The Paris Review's Blog, page 173

I Want You

Originally serialized between 1996 and 1999, Blutch’s comic Mitchum plays host to the legendary French cartoonist’s virtuosic range. Modulating from harried pen work on one page to lush, blocky tableaux on the next, he sorts through the surreal stew of his subconscious in dreamlike episodes, mixing in bits of American pop culture along the way—including, at one point, a sinister, lascivious Jimmy Stewart lurking in the shroud of a detective’s trench coat. “Mitchum was my laboratory at a certain point,” Blutch said in a 2016 interview with the journalist Paul Gravett. “Every kind of experiment was permitted. Their success or failure were secondary.” This week, New York Review Comics released the first complete English translation of Mitchum. An excerpt appears below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blutch (born Christian Hincker) is an award-winning, highly influential French cartoonist. He has published almost two dozen books since his 1988 debut in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide Glacial, including Le petit Christian, So Long, Silver Screen, and Peplum. His illustrations have appeared in Les Inrockuptibles, Libération, and The New Yorker.

From Mitchum , by Blutch, translated from the French by Matt Madden, English lettering by Dean Sudarsky. Images courtesy of New York Review Comics.

Poets on Couches: Timothy Donnelly

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.

“Rain Moving In”

by John Ashbery

Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983)

The blackboard is erased in the attic

And the wind turns up the light of the stars,

Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.

And if somewhere in this great planet

The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,

It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one

Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse.

Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step

Into disorder this one meant. Don’t you see

It’s all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires

Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial had been set

And that’s ominous, but all your graciousness in living

Conspires with it, now that this is our home:

A place to be from, and have people ask about.

 

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent publications include The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently director of poetry in the writing program at Columbia University School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.

The Paris Review’s Poetry Crossword

Jigsaw puzzles are sold out around the country, but here’s an absolutely free, no-shipping-required, Paris Review crossword puzzle. Celebrate Poetry Month by taking your mind off the world. Can you find all the poets clue-ed from our archives? Play below, or print it out by clicking here.

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures With Crosswords and The Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them.

All Love, All Beauty

Kay Ryan examines a favorite Philip Larkin poem.

Philip Larkin.

Dublinesque

Down stucco sidestreets,

Where light is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,

A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,

But after there follows

A troop of streetwalkers

In wide flowered hats,

Leg-of-mutton sleeves,

And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,

As if they were honouring

One they were fond of;

Some caper a few steps,

Skirts held skilfully (Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

—Philip Larkin

This poem sends feeling down a narrow channel, and you don’t even know it’s feeling until it explodes in a delicious mist at the end. It looks like a lot of scenery, local Dublin color, first the “sidestreets” with their “pewter” light from the “afternoon mist” that causes the lights to be on in the poky shops of a particularly stock-Irish description “above race-guides and rosaries.” Larkin’s art is on intensely quiet display: so much atmosphere is generated in so few words. It’s gray, it’s low, it’s mean, it’s tight, and something is coming. Nice to start with that preposition, “Down stucco sidestreets.” Each element moves into the next: street>light>mist>light bulbs hanging over “race-guides and rosaries.” It feels cozy, damped down, dim. A channel, but for what? Larkin is so good at creating motion in a poem.

A funeral! This is a tiny poem, so all of this happens before it registers. But if one were to anticipate what kind of funeral this would turn out to be, you’d expect it to be … narrow and gray. Which is just what it isn’t. It’s loose and colorful, filled with warmth and exchanges, capers, clapping, song: “A troop of streetwalkers … honouring / One they were fond of.” Larkin gives us their dress, which feels so flowery and flouncy and animated, the opposite of the narrow street—“wide flowered hats, / Leg-of-mutton sleeves, / And ankle-length dresses.” Consider this attention to dress that sounds anachronistic even for the time. These women sound like Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, attractive like that. And there’s a gang of them, they are their own self-approving community, progressing down the streets after the hearse, flamboyantly what they are, warm, united, and sad.

The poem moves to the interior so seamlessly. The static streets are invaded—the Dublin mist is rent—by this gaudy funeral. First the women’s clothes, then their women’s capers. Things are getting more and more animated. The poem brims with warmth by the end of stanza three, and stanza four brings it home through a single exquisitely baffled detail, a specific so specific that it becomes unspecific: are they singing of “Kitty, or Katy”?

This stanza is a marvel. First notice how cinematic it is. This whole poem has been movie-like; the passage of the procession into and then out of the frame of the poem.

In this last stanza we don’t see them at all, just the disembodied voice “heard singing,” just the trailing voice raised in song. That means we have come to Larkin’s real stage, always: the pure interior. This place tends to be troubled when he gets there, but in “Dublinesque” it is incredibly sweet. Maybe because Larkin has watched like a camera, he hasn’t got his usual gloom spiral going. It’s a sound camera, and doesn’t quite catch the name: Kitty, or Katy. And now the relaxation of this camera discipline: “As if the name meant once / All love, all beauty.”

Enough cannot be said about this ending. Let me point out first the parallels in the rhythm and single instance in the poem of rhyme: of Kitty, or Katy / all love, all beauty.

The unrhymed poem ends, then, with a rhyme, and it opens on two of the great themes in all poetry: love and beauty. It invokes all love, all beauty. And guess what? It works; we feel the tide.

Because Larkin has succeeded in narrowing the opening to the point of blur. Kitty or Katy. This is so specific to this Dublin moment that it isn’t at all specific. Exact identity is lost as love and beauty are lost except absolutely available at the same fuzzy moment. First Larkin goes to the trouble to create a rich moving picture; then he erases it, or at least erases the object of it, Kitty or Katy, then he claps on the two biggest abstractions in English poetry: love and beauty. And it works like a charm.

This is one of those moments when everything coalesces. Everything is available because everything’s gone: no one is there; the street is empty.

I want to think about the genius of “Kitty, or Katy.” Everything depends upon this dislocation, this paradoxical exact focus of all love, all beauty.

It’s an exact focus that can’t find its mark and is therefore slippery and silky word-mist. The focus is baffled and ramified; it’s tiny. We don’t know if it’s Kitty or Katy and we can’t settle. Now Larkin can dump whatever he wants into us because we are between places; that’s exactly where we are: between. It’s perfect for poetry that has to get into the cracks, has to find and work the cracks. There has to be some way to let in the dazzle, to perfume the works.

This poem succeeds because it’s short and brisk; the deep dwelling occurs at parade speed. The parade of bright flowery streetwalkers becomes a gesture, taken all together, a single surprise flowery sweep across pewter. They are the same gesture that Frost’s crow makes in knocking snow onto Frost and giving his heart a change of mood. They bring a gift, then; they change the poet. Larkin is left in the street with the fumes of all love, all beauty.

 

Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate in 2008. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and other periodicals. She has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. Read her Art of Poetry interview.

Excerpted from Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose , by Kay Ryan. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.

Chosen Family: An Interview with Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

The first moments in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days are quiet. Mina, a thirty-two-year-old classicist, is walking along the George Washington Bridge on a humid summer evening. She feels the bridge shudder in the wind. She looks past Manhattan’s skyscrapers and imagines her husband, Oscar, working at home in Brooklyn. It’s not apparent to the reader why she’s here—perhaps Mina herself is uncertain—but then she looks at the river, and remembers what people say about jumping: “When a body fell onto water from this height, it was like hitting a sidewalk.” She gently tosses one of her flip-flops over the edge, before a policeman interrupts the scene. From these first careful sentences, Buchanan sets the tone of the novel, the proximity of its narration. Starling Days is as immediate, changeable, and surprising as real life.

Mina and Oscar are young, recently married, and coping with an intensification of Mina’s depression. Alternating between their points of view, Buchanan maps their attempt to find the key to Mina’s suffering. But despite their intimate knowledge of each other, their shared histories and identities, and their most tender efforts to bring about change (they temporarily move to London early on in the story) many of Mina’s emotions remain impenetrable. When Mina is hospitalized after an overdose attempt, Oscar attends to her: “For the whole visiting hour, his face was twisted with confusion. ‘Why did you do this?’ he’d asked. But she couldn’t point and go, There, that. That’s what’s wrong with me.” The dynamic of this scene replicates itself throughout the novel—the effort to make sense of the inexplicable, the ensuing confusion, the twisted face.

In the darkest moments of this cycle, Starling Days is heartbreaking to read, and yet, most days, I closed the book with immense gratitude for its refusal to pathologize family history or identity. It feels rare—in both literature and in our world—to sit with sadness and allow it to be unruly. Buchanan proves that to recognize that some sadness is unalterable is not necessarily a melodramatic plunge into despair. Strange, enduring sadness has a mirror: small, repeated gestures of survival. In the hospital, Oscar is still looking at Mina, and inviting her to try. 

Rowan and I first spoke via Skype, but our conversation spilled into emails and messages in the weeks that followed. We spoke about choosing to hold on, and about the literature that helps us do so. 

 

INTERVIEWER

Where did Starling Days begin?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

Maybe books are the record of everything I’ve been fascinated with for several years. I could say Starling Days began in several places and they would all be true.

As a writer, I’m often thinking about how much language we have. In contemporary culture, there are so many words we can use to describe our identity. I could tell you that that I’m mixed race, that I’m dyslexic, that I’m bisexual, on and on. Each word describes something true and important about me. At the same time, no words quite describe the feeling I get when I see a bird take off from a tree that I previously thought was empty. It’s odd to be simultaneously overwhelmed by language and also to find it inadequate.

As I tried to find ways to talk about mental health, often the language around it felt like a way of silencing the experience. A particular phrase stuck out to me: “You have to love yourself, before you ask someone else to love you.” It felt both true and very untrue. It’s extremely hard to conduct a relationship—romantic or otherwise—with someone consumed by their suffering, and yet it’s unfair to expect someone to feel able to love themselves if they’re not receiving any love.

Novels and fiction are a way of examining something I don’t fully understand, so I wanted to write about a couple where one person is struggling with their mental health, and show both sides of the relationship. Although the things that happen to Oscar and Mina are not the things that happened to me, I have loved and cared about people who’ve experienced severe mental health challenges and, when I was a teenager, I experienced very serious depression. I felt able to think about both sides, and invested in thinking about both sides.

INTERVIEWER

The novel is written in the close third person, alternating between Mina’s and Oscar’s points of view. Did you start writing from both perspectives early on? Or did one character arrive sooner than the other?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

The setup of the first chapter was there from the beginning—the moment with Mina walking on the bridge, the police taking her in because they are worried she might jump, and then the switch of perspective to Oscar picking her up.

That was the one thing I did take from my life. I was once picked up on the George Washington Bridge by the police. I hadn’t thought I was going to jump. I was just walking and thinking about the things I went through when I was a teenager, and I was trying to find the feeling of wanting to be alive. And so when I was picked up, it was very frightening. I suddenly went from being a person who had agency, to being a person who had not broken any law but who was in a police car. My best friend had to come to pick me up and sign the document that says, I’ll be responsible for you. It was fine, ultimately, but that night really stuck with me. I started to think about the other people who were picked up and needed to call someone. What happens if the person you call is your husband? What happens if they take the document—the taking responsibility for you—literally? What would that mean for a relationship?

INTERVIEWER

Your first book, Harmless Like You, is also about a pair, a mother and a son. How do you view the two books—and their subjects—in relation to one another?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

Harmless Like You is about family. It’s about a mother who leaves her son. And however you feel about her choice by the end of the novel, I did want the reader to understand how she felt and why she made the choice. Her choice was in the context of a world where mothers are supposed to stay with their children.

In Starling Days I was thinking about the opposite. What happens if you can leave? Divorce is hard, but these days, in Britain and America, people understand that you can break up with someone. And so what happens if you’re trying to hold on? I wanted to take a young couple’s relationship and treat it as seriously, treat the repercussions of the desire as seriously, as you would for the relationships in a family.

We talk about chosen family—family is hard. What happens when you choose? What does that mean? If we believe the relationship between a mother and a son cannot be destroyed, even if one of them leaves, it’s still a powerful connection, then what does it mean to make that kind of connection from scratch?

INTERVIEWER

Earlier, you mentioned the perils of having too much language, or too little. And it seems one of the times we deal with these perils is precisely when attempting to build romantic connections. Mina is often acutely aware of the limits of language in her relationship, of its failure to communicate what she means or feels. During a phone call with Oscar, she reflects, “The more they said ‘okay,’ the more the word deformed. The o inflated, sounding top-heavy.” I wonder where you, as a writer, experience the limits of language as a tool. How do you persist in your craft, in spite of its limitations?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

It’s strange. No one I know loves words more than writers, and no one I know is more frustrated by words than writers. If something is easy to say or write, that is what we do. But so much of what we think and feel is sharp and vivid, confined to our skulls, and when we say it aloud it comes out drab and faded. People nod, but the essence of the feeling has been lost.

I often feel unable to communicate. My words seem to lose their depth and shine on the way out of my mouth. I am always aware of the limits. But one of the great gifts and challenges of fiction writing is that it is a way of trying to cast a spell and summon those feelings and thoughts up for another person via plot, character, language, rhythm. To do this is hard work and often it is only partially successful. But I think it is the only way I know to really talk about what it means to be alive.

INTERVIEWER

I’m also curious about the different ways Mina and Oscar harm and betray each other at various stages of the novel. There’s a scene in a flower market, where Mina and Oscar are arguing. He half-catches himself, “It wasn’t fair. She had a mental illness. You shouldn’t yell at someone who was sick. Except you did.” There are more obvious betrayals in the book, too, but the brief, fleeting conflicts—the daily harms in relationships—feel important.

HISAYO BUCHANAN

It was important to me to talk about the ways in which very understandable behavior—something that makes sense in the context of what you’re going through—still has repercussions.

It makes sense that Oscar is overwhelmed and so needs to take space. It makes sense that Mina is reaching out for anything that might be positive—even if that is pursuing another woman—because everyone’s telling her she has to find a way to be happy. But that still has repercussions. Your behavior can be both understandable and hurtful. When we talk about mental health, it’s often about the one person who has a diagnosis. But your behavior and feelings have an effect on the people around you—friends, family members, possibly even coworkers. It’s a system—a person’s health doesn’t exist in isolation.

INTERVIEWER

Mina is not in therapy during the novel, but she alludes to her past experiences, and comments on the apparent commonness of seeing a therapist, at least within her circle of friends. I remember laughing when I read, “She’d lost count of the times one of her New York friends began sentence, ‘So my therapist says.’” It almost makes me feel more hopeless to imagine us all trying, over and over, to make sense of ourselves in these tiny offices around the world. I want to borrow Mina’s words: “Mapping your emotions was easy, it was cutting a new path that felt impossible.” Is there hope? Did writing this book help cut new paths in your thinking about your emotions?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

One of the things I realized as I was writing is there are seemingly endless possible explanations for our struggles. Thinking about my own life, I often spend so long thinking about why something happened that it leaves little energy to think about what to do next. You can get so caught up in the mapping that it becomes hard to move.

For Mina, part of what she needs to see is that she is not the only one who is flawed, and that Oscar is struggling, too. This realization isn’t going to fix her, but at the same time, always thinking, “I’m broken in this way or in this way or in this way” had prevented her from seeing, “This other person needs me and maybe I can help them.” There needs to be a balance.

The challenge is to not dismiss your own emotions and to not be consumed by them. One of the things I wanted the book to do is show that they’re juggling these whole lives beyond Mina’s suicidal ideation. Mina wants to pursue her academic career, Oscar wants to impress his father, and build a stable family.

INTERVIEWER

There are things to do besides mapping your own emotions.

HISAYO BUCHANAN

There are, and you can still be worthwhile even if you are in some way flawed or struggling. You still have something to give to the world.

INTERVIEWER

Sometimes the mapping is terrifying though. Returning to the opening scene, when Mina is on the George Washington bridge, she tosses one of her flip-flops over the railing—this is why the police officer takes her aside. And later she tries to explain to Oscar, “I was reading about that actor who jumped off and I just wanted to see it. The bridge, I mean.” I do understand that impulse to look closely, but to do so is precarious. This novel in general sets out to draw closely to sadness, to learn its “floor plan”—to borrow more of Mina’s language. But how do you write about a thing like the intense spirals of depression, suicidal ideation, without reproducing its harm?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

To some extent every reader will have to decide. But for me there is something useful about, even in fiction, describing a version of the world that feels true, that feels as flawed as the world is, with people who are as flawed as they are, but that also has the joys and the beauties that are in the world. To be silent or to give a simplified version of those things is a greater risk. I know that when I have struggled with something, whether it’s training my dog or a deep emotional issue, when I go to read fiction or to my own writing, what I want is not perfect people, but people who’ve been through something or who’ve tried to think about a thing I’ve tried to think about. Otherwise, I’m completely alone with it.

I wanted to read this and not feel alone. Especially because I think there is still a lot of stigma. It might be more acceptable to say, “Oh I have this diagnosis.” But there’s a desire to have the Starbucks ad version of your diagnosis: “I have this, but I’m fine and I’m a very functioning member of society and I never do anything wrong.”

At the same time, while I didn’t want either Mina or Oscar to be perfect, I didn’t want anyone to think the worst things Mina said to herself were what I, the author, thought about them, the reader. The things Mina says to herself are some of the harshest things you could imagine. That is part of the reason I included an author’s note at the end. I tried to be as truthful as I could, but I wanted to reiterate that the book really doesn’t believe that there is a single answer for everybody. And it did feel worth it to come out of the fiction writer’s sacred room. I started to think, worst case scenario, what would it be like if someone reads my book and thinks, Yes I am Mina, or, Yes I am Oscar, or even worse, I’m worse than Mina. What do I do? Is this book telling me that my choices are wrong? I was concerned that some readers would feel that that note was more than they needed, that they would feel it was obvious, but I felt that in the end it was my job to be there for the more vulnerable reader.

INTERVIEWER

I was grateful to find the note at the end of the novel! The gentle reminder that this is just one story of many and that, “Every day you try again is an act of bravery.” Those are kind words to hear—whether or not you feel you need them in that precise moment.

When you described the importance of crafting fiction that feels true, you reminded me of when Mina explains why she first fell in love with studying the classics. Myths, she said, “had felt truer than the tilt of the planet or its long spin around the sun. This world made so much more sense if it was filled with angry, hungry gods.” What is it about fiction or myth that helps you access more reality, more truth?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

All fiction, even the most realist fiction, is this huge act of fantasy. You believe you can be in someone else’s head, or multiple-someone-elses’ heads—as in the case of both my books. But I think it’s also what we all do, even non-writers, as we go about our lives: we try to imagine how all the people around us feel. You have to believe they have an inner reality, and you tell yourself a story about that inner reality and it’s how you connect with them.

When I’m trying to understand someone who is in a very different situation than my own, I might read articles and essays, but I’ll also read fiction. Books will make me think about the relationships between people in my life. I might read a book about a mother and a daughter, and it might make me call my mother. It might make me say, “Hi, I read this. It made me think of you.” Reading and writing present a way to combat the essential aloneness of being a human being. Maybe because the characters feel like you, maybe they share your life situation. But even if they’re not you, you feel less alone, because you are connected to this other story, this other consciousness, the consciousnesses of the characters, and the consciousness of the writer as well.

INTERVIEWER

The novel takes place over the course of only a few months. How did you decide on the scale?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

I wasn’t sure exactly the span of time, but I knew I wanted it to be fairly compact. We were talking about this book versus Harmless Like You, which takes place over decades and attempts to look at this life as a whole. If you take everything that happens to Oscar and Mina in Starling Days and place it in the Harmless Like You timeline, it would probably be two chapters, but I wanted to give this time in their lives a whole novel.

I am roughly Mina and Oscar’s age and, as I started to look around me at the choices people were making, I realized that your thirties are this unique stage. It’s not quite the bildungsroman—you aren’t squishy clay. People in their thirties are already pretty much themselves, they’ve already had a lot happen to them, but they also have a lot of life left. And if you believe in long-term relationships, or equally if you don’t, if you were defining yourself against them, it’s a moment where you’re saying, “This is the set-up in my life. These are the relationships that are important to me.”

Maybe you’ll get divorced, maybe something will change, but it’s a time where you have to actively make choices that you believe will last you for the next decades. Career-wise as well—the book is about their relationship but it’s also about Mina struggling with her job as a classicist, and that’s part of what’s freaking her out—she’s crying while she’s trying to work. And Oscar’s trying to prove he can be the young professional he thinks his father wants him to be. It’s this moment where you’re fighting for the life you will have.

INTERVIEWER

Mina and Oscar do withstand so much together. And the book offers so many beautiful articulations of what love and long-term relationships look like. What did you learn about love in the process of writing this book?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

I was thinking about this as I was writing. The people you love the most become an extension of yourself, and in the ways in which we are both the kindest and go the furthest for ourselves and the people we love, we are also the harshest on ourselves.

If someone who is unimportant to you is rude or boring or tiresome, you’d say, Okay, thank you, and leave. But the moment you choose to not leave, when you say, This person, in some form or another, is permanent. It’s an incredible investment and that investment can bring out the best and the worst of yourself.

That was a big part of thinking about how Mina and Oscar treat each other. I wanted to see what it means to try not the big gesture, but the again and again and again, the small ways, to still be there, to be yourself, to be your kindest self, with all your flaws. With the idea that it’s forever. That is big and beautiful and terrifying.

Our culture generally celebrates work when it comes to your literal job. We know it may be difficult, challenging, and frustrating but we have a model for that struggle. It’s okay, if you believe the work is worthwhile. But as a society, we’re still figuring out how much work is healthy in a relationship. The characters in Starling Days each have their own answer. They have different views on how much you can ask of someone, and how much you can help someone. Writing the book reminded me that everybody has to make that decision for themselves.

 

Spencer Quong is a writer from the Yukon Territory, Canada. He lives and works in New York.

Poets on Couches: Monica Youn

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.

“Dawn”

by Federico García Lorca

Translated by Greg Simon and Steven L. White

Issue no. 104 (Fall 1987)

Dawn in New York has

four columns of mire

and a hurricane of black pigeons

splashing in the putrid waters.

Dawn in New York groans

on enormous fire escapes

searching between the angles

for spikenards of drafted anguish.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth

because morning and hope are impossible there.

And sometimes the furious swarming coins

penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

Those who got out early know in their bones

there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die;

they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,

in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The light is buried beneath chains and noises,

an important warning to rootless science.

And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs

as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.

 

Monica Youn is the author, most recently, of Blackacre.

How Pandemics Seep into Literature

Influenza victims crowd into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918.

In October of 1918, a delirious Katherine Anne Porter experienced what she termed “the beatific vision.” Close to death from the novel influenza virus that would kill 50–100 million people, Porter felt transported to a paradisal landscape, one free of the pain and fear that had overtaken her body. To the surprise of all, she survived her illness, and later transformed the experience into her powerful novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” That story is one of the few literary works directly about the pandemic that killed more people in the United States than the country lost in all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars, combined. The experience, Porter said, “simply divided my life … and after I was in some strange way altered … it took me a long time to go out and live in the world again.”

COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue, the closure signs, the antiseptic smells, the empty streets, the stacks of coffins—will weave their way into our minds and bodies, triggering us back to this moment years in the future. For me, the experience has also held an uncanny familiarity. I have spent the last five years writing a book about how the sensory and affective climate of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic infuses interwar literature, often in ways we have not recognized. My new awareness of the traces of that pandemic shifts my perception of this one, as if the sights and sounds from a century ago have re-emerged, becoming timely in ways I both feared and never wanted.

Comparisons between the influenza pandemic and COVID-19 have been widespread as we scramble for some map of how this outbreak might unfold. Through a medical lens, we ask which virus is worse. Do they spread in similar ways? How did public life change both then and now? Are there lessons that might be drawn or mistakes that might be avoided? Some differences between the two outbreaks are already clear: the 1918-19 pandemic killed healthy young adults at astonishing rates, and influenza seemed like a familiar rather than a new threat, despite the unique virulence of the strain, which meant it was even easier to dismiss—at least at first. And the timing mattered: the influenza pandemic came on the heels of the deadliest war the world had yet to see, an overlap that meant the pandemic received far less attention, despite killing so many more people. The second mass-death event in five years, the pandemic arrived when the world was already overrun with corpses and grief.

Yet the literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in precisely the realms where art excels: in emotional landscapes, in the ways a past moment reverberates into the present, in the ineffable conversation between the body’s experiences and our perception of the world.

Right now, every few days brings another reality into focus; what seemed far-fetched yesterday arrives tomorrow. The past is always another country, but the speed at which knowledge becomes outdated, naivete turns to realization, and basic truths change is dizzying during a pandemic. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter wove her own paradigm-altering experience into a broader meditation on the vertigo induced by such shifts. She encodes these swings in a play of styles, moving between a hallucinatory, dreamlike language to convey the virus’s invasion of bodies and a more straightforward, realist style to convey the war. Part of the challenge for the characters is to read correctly the story they are in; saturated in a war story that is terrible but familiar, this narrative is what seems real. They know their roles (male soldier, female civilian), the threat (artillery warfare), the enemies and the allies, and they know how this story ends (death for the soldier). Caught up in this paradigm, they miss that reality has changed, that the enemy is now invisible, that women face equal threats, that the home front is as dangerous as the front lines. There are consequences for misreading: as they worry over the threat to the soldier’s body in war, they circulate through restaurants, theaters, hospitals, and workplaces. Even after one of them falls ill, they touch and kiss and share cigarettes, believing themselves in the outdated story as a new delirium takes over the narrative and their lives. Porter captures the emotional and physical jolts of a constantly shifting reality, and the inherent risks in failing to adjust quickly enough to a new paradigm.

One’s reality doesn’t simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the reality. The unpredictability of the COVID-19 virus and all we don’t know about it means we have no idea where we are in the story or even what story we are in. Is this the first wave of something even deadlier to come? Have we reached the top of the curve? What’s the scope of the tragedy? Is the economy the real story? What do we think we know now that may prove fatally wrong? The narrative uncertainty causes many of us to turn to genre fiction and predictable movies (even if they are about disaster)—they allow us to pull down another story like a shade and sit in a place where we already know the ending. The modernist literature I spend my days teaching and studying typically grants the opposite, capturing the fragmentation and plotlessness of a postwar/postpandemic world. T. S. Eliot, who along with his wife caught the flu during the pandemic, felt weighed down by what he termed the “domestic influenza” of his health and home life, and his worries that his mind had been affected by his illness. The Waste Land—a poem about so many things and one that channels the larger zeitgeist of his moment—turns this uncertainty into a climate, with its fogs, its corpse-haunted domestic landscape, its pervasive sense of living death, and its delirious language.

The uncertainty rises, too, from the invisibility of the enemy. The consciousness is tuned to a threat that might be everywhere but cannot be seen. A world of surfaces and people become suspect, the body porous and vulnerable. W. B. Yeats captures this sense of menace in “The Second Coming,” a poem composed in the weeks after he watched his pregnant wife come close to death in the pandemic. The 1918 virus routinely drowned people in their beds as their lungs filled with fluids, and it caused sudden bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears. The poem’s sense of chaos and horror comes, of course, from many causes, including war, revolution, and Ireland’s political violence, but the poem also speaks to the terror of an agentless, hidden threat, one that drowns innocence and lets loose mere anarchy and a blood-dimmed tide.

The invisibility of the threat in turn produces what we might term contagion guilt, a haunting fear that one might pass a deadly infection to another. Routes of transmission are known generally but rarely specifically; one fears but does not know the precise means of transfer. In William Maxwell’s elegiac novel They Came Like Swallows, which recalls his own pregnant mother’s death in the influenza pandemic, the characters are haunted by all the what-ifs: what if they had taken their boy out of school earlier? What if they had chosen the next train car rather than the first one? What if they had not entered the room that day? Such guilt can live in the mind as a low-lying presence, unresolved and unresolvable. And this guilt comes, too, in its anticipatory form—what if that touch, that visit, that missed hand wash harms a loved one or a stranger? Porter’s central character in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” dreams of a nightmarish invisible bow that shoots arrows at her beloved, who dies again and again despite her attempted interventions.

As we are witnessing every day, a toxic brew of uncertainty and fear also flows into well-worn channels of scapegoating and cruelty, turning an invisible viral enemy into an illusory but visible foe. The xenophobia woven into a “Chinese virus” or even the “Spanish flu” sets up whole groups for denunciation. Factual medical descriptions of contagion, disease, and contamination morph into poisonous discriminatory metaphors of moral uncleanness and danger. The early-twentieth-century horror writer H. P. Lovecraft channeled into his postwar/postpandemic writing his prejudicial and homophobic beliefs that immigrant hordes and deviants were tainting pure Aryan blood lines. After the influenza pandemic had swept through his home state of Rhode Island, Lovecraft populated his stories with proto-zombie figures rising from the dead in the midst of pandemics or wars, bent on further destruction. Lovecraft transforms a miasmic blend of diseased atmospheres and deep-seated prejudices into monsters that can be seen and killed with impunity, a move that suggests the dangerous ways anthropomorphizing the threat may mask vicious discriminatory impulses.

And yet what pulses through all these works—and through our current moment—is the body itself. Virginia Woolf, who knew so much about illness and whose heart was damaged by her encounter with the 1918 virus, observes in her essay “On Being Ill” how illness and the body are left out of our art and conscious experiences. We deny how in truth, “all day, all night the body intervenes.” In the midst of acute illness, the world both narrows and broadens into the body’s suffering, an experience hidden in part because of the profound isolation it so often produces. As Woolf writes, “those great wars which [the body] wages by itself…in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever” go unrecorded. The post-1918 pandemic works encode these internal battles, sometimes directly and sometimes in fragments and echoes. They capture the way a virus may shatter the body’s internal perceptions, the way fever and pain and fear of death turn reality into delirium. Porter depicts this mode by having the virus seem to infect the very prose, the cascading viral chaos reflected through the broken syntax and the invading dreamscapes, the disruption echoing “the terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire.” The Waste Land and “The Second Coming,” read through the lens of a body’s internal delirium, record hallucinatory realities, fragmented perception, the burning pain of fever and ache.

And finally, there comes the aftermath, both for our bodies and for our culture. How do such experiences live on in the cells, in the memory, in the streets? The continued sense of living death, of an experience that marks us with its shadow, echoes even after a pandemic passes. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, so often read as a novel capturing the aftermath of war—which it most certainly does—also records in its title character the physical and mental exhaustion that lingers after an illness. Like Woolf, Clarissa Dalloway has heart damage from her encounter with influenza, and as she moves through the streets of London and at home, she sees her world through her sense of bodily vulnerability, her very heartbeat and its lags pulsing through the memories of her illness. The sights and sounds and smells of the sickroom float back through her consciousness, shifting the ways she perceives the London day. Whether in illness or in observation, our own bodies are busy now. They are recording our pandemic, setting in place the reverberations that will echo into our future.

 

Elizabeth Outka is a professor of literature at the University of Richmond. Her latest book, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature is out from Columbia University. 

Redux: Nothing to Grind

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.

Fran Lebowitz, ca. 2011. Photo: Christopher Macsurak.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re getting easily distracted, writing slowly, and leaving our desks. Read on for some literature that shares these same concerns: a 1993 interview with Fran Lebowitz, Sigrid Nunez’s short story “The Blind,” and Gevorg Emin’s poem “The Block.”

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.

 

A Humorist at Work: Fran Lebowitz

Issue no. 127 (Summer 1993)

INTERVIEWER

What did you do during those five years before you started writing the book?

LEBOWITZ

I sulked. Sulking is a big effort. So is not writing. I only realized that when I did start writing. When I started getting real work done, I realized how much easier it is to write than not to write. Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It’s very psychically wearing not to write—I mean if you’re supposed to be writing.

 

 

The Blind

By Sigrid Nunez

Issue no. 222 (Fall 2017)

Where were you going? Nowhere in particular. No errand, no appointment. Just strolling along, hands in pockets, savoring the street. It was your thing: If I can’t walk, I can’t write. You would work in the morning, and at a certain point, which always came, when it seemed you were incapable of writing a sentence, you would go out and walk for miles. When you came back, you would sit down again to work, trying to hold on to the rhythm that had been established while walking. And the better you succeeded at that, the better the writing.

Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.

 

 

The Block

By Gevorg Emin

Issue no. 57 (Spring 1974)

For two months

I have not written

a word.

My voice, a low

grumble, disturbs

our quarter

like the rumble

of the millstone

which having nothing to grind

grinds itself.

—Translated from the Armenian by Diana Der Hovanessian

 

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.

The Black Gambling King of Chicago

Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. 

Original illustration © Ellis Rosen

If you could trace the fate of just one dollar that passed through the hands of John “Mushmouth” Johnson, where would it lead? It probably came to his hands off a craps table or from an office of his policy syndicate, and more likely than not, it would go on to be slipped into the pocket of some crooked cop or double-dealing politician. But if Johnson, whom local papers called “the Negro Gambling King of Chicago,” managed to hold on to it, that dollar might end up supporting a hub of black music in the twenties, or the first black-owned bank in Chicago, or a poetic precursor of the Harlem Renaissance. It would grant Johnson, in death, a respectability he was denied in life.

Johnson’s life was characterized by a constant tension between philanthropy and corruption. Born to the nurse of Mary Todd Lincoln in 1857, Johnson moved from his native Saint Louis to Chicago at an early age. Some said his nickname, Mushmouth, referred to how much he cursed. Others said it was because of a “thick utterance he had in his speech when a boy.” Either way, the name signals how Johnson’s mode of expression, coupled with his lack of formal education, cut him off from genteel society. “I didn’t exactly do much book learning,” he recalled, many years later. “I went out to see where the money grew. Some of those who know me say that I found it.”

In 1882, Johnson got a job as a porter in a white-owned gambling house. He studied the business closely, and soon opened his own nickel-gambling joint on Clark Street. Johnson had a keen eye for real estate, and quickly managed to flip that location. In 1890, he took the proceeds and purchased a saloon at 464 South State Street. He called it the Emporium. It would be the seat of his gambling empire for nearly twenty years.

Decked out in Gay Nineties style, with rococo chandeliers and a bar of Honduran mahogany, the Emporium offered three stories of action: billiards on the first floor, craps and roulette on the second, and poker on the third. In order of popularity, the bar served whiskey, gin, and beer. Scorning the day’s more flamboyant scarves, Johnson presided over the Emporium in a neat black four-in-hand knot, with a pin set with a small stone. As for that stone, one gambler said, “You can bet it’s the goods.”

The Emporium became a fixture on a block known as Whiskey Row, an area that was, to say the least, disreputable. It’s where Mickey Finn famously served knockout drinks at the Lone Star Saloon and robbed his unconscious customers (giving his name to the phrase “slipping someone a mickey”). But Johnson’s Emporium was held in relatively high esteem. Black or white, rich or poor, you had a place at his gambling tables. Historian Dempsey Travis quotes his father as saying, “Where else could a country boy go just ten days out of Georgia and feel like a big-time gambler for only a nickel?”

In addition to the Emporium, Johnson was heavily invested in the game of policy. Basically a lottery, policy required bettors to place money on one or more numbers between 1 and 78. Twelve numbers would be drawn from a tumbling drum, and the wins could be enormous. One common play was called a gig, the choice of three numbers that, if drawn, could pay off at a rate of 100 to 1.

Bets could be as low as a penny, and so policy was wildly popular among the poor. Some saw the game as parasitic, draining what little wealth people possessed. But as Nathan Thompson, author of Kings: The True Story of Chicago’s Policy Kings and Numbers Racketeers (2003), told me, “Policy was the economic engine that facilitated the progress of the black community.” Many jobs were required to keep the game afloat, and policy subsidized countless businesses and institutions in the community: “Black hospitals, black banks, black insurance companies, black mom-and-pop grocery stores, black political careers and law careers,” Thompson said. For someone like Mushmouth Johnson, with virtually no education or access to capital, policy was a path to prosperity. As he asked the Chicago Tribune, “What else is there for a colored man to do?”

*

Running a saloon and a policy syndicate wasn’t exactly honest work. One gambler said he’d witnessed people pawning their shoes after a bad night at the Emporium, and men “playing in their underclothing on the proceeds of their outer garments.” But with all the pockets Johnson had to grease, it wasn’t exactly honest pay, either. To understand the fate of any given dollar from Johnson’s enterprises, one must grasp the convoluted state of political corruption in turn-of-the-century Chicago.

The Emporium was located in Chicago’s First Ward, which at the time was controlled by the so-called Gray Wolves, a group of aldermen who hardly attempted to conceal the depths of their corruption. “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Mike Kenna operated gambling houses, brazenly purchased votes, and manipulated public service contracts for personal enrichment.

If you wanted to move up in the First Ward, you had to get in bed with the Wolves, and that’s what Johnson did. An early appearance in the local papers comes in 1894, during the First Ward elections. “The gamblers were out in force and were spending money for votes,” said the Chicago Inter Ocean. Johnson “was given to understand that he would have to poll 100 colored votes in his precinct or close up his crap joint.”

The bond between Johnson and the political machine only tightened with time. Soon, he was collecting $150 a week for police protection from gamblers in Chinatown, money that in turn went to the Wolves. Johnson was subject to the same extortion. With perhaps some exaggeration (he always claimed to be poorer than he was), Johnson said he had to pay four dollars in bribes for every one he took home.

Meanwhile, in city hall, Mayor Carter Harrison Jr. was being pressured to reform the city’s vice districts. Although he frequently congratulated himself on his record of reform, Harrison’s efforts were, at best, half-hearted. Taking in a swath of high-profile gamblers in 1903, including Johnson, the Inter Ocean noted that “ten years ago these men were poor. The bulk of their money has been accumulated during Mayor Harrison’s ‘reform’ administration.” Every now and then, the mayor would have saloons like the Emporium raided, but these initiatives were seen as mere publicity stunts. It wasn’t until a citizens’ association began pressuring city hall that things started to change, and that would have fateful consequences for the saloons of Whiskey Row.

*

The year 1903 began auspiciously for Mushmouth Johnson. For $40,000, he purchased the building across the street from the Emporium. Ultimately, his enduring fortune would reside in real estate. (He claimed, “I bought a lot on a prairie where a town afterwards was located.”) But 1903 would prove the most unlucky year of what he called his “troubled and busy life.”

His problems began with a gambler named Thomas Hawkins. This wasn’t the first time Johnson ran afoul of an unhappy Emporium patron. In 1896, he’d been shot by someone who felt he’d been suckered. But Hawkins proved an unusually persistent troublemaker. The two men fell out over an $18.75 bet that Hawkins claimed to have won and Johnson refused to pay. It’s difficult to tell who was in the right, if anyone, but Johnson was often accused of being tightfisted. “For a man that has got all the coin that Johnson is said to have, he is the closest colored man in the world,” said one gambler.

The Hawkins quarrel quickly escalated. ‘MUSHMOUTH’ JOHNSON IN DANGER OF LOSING AN EYE, read a headline in October 1903. Johnson had been struck in the face by Hawkins, a blow that shattered his glasses and sent shards into his eyes. (He recovered from the wound.)

Perhaps fearing retribution, Hawkins became an instrument of the police, and his tip led to a Saturday-night raid of the Emporium. Hawkins was right to have been afraid; less than twenty-four hours after the raid, he was shot through the left arm and breast by a man named Moses Love. From his hospital bed, Hawkins accused Johnson of arranging the attempted murder, though the charges never stuck.

The whole thing might’ve blown over—just another scuffle on State Street. But the citizens’ association, which was trying to hold the mayor to his reform platform, pressed him into establishing a graft committee to investigate corruption. After the shooting, Hawkins turned state against State Street, offering to testify before the committee that illegal gambling was active at the Emporium. His testimony would give the lie to the mayor’s assertions that Chicago was gambling-free.

Johnson appears to have felt the committee closing in. He gave an interview to the Tribune in which he attempted to get ahead of the charges. “We used to have a little gambling here,” he told the reporter, but nowadays “the dust is an inch thick upstairs.” But Johnson hadn’t closed the saloon for the interview, and the Emporium was inconveniently packed. “You can’t judge by this,” he insisted. “All the rest of the week it will be like a graveyard.”

Two days later, Johnson’s saloon license was revoked. But this would be about the only thing the graft committee would accomplish. Behind the scenes, Mayor Harrison was expressing anger with the proceedings, and so, despite continued pressure from the citizens’ association, the committee eased off.

The Emporium had taken the heat for the whole corrupt system. Pointing out that Johnson, unlike the Gray Wolves, had never wavered in his loyalty to the mayor, the Inter Ocean said he’d nevertheless been “sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.” The Tribune printed an exultant limerick: “Mushmouth Johnson sat on a wall / Mushmouth Johnson had a great fall.” Meanwhile, as one member of the committee said, “The big fellows have not been reached.”

Johnson might’ve fallen, but he managed to stick the landing. A few months later, one of the attorneys of the graft committee encountered Johnson at a convention hall. After giving the attorney a warm handshake, Johnson introduced himself: “You and your graft committee had my license revoked. I didn’t think you could get it, but you did. My name is Mushmouth Johnson, and I want to congratulate you. I like a man who’s game.”

Soon enough, other issues consumed city hall’s attention, most spectacularly the Iroquois Theatre fire, in which more than six hundred people died. (It remains the deadliest single-building fire in American history.) Corruption had touched even the fire inspectors of Chicago, who’d overlooked building code violations at the Iroquois, and the mayor was embroiled in a scandal that went international. Everyone forgot about Johnson, and the roulette wheel started spinning at the Emporium once again.

*

When Johnson gave an interview in 1907, it seemed like frivolous fun. He was announcing his retirement and bidding farewell to Chicago. Claiming he had only a fraction of his once-great fortune, Johnson said he’d take a trip around the world with what remained. “You’ll hear from me down in Africa shootin’ craps,” he said, unaware of what this interview would trigger.

UNIVERSITY SOCIETY GIRL PROVES NEGRESS, the papers said on July 26, 1907. At the time, Johnson’s sister Cecilia was pursuing her masters in history at the University of Chicago. By all accounts, Cecilia was deeply intelligent and intensely charismatic. An eminent member of the Phi Delta Phi sorority, she cut a glamorous figure on campus. She bought the best editions of all her schoolbooks, and during the city’s streetcar strike rode to campus in a carriage with a liveried coachman.

But according to the reports that splashed across front pages all over the country, no one at the university had known she was black. While there was never any effort to conceal the truth, she passed for white. “Feminine jealousy began to arise in the sorority,” the papers reported, both because of Cecilia’s wealth, and because “she made the biggest ‘hit’ of the society at the dances.” Her Phi Delta Phi sisters convened their own sort of committee and began investigating her background. When one of them read Johnson’s interview, which was conducted at his home on Wabash Avenue, they recognized the address as Cecilia’s. Not only was she black, she was the sister of a Whiskey Row saloon-keeper, kept in the latest fashions with “tainted money.”

Now relieved of their jealousy, the sorority girls were outraged. “We never for a brief moment suspected she had colored blood in her veins,” said one, while another added that it was just a tragic situation: “If it were not for her color, I would willingly have her in my sorority.” Johnson, meanwhile, was disgusted. He’d witnessed every sort of mendacity and hypocrisy in his career, and said Cecilia’s “exposure” only served to expose “Chicago’s habits.” He was, he said, “glad that Chicago feels humiliated.”

But privately, Johnson was crushed by the racist abuse heaped upon Cecilia, who was forced to retreat from the academic world she’d conquered, and whom he regarded as “the brightest and most lovely thing” in his life. In September of that year, he was traveling to Kentucky from Atlantic City when he took ill with pneumonia, and died on the train. Despite his self-professed poverty, it was said that the Gambling King of Chicago’s fortune amounted to $250,000 (about $6.8 million today).

*

In Negroland, Margo Jefferson writes about the black elite of Chicago, which perceived itself as “the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all class of Caucasians.” The lower classes of Black people, Jefferson writes, had “loud voices … brash and garish ways.” Contrasting oneself with them reinforced one’s affiliation with “the colored elite … the big families, the old families … the pioneers.”

When Mushmouth Johnson wanted to do something positive for the community, he always had to do it indirectly. Whether it was contributing to the Baptist Church or helping to establish an old people’s home, the donation came through his mother or other relatives. His brash and garish ways, or what others called his “unsavory reputation and uncouth demeanor,” offended the black elite and prevented his open participation in civic life.

But in death, he gradually drifted over the divide. By 1933, his relatives were said to have come from “a pioneer Chicago family.”

The posthumous esteem is due, in large part, to the illustrious fate of that $250,000 fortune. When Johnson’s sister Dora married Jesse Binga, Chicago’s leading black businessman, local papers called it “the most elaborate and the most fashionable wedding ever held in the history of the Afro-American race in this city.” Binga received $200,000 of Johnson’s estate, which helped capitalize the Binga State Bank, the first black-owned and operated bank in Chicago.

In the arts, Johnson’s influence could be felt at the Pekin Theater, which Dempsey Travis called “the formal cradle of Negro drama in the United States.” The owner, Robert T. Motts, had worked under Johnson, and used that experience to start his own gambling business, which in turn funded the Pekin. And Johnson’s brother Elijah broke off a piece of the family fortune to build the Dreamland Café right across from Binga’s bank. Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Lil Hardin, King Oliver, and Alberta Hunter helped transform Dreamland into a major showcase of emerging black musical forms during the teens and twenties.

Johnson’s fortune even helped support the poetry of his nephew, Fenton Johnson, a key forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance. One of Fenton’s most famous poems, “Tired,” seems to look back to State Street: “I will go down to the Last Chance Saloon, drink a gallon or two of gin, shoot a game or two of dice.” One can almost hear Mushmouth Johnson’s lament after bribing yet another white Irish politician: “I am tired of work,” Fenton writes, “I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.”

 

Read more installments of Dice Roll here.

Michael LaPointe is a writer in Toronto. His debut novel, The Creep, will be published by Random House Canada in 2021.

Sheltering in Place with Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

By the time Michel de Montaigne wrote “Of Experience,” the last entry in his third and final book of essays, the French statesman and author had weathered numerous outbreaks of plague (in 1585, while he was mayor of Bordeaux, a third of the population perished), political uprisings, the death of five daughters, and an onslaught of physical ailments, from rotting teeth to debilitating kidney stones.

All the while, Montaigne was writing. From a tower on his family’s estate in southwestern France, he’d innovated a leisurely yet commodious literary mode that mirrored—while also helping to manufacture—the unpredictable movements of his racing mind. Part evolving treatise, part prismatic self-portrait, the essai, in Montaigne’s conception, was the antidote to self-isolation, a recurring conference in the midst of quarantine, perhaps even a kind of textual necromancy—his best friend and intellectual sparring partner, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, had died of plague in 1563.

“Of Experience” is about how to live when life itself comes under attack. Because life as we’ve known it is on hold at the moment, because sickness and confusion are everywhere, and because one of the things books are good for is reminding us that we aren’t alone in history or consciousness, reading “Of Experience” right now feels like an analogue to experience; not a cold study of a distant artist’s late style so much as wisdom lit for wary souls unresigned, as of yet, to world-weariness.

Given the subject matter, “Of Experience” has about it a remarkably buoyant magnitude. Take, for instance, the following passage, as translated by Donald Frame in The Complete Essays of Montaigne:

It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

Propelled by verbs—perceive, arrest, grasp, make, try, try—the sentences wheel and wrestle across the page, resisting stasis at every turn, refusing to wait around. They achieve that mimetic, nearly miraculous work of performing the very action they describe. Here and elsewhere, Montaigne’s musings on mortality, his gripes about illness and aging, his love-hate relationship with the natural order, not to mention his fervent epistemological stocktaking, make for a stubborn blueprint for life in the red zone, an operative action plan for how to wring futility’s neck.

The ubiquity of suffering heightened Montaigne’s attentiveness to the complexity of human experience. Pleasure, he contends, flows not from free rein but structure. The brevity of existence, he goes on, gives it a certain heft. Exertion, truth be told, is the best form of compensation. Time is slippery, the more reason to grab hold.

In each of these apothegms, we find evidence of what Keats would later call, in a letter to his brothers, “negative capability,” a notion that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his essay “The Crack-Up,” summarized as the capacity to embrace two contradictory ideas at the same time and go on functioning. “Of Experience” is one of Montaigne’s gravest works—“We must learn to endure,” he writes, “what we cannot avoid”—but the writing is so vigorous, so uninterested in despair. In the end, we get the sense from the writing that the writing was Montaigne’s method of magnifying enjoyment. Reading him might be as good a way as any to suspend life’s flight.

 

Drew Bratcher was born in Nashville. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He lives in Chicagoland.