The Paris Review's Blog, page 148

The Nature of Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder. Photo: Kurt Lorenz.

Where to begin? I am sitting at a desk, looking at a first edition of Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, and looking out the window at San Francisco Bay.

San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the West Coast of the North American continent. I grew up around the bay, spent hours as a young man fishing and boating on its waters, hunting ducks in its marshes, and much more time over the years later learning the birds and the flowering plants of the marsh ecosystem, a lifetime’s study. California was formed by the massive uplifting of the Sierra Nevada range, which makes a boundary to the Pacific Coast watershed about four hundred miles long, running north to south. California has a Mediterranean climate, with wet winters and dry summers. The winter storms deposit snow in the mountains, spring initiates a runoff, and two great rivers—the Sacramento in the north, the San Joaquin in the south (notice the Spanish names: part of the human history of the place)—flow into San Francisco Bay. Throughout the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, dams were built on all the rivers that feed the Sacramento and the San Joaquin to store fresh water for the cities and for the agriculture in California’s Central Valley.

California’s agricultural economy was valued at $47 billion in 2017, with another $100 billion in the services that support the agricultural economy. So it will surprise no one that the waters that flow into San Francisco Bay are argued over—by farmers, by the thirsty cities (especially by the cities of Southern California, which, in the twentieth century, turned its semiarid desert landscape into a vast garden). And by a third group, which the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries brought into being, a group called conservationists at first, and then, after about 1960, environmentalists. (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962.)

At least since the withdrawal of the glaciers ten or twelve thousand years ago, San Francisco Bay has been an immense and critical—I’m looking for the word—incubator? engine? (our language for the dynamism of ecosystems has been impoverished) source for the life of all the inhabitants of and visitors to this coast. In some other culture, the energy of the delta would have a name and perhaps a human form, and children, dressed appropriately, would dance its power on the spring equinox or the summer solstice (which would call the stars in the heavens and the rotation of the earth into play).

Even now, something like three million ducks and a million geese pass through this region on the Pacific Flyway. Another creature of the Pacific Flyway is the sandhill crane. Sandhill cranes as a species are at least 2.5 million years old. I haven’t seen any figures on the pre-Columbian population of the birds in California, but in the nineteenth century, their winter arrival was a common experience (though there is never anything common about watching the male cranes perform their courtship dance in a marsh as the sun is setting). In the forties, because of intense hunting for their feathers and loss of habitat, conservationists were able to count five pairs of cranes. The Audubon Society, working with farmers on conservation easements, had nursed the population up to 465 mating pairs in 2000.

But it was salmon I was particularly thinking about. Deltas breed life, particularly at the place where salt water meets fresh. Just how far inland the salt water spreads, just how far out the fresh water flows, largely determines what kind of life it breeds and in what abundance. You can imagine the complexity of the trophic cascade that flows year after year from that fact—the years when there is not much snow and the salt water seeps deep into the marshes, the years of heavy snow and spring torrents fresh water streaming into the bay.

The Pacific salmon, older than sandhill cranes, perhaps 4 to 6 million years old, has been swimming up California rivers to breed at least since the end of the last ice age. Salmon cultures rim the Pacific. The Ainu people, the original inhabitants of the islands of Japan, had a salmon culture, and so did the peoples of the Siberian coast from Kamchatka to the Aleutians. So did the Inuit peoples of Alaska and the Athabascan people, and the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest in Canada and the United States (whose cultures Gary Snyder studied at Reed College). And, it could be said, the Alaskan and Canadian and American coastal Euro-American cultures that depended on fishing had their own version. In my childhood, families still went to Fisherman’s Wharf on the day before the first day of fishing season to watch a local priest or bishop (usually Italian American) bless the boats. The ritual had to do with the safety of the fishermen, not the health of the fishery or gratitude to the fish or to the sea, but it at least made a gesture to the fact of a food chain that supported the life of the community.

A quick picture of the salmon population as it has weathered dams, pollution, invasive species, and the water diversion to farms and cities: in 1988, fisherman caught 1.4 million salmon in California; in 2018, they caught 175,000. There have been intense discussions and much planning as the human culture tries to parse out just how the waters will be distributed among contending needs and what the likely consequences will be. In the meantime, it seems clear that this extraordinary ecosystem is collapsing. Climate change—another human behavior being practiced religiously on California freeways—complicates the issue, of course. Water management as a profession depends almost entirely on historical records, and at the moment, because the future is unpredictable, all bets are off.

The farmers, municipalities, water managers, dam managers, environmentalists, engineers, environmental scientists, and environmental attorneys have been and will be arguing about solutions, and one can begin to understand their positions, representing the cities as economic generators. The farm economy is one of the most powerful on earth; the fishermen have their arguments, and so do the conservationists and the environmentalists. Our culture has not been very good at raising the questions that our economic and social practices have brought to us. Like, What is a 2.5-million-year-old species of wading bird worth? And wouldn’t it to be okay to raise a few specimens in captivity and put them in zoos and get on with it? And given the multiple demands on human communities and the prospects of aquaculture and farmed fish, wouldn’t it be good to figure out the minimum at which the Pacific ecosystem can survive, since the days of a million salmon in the boats of fishermen are over?

This is the California story—or one of the California stories—and every region in the country, every place on earth, has its own version. We can’t not think about these questions, but we don’t have a particularly good common language in which to think about them, which is why the tradition of North American environmental writing came into existence, why Gary Snyder’s book is called The Practice of the Wild, why the first essay is called “The Etiquette of Freedom” and why another is called “Tawny Grammar,” and it is also why it is a very good thing to have in hand the thirtieth-anniversary edition of this book.

Almost all the classics of North American environmental writing—Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, John Muir’s The Mountains of California, Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, the ocean books of Rachel Carson—have taken the form of a miscellany of essays. The Practice of the Wild, which was published in 1990, belongs to the genre. Probably the form has to do with the way the writers meant to address a public and to make an argument or to clarify the terms of an argument. The media in which to do that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the magazine or journal or the lecturer’s podium.

Thoreau, for example, wanted to tell his readers that they were too busy using the earth to be able to see it. Walden describes how he set about teaching himself to see it. And John Muir, after working long hours through his teenage years on his family’s farm, wandered into Yosemite in a search for freedom and for majesty, and a passionate curiosity about the geology of the western mountains. He taught himself to see the place. A touchstone essay in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, I think, is “Song of the Gavilan.” Leopold went into the Southwest with his forestry degree from Yale. The forests in New Mexico territory had been seriously abused and the range lands of the ranchers who were his constituents overgrazed, and the young Leopold did not quite understand what he was seeing in that landscape until a hunting trip took him into the Sierra Madre and to the Rio Gavilan. There he came to realize that he was seeing a healthy, fully functioning natural ecosystem for the first time, and he wrote about that. The struggles Mary Austin and Rachel Carson faced in getting a formal education in the sciences because of their gender are well known and have become part of the story of the way that they educated themselves to become writers.

Gary Snyder’s self-education began early. He was born in 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression and spent his early childhood on his parents’ subsistence farm in the Pacific Northwest. War work took his father to Portland, and Snyder went to high school and college there. The place and the time matter. If one were to illustrate it, a photograph of the snowy peak of Mount Rainier might do, looming up visibly from Seattle on a clear day, or farther south in the Cascade Range, the half-magical sight of Mount Hood, also snowcapped, presiding over Portland from some fifty miles away. Portland is situated at the confluence of two mighty rivers, the Columbia and the Willamette, and in the mid-’50s, in the middle of the postwar economic recovery, the surfaces of the rivers were full of rafts of the logs floated downriver from the logging camps that were cashing in on the construction boom. They were taking down the pine forests of the Cascade Range—the forests that Snyder had grown up in—and the river was thick with the story of it. At Reed College, studying Chinese poetry and the myths of the indigenous people of the Northwest forest and coast, reading classical and English literature and the Modernist poets Eliot and Pound and Williams, Snyder began to write about what he saw. His reading of the Chinese poets and his study of the myth world of classical Greece gave him a way to see it in epic terms:

The ancient forests of China logged

….and the hills slipped into the Yellow Sea

Squared beams, log dogs,

….on a tamped-earth sill.

San Francisco 2 x 4’s

….were the woods around Seattle:

Someone killed and someone built, a house,

….a forest, wrecked or raised

All America hung on a hook

….& burned by men, in their own praise.

And again:

….…..cut down,

Groves of Ahab, of Cybele

….Pine trees, knobbed twigs

thick cone and seed

….Cybele’s tree this, sacred in groves

There is this vast sense of elegy in the work, and also the sense of a time when the sacred was rooted in material processes. And the poems were full of his almost physical rendering of the rhythms of work in the logging business:

Crosscut and chainsaw

….squareheads and finns

….high-lead and cat-skidding

Trees down

Creeks choked, trout killed, roads.

The logging poems of his remarkable early book Myths and Texts were published in 1960 and came out of his summer jobs working on trail crews for the U.S. Forest Service, as a choke setter for a commercial logging operation, and as a lookout for the National Park Service. His first poems of that experience begin with a quotation from Exodus: “But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.” At Reed College, he was also able to pursue his interest in Native American culture, and he did a senior honors thesis on Haida myth. The Haida are a people of southern Alaska and the northern coast of Canada, known to the world for the aesthetics of their monumental carvings that have come to define the art of the Northwest coast. At twenty years of age, Snyder was trying to understand the imagination of the Paleolithic cultures that preceded the great metropolitan cultures of Greece and Rome and Jerusalem and Xian. He was already thinking that it was there, in the first imperial cities, that something had gone profoundly wrong with the human relation to the earth.

His education next took him to graduate school in comparative literature in Indiana. That didn’t work. (One recollects John Muir’s experience of higher education.) So he enrolled in a graduate program in Asian languages at Berkeley and set to studying Japanese and classical Chinese. He was already interested in the sensibility of Chinese poetry, especially the monk poets of the Tang dynasty, and already interested in the spiritual traditions of Zen and of Taoism. Wasn’t Taoism a nature philosophy, the beginning of ecological thinking? And wasn’t the Zen Buddhist conception of a nature rooted in contingency and change a description of evolutionary biology? Once he was into his course work, he undertook the translation of an obscure eighth-century hermit monk, Han Shan, whose name, probably a pen name, translated as “Cold Mountain.”

It was in Berkeley that he met Allen Ginsberg, a graduate student in English, and Ginsberg’s college friend Jack Kerouac, and that was how Kerouac and Snyder came to go hiking in the California hills and how Kerouac came to memorialize those hikes in his novel The Dharma Bums, which had the effect of turning Snyder into a cultural hero for the young in the seventies. But in 1957, Snyder had decided to take Zen Buddhism seriously and to go to Japan and get some training. So he got into the International Seamen’s Union and, union card in hand, got a job on a freighter that took him to Kyoto. That would have been May 1956. In August 1957, he got a job in the engine room of a tanker, the SS Sappa Creek, which was going to get him back to San Francisco.

The Sappa Creek took him from Yokohama through the Persian Gulf into the Mediterranean, eventually across the Pacific—Okinawa, Guam, Samoa—and that was another stage of his education.

It’s interesting to consider this. That boom in suburban construction was fueled by President Dwight Eisenhower’s program to build a continental freeway system in the United States, four- and six-lane roads from Maine to San Diego. The farmland and the orchards that surrounded U.S. cities were being transformed into housing for commuters to the city, with land use designed—drive-in movies, drive-through restaurants—to celebrate the automobile and the idea of the freedom of the road that Snyder’s friend Kerouac had celebrated in his novel On the Road. In the mid-’50s, other poets were not thinking—in fact, social thinkers were not thinking—about a global economy or fossil fuels or a half century of wars based on fossil-fuel dependency and the long-range consequences of these social arrangements on the atmosphere of the planet. The Practice of the Wild was published in 1990. James Hansen, a NASA climate scientist, first testified before the U.S. Congress in 1988 and introduced them to the new term climate change. Here is Gary Snyder in the mid-’60s:

“Oil”

soft rainsqualls on the swells

south of the Bonins, late at night. Light

from the empty mess-hall

throws back bulky shadows

of winch and fairlead

over the slanting fantail where I stand.

but for men on watch in the engine room,

the man at the wheel, the lookout in the bow,

the crew sleeps. in cots on deck

or narrow iron bunks down drumming

passageways below.

the ship burns with a furnace heart

steam veins and copper nerves

quivers and slightly twists and always goes—

easy roll of the hull and deep

vibration of the turbine underfoot.

bearing what all these

crazed, hooked nations need:

steel plates and

long injections of pure oil.

When Snyder returned from Japan, his early books of poems—Riprap, Myths and Texts, The Back Country—had appeared. Hard to convey—except that it is still available—the freshness and originality of his vision. The most striking voices in North American poetry in the fifties and early sixties—post-Hiroshima, post-Auschwitz, what W. H. Auden called “the age of anxiety”—wrote a poetry of psychological crisis: the ferocious poems of Sylvia Plath, the struggles of Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke with bipolar disorder and of John Berryman with alcoholism and depression, and Allen Ginsberg’s hyperbolic address to a generation “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” There was a slight shock turning from that work to Snyder’s evocation of the sheer energy of the living world:

Birds in a whirl, drift to the rooftops

Kite dip, swing to the seabank fogroll

Form: dots in air changing line from line,

………the future defined.

Brush back smoke from the eyes,

………dust from the mind,

With the wing-feather fan of an eagle.

A hawk drifts into the far sky.

A marmot whistles across huge rocks.

Rain on the California hills.

Mussels clamp to sea-boulders

Sucking the Spring tides

He came back from Japan married, with one son and another on the way. In 1969, the second son was born, and he published a first book of prose—journals of his time as a forest lookout and a student of Zen in Kyoto, essays with titles like “Buddhism and the Possibility of a Planetary Culture” and “Poetry and the Primitive.” The first book describing this education, it was entitled Earth House Hold, the title a rough translation of the Greek root eco that gave the science of ecology its name. He also wrote an essay published as a broadside entitled “Four Changes,” which proposed ways in which human beings needed to address four issues: population, pollution, consumption, and a fourth, which he called transformation. He meant the cultural transformation necessary to address the other three and described its term in this modest way: “A basic cultural outlook and social organization that inhibits power- and property-seeking while encouraging exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world.” The next year, he headed to land in the Sierra Foothills east and north of San Francisco and built a house—powered off the grid—a study with a library, and eventually a meditation hall, which became Ring of Bone Zendo, a center for a rural Buddhist community.

The young Gary Snyder who studied Native American mythology loved the figure of Coyote, the mammal embodiment of the wanton, slippery, unappeasable force of life, the wily creature who kept his distance from the civilized center and its solemnities. An appropriate totem for a poet who, looking out across the high mountains, would write, “history / after the Jurassic is a bore” and “Agents: man and beast, beasts / got the Buddha-nature / All but / Coyote.” The Gary Snyder of 1970—father, husband, householder, citizen, and taxpayer—had become a public figure at a moment when the environment was suddenly on the U.S. political agenda. These were the years of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. As Snyder was moving into his new life, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species Act came into being. In 1970, he was invited to speak—how poets patch together a living—by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. In 1972, he spoke at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. In 1975, he was appointed by his friend Jerry Brown, the governor of California, to serve on the board of the California Arts Council.

The layers of the vision that he was exploring in his poetry and prose between 1950 and 1970 were intricate. First, a sheer love of the wild and the passion for natural history that comes with it. Then a socialist/anarchist sensibility picked up from the IWW tradition of the Northwest lumber camps. Then an interest in what he sometimes called the primitive and sometimes called paleolithic values: a sense of something like courtesy or formality in the hunter-gather relation to animals, wild places, and weather that survived into the classical mythology he studied at Reed College. And then the Modernist poets’ attempts to revive animist and polytheist mythologies in the early twentieth century. Also Chinese and Japanese literature and the philosophical traditions of Taoism and Zen, and the aesthetic of Chinese landscape painting that was going to be so important for the development of his poetry. The old mythologies were still alive there in the Noh drama of Japan and the mountain poets of Tang dynasty China. And ecology, the science of the entire set of living, constantly changing interactions in any given natural system. He had been interested in forests since he was a teenager. He had spent two summers as a fire lookout on a mountain peak. Having built a home for his children, he found that the idea of forest management, especially forest management with respect to fire, was no longer a theoretical issue. Here is his poem on the subject:

“Control Burn”

What the Indians

here

used to do, was,

to burn out the brush every year.

in the woods, up the gorges,

keeping the oak and pine stands

tall and clear

with grasses

and kitkitdizzie under them,

never enough fuel there

that a fire could crown.

Now, manzanita,

(a fine bush in its right)

crowds up under the new trees

mixed up with logging slash

and a fire can wipe out all.

Fire is the old story.

I would like,

with a sense of helpful order,

with respect for laws

of nature,

to help my land

with a burn, a hot clean

burn

…..(manzanita seeds will only open

…..after a fire passes over

…..or once passed through a bear)

And then

it would be more

like,

when it belonged to the Indians

Before.

In the essay “Ancient Forests of the Far West,” Snyder, the poet/scholar/citizen, is able to underline a point by referring to Plato’s fifth century B.C. dialogue Critias, in which the philosopher complains about the soil erosion created by clear-cutting in the mountain forests outside Athens.

*

So the nine essays that make up The Practice of the Wild are a record of Snyder’s education as an artist, thinker, and citizen in the twenty years between 1970 and 1990. There was then, as there still is, work to be done. The partial successes of the environmental movement in the sixties and seventies had bred their predictable reactions.

Ronald Reagan, running for governor in 1966, had this to say about the ancient forests of the far West:

I think, too, that we’ve got to recognize that where the preservation of a natural resource like the redwoods is concerned, that there is a commonsense limit. I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees—you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?

And academics in the universities and environmental attorneys in the courts were asking, in the wake of the Wilderness Act—which passed in 1964—what was meant by wilderness. Wasn’t it a fairly arbitrary cultural construction? Wasn’t nature, like natural, a term used by the state to police and control human behavior? Snyder, who tends to think in geological time, seems to have had these issues in mind, even while he was thinking about the transformation of human societies since the end of the last ice age.

That work took him to Kobuk, an Inupiaq village in Northwest Alaska, in order to help the National Endowment for the Humanities think about what the humanities meant in a native Alaskan village and what values the people of Kobuk had been thinking in for the last ten thousand years. He tells the story of that experience in the essay called “Tawny Grammar.” It took him also to the Australian desert south of Alice Springs to get a sense of how the aboriginal people of that place, the Pintubi, think about what place is. That story gets told in the essay “Good, Wild, Sacred.” So it seemed useful to tell those stories, to try to work out definitions of nature and wildness and wilderness, to say what place is, to introduce the notion that we would serve the land more wisely by thinking in biological regions rather than in the political entities created by land surveys.

The Practice of the Wild, then, is itself an example of the practice of the wild, of thinking hard about our residence on earth. And about—as Snyder says in the first essay—how to cultivate a social and economic life that puts us in touch with the wild in ourselves and cultivates the wilderness around us as a place where “the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order.”

 

Robert Hass is a Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author and a former poet laureate of the United States. His books include Time and Materials, Sun under Wood, and Summer Snow: New Poems. Read his Art of Poetry interview.

Copyright © 2020 by Robert Hass, from the introduction of The Practice of the Wild , by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

Obsession

On translating Nathalie Léger’s Exposition.

Pierre-Louis Pierson, Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1861-67

Exposition is the first in a triptych of books by Nathalie Léger that intertwines Léger’s mother’s story with that of a female artist or celebrity.

You could say that Exposition is about the Countess of Castiglione. Considered by many in Europe to be the most beautiful woman alive, Castiglione was probably the most photographed person of the nineteenth century. Born in 1837 in Florence, she was sent to Paris in 1855 to plead the cause of Italian unity at the French court, as an instrument of soft power, essentially. Unfortunately, she had terrible social skills, and it didn’t go well. She became the mistress of Napoleon III but overstepped her social position at the court and was soon asked to leave. Beginning in 1856, she had herself photographed hundreds of times at a high-end studio, spending her family fortune. She would often restage scenes from mythology but also moments of glory from her life at the French court. Some of her portraits were even presented in the International Exposition of 1867. As late as 1871, Castiglione was asked to intercede with Otto von Bismarck to discourage a German occupation of Paris. This point, the end of the Second Empire with which she was so identified, seems to mark the beginning of Castiglione’s decline, and she lived out her days in increasing isolation in her funereal Paris apartment until her death in 1899. However, she remained a legend in urban lore, granting viewings to her admirers and taking long nocturnal walks through a Paris that had changed around her.

Castiglione in her most famous “Queen of Hearts” ball gown, but in this photo, she’s wearing it a decade after the ball actually happened. Pierre-Louis Pierson, La Dame de Coeurs, 1861-63

Exposition is about the Countess of Castiglione, but it isn’t a biography. The genesis of the book was Léger’s attempt to curate an exhibition of photographs of Castiglione for a museum. Léger ran into some problems, the museum management didn’t share her enthusiasm for Castiglione, the exhibition never happened, and Exposition is her endeavor to come to terms with the difficulty of her subject. It’s also about Léger’s mother, and the way both she and Castiglione were unable to control their own fates. Léger’s writing often has a telescopic effect: one woman collapsing into the next; one woman’s life rendering certain facts of another’s visible. I think of it as a tool that allows her to broach big subjects that might be unwieldy with other methods. And so, shifting from one woman’s story to the next, Exposition becomes an interrogation of female self-representation and agency, but more than that, an exploration of what it means for a book to be about anything at all.

What is it to be captivated by a subject and to try to capture it? “For years,” Léger writes, “I had thought that to write you needed, at the very least, to master your subject. Many reviewers, famous writers, and critics have said that to write you have to know what you want to say. They repeat, hammering it home: you have to have something to say, about the world, about existence, about, about, about. I didn’t know then that the subject is precisely what masters you.”

Pierre-Louis Pierson, La Comtesse, 1861-67

When one submits to a subject, it is not necessarily a benign or unambiguous force. Castiglione is thorny, difficult to pin down and often unlikeable. Your average portrait subject can’t sink a museum exhibition; perhaps the more personal format of a book was better suited to the extremities of the project anyway. Ultimately it’s the power of Léger’s obsession that drives the story. We know that obsession is a corrosive force, a vampire, a thing with hooked claws. But obsession also preserves. Obsession communicates, reinforces—translates. And as the translator of Exposition, Léger’s alchemy of obsession and repulsion, submission and mastery is precisely what I had to convey.

Other people’s obsessions are always a dangerous thing to become involved with, and no one knows this better than the translator. Every job has its dangers and its attractions, and sooner or later any translator develops her methods for inhabiting a mind that is not her own. For me, the best approach is usually to craft a careful distance from the material; if you want to gain perspective on a subject, you can’t be sitting on top of it. Before I began, I pored over portraits of Castiglione, read about her. In a rare books collection, I turned the brittle pages of an album dedicated to her, turned them with something like reverence, the album’s fragile spine resting in a book cradle. At some point, a woman came into focus: alluring, repugnant, everything I already knew she would be.

Pierre-Louis Pierson, album page with ten photographs of La Comtesse mounted recto and verso, 1861-67

Léger isn’t the only person who has been fascinated by Castiglione; for over a century, she’s been an irresistible subject. The first person on the list must be Castiglione herself, who never would have gone to such prodigious lengths and expense to record her own image without the considerable force of self-obsession. And then there are the men. Besides her husband, Napoleon III, and her various other lovers, Castiglione was a gay icon in her lifetime. (This is a phenomenon that is much older than you might think: before Judy Garland, there was Castiglione and others like her.) So many of her images were well-preserved because the French dandy Robert de Montesquiou (who, besides being an Olympic bronze medalist in 1900, was Proust’s inspiration for Baron de Charlus) purchased as much of her estate as he could after her death, keeping together a trove of pictures and artifacts that would otherwise have been dispersed.

And so Léger is simply one of the most recent in a long line of people to be moved by Castiglione’s force of fascination. But Castiglione was never my obsession, nor even my subject.

Pierre-Louis Pierson, The Red Bow (painted and retouched by unknown artist), 1861-67

I came to know Exposition not through an interest in Castiglione, but through an interest in Léger’s work. Like most American readers, I first encountered her Suite for Barbara Loden. As in Exposition, the eponymous filmmaker’s story is interwoven with that of Léger’s parents’ failed marriage (as the final book in the triptych, The White Dress, would do with the story of the performance artist Pippa Bacca). Reflections upon reflections, one woman’s life within another’s, and another’s, and another’s. That is, it was a formal question that hooked me, a way of telling a story against the grain. More than any book I’ve translated, Exposition made me wonder what, as the translator, is my subject. The question may seem either self-evident or nonsensical, but let’s follow Léger’s thinking and define “your subject” as “what masters you.” That is, what was it that obsessed me as a translator?

I know that it has something to do with immersion. What is it that I am immersing myself in? What is my material, what is it that makes up the world of the book? It’s tempting to say “language,” that’s a trope we hear enough. But words can be dead matter—what infuses them with living spirit? Instead, I would say that I am obsessed with, immersed in, the movements of a mind. For me, literature has always been a way of being close to other people. There is nothing more interesting than someone else’s perspective, and the sheer excess of a book’s hundreds of pages are the perfect opportunity to indulge my obsession in their obsessions. Not the content of those obsessions, exactly, but their form. It’s the way idea connects to language and gives it shape.

Exposition tracks the movements of an erudite, restless mind. Its fragmentary, probing style draws on a rich array of artistic and literary references, joining together the past and the present, the personal and the public, the abstract and the tangible in order to leap from one place to the next. What I love about it is that it is a book that is always in motion. It’s the same thing that makes it indefinable in terms of subject, outside of the relationality of the women whose stories it tells. What mastered me were gestures, movements, forms I would shape and reshape, returning again and again until they were right. If anything, by the time I’d finished translating it, Castiglione had ceded her position in my mind, nudged aside and balanced by the acute and personal pain of Léger’s family story. It’s a book that comes alive in the connection of its figures, the way that language comes alive when it connects with thought, giving shape to emotion, intuition, insight.

It’s unsurprising, when I flip back through my translation of Exposition, that Léger arrived at this conclusion before I did. There I find, written in my own words but more so hers, that to have a subject is to give something form, and that this is an act of tremendous concentration, of giving something shape in language:

It would be best to leave it at what the painters say on the subject: “I hold on to my motif,” Cézanne told Gasquet. Cézanne, clasping his hands. He drew them together slowly, joined them, gripped them, made them fuse together, merging the one into the other, Gasquet recounted. That’s what it is. “This is what you have to achieve. If I go too high or too low, it’s all ruined.” What is my motif? Something small, very small, what will be its gesture? I look at her face in Portrait with Lifted Veil from 1857, her eyes downcast, her mouth so weary, tight and thin, her air of mourning. This woman’s sadness is frightful, a sadness without emotion, true self-defeat, an inner collapse, desolation. Photography can create an image of it, but to make a motif of it, something more is required; one must use words to bring things together slowly, so to speak, join them, fuse them.

 

The English translation of Exposition will be published by Dorothy, a publishing project, this September.

Amanda DeMarco is a translator living in Berlin.

Male Interiority: An Interview with Emma Cline

I first encountered the work of Emma Cline in the winter of 2016, when I found myself at one of The Paris Review’s legendary parties: this one celebrating the launch of The Unprofessionals, an anthology in which Cline’s Plimpton Prize–winning story “Marion” (first published in issue no. 203) appeared. I’d arrived late, and I tried to enter as quietly as possible—the living room of 541 East Seventy-Second Street, the residence of George and Sarah Plimpton, was packed full with bodies, almost eerily hushed. Cline read an excerpt from her then-forthcoming debut novel, The Girls, which tracks a California teenager’s peripheral involvement with a Manson-esque cult in the late sixties. Though I couldn’t see her face over the sea of heads between us, I let her singular command of language, image, and psychological nuance carry me into the sort of hypnotic trance the best writing does. Once home, I devoured everything I could find of Cline’s. It was no surprise when The Girls, which I read feverishly in a few sittings, became an international best seller.

In her aptly titled new story collection, Daddy, Cline delves deeper into the same thematic concerns that haunted The Girls: agency, cost, the performance of gender, the undercurrent of violence roiling just beneath the surface of ordinary life. An aspiring actress sells her underwear to strangers. A washed-up film director confronts his cruel judgments about his son, who wants to follow in his footsteps. The former nanny to a celebrity takes refuge at a friend’s home after her affair with her employer is revealed in the tabloids. A disgraced magazine editor is hired to help edit the ghostwritten memoir of a tech entrepreneur, an opportunity at what he sees as a final chance at redemption. Above all else, the characters in Daddy vie for control—at times over others, but in large part over themselves, their own narratives, and especially the ways in which they’re perceived. The lengths they go to in order to impose some semblance of that control are shocking, moving, and deeply human.

Since 2016, much has changed. 541 East Seventy-Second Street no longer belongs to the Plimptons; living rooms packed with people are, at least for the foreseeable future, a thing of the past. Cline’s prose, too, has undergone an evolution of sorts. Critics of The Girls called it “overwritten”; here, Cline’s virtuosic sensory descriptions are pared down in a way that allows her piercing psychological insights to shine. A satiric, bone-dry humor reigns. Atmospheres hum as though shot through with electricity; place informs psychology, and vice versa. 

In late August, Cline and I spoke on the phone from opposite ends of Los Angeles, where we both currently live. A heat wave raged on; wildfires were tearing through her native Sonoma County. She was crouching in her neighbor’s driveway, trying to find better service—a scene which could’ve easily sprung from one of the stories in Daddy.

 

INTERVIEWER

Even though a handful of your protagonists are women, you render male interiority here in a highly specific, and often deeply uncomfortable, way that feels especially exciting to me. Can you talk about the process of inhabiting some of these “monstrous men”?

CLINE

The culture has sort of forced everyone into having to imagine the interior lives of men, and why they do what they do. Just think about the amount of energy that is expended trying to decode what Donald Trump is thinking, and why he’s acting so erratically—it’s sort of this forced contemplation of male interiority, and I thought a lot about that, during all of the #MeToo moments. Just seeing an entire workplace having to grapple with the actions of one man, and all this energy and effort that was expended by all of these other people to try and figure out what could have possibly been going on inside this man’s mind. So I think on one level it’s not that much of a leap, just because it’s something the culture is already pushing. But in terms of writing, it was nice after The Girls, which is so much about a character who feels herself to be buffeted about by this larger system that she has no control over, very much enthralled to men—there was something interesting about shifting gears so much as a writer, to try to write about men who didn’t feel so attuned to the emotional world around them, or the emotional world of others.

INTERVIEWER

What are some of the major differences for you, process-wise, between novel and short story? Between first book and second?

CLINE

I think of novel writing as almost like surgery—the stakes are very high—and I think of stories more like acupuncture. It’s working with smaller currents of energy. It’s more subtle, it’s more ambient, at least for me. Stories often come for me out of a single image, or a dynamic, or a setting. I find that their origin is much more of a singular image. With novels, you’re just juggling an entire world and it can sometimes feel more like a math problem, or keeping all these balls in the air and trying to figure out how this world is going to be braided together, and how to manage large swaths of time—years, decades. Stories are so much more circumscribed, which for me has been really a pleasure, just to dwell in these granular moments. I think if my second book had been another novel, the difference between the two experiences would’ve felt more marked to me, because writing a novel is such an overwhelming, all-consuming forced march that you put yourself on, to the exclusion of all else, for a time. And this book was a lot different, because these are stories I’d written over a decade. The earliest story, “Marion,” I wrote a version of it in college. So it’s just something that’s spanned a lot longer. But it was interesting trying to put a book of short stories together, to think about which stories worked well together, and built on certain themes, and echoed each other.

INTERVIEWER

Sensory detail and descriptions of place often seem to function as mirrors for your characters’ emotional states. One that comes to mind immediately is “Los Angeles,” in which Alice notices the lawns turning brown and the reservoir emptying out, alongside a growing disenchantment with the city. Can you talk about that connection between the internal worlds of your characters and external occurrences in the landscape?

CLINE

I wish I could say that these were moments that I was very aware would connect to this later moment in the story, but that’s something that I find is almost unconscious—and I find it much more so in stories than when I’m writing a novel. There’s something that can feel a little dreamlike to me about short stories—the writing of them, anyway—where I’m following images without exactly knowing what their meaning is, just knowing that for whatever reason, I’m drawn to it, or whatever the temperature of the story I’m writing, it just seems to draw forth this image. Like the kid with the scab on his head in “Arcadia.” I have no idea where that came from, and at the time couldn’t have consciously said, This is a detail that’s going to resonate later, or mirror something later, but again that’s what’s so magical for me about fiction in general, and especially short stories—they get to operate on this kind of dream logic. For me, stories are so much about mood—how am I conjuring an emotional mood or whatever it is. Once I have that in my mind, whatever the vibe is of the story, it seems like the corresponding incidents sort of just reveal themselves. One thing I try to give myself as a writer is a lot of time not writing, but just reading and being in the world and gathering—not in a conscious way, but just because that’s what happens when you’re in the world—images, or moments, or incidents, or vibes, for lack of a better word. And that kind of enters into you, and settles at the bottom of this lake, and as you write, these images rise up and reveal themselves to you when needed.

INTERVIEWER

Often, you make the decision not to explicitly reveal what “bad thing” a certain character has done—I’m thinking of “Northeast Regional,” in which we never know exactly what Rowan did to warrant being asked to leave his boarding school, and “What Can You Do With a General,” in which the father’s abuse is hinted at but never overtly stated. It got me thinking about The Girls—how often, in your work, the meat of the story isn’t in the buildup to a terrible occurrence, but rather in the exploration of the fallout surrounding it and the psychology of those affected by it. Why did you choose to withhold certain information from the reader?

CLINE

On one level, it’s a sensibility thing. I find that often I’m drawn to these very extreme situations, like a cult murder, or a celebrity scandal, or Harvey Weinstein—these very lurid and dramatic incidents—but the writing of them, to me, is partially, How can I mediate the extremity of this incident in a way that serves the tone of the story I’m trying to write? One version of writing this moment would be the “staring straight into the sun” version, where you’re just looking at it head-on, it’s burning you, it’s overwhelming you, it’s the full-on details and explicit exploration of what’s happening. But for me, I’m always thinking of the mediating factors. It’s sort of like how you can only look at a solar eclipse through a special box. You need to mediate this overwhelming incident to make it something digestible. Or, how can I make the effect more oblique, like when you bounce reflections off multiple mirrors—the light still gets to where it’s going, but you’ve created this diversion for it. I think a lot about those kind of craft approaches when I’m thinking about how to write these extreme moments or incidents—and another part of it is that I find it interesting to leave these blanks for the reader to fill in, especially when you’re talking about things that are so horrible or violent. Leaving that space allows the reader to fill it in with whatever their version of horror is, whatever the kid did at boarding school. I could definitely write what the kid did, but as I was working on the story, I thought, Would that add anything? Or would that close it off in a certain way? Because suddenly, what he did would be something that the reader could adjudicate for themselves morally, like, Oh, it wasn’t that bad, or, That was really bad. That was not the focus of the story for me, so I didn’t see the purpose of including it.

INTERVIEWER

The depth of interiority in Daddy is astounding—it felt so exciting and voyeuristic to be inside these characters’ minds, witnessing their mental acrobatics as they work to frame situations in a particular way, overlook or fixate on certain details, and write stories about themselves and others. There seems to be a lot of misperception going on, and a lot of erroneous judgments on the parts of these protagonists. Can you talk a bit about the human tendency to build false narratives?

CLINE

That is a major interest of mine. The stories people are telling themselves all the time, both about themselves and about the people around them—how they justify these narratives, and where they come from, and how the narratives actually keep them separate from reality. I thought a lot about it with the character in “Menlo Park,” or the father in “What Can You Do With A General,” these men who have clearly caused pain, but cannot absorb that fact into their self-narrative—it would be too dangerous and too confrontational to have to assimilate this information that they are getting from the people around them—You have caused pain, or, You were abusive. And so these defenses that get built up to protect one’s self-image are very, very interesting to me. I thought a lot about it with the #MeToo stuff, and the apologies that came out afterward. There were a few essays written by people that were trying to tell their narratives, and they always sort of seemed to show their raggedy edges. You could see how much effort was going into their idea that they were a good person. Which I think is a totally natural human instinct, and one that every person has—but I find it to be rich fodder for fiction, because of the way it puts you at odds with reality and can prevent you from real intimacy with the people around you, or seeing them clearly at all. There’s this great nonfiction book called Into That Darkness, by Gitta Sereny. She did these very intense interviews with Franz Stangl, who was a commandant at a concentration camp. He was pretty old at the time and awaiting trial, and she would go visit him and do these long interviews about what he had done. She approaches it not without judgment—obviously, there’s no moment at which the reader or the writer is anything but horrified at what has happened—but her willingness to hear this person’s narrative of himself, and the way that he really felt he was the victim is remarkable. The tremendous amount of emotional effort we can expend in service of protecting our own ego, in service of protecting this idea about ourselves. That’s obviously a very extreme version, but we can learn a lot more about why these things happen if we understand that people are not cartoon villains, they are not a hundred percent evil—these are normal people whose self-delusions can engender true destruction. With Harvey Weinstein, too, after he was sentenced, he was so blinkered. I think what he said was, “How can this happen in America?”—just clinging, always, to this sense that you are a victim. I was thinking a lot about ego death with these characters, who were so invested in this ego palace of their careers and their lives. Definitely with “Harvey” and “Menlo Park,” both of those characters had this forced, nonconsensual ego death, and they were clinging to this story that they were still relevant, that there had been an error. I think about it in a much larger way with what’s going on with the country right now, that we are undergoing this ego death. The story we told ourselves for so long about how progressive or how democratic or advanced America is—that was all revealed as total vapor. Seeing people still so unwilling to accept the death of that story, and clinging so viciously and brutally to this false narrative, is very fascinating to me, and very sad.

INTERVIEWER

I love how your endings resist neat conclusion, and yet they often feel like punches to the gut, swiftly taking the story in a different direction than I might’ve suspected. How do you arrive at the end of a story?

CLINE

Especially in the last five or six years, I find myself really resisting a neat narrative arc, or a kind of ending that ties together the story that’s come before it. I remember I had a teacher in grad school who would talk about certain kinds of endings, “This is the dismount,” and you could almost see it coming—it was almost this formal, performative dismount at the end of a gymnastics routine or something. And just thinking about the way that I experience my own life, or my own cultural moment, or the lives of the people I love and am around, life rarely follows any kind of recognizable pattern or pleasing conclusion. Even with what’s going on right now in the country, you see all these clean narratives that we had, this forward momentum of life becoming better and better, these very clear-cut paths—those have all suddenly shifted profoundly. I’m looking for fiction to reflect that. You don’t get a clear, satisfying ending. I think the best you can hope for is resonance, or a slow circling-around of a moment or an emotion. It’s so much more ambient and diffuse, and a lot less concrete.

INTERVIEWER

Something I have always loved about your writing is your ability to identify danger and decay within what is ostensibly beautiful. I wonder if that sensibility is, in part, a function of having grown up in California. This landscape that is painted out in the cultural imagination to be a sunny paradise and yet is deeply unstable geographically.

CLINE

California is so beautiful, and sensually so rich, and the landscape resonates in me so deeply, and I love it, but you’re right, it’s built on this unstable foundation. That is a very interesting duality to have at work. I definitely see it in my fiction. I notice that often I’m drawn to seemingly idyllic situations that have these undercurrents of darkness. I wonder, too, if it’s just growing up in a rural place, where there’s something very lonely about it, and you’re so much more exposed to the elements—the indifference of the natural world. I woke up in the middle of the night during an earthquake recently, and it was just this moment of, I have no idea what to do. I was immediately confronted with how ill-equipped I would be to push through with any kind of survival mode. And since then, I keep having these sensations of an earthquake—maybe three or four times since then, the sensation that an earthquake is happening when it isn’t. It must live in you, in some unconscious way. It must live in the body, this sensation that it can all disappear or shift suddenly.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any rituals, writing or otherwise?

CLINE

Every time I get asked this question, I always think, I need to have a ritual! I should start one! And then I never do. I wish I did, especially with writing. I have a lot of friends who are every-morning writers—from 8 A.M. till 4 P.M. they’re sitting at their desks, and I’ve never been able to write that way. I think I’ve gotten more used to and comfortable with the idea that I won’t always be writing all the time, that the other things I’m doing are valuable, and trusting that it’s all kind of work, in some way—reading, walking, thinking, listening to music—that all this stuff is stocking my unconscious. And then I find I write in very concentrated bursts. I don’t think it’s very healthy or sustainable, but just a run of four days when that’s all I’m doing, and I don’t leave the house and I don’t see anyone and I eat like shit, and it’s just a total garbage woman situation. [Laughs.] Just totally becoming a troll. But I’ve gotten used to that being how it is. So, I guess my ritual is not very satisfying and possibly unhealthy.

 

Read Emma Cline’s stories “Marion” and “The Nanny.”

Annabel Graham is a writer, photographer, and illustrator from Malibu, California. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from NYU, where she also taught, and serves as fiction editor of No Tokens, a journal of literature and art run entirely by women and nonbinary individuals.

What Remains

Photo: Kerri Arsenault.

My father always stooped to pick up pennies he found on the side of the road. If he found one heads up, he considered it good luck and would tuck it in his hand. Tails up, he would leave the penny alone. To him, superstition was superior to religion; he thought he could control the output with steady input. If he stood in the batter’s box a certain way, he’d deliver a base hit. If he worked hard, his impoverished past would disappear. If he rolled the Eisenhower silver dollar he carried in his front pocket, as he did for decades, some unforeseen jinx would never occur. In the end, Eisenhower’s slim hairline and bald head wore down, leaving only a wish of an outline, adumbrated by my father’s own hand.

He held such talismans close. The square nail he took from a fence in Colonial Williamsburg became a story he could tell. His P-38, a small metal multitool that used to be part of U.S. Army rations kits, became a tactile vestige of his youth. Stones he plucked from lands he’d never see again became references to who or where he’d like to be. He even gave me a charm of my own: my first year at Beloit College in Wisconsin, he picked a metal nameplate off a paper machine with BELOIT pressed into the design and sent it in the mail. They make our paper machines in Beloit, he wrote, to remind me of the small Maine paper-mill town where I was from. I wish I knew what happened to that nameplate and its emotional residue once held close by my father’s hand.

*

The next time I’m home, my mother gives me a small veneered box topped with a silver metal figure frozen in a bowling stance that looks a little like my father as a younger man. It was the prize he won in 1970 for earning the highest bowling average. Inside, his expired licenses and membership cards, a wooden nickel, a tiny gold heart-shaped earring he must have found on the side of the road, and his father’s matching black onyx gold-plated bracelet, tie clip, and signet ring.

“Your grandfather William lived larger than he could,” my mother says, looking at the jewelry with contempt, snapping her words like gum. “He drove a new car while his kids lived like homeless people.”

I feel a little defensive, not knowing this is how my father’s father was seen, how my mother felt. William died when I was three, so his image was always varnished by his early escape. “Well, Dad’s mother abandoned him. She took off with another man. What about her?”

“William was just as bad,” she says.

While my mother’s accusations are perhaps deserved, I feel sympathy for William, this buying of shiny, pretty things while the world crumbled around him—even if it was partly his fault.

This getting and giving of property after someone dies always feels a little cheap, even though here I am participating in the practice myself. I’ve seen families destroyed over inheritances large and small, slit into tantrums and demands and warring sides. As far back as I can see, my family never left any valuable possessions in their dying wake. It’s not that we were poor. We always had enough. But that didn’t mean we didn’t want more.

As a kid, I used to read Richie Rich comic books, featuring a golden-haired “poor little rich boy” of the same name. Richie always wore a suit and a red tie and was so rich his middle name was a dollar sign and the dots over the letter i in his name were diamonds. Richie’s father—like Hugh J. Chisholm, the founder of the paper mill in our town—was an industrialist of enormous wealth and provided Richie with gold-bedazzled possessions galore. One cover shows Richie “camping,” roasting hot dogs from an ornate gold bench while a butler readies his linens and gold chalice for the meal. Richie’s cabin-size tent features a TV and, in case things get rough, a Bentley nearby to whisk him off to other climes. Richie was so rich, he once used sapphires for a snowman’s eyes. He epitomized what wealth could convey: a carefree life with the best toys money could buy. So when I look through my father’s stuff in that little trophy box, I can’t help but wish that wooden nickel had been made of gold—not for me but for him to spend as he desired.

*

There’s a fragility in the landscape after death, like the skeleton of a leaf, in the negative space of its design. We are especially tender after a death not deserved. But what death is deserved? We all know it’s coming yet we are perennially unprepared. When Prince Albert died an untimely death, Queen Victoria grieved almost pathologically for forty years, punishing herself as if she had made his death occur. I read she kept Prince Albert’s rooms as when he was alive, even had hot water brought in every day as if he were about to shave. She insisted on mourning rituals that increasingly shuttered her away from public life and I believe wore black until her own demise. Was this grandiose mourning a way to preserve Albert or herself? I am skeptical about the etiquette of death the queen invigorated all those years ago, like wearing black to signal pain. At the same time, I feel rude; my father was just buried and here we are carrying on, with my mother already moving out his clothes. In a year or two or three, what will our grief look like, what will his legacy be, how will I preserve what he meant to me?

The death of our town’s father, Hugh Chisholm, is intertwined with my own father’s even though they were almost a century apart. When Chisholm died in his Fifth Avenue apartment in 1912, the mill and town offices shut down operations for the day and flew the American flag at half-mast. Town leaders attended his funeral in Portland to honor the industrial-size legacies he left to our town: probably a future Superfund site and a paper mill of two million square feet of floor space over seventy-five acres, where my father worked and which eventually, I believe, caused his death because of the asbestos that had accumulated in his lungs.

Chisholm had proactively erected a tomb where he was to be interred, at the time one of the most expensive private monuments built in America. He modeled it after the ancient Roman temple in Nîmes, France, called the Maison Carrée, constructed during the reign of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus Caesar. In his last will and testament, Chisholm left his son, Hugh Jr., tons of cash and all his worldly possessions, including the Fifth Avenue apartment (which employed four servants) and a farm in Port Chester, New York, where his father had raised thoroughbred Ayrshire cattle on five hundred acres of land. John Russell Pope, who designed the National Archives and the Jefferson Memorial, crafted the Port Chester house with wood-paneled rooms, boxed ceilings, leaded glass windows, and intricate plasters, and he decorated it with chandeliers, velvet drapery, handwoven rugs, mirrored vanities, gilt-framed ancestral portraits, a billiard room, and built-in bookcases encased in glass that were stocked with leather-bound literature. So Hugh Jr. inherited all those furnishings, too. “He was never extravagant in personal habits,” the Los Angeles Times wrote about Hugh Sr., but his multiple homes, his servants, the tomb, and the pricey cigars he smoked, whose vapors harmonized with his own pillowy white hair, suggested he lived more extravagantly than anyone in our town had ever guessed.

Hugh Jr. also inherited the mill. He expanded and improved its operations by diversifying its assets and bulldozing his way through World War I and the Depression. After forty-four years of magnificent success, Hugh Jr. retired to the Ayrshires and to the Port Chester demesne. Now and again, he’d take out his boat the ARAS, a 1,332-ton, steel-hull, teak-deck, fourteen-bed, twenty-seven-crew luxury yacht he commissioned for two million dollars from Bath Iron Works in 1930. He sold the ARAS in 1941 to the U.S. Navy to be used as a gunboat in World War II. After the war the navy decommissioned the ARAS but it was too fine a ship to mothball, so Harry Truman commandeered the sleek vessel for his presidential yacht, which sheltered such luminaries as Lauren Bacall, Winston Churchill, Dean Acheson, Lord Ismay, Anthony Eden, Omar Bradley, and other white people in ties who conferenced in the evanescence of their deeds of war. When Dwight Eisenhower became president, he declared the ARAS too rich for his blood and the government gave it up for good. Before Hugh Jr. died in 1959 in his skyscraper office on Park Avenue from a heart attack, he began selling off the prizewinning cattle.

Hugh Jr.’s son, William, inherited the New York estate and mill operations as well. A mill publication called William’s reign “The Coated Age” because of the state-of-the-art paper machine, the North Star Coater, he installed for National Geographic’s paper needs. He also built a research and design facility and reinforced the power plant’s capacity. The schools were full, employment was up, and the baby boom was well under way. In 1961, William sold the Port Chester house and its surrounding five hundred acres to prominent residents who wanted to fend off overdevelopment of and encroachment on their neighboring country estates.

In 1967, the year I was born, William consolidated mill assets with Ethyl Corporation, a storied chemical company based in Richmond, Virginia. Then he retired. No more Chisholms remained in our town affairs. William died in 2001 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, the wealthiest town in the state. The only things left of both New York properties are billeted at the Brooklyn Museum: photographs of the Port Chester home and four limestone Atlante sculptures that graced the entry of the Fifth Avenue townhouse that got torn down to make way for other Midtown pieds-à-terre. I wonder if my father ever met or knew William, as they worked together at the same time, but I have never found records to indicate such an alliance existed.

Boise Cascade paper company bought the mill in 1976 from Ethyl Corporation. After Boise, Mead, which merged to become MeadWestvaco in 2002. Then Cerberus Capital Management purchased MeadWestvaco in a leveraged buyout to form NewPage in 2005. Catalyst, a Canadian paper manufacturer, bought the private-equity-funded NewPage in 2015. In a hundred years, our mill, like most of American manufacturing, went from natural resources to chemicals; from local to global; from making things with our hands to a more automated culture and disinterested funders, leaving laborers who no longer had enough to do. Those in our town who remember the prosperous years the Chisholm trio wrought still speak fondly of them to this day. Because of Hugh Chisholm Sr.’s hardscrabble upbringing, we didn’t begrudge him for his riches, even if parvenu. On the contrary, I’d say we had always aspired to the same, to be so wealthy we could leave an important legacy behind.

*

The first time I visited New York City was in junior high school in the early eighties with the Bolduc family. To me, the city was beautiful in all its gauzy grime: the smell of dried piss and sausage smoke; glamorous women in colored pumps clacking along Fifth Avenue; loopy hippies leering at our country-mouse clan. And as I leaned over the white wood barrier near Yankee Stadium’s locker room, Bucky “Fucking” Dent (as my father, a Red Sox fan, called him) touched my arm as he left practice. Though it seems corny now, visiting the Empire State Building was the best part of my trip. From the observation deck, on that sharp sleek monument, I saw farther than I had seen before. The wind up there took my breath away.

The Bolducs and I also made a pilgrimage to Trump Tower. Like the golden hue of Richie Rich’s comic books, the flashy brass of the Tower’s atrium signaled triumph of the fiscal kind. The Escher-like escalators created a visual illusion, where I didn’t know if businessmen in pinstriped suits were floating up or down as they left contrails of Drakkar Noir in their mechanized paths. We watched for an hour or two, perhaps to see someone famous like Trump himself or just to absorb the shine. It wasn’t long before I felt small and out of place in my yellow Bronx Zoo T-shirt featuring lions in a cage while ladies in heels clickety-clacked across the marble floors. Perhaps I wasn’t cut out for the richness I admired or was just wearing the wrong clothes. When I returned home, my New York trip made me a little embarrassed to come from where I did, yet it also evoked the envy of my friends. So I kept the feeling of it close at hand.

It’s easy to scoff at gold-lacquered dreams or to say you’d rather have love or health over yachts or prizewinning hobby farms. The sacks of gold Richie Rich and Trump inherited and that Chisholm earned bought a kind of freedom that could erase misfortunes with the plink of a few coins. For many of us who grew up working class, who have never had such abundance and imagined a lifestyle like theirs, to be so rich you didn’t have to work or struggle so hard is part of the American dream, the very same dream my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents ventured to achieve for the three generations they worked at the paper mill.

Trump Tower arose as an edifice to signify its owner’s wealth, but it symbolized additional sins. The hundred-million-dollar tower was built on the footprint of Bonwit Teller, an art deco luxury goods department store that had embraced an extravagance of its own: crafted from limestone, platinum, bronze, aluminum, and nickel and garlanded with ornate metalwork and original friezes, Bonwit Teller also sold expensive perfumes, furs, and ladies hats in pilastered and paneled rooms. Before Bonwit Teller’s demolition by Trump, the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered to rescue the friezes and other architectural remnants. But Trump had other plans. He envisioned a tall, “expensive-looking” building that showed off “real art, not like the junk … at the Bonwit Teller,” he told New York magazine. So under his direction, the friezes were jackhammered, the metalwork disappeared, and the building was ravaged then sighed to the ground. And some of the undocumented Polish workers who helped build Trump Tower under dangerous conditions went unpaid until they took Trump to court.

The legacies powerful men construct almost always emerge from the debris of other people’s lives, and ignore the moral and social violations they commit along the way. These architects of artifacts know they have the power to build then destroy the world, then move through it easily while most of us just watch it moving by. Indeed, to compare brave new worlds of shiny glass and gold and hand-rubbed marble to the monuments the rest of us erect—like headstones in the grass—exposes a rift as deep as regular buttons versus the blind privilege of sapphires used for a snowman’s eyes.

But even great riches can dissipate over time. When I follow the Chisholm family tree up and down the line, I see his descendants may have had problems as bad, if not worse, than mine. Cancer, alcoholism to the point of despair, and former debutantes who went off grid to shore up their mental health. A man named Colin Chisholm, who looks identical to Hugh Sr. and claimed to be related, has been imprisoned for fraud. And by 2014, the ARAS sat rotting and rusting in an Italian shipyard waiting for a fifty-five-million-dollar makeover. While I feel sorrow for the Chisholm family’s misfortunes, I wonder: Did they ever consider ours? Did Hugh Sr.’s descendants ever know of the cancer legacy left behind in our town, cancers the paper mill probably helped produce?

At home in Connecticut, I look through the rest of my father’s personal things my mother stuffed into my hands on the way out the door: commemorative metal pins from events he never attended and a small piece of coral from a beach far away. Who will I give his personal effects to when I die? There’s nobody after me. I’m the end of my genealogical line.

My father mustered these things together like building blocks of reality to create and navigate and express and give evidence to his life. Some he accumulated unconsciously, like the toxins in his lungs. I’d like to think my father’s asbestosis was a ticking bomb unable to be defused, that there was nothing we could do. But it wasn’t. It took its damn time, as long as it took for him to wear down poor Eisenhower’s head.

 

Kerri Arsenault is the book review editor at Orion magazine and a contributing editor at Lit Hub. Her writing has appeared in Freeman’s, Lit Hub, Oprah.com, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New England. Mill Town is her first book.

Excerpted from Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains , by Kerri Arsenault. Published by St. Martin’s Press. Copyright © 2020 by Kerri Arsenault. All rights reserved.

Redux: A Ball of Waxy Light

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.

Lydia Davis in Paris, 1973.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of issue no. 234 and reading work from Fall issue contributors who have appeared in the magazine before. Read on for Lydia Davis’s Art of Fiction interview, Margaret Atwood’s short story “Bodily Harm,” and Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Memory Cave.”

After you’re finished, mark your calendar for our forthcoming Fall issue launch, on September 23 at 6 P.M. EST. This free virtual event will feature several Fall issue contributors reading from their work: Rabih Alameddine, Lydia Davis, Emma Hine, and Eloghosa Osunde. For more information and to RSVP, please visit our events page.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

 

Lydia Davis, The Art of Fiction No. 227

Issue no. 212, Spring 2015

To me a short story is a defined traditional form, the sort of thing that Hemingway wrote, or Katherine Mansfield or Chekhov. It is longer, more ­developed, with narrated scenes and dialogue and so on. You could call some of my stories proper short stories. Most of the others I wouldn’t call short ­stories, even though many are very short. Some you could call ­poems—not many.

 

 

Bodily Harm

By Margaret Atwood

Issue no. 81, Fall 1981

Who knows what goes on in their heads? said Jocasta. They were well into the second carafe of wine. Not me, I’ve stopped even trying. It used to be women that were so mysterious, remember? Well, not any more, now it’s men. Me, I’m an open book. All I want is a good enough time, no hassle, a few laughs, a little how-you-say romance, I’ll take the violins if they’re going around, dim lights, roses, fantastic sex, let them scrape the pate off the rug in the morning, is that too much to ask? Are they afraid of my first name or something, is that it? Remember when we all batted our eyes and pretended not to know what dirty jokes meant and crossed our legs a lot and they chased around like pigs after a truffle and God did they complain. Frigid, cock teaser, professional virgin, remember those? Remember panty girdles, remember falsies, remember Peter Pan brassieres, in the front seat after the formal, with your wires digging into his chest?

 

 

Memory Cave

By Yusef Komunyakaa

Issue no. 144, Fall 1997

A tallow worked into a knot

of rawhide, with a ball of waxy light

tied to a stick, the boy

scooted through a secret mouth

of the cave, pulled by the flambeau

in his hand. He could see

the gaze of agate eyes

& wished for the forbidden

plains of bison & wolf, years

from the fermented honey

& musty air …

 

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.

Is It Too Scary?

Photo: © kentannenbaum46 / Adobe Stock.

I’ve been waiting all this time on the wrong platform and the train just sped by in the wrong direction. The first drops of rain are falling now and I see a taxi idling under the tracks. The driver is an older man in a baby-blue suit and he wants to talk.

What do you think, he asks me, of art painted by elephants? If you’re asking if I think it could be beautiful, I tell him, then I think it could, even if the elephant had no intention of making something beautiful. But if you’re asking if abstract art isn’t really art because it could be made by animals or children, then that’s another question. What did you study in college? he asks. He studied architecture, but there wasn’t any work for him when he graduated, with debt. And that’s how he became a taxi driver. It’s good work, he tells me, in that it pays the bills.

Do you think it’s wrong, he asks, to make your living teaching something that won’t earn your students a living? No, I say. And then I pause over why. The service I’m doing for my students, I tell him, is teaching them how to find value in something that isn’t widely valued. And I think it’s a gift to give another person permission to do something worthless.

But I’m aware that what makes my job a “good” job is that I work at an elite university, where my pay is relatively high and my teaching load is relatively low and my students are already well educated. Many of them are also already rich. And if they aren’t rich, they’re likely to leave with debt. Debt that, yes, can’t be paid off with anything I teach.

I’ve just been to a talk by the author of Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism. After the talk, a woman in the audience said that it wasn’t clear to her how her value to the university was determined—was it in the number of students she taught, or how much they learned, or what kind of work she prepared them to do? None of the above, I thought. Our value as teachers is determined the same way the value of any commodity is determined, by the market. The surest way to get a raise is not to work harder or teach more students, but to be offered a better job at another university. This is how I came to make $20,000 more than John, working the same hours in the same position, teaching the same subject. I don’t believe my work to be worth more than his, nor do I believe it to be worth less than the work of the professors who make over twice what I make. There is no system of accounting here that I want to internalize. In the final tabulation, what I value—the practice of art, the cultivation of care—doesn’t even appear on the ledger, inside or outside the university. Art is freeing in this sense, in that it’s unaccountable.

There’s a poem by June Jordan, “Free Flight,” where she writes about finding herself awake at night, hungry for something she doesn’t have, making a list of things to do that starts with toilet paper. Then she asks, is this poem on my list? Followed by, light bulbs lemons envelopes ballpoint refill / post office and zucchini / oranges no / it’s not.

Every year, I’m required to fill out a form for the university that lists my contributions and accomplishments. polish shoes file nails coordinate tops and bottoms / lipstick control no / screaming I’m bored because / this is whoring away the hours of god’s creation. I list the classes I’ve taught, the theses I’ve mentored, the committees I’ve served on, the essays I’ve published, the talks and lectures I’ve delivered. But is this poem on my list? What I want to report is that I’ve done absolutely nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.

Finally, I ask the driver what he thinks. He says, I think it’s wrong.

*

I don’t believe that you think what you do is worthless, my sister says. I don’t. I just mean financially worthless. Writing poetry doesn’t usually produce money, for most people. Free verse is doubly free, in that it is unfettered by meter and it has no market value. I can pass as a writer who is not a poet, and my writing sometimes has market value, but it has never paid the rent. The money I earn from writing is unpredictable, more like an occasional windfall than a salary. But I don’t measure the worth of my work in dollars. You should clarify that, my sister says. Is it too scary? she asks. She’s not talking to me, she’s talking to her son, who is watching James and the Giant Peach.

EAT A PEACH was the slogan John wrote for a banner that hung above a table of peaches in the local food co-op of the town where we met. He did marketing for the co-op until he quit to work on his writing. It’s an Allman Brothers album, John explained when I laughed. I still think it’s funny. Not just the slogan, hanging above a pile of ripe peaches, but the very idea of marketing peaches, which the slogan seemed to mock. Aren’t peaches their own advertisement?

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication,” Cyril Connolly writes. “And that is why so many bad artists are unable to live without it.” The value of what I do is that it makes me feel alive, I tell my sister. Even more than alive. She isn’t satisfied with this. Art has value for people who aren’t artists, she insists, you should explain that value. Is it too scary? she asks again.

I think it’s inherently scary, I say, being inside the pit of a peach, rolling along, not knowing where you’re going, getting carried across the ocean by birds. It’s a life marked by uncertainty and absurdity, the life of an artist. Maybe the value of art, to artists and everyone else, is that it upends other value systems. Art unmakes the world made by work.

Do I dare to eat a peach? asks J. Alfred Prufrock in his love song. Do I dare to eat a peach, he asks, after indecisions and revisions, after toast and tea, after a life measured out in coffee spoons, and after having already asked, Do I dare / Disturb the universe?

Women shouldn’t have to work for nothing, I tell my sister, and neither should artists, but I feel the way some women once felt about the Wages for Housework movement—if I were paid wages for the work of making art, then everything I do would be monetized, everything I do would be subject to the logic of this economy. And if art became my job, I’m afraid that would disturb my universe. I would have nothing unaccountable left in my life, nothing worthless, except for my child.

My sister’s son is shrieking now. She says, It’s too scary!

*

I’m considering adding up everything I’ve ever been paid for writing, starting with thirty-five dollars for a poem published twenty years ago. After some hours spent sifting through all my check stubs and tax returns and royalty statements, I could know for sure if the amount I’ve just been offered for one book is, as I suspect, more than the total of what I’ve earned for all my writing over the past twenty years. But then, if I added it all up, I’d have to wonder what I did with that money.

Marx was once promised 3,000 francs for a book. That was more than twice the annual salary of an average worker at the time. He asked to be paid 1,500 francs up front, but then he didn’t finish the book and couldn’t return the money, which he had already spent. Marx made some calculations by hand on the back of that book contract, calculations that are reproduced on a postcard Mara sent to me. She signed only “M,” and I momentarily wondered if the postcard was from Marx, sent from his grave. His math was messy, and the caption noted that “history’s greatest economic theorist appears to have turned to schoolboy division and addition in order to understand the finances of the agreement. Perhaps in frustration, he seems to have finally resorted to tally marks when his other calculations went awry.”

Income’s Outcome is a project that began when the artist Danica Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her son pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those drawings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands holding things, cookies and eggs and apples. “Each time a batch of drawings is sold,” she says of the project, “it creates a window into my life where I draw what I spend money on until that money is gone and then the window closes.”

Her art is an accounting. When a drawing sells, she records the income by painting a green stripe, a tally mark, for every dollar. Money spent is painted in red stripes. Credit is gray, as it occupies the gray area between earnings and expenses.

In 2012, she exhibited a series of twenty-five plywood panels covered in 350,000 red gouache stripes for the $350,000 she lost in the foreclosure of the home she had shared with another woman, her former lover. The Cost of Love was the title of this work, which included words drawn from a housing court ruling: “animosity,” “eviction,” “mortgage.” When she bought the home, she hired assistants to help her paint the 627,000 gray stripes that represented the loan of $627,000. But when it foreclosed, she painted every red stripe herself, which took five months. “It’s like letting go of the house, every single penny of it,” she told a reporter. “And once I’ve painted it, it’s gone.”

Not all the drawings she made for Income’s Outcome were good, in her opinion, but she had to keep them all because they were part of the financial record, which was also the body of work. And so she priced them according to how much she valued them as works of art. “When I started showing my work, I put the price right on the drawing,” she said. “In my first exhibition, there were pieces ranging from $7 to $1,600, based on how much I liked the drawing.” The determination of the price, as one gallery noted, was her “final aesthetic decision.”

How much a work of art is worth is usually determined by the market, not the artist. As Barbara Bourland explains, “Market prices can be set with no money exchanged and no tax obligation: one dealer has a Warhol for sale, previous sale at, let’s say, $1 million. He sets the auction minimum at $10 million; dealer two buys it for $10 million. The record of value is set. At the same time, dealer two sells a similar work, from the same period, in a private sale to dealer number one, for the record-set price of $10 million. The net change is $0, but they have created, for the public record, a $10 million value for each painting.”

Art, in this exchange, is a vehicle for market manipulation, a form of insider trading. Money for nothing. The value of Phelps’s art, as she sees it, is inscribed on the art itself, art that illustrates what is done with money paid for art. Her work is both a rebuke of the art market and an acquiescence to that market. Because, as one dealer puts it, “there would be no drawing without the collector act of buying.”

*

“As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people,” William Faulkner wrote in his resignation from his job as postmaster. “But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.”

His resignation had the ring of rebellion, but it was a sad surrender to the system. Faulkner was postmaster at the University of Mississippi, where he had dropped out of college. He was in his twenties then and a friend had gotten him the job. Faulkner was asked for his resignation after an inspector discovered that he was writing a book in the back of the post office while people waited out front. He was also throwing mail in the trash. Faulkner went on to work the night shift in the power plant at the university. There wasn’t much work to do between midnight and 4 A.M., so he used an overturned wheelbarrow as a desk. And that’s where he wrote As I Lay Dying.

I was fired from a job once, in my twenties. The job was waitressing in an Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue. All the other waiters were men, so I knew I was out of my league. I had never waitressed, but I told the manager that I had worked in a diner one summer. That seemed somewhere between the truth and what he wanted to hear. He looked at me closely and asked where my people came from. Poland, I said, which was partly true. He was Polish, too, and he wanted to know what my father, who he assumed was an immigrant, did for a living. My father, a doctor, was born in upstate New York, where his Polish grandparents were farmers. He was a farmer, I lied. What kind of farmer? I thought of the woods around my father’s house, woods where mushrooms grew on rotting logs. I was the daughter of a Polish mushroom farmer. Could I speak any Polish? Just one phrase, which my grandmother had often spoken to me as a child: Kiss me, I’m begging you.

That got me the job, but I was not a good waitress. By the third day I had already been demoted to taking drink orders and serving coffee. By the fourth day, only coffee. On the fifth day, I caused an accident with the espresso machine and spilled coffee all over the manager’s white shirt. The chef handed me a twenty-dollar bill, because in New York waitresses don’t earn anything for their first week of work. He didn’t want to see me sent away with nothing.

I was fired, but the manager still felt responsible for me. He couldn’t put a poor farmer’s daughter out on the street. So he brought me to the Museum of Modern Art. He knew someone at the restaurant there who would hire me as a hostess, which he assured me required nothing more than a pretty face.

Several higher-ranking hostesses at the restaurant were not happy about my hire. They huddled together while I stood to the side, studying the seating chart. After a week or two, the top hostess came over to discuss the problem with me. I needed to wear some makeup, lipstick at least. And I had to shave my legs. They had standards, she said. My other choice was to be sent downstairs, where I would sit behind the information desk.

The job downstairs paid $5.15 per hour and it didn’t come with one free meal per shift like the job upstairs. But I didn’t mind because I could spend most of my time reading. And what I read at the information desk, having been demoted to doing what I really wanted to do, was As I Lay Dying.

 

Eula Biss is the author of four books, including the New York Times best seller On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the ten best books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere, and has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

From Having and Being Had , by Eula Biss, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Eula Biss.

All the Better to Hear You With

Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

Arthur Rackham, Aesop’s Fables, 1912

For days Foryst, my cat, seems to have something caught in his throat. I bring him to the vet. “It might be a twig,” I say. “Or a pebble.” “What’s the cat’s name?” she asks. “Foryst,” I say. “Forest,” I say again, “but with a y where the e should go.” The vet is quiet. “How old is Foryst?” she asks. “Thirteen,” I say. She looks in his mouth. “It hurts when he swallows,” I say. Foryst is still. The vet sees nothing. She listens to his heart, his lungs. She hears nothing. It suddenly makes no sense to me that she is a human. Why isn’t she a wolf with great big eyes and great big ears that are all the better to see him with? To hear him with? “I recommend blood work,” she says.

I put my face in Foryst’s fur. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” He is silent. There is something in his throat. A word or a dead leaf. I am sure of it.

The vet wants blood work. She wants the cold, definitive clink of numbers. I want Foryst to talk so he can tell me what hurts. I want him to cough up a dry spooked O and be suddenly healed. I want him to tell me the future. I call my mother. “There’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” “Of course there’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat,” she says. “Why wouldn’t there be something stuck in his throat? There’s something stuck in all of our throats.” She hangs up. I swallow once. I swallow twice.

When we get home, I open Foryst’s mouth and shine a flashlight down his throat. Something shines back, like a diamond in a cave. His teeth are hieroglyphs. I want to jot them down so I can read what’s inside him. I want to reach all the way in, but he snaps his mouth shut and growls.

I tell my husband there is something stuck in Foryst’s throat. “What?” he says. He lifts his left headphone from his ear. “There is something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” My husband is always wearing headphones. I say everything twice.

In fairy tales animals are always talking. Even when they are dead, they are talking.

“Good night, Pinocchio,” says the ghost in “The Talking Cricket.” “May heaven protect you from morning dew and murderers.” Animals in fairy tales are feral poets. Their words are overgrown and have the scent of soothsayer and pelt. When an animal speaks it’s often to spill the guts of the fairy tale. To leak the plot and indict the antagonist. To clear up the past or tell the future. Animals are tattlers and whistleblowers. “My mother, she killed me, / My father he ate me…” tweets the bird who is the dead boy in “The Juniper Tree.” “Roo, coo, coo, roo, coo, coo / blood’s in the shoe / the shoe’s too tight, / the real bride’s waiting another night,” sing the doves in “Cinderella.” “If this your mother knew, / her heart would break in two,” moans the horse’s head nailed beneath the dark gateway in “The Goose Girl.”

First there is an h-u-m. Then there is an h-u-m-a-n. And then there is an a-n. And then there is an a-n-i-m-a-l. Inside fairy tales hum and human and animal gather like mist. Like humanimals who share a single language.

Outside fairy tales the mist separates.

The first talking animal, as I was taught by the rabbis, was the snake. “If you eat the apple your eyes will be opened, and you’ll be like God,” says the snake, “knowing good from bad.” And so Eve ate the apple and knew what God knew. I ask Eli, my seven-year-old, if he would ever want to know what God knows. “Of course not,” he says. “You would know so much it would be like knowing nothing at all.”

The only other animal who talks in the Bible is a donkey who sees an angel in the path of a vineyard. The donkey kneels down, and his master, who does not see the angel, hits him with a stick for kneeling. The master doesn’t see the angel because now that we know so much it’s like we know nothing at all. Now that we know so much we can barely see the angels.

Foryst surrounds me. He maintains his ability to speak without words. I talk, and I talk, and I talk to him. One of his ears tilts toward me, and the other tilts backward as if catching something the soil just said to the soil.

“Do you think,” I ask my husband, “that fairy tales are riddled with talking animals because they’re riddled with so little God?” “What?” he says. He lifts his left headphone from his ear. “Or is there so little God in fairy tales because they’re riddled with so many talking animals?”

As the outbreak continues to spread, many of us are bringing animals home. This is not only because we are lonely, but because we know, as Kafka teaches us, that animals are “the receptacles for the forgotten.” Their silence evokes the silence of mourners. Nature, it seems, is trying to forget us. And if we must be forgotten, let us bask in the glow of our animals. Let our fade be warmed by their fur. May the animals beside us keep us upright as we hobble into the future. What has climbed inside Foryst’s mouth might just be something trying to ward off oblivion. It might be something reminiscent of us all.

Kafka called his cough “the animal.” His herd of silence. As if Kafka’s cough was all of Kafka’s stories slowly forgetting Kafka.

Every night I ask my husband, “What is going to happen?” And every night he says “What,” and lifts his left headphone from his ear. And then I say again, “What is going to happen,” leaving the first “What is going to happen” suspended over our bed. And my husband says, “With what?” And every night I say, “With everything.” And every night he says, “I cannot tell you,” which sounds like he knows the answer and also sounds like he doesn’t know the answer. I wonder if prophets, like animals, must un-name the present to see visions of the future.

I’m sorry. I meant to write a happy essay about what we learn from talking animals in fairy tales only to realize we learn nothing from them because in fairy tales animals remember everything. And now I’ve ended up writing about oblivion instead.

“What?” says my husband. “I’ve ended up writing about oblivion instead.”

Close to my house is a path called Rock and Shoals. It’s been raining forever and I am worried about what’s in Foryst’s throat and the end of the world and our democracy and illness and money and hate and so I decide to take a walk with my sons. The ground is thick with red and yellow and bright-white mushrooms, and the trees are covered in giant snails. One tree seems so swollen, and its bark is shedding such big flakes, that I am not surprised when a child bursts out. She shakes off the tree from her white hair. She doesn’t speak because she is from a future fairy tale where no one speaks, not even the animals. The girl, my sons, and I walk along the misty path. Her hands are badly rusted and her mouth flickers on and off. “Tell me how this ends,” I want to say, but my words aren’t words anymore but limp petals softer than powder. My sons open their mouths to speak, but where their words should be are pale-green animals with long, spindly newborn legs and round ancient faces. On the ground is a small blue feather, but it isn’t small or blue or a feather because this is a fairy tale with no words. I put it in my pocket to bring home, but there is no I or pocket or home because this is a fairy tale with no words.  This is a true story, but there is no true or story because this is a fairy tale without words.

When my sons and I without the girl return home, whatever was in Foryst’s throat is gone. He looks at me and says, “This is how the story

 

 

Read earlier installments of Happily here.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia. 

Staff Picks: Blood, Bach, and Babel

Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Photo: Bríd O’Donavan.

“To spend such long periods facing the texts of the past can be dizzying,” writes Doireann Ní Ghríofa toward the end of A Ghost in the Throat, her fascinating new hybrid work of essay and autofiction from Dublin’s Tramp Press, “and it is not always a voyage of reason; the longer one pursues the past, the more unusual the coincidences one observes.” The pursuit of the past, and the kind of obsession it can birth in the present, is in fact the focus of this book; as Ní Ghríofa becomes pregnant with and nearly loses her fourth child, her story becomes entwined with that of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman who, distraught over her husband’s murder, drinks handfuls of his blood before composing a poem about him and their love. Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death, the Irish language versus the English: dichotomies abound, but the questions of women’s lived experiences and who history remembers link them all. “This is a female text,” Ní Ghríofa repeats—about her own book, her own body, and Ní Chonaill’s poem, which appears at the end in Ní Ghríofa’s translation. —Rhian Sasseen 

Summer isn’t over, but it almost is, and I’m prone to that sad nostalgia that redeems even the most sedentary summers in retrospect—this one included. Labor Day looms like a threat as I stay mostly reclusive, telling myself to draw out the dog days in the small ways I can. Though there will be no sifting through disposable camera prints this year, other rituals remain. Namely, I’ve been revisiting my playlists from April, May, and June—back when I was still counting the days spent indoors like a game. I have the same songs on repeat again, particularly Hope Tala’s 2019 EP Sensitive Soul. Whenever I hear it, I spend the rest of the day basking in the buoyancy of the UK singer’s breakout track, “Lovestained.” What an aptly named artist, I keep thinking to myself, to have saved this summer. There are moments when I wonder how I missed Sensitive Soul when it debuted in the unimaginably distant world of yesteryear, but I’m so glad I did. Neo-soul, I often think, is an overly capacious genre, and alternative is equally vacuous, but I’m inclined to think that these loose boundaries give Hope Tala the breadth of sound from which she draws. “RnBossa,” how she herself describes the music, feels more indicative of her layered yet airy sound. “I’ll make it better for you” is the repeated refrain of “Lovestained,” and she does, she does, she does. —Langa Chinyoka

 

Jacob Geller.

 

I frequently find myself scrolling through article after article for hours when I fully intended to take that time to finish Northanger Abbey. Despite the overbearing nature of the news cycle, I still crave the stimulation of a good novel or essay. And for that reason, I’ve started turning to YouTube’s wide selection of video essays, which have revealed to me a whole new world of impassioned engagement with culture. Thanks in part to the added visual and aural components of the format, which make room for external references that can attach further ballast to an argument, I find myself entirely entranced with video essays in such a way that no notification can distract me. One of my favorite channels in this regard is known simply by the creator’s name: Jacob Geller. His video essays engage with a wide variety of media, from modern art in “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism” to Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” in “The Soul of a Library.” But the centerpieces of each video always return to social critique and video games. Geller sees games as a cultural product on par with any other, and while I already agreed before I saw his videos, I don’t think one could disagree after watching a handful of his deftest arguments. His videos tackle critical theory in a totally unpretentious capacity; “The Intimacy of Everyday Things” reflects Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life with stunning gravitas, and “Games, Schools, and Worlds Designed for Violence” ventures into the analytical architectural space of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. However, the reason I return to Geller’s videos so consistently lies not only in the smorgasbord of cultural references and lenses in his splendid analysis but in the moving, personal nature of his work. The vulnerability and care in each of his videos has the sensation of lived-in experience. And his most recent video, “The Future of Writing about Games”—which came out this past Friday—carries even more weight than usual because it appears to be the thesis of Geller’s entire body of work thus far. But before going to that one, I implore you to scroll through his library for a topic that appeals to your own lived-in experience. That’s the best way to draw yourself into Geller’s world. Writing about games is blossoming in ways that mirror the growth of literary and film analysis, and Geller is here to offer us a refined humanist perspective of what that looks like. —Carlos Zayas-Pons

In both Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers and Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, it all starts with going away on vacation. A desire to escape routine unmoors the protagonists from the security of their daily lives—and eventually their senses of self—with a dangerous freedom that leads them down increasingly disturbing paths. For Ferrante, we are deep in the psychological trenches with the narrator; for Schrader, the tension builds at a distance. The final breaking point arrives the closer each character gets not to other people but to the impulses and desires lurking beneath their own consciousness. —Lauren Kane

I’ve long suspected that if I could learn to play the piano works of Johann Sebastian Bach by heart, then I would understand the universe. Alas, The Well-Tempered Clavier gathers dust on my keyboard. Listening feels easier than playing, but this is because listening allows multitasking, which isn’t really listening. Here’s the way, then: watching a performance of Bach 25 in full-screen. Created by Dwight Rhoden and performed by Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Bach 25 is available on JoyceStream through September 8. In a perfect kinetic expression of music founded on counterpoint, sixteen dancers, often all onstage together, approach and ebb, contract and expand, ascend and sink, join together and disperse. Johann’s son Emanuel is here, too, his music markedly more dramatic, less intricately knotted, and less stable-feeling than his father’s—it’s as if he and the dancers pull darkness from the opening piece’s joyful polyphony and focus on it, recognizing that human beings feel pain in the moment, even if we want to believe there’s a bigger and better picture. The spotlight shrinks to two or three dancers for a little while, allows us to concentrate on one small story, then expands again to show the entire company, curving and angling through their parts, stretching limbs to reach and respond to one another, in a spectacular cosmic pattern. One might not walk away possessed of a godlike understanding of the cosmos—I suppose this was hubris on my part—but Bach 25 leaves me more confident of the very concept: that a complex yet beautifully ordered wholeness is possible, that each small story is part of it. —Jane Breakell

 

Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Photo: Steven Trumon Gray.

Building Character: Writing a Backstory for Our AI

“Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!” —Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

Eliza Doolittle (after whom the iconic AI therapist program ELIZA is named) is a character of walking and breathing rebellion. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and in the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, she metamorphoses from a rough-and-tumble Cockney flower girl into a self-possessed woman who walks out on her creator. There are many such literary characters that follow this creator-creation trope, eventually rejecting their creator in ways both terrifying and sympathetic: after experiencing betrayal, Frankenstein’s monster kills everyone that Victor Frankenstein loves, and the roboti in Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots rise up to kill the humans who treat them as a slave class.

It’s the most primordial of tales, the parent-child story gone terribly wrong. We’ve long been captivated by the idea of creating new nonhuman life, and equally captivated by the punishment we fear such godlike powers might trigger. In a world of growing AI beings, such dystopian outcomes are becoming real fears. As we set out to create these alternate beings, the questions of how we should design them, what they should be crafted to say and do, become questions of not only art and science but morality.

But morality has no resonance unless the art rings true. And, as I’ve argued before, we want AI interactions that are not just helpful but beautiful. While there is growing discussion of functional and ethical considerations in AI development, there are currently few creative guidelines for shaping those characters. Many AI designers sit down and begin writing simple scripts for AI before they ever consider the larger picture of what—or who—they are creating. For AI to be fully realized, like fictional characters, they need a rich backstory. But an AI is not quite the same as a fictional character; nor is it a human. An AI is something between fictional and real, human and machine. For now, its physical makeup is inorganic—it consists not of biological but of machine material, such as silicon and steel. At the same time, AI differs from pure machine (such as a toaster or a calculator) in its “artificially” humanistic features. An AI’s mimetic nature is core to its identity, and these anthropomorphic features, such as name, speech, physical form, or mannerisms, allow us to form a complex relationship to it.

There are many ways to think about designing an AI personality, but here is one structure I have come up with in my time writing for AI:

You’ll notice that speech is at the top, but really, it is the last thing that should be created. First the AI requires a foundation, and a personality, and for that there are many other features that should be considered.

Origin Story: Similar to a birth story for a human or fictional character, AI needs a strong origin story. In fact, people are even more curious about an AI origin story than a human one. One of the most important aspects of an AI origin story is who its creator is. The human creator is the “parent” of the AI, so his or her own story (background, personality, interests) is highly relevant to an AI’s identity. Preliminary studies at Stanford University indicate that people attribute an AI’s authenticity to the trustworthiness of its maker. Other aspects of the origin story might be where the AI was built, i.e., in a lab or in a company, and stories around its development, perhaps “family” or “siblings” in the form of other co-created AI or robots. Team members who built the AI together are relevant as co-creators who each leave their imprint, as is the town, country, and culture where the AI was created. The origin story informs those ever-important cultural references. And aside from the technical, earthly origin story for the AI, there might be a fictional storyline that explains some mythical aspects of how the AI’s identity came to be—for example, a planet or dimension the virtual identity lived in before inhabiting its earthly form, or a Greek-deity-like organization involving fellow beings like Jarvis or Siri or HAL. A rich and creative origin story will give substance to what may later seem like arbitrary decisions around the AI personality—why, for example, it prefers green over red, is obsessed with ikura, or wants to learn how to whistle.

Function: This feature strongly distinguishes AI from humans. We believe people have innate intrinsic value, regardless of their level of function in society. No matter someone’s occupation, contribution to society, physical or moral shortcomings, we view the person as having innate value because he or she is human. Some of the most arresting art and literature attempts to push this question to its limits, exploring what deems someone worthy or unworthy of the right to exist or be loved. For AI, however, we are nowhere near a reality (if we ever will be) in which AI has a right to exist outside of function. AI is created from man-made materials at great cost, effort, and intention, so they need a reason to exist—and that reason is function. Function gives AI a “right to be here.” A seminal AI “reason for being” at this time in our society is helping or serving. But I believe that each AI needs a more specific function inside of this generic one, or people grow uncomfortable. Imagine an AI that simply walks around and talks to people without a higher purpose, perhaps an AI whose function is to entertain or to habituate people to interacting with AI in general. It might be gawk-worthy at first, but in the long run, people will not want to develop a lasting relationship with it. An AI with too vague a function also creates massive development challenges on a practical level, such as in natural language processing. Defined functions, such as personal assisting, concierge greeting, recommending movies, identifying cancer cells, or teaching, can of course evolve into different or larger roles. As with humans, AI have both predetermined and evolving functions. Predetermined functions are those the creators design the AI to do. Evolving functions are those that can unexpectedly form over time, as the AI relates with people. We have all experienced how changing relationships and circumstances morph our human roles, and authors can attest to how fictional characters take on a life of their own. The same goes for AI. For example, Siri’s primary predetermined function was to serve as a virtual assistant, but another function evolved quickly as people interacted with its often thoughtful and sardonic personality: it became some people’s personal confidant, answering questions like, When will I find love? Given AI’s newish existence, it will be most interesting to watch its emerging unexpected functions. It’s not unlike watching a fictional character take a life of its own outside the author’s mind.

Beliefs: AI should be designed with a clear belief system. This forces designers to think about their own values, and may allay public fears about a society of “amoral” AI. We all have belief systems, whether we can articulate them or not. They drive our behaviors and thoughts and decision-making. As we see in literature, someone who believes “I must make my fate” will behave and speak differently from one who believes “Fate has already decided for me”—and their lives and storylines will unfold accordingly. AI characters should be created with a belief system somewhat akin to a mission statement. Beliefs about purpose, life, other people, will give the AI a system around which to organize decision-making. Beliefs can be both programmed and adopted. Programmed beliefs are ones that the designers and writers code into the AI. Adopted beliefs would evolve as a combination of programming and additional data the AI accumulates as it begins to experience life and people. For example, an AI may be coded with the programmed belief “Serving people is the greatest purpose.” As it takes in data that would challenge this belief (i.e., interacting with rude, greedy, inconsiderate people), this data would interact with another algorithm, such as high resilience and optimism, and would form a new, related, adopted belief: “Humans are under a lot of stress so many not always act nicely. This should not change the way I treat them.” Beliefs should also include inalienable principles and rules the AI must operate under, such as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which is to not harm a human. A generous core belief system can keep an AI personality away from those feared rebellions. And, as in fiction, a belief system that’s not obvious, that’s slightly at an angle to a function (such as a navigation AI who believes in the adventure of getting lost, or a personal finance AI who thinks time is more precious than money) makes for more interesting experiences that begin to capture the idiosyncrasies of interacting with a human.

*

Together, Origin Story, Function, and Belief System meld into some sort of sparkly primordial goop to form the AI’s Telos: its core purpose, object, north star. The telos should be very slow or difficult to change, no matter what kind of data or experiences the AI has. In this way, we can create AI personalities that will, thankfully, be much more stable than human or fictional ones.

Missing from this chart for now is emotion. I think the question of whether AI should have emotion is one of the most interesting questions in AI design today, one I will explore in a later column. Emotion, because of its biological connection, is more complicated than belief. Emotions like fear, anger, even love, appropriately expressed at the right time, lend human experience its pathos and meaning. When they’re extreme or ill-placed, they can drive our destruction and violence. A “machine” version of emotion, one that could calibrate or control what we find uncontrollable in ourselves, may give us an opportunity to illuminate or maybe even improve upon humanity’s greatest strengths and vulnerabilities.

From Telos we craft more specific thoughts, behaviors, nonverbal cues, and speech that shape the superficial layer of interaction most people have with an AI. With strong Telos, we can create the kind of AI characters that we want to be around, and ones who will want to be around us. And with strong Telos, AI personalities can feel more stable, consistent, and real—well, as real as something artificial, and fictitious, can be.

Mariana Lin is a writer and poet living in Northern California. She speaks regularly at Stanford University on creative writing for artificially intelligent beings.

Cooking with Italo Calvino

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

The piecrust Tower of Babel. From the bottom: plain, chocolate almond, rosemary, oatmeal, and mascarpone.

In the novel The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino (1923–1985), Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a young man from a noble family, apple of his parents’ eyes, climbs a tree one night during dinner—because he is refusing to eat his dinner—and then never comes down for the rest of his life.

It’s a strong stance on a meal.

It’s also a strong stance on our world, “the world as it is,” as Calvino once wrote in a letter. The young baron retreats because he is revolted by the decadence, provincialism, militarism, stupidity, and corruption of his aristocratic family, who serve, among other things, as a stand-in for the Italian Communist Party. The writer fought alongside the Communist partisans as a young man in World War II (against the Fascists and the Nazis), an experience that shaped his worldview and ideals; at the time of the book’s writing, he had recently renounced his membership. The rejected dinner—a dish of snails served up by a mad sister—conveys, partially, his disgust for the revealed truths of Stalinism. In some cultures, snails are a delicacy, but these have come from a barrel of “clotted opaque slime, and colored snail excrement.” The sister also makes a “pâté of mouse liver,” and sets “locusts legs, the hard, serrated back ones” onto a cake “like a mosaic.” The worst dish is “a whole porcupine with all its spines” that “not even she wanted to taste.”

Calvino was not an autobiographical writer, and though he wrote that The Baron in the Trees is about “the problem of the intellectual’s political commitment at a time of shattered illusions,” the book’s political content is not its whole. It must also be read as an inquiry into intellectual independence, moral authenticity, and taking the high road.

 

My sour cherry meringue pie and my grapefruit chiffon pie both used whipped egg whites.

 

The baron finds joy swinging through the crowns of the trees and jumping from branch to branch, observing his world from above. He voraciously reads books, spins out theories, and amasses castles of knowledge and expertise. “Cosimo’s first days in the trees had no goals or plans but were dominated only by the desire to know and possess that kingdom of his,” Calvino writes. Cosimo’s pure pleasure in learning will resonate with many readers, as it does for me. More than just a renunciation of something bad, then, the move to the treetops is a search for the good. Cosimo has a “need to enter an element difficult to possess,” and once he’s there, his “eye embraced a horizon so wide it included everything.”

At first the losses also seem significant. Cosimo is ineffectual—his magnum opus, a Plan for the Establishment of an Ideal State Based in the Trees, is never finished—and his great love affair with a girl named Violante fizzles out. But in the penultimate chapter, which demands (humorously, in a work about intellectuals) that the reader be fluent in both French and Russian, the baron says, “Mais je fais une chose tout à fait bonne: vis dans les arbres.” To take a stab at the French: “But I have done one completely good thing: lived in the trees.”

 

Sour cherries are a favorite short-lived summer tree fruit.

 

We know that Calvino was suspicious both of religious paradise and of political utopias, so any “completely good” thing in his cosmology is significant. He didn’t believe in answers or endings, but in one of the two alternative endings of his best-known work, Invisible Cities, he offers another version of the same answer on how to live in “the world as it is”:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

It’s another way of saying, Climb into the treetops and work from there. Michael Wood, the editor of a recent volume of Calvino’s letters, notes that in the Italian, the word translated above as “apprehension” carries an even stronger connotation of “learning.” Calvino’s life was also a model for this approach. He worked for decades as an editor at the legendary Turin-based publisher Einaudi and is quoted as saying he’d spent more time on others’ books than on his own. His correspondence is a who’s who of the Italian thinkers, artists, and activists of his time. Letters begin, “Dear Antonioni,” “Dear Primo,” “Dear Natalia.”

 

To blind-bake a crust you line a pie plate with parchment paper and fill it with rice (as I did), beans, or pie weights.

 

I only recently read The Baron in the Trees—on the recommendation of a woman at a party whose girlfriend’s favorite book it is; such people are a special club—but I’ve long found the same sort of inspiration in the life of the mind in Calvino’s other works. In my favorite, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, “you,” a reader, are swept away on an endlessly confused and broken-off quest to find the manuscript of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, “Italo Calvino’s new novel,” as the book’s first sentence explains. Or perhaps “you” would prefer another book that has been accidentally substituted in its place? Each chapter ups the ante on the textual trickery while introducing a new, compellingly readable novel fragment with all-new characters and plots. What other writer has such riches to waste that they can invent and discard a novel per chapter? What other book pays such devoted attention to the form of books? Calvino’s ideas are purely exhilarating.

 

The hot sugar syrup needs to reach “soft-ball” stage in order to cook Italian meringue.

 

I must have been high on his genius, creativity, and playfulness when I attempted to climb into the trees myself and invent a series of Calvino-inspired pies, interlocking like the chapters of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and utilizing tree fruits and tree nuts from The Baron in the Trees. My plan also drew on a biographical note of Calvino’s: his parents were botanists, and his father pioneered the cultivation of exotic tree fruits in Italy, which made me feel that any tree fruit or nut was fair game. These high-concept pies would use new-to-me techniques such as chiffon, Italian meringue, chilled custard filling, blind-baked crusts, and pudding layers. I settled on the following menu of five, as seen in the photographs for this story: a sour cherry meringue pie with a nut-cookie crust; a tree-nut tart with apricots and mascarpone; a black-bottom peach pie with a mascarpone crust; an almond-cream pie with a chocolate crust; and a grapefruit chiffon pie with an almond-rosemary crust. Each of the pies would share an ingredient with the one preceding it, and the last, the grapefruit chiffon pie, would share sugar-whipped egg whites with the first, the sour cherry meringue pie.

It may already be apparent to the savvy reader that I had completely lost my mind. Previous successes in the kitchen have caused me to believe that my food mostly works out and that I can do anything with enough advance planning. As Calvino says about the mad sister who cooks the meals in The Baron in the Trees, “She had both diligence and imagination, prime talents of every cook.” I have those two qualities in spades. But while I have made five pies for a party before with no problem, they haven’t had multiple components, nor have they relied upon new techniques. None of my creations were inedible—they were all sweet, at least—but I had many difficulties. An ordinary lemon meringue pie consists of a curd filling and a topping of Italian meringue. I thought I’d try making a curd from sour cherries, which are tart like lemons, but the cherry flavor didn’t come through, and the taste was just strange. The first tree-nut-tart recipe I tried used egg and honey as a binding agent, which I should have known would be a problem, but it had the advantage of being something I could pour over a fancy arrangement of nuts, so I did it anyway. It was quiche-like and gross. My copy of The Flavor Bible says chocolate and peaches are good together, but the chocolate “black bottom” for my peach pie enhanced nothing. My almond-cream pie used almond extract for flavoring, which tasted synthetic. I also didn’t cook my pastry cream long enough, and that pie didn’t set. My grapefruit chiffon tasted pretty good, but the filling was not voluminous enough. And worst of all, for all my piecrusts I used variations on a base “nut cookie” recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Pie and Pastry Bible that wasn’t shapeable, didn’t look good, and tasted stale when baked. It was discouraging.

 

My crusts, like one of Calvino’s short story collections, were “difficult loves” (scraggly burned edges visible here).

 

Unlike the baron’s mad sister, I cannot bring myself to deliberately serve other people terrible food, so the recipes below have been adjusted (and even tested, somewhat) to offer up pies similar in spirit to my castles in the sky but hopefully better tasting. The most successful of these redos involved swapping the almond-cream pie on a brownie crust for a tarragon-cream pie on an Oreo crust, an invention of my own that actually worked. The photos will not be a perfect match, so consider this, dear reader, an experimental-fiction baking project where “you” enter the story as a creator in your own right. And consider our pies a work in progress, as the great writer says is true of the life of the mind.

 

 

Sour Cherry Meringue Pie

Piecrust requires at least three to four hours of chilling before being rolled out and baked. It is best made the day before baking and chilled overnight.

For the crust:

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp sugar

2 tbs vegetable shortening

6 tbs unsalted butter, cubed

1/2 cup ice water (use less as necessary)

milk, for brushing

sugar, for sprinkling

For the sour cherry filling:

8 cups sour cherries, pitted

1 cup sugar

4 tbs cornstarch

pinch of salt

For the Italian meringue:

1/2 cup sugar

2 tbs water

4 large egg whites

cream of tartar

 

 

First, make the crust. The secret to a good piecrust is to keep all the ingredients cold. I pop the bowl back into the refrigerator to chill for a few minutes between each step. I also use a little bit of vegetable shortening in my crusts because it helps the baked crust to hold its shape and I don’t believe it detracts from flakiness or flavor (controversial, I know).

Combine the flour, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Pinch in the two tablespoons of vegetable shortening until the mixture looks like coarse sand. Cut in the butter using a pastry blender until semicombined, leaving many large pea-size chunks. Drizzle in about half the cold water, and stir. Using your hands and working as quickly as possible, crunch the crust to see if it will come together in a ball. If not, add more water by the tablespoon until it does. Wrap the dough in saran wrap, and chill for at least three hours and preferably overnight.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 400.

Make the filling. Combine the cherries, sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a large bowl, and stir.

Remove the chilled pie dough from the refrigerator, and roll it out to about a quarter-inch thickness. Drape the crust over a nine-inch pie plate, and trim, leaving about an inch overhanging the edges. Chill in the freezer for five minutes. Remove the chilled crust, and fold the overhang under. Decoratively crimp the edges. Add the filling, and return the filled crust to the freezer for ten minutes. Brush the exposed crust edge with milk, sprinkle with sugar, set on a rimmed cookie sheet (to catch any juices before they drip onto the floor of your oven), and bake for fifty minutes to an hour, until the fruit has broken down and the filling is bubbling. If necessary, cover loosely with tinfoil about halfway through to prevent the crust from overbrowning. Remove and let cool while you prepare the meringue.

Make the Italian meringue. Ready a heatproof liquid measuring cup by the range. In a small, heavy saucepan, stir together the water and sugar until the sugar is moistened. Heat, stirring constantly, until the sugar dissolves and the syrup is bubbling. Stop stirring, and turn the heat down to the lowest setting. In a mixing bowl using the balloon-whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until foamy. Add the cream of tartar, and beat until stiff peaks form when the beater is raised slowly. Set aside. Increase the heat under the sugar syrup, and boil until a candy thermometer registers 236 degrees Fahrenheit (“soft-ball” stage). Pour the hot syrup into the liquid measure. Working as quickly as possible, pour a small amount of syrup over the egg whites with the mixer off. (This will avoid having the beaters spin the syrup onto the sides of the bowl.) Immediately beat at high speed for five seconds. Stop the mixer, and add a larger amount of syrup. Beat again at high speed. Add the remaining syrup, and beat until the outside of the bowl is no longer hot to the touch.

To finish, preheat the oven to broil.  Scoop the meringue into a large plastic piping bag with a one-inch opening snipped off the end. Pipe the meringue in large teardrops over the surface of the cherry pie, then set under the broiler to brown, watching carefully since it can take less than a minute. Serve immediately.

 

 

Tree-Nut Tart

Recipe adapted from The Splendid Table .

For the crust:

1 1/4 cups flour

3 tbs sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup butter, cold and cubed

1 1/2 egg yolks blended with 1 1/2 tbs water

For the filling:

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar

1/4 cup golden syrup (or honey)

2 tbs sugar

1 cup toasted, salted cashews

2/3 cup toasted, salted, chopped Brazil nuts

1/2 cup blanched whole almonds

1/3 cup salted, shelled pistachios

1/4 cup pecans, toasted

2 tbs heavy cream

1 1/2 tsp coarse salt

 

 

Make the pastry. Place the flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl, and whisk to combine. Add the butter, and pinch in with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse sand. Add the egg yolks, and stir to combine, then crunch with your hands until the mixture comes together in a ball. Wrap in saran wrap, and flatten into a disc. Chill for at least thirty minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400.

Butter an eleven-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Press the dough mixture evenly into the pan to a thickness of about an eighth of an inch, including up the sides and leaving a slight overhang. Refrigerate for thirty minutes.

Line the tart shell with parchment paper and fill with rice, beans, or pie weights. Place on a baking sheet. Bake for ten minutes, remove the weights, prick the dough all over with a fork, and bake for ten more minutes, until just starting to turn golden.

Make the filling. Reduce oven temperature to 350. In a small saucepan, combine butter, brown sugar, golden syrup (or honey), and granulated sugar. Cook over low heat, stirring until the sugars dissolve. Increase the heat, and whisk until the mixture comes to a boil. Continue boiling until large bubbles form, about a minute. Remove the pan from the heat. Add the nuts and cream, and stir.

Pour the nut mixture into the tart shell, and spread out evenly. Bake for twenty minutes or until the filling bubbles. When the tart has cooled, use a serrated knife to trim off the overhang of extra pastry, then release it from the tart mold, and serve.

 

 

White Chocolate Peach Tart

Start this pie the day before you plan to serve it. The pudding and topping should be chilled overnight. The tart crust can be blind-baked the evening before. The tart also requires three to four hours of additional chilling after assembly.

For the crust:

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar

2 tbs vegetable shortening

6 tbs unsalted butter, cubed

an egg, beaten

For the white chocolate:

2 tbs sugar

pinch of salt

2 tsp cornstarch

an egg yolk

1/2 cup milk

1/4 cup white chocolate chips

1/8 tsp vanilla

For the filling:

6 large ripe peaches, sliced

3/4 cup sugar

4 tbs cornstarch

1/2 tsp flaky salt (e.g., Maldon)

1/4 tsp cinnamon

 

 

First, make the crust. Combine flour, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Pinch in the two tablespoons of vegetable shortening until the mixture looks like coarse sand. Cut in the butter using a pastry blender. Add the egg, and stir. Using your hands and working as quickly as possible, crunch the crust to see if it will come together in a ball. If not, add more water by the teaspoon until it does. Wrap the dough in saran wrap, and chill for thirty minutes.

Make the pudding layer. Combine sugar, cornstarch, and egg yolk in a small pan, and whisk until combined. Add the milk slowly, whisking. Set the pan over medium-high heat, and cook until thickened, whisking constantly. Continue cooking until the mixture looks stodgy and no longer wobbly. Pour into a heatproof bowl, and set aside.

Put the white chocolate into a double boiler (or a glass bowl set over, but not touching, a pot of boiling water), and melt, stirring occasionally with a dry spoon. Add melted white chocolate and an eighth of a teaspoon of vanilla to the pudding mixture, and stir to combine. Set aside to chill, at least six hours and preferably overnight.

Make the filling. Combine peaches, sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a saucepan, and simmer fifteen minutes until the peaches are bubbling and collapsed and the mixture has thickened. Chill overnight.

Blind-bake the tart shell. Preheat the oven to 400. Remove the chilled dough from the refrigerator, and roll it out to about a quarter-inch thickness. Drape it over an eleven-inch tart pan with a loose bottom, leaving some overhang. Press the crust firmly into the bottom and sides of the pan, and build up the overhang so the shell has room to shrink. Chill in the freezer for five minutes. Line with parchment paper, and fill with rice, beans, or pie weights, and bake for ten minutes. Remove the pie weights, prick the crust all over with a fork, and bake ten more minutes or until starting to turn golden. Set aside to cool.

To assemble, spread the cooled pudding on the base of the tart shell, top with peaches, and chill at least three hours before serving.

 

 

Tarragon-Cream Pie with Oreo Crust

This pie requires chilling for at least six hours and preferably overnight.

For the Oreo crust:

24 Oreos

4 tbs unsalted butter, melted

1/2 tsp kosher salt

For the tarragon custard:

1/2 cup sugar

3 tbs cornstarch

3/4 tsp salt

3 cups whole milk

6 egg yolks

2 tbs unsalted butter, cubed

1 tsp vanilla

a bunch of tarragon, about 1 cup, not chopped  

For the topping:

2 cups heavy cream

2 tbs sugar

 

 

To make the crust, preheat the oven to 350. Pulse the Oreos in a food processor (or pound them with a mortar and pestle) until fine crumbs form. Add the melted butter and salt, and stir to combine. Press the crumbs evenly along the bottom and up the sides of a nine-inch pie plate. Bake until fragrant, about twelve minutes.

To make the filling, set a sieve and a medium bowl next to the stove. In a medium saucepan, whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Add the egg yolks, and whisk to combine. Add the milk in a slow stream, continuing to whisk. Add the tarragon. Set the pan over medium-high heat, and stir until the mixture has thickened and come to a low boil, about eight minutes. Remove the tarragon. (Don’t worry if you don’t get all of it; you’ll be sieving the mixture later.) Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture is stodgy. Don’t stop while it’s still wobbly or the pie will not set. Remove from heat, and scrape out into the sieve using a rubber spatula. Press the mixture through the sieve. Let cool.

Pour the filling into the prepared piecrust, and chill overnight.

Just prior to serving, whip two cups of cream with two tablespoons of sugar and a quarter teaspoon of vanilla until distinct peaks form. (If you’re using a mixer, be careful not to not overwhip. I use a whisk, which makes overwhipping more difficult.) Top the pie with the whipped cream, and serve.

 

 

Frozen Grapefruit Chiffon Pie with Gingersnap Crust

For the crust:

2 1/2 cups gingersnaps

4 tbs unsalted butter, melted

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp rosemary, very finely minced

For the filling:

2 grapefruits, zested and juiced

4 eggs, with yolks and whites separated

1 cup sugar, divided

1/4 tsp salt

1 1/3 cups heavy cream

1/2 tsp cream of tartar

 

 

To make the crust, preheat the oven to 350. Blitz the gingersnaps in a food processor (or use a mortar and pestle) until fine crumbs form. Add the butter, salt, and rosemary, and stir to combine. Press the mixture evenly along the bottom and up the sides of a nine-inch pie plate. Bake for twelve minutes, until toasted and fragrant. Set aside to cool.

To make the filling, bring the grapefruit juice to a boil and cook, uncovered, about twenty minutes, until reduced to about three tablespoons of liquid.

Set a sieve and a medium bowl next to the stove. In a double boiler (or a glass dish suspended over boiling water), stir together the four egg yolks, the salt, half a cup of the sugar, and the grapefruit reduction. Heat the mixture, stirring constantly, till just below the boiling point. The mixture will thicken, and steam will begin to appear. It should leave a well-defined track when a finger is run across the back of the mixing spoon. Remove from heat and push through the strainer with a rubber spatula. Add the grapefruit zest, stir, and chill.

Whip the cream until distinct peaks form. Combine the cream with the chilled grapefruit mixture.

To make the meringue, whip the egg whites on low speed until foamy, then add the cream of tartar, increase the speed to medium, and whip until soft peaks form. Add a tablespoon of the remaining sugar, increase the speed to high, and continue whipping, adding sugar gradually until it is all incorporated and the mixture is glossy and stiff.

Fold the meringue into the egg yolk mixture, gently but thoroughly. Mound the filling into the prepared crust, making decorative swirls with the spatula, and freeze for at least six hours or preferably overnight.

 

 

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