The Paris Review's Blog, page 164
May 22, 2020
The Winners of 92Y’s 2020 Discovery Poetry Contest
For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.
The 2020 competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Diana Marie Delgado and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, final judges Jericho Brown, Paisley Rekdal, and Wendy Xu awarded this year’s prizes to Asa Drake, Luther Hughes, Ana Portnoy Brimmer, and Daniella Toosie-Watson. The runners-up were Amrita Chakraborty, Katherine Indermaur, J. Estanislao Lopez, and Jeremy Voigt.
The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center this fall. We’re pleased to present their work below.
Asa Drake.
Asa Drake is a Filipina American writer and public services librarian in Central Florida. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the New School and is the recipient of fellowships from Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her most recent work is published or forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Epiphany, and Tupelo Quarterly.
*
This Is One Way to Listen
I cut branches from the money tree. Surely
unlucky. A jackal’s head—no matter what
body we find it on—is a sign of death.
But then the good news, announcements,
store credit. And still, a jackal’s head, if I
move carelessly, will enter my kitchen.
I can’t recognize my ghosts today. This one
has an 80s windbreaker and short curls,
and my mother asks if I’m sure she’s not
a woman in white instead of a white woman.
She’s a white woman looking at my wedding
photos, I tell my mother. But what
does she feel like, my mother presses. I
don’t know every woman who made me.
Luther Hughes.
Luther Hughes is from Seattle, author of the chapbook Touched, founder of Shade Literary Arts, and executive editor for The Offing. Along with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat, he cohosts the podcast The Poet Salon. He has been featured in Poetry, Forbes, and The Rumpus, among others. Luther received his M.F.A. from Washington University in Saint Louis.
*
It Is February
Some odd stream of oak trees
………….line the sidewalk like a phrase
that never leaves the mind—
………….“I love you” or “I have love for you.”
He kissed me this morning
………….beneath the gray quilt of late winter
like he loves me, and there’s a difference
………….in the work of nature today.
Sometimes difference is simple,
………….but today there’s a woman at the bus stop
screaming, I hate you you fucking nigger.
………….I watch as sunlight crumbles
against Lake Washington, watch a bird
………….that appears, at first, to be a raven,
but with a subtle twitch of its blouse-wing,
………….turns crow as it lands next to a puddle of trash.
Is the woman angry or frustrated?
………….There’s a freckling of pigeons,
tired of the leftover Starbucks. There’s a man
………….grabbing the ass of another looking at me
as if I were a forest to be lost in.
………….There’s always a way hunger declares itself.
Is that what it means to be Black in Seattle,
………….standing here admiring the rotting moan
of car horns as if nothing were happening?
………….The white man next to me looks at me
and shakes his head, mouth shedding a smirk.
………….A police car sirens a group of women
not to cross—loud red fowl. If wondering,
………….the woman is Black. Does that make a difference?
On my phone, I read a caption that says,
………….“Missed two but got four. Next time they won’t
be so lucky,” referencing four birds, each shot
………….in the head or the unseemly breast.
Does knowing the birds are American crows
………….make a difference? There’s smoke climbing
out the sewer. There’s a child laughing
………….or crying. In the article beneath, 14-year-old
George Stinney Jr. is killed by electric chair
………….for being accused of murdering two white girls.
His Blackness is never mentioned. This matters.
………….It matters more than the shot crows,
more than the woman who by now is so quiet,
………….a city of her own. As I get on the bus,
I wonder if she has a son. I want a son,
………….which might be weird given I am newly in love,
given that we are Black. Isn’t it irresponsible
………….to raise a child in this city of mammoth hills
and Mt. Rainier teething away at the sky?
………….I think I will die before I get the privilege.
Sometimes I slush through this city
………….and feel like I have died already.
Ana Portnoy Brimmer.
Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a Puerto Rican poet-performer, writer, and organizer. She is an alumna of Rutgers University–Newark, where she received an M.F.A. in creative writing. Her chapbook To Love an Island was the winner of the YesYes Books 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest; her debut full-length collection is forthcoming with YesYes Books in spring 2021. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, Gulf Coast, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatinNEXT, and Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm.
*
Educación
……………………..after Lark Omura
Always swim towards an oncoming wave.
Never swim against the current, let it hurl you out to sea, then wade back ashore.
The shore is lined with sargassum and sea grape, not littered.
Don’t litter the sand that straddles a leatherback’s young.
Leatherbacks leave for ocean and migrate years before returning.
Returning will die on the airport runway, buried inside your rib cage.
Your rib cage will resprout with return through graveyard soil.
Keep mice away from the soil you pile into pots of ají and white oregano.
A good pot of white rice colors your lips with oil.
Pour oil into the pot to pave it with pegao.
Don’t throw away pegao, the scraping hides resistance.
Cats will hide hours before a hurricane.
The eye of a hurricane opens the eyes of a people.
The eyes of a people can grow clouded with Saharan dust.
Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic, storms through windows of foreclosed homes.
To occupy a foreclosed building is to step on a police anthill.
The police will tear gas you because you fight for education.
The police will tear gas you because you fight.
The police will tear gas you.
Tear gas washes off with vegetable oil, water and Palmolive.
Watch water at your ankles, it could be raining upriver.
El Río Guanajibo, el Río Mameyes will bathe you when your pipes and faucet parch.
When you’re parched for day’s end, have a Medalla.
A Medalla won’t raise your salary or free Puerto Rico, but tonight, it’ll do.
Tonight, listen for the strange music of sirens and chicharras.
Tonight, imagine sirens lure to shipwreck away from your archipelago.
Tonight, let news of your archipelago watch itself.
Instead, watch for Dominicana and the Virgin Islands watching you, just as eager for your hand.
Tonight, when the power goes out, give your neighbor a hand—connect them to your generator.
Tonight, connect last year’s Christmas lights and count all the burnt-out bulbs.
Tonight, from New Jersey, count the days till you come back home.
Educación
……………………..inspirado por Lark Omura
Siempre nada hacia la ola venidera.
Nunca nades contra la corriente, deja que te arroje hacia la mar, luego nada de vuelta a la orilla.
La orilla está forrada de sargazo y uva de playa, no sucia.
No ensucies la arena que acuna la cría de un tinglar.
Los tinglares se van al océano y migran por años antes de regresar.
Regresar morirá en la pista de aterrizaje, enterrado entre tus costillas.
Tus costillas retoñarán el regreso por tierra de cementerio.
Espanta a ratones de la tierra que amontonas en tiestos de ají y orégano blanco.
Una buena olla de arroz blanco te pinta los labios de aceite.
Échale aceite a la olla para empedrarla con pegao.
No botes el pegao, el raspado esconde la resistencia.
Los gatos se esconden horas antes de un huracán.
El ojo de un huracán abre los ojos de un pueblo.
Los ojos de un pueblo se pueden nublar con polvos del Sahara.
Los polvos del Sahara cruzan el Atlántico, estallan por ventanas de casas embargadas.
Ocupar un edificio embargado es pisar un hormiguero de policías.
La policía te echará gases lacrimógenos si luchas por la educación.
La policía te echará gases lacrimógenos si luchas.
La policía te echará gases lacrimógenos.
Los gases lacrimógenos se lavan con aceite vegetal, agua y Palmolive.
Vela el agua a tus tobillos, puede estar lloviendo río arriba.
El Río Guanajibo, el Río Mameyes te bañarán cuando tengan sed las tuberías y el grifo.
Cuando tengas sed por el fin de hoy, date una Medalla.
Una Medalla no aumentará tu sueldo ni liberará a Puerto Rico, pero por esta noche, bastará.
Esta noche, escucha la música extraña de las sirenas y chicharras.
Esta noche, imagina que sirenas seducen al naufragio lejos de tu archipiélago.
Esta noche, deja que las noticias de tu archipiélago se miren a sí mismas.
En vez, mira hacia Dominicana y las Islas Vírgenes mirándote a ti, igual de anhelantes por tu mano.
Esta noche, cuando se vaya la luz, échale la mano a tu vecinx—conéctale a tu planta eléctrica.
Esta noche, conecta las luces de Navidad del año pasado y cuenta las bombillas fundidas.
Esta noche, desde New Jersey, cuenta los días hasta regresar a la isla.
Daniella Toosie-Waller.
Daniella Toosie-Watson is a poet, visual artist, and educator from New York. She has received fellowships and awards from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the InsideOut Detroit Literary Arts Project, The Watering Hole, and the University of Michigan Hopwood Program. Her poetry has appeared in Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, SLICE, and The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNext. Daniella received her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
*
A Series of Small Miracles
after Ross Gay after Gwendolyn Brooks
This morning
I stepped outside & the chill
kissed my forehead but only after I gave permission
& afterwards I was still okay with the touch
& when I returned to my apartment, I was okay
with the leaving. But we aren’t there yet.
My neighbor walked by with her dog,
stopped to let me pet her & thanked me
for doing so. & listen, now I will tell you:
today, my room is warm.
I sit on my bed. I lift my shorts.
I notice the crease between
my thigh & lower belly,
trace my finger between that small valley
& I say it is good. I notice my thigh, its generosity,
squeeze the fat of it. Slap it one time for good
measure. Listen: in this poem, there are no men.
I give to myself & give again.
I cup my small breast
& I’m thankful— there is no one here
to tell her that she does not have enough to give.
I play a record & my mind is clear to hear it.
Today, I lie in bed all afternoon
& it is my choice.
I breathe in & the breathing is simple. I breathe out—
a mango grove fills my room. I crawl into a cradle of branches.
I rest my head on a bunch of mangos. Yesterday, I heard
someone call out Sorrow & I did not turn my head.
Ladies of the Good Dead
In her column “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit.
Kerry James Marshall, 7am Sunday Morning, 2003 (Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago)
My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard.
Cora Mae has a bawdy sense of humor. Most of the time when she speaks, it’s to crack a joke that would make most people blush. She wears leopard print and prefers for her hair to be dyed bright red. I have tried to imagine her in the hospital, attempting to make sense of the suited, masked figures gesticulating at her. She doesn’t know about the pandemic. She doesn’t know why we’ve stopped visiting. All she knows is that she has been kidnapped by what must appear to be astronauts.
The film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, begins with a little black girl gazing up into the face of a white man wearing a hazmat suit. A street preacher standing on a small box asks: “Why do they have on these suits and we don’t?” He refers to the hazmat men as “George Jetson rejects.” It feels wild to watch the film right now, as governors begin to take their states out of lockdown knowing that black and brown residents will continue to die at unprecedented rates, taking a calculated risk that will look, from the vantage point of history, a lot like genocide. The film’s street preacher sounds obscenely prophetic. “You can’t Google what’s going on right now,” he shouts. “They got plans for us.”
*
Under quarantine in Detroit, my father, a photographer, has been sifting through boxes of slides in his sprawling archive. Each image unleashes a story for him. Last week, he told me about arriving in Sarajevo while covering the Olympics. He stayed with a family of friendly strangers eight years before the war. “I wonder if they survived,” he mutters to an empty room.
When my cousin was a police lieutenant, she told us about getting a call for someone who had died. At first glance, they thought the man had been hoarding newspapers or magazines, but then his daughter explained that he was a composer. The papers in those leaning stacks were original compositions.
When we hear on the news that Detroit is struggling, that people are dying, do we imagine composers? Do we imagine a man who sifts through photographs of Bosnia before the war?
In a painting by Kerry James Marshall, 7 am Sunday Morning, a long, horizontal city street appears mundane on one side, but morphs into hexagons and prisms and diamonds as the eye moves right, as if the block is being seen through multiple panes of differently angled glass. If you peer closely at the building on the left, what look like wisps of smoke wafting out of a brick building can be discerned as delicately rendered musical notes. They curve underneath a flock of birds that flutter over a beauty school and a liquor store. The almost unbearable majesty of this ordinary city block evokes Detroit for me. Some summer afternoons, a lens between me and the world gets cracked, and the light and the people and history and the sky go wonky and the moment feels achingly eternal.
*
Last year, the Detroit Institute of Arts mounted an exhibition called “Detroit Collects,” featuring mostly black collectors of African American art in the city. One room was lined with giant photographs of well-dressed collectors. Immediately I recognized the wry smile of a woman named Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor.
My parents have been telling me about Dr. Taylor for years. “You’re going to love her.” “Her house is a museum.” “She used to live in Italy.” “She loves pasta.” When a friend came to town, we thought we would go to the Detroit Institute of Arts, but my father took us to Dr. Taylor’s house instead. The sun was spilling across the horizon, raspberry sherbet bleeding into orange, and the temperature was in the low teens. A handful of houses along the street had big paintings integrated into the architecture of a porch or a window. We knocked on a security gate and a woman in her nineties welcomed us inside.
“Every February, someone discovers me,” Dr. Taylor joked, nodding at the coincidence of receiving extra attention during black history month. I felt a twinge of embarrassment. Here I was, encountering one of Detroit’s most important artistic matriarchs for the very first time.
Mural by Tylonn J. Sawyer
Art in this city is on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the most gorgeous, palatial museums I’ve ever visited. Spectators can gawk at Diego Court, their faces striped with sunlight, imagining the ghost of Frida Kahlo off to the side of the room. But art also bursts out of the city’s residential neighborhoods. You can find paintings by one of the city’s biggest rising stars, Tylonn Sawyer, tucked inside a gallery like N’Namdi Center or projected onto a screen at the DIA, but you are even more likely to see it flash like an apparition in your periphery (two children gazing upward, golden orbs radiating behind their heads) as you drive past a nondescript building near the warehouses surrounding Eastern Market.
At Dr. Taylor’s house, we sat in the living room and talked for a while. The impeachment hearings were playing loudly on a television in her bedroom. “A lot of my collection is upstairs, why don’t you go take a look.” We crept carefully through a room that seemed to be fitted with exactly as many books as it could tastefully hold, toward a narrow stairway. Upstairs, canvases leaned against the walls. A figurine stood, stark, in a room off to the left. There was a photo-realistic painting of a black woman with short hair, in profile, wearing a pink turtleneck and sitting on a white couch. A black-and-white print of a man with hair like Little Richard peeked out from behind a stack of frames. In a round canvas, a man with an afro slouched behind a shiny wooden table, seated in front of geometric panes of blue, including a massive window framing a cloudy blue sky—as if Questlove were relaxing to “Kind of Blue” inside a Diebenkorn painting. Ordinary scenes of black life, exquisitely rendered, were scattered across the room, a collection relaxing into itself with a kind of easeful, dusty abundance. We were called back downstairs.
Dr. Taylor walked us through the house, and took us on a tour of the basement. African masks, sculptures, shields, and figurines were pinned to pegboard the way other basements showcase drills and rakes. I placed my hand on the baby bump of a pregnant wooden figure. “Somewhere along the line, the collecting idea just catches you,” Dr. Taylor said, humbly.
“You could tell where the problems were because you’d get a lot of things from that place,” she said of collecting work from Africa. “I realized that people were responding to what they needed; certain things in their family shrines they could part with, just to eat.” She told us about her friend, a playwright who convinced a general not to kill her family during the Biafran War. Dr. Taylor tried to hold items and then give them back when wars had ended, once she realized why they’d become so available, but she struggled to get past corrupt middlemen.
She told us story after story about the objects in her home, rendering details of character and plot to bring each item alive—“she got some men who carry lumber to carry her under their wagon,” and “he was a smooth talker, very good looking.”
Dr. Taylor has been around the world twice. A trip to Iran ended early when the Shah fell ill. She has spent entire years on sabbatical living in Italy, often bringing young members of her family along to learn the language. She was a teacher at Cass Tech, a Detroit public high school. She taught fashion design and made art out of gold in her spare time. “Do you still?” we asked. “I don’t go near the fire because I can’t run fast,” she explained.
“Do you want to see the gallery?” She offered. It seemed unthinkable that there might be more.
We walked down the steps of her porch and immediately up the stairs of the house-cum-gallery next door. Arts Extended Groupe was established in Midtown Detroit in 1950 by Myrtle Hall, along with Dr. Taylor and a group of other artists and teachers . They wanted a space that could serve as an educational tool, not simply catering to the art market or to the growing air of elitism infecting the art world. Later, Dr. Taylor moved the space to her neighborhood. We stood underneath a small painting called Ladies of the Good Dead and listened to her describe an old Brazilian tradition of displaying fabrics upon the occasion of somebody’s death. It was a way of collecting funds to buy young men out of slavery. The day outside darkened, slipped closer to single digits. We prepared our coats to go.
*
After we’ve been in lockdown for a while, I call to find out how Dr. Taylor is faring. She is doing fine, she tells me. She talked to her friends in Italy just last week. There is a woman on staff who goes to the gallery every so often to let in light and water the plants. There is a new show up for no one to see, photo-realistic drawings of the tales of Osei Tutu, detailing the founding of Ghana. She is making plans for the gallery’s next phase: a turn away from brick and mortar, in the direction of something more like a foundation.
The doorbell rings and she excuses herself. When she gets back on the phone, she says, “You can’t see the smile on my face. It’s big, I can assure you.” Two of her great-grandsons had just come by, and when she got to the door they were standing on the sidewalk, waving. “That was so nice!” Her voice conveys a haze of emotion so palpable it catches in me, too. “The second from the oldest, he calls me on his phone sometimes to tell me he misses me.” Their father, her grandson, is a phlebotomist who lives next door, she tells me, and he takes care to strip down and shower before greeting his family when he comes home. As I imagine the scene playing out, I visualize a kind of Charlie Chaplain figure, or a magician. Her tone is so infused with wonder. It takes her a moment to compose herself.
A curator chose a painting from Dr. Taylor’s collection to hang at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It’s titled Little Paul. It is a portrait of her grandson, the phlebotomist, that she commissioned from a little-known painter named Robert L. Tomlin years ago. A boy sits in a chair wearing a gray blazer, jeans, and tennis shoes, gazing intently at the corner of the room. In an article about the exhibition, a curator from the museum muses about the life behind the painting, notes how it intrigues her.
In The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the sidewalk preacher shouts: “I urge you. Fight for your land. Fight for your home.” The protagonists of the film fly by on a skateboard, passing frozen scenes of black life, scenes of a city that is disappearing in real time.
I remember, years ago, watching an interview with Kerry James Marshall, in which the painter carefully confronts two white art collectors who have amassed an impressive collection of contemporary black art, including his own, and exhibited it as part of a highly regarded traveling exhibition. He brings up the fact that no black art collector could do what they have done. His words are delivered as a statement, but in my mind, they hang in the air like a question.
When I think about the specific importance of a black art collector, I think about the moment we are living, or not living, through. There are stories inside every black life lost to the virus in Wayne County. I think of my great aunt, who bafflingly, just tested negative, and was released from the hospital last night. I think of Dr. Taylor’s attic full of artwork, which remains precious to her whether it falls in or out of fashion. I think about the affection that radiates from her voice. How it lingers. It is infectious.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan Writers’ Program.
May 21, 2020
Poets on Couches: Saskia Hamilton
In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.
“From the ‘Aeneid,’ Book VI”
by Virgil, translated by David Ferry
Issue no. 201 (Summer 2012)
A vast crowd, so many, rushed to the riverbank:
Women and men, famous greathearted heroes,
The life in their hero bodies now defunct,
Unmarried boys and girls, sons whom their fathers
Had had to watch being placed on the funeral pyre;
As many as the leaves of the forest that,
When autumn’s first chill comes, fall from the branches;
As many as the birds that flock to the land
From the great deep when the season, turning cold,
Has driven them over the seas to seek the sun.
They stood beseeching on the riverbank,
Yearning to be the first to be carried across,
Stretching their hands out toward the farther shore.
But the stern ferryman, taking only this one
Or this other one, pushes the rest away.
Aeneas cries out, wondering at the tumult,
“O virgin, why are they crowding at the river?
What is it that the spirits want? What is it
That decides why some of them are pushed away,
And others sweep across the livid waters?”
The aged priestess replied: “Anchise’s son,
True scion of the gods, these are the pools
Of the river Cocytos, and this the Stygian marsh,
Whose power it is to make the gods afraid
Not to keep their word. All in this crowd are helpless
Because their bodies have not been covered over.
The boatman that you see is Charon. Those
Who are being carried across with him are they
Who have been buried. It is forbidden to take
Any with him across the echoing waters
That flow between these terrible riverbanks
Who have not found a resting-place for their bones.
Restlessly to and fro along these shores
They wander waiting for a hundred years.
Not until after that, the longed-for crossing.”
The Land Empty, the World Empty
In the following excerpt from Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal, the prolific and fiercely imaginative novelist documents his life in Provence during the Nazi occupation of France. He writes of the weather, his family, the desire to flee, the rumors he hears from the surrounding villages, and his struggles to create “incontestably beautiful work” in the midst of crisis.
Paul Cézanne, Landscape in Provence, 1895–1900, pencil and watercolor on paper, 12″ x 19″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sunday, June 4, 1944
Ten o’clock in the morning, the alert sounds. Immediately followed by violent rumbling at the far end of town, then silence. We’re listening. The most beautiful possible weather. Sun, powder blue sky, a little cool, light wind. Since the other day when ten bombs fell a hundred meters from Margotte, the hens have laid only small eggs, hardly bigger than quail eggs; they have no yolks. Imagine the panic there must be in Marseille now. All is quiet for the moment.
*
Tuesday, June 6, 1944
Charles returns from town with news. First, the Germans are said to have arrived. He didn’t see a single one, but someone told him that they had commandeered a villa on Boulevard Saint-Lazare. Then, the landing has supposedly begun. Where, when, how, no one knows. There’s no trace of it, no indication, but it has begun, no doubt about it. A collective hallucination? Anyone declaring in the empty city today that the Germans haven’t arrived and the landing hasn’t taken place would be torn to pieces.
Cool weather, clouds, overcast sky, crosswinds, still no rain.
Yesterday Mme. X. arrived. For at least three months she’s left me in perfect peace. “If I don’t come anymore,” she said, “it’s because I’m afraid of becoming attached to you.” She makes stupid faces. I answer dryly, “There’s no danger of that.” She protests. I move on and consider how to drive her away.
Began working on Deux cavaliers again.
Serious money worries. Still nothing from Paris, no letters. Wrote to Dambournet, L’Argus du Livre, to propose selling three manuscripts to him, Batailles dans la montagne, Le Poids du ciel, Les Vraies richesses.
A difficult period to get through morally. What I would need is to succeed at some incontestably beautiful work. What I’m writing doesn’t satisfy me. Not enough real work even though I stay shut up in my office the whole day. Irritated by difficulties that I can’t seem to overcome. I’ve hardly written more than a few pages for weeks. And even those aren’t as good as the ones I was writing three months ago.
Decided to give up tobacco, I smoked my last bag of it. I won’t buy anymore on the black market. Totally eliminating personal expenses.
Noon. So, it’s true. The landing at least. Fighting southwest of Le Havre, we learn from a badly broken up radio broadcast.
Camoin came to see me this evening at about seven o’clock. I told him about all the mistakes that Vigroux made in his translation of Joseph Andrews. Camoin told me they killed Ach. Pétain and Laval speaking on the radio about the landing. The bad days have come. According to Camoin, 11,000 (eleven thousand) planes supposedly participated in the attack. Insane times! What’s going to become of us? That’s what they keep asking below, my mother, my wife, my mother-in-law, shelling peas for canning.
It’s what I’m asking myself as I write this note.
The wind has turned to the north and is blowing in gusts. Sick today. Even the light is agonizing.
*
Wednesday, June 7, 1944
A crystal clear day. The mistral has swept away all the fog. From here the hills on the far side of the valley look close enough to touch. I can make out juniper bushes on the Mirabeau hills and, more than fifty kilometers away, the details of the rock face at Sainte-Victoire. I didn’t listen to the radio at seven o’clock. It was on very loud below but I wasn’t up, and only got up later when the telephone rang. It was Mme. Meyssonnier leaving for Mison for the funeral of a cousin who was crushed by the train, to tell us she would probably return this evening by train, if there was one. We are looking after her daughter in the meantime and will be for quite some time, I imagine. We also have André with us whose wife left for her son’s first communion in Banassac, hasn’t been heard from since, and must have broken down somewhere. There are no more trains, no more letters, no more telephone. In addition to the family, I’m now responsible for little Marguerite, André, and Guy. We’re considering the possibility of having to take refuge at the Criquet farm. Aline, Guy, and I would leave on bicycle, the women in the cart, and André and Charles on foot. For the moment, I calm them down and make them stay here. There’s absolutely no reason to rush off madly on adventures, as if to a picnic. The idea that we’ll have to learn to be nomads again fills the children with joy, and the adults as well. As long as the danger is far away. It is still far away. Apparently the fighting is furious and the outcome is far from decided. Those at the head of the Anglo-American front near Saint-Vaast were thrown into the sea. The other front, on the contrary, seems to be growing.
Getting to work. And being careful about knowing too much or going too deeply into the science of things. Martel’s example. Retaining a freshness of heart and hands. That’s difficult.
Ten o’clock. The siren is sounding. Even so, the wind is terrible.
*
Thursday, June 8, 1944
Yesterday afternoon I went to Margotte by bicycle. The land empty, the world empty; it seemed like an empty Sunday. I passed households fleeing, one after another, belongings heaped precariously in trucks, heading for Marseille. At Bois d’Asson, the mine wasn’t operating. I learned at Margotte that the terrorists had forced the workers to close it. At the crossroads, groups of young men idly swinging their arms. The sweet smell of linden trees in full blossom tossed by the wind. When I arrived at Margotte, Mme. Salomé told me immediately that the Anglo-Americans had taken Paris. It turns out she had mixed up what she heard on the radio, that they were in Boulogne, but: -sur-Mer. As for Salomé, he went to look at his automobile, out of gas now for four years. He told me that he was going to go have it serviced immediately. He’s expecting the return of 1936 before long. The return to before the war. It would be useless to try to make him understand first of all, that wouldn’t be enough, and secondly, it probably won’t happen, and finally, that what will happen will only happen after horrible catastrophes. He caresses his auto, jubilant, and all ready to dive back into any postwar whatsoever, so long as he has gasoline and can rev up his engine and go backfiring down the roads.
Returned home about seven o’clock. On the dissident radio station, they’re giving orders for civil war to the gendarmes, the jailers, and even the resistance fighters. They’re ordering them to take to the maquis with weapons and supplies and to open the prison doors.
As I’m writing this down this morning, Ch. arrives from town with news. The reports are strange and contradictory. Groups of maquis fighters have supposedly seized the town hall, the post office, and the police station. But he saw armed Germans at the town hall, the post office is functioning, and the police chief, whom I know to be a Francist, is still there. More news from Charles: fighting in Sainte-Tulle. Now from my window I can see Sainte-Tulle which, at six kilometers away, is in clear sight. It’s calm, peaceful, not a sound coming from it. Third piece of news: the Anglo-Americans are supposed to have landed at Cette. Élise is nervous and asks me if we shouldn’t leave for Criquet. I don’t think so. Why do that? Let’s wait. It’s through obeying last evening’s orders that the game will be played. To what extent and in what fashion will the country obey? And on the other hand, what is there to fear?
In any case and as a precaution, I told Guy, who was heading to Criquet by bike to get milk, not to leave. And I advised Ch. simply to return to town to get enough bread for a small supply for us.
I’m doing my best to continue working on Deux cavaliers.
After leaving again for town, Charles returns. Now he’s saying that the dissidents didn’t take the town hall last night, but they came to arm those who were members of the organizations (that seems true, or at least plausible). On the other hand, the prefecture’s office in Digne was supposedly stormed. But then I wonder why there aren’t new administrators already. I just had a calm telephone call from Blavette who asked me to meet him this afternoon, so the post office is alright. Real news: a German was killed tonight at the public house and a police officer killed himself while loading his gun badly. Waiting.
I destroyed three bad pages of Deux cavaliers written over the past few days.
Mme. Meyssonier returned from Mison last evening. She had to go fifteen or twenty kilometers on foot, just this side of Sisteron, before meeting a truck that left her not far from here, where she was able to find help again.
*
Friday, June 9, 1944
After a day of true madness yesterday, today promises to be calmer. It seems someone was pulling the wool over our eyes. Last night everyone in town left their houses and went to camp in the hills. The rumors circulating predicted terrible, mysterious events for the night. André and Angèle came to spend the night with us. There were huge numbers of false reports, each more outrageous than the last. By the end of last evening there was not a single cool head among us. I had to reprimand Guy, calmly and sensibly, for wanting to take extreme measures. Today everything is back to square one. In my opinion, a premature attempt, one of those terrible blunders that’s enough to destroy the best of causes. A lack of cool heads in the command. It seems the real leaders were very displeased that these initiatives were taken. It seems to be confirmed as well that all this unrest was only regional. So I was seeing things clearly when I advised caution. Why can’t we be more English in the good sense: “Wait and see.”
Guy is determined despite what I said to him, and I told him that if he had been too quick to accept my reasons, I wouldn’t respect him as I do. One must lose one’s illusions as quickly as possible, so, yes, go where you can lose them the fastest. That’s the law of war. For the moment, all they see is a big country outing. In place of the old “unfolding of things,” now there’s the appeal of cowboy and gangster movies. Big House, Zorro, sports. Obeying the rush of blood. Permission to play a grand version of cops and robbers. A big playground. What an idiot I was to write Le Grand troupeau. The simplest solution is to calmly accept that butcher shops exist, and even to go there to buy good meat.
Yesterday, thirteen dead in Forcalquier, according to rumors. Those who went to occupy the town hall, or I don’t know what, clashed with, I don’t know, either the Germans or the militia who killed thirteen of them.
“What I want most of all,” says Guy, “is equipment.” The desire for a parachute harness. Not once, it must be acknowledged, do they speak sentimentally, as in 93, 48, or 70. They are thrilled with (laugh at) the idea of jumping. Not one speaks of grandeur or country. Oh, no. Never of country. These are political armies built on the misconceptions of youth who want to practice piano in china shops.
It’s a beautiful day, clear, full of color, a little wind.
I understand all that very well. I just don’t like it, that’s all. Behind them are others who want to be brought armchairs so they can die sitting down, from old age, cancer, their prostate.
Still no real news about the landing. Neither the English nor the Germans.
*
Saturday, June 10, 1944
Finally it’s cloudy and overcast. It hasn’t rained yet but the humid air already offers relief to the body, relaxes it. Peace, and the songs of birds. Nightingales are calling in the tall chestnut trees.
My neighbor Maurel, a miner at the coal mine in Gaude, hasn’t returned. He’s been dragooned, surely against his own wishes. He’s peace-loving, a gardener, family man, conformist, easily astounded by the tiny flash of a lighter. What purpose does it serve to make a man like this into a soldier? If this picnic lasts a few days he’ll hold out, but all the time thinking of his daughter, wife, rabbits, hens, his garden, and his new potatoes. But this is certainly not the man to fire the last shots. If the country holiday lasts too long, he’ll end up saying to himself, “Now let’s move on to serious things.” And he’ll return to the bosom of his family.
The young men, like Guy, don’t talk about battles, combat, fighting, they talk about “scuffles.” “There are terrific scuffles.” They don’t want to fight but to “scuffle.” In one sense, that’s to see clearly, already.
It’s raining hard, a beautiful heavy rain. My limbs feel light and well-oiled. My head feels at ease in the humidity. Despite new troubles, my eyes take great physical pleasure in looking at the dark blue day. The sound of rain is pleasing to my ears like music and suddenly, having taken up a book, I see magical seeds bursting forth from all sides.
In addition to the thirteen young men killed on the square in front of the church in Forcalquier, there was a drama at the police station. Captain Faucon killed the son of the police captain who wanted to arrest him and the police captain killed Captain Faucon. As for the young men, they were from the Bois d’Asson mine and still following that insane plan, they were occupying the town hall, pure and simple. A truckload of Germans arrived. The young miners advanced, naively thinking that, at the sight of their friendly faces, it would all be settled, pure and simple (which was stupid!). They were massacred. Two minutes later, absolute calm “reigned at Varsovie.” What madness! Who organized all this stupidity? Who pulled the wool over our eyes in the first place? Salomé, who told me all this, has backed off from his revolutionary declarations. He’s already recanting them.
It’s been clearly confirmed that this unrest was strictly regional and hasn’t spread beyond the district.
Four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun’s out again.
—Translated from the French by Jody Gladding
Jean Giono (1895–1970) was one of the most prolific and respected French writers of the twentieth century. Born to a modest family in Provence, he was conscripted to the French Army in World War I, and the horrors he experienced cemented his lifelong commitment to pacifism. His first major literary success came with Colline (1929), which won him the Prix Brentano. He continued to publish novels and political writings during the thirties, and his strict pacifism led him to be briefly imprisoned for collaboration before and after the Nazi occupation of France. After World War II, Giono continued to gain success as a novelist, and many of his books were adapted into films. He received the Prince Rainier of Monaco Prize for lifetime achievement in 1953, was elected to the Academie Goncourt in 1954, and became a member of the Literary Council of Monaco in 1963.
Jody Gladding is a translator and poet. She has published several poetry collections, including Translations from Bark Beetle, Rooms and Their Airs, and Stone Crop, which was the winner of the 1992 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her translations from the French include Jean Giono’s Serpent of Stars and Pierre Michon’s The Eleven.
From Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal , translated from the French by Jody Gladding, published by Archipelago Books.
America’s First Connoisseur
Edward White’s new monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.
Seth Gilliam as James Hemings in Jefferson in Paris (1995)
Among his many claims to distinction, Thomas Jefferson can be regarded as America’s first connoisseur. The term and the concept emerged among the philosophes of eighteenth-century Paris, where Jefferson lived between 1784 and 1789. As minister to France he gorged on French culture. In five years, he bought more than sixty oil paintings, and many more objets d’art. He attended countless operas, plays, recitals, and masquerade balls. He researched the latest discoveries in botany, zoology and horticulture, and read inveterately—poetry, history, philosophy. In every inch of Paris he found something to stir his senses and cultivate his expertise. “Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music,” he wrote a friend back in America, “I should want words.”
Ultimately, he poured all these influences into Monticello, the plantation he inherited from his father, which Jefferson redesigned into a palace of his own refined tastes. More than in its domed ceilings, its gardens, or its galleries, it was in Monticello’s dining room that Jefferson the connoisseur reigned. Here, he shared with his guests recipes, produce, and ideas that continue to have a sizable effect on how and what Americans eat.
In keeping with his republican ideals, Jefferson eschewed lavish banquets in favor of small, informal dinners where conversation flowed as freely as the Château Haut-Brion. According to his own account, the famous dinner table bargain of June 1790 was just such an event. Preparing the menu for the “room where it happened” that night was James Hemings, arguably the most accomplished chef in the United States. He was Jefferson’s trusted protégé, his brother-in-law—and his slave.
For nine years in Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia, it was Hemings who produced the sophisticated haute cuisine dishes with a demotic, Southern twist that we now think of as emblematically Jeffersonian: capon stuffed with Virginia ham; indulgent vanilla ice cream encased in delicate choux pastry; beef stew served in a French bouillon. And it was he who taught his fellow slaves at Monticello everything he knew about food, transmitting his influence down the generations, onto the tables of Virginia’s social elite.
Hemings’s talents had been nurtured by Jefferson, who took him to France and gave him a first-rate culinary education from some of Europe’s most illustrious chefs. Yet, every moment he spent in Jefferson’s kitchens, he did so in servitude. His biography appears to us only in snatched glimpses. We know little about his private life and his interior existence, beyond what he expressed through cooking. But his story exemplifies the strange paradoxes that have come to define the public reputation of Thomas Jefferson, a man who, in turn, exemplifies the strange paradoxes of his age.
*
James Hemings became the property of Thomas Jefferson when he was nine years old. His mother was Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved woman who had six children by Captain John Wayles, her master and James’s father. With his three wives, Wayles had a further eleven children, one of whom, Martha, married Thomas Jefferson on New Year’s Day in 1772. When Captain Wayles died the following year, the Jeffersons inherited Elizabeth Hemings and her children, including James and his little sister Sarah, known as Sally. They arrived at Monticello in January 1774, a few weeks after the Boston Tea Party, and a few months before Jefferson established himself as an important voice against the tyranny of British rule.
Martha Jefferson almost certainly knew that six of the young slaves she had inherited were her half siblings; her husband surely knew, too. It may have been a truth obvious to everyone but never commented upon, the kind of gymnastic feat of self-delusion that was common on many plantations of the era.
Throughout their lives at Monticello, the Hemingses repeatedly received preferential treatment, were selected for high-status jobs, and given special responsibilities. As the years passed, James appears to have stood out to his master as a young man of particular intelligence and strong character. When Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia in 1779, he gave the fourteen-year-old Hemings the job of messenger and coach driver. Two years later, it was Hemings and his brother Robert who were tasked with guiding Martha Jefferson and her children to safety during Benedict Arnold’s raid on Virginia. The following year, 1782, Martha died, leaving Jefferson deeply grief-stricken. When, at the end of the Revolutionary War, the opportunity came to move to France, Jefferson was happy to accept. Although Robert was head cook at Monticello, it was James, now nineteen, whom Jefferson selected to accompany him across the ocean and learn “the art of cookery,” to quote Jefferson, as no American before him had.
The Paris that Hemings and Jefferson discovered was widely regarded as the apotheosis of European civilization. For much of the preceding century French had been Europe’s lingua franca, and French dress, dance, and manners had dominated high society across the continent. French cuisine was similarly envied and copied, although many notable Parisians wondered whether the cult of food had gone too far. Rousseau once averred that “the French are the only nation who know not how to eat, since they must use such a vast deal of art, to render their victuals agreeable to the palate.” His contemporary Voltaire likewise complained about being served complex dishes such as “sweetbreads swimming in a spicy sauce”—though one wonders how much of that was due to the havoc played on his stomach by the forty cups of coffee he drank each day.
Jefferson was well aware of the intellectual dimensions of cooking and eating, and developed a philosophy of dining around it, one that combined old-world culinary technique with an American disregard for etiquette and hierarchy. How much Hemings knew about, or cared about, such ideas is unknown. In the historical record he comes alive only fitfully, and almost always refracted throughout the prism of his master. What is obvious, however, is that he had talent and an innate understanding of food that flourished under expert instruction.
For the first tranche of his apprenticeship, Hemings learned in the kitchen of a successful chef named Combeaux. After that, he was placed in the tutelage of a pâtissier, before receiving the most impressive portion of his education at the Château de Chantilly under the direction of the chef to Louis Joseph de Bourbon, the Prince of Condé. Chantilly was a thunderous statement of ancien régime magnificence, vast formal gardens outside a grand château that contained interiors of towering ceilings, marble, crystal, and gold. Here, the preparation and service of food was a remarkably serious business. At a banquet in 1671, so claimed the socialite and writer Madame de Sévigné, Chantilly’s maître d’hôtel, François Vatel, became so distressed by the late delivery of fish that he stabbed himself to death in shame and despair.
Hemings’s training was a palpable success. By 1788, aged twenty-one, he was running the kitchen at the Hôtel de Langeac, Jefferson’s official residence on the Champs-Élysées. Hemings incorporated indigenous American ingredients that Jefferson had started to grow in his garden into the recipes and techniques he’d spent two years perfecting. It was all part of Jefferson’s diplomatic mission; the Hôtel de Langeac became a beacon of the young republic’s burgeoning identity, and its commitment to egalitarianism. The screaming irony, of course, was that these platefuls of democratic idealism were being cooked by a man who was considered a slave.
Jefferson, the self-described “savage of the mountains” dove deep into French food culture. In trips to Burgundy and Bordeaux, he toured vineyards in a typically Jeffersonian manner. Not content with sampling the wine, he also made close study of the science involved, the nature of the terroir that produced the grapes of each region, and the processes of harvesting, crushing, fermenting, and aging. He came to see this education in viticulture as part of a project of cultural decolonization. Before the Revolution, he said, American taste in wine had been “artificially created by our long restraint under the English government to the strong wines of Portugal and Spain.” In this new age of liberty, he wanted American palates to stray beyond the muscular port, sherry, and Madeira that the English downed by the barrel. One day, he hoped, America would be self-sufficient in wine as in all things, producing exquisite vintages that expressed the uniqueness of the American experiment.
If living in Paris broadened the horizons of the worldly Thomas Jefferson, Hemings must have felt as though he had slipped into a parallel universe. A world away from the slave society of Virginia, he was allowed to travel around the city on his own and construct a private life that didn’t necessarily run along the rigid racial lines of home. Jefferson paid him a wage, a good deal of which he spent on improving his French. The effect this had on how a young man, born into slavery, thought of himself, must have been seismic. In Virginia, members of his family became equally skilled; his younger brother John, for example, was an excellent carpenter. But his apprenticeship in French cuisine at the apex of Parisian society had made James Hemings not a cook but a chef, more virtuoso artist than master craftsman. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the great chronicler of late-eighteenth-century Paris observed in 1788, “it is almost to the point today where chefs will assume the title of culinary artist … they are pampered, they are humored, they are appeased when they are angry, and all the other servants of the household are generally sacrificed to them.”
Except, of course, Hemings could never be fully pampered, humored, or appeased. Despite the opportunities and freedoms that Jefferson gave him, he remained a slave. Technically, manumission—release from slavery—was within his reach every day of his five years in Paris, even though racism was rife in France. In the 1770s and 1780s, a raft of laws had been introduced that required black people to carry identification papers, banned them from using the titles Sieur or Dame, and prohibited interracial marriage. The Police des Noirs of 1777 went as far as requiring detainment and deportation of all people of color who entered France from abroad, or who were living in the country illegally. But, such was the spirit of the times, few of these laws were ever enforced, especially not in Paris, where the notion was vigorously upheld in the courts that slavery was inimical to France and Frenchness. At some point during his time in the city, Hemings was sure to have learned that he could have easily secured his freedom in the Parisian courts, as many enslaved people from the French colonies had done. Quite why he chose not to, we can’t know. Most likely it was the pull of family; to pursue an emancipated life, he would have to remain thousands of miles from enslaved relatives he would never see again. By 1787, there was also an extra complication to consider: his fourteen-year-old sister, Sally, who accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Polly when she moved to Paris at her father’s instruction. It is now widely accepted that Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally—his late wife’s little sister—toward the end of their stay in France, resulting in the first of six children.
The account left by Sally’s son Madison suggests that she was pregnant when she, her brother, and the Jeffersons left France in late 1789, the country in the throes of revolution. Jefferson had been a role model to many of the revolutionaries, and heavily influenced Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a document that inspired slave uprisings in the French colonies. James Hemings would never see Paris again, though the city must have stayed with him for the rest of his days.
*
When Jefferson relocated to Philadelphia in 1791, to serve as Secretary of State, Hemings went with him. He served as chef and valet, and also oversaw the mammoth task of unpacking the twenty-seven wagonloads of items that Jefferson had accrued overseas. In Philadelphia, Jefferson and Hemings each had ways of keeping the memory of Paris alive. Jefferson had his furniture, paintings, and books. Hemings had the familiar illusion of independence; the wage that Jefferson continued to pay him, and the relative freedom he could enjoy in the City of Brotherly Love. Both men, of course, also had Hemings’s cooking.
In December 1793, Jefferson moved back to Virginia, where he began the work of shaping Monticello into the place it is now, an American expression of the Enlightenment—a museum, in fact, to Jefferson’s idea of himself. The renovations included an overhaul of James Hemings’s kitchen. A new stew stove was installed to complement the top-of-the-range, heat-sensitive copper utensils that Hemings had purchased in Paris. A list of these utensils is the only surviving example of Hemings’s handwriting. It’s a surprisingly eloquent document, showing its author to be as much of a connoisseur as the legendary man for whom he cooked. Jefferson’s sphere of expertise wasn’t the kitchen—that was Hemings’s space—but the dining table, which at Monticello and, in time, the White House became a site of pleasure and education. Guests were inducted into the uncharted territory of fine wine; some even had their first taste of ice cream or macaroni and cheese, a dish unknown to Americans before Jefferson’s return and which one confused diner described as “a rich crust filled with trillions of onions, or shallots, which I took it to be … tasted very strong and not agreeable.”
These innovations are routinely described as Jefferson’s, yet there’s no evidence that the man ever brewed a pot of tea, much less mixed a vinaigrette, whipped peaks of a meringue, trussed a chicken, or any of the other things that Hemings perfected at the Hôtel de Langeac. Only two recipes are attributed directly to Hemings, one for chocolate cream, the other for snow eggs. Several others, in Jefferson’s hand, have survived—but it seems highly likely that Hemings was involved in these, too.
As much as it may have pleased Jefferson, rural Virginia was no place for Hemings, a young man who just a few years earlier had got a tantalizing taste of freedom in the cultural capital of the world. When he asked for his manumission, Jefferson acceded, but only on the condition that he stay at Monticello for as long as it took to train his brother Peter to be the new chef. Within two years Peter could cook in the style that Jefferson valued, one which seemed so fitting to the project of Monticello—“half-French, half-Virginian,” as one of Jefferson’s guests put it. In 1796, Hemings was handed $30 and his liberty. At the age of thirty-one, he was free for the first time.
The details of what Hemings did after leaving Monticello are very sketchy. He sought work in Philadelphia and may have traveled back to Europe for a time. But prospects for a black man, even one of such accomplishment, were dreadfully limited. He drank and drifted. His last known job was at a tavern in Baltimore, where his skills were surely not being put to full use.
When Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800, he wanted Hemings to run the White House kitchen. He reached out via a mutual acquaintance in a manner that suggested he assumed his former slave would come running straight away. Through a third party, Hemings told Jefferson that he wouldn’t consider the offer unless Jefferson contacted him directly and made a formal offer. As the historian Annette Gordon-Reed outlines “Hemings had been trained in Paris … He was special … Now that he was legally free, he would have from Jefferson the dignity he deserved.” In the knotted dynamics of this strangest of relationships, Jefferson’s own pride prevented him from making a direct request, and Hemings was overlooked for the post. Not long after, Jefferson received the news that Hemings had taken his own life, aged thirty-six.
Unable to hire Hemings, Jefferson went for the next best thing, a French chef named Honoré Julien. The kitchen staff was supplemented with two young slaves from Monticello, Edith and Frances, the first of many black female chefs at the White House, the best-known being Zephyr Wright who cooked for LBJ in the sixties. Edith became a fantastic chef. Through her, Virginian flavors—sweet potato, black-eyed peas, okra—kept their presence at Jefferson’s table. But, like Hemings before her, Edith’s brilliance was tethered to her legal status. When Jefferson’s presidency ended, she ran the Monticello kitchen until his death in 1826, and eventually gained her freedom in 1837, at which point she relocated to the free state of Ohio with her husband, Joseph Fossett, nephew of James Hemings. When their first son was born, they named him James, too, likely in honor of the boy’s uncle, a man who ghosts through the archives of the written word, but whose legacy is alive in kitchens across America.
Read earlier installments of “Off Menu.”
Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.”
May 20, 2020
My Lighthouses
C Levå, Marinmotiv, oil. Collection of the Maritime Museum in Stockholm. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Certain landlocked cities have lighthouses. On such rivers as the Rhine, the Seine, and the Saint Lawrence, lighthouses gave warning of dangerous areas. In London, the Trinity Buoy Wharf light is still in existence. This hexagonal, pale-brown brick structure is located in an area known as Container City. I remember my father telling me about these buildings when I was a child. To my ears, accustomed to the Spanish language, the word container, which I never completely understood, sounded warlike; I imagined gigantic metal constructions, improbably conical or spherical in shape. It never occurred to me that they would be like shoeboxes.
When I visited that shoebox city, the shipping containers, adapted to function as housing, reminded me of the futuristic cities of nineties movies and TV series. The lighthouse on the wharf looked out of place among the container architecture, yet, like all of its kind, it was experimental in origin. For a time the building was used to train lighthouse keepers, and later to trial the lanterns and lenses that would then be transferred to other lights. It was there that the scientist (and bookbinder) Michael Faraday worked on the fixtures for the South Foreland lighthouse in Kent. A tiny museum at the foot of the lighthouse offers a display of Faraday’s instruments and personal effects.
Today the Trinity Buoy Wharf light has no lantern. It doesn’t illume, but it can be heard because it now has a bell.
The lanterns of lighthouses are the bells of churches. As with light, sound waves can also announce and convene. And in this lighthouse there’s a bell that chimes ceaselessly. A bell that will sound for a millennium. It’s made up of many other bells that chime according to an algorithm designed by Jem Finer. Apparently one day, in almost a thousand years’ time, the music of the bells will come into a harmonic alignment, in a process that can be likened to the planets moving into alignment in the heavens.
*
On the Manhattan shore of the Hudson, there is also one remaining lighthouse: Jeffrey’s Hook, better known as the Little Red Lighthouse.
The city seems to peter out. The blocks of buildings disappear at a highway crossed by a footbridge, from which the only view is cars, trees, and the river. At the far end of the footbridge is a park that I visited with Lorena when we were together in New York for two weeks: my first since moving there, her last before returning to Mexico City. We shared her apartment in Washington Heights during the apex of the summer heat. I can’t remember how we first met. It’s as if she was always there with her delicate hands and hair that is in fact chestnut, but in my mind is red. It was the dog days, a time for goodbyes, even the summer sun was saying its farewell to New York. We were walking along a winding path of tunnels and drawbridges over the rail tracks, with a view of the George Washington Bridge, which crosses from Manhattan to New Jersey. The gray of its soldered-metal engineering stood out against the undergrowth in the park. The path was descending toward the river. From the shoreline, beyond rocks jutting through the surface of the water between scraps of sunlight, the south tip of Manhattan was visible. Below the great bridge was a small red lighthouse. A lighthouse at the end of the island, at the end of the river, which Antonio Muñoz Molina calls “the lighthouse at the end of the Hudson.”
I have no memory of how I knew of the existence of this building: I woke up one day recalling that there was a lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge, with no idea of who had told me, or if I’d read about it somewhere. I had to find it. Lorena hadn’t originally planned to accompany me; she was leaving the following day for Mexico, and was glad to be returning home, leaving behind the hard loneliness that life in this city can be. But we were only one stop away. We wondered how there could be a lighthouse so close to the bustle and reggaetón of Washington Heights, so close to the subway, the banks, and the accountants. I was already feeling fond of the neighborhood, with its custom of filling the Sunday sidewalks with chairs, chat, and dominos; the sopa de siete potencia (misspelling intentional) and the twenty-four-hour fruit stands, where other substances were probably also for sale.
The Hudson here is not in fact a river, but an arm of the ocean. It has been a fishing ground since the times when the Weckquaesgeek tribe inhabited its shores, and there used to be ships that sailed from Albany to the city or on to the Atlantic. Shipwrecks were so common on this stretch of water that a red pole had to be erected to signal the danger. And red was also the color of the lighthouse, constructed in 1880; a small structure, today almost invisible beneath the bridge. Its size, color, and green tip give it the appearance of a toy.
At the last minute, Lorena decided to come with me. We’d expected to find an abandoned building, a lighthouse vanquished by the bridge and highway, a ridiculous anachronism. Instead, the smallest lighthouse in the world (or at least that is how it seemed to me then) retains enormous dignity despite being dwarfed by the bridge. It felt much more on our scale, belonging to our universe.
Around 1942, the author Hildegarde Swift watched the bridge being erected over Jeffrey’s Hook, and wrote The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, an illustrated children’s book whose main character is the lighthouse, saddened and oppressed by the construction. At the end of the story, readers discover that the bridge is its metal brother, and that the lighthouse gets to continue to fulfill its function of safeguarding boats.
When the authorities decided to sell the lighthouse, many of the children who had read The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge protested. They started petitions and even offered to collect money to buy it, to the point where the auction was cancelled. The property was transferred to the Parks Department in 1951 and the lighthouse fell into disuse. The lantern was not switched on again until 1979, when the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and restoration was undertaken. In 2002, the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Hildegarde Swift’s book was celebrated by, for pure nostalgia, presenting the lighthouse with a new lens so that it could continue to illuminate the night. It was saved, not for its utility or even historical value, but for the symbolic and literary meanings it embodied. People refused to allow life to be so prosaic, were determined that reality should imitate fiction.
Weeks afterward I returned to the lighthouse, this time without Lorena (missing her, envious that she was back home). It was the one day of the month when the building is opened to allow girls and boys to climb to the observation deck. There it stood, demonstrating to those children that it is still indispensable, and gets along splendidly with modernity.
*
Other metropolises that are far from the sea, and whose rivers have dried up or been channeled underground, have their own kinds of lighthouses. Mexico City’s Torre Latinoamericana, for example, used to function as a lighthouse on the high seas for the citizens who had lost their way in the urban tides. In those days there was only one skyscraper on the labyrinthine streets of the city, a single tower from which Mexico City seemed to stretch out forever, like an ocean; just as from the Eiffel Tower, Paris can be viewed from one end to the other.
The Eiffel Tower is still the only lighthouse in Paris. No one would dare to move a stone of that city without first seeking authorization (authorization they should not be given). By contrast, buildings in Mexico City are demolished and others spring up by the minute, each one taller than the last. They compete among themselves as trees in the rainforest compete for sunlight. During my own lifetime the Hotel de México in the Colonia Nápoles, succeeded the Torre Latinoamericana as the point of reference in the distance. Whenever I was lost, I only had to see it to be sure of which direction to take. But new skyscrapers appear every day now, taller than the Hotel de México, blocking my view.
In Manhattan there are so many skyscrapers that none functions as a lighthouse. The whole stretch of land is so densely populated with tall metal structures that, at street level, their summits are invisible. For the Manhattan pedestrian, the lighthouse is perhaps more down to earth: Central Park, that enormous oasis, the meeting place from which one can set out in a new direction, is the point of orientation on the island.
The most beautiful pseudo-lighthouse I know of in a city is the eleventh-century Carfax Tower in the heart of Oxford. Its four faces are all that remain of St. Martin’s Church. On the front of the building is a clock, with male figures announcing the quarter hours. The name of the tower comes from the French carrefour, meaning crossroads. It’s said that for many years the place offered shelter and a point of reference to travelers, and it is still the building that every tour guide in the city recommends visiting. Planning regulations forbid building higher than the Carfax in that area of Oxford, and its summit offers a view of the whole of the city, its sea of spires and rooftops.
*
Lightships, or lightvessels, as they are sometimes called, deserve a fragment of their own here. The masts of certain Roman ships were hung with iron baskets in which fires burned throughout the night. Lightships were located in very deep or dangerous waters, where it was impossible to erect a stone structure. They also acted as stand-ins for coastal lighthouses under repair, in which case they carried a huge sign saying RELIEF.
The greatest difficulty was in maintaining the stability of those vessels in tempestuous waters. It was Stevenson’s grandfather who invented the most popular means of achieving this: the mushroom anchor. The vessel on which Sir Walter Scott and Robert Stevenson traveled, the Pharos, was the first lightship in England.
In the 1930s, the earliest automatic lightships came into service; decades later solar power began to be used to recharge their batteries. With no crew and no keepers, they were ghost ships. Ignis fatui, fatuous lights, like the will-o’-the-wisps said to sometimes float on lakes or over the sea. Phantom, fiery, foolish Pharos vessels.
*
The lighthouse is always different, depending on the time and the position from which it’s viewed. There is the lighthouse in the distance, a diminutive life preserver. The lighthouse close at hand, where its size is imposing, revealing its origins as a temple, a tower, and a house of illumination. The lighthouse at different times of day: In the mornings, we see it surrounded by seagulls; at midday the sun dots it like an i, but in the evening, as the sun declines, they separate in a form of ritual farewell. At night, the lighthouse is a second, terrestrial moon. There is the lighthouse standing calmly beside the sea, and the lighthouse in a storm, a titan that resists and, in the words of Michelet, returns “fire with fire to the lightning bolts of the heavens.” And, finally, there is the lighthouse swathed in mist.
*
The world is a cornucopia of objects for the lover of lighthouses: plastic and metal models, prints and postcards. In Mexico City, there are also bakeries and hardware stores called El Faro, and Faros is a brand of cigarettes (prisoners condemned to death had the right to smoke one before facing the firing squad, from which comes the expression ya chupó faros, which literally translates as “he’s had his last drag of the lighthouse”). There are lantern stores in Chinatown and stands at son et lumière events that go by the name of Lighthouse, an interview show called The Pharos of Alexandria, lighthouse magnifying glasses, an art book entitled Your Lighthouse, a Christian sect in Los Angeles called the Lighthouse Church, and it’s the main element of a John Maus album cover. Its image and form attract us the way its light attracts ships.
*
Lying on the beach, Leopold Bloom remembers Grace Darling, the lady of the islands, the girl with her hair flying in the wind. In 1838, Grace was a young woman living with her parents in a lighthouse on the Farne Islands. One day a storm blew up, lasting longer than any other before it. Standing at the highest window with her spyglass, Grace spotted a ship, the Forfarshire, which the waves had thrown onto the rocks, splitting it in two. A number of survivors were huddled together, clinging to the wreckage, begging for help. The legend goes that Grace managed to convince her father that they must set out together to rescue the shipwrecked sailors. At the height of the storm, they rowed to the wreck and, while her father helped the survivors aboard, she kept the boat steady. They “tossed on the waves,” says Wordsworth in a poem he wrote in honor of Grace Darling, “to bring Hope to the hopeless, to the dying, life.”
—Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. She was a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters. Her book of essays Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize from Literal Publishing in 2013. She has published her work in Nexos, Este País, Dossier, Vice, and more. She is the editor and cofounder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.
Christina MacSweeney received the 2016 Valle Inclan prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, and Among Strange Victims (Daniel Saldaña París) was a finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. Among the other authors she has translated are Elvira Navarro (A Working Woman), Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Empty Set; Migrant Words), and Julián Herbert (Tomb Song; The House of the Pain of Others). She is currently working on a second novel by Daniel Saldaña París, and her translations of short story collections by Elvira Navarro and Julián Herbert will be published in 2020.
“Jeffrey’s Hook” from On Lighthouses , by Jazmina Barrera, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Published by Two Lines Press in May 2020, all rights reserved.
Where Does the Sky Start?
Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next six weeks.
Claude Monet, Coucher de soleil, c. 1868
I have been alone and because of my aloneness I have started a relationship with the sky.
The sky said: “I am open.” And I knew: this was a place to aim my attention. Such is how relationships begin. It was no different with the sky.
I realized quickly I didn’t know anything about it. I did not hear its voice the way Charles Simic heard its voice: “Come, lovers of dark corners, / The sky says, / And sit in one of my dark corners.” I began to learn the way one comes to learn a new love, that initial state of revelation, of curtains pulling open. Show me: the major events, the altering traumas, the enthusiasms, the aversions, the fears. What do you eat? What do you dream? What is your favorite month of the year? The sky wasn’t showing me any more than it already always was, but I had wasted a lot of time not paying attention. It can be good to start at the beginning. What already always was turned out to be much more than I had anticipated.
The sky is a clock. The sky is an atmosphere, a mood, a temperature, a density. The sky is home to our home. The sky is each moment’s shifting fingerprint. I devoted myself.
The questions came.
Where does the sky start?
What a simple question. How obvious. But it unsteadied me; I was walloped by the force of how much I did not know.
When are you in the sky? There are the obvious times: in an airplane; a hot air balloon; a rocket; the moment of peak height after being launched from a diving board. But if you are in a room on the second floor and lean out the window and trees outside your window are taller than the roof, are you in the sky? If you are on a mountain and you are higher than the trees but there are peaks higher than you, are you in the sky? What distance must one travel up to meet it? Is there a scientific measure with numbers and variables and exponents riding the shoulders of the regular-size numbers? Does an equation exist? Sky = 11.19 squared over weather to the third times Time times light times height of person measuring minus birds? Does an invisible band like the Tropic of Capricorn trace a line above, an invisible eggshell of guarantee that delineates: this is sky, this is not sky?
“The front of my looking out pulls / beauty taking me taking you. The scab in the sky / is gone. We have to go beyond our calculations / and the small words,” writes Alice Notley. If answers exist, we’ll have to abandon our math, and make a new language. I was alone, and I was ready.
The Chilean poet Raúl Zurita knows about going beyond small words. In the sands of the Atacama Desert he used a bulldozer to scar words onto the surface of the earth. In letters a kilometer tall that stretched three kilometers long, he wrote “ni pena ni miedo.” It is illegible on the ground; it can only be read from the sky. One must be above it to see, to receive the message:
ni pena ni miedo
neither shame nor fear
These are words for how to approach an end or a beginning. At the beginning of my relationship with the sky I learned: the sky starts at the surface of the earth.
Does every child know that? They seem to, in their drawings. The single-line horizon, and the blue above. The sky starts at the surface of the earth! We are always in it.
The sky. Up. Up above. The bright-dark uncollapsing dome. Where the stars are in their dairy field. Where the rain falls from, and the snow. Where the clouds gather, swell, drift, draw, and then withdraw. Where the sun lives and tips its pitcher of light down on us. Crescent moon. Constellation. Thunder. Sunset. Gull. Way up.
But also, right here. All around. You’re touching it. It’s touching you. An intimate lifelong relationship. We penetrate it. We take it into ourselves. We are all in its embrace. This thing I thought was up was actually all around, this thing I thought was elsewhere was everywhere, seen and unseen.
Since when? That’s another question. We emerge into it from the bodies of our mothers. Before we emerge, for the time we are alive inside, we are not in the sky, the same way a person underwater is not in the sky. To dive below the surface is to leave the sky.
Is water the opposite of sky? Ankles shins kneecaps. Pause. Thighs inner upper. Pause. Crotch zing hips. Pause. Three inches above the belly button. Pause. Then, the lift and slow fall and the entering, all the way underwater. Deep comes quick at Walden Pond, where I often swim in summer. In the deepest part of the kettle, it’s nearly 110 feet deep. A little less than half the wingspan of a 747. Not far to walk, but a long way to sink. They are not opposite, water and sky, they love each other. The sky sees itself in the water, the water flings the sky back to itself. They touch all the time. And when I tread water, head, neck, shoulders above the surface, body below, I enter both at once, absorbed at once in both, a love triangle. This is what you realize when you are alone.
We are not in the sky when we are underwater. And we are not in the sky when we are alive inside before being born. And before that? That’s another question. Some people talk about stardust, suggest we’re all descended from the sky, that our pre-origin origin starts in the stars, which is to say, perhaps we’ve been in the sky the whole time, before we were born, before even the planets were born. Our bodies are made of elements, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and so on, and these elements, the scientists say, were formed in the stars billions of years ago. That we came dusting down as star parts sounds a little like a fairy tale. Or—not even like a fairy tale because fairy tales are scarier and more gruesome. It lands on me as wish-wash, too beautiful to be true. But I’m no longer sure of anything. What happens after the future? What is this unremembered memory of nothing? Sometimes my imagination comes tap-tapping against its eggshell like a hatchling.
I started a relationship with the sky, and wondered, what took me so long? What am I forgetting? Did the relationship start long ago? I thought back, and back. I thought back to a first grade classroom in 1986. Lights dimmed, shades drawn, the TV wheeled in on a cart (a special day!) to watch the rocket. There it was on earth, everything about its posture spoke of upward thrust, potential energy, blast off. Here we were, children, gathered to witness an event. Astronauts, seven of them, exploration, history, Cape Canaveral, countdown, bravery. The rocket was orange. Three two one, great white gusty barrels of smoke we have lift off and
up
it
went
Into the sky, up and up.
And then, one minute and thirteen seconds later, it exploded.
A foamy curve of smoke against the sky, tentacular throbs, up, elbowing out, spitting down, a jellyfish of smoke against the high-up night.
We were six years old. We didn’t know. This must be how it’s supposed to look. This smoke plume in the sky, this beautiful shape, this beautiful power, spaceship so fast it’s smoke. So fast and so powerful the smoke curves against the sky, shoots curving paths against the sky. Wow. They are in the sky. Everything is different in the sky. Beyond the sky, in outer space.
But the vibration in the room changed. The vibration from the adults in the room changed.
I was almost alone in the hallway after. Two teachers stood near a classroom door. They stood close and spoke quietly and one touched the other’s shoulder. I didn’t know what was happening, I didn’t know what had happened. The rocket in the sky, the rocket rushing spaceward, the swooping torrents of smoke in the sky. Was this when my relationship with the sky started?
But no, no. It wasn’t that day. That’s not when it started. When I think of that day, I do not think of the sky. I did not know what had happened. I did not know what would happen. What I did know that day: sadness and fear. Which, like the sky, were there from the start, and maybe before.
Remember: disaster means ill-starred.
Read Nina MacLaughlin’s series on Summer Solstice, Dawn, and November.
Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Summer Solstice.
May 19, 2020
Redux: What Kind of Flowers Am I Making
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.
Iris Murdoch.
A couple of weeks ago, the Redux brought you April showers; now we’re delivering the obligatory May flowers. Read on for Iris Murdoch’s Art of Fiction interview, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” and Eileen Myles’s poem “Circus.”
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.
Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117
Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990)
INTERVIEWER
Which tends to come first—characters or plot?
MURDOCH
I think they all start in much the same way, with two or three people in a relationship with a problem. Then there is a story, ordeals, conflicts, a movement from illusion to reality, all that. I don’t think I have any autobiographical tendencies and can’t think of any novel I’ve written that is a copy of my own life.
Funes the Memorious
By Jorge Luis Borges
Issue no. 28 (Summer–Fall 1962)
I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, though he might look at it from the twilight of dawn till that of evening, a whole lifetime.
Circus
By Eileen Myles
Issue no. 214 (Fall 2015)
Jill tells me about the
show she is making
& I thought it’s like
Flowers. What kind
of flowers am I making.
I think that I met
you at work. I’m home
Now & think what
Kind of flower am
I making. How do we find
the flower, use the
Flower spread it around
I thought summer’s a good
Growing season or is
It. Is summer just hot? …
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.
Charmed: An Interview with Stephanie Danler
To call Stephanie Danler generous would be an understatement. Before we ever met, she read an advance copy of my memoir and posted about it on her Instagram account. For this fledgling author, it felt like the equivalent of being on a late-night talk show. Thinking it was a shot in the dark, I asked if she would be in conversation with me for an event at McNally Jackson in Williamsburg. At that time, in 2018, Danler lived six months out of the year in Los Angeles and six months in New York. She was in production on the second season of the television adaptation of her best-selling novel, Sweetbitter, and six months pregnant with her first child. And yet, she said yes.
I had heard about Sweetbitter, but I hadn’t yet read it. Its publishing story is mythical: the waitress who hands her manuscript to someone at Knopf and gets a book deal. I’d seen the wine glass on the cover, the bestseller status, and somehow reading it didn’t feel urgent. Really, I was jealous. I assumed I knew something about Danler’s life. It seemed charmed.
I read Sweetbitter and realized it had earned every bit of praise it received. It is a work of careful and keen observation, full of yearning, and satisfying in an almost gastronomical way.
Then I read a precursor to her memoir, Stray—a heartbreaking and lucid essay called “Stone Fruits,” which appeared in The Sewanee Review. In it, Danler reckons with her abusive mother, now disabled from a brain aneurysm, and her drug-addicted and largely absentee father. Any notion of her life being charmed was demolished.
Or was it? I had always thought charmed meant easy or without friction. But really to charm is “to control or achieve by or as if by magic,” and Danler’s prose has a sorcerer’s prowess and a wisdom that borders on mystical. The writer and witch Amanda Yates Garcia says that each initiation we face can teach us what our magical powers are and what gifts we have to offer the world. Danler offers beauty and hope in the redemptive powers of writing. Her gifts lie in her willingness to share some of the most intimate and painful parts of her life.
This interview was conducted over the phone in late April, while both of us were quarantined at home.
INTERVIEWER
A lot of people have called your first book, Sweetbitter, an autobiographical novel. And yet, though you obviously drew on your own experiences to write that book, it is not quite autobiographical. Why did you choose to write Stray as memoir?
DANLER
I’m generally not concerned with genre. As a reader, I don’t care how factual a novel is or how fallible a memoir is. But when I started to write about people I love, who are still alive, it became important to me that I held onto the truth as much as possible. It’s my truth, so it’s subjective, but I think if you are going to say that your mother hit you, or your father overdosed, or that your lover treated you cruelly, you owe it to the people involved—whether they like it or not is a different story—to tell the truth. I wanted several times to turn it into a novel because the idea of hiding behind something was so appealing. Controlling the story when you’re writing fiction can be such a relief, especially when you’re dealing with the unruliness of real life, which doesn’t conform to a narrative arc. I think I struggled with Stray for so long because I didn’t have a big ending and I thought memoirs demanded real turning points. For Sweetbitter I had an ending because it was invented. I thought, Oh, this is the swelling of the symphony that marks the end of our journey. With the memoir, I could have ended in a thousand different places. It’s really about that ongoing-ness of living. I would have loved to just disguise myself and not feel so raw about it. But I do think it’s important for readers to know that it’s true.
INTERVIEWER
I don’t know if you outline or not, but did not knowing the ending hinder you as you began to write? Or were you writing because you were trying to figure something out?
DANLER
I was collecting pieces for such a long time that it became a kind of outline. But I could not actually write the book until I knew the shape of the entire story, which included the ending. In the meantime, I was able to research California, continue examining my past, collect memories, talk to family members. I wrote the first draft of this book in nine weeks from start to finish, but at that point I had hundreds of note cards. They had been tacked up in fifty different arrangements and many of the passages had already been written, so I had a very clear sense of where I was going. I also couldn’t write it until I figured out the present tense story line for Stray, which is moving back to California and being embattled in a love affair. I wanted the narrator to be speaking from a clear place.
INTERVIEWER
There are two romantic relationships in the book. There is the Monster, a married man with whom you’re having an affair, and the Love Interest, with whom you are slowly falling in love (and who you later marry.) At one point, the Love Interest seems worried about the way you seek drama and asks, “You can’t write if there isn’t conflict?” Was it more difficult to write about your relationship with him since it’s less “dramatic” than your relationship with the Monster?
DANLER
In a way it was easier. When I was very slowly falling in love with the Love Interest, I didn’t trust the depth of a relationship that felt good or easy or “healthy,” which is a word that I hate when it’s applied to relationships. It’s too virtuous. It’s gross. You want to do something devious when you hear that. I had a really hard time believing my relationship with the Love Interest could sustain me or interest me. But that’s conflict, that distrust. That’s something to write about. Writing about the Monster was really difficult—to remember how deeply in love we were. There was something very pure and electric and life-altering about the way we felt toward each other. We were willing to risk so much to try, and we kept trying, we couldn’t let it go. I think that my adolescent value system is still enamored with that kind of love. Where you’re powerless, you have no control, you submit yourself over and over again. You fetishize the pain. It’s so different from the kind of love that I am experiencing now in my life with my husband. And so, to inhabit both … to go from my office, reading, you know, a ten-thousand-word sexting WhatsApp transcript from five years ago, to then walk out and to see my husband, to nurse my child, I actually felt like I was going crazy. It was a very beautiful time, while I was writing Stray, but it took me hours to recover myself at the end of the day. And, you know, you don’t have hours when you’re a writer and you have a newborn.
INTERVIEWER
I completely relate to that. At what point did you share what you were writing with the people you were writing about? I remember my own process when I published a memoir, how each person had different needs. How did you tackle that?
DANLER
It’s so complicated, and it shocked me how fraught the whole process was. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think about it at all when I was writing. The very first draft of Stray had things that I never had any intention of publishing, but I had needed to write them out. I am good at blacking out the rest of the world when I’m really focused on a project. I don’t think about audience, I don’t think about marketing. I don’t think about my own shame. I don’t think about how I’m portraying people. It’s a very narcissistic bubble, but it’s what I need to write. The same was true with Sweetbitter, I did a lot of correcting after the fact as I took in all of these other factors. With Stray, those factors were amplified by the real people involved. I really didn’t want my parents involved, not that my mother could be. But there’s another kind of more investigative memoir—Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance comes to mind—where there’s an absence and you search for the answers. And through that search, you’re put on a journey. I thought about calling my aunts and uncles and my cousins and conducting interviews and tracking down my mom’s old boyfriends, who I vaguely remember from my childhood, but at the end of the day, I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in the absence and the mark it left on me. I didn’t want to necessarily put the puzzle pieces together with my parents and say who they are. All I could really say was how they affected me. They still haven’t read it. My mom doesn’t read, because of her brain aneurysm, so it’s less of an issue. I assume my father will read it at some point. But everyone else in the book, I gave them a manuscript. And as you mentioned in your question, for some of them I said, “If you have an issue with anything, I will change it.” And then to some of them I said, “If you’d like your name changed, I’m happy to do that.”
INTERVIEWER
What were some of the reactions?
DANLER
The most important people were my sister and my aunt, who were both very supportive … but the first time my sister read a handful of pages from the mother section, she said, “That didn’t happen.” She was referring to when I moved home in the summer of 2005 to nurse my mother when she was released from the hospital. My sister said, “I was her nurse.” And I said, “What are you talking about? I left my job in New York. I had an apartment lined up. I came home. I worked five days a week.” And as we talked through it… I mean, the shock on each of our faces. I thought, This is a rupture. Like, one of us has brain damage. And we’re not going to be able to move past this conversation because our memories are so wildly different from each other. She believes that she nursed my mother. I believe that I was a nurse for a period of time that left its mark on me and was frankly horrifying to my twenty-year-old self. And what we came to is that I left California after three months of care. I went back to Ohio, I finished college and moved to New York. My sister lived with my mom for the next two years.
INTERVIEWER
Oh, wow.
DANLER
And while those three months had such an impact on me, to my sister they were a blip in the amount of care that she ended up giving. Her story is that I got to be free. And my story is that I have been exiled from their family life. That kind of disagreement only makes the book better, if you can come to an agreement at the end of it. But it’s a reminder that memoir is remembered experience. It is not journalistic fact. One person says it was night and the other says it was day, and they’re both sure of themselves.
INTERVIEWER
In Sweetbitter, your narrator is affectionately called Baby Monster by her restaurant colleagues. In this book, you call the married man you’re having an affair with the Monster. Tell me a little more about this word, monster, and its importance to you.
DANLER
For me it’s an affectionate term for people prone to living in extremes, people with outsized appetites, oftentimes narcissistic, lonely people. In Stray it’s more of the Nietzschean monster—“If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” If you spend enough time around monsters you will become them. I think readers expect that the third section will be about this man whom I call the Monster. Really, it is about an epiphany during this affair, that I’m doing this to myself. I’ve continued to chase a married man whom I can’t trust, who has made it clear time and time again that he’s not able to leave his wife. As for who’s causing the damage, and who’s causing the pain, it’s me. I am the monster. I think without that realization, which took me an embarrassingly long time to come to, I would not have been able to stop. Taking responsibility allowed me the control that I felt like I didn’t have for years, frankly. It moved me out of being a victim. To me, that’s end of the book. The recognition and the small call to action. That is a profound shift for someone who has been walking in circles for a very, very long time.
INTERVIEWER
One of the things that I have enjoyed so much in our personal conversations is talking about work and money. In Stray you write, “I have always found solace in work, real mind-blunting labor.” You talk about unpacking books at Borders, working at coffee shops and restaurants. How long has it been since you’ve just been writing and not doing any other side job? And how has not having a side job affected how you write?
DANLER
First of all, I also appreciate our conversations about money and making a living as a writer. I feel like we’re in desperate need of transparency about those things, but they’re considered so inappropriate.
INTERVIEWER
I know! I keep thinking, Okay, I’ve written a memoir about sex and love, I guess the only place I have to go now is money.
DANLER
Right. Money is the only thing we don’t talk about. And it runs my life. I wish I could say that I am motivated by a divine vocation or an uncontaminated love of art. I do believe that art is separate from capital, but for me personally, I can’t afford to separate them. It’s been five years since I worked in restaurants, but that sense of desperation that I had, of needing to make ends meet, of being so close to a zero balance, is still with me. All of it is. Even when I was a manager and wasn’t working for tips, that adrenalized sense of service and performance and long nights… I’ve never lost it. And so, “just writing,” as you know, means writing for magazines, writing for websites, writing for television if you can make it work. Since Sweetbitter, I’ve written interviews, freelance essays, presentations, speeches, articles, television scripts. I hadn’t written a book in four years but I was writing constantly. Writing full-time is the craziest privilege I’ve ever encountered in my life. That, to me, is winning the lottery. At the same time, I think I imagined that if I ever made it to that point, that it would be a life of contemplation.
INTERVIEWER
(Laughs.)
DANLER
That it would be a life lived purely for books and I’d constantly be in conversation with writers who were dead and alive, whether at residencies or while traveling. All I’m trying to say is that it’s still real life with rent to pay and panic and student loans and severe budgets and good years and bad years, dependents, emergencies. It has not provided the ease I thought it would. Does that make sense?
INTERVIEWER
Absolutely. So, where do you find solace now if not in the mind-blunting labor that gave you solace before?
DANLER
I actually find it in the busy work, the emailing, the chasing of TV projects. These years with Sweetbitter have been such a roller coaster. When I moved to California right before Sweetbitter came out, there were four months when I didn’t know what was going to happen. No one needed me. No one emailed me. I didn’t have to wear an apron. I used to watch the light change. I would sit in bed and be reading or working, and look out the window and then notice, Oh, an hour has passed. There was a week when I decided I wanted to microdose mushrooms while I wrote. Some days I’d get a little high and some days I wouldn’t. Now that I have my son, I cannot remember what it was like to have that kind of time. Now, my whole life feels like mind-blunting work. I still have to clean up the house after we get off the phone.
INTERVIEWER
The first house you rented when you moved back to LA during that period had been occupied by Fleetwood Mac during the Rumours era. You’re very enamored of this fact but other people don’t seem to believe it or care. I wanted to hear a little more about your love of Fleetwood Mac and what it meant to you to have that shared place with them.
DANLER
I’ve had that love since childhood. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t obsessed with Fleetwood Mac at that age. If you’re a young woman who thinks they might be a writer, Stevie Nicks is probably one of your first patron saints.
INTERVIEWER
True.
DANLER
Stevie Nicks, then Sylvia Plath, then Joan Didion. Or in some altered order. But as far as what it means to the book, Fleetwood Mac is the fantasy of Los Angeles that you’re sold when you’re from elsewhere. You’re going come to LA, make art, live in Laurel Canyon, and things will be bohemian and easy and glamorous. But that house I lived in was falling off of the hillside. I mean, I ended up having to leave. I should have added that in the postscript because the landslides became constant. The landlord took out the eucalyptus. The entire half of the hill had fallen into the house. I couldn’t sleep when it was raining, I was terrified. The contrast between the way that people romanticize California and what it really feels like to live in such a volatile environment is what I was interested in with Stray.
INTERVIEWER
Did you already have a book deal? Were you were supposed to be writing a memoir?
DANLER
I had a two-book deal with Knopf when they bought Sweetbitter, and I had sold them a second book that was a novel. When I moved to California, I told my editor I was moving there to start the book. I never wrote a word of it. I researched heavily. I went to Egypt for a month on my own dime, to research. The whole trip was a failure. The idea for that book was based on an idea of the kind of writer I wanted to be. It never felt urgent. I also carried the biases about memoir that a lot of people do, especially those who have studied fiction for most of their lives. It took two years before I told Knopf that I was writing something personal. Which is exactly what I said. “I’m writing personal stories.” And my editor said, “Like a memoir?” I said, “Oh, my god. No. Never! It’s just personal writing.” It took another year to admit it was a memoir. Knopf was great about it. But I will say, it was a lot of blind faith. Peter, my editor, had not seen a single page of it until I turned in the first draft.
INTERVIEWER
Oh, wow.
DANLER
I had been writing nonfiction for The Sewanee Review and a few other places, so I think he knew I could write nonfiction, but as I was sending in the first draft I thought, Jesus, I hope this works. It had been four years at that point.
INTERVIEWER
You describe your father’s addiction as a black hole behind his heart that drugs merely pacify. You say that you inherited that black hole from him, and I wondered if writing is what pacifies it for you.
DANLER
We’re taught that if it’s literary writing, it’s not therapy, but just the act of writing is deeply therapeutic. There’s so much research on that. I do think writing keeps me grounded to a truth outside of my own emotions. It’s almost Buddhist in the way it causes me to witness my life. I think the ability to create that distance in moments of serious pain has probably saved my life on many, many occasions. I also like drugs, I also like sex, I also like travel. So, it’s not that I have only this one, virtuous coping mechanism.
INTERVIEWER
Okay, phew.
DANLER
But writing has saved me from ever going too far. It’s always pulled me back from the edge. When people used to assume that Sweetbitter was autobiographical, I would say, But I moved to New York to be a writer! I got that job in restaurants to write. No matter how late I stayed up, or how many mistakes I made, or how terribly I embarrassed myself, I had a separate life from the restaurant world. Without that, I don’t know. I don’t know that I would have made it.
Leah Dieterich is the author of the memoir Vanishing Twins: A Marriage (Softskull, 2018). Her essays and short fiction have been featured in Lenny Letter, LitHub, Buzzfeed, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Palimpsests
In 1990, Jacob Mason stopped playing video games. I was in middle school, and I knew something had happened to him, but I was still more than a decade away from real empathy. I was more interested in myself, as middle schoolers are. Jacob lived down the street; his mother was a friend of my mother’s, but he and I didn’t know each other well yet. Something had happened and he no longer wanted to play. I took his Nintendo console and his games, including the original Mario and the original Zelda, and I was happy to have them.
That same spring in Leisurewoods in Buda, TX—my neighborhood—there was a murder-suicide. A man had killed his wife and children and then turned the gun on himself. No suicide note was found, though the murder weapon, a .38 caliber revolver, was found next to the father, Peter Joost. The lack of a suicide note was suspicious, as was the fact that none of the victims had been shot in the head, as would normally be the case. People live in that house now, a nice-ish ranch-style home on Killdeer Drive, and I think about how strange it would be to live in a house where four people died one night.
But, again, at the time, this crime was nothing more than a story to me. I was busy with my own life, fairly new to the area and having a hard time adjusting. To say my home life was hard would be an understatement, but that’s a story for a different time. Let’s just say that my life revolved around Seventeen magazine, as I tried to figure out how and what and who to be, and fantasy novels with larger-than-life heroines, and hiding whenever I heard my stepfather’s car pull into the driveway. I played Mario first, starting at the beginning and continuing all the way through, and didn’t touch Zelda for a couple of months.
But the rumors started, and they eventually reached me, even in my exile from the rest of the small town, because everybody whispered them. Peter Joost, who worked for the Texas Gambling Commission, had uncovered something, had been investigating something big. He never would have killed his family. And then 20/20 came to film, and they did a whole story about how this was not a triple murder-suicide but instead a quadruple murder. Joost had been investigating the Houston Turf Club, which at the time had a $1 billion lawsuit against the Texas Gambling Commission. The Hays County sheriff at the time, Paul Hastings, said the questions raised by the Joost family and their representatives were “beating the same dead horse.” He said he was convinced that the murder-suicide ruling would stand for one thousand years.
Later, at an interview in July of that year, Hastings said that the day the shootings were thought to have occurred, Peter Joost suddenly canceled plans for one of his son Eric’s friends to spend the night. Hastings did not identify the boy or his family.
“I don’t remember where we got that information,” Hastings said, and that was that. The world moved on.
*
Everything I’ve ever written has been about how the past lies over the present but refuses to lie there quietly. Lately, I’ve been obsessed by the idea of a palimpsest, which occurs when something is erased and printed over. Palimpsests occur when the raw material for the thing is worth more than the thing itself.
I remember several years ago seeing a Da Vinci painting in one of the Smithsonian museums. It had been placed into its own little wall, a window cut all the way through, so that you could circle the painting and see what was on the back. On the front was a portrait that I thought looked quite similar to the Mona Lisa, a woman with a familiar expression and hairstyle. I walked around to the back and there was another painting. Even more interesting was the fact that historians had x-rayed the painting and found drawings made by Da Vinci before he had covered the canvas with gesso. Once I knew about these drawings, I thought I could see them through the oils on the canvas that formed other images. Just because something’s underneath doesn’t mean that it’s hidden.
*
One afternoon near the end of the next school year, I finished Mario. I made it to the castle, and I remember it took me three times to rescue the princess. I thought about starting the game again, but instead, I put it down and never picked it up again. To this day, if I play video games, which is rare, I play them all the way through and I’m done. I never did put Jacob’s former Mario game back into his former console, but that was okay because I still had Zelda.
My stepfather wasn’t home that day, which was happening more often then than it had in Virginia, where we lived before. We were in the homestretch of the separation, the slow withdrawal of a man who had physically and emotionally abused us for seven years. It was a relief to be in the living room on a Saturday, to be out in the open like that. I put in Zelda, and waited for the game to boot.
When I cycled through the options, there was a high scorer board, a black screen with block white letters. And I’ll never forget this, not for the rest of my life, that dead kid’s name on my television. ERIC JOOST, it said. I sat back on the couch and thought about what was leaving that house, and about what I had just brought in.
*
Your obsessions, a teacher once told me, are really only visible in hindsight. It took me years to recognize my obsession with palimpsests. Everything was once something else, and that past thing, whatever it was, is always present.
At my high school, for example: the road that ran in front of it, a road we called FM 1626 or, sometimes, the Old San Antonio Road. A road I found out later is older than the United States, and was built by the king of Spain more than three hundred years ago. El Camino Real. The Royal Highway. Part of a network of roads in eastern and central Texas from a time long before even Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston were born.
And: the corner of Interstate 35 and Onion Creek Road, where an Adams Extract factory once sat, all midcentury modern and sleek. Bulldozed one summer, it remained a pile of rubble for nearly two decades afterward. The slow rise of apartment buildings on the site, the neon lights of a gas station. And still, underneath, the imagined scent of vanilla extract, of almonds, of lemons. Underneath, the gray suits and thin ties of the men who had worked at the factory, the bouffants and heels and stockings of the women. Layers there, time on time on time, and all that time below bleeding through the sterile present. This whole place a palimpsest, and all the other places, too.
So you can probably guess which child was expected at the Joost house that night. All the pieces are there, and I have framed them in such a way that there are no extraneous bits that might serve as distraction, as real life would have provided us. I still see Jacob’s mother and father socially, and my parents are close to them now. They have gone on cruises together, and I have had Thanksgiving dinner at their house. But I have never asked them about that night, about what Jacob had seen or not seen, about how narrowly he may or may not have escaped something unthinkable.
My mom has told me some stories, but I don’t know whether she ever asked, or if they told her voluntarily, or if things just come up over a friendship of a couple of decades. Jacob was there, in that house on Killdeer Drive. He’d spent the night the night before, and he was going to spend the night again. But something happened, and Mr. Joost sent him home. He left the house, according to my mother, about an hour before the sheriff said the murders occurred.
*
My television, those white letters on a black screen, that was a palimpsest, too. Eric Joost, a dead child, in my house every time I turned on Zelda. I could erase his name, but that wouldn’t erase the fact that this was a game a child who had been murdered had once played. What came before leached into the present. Two parts to the palimpsest: erasure of the old thing, addition of the new thing.
Recently, a writer came to speak at my university. He was a child when his family lived through Pinochet’s Chile. Now he writes about the disappearances on our own southern border. So many people, there but now gone. Tales, he said, of bodies being dumped from helicopters into the sea. Now, people taken by the Chihuahuan Desert, by police, by the middlemen known as coyotes, by cartels that slipped into gaps made by trade policies. The forty students who disappeared a drop in the bucket.
This writer claimed the word disappearance was a misnomer. That the people who were gone had not disappeared. Rather, he said, when a body goes missing, there’s a hyper-appearance. A conspicuous sort of absence, the kind a person can never ignore. A constant reminder of what’s been lost, the never-ending questions: Where now? With whom? In pain? At peace?
Things and people don’t disappear, not until all of the things and people they belong to disappear, too. And even then, traces left in our universe, and in every universe that comes after.
*
I think of survivors in terms of half-lives. I was very young when my grandfather, my father’s father, died. But his sons tell his stories, and they tell them to me, his granddaughter. His sons only know part of his experience and I know even less than that. I tell his stories to my children, and they, I hope, will tell their children, too.
And there’s multiplicity, as well, not just division. My grandfather’s stories involve other people, people I will never know. He was a sharecropper in Tennessee, tied to the land because he was paid in scrip instead of money. Money was rare in those days, it came only from the Works Progress Administration, only when they needed extra hands. There’s a story from this time that my grandfather would never forget, that his sons discuss at family barbecues and over Thanksgiving dinner, that I will never forget either. There was a storm—a flood—and coffins washed out of graves. His sons tell me the story of how my grandfather picked up a woman, partially decayed, and placed her back into her coffin. Before he closed it, he noticed the gouges on the underside of the lid. He noticed the pine splinters in the woman’s fingernails and hands. He imagined he saw a look on her face, horror, shining through the tendon and bone.
And her story is part of my family’s story now, but probably not part of hers. Not that her family forgot her, though they might have, she died nearly a hundred years ago. But I can’t imagine that her family ever found out what had really happened to her.
Half-lives and additions, incomplete records for every party involved. A story, by virtue of being told, is refreshed and refreshed and refreshed. So many details of a life fall away, until only certain, polished images remain.
*
And here I am, midforties, half a lifetime on the books. My version of a half-life. And it works this way for my own story, too: tales I’ve told are remembered, other things are forgotten. Parts of me exist in other people’s memories but not my own.
But I remember things, too, things that no longer exist: that Adams Extract factory, the original Matt’s El Rancho, Les Amis and Skaggi’s Pizza and houses where we imagined hobbits lived in the backyard. People, too, who were once in my life and who have not quite departed, people whose bodies I will never see again: both grandmothers, both grandfathers, and the families we were when we were together. My father, too. All of that memory, bleeding through. All of these things are mine, but, also, I am theirs. They took a part of me, too.
Here is the thing about getting older, about being halfway through a life span: half of me belongs to things that no longer exist. And this is the tipping point; this is where I slide toward ghost, the world a shimmer, all of the possibilities and all of the people, my corporeal son next to the phantom of my grandmother.
*
There’s so much missing to the story. How did the game console come to us? Did my mother’s friend say she needed to get rid of it, for her son’s sake? Did my own mother say that her daughters would like it? Does Jacob know that I still think of him and his friend?
What else does Jacob know about my family, the way I know things about his? When we run across each other at those Thanksgiving dinners, does he know about my stepfather, about the most painful and humiliating moments of my life? Does he know the contours of abuse from his time in the Joost circle, or does he believe the murder-suicide story was a lie, a cover-up? Does his mother know the things done to children, and if so, what responsibility does a person have to investigate the things you hear but never see?
I know that I never finished the game, and I don’t think I ever played it again. I’m not sure where everybody was in the moment I saw Eric Joost’s name upon the screen, where my mother was, my stepfather, my sister, the dogs. What was cemented for me in that moment was a loneliness, a solitude that has never really been breached, not even in marriage or in motherhood.
It was that boy—Eric Joost, the dead child—and Jacob, my mom’s friend’s son, and me, all in that living room on Towhee Drive in the Leisurewoods neighborhood in Buda, Texas, at the end of the previous century. My stepfather and the wake he left, even then fading but never never never gone. My mother, how she failed us. My father, on the road in Indiana, selling and repossessing and reselling pianos off the back of a truck. The beige carpet and beige walls and beige couch. The beige cocker spaniels, who were less than a year away from being taken to the shelter one day while I was at school, the burden of their care too much for a woman in the throes of divorce. A black screen on a cathode ray tube television, white capital letters. A feeling of something, the hope that I could be another person, but the answer to this question is no. I am. He is. He was. What he was then became what I am now. Nobody knows what happened that night, after Mr. Joost sent Jacob home. This is a story for somebody else. Not us. The Turf Club, the sheriff, the murder weapon on the floor. A family. A night. A canvas painted over. A figure—a ghost of pencil—underneath the gesso.
Nancy Wayson Dinan’s debut novel, Things You Would Know if You Grew Up around Here, is out this week.
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