The Paris Review's Blog, page 24

Death Is Very Close: A Champagne Reception for Philippe Petit

Photograph by Sean Zanni/PMC.

There was an air of subdued anticipation at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine as we waited for Philippe Petit to take the stage. A clarinetist roved through the church improvising variations on Gershwin in spurts, making it hard to tell if the event, which was being held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, had begun. Eventually, the lights dimmed and we were told to turn off our phones, as even a single lit screen in the audience might cause Petit to fall from his tightrope. Music started, but so quietly that it seemed like it was being played from a phone, while a candlelit procession made its way down the nave. Large boards were set up, on which footage of the Twin Towers being constructed was projected. A group of child dancers imitated Petit’s walk along the ground, and were followed by a professional whistler. After we were shuffled through this sequence that felt like a performed version of ADHD, Petit finally appeared and began walking, first meekly, then quickly, to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” wearing a white jacket laced with gold.

The original Twin Towers walk took place on the morning of August 7, 1974, after Petit and a group of conspirators broke into the World Trade Center while it was still partially under construction, and used a bow and arrow to span a tightrope between the towers. Petit walked, ran, lay down, and knelt on the wire, a quarter of a mile in the air, as the city looked on from below. It had taken more than eight months of meticulous planning to carry out the performance, including creating a mock-up of the distance between the Towers on a field in France, studying their engineering, and using various disguises and fake IDs to gain access to them. These heist-like aspects (it is referred to as “the coup”) have made it ripe material for movies including Man on Wire and The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit and featuring CGI Twin Towers.

***

Three weeks before the performance, Petit held a reception in anticipation of the event on the eightieth floor of 3 World Trade Center. I exited the elevator into a space with perhaps the most impressive view of New York I’d ever seen. Under the influence of the height and temperature change (it was a hundred degrees outside that day), the vista was so impressive that it was almost addictive; it was hard to pull myself away from the windows, as though the space were designed to keep me there, like the interior of a casino.

The floor itself was open-plan and riddled with memorabilia from Silverstein Properties, the real estate firm owned by Larry Silverstein, which purchased the World Trade Center six weeks before September 11 and led the site’s redevelopment after the attacks. Littered around the space were newspaper and magazine covers about the rebuilding efforts, novelty-size ribbon-cutting scissors and fake keys, golden trophies and glass awards, posters for corporate events (“Dancing with the Silversteins”), pictures of Silverstein’s family, a red carpet with photos of runway shows that had taken place on the floor, works of art that had been made in the building’s studios, human-size scale models of the buildings, worn-out hard hats and boots, a full-scale I beam, American flags, emblems that commemorated every time a company like Uber or Spotify leased space in one of Silverstein’s buildings, the loudspeaker that George Bush used to give an address at Ground Zero, pieces of Petit’s clothing worn during the walk, and parts of a set from the show Succession, which apparently had been filmed there.

​​Outside the bathroom, a woman sat propped up against the wall, a victim of the heat, and was attended to by an employee who promised to bring her water. Inside the large windowless bathroom, an older man in white linen was standing at the sinks, scribbling notes on what looked like a piece of cardboard and talking to himself. He would consult his board, write something, then stare grimly, deadly, at himself in the mirror, before looking back at his board and beginning his recitation again. My presence didn’t seem to affect him at all.

Back in the main space, smooth jazz played overhead as champagne and hors d’oeuvres were served. Forty or fifty people circulated around me. Large, shiny real estate men mingled with aging artists; one group was talking loudly, nearly screaming, about how they’d just had lunch at Nobu, while another discussed the details of a recent real estate venture. An hour passed before the French cultural ambassador took to the stage to introduce Petit, whom I recognized as the man who had been talking to himself in the bathroom. He thanked the crowd, noting that he saw a lot of old friends in the audience. He began pointing to and naming some of them, causing others to raise their hands in hopes of being recognized. Clearly he’d forgotten some of them, as their hands remained in the air, as if they were desperate to be called on to answer a question. He pulled a red rose out of his pocket and said that he was going to balance it on the tip of his nose. “It is all about movement,” he said, before he placed the flower on his nose, splayed out his arms, and began walking from side to side. “The wire is never still, but moving, just like the buildings.” He moved his hands like a ball juggler.

Fifty years after the original walk, watching Petit gesticulate in an air-conditioned room with One World Trade Center behind him, it was hard not to feel that if the original event had been emblematic of the raw, unsupervised downtown New York of the seventies, this event perfectly encapsulated the downtown New York of today: every facet of life contained within a billion-dollar real estate development; a gluttony of high-efficiency glass, K-frames, and speculative investments.

After the talk, I spoke with Barry Greenhouse, who’d worked in the South Tower in the seventies, and had been Petit’s main contact in gaining access to the Twin Towers. Between roasted scallops, he told me about how he’d first seen Petit performing on the street in Paris, then saw him one day at the base of the Towers years later. Petit came and spoke to us briefly, and thanked Greenhouse for coming, before running off to the next group. Even offstage, he speaks and gesticulates quickly, almost as a form of misdirection. He has a clear gravitas and command of space, but arrives at that state almost by way of a frantic separateness; you get the sense that he isn’t really there, that he is moving ever farther away from you.

Still, the memory of him that stayed with me was the face I’d seen in the bathroom, and that I’d see again as he walked the tightrope. It’s a face that is like a death mask; gaunt, and filled with a particular worry, as if the severity of the situations he has put himself into over the years has imparted to him a certain darkness. The idea of death is embedded into all his performances; when you watch him cross the tightrope, half your mind is dedicated to thinking about him falling. The pleasure you get from watching is the feeling of your mind temporarily suspending that thought. What if he swayed too far to the side, if there was a gust? In the documentary Man on Wire, when describing the moment he shifted his weight from the South Tower to the wire, he says that he thought it was probably the end of his life, and that death was very close.

***

At Saint John the Divine, Petit sat at the edge of the rope on a metal platform that was fastened to a Gothic column. Satie continued to play as Merlin Whitehawk, a puppeteer, brought out a giant seagull made of wire on what looked like a fishing pole, a bit meant to re-create a scene that had happened between Petit and a real seagull during the original walk. Eventually Sting took the stage. “If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one,” he sang, as people in the flat church seating craned their necks to get a glimpse of him.

Petit walked, ran, lay down on, knelt, and sat on the rope over the next half hour before two fake policemen, dressed in loose, stripper-like fake uniforms, came to arrest him, ascending to the rope on a wobbly ladder; a slapstick that highlighted Petit’s particular form of artistry, which at times borders on vaudeville without ever fully crossing into it.

Petit picked the handcuffs and took the microphone to dispel some rumors about the original performance, including how long he’d actually walked (less than the initially reported forty-five minutes), and how long it had taken to plan the coup (months, not years). He apologized to his friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, who he said deserved much more credit for planning the original performance, and said that, after walking between the Towers, he’d become too egotistical to share the fame with those who had helped him. There was remorse in his voice, as if he sensed some end and felt the need to make amends. He left the stage to let Sting and others finish the show, only to come riding back out on his unicycle minutes later. Dressed now in black, he and Sting walked off stage arm in arm, with the rest of the performers in tow.

I watched the crowd leave as some—those who had paid five hundred dollars for their tickets—made their way to another private champagne reception at the back of the church.

Walking down Amsterdam Avenue in the light rain, I felt an intense alienation. Petit was impressive, but the performance was inescapably underwhelming. Simulating an original event that was impactful in part because of its spontaneity and illegality had only highlighted just how impossible that feat, or anything like it, would be in New York today.

The event that night had been replete with recordings of the New York Harbor and sirens (even as real sirens could be heard outside), in addition to the fake policemen and seagull puppet. All this had been done to evoke the 1974 walk, but part of what made that walk so profound was how ephemeral it was, how it had invoked the city to an almost sensational extent: it was the thousands of people who gathered on the streets below that gave it the aura of myth. Besides a few pictures, there is almost no documentation of Petit’s “coup” at all. It is this absence, not simulations, that reminds us most potently of what is gone. After 9/11, a good deal of what remained of the towers was sold as scrap metal to China to be melted down and reused; the debris that covered Lower Manhattan was trucked to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island. Below the nave in Saint John the Divine, in the basement’s crypt next to the children’s school, are fragments of the Twin Towers; below that, in the sub-basement, is a spring.

 

Patrick McGraw is the editor of Heavy Traffic .

Hearing from Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler in her home in Cambridge. Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell.

Earlier this year, the visionary poetry critic Helen Vendler died at the age of ninety. After her death, the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas—author of  The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among many others—collected a correspondence between himself and Vendler that unfolded over email during the last two years of her life, which began as Vendler was clearing out her office at Harvard in 2022. These emails, which have been selected and edited by the Review (with spelling and punctuation left unchanged), touch on the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry; the experience of aging in all its forms; and the growth of a friendship, and understanding, between Bollas and Vendler. 

 

January 22, 2022

Dear Christopher Bollas,

A friend of a friend quoted, in an email, your generous notion that what I do as a critic of poetry has a resemblance to the work of analysis. I take that as an amazing compliment. I don’t know where you said that, but I did see that one of the steps in your career was a PhD in English at an exciting time at the U. of Buffalo, and that you’ve written a series of books with intriguing titles, which (“now that I am old and ill”—Yeats) I may not get to immediately, but hope to see a couple of them once I finish the interminable task of clearing my office (now that we once again have access after the Covid ban).

Yours truly,
Helen Vendler

January 28, 2022

Dear Helen Vendler,

Well, I guess if you live long enough, along with the ordinary suffering (and the somewhat dispiriting knowledge—and now sense—of the ending), one may be visited by something remarkable, enlivening, and utterly unpredictable.

So when I saw your name on an e-mail yesterday, it was simply … well, I do not have words.

Except. Thank you. It is so kind and generous of you to write.

Your work has inspired me for so many decades and I have in most of my books used your revolutionary intelligence.

In my view, you understand unconscious thinking better than anyone. And I say so.

I gather you are clearing out your library (as am I) so I could send you a few of my books but you will not have room and frankly I am not a writer. That I have written a few books does not make me one and so I can spare you that.

But this last week when listening to a father talking about his son—they were at an impasse—I asked: “Have you read Sandburg’s Chicago Poems?”

I was as surprised by what I said as I suppose was he as I never recommend anything to analysands.

But he ordered it, he read it out loud to his adolescent, who grabbed it and took it to his room.

Does life get better than this?

With appreciation,
Christopher Bollas

January 28, 2022

The mot juste—“dispiriting”: it rang so true.

Congratulations on the Sandburg insight. Yes, such happy moments suffuse the day they occur—and years afterward. And for the lucky recipient they can be life-changing.

I would take the gift of a book very kindly. You choose.

I attach a new essay on a little-known poem by Hopkins that wrestles with “the selfless self of self”—of interest to you, perhaps as to me—a phrase that had long troubled me.

Yours,
Helen

P.S. No need to reply; but your offer of a book is delightful. You ARE a writer: nobody but an instinctive writer would have written so many serious books!

January 28, 2022

Dear Helen,

Would you be so kind as to send me a postal address so can send the book?

Best,
Christopher

P.S. Your wonderful essay, The Selfless Self of Self, brought back to mind the puzzle that certain essential words—like “self” or “jouissance” or “amae”—are deeply known by those speaking their language but no one can define them.  Which I think is rather the point. My French friends insist that “self” cannot be translated into French and when I try to explain it, of course, I am in hot water. But these essential terms fascinate me because I think the word is almost the “thing”; it conveys an internal experience of knowledge that cannot be described.

January 28, 2022

Helen Vendler

58 Trowbridge St.

Cambridge, MA 02138

Thank you. Will I learn about “unconscious thinking?” I hope so. Helen

In a Facebook status, Vendler writes that she has Covid.

 

February 9, 2022

Dear Helen,

I am so sorry to hear you have covid and only hope it is the more moderate kind.

I wanted you to see a few paragraphs about your work in a manuscript that has been on my shelf for many years. (It can take ten years for me to finish a 50k manuscript.)

So, you will see yourself in a “work-in-progress” because you have asked how I could possibly use your work in the realm of psychoanalysis. You know more about unconscious thinking than anyone I know although I gather this is unconscious knowledge. All the better!

And odd fact of my unconscious. I have (in memory) merged Wyatt and Marvell. I connected “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near” with “They flee from me that sometime did me seek.” For at least a decade I thought this was Marvell.

I think I can see the connecting threads.

Christopher

February 12, 2022

I’m still waiting to read further in your book. But I see that for me you illuminate the links between achieved work by an artist and a successful preceding unconscious assemblage and consolidated genre of unconscious thought, and that that is why “inspiration” does not seem self-generated by the artist. That style is in fact the materialization on the page of a hidden (to the artist) internal web of unconscious thinking that has required time to form itself is I’m sure true, and that this revelation, by disposing of the idea of external inspiration, deeply depressed Hopkins is what I was groping after in the close of my piece on Hopkins.

You must know Keats’s ode on indolence—the best picture of “wise passiveness” that I know. His successive “visions” of what he imagined his unconscious was seeing and assembling could be much clarified if you took them on. I’m not at all sure I read them securely in my Keats book. Thanks so much for this!

H.

April 4, 2023

Dear Helen,

I do hope you are well.

I have been “enlisted” to speak with officials in European governments about Ukraine and Putin. The conversations and participants are all confidential but one of the most disturbing features of what is taking place is the utter lack of understanding of human psychology. These are intelligent people stuck in an adolescent frame of mind and they have no clue this is the case.

Am trying to finish up a book but hard to find the spirit.

Best,
Christopher

April 4, 2023

Deep in your gripping Oedipus. Still my livre de chevet, learning so much seeing things from your angle! Delay from health issues, but ongoing immersion in your pages.

I bet the “lack of understanding” in the officials is easily matched by higher-ups everywhere. It helps to be a mother, even better to be a single mother with no money for babysitting. Even better to be one who swore she would reject every aspect of her parents’ idea of child-raising. Even so, I had no idea how to teach young people when I started out. “Full-grown lambs” says Keats in “To Autumn”; the oddity of that phrase (“Why not say ‘sheep?’”) taught me that my students were “full-grown babies,” and I understood them much better.

With Rene’s thanks for the Bollas Reader—an excellent introduction to your originality—

Yours,
Helen

April 4, 2024

For “Rene” read “renewed.” Predictive spelling a devil’s gift. H.

May 9, 2022

Dear Helen,

Have enjoyed your lectures on You Tube.

Best,
Christopher

May 9, 2022

Dear Christopher,

I am sorry to have been delayed in writing more about the joyous experience of reading you. I’ve been sadly occupied arranging for hospice in home for my closest friend, whose health proxy I am. That was accomplished last Sunday, and I am relieved that it has been done. I think the end will come soon, so I grasp at this free day to write my delayed thanks.

It was the eeriest thing, reading your essay called “Psychoanalysis and Creativity,” where I saw the parallels between your remarks as a listener and my experience as a reader (and necessarily a listener too). The “gravitas” that brings the separate particles of experience into that grouping that you call “psychic genera” and from which you can glean, after hours of listening (more for that than for content as such), a sense of the map of the intermixed feelings and thinking processes of the analysand, also works exactly for the generation of style in poetry (which people generally don’t read for, being more interested in semantic content, philosophical implications, historical relevance, etc.).

It made me genuinely happy to see the parallels in lifting what may seem (but is not) accidental into visibility. The unknown known is a wonderful way of putting it. I think that the poets may be able to know more of the unknown known than the analysand, since the composition of poetry is a way to elicit it in symbolic form. And your explanation of the multiplicity of things to be inferred from words, gestures, emotions—and the tendency of those things to arrange themselves like iron filings to a magnet (as Donne says—“And Thou like adamant draw my iron heart”—) has its strict analogue in the way in which, after one immerses oneself (ideally) in everything an author wrote, those magnetic forms arise in my mind as “explanations” of stylistic gestures in a poem. One can’t command them; they have to rise as the result of a long process.

The frustration of not being able to understand something by will alone makes me remember a summer in which I was working very hard to understand Stevens’s long poems. I would teach summer school all morning, return and be with my son from noon till 7 (when he would fall asleep), and then going to my library office after the arrival of the babysitter, and work till late. It was a taxing schedule, but usually I could make progress. One night I was so despairing of figuring out 3 lines in Stevens’s last long poem that I burst into tears; then I suddenly heard a young voice behind me at my open office door in the deserted Smith library saying “Oh Mrs. Vendler, I’m just taking my sister—” and then broke off in an apology, seeing the tears running down my cheeks.  I imagined she thought she was interrupting some tragic experience, and I didn’t want her to think that, so I said unthinkingly, “I’m all right, I was upset because I just couldn’t understand a passage in Wallace Stevens.” She probably thought anyone who wept for that reason was very peculiar. But in reading your passages in various essays where you say, “I was pondering X” or “I was piecing together,” or some other phrase intimating how much thinking you have to do to glean the visible off the impalpable in the analytic process, I felt that your thinking resembles mine—though for different reasons and for different results. And the “evidence” is often so “accidental”:  I remember thinking about how Stevens used the definite and indefinite articles, and being frustrated because they were not included in the (predigital) Concordance.

I was struck by your comments on the artificial creations (adobe architecture, “Cape Cod”) of places in Orange County towns, as the opposites of architecture that has grown out of forms within temporally growing mentalities. My son has a house in Laguna Beach, and I’ve spent enough time there to know exactly those “theme park” constructions, as well as those like our “Sturbridge Village” in Mass., replicating a pioneer town with docents in historical costume. It’s a repellent sight if one has read any writings of the era. And, as you say, it’s all “fake”—not least because they have no Cotton Mather among the historical figures.

Of course, your reflections on everything from stand-up comics to serial killers are fascinating. Who hasn’t pursued comparable characterizations of comic or sadistic apparitions in culture? Your anecdotes (Ken Kesey and the Panthers) offer a moment of relief in the argument of a serious article, and your personal anecdotes are equally attractive on a written page. I often wish that the criticism of poetry offered that sort of relief to the reader, but I can’t manage it, not wishing to be intruding on Keats or Shakespeare. You’re working with human beings in actual life—so different from working with etymological and semantic and syntactic phenomena—but I wish I had your sense of relish of the human comedy (and tragedy). As you say, “A sense of humor … captures the intersection of two realities: the intentional and the unintentional— … breaking down one’s receptive equanimity upon encountering the ponderous”—and literary criticism is always leaning, if only slightly, in the directions of the ponderous. I love creative writers far more than scholars because of their disruption of the expected: I wish I had their wit. The “ironic fate” of any analytic session in its unwilled disruption of itself is a defense of listening with the third ear, which perceives that fate.

You have such interesting topics, but among them, the ways in which experience allows us—or drives us—to the invention of a “personal idiom” is particularly revealing. To think of selfhood as a “personal idiom” is very helpful to me, carrying, as it does, both verbal and visual implications. And your transformation of Freud’s “jokes” into excellent anecdotes (“rat” and “erratic” is my favorite) also enlivens your pages along literary lines. It’s always possible for a literary critic to miss such verbal play, and I’ve probably missed some in Stevens, and certainly in Shakespeare, who can’t help how much he loves them.

Well, enough. I’ll return to your articles; they even make me wish I had been in analysis. I didn’t understand it enough when I had friends in graduate school who were transfixed by it. But I did—twice—after bafflement, consult a therapist who clarified things from my past I thought I understood, but didn’t. I was being taught a new way of thinking, just by the intellectual reproof I took from her superior interpretation of the phenomena that had baffled me. She’s dead now, but I often think of the months I was lucky enough to have her in my life.

I treasure your “Reader.”

Thank you.

Yours delightedly,
Helen

Note from CB: Vendler likely meant the “unthought known,” a concept of mine, but unconsciously inserts her own interesting wording of the idea.

May 19, 2023

Dear Helen,

I hope this finds you well.

Here is a bit from a rough draft of the introduction to my notebooks (In the Stream of Consciousness) which will be published in 2024.

Best,
Christopher

“Shuffling off to Buffalo: English Literature and Psychotherapy Training”

In 1969 I drove east to the University of Buffalo where I was to do a PhD in English literature. At the time it was the most radical and creative English department in the country as Nelson Rockefeller—who called it the “university of the twenty-first century”—put a fortune into gathering a remarkable faculty. Many of the poets and writers from the Black Mountain School (which had closed) found their way to Buffalo, especially the doyen of that group, Charles Olson; as well as Robert Creely and Gregory Corso. They joined other poets and novelists—Robert Hass, Carl Dennis, and John Barth—and it was Hass who would change my way of thinking. In a seminar on Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Hass and other faculty attending taught us how a poem thinks, an act of sustained immersion that of course demands that one suspend consciousness to simply allow one’s unconscious thinking to receive the logic of the poetic text.

Most great poems at first read elude consciousness. They are unconscious presentations and require hearing or reading again and again before one’s consciousness begins to gather—much less to consider and organize—some of that unconscious thinking. The subtitle of The Prelude is “Growth of a Poet’s Mind” and I think this work—along with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—became the background for my own views of unconscious thinking and free association.

To encounter any complex poem is remarkably similar to listening to any complex movement of patient association. The logic of a poem moves at times in cryptic condensations that are similar to free associative speech. The finest teacher of psychoanalytic thinking, in my view, is Helen Vendler. Read any of her books critically examining a poet and his or her work, and you find an evolution of Freudian method that is stunning. Her analysis of syntax opens up a perspective that allows us to see how and in what ways character is syntactical.

Buffalo had a strong contingent of French writers and philosophers such as Rene Girard, whose lectures on the “enemy twin” were complex musings on the psychic reality of the double: a forerunner of my own thinking on the borderline personality. Psychoanalysts such as Guy Rosolato (and others) would visit for some weeks. Rosolato’s detailed lecture on the movement of the phonemic—words echoing one another—was illuminating.

Our resident genius was Michel Foucault. His English was not great, and as my French was touristic I found his lectures hard to comprehend. But somewhere in my unconscious—my father was French—I seemed to understand him.

 

May 19, 2023

Dear Christopher,

A fascinating passage. Thanks for the kind nod to me. I look forward very much to the book. (A couple of typos here in proper names: “Creeley” and an acute accent on final e in Rene.)

You hope your note finds me well. Yes and no: I have some of the disabilities of being 90, and have consequently abandoned Cambridge for Laguna Niguel, CA, to live independently near my son and his family, who live in Laguna Beach. I think you’re somewhere nearby, if I recall correctly.

Yours,
Helen

May 20, 2023

Dear Helen,

Very kind of you to reply and thanks for the heads up about the typos.

I hope your move to Laguna Niguel is proving to be a good one. We moved from Santa Barbara to Venice a year ago in order to be near our son (he is a mile away or so) and we did that in the nick of time. I have had “ordinary” health issues for a near 80 year old but I hate regimented exercise (why count the blooming number of steps one takes?) and my frame of mind has let this old body down. But I am now exercising and improving and there is hope. I have declined spine surgery (severe stenosis) but I found a neurosurgeon and a neurologist who both agreed it was too risky. I made it clear I was not desperately afraid of death (loss of consciousness?) but I did fear dying. As soon as we made the decision I felt much better. Enjoying acupuncture and reflexology.

And a question that came to mind about six months ago. I asked myself “what ‘works’ of literature have changed the way you see the world?” Four came to mind right away: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Oedipus, Hamlet, Moby-Dick. I was surprised by the selection but it was fun to think about why these works and not others.

Life is endlessly interesting.

It would be wonderful to meet you one of these days. It is easy enough for us to visit you in Laguna or Laguna Niguel.

Best,
Christopher

 

August 7, 2023

Dear Christopher,

Forgive my belated reply to your last e-mail. I won’t even try to describe my excuses, both professional and personal. Almost every one of Hopkins’s letters begins with excuses, the basic one always being that the day’s demands filled up the day, which is pretty much true here, too.

I’d be delighted to have you visit, just to set eyes on you and hear your voice. I’m too infirm to make tea, and I live alone, so you’ll understand if I offer you and your wife cold drinks instead! Would you like to come on a weekend, when the traffic is not so fiendish?

I’m housebound, pretty much, so I leave it up to you to choose a date to visit. I no longer drive, and must use a walker, but also I have the fatigue of being 90, which is very strange: you just crash. I’ll attach a picture taken on my 90th birthday in my son’s house, just so you’ll recognize me. And what is your wife’s name?

Yours,
Helen

August 8, 2023

Dear Helen,

It is wonderful to hear from you and so kind of you to invite us for a visit.

We would love to come.

We will actually be in Laguna next week and could come by on Wednesday the 16th or Thursday the 17th if that works.

If not, then in October?

We go to our farmstead on the prairie (North Dakota) for September.

And 1 to 3 is perfect. You will see that I too hobble about (use a walker) and am in a new infantile stage which I try to make interesting. Certainly it is a curious time in the so-called “life span.”

When we do come to visit I will text you if need be. But I am rarely late.

You sure look a heck of a lot younger than 90 and it is good to see you!

My wife is Suzanne: English, architect.

Best,
Christopher

August 15, 2023

Dear Helen,

I am so sorry to say that I will not be able to see you tomorrow. I have been having vertigo for a few weeks now and my balance is so precarious that the decision was made on doctors’ advice that I stay put and just wait for … whatever.

I know you have health issues and reckon, like me, that you take it on the chin and just push on as best you can.

I hope you are able to visit the seashore, or the cliffs of Dana Point where one can gain a fine view.

My very best wishes,
Christopher

August 15, 2023

I’m so sorry; vertigo is awful (as I know from a friend with Menière’s disease). Of course I’m disappointed not to meet you tom’w, but when it’s possible, let me know. I hope your balance will return!  There’s nothing worse than a bad fall; mine gave me a subdural hematoma.

My best wishes for your recovery, in return.

Helen

August 18, 2023

Dear Helen,

I am so sorry that I could not come to meet you.

I lost proprioception about 2 years ago and it has been an interesting struggle to find some way to reverse this. (I refuse to accept that this is “it” and I should just adapt).

I write now, however, to give some advice about the “hurricane” meant to descend. It is not true that we have not had the likes of this before: we have. (Laguna was flooded in the 1990s with town flooded all way up the canyon, etc.)

Perhaps you have been told what is important for you to have near you.

Please get bottled water or bottle what you have now as your water supply may be contaminated or compromised.

Close all your blinds that face the storm.

If you do not have a flashlight then do get one and have it near your bed along with cell phone.

Have food that does not require cooking.

You no doubt have a delivery account with Whole Foods or some such so you should be able to get what you need.

You are better on high ground and along the cliffs of the coast but you do not want to be in, say, Capistrano or downtown Laguna.

I reckon this is sensationalized but given climate change it may not be.

It should be rather beautiful and amazing. I loved the storms in Laguna.

Best,
Christopher

August 18, 2023

How kind of you, Christopher! I’m up on the ridge of a big hill and my son is on the top of the big bluff at Laguna beach, so we’ll be safe. I have no outside blinds, not lots of glass. I have sparkling water, milk, and OJ, plus plenty of food (and an instacart acc’t). I also have one of those “good for 3 hours of power” electrical lanterns and a superfluity of flashlights with intense light

I love storms, except for the destruction of trees post hoc.

Anent “adapting,” I feel like Millay: “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” I’m very sorry that you have the trouble with proprioception. They are discovering new treatment methods every day, and I’m sure you have doctors that are at the top of the field: Are there new trials going on? My mother used to say, dismally, that Hope had to be practiced like a virtue, the surest sign of her own despair.

I hope you’re able to write: that does me a world of good. And my door is always open, needless to say, should your health improve.

Thanks for all the good suggestions. I’ll think of you if the thunder arrives. The 1938 hurricane blew down a big tree in our backyard as we three children begged our father to go out and hold it up.

Yours,
Helen

November 4, 2023

Dear Helen,

I hope this finds you well and enjoying the Dana Point sunrise.

I am sorry we could not meet up in the summer but I can come to Laguna this week or anytime really in November or early December if that suits you?

For a one hour visit and please there is no need to provide juice or tea. It would just be great to see you in person and say hello. Round 1pm?

I am around the house for another hour or so and then back after noon.

Best,
Christopher

November 4, 2023

Dear Christopher,

Terrific! But I have a series of scans and tests coming up through Nov 17th, and can’t foresee after that till I see the pneumonologist for the “wrap up” appt on the 17th. After that, any afternoon except Mon and Tuesday (fixed helper appts, lucky me). Sounds as if you’re doing better! It will be a pleasure meeting you and Suzanne if we can work this out after Nov 25.

As ever,
Helen

November 4, 2023

Dear Helen,

Good to hear from you and good luck with the scans.

Let’s see how it goes as we are quite flexible and can come for a visit in early December or if you prefer we could wait until January.

I am a bit better, thanks, as I have decided not to walk with a walker or cane or live in a wheelchair but “fight back” which feels better even if it is more hazardous. It was wonderful to be on the prairie although I found the airports and flight, etc., far harder than I expected. Still … this is an adventure!

Best,
Christopher

November 5, 2023

Congratulations. But I hope you use a quad cane!

Thanks for your kind indulgence.

I’ll write after seeing dr for “wrap up apt.” Don’t let our visit interfere with your Thanksgiving. Give yourself a day before and after, at least! H

November 6, 2023

I actually do not know the term a “quad cane” but I think I have seen the object and can imagine it.

I took a rather bizarre cane with me to Dakota. It is a single stick with a “seat” embedded in it which one can open and then just sit on it. Ugly as hell and ungainly. But it works if one is too tired to stand anymore and there are no seats or places to sit.

Am struggling to finish my “notebooks”: titled “Stream of Consciousness” as the publisher is eager to get on with it. But it is a risk. These have good moments but also very flawed ones. I think I want to publish the flaws because it is my own truth: of thinking, revising, contradicting myself, etc. etc.

An odd time.

Maybe a trip to Laguna will turn me around!

Best,

Christopher

November 6, 2023

Dear Christopher,

I too had one of those X-canes, but it wasn’t enough for long waits, so at airports I resigned myself to a wheelchair (not even realizing it brought you to the front of the security line). One of these days Elon Musk will undo the ADA and forbid wheelchairs on flights so as to save money: ever since Trump mocked the handicapped man, and the Trumpists laughed, things have gotten worse.

Do you know that predictive spelling for “I’ll” gives, as its first choice, “ill”?

Are there more “ill” people than “I” people? By body-count? Or by which of their weird protocols—“capital letters before lowercase,” perhaps?

I’ll be back in touch. You are courageous!

Helen

November 29, 2023

Dear Helen,

Would it work for you if we came for a one hour visit on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday the 10th, 11th, or 12th of December around 11 am?

If not, then I reckon we could come late January or early February.

There is no need to do anything other than let us in!

We do not need tea, coffee, or anything.

Best
Christopher

November 29, 2023

Any chance of a later, afternoon visit? I’m a night owl, hardly compos mentis before 1pm. (And ever such: I did my PhD thesis between midnight to 4am.)

But you may have lunch plans that would interfere with a later time: if so, we’ll stick with 11 am.

My “procedures,” so tiresome, came out well, nothing more than COPD, with portable oxygen for any day promising to be tiring.

Yours,
Helen

November 29, 2023

We can come anytime in the afternoon. How about 2pm?

Well … you have stamina amongst other gifts. When I applied for college my core worry was “how am I going to survive in a place where I hear they stay up until 11 pm?”  I always went to bed at 9pm sharp. This anxiety vanished soon after I arrived. Such is the stream of life.

By the way, am musing over “I’ll” and “ill” which is fascinating …

Am working on “inner conversation” which I find fascinating and it is, as you know, utterly ignored by psychoanalysis. But surely this is our most important conversation. I loved Blanchot’s book on it. Bataille tried and of course Vygotsky. But … no one seems to get it or be able to represent it.

I believe that love of one’s self is so deeply important. And I think our conversations with our self are so crucial. Certainly in February of this year when my GI system simply stopped almost completely for a week and no one knew what to do I changed from the occasional yelp (it was painful) to a conversation. I literally spoke to my swollen abdomen as if it were an infant. And this helped. The pain came in surges every 15 minutes or so and so I did have respite. By speaking to my belly-infant I actually consoled my self. This is embarrassing but … what the heck?  What does one have to lose at this point?

So Tuesday the 12th at 2pm?

We really look forward to it.

Best
Christopher

November 29, 2023

Tues 12 at 2 it is, thank you, H

December 8, 2023

Dear Helen,

I am so sorry to say that I have a rather bad cold (3rd day of) and have looked up how long I am infectious and it states that one is until all symptoms are gone: usually two weeks.

This means that I should not come to visit you until all the symptoms are gone and that won’t allow us to meet in the next weeks.

Perhaps we can chat on the phone?

I hope you are well.

Best,
Christopher

December 8, 2023

Dear Christopher,

I’m so sorry about your bad cold, just when you’re deep in the planning for your diaries. Somehow I shrink from a spectral voice. If a visit becomes possible, fine; if not, that’s OK, too. A pleasure shouldn’t become an obligation.

Yours with best wishes for your recovery!
Helen

Helen Vendler died on April 23, 2024. She and Christopher Bollas never met.

Self-Portrait in the Studio

All images courtesy of the author.

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio.

Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it? Isn’t the opposite true—that this form of life is at the mercy of its studio?

***

In the mess of papers and books, open or piled upon one another, in the disordered scene of brushes and paints, canvases leaning against the wall, the studio preserves the rough drafts of creation; it records the traces of the arduous process leading from potentiality to act, from the hand that writes to the written page, from the palette to the painting. The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one’s own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes and forms of one’s own potentiality—a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible.

***

How does one have a potentiality? One cannot have a potentiality; one can only inhabit it.

***

Habito is a frequentative of habeo: to inhabit is a special mode of having, a having so intense that it is no longer possession at all. By dint of having something, we inhabit it, we belong to it.

***

The objects of my studio have remained the same, and years later in the photographs of them in different places and cities, they seem unchanged. The studio is the form of its inhabiting—how could it change?

***

In the wicker letter tray against the wall at the center of the desk in both my studio in Rome and the one in Venice, on the left there is an invitation to the dinner celebrating Jean Beaufret’s seventieth birthday, on the front of which is written this line from Simone Weil: “Un homme qui a quelque chose de nouveau à dire ne peut être d’abord écouté que de ceux qui l’aiment.” The invitation carries the date May 22, 1977. Since then, it has always remained on my desk.

***

One knows something only if one loves it—or as Elsa would say, “only one who loves knows.” The Indo-European root that means “to know” is a homonym for the one that means “to be born.” To know [conoscere] means to be born together, to be generated or regenerated by the thing known. This, and nothing but this, is the meaning of loving. And yet, it is precisely this type of love that is so difficult to find among those who believe they know. In fact, the opposite often occurs—that those who dedicate themselves to the study of a writer or an object end up developing a feeling of superiority towards them, almost a sort of contempt. This is why it is best to expunge from the verb “to know” all merely cognitive claims (cognitio in Latin is originally a legal term meaning the procedures for a judge’s inquiry). For my own part, I do not think we can pick up a book we love without feeling our heart racing, or truly know a creature or thing without being reborn in them and with them.

***

The photograph with Heidegger to my left, in my studio on Vicolo del Giglio in Rome, was taken in the countryside of Vaucluse during one of the walks that punctuated the first seminar at Le Thor in 1966. At a distance of half a century, I cannot forget the landscape of Provence immersed in the September light, the white rocks of the boris, the great, steep hump of Mont Ventoux, the ruins of Sade’s Château de Lacoste perched on the rocks. And the feverish, star-pierced night sky, which the moist gauze of the Milky Way seemed to want to soothe. It is perhaps the first place I wanted to hide my heart—and there, untouched and unripe as it was, my heart must have remained, even if I could no longer say where—perhaps under a boulder in Saumane, in a cabin of Le Rebanqué, or in the garden of the little hotel where Heidegger held his seminar every morning.

***

What did the meeting with Heidegger in Provence mean to me? I certainly cannot separate it from the place where happened—his face at once gentle and stern, intense and uncompromising eyes that I have never seen elsewhere save in a dream. In life there are events and meetings that are so decisive that it is impossible for them to enter into reality completely. They happen, to be sure, and the mark out the path—but they never cease to happen, so to speak. Continuous meetings, in this sense, as theologians say that God never ceases to create the world, that there is a continuous creation of the world. These meetings never cease to accompany us until the end. They are part of what remains unfinished in a life, what goes beyond it. And what goes beyond life is what remains of it.

***

I remember, in the dilapidated church of Thouzon, which we visited on one of our excursions in Vaucluse, the Cathar dove carved inside the architrave of a window in such a way that no one could see it without looking in the opposite of the usual direction.

***

That small group of men who, in the photograph from September 1966, walk together toward Thouzon—what ever became of it? Each in his own way had more or less consciously meant to make something of his life—the two seen from the back on the right are René Char and Heidegger, behind them myself and Dominique—what became of them, what became of us? Two have been dead a long time; the other two are, as they say, getting on in years (getting on toward what?). What matters here is not work, but life. Because on that late sunny afternoon (the shadows are long) they were alive and felt it, each intent in his thoughts, that is, in the bit of good that he had glimpsed. What has become of that good, wherein thought and life were not yet divided, wherein the feeling of the sun on the skin and the shadow of words in the mind so happily merged?

***

Smara in Sanskrit means both love and memory. We love someone because we remember them and, vice versa, we remember because we love. In loving we remember and in remembering we love, and in the end we love the memory—that is, love itself—and we remember love—that is, memory itself. This is why loving means being unable to forget, being unable to get a face, a gesture, a light out of your mind. But in truth it also means that we can no longer have a memory of it, that love is beyond memory, immemorably, ceaselessly present.

***

A page from Nicola Chiaromonte’s notebooks contains an extraordinary meditation on what remains of a life. For him the essential issue is not what we have or have not had—the true question is, rather, “what remains? . . . what remains of all the days and years that we lived as we could, that is, lived according to a necessity whose law we cannot even now decipher, but at the same time lived as it happened, which is to say, by chance?” The answer is that what remains, if it remains, is “that which one is, that which one was: the memory of having been ‘beautiful,’ as Plotinus would say, and the ability to keep it alive even now. Love remains, if one felt it, the enthusiasm for noble actions, for the traces of nobility and valor found in the dross of life. What remains, if it remains, is the ability to hold that what was good was good, what was bad was bad, and that nothing one might do can change that. What remains is what was, what deserves to continue and last, what stays.”

The answer seems so clear and forthright that the words that conclude the brief meditation pass unobserved: “And of us, of that Ego from which we can never detach ourselves and which we can never abjure, nothing remains.” And yet, I believe that these final, quiet words lend sense to the answer that precedes them. The good—even if Chiaromonte insists on its “staying” and “lasting”—is not a substance with no relation to our witnessing of it—rather, only this “of us nothing remains” guarantees that something good remains. The good is somehow indiscernible from our cancelling ourselves in it; it lives only by the seal and arabesque that our disappearance marks upon it. This is why we cannot detach ourselves from ourselves or abjure ourselves. Who is “I”? Who are “we”? Only this vanishing, this holding our breath for something higher that, nevertheless, draws life and inspiration from our bated breath. And nothing says more, nothing is more unmistakably unique than that tacit vanishing, nothing more moving than that adventurous disappearance.

***

Every life always runs along two levels: one seemingly governed by necessity, even if, as Chiaromonte writes, we cannot decipher its law, and another that is abandoned to chance and contingency. There is no point in pretending there is some arcane, demonic harmony between these two (this is the hypocritical claim that I was never able to accept in Goethe), and yet, once we manage to look at ourselves without disgust, the two levels, though uncommunicating, do not exclude or contrast with each other; rather, they offer each other a sort of serene, reciprocal hospitality. This is the only reason why the thin fabric of our life can slip out of our hands almost imperceptibly, while the facts and events—that is, the errors—that lay its warp attract all our attention and all our useless care.

***

What accompanies us through life is also what nourishes us. To nourish does not simply mean to make something grow; above all, it means to let something reach the state to which it naturally tends. The meetings, the readings, and the places that nourish us help us to reach this state. And yet, something in us resists this maturation and, just when it seems close, stubbornly stops and turns back toward the unripe.

A medieval legend about Virgil, whom popular tradition had turned into a magician, relates that upon realizing he was old he employed his arts to regain his youth. After having given the necessary instructions to a faithful servant, he had himself cut up into pieces, salted, and cooked in a pot, warning that no one should look inside the pot before it was time. But the servant—or, according to another version, the emperor—opened the pot too soon. “At the point,” the legend recounts, “there was seen an entirely naked child who circled three times around the tub containing the meat of Virgil and then vanished and of the poet nothing remained.” Recalling this legend in the Diaspalmata, Kierkegaard bitterly comments, “I dare say that I also peered too soon into the cauldron, into the cauldron of life and the historical process, and most likely will never manage to become more than a child.”

Maturing is letting oneself be cooked by life, letting oneself blindly fall—like a fruit—wherever. Remaining an infant is wanting to open the pot, wanting to see immediately even what you are not supposed to look at. But how can one not feel sympathy for those people in the fables who recklessly open the forbidden door.

In her diaries, Etty Hillesum writes that a soul can be twelve years old forever. This means that our recorded age changes with time but the soul has an age of its own that remains unchanged from birth to death. I don’t know the exactly age of my soul, but it surely cannot be very old, in any case not more than nine, judging from the way I seem to recognize it in my memories from that age, which have thus remained so vivid and sharp. Every year that passes, the gap between my recorded age and the age of my soul widens and the feeling of this difference is an ineliminable part of the way I life my life, of both its great imbalances and its precarious equilibriums.

***

You can make out the title of the book lying on the left side of the desk on Vicolo del Giglio: La société du spectacle by Guy Debord. I don’t remember why I was rereading it—I first read it back in 1967, the very year of its publication. Guy and I became friends many years later, at the end of the eighties. I remember my first meeting with Guy and Alice at the bar of the Lutetia, the immediately intense conversation, the sure agreement about every aspect of the political situation. We had both arrived at one and the same clarity, Guy starting from the tradition of the artistic avant-gardes, myself from poetry and philosophy. For the first time I found myself speaking about politics without having to bang against the obstacle of useless and misguided ideas and writers (in a letter Guy wrote to me some time later, one of these glibly exalted writers was soberly liquidated as ce sombre dément d’Althusser . . . ) and the systematic exclusion of those who could have oriented the so-called movements in a less ruinous direction. In any case, it was clear to both of us that the main obstacle barring the way to a new politics was precisely what remained of the Marxist tradition (not of Marx!) and the workers’ movement, which was unwittingly complicit with the enemy it believed it was combatting.

During our subsequent meetings at his house on the rue du Bac, the relentless subtlety—worthy of a magister of Vico de li Strami or a seventeenth-century theologian—with which he analyzed both capital and its two shadows, one Stalinist (the “concentrated spectacle”) and one democratic (the “diffuse spectacle”), never ceased to amaze me.

***

The true problem, however, lay elsewhere—closer and, at the same time, more impenetrable. Already in one of his first films Guy had evoked “that clandestinity of private life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.” It was this most intimate stowaway that Guy, like the entire western political tradition, could not get to the bottom of. And yet the term “constructed situation,” from which the group took its name, implied that it was possible to find something like “the northwest passage of the geography of real life.” And if in his books and films Guy comes back so insistently to his biography, to the faces of his friends and the places where he had lived, it is because he obscurely sensed that this was exactly where the secret of politics lay hidden, the secret on which every biography and every revolution could not but run aground. The genuinely political element consists in the clandestinity of private life, and yet, if we try to grasp it, it leaves us holding only the incommunicable, tedious quotidian. It was the political significance of this stowaway—which Aristotle had, with the name zōē, both included in and excluded from the city—that I had begun to investigate in those very same years. I, too, albeit in a different way, was seeking the northwest passage of the geography of real life.

Guy did not care at all about his contemporaries, and he no longer expected anything from them. As he once told me, for him the problem of the political subject by now boiled down to the alternative between homme ou cave (to explain the meaning of this unknown argot term, he pointed me to a Simonin novel that he seemed fond of, Le cave se rebiffe). I do not know what he might have thought of the “whatever singularity” that years later the Tiqqun group would make—with the name Bloom—the possible subject of the politics to come. In any case, when some years later he met the two Juliens—Coupat and Boudart—and Fulvia and Joël, I could not have imagined a closeness and, at the same time, distance greater than the one that separated them from him.

In contrast to Guy, who read narrowly but insistently (in the letter he wrote to me after reading my “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle” he referred to the writers I had cited as “quelques exotiques que j’ignore très regrettablement et [ . . . ] quatre ou cinque Français que je ne veux pas du tout lire”), in the readings of Julien Coupat and his young comrades you would find the author of the Zohar mingling with Pierre Clastres, Marx with Jacob Frank, De Martino with René Guénon, Walter Benjamin with Heidegger. And while Debord no longer hoped for anything from his peers—and if one despairs of others one also despairs of oneself—Tiqqun had wagered—albeit with all possible wariness—on the common man of the twentieth century, the Bloom as they called him, who precisely insofar as he had lost all identity and all belonging could be capable of anything, for better and for worse.

Our long discussions in the locale at 18 rue Saint-Ambroise—a café that they had left as it was, with its sign Au Vouvray, which still drew in a few passersby by mistake—and at the Verre à pied in Rue Mouffetard have remained as vivid in my memory as those that had animated the evenings at the farmhouse in Montechiarone in Tuscany ten years earlier.

***

In this farmhouse that Ginevra and I—following an unfathomable whim of that spirit that wanders where it will—rented in the Sienese countryside between 1978 and 1981, we spent evenings with Peppe, Massimo, Antonella, and later, Ruggero and Maries, that I can only describe as “unforgettable”—even if, as is the case with every truly unforgettable thing, there now remains nothing but a cloud of insignificant details, as if their truer meaning had sunk into the abyss somewhere—but the abyss, in heraldry, is the center of the shield and the unforgettable resembles an empty blazon. We talked about everything, a passage from Plato or Heidegger, a poem by Caproni or Penna, the colors in one of Ruggero’s painting or anecdotes from friends’ lives, but as in an ancient symposium, everything found its name, its delight, and its place. All this will be lost, is already lost, entrusted to the uncertain memory of four or five people and soon to be forgotten entirely (a faint echo of it can be found in the pages of the seminar on Language and Death)—but the unforgettable remains, because what is lost is God’s.

***

(What am I doing in this book? Am I not running the risk, as Ginevra says, of turning my studio into a little museum through which I lead readers by the hand? Do I not remain too present, while I would have liked to disappear in the faces of friends and our meetings? To be sure, for me inhabiting meant to experience these friendships and meetings with the greatest possible intensity. But instead of inhabiting, is it not having that has got the upper hand? I believe I must run this risk. There is one thing, though, that I would like to make clear: that I am an epigone in the literal sense of the word, a being that is generated only out of others, and that never renounces this dependency, living in a continuous, happy epigenesis).

***

From the window on Vicolo del Giglio you could see only a roof and a facing wall whose plaster, deteriorated in many places, left glimpses of bricks and stones. For years my gaze must have fallen, even distractedly, on that piece of ocher wall burnished by time, which only I could see. What is a wall? Something that guards and protects—the house or the city. Childlike tenderness of Italian cities, still enclosed within their own walls like a dream that stubbornly seeks shelter from reality. But a wall does not merely keep things out; it is also an obstacle that you cannot overcome, the Unsurmountable with which sooner or later you must contend. As every time one comes up against a boundary, various strategies are possible. A boundary is what separates an inside from an outside. We can, then, like Simone Weil, think of a wall as such, so that it remains thus up to the end, with no hope of leaving the prison. Or rather, like Kant, we might make the boundary the essential experience, which grants us a perfectly empty outside, a sort of metaphysical storage space in which to place the inaccessible Thing in itself. Or instead, like the land surveyor K., we might question and circumvent the borders that separate the inside from the outside, the castle from the village, the sky from the earth. Or even, like the painter Apelles in the anecdote related by Pliny, cut the borderline with an even finer line in such a way that outside and inside switch sides. Make the outside inside, as Manganelli would say. In any case, the last thing to do is bang our heads against it. The last—in every sense.

Translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell.

From Self-Portrait in the Studio, to be published this October by Seagull Books.

Giorgio Agamben is one of Italy’s foremost contemporary thinkers. 

Kevin Attell teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and is the author of Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction.

On Asturias’s Men of Maize

Asturias, ca. 1925. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

For millions of people in the Americas, our Indigenous heritage is something tinged with mystery. We look into a mirror and believe we see the Mayan, the Aztec, or the Apache in our faces. The hint of a high cheekbone; the very loud and obvious statement of our cinnamon or copper skin. We sense a native great-great-grandparent in our squat or long torsos, in the shape of our eyes, in our gait, and in the emotions and the spirits that drift over us at times of joy and loss. But the particulars of our Indigeneity, the weighty and grounded facts of it, have been erased from our history.

In my Guatemalan-immigrant childhood, the great Mayan jungle city of Tikal was a symbol of the civilization in our blood. Despite the humility of our present in seventies Los Angeles—my mother was a store cashier, my father a parking-lot valet—we were once an empire. My father suggested that a personal, familial greatness was there in our Mayan heritage, waiting to reawaken. I could not trace who my Mayan forebears were, exactly. But I knew the Maya were in me because I was a guatemalteco; or, in the hyphenated ethnic nomenclature of the time, a “Guatemalan-American.” Only now do I realize how deeply fraught the idea of being “Guatemalan” truly is. “Guatemala” is a way of glossing over the cultural collisions and the racial violence that produced a country centered in the mountain jungles and river valleys where Mayan peoples ruled themselves until Europeans came.

Men of Maize is Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias more than likely had some Indigenous ancestors, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr. President) sent the future author’s father and family into an internal exile in the Mayan‑centric world of provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deep into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.

In the 1920s, Asturias left for Paris to study. Soon he would become a member of a generation of Latin American thinkers influenced by the Eurocentric aesthetics and worldviews of the time: modernism, surrealism, socialism. In his own artistic practice, these ideas would fuse with the Indigenous spirituality and consciousness of the Americas. The life stories and the mythology of common Mayan and “mixed” folk of Guatemala would appear in his work, and influence it, again and again. In Men of Maize, he rejected the superficiality and sentimentality to be found in so many works about Indigenous cultures written by outsiders. The Mayan families in the novel are not hapless, helpless victims living out one tragedy after another in the face of the relentless march of modernity. Instead, in a frenzy of surreal stories and images, their ghosts and folktales and visions take over the narrative. Darkness comes streaming out of an anthill. A postman transforms into a coyote. Fire sweeps across the corn‑covered landscape, both as a tool of ruthless capitalism and as an agent of peasant retribution. In this fashion, Asturias reimagined the birth of Guatemala as a mad, disorderly event that unleashed countless personal and familial passions: betrayal, mourning, love, loyalty, and revenge.

It’s more than a little ironic that winning the Nobel Prize in 1967 made Asturias a symbol of national pride in Guatemala. By then, the writer had fled the country to escape the military dictatorship brought to power in a 1954 CIA‑backed coup. In the decades that followed, Guatemala’s elites assimilated Mayan Indigeneity into a soft‑focus narrative about the country’s national identity. Guatemala’s tourism ministry, Inguat, produced countless posters for airports and travel agencies depicting Mayan temples and stelae, and Indigenous women dressed in traditional textiles. In this “official” story, the nation’s Indigeneity was something colorful and harmless, a commodity to market to cash‑spending Europeans and norteamericanos.

My parents were in their mid‑twenties and living in Los Angeles when Asturias won the Nobel. For my father, especially, the writer’s triumph became yet another symbol of our inherent Guatemalan greatness. When we drove through Mexico on a family trip to Guatemala a few years later, he stopped somewhere along the way and bought several of his books. I remember, vividly, the beautiful woodcuts of their paperback covers, produced by the Argentine publisher Losada. On the cover for Hombres de maíz, a yellow face with enormous eyes stared out from behind black cornstalks. But I could not read that book, or any of the other Asturias books my father brought home. They were in Spanish, a language that was slowly dying in my U.S.‑educated brain.

When I returned to Guatemala in the eighties as a college educated, Spanish‑fluent adult, I mimicked Asturias’s artistic practice and began to collect the oral histories of my relatives. (Asturias’s first book, Legends of Guatemala, begins with the epigraph “For my mother, who used to tell me stories.”) I had my first grown‑up conversations with my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother, both people of striking Indigenous features. My grandfather had been born in Tecpán, Guatemala, a center of the Kaqchikel Maya; and my grandmother was from Huehuetenango, the capital of Guatemala’s Mayan north‑west frontier, the city and nearby villages home to the Mam, K’iche’, and other peoples. I asked them both the question so many young Latino people want to ask their elders: What are we? To what tribe or nation do we belong? Both answered: “No, we’re Spanish.” We were not Indian, they insisted, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

At the end of the twentieth century, it was still taboo for a person of “mixed” heritage to embrace their Mayan identity. Among the “Ladinos” (as the mixed population of Guatemala call themselves), Indigeneity remained associated with backwardness and passivity. “Indio” was an insult equivalent to “stupid.” These racist ideas endured despite all the books Asturias had written. Despite Mulata de Tal and Leyendas de Guatemala. Despite Men of Maize. Despite the shining gold medal handed to him by the Swedish Academy.

Four years after his father’s Nobel, Rodrigo Asturias, the novelist’s oldest son, founded a leftist guerrilla movement. He took as a nom de guerre the name of a character from the opening chapter of Men of Maize: Gaspar Ilom, the leader who resists the encroachment of outsiders on Indigenous lands. In the seventies and eighties, the Gaspar Ilom who was inspired by a fictional character built a real‑life army whose ranks grew to include legions of Mayan fighters. On the same trip to Guatemala on which I pressed my grandparents about our Indigenous heritage, I traveled through the countryside and saw bombed bridges and rebel  graffiti—the calling cards of that largely Indigenous guerrilla army. What I saw inspired a scene in my first novel, The Tattooed Soldier, a book that tackled the legacy of the genocidal war that the Guatemalan government launched against a Mayan rebellion.

When I finally read Men of Maize, I saw echoes of my family story in every chapter. My grandfather had told me of a days‑long walk he undertook as a young man, sleeping in the town squares with other travelers along the way. In Asturias’s novel I read of “rivulets of local folk” on the highways, “their bedding stored away in cane baskets” so that they, too, could sleep along the road. Asturias describes a shaman’s ritual to induce “spider‑spells” that involves the sprinkling of red pinole powder, flour, and tortilla crumbs on a straw mat; I have a vague memory of being a boy and my mother taking me to see a woman doing something very similar. Soon I understood that our family’s Indigeneity was not a great black hole of mystery, but rather something alive and very real inside of me. In my memories, in our way of being.

Men of Maize describes the birth of a new people. Or, put another way, it describes the journey of an ancient people into a new age. A time when they don Western clothes and marvel at the miraculous interventions of their non‑Western deities in a Spanish‑speaking world. When they live and mix with German and Chinese immigrants and Americans and assorted other “whites,” and when they have adventures alongside these new peoples. In villages and towns that are as Mayan as they are European, in the hills and jungles and valleys of a country called Guatemala. I can see now what Asturias discovered a century ago: that “Guatemala” is a synonym for mixing.

 

From the foreword to Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias, to be published by Penguin Classics in September.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a novelist, and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Our Migrant Souls, the New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, and The Barbarian Nurseries. 

Siding with Joy: A Conversation with Anne Serre

Photograph by Francesca Mantovani.

Anne Serre’s “That Summer,” which appears in the new Summer issue of  The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: “That summer we had decided we were past caring.” But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three pages, it chronicles interactions among four characters in a family—two of whom are institutionalized. There are two deaths. Serre’s narrator’s reflections on her family dynamics, charged and nuanced, are the main attraction. They bring to light entire dimensions of experience; when life has such a finely wrought interior, death is literally the afterthought. 

“That Summer” previously appeared in French, in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, a collection of stories of similar brevity. That was not Serre’s first book of short-shorts, though her books available in English are made up of longer texts. They include three short novels—The Governesses, The Beginners, and A Leopard-Skin Hat—and The Fool and Other Moral Tales, a collection of novellas. All are translated by Mark Hutchinson, who is a longtime friend. Her untranslated works include Voyage avec Vila-Matas, which riffs on an experience of reading Serre’s Spanish contemporary, going so far as to feature a fictionalized version of Enrique Vila-Matas, and Grande tiqueté, written in a combination of French and a language Serre invented for the purpose. In her latest novel, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur, an elderly author whose death is imminent directs the process of assembling the manuscript that she has, already, left behind.

This interview was conducted primarily over email. A WhatsApp call was thwarted by “enormous storms” in the Auvergne region where, for two months out of the year, Serre lives, in a house that was also her grandparents’. As in Paris, she lives alone, something she has wanted since her adolescence. Asked if she would field a personal question, the author was encouraging. “Literature is personal,” she said.

—Jacqueline Feldman

 

INTERVIEWER

Are you in Auvergne right now?

ANNE SERRE

Yes, I am. As I’ve been doing every summer for a long time now, I’m spending two months of vacation here, in this region of mountains and small lakes, in the house I have inherited. Now that my whole family has passed away, the house belongs to me.

I don’t write here. I spend my vacation the same way I did when I was a child. I walk in the lanes and meadows, look at the scenery, swim in the lakes, and at night I read in bed. There are a huge number of books in the house—three generations’ worth. Basically, I do pretty much the same things I did when I was twelve or fourteen.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel you need to be back in Paris in order to write?

SERRE

I don’t think it’s connected to the city of Paris. I just happen to live there for the rest of the year, and I live alone. I’ve always lived alone. My apartment in Paris is a bit like a big office, if you will. I work at my own pace, when I want, how I want, and however I please. For the time being, I’m alone in my house in Auvergne too. Not until August will some friends come for a visit. But the house is so filled with presences for me—my family, my father, my sisters, my grandparents, even my great-aunt and uncle who also lived here at one time—that there are too many people around for me to be able to write. Even if they’re only ghosts.

INTERVIEWER

Has it always been important to you to live alone?

SERRE

Yes, I always wanted to live alone. Even as a child or a teenager, when I thought about the future, I never saw myself getting married or living with someone as a couple. Which didn’t stop me from falling in love, of course. I like men and have been passionately in love, but I’ve always organized things so as not to live under the same roof as them. Since I never wanted children either, it wasn’t difficult.

INTERVIEWER

Does living alone lend itself to writing?

SERRE

Yes, I think that in my case living alone has been essential for writing. I’ve always been astonished that women writers I greatly admire could have a family life. Think of Nathalie Sarraute, for example, whose work is extremely demanding and required all her time—she had three daughters and was married. I always wondered how she managed it …

INTERVIEWER

In “That Summer,” many details of the family’s life are out of view. When the sisters don’t leave the island, Capri is described as being “petrified.” You have that title, in English, The Fool and Other Moral Tales, and I thought I might ask about morality. Even the first-person plural at the start of the story seems marked by a complicity, or the evasion of responsibility … Is it corrupting to be part of a family?

SERRE

Your question about “corruption” reminds me of Henry James, an author I’ve always loved, whose work is shot through with a strange feeling, never really explained, of something unspeakable you can’t quite put your finger on. There’s something on the moral plane that horrifies James (and perhaps horrified him during his childhood), but he doesn’t know quite what it is. In everything he writes, he’s trying to find it. This thing that horrified him, I think, is a form of inversion, the wrong side (but of what I don’t know) presented right side up or the other way around. It’s particularly noticeable in The Turn of the Screw. That’s where he comes closest to finding it. It’s what makes the book so fascinating, in fact.

INTERVIEWER

“I think, unfortunately, that I preferred him mad.” I wanted to ask you about this line, too, from “That Summer.” The narrator is referring to her father. What is the role of the perverse in your texts—if “perverse” is the right word?

SERRE

Most of my narrators use irony and self-deprecation, I think. It’s just the way my mind works. But I’ve certainly inherited this in large part from the English satirists and all those marvelous Irish writers from Sterne to Beckett, and also from Cervantes, Voltaire’s tales, and so on. I’ve always loved seditious fantasy and farce, enormities uttered with a smile, the narrator playing around with his role as storyteller and the tale being told. I like the detachment they allow in the face of tragedy—not to deny tragedy, but to bring out its grotesque side, since death will obliterate everything. That said, the narrator in “That Summer” is distinguished more by her candor. She likes the complex, conflicting emotions aroused by her father’s folly—and says so—no doubt because they allow her to perceive all kinds of interesting things she wouldn’t perceive in more straightforward, peaceful circumstances.

INTERVIEWER

There’s also a “slightly erotic” tinge to the father’s “joy” that can involve thinking he’s Alfred de Musset, George Sand’s lover. Erotic and family love occur together elsewhere in your oeuvre. Did you need both to form this story?

SERRE

I think that in everything I’ve written—starting with my first novel, The Governesses—I’ve associated Eros with joy. And also, despite its gray areas, with family love. My sense, but I may be deluding myself, is that I made a decision one day, when I was very young—I would choose joy. In the same way you might choose to live in this or that country. I imagine that the foundations must have been laid in my early childhood (otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to make such a decision), but later, in spite of the bereavements and difficulties I experienced, I adopted it, not as a form of “positive thinking” or as a shield against grief but because I’d noticed that siding with joy enabled me to think more clearly—to focus my thoughts. I see a bit of myself in a sentence by the Italian poet Dolores Prato, in her book Scottature. “I was in thrall to that powerful, indomitable joy that mysteriously took hold of me now and then, sometimes for no reason at all.”

INTERVIEWER

How did “That Summer” begin?

SERRE

“That Summer” began with an opening sentence that popped into my head and made me want to tell a story. When I’m writing, it’s as if I’m making a piece of furniture, a table or a beautiful wooden chair. I’m like a cabinetmaker. I love the work, so I’m always very cheerful when I’m doing it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you do many drafts of this story?

SERRE

No. In general, I write straight through, without a break. Especially stories. Then I read them over and sometimes make little changes. But the rhythm and images, I seldom change. I trust my initial impulse.

INTERVIEWER

Your stories are allusive, often featuring famous names. George Sand’s and Musset’s appear in the first lines of “That Summer,” when you’re describing the father’s illness. Can you tell me about Sand and Musset?

SERRE

I heard a lot about Musset and Sand when I was a child because my father was very fond of Musset’s work and was fascinated by his affair with George Sand. We often visited Sand’s house in Nohant. From a child’s point of view, she was a strange figure because she had a man’s name (the same name as my father) and dressed like a man. I was still at an age when you confuse reality and fiction slightly. I think that, for me, “Musset” and “George Sand” were names of characters in a fiction told by my father … and this may have left its mark … Whenever I feel love for an author—when I love someone’s work, as well as admiring its author I also feel deeply grateful to him—I have an unfortunate tendency to start thinking of him as a character in a book …

INTERVIEWER

How does reading contribute to your writing generally?

SERRE

Like any compulsive reader, my mind is full of images from the novels I’ve read. When I’m writing a story, some of these images pop into my head, get mixed up with other images from different sources (scenes I’ve experienced or imagined), and are transformed. Most of the time, I can’t really say from which specific novel such and such an image came. I might be a bit obsessed, for example, with the image of a sloping field at nightfall, with a little house at the top where the windows are all lit up, and I say to myself, Well, what do you know? I’ve seen that in a Peter Handke novel. Then later, when I’m reading over the story again, I’ll realize the image doesn’t come from Handke at all, but from an Irish novel.

INTERVIEWER

Recurring characters and settings are a feature of your work. I’m curious about Combleux—the place where, in “That Summer,” one sister is hospitalized.

 SERRE

Combleux is a name I thought I’d invented, though I later discovered that a town called Combleux does actually exist in France. It’s a name I immediately associate with Proust’s imaginary town of Combray. So in a way the hospitalized sister is in In Search of Lost Time, while the father, who’s in a famous sanatorium in Switzerland, is in The Magic Mountain, or maybe in the position of Robert Walser in his Swiss asylum at Herisau.

But then the plot thickens, because not only did I discover after my book was published that a town called Combleux actually exists, but, more recently, I was invited to go and talk about my work—in Combleux! And while strolling around the town before the reading, I was suddenly brought up short by a charming riverside restaurant that I recognized at once. I had had lunch there decades before with my father and sister … Things like this happen to me now and then, and every time I’m filled with a curious feeling—a mixture of amazement, amusement, and sadness at having forgotten so much.

INTERVIEWER

Elsewhere in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, one of your characters refers to literary journalists who ask unsuitable questions. Specifically, your narrator says that they ask, “if it’s autobiographical, which of course means nothing.” Do you, too, think that a text’s being autobiographical means nothing?

SERRE

I was referring to certain French journalists who take an exaggerated interest in the biographies of living writers. I have nothing against autobiography and love reading memoirs and letters and writers’ diaries. I’m fascinated by Elias Canetti’s powers of recollection, recounting his life down to the last comma in three enormous volumes, or Stefan Zweig’s overflowing memoirs. When Gertrude Stein writes about her day-to-day life with Alice Toklas in Paris or Billignin, I’m in heaven. But I’d be hard pressed to write an autobiographical text myself because my memory is full of gaps and whole sections have fallen to pieces—as it has been, no doubt, since my mother died when I was twelve. My memory is made up of a multitude of images that are very precise but curiously naive or elementary, like playing cards, but with no connection between them and not necessarily in the right order. When I’m writing a story and one of these images pops up, I feel as if I’m turning over a card in a game of solitaire and finding a place for it among the other cards already on the table, and this allows me to construct a narrative.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing useful for remembering?

SERRE

I don’t try to remember things when I’m writing. In a way, my own life doesn’t interest me all that much, except as material. As I said before, I try to make an object, preferably a beautiful object, with a strong presence. I don’t worry at all about how inaccurate or distorted my memories might be. I embrace it, in fact.

INTERVIEWER

Since “That Summer” is a translation, I wanted to ask about that process, too. Can you tell me about your friendship with Mark Hutchinson?

SERRE

Our friendship has lasted for more than forty years now. When we first met, I was on the editorial board of a small literary magazine in Paris where I published some of my early stories. One day we decided to get together with the members of an Anglo-French poetry review that was also based in Paris. Mark was a contributor to that review. He’d come over from England, a young poet with an impressive baggage of reading and learning. As well as talking to me about authors I knew next to nothing about because they’re not much read in France, unfortunately—Blake, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Brodsky, Marianne Moore—he talked about life in a way I’d never heard anyone talk about it before. Over the years, as a result of our more or less continuous dialogue, not only the English-speaking world and its culture but a particular form of knowledge Mark possesses have become part of me, opening up my inner world. It never occurred to me when we met (or even twenty years later) that one day, Mark, who mainly translates poetry, including René Char and Emmanuel Hocquard, would translate my books into English. But a few years ago, when the editor in chief of New Directions, Barbara Epler, decided to publish The Governesses in English, our friendship set off naturally down that path.

INTERVIEWER

What can prose do that poetry can’t? What draws you to writing narratives?

SERRE

To tell the truth, I’m more familiar with prose than with poetry, much of which is inaccessible to me, I’m sorry to say. Whereas Mark’s enormous library contains not only poetry, fiction, and essays but philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and so forth, my own library consists almost entirely of novels, short stories, writers’ diaries and memoirs, a handful of plays (which I prefer reading to seeing performed onstage), and plenty of monographs about painters, which I look at when I’m feeling poorly or am laid up in bed with flu. There’s only one shelf of poetry. I like having those books and seeing their covers—Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Every once in a while, I open one up, read a few pages, and tell myself, like Rabelais, that this is the “substantific marrow,” but I’m not spellbound the way I am by fiction. I’ve noticed in fact that I tend to read everything as if it were fiction. If I’m reading The Memorial of Saint Helena, for example, I think of Napoleon as a character. If I pick up Winnicott’s The Piggle, I think of the little girl as Alice. With Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, I think of characters from the commedia dell’arte …

Mark once said to me (and I remember this because I wrote it down in a notebook, and I always remember what I write down in my notebooks) that poetry is a way of grasping seemingly disparate facts that are grouped together because they’re part of the same species. That for Marianne Moore it was “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and for Basil Bunting, “words that name facts dancing together.” So I get the general picture. For my part, however, I need to be told a story, and I need there to be, at the heart of that story, a dangerous, mesmerizing well or passageway, as there are in most great works of fiction. It’s this passageway that attracts me. As I approach it (in reading), I feel something very powerful, a bit like Ulysses with the Sirens, if you like! And I’m sorry I can’t be more precise in describing that passageway—its nature, its function. Perhaps I try to understand it by writing …

 

Jacqueline Feldman’s On Your Feet, a bilingual experiment, was published in March by dispersed holdings. Precarious Lease, her account of a Parisian squat, is forthcoming from Rescue Press this fall.

“Siding with Joy”: A Conversation with Anne Serre

Photograph by Francesca Mantovani.

Anne Serre’s “That Summer,” which appears in the new Summer issue of  The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: “That summer we had decided we were past caring.” But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three pages, it chronicles interactions among four characters in a family—two of whom are institutionalized. There are two deaths. Serre’s narrator’s reflections on her family, charged and nuanced, are the main attraction. They bring to light entire dimensions of experience; when life has such a finely wrought interior, death is literally the afterthought. 

“That Summer” previously appeared in French, in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, a collection of stories of similar brevity. That was not Serre’s first book of short-shorts, though her books available in English are made up of longer texts. They include three short novels—The Governesses, The Beginners, and A Leopard-Skin Hat—and The Fool and Other Moral Tales, a collection of novellas. All are translated by Mark Hutchinson, who is a longtime friend. Her untranslated works include Voyage avec Vila-Matas, which riffs on an experience of reading Serre’s Spanish contemporary, going so far as to feature a fictionalized version of Enrique Vila-Matas, and Grande tiqueté, written in a combination of French and a language Serre invented for the purpose. In her latest novel, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur, an elderly author whose death is imminent directs the process of assembling the manuscript that she has, already, left behind.

This interview was conducted primarily over email. A WhatsApp call was thwarted by “enormous storms” in the Auvergne region where, for two months out of the year, Serre lives, in a house that was also her grandparents’. As in Paris, she lives alone, something she has wanted since her adolescence. Asked if she would field a personal question, the author was encouraging. “Literature is personal,” she said.

—Jacqueline Feldman

 

INTERVIEWER

Are you in Auvergne right now?

ANNE SERRE

Yes, I am. As I’ve been doing every summer for a long time now, I’m spending two months of vacation here, in this region of mountains and small lakes, in the house I have inherited. Now that my whole family has passed away, the house belongs to me.

I don’t write here. I spend my vacation the same way I did when I was a child. I walk in the lanes and meadows, look at the scenery, swim in the lakes, and at night I read in bed. There are a huge number of books in the house—three generations’ worth. Basically, I do pretty much the same things I did when I was twelve or fourteen.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel you need to be back in Paris in order to write?

SERRE

I don’t think it’s connected to the city of Paris. I just happen to live there for the rest of the year, and I live alone. I’ve always lived alone. My apartment in Paris is a bit like a big office, if you will. I work at my own pace, when I want, how I want, and however I please. For the time being, I’m alone in my house in Auvergne too. Not until August will some friends come for a visit. But the house is so filled with presences for me—my family, my father, my sisters, my grandparents, even my great-aunt and uncle who also lived here at one time—that there are too many people around for me to be able to write. Even if they’re only ghosts.

INTERVIEWER

Has it always been important to you to live alone?

SERRE

Yes, I always wanted to live alone. Even as a child or a teenager, when I thought about the future, I never saw myself getting married or living with someone as a couple. Which didn’t stop me from falling in love, of course. I like men and have been passionately in love, but I’ve always organized things so as not to live under the same roof as them. Since I never wanted children either, it wasn’t difficult.

INTERVIEWER

Does living alone lend itself to writing?

SERRE

Yes, I think that in my case living alone has been essential for writing. I’ve always been astonished that women writers I greatly admire could have a family life. Think of Nathalie Sarraute, for example, whose work is extremely demanding and required all her time—she had three daughters and was married. I always wondered how she managed it …

INTERVIEWER

In “That Summer,” many details of the family’s life are out of view. When the sisters don’t leave the island, Capri is described as being “petrified.” You have that title, in English, The Fool and Other Moral Tales, and I thought I might ask about morality. Even the first-person plural at the start of the story seems marked by a complicity, or the evasion of responsibility … Is it corrupting to be part of a family?

SERRE

Your question about “corruption” reminds me of Henry James, an author I’ve always loved, whose work is shot through with a strange feeling, never really explained, of something unspeakable you can’t quite put your finger on. There’s something on the moral plane that horrifies James (and perhaps horrified him during his childhood), but he doesn’t know quite what it is. In everything he writes, he’s trying to find it. This thing that horrified him, I think, is a form of inversion, the wrong side (but of what I don’t know) presented right side up or the other way around. It’s particularly noticeable in The Turn of the Screw. That’s where he comes closest to finding it. It’s what makes the book so fascinating, in fact.

INTERVIEWER

“I think, unfortunately, that I preferred him mad.” I wanted to ask you about this line, too, from “That Summer.” The narrator is referring to her father. What is the role of the perverse in your texts—if “perverse” is the right word?

SERRE

Most of my narrators use irony and self-deprecation, I think. It’s just the way my mind works. But I’ve certainly inherited this in large part from the English satirists and all those marvelous Irish writers from Sterne to Beckett, and also from Cervantes, Voltaire’s tales, and so on. I’ve always loved seditious fantasy and farce, enormities uttered with a smile, the narrator playing around with his role as storyteller and the tale being told. I like the detachment they allow in the face of tragedy—not to deny tragedy, but to bring out its grotesque side, since death will obliterate everything. That said, the narrator in “That Summer” is distinguished more by her candor. She likes the complex, conflicting emotions aroused by her father’s folly—and says so—no doubt because they allow her to perceive all kinds of interesting things she wouldn’t perceive in more straightforward, peaceful circumstances.

INTERVIEWER

There’s also a “slightly erotic” tinge to the father’s “joy” that can involve thinking he’s Alfred de Musset, George Sand’s lover. Erotic and family love occur together elsewhere in your oeuvre. Did you need both to form this story?

SERRE

I think that in everything I’ve written—starting with my first novel, The Governesses—I’ve associated Eros with joy. And also, despite its gray areas, with family love. My sense, but I may be deluding myself, is that I made a decision one day, when I was very young—I would choose joy. In the same way you might choose to live in this or that country. I imagine that the foundations must have been laid in my early childhood (otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to make such a decision), but later, in spite of the bereavements and difficulties I experienced, I adopted it, not as a form of “positive thinking” or as a shield against grief but because I’d noticed that siding with joy enabled me to think more clearly—to focus my thoughts. I see a bit of myself in a sentence by the Italian poet Dolores Prato, in her book Scottature. “I was in thrall to that powerful, indomitable joy that mysteriously took hold of me now and then, sometimes for no reason at all.”

INTERVIEWER

How did “That Summer” begin?

SERRE

“That Summer” began with an opening sentence that popped into my head and made me want to tell a story. When I’m writing, it’s as if I’m making a piece of furniture, a table or a beautiful wooden chair. I’m like a cabinetmaker. I love the work, so I’m always very cheerful when I’m doing it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you do many drafts of this story?

SERRE

No. In general, I write straight through, without a break. Especially stories. Then I read them over and sometimes make little changes. But the rhythm and images, I seldom change. I trust my initial impulse.

INTERVIEWER

Your stories are allusive, often featuring famous names. George Sand’s and Musset’s appear in the first lines of “That Summer,” when you’re describing the father’s illness. Can you tell me about Sand and Musset?

SERRE

I heard a lot about Musset and Sand when I was a child because my father was very fond of Musset’s work and was fascinated by his affair with George Sand. We often visited Sand’s house in Nohant. From a child’s point of view, she was a strange figure because she had a man’s name (the same name as my father) and dressed like a man. I was still at an age when you confuse reality and fiction slightly. I think that, for me, “Musset” and “George Sand” were names of characters in a fiction told by my father … and this may have left its mark … Whenever I feel love for an author—when I love someone’s work, as well as admiring its author I also feel deeply grateful to him—I have an unfortunate tendency to start thinking of him as a character in a book …

INTERVIEWER

How does reading contribute to your writing generally?

SERRE

Like any compulsive reader, my mind is full of images from the novels I’ve read. When I’m writing a story, some of these images pop into my head, get mixed up with other images from different sources (scenes I’ve experienced or imagined), and are transformed. Most of the time, I can’t really say from which specific novel such and such an image came. I might be a bit obsessed, for example, with the image of a sloping field at nightfall, with a little house at the top where the windows are all lit up, and I say to myself, Well, what do you know? I’ve seen that in a Peter Handke novel. Then later, when I’m reading over the story again, I’ll realize the image doesn’t come from Handke at all, but from an Irish novel.

INTERVIEWER

Recurring characters and settings are a feature of your work. I’m curious about Combleux—the place where, in “That Summer,” one sister is hospitalized.

 SERRE

Combleux is a name I thought I’d invented, though I later discovered that a town called Combleux does actually exist in France. It’s a name I immediately associate with Proust’s imaginary town of Combray. So in a way the hospitalized sister is in In Search of Lost Time, while the father, who’s in a famous sanatorium in Switzerland, is in The Magic Mountain, or maybe in the position of Robert Walser in his Swiss asylum at Herisau.

But then the plot thickens, because not only did I discover after my book was published that a town called Combleux actually exists, but, more recently, I was invited to go and talk about my work—in Combleux! And while strolling around the town before the reading, I was suddenly brought up short by a charming riverside restaurant that I recognized at once. I had had lunch there decades before with my father and sister … Things like this happen to me now and then, and every time I’m filled with a curious feeling—a mixture of amazement, amusement, and sadness at having forgotten so much.

INTERVIEWER

Elsewhere in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, one of your characters refers to literary journalists who ask unsuitable questions. Specifically, your narrator says that they ask, “if it’s autobiographical, which of course means nothing.” Do you, too, think that a text’s being autobiographical means nothing?

SERRE

I was referring to certain French journalists who take an exaggerated interest in the biographies of living writers. I have nothing against autobiography and love reading memoirs and letters and writers’ diaries. I’m fascinated by Elias Canetti’s powers of recollection, recounting his life down to the last comma in three enormous volumes, or Stefan Zweig’s overflowing memoirs. When Gertrude Stein writes about her day-to-day life with Alice Toklas in Paris or Billignin, I’m in heaven. But I’d be hard pressed to write an autobiographical text myself because my memory is full of gaps and whole sections have fallen to pieces—as it has been, no doubt, since my mother died when I was twelve. My memory is made up of a multitude of images that are very precise but curiously naive or elementary, like playing cards, but with no connection between them and not necessarily in the right order. When I’m writing a story and one of these images pops up, I feel as if I’m turning over a card in a game of solitaire and finding a place for it among the other cards already on the table, and this allows me to construct a narrative.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing useful for remembering?

SERRE

I don’t try to remember things when I’m writing. In a way, my own life doesn’t interest me all that much, except as material. As I said before, I try to make an object, preferably a beautiful object, with a strong presence. I don’t worry at all about how inaccurate or distorted my memories might be. I embrace it, in fact.

INTERVIEWER

Since “That Summer” is a translation, I wanted to ask about that process, too. Can you tell me about your friendship with Mark Hutchinson?

SERRE

Our friendship has lasted for more than forty years now. When we first met, I was on the editorial board of a small literary magazine in Paris where I published some of my early stories. One day we decided to get together with the members of an Anglo-French poetry review that was also based in Paris. Mark was a contributor to that review. He’d come over from England, a young poet with an impressive baggage of reading and learning. As well as talking to me about authors I knew next to nothing about because they’re not much read in France, unfortunately—Blake, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Brodsky, Marianne Moore—he talked about life in a way I’d never heard anyone talk about it before. Over the years, as a result of our more or less continuous dialogue, not only the English-speaking world and its culture but a particular form of knowledge Mark possesses have become part of me, opening up my inner world. It never occurred to me when we met (or even twenty years later) that one day, Mark, who mainly translates poetry, including René Char and Emmanuel Hocquard, would translate my books into English. But a few years ago, when the editor in chief of New Directions, Barbara Epler, decided to publish The Governesses in English, our friendship set off naturally down that path.

INTERVIEWER

What can prose do that poetry can’t? What draws you to writing narratives?

SERRE

To tell the truth, I’m more familiar with prose than with poetry, much of which is inaccessible to me, I’m sorry to say. Whereas Mark’s enormous library contains not only poetry, fiction, and essays but philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and so forth, my own library consists almost entirely of novels, short stories, writers’ diaries and memoirs, a handful of plays (which I prefer reading to seeing performed onstage), and plenty of monographs about painters, which I look at when I’m feeling poorly or am laid up in bed with flu. There’s only one shelf of poetry. I like having those books and seeing their covers—Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Every once in a while, I open one up, read a few pages, and tell myself, like Rabelais, that this is the “substantific marrow,” but I’m not spellbound the way I am by fiction. I’ve noticed in fact that I tend to read everything as if it were fiction. If I’m reading The Memorial of Saint Helena, for example, I think of Napoleon as a character. If I pick up Winnicott’s The Piggle, I think of the little girl as Alice. With Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, I think of characters from the commedia dell’arte …

Mark once said to me (and I remember this because I wrote it down in a notebook, and I always remember what I write down in my notebooks) that poetry is a way of grasping seemingly disparate facts that are grouped together because they’re part of the same species. That for Marianne Moore it was “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and for Basil Bunting, “words that name facts dancing together.” So I get the general picture. For my part, however, I need to be told a story, and I need there to be, at the heart of that story, a dangerous, mesmerizing well or passageway, as there are in most great works of fiction. It’s this passageway that attracts me. As I approach it (in reading), I feel something very powerful, a bit like Ulysses with the Sirens, if you like! And I’m sorry I can’t be more precise in describing that passageway—its nature, its function. Perhaps I try to understand it by writing …

 

Jacqueline Feldman’s On Your Feet, a bilingual experiment, was published in March by dispersed holdings. Precarious Lease, her account of a Parisian squat, is forthcoming from Rescue Press this fall.

Inner Light

Frans Snyders, Still Life with a Wine Cooler (1610–1620). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on.

“Are you having an affair with ——?” Someone had put the question to me the day before the party, and the word affair had rung so hollow that when I answered in the negative it didn’t even feel like a lie. I was mostly struck by the use of the word itself, which gave the whole thing a certain sophistication. But still, I chafed. “Why are you asking?” “I wouldn’t care if you were.” “Why would you?” “I said I wouldn’t.” In those days, I would snap at questions or laugh them off. How badly I must have wanted to be found out.

Back then—all of us in grad school—we met weekly for dinner. It began as a way of observing Shabbat as my roommate rediscovered his Judaism, or rediscovered himself in relation to Judaism, or else rediscovered everything, concluding that within the world as it existed there was no way to disentangle himself from his religion. I am not Jewish but Catholic, by then more or less totally lapsed, and while spending most of my time around this brilliant, intense religious seeker certainly shunted me along toward my own reckoning with faith, what these dinners really inspired in me was a taste for dinners. But then, maybe there was something irrepressibly if obliquely religious about even this. Around a ruined table, confessions can be offered or extracted at will, friendships forged and sundered, and the truth, or what you believe to be the truth, can be loudly declared only to be shrugged off the next morning as drunken enthusiasm. You can fake it, and have it count, or you can mean it, and have it not count.

The Friday gatherings soon swelled to two-part binges: the first, small group who came early to eat matzo soup and drink blessed wine; the second, smoke-filled blowouts with whoever happened to drop by, filling our large apartment and terrorizing our anonymous neighbors with late-night shouting, nearly everyone disastrously drunk by the end. The first group would remain secretly intact throughout the second half of the party even if we dispersed physically among the larger party, silently faithful to the privacy we had shared before everyone else had arrived. I prided myself on always remembering to turn on a lamp when I went to bed, so that my roommate could read on Sabbath morning as I slept off the hangovers to which he seemed miraculously immune.

Before long, it became clear that we needed a change. Our time together was coming to an end—graduations, far-flung fellowships, simple drifting were all in the offing—and the intimacy that inner circle had known at the beginning of the year was fading amid the revelry. We needed a dinner, with just a few of us, to restore the center that increasingly failed to hold. So, one Saturday, once Shabbos was out, we met at a different apartment to find one another again.

It was a mess from the start. In my memory, the air was stifling. Something on the stove had burned, or else it was just one of those nights when spring is wearing out and summer makes an early appearance, impatient to oppress. There were seven or eight of us. Some arrived early, some late, and it was immediately apparent that each of us had a different idea of what this meeting of the inner circle would be. One or two wanted quiet conversation, didn’t even plan to drink (well, drink much). Another pair brought drugs. Curiously, someone else brought cigars, I think, though not enough for everyone; they went unsmoked.

—— and I had spent the hour before the dinner in a terrible argument about nothing, probably because we couldn’t admit to what we wanted, and wouldn’t even know how to get it if we could—how do you put an end something that barely exists? And how do you start something, knowing it will have to end almost at once? And there we were, and no one knew, or no one admitted to knowing, and the deception filled up the spaces between the tectonic plates of incongruous desires and expectations, and before long I was sure that everyone felt lied to, even if they didn’t understand why.

I was doing the lying, so I felt responsible. I overcompensated by spouting off, holding forth, cracking jokes in general and at others’ expense. A few played along, but the tension mounted. I noticed sidelong glances, backhanded remarks, pointed silences. Finally, one friend leaned across the table, looked at me steadily, and said in a calm, firm voice: “You need to stop talking. For five minutes, just stop talking.”

That was the end of the evening’s politeness. I shouted with forced laughter that I wanted to talk for every minute that remained in the night. She shouted that I was taking up all the air in the room. Of course she was right, though she was wrong in the sense that talking was hardly the source of the trouble.

The night we had hoped for was pretty much over following this exchange, though everyone stayed until the small hours, feeling restless and unnerved and increasingly sloppy, trying half-heartedly to regain the high spirits that had never been there to begin with. By the next day, the catastrophe of the dinner was a laughable mystery, except to —— and me, who both knew, or felt we knew, the source of the tension that sent us out onto the porch for slightly shaking cigarettes, or into the kitchen for ill-advised refills, or else simply into the bathroom for a quiet breather. I swear I remember someone returning to the table wiping tears from their eyes.

Years have passed between then and now. Everyone’s over it. Still, when I think back on that time, I think of that dinner, when I wanted intimacy, would have settled for confrontation, and could only offer evasion. I want to know: Why all the deception, the withholding? Now all I see is time squandered.

Recently, I reunited with a friend who had been at the dinner, and we were able to speak honestly, admitting to everything. “You were such a mess back then,” she said, and for the briefest moment, I felt relief. Somehow, despite all my efforts to keep things hidden, something of myself had slipped through and made itself known to someone else. Then she said, “But we were so young. It doesn’t matter,” and wiped it all away. The person I had been, who had for that moment become solid, legible, irrefutably there, vanished, once again a blank space of wind and passing weather.

 

Jack Hanson is associate editor of  The Yale Review and a lecturer in English at Yale. He lives in New York.

Five Letters from Seamus Heaney

Tom Sleigh, Seamus Heaney, and Sven Birkerts. Courtesy of the Estate of Seamus Heaney.

The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979.

 

To Ted Hughes

March 14, 1995

Dear Ted,

Matthew’s letter jolted me. And not because of its frank address to money matters and its real interest in moving things along on the Schoolbag front. It made me wince that I had not long ago written to you, to thank you for—among other things—the new Selected and the paperback Pollen. When I saw “Chaucer” in The New Yorker a few weeks ago I reeled for joy. The emerald and the laundry. They were like the streamers of spring, of the Shelleyan spark scattered, new life from huge sorrow. The poem began and ended with immense promise. And in between all was exalted. And then I opened the “uncollected” section of the new book and found myself like canvas in a big wind. Which I could not rebuff. The poem about the vision of your mother and her sister and you mistaken for her brother—well, I suppose that [is] what the poem is about all right, but what it is is sheer poetry. And it is wonderfully placed as a prelude to what follows. I was deeply moved to find “The Earthenware Head” again, a poem which had stayed in me from the moment I read it years ago. But I was quite unprepared for the agon(y) of “Black Coat” and “The God”—like a “Prelude” turned inside out. The total engagement of those poems is exhausting and beautiful because of the total candor and the unleashed, justified anger. Intelligence rampant, as it were. So head-on, and not just with the “you” of the poems; as much, more, with the ring of “them” at bay around the poem-hearth. It is all really quite heartbreaking to contemplate. The positive truth in it all is that your book is as lightning-packed for me in the final pages, in the nineties, as it is/was for the me who read the early poems in the sixties. Those Sylvia poems and “Opus 131” and “Lines about Elias” set the guy-ropes thrumming. Groundswell and emptiness. Your courage and endurance and fecundity and brave solitude count for everything. When I read the poems, I just want to dwell in the daunting feel of them, but even if blurting out impressions is a kind of misrepresentation of the reality of the experience of reading them, I still want to let you know how gratefully shaken I was when I went through them. And there’s all the rest of the book as well. Gaudens gaudeo. (And I was proud of T. Paulin the other night on The Late Show. I’m sure somebody must have told you that he said—rightly but so strangely in the context of that rabid gossip arena—that you were to be revered. As poet and as example of good behavior. The verb was both unexpected and elevating.)

The month of April is more or less clear for me, and much of May, and I could do something purposeful then for the anthology. But I feel we should realign, take squarings again, pow-wow for an hour, sit and look at the same horizon, just to get in tune. Would April Fools’ Day be a possible date for a visit? I am to do the recording for the new Faber cassette series on Friday 31, in London, and I could make another day of it, if it suited you. Or perhaps you might like to come to London, either for dinner on the Friday night or for lunch on the Saturday? See what you feel like, and don’t feel you have to do anything. For God’s sake, don’t change any arrangements you might already have. […]

I’ve been flirting with the anima and have written a very few poems. But there are weeds in the cracks at last. Love to you both.

Seamus

Notes: Matthew Evans at Faber and Faber had reminded Heaney and Hughes of their long-unfulfilled contract to produce an anthology of poems for use in schools.

Hughes’s New Selected Poems 1957–1994, published by Faber, included poems that later formed part of his Birthday Letters (1998) but which, presented in this context, received scant attention from reviewers of the book; Heaney, however, evidently saw them for the bold, intimate revelations that they were. “Chaucer” was another poem destined for Birthday Letters.

Tom Paulin, a frequent guest on the BBC arts program The Late Show, had fiercely and eloquently defended Hughes’s New Selected, and Hughes’s reputation in general, against the disdain and carping of fellow guests.

***

To Henri Cole

March 14, 1995

191 Strand Road, Dublin 4

Dear Henri,

The time, the speed, the distance … All of a sudden it’s almost a year since we did the interview and still no conclusion … Australia, Christmas, some poems, much distraction intervened, but this weekend I got involved again with the big draft and will be sending Roxann a revised version of most of it in a few days. Then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to look at it all again. I’ll have Roxann send you a copy of the preliminary revised text: the revisions I’m making are mostly in the cause of legibility, sense, grammar—trimming the style, making the statements more compact and pointed, and so on. I am not altering the substance of what was said.

What may require some thought is the blocking of it, the shaping or I should say reshaping. Of course, there is much to be said for a certain randomness but I’d like it to be the best randomness we can arrange, so to speak.

Anyhow, I am confident that I shall be putting in another spurt after I get the clean copy out of the computer, and at that point we can talk again. Perhaps after reading period, in May? I know you’ll be going fifty to the dozen between now and then … And am very conscious that I am adding to your woes with the Boylston Prize. I thank you for taking it on and was gratified to learn that we have a rabbi to represent “the pulpit” this year.

Meanwhile, I have been reading The Look of Things. I hope you did not take it amiss that I did not supply a quote for the jacket. Apart from the hurry in my life when the request arrived, there is a whole history of my not having done this kind of thing for many friends and acquaintances—a circumstance which makes it easier to repeat the refusal and harder to contemplate acceptance (what would X and Y say now that he’s doing it for Z?) But enough. Thank you for the gift of the beautifully produced book and buoyantly composed poems. The combination of susceptibility to color and sensuousness and awareness of desolation and pain makes for a kind of sorrowful richness. The black currant liqueur and octopus ink of the opening poem run together in an emblematic kind of way in my mind, bitter knowledge and relished sensation. Of the latter, what beats “The Bird Show at Aubagne”? For the former, what excels “Aix”? And the combination is there, subtly and sadly, in “Supper with Roy,” “Sacrament,” “Harvard Classics,” “The Christological Year” … I could go on. But, of course, I rejoice greatly in “Une Lettre à New York” as well, where the rapturous tendency is given its head and earns its keep entirely. “Tarantula”! “And He Kissed Me …” “Christmas in Carthage.” The book has a real force because the seriousness and pain behind the poems get transformed into their doings as “verbal contraptions” selving, going themselves, transforming. And so too, of course, the pleasure behind them also becomes a pleasuring, of language, through language. The blessing of that cabbage-butterfly is all the more because of its placing! I was glad to hear you say that the Harvard reading gave you a lift, because so it should. There is a trueness that touches, a far thing in the work that brings it close. Close, that is, not dose …

Time I stopped, obviously. My love to all the Kirklanders. Drown the shamrock, if you have not already done so …

Affectionately, Seamus

Notes: The U.S. poet Henri Cole was at this time Brigg-Copeland Lecturer in poetry at Harvard; his Paris Review interview with Heaney eventually appeared in issue no. 144 (Fall 1997), of the magazine. Roxann Brown was an administrative assistant in the English Language and Literature Department at Harvard, assisting Heaney.

Cole’s fourth book of poems, The Look of Things, was published in January 1995.

“selving, going themselves”: see Hopkins’s “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same … Selves—goes itself …” (“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”).

Harvard’s creative writers had offices in a house on Kirkland Street, Cambridge: hence “Kirklanders.”

***

To Tom Sleigh

April 13, 1995

Dear Tom,

It’s not that I have not been thinking about you. I have, quite a bit. And the thoughts have as ever been tinged with second thoughts: for example, I was sorry after you rang that time in the summer that I had not urged you to come over. The usual hunched, wild-eyed panic about how I could do this and that and still have time for the spacious pleasures of sleigh rides in Wicklow intervened too automatically. Somehow, the chance had come and gone in a moment. And then too I’ve been bugged by the idea that I saw a letter from you in a big mail- pile—perhaps when I came back from Australia or Poland last autumn—and that I put it aside to read properly, after the rush-through for crisis-stuff, and then never found it. At any rate, I am haunted by this notion and only hope I am mistaken.

It’s my birthday and it is a day of utterly vernal Easter. Holy Thursday indeed. Fifty-sixth birthday. The fact that I’m actually sitting out in the open air (cf. Mark Twain on the English countryside) will give you some idea of the extraordinary pause and poise of the weather. Loveliest-of-trees time. In fact, the Housman cherry is blooming its snowflakes over my head—and there aren’t no fifty springs left no more “to look on things in bloom.” The Work. The work. Chimes at midnight. La la. Awful but—well, not cheerful either.

Since early December—no, January—I’ve managed to get down here to the cottage every week, sometimes for three nights, more usually for two. I do my “correspondence” with my helper-woman on Monday, and phone calls and fuckabouts, and try to get away 8/9-ish in the evening. Going back then Thursday lunchtime. It has been extremely good for me, and even though I have been back and forward to England and the north at weekends, for various readings and meetings, I have managed to pivot myself on silence and work time. Wrote six or seven poems in late January, early February, had a rush of conviction and threw the shape of a book together. But it is not yet “there,” although my anxiety is somewhat allayed. Meanwhile—hush, hush, I guess—I’ve started on Beowulf. You remember I turned down the commission in the early eighties, and have kept backing away ever since? Well, finally (clearly no rush on Beowulf—this correspondence has been in suspension for 14 years!) the editor wrote and said, OK, we know you’re not going to do it, so just recommend somebody else. I replied by return (on March 21) that I’d do it myself, and have knocked off 400 lines since. Voices singing in the ear that this is all folly. Other insurance-policy voice saying, well, at the end of the year, at least you’ll have something to show for the Sabbatical. Some of it—anywhere that a boat floats—very bewitching. Most of it pretty hall-troop and Weland’s work kind of stuff. The formal speeches especially. Ah well, Fitzgerald gets Homer, Pinsky gets Dante, Walcott gets both, and Seamus gets Beo. Serves him right for doing Anglo-Saxon in the first place. (Made up my own kenning—when the Beowulf boys come off the boat and stand their spears up I call it the “seafarers’ stook”—but is it worth doing three thousand lines to get one touch of originality?)

Had a lovely weekend in Kraków with S. Barańczak before Christmas. His translations of my verses came out and we did readings there and in Warsaw. But the feel of Kraków—great square, marketplace, cafés, baroque churches, closeness of quarters of old town, kitchen-life of the poet-persons (practically Sol Poste in its credibility)—was something unique. It had duration-life, as the Gutenberg elegist might say. I came away from it as if I had been for an indeterminate but salubrious time immersed in Miłosz. (Who called the kitchen where we were after the book-launch and told me I was there “in very good hands”—but with wonderful Slavic slouch and trail to the words, as you can imagine.)

I love being off teaching and as the spring weather opens up and the whins go gold and the sycamore fantails for us, I ask myself how I am going to face Warren House and a lecture course and a workshop. Not much, in a way; but a whole absconding from this open-souled time.

Will The Work be out soon? It stays with me as a pressure and bulwark of a book. A line drawn, a ground stood and a pain constellated. Also a book that makes me want to write myself, because of the way it has found a ground for its sounding, a first stratum which is the string, the strum, that the whole thing is tuned to. I’ve not read it recently, but it has found its place in me as a certain register.

My love to Ellen. The one thing I truly miss this year is the rejuvenation of Stinson courting and Dothan doting and Washington wonking (I said wonking). My love to them all, and to any ambient Ukrainian you may encounter. Four years, and I’ll be visiting schoolchildren—again.

Love, Seamus

Notes: The poet, essayist, and academic Tom Sleigh had been Professor of English at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, since 1986. He and Heaney met in 1984, after a reading at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. When Sleigh sent him his first book of poems, After One, Heaney invited him to lunch in Cambridge and a friendship developed from there.

Mark Twain had called the English countryside “too absolutely beautiful to be left out doors”; allusions to Housman, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Bishop (her poem “The Bight”) follow thick and fast in one of SH’s more than usually packed paragraphs.

“The Work”: a sequence of poems Sleigh was writing after his father’s death, its title altered to The Chain when it was published the following year.

Heaney’s “helper-woman” was Susie Tyrrell.

Sol Poste was a Portuguese restaurant where Heaney, Sleigh, Sven Birkerts, and Askold Melnyczuk, the “ambient Ukrainian” of the final paragraph, were wont to gather. Ellen Driscoll was Sleigh’s wife and they lived at Stinson Court, while Birkerts and his wife lived on Dothan Street, in the Boston suburb of Arlington.

***

To Stanisław Barańczak

28 April 1995

< I wrote this down in Wicklow earlier to-day, on my increasingly beloved laptop … >

… I have been bogged deep in another translation. Although you don’t get bogged in ironworks, come to think of it: Beowulf (for that’s what I’m at) is composed of ingots of Anglo-Saxon, peremptorily dumped clang-lumps of language, brutal bard-ballast that modern English cannot budge or break open. Like trying to assault that castle in Cracow with knitting needles. I see and hear my lines like clotheslines pegged out with little tinkling trinkets and tin bits and keepsakes, while the original is something brutal and Soviet steelman-Stalinesque, more tanklike than trinkety. But after all, as you can see, I do enjoy the impossibility of it, which means that with combine-like tedium, I keep facing it down in Wicklow, a bit entranced, a bit reluctant to leave the labour of it. Anything more different from Treny is hard to imagine. No anima in the poetry, it seems—except when the sea enters. Bóats bring óut the beáuty in the médium. (Christ! An Anglo-Saxon line, unpremeditated, I swear, noticed afterward as I read through this.) …

***

To Bernard and Jane McCabe

May 28, 1995

Dear Bernard and Jane,

Apple PowerBook. Collapse of archaic man. Farewell to the quill, the vellum, the scratch of the pen—of course! that’s where the word came from!—the ink-spurter, as Flann O’Brien called it …

Enclosed are slightly disturbing evidences of new poetic activity. I deeply enjoyed writing the “Dialect Versions” but would not be surprised if you enjoined me to cut it out … there is an element of schoolboy humor, I agree, sixth form snigger. Does one get away with it? I ask because I so much valued, Bernard, your response to the whole manuscript and the beautiful alertness and care with which you picked up on those tics and habits. I should have been more alert and careful and answered promptly—in case you thought I was huff-huffing, than which nothing could have been further from the case. I burbled something into your answering machine too late, I think, since you had already pleasured away to gooseland. Anyhow, I did act on the recommendations, brought ‘The Rain Stick” up to be the first poem in the book, put the MacDiarmid poem in the penult. posit., dropped “Damson” (there goes an “I love”), changed “I love” in “At Banagher” to “And more power to him …” and did a job on one or two of those “alls.” Cadenced closure injunctions to be treated soon … (I’ll be interested, of course, to see if you think I get away with the new Mycenae things.)

Gooseland. Roman remains in museum at Périgueux. Les grottes. I personally am very regretful that I could not be there for a while, because I have this “epiphany” poignancy in remembering a late arrival in the Périgueux museum one afternoon in July 1981, while we were at Domme, near Sarlat, in a gîte, the kids all fourteen years younger … Anyhow, I didn’t have enough time in the place and promised myself to come back. I also remember sitting later on with small sharp wife (Herbert, the dog!) in [a] sunsetty, mellow tile ’n’ bricky place or parc as the boules clocked and borped and we considered where to go for some good old ancienne cuisine. End of flashback. No doubt you had mellow soirées and poignancies and rich munchings, riparian sloths and fluvial reveries. Reverruns. Grassy banks. Meanwhile, s.s.w. has been constantly and anxiously bowed to the books, the fine swimmer’s back and shoulders humbly hunched, the sauce-sniffing, herb-scenting nose to the grindstone, the whole energy concentrated on getting through to noon on Tuesday 30 May when it all stops. She has been greatly focused and truly tense about it all—nobody should be doing exams in their fifties!—and I am glad to have been around, even if it was only to keep out of the way. I believe she will, of course, pass the whole thing with les couleurs flying, but she has not had much joy these past few weeks. Reward in our case is a trip to Spain, to Anne and Ignacio in Asturias for three weeks in July. Hooray.

… Did I tell you I have finally agreed to translate Beowulf for Norton? Anyhow, Grendel’s mum and all that looms. I have just got to line 845, where the mod-werig Grendel goes to the nicor-mere and the melody of mourning becomes irresistible. I suppose one does it for those keens and slow airs that swim up out of the “fenmists” (fenmist criticism, ja?) and for the bewitching interludes—so few, so short—of sea-travel, the floater on the waves, in close under cliffs, the foamy-necked, most like a fowl. No anima, it would seem, elsewhere in the poetry. …

Notes:

The “Dialect Versions” are not readily identified.

“Herbert, the dog!”: Bernard’s brother, the Dominican priest and theologian, Herbert McCabe.

“nose to the grindstone”: Marie Heaney was completing her MPhil in Irish S tudies under the aegis of University College Dublin.

 

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September. All letters published with permission of the Estate of Seamus Heaney. 

On Fogwill

Photograph by TBIT, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “learned to use a gun at eleven, got his first motorcycle at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, started studying medicine at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero once wrote. Fogwill was born outside Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived until 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a young man, but it wasn’t until 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, after he’d lost the fortune he made in advertising, that his story “Muchacha Punk” won a prestigious writing contest and his literary career took off. In 1982, he wrote his most famous novel, Los pichiciegos. Set during the Falklands War and published while the conflict was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of war, a kind of Slaughterhouse-Five for Argentina, was an immediate sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the military dictatorship. A writer of short stories, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish more than twenty books across a thirty-year career.

Drawing on his background in advertising, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, just so, like Prince or Madonna—into a brand. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing both the military dictatorship and what he called the “horror show” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “almost alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable body of work, an idea, an inimitable way of being, and above all, an ethics.” Known as a generous friend and mentor, he guided younger writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira.

Like his persona, Fogwill’s writing is provocative and irreverent. He absorbed the different strands of the Argentine tradition and produced a literature that defies classification: a literature of ideas and the body, the political and the personal, the ordinary and the ineffable. Nimbly traversing form and genre, he employs myriad styles while maintaining a singular and inimitable sensibility.

Nowhere is this gift more apparent than in his short stories, which range from metafictional parody to drug-fueled delirium, from realism to political satire to forays into genre, from hedonistic escapades to deeply personal explorations of music and art. Despite their density of thought and narrative complexity, his stories are never a slog. At times his prose is euphoric and propulsive; at others, subtle and restrained. Fogwill is interested in the manipulations of social, political, and economic constructs; in the fraught relationship between words and things, between meaning and experience; in the body, the sensorium, and desire; in altered states, dreams, and memory. Humorous and unsettling, acerbic and contemplative, his stories explore the randomness of life and the ways in which meaning rises out of incoherence, revealing itself in flashes, in fragments, in ephemeral moments.

“Muchacha Punk,” the story that launched Fogwill’s literary career, is ostensibly the picaresque tale of the one-night stand an Argentine traveler has with a British “punk girl.” “What’s interesting about this story,” the protagonist states at the outset, “is ‘I slept with’ the punk girl.” And on the surface, that is essentially the plot: a chance encounter on a cold winter night in London, a mutual attraction, an amorous adventure. But what unfolds on the page is far more intricate, evolving into a story that deconstructs itself as it is being written, a story about class and the politics of language, about cultural collision and historical contingency where, against the backdrop of a brewing conflict between Argentina and the UK, a night in the life of one man brings the zeitgeist of a decade into focus.

In “Help a él,” his parodic homage and anagrammatic inversion of Borges’s canonical “El Aleph,” Fogwill reframes the encounter with the fantastical, all-seeing orb of Borges as a psychotropic and erotic episode. While both stories are, ultimately, about loss, about the death of a beloved, “Help a él” manages to bring the cerebral Borgesian experience into the realm of the corporeal and libidinal. Where Borges’s “instrument” allows his protagonist to gain access to the infinite and to thereby hear again the “irretrievable voice” of his lost love, the “syrup” that Fogwill’s protagonist imbibes actuates an intensely lubricious reunion where hallucination, oneiric fantasy, and memory meld together. Like Borges, Fogwill layers in metafictional references; like Borges, Fogwill pokes fun at the figure of the writer and the literary endeavor, but by making transcendence less a matter of knowledge, by taking it out of the library and the labyrinth and grounding it in bodily pleasure, he brings the Borgesian—and by extension, the Argentine—tradition into conversation with a more contemporary cosmology.

Stories like “Japonés” and “Passengers on the Night Train” showcase Fogwill’s chameleonic virtuosity, how he could adapt and eschew genre conventions to create taut, suspenseful narratives while maintaining his poet’s attention to language, his wry humor, and his ludic sensibility. In “Japonés,” Fogwill’s hypnotic prose and detailed knowledge of sailing create an immediacy that put the reader aboard the boat where the narrative takes place, setting up a turn that comes out of nowhere and transforms a tale of adventure and camaraderie into something like a ghost story. “Passengers on the Night Train,” which appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, is a ghost story of a different order, a master class in pacing and perspective, where the vicissitudes of trauma and memory are refracted to disquieting effect through a series of inexplicable events in a small town.

“Day’s Residues,” meanwhile, puts us inside the frayed nerves and disoriented sensory experience of a man at the tail end of a days-long cocaine binge. As the story unfolds, the borders between reality, dream, and hallucination become increasingly porous. Scenarios and characters recur, overlap, and are reconfigured. The overall effect is that the story itself—in its rhythm, its structure, in the way it agitates one’s nerve endings—mimics the movement of a dream. But the unstable narrative footing also occasions moments of poetic lucidity. For Fogwill, dreams are “a dark dissolution” wherein “consciousness breaks down slowly, sloughing off its useless artifice”; a bodiless state wherein the palimpsests of waking life accumulate without meaning and the veil of language drops, revealing things “in their full being.” Dreaming is both the structure and substance of the story, making for an experience of reading that is simultaneously dread-inducing and stimulating, disconcerting and epiphanic and entirely unforgettable.

A prodigy and a polymath, a singer and a sailor, a lover of art, music, tobacco, fast cars, and public outbursts, Fogwill was a brilliant and subversive writer, a larger-than-life figure, Argentina’s quintessential poète maudit. His influence is pervasive and enduring in Spain and Latin America. Although those of us in the Anglophone world might be a little late to the party, here’s hoping his singular body of work finds a foothold here. His writing demands our attention.

 

Will Vanderhyden is an award-winning translator of Spanish literature.

Four Letters from Simone to André Weil

From Sample Trees, a portfolio by Ben Lerner and Thomas Demand in The Paris Review issue no. 212 (Spring 2015).

When asked if there was “a close intimacy” between him and his sister, André Weil replied, “Very much so. My sister as a child always followed me, and my grandmother, who liked to drop into German occasionally, used to say that she was a veritable Kopiermaschine.” Biographers have emphasized—overly so, according to André Weil—the episode described by his sister in a May 1942 letter to Father Perrin, known as her “Spiritual Autobiography”: “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair which come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.”

The largest part of the known correspondence between Simone and André Weil dates from the period when André was imprisoned for being absent without leave from his military duties; he was held first in Le Havre, then Rouen, from February to early May 1940. These circumstances gave Simone Weil an opportunity to explore scientific, and particularly mathematical, questions that were significant to her. In particular, one must note the importance given to the crisis of incommensurables in her correspondence. The reason this moment in the history of thought plays a central role at this point in Simone Weil’s reflection on science is well defined by André Weil in a letter dated March 28, 1940: “A proportion is what is named; the fact that there are relations that aren’t nameable (and nameable is a relation between whole numbers), that there have been λόγοι ἄλόγοι, the word itself is so deeply moving that I can’t believe that in a period so essentially dramatic … such an extraordinary event could have been seen as a mere scientific discovery … what you say about proportion suggests that, at the beginnings of Greek thought, there was such an intense feeling of the disproportion between thought and world (and, as you say, between man and God) that they had to build a bridge over this abyss at all costs. That they thought they found it … in mathematics is nothing if not credible.”

The crisis of reason that Simone Weil apprehended in contemporary physics led her to revisit the birth of the scientific spirit. The relationship between this crisis of science as a crisis of reason and her interest in the question of incommensurables is clear. Rationalizing irrationals was at the heart of the mathematical problem of incommensurables. According to Simone Weil’s interpretation, the same difficulty was encountered in her day with quantum theory (see her study “Classical Science and After,” as well as the article “Reflections on Quantum Theory”). How do we rationalize what appears—according to her interpretation—to be an “irrational” of this theory, in particular its uses of discontinuity and probability, notions on which the new physics rested? Could the crisis of reason, which is also a crisis of the notion of truth in contemporary physics, cause the same mental aberrations as the one produced by incommensurability, an aberration that led the Sophists to be skeptical of Logos and truth? Simone Weil’s references to Plato and her constant appeal to a new Eudoxus represent a desire to escape the skepticism of a new sophistry. She would write to her brother: “The popularization of this discovery casts discredit upon the notion of truth that has lasted to this day; it … contributed to the appearance of the idea that one can equally well demonstrate two contradictory theories; the Sophists spread this point of view among the masses, along with knowledge of an inferior quality, exclusively aimed at the conquest of power.” This marriage of a purely operative and combinatory science with the quest for power is what Simone Weil feared.

—Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux

 

Saturday [February 1940]

Dear André,

I see that for the moment your morale is good. I hope this will last. Your letter brought us considerable comfort. You ask us for many details; it’s not very easy. I don’t really know what to tell you about myself; my life is currently devoid of any memorable events. I wrote an article comparing politics in ancient Rome to the events of our era for Les nouveaux cahiers [The new notebooks]; I found singular analogies, but I think I already told you about it last winter. Only the first part of the article could be published; it’s such a shame. In the course of the preparatory reading I did, I discovered someone admirable: it’s Theodoric, the one who has his sepulcher in Ravenna. Procopius, who was in the camp opposed to him, said that during his entire reign he only committed one injustice, and that he died of sorrow over it. His letters (Theodoric’s) are delightful. Aside from that there’s an article by me on the Iliad awaiting publication by the N.R.F. I don’t know what will come of it. It contains bits of translation in which I was able, for certain lines, to keep the exact order of the words; in any case I was always able to translate line by line, I mean to have one line (of irregular length) of the French text correspond to each line of verse. If you know bits of the Iliad by heart, you could try to translate them; when you use a method like this one, it often takes a half hour or more to finish a line. It’s also excellent for forming style. Translating Keats into French (in French verse, for example) must also be a fun exercise. I’ve never tried.

A good occupation when one has too much time would also be to think of a way to let laypeople such as myself glimpse what exactly the interest and significance of your work is. For even supposing that it’s absolutely impossible, as you maintain, the fact of trying surely would not be without benefit to you. The benefit would be, I think, considerable. And even if you don’t succeed in formulating something I can understand, I think I would glimpse enough for it to be extremely interesting to me. Especially since I am less interested in mathematics than in mathematicians, as with every other field.

To come back to me, lastly, to make use of those moments when my capacity for work is weak (they are frequent), I’ve started studying Babylonian. I have a selection of Assyro-Babylonian texts, with the text transcribed in Latin characters, and the translation opposite, line by line; I’m playing around with making a juxtalinear translation without a grammar or a dictionary. In this way, I made the acquaintance of a certain Gilgamesh, the hero of an epic translated from the Sumerian. Friendship is its driving spirit; Gilgamesh loses his friend and immediately starts fearing death and running through the desert looking for eternal life, but he doesn’t find it. Later, he evokes his dead friend’s shadow, which gives him not very comforting information about existence beyond the grave. I read a few words lines of it to Evelyne, who has already retained a few words of Babylonian from it. As language and as poetry, it’s far from being as good as Homeric Greek. Egyptian would be more interesting, but it’s too hard.

See you soon, I hope. I hope we’ll be able to bring you books. Do you want Retz’s Memoirs and Pepys’s Diary? I deeply hope we’ll be able to see each other tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, since it’s impossible for us to trade places, which would be my deepest desire.

Simone

 

[February 1940]

Dear André,

We still need to wait a little, it appears, before we have the authorization to see you as much as we would like. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but write. But I hope that with some paper and books now, you aren’t bored, and that you exercise to keep in good shape.

Who knows, maybe you’ll discover some fascinating things? But here’s another distraction, now that you have leisure time. I don’t remember if I told you about this in the letter I wrote you from Le Havre, and that you must have received by now, but never mind. It would be to look for a way to make commoners (me, for example) appreciate the value of your current research. I’m sure this would be a very good exercise for you. What do you risk? You don’t risk wasting your time, since you have time to waste. It’s all fine and dandy for you to make fun of people like one of my former friends at rue d’Ulm who philosophize about mathematics without knowing anything about it, but perhaps it’s the mathematicians themselves who should try to do this work. Not like your friend Claude, of course. Not like the hero of Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece when he meditates on painting. But maybe there’s a way for one to become aware of what one is doing, and the value in what one is doing. And if one becomes aware of it, it must be possible to let nonspecialists at least get a glimpse of it. What would it cost you to try? I would be fascinated.

I think you were already no longer in Paris when I managed to get a copy of the book on Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics. I don’t know if I wrote you that I was able to get it. I want to write to the author about a question he leaves unresolved, that of the means by which the Egyptians were able, with a geometry he considers extremely crude and empirical, to find a remarkably accurate approximation of π, that is to say surface area of the circle = (8/9d)^2. This seems quite easy to imagine, if one assumes the methods are very crude. If the circumscribed square is divided into eighty-one little squares, one can consider that the circle’s surface area can be found by subtracting three of these squares from each corner, plus the approximate sum of three half-squares.

There’s a truly delightful Babylonian problem. One is given the dimensions of a canal to be dug, a worker’s daily output in volume of earth displaced, and the sum of workdays and workers. One must find the number of workdays and that of workers. I wonder what students’ parents would say if an exam today included a problem formulated in similar terms? It would be fun to try it. Strange people, those Babylonians. Personally, I don’t much like this abstract thinking. The Sumerians must have been a lot more congenial. First of all, they’re the ones who invented all the Mesopotamian myths, and myths are far more interesting than algebra. But you, you must be directly descended from the Babylonians. As for me, I do think that God, as the Pythagoreans put it, is ever a geometer—but not an algebraist. Be that as it may, I was pleased, when I read the last letter I received from you, to see that you denied being a member of the abstract school.

I remember that at Chançay or Dieu-le fit [sic] you said that these studies of Egypt and Babylon cast doubt on the role heretofore attributed to the Greeks as creators in the discipline of mathematics. On the contrary, I think that so far (subject to later discoveries) they provide a confirmation of this role. The Babylonians appear to have focused on abstract exercises concerning numbers, the Egyptians to have proceeded in a completely empirical manner—The application of a rational method to concrete problems and to the study of nature seems to have been specific to the Greeks. (It’s true that one would need to know Babylonian astronomy to be able to judge.) What is singular is that the Greeks must have known Babylonian algebra, and yet one doesn’t find a trace of it in them before Diophantus (who lived, if I’m not mistaken, in the fourth century A.D.). The Pythagoreans’ algebraic geometry is something else entirely. Religious conceptions must be behind this; apparently the Pythagoreans’ secret religion made use of geometry, and not algebra. If the Roman empire hadn’t destroyed all the esoteric cults, maybe we would understand something about these enigmas.

I think I told you that I published half a study comparing ancient Rome to certain contemporary phenomena in Les nouveaux cahiers. The second part was deeply appreciated by those who had the opportunity to read it, but their numbers were very limited. The first part got me a letter that gave us a good laugh and which I’ll copy for you here:

Madam,

Reduced to immobility and not knowing “who” I could consult, I turn to you to inform me: Who are you? An article in the January 1st issue of Les nouveaux cahiers is behind this question.

Sincerely,

The signature is unknown to me. Your mother thinks it’s someone burning with a desire to avenge the Romans, and that “reduced to immobility” means: If I wasn’t reduced to immobility, I would show you. … On the off chance, I didn’t reply. I wanted to reply: And you, sir?—or else: sum qui sum—or to send a photo of myself—or a copy of my identity card. But it still seemed preferable to me to save twenty sous. He will never know who I am. The question is formulated in a truly admirable manner.

I’m only telling you about things of no interest, but I don’t find “cast-iron prose” at the tip of my pen every day.

Thank you for saying that the future needs me, but, as I see it, it doesn’t need me any more than I need it. If only I had a time-travel machine, I wouldn’t point it at the future, I would point it at the past. And I wouldn’t even stop at the Greeks, I would go at least as far as the Aegeo-Cretan era. But the mere thought takes effect on me as a mirage would on a man lost in the desert. It makes me thirsty. It’s better not to think about it, since we’re confined on this tiny planet and it will only become big, fertile, and varied again, as it once was, long after us—if it ever does again.

In the meantime, enjoy Aeschylus and the Sanskrit texts, which I hope you will soon receive.

Simone

 

[March 1940]

My dear brother,

I’m sending back your dedication in a slightly modified version. You’ll notice the reasons for the modifications yourself, I think. Most are prompted by concerns with logic and style, and especially the concern with preserving the unity of tone. I’m inclined to entirely cut the metaphor about sowing, wheat, etc., because it’s really not in the Louis XIII style of the whole thing, and the contrast is damaging. (Furthermore, the term plowing in this metaphor couldn’t be more unsuitable, for obvious reasons.) I slightly modified the terms of the temple metaphor, primarily for the same reason (to avoid a break in the unity of tone), and also to attenuate it and make it a little vaguer; it would prob ably be disagreeable for É[lie] Cartan, and in every respect inappropriate, for it to be written in such a way as to suggest an opposition between him, alone on one side, and everyone else on the other. In the last line, I changed one word, because your lawyer absolutely advises against leaving the one you used. Overall, I thought it wise to change a few nuances of detail that could lead ill-intentioned people to doubt whether you’re seriously expressing what you think.

Now just use these suggestions as you please, and send Henri Cartan the definitive text you’ve settled on.

I think it’s better to give up on the: “To Monsieur Monsieur …” One reader in a hundred might know this was the custom in the seventeenth century, and even he won’t think it’s serious.

We’ve given the proofs to the publisher. He’s asking for the dedication as soon as possible, of course.

I’m pleased to see that reading my friend Retz has given you a taste for that period’s style. It is infinitely superior, in my view, to that of the second half of the seventeenth century.

Fraternally,
Simone

 

[March 1940]

My dear brother,

Whatever you say about it, “some disquiet,” works very nicely. But discussing details of style in writing would be long and tiresome. I think your text has now reached the state of perfection, if as Valéry puts it perfection is defined by the exhaustion of the desire to modify.

How could you take my coadjutor for a Neapolitan! What blasphemy! Has anyone ever come out of there, in terms of political geniuses, other than low schemers? Doesn’t he exude Florence from every pore? And don’t you remember the Gondi Palace, in Florence, on Piazza della Signoria, set back on the left when one looks at the palace della Signoria? It isn’t adorned with much, but is most beautiful. I suppose the Neapolitan abbot you speak of is Abbot Galiani; all I’ve read by him are excerpts of letters, but I’m quite sure he had very little in common with Retz. In Mme d’Épinay’s entourage, there were only frivolous, skeptical people with low souls. While my coadjutor was first and foremost an honest man and a great soul, though that is somewhat hidden beneath the heap of adroitly intertwined intrigues. Today he might give the impression of a traitor, because in that happy period there were no political parties, and loyalty to an abstract idea, even a religious one, would have seemed utter foolishness. One was loyal to living human beings to whom one was bound by friendship, by commitments made, by the duty of protection or obedience, or by esteem. In that sense, the concern for loyalty and honor dominates all my coadjutor’s intrigues. The concern for public good also dominates them. The sense of everything he did was a desperate attempt to destroy Richelieu’s work; when he was defeated, something perished for all time. The beginning of the seventeenth century was, in France, Spain, and England, something extraordinarily luminous; an undefinable inspiration reached its peak here and perished all of a sudden, never to reappear. Personally, with the exception of Racine, I don’t esteem anything that came after 1660 (to the present day) as much as what came before. I’m not including Corneille, for whom I don’t have much esteem in any respect. But have I told you about Théophile?

Les astres dont la bienveillance
Se sent forcer de ta vaillance
Sont apprêtés pour t’accueillir;
Déjà leur splendeur t’environne;
Dieu comme fleurs les vient cueillir
Pour t’en donner une couronne
Qui ne pourra jamais vieillir.
(Ode à Guillaume d’Orange)

[The stars whose benevolence
Feels strengthened by your valor
Are ready to welcome you;
Already their splendor surrounds you;
God picks them like flowers
To give you a crown of them
That will never age.]

And this, on the civil war of 1620 (in which Richelieu was on the rebel side, by the way)

La campagne était allumée
L’air gros de bruit et de fumée,
Le ciel confus de nos débats,
Le jour triste de notre gloire,
Et le sang fit rougir la Loire
De la honte de vos combats.

[The countryside was burning
The air thick with noise and smoke,
The sky chaotic with our disputes,
The day sorrowful with our glory,
And blood made the Loire blush
With shame for our battles.]

And doesn’t this seem like the best of Valéry?

Je sentis mon sang se geler
Et comme autour de moi voler
L’ombre de ma douleur future.

[I felt my blood freeze
And as if around me there flew
The shadow of my future pain.]

He too had that sense of friendship and that generosity of soul that hasn’t been seen since that period. He wrote to Balzac: “What acquires me friends and the envious is simply the easiness of my morals, an incorruptible loyalty and the open profession I make to love perfectly those who are without fraud and cowardice.”

Naturally, he was made to suffer horribly and die prematurely. If he’d had a little baseness in his soul, he could have lived to a ripe old age, and would perhaps be regarded today as one of the two or three greatest French poets. Personally, I see Villon, Maurice Scève, him, and Racine as above all the others, and by far.

I’m not sure that the discovery of incommensurables is a sufficient explanation for the Greeks’ obstinate refusal of algebra. They must have known Babylonian algebra from the beginning. Tradition holds that Pythagoras traveled to Babylon to study there. Naturally, they transposed this algebra into geometry, long before Apollonius. Transpositions of this kind found in Apollonius probably concern quadratic equations; those of the second degree could all be solved once the properties of the triangle inscribed in the semicircle were known, a discovery attributed to Pythagoras.

(This way one finds two quantities of which either the sum and product are known, or the difference and product.) But the singular thing is that this transposition of algebra into geometry seems not to be a side issue, but the very mainspring of geometric invention throughout the history of Greek geometry.

The legend concerning Thales’s discovery of the similarity of triangles (when a man’s shadow is equal to the man, the pyramid’s shadow is equal to the pyramid) relates this discovery to the problem of a proportion whose term is unknown.

We know nothing of the following discovery, by Pythagoras, of the properties of the right triangle. But here is my hypothesis, which is certainly in keeping with the spirit of Pythagorean research. It is that this discovery comes from the problem of finding the mean proportional of two known quantities. Two similar triangles having two noncorresponding equal sides represent a proportion with three terms:

If the two extremes are constructed on a single straight line, the figure becomes a right triangle (since the angle between a and b becomes a straight angle, half of which is a right angle). The right triangle’s essential property is that it is formed by the juxtaposition of two triangles similar to it and to each other. I think that Pythagoras discovered this property first. The right triangle also provides the solution to the opposite problem: if the mean proportional and the sum or difference of the extremes are known, find the extremes.

As for conics and their properties, the inventor in this case is said to be Plato’s student Menaechmus, one of the two geometers who solved the problem of doubling the cube posed by Apollo. (The other is Archytas; he solved it with the torus.) Menaechmus solved this problem with conics (two parabolas, or a parabola and a hyperbola). So, it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that he invented them for this purpose. And the problem of doubling the cube comes down to finding two mean proportionals between two known quantities.

It’s easy to imagine the process of the discovery. For the cone consists of a circle of variable diameter, and the parabola provides the series of all the mean proportionals between a fixed term and a variable one.

So, there is a continuous series of problems: a proportion with four terms of which one unknown— a geometric progression with three terms of which the middle term is unknown—a progression with four terms of which the two middle terms are unknown.

Just as the right triangle’s properties made it possible to solve second-degree problems, those of the conics made it possible to solve those of the third and fourth.

Note that while we solve the equations by supposing that the expressions √,∛, etc., have meaning, the Greeks gave them a meaning before tackling the equations of corresponding degree.

Also note that the assimilation of the unknown to a variable goes back at least as far as Menaechmus, if not further. One can hardly suppose that the Babylonians, with their numerical equations, had this notion. The fifth-century Greeks had the notion of function and of representing functions by lines. The story of Menaechmus gives the impression that for them curves were a means of studying functions, rather than an object of study in their own right.

In all this, one sees progress whose continuity is never interrupted by the crisis of incommensurables. To be sure, there was a crisis of incommensurables, and its impact was immense. The popularization of this discovery cast discredit on the notion of truth that endures to this day; it brought about, or at least contributed to bringing about the idea that one can equally demonstrate two contradictory theories; the Sophists spread this point of view among the masses, along with knowledge of an inferior quality, exclusively aimed at the conquest of power; starting in the late fifth century, it resulted in the demagogy and imperialism from which it is inseparable, with consequences that ruined Hellenic civilization; it is through this process (to which other factors such as the Greco-Persian Wars naturally contributed) that Roman weapons were finally able to kill Greece, without any possible resurrection. My conclusion is that the gods were right to have the Pythagorean guilty of divulging the discovery of incommensurables perish in a shipwreck.

But I don’t think there was a crisis among the geometers and philosophers. Pythagoreanism was ruined (insofar as it was) by something entirely different, namely the mass massacre of Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia. In fact the star pentagon, which represents a relation between incommensurables (the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio), was one of the Pythagoreans’ symbols. But Archytas (one of the survivors) was a great geometer, and he was the teacher of Eudoxus, who is responsible for the theory of real numbers, the notion of limit, and the notion of integration as described in Euclid. There is nothing to suggest that when the Pythagoreans spoke of numbers, they only meant whole numbers. On the contrary, by saying that justice, etc., etc., are numbers, they made clear, it seems to me, that they were using this word to refer to any kind of proportion. They were certainly capable of conceiving of real numbers.

In my opinion, the essential point of the discovery of incommensurables lies outside of geometry. It consists of the fact that certain problems concerning numbers can sometimes have a solution and sometimes be insoluble; for example, that of a mean proportional between two given numbers. That alone suffices to prove that the number in the narrow sense of the word is not the key to every thing. Now, when was this realized? I don’t know if there is any information about this. In any case, it was possible to realize it before geometry; one merely needed to make a special study of problems of proportion. And in that case the geometric process to find mean proportionals (height of the right triangle) would immediately have appeared, as soon as it was discovered, as not being subject to any similar limitation. So much so that one can wonder if the Greeks might have studied the triangle to find proportions expressible other wise than in whole numbers, and if consequently they might have conceived of the line as a function from the start, as they later did with the parabola. One can find objections to this theory, but in my opinion they fall flat if one remembers the role secrecy played among Greek thinkers and their custom of only diffusing by distorting. The fact that Eudoxus is the creator of a perfect and completed theory of real numbers in no way rules out that the geometers could have glimpsed this notion from the beginning and constantly strived to grasp it.

One might ask oneself why the Greeks were so committed to the study of proportion. It’s certainly a question of religious preoccupation, and consequently (since we’re talking about Greece) a partially aesthetic one. The link between mathematical preoccupations on the one hand and philosophical-religious ones on the other, a link that is historically known to have existed in Pythagoras’s era, certainly goes back much further than that. For Plato is a traditionalist to the extreme and often says, “the ancients who were so much closer to the light than we are …” (obviously alluding to an Antiquity far more remote than that of Pythagoras); furthermore, he posted “No one enters here who is not a geometer” at the door of the Academy and said, “God is ever a geometer.” The two attitudes would be contradictory—which cannot be—if the preoccupations from which Greek geometry arose (if not the geometry itself) didn’t date back to early Antiquity; one can suppose that they come either from the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece, or from Egypt, or both. Furthermore, orphism (which has this dual origin) was such an inspiration to Pythagoreanism and Platonism (which are practically equivalent) that one can wonder if Pythagoras and Plato did much more than comment on it. Thales was almost certainly initiated into Greek and Egyptian mysteries, and was consequently steeped, from a philosophical and religious perspective, in an atmosphere similar to that of Pythagoreanism.

I therefore think that the notion of proportion had been since quite a remote Antiquity the object of a meditation that constituted one of the processes for purifying the soul, perhaps the principal process. There can be no doubt that this notion was at the center of the Greeks’ aesthetics, geometry, and philosophy.

The Greeks’ originality in terms of mathematics isn’t, as I see it, their refusal to accept approximation. There is no approximation in the Babylonian problems, and for a very simple reason: it’s because they are constructed from the solutions. Thus there are dozens (or hundreds, I don’t remember) of fourth-degree problems with two unknowns that all have the same solution. This shows that the Babylonians were only interested in the method, and not in solving problems actually posed. Likewise, in the problem of the canal I mentioned to you, the sum of workers and workdays is obviously never given. They enjoyed supposing unknown what is given, and known what is not. It’s a game, obviously, that does the greatest honor to their conception of “disinterested research” (did they have scholarships and medals to stimulate them?). But it’s only a game.

This game must have seemed profane to the Greeks, or even impious; other wise why wouldn’t they have translated the algebra treatises that must have existed in Babylonian at the same time that they transposed them into geometry? Diophantus’s work could have been written many centuries earlier. But the Greeks did not see any value in a method of reasoning for its own sake, they valued it insofar as it allowed the effective study of concrete problems; not that they were avid for technical applications, but because their sole object was to conceive more and more clearly of an identity of structure between the human mind and the universe. Purity of soul was their only concern; “imitating God” was its secret; the study of mathematics helped to imitate God insofar as one saw the universe as subject to mathematical laws, which made the geometer an imitator of the supreme legislator. It’s clear that the Babylonians’ mathematical games, where the solution was given before the data, were useless to this end. What was needed was data actually provided by the world or action on the world; so what was needed was to find ratios that did not require the problems to be artificially prepared to “come out right,” as is the case with whole numbers.

It’s for the Greeks that mathematics was truly an art. Its purpose was the same as the purpose of their art, namely to make perceptible a kinship between the human mind and the universe, to make the world appear as “the city of all rational beings.” And it was really made of solid matter, matter that existed, like that of all the arts without exception, in the physical sense of the word; this matter was space actually given, imposed as a de facto condition to all of man’s actions. Their geometry was a science of nature; their physics (I’m thinking of the Pythagoreans’ music, and especially of Archimedes’ mechanics and his study of floating bodies) was a geometry in which the hypotheses were presented as postulates.

I fear that today it is rather toward the Babylonian conception that we’re moving, in other words playing games rather than making art. I wonder how many mathematicians today see mathematics as a process aimed at purifying the soul and “imitating God”? What’s more, it seems to me that the matter is lacking. There is a lot of axiomatics, which seems to be closer to the Greeks, but aren’t the axioms largely chosen at will? You speak of “solid matter,” but isn’t this matter essentially formed by the entirety of mathematical work accomplished to this day? In that case, current mathematics would be a screen between man and the universe (and consequently between man and God, as understood by the Greeks) instead of putting them in contact. But perhaps I’m disparaging it.

Speaking of the Greeks, have you heard of a certain Autran, who has just published a book about Homer? He has put forward a sensational theory, namely that the Lycians and the Phoenicians of the second millennium B.C. were Dravidians. His arguments, which are philological, do not appear to be unworthy of interest, as much as one can judge without knowing the Dravidian languages and the inscriptions he quotes. But the theory is most appealing— too appealing, even—in that it gives an extremely simple explanation of the analogies between Greek and Indian thought. Climate might be sufficient explanation for the differences. Be that as it may, how could one help feeling nostalgic for an era in which the same thought was found everywhere, among all the peoples, in all the countries, where ideas circulated over a prodigious expanse, and in which one enjoyed all the riches of diversity? Today, as under the Roman Empire, uniformity has descended upon every thing, erasing all the traditions, and at the same time ideas have practically stopped circulating. Well! Perhaps in a thousand years it will be a bit better.

Fraternally,
Simone

 

Translated from the French by Nicholas Elliot.

From A Life in Letters, edited by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux in collaboration with Marie-Noëlle Chenavier-Jullien, Annette Devaux, and Olivier Rey and translated by Nicholas Elliot, to be published this month by the Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist, widely considered one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century.

Robert Chenavier is president of the Association for the Study of Simone Weil’s Thought and the author of four books, most recently Simone Weil, une Juive antisémite?

André A. Devaux (1921–2017) was a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Nicholas Elliott is a writer and translator based in New York City. He has worked extensively in theatre in New York and France, is a contributing editor for film at BOMB magazine, and was the American correspondent for the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma from 2009 to 2020.