The Paris Review's Blog, page 196

To Be Mary MacLane

Advertisement for Mary MacLane’s film Men Who Have Made Love to Me, 1918. Photo: Perfection Pictures / Essanay Film Manufacturing Company / George Kleine System. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“I of Womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.” Thus begins one of the most unusual books in our literature, by one of the most scandalous American writers.

When The Story of Mary MacLane was published by the prestigious Chicago firm of Herbert S. Stone and Company in April 1902, its author was skyrocketed to nationwide notoriety. The book was an immediate sensation. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and the fact that it was the work of a teenage girl—living in Butte, Montana, of all places—made the scandal complete. Every Associated Press affiliate in the country ran a front-page story on it. Here for the first time was a young woman’s “inner life shown in its nakedness”:

I have discovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things … I care neither for right nor for wrong? my conscience is nil. My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility. I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness … May I never become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity—a virtuous woman …

Respectable critics roared their disapproval. “Mary MacLane is mad,” wrote the New York Herald. “She should be put under medical treatment, and pens and paper kept out of her way until she is restored to reason.” The New York Times urged that she be spanked. Other critics raised the charge of “obscenity.” When the Butte Public Library announced that it would not allow the book on its shelves, the Helena Daily Independent applauded, arguing that if this book “should go in, all the self-respecting books in the library would jump out of the window.”

The Story of Mary MacLane was an instant best seller. Some eighty thousand copies were sold the first month alone, and the resulting $17,000 in royalties allowed MacLane to fulfill her greatest ambition: to escape Butte. The book went through several printings, and its author remained front-page news for years. Mary MacLane Societies were organized by young women all over the country. The popular vaudeville team of Weber and Fields—remembered today mostly as the introducers of pie-in-the-face gags—did a burlesque of the book. A full-length spoof was published, titled The Story of Willie Complain. “Montana’s lit’ry lady” found her way into the comics and popular songs. There was even a Mary MacLane Highball, “with or without ice-cream, cooling, refreshing, invigorating, devilish, the up-to-date drink.”

The rage for “MacLaneism,” against which leading critics from coast to coast declaimed so fervently, also had its more somber aspect. It was reported that a Chicago girl who had organized the local Mary MacLane Society was arrested for stealing a horse. She said she committed the theft because she needed the experience for a novel she was writing. And on May, 4 1902, the Great Falls Daily Tribune told of a Michigan fifteen-year-old who “imagined herself ill-used and misunderstood. The reading of the morbid ravings of the Butte girl convinced her that she was, and a dose of arsenic followed. She died with a copy of the book in her hands.” According to some reports, MacLane’s book prompted a whole rash of suicides.

Who was Mary MacLane—this Montana girl who drove literary critics to distraction and made moralists furious, and whose book was said to provoke insanity, crime, and suicide?

Descended from “a long line of Scotch and Canadian MacLanes,” Mary was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on May 2, 1881. Throughout her life she was fiercely proud of her father’s “Highland Scot” heritage, and she considered her own rebellious genius to be a direct result of it. At age four her family moved to western Minnesota. Her father died when she was eight. A few years later, after her mother had remarried—this time to “a mining man”—they pressed on to Montana, finally settling in Butte in the mid-1890s. Those who knew Mary MacLane in those years recalled her as a studious, withdrawn, and somewhat morbid child; her schoolmates called her “The Centerville Ghost” because she liked to prowl around the local cemetery at night. For two years she edited the Butte High School paper. She graduated in 1899, with proficiency in Latin, Greek, and other languages.

She seems to have read whatever came her way—everything from Nick Carter pulp mysteries to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Drawn to the great Romantic poets, Byron and Keats above all, she was also fond of “books for boys.” She did not, however, care for “girls’ books”: “I felt as if I had more in common with the Jews wandering through the wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons.”

Well versed in the history of the struggle for women’s rights, she read and liked the feminist authors—especially Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Victoria Woodhull—but took no part in the organized women’s movement. Similarly, she admired “the noise and color and morale of the crowds on a Miners’ Union Day” (Butte was a stronghold of the militant Western Federation of Miners, and later of the Industrial Workers of the World), but remained outside the ranks of organized labor. “I am always alone,” she wrote. “I might mingle with people intimately every hour of my life, still I should be alone.”

Outwardly her life remained in many ways as severely restricted as that of most women in the turn-of-the-century United States, crushed beneath the weight of custom and crippled by prejudice. But inwardly her spirit yearned for love, adventure, and the marvelous, and teemed with a defiance that found expression in her writing. It was what she did with these yearnings and this defiance that makes her work so unique and important. And what did she do? Simply, brilliantly, rigorously, she revealed the real working of her mind in the various circumscribed situations of daily life.

“The clearest lights on persons,” she noted, “are small salient personal facts and items about them and their ways of life.” Out of these “small salient personal facts” Mary MacLane elaborated her own myth—a myth of herself. From the seemingly most trivial things that surrounded her, she distilled a pure magic. She wrote, with sensuous detail, on “the art of eating an olive,” on her long walks over Butte’s endless “sand and barrenness,” on the sexual longings stirred in her by seventeen engraved portraits of Napoleon. Narcissistically, obsessively, playfully, she explored the infinite irrational depths of her recalcitrant subjectivity. “Just to be Mary MacLane—who am first of all my own self, and get by with it!—how I do that I cannot quite make out.”

After The Story of Mary MacLane she published two more books: My Friend Annabel Lee (1903) and I, Mary MacLane (1917). She also contributed feature articles to a number of newspapers and magazines. None of her writings fit into the usual literary classifications. They are neither fiction nor nonfiction; they are not “stream of consciousness” narratives and should not be confused with “true confessions.” Although presented in diary form, they are really something quite different. They are certainly not autobiography, philosophy, or psychology, any more than they are stories, essays, or poems. Mary MacLane defied existing genres and created her own.

Poetic humor is her hallmark. Much of her work, such as “The Six Toothbrushes” and “The Back of a Magazine,” makes us think of Lautréamont and Jarry. There is an “anti-literary” quality about her writing—anti-literary in the sense intended by André Breton and Paul Éluard when they declared that “poetry is the opposite of literature.” Although an avid reader she disdained the society of litterateurs and contributed rarely, if at all, to literary reviews. Her eccentric, playful, yet radical divergence from the dominant literary tendencies of her time qualifies her as an authentic presurrealist.

“I do not write what my thoughts are saying to me,” she acknowledged, although “now and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm.” But “something lives, lives muscularly in me that constantly betrays me, destroys me against all my own convictions, against all my own knowledge, against all my own desire.” With the same striking candor she recognized the limits of her own self-assigned project: “It is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of a Room I have just quitted.”

If most critics disparaged her with uncomprehending malice, there were at least a few exceptions. The novelist Gertrude Atherton, who visited MacLane and wrote about her at length, admired not only her writing but also her conversation, “a mixture of slang and prose of an almost classical purity”; she found, too, that MacLane’s “criticisms of current authors were acute, unbiased, and everything she said was worth listening to.” Hamlin Garland praised “her crisp, clear, unhesitating use of English.” H. L. Mencken admired her sense of “the infinite resilience, the drunken exuberance, the magnificent power and delicacy of the language,” and said he knew of no other woman writer who could play on words more magically. In a full-page review in the Chicago American, Clarence Darrow pronounced The Story of Mary MacLane “little short of a miracle,” and went on to say that “no more marvelous book was ever born of a sensitive, precocious brain.” The socialist Oscar Lovell Triggs saluted MacLane’s courage in portraying “the inner history of her life.” And Harriet Monroe, who went on to become the founding editor of Poetry magazine, likened MacLane to Emily Brontë and elsewhere stated that she had never met anyone with more analytical power.

After The Story of Mary MacLane was published, the young author visited Chicago and then went East for a time. Rumor had it that she might enroll in Radcliffe College or Vassar, but nothing came of it. She found life in Boston and Cambridge dull compared to Butte, “where the people are so much more virile and full of imagination.” She much preferred New York, especially Greenwich Village, where she kept an apartment for several years. Her New York writings include an affectionate sketch of Coney Island and a strong indictment of Wall Street.

Wherever she went she was sure to confound the philistines with her unconventional behavior. She went out of her way to insult Butte society matrons who staged a literary reception in her honor. A trip to Newport, Rhode Island, provoked an article sharply critical of that fashionable resort town’s class pretensions and arrogance. Mary MacLane simply could not be “domesticated.” Violating social conventions was the essence of her being. At a time when tolerance of dissident sexuality was virtually nonexistent, she openly avowed her lesbian inclinations. We find her refereeing a prizefight in Thermopolis, Wyoming, and frequenting low-class gambling dives on Forty-Second Street in New York. In later years she seems to have rejected literary society altogether and, with characteristic defiance of white middle-class propriety, chosen to live instead in Chicago’s African American community. Always, everywhere, she freely expounded her controversial views on marriage, the family, sex, religion, literature, morality, the greed and idiocy of the rich, and anything else that came to mind.

Unlike so many authors who enjoy initial success in Chicago and then move to New York to grow old and respectable, in 1917 Mary MacLane came back to the city of her youthful triumph for what turned out to be a second triumph, of sorts—or at least another scandal in the grand MacLane tradition: she made a movie!

An “ardent film fan” herself, when she received an invitation to make a film from the producer George K. Spoor of Chicago’s renowned Essanay Studios, where Charlie Chaplin made his greatest shorts, she readily accepted. Shortly after her arrival in town, production began on the full-length feature Men Who Have Made Love to Me. Not only did MacLane write the script—based on an article of the same title she had published in 1910—she also played the starring role: herself.

Directed by Arthur Berthelet, the seven- or eight-reel Men Who Have Made Love to Me was released in January 1918 and was widely reviewed throughout the country. Unfortunately, no print of this film appears to have survived. Most critics didn’t care for it, needless to say, although a few begrudged her some ability as an actress, and her director said that the comic vamp reminded him of the young Sarah Bernhardt. Not surprisingly, the film provoked the wrath of puritanical public opinion; it was banned by the Ohio Board of Censors as “harmful to public morality.”

And so Mary MacLane, who embodied much of the spirit of the “Jazz Age” two decades early, was still going strong in 1918. Not for nothing has she been called the earliest example of the “New Woman” in literature, and even “the first flapper.” But when the Roaring Twenties roared into full swing, she was no longer the constant headliner she had been in her youth. After the furor provoked by her movie died down, she settled in Chicago. Her contract with Essanay called for a series of films, but she made no others. In part this may have been because the first film was not a box-office hit, but MacLane’s failing health was surely another and perhaps greater factor. She had been considered frail even as a child, and in 1910 she suffered a severe case of scarlet fever. Sometime in the twenties, if not earlier, she was diagnosed as having tuberculosis.

She was cared for during her last years by her best friend, the African American photographer and longtime Chicagoan Harriet Williams, whom she had met through New York acquaintances not long after her first book came out in 1902. The two had stayed in touch and were especially close during MacLane’s last four years. On August 6, 1929, she died in her room at the Michigan Hotel on South Michigan Avenue, not far from Williams’s studio. She was forty-eight years old. Williams, together with Harriet Monroe, arranged her funeral.

For decades after her death Mary MacLane remained largely an unknown. Her books were long out of print and difficult to find, even in libraries. Standard literary histories and anthologies ignored her completely, and until recently even feminist writers rarely referred to her except in passing. Amazingly, she is not profiled in the three-volume reference work Notable American Women.

Yet MacLane’s is an important voice, rebellious and original, and surely will be listened to again. At a time when most American “women’s literature” reeked of genteel sentimentality, moralistic uplift, and other literary sugar water, she offered readers stronger stuff by far. Scandalously, passionately, she rejected bourgeois Christian notions of “femininity” and scorned the patriotic platitudes about life in the U.S. Above all she affirmed her right to a free sexuality, and insisted that the quest for experience and self-realization is too important to allow it to be impeded by stupid, narrow-minded bigots and bureaucrats. After nearly a hundred years, her radical pessimism, her individualist feminism, her refusal to adjust to the misery and hypocrisy of an unjust and exploitative social order have retained and even multiplied their force, and more than ever win our respect and admiration.

“I can shake my life like a hollow gourd,” said Mary MacLane, “and hear the eerie rattling sound I make in it.” There is a bitter humor in these words, as in so much of her writing. Although she felt that her humor was “far too deep to admit of laughter,” she coolly and calmly insisted on keeping the last laugh for herself. “In my black dress and my still room, I say inwardly and willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly: Ha! ha! ha!”

 

Penelope Rosemont is the author of Dreams of Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS and the Seven Cities of Cibola; Beware of the Ice and Other Poems; and, most recently, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. She is also the editor of the seminal anthology Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Her paintings appeared recently in the exhibitions “Revolutionary Imagination: Chicago Surrealism from Object to Activism” and “Dada Chicago.” She continues to be active in the surrealist movement in the U.S. and Europe. She lives in the Chicago area.

From Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields , by Penelope Rosemont, out now from City Lights Publishers. Copyright 2019 by Penelope Rosemont. Reprinted with permission of City Lights Publishers.

Sum Effects

When my grandmother died she owned no property, personal or real; no goods, durable or consumable. Personal property is also called movable property, personalty, movables, chattels (chattels first meant goods and money, and later came to be associated with a beast held in possession, livestock, cattle; chattel, as slaves, came into use in the seventeenth century), and under U.S. law can be further divided into tangibles and intangibles. Tangible property can be felt or touched and intangible property is immaterial. Personal effects are tangibles; debt and goodwill, intangibles. (And then there was paraphernalia, a specifically female version of personal effects: these are called her paraphernalia … the apparel and ornaments of the wife, which also included tableware and sometimes her bed.) Real property, with its echoes of real estate, realty, royalty, realm, kingdom, is immovable property, land and the structures on it. Durable goods, also known as hard goods, have a useful life of three or more years, and consumable goods, also known as soft goods, get used up or discarded; a further subset is known as perishables, goods prone to disintegration or decay. Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions. She didn’t leave a thing, save her body and that, of course, would be gone soon, too.

My grandmother was under my custodianship, a kind of power, although in daily practice she was under the care of the nurses and aides at the Sherwin Manor Nursing Home. Mine was the name they had on file, the responsible party. She died with no clothes, shoes, sleepwear, undergarments, accessories, eyeglasses, jewelry, toiletries, trinkets, talismans, keys, loose change, photos, birthday cards, collectibles, household goods, furniture, financial assets, or real estate.  She never owned a vehicle. She owned no artwork, although her husband, my grandfather, was an artist by trade, in the trades, a sign painter. (He scribbled dirty pictures on scraps of newspaper to amuse me while we did the crossword puzzle in the Chicago American.) There had been a wedding ring, removed before she went into the nursing home and then stored in a safe-deposit box; a heavy gold choker that sat on one’s neck like a snake, passed on to my mother and then to me but never worn; a small ruby ring, possibly a child’s, which I lost in a motel room. She died without anything to her name, a phrase that arguably has its origins in the ability to sign one’s name to a binding document, a right that many women were long denied. Civiliter mortuus, civil death.

I first came across the term civil death in the landmark 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, articulated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early feminists, who argued that the twin institutions of marriage and patriarchy had rendered women, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. Civiliter mortuus: civil death. To be civilly dead is to lose the rights of citizenship through imprisonment or banishment. To lose the right, among other rights, to property and wages. Civil death had its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where it was known as atimia (dishonor) and infamia (infamy), respectively. It was a form of collective forgetting that forced the infamous, the disregarded, to disappear from the polity. Had I, as her default caretaker, rendered my grandmother civilly dead?

She had never been rich. She had always been envious. Of the moneyed, of her younger sister.  Her younger sister, who wore a tiara at her wedding and married a merchant.  My grandmother was contemptuous of her sign-painter husband, whom she may have loved but often derided.  He made enough money to put food on the table but not enough for her to flaunt.  He spoke with a foreign accent; he was Russian-born.  Her sister’s husband spoke with an accent too, but his was of the west, of Montana, and so it mattered less that he was crude.  His crudeness was home-grown.  My grandmother was long-suffering, and we knew it.  My mother called her Sarah Bernhardt.  She fell to the floor when the call came about my grandfather’s death.  She was putting on an act, my mother implied.  A show.  But can it be both, can one put on an act and be shocked to the floor in grief?  She went down gently, so as not to hurt herself. Perhaps my mother felt that these antics allowed no room for her own pain, which was quieter but no less piercing.

She never owned a home, unlike her rich sister, who owned two homes, one a waterfront property in Miami with mango trees and a private dock, where my grandparents were regularly invited to spend the winter. It was a largesse my grandmother expected and resented, and one she feared would be withdrawn. She lived on Surf Street, in the Surf Hotel, a cramped apartment, two blocks from Lake Michigan, and then she lived with us, and then, widowed, she lived with another widow, an arrangement based on saving money and eliciting mutual dislike, and then, after the widow sold her house, she lived in a nursing home, on Medicaid. When she lived with us, we shared a bedroom. She complained of the cold. Her bed was against the wall by the window; every night she asked me to move it. She was afraid of drafts. She wrapped herself up in cardigan sweaters and wore hose rolled at the knees. Often she held herself. Her breasts were massive, a geologic formation. Years later she had to have one of them removed. Once there was a Peeping Tom in the window, his face a dark outline against the glass. I was equal parts frightened and flattered. Be careful, she used to say, about almost everything.

Her father, a peddler, Russian-born as well, had sold sundries off a cart. He’d stocked other people’s shelves with goods, iron goods according to one census report and junk according to another, until he fell off his cart and died.

In sixteenth-century Germany, a person who was civilly dead was referred to as vogelfrei, which literally translates as “free as a bird” but actually meant an outlaw, a person unbound by law, subject to no protections, so the freedom belonged to others, who were free to kill him and leave him for the birds. His body should be free and accessible to all people and beasts, to the birds in the air and the fish in water so that none can be made liable for any crimes committed against him. Kaiser Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, declared the Roma vogelfrei and ordered them to be treated with all possible severity both in body and property. Marx later called the proletariat, free from the bonds of feudalism but not free to enter into the new economy, free and rightless, while Hannah Arendt said the Jews, under Nazism, were free game. The wife, the villein (feudal tenant), the monk, the slave, the immigrant, the incarcerated, the elderly, the disabled, the queer, all have been described as civilly dead, or as one early English jurist wrote of the villein and the monk, being under the power of their lords.

When she died, I was my grandmother’s only living relative. I thought of myself that way, even though her younger sister was still alive, because her sister needed her own caretaking, and my brother, the third living relative, lived in California, too far away and disinclined to do any caretaking at all. I was disinclined, too, but took up the title—if not the role—and the martyrdom as well.

Is love a requisite? Would I have grown to love her if I’d tended her body? Wiped her clean, brushed her hair, daubed on lipstick, spooned cottage cheese. When my friend A was in labor, she asked for ice repeatedly, and I fed the chips between her lips; at the required time I cut the cord. Now, years later, the urgency of those moments binds us. Would rubbing the rough spots on my grandmother’s skin with Aquaphor have eventually eroded my indifference, as if in applying a salve I, too, would be soothed? “The opposite of moral is not immoral” but indifferent, a political activist recently wrote. I was indifferent toward my grandmother. I paid her little regard. You do not necessarily feel it, Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa once said when a student asked about how to be compassionate without feeling it first.  You are it.

My grandmother had already been dismantled. She’d lost her husband, her daughter, her breast, her bearings. She could no longer roll out blintzes on the kitchen table. She’d lost half her size. She didn’t know her own thoughts. She could no longer sign her name. Had she shed her resentments, too? Her fears? Of being poisoned by the nurses. Her curses? Khob im in bod, Yiddish for “throw him in the bathtub,” said when she wanted to demonstrate aggrieved indifference. Her superstitions? Pull your ear if you sneeze while thinking or talking about the dead—so death, for the time being, won’t come knocking. There was no will, no final and determining document. (To die without a will is to die intestate, without testimony, without witness.) No declarations or requests. She was dead in law and in deede.

What about the TV set?

What about the skinny watch she wore embedded in her wrist, similar to the one I wear now?

When I arrived at the nursing home, they gave me a plastic bag, empty except for her release papers. Isn’t the only living relative supposed to keep track of such things? Isn’t she supposed to write her grandmother’s name on the inside of all her clothing with a water-resistant Sharpie so she might still keep her own stock and goods whole, in apparancie to the worlde; buy garish new housecoats when the old ones wear thin; replace the soiled underwear; dry-clean the sweaters; restock the AA batteries for the TV remote; cut the chicken breast into pieces so her grandmother can spear them with a fork; lubricate her lips; bring treats of chocolate-covered strawberries; monitor the medications; sort the family photos and slip them into cheap decorative frames to put near the bed so her grandmother could look at them and the staff could admire the assembled array of her family? Don’t we carry photographs of … those we love who have died? Don’t we …keep them on the mantel as a reminder of all that is precious and binds us to this life? Isn’t she supposed to keep track, so in the end there’s an accounting, a ledger of the incoming and the outgoing, an ultimate tally?  Hannah Arendt said that conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who waits for you if and when you come home, Locke said it’s nothing more than your own opinion of your own actions, and research claims that the best long-term-care insurance is a conscientious daughter. At the desk I had to introduce myself, I had to say I’m Goldie Alter’s granddaughter. They didn’t know me otherwise. They didn’t recognize me. I offered my name up as if it were an apology. A nurse looked up, a flash of contempt in her eyes, before we got down to the final paperwork that, once signed, was slipped into the bag, otherwise empty.

It was a convenience store bag, 7-Eleven or Osco or Target or Walgreens.

Goldie Alter died in Chicago, Illinois, on August 3, 1995, midnineties, her exact age indeterminate, with no possessions. In my absence, she’d been whittled down to nothing. The bare facts remain, but some of those are in question. She’s buried in Westlawn Cemetery, next to her husband, Leo, and near their daughter, Harriet. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, she was once a clerk and, once married, she had no occupation and no income. She could read and write. Her maiden name was Zaslavsky. She was born in 1897 or 1899 or 1900, on December 5 or 12, in Chicago, the second child of Sarah and Joseph. She was preceded in death by her husband and daughter, her older sister, Sadie, and younger brother, Sidney, and survived by her younger sister, Etta, and two grandchildren.

Here, then, is an imagined accounting, a closing inventory. In the end, there was her bed, durable and movable. The sheets, discardable. The underpads, changed daily and perishable. The pillow, hypoallergenic, stamped PROPERTY OF SHERWIN MANOR. The lift device above the bed. The straws, the cup, the bedside table. A pack of sponge swabs. A tube of Aquaphor. The chest and wardrobe. Compression socks. The wheelchair, lap cushion, restraining vest. Down the hall, the dining tables, the faux wood chairs, arranged expectantly. A blue sweater draped over a chair. Pine cone centerpieces. On the wall: FIRST AID FOR CHOKING: GET THEM TO COUGH. The potted ficus tree, unfurling a new leaf and dropping another. The TV, at high volume. Shirley Temple was the first choice to star in this 1939 musical but Judy Garland got the part. The remote, on a cord. A clock with vines. Copies of Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, Better Homes and Gardens, Reader’s Digest. IS DOLE TOO OLD FOR THE JOB? MONICA SELES BREAKS HER SILENCE. There were Monet’s water lilies. A bateau along the Seine. The Chicago skyline. Fire extinguishers behind glass. Unfinished meals on a cart. The smell of consommé. An aquarium with black and yellow striped fish. There were locked cabinets with medications. Locked closets with clean linens. There was a calendar on the wall. Today is Thursday. A bulletin board with announcements. Irv Williger’s birthday. Memoir, bingo, a Frank Sinatra impersonator. Sign up for the symphony: Bartók and Bruckner. The rabbi is visiting. Hair appointments. There was the orange cone on the floor with the figure of a man falling. There were emergency exits. Intercoms. Instructions, codes. Wall phones. Arm rails. STAFF ONLY. Room numbers, door tags. The Prince Sleeps Here. Rosenthal, Weisbourd, Schaps, Harris … A chair behind the desk. The bird on the vine clock calling. There was a draft moving down the hallway, tangible and felt.

 

Peggy Shinner is the author of the essay collection You Feel So Mortal, which was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She lives in Chicago.

Selected Utopias

Installation view: “Utopian Imagination,” Ford Foundation Gallery, September 17–December 7, 2019. Photo: Sebastian Bach.

On my way to see “Utopian Imagination” (on view through December 7), the final installment of the artist and curator Jaishri Abichandani’s trilogy of shows at the Ford Foundation Gallery, I passed a group of Lyndon LaRouche acolytes. LaRouche, known over the last forty or so years as a convicted criminal, conspiracy theorist, and perennial candidate for president, died earlier this year, but his fringe beliefs live on through these dutiful members of his movement. They were handing out flyers such as INTERNATIONAL CALL TO YOUTH: The Age of Reason Is In The Stars!, which describes the climate activist Greta Thunberg as a “hedge-fund cover girl” for Wall Street, and Some Plain Facts Bearing On the Impeachment, which proclaims: “Remember, the oligarchy’s spokesman, the British House of Lords, have already instructed their assets in the United States that under no circumstances can Donald Trump have a second term.”

It used to be easier to dismiss fringe narratives like these, but things have changed: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushes anti-vax claims, Edgar Welch shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria looking for an alleged (and quickly debunked) child-trafficking ring, and the aforementioned Thunberg gets picked on by President Trump for speaking about the realities of climate change. It’s a hard time not only to be sure of a narrative’s veracity but also of how to tell a better, more hopeful one. The pieces collected in “Utopian Imagination” provide glimpses of different futures, ones more joyous and inclusive.

 

farxiyo jaamac, Android Girl, 2017. Private collection.

 

It’s not a large show, but it doesn’t need to be. Abichandani has an eye for pieces that offer up their own stories, and the lack of accompanying text on the painted walls (blue, instead of the usual white, a quiet readjustment that resets the whole space) ensures that moving through the exhibition is an immersive and seamless experience. Abichandani draws inspiration from such writers and thinkers as Naomi Klein, Octavia Butler, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, whose 1905 story “Sultana’s Dream” depicts a feminist utopia called Ladyland. “You need not be afraid of coming across a man here,” a character explains early in Rokeya’s tale. “This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here.”

 

Mariko Mori, Miko No Inori, 1996. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

A few works here offer visions that resonate as strongly as a Ladyland. The first thing you see, even before entering the gallery, is Saks Afridi’s The Prayer Catcher, a flying mosque suspended vertically against a wall. It looks like part of a set for Muslim sci-fi action figures, and Afridi provides a compelling premise: “For a brief time, a mysterious spacecraft resembling a hovering mosque appeared, and every human on Earth was granted one answered prayer every 24 hours.” With Cloud 9, Yinka Shonibare CBE imagines an African-led space program via an astronaut and a flag rendered in bright colors and dizzying patterns. Zack Ove’s Sky Lark, a cobbled-together spaceship made of found materials (it’s the only piece here whose materials list includes both “vintage fairground ride” and “trumpets”), reimagines space travel as a method of transportation accessible to just about anyone.

 

Zak Ové, Sky Lark, 2017. Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, 21c Museum Hotels.

 

 

Beatriz Cortez’s contribution encompasses the wishes and hopes of many more than just the artist. At the push of a button, her four Boxes of Wonder print out slips of receipt paper with quotes from famous authors and thinkers, dreams from the Guatemalan art collective Kaqjay Moloj, encouraging words from Cortez’s email inbox, and wishes from “a group of immigrants and border crossers.” One of the printouts I received read:

Cuando llegue el futuro:

When the future comes:

We will have built dreams together

Habremos construido anhelos juntos

 

Lola Flash, Syzygy, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Near the back of the exhibition is one of its most striking pieces, Lola Flash’s Syzygy, a self-portrait created especially for this show. An artist and activist known for her involvement with ACT UP, Flash has often participated in work that challenges prevailing narratives, such as the photo project Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do. In Syzygy, Flash wears a prison jumpsuit, a space helmet, and a pair of handcuffs, unlocked. Behind her, blue sky with a single cloud, forested hills, and rippling water fill the frame.

Shot from below, Flash towers over the scenery, as if swapped in for 2001’s space monolith, a human answer to assumptions about an automated future. It’s a composition that feels excited about a frontier. On the Ford Foundation Gallery’s Instagram account, Flash says of the photo, “It’s hard to think of life in the future when we’re not incarcerated.” But Syzygy offers a blueprint of a better, more galactic future, prisoners liberated and “jumping from planet to planet full of joy.”

It takes work to be optimistic. Thankfully, Abichandani and the artists featured in “Utopian Imagination” have done that work. 

 

Saks Afridi, Sighting #6, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

Lucas Adams is a writer and comics artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the cofounder and coeditor of New York Review Comics.

Redux: Your Name Means Open

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, we’re reading pieces that are featured on The Paris Review Podcast, which just wrapped up its second season. Read on for Tennessee Williams’s Art of Theater interview, Danez Smith’s poem “my bitch!,” and Philip Roth’s short story “The Conversion of the Jews.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast!

 

Tennessee Williams, The Art of Theater No. 5

Issue no. 81 (Fall 1981)

I now look back at periods of my life, and I think, Was that really me? Was I doing those things? I don’t feel any continuity in my life. It is as if my life were segments that are separate and do not connect. From one period to another it has all happened behind the curtain of work. And I just peek out from behind the curtain now and then and find myself on totally different terrain.

 

my bitch!

By Danez Smith

Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

after Nicole Sealey

o bitch. my good bitch. bitch my heart.

dream bitch. bitch my salve. bitch my order.

bitch my willowed stream. bitch my legend.

bitch like a door. your name means open

in the language of my getting by. bitch sesame …

 

The Conversion of the Jews

By Philip Roth

Issue no. 18 (Spring 1958)

“You’re a real one for opening your mouth in the first place,” Itzie said. “What do you open your mouth all the time for?”

“I didn’t bring it up, Itz, I didn’t,” Ozzie said.

“What do you care about Jesus Christ for anyway?”

“I didn’t bring up Jesus Christ. He did. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Jesus is historical, he kept saying. Jesus is historical.” Ozzie mimicked the monumental voice of Rabbi Binder.

 

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

The Radical Mister Rogers

Collage by A. E. McClure/ Yearbook photo courtesy of the Department of College Archives and Special Collections Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

Twenty-year-old Fred Rogers did not like Dartmouth College. The Ivy was a “beer-soaked, jockstrap party school,” as Maxwell King, Rogers’s recent biographer, puts it. Dartmouth also didn’t have a music major. But Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, did, plus a reputation as “the only New England college not located in New England.” In 1948, after two years at Dartmouth, Rogers transferred to Rollins and minored in French. “Bold move,” King summed on a phone call. Rogers had been a timid and sickly boy, overprotected. The switchover was “an instance of daring.” “And I think Rollins was the first place where Rogers really felt happy,” King told me. He’d once explained: “I just felt so much at home there.”

When I attended Rollins, sixty years after Rogers, his oil portrait hung in the concert hall, and a blue zip-front cardigan and signed canvas sneakers were encased at the library, like relics. We used to joke that a Rogers endowment bankrolled the landscapers—a huge, omnipresent force who cared for our subtropical surroundings—and frat boys boosted the urban legend that the children’s-TV host was an ex-Marine sniper.

Today, I’d shred those boys for wanting to bend the nonsmoking, teetotaling, vegetarian, pacifist mensch into a macho. Of course, Mister Rogers would not favor incivility. Mister Rogers would talk me out of it, slowly and softly. “He had this amazing ability to look into people and see past the adult façade that we present, and take a really direct look at the aching kid that’s within all of us—and to decide what that kid needed,” said the journalist Tom Junod, whose 1998 Esquire profile is the basis of the recently released A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks.

The director Marielle Heller waited almost a full calendar, until Hanks’s schedule opened up, to make it happen. “Tom was my first and only choice,” she told me. Hanks was Rogers’s favorite actor, perhaps because of his roles as the man-child in Big and the gentleman in Forrest Gump. Hanks has also been the playful cowboy in the Toy Story franchise and the boyish boss in Saving Mr. Banks. All these characters are renditions of Fred Rogers’s idée fixe that not only does the kid remain in every grown-up, a grown-up is coming of age in every kid, and that our humanity depends on keeping them conversant.

The last two years have seen a Mister Rogers boom: a documentary (the highest-grossing bio-doc ever), two biographies (Shea Tuttle’s theologically driven Exactly As You Are dropped in October), and this boffo film. But his undergraduate experience, that searching, shaping time between childhood and adulthood, has hardly been considered. In this peak Rogers moment, as a fellow alum, I had to ask: what was Fred Rogers like in college?

“He was different,” Joanne Rogers, his widow, told Jimmy Fallon last year. The couple met at the Rollins conservatory and were popular. “In his young days, he was lively and full of fun, but he talked about his feelings…” Kids who were out of sorts would drop into his dorm room “just to talk,” Fred Rogers once wrote. According to one athlete, “He had feelings for everybody, even the mean football players.” Joanne thought to herself, “‘Jeez, maybe he’ll work at an orphanage!’”

 

Rollins’s theater and chapel circa Rogers’s time there.

 

This was fifteen years before desegregation, in the Deep South, at a pastel-colored liberal-arts college of fewer than 650 students. It was in a pocket of Orlando that is historically where well-heeled Northerners wintered. Thus the town’s name, Winter Park. The long green that runs up to campus is called Central Park. The tony street it parallels, Park Avenue. Rogers’s family would arrive from Pennsylvania in a convertible with their butler-chauffeur and take a big lakefront villa nearby during the coldest months. He was sensitive about being highborn, though many of his classmates were from even greater wealth. Another lasting friend of the Rogerses, Jeannine Morrison, remembers how the driver shuttled Rogers’s adopted little sister around “like a princess.” They’d see the drop-top go by, and “Roge would say, Isn’t that disgusting. He would get so furious,” Morrison told me. He hid a Buick on the edge of campus. “He didn’t want anyone to know he had it.”

Eatonville—Zora Neal Hurston’s majority-black hometown—is a half hour from Rollins, and Rogers sometimes volunteered there. A report he penned for the Interfaith and Race Relations Committee, of which he was chairman, mentions their support of a drive for a nursing home that could function as a surgery and maternity for Winter Park’s African American community. This was Jim Crowism. There was no doctor in Eatonville who accepted black patients. Rogers noted that while there was one in Orlando, it cost $8—a lot then—to see him.

Just before Rogers’s second year started, in the county next door, young black men known as the Groveland Four were accused of raping a white teenager. A sheriff’s posse murdered one of the men. An all-white jury hastily convicted the other three. This January, the four men were posthumously pardoned, but in Rogers’s day, the local NAACP was on their defense. “We can imagine the dissonance,” Michael Long, the author of Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister, said to me when I asked him about how those years in Florida at Rollins informed Rogers’s sensitivity to race relations.

Long observes in his book that the Rollins kids didn’t join any direct action efforts. They screened documentaries and set up lectures and charitably dished resources such as books and lights at the substandard Jim Crow institutions. “Rollins was such a bastion of Southern white privilege,” Long points out, “that the work undertaken by Rogers and his committee must have appeared to some of his fellow students as downright radical.”

In Pennsylvania, Rogers’s parents had employed George Allen, the son of a black maid who’d passed away. Allen lived with them, and taught Fred how to play jazz and pilot a plane. “Rogers is moving from that model where you invited black people into your family as help, to a model where black people are undertaking educational and medical initiatives in their communities and inviting white people to come help out,” Long went on by phone. “It’s beyond paternalism but not so forward as direct action. He’s navigating a middle course that typifies the way he’ll do things after college.”

Long paused. “Rollins really connects to the show’s launch.” The taping began in September 1967, after that summer’s Detroit riot. “Again, Rogers did not march for Civil Rights or preach electoral politics.” Instead, he programmed “super intentionally.” While whites were fleeing cities for enclaves in the suburbs, in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, in the fourth episode, a black teacher stops by with her class of integrated schoolchildren and a smiling Mister Rogers greets them: “I’m glad to see you.”

“Our interest in Rogers is peaking. But you cannot understand him—or the interest in him now—outside the historical frame,” Long stressed. In our current imagination, Mister Rogers becomes an apolitical “Mister Feely-Feely. That, by the way, is how I think the Fred Rogers Center and its minions prefer to depict him.”

*

While at Rollins, Rogers was a member of the International Relations Club, president of the French Club, on the Community Service Committee and the Welcoming Committee, in the Music Guild and the invite-only Key Society (recognizing “all-around efficiency”); he was on the intramural swim team, in the choir, and staff at the chapel. To quote the chapel’s dean: “Activities are the trial run of growing up, when we try parts and roles for size and comfort.”

My involvement as an undergrad was limited to a post on the Parking Ticket Appeal Committee. It meant I was thick with campus security and had some power to get my associates out of fines. Rolly Colly, as we called Rollins, was ranked by Playboy as “the hardest-partying small school in the country” in 2010, the year after I graduated. A best-selling T-shirt adapted our motto Fiat lux (“Let there be light”) into Fiat luxury. The country club temper was out of control. Even so, we late-eighties babies comprised one of the last classes whose childhoods overlapped with Misters Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the school conjured the alumnus like a favorite son and tried to impart his brand of global citizenship on us. (Rollins plans to install a bronze likeness of Rogers in 2020.)

An etched marble plaque, “Life Is For Service,” was bolted onto one of the walls lining an arcade outside my sorority. We were told that Rogers jotted that down on some paper and stored it in his wallet for the rest of his life. He did. But collegiate Rogers was also a funnyman. “Roge liked to cover the ‘Ser,’” Morrison told me, “so that it read “Life Is for vice.” Once, when the senior boys were mandated to come to the evening meal in coats and ties, “He rolled up in a coat and a tie, and no pants!” At Rollins, he wrote satirical lyrics to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” later sung by him as the grandiose puppet King Friday XIII:

Propel propel propel your craft

Gently down liquid solution

Ecstatically ecstatically ecstatically ecstatically

Existence is but an illusion

Here and there, The Sandspur, the school weekly, reported that Rogers had composed a new fugue or “honored everyone with some of his original songs” at a Halloween bash. When he acted with Anthony Perkins (Alfred Hitchcock’s future Psycho lead) in the play “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” the review said Tony gave a “smooth performance” and Freddy “added a successful comic touch, although he lacked projection.”

 

“The inimitable Fred Rogers” at a Halloween party in 1950. Clipping from the student paper courtesy of the Department of College Archives and Special Collections Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

 

After Rogers transferred in, Rollins’s long-serving, much-loved president bowed out. Newcomer Paul Wagner had pioneered audio-visuals in the classroom and was “hunky” and “bossy,” according to Joanne. He was the youngest college president in the country—just thirty-one, the New York Times and Newsweek noticed.

The trustees tasked their new “Boy Wonder” with economizing. Because football operated in the hole, it was axed. That probably didn’t phase Rogers. However, when the president cut the housemothers from the men’s dorms, Rogers sent him a five-page letter (referenced here for the first time): “So since college is a little life in our big life and our childhood is such a deciding factor to our adult happiness and the college freshman year corresponds to our childhood—I’m concerned about the freshmen,” he wrote, underlining. Decisions at Rollins were traditionally crowdsourced (even classes were done as round tables) and that MO would stick with Rogers throughout his career.

 

From Rogers’s 1950 letter to President Wagner. Courtesy of Joanne Rogers.

 

Wagner did not respond, and the housemothers issue seems to have compelled Rogers to run for student government. He lost, but Rogers was among the students who formed an emergency steering committee when, not long after, Wagner sacked a third of the faculty in response to declining enrollment. Rogers was “something of a campus activist” and “a leader,” King writes, dispensing quickly (and vaguely) with the phase in his biography. “One of the interesting aspects of Fred’s role on campus in this period—Joanne called him a ‘rabble-rouser’—is that he never repeated it later in life.”

Pro- and anti-Wagner factions poisoned the school and town. “This enormous explosion!” said one of the deans, recalling how much of the student body went full-tilt for the twenty-three canceled profs. The New Yorker punched Wagner in “Talk of the Town,” Time and Life covered the squeeze (“a case history of what lies in store for countless small colleges”). The student weekly foamed. I asked King whether he believed the nasty twelve-week ouster—which concluded when cops walked Wagner off campus—taught Rogers to keep clear of politics. “He didn’t like conflict, contention, strife. He had this brush with that at Rollins and backed away from it,” King said. “From a programming standpoint, you can argue that he was quite radical. On a personal level, I think he became very cautious.”

This goes to the center of it. Until the election of Donald Trump, the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was titled The Radical Mister Rogers. The filmmaker (owing much to Long’s book) realized that billing “would turn off people who needed to see it.” Joanne told me the premiere at Sundance was attended by cross-party politicians; in fact, she’d heard it “pleased both sides.” In the outright sense, she allowed, Rogers did not behave politically. “Many parents wouldn’t have let their kids watch.” (The national broadcast of Neighborhood was sponsored by the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and “Sears would not have wanted to lose people.”) “But if both sides were pleased with the doc,” held Long, “either one side wasn’t paying close attention or its treatment of Rogers’s leftist politics was insufficient.”

“Rogers sure as hell was political—the Neighborhood messaged countercultural values like diplomacy over militancy—and he himself got vocal when the wellbeing of children was at stake,” Long added. (The housemothers letter I found archived at Rollins is a precocious example of that.) He was close to Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, and lobbied for Heinz’s bill to exempt one parent of military couples or single parents from deployment during the Gulf War. “Does the U.S. Congress have little or no understanding of early trauma due to premature separation anxiety?” Rogers asked Heinz, upset when the bill failed.

Whatever differences exist between the rabble-rousing college student, and the more restrained man we all knew on television, certain essential elements of Rogers were there all along.

 

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She’s contributed to the New York Times Magazine, VanityFair.com, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Orion and is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen’s statue of the Little Mermaid.

Detroit Archives: On Haunting

In her new monthly column, “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. 

Inside the Whitney Mansion in Detroit

A few weeks ago, I met up with my mom and her friend Judy at a Detroit brunch spot, the garden of the Whitney Mansion. Billed as “an oasis in the heart of Detroit,” the outdoor courtyard is the site of wedding receptions and concerts. A bustling crowd of diners clapped politely as a revolving line-up of indie and jazz singers performed in a corner of the garden, their backs facing Woodward Avenue. Built in 1894 by a lumber baron who was celebrated, I guess, as “the wealthiest man in Detroit,” the ornate mansion has been restored to its original splendor. On this morning, the garden was abloom with smiling people and their garden-themed summer wear. The maître d’ had a podium. Our food arrived overlaid by fancy covers.

After we ate, we walked around to the front of the mansion. “I remember the homeless woman who lived there,” Judy said, tracing the lines of the nook that woman had made for herself on the porch. Judy and my mother had worked together at the Whitney Mansion in the late sixties. Gawking mansion-goers drifted in and out of the ornate doors.

Upstairs in the bathroom, Judy and my mom pointed out the architecture of their memories, bisecting the bathroom stalls with their pointer fingers to show where the wall of their office used to be. Downstairs, they gestured at the restored fixtures, at the parquet floors, the paintings on the wall.

“This is where I pierced your ears,” my mom squealed, pointing to the spot where Judy sat while my mother pushed a needle through her lobes to meet “a potato or an apple” on the other side. The two of them giggled as they moved from room to room. “I wonder if we can go in the solarium,” Judy kept wondering out loud. They stood in the place where a switchboard used to be. Sometimes, Judy would relieve the phone operator, pulling chords and pushing buttons to connect callers. “Don’t you remember that Lily Tomlin sketch?” She said, bringing the old technology back to life through her best Tomlin imitation. “One ringy dingy?”

We encountered a tour group gaping at a gigantic safe on the wall. The tour guide gestured vaguely at its mechanics. “I know how it works!” Judy piped up, and the guide ushered her forward to pantomime how the wall-size safe door would have been opened. The tour group seemed intrigued, and Judy and my mom warmed to their audience. They explained that they worked here for the Visiting Nurse Association. “The FBI interviewed me in that room over there,” Judy said, pointing in the direction of the plant-filled, sun-drenched solarium.

I looked at the tour group, anticipating a big reaction. Instead, the group and the guide moonwalked out of the room, toward the entryway. They were on their way, perhaps, to the “ghost bar,” away from the building’s actual ghosts and on to something glitzier, something more watered down.

“Can we go in the solarium?” Judy asked a white woman behind a desk. “No,” the woman said. Judy tried to explain to her why the room was important.

One afternoon, when Judy was at work, the FBI had come looking for her. Two white guys in trench coats, just like you’d expect. Her boss, a Unitarian activist, muttered, “Well, I wonder what took them so long.” They took her into the solarium. They wanted to know why her bright red TR3 sports car with a white top, so low to the ground you could reach out and graze your hand on the pavement, had been seen at certain spots around town. Judy had trained as a peace activist, and she knew she didn’t have to answer their questions. “Why don’t you ask my car?” she replied, both brazen and scared.

Back then, Judy’s housemate belonged to the Black Panther Party. He would borrow her car while she was at work, to deliver the party’s papers.

“This woman doesn’t care,” I said a bit too loudly, annoyed on Judy’s behalf, as we turned to walk away from the desk.

“Yes, she does,” a black waiter said, missing no beats. He’d come out of nowhere, and displayed such impressive social dexterity, gently nudging his colleague to pay attention. It was as if he’d caught a falling vase, and I forgave the mansion for a moment.

We walked slowly up toward the second floor, past an astonishing, stained-glass window. It arced across the entire wall of the landing. There would be a wedding here soon, and well-dressed people wandered past carrying flowers, looking a bit lost. We tried to step out of their way when possible. There were paintings of ghostly looking children everywhere, an attempt, it seemed, to fortify the program called the “paranormal dinner tour.” I felt like I was on the pilot episode of American Horror Story.

As my mother admired the fireplaces and the woodwork, I puzzled over the art in one particular room. There were photographs that most Detroiters would describe as “ruin porn”—a piano in an abandoned factory, decomposing houses. I would be lying if I said that I don’t find beauty in these kinds of images, but for such a public space to display them as a representation of their own city surprised me. I wondered who the mansion hoped to attract as its clientele. Judging from the website, it’s the tourists whose travel to the city is contingent upon locating “an oasis” beforehand. A place inside of which the city’s hard times might still feel sexy, far enough off, best contemplated over an old-fashioned, alongside paintings of titillatingly creepy children.

In a class that I’m teaching right now, we are talking about braided essays—what you might call lyric, woven with multiple threads of narrative. A few weeks ago, one student asked us to think about the form in terms of haunting. As in, one strand of narrative is haunted by another.

*

In the late sixties, the Whitney Mansion served as home base for the Visiting Nurse Association. The VNA conducted an infant health study in an initiative to intervene on an absurdly high mortality rate in certain areas of the city—sometimes as high as 45 percent. My mother and Judy were part of a group of researchers deployed to hospitals and homes throughout Detroit to interview new mothers, and to determine, contextualize, and propose solutions for the factors contributing to these disproportionately high instances of infant illness and death.

The most distinct memory Judy has of working for the infant health study was when she encountered a mother who had a normal period until suddenly, her water broke. She and her husband were thrilled for the unexpected child. But then there was the other end of the spectrum: a thirteen-year-old in the same situation.

Another vivid recollection Judy has from that era is of taking a bus to one of the hospitals where she would be interviewing mothers. The Tigers were playing in the World Series, and the bus driver had the game on the radio. When the Tigers won, he stopped the bus and let everyone run out into the street. Everybody hugged each other indiscriminately. It was one year since the city had exploded with social unrest. Judy had been in California when news of the 1967 uprising (many Detroiters won’t call it a riot) came on TV. She saw her apartment in the footage and wasn’t sure it would be there when she got back. After she came home, she went to a bar to meet her boyfriend who was part of the band the Spinners. She was the only white person in the room, and the whole place fell silent until the band leader raised his hand and waved her over.

My mother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, had just started dating my father, an African American cameraman who worked nights for the local TV station. He would pick up pork chop sandwiches doused in hot sauce from his mother’s house and drive my mom to each home on her list, waiting as she did her work. Inside the homes, my mother asked what she knew to be terribly invasive questions of mothers who were sometimes still children themselves.

The other night, as she hovered near the edge of sleep, my mother reminisced about that job with a dream-like intensity. She told me about sitting on one young woman’s porch, as the young woman’s baby slept inside. “She had a small washing machine on her counter in the kitchen,” my mother said. The day had been pleasant. They had formed a quiet bond.

Over my desk, there is a photograph of a little girl. A friend of mine found the photograph near a Detroit dumpster almost ten years ago. This is the face I think of when my mother tells me about the young woman on the porch. As if my brain is trying to reassemble something.

*

I keep thinking about Patti Smith’s performance of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the Nobel ceremony. It was barely a month after the 2016 presidential election, and Smith sang this song by Bob Dylan in honor of his prize. The song was filled with dystopian visions: Sad forests. Dead oceans. A bloodied branch. Broken tongues. At one point, Smith took a pause. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I’ve replayed and replayed it. Smith starts out the verse without any problems, addressing, a “blue-eyed son” not unlike her own. She sings, “saw a newborn babe with wild wolves all around it.” She manages the next couple of lines. What she’s meant to say when she loses her words is actually quite graphic: “I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’.” Rather than sing this, though, she circles back to the lyric that came before: “I saw the babe that was just bleeding. I saw the babe that,” she sings, her voice falling into fragments. She is unable to leave the newborn to the wolves.

Amanda Petrusich describes the event for the New Yorker: “audience members, dressed in their finest, wiped their eyes, blindly reached for each other, seemed unable to exhale.”

Smith writes, in the same publication, “I hadn’t forgotten the words that were now a part of me. I was simply unable to draw them out.” She explains it as a case of nerves rather than a case of global despair, but every time I put that video on to play, the rationale seems not to matter. The performance forecasted moments when we would all lose our words—like the newscaster unable to utter the phrase “tender age shelters” while reporting on infants in migrant detention.

“Hard Rain” is based on “Lord Randall,” a ballad in which a young man has a conversation with his mother. If you reduce the song to its list of core questions, you are left with: Where have you been? What did you see? What did you hear? Who did you meet? What’ll you do now?

This reminds me of the conversations I have with my own mother. Sometimes, even after I’ve said goodbye, she’ll ignore me and begin asking more things about my day. Recently, I told her bluntly that she had to let me go.

So often, I hang up without asking her the same questions.

 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan Writers’ Program.

Re-Covered: The Mischief

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

Let’s play “guess the novel”: It was written and first published in French in the mid-50’s, and is set over the course of a single summer. Its heroine is one of the jeunesse dorée, dissatisfied and bored despite her wealth and privilege. She drives a fast sports car, and idles away her days sunbathing on Mediterranean beaches and flirting with her boyfriend. She’s a capricious enfant terrible, and she’s stricken with jealousy at the happiness of a couple close to her, so she amuses herself by sabotaging their relationship, with unexpectedly tragic consequences.

Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, but a lesser-known work by the Algerian writer Assia Djebar. La Soif was first published in France in 1957 (three years after Bonjour Tristesse) and nimbly translated into English by Frances Frenaye, as The Mischief, the following year. There are plenty of parallels between the two novels. Both were debuts written by precociously young women writers—Sagan was eighteen and Djebar twenty-one—a description that also applied to their heroines: Sagan’s seventeen-year-old Cécile and Djebar’s twenty-year-old Nadia. However, while Bonjour Tristesse remains famous, recognized today as a mid-twentieth-century literary sensation-turned-French-classic, The Mischief is barely remembered, out of print in both the original French and the English translation.

This isn’t to say that Djebar (who died in 2015 at the age of seventy-eight) is unknown. On the contrary, she’s remembered as one of Algeria’s most celebrated female writers and intellectuals. She wrote more than fifteen novels in French (which were then translated into more than twenty languages), and was a critically acclaimed film maker and internationally respected academic. She had the voice of an intersectional feminist long before the term became popular. “Her novels and poems boldly face the challenges and struggles she knew as a feminist living under patriarchy and an intellectual living under colonialism and its aftermath,” her American publisher Seven Stories Press wrote in a statement made upon her death. A decade earlier, Djebar had made headlines when she became the first North African woman (and only the fifth woman) to be elected to the Académie Française. In the years that followed she was regularly named as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She spent her entire life shattering glass ceilings: La Soif, for example, was the first novel written by an Algerian woman to be published outside of Algeria. Not that this impressive detail saved the book from being considered rather lightweight by contemporary critics. The comparisons to Bonjour Tristesse were not particularly helpful. Sagan’s novel, although notorious, had garnered mixed reviews, some of which were extremely damning; a “vulgar, sad little book,” wrote The Spectator. Although critics don’t appear to have been as harsh about Djebar’s novel, despite its “nicely plotted” and “skillfully executed” turns—as the reviewer in the New York Times described them—The Mischief was reduced to somewhat trivial juvenilia. This opinion only solidified as Djebar’s voice became more overtly political throughout the course of her career. Many of her later novels remain in print—from Les Enfants du Nouveau Monde (The Children of the New World, 1962), which documents the lives of women in a rural Algerian town who are drawn to the resistance movement through her impressive tetralogy about the history of Algiers that emphasizes the horrors of the country’s colonial past, its struggle for liberation, and the subordinate position of women in Maghreb society, which began with L’amour, La Fantasia (Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade, 1985) and ends with Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison, 1995). But with its ostensibly more frivolous storyline, The Mischief has fallen by the wayside.

*

Like Bonjour Tristesse, The Mischief is narrated in the first person, and like Sagan’s Cécile, who, when she recalls the summer she was seventeen, is beset by a “strange melancholy,” Djebar’s Nadia is haunted by a similar bygone episode in her life. “I had thought I could banish the past from my mind,” she says after she’s told her story, “but all the time it lay, like a mass of dense water, within me.” Nadia’s life is one of easy distractions—“the light rhythm of group excursions to the casinos and cinemas of Algiers, of rainy Sundays whiled away at surprise parties, of mad drives in sports cars as skittish as thoroughbred horses”—but these entertainments have left her cold. She’s “empty inside,” overly familiar with “the brackish fatigue of a morning-after, after wasting the night with jazz bands and cigarettes and facile gaiety, and facing with a heavy head and weary limbs the advent of a grey, grey dawn.” Only slightly older, Nadia looks back on the antics of her younger self. “My life was uneventful, superficial and empty,” she confesses, “of exactly the sort to justify a twenty-year-old’s cynicism and disappointment. So I was wont to reflect, with no other satisfaction besides that of my own lucidity.” Her candor adds to both her allure and her plausibility. Djebar’s ability to capture the ennui of excess contributes to the novel’s realism.

Then Nadia discovers that an old school friend, Jedla, and her husband, Ali, have rented the villa next to that of Nadia’s older sister Myriam (with whom Nadia herself is staying for the summer, at a popular, upmarket beach resort on the Algerian coast). Before long, Nadia begins playing games with their trust and affection. She sets out to seduce Ali as summer sport—“to satisfy my vanity and fill my idle time”—but a host of conflicting deeper currents are at work beneath the surface: “Amid the dull summer heat, a mysterious interplay of emotions was subtly and shiftingly weaving itself in the quiet air.”

Nadia’s mother died giving birth to her, thus she’s only ever known the affection of her doting father. He has older daughters by another wife, but Nadia remains his spoiled youngest child. This summer, however, he’s away in Europe, and Myriam is occupied by her own family—her husband, her child, and the new baby that’s on the way. Nadia is adrift, untethered from commitments, people, and responsibilities. She was, we learn, engaged to be married, but recently called it off. She has a sort-of boyfriend, Hussein—who makes up a foursome with her, Jedla, and Ali—but she toys with his affection, proving indifferent to his eager advances but desiring his attention. And then there’s the nature of her feelings toward Jedla. Nothing is made explicit, but something more than friendship is definitely implied. Glimpsing her for the first time since they were at school together four years earlier, Nadia, her “heart pounding,” realizes that the other woman’s “dark eyes had lived inside me all this time, buried in some turbid emotion.” So, too, all is not what it seems when it comes to the newlyweds’ relationship, something Nadia only comes to realize long after she has become embroiled in their lives, after which things quickly spiral out of her control.

As a haunting tale of roiling passions and power play, The Mischief is impressive, especially as the work of a writer only just out of her teens. But the text takes on an extra dimension due to the unique position that Nadia occupies. Her father is Algerian, but her mother was French. “With your mixed blood,” Hussein reminds her, “you’re on the borderline between two civilizations.” She has been raised in Algeria but “in Western style,” thus her “blonde hair and easy-going ways” mean she passes for European. As Hussein puts it, she’s “on the fence”: neither fully French, nor fully Algerian either. Djebar doesn’t dwell on this aspect of her protagonist’s identity, but the novel carries the undercurrent of racial and sexual politics, elements that haven’t always been given the attention they deserve.

*

Take the figure of Myriam, for example, whose life can be pieced together from scattered details: she married young, as was expected of her; to all outward appearances she’s a compliant and respectful wife, but her feelings toward her marriage aren’t straightforward—she “loved and feared” her husband, but also feels “a sort of embittered regret for the waste of her youth.” Myriam’s husband is never named, nor does he appear, yet he casts a shadow over the text. It’s no throwaway line, for example, when Nadia describes the way her Algerian brother-in-law “looked askance at my trousered legs and the tip of my cigarette burning in the darkness.” Then there’s the setting of the novel, the beach resort that’s “fashionable” enough to be “frequented by colonials.” Nadia’s family, Djebar takes pains to point out, are the only Muslims in residence (prior to the arrival of Jedla and Ali). Ali, it’s also worth noting, is a young Algerian nationalist with firm ideas of what his country needs: “People are always talking about colonials and colonialism, but the real trouble lies in our own lethargy, which leaves us open to exploitation. That’s what’s got to be shaken.” This tension, between Algeria and Europe, rears its head again near the end of the novel when Nadia tries to shock Jedla with “sordid […] scabrous” stories about her family:

There was no use talking about the tender voice of my father. Myriam’s submission to her husband, Leila’s satisfaction over having a European servant. Jedla wanted to think that money, emancipation and a European upbringing has spoiled and corrupted the whole lot of us, especially me. And probably she was right, at that.

Although Nadia defies many of the restrictions ordinarily applied to women in traditional Algerian culture, in reality she isn’t as uninhibited as she would like to be. Her own identity—as a woman, an Algerian, and a European—is complicated. On a variety of occasions she shows a vicious contempt for the Algerian women around her—her sisters Myriam and Leila, and Jedla—whom she thinks have been too quick to “submit to convention.” Yet at the same time, she’s not immune to the social conditioning that lies behind this subjugation, seeking refuge in the protection Hussein can offer her: “in this reassuringly masculine presence, everything nightmarish faded away.” Nadia is the focal point of a nexus of complicated assumptions, prejudices, and traditions, inadvertently representing different things to different people. This was something Djebar herself pushed back against her entire life. “I am not a symbol,” she consistently told people who tried to box her identity into certain categories. “Each of my books,” she told the French press when she was elected to the Académie Française in 2005, “is a step towards the understanding of the North African identity and an attempt to enter modernity.” She might have been young when she wrote it, but The Mischief was no exception.

*

Born Fatima-Zohra Imalayène, in 1936, in Cherchell, a small seaport village near Algiers, Assia Djebar was the pen name she adopted on the publication of her first novel, for fear the book might offend her father. Not, however, that he was a traditionalist. He was the only Algerian-born French teacher at the colonial school where he taught, and the unconventional driving force behind his daughter’s education. As Djebar explained, he “broke with Muslim conformity, which would otherwise almost certainly have kept me in seclusion as a marriageable maiden,” instead making sure his daughter stayed in school. As a consequence of which, in 1955, Djebar became the first Algerian woman to study at the École Normale Supérieure of Sèvres—one of France’s most elite educational establishments—though she was expelled only two years later for striking along with the Union of Algerian Students to protest France’s colonial rule. This was when Djebar wrote The Mischief, and although it wasn’t about the specifics of the moment, it was born from that tumult and very much its own political statement on a topic that Djebar would return to again and again throughout her life: the curtailing of womens’ freedom under outdated traditions passed off as the Prophet’s teachings.

Torn between two countries and two cultures, Djebar returned to Algeria after it won independence in 1962, but, feeling increasingly isolated—“there were only men in the streets of Algiers,” she told Le Monde—she returned to Paris. She spent time in America, teaching at universities in Louisiana and New York before returning again to France. Despite making it her home for much of her life, Djebar’s relationship with France was one of great ambivalence. French was the language she’d been educated in (despite speaking Arabic and Berber at home with her mother and grandmother, she didn’t learn to write Arabic until she was an adult). It was the language of her liberation, that which had enabled her to live a political, intellectual life that would have been out of reach to the majority of her female peers, those who’d been taken out of school at the age of ten. Yet it was also the language of her country’s oppressors and had been foisted on her—while Algeria was a French colony, teaching in Arabic was forbidden. “First it was the language of the enemy,” she explained, “then it became a kind of stepmother, in relation to the maternal tongue of Arabic.” By the end of her life, she was embraced by the French—speaking on Djebar’s death, President Francois Hollande called her “a woman of conviction, whose multiple and fertile identities fed her work, between Algeria and France, between Berber, Arab and French.” The Mischief takes us back to the moment when she was just beginning to explore these complexities, a young woman forging her own nuanced identity, as yet unsure that she would be heard.

 

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here. 

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

Ghosts

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It has run every Friday this month, and will return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. The next installment will arrive the first Friday of January. 

My mother bought the kitchen table in 1969. It’s dark maple, four chairs, their backs a row of five slats. The etchings of my math homework mark the wood, but the busiest scratches cover the space between my parents’ seats, like the ghosts of all they passed across the table and what they must have said. My mother always sat across from me, my father to my left, and eventually my daughter, Indie, sat across from my father. When he died suddenly in 2017, my mother sat in her chair at the table calling friends, one by one, to tell them he was gone. I don’t remember eating at the table after that. On the morning after my mother’s funeral a little over a year later, I sat in my chair at the table writing checks, paying her bills, signing her name.

In January, Indie and I left my parents’ house for the last time. A house built when I was nine, in 1979. I remember walking through it when it was only a concrete slab and a fireplace. That afternoon, as I moved to stand in the door of each room, I kept saying thank you as if my parents were there, as if they could hear me. All the furniture and the décor was still intact, the way I wanted to remember the house. Indie and I packed up my childhood bedroom suite, my father’s chair, his cherrywood stereo console, boxes of my mother’s belongings, her two white suitcases (a high school graduation present from 1963), and the kitchen table. Left the rest for the estate sale. When I closed the back door for the last time, I was forty-nine. Indie considered it her childhood home, too, the only one that had been consistent throughout her life. She was sixteen.

Yesterday, for the first time since we had moved the kitchen table into our apartment, she and I sat down to eat at it. It had taken us ten months. Indie stood with a hand on the back of her chair and asked, “How do the seats work here?” I set down the placemats: “We sit where we always sat.”

In 2007, when we moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, Indie was five. Back then, her bright blonde bob was always tousled. She had her own room in the duplex I rented, but she never slept in it. For four years, she slept close to me on the futon a friend had given us on his way out of town. The day I signed the lease on the hood of the manager’s truck, she looked over at the front door and muttered something about the past tenants, a brick through the front window. Later, Indie picked up half a brick in the yard, and for as long as we lived there, we’d find the glass, piece after piece.

It was in Oklahoma when Indie first told me about the ghosts. She made me promise I wouldn’t write about them. And I never have. Until now.

At the kitchen table, we started reminiscing—something we’ve started doing more and more during this last year, a way to recognize and name what’s built or broken our lives. This time we talked about the ghosts, the ones in Oklahoma, New York, New Mexico, even here in Texas. When I reminded her that she had asked me not to write about them when she was little, she said, “You can write about them now.”

In New Mexico, when Indie was twelve, we lived in an adobe house, the oldest house in town. We were sitting in her room one night when she heard footsteps outside the door, steps across the back deck. I didn’t hear them, but I ran to the kitchen and called the police while Indie peeked through the window to see a shadow on the deck. The police didn’t find anyone around the house, but we never heard the steps of anyone leaving, a sound neither one of us would have missed.

I’m not writing about all the ghosts here.

Indie described them as strangers, men who shuffled around in dark suits, women in dresses who’d come stand next to her, all kind, friendly, smiling. Sometimes kids. It was the little girl and her dog standing in the corner of Indie’s room in the duplex who terrified her. The one that showed up often, looking like she needed help. After that, Indie kept her door closed most of the time. I didn’t like going in there, either.

Once in Oklahoma, I sat in the stands watching Indie at swim lessons, when she suddenly draped her arm over the edge of the pool and looked up into the stands, smiling. Not at me, but somewhere farther down the bench. While I drove us home, she told me it was a good day, and when I asked why, she said, “Because Great-Grandma was in the stands, watching me swim.” My father’s mother, the woman who once showed us how to make her chocolate pie, a secret recipe.

For forty years, I moved through the rooms of a house where others move now. I still have the key to that house on my keychain, as if I could step up to the front door at anytime and unlock it, walk into the living room, and turn on the lamp.

After my parents were gone, Indie and I often made the hour drive to their house on weekends to feel close to them, to water my mother’s flowers, to make it look like someone still lived there. But most of the time, the house was empty, so I bought an alarm system, one I kept on until the day the new owners were given the keys and moved in. The night before they did, I checked the activity log on the app and found a long list of detected movements in the living room, my parents room, out the back patio door, into the garage, back and forth, over and over again. As if they were there. But the house, I knew, was empty.

I put my father’s stereo console in my room, and when I’m in there, sitting at my desk or turning back my bed, I hear something inside the stereo, a boom, tubes from a system manufactured in the seventies. All those decades my father kept his Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis records spinning, I never once heard it. Now when the console pops in my room, I ask, “What is it, Daddy?.”

One night in New York, when Indie was nine, maybe ten, we were sitting on the couch in the house we rented, a house Indie said was “crowded” the day we moved in. She turned suddenly, as if she had been called by someone. I turned, too. “There, in the doorframe,” she said, staring.

When Indie or I make my grandmother’s chocolate pie, we always linger on the first bite. It all comes back to us, the twang in her voice, the day she taught us to make it, our missing a little softer in those moments.

The night of my mother’s funeral, I slept on top of my parents’ bed and woke to a figure in the doorway: “Indie, if you’re going to stand there, come get in bed with me.” Not long after, I heard Indie’s voice calling out from the living room where she had been sleeping. She said Gramma had been standing by the foldout couch, watching her.

Yesterday we sat for a long time after the plates were empty, exchanging stories. Indie said people don’t follow her anymore, but she does feel energy clinging to her sometimes, and when it gets really strong, like when she’s leaving a room, she rushes out and closes the door. I didn’t tell her this, but I have noticed how often she closes doors quickly, almost slamming them. I asked if that’s why she leaves the light by her bed on all the time, even when she’s not there. She laughed, her long blonde hair spilling across her face: “No, I just forget to turn it off!” Our laughter built, broke us free. We got up to put our plates away, and I looked back at the table—two placemats, two empty places—the missing a little softer in that moment.

The ghosts that follow us now are ones we know. This time next year, I’ll move through these rooms alone.

 

Read earlier installments of  The Last Year  here

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

Thanksgiving with Laura Ingalls Wilder

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

My thrifty-housewife version of Ma’s “scrap bag” is this colorful mixture of sanding sugar left over from children’s parties. l used it to make sparkling cranberries for the top of a vinegar pie from the book Farmer Boy.

Everyone who grew up on the Little House books has their own particular treasured food memory from the books. How Pa butchered the pig, smoked the meat, and used every bit of it, down to inflating the empty bladder for the girls to play with as a balloon. The spring on Plum Creek when they ran out of food and ate only fried fish and “crisp, juicy” turnips. Ma frying “vanity cake” doughnuts, so named because they’re “all puffed up, like vanity, with nothing solid inside.” Almanzo stuffing himself from the following spread at the county fair: pumpkin pie, custard pie, vinegar pie, mince pie, berry pies, cream pies, raisin pies …

Reading these books—or rereading them as an adult, which is arguably an even better experience—makes me want to cook, eat, wear calico dresses, sleep on a straw-tick mattress, and plant seeds in the freshly tilled earth. With their lengthy descriptions of cooking and other homesteading processes, they’re the perfect inspiration for a from-scratch Thanksgiving meal; they’re all the more seasonally appropriate because the holiday’s roots lie in scarcity, the way the Ingallses’ lives did. Thanksgiving also presents an opportunity for reckoning with Wilder, whose work has been criticized in recent years for its cultural insensitivity toward Native Americans.

 

This biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder makes scorched earth of her mythology, but not in a bad way.

 

Such reckoning might feel unwelcome to anyone who treasures their Little House dreams the way I do, but reading Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser’s extraordinary Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Wilder, I found the truth behind the books to be even more rewarding than the fiction. We need to know that Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) grew up to own a Ford Model T and eventually left De Smet, Nebraska, in her last covered wagon, bound for the more forgiving Missouri Ozarks, because farming was a bust. She raised chickens and administered farm loans and—at the urging of her daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane—began writing for newspapers to make an extra buck.

The Little House books, which appeared between 1932 and 1943, were designated as fiction because while they are indeed based on Wilder’s pioneer childhood, they’re told out of chronological order and do not faithfully represent it. The books were, in many ways, an effort to rewrite a childhood of tragedy and desperate poverty, and they were further sanitized in the editing process. As Fraser says, there’s so much food in Farmer Boy because it was written in 1933 and “in its lingering, loving portrayal of the mouthwatering abundance of farmhouse fare, it gestures towards the Depression’s straitened circumstances.”

 

A chicken pie from Farmer Boy was served as a part of a spread that included “rye ’n’ injun” bread, baked beans, fat pork, and beet pickles. Almanzo followed it with a slice of pumpkin pie and a piece of apple pie with cheese—possibly implausibly, if you think about it.

 

The family’s straitened circumstances were not the only elision. It is well known that the supposedly empty landscapes of the American West were actually inhabited by Native Americans, and it’s worthwhile to read Fraser’s explanation of how the Homestead Act in 1862, and the later interpretations of the 1841 Preemption Act, moved them out so settler families like the Ingallses could move in. (Adult readers of Little House on the Prairie will notice that Pa arrived in Kansas before the land was open to settlement; he was illegally squatting on Osage territory.)

It’s less well known that the entire small-farming ethos was a fantasy as well. Pa could hunt and trap and build a house and dig a well, but as Fraser portrays it, he had no chance. When he was trying to farm the Great Plains and blithely wondering what the old-timers meant by “grasshopper weather,” the landscape was already suffering the beginnings of the environmental collapse that eventually created the droughts and dust storms of the thirties. “The larger issue [was] that within a decade of the civil war, virtually all the land best-suited to small-scale agriculture in the United States had been taken, and what was left was marginal,” Fraser writes. “On that leftover land homesteaders could not succeed, no matter how hard they worked. They were bound to fail.” Later in the book, she writes, “Wilder never came to terms with what FDR saw and explained so clearly: the land had limits, and no solitary, undercapitalized farmer could ever hope to overcome them.”

None of this makes me love the Little House books any less, but it bears mentioning. Much of my DIY kitchen ethos was formed by ideas of independence and living-off-the-land taken from Laura’s pioneer childhood. The girl who makes pancake men with her mother and begs for a sunbonnet and a butter churn (to her mother’s horror) becomes the woman who sews her own clothes and bakes her own pies and would never, if she were somehow still alive, order a meal kit off the internet. But as Fraser’s biography shows, the virtue and alleged simplicity of this lifestyle is both a fantasy and a privilege. The Ingalls family’s lifestyle was rooted in the massive appropriation of someone else’s resources, and it was not sustainable, even for them.

 

Barbara Walker, author of The Little House Cookbook, offers a recipe for making your own vinegar from apple cores, to use in vinegar pies. I used this funky, tasty, powerful store-bought kind and worried that the specified three tablespoons would be too intense. It was perfect.

 

Instead of a turkey-porn-shot Thanksgiving feast, then, I made a meal of relative scarcity while still trying to capture a feeling the books convey: that everything the characters eat is delicious. My first challenge was “hulled corn and milk,” an extremely simple dish that is one of Laura’s favorites in Little House in the Big Woods. My recipe benefits from Wilder’s intensely detailed, several-page description of the procedure (such passages were explicitly part of the books’ formula for success).

First Ma sweeps out the stove and burns some “clean, bright” hardwood for ashes. She then makes a cloth packet of the ashes and boils them with dried corn, until “the kernels of corn began to swell, and they swelled and swelled until their skins split open and began to peel off.” This was mysterious to me, but research showed that the wood ash, when boiled in water, creates a homemade lye solution, and that soaking corn in it is a time-honored indigenous process called nixtamalization, which increases the nutritional value of the grain. Doing something like this at home is just the kind of challenge a post-Laura home cook likes, though I had to make several concessions to modernity, including using popcorn instead of the proper large-grain dried corn, and first boiling and straining my ashes instead of making a cloth packet for them.

In the end, it sort of worked. I don’t know if I properly nixtamalized anything, but I did make a caustic solution that released eye-watering fumes, and I did boil the corn in it until the skins swelled and split, but no amount of rubbing caused the hulls to come off and float to the top of the water, as they do for Ma. The cleaned kernels in milk tasted mild and toothsome, with an intriguing finish of corn and cinnamon. If I could produce them in bulk, I would. The taste was special enough to have been worth the two days of effort.

 

After Pa and Laura set a fish trap in Plum Creek, they catch “buffalo fish and pickerel, and catfish and shiners, and bullheads with two black horns” and “some whose names they did not know.” Ma “rolled them in meal and fried them fat and they ate all those good fish for supper.”

 

My second dish is a revisitation of the spring of fish and turnips from On the Banks of Plum Creek. As a child, you barely notice details like “every day there was fish for breakfast and fish for dinner and fish for supper.” It just sounds fun. But as an, adult you realize, Wait a minute, they have no other food. Ever since rereading the series ten years ago, I’ve wanted to know if that meal would be as crispy and delicious as it sounded or if it would be more like my real-life experiences of those foods. I bought the best turnips and river fish available to me from vendors at the Union Square Greenmarket and had an unexpectedly lengthy and authentic pioneer experience in desliming and scaling the fish. However, my best pan-frying and honey-roasting did not make this a food I would recommend for breakfast.

Despite the scarcity theme, I couldn’t resist trying at least one over-the-top-sounding dish from Farmer Boy, a “chicken pie” that received the following description: “Father’s spoon cut deep into the chicken-pie; he scooped out big pieces of thick crust and turned up their fluffy yellow under-sides on the plate. He poured gravy over them … He added a mound of baked beans and topped it with a quivering slice of fat pork. At the edge of the plate he piled dark red beet pickles.” I made the pie and baked beans from recipes in The Little House Cookbook, by Barbara Walker, and did a quick pickle of the beets from my own repertoire, choosing golden instead of red in order to keep my hands clean. The dish was another revelation. I thought the technique would be too simple, but the result was spectacular. Apparently, nothing can go wrong with chicken, gravy, bacon, and piecrust. The additions of baked beans and beets summoned a weird Great Depression vibe I wasn’t expecting.

 

“And it was good to know that there were turnips enough in the cellar to last all winter long.” In On the Banks of Plum Creek, after two seasons of grasshopper-plague, only turnips stood between the Ingalls family and starvation.

 

For dessert, I chose the most humble-sounding of the spread from the Farmer Boy county fair: a vinegar pie, which the author of The Little House Cookbook says was called “poor man’s pie.” I didn’t prebake my crust, and the result looked so wonky, brown, and gelatinous when it came out of the oven that I added whipped cream and sugared cranberries at the last minute. It was the best pie I’ve ever made or tasted. While devouring this show-stopping end to my humble feast, I reflected that if books can’t quite be read at face value anymore, they ought to be taught, and they can certainly be cooked from.

 

 

Hulled Corn and Milk from The Big Woods

Try this at your own risk.

firewood

2 cups popcorn (or dried, untreated corn for hominy)

 

 

First, make a fire, and burn your wood down to ash. When it has cooled off, reserve about two cups of ash.

Boil the two cups of ash in two quarts of water for fifteen minutes, then allow them to sit overnight.

Pour off the water from the ash residue, then strain it through paper towels, creating a cloudy, grayish liquid. Be careful not to touch the liquid or any of the residue, as it is supposedly caustic; this is your homemade lye.

Boil corn in the strained lye liquid for four hours, or until the corn doubles in size and the skins split, adding more water as necessary.

Rinse the corn under running water, then in several changes of clean water in a bowl. Leave to soak for an hour.

Keep the corn in the water as you rub it between your palms. If you’re lucky, the skins will fall off and float to the top. Mine did not, but I was able to pinch them off with my fingers, very slowly.

Serve with milk.

 

 

Plum Creek Turnips and Trout

6 medium-size turnips, as young and sweet as possible, chopped in 1-inch cubes

4 tbs butter, melted

4 tbs honey

two small river trout

2 tbs flour

1 tbs butter

1 tbs oil

8–10 small sage leaves

salt and pepper, to taste

 

 

Preheat the oven to 400.

Place the chopped turnips in a large baking dish, and toss with melted butter, honey, salt, and pepper. Roast for ninety minutes, removing the pan to toss the turnips every half hour. After ninety minutes, turn the heat off, and leave the turnips in the oven for another fifteen minutes to dry out and caramelize.

Clean the trout, and pat them dry. Dust them in flour, then season liberally with salt and pepper. Fry in the butter and oil on a skillet over medium heat until browned and cooked through, about five minutes per side. Remove the trout, add the sage leaves to the pan, and fry until crispy. Serve topped with sage.

 

 

Farmer Boy Chicken Pie with Baked Beans and Pickled Beets

Adapted from The Little House Cookbook, by Barbara Walker. You will need a nine-and-a-half-inch glass pie dish. It’s best if the piecrust chills overnight prior to the day you want to serve the dish. Making the bacon, gravy, and browned chicken the day before would also be convenient for baking and assembly. Note that this piecrust is larger than the usual recipe for pie.

For the piecrust:

3 cups flour

3 tsp sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

8 tbs vegetable shortening

2 sticks butter, diced and chilled

1 cup ice water

 

The trick to piecrust is keeping all the ingredients cold. I place the bowl in the refrigerator for a few minutes between steps.

Place flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl, and whisk to combine.

Add the vegetable shortening. Rub and pinch it into the flour with your fingers, until the mixture looks like coarse sand and there are no large lumps.

Add the cold cubed butter, and cut it in with a pastry cutter, until well blended, leaving some pea-size lumps.

Drizzle in about half a cup of the water, and stir. When the mixture has partially come together, crunch with your hands and see if it forms a mass. If yes, divide in two, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight. If not, add cold water a tablespoon at a time, crunching and checking, until the dough comes together. If the mixture starts to seem warm while you’re working on it, pop it in the refrigerator for a few minutes to rechill.

 

 

For the pie filling: 

3 slices bacon

1 large roasting or stewing chicken, cut into pieces, reserving giblets and carcass

salt and pepper to taste

2 tbs flour

1 piecrust, chilled overnight

1 egg for glaze, beaten and mixed with 1 tbs warm water

 

First, make the liquid for the gravy. Bring two cups of water to boil in a medium saucepan. Place the giblets and carcass in the pan, and simmer, partially covered, for thirty minutes. Then discard the neck and carcass, reserving the liver and the liquid to make gravy.

In the meantime, fry the bacon in a large skillet until crispy. Remove, reserving both the bacon and the grease. Keep the grease sizzling on medium-high heat.

Season the chicken pieces generously with salt and pepper, and add to the bacon grease, skin down. Fry until brown, then remove the pieces from the grease, and reserve.

Pour out most of the grease from the skillet, leaving about three to four tablespoons. Return to a low heat, and sift the flour slowly over the fat, whisking to prevent lumps. When the flour has been incorporated, add the giblet liquid to the hot pan in a slow drizzle, whisking continually until the gravy thickens.

Take the cooked chicken liver and mash it into the gravy with a fork. Don’t worry if there are lumps; they’ll melt during the baking process. Let the gravy cool. All of this can be done the day before you plan to serve the pie.

About three hours before you plan to serve the pie, preheat the oven to 350.

Roll out the bottom piecrust, using plenty of flour to prevent sticking. Drape it over the pie plate and trim, leaving about a half-inch overhang of dough around the dish. Chill for ten minutes.

Assemble the chicken pieces in the dish as evenly as possible so that the top of the pie won’t be uneven. (Mother Wilder put white meat on one side and dark on the other and marked them with different-shaped evergreen trees.) Pour the gravy over the chicken pieces, crumble the bacon on top, and chill.

Roll out the top crust. Place it over the pie, trim, pinch the edges shut according to your method of choice, and cut a few decorative vents in the top. Freeze for ten minutes.

Paint the top crust with egg wash, place the pie on a baking tray (to catch the drippings), and bake for ninety minutes, putting tinfoil over the top halfway through baking to prevent excessive browning. Serve hot, with baked beans piled on top and pickled beets on the side.

 

 

For the Baked Beans:

Adapted from The Little House Cookbook, by Barbara Walker.

2 cups Rancho Gordo “Yellow Eye” beans, soaked overnight

4 strips bacon

1/4 cup molasses

 

Preheat the oven to 300.

Chop up the bacon in one-inch pieces, and fry in the bottom of a medium saucepan until crispy. Remove and reserve.

Pour out the extra bacon grease, then add the beans. Cover the beans with four cups of water, and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer, and cook until tender, checking after about twenty-five minutes. Rancho Gordo beans cook dramatically faster than other varieties of dried bean. If you’re substituting, Walker recommends navy, pea, or “little white.” In that case, start checking after forty-five minutes.

Drain, reserving the bean liquid.

Pour the beans into a shallow glass baking dish, add the bacon and molasses, then fill the dish just to the level of the beans, using the reserved bean liquid. Bake until brown and crispy on top and brothy beneath, about two hours. Add more liquid as necessary.

 

 

For the Pickled Beets:

4 medium beets

1/2 cup vinegar

1 cup water

a bay leaf

4 allspice berries

4 black peppercorns

a whole clove

1 tbs sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1 tbs olive oil

 

Put the beets in a three-quart saucepan, cover with cold water, and bring to a boil. Cook at a low boil until tender, about forty-five minutes to an hour.

While the beets are cooking, make the marinade. Combine vinegar, water, bay leaf, allspice, peppercorns, clove, sugar, and salt in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil. Once the mixture boils, remove from the heat, and let cool.

Drain the beets. When they are cool enough to handle, peel and cut into thin slices. In a glass jar or a bowl, combine the beets, the marinade, and olive oil. Cover and refrigerate for twenty-four hours.

 

 

Thanksgiving Vinegar Pie

Adapted from The Little House Cookbook, by Barbara Walker, and from the website 101 Cookbooks. Note: it’s best to make the sugared cranberries and the piecrust the night before.

For the sugared cranberries:

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

2 cups fresh cranberries

1/4 cup large-grain sugar, for rolling

1/4 cup small-grain sugar, for rolling

 

Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil. Once it has boiled, remove from the heat, and let cool. Pour the liquid over the cranberries, and refrigerate overnight.

Drain the cranberries. Working quickly so they don’t totally dry out, roll them first in large-grain sugar and then in small-grain sugar. Spread out on a plate to dry.

 

For the piecrust:

1 cup flour

1 1/2 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

2 tbs vegetable shortening

6 tbs butter, diced and chilled

1/2 cup ice water

 

As stated earlier, the trick to piecrust is keeping all the ingredients cold. I place the bowl in the refrigerator for a few minutes between steps.

Place flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl, and whisk to combine.

Add the vegetable shortening. Rub and pinch it into the flour with your fingers, until the mixture looks like coarse sand and there are no large lumps.

Add the cold cubed butter, and cut it in with a pastry cutter, until well blended, leaving some pea-size lumps.

Drizzle in about half a cup of the water, and stir. When the mixture has partially come together, crunch with your hands and see if it forms a mass. If yes, divide in two, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight. If not, add cold water a tablespoon at a time, crunching and checking, until the dough comes together. If the mixture starts to seem warm while you’re working on it, pop it in the refrigerator for a few minutes to rechill.

 

For the filling:

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup flour

a pinch of nutmeg

3 tbs raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar “with the mother”

 

Preheat the oven to 400.

Roll out the piecrust, drape over the edges of an eight-inch metal pie plate (preferably one with air holes), and trim, leaving a half-inch overhang for crimping. Make a decorative edge using your method of choice. Chill.

In a large bowl, blend flour, nutmeg, and both sugars with your fingers until no lumps remain. Stir in vinegar, eggs, and a cup of water until well mixed.

Pour the filling into the prepared pie shell, and bake for thirty to forty minutes, until set. Remove and chill.

 

To assemble:

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

2 tbs (or more) sugar, to taste

Whip the cream until it holds soft peaks. Add the sugar, and stir.

Top the chilled pie with a liberal layer of whipped cream and a pretty mound of sugared cranberries.

 

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

Behind the Scenes of ‘The Paris Review Podcast’

The second season of our celebrated podcast is here to carry you away from all the troublesome sounds of Thanksgiving squabbles. And if you’d like to know how something so excruciatingly exquisite gets made, read on for a behind-the-scenes interview with executive producer John DeLore. He is a senior editor and tenured audio engineer at Stitcher’s NYC studio. In addition to The Paris Review Podcast, he has worked on Stranglers, Beautiful/Anonymous, The Longest Shortest Time, Couric, Clear + Vivid with Alan Alda, Fake the Nation, The Sporkful, and Household Name. He answered some questions from our engagement editor, Rhian Sasseen, about his preferred microphones, the differences between Season 1 and Season 2, and how to respect both the language and the listener.

INTERVIEWER

In the spirit of the many times “pencil versus pen?” has been asked in The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interviews, what’s your preferred setup for recording?

JOHN DELORE

Most of the process is not a solitary craft. And while a lot of recording happens in our studio where we’ve got our preferred tools and our studio vibe, a lot of it is happening out in the world, or “in the field,” as they say.

And for me, I’m sort of always “in the field.” I’ve had the same silver Zoom H2 portable recorder for almost ten years, and I carry it just about everywhere I go. And these days I’ve been using the iPhone VoiceMemo app. It’s like a butterfly net. I hear something in the world, like a train on an elevated track, or a nice bird, or a thunderstorm, and I capture it. I label it and throw it in this massive folder of random sounds.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a particular type of, say, microphone you gravitate toward over all others—or are only writers this superstitious about the tools they use?

DELORE

When I will be more intentionally hunting down sounds, in those cases I’ve got a more proper setup. My Sennheiser shotgun mic with a pistol grip and a big wind cover, plugged into a more robust recorder. And then there are other situations, where I’m lugging around a suitcase of gear, like the time Jamaica Kincaid invited me into her home to record her reading and discussing her work. I packed extra mics, cables, an extra recorder, an excessive amount of AA batteries. Those are the situations where you’ve got one shot to capture that moment in time, and in those cases it’s less about “superstition” and more about discipline and preparation.

If someone reading this is not interested in specific technical details, then jump to the next question. For the rest of you, here’s a little bit of detail.

In the studio we use Shure Sm7B microphones. I’ve always liked the way they sound. They don’t add any color to the sound, and it’s a very straightforward and clean-sounding mic. In the field I like a Sennheiser MKE #600 shotgun paired with a Zoom H5. The H5 lets you simultaneously record a stereo image with the built-in microphones while also recording the shotgun mic onto a third track. The stereo image can go a long way in terms of making the listener feel they’re surrounded by a place.

The shotgun mic is designed with a “throw” so you can capture good direct sounds without being right next to the source. These are used in movie shoots. They’re the mics that boom operators are holding above the actors’ heads, just outside the camera frame. In the first season, when you hear Jamaica Kincaid talking about the birds in her backyard, I think I was about six feet away from her using the shotgun mic.

That “throw” also makes the shotgun very useful in the field because you can put it on a coffee table or a desk a few feet from a speaker and still get a full-sounding recording. That smaller desktop mic stand is also much more portable. But if I’ve got a car, or a budget to expense a taxi, I’ll sometimes bring a Neumann KMS #105, which is a really great sounding microphone. But that mic requires more proximity to the speaker’s mouth to get the full-spectrum sound, so it requires bringing a bigger mic stand. So sometimes a technical decision is made based on the fact that I’m riding the subway and I don’t want to carry all the extra stuff. Okay. Nerd alert over. Next question.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any favorite moments from recording or editing Season 2?

DELORE

For this season, I was there for the Alex Dimitrov in-studio session. It was actually the very first thing we recorded for this season. His poem “Impermanence” is really beautiful. It’s one of those poems where the personal aspect gradually moves into this bigger, more abstract and more indefinable space.

I remember reading it, and it’s one of those poems where you read it, then you reread it, and when it’s on the page you can linger on different stanzas or lines for as long as you like. But when it’s put into a podcast, all that subjective patience disappears. Everyone is now locked to the same timeline. So when we recorded that poem, and all the other works, we spent a little time trying to find the right pacing for a few choice moments, to create a listening experience that gives folks room to digest and enjoy the progress of the poem.

Of course, we also try to get a little bit of ephemeral interview tape from our readers, and Alex gave this really beautiful answer to Emily Nemens’s question, “Why do you write poetry?” His poem and his answer are in the first episode, so if you’re curious to hear his answer, by all means, subscribe to the podcast right now!

INTERVIEWER

The relationship between writing, editing, and reading is clearly a source of continued fascination and relevance within the pages of The Paris Review. Did you approach editing Season 2 differently from Season 1?

DELORE

For us, editing often means taking all the raw tape and editing the best takes together. Sometimes we have a reader try a line a half dozen times, just to have options. After we have the audio all edited together, we start adding sound design and scoring. Those decisions will often alter the pacing of the read a bit. For example, if there’s a particularly emotional section in the middle of a story, we’ll let the music post for a solid moment, maybe as long as ten to fifteen seconds. In the audio version, we create pockets of space to leave room for listeners to process and digest an idea or an emotion. Sometimes it’s just a second or two, but other times it’s a longer moment of scoring.

I think that in both seasons we’re abiding by the same general principle of respecting both the language and the listener. We’re presenting a lot of really beautiful language—as well as some really complicated language—so we need to create a space where the listener has room to process in real time, and where the language is supported by the vocal performance, the pacing we create around the read, and the scoring and sound-design choices we make to underline the read. To me, Season 2 feels a bit more like the pieces are in conversation with one another. Less themes, more echoes.

 

Read more behind the scenes interviews. Producer Helena de Groot delves into the art of interviewing, executive producer Brendan Francis Newnam discusses the finer points of recording and producing, and composers David Cieri and Emily Wells talk about scoring Seasons 1 and 2.