The Paris Review's Blog, page 17

True Love at Dawn

Photograph by ジン (多忙中), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.1 JP.

The following short story by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), newly translated by John Nathan, was first published in the June 1965 issue of Nihon (Japan) magazine.

1.

That morning, for the first time in a long while, Ryōichi and his wife refreshed themselves with an exhilarating kiss.

In the not-quite morning, they emerged onto the balcony to kiss beneath the merest hint of white in the sky, sensing in the corners of each other’s lips the coolness of dawn air like a sip of peppermint water even while they probed with their tongues the accumulated heat of the long night in their mouths, a kiss, the first in a very long while, they could prolong and never tire of.

Roosters were crowing, the trees in the orchard were still shrouded in mist, and though it was May the air was chilly against their skin. Ryōichi’s wife, Reiko, was wearing a blue negligee without sleeves, and because she was standing on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around her husband’s neck her breasts tumbled from the openings below her arms and appeared to be swaying in the gentle morning breeze.

She didn’t look her forty-five years: her snow-white skin showed no signs of wear, her weariness was hidden inside her, submerged deep down. On occasion it briefly appeared, like black sand at the bottom of a stream, but that depth was no longer a domain of her body. How to put it? She preserved the flesh at the surface exquisitely, allowing nothing that occurred in this world to blemish it, living, aging, leaving the transparent cream at the surface of existence undisturbed, accumulating and sinking deep down in her body all the detritus of life. To Reiko, accordingly, it might be said that the depths beneath her skin were no longer a domain of her flesh. Shall we call it the domain of her spirit? Or was it the domain of a waste disposal area where decay and decomposition were always proceeding, the domain of living death? In any event, nothing pooled and stagnant at this depth ever surfaced to her exterior, never exerted its influence, that is, on her flesh.

It was the same for fifty-year-old Ryōichi. When they had first met, a couple so beautiful it was hard to imagine, he was twenty-three and Reiko eighteen. They stayed in touch for seven years, and when Ryōichi was repatriated at the end of the war and they were married, he was thirty and his wife was twenty-five. Since they had had no children in the course of their twenty-year marriage, their world consisted of the two of them alone.

How Ryōichi managed to spend those twenty years doing nothing, living in a house he had inherited from his father after the war, no one knew. According to some, he had relied on diamonds his mother snuck into the country from abroad before the war was over. She was said to have hidden a fistful of 10-karat and larger stones in a jar of cold cream and brought it back to Japan.

But after his parents’ deaths, he dedicated his financial acumen to ensuring a living for himself and his wife, taking advantage of occasional shifts in the economy to prosper and enjoying an idle life. Ryōichi’s inactivity in itself seemed to be his revenge against something—in any event, however impossible it might seem, they managed their assets splendidly and lived on their love for each other alone.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they lived on memories of their love: each passing moment they gambled on that first encounter, that beautiful first astonishment. In her husband of fifty, Reiko continually discovered the vestige of a thirty-year-old; in his forty-year-old wife Ryōichi endlessly perceived eighteen-year-old innocence.

Was this grotesque? Was it impossible to convince someone else of an illusion of beauty so very subjective as this? In fact, ever since these two had ceased to be twenty-three and eighteen, from the moment, that is, that they’d turned twenty-four and nineteen, this had been for them the most critical challenge in life or, rather, this side of life. They had stubbornly refused to resign themselves. And their abnormally youthful appearance had helped.

But youth had its limits. Gradually they came to shun the light of day but also disliked artificial lighting at night and grew to love the subtle light of dusk and dawn. In that ambiguous yet natural light a man of fifty and a woman of forty-five could bask in a subtle blessing of nature that revealed them only in silhouette; they understood that only at nebulous times like these would nature relax the cruelty of natural law and preserve with freshness, like dawn breaking over a mountain, the reflection of a distant youth.

Even now, Reiko remembered well the perfume her eighteen-year-old self had stealthily removed from her mother’s dressing table. Because Ryōichi had praised it, the perfume had become for her life’s most ceremonial aroma, applied only before she shared with him one of their intimate moments. By this time there was no need to ask, when Ryōichi desired the perfume she knew it intuitively and made sure, just as she had at eighteen, that her breast was delicately scented with it. Even now the fragrance wafted above the balcony where they were embracing. At that moment Reiko, forty-five, was unmistakably eighteen years old.

Ryōichi’s house was on the outskirts of Tokyo, across the Tama River, and from the balcony on the second floor, beyond the orchard directly below, the white line of a river was visible. Traffic in this area had become heavy, but the orchard muffled noise from the street; at a time like this, shrouded in morning mist, the house appeared to stand at the edge of a milky lake.

Now wrapped in a blue negligee, Reiko’s body, even in the chill of a May morning, was as heated as the coals on a dawn brazier. Her lovely, sensitive response to Ryōichi’s touch, the rippling of her flesh, the aliveness of her trembling as though his questing fingers were awakening anew each part of her body, the young girl’s eagerness that lifted her to her tiptoes to embrace him—head to toe she was eighteen all over again.

In the same way, Ryōichi’s kiss, as though he were in a dream with the woman he had partnered for twenty years, was hardly the kiss of a fifty-year-old man. He had retained the robust power of youth, and his fingertips, gently stroking his wife’s hair, shivered with the young man’s innocence that was part and parcel of his strength.

It was a sublime kiss, a kiss of soaring purity they hadn’t experienced for many years.

Not surprisingly, the preparation for such a kiss as this had required hard work and a complex, artificial experiment that would have repulsed ordinary citizens as unnatural. Perhaps, but if anything was beyond doubt it was that this kiss was wondrously natural, and that creating this most natural moment had required measures unnatural in the extreme.

There was no helping that: If they wished to oppose nature, to deceive it in order to bring into play once again its gentle, benign power, they would have to push human understanding to its limit. The first few years they had relied on poetry and imagination, but poetry and imagination are by nature unrepeatable and quickly frustrated attempts to return to the same source: the god they wished to summon could be rendered manifest by poetry and imagination only once. When the effort to repeat began to feel tiresome they tried recovering what they sought with performance, but while performance was inherently repeatable, repetition required an icy detachment.

What they were attempting to revive was simple enough—a winsome girl lifts her gaze to the youth she loves, the fields sparkle with dew, war and the uncertainty of life hover on the horizon, a parting is in the air, and a kiss like the first flicker of dawn brushes youthful lips—the supreme bliss of an unforgettable love. But for twenty years since their marriage the husband was always there and so was the wife, always there. Who could have blamed them for that! But when “being there” becomes an immutable certainty, from that moment on decay proceeds. Unlike the average couple, these two struggled against decay and the process of decomposition with all their might. And when they realized that poetry and imagination and performance had all hit bottom they conceived the most unnatural method imaginable and gradually put it into practice. It was an approach that was likely to have occurred to anyone suffering from lassitude in the extreme, but they were at pains to employ it in the most beautiful way imaginable, impeccably. Their efforts were aimed at one thing only, a kiss ripening on the lips of a young girl on a May morning. In a word, they began using other people.

The heartless contempt required to use others became a guarantee of their passion. They went so far as to consider their cruel contempt of people who were merely young a justifiable means of educating them.

And now, on this May morning on a balcony at the break of dawn, Ryōichi and Reiko merged into one being.

They both knew that a couple as beautiful as themselves, forever young, was to be found nowhere else. Ryōichi had been using an imported hair dye for years: his hair, clean to the touch, maintained the jet-black luster of a young man’s. Reiko’s beauty beggared description! The pale white skin of her face was without a wrinkle; the fluttering of her eyes beneath her thin eyelids revealed the sensitive soul of a young woman.

The masterly beauty of their kiss was born of a rare blending of innocence and practice; they both knew well how sumptuous and seductive it must appear through a lace curtain, so pure it was close to inhuman.

The kiss continued, the cocks crowed, the light in the sky gradually turned their silhouettes rosy.

Suddenly a shadowy figure sprang to the balcony from behind the curtain and slammed into them.

 

2.

Q: Your name and age?

A: Takeshi Yamawaki, twenty-one.

Q: Your school?

A: L. College, lit department. I wasn’t there much.

Q: Family?

A: I left home and was living by myself in an apartment.

Q: Your parents agreed to that?

A: They weren’t crazy about it. My father is the president of a medium-size company and he wanted me to take over the business but I blew him off. The economy sucks right now, and his optimism was looking pretty thin. I guess he tells himself he’s doing whatever it takes to come out ahead. What’s weird about him, when he loses his temper and gets really mad he pays me for it. He’s convinced himself that he’ll turn his son into a delinquent if he doesn’t pay up when he gets mad. So I made him hopping mad and took a big payoff and used the money to move into an apartment in Shinjuku.

Q: Where did you meet Yuri Miyazaki?

A:  At Funky, a mo-ja cafe where I’ve been hanging out lately.

Q: “Mo-ja”?

A: Are you serious? “Modern jazz”! I’m nuts about Clifford Brown, nothing special about that, but what makes Funky special is, the owner is also a huge Brownie fan and plays nothing but his records all night long, so I started hanging out there. That’s where I met Yuri. We were both a little stoned that night; she came over to my place and we got it on right away.

Q: How long were you sleeping with her?

A: About half a year, maybe. On and off. Neither of us was that turned on but I guess we became besties. Yuri was also crazy about Clifford Brown. She’d say stuff like she lived for “the powerful, manly luster of his tone”—lines she picked up in the jazz mags. Truth is, we were happier listening to Brownie records side by side than we were having sex.

One evening we were sitting at Funky spacing out when someone came in we hadn’t seen before. In the dim lighting she looked like a flashy young woman at first glance, and quite a beauty at that, so everyone was looking, but then she sat down at a table next to ours and I saw right away that beneath her heavy makeup she was a fairly old gal. If I say so myself, I have a pretty decent eye for a skirt’s age. There’s something suspicious about a woman who looks too young. A truly young woman doesn’t show her age off. You take a woman in her thirties, she’s selling a slightly faded youthfulness, she’s confident she’s displaying a product that’s different from someone in their twenties, so she doesn’t wave her youth in your face. I guessed this one would be in her forties, and my estimate was accurate. For some reason she cheered me up a little. You old witch! I laughed to myself.

The Funky crowd takes pride in being dumbass and poor rather than young and attractive, so they tend to be put off by a wealthy alien like this one—but I’m just the opposite, I preen.

The woman sat down facing me, and when our eyes met she sort of smiled. I returned a thin smile, and I still remember the sensation I had at that moment, like floating in space. Yuri noticed something right away and pressed my thigh and said, “She’s coming on to you.”

“So what! She’s an old bag.”

“Go for it—earn yourself a sports car!”

At a modern jazz place like that, customers become friends right away. The woman bought us drinks and the three of us chatted about things. She told us some pretty personal stuff, that her husband was jealous, for example, so jealous that all he’d have to do was find out she came to a place like that alone and she couldn’t imagine what might happen to her. Thinking about my relationship with Yuri, it seemed to me she must’ve been pretty struck on herself to imagine her man would be that jealous.

We sat there confiding in one another like nobody’s business, and the woman must’ve noticed that me and Yuri were just friends, because she turned to her and said, “Instead of hanging around here, you should try the bar at the Rainbow Hotel. I’ve heard old guys hang around there just waiting for unspoiled young women like you.”

Q: Did you get involved with the woman that same night?

A: Take it easy—don’t rush me!

At first she was open and straightforward, but when we left Yuri sitting there and it was just the two of us she stiffened up and began acting naive. All of a sudden, she turned into a wall you couldn’t climb. On one hand I thought, What a bitch! An old hag carrying on like a prude! but at the same time there was something about her act that was weirdly interesting to me.

She was wearing a violet dress and it looked damn good on her. But there was something, I don’t know, pitiful about that perfect fit. She had a weird mixture of inexperienced girlishness and middle-aged cool—one or the other would’ve been easy to handle, but in her case one made the other appear all the more grotesque. Besides, we have a right to feel contempt for adults, men or women, who try to wheedle themselves into our young world. She had a habit of looking up at me innocently every now and then but that disgusted me, like a begging dog.

I wanted her to be more assured. She seemed to cower, like she was a criminal even though she hadn’t done anything, and seeing her fear what might be coming made me want to torment her all the more.

Despite her efforts to disguise herself with makeup, the coarseness of a woman past her prime was visible on her earlobes and the wings of her nose. Her voice was charming, young for her age, but I could hear a false note in it. Even so, I can’t say I didn’t like that kind of expensive, flashy ugliness. We went dancing, and when she thrust out those luscious lips of hers with their—authority, I guess I’d call it, I was overwhelmed by the dignity of a kind of older woman I had never known. If she’d had had gray hair and wasn’t wearing makeup I think I would have gone for her even more.

“It would be terrible if my husband saw me like this,” she whispered in my ear at the table in the nightclub, glancing nervously at the people nearby.

“Why? Wasn’t it you who came to Funky trolling for men on your own?”

“If you put it that way, I have nothing to say.”

“And even so, you love your husband?”

“I don’t love him, I’m afraid of him.”

“That’s perfect! It spices things up.”

It felt good talking to her like a young jerk.

That night we just kissed, and her response to the kiss just about knocked me over. It might have been a virgin’s first kiss, she looked that astonished, her performance was so exaggerated I had to doubt she could really be that shaken. It put me off a little. Then, on the way home she put some money in my hand and said we should meet at Funky again.

Q: How much was it?

A: Five thousand yen. It was a decent amount and, to tell the truth, it was the first time in my life I had taken money from a woman.

Q: But you accepted?

A: When I pretended for just a second to hesitate, she said, “It’s for your tuition, so take it!”

Q: What did she mean, “your tuition”?

A: Don’t ask me.

Q: How was your second meeting?

A: I better talk about Yuri first. We met the next day and the weird thing is, I had a feeling our friendship was over. I mean neither of us felt like talking about the night before and we sort of had nothing to say to each other. We both—I knew perfectly well that Yuri wasn’t the sort of girl to go straight home after we had separated at Funky. Until then, we’d always been straight with each other no matter what, but somehow I had the feeling I never ever wanted to talk to anyone about that woman.

Q: So what about your second meeting?

A: She was even more passive, to the point where she knew she was irritating me. And she babbled constantly about her husband, how awful it would be if he found out, how he would certainly kill her if he knew.

I understood this was a technique for turning me on, and that that made me perverse.

“I guess if you were twenty years younger, your old man would be even more jealous,” I said.

“If I were twenty years younger? Guess how old I am?”

“How about you save me the trouble!” I spat out. I saw sadness in her eyes.

Everything she had on was expensive, even her perfume was some pricey stuff unfamiliar to me. I noticed moments—and they bothered me—when all of a sudden her mind appeared to wander. We took a walk in a park at night, and in the shadows of a grove of trees, like so many lovers, I took the opportunity our surroundings provided. She shivered like a young girl but naturally we didn’t go all the way.

Q: Why “naturally”?

A: Because I’d also stopped feeling like I wanted to go farther. Not until she invited me. Maybe I was falling for her a little.

Q: Even though you knew about the difference in your ages? Wasn’t it actually about money?

A: If it was about money I would have been pushier about having my way with her. But seeing her relax, hiding her face in the darkness, may have made me stubbornly perverse. For her part she came alive in the dark and laughed that girlish laugh of hers. If I closed my eyes I might’ve thought I was with an eighteen-year-old; her skin under my hands was so smooth it was slippery, maybe from the dew on the grass.

I struggled to keep her ugliness in mind, and the creepiness of her age. But that sort of detached awareness leads to an intoxication of its own, I guess it’s like listening to cool jazz. I kept hold of my contempt. This woman was scared of reality. So be it! I’d seize hold of the reality that terrified her and wave it in her face, that’s how I felt.

Q: We’re not looking for abstract replies. Think more concretely. So the woman kept toying with you, one step forward and one back, and you were probably paid each time?

A: That’s right.

Q: And she must have told you repeatedly there’d be trouble if her husband found out?

A: Right. We’d be walking down the street and all of a sudden her eyes would open wide with fear and she’d say she had the feeling her husband was watching. I told her it wasn’t because she wanted to hide her age that she was afraid of daylight, it was because she had the feeling her husband’s eyes were there in the sun. I was mostly joking and gave her a little smack on the ass. A little later, with tears in her eyes, she said, “Thank you.”

If I’d really had contempt for her I should’ve slept with her sooner even if it meant using force.

Q: But there is conclusive evidence that eventually you did copulate. How did that come about?

A: One evening I was feeling so hot for her I couldn’t stand it and invited her to a hotel. Once I’d taken that step my self-respect demanded that I carry through no matter what. She seemed deflated suddenly and begged me to wait one more night. She said If she stayed at a hotel in town her husband would certainly sense it. If I would give her just one more night she’d arrange for a safer place.

Q: And did you wait?

A: My contempt demanded it.

Q: And?

A: The next night very late, even more dressed up than usual, she shows up in a red MG she’s driving herself. Until then, I’d never dreamed she knew how to drive, and since she was in a pretty nifty car I climbed in with pleasure.

“I know a place, it’s in a suburb that’s a little far but it’s absolutely private. It’s a place where friends are allowed to do whatever they like so you mustn’t feel uncomfortable no matter what happens.”

With that warning, she drove through the night streets and kept on driving, past the Tama River, across a bridge and down a road with very few houses on it into an orchard where the trees were casting dark shadows in the moonlight.

Q: So she actually took you to her own house—

A: Yes, but the really dumb thing is I didn’t realize that until the next morning. When we got there she lit a candle and went in to the dark foyer. I was laughing to myself. There must be electricity, the bitch is just creating atmosphere, I thought, but her fear of light also made me sorry for her. She led me up the stairs to a corner of a large room on the second floor. In the faint light from the curtained French windows to the balcony, I could just make out what appeared to be heaps of old furniture—the back of the room was in darkness.

We lay down together on the couch against the wall. Just then I thought I heard a murmuring in the distance and a hushed voice that might’ve been a girl crying or laughing.

“Don’t worry about that,” the woman said, so I paid no attention. Truth is, I had swallowed a fair amount of Hyminal with beer and was able to slip easily into any mood I wanted.

The woman undressed in the darkness and threw herself at me as if driven by fear, but it wasn’t fear, it was genuine happiness so intense it was scary. If we’re talking young girls, I’ve had plenty, and a lot of them turn me off. They repress their happiness out of a weird kind of vanity, or keep it to themselves, measuring it, or express it stingily, like a cat, or babble romantic words that are out of place, translating the language of the flesh into meaningless spiritual language.

But this forty-something-year-old turned into the most feminine woman I’d ever met—glowing faintly like the Milky Way on a summer night, she melted into me. And between sobs she kept cupping my face frantically, making sure where it was and finally, in a voice I could barely hear, she whispered “Ryōichi.”

I was stoned out of my mind, unfazed by any of this, and caressed her more and more wildly. Five or six times in this way she seemed to be calling a man’s name. Finally, as if to make sure of the name, she made sure of my body.

None of this bothered me. Inside my happiness, my somewhat abstract happiness, I was able to be indifferent to the world around me. At that moment not even a hydrogen bomb would’ve mattered, I could probably have pushed it around with my toes … before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.

Q: And then it was that morning.

A: Morning, yes, but when I woke up the room was still in semidarkness.

Q: The first thing you saw when you opened your eyes?

A: I wasn’t trying to see anything, but in the chill of dawn I sensed for certain right away that the woman was no longer next to me. I stood up groggily. That’s when I saw that something white was stretched out on the other side of the furniture. It seemed to be a woman. I tiptoed across the room, careful not to trip on the antiques lying around, and approached. I couldn’t make out the sleeping face clearly but I knew right away it was Yuri.

“Yuri”—I called her name softly and shook her.

Q: She woke up right away?

A: Yes, she was always easy to wake up.

“What are you doing here?” she said, staring at me with her large eyes open wide.

“I could ask you the same thing!”

“A man brought me here last night, the old guy I met at the Rainbow Hotel last month.”

“I see, I get it! We’ve been used.”

“For what?”

“They’ve used us as tools. Fuckers! They’ve picked a perfect way to make fools of us.”

“Oh wow—”

Yuri is sharp as a whip, she understood right away but she wasn’t the least bit upset. She sprawled on the couch in the opposite corner from the one I’d slept on, toying with strands of her hair and putting them in her mouth. She turned to the French windows and then waved me over.

Q: What did you see on the balcony outside?

A: A man and a woman were standing there embracing. They were unmistakably a couple. A peerless model of a husband and wife. We’d been deceived by them and used.

Q: And that’s when?

A: I stood there staring. They were lost in their kiss.

Q: For how long?

A: Five minutes? Ten? It might’ve been longer.

Q: What were you feeling as you watched—anger? resentment?

A: Wrong.

Q: But gradually you became emotional, and when you touched your pocket and felt a switchblade you took it out and opened it. That must have been anger? Or are you saying it was in cold blood? In any event, you rushed onto the balcony and stabbed the woman first and then her husband. There’s no doubt about your crime. But if it turns out you were acting on the blind anger of a young person who’s been used, manipulated as a tool, that might be considered an extenuating circumstance. So why not call it that?

A: I can’t. Because it wasn’t simple anger.

Q: Then what sort of anger was it?

A: How can I describe it? What do you call veneration and anger mixed together? Or anger mixed with joy and longing?

I watched that evil, unhealthy, inhuman couple kissing endlessly and gradually I began to feel that we had been undone. It wasn’t just anger at having been deceived and used, a feeling of defeat was rising in me, flooding my heart like water pouring into a torture chamber.

I’m not sure why I felt as I did at that moment—that we were phony and they were the real thing. That compared to them we were simply shadows, that our worthless youth might deserve to be used in this way.

It was weird—as the dawn light brightened during that long kiss they gradually transformed. That old guy and his crone actually began to appear younger and more beautiful than any beautiful young lovers.

I could hear roosters crowing. With that ominous sound ringing in my ears, I watched them achieve the beauty of brittle porcelain figures about to shatter as daybreak bathed them in rosy light. Until that moment I had never seen such a pure and beautiful kiss and I doubt I ever will again.

I pointed the blade of my knife at them and rose up.

Q: Why?

A: Because they were beautiful and real. That’s it. That’s why. I didn’t have a single other reason to kill them.

 

Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan.

From Yukio Mishima’s Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories, edited by Stephen Dodd, to be published by Vintage International in January.

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) was the author of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Sound of Waves, among many other novels. He committed ritual suicide in November 1970, after finishing the final novel of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy.

John Nathan is the Takashima Professor Emeritus of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; a translator of Japanese literature, including novels by Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe; and an Emmy Award–winning filmmaker. He is the author of Mishima: A Biography and Sōseki: Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist, among other books. 

Woodshop Diary

August 12, 2024

This new project is solid wood: a conductor’s podium and music stand for the symphony orchestra in a nearby city. It’s my first day back in the shop after six weeks in New England. C. gives me a hug on the way in. He shows me what I’ll be working on that day: enormous slabs of cherrywood, rough-sawn around the edges.

C.’s shop is on the smaller side: a single lot in a residential area. There’s a lot of natural light: thanks to an architect C. used to work with, the ceiling is spotted with circular skylights that magnify the sun’s light while muting its heat. Usually for carpentry jobs, I’m on a crew: between gigs as a boatbuilder and then as a house carpenter in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, I’ve worked on teams of as few as three and as many as thirty, both in shops and out on jobsites. In C.’s shop, it’s just the two of us all day between the machines, save for deliveries of wood, or C.’s wife popping in, and breaks for coffee and lunch in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston.

I met C. through my sponsor, and though C. wasn’t in recovery, he’d lost his brother to drugs. It was immediately clear we’d get along. C. is smart and kind with equal intensity, dark-haired, in his mid-forties, a self-taught furniture maker, trained as a classical guitarist. He doesn’t dress like your stereotypical tradesman: he wears casual pants rather than double-kneed dungarees, prefers sneakers to boots. He has an eye for beauty and a brain for processes. He’s precise, exacting, like any good furniture maker must be.

A milling day for me. Four legs made of three thirteen-by-seven-inch blocks, each two and a quarter inches thick. Taking rough-cut wood and milling it down is one of the most immediately satisfying tasks in a shop: using a jointer, a thickness planer, and various saws, you take an unwieldy, shaggy slab of wood and flatten it into squared blocks of workable beauty.

In the afternoon, we draw a sketch of the rest of the stand: a roughly four-by-four-foot platform made of four legs with interior and exterior bevels, connected by four skirt pieces, and a frame-style platform for the conductor to stand on. A piece of carpeted plywood will prevent the conductor’s feet from making too much noise on the podium. We’re also building a matching music stand for the sheet music to sit on. Drawing it, we kept asking each other, Does that angle look good to you? Don’t measure: It looks good, right? Draw it and use it, C. says, with his slight Texas twang.

August 14

Before cutting angles into the glued-up legs, we need to get them trimmed and squared. Because they’re so thick, we put the big blade on the sliding table saw—the biggest I’ve ever seen. When I kick it on, I can feel a breeze coming off it.

I have to use my hand to push the glued legs past the spinning blade—I’m afraid it’s going to cut my fingers off. Fear is a funny thing in a woodshop. It’s good to be afraid, to be aware of where your hand is in relation to the blade, but being too afraid is dangerous: your grip and push need to be steady. I breathe deep and move slow, listening to the wood push through the saw. There’s thinking involved: every face of each leg will have an angle cut into it, which is a challenge because you need a flat square edge to make these cuts. It’s a sort of puzzle. I make a jig to run the blocks through the table saw, cut off one inner face, take the offcut, tape it back to where it had been removed, flip the block, and cut the other inner face at the same angle.

Meanwhile, C. works on other projects. Goes into the yard behind the shop to throw peanuts and pecans to squirrels.

 

August 16

A mortise and tenon is simple: negative space and positive space coming together to hold two pieces in place. A slot is cut into one piece of material, the mortise: the negative space. Then material is shaped to fit into that hole: the tenon. This is how we’re going to join the skirt pieces of the stand to its legs. C.’s shop has a mortiser, a big, powerful piece of Italian machinery, like a horizontal drill press that cuts slots in the ends of the skirts and in the faces of the legs. Once it’s set up, I can clamp each of the pieces to the table and slowly run the spinning bit into the angled end-grain of the skirts and the angled interior faces of the legs. It’s slow going. I listen to all of the Cure’s Disintegration, Charli xcx’s Brat, and Outkast’s ATLiens on my headphones.

When I put the pieces together to see if they fit, the frame of the stand holds together, a skeleton version of what it will eventually become—a moment of genuine joy. But pulling the frame apart is another story: The tenons are just a little too thick, meaning we have to sand some material off them, if we can get them out of the mortises. Though C. and I both use all the muscle we have, we still can’t get a couple of them out of one of the skirts. We spend an hour with vise grips, hammers, clamps, and compressed air, trying to wiggle and bang the tenons out of place. When we finally get it clear, C. shows me his hand. His muscles have cramped so much that his fingers are stuck in a claw.

 

August 19

We load up our respective pickup trucks and drive to a museum a couple blocks away to deliver the desk we built for their entryway last spring. The door to an enormous loading dock opens. There’s a freight elevator at one end, a couple of offices on the other, space for us to assemble the desk, and about a dozen crates, ranging from large to very large.

It occurs to me later that the crates are full of art, likely millions of dollars’ worth, which is why there is another man in the corridor with us, not speaking, just watching us put the desk together. It’s Monday, so the museum is closed. When we’re done, the man watching finally speaks: You two will be able to come pull this thing apart and put it back together in the other building if we can’t get it over there in one piece, right? C. and I both wait for the cracked smile or the “I’m just busting your balls” wave-off, which never comes. After a couple beats, C. says, Well sure, yeah.

 

August 21

The hottest day of the year. At the lumberyard, we wander between separate hangars categorized by hardwoods, softwoods, sheet woods, and exotics. Men in polos pull up in big, clean F-150s and pick what they need or ask workers wearing hoodies in the hundred-degree heat to grab things for them. We end up with wenge, a dark, exotic hardwood from south-central Africa, and a sheet of pale Russian birch plywood. Both are difficult to source ethically—the latter in particular, since the invasion of Ukraine—but they’re the only options available within our time frame.

The cherry skirts, which we’ve cut into long trapezoids, will have an inlaid wenge border. Once the inlay channels are cut, I start milling the wenge. It turns out to have bright yellow streaks, not what we were looking for: most likely an issue due to storage in the lumberyard. After a lot of head-scratching, we decide to use them anyway. We’ll just have to dye them black.

 

August 23

I think about my father, who died by suicide thirteen years ago this week. Wonder about how he felt in the kitchens where he worked. The stories he told over the sound of steel pounding wooden cutting boards.

 

August 28

I start school again this week, so I’m coming in only on Wednesdays and Fridays. I find myself missing the work, feeling disappointed returning to the shop and seeing that little things have moved forward without me moving them. C. is always careful to show me exactly what he’s done and exactly how he did it, to tell me about his failures and confusions and fuckups.

Today: lots of hand-tooling, very few machines, hand-planing, sanding. Then lots of taping and gluing. After a while, some more hand-planing and sanding. We’re making slow but important progress, fine-tuning.

Today, we talk about anger. I tell him about an old boss who threw a chop saw off a roof in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two coworkers who got into a fistfight at a client’s house after one sneezed in the other’s face. C. tells me about someone at work saying, full of rage, “Unfortunately, we’ve been lamenting the tamale situation lately.” We laugh. Somehow the conversation shifts, and I’m asking C. about how his brother died, what led to his overdose. He answers my questions, tells me the story. I explain how my father relapsed—first on booze, then on pills after a car accident—before he died. Because we’re sanding and making such fine dust, we turn off the big fans. Just the sound of high grit on hardwood and our voices.

 

September 4

Almost every carpenter and woodworker I’ve ever worked with was a skater at some point in their life. I don’t know if it’s because the mentality of skateboarding is similar to the one needed for working with wood: comfort in solitude and pleasure in like-minded groups, fierce perfectionism and self-criticism, a pull toward things that can hurt you, an attention to beauty and procedure. C. and I tell each other stories about slams we’ve seen and taken, talk about the up-and-coming skaters who are doing things beyond belief.

I miss Friday work to give a poetry reading in Austin. When I get back, C. tells me the conductor stand came together easily. We still have to make the music stand. Another milling day, which is a relief after the complicated cutting of the previous weeks. I find that if I miss a whole week of work, I come into the shop with a little more fear, which is probably good: I want to keep all my fingers.

Milling the cherry wood, revealing its gorgeous, watery grain, I remember my friends yelling at one another to “just commit” at the tops of ledges and three sets—back when we were young and couldn’t get hurt.

 

September 11

I usually zone out when C. talks about finishing: a crucial but unsexy part of woodworking. When I was building boats in coastal Maine, brushing on the coat of oil was always the least interesting part of the process to me. But when C. puts some stain samples on the cherry, he has my attention: with one coat of clear polyurethane, the shimmering grain gains even more depth and sparkle.

When he puts a piss-yellow stain on another piece, it looks horrible, comically bad, but C. tells me to trust the process. An hour later, he sprays the poly over the yellow stain. The cherry grain below pops with a greater contrast than I’d thought possible. It is gorgeous. All the weaving and waving dark grain leaping against the lighter wood, no longer yellow but a deep orange brown.

Not too much machinery running today. We talk a lot. With the gray sky, it’s hard to get going. An old teacher told me the secret to woodworking is simple: make the right line, and cut to it. It’s the kind of day when the pencil line pulls away from the ruler.

 

September 13

I’m working on another book of poems and a book of prose. Sometimes I feel guilty that, in the middle of a conversation or a moment of beauty in the shop, my impulse is to write it down for a story, for an image. To use it. And then I do or don’t—and I keep working.

 

September 18

Gluing veneer sheets to the flat plywood face is the most stressful part of a veneer job. Glue, by nature, is both tacky and slick. For the music stand, we’re using hide glue, as opposed to wood glue, because it’s more stable: the piece is less likely to warp. Hide glue is an animal product, and smells an awful lot like roadkill. Rolling it over the cherry veneer and then over the plywood clears the sinuses. It doesn’t feel unpleasant to me—sort of like sniffing Magic Markers, gasoline, or PVC primer, though without the high.

I spend the morning grain-matching thin sheets of cherry veneer, joining their edges flat, and laying them out so that, to the untrained eye, the large plywood sheet will pass for solid wood. The veneering process is precise and relaxing. It’s satisfying as all hell when the seam between two pieces disappears: a little daily magic trick.

 

September 20

C. texts me a picture of the veneer over the weekend to show me that it dried beautifully.

The last complicated step: adding some wenge inlay and a cherry edge border to hide the plywood edges. The result will be a cherry face, a thin line of dark wenge, another inch or so of cherry bordered by another thin line of wenge, and a final one- inch border of cherry. All the corners are mitered, two forty-five-degree angles coming together to make a square corner. It’s the kind of job that doesn’t feel totally right until suddenly things are done. But when everything comes together glued up and gorgeous, C. and I both smile and run our fingers over the smooth face.

About two hours into the inlay process, C. realizes that the music stand will be used only for rehearsals: only the conductor and the stagehands will see what we’re working on. We laugh in a sort of sad way.

 

September 25

The stand’s base is built hollow so a piece of wood can be slid up and down to adjust the stand to various heights. We have to fasten the face to that piece so its angle can be adjusted too. For this, we use silver and brass hardware. The gold of the brass blends with the amber orange of the cherry swirl, a little accent of glamour.

 

October 2

The symphony hall is about three hours away through Texas Hill Country. We take off at 7 A.M., while the Houston sky burns off its orange into the pale yellow that I’ve been waking up to in the summer months. C. and I now have the friendship that comes from this kind of work: it’s more than just enjoying each other’s company and stories but an understanding of how someone’s mind works. It’s something of a mutual flow state, knowing what he’ll need next, what he’ll already have prepared for me. No music on the car ride, just conversation.

At the request of the symphony, we used gold carpet on the podium’s flat platform rather than the normal red. It looked odd in the shop, but in the symphony hall, it makes sense. The hall is grander than I’d expected. Its pale gold walls welcome our amber-burning wood. With the stage manager, we move the stand and the podium into place. The guy laughs at me and C. when we say we’ve never stepped onto the finished podium. So we do, stepping off and on for a few minutes, in front of a few thousand empty seats.

 

Kelan Nee is a carpenter, and poet from Massachusetts. His debut collection Felling was released in May 2024 by and was the winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller prize. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the Yale Review, Adroit Journal and elsewhere. He lives in Houston where he is a PhD candidate in critical poetics and the Editor of Gulf Coast Journal.

Rouen’s Municipal Library, 1959–1964 (or, The Formative Years)

Rouen. Photograph by Jorge Láscar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In France, the public library is a revolutionary inheritance in quite a literal sense. At the end of the eighteenth century, thousands of books and manuscripts were seized from nobles, convents, and monasteries, and they needed a place to be housed. The municipal library of Rouen, France, inaugurated on July 4, 1809, formed part of this history of democratized access to knowledge. Initially, however, it was open to the public only from ten to two, and not on Sundays—the only day working-class people had off. As a result, for a long time its patrons comprised a largely elite and intellectual milieu. Gustave Flaubert, for instance, spent many hours there. It was in Rouen’s municipal library that he took notes on ancient Carthage for Salammbô; it was where he read up on eighteenth-century philosophy, magnetism, Celtic monuments, and other topics for his unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet. A century later, having moved down the street to a belle epoque building that also houses Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, the library played a significant part in Annie Ernaux’s intellectual development, too. As she explores in this short essay, first published in French in 2021, to Ernaux the library represented the emancipatory possibilities of literature, though also the more opaque and oppressive codes of bourgeois culture. Class conflict, shame, ambition, hunger, imagination, the politics of knowledge—the kindling that fuels Ernaux’s writings—were all ignited by her early encounters at the public library of Rouen.

—Victoria Baena

If it hadn’t been for a philosophy classmate at the Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc, I never would have entered the municipal library. I wouldn’t have dared. I vaguely assumed it was open only to university students and professors. Not at all, my classmate told me, everyone’s allowed in, you can even settle down and work there. It was winter. When I would return after class to my closet-size room in the Catholic girls’ dorm, I found it gloomy and awfully chilly. Going to a café was out of the question, I didn’t have any money. The thought of working on my philosophy essays, surrounded by books, somewhere that was surely well heated, was an appealing prospect. The first time I entered the municipal library, at once shy and determined, I suppose, I was struck by the silence, by the sight of people reading or writing as they sat at long rows of tables pushed together and overhung by lamps. I was struck by its hushed and studious atmosphere, which had something religious about it. There was that very particular smell—a little like incense—which I would rediscover later, elsewhere, in other venerable libraries. A sanctuary that required treading cautiously, almost on tiptoe: the opposite of the commotion and confusion of the lycée. An impressive and severe world of knowledge. I didn’t know its rituals, which I had to learn: how to consult the card catalogue, separated into “Authors” and “Subjects”; how to record the call numbers accurately; how to deposit the card into a basket, before waiting, occasionally a long time, sometimes shorter, for the requested book. I got into the habit of coming to the library regularly and writing my philosophy essays there. In the age of the internet, one can no longer imagine the pleasure of opening a drawer, handling dozens of index cards, deciphering them—some were handwritten—and rifling through the titles before taking a risk on one of them. Then, finally, the surprise of encountering the book I had requested, with its particular shape and cover. To tackle the immortality of the soul, I took out the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Its large bound volumes dated to the prewar years and might not have been opened since then. It was exhilarating. Seated among readers whom I identified as professors or experienced students, I was sometimes seized with a feeling of illegitimacy, even if this quickly ebbed. With a certain measure of pride, I felt myself becoming an “intellectual.”

After my baccalaureate my attendance at the Rouen library abated, the result of a significant year that I spent partly in England. But at the end of October 1960, having enrolled in preparatory classes at the faculty of letters (a severe barrier to entry for higher education), I rediscovered it with immense pleasure. It hadn’t changed. The students, clutching bibliographies provided by the professors, descended on the library records upon leaving their first class. I too was eager to hurry up and borrow as many of the recommended works as possible, in order to catch up on the year I had lost. I was bulimic for knowledge. I considered the professors merely guides, since the bulk of the work, which consisted of reading the primary texts and criticism, was up to me. Suffice it to say that the library held a crucial place in my schedule. But the first day I was reunited with the library, there was a setback: construction was about to begin and would last three years, the reading room was to be moved elsewhere. I had a vision of an infinite expanse of time, into which I projected myself, asking: What will I have become three years from now? What will we have become? The “events” continued in Algeria. I had chosen my side: independence.

It is that temporary reading room which I remember most clearly. You could access it from the Place Restout, through a small door located around the side of the building. A staircase led to a sort of antechamber—was it on the first floor, or the second?—where an imposing statue of a seated woman arose from a pedestal, her feet just within reach. Thus some mischievous visitor or another would be tempted to slip a cigarette between her toes, where it would remain for some time. On the left was the long, narrow, high-ceilinged reading room, lined with respectable paintings. I think there were three double rows of tables facing one another; you could easily gauge how busy each was by glancing around upon arrival. The entrance, with the librarians’ counter and the card index, was on a raised platform set apart from the rest of the reading room. One of my most powerful and visceral memories is of going up and down those steps to the counter,  hundreds of times.

One after another, a series of severe ladies (ladies whom my twenty-year-old self characterized as being “of a certain age”) would go up to the counter. This was where the book request forms would be deposited, before being scooped up by two employees. It was their job to fetch the books from the stacks, which were not only mysterious but also quite distant, to judge by the time they took to return (with or without the desired book in hand). I remember the note scribbled on the form—“checked out”—which would throw me into consternation. With “removed,” at least some hope remained. The two staff members, who were dressed in navy blue uniforms (did we call them guards? assistants? clerks?) played an important role in the daily practices of the library. They were the ones we dealt with, the ones we accused of dawdling or even of going for a drink between trips to the stacks. I remember those employees most clearly, compared to the rest of the library staff: both were small, one brown-haired, skinny and red-faced, reserved; the other was plump, with thin hair, his blue eyes washing out his fat face. He was always cheerfully familiar—some of the women said he was lewd.

The readers consisted mainly of students from the faculty of letters, then located on the rue Beauvoisine, and the faculty of law, on the rampe Bouvreuil, both of which were very close by. Students from privileged social backgrounds (with the exception of a small number of scholarship holders—I was one of them), for whom the sum allocated by the state was enough to live on without having to work on the side. In the library you rarely saw the many students who were employed as monitors. A few unusual characters haunted the place: like that one man in his thirties, dressed in a long coat which he never took off and carrying an empty bottle, which he would place at his feet or at the entrance to one of the faculty’s classrooms, no matter the discipline, having noted down all the courses being offered, line by line, in his notebook.

Naturally, the library was the stage for subtle games of seduction—more refined than in other student haunts—whose main strategy consisted of claiming a seat next to or opposite the desired person. A complicated operation, and one contingent on the room’s often extremely tight occupancy.

On the surface, the political realities of the outside world didn’t find their way in.. But we did learn that the sudden disappearance of a history student was because he had reached the end of his military deferment and had been sent to Algeria. We knew which groups of students were sympathetic to the OAS.¹ 

Social realities were invisible, too. When I wasted my time whispering and chatting with my table companions, thinking about the boy sitting across from me or glancing over at him, I would feel guilty afterward. The shelter I found in this place and its books was an illusion. Unlike my parents, I didn’t “work with my hands.” If I didn’t pass my exams, they wouldn’t “feed me to do nothing,” as they put it, and I would have to get a job, whatever that might be. But my ambition was to pass the agrégation and to write. This desire had come to me between high school and college, during that time of uncertainty about my future that I had spent in London as an au pair. I began writing a novel in the fall of 1962, while preparing the final two certificates that would grant me a bachelor’s degree in modern literature. A university residence for female students had opened on rue d’Herbouville. Nothing like this had existed before, which says a lot about the intellectual esteem in which girls were held at the time. I got a room there, happy to no longer need to commute between Yvetot and Rouen. During the two years that followed, I grew and evolved within this circumscribed area of Rouen, a sort of magic triangle whose angles were composed of the residence on rue d’Herbouville, the faculty on rue Beauvoisine, and the library. My novel was rejected by Éditions du Seuil. I got my degree and began a master’s thesis. It was about women and love in surrealism. It stood out in the academic landscape of the time, but above all I faced the difficult task of finding texts by Breton, Aragon, Desnos. Nadja, Paris Peasant, The Libertine—none had been reissued, and they were not available at the library. But in the weeks before the temporary reading room closed, what I was most eager to consult were medical journals. Journals on a taboo subject: abortion. I still have the reference, scribbled in a notebook: “J. Desbordes. Surgical and Medical Records, Normandy, January 1953, Norm – mm. 1065.” I wrote about this in Happening.

In February 1964, I found the new library transformed, now with a bright, modern aesthetic, with separate tables and an elevator. I felt slightly disoriented there, and transitory, too, since I would have to leave for Bordeaux at the end of the academic year. I have no strong memories of the few months I spent there.

Whenever I return to Rouen, if I happen to pass in front of the library and see the small, sealed door on the Place Restout, I think of the statue in that long, sealed room, and of all the hours I spent there. I am certain that they were among the most intense and decisive of my life.

 

1. The Organisation armée secrète (Secret Armed Organization), a far-right paramilitary group founded in the early sixties, which engaged in violent attacks and assassinations in both Algeria and France in an attempt to prevent Algerian independence.

 

Translated from the French by Victoria Baena.

This essay originally appeared in La Bibliothèque de Rouen: 200 ans d’histoire(s), edited by Marie-Françoise Rose.

Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Victoria Baena is a literary historian, a critic, and a research fellow in English and modern languages at the University of Cambridge.

New Poetry: Margaret Ross, Nora Claire Miller, and Richie Hofmann Recommend

Photographs courtesy of Nora Claire Miller.

Whenever I open the fridge, the same poem falls off the door: “you against the green screen, a place / without history,” from Tracy Fuad’s collection about:blank.

The poem is printed on a postcard, and it has been falling off my fridge for over a year now. I sometimes think about moving it or using a better magnet. But I like that the postcard can be dislodged easily. Wherever the poem falls, the surface it lands on—linoleum floor, grocery bag, shoe—becomes its own green screen, its own substance disconnected from time.

Each month, I get two copies of a new letterpress-printed poem in an envelope—one to keep and one to send, according to Kate Gibbel, the editor of the Vermont-based Send Me Press. Founded in 2021, SMP only sells two things on their website: postcards, and a bumper sticker that says I LOVE POEMS. I’ve sent a few of the duplicate postcards to friends, but I usually forget, so there are two copies of lots of poems around my house. I like to place the postcards situationally. I put a poem by Liam O’Brien on the kitchen table. “cold salt    hot little hand,” I say to myself every time I grab the salt. I have a poem by Micky Bayonne propped beside a lava lamp: “I buried into the fissure, the glow! / How could I not be drawn in? Spun down?” There’s also a copy in my car. The fissure, the glow! I think often as I drive, my car yelling I LOVE POEMS at the world.

Recently I drove to visit Kate while she was printing. I watched her pick up each metal letter and arrange them on a tray. It takes many hours of work to typeset a poem like this, print the copies on the giant press, and then to cut the postcards, address and stamp each envelope, and mail them out.

I sometimes ask Kate if she’d ever consider switching to a less tedious way of making postcards. But Kate always says no. Like the poem that keeps falling off my fridge, the time it takes is the whole point.

—Nora Claire Miller

Enjambment makes music but it can be an instrument of metaphysics too. Read “it was broke / Before they made the avenue” and you’re situated in a certain period, “Zigzag so you couldn’t cruise” and you’re in another moment altogether. Still, the era of no-avenue endures on that previous line.

I’m quoting from a new book of poetry by Gabriel Palacios, A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign, which floats and cuts with vertiginous acuity through stuff piled around the Southwest. In Palacios’s poems, sublime lyric density is a means of perception, a form of infrared. It reveals specificities I want to call enjambed images. I don’t mean descriptions spanning several lines of verse. I mean images that fuse different surfaces and compact time: “My child’s eyeball strobic in the wide-brimmed hatted / death’s head given placard.”

Time never progresses, it accrues in place (“Like anaphylaxis, additional mornings / did ensue”), and Palacios’s verse extrudes the spectral accumulations. I’m moved by how he writes about ancestors, past selves, scarred public space. Two sequences orbit seraphs and holographs, incandescent unphotographs, and imperial nostalgias like the neon ruins of the Spanish Trail Motel. Interacting scales of menace emerge elliptically: “this creditor / in sequined ball cap,” “Colonial geometry,” “Dumb police,” “Sinaloa / deathshanty of desiccated shrimp boats,” “A pivotal murder on your mother’s side / Changed by the telling.” Thinking in this book is no abstract process; every poem is full of things. Part of the work’s power lies in Palacios’s subtle sense of metonymy, the shrewd and often funny way he glosses details, making us see something sharp and discrete while feeling something vast and ambient. “Airport parking annexes rewild / To an amplitude of green Big Paint would call / Antiquity.” “Aesthetically speaking / You smell smoke here.”

—Margaret Ross

 

 

Emily Jungmin Yoon’s first collection of poems explores the intersections of public and personal histories—forging a harrowing art out of the words of Korean “comfort women” and their narratives of sexual violence during and in the aftermath of World War II. In her second collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, Yoon’s gaze is turned to intimacy. To highlight her interest in our shared “creatureliness,” she includes a host of nonhuman animals in the poems, often as figures for our animal needs and desires. In the opening poem, “What Carries Us,” she writes: “Imagine love as a horse. // Think about us—a distance / apart only a flying thing could connect us— // standing and pacing, tamed and watching, // then finally with each other, laughing, / as if to collapse, unbridled as wild horses.” Distance and connection, the human and the animal, stillness and transit, joy and collapse—these are the tensions that run throughout the collection. In another poem, occasioned in part by the statement that there is not “ ‘an eco-friendly’ way to swim with dolphins,” the speaker declares, “We do not have to touch everything we love.” Yoon is an expert at cataloguing horrors: climate change, natural disasters, a ceaseless predilection for violence, racism, and intolerance, the pain of migration. But there’s wonder and beauty here too. The book’s most arresting moments are quiet scenes between people, scenes of parting and of goodbyes, in elegies for grandparents, and in proper love poems. It includes some of the most beautiful wedding vows I’ve ever read, a charming poem about friendship among poets, and another about looking to the constellations, about feeling lonely and small, but being in the world together. Her poems are a space where these realities can co-linger, can be weighed and contemplated. Cynicism never blots out the marvels; the marvels, in turn, never obscure the world of threat we all belong to. They are, in Yoon’s book, part of moving—down the page of the poem, or forward into the future—closer to the creatures we are. “In all the futures I am capable of prayer for,” she writes, “you are not alone—you are alive.”

—Richie Hofmann

Six Handbags

Photographs courtesy of the author.

The big one was too big. And the little one? The little one was too little.

I was looking for something in a place where it was impossible to find what I was looking for. I was in an Acne Studios store in Tokyo looking for a “work bag,” and I was delusional. A handbag that costs more than $1,500, made from the skin of an Italian baby cow, does not need to account for the dimensions of a thirteen-inch MacBook. It does not need to work for a living, commute via subway, or fly Spirit Airlines. It is a thing of fantasy. If I were truly searching for utility, I would use a tote bag.

The “work bag” was an excuse. What I really wanted was not a work bag or even a handbag but a portal to a glamour so total it could engulf me. I know from both advertisements and experience that there are many such portals. But entry requires preparation and research.

A lot of people are obsessed with bags. They talk, vlog, and post about them on the internet. But in real life, it is uncouth to talk about designer bags. It is couth only to have one appear on your arm and, when someone asks about how much it cost, to be nonchalant. I have trouble being nonchalant. I am usually flustered. I deflect, I stress how much of a discount I got. I worry people will think I am shallow, or that I have more money than I do. I just love design, I say, and even I am not convinced.

This is how I found myself in an Acne Studios store, looking for a portal.

 

 

1. Acne Studios Musubi Midi Shoulder Bag

The portal is shaped like a square. It is made of a firm, matte leather that gives it structure but lets it remain pleasingly slouchy, as if aware that it should not try too hard. A wide strap allows it to be carried over the shoulder, or, on a small enough person, draped across the body. I’ve decided on the one that is too big, the Midi, sacrificing cuteness for utility. The strap and the bag intersect miraculously in a Japanese obi knot, the kind used to tie a sash around a kimono. When I touch it, I sense every Acne photo shoot, celebrity endorsement, and runway show lacquered onto its leather, invisible to the eye but humming below the surface.

As the sales associate walks me through the bag’s features, I pretend that it is my first time hearing about them. I pretend I have not already spent hours with the bag on YouTube, that I have not gone to see it twice in person in New York, that I have not researched its lower price abroad, and that I have not purchased it once and returned it, finding its beauty—and my financial justification for it–too tenuous. She says it was released in 2018. I smile, knowing it was released in 2017. I pay $1,400, a hundred less than I might have in the U.S., for the bag.

After I bring it home, I am lightheaded. Then I am nauseous. I used to be a normal person. Now I am this kind of person. This is an irresponsible use of my book advance, I think. Do I deserve this? Does anyone? I lean close to the bag and inhale. I remember that the leather is baby-cow skin. I smell the earth, animal mortality, and the moment of my financial trauma.

I transfer my water bottle, thirteen-inch MacBook, and wallet from my old bag—a humble backpack–to the Musubi. It cannot fit my gym clothes or the novel that I am reading, but I understand now that I have been going about this all wrong. I’ve been looking for a bag that can fit my life. I should be looking for a life that can fit into my bag. I do not need to read, to go to the gym. I need only what will fit inside the portal.

My life feels now more supple, more powerful, more sleek. But I also feel embarrassed, like a snake slithering at the feet of the Acne executives, duped. When I bring the bag to a faculty meeting at the university where I teach the next day, I do not see my coworkers, only their bags. A tote bag asks about my summer break. A sensible backpack gives me a hug. A briefcase hands me an agenda. I blush involuntarily, feeling lavish. I am the most extraordinary, most beautiful, most fragile thing in the room.

 

 

2. Balenciaga Superbusy Small Sling Bag

I see my friend Jeeu for drinks. She is also a bag person, so she knows that with every bag comes a story. I tell her I bought the last Musubi in Tokyo, and that it was for the memory. I was on vacation. It has been already very useful, I insist. There is wisdom, and pity, in her eyes.

When it is time to pay, she pulls a credit card out of a specially made holster on a shiny black leather bag I have never seen before. I tell her she really buried the lede. She hands it to me for inspection. It is a baroque version of a work bag, a shoulder bag covered in small pockets for keys, lip gloss, and credit cards but also for AirPods, a flip phone, and a ballpoint pen. It is cancerous with utility yet, in its excess of pockets and compartments, has nothing to do with the economical, only with the cute. In its orbit, I see a parody of my own life. Always so busy, so full of stuff. With what? the Superbusy seems to say. You are so silly, it says.

That night in bed I watch videos about bags. I find one video on the Superbusy, in a size bigger than the one I want, from a hardcore Balenciaga enthusiast with the username gallucks. Across the thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds of “what’s in my BALENCIAGA bag ?,” gallucks zips and unzips its diverse assortment of pockets. “It’s basically got, like, a million pockets,” he says, holding it up to his face. “Which is probably why it’s the best bag ever to do a ‘what’s in my bag’ for.” He slings it over his shoulder and leans into its slouchy shape. He positions his arm in a V, contorting his body into a cute position. The bag’s zippers sound satisfyingly loud, portending heavy metal hardware.

I feel that the bag crystallizes the Balenciaga ethos of subculture, irony, and high fashion, and I want it. The Musubi, only a few months old, sits forlorn by my bed, its charm already dulled by acquisition. The iPhone looms over my face; it is the only light in the room. After I watch the video several times, I scroll through the rest of gallucks’s oeuvre to look for mentions of the bag and I find another vlog uploaded two years later, titled “nyc shopping with my boyfriend.” The bag appears again at 14:41 and 24:50. A few months later, I find the bag on a European resale website on sale for 20 percent off. I buy the Superbusy.

 

 

3. Miu Miu Leather Beau Bag (Yiguoluxe Version)

After much deliberation, my friend Alberto has also just purchased his first designer bag. It is a Miu Miu Leather Beau Bag. It is a thing of masculinity, made fey with soft leather and the brand’s logo embossed on the side. It has a simple handle long enough to sling over a shoulder but also short enough to carry in your hand. The bag’s boxiness can be complemented with colorful, childlike charms.

I want it too, I realize. But I can’t justify getting another bag so soon.

Online, I read about the rise of superfakes. The industry is largely sustained by Chinese housewives looking for supplemental income. They serve as salespeople for factories in China, liaising with individual overseas buyers over WhatsApp. They often know little about the bags’ production itself, in order to keep the supply chains safe from discovery. They manage entire empires from their phones.

Yet the gender and background of my salesperson is entirely up to my imagination. Their username is listed only as “Yiguoluxe.” All our business is conducted over WhatsApp. Their profile picture is of a handbag.

Through a link, I can see the newest wares from the Yiguoluxe factory. The hands that model the bags are slender, with finely painted nails, but they also seem to change with every bag. The list of available bags updates every few days. When I check the list a week later and cannot find where it ended last time for all the new additions, I feel dizzy.

It is the unintellectual thing to valorize the real over the fake, I tell myself. So I message Yiguoluxe. My messages consist of screenshots of bags that I am intrigued by, at first from runways and then, as I become more fluent in the ways of the superfake business, from the website that lists the company’s available wares. Yiguoluxe replies with prices. One time, I ask about a different bag and inexplicably receive a response in Spanish:

“Este producto esta temporalmente agotado.”

I imagine a woman sitting on an ornately carved wooden chair, her feet up on a table, French-tipped nails clacking away at her phone. I imagine a man in sweat shorts and an oversized T-shirt, typing to me through one of several desktops.

I look at the listing for the Miu Miu bag online ($3,850) and then at the one on Yiguoluxe ($139). I sigh and message that I would like to purchase it and ask what the next steps are. They tells me it will take nine to twelve business days for the bag to arrive from overseas. I am sent a PayPal link. While I wait, I become unsure about the bag’s quality.

“Is the bag close to original quality?” I message.

“Yes, they are all 1:1 high quality. We all make original molds and patterns at the counter.”

“They’re all made from first-layer cowhide,” they continue. Then they send a video.

In what looks like a small closet, hides of shiny black leather hang off a metal shelf. Behind the leather are other, folded hides, in blue and dark green. The floor is beige tile and the walls are off-white. As the camera moves, the hides glisten under the flat fluorescent light. Their edges are erratic but organic-looking, and I try to imagine what parts of the cow they may have originated from. A pale hand rubs a hide between its fingers.

The video neither reassures me about nor dissuades me from my purchase. I suspect Yiguoluxe sends it generically to many of their clients.

“Oh wow, great, thank you,” I write, and I follow up quickly. “What about the hardware?”

“Overall, it’s all good,” they write back.

“Ok this is my first time so I just curious,” I reply.

“It will definitely satisfy you. ”

 

 

4. Bottega Veneta Cassette Mini Belt Bag (Yiguoluxe version)

Over the next year, I acclimate to the lives each of the bags requires of me. I find I reach for the Superbusy a lot, even though it cannot fit a book or a laptop. It is made of Arena lambskin, which is hardier than the Musubi’s calfskin. While the Musubi demands, by its material, to remain pristine, wear and tear add to the charm of the Superbusy’s subcultural mystique. They all make me inordinately happy—except the Miu Miu (Yiguoluxe version), which I still regard with suspicion. Having compared it to Alberto’s I know that it is almost indistinguishable from the real, but I still fixate on the way the zipper catches, or how the light seems to strike the leather in an unsatisfactory way. The real, it is said, speaks for itself, but the fake is always performing its authenticity. This anxiety sets it up to make mistakes.

I am embarrassed to carry it, and when I do, I wear it with the Miu Miu logo facing my body. Acne was my gateway into expensive brands, one that I could rationalize with its art-world adjacency. With a fake Miu Miu, I am squarely in the realm of class drag, of status symbol, the unjustifiable.

I return to the vloggers. Buying one, even three, bags did not sate my desire, I’ve found, but fracture it into a thousand new forms. I rewatch “what’s in my BALENCIAGA bag ?” and “nyc shopping with my boyfriend” like comforting reruns. I notice new videos have been uploaded and I compare the images of the bag with the one in my room.

I turn to the internet for reflection. “I cannot stop myself from buying handbags,” violeturq says in a January 26, 2016, post on Purseforum with the title “What causes an addiction to handbags?” She continues: “I’ve realized it’s a real addiction I have, but for the life of me, I cannot work out what’s behind it. I now have so many bags that I’m starting to fill up yet another wardrobe in yet another bedroom.” The members of Purseforum rush to commiserate with her. They share this inexplicable affliction. Their search for the “perfect bag” (which they acknowledge doesn’t exist) is detrimental, and understandable, but maybe she should also consider the possibility of a genetic predisposition towards addiction (“For my grandpa, it is alcohol. For my dad, he collects lot of junk -> sinks, pipes, tools, anything for home improvement. For me, I used to collect dvds/ movies, coupons, and now handbags/ slgs”). The replies go on for five pages, and lead to suggestions for scores of other blogs asking the same question. Some become very zen, reflecting on the unending nature of desire.

I close my laptop. Leaving my apartment to pick up takeout, I grab my keys and wallet and phone, and I look at my bags. Every one of them looks too big for the task. I now have a real big bag (Musubi), a real medium bag (Superbusy), and a fake medium bag (Miu Miu) but nothing small. I walk out holding my belongings in my hands, like a lunatic, and I mourn the lost opportunity to cherish something tiny.

Instagram algorithmically feeds me a small crossbody bag of interwoven leather strips from Bottega Veneta. As a brand, BV feels vaguely Mediterranean and vaguely aristocratic. I find its silhouettes generally too preppy for my liking. But this one is plain, rectangular, and black with a practical strap. TikTok algorithmically feeds me influencers who tell me that it will fit an iPhone 15, keys, a wallet, and even my headphones. It has no branding other than its design, and even my boyfriend, a normal person, approves.

The fashion TikTokers say that they do not regret paying $1,200 for it. I catch myself thinking, Oh, that’s not that bad, and I wonder who I have become. When I go to Boston to visit my boyfriend, I tell him I am going on a run, and I do go on a run, but I also stop by the Bottega Veneta store to try the bag on my body. In the store, I feel more winded than I do on my run, and when I put it on my body I feel a sense of wholeness. I also feel the smoothness of the leather; I slip my hand between the intrecciato weave to test its constitution. I fixate on the way the sales associate’s tongue trips gracefully when she says in-tre-cci-ato, as if it were a rare gem.

Back at the apartment, I open WhatsApp. A test drive, I say. A dress rehearsal, I say. You are so silly, the Superbusy says.

I order the Bottega Veneta Cassette from Yiguoluxe, for fifty dollars. When it arrives, I take it out of the box. I peer into its surface, trying to discern any outward manifestations of its fakery. The cowskin is dull, it is not supple as it was on the real. It has a rank, chemical smell. The woven leather strips feel loose when I pull them. The strap is stiff and retains a kink from its packaging that bothers me. My suspicions return.

The bag is still lacking something. I think: It is lacking trauma. I have experienced no financial pain in obtaining it, and I feel that I cannot recognize the bag’s love without the sting of sacrifice. Though I know the leather is real, I wonder: Did this bag come from a fake cow, in a fake pasture, with fake grass?

What is the exact texture of this fakeness, and what does it mean for my sense of reality? Online, I read an article about a man named Dominik Halás, who is master authenticator for the luxury vintage resale site the RealReal, and I decide to DM him, for research.

I meet Dominik at the Blue Bottle near the World Trade Center. He wears head-to-toe Yohji Yamamoto: a flowy black blazer; puffy Bermuda-length pants; and a blue shirt. He has a scruffy beard and blue eyes, and he is surprisingly young, just over thirty, if that.

He works at a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and he grew up in the New Jersey suburbs. He went to Brown, where he studied art history and architecture. He tells me he considers his primary life drive making his mother, an immigrant from Slovakia, proud. He says his role at the RealReal is his first full-time, salaried job. This job consists of assessing garments when they arrive, delegating the easier authentications to his team and picking out the most difficult garments for himself. He cross-references archival runway photographs, video, and occasionally manufacturing data, but much of his job is very subjective–it often involves smelling the garment, rubbing it between his fingers, assessing its textures.

I sip my tea.

I ask him what he thinks the purpose of the “real” is, and how it operates practically at his job.

“Well,” he says. “I think of it as preserving an artist’s legacy,” he says. “These are designers I admire, and I want them to have a legacy that is cohesive and true to what they intended,” he says. “It’s also a very subjective process that has me meld research with physical evidence.”

He offers to take me downtown to demonstrate. We walk to the designer vintage store Superette, where his girlfriend, an art history student at NYU, is working. He swipes through the racks quickly and identifies a red heavy-knit sweater and pulls it out.

“This,” he tells his girlfriend.

She gasps. “But …” She pauses. “You know who brought that in?”

We wait.

“Halsey. Why would Halsey bring in a fake?”

Dominik shrugs, and turns the red sweater inside out. He finds the manufacturer’s tag and rolls it between his index finger and thumb.

“Real LV will have a smooth feel when you do this,” he says. “But this one is rough, it catches,” he says.

I pull the tag, as he did. I peer into the knit of the red sweater, and I think of my BV bag. I look around me, at the store, at the garments, at Dominik and his girlfriend.

“You never know anymore,” the girlfriend says, and puts the sweater back on the rack.

 

 

5. Bottega Veneta Cassette Mini Belt Bag

A year later, I buy a real one, used, for roughly $500, as a graduation gift for my boyfriend. We will share. I rub the papery leather between my fingers. I feel aristocratic, Italian, absurd, but at peace. I bring the cowskin up to my nose, to my own skin. My sense of reality is restored.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin writes: “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag … then I am a human being after all.”

 

 

6. Balenciaga Le City Bag, circa 2011

I carry the Musubi for work, the Cassette for pleasure, and the Superbusy everywhere else. The fake bags sit in my closet. By touching each portal’s skin, I am elevated briefly to another plane, yet each touch also conjures the personal history of mania that led to its acquisition. Three years after my first purchase, I feel like a veteran of so many dopamine desire and fulfillment cycles. My desire for bags is earthly, human, and symbolic for all that can never be sated in my life. My desire might only be extinguished with years of Buddhist meditation practices, I think, practices that will gradually lead me to an Enlightenment free from bags.

Or I will admit that the chase is half the pleasure, and just buy used from eBay. I find a used Balenciaga Le City Bag for $350. My venture into archival design makes me feel like my collecting practice is (a) a practice and (b) developing depth and idiosyncrasy. Unlike the Balenciaga, the Miu Miu, or the Bottega, this bag has a design that remained popular from its release in 2001. When Balenciaga rereleases the bag a month later, I feel like I have beat a trend. I wonder if I might settle down.

The leather on this Balenciaga bag is slouchier even than the Superbusy’s, but the bag is more capacious. This portal is shaped like a rectangle. It has two top handles and burnished metal hardware. It sags dramatically when carried, the leather crinkled with age. It has two iron studs affixed to its front side that resemble eyes or alien bone. It fits a laptop and a water bottle, and I can return to the gym.

The leather is faded. There are stretch marks and patches that look like friction burns. I remember again that leather is skin. Using a moisturizer and gloves, I slowly massage the cream into the surface, moving in soft, upward circles, as I have learned from my own skincare regimen. I buff the cream with a small towel and then apply an additional layer of wax, kneading it into the cracks. When it is dry, I hang it in my closet for later use. Some days, I carry it with nothing inside at all.

 

Simon Wu is a writer and an artist. He is the author of the essay collection Dancing on My Own.

Passion, Jealousy, Love, and an Unquestionable Disdain for Art

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, in books that are coming out this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope (Polity):

Acting out of fear is not a way of acting that supports a sustainable future, which would require a meaningful horizon and action that forms part of a narrative. Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech.

From Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest is Silence (NYRB), translated by Aaron Kerner:

From the moment I saw it this letter drove me to reflect on the depths concealed by its apparent frivolity. What do we have here? I asked myself. Passion, jealousy, love, and an unquestionable disdain for art? Does this woman, I thought, actually lack an understanding of art? Is she incapable of appreciating anything beyond a bit of embroidery, an apple pie (or compote), a floral arrangement, or a hairdo teased in preparation for a party? All this the letter seemed to reveal with utter artlessness, but something about it continued to disturb me.

By this point the reader will have divined that that something was the word “breasts.”

Three times I was forced to transcribe it, for whenever I reached the word “breasts” in the course of my task I grew confused and put down “pests,” or “jests,” or “tests” instead, until I realized that something was happening to me around that word in particular and I ruminated on why precisely this word out of all of the rest should be the one to trip me up, and why the signatory, Lucy, spoke of legs, arms, and breasts rather than heads, elbows, and feet, and I realized that behind that exalted philosophical talk about the All was concealed an insinuation of something far more tangible—that is to say, graspable.

 

From Et Tu, Babe, collected in A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader (Back Bay Books), edited by Rick Kisonak:

I had once intended to write an entire novel while having to urinate very badly. I wanted to see how that need affected the style and tempo of my work. I had found, for instance, that when I’m writing about a character who’s in a Ph.D. program and I don’t have to urinate badly, I’ll have him do a regular three- or four-year program. But if I’m writing a novel and I have to urinate very very badly, then I’ll push the character through an accelerated Ph.D. program in perhaps only two years, maybe even a year.

 

From Lisa 2, v1.0 (Calamari Archive) by Nicholas Rombes:

The computer sits there innocently.

Close Formation: My Friendship with James Salter

James Salter, at left, and William Benton in Paris, 1985. Photograph courtesy of Kay Eldredge.

 

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
—James Salter

 

I glanced up from my desk as an attractive couple came into the gallery. We exchanged greetings. They made a cursory tour of the space. I’d seen only a postage-stamp headshot on the back of a book, but thought I recognized him.

“Are you James Salter?”

“Yes.”

That monosyllable was worth recording. Uttered almost as an abrupt sigh.

“I’m a great fan of yours,” I said.

The conversation moved quickly beyond pleasantries (who and what I was: a poet, running an art gallery) to a level of reciprocal energies in both Jim—as he had introduced himself—and Kay, his partner, all underscored by my exuberance in meeting them. They’d driven down to Santa Fe from Aspen and had been in town for a day and a half.

“We’re staying at La Fonda,” Jim said. “Come over and have a drink with us when you finish up here.”

I’d read A Sport and a Pastime when it came out in 1967; then the two earlier novels, The Hunters and The Arm of Flesh—lesser, but with glittering veins of what he was to become—as well as a few brilliant short stories. My wife and I had read Light Years, his most recent book, almost to each other. It was a portrait of a marriage and in a certain way had followed us to Mexico, Santa Barbara, Key West, and, finally, Santa Fe, in the erratic trajectory of our own unraveling lives and eventual separation. It was now 1978—I’d been there for a year.

La Fonda was three blocks from my gallery, at one corner of the plaza. Jim had given me their room number. I crossed the dark lobby with its ancient tiles and climbed the stairs to the third floor.

“What would you like to drink?” Jim said.

“What have you got?”

“Everything.”

He was strikingly handsome. People remarked on his resemblance to Paul Newman. Kay, younger, with light auburn hair, had a fresh, winsome beauty. The thought crossed my mind that it was a little like visiting the Fitzgeralds on the French Riviera. The hotel had been built in the same period. The room was small, with a few obligatory Southwestern features—latillas on the ceiling, a reproduction of a Navajo sand painting on the wall—and cluttered with things they’d brought with them: their “bar,” a pile of books. I was too dazzled to remember much of what was said that evening. We talked at one point about how he wrote—first drafts by hand and later on an IBM Selectric typewriter.

I asked what his handwriting was like. “It’s nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “There’s a letter I just wrote, over there on the dresser—you can look at it if you like.” It was a full page, written with a fountain pen in clean, even lines without an error, on a sheet of La Fonda stationery. (Over the next three and a half decades, the letters I received from Jim—a number in the hundreds, many of them handwritten—were equally flawless and often on hotel stationery.)

Europe might have been mentioned that night; it came up early in our conversations, along with the fact that I had never been there. “That’s hard to believe,” said Kay. “You’ve got to go!” Jim added, “We’ll take you with us next time.” As if a relived image had intervened in his thought, he said, “Ah, my boy, you’re going to love it!”

By Europe, Jim chiefly meant France. His standard description of Europe was that Italy had a few charms, Austria and Switzerland were places to ski, but other than that, France was it. “What about Spain?” a friend of theirs asked, one night in New York. “I suppose,” he shrugged. “Hemingway liked it.”

They were planning to drive back to Aspen in the morning. I mentioned that if they wanted to spend a few more days in Santa Fe, I could offer them my apartment, explaining that I had a living space in the back of the gallery, where I stayed when guests were in town.

“Let’s take a look at it,” Jim said.

The apartment was an upstairs studio in a compound set back from the street. A hammock hung at one end of the main room on a narrow, glassed-in sun porch. Jim put Kay in the hammock, rocking her back and forth. “How do you like this, my darling?” The question was delivered in a rhetorical tone, like stage dialogue.

***

We saw one another in the evenings over the next few days, and once or twice made dinner in the apartment. Jim’s manner of speaking had an edge of something like artifice, as if it were shaped by print, with some of the same remove and distance. It was unusual enough that I asked about its source. “Practice,” he said. A woman, a documentary filmmaker who had known him in California, once complained to me: He makes you jump through hoops. It was true; he used speech sometimes like a puppeteer’s strings. But it was also style and delivery. Our early conversations in Santa Fe were made up of the rush of mutual involvement. He told stories with great flair; you could sense a repertoire. “Saul Bellow and I bought a house together in Colorado, an investment house,” he said. “We worked on it ourselves. One day we were up on the roof, nailing shingles. Way down in a field, a man rode by on a horse. The horse threw him. He was hollering or something, I guess. Anyway, Saul climbed off the roof and went down there, because he’s interested in things like that.”

We talked mostly about books and writers. Jim was conservative in his references and gave little credence to the achievements of anyone outside the mainstream of literature. He said he wished he’d been at Columbia, with Lionel Trilling, instead of at West Point, and was currently reading Trilling’s book Sincerity and Authenticity. Except for Dubliners, he considered James Joyce batty. He thought the abstract expressionist painters were fraudulent artists who couldn’t draw. He knew nothing about music; he didn’t like jazz. I told him that his own work contradicted these notions and how much he was admired by then-nonestablishment figures, like John Ashbery and Robert Creeley.

He said, “I think I got a letter from him.”

“From Creeley or Ashbery?”

“Yes, one of those guys.”

The divide in poetry between the establishment and the postwar avant-garde was still, in 1978, a tangible conflict. Ashbery had famously written  that Elizabeth Bishop was probably an establishment poet and that it was a good thing because it proved that the establishment wasn’t all bad. When I made, in passing, a negative comment about rhyme, Kay, a journalist who wrote for various magazines, seemed affronted.

A picture, not just of limits, but of a kind of circumscribed literary attitude in their lives, began to take shape.

“Your poems rhyme,” she said to Jim, “at least the ones you’ve sent to me.”

His response had the perfunctory tone of being the authority in her life. He acknowledged that most contemporary poetry didn’t rhyme. Then with an edge, he added, “But poetry has always rhymed, and will again.”

I gave them a copy of my translation of L’Après-midi d’un faune, which had just been published, hoping that Jim, whose work had a place of its own in the literature of France, might like it.

“Dust on my head,” he said. “You’re down here translating Mallarmé, and I’m up in Aspen doing I don’t know what—but not that.”

We were walking back through the town after lunch at Tia Sophia’s restaurant. The day was cool, with a sky of pristine blue against the soft edges of adobe buildings.

Kay asked how I’d learned French.

“I didn’t,” I said. “I’m not at all fluent.”

“But,” Jim said, “if you’re not fluent, how can you translate a French poet, especially one like Mallarmé?”

“You work backward from other translations.”

“But you don’t know yourself, firsthand, the exact thing being said.”

“That’s available. You can get the meaning. Making it into a poem, in English, is the hard part.”

He held on to his position, implying that a lack of fluency equaled a form of deceit, as if I were trying to get away with something—or, more bizarrely, as if the goal of my efforts was to make people think I spoke French.

It was an unexpected confrontation. I was shut down, out of a sense of deference. I explained that it was something like Pound’s Sextus Propertius or Cathay.

“Well, I haven’t read them,” he said. This attitude was a permanent component of Jim’s makeup, a militant disdain that surfaced like a reflex. This attitude was, in the scope of a much more complex and generous intelligence, a minor quirk that often had to do with underestimating the depth of something he didn’t know. It belonged to the swagger of self. Fairly late in his life he became friends with Kenneth Koch, who wanted to meet him purely out of admiration. “He’s my favorite prose writer,” Kenneth told me. Of Kenneth’s work, Jim said, “It’s not poetry—it’s just clever writing broken into lines.”

It was disillusioning to encounter these biases and recalcitrant positions in someone I revered. On the other hand, the wholesale dismissal of establishment writers, like Trilling, by a band of loosely connected poets, including me, could easily be seen from Jim’s view as simply foolish. Jim and I plowed through disagreements with the attitude that we could afford them. They brought into sharp focus challenges particular to, and made viable by, the responsibility of a friendship.

Our back-and-forth was agile, sounding out depths and wavelengths. Things were said by both of us to please, to impress, to entertain. He told a story about coming back from Europe on the QE2. Something had gone wrong. All the toilets on the main deck were stopped up. This had gone on for two or three days. Finally, the captain came on the intercom to address the passengers. I interrupted him and supplied the line: “The ship is stinking! The ship is stinking!” Jim’s laughter burst out as if a switch had been thrown. He was wiping away tears by the time he recovered.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What did the captain say?”

“No, nothing, nothing, yours is better.”

One night, in the apartment, Jim read to Kay and me a section from the manuscript of Solo Faces, which he was working on. It was written first as a film script, commissioned by Robert Redford. When Redford decided not to do the movie, Robert Ginna, editor in chief at Little, Brown and a friend of Jim’s, contracted to publish it as a novel. Hearing it in Santa Fe, at an altitude of seven thousand feet, with mountains rising above the town, was like a palimpsest of real and metaphoric heights resonating with each other.

***

Jim was fifty-two when we met, fourteen years older than I. It was an age gap heightened by profound differences between his life and mine. Growing up, he had lived for a period in the Carlyle Hotel. His father, a retired army colonel, was a businessman in real estate. Jim was an only child. He went to Horace Mann School, where Jack Kerouac had been a couple of years ahead of him. Mildred, his mother, whom I got to know, continued to tell him into his seventies that he was a prince. He gave up an acceptance to Stanford and went to West Point at the request of his father, who had gone there himself, graduating first in his class. After college Jim joined the Air Force and became a fighter pilot in the Korean War, flying more than one hundred missions. With the publication of his first novel, The Hunters, he changed his name from James Horowitz to James Salter. The novel was successful and made into a movie, starring Robert Mitchum. Jim resigned his commission in the Air Force. (It was, he said, the hardest thing he had ever done.) A career of writing films followed. He wrote Downhill Racer for Robert Redford, The Appointment for Sidney Lumet, and Three, starring Charlotte Rampling and Sam Waterston, which he also directed. By the time we met he was the author of four novels.

In comparison, I grew up with a single mother in a small town on Galveston Bay, where I quit school in the ninth grade.

At the end of Solo Faces, the main character, Rand, at age forty or so, is living a kind of white-trash existence in the Florida panhandle, with the purity and anonymous glory of his life as a climber behind him.

He had a small apartment, two rooms and a kitchen, neat and somewhat bare. There was a wooden table with books above it on a shelf, a hammock, a wicker couch. The sun came through the windows in the morning and poured on the empty floor.

It was a description of my apartment in Santa Fe. The novel came out the year after Jim and Kay were there. We’d kept in close touch. Soon they moved to Sagaponack, on the south shore of Long Island. I was in New York for a few days and borrowed a friend’s car to drive out to visit them.

“We’re having flank steak with a Bordelaise sauce and road potatoes,” said Jim. “Have you ever had road potatoes?”

“They fall off the trucks from the farms,” Kay said, “and Jim brings them home.”

“What do you want to drink? I bought you some beer. Or I can make you one of these.” Jim was finishing his second martini when we sat down at the table. I thanked him for the cameo appearance of my apartment in Solo Faces.

“People always recognize their houses,” he said, “but never themselves.”

I asked if I was Rand?

He gave a kind of half shrug.

***

From left, Kay, Jim, and Bill in Sagaponack, 1986. Photograph courtesy of Kay Eldredge.

On that same trip to Sagaponack, Jim gave me the manuscript of a story to read. Over the subsequent years, beginning with the stories that were eventually collected in Dusk, I read almost everything he wrote before it was published. With prose as finely tuned as Jim’s, my task involved little more than taming down his cape work or catching a rare false note. Yet the changes I recommended occurred in calibrations that both tested and deepened our friendship. It went without saying that anything other than absolute honesty would be indefensible. “It stings,” Jim said, “but it doesn’t hurt.”

The gap created by the lack of a father removes from the horizon of a child’s life—to use a figure of Rilke’s—an object, but not a direction, of love. It’s a paradox that hangs on in a kind of midair and becomes to one degree or another an ineradicable part of male friendships. The age difference—in its iteration of fifty-two and thirty-eight, when Jim and I met—had for both of us a father-son element. These positions shifted subtly over time but remained part of the permanent structure of who we were. It was both a challenge and a kind of miracle in my life.

The page was the place we met, not so much as equals but on neutral ground. He paid close attention to the comments and suggestions I made about the work he showed me and would often say, a day or so later, something like, “I put in nearly all your corrections.” It was symbiotic—the desire to please and the parity it achieved in the process. For an ego as redoubtable as Jim’s, the act of listening to whatever I might have to say in these discussions was a clear, almost moral, attention. He was a West Point man, facing with personal honor a situation that tested him. You could sense the control, the strength behind blue, unblinking eyes. Once, in a story that was eventually published in Last Night, I marked the phrase “a mild strabismus,” which he had used in the description of a female character. I pointed out that the phrase came verbatim from my novel Madly.

“Well,” he said, curtly, “you can’t copyright a phrase.”

I reminded him that many people knew we were close. He said he didn’t care if people thought he had taken it from me.

“But they won’t,” I said.

“Oh … they’ll think you took it from me. Okay, I’ll change it.”

In Sagaponack that fall, where I had rented a cottage, life consisted of work, with the salt pond out the front door, the beach and ocean. Aside from weekends with my kids, I was virtually a family member of the Salter household. Jim and I played kick-pass-punt into the last of dusk, or tennis on the local courts. We read the same books. Bobby Van’s bar was the center of Bridgehampton nightlife. There were those girls but not, to quote a poet, “one face.”

Kay was pregnant. Jim sang a variation of a Jerome Kern song, sounding authentically nervous, “And when I tell her / and I’m certainly going to tell her …” This referred to Mildred, his mother. Kay and Jim had talked about the possibility of having a child, and they were ambivalent and at times divided. The subject spilled over as a concern in their small circle of friends because of tensions that were openly aired, but also because it was more complicated than it would have normally seemed. Allan, Jim’s eldest daughter, from his first marriage, had died three years before, in 1980, at twenty-four. It was a horrifying accident. They’d had the guest house in Colorado remodeled by a contractor; a bare wire was touching a water pipe. Allan was electrocuted. They came home from a concert and heard the shower running. It was a tragedy that got folded into silence. At the time it happened, Kay took on the job of informing friends. She called me in Santa Fe. The helplessness that I felt was in some way increased by knowing that Jim, with all his powers, was equally helpless. As he said toward the end of his life, it was something he was never able to write about.

Kay had a miscarriage. However, the work of preparing Mildred, and Jim’s grown children—Nina and the twins, Claude and James—for the possibility of a child was done. Claude and James were all for it; Nina, the eldest, who had never completely accepted Kay as Jim’s partner, was opposed, which everyone was prepared to live with.

Jim’s story “Akhnilo” was published in Grand Street, in 1981. It deals with a sense of the unsayable, the unknowable, the thing that only the center of the night might contain, tangled and beckoning at the edge of the brain’s defeat. It’s unlike any of his other stories. It seems made out of the architectonics of futility—of language breaching its limits, deployed as a narrative shell. I said something along these lines when he first showed it to me, without mentioning Allan. In the same tacitly formed space, Jim said, “You’re reading too much into it.”

***

In 1985, I went to Paris with the Salters. Kay was eight and a half months into a second pregnancy. They had arranged for the baby to be born at the American Hospital, in Neuilly. I’d never been to Europe, and both Jim and Kay saw it as an opportunity to rectify what Jim viewed as a discrepancy in our friendship. They were bringing Sumo, Jim’s corgi, and planned to travel around the continent by car. I could help with the driving and perhaps some of the logistics. A further and more important reason for going was that they had asked me to be the child’s godfather.

We flew out of JFK on a cold late-February night. I bought John Russell’s book Paris to read on the plane. French was being spoken in soft, seductive voices. The cabin was sealed off. America was outside.

Coming into Paris from the airport, the first thing we did was find a bistro open at that hour of the morning that had huîtres. Jim’s enthusiasm was unchecked. “We’ve got to have huîtres! It’s part of your education.” It would have been very hard to talk Jim into eating raw oysters in New York City. But here, served on platters of ice, elevated by a metal stand in the center of the table, they were huîtres and, as Kay said, they were France.

 We spent much of the first day in Paris preparing for a road trip. We left the following morning for Klosters. Kay arranged herself in the back seat as comfortably as possible, with Sumo, the corgi, at her side. Kay and I were closer in age, which gave our friendship a solidarity to draw on. Mildred sometimes made veiled remarks that implied we might be more than friends, but that was never true. I was someone Kay confided in. She was factual, fair-minded, and capable of candid affection. Our relationship, coming through Jim, was reaffirmed between us as a value of its own. As we got in the car that morning, she hugged me and said how glad she was that I was in her life—and then added, “And in Paris!”

At Klosters, Jim and I skied with Adam Shaw, the son of Irwin. The Parsenn has the longest ski run in Europe, starting at the top of the Alps, where peak after white peak cluster together like a meeting of the upper reaches of the world. The run itself passes through two small villages on the way down. The act of snaking down the mountain was distilled, by Jim, into slogans that doubled as metaphors for life. Ski the Bumps. All Conditions Are Perfect Conditions.

The next day, we left Klosters on our way to Kitzbühel, to ski the Streif on Hahnenkamm, famous as the most demanding slope on the World Cup circuit. It had been used in Downhill Racer as a prominent part of the film. At Innsbruck, Kay began to have what she thought might be contractions. It was a Sunday. We found a maternity hospital, with a row of women in rockers on a sun porch. There was no doctor on duty. The woman at the desk explained that midwives had the same function as doctors in the hospital, and that Kay could be seen immediately. “That might be better,” Kay said, “than running around on Sunday, trying to find a doctor.”

We waited for her outside. Jim took Sumo for a walk. The day was windless, quiet, with a sallow orange light coming through tall sycamores.

After nearly an hour, Jim said, “I hope she’s not in there having an Austrian.”

As it turned out, Kay’s pains vanished for the next week or so. We returned to Paris. The apartment I’d rented belonged to Dominique Nabokov, a photographer friend of mine in New York. She was the widow of the composer Nicolas Nabokov, Vladimir’s first cousin. Piled under the bed were posters from ballets and boxes of scores. His librettists had included Stephen Spender, Archibald MacLeish, and W. H. Auden. The apartment was in the eleventh arrondissement. Much of the area around the apartment had been left untouched during Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, due to its association with Les Misérables. Jim and Kay’s apartment was in the sixteenth arrondissement. They had rented it through friends. The rooms were spacious and airy, with large windows and modern furnishings. We were each where we belonged.

A couple of weeks later, Jim called in the middle of the night: “The launch is underway. We’re at the hospital, come over as soon as you can.” I got out of bed, dressed, and headed toward the metro, past shops with pulled-down roller-shutters, their colored awnings retracted and gray in the dark. On the corner, the pale green cross of a pharmacy was unlit. A parked moped, resting on its kickstand, stood in front of the doorway. It was cold with low clouds over the city. Already, I felt a sense of propriety about life in Paris and had to remind myself that this—the birth of the baby—was why I was here. The Parmentier metro station was closed. I crossed to the intersection of the avenue and got a taxi.

The baby had been born by the time I arrived at the hospital, a boy, named Theo Shaw Salter. They had opened a bottle of Château Latour 1976, brought for the purpose of moistening the baby’s lips. The obstetrician, who resembled Dr. Gachet in Van Gogh’s portrait, joined in the toast.

Kay looked tired, but thrilled. She held the baby for me to see with a look of triumph. The doctor commended Jim on the wine and talked about playing golf.

Around four or five that morning, after Kay had fallen asleep and the baby was put in the nursery, Jim and I went out to Au Pied de Cochon, ate French onion soup, and drank champagne. I had never seen him as emotionally exposed. He was nearly sixty years old, a man of practiced detachment—joyous.

***

I’d moved back to the city before we went to Europe, taking over a rent-stabilized apartment on Ninety-Third Street that Kay had kept as a workplace in New York. Jim described the location as “a little high,” referring to the numerical values of the streets going north toward Harlem, away from the more fashionable Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. At some time in the past, Jim had pasted on the inside of the back door, beneath the peephole, the typed phrase “Remember, it’s better than Beirut.” I was working as an independent art dealer and had a new girlfriend, a painter named Mari. We spent a weekend at the Salters’. Mari had read A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years before I met her. The first night we were there, below the surface of amenities, Mari’s presence had an unstated effect. Her looks were part of it. She had almost plain features that came slowly into focus as beautiful, with black straight hair cut above her shoulders. The difference in years that separated my life with women from the settled existence of Jim’s was conspicuous. It was an axiom of his that there was a time for love. When we came down to breakfast the next morning, his first words to me were, “What would you like—a dozen eggs?”

It was a funny line, but it also belonged to a kind of masculine colloquy, like a vestige of military life, where a boyish fascination with sex remains a resonant form both of address and perception. It seems scarcely possible to think of the author of A Sport and a Pastime as being innocent in any way that has to do with women—unless, in fact, you turn the idea around and view the book as the apotheosis of a generational innocence. Jim was in his mid-thirties, an officer in the military, married with children, when he met the girl that Anne-Marie, in the novel, is modeled on. He’d had affairs, but experience isn’t exactly the opposite of innocence. Honor and a sense of duty were strong factors in his life. His father had recently died, after major financial setbacks. Part of what makes A Sport and a Pastime so compelling is its singular intensity as experience. The unnamed narrator of A Sport and a Pastime shadows and finesses the writing. The girl, eighteen in the book, was actually sixteen. It was 1961, the beginning of the decade of the sexual revolution.

After being turned down by almost all the major New York houses, the book was published by George Plimpton as a Paris Review Edition. At the time, they had published only one previous book (Louis Zukofsky’s “A” 1–12). Plimpton’s sole editorial input consisted of a phone conversation. Jim told the story, imitating George’s upper-class accent. “You know, really, most important works of fiction are written in the third person.” Jim said, “What about All Quiet on the Western Front?” adding that he felt his book needed to be in the first person. Plimpton said, “Well, good, in that case, we’ll proceed with it as it is.”

A Sport and a Pastime didn’t sell. It failed to create a buzz. Like a book of poems, it appeared and sank out of sight. Through Robert Ginna, Jim had an assignment to interview Graham Greene for an early issue of People magazine, of which Ginna had been a founding editor, and which in those days published interviews with major literary figures. Jim gave Greene a copy of Light Years, and Greene used his influence to get it published by Bodley Head in England. This not only changed the destiny of Light Years but brought a new and wider readership to A Sport and a Pastime.

When the film about Jim and A Sport and a Pastime was made, in 2011, Ed Howard, one of the producers, wanted to include a scene in which Jim and I would carry on a supposedly spontaneous conversation about the book. We were arranged in the breakfast nook at Jim’s house in Bridgehampton. The big camera on a tripod was inches away. Ed, off camera, was giving us direction, coaxing us along. Jim had retreated. The cameraman, pitching in, asked me if I thought it was necessary to believe in the narrator of the book. I said that it was important because otherwise the book would be read as an act of total narcissism. I might have said more about it, but we were stopping and starting. In the finished film the comment was cut. Yet part of the book’s greatness is that it is a work of unabashed narcissism; the narrator empowers it by being an invention you can see through but at the same time tacitly support. The narrator was in fact a late addition to the book.

***

Jim and Kay in Aspen, 1986. Photograph courtesy of Kay Eldredge.

One day Kay and I were talking about a play she’d written. I’d read it and made some comments. We were in the new house they had built, in Bridgehampton. Jim had a desk in the living room, which was cluttered with papers and books, including The Lover, by Marguerite Duras. I remembered a passage in Duras’s book, about writing, that I thought might fit with what we’d been discussing. Jim was doing something in the kitchen, which opened into the living room, and stopped to listen when I read it.

Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement.

Jim was suddenly in a rage, denouncing everything about the quote, trashing Duras, hollering at me. In a fury feeding on itself he kept going, denigrating me for seeing any value in the statement, dismissing Duras as a drunk. It went on. I froze into silence. Kay finally intervened, saying that if he didn’t like the quote that was his business, but it was no reason to behave this way. He calmed down a bit but continued in the same mood. He was sometimes competitive where Kay was concerned but had never been jealous of me that I knew of. Nor did he have any reason to be. Our friendship had involved the three of us from the beginning. This was twenty years later or more. We had been exemplary in our affection for one another. No one had been wounded in what made up the continuing dynamic of our lives. I’d seen Jim lose his temper in other situations, but not to this extent. Eventually he apologized, saying that although he still didn’t like the quote, it didn’t justify the way he’d acted.

A polarity of “vanity and void” in the act of writing amounts to the opposite of fulfilling a set of incremental steps to tell a story; in the same way, “some inexpressible essence” is the opposite of craftsmanship. Duras’s quote—almost the definition of what a poem is—challenges the terms of novel-making in precisely the areas in which Jim most excels. If it hit a nerve, perhaps it was that one. I may be wrong. As Kay said, “He sometimes does this.”

***

Walking with Jim down the streets of Manhattan—or anywhere: Paris, LA—was an experience of male camaraderie. He is at your side, bumping shoulders, a reiteration of bond and forward motion as a unit of being, lead and wingman, in close formation. Few occasions offered him the ease and simplicity of this kind of connection. He imposed, as a matter of course, emotional distance on all the interactions of his life. You understood it as a limitation. He peered in from outside, mildly perplexed at moments of casual intimacy—hugs between friends. It was as if the general qualities he possessed—shyness, reserve, superiority, military authority, manliness, cool—were raised to a pathology. Or perhaps something reductive in the love of women rendered, on a moral scale, other physical expressions of affection false, or misplaced. It’s hard to guess.

Dusk came out in 1988 and won the PEN/Faulkner Award. We went to Washington, D.C., for the ceremony. At the reception for Jim, a gray-haired lady came up to him and said, “I’ve read all your books; you’re as great as Ernest Hemingway.” Jim thanked her politely and shook her hand. When she left, he said, “I resent the comparison.”

I can’t recall the context of the first conversation between us when Hemingway was mentioned. It happened in passing, with Jim repudiating the link between them that could be made, he said, “for obvious reasons.” On another occasion, he spoke with derogation of Hemingway’s “fatuous role-playing.” Once, in Bridgehampton, when Jim and Kay were out of the house, I read two or three chapters of Green Hills of Africa, which was sitting on the coffee table. When they came back, I mentioned how good it was. Jim nodded and said, “Oh, yes—he can do it, no question about it.” Hemingway remained, like a mood or the weather, a presence in his life. Recently, looking at Light Years—my favorite of Jim’s novels—it occurred to me that the opening paragraph could almost be seen as a counterpart to the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, which sits like a set piece at the beginning of Hemingway’s book, at once all style and none, an uncanny dazzle down to its final word. In both of the books the opening paragraph is ten lines long; each has a river in it; and each has the formal value of being a prelude to what follows. Whether Jim did this consciously is incidental. The black river without “one cry of white,” is, as an invocation, an appeal in the image of itself to unconscious depths.

***

Jim’s ninetieth birthday party was held at Maria Matthiessen’s house, in Sag Harbor. I have a photograph of him on my wall that Kay took as he arrived. The gravel front yard is in shade, but across the street in the distance behind him, watery sunlight breaks through the trees in a bright grassy splotch of yellow. He has on a white linen suit, carrying the jacket on one arm, with a blue-and-white thin-striped long-sleeve shirt, some papers in one hand, glasses in the other—a wide smile on his face. Tan, moving with youthful agility, he is handsome in a way that defies his age.

Jim at ninety. Photograph courtesy of Kay Eldredge.

The party took place in the backyard, with a few tables set up. It was a gathering of close friends, ten or twelve people. Maria had moved there from Sagaponack after Peter died. The air was warm, moist, with a faint scent of something night blooming. Sag Harbor was a waterfront town, a historic whaling village, on Gardiners Bay. Bob Ginna had lived there for years. We were not far from the Oakland Cemetery, where Jim had bought a plot for himself. Ten years ago, we’d walked through it together. It had an agreeable aspect, with open spaces and beautiful trees. Nelson Algren was buried there. Jim stopped in front of a slender marble gravestone.

He asked me what I thought. Thinner and taller in proportion to some of the other stones, it was Balanchine’s. Beneath the name and dates, it said “Ballet Master.” Jim hadn’t decided yet to be buried here but he knew he didn’t want his body cremated. “I might need it later,” he said.

After dinner a few speeches were made. Bob Ginna’s was especially touching; it overflowed in shifting directions of affection. I said a few words. Kay talked about Jim having been twice her age when they were first together, but that now the difference had dwindled to a smaller percent.

“I’m catching up with him,” she said. At the end of the evening, as people were leaving, Jim came over to me and shook my hand.

“Well, Bill, I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

It was a statement made in an easy tone but loaded emotionally.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll see you soon.”

Good nights were being said all around. One of the other guests had offered to drive me to the station and was waiting in his car. I was taking the train back to New York. Jim gave me a hug.

I called them nine days later in Bridgehampton. As soon as Kay answered the phone, I knew. She spoke with forced courage in a devastated voice, almost not her own. Jim had died that morning of a heart attack. One of the things that rushed through my mind in that moment, like a wavering in the brain of a child, was the sudden awareness not that he had died, but that he could.

Soon after we first met in Santa Fe, Kay called from Aspen to invite me up for a visit. “We’ve imprinted on you,” she said. “You’re essential to us now.” I felt the privilege it was to be a part of their lives. I was shocked by it, elevated beyond permission.

After a certain point, friendship goes without saying. It exists in its own ordination. When Pound writes “Nothing matters but the quality of the affection,” it’s the word quality that gives the statement consequence. You’re aware that intelligence, discernment, sensitivity, and perception are involved, and that affection of a high level is different from something lesser. The statement is made with the upper limits of quality in mind. Our friendship was like that.

We cherish each other because we die. This was something expressed in various ways over the years. The restraint and distance inherent in Jim’s relation to the people he loved was now an extended measure of what was mourned; not that it should be any different, but that it was there all the time, the hiatus, the not-said, the little death, redolent of a truth, of love bereft of its object. In life, in death. I miss him immensely.

At the birthday party in Sag Harbor, robust and in fine spirits, he stood up in his white suit and made a brief speech about being a writer. “I didn’t have a demon, in the way that some writers do—Lawrence, for instance. I wanted only the praise. That was all.”

 

William Benton’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other magazines. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Birds, Marmalade, and Backlit, as well as Madly, a novel. His most recent is Light on Water: New and Selected Poems. He is currently at work on a memoir, of which this is an excerpt.

The Cookbook Review

Photograph by Pierre André Leclercq, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Bean Bible is at once an apologetic for the world’s legumes and also somewhat apologetic about them. The Bible is dedicated to the author’s husband, who “never objected to endless nights of bean meals”; a blurb identifies its subject as the ultimate underdog: “oft-maligned, subjected to ridicule, and despised by children everywhere.”

Twenty-four years after its publication, things have changed. Beans are no longer synonymous with flatulence alone, and the only reason you wouldn’t be able to purchase a quarterly heirloom bean subscription is because Rancho Gordo is sold out. When I find myself yearning for an ideologically purer legumania, however, I still find myself turning to the Bible, a time capsule of the far more ascetic era of vegetarianism that raised me on black bean quesadillas and chickpea soup.

Caveat here: The Bean Bible is not actually a vegetarian cookbook. (It includes nearly half a dozen recipes for duck alone.) But it reflects a world in which meatless staples were far less ubiquitous than they are today, purporting to introduce readers to “the Lebanese chickpea spread hummus” and canned beans from “the Puerto Rican brand Goya.” Directed at an adventurous but naive readership, the Bible remains worldly enough to have earned the ire of at least one Goodreads reviewer frustrated by the book’s focus on “East India cooking.”

But I don’t read the Bible for its recipes. What makes it special is its systematic review of the legumes themselves, particularly chapter one’s genealogical (beanealogical?) charts, which I like to meditate upon as though they catalogued the names of my ancestors: cowpea, goober pea, lady pea; mortgage lifter bean and blue shackamaxon; beluga lentil and pardina lentil and speckled minisink. (Rumor has it that the European soldier bean and the French navy bean are still fighting it out on page eight.) Whether or not I ever cook any of those pedigreed varietals—almost certainly I will not—I’m honored to be just one of a long, long line of FODMAP enthusiasts.

—Emmet Fraizer, intern

Like many of the best cookbooks, Full Moon Feast suggests that there is an order to life via food and that, if we follow it, we will be okay. In the first chapter, Jessica Prentice shares her personal journey out of disorder. As a teenager newly aware of both animal rights and beauty standards, she tried to avoid almost every food group. Inevitably hungry, she would binge on junk before guiltily returning to a raw vegetable diet. It was only when she began eating seasonally that she was able to find balance. Thus chapter one is about the Hunger Moon, sometime around February, when fresh food is hard to find in the Northern Hemisphere. Nature appoints a time for austerity, Prentice discovered, just as it appoints other times for plenty, and the chapter’s opening essay is followed by root-cellar recipes for parsnip soup and borscht. After “Hunger Moon” comes “Sap Moon,” in which Prentice describes the traditional processes of making maple, coconut, and palm sugar—developed by people with ancestral connections to the source plants and the earth in which they grew—in contrast to the history of violent displacement that underlies industrially refined white sugar. (Not that she is anti-dessert. “Sap Moon” recipes for panna cruda and rice pudding use maple, coconut, and palm sugar, with sustainable sources for each listed in the back of the book.) Skipping forward a few moons to summer, the chapter on the Mead Moon, which ponders spiritual ritual intoxication dating back to Greek bacchanalia, segues nicely into the one on the Wort Moon, which explores the interrelated histories of herbal medicine and brewing—traditions that, in Europe, were irreparably damaged by witch burnings. In each chapter, Prentice explores how different cultures use natural cycles of abundance to nourish body and soul. She also unpacks the ways that today’s economy and culture have disturbed traditional values that were once shared across many cultures—for example, she links the degradation of dairy to both capitalism and misogyny. Rather than judgy, her tone is curious, thoughtful, and unhurried, like a certain kind of yoga lecture, and with a similar restorative effect.

—Jane Breakell, development director

“Welcome to the oasis. I hope you like it here,” writes Rawaan Alkhatib at the beginning of Hot Date!: Sweet and Savory Recipes Celebrating the Date, from Party Food to Everyday Feasts, the most sumptuous cookbook I’ve ever encountered. Hot Date! is of course a cheeky title, and it’s a fun game to read date with its romantic English cognate, especially in sentences such as “There’s an Arabic saying about how to get your palm trees to grow the sweetest dates: Keep their feet in the water and their heads in the fires of hell.” From “Party Food” through breakfasts, main courses, sides, desserts, and condiments, every recipe includes dates or a date-based product—which might seem like a narrow constraint, but this oasis is a world. 

Alkhatib, in addition to being a prodigious chef, is a poet, museum designer, and fantastically whimsical illustrator. (When she was in graduate school, she handed around homemade chocolate truffles at a poetry reading and directed audience members to begin eating them at the beginning of one of her poems, which was written in the shape of chemical bonds for a particular kind of sugar. When she got to the center of the poem, the audience started crackling: there were Pop Rocks hidden in the chocolates, exploding mouths with fireworks at the very moment she reached the center of the “sugar” in the poem itself.)

The cookbook opens with an illustrated “Guide to the Date,” from the ajwa (“considered the prophet Mohammad’s favorite variety”), to the khalas (“the ne plus ultra of dates … Complex flavor with notes of honey butter, sweet potato, ripe sugarcane, and toasted caramel released in successive waves, with a nutty taffy finish”), to the tiny but mighty zamli (with “toffee-textured flesh”). The recipes have names that make them parade off the page: Curried Sausage Rolls with a Surprise Inside, Sculptural Breakfast Bars, 13-Hour Lamb with Date and Feta Relish, Whole Roasted Pineapple Draped in Spiced Caramel. Even the more calorically austere ones—carrot soup, celery salad—manage to be decadent in their descriptions.

Dates are the star, but Alkhatib gives the dates dates, too, introducing a dramatis personae of other pantry items that enhance the fruit: bulgur, black sesame paste, cardamom, desert truffles (“imagine a sandy potato but with an air of mystique”), ghee (“make butter better by making it more buttery than butter”), nigella (Alkhatib’s mother shipped her a bottle with the phrase “CURES ANYTHING BUT DEATH”), vanilla beans (seemingly commonplace, but “one of the only orchids to produce a foodstuff that’s edible to humans” and a compound in both breast milk and baby formulas). Don’t sleep on the Stuffed Date “Notions” (“Plantain Chip + Lime + Crema + Cilantro”), “Marzipan!,” and “Suggested Menus” at the end. Savor this book with your sweetheart, take yourself out on your own date: Hot Date! is a joy.

—Adrienne Raphel

Windows and Doors

Window in the west facade of the Lutheran Fishermen’s Church in Born auf dem Darß, Germany. Photograph by Radomianin, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Workers are installing sliding glass doors on the mudroom. Can you hear the drilling and hammering? I love when you can’t tell what season it is. Tables and chairs, usually on the deck, are sitting around the grounds, and I can’t do the things with the garden you’re supposed to do in the fall. I’m upstairs. Around my shoulders is the down comforter I bought at a yard sale in Scottsdale. Richard misses the warmth of Arizona, which to him was anywhere but cold, damp England, where he lived without central heating. Yesterday, I walked with a friend I’ve known almost all my life, and another friend I’ve known even longer sent me an email. Another friend got in touch, too. This third friend’s email was the place where train tracks switch and your life takes a different course, and I could see why the novel mistakes for meaning the beautiful patterns that form in a life.

When you break a dish, sweep it up quickly and throw away the pieces. Sweep the floor where it broke and run your hand along the surface. When you buy a house, walk through the walls. When you meet a stranger, you are replacing the lost dish. When you think about friends who are out of reach, imagine yourself in a line of text, moving across a page, and each of the letters is a person you know, walking along briskly with you.

A while back, I spritzed room scent on my wrist, thinking it was perfume. No one knows what to do in Hudson. It’s Who cares there all the time. I held my wrist to my nose and then to Richard’s nose. I said, “It has an undertone. The musk of an animal, maybe?” He said, “A dachshund?”

I worried about carrying the scent of dachshund into the food market where we were heading. I bought small pieces of chicken Milanese to eat while we walked and to save some for Richard. I like eating on the street. Richard is, Really? I’m, It reminds me of New York.

Around this time—and just as I was thinking Richard wouldn’t leave me—an owl flew away from the Central Park Zoo. During the year the owl lived, people posted pictures of him, looking happy on a branch here and there. Richard said he hoped I wouldn’t “go off him” as time went by. We were more interested in freedom for the owl than in freedom inside our relationship. The natural state of an owl is to fly off in one bright flash of love.

The other night, we watched Lawrence of Arabia, a movie without even one woman in it. There are a few female corpses when Turks are slaughtered by Arabs on their way to Damascus. In every frame, you can see Peter O’Toole thinking, and you can’t look away for even a second. In 1916, before setting off on a diplomatic assignment to meet King Faisal, T. E. Lawrence was a lost man looking to become a person. The way to turn lostness into a person is to enter a desert.

O’Toole as Lawrence looks beautiful in his flowing white robes, and you wonder how you would look in that gear, and how fashion and sex fantasy move people through the garden of forking paths. Richard mentioned that O’Toole had grown up very poor and working class in Leeds and had shed his Yorkshire accent at RADA. How did he know his body would move him into the world? It must have been remarked on that he was very beautiful.

After World War I, Lawrence returned to England and during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 he tried to help King Faisal gain independent authority over Syria. Faisal was outplayed by the French in a deal they’d made with the British to maintain a French military presence in the region.

After we watched Lawrence of Arabia, I said to Richard, “I wish we could live another hundred years.” He said, “We’ll only be a foot tall.” I said, “Why?” He said, “You get smaller. We won’t be able to get up on the couch.” I said, “We’ll need one of those cat ramps.” He said, “Maybe we should build one now.”

October 4 was our anniversary. We have been together for eighteen years. That is the number of years my dog lived. In dog years, we have been together all our lives.

Richard’s reading a book about fakes. He likes being confused about whether something could be said to be a genuine anything. The best thoughts are love affairs you can dip in and out of until they become words.

I love to sit on a bench and watch the world of Warren Street float by. Richard is pretty sure it means we have entered the alter kakers portion of our program. I don’t care. A woman passed us on Warren Street once, sitting on this bench, and she took this picture.

Photograph courtesy of Laurie Stone.

The picture was taken when spring was becoming summer. The woman said we looked happy. We are happy on Warren Street. We walk hand in hand or I link my arm through his. When I first met him, I tried walking with my arm around his waist, and he didn’t like it. He felt twisted up and demonstrated the feeling in a wrestling hold. He said, “Can you walk like this?” I still miss that way of walking.

Today in bed, as we were having tea, he said, “Every day with us is a mitzvah.” I first laid eyes on him, there was more brown in his hair. He was wearing a different pair of very cool glasses. That and the English accent and the adorable face and the sleek body and a brain that is a dachshund, sniffing around at everything, were immediately appealing.

He’s a witch, so after eighteen years he doesn’t look that different. Never mind about me. October 4, 2006, was the luckiest day of my life. Everything changed. Everything that is good in my life became possible. I was sixty years old, and he was fifty-six. Life stretched out before us, not as more life but as a different life. If we act like teenagers, you know why.

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Streaming Now column for LIBER: A Feminist Review, and her Substack is Everything Is Personal.

Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists

Illustration by Albert Robida, from chapter seven of Pantagruel (1886). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Few are the authors whose names rise to the status of adjectives: Shakespearean profundity, Dickensian squalor, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Rabelaisian—satirical, excessive, corpulent—joins these ranks. The French author François Rabelais’s first novel, Pantagruel, is a heady celebration of abundance in which sexual organs and epic feasts sit alongside scatological humor. Beneath the absurdity, however, is a deep critique of Renaissance learning.

The plot is simple: Pantagruel, a giant, grows up, gets an education in Paris, makes many friends, and ends up fighting to defeat the Dipsodes, a rival group of giants who have invaded Utopia. In an early chapter, the eponymous hero heads off to the University of Paris and stumbles upon the Library of Saint-Victor, which he finds “most magnificent, especially certain books he found in it.” What follows is a long list of rather odd titles, among them:

• Bregeuta iuris (The codpiece of the law)
• Malogranatum vitiorum (The pomegranate of vices)
• La couillebarine des preux (The elephant balls of the worthies)
• Decretum universitatis Parisiensis super gorgiasitate muliercularum ad placitum (Decree of the University of Paris concerning the gorgiasity of harlots)
• La croquignolle des curés (The curates’ flick on the nose)
• Des poys au lart cum commento (On peas with bacon, with commentary)
• Le chiabrena des pucelles (The shitter-shatter of the maidens)
• Le culpelé des vefves (The shaven tail of the widows)
• Antipericatametanaparbeugedamphicribrationes merdicantium (Discussion of messers and vexers: Anti, Peri, Kata, Meta, Ana, Para, Moo, and Amphi)
• La patenostre du singe (The monkey’s paternoster)
• La bedondaine des presidens (The potbelly of presiding judges)
• Le baisecul de chirurgie (The kiss-ass of surgery)

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity. Here there is none of that—the titles are solipsistic and self-referential, “codpieces” without organs, surfaces with no depth, skin with no substance.

This salmagundi (today this means “a dish of seasoned meats,” but the word comes from Rabelais’s Le tiers livre) gestures at some basic problems of information management: What sort of collection should a library hold? How should books be classified? What is the function of lists?

Lists are important because they manage our order of discourse. And because they are the heart of information systems, they teach us how data becomes knowledge. In Rabelais’s time, the old cosmology of medieval knowledge was dismantled piece by piece and reconstructed into the new constellation of the humanist encyclopedia. This state-of-the-art knowledge was then scattered far and wide by printed books. The historian Ann Blair has shown that this proliferation of books gave rise to the anxiety of “too much to know.” It was the newly invented printing press that inspired Rabelais to summon forth the incandescent trope of poetic enumeration. 

***

The Renaissance also gave birth to the studiolo, the private study or personal library coveted by all well-heeled cultural elites. From Petrarch to Machiavelli, from aristocrats to cardinals, well-read humanists engaged in a gentle sort of competitive rivalry to curate a bespoke room of one’s own. The study was grounded in bibliophilia: a love of books, it was believed, uplifted the soul. Fiction responded by highlighting the negative side of bibliophilia. Some of the great characters in Renaissance literature have their lives upended by books: Don Quixote reads so many chivalric romances that he becomes mad; Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is exiled to an island on account of his readerly obsession; Doctor Faustus spends too much time in his study and sells his soul to the devil. In an era of discoveries and upheavals, these bibliophiles’ readings and identities are so entangled that they lose their grip on reality. Overwhelmed by the confusion of atlases, catalogues, and encyclopedias, they take their world to be their library, and the library to be their world.

Pantagruel shares with these book-besotted men an epistomania, an overwhelming appetite for knowing it all. My sense is that Don Quixote, Prospero, and Faustus were invented to show how noble minds can be overthrown by their own libraries. But Pantagruel is quite different from this distinguished company, for Pantagruel enters an institutional library—and only briefly at that—and exits unscathed.

In the thirteenth century, the University of Paris emerged as the leading center for scholastic philosophy in Western Christendom, in no small part due to the contribution of the Abbey of Saint-Victor. In 1114, William of Champeaux, after a long and brilliant career at the school of Notre-Dame, settled in an abandoned hermitage outside the city walls and founded a community of canons in honor of Victor, a fourth-century saint. The abbey quickly became distinguished for its erudition.

The Book of Orders, written around 1116, gives us a sense of what life was like inside the abbey. The monks lived in an environment in which every micromovement—from waking, sleeping, eating, walking, and standing, to praying—was precisely and strictly regulated. To this regime of absolute control Giorgio Agamben has devoted a slim book: The Highest Poverty (2013) reconstructs how the imposition of order undergirds the entire infrastructure of Western monasticism. Agamben calls the monks’ obsessive restrictions on what to do and how to do it a “form-of-life” in which “form” and “life” become inseparable. “What is a rule, if it seems to be mixed up with life without remainder?” he asks. “And what is a human life, if it can no longer be distinguished from the rule?”

One of the most important regulatory roles in the Victorine community was that of the armarius, the librarian. He possessed “in his custody all the books of the church.” He dictated the common readings and chants for all occasions, “whether at Matins, at Mass, at chapter, at the table, or at collation.” As it happens, posterity has bequeathed to us Saint-Victor’s library catalogue from 1514. The armarius at that time, Claude de Grandrue, made a list of the Abbey’s 1,081 manuscripts and did some innovative things: he inscribed an “ex libris” at the beginning of each volume, foliated every page, and assigned a pressmark to indicate its location. The books were then arranged in an alphabetical sequence: A–Z, AA–ZZ, AAA–OOO. Here is a sampling:

A: The Old and New Testaments, usually with the Glossa ordinaria

B: The New Testament, biblical concordance, works on the Bible by Pierre le Mangeur, Jean Marchesini, Adam of Saint-Victor, Pierre Riga; Greek and Hebrew Psalters, Greek Gospels

C–F: Commentaries on the Scriptures

G: The works of Albert the Great

H: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas

K–M: Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and theological questions by Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Giles of Rome, Guillaume d’Auvergne

N–Q: Canon Law, Gratian’s Decretum, writings by Yves de Chartres, Bernard of Compostella, Baldo Ubaldi; documents on the Great Schism; the councils of Constance and Basel; handbooks on notaries; manuals on epistolary

R–S: Civil law, texts and commentaries, barbarian laws, feudal laws, customs of Normandy

T: Medicine, texts and commentaries (Galen, Avicenna, Hippocrates, Arnaud de Villeneuve, Guy de Chauliac, et cetera)

But by the time of Rabelais, such knowledge systems must have seemed superannuated, and thus ripe pickings for satire. The author’s entire apparatus aimed to topple such strict hierarchies. His exuberance erupts from these rigid boxes of knowledge; he crafts instead a cunning poetics of infinite enumeration. Who else would come up with Three Books on the Mensuration of Army Camps in the Hair; Hotballs [chaultcouillons], On the Guzzling-Bouts of Doctoral Candidates and Doctors: eight highly lively books; The Fart-Volleys of the Bullists, Copyists, Scriveners, Brief-Writers, Referencaries, and Daters, compiled by Regis; or Marforio, a Bachelor lying in Rome, On Skinning and Smudging Cardinals’ Mules? His salty catalogue mocks the Faculty of Theology and its hairsplitting scholastic ratiocinations, and skewers the vices and laziness of the clergy. Rabelais was the perverse librarian par excellence.

***

Yet this list is a parable of not just medieval pedantry but early modern information overload. Across Europe, books about books proliferated: publishers offered seasonal lists; owners catalogued their collections; censors compiled indexes of prohibited books; auction inventories were drawn up for the estates of the deceased. But is not a random collection of titles—no matter how clever—too tiresome for the reader? Does not the multitude of names lead to tedium or frustration, and therefore to skimming or skipping?

In the Middle Ages, Noah’s ark was the emblem of the total archive. In fact, bibliographers and Noah have many things in common. They must contend with the problem of inclusion, inventory, and survival. Like animals, manuscripts can multiply. In the Bible, Noah’s ark offers safe passage to every creature great and small. But were there some that didn’t make the evacuation? In that sense, Rabelais is Noah 2.0: not only does he include all the books that have ever existed, but he includes even those that do not exist. Like Noah, Rabelais suffers from the pathology of accumulation.

Along with the ark, Rabelais uses another figure: the abyss. The word appears twice in other parts of the book: “an abyss of science” and “the true well and abyss of the Encyclopedia.” The logic of enumeration, pushed to its extreme, becomes an algorithm of the absurd. Rabelais points out that there are oddities in the world that cannot fit into any classification scheme, more things in our heaven and earth than are dreamt of in either the medieval pretensions of the summa or the ambitious early modern bibliographic machines. The abundance of the information ark becomes an encyclopedic abyss.

It is only from this historical condition of data glut that characters like Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Prospero, and Doctor Faustus could have emerged. Though the topos of multitudo librorum—too many books—existed already in antiquity, the proliferation of texts brought on by the printing press was unprecedented. That these characters are all driven to bibliomania suggests their inability to cope with cognitive inundation. They show the tragedy of reading too much, and too wrongly. It is only Pantagruel who exits the library laughing.

***

Every cultural action has an equal and opposite reaction. The bibliographers and the censors existed side by side. At the exact same time that bibliophiles were churning out lists telling people what to read, a countervailing force pushed back: bibliophobia. Church authorities were churning out lists of what people should not read.

One of the first counterblasts to the Reformation was the Catholic Church’s creation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Pantagruel had the honor of making the list. In 1533, less than a year after its publication in Lyon, the book was denounced by the authorities; a revised edition in 1543 expurgated some of its racier bits. In 1551 the Sorbonne published a list of censored books that included editions of Pantagruel, Gargantua, and Le tiers livre. The Council of Trent placed Rabelais at the head of the “heretics of the first class.” As soon as each of his four books appeared in print, they were condemned by the French authorities.

The creator of any list endlessly negotiates the desire to submit and to control, to surrender and to order. The Roman censors’ knowledge was parasitic: they used the very same works that they condemned to compile their own lists. For example, a library in Bologna possesses a copy of Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca instituta et collecta once owned by zealous Jesuit, Antonio Possevino. It is heavily annotated, and Possevino used Gesner to create his own guide, called the Bibliotheca selecta. As the title implies, he selected for the reader texts that are in absolute conformity with church doctrine. What is interesting is that the Jesuit and Gesner both cancel and supplement each other. They both try to direct the reader to what is worthwhile and what is not. The bibliographer creates metaknowledge, whereas the censor suppresses it.

So between the Scylla of classification and the Charybdis of suppression, Rabelais avoids a shipwreck by deploying what he knows best—excess. He bypasses this bibliographical conundrum by presenting fake books. How can you be censored if you don’t have any content?

***

In Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” readers can find:

The detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.

With Babel, we come full circle back to the ark. Like Rabelais, Borges wants to know and have it all—in fact, the moral of the story is that our dream of the total library is actually our deluded desire to become gods. In the Bible, the ark and the Tower of Babel are survival machines that protect humans from divine calamity. Totality and ruin, humans and God, proliferation and confusion—these are the grand themes of the Bible and the history of imaginary libraries.

Lists beget lists. But they also cannibalize one other. In fat years, we make lists to keep track of what we have. In thin years, we make lists of what we had or what we want. They give us a measure of comfort and hope. And in good times and bad, we make lists of invented books to remind us of our finitude.

 

From The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries , to be published by Princeton University Press in December.

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.