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The Paris Review’s Favorite Books of 2023

Henry Taylor, UNTITLED, 2010. From Untitled Portfolio, issue no. 243. © HENRY TAYLOR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER AND WIRTH. PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAKENZIE GOODMAN. 

Book that made me cry on the subway: Stoner, John Williams
Book that made me miss my subway stop: Prodigals, Greg Jackson
Book I was embarrassed to read on the subway: The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis
Book someone asked me about on the subway: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Book I saw most often on the subway: Big Swiss, Jen Beagin

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

My reading this year was defined by fascinating but frustrating books. Reading to explore, reading for pleasure—sometimes the two don’t converge. In January and February, I battled against Marguerite Young’s thousand-plus-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, reading a pdf of it on my computer (why did I do this? I honestly don’t know) and developing a (hopefully temporary) eye twitch in the process. Among other things, the novel is about a bedridden woman in a decrepit mansion experiencing vertiginous opium hallucinations for pages on end. I’m glad I read it but I’m not sure I would recommend it. Speaking of opium, I also finally finished Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, another kind of fever dream (originally written for money, it’s a mishmash of autobiography, philosophy, and outright plagiarism) that is both completely bonkers and a foundation of modern literary criticism—in it, Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief.” One early reviewer of it expressed “astonishment that the extremes of what is agreeable and disgusting can be so intimately blended by the same mind.” Maybe I relate to this more than I’d like to admit. But a primary purpose of these lists is to give people ideas of what they might enjoy, more than what they might profitably suffer through. So, these books gave me pleasure this year: among others, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Hannah Sullivan’s Was It for This, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. I learned a lot from all of them, too.

—David S. Wallace, editor at large 

The text that looms largest in my mind this year is Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. The novel first appeared in the U.S. in 2020, but it reentered the public consciousness this fall when the organization Litprom, citing the war in Gaza, canceled an award ceremony for the novel. Over a thousand authors formally rebuked the decision. Meanwhile, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues, abetted by U.S. funds and rhetoric; since October 7, as of this writing, Israel has murdered over 18,200 people in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Minor Detail is a fictional telling of true events—the documented rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert, in the summer of 1949. In the first half of the novel, Shibli imagines the day-to-day activities of the commanding officer in the lead-up to and aftermath of the girl’s capture. In the latter half, Shibli fast-forwards to the near-present, narrating from the perspective of a Palestinian woman who has become fixated on the girl’s story and travels out of the West Bank—with a borrowed ID card that will allow her passage through the intervening military checkpoints—to research the crime. I am especially interested in the rote style of the first act, in which acts of violence bleed together with the mundane. Shibli meticulously describes, for example, the officer’s obsessive daily washing routine, including shortly before the execution of the girl:  

He took the towel, dipped it in the bowl, rubbed it with the bar of soap, and passed it over his face and neck. Then he rinsed it, rubbed it again with the soap, and wiped his chest and arms. He rinsed it, passed the bar of soap over it again, and wiped his armpits. Then he rinsed it, rubbed more soap on it, and wiped his legs, without removing the bandage from his thigh. When he had finished wiping down his entire body, he rinsed the towel once more and hung it where it had been before.

The effect is hypnotic. The style makes even brief distraction feel impossible. I admire Shibli’s refusal to abbreviate action, the patience and fortitude with which she illustrates the minutiae that surround and constitute violence.

—Spencer Quong, business manager

Early this year I was having a really bad kind of January week that I ended abruptly by booking a next-day ticket to Vegas and an Airbnb in a nonplace called Pahrump an hour outside it, which ended up being the most fateful experience that a sequence of “Price: Low to High” algorithms have ever conjured me into. The very existence of this town—really just a sprawl of chain-link fences dividing the desert into homes—seemed to me miraculous, as did the random act of free will that had led to my own presence in it; perhaps it was this combination that gave my time in Pahrump the feel of a fateful transformation. Or maybe I had to go to Pahrump in order to find The Pahrump Report, Lisa Carver’s extraordinary diary of a journey uncannily similar to my own: a woman, just turning up, in the loneliest, loveliest of places—this “bowl of endless time.” There she finds lots of interesting people, and funny situations, and love, and freedom. (I also recommend its sequel, No Land’s Man, her diary of travels in Botswana and France.) Carver’s prose, totally unmannered yet deeply lyrical, reminds me of the Dixie Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces”: you can just hear the blue sky in her voice! Her words are like sun on skin, and wind, too; they sound like aliveness. (You can also read Carver write on strip clubs and cancer on our website.)

I also loved: June-Alison Gibbons’s recently reissued The Pepsi-Cola Addict, a cult novel first published in a tiny run when Gibbons was only sixteen, and eclipsed in strangeness only by her own life story. Her protagonist is a classic good boy gone bad—an eighth grader addicted to Pepsi—whose trials and tribulations make for a surreal coming-of-age story as stylistically sweet, sickening, and sparkly as soda (sorry). “There was an elaborate silence.” Like the best of YA fiction—only better—the novel is a wonderful waterfall of awesome similes, weird adjectives, and exuberant alliteration. It’s also genuinely moving: sad and scary in that senseless, nightmarish way only teenagers can feel. 

And Kate Briggs’s The Long Form, probably the only recent novel I’ve read that I can say reminds me of Virginia Woolf. The Long Form is about a young mother and her newborn, but really it is about discovering and inventing relations: between these two, intimate strangers; between life and literature; between space and sound and color. Briggs writes the baby as a kind of blooming diagram, an emergent perceptual phenomenon; like the mobile above her bed, “she was pointed and gapped, full and empty, twisting and suspended, spacey and closed. She was DOTS. … She was a retreating ebb, now an unfathered but gathering, persistent flow.”

Finally, the melancholic Time Tells: Volume 1, a study of time—romantic timing, in particular—as it is modulated by digital media, music, and the movies. Masha Tupitsyn does media criticism like no one else. The book, so attentive to form, fully invents its own: philosophy in the style of a meandering personal anecdote presented as a documentary film transcribed onto the page. The chapters range from close readings of the time stamps in Zodiac (2007) to an interview with Tupitsyn’s mother about style in the Soviet Union. My favorite is a superedit of YouTube comment nostalgia: “I’m 14 and I love this song. / Im 9 and i love this song. / Im 41 years old… / Funny how time flies…”

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

I traveled through France in the summer of 2023, and the best thing I read there was a classic Nicoise cookbook recommended to me by a lovely chef from a village in the South. It’s called La Cuisine du Comté de Nice by Jacques Médecin, and, the chef warned me, is usually expensive and hard to find. But it’s worth it for the gorgeous photograph of an orange fish on the cover and the anecdotes peppered with local dialect. Médecin’s central fixation is to return the Nicoise salad to its former glory before commercial success. “What crimes have we committed in the name of this pure and fresh salad?” he implores, in my very rough translation. Never mix tuna with anchovies, as tuna was historically too expensive and rarely used. “And never,” he concludes, “include the smallest boiled vegetable nor the least bit of potato.” Instead, focus on fresh tomatoes and their interplay with other raw vegetables. Since returning to the States, I’ve been living vicariously through Meg Bernhard’s Wine, on her year spent making wine in Spain, and Alice Feiring’s sensorial memoir To Fall in Love, Drink This. Feiring pairs each chapter with a wine, and I’m tempted to drink my way Julie and Julia–style through her book. A favorite I’ve had so far is Bénédicte et Stéphane Tissot’s trousseau called Singulier, which Fiering describes as “a charming innocent who went off to the Sorbonne, smoked fiendishly, danced with frenzy, and yet could perform a flawless pirouette.”

—Elinor Hitt, reader

The baby arrived in early January, and I spent more of his first six months of life reading than I expected to. You can read (smallish books, mostly) with a baby asleep on your chest, or while feeding him a bottle, or while you’re jittery and awake after ten cups of coffee in the middle of the night when you need to be sleeping. 

I read Homo Faber by Max Frisch, a fun incest / “age of the crisis of man” novel by my current favorite (by default) Swiss writer. I loved Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko, recommended in an Elif Batuman essay about rethinking the Russian classics, a piece with which I otherwise found myself in pleasurable but fundamental disagreement. I fell completely in love with Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali and became very depressed when I learned it was the only novel he published before his early death. So I read Don’t Look at Me Like That by Diana Athill, in which Ghali is fictionalized as a disagreeable Egyptian student, and was grateful for Athill’s dry wit and perfectly calibrated storytelling. 

In the spring, my friend Christine gave me a long list of Fassbinder movies to watch, which led to our household being taken over by sadistic German melodrama for two months, and to my inhaling Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, which I wished was a thousand pages long. I read A Foreign Woman and The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov and reconfirmed that Dovlatov was definitely the funniest Cold War–era Russian Armenian novelist. I finally overcame my fear of Daša Drndić’s sparsely voweled last name and read her novel Battle Songs, which was so excellent I went out and bought three more of her books, none of which I read. I read The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy and just would not shut up about how great it was. I listened to like five Annie Ernaux audiobooks narrated by Tavia Gilbert and I can’t imagine even the author herself doing a better job of reading her work, though admittedly I do not speak French. 

When my self-directed “parental leave” ended, my reading became far less focused due to a deluge of student work and (ahem) pieces to consider and edit. These jostled for time with the harrowing one-two literary true-crime punch of A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell and This House of Grief by Helen Garner. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel was the perfect book for a subdivided brain—a lovingly curated smorgasbord of Melville arcana lightly masquerading as a pandemic novel. Grete Weil’s story collection Aftershocks felt like ideal autumn reading: sharp, short narratives of characters who avoided or survived the Nazi death camps but left parts of themselves behind in the carnage. In recent days, I’ve been reading the newish translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, since a couple of (very literate!) friends asked whether we named our son after him. We didn’t, and I am in no danger of finishing it before his first birthday. 

—Andrew Martin, editor at large

On a recent trip to Berlin, I visited Colorama, a small, community-focused publishing house and Risograph printing studio producing some of the most beautiful and exciting comics in the world, including my favorite book I read this year: Nino Bulling’s Firebugs, an unusually nuanced story of transition delivered in quietly incandescent dialogue and striking visuals—all black and white, with red borders and text, printed on both glossy and matte paper. At the storefront-slash-workshop, I discovered a number of other treasures, such as Melek Zertal’s Fragile, Max Baitinger’s Jazz Night, and an excellent perpetual calendar featuring work by twelve different artists, which I look forward to using, well, in perpetuity. A few days before that, I’d stopped by Hopscotch Reading Room (whose Instagram is worth following wherever you are in the world), where I spent several trancelike hours eavesdropping on other patrons seeking books and comrades. As the owner, Siddhartha Lokanandi, paced the store on a protracted phone call with a publishing house, trying to replenish his stock of Edward Said, I pored over several stacks of the recommendations he’d pulled for me, conjuring them from here, there, and everywhere as if by magic: a manifesto by the French anarchist collective Tiqqun; a Russian lesbian monster novel of the early twentieth century; poetry by the Moroccan communist Saïda Menebhi, who died in prison at twenty-five; and rollicking comics by Elsa Klée, Mikkel Sommer, and Mazen Kerbaj. Other comics I read and loved this year were Bishakh Som’s speculative short stories in Apsara Engine, and her funny, delicately drawn memoir-of-sorts, Spellbound; Joe Kessler’s kaleidoscopic Windowpane and The Gull Yettin; the undersung manga artist Nazuna Saito’s Offshore Lightning, translated by Alexa Frank; and Dirty Thirty, an anthology of selections from the past three decades of the very fun Slovenian comics magazine Stripburger. 

On the prose fiction side of things, James Frankie Thomas’s Idlewild—a post-9/11 tale of refracted queer and trans longing, teenage drama club rivalry, and ill-considered fanfiction projects hosted on LiveJournal—might have been the first novel to keep me up all night since high school. I was delighted, too, by Hannah Levene’s Greasepaint (forthcoming from Nightboat in February), a joyously eccentric portrait of a community of lesbian musicians in fifties NYC, often told in long stretches of quickfire conversation. And working on our new Art of Fiction interview with the Chinese writer Yu Hua introduced me to his sly, piquant storytelling, from the early Kafka-inflected stories of The Past and the Punishments (translated by Andrew F. Jones) to his most famous novel, To Live (translated by Michael Berry), in which a wealthy ruffian of the sort who remorselessly beats his pregnant wife and impels servants and prostitutes to piggyback him around town gambles away his family fortune and spends the rest of his life repenting. It’s a bleakly funny—and wrenching—saga that spans the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. “Back then we didn’t have tissues, and in the end what I had to do was wrap a towel around one of my hands, wiping my face with it and writing with the other,” Yu Hua tells Berry, his interviewer, of his time working on the book in the nineties. “I think if a writer can’t even move themselves they probably won’t move their readers.” 

—Amanda Gersten, associate editor

For years, Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem beckoned me. In the spring of 2023, I responded. A strange and powerful book, made somehow less strange by reading about the author’s magical relationship with Tituba—one of the first people to be accused during the Salem witch trials. Though she died more than two centuries ago, Condé says Tituba reached her from the beyond to tell her story.

In summer, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor entered my life with Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which I adored. While I loved Tituba’s anticolonial tell-all, I also have a weakness for crisp British understatement, detached third-person, and postimperial drear. Angel was equally great.

They say New York is book country, and I think what they mean is, sometimes a massive ad campaign for a Halloween TV show called Five Nights at Freddy’s reminds you that you’ve never read Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s (the one about the school for child actors), and you go to your local library and get it and gulp it down: a classically Fitzgeraldian, life-affirming cocktail of gentle tragedy and wry humor. 

My winter read is Sigrid Undset’s Olav Audunssøn tetralogy, which I actually haven’t read any of yet, because I just learned, with great excitement, that it exists, and has recently been translated into English by Tiina Nunnally. Undset is best known for her Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which my mom turned me on to some years back, and which, like Olav Audunssøn, follows a single character’s life in medieval Norway. I can’t wait.

—Jane Breakell, development director

I got laid off in the spring, which put me in the mood to resolve some unfinished business. So I finished several collections of which I had only ever read a couple stories. This was a largely fruitless task, but it did give me Lydia Conklin’s brilliant Rainbow Rainbow, which features characters worried they are too old, too young, too out of control, and/or queer but not queer enough. Summer brought several pastel-hued issues of the monthly magazine One Story, including Vauhini Vara’s chilling story “What Next,” a portrait of single motherhood, and Jenn Alandy Trahan’s chatty “The Freak Winds Up Again,” an ode to dirtbagging around Buffalo Wild Wings and baseball diamonds. In the fall, determined to make the most of the lingering warmth, I grew obsessed with both my bike and reading books that fit in my smallest, most bike-friendly bag; Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch, excerpted in our Winter 2022 issue, was a standout in that category. Now, hunkering down for the winter, I’m reading Jean Baudrillard’s America and missing cold snaps in the California desert.

—Izzy Ampil, intern

2023 will go down in my mind as the year I read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. I was lured to it over an afternoon spent watching my friend Simone peal with a gossipy sort of laughter every few minutes as she read it herself. As soon as I picked it up, I felt more in cahoots with Anna Wulf—whose existential disillusionment has turned her away from love, a career as a writer, and the British Communist Party—than I ever have with a fictional character. By the time I put it down, months later, I was both in love with her and utterly convinced by the portraits of heterosexual doom scrawled across her diaries (the components of the eponymous notebook). My recollection of Lessing’s work is still changing—especially now, at what feels like an apex of the new decolonial epoch, her studies of the Western left beneath the long shadow of McCarthyism ring less like a lesson in history than a portent for a recursive future. Anna seems to believe, or seems to want to believe, that political hope, if not romantic companionship, is a solution to the solitude at the bottom of being alive. Maybe the most basic and profound affirmation the author conveys through Anna is that this kind of hope is not incompatible with fiction—that in fact, it is fiction. As Lessing says in her own introduction, the “second theme” of her novel is “unity.” What is unity, I wondered this year, if not recalling the laughter of a friend and knowing at last exactly what had been so funny? 

—Owen Park, reader

Happy Books

From Recent Vases, a portfolio by Francesca DiMattio in issue no. 228.

This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me?

I began to read with these ideas loosely in mind. In the fall, alone in Vermont, I read James Salter’s Light Years. This is a novel about a marriage—about the surfaces of a life and the cracks beneath that surface, the eventual rupture and the aftermath of that break. You have to wonder, a little: how did these two people ruin this beautiful life in a house on a river, filled as it was with bowls of cut flowers, bottles of wine, a pony, a dog? Skating on ponds in winter and Amagansett in the summer. Who would actually wreck such a thing and why? But then I remembered, surprisingly close to the end of the novel, that my own parents had ruined just such a happiness in just such a way, perhaps more dramatically, but not so differently; I had a childhood filled with cut flowers too. This is a tragic book, but it also manages to narrativize something about happiness, about how it is always a dance between the surface and the subterranean. This dance is obscure, even to its participants. We cannot know other people or their happinesses and we cannot quite understand even our own.

I also read, this fall, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. This is a novel about two married couples, and I was interested especially in one of them. This couple is not very different from the couple in Light Years: they too have a beautiful and aesthetically oriented life characterized by a certain kind of abundance. There is also a woman whose power comes from her slight withholding, and a man who struggles against this, sometimes to the point of misery. And yet this novel is essentially comic. That is where Colwin points us in much of her work, toward that glass-half-full view of human relations and how they might be navigated; even when the actual situations might seem miserable (untenable affairs, as in Another Marvelous Thing), she takes a view of them that might be described as both clear-eyed and full of light. In Happy All the Time, happiness works its way into the narrative mostly through the characters’ acceptance of its limits, and their realizations that the fact of it is a grace. When the four characters sit down with four glasses of wine and toast “to a truly wonderful life,” I thought, Yes, there it is. I am always insisting on toasts, and remarks, on the mysterious power that lies in repeating over and over how lucky we are, really, to be in the company of those we love.

So it does exist, she thinks, happiness.

So it does exist, he thinks, happiness.

These lines appear in the middle of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos, which I also read this year. It is a marvelous novel, but decidedly not one about happiness, or not one that appears to be; it probes instead the profound depths of misery we sometimes endure in the name of what we call love. There it was, though, the word happiness, coming up again and again, maybe because I was looking for it. The tortured couple discovers over and over that they are happy. They’re wrong, I thought, reading those lines, but then are they really, and who was I to say? How many times have I been wrong too? I used to lie in bed in certain moods and listen to a YouTube recording of James Merrill reading his poem “Days of 1964,” and these lines always made my breath catch:

I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights
Even of degradation, as I for one
Seemed, those days, to be always climbing
Into a world of wild
Flowers, feasting, tears­­—or was I falling, legs
Buckling, heights, depths,
Into a pool of each night’s rain?

Who can tell the difference, really, in those moments of total suspension, between the climbing and the falling?

I began to tell people I was working on “my happiness project,” an essay of sorts that was also kind of a reading list, a way of immersing myself in thinking about something I couldn’t stop thinking about anyway. I kept feeling like I was making no progress on this so-called project. (Was I “too happy to write,” or simply too lazy?) I read Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book whose tone is defined by that slightly manic happiness of being young and alive in Paris, having love affairs, getting into scrapes and out of them—the happiness of the carefree or reckless, depending on your point of view. In Lucia Berlin’s short stories, too, and Cookie Mueller’s, which I read to start the year, there is lots of that madcap happiness, which we might more often call pleasure for its association with drugs and dancing. This is the kind of total bliss that can presage the moment when someone burns down the house.

And then there is Penelope Fitzgerald, who came to mind first when I thought hazily about happy books. I mentioned the novel The Blue Flower to someone, when I was talking once again about happiness. I said I have always considered it a sublimely happy book. He said, “But she dies.” My first thought was, well, we all do, but he had a point; death is the place where that particular narrative ends, and prematurely. So I reread those last pages, and I thought that after all, I was right—that at its core this novel articulates something I had been trying to find or say myself, about the possibilities of love, even as it comes to an end one way or another.

I said before that I was “frighteningly” happy, and that word seems telling to me, because the narrative of happiness, if such a thing can be said to exist, is always defined by the possibility of happiness’s end. There is, and we know this now, no happily ever after, no final resolution, though of course that doesn’t stop me from writing to Kristi, every now and again: I just want to know how everything will turn out. We are happy and so we worry—or should I say, I worry. I know there are people who can leave a happiness unexamined, but I am not one of them. In turning our happiness over and over, inside out, we can see all the paths for it, or so we think, though the truth is that we are never exactly right. In Kairos, the young woman says to her mother that she wishes she knew where they would be in a year, and her mother says, “We’re lucky we don’t know.” You might read that ominously—we are lucky because we are blind to the coming disaster—or you might read it, as I did, as a comment on the way unknowability is essential to happiness, which is not stasis, but rather something that is surprising and changeable. That’s what makes it possible, the narrative, the fact that there is no solidity or stability to happiness, and also no end.

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

Mazda Miata

Mazda Miata. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

The most handsome man at my high school was so beautiful that I would have been happy to watch him plunge a clogged toilet. He had a flourishy name that I both can’t and would rather not remember. Gustavo. Gonzalo. Gianni. Goiter. Something. He ended up falling in love with a Mormon girl with a set of eyes so wide that she reminded me of a parakeet I once had. In the hallways, he would watch her with smile after big, moronic smile, crumpling under the hugeness of the luck that hooped and smothered the two of them. We all knew that he was thinking of proposing to her, which meant that he was about to convert to Mormonism, which is a long way of saying that there was nothing that made my blood jump more than thinking about this miracle couple working through a fatiguing bureaucratic process just so they could have sex.

Every day after school, I would pass his car in the parking lot. It was a Maraschino-colored Mazda Miata—a two-door soft-top with a curvy body like a woman’s. For some reason everyone was aware that nineties Miatas were delicate models with a knack for flipping and killing their owners in accidents against even marginally heavier vehicles. My best friend at the time thought this was delicious information. “One wrong sneeze and he’s dead,” she loved saying. Or – selectively stressing any mixture of the following words – “That has to be the stupidest car you could possibly buy.” This crotchety routine was boring before it started, but she made it very hard not to imagine his body getting scraped off the highway by some fabulous road shovel.

That Miata moved me. For as long as I knew him and her, as soon as I got into bed and shut my eyes, I would wonder what they did together in there. My mind held a picture of the Miata parked in front of the bakery in the strip mall by school. She would be in the passenger seat, and he would be visible through the shop window, buying her fruity, fatty prizes like banana cream pie and peach milkshakes and coconut donuts, balancing them on top of one another as he brought them back to go untouched and roast in the sun on the middle console as they drove away. Then, meaningfully, they would stare at each other after he turned onto the main strip. The floor of the car would be disgusting—hoagie wrappers, sugar shed from sour candies, pizza boxes in the back with the sauce and solidified cheese looking like the leftovers of a major surgery—and she, more gorgeous in counterpoint, would speak in a voice smooth and crotch-tightening, invoking her God and his testosterone. He would press a button, and the sky—which would be the exact same color of her jeans—would slide open. Her big eyes would be pointlessly full of tears. They would consider reaching out to grope one another, but in the gel of the dream, soft and void of logic, they would be too scared that in the process they might knock the donut or the whatever over and inspire some insane collision. Before I decided what love was or could be—and, for that matter, heaven and hell and eternal punishment; what it all was going to cost them—I would mash them into a savory pulp against a truck, chewing my cheeks down until I slept.

Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for Bookforum, The Nation, The Washington Post, and NPR, among others.

An Excerpt from our Art of Poetry Interview with Louise Glück

TUCSON, ARIZONA, 1978. PHOTOGRAPH BY LOIS SHELTON, © ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS, COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA POETRY CENTER.

In remembrance of Louise Glück, we wanted to take the special step of sharing the beginning of her Writers at Work interview, conducted by Henri Cole, on the Daily. We hope you’ll read it, along with her poems in our archive and the reflections on her life and work that we published after her death this fall. (And to read the rest of this conversation, subscribe.)

In early March of 2021, Louise Glück visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID, she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years, she rented a house during the winters. She packed pumpernickel bagels, apples, and cheese for our six-hour road trip, and she brought CDs of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian master of the modern chanson. Long ago Glück and her former husband had listened to operas on road trips, but this was her first car trip in many years. She knew the musical works backward and forward, pointing out Maria Callas’s vocal strengths and clapping her hands while singing along with Brel. The magnificent almond orchards of central California had just begun to blossom and gleam beside the rolling highway. At the farmers’ market in Claremont, she bought nasturtiums and two baskets of strawberries while talking openly about her girlhood and how she’d weighed only seventy pounds at the worst moment of her anorexia. “But you love food, like a gourmand, Louise,” I said, and she replied, “All anorexics love food.” The hotel where she was staying seemed dingy, but she did not complain. Sitting on the bed cover, she propped herself up with pillows and responded to the endless emails arriving on her mobile phone.

Some months earlier, Glück had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When the Swedish Academy phoned her quite early in the morning with the marvelous news, she was told that she had twenty-five minutes before the world would know. She immediately called her son, Noah, on the West Coast, and he was joyful after overcoming his panic at hearing the phone ring in the night. Then she called her dearest friend, Kathryn Davis, and her beloved editor, Jonathan Galassi. Reporters quickly appeared on her little dead-end street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon she was exhausted from replying to the journalists’ questions, like “Why do you write so frequently about death?” Because of the lockdown, her Nobel medal was presented in the backyard of her condominium. Gray clouds blocked the sun. A light snow and frost covered the yard. The wind gusted. A small folding table was set up in the grass with an ivory cloth that made the gold medal shimmer. I watched the ceremony from Glück’s back patio, on the second floor. She wore black boots, black slacks, a black blouse, a black leather coat with big shearling lapels, and fingerless gloves. A cameraman asked her several times to pick up her medal, and she obeyed, as the wind blew her freshly cut hair across her face. The Swedish consul general explained that normally Glück would have received her medal from the king of Sweden, but that she was standing in for him. The consulate had sent a large bouquet of white amaryllis, but Glück thought they looked wrong in the austere winter scene, so they were removed from the little table. The ceremony took no longer than five minutes, and she shivered silently until she finally asked if she could go inside to warm up.

From the beginning, Glück cited the influence of Blake, Keats, Yeats, and Eliot—poets whose work “craves a listener.” For her, a poem is like a message in a shell held to an ear, confidentially communicating some universal experience: adolescent struggles, marital love, widowhood, separation, the stasis of middle age, aging, and death. There is a porous barrier between the states of life and death and between body and soul. Her signature style, which includes demotic language and a hypnotic pace of utterance, has captured the attention of generations of poets, as it did mine as a nascent poet of twenty-two. In her oeuvre, the poem of language never eclipses the poem of emotion. Like the great poets she admired, she is absorbed by “time which breeds loss, desire, the world’s beauty.”

The conversations that make up this interview mostly took place during the days of Glück’s visit two years ago, which included a rooftop seminar—with the San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop—and a standing-room-only reading at the Marion Minor Cook Athenaeum, during which she dined with students, an experience that evidently gave her pleasure. She had no desire to undertake a cradle-to-grave interview, but she was happy to converse about her new book, teaching, and craft, and read the version of the interview that I sent her as a work in progress. After her unexpected death on Friday, October 13, 2023, I shared our pages with the Review, since there would be no further conversations.

INTERVIEWER

Am I correct in thinking that you write two kinds of books—one a collection of disparate lyric poems and another that has some of the characteristics of prose, with a narrative thread?

GLÜCK

Yes, and I seem to rotate between the modes. I also think of my books as either operating on a vertical axis, from despair to transcendence, or moving horizontally, with concerns that are more social or communal, the sort of material you might expect to show up in a novel rather than a poem. Averno (2006), for instance, is a book quintessentially on a vertical axis. And A Village Life (2009) is utterly the opposite—with different speakers coming from different times of life, living in some unspecified little seemingly Mediterranean village, though the model was Plainfield, Vermont, where I lived for many years. You make substitutions to keep yourself inventing.

INTERVIEWER

In your books that move from despair to transcendence, does the divine play a role?

GLÜCK

You could say that the divine is usually at the upper region of the vertical-axis books. In the dark lower region is human flailing—without the divine. Because I’m not a religious person, I would not use this word, divine. But I do think that there is the sense, in the upper regions, of having somehow been rescued and, at the bottom, a sense of having been abandoned.

INTERVIEWER

Where did this idea of a book as one whole thing come from?

GLÜCK

I thought about books that way from the beginning. I was writing short poems, but I wanted to build environments. I wanted to suggest an atmosphere as opposed to a subject or agenda, a meditation or quest as opposed to a stance. Of course, in the early books this isn’t obvious, though I gave great thought to the order of the poems and their implicit arc or trajectory. This attitude became more obvious in Ararat (1990). I remember that when I wrote the first poem—with all flat declarative sentences, no figurative language, no images—I thought the only way it could possibly work was as a whole book, meaning that the flat language had to have, behind and around it, a world.

INTERVIEWER

What about Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014)?

GLÜCK

The adventure of Faithful and Virtuous Night, which moves along a horizontal axis, was twofold. First, writing a very, very long poem, which has to do with—I always deplore this as a subject matter—art and the making of art, though the speaker begins as a baby, and I think this gives it a certain kind of originality. The other thing I discovered was the prose poem. I had never understood it as a form until I read Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible, which galvanized me. I thought his were the most amazing prose poems I had read in a long time, which didn’t suggest that I would be able to write them myself. My book was almost done, but it felt leaden, and it needed something else. A close friend said, “Why don’t you read Kafka’s short shorts, which are like prose poems?” I had read Kafka’s short shorts, but I follow advice when it’s given by someone I have high respect for. And when I read them again, I thought, Oh, I don’t think these are that good—I could do this. So I did, and it was so much fun. And then for a while I forgot how to write lines, so that was its own little calamity …

INTERVIEWER

Would you say more about your friends and how they influence your work?

GLÜCK

Most of my books are dedicated to my friends. My friends are the center of my life. They are crucial. I change my life to be sure that I see them. They’re all quite different people. I would be impoverished without them. Recently, I bought a small house in Vermont, where my oldest friends still are. My dearest friend now lives two minutes away. For a very long time, I lived in Cambridge and showed her everything I wrote though she lived elsewhere, but now another form of the friendship has been resumed, and it seems that it was waiting to be resumed at any time when it could be. My friendships with people in different cities seem to be like that. There can be a distance in time and also a geographical distance, but when I see them again, it’s as though no time has passed. I mean, much time has passed, many things have changed, but you resume the conversation about what’s going on in the same way as before. And that is the most extraordinary ongoing fact of my life.

INTERVIEWER

“Winter Recipes from the Collective,” the title poem of your recent book, makes me wonder whether you ever lived in a collective or ashram or commune. Also, did you write the sections of this long poem in the order in which they appear?

GLÜCK

I’ve never lived in a collective or ashram or commune. Plainfield was the closest—severe weather would turn the village into something like a collective, in that there was a great deal of pooling of resources and watching over the needs of others and cooperating to survive the ordeal of the very long winters, scarily less long now. Everything in the poem is made-up—the collective, the moss-collecting and fermenting, the bonsai cultivation, and the Chinese master. The sections were written at long intervals, with other things in between, over probably a few years of not writing much. The first section was definitely first.

INTERVIEWER

Do you write every day? Are your poems written long after lived experience?

GLÜCK

I don’t have a regular writing protocol or schedule. I’ve found that too anxiety-producing, because there were so many days I sat in front of the typewriter and a piece of white paper and wrote nothing. It was an annihilating experience. So I write when I begin to have phrases in my head—I jot them down, and then, after a while, I go to the typewriter.

I don’t think I write through transition periods. What happens to me is that something stops, something ends, something is brought to a closure. Then I have nothing—I’ve used up whatever it is that I had and must wait for the well to fill up again. That’s what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t feel like a sanguine experience of sitting quietly while the well fills up. It seems like an experience of desolation, loss, even a kind of panic. The thing you would wish to be doing, you can’t do. I’ve been through a lot of those periods, and what seems to happen, or what has happened in the past, is that after a year or two, or whatever the duration, another sound emerges—and it really is another sound. It’s another way of thinking about a poem or making a poem, a different kind of speech to use, from the Delphic to the demotic. Suddenly I’ll hear a line—you can’t hear this yourself when I read, because my voice tends to pasteurize everything—suddenly I’ll realize that I’m being sent some sort of message, a new path, and I try it on. That’s how things change for me—it’s never that I work my way through it. I have friends, great poets, who seem to make extraordinary use of a daily ritualized writing practice, but for me that doesn’t work at all.

INTERVIEWER

May I ask about “Song,” the beautiful closing poem in Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021)? Is the “you” in the poem you, Louise?

GLÜCK

No. The “you” changes in this book—sometimes the you is a sister, a friend, a companion, a person who is on the journey with the speaker. The you in “Song” is slightly different from the friend-companion-sister figure—this is you, the reader, or whoever is listening to me. In the dream that was the basis for the poem, I think the you was a good friend of mine. We had been talking about ceramics. I love ceramics.

INTERVIEWER

In your dream, was the ceramist really named Leo Cruz?

GLÜCK

Yes, and I don’t know anyone by that name. I don’t know anyone named Leo, and I don’t know anyone named Cruz, so it was an invention. That’s what I liked about the line. You couldn’t find him. He’s not in the world. I mean, there may be forty-five hundred of them, but this one who makes porcelain in the desert, he’s not there. He’s part of a dream. He stands for the fact that something in the desert is alive.

INTERVIEWER

The imagination?

GLÜCK

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER

What is it about ceramics that you love?

GLÜCK

I like objects that have utility. I like beautiful things that have a use. I’m a very domestic person. I like to cook, so I like table service, which inevitably leads to ceramics of some kind. I also like flower vases and objects that have no use, but mainly it’s the combination of beauty and usefulness. Also, I love old Japanese ceramics. The idea that something valuable is fragile is also attractive to me.

When I first moved to Vermont, in my late twenties, a long time ago, Goddard College was flourishing. I had a one-semester appointment—that’s why I moved there—and it was my first job teaching a poetry workshop. Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there, which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young. A lot of interesting people in that period were making remarkable ceramic art, and there was a great teacher, so I would hang out at the pottery studio, and I learned how to use the wheel—not expertly, but I loved sitting at the wheel and feeling the clay. I loved the way you would hold your hands steady and a shape would form. I especially loved doing raku. Do you know what raku is?

INTERVIEWER

Does it have a crackly glaze?

GLÜCK

You use a certain kind of glazing that’s more porous than normal glazes. When you pull the pot out of the kiln, you might throw it outside onto something that will affect the way the glaze plays on and imprints the object. There is a feeling of randomness. It was so exciting to pull this hot thing out of the kiln and walk outside and throw it into the snow. Then you’d have to find it. Sometimes they were horrible-looking—little gaseous-looking lumps. But it was always fun, and sometimes they were quite beautiful. I mean other people’s were quite beautiful—mine were rarely beautiful. I did keep one somewhere, or I tried to keep one.

INTERVIEWER

Do you prefer to write from your dreams and unconscious, as you do in “Song,” or to make things up? How do you choose?

GLÜCK

It’s not choose. Something presents itself and you have an instinct for what you can use, the way a bird building a nest knows, Oh, I need a little piece of red ribbon there, and then goes out searching for red ribbon, or the bird might not know that but see the red ribbon and think, Hmm, that has my name on it. You use what you come across, and you come across your dreams with regularity. I don’t sit at my desk and think, Now I will use something from my recent dream. It’s more like I wake up with a line and I write it down and I look at it, and it’s mysterious because the dream is mysterious—I don’t know what it means. Then I invent a context for it. Or I fail.

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Angels

Santa Maria Maggiore, Alberto Pisa, 1905. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In Rome in June the heat is liquid, a flood. It is the worst drought in seventy years. The heat rises from the paving stones. In Monti, a few streets from the Colosseum, the air shimmers in the Piazza degli Zingari and up the Via del Boschetto. From there, the Via Panisperna dips down toward the Piazza Venezia, which by the mid-morning has turned into a cauldron. By noon the water-sellers are sold out. In the Val d’Orcia, the obsidian and alabaster hills are now a dismal shade of yellow and my friend Katia opens the door overlooking the valley and prays for rain.

By July it is impossible to go out except in the early morning or in the evening. There are no fans for sale at the shop near the Madonna dei Monti where an old couple, a man and a woman, sit outside on camp stools; the place where I bought what I thought was an iron and when I came back to the flat with its tiny balcony and unpacked it, it turned out to be an electric carving knife. It is too hot even to sit by the fountain until late in the afternoon when an awning of shade creaks over the piazza, but inside the churches it is cool. Drawing a circle around the piazza, there are six churches within seven hundred feet of the fountain: the Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli, in which the chains that bound Saint Peter are held in a reliquary; the basilicas dedicated to the martyred sisters Pudenziana and Prassede, which house the bones of three thousand martyrs and a portion of the pillar on which Christ was flogged; the church of Santa Maria dei Monti, on the site of a fourteenth century convent; the church of San Silvestro e Martino, on the Via Cavour which in the summer is lined by white magnolias, their waxy blossoms hidden in the burnt-edged leaves. In Rome, we learn, there is a phone app on which to find Masses at the nine-hundred odd churches throughout the city, called Ding, Dang, Dong, after the lyrics of the song about slumbering Giocomo—”Frere Jacques”—which appear as a web full of stars.

The sixth and by far the largest church, Santa Maria Maggiore, looms like a mother spider over the smaller churches and basilicas, pulling up the threads of the strade from the Via Cavour, towering over the magnolias, the reliquaries, the bakery with a scale model of the Colosseum in bread in the window, the Chinese markets piled high with espadrilles on the Esquiline Hill, which never seem to have any customers, the tourists fanning themselves by the barely liquid fountain, the man at the kiosk by San Pietro in Vincoli who has directed every passerby to his brother’s restaurant, Trattoria di Roma, near the cash machine by the Cavour station, for thirty years. Pasta! he says, Coca-Cola! Rome is a game of cat’s cradle. In Monti, an early morning walk is a pulled string drawn up towards the huge basilica, whose enormous facade looks more like a courthouse or a bank than a church. The piazza which folds down from the steps like a baby’s bib is white hot at 9 A.M. All the doors are closed, or are they? No. A white tent is set up at the south entrance, which is reached by following a line of metal fencing, permanently askew. Santa Maria Maggiore is part of the Holy See; to enter is to go from one country, Italy, to another, an embassy of the Vatican. Two young men wearing army uniforms are drinking coffee, their feet on the desk, machine guns on the folding chair beside them. They wave a visitor through.

In the mosaic in the apse by Jacopo Torriti, Mary in her blue robes sits next to Christ, floating over a moon the size of a thumbprint. The girls who come in from the street with bare shoulders are given blue paper shawls by the guards, so that they wander around the Basilica looking like madonnas who have been culled from the mosaics, or left to make up their own stories as they go along, as, in any case, we all do. In 352, during the Pontificate of Liberius, when a Roman nobleman, John, and his wife, a childless couple, decided to dedicate their fortune to the church they asked for a sign of what to do: it snowed in August on the Esquiline Hill, and the drifts outlined what would become the perimeters of Santa Maria Maggiore, sometimes, then as now called Santa Maria della Neve, Saint Mary of the Snow, a Pointillist panel written on the fine silk of the past, drawn through the eye of a needle. Every August, white rose petals float down through the nave to commemorate the groundbreaking.

What to do? The church is cool after the hot tar of the street, the blue clad girls drift under the gold coffered ceiling and down Bernini’s spiral stair. To the left of the entrance is the Cappella Sforza, the last work of Michelangelo, who, at eighty-seven, supervised every detail, day by day. An elliptical space framed by a columns, open only for silence and prayer. Inside the grille, three or four people, scattered in the pews, heads down. It is like being inside an egg, or a sea urchin. Years ago on an island off Maine, the beach was strewn with sea urchins, each one a pale green basilica striped white with salt, and in an old bottle washed up by the tide the children found a message: I will be gone when this you find. A moment that passed, like a melody, into story, as when the angel came to Mary and said, Yes: You.

Alighting on the pediments over the high recessed doors are four languorous angels, two on each side, who look as if they have touched down for a picnic; one has a pipe in his hands, another can’t be bothered to do anything but purse his mouth to whistle. They take no notice of the penitents below, as if for them we barely exist, ghosts of ghosts, replaced one after another as they watch, century after century, at every moment they look as if they are about to take off through the tent of the roof. Each time I went into the chapel on those very hot days, I thought: They will be gone. But there they were, gamboling, whistling.

I wanted to walk as I usually do in Rome, circling down from the Gianicolo up to the Villa Ada and back, and I was angry at the heat, which prevented me from walking until the evening, and at being in Rome again without you, as if Rome for me would always be a city where you were not. Months ago, at the beginning of the year, we went to the very end of the Cape and looked for shells in the bracken. I said, Next time I drive down this road my father will be dead. And in the evenings at the hotel, we watched hours of a film that led to only one thing: an ending, a concert on a roof, where a band of troubadours alit for a moment before they left the earth, the tunes from the amplifier eddying down into the street, where at lunchtime the office workers looked up and saw something amazing: as if love like everything else has only one way to go, the atoms rising up and dispersing. Oh, we want to say, come back, come back to where you once belonged. And then I see that I have it confused, I barely know to whom I am speaking, or whom it is I have missed so desperately, nor why I think I will find it here, in Rome, waiting for August when the white rose petals will float down through the nave of Santa Maria Maggiore, wondering what are they waiting for, these angels, or if it is absence I crave, making a home far from home, among the silver threads of the basilicas, built on their abacus of bones.

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent book is In Italy: Venice, Rome and Beyond, from which this essay is adapted. A novel, Inverno, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January, and Next Day: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf this summer. A long-time contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale.

Martin Scorsese’s Family Pictures

Ernest Burkhart and his wife, Mollie, née Kyle. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In spring 2021, a photo still from Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon went viral. The image features the film’s protagonists, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), seated at a table, having just finished a meal. The table is Mollie’s table, in her home, in Osage County, Oklahoma. The larger setting is one of the most insidious criminal conspiracies in American history, a period known as the Osage Reign of Terror, wherein the white cattle rancher William King Hale colluded with associates, including Ernest, his nephew, to steal Osage oil fortunes. Sometimes this scheme involved white men marrying into Osage families and then sometimes murdering their new lovers. In the photograph, Mollie gazes over at Ernest, who’s looking up at the ceiling. In the frame, she is a Mona Lisa in semi-profile, a muse of multitudinous moods. What is that inscrutable expression on her face? Is she being coy? Flirtatious? Is that an inquisitive look? Or one of bemusement? Is she laughing at her beau, or at her predicament—the condition of falling in love with a racist doofus she knows is mainly interested in her money? (Oof.) The still became a meme when the New York Post tweeted that DiCaprio was “unrecognizable” in character; the replies underlined the actor’s utter recognizability. This still, an object of public fascination more than two years before the film’s general release, became a meme as social media users poked fun at the Post, but the meme cycle also enabled viewers to meditate on the interpersonal dynamics in the photo, dynamics they would be unable to view in context. The image is a distillation of the film’s central mysteries, and reading it is training for assessing the big questions at the heart of the movie: What does she see when she looks at him? What should we see when we look at them?

It’s fitting that a photograph was the film’s first offering, because Scorsese is always calling attention to the photograph as a marvel, and as an object, in his work. The director’s signature credit line— “A Martin Scorsese Picture”—is delightfully archaic. The phrase is redolent of the studio system, painted sets, and actors in redface. This is a picture that is partly about making pictures, and the tensions therein. Within the film’s first moments, the audience witnesses a succession of murders of Osage citizens. The deceased are posed with piety, stretched out on their beds, decked out in their best, arms crossed against their chests; this sequence, and some other shots interspersed throughout the film, recall James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead, which features the legendary portraitist’s stately photographs of funeral pageantry. And then there are the more direct references to image-making, mostly in montages of vernacular photography: souvenir photos at rodeos; roustabouts posing before a cameraman; wedding portraits; home video–style clips; newsreels of major events, including of , of members of the Osage Nation traveling to Washington, D.C., to talk with President Coolidge about the murders, and of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which that city’s white citizens killed numerous black residents and destroyed a thriving black commercial district. There are gorgeous studio portraits of Osage folks—who, the film tells us, call the moon “Mother”—sitting inside a paper moon, rendering that kitschy, sentimental photo format with cosmological poetry. As members of the Osage Nation line up to receive royalties from their oil allotments, a photographer advertises his services by using an emotional appeal: “Thirty-dollar photo for posterity. Don’t you want to preserve your family history?”

Of course, given the white residents’ attempts at exterminating the Osage, that last line is a bleak joke. In Killers, there’s a stark boundary between preservation and exploitation, one as distinct as that which demarcates the Osage reservation and off-rez areas. We’re constantly seeing people take in images, or participate in the making of their own: we see them looking, or being looked at, which adds another touch of paranoia to a film about a sprawling criminal conspiracy. But these metatextual scenes also underscore the limits of photography, and the fact that, in spite of photographic evidence, the brutality continues; as the end of the movie confirms, making art is no absolution. The film’s picture-taking brings to mind the ethnological work of someone like Edward S. Curtis, whose twenty-volume photographic study The North American Indian, comprising documentation of dozens of Indigenous nations, was initially funded by J. P. Morgan. Curtis’s work, rife with what the Diné artist and photographer Will Wilson calls “lacquered romanticism,” imprinted Indigenous images as hopelessly archival; in Curtis’s work they are a “vanishing people” tragically consigned to the past.

Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s most demanding epic of American grotesquerie, gestures toward this anxiety about the future. The film opens with an Osage child witnessing a ritual that the elders rightly worry will die out, and closes with a scene that serves as something like a contemporary bookmark to the opening, underscoring survival amid torturous conditions. Parts of this film can be grueling to watch, and it’s my sense that not all of the murders needed to be presented as graphically as they are. But the movie is also, at times, breathtakingly beautiful. The violence contrasts with the delicacy and intricacy of some of its themes. Maybe the killing is just Marty being Marty; after all, his oeuvre is filled with some of cinema’s most indelible sequences of violence, much of it slapstick, some of it deadly serious. Or maybe the occasionally grisly depictions are in service of twenty-first-century expectations of unambiguous moral transparency: seeing is believing, and here, it’s hard to see the cruelty done to Indigenous people and come away with any sense of moral equivocation on the part of the filmmakers.

The pictures in Killers also recall instances of photography in other Scorsese films. In Raging Bull, the ringside paparazzi take pictures almost at the same rate that Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes) pummels Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro), who is nearly blinded by jabs and flashes. In Goodfellas there are the offscreen mugshots of legally embroiled mobsters, and, early in the film, the freeze-frames of the criminal brotherhood gathered outside of the courthouse after a teenage Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) beats his first case—the moment characterized by the jubilance of a fraternity’s yearbook page. There are also the photojournalistic snapshots in Goodfellas, bound for some federal dossier; the security camera footage in Casino; the slideshows and corkboard surveillance webs in the precinct scenes of The Departed; the goofy wedding VHS tape in The Wolf of Wall Street. These meta-meditations on image-making, in films about sin and redemption, seem to speak to Scorsese’s philosophy of cinema as a quasi-religious, collective experience. In a 2000 New Yorker profile, he explained, “I believe there is a spirituality in films, even if it’s not one which can supplant faith. … It’s as if movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious.” The director’s films are therefore partly about the act of capturing that shared memory, of making the act of noticing legible for viewers. They’re prompts, prodding his audience to remember that which is forgotten.

The Reign of Terror would have been one such event in danger of disappearing from historical memory—outside of Osage communities—if not for this movie’s source material, David Grann’s best-selling 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon. His book includes a collection of photos of the Osage Nation, some of which Scorsese has reproduced in the film. There’s one such photo, of Mollie and Ernest Burkhart, in which the couple are situated in front of some kind of blank backdrop. Mollie’s seated, and Ernest stands behind her. Neither smile. The picture suggests a shared reality amid conflicting reports about the couple’s romance and, given Ernest’s actions—including conspiring to kill his in-laws—whether any love ever existed between them. The juxtaposition of the couple’s garments in the photo gets at the culture clash: he wears what appears to be a suit, black jacket, white shirt, and dark bow tie. She has a shawl draped over her shoulder, and her shirt is stunning—it appears that the blouse is embroidered with tiny quilts. Look closer, and the quilts, with their fraying edges, also resemble windows. If the focal point of this picture is the relation between this woman and this man, the tenuous imbrication between this Indigenous woman and her white grifter husband, then the punctum is the ambiguity of the symbol on her shirt, at least to outside eyes. Killers of the Flower Moon retains the ambivalence of this photo. The film addresses the quandary of the Burkharts’ love by matching the energy in the couple’s body language. It treats this romance with a lack of narrative certainty. It shrugs.

***

There is so much opacity in an antique portrait. Try looking at one taken before 1930, and you’ll see what I mean. There’s a respectability that impinges on the imagination of the contemporary viewer, who may struggle to enter the coldness of the photo studio, with its elegant props and formal poses. My great-grandparents’ wedding portrait, which anchors many family mantelpieces, is such an exhibit. It reminds me of the Burkharts’ photo, and was probably taken just a few years after theirs. In it, my great-grandmother sits in a grand chair. She wears the customary white garments: lacy dress, flapper hat, bone-colored stockings and gloves. She holds a pretty bouquet of flowers, and stares shyly, perhaps even mournfully, at the camera. Beside and slightly behind her, my great-grandfather is the picture of restraint, stiff in his three-piece suit. The stilted affection in this portrait invites questions about the nature of their love story. Of course, they could have been asked to pose this way, but knowing what I do about their relationship, this wedding photo foreshadows a complicated, stressful marriage: my great-grandfather’s severity and hostility on paydays, my great-grandmother’s self-sacrificing generosity. But still, there’s a scrim between them and me, a filter of nearly a hundred years—and a century’s worth of shifting social norms—separating us. I can access only so much.

This portrait is, as Tina Campt might call it, “quiet.” The frequencies of so many photos taken now are so loud: poses predetermined for popular appeal; performativity that seems more apt for an ad; overwrought captions that mimic the emotional maximalism of radio hits adapted for pharmaceutical commercials.

Italianamerican, Scorsese’s 1974 documentary, is suffused with portraiture of his parents’ wedding, childhood pictures of him and his brother, photos of his deceased grandparents. In interview segments that are interspersed with Italian mandolin music, Scorsese’s folks banter like sitcom in-laws, alternating between quips that would be at home in The Honeymooners and more straightforward admissions of affection. Nearly all of the director’s movies are essentially family portraits: of street toughs (Mean Streets); of the Band, and their extended fam, celebrating them one last time (The Last Waltz); of an inchoate criminal brotherhood (Gangs of New York); of Wall Street bros (The Wolf of Wall Street); of associates, plucked from wherever “back home” is, setting down new roots elsewhere (Casino, Silence). The sustainability of love in families is a consistent plot point of Scorsese’s films: the way it can be tested and threatened and strengthened by personal growth.

Were Mollie and Edward Burkhart in love? The question is at the core of the discourse surrounding Killers, and it grips me, too, along with that of the film’s potentially gratuitous violence. The concerns seem related somehow, in that they are about Scorsese’s negotiation of text and subtext, what needs to be explicitly surfaced and what can remain more finely drawn. At the film’s Los Angeles premiere, Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant for Killers of the Flower Moon, said, “When somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love.” It seems impossible for someone to claim to love someone they are actively abusing. But it happens all the time. Scorsese has been mum about his own opinion on the couple, pointing instead to statements from members of the Osage Nation, including the Burkharts’ granddaughter Margie, who he says told him, “Don’t forget it isn’t as simple as villains and victims. You have to remember Mollie and Ernest were in love.” Assessing the truth of love from a century away is kind of like parsing the very nature of love itself. Often this discourse becomes a way of reclaiming or reassessing a subject, rescuing them from harm—a long-distance, anachronistic wellness check for a victim of abuse. Using twenty-first-century terms to describe choices made in a vastly different context can feel like the anthropomorphism applied to animals in a cheesy nature documentary. The inquiry becomes a way of reestablishing the framing of an otherwise slippery, unwieldy thought experiment, a problematic for contemporary viewers to project onto old images, like slapping a funny tagline or pop culture reference on a viral picture.

Getting married, just like taking a photograph, is often a way of trying to capture some ineffable feeling, to preserve it for posterity. Representations of romance are sometimes thin, or insubstantial, like a list of reasons an incompatible couple has drafted for staying together.A love story can be as rote a format as cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians (in Killers, Scorsese troubles the latter genre, and spoofs the former). Sometimes love is a kind of death drive, Romeo and Juliet–style. In The Harlem Book of the Dead, Van Der Zee reveals that one of his subjects, a young woman photographed in her coffin, was “shot by her sweetheart at a party with a noiseless gun.” “Love” is sometimes a euphemism we use for exploitation. (Does the parasite “love” the host?) “Love” is sometimes what we say to rush along the aphasia for emotions we can’t name, a vocabulary of confounding sentiments summed up in the trite reflections on a Valentine’s Day card. Sometimes “love” is the void at the heart of a relationship. There are sometimes several modes of connection between couples—convenience, children, money, sex, ambition, codependency, for example—and love never enters the picture. It occurs to me that this might be true of Scorsese’s picture as well. Perhaps love misses the point entirely. A different word altogether—care—punctuates several of the film’s most memorable moments:

Ernest, curious about Mollie’s living arrangements, asks her, “You live in this house just with your mother?” She replies, “I take care for her.”

One of two doctors King Hale assigned to poison Mollie says to Ernest, “Bill Hale has entrusted us with this care.”

After lashing out at Mollie for being suspicious of the doctors, Ernest tells his wife, “I am to take care of you. No one, no one, is gonna hurt you when I’m in front.”

Ernest asks his uncle why he takes care of Henry Roan, an Osage man who is laid out in front of Hale’s fireplace. Hale explains that Roan is a “melancholic” who’d tried to commit suicide before, and then elaborates: “I take care of that man because he’s my neighbor and he’s my best friend. That’s twenty-five thousand dollars laying there. I got an insurance policy on him; it’s against what he owes me, so if he succeeds in demising himself before the end of the year, I forfeit. So he needs to stay alive at least a few more months. I might even get a chance at his headrights.”

Rita, one of the Kyle sisters, asks her sibling, “How are you being taken care of, Mollie?” Mollie replies, “Ernest takes care of me, best he can.”

A baby sick with whooping cough “needs care.”

Ernest, trying to shake off an FBI agent at his door, says, of Mollie, “She’s resting right now and I’m caring for her.”

Shifting one’s gaze from love to care gives way to a much more nuanced consideration: of the way U.S. institutions actively counteracted the Osage’s ability to be stewards of their own nation, and of the land they were forced to flee; of the ways in which whites colluded with the courts to serve as guardians, or caretakers, of the Osage oil rights; of the dereliction of care from doctors and lawmen and other professionals; of Ernest’s malevolent caretaking, which involves poisoning his wife. The film is ultimately about whom, and what, exactly, viewers are encouraged to care about, or focus their attention on. Love is a noiseless gun, a subtle syringe. Care is something entirely different, and is less likely to be confused with malfeasance. Love is subjective, while care can be judged more objectively. All too often, inquiries into love are simple, but questions of care are a lot more complex.

Killers of the Flower Moon lies at the nexus of these two concepts. Love is this film’s focal point, but care is its punctum. In the context of Scorsese’s oeuvre, Killers is another mantelpiece portrait, a framed portal to another world, a way of contributing to common memory. Each of the nearly 297,000 frames in this 206-minute film is an instance in a dynamic sequence of events, a sequence moving literally too fast for us to perceive any single image. Impressions are possible only after some time has passed. In a speech for Variety’s Power of Women gala, Lily Gladstone spoke about the Burkharts’ relationship. “This complicated ‘love,’ this unhealthy ‘love,’ “ she said, “serves as an analogy for the ongoing treatment of Native peoples worldwide, particularly those of us who are resource-rich.” Ernest and Mollie’s wedding shot might be a form of delegation photography, that genre common in history textbooks, which portrays Indigenous nations engaged in diplomatic relations with white settlers. What is a marriage license if not the most common treaty between people?

 

Niela Orr is a critic and a story editor for the New York Times Magazine.

In the Spin Room: At the Republican Debate

Photograph by Antonia Hitchens.

Last night, the fourth Republican debate took place in Alabama; Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis took the stage. Immediately thereafter, news outlets started publishing “takeaways” and declaring winners. (Notably absent was the frontrunner in the polls, Donald Trump.) We were curious, in the lead-up to this debate, about what goes on behind the scenes of this staged media event, so we asked Antonia Hitchens, who’s been reporting on the presidential campaign, to write a dispatch from the “spin room,” where she spent one of the previous debates, in September, in Simi Valley. 

I drove from my apartment in LA to Simi Valley to attend the second Republican presidential debate, and when I arrived, at 1 P.M., the media lot was already so full that I had to park on grass, like at a music festival. Three women from a national newspaper got out of the rental car next to me, carrying their blazers over their arms to put on later, talking about trying the twenty-dollar smoothie at Erewhon while they were in town. I waited in line to board a bus that brought us to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a mission-style building on a mountaintop, overlooking the valley below. I followed streams of people from the bus into a huge white tent, like at a wedding, for journalists to file their stories.

Inside, dozens of long tables were draped in navy tablecloths and littered with advertisements for Reagan’s Bar and Bistro, which was serving made-to-order food from 7 A.M. to 10 P.M., during filing time. The Reagan Library has a partial replica of the White House Rose Garden and a full-scale replica of Reagan’s Oval Office and the Situation Room; the media “filing zone” had been set up on the “White House South Lawn.” Also scattered on the property are an F-117 Nighthawk, an F-14, and an Abrams tank. Fox News, the event’s host, hung its Fox Business “Democracy 2024” banner opposite a banner advertising the Southern California showing of a traveling exhibit called Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. I walked past it to the museum gift shop, where the Ventura County bomb squad browsed together in a small group, looking at “Commander in Chief” desk decals.

As a non–TV anchor, the only place I could go outside of the filing center was the spin room, the place for each candidate and their team to come out after the evening’s debate and say that they won. Per William Safire, the term “spin doctor” was first used in 1984. Regarding that October’s Reagan-Mondale at the Kansas City Music Hall, the New York Times wrote: “Tonight at about 9:30, seconds after the Reagan-Mondale debate ends, a bazaar will suddenly materialize in the press room of the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium. A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won’t be just press agents trying to impart a favorable spin to a routine release. They’ll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates, and they’ll be playing for very high stakes. How well they do their work could be as important as how well the candidates do theirs.” A witness to the same debate described what ensued after each candidate left his podium: “It was very intense. I just remember these clumps, masses of reporters around each clump.” Phalanxes. Twenty years later, in 2004, the Times reporter Adam Nagourney deemed spin rooms “degrading” and encouraged his colleagues in the press to stay away. I wanted to see the 2024 iteration of spin rooms, particularly since Trump, the Republican front-runner, is so far ahead he doesn’t even bother coming to the debates or coming out afterwards to declare he won.

Pre-debate, there was nothing to spin, just a few rows of chairs under fluorescent light, where some people were sitting and starting to write their stories. A rope delineated the main floor from the part of the room where each network had its cameras set up. Around 4 P.M., a crowd started to gather around the rope. Someone had walked onto the Univision broadcasting platform to get miked up. I wondered if everyone was flocking over to the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum (1 percent in the polls at the time; has since dropped out) like he was a celebrity because any candidate sighting gave them a sense of urgency. It turned out to be the governor of California, Gavin Newsom; their hair looked similar from behind.

“He’s devastatingly good-looking, come get a look,” one reporter said to the gathering crowd as Newsom settled in for his TV spot.

When Newsom turned to the press gaggle, one guy dragged over a crate to stand on, holding out his iPhone to record what Newsom—whose voice barely rose above a whisper—was saying. A TV reporter waded around the periphery of the scrum, wearing a cord that attached him to his cameraman like a leash. The teenage event volunteers in Reagan Library T-shirts stood to the side, monitoring the group.

With three hours still to go before start time, sick of looking at my screens, I sat on the patio of Gipper’s Bar and Bistro next to two VIP debate guests—the official audience members vetted to sit watching live in the arena, like the studio audience at a sitcom taping—bored of mingling in their VIP area. One was Irish and one was from LA. They’d been invited because they worked at Rumble, an online video sharing platform that was streaming the debate. “They give us drinks and heavy hors d’oeuvres. It’s just nice to see something live. It’s a show,” one of them said.

From the scenic overlook of Gipper’s patio, I watched reporters take sunset photos using varying degrees of professional gear. As the light went down over the mountains, we could see the fleets of Escalades and police cars and trailers in which the candidates were being kept. Each candidate had a Star Waggon trailer, like on a movie set. Once they were escorted into the Air Force One arena to begin the actual two-hour debate performance, their campaign staffers wafted around their bosses’ trailers, mingling.

Watching the debate from the filing center isn’t that different from watching it at a bar, except that you can be observed writing or tweeting by hundreds of peers. I tried to avoid looking over people’s shoulders. Two rows ahead of me, in the spin room, I saw a woman write and then delete a lede mentioning Woody Allen.

During the last twentyish minutes of the debate, bodyguards in sunglasses and polo shirts made a human wall as people started to linger at the rope between the floor of the spin room and the network stand-up area, waiting for the candidates and campaigns and surrogates to emerge.

A group of Mike Pence (former Trump VP; has since dropped out) campaign staffers walked out briskly pushing a baby in a stroller and nobody really paid attention; it was hard to tell whether the baby was a Pence grandchild or a talking point or just the baby of one of the staffers who’d come to the debate with Pence. They never got the story out, because Sean Hannity walked by the rope next. It was like when a Broadway star comes out on the sidewalk to sign programs.

A reporter from a podcast shoved his microphone in Hannity’s face. “Why do you have a CIA pin on?”

Hannity looked down at his lapel. “I wear a lot of pins.”

A reporter from a military news website: “Do you always wear an FBI pin?”

The other campaigns were pouring out into the spin room in delegations, holding up narrow red signs with their candidate’s name on them to indicate they could be interviewed about that candidate.

A reporter fought to get to a woman holding a DeSantis sign: “How did he do?”

“He did great.”

The woman from the military news website reached out across the rope to a delegate holding a Vivek Ramaswamy sign.

“Do you remember me?” the reporter asked.

“Sort of, yes?” the Ramaswamy delegate responded, trying to read the reporter’s name on her badge. “I was with Dr. Oz last year,” she went on, referring to last year’s midterm elections, when the TV doctor Dr. Mehmet Oz ran for Senate in Pennsylvania.

“How are you liking this?” the reporter asked.

“I really like my candidate,” the delegate said.

After the sign holders did their red-carpet walk, they let themselves loose into the room on the other side of the rope to be chased around by reporters, roving around in packs and sometimes colliding with one another.

The only candidate other than Vivek Ramaswamy to cross the rope was Burgum, the still unknown North Dakota governor. He’d torn his Achilles playing basketball before the first debate in August and was still perched gingerly on a kneeling scooter. Onstage, he stood on two feet at the podium, but in the spin room it would be easy for him to be knocked flat or jostled. Per the logistics leaflet we were given beforehand: “As room traffic picks up following the debate in the Spin Room, we ask you to move with care and caution for candidate safety and security, and your own.”

A Pence campaign staffer stood a few paces away, pushing the stroller of the unidentified baby back and forth with one hand.

Newsom walked in eager to please, commenting on Taylor Swift and the football player she might have just started dating. “That’s the real debate!” he said to the crowd.

Meanwhile, the debate audience had been ushered into a sedate outdoor after-party, the one that the guys from Rumble thought would have heavy hors d’oeuvres. I wandered into the courtyard where it was being held, under the same kind of white wedding tent as the filing zone’s. Attendees had to keep on their badges that said “audience” just like we had to wear badges that said “press.” They had an open bar and a flaming ice cream station and a stand to buy Reagan paraphernalia. I smelled a bottle of perfume on the for-sale table next to jars of jelly beans. “That’s the scent President Reagan wore,” the woman manning the booth told me. I walked back over to the building with the spin room and took the elevator down with a group of several older people who had tired of the donor cocktail and wanted to keep watching a performance by sneaking into the spin room. They had brought their wineglasses with them. “This is gonna be way better,” one said to the others, waiting for the elevator doors to open.

Antonia Hitchens writes for the New Yorker, among other publications.

Announcing Our Winter Issue

A poet recently sent me an essay by George Oppen called “The Mind’s Own Place,” published in 1963. In it, Oppen grapples with lines from Brecht’s “To Those Born Later”: “What kind of times are these, when / To talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” Oppen, a poet who had withdrawn from writing for nearly twenty-five years to pursue his political commitments, sees Brecht’s concern as valid: “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.” But he also acknowledges that there is “no crisis in which political poets and orators may not speak of trees, though it is more common for them, in this symbolic usage, to speak of ‘flowers,’ ” which tend to “stand for simple and undefined human happiness.” He goes on:

Suffering can be recognized; to argue its definition is an evasion, a contemptible thing. But the good life, the thing wanted for itself, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. William Stafford ends a poem titled “Vocation” (he is speaking of the poet’s vocation) with the line: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.” And though it may be presumptuous in a man elected to nothing at all, the poet does undertake just about that, certainly nothing less, and the younger poets’ judgment of society is, in the words of Robert Duncan, “I mean, of course, that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, turn wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.” 

Usually, on the date that a new issue of The Paris Review lands in bookstores and on newsstands, you receive a letter much like this one, announcing it and advertising its wares. In these letters, I have made a habit of loosely tying one piece in the issue to another, suggesting that, while The Paris Review is almost never put together with a theme in mind, some concern might have unconsciously risen to the surface as the editors made their selections—or even that these selections give a kind of animal unconscious to the magazine itself. This is not one of those letters, in part because it does not seem to me the time for any kind of argument about literature and why it might or might not be important. Also, as far as I can tell, the pieces in this issue share very little in common save their quality and perhaps the fact that they each represent, in some form, a quest to find out what the world is trying to be and what it is to live in it. In all this, I am grateful to our contributors, and to you, our readers, for accompanying them. As Louise Glück (1943–2023) tells Henri Cole in her Art of Poetry interview in the new Winter issue, “Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. That role is assigned to us and never removed.”

 

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.

Writing about Understanding

Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows. Photograph by Sophie Haigney.

The paragraph is perhaps an undercelebrated unit of writing. Sentences get their due, as do individual words, but paragraphs? At the Review, we’ve asked writers to select a favorite paragraph and write a paragraph—or several!—on it. This is our first piece in a periodic series.

Yes, I think you three have been quite happy. But I doubt if Cordelia has enjoyed a single moment of her childhood. It has all been a torment to her. She is not selfish. It is not what she has lacked that is an agony to her, it is what we all have lacked. She has hated it that all our clothes have been so shabby and that the house is so broken down. She has hated it that I have always been so late in paying Cousin Ralph the rent. She has hated it that we have so few friends. She hates it that your father has gone away, but not as you hate it. She would have preferred a quite ordinary father, so long as he stayed with us. She wishes she could have lived a life like the other girls at school. Your father’s writing, my playing, and whatever goes with those things, and the enjoyment we have had, are no compensation to her for what she has lost. Now, do not dare to despise her for this desire to be commonplace, to be secure, to throw away what we have of distinction. It is not she who is odd in hating poverty and”—she felt for the word—“eccentricity. It is you who are odd in not hating them. Be thankful for this oddity, which has brought you safe through terrible years. But do not think you owe it to any virtue in yourselves. You owe it entirely to your musical gifts. The music I have taught you to play must have made you realize that there is a great deal in life which is not affected by what happens to you. Also the technique has been more help to you than you realize. If you are not soft, it is because the technique you have mastered, such as it is, has hardened you. If God had not made you able to play you would be as helpless as Cordelia, and it is not her fault but God’s that she cannot play, and as God has no faults let us now drop the subject.

This paragraph appears late in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, which is likely the novel I’ve reread more often than any other. And this passage is one that I return to all the time, both when life is hard and when life seems lenient enough to grant me a moment of reprieve. At the center of the novel are three sisters: Rose and Mary, twins who are prodigies on the piano, and Cordelia, their unmusical sister who dreams of becoming a world-famous violinist. This paragraph comes after Cordelia’s dream is dashed, and Mamma, their mother, who is a genius on the piano, speaks sternly to Rose and Mary and their brother Richard Quin, admonishing them.

There are many things I love about the paragraph. As I’m typing it out, I’m surprised how long it is. (In fact, many of West’s best paragraphs are long, sometimes occupying an entire page or two). Readily, West allows a character to speak without authorial interventions or interruptions from other characters. Were I discussing this in a writing class, comments would be bound to arise that this is not the right way to write dialogue, but who cares about the right way or the wrong way to write dialogue when one can listen to an extraordinary character like Mamma talk, as thrilling as listening to Shakespeare or a master pianist? The best writing—not only long passages of description but dialogues, monologues—always has an element of music and an element of poetry in it. This paragraph has both in abundance.

And what Mamma says—“Be thankful for this oddity, which has brought you safe through terrible years. … The music I have taught you to play must have made you realize that there is a great deal in life which is not affected by what happens to you”—is what I often repeat to myself, sometimes in a variation for my own situation: “Be thankful for your oddity, which has brought you safe through terrible years. … The books you’ve read and the books you’ve written must have made you realize that there is a great deal in life which is not affected by what happens to you.” Some people—perhaps many, one imagines—are ready to disagree with the sentiment, which goes against a kind of Americanness by which much of life (and literature) has to be seen and experienced only through the lens of the self: my angle, my story, my identity. Well, the more reason for me to celebrate a different sentiment along with Mamma.

The last thing I would like to say about this paragraph—and also about this novel—is that many writers can write misunderstanding well, but Rebecca West is supreme at writing about understanding. Mamma, in her usual clear-eyed way, has understood each of her family members, but even more than that, she articulates her understanding in the most precise and eloquent manner, without judgment. If this is not what literature is for, what else then?

 

Yiyun Li is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a PEN/Malamud Award, among other honors. She teaches at Princeton University. 

The Secrets of Beauty

Cocteau’s epitaph in Saint-Blaise-des-Simples Chapel in Milly-la-Forêt, via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by Renaud Camus, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Jean Cocteau wrote on anything he could get his hands on, wherever he could. Édouard Dermit informs us that he often saw Cocteau writing next to him in the car, or while lying down, or when at the table (between fruit and dessert courses), using the smallest scrap of paper or cloth. This version of Secrets of Beauty was composed in March 1945, on a long journey back to Paris. Toward the end of the text, he writes: “Why do these thoughts come to me, to someone who is so reluctant to write? It’s probably because … I am writing them on the move, in a third-class carriage that keeps jogging me. I reconnect with this dear work [of writing] on the endpapers of books, on the backs of envelopes, on tablecloths: a marvelous discomfort that stimulates the mind.” 

Cocteau was like one of those magicians who, having announced that they are going to reveal the secret of one trick, immediately perform another. He offered up “secrets of beauty” so frequently that the volume from which the following notes have been extracted could almost be called New Secrets of Beauty. The book followed in the tradition of Cocteau’s Le Coq et l’Arlequin (The Cock and the Harlequin) in 1918, Le Secret professionnel (Professional secrets) in 1922, Le mystère laïc (The secular mystery) in 1928, and Démarche d’un poète (A poet’s process) in 1954, as well as countless shorter articles in which the poet promised to reveal secrets about his plays or films.

These notes remind us of the following lines from his book about Jean Marais: “Beauty hates ideas. It is sufficient to itself. A work of art is beautiful just as a person is beautiful. The beauty I speak of provokes an erection in the soul. One cannot argue with an erection.” Is it therefore pointless to attempt to get to the bottom of Jean Cocteau’s s ecrets? We will content ourselves with relating them to an answer once given by the Dalai Lama, which Cocteau quoted on several occasions: “The secret of Tibet is that there is no secret. But it is the one that must be defended with the greatest care.”

—Pierre Caizergues

 

Poetry can act only as a physical charm. It’s made up of a host of details that cannot be distinguished instantly. If this were not the case, then it would be impossible to expect anyone with concerns of their own to venture into the labyrinth of a style, to explore its every recess, and to lose themselves in it.

***

Poetry stops short of ideas. Ideas are lethal to it. Poetry is itself an idea; it cannot express ideas without becoming poetic and thereby annihilating itself.

***

Poetry is not holy just because it speaks of things that are holy. Poetry is not beautiful just because it speaks of things that are beautiful. If we are asked why it is beautiful and holy, we must answer as Joan of Arc did when she had been interrogated for too long:

“Next question.”

***

To read poetry you must be inspired.

***

The word poetry is much abused; it is used for everything that seems poetic. But poetry cannot be poetic. Poetic things acquire a borrowed radiance from poetry.

***

A poet’s violence cannot be long-lived. Joan of Arc wasn’t around for long.

***

The poet is a servant of forces that he does not understand. He must keep the house clean. His progress can only be moral.

***

A poet cannot achieve visible success. That which is clandestine cannot become official without ceasing to be clandestine. Those who believe that they are bringing a secret to light are mistaken. They are driven out of the shadows where poets live, and a new clandestinity re-forms behind them.

***

Baudelaire’s contemporaries saw only grimaces in his work, and only grimaces they admired. From behind these grimaces, the gaze traveled slowly toward us, like starlight.

***

Slackness, lyricism, and words are the downfall of young poets. I advise them to follow an old wives’ regimen, a very simple form of hygiene: Write backwards, join up your letters, write while looking at the paper in the mirror, make a geometric drawing, place words on the points where the lines intersect and fill in the gaps afterward, turn a famous text upside down by inverting the meaning, and so on.

In this way they will become athletes and build their mental muscles. Strong goodness is stronger than wickedness that passes for strength. One must overcome conformity to the latter. One must be good.

***

The left cannot go right. If it seems to be going right, that is because it has become right; it is no longer left. It will never be left again. That’s the end of it.

***

Poetry is subject to specific laws. A serious man who is capable of feeling like a poet can give the impression of being one simply by knowing these laws and by studying the mechanisms that produce beautiful or unusual things.

***

Beauty is lame. Poetry is lame. It is from a struggle with the angel that the poet emerges—limping. This limp is what gives the poet his charm.

***

If poetry didn’t limp it would run, and it cannot run because it counts its steps and moves erratically.

***

A poem stands in defiance of what man habitually considers to be the best way of expressing his thoughts. One must therefore be very humble in order to read a poem without antagonizing it.

***

Cinematic poetry: I am often asked what I think of it. I think nothing of it. I don’t know what it is. I have seen films made without the slightest poetic concern that nonetheless exude poetry, and I have seen poetic films in which the poetry simply doesn’t work.

Poetry in films derives from unusual relationships between objects and images. A simple photograph can produce these relationships. I have photographs at home that were taken in the warehouse where the Germans melted down and destroyed our statues. The most mediocre statues became great.

Poetry works like lightning. Lightning strips a shepherd bare and carries his clothes several miles away. It imprints on a ploughman’s shoulder the photograph of a young girl. It can obliterate a wall and leave a tulle curtain untouched. In short, it creates unusual things. The poet’s strikes are no more premeditated than lightning.

Poetry borrows astonishing contrasts that occur by chance. It disorientates; it accidentally establishes a new order.

***

Poetry is a precision instrument. A precision shot. A long-range shot.

***

People say to me, “You don’t change.” I reply, “I’m too distracted.”

***

A poet must concern himself with poetry alone.

***

Poets receive only love letters.

***

A man without a drop of passionate blood will never be a poet.

***

B. wrote poems before he was shot. A man who wants to outlive himself thinks only of writing poems.

***

Apollinaire spoke to me about “event poems”: each poem must be an event. Sometimes poets milk events for more than they are worth. These opportunistic poems are always the ones that attract the most attention.

***

The absence of rules in poetry forces the poet to discover methods that bestow upon his work the mystique of a secret cult ritual.

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Style is not a dance. It’s a process.

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A poet should be recognizable not by his style but by the way in which he looks at things.

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A poem arises from a marriage between the conscious and the unconscious; between will and a lack of will; between accuracy and vagueness.

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All beautiful writing is automatic.

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A poet must be a saint, a hero, but without anyone knowing it. He must have no fear of death, with which he ought to be on first-name terms.

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A poet hates himself. He respects only the vehicle within himself.

***

A poet’s laziness, waiting for voices: a dangerous attitude. It means that he isn’t doing what he needs to do in order to make the voices speak to him.

Discover physical and moral hygiene. Always be in a state of grace. The poet’s religious exercises.

To sleep is to return to the stable. Don’t sleep too much.

 

Translated from the French by Juliet Powys.

An adapted excerpt from Jean Cocteau’s Secrets of Beauty, translated by Juliet Powys and with a foreword by Pierre Caizergues, forthcoming from ERIS in January.

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist. He was prominently associated with the Surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements.

Juliet Powys is a translator of French and Italian. 

Pierre Caizergues is a poet, an editor, and the director of the Jean Cocteau Committee.