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Re-Covered: A Black Female Beat Novel from the Sixties

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

When I read the extract from the writer and activist J. J. Phillips’s novel Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale in Margaret Busby’s groundbreaking Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (1992), I immediately knew that I had to track down a copy. Phillips’s writing is raw, but it’s astonishingly lyrical, too, mesmerizingly so. Later, trying to find out more about the book, I came across the novelist and academic John O. Killens’s verdict in Ebony magazine, congratulating Phillips for having “captured the beauty of Negro language and put it down without fear.” This is all the more impressive a feat considering she was only twenty-two years old when this, her debut novel, was first published in 1966.

Reading Mojo Hand in its entirety only confirmed my initial impression; it was unlike anything else I’ve read. It was also a book I’d never heard any mention of outside Busby’s anthology, which seemed particularly bewildering given its strange, unique power. I quickly came to agree with the American historian, novelist, music critic, and longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, who, in 2015, described it novel as “the most neglected book I know.” Perhaps this disregard has an explanation. Reading it today, it’s clear that Phillips was a writer ahead of her era, and Mojo Hand, as summed up by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carolyn Kizer, was simply “too rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.”

Drawing on the majesty and might of a Greek myth, it tells the story of a light-skinned black woman from San Francisco named Eunice Prideaux, who has abandoned the comforts of her middle-class life and traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, in search of Blacksnake Brown, a blues singer whose music has cast a powerful spell over her: an “Orpheus with a diamond in his teeth,” who “heralded the sun” with his guitar, “the instrument that became a part of him.” Blacksnake is loosely based on the real-life blues musician Lightnin’ Hopkins, whose music Phillips became obsessed with when she was eighteen. The Blacksnake in her novel is old and mean and treats Eunice badly, but she’s a woman possessed. It’s a love story, for sure, but not one that deals in anything close to romantic stereotypes. As one reviewer described it, Eunice and Blacksnake’s entanglement is “a nasty love.” As such, it’s perhaps unsurprising that when the book first appeared, its strange mixture of mystical, musical, and sexual enchantment elicited both impassioned praise and fervent condemnation. Some, like Killens, applauded the arrival of a talented new voice, while others found fault with a work they simply couldn’t get a handle on. Writing in the Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller declared the book formally defective, while the literary and jazz critic Albert Murray completely tore it to shreds in The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture (1970), accusing Phillips of both terrible writing and perpetuating unflattering racial stereotypes:

That its young author would rather be a novelist than a social science expert is somehow clear enough; but as yet her conception of the art of fiction is as aboriginal as that of certain widely patronized Negro literary figures who have yet to realize that banal sayings, slang anecdotes, dirty remarks, and bad song lyrics do not become literature simply because they are published in book form.

Following a 1986 reprint, and UK publication the following year, Mojo Hand garnered a smattering of further critical acclaim. Most of these write-ups acknowledged that the novel hadn’t received the attention it deserved the first time around; audiences in the eighties didn’t regard the book as anywhere near as problematic as some in the sixties had. No one, for example, reiterated Murray’s complaints. Although there were—and are—still obstacles to overcome, much had changed in the twenty years that had passed between editions. Today, we’ve come closer to understanding that representations of characters of color should be afforded the same privileges as those of their white counterparts, including the privilege of weakness and imperfection. A character ought to be able to be flawed—whether complicated and cruel or misogynistic and violent—without the charge that this reflects badly on the rest of their race. “In a decade during which American readers are rediscovering and celebrating the misprized (and even suppressed) voices of black women writers,” wrote James A. Snead in the Los Angeles Times in 1986, praising the relevance of the novel’s reissue, “Mojo Hand represents a most timely and impressive spiritual chronicle.” I firmly believe that audiences today would be even keener to embrace what’s clearly a trailblazing work of fiction. In fact, despite its uniqueness, if I had to compare the novel to anything, it would be to Fran Ross’s brilliant Oreo (1974)—the story of a young biracial fourteen-year-old who runs away from her black grandparents, with whom she lives, and goes in search of her white, Jewish father—which was reissued to much praise by New Directions in 2015. They’re completely different books—not least because Oreo is a rollicking picaresque comedy, which Mojo Hand certainly isn’t—but they both broke the mold and completely defied expectations when it came to the subjects readers expected from young black women writers. They’re both loosely based on a Greek myth—Oreo on the myth of Theseus, and Mojo Hand on that of Orpheus—and each is an unexpected take on a certain political moment. Ross’s novel was published at the height of the Black Power movement but it’s a story about a black woman on a mission to find her whiteness, while Phillips’s novel was a far cry from the serious “social issues” work many surely expected a young civil rights activist to pen in the early days of the civil rights movement.

*

Having, at the very beginning of the novel, arrived in Raleigh with nothing but her guitar, Eunice soon finds herself living with Blacksnake, working at a hotel-cum-whorehouse, and spending her meager wages on beer and gin. Murray’s criticism that the book perpetuates racist stereotype aren’t entirely baseless. The men Eunice encounters, Blacksnake included, are, by and large, drunk, abusive, and only after one thing. They treat women terribly, using them for sex, or as unpaid laborers. And the women, although unfairly put-upon, aren’t much better; they drink and talk dirty. Fuller’s complaint that the novel is “almost plotless” is also a fair observation. There’s a virtuosic early interlude during which, having been mistaken for a prostitute, Eunice is locked up in the county jail for two weeks. Then, toward the end of the book, after her relationship with Blacksnake has soured, she travels as far as Lake Charles in a half-hearted attempt to escape his clutches, only to find herself drawn back into his orbit. Otherwise, not that much happens. The pleasures of Mojo Hand lie elsewhere: in Phillips’s powerful portrait of her protagonist’s search for her black roots, her depiction of the magnetism of Blacksnake and his music, and the hypnotic rhythms and power of her unvarnished yet luxuriant prose. Mojo Hand is infused throughout with the smoky, boozy atmosphere of a late-night blues joint. It’s a novel of intense feeling—something that contemporary readers are now finally more familiar with—in which Phillips creates a potent sense of place and mood. Her portrait of downtown Raleigh, where most of the book is set, is a sort of underworld—“unpaved streets crowded with ramshackle houses as close together as a mouth full of rotten teeth,” with its pool halls and beer parlors—fueled by cheap liquor and love, where violence, jealousy, and pain lurk in dark corners.

The novel begins with Eunice stepping off the train into the “black heat” of the South. It isn’t until she winds up in jail that we’re afforded a glimpse of where she’s come from: a world of cotillions and “society women of eternal agelessness” gathering for “tea and talk.” Bored and restless at one such soiree, Eunice thumbs through a stack of records, switching out the classical tune playing on the phonograph for Blacksnake Brown’s “Bakershop Blues.” The effect is instantaneous. She hears “shouts and shrieks” from the other room: “Everyone had relaxed. Some women were unbuckling their stockings, others were loosening the belts around their waists. Someone had gotten out brandy and was pouring it into the teacups.” It’s a moment of Damascene clarity: Eunice realizes that “she had to go find the source of herself, this music that moved her and the others, however much they tried to deny it.”

In the novel, the blues aren’t just something people play, they’re bound up in the very essence of blackness, something one’s “born with,” even if—as is the case with Eunice—they weren’t strictly born into it:

Until this night she had been outside of the cage, but now she had joined them forever. The wizened jiving man had been the instrument by which she acknowledged her kinship to him and all those others who daily were squeezed into nonexistence, and nightly, in the ripe heat, violently asserted their being. His music was the music of such nights, the music of the evening resurrection of an entire people.

Phillips’s “insider’s knowledge” of the blues, as Kizer described it, was much praised by the critics who recognized the novel’s brilliance. “What comes through is music: the music of language, the music of the blues, the anguished music of black America,” declared the Baltimore Sun. Phillips conveys the eroticism of the music, how the blues tell stories of sex and love, and pain and damage, music-making bound up in lovemaking. As she describes Eunice and Blacksnake playing together:

He had told her not to sing so much, yet he sang violently as he plucked the accompaniment from her pliable essence. Desisting and yielding like a properly drawn string, being was given and taken and given again. Raucously and inaudibly the blues spilled forth, whirled down and sprang up again, with only a creaking bed to hold the demands of their tension.

But Mojo Hand is also a portrait of a woman ensnared and ill-treated. Fuller’s description of Eunice as moving through the book “like a somnambulist” is perfect. But whereas he sees this as a flaw—indicative of Phillips’s inability to account for or explain her character’s motivations—on the contrary, I would argue that this is absolutely integral to the novel’s peculiar, hypnotic power. It’s less a love story about individuals and more a tale of mystical, mythic proportions. “Mojo Hand is as sophisticated as primitive sculpture, and has the same element of magic,” critic Harriet Doar concluded in the Charlotte Observer. “The characters move along invisible threads, as if under a spell.” This enchantment reaches out beyond the margins to intoxicate the reader. After the first flush of attraction with Blacksnake has faded, Eunice sinks lower and lower into “the drudgery of the days,” caught in “those treasonous blues and the man weaving sabotage in her with the craft of his hands.” At her wit’s end, she seeks out a “spiritual mother” called Madame Karplus, who ties up a “mojo hand”—a magical charm that induces luck, in this case bad luck—against Blacksnake. Theirs is an affair that, “given the Orphic parallels,” according to Snead, “ends with tragic predictability.”

*

So what of Phillips’s relationship with Lightnin’ Hopkins, the real-life Blacksnake Brown? Phillips grew up in Los Angeles, in a progressive African American family—“for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Caucasians in visage and speech.” “From early on,” she told Alan Govenar, author of Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues (2010)—the only analysis of the novel and the author’s life that I’ve been able to find—“I was exposed to varieties of cultural expression, including dress, food, music, language, dialects, idiolects, ways of looking at the world and inhabiting it.” All the same, her first year at Immaculate Heart College broadened her horizons even further. In guest lectures by the musicologist Peter Yates, she was “grabbed” by the folk and blues music he introduced. Then, that summer, spurred on by “the galvanizing force” of the previous years’ Freedom Rides, she went to Raleigh to join the civil rights movement. There she participated in the voter registration program organized by the National Student Association, going door to door to sign up unregistered black voters. Afterward, she remained in town “to engage in independent direct action strikes just to shake up the status quo.” While participating in a CORE-sponsored sit-in at the local Howard Johnson’s restaurant, Phillips was arrested, convicted of trespassing, and sentenced to thirty days in the Wake County jail. It was an episode that, looking back on it in an essay she wrote in 2016, she described as “an immersive intensive in which I got the kind of real-life education I could never have obtained otherwise.” It also provided her with firsthand experience on which to draw when writing about Eunice’s time in lockup.

Back in Los Angeles for her sophomore year, Phillips delved ever deeper into black roots music. She found herself captivated by Samuel Charters’s description of the enigmatic Lightnin’ in The Country Blues (1959). Charters had traveled to Houston to track the elusive musician down, and Phillips wanted to see if she could do the same. Thanksgiving break, 1962, she and her roommate Krista Balatony each told their parents that they were going to spend the holiday at a friend’s house in nearby Montecito. Instead, they took the Sunset Limited—“hoboing in coach by keeping one step away from the conductor”—all the way to Houston. Once there, they asked around until someone was able to help them find the man they were looking for. They spent every night of their stay in the Snowboat Lounge listening to Lightnin’ play. Phillips—who’d bought along her guitar—jammed with him after hours.

Their trip was brief; they soon returned to school. But, only a few months later, Phillips was expelled. The official reason given was violation of her dorm curfew, but as she wrote in the 2016 essay, “it is my firm conviction that I was railroaded out of this almost exclusively white, Catholic women’s college because I had become an ‘inconvenient Negro’ and the administration considered my race and my civil rights activities liabilities.” There was, as she pointed out to Govenar, no small irony in her situation: “I’d gone to Raleigh to help eradicate racism, I’d gone to jail and I’d been a passenger in a car that was chased by the Klan—I literally put my life on the line for my convictions, only to return to Los Angeles to be done in by the very beast I had gone South to slay—at the very institution I had naively put my trust in.”

No longer tethered to the West Coast, Phillips returned to Houston in 1964, embarking on a sexual relationship with Lightnin’ that lasted for the next five years. As Govenar clarifies, Mojo Hand is in no way straight autobiography; many of the details are entirely invented—Blacksnake’s physical violence toward Eunice, for example. But much of the background color of the story was gleaned from Phillips’s firsthand experience, not least the existence of a rival for Lightnin’s affections: the woman he referred to as his wife, Antoinette. In the novel Blacksnake has a spouse in Lake Charles, to whom he returns toward the end of the story, leaving Eunice “like some lonesome ghost.” In reality, however, Phillips was the one who realized that her relationship with Lightnin’ was no longer tenable. Her parents were threatening to come and drag her back to California by force, and Antoinette was promising to do her some damage—“put some Louisiana hoodoo on me or shoot me”—so she cut her losses, bowing out gracefully. Back in Los Angeles, she got a job as a fry cook and began work on Mojo Hand.

Interestingly, Phillips didn’t sit down to write the novel with publication in mind. She wrote it entirely for her own satisfaction—in an attempt to compose something that “incorporated some of my experiences and impressions of that most memorable summer” in Raleigh, her self-confessed “fascination” with Lightnin’, and what she described as her “abiding interest in herpetology, especially the blacksnake”—but when she showed it to one of her old teachers (also a writer) at Immaculate Heart, “because I hoped he would tell the nuns that I could actually accomplish something even though they’d expelled me,” he sent it straight to his agent, who sold it almost immediately. It took Phillips—who is still alive today—thirty years to publish her follow-up, The Passion of Joan Paul II: A Pasquinade (1996), a slim work of satire on the papacy. And only one further work has appeared since, a poem, Nigga in the Woodpile: A Rant and Commentary (2008). Both were released by small independent presses and received scant critical attention. Had Mojo Hand marked the beginning of the celebrated writing career it seemed to promise, surely it would be better known today.

Although it’s definitely not a depiction of the civil rights activism of the sixties—indeed, Phillips slyly includes a scene in which an NSA representative comes knocking on Blacksnake and Eunice’s door to try to register them to vote, but neither of them sees any point in doing so—Mojo Hand was forged in that climate of radical resistance and revolution. Speaking with Govenar, Phillips explained that in its own way, the novel reflected her personal political awakening, something its detractors universally failed to recognize. She describes it as “a story of one person’s journey from a non-radicalized state to the radicalized real world, as was happening to me.” I can understand that it might have confused some readers; given the active role Phillips had taken in the civil rights movement, Mojo Hand is probably not the novel many would have predicted she would write as a consequence of her experiences. But in my mind, this only makes it more interesting. “It was against the grain when it was written, inasmuch as it is a political novel at all it is deeply skeptical,” John Williams astutely observed in his review of the book in the British magazine The Face in 1988, “rather it’s a kind of female beat novel.” I couldn’t agree more; Mojo Hand is the story of a young woman’s quest for her own identity and empowerment. And, inasmuch as the personal is the political, it’s no coincidence, for example, that as the story draws to a close, it’s Eunice’s music—music that in the course of the novel has become increasingly powerful and evocative—that’s replaced Blacksnake’s: “They say that when a man gets the blues, he catch a train and rides, and when a woman gets the blues, she hang her head and cries,” she sings, “but when this woman gets the blues, she puts on her black wings and flies.”

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here . 

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

Betraying My Hometown

The Longmen Grottoes scenic area in Luoyang, China, near the Yi River, located in Henan Province. Photo: © Dan / Adobe Stock.

Some people spend their entire lives in their own home, village, or city, while others spend their lives elsewhere. There are also some people who end up constantly traveling back and forth between home and another place.

When I was twenty, I left home to join the army. This was the first time I took a train, the first time I watched television, the first time I heard about Chinese women’s volleyball, and the first time I had the chance to eat limitless amounts of dumplings and meat buns. It was also the first time I learned that there were three categories of fiction: short stories, novellas, and novels. It was also back in 1978, while I was living in the military barracks, that I became enthralled by the solemnity and even the smell of China’s literary journals, People’s Literature and Liberation Army Literature and Arts. It was around this time that I happened to see, on the cover of a book in the city library, a picture of the blue-eyed Vivien Leigh. I was shocked by her beauty, and for several minutes I stared dumbfounded at the picture. I couldn’t believe that foreigners looked like this, that there could be people in this world who appeared so different from us. So I checked out all three volumes of the Chinese edition of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, each of which had a cover with a picture of Leigh from the film adaptation, and over the course of three nights I finished the entire thing. I had assumed that the rest of the world’s fiction was identical to the revolutionary stories and the Red Classics that I had read, and this was how I came to realize how limited and warped my understanding of literature was.

I began excitedly reading works by Western authors such as Tolstoy, Balzac, and Stendhal. While reading Hugo’s Les Misérables, I felt my palms grow sweaty, thinking that Jean Valjean might step out from the book’s pages, a thought that was so disturbing that I frequently had to close the volume and crack my knuckles just to distract myself. Similarly, while reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, I would wake up in the middle of the night and go out to the military drill grounds, and only after running a lap in the frigid cold would I return to my dormitory and continue devouring the novel. But it was Margaret Mitchell who truly transported me to another world, a casually dressed maid leading me into a solemn church.

It was at this time that I began to commit myself to reading and writing, and even submitted manuscripts for publication. In 1979 I published my first short story, which unfortunately is now lost. For that work, I received eight yuan, which made me more excited than an 800,000 yuan payment would today. I used two yuan to buy candy and cigarettes for my company and platoon leaders, as well as my fellow soldiers. Then I pooled the remaining six yuan with the earnings I’d saved up from the preceding three months, leaving me with a total of twenty yuan, which I mailed home to help pay for my father’s medicine. Over the next few years I managed to publish one or two stories a year, from which I earned between a dozen and several dozen yuan. I sent almost all of my payments home, and my mother or elder sister would give the money to the town pharmacy or hospital for my father’s medicine and treatment. Eventually I was promoted to cadre and got married, but I secretly still dreamed that one day I might be able to become an author. If I did, my father would feel that I had truly succeeded in establishing both a career and a family—meaning that he could now depart from this life.

The same way that a tree can bear fruit, and the fruit can decay, die, or yield a new fruit tree, over time, a single household can grow into a village. Everything is merely a repetition or a reenactment of this same basic process of growth. Regardless of whether you spend your entire life on a single plot of land or leave home and seek your fortune elsewhere, it is impossible to escape your destiny.

I never stop to ponder things beyond fate, because accepting fate is my only way of approaching the world. When my father told me to go seek my fortune, I began struggling to achieve that “fortune.” When Margaret Mitchell showed me a new world, I began exploring it. I set about reading and writing, establishing my career and earning money, and when I was tired I would return to my family home and chat with my mother and my siblings, and do what I could to help out the other villagers. After recovering my strength I would leave again, only to return when I was tired. I believe that this process of traveling to and from the village is a trajectory arranged for me by heaven.

*

In 1985, my son was born, and my mother moved from our hometown in the countryside to the old city of Kaifeng, to help with the baby. That also happened to be the same year that I published my first novella in the now-defunct journal Kunlun. Running just under forty thousand Chinese characters, the novella earned me almost 800 yuan, and our family was almost more excited to receive this vast sum than we had been by the birth of our son. To celebrate, the entire family went to a restaurant and wolfed down a meal, and we also purchased an eighteen-inch television set. From the 1979 publication of my first short story to the 1985 publication of my first novella, I had endured six years of hardship and toil, and my family understood how this was bittersweet. My mother, however, took that thick copy of Kunlun and leafed through the twenty-odd pages containing my story, then remarked, “You were able to earn 800 yuan for such a short piece? This is much better than a peasant farming the land. If this is the deal, then you should spend the rest of your life writing!”

I similarly felt that this line of work was much better than being a peasant. I didn’t have to endure adverse weather, and had the opportunity to attain a degree of power and fame. This was definitely something to which I could devote my whole life. When I had left home, my father had exhorted me to go seek my fortune, and my mother was now recommending that I continue writing—so what reason did I have to stop? Later, during the golden age of contemporary Chinese literature, a television series for which I had written the screenplay was broadcast on CCTV at prime time for three years, and royalties for this script were larger than the ones I received for my fiction. I was able to send my mother so much money every month that she felt she wouldn’t be able to spend it all even if she ate meat every day. Furthermore, every New Year the town mayor, county mayor, and county party secretary would come to our house to offer us their greetings, and consequently all the other villagers realized I had become famous enough for the county mayor to visit me and invite me out to eat. It was as though a household had, in the blink of an eye, succeeded in becoming not merely a village but an entire city, and during that period our home’s appearance and spirit were like the arrival of spring after a bitterly cold winter. Even the calls of the sparrows on the tree branches and the house’s eaves sounded different from before.

In 1994 one of my novellas ran into trouble, and consequently I had to spend six months penning self-criticisms. During this period I spent all day writing self-criticisms and all night working on my own fiction, until in the end my lumbago and spinal arthritis began flaring up. Eventually my health deteriorated to the point that I had to write while lying flat on my back in bed. I even needed someone to bring me food and put it right in my hand. During this period, my mother, elder brother, and elder sister came to the barracks to visit me. When my mother saw that I was unable to walk or even sit up, and instead was lying flat on my back on a stretcher the Federation for Disabled Persons had built specifically for me, with a movable board positioned directly above my head so I could still write, she exclaimed, “Have you driven yourself insane with your writing? Have you taken a perfectly good person, and transformed him into a disabled one?” My elder brother looked at the stretcher and the frame holding my writing board, and asked, “Why bother with all of this? … Isn’t living well ultimately more important than these things you want to write?” Meanwhile, my sisters both said the same thing: “We are already living quite comfortably now, so there is no need for you to lie here every day and continue writing these things people don’t like.”

There was a period of silence, after which my family began urging me to stop writing, adding that if I felt I really had to continue, I should at least focus on things people like—such as screenplays for television series on CCTV. Thinking back, I realize that these were not merely my family’s own words, but were the voice and the sentiment of the entire village. At the time, however, I couldn’t understand this collective voice and spirit and, instead, nodded as earnestly and piously as if I were writing a self-criticism. After my family left, I continued lying on that stretcher, writing my novel Streams of Time. After Streams of Time, I wrote the novella The Years, Months, Days, as well as the novels Hard Like Water and Lenin’s Kisses. After the publication of Lenin’s Kisses, however, I was forced to leave the army and find a new employer, following which I wrote two more novels that incited even greater consternation. During that year’s Lunar New Year festival, our county’s mayor called me up and announced, “Lianke, I want to tell you something undeniably true: you are now our county’s most unwelcome resident!”

Upon hearing this, I abruptly realized what kind of transformation my relationship with that region had undergone. It was as though an ox had accidentally trod on the body of the farmer charged with looking after it.

*

After I learned that I was our region’s most unwelcome resident, three days passed without my leaving the house. I didn’t find the mayor’s remark humorous, nor did I see it as a drunken rambling. Instead, it was an articulation of the region’s attitudes and positions, given in the local accent. At this point I began to ponder the relationship between my writing and this land. I noticed that while the land could very easily do without me, I couldn’t survive without the land. Without me, the land would just follow its current trajectory. The sun would continue to rise and set, and life would go on as it had for more than a thousand years. However, without that land, I would no longer be myself. Without that village, I would be nothing. I reflected that perhaps I had strayed too far from that land, that I had forgotten the color of the soil. I had eaten and drunk my fill from that land, and then had taken enough food and essentials to move forward for a long time without looking back. This is how I ended up straying so far afield, to the point that I almost forgot where I was born and had grown up. Even the relatives still living on that land didn’t believe that I still had any close ties there.

I had to return again to that land.

When I came home for the New Year celebration in 2012, I was prepared to ignore the people disparaging, critiquing, and cursing my family. But as it happened that year our family enjoyed an unusually peaceful and congenial holiday period. When I went to visit my relatives, I heard the flowing river, which reminded me of how I would sing exuberantly in the fields when I was a child. Together with my mother, sisters, and sister-in-law, I watched the television series My Fair Princess and ate New Year dumplings and stir-fried dishes. That entire visit, until I left home on day five of the new year, I didn’t hear a single critique of me or my writing. But, after the festivities had concluded and I was about to depart, my elder brother smiled bitterly and said, “When you go back, perhaps you could write other sorts of things? You could write something different!” And as I was driving back to Beijing, the nephew escorting me murmured, “Uncle, my grandmother asked me to speak to you on her behalf, and tell you that it is still possible to live a good life without writing. There is no need for you to hang yourself from this tree of writing … ”

*

I really was going to hang myself from this tree of writing.

I knew I had strayed too far from the original wishes of my parents, my sisters, my elder brother and his wife, and my fellow villagers. I felt like a child who runs away from home when he is young, and when he approaches sixty and finally decides to return to his hometown and live out his old age, discovers that he can’t even find the house where he grew up. In fact, he can’t even find the village. I felt like a child who adopts a religion but then rarely encounters a church or mosque, or a Buddhist or Taoist temple, and consequently although he might have God in his heart, over time he might forget what a church or temple is, and when he returns home he might not even recognize these places of worship.

In this case, it is not the church that rejects the believer, but rather the believer who abandons the church.

Some might say that a home to which one cannot return is the only true hometown. My hometown never rejected me, and whenever I return almost everyone welcomes me and appears to be proud of me. However, I don’t dare tell them what exactly I spend my days writing. I am this region’s unfilial son, an enemy agent, and the reason everyone still smiles when I return is that they don’t know that I’m a traitor to their land.

I heard that during the War of Resistance against Japan, in a village in the Northeast there was a traitor who was able to enjoy a good life by selling out his relatives. It was said that every time he went into the city pretending to do business but actually to deliver intelligence reports to the Japanese, he would always return with many small goods that were scarce at that time, and would distribute them to his neighbors and fellow villagers. The neighbors and villagers all viewed this traitor as the most generous person in the village, and even in the entire northeast region. Even after he was executed following the end of the war, none of the locals could believe that he was an unfilial son and a traitor.

I often wonder whether it has been by betraying my land that I have managed to achieve fame and fortune, whether this is how I have managed to live a comfortable life. However, even if I completely abandon my home and my land, our family’s front door will still be open, awaiting my return. Whenever I return home, which I do sometimes several times a year, all of my relatives, neighbors, and fellow villagers know that I’ve come back, but I am the only one who knows that I have not truly returned to the home of my youth. My body may have returned, but my spirit continues to hover over the fields beyond the village. I do not want my family and neighbors to know what I have said, done, or written while I was away—the same way that that traitor from the Northeast did not want those in his village to know what he had said and done in the city. So whenever I return home, I am meek and silent with my mother, siblings, and other relatives. I smile and nod pleasantly and, regardless of what is said, always feign a look of devoted attention. Nevertheless, I know that between me and that piece of land there is a wall I have built and which only I can see.

It might appear that the world and human affairs are static, but in reality things are constantly changing. Not long ago, during the first half of 2018, I once again returned home to rest and recover my strength. After dinner, everyone sat around awkwardly, silence pressing down on us like a black haze. My father’s funeral portrait was sitting on the table staring at me, while my mother, my sisters, and my brother and his wife all remained silent and stared down at the ground. At that moment—after perhaps a few seconds, though maybe it was a few years or even centuries—my elder brother began to speak.

He said to me, “Lianke, you’re already sixty, right?”

I laughed. “Yes. From the time I left home to join the army, it has already been forty years.”

No one could believe it had already been four decades since I left home, just as even I couldn’t believe that I was already sixty. Everyone was struck by this reminder of the inexorable passage of time, like someone who is hit on the head by a club but can’t believe that the attack has occurred, though the blood seeping out through the cracks in time proves that it is true. My elder brother then adopted a tone similar to our father’s, and said, “You are already sixty, and have read many books. While you are away from home, you should do whatever you want.”

Then my mother said, “I’m already eighty-five. While you are away from home, you should write whatever you want, just as long as you return every year to visit me and this home.”

And then … and then I suddenly felt relaxed. There was silence again, the silence between people who meet again after a long separation. It was as though the physical architecture of a church had recognized a believer who had returned after a long absence, and then used its bricks and tiles, its beams and rafters, as well as the pictures and objects hanging from its walls, to embrace its lost child.

This church would welcome this person to sit in the center of the building, where he could rest, reflect, ponder, and murmur. It would say to him, “If you continue going away, and want to go even further, then this church will follow along behind you. You don’t need to worry that you’ve left the church behind, since regardless of where you go, and regardless of how far you travel, your home and your land will always be under your feet.”

—Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas

 

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous story collections and novels, including The Day the Sun Died; The Years, Months, Days; The Explosion Chronicles; The Four Books; Lenin’s Kisses; Serve the People!; and Dream of Ding Village. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, he was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina Étranger. He has received two of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.

Carlos Rojas is the translator of several books by Yan Lianke. He is the author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Reform in Modern China; The Great Wall: A Cultural History; and The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity, as well as many articles. He is a professor in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke University.

Excerpted from Three Brothers © 2009 by Yan Lianke. English translation © 2020 by Carlos Rojas. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.

Laughter as a Shield: An Interview with Souvankham Thammavongsa

I first reached out to Souvankham Thammavongsa for this interview in February, which feels like a lifetime ago. That was back when we were all still going to work and seeing movies and hugging our friends and family with impunity. Though only a few months have passed, that now seems like a bygone era. A bygone world, really.

In Thammavongsa’s new book, How to Pronounce Knife, she draws upon her childhood as the daughter of Laotian immigrants to tell fourteen stories, each an exploration of foreignness and belonging. In one story, an aging widow falls in love with a much younger man; in others, a child recalls learning that the earth is round, and a Lao woman teaches herself English by watching daytime soap operas. In sparse prose braced with disarming humor, Thammavongsa offers glimpses into the daily lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating the desires, disappointments, and triumphs of those who so often go unseen. 

Over the past week, while cooped up at home, I reread the slim collection and found that, like so many things, it resonates differently in isolation. Moments I had thought lighthearted on first reading now struck me as heartbreaking. Lines that had been out of focus suddenly came into sharp relief. A wistful description of fermented fish sauce nearly brought me to tears. On rereading, I also noticed—perhaps because I have been feeling claustrophobic—just how spacious the stories are. Though short enough to read in one sitting, they feel vast in their scope, offering ample room to wander. 

In this surreal moment, when so many of us are confined within cramped homes and cluttered minds, this book is a welcome reminder that, given the right attention, even the smallest spaces can feel expansive.

In addition to writing fiction, Thammavongsa is an accomplished poet and essayist. She has published four acclaimed books of poetry. This is her first collection of short stories. Our interview was conducted over the phone between Toronto and New York, just days before COVID-19 sent the world into lockdown. We spoke about language, laughter, and our shared love of country music.

 

INTERVIEWER

Many of the stories in your collection are concerned with language, both translation and mistranslation. Which languages were spoken in your house growing up?

THAMMAVONGSA

It is a bit confusing. I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. Most people are recognized as a citizen by the country they are born in, but in a refugee camp, you are considered stateless. So although I was born in Thailand, I am not Thai. My parents are Lao and immigrated to Canada when I was very young. I grew up in Toronto, near Keele Street and Eglinton Avenue West. In our neighborhood, it was not a big deal to be a refugee. Almost everyone was.

We spoke Lao at home. I spoke English at school, but almost never used it with my parents. I think from a very early age, I was aware of the power of language. In our house, English didn’t have the same potency as Lao. I could cuss in English, for example, and it meant nothing. Whereas, in Lao, language like that could cut deeply and be vicious. English never held the same weight. Nothing anyone has ever said to me in English could hurt like that. And English took something away from my parents, too. It wasn’t their native tongue, and seeing them use it diminished them somehow—their authority, their sense of humor, their brilliance. The languages are so different. 

INTERVIEWER

In what ways are they different?

THAMMAVONGSA

Well, for one thing, Lao is very connected to sound. A lot of words in the Lao language sound like what they are. The word “cat” for example sounds sort of like a meow. It’s onomatopoetic. In Lao, the sound of language is deeply connected to the meaning of language, which is a sensibility that I think has informed my poetry.

INTERVIEWER

The stories in this collection are remarkably restrained. You withhold a lot from the reader. Often we don’t know where we are or even what a character’s name is. It creates both a sense of dislocation and great room for possibility. Can you talk a little bit about that choice?

THAMMAVONGSA

The thing about simple language is that it can be very porous. It leaves so much room for the reader to do the work. Often in my stories I don’t refer to any specific place, I just use the word “here.” The reader has to determine where “here” is. Or else, they are haunted because they don’t know. All the characters in the stories are immigrants coming from somewhere else. They don’t really know the spaces they are occupying either. So I left that word intentionally vacant. In this instance, even a little word like “here” is doing so much for the text. Even in a short story like “Paris,” no one ever goes to Paris and we’re never in Paris, but because of the title we enter the story with the idea of Paris—its culture, its sophistication, its fashion. It haunts the text because it’s so far removed from everybody and everything in this chicken-processing plant.

INTERVIEWER

The title of your book is a reference to the first story in the collection, in which a Lao child is learning to read and gets tripped up by the word “knife” with its tricky silent k. She asks her father for help and he pronounces it with the k sound. When she goes back to school, her classmates make fun of her, but she insists that her father’s pronunciation is correct. This small moment reveals so much about the limits and treacheries of language, and the ways it can divide and unite. You have said that this moment is based on experiences you had as a child. I’m curious how this early awareness of the power of language has informed your writing?

THAMMAVONGSA

Yes, my parents mispronounced things all the time, and they did it with a wonderful and grand confidence. I would tell my parents that the kids at school pronounced knife with no k sound and we would laugh and laugh at how silly they were. There’s a letter right there and they don’t even do anything about it! And they call themselves educated! All of the stories play with that in some way—what is lost and what is gained in these mistakes. How can the “wrong” thing be in some ways more right, or contain more potential, than the “right” thing? I am interested in the value of a mistake. If the character knew how to pronounce that word from the beginning, there wouldn’t be a story. But because she struggles with it, she knows its power. Language is all about symbols. This little word “knife” becomes a symbol for something so much larger and more complicated. It becomes a way of honoring her family and her place in the world. When the little girl argues with her teacher about the pronunciation of the k, she isn’t just being difficult, she is fighting for the validity of her experience and the integrity of her home. 

INTERVIEWER

There is a lot of humor in your writing. I laughed out loud several times, particularly with “Chick-a-Chee” and “Randy Travis,” and found myself surprised in places by the lightness and generosity of your voice. Many of your characters are facing grave injustices of one kind or another, whether emotional or political or economic. These circumstances wouldn’t seem to lend themselves easily to laughter, yet you manage to inflect humor without being derisive or diminishing the gravity. That’s not an easy needle to thread.

THAMMAVONGSA

Laughter is very important to me. The cornerstone of all these stories is laughter. To me, laughter isn’t frivolous. It is a way of surviving. Laughter when things are horribly unbearable. Laughter when things are uncomfortable. Laughter when there is nothing else to feel. Also when there is joy, too. You have to laugh because that’s how you take back your power. Deriving humor from pain, and allowing the two to coexist within a single moment, has been integral to my experience of being an immigrant.

INTERVIEWER

In “Edge of the World,” a Lao man describes how, whenever he is told to do something at work, he responds, “Yes, sir!” but he says it with the tone and force of a “Fuck you!” It’s a really funny little moment. In this instance, the humor seems to be unlocking something—a kind of reclaimed power or space for resistance, perhaps. 

THAMMAVONGSA

Yes, yes, exactly. So that moment is meant to be funny but it’s also an inversion. He has taken his position of subservience and flipped it on its head. A phrase that is an expression of polite obedience becomes a private expression of defiance. The laughter is almost like a weapon or a tool.

INTERVIEWER

Can you say more about that?

THAMMAVONGSA

You know, I’m a huge fan of Richard Pryor and if you watch the way he talks about his family, about the way he grew up and about his mother and some very difficult subjects, the way he frames them in humor is really interesting and powerful. He makes the audience laugh and then he holds onto that laughter like a shield so that the experiences he’s talking about can’t destroy him. I think I’m trying to do something similar.

INTERVIEWER

What a spectacular image. In “Randy Travis,” the narrator describes that her mother loves American country music “because it reminded her of the way the women in her family talked amongst themselves. It felt familiar. The pleas, the gossip, the dreams of the big city, what it was like to be from a place no one had ever heard of.” I had never thought about American country music that way before.

THAMMAVONGSA

Ya know, I love country music. I love Randy Travis and Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton. One of the reasons it’s so good is because it relies on simple storytelling. The songs are stories about love and family and loss. They are about feeling dislocated and yearning for a sense of home, which anyone can relate to, but especially immigrants. Even though these musicians are American, they give voice to something that really resonates with the experience of being an outsider. It’s very comforting to know that even when you belong to a place, you can feel alone in it and estranged from it. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. That longing is universal.

When I first heard Dolly Parton’s song “A Coat of Many Colors” as a kid it just broke my heart. The song is about this coat that her mother made for her that she thinks is the most beautiful coat in the world, but when she wears it to school she realizes that it is made of rags and it’s actually ugly. And that is sort of like the experience of pronouncing knife with a k. At home you think one thing and then you go out into the world and your view changes suddenly and everyone tells you that your perspective is wrong. One of the questions I wanted to make room for in these stories is, Why is that wrong? What if it could be a coat of many colors? 

INTERVIEWER

What are your thoughts about how your work relates to or challenges prevailing narratives about the immigrant experience? 

THAMMAVONGSA

Often when we encounter refugees and immigrants in the news and in literature, they are sad and tragic figures. And, in some ways, that makes sense. The suffering is real and I don’t want to diminish it. But that is also a very narrow range of what we feel and who we are. We don’t often get to see ourselves as ferocious or furious or ungrateful or joyous or enamored. And I really wanted to give voice to some of those other, less familiar, aspects of the experience. I wanted to try to visualize those feelings into stories and place them alongside the many stories of sadness and anger to make a more complicated picture.

 

Cornelia Channing is a writer from Bridgehampton, New York.

The Writer’s Obligation

© Layn / Adobe Stock.

The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to pay attention. Dreamed last night of a senile woman who’d taken up piano-playing; dementia had etherealized her features. Like a seasoned, reputable coach, I stood behind her while she fumbled through Schubert. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to remember the history of song, and to remember the reasons that troubled people have looked toward song to relieve pain and to organize, with other sufferers, in resistance.

*

With curiosity and reverence, I pulled down, from the shelf, the legendary No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, the original paperback edition, 1973, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to revisit books to which we have ceased paying sufficient attention, books we have failed adequately to love.

*

On a transcontinental flight I read Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. I wanted to live in the crevice where words broke down, and where matter arose to compensate for the loss. Some words I found in The Unnamable: “grapnels,” “apodosis,” “sparsim,” “congener,” “paraphimotically globose,” “circumvolutionisation,” “inspissates,” “naja,” “halm,” “thebaïd.” These words—obstructions in the throat—seemed specimens of rigorous, refined accounting, of a system so late-stage, so desolate, it could only satisfy description’s mandate by lodging in words virtually never used. And, while 39,000 miles in the air, I imagined an island where the only currency, for the stricken inhabitants, gumming their porridge, was the obsolete word, the rare word, the word stigmatized, in the dictionary, as “literary.” I was imagining an island—call it the planet Earth—after most of it was rendered uninhabitable, where there were no words or only the most elementary words or only the most obscure words, only those words so specific, so paraphimotically globose, that they could function in this new, eviscerated terrain. Imagine, then, an ecology of language, where only “cang” and “ataxy” can make the rivers flow, where only “serotines” and “naja” can serve as verbal cenotaphs for the missing bodies, whether made of words or of matter, that failed to arrive at this final, spectral island. If we don’t live on that island now, we may, one day, and we might not be “we” any longer; we might be sparse tuft or diatomaceous phlegm.

*

Long ago I knew a little boy who was afraid of diatomaceous earth—a bug killer made from “the fossilized remains of marine plankton,” I learn from a website that sells this product, or defines it, or rails against it. I knew a little boy who was afraid that the presence of diatomaceous earth in the family’s garage would destroy his lungs. He feared that diatomaceous earth would insinuate its chalky presence into the house itself. The patriarch of that house had a name almost identical to the nineteenth-century German peasant who discovered diatomaceous earth. The name of that peasant, Peter Kasten, closely resembles my father’s name; the only object missing is the suffix “-baum.” The only object missing is the tree—not the actual tree, but the name for the tree, which is itself the sign of a so-called race, tribe, or population for whom poisons would eventually matter. There are no tribes for whom poisons do not always matter. Poisons mattered to the boy—not me, but my brother—who lived in the house adjacent to the garage containing diatomaceous earth. I imagine that my brother feared the diatomaceous earth not simply because it was possibly toxic to human lungs but because its first discoverer bore a name similar to our father’s. And so, as Michel Leiris and other word-unveilers have noted, we travel into our stories—our bodies, our destinies—through the words that accidentally or deliberately serve as the vessels holding the material facts, the powders, the liquids. I will say “unguent” here because I seize any opportunity to say “unguent,” not because I want perfume or healing or exoticism but because I want vowel mesh, I want a superabundance of the letter “n,” hugging its “g,” and I want the repeated, nasally traversed “u,” which is an upside-down “n.” Unguent. And thus we dive into that aforementioned crevice where words crossbreed: my brother feared death at the hands of a bug killer discovered by a German man whose name uncannily resembled the name of our German father.

*

The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to play with words and to keep playing with them—not to deracinate or deplete them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering history, recovering wounds, reciting damage, and awakening conscience. I used the word “awakening” because my eye had fallen on the phrase “to wake the turnkey” from The Unnamable. Who is the turnkey? The warden who holds captive the narrator, if the narrator is a single self and not a chorus. “To wake the turnkey” is a phrase I instinctively rearranged to create the phrase “to wank the turkey.” Why did I want to wank a turkey? Is “wank” a transitive verb? According to the OED, the word’s origin is unknown, and it is solely an intransitive verb, which means it has no object. I cannot wank a turkey. You cannot wank a turkey. We cannot wank a turkey. They cannot wank a turkey. The turkey could wank, if the turkey had hands. I have no desire to investigate this subject any further. Before I drop it, however, let me suggest that Beckett’s narrator, the solipsist who paradoxically contains multiple voices, is, like most of his narrators, intrinsically a masturbator, as well as an autophage, a voice that consumes itself. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to investigate the words we use; investigation requires ingestion. We must play with our food; to play with the verbal materials that construct our world, we must play with ourselves. Producing language, we wank, we eat, we regurgitate, we research, we demonstrate, we expel; with what has been expelled we repaper our bodily walls, and this wallpaper is intricate, befouled, and potentially asemic—nonsignifying scratches without a linguistic system backing them up, scratches we nominate as words by agreeing together that this scratch means wank, that scratch means cang, this scratch means diatomaceous, that scratch means masks.

*

Susan Sontag once praised a maxim by the painter Manet, who said that in art “you must constantly remain the master and do as you please. No tasks! No, no tasks!” I often quote Sontag quoting Manet. Writing is a terrible task. It is also, sometimes, a pleasure, but it is more often a task. The arduousness of the task, and the succulence of the pleasure, are coiled together. For Sontag, writing must have often been a task, and she was often fleeing the task, even in her own writing. It’s possible to read any of her sentences as a round-trip flight between pleasure and task. The flight grows marmoreal—hardened into its pose—and that state of stillness-in-motion (a modernist ideal) is her finished sentence. “Mastery,” as Sontag, quoting Manet, constructs it, is a matter of fleeing task; we flee the task to become the master. Mastery, a dubious concept, needn’t be our lodestar; we can flee task not in search of mastery but in search of circumvolutionisation. More on circumvolutionisation in a minute.

*

“No more masks! No more mythologies!” So goes the passionate cry uttered in Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Poem as Mask.” No more tasks, I say, crossbreeding Rukeyser’s phrase with Sontag’s (or Manet’s) “No tasks!” Mask and task are two nouns—two behaviors—I love. From Oscar Wilde come masks; from the Marquis de Sade, and from Yahweh, come tasks. After Eden, masks and tasks. In Eden, we had neither. Literature—the respite of the fallen—is the process of making do with mask and task, diverting ourselves with tasks that mask our disenfranchisement. We are disenfranchised, regardless of our station, because we belong to an earth that will continue to bear our presence only if we remain adequate custodians of this material envelope, fragile, in which we dwell, an envelope consisting of just a small interval of habitable temperatures. To unmask the systems that will destroy our possibility of inhabiting the earth is the task of a language that operates through masks and the avoidance of tasks. Past the obvious tasks we fly, in search of tasks more stringent, more personal, more awed, more seamed, more circumvolutionary. Circumvolution must be voluntary; no master can impose it. Beckett’s word, “circumvolutionisation,” is not in my two-volume abridged OED. Perhaps the word does not really exist. Perhaps it only exists in Beckett’s mouth, or the mouth-mask that we call a novel. To flee the words we have been allotted by an immoral system that wishes to drain the swamp (as the current political administration describes its wish to destroy governance), and to seek circumvolutionisation, if circumvolutionisation turns you on, is the very simple medicine I stand here to offer you. Circum- means “around.” Volvere means “to roll.” In my dream last night, the senile woman playing Schubert on the piano had sat, a few dream moments earlier, gossiping with fellow sufferers in a room usually given over to psychoanalysis; my crime, in the dream, was either that I had crashed a borrowed car, or that my existence was filthy and inadmissible. In the dream, gobbets of mud were stuck to the bottom of my Blundstone boots. Homoeroticism lay encrypted within those muddy clods. My soiled homo-boots sat on the porch of the senile woman who’d been practicing her awed Schubert. Dirt’s movement into and out of a house has always been the topic I circle around, and I beg you to take my circumvolutionisations as seriously as possible, and to eat them, as you would eat an allegory, biting hard into its brittle exterior, like an unfriendly candied almond, Mandelbrot, Mandelbaum.

 

Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, and artist. His books include The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Jackie under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon; My 1980s and Other Essays; Humiliation; Hotel Theory; The Pink Trance Notebooks; and Camp Marmalade. He lives in New York City, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Copyright © 2020 by Wayne Koestenbaum, from Figure It Out . Excerpted by permission of Soft Skull Press.

Inside Story: What Spot?

In our new column, “Inside Story,” parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times.

Like many things I love, What Spot? entered my life through happenstance: my son just happened to pick it out of the pile of books in his preschool classroom; my son just happened to have the one teacher who sent books home each week; he just happened to secure a last-minute spot at this preschool.

If it were not for this seemingly fateful chain of events, I do not think I would have ever come across this charming tale of wonder and fear and empathy. All of these emotions feel re-created on the book’s cover, which magnifies and directs your attention to the period of the question mark, which appears target-like, a red dot encircled by other circles. Written by Crosby Bonsall for the “I Can Read!” series, which Harper Collins launched in 1957 with the publication of the now-classic Little Bear, by Elsa Holmelund Minarik, What Spot? is now out of print.

Rather than trust that my son would be able to choose the same book each week, I bought a used copy. It arrived well-loved, with damaged pages, signs of its former life. I delighted in seeing my son pretend to read the book aloud on his own, so simple was its two-syllable, incredulous refrain, punctuated by a question mark that seems conjoined to an invisible exclamation point.

Two days before we entered the stay-at-home phase of our lives, my son went on a field trip to see a production of The Princess and the Pea. His teacher sent us a PDF that explained to children how to prevent coming into contact with the coronavirus. She told us she read the poster to the children to reassure them. She also reassured us, saying that she would have the children wipe down their theater seats and wash their hands.

Time was once less abstract, more palpable. I once could ask how school was. I could say tell me about the play. I could let my children know what they would need for school the next day. I could pack lunches and backpacks. I could check my work email after sending them off. I could have a day, a day that was measured and complete, one that I did, indeed, measure out with coffee spoons.

Now, my children and I dream the dizzy dreams that manifest in between reality and a life once lived.

They do not want to do their school work. I give them other activities instead. Okay, I say, forget it. You don’t want to write about that fairy princess book, then write about what you want to write about. My daughter begins to pen a fantasy in which she rescues newborn kittens and nurses them in the wee hours of the night. I say, That’s beautiful. I say, That’s great. My god, I don’t care, just keep writing. I say this while I myself have ceased writing.

My son can now read What Spot? on his own. He’s in first grade, but, like studies have shown, being avidly and abundantly read to during his infancy and early development have accelerated his reading, which is now on a third-grade level. That said, he doesn’t like to read, doesn’t want to read, preferring instead to be read to. He loves being read to, and I, his dear mother, love to snuggle, smell his little-boy head, and read to him. Sometimes, he’s inspired to read certain parts, certain pages, certain voices, and I pause and allow him, savoring his little-boy voice, his small struggles against the shore of vowels and consonants. It is a voice inside a seashell; I know this, this ephemeral nature of children and their coos and their calls. The voices can cease to call. I savor the calling.

My family and I once marked time by the passing of it; we now mark time simply through the unknowing and unowning of it. My son comments on his weather journal—we’ve had so few sunny days. We’ve had so few days, I think, sun or no.

But we have had days. My friends text me, as if to reinforce it: How are you 4.5 weeks in? Four and a half weeks in, and I haven’t done much of anything.

What Spot?, published in 1963, features a lonely walrus adrift on an icy island. He watches the sea and the ships that drift by, happy and content, day after day, until, one day, he sees a black spot in the snow. Needing reassurance that he is not the sole witness to something that may or may not exist, he implores a puffin, whom he befriends, to see it, too.

I once measured my days through providence. One summer, when life made little to no sense, I was devoted to a certain astrologer, whose horoscopes were so aligned with my circumstances, so empathetic to my struggles, so in tune with my discord, they made me believe, however briefly, that my fate was somehow tied to the stars. Despite being schooled to believe otherwise, I could believe that my life, and thereby my fate, were linked to celestial bodies, ancient and everlasting.

I know now, though, that fate is privilege. When my sister’s cancer was discovered, the once-indiscernible spot had already spread, flared, took over—a target without a target. The doctors tell her what they alone can see, what she herself cannot see. Validation, in this case, is anything but reassuring.

Nevertheless, the walrus wants to know what the spot is that lies in the snow, the spot that he alone can see, even if what lies beneath is dangerous or maleficent. Unlike tales of exposure prompted by a fervent curiosity that leads to the unleashing of evils or maladies, it is not curiosity that drives the walrus: he’s worried that not only is the spot “a thing,” but that the spot is the nose of creature who is buried in the snow.

 

Illustration from What Spot?

 

Since we’ve entered the new life, the one without temporal beams, we’ve witnessed the red spots mushroom, blooming poppies, scarlet sequins blistering the earth map we once treaded.

They didn’t believe her, my son said when I asked him about the play. The princess had indeed felt the pea, but no one believed her.

Eventually, the walrus is able to convince the puffin to look harder, even if where to look is merely the ether of a nebulous “there”; however, the Puffin can’t be convinced that the Spot is “a thing”—he’s adamant that “it’s nothing, nothing at all.”

It could have been nothing, nothing at all, but the uncovering revealed spots in the breast, the lymph nodes, the adrenal glands, the liver.

The walrus wants to unearth the creature, whose black nose—that little, barely discernable spot—he thinks, is showing through the snow. The puffin won’t help. The black spot, after a bit of digging, is a black stick. The Walrus thinks it might be a sea snake or “a great big bird.” After more digging, two eye-like circles appear; the walrus becomes more convinced that he must help this creature out of the snow, and, as it begins snowing hard, he works faster and more furiously, determined to help this creature and keep it from being buried forever, even though that creature might harm others. The walrus wants to save a life, even if he doesn’t know his own fate—he wants to change the course of fate for this unknown creature.

In 1963, when What Spot? was published, the United States began administering the oral polio vaccine, which apparently could be taken with a sugar cube.

My daughter’s fears are mostly invisible, things that she sees in her head. Like the puffin, I spend a great deal of time and effort to reassure her that it’s nothing, nothing at all. But I know her terror is “a thing,” and what she fears may or may never be uncovered.

Of course, I would love to tell her that I, too, see the spot, to validate her sense of the world, but perhaps I don’t want her to have a sense of the world that includes terror.

The puffin, however adamant that the “thing” is “nothing at all,” finds himself in a terrifying bind when, unearthed, the “thing” puts his life in danger. All of a sudden, the “thing” is something. A child will easily recognize the “thing” to be an ordinary, harmless, red toy wagon, but for the puffin, who still insists that the wagon is “nothing, nothing at all,” the toy wagon becomes a thing that could kill him. The wind blows hard and rolls the wagon and the puffin haphazardly over the ice and perilously close to the consuming sea.

My son doesn’t get why the other creatures who spy the puffin and hear his cry for help, rather than aid the Puffin, just nonchalantly say, “Don’t worry. It’s nothing, nothing at all.” The other ice creatures go on with their ice-creature lives: a polar bear enjoys a bath in the sea; a seal plays with a snowflake; a dog rolls snowballs; a reindeer dances; a whale rests on a wave—all of them oblivious to disaster, all of them noticing yet denying the danger, downplaying the fear.

Eventually, the puffin and the wagon fall into the hole from whence the wagon came and become entombed completely in snow excepting the black spot of the puffin’s nose. The polar bear asks what the walrus is looking at. It is the same old story, but now, now we know that the walrus knows.

He knows now that the nothing is something. He tells the polar bear that the spot is not a spot, but rather “a puffin I know.”

They didn’t believe her, my son said. But she felt it.

The walrus quickly unearths the puffin and the wagon. They throw the wagon into the sea. When we get to that part of the story, my son says, “Oh, Greta Thunberg wouldn’t like that—she’d tell them ‘you ought to be ashamed!’” I laugh, as he intended for me to: the funny notion of imagining the book in this new now.

 

Illustration from What Spot?

 

The end of the world is what my daughter worries about. She doesn’t like time passing. Her fear of time is her fear of mortality.

I no longer rely on horoscopes to tell me what it is I should be paying attention to or what I should do to protect myself against ill fortune; I no longer use it to receive validation that these bright spots in the firmament might mean anything other than their own bright glinting.

To feel something rather than nothing: maybe that’s what I mean by fate.

My sister asks if she’s going to die; my daughter says that she doesn’t want me to grow old and die. To both of them, I reassure that death is nothing, nothing at all, that we’re okay, that’s everything’s going to be okay.

They didn’t believe her, my son said. But she felt it. She felt something rather than nothing.

I look at the bright spots of red, the measles rash taking over each screen I see, a blood peony bursting over the city in which my sister lives; I think, it’s a puffin I know. Each spot is a puffin I know.

 

 

Jenny Boully is the author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in General Nonfiction.

Redux: Suspension of Disparate Particles

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

Marilynne Robinson.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re embracing hermitism. Read on for Marilynne Robinson’s Art of Fiction interview, Rick Bass’s short story “The Hermit’s Story,” and Karen Solie’s poem “A Hermit.”

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

 

Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198

Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008)

INTERVIEWER

When you were little, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?

ROBINSON

Oh, a hermit? My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work. There we were in this tiny town in Idaho, and he was like Alexander dividing up the world: I’ll be the painter, you’ll be the poet.

 

 

The Hermit’s Story

By Rick Bass

Issue no. 147 (Summer 1998)

An ice storm, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption of light but by some chemical reaction within the glossy ice; as if the source of all blueness lies somewhere up here in the north—the core of it beneath one of those frozen fields; as if blue is a thing that emerges, in some parts of the world, from the soil itself, after the sun goes down.

 

 

A Hermit

By Karen Solie

Issue no. 218 (Fall 2016)

Experience teaches, but its lessons

may be useless. I could have done without

a few whose only by-product is grief,

which, as waste, in its final form,

isn’t good for anything.

A helicopter beating all night above the firth,

a Druid shouting astrology

outside the off-licence will eventually

put the Ambien in ambience.

Our culture is best described as heroic.

Courageous in self-promotion, noble

in the circulation of others’

disgrace, our preoccupation with death

in a context of immortal glory truly

epic, and the task becomes suspension

of disparate particles …

 

If you like what you read, get a year of The Paris Review—four new issues, plus instant access to everything we’ve ever published.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Revising

Walt Whitman in 1891. Photo: Samuel Murray. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention.

One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other.

The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversize production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet.

The third edition, of 1860, included 146 new poems—a nearly unbelievable number! Some sixty-eight of these were written between the appearance of the second edition, in 1856, and June 1857, when the poet was clearly in a kind of creative fever, one that essentially did not subside until the 456-page third collection was headed for the press. This third volume was produced by a commercial publisher, and is indeed more traditional in design. Dropping the models of coffee-table book and portable testament, it looks more like most mid-nineteenth-century books of poems, with small line drawings and ornamental flourishes around the poems’ titles. The frontispiece presents the poet in an engraving taken from an oil portrait, Walt Whitman with lush but not yet prophetic locks and a stylish cravat, more Romantic spirit than one of the roughs. Somewhere between two thousand and five thousand copies were printed, and the book was largely well reviewed, and fared better in the marketplace than the earlier editions.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Whitman had abandoned his practice of expanding and rearranging his book. Why not write one collection, set it aside, and write another? This is one of the primary ways poets progress; looking at a book you’ve finished, you don’t want to pursue exactly that same path again. A new collection invites us to vary form and tone, try on a new stance, strike out in a new direction and thus view familiar territory from another vantage point. In truth, our obsessions, our ways of making meaning, even our signature vocabulary and syntax often stay remarkably close to where we began; if we’re lucky, we just get better at using them. But, as we move from book to book, serious attention to the matters at hand can help to widen the embrace of our work a bit, and just a bit can prove plenty. Suppose Whitman had decided to bring a thread that had been recessive in one book—the abject self-doubt he reveals in the chilling final section of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” for instance—and bring it more into the foreground in the next? What unexpected, potentially rich poems we might have had!

Or maybe not. I can see reasons why Whitman would have wanted to go on cultivating the singular field of “leaves” that comprised his book. In a way that is true of no other great poet, his poems were a tool to make something happen; the change he wished to effect, and sometimes believed he could, was more important to him than art. This is why he could later say he wished he’d been an orator instead, when he’d written at least two of the greatest poems in the language. Of course poets themselves don’t get to know if they have written anything that will last, but Whitman tells us, in no uncertain terms, that he will be read after his death, by men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence. I can confidently say that, had I written “Song of Myself” or “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” I would not be wishing I’d chosen another career.

It’s in the 1860 edition that the poet first begins to arrange his poems in clusters, making thematic clumps, breaking one off here and adding another there. He would go on remixing the order for the rest of his life.

This was largely a mistake. It results, at the worst, in sections of poems about the sea, or winter, and this kind of organization inevitably diminishes the work. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” takes place on a beach, but it is not “about” the sea, because great poems are not “about” in this way; they are profound reaches into that “furnace of meaning,” and they use whatever is at hand—the sea, a ferryboat ride, an unruly field of grass—to get to where they need to go. The “subject” matters until the furnace is lit, and then the poem almost seems to burn its ostensible occasion clean away.

It may be that Whitman arranged and fiddled because he came to understand, over time, that he was losing the capacity to create the magnificent, visionary odes that had launched his career. He would suffer from poverty, and from anxiety over his reception and reputation; as an outsider who both wanted and did not want to be on the inside, he was in a position of near-constant instability. He saw the boys he adored, the ones he hoped might base a newly energized democratic order on their affection for each other, tear one another apart on the battlefield instead, in a war of mind-bending brutality. He wandered from bed to bed for five years in makeshift hospitals, in appalling conditions, offering what comfort and witness he could, and destabilized his own health in the process. He suffered a massive stroke and required help for the rest of his life. How could I expect him to go on writing great poems when he’d already created ones that no one had known how to write in the first place, poems that sail right past what we thought a poem could do?

 

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honors include the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

Excerpted from What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life . © 2020 by Mark Doty. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Celebrity Chef of Victorian England

Edward White’s new monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

Alexis Soyer, artist unknown (courtesy Alexis-Soyer.com)

When the potato blight arrived in Ireland in September 1845, many of those in power downplayed the threat it posed. The disease had already blackened potato crops across the Americas and Western Europe, but dire predictions about the damage it could wreak on Ireland’s staple food were dismissed as irresponsible scaremongering, “deluding the public with a false alarm,” in the words of the mayor of Liverpool.

That line didn’t last long. By October it was obvious that the lives of millions were at risk. In response, the British government offered half measures, unwavering in its determination that the solution should not be worse than the problem. To break economic orthodoxy by providing direct aid to those in need would be tyrannical, it was argued, and create a culture of dependency and deception. Charles Trevelyan, the government official leading the relief effort, put it bluntly: “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

1847 was the nadir of the crisis. Countless people died of starvation and disease, others fled in droves. The mayor of Liverpool could no longer contest the reality of the crisis; so many destitute refugees came to his city that it was described by the registrar general as “the cemetery of Ireland.”

Into the bleakness stepped Alexis Soyer, the most famous chef in London, a man who had made a fortune from catering to the outsize appetites of sybarites and playboys, and about as unlikely a savior of the famished as it’s possible to imagine. A peacocking, Rabelaisian embodiment of modern London, Soyer was as adept at self-promotion as he was at creating the extravagant high-society banquets for which he was famed. Nevertheless, in Dublin on April 5, 1847, he unveiled his plan to end the suffering of the Irish people: a specially designed soup kitchen, combining the traditional craft of French cooking with the efficiency of modern science.

The launch was attended not only by thousands of famine victims, but by representatives of the press, and hundreds of well-to-do observers, including the Duke of Cambridge and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. As the hungry stood behind metal railings outside, VIPs were given a first look inside the kitchen, where they sampled for themselves what the famous Soyer had rustled up with food aid rations. “The contrast was sudden and striking,” reported the Dublin Evening Post the following day. “A moment before, and the lovely faces which lighted up the pavilion, smiled their approval of every thing they saw; a moment after, their places became filled by the poor, upon whose persons famine and misery and time had seemed to have done their worst.”

As laudable as it was unsettling, Soyer’s soup kitchen experiment was a precursor of the awkward union of celebrity and humanitarianism so familiar to our own times. But it was also the emblematic moment of Soyer’s unique culinary life, lived at extremes—poverty and wealth, toil and glamor, feast and famine.

*

Soyer was born in France on February 4, 1810, in Meaux, a town best known for its rich wholegrain mustard and its brie. When leaders from across Europe met at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the French diplomat Talleyrand, confident that nowhere on earth contained such edifying delights as a French kitchen, arranged a tasting contest of sixty cheeses from across the continent; Brie de Meaux was declared the winner.

Despite the gastronomic distinction of his hometown, Soyer grew up poor and knew what it was to be hungry. Yet, as was the case with many of his compatriots then and now, he was raised to believe that good eating and good cooking should not be the preserve of the affluent. Aged eleven, he was sent by his parents to Paris where his older brother Philippe was already making his way as a chef. When Philippe helped Soyer get his first taste of a professional kitchen, the boy’s talent for cooking was immediately obvious, as was his ebullience and charisma, qualities that allowed him to command a kitchen in the heat and smoke of service. His career soared, but when revolution rattled Paris in the summer of 1830, Soyer fled to London. There, he worked for some of the richest and most powerful aristocrats in England, and built a public profile as a hard-drinking extrovert with a fabulous singing voice, an exotic young genius in and out of the kitchen.

In 1837, still only twenty-seven, Soyer was named chef de cuisine of the Reform Club, the social center of the Liberal movement, and a magnet for foreign dignitaries and celebrated Londoners. On the occasion of Victoria’s coronation the following year, he prepared a huge celebratory breakfast for thousands of paying customers, filled with such wonders as Turban of Larks à la Parisienne, pigeon in vine leaves, and turtle soup. Over the next decade, Soyer developed something of a culinary empire based on his reputation as the most brilliant chef in the land, selling the idea that you, too, could create dishes fit for a queen. He authored several extremely popular cookery books, and his dandyish red beret was used as a brand logo for the wildly successful range of sauces and drinks he launched under his own name, as well as various gadgets and utensils of his own design.

The base of his operations was the futuristic kitchen of the Reform Club, designed from scratch by the man himself. Every square inch of the space made extensive and imaginative use of the very latest science and technology: there were refrigerators, speaking tubes, ventilation devices, and lifts, pulleys, and steam-powered machines of all sorts. Traditional charcoal ovens—which clogged the lungs of kitchen workers and hastened the deaths of innumerable chefs—were banished in favor of gas, allowing chefs to regulate the temperature of each pan as never before. The word “ergonomics” was not coined until 1857, when the Polish scientist Wojciech Jastrzebowski first used it in an essay on “the science of work,” but the essential concept was evident in Soyer’s new kitchen, where space was created from nothing—wheels were added to tables and cabinets while chopping boards slid in and out of countertops. The kitchen was a modern marvel, covered extensively in the press and tied firmly to the chef who had designed it. Amazed visitors arrived daily for a guided tour. Soyer reckoned that in 1846 alone, he welcomed at least fifteen thousand people.

That same year, 1846, was when the Great Famine really took hold—but it was also the moment of Soyer’s most lavish banquet, in honor of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt. Dozens of dishes were laid on, starting with several different soups and ending with a thirty-inch-high pyramid made of meringue, grapes, nuts, pineapples, and sugar work, on top of which stood a perfect miniature model of the Pasha’s father. That Soyer should have been serving up such indulgence at a time of extreme privation seems to have pricked his conscience. He didn’t even have to look as far as Ireland—or Scotland, which was also suffering the effects of the blight—to find those in need; it was the want, disease, and squalor of 1840s London that led Henry Mayhew to write London Labour and the London Poor, an immensely influential account of the wretched living conditions endured by millions of the city’s poorest inhabitants, who rarely received any more from the laissez-faire government of the day than did the impoverished in Ireland.

When Soyer investigated the charitable efforts in place to feed London’s needy, he was appalled to discover soup that was innutritious, unpalatable, and—perhaps worst of all—wasteful. He could scarcely believe his eyes when he witnessed “one hundred pounds of meat cut into pieces of a quarter of a pound each, put into one hundred gallons of water, at twelve o’clock of one day, to be boiled until twelve o’clock the next day,” leaving nothing but thin, discolored water. Those in charge of the existing soup kitchens were well-meaning and kindhearted, he acknowledged, but severely lacking in the skills he had as a chef, and the knowledge he felt was an immanent part of French culture. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the Platonic ideal of the nineteenth-century French gastronome, considered soup to be “the foundation of French nutrition,” and fundamental to the living of a properly French life. To the mind of a French chef, an inability to make a soup that was both tasty and healthful was a shameful failure.

So, Soyer embarked on a new scheme to nourish the starving and educate the ignorant, designing a soup kitchen in the Spitalfields district that was run with the same inventiveness, professionalism, and efficiency of his space at the Reform Club. He also gave cookery lessons to “respectable” ladies who wanted to provide for ailing communities, and published some of his “famine soup” recipes in newspapers, and in the pamphlet Soyer’s Charitable Cooking. Soyer calculated that he could produce one hundred gallons of soup—meat, fish, or vegetable—for less than £1, and that daily portions were, on their own, nutritious enough to sustain the average person. Exactly how the idea came about to transfer these methods to Ireland is unclear, but by the beginning of the 1847, Soyer had been granted leave from the Reform Club to travel to Dublin, where he spent several weeks exploring the desperateness of the situation.

By early April, the model kitchen in Dublin was complete. When Soyer flung open the doors of the kitchen on its launch day, the dignitaries encountered a space of two thousand square feet, which resembled an assembly line more than a restaurant. In order to maximize space, Soyer had people queue in eight lines, all in a precise zigzag formation. At the end of these lines was a three-sided counter—as one might find in an enormous pub—behind which stood a gigantic bread oven, and a three-hundred-gallon soup boiler, surrounded by eight bains-maries, in which freshly made soup was kept warm before being ladled into bowls on the counter. Next to each bowl was a metal spoon, fixed to the countertop by a chain. Each recipient was given exactly six minutes—measured by the ringing of a bell—to finish their soup, before walking to the exit, where they were given a chunk of bread or a biscuit to take with them. The bowls were rinsed and refilled for the next in line. With this method, Soyer could feed close to nine thousand people a day.

It was undoubtedly efficient, though horribly redolent of the workhouse, and even at the time, the presence of the gawping gentry on opening day struck some as unforgivably exploitative. One observer wondered why these respectable ladies and gentlemen hadn’t simply gone for a day out at the zoo. Others were more concerned that Soyer’s claims that his soups were nutritious enough to sustain the starving were unfounded, the sort of promotional puffery one could expect of a man who was as much salesman as chef. “Soup quackery” was how one skeptic summed it up.

For all its flaws, Soyer’s soup kitchen was an impressive achievement, and its example produced clones all over the country. His model kitchen up and running, he returned to the excitement of London. But, Soyer was never quite the same again. His love of food now served a profound purpose; for the decade of life he had left in him, he continued in his efforts to teach the inhabitants of the British Isles the true value of cooking and eating.

*

As it turned out, Soyer’s legacy in Ireland was short-lived. By September 1847, the government had closed all the soup kitchens, thinking the blight had finally left and the crisis was coming to a close. It was an awful miscalculation. Hundreds of thousands more would die or emigrate as a result of the famine over the next five years.

In 1850, Soyer parted ways with the Reform Club after thirteen years of service. Thirsting for a new challenge, he sank all his money into a madcap scheme he called Alexis Soyer’s Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations, for which he transformed a stately home adjacent to Hyde Park into a cornucopia of world cuisine during the Great Exhibition of 1851. The project hemorrhaged money, and Soyer lost practically everything.

Gradually, he clawed it back, by returning to his roots as a chef who knew how to make a little go a long way. In 1854, he published Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People, his first book aimed not at the wealthy, or even the middle classes, but “the million,” as he referred to the laboring people of Britain. Aside from the recipes—often Soyer’s take on hearty English standards—he provided his readers with an elementary education in kitchen skills: paring, skinning, and carving, even how to boil an egg and make toast, a reflection of how lacking he felt the British were in their feel for food. His ultimate hope was that the book would not just allow ordinary people to eat better, but reconnect them with what they put in their bellies, and educate them of its origins. In Ireland he had been outraged to see fish taken from the teeming stocks surrounding the island used not as a source of food, but as a fertilizer for potatoes, the monocrop that had driven the country to famine. Consequently, much of Shilling Cookery is dedicated to avoiding waste, having diversity in one’s diet, and the importance of eating locally and seasonally. This focus on what we now call biodiversity and sustainability strikes modern readers as remarkably prescient, though Soyer would perhaps answer that these were simply the traditional standards of the food culture in which he was raised.

A few months after Shilling Cookery was published, Soyer found himself cooking in a crisis zone once again, this time in the Crimean War. Bogged down by the exigencies of life on campaign, British soldiers were beset by illness, disease, and malnutrition. The reports of Florence Nightingale’s work in reforming the military hospitals had made her a household name back home, and in early 1855 Soyer joined her to sort out the shambolic state of their kitchens. Though wildly different personalities, the pair admired one another, became friends, and formed a formidable, if brief, partnership. Soyer’s impact was transformative. He taught soldiers how to run a kitchen, catering more and better meals faster, cheaper, and with a minimum of waste, all of which helped to slash mortality rates. He also designed a portable gas stove that could be used in the field, a variation of which was regulation kit in the British Army until the eighties.

Within three years of his return from Crimea, Soyer was dead. He succumbed to a stroke on August 5, 1858, aged forty-eight. Today, Florence Nightingale’s memory is as strong in Britain as ever: seven new hospitals across the country, built in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, are named in her honor, evoking the values of compassion and resolve with which she has become synonymous. Soyer’s presence is less obvious, but still detectable. Over the last few weeks, Jamie Oliver, another ball of entrepreneurial energy who became a household name by trying to teach Brits one end of a carrot from the other, has been hosting Keep Cooking and Carry On, a TV series in which he shows lockdown Britain how to make something exquisite out of our stockpiles of canned fruit and frozen vegetables. Soyer would have loved to have done the same. And, the lessons he preached about savoring what you have, knowing where it comes from and how to use it, and appreciating that every time food fills the stomach it also soothes the soul, seem urgently relevant to us all.

 

 

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.” 

The Art of Distance No. 5

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

“Love letters, fan mail, business correspondence, even missives to a future self: letters can bring us together across time and space. The connection they offer feels particularly welcome in our disjointed moment. There’s something special about letters between friends, diary entries, and even appeals sent into the unknown—see this week’s pieces from the Paris Review archive to prove my point. Pen to paper does still create some alchemy.” —EN

With little to do these days but sit inside and look out the window, I’m very aware of my neighbors, for better (the kid in the high-rise across the street airing her stuffed animals by letting them down from the window on strings) and for worse (the man downstairs playing music that shakes my floor). Mavis Gallant is, too, only she makes her Paris neighbors immortal characters of a tiny, finely wrought serial. Her “Diaries” remind me that to set down observations of the world honestly, precisely, and completely—however physically small that world might be—is to find the inevitable story in it. —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer 

“I’m running late, I’m sorry.” Just about every writer has had to deliver this news to her editor at some point, but only in the hands of Dylan Thomas does a mea culpa become its own adventure, with equal parts writerly despair and linguistic playfulness, with a veritable menagerie thrown in for good measure (I count several birds, a frog, and black sheep). Thomas’s letter to Botteghe Oscure editor Marguerite Caetani offers a window into a singularly talented writer facing his steepest uphill. The piece he is overdue on? His classic play Under Milk Wood—the last piece he’d finish before his death.

When we decided to feature this letter in Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast, the challenge of casting a reader gave me the slightest pause. Dylan Thomas’s sonorous boom is unforgettable, so rather than seeking out an imitation, we opted for another iconic British voice. Listen to Salman Rushdie read excerpts from the letter in Episode 15. And speaking of menageries … those caws? Straight from the birds outside Thomas’s boathouse in Laugharne. —EN

David Sedaris writes about his family with the touch of a Greek dramatist, canonizing each member in his own personal mythology. Sedaris’s “Letter from Emerald Isle,” which appeared in issue no. 222, recounts a Thanksgiving spent with family at their North Carolina beach house. Each line is haunted by those who have passed, as the author contemplates his youngest sister’s suicide and the efforts of those who remain to heal. Now, I am confined inside with my own immediate family, and it feels more than ever like Sedaris is writing directly to me: embrace the strangeness of familial life, he advises, along with its manifold comforts. —Elinor Hitt, Intern

Renee Gladman’s diary entries are undated and all start with the phrase “I began the day…” They capture exactly how thoughts wax and wane from abstract to mundane through the course of an unstructured day. These entries are wonderful odes to the indulgence of solitude, of having no one to talk to but yourself. A foil to Gladman’s diaries are Jan Morris’s, which are more nineteenth century—the way they take into account Morris’s impressively learned frame of reference (they start with a bang: “I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea”). Unlike Gladman, Morris is not alone but with her wife, Elizabeth, in their home in the English countryside. Maybe that is why they are more outward-facing, but both Gladman and Morris are examples of how brilliant minds sit with the impressions of their days. —Lauren Kane, Assistant Editor

I’ve always liked this Peg Boyers poem, “Open Letter to Alberto Moravia,” in which she imagines a letter from Natalia Ginzburg to Moravia, chastising him that “publicity, that siren, has seduced you.” After reading that, I suggest you follow it with our Art of Fiction interview with Moravia from 1954, and then stay in the fifties with issue no. 17, which features a work of nonfiction from the poet W. S. Merwin that draws on his diaries concerning his trip home to America after seven years in Europe. Merwin’s entries sum up that peculiar, familiar sense of never quite feeling attached to a place: “They say that after seven years every cell in your body has changed. You are a different person.” Reading this as I shelter in place, I find myself fantasizing about trains, airplanes, boats, and moving vans. —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor

Isolation and time, for me, make a space that is swiftly filled by memories of faux pas and anxious rumination over the meaning of old messages. Nothing captures the game of hunting for clues and puzzling out phrase and intention better than this correspondence between May Swenson and Elizabeth Bishop. Ostensibly, it begins as a series of letters about songbirds, out of which Swenson shapes a brilliant and teasing poem, “Dear Elizabeth,” reflecting her words back at herself. It is a true exchange—for Bishop, as much as it is from Bishop—and that to and fro makes it all the more beguiling. —Chris Littlewood, Intern

 

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Poets on Couches: Carl Phillips

In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

“It Is the Rising That I Love”

by Linda Gregg

Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986)

As long as I struggle to float above the ground

and fail, there is reason for this poetry.

On the stone back of the Ludovici throne, Venus

is rising from the water. Her face and arms

are raised, and two women trained in the ways

of the world help her rise, covering her

nakedness with a cloth at the same time.

If this continues, she, goddess of beauty

and love will have accomplished the earth

where I stand. She from water to land,

me from earth to air as if I had a soul.

It is the rising I love, in no matter what

element, to the one above. As I ascend, helped

by prayers and not by women, I say in all my

sexual glamor, see my body bathed in light and air.

See me rise like a flame, like the sun, moon,

stars, birds, wind. In light. In dark.

But I never achieve it. I get down on my knees

this grey April to see if open crocuses have a smell.

I must live in the suffering and desire of what

rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding

of gears against our bodies and lives.

Carl Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. His most recent book is the poetry collection  Pale Colors in a Tall Field . Read his  Art of Poetry interview .