The Paris Review's Blog, page 166

Poets on Couches: Eliza Griswold

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.

 

“After Our Planet”

by Mark Strand

Issue no. 125 (Winter 1992)

I

I am writing from a place you have never been,

Where the trains don’t run, and planes

Don’t land, a place to the west,

Where heavy hedges of snow surround each house,

Where the wind screams at the moon’s blank face,

Where the people are plain, and fashions,

If they come, come late and are seen

As forms of oppression, sources of sorrow.

This is a place that sparkles a bit at 7 P.M.,

Then goes out, and slides into the funeral home

Of the stars, and everyone dreams of floating

Like angels in sweet-smelling habits,

Of being released from sundry services

Into the round of pleasures there for the asking—

Days like pages torn from a family album,

Endless reunions, the heavenly choir at the barbecue

Adjusting its tone to serve the occasion,

And everyone staring, stunned into magnitude.

II

The soldiers are gone, and now the women are leaving.

The dogs howl at the moon, and the moon flees

Through the clouds. I wonder if I shall ever catch up.

I think of the shining cheeks, the serious palettes

Of my friends, and I am sure I am not of their

company.

There was a time when I touched by the pallor of truth,

When the fatal steps I took seemed more like the drift

Of summer crossed at times by the scented music of

rain,

But that was before I was waved to the side

By the officer on duty, and told that henceforth

I would have to invent my pleasure, carve it out of

the air,

Subtract it from my future. And I could have no

illusions;

A mysterious crape would cover my work. The roll of a

drum

Would govern the fall of my feet in the long corridors.

“And listen,” the officer said, “on any morning look down

Into the valley. Watch the shadows, the clouds dispersing

Then look through the ice into nature’s frozen

museum,

See how perfectly everything fits in its space.”

III

I have just said good-bye to a friend

And am staring at fields of cornstalks.

Their stubble is being burned, and the smoke

Forms a gauze over the sun’s blank face.

Off to the side there is a line of poplars.

And beyond, someone is driving a tractor.

Does he live in that little white house?

Someone is playing a tape of birds singing.

Someone has fallen asleep on a boxcar of turnips.

I think of the seasonal possibilities.

O pretty densities of white on white!

O snowflake lost in the vestibules of April air!

Beyond the sadness—the empty restaurants,

The empty streets, the small lamps shining

Down on the town—I see only the stretches

Of ice and snow, the straight pines, the frigid moon.

IV

“I would like to step out of my heart’s door and be

Under the great sky.” I would like to step out

And be on the other side, and be part of all

That surrounds me. I would like to be

In that solitude of soundless things, in the random

Company of the wind, to be weightless, nameless.

But not for long, for I would be downcast without

The things I keep inside my heart; and in no time

I would be back. Ah! the old heart

In which I sleep, in which my sleep increases, in which

My grief is ponderous, in which the leaves are falling,

In which the streets are long, in which the night

Is dark, in which the sky is great, the old heart

That murmurs to me of what cannot go on,

Of the dancing, of the inmost dancing.

V

I go out and sit on my roof, hoping

That a creature from another planet will see me

And say, “There’s life on earth, definitely life;

“See that earthling on top of his home,

His manifold possessions under him,

Let’s name him after our planet.” Whoa!

 

Eliza Griswold’s most recent book of poems, If Men, Then, was published earlier this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In 2019, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her nonfiction book Amity and Prosperity.

Literary Paper Dolls: Clarissa

ILLUSTRATIONS © JENNY KROIK

There is a sound made by a room full of people at a party. It’s a radio between stations with a stretch and pop and one voice coming into focus and certain stories turning up like bingo balls from the collective burble. I love this sound.

I throw parties for The Paris Review. That’s not what it says on my business card, and I certainly have other duties, but this is one of them. There are equations for judging provisions for a party. The average person drinks x number of drinks, times x number of people divided by glasses in a bottle, bottles in a case, et cetera, et cetera. I sometimes use these equations. I sometimes consult my old receipts, my faithful notes, but there is no keener pleasure or sharper anxiety than standing at the wine shop, bottles of merlot, burgundy, Côtes du Rhône, and Beaujolais in every direction, while trying to picture the crowd, the party, the temperature that day, and the humidity, what they will be wearing, the news that might buoy or sadden them—the mood of three hundred people who, not all at once, but over the course of the night, will be drinking this wine and think—no—feel, the two cases of white (the Sancerre), two of red (the Médoc), a half case of the crémant.

I have grocery lists, too, of course. It would be easy to send an intern to the shop with a list—they are as a rule very capable, too bright for easy errands and yet cheerful when sent on them. But how could I know in advance to tell them to get just a few of those stupidly expensive oranges straight from Italy, still packed in their leaves, which I did not know would be there until I saw them, and which will light up the windowsill and tempt the photographer to take a picture before the density of the crowd makes such a shot impossible.

In other words, I get the flowers myself. I always do.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about the rich interior life of humans in a metropolis, the minds of people inevitably tangled with each other. The mind we enter most often is that of a woman just past fifty on a day she throws a party in London in June of 1923. A landmark of the Modernist form, few readers will need even that barest of plot summaries: almost everyone through high school knows the novel is a drifting portrait of her conscious and subconscious thoughts interwoven with those of a few figures around her: the man she loved as a young girl, her husband, a shell-shocked young man encountering a very different London, that man’s wife.

Clarissa Dalloway is given a relatively small sphere of agency—not because she was written by a man who doesn’t care about her, or because she is an older woman without enough “market appeal,” but because Woolf draws her like it was. As we know from our grandmothers, mothers, and—god help us—our own lives, women are often cast as the supporting figures to men. Virginia Woolf herself is famous in part for escaping, and drawing attention to, this fate. Clarissa excels then with what she has: parties, memories, loyalties, “a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly,” the florist “who thought her kind,” and her servants, who respect her so much that, when taking her parasol, they “handled it like a sacred weapon.” Only on this recent reading of Mrs. Dalloway did I learn that Woolf wrote the novel not from the tangle of London itself but from the suburbs where it was deemed safer for her mental state. She was writing a love letter to London, from just outside its power.

Woolf’s famous protagonist, Clarissa, thinks of her identity in part as being “Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.” She has in one hand the domesticity of her present and in the other the romanticism of her past. The past is painful and potent, because so much of her future was then unknown. It seems to me that Clarissa has less regret and more nostalgia for the deliciousness of being undecided, complex, messy. Peter Walsh is the not-quite-forsaken suitor of Clarissa’s not-quite-forsaken youth. He insults her when they are young by telling her, “She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of a perfect hostess, he said.”

The orchestration of lives is her medium and even Peter admits that if this is her métier, she excels: “behind it all was the network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches of flowers, little presents; so-and-so was going to France—must have an air cushion.” There were places to record this kind of information: women used to keep books filled with menus served and seating charts, who mustn’t be seated with whom, who couldn’t tolerate that one’s wife, whose guest that man was previously. I do this still, the record-keeping and the “running about.” I don’t always get it right, but when I do it feels like attaining knighthood. When the work is done well, it isn’t conspicuous. Very good hostessing is often invisible.

I do have, as I said, other duties at the magazine. I don’t only find florists in L.A., collect fir and pine branches before the Christmas party, place a particularly handsome man at the door, adjust the lights, keep up with the bartenders. And yet, in my role as a party-thrower, I have read Mrs. Dalloway quite carefully, checking for confirmation, affirmation, or an icy snub from Woolf. But there isn’t a moral in Mrs. Dalloway. It isn’t at all clear that Clarissa would have been happier with Peter, or as a poor women living for principles alone (had she been able to live as a wealthy woman alone, that might have been a good option, but that is a different story). And it is a great pleasure to bring people together. At my first party, or perhaps my second, I sent a text message to someone who would safeguard the emotion for me: “Remind me that I had a body high. Remind me that I couldn’t imagine it would be ecstasy.”

It is partly by habit and partly my necessity, since I tinker till the last moment, to step into the office bathroom to change just as the party begins. If I plan it right, I don’t hear my name at all. No one notices I’ve slipped away because everything is ready. I’m not the center of the party—I’m the corral at the edges. There is the low music, which will later be muted by revelry, the sound of the staff playing pool—the workday dissipating as the click of the balls turns into the chatter of a filling house. Then I’m ready and I’m dressed and, if I’ve done a particularly fine job transforming, I get a nod from the bartenders as I pass them and it is time to begin. Not at the top of the stairs, perhaps, but at a threshold.

THE GREEN  DRESS

Before the party, there is always a flapping loose end or two, asking to be tied down, staked. One is always something of vital importance and the other is always something very minor, often to do with attire. And, as is the way with things, they always seem of about equal importance for a moment or two. On the day of her party, Clarissa sits to sew up a tear in her favorite green dress: “Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly to the belt.”

THE WHITE FROCK 

Clarissa looks back on a summer in her twenties, “early in the nineties.” Thirty years later Clarissa can “remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall ‘if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.’ That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seaton!”

THE COAT

While researching clothing for Clarissa, I found a photograph, a striking snap of Woolf from June 1926, the summer after she published Mrs. Dalloway. There she is in silk and velvet, as the English summer allows—a little skeptical but wise beyond her years. I gave her coat to Clarissa.

THE FLOWERS

Clarissa’s immortal excursion: to buy the flowers. There she is on a busy day, “snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness.” During the day, Clarissa is alive to the possibility that her hat is wrong and that she perhaps could care a little less for gloves. “She had a passion for gloves.”

 

THE HOSTESS

The secret is that, even during the party itself, the hostess longs most to leave because she cannot. Since I am not exactly the hostess I can leave, for a moment or two. I yearn to hear that the ice is out, that we need more lemonade. I find a friend, if I can in the crush, and duck out to breathe a minute on the stairs. I shake the sweat out of my hair, buy twelve bags of ice and a pack of gum past midnight. Every time, the men at the deli joke gently: “having a party?” Every time, I smile.

 

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Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

Jenny Kroik is an illustrator and painter. She has created covers for The New Yorker, and made illustrations for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Penguin Random House, and more.

The Great Writer Who Never Wrote

Stephen Tennant’s letters, thought Stephen Spender, were “the essence of English retention—objects for private consumption, deluxe samizdats.” Tennant also wrote poems, painted pictures, and worked on a novel, never to be completed. His most significant published work was his 1949 foreword to his friend Willa Cather’s essay collection, commended by Cather scholars and still in print today.

Cecil Barton, Stephen Tennant (©The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s)

By the time of its reclusive occupant’s death in 1987, the faux-Elizabethan country manor Wilsford, in Wiltshire near Stonehenge, overflowed with a dusty mishmash of valuable antiques, ephemeral gewgaws, and exotic objets d’art. Outside, ivy shrouded the gables and moss thickened on the roof tiles. In the overgrown gardens stood a myriad of neglected statuary, marble urns, stone columns, and rococo fountains. To disperse it all, Sotheby’s hosted hundreds of potential bidders, over four days, at what they described as an “English eccentric’s dream house.” Said eccentric was Stephen Tennant, who was born at Wilsford in 1906 and died there, aged eighty-one. According to his devoted housekeeper and nurse, Sylvia Blandford, he’d have turned in his grave at the spectacle of his possessions being pawed over and auctioned off piece by piece. But he had left no will. Death was not, perhaps, a notion permitted within Tennant’s elaborate fantasy world, into which he had retreated ever deeper as the decades passed.

Like a fairy-tale character magically granted every conceivable blessing, only to discover those blessings carry a curse, the Honorary Stephen James Napier Tennant began life arrayed with sublime advantage. His father, Sir Edward Tennant, came from a family who owed their vast wealth to a Scottish ancestor’s invention and patenting of bleach powder in 1799. Edward’s blue-blooded wife, Pamela Wyndham, was a socialite who courted the leading artists and writers of the day. Pamela doted on Stephen, her youngest child of five, and encouraged him in his creative pursuits. As he was turning fifteen, she even arranged for his first art exhibition, at a respected London gallery. All the biggest national newspapers covered the event, offering fawning praise of the artist and his work. It must have been intoxicating indeed. And yet, as any former child star will attest, nothing warps one’s sense of self like youthful celebrity.

If Pamela took a keen interest in her precocious adolescent’s artistic promise, she paid little attention to his reckless behavior, such as his habit of offering local soldiers a cigarette in exchange for a kiss. Once, when an encounter went further than a kiss, he was apprehended and brought home by a policeman, who assumed the boy would face consequences. He was mistaken. Sir Edward had recently died, and it never occurred to Pamela that Steenie, as he was known, should be anything but his uninhibited self. Tennant’s gift for high camp, cultivated as least partly as camouflage for shyness, was always displayed at heroic levels. On one visit to New York, he disembarked the ship in full makeup, his hair in marcel waves, with a bunch of orchids in his hand. “Pin ‘em on!” jeered a customs officer, to which Tennant responded: “Oh, have you got a pin? What a wonderful welcome … you kind, kind creature.” John Waters, who in 2015 named Philip Hoare’s excellent biography of Tennant as one of his ten favorite books, put it thusly: “Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch—believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.”

It was in the late twenties, when Tennant was around twenty-one, that his life peaked. Among the so-called Bright Young People, whose decadence and penchant for fancy dress kept gossip columnists in brisk trade, he shone the brightest. “His appearance alone,” the Daily Express rhapsodized, “is enough to make you catch your breath.” He inspired Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh characters, was sculpted by Jacob Epstein, wrote style columns, and stole the show in the group photographs that helped launch Cecil Beaton’s century-defining career.

Soon after Beaton was introduced to Tennant in late 1926, he accepted an invitation to Tennant’s home, Wilsford, for the weekend. “My whole visit from beginning to end,” the twenty-three-year-old Beaton recorded in his diary, “was like being at the most perfect play. Here Stephen was saying glorious things the entire time—funny, trite, vital, importantly exact things.” Tennant’s influence was formative, believes Beaton’s biographer, Hugo Vickers. “While Stephen was far from short of ideas, he lacked the stamina to carry them out himself. Thus he was often the inspiration of an idea and Cecil its executor.”

Tennant’s lack of stamina, both mental and physical, was to be the prevailing theme of his existence. His fragility haunted and doomed his one grand passionate affair: with Siegfried Sassoon, the revered poet and war hero turned pacifist. They first met through friends in the summer of 1927, when Tennant was twenty-one and Sassoon forty-one. Tennant’s initial impression of Sassoon, he later reminisced, was of “some charming wild animal—one never felt he was really tame (or tameable).” An instantly smitten Sassoon wondered if this fey youth, so beautiful and narcissistic, was capable of love. Yet fall madly in love Tennant did. Soon, he was addressing Sassoon as “My heart’s best beloved” in letters, and the poet was composing sonnets to him. During their relationship, Sassoon assumed the role of caretaker to his delicate, pampered lover—who, having grown up a sickly child and suffered from tuberculosis since his late teens, periodically took to his bed for weeks. Sassoon happily kept close vigil. “I ask for nothing,” he wrote in April 1929, when Tennant was recovering from a lung operation, “but to be near him always.”

To Sassoon’s torment, Tennant began asking for solitude during his bouts of invalidism. In reaction to this rejection, the poet moved into a house near Wilsford and took to lurking around the grounds, before going home to drink and weep. His hopes that they might, after all, have a future were raised when he was allowed in to see Tennant on a few occasions. And after the patient was diagnosed with neurasthenia and admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Sassoon visited him there, too. But the final break, when it occurred, was brutal. In May 1933, Sassoon received a letter from Tennant’s doctor. “He says you upset him and make him feel ill,” Dr. T. A. Ross wrote, “and that he cannot see you again.” Sassoon was stunned. By the end of the year, he had proposed to a woman, Hester Gatty. She was Tennant’s age, twenty-seven, and said to resemble him. The marriage was not a success.

From then on, Tennant romanticized his time with Sassoon, whom no other lover would eclipse in his self-mythology. “It is quite paradoxical,” Philip Hoare observes, “that having so summarily dismissed Siegfried, Stephen should seemingly spend the rest of his life regretting the action—or, at least, continually recalling the years he spent with Sassoon as an idyllic lost past.” Rose-tinted memories, abstractions, were preferable to a reality in which his idealizations might be threatened. “I am one of those sad people,” Tennant wrote, “who would like to be loved without being known—to be a wonderful memory, a legend, a glory…” His arch manners, ultra-glamorous primping, and brazen flouting of masculine taboos all kept the world at arm’s length. As Beaton reflected, “so many of Stephen’s eccentricities and poses were a part of his illness.” Alas, these self-preservation strategies were fallible, and Tennant relapsed into physical illness and depression many more times. In the late forties and again in the fifties, he underwent several rounds of ECT under general anesthetic.

The same phobia of being seen thwarted Tennant’s literary ambitions. As a young man, he wrote at least one novel, which he chose not to publish. And he spent many decades on his projected magnum opus, a Marseilles-inspired novel to be titled “Lascar,” conceived in 1938 and never to be completed. He revised, rewrote, and reconfigured the story of, in his words, “crude desires, lusts, fidelities, and treacheries.” He began other novels, and engaged in such procrastinatory activities as illustrations and designing covers, only to return to it. In 1941 Cyril Connolly’s magazine, Horizon, published a “Lascar” cover featuring one of Tennant’s own paintings. In Connolly’s opinion, he was “an interesting and pathetic phenomenon, a great writer who can’t write.” E. M. Forster, meanwhile, read sections and urged Tennant to stick with it. Various other author friends offered kind words and advice, including Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, and Willa Cather, whose work he idolized. (He wasn’t very interested in male writers.) The American novelist, an unlikely but close friend, said she had high hopes for “Lascar.” In the eighth decade of Tennant’s life, and of the century, by which point he rarely ventured beyond the perimeter of Wilsford, he was still, supposedly, working on it.

Tennant’s slide into inanition was gradual but inexorable. In early middle age, he still took trips abroad and socialized in between periods of seclusion. Then, from around age fifty, he spent ever more time at home. In his bedroom, strewn with his favorite books, paintings, old photographs, diaries, and mementos, he could luxuriate in remembrance and forget he was no longer that ravishing young aesthete, so full of promise. “I used to be beautiful like you, can you see that?” he asked Marie Helvin, who dropped by one summer with the interior designer Nicky Haslam. “I used to be so beautiful… It’s a thing we can never stop being, can we?”

Callers were received as Tennant reclined on his unmade bed. He only got up in June, he’d explain, to see the roses. In truth, he sometimes went shopping: a lifelong occupation was buying furniture and curios for the house and gardens; the more recherché, the better. A 1966 letter from his brother Christopher, who looked after his finances, suggested mildly: “I think the first thing to find out about the seal pool is how much it would cost to maintain and look after the seals.”

The correspondence Tennant produced from his sequestration was copious, and arrived scented and illustrated. He also continued to paint, and occasionally exhibited. In 1976, at age seventy, he had a joint show at a Mayfair gallery with the surrealist artist Cecil Collins. The Connoisseur magazine said of Tennant’s work: “Everything conspires to create an air of mystery and romance… There is an air of fin de siècle, a time past and desirable, but now irrevocably out of reach.” Tennant, unwilling to burst his own carefully fashioned bubble of nostalgia and illusion, declined to attend the exhibition’s private view. “I don’t want to see any friends or neighbors ever again,” he told Beaton a couple of years later. “I am a total sad recluse alas. I’m a complete failure in every way.” The photographer, who had recently suffered a stroke, was shaken. “It is the end of an epoch!” he noted sadly in his diary.

Tennant’s closest neighbor in his final years was V. S. Naipaul, who lived with his wife, Patricia Hale, in a cottage on Wilsford’s grounds between 1971 and 1986. The two men never met, though Tennant would send his housekeeper over with little gifts of poems and pictures. And thanks to the stories Naipaul heard from staff and visitors, Tennant became a central presence in his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. In this melancholic introspection on the idea of home, the writer/narrator diagnoses his hidden landlord with acedia, a profound spiritual dejection. He astutely speculates on the cause: “Perhaps he had stalled in what might be considered an earlier state of perfection,” that is, his youthful identity in all its glory. “But that perfection … had turned to morbidity, acedia, a death of the soul.” He also muses on how the Tennant character’s extreme privilege, rooted in the dying British Empire, is the mirror image of his own impoverished beginnings in the colonial Caribbean. “I felt I could understand his malaise; I saw it as the other side of my own… Privilege lay between us. But I had an intimation that it worked against him.”

Tennant never read The Enigma of Arrival, which was published in March 1987, less than three weeks after his death. He would have appreciated it, given his discerning literary taste and desire for immortality. As he inquired of a friend, happily and rhetorically, a few years earlier: “Am I a legend? I suppose I am. How exciting!” He remains so, a century on from his first taste of the limelight as a teenage artist. In the publicity for “Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things” (an exhibition previously due to run this spring at London’s National Portrait Gallery), and the accompanying book (out now in the UK and the U.S.), Tennant upstages his peers just as he did in the twenties. Beaton’s photographs capture that portentous, perfect moment upon which, in a tragic sense, Tennant’s entire life would pivot. He appears in them as he always wished to be seen: otherworldly, untouchable in his beauty, and eerily, eternally modern.

 

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, Longreads, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Awl, Words without Borders, and other publications. She was the first writer of the Daily’s Feminize Your Canon column.

Redux: Landing without Incident

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.

Alice Munro.

This week at The Paris Review, in honor of Mother’s Day, we’re thinking of motherhood and children and the work behind parenting. Read on for Alice Munro’s Art of Fiction interview, Lorrie Moore’s short story “Terrific Mother,” and Camille Dungy’s poem “The Average Mother Now Spends Twice as Many Hours on Childcare as Did Her Counterpart in 1965, and She Also Spends Three Times as Many Hours Working Outside the Home; or, How to Sing a Song of Sixpence When You’re Really Feeling Wry.”

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.

 

Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137

Issue no. 131 (Summer 1994)

INTERVIEWER

Doesn’t any young artist, on some level, have to be hard-hearted?

MUNRO

It’s worse if you’re a woman. I want to keep ringing up my children and saying, Are you sure you’re all right? I didn’t mean to be such a . . . Which of course would make them furious because it implies that they’re some kind of damaged goods. Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that. Not that I neglected them, but I wasn’t wholly absorbed. When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I’ve told her that. This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me. I feel I’ve done everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot more family dinners.

 

 

Terrific Mother

By Lorrie Moore

Issue no. 124 (Fall 1992)

Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty-five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous—just at the beginning, a twinge of stage fright swinging up from the gut. “Adrienne, would you like to hold the baby? Would you mind?” Always these words from a woman her age looking kind and beseeching—a former friend, she was losing her friends to babble and beseech—and Adrienne would force herself to breathe deep. Holding a baby was no longer natural—she was no longer natural—but a test of womanliness and earthly skills. She was being observed. People looked to see how she would do it. She had entered a puritanical decade, a demographic moment—whatever it was—when the best compliment you could get was: You would make a terrific mother. The wolf whistle of the nineties.

 

 

The Average Mother Now Spends Twice as Many Hours on Childcare as Did Her Counterpart in 1965, and She Also Spends Three Times as Many Hours Working Outside the Home; or, How to Sing a Song of Sixpence When You’re Really Feeling Wry

By Camille Dungy

Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)

We flew through a thunderstorm on our way into

Pittsburgh, landing without incident, but a hailstorm

descended, delaying our bags.

Forty minutes.

One hour.

When we got into the Town Car, both the driver and his

wife’s well-timed pot roast were burning.

When he started driving, the baby started screaming.

She wouldn’t stop screaming …

 

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Aiming Smaller: An Interview with Jenny Zhang

During our phone call in the middle of April, Jenny Zhang set the scene: “There is something really bittersweet about talking to you right now, because we had originally wanted to meet up in New York City. I had imagined that we would be walking around the streets of Manhattan and talking about poetry, and it would be really cinematic and literary. That’s something I always wanted to do because of books I read when I was a kid, and I wanted to live that life. This is, I guess, romantic in a different way—in the way that I yearn to do that, and we cannot.”

Zhang’s childhood became a touchstone in our conversation, memories and anecdotes unspooling in response to my questions. Her award-winning collection of short fiction, Sour Heart, was told from the perspectives of children and “in the language of childhood, with its unruly spirit and raw emotions.” Her second full collection of poetry, My Baby First Birthday, out today, delights in the same riotous way as her fiction and her first poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. She writes in a wild and phonetic vernacular, pairing the sonic incantation of visceral sounds with internet slang and bodily functions; she is playfully irreverent, deploying words like cunt with a wink, daring you to be offended. But there is a sense of control thrumming underneath everything, the same grounded feeling communicated by Zhang’s smart, down-to-earth sensibility.   

 

INTERVIEWER

Your book of stories, Sour Heart, received a glowing reception in 2017. Was there any temptation to continue writing fiction? Why did you turn back to poetry?

ZHANG

I did feel like retreating after getting all of that really great positive press for Sour Heart, and doing all those interviews, and constantly talking about my process, and after the fact, trying to make a story out of the stories I had written. I felt like every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t rid the audience from my mind. As soon as I’m calculating for an audience, I lose interest in writing. It’s just another exhausting performance. I wanted to practice writing fiction without any thought of sharing it. When I’m writing, I don’t write with the thought that I’m going to share it with the world. Or, I prefer not to think that way. As a fanciful seven-year-old, I wrote diaries and I was sure that someone would break into my home, and steal all of my journals, and be so dazzled by this seven-year-old writing in a journal that they would come back and like, introduce me to their uncle who would be a scion of the publishing industry. I had those fanciful thoughts and would write diaries with the intention of making that happen. But now I really treasure the feeling of writing without expectation and without the thought that it would reach anyone, but just to write. Just to, I don’t know, process something that maybe is a little bit more unconscious.

The other thing was that I missed poetry. There was a time when I used to read my poetry two or three nights a week. And sometimes, these would be poetry readings where there would be twelve people there. You know, there’d be five readers, and each person brought a friend. I missed the intimacy of poetry. I missed the immediacy of poetry. I was sick of telling narrative stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. I just wanted to go into a different place. And I also just wanted to be a little smaller. I know the ultimate goal is often to be bigger, and bigger, and bigger. But I guess I was interested in seeing if there was some other way to be.

INTERVIEWER

So, poetry was a kind of a sanctuary, in a way. It was a place without an audience and a place where you could just be for a while.

ZHANG

Exactly. I’m also a very slow writer. I let things sit for a while. It’s like I purposefully want my things to be less relevant, or something. Because if I wait, and put things in a drawer, and don’t share them for a while, then the moment where I wrote them has passed and we are in a different moment. And it’s almost like I want to know with stories, those poems, whatever the thing I wrote—is it still relevant now that the moment has passed?

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned the childhood diaries, but was writing a part of your adolescence? Being a writer, was that something you pursued from an early age? Or did you come to it later?

ZHANG

I was, for whatever reason, singularly obsessed with writing. I suppose it was because I felt so uncomfortable speaking as a child. Partially because I had immigrated here in kindergarten and had to start over, language-wise. In fact, when I was a really, really small person, I was obsessed with speaking and oral storytelling. I spoke at a very young age, and I couldn’t stop speaking. For whatever reason, I loved to “entertain” with my stories and would tell them to whoever would listen. I had an identity crisis at the age of five, because the thing I loved to do the most for the first five years of my life, I wasn’t able to do anymore. And then, by the time I learned to express myself in English, I’d been chastened by the initial stages of trying to speak and people laughing or not understanding what I was saying. So, I kind of gave up on speaking for a while. And there was also this interim period where I spoke in this glossolalia, because I couldn’t speak English, and then nobody understood my Chinese. I would just speak gibberish. I would read storybooks out loud. I’d force my glossolalia on the unwitting friends of mine who were like, What are you talking about, babbling and sitting here flipping the pages of this children’s book in front of my face? But I must have, for whatever reason, had a really strong impulse to communicate and tell stories. So, once I was able to write in English, it was all I wanted to do.

INTERVIEWER

Your poetry really uses the sonic qualities of language. It seems like lines can be incantatory, and there’s a kind of call-and-response element to them. Or your language feels organic, like sounds and noises grow out of whatever’s being said right before them. And it all works so well together. Do you feel like the sonic quality of language sometimes takes over what you’re working on in a poem?

ZHANG

You know, I know that Mary Oliver is, like, a very, very basic person to bring up. But I think she’s great, and her book A Poetry Handbook is a great book to read for anyone who wants to read a book about poetry. There’s this chapter where she talks about sounds, and saying the phrases hush, be quiet, and shut up. You can’t say shut up that gently or that slowly or that drawn out, but you can’t help it that when you say hush, you create this soothing effect. Be quiet is a more neutral space, but depending on the intonation with which you say it, it can have a punishing sound. And that really resonated with me, because I’m in this interesting position where English is not my first language, but it’s my native language because it’s the language I’m best at, and I actually have a memory of what it was like to learn it. Most of us don’t remember what it was like to learn our native language. So much of it was just hearing sounds and trying to understand what someone was saying just from the way it sounded—not from vocabulary, but from sounds. And I remember I used to go to this babysitter’s house after school, and she would babysit for, like, thirty different kids, and so she’d plop us all in front of her TV, and everyone would be watching … what was that show called? DuckTales?

INTERVIEWER

Where Scrooge McDuck dives into a big room filled with gold coins?

ZHANG

Yes! Just swimming in gold coins in the intro song, right? I would watch that, and I would close my eyes and I would hear the sounds of Scrooge McDuck and his nephews talking, and I feel like I knew what the story lines were. Later in my life, my grandparents would come and visit us, when we lived in the suburbs, on Long Island, and there were no Chinese people around. I would come home from school, and my grandmother would be like, Oh yeah, I had a whole conversation with a neighbor, he’s really worried about his daughter because she’s eight months pregnant … And I’m like, Wait, the neighbor is a white American who only speaks English and you don’t speak a word of English. How did you get all that information? How did you manage to have this whole conversation? But often she would be right. There is a part of me that believes sounds also have meaning. It’s not just words, it’s also the vibes that sounds give out, independent of what we have decided means what.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking of language, sounds, and vibes, let’s talk about the way you use vulgarity in your work.

ZHANG

Yeah, it must go back to, again, a fascination with language and the power that we assign to words. I’m always interested in words that create a physical reaction. The first time I heard someone say a curse word and someone else recoiled, physically, I just couldn’t believe that there was such a thing as a word that could make some shudder, or boil up in rage, when previously, everything was fine. That felt so absurd. As a child, I was like, how is that possible? That if I say damn it, someone else is shocked. Nothing changed about me as a person—I’m still the same person, I just said a word. I think because people also had that reaction to me when I spoke in Chinese or couldn’t say a word right, there was this time where I equated … there was this period of time where I was like, what are the right words, and what are the wrong words?

INTERVIEWER

You say that you go to readings, and enjoy reading your work out loud. That seems also to have been formative for you.

ZHANG

Yeah, I guess to be honest, I don’t often read an entire book of poetry silently. I read out loud, or have it read out loud to me. There’s this poet, Anaïs Duplan, whose work I discovered at a reading. He read this poem called “Black ’n’ Relaxed II” and it was like listening to a song at times—it had a rhythm that had meaning for me. Monica McClure was somebody that I really loved at readings. Leopoldine Core. It’s like people who only like going to live shows and won’t listen to records at home or something—I’m like that with poetry.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel your poems have a sense of humor?

ZHANG

I try to. Having a sense of humor is really important to me. I know that some people don’t find me funny at all, and that sucks for them. Maybe that’s wrong to say. I think I have to be on the same level as someone else for humor to happen between us, and I guess I always feel like there’s a part of me that’s like, Come, just come and be on my level. You’ll find me funny if you can do that. But if you’re looking up to me, or you’re looking down on me, you’re not going to find me funny—you’re going to find me annoying and gross and stupid and smug and shitty. I don’t know how else to put it, but sometimes I’m just like, come and be on my level. Let’s laugh. I find a lot of things funny—even terrible things that have happened to me—and maybe that’s a coping mechanism. I need to be able to see the absurdity of something terrible, and I need to also make fun of terrible things that have happened to me. I think that’s always my impulse.

INTERVIEWER

But that exists alongside heavy themes in this collection, such as suicide, choosing to be alive—being brought into the world and then having to reckon with where you’ve ended up. I’m curious if this ties somehow into the structure of four seasons in the book.

ZHANG

I was actually thinking about the first year of being alive on earth. I guess I did want to go through the seasons. But I didn’t really think about it too much, to be honest. I mean, the collection is called My Baby First Birthday, and I took that title from a Facebook comment that my mom made. My uncle had posted a photo of me on Facebook, sitting between him and my dad on my first birthday, and my mom had commented on Facebook underneath that photo “my baby first birthday.” In one sense, it’s a typo, it’s a grammatical error, because maybe she meant “my baby’s first birthday,” but I also like this idea of, maybe it’s her baby-first birthday. We have lots of baby-first birthdays in our lives, and there’s lots of moments where we feel like it’s our baby-first birthday, and it doesn’t have to be so literal. I was thinking about the first year of being a mother, being a father, being a parent—the first year of being alive, the first year of anything, of falling in love, of entering through whatever portals we enter through that take us to some other world—that first year is so significant.

INTERVIEWER

Both the title of this collection and of your first collection of poetry came from your mother. Something that your mother had written to you.

ZHANG

Yeah, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. I owe my mom a lot. That’s something she would write in emails to me. When we were living in different cities and countries, she would write me a lot. Have you ever seen that movie by Chantal Akerman, News from Home? It’s mostly just footage of New York in the seventies, and she reads letters that her mom sends her from France. And she doesn’t ever read the responses that Chantal writes back, so you get a sense of their relationship in this very one-sided way. The mom in that movie reminds me in some ways of my own relationship with my mom—she’s very warm and loving, and she always wants to hear from me, and she always wants to know what’s going on. In News from Home, when the mom is sending letters to Chantal and not really getting responses, she’s warm and concerned at first, but then she gets increasingly agitated and worried, and at one point you hear one of the letters just like, How are you really doing? You never really tell me how you’re doing. It really reminded me of times when I was abroad and alone in a country, and alienated, but also not wanting to send back bad news, and so I would just avoid writing until I felt better. And during those periods of time when I didn’t want to write back, because I didn’t want to bring back news of feeling like a failure and feeling isolated and depressed to my parents, I would get these emails from my mom that said, “How are you? What’s going on? Don’t worry about us, we are all find.” And again, it was that thing of this grammatical error that set my imagination leaping. I liked this idea of being found and being find, rather than being fine, because in some ways I never feel fine. That’s a very high bar to achieve.

 

Lauren Kane is a writer who lives in New York. She is the assistant editor at The Paris Review.

The Art of Distance No. 8

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

“There is, of course, a great deal to grieve about this long stay-at-home term, but among the things I am truly grateful for—in addition to all the frontline workers who are keeping us safe—is the quiet wellspring of awareness that bubbles every day. So many things were right here all along, in my home, if only I hadn’t been too busy to notice them. For instance, I know my family better than I did eight weeks ago. Having spent all this time with them, I like them more, which means I love them better. I can’t regret that. The archive pieces unlocked this week are a grab bag of staff favorites, but I’d like to think of them collectively as a tribute to the handful of unnoticed wonders this strange way of living has the capacity to reveal. It’s a small consolation, I know, but I hope a meaningful one.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director

Corey Arnold, Crabbing aboard the Rollo, ca. 2008.

In one of Corey Arnold’s Fish-Work photographs, two fishermen process crabs on a ship’s table as the deck tilts at an alarming angle under their feet. In another, they face a foam-topped wave—taller than they are—apparently menacing the starboard rail. The world might be a pitching ship now; the inexpert sailor might turn from the work, mesmerized by the danger of capsizing. But the people who supply our food—fishermen, farmers, grocers, and couriers, among others—carry on, deft and sure-footed. Here’s hoping that the fleets, threatened by rock-bottom prices because of restaurant closures, can continue to do so, and that we can all find our sea legs as the weather continues to shift. —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer 

Issue no. 119 features a photo from the American artist Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table” series, her pivotal photographic work consisting of twenty different photos of Weems sitting at her kitchen table. The series explores representations of black women in American culture. The chiaroscuro effect Weems is able to create from just a kitchen lamp is extraordinary. —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor

During a certain period in baseball movies, you couldn’t swing a bat without hitting some unforgettable female characters, from A League of Their Own’s Dottie Hinson to the vivacious Annie Savoy of Bull Durham. Tony Sanders’s poem “The Warning Track,” from the Spring 1993 issue, is of the same era. It introduces readers to Mary, a New Yorker who longs for the trips to Shea Stadium and the ball fields of her youth while tending to a good-for-nothing husband. The poem eventually leaves Mary behind as life marches on, but her nostalgia remains like a kind of ghost, asking, “Could we regroup / and reconstruct the narrative as it was / complete with those spontaneous digressions we found / sitting together in the stands of an abandoned ballpark.” —Lauren Kane, Assistant Editor

The poet Amy Clampitt was a great noticer, professional level. She writes about flowers, landscapes, expanses, details the way Georgia O’Keeffe paints them—not with those hallucinatory colors but with that kind of insatiable attention, that sense of the experienced world as a fact that is always drawing one out of and beyond oneself; that world is also, of course, full of shadows and uneasy undercurrents. But in her Art of Poetry interview, Clampitt recalls that in childhood, “what I most enjoyed was the order of the seasons and especially the arrival of spring, which, when you are small, comes from a great distance.” I think many of us are feeling attuned right now to distances near and far, which, in a way, seem to have switched places. Clampitt’s kind of attention helps me begin to sort it all out. —CMT

There is a funeral parlor at the end of my street. In more common times, that corner is silent. But these past few weeks have been different. When I pass by on some insignificant errand, I sometimes see a driver waiting solemnly by the hearse, or witness the funeral director open the door to someone recently bereaved while trying to maintain a respectful, socially distant six feet. I am reminded of “August Notebook: A Death,” by Robert Hass, in which he reflects on the necessary journeys a body (in this case his brother’s) must make after death. And I’m reminded, too, that during this crisis, and despite the dangers, so many people continue to quietly do their difficult work. —Robin Jones, Publishing Manager

 

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Vanished into Music

Arthur Russell.

There’s a man on the ferry. He’s wearing jeans and a baseball jacket, and standing at the stern, his handsome face pitted with acne scars. Everyone else is looking at Manhattan. It’s 1986: the twin towers dominate the view. But this man isn’t looking at the buildings. He’s staring at the swirling water, the confluence of tides, the East River and the Hudson coming together in the harbor of the city.

Out here, everything is expansive. Out here, everything falls away. He has his Walkman in his pocket, his headphones around his ears. The music he’s listening to is a mix he finished late last night. When he was done—though nothing he does is ever done, exactly—he took the cassette and left the studio. Full moon, of course. He has been recording this album every full moon for three years now. Sometimes he curls up in the studio for a nap, waking in the small hours with a new idea, an unprecedented sound bubbling through his mind.

His name is Arthur Russell. He’s thirty-five. He’s a gay man, a Buddhist, a cellist, a country singer, an avant-garde composer, a disco queen; he is the greatest musician you’ve never heard of. The music he’s been making doesn’t sound like any music that’s ever been made before. It’s like music from the bottom of the ocean, it’s like music they play in nightclubs on the moon. The album he’s working on, his first, is called World of Echo. Just his voice and his cello, in a studio in the deserted Financial District, surrounded by empty, glowing offices. One man pushing music to its limits, finding the breaking points, making the most beautiful songs imaginable and then teasing them apart like taffy, amplifying and distorting until they dissolve into lakes of sound.

In the booth, he listens tensely, moving his shoulders a little, dancing on the spot. Which is best? How does the cello sound when it’s distorted, feeding back like an electric guitar? How subtly can he bow, making gauzy veils of sound? Is it better when you can hear the words he’s singing, or when there’s no intelligible language at all, just a polysyllabic babble, the music pouring through him?

At two or three or four in the morning he stops and slots in the night’s tape, listening to it repeatedly as he prowls the sleeping city. Sometimes he’ll walk for hours, wandering the streets of SoHo or following the river north. Maybe he’ll stop at Gem Spa and buy an egg cream; maybe he’ll call in at Paradise Lounge or the Garage, where the beautiful boys dance, black and white together, in an ecstatic sweaty fusion.

*

Lately, though, Arthur has been losing his taste for the nightlife; lately he’s been feeling dog-tired. So tonight he finds himself on the ferry at dawn, gazing out at the water, loving how the music sounds over the low drone of the ferry’s engine.

He doesn’t come from here. He’s a farm boy, a refugee from the cornfields of Iowa, seeking his fortune in the big city. He never felt like he fitted in in Oskaloosa and at eighteen he ran away from home. He washed up in a Buddhist commune in San Francisco, where he was forbidden to play his cello and so hid in a tiny closet to practice for hours. In 1973, at the age of twenty-two, he made the move to Manhattan, finding an apartment in the Poets Building, a tatty East Village walk-up that was home to the poet and counterculture legend Allen Ginsberg, who encouraged him to come out as a gay man.

The wake of the boat is white. Arthur leans on the rail, dreaming of his future. What he wants is to be a pop star, though he is hampered by his shyness, his lack of money, his perfectionism, and his refusal to compromise on any aspect of his vision. Most musicians stick to a single scene but Arthur has always been a rover. He’s a restless soul, sticking his nose into all the different places in the city where music is made. Boundaries and borders mean nothing to him; he hurdles them with ease.

Within a year of his arrival in New York, he was appointed musical director of the Kitchen, the venue at the heart of the city’s experimental music and performance scene. He collaborated with minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and at the same time he played dirty downtown rock ’n’ roll, running out to CBGB to play cello with the Talking Heads. Any music could be experimental music; any music could be pushed to its limits.

And then he discovered the hedonistic, libidinal world of disco. All across downtown, nightclubs were proliferating: wild spaces where you could sweat with a thousand strangers, relinquishing inhibitions in a nocturnal world of rhythm. Quickly, he began to release dance records, under multiple pseudonyms. Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, named for the constant cry from the dealers in the park by his house. Indian Ocean, Killer Whale: names for alternate selves, each with their own alternate vision. You could dance to these records, sure, but they were also experimental adventures in minimalism in their own right: spacey, dubby, weirdly unstructured grooves, shifting in mood from high-octane, fist-pumping ecstasy to a more childlike, innocent sensuality.

Listening to World of Echo over the sound of the water, he thinks it is the most complete thing he’s ever done. But it’s never easy to put something new into the world. The album is released later that year and though the early reviews are positive the sales are appalling. There is no market for the music of the future, not yet.

*

One of the most magical things about Arthur Russell’s music is the way it conveys feelings, especially feelings that are not easily translated into words. For him, music is a place of refuge, a haven: an infinite realm into which he can voyage, even vanish. He hopes it might bring him fame, heightened visibility, but he also loves the way he can swim out into it, temporarily disappearing from the world.

AIDS accelerates this tendency, turning it malignant. His natural spaciness becomes confusion, while his capacity for wandering gives way to a dangerous tendency to get lost. The virus lays waste to him, eroding his immune system. The end comes fast: April 4, 1992, in a hospital bed high above New York.

How do you define success? Arthur Russell was only forty when he died, flat broke, a few obscure singles and one album to his name. But he left behind thousands of hours of unpublished music, hundreds upon hundreds of songs. In his absence, it has slowly been released into the world, to growing appreciation and acclaim. Listening to it now, it becomes apparent that the quiet man on the ferry, dancing silently to sounds that only he could hear, might have been one of the best and strangest talents of twentieth-century composition, a nomad with an absolute commitment to freedom, whose natural element was music itself.

“That’s us,” Arthur once sang, “before we got there.” He’s telling a story about being a kid, driving to the lake before dawn to swim. Then the beat kicks in, and now it’s love he’s singing about, or maybe just how it feels to be awake in the world on a summer morning. It’s a wild combination all right, and so was he: a firework on the Fourth of July, everything all at once, in a flash, and gone before you could grasp what you’d seen.

 

Winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Olivia Laing is the author of three previous books of nonfiction, including The Lonely City, and one novel, Crudo. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She lives in London, England.

Excerpted from Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency © 2020 by Olivia Laing. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Quarantine Reads: The U.S.A. Trilogy

Our flat in London has five windows and two skylights. Like most renters in this city, we have no yard, no balcony, no fire escape. Four floors up from the street, the windows offer our allotment of open space; the sky forms our personal outdoors. Over the past weeks, since our early self-quarantine bled into the UK’s nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, I have studied the way patches of light move through this flat like I’m a geographer of warmth. I follow it in arches as the hours pass, as though I’m a dot floating across a time-lapse heat map. Cooped up in a few hundred square feet, I have learned that my sanity depends on putting myself in that path of light, again and again and again.

It begins in our bedroom, which faces southeast: early in the morning, a rectangle of light hits the wall at the foot of our bed, bisected by the windowpane’s even cross. At midday the skylight creates a square foot of heat in the hallway; the dog and I sit there, sharing it. By early afternoon the sun has moved to the other side of the flat; a corner of the dining table is flooded with light, illuminating every pock and scratch in the wood. If I sit there until evening, the sun leaves my cheeks pink.

I’m light-chasing in my mind, too: trying to hop from one safe, warm spot of focus (the potted mint thriving in the window; the thin-sliced meat dry-curing in the oven; the dog nuzzled against my side) to the next (an untouched tray of watercolor paints; a fresh set of mismatched sheets on the bed; a bath at midday). The shadows of dread spread beneath my conscious thoughts. I look away as long-laid plans crack and rot. Fear has become ambient, the way you stop hearing the speeding train’s rattle when you live next door to the tracks.

Like all those who have built lives in a country that is not their own, where one’s right to exist is granted only in brief, expensive, and uncertain installments, I found myself caught between risks: the risk of staying in London and the risk of returning to America, the risk of distance and the risk of infection, the risk of being within and the risk of being without. Time made the decision for me.

There go the shadows! Gosh are they dark. I leap back into the silly, easy light: the neighbor’s blossoming jasmine, the dog’s wet nose, the warm breeze at night. There is birdsong in the neighborhood, was that there before? If I fill my mind with only this, I may get through. I know it’s a privilege to even try.

Books, I’ve tried, too. I page through new books and old books and books I’ve read before, desperate to be swallowed up. But it’s as though my brain’s been rewired: linear plots appear naive and presumptive; realist dialogue rings flat like a bad pilot script; and depictions of normalcy shoot my thoughts down a rabbit hole of when-will-it-be-that-way-again. I try and fail to lose myself, but then the book gets set down, and I somehow wind up on eBay, channeling homesickness into bids for Chicago kitsch.

I was aimlessly watching the ticker go down on an auction for Cubs paraphernalia when I saw the fat spine of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy staring me down from the shelf. I’d read the books years ago, as an undergraduate in California, a time in my life characterized by so much ease and beauty that I find it hard to believe it actually happened. Back then I’d admired the rhythm of his sentences and the ambition of his project, but had found myself listless in the face of his determined experimentation: the novels, The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and Big Money (1936), shuttle between snapshot narratives of various fictional American men and women; brief biographies of famous men; snippets of poetry and popular music from the radio; stream-of-consciousness autofiction; and headlines and sentence-length clippings from the Chicago Tribune and the New York World News. It’s a clattering 1,184-page portrait of a nation in perpetual crisis, reckoning with war, precarity, economic upheaval, cavernous political divisions, capitalism’s parasitic expansion, and the thwarted rise of American social democracy. To say that it’s a trilogy of “renewed relevance” would be to suggest the story of America has ever been otherwise.

Its massive size, which once filled me with a sense of studious obligation, now grants me freedom to roam. I read diligently for a few pages; I page ahead, flip back. I read like I’m improvising the act of reading. I stare at the headlines: “EMPLOYER MUST PROVE WORKER IS ESSENTIAL”, “THIS IS THE CENTURY WHERE BRAINS AND BILLIONS ARE TO RULE”, “STRIKING WAITERS ASK AID OF WOMEN”, “CONFESSED ANARCHISTS ON BENDED KNEES KISS U.S. FLAG”. My mind flits across the tales of Janey and Mac and Eleanor and Richard; I glimpse the lives of journalists and mechanics and actresses and activists. Dos Passos’s Modernism mimics the pattern of attention we’ve developed on the internet: headlines declaring personal or national disaster are interspersed with enjoyably vapid snaps of popular culture and the tales of individual lives. It’s impossible to linger on any given moment; it’s gone as it begins. I read Dos Passos before I go to sleep, I read Dos Passos when I wake up, I read Dos Passos while I follow the sun. I absorb maybe a third of what I read; the other two thirds just keep me company, run-on sentences filling my mind, keeping other thoughts out.

In truth, what is portrayed is a glimpse of what’s likely to come: wholesale unemployment, the vicious reassertion of capitalist power, rare moments of mercy spread far across a long line of economic devastation. Yet these snapshots of two cities I love—Chicago, New York—bring me comfort at a moment when I have no idea when I’ll see them next. The characters’ vagabond lives throw my own stasis into clear relief: their lives are uncertain, premised on promises the market never intended to keep, but there is an irrepressible momentum to each story, months and years passing in pages, characters ricocheting across the country in search of some kind of progress, rarely finding it but pushing forward all the same, each motivated by their own private fiction of America.

I’ve never really known an America like that, except through the stories my immigrant grandmother told me: the way, as a child, she would watch planes pass over the Philippines and imagine that every single one of them was headed to the States. Her single-minded certainty that one day she’d put herself on one of those planes; her dogged belief that when she got to America, her life would really begin. I’m now the third generation to learn that to call two countries home is to live in a perpetual state of flight: you have always just left, you have always only just arrived.

That immigrant restlessness is borne out in the expansiveness of Dos Passos’s project, his insistence that meaning would be found not in one person’s life but in a whole wave of voices, a ceaseless coming and going. The U.S.A. trilogy offers the comforting cacophony of the collective at a time of isolation. I know America will be changed when I next return (when will that be?) and I envy those who have the luxury of taking it for granted, who sigh that they wish they were in Europe, that they wish they were anywhere else. I understand where it comes from, but all I can think of is home. So I read Dos Passos and I let the days pass and the news cycles keep cycling through, rendering home for me in statistics and headlines and photographs of empty streets.

Dos Passos ends his trilogy with an unnamed young man on a plane headed west, looking out at the sky over the country as the plane passes through dusk: Cleveland, Chicago, Cheyenne, Salt Lake.

The transcontinental passenger thinks contracts, profits, vacationtrips, mighty continent between Atlantic and Pacific, power, wires humming dollars, cities jammed, hills empty, the indiantrail leading into the wagonroad, the macadamed pike, the concrete skyway; trains, planes: history the billiondollar speedup…

A hundred miles down the road.

In a corner of our apartment where the light never hits, we have a photograph by Berenice Abbott, one of Dos Passos’s Modernist contemporaries. The image depicts Exchange Place in Lower Manhattan, after the Wall Street Crash. Abbott’s vantage point is surreal, as though she’s on a tightrope between two skyscrapers, looking down on the street. Men in professional dress walk the streets, unidentifiable; a few look up, most keep their heads down. New Street and Broad Street form stripes of sunlight between the shadows of the skyscrapers. And at the end of the road, there’s a slight curve, where Exchange becomes Hanover, and a building at the edge of Abbott’s sight fades into the polluted, dusty light, like the part of a dream where your mind hasn’t thought far enough, a corner your subconscious didn’t get a chance to build. Of course, for those on the ground, the disappearing point isn’t there at all: just more road ahead, more shadows, more light to chase.

Head swims, belly tightens, wants crawl over his skin like ants: went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your home, shine bigger than your neighbor … paychecks were for hands willing to work … waits with swimming head, needs knot the belly, idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic.

A hundred miles down the road.

 

Jennifer Schaffer is an American writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere in print and online. 

Rethinking the Eighties: An Interview with Quan Barry

Left: Quan Barry, photo courtesy of the author

In 1692, a small group of adolescent girls dominated Salem politics, accusing local women and men of witchcraft. The condemned women were often misfits, unfairly deemed dangerous by their kin. The young accusers themselves—their active imaginations stifled by puritanical life—quickly became the main players in the Salem witch trials. In her second novel, We Ride Upon Sticks (Pantheon, 2020), author Quan Barry reexamines this notorious history with a new question in mind. Who would these women and girls be had they lived three hundred years later? Her answer: the 1989 Danvers High varsity field hockey team.

We Ride Upon Sticks is a feminist bildungsroman set in a township just outside of Salem in the eighties. The field hockey team is on a losing streak, so they employ a dark strategy, using witchcraft to turn the season around. Forming an unlikely coven, each player signs her name in a makeshift devil’s book—a diary with a picture of Emilio Estevez on the cover. The losing streak becomes a winning streak, but victory on the field leads to debauchery off. A Ouija board urges human sacrifice, cars are smashed by field hockey sticks, a tarot reader is consulted, and potions are brewed. The team gathers for bonfires as regular and ritualistic as the games, where Janet Jackson blares on full volume and Bartles & Jaymes flows freely. Partaking in this pagan revelry, the girls dance stark naked in the clear light of the New England moon.

Barry’s novel is a love letter to her hometown of Danvers. In artful prose that recalls Barry’s long career in poetry, she depicts her local landscape in detail, unveiling the communal memories imbued in each turn of Route 1 and each corridor of Danvers High. But her narrative is as universal as it is regional. The field hockey coach, Coach Butler, is recognizable to any woman who partook in high school sports. She was modeled on Barry’s real-life coach, Barb Damon, and so vividly recalls my own, Miss Monahan, who would stand on the sidelines waving her stick like a baton as I tore through crowds of players twice my size.

Barry and I spoke over the phone in mid-March, just after she had concluded a book tour in New York and along Boston’s North Shore. She had appeared at Danvers High not a week before. Though COVID-19 loomed, we lingered on unrelated topics, such as hair, feminism, and D.I.Y. witchcraft. Our conversation took place, quite aptly, on Friday the thirteenth.

INTERVIEWER

In We Ride Upon Sticks, you play with the aesthetics and tropes of movies from the eighties, especially horror movies. Why did you choose the eighties as the backdrop for the novel?

BARRY

I’m from the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. I graduated from high school in 1990, which means I played on the field hockey team in 1989, the year in which the novel is set. But unlike in the book, it was never a rags-to-riches story. We were good all along. I knew the eighties. I knew the town. I knew the history of the Salem witch trials. That’s why all of those elements are in the book. I didn’t realize it when I was going into the project, but I like the fact that we can look back on that decade with a wiser eye. Oftentimes when people think of the eighties, they just recall the funny clothes and the hair. But, as is discussed in the book, the eighties definitely had their issues. It’s post-Reagan, you have the Central Park Five, you have the AIDS crisis. There was a lot going on, and I was interested in rethinking that time through a more complicated lens. It’s a time that was dear to my heart, because that was when I came of age.

INTERVIEWER

In the book, witchcraft is a practice through which women can express and act on otherwise forbidden urges, and of course, this book takes place on the grounds of the Salem witch trials. The recent #MeToo movement is often referred to as a “witch hunt.” How were you thinking through the connections between witchcraft and feminism?

BARRY

I’ve always thought of witchcraft in terms of female empowerment, because many of the women who were hung historically did not fit into society in traditional ways. They weren’t mothers, or they were old, or they were seen as too powerful. One of the first women who was hung in Salem was Bridget Bishop. A couple of the things were held against her—she was a tavern owner and she supposedly liked to wear red. I’ve always thought of witchcraft as a tool of female empowerment, even going back to paganism and Wiccan practices. Witchcraft is very Mother Nature–centric, and it just made sense that it would be braided into the book. I also wanted to write a story about teen sports, but one that looked at teen sports played by girls, which we don’t see much of in books and movies, even now. Think, too, about women’s soccer—the fight for equal pay and the difficulty that they’re having with that today.

INTERVIEWER

The spirit of the U.S. women’s soccer team reminds me of the Danvers field hockey team, in a way. I love that moment when they realize they are the first female team at Danvers High to be thrown a pep rally.

BARRY

Yes, they’re the first ones through the hoop. And when it comes to sports mascots, they are usually all male or even ambiguously gendered. Right now, in 2020, the Salem High School football team is called the Witches, which I just love. When was the last time you heard about a sports team that had a distinctly female mascot?

INTERVIEWER

The eighties were also a moment when possibilities for women were changing, as was our understanding of gender. This tension plays out between the two characters named Cory. Girl Cory, the ultrafeminine “it girl” of Danvers, and Boy Cory, the only adolescent male in a women’s league, play opposite positions on the team. And yet, in some ways, they seem like doubles of each other. How were you thinking through gender and queerness in the novel?

BARRY

I was thinking about it in terms of silence—that, unfortunately in the eighties, in Danvers, there wasn’t even a language for LGBTQ people. Not in a lot of places, and particularly not in high schools. How could people who were LGBTQ discover who they were in a world in which there was no language for what you might be? There was no vocabulary. If you don’t see yourself in the culture, how do you make sense of who you are? I was very much thinking about that with respect to Boy Cory and trying very hard to be sensitive to their arc. Now that you mention it, I hadn’t thought of the Corys as being parallel in certain ways. But somebody who I very briefly dated—among his friend pool there was another couple, a boy Cory and a girl Cory. I just thought that was so funny then. We were children of the eighties, before there were as many unisex names.

INTERVIEWER

We Ride Upon Sticks is narrated by an anonymous yet omniscient first-person plural, “we.” Why did you choose this type of narration for a story about young women?

BARRY

I always knew that I wanted to write it in a “we” voice. But I just didn’t know who the voice belonged to. At first, I thought that the voice belonged to the school. And then, for a very short period of time, I thought that the voice belonged to the freshman team. When I was on the freshman team, the varsity girls just seemed so adult to us. I was talking to my friends about it, and we all agreed that we knew everything about the senior girls. We idolized them. But then I realized pretty quickly that that didn’t work either. I realized that it’s the team that tells the story. They develop a hive mind, able to communicate silently as a collective, and that is one witchy element in the book. Even though they cast spells, too, there’s never any evidence that it really works. I kept wondering—is this just them being teens and believing in themselves? Or is it actually witchcraft? Maybe their hive mind is just their strong connection to each other. But the “we” voice did add this element of witchy-ness.

INTERVIEWER

By contrast, other coming-of-age novels are often single-minded and individualistic, focusing on the consciousness of one adolescent. The communal narration plays with that trope and even breaks it apart quite radically.

BARRY

There’s a way in which friendships among teen girls are more emotional than those among teen boys. And I do not mean that women are more emotional. But you don’t often get the sense that teen boys could necessarily finish each other’s sentences. Women can become very close. And our society sanctions that—it’s okay for women to be close in ways which aren’t allowed for men, which is too bad. I think that the “we” voice is reflective of a sisterhood, a sisterhood that allows the team to have that particular closeness and that group-thought mentality.

INTERVIEWER

Your first novel, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, is set in Vietnam. But in We Ride Upon Sticks, you write quite intimately about your hometown. What was it like to revisit Danvers in fiction?

BARRY

When you write your first book, nobody, by and large, is waiting for it. You have all the time in the world to write it. So, I traveled to Vietnam for research. When revisiting Danvers, on the other hand, I already knew it all. As a kid here, we were taken on field trips around various local historical sites. We went, from time to time, to Salem, which is basically the town next door. I just imbibed the history of the place. You’d pass the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in the car on the way to the mall. I played soccer by the Danvers Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial. It’s where the Salem Village Meeting House used to be. There are these markers around town that I have always known about. So, I wrote this book very quickly. It took me only a year to have a solid draft done. Thinking about Danvers—it was just fun. It was just fun to write about my hometown.

INTERVIEWER

As the women of the Danvers field hockey team research dark magic, they encounter religions that white American communities may often think of as witchcraft, such as voodoo and Santeria. Could you speak to the tension in the novel between this largely white community in Massachusetts and its experience of difference, other, and race?

BARRY

There are three characters of color in the book. There’s A.J. Johnson, and there’s Sue Yoon, first-generation Korean, and there’s the adopted Julie Kaling. It’s through these three characters that I talk about what it’s like to be a member of a minority community in predominantly white spaces. They each present different ways of being in a predominantly white space. In many ways, A.J. feels it the most acutely as an African American student. Take, for example, her experience reading Huckleberry Finn at school. For Sue Yoon, who is first generation, it’s about assimilation. Sue Yoon’s story takes place during Halloween. She has a tarot reading and gets a piece of advice. The reader—this woman who’s maybe a Wiccan—tells Sue Yoon, “Fuck ’em. Don’t pay any mind to what people think or say.” That’s the message at the end of the day. Be yourself. Be true to who you are. Empower yourself, and you’ll go a long way. Julie Kaling is different, too, because she’s adopted, and her family is white. I didn’t want the team to be homogeneous. I wanted there to be difference among them. To not address race would not create an accurate picture of this particular place and time. I hope that it complicates the reading of the book in a good way. And it maybe makes readers rethink their own experience of the eighties.

INTERVIEWER

I loved A.J.’s campaign to have Huckleberry Finn removed from the syllabus, which culminates in a book burning. What role did literature play in your own childhood, and when did you first find fiction that spoke to you?

BARRY

I was a weird kid. I’m the youngest of five, and I always wanted to be like my siblings. When I first started to really read—I would say, fourth grade—I would read the high school books that my sisters were reading. I remember reading The Crucible. I remember reading The Old Man and the Sea. How much did I get out of it? I could physically read them, but did I understand them? Probably not. But I have this memory of reading adult literature as a kid. And in elementary school, there used to be book sales. My brother and I are both adopted, and we were basically the only children of color in the school. There were maybe five of us at a school of two or three hundred. I remember Mrs. Atwood, our librarian, saying at the book sale, Oh, here’s a book that I think you’d like. I still remember that book—Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe. It was about an African American girl living in the South. It was about her adventures, and what she was up to. It became my favorite book. I couldn’t tell you what happens in it. But I still remember that book, because I don’t have memories of seeing many African American characters elsewhere.

INTERVIEWER

Hair is a recurrent theme in We Ride Upon Sticks. I’m thinking, of course, of Jen Fiorenza’s “Claw”—her classic eighties ’do that is personified as its own character. Julie also defies her mother’s rules by washing her hair with egg whites, and A.J. comes into her own when she gets braids. Why is hair an important or useful image to you?

BARRY

For girls and women, appearance is so much a part of our identities, fortunately or unfortunately. In the eighties, hair was everything. It was a mode of expression. You could tell things about people by their hair. It signaled something about them. And it made sense to me that the hair would be an important part of the book. I think of the Claw as Jen Fiorenza’s id. It’s maybe even the team’s id. The Claw literally says the things that they’re all thinking and voices what they all want to do. It was a lot of fun to think about that character. I don’t remember at which point I knew that the Claw would be a character. I think if I had sat down and planned it, it would have sounded nuts to me.

INTERVIEWER

Most of the characters have one physical feature that’s monstrously exaggerated, such as the Splotch on Mel Boucher’s neck, the Claw for Jen Fiorenza, and the Chin for Nicky Higgins. This stylistic move again recalls popular movies of the eighties. Many are set in high schools, where that might already be the predominant way of categorizing and differentiating between people—by their most defining traits. Which eighties actors would you cast to play your characters?

BARRY

Well, unfortunately, there weren’t that many young African American actors in the eighties. For A.J. Johnson, because she is an actress, I’m thinking a young Janet Jackson. Which is funny because the team listens to Janet Jackson. Or Lark Voorhies from Saved by the Bell. Similarly, there aren’t many Asian actresses who I could even name from the eighties. There’s always Margaret Cho—but she’s older than that, much older. If we were filming it now, I would cast Lana Condor, who’s in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. She could be Julie Kaling. Even though he’s supposed to be blond, the real Emilio Estevez could be the football captain. The only character who’s based on an actual person is the field hockey coach. She is modeled after our coach, who passed away last year. People are saying online that Meryl Streep could play her.

INTERVIEWER

Is there one character or player on the Danvers varsity field hockey team with whom you connect the most?

BARRY

They’re all a combination of me. There’s something about Abby Putnam that I like. I see her as being fearless. She’s fearless but she’s also authentic. Even though she’s an optimist and a go-getter, it’s not in a fake way. If you think about the movie Election, Tracy Flick seems a little delusional. Abby’s a go-getter, too, but she’s not one-minded like Tracy Flick. She is genuine, and real, and reliable, and her friends turn to her and she’s a rock for them, and she’s pretty happy. She’s the character that I most aspire to be.

 

 

Elinor Hitt is a writer living in Manhattan. She is an editorial intern at The Paris Review.

Staff Picks: Mums, Moms, and Mothers

Photo: Jane Breakell.

In a paper gesture to the fistfuls of wilting dandelions offered by children, and beloved—surely!—by mothers all over the dandelion-growing world, I offer my mother Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. I can remember Mom saying about certain plants, They grow where they are planted; in her tone, gratitude and admiration for the least fussy members of the garden. Were they wildflowers, which, as Dolly Parton sings, “don’t care where they grow”? Weren’t all flowers wild, at some point? Perhaps some are closer to their primal selves than others. At any rate, Mom—a Manhattanite transplanted to New England, with a few trying stops along the way—admires a plant that can make itself at home, and I’m grateful to her for encouraging, in conversation and by example, a weed-like adaptability in her children. In his guidebook, Lawrence Newcomb lets us get to know actual wildflowers with a neat key based on simple distinctions of flower shape, number of parts, and the shape and arrangement of leaves; detailed illustrations; and, important for my word-loving mother, a fine glossary of excellent botanical words: calyx, spadix, corymb; bulblet, axil, umbel. Today I identified a backyard flower as a celandine poppy: four symmetrical petals, deeply lobed leaves in opposite pairs. Newcomb describes this flower as “juice yellow.” He also notes its growing zone, which lies between western Pennsylvania and southern Wisconsin. Someone must have planted it in my scrubby little New York yard, where it now flourishes. I wish that I could keep a cutting from wilting and bring my mother a juice-yellow nosegay. —Jane Breakell 

I haven’t read anything lately that reminds me specifically of my mother or even moms in general, so for Mother’s Day, I thought I’d ask my mom about the book she’s been reading: On Lighthouses, by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. My mother has a healthy appetite for exploration, and it’s a shame that Mother’s Day this year will go by without some sort of adventure. When I moved to the city, I bought her the guidebook 111 Places in New York You Must Not Miss, which has taken us to locales as varied as the Merchant House Museum and the SeaGlass Carousel in Battery Park. On Lighthouses, based on what she tells me, is the history of six lighthouses in America. Some chapters start with a story; another chapter is the diary of a lighthouse keeper. Lighthouses, the “frontier between civilization and nature,” are places of solitude. But they are also signals of shore and home. This book is a light at the end of the tunnel, showing us places we’ll see and things we’ll do when we can go out again; my mom tends the lighthouse. —Lauren Kane

 

Margaret Brown Kilik.

 

As my first Mother’s Day at home in years approaches, I’ve turned to Margaret Brown Kilik’s posthumous novel The Duchess of Angus, which tells the autobiographical story of Jane Davis, an English major who returns home to San Antonio to live in her mother’s run-down hotel. My own mother, with whom I am sheltering now, taught me to recognize good literature. Her lessons: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and, more recently, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Kilik deserves a place in this canon, but her midcentury novel was only just published in March. Jenny Davidson—Kilik’s step-granddaughter and my professor at Columbia—prepared the manuscript for publication after acquiring it in 2017. Davidson’s introduction is as intelligent as the novel itself. She explores the history of Kilik’s eccentric mother, Agnes, also writing that the author’s voice contains “the flat affect and disturbing candor found in the fiction of J. D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath.” Kilik’s blunt sense of humor could even be compared to that of Dorothy Parker, though her protagonist is able to generate witty comebacks or aphorisms only after the moment has passed. In Jane’s own words: “I was furious. Senselessly furious. At that time I had not yet learned to bone up on the answers in anticipation of the questions. I lacked the presence of mind to retort, and it was useless to depend upon the depth of my emotions to see me through, for like domestic champagne, they never quite bubbled up to their potential but were more often lost in the yellow liquid. I groped about in my silent prison while the moment passed.” Jane vacillates between youthful euphoria and self-hatred. And her inarticulateness in real time draws a sharp contrast to the cruel judgments she makes of herself and others in thought. The Duchess of Agnes, a joint feat by Kilik and Davidson, is the perfect starter for book clubs among mothers and daughters who now find themselves living together again. —Elinor Hitt

Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other was the first of my quarantine reads, but seven weeks and twelve books later, it is still the one I think of most, particularly as Mother’s Day approaches. Here is a multigenerational, multifocal narrative about strong women, motherhood, and networks of female friendship in the contemporary UK (though Evaristo admirably stretches those narratives back most of a century). I don’t need to speak of its merits—the book won the Booker; enough said—but it did inspire me to appreciate all the women in my life anew, their narratives, how our paths approach one another and split apart again, and how, with good luck, those paths sometimes intersect in ways that make each thread stronger. Right now those intersections are virtual—talking Chekhov with my mom as she shelters in Maine, sending my best friend a video message for her first Mother’s Day, reading Yum Yum Dim Sum to a friend’s kids in Queens (which will have to do until we can get together in Flushing again—I can taste the shumai). Nothing is as good as being able to show up on my mom’s doorstep and surprise the snot out of her—but for now, I’m grateful for literature that helps us appreciate mothers, and technology that lets us tell them so. —Emily Nemens

I hated nature, Mum, which looked better in photographs; Britain was sodden, as advertised, the countryside tasteless and passé in its browns and greens and grays, and everywhere the warbles and shrieks of birds pealed, telling nothing. I wanted it all gilded and wrought and Romantic. Still, not to be alone, I trudged along, preferring the sounds I gleaned from your patient taxonomy: whimbrel, kittiwake, chiffchaff, dunnock, nightjar. Eventually, among other things, I learned from you to tell a brambling from a chaffinch, and that no, the glint in the distance was not a goldfinch. I read R. F. Langley’s (1938–2011) poems with you because I could make no sense of them. I was astounded by their strange, off-kilter rhythms, their dense rhymes and unspooled syllables, and how lines shaped the mouth in recitation. Langley writes: “Talk to mother. Speak in a natural / easy voice, cruising the words. Cirrus and / thisles. Thiskin. Largesse. Debonair. Then / oaks and hornbeams and forever.” But as he speaks, the words break and meld: “Say that mother is out there, / and she is thiswise, thissen, thiskin, which / is thistles, cirrus cruising de bonne aire.” The meaning remained remote until you explained the terms—Callophrys, Grimmia—that granted access and denoted clearly what was there. The more we read, the more they unfurled; too often, what seemed to be a private obscurity just demanded attention. As he writes of a beetle: “Detail is so sharp / and so minute that the total form suggests / infinity.” Like you, Langley showed me how to see. His Complete Poems, comprising just forty-eight written over nearly four decades, is my most treasured book, even as it still eludes me. The last poem, his most transparent, “To a Nightingale,” begins from “Nothing”—there is a poet paused in the countryside, then birdsong. “I am / empty, stopped at nothing, as / I wait for this song to shoot.” Yet the poem slowly fills in the small particulars that shape the whole: “Red mites bowling / about on the baked lichen”; “Darkwing. The / flutter. Doubles and blurs the / margin”; a voice like “a soft cuckle of / wet pebbles.” You tell me about the visitors in isolation: the barn owl watching Poldark with you through the undrawn window, the jostling of squirrels who lost their nuts, and a local cat’s Jacobean slaughter of sparrows. With a leaf between the fingers, Langley writes: “There seems // to be no limit to / the amount of life it / would be good to have.” I long for the loam, for the puddle-furrowed paths to Grantchester, to see an arrow of geese above the fens, or to wait for a kingfisher, hushed in a hide with you. Sitting by my window, as I think of you, Mum, I sound the names of the birds that pass: pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon. —Chris Littlewood

 

R. F. Langley.