The Paris Review's Blog, page 38

Young, Slender, Blond, Blue-Eyed

From Interiors, Claudia Keep’s portfolio in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. PHOTOGRAPH BY CARY WHITTIER, COURTESY OF CLAUDIA KEEP AND MARCH.

I climbed the stairs two at a time. I no longer know what I was thinking about in that stairwell, I imagine I was counting the steps so as not to think of anything else.

I arrived at the door, caught my breath and rang the bell. The man approached from the other side, I could hear him, I could make out his footsteps on the wooden floor.

***

I’d first met him on the Internet just two hours earlier. He was the one who’d contacted me. He’d told me he liked boys like me, young, slender, blond, blue-eyed—the Aryan type, he’d insisted. He’d asked me to dress like a student and that’s what I’d done—at least his idea of a student—with an oversized hoodie I’d borrowed from Geoffroy and sky-blue trainers, my favorites, I’d done what he wanted because I was hoping he’d reward my efforts and pay me more than he’d promised.

I waited.

***

Finally, he opened the door and at the sight of his body I had to tense my face to keep from grimacing—he didn’t look like the photos he’d sent, his body was flabby, heavy, I don’t know how to put it, as if he was sagging or rather oozing to the floor.

Just coming to the door had been a strain for him, I could see his fatigue, his shortness of breath, the dozens of tiny drops of sweat shining on his forehead. I tried to look at him as little as possible, I wanted to avoid seeing the details of his face. In less than an hour you’ll be out of here with the money, I thought. His odor reached me, a synthetic smell of vanilla and sour milk. I focused on that sentence—In less than an hour, the money—when suddenly I heard voices behind him in the flat. They belonged to men, several of them, maybe three or four. I asked who they were, he smiled and said: It’s nothing. Pretend they’re not here, they’re used to it, I often bring in whores, you’re not the first. We’ll go to my room and you ignore them.

***

I thought: I don’t want other people seeing my face—the shame began to rise inside me, from the tips of my fingers to the nape of my neck, like a warm, paralyzing fluid, I recognized its burn. I threatened to go home. I thought it would hurt or irritate him but he didn’t try to stop me. Calmly he offered to give me fifty euros for the trip if I wanted to turn and go, and I hated him for not getting angry. I needed more than fifty euros. Okay, I said, we’ll go straight to your room, they won’t see me, I’ll pull up my hood.

He promised me his friends wouldn’t try to see my face, they don’t give a shit; he was already turning around, I could see his fat white neck. Think of the money, think of the money.

***

I crossed the living room with him. He walked in front of me. I lowered my head, the hood hiding my face. In the bedroom he sat on the edge of his bed, the weight of his heavy body on the mattress produced a high-pitched creaking sound.

The mattress screamed in my place.

I stood there, facing his body, I didn’t dare move, he looked at me. Fuck you’re a turn-on with your little Nazi face. I didn’t say anything, I knew my silence would please him, that was what he wanted and what he was paying me for, my toughness, my coldness. I was playing a role. He asked me to undress, he said: As slow as possible, and I did.

Now I was naked in front of him, waiting. He just said: I want you to fuck me like a slut. He straightened up, pulled his trousers down to his knees, without taking them off completely, turned and got on all fours on the bed—his ass in front of me too white and too red, flaccid, limp, covered with little brown hairs. Go on, fuck me, fuck me like I was your little slut, he repeated. I rubbed my cock against his body but nothing happened, my cock remained inert, I failed, I wasn’t able to think of anything else, to imagine myself in another situation, the reality of his body won out, as if it was so brutal, so total, that it made any attempt at imagination impossible. Can’t do it? he asked and to save time I said Shut the fuck up. I felt his body shudder under my fingers, he loved it.

***

I tried again, rubbed against him, on him, desperately, forcing myself to imagine another body in place of his body, another body under my body, or rather on my body, because I knew that was what usually turned me on. I concentrated, but the contact with his dry, cold skin brought me back to the truth and his presence. He started to sigh to show his impatience. I told you shut the fuck up and don’t move, I repeated, but I knew it wouldn’t work as well the second time. He wanted something else. I rubbed myself even harder against him but I knew I’d already lost, I’d lost from the start, today I look back and I think I knew that the moment I entered his room.

***

I thought of the money I needed, the shame the next day if I had to tell the dentist I couldn’t pay him, the look in his eyes and the words he must have known by heart, Can I pay you next time, I’m sorry, I don’t have my wallet, I forgot it, he’d have known I was lying and I’d have known he knew, and I thought of the shame this infinite game of mirrors would cause—it was as simple, as banal as that, that was why I was in this man’s house, naked against him. He was still in the same position, motionless on all fours. I backed up a bit, walked round the bed and came to stand in front of him. His features were drawn, his face was pleading, exhausted from waiting. Suck, I said, and he took my still soft cock in his mouth. I closed my eyes. I don’t know how I managed, but after about twenty minutes standing there in front of him my cock bulged and I came, I pulled out of his mouth to cover his face, and looking down I saw the thick, white liquid on his forehead, his cheeks, his eyelids.

My breath shook.

***

I got dressed. I thought: It’s almost over. Almost over. He grabbed a towel from the bedside table that he’d probably put there knowing I’d come, wiped his face and walked over to a small chest of drawers. He took out a wad of notes and came over to me.

He gave me a hundred euros; I didn’t move. He knew exactly what I was expecting and why I didn’t move but he pretended not to understand. He was playing with me, he knew full well that I saw what was going on, that I knew he was playing with me but that I was too afraid to say anything. Finally he said You did half the job so I’m paying you half the money. You should have fucked me, you didn’t. A whore who doesn’t fuck isn’t a whore. You can be glad I’m giving you a hundred. He didn’t say it aggressively but more as an observation, the way you cite a rule or the terms of a contract. I’d learned to recognize how rich someone was at a glance, I could see it, I was never wrong, I knew he was rich and that paying me a hundred euros more wouldn’t have changed a thing for him, that having a hundred euros less in his wallet wouldn’t have made the slightest impact on his life. My heart was pounding in my chest (it wasn’t my heart that was pounding but my whole body). I started to describe my situation to this man in front of me, I didn’t even know his name but I told him everything, the shame, the dentist. That wasn’t his problem, he said, when you do things by halves you get half what you bargained for. You have to know what you want in life. You’re young, you have time to learn.

***

It was when he said those words that I decided to back down. His friends in the next room could get worried and come in to see if everything was all right, they couldn’t see my face—They mustn’t see your face, Other people must not see your face.

***

I took the money and left, walked through Paris in the night, and went home. Outside, the pavements were shiny from the rain, reflecting the streets like a second city projected onto the ground. I walked. I didn’t think I hated him. I didn’t think anything.

When I entered my flat I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. Even when I was crying I didn’t think anything. I no longer knew my name. I wasn’t crying because of what had just happened, which wasn’t such a big deal, just the sort of unpleasant thing that can happen to you in any situation; rather, what had just happened allowed me to cry for all the times in my life when I hadn’t cried, all the times I’d held back. It’s possible during that night, in that room, I let my eyes cry twenty years of uncried tears.

I walked to the shower. I didn’t take off my clothes. I turned on the warm water and felt it run down over me, from the top of my head to my ankles. I tilted my head back, stretching my throat, and opened my mouth as if I was going to scream, a long, beautiful scream, but I didn’t. The water soaked my clothes, my white T-shirt turned the color of my skin, my soggy trousers grew dark and heavy.

I stayed under that shower for a long time, watching the water running down over me. When I got out morning was breaking. I think it was then that I asked myself if one day I’d be able to write a scene like that, a scene so far removed from the child I’d been and his world, not a tragic or pathetic scene but above all one that was radically foreign to that child, and it was then that I promised myself I’d do it one day, that one day I’d tell everything that had led up to that scene and everything that happened afterwards, as a way of going back in time.

 

Translated by John Lambert.

From Change, to be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in March.

Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, and Who Killed My Father. 

John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov.

Caps for Sale

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter van der Heyden, The Merchant Robbed by Monkeys, 1562, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0 Deed.

I’ve noticed that a striking number of the best children’s books have been written by people who had no children: Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon). H. A. and Margret Rey (Curious George). Maurice Sendak. Dr. Seuss.

I have a theory as to why. If you don’t have kids, you can only really experience the book from the child’s point of view. Parents can’t help but have all kinds of agendas when they read a book to their child. And who can blame them? As long as the child is a captive audience, why not teach them about something? Like patience, or the alphabet, or Who Simone Biles Is?

The best children’s books teach none of that. They aren’t advertisements for anything—not even the important things. They’re an advertisement for reading itself; for the entertainment value of the world itself. 

Consider Curious George. The first book in the series is a full-scale assault on the senses of young children with a relentless barrage of every thrilling and dangerous thing that primally fascinates them. On successive pages in a single book, George is kidnapped (from a jungle); goes on a boat; calls 911; gets a visit from the entire fire department; then is arrested by the police for placing the call; goes to jail; then escapes jail—by flying high above the city, carried by a bunch of balloons. These things happen in the same book, in a row. It is hard to imagine a responsible parent dreaming up such a sequence at bedtime, let alone a sequel (Curious George Takes a Job) in which George explores a hospital unsupervised and passes out in bliss from inhaling ether. 

Children’s books are not for teaching or moralizing or philosophizing. (That’s what articles about children’s books are for!)

At the top of this particular list of children’s authors is Esphyr Slobodkina (1908–2002). Slobodkina was an acclaimed modern artist in the early twentieth century turned illustrator of multiple children’s books, including several books by Margaret Wise Brown. Caps for Sale (1940) is her masterpiece.  

In Caps for Sale, a peddler walks through his village with seventeen caps atop his head, sixteen of them for sale. “Caps for sale, caps for sale, fifty cents a cap!” calls the peddler, all day, every day, as he walks through the village. On one slow sales day, the peddler takes a nap under the tree, and while he sleeps, a pack of sixteen mischievous monkeys descend to take all his caps and then return to the tree, wearing them. This inspires the start of a second musical refrain to kick in: “You monkeys, you! Give me back my caps!” And the monkeys’ response: “Tsk, Tsk, Tsk!” 

A good children’s book has a lot in common with a song. In Caps for Sale, the setup and journey of the story are really the verses that support these choruses. I loved the music of Caps for Sale, as sung by my mother when I was a kid, and as most of us do with most of our favorite songs, I memorized the lyrics without thinking too much about them.

I reconsidered the book when two pretty good posthumous sequels were published a few years ago. 

In More Caps for Sale (2018), we learn more about the peddler: we follow him back through the village to his home, where, in the most beautifully drawn frame of the series, we see the mustachioed bachelor sleeping snugly all alone in the center of a small bed, in the center of a simply decorated room, under a window facing a tree that we can only hope will soon fill up with monkeys. It wasn’t until I saw that image that I realized what a lonely figure the peddler had been all along. His only interactions are with hat customers and, when even that fails, monkeys. And yet in the book he feels soulful, complete. He’s always yelling at the monkeys, for the very understandable reason that they threaten his already threadbare livelihood. But he also needs the monkeys. In all of the books, the monkeys help out the peddler once they realize the gravity of the situation. The peddler never knows this or thanks them, but it’s felt. 

After reading More Caps for Sale, I bought an extra copy of the book so I could carefully tear out that beautiful image of the peddler and hang it in my own bedroom. “That is … so sad,” remarked the first person to see it. 

Were these the lyrics to this song I loved? Is Caps for Sale a sad story deep down—a peddler living all alone, no friends, no family, whose only social interactions are with hat customers and monkeys?

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he’ll write a children’s book.

 

B. J. Novak is a writer and actor. He is the author of The Book With No Pictures and One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories. 

Letters to a Biographer

Greg Johnson and Joyce Carol Oates have been corresponding since 1975, when he wrote her a letter about a professor of his who had committed suicide and she responded. He wrote to her occasionally over the following years, mostly about her writing, and then eventually his. Their back-and-forth became a friendship, led to a biography Johnson published in 1998, and continued after. “Inadvertently, unwittingly, through the years Greg and I seem to have composed a kind of double portrait that, at the outset, in 1975, neither of us could possibly have imagined; nor could I have imagined that Greg would be my primary correspondent through most of my adult life,” Oates writes in her introduction to a selection of these letters, which will be published in March. The letters provide, as the best ones do, flashes of dailiness that build up over decades into something more substantive. The Review is publishing several,  from 1995, below.

 

January 25, 1995

Dear Greg,

I’m enclosing the London Review since they’ve sent me several extra copies, and I thought you might find the publication attractive. It’s a junior version of New York Review—each review much shorter, but approximately the same quality. Elaine [Showalter] often publishes here.

Yes, I did ask [my publicist] to send You Can’t Catch Me. (Do you recognize Tristram?) Thanks for your comments! It was a fascinating puzzle, to me, to write; the appropriation of a “self” by another “self” continues to haunt . . .

. . . The Bienens are in Evanston, IL, very busy, of course, but we continue to hear from them and will see them fairly soon, back in Princeton for opening night of Emily’s new play (an adaptation of the Delaney sisters’ memoir) [Emily was Emily Mann —GJ] . An opening night of my own is Feb. 1. (But I must attend two previews beforehand, one followed by a “panel” of Deborah Tannen and me. My play The Truth-Teller is about a sociolinguist—not Deborah!)

We had a lovely dinner and theater evening with Betsey Hansell and her husband Cliff Ridley (drama critic, Philadelphia Inquirer) on Sunday, before attending an excellent performance of The Cherry Orchard . . . Betsey said that she enjoyed her conversation with you very much, and asked about you. Of course, we were delighted to boast a bit about your OR book and other outstanding accomplishments. (I wonder if you know what Betsey looks like? Probably you wouldn’t remember, from our photo album. She and I were extremely good friends in my Detroit/Windsor years. I feel a real sisterly affection for her, and we are both very interested in art.)

Speaking of which: I’ve had a truly wonderful, absorbing and fascinating few weeks, writing a monograph, George Bellows: American Artist, for the Ecco “writers-on-artists” series. I’d never done anything quite like this, and now I really envy art historians. Bellows’s work is remarkably varied, and frequently brilliant. He’d become famous immediately for his boxing paintings, but they’re a small fraction of his output; I’m most taken by his seascapes and landscapes, and some of his odd, provocative portraits.

. . . I’ve been asked to review, of all unlikely subjects, Jack Kerouac—Reader, Selected Letters—for The New Yorker. I have to confess I’d never read Kerouac, must simply have skimmed through On the Road. I hadn’t known he was so self-consciously/doggedly “literary”—very much like Thomas Wolfe, upon whom he modeled himself as a young, word-infatuated writer. But what a sad end . . . dead of alcoholism, burnt out, at forty-seven. While his fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and sinister William Burroughs are still going strong.

. . . Did I mention that Foxfire is (supposedly) going to be made into a film? Production begins in March, in Portland, Oregon. I have not had anything to do with the screenplay, though I’d met the producer, or one of the producers, a literary-minded woman, a year or so ago in Los Angeles. I have the idea that not just the setting has been changed, but the era . . . which means that the very atmosphere will be different. The director is a woman of whom I’ve never heard—Annette Heywood Parker.

Are plans moving forward for Pagan Babies, and Julia Roberts? If you’re invited to do the screenplay, it might be an “interesting and novel experience,” as they say.

I too received the Jay Parini Steinbeck, and have been asked to review it (for New Yorker)—but declined, since I simply don’t have the time. It would require rereading much of Steinbeck, which might not be a bad idea; but not right now. At the classy and expensive ($21,000 annual tuition!) Pomfret School, where I spent 2.5 hyperventilated days, every other question was about “Where Are You Going . . .” Help!

Much affection from all,

Joyce

 

Valentine’s Day, 1995

Dear Greg,

. . . I hope, as my biographer, you won’t be disappointed: I declined an offer from our friend Lanny Jones, People editor, to write an O.J. essay for them, based upon a few days at the trial. And I’m afraid I have backed off from the Tyson piece, suggesting in my stead Thom Jones, who not only knows about boxing, but has been a boxer . . .

I’m afraid I also declined reviewing Bill Gass’s The Tunnel for the New Yorker, on the grounds that Bill is a friend of mine. (That might be news to Bill.)

Pagan Babies, the script, will be so radically unlike the novel, I’m sure, that, if it is filmed (as we hope it will be!), you’ll probably be in awe of such imagination. (I still haven’t seen Lies of the Twins beyond the first ten minutes.)

The Truth-Teller received a decidedly “mixed” (and rather baffled) review in the Times, but has been having sell-out performances and seems to be doing very well with audiences. A gay subscribers’ group had an evening, and, evidently, they loved the play. (“They are the most wonderful, sympathetic audiences you can have,” the theater manager said.) Since the play is about gender-switching, among other things, this makes sense. The reviewer managed not to notice any theme of gender, nor did he speak of linguistics, which is the play’s main subject. But this is more or less expected, I guess, in the theater, where one is never reviewed by a fellow playwright or writer, as in the literary world.

Ray is fine, my mother seems in good spirits, but my father is not very well, I’m afraid. Many ailments, not the least of which is his macular degeneration (gradual blindness). They weren’t able to come to Truth-Teller, and I doubt they’ll be visiting anytime soon. [Are there] “stars” in Foxfire? It’s such a low-budget film, “asteroids” might be more appropriate. I have not heard a word. [Actually, the very young Angelina Jolie played a major role in the film, though she was not yet a “star.” —GJ] . . .

Love,

Joyce

 

March 8, 1995

Dear Greg,

What an astonishment—to open your packet and discover those letters! [The letters were to and from Carol North, a college friend. —GJ] I’ve been quite stunned. I read them in a virtual haze, and reread—having to see, yes, it is my voice, a juvenile version, embarrassingly so!—(but I suppose I was “young”—still in my teens at the time of the earliest letters). (I haven’t been able to force myself, actually, to read the putatively funny [Southern] “dialect” letters—and who “Bethlehem J. Hollis” was, I don’t know. A character in my fiction, I suppose.

You can’t imagine how disorienting it is to confront these buried, lost “selves”; at least there is nothing scandalous or deeply upsetting involved. In fact, I’m touched that Carol North should have saved these letters for—can it be almost forty years? Incredible. You’d think they would have been tossed away long ago, or allowed to molder quietly. (I haven’t seen a letter of Carol’s for decades. I doubt that I’d saved them even back in the fifties.) It’s true, I was wrong about my parents’ memory of Robin and me playing chess. [Joyce had insisted to me that she and her brother Robin (a childhood nickname for Fred, Jr.) would never have played such a sophisticated game as chess; “maybe Parcheesi,” she joked. Fred and Carolina had told me that Joyce, losing, would sweep all the chess pieces off the board in a fit of pique. As it happened, in a letter to Carol North, Joyce admitted that she and Robin did indeed play chess, and that Robin would usually win. —GJ] I do remember Robin’s and my camaraderie (mostly during the summers); obviously we were quite fond of each other, and got along in sister/brother sitcom/bantering ways I’ve never experienced with anyone else. Robin was lots of fun! (Now he has matured into a soft-spoken, intelligent, and somewhat bemused “Fred Oates, Jr.” in whom “Robin” still lurks, if dimly. I think we regard each other warily now as adults, each hoping the other won’t reveal our utterly silly child/teenager selves in the presence of adults!)

Isn’t it odd that these early letters, in their gawky unself-conscious “humor,” including even strained dialect, are so like Flannery O’Connor’s letters?—well, I mean some of her letters, if I remember correctly. Yet I would not have read these letters of O’Connor’s for decades. And, evidently, I hadn’t read O’Connor’s fiction at this time; it seems to have been Carol North who introduced me to it.

. . . One prevailing theme of the letters, as of my life generally, is my lamenting the passage of time; my own wasting of time (which is considerable—why people imagine me “prolific,” I can’t guess, a morning flies by and I’ve accomplished virtually nothing or have in fact undone something imagined accomplished the day before) . . .

I can’t imagine what Allen Tate meant by speaking of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, et al., as “steeped in the tradition of mediocrity.” (Non-slaveholding universities?)

. . . Early sightings of John Updike! Somehow, Bob [Phillips] inveigled John to give him a poem for the [Syracuse] Review. Amazing.

. . . The Times received much mail regarding my essay on so-called “victim art” (Feb. 19, Arts & Leisure); a good deal of it was said to be angry, even “vicious” . . . extremely negative. The subject has been politicized, like so much these days . . .

Much is going on here: primarily Here She Is!—the first preview is this evening, and a gang of us are going including Emily, Dan Halpern, Sallie Goodman. I hope it will be fun. (Sorry you can’t come. Some of the plays’ themes might be of interest to you. But they are available in The Perfectionist & Other Plays, due out soon from Ecco, with a lovely striking cover.)

. . . My favorite play of mine Bad Girls will be performed by a theater at, of all places, the U. of Georgia! So you’ll have little excuse not to attend. The run will be brief, May 3–13, and the artistic director is someone named August Staube . . .

Again, Camille Paglia! [I had written Paglia to see if she wished to comment on Oates’s work for my biography. —GJ] I read your quote from her to Elaine on the phone, and we laughed heartily at the notion that Princeton is a “hotbed” of “feminist p.c.” Apart from Elaine and a few others, the English Department is quite solidly mainstream. Why anyone would “seethe” and be “driven crazy” by others’ careers is a mystery to us. Camille P. obviously values the Ivy League more than its inhabitants . . .

Yes, do send my father a large-print book. His eighty-first birthday is March 30. I think it would cheer him, a bit. He has been—well, humbled by recent health problems. He’d had to give up—his exact words, “give up”—attending classes at Buffalo, though they’ve meant so much to him. (With his ailments, and his failing eyesight, he’d been waiting in freezing wind for the Greyhound bus, and just couldn’t take it any longer. I feel so sorry for him! But he doesn’t want sympathy, understandably.) Any note at all from you, or card, or photo of Lucy (seriously!) and you—would be appreciated. (But no suggestion of health concerns, please!)

(Ray is pioneering with a new Macintosh, and the mysteries of e-mail. Are you “on-line”? I seem to be, at least in theory . . .)

Much affection, and many thanks!

Joyce

 

March 25, 1995

Dear Greg,

. . . I hope that by May 3, 4, or 5 (ideally this date) you’ll be free to come to Athens, for my play [Bad Girls]; I must be there for a few rehearsals, and for a few performances. It’s my favorite play of my own . . . I’m curious, and excited, over the prospect of seeing it, transplanted from upstate New York (“Yewville”) to Georgia accents (!). Ray will also be joining me for a day or two, we hope . . .

Your new house sounds very spacious. Are you going to plant flowers, etc.? Ray is itching to get outside though the nighttime temperatures are around freezing; he isn’t happy until he has planted his first crop of lettuce. We’ve been going out running/hiking in the very gusty winds, usually in the Hopewell area . . .

Ken Kesey!—he’s very much of the sixties, still. White-haired, a bit overweight; describes himself as a “warrior”; is campaigning to have marijuana legalized in his state; a benign paternal presence onstage, though I don’t think he was especially tuned into the discussion. He spoke often of the need for us all to love one another. (He dresses oddly, but only mildly oddly . . . not a disruptive “character.” He carries a rubber salmon (?) under his arm, a sort of tote bag, quite realistic-looking and a conversation piece. He was friendly enough to me, if a trifle vague; I doubt he’d ever heard of me, but wasn’t at all confrontational.) Tulane U. is quite attractive, and New Orleans reminded me of both Miami and Los Angeles (with the high crime rate, too) . . .

Actually, you would love e-mail. It’s probably better for you that you don’t explore it; you might become addicted (like Elaine, among others of my acquaintance). I certainly could be, but stay away from the computer, preferring to type out letters, as I type out prose fiction. E-mail is a sort of delicious post-literate means of communication somewhere between a letter and a telegram; or between voice mail and fax . . .

Thanks for your nice comments on my Antaeus story [“Mark of Satan”]. It’s one of my favorites of my own, and will conclude Will You Always Love Me? (which as you know is dedicated to you) . . .

My father said on the phone this morning that he’s feeling better, and he sounded upbeat. So I’ll take him at his word. My mother is in good spirits, too. Now they’re hesitant about flying—navigating airports, mainly—we won’t see them until late this spring, when I give a talk at Rochester in May. I hope you sent them a photo of you with Lucy; I know they’d love it . . .

My Mulvaneys [We Were the Mulvaneys] proceeds slowly, yet richly; too richly—I’m already at p. 112 and have only covered about 1/10 of the story. Yet I’m not going to let the novel writing weigh so heavily upon me as Corky [Corky’s Price was a working title for her novel What I Lived For. —GJ] did, I swear . . .

Much affection from the gang at 9 Honey Brook . . .

Joyce

 

April 17, 1995

Dear Greg,

We too were shocked and saddened by Diane’s death. [Diane Cleaver, my agent, died suddenly in her Greenwich Village apartment at age fifty-three. —GJ] . . . It’s a terrible thing, the only good aspect of which, she didn’t suffer, and might not even have known what was happening.

. . . Thanks for the lovely snapshots! The house is most impressive.

. . . I’m not absolutely against a “selected journal”—only hesitant, or modest (?) about its possibilities. (Actually, Tina Brown asked me about it, and I murmured an ambiguous reply.)

My parents appreciate your recent kindnesses, and mention it each time we speak on the phone . . .

My e-mail is very, very minimal, and rare. As I’d said, I don’t really care for that sort of correspondence . . .

Much affection,

Joyce

 

April 24, 1995

Dear Greg,

. . . We’ll see you on Friday (for dinner first? then the play?). I haven’t heard anything from August Staube for a while, and have no idea how rehearsals are progressing. In Bad Girls, casting is essential . . . I’ll know within minutes if it’s going to be a disaster, as soon as I see the actresses. (In theater, casting is 90 percent of the effort. If you make a mistake at casting, there’s virtually nothing you can do to rectify it, no matter how brilliantly people might work.)

. . . Yes, my father is just delighted with the books. Simply to be remembered is very nice for him. He’s making an effort to keep involved at U Buffalo though he doesn’t take courses; he’s going to a literary festival this weekend that includes, along with Allen Ginsberg, your friend Camille Paglia. (I hope she won’t “go crazy” and denounce me on my home turf . . .)

. . . So sad: not only did the PEN/Faulkner go to another novelist (a “first novelist”), but the Pulitzer, another time. (Did I mention I’d been nominated, with four other titles, for the PEN/Faulkner? Maybe if my novel had another author’s name on it, it might have fared better.) I’m looking forward to next week, though with some trepidation. (I do want to see your house, certainly—and Lucy [Lucy was my pet dachshund.  —GJ].)

Much affection,

Joyce

 

May 20, 1995

Dear Greg,

I certainly didn’t expect The New Yorker to be interested in excerpts from my journal, and will be curious to see what they choose. Thanks so much for selecting and organizing. You must have a magic touch. Not only don’t I reread the journal, I draw back from even thinking about it; not modesty, but a sense of, To what purpose? I suppose it is a good idea to have a repository of memory, though. Since most things are doomed to a double oblivion—natural transience, and then being forgotten . . .

Yes, I thought the Georgia Rep did an excellent production of Bad Girls. I liked all the actors, and August Staube—so energetic, imaginative, and funny. Too bad the Rep does only “new” plays, which limits my connection with them, considerably. (The lengthy, large-cast Thoreau would not be appropriate there.) Where Bad Girls might go next, I’m unsure.

The Guthrie Theatre just called with the unexpected, good news that they will be performing Tone Clusters, on a bill with Albee’s Zoo Story, July 14–Sept. 9. But I doubt we can get to Minneapolis in our already-crowded summer. I may have mentioned—I have a new play, The Woman Who Laughed, opening at the Sharon Stage, Conn., in August.

This Monday I’ll be reading from You Can’t Catch Me in Rochester, and we’ll stay with the Heyens, and take them and my parents out to dinner. My father is in considerably better spirits than he was, fortunately. Next day, we’re having lunch with Toby Wolff and some of his writer friends in Syracuse, and will spend the night in Ithaca, lovely college town.

One of the characters in my new novel [We Were the Mulvaneys], coincidentally, is in Ithaca at the moment, which is convenient.

My next-performed play will be a revised version of Homesick, at the McCarter One-Act Play Festival next month. Would you like to come up and visit? There are many more journal pages accumulated in my closet . . . I’m trying to encourage my parents to come, too. I don’t have the precise schedule, but the festival runs from approximately June 9 to June 18 and there are excellent, “real” playwrights (Jane Anderson, Wendy Wasserstein) involved . . .

Good luck with choosing an agent! Ray says hello & warm regards.

As always,

Joyce

 

From Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer by Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Greg Johnson and forthcoming from Akashic Books in March.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Humanities Medal, and a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers is her latest work.

Greg Johnson has a Ph.D. in English from Emory University and has published three novels and five collections of short stories in addition to five books of nonfiction, including Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction and Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. 

Sorting through the Wreckage: The Stories of Diane Oliver

Diane Oliver. Courtesy of Peeler Studios.

Read Diane Oliver’s short story “No Brown Sugar in Anybody’s Milk,” published in the Summer 2023 issue of the Review.

A year ago, I had never heard of the astounding short story artist Diane Oliver. This admission is embarrassing, as I am a novelist and professor. Furthermore, Oliver and I have a number of shared characteristics. We both are Black, Southern, daughters of educators, graduates of women’s colleges, and we both attended the University of Iowa. Born in 1943—the same year as my mother—she was a generation ahead of me, paving the way. Yet, somehow, I had never come across her work, not even at Spelman College, where Black women’s writing is the core of the English major. Initially, I blamed myself. Why had I not been more diligent as a graduate student? Oliver published four stories in her lifetime, and two posthumously. Her work appeared in Negro Digest, Sewanee Review, and was reprinted in the anthology Right On!. In other words, Neighbors was hiding in plain sight. After more thinking, I faulted the gatekeepers—whoever they may be—for not including Oliver in the anthologies that form the curriculum of writing programs. But after a while I grew tired of wondering why and chose to celebrate the discovery.

I encountered Neighbors in a most unusual manner. I received a copy printed on plain paper, no intriguing cover, no laudatory blurbs from great writers, not even a paragraph from the publisher providing context or summary. I knew only that the author was a Black woman and the manuscript was slated for publication. The bound stack was simply labeled “Neighbors.” I could have asked for more information or done a quick Google search. Instead, I recognized the opportunity for what it was: a chance to let the words introduce me to the work of Diane Oliver.

This breathtaking collection of short stories is a marvel. When I was a young writer, I remember receiving this advice from one of my peers: “Imagine that the world as we know it is over. Now imagine the people of the future trying to sort out the wreckage. Well, that’s what books are for—to let the new people know what the hell happened.” I had almost forgotten that scrap of undergraduate wisdom until I read the first few pages of this book. Neighbors evokes the feeling of sorting through a time capsule sealed and buried in the yard of a Southern African Methodist Episcopal church in the early sixties. The political issues of the day—namely racial integration—permeate the narratives, as this is this most significant social shift since emancipation. Oliver explores the changing America while beautifully documenting the culture of Black Americans living in the South. She remembers the domestic workers who leave their own children home alone to keep house for rich white folks. Boy coats with raccoon collars were all the rage for the wealthy, while poor folks took pride that their simple clothes were cleaned and ironed. “Up North” and “Chicago” are both shorthand for a promised land where a person could earn a decent wage and send her children to college. This is Oliver’s world, and she shines a light in every corner.

The title story, “Neighbors,” stands in stark contrast to the iconic image of six-year-old Ruby Bridges, precious in braids and a pinafore, bravely integrating her elementary school. The little girl is surrounded by federal marshals. The famous photo doesn’t show the jeering crowd of adults, nor does it show the child sitting alone in her classroom, since the other parents removed their children in protest. Norman Rockwell recreated the moment in his painting The Problem We All Live With, but portrayed the girl against a backdrop of thrown garbage and painted slurs. In her best-known story, Oliver takes us where the news cameras will never go. This is the story of a family the night before their first grader is set to integrate his new school, alone.

When we are able to see the dynamics inside the family’s home, the correct path is not obvious. Despite the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education, is it morally right to send a child where, at best, he is not wanted? A neighbor muses, “Hope he don’t mind being spit on, though.” After a sleepless night, the mother says to the father, “He’s our child. Whatever we do, we’re going to be the cause.” And in that moment, the issue at hand is more personal than political. Is there a true distinction between what is best for the race and what is best for their little boy? Whatever decision they make, there is no way that the reader can judge them because Oliver has taken us for an uphill walk in their shoes.

She revisits the subject in “The Closet on the Top Floor.” Winifred, a college freshman, is “tired of being the Experiment.” Her first day of college marks the thirteenth year of integrating educational institutions. “Her father had worked hard, petitioning the trustees and threatening a court suit to get her into this college, and she had felt ashamed for not wanting to go.” Although her parents have the means to keep her in the latest fashions, she never fits in on the campus of the Southern women’s college. Isolated, homesick, and racially marginalized, Winifred’s mental health begins to deteriorate. As she leaves college, shattered, it is tempting to read this story as a coda to the one begun in “Neighbors,” affirming the family’s decision not to send little Henry to the white school. Yet an honest reading causes one to wonder if Winifred is driven mad by the racism of the school or her parents who think civil rights is just a game.

Although Brown v. Board was a seismic decision, hobbling “separate but equal,” there were many Black folks to whom Winifred’s college experience would seem like a high-class problem. These are the women who clean houses, the children who sleep on pallets on the floor, and babies born “afraid to breathe.” Oliver’s storytelling would be incomplete without their rich emotional landscapes.

“Traffic Jam” centers on Libby, a young mother who works for Mrs. Nelson. Her husband, Hal, is who knows where. In many ways, this story is a retelling, or perhaps an untelling, of the Black maid who loves her employer’s family as her own. Although the bulk of the story takes place in Mrs. Nelson’s kitchen, it is clear that domestic work is a job for Libby, not a calling. As she prepares breakfast for the Nelsons, she worries about her own baby left in a laundry basket on a babysitter’s porch at 6:30 A.M. When she heats soup for their lunch, she thinks of her daughter scavenging for fallen fruits. And overlaying all thoughts is her longing, anger, and concern for her husband, Hal. She yearns for him as a lover and partner, but she also desires the security and respectability of having a husband at home. When she is reunited with him, the Nelsons could not be further from her mind:

She was almost upon him now … She wondered for a minute what she would say; she had imagined him coming home but not at a crazy time like this. Yet, she felt strangely sure of herself … She kept walking toward him, and even this far away she could see the high cheekbones that marked all of their children as belonging to him.

When they finally touch, the meeting is sensual, but with Libby’s anger streaking through at his long absence. She is exhausted and embarrassed about having been driven to steal slices of ham from a white woman’s kitchen to feed her children. Her husband announces that he bought a car, blue with new seat covers. Frustrated that he would squander his savings, she understands that “if she wanted him, she had to want the car.” They go home to resume their marriage. Except for the paper bag of stolen food, the Nelsons are all but forgotten.

Oliver demonstrates a gorgeously layered understanding of the range of Black life in the South. She understands the life of a poor woman traveling miles on foot to take her children to the doctor. She empathizes with a couple who are driven by racism to live in the forest, and are then gripped by homicidal rage. She knows why destitute families would sell everything they own to buy train tickets to the North, having no idea what awaits them. And she can also write the inner life of a doctor’s wife forced to entertain a sullen stepdaughter, just as these lives are impacted by the changing racial and social mores.

If Black lives are changing in the wake of segregation, then so are white lives, and Oliver turns her eye to them as well. “Spiders Cry Without Tears” explores an interracial romance in the wake of Loving v. Virginia. The heroine, Meg, is a “Kelham lady. All the girls in her family marched in the annual Daughters of the Confederacy Parade, smiling at the groups of Negro children who waved them to the cemetery.” Meg, now divorced, falls in love with Walter Davison Carter, a wealthy doctor. Although he may be mistaken for Portuguese or some other tan foreigner, he is definitely Black. Furthermore, he is married to a woman who is terminally ill. Despite the fact that she should be disgraced only “for her grandmother’s sake,” the relationship blossoms and endures for years. For Meg, there is a cost for loving across the color line. Learning of the affair, her friends distance themselves due to the mere possibility that “he looks like he’s trying, well you know, to pass.”

Eventually, Walt’s wife passes away, and the couple marry. Meg is completely alienated from her old life, but finds that being Walt’s mistress was much more satisfying than being his wife. Oliver chooses not to make their marital conflict a matter of race. “He owned her exactly as he did the house, the cars, and those poor people who thought their hearts would collapse if her husband retreated from medicine.”

Oliver shrewdly allows race to dominate Meg’s understanding of the relationship during their courtship. There is even a moment just before their marriage when she berates herself for thinking of him as “colored” after so many years of intimacy. But once they are married, gender becomes a more significant factor than race. She is his wife, who happens to be white. This is what is known as intersectionality.

Neighbors is the rare work of fiction that is somehow of its time, yet before it as well.

Recently, an interviewer asked me who did I consider to be my literary foremothers. I listed all of the greats—Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry—but then I added Diane Oliver. Her name surprised me as much as it surprised the reporter. I have only recently been made aware of Oliver’s work, but I feel that her thinking somehow influenced mine. There is a part of me that says that this is impossible, but the part of me that feels the presence of spirits knows that it is possible.

Writing fiction can be an otherworldly experience. Is it not magical and inexplicable that we transform imagination into marks on a page, legible and lasting? I believe that twenty-two-year-old Diane Oliver released these stories into our common air, water, and soil as she inked them onto the pages. Just as we all have ancestors whom we never had the pleasure to meet, we carry their legacies in our bodies. Their memories nest within our own. Their words are our words, whether we know it or not.

 

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver, forthcoming in February from Grove Atlantic.

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and a Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.

Making of a Poem: Nadja Küchenmeister and Aimee Chor on “feathers and planets”

Basile Morin, close-up photograph of swan feathers letting sunlight through, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nadja Küchenmeister’s “feathers and planets,” translated by Aimee Chor, appears in our new Winter issue, no. 246. Here, we asked both Küchenmeister and Chor to reflect on their work.

1.Nadja Küchenmeister

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The poem began, as it often does for me, with an image (“sugar, stirred into cream”) and at the same time a rhythmic set of sounds that, ideally, make a phrase into verse. I like tonal neighborhoods that are not immediately apparent but rather reveal themselves in the writing of a poem (in German, the words Einkaufsnetz [shopping bag] and Bett [bed] make a tonal connection, as do, more distantly, Netz [net] and Fuchs [fox]—at least to my ear). However, these resonances, these rhymes, have to emerge on their own—I cannot force them. They establish themselves on the basis of something that was already present in the poem. You could also say that something only comes to be because something else came into being before it. This is true for images and motifs and for sounds as well. In this sense, a poem always also creates itself, although of course I am the one who gives it its order.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)

The final poem I wrote for Im Glasberg (In the glass mountain) was “feathers and planets.” It posed a problem for me because for a long time I had only the start of a poem. There were images that wouldn’t fall into place, that stood disconnected alongside each other. It was an abandoned poem. But I knew I still needed a piece for the book because I was aiming for a certain symmetry. (The first poem I had written for the book was “black laundry,” which also appears in The Paris Review.) Eventually I pulled the text that would become “feathers and planets” back out again. When the “briefs in the sleeve of a winter coat” appeared, I knew I was safe, poetically speaking, that the poem could work, even though it’s still a fairly small poem for me—perhaps because I had to wrestle with it so much?

With some poems, the images arise almost as if in a dream—one word elicits the next, one sound leads to the next (as happened with “black laundry”), whereas with others, I feel like I’m dragging myself from verse to verse with lead on my feet. And that’s not a bad thing. But it shouldn’t show once the poem is finished.

What was the challenge of this particular poem? 

The challenge consisted of a dissatisfaction that is hard to explain, that said, You are not finished yet. Sometimes I try to deceive myself—I just want a poem to be done, now! But it’s only finished when it’s finished. Fortunately, over the years you get a good sense for this. Just putting images and sounds alongside each other does not make a poem. It always has to do with the form. This is why, for me, it’s never about working on the feeling but always about working on the language. The language is what creates an emotional center, if one is successful. It is when a text has become more than a collection of images and thoughts that a poem begins.

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished after all?

At some point, a poem is finished. Or not. If it’s not finished, it’s not a poem, and I set it aside. I don’t make changes in hindsight. I don’t still like all of my poems. But I am uncomfortable with the thought of poets reissuing volumes with poems that have been reedited, since this takes something away from the readers—part of their history with this poem. It’s okay to see in a poem what the poet was not yet capable of at that point. The poem “feathers and planets” was finished at a certain point, meaning that there was a shape that I had worked to create out of a pile of memories. What is perhaps decisive is that these memories transform themselves in the course of writing; they increasingly become the memories of a lyrical “I” that does not appear as such in this poem. And yet there is a consciousness, recognizable throughout the text, that recalls images, that remembers. I believe that when we are working with memories, literature starts where one starts to invent one’s own life. It is still your own life, and at the same time, it is different.

2. Aimee Chor

What was the challenge of this particular translation? 

One challenge of translating the poem was how much I love it. The way that this translation means and sounds has a lot of me in it—I am giving it to you in the way that I received it. While on the one hand that is inevitable—and welcome—on the other hand I wonder whether I have accurately conveyed the poem written by Nadja to the readers of the translation in English.

Another challenge is that the English is in some ways very unlike the German: Wäscheständer does not sound like laundry rack, and quark is not really the same thing as cream. But turning the poems into English creates new sonic and linguistic overlaps, both those I work at and the serendipities that I do not plan and for which I am grateful.

Did the translation otherwise come easily, or was it difficult? Are there hard and easy translations?

On their face, Nadja’s poems aren’t difficult to translate. The language is not especially opaque or convoluted. I do find some translations from German more difficult than others, at least when it comes to unpicking the meaning of the German itself. But beyond that, translating any poetry is difficult in a way very different from writing poetry. The original is always there, even after you let go of any simple idea of equivalence, and the translator is responsible to it, to do justice to it—that sounds like an ethical demand because it is, I think. I was fortunate that the poem comes from a book that is quite coherent, and so translating some of its poems taught me how to translate others, which in turn taught me how to revise the initial translations. The words and the rhythms of the translation have at least as much to do with the other poems in the book as they do with the logic and flow internal to this particular text. I am glad that it stands on its own, but it’s impossible for me to read it that way.

When did you know this translation was finished?

I could revise a translation forever, I think. But it’s done when trying new words or patterns doesn’t make it any better, just different or worse.

 

Nadja Küchenmeister’s most recent book of poetry is Im Glasberg (In the glass mountain). She is the winner of the 2022 Basel Poetry Prize.

Aimee Chor is a poet and translator.

Gravity and Grace in Richard II

From How do You Hold Your Debt?, Christine Sun Kim’s portfolio in issue no. 241. COURTESY OF CHRISTINE SUN KIM, FRANÇOIS GHEBALY, AND JTT.

In the opinion of Simone Weil, King Lear was the only one of Shakespeare’s tragedies completely permeated with a pure spirit of love, and therefore on a level with the “immobile” theater of the Greeks. Perhaps Richard II never caught her attention at an auspicious moment. It is, anyway, very difficult to grasp and wrest into the light this mysterious tragedy, the most silent of all of Shakespeare’s works—this path that is constantly covering its own tracks, this voice that doesn’t want to raise any particular problem or to support any particular thesis. A story recounted with eyes downcast, slowly and, one might say, in the dark: en una noche oscura.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings—
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.

For five long symphonic acts, full of returns and rigorous reprises, confined in the very tight mesh of unbroken blank verse, not a single laugh, in this drama of young people, not one gallantry or a pleasantry, even a lugubrious one, from a clown. Not one of those great breaths of spring or autumn. Not one of those gratuitous songs as natural to Shakespeare as the circulation of the blood. In Richard II, everything falls inexorably down. Everything obeys the law of gravity. And yet it is in Richard II, more than in any other work since Homer, that the royal gestures “continually cross like blinding flashes” and grace blooms, a pure, pale flower, on the dark foliage of necessity. Never, I think, have “gravity and grace” been more exactly encapsulated in a play.

If Hamlet is the tragedy of irresolution, Richard II is the tragedy of relativity, or rather of reversibility. A group of young princes, united by ties of blood, and profoundly divided by this same blood (which has many times been spilled by their ancestors), whose consciences are extremely refined and whose spirits are ardent and melancholic, unremittingly clash in an attempt at loyalty and unity that is continually frustrated. Behind them two old men, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, grow feeble and obscurely fall into the same strain, already tinged with defeat or with a presage of death.

Call it not patience, Gaunt. It is despair.

By the end of the play, not one of these characters (except two of the most peculiar, Northumberland and Carlisle)—not one of these men striving toward a solemn, absolute assertion of self—will still wear the ardent expression he wore at the start. The law of gravity will transform them, one by one. It will give them different expressions, different gestures, different absolutes. It will convert them all into the common absolute of misfortune—already familiar to the old but terrifying to the young—and at this somber threshold they will slowly turn around and say a final farewell to grace, in sorrowful, loving remembrance of those they have lost or will have to lose, according to the law of gravity.

For Mowbray and myself are like two men
That vow a long and weary pilgrimage.
Then let us take a ceremonious leave
And loving farewell of our several friends.

The very slow fall of Richard II, immersed little by little, as into boiling oil, in his own essential grandeur; Bolingbroke’s ascension to an irresistible throne, which overpowers his pure, law-defending temperament; the foolish loyalty old York shows to the new king in an effort to make up for his heartbreaking disloyalty to the old one; the terror of death in the heroic boy Aumerle—the fatal fruit of his boyhood: In this chivalric drama, there is not a single chivalric situation that does not eventually fall back on necessity—and that, from this necessity, does not reach out toward the most spiritual chivalry—which is to say, toward grace. Gestures of grace that the poet pauses midair, when they are just about to fall. The grievous and chastened sorrow of each individual voice, isolated and yet flowing into the others,

Like an unseasonable stormy day,
Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores
As if the world were all dissolved to tears . . .

Certainly in no other tragedy by Shakespeare, or by anyone else, have aversion and rancor been so perfectly ignored—absent from the depths of the soul and the envelope of the language alike.

Each of the characters, once he has finished with his moral violence, redeems it by means of respect. York, who has become a traitor by the law of gravity, speaks of the fallen Richard:

As in a theater the eyes of men,
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious;
Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes
Did scowl on gentle Richard. No man cried “God save him!”
No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home,
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head,
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,
His face still combatting with tears and smiles,
The badges of his grief and patience,
That had not God for some strong purpose, steeled
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted . . .

The vanquished king hands over the crown of England to his rebel cousin, whom he had earlier banished, then dispossessed, according to the law of gravity. The conscience of “the Lord’s anointed,” which is as strong in him as it is in all the others, even after he has lost the throne, here dissolves into a miraculously clear-eyed meditation on his own misfortune:

Here, cousin, seize the crown. . . .
On this side my hand, and on that side thine.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen and full of water.
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

An unmerited offense, called down by the law of gravity, can still be redeemed by grace, and in this case without any effort at all, in perfect purity. A gardener has imprudently spoken to a servant of Richard’s fall. The Queen, in the shade of a tree, overhears him, and in her despair hopes that the plants tended by this messenger of misfortune will cease to grow. Left alone, the gardener thinks aloud:

Poor queen! so that thy state might be no worse,
I would my skill were subject to thy curse.
Here did she fall a tear. Here in this place
I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace.
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen
In the remembrance of a weeping queen.

Bolingbroke, the new king, is finally brought his “buried fear,” which is to say the corpse of Richard, who has been killed by a courtier who had heard that the new king desired his death. To the murderer, who is in any case already repentant and full of reverence for the royal blood he has spilled, Bolingbroke responds with the loyalty that is the basso continuo of the entire tragedy, the constant of all its characters:

They love not poison that do poison need,
Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murderer, love him murdered.
Lords, I protest, my soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.

It is this marvelous consciousness of the core of human tragedy, the reciprocity and the simultaneous incompatibility of the elements that compose it—influence and destiny—that bonds these men’s souls so closely together. Actions have only a sad, intermediary function. Beauty alone can affix a seal on words or deeds.

So it always is and always has been, since the immobile first act (to which the memory repeatedly returns), when the two young knights, Mowbray of Norfolk and Bolingbroke, were presented to the King and accused each other of treason. The weight of truth was already shifting continually: at first it was Norfolk, then Bolingbroke, who was convincing—and the King subtly doubted, not them, but the truth itself. It is only natural that he should have tried to pardon them, even if at the risk of his own life; and their refusal is just as natural, their wish to fight so that death itself might condemn or absolve them. Unlike all of Shakespeare’s other tragedies, Richard II has its longest and most seriously significant pause in the first act. This is in the very slow heraldic episode, where the loveliness of the young, indomitable figures is entirely enshrouded in the bluish gray of dawn, the inexpressibly pathetic bell-tolling of a chivalric ceremony—and the sadness of the reciprocal respect that, in the most intense instants, is transformed into a naked silence, already stripped of all hatred and conscious only of the misfortune to come.

For Mowbray and myself are like two men
That vow a long and weary pilgrimage;
Then let us take a ceremonious leave
And loving farewell of our several friends.

With a graceful gesture, interrupting the duel, Richard has for an instant halted the law of gravity—but only to be doubly overwhelmed by it, since the measure of gravity and grace is always and inevitably equal. It is the spared life of Bolingbroke that, following a concatenation of events rigorously alternating between influence and destiny, will naturally bring about Richard’s death.

***

Is it important to ask ourselves by what paths Shakespeare arrived at this perfect equilibrium of spiritual perceptions, which has no precedents and which we will not find so purely distilled in any of his later works? Perhaps it would not be if the tragedy itself were not continually breaking away from us, its spectators or readers, and soaring to that zone of profound mystery I have called la noche oscura. A zone of mystery that (as in the duel scene in Richard II) is the first and perhaps the most charged of all the great Shakespearean plays. Indeed, according to a chronology as sparse as it is rich in illuminations, before Richard II Shakespeare had only written comedies and one grim exercise: Titus Andronicus. King John was quite probably written later, and there is no proof that the first two parts of Henry IV, which are set a little nearer to this period, preceded it. But all this hardly matters. Only one thing is certain: Richard II is the telltale pause that declares the first great experiences of the soul. Everything in this pause is eloquent—the scarceness and austerity of the images, all subjected to the greatest spiritual tension; the unusual sense of time, mercilessly and minutely measured by the verse; and above all the attempt, which is even more unusual considering this is Shakespeare, to keep everything within the confines of the purest sorrow. The image of the man, as the work elusively proceeds, seems so close and so immobile it makes us think of an optical illusion—the result, perhaps, of that veil of tears that he continually suspends between himself and us.

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;
For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion . . .

But where the glaring identification between author and character lets us see the whole tragedy as a pure meditation—a secret tribute or a secret apology—is in the fallen Richard’s lamentations. Here is the mark of misfortune out of reach for mere imagination; the mark of that misfortune “which has nothing to do with unhappiness” and which alone reveals to us the monotony of horror; the immobility of time, in horror, that swallows up everything; the sameness, in horror, of all human losses. Thus Richard feels, in prison, his own person has been transformed into time:

How sour sweet music is,
When time is broke . . .
For now hath time made me his numbering clock.
My thoughts are minutes . . .

Thus he imagines the mere falling of tears will be enough to dig a grave:

We’ll make foul weather with despised tears . . .
As thus, to drop them still upon one place
Till they have fretted us a pair of graves
Within the earth; and therein laid—there lies
Two kinsmen digged their graves with weeping eyes.

Thus he feels the blood of twenty thousand soldiers pouring down his face:

Comfort, my liege; why looks your grace so pale?
But now the blood of twenty thousand men
Did triumph in my face, and they are fled;
And, till so much blood thither come again
Have I not reason to look pale and dead?
All souls that will be safe, fly from my side,
For time hath set a blot upon my pride.

No less, and perhaps more, than the Sonnets themselves, Richard II’s fall bears witness to Shakespeare’s noche oscura—that compulsory passage in human existence through moral violence out of which, dead or alive, a new man cannot but emerge. That the tragic emotional parable of the Sonnets is begun during this same period in Shakespeare’s life may mean a great deal or very little. The report of the death—also around this time—of Hamnet Shakespeare, his eleven-year-old son, or the story of Shakespeare leaving London to retire, at the age of thirty-two and at the height of his adventure in acting, to the small town of Stratford may also mean a great deal or very little. The one thing we know for certain is that the violence was converted into suffering, and that the suffering divinely blossomed into love.

 

From The Unforgivable and Other Writings, to be published by New York Review Books in February. 

Translated from the Italian by Alex Andriesse.

Cristina Campo (1923–1977) was an Italian writer, poet, and translator. A congenital heart malformation kept her out of school and social life for much of her childhood, forcing her into a reclusion enlivened by her reading. A bona fide autodidact, she had by her teens begun to read deeply in Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English literature. After World War II, she moved to Rome, where she became acquainted with Eugenio Montale, Curzio Malaparte, and Roberto Bazlen, among others. She nearly always published under pseudonyms (Cristina Campo being one of them) and translated—Simone Weil, Katherine Mansfield, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf—far more than she wrote.

Alex Andriesse’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Granta, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Prodigal, and Literary Imagination. He has translated several works from Italian and French and is an associate editor at New York Review Books.

Januarys

Beach in January. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CC0 4.0.

Every December day that I’m in Maine I swim in the ocean and my husband tells me I’m insane. The temperature keeps dropping. I get two respiratory infections, a twenty-four-hour stomach thing. Why? he says to me. Mom, the children say. They have only recently transitioned me to Mom from Mommy, and every time they say it my breath catches. Their dad’s Cuban and I’ve tried to convince them to transition me to Mami. It’s Spanish! I say. You’re white, Mom, they say. You know, Mom, our younger kid says, beating yourself up isn’t a hobby. I’m preparing, I tell them. For what? they say. For January.

The first January we live in Maine, the twenty-second month of the pandemic: we’re all so tired and almost everyone I know in New York is sick. My job has gone remote and I get up each morning to work when it’s still dark. I turn on the small space heater in my office and wrap a big blanket around myself, sit with my computer on my lap. Evening comes, and I text my friend five minutes before I teach at seven. I’ve been at my desk for fourteen hours but can’t think of a single thing I’ve done. What if I hate teaching now? I say. Babe, my friend texts back, it’s January. You hate everything.

The Januarys in high school are all track—all the early Januarys are in Florida and the monotony of those sunny, plastic, clear and cloudless days comes to feel like it’s assaulting me. I run four events at least. The two-mile is the longest, and the last race of the day. Late nights on the bus, the too-big jacket and sweatpants, crumbled rubber on bare thighs while I sit and stretch with my Discman, bile in my throat at the start; everybody cheers when I win, no one after talks to me.

The first January in New York, alone, on Tenth Street between C and D, I’m twenty-one. I call in sick to work. I tell them I got food poisoning because I’ve worked nonstop for months and I can’t fathom smiling another minute, another day, at some klatch of too-thin women who order just one order of our extra-special-everybody-loves-it chocolate-bag dessert with extra spoons, whipped cream on the side; at some guy, with his hand on the low curve of my back, who keeps sending back his steak. I count the cash stuffed in the dark wood box I keep by my bed and then I call again and tell them I threw up so much I ruptured my esophagus and now I have to go to the hospital. I think about how easy lying is. I read books all day, watch TV all night, hardly eat because I can’t afford to eat. restaurant is uptown and I live downtown and I walk around the whole time assuming that I won’t get caught and I don’t. Oh God, they all say when I come back to work, their eyes scanning my face, you must have been so sick.

The January we’re in Florida, the town where both of us grew up, our first time as grown-ups—also the first time we’re a we—I’ve replaced the only teacher that I ever liked in high school midyear because he killed himself. A cold snap comes, sixty-five degrees and the students all wear puffy coats and there’s a cockroach infestation in the English classroom hallway. I’m the only English teacher not afraid of cockroaches, so often, while I’m teaching, another of the English teachers will come get me, squirming. We found another one! She’ll stand up by the board in my room with my students. I’ll get a paper towel from the teachers’ lounge and go into her classroom, where the students are all talking, unconcerned about the cockroach, relieved to have this break, and I’ll pick it up if I can find it, hold it in my hand, and bring it outside by the street so it can run away.

The January we live in New Orleans is the coldest January anybody in New Orleans can remember. The door to our backyard in our little Irish Channel shotgun has a crack, the big windows that I loved so much when we moved in are, my now-husband tells me, only single-paned, and I sleep in a wool cap and long underwear with two sweaters on top and we have sex with as many clothes on as we can. The Saints are bounding toward the Super Bowl and the whole town’s alight. Tulane girls in ponytails and old women talk strategy out on the street. At our favorite restaurant, which has the best red beans and rice—the bread pudding’s even better—the door doesn’t close all the way unless you press it perfectly and every time someone leaves someone screams the door! Because when it’s left open, the cold gets in, and sometimes the people leaving stop and try again and sometimes someone gets up to help, and often the whole time we’re there, someone is screaming the door!

The January we live in Brooklyn on Ocean Parkway, I drive our tiny white Honda Fit up from Florida, where we’ve been the past six weeks. My husband has to stay for work, and I have classes to teach, so I drive twenty miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike with the dog curled up next to the gas pedal because he is afraid of everything on earth but me. I try to get a hotel in Virginia but all the hotels are full and the one that isn’t full doesn’t take dogs, so I take naps on the side of the road with the car running. Then I drive again, the hazards still on, so slowly that it feels like we won’t get there before spring.

The January we live in Brooklyn on Underhill and Sterling, I am newly pregnant and our friends who have two kids have their heat turned off by their landlord, so they come stay in our one-bedroom apartment for the week. We set them up on the couch, the two parts of it pushed together to make one big bed with lots of blankets and pillows. They have no money left, and I lend them my MetroCard when the husband goes to look for work. Trapped inside for the hundredth day, a polar vortex making every minute outside a biting, aching cold, they have no childcare or preschool, and I give my friend my credit card and she takes the kids to the children’s museum, and I get five hours to myself. I get five hours by myself with the knowledge that now there is a person just like these two people staying with us—crying, eating, wetting their pants, throwing tantrums, hot-skinned, wiggly, crawling over both their mother and their father as if their bodies were their bodies—that something like that is growing inside of me.

The January we live in Brooklyn on Twelfth Street, I’m pregnant again, and I need more work. I call the babysitter we can’t afford. I put on a blazer and nice slacks that are too tight and go into a brown-bag lunch session about ghostwriting. Everybody takes notes, and there’s a lot of leaning forward in one’s chair, a lot of nodding earnestly. No work comes from it.

The January we live upstate in Cold Spring, they don’t clear the roads enough. I take the 4:30 A.M. Metro-North into Grand Central, then the subway to my sister’s Murray Hill apartment, where I drop my stuff, even though my sister and I hardly ever talk, so I can go running in Central Park before I teach.

The January we live in Brooklyn on Fifteenth Street, it’s too close to the BQE, I think. I google how close is too close but it’s the only apartment we could find and afford in this neighborhood. There’s a glass-and-metal processing plant across the street. I get up at four thirty to work but our younger kid is up by five. I have a chair set up next to the sliding glass door that leads out to the small balcony with a view of the highway. We have a folding table in front of the door where we’ve piled up my overflow of books and all of the kids’ art. I lean my head against the sliding glass, my computer in my lap, and watch the old men and women with their can-filled shopping carts. The street is the street that a lot of people turn down to get to the highway’s onramp, so there’s almost always noise, whooshing too-fast cars and honking horns, the beeping backing-up of trucks. When our kid wakes up, hot skin and sour breath replace the computer on my lap. We live on the top floor and there are pigeons that live on the apartment roof. There’s a hard plastic awning over the small balcony and their claws scratch against it, and when they land on it, there’s a popping sound. Our kid fits nested in my lap and we watch the traffic pick up, the sky lighten with sun. We watch the snow fall when it comes. We listen to the birds scratch-pop.

The January we live in Florida again, in the pandemic’s miasmic middle stretch, I don’t mind all the sun and warmth as much. We share a house with my husband’s parents and a room with both the kids. I stay up late and listen to them breathe. I tell my family that I have to work and sit outside with my coffee in a short-sleeved shirt and linen pants, and I watch the three large palm trees rustling in the wind in the backyard, my computer closed and quiet next to me.

That first January we live in Maine, every deeper drop in temperature, every greater fall of snow or rain or both, is an opportunity to prove that I can run in that too, that I can put small spikes attached to rubber straps on my shoes, put on another layer of pants, a tube of fleece around my neck that I can pull up over my face. I like the six-degree days more than the twenty-degree days. I can hardly stand the days that go up past thirty-five. On colder days the oxygen is thinner, the internet says, so my lungs have to work harder when the air is that cold. My breath catches halfway down. But I like the way the cold braces. Bracing cold feels like someone else’s phrase, but that’s the word I think of, every time I run, and the wind whips—I speed up—I feel my lungs work hard.

 

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight.

What If We’re All Self-Playing Harps?

Wind Harp, a twenty-eight-meter Aeolian harp and public sculpture designed by Lucia and Aristides Demetrios and constructed in 1967 on a hilltop industrial park in South San Francisco. Photograph by Jef Poskanzer, 2005. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, CCO 2.5.

Right after ChatGPT was made publicly available, people kept sending Nick Cave algorithmically generated song lyrics in the style of Nick Cave. At first, he tried to ignore them, but they kept arriving. Dozens of them. After reading one that featured a chorus with the refrain “I am the sinner, I am the saint / I am the darkness, I am the light,” Cave felt compelled to respond with an open letter published on his personal website. “This song sucks,” the former punk musician begins. Real songwriting arises from the “internal human struggle of creation,” a process that “requires my humanness.” “Algorithms don’t feel” and cannot participate in this “authentic creative struggle.” Therefore, ChatGPT’s poetry will forever suck, because no matter how closely the lyrics replicate Cave’s own, they will always be deficient.

In Cave’s weltanschauung, as laid out in the letter, the machine is a priori precluded from participating in the authentic creative act, because it is not, well, human. If this argument sounds hollow and slightly narcissistic, that’s because it is. It follows a circular logic: humans (and Nick Cave) are special because they alone make art, and art is special because it is alone made by humans (and Nick Cave). His argument is also totally familiar and banal—a platitude so endlessly repeated in contemporary discourse that it feels in some way hard-baked into the culture. According to historians of ideas (see Arthur Lovejoy, Isaiah Berlin, Alfred North Whitehead), this thesis took form sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century. A brief and noncomprehensive summary: to preserve human dignity in the face of industrialization, philosophers and poets, who were later called the Romantics, began to redraw ontological boundaries, placing humans, nature, and art on one side, and machines, industry, and rationalism on the other. Poets became paragons of the human, and their poems examples of that which could never be replicated by the machine. William Blake, for instance, one of Cave’s heroes, proposed that if it were not for the “Poetic or Prophetic character,” the universe would become but a “mill with complicated wheels.”

These may have been radical ideas in the late eighteenth century, edgy ripostes to an Enlightenment discourse that had grown stale with its own self-assurance. But two centuries later, the versions of this argument that we have seen play out in response to corporate-manufactured AI hype come across as stale, self-aggrandizing, and distinctly conservative. It also does a disservice to Romanticism’s intellectual legacy, which offers a far more nuanced conception of creativity than Cave’s. In fact, within the Romantic canon there is a metaphor concerning how poetry is made that casts the poet not as an emoting, suffering, conscious being set apart from the inanimate world but as an instrument that takes sensory input and translates it, via some internal mechanism, into poetry. In other words, a kind of machine.

***

The story behind this metaphor begins on a summer’s day in 1795, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge traveled to the town of Clevedon to visit his fiancée, Sarah Fricker, in a seaside cottage where they would, later that same year, spend their honeymoon, and begin their lives together as a very unhappily married couple. One evening, the pair was sitting in the drawing room, admiring the clouds as they changed color with the setting sun, when Coleridge looked at Sarah, and felt, for a rare moment, content and at ease. It was only fleeting, though, because the next moment, Coleridge’s calm was interrupted by an odd melody emanating from a wooden box lodged in the window. It looked like a rectangular acoustic guitar with no fretboard, set on the windowsill, the sash pulled down to just above the strings. When the evening breeze blew, it passed through the box and out came an otherworldly music.

This wind-powered instrument was called an Aeolian harp. It functioned somewhat like a wind chime, but with strings: if the wind hit the strings with just the right amount of pressure, they would sing out all on their own. The harp got its name from Aeolus, the Greek god of winds, and it appeared in many ancient myths. Hermes is said to have invented the lyre after hearing a breeze make music while blowing through the sinews and bones of a decomposing tortoise. King David, when still a shepherd, would listen to his harp at night as it was played by the northern wind. The phenomenon was later harnessed by a German Jesuit and polymath named Athanasius Kircher, who, in 1650, described a design for a “self-operating harmonic device“ in his book Musurgia Universalis. (He also invented a device capable of composing millions of church hymns by combining randomly selected musical phrases. These contraptions were housed in the Kircherianum, his personal museum in Rome, whose rooms were filled by the haunting sounds of his musical automatons, as well as other curiosities like vomiting mechanical crabs and cats dressed up as cherubs.) Kircher’s self-playing harp remained an obscurity until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Scottish composer James Oswald, who had read the ancient Aeolian myths, built his own version of the self-playing instrument. His harp was compact and could be placed easily in a window. He sold many from his London shop, and soon other instrument-makers began copying him. By the end of the century, the Aeolian harp was an aspirational lifestyle gadget among England’s emerging middle class—a kind of home-entertainment system, the Bose speakers of its time.

And yet the harp remained somewhat enigmatic and mysterious, too. Few understood the scientific principle according to which the Aeolian harp produced its music. Sometimes when the wind blew strong, it would make no sound. And other times, when there was seemingly no breeze, the strings would hum to life. Many imagined that the harp contained some inner life. One scientist published a study hypothesizing that the harp broke down the wind into its sonic constituents, in much the same way that a glass prism breaks white light into color. There were meteorologists convinced that, if they listened to it the right way, the Aeolian harps song could predict the weather.

That summer evening in Clevedon, Coleridge was overcome by this Aeolian mystery. As the breeze blew and the harp issued forth its sounds, the groom-to-be meditated on how the passive harp was nevertheless capable of producing music. Coleridge then began to wonder whether he was also just an instrument, like the harp, and that his verses were not composed through free will or human drive but just the product of sensory inputs interacting in some way with his brain. The idea struck Coleridge powerfully, prompting him to write a poem called “The Eolian Harp,” which is structured like the galaxy-brain meme, escalating in philosophical profundity with each stanza until it reaches its crescendo:

     And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

In other words, what if we’re all just self-playing harps?

***

There is something in this metaphor that seems distinctly un-Romantic. It figures the poet not as the paragon of humanness but an indolent plaything that generates verse via mechanistic and aleatory interactions with external forces. In fact, the intellectual origins of Coleridge’s Aeolian poetics are pre-Romantic. When composing “The Eolian Harp,” Coleridge was almost certainly inspired, at least in part, by the writings of the Enlightenment physician and philosopher David Hartley. In his major intellectual work, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), Hartley proposed a harp-like theory of consciousness: vibrations in the environment generate sensations in the body, which then rattle around inside the body and generate ideas, which can then be expressed in language. It is a proto-neuroscientific theory—wherein consciousness is the product of sensations vibrating inside the human instrument—and many of Hartley’s Romantic critics accused him of reducing the human to mere mechanism. But Coleridge saw it differently. For him, Hartley’s vibrational theory suggested a vibrating, animate, poetic cosmos. The role of the poet was to tune into the cosmos and translate its many vibrations into beautiful verse, much like the harp translates the wind into music. Poetry was not dredging up internal, subjective emotion but attuning to one’s environment. To be harp-like, then, was to push past the boundaries of the human and to commune with the living universe, or what Coleridge describes in the poem as:

the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere

This framing proved influential among Romantics. Shelley, in his “Defence of Poetry,” wrote: “Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind of an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.” And Wordsworth, in the Prelude, muses how “the sweet breath of Heaven / Was blowing on my body, felt within / A corresponding mild creative breeze.” The Aeolian metaphor traveled, too, appearing as a motif in the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Hardy. So central was the harp metaphor to Romantic poetics that the literary critic M. H. Abrams proposed that “without this plaything of the eighteenth century, the Romantic poets would have lacked a conceptual model” for how poetry was made.

And yet these days, very few think of poets this way. More commonly, we think of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators,” or Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflowers of powerful feelings. This may be partly because Coleridge later repudiated Hartley’s theory of vibrations, turning instead back to the faith of the Church of England. But it could also be because Aeolian harps grew obsolete. By the end of the nineteenth century, the same bourgeois households that had once entertained guests with the haunting tones of the harp were now listening to recordings on the gramophone. These new machines—which later gave way to record players, CDs, minidiscs, iPods, Spotify—decoupled music from its immediate performance and transformed into a reproducible, abundant, and eventually, almost superfluous commodity. Suddenly, any melody could be enjoyed over and over in private at the whim of the listener. There was no need to rely on the chance play of wind upon harp strings to have music in one’s house. The Aeolian harp was redundant, along with its metaphor. After all, what use is comparing a poet to an Aeolian harp if most of us don’t even know what it sounds like?

And even if you seek out an Aeolian harp to listen to, it is, I discovered, not so simple to find one. After reading Coleridge’s poem, I wanted to hear the harp in action, to help me understand why it provoked such a radical and idiosyncratic theory of creativity. I called around with little luck. The only people I could find with a lingering interest in Aeolian harps were a few esoteric wind-instrument makers and avant-garde composers. These people did not just have some passing interest in the wind instrument—they were passionate, as if the instrument, when heard, inspired some zealous appreciation, which of course made me even more curious. There was a woman I spoke to called Jodi who had been traveling the world and recording Aeolian emissions from bridge cables. Now, she was trying to structure the recordings into a “global bridge symphony,” which was tricky, because each bridge had its own phonic character. The Brooklyn Bridge, she told me emits a gentle, burbling tone. The Anzac Bridge in Sydney, though, is high-pitched and staccato. “A neurotic bridge,” Jodi said, as if she had communed with the bridge interpersonally. (This intimacy with the inanimate reached a peak in 2013 when she fell in love with a stone bridge in the South of France called the Pont du Diable. She asked permission from the mayor of the town to marry the bridge, and he assented, so, in the summer of 2013, she invited fourteen of her closest friends to witness her betrothal. She walked down the aisle to Nick Cave’s ballad “Into My Arms.”)

I asked Jodi if there were any bridges in Melbourne that I could listen to, considering that I couldn’t find any harps. “Melbourne is a quiet city,” Jodi said, ruefully. Our biggest bridges, the West Gate and the Bolte, have no cables. There was once a singing pedestrian bridge in the outer suburbs that had been built over a freeway. It didn’t have cables but metal balustrades, with many little decorative holes drilled into them. When the wind blew, as it almost always did due to the endless convoy of trucks that drove beneath it, the air would pass through those holes and generate a sound that residents described as being like that of a child being tortured. The holes were filled in and the bridge fell silent.

“Wait,” Jodi said, suddenly hopeful. “There is one small footbridge in the city that has cables. But I think they have been covered in plastic, so you’d need a stethoscope to hear it. Do you have a stethoscope?” I said I didn’t. “In that case, I really don’t know if there is anywhere I can send you,” Jodi said, apologetically, before hanging up.

A week passed and I had given up on hearing a harp when Ros, a composer who had constructed several large-scale Aeolian instruments on a fifty-five-acre property somewhere in the bush, called me up. I had emailed her weeks earlier and never heard back. She had been traveling, she said, but was back in town. “I have what you’re after,” she added. “A harp?”

That Saturday, I visited Ros at her house, which was, coincidentally, only a five-minute walk from my own. It was a blustery day. The cracks in the floorboards of my house whistled. The bin fell over and my cat scampered. Ros was waiting for me out the front of her well-maintained Victorian terrace, her brilliant orange hair whipping back and forth in the breeze. She shook my hand and led me inside to her music room. The walls were painted bloodred and each corner of the room was cluttered with various wind instruments, including dozens of ornate wooden recorders that Ros had carved herself.

“Here it is,” Ros said, pointing at the window. Wedged on the sill was a white cardboard box—almost like an oversize shoebox—with nylon strings pulled tight across from one side to the other. “It’s a very simple harp, not ornate at all,” Ros said. “But the best thing about it is that it’s portable. In Ireland, back in the day, every house would have a harp on the door and if you sold the house the harp would stay, like it belonged to the place. And of course, the harps I built on my property are too big to move around. And their strings are always breaking due to exposure. But this one I take with me everywhere I go.”

Ros took the harp from the window and began to tune it, and as she did, she told me, in scientific terms, how the harp works. When the wind blows against the harp, it is not the string itself that makes the sound but the breeze deflecting off them like tiny whistling tornadoes, she explained. The whistling tornadoes are called von Kármán vortex streets, a well-known phenomenon in fluid dynamics.

“But the thing is,” Ros said, placing the harp back in the window, “even though we understand how it works, the harp only plays when it wants to anyway. Like today, for example. It’s so windy, and nothing. All winter, nothing! It’s refusing to sing for us. But we could try something.”

Ros opened the door and called out down the corridor. “Arthur, darling. Could you open the kitchen window?” “Huh?” a voice called back. “The harp, darling,” Ros said. “We’re just trying to get the fullness of the wind.” A window opened somewhere, and an icy gust ripped through. The piano lid slammed shut, but the harp remained dead silent. Ros raised her eyebrows. “This is the thing with the harp. It’s a barometer of the now. It tells us where we are.” “Where are we?” I asked. “I think we’re stuck,” Ros said. “And sometimes we just have to give in and wait until the wind changes.”

 

Oscar Schwartz is a writer and journalist. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

Aerial view of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters some time between 1990 and 2006. Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

I dwelled a little on this point.

She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.

When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted.

“So my visit wouldn’t be classified?”

Vivian confirmed that I could tell anyone I wanted. “Just don’t tell them my name—or I’ll have to kill you. Just kidding!”

As I considered the invitation, I kept wondering why I’d been invited. I don’t write about CIA-adjacent topics, nor am I successful enough a novelist that people outside a small circle—one that I doubt includes U.S. intelligence agencies—know my name. So the invite was a bit of a mystery. This was the second-most common question that came up when I told writer friends about it, topped only by: “No speaking fee?” At first, I wondered whether the gig was part of a recruitment strategy. But it doesn’t take a vast intelligence apparatus to know that I am not intelligence material, not least because I am a professional writer.

Next I wondered if my visit could be used as soft-diplomacy propaganda. Look how harmless we are! We let writers come to our headquarters and pose for pictures. The CIA had veered into this type of literary boosterism before—supporting, for example, the founding of the very magazine for which I am writing this piece. So it wasn’t out of the question. In 2021, I had turned down an invitation from the government of Saudi Arabia for an all-expenses-paid trip to a writers’ retreat at al-‘Ulā, as I didn’t want to be a part of their arts and culture whitewashing. But in the end, I couldn’t think of a way that I’d be a useful propaganda tool for the CIA—unless they anticipated me writing this essay (in which case, kudos CIA)—and so I said yes.

***

On the agreed-upon morning a few weeks later, I left my apartment in D.C. and drove into the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke that was floating over the city. By the time I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the George Bush Center for Intelligence exit, and on to a restricted usage road, I was already nervous. I’m the kind of person who weighs and measures my suitcases before flying, lest I be scolded at the airport, and I do not like driving down roads with signs like EMPLOYEES ONLY and WILL BE ARRESTED.

At the gate intercom, I gave my name and social security number—Vivian had gathered this information and more ahead of time, over a series of phone calls, each from a different phone number—and a police officer gave me a visitor’s badge that was to be displayed on my person at all times. He warned me that I was to be escorted at all times.

I met Vivian in a lot between the first gate and the second gate, where her car was the only one parked. She gave me another badge that appeared identical to the first. I left my phone in my car as instructed, and we got into Vivian’s car and drove to the second gate. That was when things started not going as planned.

Four agitated police officers blocked our way.

“He can’t leave his car here!” they yelled when Vivian rolled down her window.

“But I cleared this ahead of time,” Vivian said.

“He can’t leave his car here. It’s a security risk.”

“But how am I supposed to escort him if we can’t drive together?”

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “I just do parking.”

It turned out that, like in many bureaucracies, the individual parts that made up the CIA were siloed, and there was no point in arguing about logical contradictions.

Vivian gave up and drove me back to my car, clearly stressed. I told her it wasn’t a big deal—I would just follow her.

The problem, she said, was that we wouldn’t be able to park in the same lot. And I had to be escorted at all times. And employee parking at the CIA was a mess. “It’ll take me forever just to walk to you.”

She resolved that she would simply park in VIP visitor parking with me, and if she got a ticket, she got a ticket. “Just follow me.”

I got in my car and followed her to the gate. I watched from behind the wheel as she drove up to the gate, talked to one of the police officers, and drove off past the gate at a good clip, very much not being followed by me.

I pulled up to the gate, and an aggressive police officer questioned me about why I had two badges.

“Didn’t it seem strange to you to get a second badge when you’d just got your first one?”

“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “Everything seems strange to me.”

A different cop told him to give it a rest, handed me a third badge, and asked if I needed directions to VIP parking. I have a terrible sense of direction—I once got lost at Costco for so long that they had to call my mom over the PA; I was fifteen—and Google Maps isn’t much use at Langley.

The nice cop said that I needed to turn right and follow the road until the sixth left. There I would see a line of squad cars and a gate, where my badge would swipe me in.

“If you see a helicopter, you’ve gone too far,” he said. “Just loop back around. Don’t make a U-turn.”

When I later told Vivian about the mean cop and the nice one, she said, “They’re always doing that good cop–bad cop thing.”

“For parking?”

“For everything!”

I found the VIP parking on my first try. I held my badge out to the scanner. The gate rose! I drove in. And drove. And drove. And drove. In circles, because all the spaces in the small VIP lot were taken. I couldn’t leave the parking lot—I wasn’t supposed to be unescorted anywhere on campus, but at least in visitor parking my presence was somewhat explainable—so I kept circling the lot, accumulating sweat. Finally, someone left. I parked, got out, took a breath of ashy air, and wondered what to do next. I was relieved to see Vivian’s car stuck at the VIP gate, negotiating with the voice on the intercom.

“They won’t let me into VIP parking,” she explained as I got into her car. “They said it’s a security risk.”

We turned back onto the main road and drove for a bit. And then, after a bend, there appeared an abundance of parked cars. Cars upon cars upon cars. I’d never seen a parking lot this big, outside of professional sporting events. The quadrants were labeled by color, the rows by letter; we weaved through row after row of Virginia plates, from Blue D all the way up to Purple V without finding a spot.

I asked Vivian how many people worked at the CIA.

“Maybe two million?” She smiled and confessed that she had no idea, even though I was made to understand that she had been at the CIA, and in the writing group, for a number of years.

As we snaked through line after line of cars, Vivian told me that if you worked here and wanted to avoid a twenty-minute walk from your car, you had to be at the office by 7 A.M. I wondered if this was intentional—a way to encourage long hours, like the tech companies that offer employees free dinners in the cafeterias that don’t open until 6:30 P.M. Or if it was the result of expansion necessitated by the post-9/11 surveillance state and the popularity of phones that record our every movement. As Kerry Howley notes in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, we have created and stored more data in the twenty-first century than in the rest of human history combined. If the government wants to find coherent stories in all that data, I thought as I looked at the vastness of the lot, someone has to comb through it.

At first, we couldn’t find the conference room. Like me, Vivian wasn’t allowed to bring her phone into the main building, but even if she had, I don’t know who she would’ve called for directions. CIA officers generally don’t know their coworkers’ last names. (The Starbucks at Langley is the only Starbucks where baristas aren’t allowed to ask for your name.) So I am without photos or notes, but walking through the main building at Langley, is, in my memory, like walking through an airport terminal in a major metropolis, crossed with a hospital, crossed with an American mall, crossed with an Eastern European university. It’s big and gleaming and cold and brutal, all at once. There was a hall of presidential portraits with notes from commanders in chief to the Secret Service, all of them written in elegant fountain pen, except for Donald Trump’s, which was written in Sharpie and said “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”

We finally found the conference room, through a side door in the CIA Museum. It was unclear who this museum was for, but it was not a bad museum, full of objects of interest: pieces of the Berlin Wall, tie-clip cameras, Soviet bugging devices, et cetera, displayed in glass cases. Six people were seated at the conference table inside the conference room, which was windowless and had a big CIA seal on the wall.

“Sorry we’re late!” Vivian announced.

“Strip search?” one of the men joked.

“Parking,” I said.

A collective groan. The goddamned parking.

I began by asking what people were writing. Surprisingly, none of the CIA writers were writing spy novels. They were working on short stories. Self-published dystopian sci-fi. A presidential biography. Upmarket fiction. A personal blog, which I was told to check out if I ever wanted a really good muffin recipe. The writing group was organized around what sounded like a listserv announcing periodic meetings to whatever members were available that day. Only about half the people in the room seemed to know one another.

I talked a little bit about writing beginnings and working through false starts. I read the first page of my latest novel, explained why I’d set the first scene in the U.S. when the rest of the novel takes place in Ukraine, and went through all the false starts I’d taken to get where I was going. One officer raised their hand and asked about establishing voice in first versus third person. Another asked about revision techniques. Another about the shift from writing alone to working with an editor. It was the least remarkable Q&A I’ve ever been a part of.

I had a little time to kill before our lunch reservation—seating time in the executive dining room was not flexible—so Vivian took me to the gift shop.

Given that almost no one’s allowed inside Langley and the people who work for the CIA aren’t supposed to advertise it, it was, like with the museum, a bit of a mystery who the gift shop was for. The shelves were stocked with T-shirts (Central Intelligence Agency), mugs (Central Intelligence Agency), and novelty barbecue sauce (Top Secret Recipe!). There was also a Pride Month display (Central Intelligence Agency in rainbow). I bought a Pride Month pen for four dollars.

***

The dining room was long and mostly empty—apparently a security thing—with white tablecloths and a long wall of windows looking out at the swampy greenery of northern Virginia. Or I was told that it normally looked out at greenery. Today it looked out at wildfire smoke. The menu was essentially cafeteria food—normal American fare. I ordered a burger with sweet potato fries and a Coke from a businesslike waitress in a white dress shirt.

The CIA officer seated next to me asked if I thought it was worth getting a literary agent. I said yes, and she seemed skeptical.

“In my other work,” she explained, “I can get movie people attached.”

I still have no idea what she meant.

While we waited for our food, the writer of dystopian sci-fi confirmed that if you work for the CIA, lawyers have to vet anything you publish. But they were more lenient than I would’ve guessed. She said that one of her novels had helped change how the agency viewed fiction versus nonfiction. While reading her novel, the lawyers decided that just because a character in a novel says something doesn’t mean that the author necessarily agrees, so there should be more leeway for CIA fiction writers. (Which suggests CIA lawyers are more nuanced literary critics than half of Goodreads.)

Obviously you can’t share classified information, I was told. You can’t violate the Hatch Act, showing your political affiliation, and you’re also not supposed to violate the Washington Post rule, which was: Would the CIA be embarrassed if this were in tomorrow’s Washington Post? (This seemed trickiest to determine.)

Another officer mentioned that, since the CIA has people doing things abroad that could be considered dubious, you had to be sensitive about that. I asked what they meant when they said dubious, which resulted in a change of topic. I asked if they knew of any issues with someone trying to publish something that they couldn’t get approved. One of the older writers said that she had heard of an officer who had tried to publish a memoir that discussed his experience of racism in the CIA and was told he couldn’t until he retired.

After lunch—everyone paid at the register, in cash, and Vivian paid for me—Vivian walked me out to my car.

“It was interesting to learn what you all can and can’t write about,” I said to Vivian. “I didn’t realize you had so much freedom to write about your jobs.”

We passed through the security turnstile and walked over a giant CIA seal, which I recognized from several movies, painted on the marble floor.

“The last thing in the world I’d want to write about is this place,” Vivian said at the door. “I can’t imagine anything more boring.”

 

Johannes Lichtman’s debut novel, Such Good Work, was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. His second novel, Calling Ukraine, is available in hardcover and will be published in paperback in April.

Ripping Ivy

Ivy. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0.

When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn’t bother me much. It’s not what I would have chosen—who would choose an invasive species?—but my spouse and I agreed we would come up with a Yard Plan and make strategic choices, slowly and deliberately, including eradicating the ivy. Getting rid of ivy is notoriously difficult—my mom warned me it’s “backbreaking work.” I was also, when we moved in, finishing a book project, then in its sixth year and finally arriving at the fact-checking stage. The ivy project existed in the future.

One day, in a stolen moment of daylight, I was sitting around in our front yard with my spouse and small childwhen I noticed a little ivy creeper reaching out, venturing beyond its bed into the grass. The beds were bad enough as it was, but they certainly could not be permitted to grow. So, I grabbed it and pulled. It did not yield. Tough guy, huh? I regripped and pulled harder, and it popped out of the ground, spraying dry dirt in my face. I was elated. I had contained the ivy. I grabbed another vine and pulled.

That was the beginning. From that moment forward, all I wanted to do was rip ivy out of the ground. The ivy beds were just outside my office window, and I knew they were sending out their little traveler vines and growing their territories whenever I looked away. I started ripping ivy while the baby napped. I started ripping ivy while on calls with editors and sources. I invited a neighbor who had (in my defense, unknown-to-me) back problems to come over and rip ivy with me as a social engagement. (She joined me, and hurt her back.)

Ivy’s presence in a yard is binary: all of it has to go, or those green leaves will spring back up at the next rain. I heard this time and again from neighbors who wandered by as I hunched over my work; it seemed everybody had an ivy-pulling story. One couple stopped repeatedly to tell me that ivy is the work of the Devil. A man took pains to tell me I would never win—it would just come back again. Okay, I said. We’ll see, I thought.

I began to develop my own ivy-pulling techniques: I would pull up on the easy, thin, green traveler vine to see where it came from, what larger root system sponsored it. Usually it intersected with another vine cluster. If I was feeling aggressive I would rip them both out at once with my bare hands. I used clippers to chop through any roots too thick to pull. When I pulled an especially long vine and root system out, it would snap in the air like a whip. Then I would break it in half and throw it on the enormous and growing pile of my dead.

I started seeing ivy tangles when I closed my eyes, ivy in my dreams. Late at night, without the option to do my work (pulling ivy), I had to focus on my real work, the enormous pile of unchecked facts, the documents that needed scanning, the sources who needed calling yet again. I had expected fact-checking to be a phase of delegation after I hired a fact-checker, but in fact I had to spend quite a lot of time preparing, organzing, in order for her to be able to work. How were these facts so unruly?

Slowly, over the course of three months, the ivy beds shrank. My misplaced diligence had a tangible effect: I was winning. I got sunburned, my hands blistered, and my back did start to hurt, but: I won. The ivy has not come back. The battle with the facts ended, too: my book was published in March of 2022, and I’m not going to say more about that because I don’t want to jinx it.

And so our yard is ivy-less. But I honestly miss the job. Without facts to check or vines to pull, I have felt a little lost, a little aimless. Unmoored. When I take walks in the park, I very casually rip out the vines intruding on the pathway as I breeze by; I eye my neighbors’ yards of complacent ivy with anxious, compulsive envy and wonder how weird it would be to offer help. Every once in a blue moon, from somewhere underground, a little ivy creeper will spring up on the edges of my yard. I am always elated to see it; it feels like running into a long-lost friend. I jump to rip it out.

Mary Childs is a host of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, and the author of The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All,  from Flatiron Books.