The Paris Review's Blog, page 163

Staff Picks: Gabbert, Guzzler, and Greene

Elisa Gabbert. Photo: © Adalena Kavanagh.

Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory is one of those books that send you to your notebook every page or so, desperate not to lose either the thought the author has deftly placed in your mind or the title of a work she has now compelled you to read. The essays encompass sickness and trauma, anesthesia and memory, politics and political apathy, but owing to the force of Gabbert’s attention, the book remains determinedly cohesive. Written before COVID-19 altered all our lives so irretrievably, it is also a work of uncanny prescience. With this chronology in mind, it is difficult to know what to make of the following: “Many experts think the most likely culprit of a future pandemic is some version of the flu; flus are common, highly contagious, and especially dangerous when there’s a new strain to which people have limited immunity.” Or this: “I wonder if the way the world gets worse will barely outpace the rate at which we get used to it.” Or this: “How can it be so, that I have to waste my life this way, when the world is ending?” Even chloroquine (a cousin to hydroxychloroquine) and Anthony Fauci make appearances, long before these names were known to the rest of us. I wonder if Gabbert may be working on an update before The Unreality of Memory hits the shelves this August, though, in a way, I hope she isn’t. As it stands, the book somehow manages to be a germane contribution to today’s—and tomorrow’s—conversations while still existing as an uneasy cultural artifact of a time just recently past. —Robin Jones 

When writers become friends, as often they do, the better for readers: those writerly powers of observation and description somehow seem to work overtime when it comes to peers. Greene on Capri, Shirley Hazzard’s brief memoir of her friendship with Graham Greene, begins when they meet in the sixties on the island of Capri, where a thirty-something Hazzard and her husband often vacationed and Greene owned a home. One might imagine that having Hazzard as a friend would be first delightful, for her charm and wit, and second painful, for her sharp powers of observation. Hazzard steadfastly rejects nostalgia or sentiment—she is frank about the capricious Greene’s difficult genius, his bad temper, his misogyny, and his affairs. But there are also tender moments, almost like something out of a Hazzard novel: the two recite poetry to each other and sit down to aperitivo in piazzas and late dinners at a restaurant called Gemma. In an odd reticence that goes unaccounted for, there is very little of Hazzard’s own life and feelings, but the unflinching approach to Greene’s personality and writing is so engrossing you almost don’t notice. —Lauren Kane

 

Ahmed Bouanani. Photo: M’hamed Bouanani. Via Wikimedia Commons (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

 

The Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani’s 1989 novel The Hospital, translated by Lara Vergnaud and published by New Directions, is a bit of a nightmarish read. An unnamed narrator enters a hospital—based on Bouanani’s own experiences with tuberculosis—and, from there, encounters the familiar and yet foreign parallel universe of the sick. His fellow patients, with names like Guzzler and Rover, alternately lie, weep, and joke with the narrator as he drifts in and out of wellness, and there are plenty of meditations on the nature of the afterlife. There is something Kafkaesque to Bouanani’s depiction of the hospital and the way its bureaucracy shifts and changes the lives of its inhabitants—is the hospital hell? And what exactly is hell, anyway? By the end of The Hospital, the question remains unanswered in the best possible way. —Rhian Sasseen

I briefly mentioned Cole Escola in my recommendation of At Home with Amy Sedaris last week, but the master of high camp deserves a staff pick all to himself. A few weeks ago, he released a self-produced comedy special titled Help! I’m Stuck! with Cole Escola, which proves he’s likely made better use of this time in quarantine than the rest of us. Escola first caught my eye on Instagram with his DIY bits and character sketches. His best: the wistful, washed-up actress who speaks, in a lilting mid-Atlantic dialect, of her bygone Hollywood days. In his nearly hour-long special, however, Escola goes beyond his regular schtick and gives his audience a meatier program. The show opens with Escola, clad in a silky robe, dusting his quaint apartment in time to Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G. But the well-mannered introduction comes to an unexpected end with a close-up on a teary-eyed Escola, his face covered in, well, excrement. This isn’t the last time we see Escola like this—it’s how he introduces each sketch. It’s repulsive, as he undoubtedly intends, but I couldn’t stop watching, soon to be rewarded by even more of his eccentric characters. In one sketch, an MGM-style film noir, he plays not only the femme fatale Jennifer Convertibles but also her boyish assistant, her Swedish nemesis, and a voice-over detective. I was so engrossed that I had completely forgotten it was a cast of one. Yet time and again I was brought back to reality by a despairing Escola, looking into the camera and sobbing, “This is humiliating … really degrading—to you more than me.” —Elinor Hitt

“When I was a child I spoke as a thrush, I / thought as a clod, I understood as a stone, / but when I became a man I put away / plain things for lustrous,” begins Denise Riley’s extraordinary, exacting collection Say Something Back, obscuring the Corinthians verse as if “through a glass, darkly.” In these disjunctures, there is no place for the poet to see herself. She wonders, “shall I never / get it clear.” It is not the brightness of a mirror that the poems offer but the luster of obsidian. A poet and philosopher, her work is marked by a sustained interrogation of the “I” of lyric. A recently released book from NYRB Poets brings together Say Something Back and the prose work Time Lived, without Its Flow, both written after the loss of Riley’s son, which left her with “the curious sense of being pulled right outside of time, as if beached in a clear light.” It is a sense that lies beyond the cruel limits of language, which demand that she mark time and person: “ ‘He died’ is a strange sentence, since there’s no longer a human subject to sustain that ‘he.’ ” Why, in the face of such a common pain, is there no shared language for this loss, “no specific noun for the parent of a dead child”? Is there a self that can bear a mother’s grief? “Does sifting through damage ease, or enshrine it?” One lyric asks: “You principle of song, what are you for now?” It cannot bring him home; her questions are answered with only their echo. The collection ends suspended in paradox: “What to do now is clear, and wordless. / You will bear what cannot be borne.” Yet in her refusal of sentimentality, of elegy, Riley asks, profoundly, what poetry can achieve—and for whom. “It’s late. And it always will be late.” But for those who have known the pain of such loss, her poetry offers an “I” to share in. —Chris Littlewood

 

Denise Riley.

The Only Believers

Paint brushes and watercolor paints on the table in a workshop, selective focus, close up

“In the Universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.” —William Blake

Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains how the brain is like a folded hand. A fist. The thumb against the palm represents the limbic regions, brain zones dealing with emotions, stress. The folded fingers are the cerebral cortex, which help with rational thought and regulating moods. The fingernails are the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used for decision making, ethics, and morality. All these zones work together as a team. Faced with panic, the fingers spring up, we lose rationality, ethics, and are left with our emotions. We often rely on our basic instincts: fight, flight, or freeze. We may feel disorganized, unable to concentrate or make decisions, suffer from mood swings, frustration, and bouts of adrenaline. The trick is to find a way to bring those fingers down. Keep everything connected.

We’ve been in confinement in France for over two months. Here in Brittany, under lockdown, when I’m not writing or online lecturing, I’ve been working as a clinical arts therapist. Three days a week, I leave the cherry tree blossoming in our garden and head along empty roads to a psychiatric hospital. On the car seat to my right is the file I dutifully compiled the first day of confinement. It contains my regulatory paperwork, proving my right to leave my house, forms ticked and completed: name, date of birth, address, hour of departure, arrival. A photocopy of my passport. A stamped document from my employer. Everything is signed.

On Monday, I work with a patient with severe schizophrenia. We discuss how he is coping: “It’s reality. The real. The real. You have to be responsible.” He repeats this calmly, in an echolalia fashion, pacing up and down a corridor. I think of this virus and Lacan’s idea about the real as  “that which is strictly unthinkable.” The real needs to be masked. Literally or metaphorically. We clothe the real that terrifies us in words, music, images and jokes. We cloak it in culture. We metamorphose the nightmare.

My file is bright orange. I have drawn flowers inside, thinking of spring, Frida Kahlo, fecundity, ephemeral beauty. Khalo wrote: “I paint flowers so they will not die.” In my garden, the cherry tree blossoms, a delicate pale pink abundance in an azure sky.  These flowers of mine seem like hope, a ritual opening and closing, in an unprecedented time when the notions of touch, language, and barriers have been fundamentally modified. Restricted. My five-year-old daughter pronounces the word coronavirus perfectly, articulating every syllable. The word feels wrong when it falls from her mouth: Co-ro-na-vi-rus

When I arrive at work, the hospital gates, usually open, are locked. Doors normally left ajar require a badge or key. Before walking into rooms and units, I string a mask over my face and disinfect my hands. I create barriers against disease, infection. What Foucault described as “the tangible space of the body” has been neutralized, objectified. We place arrows on the floor in sticky orange tape. Put up NO ENTRY signs. Restrict space. In January, in what seems another version of my professional life, I encouraged a patient to throw paint, Jackson Pollock–style, onto a tabletop-size canvas. “You are allowed to make mess. Follow your instincts,” I said, encouraging freedom of expression, singularity. In February, with a female drama-therapy group, we played trust games, tumbling into each other arms. “We can touch and be safe,” I reassured. Kandinsky wrote, “There is no ‘must’ in art, which is forever free,” I told another art-therapy sculpture group in early spring (just before lockdown began), as we built imagined worlds from papier-mâché balloons. One female patient constructed a globe with scraps of recycled antique maps: tainted borders realigned, geographies and topographies altered. At this point, no one was wearing masks. Instructions were to disinfect hands, implement social-distancing, alter boundaries.

Since the start of the pandemic, there are days when everything is calm, and others when trauma seems to pour from the sky. During one sunny lunch break, a social work student—whom I have only just met—confides to me that her estranged father has just died. How to get a death certificate, organize a funeral, empty a flat, enact the rituals of grief and loss during lockdown?

Compassion and solidarity are pillars in the architecture of these moments. Even if we cannot reach out and touch each other, our ears can still listen, our eyes communicate. “Solidarity is essential,” I repeat to other members of staff as we talk about our daily professional ventures into new practices, new rules, new ways of being, caring, and losing.

Research shows that infectious diseases have associations with mental illness. There is an increased risk of OCD, Tourette’s syndrome, depression, anxiety or panic. Confinement can cause post-traumatic stress disorder. The Chinese government has been using mental health care tools employed during the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, treating the current crisis, in terms of health strategy, on the same level as a major trauma.

The notion of order is always on my mind. Suddenly, I have found myself redeployed, wearing a mask and white coat, la blouse blanche. When I take a selfie, I realize my mask is upside down. This seems apt, since the world is inside out, and upside down, and we are all turning around. “It is a double confinement,” a nurse comments; for patients hospitalized full-time, or in locked wards, their confined space has shrunk further. No afternoons out. No visitors. No walks in the park. Physical movement is restrained, defined. There is no wandering, no exploring. No flaneur or flaneuse. To save lives, patients and staff must respect the rules. Yet, as Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, “Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.” Psychiatry is the medicine of the spirit, the mind. In the midst of a sanitary crisis, how to provide the space so a soul can breath?

We have a COVID ward, providing specialized care for people suffering from COVID-19 and mental illness. Patients arrive and leave.

In outpatient units, to reduce contagion, we receive only emergency cases, or clients with CTOs (Compulsory Treatment Orders). Otherwise, we schedule telephone interviews, or carry out home visits. For hours, I listen to voices, silences, pauses and inflections, pitch and tone. I try to fathom, catch what is between the lines. Many of our patients are at high-risk from the virus, as they suffer from comorbidities psychiatric and somatic. We are treating both their physical and mental health. Ring us whenever you need, we tell patients on the phone. “How are you? Your physical health? Your mental health? We are here.”

One day, I accompany a distressed patient from a closed ward, and we make a silver handbag from empty coffee packets, plaiting strips and stapling sections into place. In this act of punk tailoring, she makes decisions, exercises freedom. Kandinsky believed that “Art must always be a choice.” This imagining of something new counterbalances Lacan’s real. We create a reality that is thinkable, touchable, and beautiful, beau. Small acts provide pockets in which to place our hope.

From mid-March onwards, our medical directives change nearly daily: what we must do, not do, try to achieve. We pin information on noticeboards: crisis management, disinfection procedure. Risk. Security. Protect. Diagrams with arrows, stages, beginnings and ends. Some patients are destabilized, others stable, certain patients seem slightly better.

The days pass, and both staff and patients, as Louise Bourgeois said, are doing, undoing, and redoing. Doing, undoing, and redoing, trying to keep our hands closed.

This week, with a patient, we joked about doing music therapy on the phone. In our usual sessions, we pass a drum in a circle, transferring it from hand to hand. Suddenly, he begins singing, a song we learned together and sang every week with the group. An old campfire song, one I learned years ago. Through the receiver, I hear his voice, perfectly in tune, his hand tapping the rhythm, the beat.

“Today,” he sings “I feel older.” Tap, Tap. “Than I’ve ever felt.” Tap. “In my life.” Tap. Tap. Tap. I join him, and we sing the lyrics together. “That’s not surprising really.” Tap “I am.” We burst into laughter.

In that moment, I am filled with hope. Despite the pandemic, the telephone, the distance, connection is possible. Realities are possible. Creative realities, imagined realities. Recently, wearing gloves and masks, I accompanied a patient making an improvised collage poem, randomly choosing cutout words. Instead of leaning on the painted spotted wooden workshop table, we worked on a neutral plastic disinfected surface. Two meters apart. Yet, the words she selected were not bland, indifferent, or sanitized. Our eyes met, above our masks, as she read out the opening lines: “Je vais partir … I will leave. Arrive. Return. On the road. The landscape evolving. But where are we? Seek…” In What is Politics? Hannah Arendt writes, “the only believers in the world are artists. The persistence of the art work reflects the persistence of the world.” The resilience of the human spirit blossoms. It flowers in unexpected spaces.

 

Susanna Crossman is the co-author of L’Hôspital, Le dessous des Cartes (LEH, 2015). Her debut novel, Dark Island, will be published in French in 2021 (Editions Delcourt).

Les Goddesses

John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft, ca. 1797, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 25 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A young Englishwoman named Mary Wollstonecraft lived by her wits and her pen. At thirty-four, Mary did not expect to marry, but she soon met an American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay and believed she’d found her soul mate. In love, they moved to Paris where they had a daughter, named Fanny.

But Gilbert began to travel more and more, and soon it became apparent he had a wandering eye as well. Heartbroken over this desertion, Mary drank laudanum. She survived, but within a matter of months was despondent again and jumped from a bridge into the Thames.

Miraculously she was rescued and nursed back to health by William Godwin, like Mary a political radical, to whom she quickly developed a strong attachment. Later married and happy, they read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud together the night before she went into labor. Tragically, Mary died a few days after giving birth to a second daughter, also named Mary, who would be raised, along with Fanny, by William Godwin, who would remarry.

His new wife had a young child of her own, Claire, and the three girls grew up as sisters; they became known as Les Goddesses. When Mary was seventeen, a famous poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley came courting: he first paid favors to Fanny but quickly fell for Mary and the two eloped to the Continent, taking Claire with them.

Fanny, crestfallen, stayed behind and, like her mother, drank laudanum. The real story concerning the lives of these extraordinary women is filled with many paradoxes, and without a doubt it is more fantastic than any fiction.

*

Gray to Green

Sitting on the floor in sunlight and reading through eight small notebooks going back to 1998, looking for a phrase about Goethe: The stars above, the plants below. The thought is connected to Goethe’s mother and what she taught him about the natural world; more generally, it is about how people lived in constant relation to nature.

I never found the reference; it was something I had stumbled across on the internet, but it led me to The Flight to Italy, Goethe’s diary (recommended by Kafka, in his diary), in which G. abruptly takes leave of a turgid existence in Weimar and travels incognito to Italy for the first time in his life. He is thirty-seven years old, and the trip is a revelation and a creative renewal of mammoth proportions. He draws plants, collects rock samples, and begins to dress like the locals so as to pass and be better able to observe their customs. G. reports on the weather patterns (sublime clouds and sunsets); he develops a theory of precipitation involving the curious concept of “elasticity.” He looks at architecture and writes of his worshipful love of Palladio; he has a deep appreciation for Italian painting but rails against the squandering of genius and talent on the “senseless … stupid subjects” of Christianity.

Because the diary is written quickly, informally, it feels uncannily contemporary. It is hard to believe this is a voice from the late eighteenth century. In addition to studying everything, G. takes a hard look at himself, and toward the end of the book there is a striking revelation: he confesses his “sickness and … foolishness,” his secret shame that he had never before made the trip to Italy to see firsthand its art and architecture, the objects of his lifelong fascination. Two days before arriving in Rome, he no longer takes off his clothes to sleep so as to hasten his arrival, and on October 26, 1786, he writes, “Next Sunday I’ll be sleeping in Rome after 30 years of wishing and hoping.”

The effusive diary abruptly goes silent: “I can say nothing now except I am here … Only now do I begin to live.” To his Weimar friends, he writes: “I’m here and at peace with myself, and, it seems, at peace with the whole of my life,” and to his lover, Charlotte von Stein: “I could spend years here without saying much.”

The Flight to Italy is filled with references to plants and crops; G. even has a theory of a “primal plant” form. The only star he mentions, though, is the sun.

*

The Real

Now it is a conflict between the idea of writing from the unknown versus working from notes and journals. Elsewhere, I have compared these different modes of writing to two genres in photography: the vérité approach of the street, seizing life and movement with little chance of reprise, and, in contrast, the controlled practice of the studio, where the artist is less exposed, the environment more forgiving, and time more malleable. And perhaps another iteration of this distinction between risk and control was intimated in something I heard a critic, quoting Godard, say on the radio when I lived in Paris in 2008: “Filmmakers who make installations instead of films are afraid of the real.”

In his six-hour documentary Phantom India, Louis Malle travels all over the subcontinent filming, and later, in voice-over, he analyzes and reflects on the intrusion and indiscretion of the camera. Malle will never get over this feeling of impropriety, but he will keep on shooting, hour after hour, pushing up against the act of documentary in an attempt to understand something about India and something about himself. Much of Phantom India is straight-up documentary, but there are moments of intense self-scrutiny and questioning, for instance when Malle describes his inability to be “present,” to experience the “real” of what is taking place before the camera.

He lives in his head, sometimes thinking of the past but mostly caught up in a work whose meaning will only be locked in at a future moment. To every new situation, his first instinct is to invoke memory and analysis: a scene on a beach at daybreak reminds him of another, twenty years earlier, when he was making his first film. “A tamer of time, a slave of time” is how Malle understands his predicament. At a certain point, he and his crew stop filming. Only then do they begin to experience the present tense, the slowness of time, and what Malle calls “the real.”

*

The Wet

Another problem for me now is the welling up of the “Wet,” the insistent preoccupation with narrating certain aspects of the discredited past, things I may never be ready to tell.

Previously I have incited myself to write by beginning with the most pressing thing, but the problem now is that I can’t face writing about the Wet. I think about giving it a masquerade, or perhaps the Wet will duly give way to something else.

This document parallels another one written from notes collected in diaries. That one is accompanied by the uneasy feeling of cannibalizing myself. This document, though not a book, is trying to begin according to a principle described by Marguerite Duras: “To be without a subject for a book, without any idea of a book, is to find yourself in front of a book. An immense void. An eventual book. In front of writing, live and naked, something terrible to surmount.” I wanted to try, almost as an experiment, to write both ways, one alongside the other in tandem, but already I’ve begun to fold in notes from that other document …

Was Duras opening her veins? Yes and no. She was also opening the bottle. But she would go at it—writing and drinking—for days and nights. She had stamina, as Susan Sontag would say. And she was not afraid of the Wet.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “The more honestly you put yourself into the story, the more that story will concern others as well.”

*

Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, ten years after Goethe and two hundred years before my sister Claire, was Wet and Dry. She was a brilliant star in her firmament, a passionate, early advocate of women’s, children’s, and human rights and an enlightened defender of truth and justice: a radical. She went to Paris to witness the revolution and lived to tell of the bloody Terror of 1793/94. A woman with enormous intellectual capabilities and savoir faire, she supported herself, and at various times one or more of her largely hapless six siblings, by writing.

But she also suffered from depression, and, brokenhearted over the rejection by Imlay, drank laudanum. In an attempt to revive her, he offered a mission of travel to Scandinavia to investigate a murky business affair of his. Mary accepted because she needed the money and hoped that this continued involvement with Imlay might ensure a positive romantic outcome.

In 1795, she set out on a dangerous ocean voyage with her infant daughter, Fanny, and a French maid. Like Goethe on his travels to Italy, Wollstonecraft wrote letters to Imlay chronicling her observations and emotional responses to the landscape and peoples of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Her heartbreak is softly intimated in the letters, but mostly she reflects and reports with a journalist’s eye on the native customs: a featherbed so soft and deep it is like “sinking into the grave”; children swaddled in heavy, insalubrious layers of flannel; airless homes heated with stoves instead of fires—here, like Goethe, Mary invokes the odd concept of “elasticity” to talk about the air. Viewing the mummified remains of some nobles, she responds with characteristic indignation: “When I was shewn these human petrefactions, I shrunk back with disgust and horror. ‘Ashes to ashes!’ thought I—‘Dust to dust!’ ”

After her return home to England, Wollstonecraft composed the letters into an extremely well-received book titled Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It was published in 1796, two hundred years before the birth of my son, Barney.

*

Alison

Soon after I arrived in Paris, shaky with jet lag and insomnia, I asked Alison, my oldest friend, if she’d help me brainstorm. Bless her, she is always willing, and she is a font of ideas and strategies. I was struggling and fearful, convinced I’d do nothing of value in this city: I took a pill and drank a glass of wine on a cold terrace on the rue de Rivoli, and told Alison this:

I came to Paris in 1976 just out of high school. I was lonely, depressed, bored, illiterate. I was thin, I was fat, with no control over any of it. I was a Francophile with a deep longing to be part of the culture, but I was clueless, infused with teenage ideas about ‘the Romantic.’ A French friend told me emphatically: ‘The Romantic is the nineteenth century. End of story.’ I met the two Quebecois artists in the Cité Internationale des Arts studios. They were friendly but aloof. Thirty years later, I am back in Paris with a husband, a son, a life. I have one of those studios. I am thin. I have money. I have MS.

Alison’s eyes light up: “That is the perfect story.” But I have no idea how to write a story. About telling certain episodes of your past, Norman Mailer said: “You must be ready.” I may never be ready. Some excised paragraphs, the original motivation for this project, now reside in a separate document labeled “Pathography.”

Why does everyone want to tell their story? Why do all of my students talk about “representing memory”? Why is Amy, in grad school, suddenly conscious of her working-class roots, destabilized, and obsessed with her childhood? Why is my sister Jane tormented by the past and asking Mom to talk to her shrink? Why did I spend so much time in Paris, agoraphobic, brooding, tunneling into realms of childhood where I found pockets of it illuminated with sudden, violent flashes?

Isak Dinesen: “The reward of storytelling is to be able to let go … All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”

*

Siblings

At the end of my copy of Flight to Italy, there are short bios of all the principals in Goethe’s life. His mother, Katharina Elisabeth Goethe, is described as a very supportive woman, and there is a citation from Freud about G. having been his mother’s favorite and about how children singled out in this way retain a lifelong confidence and glow. This led me to Freud’s brief essay “A Childhood Recollection,” an analysis of an early memory G. recounts in his autobiography of throwing dishes out the window when he was a small child. The episode remained mysterious to Freud until, as is typical of his method, he began to hear similar stories from his patients and started to piece together a theory, namely that the throwing of objects out the window is typically linked to a child’s fury and jealousy in response to the arrival of a new baby. I strongly suspect I reacted just as violently or even more so to the births of my five younger siblings. A therapist explained this to me once and said I should practice self-forgiveness, but it took Freud’s words to cement the notion that my behavior was not a murderous aberration of childhood. A description of one of these cruel episodes of “acting out” has been excised and relegated to the “Pathography.”

Michael Haneke: “Artists don’t need shrinks because they can work it out in their work.”

But can we do without Freud?

*

Sharon & Gloria

I fell asleep in the afternoon and dreamed I was commiserating with Sharon Hayes about how a work, once finished, is “like a tombstone.” Gloria Naylor said this about her book The Women of Brewster Place: “I had gotten a bound copy of the book—which I really call a tombstone because that’s what it represents, at least for my part of the experience.”

The thing is only alive (and, by extension, I am only alive) while it is in process, and I’ve never quite figured out how to keep it ignited, moving. Some stubborn gene always threatens to flood the engine just at the crucial moment of shifting gears.

*

Mary and Mary

Like Goethe’s Flight, Wollstonecraft’s Letters, a narrative moderated by a journey, has a special, self-generating momentum: a trip, with its displacements in time and space, can be the perfect way to frame a story. Combine this with an epistolary address, and it would appear to be the most easeful of forms. Letters was the only happy outcome of the Scandinavian trip. Five months after her first suicide attempt, on confirmation that Imlay had a lover, Mary jumped from a bridge in rain-soaked clothing to hasten her descent. She was saved by a boatman and briefly consoled by Imlay, who shortly thereafter disappeared for good from the lives of Mary and Fanny. But M. W. was lucky to find a friend in the person of William Godwin, a sage man who, according to M. W. biographer Lyndall Gordon, counseled: “A disappointed woman should try to construct happiness ‘out of a set of materials within her reach.’ ”

A year later, in 1797, in love with Godwin, married, and pregnant, Mary read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud with him. The following night, she went into labor and gave birth to a child who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, whom she would soon leave motherless. The delivery was botched: the placenta did not descend, and a doctor’s unwashed hands reached into the womb to tear it out. Sepsis set in, the mother’s milk became infected, and puppies were used to draw off lactation. Two hundred years later, in 1997, less than six months after giving birth, I flew across North America with an electric pump to suction the milk from my breasts. But I missed my connection and arrived at my destination twelve hours later, my breasts grotesquely engorged. I took a photo in the hotel room and some years later published it in LTTR, a minutely circulating queer-feminist journal. Now that photo is all over the internet, completely out of my control.

Part of the tragic irony of M. W.’s death in childbirth was her own enlightened advocacy of simple hygiene and nonintervention in the care of infants and mothers; suspicious of doctors, she was a believer in wholesomeness and common sense in an age of superstition and quackery.

*

The Sun

Wollstonecraft and Goethe, both northerners from cold, rainy climates, enthuse repeatedly in their correspondences about the presence of sunshine. Goethe marveled to his friends about its perpetual abundance in Italy (“these skies, where all day long you don’t have to give a thought to your body”), and for Wollstonecraft in Scandinavia its effects are central to her evocation of the sublime, which she experiences in her travels along the rocky coast and mountainous landscapes of Sweden and Norway.

The warm reach of the sun was also surely a factor in granting each of them a measure of peace: for Goethe, when he arrives in Rome and no longer feels the need to double his life in writing (“I am here … Only now do I begin to live”), and for Wollstonecraft, during countless moments when nature impresses itself on her as the salve and renewal of an exhausted, disillusioned spirit. Waking on a ship one morning, she greets daybreak with these words: “I opened my bosom to the embraces of nature; and my soul rose to its author.” Two decades later, her daughter Mary Shelley would write from the banks of Lake Geneva: “When the sun bursts forth it is with a splendour and heat unknown in England.”

In 2004, in Needville, Texas, an asteroid was named for Mary Wollstonecraft (Minor Planet Center designation 90481 Wollstonecraft).

*

“Les Goddesses”

Aaron Burr, visiting England from America in 1812, bestowed this epithet on Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters, Fanny and Mary, and their stepsister, Clara Mary Jane Clairmont, known then as Jane and later as Claire. Two years later, Mary, age seventeen, and Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped to France with Jane in tow; Fanny—with disastrous results—was not invited to join them. Lord Byron eventually formed part of the group, and together they lived an idyll of poetry, song, travel, and love, surviving on whatever money they could squeeze from Shelley’s father. On foot, atop a donkey, and by boat, they journeyed through parts of France, Switzerland, and Germany, keeping a collective diary subsequently published under the title History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Nearly two hundred years later, I procured a facsimile edition of this book printed in New Delhi, no doubt downloaded from Google Books: the insides are a distant cousin of the original typeset, but the cover is a bright red design adorned with Islamic patterning. It is an utterly charming object, as is the prose it contains.

Eventually the Shelleys settled in Italy, where they wrote; read the classics, Rousseau, and Goethe; and Jane, in particular, studied music and languages. About Rome, Mary proclaimed: “[It] has such an effect on me that my past life before I saw it appears a blank & now I begin to live.” They existed like this for eight years, short of money, outcasts living in defiance of the rigid matrimonial conventions of the early nineteenth century. The ménage was not without its tensions and jealousies: Mary, pregnant and ill for much of the time, quickly began to find Jane (now Claire) an irritant. Claire was vivacious and talented, and though she could sometimes be dispatched, she would remain a resolute fixture of the Shelley circle. Mary began to use a little sun symbol in her diary to indicate Claire’s presence on any given day.

*

Jane

Mary Wollstonecraft’s parents, John Edward and Elizabeth, were married in 1756; their union produced seven children. Two hundred years later, my parents, James and Patricia, met in England and married in 1956. They also had seven children—six girls and one boy—beginning with Jane Elisabeth in 1957.

Prompted by a stay in rehab, my sister decided to write a memoir of her childhood and addiction. In an email, she told me: “I am in the process of teasing out an ending, but I’m now edging up to a very respectable 60,000 words, plenty to qualify for a book. Now, of course that the deed is nearing completion and I have set down once and for all a true record of what has happened (sorta, kinda), I am feeling somewhat uncertain.”

M. W. wrote of “the healing balm of sympathy [as the] medicine of life,” a concept Jane, an uncommonly sensitive and empathic person—always, since childhood—and now an amateur homeopath, would undoubtedly agree with. Jane reminds me of M. W. in some ways. A nurturing mother of three daughters, she is a strong and caring woman who, like M.W. at times, both keeps her distance from doctors and their drugs and is emotionally fragile, prone to depression and occasional rash behavior.

*

Fanny

Fanny, to whom Percy Shelley had first shown affection, was excluded from the Summer of Love. She had inherited her mother’s melancholic streak, and though she tried to combat the depressive feelings she was dogged by what she called: “Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humour.” Fannykin, of whom Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the Scandinavian Letters when her child was a babe, “I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or her principles to her heart,” succumbed to exactly that predicament of the nineteenth-century woman without means. Fearful of becoming a burden, Fanny drank laudanum as her mother had done, but unlike Mary, she was successful.

Young Mary’s bliss with Shelley was short-lived, as death began to intrude with frightening regularity. Of her four pregnancies, only one child, Percy Florence, survived. Claire’s daughter by Byron, Allegra, whom Byron callously separated from her mother, died at age five, alone in an Italian convent. Just prior, Claire had written heartbreakingly in her journal that recovering Allegra would be like “com[ing] back to the warm ease of life after the coldness and stiffness of the grave.” Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, in an advanced state of pregnancy, drowned herself in 1816, and, eight years into his relationship with Mary, Shelley himself drowned in a boating accident on the Gulf of La Spezia off the coast of Pisa with their close friend Edward Williams. Byron, who’d committed himself to a war of independence in Greece, died two years later in Missolonghi of fever.

*

James and Patricia

In 1975, my father, James, age forty-five, fell from the roof of our house one Saturday morning in August and never regained consciousness. I had just turned seventeen, the same age as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin when she eloped to France with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jane Clairmont. My mother, Patricia, retreated to the top of our big box of a house and all hell broke loose below. The Davey girls were not writing poetry, studying Greek and Latin, and procreating; we were listening to David Bowie, Roxy Music, and the Clash, and ingesting too many drugs. Interviewed by a journalist friend about our active sex lives at the time, my mother responded ruefully: “I’d mind less if I thought they enjoyed it more.” It was a different time and different kind of rebellion; nonetheless, many thought of us as a female force—goddesses, no, but “Amazonian,” yes, to be reckoned with. And that is what I tried to show in a series of portraits I took in Ottawa and Montreal beginning around 1980. “Les jeunes filles en fleur” was another expression used by the same journalist friend to describe some of us, but that came later, after we’d settled down a bit.

*

Claire and Kate

Claire Davey, small and taut, and the only one among us who did not regularly swell and shrink, never succumbed to intoxicants or liquor. And she never threw herself at men, as did some of her sisters, as did Claire Clairmont with Byron. Temperate, she traveled, she studied; now she teaches philosophy and yoga to high school students in Toronto. Kate, born a year and a half after Claire, in 1961, two hundred years after Mary’s brother Henry Wollstonecraft, was the fearless party girl, drinking and inhaling pills until she passed out. Kate never “recovered” into anything resembling normalcy. Multiple stays in rehab would eventually lead to a lifetime of AA, NA, OA. Intelligent, sensitive, she opted out. She read every novel on my mother’s bookshelves and filled the house with rescued animals. Some of the original five cats and four dogs have passed on, but the smells linger to remind us of nineteen-year-old, blind, incontinent Candy and gentle, gormless, clubfooted Duke, found on a reservation.

*

Claire

Of the Shelley entourage, only Mary, her son Percy, and Claire Clairmont lived beyond their thirties. At the dissolution of their circle, Claire joined her brother in Vienna and began to work as a teacher, but she was hounded out of this employment by the lingering scandal of her youth and forced to migrate as far as Moscow, where she became a governess. Her journal, a penetrating literary document, was published a century later; an old woman, she eventually settled in Florence with her niece Paola and became the model for Henry James’s story “The Aspern Papers.”

*

Mary and Percy

Widowed, Mary Shelley was at the mercy of her tyrannical and conservative father-in-law, a man who had never accepted his son’s poetic gift, nor his marriage to Mary. After editing a posthumous collection of Shelley’s work in 1824, Mary was forbidden by the patriarch from publishing any more of Shelley’s poetry or even writing about him, lest it shame the family, thus forcing her into a conventional lifestyle for the sake of her son and his inheritance, small sums of which were parsed out to them while Shelley senior lived on and on, defying all expectations of his demise.

According to Muriel Spark, Percy Florence inherited none of his parents’ literary or artistic talent and refused to visit art museums with his mother when they traveled in Europe. Although he was a disappointment to Mary, she later grew to appreciate what Spark termed his “phlegmatic qualities.” Percy was “to remain loyally and negatively by [Mary’s] side to sustain her old age.” He married Jane Gibson, a sympathetic woman who became Mary’s friend and caretaker during her final illness at age fifty-three. Percy and Jane did not have children.

*

Barney

Age thirteen, Barney does not like art museums either—he says they instantly make him feel sleepy. He told me, “An ideal way to spend the day would be to drive to an airport and watch the planes take off and land.”

*

Tautology

I learned the meaning of this from Baudelaire via Barthes: “I take H [hashish] in order to be free. But in order to take H I must already be free.” And from Alejandra Pizarnik: “To not eat I must be happy. And I cannot be happy if I am fat.” This comes close to summing up my adolescence.

*

Homeopathy

In November 2010, on the recommendation of my sister Jane, I traveled to Montreal to visit Dr. Saine, a famous homeopath, a man who, like his father before him, had treated thousands of people with MS. I sat with him in his Dickensian study, surrounded by stacks of paper and books, some framing white busts—no doubt Dr. Saine’s predecessors, the discoverers of this strange and mystical science. He interviewed me for three and a half hours about symptoms, cravings, fears, and dreams.

He felt my frozen feet and lit a fire, burning a cube of oak. “How do you feel when you see a poor person? On a scale of one to ten, how much do you fear poverty? Cancer? Death?” “How do you feel when you are with your son and your husband enters the room?” And on and on. “Is there anything you haven’t told me about yourself?” I told as much as I could, including some of the bad and shameful memories from the “Pathography” (because you have to), but the long interview was tiring, and my fragmented story came out rather flat and monotone. He received it all without judgment, indeed, with a high degree of curiosity, almost excitement.

He said my case was unusual—perhaps my parental influences were too strong, too dominant, neither one giving way—and this left him torn between two antidotes. I departed with two tiny glass vials, coincidently each substance related to photography: sepia, which is a dye used to tone photographic prints, and lycopodium, the spores of club mosses that were ground into combustible powder and ignited in the era before flashbulbs.

*

Being

“To do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciations,” wrote Walter Benjamin. Yet that abandonment is precisely what would begin to take place in my photographs over the next ten years, beginning in 1984, until my subjects constituted little more than the dust on my bookshelves or the view under the bed. The burden of image theft, as Louis Malle put it, had something to do with my retreat, but also a gradual seeping in of a kind of biographical reticence, perhaps connected to my present reservations around telling my story (“Pathography”).

I, too, ingested excessive substances in decades two and three, and one result is that I can barely keep track of the analogies I’ve posited, from Duras’s “immense void” and the unscripted of vérité, between rehearsed writing (from journals) and photographic mise-en-scène. And what is meant by “the real” in the pronouncements of Malle and Godard (“Filmmakers who make installations instead of films are afraid of the real”)? For Godard, the real is about confrontation and risk in time-based media, the old-fashioned way, no props allowed. Malle uses the term to describe a state of “being” to which he accedes when he finally stops filming in India; it is about experiencing a kind of existential peace, a freedom from the need to be making something. But he can only enjoy the feeling because he has worked very hard for it.

*

The Green and the Wet

Over the years, I’ve brushed up against a peculiar sensation of “being,” usually in green places where water infuses the air: in a marshy field in England crisscrossed by canals; on the tiny, narrow peninsula of pine-choked soil that is Provincetown, in fall or winter. Something about the “elasticity” of the air infuses “the elasticity of my spirits” and allows me to enter an unusual state of weightlessness, an intense and rare feeling of well-being.

Displacement in space, and the attendant fatigue of travel, must be contributing factors to this febrile state, not unrelated to Stendhal syndrome, which had its origins in Florence in 1817. Stendhal noted this phenomenon in Italy just one year before Claire Clairmont and the Shelley party found themselves climbing the ruins of the Colosseum on their nightly walks through Rome. Goethe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Shelleys were all weary travelers—M. W. had recently given birth, and Mary Shelley, her daughter, was more or less pregnant for five years. They both had very young children in tow; they were exhausted. In early 1997, sleep-deprived, I walked through the snow-covered woods of Provincetown with infant Barney strapped to my chest. I needed to move at all costs; I craved something mind-altering.

*

Sepia Days

Mary Shelley died in 1851 and Claire Clairmont in 1879, but no photographs of them seem to exist, at least on the web; there is a photographic oval of Percy Florence Shelley as an older man—he looks a bit like Freud.

In his essay “A Little History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin cites Goethe, apropos of August Sander: “There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.” Mary Wollstonecraft and Goethe were just pre-photography, Goethe by only seven years. Their travel writings have the vividness and spontaneity of snapshots, and Goethe’s phrases and sketches, in particular, feel startlingly modern. It is not a stretch to imagine that Goethe, with his scientific mind, might have anticipated the nascent technology: it was “in the air,” after all, long before 1839.

The close observation that Goethe championed and was his means to knowledge, to “true theory,” was precisely the promise held out for photography for many, many decades, perhaps a hundred thirty years if we count up through the late 1970s. And that is when I started taking pictures, at the very moment when the truth claims of the photograph were being dismantled by theory. That moment of the “Discourse of Others” has passed or shifted, but it marked me, changed for good the way I work.

When I wrote about “being” four years ago, it was under the tapering effect of steroids. Now I take drugs that make me sleep. But this morning I woke early with precisely the idea of writing these lines and taking a picture of the rising sun reflected off the giant apartment building in the distance. Up at seven for the first time in … ? Photograph gleaming building—my old habit from when I’d wake with the sun.

*

Coda

On the subway downtown to the New York Public Library in search of Mary Shelley’s diaries, I began to notice subway riders absorbed in writing of their own: a woman paying her bills, another marking pages on which the word draft is stamped in large letters. Some are standing, precariously balancing pads and pens on crowded trains; others look off into space, lost in concentration. There is a man folded over his crossword, whom I captured in the same pose on more than one day, and children doing their homework. A woman wearing orange velvet gloves clutches a small yellow pencil.

Just when I’d been writing about the disappearance of the figure from my photographs, I found myself taking street pictures again in the dim green light of the Manhattan subway. I experienced the same unease and doubt I’ve always had in taking pictures on the street, and I kept expecting to be asked what I was doing. But the writers themselves, eyes downcast, were unaware of my camera, and those looking on, over my own shoulder even, seem only mildly surprised by the small point-and-shoot, a note taker itself, recording the underground writers as we ride.

 

Moyra Davey was born in Toronto in 1958. She has had solo exhibitions at Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2010); Tate Liverpool (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2014); and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2014), among other venues. Davey lives and works in New York.

From Index Cards , by Moyra Davey © New Directions.

More Than Just a Lesbian Love Story

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

“Shameless” and “unpublishable”—this was the reaction of her publishers when the Dutch writer Dola de Jong first submitted her novel The Tree and the Vine (De Thuiswacht) in 1950. Four years later, it made it into print, thanks in large part to the backing of prominent literary figures such as the Dutch poet Leo Vroman and the Belgian writer Marnix Gijsen, both European exiles living in America (as was de Jong by this point in her life). She also had the support of renowned New York editor Maxwell Perkins, the man who’d discovered both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and who’d published de Jong’s And the Field is the World (1945), the story of a young Jewish couple who flee the Netherlands for Morocco on the eve of the Second World War.

What made The Tree and the Vine so shocking was its candid depiction of queer desire. It follows two young women in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the late thirties: Erica, a rash and impatient fledgling journalist who doesn’t live by anyone else’s rules, and the much more guarded, inhibited Bea, the narrator of the tale. De Jong’s publisher’s concerns were predictable. A bold and groundbreaking work, The Tree and the Vine caused a stir, both in Holland when it was first published, and then later again when it was translated, by Ilona Kinzer, into English and American editions, in 1961 and 1963 respectively. Though it clearly struck a chord with many readers—de Jong, it was said, received piles of fan mail from married women who questioned their life choices after reading it—its nuances were lost on many. As Lillian Faderman explains in her afterword to the Feminist Press’s 1996 reprint, a reviewer writing in The Statesman and Nation (May 12, 1961) was “unable to appreciate the book’s subtleties and larger meanings.” A new translation, by Kristen Gehrman, published this month by Transit Books, hopes to appeal to a broader readership today. As Gehrman argues, it’s a novel that deserves to be appreciated as something more than just a tale of war, or a lesbian romance.

Though the Statesman and Nation’s reviewer describes the novel as a portrait of “exotic vice,” “compulsive sin,” and “sexual pervert[s],” by today’s standards, de Jong’s depiction of lesbian love really couldn’t be any tamer. This is not a book that titillates; its emphasis instead is on the pain and damage caused by repressed desire. Although they have their more theatrical moments, on the whole Erica and Bea are far from histrionic. As Faderman reminds us, though, the reviewer is using “cliché terms […] characteristic of cover copy for the lesbian pulps of the era.”

Which is not to say that de Jong was unaware of that genre. Faderman continues by explaining that although the “quality and seriousness” of The Tree and the Vine far transcends its pulpier cousins, this doesn’t mean it’s immune to the broader influences of the period. Certain elements of the novel capture the flavor of those more sensationalist volumes. De Jong depicts the darker, dangerous side of the world of same-sex desire, and the way it’s a source of torment—physical and psychological—for those who exist within it. It is also a potent source of self-hatred, and de Jong pathologizes Erica’s lesbianism with the suggestion that it can be traced back to the problematic relationship she has with her mother. Reading the novel made me think of Yelena Moskovich’s description in her 2018 essay for the Daily, “Hunting for a Lesbian Canon,” of the first lesbian pulp “accidental best seller”: Tereska Torrès’s Women’s Barracks (1950), “a fictionalized autobiographical account of [Torrès’s] wartime service in London for the women’s division of the Free French forces, where we follow a barracks full of young women navigating identity, love, and politics amid their French Resistance duties.” Erica—who in the early days of the Nazi occupation joins the Dutch resistance, as courageous in her politics as she is in her love life—wouldn’t be out of place amongst Torrès’s protagonists.

Bea and Erica meet in 1938, and the events of the novel play out in parallel to the storm clouds of war amassing across Europe. The terrible specificity of the historical context is, however, much more than circumstantial. The menacing backdrop to the psychosexual drama has an important hand in shaping Bea’s character development, transforming her from a rather unlikeable, mousey wallflower into a woman of action, one prepared to do anything she can to try to save the life of the woman she loves, even while she refuses to admit to herself what’s driving her. This is where the true brilliance of the novel lies: in de Jong’s impressive and nimble rendering of Bea’s inner conflicts and complexities.

*

Bea first meets Erica at the home of a mutual acquaintance. She’s instantly attracted to this captivating young woman who looks “like a boy in need of a haircut.” Only a month later, the two women move in together. They rent an apartment on the Prinsengracht, one of Amsterdam’s three main canals. It is not a romantic arrangement; they’re just roommates. They have separate bedrooms, and a mutual understanding that they “each lead their own lives.” All the same, their relationship quickly slips into one of jittery codependence. Bea—who has few friends compared to the much more boisterous and sociable Erica—takes on the role of the other woman’s “benefactor.” Erica, for example, brings no bed with her, claiming she can just as comfortably sleep on a pile of blankets on the floor. Bea is shocked, so she buys her friend a bed for her birthday, an act of generosity that sets a dangerous precedent, not least because Erica is a spendthrift while Bea is much more prudent with her earnings.

We, along with Bea, come to experience Erica’s mood swings: how she fluctuates from one minute to the next between intensity and apathy, outbursts of passion and activity followed by periods of introspection and lethargy. Shades of the wild, destructive Robin Vote from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) abound. Although Bea initially struggles to understand the source of her friend’s restlessness, she at least comprehends that it is “something deeper inside” Erica than ordinary, everyday frustrations, “something to do with her actual being.”

When the two take a summer holiday together in Paris, Erica is revealed at her best and her worst. Initially, she’s in her element, carefree and without responsibilities, soaking up every last detail of Parisian life:

During those four days in Paris, she threw ballast overboard and sounded the foghorn for the first time. She cut the anchor and cruised through Paris like a young pirate, the wind in her sails.

The two women’s idyll is shattered, however, when they meet Judy, a loud and uninhibited American with whom Erica becomes instantly “fascinated.” Bea unhappily finds herself relegated to a third wheel, but the speedy intimacy between the other two is tense. Erica and Judy behave “like two little girls—one minute they were hitting and scratching each other and the next they were wrapped in each other’s arms and sharing their deepest secrets, promising to be friends forever.”

Bea claims to not understand what couldn’t be any more glaringly obvious to the reader—as Faderman suggests, Bea’s lack of self-knowledge “forces the reader into the interesting role of analyst,” and with this, our focus shifts from Erica to Bea. The fierce heat of her anger at being frozen out suggests that her jealousy is more than that of just a friend. She’s like Martha Dobie in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), willing her feelings toward her friend to be nothing more than platonic in a desperate attempt to fool herself.

The narration is given in retrospect, Bea looking back on her and Erica’s entanglement a decade and a half after the fact (the date given for Bea’s manuscript is 1954), and yet, in relating the events as they played out at the time, Bea presents herself as a gloriously unreliable narrator. She’s not only slow to pick up on Erica’s sexual attraction to women (herself included) but slower still to admit to the taboo desire this unleashes within her. It isn’t hindsight alone that allows her to reassess the past. “For a long time,” she writes at the beginning of the novel, “I saw myself as an innocent bystander, but now I know that I changed my course for Erica. Whether my life would’ve been better or happier without her—who knows. I certainly don’t.” There’s a hefty dose of self-deception thrown in here, too. Yet like anyone in denial, she can’t help but give herself away, especially when describing her awkwardness with her then boyfriend, how torn she was between him and Erica. “In my life, men have always been like shadows waiting in the wings. There was never room for them on stage because Erica held the spotlight,” she can only now confess.

When, eventually, the tension between the two women reaches a crescendo, culminating in a desperate explosion from Erica, “of anger, hate, and disappointment,” the supposedly naive Bea protests her ignorance. “She accused me of misleading her, of driving her to confess, of letting her have her way and then humiliating her with my rejection. There was nothing for me to say. How innocent, no, how blind and stupid I’d been.” This episode, which occurs about two-thirds through the novel, marks a sharp shift in perspective. With Erica’s true identity out in the open, and with it her feelings for Bea, it becomes apparent that, however unpredictable her behavior has been, it’s actually Bea’s obsession with Erica that’s the more unruly force at work. Erica, at least, acknowledges who she is—“She resigned herself to a nature that couldn’t be changed, accepted the consequences and enjoyed her life”—whereas Bea, tightly trussed up in the societal norms of the era, is too ashamed to do the same. “I didn’t dare disturb the dark craters of my soul,” she confesses retrospectively. “I’d simply bought myself peace of mind by ignoring who I was.”

Reconciled, albeit uneasily so, as Hitler’s troops march ever closer, Bea becomes increasingly afraid for Erica’s safety. Erica’s birth father, whom Erica never knew, is revealed to Erica to have been Jewish, which means that under the Nazi classifications, she’d be labeled “bastard Jew I” and thus “would likely suffer the same fate as the ‘real’ Jews.” In unexpectedly thrusting Jewishness upon Erica—“It’s crazy, Bea! Now I’m suddenly a Jewess,” she exclaims, shaking her head “in disbelief and half-amused despair”—de Jong cleverly draws parallels between sexual and racial identities. Both are revealed to be arbitrary, and yet horrifyingly all-determining. Despite Bea’s best efforts to save her, in tandem with so very many of the country’s Jewish citizens, Erica rushes headlong toward tragedy.

*

The Tree and the Vine is not autobiographical, but de Jong did draw on her own lived experience when it came to the accumulating fear, the “anxiety and doubt” that plagued Amsterdam’s Jewish residents as they learned about “the misery of the Jews under the Nazi regime” elsewhere in Europe. Attuned, as Bea is, to this danger, de Jong fled the Netherlands for the safety of North Africa in 1940, only weeks before the Nazi invasion. Although she tried to convince her father, her stepmother and her brother to accompany her, they refused to leave. They were murdered by the Nazis not long after.

In Tangier, de Jong married the Dutch artist Jan Hoowij, and supported herself teaching children ballet—she’d studied dance in both the Netherlands and England, and had performed for eight years with the Royal Dutch Ballet. The couple emigrated to America in 1941, and became U.S. citizens six years later. After she and Hoowij divorced, she made a second marriage to the American writer Robert H. Joseph.

In America, she wrote and published books in both Dutch and English, earning particular acclaim as a mystery writer—she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for her 1964 novel The Whirligig of Time. She also worked as a reader of Dutch literature for New York publishers, and was responsible for the English edition of The Diary of Anne Frank, among other well-known Dutch titles in translation.

The prominent readers and writers who admired The Tree and the Vine from the get-go were able to see beyond its then-provocative subject matter to the virtuosity of the novel itself. Gijsen, for example, described it as “an important and remarkable book—and not because it addresses a delicate problem with so much understanding, that’s just the starting point. I’m more in awe of the finesse with which Dola de Jong sketches her two main characters.” This was praise echoed by V. S. Naipaul, who astutely recognized that Bea was the beating heart of the novel. “De Jong makes her narrator a real person,” he wrote in his review of the first English translation in The Listener, “the plain woman over thirty, who does not want to recognize her nature and has brief, dutiful, joyless affairs with men. Therefore, she is always lonely; her little affections and pleasures will never change that. She is not aware of the barrenness of her existence. This silence, this refusal to see, is very touching, and is delicately rendered.” As Gehrman argues today, in the translator’s note at the end of the recent reissue, The Tree and the Vine is a story that’s also “reflective of the broader female experience,” a rich and poignant tale that she hopes will move every reader and “push them to think about their own inner worlds and those of the women they love.”

 

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here . 

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the NYR Daily, The Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub, among other publications. 

The Unreality of Pregnancy

Egon Schiele, Schwangere. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Over these past months, nine, to be exact, I’ve come to think that pleasure and pain always have something to do with things either entering or exiting your body.

Nine months ago I didn’t know that a series of events related to those entrances and exits would converge that November, the same month I turned thirty. My father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Adriana committed suicide by throwing herself from a hotel window, and I was lying in a Spanish National Health Service hospital bed, recovering from major surgery. I returned home, devastated by the news, and physically very weak. I can scarcely remember the days following my operation, two weeks during a particularly cold winter, during which I’d needed J’s help for almost everything. To cut my meat, to brush my teeth, and to clean my incisions.

I’d had some excess mammary glands removed from beneath my armpits and I could barely move my arms. I had two enormous scars from which catheters emerged, draining dark blood. I’d decided to have the glands removed because, aside from being unattractive and annoying, the doctors had assured me that, one day in the remote future when I decided to have children, they would fill with milk and cause me terrible problems. And so I decided that I should amputate what I saw as a deformity, even though my mother, with her magical worldview, insisted on reminding me that in other times, women with supernumerary breasts were burned as witches: for her, my two extra breasts could have held supernatural powers.

The surgery went off without complications but the recovery was turning out to be very difficult. On top of that, the antibiotics they had prescribed to prevent infection seemed to be burning a hole in my stomach.

On J’s birthday, just a few weeks later, I was still feeling so uncomfortable that I decided to stay home. I don’t tend to miss my spouse’s birthdays, so this was unusual. Now, in addition to intense stomach pain, I was nauseated. The next day, when it was time for me to go back to the office, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was too tired. I threw up the entire morning. At noon, J called to see how I was doing, but also to give me some news. “Don’t panic. Okay? The magazine’s closing. It’s done.”

My father’s prognosis unknown.

My friend throwing herself into the void.

My mammary glands hacked off.

And now I had lost my job.

*

J came through the door with a pregnancy test in his hand. We’d been toying with the idea for a few months, in a perpetual coitus interruptus. The true vow, before the “I’ll love and respect you forever” part, is: “I promise not to come inside you.” It’s the first promise that gets broken.

There’s a secret rebellion, maybe a stupid one, but a rebellion nonetheless, against the adult world, or against anything, in never having a condom in the bedside table. I’ve always thought the hottest thing is that familiar scene when the lovers are just about to climax and something interrupts them. Cut short, what could have been a good orgasm becomes the best orgasm. No complete orgasm can exceed a perfectly incomplete one. Pulling out is like retiring at the peak of your career, like writing a masterful volume of short stories and then disappearing, like killing yourself at the age of thirty.

We fell silent for a few seconds looking at the indicator; it’s like looking at the gun you’re going to use to kill yourself. A pregnancy test is always an intimidating presence, especially if you’re freshly unemployed.

I had to pee in a vial, sprinkle a few drops on that white thingy while J read the instructions and finally figured out that two stripes means yes and one stripe means no. According to the box, a home pregnancy test is 99 percent accurate if the result is positive, while, if it’s negative, there’s a greater margin of error and the test should be repeated in a few days. I don’t know how many times I’d taken that test in my life, the result almost always negative.

Women play all the time with the great power that has been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.

On the leaflet it also said that pregnancy tests measure the presence in urine of a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin. This hormone, let’s call it gona, appears in the blood approximately six days after conception, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterus. In the five minutes it took the gadget to decide what would become of my life, I scrolled in slow motion through every time I’d made love during the past month, trying to identify the fatal day. Finally, the two red bars quickly appeared, like the words “The End” in a movie.

“That’s the last time we ever work together at the same place,” I said to J.

Because now we could actually say that an entire family was about to be out on its ass, and facing the coldest Christmas in years, according to the weatherman. Although the weatherman is usually wrong.

*

Two gametes form a zygote. I like the way the fertilization formula sounds. It’s pure math. The most powerful feelings upon discovering that you’re pregnant have to do with the unreality of the math. They’ve told you it’s there, that it will multiply in size, that now it’s the shape of a peanut, and then a cherry, and so on, but you don’t see it, you don’t feel it. I could have opted to pay two hundred euros for one of those ultramodern sonogram machines that show you what’s inside, but for now, I would limit myself to consulting direct testimonies. To one woman, a four-week-old embryo looked like a shrimp, to another, it was a pea, to another, a little fish, and to another, a spot in the distance. Why should maternity draw us immediately into lyrical digressions and take us to the edge of inanity? Could the mere possibility of having a baby with the face of a frightened monkey in our arms be enough to trigger that unbridled tenderness? I decided to write my own zoological turn of phrase: “At four weeks, a child is like the ghost of a seahorse.”

The truth is you still can’t see anything. Just the premature gestational sac, less than ten centimeters in diameter, the bag inside which the fetus will grow. What an awful word fetus is. It’s so ugly. An embryo looks like something that could only be aquatic. It doesn’t look human. It has a tail. It’s four millimeters long and its eyes are like the pair of black dots that you sometimes find in a raw egg before putting it in the skillet.

In my old encyclopedia of the human body, I read that in an embryo you can already make out the spinal column, the lungs and the rest of the organs, all on a minuscule scale. However, a four-week-old baby is not a human being, it’s hundreds of species all at once. Up until recent decades, it was thought that the human baby passed through every stage of evolution inside the mother’s womb, that it had the gills of a fish and the tail of a monkey. It seemed plausible. Then it was proven that those weren’t really gills and that wasn’t really a tail, but, in seeing the images of a fetus’s evolution, one might well conclude that pregnancy is the trailer for the movie of life. Would you like to see the whole film?

Books don’t prepare you for what’s coming. Manuals for pregnant women must have been written by mothers completely drugged by love for their children, without the slightest pinch of critical distance. They all say: you’ll feel slight nausea in the morning, your breasts will become full and tender, you’ll feel tired and the frequent need to urinate. Ah, and of course: “don’t smoke, don’t drink coffee or Coca-Cola, don’t take drugs, avoid X-rays.” How the hell am I supposed to bear all this stress without even a can of Coca-Cola? How is it that no one has yet created a designer drug for pregnant women? Prenatal ecstasy, LSD for expectant mothers, something like that.

To start with, it’s not just nausea; the fundamental malaise that seizes you when you wake up in the morning is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at the same time, like waking up after a loved one’s funeral or seeing dawn break on the day after losing the love of your life. The nausea would attack me in the most inopportune places and times. I started to think that it revealed a certain psychology in my relationship with things. For example, I always got nauseated when I had to do something that I didn’t want to do, like go out to buy bread very early in the morning in the middle of winter. It also appeared when I was with a certain, very beloved friend. Every time I saw her I would have to run to the bathroom.

Don’t even get me started on my breasts; they hurt at the slightest touch. They weren’t the only sensitive things. It was all of me. I never imagined that I could cry watching one of those horrendous talk shows hosted by some snake in the grass who interviews children searching for their mothers and neighbors who hate each other; but cry I did, oceans of tears, especially at stories like: “Her husband cheated on her with the ninety-nine-cent-store clerk … Let’s bring out the huuuuusband!” I, a person with advanced degrees, raised in a home where we listened to Silvio Rodríguez and Quilapayún, would find myself curled in a fetal position under a blanket, the remote control my only umbilical cord to the world. And someone had pressed the slow-motion button.

I spent long hours watching trash TV, sleeping and dreaming that I was giving birth to a monkey.

—Translated from the Spanish by Jessica Powell

 

Gabriela Wiener (Lima, 1975) is the acclaimed author of six collections of crónicas, including Sexographies (2018), her first to be translated into English. She writes regularly for the newspapers El País (Spain), La República (Peru), and others in the U.S. and Europe. In Madrid, where she lives, she worked as the editor of the Spanish edition of Marie Claire.

Jessica Powell has published dozens of translations of literary works by a wide variety of Latin American writers, including Silvina Ocampo, Pablo Neruda, and Antonio Benítez Rojo. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and has been a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and long-listed for the National Translation Award. She lives in Santa Barbara.

Excerpted from Nine Moons , by Gabriela Wiener, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Powell, published this week by Restless Books. © Restless Books 2020.

What Color Is the Sky?

Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. 

Paul Signac, View of Saint-Tropez, 1896

Sky blue. Please picture it. Put a swath of sky blue in your mind. Just for a moment. Sky blue. Close your eyes. You see it. Now, look out the window, up and out to your sky. I wonder, what color do you see? Does it match the color your mind projected? In the room where I sit now, in my apartment on the first floor, in the small Northeastern city where I live, a little after eight in the morning, sun slants across the dusk-orange couch and the brown blanket slung on the back of it. The windowpanes repeat themselves in shadow, elongated squares over the dark red rug. From behind the roofline horizon, dish towel light seeps through a tangled net of branches. What little sky I can see is not so much color as light. Looking at it, I wonder, if I didn’t know what color the sky typically was, would I call it blue? I see a blue-ish-ness, a graywhiteblue glow, but is that only because I already know the sky is blue? How much of what we see is because we think we already know what’s there? What would I call this color if I saw it on a piece of cloth? And you—how much is the way I see you limited by the words we have been taught for each other?

What color is the sky?

Robin’s egg. Peach. Opal. Purple. Baby-hair blond as my brother’s was. Garnet. Lavender. Turmeric. Charcoal. Periwinkle. Dirt road. Yarrow. Powder. Bruise. Rice. Absinthe. Piss. Shadow. Mussel shell. Ash. Blood clot. Clementine. Pistachio. Mauve. Faun. Inner thigh. Midnight. Cantaloupe. Underblanket. Honey. Olive. Orgasm. Peppermint. Raisin. Sapphire like the wedding ring my mother wore, a thin band of tiny flat sapphires so dark it looked black, but off her finger, where always it is now, marriage done, held up in the light, deep dark blue. Heather. Smoke. Yolk. Bone. Baseball. Candle. Creamsicle. Lichen. Lilac. Bile. Black silk. Hawk eye. Camouflage. Amaranth. Lamb. Is vacancy a color? Is absence a color? If you try to think of nothing, does it have a color?

In Clarice Lispector’s second novel, The Chandelier, the narrator makes figures out of clay she collects from the bank of a river. She makes all sorts of figures and shapes. “She could make anything that existed and anything that did not!” Except for the sky. With the sky, “she couldn’t even start. She didn’t want clouds—which she could obtain at least crudely—but the sky, the sky itself, with its inexistence, loose color, lack of color.” The sentence drifts off. The period occurs, but the sentence, the thought, dissipates, passes, becomes nothing, doesn’t quite complete itself but is also totally complete. What a thing Lispector does, to re-create the sky in a sentence about not being able to make the sky.

The lack of color of the sky—when I try to think of this, my brain offers me the inside and outside of a clamshell, the grays, whites, violets, golds, creams, smooths, not a color but a quality. Or a deep, dense white.

Deep white like when an airplane moves through clouds. I like to sit by the window when I am on an airplane. When else can you look at the earth like this? When else can you look at the sky like this? But I do not like to look when the thick white cloud consumes the plane. In those moments, I look at a book or close my eyes and hold my good luck rock. The deep white frightens me; there’s no way to orient. How close or far are we from anything? Everything too close, and yet we are in the infinite, there’s no beginning or end to anything. In that whiteness, there are no edges.

In his short essay “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton writes, “White is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black.” For Chesterton, white is not an absence of color just as “mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.” Our plain and positive star burning ninety-three million miles away lets us see, allows us the experience of color, color, “this infinitude,” as Dingeman Kuilman has it, “which we sooner feel than understand.” And if we look too long at the plain and positive star, our star that lets us see, if we aim our eyes right at it, we’re told as children, it can burn us into blindness, it can strip away our vision. If it weren’t true, we’d make a myth of it. The fable of looking too long at the sun. Look too long at the thing that brings vision, and it takes away your vision.

The paintings of Pisanello “instilled in me the desire to forfeit everything except my sense of vision,” writes W. G. Sebald in Vertigo. An endorsement for a work of art if ever there was one. He goes on to write of visiting Pisanello’s Saint George painting in a church in Verona, and the way sections of it have fallen into disrepair, disintegrated into nothing: “The vacancy into which the fragment dissolves still conveys something of the terror” that those dealing with the dragon would’ve felt. There is horror in the emptiness, horror in the fading into nothing. This dissolving into vacancy, into inexistence, into the dimensionless white of the clouds, provokes a singular sort of fear; our composure comes under threat. To look too long at the sun risks blindness. What of looking too long, thinking too long, of the sky?

How are we to deal with its inexistence? How are we to wrestle with its not-ness while we, here on the surface of the earth, pulse with our boned and wet-gutted presence? We can list colors. We can give shape to cloud—look, a wizard on the move; look, a white wolf; look, a volcano, a demon, a seahorse, an elephant, an infant, Jerry Garcia. The narrator in Lispector’s novel, trying to make the sky out of clay, “discovered that she needed to use lighter materials that couldn’t be so much as touched, felt, perhaps only seen, who knows.” Who knows!

The sky is blue. Oh? Look at it again. It might be that this morning or this afternoon, your sky is blue. Sky blue. But the sky holds all the colors, the whole infinitude, more sensed than understood. And yet, we agree, the sky is blue. It’s safer this way, to have things we know. What color are roses? Red! What color is the sky? Blue! It’s safer because if something can be everything at once, and perhaps not exist at all, it can snag at the threads—the loose threads—that hold us together. A bicycle seat doesn’t hold all the colors. It isn’t more than one thing at once. The sky is blue. The ocean is blue. I look at you. I see you as consistent day to day. The sky is blue. I look at you and see the things I expect to see from knowing you for all the days I’ve known you. I am seeing what I expect to see. There might be no blue in the sky. But I’ll see blue because that’s what I know the sky to be. Its essence is blue.

But it isn’t.

Its essence is absence. Its essence is all the colors. What do I miss by seeing you the way I expect to see you? The way that is safe? What do I not see in my own self? Watching the sunset of my own self? What do I not see because I expect to see the things that I’ve come to live with every single day of my life, just as I live with the sky every single day of my life? What absence do I miss? What colors?

The sky is blue! We need to put our feet on something solid. We need to rest our minds on something solid. The sky is not solid. We cannot rest anything on it.

All the colors exist in the sky. It holds all the colors, and none. Your own list of colors of the sky could have as many words as mine, more, a whole different accumulation of hues, the sky will take them all, has space for all of them. They are all correct, and none of them get close, not any of the words. This is a strange thing about the sky.

And there’s a strange thing about our days right now. The carbonation of our interaction has been flattened, the fizz and bubble of our social lives stilled, and we are left to drop into something quieter. Time takes on an unusual ooze and instants get denatured. What’s on offer now (always) is contact with a purer existence, not in any moral way, but the opportunity to observe the texture of one moment moving to the next, the same way one might watch the sky move itself across the surface of a puddle by the curb after it has rained.

Stomp the puddle. The sky explodes. One thousand droplets fly, the sky reflected in each one, spinning. Tiny globes of water leap up for a moment, showing the sky to itself, before showering down, smooth, soon to be reabsorbed into the still surface from which they came. Does it seem familiar? A plain and positive thing, sooner felt than understood, which one has either seen or not seen.

In this stillness, we drop through the surface of the sky, we sink into our minds, through the memories, the fantasies, the sticky cupboards of shame, the locked boxes of pain, we keep going, down down down, until we tumble off the cliff into our unremembered inexistence. Clamshell? Blood clot? Amaranth? Lamb? What color is it there? No one has ever told us.

 

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. 

Redux: The Heavenly Dolor

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Janet Malcolm. Photo: © Nina Subin.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about distance, travel, and all the vacations we’re not taking this summer. Read on for Janet Malcolm’s Art of Nonfiction interview, Alejandro Zambra’s short story “Long Distance,” and Kenneth Koch’s poem “To the French Language.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.

 

Janet Malcolm, The Art of Nonfiction No. 4

Issue no. 196 (Spring 2011)

Well, the most obvious attraction of quotation is that it gives you a little vacation from writing—the other person is doing the work. All you have to do is type.

 

 

Long Distance

By Alejandro Zambra

Issue no. 210 (Fall 2014)

Juan Emilio was short, redheaded, dandified. He dressed with awkward elegance, as if his clothes were always new, as if his clothes wanted to say in a loud and energetic voice, I don’t have anything to do with this body, I’m never going to get used to this body. We made a reading list that I thought might interest him. He was enthusiastic. I liked Juan Emilio, but the warmth I felt toward him was tempered by an ambiguous, guilty feeling. What kind of person could allow himself, when he was of working age, such a long European vacation? What had he done all that time, besides take his grandchildren to all the ice-cream parlors in Paris?

 

 

To the French Language

By Kenneth Koch

Issue no. 158 (Spring–Summer 2001)

I needed to find you and, once having found you, to keep you

You who could make me a physical Larousse

Of everyday living, you who would present me to Gilberte

And Anna and Sonia, you by whom I could be a surrealist

And a dadaist and almost a fake of Racine and of Molière. I was hiding

The heavenly dolor you planted in my heart:

That I would never completely have you.

I wanted to take you with me on long vacations

Always giving you so many kisses, ma française—

Across rocky mountains, valleys, and lakes

And I wanted it to be as if

Nous faisions ce voyage pour I’étemité

Et non pas uniquement pour la brève duree d’une année boursiere en France …

 

And to read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives.

Unflinching Honesty: An Interview with Meredith Talusan

 

Though I have never met Meredith Talusan in person, she seemed, one Tuesday in late April over Zoom, familiar to me, like we’d been in conversation already for a long time. Perhaps it’s because I’d just recently finished reading Fairest, her memoir. Perhaps it’s because Fairest is written with that kind of wrenching honesty and unflinching self-evaluation—often just embryonic or gestural in most other memoirs—that engenders a feeling of quiet intimacy with the writer. Perhaps it’s because her account of queer desire and trans longing felt adjacent to my own, as I am, like Talusan, a trans person who medically transitioned after graduating from Harvard. Her description of walking home, after a party, to her dorm down Mt. Auburn Street—wearing a dress in public for the first time—was a vertiginous aide-mémoire, returning me to the first time I wore boxers and a binder and a horrible pleather jacket, walking down Mt. Auburn Street, heading home by the same streets, a little more than a decade after Meredith did.

Fairest tracks transitions that aren’t visually perceptible, but are narratively indelible: transitioning from a boy to a nonbinary trans-feminine person; moving from a small village in the Philippines to Harvard; being mistakenly perceived as white because she is albino; unlearning overvaluations of whiteness and the desire to be perceived as white.

Over a quiet afternoon, we spoke about the tropes of trans memoir, recursive fantasy, the ethics of autobiographical representation, shame and narrative revision, and queer cruising.

INTERVIEWER

Your memoir felt radically different from any other trans memoir I’ve encountered. Why did you choose the Proust epigraph about being imprisoned in the wrong body, which is a longstanding trope of these memoirs?

TALUSAN

I was primarily interested in thinking about precedents, windows of existence around work that I’ve read before, with the understanding that different eras have had really different conceptions of gender. I was actually much more influenced, in certain ways, by James Baldwin, so I was looking for a Baldwin epigraph from Giovanni’s Room, but his work is even worse when it comes to portraying trans people. I felt that contextualizing the work of the present within the understanding of how people have seen gender in the past was important. Especially in Sodom and Gomorrah, how tortured that relationship to gender is, how during that period of time there was a much greater overlap in peoples’ conceptions of gender and sexuality. Where I come from, the Philippines, gender is contextualized in certain similar, though significantly less, phobic ways.

INTERVIEWER

As soon as I asked that question I thought, well, you’re also working with familiar language, there’s rhetorical continuity in your work with mid- and late-century American trans-feminine memoir. I’m thinking of books like Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography and Reneé Richards’s Second Serve, where language like “no longer a son,” or “the man I used to be” was used. I don’t see that anywhere now in contemporary memoir, other than in your book. What’s at stake for you in that move?

TALUSAN

I have always been open about how my own trans experience was not one of assigned-gender denial. It dovetails into my specific cultural upbringing. I don’t perceive myself as never having been a boy, or never having been a man. But I recognize that the rhetoric of “born a man” or “used to be a man” has been deployed by people, by anti-trans people, for a really long time. And the idea of the gender “one is meant to be” since birth has been such a vital element of medical gatekeeping around trans health care. There are reasons why, politically, it’s been important for the trans community to adopt that language, and for people to believe that about themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously. One of my major goals writing the memoir—especially having spent a lot of time on political writing, writing op-eds about trans issues—was to situate it as me explaining myself to myself. Because so much trans memoir has been about explaining ourselves to cisgender audiences and justifying our existence. And I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to give myself the opportunity to be able to understand and situate my experience during those periods of my life with the person I am now. So the reader is positioned not as a person that I’m explaining myself to, but as an observer in my self-exploration.

INTERVIEWER

Another trope I’m always fascinated by are mirror scenes. There’s a scene where you are at a Harvard reunion in 2017 and you’re looking at the mirror, and after a moment you say, “the mirror was just a mirror now.” And my first question was, when is that ever true? When is a mirror just a mirror? The mirror, not unlike the madeleine, allows you to explore narrative fantasy—by which I don’t mean fantasy narratives, but the fantasy of a kind of narrative. What kinds of narratives did the mirror help you to access, in a phantasmic sense?

TALUSAN

I am somebody who is consistently perceived, as I move through the world, as a person with a history that I don’t actually have. The mirror was a really good foil to describe that experience. I’m perceived as cisgender, which I’m not, native born, which I’m not, able-bodied, which I’m not, white, which I’m not. There’s a way in which the mirror is a vehicle through which I’m able to face those two realities—the realities of perception, and the reality … not even of truth, because the fact of the matter is perception creates its own truth. So whatever you want to call that … antiperception. I was brought, really unwillingly, into my white-passing identity and into an identity that’s not being perceived as Filipino, but often albino. I see mirrors everywhere. Whenever I see any person I often have to situate myself in relationship to them and the image that they’re projecting because I am so many people at once. I am both white and not white, cis and trans, a woman with a male past that she’s not disavowing, who now lives in a more indeterminately gendered space. I don’t know where nonbinary gender exists, but it’s not on one side or the other.

INTERVIEWER

I was struck by the scene in which you’re arriving at Harvard for the first time and you take a cab from Logan Airport. When the driver asks where you’re from, you describe a life that is not yours, but is your then fantasy—Santa Monica, a beach house, private school friends you’ll meet at Harvard, a white mom and dad—a fantasy that you describe yourself creating for the cab driver’s benefit as well as yours. Fairest deals a lot with regressions and declensions of fantasy, like what R.D. Laing does in Knots. I see you see my fantasy, I fantasize about your fantasization of me.

TALUSAN

There are a number of moments in the book where that happens. The one that I had the hardest time coming to terms with was the scene where I hire a Filipino sex worker to have sex with and then, in the middle, get lost in the fantasy of us both being Filipino boys together, then opening my eyes and realizing that the reality of my body would lead someone else to have a very different fantasy than the one I was having. Those moments were challenging to write, it was hard to be vulnerable enough to write that that is what I did. As a memoirist, to accept whatever you want to call them … mistakes in judgement, ways in which I’ve behaved that I wouldn’t behave now, I hope, if I were put in similar situations. But in some ways, it wasn’t particularly challenging to write about that regression of fantasy because it’s such an enormous part of my life. All of my close relatives, including my grandmother, whom I was closest to, informed me, from my earliest memories, that I was going to grow up to be a white American person. My life now is in many ways a living projection of their fantasies.

INTERVIEWER

In the book you write, “I would have probably been bakla, had I remained in the Philippines.” Bakla doesn’t have a precise complement in Western gender taxonomies, but as I understand it, in the Philippines, it’s a third gender, a category of folks who are assigned male at birth, but present as female. But bakla is not an identity you identify with in the book. It seems to me as well that you have an ambivalence about transness as an identity. I’m referring to the moment where you talk about Renée Richards and Christine Jorgensen as such a limited representation of transness that doesn’t feel homey to you. Could you say a bit about what it’s like to write about an identity that doesn’t have the same kind of intelligibility for an audience mostly of white American readers? I’m thinking as well of Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, which focuses on an ogbanjie. Emezi has described ogbanje as “an Igbo spirit that’s born into a human body, a kind of malevolent trickster, whose goal is to torment the human mother by dying unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again.” Ogbanjie, rather than trans, more accurately frames the identity Emezi writes about. I was teaching Freshwater a few months ago, and all of my students were like, Cool this character’s trans. No … and yes.

TALUSAN

In part, the project of writing the book was to be able to situate it as a narrative that defies a lot of those Western categories. And a lot of people are doing that work, not just me. I’m thinking of Cyrus Dunham, in addition to Akwaeke Emezi, or the work of Alok Vaid-Menon. When I call myself trans and when I identify as trans in a Western context, the fact is that I am trans, and a person who experienced medical transition. But I did not experience an antagonistic relationship with my body in ways that a lot of people describe. Or I’ve moved to a category where I don’t feel comfortable identifying exclusively with a binary gender. Those challenges of categorization hopefully expand what trans means. Expanding how we conceive people’s transitions. Hopefully the book can offer a sort of understanding of how transness can take on this incredible array of forms. What’s really interesting is those limitations exist in the Philippines, too, but in different ways. In the Philippines, trans women who undergo surgery and are no longer discernible as third gender are, in certain ways, more marginalized and more oppressed than bakla, especially on the street, because they’re perceived to be deceptive in ways that bakla are not. Also, it’s still very challenging for trans women in the Philippines to be attracted to other women. The idea of a trans lesbian, for a Filipino constellation of gender and sexuality, is challenging.

INTERVIEWER

You came into your sexuality during the height of the AIDS crisis, and you write about walking down Eighth Avenue and seeing porn theaters. When so much of the book felt familiar to me, this moment felt rooted in a queer history I never experienced, remembering urban and public queer intimacies that once existed before the Disneyfication of Times Square. This is something Samuel Delany writes beautifully about, but something I rarely encounter from a trans perspective. Could you speak about this world of queer sexualities that has been lost?

TALUSAN

I do feel like, for me, the set of definitive texts around cruising in Times Square is Times Square Red Times Square Blue. I think it allowed me to situate my own fascination with whiteness during that period of my life as a fetish. I was culturally raised to believe in the superiority of European people, and so from that perspective, cruising culture was really important for me, having had sex with older men during that period and having had, in certain ways, a real form of queer mentorship that isn’t as prevalent in the heterosexual world. But it was also important for me to own up to the fact that I didn’t have sex with any people of color until after I transitioned. And I had opportunities to. Oh, yes! The fact that I just said I didn’t have sex with any people who were not white, and yet I had sex with that sex worker … that fault of memory indicates something about my consciousness, how in certain ways I viewed that experience as a manifestation of the person I would have become had I stayed in the Philippines rather than the person that I was.

INTERVIEWER

When you talk about this book do you say I, or the speaker, or the character? How do you refer to this figure?

TALUSAN

Something in between something else, which has no—a term that doesn’t exist. I want to be able to own those experiences and I want people understand that I experienced them, which is why the book is a memoir. Because it was written really novelistically, but I want the narrative to be evaluated as a personal narrative. You might disagree but I’m really antipathetic to Andrea Long Chu’s review method for Jill Soloway’s memoir, which evaluated the person’s actions rather than evaluating the way that the person was situated in the narrative of their actions. We’re not writing antipathetic reviews of Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles and her cluelessness, or Maggie Tulliver from Mill on the Floss and her fickleness. In the context of this narrative I was very careful to situate myself within the frame of mind that I was in during those moments, as I was experiencing them. Which necessarily means that in a lot of cases I feel differently about those experiences now and probably would have done something else today. So that’s part of why I resist both me as a character and me as a person, because I feel like I’m in between. And also, while I’ve already dug myself into a hole by mentioning the Chu review, I also really deeply object to this notion that a memoir’s flaw is the author telling on themselves. Because the memoirist’s entire job is to expose inconvenient, difficult, tortured truths about themselves—otherwise one would just be left with a simple narrative in which the memoirist emerges as a character of virtue, and what does the reader get from that?

INTERVIEWER

How did you come up with the title? As you say in the book, there is “no such thing as a single fairest life.”

TALUSAN

I am one of those people who needs a title in order to understand a piece of writing. I think I understood that the title had to coalesce as many of the elements of the book as possible, and I knew that it would be equally about being trans and about race. That was very important to me, even though I felt a lot of ambient pressure like, Oh, there’s a lot of interest in trans stuff, just make it a trans memoir. I think that was how the idea of Fairest came to be. Oh, yes, there is this term in our culture that equates feminine beauty with whiteness and then, in the aftermath, realizing it is also about justice, about fairness, both in the interpersonal sense and in the broader sense.

INTERVIEWER

I know that I’m the first trans interviewer to interview you about this book. Is there a question that you want a trans interviewer to ask you?

TALUSAN

Maybe I’d want you to ask me how I hope the book will affect trans people. Maybe I want you to ask me that.

INTERVIEWER

I do want to know how you think it will affect trans people. I also want to know what you hope trans people will do with it.

TALUSAN

I’ve long perceived myself as not being quite of my time. I transitioned in 2002. I was transitioning in an environment where it was assumed that if you could be perceived as cis, you would go into stealth after you transitioned. I’m really curious about what young people, younger people, significantly younger—people who are post-transition and twenty years younger than me—how they would perceive this, because it’s not necessarily a projection of their life, it’s more of a projection of their life from a past generation. In terms of what people do with it, the thing that I find difficult to articulate, and is very difficult to articulate in general, in an American environment with such a strong ideology of individualism, is the simultaneous fact that one should be able to respect any person’s self-conception while at the same time all of us need to be a lot more cognizant of the ways in which our environment shapes us. Which is something that I feel viscerally as somebody who comes from two very different cultural worlds. What’s really interesting about being a writer is you get to spend time thinking to yourself, this is the story of my life, this is the story of how this happened. Then, you need to ask, is this how I really felt, is this how I really and truly conceive of myself? Whenever I’m writing a scene, the first way I usually write it is the way that corresponds to existing tropes of how such scenes are written. Its only in excavating the specific memories of what actually happened and the interaction between those factual elements of the story and the constellation of feelings that I’m having that I come to a more specific truth. And I feel like—I don’t know if concerned is the right word, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I believe that a lot of trans people … well, no, I can’t believe that because I don’t know thousands and thousands of trans people. I can only say that I can imagine, given that I had to write a whole book in order to figure out really specific aspects of my identity, I could imagine there are trans people out there who rely on existing tropes to describe their identities and experiences, when, upon self-examination, those tropes don’t actually hold up. Their conceptions of themselves are more specific, idiosyncratic, and perhaps unique, than they themselves allow for at this moment.

 

RL Goldberg is a Ph.D. candidate in English and humanistic studies at Princeton.

The Art of Distance No. 10

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.

“It’s getting warmer—for real this time—and since the world has sort of skipped spring, here at The Paris Review, we’re skipping ahead, too. The Summer 2020 issue, no. 233, will hit mailboxes shortly, and the season pretty much starts right after Memorial Day for publishing, so here we are. I know there’s a lot about this summer that will be far from ideal, and I hope some of the unlocked pieces below will help you grieve those things. But we will be able to get outside more and enjoy the weather (and find more excuses to unglue our eyes from screens). The days will be longer (a mixed blessing, I realize, for those with kids), and there will be more time to read, even if not on the beach—at least you won’t grease up your books with suntan lotion. So let us help you get a head start on summer. Meanwhile, please keep staying safe, and we wish you many stunning sunsets, from wherever you view the glorious summer sky.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director

Alan Fears, Every Man Is an Island, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 30″. Image courtesy of Alan Fears.

Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview might not be the most obvious choice when it comes to the idea of summer, but for me, her novels and the coming season are one and the same. Summer reading demands a really good plot, something that will stand up to the heat-induced torpor; one of my most vivid summer memories is first reading The Days of Abandonment one long July day six years ago. In her interview, Ferrante has the same idea: “In the case of The Days of Abandonment,” she says, “the writing freed the story in a short time, over one summer.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor 

I think of Hernan Diaz’s incredible novel In the Distance as a summer book because it’s mostly set in the American West in hot, unforgiving weather. The Review didn’t publish it, so I can’t unlock it here. But I can share Diaz’s story “The Stay,” from issue no. 227, which I remember reading around this time a year ago. It’s a story about being stuck indoors in a strange apartment, watching movies, and the weird kinds of friendships that can form from a distance. So some overlaps with the present situation. And it’s marvelously diverting. —CMT

J. D. Salinger was, among other things, a great practitioner of self-isolation, and Betty Eppes’s glorious piece “What I Did Last Summer” is perhaps the closest the Review has come to an Art of Distance interview. (We shared this one a few weeks ago, but in case you missed it, here it is again.) Eppes is looking to fill the summer vacation and score a scoop, so she sets out for New England to corner the famous recluse. “Salinger isn’t one of my favorite writers,” she admits. “What had fascinated me was that as a girl in Smith County, Mississippi, where males and females are very secluded from one another, I had two older brothers, and reading The Catcher in the Rye was like opening a secret door into their private male world.” As with many such mysteries, there appears to be little behind the curtain. She leaves a note for Salinger in the local post office, stakes him out in a “sky-blue Pinto,” drinks dozens of Tabs, hides a recorder in her blouse, and, when he arrives, rattles through her questions as an audience gathers in horror. As summer adventures tend to, it goes awry. Salinger is recalcitrant; the longest answer he offers is after, grasping at straws, she asks, “Are you informed on the differences between cold-pressed oil as opposed to oil extracted by other methods?” Fear not, dear reader, he is. Next summer, it’s a trip to England to interview George Mason: “He was a piece of cake compared to J. D. Salinger.” —Chris Littlewood, Intern

Like summer, grief is impermanent. Mary Terrier’s “Guests” is a sharply rendered portrait of adolescence that takes place the summer after the narrator’s mother dies. Her father’s new, younger girlfriend becomes de facto babysitter to her and her brother during the day, and Terrier’s eye catches with grace and precision a young girl’s confusion at finding herself swept into the carefree world of life without a mom. After you’ve read the story, listen to Molly Ringwald reading it in this episode of our podcast. —Lauren Kane, Assistant Editor

It’s hard not to feel wistful when thinking about this time last year. I spent a good part of summer 2019 sitting on a beach in Delaware with issue no. 229 in hand, flipping through Alan Fears’s portfolio of summer-themed paintings, “I’m OK, You’re OK.” One, cheekily titled Hot Ken, depicts a pink-faced man with a thin blond mustache on a striped beach chair. In another, a neat row of surfers with identical half smiles stand clutching a board that reads: PROFESSIONAL. It’s titled Slippery When Wet. Perhaps my favorite, however, is A Light Refreshment, an image of a lean, elegant man enjoying an aperitif on a bright green tennis court. These paintings seemed to mirror the landscape around me—the crowds of sunbathers and swimmers at leisure in a manner that now seems preposterous. The final line of Charlotte Strick’s introduction makes me yearn for summers both past and future. “Let’s slather on some PABA-free SPF 50 and try our best to turn our attention away from the troubling news and toward one another,” Strick writes. “Let’s dip our toes in the pool and get back to the serious business of the unserious. This pursuit may just help us sail free of the darker seasons behind us.” —Elinor Hitt, Intern

 

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Staff Picks: Slapstick, Stanzas, and Stuff

Michael Rips. Photo: Ric Ocasek.

Cooped up at home, many of us are now being kept company by our stuff, that antifunctional classification of belongings that rarely move from their spots on side tables and shelves, displaying little immediate value to anyone but their owners. The stories of how these things came to be, or how they came to be possessed by us, measure their worth, and those with a special sensitivity to that worth become collectors. Two writers have recently captured the singular vocational pull of the collector, and in doing so, they show us the whimsical and strange roots that run deep beneath stuff. Michael Rips’s memoir The Golden Flea chronicles both the author’s lifelong pursuit of oddities and the disappearance of New York’s flea subculture into the anecdotal past (the Chelsea flea market on Twenty-Fifth Street, the last bastion of the once-glorious economy described in The Golden Flea, closed this year). Allan Gurganus’s recent story in The New Yorker, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” is a nested narrative, a story of an old portrait as told by a junk-shop owner to a graduate student whose academic specialty is collecting. The narratives of the painting’s subject and the student’s bid to possess the painting unspool alongside each another. As the modern person’s general interest in stuff wanes, both Rips and Gurganus are invaluable shopkeepers, telling us the story of something old in hopes we may pick it up and take it home. —Lauren Kane 

If the month of May has brought one good thing, it’s a new season of At Home with Amy Sedaris. Sedaris’s idiosyncratic caricature of a homemaker’s talk show is, if anything, hard to describe. It’s like an early-aughts Food Network series injected with a heavy dose of slapstick. Each episode has a theme, such as dinner guests, holidays, or book club meetings. The theme of this week’s episode—a bit more preposterous—is childbearing. The fictional local actor Russell Schnabble (John Early) turns a craft room into a nursery, and Amy makes a haphazard mobile with rusty nails collected from the yard. But when Amy tries on maternity clothes with a fake belly, things start to go awry. I won’t give away much more, but I will say it involves a hysterical pregnancy. Despite the frequent gags and overall uncanniness, Sedaris’s show has its basis in reality. It’s set in the imagined “Research Triangle” area, a tight-knit Southern community not unlike the North Carolina suburb where the Sedaris children grew up. A regular cast of neighbors visits Amy as if she were Mr. Rogers, my favorite being Chassie Tucker, played by the incomparable Cole Escola. He is a stand-out comedian in his own right and a delight to see grace the screen. At Home with Amy Sedaris has always permitted me to embrace my homebody sensibilities. But now, in confinement, Amy’s absurdist take on domestic life feels even more relatable. —Elinor Hitt

 

Brad Fox.

 

I’ve been finding it difficult to focus on novels lately, but Brad Fox’s is a happy exception—a perfect quarantine read in many ways, though it’s more than that. Tess—a veteran humanitarian aid worker from Kansas with skinny limbs, a rough childhood, and, one imagines, a thousand-yard stare—spends a night in a New York hospital room with her old buddy Laura, a fellow humanitarian who has left the field and is having a baby. Tess fetches ice and presses Laura’s hips while Laura screams; in between, Tess recalls the years they worked together in the Balkans, Cairo, and Istanbul. As Tess drifts from country to country, past to present, expatriate scene to expatriate scene, the language is terse yet urgent, with bright glimmers of beauty. It’s the language of crisis, tuned to the story it tells: After years of wandering the world and considering it home, after dedicating her life to a field centered on helping humans for humans’ sake while witnessing the world grow ever more violent, Tess in the maternity ward suspects that humans are the problem. “We should all drop dead,” she thinks, rubbing her pregnant friend’s back. “It would be the best thing that could happen.” No! But the sentiment isn’t totally unfamiliar to those of us who have grown up watching humans destroy each other and our coearthlings, the mishandling of COVID-19 just the latest manifestation of an omnipresent horror. Wading through the years with Tess, searching alongside her for a sense of worth and purpose amid memories of different gigs, parties, languages, apartments, and friendships, is just the sort of literary companionship I want these days. Along with my novel-concentration issue, I have trouble focusing on video calls, but I’m looking forward to Fox’s with Wayne Koestenbaum in a McNally Jackson Zoom room on Monday. —Jane Breakell

Many of the poems found in Whale and Vapor—a new collection by the Korean poet Kim Kyung Ju, translated by Jake Levine and published by Black Ocean—deal with the eternal themes of either love or poetry itself. “Among my thousands of names / my saddest name / is you,” goes the first stanza of “Let Me In”; “Poet Blood” declares that “the poet’s role is to play breath.” Sometimes the subject matters are even combined, like in “Contemporary Literature,” which begins, “I try to think about my love’s reaction and / the side effect you have of disappearing.” In their thematic repetition, these poems remind me of watercolor paintings, thin washes of color that, when layered, turn opaque. A painter even figures in one of the poems, “Cave Story,” which asks how exactly one can convey the artist’s vision in a work of art. I don’t know the answer to that, but in Whale and Vapor, Kim successfully creates a world of lyric intimacy. —Rhian Sasseen

The Atlantic released Floodlines, an eight-episode podcast, this March. That was two months ago—fifteen years after its ostensible subject, Hurricane Katrina, and amid a particularly strange moment in our current crisis, before the worst of things happened but still too late. But the show turned out to be strangely well timed. For one thing, it provided an escape valve that I desperately needed from reading and hearing and thinking and worrying constantly about the coronavirus. For another, and more important, Floodlines is a blunt reminder that the term natural disaster is a particularly disingenuous gloss. These things—hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, pandemics—are certainly at some level random, but not much about them is. Who is prepared and who is vulnerable, who is protected and who is abandoned, who receives help and who does not, who suffers, who lives, who dies: much of that is set beforehand. In this country in particular, those fault lines are increasingly plain to see; equally plain to see are the odds that whatever lessons we should learn from this pandemic will be as lost as those we have already had so many terrible opportunities to learn. —Hasan Altaf

 

Vann R. Newkirk II, host of the podcast Floodlines.