The Paris Review's Blog, page 190

Living Essayistically

Robert Musil. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I am looking at a photograph of a late-middle-aged man in a gray suit with broad lapels. He is wearing a bow tie. There are dark leaves behind him and the lines of a sunlit house. His right hand dangles across the armrest of a wicker chair in which he is sitting with one leg draped over the other. The left hand, wearing a signet ring, rests on a round table and is loosely holding a cigarette. The face could belong to a European diplomat or businessman of a now extinct type: refined, austere, intellectual. The dark, dense eyebrows add an expression of calm virility. The only incongruous detail is the eyes: they are closed.

One assumes at first that the snapshot was taken at the moment of blinking. But it is difficult to imagine this face with the eyes open, because all its features and in fact the whole gesture of the body, which at first glance appeared so urbanely relaxed in its well-tailored suit, are drained of motility, as if drugged. At any minute, the cigarette may drop from between those slackly curved fingers. Is this a picture of mortal exhaustion or of extremely attenuated contemplation? Probably it is both. The man depicted is Robert Musil, who died at the age of sixty-one, less than two years after this photograph was taken. At Musil’s funeral, which was attended by eight people, the eulogist applied to him a statement Musil had made about Rilke: “He was not a summit of this age—he was one of those elevations upon which the destiny of the human spirit strides across ages.”

Today no one would dream of describing a human being in such grandiose terms—a political program, perhaps, or a space mission, but not a person, and certainly not a writer. It may have something to do with the expectations writers have of themselves, and with a rather diminished sense, generally, of the human spirit having any sort of destiny. Perhaps it’s better that way. A more modest perspective may open up a vision of what is staring us in the face: that unless we supply the essential necessities to the collective body of man, the spirit may have to find another planet for the fulfillment of its destiny. Musil himself was coming to a similar conclusion near the end of his life (chastened, perhaps, by the enormity of World War II and by his own experience of severe poverty): “The most important thing is not to produce spiritual values, but food, clothing, security, order … And it is just as important to produce the principles necessary for the supply of food, clothing, etc. Let us call it—the spirit of privation.” Elsewhere he described himself as “building a house of cards as the earth begins to crack.”

The house of cards was a huge, phenomenally ambitious construction, more than twenty years in the making and never finished, titled The Man without Qualities—a satire on the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a utopian novel about untried possibilities of being, a meditation on the nature of history, a critique of the major ideologies of the twentieth century, an attempt to combine the different exactitudes of reason and mysticism. The book, a critical success after its first volume was published in 1930, was virtually unknown at the time of the author’s death in 1942. Today it is frequently mentioned along with Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time as one of the great modern novels.

*

The term novel bears a great deal of stretching. Randall Jarrell’s witty definition—“a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it”—seems designed to fit most if not all cases. But The Man without Qualities does not match that description because it appears to be intent, from the beginning, on subverting narration itself. As soon as a lively scene or dramatic incident threatens to turn into a story, a train of reflection comes along to interrupt it. Some of these digressions exfoliate in the protagonist’s brain or issue from his mouth in lengthy soliloquies, others accompany his reflections as a kind of meta-commentary, still others play themselves out in his absence, describing the mental and emotional states of other characters, or detach themselves entirely from the novel’s plot to disport themselves freely in a chapter or two of their own.

But perhaps the idea of narration bears some stretching as well. Essay, in this quintessentially essayistic novel, is the mode for depicting a mind so active that it nearly constitutes a character independent of the man whose mind it is. That man is a thirty-two-year-old Austrian mathematician known to the reader only by his first name, Ulrich, who, disillusioned in his quest for intellectual glory after reading in a newspaper about a racehorse of genius, decides to take a yearlong “vacation from life,” which he conceives of as an experiment in pure philosophical contemplation—“living essayistically,” he calls it—in the hope of perhaps, by that pathless route, discovering an occupation better suited to his abilities. If he does not find it within a year, he will put an end to his life, because, to his fanatically logical and consequent mind, an unjustified life is not worth living.

*

One of Ulrich’s favorite maxims is that reality is just a possibility: everything that happens could have turned out differently. So it is no surprise to him when, almost immediately after he begins his retreat from active engagement with the world, his father, a prominent legal scholar, introduces him to a circle of socialites, aristocrats, financiers, and intellectuals who are nothing less than obsessed with action. They are planning a “great patriotic campaign” to celebrate the seventieth jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef in December 1918. They call it the Parallel Campaign because a similar festival is being prepared in Germany for the thirtieth anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign in the same year. Upstaging the Germans is no small matter, especially as the Parallel Campaign’s director, the benign and elderly Count Leinsdorf, seems constitutionally unable to make a decision without crippling it with dilatory maneuvers. But the ultimate goal is both noble and grand: to demonstrate, with a resounding festival, Austria’s preeminence among nations as a fountainhead of culture, intellect, beneficence, peace, and, why not, military might as well.

Ulrich is appointed the honorary secretary of this cabal, and it is mainly through his eyes that we witness the high-minded pedantry, boondoggle, and oratorical pomp, with a dash of chicanery in the mix, by which its members contrive to get nothing done in their endeavor.

*

Ulrich’s year of “vacation from life” begins in August 1913. Sarajevo is just ten months away. Of course he cannot know this. The Parallel Campaign’s designs for a pan-Austrian peace festival will eventuate almost on schedule in the collapse of the empire following Germany’s defeat in a pan-European war. None of the characters in The Man without Qualities are prepared for the impending disaster.

Does that lead their endeavors and hopes ad absurdum? Not at all. Nothing was further from Musil’s intentions than a grim demonstration of historical necessity, for the simple reason that he did not believe in such a thing. Every one of his characters, even the most foolish and most deranged, is an avatar of possibility. The war itself, even though it actually happened, was no more and no less than that.

*

One of the many received notions Ulrich takes pleasure in discarding is that a man—not just any man and not, generally speaking, a woman, but a man of account in the world—must be endowed with qualities for which he is known and by which he knows himself. Ulrich has many admirable and a few unattractive qualities, but they don’t adhere to him; they are not, to his own perception, even tangentially his. Because he commits himself to this paradox and lives authentically within it, he exerts, especially on women, a mysterious appeal that one jealous friend characterizes as the empty glamour of “a man without qualities.” That is a designation Ulrich is happy to accept, and in fact he is that in much the same way that a tightrope walker can be said to be a man or woman without gravity. Ulrich performs, on an often brilliantly funny level of abstraction, the dizzying, high-stakes adventure of divesting himself of all the cultural axioms that support what his contemporaries agree to call “reality,” in order finally to arrive at the great Platonic question, and to ask it in earnest and without flinching: What is the good life—or the holy life, if you will—and how can one live it without self-deception, and without retreating into prerational modes of feeling and thinking, in a world that has lost its passion for the good?

This question does not crystallize in Ulrich’s thoughts until he meets his sister Agathe more than seven hundred pages into the novel. Her name—which, significantly, is derived from the Greek word for “good”—has not been mentioned before: she appears, as it were, out of nowhere. As their relationship unfolds (how apt the floral image in that metaphor seems here: a continual, unhurried opening and disclosure), one has the impression that she has been present to him all along precisely by her absence. In all his dealings with both men and women before meeting Agathe, Ulrich has displayed charm, diplomacy, lust, aloofness, private scorn, occasional stirrings of compassion, but on the whole a notable absence of tenderness, let alone love. Something was missing. Now she is here.

Their encounter marks the beginning of a radical departure for Ulrich and for the novel itself. The narrator describes it in a rare address to the reader several chapters further on:

But whoever has not already picked up the clues to what was developing between this brother and sister, let him put aside this account, for it describes an adventure he will never be able to approve of: a voyage to the edge of the possible, leading past, and perhaps not always steering clear of, the dangers of the impossible and the unnatural, indeed of the repulsive; a “limit case,” as Ulrich later called it, of restricted and special validity, reminiscent of the freedom with which mathematics occasionally employs the absurd in order to arrive at truth. He and Agathe came upon a path that had much in common with the business of the God-possessed, but they walked it without piety, without believing in God or the soul, or even in a Beyond or a Once Again; they had come upon it as human beings belonging to this world and walked it as such: and just that was the remarkable thing about it.

*

Agathe and Ulrich withdraw from society, eventually retreating to Ulrich’s little rococo château in the middle of Vienna as if to an island. For a while, in obedience to social pressure, they attend elegant soirees with the idea of finding a new husband for Agathe (she intends to divorce the man she is married to), and Ulrich pays visits to various friends and acquaintances, including the luminaries of the Parallel Campaign. But before long, these worldly forays recede from the novel’s horizon, until the siblings’ retreat becomes near absolute. Their private adventure, both spiritual and erotic, becomes the central theme of the novel. That is the principal reason why it was possible for the editor of this book, without violating the novel’s integrity, to excerpt thirty-six chapters, all of them centered on Agathe and Ulrich, as a self-contained narrative, in effect a novel within the novel. A loss of complexity and illuminating contrast is unavoidably entailed in this experiment; but that loss, I believe, is offset by the gain of unbroken concentration on what Agathe calls “the last possible love story.”

*

The main part of the first volume, after a brief introductory section called, ironically, “A Sort of Beginning,” is titled “Seinesgleichen geschieht”—“The Like of It Happens.” This little gem of compressed bitterness expresses, with epigrammatic precision, a state of affairs in which the same thoughtless habits of speech and emotion, the same petrified rules and dogmas, inadequate moral systems, and ingrained patterns of behavior, repeat themselves ad nauseam under the guise of novelty and innovation. If one extends that observation beyond the span of personal existence to history itself and perceives its epochs and eras succeeding each other like the meaningless trends of fashion with little or no advance in moral intelligence, one can begin to appreciate, if not necessarily share, Ulrich’s revolt against the self-replicating ways of “reality.”

The second volume, where Agathe makes her entrance, bears a starkly contrasting title: “Into the Millennium,” followed by the parenthetical subtitle “(The Criminals).”

The millennium, in German, is das tausendjährige Reich, a term that, irrespective of Hitler’s use of it as a slogan for his twelve-year reign, carries a good deal more emotional charge and mythic resonance than the Latinate English word, which in our century most of us have come to associate with the turn of a page in the calendar. It is the name for the thousand-year kingdom of peace prophesied in the Bible and fervently awaited by millenarian sects through the centuries and still today. One does not expect Robert Musil to invoke such a reference without irony. He was as imbued with the ethos of the Enlightenment as any twentieth-century author, a merciless critic of all kinds of mystification, secular as well as religious. Nevertheless, it is the skeptical, scientifically trained Ulrich, in many ways Musil’s alter ego, who declares to his sister, only half jokingly, that together they will embark on a voyage to that fabled, improbable realm.

The source of his faith is not a belief founded in Scripture but a memory referred to by the title of an early chapter as “The long forgotten and supremely important affair with the major’s wife”—an unconsummated romance when he was a twenty-year-old recruit that ended with his fleeing the object of his love and withdrawing to a remote island. There he experienced “the very state described by those believers in God who have entered the state of mystic love, of whom the young cavalry lieutenant at that time knew nothing at all.” This condition is so different from ordinary consciousness that it constitutes a “second reality,” in which “love is not a desire for possession but a gentle self-unveiling of the world for which one would gladly forgo possession of the beloved.” Ever since then, at transient moments in the midst of his otherwise worldly and alienated existence, he has felt intimations of that same state of being, which he calls “the other condition.” The descriptions of this state in the writings of the mystics speak to him “in tones of intimate kinship; with a soft, dark inwardness” that is “the opposite of the imperious tone of mathematical and scientific language.” (The word translated above as “intimate kinship” is Geschwisterlichkeit. It is usually translated as “fraternity,” but the root of the German word is Schwester, meaning “sister.” In such subtle ways is Agathe prefigured—announced as it were—early on in the novel.)

Ulrich has no intention of renouncing science and mathematics. Their austere beauty is the passion of his intellect. But he rejects the rationalist prejudice against mystical experience, which has its own, necessarily poetic and metaphoric language, just as he rejects, with a good deal of revulsion, the sentimental cult of “spiritual” feeling pitted against the hard-won attainments of reason.

*

Is Ulrich unhappy or despairing? Not in the usual sense we give to these words. He is extremely lonely but is too tough-minded to indulge in self-pity, and he enjoys human company, though always at an ironic remove. Vaguely, he notices that he does not love himself as he once did, but it is in the nature of such lack that it largely occludes what was lost. It’s probably fairest to say that he has a genius for disillusionment. In any case, by the time he departs for the provincial city of —— to discharge himself of his filial obligations on the occasion of the death of his father, he has shed almost all of his attachments and ambitions and is open to whatever unforeseen possibilities life may have to offer him.

 

Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has received several prizes, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 2008 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s verse play Penthesilea. He is the author of two memoirs—Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and, more recently, In the House of My Fear. His translation of Prometheus Bound was produced at the Getty Villa in 2013 and published in the NYRB Classics series in 2015. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From  Agathe; or, The Forgotten Sister , by Robert Musil, translated from the German by Joel Agee, published by New York Review Books. Introduction copyright © 2020 by Joel Agee.

Redux: A Piece of a Beginning

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.

Salman Rushdie. Photo © Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating new beginnings. Read on for Salman Rushdie’s Art of Fiction interview, Grace Paley’s “A Piece of a Beginning,” and Linda Gregg’s poem “After the Beginning.”

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 if you subscribe via our special bundle, you’ll get a tote bag, too! And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast.

 

Salman Rushdie, The Art of Fiction No. 186

Issue no. 174 (Summer 2005)

INTERVIEWER

Were you writing fiction at the same time?

RUSHDIE

I was beginning. I was very unsuccessful. I hadn’t really found a direction as a writer. I was writing stuff that I didn’t show anyone, bits that eventually came together into a first novel-length thing that everybody hated. This was before Grimus, my first published novel. I tried to write the book in a Joycean stream of consciousness when really it needed to be written in straight, thrillerish language.

 

 

A Piece of a Beginning

By Grace Paley

Issue no. 167 (Fall 2003)

One day she fell flat on her face right out of American middle age into amazing age itself, oldness, a condition she thought she’d like if it could last as long as childhood had. But already, the days themselves were shorter, a wintering fact.

Then, people assuming wisdom began to ask her lots of questions. Some were slipped under the door; some were mailed. Close friends phoned or faxed. For some reason no one e-mailed.

 

 

After the Beginning

By Linda Gregg

Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986)

The woman is preparing her body for sleep.

She hangs the hair forward

and it almost touches her feet.

After brushing, she throws it up and back

on to her shoulders. Then splashes water

on her face twenty times.

There is someone inside her happier

than she is, waking as she goes to sleep …

 

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The Limits of Standard English

© ~ Bitter ~ / Adobe Stock.

Few large groups of English speakers have borne as great a burden of stigma as black people. In the time of slavery, that stigma was enshrined in law—and even after emancipation, legal measures have been used to ensure that black people could not easily vote, could not access decent education and transportation, and so on. Since the civil rights era, many legal barriers to equality have been removed, but society has yet to catch up. As of the second decade of the twenty-first century, black people are almost five times as likely to be jailed as white people, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. It’s not surprising, then, that the dialect many black people speak is stigmatized, too—to such a great extent that it’s often denied the status of dialect, becoming merely “bad” English. That assumption has become so ingrained, it’s even taken up by some black people themselves.

“There is no such thing as ‘talking white’ … It’s actually called ‘speaking fluently,’ speaking your language correctly. I don’t know why we’ve gotten to a place where as a culture—as a race—if you sound as though you have more than a fifth-grade education, it’s a bad thing.” This was the argument of a young black woman whose video on the subject went viral in 2014. In her view, speaking what linguists call African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is not speaking “fluent” English. It is bad English—the kind of English that should be dispensed with by the time you’re eleven years old. As the journalist Jamelle Bouie wrote about the video, “the … ideas that black Americans disparage ‘proper English’ and education and use a ‘broken’ version of the language have wide currency among many Americans, including blacks.”

The funny thing is, most English-speaking people, wherever they live, are to some extent familiar with AAVE. That’s because of the powerful projection of black culture through movies and music, including the massive popularity of hip-hop. Despite being stigmatized in America itself, the dialect has cachet around the world, though arguably that’s because it’s seen as “edgy”—romanticized as the argot of gangsters and drug dealers. So when Britons or Australians read phrases like “I ain’t lyin,” “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it,” “He be workin’ hard,” they can identify the speaker as likely being black; they can conjure up the accent and intonation in their minds’ ear.

And yet because this dialect is one that’s very close to standard English, and is used by a group whose status is generally low, it gets branded as “sloppy speaking,” “slang,” or “ghetto.” The last label, although freighted with racial judgment, could at least make linguistic sense. We know that dialects emerge when there is geographical stasis. In areas of cities that are primarily black for a number of years, even decades, distinctive ways of speaking are likely to develop—more so given that the isolation is in this case both physical and social.

As Geoffrey K. Pullum makes clear in an article entitled “African American Vernacular English is not standard English with mistakes,” AAVE is a dialect no less complex or expressive than more prestigious forms of the language. It is rule-bound and systematic. It also happens to be the means of communication of a marginalized, often economically disadvantaged group of people. In fact, AAVE possesses at least one fine grammatical distinction that standard English completely lacks. Pullum explains that there is a “remote present perfect” tense in AAVE, evident in expressions like “she been married,” where “been” is emphasized. This doesn’t just mean “she has been married,” but “she is married and has been for some considerable time.” In a similar way, the AAVE form “be” + present participle—“be walking,” “be singing,” et cetera—is often mistaken for the equivalent of the English present continuous tense: “is walking,” “is singing.” In fact, it marks what is called “habitual aspect”—meaning the action is performed as a rule, not necessarily right this minute. “He be singing” therefore means not “he is singing,” but “he sings [as a hobby, or professionally].”

Another distinctive feature of AAVE is the use of the double negative, as in: “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.” In standard English, this would be “I haven’t ever seen anything like it.” What is the reason for a double-up like this? If you say “I ain’t never,” don’t the two phrases cancel each other out? Aren’t you saying you have in fact seen it? That’s one argument for why this is just “bad,” irrational, sloppy English—but it’s wrong. What we’re seeing here is not logical negation but, as Pullum points out, a fairly common linguistic strategy called “negative concord”—negative agreement, in much the same way that, in French, nouns and the pronouns and adjectives used to describe them in a sentence must all agree in gender. Plenty of other languages have developed negative concord, for example Italian. “There is no one there” would be non c’e nessuno—literally “not is no one [there],” grammatically closer to the AAVE “ain’t nobody there.” It wouldn’t be plausible to accuse sixty million speakers of standard Italian of sloppiness or speaking in slang. So why would we do the same with AAVE?

AAVE often leaves out what linguists call the “copula”—that grammatical form of the verb “to be” (in other words, not the form that means “to exist,” as in “there once were dinosaurs,” or “to be equal to”—as in “God is love”). So a black speaker might say “How you doing?” or “You late.” But the standard forms of many languages do this—for example Arabic, where “You are late” is Anta muta’akhir—literally, “You late.”

None of these facts dampened the controversy in 1996 when the school board of Oakland, California, passed a motion addressing AAVE, which it called “Ebonics.” The board made clear it would recognize the dialect used at home by many of its pupils and would deploy it in the classroom, for example to “translate” standard English sentences so that students could understand them better. It is a mark of the stigmatization of AAVE that this move was met with fury, igniting a debate across the United States. A widespread assumption was that it was an example of “political correctness gone mad,” where a clearly substandard form of the language was being elevated simply because it was used by black people. The desire to bend over backward to accommodate an ethnic group’s sensitivities was trumping the need to deliver a high-quality education to the students of Oakland. The move was condemned as dumbing down, and of depriving black students the means by which to improve themselves. It was criticized by pundits both black and white. The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said: “While we are fighting in California trying to extend affirmative action and fighting to teach our children so they become more qualified for jobs, in Oakland some madness has erupted over making slang talk a second language. You don’t have to go to school to learn to talk garbage.”

Given just how disparaged AAVE is, it’s not surprising that it was viewed as “garbage.” And it’s certainly true, given the way such attitudes permeate the worlds of employment and higher education, that students who could not master standard English would be at a disadvantage. But would using AAVE in classrooms squeeze out standard English, or aid its speakers in getting to grips with the more prestigious variety? Here’s what the Linguistic Society of America said in a 1997 resolution: “The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American Vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘defective,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning.” Not only that: “There is evidence from Sweden, the US, and other countries that speakers of other varieties can be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective, the Oakland School Board’s decision to recognize the vernacular of black students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound.”

In other words, using AAVE to help students acquire standard English actually speeds up that process. So why the fuss? Really, it just comes down to the closeness of AAVE to English—which enables it to be regarded as merely a sloppy version of the latter—combined with the extreme stigmatization of black people, such that symbols of their culture, including dialect, denote worthlessness. Among white people, anger at the normalization of AAVE might have been rooted in fears that it would, as a result, be in a better position to “contaminate” standard English.

Politics and language frequently collide in this way; how could they not? The way we speak becomes distinctive when we are separated from outside influences, either geographically, socially, or both. Over time, distinct dialects become powerfully symbolic of those networks. They can be badges of pride, or of shame. They can be elevated to the status of “language,” remain dialects, or get disparaged as slang. But these decisions are mostly sociopolitical, to do with stigma and status. The linguistic categorization starts with the idiolect—the forms of speech used by a single person. A collection of mutually intelligible idiolects forms a dialect. Where two dialects are not mutually intelligible, they are often called “languages”—unless there is a political or cultural reason not to regard them as such—as with Arabic, for example.

Languages don’t have hard borders. In places where populations have been stable for many centuries a dialect continuum can develop, as in southern Europe, where Italian blends into French and then to Spanish. So what is Italian? What is English, French or Spanish? Are they objects you can point to? Where do they begin and end?

In truth, of course, the mistake lies in taking languages to be “things,” analogous to objects. Once again, we find ourselves under the net. Because we can say “I learned Spanish” using the same syntax as “I kicked a ball,” we take the shorthand—Spanish is a “thing” that can have something done to it—to be reality.

Languages do exist, but they are not necessarily the things we take them for. On the one hand, we each have an understanding of at least our mother tongue that allows us to produce sentences in it according to certain rules. I say “I kicked the ball” not “the ball kicked I.” That knowledge of rules in our brains is one part of the reality of a language. The other part is its existence as an autonomous system, a means of communication whose form is negotiated between speakers. It is not fixed, but changes as it is used in millions of separate interactions.

 

David Shariatmadari is a writer and editor at the Guardian. He studied linguistics at Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he now lives.

Excerpted from Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth about Language . Copyright © 2019 by David Shariatmadari. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Re-Covered: The Sky Falls by Lorenza Mazzetti

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

Lorenza Mazzetti, 1950s. (Unknown photographer, courtesy of Shelley Boettcher)

In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these four young, avant-garde filmmakers was a belief in “the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.” They eschewed traditional box office appeal in favor of authentic depictions of the quotidian, particularly that of the ordinary working man and woman. Mazzetti, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety-two, was then only twenty-eight years old—she’d recently moved to England from her native Italy, and first gotten work as a potato picker. Later that year, her second film, Together—which follows two deaf-mutes through the bomb-wrecked streets of London’s East End, or as Mazzetti described it, “fields of ruins overrun by children”—would win the Prix de Recherche at Cannes Film Festival. Her first film, K (1954), “suggested by” Kafka’s Metamorphosis and made on the most shoestring of budgets while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, anticipated the Free Cinema movement, and her signature appears first on the manifesto. And yet today she’s the least commemorated of the four, and her name is often little more than a footnote to the group’s history.

She’s even less well known as an author, especially beyond the borders of her native Italy. Although her first novel, Il cielo cade (1961)—translated into English, by Marguerite Waldman, as The Sky Falls (1962)—was awarded Italy’s prestigious Premio Viareggio Prize, and is still considered something of a contemporary classic there, the English translation has been out of print for years. Told from the point of view of her child narrator, Penny, the author’s fictional alter-ego, it details the tragic events of Mazzetti’s own childhood during the Second World War: namely the murder by the Germans of her aunt and her cousins, followed by the suicide of her distraught uncle. The Sky Falls is ripe for rediscovery, not least because recent years have seen significant efforts to restore Mazzetti’s place in the cinematic canon. It’s only fitting her equally audacious literary work be celebrated as well. Mazzetti valued the same intensity of personal experience in her writing that she did in her filmmaking. Despite having been written nearly sixty years ago, Penny’s voice is astonishingly fresh, urgent, and compelling.

*

“I wonder if it is right for me to love my sister Baby more than the Duce,” Penny asks at the beginning of The Sky Falls. The siblings are orphans, living with their Uncle Wilhelm, Aunt Katchen, and their cousins, Marie and Annie, in a large villa in the Tuscan countryside. Mussolini’s portrait hangs on the wall of their classroom at the village school, watching over the Little Sons and Daughters of Italy, all of whom would “give, if necessary,” Penny has no doubt, “our blood for the cause of the Fascist Revolution.” All the same, her sister remains Penny’s best beloved: “If Baby is angry with me it’s as though the sky were to grow dark and the sun turn black and my heart were slowing freezing up.” Amongst The Sky Falls’s other achievements, it’s a thoroughly convincing depiction of an all-encompassing sibling bond. Mazzetti and her own twin sister, Paola, were inseparable; they lived together in Rome at the time of Mazzetti’s death.

Penny and Baby’s life is, by and large, an innocent idyll. They spend their days playing with their cousins and the other children from the village. Thus, early sections of the novel are reminiscent of scenes from the English-born but Italian-wed writer Iris Origo’s wartime diaries, A Chill in the Air and War in d’Orcia, as seen, of course, through the eyes of the children roaming the Origos’ bucolic estate. Penny often gets into trouble, especially with her strict uncle. He’s not unkind to her, and she loves him dearly—“To think that I’d give my life for him and he doesn’t even know it!”—but he sets impossibly high standards for his precocious and high-spirited niece. “The grown-ups are always right and there’s nothing we children can do about it: my truth and my lies aren’t real,” she thinks during a routine punishment for talking back. The temptation is to describe Penny as a bit of a drama queen, but her existence is steeped in the discourse of martyrdom and self-flagellation. This originates in both the Catholic Church, which holds significant sway over the neighborhood, and in the form of the Fascist propaganda being fed the children during this period. Indeed, in the excellent 2000 film adaptation of the novel, directed by Andrea and Antonio Frazzi, the extent of the children’s indoctrination is emphasized by the fact that when Penny and Baby first arrive at their aunt and uncle’s home—Isabella Rossellini plays beautiful, kind Aunt Katchen, and Jeroen Krabbè is handsome, cultured Uncle Wilhelm—they’re dressed in spotless Piccola Italiana uniforms and creepily greet their new guardians with the salute Il Duce.

Uncle Wilhelm, who is Jewish, is the only one not taken in by either religious or nationalistic rhetoric. He sits in his armchair “looking depressed” while the children run around him “roaring” their patriotic responses to one of the Duce’s speeches on the radio. This simply confuses Penny, but his refusal to let the family attend Mass causes her anguish. Preoccupied by fear that Uncle Wilhelm is going to hell unless she and the other children can find some way to save him, Penny dictates that they must do penance on his behalf by walking through fields of thorns. It’s his absence of Fascist fervor, of course, that’s the most dangerous; though Penny, and thus by extension the reader, remains oblivious to how the war is playing out beyond this tiny patch of rural Italy.

Penny’s confusion continues even after the Germans have arrived, commandeering quarters at the villa. The local priest warns her that Uncle Wilhelm is in grave danger. She knows something about the priest’s caution is “odd”—he and her uncle are two men who don’t normally have anything to do with each other—yet she can’t believe that the Germans, especially the general in charge who’s courteous and civilized enough to regularly play chess with Uncle Wilhelm, could present a threat. Penny’s view of the world is fragmentary, and her understanding incomplete. As we watch the events unfold through her unwitting, innocent eyes, we feel a mounting tension that would be impossible if the story was being told from the perspective of an adult. Penny wants to believe her uncle when he dismisses the priest’s fears. “My uncle always knows the truth,” she asserts. “He is Truth and Justice in person and can never be wrong.” Yet at the same time, the eerie sound of the officers “clicking their heels and shouting orders” as they bustle about the villa during the night sets her heart thumping, and she feels “danger hovering like a gigantic monster.” “What if Uncle’s truth were not true?” she contemplates fearfully. “What is the truth? I should like the truth somehow to appear in large letters in the sky.”

The Sky Falls is so much more than just a book about the horrors of the Second World War. It is as much a loving homage to the picture-perfect childhood Mazzetti’s aunt and uncle provided for her and her sister before circumstances beyond their control overwhelmed them, and thus also a moving portrait of the cruel loss of childhood innocence. As Mazzetti explains in Because I’m a Genius!, the 2018 documentary about her life and work directed by Steve Della Casa and Francesco Frisari, the writer friend who helped her find the voice with which to narrate The Sky Falls showed her, “that if I saw my childhood through the eyes of the child who had experienced it, I could write in a happy, cheerful way about it, while if I wrote as an adult, I would have spoken of revenge, anger and horror.” The novel’s horrifying and violent dénouement is all the more chilling for it, especially the gruesome tableaux on the final page: Penny and Baby, their hands and dresses soaked with their uncle, aunt, and cousins’ blood, crying over their dead bodies in the still-smoking ruins of the now destroyed but once majestic family villa.

*

Although The Sky Falls was published as a novel, it’s autobiography in all but name. Mazzetti and Paola’s mother died in childbirth in 1928, after which their father handed them over to his sister and her husband to raise alongside their own two daughters. Their uncle was Robert Einstein, Albert Einstein’s cousin, and Mazzetti was always convinced that the murder of Robert’s family in what’s since become known as the Strage di Rignano Massacre was “a precise order against Einstein’s relatives.” How else to explain the Germans sparing both her and Paola’s lives, or that of the servants and farmhands on the property, other than the fact that none of them shared the famous man’s name? Believing he was the only one in danger, Robert had eventually heeded the warnings and fled to the relative safety of the local partisans. In his absence, the Germans took the rest of the family hostage. Mazzetti and Paola were close enough to hear their aunt and cousins being executed in a nearby room in the villa. Overwhelmed with guilt and grief, Robert committed suicide, leaving his adopted daughters all alone in the world.

Mazzetti left Italy for London in the early fifties, where she ended up at the Slade. As she explains, both in her London Diaries (which were published in the original Italian in 2014, and as an English edition four years later, translated by Melinda Mele) and Because I’m a Genius!, she turned up at the art school the day before term began and demanded she be allowed to enroll. “I’m a genius!” she told Sir William Coldstream, the school’s principal, convincing him to bend the rules for her. It was he who later introduced the same willful young woman to Denis Forman, then head of the British Film Institute. She had borrowed, without permission, the school film society’s equipment in order to make her first feature, and brazenly told the lab that developed the film to charge it direct to the school. Sir William came up with an ingenious plan to see if Mazzetti deserved to be reported to the police for theft: he would screen K for an audience of her fellow students, and if they applauded her efforts, he’d excuse her questionable methods. Not only were her peers bowled over by her work, but Forman—whom Sir William had also invited to the screening—was so impressed by Mazzetti’s raw talent that he immediately agreed to finance her next feature. Together was the first publicly funded film made in the UK by a woman director.

After taking Together to Cannes in 1956, Mazzetti was on course for a brilliant career in the UK. And yet, she decided to return to Italy. Back home, she realized that she was finally ready to “tell the world what I witnessed.” Once she’d found Penny’s voice, she wrote The Sky Falls in only twenty days. She sent it to publishers, but to no avail, until, that is, the famous neorealist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini—who’d greatly admired Together—took the manuscript direct to Attilio Bertolucci, the editorial director at the Garzanti publishing house. Bertolucci published the novel with an introduction by Zavattini, and submitted it for the Viareggio Prize.

Mazzetti worked on a few Italian films and TV productions, but her interest in the medium was waning. She published a sequel to Il cielo cade in 1963, Con rabbia—translated into English, by Isabel Quigly, as Rage (1966)—which picks up Penny and Baby’s story after the war, in which, now adolescents, they’re living in Florence. Read as a standalone work, The Sky Falls is potent enough—“a brilliant tour de force, charming and harrowing,” described the Spectator. But the “flinty anger” that critic Penelope Mortimer, writing in the Daily Express, identified beneath the surface of the first book explodes to the fore in Rage. Penny is struggling with all the usual torments of adolescence—an “awful age when you know everything wrong and at second hand!” she wisely surmises, and one made all the more complicated for a woman in what’s very much a man’s world: a “prisoner of my sex,” the “prey” of rapacious men, “[a]n object to chase through the dark streets, to impress with their male voices, to debase after they’d fondled it, to despise after they’d used it. An object to look at, to wink at, to pierce or to strip with their eyes. An object that belonged to them”—but she’s also dealing with the trauma of her past. If The Sky Falls is a child’s dream-turned-nightmare, Rage is more like a feverish hallucination from which Penny is unable to escape. With its intense focus on interiority, often at the expense of plot, it’s admittedly less accessible than The Sky Falls. As a portrait of a traumatized and confused adolescent, however, it’s masterful. Her straightforward depiction of everyday sexual harassment will resonate particularly with contemporary readers, I’m sure. Mazzetti also penned a third volume in this autobiographical series, Mi può prestare la sua pistola per favore? (1969), but it’s yet to be translated into English.

For a time, later in life, Mazetti wrote a weekly column for the magazine Vie Nuove, in which she interpreted readers’ dreams (with the help of a Jungian psychoanalyst), but her main interest, somewhat unexpectedly, became puppetry. She set up a children’s puppet theatre at Rome’s Del Satiri Theater. An article in the New York Times in 1988 describes one of her performances, the tale of an orphaned prince and princess, who by the end of the show have “charmed a dragon, outsmarted the witch and—not orphans at all—found their parents.” Perhaps it’s not as surprising a medium as it might initially seem. In Because I’m a Genius! Mazzetti describes her own life after having been accepted at the Slade as like a “fairy tale,” and The Sky Falls reads like a modern-day Grimm’s tale, beauty and horror, innocence and corruption side-by-side. Mazzetti spent her entire life telling and retelling the story of her childhood, sometimes explicitly—as in the series of eighty paintings she exhibited in 2010 depicting her and Paola’s life at the villa with the Einsteins—and sometimes more implicitly—as in the world of puppetry. It’s high time her work found the broader audience it deserves and The Sky Falls took the place it merits, both among other narratives set in wartime, and those of portraits of the artist as a child. That Mazzetti won’t be around to see this herself is extremely saddening. Indeed, when I wrote this column—in what now turns out to have been the week before she passed away—I had no idea that I was penning an obituary. I can only hope the news of her death will lead readers to discover her beautiful but chilling novel.

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here . 

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

The Upside of Brandenburg v. Ohio

© davidevison / Adobe Stock.

The first time I met an aspiring white supremacist was during a class trip to a county career center in southwest Ohio. He was tall and had buzzed hair and told my friend Niquelle and me that he loved the movie American History X. He wanted to be like Edward Norton’s character, he told us, “but before the part where he turned all pussy.” Norton’s character is an American neo-Nazi who is sent to prison—where he undergoes his aforementioned conversion—after forcing a black man to place his mouth around a curb and then executing him by stomping on the back of his skull. I remember looking over at Niquelle, who is black. I remember feeling my breath catch in my chest, upon which my Star of David necklace dangled, outside my shirt.

Growing up in southwest Ohio, I was aware of the way I could become more or less invisible—more or less white—based on whether I tucked in my necklace or wore it out. (A soggy sort of superpower: Jewboy to the rescue?) I often wore it out in new places, perhaps with an edge of defiance, seeking some sort of confrontation. But then when it came, like on that day—

I didn’t say a word.

I asked Niquelle about this incident recently, and she told me she also remembered the day and the guy vividly, but couldn’t recall the context: “Did he just look at us and let out this terrible thought? Did someone say something that made him angry?” We both remembered being whisked away by the teacher or staff person who was leading the tour, and then that was that.

Later, for a period of a few weeks, a group of kids at our high school started cracking jokes that centered around “curb stomping.” I remember one guy grabbing my shoulder right after making one such joke. Don’t be so sensitive, dude.

This was 2004. Exactly four decades earlier, a bit farther south in Ohio, a full-fledged white supremacist made a speech that would fundamentally change what can legally be said in these United States of America. The date was Sunday, June 28, 1964. A journalist and cameraman from the Cincinnati-based TV station WLWT Channel 5 made their way to a Hamilton County farm just outside the city, where they had been invited by a local Ku Klux Klan leader named Clarence Brandenburg to cover his group’s rally.

Three weeks earlier, on June 5, 1964, in my hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a barber named Lewis Gegner decided to sell his shop and leave town rather than desegregate his business, after facing a years-long nonviolent campaign that culminated with the arrest of 108 activists. The Ku Klux Klan would later invite him to speak at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, in recognition of his “steadfastness.”

That same month, on June 22, in nearby Oxford, Ohio, Freedom Summer volunteers learned that three of their colleagues had gone missing while investigating a KKK church bombing in Mississippi the night before: a black civil rights activist named James Earl Chaney and two Jewish activists named Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. According to the historian Taylor Branch, a Mississippi sheriff responded to their disappearance by saying, “If they’re missing, they just hid somewhere trying to get a lot of publicity, I figure.”

Their bodies were found on August 4. According to an article by the civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman, James Earl Chaney had been chained to a tree, tortured, and castrated before being shot thrice. Michael Schwerner cradled Chaney’s body in his arms before being shot in the heart. Andrew Goodman tried to run and was shot. An autopsy showed that he had red clay fragments in his lungs and fists, indicating that he was likely buried while still alive.

On the Hamilton County farm near the end of June 1964, forty-four-year-old Clarence Brandenburg gave a speech to an assembled group of a dozen men clad in white robes and hoods. In a later part of the news channel’s footage, the Klansmen are seen marching in circles around a burning cross, some of them carrying guns, shouting things including “Freedom for the Whites” and “Bury the niggers.”

“We’re not a revengent organization,” declared Brandenburg, who was wearing a red hood over his white robe. “But if our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken.” In a second clip, Brandenburg is seen repeating a similar speech, and adding, “Personally, I believe the nigger should be returned to Africa, the Jew returned to Israel.”

And then that was that.

The group dispersed, and everyone went home for supper, or a nap, or a beer, or a game of gin rummy, or whatever one does after attending a Ku Klux Klan rally.

This word revengeance was later mocked, and Brandenburg’s remarks were labeled “self-evidently stupid and silly”—by his own defense lawyer. But that’s the thing about white supremacists: their rhetoric is mostly self-evident stupidity and silliness nestled between bursts of horrific vitriol. As cathartic as it can feel to mock, said silliness doesn’t make their rhetoric any less deadly serious. Or less deadly.

Right?

Which brings us back to the central question of Brandenburg v. Ohio, a question that is as relevant in our current era as it was in the sixties: How deadly is such rhetoric?

Deadly enough that it should be illegal?

The answer given by the State of Ohio was yes.

Following the broadcast of his speech at the KKK rally, Clarence Brandenburg was arrested on August 6, 1964, two days after the bodies of the murdered activists were found in Mississippi, and charged under Ohio’s criminal syndicalism statute, which, like other similar statutes around the country, was originally put on the books primarily as a bludgeon against communist sympathizers and which criminalized advocating “sabotage, violence, or … terrorism … as a means of accomplishing … political reform.”

Brandenburg was convicted, fined a thousand dollars, and sentenced to one to ten years in prison. His appeals were rejected by lower courts and by the Ohio Supreme Court. Brandenburg had been laid off from his job at GE in 1958 and had filed for bankruptcy in 1959. So when the ACLU offered to appeal the case, pro bono, to the United States Supreme Court, Brandenburg accepted. His lawyer? A forty-eight-year-old Jewish ACLU volunteer named Allen Brown.

Brown died in 2004, but his friend and colleague Norman Slutsky said of him: “If ever there was a Jewish saint, it was Allen. He was an absolute mensch. One of the most beautiful men I knew.” Brown was short, a little on the hefty side, and had a raspy voice, accentuated by his constant smoking. Once a judge reprimanded him for his constant motion during a trial and threatened to hold him in contempt of court if he didn’t keep his hand on the podium at all times. During his closing arguments, Brown stuck one finger out, placed it on the podium, and then danced as far as he could, in every direction, with his fingertip still touching the wood. In another case, an obscenity case, Norman Slutsky told of Brown, the Jewish saint, picking up a giant dildo brought as evidence by the prosecution and waggling it in the faces of the jury members, growling: “This may disgust you, and this may disgust you. But it is not obscene.” Allen Brown was not a religious man, but he was a true believer in the First Amendment. When he died, his family asked that donations be made to the ACLU.

Also representing Brandenburg on behalf of the ACLU was one of the organization’s two national lawyers: a thirty-two-year-old African American attorney named Eleanor Holmes Norton, now the congressional representative for the District of Columbia. Norton had graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A 1960 article in the Antioch Record describes how Norton, known then as Ellie Holmes, coordinated efforts between the Antioch chapter of the NAACP, the local ACLU, and other activists to desegregate all of the still-segregated businesses in town. (The only holdout by the time Norton left Yellow Springs was Gegner’s barbershop.) In 1964, Norton traveled to Mississippi as legal counsel to the Freedom Summer. She was, in short, no stranger to American racism and no friend to its proponents. In a 1969 interview, reprinted in the Record, she said: “If you look closely at the color of my skin and the texture of my hair, you will see that I could only be in this for the principles involved. Self-interest becomes an absurdity.”

And so the case in which a Klansman, represented by black and Jewish ACLU lawyers, faced off against the State of Ohio got underway.

In the oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, the lawyer representing Ohio, Leonard Kirschner, made the following argument as to why Brandenburg’s speech should be illegal: “If I were to run down Harlem, shall we say, and say ‘Bury the Negro,’ ‘Send them back to the black Africa’—”

Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, interrupted: “He wouldn’t last that long.”

Laughter in the otherwise somber courtroom.

Six minutes later, Allen Brown began his rebuttal by stating that the massive violation of the First Amendment found in the State of Ohio’s laws can in fact be illustrated by Justice Marshall’s response to Kirschner’s hypothetical situation. “Justice Marshall,” Brown said, his gravelly voice rising, picking up speed, building to something important, “is safe for the moment because the venue is in Washington, D.C., but in Ohio, could be indicted for suggesting a violent reaction by the Negro community.”

And then that was that.

*

The Court’s decision was unanimous: Ohio’s criminal syndicalism statute, and others like it around the country, was unconstitutional. Advocacy of violence in the abstract is not sufficient grounds for the government to prohibit speech. In order for the First Amendment to be curbed, according to the Brandenburg ruling, advocacy of violence must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and be “likely to incite or produce such action.”

In other words, the State of Ohio cannot arrest an aspiring white supremacist in a county career center who says, “I believe in killing blacks and Jews.” Government officials could intervene only in a case in which he said, “Let’s kill this black and this Jew, right now.”

A word, here, on white American bigotry and the identities of its obsessions. Baldwin, in 1967: “One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t.” He’s right, of course. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman weren’t shot because they were Jews—except in the roundabout, romantic, fictional sort of way that links their Jewishness with their conscientious activism. The recent synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh did have a handful of American precedents—the lynching of Leo Frank, the murder of Alan Berg, the Jewish Community Center shootings in LA and Kansas City, and some others—but only a handful, not thousands. Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative estimates that 4,075 black Americans were murdered in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 alone. White supremacists are obsessed with both groups, but their murderous frenzy has been almost entirely directed toward only one. Perhaps this discrepancy is partially due to Jewboy’s aforementioned soggy superpower—the ability to blend into American whiteness. At its worst, we have Charles Leb, the owner of a kosher deli in Atlanta who, in 1963, when faced with nonviolent sit-ins calling on him to desegregate his establishment, enlisted the help of none other than the KKK; at its worst, we have Stephen Miller, who has helped give voice to an agenda of white supremacy in the Trump White House. But this discrepancy is also certainly due to the fact that one of the foundational pillars of the United States of America—and one that has never truly been renounced—is the dehumanization, murder, torture, persecution, and wild hatred of black people.

Thanks to Brown, Norton, and the ACLU, Brandenburg walked free. (Though a few years later, this pleasant fellow would be jailed for sixty days for harassing his Jewish neighbor by repeatedly telephoning to berate him with anti-Semitic tirades.) Was the ruling in Brandenburg a victory for the forces of revengeance and hatred in this country?

In 1977, the Nazi Party of America sought a permit to hold a parade in Skokie, Illinois, a majority-Jewish village that was home to thousands of Holocaust survivors. Under the standards set by Brandenburg, such a parade was obviously permissible: the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision to allow the march. The permit-seeking American Nazis were represented in court by the ACLU, as was the case in Charlottesville, forty years later. But we’ll get there.

In the meantime, the other side of the coin: after facing pushback from fellow activists for her work in Brandenburg, Eleanor Holmes Norton made a statement, reprinted in the Antioch Record in 1969, in which she argued that such cases were more likely to benefit radical activists than Brandenburg’s colleagues, and that her defense of racists’ right to express their views did not conflict with her “black militant philosophy.”

“Actually,” she said, “The right wing cases are real plums. When I defend a left winger’s right to dissent, I am not saying very much to the increasingly larger body of people in this country committed to repression of extreme ideas. But when I’m defending a racist’s rights, the object lesson is dramatically clear.”

In the 1973 case of Hess v. Indiana, based on the standards established in Brandenburg, the Court unanimously ruled to overturn the conviction of the antiwar protester Gregory Hess, who was arrested for declaring something along the lines of “We’ll take the fucking street later” within earshot of a cop. And in a 1982 ruling, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., the court unanimously ruled that the First Amendment, as interpreted in Brandenburg, protected a 1964 speech given by Charles Evers, the brother of the murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, in which he warned black residents of Port Gibson, Mississippi, against violating a local NAACP-led boycott of segregationist merchants. “If we catch any of you going into these racist stores,” he said, “we’re going to break your damn neck.” Even though some residents were indeed later met with violence after violating the boycott, the Court ruled, under the standards set forth by Brandenburg, that Evers’s speech could not reasonably be construed as intentionally and directly inciting imminent violence.

So where does this all leave us?

Probably in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, with hundreds of self-evidently silly and stupid white men and boys bearing Walmart torches and chanting about “Jews not replacing us.” The right of the Unite the Right rally to take place had been supported, in line with Brandenburg and Skokie and Hess and NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, by the Virginia chapter of the ACLU.

The argument that the horrific violence that took place that day—including a group of white supremacists savagely beating and stomping on a black man named DeAndre Harris as he lay splayed out on the ground of a parking garage, and one white supremacist, from Ohio, ramming his car into a crowd of leftist counterprotesters and murdering Heather Heyer—had far more to do with failures on the part of law enforcement than with any sort of speech that day is, to my mind, a basically sound one. Still, it bears mentioning that after what happened in Charlottesville, the national ACLU did draw up a list of guidelines for case selection that, while decidedly not repudiating the Virginia ACLU’s decision to defend the white supremacist rally’s right to take place, did foreground the tension inherent in defending such speech and clarified that the ACLU will “generally not represent protestors who seek to march while armed.”

*

A few months after the rally in Charlottesville, my wife and I moved back to southwest Ohio. A few months after that, our daughter was born here: tiny, curious, adventurous, brilliant, Jewish.

Our town, Yellow Springs, still feels imbued with Antioch College’s progressive spirit and the legacy left by Eleanor Holmes Norton and other activists since. But there are Confederate flags flying in the rural stretches around us, and I’ve read article after article about white supremacists (around my age) living in the area: the Hitler-admiring white nationalist from Huber Heights; the founder of the website The Daily Stormer, whose main pages include “Race War” and “Jewish Problem,” based near Columbus. While Jews are not at the very top of American white supremacists’ list of bloodlust, these questions, questions of speech and threat and assembly and safety, do not feel purely academic or theoretical to me. There is no flippancy or cavalier intellectualization in my fingertips as I write, here in southwest Ohio, my tiny Jewish daughter napping in the other room, that even after Charlottesville, I think that Eleanor Holmes Norton and Allen Brown and the ACLU were right in their defense of Clarence Brandenburg.

Because in truth, the ideologies of Brandenburg and the Tiki torchers are not as divergent from the core ideologies of the American political regime as many think they are. In truth, throughout American history, government suppression of speech and expression has been far more frequently and viciously directed against leftists and radicals, against black militants and Jewish communists, than it has against the various Brandenburgs of this nation. In that light, the Brandenburg case appears as a form of aikido, in which Norton, Brown, and the ACLU harnessed the force of American white supremacism itself as a means of ultimately defending those who would seek to undermine American white supremacism and its cousins: bigotry, xenophobia, imperialism, and bellicosity. In other words, in challenging the government’s right to punish Brandenburg for saying heinous things, a counterintuitive but profound sliver of freedom was wrested from this deeply unfree country.

And for that, here in southwest Ohio, I am grateful.

 

Moriel Rothman-Zecher was born in Jerusalem and raised in southwest Ohio. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the National Jewish Book Award, and was the winner of the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction. He is the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Honor and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature. His work has been published in the New York Times, ZYZZYVA magazine, Runner’s World, Haaretz, and elsewhere. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with his wife and their daughter. He is currently working on his second novel, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2021.

From Fight of the Century , edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

How to Imitate George Saunders

The first time I met George Saunders, I got shivers of déjà vu. I’d driven to his house in upstate New York, to interview him for this magazine, and he’d come out to his driveway to shake my hand. It was a crisp fall day in the wooded hills south of Oneonta, with a hard wind and bright blue skies, and the trees cast sharp, waving shadows on the hood of his Prius. There was something about the way he swung open his front door and ushered me into his mud room, wearing his wide Midwestern grin, that felt eerily familiar. Then I realized why: I was living out a fantasy I’d indulged a hundred times. For much of my twenties, what I’d wanted, more than almost anything else, was to get inside Saunders’s mind, learn how it worked, and steal his secrets, so that I could write short stories that were as good as his short stories. My dream had been to sit down with him and ask him whatever I wanted.

I couldn’t do that in my twenties, but I could make the surfaces of my stories resemble the surfaces of his stories. Present tense, first person, short declarative sentences, frequent jokes. Characters whose thoughts and speech were peppered with euphemistic neologisms. A working-class American suburb in a troubled near-future, a naïve narrator with a good heart, a shopping mall. I could assemble those parts, but the result was never George Saunders. There was something else he was doing. He had a technique whose effects I could feel but whose workings were mysterious to me. After I had written a stack of bad stories in a fake-Saunders mode—security guard finds gateway to hell in fountain of food court, et cetera—I stopped trying to write the way he did, feeling I had wasted two years trying to pull it off. When I applied to M.F.A. programs, I got into the one at Syracuse, where he taught. He even called me and encouraged me to come, a great moment of my life. But I’d decided he was dangerous, for me. Given how Saunders-derivative I was, the last thing I needed was more Saunders in my head. I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, hoping it would whip the Saunders out of me. A couple of times, my classmates submitted Saunders-y stories, and in workshop I enumerated everything that was imitative about them, surprising myself with my own prosecutorial zeal. I had expected Iowa to be mean at times; I just hadn’t expected that the source of meanness would be me.

Now I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self, It’s okay to imitate Saunders, just not in the hapless, superficial way you’re doing it. What you need is more Saunders in your head, not less, in the sense that what you need is a deeper understanding of what Saunders does. The interesting, generative way to imitate Saunders is to imitate what he does with the bones of a short story, not what he does with setting, dialogue, or prose.

But “bones” isn’t quite right. In fact, one of the most important aspects of the Saunders aesthetic is something that might be termed “bonelessness.” A boneless story doesn’t begin with an idea for a central conflict, or with an outline, or with any other structural design. A boneless story has no skeleton. That doesn’t mean that there’s no action. To the contrary, Saunders’s stories are packed with incident. But the stories accumulate beat by beat. As a general rule, Saunders doesn’t conceive of plots in advance, but rather tries to write one funny, interesting moment, and then another funny, interesting moment, and so on. A Saunders story grows like a fungus. It wouldn’t be totally accurate to say that it grows sentence by sentence. To use Saunders’s words, it grows “bit” by “bit.” A bit is often a joke, but not necessarily. It can be a tragic occurrence, an incisive observation, a grotesque shock. It’s anything that administers a stimulus to the reader.

“I discovered that I could make a fairly ambitious story via fragments,” he told me, in the interview.

“I didn’t have to have a through line or a plan, didn’t have to know where it was going… If you trimmed all the fat out of a bit, it would start to thrum with meaning—and then, all of a sudden, it would have something it wanted to cause. So there would be these, like, vital bits on the page, not linked to anything yet. And then structure became just linking up those vital bits, looking for the simplest way to connect them.

So, if you cut all the lazy shit out of a story, what’s left will tell you what structure to put in place so that none of those good bits need to be lost. And then you are trying to arrange them so that they are in causal relation to one another.”

How does one bit cause another bit? Consider this passage from “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” The story is set in a Civil War theme park beset by violent teenage gangs. The narrator, one of the park’s executives, has asked Quinn, an actor hired to play historical figures, to expel the gangs from park property.

…I hear gunshots from the perimeter. I run out and there’s Quinn and a few of his men tied to the cannon. The gang guys took Quinn’s pants and put some tiny notches in his penis with their knives. I free Quinn and tell him to get over to the Infirmary to guard against infection. He’s absolutely shaking and can hardly walk, so I wrap him up in a Confederate flag and call over a hay cart and load him in.

…We decide to leave the police out of it because of the possible bad PR. So we give Quinn the rest of the week off and promise to let him play Grant now and then, and that’s that.

(A short digression: See how well those two paragraphs work on their own, cut off from the rest of the story? “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” is like an octopus, an animal whose tentacles remain alive even when severed from the rest of the body, because each tentacle has its own brains, instead of bones. The whole creature is a sack full of brains.)

The first “bit” is that the gangs tie Quinn to the cannon. (This is a Civil War theme park with only one cannon, we learn from the article “the.”) The second bit, caused by the first, is that once the gangs have rendered Quinn helpless, they notch his penis, a highly specific, considered, psychological torture. The specificity and originality of the form of that torture cause the third bit, which is that the narrator orders Quinn to “get over” to the Infirmary to make sure his penis doesn’t get infected, not the gentlest or most respectful response, and one that raises the comical question of what the Infirmary is like. Historically authentic, medically modern, or somewhere in between? The narrator’s demand that Quinn go to the Infirmary on his own steam suggests the problem that Quinn is trembling and unable to walk, (“absolutely shaking” in the narrator’s office-speak) which causes the fourth bit, which is the narrator wrapping him in a Confederate flag and depositing him in a hay cart, as if he’s a figure in an oil painting of wounded Southerners. The whole incident is so unsavory it suggests the fifth bit, the decision not to call the police because of “possible bad PR.” Which leads to the sixth bit, the decision to give Quinn a week off and let him play Grant “now and then,” which is enough to buy his silence.

Just by letting one bit sprout another bit, Saunders gives us new details about the setting, a new turn in the plot, and an implied critique of late-stage capitalism, all as side effects, happy accidents. The development of political themes, and the escalation of hostilities between the park and the gangs—these things happen organically, not by authorial fiat. If you start with good bits, the framework you develop to hold them together will be more interesting and fun than any framework you could think up in advance. Saunders told me how sweet it was to discover this way of working.

I’d been driving myself crazy with questions like, What do I believe about structure? and, What is my theory about character development? and, Well, what is a story, anyway?

This new mode’s whole idea was to put those questions aside. Just keep the reader reading, and all questions will be answered. And suddenly, as a bonus, I was blurting out things about my position in the world that I hadn’t even known until I blurted them out.

That may be the single most important accomplishment, for a writer: to surprise oneself with truths that were previously obscure.

You can take the boneless mode and pair it with long, lyrical sentences. You can pair it with a realistic setting, or with autofictional reminiscences, or with any other un-Saunders-y surface. In fact, you probably should. That way, it will be Saunders-y in the best way possible, that is, it will be Saunders-y without anyone being able to tell.

 

Read the Art of Fiction with George Saunders in our winter 2019 issue.

Benjamin Nugent is the author of Fraternity, a collection of linked stories forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He’s the recipient of the 2019 Terry Southern Prize. 

On No Longer Being a Hysterical Woman

Original illustration by Anne Osherson

I cannot locate the day that I finally meant it, this heretofore speculative suicide think, but by some point, not long ago, it seemed I had only two choices: get a hysterectomy, or die. I would not die from endometriosis alone, though it is often called benign cancer, but neither could I bear to live with it.

This past summer, I reached a breaking point. A choppy cross-country move disrupted my medical care, requiring new referrals, specialists, a primary care physician, a new medical cannabis card in a state with a completely different policy, a renewed opioid prescription until I could get the medical cannabis card, refills of antidepressants. A lost social security card stuck on a moving van that arrived two weeks late delayed my ability to get a New York State ID, which I needed in order to see a doctor who could authorize my medical card. All this in the middle of nonstop travel I had scheduled months in advance, as part of my book promotion and visits to universities and festivals.

Three nights before a trip to Europe, where I was up for a prize, I messaged a suicide hotline. I’d missed too many medications at once and needed immediate care. I made it through, but microaggressions in Edinburgh and Paris pushed me into a full depressive episode. The entire ride from Disneyland Paris to my hotel, I considered jumping from the moving Lyft. But it would be too complicated for my husband to retrieve my body internationally, I reasoned. I’d wait until I returned to Ithaca. My period started, and, along with the chemical withdrawals, contextualized some of my increased depression. I took Xanax and Trazodone and Cymbalta and returned to that old devil, Percocet, and fell asleep. I stayed in my Paris hotel room for days, only coming out for Uber Eats orders that turned to gravel in my mouth. I returned to the States and slept and cried. Major crisis temporarily averted; hopelessness still on high; suicide watch on the down-low; hysterical stereotype achieved.

*

I have always lived in the Gothic castle of my body and brain. Before I was a hysterical woman, I was a hysterical child, a textbook case of what pseudoscience once called female hysteria. The depression predates my own memory. “You were always a melancholy child,” my mother says. In preschool, when a fifth-grade boy I liked preferred a fifth-grade girl, who in my four-year-old mind was my best friend, I was inconsolable. I could read and write and was known as advanced, derisively as “grown,” at my Montessori-style school, but I couldn’t interpret social cues. I don’t remember the details, only that I came home so distressed after seeing Alexandria fanning Ricky with a hat, that my parents, shocked by my reaction, kept me home from school. “You also cried every day of third grade,” my mother says. Major depressive episode at seven? Perhaps. Emerging pattern, certainly.

Anxiety: My symptoms of OCD started around preschool, too, when I found the photos of my own birth that my parents had left out in our den. The sight of the blood, the blue sheets, my crowning—the horror, the horror—sent me screaming from the room. My parents hid the photos, but a compulsion forced me to search for them frequently, reproducing the panic that became routine in my life.

By middle school, I carried deodorant along with aerosol perfume sprays, pre-Axe designer knockoffs arranged near the gum in the grocery-store checkout line (“If You Like Sunflowers You’ll Also Enjoy Dandelion”) to mask my anxiety-driven hyperhidrosis. I cried that I was going crazy, and my mother gave me self-help books. She’d felt the same way at my age, she assured me. I couldn’t open the books, but I used a biblical concordance to locate verses on anxiety—it was my mother’s method; she was too scared or too busy or too something to seek therapy herself, and thus she did not recommend it for me. At first, the verses eased the feelings. Then I needed the ritual; if I didn’t read them every day in the same order, bad things would and did happen.

Dysmenorrhea: In sixth grade, I prayed every day that God would make me skinnier, prettier, a better Christian, let me marry Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Andrew Keegan, and that I’d start my period before I turned twelve. My period arrived in my eleventh year, but by thirteen, it became debilitating. A teacher’s assistant who resembled a sun-burnt Tweety Bird (I’m still working on becoming a better Christian) looked at me with disgust when I limped into the school office complaining of cramps so bad I feared for my life. My mother drove across town, swooped me up, and gave Tweety a tongue lashing that took my pain down from a vindictive 9 to a vindicated 7.

Lasciviousness: I learned to masturbate from my mother’s Christian self-help book about parenting “a rebellious teen.” I didn’t know I was one; I didn’t require a curfew because I never went out after 6 PM and even then only to sulk on the porch or skateboard around our neighborhood. I flipped through the book and found a section on masturbation. One of my teachers had been arrested for doing it in a parking lot, and my friends joked about “jacking off,” but I didn’t know the mechanics of doing it for myself as a girl. The description in the book was so graphic that it served as my first erotica, and, thus, a new daily compulsion.

But bad things came, I believed, as punishment. The bleeding first, pink spotting every day from the age of fifteen, then a terrified gynecologist visit, each bloody mark correlated with touching myself where only JTT or Andrew Keegan one day should.

Sanitorium: In 2011, a nervous breakdown that had been swelling since 2009—since 1983—erupted. My eating disorder became out of control and I believed God was telling me to do terrible things. The suicidal thoughts that started when I was fourteen, and that intensified each month before my period, became unbearable. I sought psychotherapy, and only narrowly avoided hospitalization.

*

In the photos from my recent trips, I look happy, but I am dead behind the eyes; I chose not to post the ones from Disney because my sparkly Minnie Mouse headband makes me complicit in a lie. The last night of the Brooklyn Book Festival, where on Instagram I am smiling with friends, I considered jumping from somewhere, but New York hotel windows don’t open far, and I hate being an inconvenience, the source of honking and short-lived rubbernecking. I continued to show up for the events I’d scheduled, though I left most of them depressed, crying through the few nights I spent in my own bed, sick with endo and something equally horrifying.

I made and unmade and remade and unmade final plans. Three nagging thoughts complicated them: I didn’t want to hurt my family, particularly the several living with mental-health disorders. Nor did I want to hurt my husband any more than I already have. And I didn’t want to imitate art, reenact the plot in “Suicide, Watch,” my own short story in which a black woman named Jilly announces her suicide plans on Facebook and, disappointed by the reactions, essentially dies of ennui. “Don’t be a punchline. Don’t be a Jilly,” I’ve told myself for the past six months.

I took down my Facebook and Instagram, briefly. I couldn’t announce a suicide with nowhere to do so. I gave up on waiting to be acknowledged by two different crisis lines. I emailed my doctor back in Illinois asking for emergency refills and higher doses of my antidepressants, for anything to tide me over until I could get into the New York medical cannabis system. I took up smoking for two weeks—actual cigarettes—I, a Southern Californian vegan of twenty-one years, a millennial yogi whose father owns a McGruff puppet and says “hugs, not drugs” whenever I see him. I made gifts for people I love. The quicksand still came up to my neck.

I went to the ER and then to a medical cannabis prescriber, telling them each that I couldn’t live this way any longer, and finally got my card. I burned my ankle with a cigarette lighter to feel something, anything, else. I used an X-Acto knife from my craft room to cut myself, but it was covered in cured resin and only bruised but never broke the skin. I Skyped with my therapist. I texted a crisis hotline, messaging for hours with a kind counselor. I told my husband how to access the high-yield savings account where I keep my prize money, our down payment for a dream house near a beach. But he’d live in it alone because I was going to die. I hadn’t decided between jumping into one of the gorges surrounding our new home in Ithaca (so known for its high suicide rates that there are nets in them to stall a leap), or swallowing handfuls of pills while the drugs took me away from myself.

I’d text my family that I loved them, leave a note for my husband; I am not, intentionally, a monster: “It was never your fault. You are as close to perfect as I can imagine, and I’m sorry I am not.”

I’d wander lonely as a ghost, remorseful for my ingratitude while alive. I had the appearance of having it all: Ivy League teaching gig, named professorship, successful debut book, long tour, a few prizes, fancy dresses, gizmos and gadgets galore, a new tax bracket, lots of Instagrammable content. I possessed a lot—just not a life without the casual and blatant racism and misogynoir and ableism directed at a chronically ill black woman living and working in predominantly white spaces.

Depression says that if I were more grateful, did more yoga poses, took more magnesium, pushed myself more, I’d be better. Depression is a white supremacist, a malignant narcissist, a rape apologist, a gaslighter, Iago, a sadist, a masochist, a hot Lego underfoot, a mind made hell. No amount of privilege, or gratitude, could undo these incurable, chronic diseases.

*

I ended my 2018 essay about endometriosis in The Paris Review Daily excited about excision surgery with a top specialist and the prospect of getting a new life. But while each surgery removes disease, it leaves behind scar tissue. In the long game, repeated surgical treatment is a tautology, a logical fallacy, and the hormonal treatment a farce; it can cause osteoporosis and symptoms mimicking multiple sclerosis. My symptoms are as bad now as they were when I wrote that essay: flooding periods that put The Shining to shame, clots the shapes and sizes of large U.S. states, lower back pain that feels like an ongoing colonoscopy without any of the drugs, chronic fatigue on top of the amount of Chronic I take. I fear I might never, ever come down, and I also fear each time I do that I won’t come up again.

Few of my current treatments are the same. Now I take two antidepressants; Lyrica (a nerve drug typically prescribed for fibromyalgia); the maximum dose of medical cannabis the state of New York will allow; liothyronine for my newly diagnosed hypothyroidism; ketamine and lidocaine creams; and a host of suppositories. My vagina and rectum have tried more party drugs than I ever could have imagined. Multiple times a day I pump them with ketamine, NSAIDs, Valium with a muscle relaxant, and cannabis suppositories, which aren’t worth the burning diarrhea.

On the bright side, I am lubed up and chilled out at nearly all times. On the dimmer side are the costs.

Financial: $800 a month in weed, gas to and from Syracuse weekly (my husband drives while I sing to drown out the sounds of my sorrow); and a monthly trip to NYC ($90 roundtrip on the Ithaca Platinum Bus, plus the cost of a decent hotel stay) to see a specialist who, while lovely, sticks more things into my butt, stomach, and thighs (and I have, reluctantly, relented to injections in my vulva and now, from a new pain management doctor, additional shots around my spine), injections that work on my hypersensitive nerves. None of these is a cure, each a mere holdover until the next surgery.

Emotional: Every time we drive the hour to the dispensary, I know they will tell me I can barely have any more medication. And I know I’ll have to temper my rage into something eloquent that will get me my drugs instead of a head bashing from the security guard.

Relational: I would like the physical and emotional bandwidth it takes to be the big spoon, at least sometimes. I would like to not be a crying, leaking, fainting thing, carted off to bed each night because once my night meds (nightamins) interact and the witching hour strikes, I’m deadweight, dross on my husband’s neck, a wilted toddler draped over his arms.

Miscellaneous:  I’m skinny again, nearly back to my presurgeries weight, but even the weight loss is a lie. It—twenty pounds since July—is the result of hypothyroid treatment, stress starving, and digestive issues: nausea that keeps me from eating, sometimes for days, and constipation that prevents what little I eat from leaving my body.

Reputational: Despite their reassurances, I worry that my new colleagues will think I’m simply burned out from a year of so many highs, or from overcommitting to the many things I feared I couldn’t turn down because I was just happy to be in the room, and what if no one ever asks me for anything ever again, because as a recovered token, I know how quickly I may be laundered and replaced. I am trying, however, to sit down before I get sat down, before I become that sorry ghost. Aretaeus of Cappadocia calls the uterus “an animal within an animal,” a “living thing inside a living thing.” Mine is a dead thing inside a thing trying (not) to die.

So I’m scheduling a hysterectomy in addition to what I hope is a final search-and-destroy excision surgery. I’ve requested medical leave. Who will I be without a uterus, without one of the diseases that has occupied so much of my time? I have suffered nearly three hundred periods, starting from age eleven. Now my blood will dry up like a raisin in the sun, dreams deferred, yes, but a life sweetened, possibly?

I have resisted hysterectomy on two principles, my age and history. I have resisted because of the oversterilization of black women (who have the highest rates of unnecessary hysterectomies). I have resisted because modern gynecology was founded on the torture of my ancestors, used at the whims of a sado-racist who tore apart the bodies of enslaved black women and children like wishbones. His name, though it shouldn’t matter, was James Marion Sims. He forced archaic devices into black women and loosened the skulls of black babies with fish tools, and the many statues and monuments to him have only moved around, eulogizing the source of grief rather than the aggrieved.

If I store my uterus in a jar, like a talisman for the posterity I won’t create, I may pour formaldehyde libations for my foremothers, the wombless women; for Henrietta Lacks; for Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey, the few named victims of Sims, though they all had names. For Saartjie Baartman and the trans and nonbinary people paraded around for science, on social media, by a society of spectacle, by virality. For my black, indigenous, POC trans and nonbinary folks with endo, for whom treatment and bureaucracy are extra, extra complicated. For those detained by the U.S. government at the border, without hygiene, many of whom live with endo and cannot access medications, let alone compassion. For the incarcerated women who have woken to find themselves sterilized without consent. For the uninsured and undiagnosed, I empathize, and, after I have put on my own mask, I hope to increase my activism around reproductive and insurance justice.

My surgery is scheduled, research conducted, but not too much research. The mind does not need to know all the ways it can hurt; I already know too many. Even after the surgery, I’ll need to monitor my mental health. I may need hormone-replacement therapy, may lose my ovaries or need a bowel resection. Endo may still grow back. I may end up worse off, prolapsed, a ghost of a ghost, a dead thing inside a dead thing at last.

But maybe, too, what if  I get my life back? My friends can throw me a “Yellow Wallpaper” party and we can alternately dance and scream-cry and creep along the baseboards, eating crumbs of paste and actual cake, with gluten.

If I leave behind a literary legacy, I want it to be one of ethics, of irony and wit. Not that I died like one of my characters. A good story, I tell my students, often ends with a gut punch, a punchline, or beautiful lyricism. Let mine, I pray, end only with the latter, and not too soon.

 

Read Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s earlier essay on chronic illness here.  

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, and other publications. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize; was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize; and has won the PEN Open Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and an Audie Award. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. She currently works as an assistant professor of creative writing at Cornell University.

 

Trains

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It ran every Friday in November, and returns this winter month, then will again in the spring and summer.  

Photo by Indie Talbot, train tracks at the Dallas Station in 2013

Trains thundered through that town, behind the woods that bordered our backyard. I’d stand at the kitchen sink and watch out the window, catching only flashes of the cars through crowded branches. I envied the train’s travel, imagined some town down the line and wondered if I’d been there before. It always felt as if I had. Those trains rumbling through northern New York all passed by midmorning, leaving the afternoon to rest quiet in their absence. I remember snow falling in diagonal lines, the woods silver-gray.

My daughter, Indie, liked to wander those woods behind the house we rented. She would have been ten or eleven then, her blonde hair a bob. She’d take a backpack and a walking stick with her, and I’d open the back door and call after her, remind her to watch the time, the light, and in winter, the snow’s depth. She’d turn and wave as the woods drew a curtain behind her. Once she came back to tell me about a pond with beaver dams, and another day she stomped snow from her boots in the breezeway while sharing her discovery: railroad tracks.

Not long after she was born in February of 2002, her father began searching online for an old truck. The truck idea was a part of a slow shift, like the guitar he learned to play, the thick beard he grew, the flannel shirts he started ironing before leaving for his maintenance job at a resort, where a woman in the event-planning office paid him just enough attention. When he found a blue 1978 Chevy C20 Bonanza with a white camper, he caught the Amtrak in Denver and rode it to King Street in Seattle. It took him almost two days to get there, longer to drive back. When he called from the station in Washington, he sounded far away, but not the kind of far I could measure by miles.

During those summer days in Boulder while he was gone, Indie rocked in her swing to Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits while I sat on our balcony reading Door Wide Open, a collection of letters between Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson written from March 1957 to November 1958. While I read, I kept the balcony door open, the screen door shut. From out there, everything appeared in shadow: the futon against the wall, the CD player on top of the TV, the back and forth of the swing, even the calendar on the kitchen wall, the one with trains in black-and-white. I remember staring into the apartment, feeling as if I were looking at a photograph of something that would soon end, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I knew before I knew, I was already looking back.

While Johnson waited in her Village apartment for Jack to come and go, and Jack dashed off postcards from Mexico City and Orlando and San Francisco, I realized I had my own Kerouac running rails and riding roads to places I still haven’t been. And then Indie’s father came home one morning long to enough to say he was going. It was that sudden. And for the rest of that year, I left the numbered boxes on the calendar blank. I couldn’t bear to record any of those days, to name them. Every month I flipped the calendar to find another train before me, still. I’d stare at each one, wonder how time kept moving.

I don’t like to write about Indie’s father. I’ve done enough of that. But in this last year together at home, before Indie leaves for college, he is noticeably absent. She and I talk about him now and then. It’s as if he’s a man we saw once, missing a train. A stranger left behind at the station.

In 2013, Indie and I took the Amtrak from Chicago, where we lived that year, to Dallas to visit my parents. Neither of us had been on a train before, and we loved rocking along, stopping at the small brick stations, seeing passengers shuffle on the platform. After twenty stations across four states, I was surprised to realize we were riding the stretch of tracks that ran behind my parents’ house, the house I had lived in since I was nine. How mysterious it felt to watch the streets I knew so well from the window of a train. As if I had never been there before.

The other day I found a calendar in a box from 2010. “Classic Trains,” twelve steam engine locomotives. I was confused by the year because I thought it was the calendar that had hung in our kitchen in Utah. That would have been 2006. I bought it because I had checked myself into a rehab center outside Salt Lake City on December 9, 2005, after wine became a route I took too often. Indie stayed with a very kind family, friends, until I returned during the first days of January and bought the calendar. Many of my fellow patients were railroad workers, men who rode trains in the middle of the night. For months after we all got out, a couple of them would call every other week or so from a train. If there’s a sound to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, I have heard it through the phone. I wish I still had the voice mail from the mustachioed hay-farmer-turned-railroad-worker, the message he left the exact hour (3 AM) of Indie’s fourth birthday. I remember every word: “Jill, it’s your ol’ pal, Andy. I’m riding the rails through some field in Oregon, but I’m going to break the rules and sound the four whistles for Indie’s birthday. I love ya, Jill.” And then the whistles sounded—one after another—as lonesome as I imagine we all can be sometimes. That was the last time I heard Andy’s voice.

In Texas in the middle of the night, the train whines beyond the woods outside my bedroom window. I turn over, half asleep, and sink into the sound of passing through, of going and gone, the four-whistle warning. Here, about forty miles from Dallas, the trains sing through every hour.

In his first novel, The Town and the City, Kerouac writes, “Suddenly there was the rumbling of the train coming … the giant engine overtopped them passing in a tremendous flare … It was time, time … the train … moving, moving.”

This last year with Indie is a thundering train.

The woods of what’s to come a curtain.

Listen, there’s the train now.

 

Read earlier installments of  The Last Year  here.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by the Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.

They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Lionel Messi. Photo: David Ramos.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You’re in one place, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you’ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on—you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting—is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate you. The pontificators and the screamers have their say. Some of us have no interest in you, but the simulacrum makes sure we know who you are. We parse from all of this what we consider pleasure: love, hate, indifference. You’re standing in one place, one patch of grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. A ball floats in the air toward you. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places. Your name is stamped between your shoulder blades. You turn your back away from the ball. We all know who you are. You balance yourself and focus. What you’re about to do has no name.

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The Empty Room

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

The more empty the photograph, the more it implies horror. The void that dominates an empty photograph is the site of past human activity. It presents itself as a hole in the middle of the picture. The beds, tables, chairs, lamps are not the subject; they are the boundary. Some empty images tease the eye, suggesting clues that may dissolve upon closer examination. More often the scene is as near to a blank canvas as it can be without fading into nothingness. But then we, as habituated viewers, tend to brush a dramatic gloss upon such pictures. What we see cannot be as perfectly banal as it seems. The lighting and composition awaken unconscious memories of crime-scene photos; the drama comes from what is missing. It’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes’s dog who did not bark. What is missing is an apparent reason for the picture to have been taken.

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