The Paris Review's Blog, page 154

Self-Portrait in Venice

Lion of Venice, Photo: Didier Descouens. CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

In maps of the brain, the central cortex is shaped like Venice. The amygdale, the locus of emotion and fear, is the quarter of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo; the hippocampus, the site of long- and short-term memory, is the entry into Venice via the Grand Canal; the cerebellum, which regulates balance, the lagoon bordered by the Lido; the hypothalamus, which controls circadian rhythms, the Piazza San Marco. The first summer I came to Venice, I was nineteen. I was with a boy I thought I might marry, and we sat on the steps of the baroque basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, which is a short walk from where I am writing now, at the Pensione Accademia, in the quieter environs of Dorsoduro. We ate sandwiches made of pressed veal, and drank cans of aranciata. It was too expensive to stay in Venice; we took the train from Padua, where we had gone to see the Giottos in the Scrovegni Chapel, and stayed in a gimcrack boardinghouse where the walls were paperboard painted to look like wood. The ceiling of the chapel was flecked with gold stars. Now, in Padua, you walk into an air-controlled chamber and have fifteen minutes to look at the frescoes. Then, you stayed as long as you liked. We sat in the pews and read letters that Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote from Italy. It was hot and I argued with the boy—I did not want to hear any more about Savonarola, with whom he had become obsessed. He had written a senior thesis on Jonathan Edwards, about whom I had previously listened. To annoy me, because I would not listen, he was rude to an old friend of mine who had come up for the day from Florence, where she was studying, to meet us.

It has been years since I spoke to either of them. Perhaps it is better for me to come to Venice alone; there is no one with whom I have been to Venice that I am now on speaking terms, as if one caprice of the city is to induce fever dreams from which there is no return. On June 4, 1851, Mrs. Browning wrote to a Miss Mitford:

I have been between heaven and earth since our arrival at Venice. The heaven of it is ineffable. Never had I touched the skirts of so ineffable a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water … nothing is like it, not a second Venice in the world … But now comes the earth side: Robert, after sharing the ecstasy, grows uncomfortable and nervous, unable to sleep or eat, and poor Wilson, still worse, in a miserable condition of sickness and headaches.

On the earth side, from the man whose face was like a portrait by Bronzino: “Would like to report something amusing yet I have really overstretched myself and am paying for it … Today high blood pressure, splitting headache, not enough sleep, and all the usual tension.” Perhaps my own instinct for complication, for the rococo, for situations that cannot possibly resolve themselves, can be traced to an inability to keep track of a thought a sensible person would heed—a grain of millet blown over San Marco, which, left to fall into the canal, swells and bursts?

The night before I left for Venice, I was beside myself, turning the bedside lamp on and off as if it were a lighthouse, without which I would founder. Beside myself as beside a fish, snagged from the water, slapping its tail on the dock. In a room downtown where I go every week to talk about the catch in my throat, the man to whom I am speaking, who has close-cut gray hair and the face of a turtle, who does not take his eyes off me once, says: “Why do we saying ‘falling in love’? What does it mean?”

In the morning, before I left, in order to distract myself from nervous tension, I walked from the tall drafty house to Eighty-First Street, to buy some books, and then walked back, a round trip distance of four miles, carrying a new phone I bought in order not to vanish from the earth when the plane touched down at Marco Polo Airport, as if I were a scout going into the woods with only a compass and candy bar, a stick figure teetering on a high bridge. There was a gull on the stoplight at Ninety-Sixth Street. Manhattan is also a city surrounded by water. For months, typing in bed before even the cats woke, the long letter I was writing—the letter that was now shaped like a book, a very bad book, but a book—had threatened to engulf me. I was caught between the present and the past like a fly to flypaper. The past is narrative, Primo Levi says; the present, description.

*

The best way to approach Venice from the airport is to take the water taxi. It is also the most expensive. Like most things in Venice, there are convolutions before the payoff. There is no transport between the airport proper and the boat dock where the water taxis come in. You pull or carry your luggage down a long pathway, a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile, following signs put up to encourage the traveler. This is the last direct route in Venice, the last walk on which not to get lost. At the dock, Manolo, the director of water traffic, talks endlessly into his cell phone, gesticulating about what seems to be nothing at all. He is a handsome man, taller than most Venetians, and indeed, he is not from Venice but from Naples.

The company’s logo is a winged gold lion, the symbol of Venice’s patron saint, the apostle Mark, who appears to the prophet Ezekiel as a lion with wings; the lion is often depicted over water, to show dominance over the seas. The story of the winged lion is a fairy tale of gilt and chicanery. In the ninth century, three avid Venetians removed the body of Saint Mark from his tomb, in Alexandria. To hide the body, they put it in a basket and covered it with herbs and pork flesh, which Muslims would not touch. As they set sail for Venice, a great storm blew up, and Saint Mark appeared to the captain, who sailed the boat to safety. The Venetians carved the likeness of the winged lion on their doorways, and kept lions as pets. One was kept in a gilded cage, in the piazza, until it died, poisoned by the gilt paint it licked off the bars. A Venetian story. Lions were then forbidden in the city precincts for a hundred years.

After a long wait, water taxis arrive, and passengers board the boats in no discernible order. My suitcase is handed over. The lagoon straightens itself out briefly to a funnel as it passes San Michele, the island of the dead. The boatman knows everyone on the waterway. He raises his hand in greeting to each boat we pass. He is solicitous; if it is too windy I can go in the cabin. It is windy, but I have wound a scarf around my head. He nods, satisfied. We pass through the fog, and then, all at once, it is there: the Grand Canal, beautiful and absurd. Can there really be gondolas? There are. A little boy waves from the window of a vaporetto, a boy who looks exactly like the son who belongs to the face in the mirror. He keeps waving madly, all the way until the taxi turns into the landing of the hotel on the Rio di San Trovaso, right before the Ponte Accademia. For a moment it is all light and water. At the hotel, the hanging geraniums are violet, red, and pink. There is a little step down to the concierge desk, but despite the warning sign I trip.

Everyone trips. The pensione is like the water taxi, like Venice, beautiful and impossible. In the garden, bougainvillea hangs over a glider, a waiter brings you delicious snacks with your evening drink, and at breakfast there is melon the color of a sunset. But you must log on with a different password every day to use the internet, postage is noted carefully in a book, and the windows in your room, though you have asked to have them left open, are shut up tight against the air from the lagoon, which, the chambermaid says, is not healthy for sleep: “Signora, it will give you nightmares.” Incubi. She makes a strangling gesture with her hands, and rolls her blue eyes like a horror-movie starlet. “You have been here before, yes?” Guido, at the desk, asks, “but with your husband, a man with silver hair?”

In a portrait of the brain made by phrenologists, the cerebral cortex, San Marco, is the location of the sublime. Venice is a city of the unconscious. Joseph Brodsky, who is buried on San Michele, wrote: “I felt I’d stepped into my own self-portrait in the cold air.” And, in the middle of a reverie about the Grand Canal:

I say this here and now to save the reader disillusionment. I am not a moral man (though I try to keep my conscience in balance) or a sage; I am neither an aesthete nor a philosopher. I am but a nervous man, by circumstance and by my own deeds; but I am observant … I have no principles; all I’ve got is nerves. What follows, therefore, has to do with the eye rather than with convictions, including those as to how to run a narrative. One’s eye precedes one’s pen, and I resolve not to let my pen lie about its position.

What is the position of my pen, writing in the garden of the Pensione Accademia, at ten in the morning in the month of June? Venice is a city of nerves, running on harp strings, Carnevale looping into Lent. My own life, too, it seemed to me, veered between impulse and a mania for privacy and restraint, which is one way of saying that I was especially chary with what was the truth. I had many reasons I used to explain this away, none of them good. I slept with the windows open, inviting the incubi. In the middle of the night, a speedboat with the motor idling outside the window, although motorboats after 8 P.M. are forbidden, plays Electric Ladyland loud enough to wake the dead on San Michele. Behind the closed shutters, someone in Dorsoduro turns over, dreaming. A girl walks by on the strada, using her cell phone as a flashlight.

Yesterday, on the way to sit on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, I window-shopped: velvet, glass, marzapane in the shape of starfish. Outside a shop selling evening clutches made of scored velvet, shining like jam studded with gold beads, a woman in tennis shoes says to another, “Very pretty but will you use it in Portsmouth?” The treasures of Venice are like dreams told before breakfast. When they leave the light of La Serenissima they turn to dross. In another shop, I see a tiny glass goblet, azure and gold. The stem is a snake, the letter s. In the middle of the night, I resolve to return to the shop and find it again—a present for Bronzino. The laptop on which I am typing here in the garden keeps New York time: it is 4:27 A.M. in the tall drafty house and on Seventy-Eighth Street, which is empty because he is sleeping elsewhere. I am awake while almost everyone else is asleep, although an email arrives sent from Christchurch, New Zealand, dated tomorrow, from the voice on the telephone to whom I am not speaking. It does not tell me what to do next.

I have been in many cities on my own before, but not Venice. I write to Bronzino, but for now do not send a message that says, I very much wanted you to come with me but now I think it is better you did not. I say I will explain when I return. At a concert at San Vidal, at the turn of the Accademia bridge, I list all the reasons I must embark on my own into the byways of the lagoon. One: Bronzino understands music deeply, I do not. The first half of the program is Vivaldi, and I resolve to leave at intermission. The church is full of students, it is hot, I am thirsty. Instead, I exit in the interval and buy an aranciata at a bar in the campo, then find myself back in my seat. It is Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in G minor, and I burst into tears, although I do not know why it moves me or when I have heard it last.

The next morning, at Santa Maria dei Miracoli, hemmed so tight in Cannareggio that it might be a white handkerchief in the district’s pocket, I am in tears again. The confectionary marble church, finished in 1490, was built to house Niccolo di Pietro’s icon of the Madonna, which is said to have shed real tears. Perfectly restored, the church is a favorite of Venetian brides. Mermaids and angels are carved into the chancel. When I first saw it, at nineteen, I thought: I will get married here. I have been married twice, neither time in Venice. It is perhaps not adequate to say that the marriages have not lasted, for, after all, they have yielded children, monographs, candlesticks, cabinets, all of which are scattered here and there, lasting.

On the way to the campo, I find a shop where years ago I bought a gold bracelet that I later lost in New York at the movies. The proprietor, older, is seated in exactly the same place, behind the glass counter filled with junk. Is there another bracelet? No. She shows me an extraordinarily ugly opal ring, which I consider buying. The last time I was there, on the steps by the shop was a little girl just out of her pram, with whom I shared a cornetto, while her parents drank un’ombra across the campo, looking at me gratefully. I was married then, and my husband sat nearby at a little table, drinking a coffee. In his pocket was a box containing gold earrings set with jade and pearls he had found while out walking that morning. It was the last trip we made together.

In Venice there are the usual places to go: San Marco; the Frari, where the Madonna soars convincingly up to heaven; the Rialto. These places do not usually include the church of I Gesuiti, on the esplanade of the Fondamente Nove. The way there is along the west flank of the hospital, near the Questura. I ask a young mother pushing a baby, who holds a sticky ice cream, for directions. The sun is so hot that I inch along, looking for shade. Then there is the high arched bridge beyond the vaporetto stands, and the Gesuiti, looming, solemn as an elephant. The first time I came here I was sick, and the sacristan found me a place in the back where there was cool water and I could put my face in my hands. Today heat gleams on the steps. Inside it is quiet. I am the only person on earth in the church. How can it be? The floor, which is made of black-and-white marble, a geometric pattern not quite classifiable, is uneven and undulates beneath the pews. The interior is entirely black and white—Jesuitical. When I look up I am amazed to find that the curtains over the pulpit, which I had always thought were huge swags of black-and-white figured velvet, are in fact marble carved to look like velvet.

In Venice things are and are not what they seem, the strobe light of the imagination is on full-time. It is daunting, the combination of beauty and legerdemain. On the way back to the pensione, after an evening out, the water under the Ponte Accademia is black, then azure, the lights of the vaporetto turning the waves sunset colors until it disappears in the direction of Ca’ Rezzonico, the palazzo where Robert Browning died. It was owned by his son, Pen, and his rich American daughter-in-law, Fannie Coddington Barrett; Browning, whom Venice made nervous but who could not stay away.

 

Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry—including, most recently, Orbit (2017)—as well as five books for children and a collection of essays, An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (2013). Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale University.

Excerpt from Two Cities , by Cynthia Zarin, published next week by David Zwirner Books. © 2020 Cynthia Zarin.

The Art of Distance No. 20

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below.

“Many summertime rituals have been iced this year in the name of health and safety, including those of Hollywood. No big summer blockbusters for 2020; big-ticket movies have been postponed or sent straight to streaming. And while there is more content to watch on our laptops now than at any time in human history, I miss the movies: the chance to spend a few hours in the cineplex’s too-cold air conditioning, eating oversalted popcorn and watching something with a lot of explosions and/or dinosaur attacks. That being said, maybe even more than mall multiplexes and The Lost World, I’m missing my neighborhood theaters: I think it was at Village East—formerly a Yiddish theater, now on the National Register of Historic Places—that I saw my last film in theaters, a German epic inspired by the life of Gerhard Richter, Never Look Away. Little did I know those three-plus hours of huge cinematography, swelling music, and fraught, inspired narrative would have to last me awhile.   

But! There is a bright side to this theater-free season: The Paris Review can take you to the movies, in some literary sense. Read on for unlocked fiction, poetry, and interviews that can transport you to the cineplex, and below, find details on our own streaming offering: Plimpton!, the documentary (a New York Times Critics’ Pick) about the magazine’s charismatic, intelligent, and always adventurous founder.” —Emily Nemens, Editor

From The Virgin Suicides. Photo: © Paramount Classics / Courtesy Everett Collection

There’s some COVID-appropriate hoarding in Rachel Khong’s “The Freshening,” but I highlight the story because the protagonist is also stuck at home, screening blockbusters in a suboptimal DIY cinema setup: “I took the ancient VCR from my closet. I plugged the cords into the television set. I had only four VHS tapes in my possession, and those, of course, were Supermans I through IV.”

The plot of The Virgin Suicides, the Jeffrey Eugenides short story that debuted in 1990 in The Paris Review, the subsequent novel, and the Sofia Coppola film, is summed up in the three-world title and summarily expanded in the story’s first line: “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” Of course, the how and why is why we read, and from this early glimpse of Eugenides’s first novel you can see a skilled storyteller recount the tragic tale of the Lisbon daughters with such empathy, wryness, and eye for detail that it nearly makes the camera redundant.

Go behind the camera with Claribel Alegría in her poem “Documentary,” translated from the Spanish. The poet calls the shots in an imagined documentary of her “wounded country,” and the reader views her shot list just as a camera might: “A panorama of iguanas, / chickens, / strips of meat, / wicker baskets, / piles of nances, / nisperos, / oranges.”

Deborah Eisenberg’s “Taj Mahal” looks at the film business from another angle: the familial. The narrator is offloaded on his filmmaker father, Anton Pavlak: “When I tell people that I was sent to stay with Pavlak during the heyday of his Hollywood period and I name some of the actresses who were likely to star in the breakfasts I had with him at his home, they look at me as if I’d said that my mother used to send me out to play with lions and tigers.” There are few felines here, but a good brunch scene—another thing that feels of another era.

The Paris Review has published a handful of Art of Screenwriting interviews, but in exploring that subcategory you might miss David Mamet, the wearer of many hats, who discusses his jump to moviemaking in his Art of Theater interview. “A lot of it, directing especially, is how many boxes are hidden in this drawing?”

And I’ll close with a reminder that there is a silver lining to watching movies at home—no annoying seatmates. As Chase Twichell reminds us in her poem “Bad Movie, Bad Audience,” sometimes that Chatty Cathy a few rows back can really be a drag.

This week, Paris Review readers have an exclusive opportunity to rent or purchase Plimpton!, the 2013 documentary about the founder and longtime editor of the Review, who was “one of the great adventurers of the 20th century.” The film was created by the team behind The Paris Review’s My First Time video series, and it follows George Plimpton “on a lifelong journey akin to fictional characters such as Forrest Gump and Indiana Jones. He hung out with U.S. Presidents, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, forced Willie Mays to pop out in Yankee Stadium … played goalie for the Boston Bruins, struck the triangle for the New York Philharmonic and acted alongside John Wayne, Warren Beatty and Matt Damon,” all while editing the Review. May this film offer you some meaningful distraction and insight into the life of an iconic literary figure. A portion of the proceeds from every digital rental goes to support The Paris Review, a 501(c)(3), so please consider watching early and often.

Sign up here to receive a fresh installment of The Art of Distance in your inbox every Monday .

The Crisis Cliché

On a Saturday, as though the concept of “weekend” still pertains, we go for a drive. This is a great excitement. It marks the day as different from other days, brings it into Technicolor, and it feels like movie magic to be in a car in motion, seeing a wider world of different streets out the passenger window, now more zoetrope than mere plane of glass. I gaze through it with moronic delight, like a person who’s never ridden in a car before. There’s also—after all these slow, ambulatory weeks—the plain thrill of speed as we accelerate onto the highway. All of this is heightened by the frisson of the illicit, because these roads are deserted and above them loom signs telling us to avoid nonessential travel. As I read them, something both sincere and self-mocking rises up in me, wailing, to ask: “but what’s ‘essential’ anymore, what does ‘essential’ mean now?” The things we used to hold essential—human touch, in particular—are now denied. Masked, we stand six feet away from our friends making hugging motions at each other in a sad, awkward, teddy-bear like travesty of the real thing. It is so good and necessary to touch and be touched. It is also so good and necessary not to transmit this virus which, unlike touch, is not a discrete and contained contract between two, but a potentially endless chain of infection. So I know that this drive, this nonessential travel, is an infraction. I also know that leaving the house and getting in the car strikes me as a psychological necessity, that is to say, essential.

The world has become much smaller—physically circumscribed by the walls of our homes, socially contracted to the friends we wish to call (or Zoom)—and simultaneously bigger, because now all the shameful inequities of this country tower over things, crudely exposed and monstrous. The enormous problem, then, is the political one: the way in which we’re called to do all we can to ensure this moment reconstitutes us in lasting, salutary ways. And then there’s the much smaller problem: the individual one, my problem, which is that I have not written King Lear in quarantine. Instead, I have been mostly logging in and out of Twitter, against a white noise brain backdrop of Rilke, on loop, going: “You must change your life.” In “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” he ends the sentence and with it the poem like that—a sober period. In my head it ends with a hysterical flurry of exclamation points and runs in all caps.

The signs above the freeway are also in all caps. They usually read EXPECT DELAYS or some other bathos of pure information. But today, they exhort LOVE ONE ANOTHER, preach THIS TOO SHALL PASS. I’m embarrassed to be moved; how perturbing that something can be both trite and true. To witness utilitarian urban scenery transformed from signs, in the most factual and straightforward sense of the word, into signs in the metaphorical sense, strikes me as amazing. As in: Omens! Symbols! Things glowing with meaning! I think of Jenny Holzer and her sometimes-luminous truisms. (WISHING THINGS AWAY IS NOT EFFECTIVE; ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.) Specifically, I think about their increased ubiquity since the election of a reality-TV bigot to the presidency of the United States, an event, which, like the sightless fools we are, we thought to be the peak catastrophe, not knowing it was just the prelude to the even bigger disaster to come. Through this second disaster, the pandemic, the awfulness of the first disaster has been emphasized. The murderous ineptitude, venality, and total moral vacancy of that reality-TV bigot has been revealed as even worse than we first believed.  

I don’t think the popularity of these Holzerisms can be explained solely by their quality of easily echoed sloganeering, or to put it another way, their tweetability. I think it’s more to do with the fear pervading this moment. In a nation under siege, in a hyperaccelerated, roiling time of horror and confusion and pain and panic, our resistance to platitudes grows vulnerable. Because who wouldn’t want the consolation of a solid and righteous thing, all caps blazing, in all this fucked-up flotsam? I think of another Holzerism, perhaps her most famous of all: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. Just as I recall it, here’s Morrissey, doleful and arch and sincere all at the same time, singing out the car stereo: “Please, please, please let me get what I want.”

LOVE ONE ANOTHER. THIS TOO SHALL PASS. But that was yesterday. And now it’s today and I feel a venomous loathing for these same phrases; for, respectively, a milksop of a plea and a warm fart of a bromide. Still, the days continue to ask varietals of the same question: How will you live now? What matters now? You can avert your gaze from the question and mutter, teenager-ish, to be left alone, but the question still stands there, hands on hips, waiting for an answer. It doesn’t go away.

We know this: that grief accentuates feeling in all directions, especially those poles of euphoria and despair. When flayed by loss, horror, bereavement you become radically sensitized—being skinless, you feel it all. It’s why eulogies tend to be better than wedding toasts. Grief also seems to paint coincidence in all things, making the world a web of meaning, or at least, presenting that welcome delusion. Lately, I think of a friend I haven’t been in touch with for years and then minutes later her name lights up my phone with a text. I think of the Holzer line and then Morrissey sings it. And so on.

The coincidences are not always numinous: in the car on that drive home, my partner and I find ourselves talking about Hooters, the large-breast-themed restaurant franchise, which, improbably, still exists. At least, we think it does. Does Hooters still exist? And if it exists (as we think it does), might there be one nearby? We, a couple of vegan feminists, joke desultorily about making Hooters the first restaurant we visit when lockdown is lifted. Haha. Who knows, maybe they have good fries, we could eat those. And then I look out the passenger window and, unbelievably, I see a Hooters. There it is, its bright orange signage, its cheerfully vulgar bubble font. I hoot. What a trashy miracle.

Cliché, as with the writer’s other sworn enemy, sentimentality, cheapens and ossifies experience, and so prevents us from seeing and feeling. In order to get at the truth of seeing and feeling, the writer has to make it new: this itself has become a cliché of writing instruction since Ezra Pound first made the injunction.

This is no time for clichés, and this is absolutely the time for clichés. Indeed, now more than ever. No time for them because a crisis like this demands that we be at our most awake, our most rigorous, our most discerning. We must actually make it new, “it” being nothing less than the country, our attitudes, our priorities, our governance, our vision. But also, very much a time for them. First, because, in their familiarity, they present comfort, at a time when no feeling person could deny another such a thing. Let’s take whatever we can—rewatching old episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, eating microwaveable snacks associated with childhood, or, yes, succumbing to the cosiness of a well-worn phrase. Why shouldn’t we allows ourselves the reminder that what does not kill you makes you stronger—and still won’t kill you, and still makes you stronger, over and over. There’s a reassuringly obdurate quality of repetition to cliché; it produces the same quieting effect as hearing the jolly theme to a long-running TV show, that credit music you’ve heard hundreds of times before. The French word, in fact, is onomatopoeic, meant to conjure the sound of a metal printing plate, a term which suggests identical copies turned out, ad infinitum. Second, and this is more germane to the moment, clichés provide comfort in being sites of consensus. In 2020, there can seem very little solid epistemological ground to stand on: unchecked falsehoods are promulgated across networks, voter suppression falsifies democracy, we disagree viciously and often punitively about what’s offensive and what’s acceptable, all while a shameless and fatuous president spouts torrents of lies which perhaps can’t even be called that since the notion is predicated on the perpetrator having some sense of truth. So it is that we might find ourselves shoulder to metaphorical shoulder, huddled around the campfire of this too shall pass.

It’s hard to get warm at that campfire. Instead, I find myself putting desperate, doomed demands on every book I open. That same voice of self-mocking sincerity wails, Who will tell me the truth! And (contra Holzer), Deliver me from cliché! I don’t want truism or escapism, I want truth and the opposite of escapism.

I read some A. R. Ammons. I sense I’ve found a grown-up, that is to say, a person who knows that you never really grow up, that there’s no terminus of selfhood, no full and final repletion, that you never arrive, but instead, if you’re really lucky, if you really try, you just keep growing.

In Ammons’s poem “Corson’s Inlet” there’s a sense of Yeats’s bitter, sardonic line, “the best lack all conviction” taken ingenuously, in other words, renewed into sincerity; Ammons is consolingly uncertain. To lack conviction offers itself as the best way to be. The uncertain poet allows himself a walk. Across the dunes, on the sand, he is “released from forms”: a pleasing line to find in any poem that, however loose, must take line and form. Nature has effected this release, freeing him from “perpendiculars”—all the “straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds/ of thought” and delivering him instead to “the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends/ of sight.” Terror and freedom run in and out of each other, as they tend to do. It’s exhilarating to be within his consciousness, “all possibilities of escape open” as he declares, “I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries.” To reside in this world of uncertainty seems less an abdication than a brave engagement.  “How will you live now?” takes on new light, presenting itself as a question that calls more to be dwelt in than answered. Ammons’s poem, both bleak and rapturous, ends with him, “enjoying the freedom that”:

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

A new drive, a new walk, another tomorrow in which to try again to make it new.

 

Hermione Hoby is a novelist and cultural critic. She is the author of the 2018 novel Neon in Daylight. Her second novel, Virtue, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

Murder Most Foul

The legendary mystery writer P. D. James, often dubbed the Queen of Crime, was born on this day a hundred years ago. Below, read her 1982 essay “Murder Most Foul,” in which she explains her attraction to detective stories, considers what makes a successful whodunit, and highlights her favorite practitioners of the genre—including her predecessor Agatha Christie, “a lady I think of less as a novelist than as a literary conjurer whose sleight of hand as she shuffles her cardboard characters can outwit the keenest eye.”

P. D. James. Photo: Ulla Montan.

“Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent enjoyment than any other single subject.” So wrote Dorothy L. Sayers in 1934. She was, of course, thinking of murder; not the sordid, messy and occasionally pathetic murders of real life but the more elegantly contrived and mysterious concoctions of the detective novelist. To judge, too, from the universal popularity of the genre, it isn’t only the Anglo-Saxons who share this enthusiasm for murder most foul. From Greenland to Japan, millions of readers are perfectly at home in Sherlock Holmes’s claustrophobic sanctum at 221B Baker Street, Miss Marple’s charming cottage at St. Mary Mead, and Lord Peter Wimsey’s elegant apartment in Piccadilly. There is nothing like a potent amalgam of mystery and mayhem to make the whole world kin.

When I came to write my first novel in the early sixties it never occurred to me to begin with anything but a mystery, partly I think because its highly disciplined form provides an admirable apprenticeship for a writer who aspires to become a serious novelist. I had always enjoyed the genre—Dorothy L. Sayers was a potent influence—and I was fascinated by the challenge of trying to do something new with the well-worn conventions of the detective story: the central mysterious death; the closed circle of suspects each with a credible motive; the arrival of the detective like the avenging deity of an old Morality Play; the final solution which the reader himself can arrive at by logical deduction from clues presented to him with deceptive cunning but essential fairness.

In my own reading it wasn’t the puzzle which most intrigued me and I sometimes think that fewer readers watch for every clue, note every twist in the plot, and sniff happily after every red herring than we writers imagine. My younger daughter, reading my latest book, merely comments: “It can’t be him or her; you like them too much”, and I suspect that most of us guess the murderer more through our knowledge of the author, his style, prejudices, and foibles, than through close attention to every detail of the plot. We are pitting our wits primarily against the writer, not his villain or his detective.

So if correctly guessing the identity of the murderer isn’t always the chief attraction, what is? Perhaps it is the age-old and universal pleasure provided by a well-told story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, a tale which takes us into a world in which we know that wrong will finally be righted, the guilty exposed, the innocent vindicated, and human reason will triumph. Perhaps is it the frisson of vicarious terror and danger as we sit safely by our fireside or pull the bedclothes more comfortably under our chin. Above all, in our increasingly violent and irrational world—in which so many of our societal problems seem insoluble—the mystery offers the psychological comfort of a story, based on the premise that murder is still the unique crime, that even the most unpleasant character has the right to live to the last natural moment, and that there is no problem, however difficult, which cannot be solved by human ingenuity, human intelligence, and human courage. I suspect that these are some of the reasons why I enjoy mysteries. Perhaps they are also the reason why I choose to write them.

One of the ancillary pleasures of reading mysteries is that of discovering new facts and gaining an insight into different and fascinating worlds. It has been said that a good mystery consists of twenty-five percent puzzle, twenty-five percent characterization, and fifty percent what the author knows best, and I, for one, have much enjoyed learning about horse racing from Dick Francis, theatrical life from Ngaio Marsh, banking from Emma Lathen, and campanology from Dorothy L. Sayers. The setting, too, is of immense importance in transporting us to another world. I can gain a keener and more perceptive understanding of Californian life and mores from Ross Macdonald than from any travel book. I walk the bridges of Amsterdam with Nicolas Freeling’s Van der Valk, or swelter in the heat of Bombay with H. R. F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote, while the very smells and sounds of Paris rise from the pages of Simenon.

At the risk of disappointing mystery fiends, I have to confess that I am not an addict in the sense that I have to have my daily fix even if the dose isn’t up to strength or standard. My reading is discriminating and, I admit, somewhat limited. Much as I admire those fine writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (and their influences not only on crime writing but on the modern novel has been significant), I am not really an aficionado of the school of gun, guts, and gore. I prefer a more domestic murder; the contrast between an ordered society or environment and the shocking and contaminating irruption of violent death. Those writers I most enjoy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh, are all experts in malice domestic, and they conform to W. H. Auden’s dictum that “the corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.” All three worked within the conventions of the genre, yet all helped to raise the mystery from a subliterary puzzle to a form with serious claims to be regarded as a novel. All understand the importance of setting and atmosphere. All could create characters who are more than stereotypes waiting like cardboard cutouts to be knocked down by the detective. All set their stories unambiguously in their time and place and made some attempt to combine the mystery with the novel of social realism. I would place Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors high on my list of favorites, while Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke is probably among the best mysteries ever written. The opposing characters of the murderer, Jack Havoc, and the gentle but implacable Canon Avril make nonsense of the criticism that the mystery is an essentially trivial form and that the great absolutes of good and evil are, and must always remain, outside its range.

It is interesting that all three writers are women as, of course, was that phenomenon, the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, a lady I think of less as a novelist than as a literary conjurer whose sleight of hand as she shuffles her cardboard characters can outwit the keenest eye. Because this quartet of female experts in death are preeminent, I am often asked the invidious question: “Why are respectable middle-class ladies so good at murder?” It may be that literary mayhem is our way of sublimating our aggression or of purging irrational feelings of anxiety or guilt, but I doubt whether we need delve into psychological theory for an answer. The construction of clues demands a keen eye for the domestic details of everyday life, and in this women excel. Who was where and with whom and when? Who ate the poisoned salad and who prepared it? What woman would wear that purple lipstick found by the body? Who locked the library door and when? At what time precisely was that telltale red stain first noticed on the bedroom floor? And women are particularly skilled at dealing with the motives for murder, the tensions, intrigues, jealousies, and resentments which can fester in the closed circles beloved of crime writers to erupt finally into the ultimate crime.

A bad mystery is the easiest of all books to write; a good mystery is among the most difficult. The problems of construction itself are formidable. So much has to be achieved within the eighty to ninety thousand words which are the average length for the genre. The characters of the detective, victim, and up to half a dozen suspects must be firmly established and psychologically credible; the method of murder must be feasible and, if possible, original; the setting must both influence and enhance the mood of the story; the denouement—that most difficult chapter of all to write successfully—must be intellectually satisfying as well as exciting. The whole may be likened to one of those ingenious puzzles: oddly shaped pieces of wood which, when fitted together, form a perfect sphere. To achieve this, careful preliminary planning is essential before the first word is written. I usually make notes, not only of the weather, location, and characters, but of where everyone is at the crucial time of death. I try to describe the murder realistically and I am sometimes asked whether I frighten myself. The answer has to be no. I can be frightened by the books of others, never by my own. Perhaps this is because, paradoxically, the writer needs to be both deeply involved in and yet detached from his work.

And what of the future? For years now critics have prophesied the demise of the mystery, at least in its traditional form. One nineteenth-century critic, reviewing Conan Doyle, wrote: “In view of the difficulty of hitting on any fancies that are decently fresh, surely this sensational business must soon come to an end.” Certainly, it isn’t easy to invent original ways of murder, while the exotic and sometimes bizarre settings of some modern mysteries bear witness to the almost desperate search for new locations and fresh ideas. “Death hath a thousand doors to let out life” and most of them must have been used by now. Apart from the ubiquitous blunt instrument, shooting, hanging, and throttling, the unfortunate victims have been dispatched by the prolonged ringing of church bells; stabbing with an icicle; a bullet from a revolver triggered by the loud pedal of a piano; poison on the back of postage stamps; the injection of a bubble into a vein. A few have even been frightened to death.

But still the sensational business flourishes, a source of innocent relaxation, diversion, and reassurance to new generations of readers. The modern mystery addict is, of course, more sophisticated than his counterpart in the heyday of the country house murder when no cast was complete without the butler, when the library became established as the most lethal room in England, when the detective was invariably an amateur of impeccable lineage and superhuman talent while the professional police were bicycling buffoons deferentially tugging their forelocks to the gentry, and the denouement took place after dinner, with the whole cast in evening dress, when the least likely suspect would be unmasked as the murderer. Frequently he then obligingly killed himself to spare the readers the disagreeable thought of the public hangman.

The modern mystery has outgrown these naïvetés and simplicities and those writers whose work will last are those who succeed in the difficult task of combining the old traditions of an exciting story and the satisfying exercise of rational deduction with the psychological subtleties and moral ambiguities of a good novel. Here, in the words of Robert Browning, we are indeed “on the dangerous edge of things” where the writer is exploring that greatest of all mysteries, the human heart, and where there may be no neat and simple answer in the final chapter, not even for a Hercule Poirot or a Lord Peter Wimsey.

 

P. D. James was the author of twenty-one books, many of which feature her detective hero Adam Dalgliesh and have been televised or filmed. She was the recipient of many honors, including the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. In 1991 she was created Baroness James of Holland Park. She died in 2014 at the age of ninety-four. Her short story “The Part-Time Job,” published to celebrate the centennial of James’s birth, is available now from Vintage Shorts and Faber and Faber.

“Murder Most Foul” was originally published in the Observer in October 1982. Text © 1982 by P. D. James.

Staff Picks: Cardboard Cities, Choral Singing, and Cross-Stitch

Alanna Reeves. Photo: Alanna Reeves.

Alanna Reeves, a visual artist and writer from Washington, D.C., is an emerging voice in contemporary American art. When Reeves and I went to school together growing up, everyone wanted to model their handwriting after hers. But it was in art class with the printmaker Percy B. Martin that it became clear she was much more than her fastidious script, that she was the real deal. Five years after receiving her B.F.A. in illustration and art history from the Rhode Island School of Design, Reeves has indeed made her mark. Last week, she partook in a virtual conversation hosted by Strathmore, offering an overview of her recent work and the theory behind it. The first piece discussed, Límon, was perhaps the most striking: a black-and-white photograph of her paternal grandfather overlaid with yellow embroidery floss in a design inspired by cross-stitch patterns. In much of her work, Reeves reexamines her girlhood pastimes, such as cross-stitch and paper dolls—activities with sets of prescribed patterns and rules. One audience member observed that the stitching looked almost like a chain-link fence, barring uninhibited access to the subject yet inviting the viewer to peer through nonetheless. Reeves agreed, noting that she purposefully left his eyes untouched. Only the corner and lid of one eye are embroidered, delicately stitched in a freehand that deviates from the otherwise geometric pattern. Now Reeves has been doing more printmaking, which, to me, recalls the early influence of Martin. The pandemic has not stopped her momentum, and she will be exhibiting work with D.C. Arts Center in the fall and Strathmore in January. In the meantime, you can keep up with her work on Instagram. —Elinor Hitt 

In Italian, arcipelago is a near-cognate to the English archipelago, missing only the h: a letter of exhalation, ventilation. The latter word provides the title for one of the only book-length surveys of Antonella Anedda’s work to be published in English, translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick. Ventilated these poems are: whether it is the “stones, / refueling themselves with wind at every stop,” a “breeze seeping from the heart of the rocks,” or the “air between the orange trees the living gently displace,” the landscape is alive with respiration, while the human figures fail to catch their breath, such as “the drunkard who yesterday on the windy dock / was rocking and singing with his mouth shut.” Anedda’s ancestral Sardinia is the grand subject of her work, featuring prominently in a beautiful cluster of poems named after Maddalena Island. In one of these, the speaker pauses to “blow on the Bocche,” another fixture of Italian geography with a near-silent h, a mountain range in Northern Italy whose name literally translates to “mouths”—the poet, poem, and physical world breathing out as one. —Lauren Kane

 

Jackie Kay. Photo courtesy of the University of Salford Press Office. CC BY 2.0.

 

Jackie Kay is Scotland’s Makar—our national poet—and The Adoption Papers (1991) is her first collection. Kay, who is of Scottish and Nigerian descent, was brought up by white parents in Glasgow, and the adoption referenced in the title is her own. For the first half of the book, three voices are given three different typefaces: Palatino, Gill, and Bodoni. These represent the three women of the adoption triangle: Kay, her adoptive mother, and her birth mother. At first, one might find oneself looking back at the typeface key, making sure of the voice, but as the poems progress, the familiar thoughts, worries, and cadences of each voice are sufficient context to abandon this stop and check. One sees emerging those themes that will reappear in Kay’s later works: belonging, identity, race, and, of course, love. As Ali Smith once noted, Kay writes from “a literary tradition of shapeshift itself, one that finds voice in unauthorised, unexpected forms and places; one often concerned with the search for a communal form.” And it is this search for communal form, I think, that drives the second, less autobiographical part of the collection, “Severe Gale 8.” In Scotland, at the time of Kay’s writing, nothing felt more communal than opposition to the Tories. “There was no bread,” she writes of eighties Britain, when the bankers “sang their tune at the Stock Exchange.” “There was no bread,” when Thatcher’s “Poll Tax / arrived that winter of the second hurricane.” “There was no bread,” in the decade “when every cardboard city / was so jam-packed that strangers / recognized each other’s smells.” Things are arguably no easier now. The difference today, of course, is that the Scottish Government, established in 1999, is able to position itself between the misdeeds of Westminster and the Scottish electorate. This accounts, perhaps, for the groundswell of support for that other search for a communal form: Scottish independence. —Robin Jones

For more than a decade, the Maryland-based duo Wye Oak has been my favorite working noninstrumental music ensemble. Songwriter Jenn Wasner has a voice that approaches Joni Mitchell–like power and pettiness, and certainly looks back toward Mitchell for how to create melodies and lyrics that have story and drama coded in them. And Andy Stack, the producer and drummer-keyboardist (onstage, he plays both at the same time in a totally ungimmicky way, purely for efficiency), is a sort of invisible wizard. Wasner’s new digital-only solo EP under her Flock of Dimes moniker, Like So Much Desire, shows her to be no less formidable an artist without Stack’s presence. The songs are more piano- or keyboard-centric, without all of Wye Oak’s marvelous genre slaloming, and make for simply beautiful, often breathtakingly so, music to listen to when alone—and who isn’t alone these days? This duo is having a busy month despite lockdown, as today marks the release of Wye Oak’s new five-song EP, No Horizon, a set of indie rock tunes layered atop a bed of choral singing by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. It’s just magisterial music, transcendent, huge music, yet also sad, intimate, probing. How wonderful it is to hear these artists at the peak of their powers, now a long-lived band but more ambitious than ever. I can’t wait for what’s next. —Craig Morgan Teicher

Four months ago, when I was young, I became obsessed with a relationship map of a group of polyamorous, pansexual, occasionally incestuous (but I prefer not to dwell on that) penguins. They paired and parted, frolicked and feuded; woven among them were the aquarium staff, the penguin handlers, some of whom were bound to the penguins only by being despised by the penguins. I was longing for tumult and—oh, God—scandal. In essence, I had been starved for gossip since lockdown. But no matter how charming, the love lives of penguins were no substitute for the mess of human intrigue. So I started The Plum in the Golden Vase, rendered in an extraordinary, erudite, and exhaustive translation by David Tod Roy that spreads over five thick volumes and more than three thousand five hundred pages. Signed off by the “Scoffing Scholar of Lan-ling,” apocryphally this sixteenth-century masterpiece was written for the only reason novels should ever be written: revenge. The myth holds that Wang Shizhen wrote a page-turner and then made a toxic ink, or sprinkled a lethal powder on the corner of every page, waging his nemesis would tear through it, licking his fingertips to turn the pages. The Plum in the Golden Vase is the most delicious poison. The Chinese title, Jin Ping Mei, gives some clue to the layers with which the book was written: it is at once a lovely image of plums in golden vases, a combination of characters from the names of three central women in the novel, and a dirty joke. The book itself was a scandal—dismissed as pornographic and evil, frequently censored and banned, even as it was loved, studied, and imitated. The frank sexuality is part of the novel’s uncommon attention to how people live with one another and how gender, power, and desire shape character. Both wayward and impossibly intricate, it centers on the merchant Hsi-men Ch’ing and his many wives, concubines, children, and servants (Roy uses Wade-Giles romanization rather than pinyin, a choice that contributes to the book’s length). There is scandal by the dozen, and quite possibly everything else, from feasts and faux pas to drinking games, pranks, aphrodisiac overdoses, mean monks, murders, and lengthy arguments about the use of laundry bats. The novel is endlessly allusive, slipping into or parodying classical verse, and Roy catalogues it all in absurdly comprehensive footnotes. His translation also has a playfulness and energy; the insults can be so gloriously zany you pray for an occasion to deploy them (“You crazy chunk of knife-bait!”). The Plum in the Golden Vase has such vitality, such depth of characterization, that it makes life seem drab. It possesses a detail and complexity that seem to halt time. All right, I admit I haven’t finished it yet. But my time at The Paris Review is up. Besides, this is a book to read for the rest of your life. —Chris Littlewood

 

Illustration from The Plum in the Golden Vase.

Cooking with D. H. Lawrence

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, August 28, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, click here, or scroll to the bottom of the page.

I crusted the gamekeeper’s “simple chop” with mushrooms—not what Lawrence intended but I’ve made the recipe (from his fellow Briton Mary Berry) half a dozen times since.

Few people could have been more off-grid than the English writer D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) during his sojourn at a cabin eighteen miles northwest of Taos, New Mexico, where he and his wife, Frieda, lived without electricity, kept chickens, built an outdoor oven, made adobe bricks and “a meat safe to hang from a tree branch,” evicted nests of rats, and traveled two miles on horseback for their milk and mail, their butter and eggs. The time Lawrence spent at this place—called “punishingly remote” by the biographer John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider—was relatively short, a span of months in 1924 and 1925, but he considered it home, and after his death, Frieda returned there to live until she died in 1956.

It’s a lonely moment for me and an off-grid moment for many of us, so it seems time to pay a visit to Lawrence, his work, and his food—and to ask what can be learned from literature’s most notorious outcast.

Lawrence, David Herbert, was born in poverty in the English Midlands, where his most enduring work, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, takes place. He was the son of a coal miner and a woman come down in the world, and he had brief early success writing about miners. Barely had this tall, thin twenty-three-year-old with blond hair, a red beard, and weak lungs broken into London’s literary circles when the trouble started. His work was too sexual, too grossly physical—as if it were written “with one hand in the slime,” said one of his detractors. It was the beginning of a career of censorship and suppression, and for the rest of his life, Lawrence lived hand to mouth on a very small income, helped by well-placed friends (including John Middleton Murry, Ford Madox Ford, and the editor Edward Garnett, husband of the great translator Constance Garnett). He was often abroad, where he could live cheaply while the courts were looking for him in England. Lawrence’s personal life was also controversial; he met his great love, Frieda von Richthofen, when she was married to someone else, and for many years the couple lived openly in adultery, an issue complicated by Frieda’s German nationality and the outbreak of World War I. It wasn’t until 1959, twenty-nine years after Lawrence’s death, that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in the United States by Grove Press, which was known at the time for its groundbreaking stance against censorship.

 

 

Many of us know the outlines of that story, and also that there has been scanty rehabilitation for Lawrence since then. He is perhaps uniquely capable of the ghastly and ridiculous, and his writings about indigenous people, politics, race, class, and gender contain many statements that are unacceptable to the modern reader. He also had an occasionally violent relationship with Frieda (mutual violence, his biographer says, and not how it has been portrayed), which for years has disqualified him from serious consideration.

I read Lady Chatterley in high school for the dirty parts—disappointing, to the teenage mind—and then again in my twenties to be outraged over the antifeminist parts, in which sense I was not disappointed. Constance Chatterley—a “ruddy, country-looking girl” with a “sturdy body, and slow movements,” “big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice”—is married to an English aristocrat who is impotent and confined to a wheelchair from a war injury (the condition, wincingly, serves as easy metaphor for a sterile, industrialized, “unnatural” man). Lawrence believed the sexual relationship between a man and a woman was the central thing in human life; without sex, Connie’s body is “disappointed of its real womanhood,” “flattening and going a little harsh.” She falls in love with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her estate, who, unlike her husband, can give her “a bit of cunt and tenderness” and wants people to “fuck with warm hearts.” It is very, very important to the narration that Connie let Mellors take the lead in this fucking, that she be submissive to him, and that she do nothing to “get a grip on her own satisfaction.” Supposedly, this just-lie-there approach—described as being a “passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave”—leads to the most dazzling sexual fulfillment. At this point the young feminist throws the book across the room.

 

Lawrence loved sex and baked cakes—both very good things. This is the base for an any-fruit cake from ‘The Great Dixter Cookbook.’

 

To pick the book back up twenty years later, however, is to notice things. Lawrence was a gender essentialist to the bone, and he thought defending maleness was important—it’s amazing how his sensitive, palpating fingers found our cultural hot buttons a hundred years ago and have stayed on them. The maleness he posits, though, is so different from the one we’re used to that I find it worth listening to. I don’t think anyone has ever written so evocatively about being in the male body during sex, or been so revealing about the sensual and emotional details of experiencing the female body as a man.

Moreover, Mellors is “smallish, sensitive, soft,” and his tenderness, his vulnerability, his deep engagement with Connie’s femaleness—I’ll call it her gender identity, to rag-pick the parts I like—depart so drastically from the conventions of manhood in his time and ours that it’s very little surprise Lawrence was suppressed, or that he discomfits readers to this day. While I was rereading Lady Chatterley, I came across an exquisitely stupid opinion column from 2019 that, in the process of bashing the book, fails to understand Mellors’s vulnerability; his class-freighted language makes the opinion writer uncomfortable precisely because it’s not conventionally macho about sex. The book has held the title of world’s most notorious sex novel for nearly a century not because it’s the most graphic thing ever written but because it was and still is subversive of the codes of how we’re allowed to speak about our bodies, our genders, and our desires.

It’s also extraordinary to find a male thinker who considers romantic, sexual love to be the foundation of human society, or any thinker who makes that declaration while having very little use for children and the family. Lawrence is heteronormative, but I find myself wanting to take his thought and build on it. Unpinned from biological sex (he’d object to this, I am aware), his roles of maleness and femaleness are subtle and generative and crackling with sexual energy. It’s also worth noting that he experienced sexual love and desire for men (feelings that were not acted upon, Worthen says; less credible sources, such as Mabel Dodge Luhan, writing in Lorenzo in Taos, disagree), so maybe a bit of wiggle room here isn’t so wrong.

 

Anaïs Nin understood Lawrence the way few of their contemporaries did. Her monograph on him was one of her first published works.

 

I’m not alone in thinking so. In 1932, two years after the writer’s death, an as-yet-unknown young woman named Anaïs Nin published a monograph on Lawrence, which is perhaps even more wonderful to read than Lawrence himself and claims much of his thinking as queer space. Nin says Lawrence wrote not to engage our intellects but to evoke a state of consciousness; he “never means what is literally apparent.” Characters are symbolic, “dreams and reality are often interwoven,” and it was “not the truth, but the stirring, live quality of Lawrence’s truth that upset people.” His men and women, then, may not be what they seem.

There’s more: Lawrence’s observations on class, on industrialization (he was of the generation that saw it take hold in the English countryside), on nature and the environment, and on American whiteness, which he wrote about while living in proximity to the indigenous populations in Taos, were in many ways prescient. Even his approach to food feels bizarrely modern.

 

For a dish of “bread with cheese and chives,” I used Crowley Cheese, a favorite local brand in Vermont.

 

Food appears infrequently in Lawrence’s novels and, when it is specific, is often an example of urban, elitist decadence. At one point in Lady Chatterley, he damns “these manly he-men, these flaneurs, the oglers, the eaters of good dinners!” Conversely, the foods the gamekeeper eats are dogmatically unpretentious—once “a simple chop,” another time “bread with cheese and chives,” both consumed with beer. When the aristocratic Connie and her sister visit Mellors in his house, he taunts them with food that won’t suit them (“boiled ham, cheese, pickled wa’nuts if yer like”). Lawrence did not say that food was political, but he treated it as such. Nor did he predict agribusiness, factory food, and the obesity epidemic, but he saw that industrialization would threaten men’s bodies, and he lamented it, specifically focusing on the bodies of the laboring poor. In the form of factory food, that prediction has been borne out.

On my third reading, I have fallen in love with Lawrence, though it’s a prickly, uncomfortable kind of love that demands regular interrogation. For example, I was aware while setting out to make his food that I am just the kind of sophisticated urban woman he’d think should spend less time ambitiously cooking and writing and more time in bed. Sexist? Maybe. Wrong? Maybe not entirely! I was helped in liking him, also, by knowing that he did all the cooking (and cleaning) for himself and Frieda, and was known for making good bread. There’s not much detail on his food in his letters—“because it was such a normal part of everyday life that he never boasted about it!” Worthen told me. But in one anecdote, after a blowout fight with friends at the Kiowa Ranch, he made amends by bringing over bread and a cake, presumably baked in the outdoor oven he’d built.

 

This backyard oven was quick and easy to build. With the help of a Dutch oven, it baked delicious bread.

 

I settled on two gamekeeper meals from Lady Chatterley—the simple chop and “bread with cheese and chives”—as well as the apology cake, baked with fruit of the English countryside. This kind of unadorned cooking is a challenge because it’s all technique. I needed to make bread from scratch, which has been a problem before. I struggle to fry a tender pork chop. Even with the cake, my go-to favorite for summer fruit involves Madeira, orange zest, and way too many bowls. I had to seek out a plainer recipe. The dishes were so basic that I decided to follow the only preparation instruction the author really offered, and also take advantage of my current countryside location: I built an outdoor oven the way Lawrence did in Taos.

Most DIY bread ovens are made from clay or cob (a mixture of mud and straw) and require a mold of wet sand and the ability to build a template for a brick arch. I would have had to source a variety of materials, and I wasn’t sure I’d have enough time for the various layers to set. Instead, I found a plan on a website to make an oven in an hour that could be adapted for the materials I had easily available: bricks, firebricks, cinderblocks, and two stone pavers. Stacked together without mortar in a boxlike shape, these items made a chamber barely big enough for a small pizza, but I could build a fire in it, and if I left the coals inside, it was hot enough to bake bread (with a clay or cob oven, you can scrape the coals out, seal up the oven, and bake using radiant heat, but experimentation showed that my bricks did not retain heat well enough to do that).

To round out the meal, I consulted my spirits guide, Hank Zona, for a wine pairing. Despite the gamekeeper’s preference for beer, wine seemed a better fit for my outdoor summer menu. To my surprise, I learned that New Mexico was the first place wine was grown in what is now the U.S., starting in 1548, when it was introduced by Spanish missionaries who planted a grape now known as Mission in this country and Pais in Chile. The New Mexican wine industry declined as a result of floods in the forties but has had a resurgence in the past couple of decades, and the Pais or Mission grape is newly trendy today. Zona recommended drinking it chilled, and he said my particular bottle, the 215 B.C. Ferment from the Garage Wine Co., would taste like sage and blackberries and be “more like a shrub.” Perhaps I was being an “eater of good dinners,” but I was really looking forward to a cold red and an outdoor fire.

 

Lawrence hated industrialization and believed that living close to nature was essential for the human spirit. Nothing bespeaks his ethos like homemade bread.

 

The meal preparations were easy and effective. My simple chop came from a recipe in Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking, a tome of English basics. I planned to brine the meat, add a crust of mushrooms stewed in milk (another preparation once mentioned by Lawrence in a letter), and finish it off by the crackling flames in the outdoor oven. The cake I chose was an “any fruit” summer cake from The Great Dixter Cookbook, a farm cookbook from the English countryside. The bread with cheese and chives would use Crowley cheddar, a Vermont favorite, and a half-white homemade bread. For the bread, I did many things the easy way: I used yeast instead of making a sourdough starter from scratch; I kneaded it with the dough hook on my mixer; I proofed it in the oven with the light on, which is very quick; and ultimately I baked it in a Dutch oven inside the outdoor oven to protect it from the smoke. I’ve now made several loaves this way, and though I have to scrape some charred bits off the crust, they are shatteringly crisp-crusted without and chewy within. The oven works.

The rest of my food was heavenly as well. The cold red wine, in particular, tasted black, piquant, and herby, and it picked up the sage I used to flavor the mushrooms on the pork chops. The cake was easy summer perfection. I would not take D. H. Lawrence by the letter, and can recommend reading him only in critique, but … he does make a good dinner.

 

 

Freshly Baked Bread with Cheese and Chives

For the outdoor oven: 

Note: This oven was built in a wet, nonflammable New England field. Please follow all fire-safety dictates and regulations in your area.

6 cinderblocks

12 firebricks

44 measurement red bricks

two 23 x 12″ paving stones

 

 

Find a level surface in a fire-resistant area. Stack the cinderblocks in two three-block layers. Top them with a layer of firebricks, creating a small overhang in both the front and the back (this makes it easier to scrape out the coals, but you’ll need to be careful not to flip the two front bricks when putting items in the oven). Stack red bricks along the sides and back, five bricks high. On top, place the two paving stones and a few extra bricks if you have them to seal the cracks. Build a fire inside near the back, light it, and continue adding wood and building up your bed of coals for about an hour to get the oven nice and hot before baking bread. Pizza or other open-air items can be made near the front even sooner.

 

 

For the bread:

This recipe requires a Dutch oven.

a packet of instant yeast

2 cups warm water

pinch of sugar

4 cups half-white bread flour

1 3/4 tsp salt

white flour (for kneading)

olive oil (for the pan)

2 tbs cornmeal

cheddar cheese (for serving)

diced chives (for serving)

 

 

Put the two cups of warm water, the yeast, and a pinch of sugar in the bowl of your stand mixer, and stir. Let sit for five minutes, until the yeast bubbles up. If it doesn’t bubble, start again with fresh yeast.

Mix the bread flour and salt, and then add to the water in the mixer. Knead on “stir” with the dough hook for ten minutes. This will be a very wet, sticky dough. Flour your hands, then turn the dough out on a floured countertop, kneading by hand for a few minutes and adding as little flour as necessary to prevent sticking (you want to be sure the dough is soft and pillowy and bounces back some when you poke it with a finger).

Lightly oil the interior of the same bowl you used to mix the dough, drop the dough back in the bowl, cover with Saran Wrap, and leave to rise until doubled in volume, a process whose time varies based on the temperature of your kitchen (I have been proofing dough in my oven with the light on, and it takes about thirty minutes to double).

After the first rise is underway and you’re able to see how quickly it’s coming along, consider the timing of preheating the oven to 500 or starting the fire in the outdoor oven. You’ll want about an hour to feed the fire and then thirty minutes to preheat the Dutch oven (with the lid on) while letting the flames die down before baking. That means you should start the fire ninety minutes before bake time (if you’re using a conventional oven, preheat it to 500, and put the Dutch oven in half an hour before bake time).

When the dough has doubled in volume, take it out and punch it back down. Lightly oil the bowl again, and return to rise.

Line a clean tea towel with a smooth layer of cornmeal. When the dough has finished its second rise, either put it in the refrigerator if you’re not ready to bake or turn it out onto the countertop, shape it into a ball, and then place it on the center of the tea towel. Flip the edges of the towel over the center of the bread to evenly distribute the cornmeal (you can leave it on the counter for five to ten minutes, but no longer, or the dough may rise too much to fit easily into the Dutch oven).

Carefully remove the Dutch oven from the oven (don’t burn yourself). Flip the bread directly into it, cover, and bake for forty to fifty minutes, rotating the Dutch oven once if you’re baking outdoors. If you’re cooking indoors, remove the lid about ten minutes before the end of the bake. Bread is done when it makes a hollow thumping sound on the bottom. Let rest ten minutes before slicing.

Served topped with slices of cheddar cheese and sprinkled with chives.

 

 

Pork Chops with Mushrooms

Adapted from Foolproof Cooking, by Mary Berry.

2 pork chops on the bone

2 tbs salt for brine

salt and pepper (to taste)

3 tbs butter, divided

1/2 small onion

3 oz mixed wild mushrooms, sliced

3 sage leaves, chopped

4 tbs milk

1 heaping tbs sour cream

3 tbs bread crumbs

1/3 cup grated cheddar cheese

pinch of salt

 

 

Preheat the oven to 400.

Brine the pork chops for thirty minutes before cooking. Remove from the water, pat completely dry with paper towels, and season with salt and pepper on both sides.

Heat a large cast-iron skillet to very hot. Add a tablespoon of butter, and then immediately, before the butter burns, add the two chops. Fry without moving until browned on one side, then flip. When both sides are browned, use tongs to sear the fatty edges as well. Remove and reserve the chops.

Heat a separate skillet on medium-low. Add a tablespoon of butter, then the onion. Fry until the onion softens and begins to brown, about ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Add another tablespoon of butter, the mushrooms, and sage, and toss to combine. Fry for a few minutes. As the pan begins to look dry, add milk by the tablespoon, simultaneously steaming and frying the mushrooms. When the mushrooms have softened, turn the heat down to low, add the sour cream, stir, and cook for five minutes more, until the sour cream is absorbed. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

In a separate bowl, combine the bread crumbs and cheese. Just before you’re ready to serve, top each chop with half the mushroom mixture, followed by half the bread-crumb-and-cheese mixture, and return to the oven. If your chops are skinny, they probably cooked through while browning. If they are thick, they may need ten to fifteen minutes in the oven. Bake until the cheese has melted, the crumbs are toasted, and the meat is cooked through (I did this last step outdoors).

 

 

Simple Summer Cake with Any Fruit

Adapted from The Great Dixter Cookbook.

For the batter:

stick of unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing the tin

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking soda

pinch of salt

2 eggs, room temperature

For the topping:

4 cups of fruit, chopped

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp ginger

1/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

juice from 1/2 lemon

 

 

Preheat the oven to 350.

Butter an eight-inch springform pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper, and butter the parchment.

To make the batter, cream the butter and sugar together in a stand mixer. In a separate small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the eggs to the mixer one at a time, alternating with half the flour mixture and mixing between additions.

To make the topping, combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl, and toss to combine.

Spread the batter on the bottom of the pan, top with fruit, and bake for forty-five to fifty minutes on top of a foil-lined baking sheet to catch any juices. When the cake is done, a tester in the center will come out clean of batter, though streaked with fruit juices. Serve warm.

 

 

Wine!

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona on Friday, August 28, at 6 P.M. for a virtual literary wine tasting on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. Bring a bottle of one of the specific wines listed below, or any chilled red—and we’ll discuss Lady Chatterley’s Lover, give you tasting notes, and suggest how to pair with food. No drinking experience or affection for D. H. Lawrence required.

Ask for Pais at your local wine store. Some names to look for from Chile for Pais and Pais blends: A Los Vinateros Bravos, Clos des Fous, Garage Wine Co. (the one we used), J. Bouchon, Mauricio Gonzalez, Morande, Onda Brava, Pedro Parra y Familia, Roberto Henriquez, Tinto de Rulo, Vina Gonzalez Bastias, Vina Maitia. Mission wines are available at stores with a trendier selection. Look for Monte Rio Lodi Mission, Pax Wines Mission, and Somer’s Vineyard.

The following is a list of stores in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey that have Pais or Mission wines. Anyone outside of those areas who needs help finding a bottle can email us (hank@thegrapesunwrapped.com).

Stores with Pais:

In Manhattan:

Chambers Street Wines

148 Chambers St. A

New York, NY 10007

212-227-1434

PJ Wine & Spirits

4898 Broadway

New York, NY 10034

212-392-1160

Some Good Wine

13 East 8th St

New York, NY 10003

212-777-3151

Union Square Wines

140 4th Ave

New York, NY 10003

212-675-8100

Verve Wine

24 Hubert St

New York, NY 10013

212-810-2899

Wine Therapy

171 Elizabeth St

New York, NY 10012

212-625-2999

In Brooklyn:

Blanc et Rouge

81 Washington St

Brooklyn NY 11201

718-858-9463

Grain & Vine

190 Union Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11211

718-782-9463

Leon & Son Wine and Spirits

995 Fulton St

Brooklyn, NY 11238

347-689-9253

Michael Towne Wines and Spirits

73 Clark Street

Brooklyn, NY 11201

718-875-3667

Uva Wines

237 Bedford Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11211

718-963-3939

Vanderbilt Wines

573 Vanderbilt Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11238

718-398-1800

In New Jersey:

Bottle King

343 W Mt Pleasant Ave

Livingston, NJ 07039

973-740-0711

Cool Vines

350 Warren St

Powerhouse, Jersey City, NJ 07302

201-432-8910

Gary’s Wine

Bottle Hill/Rose City Shopping Center

121 Main St

Madison, NJ 07940

973-822-0200

Riverview Wines

43 Bowers St

Jersey City, NJ 07307

201-420-8900

Stirling Fine Wines

1168 Valley Rd #5

Stirling, NJ 07980

908-647-5580

The WineBuyer

1950 Rt 23

North Wayne, NJ 07470

800-946-3937

Stores with Mission wines:

In Manhattan:

Union Square Wines

140 4th Ave

New York, NY 10003

212-675-8100

Verve Wine

24 Hubert St

New York, NY 10013

212-810-2899

Wine Therapy

171 Elizabeth St

New York, NY 10012

212-625-2999

In Brooklyn:

Dandelion Wine

153 Franklin St

Brooklyn, NY 11222

347-689-4563

Leon & Son Wine and Spirits

995 Fulton St

Brooklyn, NY 11238

347-689-9253

 

 

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

Masks at Twilight

In the final years of his life, Paul Klee’s productivity skyrocketed. Fearing suppression by the Nazi party, the beloved Bauhaus instructor had fled Germany and returned to his home city of Bern, Switzerland, where he struggled with an autoimmune disease and watched Europe backslide into another war. “Late Klee,” on view by appointment at David Zwirner’s London gallery through July 31, focuses on his output from this period. Abstract yet immediately striking, these late works display Klee’s continued experiments with line and his interrogations of mortality—both the world’s and his own. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Paul Klee, pathetische Lösung (Pathetic solution) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.

 

Paul Klee, Schema eines Kampfes (Diagram of a fight) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.

 

Paul Klee, Besessen (Possessed) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.

 

Paul Klee, Ohne Titel (Gitter und Schlangenlinien um “T”) (Untitled [Grids and wavy lines around “T”]) (detail), ca. 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.

Paul Klee, Garten in der Ebene (Garden in the plain), 1925. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.

 

Paul Klee, Masken Im Zwielicht (Masks at twilight), 1938. Photo: Anna Arca. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.

 

“Late Klee” is on view by appointment at David Zwirner’s London gallery through Friday, July 31.

A Keeper of Jewels: Remembering Brad Watson

Brad Watson. Photo: © Nell Hanley.

I met Brad Watson in 2004. He was starting a one-year stint as the Grisham Visiting Writer at Ole Miss, where I was an M.F.A. student, and I’d signed up for his workshop. The week before the semester began, I saw him at a bar in town, newly arrived and sitting on a stool by himself. I went up and introduced myself and he looked me over and grinned. His eyes had this way of shining when he found something funny.

“You the one who wrote that weird story with the mannequin?” he asked me.

“I am,” I confessed.

“I enjoyed it,” he said, and picked up his drink. “I like sort of oddball stuff.”

At that point in my life, my glorious and unpublished twenties, I knew only that I wanted to be a good writer, not that I could be. So, this exchange gave me a suspicious confidence. I liked Brad from the start.

After we said goodbye, I walked directly to Square Books, smiling, and bought his debut collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men. I then went back to my apartment to read it. I wish I could tell you that it charmed me as much as he had, but the truth is I was young and jealous and dumb and distrustful of people who’d had so much success early in their career. The book was published by Norton. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize for Fiction. Writers who accomplished these things at first blush angered me back then. They had to have some connection, I always thought, they must be plugged into some secret writer society in New York for these things to happen. And here I was living in Mississippi, in an odd circular apartment complex the locals called Ewok Village. What chance did I have?

All I knew for sure was that his stories were set in the South, like mine aimed to be, and because of this I felt a bit competitive with him back in my idiot days. I didn’t want to be just another Southern writer, though, and when I realized the title story of his collection was about men out fishing, shooting at snakes and turtles, as so many Southern stories seem to be, I rolled my eyes. I decided this Watson guy, with all his critical acclaim, would be my benchmark. Whatever he achieved, I told myself, I would top it. He, of course, already had a collection and a novel out at that point, whereas I’d not published a single thing of note. Still, he was older than me. I figured I had a decade to catch him.

Little did I know the sort of genius I was up against.

In addition to the workshop, I signed up for Watson’s take on Form, Craft, and Influence, a course in which the professor chose books they considered formative to their own aesthetic or style. Barry Hannah taught Kafka’s The Trial in his version; Tom Franklin taught Rick Bass’s The Watch. Brad’s syllabus, however, remains to this day one of the most eclectic I have ever seen. He assigned things like Michael Ondaatje’s verse novel The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Kate Jennings’s Snake, Richard Brautigan’s Willard and His Bowling Trophies, and The Lover by Marguerite Duras, among others. For a writer who grew up in the South, riding the dirt roads of Faulkner and O’Connor since undergrad, it was a bewildering volley of new voices and settings.

Yet Brad’s interest in these books was so contagious that my friends and I found ourselves behaving oddly, like reading passages of Lars Gustafson’s The Death of a Beekeeper, which he’d also assigned, to each other on a Saturday night instead of going to the bar. It wasn’t until midway through the semester that we began to realize what these disparate books had in common. They pushed boundaries, yes. They were beautifully written, of course. But, what seemed to connect them all for Brad was a thread of deep sadness woven throughout each narrative.

Around this same time, Brad had also grown more morose. There was a woman in Texas named Nell that he loved, it turned out, as well as two sons from a previous marriage. He was thankful for the paycheck in Oxford but missed these people too much for his heart’s liking. The loneliness got to him. In those days, the Grisham Visiting Writer lived in a nice house right off the town square in Oxford, and Brad took to holding his classes there. On many nights, these classes were cheerful and fine, but on others we would show up to the house to find Brad staring at a fire in the fireplace, though it wasn’t cold out. He would conduct the class as he was paid to do, kind and thoughtful as ever, but it was obvious his heart wasn’t with us.

*

After fancying myself too cutting edge for Last Days of the Dog-Men, I finally read Brad’s first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, and realized what a fool I’d been. This novel, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002, does everything a Southern Gothic novel is supposed to do, everything I thought I was supposed to be subverting, but does it in such a sublime and well-crafted way that all the knobs on my amp had to be readjusted. Everything that could have been a Southern cliché—small town characters named Finus and Creasie and Birdie, a necrophiliac, an undertaker, a medicine woman, even a ghost—all feel totally fresh and unique. And the factor that differentiates these characters and their stereotypes, of course, is Brad. He never took a character lightly.

Finus is not just some eighty-nine-year-old coot but, instead, an obituary writer and lover of Wordsworth who recognizes his only moment of transcendence had been when he was a young boy and accidentally saw a girl, whose heart he’d never be able to win, do a cartwheel in the nude. Such a long stretch of years between him and that moment of joy and soon the novel, rotating through strange and empathetic characters almost kaleidoscopically, reveals itself to be the very thing Brad had been trying to show us in class. It is a beautifully written, boundary-pushing meditation on love, loss, and sadness, like nearly everything he’d assigned.

I felt something in me click.

The way to make your own path as a writer, I began to understand, was not to discount every literary convention you came across, but to use it, instead, to your advantage. You don’t ignore Faulkner and Flannery, Hurston and Welty. You build upon them to create a new voice. A new Brad Watson. This can’t be done by reading only the writers you most want to emulate, but by reading those you may seem, on the surface, to have nothing in common with. As obvious as this should be, it wasn’t to me then, and Brad cracked it open.

*

Brad left Oxford the next summer, and we kept in touch sporadically. He soon landed a great job in Wyoming and, in these years away from one another, my admiration for his work grew. I read the stories he was publishing in The New Yorker, Ecotone, and Granta, each one so different, strange, yet so undeniably his that I came to recognize what was afoot. Brad Watson was quietly becoming one of the best writers in America.

This was confirmed for me with his next collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which contains stories so distilled and original that I felt nervous to talk to him. What do you say, I wonder, to a person so talented? I began handing out stories like “Alamo Plaza” and “Visitation” to my own grad students. The accolades had come to him again in great and deserving waves, yet Brad never acted like he’d done anything extraordinary. Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives had just become a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2011, but when I got him on the phone to congratulate him, he wanted to talk about my work rather than his. He also wanted to put in a good word for a student of his who’d applied to the M.F.A. program where I teach. It was incredible. As I write this now, I realize that Brad had also won a Guggenheim and O’Henry around this time, a fact I found on Google because he never once brought it up in conversation.

The last time I saw Brad was shortly after Miss Jane, his last book, was published. I’d been asked to moderate a panel he was on at the Mississippi Book Festival. I had read the novel and loved it but had not yet told Brad this news. We met up at the hotel bar the night before the panel and, after a quick hug and order of bourbon, I began to gush about the book so earnestly that I felt almost embarrassed. However, I needed to tell him, and I want to state this as clearly as I can: I believe Miss Jane to be a masterpiece of American literature. It is as remarkable as any book to ever come out of the South.

A story based on his own great aunt, a woman born in Depression-era Mississippi with a rare genital abnormality that made her incontinent for life, I knew Brad had worked on this book for over thirteen years. Miss Jane is a novel about a person’s entire life, from its first beginning on earth to its last new beginning possibly elsewhere, and is so richly imagined and empathetically spun that I couldn’t believe I knew the person who’d written it. I told him how it almost pained me with its beauty, and even recited a moment to him from the novel I will never forget. It is when Jane, still a child and only beginning to truly understand the difference between herself and others, looks out of the kitchen window and feels a “strange presence” lock into her consciousness, one that is “like no one else’s in the world … and it sent a current into her spine up into the base of her neck, the tingling of it coming out of her eyes in invisible little needles of light indistinguishable from the light of the gathering day.”

“My God,” I told him. “I just read that part it over and over. It killed me.”

“I remember where I was when I wrote that,” he said. “I was living in Oxford, staying at that house. That’s probably around the time we first met.”

This exchange clarified, for me, the reason I so much admire Brad Watson’s craft. That line about the light from her eyes had come to him over a decade before and he had written it down and recognized its obvious beauty yet kept it close to his chest like one does a jewel. He went on to move between cities and states with it there by his heart, to write other stories, to win awards and fellowships, and in all that time had not pawned it for a quick payoff, but instead held onto the glowing image like a parent does a child, until it is ready to move on its own through the world. I was awed.

So, I told him what I am about to tell you.

If I could have any career as a writer, I would choose Brad Watson’s. One reason for this may seem obvious, in that every novel he ever published was a finalist for the National Book Award (Miss Jane joined The Heaven of Mercury with that distinction in 2016). Yet, that’s not it. Instead, it is that Brad seemed able to do what so few writers can; he never let his ego rush the story. He did not grab for the low-hanging fruit. He was patient with his characters, with himself, and kind to everyone else in the process. How many writers with that kind of early acclaim, I wonder, would go fourteen years between novels? Only those, it seems to me, both bold enough to recognize their own greatness and humble enough to await its return.

When I told him this, he said, “Yeah, but I’ve never made the best seller lists. I don’t know. I always wanted to write just one book that was read.”

And, of course, he was read, but that is the terrible thing about space and time. When budding writers are sitting at home, reading a book by their favorite author, making notes on their favorite lines, the author is often sitting hundreds of miles away at their own home unaware, wondering if they will ever write anything good.

*

Yet my clearest memory of Brad has nothing to do with his work. It is instead of a time right after I met him, in Oxford, when I was in love with a woman as well. My wife and I had gone out to dinner at a sushi place in town called Two Stick and saw Brad standing by himself near the host stand. We asked jokingly if he wanted to join us, under the impression he likely had a hundred more important people to see, and he unexpectedly said yes. We were led to a low table where we sat cross-legged on the floor on big cushions and what you need to know, I suppose, is that writers are not always friendly. The more accomplished ones can pick up a habit, it seems, of looking over your head instead of into your eyes in public places. It’s as if they are waiting for another famous writer, perhaps their missing twin, to walk in. Yet Brad sat with my wife and me for hours and talked as openly as a person can. He asked my wife about her family, her interests, and talked to us about the people he missed. His love for these people was obvious and vulnerable and his grin, gap-toothed and welcoming, made us hope the night would not end. My wife, who has now been to enough readings and book launches to have a rock-solid idea about how some writers behave, was also struck by how genuine he was.

So, when I found out about Brad’s death, I called her to tell her. I was out of town, but the news had reached me through the grapevine of Southern writers like Tom Franklin, Michael Knight, and George Singleton, as if each was a pallbearer of Brad’s name. By the time I got her on the phone I was crying.

She listened to me, consoled me, and said, “I’ll always remember that night at Two Stick. The three of us just sitting on the floor and talking. I remember his smile. He was so kind.”

“I know,” I told her. “I remember that, too.”

It was the night I discovered the writer I am always trying to be.

 

M.O. Walsh is the author of the novels My Sunshine Away and The Big Door Prize (September 2020, Putnam). He currently directs the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans.

Be Good

© Hamdan / Adobe Stock.

The eighty-four days I spent in a relationship with my rapist were days filled with music. We met in a nightclub, Schoolboy Q pulsing around us as he held my waist and I yelled my name into his ear. After our first date, I let an awards show replay in the background as I squealed into the phone with a friend. Earlier that evening, he kissed me deeply as he dropped me off at my car. “I shouldn’t let you leave,” he whispered before parting my lips with his tongue. I recounted these details as Beyoncé belted “Drunk in Love” in a performance taped only a few weeks after her self-titled album’s release, when the world was abuzz with her fuller, post-baby body, her unapologetically sex-positive lyrics. My rapist made me feel the way Beyoncé looked on that stage, her heavy thighs peeking through glittery fishnets as she reclined backward on a chair with the microphone so close to her lips, she could have licked it.

One night, my rapist asked if I’d heard of Gregory Porter. “There’s a song of his that reminds me of you,” he said, and that was the first time I heard “Be Good (Lion’s Song).” It’s about a couple, except the man is a lion, and the woman has trapped him in a cage because he can’t be trusted to roam freely. In the first verse, when they meet, the lion is brushing his mane; by the second, he has trimmed his claws and cut his hair, and the woman has already told him that lions are meant to be caged; if they’re left to walk around, “they might just bite.” The woman’s name is Be Good, a phrase she also repeats to him, though it is he who sings that refrain to us. He is both her amanuensis and her accuser. “Does she know what she does / when she dances around my cage?” he asks again and again, each time more plaintive than the last.

My rapist compared me to Be Good because the tenor of our relationship had changed. I had become a difficult woman where I had been so simple before, wanting only his body—nothing more. We had a lot of sex, and my rapist had few inhibitions and even less predictability. In one moment, he could be gentle, almost tearful. In another, rough, commanding, and I liked it. I’d spent much of my life doing the things I believed people expected me to do. Sometimes, I was successful in pleasing them. Other times, I failed miserably, and I thought of those failures constantly. It was nice to let someone else be responsible for making decisions.

But we were a few months into it, and I had grown tired. My body was always sticky with him, my stomach churning from whatever we drank the night before, and we drank often. I was growing increasingly paranoid about our relationship. Where was its substance? Did he really know me? Once, during a conversation about marriage, I asked him a series of questions, things I already knew about him: my mother’s and my siblings’ names, my majors in college. He couldn’t answer. Those things weren’t important. We loved each other.

But what did we really have in common? We were both prone to sadness, but we treated our sadnesses differently. His made him angry; the corners of his eyes would sizzle with tears. “Can I hug you?” I would ask. “Do I look like I need one?” he would retort. When I was sad, I played music and sat quietly in dark rooms. I once played Florence and the Machine’s “Breaking Down” for him. “This is what my depression feels like,” I explained, “a monster that creeps into my brain while I’m sleeping.” “Aw! I’m sooooo depressed!” he screeched, clutching his chest, his voice high-pitched to mimic mine. I recoiled, shocked that someone who could hold such sadness could also mock it.

Months before I met my rapist, I had taken a vow of celibacy, a thing I’ve done many times in my adult life. It’s a throwback to the Christian purity contracts of my childhood, the promise to stay chaste until marriage. Something with my rapist was feeling off-kilter, and perhaps returning to my vow would be the answer. In hindsight, I understand it might have looked like an erratic, inconsiderate decision, but it was my right. My rapist didn’t think so. “You tricked me!” he roared. “You’ve seduced me and now you’re trying to flip things around to control me.” He would laugh, shaking his head. I was no better than Be Good, but I shrugged it off. No one had ever loved me enough to sing about me. I had my suspicions that no one had ever loved me at all. This is what I was trying to disprove. Maybe, if we slowed down, I could see things more clearly.

*

Cathy Caruth calls trauma “the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in an attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” And the truth is more than a combination of facts, of what we know happened. It’s also the lost experiences, “what remains unknown in our actions and our language.” When my rapist raped me, I didn’t know it. It was a Sunday, though I have blocked out most of the day. I can’t remember if I went to church, but I can remember having a potluck dinner with friends. There would have been laughter, maybe even raucous conversations about partners. There was wine, which I drank, and even more when I got home, where I turned out all the lights before texting him. I hadn’t held my ground after saying I wanted to dial things back, and I didn’t want to see myself doing what I was about to do: break the promise I had made to myself.

The first time we had sex that night was consensual and, afterward, I thought we were done. He was leaving, and I was sprawled on the bed, drifting into a stupor. I heard him take his keys from the nightstand and then put them down. I saw the blur of his red shirt, dimly illuminated by the glow of streetlights seeping through the blinds. I remember the heave and cry of the bedsprings, the heaviness of his body. I remember being unable to move, though no one was holding me down. I don’t remember how it began, or how it ended—only the weight of him, then his absence. I woke up sore the next day, and there was an unopened condom on my nightstand. When I asked my rapist about it, he said, “I left it there on purpose, to remind you how connected we are to each other. I was trying to fuck you into submission.” It would take months—years—to understand what that meant, and that there are costs for both remembering and not remembering, even though both are strategies for survival.

I’m not sure why, years later, I pulled up the video for “Be Good” on YouTube; although, if I’m being honest with myself, I wanted to hear the song again, and pore over the images associated with it. Doing that would be the closest thing to seeing my rapist, a desire that felt deeply unsettling, but in a way that felt manageable. At any time I could close the window and Gregory Porter would disappear. At any time, I could remind myself that Gregory Porter is not my rapist, just someone who sings beautifully.

In the video for “Be Good,” a woman dances alone, oblivious to her love interest: a somber, dark-suited man with a neat side-part razored into his low-cut kinks. He’s accompanied by a Cupid-in-training, a girl who unsuccessfully tries to make the woman notice her admirer. First, the girl tries painting on the man’s smile: she literally gives him head gear attached to a binder, with sketches of characters in various states of joy, then grief. Next, she offers a cardboard boom box that he plays beneath the woman’s window, but the woman remains blissfully unaware. She dances away, and it isn’t until the man cuts into her dance and offers his hand that she even acknowledges his existence. Instantly, she falls into his arms, and lets him lead in a courtyard surrounded by other dancing couples. Young men in stylish sunglasses and old men in Kangol hats dip the women, whose large Afros tilt toward the cobblestones as they laugh. Everyone in the video is beautiful. Everyone in the video is Black.

The couples make me think of the life my rapist and I dreamt of building. He owned a home, but he hated its size and the work he imagined it would need to accommodate a growing family. So he pored over models of geodesic houses, those cheaply built structures that can be as small or as large as you want, but don’t always last. Behind those hastily assembled walls, we could have been one of those couples from the video, my rapist leading the dance as the lion swears he has trimmed his claws and cut his mane. We could have been neat Black. Respectable Black. Safe Black.

One night, my rapist and I were pulled over on our way home from an art exhibition where we’d drunk wine and marveled at Rockwell paintings of integrated neighborhoods. What I hadn’t seen when the officer asked for his driver’s license was that my rapist had first shown the badge he used to enter the building where he worked as a public health official. The officer believed my rapist’s excuse about still getting accustomed to his new car and let him go with a warning to turn his lights on next time. Later, we drank rum milkshakes and drafted a description of a robbery suspect, like the hyperbolically vague ones I often received by email from campus police at the university where I worked. Light to dark-skinned male, between the ages of 18 and 65. Short hair, but might possibly have dreadlocks. Anywhere from 5’0 to 6’5” feet tall. We shook our heads at the absurdity. “But I wasn’t worried tonight,” my rapist reassured me, “once the cop knew what I was.” He was enamored with the kind of respectability that gave him a pass, that made him safer to do whatever he wanted in a world where so few Black people could, including the women he dated.

*

I think of what I missed in his exchange with the officer, but also what my rapist might have missed with me. Everyone keeps telling me rape is about power, and I wonder what power my rapist thought he could gain by raping me. In another life, I was the card he would have slipped the world: a wife with advanced degrees sitting in the passenger seat of the nice car he would drive to our round house, where we would listen to our vintage-voiced music and secretly make jokes about racism. The frames of geodesic houses look like intricate cages, and I wonder what he was trying to lock himself in while also feeling safe. And yet even that rationale feels like an act of mercy I don’t think he deserves.

In her lyrical history of colonial Antigua, A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid writes: “There’s a world of something in this, but I can’t go into it right now.” This is how I feel when I think about rape and power, because, as with any story of systemic violence, I no longer have all the details. I am struggling to grasp the full scope of the narrative even though I understand such is sometimes unbearable. Several days ago, I read an article about the rape and murder of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, and how proudly her killer recounted his reasons and methods for killing her. Halfway through, my brain started scrambling for an explanation. How could someone who spent the last days of her young life fighting for justice for Black people suffer so much violence? Maybe it’s a conspiracy, a cover-up, I reasoned. Maybe the police have, for some reason, fabricated this, and these details are actually false. But I know there are other stories like hers. And the details in those stories are the truth. My disbelief is the cage my brain has built for my own survival, which has also trapped me into straining to make sense of what I can’t. In the case of my own experience, I also have to direct myself away from logic for several reasons; first, because what has been lost to my memory in the aftermath of trauma prevents me from having all the details. But also, and this is difficult to say: when I think too intently about what romantic dream of communal solidarity is lost to me as a Black woman who knows that my body is unsafe even in the midst of a world on fire—presumably for the sake of my safety—I lose all hope, and I need hope to heal. There’s a world of something in this that I will one day get into, but I can’t get into it right now.

I wrote this essay thinking I could do one of the few things I’m good at, and make peace with my rape and my rapist for once and for all. Gregory Porter did that with his absent father. Before he made jazz albums, Porter wrote a musical about his life, and it included an apology from his dad. “Once I performed it on stage,” he said, “I actually released that bitterness that I had towards him.” I wish I could do that. I wish it was that easy: me looking to Gregory Porter as an exemplar who can lead me out of this, and who conveniently reminds me of the person who hurt me most. It would be like closing a gap, making a perfect circle. But I can’t hear “Lion’s Song” without thinking of my rape, and I can’t hear Porter’s voice without thinking of my rapist. And I’m still trying to understand the logic of rape itself, even though I know there isn’t one, other than the fact that, if my rapist hasn’t gotten help, he has already done this to someone else. On average, most rapists offend seven to eleven times before they’re caught. And, as in the case of Toyin Salau, rape victims are often victimized multiple times. So, somewhere, my rapist may be telling another woman she is Be Good, and she thinks she has power, that she is in a safe place with him in his cage. But she’s not. Even if this has happened to her before, she has no idea what might ultimately transpire.

 

Destiny O. Birdsong’s writing has appeared in African American Review, Indiana Review, and The Adroit Journal, among other publications. She has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Richard G. Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review. Her debut collection of poems, Negotiations, will be published in October by Tin House Books.

What Shape Is the Sky?

This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky.

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857.

I walked to a high place and slept at the top. The air there was thin. Someone sleeping in the space adjacent was ill. Coughs punched through the wall in the night. But wall is not the accurate word for the thin sheets of particle board that divided the space. A quilt hung by clothespins would’ve caught the sound better, baseball into mitt as opposed to baseball through wax paper. “Altitude sickness” had been whispered in the courtyard in the evening as the sun did a better and better job hiding itself behind the mountains, sending megaphones of cold light toward whispers of clouds. In bed, I worried as the sounds of the sickness graveled and percussed their way to my ears. Tunnel of throat, dark cavity of lung. Breath yolky and frothed. Go down, I urged the person in my mind. Go down. Get lower where your lungs and blood can feed on the oxygen they need. I wanted them to stop coughing and I did not want them to stop coughing because I feared that a stopped cough meant dead.

I lay in bed that night—a plywood platform on which I spread my sleeping bag—wearing double the regular amount of pants, four layers of shirts, a down vest, a wool hat. I pulled the hood of the bag over my head to muffle the coughs. I did not fear contagion, but the sickness in the next room meant the sickness was possible in my room, too. And by room I mean my body. I was far away, higher than I’d ever been on earth. I was afraid. I did not want to die. And it seemed so lonely to die so far away from everyone I loved.

At some point, I slept. And at some point, deep in the night, I woke, having to piss. I did not want to remove myself from my sleeping bag, slip into my boots, and walk the path outside to the squatters around the corner. But it wasn’t a problem that would solve itself so I emerged from my small room with thin walls and stepped into the mountain night.

I stood stiller than I have ever stood and I looked up.

Never so many stars. The snow on the peak glowed blue pink in the moonlight. I put my hands on my head and took the air into my lungs. Silence throbbed. Not noise, but vibration, the mysterious, mighty, silent vibration of the mountains and the sky. So far up. So far away. But far away from what? Far away from every person whose name I repeated in my mind as I walked the path that lead me to this mountain in some sort of stepping prayer of love. Far away from the drawers in my kitchen that hold the dish towels and the takeout menus. Far away from home and all that was familiar. And yet, and yet—

I was the closest I’d ever been to all of it, and everyone. All at once, it was not me looking up. I was gone. I, as I understand myself, evaporated. The body I was breathed in, was breathed in, and there was no inside-me anymore. A mingling instead with the night, the rock, the mountain peak, its snowy ridge. Not I, but star and wind and dust. Not I, but void, absence, everything. Not I, but a scattering of matter like tossed stones across the surface of a lake, touching everything at once.

The sky dissolved me. The stars dissolved me. The mountains, throbbing, shifting, laughing, they dissolved me. Then the laughter of the mountains moved through me and my atoms reassembled. I came back to myself realizing I was laughing. Tears all down my cheeks.

And now, here we are. An afternoon, summer, near sea level, in a new stretch of reckoning and free fall. My neighbor with the big dog is whistling on the sidewalk. Breeze moves the sycamore leaves. Flies dip and rise about the big blue recycling bins. A yellow butterfly flickers against the green. No clouds. The sky is blue. I came down from that mountain and I have been back down now for years and years. As René Daumal writes in Mount Analogue:

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

Daumal is incorrect. One need not summit to see. To know what is above, one need only lie on the grass and look up, float on one’s back on a pond and look up, tilt the chin toward the sky and look up. Any moment, a mountaintop. He’s right about not being able to stay on the summit forever, that’s true, but I argue: one descends, one sees still. What do I know? Only that for a moment I became the sky and touched everything at once. Only that this possibility exists. The possibility to reach a state of all-nothingness again. That somewhere way beyond the summit, sky, time, death — these things are the same.

I can’t identify all the different kinds of clouds. I only recently learned how high thirty-five thousand feet is. I didn’t know that the sky starts at the surface of the earth, that we are in it.

“When a man is hurt, he makes himself an expert,” writes Tony Hoagland. I knew one man, heart busted, who learned bicycle repair, adopted a new persona that involved, in part, those flimsy little racing caps. Another pursued his expertise in drug use. Learn through suffering, my mother told us over and over. But at some point, pain is no longer a visit to the store that sells wisdom. At some point, we enter the store, scoop our hands into the large wooden bowls, all of them empty, and ask, Is it worth it? We leave empty-handed knowing less than when we walked in.

A place inside holds our devotion, a suede pouch whose walls can spread without limit. When we lose someone or something we’ve devoted ourselves to, a vacuum is created, a void-space. This chasm of aloneness can barely be tolerated, so pain rushes in to fill the void, because pain is easier to tolerate than empty space. We mistake this pain for heartbreak and grief, but the pain is bandage. Heartbreak and grief come from touching the void that is revealed when we lose something or someone we have loved. Heartbreak, grief, are less about pain and more about fear, the great intolerable fear. Where once someone was, they no longer are; as I am now, I will not always be.

And so we fill ourselves with new devotion, we aim our attention, we pursue expertise—in the mechanics of a bicycle, the shape of someone else’s laugh, a flower garden, a new language, the sky. We try to soothe the hurt we’ve carried from the start, the secret grief over the nothing that surrounds us, that touches us at all times, the thin wall that divides our presence and our absence. I did not aim my attention at the sky because I was alone, it turns out. I aim my attention at the sky because I desire, and am afraid.

Nature doesn’t loathe the vacuum. The only thing Nature loathes is the leaf blower. Sometimes I forget that we’re part of Nature, too, like the clam, the cloud, the tide, the egg, the eclipse, the shifting bands of color that accompany the setting of the sun.

I do not know if the person coughing in the space adjacent made it off the mountain. I have not thought of them in years, but recently the sound of their cough came rattling back to me across thousands of miles and thousands of days. So little separated us that night. Are their bones calcifying, turning to rock, becoming part of the peak, flesh pecked by bird and carried in flight? Are you still there? Am I? Can we stay on the summit forever? At some point, yes, we will. We will always and forever be there, dissolved into the sky that does not ever end, returned to the stars, touching everything at once. Can you imagine? We will all enter our own inevitable endlessness.

Not yet.

The forecast calls for thunderstorms. Last night, a thunder came so loud it set off a car alarm. The clouds opened and the sound of drenching rain washed me back into dark and weightless sleep. I woke to a new morning and walked outside to rebehold the sun.

 

Read earlier installments of Sky Gazing.

Read Nina MacLaughlin’s series on Summer Solstice, Dawn, and November. 

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Summer Solstice.