The Paris Review's Blog, page 183

Be Yourself Again

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Amina Cain revisits Jean Genet’s The Maids.

When I was writing my novel Indelicacy, I felt myself in conversation with Jean Genet’s play The Maids. First performed in Paris in 1947, the play is loosely based on the story of the infamous Papin sisters, who murdered their employer in 1933 in Le Mans, France. I’ve never seen the play performed, though I’ve watched the film version from 1975, directed by Christopher Miles. When I first read The Maids, I wasn’t interested in the idea of murder but in Genet’s highly charged representation of the two sisters, their crazed relationship to each other, as well as to their “Madame,” and in the depiction of class warfare in a domestic space. More recently, I’ve been thinking, too, about its mad circling of artificiality and authenticity, two sides of the same coin.

In their roles as maids in the rooms of Madame’s high-class apartment, Solange and Claire become unhinged, especially when they are there alone. They are free then to do as they like, and the desire for another reality, and the level to which they pitch that desire, drives them into an electrifying realm of fantasy and performance. It feels as if this is what the end of fantasy looks like, if you follow it as far as it can possibly go. And if the fantasy is as filled with bitterness and rage as the sisters are, then it feels like it will explode.

In the past year I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the idea of authenticity. This is partly because I feel at times I have lost sight of my authentic self, and I want more than anything to come close to it again. For me, authenticity means that how I act and what I say, and how I actually feel around others, are aligned, that I am connected to myself and to another person at the same time. I want my writing to be authentic, too, for every sentence to reach toward honesty and meaning. Genet manages in The Maids to come up to the very edge of this, in that nothing is held back, everything is expressed, everything breaks the surface and is free. This is especially true within the sisters’ performance, what they call “the ceremony,” in which they take turns playing each other, and Madame, and play at cruelty and revenge. Because of this sense of freedom, this reach toward liberty, the play feels oddly clean, satisfying.

But when one sister overpowers the other, an already unsettling situation gets even darker. It doesn’t seem that it could. It is painful to hear the insults the sisters hurl at each other. They understand all too well how they are seen by society, with what distaste, disgust, even. Claire yells at Solange: “A vile and odious breed, I loathe them. They’re not of the human race. Servants ooze. They’re a foul effluvium drifting through our rooms and hallways, seeping into us, entering our mouths, corrupting us.”

The play shows us the risks of an expression without limits, of following desire to its breaking point, especially if it has been pushed down by an oppressive system. In this case—class. Genet recognized, as does director Bong Joon-ho in his film Parasite, the horror and tragedy of turning that expression inward, or at those who occupy a similar class role, namely as servants to the rich. Both works portray self-harm in brutal ways.

When the maids know Madame will soon be coming home, they rush to put things back in their places, including themselves, slipping back into their “proper” roles. Now they play at being nice to her; now they are false. In their relationship to Madame, they cannot be their authentic selves. Their identities hinge upon their service to her, always. And is Madame false also? When she is nice to them, gives them compliments and clothing, is it real, or is it pity? As the provider of their livelihood, does she think of herself as a savior? Does she ever see them as they actually are? For the introduction to the play, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “In like manner, wealthy, cultivated and happy men have, from time to time, ‘felt sorry’ for Genet, have tried to oblige him. Too late. He has blamed them for loving him for the love of Good, in spite of his badness and not for it.”

My loss of authenticity is related to change, to how, as I’ve gotten older, I seem to have become a different person. In a way I have become strange to myself, and so how I feel around others has also been destabilized. I have more fears than I had when I was younger; I am more rigid; and there has been a loss, too, of the freedom I once felt, when the world seemed entirely open, and utterly beautiful. And yet, in my writing, I am able to access parts of myself I thought I had lost. I named one of the characters in my novel after one of the sisters, Solange, not with the intent to rewrite her but because I was interested in the currents that often remain invisible, that aren’t usually acted out as they are in The Maids.

My Solange is not Genet’s Solange, but she is a maid, to a woman named Vitória, who, before marrying a rich husband, was also a cleaner. I wanted my Solange to carry within her the potential of the other Solange, and a dark history of maids throughout time. Solange does not like Vitória; she makes this very clear. Solange keeps herself walled off, protected. But this is a full-time project, for they must see each other every day, living as they do in the same house.

How often these dynamics have existed, and still exist, in the space of the home, where “Madame” and “Monsieur” lay their heads and sleep, where they sleep with each other, and where “their” servants in other rooms live their own private realities, too. Of course these kinds of relationships aren’t always bad, but when they are bad, to have to live together, employer and employee, is its own unique condition. Home should be a place of retreat and safety (though we know that’s not always so); above all, a place where you can be yourself. To have to maintain those class roles always, especially if they are enforced with any kind of degradation, is a violation of the sacredness of one’s life, and a violence all on its own.

The “ceremony” Genet’s sisters engage in enacts this kind of violation and violence, but it also engenders a sense of intimacy and, again, freedom. It is Madame’s apartment, true, but it is their stage, and in some ways they are very much at home there. And when Claire and Solange perform the ceremony, they wear Madame’s clothes. In The Maids, domestic space is political, as it always has the potential to be. Ownership can’t permeate all of life, and part of what The Maids does best is to push it off, and to push off the oppressive roles class and servitude create.

The end of the play contains an ultimate violence and with it an ultimate sadness. The maids are allowed to be their real selves only through sacrifice, by entering a space no one should ever have to enter. I’m being cryptic, but I don’t want to give anything away. As a writer and an artist, Genet wasn’t afraid to enter into any of it, and that is part of how he gets close to authenticity. In the play, Solange says in a moment of exhaustion, “Be yourself again. Come on, Claire, be my sister.”

 

Amina Cain is the author, most recently, of Indelicacy.

Staff Picks: Swans, Sieves, and Sentience

The male swan ensemble in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Photo: Johan Persson.

When I was a dancer, performing Swan Lake was a rite of passage. My memories of doing so, though, involve only pain—the pain of standing in regimental lines for impossible stretches of time, of finding the will not to walk offstage. Swan Lake epitomizes balletic femininity as much as it does the exploitation of the female body in dance. But Matthew Bourne’s adaptation, which recently concluded a two-week run at City Center, challenges the ballet’s traditional gendering by featuring a cast of male swans. Setting Swan Lake in Kensington Gardens after dark, Bourne evokes the London of Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson—where a man walking alone at night might come face to face with the supernatural, if not his own psyche. Bourne’s men pound the ground and heave collective, audible breaths. Their movements accentuate the weight of the physical body rather than creating an illusion of birdlike lightness. I am always wary, however, of Bourne’s indulgence in spectacle. Scenes set in present-day London are so saturated with cinematic gimmicks, so staged for a laugh, that their humor undercuts the psychological and choreographic complexities of the darker sections. That said, the Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball’s performance as the Swan/Stranger was one of the best New York has seen in years. Bourne’s Swan Lake, kitsch aside, is a testament to the choreographer’s ingenuity and to the enduring allure of the ballet itself. —Elinor Hitt 

Dirty Projectors: another extraordinary musical party to which I am a late arrival. Where did this David Longstreth person come from? Who invented him? Under the banner of indie rock, he draws together a wide array of influences—African music, Latin percussion, classical composition techniques—and bundles them all into a kind of pop overload that is almost always too much, though, at the moment, I can’t get enough of it. Dirty Projectors’ 2018 studio album, Lamp Lit Prose (Longstreth has a penchant for literary lyrics), is a follow-up to their self-titled 2017 album, a belated breakup record about the end of Longstreth’s relationship with his onetime bandmate Amber Coffman (that record, I gather, is supposed to be a melancholy affair, except it sounds to me like Portishead slurped up a big bowl of Björk and then set it on a roof in the middle of a lightning storm). Lamp Lit Prose is a bouncy return to form, a fast-paced and eclectic album that delivers everything listeners have come to expect from Dirty Projectors: overly intricate guitar lines, all kinds of rhythmic feels, multipart vocal harmonies, Longstreth’s rubber-band falsetto, and melodies that are as complicated as they are hard to forget. I can’t get the song “That’s a Lifestyle,” a kind of political diatribe, out of my head, with its infectious singsong chorus: “The monster eats its young / till they’re gone, gone, gone … It wants blood, blood, blood.” As a follow-up, at the end of 2019, the band released Sing the Melody, an in-studio live recording of many of these songs, which is great if you want a second helping. —Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Robert Glück.

 

There is a Rufus Wainwright song that is a pretty little number with a pretty little proposition: “Wouldn’t it be a lovely headline, ‘Life Is Beautiful’ on the New York Times?” This week, that headline could hardly feel further away. And yet opening Robert Glück’s soon-to-be-reissued Margery Kempe, I felt a similar stroke of whimsy: What if the New York Review Books Classics version of the literary canon were common cultural currency? Like their fabulous covers (about which much has been said), these books paint a rich and deviant portrait of human life. Over the years, New York Review Books has sieved chunks of gold out of the caverns of forgotten paperbacks: Cassandra at the Wedding, The Juniper Tree, Season of Migration to the North, Lolly Willowes, books that are beautiful and wild and were there all along. Take heart: there was weirdness in the margins, women who cruised by wearing their watches on their pulse. There was room for the strange, and there will be room again. Margery Kempe is a classic NYRB Classic. It’s a novel (maybe) that weaves the story of the religious fanatic Margery Kempe—author, in 1438, of perhaps the first autobiography ever written—with the tale of a love affair in eighties San Francisco between an older man  and an impossibly beautiful younger one who belongs to the tips of America’s upper class. What connects the threads is erotic love: Margery’s for Jesus, whom she understands herself to be fucking, and the two men’s for each other. The writing is lovely. With the subtlety of the obvious, Glück collapses the centuries that separate the two storylines and zips up the space between erotic and religious devotion. Margery’s orgasms are God-given, a mingling of godhead and maiden, an ecstasy of body and spirit. Aren’t most of us as mystified by our sexuality as we are by divinity? Why not consider the former with the awe we reserve for the latter? With Valentine’s Day upon us, let us kneel. —Julia Berick

As they did for the eighties post-punk bands from which Shopping derive their sound, synths play a prominent role in the punk trio’s new album All or Nothing. I’ve long been a fan of Shopping’s music, and All or Nothing continues to mix spiky, danceable compositions with politically biting lyrics that bring to mind the best of Au Pairs and Gang of Four. Highlights include “Initiative,” which makes a mockery of nonsense go-getter language (“Why can’t you show some initiative?”), and “Follow Me,” which slyly turns the tables on the surveillance state. And after you’re finished listening to this one, you’ve got three more excellent albums you can delve into—2018’s The Official Body (produced by Edwyn Collins), 2015’s Why Choose, and 2013’s Consumer Complaints—as well as each band member’s other musical projects (including the guitarist Rachel Aggs’s excellent, Postcard Records–esque Sacred Paws). —Rhian Sasseen

Slipped into all the other early 2020 headlines about the increasingly camp unraveling of our democracy was the revelation that privacy is now a thing of the past. Like so much of the news these days, Kashmir Hill’s stunning investigation into the company Clearview AI reads almost like satire. Funded by Peter Thiel and created by Hoan Ton-That, a thirty-one-year-old self-described “entrepreneur, computer hacker, guitarist and part time model” (whose past work involves apps such as Trump Hair and Friend Quiz), the Clearview AI facial-recognition app allows you to take and upload a photo of someone in order to learn their name, address, phone number, and any other information available online. Without any public oversight, the technology has already been sold to more than six hundred law-enforcement agencies. There is no regulation in place to prevent it from being sold to private companies or becoming a consumer product. If the company is left unchecked, leaving one’s house with any anonymity will soon become impossible. I read about all this while lost in Joanna Kavenna’s Zed, which depicts a technocratic dystopia so engrossing, prescient, and disorienting that the edges between it and the world blurred, and I could no longer tell if Clearview AI had simply emerged from the novel. In Zed, a tech company called Beetle controls the Western hemisphere. Its predictive algorithms are so advanced that people are jailed for crimes their “lifechains” suggest they might commit, home refrigerators offer passive-aggressive suggestions, meetings take place in Real Virtual boardrooms where everyone’s slightly more beautiful avatars can be set to Calm or Relaxed Jovial, and personal AI assistants attached to everyone’s mandatory wristband (BeetleBand) must be treated with the respect of sentient creatures. As an uprising stirs in the (aptly named) Last Bookshop, Beetle introduces BeSpoke, which translates all speech into a preapproved, algorithm-selected, reduced vocabulary (“This is not good”). Everything begins to unravel and break, the AI assistants start to speak in poetry, and chaos blooms through the cracks. One of the markers of good art for me has always been its ability to leave a new film over the world, the way certain museum shows, when one exits the gallery, seem to have transformed the city itself. Zed is a novel about our most eternal concerns—free will, identity, language—transposed onto a future that feels terrifyingly present. Pair it with Anna Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley, a kaleidoscopically vivid fever-dream window into the baby billionaires of the tech boom, and you’ll never want to look at your phone again. —Nadja Spiegelman

 

Joanna Kavenna. Photo: © Alexander Michaelis.

Learning to Die: An Interview with Jenny Offill

 

“All around us things tried to announce their true nature,” observes Lizzie, the heroine of Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather. “Their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.” In Weather, as in her groundbreaking novel Dept. of Speculation, Offill captures both the “terrible music” and the “quiet radiance” of contemporary life. She allows us to see the world anew, as a place where we can—and must—encounter both discord and poetry.

Lizzie, a librarian “not young or pretty enough to matter,” moves through a stunned city during and after an election. As she grows “edgy and restless,” she listens to podcasts and lectures about glaciers, and to the seemingly trivial worries of Uber drivers and competitive mothers; she meditates with Buddhists before watching TV shows about extreme shopping and drug addicts ambushed by their families. Like the Wife in Dept. of Speculation, Lizzie is a keen, often hilarious observer, fiercely intelligent but utterly ignored and relatively powerless. But Lizzie attempts, even achieves, something heroic by the novel’s end. She sympathizes with the flawed and the flailing; she investigates and instigates survival strategies, and, like Offill herself, she finds the “quiet radiance” despite it all.

Offill and I live close to each other in the Hudson Valley. Reading Weather, I recalled two moments where her presence had shifted something from the ordinary to the beautiful and then to the terrifying. In the first, we went for a walk behind a rambling mansion, on a route that was private and, to me, unknown. She had said something about a beach, but I thought this must be an exaggeration, as the landscape around us is forests and hills. Yet when we broke through the clearing, there was not only a beach but a small island and a cove set off from the rest of the Hudson. Something shimmered in the water; I thought it might be a bird. Instead, a naked woman rose out of the water and began to swim toward us. My daughter screamed with joy, thinking she’d at last seen a mermaid. Jenny shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, This is where I live. Strange things happen. Years later, as she drove me home from a party, I mentioned that I was having trouble breathing but it was likely nothing, probably an allergy to dust in my attic or pollen in the fields. I might have ignored the fact that I was often winded and dizzy, but Jenny insisted I go the ER in a manner that felt somehow sage and inarguable. When I went to the hospital the following day, the doctors discovered a collapsed lung and something “suspicious.” All around us things tried to announce their true nature. Recently, I emailed Jenny to ask about post-Trump anxiety, preppers, and how the novel, and the author, can create quiet beauty in a time of terrible music.

 

INTERVIEWER

Was there a particular moment that led to the inception of this novel?

OFFILL

The novel came out of years and years of talking about extinction and climate change with my friend, the novelist Lydia Millet. At a certain point, all of it just added up and I thought, what is wrong with me that I still think about this so abstractly, that I still don’t feel it? So in a way the process of writing Weather was about trying to move from thinking about what is happening to feeling the immensity and sadness of it.

I was also struck by an article I read about how a well-known British environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth, was walking away from years of campaigning because he believed hopes were being raised falsely that we could still stop or contain the climate crisis. The article was rather glibly titled “It’s the End of the World as We Know It … and He Feels Fine.”

In fact, he went on to found a group for artists and writers called Dark Mountain. You can read their manifesto here. It begins quite chillingly with this passage:

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end.

A very early draft of Weather had the working title “Learning to Die.”

INTERVIEWER

“That pattern of ordinary life” Kingsnorth mentions, as a kind of disguise of social fissures, could also apply to a lot of contemporary American literary fiction. Either as disguise or indifference, the lauded novels of our time tend to focus on the ordinary daily lives of the characters, rather than portraying the characters as intertwined with or impacted by political or environmental issues. Were there novels you turned to as models, either from the past or from your peers?

OFFILL

Lydia Millet’s trilogy How the Dead Dream, Ghost Lights, and Magnificence is always my model for how to write well about these things. I was also influenced by Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction book The Great Derangement. One of the most brilliant “climate change” novels was written nearly thirty years ago: Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

INTERVIEWER

The narrator of Dept. of Speculation was a Brooklyn author dealing with motherhood, her artistic ambitions, and infidelity. In Weather, the crisis is outside the narrator’s home—she grapples with climate change and the election of a dangerous president. What interested you in exploring the world around and beyond the narrator?

OFFILL

Well, she works in a library and people who work in libraries are constantly thinking about the world around them and their patrons as well as about what is going on in their own heads. So it seemed fitting to make Weather have a wider field of concern.

I spend a lot of time in both local and university libraries and one of the things you immediately notice is how much the people who work there function as emergency social workers for our threadbare social systems. Librarians should be designated official first responders at this point. When the economy crashed, many people turned to librarians for help writing résumés or filling out job applications. Many librarians also find themselves on the front lines of our country’s opioid crisis. Nearly any city library you go to will have people trained to administer Narcan or hold workshops to teach citizens how to help their addicted family and friends. They also hold literacy classes and after-school book clubs and a million other things that contribute to the community. Some are even experimenting with lovely programs such as toy or tool libraries within their space.

Meanwhile, everyone who ever meets a librarian says, Oh, lucky you, you get to sit around and read books all day.

INTERVIEWER

The library also works surprisingly well as a setting. You have all these minor, but important recurring characters, like the “doomed adjunct” and a “mostly enlightened” woman.

OFFILL

Libraries are one of the last noncommercial spaces we have where everyone is welcome. They strike me as a little glimpse of how we could live if we chose to be a generous society rather than a fearful one.

INTERVIEWER

It does feel like we’ve chosen to be a fearful society, particularly since Trump’s election. You do such an astonishing job of capturing the fear that existed in the days immediately after that. I found it painful to read—in a good way, I suppose—because it forced me to acknowledge there was—and there still is—this kind of humming, imperceptible unease we’ve all become inured to. Maybe we’re dealing with it by TV binges or social media; it’s too disturbing to really think about. How were you able to return to that moment of Trump’s election and evoke the very specific and peculiar unease?

OFFILL

Oh, I don’t think that unease ever left me. I didn’t have to return. It waits for me every night when I turn off the light and think about the news of the day. But the unease was so strong that it overrode my introverted tendencies and made me start to explore collective action as an antidote to this pervasive fear and dread. In the political area, this meant lots of calling, letter writing, et cetera before the midterms. In terms of the climate, it has meant donating as much money as I can to long-standing environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity which is fighting to save the Endangered Species Act. And I have also joined Extinction Rebellion, which is a nonviolent direct action group that reminds me in many ways of Act Up. One of its main demands is a quite simple one: tell the truth, which means admit that it is an emergency and act from that place.

INTERVIEWER

Despite the engagement with these issues, Weather never feels didactic or expository. I imagine it wasn’t easy to take on these subjects within the confines of a novel.

OFFILL

I tried very hard not to be didactic. I don’t have the answers to these questions, so in that way it was easy not to be prescriptive or self-righteous. Also I am, by any measure, a hypocrite who has not figured out how to align my daily life with my conscience. Instead, I am the queen of half measures. I eat 85 percent less meat than I did five years ago. I take trains instead of planes sometimes. But that kind of incrementalism is all I’ve managed. The only area where I have pushed myself at all is that, though I’m not a joiner, I have decided that collective action is needed over the lonely individual kind.

INTERVIEWER

In terms of not being prescriptive or self-righteous, the use of language in this book is avowedly original, the opposite of a screed or lecture. Instead of authoritative statements, there are such startling sentences and moments of beauty. I know in the past you’ve spoken about the importance of poetry, and the book has these moments where, formally, it feels like there’s a necessary intervention of lyricism. Can you talk about these shifts in language, i.e., “Hard to believe that isn’t joy the way it flies away when I fling it out the window.”

OFFILL

I think Lizzie’s mind just moves that way sometimes, especially when what she is experiencing is just a flicker of feeling, like this moment of interspecies curiosity. She says at one point early on that she has to be careful because she is prone to making sudden alliances with strangers. “My heart is prodigal,” as she puts it. She is startled to discover that these alliances and moments of recognition are starting to include nonhuman creatures as well.

INTERVIEWER

She also discovers preppers and becomes more involved with activism when she starts working for Sylvia, her former mentor, who is now a popular podcaster. Did you spend time with these kinds of characters, in real life, while writing?

OFFILL

Yes. Activists in real life, preppers in the ether. Activists much preferred. The prepper world is fascinating, but sometimes if you go in too far you will find a really dark xenophobic or racist streak underlying all the talk of go bags and candles made out of a can of tuna fish. This is, of course, not true of all people who designate themselves as preppers. Some are genial back-to-the-land types, or friendly folks who want to live locally in case the intricacies of the global food chain collapse.

INTERVIEWER

Did the novel change, as you spent time in these worlds?

OFFILL

It became less about materially prepping and more about spiritual prepping, maybe. In this way, it mirrored my own sense of what I needed to do and what kinds of action I might take. This is why I included the section Tips for Trying Times on my website. I am really interested in how people in other moments of history kept their spirits up in dark moments.

INTERVIEWER

Did writing about this moment of history help you with that aspect—keeping spirits up in a dark moment? I wonder, since you seem drawn to writing about states of crisis, whether marital or environmental, if it is cathartic to explore them through art?

OFFILL

I don’t know if it’s cathartic. I’m not sure I think that way. But it is deeply interesting to me to try to make something out of this endless swirl of thoughts and images and ideas in my head.

INTERVIEWER

There is a really striking moment in the novel when Sylvia says, “What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances.” It seems to me that all your novels ask this question. In this moment, where the culture is so interested in the “antihero” and the “bad guy,” it feels almost defiant to care. How do you avoid that kind of pervasive cynicism?

OFFILL

Caring is all we have, I think. Cynicism is just a soft form of denial.

 

Rebecca Godfrey is the author of the true crime book, Under the Bridge, and a novel, The Torn Skirt. 

The Photographer and the Ballerina

When the photographer Sayuri Ichida moved to New York in 2012, she found herself plunged into an ice bath of alienation, depression, and regret. Born and raised in Japan, she struggled to settle into a groove in this unfamiliar city. Ichida’s friendship with the New York Theatre Ballet dancer Mayu Oguri, who also hails from Japan, bloomed out of a shared sense of displacement. Featured in the Fall 2019 issue, their ongoing visual collaboration sees the performer assuming ballet positions throughout the city—a clever take on the experience of immigrants trying to find their place in a foreign country. Below, a new set of images shows Oguri, thirty-three weeks pregnant, venturing out into the city once more.

 

Sayuri Ichida’s “New and Recent Photographs” appears, along with an essay by Chloe Honum, in the Fall 2019 issue.

How to Leave Your Lover with Lemons

This Valentine’s Day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang.

Postcard, originally mailed in Michigan on February 13, 1909

Back when my husband was my boyfriend, he mentioned an antique postcard that he’d picked up and mailed to his parents. On it, a man’s outreached hands held green and yellow oviform fruits; the type read “A Lime and a Lemon With My Compliments.” Andy didn’t quite understand the card, he told me, but it had amused him, and he wondered what had become of it.

That was early in our relationship. I was eager to be lovable. Shopping eBay for another copy for him, I scored two, both showing a crateful of citrus. “This Box of Oranges, with my Compliments, from Florida,” went one; “This Box of Grape-Fruit With My Compliments From Florida,” went the other. I’m from Florida, so the postcards were on-target, and next visit home I sent them out to desired effect. Vitamin C protects the body against scurvy—that was the meaning in my mind. You offered lemons to people you approved of to keep them prime.

Neither of us yet knew the true meaning behind the phrase “handed a lemon.”

Recently, I bought Andy a manual citrus press, and went back online to find a vintage postcard to accompany the present. That’s where it all began.

 

There was a black-and-white photograph from 1908, in which a lady dropped the fruit into the palms of a gentleman down on bended knee: “A LEMON FOR YOU.” Another, from the same era, shows a teddy bear in a top hat clutching a lemon—a look of shock on his mug—while a teddy bear in a skirt made her exit under a parasol: “Well! Well! You never can tell.” A card made of leather (yes) suggested “This

What Men Have Told Me

Adrienne Miller was the literary and fiction editor of Esquire from 1997 to 2006.

Berthold Woltze, Der lästige Kavalier (The Irritating Gentleman), 1874, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 22 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A man said to me, “I’ve always wondered why it is that your sisters aren’t better writers.”

A man asked me, when discussing the work of a female author, “Is she a ‘big’ girl?”

A man asked, “Why is there always a scene in every women’s novel with a female character making snow angels?”

A man asked me why it was that women writers seemed to be capable of only two things: sensation on one hand or attitudinizing on the other.

A man told me that he didn’t believe I’d read enough books to be able to do my job effectively.

A man told me that only someone with an M.F.A. should have my job. (The real answer: someone with an M.F.A. definitely should not have had my job.)

A man, someone probably actually lower on the status totem pole at Esquire than I, took a story I had acquired and had already edited—and did his own (very poor) edits to it, returning it to me as if he were some sort of conquering hero.

A man said that no one would take me seriously until I won a National Magazine Award for Fiction.

A man told me that he couldn’t believe the literary editor of Esquire had never read anything by Anna Akhmatova.

A man seemed to believe that he needed to routinely explain my “mission” with regard to the literary section of the magazine: “The stories can’t be perfunctory,” he’d say. This was his trademark word: “perfunctory.” Naturally, my private code name for this guy became Perfunctory Man. And was he ever. As Simone de Beauvoir put it: “The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.” (And, indeed, I was one happy individual when Perfunctory Man was finally fired.)

A man—okay, men were Hobbesianly snaking around, trying to get in their own short story submissions. There were always men after my job, and I would come to feel as if I were constantly whipping a lit torch around to protect my territory. But had these men ever actually read any of the fiction published in the magazine? Unclear.

A man referred to a woman who worked at the company as a cunt.

A man said to me, “I wish my groupies were of a higher caliber.” Me: “You have groupies?”

A man told me that I should “fucking spit” on a notoriously demanding female media professional.

A man brought a coffee-table book of high-end pornographic art to me at a work lunch.

A man said, at another work lunch, “You’re not so young anymore, you know.” The man was my father’s age. My age: twenty-eight.

A man asked, at the end of a professional drinks appointment, if he could kiss me.

A man asked me, after he’d moved my hand close to his crotch at another professional drinks appointment, if something he’d done had made me seem so close to crying.

A man—one of the most celebrated writers in the country—sexually assaulted me. After a professional drinks appointment, when we were standing together on a sidewalk waiting for a light to change, he put his hands down my pants.

(After that, I pretty much stopped doing professional drinks appointments with men.)

A man rated, in terms of purported attractiveness, the women—the brilliant and judicious women—who read our unsolicited short story manuscripts.

A man said that “everyone wondered” whom I had slept with to get my job.

It would go like this: I’d find myself at an event, standing or sitting next to some man, illustrious in this or that sphere; another man, unknown to me, and assuming an air of importance, would come up to the first man. I would note how often the second man would look through me, around me, over me, to something much more important. People are ghosts until you actually have to start taking them seriously.

My view: these men were, as Kate Millett wrote of Norman Mailer in her masterwork Sexual Politics, “prisoner[s] of the virility cult,” and their chest-thumping machismo was, more or less, a pose—even if they didn’t know it. It’s always hard to gauge how self-aware other people are, but the overall sense usually seems to be: not very. We are unknown to ourselves. (Recall, in an extreme but useful example, that Mussolini wanted his epitaph to read: “Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.”) So I attempted to take a nuanced view, even when the actions of the men were abhorrent. I tried to approach the behavior with a spirit of irony, leniency, and good humor … when good humor was musterable.

The truth: my career had been built around protecting male egos. This was the world I lived in. This was the world I knew, and I never believed this world could, or would, change. It seemed incomprehensible that the system could ever collapse. So I started trying out a new approach. I would change myself. I would become unattackable. I’d train myself not to let other people’s—men’s—opinions of me penetrate. I’d become a fortress to be approached, a Soviet tank of the spirit.

This was a strategy. This was a deeply antisocial strategy, in fact, and philosophically in direct conflict with the central precept of my job. When you’re trying to cultivate appreciation, you have to maintain an open heart.

 

Adrienne Miller is the author of the novel The Coast of Akron. She lives in New York City with her husband, son, and Italian greyhound.

From the book In the Land of Men , by Adrienne Miller. Copyright © 2020 by Adrienne Miller. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Torment of Cats

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

Right, Hrabal with one of his cats (courtesy of New Directions)

“If you want to write, keep cats,” Aldous Huxley famously said. As I read Bohumil Hrabal’s haunting but strange slip of a memoir, All My Cats, I wondered if the Czech writer would have agreed with him. Hrabal’s book was originally published in 1986, as Autičko—which translates as “the Little Car,” the nickname Hrabal gave first to his Renault 5, a small white car with ginger-colored seat covers. He later gave the same name to one of his cats, a kitten with “white socks and a white bib, and the rest of it had a tabby pattern, but in ginger.” The volume has only recently been translated into English, excellently so by Paul Wilson. Do not be fooled by the cuteness of the book’s original title, though. In it, we encounter a cat lover trapped in a hell of his own making, driven to the brink of madness.

Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Morovia, began writing poetry in the forties, and by the following decade switched to prose. Little of what he was writing made it into print—instead he read his work aloud at meetings of an underground literary group, attended by the novelist Josef Skvorecky and run by the poet Jiri Kolar. Some of Hrabal’s stories appeared in samizdat editions, but his first officially published work, Lark on a String, was withdrawn in 1959, a week before it was due to be released; his formally inventive style regarded as the antithesis of the realist works glorified by the Communist regime. (It eventually appeared, four years later, as Pearl on the Bottom.) In the early sixties, Hrabal’s émigré friends helped distribute his work abroad, where it found a success that allowed him to write full time. He’d worked, before then, as a railway laborer, an insurance agent, a traveling salesman, a laborer at a steelworks, a compactor of wastepaper at a trash plant, and a theater stagehand. Those odd jobs inspired certain of his novels, such as Closely Observed Trains, a story about a Czech railway worker who defies his Nazi oppressors, and Too Loud a Solitude, in which the narrator builds his own library from books he’s salvaged, as Hrabal did during his time at the trash plant. The publication, in 1963, of Pearl on the Bottom launched Hrabal’s career properly in Czechoslovakia. This was followed, only a year later, by Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age—a book that, like Lucy Ellmann’s recently lauded Ducks, Newburyport, unfurls in a single, rambling sentence—and the year after that by Closely Observed Trains, which further cemented Hrabal’s success when it was adapted into a movie. Directed by Jiří Menzel, Ostře sledované vlaky won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and remains today one of the popular works of the Czech New Wave.

Although by the mid-’60s Hrabal was famous, this didn’t mean he had carte blanche to publish whatever he wanted. After the Prague Spring in 1968, his work was once again banned until the late seventies. It’s thanks to people like Skvorecky—who had left Czechoslovakia for Toronto, where he published the works of his friends—that Hrabal’s writing still reached readers. Not that the years of censorship did much to dim Hrabal’s fame. In 2008, his fellow countryman Milan Kundera called Hrabal “our very best writer today,” and with each new translation of one of his works, Hrabal continues to find new admirers further afield.

That it has taken thirty-odd years for All My Cats to join these translations perhaps isn’t surprising. Although it showcases many of the same stylistic elements that distinguish Hrabal’s fiction—such as the near stream-of-consciousness, meandering soliloquizing of his narrator—this memoir is a trickier beast to wrangle with. Although All My Cats starts out as an enchanting account of a cat lover’s feline-filled existence, the book soon transmogrifies into something much darker, becoming a meditation on love, loss, genocide, and guilt.

*

Writing in the New York Times three years ago, Parul Sehgal memorably described Hrabal as “one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of gossip, beer, cats and women (in roughly that order).” In 1983, when Hrabal sat down to write All My Cats, he was sixty-nine years old and recovering from a serious car accident. The cats in his life, he admits at the very beginning of the book, had by this point replaced the women of his youth: “Somehow I had reached an age where being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because now I was bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the ways girls used to love me when I was young.”

The cats he’s talking about live at the country cottage Hrabal shares with his wife in Kersko—about an hour’s drive east of Prague. They’d bought it back in 1965, when Hrabal was reaping the first financial rewards of his writing. It was a weekend getaway from the city; somewhere Hrabal could supposedly write undisturbed. At first, all was wonderful. The cats—of which there were initially five—eagerly awaited Hrabal and his wife’s visits. “I’d gather them, one by one, into my arms and press them to my forehead,” he writes, “and somehow or other, those cats cured me of my hangovers and depressions.” As if to corroborate Jean Cocteau’s assertion that cats are “the visible soul” of a person’s home, Hrabal describes the early morning “meshugge Stunde”—the “crazy hour”—during which the cats, warmed against the cold night air by the covers of Hrabal’s bed, would take off, running wild around the house in joyful excitement, swinging on the curtains, pulling clothes off chairs, fighting over slippers and “winding themselves into little balls and knocking everything off the table.” Before long, the cats become a responsibility weighted round Hrabal’s neck, turning his former bucolic idyll into “a hell,” a “house of horrors and humiliations.”

When he’s in Prague, he worries that the cats are cold, hungry, and lonely without him. Thus, unable to concentrate on his writing, he’s drawn back to Kersko—in the winter, he travels by bus, which is safer, he thinks, than driving himself, for who would feed his cats if he was hurt in an accident? But once there, his writing again eludes him: “The typewriter would clatter away but there was never enough time to attend to stylistic niceties, I had to write quickly so I could spend time with the cats because, though they lay there with their eyes closed, they’d be watching me through tiny slits, lulled by the clacking of the machine.”

Soon enough, distraction turns to anger. Hrabal forcefully boots a particularly annoying feline out into the garden, and then is immediately overwhelmed with regret: “I couldn’t write because I had struck a cat that I loved, I had kicked an innocent creature who meant everything to me.” This oscillation—between exasperation, rage and violence, and contrition, love and self-reproach—is what drives the narrative. Hrabal is trapped in a limbo. His distinctive “palavering”—Skvorecky’s translation of what Hrabal himself termed his “pábení” style—or, in other words, his free-flowing monologue (as James Woods helpfully elucidates, an “anecdote without end”) lends itself particularly well to such undulations. Repetitions become a considered stylistic element, most notably Hrabal’s wife’s exasperated protest, “What are we going to do with all those cats?” It’s the very first line of the book; foreshadowing the actions Hrabal will eventually find himself forced to take. She herself is a vague figure, this is the only thing she says, but it’s echoed as a refrain throughout the volume.

What, indeed, is Hrabal going to do about all those cats? When two of Hrabal’s cats produce a litter of five kittens each at the same time, enough is enough. Acting “in a kind of fever,” he sends his wife to the neighbors before picking three kittens—still blind, and as tiny as “transistor radio batteries”—from each litter and bundling them into an old mail bag. As if “in a trance,” he carries the sack into the woods and “battered” it “against a tree, again and again and again.” It’s a scene of shocking violence, leaving him feeling “crushed, suffocated by what I had felt compelled to do”:

I was trembling all over but I had to keep going so I bent over and felt those tiny heads and realized to my horror that the kitten were still stirring and so, just like that time in the winter, I took the axe I used to split wood…

The reality of what Hrabal has done terrifies him. Looking down at the “mishmash” of what’s left of the dead kittens, now lying in the hole in the ground he’s dug for them, they remind him of “images from Nazi mass graves.” Later that day, stroking the kittens he left alive, he realizes “that this was just like those photographs from the ghetto, where an SS officer or an executioner squad would have their pictures taken standing over a pit filled with corpses.”

It’s an appalling comparison, but one that befits the gravity of the deep rumination on guilt that follows: “Nothing could calm me, and I suddenly knew that the crime I had committed was greater than that of Raskolnikov, who beat two old women to death only to test the foolish notion that it is possible to kill and escape punishment.” Hrabal is “racked with self-loathing,” plagued by remorse, yet at the same time, he can feel his face turning “pale and ashen” at the thought of his cats producing more kittens. He doesn’t want to live without his beloved pets, but neither can he exist peaceably alongside so many of them. The only real solution would be for both him and the cats to “simply cease to exist,” but instead he has to keep killing them, which in turn tortures his conscience.

The torment he suffers is so acute that he comes close to committing suicide. But, contemplating the act, he realizes that he doesn’t want to die: “I wanted to be in the world. There were still things I wanted to write.” All the same, he’s completely preoccupied by the crimes he’s committed, likening his anguish to that of “all those who had taken part in wars and had killed millions of innocent people.” His feelings of guilt intensify when he wonders at his “audacity in comparing the life and death of cats to the life and death of people”:

Yet having realized that, my feelings of guilt for the death of those kitten and cats did not go away, because in the end I came to the conclusion that one cannot even kill a cat, let alone a person, with impunity, nor can one with impunity expel a person, let alone drive away a cat, without consequences.

*

When Hrabal began writing, he was drawn to the work of the French Surrealists. Although he departed from that model relatively early on in his career, he remained a writer always able to see—as Seghal so perfectly puts it—“the strangeness in ordinary life.” As such, All My Cats is both a simple tale about a man and his many pets, and a powerful metaphor. It’s a book that forces us to reckon with the idea that to be human and to be alive is also to be guilty and to suffer for it. This is a book about what one does when existence becomes untenable, and how guilt—as it gnaws relentlessly through us—must be carried for a lifetime.

 

In the epilogue, Hrabal is out walking one cold winter’s day when he comes across a swan, trapped in a frozen river. He inches out across the ice to try to rescue the bird, but she’s wild with rage, raining jabs as sharp as axe blows down on his hands with her beak. Distraught and bleeding, he retreats. He returns though, the next day with thick leather gloves, only to find the bird has perished in the night. It’s not just a coincidence, he thinks:

the swan who refused to let me save her had been placed there by my destiny, which comes from outside of one, a part, a fragment, of a message from elsewhere and that in fact, since I was capable of beating to death those cats who had so passionately desired nothing more than to be with me in the world, so this swan, whom I had wanted to help survive and be in the world, instead sacrificed herself, preferring to die, to deny herself life, to show me, not that the opposite of everything is true, but on the contrary, that the opposite of everything is not true and that once again, I was guilty, just as I had been guilty all my life, even though I did not know why or what could have been the cause.

Hrabal died in 1997, at the age of eighty-two, after falling from the fifth-floor window of a hospital in Prague, where he was being treated for severe arthritis. It was officially declared an accident—he was supposedly reaching out of the window to feed the pigeons outside—but in the run up to his death he’d become increasingly obsessed with jumping from the fifth-floor window of his own apartment. Regardless of whether the fall was an accident or Hrabal intentionally took his own life, it’s a tragic story, but in the light of the torments recounted in All My Cats, I can’t help but find something serene and consoling in the knowledge that Hrabal finally found release from the burdens of his conscience.

 

 

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here . Read an excerpt from All My Cats on the Daily 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. 

The Bird Master

The below is an excerpt from Yoshiharu Tsuge’s semiautobiographical manga The Man without Talent (translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg). In keeping with the customs of the medium, both the panels and the text are intended to be read from right to left.

 

Yoshiharu Tsuge is a cartoonist and essayist best known for his surrealistic, avant-garde work. He began drawing comics in 1955, working primarily in the rental comics industry that was popular in impoverished postwar Japan. In the sixties, Tsuge was discovered by the publishers of the avant-garde comics magazine Garo and gained increasing recognition. He withdrew from Garo in the seventies, and his work became more autobiographical. Tsuge has not published cartoons since the late eighties, elevating him to cult status in Japan. He lives in Tokyo.

Ryan Holmberg is an arts and comics historian. He has edited and translated books by Seiichi Hayashi, Osamu Tezuka, Sasaki Maki, Tadao Tsuge, and others.

From The Man without Talent , by Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg. Images courtesy of New York Review Comics.

Redux: Film Is Death at Work

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.

Billy Wilder.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re watching some flicks, some pictures, some movies. Read on for Billy Wilder’s Art of Screenwriting interview, Hernan Diaz’s short story “The Stay,” and Chase Twichell’s poem “Bad Movie, Bad Audience.”

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 don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast!

 

Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting No. 1

Issue no. 138 (Spring 1996)

I used stars wherever I could in Sunset Boulevard … The picture industry was only fifty or sixty years old, so some of the original people were still around. Because old Hollywood was dead, these people weren’t exactly busy. They had the time, got some money, a little recognition. They were delighted to do it.

 

 

The Stay

By Hernan Diaz

Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

I decided to go to the movies. I didn’t really care what was playing; I just wanted the sense of relief when the lights fade out and the world dissolves, the slight confusion when they are turned back up and it reassembles itself.

 

 

Bad Movie, Bad Audience

By Chase Twichell

Issue no. 124 (Fall 1992)

… In our ears the turbo revs,

the cheekbone cracks,

a stocking slithers to the floor.

Cocteau said film is death at work.

Out of the twilight a small voice

hisses shut up, just shut the fuck up.

 

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 Paris Review Wins the 2020 National Magazine Award for Fiction

Kimberly King Parsons, Jonathan Escoffery, and Leigh Newman.

The Paris Review is honored to be the recipient of this year’s National Magazine Award for Fiction, recognizing in particular three stories published in 2019: “Foxes,” by Kimberly King Parsons; “Under the Ackee Tree,” by Jonathan Escoffery; and “Howl Palace,” by Leigh Newman. Nominees and winners were announced in a live Twittercast on February 6, and the magazine will be recognized at the awards ceremony in Brooklyn on March 12.

Below you can get a taste of all three stories.

From Kimberly King Parsons’s “Foxes” (issue no. 229)

What’s worth happening happens in deep woods. Or so my daughter tells me.

Her plotlines: In the deep woods someone is chasing, someone else is getting hacked. Hatchets are lifted, brought downdowndown. Men stutter blood onto snow. A cast of animals—some local, some outlandish—show up to feast on the bits. “The bitty bits,” she’ll say, “the tasty remainderings.” Good luck diverting her. Good luck correcting or getting a word in once she gets going. It’s gruesome, but this type of storytelling, I’ve been assured, is perfectly normal among children her age.

From Jonathan Escoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree” (issue no. 229)

If you carry on like before with Reyha and Sanya and Cherie, is Sanya who will come beat down your door and cuss you while Cherie sneak out back. You’ll make promise and beg you a beg for she hand in marriage one time. Is Sanya you love, like you love bread pudding and stew, which is more than you have loved before. You love that when she walk with she brass hand in yours, you can’ tell where yours ends and hers begins. You love that where you see practical solution to the world’ problem, Sanya sees only the way things should be; where you see a beggar boy in Coronation Market, Sanya sees infinite potential.

Most of all, is she smile you fall for. Sanya’ teeth and dimples flawless and you hope she’ll pass this to your pickney, and that them will inherit your light eyes, which your father passed down to you.

From Leigh Newman’s “Howl Palace” (issue no. 230)

To the families on the lake, my home is a bit of an institution. And not just for the wolf room, which my agent suggested we leave off the list of amenities, as most people wouldn’t understand what we meant. About the snow-machine shed and clamshell grotto, I was less flexible. Nobody likes a yard strewn with snow machines and three-wheelers, one or two of which will always be busted and covered in blue tarp. Ours is just not that kind of neighborhood. The clamshell grotto, on the other hand, might fail to fulfill your basic home-owning needs, but it is a showstopper. My fourth husband, Lon, built it for me in the basement as a surprise for my fifty-third birthday. He had a romantic nature, when he hadn’t had too much to drink. Embedded in the coral and shells are more than a few freshwater pearls that a future owner might consider tempting enough to jackhammer out of the cement.

For more great fiction—as well as top-of-the-line poetry, art, interviews, and essays—subscribe to The Paris Review today.