning Roe v. Wade, we are told that feminists are being hypocritical in our opposition to her. In truth, conservatives’ clumsy use of feminist rhetoric is an instinctive appeal to something more basic than the formalized women’s movement. They are calling on women’s powerful loyalty to one another, thus recognizing it as feminists’ most potent tool. When the pro-life movement became ascendant in the late seventies, it was because of its brilliant methods of undermining that loyalty, most often by reframing abortion not as “as a political issue affecting the condition of women,” as Willis writes, but “as an abstract moral issue having solely to do with the rights of fetuses.”

Coney Barrett belongs to a charismatic Catholic sect called the People of Praise who famously used to call their women leaders “handmaids,” though they stopped after the Hulu started airing its series A Handmaid’s Tale, possibly seeing it as a little on the nose. All members are assigned a male “head” who counsels them spiritually and practically; married women are “headed” by their husbands. If Coney Barrett managed to pursue a career that is mostly foreclosed to women in her religious group, particularly those who have seven children, there is no reason to believe she sees economic opportunities for women as something worth fighting for. Her solidarity with other women has been thoroughly eroded by both her conservative and religious indoctrination and her adventures in leaning in. According to the New York Times, “[The People of Praise] is almost entirely run by men in part because it ‘communicates to all men their shared responsibility for the life of the community,’ ensuring men do not leave family and community matters to women.” This statement also nods toward feminism, with its emphasis on men pitching in with domestic duties. But it can also be interpreted as a radical rejection of the high status of women in even many conservative church communities, where they can gain positions of authority and influence through teaching, volunteering, and music ministry. As MLMs exploit close-knit networks of women for their buying power, conservative Christianity has been seeking to cut those networks off at the root, making women ever more directly beholden to men. But when you look at all this manipulation up close, something startling becomes clear: would the corporate and political systems be trying so hard to stop women from organizing if we didn’t pose a threat? As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez captioned an Instagram post about the squad, herself and three other progressive congresswomen who have become the conservative movement’s favorite villains: “When your sisterhood is so powerful the President of the United States can’t stop thinking about it.”

*

There is an unsettling symmetry to the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, an echoing dread many women will feel even if they don’t examine it. The last confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court justice were a notably ugly moment in the Donald Trump presidency, amid a stream of ugly moments. At Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified before the judiciary committee for four hours, calmly describing how Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen. When it was Kavanaugh’s turn to testify, he threw a disturbing tantrum where he cried, yelled that he liked beer, and whined that he may never be able to coach children’s sports again. And still he was confirmed by a 52–48 vote in the senate, with the moderate, pro-choice Republican Susan Collins giving a mealy-mouthed speech on the floor of the Senate defending her yes vote by saying that Kavanaugh had assured her that he would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. I can’t be the only who felt this like a blow to the chest. It was the feeling that Kavanaugh’s confirmation was the end of the #MeToo movement as we knew it.

Now, along with Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett is poised to make life harder for millions of women, threatening abortion rights, the availability of contraception, and most immediately, the health care of families that rely on the Affordable Care Act. This confirms something we may have suspected, which is that the #MeToo message had been muddled and undermined. Despite all efforts, the connections were not clear, the message was not heard: there is a larger system keeping women on the margins of American life, of which sexual violence is only one tactic of enforcement, and for which justice against individual abusers is only a salve and not a cure.

We might have also suspected that #MeToo did not go far enough in its demands at the height of its cultural power. Since then, #MeToo seems to have devolved into a circular conversation about celebrity cancel culture, abandoning exactly the women who need defending most, those at the intersection of race, class, and gender oppressions who are not only the most likely to be sexually harassed and assaulted on the job, but who suffer most from abortion bans, the lack of childcare and paid parental leave, and the assault on affordable health care. In other words, when there was a national conversation around gendered violence, there was a failure to overtly integrate it with the other issues at the heart of the feminist cause. There were barriers to this, of course, mostly that the movement’s power was in its ad hoc coalition united by the barest of feminist demands: stop harassing us; stop raping us. Anonymous hotel workers and Fox News anchorwomen were gathered, uncomfortably and temporarily, under the same banner. If some of us saw the inconsistency in fighting for women to be able to safely spew hatred on Fox News, it still seemed like a net good, not to mention a source of delectable schadenfreude, to see Roger Ailes go down in flames.

This is clear evidence of how the organized feminist movement has deteriorated in this country, even as calling oneself a feminist has become more socially acceptable. We dare demand only safety, never security. Solidarity will only take us so far—we need theory, infrastructure, diversity, and nuance in fighting the forces of revanchism that seem to strike with more violence after any moment of feminist progress. The evangelical movement, corporate interests, and far-right forces have mounted a massive backlash against women’s equality since the seventies, comprised of many mini backlashes, of which the Trump presidency is only one. #MeToo was just a start to building back what has already been eroded. The fact that many people cannot differentiate between postfeminist “empowerment” and real feminism is a victory for those forces that have systematically opposed real gender equality. (Confusing the issue is a classic move in the conservative playbook: the greatest enemy of the Equal Rights Amendment was the empowered woman Phyllis Schlafly.) Postfeminist rhetoric has caused tangible harm, playing an active part in perpetuating the widespread sexual abuse that women until #MeToo were told they had to learn to live with. We are trained to believe that being a girl boss means persevering and not playing the victim. As the ESP mission statement says, “There are no ultimate victims; therefore, I will not choose to be a victim.”

NXIVM is also a #MeToo story: high-profile serial abusers like Harvey Weinstein led authorities to take the case against Raniere more seriously. There had been newspaper stories as early as 2012 detailing NXIVM corruption and accusing Raniere of violence and statutory rape. But when former DOS slaves took their story to the New York Times in 2017, they were told that it wasn’t necessarily newsworthy at the same time that the FBI told them that the branding of their flesh was consensual. After #MeToo, the tide turned quickly against Raniere, with an exposé in the Times, the exodus of dozens of members from NXIVM, and, soon enough, federal charges.

But, of course, defeating Raniere does not destroy the cultural forces that allowed him to belittle, control, and indoctrinate women through NXIVM for two decades, and broader #MeToo activism doesn’t either. A notable thing about DOS is the way that women’s relationships with other women were leveraged against them. Women were afraid if they left, not that they would lose access to Raniere, but that they would lose the close friendships with women that the group had forged. When recruiting for DOS, Allison Mack invited women to join her “women’s group,” and women with the same “master” often called each other sisters. Women still need sisterhood. There is no reason not to start more formal women’s groups like those who read, organized, commiserated, and raised their consciousnesses together as the decentralized structure of the women’s liberation movement during feminism’s second wave, and whose vacuum DOS, MLMs, church groups, social media communities, and group texts have made their feeble and/or sinister attempts to fill. Antiwoman forces tell us we should be satisfied with takedowns for people like Raniere, with our chance for a woman to replace a woman on the Supreme Court, no matter who she is. We know better. Interpret NXIVM as a new fairy tale, with Raniere as a particularly pathetic Bluebeard, and take its lesson to heart. Any women’s movement that does not demand justice for the most marginalized, that does not threaten the status quo, will eventually contribute to our oppression. In materials from the first Jness, Nancy Salzman said, “Welcome to the first women’s movement started by a man.” She seems to be foreclosing this as a criticism, but also to be pitching it as an improvement on all of those previous, irrational movements led by emotional women. This is a lesson of the NXIVM story, too: the way a false women’s movement can be taken down by a real one.

 

Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.

The Best Witch Novel Is One Nobody Talks About

On a visit to the UCLA Library, the author and scholar Maryse Condé found herself lost in the stacks. A library can be a spooky place. It is little wonder that they are so often listed among haunted buildings. The whispering shuffles of paper, the eerie quiet, the echoing click-clack heel-toe of shoes on cool linoleum floors. The impatience of a long-shelved book awaiting a reader might be the only thing to rival that of a spirit biding her time until the perfect audience appears. Says Condé of the inspiration for her novel I, Tituba … Black Witch of Salem, “I got lost in the huge building and found myself in the history section in front of a shelf full of books about the Salem witch trials. Looking through them, I discovered the existence of Tituba, whom I had never heard of before.”

Armed only with what scant information history managed not to mislay about the life of this woman, Condé invented the rest. What she, and we, do know is that Tituba played a critical role in one of the U.S.’s most infamous events. One of the few Black women in Salem, she was the first woman to be accused of witchcraft during the witch trials. Her deposition, which survives in the historical record, appears as a chapter in the text. Condé’s Tituba narrates the story of her life in a flamboyantly ironic voice. She is a modern and charming heroine capable of evoking both witchy cackles of satisfaction when her oppressors get their due, and tears of sorrow and rage at her ultimate fate. History observed through the veil of intersectional feminism does not look rosy, of course. Colonialism, the slave trade, racism, Puritanism, misogyny: how quaint were the Puritans to think there was only one devil in Salem. “I wanted to offer her her revenge,” Condé has said. The title itself is an unashamed confession. I, Tituba … Black Witch of Salem is a reclamation of this woman’s place in history and literature, and an act of revenge on the history that forgot her.

Like the best characters, Tituba is a contradiction: born from violence, she embraces love. From the very first sentence, Condé lays plain the degrading terror of life as an enslaved woman: “Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt.”

Tituba appears here and there in history lessons and pop culture, but rarely as more than a catalyst for the rest of the Salem drama to unfold. When asked if Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was used as a source, Condé’s responds, “I saw an adaptation of the play in Paris while I was a student. It did not impress me.” She reminds readers in the afterword that to miss the parody in her novel is to miss the point. She goes so far as to weave in a new reading of The Scarlet Letter: toward the end of the book, the spirit of Hester Prynne appears nightly to offer Tituba “bodily pleasure.”

In Condé’s telling, at the age of seven Tituba sees her mother hanged for defending herself from another rape by a wealthy planter. “They hanged my mother” is repeated several times to devastating effect. “I felt something harden inside me like lava; a feeling that was never to leave me, a mixture of terror and mourning. When her body swung round and round in the air, I gathered up enough strength to tiptoe away and vomit my heart out in the grass.”

An old woman named Mama Yaya takes her in and initiates her into the world of magic. “You will suffer during your life. A lot. A lot. But you’ll survive.” Tituba’s humor, dry and droll, emerges: “That was not very reassuring!” she recalls thinking. The spirit of her mother, Abena, warns her away from unworthy men, whom Tituba is unable to resist. Her husband, John Indian, is only the first, while Abena’s spirit, in the shadows, sighs at her daughter’s weakness.

“You don’t know how to talk. Your hair is a tangle. You could be lovely if you wanted to,” Tituba’s future husband insults her on their first meeting. And yet she falls in love, another tragedy among the many. “Up until now I had never thought about my body. Was I beautiful? Was I ugly? I had no idea.” The reader is as infuriated as the ghost of Abena, who laments over and over, “Why can’t women do without men?” Tituba cannot help herself, though. Her magic comes from what she will be routinely punished for: her connection to her ancestors, her expertise as a healer, and her sexuality.

To stay with John Indian, Tituba must become an enslaved woman. She must learn about Christianity, of which she knows nothing. She must endure the abuse of her husband’s mistress, Susanna Endicott. “Nobody had ever spoken to me, humiliated me, in such a manner! … My blood was boiling inside me.” Just as she has never considered that she might be unattractive, she never knew her magic as anything but a gift. She is incensed at the charge that she is dealing with Satan. “Before setting foot inside this house, I didn’t know who Satan was!” she retorts.

Following the advice of her spirit guides, Tituba conjures upon Endicott a humiliating illness instead of killing her outright, and soon both she and her husband are sold to Samuel Parris. She befriends Parris’s wife and daughter, while enduring the humiliations and violence of this second-rate minister. “We stayed a year in Boston while Samuel Parris waited for his religious community, the Puritans, to offer him a parish. Alas! The offers did not exactly flow in!” The reader is like a poppet, and every sentence is a needle inserted to elicit the emotion Tituba wants to conjure. Sly as Satan in her moments of bone-dry wit, barely a few lines later she returns the focus to the reality of history when John Indian brings her news of the slave trade: “Thousands of our people were being snatched from Africa. I learned that we were not the only ones the whites were reducing to slavery, they were also enslaving the Indians, the original inhabitants of both America and our beloved Barbados.”

The evil of the Puritans among whom she is trapped astonishes. The wife herself tells her neighbors, brought over by the screams of her children, “A child is like bread that requires kneading.” The neighbors then urge her to beat them more often, shrieks of torment in the background. When Tituba writes, “That was Salem! A community that stole, cheated, and burgled while wrapping itself in the cloak of God’s name,” she may as well just say, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

Tituba, one of the only Black women in Salem, is naturally the first accused of the crime of witchcraft, even as respectable Puritan women approach her for magical favors. She holds fast to the advice of her spirit guides, “Don’t become like them, knowing only how to do evil.” Amid this, John Indian still finds the time to criticize her, “You’re neglecting yourself, wife. You used to be a meadow where I grazed. Now the tall grass of your pubis and the tufts of your armpits almost disgust me.” It is not a surprise when he becomes one of the accusers to save himself. Sigh.

It is while she is imprisoned and awaiting trial that Tituba encounters Hester Prynne, and their friendship offers hope not only for our narrator, but for the future of women—with or without men, as Hester’s ghost later suggests. In one of the best lines of the book, Hester says, “You’re too fond of love, Tituba! I’ll never make a feminist out of you!” She is the first person to ask Tituba to recount her story, to make her feel that she is worth remembering. With a “Crick, crack!,” the traditional Caribbean phrase to open stories, Tituba takes her rightful place in history and literature. By remembering Tituba, Condé has made a loving gesture to remember all of the Black women forgotten and abused by history. Angela Davis writes in the forward that Tituba’s voice is “the voice of a suppressed black feminist tradition.”

Originally from Guadeloupe, Condé has won many major French literary prizes. In 1986, the year it was published, I, Tituba won the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme. In 2018, Condé was awarded the so-called alternative Nobel, the New Academy Prize in Literature, when the Nobel was temporarily suspended due to accusations of sexual misconduct and an ensuing scandal. (Was that the spirit of Abena sighing again?)

To travel with Tituba, from Africa to Barbados and then to Boston and Salem, is to relive so many brutalities inherent to colonial life. The matter-of-factness with which Tituba recounts horrific events leaves a reader gutted. Every blow and slur Condé places into her historical re-creation is an intentional violence for the purpose of remembering. When they are first in New England, Tituba wonders to her husband: “Perhaps it’s because they have done so much harm to their fellow beings, to some because their skin is black, to others because their skin is red, that they have such a strong feeling of being damned?”

The most damning lines in the book, however, read like a prayer: “I hope that the generations to come will live under a welfare state that will truly provide for the well-being of its citizens. In 1692, at the time of our story, this was not the case.” It is hard not to notice Charlottesville printed in bold on the back cover of the University of Virginia Press edition and feel the consequences of refusing to remember.

In Condé’s history, Tituba returns to Barbados a legend—“Are you the daughter of Abena, who murdered a white man?” As the month of October waxes toward Halloween, the celebration of witches is in full swing. How can it be that this book written to remember feels so often forgotten? Let Tituba be remembered for herself. Let Condé’s I, Tituba be seen for its brilliance. In the epilogue, Tituba grants favors to those who sing songs to celebrate her life, but the voice Condé has given her is already reward enough.

 

 

J. Nicole Jones is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in VICE, VanityFair.com, the Harper’s Magazine website, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and others. Her memoir, Low Country, is forthcoming from Catapult in 2021.

All of Time Is a Grave

Photo of Breece D’J Pancake, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Breece D’J Pancake’s dozen stories, completed in the last four or five years of his life, include some of the best short stories written anywhere, at any time. Forty years of the author’s absence cast no shadow. The shadings, the broad arcs of interior, antediluvian time, are inside the sentences. The ancient hills and valleys of southern West Virginia remain Breece Pancake’s home place; the specificity and nuance of his words embody the vanished farms, the dams and filled valleys, the strip-mined or exploded mountains. His stories are startling and immediate: these lives informed by loss and wrenching cruelty retain the luminous dignity that marks the endurance of all that is most human.

Breece Pancake’s stories are the only stories written in just this way, from inside the minds of protagonists coming of age in the mountains of an Appalachian world closed to others. I’ve said, in a quote for an earlier edition of his work, “Breece Pancake’s stories comprise no less than an American Dubliners.” I meant not that the author’s style is similar to Joyce’s, but that the stories are a map of their physical locality, above and below ground, just as Joyce’s stories are a map of Dublin’s streets in Joyce’s youth. And that the links between the stories are as finely calibrated, and as naturally present in the material itself, as those in Joyce’s Dubliners. Colly’s mourned father in “Trilobites” is a literary relation to Bo’s dead father in “Fox Hunters” and foster son Ottie’s never-known father of “In the Dry”; the stories share a generational, nearly biblical sense of time. There is the long-ago time in which men and women brought forth their issue in the isolated, virginal hills they owned and farmed and hunted; there is the loss of the land, of living from it; there is industrialization, exploitation, ruin.

“Trilobites,” the first in The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, is a portal to other stories as tone-perfect and wholly accomplished: “Fox Hunters,” “Hollow,” “In the Dry,” “A Room Forever,” “The Scrapper,” “The Honored Dead”—readers will have their favorites—but “Trilobites” comes first, as though clearing the way and claiming haunted ground with exhilarating precision. Colly, the story’s protagonist, was born in this country and “never very much wanted to leave,” but his father, who paid his dues in combat on the Elbe, died alone in a West Virginia field, “a khaki cloud in the canebrakes.” Colly is no good at farming the beautiful hilly land, with its dust devils and wind-furled rows of cedars, its brief rainstorms and willow-wisps, the patchy fog that curls little ghosts into the branches and gullies. All of time is a grave. “I look again at the spot of ground where Pop fell. He had lain spread-eagled in the thick grass after a sliver of metal from his old wound passed to his brain. I remember thinking how beaten his face looked with prints in it from the grass.” The loansman stands by with a contract to buy the farm, build a housing project, fill the bottoms with dirt and raise the flood line. The Permian certainty of geologic time, eons of graves, striations of rock and shifting landmass, flows through the stories, and the prehistoric Teays River, gargantuan and mighty, vanished underground, seems to pulse with absence in the prose. Colly gaffs for a turkle in a drying creek, as though wrestling a fellow survivor from its shrinking dominion; equipped with the author’s vision, he looks at the land and sees the past. “I look down the valley to where bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails are covered with a highway, and cars rush back and forth in the wind.”

Breece’s suicide on June 8, 1979, twenty-one days before his twenty-seventh birthday, left others to champion the survival of his work. His widowed mother, Helen Pancake, dedicated herself to seeing his book published. James Alan McPherson’s foreword, and John Casey’s afterword, were written for the stories’ first publication as a collection in 1983. Both writers were his teachers; they tell us what they can of who he was, how they learned of his death, and the ways in which he approached them later in dreams and memory. They weren’t his mother or his sisters, or Emily Miller, the girl who begged John Casey to “go see” because she couldn’t. But they were his mentors and continued to support his work after his death. Like everyone intimate with a suicide, “they will take his death to their graves”: the phrase creates a burden so gravid that it defies cliché. His death, for those who knew him and are still alive, is a long time ago now, but it never goes away. That’s why suicide is a moral crime. As surely as homicide, matricide, or fratricide, it ends a lived life and opens a wound. We attend to the story of his death, a limited, fractured story, to move beyond it, past limitations and personal history. His fiction is the world he lived in, the world he made. “A long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can almost feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites make when they crawl.”

I never knew Breece D’J Pancake except through his work, but his life brushed past mine three times. Born the same year, twenty-one days apart, we were raised in different versions of West Virginia. He was from the small town of Milton (population 2,500) in the southwest part of the state, and attended, in his freshman year, West Virginia Wesleyan, a Methodist college in Buckhannon, my hometown. Buckhannon (population 6,000) is in north central West Virginia, part of the Tristate Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia region then linked by straight-ticket Democratic sympathies and strong unions. I was a senior in high school in 1969–70; Buckhannon-Upshur High School won their third AAA football championship and I was in passionate “first love” with the tight end, a brilliant boy whose musician brother died in Vietnam that November. It’s odd to think of Breece living in Buckhannon. He joined the drama club but left Wesleyan (“Still nothing to do in Buckhannon?” he wrote to a former classmate) to attend Marshall University in Huntington, near his parents. After graduation, he went south, to teach at military academies in Fork Union and Staunton, Virginia. I went west, to San Francisco, then Boulder, waitressing. I’d published a few poems and wrote my first story, “El Paso,” for application to M.F.A. programs. He taught cadets, sent his work to John Casey at the University of Virginia, and began driving the forty minutes from Staunton to Charlottesville to sit in on Casey’s weekly workshops. Casey “tried to send him off to Iowa for a year to get him some more time to write,” and Vance Bourjaily accepted him into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, class of ’76–’78 (my class), but apparently didn’t offer him financial aid—or perhaps financial aid decisions were already made by the time Bourjaily read Breece’s work.

Iowa’s M.F.A. program was famous, but I went there because they offered the best financial support—in-state tuition and a small stipend. Workshop students at Iowa, pitted against each other for second-year funding, were viciously competitive, but there were no Southern codes of honor as at UVA, and class-conscious noblesse oblige did not enter into things. It would not have mattered that Breece wore jeans, flannel shirts, and boots—most of us did. And Breece’s work, in any case, would have distinguished him at Iowa, where the work itself finally defined one’s status. He would have encountered a larger, more broadly ranging group in a Midwestern landscape that promised a remove from the past.

But Breece was accepted full-time at UVA, and saw himself as John Casey’s apprentice. He went south to the antebellum-by-nature UVA campus for grad school, was eventually awarded a Hoynes Fellowship, and moved to One Blue Ridge Lane, near the university. His 12 x 12 apartment, in the east wing of a building that had been servants’ quarters for the manor house on the property, shared a circular drive with a few other cottages. His landlady, Mrs. Virginia Meade, gave occasional English department parties and “had the gall,” Breece wrote his mother, to ask Breece to tend bar: “Said if I didn’t, she’d have to hire a colored, and they don’t mix a good drink.” The Georgia expat James Alan McPherson, who won the Pulitzer for Elbow Room while Breece was his student, called UVA “a finishing school for the sons of the southern upper class,” and the English department, “the interior of a goldfish bowl … an environment reeking of condescension.”

Breece felt excluded, looked down upon, even as he achieved success. He wrote to his sister Donetta, “Made it! Atlantic bought ‘Trilobites’ for $750 … This has really set fire to Wilson Hall and the (Cross yourself) English Department. Poor second rate citizen Pancake who can’t speak the King’s English … that turkey made it.” According to his teachers and fellow students, he played up his “otherness,” exaggerated his accent, spread tales of eating roadkill and fighting in bars. The surname Pancake is an Anglicized version of the German name Pfannkuchen; he was Scottish (Frazier) on his mother’s side and took his middle initials from a printer’s error in The Atlantic galley of “Trilobites”: D. J. for Dexter John translated to the aristocratic D’J with the grace of an apostrophe. He was courtly toward women, if defensive concerning “Women’s Lib”; James Alan McPherson remembered that Breece “spoke contemptuously of upper-class women with whom he had slept on a first date, but was full of praise for a woman who had allowed him to kiss her on the cheek only after several dates.” His sympathies were for the dispossessed, the underdog, the working poor. “I am sick to my stomach of people who drive fine cars, live alone in big apts., never worked a day in their lives,” he wrote to his mother of Albemarle County, Virginia, soon after moving to Charlottesville. “This county is second in the country for millionaires—LA county being first. It do get hard to swallow.”

Milton, in southern West Virginia, did not breed millionaires. The novelist Mary Lee Settle, a West Virginia native who taught at UVA, addressed West Virginia/Virginia cultural dissonance in her novel Clamshell: “Physically, [VA] is only a barrier of mountains away, across the Allegheny Divide, but to us Virginia is our Europe, hated and loved, before which we are shy, as Americans are shy in Europe.” Northern West Virginia towns were more like small towns in Pennsylvania or Ohio; Virginians didn’t matter at all to us. My family’s Ohio relatives hosted my brothers when they worked summer jobs in Youngstown’s steel mills; we would have seen antebellum pretensions as laughable. But southern West Virginians, even those descended from aristocratic Lost Cause Virginians, can still find themselves particularly disparaged by Virginians.

This was news to me until a somewhat famous Virginia writer delighted in informing me that he and his wife had grown up deriding West Virginians across the Tug Fork River: “We could actually see them on the opposite bank at high school parties, and we’d throw beer cans and cat-call them.” He seemed to think that real or imagined disparities of wealth and “prestige” on two sides of a river had to do with the inbred superiority of Virginians, rather than the economic advantage of slave-state evil that plantation Virginia practiced so enthusiastically. Most Americans, even now, are unaware that West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1863 to stand with the Union, that West Virginia’s state motto, “Mountaineers are always free,” is a reference to Virginia’s slavery economy and unjust taxation of its “western frontier.” West Virginia, the only Appalachian state entirely located within the Allegheny, Blue Ridge, and Appalachian mountain ranges, was and remains geographically and culturally isolated. Virginia considered the land—so towering, pristine, majestic, navigable only by river—worthless, until Big Timber and Big Coal colonized the state anew.

Breece was insulted by what he considered superficial representation of his home place, as in Harry Caudill’s influential Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and the “selling short” of his frugal, morally upright people. He connected, through his idolized father’s experience, to Depression-era, World War II standards of masculinity. The wrinkly old boundary post in “Trilobites” is a monument: “Pop set it when the hobo and soldier days were over. It is a locust-tree post and will be there a long time.” Like many writers, Breece didn’t belong in the place where he was born, but knew its history in myriad detail, swearing eternal allegiance in his writing and being. He didn’t play sports, which so define boys in rural small towns; he wasn’t meant for mine or factory work (his father once warned him, “Son, you’d better get an education because those hands will never fit a shovel”), but loved the land down to the strata and composition of the mountains themselves. A good student, he wrote about working-class characters whose families did not possess the measure of security his own had managed to attain. A farmer in “The Honored Dead” angrily refuses his son an education: “Everybody’s going to school to be something better … I don’t care if they end up shitting gold nuggets. Somebody’s got to dig in the damn ground.” The farmer isn’t wrong. Every word and phrase and punctuation mark in a Pancake story is perfectly chosen; each story engages our complex empathy and presents unresolvable dilemmas. Breece did meticulous research on doghole mining, long-distance trucking, Holiness congregations, serpent handling, and more; typically, he wrote fifteen drafts of each story, but his unerring sense of the culture and sound of his characters was bred-in-the-bone.

*

A large rectangular slab marks Breece’s grave in Milton Cemetery. Its border, the letters of his name, his dates, a small, centered cross, are raised in brass. His parents’ graves are just beside. His stone, flat to the ground, seems to deepen into the earth like a pillar. Two weeks before he died, Breece wrote to his mother about a dream he’d had: “I came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, as if it were all a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes—all white—snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream.”

The miraculous, exhilarating truth is that Breece D’J Pancake fought his way out of any dream, no matter how pervasive or foretold, with the sheer power of his dedication and intent, his genius and his passion, in language that is his alone. Truly great work delivers worlds that are known rather than merely understood or apprehended. His stories will be read as long as American stories survive, passed on, head to heart.

 

Jayne Anne Phillips, a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, was born and raised in West Virginia. She is the author of two short story collections, Black Tickets and Fast Lanes, and five novels: Machine Dreams, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark & Termite, and Quiet Dell.

Excerpted from The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters . Introduction copyright © 2020 by Jayne Anne Phillips. Published by Library of America. Used with permission.

Redux: Of Time Accelerated

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.

Chinua Achebe.

This week, we’re highlighting work by Nigerian writers in the archive and the current issue. Read on for Chinua Achebe’s Art of Fiction interview, Eloghosa Osunde’s short story “Good Boy,” and Wole Soyinka’s poem “Your Logic Frightens Me Mandela.”

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!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.

 

Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139

Issue no. 133, Winter 1994

INTERVIEWER

How much do you think writers should engage themselves in public issues?

ACHEBE

I don’t lay down the law for anybody else. But I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens. They are generally adults. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take.

 

Photo: Michael Sander. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Good Boy

By Eloghosa Osunde

Issue no. 234, Fall 2020

Start here: I’m not inspiring. When I first moved to Lagos, I didn’t come here with good mind. I came here with one mission and one mission only: to get a lot of money, so as to prove my popsy wrong. That’s all. For me, blood family doesn’t mean shit. Family is your spine dividing into four, hot metal in your back, red life shooting out of you in a geyser. It’s you falling forward in slow motion, a yelp in your neck, whole outfit ruined in the air. You, reading this, you’re here, alive, because your parents synced and you showed up. That’s it. Even if they planned for a child, it was still a raffle draw. A hand went in a bowl and picked you. The tree shook and a fruit fell down.

 

Photo: Tom Woodward. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Your Logic Frightens Me Mandela

By Wole Soyinka

Issue no. 107, Summer 1988

Your logic frightens me, Mandela,

Your logic frightens me. Those years

Of dreams, of time accelerated in

Visionary hopes, of savouring the task anew,

The call, the tempo primed

To burst in supernovae round a “brave new world”!

Then stillness. Silence. The world closes round

Your sole reality; the rest is… dreams?

Your logic frightens me.

How coldly you disdain legerdemains!

“Open Sesame” and—two decades’ rust on hinges

Peels at touch of a conjurer’s wand?

White magic, ivory-topped black magic wand,

One moment wand, one moment riot club

Electric cattle prod and club or sjambok

Tearing flesh and spilling blood and brain?

This bag of tricks, whose silk streamers

Turn knotted cords to crush dark temples?

A rabbit punch sneaked beneath the rabbit?

Doves metamorphosed in milk-white talons?

Not for you the olive branch that sprouts

Gun muzzles, barbed-wire garlands, tangled thorns

To wreathe the brows of black, unwilling christs.

Your patience grows inhuman, Mandela …

 

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 sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!).

Cinema Hardly Exists: Duras and Godard in Conversation

In the fall of 1979, Jean-Luc Godard invited Marguerite Duras to appear in a scene for his film Every Man for Himself. Because Duras refused to be filmed, Godard recorded audio of a conversation with her instead, and later used a few lines of what she said as part of the soundtrack to a sequence in the film. As Cyril Béghin notes in the introduction to Duras/Godard Dialogues, a new book featuring three conversations between the pair: “Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing, and speech since his first films.” In the following excerpt from the transcript of their hour-long encounter, they discuss political speech, public appearances, the relationship between image and text, and much more.

Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard. Photo courtesy of Film Desk Books.

GODARD

If I asked you to do something on television, would you accept?

DURAS

If it was you, yes.

GODARD

What do you mean by “if it was me”? What does it mean to know me?

DURAS

But knowing you and knowing your films are the same thing.

GODARD

Well, for the moment, I’m no longer making a lot of films …

DURAS

Yes, but you have made films!

GODARD

I think that you and I are a little bit like rival siblings because, perhaps unjustly, I have a hatred for writing [l’écriture]. Not for writing in and of itself, but once it’s there, it’s always there … Whereas in your case, without the writing—I don’t know whether to call it writing or text …

DURAS

I call it the writing [l’écrit]: the text or the writing.

GODARD

Still, there is some need for an image, isn’t there?

DURAS

On the screen, I need both things, neither of which gets in the way of what I would call “the amplitude of speech.” In general, I find that almost all images get in the way of the text. They prevent the text from being heard. And what I want is something that lets the text come through. That’s my only concern. That’s why I made India Song in voice-over.

GODARD

That lets the text come through, but also carries it? Like a ship carries cargo?

DURAS

Yes, like a truck carries it. But for me, the cinema hardly exists. I often say it doesn’t exist.

GODARD

Hardly, or hard to do?

DURAS

Hardly. Not hard to do, no, I don’t think so.

GODARD

Personally, I think it talks too much. But more than anything, that it repeats its statement, that it repeats something written. I like your films because they don’t come from the cinema, but they cross it.

DURAS

I make my texts bend to the cinema. I’m not going to churn out a text that I would offer to be viewed, to be heard along with images, the way I would churn it out in a book, the way I would offer it to be read in a book. I have to use the screen to structure the reading of the text. That’s not the same thing, after all.

GODARD

No, not at all.

DURAS

But as far as I’m concerned, there is no cinema. Without text, it doesn’t exist.

GODARD

No. Silent film had a lot of text.

DURAS

Yes, that’s right. The silence that always exists around a text. Not a text, but the reading of a text. It’s speech that can provide that silence, that creates it.

GODARD

You didn’t want to talk in front of an audience the way you’re talking now. Would you have had the impression you were stupidly repeating yourself?

DURAS

You’re talking about Digne? [Invited to the Rencontres cinématographiques de Digne-les-Bains festival in 1978 for the screening of Le Camion, Duras attended but refused to introduce the film.]

GODARD

Yes, or something else.

DURAS

You’re talking about talking to an audience?

GODARD

Yes, but at a festival. Do you go to them?

DURAS

Yes. The festival in Hyères asked me to come just so I would be there. That’s all. Along with everyone else. But they didn’t ask me to speak, not once. Oh yes, once, on the radio. But that was nothing. And I think that’s the only acceptable option for me now. In Digne, in the heat of the moment, just like that, I had a kind of very violent reaction against speaking after the screening. That’s over now. I will never again speak about my films after a screening. You see, writing is still a little bit like disappearing, like being behind something. As long as you’re writing, you don’t have to appear. A rather simple syllogism, but that’s how it is.

GODARD

Where did this need come from for you, at a certain point, to still be taken on, to be transported by … Was it because the texts were getting more difficult?

DURAS

You know how it is. The requests are endless. People begged me once, they begged me ten times. You give in, and then there it is. But I had gotten physical signs that there was something about all this that was dubious, I would say nearly immoral—about speaking afterward. It made me physically ill. I was disgusted with myself after I spoke. And that’s how I understood that I was wrong.

GODARD

You had questions you wanted to ask me—you were saying you wanted to come with me.

DURAS

Yes, but when you tell me you hate text …

GODARD

Text, but in the sense of the Law. I have the feeling that Moses, for example, saw something in the Tables of the Law, and then after that he made people believe there was something written.

DURAS

Moses didn’t talk. He talked before.

GODARD

Yes, but they were texts that he had made up.

DURAS

He never spoke; he shouted. Ultimately, I think they all shouted. I think that Jesus was in a constant state of anger. And Moses was so possessed by the spirit of God that he could only shout. He could not utter a word. It was a word that spoke. The Law was in itself.

GODARD

Yes, but it was written. I mean, they’re the sacred texts. Whether we’re talking about ID cards or traffic laws or currency-exchange restrictions. I have the feeling I’m being prevented from seeing. That I see things, but before I can formulate them, in a different formulation from the one in use, I’m forced to see in a way that simply makes it a repetition of the old formulation. So there’s no need to see.

DURAS

Yes, yes.

GODARD

Like a screenplay that says, “The forest is burning.” If you have money, you burn a forest. Or “The Titanic is sinking”: eight hundred people in the water, so you put it in. But you didn’t see anything.

DURAS

If I say, “The Titanic is sinking,” I see it.

GODARD

But that’s exactly the point: you wouldn’t write a sentence like “The Titanic is sinking”!

DURAS

Oh, yes! I’m constantly using pleonasms. I think that when you say, “The Titanic is sinking,” and the Titanic is actually sinking, it’s far stronger than if you say nothing. At one point in India Song, I said, “There are the cries of oarsmen on the Ganges,” calls from one boat to another, from one fisherman to another, and I say so. I say that these are the fishermen of the Ganges, the sounds of Calcutta—while one hears them. Or rather after one has heard them, immediately after. That has a very powerful effect on me. It increases the sound tenfold. But there is nothing more opposed to text than the way magistrates speak. The speech of the law. For example, you see, I would argue that the thing most opposed to text, rather than image, is political speech. The speech of power.

GODARD

But is it possible to produce a text today that is not a form of magisterial speech? I don’t think so.

DURAS

One can try.

GODARD

One can try, but I think it’s a waste of time. And that’s why you make Le camion, India Song, and Lol Valérie Stein [The Ravishment of Lol Stein, 1964], or why you need to make [Baxter,] Vera Baxter. If you have Delphine Seyrig, it’s not the same thing as if you don’t have Delphine Seyrig. At the time of Un barrage contre le Pacifique, that wasn’t exactly the case, so there’s been a turning point in terms of the anxiety of writing … I have the impression that we’re crossing out the image …

DURAS

What are you talking about? Un barrage contre le Pacifique?

GODARD

What I hate, what I detest—this is why I’ve more or less stopped, though I’m still trying to survive—is that, in fact, people prevent you from making a film calmly, from calmly enjoying it. They force you to make it anxiously, and I think that it’s in the writing that the anxiety develops, sooner or later—maybe not for “real writers,” if that means anything. But that it comes from … Like you were saying, Moses saw the images, he didn’t shout. Afterward, he started to shout.

DURAS

But Deuteronomy, all of Esther, that’s speech …

GODARD

Yes, it’s people preventing the image. They’ve always said as much: “You shall not make images,” “it is forbidden to make images.” But they don’t forbid themselves from making them.

DURAS

The entire French and European Middle Ages, all of Islam, are also deprived of images. Historically, it had another meaning.

GODARD

Yes, but it’s rare. Or the story of Van Gogh—it’s true that he was one of the rare painters to paint in anger. But that’s not certain: I don’t think it’s just some regular anger, that’s not exactly it. One might think so, but I think it’s something else. Yet it seems to me that writers and musicians are angry. They need shouting and hollering.

DURAS

I can’t imagine a literature of peace and quiet. I think of it more like a literature of crisis. I don’t think the image can ever replace what I’ve called “the indefinite proliferation” of the word.

GODARD

Why completely eliminate it?

DURAS

Why eliminate the word?

GODARD

No! Why eliminate the fact of seeing without saying!

DURAS

I’m not eliminating it, since I’m making films. Now, what I’ve eliminated in the last three or four films are the actors. I’ve just made five films without actors. I don’t know if there are actors in India Song. There are proposals, but I don’t know if they are actors, in the full sense of the term. In any case, they’re not acting. They are offering themselves as an approximation of the character. I can no longer get into a film in which actors take charge of representation. I can no longer stand having that intermediary between the filmmaker and myself, as the viewer. You’re the only one who uses actors by negating them.

GODARD

Do you believe in the Devil?

DURAS

Me? I believe in the Devil, yes. I believe in the Devil. I believe in evil. Because I believe in love, I also believe in evil.

GODARD

Yesterday you were saying that you were surprised that people don’t talk about the disinfection of politics?

DURAS

Disaffection.

GODARD

Yes …

DURAS

You changed the word on purpose. We don’t want to disinfect [politicians]. They will always proliferate. Screens are completely poisoned by this way of speaking, which represents a degraded kind of speech, a completely degraded discourse. The antithesis of true speech. A kind of speech that is antithetical to speech. All the great politicians wrote. They didn’t speak. I mean, we’re far from after-the-fact speech, from the kind of speech we started talking about earlier. One that comments. The kind I refused in Digne. Nothing is less written than the political discourse of power. By “power,” I obviously mean the institutionalized parties, whether on the left or the right. In other words, the speech of the political trade, the speech of propaganda. Of the street performer. Nothing is more opposed to true speech than that. And it must be said that often the speech of cinema, cinematic speech, follows this example. It’s a speech that sells, that sells its merchandise. Deep down, I’m very moral! [laughs.]

GODARD

If we ever go on television, we should do this interview …

DURAS

Which television? Do you really want to go on television with me? I thought you were asking me a question of principle, that kind of thing.

GODARD

Yes, that’s also true. I’d prefer to make television. But that’s more difficult.

—Translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott

 

Nicholas Elliott has been the New York correspondent for Cahiers du cinéma since 2009. He is a programmer for the Locarno Film Festival and a contributing editor for film for BOMB magazine. His writing on film has appeared in Film Comment, 4Columns, and anthologies on the work of Chantal Akerman, Philippe Garrel, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

From Duras/Godard Dialogues , translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott and published by Film Desk Books this month.

The Stylish Disaffection of “Divorcing”

Susan Taubes’s fiction is animated by an unbearable awareness of death. Her first and only novel, Divorcing (1969), had the working title To America and Back in a Coffin. (An apt title, but deemed unmarketable and rejected by her publishers.) Like her contemporary Ingeborg Bachmann, Taubes’s fiction transposes existential mysteries with aesthetic ones. (There are other similarities between the pair: both published only one novel; both novels feature a love interest named Ivan; neither writer would live to see fifty.) Long out of print, Divorcing will finally be reissued by NYRB Classics this month. Taubes’s foreshortened oeuvre—this novel, an unpublished novella, a handful of stories—offers a range of formal precarities that mirror states of inward collapse. Fiction seemed to give shape to her own vulnerability. A lifelong depressive, she took her own life mere weeks after Divorcing was published. Her close friend Susan Sontag later suggested it was Hugh Kenner’s New York Times review that finally pushed Taubes over the edge. “Lady novelists have always claimed the privilege of transcending mere plausibilities,” he’d written. Sontag herself would identify the body.

The protagonist of Divorcing, Sophie Blind, an academic and novelist, may or may not be alive. “I died on a Tuesday afternoon, struck by a car as I was crossing Avenue George V,” she tells us early in the novel. She is in Paris with her lover. Her charmless marriage to Ezra, a cruel and charismatic intellectual, awaits her in New York City. Her death seems less biological fact than act of imaginative liberation, the pulled escape hatch of a highly pressurized consciousness: “My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free, spread, speeded, pressed jubilant, rushing to the seven gates of Paris.” As a narrator, she inhabits a kind of third space, quantum uncertainty, neither living nor dead, neither present nor past.

The novel’s first half is a study of the Blinds’ failed marriage, a tilting relationship freighted with years of deception and three precocious children. Taubes has created an unctuous, carnal, brilliant, despicable foil in Ezra. (In his preface, David Rieff writes, “For those who remember him, or have read the many recollections that have been written about him, the portrait of Ezra is an uncannily accurate description of [Susan’s husband] Jacob Taubes.”) His pettiness and bullying are indexed with excruciating clarity:

Ezra complained; Ezra was appalled by beads and clay and stuff and rags and paint, especially children painting on the wall… For a long time she refused to believe in Ezra’s transformation. Was this Ezra talking through his nose like his father? He grew a belly, developed strange ailments, he screamed at the sight of a crack in the wall, anything spilling, a missing button; it had to be repaired immediately.

The familiarity of domestic turmoil gives way to Modernist phantasmagoria. Lyrical fragments of New York City life shade into fever dream set pieces: in one, a rabbinical courtroom drama is enacted in which Sophie begs for condemnation (her crimes include “eating fried octopus, cock sucking, animal worship”); in another, she meets with an LSD researcher who has only recently attended Sophie’s funeral. “Entelechy, my dear,” she advises, “that’s the ticket. The purposive universe. The burgeoning processive, dynamic continuum.”

This experimentalism relents in the novel’s more straightforward second half, in which Sophie recounts the history of her Jewish family in midcentury Budapest. We learn that she fled with her father to America before the war, while her mother chose to remain behind with another man. (There are intimations here of the divorce she will repeat with Ezra.) Her eccentric family is rendered in pungent detail: Grandpa Ripper completing “complicated calculations to prove how rich he would be now if he had invested his money differently”; Aunt Rosa recalling how she’d escaped the city during the war, “leaping on a moving train in her nightgown.”

Though her mother later joins Sophie in America, a gulf has opened between them. The source of the wound reveals itself in oedipal flashes: “You were born and it was over… He fell in love with you, you know the story. He gave you all his love, he took from me the little words of endearment and gave them to you, my little fish, my canary.” Her father, with whom she takes Sunday walks, is warm, self-mocking, often overbearing. His contradictory nature—he is an atheist psychoanalyst active in the Jewish community—appeals to Sophie’s own sense of unfixedness. Like his daughter, he is baffled by the vacuous novelty of American life: “He really didn’t know himself what was demanded of a woman in this new and changing world; what a woman should be, and his daughter in particular.”

Published in 1969, Divorcing heralded the rise of the lean, epigrammatic fiction of the mid-’70s, such as Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. The critic Katie Roiphe has referred to them as “Smart Woman Adrift” novels, works in which a youngish female figure “floats passively yet stylishly through the world.” While the specifics of their execution differ—Adler is funnier, for instance, and Hardwick more mandarin—they share a set of aesthetic and tonal hallmarks. Each is impeccably controlled, wry, anxious, socially engaged, aphoristic, and alert to incongruity. There is everywhere a sense of imminent collapse, of doom that generates a specific interest in endings. Adler’s narrator in Speedboat, Jen Fain, offers a pithy summation of the desperate fleetness of this sort of fiction: “the momentum of last resort.”

Divorcing anticipates the allure of this stylish disaffection. Sophie’s cosmopolitanism, her coolness, her sexual appetite, her exhaustion, her intellectualism and indifferent glamor would become recognizable literary capacities, appealing features of a modern protagonist. Far from mere posturing, these sensibilities were governed by the shared disorientations of the postwar period. Their articulation required newer, more ambivalent forms. Smallness, idiosyncrasy, waste, dread, anecdote, illusion, none was an impediment to fictive or analytical richness. The fragment was in fact a much larger narrative unit than writer or reader might have suspected. It offered a kind of raid on appearances. What Hardwick said of Adler applies also to Taubes: her style is her meaning.

But neither style nor meaning fully adhere. Divorcing is caught between two forms, that of the bourgeois realist novel, rich with domestic incident and historical sweep, and the emergent fragmentary novel’s network of apprehensions. Whenever the book leans into its traditionalism, the shards of Sophie’s consciousness seem to push upward through narrative skin, unruly and eager to return. These invisible pressures contribute to the novel’s perplexing in-betweenness. Is it a traditional form rent by some barely contained disorder, or an ambitious experiment contorting itself to the dimensions of familiarity?

Incipience compels a unique audience. Divorcing is the stuff of literary cults. It is vivid and inchoate, its surface slick from recent molting. It is fascinating and flawed, a gathering of antithetical forms, sheered edges, leaps of faith. It is tremendously anguished, a hair shirt in which beautiful forms have been woven. Its abrupt ending seems unfinished, as if Taubes were at last stymied, unsure how to stick the landing. But there is fascination here alongside much confusion. The novel seems to me both apprentice work and minor classic. That it has vanished for so long is remarkable. (Such things are mysterious; the founder and editor of NYRB Classics, Edwin Frank, has said that Divorcing was recommended through an online suggestion box.) It is easy to feel gratitude for its return. As with Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a thematic companion, its following stands to grow with time and word of mouth. Some works are merely reissued; this feels more like a resurrection.

Dustin Illingworth is a writer in Southern California.