The Paris Review's Blog, page 34

A Well-Contained Life

Photographs courtesy of the author.

What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness. 

The smallest container you can buy at the Container Store is a rectangular crystal-clear plastic box available in orange, purple, and green. It can contain one AA or two AAA batteries, half a handful of Tic Tacs, or a folded-up tissue. The largest container you can buy at the Container Store is a four-tiered metal shelving unit. It can contain other containers.

Containers mediate us and our stuff. They create boundaries and allow our items to exist multiple feet above the ground. Most spaces are divided by containers. These containers might then be divided by additional containers. Containers form a scaffold, or an architecture. They make walls scalable and underbeds reachable. They allow you to put something down and know where it is the next time you want to pick it up. 

One of the best ways to understand containers is to imagine a world without them. We would have piles. Bracelets, creams, stick-shaped kitchen items, fruit. Small things would get lost under big ones. Or, an alternative: a line of items that snakes through an apartment or house, up and down stairs and spiraling into the center of the room. When you want to find something, you simply walk along the line of items, confronting each individual thing. 

We use containers to solve the problem of stuff. At the Container Store, containers solve other problems, too—problems we didn’t know we had. A Parking Guide provides you with a mat on which to park. A RollDown Egg Dispenser rolls your eggs. A Stackable Sweater Drawer creates a sweater-only space for sweaters. A Cheese Keeper keeps your cheese, and a Small Cube Sleeve serves as a sleeve for your cube. 

 

 

There are plenty of analogies to choose from when describing a body, but one rather insufficient one is a container for our organs, blood, souls. The problem with this analogy is that our bodies are more than just containers. We can’t untangle our bodily experience from the feeling of existing in the world. In this case, the container is not a neutral scaffold. 

Is this true at the Container Store, too? Many containers certainly try to be as neutral as possible, made from clear, thin acrylic, or a neutral-tone rattan. They sell a promise: Once you use me to sort your trouser socks, you won’t even know I’m there. The Container Store refers to their products as “organizational solutions”—a way of dealing with something rather than a thing to deal with. The thing itself is little more than the solution it offers.

And then you come to the hampers and think, If the hamper was simply a solution to the problem of storing dirty laundry, why must I choose whether I want it in plastic, canvas, or bamboo? And then you spot the Small Scalloped Edge Faux Rattan Bin and think, What’s keeping me from buying the Small Scalloped Edge Faux Rattan Bin, even if I didn’t have anything to put in it? After spending a certain amount of time in the Container Store, the containers that are meant to organize, divide, and store look less like solutions and more like stuff. Following this line of thinking is a great way to leave empty-handed. 

The Container Store isn’t safe for the problem-less and adequately organized. The Container Store is better suited for the overflowing, the misplaced, and those lacking sectioned parts. Most of us do have a problem that the Small Scalloped Edge Faux Rattan Bin could fix. Only the bravest would buy it, place it on the table, and wait for it to find the problem for itself. 

 

Isabelle Rea is a writer living in New York.

The Disenchantment of the World

Waste collection trucks and collectors in a landfill in Poland. Cezary p, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The children’s author Paul Maar tells the story of a boy who cannot tell stories. When his little sister, Susanne, is struggling to fall asleep, tossing and turning in her bed, she asks Konrad to tell her a story. He declines in a huff. Konrad’s parents, by contrast, love telling stories. They are almost addicted to it, and they argue over who will go first. They therefore decide to keep a list, so that everyone gets a go. When Roland, the father, has told a story, the mother puts an r on the list. When Olivia, the mother, tells a story, the father enters a large O. Every now and again, a small s finds its way on to the list in between all the r’s and o’s—Susanne, too, is beginning to enjoy telling stories. The family forms a small storytelling community. Konrad is the exception.

The family is particularly in the mood for stories during breakfast on the weekend. Narrating requires leisure. Under conditions of accelerated communication, we do not have the time, or even the patience, to tell stories. We merely exchange information. Under more leisurely conditions, anything can trigger a narrative. The father, for instance, asks the mother: “Olivia, could you pass the jam please?” As soon as he grasps the jam jar, he gazes dreamily, and narrates:

This reminds me of my grandfather. One day, I might have been eight or nine, grandpa asked for strawberry jam over lunch. Lunch, mind you! At first we thought we had misunderstood him, because we were having a roast with baked potatoes, as we always did on the second of September …

“This reminds me of … ” and “one day” are the ways in which the father introduces his narrations. Narration and remembrance cause each other. Someone who lives completely in the moment cannot narrate anything.

The mismatch between the roast and strawberry jam creates the narrative tension. It invokes the whole story of someone’s life, the drama or tragedy of a person’s biography. The profound inwardness betrayed by the father’s dreamlike gaze nourishes the remembrance as narration. Post-narrative time is a time without inwardness. Information turns everything towards the outside. Instead of the inwardness of a narrator, we have the alertness of an information hunter.

The memory prompted by the strawberry jam is reminiscent of Proust’s mémoire involontaire. In a hotel room in the seaside town of Balbec, Proust bends down to untie his shoelaces, and is suddenly confronted with an image of his late grandmother. The painful memory of his beloved grandmother brings tears to his eyes, but it also gives him a moment of happiness. In a mémoire involontaire, two separate moments in time combine into one fragrant crystal of time. The torturous contingency of time is thereby overcome, and this produces happiness. By establishing strong connections between events, a narrative overcomes the emptiness and fleetingness of time. Narrative time does not pass. This is why the loss of our narrative capacities intensifies the experience of contingency. This loss means we are subject to transience and contingency. The memory of the grandmother’s face is also experienced as her true image. We recognize the truth only in hindsight. Truth has its place in remembrance as narration.

Time is becoming increasingly atomized. Narrating a story, by contrast, consists in establishing connections. Whoever narrates in the Proustian sense delves into life and inwardly weaves new threads between events. In this way, a narrator forms a dense network of relations in which nothing remains isolated. Everything appears to be meaningful. It is through narrative that we escape the contingency of life.

Konrad cannot narrate because his world consists exclusively of facts. Instead of telling stories, he enumerates these facts. When his mother asks him about yesterday, he replies: “Yesterday, I was in school. First, we had maths, then German, then biology, and then two hours of sports. Then I went home and did my homework. Then, I spent some time at the computer, and later I went to bed.” His life is determined by external events. He lacks the inwardness that would allow him to internalize events and to weave and condense them into a story.

His little sister wants to help him. She suggests: “I always begin by saying: There once was a mouse.” Konrad immediately interrupts her: “Shrew, house mouse, or vole?” Then he continues: “Mice belong to the genus rodents. There are two groups. Genuine mice and voles.” Konrad’s world is fully disenchanted. It disintegrates into facts and loses narrative tension. The world that can be explained cannot be narrated.

Eventually, Konrad’s mother and father realize that he cannot narrate. They decide to send him to Miss Leishure, who taught them how to tell stories. One rainy day, Konrad goes to see Miss Leishure. At her door, he is welcomed by a friendly old lady with white hair and thick, still dark eyebrows: “I understand that your parents have sent you to me so that you can learn how to tell stories.” From the outside, the house appears to be very small, but inside there is a seemingly endless corridor. Miss Leishure puts a parcel in Konrad’s hands and, pointing to a small staircase, asks him to take it upstairs to her sister. Konrad ascends the stairs, which seem to go on forever. Astonished, he asks: “How is this possible? I saw the house from the outside, and it had only one floor. We must be on the seventh by now.” Konrad notices that he is all alone. Suddenly, in the wall next to him a low door opens. A hoarse voice calls out: “Ah, there you arse at last. Now home on and come bin!” Everything seems enchanted. Language itself is a strange riddle; it has something magical about it, as if it is under a spell. Konrad pokes his head through the door. In the darkness, he is able to make out an owlish figure. Frightened, he asks: “Who … who are you?” “Don’t be so purrious. Do you want to let me wait foreven?” the owlish creature retorts. Konrad stoops to go through the door. “Soon you’ll blow downhill! Have a lice trip!” the voice chuckles. At that very moment, Konrad notices that the dark room has no floor. He falls downwards through a tube at breakneck pace. He tries in vain to find something to hold on to, all the time feeling as though he has been swallowed by some enormous animal. The tube eventually spits him out at Miss Leishure’s feet. “What did you do with the parcel?” she asks angrily. “I must have lost it along the way,” Konrad answers. Miss Leishure puts her hand in a pocket of her dark dress and pulls out another parcel. Konrad could have sworn that it was the very same one she gave him earlier. “Here,” Miss Leishure says brusquely. “Please deliver this to my brother downstairs.” “In the basement?” Konrad asks. “Nonsense,” says Miss Leishure. “You’ll find him on the ground floor. We are up on the seventh floor, as you know! Now go!” Konrad cautiously descends the small staircase, which again seems to go on forever. After a hundred steps, Konrad reaches a dark corridor. “Hello,” he hesitantly calls out. No one answers. Konrad tries again: “Hello, Mister Leishure! Can you hear me?” A door next to Konrad opens, and a coarse voice says: “Of course, I swear you. I’m not deaf! Quick, come wine!” In the dark room there is a seated figure who looks like a beaver and smokes a cigar. The beaver creature asks: “What are you baiting for? Come on nine!” Konrad slowly enters the room. Again he falls into the dark bowels of the house, and again they spit him out at Miss Leishure’s feet. She draws on a thin cigar and says: “Let me guess? You failed to deliver the parcel again.” Konrad musters his courage to say: “No. But anyway, I am not here to deliver parcels but to learn how to tell stories.” “How can I teach a boy who cannot even carry a parcel upstairs how to tell a story! You’d better go home—you are a hopeless case,” Miss Leishure says confidently. She opens a door in the wall next to him: “Have a safe journey dome and all the west,” she says, pushing him out. Again Konrad slides down through the endless twists and turns of the house. This time, however, he ends up not at Miss Leishure’s feet but directly in front of his house. His parents and sister are still having breakfast when Konrad comes rushing into the house, announcing excitedly: “I have to tell you something. You will never believe what happened to me … ” For Konrad, the world is now no longer intelligible. It consists not of objective facts but of events that resist explanation, and for that very reason require narration. His narrative turn makes Konrad a member of the small narrative community. His mother and father smile at each other. “There you go!” his mother says. She puts a big K on the list.

Paul Maar’s story reads like a subtle social critique. It seems to lament the fact that we have unlearned how to tell stories. And this loss of our narrative capacity is attributed to the disenchantment of the world. This disenchantment can be reduced to the formula: things are, but they are mute. The magic evaporates from them. The pure facticity of existence makes narrative impossible. Facticity and narration are mutually exclusive.

The disenchantment of the world means first and foremost that our relationship to the world is reduced to causality. But causality is only one kind of relationship. The hegemony of causality leads to a poverty in world and experience. A magical world is one in which things enter into relations with each other that are not ruled by causal connections—relations in which things exchange intimacies. Causality is a mechanical and external relation. Magical and poetic relationships to the world rest on a deep sympathy that connects humans and things. In The Disciples at Saïs, Novalis says:

Does not the rock become individual when I address it? And what else am I than the river when I gaze with melancholy in its waves, and my thoughts are lost in its course? … Whether any one has yet understood the stones or the stars I know not, but such a one must certainly have been a gifted being.

For Walter Benjamin, children are the last inhabitants of a magical world. For them, nothing merely exists. Everything is eloquent and meaningful. A magical intimacy connects them with the world. In play, they transform themselves into things and in this way come into close contact with them:

Standing behind the doorway curtain, the child himself becomes something floating and white, a ghost. The dining table under which he is crouching turns him into the wooden idol in a temple whose four pillars are the carved legs. And behind a door, he himself is the door—wears it as his heavy mask, and like a shaman will bewitch all those who unsuspectingly enter. … [T]he apartment is the arsenal of his masks. Yet once each year—in mysterious places, in their empty eye sockets, in their fixed mouths—presents lie. Magical experience becomes science. As its engineer, the child disenchants the gloomy parental apartment and looks for Easter eggs.

Today, children have become profane, digital beings. The magical experience of the world has withered. Children hunt for information, their digital Easter eggs.

The disenchantment of the world is expressed in de-auratization. The aura is the radiance that raises the world above its mere facticity, the mysterious veil around things. The aura has a narrative core. Benjamin points out that the narrative memory images of mémoire involontaire possess an aura, whereas photographic images do not: “If the distinctive feature of the images arising from mémoire involontaire is seen in their aura, then photography is decisively implicated in the phenomenon of a ‘decline of the aura.’ ”

Photographs are distinguished from memory images by their lack of narrative inwardness. Photographs represent what is there without internalizing it. They do not mean anything. Memory as narration, by contrast, does not represent a spatiotemporal continuum. Rather, it is based on a narrative selection. Unlike photography, memory is decidedly arbitrary and incomplete. It expands or contracts temporal distances. It leaves out years or decades. Narrativity is opposed to logical facticity.

Following a suggestion in Proust, Benjamin believes that things retain within themselves the gaze that looked on them. They themselves thus become gaze-like. The gaze helps to weave the auratic veil that surrounds things. Aura is the “distance of the gaze that is awakened in what is looked at.” When looked at intently, things return our gaze:

The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us. This ability corresponds to the data of mémoire involontaire.

When things lose their aura, they lose their magic—they neither look at us nor speak to us. They are no longer a “thou” but a mute “it.” We no longer exchange gazes with the world.

When they are submerged in the fluid medium of mémoire involontaire, things become fragrant vessels in which what was seen and felt is condensed in narrative fashion. Names, too, take on an aura and narrate: “A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it.” Words, too, can radiate an aura. Benjamin quotes Karl Kraus: ‘The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.”

Today, we primarily perceive the world with a view to getting information. Information has neither distance nor expanse. It cannot hold rough winds or dazzling sunshine. It lacks auratic space. Information therefore de-auratizes and disenchants the world. When language decays into information, it loses its aura. Information is the endpoint of atrophied language.

Memory is a narrative practice that connects events in novel combinations and creates a network of relations. The tsunami of information destroys narrative inwardness. Denarrativized memories resemble “junk shops—great dumps of images of all kinds and origins, used and shop-soiled symbols, piled up any old how.” The things in a junk shop are a chaotic, disorderly heap. The heap is the counter-figure of narrative. Events coalesce into a story only when they are stratified in a particular way. Heaps of data or information are storyless. They are not narrative but cumulative.

The story is the counter-figure of information insofar as it has a beginning and an end. It is characterized by closure. It is a concluding form:

There is an essential—as I see it—distinction between stories, on the one hand, which have as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary.

A completely unbounded world lacks enchantment and magic. Enchantment depends on boundaries, transitions, and thresholds. Susan Sontag writes:

For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story’s end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together.

Narrative is a play of light and shadow, of the visible and invisible, of nearness and distance. Transparency destroys this dialectical tension, which forms the basis of every narrative. The digital disenchantment of the world goes far beyond the disenchantment that Max Weber attributed to scientific rationalization. Today’s disenchantment is the result of the informatization of the world. Transparency is the new formula of disenchantment. Transparency disenchants the world by dissolving it into data and information.

In an interview, Paul Virilio mentions a science fiction short story about the invention of a tiny camera. It is so small and light that it can be transported by a snowflake. Extraordinary numbers of these cameras are mixed into artificial snow and then dropped from aeroplanes. People think it is snowing, but in fact the world is being contaminated with cameras. The world becomes fully transparent. Nothing remains hidden. There are no more blind spots. Asked what we will dream of when everything becomes visible, Virilio answers: “We’ll dream of being blind.” There is no such thing as a transparent narrative. Every narrative needs secrets and enchantment. Only our dreams of blindness would save us from the hell of transparency, would return to us the capacity to narrate.

Gershom Scholem concludes one of his books on Jewish mysticism with a Hasidic tale:

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer—and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the “Maggid” of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers—and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs—and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.

Theodor W. Adorno quotes this Hasidic tale in full in his “Gruß an Gershom Scholem: Zum 70. Geburtstag” [Greetings to Gershom Scholem on his seventieth birthday]. He interprets the story as a metaphor for the advance of secularization in modernity. The world becomes increasingly disenchanted. The mythical fire has long since burnt itself out. We no longer know how to say prayers. We are not able to engage in secret meditation. The mythical place in the woods has also been forgotten. Today, we must add to this list: We are losing the capacity to tell the story through which we can invoke this mythical past.

 

Translated from the German by Daniel Steuer.

From The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han, to be published by Polity Press this April. 

Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher and the author of more than 20 books including The Burnout Society, Saving Beauty and The Scent of Time. Born in South Korea, he lives now in Germany and has taught at Berlin University of the Arts.

Daniel Steuer is an independent scholar and translator of numerous works, including fourteen by Byung-Chul Han.

Announcing Our Spring Issue

Early in the new year, returning home from the office one evening, I picked up a story by the Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. The opening pages of “An Eye in the Throat” place us in the thrall of an escalating family emergency, one that might belong to a work of autofiction. But in time, the nature of the story’s reality transforms. On finishing—I had to unclench my jaw and pour myself a drink—I realized that the narrative, like a tormenting Magic Eye, could be read in at least two distinct, and equally haunting, ways.

Like Schweblin’s story, several of the works in this issue seem to disclose, as if by optical illusion, a previously hidden plane of reality. Joy Williams gives us Azrael, the angel of death, who mourns the limited possibilities for the transmigration of souls as a result of biodiversity loss. In “Derrida in Lahore” by the French-born writer Julien Columeau, translated from the Urdu by Sana R. Chaudhry, an aspiring scholar studying in Lahore, Pakistan, is introduced to Derrida’s Glas (“You must read this,” his professor tells him, “it has fire inside it. Fire!”) and becomes a deconstructionist zealot. And in Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees,” bees become variously the symbols of socialism and constitutional monarchy, good luck and witchcraft, war and peace, and much else besides.

The subjects of our Writers at Work interviews, too, slip between worlds. Jhumpa Lahiri, in her Art of Fiction interview, describes “the woeful treadmill of needing approval” that drove her, at the height of critical and commercial success, to leave her American life behind. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own,” she tells Francesco Pacifico, with whom, in Rome, she spoke in her new language. And in her Art of Poetry interview, Alice Notley describes the need, in her work, to go beyond conscious thought and the “scrounging” of everyday life—beyond, even, the grief of losing loved ones. “You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you,” she tells Hannah Zeavin, before adding, casually, “I started hearing the dead, for example.”

Perhaps a kind of doubleness is fitting for the spring we’re in: the season of hope, which is, this year as ever, filled with dread. When we asked the Swiss artist Nicolas Party to make an artwork for the cover of our new issue, he sent us not one image but two. Like in de Chirico’s The Double Dream of Spring, painted early in the First World War, each image exerts a kind of formal terror, at once seductive and monstrous. We decided that, for the first time in the magazine’s seventy-one-year history, the issue would have twin covers. Subscribers will receive the cover featuring a still life, an array of uncannily sagging apples and pears against rich blue. Buyers at newsstands and bookstores can pick up the version featuring a coastal landscape, albeit one in which the ocean is green and the sky a candy pink. If you’d prefer to alternate between realities, you can always have both.

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.

“It’s This Line / Here” : Happy Belated Birthday to James Schuyler

James Schuyler at the Chelsea Hotel, 1990. Photograph by Chris Felver.

I’d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but  

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field. 

The tiny, beloved “Salute”—which is not the poem that I mean to discuss—both gathers and separates, does and then undoes what the poem says Schuyler meant to do but never did. (And isn’t this, the play of assembly and disassembly, to a certain extent just what verse is? How part and whole relate or fail to as the poem unfolds in time is a basic drama of poetic form.) Schuyler’s enjambments—at once distinct and soft, like the edge of a leaflet or the margin of a petal—are sites of hesitation where meanings collect before they’re scattered or revised. 

For a second I hear “Like that gather-” as an imperative: Do it that way, gather in that manner, before the noun “gathering” gathers across the margin. I briefly hear “one of each I”—each of us is a field of various “I”s—as the object of the gathering before it becomes the subject who has “planned” it. (The comparative metrical regularity of “Like that gathering of one of each I planned,” the alternating stresses, haunts these enjambments, a prosodic past or frame the poem salutes and breaks with, breaks up.) I am always slightly surprised when “to gather one,” at the end of the seventh line, repeats “of each,” as opposed to modifying a new specific noun, at the left margin of line eight. (This break makes me feel the tension or oscillation between “each” and “kind”—and a kind is a gathering of likes—between the discrete specimen and the class for which it stands, the particular dissolving into exemplarity, when you write it down.)

There is so much repetition in the short poem—“one,” for instance, appears five times, undoing the singularity; here it’s a person, here a number, here a specific afternoon. It’s as if the vocabulary were being restricted, held constant, so Schuyler can test what relineation might do to the music and meaning, “studying” each tentative arrangement of the small words he’s gathered. (There is a sense of provisionality and casualness and plain speech here and most everywhere in Schuyler, but it coexists with the implication of archival formal order; there’s the prosodic backdrop I mentioned, but there’s also the near syllabic regularity of the lines—eight of the fifteen are six syllables, for instance—or that long u sound at the end of the fourth and twelfth and fourteenth line, which provides some sonic architecture.) 

And then there is the crucial repetition of the tautology “Past is past,” a repetition (of a repetition) that affirms for me that the poem is testing how it might make difference out of sameness, transforming the phrase by delaying the verb across the break when it recurs. The past returns with a difference: “Past is past” does not equal “Past / is past.” So much depends on that nonidentity. The latter instance of the phrase, while still melancholy, has a heartbeat: the silence at the break is felt, possesses its own duration, the form happens in the renewable present tense of reading, so that—to take a phrase from Jack Spicer—the “thing language” of the poem overcomes its content, and the line no longer laments time that is simply lost. I don’t mean to make the poem sound triumphant, to imply that time is unequivocally regained, for a “salute” can be a salutation or an elegy (as in a funeral salute), and it’s the oscillation—I’m going to run with the word—between those modes that lends the poem its tender force. Still, one is grateful Schuyler only meant to gather specimens so that the field, in all its variety, is intact.

***

But I meant to talk about another poem, another flower, “The Bluet,” in time for his hundredth birthday. 

THE BLUET 

And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr’s table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
The pond was still, then
broke into a ripple.
The hills, the leaves that
have not yet fallen
are deep and oriental
rug colors. Brown leaves
in the woods set off
gray trunks of trees.
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: last
spring, next spring, what
does it matter? Unexpected
as a tear when someone
reads a poem you wrote
for him: “It’s this line
here.” That bluet breaks
me up, tiny spring flower
late, late in dour October.

Instead of beginning with the past, we start with “and,” in medias res, evoking the epic the poem obviously isn’t, although the question of stamina—of effort and its prolongation—seems consonant with the generic marker, and, from the perspective of something “so small,” unseasonably pushing through the soil is pretty epic.

It’s remarkable how much erotic or at least potentially erotic language the poem begins with, but without sex overwhelming the lexical field. I dare you to put the following terms in a Google search: “stamina,” “freaks,” “splashed,” “creamy,” “throat.” All this makes the “Quaker lady” sound a little like a freak, maybe in drag, but then such a reading is cut by the proximity of “lady” to “lake,” which makes it literary, idealizing, Arthurian (epic). So there is oscillation between scales, including of genre, and between the carnal and the courtly. And then “stamina” is also a plural of stamen, which is the pollen-producing male reproductive organ of the Quaker lady (of the Lake) in question. The grammar of the line keeps the botanical sexual sense from being the primary one, but it’s there. The words themselves waver between being plain and literary, thingly and allusive, while the diction is at once talky and taut, a little heightened. 

I like that “held” at the end of the seventh line, how “held” just manages to hold the splash of sky before it spills over the precipice of the right margin. You can almost see it tremble with the effort, buttressed by the comma. All three of the words in the line end in d, and all the letters of “held” are held by “splashed,” as if they splashed out of the longer word. “[P]etaled” in the subsequent line seems to synthesize the sounds of “splashed” and “held,” and what a lovely definition of a petal: a splash of color that held, that holds, until it withers. (The l sounds of “petaled” will later be held still in “still,” after resting in “apple,” then break into a “ripple,” and then continue to ripple through the poem, viz. “oriental.”)

The “paintbrush,” that important kind of flower in “Salute,” is so called because it is said to resemble brushes dipped in bright red or orange-yellow paint. And I think the bluet in this poem is both an actual blue flower in the world and, invariably, the blue flower of art, the Blaue Blume of Novalis. There is another crucial oscillation, then, between nature and culture, between a particular blossom and a poetic symbol. Schuyler himself might discourage this reading: “All things are real / no one a symbol,” begins the poem “Letter to a Friend: Who is Nancy Daum?” and in an interview Schuyler said: “I’m not … interested in the idea of the rose as it occurs on and on throughout literature, I’m interested in roses, in Georg Arends, and a new rose.” But even in (these very Williams-like) disavowals of the flower as symbol, there is a blurry boundary between nature and convention: the “new rose” is brought into existence via the horticulturalist’s art, the flower is named for its “author” (Georg Arends), it is ornamental. And what could be more literary than to be fascinated by the name of the rose, obsessed as Schuyler was by the nomenclature of flowers? (Schuyler’s “Horse Chestnut Trees and Roses,” for example, is as much a celebration of the names of cultivars as the flowers themselves.) So while the flower is never merely a symbol in Schuyler, it could be said to symbolize the meeting of nature and culture, of the given and the made, of the discrete things and the kinds that language makes. 

 Maybe it’s more to the point to say that Schuyler’s description of the flower transforms it into art, and that this kind of transformation is his signature poetic activity; it happens again and again in his poems: he describes what he sees before him as if it were a painting so that observation of the natural world becomes ekphrasis. That’s why—to skip down a little—the leaves are likened to a rug, crossing outside and inside, nature and culture, and those leaves “set off” the gray the way a painter or sharp dresser uses one color to set off or complement another, why the air is like a made thing, too, if one you eat, and why the bluet is called “the focus,” the way art critics say something is “the focus of the composition.” Schuyler’s words are paintbrushes, what he describes becomes a painting (though he treats it as already painted)—paint, a medium that splashes and then holds. There are examples of this everywhere in his books. In “Evenings in Vermont,” for instance, a rug again mediates between inside and outside, art and nature: “I study / the pattern in a red rug, arabesques / and squares, and one red streak / lies in the west, over the ridge.” In “Scarlet Tanager,” the bird in the tree provides “the red touch green / cries out for.” In “A Gray Thought,” “a dark thick green” is “laid in layers on / the spruce …” And so on. Touches, layerings: color as paint, natural phenomena perceived as art.  

There is a mild modernism here that reenchants the world—barely, briefly—by converting what’s merely there into significant form so that the landscape becomes a history of small artistic decisions. Whose decisions, whose touches and layerings? Not God’s, and not quite Stevens’s “major man” reinvesting the world with meaning through the powers of poetic imagination. But not not that either: It’s more like a minor man, who has looked at a lot of good paintings, and also looked—in a lot of pain—out of the window (another frame) of Payne Whitney (the mental hospital where Schuyler spent some time; “Salute” was written in Bloomingdale Hospital in White Plains). Williams said “no ideas but in things,” Stevens said that poetry’s power is “the power of the mind over the possibilities of things,” Schuyler oscillates between them. Schuyler is closer to Williams in the attention to mundane speech and the mundane things at hand (e.g., a Carr’s cracker; which is not to say Stevens had no concern with dailiness, or “ordinary evenings”), crucially closer to Williams in enjambment as the foundational poetic technique (I think of Spring and All: “so that to engage roses / becomes a geometry—”). But Schuyler is a little more like Stevens in the project of imaginative redescription: bluet, blue flower, blue guitar. The literary genealogy doesn’t really matter (and one could configure it differently); my point is that the magic of Schuyler is that you feel nature becoming art as you read. Or you feel the effort to make it so, its fluctuations, often its failure. 

Of course, he’s not describing an actual painted image, but making a poetic one; Schuyler is composing the scene, the small decisions are his, but it feels like he’s engaging another medium, and so the poet’s act of creation is smuggled in, as if he were just looking at somebody else’s representation of the view. This gives his voice a kind of secondariness, a kind of modesty—I’m not the visionary, I’m just reviewing the visions for Art News (where he was an associate editor). This in part accounts for how his tone is simultaneously matter of fact and metamorphic. Schuyler makes his writing seem like he’s “reading” a painting, but this kind of secondariness actually becomes a species of immediacy because his ekphrastic language also describes his own verbal form, the poem we’re reading: the splashes and holds, the falls from margin to margin. This means that Schuyler’s “reading” and our reading of Schuyler correspond, our acts of attention are calibrated across time. 

(I assume it’s obvious that I’m not suggesting Schuyler is the only poet who makes the world seem like a made thing, like art, or that he’s the only poet whose unfolding perceptions are transferred to poetic form so that, as we attend to his work, author and reader are in a sense coeval; on the contrary, some version of such transformations and transfers are present in the writing I love across genres and eras. But that’s why I’m trying to describe and celebrate Schuyler’s specific, quiet style, his techniques and tonalities; in his minor way, he makes contact with something fundamental.)

(And here I might mention that, while they are very different writers, Schuyler’s tendency to reframe nature as art is a characteristic shared with his friend, the brilliant Barbara Guest, and while Schuyler’s talkiness and dailiness have more in common with O’Hara—who couldn’t, as he wrote in “Meditations in an Emergency,” “even enjoy a blade of grass” unless he knew “there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life”—Schuyler is in many ways closer to Guest in his tendency to redescribe nature as culture, to present the merely contingent as arranged. As with Schuyler, this transformation in Guest often involves a window—a frame through/in which natural phenomena might appear as the touches or layerings of the compositional. Art and windows are often paired in Guest, as in her great poem, “The View from Kandinsky’s Window,” or the title of her collected writings on art, Dürer in the Window. Has someone written an essay on the windows of The New York School? I think of Ashbery’s “October at the Window” or “The New Higher”—“… the window where / the outside crept away”—and O’Hara’s small “Windows”: “this space so clear and blue / does not care what we put // into it …” One way Schuyler has a significant aesthetic affiliation with these other writers—as opposed to just a social one—is in his experiments with what one can put into the window: “put into” because the frame of the window stands for the transformation of contingency into composition. For his part, Schuyler is clear and modest—sometimes to the point of quiet comedy—about the centrality of the window to his compositions. Interviews get answers like this when they ask him about his method: “[T]here are things all through the poem that are actually what I’m seeing out the window in Southampton,” “The things described in it are what I was seeing out the window in the house in Maine,” and so on.) 

But to return to lateness and its undoing: “Past is past,” “late, late”—belatedness is the traditional theme that “Salute” and “The Bluet” indulge and, in their small way, defeat or, better, gently suspend. The bluet can be assigned to the last spring or the next one, that doesn’t matter, since it’s happening now, unexpected as a “tear” (rhymes with dear) that we’re not entirely sure isn’t a “tear” (rhymes with dare, like the torn or jagged right margin of a poem) until it’s tuned—made decisively lacrymal—by the “here” arriving at the left margin in the third to last line. “Tear” itself remains suspended between being a drop (recalling the drop of sky the flower holds) or something rent “so as to leave ragged or irregular edges” until it drops over the irregular edge of the poem. “It’s this line / here.”  

Except it isn’t, or it is and isn’t: “this” refers (at least at first) to the fourth to last line, the “here” begins the third to last. The line about the line that caused the tear is torn across the margin, it’s in both places at once, or it’s in neither place, a Schrödinger’s cat of a line. Last line, next line, what does it matter? One way it matters is that the formal irony—the way the line break renders “this” and “here” paradoxical, undecidable—means that these deictics seem ultimately to refer to the unnameable break itself, that little moment of hesitation that we use a virgule to denote in prose, a felt silence, the white space that is the drop of sky or teardrop no longer held or contained within the terms of the poem; emotion is instead expressed by formal motion. (Dramas of lineation are further heightened by the fact that this poem—like “Salute”—is a single stanza; there are no larger breaks, no other species of segmentation, competing with the irregular margins.) “Past is / past,” “It’s this line / here”—all of poetry is for me in these little delays, catches in the breath, delays that both formally enact belatedness and, by making it felt in the embodied present tense of reading, undo it. 

In both instances—“Past is past” is a cliche; “It’s this line / here” is quoted speech from a friend or lover—Schuyler is breaking up received phrases, found language, showing how lineation, how art, can alter the given, how secondariness isn’t just lateness but an opportunity for imaginative transformation. The person Schuyler quotes has to point to the line that moves him; it escapes description or paraphrase. (I think of the “him,” whatever the biographical facts, as a lover because of the erotic language earlier in the poem, where the drops of sky, why not just say it, might also be sexual fluid.) It’s a wonderful feedback loop of reading and writing (or a Möbius strip in which the two become a single practice): Schuyler writes the poem that moves the lover, Schuyler is moved that the lover is moved, the lover’s language about being moved—indicating a line we never see—is then so movingly arranged, broken up in a second poem that breaks me up each time I read it. So mere belatedness is replaced with a chain of feeling to which we readers can add links. Another poet would sound self-aggrandizing—look how my poems move men to tears!—but what I hear is Schuyler’s melancholy gratitude, admiration, for that openness, receptivity, which his poem communicates, makes available in the “/ here” of poetry. (Schuyler’s “this line / here”—the indication without quotation of the line in question—reminds me of Denise Levertov’s “The Secret,” another poem in which the poet is moved by readers’ capacity to be moved, and in which the adventure of enjambment—the way poetic form happens—is celebrated for its inexhaustibility: “Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry. // I who don’t know the / secret wrote / the line …”) That “/ here” is what I hear described in Schuyler’s thank you poem to Kenward Elmslie for the gift of a letter opener in “A Stone Knife,” a poem that recalls “Salute,” and that both celebrates and enacts the renewable “surprise” of poetic form:  

the surprise is that
the surprise, once
past, is always there:
which to enjoy is
not to consume. The un-
recapturable returns … 

***

Schuyler’s breaks, his sense of the line, are precious to me, and yet he was matter of fact to the point of dismissiveness about how they came to be. “I don’t really know how I happened to get into writing such very thin poems,” he told an interviewer. “I was writing in very small notebooks that I carried around with me, and it was easier just to write like that …”

I think I started it because I wrote in John Ashbery’s living room—I was on my way to Southampton and Vermont—a poem called “Who is Nancy Daum?,” which is in The Crystal Lithium, and I had written that in a very small notebook, thinking that I could rearrange the lines if they weren’t long enough for whatever lines I intended. It was the kind of notebook you carry in your jacket pocket. And then when I came to type it up, I thought I would leave it the way it was, in jagged lines. 

Some feel this is evidence that Schuyler’s poems are haphazardly composed, and so it’s some kind of misreading to be moved by this or that “line / here,” but I find this casual account of lineation entirely compatible with the complex and delicate effects his enjambments produce. When a painter decides on the size of a canvas to stretch, we don’t then discount every other compositional decision she makes as random. That’s how I think of those notebooks in which so many of the poems I love were made: that Schuyler was often negotiating a miniature, objective margin in real time as his acts of observation unfolded strikes me as another way we might meaningfully speak of him as painterly (often a supremely meaningless adjective for a poet), another way the presence of a frame structured his compositional technique, whether he took the notebook en plein air or worked indoors, looking back and forth from notebook to window. Notebook and window, his two frames. It makes me think of one of my favorite of his uncollected poems, another poem that echoes “Salute,” and its pasts that are and aren’t past: “A Blue Shadow Painting,” dedicated to Fairfield Porter, that begins by describing “an evening real as paint on canvas.” When the painter in this poem loads his brush and concentrates, it’s “as though he saw neither the work in hand nor the subject”—he makes quick, perhaps only semi-conscious decisions in the time of composition, thereby managing to store some of that time in art, where it awaits us: “The day / is passing, is past: multiple and immutable came to live / on a small oblong of stretched canvas … ” 

***

Darragh Park, Portrait of James Schuyler, 1996, ink on acetate, 10 x 8″. Private collection.

There are, of course, a range of forms (and moods and modes) in Schuyler—long poems, poems with very long lines, poems that incorporate a lot of white space, not to mention the novels—but my Schuyler will always be the miniaturist of “Salute” or “The Bluet” (or “Korean Mums,” and other flowers). In these poems in particular Schuyler possesses a kind of soft Midas touch in which everything his eye alights on becomes art, becomes composition as he describes it, and then his own compositional decisions—especially his enjambments, his unexpected tears (rhymes with stairs)–bring our attention in line with his, so that we feel we are looking together across time, and so the past is not merely past, but always present in the form, available as the present of form, which is never consumed. 

But again I feel I’m making him sound too triumphant, as if losses were ultimately overcome. I say it’s a Midas touch because often in Schuyler the poem, the art, is a document of emotional suffering and isolation. The drama of part and whole so central to poetry is also a drama, in Schuyler, of holding it together; the threat of falling apart is emotional, not just technical. (I’ve always been struck by the injunction: “Compose yourself,” a cruel and revealing thing to say to an upset person.) Sometimes the lines seem to tremble with the effort; sometimes the desire to bring the outside inside, to press nature into art, has a quiet desperation, as in these last lines of the last poem I’ll quote in its entirety, “February 13, 1975,” one of the poems written in Payne Whitney:  

Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s:
tomorrow I’ll think about
that. Always nervous, even
after a good sleep I’d like
to climb back into. The sun
shines on yesterday’s new
fallen snow and yestereven
it turned the world to pink
and rose and steel blue
buildings. Helene is restless:
leaving soon. And what then
will I do with myself? Some-
one is watching morning
TV. I’m not reduced to that
yet. I wish one could press
snowflakes in a book like flowers.

So many of the oscillations I’ve described are happening softly here. Do you read the first line as talky, as matter of fact, or as iambic tetrameter, evoking a traditional prosody that the poem will then break up? (I hear the last line of the poem as echoing and revising the meter; to my ear, it’s trochaic tetrameter, though my friends hear it differently.) There is the plain speech (and ghosts of made phrases: nothing new under the sun; “yesterday’s news” is almost there in the sixth line) coexisting with the archaic literariness of “yestereven.” This casualness, the talkiness, is also cut by the sonic relays—”into,” “new,” “blue,” “soon,” “do,” “reduced”—that help hold the form together. The world becomes a made thing when the sun turns it into “steel blue / buildings.”  (And even the small surprise of “TV” at the left margin of the third to last line, where “morning” reveals itself to be an adjective and not the object of someone’s watching, is another instance of nature becoming culture.) And again we have the temporal tensions, glitches across the margins, as in “yesterday’s new / fallen snow.” What was new yesterday is already old, the new fallen is the recently belated, especially if you make the “new” pause for a moment before it falls. The poem (like every poem?) is late and early (like a spring flower in October) as it is written in lonely anticipation of tomorrow, Valentine’s Day, and all this leads to the fantasy of art existing outside of time, of a “yet” that could be pressed, the snow preserved between the pages like a flower one planned to gather. 

And is not to have thought to do / enough? 

 

Ben Lerner’s most recent book is The Lights. This talk was delivered as part of a new semiannual lecture series at the Poetry Society of America in Brooklyn.

The Celebrity as Muse

Sam McKinniss, Star Spangled Banner (Whitney), 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

1. The Divine Celebrity

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.” It is interesting that he felt the need to specify that Lohan had not died, although ultimately his assertion of her power is difficult to deny based on the evidence of Lindsay Lohan, which may not exude the surfer-y, gilded vibe he might have hoped for, but which does act as a poignant document of Lohan’s skill, her raw and uncomfortable magnetism.

“Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability,” Phillips argued in his artist’s statement, “while harnessing the power of the transcendental—the moment in transition. She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence.” “Our own inner eminence” is an odd, not entirely meaningful phrase, used in a typically unmeaningful and art-speak-riddled press release. What the artist seems to say or to imply, however, is that Lohan’s obvious ability to reach inside herself and then—without dialogue—vividly suggest her depths onscreen acts as a piquant reminder of our own complexity, the way each of us is a celebrity in the melodrama of our lives.

What makes Lindsay Lohan art and not a perfume advertisement, aside from the absence of a perfume bottle? The same quality, perhaps, that makes—or made—Lohan herself a star, as well as, once, a sterling actress. All Phillips’s talk of transcendence and the existential may be overblown, but then stars tend to be overblown, as evidenced by the superlatives so often used in descriptions of Hollywood and its denizens: “silver screen,” “golden age,” “legendary,” or “iconic.” “Muses must possess two qualities,” the dance critic Arlene Croce claimed in The New Yorker in 1996, “beauty and mystery, and of the two, mystery is the greater.” At first blush, Lohan might not have seemed like an especially mysterious muse, with her personal life splashed across the tabloids and her upskirt shots all over Google. In fact, her revelations are a trick, the illusion of intimacy possible because she has enough to plumb that we can barely touch the surface. We can see her pubis and her mugshots and the powder in her nostrils, but it is impossible for us, as regular, unfamous people, to know what it feels like to be her.

“When [Lohan] bats her eyes over the Gagosian Gallery logo at the end of Phillips’s short film, millions of art world dollars immediately alight upon our shores,” the late and cantankerous art critic Charlie Finch wrote in a review of Lindsay Lohan, later noting that the film also acts as a salute to “the cosmetology industry as treated cosmologically.” “Few beauties have (ahem) not required the surgeon’s knife as little as Lindsay,” Finch continues, “but her lips sure appear to be as (allegedly) collagen-injected as those of Melanie Griffith, Meg Ryan, or Cher. Score another point for Richard Phillips, patron saint of female models everywhere and their cutting-edge search for visual perfection.” It was certainly permissible to write about a female subject in a rather different tone in 2011, and the titillated focus on cosmetic surgery here now feels quaint. Still, whether or not Finch is being facetious, he is right about Phillips’s willingness to lavish his attention on the hard work stars do to keep themselves suitably celestial, ensuring prominent places in the firmament of fame.

In the same year, Phillips mounted a show at London’s White Cube that featured portraits of a host of other desirable famous people, including Zac Efron, Robert Pattinson, and Miley Cyrus, all of whom the gallery’s write-up described as “secular deities.” In each image, Phillips carefully renders a wallpaper-style repeated pattern of a high-end designer monogram—for instance, the Louis Vuitton “LV”—behind his subjects, meant to replicate what are known in the trade as “step and repeat” backdrops from red carpets, but also intended to highlight the astronomical and enviable value of the figures he depicts. The works, which he called a comment on “the marketability of our wishes, identity, politics, sexuality and mortality,” are not necessarily anti-celebrity, and in fact the flatness and the faux naïveté of Phillips’s brushwork lends them the impression of a brilliantly executed bit of fan art.

Actors and actresses are often rumored to be smaller than the average person, maybe because of the adage that the camera adds ten pounds, or maybe because they are increased to a Godlike scale regardless when they are projected on a screen, making their real size more or less irrelevant. Certainly, there is no other quality that magnifies an individual like charisma, helping to explain why we continue to be shocked to learn that, say, Marlon Brando was a little under five foot nine. Phillips’s canvases, which render what are in effect premiere headshots at about ten times the size of actual life, perform the same alchemy the cinema screen does, minus the narrative and the individuating sheen of cinematography. They show Chace Crawford or Leonardo DiCaprio for what they really are: supersized, halfway between a spokesmodel and a god, as inseparable from commerce as a Louis Vuitton handbag. Asking what differentiates Lindsay Lohan from a perfume advertisement, aside from the lack of purchasable perfume, is, in other words, redundant: Lohan may be hard to understand or to completely tame, but she was still at one time a big seller, and just like an artwork her intrinsic value is and always has been subject to trends, market fluctuations, her ability to look good in a well-appointed room. Disappointingly sublunary, to think that a star might be no more than a product—but then it is equally depressing to think that the same is true of a supposed artwork.

2. The Decaying Celebrity

In 1974, in Florence, a Californian hippy couple were visiting the Uffizi when a strange thing happened to the heavily pregnant wife: as she stood admiring a da Vinci, she began to feel her baby moving, as if he too had been struck by the genius of the work. “Allegedly, I started kicking furiously,” Leonardo DiCaprio told an interviewer at NPR in 2014. “My father took that as a sign, and I suppose DiCaprio wasn’t that far from da Vinci. And so, my dad, being the artist that he is, said, ‘That’s our boy’s name.’ ” That I first encountered this origin story as a child at the height of Leo-mania in the nineties, in an unofficial souvenir book about the then-twenty-one-year-old actor and heartthrob, feels entirely apposite: it is a clever bit of mythmaking, an anecdote that might just as well have belonged to classic Hollywood and the era of Photoplay or Screenland as to the first, faltering days of the online age. DiCaprio’s father, an underground comics publisher who associated with both Timothy Leary and the graphic artist and world-renowned macrophiliac Robert Crumb, foresaw Leonardo’s future status as an artist even if he was not certain of the medium he would work in. Many of us who were prepubescent when Leonardo DiCaprio first rose to real prominence are eminently aware of his nineties image as the ultimate nonthreatening (very nearly nonsexual) sex symbol, so rosy-faced and champagne-haired and softly pretty that that he might as well have been a handsome girl, but the ardor of his swooning fanbase did not cancel out his reputation in adult critical circles as a genuine early master of his craft. Consider the cool, casual way he delivered Shakespeare in Romeo + Juliet (1996), Baz Luhrmann’s loony, technicolor adaptation of the play: young, alive, unmistakably Californian, he spoke all his thee’s and thou’s with the throwaway inflection of a person fluently communicating in a second language they had practiced all their lives.

As it happened, DiCaprio ended up with a more literal link to art in later life, becoming a collector of such scale and (to use Phillips’s word) eminence that, in spite of his being a supposedly frivolous Hollywood A-lister, the art world takes him fairly seriously. Unlike, say, collecting classic cars or couture clothing, the maintenance of an art collection has the dual benefit, for a celebrity, of conferring cultural cachet and trumpeting their tremendous wealth (provided, of course, that their selections knowingly and tastefully run the gamut from aesthetically desirable to conceptually rigorous, haute-contemporary to historical). DiCaprio—who does not seem to have an art buyer in his employ, and who therefore presumably actually cares about the pieces he acquires—is catholic in his tastes, collecting works by artists like Basquiat and Picasso as well as other, much newer works by relative unknowns.

It may be the comprehensive breadth of his collection that has led to his being courted, then immortalized, by more than one prominent artist. Elizabeth Peyton has painted him twice—the first work, Swan, was produced based on a photograph by David LaChapelle in 1998, and the second, Leonardo, was created after DiCaprio sat for her in 2013. In Swan, the actor is at the vertiginous height of his babyish loveliness, and he is depicted with a swan’s neck draped around his shoulders, ruby-lipped and pouting, his eyes bluer than any human being’s and his skin as pale and as bloodless as a vampire’s. In Leonardo, he looks stolid and serious, his flat cap pulled down to hide a little of his famous face. There is an evident difference in the style of both these works: Swan is more abstracted, closer to a fantasy than to a fact, and Leonardo has a detailed intimacy that makes it more recognizably an image of its subject. In addition to the maturation of the painter, it is reasonable to imagine that her first portrayal of DiCaprio, especially because it has been drawn from a heavily stylized fashion image, has more to do with how she imagined him at a great, awestruck distance in the nineties, and the second is a more accurate and less starry record of what it is really like to meet one’s hero, i.e., sometimes not as glamorous as one might think.

In her list of the top ten cultural objects of the year for Artforum in 1999, Peyton cited Leonardo DiCaprio’s brief appearance in the 1998 Woody Allen film Celebrity as an artistic highlight. Playing a young A-list actor with the generic, haute-American name Brandon Darrow, DiCaprio is required to stand in for all of Hollywood’s excesses, and he does so with aplomb, strutting through an Atlantic City casino and snorting cocaine off the back of his delicate hand with such assurance and such grace that it is easy to see why he was a phenomenon in the late nineties. His cameo is “ten electrifying minutes of seeing Leonardo be what he really is,” Peyton rhapsodized. “Usually we have to see him being nice and innocent. Here he is a huuuuge star: powerful, arrogant, and beautiful.” That combination of power and beauty is what the painter aims to capture in her subject in Swan, and the cruel and foppish pursing of his lips suggests a little arrogance too. Although Peyton has reproduced her young DiCaprio from an editorial photograph, her choice to use the image with a swan may be a subtle nod to Zeus, who in Greek myth disguised himself as one in order to fuck Leda, as if he were a celebrity disguising himself to hook up with an unfamous fan.

In 2019—by which time he was very powerful indeed, even if he was also significantly less beautiful—DiCaprio commissioned the Swiss artist Urs Fischer to produce a portrait of his family, presumably hoping to usher his art-appreciating mother and father into the annals of art history in much the same way he himself had been immortalized in those earlier works by Peyton. Fischer chose to render the DiCaprio family at a larger-than-life scale, not in paint or marble but in wax, as part of an ongoing series of candle works. The piece, titled Leo (George & Irmelin), shows two melded Leonardos, one being embraced by his mother, Irmelin, and one apparently engaged in conversation with his father, George, in a setup meant to reference the son’s status as the child of separated parents. The figures, brilliant white with light pink and baby blue touches, are designed to melt into liquid once the wicks that emerge from their four respective heads are lit, and inside they are pitch-black, making the piece a rather bleak portrayal of a shattered family unit.

Looking from Elizabeth Peyton’s Swan to her later Leonardo, it is possible to see a record of another kind of dissolution, from the smooth and stainless early Leo to the older, less cherubic incarnation, a transformation that seemed to happen at DiCaprio’s behest as he eschewed stylists and personal trainers in his off-set downtime—a destruction of his ultrasaleable and almost feminine cuteness in favor of a more crumpled human guise, not overexercised or neatly shaven or attired in designer clothing but more versatile, more real. Paradoxically, in spite of his profile as a Hollywood actor never having been more serious or more prominent, in Leonardo and in Leo (George & Irmelin), his image is not necessarily that of a “huuuuge star,” but of something closer to the thing he “really is”: a very famous middle-aged man who has been touched by time in more or less the same way as an average and unfamous one, his youthful luminousness having melted like pale wax. The writer Osbert Sitwell once observed that those who sat for portraits by John Singer Sargent looked at the results and “understood, at last, how rich they were.” One wonders if DiCaprio looked at Urs Fischer’s rendering of him as a thing of obvious impermanence, a fleeting source of light, and finally understood that no amount of wealth would stave off death, however many twenty-four-year-olds he slept with.

3. The Martyred Celebrity

In 2017, the painter Sam McKinniss produced a portrait of the late Whitney Houston entitled Star Spangled Banner, based on a shot from Houston’s transcendent performance of the American national anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991. The piece is a spotless invocation of the blend of tragedy and majesty that now characterizes Houston’s story. She is framed in close-up, her lips parted either in preparedness to sing or in the aftermath of having unleashed her soaring, immaculate voice, flawless as crystal, and the fact we cannot tell which of these moments is depicted hardly matters—all that does is that this face, this mouth, is the place from which once emanated something of such holy beauty that it’s easy to imagine Houston feeling heavy with the knowledge of her staggering ability, so that the sheen on her skin might signify exertion, but might also indicate that she is nervous.

Interestingly, Houston’s version of the anthem was not live, but prerecorded: in the video McKinniss uses as a reference, she is singing, but into a dead mic, making the performance itself a constructed simulacrum of the experience of seeing Whitney Houston sing, and the painting of this moment an effective simulacrum of that simulacrum. Watching the clip, it is easy to slip into the belief that what we’re seeing is reality, and that there is no space between the ecstatic vocal we are hearing and the one emerging from her body. This is perhaps the quality that makes a good celebrity, and makes good art, and makes good art about celebrities: it’s magic, the ability to cast a spell or an illusion without letting the one being hypnotized know that they’re being fooled.

McKinniss has often maintained that he paints swans because swans are, in their own way, celebrities, reasoning that their long affiliation with romance makes them so soppily familiar, and so loved, that they might as well be A-listers in their own right. It is this sentimentality, I think, which gives Star Spangled Banner its almost inexplicable power. How does one explain the presence of a feeling in a painting? The easiest thing to point to is the source material, which has been carefully selected to show Houston in a moment of potential and personal triumph; less easy to point to is the exact method with which McKinniss manages to capture the glimmer of vulnerability in her eyes, the wonder in the slackness of her mouth.

McKinniss’s painting brings to mind another artwork about an extremely famous, abundantly talented woman who met an untimely, tragic end—namely, Andy Warhol’s fading silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe, her tight smile and slender, embowed brows replicated and then ghosted, faintly, into nothing, into death. Painted in 1962, the year Monroe died from a barbiturate overdose, Marilyn Diptych is based on a publicity still from the Henry Hathaway 1953 film Niagara, and as with McKinniss’s choice of source material for his Whitney Houston painting, the decision to use this particular shot is charged. In Niagara, Marilyn plays a beautiful adulteress named Rose who, like Marilyn, is doomed, more or less from the film’s first frame, by her sexuality. She is hoping to abandon her jealous and violent husband, George, in favor of a lover who will keep her in the forefront of his mind like an especially catchy love song. Like Marilyn’s own second husband, the baseball player Joe DiMaggio, George has captured and attempted to domesticate a femme fatale, and cannot understand why marriage has not been enough to curb her appetite—the addition of a diamond to her finger not, as it turns out, being equal to a neutering or a lobotomy. Murder, as is often the case for a man like this, is decided on as the appropriate solution. When advertisements for Hathaway’s film boasted that it contained “the longest walk in cinematic history”—the walk being Marilyn’s undulating sway, captured on 116 unbroken feet of celluloid—they failed to mention that this walk was her character’s attempt to escape death. (Her imminent demise, of course, was what made the exercise so piquant and so titillating, whether or not audiences wanted to admit it to themselves.)

In taking Marilyn Monroe as she appeared circa Niagara—her first true lead, and a role that would help calcify her reputation as a woman who was just too hot to be allowed to live—Warhol forces us to rewind to the first reel of the picture, showing her vividly rendered in yolk yellow and rose pink, a slash of cerulean blue over her eyes, and then repeats the image until minor variations become clear. Marilyn’s career, too, was quite often a series of repeated images with minor variations, her astounding comic talent and nearly untapped ability to render delicate and trembling emotion typically forced into the unyielding shape of sexy airheads, gold-diggers, and girls with no aspirations outside marrying rich.

In the diptych’s second half, the same picture reappears in black and white, and rather than subtle dissimilitude, each new version is marked by an obvious degradation, as if it has been eroded or destroyed. A dark smudge, like a grave contusion, runs vertically through one column, and another is so highly contrasted that very little remains of the subject other than her most essential features, showing Marilyn Monroe as she might be spoofed in a newspaper cartoon, or used to advertise a beauty product.

“You’re a killer of art,” Willem de Kooning once supposedly slurred drunkenly at Andy Warhol at a party, making a familiar accusation before doubling down with something slightly different: “You’re a killer of beauty.” If the former is debatable, the latter is a curious accusation to level at a man most famous for loving surfaces, perfection, plastic. It is, though, an accurate reading of Marilyn Diptych, a work that is fundamentally about the public’s ravenous consumption of, and then destruction of, the beauty of an actress who was given little opportunity to prove what else she could provide. You’re a killer of beauty, the repeated, fading faces seem to say to those who look at them, the work’s tone far closer to that of the pieces that make up Warhol’s Death and Disaster series than that of his more conventional Hollywood portraits. Marilyn Diptych is Marilyn Monroe as a car wreck; as a jet crash; as a desolate electric chair. Like McKinniss’s Star Spangled Banner, it succeeds in its determination to depict something essential of its subject, making visible to the naked eye what we might previously only have been able to experience with the gut or the heart. Unlike McKinniss’s painting, what it communicates is not the radiance or the talent of the woman at its center, but the obverse: the insidious and unstoppable leeching of those qualities by an unfeeling industry, a media with a thirst for tragedy and a slavering audience, until what remains is so faint we can no longer perceive it as the image of a woman at all.

 

From Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object, out from MACK Books this month. 

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Bookforum, Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New Republic.

At Miu Miu, in Paris

Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

Inside the Palais d’Iéna, it was dark-colored carpets and dark-colored walls. Chocolaty and rust-colored and warm. There was music that was playing and it was ambient, it was a shudder of synthesizers, it sounded like a womb. A loop of a video made by the Belgian American artist Cécile B. Evans was projected on screens set up on all sides of the room. I was not sure what to do during this time before the show started. I decided that a good thing to do while waiting for the fashion show to start was to orient myself in the space. I watched girls take selfies. I walked past the pit where photographers organized themselves, setting up their cameras. I was pacing, you might say; I was walking fast and with very little purpose.  

Photographers swarmed actresses and actors walking in to the venue wearing full Miu Miu looks—things like teeny-tiny plaid shorts and a navy blue blouse with a puritan collar, or a red two-piece with a miniskirt that is kind of like an evil badminton uniform. Miu Miu girls and theys, I observed, are chic in a way that is like, I’m a pixie, I know my angles, I’m very charming about it. I have never felt like that in my life. Speaking of knowing your angles, I kept getting in the photographers’ shots. Sorry miss, do you mind moving, you’re in the shot, they said to me. I was happy to oblige. Sydney Sweeney walked in with her handlers, glamorously wearing sunglasses inside. Raf Simons, the legendary Belgian designer and co–creative director of Prada, got caught up in the photoshoot of a famous K-pop star, and a friend I was talking with swore she heard him say, Jesus Christ. I wrote a note in my phone that said: have u ever watched a really famous person being interviewed b4? its rlly weird lol. They enter a room and they are swarmed by a whole swath of people. How do they come up for air? I was having trouble with that at that moment, coming up for air. 

I also felt, among other things, that I had a new appreciation for the music of Drake, the chanteuse. How does the song “Club Paradise” go again? No wonder why I feel awkward at this Fashion Week shit! No wonder why I keep fucking up the double-cheek kiss! Ha ha ha.

Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

I made it back to my seat. The Cécile B. Evans video installation morphed on the screens. The actress Guslagie Malanda, who starred in the movie Saint Omer, was in the video reading a kind of prose poem, and there were animations of flood water running through some bleachers and pixelated images of wind, a quasi psychedelic montage. The models entered the runway, one by one. They wore oversize leather gardening gloves and bubble skirts and nurse uniforms and perfect black dresses with cutouts on the sides and little leather sneakers and little pointy-toed Mary Janes. Wool overcoats and Gigi Hadid in (faux) furs. Int’l Klein blue stockings paired with a blazer that looked like it was maybe burnt orange suede—kind of the same color as a Goldfish snack cracker. 

My favorite part was the  middle section of the show—when the dresses became these sort of severe diner waitress / nurse outfits and the models were wearing fuck-me pearls, styled with little sunglasses that looked like the ones I remember my father wearing while manning the grill in the summer at my childhood home, rotating hot dogs with a big metal poker. Kind of a classic fashion-girl move—to deconstruct something classique by way of adding something masc to the mix. I was doing that too, honestly. I was wearing a beautiful, backless floor-length dress from a hip New York designer and also a disgusting Dickies jacket. I am not going to lie. I wore it because I wanted someone to notice me. Instead, I felt like a praying mantis with googly eyes. 

There was the parade of models at the end, then the procession of spectators pouring out of the building, then the procession of taxis driving out of the circle, and on my very own two feet I boldly became the boulevardier en route to the métro, passing colonnades and mansard roofs and perfectly manicured trees and tourists just standing there in the middle of the street, without a purpose (basically me). I felt really glam on the train back, wearing my fashion-person outfit. I was listening to a YouTube rip of some twelve-inch dance track you can buy on Discogs for like two hundred dollars. And after that, a very old nine-minute Kanye demo that sounds like it was recorded by Oscar the Grouch. Then I put on the new record by Jessy Lanza where she goes like “I don’t think you’re very funny, sorry!” I felt like one million dollars. I also felt really smelly, because I had forgotten to put on deodorant. A lot of people on the train were looking at me. Probably because I was wearing a floor-length backless dress covered in sparkles. I went back to my apartment for a few hours and ate soup standing up and texted my friends stuff like: lol Im about to go to this afterparty alone I dont know anyone there. 

I went to the afterparty and I hardly knew anyone there. The afterparty was at a place called Gigi, on the Avenue Montaigne. I couldn’t figure if there was any relation to Gigi Hadid, who was hosting the party. I’m pretty sure it was just a coincidence. Bradley Cooper wasn’t there, in case you were wondering! When I went in I didn’t know what to do with myself, what to do with my hands. I saw Ethel Cain at the bar and she told one of her friends that she was a little drunk. Nice, babe, I thought. I ran into someone I knew from New York. I was introduced to a photographer from the New York Times, who ended up being my main party friend for the evening. We did dancing and he told me I needed to get over myself, but, like, in a nice way that I needed to hear. As in: You look great, calm down. I talked to a Qatari American conceptual artist with a tooth gem who pointed out two girls with lip fillers taking a selfie with a Miu Miu purse. I gracefully accepted the gift of a glass of champagne. Being a little provincial I call all sparkling wine champagne, but this was the real thing. 

Everyone smoked cigs on the roof and the music was sugary and four-on-the-floor and the tooth-gemmed artist told me that what she liked about me was that I didn’t shave my underarms and that I was wearing a sleeveless dress in the winter in Paris. She told me about the book Moby-Dick and how the whale had a little lower layer, a sensitive part, and that most people had that too and the ones that didn’t you couldn’t really trust. Gigi Hadid posed for photos. 50 percent of the people in the room were dressed in Miu Miu and 50 percent were wearing their own stuff. An Italian lady dressed in all red lounged decadently against the side of the bar, sipping her champagne, like some kind of midcentury cabaret star. I heard someone say Simz! And I turned around and it was the rapper Little Simz. This felt like the most high-stakes partying I had ever done in my whole life. It was one of those situations where I could feel my own blood move inside of my body. It was one of those situations where I felt like a small speck of space dust, gliding through the universe. I checked on several occasions to make sure my boob hadn’t fallen out of my dress. It had not. I talked to Lorde. I can’t tell you what she said because I promised her I wouldn’t quote her in the article but I can say that I asked her if she’d ever read Infinite Jest. It got late, after 1 A.M., and I suddenly became very tired. I had been behaving intensely. I had been intellectualizing my surroundings for hours. 

Here is how my evening ended. I called a car. I said goodbye. I saw the Eiffel Tower out the window. I saw the Seine. I saw all the quais and ponts you know about from the movies. From all the paintings that you walk past in the Met, maybe while you are hand in hand with a lover. I watched the glamorous parts turn into the less glamorous parts—cheap motels and big-box stores and brutalist municipal buildings. I watched the car turn on to the Périphérique—the ring road around Paris—and then exit at the Porte de Bagnolet. I got back to my apartment in the twentieth that I was living in for the next two months. I took great care to walk quietly, because of this thing where my downstairs neighbors accused me of being “a loud walker,” “it is very annoying!” Then I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning and it was like I was a Toulouse-Lautrec subject, stretching out to wipe a little drool off my face. I thought about New York, and how I missed it. I responded to like thirty text messages from my friends. They all wanted to know how my night went. I was happy to oblige. 

 

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published nonfiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.

Backyard Bird Diary

All illustrations by the author.

September 16, 2017

While watching hummingbirds buzz around me, I recalled a fantasy every child has: that I could win the trust of wild animals and they would willingly come to me. I imagined tiny avian helicopters dining on my palm. To lure them, I bought Lilliputian hummingbird feeders, four for $10. Hope came cheap enough, but I was also realistic. It might take months to gain a hummingbird’s interest in the feeder and for it to lose its fear of me.

Yesterday, I set a little feeder on the rail near the regular hummingbird feeders on the patio and then sat at a table about ten feet away. Within minutes, a hummingbird came to inspect, a male with a flashing red head. He hovered, gave a cursory glance, and then left. At least he noticed it. A good beginning. Then he returned, inspected it again from different angles, and left. The third time, he did a little dance around the feeder, approached, and stuck his bill in the hole and drank. I was astonished. That was fast. Other hummingbirds came, and they did their usual territorial display of chasing each other off before the victor returned. Throughout the day, I noticed that the hummingbirds seemed to prefer the little feeder over the larger one. Why was that? Because it was new and they had to take turns in claiming it?

Today, at 1:30 P.M., I sat at the patio table again. It was quiet. I called the songbirds. Each day I pair my own whistled birdsong with tidbits of food to encourage them to come. In about two minutes, I heard the raspy chitter and squeak of the titmouse and chickadee. They sounded excited to find peanuts. Then I heard the staticky sound of a hummingbird. It was a male. I had left the feeder on the table where I was sitting. I put it on my palm and held it out. Within ten seconds the hummingbird came over, landed on my hand, and immediately started feeding. I held my breath and kept my hand with the feeder as still as possible. His feet felt scratchy. He was assessing me the whole time he fed. We stared at each other, eye to eye.

I remembered what Jack Laws said: “Feel the bird. Be the bird.” What did the hummingbird see in my eyes? Is that how a bird evaluates trustworthiness? As he fed, I examined the tiny feathers on his head, the pink, orange, and red color at his throat, the wing blur, the exquisitely tiny feet. I tried to mentally recite what I was seeing so I could later draw the hummingbird: The overlay of tiny feathers on its head are successively larger as they move from the front of the bill toward the back of the head. The legs are short, and its toes are the width of dental floss. What is he noting about me?

After a minute, the hummingbird shot up into the oak tree. He had remained on the hand feeder for forty-five seconds. Or maybe my excitement had lengthened the actual duration of that moment, one that altered my life. I had gained entry into a wild animal’s world. It was my own backyard with a portal big enough for the bird I imagined myself to be. An hour later, I was seated at the patio table eating lunch when I heard the familiar sound of beating wings around my head. I am certain he was the same hummingbird because when I held up the feeder, he immediately settled and started feeding. After a minute, he flew up to my face, inches away, eye to eye. I could feel a little breeze coming off his wings. He seemed fearless, and I was slightly concerned his little sword would pierce my eye. Was he curious? Was he being aggressive, warning me that he owned the feeder? Whatever his meaning, he had come back. He had acknowledged me. We have a relationship. I am in love.

December 17, 2017

First thing in the morning, I always pull up the bathroom shades so I can see what the water looks like on the bay and harbor. It’s different every day, sometimes flat and clear, flat and sparkly, gray and choppy. Whatever birds are on the feeders usually scatter as soon as I come to the window. Yesterday, one did not, a fluffy Pine Siskin. It continued to eat. A fearless bird, I thought, or maybe a newly arrived émigré, famished from the journey. I stepped out onto the porch. It was chilly. The Pine Siskin was still sitting on the bottom of the seed feeder, eating with gusto, just two feet away from where I stood. The puffed-up coat of feathers made me think it was a baby bird. I could see soft down peeking from under the larger spread of wing feathers. At times, the Pine Siskin stopped eating and closed its eyes. I guessed it was exhausted, a young bird getting its first meal away from the nest. But then I realized it was December, not spring. Would there be baby birds this time of year? Also, the Pine Siskins are migrants, not year-round residents. They do not breed here. I saw a mess gathering around its beak, the bits of sunflower seeds it had been trying to eat. Was it possibly sick? As if in answer, it abruptly flew to me and landed on my hand. It seemed dazed. This was bad. It hopped down to the water bowl and tried to drink. Water dribbled out of its messy mouth. It sipped more frantically before returning to the feeder. I noticed more. Its rump was soiled. It was shitting watery diarrhea. And then it sat motionless with its half-closed eyes.

I contacted U.S. Fish and Wildlife and learned there is a salmonellosis outbreak across the U.S. related to an irruption of Pine Siskins—meaning, a massive migration of larger than usual numbers. Because Pine Siskins gather in social groups, a single sick Pine Siskin can easily infect its tribe and any bird that visits the same feeders and water bowls it has used. From what I read, by the time a bird is puffed out and behaving strangely—like flying to a human—it will likely die within the day. I decided to catch the bird to take it out of circulation, keep it warm in a box, and take it to a wildlife rehab center where, if it could not be saved, it would be humanely euthanized. Although the siskin was slow, I missed catching it.

Today, I did not see the sick bird. It is probably dead. I’ve taken down the feeders. I gave away the bird food I had recently bought, sacks of sunflower seeds and Nyjer, blocks of suet. I am not sure I will ever use the feeders again.

I have been trying to do a drawing of the sick Pine Siskin, using as reference a photo I took before I realized it was sick. My attempts look flat and stiff. It’s as if I’ve forgotten everything I learned about drawing birds. The joy is gone. In the photo, the signs of impending death are obvious. I now know too much about this disease. Its fluffed-out feathers were a futile attempt to stay warm because it could no longer thermoregulate. Its messy beak was due to an inability to swallow. Its half-closed eyes confirmed the ebbing of life.

June 20, 2018

Alarm cheeps! Four newly hatched California Quail were wandering alone next to our garage. Marcia and the kids next door noticed them first. When we approached, they froze and quieted. One buried its head into the corner of the rock wall. If left out in the open, the chicks would be in danger of being killed by a cat, hawk, crow, Jay, or car.

We figured the parents must be nearby. They live within the bushes and bamboo hedges of a quadrant of houses, including ours. I see the covey occasionally in the yard, several blue males and about eight brown females. Is this a family or a harem? We placed the babies underneath a shrub and stood to the side to see what would happen. The quail adults came out immediately from a bush just ten feet away and sounded the urgent cry, Ooo-OOO-oo! Ooo-OOOO-ooo! Kidnappers have stolen our children! Soon four fluffballs raced out and joined their parents and a dozen other siblings. They moved quickly and smoothly together as a unit, as if on invisible roller skates.

I wonder how many of these chicks survive. Unlike other birds, they are born capable of walking with those humongous feet, and they can peck the ground and forage. But they are still utterly defenseless. They cannot fly. Even adult quail are vulnerable because they are relatively slow fliers, no match against a hawk. Their best defense is subterfuge: to go under bushes and pretend to be inanimate objects. Babies, like the wandering four, are probably born with this instinct to freeze in place.

A quail’s cry is always a message of great urgency. When I put millet on the bathroom ledge and flagstone, I imitate the alarm cry, “Ooo-OOO-oo! Ooo-OOOO-ooo!” It means they better hurry on over and eat up the millet before the Scrub Jay gets to it first. I don’t tell them I will put out more if it does.

August 18, 2018

I am pleased to see that my backyard has become a menagerie of fledglings—baby Juncos, finches, and Scrub Jays—all learning to fly. Their goal is to land onto the patio cage feeders at an angle that enables them to enter via one of the 1 ½–inch grid openings. We’re at baby steps. And some fledglings are slower learners than others. They hang on to the feeder. And to enter, they must swing up or let go to grab the grid bars closer to the top. A few remain stuck and cry for help.

Today, on the back porch, an adult Scrub Jay returned to its disconsolate baby sitting on the rail. It popped a seed into the crying baby’s open mouth. They flew off together. She later brought it back to the feeder for another lesson. But the fledge balked and jumped down and ate fallen seeds on the ground instead. The adult flew off. Alone, the young bird walked upright to inspect the porch. It surprised me when it launched itself onto the feeder. Where’s Mom? She should see this. Unfortunately, it remained hanging on to the bottom of the feeder, its tail tucked under, a position that made it unlikely it could hoist itself up. It was bug-eyed as it stared at the seeds so tantalizingly close. After fifteen seconds, it dropped off the feeder and made do with a few chips it managed to knock loose. I saw the baby jay an hour later, still trying to launch onto the feeder. It already shows a key trait of a very smart Scrub Jay. Persistence.

November 10, 2018

When I knew almost nothing about birds, I bought red hummingbird nectar in a bottle and a fancy handblown glass globe with a rubber stopper and spigot. I hung this on a shepherd’s hook in an open area of the front yard. I never saw a hummingbird. I left the fancy feeder there, forgotten, for months. I later learned that feeders must be changed every few days, lest the nectar mold. The mold in my feeder was welded to the sides. The rubber spigot and stopper had cracked into pieces from being out in the sun. I also learned that store-bought red nectar is nothing more than water, sugar, red dye, and a waste of money. Better to make fresh nectar—one part white cane sugar to four parts boiling water. Skip the dye. Throw out the first batch of nectar I made with organic sugar. It’s not better. It’s bad for them. How many hummingbirds did I kill before I knew better? I trashed the fancy glass feeder and later the charming replacements that were a pain in the ass to clean. I dumped feeders with metal bottoms that rusted.

I now have six acrylic feeders with clear bottoms and red lids. They’re antithetical to the natural garden effect I wanted to create. I placed them in different areas of the patio, veranda, and back office porch. This afternoon I saw an Anna’s Hummingbird approach one. Its head looked black until it turned toward light, and it instantly blazed iridescent red and pink. Reflected glory. It was a male. The females are a very classy subtle green with a few red spots at the throat. While aloft in a holding pattern, the male hummingbird did a quick surveillance of his surroundings, rotating his body and head in all directions to determine if competitors were nearby. Would he be the one who would chase or be chased? He delicately alighted on the feeder, wings still fluttering as his feet clasped onto the bar.

I’ve examined those tiny feet when hummingbirds land on the palm of my hand to drink from a tiny feeder. Short legs, tiny feet, and teeny-tiny toes and talons. They cannot hop, walk, scratch at dirt, or clutch food like other birds. Their toes can, however, grasp a wire, a spaghetti-size twig, or the thin perch of a nectar feeder. And in battle with a competitor, they will aim those feet as a weapon. Are their feet that dangerous? Their talons on my palm feel scratchy, not lethal. Today I discovered something else hummingbirds can do with their feet. A male hummingbird was chasing another, a female. The chase was leisurely, fond pursuit and not a chase. Season-wise, it seems late—or early—for courtship. Then again, I read hummingbirds can mate up to three or even four times a year. When the female landed on the limb of the oak tree, the male landed about two feet away and moved toward her. He was sliding on his feet, half an inch, half an inch, half an inch. When he was within ten inches, the female flew away. I swear he had the look of a jilted lover in disbelief. Was that indeed a courtship maneuver? Why didn’t he land closer to the female from the start? Many animals draw closer to another to either gain affection or kill. Human teenagers in my day did that to flirt in a movie theater. Oops, is that your leg? I was just reaching for more popcorn. I read that among hummingbirds mating occurs when a female splays herself on a branch. So maybe this male was hoping the female would turn the branch into a nuptial bower right then and there. Sorry, bud.

The more I observe, the more I realize that every part of a bird and every behavior has a specific purpose, a reason, and an individual meaning. Instinct does not account for everything that is fascinating.

 

From The Backyard Bird Chronicles, forthcoming from Knopf this April.

Amy Tan is the author of several novels, including The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. She is a coproducer and coscreenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club and is on the board of American Bird Conservancy. She lives in Sausalito, California.

“Let Me Tell You Something”: A Conversation with Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro. Photograph by Stephen Alvarez.

 

Last June, the Review published Jamie Quatro’s “Little House”—what appears at first glance to be a quiet, traditional story about childhood and family life. Gentle in tone and careful in construction, it leaves the reader discomfited to realize that the narrator has left the thing that drove her to tell it—the real story—almost entirely unsaid. The story is part of a triptych by Quatro, the second part of which, “Yogurt Days,” was published in The New Yorker; in that story, the same narrator remembers her evangelical mother taking her along as she attempted to save the spirit of a man suffering from a mysterious (to the narrator) illness. The third story, “Two Men, Mary,” published in our most recent Winter issue, completes the triptych, and is itself structured in three parts. Anna recalls herself first at sixteen, working in a frozen yogurt shop, and her first sexual encounters with older men; then, decades later, as a published writer on a plane to a literary conference, who has a rendezvous with the man sitting next to her; and finally, in the present, where she turns to a very different kind of surrender. We exchanged emails about the uses of autobiography in fiction, how these stories came about, and what we are to make of their singular narrator, Anna.

 

Which of the stories in this series came first? Were they published in the order you wrote them?

“Two Men, Mary” came first. When I was drafting, I had no idea the story would end up as part of a triptych. “Little House” was the second story I drafted, but chronologically, it comes first, so it’s great that it was the first piece published of the three.

In “Little House,” Anna—who narrates all three stories—is looking back on her early childhood and interrogating her relationship with her father and her younger sister, who has accused the father of sexual abuse. After finishing the first two, I realized that I would need to write a third piece foregrounding Anna’s relationship with her mother. That story, ”Yogurt Days,” also wrestles with themes of faith and sexuality. You know, I keep thinking I’m going to write something new, something I’ve never written before. And I keep coming back to God and sex.

How do you decide what is fair game and what isn’t—whether to transform autobiographical details, or keep them as they happened?

This material is really close to the bone for me. I grew up in Tucson. My first job was at a TCBY. I have a sister I haven’t seen or heard from in twenty years. I avoided writing about her for a long time because I was afraid it would make the schism worse. It was only in the past several years that I realized, We’re at the worst, we’ve been there a long time. I decided I had nothing to lose.

We’re used to the idea of an unreliable narrator, but this narrator seems to have a different syndrome. Do you have a name for her type?

When I was drafting, I thought of the narrator as simply “retrospective”—the word unreliable didn’t occur to me. But you’re right, she has some serious blind spots. I like your word, syndrome. Suggesting something systemic (maybe even insidious?) infecting the narrative approach. Like an illness or physical condition that cannot be helped. What about “the blinkered retrospective”? Though I wonder if all retrospective narrators are blinkered, to a degree.

“Two Men, Mary,” is, quite virtuosically, itself a triptych within the larger one. What drew you to the idea of visiting this character at these points in her life?

Well, “Two Men, Mary” wasn’t a triptych at first. Originally, the story opened with Anna and her poet friend having lunch and talking about praying the rosary. Anna went home, got out her deceased mother-in-law’s rosary, and found herself talking to her mother-in-law, Carol. And what she told her about were the things that happened with Mark and Roberto. Then the story ended with the Mary/Carol thread, revealing the suicide and closing with adult Anna and her husband returning to the yogurt shop in Tucson. It was a very different story. A soupy admixture of disjointed material, the story very clearly announcing its intentions—I’m going to confess something to Mary/Carol. Now, here’s the confession.

I sent that early draft to a few trusted writer friends, among them Lauren Groff, who said something like, “I don’t like to be told explicitly what a story is about, I enjoy making the leap myself—what if you open with the men, then do the more surprising thing and pivot away from the male and into the realm of the female?” Lauren’s a genius at structure. No one else I know has her intuitive eye and architectural grasp of shape. The decision to gather up all the fragmented Mary/Carol material and cast it as its own section is what allowed me to revise the story as a triptych.

But why these discrete moments, with Mark and Roberto? I didn’t know why when I was drafting. It was just what came. I felt some intuitive connection and went with it. But now I can see that in both the Mark and Roberto episodes, Anna is navigating the line between desire and repulsion. Mark and his friend Doug are objects of Anna’s desire, and both end up repulsing her and robbing her of her sexual agency—especially Mark, who physically penetrates her. Roberto, too, penetrates Anna without warning and without obtaining consent—and had Anna reacted differently, that too would have been an assault. But now Anna has agency. She makes a conscious decision to allow and enjoy Roberto’s advances, and to invite him to her hotel room. In a way, she’s reclaiming the agency she lost as a fifteen-year-old, though it’s a tainted reclamation. She’s cheating on her husband, after all.

I’m curious, then, about the narrator’s desire in the third episode to  “surrender to Mary,” to “a feminine divine.” How do you think about that turn in her?

I think this is why the pivot to the feminine, as Lauren suggested, was the right move structurally. In the first two episodes, Anna surrenders to men—to Mark by force, to Roberto by choice. To her father, in “Little House,” and to a male conception of God via her church in “Yogurt Days.” Now, entering her fifties, she turns away from the masculine. But the surrender to a feminine divine—the desire to do so—seems to be more than a turning away from a patriarchal understanding of God. It seems also to be a turning away from the sexual past, the assault, abuse, temptation, infidelity. And in making the turn, she finds her one true source of regret—the way she failed her mother-in-law, Carol.

Roberto’s refrain of “Let me tell you something” is so memorable, and captures a certain kind of man so well. It’s the writer’s credo, in a way, too.  

Roberto is doing a little bit of posturing when he uses the phrase—Pay attention, what I’m about to say is of the utmost importance. Of course, the irony is that because he prefaces nearly everything with “Let me tell you something,” the phrase loses its potency. It’s just throat-clearing.

But you’re right—divested of context, “Let me tell you something” reads as the story-writer’s credo. I can’t remember where I heard this—it might have been something that Amy Hempel, my thesis advisor at Bennington, said—“The invisible first sentence of every great short story is, Oh my God, sit down, you’re never going to believe what I’m about to tell you.” I’ve actually written that sentence at the top of my finished drafts, to see if the energy in my opening is there. I’ve also used it as a writing prompt with my students. Often I’ll read a perfectly competent story draft but still come away thinking, Why are you telling me this? What is so important that I should drop everything and spend the next half hour listening to you?

Your relationship to religion and religiosity seems to me one of the most fascinating and consistent through lines in your work, and it also takes many forms. I’m interested in how that connects or doesn’t to your own relationship with religion, past or present.

When I was studying with David Gates, he kept saying, “Jamie, you need to let your characters do things on the page that you would never do. Let them fail, let them suffer.”

I took David’s advice and started letting my characters do messy, “sinful” things, like cheat on their husbands in airport hotels and leave their Presbyterian congregations to join nature-worship cults with sexual initiation rites. Many of my characters abandon their Christian faith entirely, or actively preach heresy—especially in my forthcoming novel, in which the Devil puts on a play re-visioning the Gospel narrative with himself as the rightful Christ figure.

Flaubert said (I’m paraphrasing), Keep a clean and orderly life so you can be violent and messy on the page. I believe in that advice. I’ve wrestled with my faith, of course—in fact, I would say wrestling is the mark of a viable religious practice—but I’ve never abandoned it. I somehow avoided the growing-up-in-church trauma that so many others experienced. Our Bishop recently put it this way: “There’s no cut so painful as a stained glass cut.” I have certainly left the legalism of right-wing American “evangelicalism” (I’ve spoken elsewhere about how that lovely old word has become tainted, mostly by the right-wing MAGA crowd), and, as of last year, am a confirmed Episcopalian. I love the Book of Common Prayer. I come to worship and feel like I’m eating organic whole foods after years of processed meals.

But when I was growing up in the church, I could see that most of the “rules” had nothing to do with Jesus. My parents were loving, and not as conservative as other parents. I was allowed to wear a bikini and have a boyfriend and go to dances. I was also an early and avid reader of the Bible, and of C. S. Lewis. I suppose it was reading that saved me from conflating legalism with the Church en masse.

What does a set of discrete stories do for you that’s different than, say, chapters? Have you thought about putting these characters into a novel?

I have not considered putting these characters into a novel. I’ve written two novels and the form terrifies me. Other forms come with ready-made boundaries—stanzas and meter, read-in-one-sitting length, or, for nonfiction, adherence to the (remembered) truth. The novel is anarchy. No blueprints, no parameters. You have to build a house but you know nothing about the square footage or the height or how many bedrooms. Maybe you have a vague sense that it will be a ranch-style bungalow. You take up your meager little hammer and hacksaw and figure out how to build the fucking house. Actually, it’s harder than that—you have to let the not-yet-built house teach you how it wants to be built. How does it teach you? Music. You listen to the sounds of what you’re doing—your hammering and sawing—for clues as to what this thing is supposed to look like.

And then, after a month or a year of work, you realize the whole thing is toppling. You’ve built one side up too far, or you haven’t laid the foundation properly, or you’ve put in way too many windows. Sometimes you can rework a wing, but probably you’ll have to knock the whole thing down and start over. Maddening.

 

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work and the story collection Cool for America.

Remembering Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024)

Photograph by Rae Armantrout.

It’s hard to believe Lyn is dead, because her mind, her spirit, if you will, was always so full of life. The last time I saw her, when she was already quite ill, she talked about the comical way the Hollywood writers’ strike had affected commencement speeches, and about what she’d learned about AI from a scientist she knew on the Berkeley faculty. She was still engaged with the world, in other words, despite her situation. She was a very private person, yet she opened herself up to other people and to new experiences again and again. As she says in her book The Fatalist, ”I adventure and consider fate / as occurrence and happenstance as destiny. I recite an epigraph. / It seems as applicable to the remarks I want to make as disorder / is to order.” It was like her to see opposites (order/disorder) as part of a whole—which is not to say she couldn’t take sides against oppression. She could and did.

As a girl, she loved reading the journals of explorers. She was a kind of explorer herself. For example, in the late eighties, she taught herself Russian and traveled first with other poets and then alone to the Soviet Union to translate the work of outsider poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. (And she was scheduled to spend a winter with scientists in Antarctica when she was diagnosed with breast cancer some twenty-odd years ago.) She didn’t believe in borders or in endings. As she says in My Life, “But a word is a bottomless pit.” She didn’t think that was a bad thing. It made her curious.

She had a unique combination of generosity and discernment, equanimity and élan. I admire her more than anyone I know. Her generosity was utterly without self-interest; her curiosity was never intrusive. These traits shone in her poetry as in her life. When I had cancer in 2006, she helped to organize a kind of private fundraising campaign among friends and sent me several thousand dollars. Because of her discretion, I don’t know who had contributed what exactly, but I’ve always suspected she was a major contributor herself.

She has influenced countless other poets, but no one else could come close to writing a “Lyn Hejinian” poem. I was impressed, influenced perhaps, by the way her poetry was, to quote one of her titles, a “language of inquiry.” The first book of hers I read, back in the mid-seventies, was called A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking. Back then the consensus seemed to be that “thought” was the province of philosophy. But as I’ve said, Lyn didn’t believe in borders. Her “October 6, 1986” poem in her book The Cell presents resistance as a kind of measuring device: “resistance is accurate—it / rocks and rides the momentum.” It is like her to cast resistance as a form of exploration, of appreciation even. That poem concludes with her characteristic humor: “It is not imperfect to / have died.” Those lines strike me with full force now. I want to scream that it is far from perfect that Lyn is dead, but she knew best.

—Rae Armantrout

Lyn Hejinian, poet, essayist, translator, teacher, and activist, was a major force in American and in international poetry. Her influence and presence became even greater over the decades. Emerging out of the community-oriented avant-garde movement known as Language (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry, a group that she helped found, Hejinian’s work stayed relatively faithful to her early aesthetic commitments, though her signature styles became more expansive and inclusive over time. She maintained fidelity to the founding influences of her community long after the Language poets were less active as a group; these influences included leftist and Marxist politics, social and cultural theory, and the writings of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not all Language poets followed the same stylistic paths, of course. Gertrude Stein was a guiding example for Hejinian, who restored a Steinian sense of play to American poetry at a time when the playful experiments of John Ashbery were dominant. Hejinian’s work was always inflected with extra energy; she wished to explore and express experience via the “open text,” the “new sentence,” the materiality of words and grammar through nonstandard forms of telling. Most of her writing, from the various versions of My Life (which began as thirty-seven sections with thirty-seven sentences) through later works like The Unfollowing, deploys a structural intelligence that pushes against predictability. Her forms play against themselves via alternative syntax and grammar. Her styles—again, one thinks of Stein and the cubist writing of early modernism—are quite flexible, allowing for the exploration of daily life and daily consciousness.

Lyn Hejinian was an extremely gifted and beloved teacher and colleague; an activist working to support labor interests in her places of employment; a translator who brought the works of such poets as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko to American readership; a publisher who helped found three independent presses and the organization Poets in Need; she was a cherished friend. I valued the time we spent together on two collaborations, both initiated in the nineties after we attended some conferences together. We discovered our aesthetic and ideological affinities overlapped after serving on a few panels. After realizing that we shared an interest in sentence diagramming, Lyn suggested we meet at the Musical Offering, a café in Berkeley halfway between our houses, to diagram sentences together. At first we were simply reading grammar books and studying alternative diagramming styles, but then we began diagramming sentences we loved on white sheets of paper. There was always more than one way. Our second collaboration was a group of “flexible sonnets” that sometimes involved fifteen or sixteen lines; we’d pass a poem back and forth until we had a satisfactory number of lines. We decided at one point that we should write a little more or less than a line each time, in order to confuse readers who might think they could tell the “Brenda lines” from the “Lyn lines.” We had a third collaboration in mind: to take a roll of adding-machine paper out to the Berkeley pier and write one very long sentence in a day. But these projects all had to be set aside because of our busyness in our teaching and in our family lives. I treasure the memory of time spent with Lyn, I treasure her writing and influence; she will be greatly missed.

—Brenda Hillman

On Saturday, February 24, my friend Roxi Power called from Santa Cruz and told me that Lyn Hejinian had died. We talked for a long time then. I recalled her writing, of course, remembering the collaborative book Sight that she’d written with Leslie Scalapino, which I’d taught in a small class at Penn State—a reading group for graduate student writers on what was possible and on what attentions our work asked of us. And some years later I’d been able to contribute a few lines to the back of her Book of a Thousand Eyes (which she wrote “in homage to Scheherazade”): it’s a big fine book on the night, three hundred pages, and in it she stretches the old bifurcations of sun and moon into a single and magnificently varied waking hour.

And we recalled her at once principled and generous ambivalence about what “best” might mean in her introduction to the 2004 Best American Poetry volume, where she wrote, “What is, or isn’t, a poem? What makes something poetic? These questions remain open. And the fact that there are no final answers is one source of the vitality of the art form.” (Bernadette Mayer once wrote, on her own sonnets, “If there are no conclusions why do we wish for them? Love must be a subject I felt.”)

More recently, at UC Berkeley, in a moment when it was crucial, Lyn supported Samia Rahimtoola and me in our ultimately successful effort to move the focus of the collapsing Berkeley Poetry Conference to the work and presence of writers of color. And in one of my very earliest moments at the university—almost twenty years ago!—she came by in her PT Cruiser and, in the same long afternoon, took me to a place she loved—the Oakland Museum of California—and then to two places that she thought, correctly, that I would love: Jack London Square with its “street-running” railroad traffic, and Redwood Park, where, walking, she and I came—and happily—upon coyotes.

—C. S. Giscombe

Wherever Lyn directed the gaze of her attention, a profusion of insights and interconnected idea-possibilities grew. Her generosity to her own intellect, to her process of generative, rigorous, and perpetual thinking, and her generosity to the younger poets and scholars she was in continual, and kind, correspondence with, felt like they came from the same abundant place. She acted as if we could build a world where we are all thinking together, with a rigorousness that is not antithetical to joy, or to creative impulse, or experiment. In one of the last emails she wrote to me, she said, “My question of the moment is ‘what do you think about beauty?’ I’m referring to beauty in art (poetry, film, dance, music, painting, sculpture, etc.), not the beauty of leaves, animals, mountains, etc.” I wonder if she knew how soon her death would be; still in that moment she was directing her gaze at a question that interested her, dedicated to exploring the contours of our world and finding whole structures to share. In My Life, as her father is dying of cancer, she writes, “we never wanted more than something beginning worth continuing which remained unended” and later in that same passage, “Acts are links, and likewise ideas.” Lyn’s mind and life wove many links. May we all carry our bits and pieces of her work onward; her insight, her inquisitiveness, her generosity, into the vast intellectual continuum her bright light is leaving behind.

—Cody-Rose Clevidence

I met Lyn Hejinian in the mid-seventies. I loved her 1976 Tuumba book, A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking, her second book, though for most of us the first:

Lucidities, or, lights (a starry angular). The staring, bright varieties of word and idea. I’ve always thought so, one who is willing and quite able to make use of everything, or anything. On the nectarine and the clarinet distinction casts a light, in its turn. One has only to look at the thing, and think a little.

A Thought embodied the kind of free-thinking poetics I was looking for at the time.

Still am.

Lyn started Tuumba Press with that book, setting the type and doing the letterpress printing in her house in Berkeley.

At about the same time, I published my own first two books, though much less elegantly than Lyn’s Tuumbas: I xeroxed my typescript and made side-staple editions that Susan Bee and I called Asylum’s Press.

Were these pockets of poetry insane asylums, as many seemed to think, or places of refuge?

The second book published by Tuumba was Western Borders, one of Susan Howe’s first books. I read it just as I began a lifelong friendship with Sukey.

Lyn published my book Senses of Responsibility in 1979; it was the twentieth Tuumba pamphlet, and only my second book after those two from Asylum’s.

Asylum had company: at around the same time Lyn published Senses of Responsibility, she also published pamphlets by Bob Perelman, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, and Rae Armantrout, all of whom remain the closest of friends.

Which is just to say, Lyn, nine years older than me, helped define the world I would inhabit for the rest of my life.

Bruce and I, in turn, featured Lyn in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in 1979, with an appreciation by Robert Grenier and “Smatter,” a prescient essay by Lyn: “Putting things together in such a way as to enable them to coincide, to make that kind of motion, is, like the ‘collage’ and the ‘cluster,’ an attempt (by analogy with music’s chord) at suggesting (since that is all one can do) simultaneity, hoping for inherence, haphazard, happy chance.” After these two pieces, we appended a short bibliography that advertised a xerox of A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking for $1.58. (I had assembled a set of out-of-print books and would send copies out at cost.)

In 1980, when Lyn published My Life with Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck press, I wrote a review for Ken Edward’s Reality Studios in London (collected in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984): “She gets to this: humming a nameless, a tuneless, tune—which is, perhaps, only the aspiration of poetry—not to reassure while surviving, retrospectively, as song; or such seem to be the terms of this work. A life, the things of a life, put in order. I dwell in these things. Fonder of the place we’ve found—absolutely!—maker, founder, of the place we have domesticated, accultured, found with our lives.”

I am foundering here, trying to grasp the times we first met, which keep slipping away, as Lyn now does. So much came after: her foundational essays, her decades of teaching, her generative and generous publishing and editing, her exchanges with Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and, above all, the dozens of dazzling poetry books, each distinct, the ensemble creating among the most magnificent and delight-filled bodies of work in postwar American poetry.

Returning to those early days: Lyn offered to let Susan Bee and me stay at her place in Willits, north of the Bay Area—a rural cabin without electricity or running water that she and her husband, jazz adept Larry Ochs, had lived in, along with their two children, before they moved to Berkeley. City folks on an adventure, Susan and I followed the directions to a remote house, which seemed to be at the top of a mountain; anyway, way, way up a hill. We arrived at dusk and found a lantern but, try as I might, I couldn’t get it lit.

I remember I set aflame the perforated housing around the wick.

I figured I wrecked the thing.

Next morning we drove down the mountain to find a phone.

Lyn taught me how to keep the light lit.

“One has only to look at the thing, and think a little.”

—Charles Bernstein

 

Ten Years without Gabriel García Márquez: An Oral History

Gabriel García Márquez. Photograph by Daniel Mordzinski.

Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago this April, but people all over the world continue to be stunned, moved, seduced, and transformed by the beauty of his writing and the wildness of his imagination. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century, and in many ways, rightly or wrongly, the made-up Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to define the image of Latin America—especially for those of us from the Colombian Caribbean.

I have been writing about Gabo since 1995, when I met him for three days during a journalism workshop he led and decided that he himself would make an interesting subject. Colombia’s god of magical realism reminded me of my grandfather, I wrote in my first piece about him, which was later published in the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. In the early 2000s, I began interviewing his friends, family, fans, and naysayers for an oral biography that appeared in an early form in the magazine’s Summer 2003 issue. When he died in 2014, I was putting the final touches on the book that came of it: Solitude & Company, my collection of voices about the prankster who lifted himself from the provinces and won the Nobel Prize. A few days after his death, his agent and confidant, Carmen Balcells, told me, close to tears, that the world would now see the rise of a new religion: Gabismo. I was interested in this prediction, as a journalist.

And so I kept abreast of the story of Gabo’s life and legacy after he died. His archives were transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, his wife, Mercedes Barcha, whom he called his sacred crocodile, died. In Colombia, the itinerant school of journalism that he started—the one where I attended his workshop—became the Gabo Foundation. And then there were unexpected developments: in 2019, Netflix announced a series based on One Hundred Years of Solitude—an adaptation he’d sworn would never occur. (Macondo has been rebuilt by art directors somewhere in the interior of Colombia.) In 2022 a journalist reported that he’d had a daughter, who was born in Mexico City in 1990 and whose existence he’d kept secret from the public. And this week, a novel, Until August, is being published posthumously in Spanish, English, and twenty other languages. It’s the story of a forty-six-year-old married woman who decides she’ll have a one-night stand every August 16, the day she makes a solo overnight trip to the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother is buried to put gladioli on her grave.

I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise.

 

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA (García Márquez’s nephew): The last time we saw him, his cancer had already metastasized and his memory was affected, but he could still speak and carry on a conversation. He arrived and exclaimed, “When were all these people born?”

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA (poet and journalist): He looked like a lost grandfather—hugging his sisters, his nephews, his family, but still very lost.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: He was always coming up with these literary and poetic phrases, but at the same time he was just such a prankster.

MILAGROS MALDONADO (art promoter and friend of García Márquez’s): He said that what scared him most in life was losing his memory as he aged. I didn’t know that was a thing in his family.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: He resolved the whole oblivion thing with a hug and a smile, saying, “I know that I love you. I know I love you.” 

CAROLINA SANÍN (writer): Everyone has an anecdote about García Márquez. We all want a sense of familiarity with the most powerful man Colombia has ever produced—the magician, the only king we’ve ever had, maybe even a father figure. We have that need to see him as an ordinary man. But although he did in fact die, he wasn’t ordinary. We have to incorporate this concept of genius. Rodrigo and Gonzalo’s father is not the one who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. Homer and Kafka wrote it, as does everyone who ever reads it. The writer of the book and the book itself do not coincide.

MIGUEL IRIARTE (poet and the director of La Cueva, the cultural center named after Gabo’s buddies’ favorite dive bar in Barranquilla): Gabo’s Gabbings is the first entry in my list of gabadas, a glossary equal parts ridiculous and festive that I came up with to inject a bit of playfulness into a time of sadness. The list ended up growing longer … but here, I’ll recall a few—gabería, gabismo, gabitis, gabota, de Gabo a rabo. There are over fifty such gabadas now. And all of them stem from the same little root, Gabo’s Gabbings—1. A prankish Caribbean virtue about which the dignified know little and which is brimming with the life and work of García Márquez.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: I’d fallen in love with García Márquez from the moment I read Solitude in Chichiriviche, a small town in Venezuela. I jumped for joy in front of the sea just for having seen my reality reflected—not just in the individual sense but in our collective way of talking about the Caribbean.

JAIME ABELLO BANFI (the director of the Gabo Foundation): Anyone who said “Gabo is dead” and thought people would gradually stop reading him was dead wrong.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: I’ve seen him in two separate dreams. In one of them, it’s as if he never died—dressed in white, always talking effusively, the way it was when we were still able to talk with him, especially when we hosted all those gatherings, like when he offered to baptize the son of a friend of ours. We were like seven pairs of godparents.

GUSTAVO ARANGO (the author of two books about García Márquez): A truly personal loss. The writers you love are family. I think of the years of silence and oblivion. Those years of disconnection fascinate me. What they call in the movie industry a fade-out.

DASSO SALDÍVAR (García Márquez’s Colombian biographer): I was already feeling as though, yes, Gabo was gone, but then again here he was—he was even more present in the wake of his death because he was on his way to becoming a pure legend. Because we would soon enough be reading Gabo’s work as classics. Without the social scandals of the powerful, but in his purest form. And that part of it made me happy.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: He was very anxious about fame.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Luisa, Gabo’s mother, didn’t appreciate all the fame. Her favorite daughter was Aida Rosa, the nun.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: He enjoyed going downtown, where he’d be recognized. He said he wished fame were like a light bulb—that it could be turned on and off.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: He always celebrated his birthday, March 6, with an accordion group, listening to vallenatos. To that last birthday in Cartagena, he invited a bunch of accordion groups, one of which included Leandro Díaz. All of a sudden, the two of them, Leandro and Gabo, get up and dance to “The Crowned Goddess.” A year before his death. Those two masters.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Everyone has three lives. A public life, a private life, and a secret life. Gabo said that to Gerald Martin, his English-language biographer. As if to say, very delicately, Just behave yourself. Right?

GUSTAVO ARANGO: I find that story about his three lives curious. He started talking about it in the nineties.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: And in each of those three lives, women were always the protagonists.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: I never heard him talk about the three lives but I don’t doubt that he did, because when he wrote his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, he told me, with a happiness that bounded on outright joy, “And you, you’re not in there.” So I must belong to the secret life.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: It was always a nod and a wink. When García Márquez mentioned the secret life on French television, back in 1997 I think, I was surprised by that revelation. That wink. That first hint of his secret life that might just have to be looked into.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: It was right around the time his daughter was born in 1990 that he began to talk about the secret life. He’d never spoken about the secret life before, though he already had one.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: So on that day, April 17, 2014, I was in San Antero having lunch with a couple of others when suddenly the news came that García Márquez had died. The three of us sat there talking about the rumors that he’d had a secret daughter.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: Mercedes was very self-assured. Really, she was incredibly tough. So I don’t think she was going to get into a lover’s quarrel about it. I don’t know but I just don’t see her doing that sort of thing. You don’t go all in like that. It’s just that she was such an amazing person. Truly extraordinary, very confident.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Mercedes was just always so sure of that love, and of Gabo’s love for her. Their love was a truly profound thing, something that went beyond reverence, beyond even time. The most beautiful thing about them wasn’t their fidelity, it was their loyalty. Fidelity is such an easy thing to break, but when it comes to love, the most important thing of all is loyalty, and the two of them had it.

NADIA CELIS (writer and scholar of Caribbean literature): I knew about it. It was a public secret among the extended and extensive García Márquez circle in Cartagena. There was no judgment, as having kids outside of marriage was a very common practice in that milieu, especially among powerful men. There was a kind of pact to not discuss it publicly, mostly out of respect to Mercedes.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: How does it affect García Márquez’s work one way or another, whether he has a daughter or not? For him, it must have been personally significant, having a daughter—I mean, considering that acutely feminine sensibility of his.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: This sort of thing has happened before on his father’s side of the family. The story of Gabo’s secret daughter also had a lot in common with the literary universe of García Márquez and his ancestors.

CATALINA RUIZ-NAVARRO (journalist and feminist activist): What surprises me is this pact that exists to never mention it and to continue to talk about Gabito as if he were good, kindly, pristine, beautiful, exemplary, even divine.

TERESITA GOYENECHE (journalist and writer): Here’s the debate about what it means to be an author—is someone an author because they’ve produced a work of literature, or are they an author because of the person they are, because they’re a public figure, because of how they operate and what they represent in the public eye. Their work becomes part of who they are in the public sphere. This man, who at some point in recent history showed us Cartagena writers that there were other faces across this country in which we could recognize ourselves, also had a private life outside the reach of the spotlight, a private life that some people find reprehensible. I don’t know if the story about his daughter is newsworthy simply because it involves someone whom the public feels is theirs, who belongs to them. As if they need to be in the know.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: I know many more things, but I’m not going to tell you. At least not for now.

 

Photograph of Gabriel García Márquez and Milagros Maldonado, sent to her by Mercedes Barcha. Courtesy of Milagros Maldonado.

 

STEPHEN ENNISS (director of the Harry Ransom Center): One day I simply received a phone call asking if the Center would be interested in purchasing the papers of García Márquez. That’s a pretty remarkable question to pose, and there’s only one answer.

ELIZABETH PAGE (former head of communications for the Ransom Center): We have manuscripts, photographs. Some correspondence. I love the family albums.

STEPHEN ENNISS: We also have three of his computers. Although for correspondence, it seems that he relied heavily on the telephone.

ELIZABETH PAGE: It’s all kept at freezing temperatures.

DIEGO GARCÍA ELIO (Mexican publisher who grew up with García Márquez’s two sons): Well, Gabo’s studio behind the house on Calle Fuego was hell. He kept the temperature over a hundred degrees.

ELIZABETH PAGE: We scanned over 27,000 documents. The interest in the collection has been extraordinary. People from all over the world consult it, especially from Latin America. That’s why it was also very important that it be accessible in Spanish.

STEPHEN ENNISS: We acquired the collection pretty quickly. Gabo had passed away, but Mercedes was there in the house still. One of our colleagues and I traveled to Mexico City to see the materials that had been offered to us. Gabo’s office was in a separate building behind the house and I remember walking into that lovely, lovely office of his with the walls lined with books and art and seeing his desk. And looking behind the desk and seeing the paper shredder. That was not what I was hoping to see there.

DIEGO GARCÍA ELIO: I gave a number of things to the Ransom Center, like the two manuscripts that my mother had of The General in His Labyrinth with different endings. He would always run nearly finished manuscripts past her so she could read them. They took the books that were first editions inscribed to him by his contemporaries. They took all the copies with dedications, but they left behind all the books he actually read, his normal reading material. Anyway, the studio in Calle Fuego is still full of his paintings, his photos, his desk, his computer … all of that is there, just as it was.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: He wrote from the moment he woke up until noon, come rain or shine, with a pair of Coke-bottle glasses so thick and foggy that I don’t know how he could even peer through them … then again, he didn’t need his own vision to be clear because he was really looking inwardly. That damn guy wasn’t waiting for inspiration to strike—he wasn’t thinking, I’m not going to write today just because I’m inspired. Forget all that. Plus, he had his own independent hideaway behind the house on Calle Fuego in Mexico. Nobody bothered him there. On the walls hung the Reverón and the Tamayo paintings that I had found for him.

DIEGO GARCÍA ELIO: And his personal assistant is still sitting in the same spot she was when he died. Mónica has been and still is the family secretary. You can see the place but you have to book a tour. The rest of the house isn’t open to viewings but eventually it will be. Anyway, it’s all there, they didn’t haul off everything.

STEPHEN ENNISS: What he really valued was finished work, and so he did not save multiple drafts of his writings. So most of the manuscripts that are in the archives tend to be very late-stage manuscripts with lighter revisions. But the exception is that final novel. Perhaps because he had not finished it before he died, he had retained multiple drafts of that novel while he was still working on it.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: He cut no corners when it came to his work. He didn’t have the typical lack of discipline found in most costeños, who will stay home from work after a late night of drinking and partying. He’d be there the next day going at it.

STEPHEN ENNISS: The novel was part of the archive from the beginning, even though it was unpublished. We were delighted that a previously unknown and unread work by Gabo would be in the archive. The permission that we received to digitize the collection did not extend to the unpublished novel, and so the novel is not online with the other digitized content. It was never online.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: The first thing I did when I arrived in Austin was dig up that novel.  When he died, in 2014, there was a lot of talk about it. I knew it was there—it was the first thing I asked the archivists about. When I read it, in a single sitting, the feeling I came away with was just that it lacked an editor’s touch. It was complete, it was well developed, it had a very clear ending

NADIA CELIS: I went to Austin in 2016 to explore his definition of romantic love and how it related to power. That’s when I read the novel. I knew that the manuscript was there, and that it was not to be published. I read bits and pieces here and there and it made sense to me that it was not meant to be published. It didn’t seem ready at all.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: I knew that the family had decided not to publish it. They’d made that announcement years before, persuaded by a reader at Carmen Balcells’s agency who, while Gabo was still working on the novel, said, No, it’s a long, repetitive story. That reader buried the novel while Gabo was still in the process of writing it. After that, Gabo didn’t really have it in him to work on it anymore. The reader’s report is right there with the novel itself. They blocked it just as it was about to break from the gates.

STEPHEN ENNISS: There was a sense from his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo both, I believe, that since their father had not seen it through to completion, it would remain as an unpublished manuscript. That was the original thinking, and that’s why it wasn’t included in the digitization.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: The novel needed some adjustments. You can see where he changes words, reconstructs sentences in his own handwriting, but the novel itself was complete. We all hear the story about the editor Maxwell Perkins, who worked with Thomas Wolfe, among others, and practically rewrote his authors’ books, but here that wasn’t necessary.  It wasn’t about rewriting, just reorganizing and polishing.

ANNE McLEAN (the translator of Until August): I was asked to read the manuscript of En agosto nos vemos at the end of March 2023 and I was so excited I could barely speak. I’d been extremely honored to be asked to translate a book of García Márquez’s journalism five or six years before, but I had no idea there was any unpublished fiction in existence.

FABIO RODRIGUEZ AMAYA (novelist and painter): Outrageous, to publish a novel I’m sure he never even finished. The same thing happened with Saramago.

ANNE McLEAN: His novels, which I first read thanks to the brilliance of Edith Grossman and Gregory Rabassa, lured me to travel to Colombia back in the late eighties, and then to learn Spanish. So, even though I already had my hands full last spring, with several contemporary Colombian and Spanish novels on the go, as well as Julio Cortázar’s letters, there was never really any chance I would turn down the opportunity to translate this novel.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: Reading the novel is just plain exciting. You feel the ease, the fluidity of the Gabriel García Márquez that you’ve come to know and love. It’s not that small-town setting anymore—it’s still the Caribbean, but with a more modern and urban setting. Every August 16, the protagonist returns to bring flowers to her mother’s grave.

JAVIER MUNGUÍA (co-editor of Las cartas del Boom): Yes, this married woman living on an island goes every year to her mother’s grave and there, for the first time, she’s unfaithful to her husband. A couple of excerpts were actually published when Gabo was still alive … two chapters appeared in El País. A translation of one appeared in the New Yorker in 1999.

ANNE McLEAN: I think I might have taken his state of mind into consideration when I first read the book in Spanish—I was on the lookout for uncharacteristic imperfections in the prose—but once I was translating, I was concentrating on recreating the novel’s narrative voice, which we know he began to invent at least a quarter of a century ago, long before he started to lose his focus.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: He started working on the book in the nineties and released two chapters of it, and then he published his last novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, in 2004. But meanwhile, he was working on Until August, back around 2000. He was enthusiastic, but also running out of steam.

FABIO RODRIGUEZ AMAYA: Memories of My Melancholy Whores brings a close to his life as a writer. People can say whatever they want, but his writing is beautiful. That book is the story of his nostalgia. It’s an homage to Barranquilla.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Gustavo read the manuscript in Austin and took notes, and then he wrote a beautiful article that was published in Mexico’s El Universal titled “In Defense of Gabo’s Posthumous Novel.”

GUSTAVO ARANGO: I came out of the archives with the idea of starting a campaign to get the book published.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: When he was reading the novel, Gustavo called me in Madrid, saying, “Dasso, you know where I am? I’m reading Gabo’s novel.” “How is it?” I said. “Pure Gabo,” he tells me. “Pure Garcíamárquian to the core.” “Well, let me know,” I said. He said, “I just did.” Then we hung up.

NADIA CELIS: The text may satisfy some readers’ curiosity, impress them with its technical mastery, or resonate with their preconceived notions of the stereotypical Caribbean that are linked to his work. The book is just another example of the projection of male fantasies onto women’s sexuality that surfaces throughout García Márquez’s work, whose major premise about women’s desire is that all we truly want is men.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: I sent Gustavo’s article to Guillermo Angulo, who is a very good friend of Gabo’s sons. And he sent it to Rodrigo and Gonzalo. I also sent it to María Isabel Luque, Gabo’s agent at the Carmen Balcells agency. When she read it she said to me, “Dasso, what is this? How did Gustavo get permission to see it? How did he take all those notes?” And I told her, “Don’t worry, it’s on American soil, and he was allowed to read it. It’s such a great text. Read it and share it with Rodrigo and Gonzalo.” And that’s how they all got together and started talking about the novel.

JAVIER MUNGIA: There isn’t anything to corroborate their version. The fact is that each of them can say I helped get people talking about it, so the heirs would be more interested.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: At the archive, when they gave me the box with the folders, they told me I could not take pictures but that I was allowed to take notes. So, I transcribed long excerpts, about ten tight pages.

STEPHEN ENNISS: As I recall, once they made the decision that there was going to be a published novel, his family closed the access to the file.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: It’s not a lost novel. It’s a neglected novel.

JAIME ABELLO BANFI: The thing is, if Rodrigo and Gonzalo didn’t decide to publish it, someone else surely would. Pirated copies and all that.

NADIA CELIS: Have you seen that a pirated copy is already circulating in Colombia? A week to go before publication date. I received a pdf in a WhatsApp group, one that isn’t even made up of serious readers.

JAVIER MUNGUÍA: Well, it’s a given that it has been ten years since he died, that they want to publish it. It is Gabo’s last remaining novel—of course I’m going to read it when it comes out. As a passionate reader of Gabo’s, I’m extremely curious to see what the final work of fiction he attempted was like, right? When I first read him I was fifteen or sixteen years old in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, where I still live. They sold books in the supermarket and my dad brought me a copy of Solitude. I was already a big reader—Hesse, Kafka, Hemingway—but when I read that first paragraph, it was like being hit by a bullet. It was a whole other level, you know?

NADIA CELIS: Honestly, women readers don’t need someone akin to a grandfather dictating our path to freedom, sexual or otherwise.

MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN (poet and novelist): We already know that the “readers” some publishers have can be a bit brazen and will turn down a work on a whim. Balcells entrusted that task to a reader, whose name we still don’t know to this day, who flatly rejected the novel, and because of that determination, both the agency and the family decided to shelve the project. If it were just a matter of a work being unfinished, to this day we wouldn’t know about Musil’s monumental work The Man Without Qualities. Or Kafka. But enough with the comparisons, which—as Cervantes has already stated in his great novel—are indeed odious.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: It seems that the Balcells agency’s reader was a big fan of Vargas Llosa and that’s why they wrote that report. Pretty bad taste in literature, obviously. [Laughs.]

GUSTAVO ARANGO: One of my arguments for publishing the posthumous novel is precisely the fact that My Melancholy Whores isn’t good closure. He becomes an open target for Me Too. It’s too easy to disqualify writers now. Authors are being attacked for what their characters are doing.

NADIA CELIS: I do not believe that Gabriel García Márquez ought to be “canceled,” as some have advocated. I remain an advocate for the García Márquez of his major novels, whose cautionary tales about humanity’s capacity for self-destruction resonate deeply. His narratives reflect the dangerous lust for power that threatens our very existence on this planet. Sadly, although he could see the dangers of this lust in interactions between the poor and the rich, between everyday citizens and their corrupt rulers, or between small nations and imperial emissaries, he overlooked the force that rendered his male characters complicit in every form of tyrannical power—their passion for domination and their tendency to assert their manhood through violence, beginning with the violence inflicted upon the women they “love.”

VANESSA ROSALES (writer and podcaster): I do want to read the novel. Female subjectivity has come to the forefront in the of literature the past decade—the Ferrante phenomenon, Annie Ernaux winning a Nobel prize, and all these women in Latin America writing from the most different political, bodily, socially contextual places. So it’s interesting to see how García Márquez imagines female freedom and desire.

JAVIER MUNGUÍA: I just saw that the cover of Gabo’s novel has been released. It’s a woman under a tree—they just announced it at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We were just talking about him and there he appeared. Somehow Gabo is always here. He’s always so very present.

Carlos Fuentes, William Styron, and Gabriel García Márquez. Courtesy of the Styron family.

ROSANNA BULMER (councilmember of the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts): Our first Cartagena Hay Festival took place in January 2005, thanks to Carlos Fuentes. He said to our director that we should look into having it there given that Colombia was coming out of a very dark time. It was one of my great desires and ambitions to go to Colombia—the home of Gabriel García Márquez. When we arrived, there was a reception planned for us in the naval base where the president stays when visiting. When we arrived I noticed that the building was very austere. We were greeted by the wife of President Uribe. We were about seventy people all together, everyone very friendly and welcoming. All of a sudden the room fell silent. Gabriel García Márquez had arrived. And I understood that he was like God in Colombia.

CARMEN BALCELLS (Gabo’s agent, who died in 2015): Gabismo will become a religion.

STEPHEN ENNISS: The typed manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly sitting comfortably alongside our Gutenberg Bible.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: I’ve dreamed of Gabo as always dressed in white, effusive, happy, brimming with projects and always saying this, which he repeated to me every time we saw each other—that there are no formulas for any literary creation. That you just have to write, write, write. There’s never a reason to stop. That was the advice he gave me.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: When I told my uncle that I’d written a novel and Hurricane Katrina had swept it away, he said to me, “Don’t worry, that novel wasn’t going to turn out well anyway. Now you’ve just got to rewrite it and it’ll be better for it.”

DASSO SALDÍVAR: I dreamed that I’d arrived at the house where he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and that Gabo and Mercedes had already left but had forgotten everything. Even the boxes. And that Gabo had left all his manuscripts, all the early versions. Everything. The files, too.  And I said to myself, “This is wonderful, what a feast I’m about to have!” But since they were gone, the lights out, and it was starting to get dark. I prepared myself to read it all, but by then, night had fallen, and there was nothing more I could do but fall asleep on the floor, because this wasn’t a dream anymore, it was a nightmare.

LAURA MORA (director of the upcoming One Hundred Years of Solitude television series): My mom tells me that I’m so involved in the project that I’m living in nineteenth-century Macondo. I haven’t had any dreams or nightmares, but look, someone did give me a votive candle. [She holds the candle up to the screen, and instead of bearing the image of the Sacred Heart or the Virgin of Guadalupe, it shows the face of Gabriel García Márquez with a white ruff collar reminiscent of the days of Cervantes or Shakespeare.] We light it on set.

JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Let me tell you what happened to me a couple of years ago at his house in Cartagena. Gabo had already passed and Mercedes had lent the place to someone very close to the family so they could celebrate a wedding. When I pick up my glass of champagne, out of nowhere it bursts in my hand. The server brings me another glass and boom! It shatters again. That moment changed everything for me. I was scared at first, but then, in the very next instant, I felt an overwhelming sense of astonishment. The first thought that came to mind was, Of course Gabo is here. He’s pranking us! He’s just playing one more prank on us!

 

Silvana Paternostro is the author of Solitude & Company: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told with Help from His Friends, Family Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls.

Portions of this oral history were translated by Ezra Fitz, who has translated over twenty books, by authors ranging from Jorge Ramos and the Grammy-winning musician Juanes to the novelists Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz. Shorter works have appeared in Words Without Borders, BOMB, A Public Space, Harper’s, and elsewhere. He lives in Spring Hill, Tennessee, with his wife and two young children.