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A Duel or a Duet: On Graham Greene

Graham Greene. Unknown photographer, public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have the luxury of having no known biography. Greene, having written about his life and having had his life extensively written about by others, remains near when one reads his work—not insistently dominating or distracting, as some writers may prove to be, but as a presence often felt and at times caught by a side glance.

The first moment appears in Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape. In a chapter about Brighton Rock, which Greene called a labour of love, he explains the original inspiration for the novel with a reminiscence about the first film he saw at age six—a silent film about a kitchen maid turned queen, with live music played offscreen—he writes, “Her march was accompanied by an old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded … That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality.”

The second moment appears in Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant by Leopoldo Duran. In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel Monsignor Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. “I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, learning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing … With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.”

To say that these two moments encapsulate Greene’s work for me is an irresponsible cliche: the point of literature is not to be put into capsules, a trick good only for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Rather, the two moments provide a home key whenever I read Greene’s work. There are multiple pairings of twos in both scenes: a duel or a duet; who can say which is the more apt noun here?

In the first, the heroine, a kitchen maid and a queen within one being, offers a fairytale setting for some confrontations: reality versus fantasy, past versus future, entrapment versus freedom—variations of these appear in many of Greene’s novels. But a more interesting pairing is the beautiful image of a silent woman on the screen and the old lady plinking-plonking off stage: which of them is more dramatic, more romantic, more illusory and yet more permanent? And of course, in that same passage, there is also Greene the author (in his mid-seventies, going by the publication date of the book) and Greene the six-year-old boy. The mature man feels the young boy’s emotions—in Greene’s own words, “to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony.” The younger self, in carving into his memory feelings he’s not yet capable of articulating or even understanding, is nevertheless an equal partner: here is the source of a writer’s sense and sensibility, like the initial vibration that makes the sound; what comes after are echoes and reverberations.

In the second moment, again the illusory cinematic art appears. Father Juan, with his seventy years of Trappist history, must never have watched a film, and there he stands, witnessing what would remain a mysterious process to most audiences in the cinema. The clash and the harmony between the holy and the secular, believing and make-believing, faith and entertainment, the pending death of Monsignor Quixote—a fictional character, whose Sancho in the novel is an ex-mayor, a communist—and the pending death of Father Juan in the not too distant future: one has a sense that one enters, at that moment, the quintessential Greene land.

There is defiance that comes only with youth and inexperience, the refusal to accept life as it is: no one says a kitchen maid cannot also be a warrior queen; no one says a child cannot have the emotions that would put the world, which is often indifferent, to shame. There is also a defiance that comes with old age when the world seems no longer new: surely there is still something more to ponder, even if you’ve lived close to God in a Trappist cell for seventy years. And those who understand both kinds of defiance, one suspects, will be the right readers for Greene.

***

There are different ways to talk about Greene’s work. We can focus on the amphitheater of history, where wars, revolutions and colonial intrigues play impersonal gods to the mortals. We can scrutinize the mundane settings waiting for major and minor human dramas to happen—the streets and alleyways of Brighton and Saigon, the unaired offices of London ministry buildings, the manicured suburban gardens, the well-lit casinos and much-visited seaside resorts, the jungles and rivers of Africa and South America. We can also step away from those external settings and enter the interior landscapes of many of his characters, some of them with God on their side, others without; some have time on their side, others not; some with friends or loves or even enemies on their side, others not. But all of them have memories and dreams on their side—a blessing, even if it sometimes masks itself as a curse. And all of them, it seems to me, are only half of a duel or half of a duet, their partners sometimes visible and other times invisible.

In “A Day Saved,” an unnamed narrator follows an unnamed man, with a detailed plan to kill him and yet with the horror that he knows nothing about the man, not even his name. This seems a classic Greene dilemma, where one man’s despair and (partial) knowledge and another man’s innocence and faith in the ordinary (if he takes a flight instead of a train, he will save a day) constitute the quicksand for the reader: surely we are in a worse situation than the two characters; there is no choice for us but to be both of them at the same time. “A day saved … Save it from what, for what?” We may as well ask ourselves every day, for the rest of our lives, without knowing the answer.

In “The Basement Room,” a child—temporarily orphaned (his parents are out of town)—and the butler of the house, whom the child loves genuinely, are set on a course from page one to betray each other in the most fatal manner, and nothing will help them or save them. All the same, for as long as they go on being gentle and tender towards each other, we readers hold on to wishful thinking: of course, life will not take their sides, but perhaps—just perhaps—because of that, they will end up on the same side, two partners in a perpetual duet rather than being pitched against each other in a duel. But wishful thinking neither saves the butler nor the child nor us.

***

Is there any fundamental difference between a duel and a duet? In each, a connection predates the actual event. What comes­ after—understanding or misunderstanding, agreement or disagreement, harmony or dissonance, conversation or argument, life or death—may surprise us, but it is because human relationships are by nature surprising; what comes after may feel inevitable, and that too is what human relationships are about.

I started to read Greene when I was a young writer; twenty years later, he remains among a handful of writers I reread. His work keeps one’s mind on tiptoe. Illusions beget disillusions but also hopes; hopes beget illusions but also clarities.

As I was writing this, I looked for Ways of Escape on my bookshelf, wanting to revisit the cinema scene with the six-year-old Greene. It would be like a return to the home key, I thought, but among over twenty books by Greene (a few in duplicates) and still more about him, the one book I was looking for was absent! So much for the wish to see my previous annotations in the book and to have a duet with my younger self. And that missed connection, I must admit, is surprising and inevitable, like a tree standing inconspicuously and yet meaningfully in Greene-land.

 

This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new selection of Graham Greene’s stories, Duel Duet, to be published by Vintage Classics this month.

Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books, including the story collection Wednesday’s Child, which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, and the memoir Things In Nature Merely Grow. Her honors include fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations, and a Windham Campbell Prize, among others.  

My College Diary

I didn’t black out my diary like this—my process involved underlining parts I wanted to keep—but this gives a sense of how much is missing.

I kept a typed diary in college. It started three weeks into freshman year and ended three days into senior year. Over 1,079 days, I typed 76 entries, totaling 21,975 words.

Here, I’ve edited it down to 43 entries and 2,286 words. I edited only by deleting. I retained grammatical errors, such as incorrect comma usage, but I fixed typos and standardized the word-level style—italicizing books, etc.

An erasure poem is made by blacking out words in a poem. Memory is a mode of erasure that blacks out most of life. A diary is an erasure of memory—everything not written is blacked out. This post is an erasure diary where the smallest unit of erasure was the sentence. I erased 89.6 percent of the original. I feel wonder, thinking back to my college self, who did not anticipate this happening to his private diary.

2001

9/26

Today I had lunch with Veska and Catherine at Third North. I know that nothing really went wrong but I always feel disappointed when I don’t have a lot of fun with Veska.

9/29

After work I watched Gattaca on my computer. What a great movie, really moving.

10/3

Jessica thinks that I don’t like her because I don’t talk to her but I think she is really nice and interesting, I am just like this. Veska told Jessica that I don’t talk to her either, so remember, like in the handbook… they think I DON’T LIKE THEM, they don’t NOT like me. People that is.

10/18

After writing class I kind of just drifted away from Kevin and Vivick even though we were walking the same direction. I don’t know, I just have this thing where I think people don’t want to be my friend.

10/20

I’m going to walk real far and listen to my tapes then my CDs tonight. I just want to get away from all this.

10/31

Halloween. Went to my classes, went to work. Came back, did homework and study. Wrote a poem and short story. Now I sleep.

12/04

Already December, my life is slipping away. I talked to Veska today. She came to check out a book. We talked. It was nice.

 

2002

[I made no entries that year]

[end of freshman year]

 

2003

1/13

Adam and I’s first day in London we walked around Oxford street for a while then went to a high-class shopping mall called Harrods. We saw Buckingham Palace, saw some funny stores (BRB, Buybest, Hobgoblin Musix) and saw Big Ben. After a while it became like a job going to landmarks and taking pictures.

1/17

We headed out at 2 p.m. and once we reached Victoria Station we were bored. Adam told me that he felt trapped because there was nothing to do, but the day before I had told him that I felt trapped—I wonder if he didn’t listen to me, or forgot, or what, but Geri does the same thing.

1/18

I got really depressed tonight—almost out of nowhere. I was happy, in the airport I felt good, even after the 8 hour flight and even without coffee I felt good. We went outside and it quickly became obvious that New York is one of the worst cities in the world.

1/19

I woke up and tried to be upbeat, but just couldn’t. When I woke, I felt as if I had horrible amounts of gas or something—it was that kind of feeling—most of the day I laid in bed, never quite falling asleep. Geri read beside me and when I opened my eyes to look at her, she would look back and I wouldn’t know to talk or turn away or what. I tried keeping the blanket over my eyes to avoid that.

4/22

While my dad’s lawyer made his case, the judge thumbed through the dictionary-thick packet of evidence for my dad’s case that my dad’s lawyer had put together. He thumbed through it as if it was a specialty magazine that he once had a brief interest in. The sentence came and it was 70 months in prison.

[…]

My dad joked and laughed. “I can finish the lasers now!” He smiled and laughed later and pretty soon was talking about how the pigeons in the park had really fat necks.

4/23

I sort of wish I could spend a year in Vietnam.

[end of sophomore year]

5/24

On the phone, I tried to start telling Geri about my day, but my voice sounded flat. I tried to be happy but it was horrible—my mood plummeted and I ran some tears too. I felt like ending my life. It was so sudden.

[…]

I know I love her because when I’m with her I don’t feel unproductive, (as I do without her when I’m not creating art or work) I just feel happy and lessened of the burden of having to create. I love that Geri never complains when she’s with me.

5/26

I started White Noise by DeLillo and am enjoying it.

5/27

I’m going to write a novel.

6/5

Geri and I got into an argument again last night. We were fine for about an hour but then she wanted to know why I didn’t want to go to her house in MA and I was joking—I said, “Because the carpet is ugly, it’s brown.” And she said that only one room had brown carpet and the other rooms had blue carpet, and I said, “The second worst color,” referring to the blue carpet, and she seemed to be offended by it. That put me in a mood and I just couldn’t talk anymore.

[…]

I haven’t written anything since my story about the kid confessing to his parents his dream of being a grocer.

6/16

It’s hard to believe that I can find someone to be with that would stay with me for 8 months.

8/11

Dad came out and hugged Mom and I. He looked really happy. He said that he was reading before we came. He said that everyone inside gambled. His stomach was still fat but his skin color looked very healthy.

[…]

When we left, Dad hugged Mom and he must have grabbed her ass, because a guard called him over. Dad said that the guard said, “Don’t grab her ass.” Dad said: “What’s ass?” The guard laughed and said, “Don’t grab her ass.”

9/30

Geri and I broke up. At first, she broke up with me, then she wanted back, and I said no, but then I said yes, and then we fought again and broke up again, and then we got back again, and then I broke up with her and then she wanted to get back together and I said okay and then she said that no, she wanted to break up, and again she wanted back and this time I said no, we better just stay friends.

[…]

Rachel read my novel but she didn’t say anything about it. This is weird. Adam hasn’t said anything either. Neither has my brother.

[…]

Mom said that she received a letter from him where he expressed his love and that he was changing into something less business-like and more human. She said she cried for an hour after she read it.

10/5

My moods change so quickly now. I can be so depressed and lonely and then 2 or 3 hours later be happy and all that.

[…]

Tonight I was happy writing my novel and I didn’t worry about friends.

10/9

This is the worst feeling. But I like it. I like to sleep with this feeling. In some weird way, I look forward to lying down, having the lights off, and trying to cry, of thinking sad thoughts, of crying.

10/18

I hung out with Adam, Mike, Kevin, the Singaporeans, and even Veska and Victor and Alan and Jessica once. I had forgotten.

10/25

Tonight I read an Amy Hempel interview in the Paris Review which led me to read Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison, which I am still thinking about now […] Geri emailed me and said that I showed disinterest in her, and she wants to know if it’s because I think she wants to go out with me or because I don’t like her at all even as a friend. I don’t know. It’s confusing and I don’t want to think about it.

[…]

I also received a second letter from my dad. He wrote “love, Dad” for the first time ever. He said he loves me for the first time ever.

10/26

After finding Mary Robison’s email address on Google, I emailed her this long email talking about Rachel and my novel and her novel.

11/3

I workshopped my latest excerpt of my novel today. They liked it.

11/9

I spent last night and tonight completely alone (Friday and Saturday). Each day I went to write in the computer lab, wrote for about 2 to 3 hours then did some homework then went to St. Mark’s Bookshop. I ate tonight at the weird Italian/Japanese place.

11/10

I woke up at 1, got to work at 2. I worked until 7 and left to Third North computer lab. While there, I wrote till after 9. Then I worked on Reporting stuff until 11:45. Then I bought some eggs and instant noodles. Then I went back to the dorm. At the bus stop I gave a guy over 2 dollars and he talked to me about war and his Iranian psychiatrist.

11/14

It’s weird, the less I pay attention to her, the nicer she is to me. I guess it’s not that weird.

[…]

So then I saw that Singapore kid who has real big muscles. He said he weighs 160 pounds. We talked on the bus. He waited for me when he got off the bus and he said he was getting take out and he asked me if I wanted to come and I said I wasn’t eating but I’d come anyways and he said I was a good guy. I felt good then, very very good. So we talked and I told him about my novel and he was really interested, but all of a sudden he had to go buy toilet paper so we said bye.

11/24

I’ve noticed that Matt in my class always leaves class really fast and during breaks he doesn’t talk to anyone, he just looks down at his papers. I feel sad about this.

12/2

I haven’t talked to Rachel in a long long time. The last time I saw her she was walking down Lafayette towards Canal and she tapped my shoulder and waved at me, but wasn’t smiling. She had a weirdly neutral face.

[…]

I want a girlfriend with social anxiety.

12/5

Today in Reporting, on my break I went and bought a sprinkled cookie. When I came back, Rachel was checking her email. I sat there. She asked me, “Why don’t we hang out anymore?” I said, “I don’t know.” What does that mean? I don’t know.

12/13

I’m worried about what will happen when I’m done with this novel. Will I try to hang out more? But with who? The novel is my life now.

 

2004

1/21

I went to dinner with Rachel. We went to Congee Palace. While we were there, she said, “This was fun.” I think she said that a few times. And back in my dorm, when she was leaving, she said it again. “This was fun.” She said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”  I lent her two Lorrie Moore books and Mock Orange’s “First EP” (which I’ve been really into). Writing all this makes me happy.  =). Makes me realize everything that I appreciate, that I derive joy from, pleasure from. Writing. Music. Little relationships.

[…]

I think I really like Rachel. I’m just still having trouble BEING with people.

[…]

AJ said that my novel was making him crazy. The 2nd person voice. He also asked why I didn’t write about Asians. Ha.

1/30

I saw Rachel tonight. At midnight at the bus stop. She said she was sick. We talked some. But on the bus, we sat in silence for some. It was awkward, for me, at least. After, I felt sad. Before, I was so happy.

[…]

I also talked with Tara during the break. She said she’s written to Lydia Davis too, other than Lorrie Moore. Thinking back on it, she’s a really cool person to talk to. She listens and asks questions and is interested in me. She said that she thinks i’m a writing freak.

3/30

Sometimes I get this slow, life-furling moment, where I unfocus my eyes and just know that someday I’m going to end my life, that someday I just won’t be able to take it anymore. It’s an awful knowledge. Only a little bit comforting.

[end of junior year]

8/24

Today I met Tara in the street! I didn’t recognize her at first. She waved to me though, then we did a really, really tentative going towards each other, not going towards each other, thing. Finally, I took off my head phones. She was with her dad. He had glasses and a lot of nice white hair. He was small.

9/1

I sent Tara an e-mail while at work today. I read “The Lovers” by Joy Williams. I found it somewhat like Raymond Carver. I liked it a lot. Was funny, mysterious… I find that I like stories that have a lot of irresolution in them.

9/2

Tara replied to my e-mail ultra terse. It was about three short sentences.

9/3

I yelled at my mom tonight for about half an hour. She asked me if I was in the library when Dad called earlier. I got mad at that. Because she said a few weeks ago that she wouldn’t ask me “Where are you?” anymore. I overreacted. I felt like shit after. I got so angry and frustrated. I wrote three e-mails, called her back twice to “get things straight.”  I felt so awful. I was crying in the library on the second floor inside balcony area. This other Asian kid was looking on the Internet. I’ve seen him at the library before.

9/5

I almost got hit by a bus today.

9/7

Tomorrow is my first day of classes.

9/9

I’ve been eating canned tuna. And bags of pecans and almonds. I’ve been using my big earphones.

 

 

Tao Lin is the author of ten books. He is active on his blog/newsletter.

Sundress: What a Beautiful Shiny Word

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

 

From The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky:

Sundress: what a beautiful shiny word; my mother used to wear a light blue one that she sewed for herself. She made everything she wore with her own two hands, she was a dressmaker. For a few months in 1954, she even had a shop, which she called her butík. But she made more clothes for herself than for her clients, and she knew how to make herself look far more beautiful than any of the women who paid her to make them look good. Even when she had to go out to buy bread or fruit, she’d walk out of our low-income building looking like a rich movie actress, like a different mother entirely, whether she had on her winter coat with its astrakhan collar, or a pencil skirt, or a bell skirt, or her sundress. And maybe she actually was a different woman, that’s how I see her now anyway, my eyeglasses briny with the sea air, my nerves shot, cataracts clouding my sight. When she went in the water, she’d never go in deep and she always swam the breast stroke: her long neck extended, her chin held high, her mouth closed so as not to swallow the salt water, her small ears with their delicate lobes. She often lost things on the beach she considered precious, and when she started digging desperately in the sand, we children would always try and help.

From Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment (NYRB Classics), originally published in 1980, a reconstruction of the nineteenth-century case of a “wild boy”:

This is a true story, as true as I can tell it. The story recounts an extraordinary life that was neither good nor evil nor conventionally heroic. The Wild Boy of Aveyron survived on the outer edges of humanity in a state of something like moral weightlessness. We have no need to pass judgment on him, only to take account of so remarkable a case. The appeal of the story lies in a rare combination of uncertainty and hope lodged in the events themselves, and in the way those events seem to touch our own lives.

 

From Kate Riley’s Ruth (Riverhead), a portion of which was previously adapted for The Paris Review:

Ruth knew she could not be entirely defective, because she loved Christmas. To have the trust of babies and animals; to delight in a God who made lady slippers and spotted toadstools; and to know with mind, body, and soul that God hung lower during the Christmas season: these were the qualifications required for humanity, and at least she managed one. 

 

From Mr. Ch’ing-Chih, one of three novellas collected in Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White (Columbia University Press), translated from the Chinese by Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt:

If cooked rice could be as abundant as the words he was learning, he would eat three big bowlfuls without a second thought, eat until he was full, full and contented. When his grandma, who couldn’t read, saw him writing on a sheet of paper, she reverently admonished him to never burn any paper with writing on it.

“Cherish Writing Pavilion, ever hear of it?” She picked up his exercise book and looked it over carefully, as if it included written incantations. “Don’t throw this away. When the junk collector comes, we’ll ask him to send it to Cherish Writing Pavilion.”

“What do we send it there for?” he asked.

“To be burned like gilded spirit paper.”

“Can even writing be offered to deities?”

She responded with a self-assured nod. “Grandma will go with Kiyoshi to worship the Patriarch of Literary Study when he has an exam.”

 

From “Pride,” in Anne Waldman’s new book of poetry, Mesopotopia (Penguin):

          Where to run?

                     Practice of dolls and their cosmos 

For dark love of self

Goddesses, I the courtyard

How much more than I, the courtyard

Carry a voice and will not move …

 

The White Blouse of Sandra Mozarowsky

Mozarowsky in Beatriz (1976), directed by Gonzalo Suárez.

For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and poets have pursued the meaning of life. Is there one, and, if so, what is it? Spirituality? Religion? Ask a man on the street the meaning of life and he might just say “Surviving.”

But ask a teenager, and you’ll get your answer. She’ll tell you the meaning of life is Love, and her certainty should make you happy for her. By twelve, I’d fallen in love more than fifteen times. My romances were huge, earth-shattering, much more devastating and intense than any of the ones that came later. All the men were perfect, being imaginary, and since I saw no need for messy breakups, we always ended things on good terms.

When I was six or seven, our babysitter entertained us with fairy tales. She always told the same story. Once upon a time, in a faraway land, Pablo (my brother) married a princess and became king. Blanca (my sister) wed the crown prince of the country next door, which meant she, too, was in line for a throne. I always got the prince’s younger brother, which meant contenting myself with being a princess—and I was not content. Who would be? In my imagination, I stole my sister’s boyfriend.

Sandra Mozarowsky was never a queen. She was never a king’s girlfriend. She was the king’s lover, though, if you believe the rumors.

As the Franco regime approached its end, its subjects started demanding freedom of expression. Not the whole country, but enough of us to be heard. Our demands for liberty got louder and more insistent, and the regime took them to mean that we wanted to see breasts. We wanted naked women, or half-naked, and so we spent the mid-seventies gaping in awe as our country attained the dubious freedom of a national cinema starring girls who, without fail, opened or removed their tops within seconds of appearing onscreen.

Yes, in Spain, freedom was for breasts. You could spy some liberated bush in a semilegal softcore magazine, too, though never ever a penis. Visible male genitalia would be libertinism, which was anathema. According to the many government ministers and functionaries assigned to disseminate this message, liberty was one thing, libertinism another, and as a nation, it was important for us not to get them confused.

As a nation, we were waiting for Franco to die. Some of us were eager and excited; some were fretful and afraid. Some of us staged strikes and demonstrations that were met with ferocious police repression. In his sickbed, the dictator signed his last death sentences with a decisive, if shaky, hand. All the rest of us sat and watched destape.

Destape, which means “undressing,” was the name we gave our new erotica. We were such innocents, or such pigs, that we really did assume all those tits meant democracy and freedom, or, at the very least, an uplifting promise of both.

Sandra Mozarowsky was a destape actress, but before that, she was a girl. She was one her whole life, really: she died at eighteen. She was born in Tangiers in 1958 (three years before me), the third and youngest child of a Russian father, Boris, and Spanish mother, Charo Ruiz de Frías. In 1961 the family moved to Madrid, where Sandra studied at the British School and, according to a piece in the October 1, 1977, issue of ¡Hola!, “began to demonstrate her artistic gifts, especially in dance, distinguishing herself as an outstanding ballet student.”

At ten, Sandra made her screen debut in El otro árbol de Guernica, which, she explained in an interview, was just luck: a friend of her mother’s happened to mention her to the director, Pedro Lazaga. She waited only four years to “get back in front of the camera,” as she put it, in Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos, which stars José Luis López Vázquez as a Spanish hick with a major issue—any time he meets a girl he likes, he involuntarily tanks the attraction by imagining her with a beard. He goes to a psychologist, who unearths a childhood trauma that caused his compulsive inhibition with women, then reminds him that men are the kings of creation, women their lesser helpmeets.

“From now on,” the shrink instructs, “before you go up to a girl, repeat to yourself, ‘She’s inferior to me.’ ”

López Vázquez and his buddies plan a trip to Biarritz to see sexy movies, like Last Tango in Paris. Pre-destape, when anything horny was banned in Spain, our columnists and talking heads hotly debated the line separating erotica from porn. On the one hand, it was a major controversy, but on the other, we all knew erotica was tasteful, it was art, and porn was neither. Regardless, you couldn’t see either in Spain. Nudity was a no-go, and so we poured into Biarritz and Perpignan on the weekends to see everything the generalissimo, in his wisdom, had chosen to censor. Heading home, we felt very free and sophisticated. We’d seen nipples! Pubic hair, too, and a silhouetted hard-on. We’d even seen half a ball.

I, too, went to Perpignan to watch porn. I have no memory of who drove, who else was there. Grown-ups, presumably. I was fourteen, and all I remember is that Emmanuelle was sold out and we had to content ourselves with some strange movie, nearly all sex, that nearly bored me to tears. I only refrained from napping because my true goal wasn’t just seeing the movie but describing it—i.e., bragging—to my classmates.

When López Vázquez and his buddies arrive, they discover that Biarritz is swarming with Spaniards. Not a single car has French plates. Spanish buses idle en masse outside the theaters. All of Spain has descended on Biarritz to watch what we used to call blue movies. Our heroes, of course, are delighted, especially since, as good Spaniards, they’ve never bothered learning any language but their own. Post-beach, our three hicks shut themselves up in a theater, watching the same movie on repeat, gaping at every nipple and thigh. Sandra appears very briefly, as a “young French girl” who sits with our protagonists at the cabaret they go to after finally staggering out of the theater. She and her two friends are cute and young, the Spaniards old and ugly, but the girls still want to sleep with them. (Unsurprising in this version of reality, which holds that Spanish men are irresistible and French women are sluts.) Sandra, lucky girl, gets López Vázquez, who could be not just her dad but her grandfather. She gives him her most charming smiles, her most seductive green-eyed looks, but when he tries to kiss her, the curse strikes. A huge, dark beard sprouts from her face, and he recoils in fear. After that, a showgirl hauls him on stage—in drag? In a duck costume? I can’t remember. I turned the movie off as soon as Sandra’s scene ended. I was only watching for her.

***

When she was sixteen, in 1974, she made her horror debut in El mariscal del infierno, starring Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina Álvarez) as a villain based on the medieval serial killer Gilles de Rais. Sandra plays a nameless virgin whom he sacrifices so he can give her blood to an alchemist who’s promised to use it to make him a sorcerer’s stone. Sandra’s character has no lines, which happened to her so often that she picked up the same techniques as a silent film star. In this role, she’s tending crops when Paul Naschy’s henchmen kidnap her. She gets dragged into his lair, where she cowers in her white blouse, screaming in horror as he rubs himself against her, rips her top, grabs her breasts. She faints at precisely the right moment and wakes in a canopy bed with Paul Naschy thrashing on the ground beside it, having an epileptic seizure (Sandra, terrified, screams some more).

Next, the director takes us outside the castle. Sandra, gagged and shrouded in red, lies bound on an altar, waiting for the knight’s wife, a harpy with painfully overplucked eyebrows, to slit her throat. Our villainess is wearing a strange dress, long and narrow, with an enormous collar and swinging sleeves, paired with a little conical hat like stewardesses wore back then. Overall, the effect is hippie-medieval, very sixties kitsch.

Sandra does, indeed, get her throat slit. She writhes while it happens, breasts bouncing, huge. She’s silenced by the gag, but panic transforms her face as it did in nearly all her roles: Sandra as sacrificial lamb, damsel in distress, tied up and murdered by one monster after the next.

Sandra Mozarowsky was beautiful. She had a Slavic face: huge green eyes that tipped up at the corners; wide, plush mouth; pale skin; so much straight, shiny chestnut hair she could have starred in shampoo commercials. Would have, if she hadn’t died too young to get truly famous. In an old issue of Pronto, I saw her described as a “girl-woman who broadcasts sexiness and innocence at the same time … green eyes, perfect features, and a statuesque body—though she’ll have to be careful not to get fat.” An exaggeration, that last bit. Sandra wasn’t thin, and she did put on weight easily, but no one cared about that, given her age, beauty, and gameness to take off her clothes whenever a script called for it—which was always, every time.

One person did care about Sandra’s weight: Sandra herself. Dieting was one of the obsessions of her short life. She’s half-naked in many of the photos I’ve seen of her. In one, her hair spills over her breasts, covering them, as if she were Lady Godiva. In another, she’s looking sleepily at the camera, mouth ajar, an embroidered vest just barely covering her nipples. In a third, she’s on her knees in a bikini, hands behind her back, pouting suggestively at the camera. And a fourth: Sandra taking (or ripping) her white blouse off, one shoulder already bared. A faint halo seems to encircle her, like a cloud drifting away. She looks, unsettlingly, equal parts virgin and whore.

Sandra came from a conservative, middle-class background, and I doubt her parents were thrilled about their youngest daughter’s burgeoning career as a destape star. In an interview with Primera plana, Sandra says, “For four years, my parents were against my acting. Slowly, though, I convinced them to let me do it as long as I could balance it with school.”  In a short interview she gave the magazine Diez minutos in July 1975, as part of the press tour for Las protegidas, her father’s supposed opposition to her acting came up again. Asked if she “connected” to her role as a prostitute, Sandra says, “Well, it’s challenging, but I just tried to remember that the character’s new to the job, and excited about it.”

Sandra comes across as independent, a person of character, as she liked to say. She was only sixteen in July of 1975. Franco hadn’t died yet, Spanish society was Catholic and repressed, and yet she managed to earn a nice living acting in movies that scandalized her family.

In that same issue of Diez minutos, I encounter a distracting story. It’s a scoop—exclusive!—titled, “Romeo and Juliet in ’75.” On the cover, we get a taste: “Meet the lovers whose fate broke Italy’s heart! Before throwing themselves under a train, they left us their last words on tape …”

Our Juliet, Maria, was born in the town of Rapolla. She died at seventeen. We don’t get her last name, only that of her Romeo, Michele Gastoni, a nineteen-year-old from nearby Melfi. We see them in black and white: Juliet (Maria) is a sweet, scared-looking girl, Romeo (Michele) a resolute youth with thin lips and one of the most egregious haircuts I’ve ever seen, a dense curve of hair clamped over his narrow face.

After introducing the couple, the writer describes Basilicata, the region where they lived. Apparently, misery and poverty are endemic there. Perhaps this is meant to contextualize the appalling story that comes next. Our two lovers committed suicide by lying on railroad tracks. Every night, the last train arrived in Melfi at 11:45, having passed through the nearby Tunnel of the Seven Bridges at top speed. On the day they died, the teenage couple spent over an hour in the dark tunnel, waiting for the train. During that hour, they—mostly Michele—said goodbye into a tape recorder, preserving their motivations for posterity.

“One, two, three,” says Michele. “If you’re listening, return this recorder to M— F—. He didn’t know why I asked to borrow it. And share this tape with the world. I’m sorry if it upsets people, but it’s what I have to do. Life is shit. It’s too boring. Maria agrees. Maria, you talk.”

“No, no. I don’t want to.”

“If my parents are listening, and my brother, don’t worry. It’s not your fault I’m killing myself. It’s society. You guys should go on with your lives. Don’t remember me. I’m gone, so why bother? Forget me. Maria, seriously, you should talk.”

“No.”

“Okay,” Michele says, and resumes his broadcast, complaining that nobody appreciates him or shares his ideals. He assures the listener that he’s not taking the wrong path, and that it’s better (“more appropriate,” he says) to die than to escape life with drugs and so on. Why should anyone be miserable for sixty or seventy years? he asks. “We can leave this life because we know the next one is coming,” he says. “I know the next world will be an improvement. Ours is shit! Maria, come on, talk.”

Maria’s sobbing. “What should I say?” she chokes.

“Say hello to someone. Say goodbye.”

“Goodbye to everyone, especially Mama. No, no. I can’t.”

“Why are you dying?” Michele asks. “What’s making you do this?”

“Lots of stuff,” says Maria, still crying. “Society, people …”

“We want to speak, even though it seems like we don’t,” says Michele, and launches into a furious denunciation of humanity.

At some point, Maria interrupts. “I’m ready to talk,” she announces, no longer in tears. “I want everyone to know we really thought about this. We were talking about it for a long time, going back and forth, and this morning we made up our minds. We’re not changing them now. No one understands us. Society can’t understand anyone, which is why we’re all prisoners. So don’t cry for me, okay? I love you, Mama, Papa. I love my family. I’m cold.”

“All right,” he says. “Lights out.” We hear them getting ready for the train.

“Hold on!” Maria calls. “Where are you going? You said we’d go together!”

“We’re no one,” Michele concludes. “But no one else should have to die like this.”

After that, the lovers lie quietly in the tunnel. On the tape, we hear the train approaching, their breath, the locomotive whistling into the tunnel, the cars roaring on the tracks, the brakes shrieking, someone shouting “A shoe!”

“Was it a person?”

“A boy?”

“No, there’s a girl here, but she’s missing her head.”

I’m surprised that a tabloid like Diez minutos would run this story in 1975, alongside “Amparo Muñoz turns twenty-one,” which features photos of our Señorita Universo blowing out her candles; “Why the name Pérez matters”; “Jackie Onassis’s intimate secrets”; and “In the sun with Patricia,” a color centerfold in which Patricia, who they describe as “Claudia Cardinale meets Candy Rialson, with some Raquel Welch thrown in,” poses very seriously in her bikini on a rock by the sea.

Diez minutos’s transcript of the taped dialogue has a strange narrative pull. Michele comes across as a resentful, arrogant, domineering young man, clearly the brains behind both the suicide and the recording. He scolds his parents for their poverty, his brother for his acceptance. He’s not a sympathetic narrator.

But Maria! Her death hurts. She was an innocent, suggestible, infatuated girl, totally willing to submit to her shithead boyfriend. On the tape, she’s his echo, so admiring and obedient she let him talk her into suicide. She gave up her life for love. Puppy love. She’d only been dating Michele seven months. Surely if he hadn’t roped her into this death pact, she’d have dumped him, or he her, leaving her upset, but alive.

How can a seventeen-year-old decide whether life is worth living? How can she reject something she barely knows?

***

Several months before Sandra Mozarowsky died, an interviewer asked her, “What do you see in your future?”

“I never think about my future. I mean, I can’t imagine it. I have a hard time believing in tomorrow.”

“What’s your goal in life?”

“Being remembered after I die.”

“Do you worry about death?”

“I’m not there yet, luckily. I’m not sure we should worry about death, and anyway, I’m realistic. You’re born, you get old, and then you die. It’s the way of things. Why should I have a problem with it?”

As far as Sandra was concerned, the meaning of her life was clear. She was going to make her mark, be a hit. I talked to an actor and an actress who worked with her on different films, and they agreed: she was a nice girl with good manners, a little shy, very ambitious. She wanted to be a star.

I suspect the silly answer she gave the interviewer (whose question was equally silly) hides an unexpected wisdom. A philosophy, even: Since I haven’t died, how should I know whether to be afraid of death? She’s got a point. What scares us about death is its mystery. Not even the oldest or wisest person can tell us what death is like. Maybe that means we should stop worrying about it so much.

There’s nothing humans love like a pit. We may be frightened, but deep down, we’re attracted to the void. Stand on the edge of a cliff, and you’ll see how positive death suddenly seems. Maybe it’s exciting; maybe it’ll be a change of pace. Our fascination with the things we fear is the reason we like horror movies. Sandra starred in seven works of erotic horror: Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota, El mariscal del infierno, La noche de las gaviotas, El colegio de la muerte, El hombre de los hongos, Beatriz, and El espiritista. She made twenty movies between fourteen and eighteen.

Camus writes, “The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe’s works in ten thousand years will be dust and his name forgotten … Of all the glories the least deceptive is the one that is lived.” According to Camus, this means actors are lucky. An actor can succeed or not, but if he does, it happens now. He doesn’t have to wait for posterity, which is probably never coming. His art means he lives many lives, as many as the characters he plays. He’s no one and everyone, pure appearance, so many souls jammed into one body.

So Sandra Mozarowsky chose the best profession, and, as if she sensed that she only had a brief measure of time on earth, she hardly wasted any of her hours on diversions and distractions. Instead, she worked like a mule, living many lives through her characters. But oh, what lives! Nearly all of them were unbearable.

At sixteen, she got her first starring role, in El colegio de la muerte. It’s set in Victorian London, but you can tell it was shot in Spain: all the exteriors are in Madrid and Toledo. Sandra plays Leonor, a surprisingly well-nourished orphan. In the opening scene, we see her (of course) mostly naked, tied to the rafters of some sort of dungeon, cowering as one of the mistresses of the orphanage where she lives whips her. After the beating’s done, its perpetrator, Miss Colton, bans Sandra from seeing the doctor who’s scheduled to visit the next day. Sandra’s gorgeous green eyes well with tears: she’s secretly in love with the doctor.

Every girl in the orphanage is beautiful, like Sandra, and every single one lives in fear of the vile Miss Colton and her iniquitous boss, Miss Wilkins. Both are parched, severe women with overplucked eyebrows, scraped-back hair, and high Victorian collars. From their sly expressions, we know they’re the villains. We get to know only one other orphan, Sandra’s best friend, played by a very young Victoria Vera. All the others vanish—a budget issue, I’m sure. You can tell that the movie (which, to be fair, has its charms) was made on a shoestring. Its whole cast is Spanish, despite the English setting, and Dr. Kruger, the supposed heartthrob, is a gnomelike man with a colossal head. It seems like the sets were borrowed from an amateur theater: one scene takes place in an utterly unrecognizable Regent’s Park, which, luckily, is mostly hidden by fog, like a Japanese garden on a fan. Of course, there’s a cemetery, a disfigured mad scientist, some interring and disinterring of corpses, some swordfighting, secret tunnels, moonlit escapes, a profoundly homoerotic scene of a lecherous Miss Colton lotioning Sandra’s scarred back, white blouse pooling at the young woman’s waist. By that point in the story, Sandra’s leaving the orphanage—someone has found her a job as a governess—but Miss Colton has a secret to tell her first. Once the blouse is chastely buttoned, the teacher asks Sandra to join her in her room, but Miss Wilkins gets there before Sandra does. Having guessed that the other teacher is about to denounce her, Miss Wilkins stabs Miss Colton with a dagger.

Miss Colton dies after revealing that what awaits Sandra is not a steady career as a governess but a nightmarish fate that has already befallen Victoria Vera. Cut to the other girl in the mad scientist’s laboratory, heavily sedated and lashed to an operating table, leather straps crisscrossing her body and mask covering her face as the evil scientist cuts into her cranium. With one incision, he turns her into a living corpse, a walking dead girl who, instead of wreaking havoc, is doomed to be loaned out to satisfy the depraved fantasies of men like Lord Ferguson, who looks like he should be playing a bandit from the Sierra Morena. Now we know the orphanage’s terrible secret—and Sandra does, too.

From here on, Sandra, in her white blouse, runs like a soul in torment, narrowly escaping all kinds of threats and torments. But at the end, she ends up bound and gagged as usual, back to the silent-movie routine: open eyes, shrieking mouth, body writhing in just the right way to make her breasts pop out of that white blouse. It’s a ridiculous movie. Even Camus would say it’s too absurd. We don’t have to spend more time on it, but I just want you to know it ends with a cruel anagnorisis: Sandra learns that the man of her dreams, the good Dr. Kruger, is in fact the wicked, deformed scientist. You should really just watch Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In one interview, Sandra said, “Now that I’m very close to having a real career, there are people out to get me. Saying I’m vain, or an exhibitionist, or only getting cast for my looks. None of that’s true, but I can see why someone would get that idea from the movies I’m in. I’ve just had to be a good girl, a trained seal. You know how the industry is.”

The interviewer asks if she feels that she’s being objectified. Sandra replies, “I wouldn’t say that. I mean, not more than happens to any woman. And when it happens, I always learn something from the experience. You know, I’ve learned a lot just being on set. I take classes in my free time—speech, movement, ballet—but my serious education happens when I get a script. I study my part, see how close I can get to the character, how completely I can understand her. Directors don’t always want you to identify with your character, but I do. And when I’m rehearsing, I always tape myself so I can listen and correct my performance. I’d rather learn alone than get a coach, since in the end, the only person I’ll always have by my side is myself.”

It breaks my heart to envision her rehearsing in her room, wailing, “No, don’t!” and “I’m begging you, please, please let me live!” and “Oh!” and “Ah!” and “Ayyy!” into her tape recorder. All that panting, all those muffled shouts and anxious gasps and sobs and unstoppable weeping, and never once “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down! And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, that suck’d the honey of his musicked vows” or “When you durst do it, then you were a man; and to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man. Nor time nor place did then adhere, and yet you would make both. They have made themselves, and that their fitness now does unmake you. I have given suck, and know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.” No, Sandra Mozarowsky was never Ophelia, or Lady Macbeth, or Hedda Gabler.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus concludes at the end of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” having compared the absurd man—the man who knows, who’s conscious of his mortality and of the futility of pursuing transcendence—to the Homeric hero condemned by the gods to eternally roll a boulder up a mountain. Century after century, Sisyphus ascends the mountain, bearing the weight of the rock, which will roll to the bottom when he’s about to achieve his goal, and down he goes, up, down, up, down—and Camus wants us to imagine him happy! He writes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (he doesn’t speak of women’s hearts). “It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. ‘I conclude that all is well,’ says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred.”

One must imagine Sandra happy, happy during the long nights and chilly mornings on set, happy in her coat, or maybe a bulky sweater, drinking coffee and chatting with the cast and crew while she waits for her call, getting ready to shed her coat and kick her shoes off the moment she hears “Action,” to tremble barefoot in her white blouse with its elbow-length sleeves, its neckline that comes up to her collarbone, though in this scene or the next, by order of the script, it’ll get undone to reveal a shoulder and breast, or else shredded, or spattered with blood, or crumpled on her exposed belly while some man’s ass moves rhythmically between her open legs.

I’ve seen Sandra wearing that demure white blouse in El mariscal del infierno, in La noche de las gaviotas, in El colegio de la muerte, in Beatriz, in Pecado mortal, in Train spécial pour SS, in Ángel negro. I want it to have a meaning. Surely that virginal blouse isn’t just a coincidence. It’s a symbol, a signal, a sign pointing to—what? A bunch of male directors (she never worked with a woman) seeing her in a white blouse, liking the view, and repeating it? Could be. I’m pretty sure I got Camus’s point about absurdity, so I’m not going to come up with a whole myth of the shirt. I’m not even going to keep asking why she played the same two roles—the damsel in distress and her reverse, the prostitute—so many times. Could a young actress in Spain aspire to anything else at the time?

At seventeen, Sandra complained to the press, “I’m sick of saying, ‘Yes, this one is destape,’ or ‘No, it isn’t destape.’ Just flip a coin. Really playing a character is about a lot more than whether you have to take your shirt off. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t.” But by the time she got done shooting in Mexico, she’d changed her tune. She told ¡Hola! she was “saying goodbye to movies” for a while, that she was “sick of always playing the same part, sick of script after script where I have to take my shirt off. I’m moving to London to study English and drama, then coming back to Spain for my baccalaureate, and then I’ll act again. I love it more than anything else in the world, but I’m quitting until I have the qualifications that get you treated as more than an object.”

One night, Sandra appears on television. She’s in her bedroom pouting and whining, bursting out of a white dress with heavy, pseudomedieval silver embroidery. The comic actor Alfredo Landa appears in the doorway, wearing a white tunic over brown breeches and carrying some sort of instrument made of a ram’s horn. Concerned, he asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, it’s so awful,” she says, weeping. “I’m so scared. My lock rusted, and I can’t turn the key.”

“What lock?”

“On my chastity belt! I put it on and now I can’t get it off,” Sandra says, raising her skirts to show a gilded chastity belt with a giant padlock.

This work of cinema is called Cuando el cuerno suena, and it unites me and Sandra in eternity, or in my small, cluttered living room with its heaps of books and drafts and newspapers. I rent my apartment, so while it’s my right to be here, I’m still a precarious resident—of my home and of time, unlike Sandra, who’s returned from the dead on my screen. Camus was wrong to say actors’ glory is ephemeral and fleeting. He wasn’t thinking about movies or television, where even something as silly as Cuando el cuerno suena can live for all time. You could say it’s not Sandra who’s joined me, just her appearance, but Camus says the actor is his appearance, so here she is.

 

Translated from the Spanish by Lily Meyer.

An adapted excerpt from The Shy Assassin , to be published by Vanderbilt University Press this November.

Clara Usón was a practicing lawyer for twenty years before writing her first novel, Las noches de San Juan, which was awarded the 1998 Premio Femenino Lumen. With La hija del Este (The daughter from the east), she became the first woman to win Spain’s National Critics Prize. El asesino tímido (The Shy Assassin) was awarded the 2018 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, recognizing excellent literary works written in Spanish by female authors.

Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novel Short War. Her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians, and her novel The End of Romance is forthcoming from Viking in winter 2026.

But How, How to Occupy Life?

Marguerite Duras in 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Marguerite Duras’s Le navire Night (The ship named Night) is both a film and a would-be film, or rather a documentary of a film that the writer decided never to finish. Duras abandoned her initial project after several days of shooting, deciding instead to record the “disaster” it became. What results is an eighty-nine-minute composition of slow, panning shots and zoom-outs on the actors that would have starred (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, and Mathieu Carrière), the makeup and wardrobe they would have worn, and the Parisian backdrops and candlelit rooms in which they would have played their roles, overlaid by the voices of Duras and her friend the film director Benoît Jacquot reading directly from the text she had planned for the actors to use as their script. The original text, written in 1978, describes the paranoia and passion of an erotic affair conducted entirely over the telephone by a young man and woman, insomniacs both, the man working a night shift and the woman dying of leukemia, as they pleasure themselves to each other’s voices and make ill-fated plans to meet in person. Below, translated into English for the first time by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, is Duras’s account of the making and unmaking of Le navire Night, a film which she would elsewhere call “beautiful and vain.”

—Owen Park, editorial assistant

 

 

The story in Le navire Night was told to me in December ’77 by the person who had lived it, J.M., the young man of Les Gobelins. I knew J.M. and I knew the story. There were about ten of us who knew of its existence. But we had never spoken about it together, J.M. and I. It was after three years passed that one day—I had spoken about it with a friend of J.M., who said she had already forgotten certain details—I was afraid that the story would be lost. I asked J.M. to record it on tape. He agreed.

Apart from certain dates and the knot of names in Père Lachaise that he had never managed to disentangle, he remembered. Everything was still there. It was three years after the end of the story, F.’s wedding.

Hearing him tell it, I understood that J.M. had no doubt always hoped to bring this story face to face with a listener, but that he had always feared—when the moment came—that people wouldn’t believe him “if he said everything.”

And that rather than being troubled by it, he was happy to speak about it.

It was based on that tape recording that I wrote Le navire Night—twice over, with six months in between. The first version of the text is from February ’78, it appeared in Minuit journal. The second version of the text is what is published here, it is the final text from the film shoot, July ’78. I gave the first version of the text to J.M. He read it. He said that “everything was true but that he recognized nothing.” I asked him if I could publish it and then perhaps, later on, turn it into a film. He told me that he hoped I would. That day we stopped talking about the story. T o tell the truth, never again. After having read what his own experience became—in the words of another—J.M. remained silent but as if he were always on the verge of speaking. I think he must have realized that other versions of his story were possible—that he had silenced them because he didn’t know that they were possible just as they were possible for any story. I think too that his own version had carried him so far that he had forgotten its sprawl, its banality.

A few days after he read the text, J.M. called me, he told me that he had been consumed again by a desire for F. that was so strong—after reading the written story—that he wanted to know whether she was still alive and he asked me to use her full name, rather than her initials, in Minuit. So that F. would understand that he was calling out to her. I said that the initials seemed sufficient to me given that F. knew her own name. He agreed.

Later, during the week that followed the film’s release, I called J.M. He told me that he had received phone calls with no one at the other end of the line except for that presence, breathing, undeniable, which he knew was hers. Because that was already her behavior as their story was unfolding, to make sure he knew that she loved him still and so intensely that she might die from it.

The dying F. was still alive at the beginning of 1979. I haven’t seen J.M. again since then.

I didn’t distribute the text of Le navire Night among those who spoke it in the film. There were only dashes before the sentences to indicate that the speaker should change at this or that moment of the narrative. Similarly, I didn’t specify the order of the shots or describe their content.

These precautions, I think I took them to try and erase the traces of the film in order to keep the reader from using it instead of their own interpretation.

I believe now—surely I have always believed it, but how, how to occupy life?—that it was perhaps not worth the effort to make the film. I believe the film was no doubt surplus, too much, thus unnecessary, useless. That it was in sum the marriage of desire on the very premises of the night but of the night chased away, replaced by the day. The light in the bedroom of the lovers, I think it shouldn’t have been done. After the writing of the text, everything came too late, everything, because the event had already taken place, in fact, in the writing. Because writing, whether it be written or read, it’s the same thing in this case, it’s also the sharing of the general story. This story, which belongs to everyone, I had the right to have my part of it because that’s how I share it with others, by writing. But perhaps I didn’t have the right here—here, I think of evil, of the devil, of morality—once the writing was over, once that universal night of the abyss was penetrated and closed back up again, to act as if it were possible to go back there to look a second time. To pass through the abyss, that first age of men, of beasts, of fools, of the mud, through the specter of the light, even if it was through an identity that was uncontrollable, even accidental.

It was unavoidable to write Night—we know this—yes, it was beyond control. But it was avoidable to film it—that we also know—and I won’t get away with it: it was avoidable to make a film with that darkness. But how to occupy the time?

The person who is revealed in the abyss claims no identity. They claim only that, to be the same. The same as the person who answered them. As everyone. It’s a fabulous clearing-out that begins as soon as we dare to speak, rather as soon as we arrive there. Because as soon as we call we become, we are already the same. As who? As what? As what we know nothing about. And it’s by becoming the same person that we leave the desert, society. To write is to be no one. “Dead,” said Thomas Mann. When we write, when we call, already we are the same. Try. Try while you’re alone in your bedroom, free, with no outside control, to call or to answer beyond the abyss. To fuse with the vertigo, the immense flood of calls. This first word, this first shout, we don’t know how to shout it. May as well call God. It’s impossible. And it happens.

My good fortune is that I escaped from the first edit that I made. I wrote for the press, when the film was released, the story of that failure. I include it here for the sake of memory and also because I see it there already, albeit masked, the ban that I establish for myself, the film:

I began filming Le navire Night on Monday, July 31, 1978. I had planned out the images. On the following Monday and Tuesday, through August 1, I filmed the shots planned for the edit. Tuesday night, I saw Monday’s rushes. In my journal that day, I wrote: film ruined.

For one evening and one night, I abandoned the film, Night. I stood outside of it, far, as separate from it as if it had never even existed. This had never happened to me before: to no longer see anything, no longer glimpse the slightest possibility of a film, of a single film frame. I had been completely wrong. The edit was false. More than that: I had been a stranger to the film: the edit didn’t exist.

I said to my friends: ‘That’s it, it happened to me.’ My friends told me that it was normal, that given what I was trying to do in cinema, they had expected it. We spoke very little. They had seen the rushes too and we were all in agreement. We spoke of what had to be done, notifying the production, the team, the actors, that everything would stop.

Benoît Jacquot told me to wait for the next morning to make a definitive decision about stopping the film. To sleep on it. I agreed.

I don’t think I hoped for anything from that coming night, from sleep. It would have troubled me to keep hoping. I was happy, suddenly plunged into a boundless sterility, akind of expanse without any accident, no suffering, nor desire. Finally present to myself in this assessment of an avowed failure, with no recourse. It was clear. It was finished.

Cinema, finished. I would start writing books again, I would return to my native land, to that terrifying labor that I had abandoned ten years prior. Meanwhile, I felt good. Happy. I had won that failure, I had won. The happiness must have stemmed from there, from having won. I leaned on that victory, that of having finally reached the impossibility of filming. I had never been so sure of a success as I was of that failure, that night.

I’ll add that the financial aspect wasn’t important to me. I gave myself permission to ruin a film, it didn’t matter to me.

I slept. And then, as usual, I had that insomnia—a symptom of depression, they say—that comes before dawn. And during that insomnia I saw the disaster of the film. I saw the film.

In the morning, we met up again and I told my friends that we were going to abandon the edit and shoot the disaster of the film. During the day, we would film the set and the actors’ makeup. We did it. Little by little, the film came back from the dead. I did it. I saw, each day a little more, that it was possible. I found the material to cover the screen while the sound, the story, elapsed. I realized that it was possible to attain a film derived from Night, which would testify to the story all the more (but to an incalculable degree) than the supposed film of Night that I had attempted for months never could have. We turned the camera around and we filmed what was going on inside, the night, the air, the projectors, some roads, some faces too.

The deferred narratives of Le navire Night about Greece are from episodes of the friendship that links us, Benoit Jacquot and me. It’s true, I went to the Parthenon and to the Athens City Museum in that way. And it’s also true that afterwards I recounted it to him alone. And also that then he went there strictly in the same way. It’s our way of finding each other through time.

 

This text is adapted from Six Films, which will be published in September by Inpatient Press. The book collects Duras’s writings on Le navire Night and five of her other works as a director, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan.

Marguerite Duras was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Her breakthrough international success came with The Lover, a semi-autobiographical novel that won the Prix Goncourt. She made significant contributions to cinema, writing the acclaimed screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Olivia Baes is a multidisciplinary artist. Her translations include The Easy Life and Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras, cotranslated with Emma Ramadan.

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator from the French. Her translations include Sphinx, Not One Day, and In Concrete by Anne Garréta and A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa.

Ten Questions for Joy Williams

WITH ROBERT STONE IN KEY WEST, CA. 1995.

“Forgive me for the things I have done and for the things I have left undone,” Joy Williams said in 2014, in her Paris Review Art of Fiction interview. “I may very well write out of a sense of guilt.” Her new story “After the Haiku Period,” which appears in the Review’s Summer 2025 issue, is a story of guilt askew, which centers on a pair of twins in their sixties, the daughters of a coal-bed-methane-drilling-company tycoon (“We called Daddy Midas,” one sister says. “Everything he touched turned into some ghastly energy source”) and their devoted “sage,” Jimmy, who knows just what to pack for their picnics. Fueled by white wine, lemon squares, and family shame, Camilla and Candida make a pastime of hatching dramatic plots to make the “destroyers and despoilers and death dealers” pay—until finally, one night, they take the plunge. Williams—who has published twelve stories in The Paris Review, dating back to 1968—is hesitant to talk about craft. (“I do believe there is, in fact, a mystery to the whole enterprise that one dares to investigate at peril,” she said in her interview.) Still, we couldn’t resist sending her a few questions about the mysterious enterprise of this particular story, which she responded to over email.

 

THE EDITORS

Will you tell us about where you’re writing to us from, and set the scene?

WILLIAMS

The desert, where it’s 110 degrees.

EDITORS

How did this story begin for you? Was it with an image, a sentence? The names of the twins, perhaps?

WILLIAMS

It was actually a vision of the leeches on a lakeshore—a sizzling chili red and long as baguettes.

EDITORS

When did you write the story, and did it come easily? Did you revise it very much, and if so, how did it change?

WILLIAMS

The ladies were floating around in conversation with themselves. Jimmy was a late addition. I really want to thank the fact-checkers at The Paris Review—I misstated a conversation between Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows and they caught it big-time, as well as the gestation period of the humpback whale.

EDITORS

Do you think of yourself as a writer interested in social class?

WILLIAMS

The thought of two upper-class ladies attacking a slaughterhouse enchanted me.

EDITORS

What have you noticed about twins, or about the children of rich people?

WILLIAMS

I don’t know any rich people, or twins, for that matter.

EDITORS

Music comes up a few times in this story—the hope that some melody might change hearts and minds. What role does music play in your life?

WILLIAMS

I play CDs all the while I write. Glenn Gould, the music of Gurdjieff and de Hartmann … my old friends.

EDITORS

How have you been feeling, of late, about our ethical commitments to animals and nonhumans?

WILLIAMS

I do think people should think of the role of abattoirs more.

EDITORS

Camilla’s worldview is formed in part by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. When did you read that book, and how did you respond to it?

WILLIAMS

I never finished reading The Jungle as a child.

EDITORS

The story refers to the twins’ father’s participation in “the Slaughter, when all animal life was being extinguished by guns and strychnine.” One of our editors found herself googling to see if it was a real event. Is it? Can you tell us about the Slaughter?

WILLIAMS

Post–Civil War, the military and many helpful folk with rifles set out to exterminate the buffalo and other animal life on the plains as a means to eliminate the Indians.

EDITORS

What is the poet Issa doing in this story? Are you also disappointed with his bathtub poem?

WILLIAMS

Issa can pop up anywhere. I find his death poem very funny.

 

“After the Haiku Period” appears in Joy Williams’s forthcoming collection The Pelican Child, which will be published by Knopf in November.

Letters from Claude McKay

James L. Allen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

To Langston Hughes

April 24, 1926
Nice, France

My dear Langston

I had the book alright and beg your forgiveness for not thanking and congratulating you too before. But for three months I’ve been going around with your letter in my pocket (that nice racy one about your party at [Carl] Van Vechten’s) with the intention of writing you a real letter. But I have been so worried and unsettled I could not settle down to the job. I picked up a hundred francs here, a dollar there, trying to live in a way you can’t imagine. With me, trying to live became a job, a problem. I moved from Juan-les-Pins to Cagnes from Cagnes to Nice from Nice to Menton and back again to Nice, wherever I heard of a cheap room I hunted it up. But you can live cheap when you have the teensiest bit of sure money coming to you. When you haven’t, it’s stupid to bother. When I came out of hospital I found a job as valet-butler to a civilised cracker doctor and his Russian wife. I stayed with them a month. The experience was so interesting I kept a diary of it. When I say civilized I mean it in the typical cracker sense. I couldn’t stay over the month and I stayed it out simply because I’d lose my 200 francs if I hadn’t. It gave me an insight into what the French “bonne a tout faire” has got to do. You work from 7–10 at night without any letting up. You get indifferent food, a bed etc. That is, it’s little different from what a slave domestic was doing in Virginia a hundred years ago. I quit it to work on a building—(but I had almost forgotten to tell you that the old cracker told me that if I were a good boy and stayed with him I could have all his clothes when he was finished wearing them! That would be a part of my wages. I used to hear of that in America but I had to come to France to prove it for myself!)

I stayed on the building a week and through Max Eastman’s influence I have a temporary job with Rex Ingram. He is a very nice man, entirely taken up with his work of course, but devoted to fine and artistic things. I gave him your book because he was so interested when I spoke to him about you, [Countee] Cullen, the New Negro and the intellectual Negro movement in America. So you may imagine how happy I am to have this other copy with the nice words you have written in it. I am reading stories for Ingram with the idea of perhaps finding a good scenario for him. The job is really a sinecure, just to help me out over these hard times, but I find it interesting enough—I do read a little. And up at the Studio I peep around to see what’s going on. Highly fascinating a cinema studio. I get 40 francs a day—enough for my meals and a good room. I am more than content. This you can see from this long letter. As an assembled whole, I love your book [The Weary Blues (1926)] immensely. Oh, I wish I had a chance to review it somewhere! First, I love the cover—jacket I mean. It is daring and vivid. I like the title poem, the proem, Jazzonia, Negro Dancers, The Cat, Nan, Banjo Dance, Blues Fantasy, Cross, When Sue Wears Red, Water-Front Streets, Port Town, Young Sailor, Disillusion and more and more. And if you want to know the ones I disliked intensely I name The South, Caribbean Sunset, The White Ones. That God having a hemorrhage is a most vivid but intensely nauseating image to me. I don’t know why. I am not religious in any of the orthodox ways. Guess I would be affected in the same way if you had written a bull or woman having a hemorrhage. Cross is a beautiful poem for me, perfect exquisitely done. It shows that while others are vainly prating about artistic freedom among Negro Writers, you have won out over all obstacles. You have opened up new vistas by touching a subject that thousands of Afro-Americans feel and yet would be afraid to touch. Oh but it is as dull and painful to recite about what creative act should be as it is to read about it.

You were lucky in Van Vechten’s introduction. He is a sophisticated man and wrote just the right thing. Nothing overdone. In my case (it is the first time I am saying it) there was very, very much overdone. In some parts it was like screaming my merits from a mountain top. I don’t like too much of that sort of thing myself. The quiet, subtle unobstructive is more to my state of mind.

All that may surprise you considering my politics! But that is nothing. In spite of my politics I don’t like politicians, red, black, pink or white. And while I was on the Liberator I was never in with the very political set. I always preferred the Bohemian dilletanti and the more decadent they were the better I liked them.

Now the news you give me about yourself changes like a chameleon. First I thought you were working with that Negro History man and going to Howard. Next I heard of you in a Washington hotel. That was astonishing. Now Lincoln. Of course Harvard sounds better to me but you must have your reason for preferring Lincoln. Guess you’ll find it difficult to stick to any sort of university work—being a poet! But one of the Negro colleges might make of you what Michigan made of [Robert] Frost. That was a very fine gesture indeed. You should be bothered about the whims and prejudices of the Negro intelligentsia. They are death to any would-be Negro artist. a plague on them and however hard hit and down I am they come get their claws on me.

I must stop now—the cafe is closing. I have written a book of short stories—sending them to New York next month. More about that anon. Congratulations. Wish you could come to Europe this summer! We would continue to have some fun. Give my warmest regards to [Alain] Locke. Tell him I would feel it an honor to have a copy of the New Negro. I can’t afford the price from way over here.

Ever Claude

 

To Louise Bryant

Monday [April 26 or May 2, 1926]
Nice, France

Dear Louise

Your letter makes me happy. You’re indeed my patron saint. That’s the only way to say it.

I quit my model job and went to work in a building. It was harder but better. Then I got a call from the Rex Ingram company and I worked there for a week as an errand boy. At the end of that week Mr Ingram set me to read stories for him. I shall continue to do that until the end of May. I read mostly Arab stories. The studio closes down in May for two months. I don’t know what I shall do, but I feel hopeful that I shall surely keep on finding something to go on with.

My address will be Cook’s in Paris as previously.

That you’re taking the stories to America without sending them back to me makes me feel better than ever. Of course there must be many changes to make. I always find them after I have a story typed. I think I ought to cut down the foreword to “Gigolo”—way down to two sentences. Maybe you have something to suggest about it. I have a little more leisure since I started in on the stories for Ingram and I am using it to do the two stories that were not in with the lot. The Human Race (the semi-socialist thing that Max [Eastman] disliked so violently and which we almost quarreled over) I am rewriting. The novel I have all planned, in part half written. And I do hope you manage something so that I could start working on it for that prize. If not possible, it must wait until I can do it.

Wish you good luck and bon voyage and no words by pen or mouth can ever express my gratitude to you. I’m never very good at expressing myself that way, but I do hope you’ll understand.

If I tried to express what I really feel it would be banal. I know.

Sincerely yours

Claude—

 

To Langston Hughes

June 13, 1928
Barcelona, Spain
[On Letterhead: Au Lion d’Or, Barcelona]

Dear Langston,

I came down here from Marseille on the first and my first effort to write is this letter to you. This is the kind of city that you sleep and dream and dance and play and do anything except work in unless you’re bound to. Certainly it is the most subtly fascinating place I’ve struck yet in Europe. It has all the substantial solidity of London, but it is colorful and not forbidding gray as London is. And there are no nasty slums. It’s a great spread of avenidas and boulevards, and queer, narrow, crooked streets all bright and clean—not the rather overdone cleanliness you feel about Holland and nothing of the filth and stench of little French streets. And there is a langour about it that seems so strange when you realize that it is a hard-working and intensely industrial city. But that, it appears to me, is just why it is so charming.

I came down here to see Marseille in perspective while I am going over my book. I thought it would be better to get out of French atmosphere altogether. And there could be no better perspective, I think, then from here, for it is Mediterranean near to the scene of the book, yet with none of its color and character.

I wonder where you are now and are you thinking of coming over this summer? I should love to meet you face to face.

I see [W.E.B.] Du Bois has given me hell in the Crisis. If he had praised me it would have been a greater surprise. He is a good writer when he is bitter and combative, but he certainly knows nothing about real life and (judging from his writings) I don’t think he understands what art is about and those two great defects prevent him from being a first-rate propagandist. However, I never thought he was dishonest + I feel that now by his printing my poem in the same issue in which he roasts me. There is a history to that poem. I sent it with three others to the “Crisis” towards the end of 1925 when I was ill and broke on the Riviera. At the same time I sent verses to three other N.Y. magazines, The Nation, Bookman, Century, telling the editors I was ill + broke and would be happy if they bought a poem from me. The Bookman ([John] Farrar) took two and paid me a dollar a line. The Nation paid me promptly for one. [Carl] Van Doren in the “Century” did not reply but he was kind enough to return the verses to [Eric] Walrond, although I had not enclosed stamps. The only magazine that did not reply was the “Crisis”! I know they are not rich by any means, but they might have replied. I thought they had not received the poems that they had gone astray in the mails. Then 2 years after, when I had my contract with Harper’s, I saw 2 of the poems in the “Crisis.” I immediately wrote to Du Bois about it. He sent me 10 dollars + said Jessie Fauset was in charge of the office when the verses arrived + neglected to reply. I told him then that those verses had been sent for a special purpose + that I did not care to see them in print now + I asked him to return the others. He never did + the next hint I had of them is in this number of the June “Crisis”. I am sending him a letter now that will be good for him. It won’t be the first time we have locked horns. But you know I don’t give a damn. I love a fight, when I feel I am in the right. This is a bad pen so please forgive the formation of my letters.

Send me a card if you should be too busy to do a letter.

Ever Claude

The envelopes of the cafe were so ugly, I came to the forum to find an uglier one which I have [indecipherable] as I packed mine away in a basket at Marseille by mistake.

 

To William Aspenwall Bradley

October 1, 1928
Casablanca

Dear Bradley

I left Barcelona towards the end of August and visiting Valencia, Sevilla and Tangier, have just arrived here, to find your letter of August 28 and a cargo of correspondence. I might have stayed on longer in Barcelona if I had the least intimation that you were thinking of coming down, especially as I wanted to go to Majorca myself and didn’t. If you haven’t gone yet and are thinking of going any time this fall or winter a comfortable and not dear place to stay is the Persian Floret right on one of the Ramblas near the Plaza de Cataluña.

I took it into my head to come here after meeting again in Barcelona a Martinique navigateur whom I had met in Marseille and who makes his home here among the Arabs. There is a little colony of them here—Negroes who are not Mussulmen—and it has been very interesting to come among them. For the first time in my life I feel really moved to make casual notes about a new place visited. It is very interesting to see how these colored fellows have adapted themselves to the ways of the Arabs, having Arab wives and all living together in a kind of community Arab house in one of the native quarters a long way from the ville European. They live in a simple, primitive way and although the rooms and the charming court that the families share in common are clean, it is indescribably filthy and smelly outside around, for there is no sewage system. It is the same in the old native town abutting the European.

But away from that the life is very stimulating with its rich variety of color. Now that I am among the Arabs among themselves, I feel about them just as I did about the East Indians when I was a boy and have, in a way, always felt. The two peoples resemble very much. I haven’t the slightest sympathetic attraction towards them, but there is so much to admire. There are certainly wonderful types among them, majestic men and women and so dignified and aristocratic compared to the Europeans. There are splendid types of Jews too who make me think of the patriarchs. I have never been able to analyze why I don’t feel drawn towards Arabs and Indians. Among the Chinese, on the other hand, I feel comfortable just like one of them even though I don’t understand their language.

The European life here is very active—quite different from Spain where a lazy languor pervades everything, everywhere. At least so it seemed to me. There are fine new buildings of neo-arabesque architecture and all over the town between the port and the “gare” buildings are going up feverishly. But I have never seen so much dust and sand before and that makes the landscape sad and uninviting. There are no trees—only shrubs, miserable things under the dust. In the new town they are just putting trees in the streets.

All I have seen here is spurring me on to go to West Africa. I have been thinking of a trip there for the last ten years and I want to make it now that I have the chance. And the life of the Negroes among the Arabs here make me more than ever curious to go and see the real thing. I think I could do a book of my trip from a new angle that would be worth the experience of going.

Also if you have any payments for me for September and October I shall be happy to get some as I am about at the end of my resources.

And now to “Banjo.” I toted it along with me, rereading, emendating, rewriting and retyping and pasting all the time, and it is now almost as I want it. I shall send it off during this week. If you think it is in shape too awful to go to Harper’s, Miss Jessie Hyde of 8 bis rue Campagne Première, will type it over for me. I know her well. She has done work for me before and is a good typist.

My traveling about again is doing me good and I am feeling fine and I hope you are too and your family. Tangier is a great place, a kind of little Marseille and more interesting than Casablanca from an artistic point of view.—Thank you for that cutting from “Comedia.”

Sincerely Yours

Claude McKay

 

To William Aspenwall Bradley

November 2, 1928
Fez, Morocco

Dear Bradley

I came here from Rabat a few days ago and I’ve been having such a great time in the native town I’ll have to quit (because my head can’t stand the storm) and go back to Casablanca and to Marrakech, where I hope to spend a week. After, I’ll start for West Africa as soon as the money arrives. I should have started for Casablanca today but I am broke and must wait until the bank puts through the October cheque + remits it here.

The native town is a wonder. The Arabs take to me quite as the people of all classes did in Russia and I have visited and been entertained in many homes—every day during my six days here, sometimes 3 homes during the day and I must take cous-cous or tea in each, while I present a bottle of wine or liqueur in return. The “indigines” are not allowed to buy wine and liqueurs—openly. I can buy, of course, although I am not taking any wine at all now. Oh, about my taking a bottle of something—they say the custom is that anyone invited to an Arab home must take some kind of a gift. I have some very amusing stories to tell you when we do meet.

I get to know many things as I am not French—nor white. I’ve been in many dens where they make the “kiff” and an old medieval house with a wonderful court where young girls—blacks and Arabs—are actually sold—secretly. But it is not the white-slavery traffic, nor the old-time Negro slavery, it is rather a way of getting a domestic servant or a slave-wife. It is a big experience to know the Arabs among themselves. My admiration is greatly increased although I don’t feel drawn to them in any way. I don’t feel I would want to live among them a long time as I did among the Russians.

Curiously Fez—Medina is very reminiscent of Moscow. The minarets of the many mosques have the same rich jewel colours of the Moscow churches and I have seen Arabs here of the same features of the Tartar type of Russians. And it is those Arab types that I like most. It is very amusing in the Arab homes to watch the women agitating the curtains and peeping at you even showing you a little of the unveiled face that you are not supposed to see. Once I did stare too much at one of the women’s quarters and my Arab companion told me I should never look even if the women did accidentally expose their features, for that would be taken as an affront to the men and Arab customs.

I am anxious to hear what you think of the finish of “Banjo.” If your opinion is favorable I know I won’t have to worry about its fate. It is raining here and cold although it is far enough South. But the country here is surrounded by mountains, some of them white with snow. I left both my overcoat + raincoat at Marseille + must make the best of it.

With best wishes Yours Sincerely

Claude McKay

 

To Louise Bryant

June 17, 1929
Paris, France

My dear Louise

After meeting you that first night in the Select I did not get off alone until the following night when we had dinner together. And then I cried nearly all night and couldn’t go to sleep until I took four Dial Cibas. I could hardly wake up the next day. Maybe I was foolish to cry, simply because I was disappointed in our meeting like that after I have been looking forward toward our meeting all these years. But I was terribly affected even though I was sitting there laughing and trying to be jolly. You know I have cried only three times in twenty years—when my mother died in 1909, when I was shocked crazy by the abrupt news of Crystal Eastman’s death and the other night.

You see I remembered how we first met and you danced with me at the Liberator ball—it was rather romantic—and I remember too the splendid oriental costume you lent Max [Eastman] and my wishing I had one myself. Then I remembered our second brief meeting, when Florence [Deshon] committed suicide and I was trying to take care of Max and my slipping off when you came. The third was our banal meeting at the Dôme when you were with that awfully ugly woman, the journalist, who made me introduce her to some fixture of the café who was always uniquely advertising his good looks.

I left Paris a few days after and I don’t know what I would have made of myself if you were not always encouraging me with money and your faith in me and my talent to write in the face of all sorts of discouragements. Even at Marseille, I was so down under the life, that I couldn’t see that there was big stuff in it until you made me see in a strong letter about it and myself. This book “Banjo” really grew out of your suggestion. It was after your letter I realized that I was sweating and swilling through a golden mill.

I go over all this old ground because it was so terrible to meet you like that. I know it must have been hell for you in the sanitarium and after the stupid English doctors sentencing you to death. But I am sentenced too and all of us poor human devils are sentenced, excepting that some sentences are short, while others are long and (as I am on the subject) I suppose quite a number of us who went into Russia came out heavily sentenced.

Anyhow, I meant (any place away from that detestable Montparnasse quarter of utterly lost and dead souls) to meet and talk to you quietly about yourself and myself and our work. We were not ourselves those two evenings at the Select—nobody ever is in that atmosphere of poseurs and so-called free people. I shall go by your hotel to leave this letter and whenever you want to see me I am at your pleasure.

Yours ever Sincerely,

Claude

 

To Louise Bryant

August 1, 1929
Paris, France

Dear Louise

I got your address from Flossie and am sending you this letter I wrote after our meeting at the Select. Reading it over I don’t see that I want to change it in any way even though it is so sentimental.

Flossie tells me you are going back to N.Y. and I wish I could see you before your going, but I am on the point of leaving Paris myself. I can’t stick Montparnasse, there is none of my old friends (those I appreciate about) and I have no new ones that I care for.

I got the Blackbirds to go to a good party that the Blackbirds [McKay means Bradleys] gave. I only wish you were there. I enjoyed myself immensely. I invited our mutual friend Gwen. I was rather tight—drinking beer—but I had all my wits. When the party was nearly breaking up we were some of us a little off in a group with Gwen among us. Graeme [Taylor] suggested that we should finish the morning at his studio and I said: Yes let’s all go and have a nice bi-sexual party. I meant no offence to Gwen (for I suppose these were more people from my side at the party who were that way inclined) But Gwen took it very personally and said to me—“You know, Claude, you have a reputation for being a homo.” “Sure,” I answered, “I sleep with all the boys, but only the aristocratic ones, and so it’s hard to prove anything on me.” So she didn’t say any more. It was funny because I took Gwen to the theatre party and the party afterwards because I have always liked her, ever since I met her at Cagnes. We went up to Cagnes from Nice—4 boys and some Lesbian girls from St. Paul and had a wild time in Harriet’s studio. For my part I have never been with nor at any time liked the he-men crowd who like to “swing on fairies.” See Hemingway’s book [The Sun Also Rises]. But I don’t like people who wear labels and pose, I don’t like he-women any more than I like he-men, nor fairies who scream + play the jeune fille a la Victorian age in this machine age when the best women are the sporty, athletic types. I suppose I am nearer to the ancient Greeks + the Orientals of today who take these things in a natural and dignified manner.

My love to you and the kid.

Sincerely Claude

 

To William Aspenwall Bradley

Thursday [likely August 1, 1929]
Paris, France

Dear Bradley

I had a wonderful time at the party and I think everybody else did. Please tell Mrs Bradley how sorry I was not to be present when she was leaving to thank her for her nice management, but I hope I shall see you both again before I leave Paris to get down to work. I am sorry too I missed thanking Mrs [Stella] Bowen—but I had been drinking with my party—only beer, but it takes just a little to go to my head nowadays—and was in no mood to say an interesting word even with the persons I would have liked to talk to most—like [Blaise] Cendrars. I was only in a mood to enjoy myself, and I did.

I think most of the show crowd enjoyed themselves except Miss [Aida] Ward, perhaps. It was a pain taking her home, she is so over-nice + I’m afraid she can’t help being that way. Her mother is a fine person. Snaky Hips and Adelaide Hall, the two that I prefer more than everybody else, were delightful and delighted with everything.

I’ve got to go to Berlin for a few days, but I’ll come back here before I decide definitely about going off. So I hope to see you either before or after Berlin.

Sincerely

Cl. McKay

I stayed in bed all day + all night yesterday to recover + am o.k. Again!

 

From Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer, to be published by Yale University Press this September.

Claude McKay (1890–1948) was a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance. His books include the poetry collection Harlem Shadows, the novels Home to Harlem and Banjo, and the posthumously published Amiable with Big Teeth and Romance in Marseille. 

Modernist Blondes

Earle K. Bergey’s cover painting for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Before I read Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the 1953 Howard Hawks film had already influenced my existence as a young girl in the form of a Marilyn Monroe VHS box set. It wasn’t the glitz and glamour that attracted me (though it helped) but the gleeful mischief of two women putting one over on a world of men. A femme fatale without anything too fatal. At its core, there was an idea of using one’s feminine wiles for good, if not for society then at least for oneself— and maybe a girlfriend or two. By twenty, reading the novel helped contextualize my own mischief within a lineage of women. Perhaps getting a man to buy you gifts wasn’t feminist vigilantism, but it was indeed fun. At that age, there are so few opportunities to test one’s power and charm. It taught me the valuable lesson that laughter at the expense of powerful men was not so expensive after all.

Anita Loos began writing Gentleman Prefer Blondes as a joke on her unrequited paramour, the editor and Algonquin Table alum H. L. Mencken. Out of spite for the genius’s “palpably unjust” penchant for blondes, Lorelei Lee—perhaps the blonde all blondes are unconsciously measured up to—was born. The novel is often remembered as an artifact of the Jazz Age full of prohibition liquor and loose morals, and, stylistically, it displays the kind of lighthearted play that more writers could experiment with only if they took themselves less seriously. Loos, in her “Biography of the Book,” states that as she began to write the beginnings of the novel on a train, she approached writing it “not bitterly, as I might have done had I been a real novelist, but with an amusement which was, on the whole, rather childish.” Two gold-digging flappers taking Europe by storm sounds like the perfect twenties romp, but for those with sharp minds, there was more than meets the eye. At the time of publication, Edith Wharton and William Faulkner were gushing fans, with Wharton calling it “the great American novel.” It is unfortunate that Blondes was published the same year as The Great Gatsby and is now greatly overshadowed by the latter’s legacy. There’s an argument to be made that, if Loos and her characters were slightly less glamorous (and less feminine), perhaps the novel would have been remembered as a prominent example of a modernist text.

Our seminal blonde, Lorelei Lee, comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a dubious backstory full of intrigue. An archetypal faux-naïf, she uses her perceived naïveté to get the better of the gentlemen around her.

When one of Lorelei’s suitors sends a letter asking for her hand in marriage, Lorelei takes photographs of it with the excuse that if she lost it, “she would not have anything left to remember him by.” However underplayed, this is an astute move to protect herself under a breach of promise law. If he was to change his mind, she could sue him for walking back on the engagement. For Loos’s flappers, a girl’s own survival is always top of mind.

Lorelei’s counterpart, Dorothy Shaw, acts as the rough-talking brunette foil to Lorelei’s purposely sanitized account of their misadventures. Dorothy can stay up all night, drink as much as men, and lacks what Lorelei calls “reverence.” Her rugged vernacular, street smarts, and devil-may-care attitude Lorelei teasingly disapproves of: “And, after all, why should I listen to the advice of a girl like Dorothy who travelled all over Europe and all she came home with was a  bangle!” Regina Barreca writes in her introduction of the 1998 reissue of the novel that Dorothy works as a “mouthpiece for Loos’s own wisecracks,” Loos herself being a gaminesque brunette.

In the lesser read sequel Gentleman Marry Brunettes, Loos writes, “He really does not mind what a girl has been through, as long as she does not enjoy herself at the finish. But Henry said that when girls like Dorothy do not pay, and pay, how are all the moral people going to get their satisfaction out of watching them suffer.” Loos pokes fun at the idea that a woman having too much of a good time should be punished. In her autobiography, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, she writes of her screenplay for the film Red-Headed Woman, starring Jean Harlow, “Our heroine, the bad girl of whom all good husbands dream, ended her career as many such scalawags do, rich, happy, and respected, without ever having paid for her sins.” There’s virtuosity in women who pursue their needs, wants, and diamonds in spite of it all. Their enterprising nature finds a crack in men’s egos, easily slipping through without catching their dress.

Anita Loos has somehow been forgotten despite being a seminal figure in Hollywood. Her repertoire spans from writing scenarios and title cards early in the silent film era and extends well into the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her impact on cinema, and in fact, how we tell stories about women, has been influential, though rarely mentioned. Loos’s name lingers somewhere in the movie credits, often the one studios called to take a screenplay off the hands  of a “serious” novelist (as was the case of Red-Headed Woman from F. Scott Fitzgerald). Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is full of malapropisms and charming innuendo delivered like a wink from a screen siren.

A Loos heroine has style, wit, and often comes away unscathed—what the protagonist of the Loos-penned 1935 film Biography of a Bachelor Girl calls “A woman who dared sort of thing.” This was not only important for my own practice of developing women characters, but also for my own life. A pithy one-liner is best served in the moment, not only on the page. Her work bolstered my belief that fun and glamour could be a worthy intellectual pursuit. It’s not like the kind of women Loos wrote about disappeared; they just became less commonly depicted. Walk into the bar of any swanky hotel and you will see variations of a modern flapper, getting what she wants. To be a woman who dared, while also writing her back into existence, was always my aim.

Humor is often misunderstood as froth that cannot be sustained in the canon. This is unimaginative. Loos understood this. In a tragic world full of hypocrisy,  the laughs become all the more earned. Comedy that doesn’t outright pronounce what should be laughed at gives the reader something to parse between the lines. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, laughing at the wrong thing can often make you the subject of its very skewering. Those who have been in the heady proximity of a girl in command of her charms can understand the text’s ingenuity. The novel plays on the feminine as a device against low expectations. You only find them unintelligent if you are similarly so. The humor relies on Lorelei being a character who is seemingly passive, but “acts in response to her own desires rather than in response to the desires of men.” A woman is free to do what she wants as long as everyone thinks she does it without shrewdness. She can’t help it, how was she to know? As Lorelei says, “when a girl’s life is as full of fate as mine seems to be, there is nothing else to do about it.” The poet William Empson wrote a rather tragic villanelle titled “Reflection from Anita Loos” that ends with the line “a girl can’t go on laughing all the time.” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dares to ask, Why not?

 

An adapted excerpt from the introduction to the one-hundredth-anniversary edition of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, to be published by Random House this August.

Marlowe Granados is the author of the novel Happy Hour.

The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin. Photograph by Maria Sorokina.

My problems started much earlier than the night before deadline—they started in my childhood, when I completely failed to learn Russian, and though an inability to function in a writer’s original language has never stopped me and shouldn’t stop anyone from pronouncing upon a translation, I admit that in my maturing years I ran into compounding difficulties, including the facts that I’ve never lived and written in a country that proscribes me, that I’ve never had to leave the country of my language and gone to settle abroad, that I’ve never had to live up to or live against a new identity projected onto me in exile as something of an artist-spokesman for political opposition, and—believe it or not—that I’ve never been mistaken for a one-man repository or symbol-embodiment of my literary culture, which happens to be one of the foremost literary cultures in the history of the world. It’s so much easier, I’m realizing now, to introduce a book by a writer who stayed at mediocre home, surrounded by his more-or-less admiring publishers who publish him, and his more-or-less admiring readers who read him; it’s so much easier, in other words, to introduce a book by a writer who is dead, which is admittedly how I feel sometimes, in my shut-into-my-apartment-and-English existence.

Vladimir Sorokin, however, is alive; he is quite alive, and when I asked him how and why (along with a clutch of other questions even more sincere), he obliged me with answers that contained all the intelligence and humor I expected, but also with a startling and I’d even say troubling tenderness and grace. Perhaps I’d missed this in what I’d read of his two-dozen-or-so-books, or perhaps this is new—a new element that in complete contradistinction to the extraterrestrial Ice that falls to the Siberian earth in his Ice trilogy is loving, positive, constructive (I should also say, speaking in these optimistic terms is novel for me).

The interview that follows transpired via email, and via the author’s prodigious translator Max Lawton in winter 2024–2025. I hope its contents convey the high respect I have for Sorokin, who is one of the great prose writers of his remarkable Russian generation born around the death of Stalin, a generation that includes at least one other estimable Vladimir, the late Vladimir Sharov, and whose best still-living prose writers and poets now dwell in Berlin, Paris, London, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Zurich, Athens, Rome, Tel Aviv . . .

 

INTERVIEWER

Reading you over the years at the inevitable delay of translation, I’ve always thought to myself, This is brilliant, but beware! If I have to distill this thought—this feeling—into questions, I’d ask the following. Is parody dangerous? Does satire of a regime ultimately serve the regime? I guess I should ask a politician instead. Can you make fun of something without making it stronger?

VLADIMIR SOROKIN

Joshua, you’re asking a very important ontological question. I could easily fall into conceptual speculations on this theme so as to justify myself and, I think, would be able to find justificatory arguments regarding my use of satire and humor, referring to Rabelais, Swift, and Hašek, I have done so in many interviews and have also grown a fairly thick skin, off of which such questions quickly bounce. But, in conversing with you, another writer, I don’t wish to do this. When I was writing Day of the Oprichnik, then The Sugar Kremlin, what I was thinking of least of all was the benefit or harm of such texts vis-à-vis the state’s evil or a potential victory over it (and, for me, Russia’s pyramid of power has always been evil). When I start writing any book, I want one thing: for the book to turn out well, which is to say for it to be a self-sufficient work of literature, one unconnected with current issues of people or the state, even if the very subject of the book is the vileness of power.

INTERVIEWER

I asked this because you come from a culture in which writers were once extraordinarily important. What does it mean to be a Russian writer today, though? A Russian in exile—does it feel like exile?—in Germany? (We’ll agree for present purposes that Berlin is Germany.)

SOROKIN

I’m going to be frank here—I don’t know what a Russian writer is today. The simplest answer would be someone who writes in Russian. On Nabokov’s grave in Montreux is simply written “écrivain.” I feel very close to this sentiment. In the West, alas, there are still a great many clichés regarding Russian writers—spirituality, the metaphysics of Russian spaces and Russian nature, suffering, deadly love for a femme fatale, the horrors of the Gulag, totalitarianism, et cetera. I’m not against all of those themes, but I am against the cliché. Circumstances conspired such that I ended up in Berlin. But the last thing I want is to consider myself an emigrant, as Nabokov did. Unlike him, I can return to Moscow at any time, there’s no Iron Curtain. I just don’t wish to go to Putin’s Moscow right now. Nabokov’s situation was a great deal tougher. He was fleeing from death. Whereas I simply moved to Berlin. Even before this, my wife and I lived between Moscow and Berlin. And I hope to return to Moscow if the situation changes and the war in Ukraine ends.

INTERVIEWER

The Sugar Kremlin, like certain strains of your work, partakes of multiple genres, multiple forms—folktales, theater or film scripts, letters, dreams, and songs—but there’s a sense that this variousness isn’t yet another postmodern reinvention of the novel so much as a waking-up-from-a-long-nightmare declaration that the novel never existed. Do you recognize this reading? What does the novel mean to you?

SOROKIN

It seems to me that the best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel. We need simply recall Gargantua and Pantagruel, Ulysses, or War and Peace. These are referred to as great novels, even though, formally speaking, it’s almost as if they weren’t novels at all. They’re simply novels that are well suited to their time, which is why they turn out to be great novels. The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure. In order to conceive of the contemporary world, I make use of complex optics, which can be referred to as faceted vision, like what insects have. Keeping in mind that, today, in post-Soviet Russia, the imperial past, which was not buried in time, presses in on the present like a glacier, the question of the future is suspended. As young Russians admit to me, “We do not feel the future as a vector of life and development.” This is an absolutely pathological situation and a writer needs a special sort of vision in order to adequately re-create this on the page (you’ll notice I say “re-create” and not “describe”). For this, I make use of a system of mirrors set up on two platforms–one is the past and one is the future. You can call this postmodernism or grotesque metarealism, I don’t mind either way. But the grotesqueness of Russian life didn’t begin with post-Soviet Russia, we need only recollect the worlds of Gogol.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you prefer the verb re-create to describe? What’s the difference? And why, when it comes to the contemporary, does recreation-on-the-page seem to be possible or at least more possible than description? Has something happened to realism or reality?

 SOROKIN

I don’t like the term description of the world, it contains a clear reference to secondariness—to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds—not describe the world that’s already been created. Tolstoy, Kafka, and Joyce were able to create their own worlds, which is why their prose stuns with its intellectual authenticity.

INTERVIEWER

And what does style—the music of your sentences—mean to you, especially given that fools like me must read you in translation? What am I missing?

 SOROKIN

Joshua, I am simply a fool of literature who trusts his intuition alone—it’s all that I have. To put it generally, a book’s intonation is very important to me. That is the locomotive able to pull a novel toward new expanses, new horizons, but also able to knock it down into the abyss of routine. The intonation of a first page is like a melody you catch–a melody that begins a symphony. Which is why there are many books I don’t even finish ten pages of, sensing that they “don’t sound right.” But, alas, I’m also a bad reader … In my life, a great deal has been and continues to be devoted to the visual arts.

INTERVIEWER

In what way? I mean, you just scoffed at “illustrativeness.”

SOROKIN

Until I was twenty, I thought I was going to be an artist and devoted a great deal of my time to both painting and drawing, which I don’t even remotely regret. In the eighties, I made my living by illustrating books, which allowed me to support my family and write prose in the evenings. You might well say that, ever since, I’ve been standing with only one leg in literature and the other in the art-ocean. This gives me the unique opportunity to look at literature as an art-object. Which is why I really do understand Nabokov, who wished to turn the reader into a viewer, as he once put it. Art helps me to create literary spaces, this way of seeing is always with me, but to explain the principles of such a way of seeing is difficult.

INTERVIEWER

What do you see as the relationship between the chapter here called “The Queue” and my favorite of your early novels, translated as The Queue? Is the line the great unit of our time—and is there anything besides the word itself, or an impatience for meaning, that unites the lines we wait in and the lines we read?

SOROKIN

The queue is an eternal theme of the Russian world–but not only of the Russian world. During the pandemic in Berlin, my wife and I stood out in the November cold and rain for four hours to make our way onto the bus where they were administering the Moderna vaccine. All of this was organized with a disgusting lack of humanity. I saw a queue of people trembling in the cold, as if this weren’t the twenty-first century, but the forties of the European twentieth century! Which is why, for me, a queue is an archaic monster that lives inside of us and can easily emerge at any moment, paying no mind to time or century.

INTERVIEWER

So you were vaccinated! Which brings me to questions of paranoia and conspiracy. I feel that novelists, especially in the so-called West, when faced with suspicions or dread, used to ask themselves, Is this true? Now, in a time when anything, when everything, “can be true,” the new thing to ask is, Can we live with it? How has fiction changed as the culture has become more and more explicitly self-fictionalizing?

 SOROKIN

“Is that really true?” is an eternal question in our world, where fakes multiply with each passing minute. But I rely on my intuition, as I did before. My life experience and my inner feeling are all I have when assessing a phenomenon, person, or event. It seems to me that we have nothing else. To take something on faith is a dangerous act in our time.

INTERVIEWER

The politics of this book are quite direct. The Sovereign, who reigns supreme, who builds the wall, is also “a sewer rat,” whose dominion is some amalgam of the Soviet revolutionary era and the near-future New Russia. What connects that historical age to this coming age—or is there no difference, save a few technological breakthroughs and better Chinese food outside of China?

SOROKIN

In Russia, all epochs are tied together by one thing—the pyramid of power. It was built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century and hasn’t fundamentally changed since then. The language spoken by Russians in the sixteenth century changed, but the system of power did not! This pyramid is archaic, opaque, unpredictable, inhumane, and absolutely vicious to the populace around it. At the summit of the pyramid sits a single person who has all of the power for himself–the laws that exist for ordinary citizens do not apply to him. All of the ills of Russia are a function of this pyramid. It was an apposite structure in the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries, then, in the twentieth, it gave birth to a beastly totalitarian regime, but, in the twenty-first, it’s a total anachronism, putting the brakes on the development of the country and frightening its neighbors. The consequences of this have now become visible to the whole world. The pyramid of power is a kind of reactor of imperial energy that produces hard radiation. The one sitting on top of it mutates, losing all human qualities and turning into a slave of the imperial idea. Like in The Lord of the Rings.

INTERVIEWER

Is the Russian pyramid primarily a tomb, like its Egyptian predecessor, or some sort of gods-appointed abattoir, like the pyramids of Mesoamerica? And how does the Russian pyramid—at least your use of it—jibe with Marx’s class pyramid? Or with Freytag’s literary pyramid? Why so many pyramids—and what kind of pyramid is your book’s Kremlin?

SOROKIN

The Russian pyramid of power is a mystical object. It was created over the centuries, starting in the sixteenth. In it were united the authoritative principles of the Golden Horde and Byzantium, as well as Russians’ pagan beliefs. In Russia, power took the place of God, this having been especially clear during the Soviet Union when Stalin became a living god and Lenin a dead one, a mummy who was placed into a pyramid resembling an ancient ziggurat on Red Square. And the Soviet people worshipped this mummy.

 INTERVIEWER

Here is my favorite passage of this book:

Sixteen months ago, six members of the mystical, anti-Russian sect “Yarosvet” were arrested. Having drawn a map of Russia onto a white cow, they performed a certain magic ritual, dismembered the cow, and began to take pieces of the cow’s body to remote regions of the Russian state and feed it to foreigners. The cow’s hindquarters were taken to the Far East, boiled, and fed to Japanese settlers, the flank and underbelly were taken to Barnaul, where they were folded into pelmeni and fed to Chinese people, they made borsch from the brisket in Belgorod and fed it to eighteen dumb fuckin’ Ukrainian overseas traders, they made a meatballs out of the cow’s front legs for Belarusian farm laborers in Roslavl, then made kholodets from its head, which, not far from Pskov, they fed to three old Estonian women. All six of the sectarians were arrested, interrogated, then admitted to everything, named their accomplices and abettors, but, nevertheless, a dark place still remained in the case: the cow’s offal.

Here we have what you call the “magic ritual of the ‘dismemberment’ of Russia”—but of the Russian state, or of Russian culture—both? And what is the offal in this metaphor? The “intestines, stomach, heart, liver and lungs”—by reading you are we reading them? Or, to put it another way, to what degree are you consciously performing literary haruspicy on the Russian corpse and corpus?

SOROKIN

If we speak of Russia as a “sacred cow,” this is indeed an image in the heads of many of our officials and patriots. But, when looking at a map of Russia and its size, you understand that it’s not a cow, but a brontosaurus. The fear that the neighbors of this brontosaurus will bite it in the ass haunts our patriots. Which is why Russia periodically attacks its neighbors. An act that usually ends sadly for Russia. Imperial Russia collapsed after the war it lost against tiny Japan, just as the USSR collapsed after the war it lost against Afghanistan. About what will happen now, one can only fantasize … If you wish to speak of the guts of the Russian brontosaurus-cow, then this is pure Russian metaphysics.

 

This conversation is adapted from the introduction to Vladimir Sorokin’s forthcoming story collection, The Sugar Kremlin, which will be published by Dalkey Archive in August.

 Joshua Cohen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

For a Little Fresh Air …

James Webster flying over Mount Fuji.

In a dream someone says to me, “You have been left in the dust.” An idiom for being left behind, outdone, but I hear it literally. I’m covered in dust and left there. It’s in my lungs. I am allergic to dust mites. I also remember its biblical twin: “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” Another one bites the dust.

“Let me remind you that the word pollution, with its religious and medical origin, first meant desecration of places of worship by excrement, and later the soiling of sheets by ejaculation, usually from masturbation,” the philosopher Michel Serres writes. I’ve been wondering about the relationship between dreams and trash lately as I listen to patients. What parts of ourselves do we leave lying around? Lacan was increasingly preoccupied by the residue, or waste, excreted by our will to representation. Our excessive mental efforts score the earth in both senses of stain and scratch. This thought seems to go along with the increasing volume of pollution, of trash, of civic ill will, that marks the extension, as Serres writes, “of appropriated space … and also the increase in the number of subjects of appropriation—individual, family, nation.” Either we are still animals marking territory, or we have exceeded the animal realm by attempting to mark all territory—sea, earth, air, and even outer space. My friend laughed at the idea that we were excited by a trace of water on Mars. “There’s so much water here!” she exclaimed.

Serres calls for universal dispossession before the war of all wars begins. No one willingly gives up ownership of anything, I think. Sacrifice, if we are to make it, requires some kind of structure that wills us toward it. Freud, for his part, was interested in the expansion outward of the ego by day and its recoiling at night in dreams. I think of patients who have tried to tell me that dreams are just the brain cleaning up trash. This isn’t possible. Not because I believe in dreams, but because we don’t even know what to do with real trash. Better interpretation: a reaction to the act of nocturnal emission. A universal tendency toward debasement in the sphere of dreams.

***

Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will. His own ashes, not his house reduced to ashes by wildfire. This was made clear by my unease with the material in the bag. In the dream, I was told I was one among many to receive this gift. I admired this “spreading” of himself after death, which seems like something attributed to women by men. Day residue: a video of Palestinians sorting human remains amid the rubble came across my feed. How do you even know what to look for? I wondered. Probably one learns. A patient recently told me that story about Keith Richards snorting his father’s ashes. The father is made immortal by this silly mythic tale. What lives on of all these lives reduced to ash? A separate line of thought suddenly appears—drugs, or some substance, in small plastic bags. Matter is disseminated and then appropriated by our bodies. In my dream, this is reversed. The body is circulated and made an object of consumption. The latter we sometimes call love.

***

In After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus describes loved ones eating Acker’s ashes, which Kraus calls “cremains.” Never heard this offensive portmanteau before. She quotes Matias Viegener: “What hit me most was that K would have no choice about whom her ashes inhabited.” Scattering them often proves more difficult than you would expect. Some comical scenes of ashes blown back in faces, like Donny’s funeral in The Big Lebowski. Continual unwitting consumption of ashes on a Los Angeles beach. A sermon that drifts into the death toll of the Vietnam War. “What the fuck does anything have to do with Vietnam?” yells the Dude. The same beaches are now closed, as carcinogenic material pools on sand. Rain, running through ash, carries pollutants downhill. The Pacific Ocean—black—will have to be tested for safe swimming conditions. A friend, her home close to the Altadena fires, tells me her lemon trees have grown fruits that look like bananas.

***

The new uniform is black, Baudelaire writes. An expression of constant mourning, a false bid for equality through aesthetic conformity (or horde psychology), and a new professional public mentality: “political undertakers, amorous undertakers, bourgeois undertakers. We all observe some kind of funeral.” We are all funereal workers conducting our own burials. The time stamp of this diagnosis is roughly 1850. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire is the contradictory hero of a disappearing trace of life. “The world is about to end,” writes Baudelaire. “The sole reason it might continue on is that it exists. … These times are perhaps quite near; who knows whether they are not already upon us, and whether the coarsening of our nature is not the sole obstacle preventing us from recognizing the atmosphere we breathe.”

“To fuck is to aspire to enter into another, and the artist never leaves himself,” writes Baudelaire. Followed by, “I’ve forgotten the name of that bitch … Ah, what the hell, I’ll remember it on Judgment Day.” According to Benjamin, a “measureless desolation” appears on the horizon embodied by the miserable, misanthropic, and misogynist Baudelaire. My friend Elissa Marder argued that he was trying to inscribe memory onto the bodies of women, the last place it might hold. Who wouldn’t hate them for that burden and possibility? Baudelaire: Poetry became his real mistress. He let this new world, which he named “modernity,” waste him, run through him, and yet somehow he coarsens into our prophet. I’m told to enjoy this contradiction, but I’m having so much difficulty reading him. Something is overly familiar even when foreign—so French.

Baudelaire is shocked by the everyday—its speed, its blankness. Our needs blunted in the smooth, mechanized functioning of life. We are nostalgic but empty of experience. “On the vaporization and centralization of the Self. It all comes down to this,” Baudelaire begins his unfinished work My Heart Laid Bare. I feel myself turning into air. “Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind,” writes Benjamin. His modernity is a “star without atmosphere.” Benjamin is nodding to Nietzsche, who found his likeness in the syphilitic poet and introjected him mimetically, copying him word for word into his diary.

A century and a half later, we are still saying it’s the end of the world, but our inability to recognize the atmosphere we breathe is more literal. Baudelaire indulges the end openly with his heart laid bare. How else should we discover our spiritual ruin? Nietzsche, as if finally exhausted by Baudelaire’s relentless darkness, closes his manic diary abruptly. He turns the page with what feels like utter exasperation and attempts to start anew, writing simply: “For a little fresh air! …”

***

I once wrote about a dream where my maternal grandmother’s ashes were served to me in the form of toast. I was amused by the double entendre.

***

“There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world,” writes Bruno Latour, in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, several years before his death. We only have this earth. Without vegetation and microorganisms in the soil, inorganic forces would reign as they do on seemingly every other planet. Lightning would remove nitrogen from the air, leaving most of it dissolved in the sea. The soil would be filled with carbon dioxide. Oxygen was pollution until a life-form grabbed onto it, driving billions of other species into extinction. Will we delay the disappearance of our atmosphere? Embarrassing moment: Latour says it’s not apocalypse soon, it’s Apocalypse Now (exclamation point). French theorists’ obsession with American movies is so funny to me. Still, he’s right. Well before the dawn of SpaceX:

What no longer makes any sense is to transport oneself in dreams, without obstacles and without attachments, into the great expanse of space. This time, we humans are not shocked to learn that the Earth no longer occupies the center and that it spins aimlessly around the Sun; no, if we are so profoundly shocked, it is on the contrary because we find ourselves at the center of its little universe, and because we are imprisoned in its minuscule local atmosphere.

Do you want your future to be among the stars in space or on this planet? Elon Musk once asked, seemingly disgusted with belonging to this world.

I think of my patient: She had a dream that her mother took the reins of an old horse and led her through a narrow passage in an old house in a mountainous landscape that led to another narrow passage, in another old house, ad infinitum. The scene is decidedly natural. But rather than emerging outside, she ends up further and further inside herself—caught in her grief about aging, her grief about not conceiving another child, her grief about human waste. Can someone please take the reins? She wants a life more pastoral. “Past oral,” I mutter. Latour wants us to understand that there is no pilot or God we can turn to. Even human actors must be understood as one agency among others whose forces are constantly colliding.

The last image I saw that reminded me of a streak of lightning was in a video of a Black Hawk helicopter colliding with an airplane over D.C. Trump: “Real tragedy … a dark and excruciating night … cold night, cold water.” My patients speak about this plane crash and the Federal Aviation Administration chief who quit on Inauguration Day: “I would accept the stripping of our last institutional and natural resources but not failed air traffic control. That’s chaos.” A man, late one night: “There have been eight plane crashes.” “Eight?” “Yes, there were two more yesterday in Arizona.” I come upon this line in Freud’s lecture, “The Question of a Weltanschauung”: “It is possible, indeed, that with our present economic crisis, following after the Great War, we are only paying the price for our latest tremendous victory over nature, the conquest of the air.”

***

Knowing that my father was in the aviation wing of the Marine Corps, a psychoanalyst asked me if I had read the out-of-print 1952 book The Love and Fear of Flying, by Dr. Douglas D. Bond, who worked with pilots in America and Britain during World War II. I waited with bated breath for a copy, previously belonging to the U.S. Air Force, to arrive. This was Bond’s only book. At the time of his death, in 1976, he was a consultant to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I still find it hard to imagine such a person. Would they still want a psychoanalytic consultant today? Would I do it if I could?

“Over and over,” Bond writes, “one hears this same refrain among flyers—the separateness of themselves from others; the unity of those who fly against those who do not; the feeling that among them there exists some inexpressible bond … that only in the air are they whole; that there they find something long sought which allows the supreme fulfillment of themselves.” To love flying, according to Bond, is to renounce women and find a hidden god. Pilots’ private lives on the ground with family are extremely troubled. They are particularly inarticulate, since their libidinal lives are tied to something inexpressibly sexual about flying. Pilots endure long combat missions, enclosed in cockpits. “A striking thing about air warfare is that it is practically silent.” They rarely encounter enemies directly. These conditions help them maintain the steady denial of danger. The love of flying unfolds under a constant threat of death—a threat they deny by entering a state of mute ecstasy. They experience it, for the most part, passively. And yet this surrender becomes the hallmark of a supreme masculinity. Strange.

Bond wants the military to understand how this subtly constructed suicidality makes for the best pilots. The question is one of knowing how and under what conditions it breaks down. In Bond’s estimation, this has everything to do with chance events that connect with unconscious determinants, whether that’s impotently witnessing one’s gunman face peril, seeing another plane plummet to the ground, or watching the parachute of an admired fellow airman catch fire. What is called “flying fatigue” is not exhaustion, Bond argues, but the surfacing of unconscious meaning. A neurotic phobia is born by accident. Emotional fears and conflicts begin to erupt, shaking pilots’ faith in their planes and their love of flying. Bond writes about one pilot who became obsessed with checking his engine. His beloved uncle had died in a car crash. That old grief resurfaced after he watched another plane crash when its engine took flak. He could no longer access the defensive resolve he once relied on. The Icarus complex is shattered.

Wouldn’t it be reasonable to fear a plane crash while flying in a combat zone? Yes, Bond writes—but not for pilots. If they are unable to summon their prior armor and quickly recover, they should be grounded indefinitely. The witnessing of an accident will lead to more and more overdetermined, neurotic accidents, which will be costly—not just to the pilot, but to the military as well. Planes are expensive. In war, time is of the essence.

Nothing in the pilot’s past can be isolated to predict a breakdown. Only careful analysis can be undertaken. The resilient, efficient pilot is truly libidinous in his love for flight, whatever the cost to his ordinary life. Bond wants us to see how his fate is left to chance. As Yeats wrote of the airman,

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

I suppose the analyst who sent me to this book knew I had questions about my father’s death, which bore traces of suicidality. His willingness to waste what time he had left with me, his denial of death to the very last moment, never being able to say much of anything to each other. Who dies like this? Now I know. Pilots.

We are all paying the price for the conquest of the air. Forward and backward in time is a waste of breath for those who delight in a lonely roll of the dice. If it was a new reality for those squadrons of fliers in the great wars, this now feels like a signature of the contemporary world. Isn’t it strange watching so many men roll the dice with our lives these days? “Bearing you like a girl, the atmosphere spreads itself to you now. This is your place,” wrote the pilot and poet Fleming MacLiesh. Air, of course, is also the mute articulation you fly through. For my part, I’ll place my bets on the atmosphere without asking her to spread anything of herself to me.

***

The Piggle, published in 1977, is D. W. Winnicott’s case study of a two-year-old child named Gabrielle. Piggle is a term of endearment. According to her parents, she hasn’t been herself since the birth of her sister. Her mother seems disturbed by new intonations in her speech; she constantly talks about a black mommy who appears in the night. I’m amazed by how Gabrielle replicates the sounds of air in sessions. A train: “Puffer puff—blow—blow—blow—puffer puffer puffer [sings] puffs blows.” A tractor in the rain: “Tipple, topple, pitter patter, raindrops, I hear thunder, I hear thunder. Pitter patter raindrops. Here’s a man with glasses.” She comes to sessions with her daddy. She’s pleased to have this time away from the new baby with him and Dr. Winnicott.

In sessions, Winnicott begins to focus on the Piggle’s greedy investigation of the other’s body. She clearly has questions about pregnancy, wondering where this new baby came from. Black is the signifier that seems to stand in for everything: hunger, the dark inside of the body, destruction by greed (we have just passed through World War II), intimate relationships that feel ruined by big feelings, the darkness of distance and separation, nighttime terrors.

Me [Winnicott]: Do you dream about it being black inside?

Piggle [Gabrielle]: Piggle frightened.

One day, after taking the stuffing out of a doll, the Piggle begins excitedly talking about her father’s “wee-wee” and her mother’s breasts. Later, Winnicott offers the following interpretation:

Me [Winnicott]: You really were a bit frightened just then when you thought of eating the inside out of the wee-wee.

Gabrielle: Yes. Katchou! [by which she really meant, “Isn’t it hot, and how tired I am”].

What a wild interpretation! Everyone in my reading group was aghast. Can you really say this? To a child? Winnicott seems to want to seize Gabrielle’s aggression; help her take it all the way, take everything out. I’m pleased that the Piggle sneezes her agreement in accordance with her mode of air thinking.

Gabrielle seems to move from inside the claustrophobia of the family out toward a world where she can build up a feeling of excitement that will sustain her. I see this as a move from blackness to air. She has a fabulous dream where her family joins Winnicott in his swimming pond filled with fish. He tells her the pond is his office, where they play with everything and can imagine anything. This seems to please her—a life inside out.

Gabrielle and Winnicott play a game in one of her last sessions in which she bursts out from the curtains yelling, “I am the wind; look out!” He tells her she must be thinking about breathing, something she could enjoy only after she was born. Winnicott reconstructs an outside world for her. Or: a her on the outside, which is funny since people think psychoanalysis is all about getting in touch with one’s “insides.” The Piggle’s true self, to use Winnicott’s phrase, is an environment, not an entity.

***

A patient has a dream that he’s underwater, in a series of tunnels. He says to himself, “I’ve been here before.” He turns to me: “I’m reassuring myself that I know the way out. It’s just on the other side.” But he can’t find the exit, nor any pocket of air. He tries to swim farther. Panicking, he turns around. He’s lost. And then he wakes up. I don’t say it to him, but he has been there before. That doesn’t mean he’ll know where to go. In fact, it’s almost an assurance that he won’t find the way out. Every hallucination in psychoanalysis is lined with the memory of the maternal body. The joke is as real as it is stupid: womb = tomb.

***

A friend spoke to me about his brother, who had overdosed. “After about a year,” he said, “he is a part of me but also a part of history. I speak to him every day, but he’s gone from my life. Isn’t this what they say when they speak of angels?” I envied him his mourning. I don’t know where my father is. Still alive, back home; I haven’t bothered to call. Dead? I saw his dead body wrapped in a polyester yellow-and-maroon Florida State Seminoles blanket. Vanished. Morphine and a cloud of ashes ejected from a propeller plane across the Gold Coast. There, always there, in every voice that withholds, censures, injures, or begs. Somehow this still counts as mourning. Yesterday, in a dream, his face inside a French doctor who asked me to get on top (joke here about mourn and mount). Why are you so old? I thought. Wouldn’t it have been better to ask, Why are you so dead?

***

A patient has a dream in which an infinite number of tiny crabs crawl out from her armpits. At first, it reads like one of those dreams we know well—shame, bodily horror, the panic of something multiplying beyond control. But she pauses. She tells me the dream felt strange because it seemed off with how she’s been feeling—she says she’s further away from all that now. In another dream, she’s at a restaurant with me. She orders lobster. At the end, she’s worried about paying. I joke, gently, “More crustaceans?” She remembers that recently, in waking life, she wanted to order lobster and was startled by the desire. “It’s not something I’ve ever wanted,” she says. “I don’t even really know how to eat it.” How could want just arrive like that? It does.

Then she remembers a childhood memory of a “Great Lobster Escape.” One summer, a neighbor bought all the lobsters from a local restaurant and let the kids release them into the ocean. It was a sweet gesture, meant to be redemptive. But the next morning, many of the lobsters had washed up dead. The image lingers; she is a crustacean trapped in a tank waiting to be eaten or released in a sham game for children saturated with adult fantasies of freedom.

In another session, a dream ends with an image of explosions, shooting stars, a beautiful density in the sky. The mood shifts—from awe to dread. She rises up into the air, surrounded by lights. I see her like this, the way she disappears into the infinite. She sees herself as mute, or nearly so, but when her voice emerges, it has this suspended, hovering quality—ephemeral, yet total. That same infinity threatens to disappear her, flood her with shame, erase articulation. But then, in some moments, it lifts her. It’s hard to work that edge. You never know which is at hand. It’s hard for me, too—not to take from her what suffering also gives. Her sublime sound. I wouldn’t take it if I could.

***

Swimming on a reef, I follow a rather large snapper for some time. I play with wondering if it’s my father, since I know this fish. I know it because of him. Snap her. I decide to swim back when a group of incandescent squid appear and stare at me. Hovering two feet below the surface, the three of them change color and swim in zigzags. Their chromatophoric skin, drenched in sunlight, changes color to a hypnotic rhythm. Shockingly beautiful and unreal. The larger squid and its smaller companion move in synchrony, while the third, also small, stays off to the side. It was like this. They are reminding me what it was like: either with him irrevocably, or alone, watching. There’s no way back or out of this configuration. No way through. I swim on. I bid the cephalopods adieu.

 

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of On Breathing and Disorganization and Sex. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Pulsion Psychoanalytic Institute.