The Paris Review's Blog, page 195

Nellie Oleson, C’est Moi

Nellie Oleson, as played by Alison Arngrim

I only have one insight about the Little House TV series, so I’m just gonna get it out of the way up front here. It’s this: Nellie Oleson made that show. I don’t just mean the character is an essential part of the show’s success. I mean Nellie Oleson wrote the original books and most of the scripts for the TV program. She directed most of the episodes, and, for the most part, she was the audience.

I am saying: you and I and Ronald Reagan and possibly Saddam Hussein and definitely Michael Landon—were Nellie Oleson.

Put down that gun. Sorry, put down that frontier rifle. Hear me out. Let’s start on a very basic, noncontroversial level.

The books came out in the thirties and early forties. The woman who wrote them, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was in her midsixties when the first one dropped. Her case is well documented. She did live more or less like she describes in those novels, and so she had the luxury of being able to traffic in billions of authentic details. And the novels were a big hit. For forty or fifty years, everybody read ’em. (Except me—’til a couple months ago.)

In the books, Nellie is not a very important character. She isn’t even introduced ’til the fourth book in the series (On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937).

 

 

When she is introduced, we are treated to a heavy dose of … well, it’s not exactly satire. Neither is it unhinged loathing. The author coolly does on the page just exactly what the creators of the show did on the screen, i.e. created a character medically incapable of any decent sentiment or act. Nellie relentlessly strives to serve her own basest impulses, especially to dominate and to sneer.

 

 

In drawing Nellie like that, the author was prosecuting a revenge against an actual enemy from her childhood. In other words, the point of view that condemned Nellie for being petty and self-serving was itself petty and self-serving. Or let me put it this way: to imagine that another person lives to antagonize you and your interests, to imagine that another person’s every utterance is (and must be) a rigmarole of self-righteousness and vituperation—this is the telltale sign of a mentality very like Nellie’s. Only a Nellie would write something like that.

Now do you see why I say Nellie wrote those books and scripts? And the fact that you got off on it when Laura slapped Nellie, the fact that that was cathartic for you, tells you a lot about your own blonde curls and doll-hoarding and self-righteousness. Don’t feel singled out, though. I’m right there with you, sister. We all are.

One of these days, you should have a look at Alison Arngrim’s memoir of that period of her life, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (2010). (Arngrim played Nellie, obviously.)

 

 

As far as I can see, the actress doesn’t have a drop of insight into the meaning of the character she did so much to bring to life. Indeed, she blesses Nellie for showing her, Alison, how to stand up for herself. Or something. Just the same, there is plenty to be learned from the book, if you know what to look for.

Consider. The show was not actually that great. Almost all the actors were colorless mediocrities, and the scripts were drivel (fake problems, fake solutions). And no actor on the show was worse served by those scripts than Arngrim. She doesn’t say this in the book; I’m saying it, having watched a bunch of episodes recently. She has no good lines. Every single word out of her mouth has to be smug, witless, and mean. But! Something about Arngrim’s particular face and voice created a tormenting blend of contrary electromagnetic impulses. She was vilely repellant, and at the same time mysteriously compelling.

I’m quite unwilling to credit this to acting talent, yet when I ask myself if any teenager in a blonde wig could do what Arngrim did, I find myself hesitating. Maybe there is some gift involved? But if there is, it’s not present in that memoir. There, she is mainly a hearty, wise-cracking, self-appointed “camp” goddess. Not Nellie—just somebody you might know from work.

The writers were Nellie. Look, if Laura and her adopted brother (whose name escapes me) go into a neighboring town and pretend to be orphans to cheat people out of money, the show handles the scene like it’s Huck Finn. If Nellie and her brother, Willie, did the exact same thing, it would be painted as villainy—and they would botch it, get caught, have to throw someone else under the bus to escape punishment, et cetera. Because that’s how the Nellie writer-mentality operates. The “good” people can do no wrong, even when they do wrong. And the wicked are never just wicked—they are also fools.

When I go home these days, I pass through a time portal. My mother and I sit just where we did in 1974–83, when the show was still being shot. Little House practically has its own channel now. I sit there, marveling at how little I remember from the episodes. I, who seem to remember all the episodes of M*A*S*H verbatim! Also: Family Ties, and whatever that show was that was set at a girls’ school, they all wore uniforms, and there was a token black girl, Tootie, and her friend was Natalie, and Blair was the tall, good-looking one. Jo was the tough one. God, what the hell was that thing called? The Facts of Life.

Listen, I can recount plots of those and a hundred other shows from the seventies and early eighties, but I couldn’t remember a single line from any of the Little House episodes, though I saw all of ’em many times. When, in preparation for writing this piece, I was reading Melissa Sue Anderson’s memoir (The Way I See It, 2010)—80 percent of which consists of plot summaries of famous episodes—I remembered exactly nothing.

 

 

Oh, but I remember Nellie Oleson. I remember her, and she remembers me.

But then, when I emerge from the time portal, squinting, shielding my eyes from the glare, I am confused. The philosopher has led me out of the cave animated by mere shadows, into the daylight of reality. And what do I find? Nellie Oleson is running the country now.

 

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is Try Never. He is a correspondent for the Daily.

Staring at a Digital Black Hole

Tehran skyline

On the morning of November 16, 2019, we, the exiled Iranians, woke up and like billions of other internet addicts in the world immediately checked our phones, only to realize that Iran had been cut off from the global internet.

Many of us are members of family group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, used to receiving a “good morning to my children” from a parent, a “did you finally go to the doctor?” from the other parent, a picture of the overdue first snow in Tehran from an aunt, and a joke about the president from an uncle. Over the years, these short messages have served as daily reminders of where we come from and who our people are. Above all, they have been our daily reassurance that our families were fine. The internet had functioned as the umbilical cord that kept alive the part of our soul still dependent on the motherland. That morning, the cord was cut.

*

The internet blackout, we learned, was the Iranian government’s response to the protests that broke out after it announced a 300 percent increase in the price of gas. The decision was made and implemented at midnight, with no advance warning given.

Thanks to the state of Iran under sanctions, the news of the price hike was like a lit match in a barrel of dynamite. Protests spread very wide, very fast. The protesters moved beyond the gas price issue to target the entire status quo. The Iranian government let loose its police and militia. The crisis became so deep and so serious, the bloodshed so vast and the heap of corpses so high, that the government cut off the internet to keep people from organizing and to stifle the distribution of videos of its brutality, which included numerous instances of indiscriminate shooting at unarmed protesters.

For us, the Iranians abroad, desperate and in the dark, the savagery was nothing new. Everyone who has paid attention to Iran, a country beleaguered by ruthlessness of sanctions and brutalized by its own vicious, paranoid government, expected an explosion of violence. But the internet blackout came out of nowhere. None of us had ever thought that one day Iran would become a digital black hole, a dark void on the blindingly glittering map of the global network. We found ourselves locked out of the house whose windows, we had thought, we would always be able to look through.

*

Because of what I have published in this hemisphere, I might be persona non grata in my own country. Not that anybody has bothered to notify me. On this matter, the government in Iran takes pains to deny you the pleasure of certainty. But a rule-of-thumb assessment of my situation suggests that, at this point, the risk of being arrested upon reentry would far outweigh the benefits of going home. Like thousands of other Iranians, I have come to terms with my status as an exiled person.

When I was first coming to terms with this, one chilly spring morning I biked down to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. It had rained the night before, and the dew on the grass formed a vast, sparkling gossamer web over the cemetery hills. I trudged up an incline past some graves, reading a date here, a name there, sometimes conjuring up a little biography for the bones lying under the stone.

I had gone there because I had felt the need to think through all the potential tragedies and disasters that might transpire during my absence from Iran: deaths in the family, deaths of close friends in jail, deaths in accidents, from cancer, in protests. I thought of the faces of those who would die and imagined the circumstances of their deaths, masochistically exaggerating the amount of pain or shock they would have to endure. Then I imagined myself in the moment of receiving the news, what I would say on the other end of the phone, what I would do after hanging up, two hours later, two days later. When you are an exiled person, you have to think up methods of mourning from afar, strategies for dealing with the crushing loneliness of grieving a soul no one around you has ever met.

I left the cemetery drained and distressed, but at least I thought that I had covered all the grounds. At no point during those macabre few hours did the notion of an internet blackout cross my mind. I could never imagine that one morning everybody would disappear from the screen, as though a richly detailed hallucination had come to an end, and that I might never be told of their deaths at all.

And yet, what I experienced as nothing less than apocalyptic was in fact the norm for people until very recently. Throughout history, billions of people have left their homelands and have been cut off from family and friends for months, sometimes years at a time. Maddening as it was, the blackout confronted me with how the internet has hooked me. Even in that time of distress, I pledged to chip away at that dependence.

*

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard generated a great deal of controversy over the course of his career, in part because he was writing about the internet before it existed. In his book Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he declared the arrival of a new era of representation. He believed that the new media, by which he primarily meant cable TV, had ceased to care about reality. Rather, equipped with new technologies, it engaged in “generation by the models of real without origin of reality: a hyperreal.” Which is to say, the TV could create an image of reality more real than reality itself. This hyperreality, in its two-dimensional display of lights, was so compelling, he contended, that people would choose it over what they could feel and perceive in the world. “The map precedes the territory,” Baudrillard wrote. Or perhaps more accurately, the map creates the territory while pretending to be a representation of the territory.

Baudrillard’s theory might have seemed too bleak to be plausible for the pre-internet world, hence the backlash from old-school humanists like the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. At the end of Baudrillard’s famous talk about the Iraq war, Vargas Llosa thought of approaching his old friend, but he changed his mind: “I didn’t go up to say hello or to remind him of the bygone days of our youth, when ideas and books excited us and he still believed we existed.”

And yet for us, two decades into the new millennium, living on this warming, crisis-ridden planet at the mercy of tech billionaires, the notion of hyperreality sounds perfectly commonsense. It is a fairly accurate description of how our realities are constructed online.

*

Probably no one in this world is more susceptible to hyperreality than the exiled. In their yearning for the homeland, they plunge into the country they find on their phones. Many displaced people, especially if they are from tumultuous places like Iran, spend an inordinate amount of time with their devices. Their bodies move around in American space, their feet traverse American asphalt, yet their soul is in the tiny computer they carry in their pockets. They follow every single conversation on Twitter, look at every picture on Instagram, check out the trends, constantly engage in the comments sections. The hyperreality is so thorough that it is easy to forget where you actually are.

On my social media, the response from the Iranian diaspora during the blackout reflected this disconnect from the bodily experience. My timeline was filled with “We miss you! Please come back!” tweets, as if those 280 characters could substitute for flesh and warmth. In the ‘real” world, those 280 characters provide new data points for the surveillance of our lives while making the Marks and Jeffs of the world wealthier. When the internet was finally reconnected, the exiled Iranians used a popular hashtag, roughly translated as #WhenYouWereNotHere, to tell their former countrymen what had happened online in their absence. And yet we were the ones who were not there. While we whined on Twitter, the difficult reality of our friends and family on the ground continued on without us.

Monitoring your homeland from afar is like watching a live broadcast of a surgery. You can grasp all the details, absorb all the information, take notes, and then talk through it with others for hours, but none of that makes you a surgeon. When you haven’t cut open skin with your hands, touched the organs, soaked your plastic gloves in blood, it is a joke to think you know the first thing about surgery.

*

In 2019, living off the grid seems like a naive fantasy. Especially for us, citizens of fragile states like Iran, to remain in the dark would be too painful. But, as we learned in mid-November, the internet can be shut down in a blink. We are dependent on a system that functions at the whim of unaccountable private companies and governments.

Is there a way to strike a balance? If there is, I can’t find it. I am incapable of separating my life in exile from the hyperreality of my homeland. I continue to look at the map, even though I know my feet never touch the soil of the real terrain. The map will not show me a way home, but at least I can make sure, every morning, that those I love are still alive.

 

Amir Ahmadi Arian’s essays and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. His novel, Then the Fish Swallowed Him, is forthcoming from HarperVia in March 2020. 

Redux: Credible Threats That Appear and Disappear Like Clockwork

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.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of the Winter issue. Read on for three archive pieces written by contributors to our new issue: an excerpt from Georges Perec’s novel A Man Asleep, a selection from Jeffrey Yang and Kazumi Tanaka’s collaboration “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home,” and Rae Armantrout’s poem “Now See.”

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.

 

from A Man Asleep

By Georges Perec

Issue no. 116 (Fall 1990)

You are sitting, naked from the waist up, wearing only pajama bottoms, in your garret, on the narrow bench that serves as your bed, with a book. Raymond Aron’s Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, resting on your knees, open at page one-hundred and twelve.

At first it’s just a sort of lassitude or tiredness, as if you suddenly became aware that for a long time, for several hours, you have been succumbing to an insidious, numbing discomfort, not exactly painful but nonetheless intolerable, succumbing to the sickly-sweet and stifling sensation of being without muscles or bones, of being a sack of potatoes surrounded by other sacks of potatoes.

 

 

from “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home”

By Jeffrey Yang and Kazumi Tanaka

Issue no. 221 (Summer 2017)

 

 

 

Now See

By Rae Armantrout

Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

Don’t worry.

We have armies

of showrunners

writing our dreams,

ones where we’re featured

as skilled apparatchiks

facing credible threats

that appear and disappear

like clockwork,

leaving no apparent

damage …

 

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

A Letter from New York

In 1939, three years after leaving the Tuskegee Institute, Ralph Ellison regained contact with his close friend Joe Lazenberry, a Tuskegee classmate whom Ellison had presumed deceased. The following, a reply to a letter from Lazenberry, is the fullest account Ellison wrote of his time spent in New York; Dayton, Ohio; and again in New York after leaving school. It is a factual and meditative version of both his life and the development of his mind in his midtwenties.

Ralph Ellison. Photo: United States Information Agency staff photographer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

To Joe Lazenberry

New York

April 18, 1939

Dear Joe:

You have no idea how glad I was to hear from you again. I mailed the card in spite of having been informed that you were deceased, like Mark Twain, and I assure you that more than mentally my heart was in my mouth. It was like this: I happen to know a girl from St. Paul, Zelma Jackson, who gave me this information with a very positive assurance that it was true. I didn’t know what to think; she was positive and I couldn’t accept. I started to write your mother but decided that it would be too painful; after all the damn gal might have known what she was talking about. Well, I thought, that guy couldn’t leave without giving me a chance to cuss him out for failing to answer my letters, he’s bad, but not that bad. Then last month I wrote Rabb asking him about you and he answered that if you were dead it was only from the neck up. So with that hope I sent out the feeler. I am glad we are no longer out of contact. I suppose it takes some such incident as this to make one realize you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry. I’ve known a slew of people since the Tuskegee days Joe but none I would rather have as a friend—and alive.

In broad outline it is surprising how similar the patterns of our lives have been. The following brief list of events will explain what I mean.

As you will remember, 1936 found me working for the psychoanalyst about whom I wrote you. Incidentally you might get an idea of the type of research they wished to have you do by reading After Freedom, the new book by Hortense Pondermaker who is an associate of Sullivan and much affected by his school of thought. Anyway, the job ended in Jan. ’37 and I went to work in a paint laboratory, testing paint for the father of one of the patients whose friendship I had made while at Sullivan’s. Only Negro in lab. incurring much wrath. Saved little money and stuck it out until July when bad tonsils and the desire to take part in the Spanish conflict made it necessary for me to leave. Bad tonsils out and by Aug had applied for passport. So many fellows going without much money that State Department had become suspicious. Department agents examined me, trying to crack my story, but lied out of it, making it necessary that they use technicality of my limited funds to keep me this side the Atlantic. Somewhat set back by this; the bastards waited until the morning I was to have sailed to investigate. Decided to try a tramp steamer to Mexico and thence to Spain. Took part in strike, picketing with union at a time when scabs had to be carried to and from the boats under the protection of a squad of New York’s Finest, and there were goons.

I kept this up, my funds growing short and my pride long, sleeping in the Harlem office of the Daily Worker, eating at the home of friends who paid my transportation to meals and away, until October when I received word that my mother was very ill in Cinn. Went there. Lost her the day after I arrived. After funeral went to Dayton where she and my brother had made home about time I left South. Had to wait there for insurance to pay off. Funds faded, that General Motor’s town without work, plants having closed down. Hunted with a friend all season shooting quail and rabbits, the quail illegally, which got old for food. This was all well and good as long as the season lasted. But then Dec. came and with it ice and hunger. Friend’s wife, already the mother of three, became pregnant with child she could not bear lost her mental balance. Thought brothers were receiving charity from husband when it was really the other way around since we had given him our last funds to pay her physician. She insisted that we move—perhaps we were absorbing too much heat. We did. Snow on ground. Wind. Ice. Slept in his old Ford sedan in garage, slipping in after 12 in the darkness up to which time we loafed in pool halls, lobby of Y.M.C.A. Lived on doughnuts, milk which brother was able to charge at store where Mother had traded. Finally he got keys to tailor shop where he had once worked. Warm there, steam all night. Slept on coats piled on floor. About this time I helped fellow in cafe with his social security reports and on strength of this and the insurance money it seemed we would never receive, he allowed us to run up a bill. This lasted till latter part of Feb. when money did arrive. Left there, and my brother, who likes the dam place, on Mar 2 for NYC. Lived with white friends off Central Park, regaining faith in human nature. Looked for work. No work. Met wife at friend’s house. Led with my chin. No jobs. Relief and W.P.A. Lived in sin for seven months, then civil ceremony. Still on W.P.A. and despite of what the bastards in Congress say, there are still no jobs. Not even at this horses ass of a Worlds Fair!

Hope you can find your way through all this Joe. It is important only because it is a sort of rough blueprint of my maturing. I had lost my friendship with W. B. W. [Walter B. Williams, a librarian at Tuskegee who befriended Ralph and is mentioned in Ralph’s 1930s letters to his mother] because of my political views—of all things—in the winter of ’36 but the Dayton experience tested these views and made for strength to survive through it without bitterness. I came back to the city with a sort of strength, a feeling of lyrical self-confidence. Not a feeling that this was the best of all possible worlds, but I could survive no matter what the circumstances.

I suppose the very fact that I got married proves something unusual happened. It took nerve for a broke guy to go after my wife in the manner in which I did. She is a former member of Black Birds, the 1929 version, which she joined at fifteen and went to Europe. She left show in Berlin and toured the continent for six years, leading a band and singing, returning here in ’35. Has broadcasted and worked nightclubs and Broadway shows, etc. Is not an intellectual, but possesses a sensitive intelligence, looks well, cooks well, and is skillful at all those things a man is interested in finding in the woman he marries—and this statement is no mere compensation. Most of all Joe, she’s politically alive, thanks to having been present when Hitler entered Vienna; is no respecter of bourgeois conventions, being both politically alive and an actress, and possesses a good supply of what is called, “guts,” a quality very necessary these days. Damn! It sounds like bragging to me; don’t it? Forgive me the heat of my blood, the mist of mine eyes, the lyricism of my groom-hood.

But you Joe! How the hell did you bring yourself to marry after the disillusionment of Tuskegee? I respected your moods and opinions more mature than mine, and thus more preeminent than mine in those days, and as a result I believed you would never have the confidence to marry. I’m dam glad to know it wasn’t true. I’m glad you weren’t so certain of things, for now I’ve come to suspect people whose grasp of the world is such that they solve all contradictions, all problems so soon. I hope some day that we’ll meet the girl. Was there anyone who saw things in their correct perspective in the twisted environment of Tuskegee—unless it was you Parker, and myself, who were aided and sustained by lemon juice and the liquor of the moment? I think not. Where is that guy? I’ll never forget the time he purchased Ceeley Williams for me and my surprise that it could be so tight. Then there was the time we went to a gambling joint and he almost got in a fight—I won’t forget that either.

*

Tuesday, April 25th, 1939.

It seems, Joe, that I can never finish anything these days without interruptions; even when it is rushed as this is. After reading the first two pages I think you had better send me a list of questions so that I might clear up any confusions.

The idea of your trip sounds swell from certain angles of vision. After the romanticism of the attempted Russian venture, however, I wonder if the possibilities that occur to me are the same that makes it so attractive to you. Incidentally, I have been talking of a trip to Mexico for some time, but of course there is the money angle. Wright, too, who has just won a Guggenheim fellowship, is thinking in the same channels. Perhaps I should explain the statement concerning Russia. To have entered in such a manner would have resulted in almost certain imprisonment. You, my friend, would have been taken for a spy. Since the widespread sabotage and wrecking which resulted in the recent trials, it has been extremely difficult to enter the U.S.S.R. through the regular channels. The Russians would have thought that their enemies, knowing of their friendliness to American Negroes, had resorted to sending you as a capitalist wolf in naive sheep’s clothing. Why don’t you try through official channels? Go back to the trip. It seems to me that with your knowledge of sociology that it would provide excellent opportunities for research. Something more scientific and more penetrating than the things done by Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell and others, who have offered indignation and pity rather than analysis—even though I think the camera and text have combined to give a picture lush with implications and of undoubted social and artistic value. No one has approached Negro life in this manner and it seems a fertile field. No doubt a publisher would jump at such a book. About Mexico I think that here too, you could do a valuable piece of work. When considered from the point of view that the cultural and economic condition of the two peoples are so very similar, it becomes astonishing that there is practically no contact between them; no one interested in interpreting each to the other. Langston Hughes knows the language but fails to see the important job he could perform, he has no vision in this direction. If we are ever to attain independence in the Black belt, or rather, if that independence comes to depend upon armed uprising, then these people will be our logical allies; their history is such that they could not help but be sympathetic, could not help but offering some help. They are fighting now for their independence from American capitalists and in time—if they keep their present political direction—they will be come an important factor for democracy in the Americas. You might perform an important job without becoming involved with anybody’s politics; the facts and the nature of the material is such that it would not be necessary. Of course this takes money, but living is cheap in Mexico. There is also the possibility that you might obtain a job teaching there. I am told that sociologists etc. are needed. No doubt they would jump at the implications of having an American Negro working with them.

You say you plan to “enjoy to the hilt what this life has to offer to two individuals etc.” Malraux in his Man’s Hope has a character who has been put the question “how can one best make the best of one’s life” answer: “By converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought.” Conscious thought has a way of leading to action. In fact the action is the consciousness—unless one is a fool or a knave, or both. Be that as it may, I believe in the answer and as I remember you I think you will agree.

One should live at the height of his time intellectually, one should be able to pick apart every experience, examine it and relate it to his whole world-view. In short a man should possess his experiences and not be possessed by them. Such thought becomes creative. And these times of social consciousness the resulting action is likely to become social action. This is rough as hell but likely as not you know what I’m trying to say even better than I do myself. Now: Today life in the U.S., seems to offer some pretty bitter experiences, so much so that, unless you’re rich, for the believer in democracy it offers only disillusionment; so much so that through all strata of our population you find people forging weapons to protect themselves: labor unions, C.I.O. and the League of American Writers etc. The intellectual has fared no better than the worker. His world has become one of social action. To live life to the hilt as you put it has come to mean living with an alertness to the social forces operating in the world today; there is no escape, nor through art nor through literature—just finished Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—nor through music. What I’m trying to say, Joe, is that if you take the trip do by all means take it “to the hilt,” deep and wide but then convert it to conscious thought; make a book of it. A mocking bird sang each night on the post office building at Tuskegee, in the moonlight and shadows scented with honeysuckle. It made an impression on me. One summer I helped you make a survey of a cooperative farm a few blocks from America’s largest Negro school, where people who could not read or write worked bare-foot in the Alabama sun. This too, made an impression, though a bewildering one. At that time I believe I put the more value upon the moonlight and mocking birds; now it is the other experience that has become the more meaningful. Conscious thought has converted it into an impulse to creation; in these times it is the positive reality. One sucks experience through the body into the mind and there makes something of it to change, improve the realities from which the experience came. You are certainly lucky to have a wife who will go along with you. Older Negro women had the pioneering spirit, even one of adventure, but the younger crop reach too readily for the shadow of Security, perhaps it should be SECURITY. The two of you should be able to influence the consciousness of the entire next generation of Negroes.

It is that that we here are attempting to do. At present it is still unformed organizationally, but the consciousness is here. Wright already has one book and another to be published in the fall. Theodore Ward has Big White Fog that was produced in Chi., and is working on another. I am mapping a novel of the Negro college. I believe, Joe, that all Negro institutions should be examined and exposed for what they are in the light of world events. It will be muckraking of a sort, but we hope, constructive in its very power to disintegrate. Perhaps there won’t be an organization but we will have a group in contact with one another who know what they are about, the direction in which they are traveling. Frankly, we are angry; but not so much so that we can’t see. The standards are high—Wright is rated with Hemingway, is an important figure in the League of American Writers. We have overcome the cultural and intellectual isolation that has been characteristic of Negro writers. Let me know what you think of it and I’ll go into it more fully next time. I guess I’ve written enough to start you to debating, then the both of us shall discover what the other has been thinking these last years. Perhaps you’ve done a book—how the hell would I know? My best wishes to Mrs. Leroy Francis Lazenberry and success to you both.

Ralph

 

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) was born in Oklahoma and trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936, at which time a visit to New York and a meeting with Richard Wright led to his first attempts at fiction. Invisible Man won the National Book Award. Appointed to the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 1964, Ellison taught at several institutions, including Bard College, the University of Chicago, and New York University, where he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities.

Excerpted from The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison , copyright © 2019 by The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust, reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency.

The Silence of Witches

Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

Edmund DuLac, illustration for The Little Mermaid, 1911

I have a dream my mother is standing at my front door crying. Her hair is wet and tangled in seashells. She’s read a story I’ve written. “How could you,” she says. “Your own mother.” She opens her coat and out march my husband, his daughters, my brothers, my sons, my father. I try to run away but they catch me by the collar. “How could you, how could you, how could you?” they chant. “Your very own mother! Your very own us!” I’ll stop writing. I’m sorry. And I do. I stop forever, and instantly my lips and hands are dotted with mold. White threads spread across my face where mushrooms begin to swell. I grow wild with silence.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” says my mother. “Forget it. Enough with the drama.”

“But my silence is real,” writes Maurice Blanchot. “If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.”

Of all the silences in fairy tales, the most pronounced is the Little Mermaid’s. For a potion that will turn her into a human, she pays the sea witch with her tongue. In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” the sea witch lives where no flowers or sea grass grow, where “all the trees and bushes were polyps, half animals and half plants.” It’s the sea witch’s silence, her exile, her house built from the bones of shipwrecked humans, the toad feeding out of her mouth, and the snakes sprawled like illegible cursive “about her great spongy bosom” that is the silence of poets. It’s Blanchot’s silence. It’s the silence of outsiders and mothers. Once kept it will run ahead, and wait for all of us to catch up. And as it waits, it will grow.

The Little Mermaid’s silence is the silence of children. But the sea witch’s silence is the silence of an old woman with a story no one will ever know. The first silence is soft and lovesick and melancholy like sea foam. The second silence surrounds you like water surrounds a drowning woman, transparent and cruel.

It’s been a difficult year. My stepdaughter moved in for seven months and then moved out. She left Mavis, her pet tarantula, behind. My husband and I argued more than ever. My grandmother died so I couldn’t call her up to ask her advice. In an act of grief I bought a yellow rotary telephone for my desk. It’s plugged into nothing. Sometimes I just hold the receiver up to my ear and listen. Sometimes I talk.

As the date of my stepdaughter’s departure grew closer, I practiced politely biting my tongue. There was so much to say, but I said nothing. I bit and I bit. “Peace,” I once wrote in a story about daughters, “is what pain looks like in public.”

Like Blanchot promised, my silence returned “a little farther on.” A tree began to grow right in the middle of my house. Instead of seeds, its fruit had sharp little needles. I don’t know what this fruit is called, but it’s no fruit you want. I pushed my thumbs inside and split the flesh. I rinsed the pulp off a sticky needle, and thread it. In my own house I said nothing and then more nothing, and the tree thickened. And now it’s winter and my house has grown a tree, and this tree bares fruit, and with its needle-seeds I begin to sew. I make a sewing. It’s not a dress. Or a shawl. There is nowhere for a body to go inside this sewing. It’s a long and narrow thing. It’s the cold path home if the rest of the fairy tale were missing.

“Hi.” I show the sewing to Mavis, the tarantula, because I probably shouldn’t show it to my husband and my grandmother is dead and my stepdaughter has gone back to her mother’s and my sons should be spared and also it’s imaginary. Mavis is crouched over a live cricket struggling in her web. Mavis is too busy with her own silence to look up. And even if she did look up, she’d probably just blame me for having been left behind.

I can hardly bear to look at Mavis, and yet I can’t stop looking. “Good morning, Mavis. You okay?”

“I don’t want to hear one word about that tarantula,” says my mother. “Not one word.”

“I felt it shelter,” writes Emily Dickinson, “to speak to you.”

“Oh my god, Sabrina,” says a dear friend. “Set the fucking thing free.”

I feel for the sea witch. To whom can she talk other than the bottom of the sea? On the flight back from my brother’s home after Thanksgiving, I watch the 1989 Disney animated feature, The Little Mermaid. It’s lousy with ideological traps. It’s empty of what makes Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales so dark and alluring. No lavish agony disguised as piety. No cultish suffering. In Disney it’s all big, bright eyes and high hopes and too much singing. The sea witch has a name: Ursula, which means “little bear” even though she seems to be an octopus. She wears a gold nautilus around her neck, and this is where she keeps Ariel’s voice after Ariel signs her voice away with a fishbone. That the sea witch had once ruled the kingdom has been added to the fairy tale. But why she’s been banished remains untold even though she’s marked all over by her banishment. Eli, my six-year-old, begins to watch with me but grows bored and plays a word game instead. There is rough air. My water slides off the tray and spills. Eli keeps asking me to help him unscramble letters to make words, but the plane is shuddering through clouds and I’m holding his hand too tightly. “Mama! We’ll either die or we won’t die. Just tell me one word.” And I do. It’s “stop.”

A student asks me if I ever wonder if I should just stop writing. “Is it really worth it,” she asks. “All this vulnerability? All this exposure? Possibly hurting everyone you love?” I tell her language is what I have, and I think without it I’d grow tentacles, and sharp little teeth would poke through my skull. She laughs. “I’m serious,” I say. “If I stopped writing I’d go sea witch.”

“But shouldn’t certain things be left sacred?” she asks. “Like your children?” The word “children” floats above my head like a magnificent cloud about to burst. And when it bursts I will be drenched by them. All day I am drenched by them. A holy water. Why, I wonder, should the sacred be unsayable? How can I write about motherhood without writing about my children? Who would play their part? The birds in the trees? A stranger? The shadows?

“Why,” asks my stepdaughter, “did you write about me?” Another cloud. I look up. It’s in the shape of a heart, no, a mouth. I want to say something about repair. About fixing us. About love, and fear, and hard work. About wanting to help her. But instead I say, “this is my life, too.” And the cloud thins.

The nautilus shell Ursula wears around her neck is hollow. The shell is a living fossil, like a fairy tale. Like a fairy tale, it’s an ancient casing that once held a breathing thing in place. A similar spiral is encrypted in the inner ear and hurricanes and spiderwebs and the uterus. It is proof of where a story once lived or tried to live, and marked by the same elliptical orbit that makes it practically impossible to tell where one thing begins and where it ends.

“It is true,” writes Lucie Brock-Broido, “that each self keeps a secret self which cannot speak when spoken to.” I’ve been teaching my secret self to speak. It bleats, hungrily. Its legs are spindly and its heart is ancient. It was my husband who once helped me build it a room with stained glass windows, and a bed for waking up and dreaming.

Many years ago, when I was around my stepdaughter’s age, I burned my arms with cigarettes. I can still count on my arm how many times I did it: twelve. A collection of full, white moons. A lit-up path down my left arm that hasn’t faded. I was twenty and I loved someone who was cruel. I became silent and gaunt, and wrote little down. And so the answer I gave to my student is wrong. If I stopped writing I’d be covered in moons. Their light would be so blinding I’d barely be able to see my children. Or my mother standing at my front door crying.

“When I was little,” says my six-year old, Eli, “I thought the moon was following me.”

“Me, too,” I say.

In 1978 two young scientists studying 500-million-year-old nautilus shells discovered that the number of lines on each chamber was consistent with the time it takes for the moon to revolve around the earth. Today’s shells have thirty lines on each chamber, but shells from 420 million years ago have only nine lines per chamber. Which means the moon once revolved around the earth in nine days. Which means the moon was once closer. Which means silence was once closer, too. We hide and hide our silences. And yet, like the moon, they’re still here. They’re just a little farther on.

 

Read earlier installments of Happily here.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia. 

 

Comics as System

In his new column “Line Readings,” Ivan Brunetti begins with a close read of a single comics unit—a panel, a page, or a spread—and expands outward to encompass the history of comics, and the world as a whole. 

Pictures and words, pictures as words, words as pictures, neither quite pictures nor words: comics are self-contained systems, worlds unto themselves, answering to no one. From one panel, to one page, to one sequence, to one story, to one book, each level of a comic holds a small universe, and each small universe folds out into a larger universe. These systems need basic parameters and a modicum of internal consistency so that they can function not unlike language, but they are also dynamic, fluid, unstable, imperfect, flexible, and open-ended … not unlike language. As we decode them, they reconstitute themselves in our brains as narrative (or poetry, or both). In any one panel, or the spread of two panels, or any given sequence, we glimpse the entire book in microcosm.

Consider the above panel from Mark Beyer’s 1987 book Agony. What exactly is happening in this strange image? And, stranger still, why is it possible for us readers, with relative ease, to figure it out?

Square, circle, triangle. One can’t get more elemental than this perversely Bauhausian composition. The razor-edged square panel border bounds the image, not quite fully encompassing the large, lumpy circular shape, which turns out to be a head (human? monster? both?). Concentric circles within the circle quickly read as “eyes” and the arc of a possible “mouth” is visible at the bottom of the image. The nose isn’t as easy to discern at first, but once “head, eyes, and mouth” click, we complete the cycle and also see “nose” smack dab in the middle of the image. In this nasal area we also see a confluence of triangular shapes, bringing our eye squarely (sorry) to the center of the composition. Diagonals, which often signify and accentuate motion, activate the image: a gush of blood forms one triangle, the arm holding the stick and the resultant stream of blood another, and the angle of the text label’s arrow (comically but helpfully informing us that this rather unwieldy stick is actually a “toothpick”) forms yet one more. Just to the right of center, there is a secondary, much smaller figure/character, whose nose conveniently forms an additional triangle directing us to the center of the image, where the main action resides.

The short crosshatch hugging the outline of this smaller figure read as “shadow”; interestingly, while this shadow suggests that the figure is a flat, cutout doll, at the same time it creates a foreground layer of space: this figure reads as being in front of the large head, and there is even a light source! There are also near-triangles at each corner of the square (actually two triangles at the bottom left), clarifying the figure/ground relationship: these reinforce the idea of the large circle as “head” inside an architectural “space.” In fact, the baseboard at the bottom left clearly shows that this background is a room, one inadequately sized for the enlarged head, implying that the head is likely swelling, throbbing, ready to burst.

These spatial relationships are decoded in a microsecond. The text takes us slightly longer to process (say, 2–3 seconds). We discern that only the smaller figure is speaking, the large head eerily silent, helpless. The words repetitively describe what is depicted in the image, violating one of storytelling’s cardinal rules: show, don’t tell (and definitely don’t do both). Here the telling is intentional, slowing everything down, making what should be a horrific and extreme action all the more deadpan. Note the two key, well-chosen verbs in the balloon: lance and drain. The words apply not only to the action in the picture, but also to the action in our minds: the drawing lances our expectations (rules of scale have been violated), and drains the gore. It is at once a drawing both bloody and bloodless; therein, I think, lies its humor.

 

 

At this point I should mention that the book itself is five inches square, not quite two hundred pages thick, with most pages comprising only one panel. When we open the book, our eyes can’t help but take in a spread of two juxtaposed panels/pages. We absorb each spread quickly, both as one large compositional space as well as one short sequence, before we even have a chance to fully read each panel. In this case, the adjacent page clarifies many things, including: the characters (two humans, and we might guess one is male and the other female, based on their clothing); the setting (a sparse room inside an apartment, with a cityscape visible through a window); the point of view (third person omniscient, always clinging at close range, haunting our characters); the proportions (the woman’s head is shrinking but still oversize); how much time has elapsed (via the caption “shortly”); and the overall situation. No sooner than one predicament has been resolved (the head is getting smaller as the blood drains), the characters are thrust into another conundrum (the apartment is quickly filling up with blood).

A word about the perspective of that room. Or, wait, is it actually perspective? Maybe a paraline drawing? Well, it’s some sort of system of spatial representation, one wholly unique to the artist. The room feels cavernous, with the vanishing points inexplicably visible in the corner of the room, although the perspectives of the ceiling and floor don’t quite match up, and they really aren’t vanishing points, technically. The center cannot hold, and neither can the horizon line, but somehow it does. Note that the ceiling and floor enclose the massively deep space, paradoxically constraining the scene, rendering it claustrophobic. The rising tide of blood only adds to the dread of confined characters running out of time. Although nothing in this book looks quite like our everyday world, on this and every page, we readers always know exactly where we are. We are given often rudimentary visual information, but with just enough detail to decipher it.

If we examine the panels/pages immediately before this spread, we get a fuller sense of the sequence and its context; a partial cutaway view of the apartment informs us that the oversize head is growing at such a rate that it is unable to fit through the door. Fanning out further, we learn the character’s names: Amy and Jordan, the blandness of which flies humorously in the face of the crushing, outlandishly expressionistic horror of their perversely picaresque story. Amy has been reduced to a human skeleton, the flesh melting off her bones, after being exposed to the toxins from an unexplained industrial explosion that killed off all the natives of the island upon which Amy and Jordan were imprisoned; all of this happened because Amy and Jordan were off on an ill-conceived exploratory/anthropological mission, every aspect of which has backfired. In any case, Amy’s flesh has started to grow back, but now her outsize head is rapidly swelling as the result of complications from a postsurgery infection. I’m actually skipping some of the funniest, most savagely satirical parts of the sequence. At one point Amy declares, “things seem so bleak,” a darkly funny understatement, applicable to the entire book.

But where do these drawings come from? One’s mind immediately conjures Paul Klee’s puppets, or Kachina dolls, or perhaps George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, with its vast and shifting nighttime landscapes. There is something both cute and nightmarish at work here, something primal but repressed (sex, as such, doesn’t quite exist in the story), but the artwork is original, controlled, sophisticated. This is a style of cartooning arguably never seen before or since; to be influenced by it is, effectively, to plagiarize it. Like much of the best cartooning, it is sui generis; it seems to have synthesized everything and nothing. These comics are similar to young children’s drawings, which are similarly sophisticated in their usage of over-all composition. They also share another quality with both dreams and stories created by children: a free-form, “anything goes” willingness to let the narrative splay where it may, adult logic be damned. (All of the above are sincere compliments.)

 

 

Despite the frozen stillness of the individual panels, the story sails. The narrative has no chapter breaks, and the flow of time is staccato, unpredictable, and sometimes absurd: one memorable conversation is interrupted midway by a caption informing us that two weeks have passed between word balloons. The only time a date appears in the story is on a newspaper page, and the year “0000” isn’t much help; meanwhile, the captions are relative only to the story itself (“shortly,” “later,” “soon,” and so on), caging the characters as well as the readers in an arbitrary, oppressive “now” beholden to no outside reality. Agony takes place any-time, every-time, and no-time.

 

The book uses repetition for comic effect; examples include travel by boat, multiple instances of our protagonists trying to live in nature, and continual confrontations with strange animals and creatures. It also “rhymes” actions across disparate pages: for instance, some physical attacks are positioned in similar areas of the compositions. The characters are stuck in a simulacrum, a capricious, unwinnable video game, always striving but not really advancing. Agony’s world feels like a desktop globe, one with the seas and oceans painted black. The characters may hit dead ends, but the narrative never stagnates; it remains a kinetic feedback loop, suggesting an ailing but pulsing organism. Through the genius of the cartoonist, before we can ask “what?” we instead ask “what next?” Tragedy becomes farce becomes tragedy again becomes comedy, ad infinitum. The tone is one of claustrophobia. Amy and Jordan are hemmed in, battered by the vagaries of randomness and human cruelty, continually pedaling on a wheel of decay, dread, and terror. By story’s end, the pattern is ready to begin all over again.

 

 

Agony was first published in 1987, by RAW books. The underground comics of the sixties were an integral part of the hippie counterculture, but by the seventies they went even deeper underground, nowhere near as popular and operating under the radar. But what didn’t kill them, made them stronger: in the eighties a renaissance was underway, with some of the sixties artists making their best work, now joined by a new generation of artists inspired by the undergrounds. The eighties coalesced around the twin vortices of two essential anthology magazines: RAW (edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly) and Weirdo (originally edited by Robert Crumb, later by Peter Bagge, and finally by Aline Kominsky-Crumb). The work could be trenchant, poignant, formally daring, iconoclastic, but it was always committed to the singular vision of the artist, eventually forging the graphic novel movement of today, and cementing the idea of comics as a worthy form of both art and literature. Agony is an exemplar of that eighties “alternative” comics movement. To this day, I cannot picture that decade through the lens of pop culture, a time of saturated, hot colors; rather, it remains a grim, reactionary era of greed, nationalism, delusional feel-good slogans, an assault on the fabric of our society, a doomsday decade visible for me only through a thick scrim of black and white crosshatch.

Agony’s structure reaches back further in time to the wordless picture novels of the twenties and thirties, pioneered by artists such as Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, and others. These, too, were “graphic novels,” featuring one panel per page, printed in black and white, dense with ink, following protagonists through sometimes harrowing experiences, social and personal upheavals, and parable-like journeys of moral discovery.

 

Pages from the early wordless novels of Frans Masereel (left) and Lynd Ward (right)

 

Mark Beyer remains an elusive, rather mysterious figure in the world of comics, reappearing every so often. A current biography flatly describes him as a “former cartoonist,” which I hope is incorrect. Despite being published by notable houses and periodicals, producing several well-reviewed books, and in the nineties having an animated series on MTV’s Liquid Television, he remains an “outsider cartoonist” appreciated mostly by aficionados, never quite breaking into the mainstream psyche, gallows humor evidently not being everyone’s cup of tea.

New York Review of Comics reissued Agony in 2016 (with an excellent introduction by Colson Whitehead). The timing wound up being, sadly, quite fitting. Dark humor can elicit two slightly different kinds of laughter: one is born of unspeakable guilt (example: we chuckle and exclaim, That’s not funny!), the other born of empathy (as in, Haha, there but for the grace of God.). The tortured Amy is Agony’s moral center: she has a conscience, and because she suffers so, she is the character with whom we most empathize. We laugh the laugh of recognition. Who among us has not at some point felt overwhelmed, defeated, lost? Agony is a book filled with pain, misery, brutality, and hopelessness, but our unexpected laughter reminds us that we must carry on, regardless. How much worse can it get, after all, and besides, what else is there?

 

Ivan Brunetti is a professor at Columbia College Chicago, the author of Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and Comics: Easy as ABC, and the editor of both volumes of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. His drawings occasionally appear in the New Yorker, among other publications.

The Only Untranslatable American Writer

Gary Lutz.

About a decade ago, I was in Paris with a gathering of French translators and editors, talking about Gary Lutz’s work. Several of them had, at one time or another, tried to translate him, and all of them—some after months of trying—had found this to be impossible. Lutz’s work was too deftly sewn into the English language to be picked free of it. Each story is so much about the specific tonal, sonic, and rhythmic relationships within English, and so much about torquing a given historical moment of that language by injecting it with archaisms and oddity, that to reproduce it in French just didn’t work. It was, one translator told me, more exacting than poetry, and infinitely more complex. “Technically I could translate it,” he told me. “I did translate several pages of it. But, then, rereading it, I realized it had, somehow, when I wasn’t looking, escaped. Then I retranslated those pages a different way. Still it was gone. I could try again, but no. Lutz will always escape.”

These were translators who relished a challenge. They had, between them, translated the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, Mark Z. Danielewski, William H. Gass, and David Foster Wallace. One of them had translated a story of mine that contained a list of more than a hundred varieties of barbed wire, arranged to create certain sonic patterns. “What other American writers are untranslatable?” I asked. They shrugged. “Just him,” one of them finally replied.

So when I say that Lutz is unique, I mean this in a much more serious way than how the term is usually applied to writers.

*

Gary Lutz is unique. He is perhaps best known for his first book, Stories in the Worst Way (1996), which rapidly acquired a cult following. These are stories possessed of a great surface clarity, and yet there is a certain evasiveness on the part of their narrators. The stories often conclude suddenly, surprisingly, even gnomically. They are not exactly stories in the usual sense. The plots, when they have them, are extremely attenuated. Characters from one story seem to be echoes or doubles of characters from another story, and doubling proliferates within the stories as well. All the narrators, whether third person or first, whether male or female (and in some stories a great deal of time may go by before one can say with any degree of certainty if they are one or the other), seem to have a penchant for a certain sort of language play, a delicate manipulation of syntax.

There’s also a love of unexpected word combinations: the “fruitful botch of a girl,” for instance, that appears on the first page of the first story, “Sororally” (a title that suggests Lutz’s love of the arcane or uncommon word, and his deftness in bringing forgotten words back to life). “What could be worse,” begins that story, “than having to be seen resorting to your own life?” Yet, in story after story, throughout Lutz’s work, we see narrators who seem to be resisting being ensconced in their life at all, narrators who use language as a defense and as a form of evasion while at the same time, through language, they fall more thoroughly into the trap of a muted and incomplete existence. These are stories about relationships without relation (sexual or otherwise), with characters possessed of an unrealizable impulse to reach out to touch—and even pass through—another person so as to move into another life. Under such terms, sex becomes a kind of frustration: “The trouble with coming was that I actually did arrive somewhere. I arrived at the place my body had already left. I got there just in time to get a good look at what had happened where things were.”

Lutz’s early stories are also often mordantly funny. The narrators stumble through situations saying things that are sometimes off, sometimes just odd. Sometimes they seem to address the reader directly: “When I wrote this originally, it was a piece on walking as a disorder of the body: walking as affliction, not function. I am relieved that no one will ever get to see it.” Indeed, a great many of these stories might be seen as cleaned-up versions of stories told in a bar by, say, a former professor of literature once he has had enough drinks to be in a confessional mood, but not so many as to be completely indiscreet. He, or sometimes she—or sometimes that distinction isn’t important—will tell you their secrets, but they’ll tell them murkily. It will be up to you to figure out exactly what is being said, and why.

*

I speak of Stories in the Worst Way for as long as I do because all the gestures found in it are gestures to be found in Lutz’s later work as well—though their modulation decidedly changes from book to book. Stories in the Worst Way remains strong and original upon rereading. But it also feels like a younger man’s book, a book by a person who, despite the manifold struggles of the characters within it, has not yet been thoroughly beaten up by life in the way we increasingly are as we age. The language and gestures are spectacular, even spooky, but there’s a certain lightness (in Calvino’s sense of the term) buoying them up.

For me, Lutz’s second book, I Looked Alive (2003), is even better. It is grimmer, more confessional, less madcap. It is more deeply suffused with loneliness and longing and loss. Its characters flail to sort out their sexual identity and feel like they might have missed the boat: “For too long a time I lived in the trouble between women and men without taking anywhere nearly enough of it for my own.” Characters here seem to fall into relationships without really understanding why, and spouses tend to matchmake for their other halves until their relationships flinder away and are gone. People seem to be wandering dazedly through their own lives—or through someone’s life, anyway. A strand of hair or a crumpled receipt, disjecta of some kind, is something that a narrator might cling to more than to the person who discarded it. The language is slightly thicker, in the same way that one’s body thickens as one gets older, and the syntax a little more gnarled. The stories overall are slightly longer and as a result the reader is steeped more thoroughly in each life. The frequency of Lutz’s use of archaisms and unlikely word combinations has accelerated slightly—an acceleration that will continue in his later work.

In other words, in I Looked Alive Lutz has fallen even more deeply into the sentence and its dynamics. Whereas his earlier narrators still often acted as if they had an escape route, these narrators seem more aware of their own trappedness. The attenuated plots of the first book are even more attenuated here. Instead each story offers a series of situations with large gaps between, brief moments or encounters strung like beads along the whole length of a desperate, thwarted life.

*

Lutz followed I Looked Alive with three shorter offerings: Partial List of People to Bleach (2007, revised 2013), Divorcer (2011), and Assisted Living (2017). Partial List contains both stories written in the years directly before its publication and some of the earliest stories that Lutz published, originally in The Quarterly under the pseudonym Lee Stone. Elsewhere I have called it “at once cruelly honest, precisely painful, and beautifully rendered.”

Divorcer, the longest of these three later books, is perhaps the most thematically focused of all of Lutz’s books, with its seven stories revolving around both the pain and inevitability of divorce and separation. The title story is one of Lutz’s longest stories, and two others are quite long as well; he’s beginning to elbow more space out for his characters, to heighten the density of his exploration of their damaged lives. These stories are, like most of Lutz’s other stories, oblique, but at the same time there’s more interest in mapping a discrete period: the particulars of a breakup and its aftermath. There’s a sense of struggle and hopelessness, and also weary recognition: “We were not so much a couple as a twofold loneliness.”

Assisted Living is four stories, fairly concise, and continues in the path of Divorcer. Breakup, aftermath, and struggling with a sense of self are prevalent in many of these stories, with faint glimmers of perhaps false hope. “All roads led to the one road that wasn’t going where you wanted to go,” says one character, summing up her life. But then goes on to qualify: “Except now and then people make a show of themselves, make themselves fathomable in something cap-sleeved, and jam the small talk with wherefores vast and mattery.”

The final section of The Complete Gary Lutz, “Stories Lost and Late,” consists of two long stories and seven very short ones, none of which have been previously collected. “My Bloodbaths,” which opens the section, is the longest story Lutz has ever published. It was based on earlier unpublished writings but transformed and repurposed. I place it among his very best work. “Am I Keeping You?,” which closes the section, is also long and similarly strong. The shorter stories come from pieces started in the nineties but finished and reworked only recently, and they present an intriguing mix of old and new. The longer stories present a narrator’s slow and careful self-evisceration in exquisite detail. They are wonderfully and terribly painful in a way that provides less respite than the shorter pieces, but also greater insight.

The drama of Lutz’s work is in the language—in the sentence as a unit in particular. He crafts each part of his sentence carefully enough that there are subdramas in the relationships of the words themselves, in the productive tensions between them. If you are looking for story and plot, you have come to the wrong place. If your idea of character involves epiphany and obvious change, then look elsewhere. But if you are interested in seeing what language can really do when deftly manipulated to give it great flexibility, in seeing how the subtleties of struggling minds might be expressed, and in learning a new way of reading, welcome.

 

Brian Evenson is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the winner of the International Horror Guild Award and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel. His latest book is Songs for the Unraveling of the World.

From Brian Evenson’s introduction to The Complete Gary Lutz , by Gary Lutz, out from Tyrant Books this week.

Staff Picks: Battle Hymns, Boarding Schools, and Bach

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper.

Over the holiday weekend, I devoured The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s remarkable and deeply researched memoir about her family’s New Orleans home. The youngest of twelve siblings, Broom grew up in a lively—and at times chaotic—shotgun-style house in the neighborhood of New Orleans East. Bringing together oral history, archival research, and first-person narrative, Broom weaves a multigenerational story of place that celebrates and complicates one of our nation’s most mythologized cities. “The Yellow House was witness to our lives,” writes Broom. And indeed, the house itself is essentially the protagonist of the story, a living organism animated by the decades of life that course through it like a pulse. Broom is an uncommonly thoughtful archaeologist of her own past, uncovering fragments of near-forgotten stories, dusting them off, and delicately piecing them back together. What emerges is an astonishing and kinetic portrait of the way places shape, and are shaped by, the people who love them. —Cornelia Channing 

Despite its forbidding setting and circumstances—the draconian and seemingly impregnable “Lutheran nunnery” of a girls school in small-town Hungary, 1944—Magda Szabó’s Abigail, which comes out in January in a translation by Len Rix, is less bleak than her three other novels currently available in English. Fair enough: the author’s most popular book in her native language, Abigail was written for young adults, and there is more than enough boarding-school adventure and misery (and camaraderie) here to satisfy that taste (Georgina Vitay is a character as memorable as any Harry Potter or Serena van der Woodsen). To this, Szabó adds her usual unmatched empathy and insight; she is a master of misunderstandings, misreadings, the blindness that is part of being human. The relative lack of bleakness is due to there being no real ambiguities in this book; the reading is like an unwrapping, a revealing, which has its own power. In the end, one will not have one’s heart broken the way one did by Iza’s Ballad or The Door, but this black little heart, at least, will be patient: Szabó’s range was wide, and New York Review Books, aided by capable translators, is doing a fine job of revealing the scope of her talents to anglophone readers. —Hasan Altaf

 

Elias Gottlob Haussmann, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1746, oil on canvas, 31 x 24″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

I won’t pretend to be a scholar of classical music, only a deep lover of what William Carlos Williams calls “sound addressed / not wholly to the ear.” He means music that rewards being thought about—or that one can hear best, in part, by thinking while one listens. I discovered how much I like to think and listen to Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin only recently, through a 2018 recording by the violin virtuoso and classical superstar Hilary Hahn. In this performance, Hahn plays Sonatas 1 and 2 and Partita 1, thus completing the set she began on her very first recording in 1997, in which she plays Sonata 3 and Partitas 2 and 3. This is, as I understand, music that great violinists work on over a lifetime—it’s sinuous, vigorous. I won’t try to narrate or paraphrase its moods and modes, but suffice it to say it seems to contain every possible thing if you’re willing to slow down and tuck into it. But this music has hit me deepest in a newer recording, just out from ECM, by the Austrian violinist and conductor Thomas Zehetmair. On his Johann Sebastian Bach: The Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo, Zehetmair digs into all the crannies of this crenellated music. If Hahn’s versions feel like an aging house, Zehetmair’s are an old one, creaky in the corners, full of drips and drafts and places people have lived and maybe died. I’m not saying they’re better than Hahn’s, just different, maybe dirtier, as if the strings might almost break when the music is at its darkest or brightest. Zehetmair’s versions seem to have been through more heartache; they’re a bit less hopeful, and perhaps, like me, you prefer that sort of thing. —Craig Morgan Teicher

I was initially intrigued by Hermann Ungar because of his connections to Franz Kafka. Ungar, like Kafka, was a Czech Jewish writer in turn-of-the-century Prague who died tragically young and explored themes of power and obsession in his writing; at the 1963 and 1965 Kafka conferences at Liblice Castle, Ungar was mentioned as a member of Kafka’s “Prague circle.” Ungar’s first novel, The Maimed, originally appeared in 1923; in 2002, Twisted Spoon Press published Kevin Blahut’s translation from the German. The novel’s plot follows Franz Polzer, a hapless bank clerk who enters a sadomasochistic affair with his landlady. Thomas Mann apparently called the book “a sexual hell”; reading it is an uneasy experience, and there are moments in the narrative that genuinely surprised me with their explicitness. Polzer, who seems truly unnerved by the sexual appetites of women, reflects back frequently on what might have been an adolescent love affair with his friend Karl, who now lives with an unnamed degenerative illness and whose arm is amputated near the novel’s end. Shame surrounding class and sexuality cloud the book’s claustrophobic atmosphere, and the anti-Semitism of Prague’s Christian community rears its ugly head again and again. By its ambiguous end, The Maimed proved to be one of the more tense and thoughtfully perverse reading experiences I’ve had in a while. —Rhian Sasseen

On a recent Sunday, I was folding my laundry while listening to This American Life, as white women in Brooklyn are wont to do. It was an old episode, a reaired live recording called “Lost in America,” which I may have heard years before but now hardly remembered. Midway through the episode, Ira Glass introduces the endearingly nasal voice of Sarah Vowell, who goes on to share an ingenious essay on the evolution of the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She tracks the song’s transformation from “John Brown’s Body,” an American Civil War–era celebration of the famed abolitionist, into a staple of state funerals. Vowell’s piece is a spectacular piece of writing but an even better listening experience. A live band plays snippets of each iteration of the song, injecting life and nuance into the analysis. And the audience, their laughter and silence, can help even the most lonely of laundry folders feel a part of something grand, something shared. Like a child or a Catholic, I am moved by all things triumphant. But Vowell articulates perfectly the power of this catchy tune, how over centuries it came to carry the weight of many movements and how the collective power of voices singing in unison can buoy the spirit and affirm our most noble impulses. Of course, this power may be fleeting, but at least, as Vowell notes, “we’re all in it together, if only for the length of the song.” —Noor Qasim

 

Sarah Vowell. Photo: © Bennett Miller.

Curled Thyme

In this previously unpublished essay, the legendary Imagist H.D. muses on the Greek bucolic poet Theocritus.

Photo of H.D. taken from a postcard inscribed “To Marianne Moore, H.D.,” ca. 1921. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where the Greek voice speaks there are rocks. But these Sicilian rocks of Theocritus, particularly of the twentieth Bucolic with which I specifically deal, are sunk a layer beneath rich soil. Theocritean rocks are covered with earth, rich loam and successive sun-baked, sun-broken and un-crumbled layers of oak leaves, blades of rank grass and reeds and many feathery, dusty, dried, and broken herbs and flowers, witches’ herbs and vine leaves and withered berries of grapes. Only by study of this surface, ripe, rich, decadent only in the sense in which a brittle sun-baked July leaf is decadent, do we realize the real quality of those rocks … Greek even if once-removed, Sicilian. In Theocritus are layers of rocks, and under the rocks is fire, ever ready to break out volcanic, infernal one might say, were there for the Greek any inferno but that of suppression and inhibition and actual bodily death.

This is the world of Theocritus, as different from that of Euripides as black earth from limpid water, water surface that reflects images of Olympians, pure spirits, as if the sun threw color and fire, different yet the same, passing through that Athenian intellect. For at Athens there is light and one has never seen such light, not in dream, not in vision, not light reflected from rock-pools, nor light from the ridges of mountains. There is gold in Egypt, there is air doubtless, warmed and colored and steeped in gold in Assyria, in Phoenicia, in Libya, gold beneath and above, there is heat in Assyria; there is color everywhere, there is light in one city.

But there is shadow elsewhere. There are spaces of blackness, warm and soft and restful; blackness which spreads soft cushions where we may rest, blackness of dream, witchcraft, blackness, too, of rest, of mirth, blackness as of a great curtain against which the figures of Theocritus stand, brilliant images, red and rust-color, black-purple, mops of tangled hair, goat-herd, goat and kid and bull, and divine images, drawn with the richness of a Rubens, designed not to draw us toward the sky and its enchantments but to bring us close to wholesome, passionate things of earth.

She hates me and I sweat with agony “as a rose with dew” says the boy.

We have often met this boy. We have known him throughout the whole of Hellenic literature. We had grown weary of his fifth-century perfections; we had grown tired of him, friend and companion of the great, pupil, essence of the divine, drawing his master to contemplation, through repression, of the abstract and geometrical. We had seen him, tall and serene, amid the banqueters of the early dramatist, Plato, man of the world, Athenian and poet. We had worshipped him, “the morning star among the living”, but all stars, all suns, must set. So we followed him again, half furtively into the hidden gardens of effete, outlying suburbs; followed him and again, loved him half furtively. Till we grew sick of the roses and the myrrh and turned with relief to the late epigrammatists who made of him a mark for poignant satire.

Satire, the death-blow, resounding of hammer-strokes on already broken bones, virulent acid to eat away decay, has, too, its death-blow, meets in the end defeat. For when the body is purged or slain or dead, there is a new body, whether of individuals, of nations, of modes of thought, of literatures, or feelings, or emotions. Beyond life there is death, beyond exuberance, there is inevitable decay. Equally beyond death, there is life, old forms in new environments.

Through the medium of this boy, a traditional figure for inspiration and for mirth, Theocritus, for the first time, weds beauty with the jeer at beauty. The Greek country boy loves Eunica. He has found her in the city. He has never before seen rose and pink so divinely mingled on so white a face. With a tittering sneer of Eunica at “dank lips, black hands, rank smell,” by a subtle, inner reading of the poet, we sniff not so much the grosser sweepings of the ox-stalls as fresh hay and new-turned loam.

Rather it is from the girl Eunica we turn. Not because of the boy’s crude tirade at her, not because he tells us, “she spit at him, mouthed and played the whore” but because we ourselves see her with our own eyes, standing on that squalid pavement (the Alexandria of Theocritus’ later period), her pleated shawl dust-stained and hinting of dead myrrh, the tattered fringe of her under-vest gray and lusterless in the noonday sunlight, her yellow-tinted curls showing the marks of a too-ambitious iron beside the boy’s clustering locks, burned crisp with Sicilian sun.

Beauty and the jeer at beauty meet. Look, he says, am I not a man? My hair curls like the selena-flower, my eyebrows are lustrous black, and such and such and such fine phrases he uses, parsley, honeycomb, inept and futile embellish the description of his own charms.

The poet jeers at beauty, destroying with one hand, rewelding with the other. We hear him play two themes upon a double-pipe. The girls may jilt me, says the boy, and he becomes a figure of satire comparing his stupid eyes to the beauty of the Athenian goddess, but his music he says is sweet and we know that this is true.

At the end of this idyll, the poet lets the boy play for us soft, yet full and ripe music, under great wind-swept pine-trees, a tone lower, no shrill Dionysic ecstatic flute-note, but reeds, rich and quiet.

Here the names we have met and worshipped in distant stars, again worshipped in temples and loved on earth, and loved over-familiarly and grown to tire of, are renewed for us beyond their death, a renewal, a new life. For Kypris, white star, met Adonis in the shadow of great oak-woods and clinging to the rough trunk of an oak-tree wept for him there, and the Moon herself, white slaying scimitar, stood, only a Lady, after all, tired, with disillusioned feet, upon a hill in Latmos.

 

Born Hilda Doolittle, H.D. (1886–1961) was an American poet and novelist notably associated with imagism, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in London during the early twentieth century. Though somewhat overshadowed by her contemporaries in historical and critical accounts of the male-dominated modernist movements, H.D. is considered one of the most important and inimitable writers of her time.

“Curled Thyme,” by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), copyright © 2019 by The Schaffner Family Foundation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. From Visions and Ecstasies: Selected Essays , by H.D., published by David Zwirner Books.

The False Innocence of Black Pete

Writing a weekly column for a Dutch newspaper is a good way to lose heart. Not because whatever topic you choose, you’re bound to receive slews of emails from readers who disagree with you, or because of the amount of hatred people tend to offload in those letters. What gets you down is that some people seem to think that when you contradict them, you lose your right not only to freedom of speech but to your nationality. “That’s not the Dutch way of doing things.”

When I hear this, I often find myself coming back to the James Baldwin passage from the Autobiographical Notes that begin Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Although I have lived here for almost five years now, the country that I love most is not the United States of America. I was born in the Netherlands, and most of my family and friends live there. Still, the notion stays the same: precisely because I love the Netherlands so much, I insist on my right to continuously criticize her.

The aim of that criticism is to better the principles by which that country functions, and because I know no single person—and certainly not me—can be the moral center of a country, my hope is that other Dutch people will do the same. I suggest we start by taking a closer look at our family holidays.

Every year, on the December 5, the Dutch celebrate the feast of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas). The concept of Sinterklaas is different from that of Santa Claus. For starters, Sinterklaas is not a Christmas character; Sinterklaas’s name day is December 6. Furthermore, Sinterklaas does not live on the North Pole but, rather, in Madrid. He comes to the Netherlands a few weeks before his birthday by boat and he rides a horse. He does look like Santa Claus, in the sense that he, too, is an old, white, and bearded man. Sartorially, however, Sinterklaas looks more like the pope: he wears red robes and a red miter with a big cross on it, and carries a golden staff.

Every night of his Dutch sojourn, Sinterklaas makes a round on his horse to hand out small presents to the Dutch children. I write “small” because they have to fit inside the shoes the children have put out at night (near the radiator or in front of the fireplace). Sinterklaas has helpers, called Zwarte Pieten (the Dutch plural for Black Pete), who travel alongside him on foot across the rooftops and slide down chimneys to deliver the gifts. The night before his birthday, Sinterklaas goes to visit all the children in the Netherlands one final time to bring them a few more presents. This time, most of them are too big to fit in their shoes, so he knocks on their front door and leaves a big bag of gifts. This night is called Pakjesavond—a contraction of the Dutch diminutive for gifts and the word for evening. Since the early fifties, Sinterklaas’s gifts come with letters addressed to the children, composed of carefully constructed rhymes, that are both funny and didactic and that reveal Sinterklaas has his eyes—or rather, Pete’s eyes—on you all year round.

The celebration of Sinterklaas has a long tradition: as far back as the middle of the sixteenth century, children have been putting their shoes out at night. Since the middle of the nineteenth, though, Sinterklaas (portrayed by an older, white man) arrives by steamboat, and usually sometime in the middle of November. He is accompanied by Zwarte Piet, his helper. The number of Sinterklaas’s helpers has grown steadily over the years; at the end of World War II Canadian soldiers in the Netherlands organized a Sinterklaas celebration with a mass of Zwarte Pieten. Ever since, Sinterklaas has been accompanied by many Pieten. These are portrayed in the streets by white people playing dress up. Piet has a black face and big red lips and wears golden hoops in his ears. When I was a kid, this version of Zwarte Piet was prominently featured in advertisements and on wrapping paper and confectionary packaging. This media and print incarnation of Zwarte Piet has mostly been phased out, but close to ninety percent of Dutch schools still use live actors (amateurs) during their celebrations: white people in blackface portraying black people as acrobatic, slightly dim-witted, kindhearted, gullible “manservants” (the word Dutch children use to describe Piet in their Sinterklaas songs).

As I child, I loved Sinterklaas: I loved the gifts he left in my shoe and Pakjesavond (of course), but I also loved sitting around the fireplace, drinking tea, eating chocolate snacks, and listening to my parents reading his poems. I loved singing for him on the evenings before December 5 and I put a carrot in my shoe for his horse. Once, I staked out the front door all evening until, finally, I had to pee. It was in just that minute that Sinterklaas knocked on our door. When I opened it, he was gone. Still, I loved it when he came to our school and invited you to sit on his lap and how he talked to you in his low voice. He had read in his big book that I should work harder on my long division and my handwriting.

And I loved his Pieten, too.

It wasn’t considered problematic that I thought of them as “his” Pieten, either. I grew up in a predominantly white world: white parents, white teachers, white doctors. There was one black boy in my high school, and he came in by train. The only other black people I knew were soccer players and Gerda Havertong, one of the characters on the Dutch version of Sesame Street (who first raised this issue more than thirty years ago).

Twenty years later, despite the shifting demographics (nowadays, nearly twenty percent of the population has a non-Dutch background, and slightly more than half of them of non-Western origin), the Netherlands is still a very white country, especially outside the big cities. Those white people will argue that Zwarte Piet is a children’s friend, a funny, boisterous trickster who hands out candy (before Sinterklaas comes to visit your school, the Zwarte Pieten come running into the classroom, throwing around candy, sprinkling the floor with pepernoten and other sweets).

I don’t think I should have to elaborate too much on how problematic this is in a modern, multicultural society.

Last week, a short video of a thirty-year-old white man in plain clothing and blackface broke the Dutch internet. In it, the man, clearly upset, says: “What, in heaven’s name, are we all doing?” The man looked lost, sounded lost, and, as far as I can tell, felt lost. He was also, and I want to repeat this, saying this in blackface in front of a camera.

What the man was referring to, though, was not his own makeup but a recent string of demonstrations by a Dutch action group named Kick Out Zwarte Piet.

Kick Out Zwarte Piet is a poorly chosen name, since the group does not want to abolish Zwarte Piet but merely change his appearance to one that does not include blackface. Their goal is not to abolish Sinterklaas but to make the celebration more inclusive. The organization was founded by Jerry Afriyie and Quinsy Gario, two black poets from Amsterdam who have been objecting against the racist rendition of Pete for years. Since 2015, the year that they founded KOZP, these peaceful protesters have had, on the less violent side of the spectrum, eggs and beer cans thrown at them and their buses blocked on a highway, and on the more violent end they have been molested and attacked by police and populace alike. The most liked comment underneath the video of state violence against the protesters was “Good riddance.”

Many Dutch people seem to believe that by wanting to change the appearance of Zwarte Piet, KOZP is trying to destroy a tradition as Dutch as, say, cheese and clogs. But modifying traditions isn’t the same thing as destroying them. In fact, it is the polar opposite: it’s about trying to keep them alive.

Six years ago, I wrote a column for Het Parool stating that the prevailing incarnation of Zwarte Piet was both cruel and offensive. For years, I kept a printout of the vitriol that I received taped to the inside of my wardrobe door—it was my own personal anthology of the poetry of aggressive ignorance. It reminded me: This is what people are like.

But not all of them, of course. It would be wrong to equate YouTube comments and hate mail with the opinion of the moral leaders of a country.

Two years ago, when confronted with a camera and microphone and asked about his views on Zwarte Piet, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, started his answer from the child’s perspective. It’s a nice tradition, he said, a holiday for children, protesters should leave those children alone. “Let’s all just act normal.”

Sinterklaas as a family holiday—it’s a powerful frame, and a highly misleading one. The common misconception is that Sinterklaas, because it is a holiday for children, is a children’s affair. But Sinterklaas is organized and overseen by adults. And there is nothing innocent or normal about the way we go about it. No wonder, then, that some people are protesting this racial stereotype however they can.

This is another misconception: Zwarte Piet isn’t a sensitivity issue for black people to get over, nor is it a moral conundrum for them to solve; it’s a social problem started and upheld by white people. Recently, the Dutch prime minister welcomed two white people in yellow vests, very unsuccessful copycats of the French gilets jaunes, into his office in The Hague for the second time. The online joke went: now they’ve all had their turn.

But when Rutte was asked why he hadn’t spoken to Kick Out Zwarte Piet, his initial response was that “politicians don’t get to decide on Sinterklaas,” and after that that he “first had to assess what that group wants.” Politicians are our elected representatives; they do get to decide; they are there to discuss and debate our legislation, shape our policies and our nation, on the basis of their principles and beliefs.

And it seems the Dutch prime minister knowingly and willingly supports blackface.

To the outsider, this complete lack of moral leadership might be baffling. But the Dutch don’t expect much more from a man who made a career as a human resources manager at Unilever, the Dutch multinational stuck in environmental and sexual harassment controversies, and who has had surprisingly little to say about Dutch colonial history or the country’s heritage of transatlantic slave trading or a critical report from a United Nations committee from a few years back that urged the Netherlands to actively promote the elimination of the racial stereotyping. Responding to this report, our prime minister stated, “Black Pete is black, and I cannot change that, because the name is Black Pete, so I cannot change it … It’s an old children’s tradition … I can only say that my friends in the Dutch Antilles, they are very happy when they have Sinterklaas, because they don’t have to paint their faces, and when I’m playing Black Pete, for days, I’m trying to get the stuff off my face.”

As a teenager in the Netherlands, I was taught to believe we live in a progressive country, a country where we respected the individual rights of the members of any minority. There’s even a Dutch phrase for this, Nederland, gidsland. And I know that on paper and in practice the Netherlands is still a model political country: a lot of Americans, upon finding out that I’m Dutch, talk to me about our liberal drug policies, our same-sex-marriage laws, and our enlightened stance toward euthanasia, reproductive rights, and abortion.

Yet my mother would talk to me of other things when I was young. Once, when I was listening to Van Morrison, she said, “Could you please turn off that black music?” I asked her what she’d like to hear. “I don’t know. Something … calmer? More melodic?” And my father, like most liberals of his time, simply thought that integration meant a prayer room in the factories, instead of equal chances for your offspring in the labor market.

The way we feel about things is affected by what we are taught to feel and believe. The philosopher Richard Rorty pointed out that only descriptions of the world are true or not, and humans decide which descriptions hold truth. Truth is not an innate quality of the world but of language and thought. If we believe that black music is noise, that Zwarte Piet is black, that the Netherlands is a model country, then these are only things we have chosen to believe.

The UN wasn’t the only institution to write a report on Sinterklaas. The Dutch children’s ombudsman, Margrite Kalverboer, spoke to children and young people in the country. Nonwhite children reported experiencing discrimination on a daily basis that worsened around Sinterklaas. Kalverboer’s position was very clear: the racial stereotype of Zwarte Piet contributes to bullying, exclusion, and discrimination and is therefore contrary to the international Convention on the Rights of the Child. The children’s ombudsman states that “by stripping Zwarte Piet of discriminatory and stereotyping characteristics, he can be made into a figure that does justice to the pleasure that so many experience in the Sinterklaas tradition.” It is up to adults, she writes, to ensure all children feel safe and enjoy the holiday.

Starting this year, the daily television show Sinterklaasjournaal will feature only Pieten with smudges of soot across their faces (remember, Piet comes down your chimney). Some urban Dutch municipalities have followed suit. It looks like the beginning of change. But instead, many Dutch people are digging in their heels: De Telegraaf, the country’s biggest newspaper, reported that close to seventy percent of the Dutch population is unhappy with the continuous discussion about Zwarte Piet’s appearance. More than half of the primary schools in the country still have blackface Zwarte Piet visit their classrooms.

A lot of things about Sinterklaas have changed over the past few years. This year, for the first time since 1952, he arrived by steam train (the city of Apeldoorn does not have a port). His horse, once gray and called Amerigo, is now black and goes by the name of Ozosnel. Sinterklaas is a constant reinvention, but Zwarte Piet is still black.

Why can’t the Dutch “act normal” and change Piet’s appearance? It could be their anxiety about the “new” makeup of the Dutch population. The cultural expressions of any period, and this includes folklore, tend to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. Said more coarsely, white people “need” Zwarte Piet because they need to put black people down. They react to increased diversity by slinging disparaging stereotypes and humiliating their fellow countrymen. This would mean that the Dutch, consciously or unconsciously, are fundamentally racist. This could be the case.

At the same time, when I look at that man in blackface on camera asking, “What, in heaven’s name, are we all doing?” I feel there’s something else going on. Those Dutch people who think Zwarte Piet should stay black believe that they are not racist. They are unwilling to change his appearance because that would mean acknowledging that what others are saying is true. Ironically, for a lot of white Dutch people, the preservation of the racial stereotype of Zwarte Piet perpetuates their myth of the good of their society, of how non-racist it is.

This is the third misconception regarding Zwarte Piet’s current incarnation: that there is something intrinsically good and innocent about it just because it’s Dutch.

Last week, after a string of racist incidents, a Dutch soccer match was halted because of Zwarte Piet chants. Famous Dutch pundit René van der Gijp, not a man known for his progressive viewpoints, finally realized that racism and Zwarte Piet are intrinsically linked. Van der Gijp said he had come to this insight after listening to two black Dutch soccer players tell their stories on television. “They have two bad months a year,” he said. Another commentator replied, “What about the seventy-one percent of the Dutch population that wants to keep the celebration the way it is? You let the stories of those people make you crazy.” Van der Gijp replied: “Well, they hate it, it hurts them … Do you really think a four-year-old cares if Piet is green, black, or blue?” On national television, the pundit was questioning his—and every other white person’s— privilege. He was asking: “This isn’t who we are, is it?”

Why does Zwarte Piet endure? Because our prejudices are forever tied up in our sense of self. Most white people in the Netherlands cannot bear to acknowledge that they are responsible for perpetuating a society in which the feelings of black children matter less than those of white adults. Most white people in the Netherlands do not want to have to ask themselves: What, in heaven’s name, are we all doing?

 

Philip Huff is an award-winning author of three critically acclaimed novels, a short story collection, and a collection of essays on literature. He lives in New York City.