The Paris Review's Blog, page 45

On Peter Pan

Scene from Mabou Mines Peter and Wendy with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine.

I remember reading Peter Pan as a kid, a version based on the 1953 Disney movie—based on J. M. Barrie’s story. It turned me on. I’m six or seven, and I’m flipping through the pages, and there’s a picture of Peter with his arms crossed and his back to Wendy. He’s angry with her for some reason, and it turned me on. The words, the image, the anger? All of it, some kind of thrill-ball a kid has no words for.

All kinds of people become aroused, in one way or another—when we’re children and when we’re old. It doesn’t start or stop. Aliveness is erotic, the senses awakened. Everyone knows kids get turned on by this thing or that thing without instruction by adults. If you want to know why people lie about this fact and pretend that children—and often female humans along with them—start out sexually “innocent,” I can refer you to Nietzsche, who blames Christianity. Sexual feeling is anarchic, sudden, and sometimes inconvenient. It can’t really be contained.

What to call the feelings you don’t have words for? A kind of fainty, oh my God what is this sensation I wouldn’t have spoken about. It wasn’t because I was masturbating. I didn’t learn to masturbate, so I could come, until after I’d had sex. I’m twenty, maybe, when one day I say to myself, “If he can do that, so, probably can you.”

As a child, I wouldn’t have spoken about my “funny feelings” perhaps because shame moves in early. Also, in childhood, secrecy is all we have—our private inner lives—in a world where adults control so much of us. Maybe, as children, we keep arousal to ourselves because we don’t want anyone tampering with our pleasure. Also, in childhood, there’s no end of feelings we don’t have language to describe—grief, fear, and anxiety about things we anticipate, come to mind. Secrets are sexy.

With Peter Pan, the feeling came from reading and looking at pictures on the page. Oh my God, words could do that! Later, when I discovered porn, I was even more impressed by the excitement reading could produce. The metaphysical properties of words, bundled into grammar, producing an inner world you could see and smell in your mind and also made your body vibrate.

Is Peter Pan a particularly sexy story? I think it is. Kids as flying runaways, escaping through the window of their house. Freud might not have been right about a lot of things he theorized, but I think he was onto something when he said flying in dreams is sex. Remember all those dreams of flying you had and maybe still have? Until not that long ago, I would dream I was flying down Broadway, close to the ground. It was like swimming, except in air.

Peter Pan is a boy who refuses adult life. As a girl, you identify with his confidence and daring. I mean, who else are you going to identify with? Five minutes after arriving in Neverland, Wendy becomes a mommy figure, tidying up after the lost boys and reading them bedtime stories. In Barrie’s play Peter and Wendy—it debuted in London in 1904 and became a huge and lucrative hit—Peter was played by a woman, a tradition that continued far into the twentieth century. Famously, when I was young, Mary Martin played Peter in a musical version of the play that was broadcast on TV year after year, with Mary and the kids harnessed to ropes that lifted them into the air.

The eros of the adults who create children’s literature can’t help but wash over their stories, too, and it goes into us, as children, in a way that’s not mediated or judged. Think of Lewis Carroll’s infatuation with his neighbor’s daughter Alice Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland. Similarly, Barrie was deeply attached to the five sons of the Llewelyn Davies family, who were near neighbors of Barrie and his wife, and who were the models, he said, for Peter and the lost boys.

In 1997, Mabou Mines, the great avant-garde theater company, presented a version of the Barrie tale that mined its eros of longing, lostness, and escape. I wrote about the production, directed by Lee Breuer and presented at the New Victory Theater in New York, for The Nation, unaware at the time of its connection to the stirrings I’d felt as a kid. Only now do they whoosh together, the girl alone in her bed and this show that lifted off its moorings of innocence and sentimentality to become a meditation on exile so plangent all of us in the audience sobbed.

Scene from the Mabou Mines production of Peter and Wendy, with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine.

The brilliant actor Karen Kandel played Wendy and Mrs. Darling. She also spoke as ventriloquist for all the other characters, who were represented by puppets and manipulated by a crew of handlers in beekeeper costumes—as Edwardian-style equivalents of Bunraku handlers. Some puppets required several handlers, like Nana the dog, who appeared in act two wearing a crocodile mask as she hunted for Captain Hook. Some puppets were mere toys and two-dimensional shadow puppets on sticks. Some sets were as simple as origami-style models that looked like the miniatures in pop-up books.

There was live music as well, based on Irish shanties, with tough-minded lyrics by Breuer, Liza Lorwin, and Johnny Cunningham. In the songs, the characters struggle for a balance that humans can’t actually achieve. The nursery has mommy but no freedom. Flight is glorious but lonely. Everyone wants a mom, including Hook, but no mom can measure up to the fantasies people form, and even Wendy’s mom, who is devoted to her children, has “a mocking mouth with one kiss Wendy could never get.”

Tinker Bell glories in being abandoned. Peter is sexy but infantile—he’s everyone’s trick and no one’s dependable object of desire. “It is only make-believe that I am their father,” he says, referring to the lost boys. No one can ever really be man enough, the show says, unless they remain a little boy.

At the end of act one, the wolves of Neverland lament their outsideness at the same time they howl for the joy of running free. The mother tries to tidy up her children’s minds and can’t. The map of a child’s mind is Neverland—a sky with stars depicted by pin lights. At the play’s end, the lost boys, having returned to humdrum existences, ache in phantom parts of themselves they no longer have but can still sense, singing for all of us, “Oh magic island, dream of us, set us free.”

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing that is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Streaming Now column for LIBER: A Feminist Review, and she writes the Everything Is Personal Substack.

Peter and Wendy at Mabou Mines was written and produced by Liza Lorwin, directed by Lee Breuer, and designed by Julie Archer. Music was by Johnny Cunningham, and the part of narrator was performed by Karen Kandel.

The Language of Lava Lamps

Photograph courtesy of the author.

In an office-building lobby in San Francisco, there is a wall where about one hundred lava lamps simultaneously flow. They are not just decorating the wall; they are helping to encrypt the internet. 

The lava wall is owned by a software company called Cloudflare. A camera photographs the lava lamps, whose patterns are constantly shifting. Each image is then digitized and stored as a series of numbers. This analog process produces sequences that, in their organic variance, are more unpredictable than anything a computer could generate on its own. With the help of its lava lamps, Cloudflare encrypts at least 10 percent of global web traffic.

As the owner of fifty lava lamps, I felt validated when I found out about Cloudflare’s wall. I bought all the lamps within a six-month span I now refer to as my “lava period.” It started when I broke my lava lamp of eight years by leaving it on for two weeks. The lamp had survived the dumpster I found it in, and two cross-country moves, but it couldn’t endure its own heat. Many things went wrong at once: the wax (the “lava,” the substance that moves) started sticking to the glass, the liquid lost its color, and the spring that sat at the base of the globe broke into pieces. Little bits of metal bobbed at the surface, as though drowning and reaching up for help.

Bereft, I went on the internet, where I quickly learned that we were in the midst of a lava lamp shortage. It was 2022 and Schylling, the leading U.S. manufacturer of lava lamps, had temporarily shut down the LAVA® online store, citing supply chain issues. I turned to eBay, where price gouging meant that most of the available lava lamps were going for hundreds of dollars. In a panic, I made lowball offers on the only three listed for under thirty. I didn’t expect to, but I won them all. 

After that, I couldn’t stop. I ordered a lava lamp shaped like a crayon, a lava lamp from 1971 still in its box, a lava lamp embedded in a six-foot-tall standing lamp. I was always looking for good deals. Once, I met a woman in a gas station parking lot off the interstate to buy a vintage glitter lamp for ten dollars.

My partner wanted me to stop buying lava lamps. It was an expensive hobby, and we were running out of room in our apartment. But like the web encryptors at Cloudflare, I cared about the differences between each lava lamp: the way some produce slow, luminous pillars while others look like bottled weather. Governed by heat and by fluid dynamics, no lamp will flow the same way twice. Every detail matters: the temperature of the room, the balance of chemicals and wax. Despite its simple design, a lava lamp’s contents are as permutable as an alphabet. Together, a group of lamps felt like a series of symbols written in wax that I could never quite read: blue column, crimson circle, yellow ribbon. I kept buying lava lamps because I wanted to build a kind of language with them. 

I started using the lamps as a teaching tool, showing them to high school students as a way to talk about form and content in poetry. The form was the lamp’s external shape: the silver base like an hourglass, the bottle resting atop it. The content was everything in the lamp that could move: the water, the chemicals, the wax. A student once asked how the heat from the light bulb that made the lamp function would be categorized: Form, or content? I didn’t have a good answer—it felt like a secret third thing. 

The lava lamp’s origins are the stuff of internet folklore. The story goes that the first one ever made was intended to serve as an egg timer. Modeled after an hourglass, it was filled with oil and water that would separate with heat. If sand in a bottle could measure time, the inventor Donald Dunnet had asked, why not liquid? In 1963, a nudist experimental filmmaker named Edward Craven Walker began selling what we now know as the lava lamp. He had been inspired by seeing one of Dunnet’s egg timers in a pub. The lava lamp was originally marketed as a high-end decoration for sophisticates. Its rocket-like design, a reflection of the iconography of the space age, soon became emblematic of the psychedelic culture of the period. Walker used the money he made selling lava lamps to help fund his nudist resort. 

Teaching over webcam in the glow of a lava lamp, I tell my students that poems—like jokes—hinge on surprise. Patterns established and then altered. A lava lamp, then, is a perfect poem. A liquid hourglass of light, it measures out time in stanzaic blobs. People need poems and lava lamps for the same reasons. We need light that feels familiar in all its shifting. 

 

Nora Claire Miller is the author of the chapbook LULL. Their poem “Rumor” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 246. 

So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010. Photograph by Justin Hoch, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

“He’s dead.”

The voice on the phone belonged to Joshua, a friend with whom I had gotten sober years ago. Back then, in the nineties, driving to and from twelve-step meetings held in smoky church basements across Rochester, New York, in a rickety station wagon with my drum set in the wayback, we kept ourselves focused by improvising sketch comedy and working out stand-up routines that Joshua would then use in his fledging act, which he’d eventually abandon in order to become a travel writer specializing in Southeast Asia. He was calling from Portland.

“Who’s dead?” I asked, trying to think who from our past might have relapsed.

“The actor, the guy you’re writing about. Overdosed on heroin.”

“Philip Seymour Hoffman?”

I switched the phone to my other hand, eyes scanning the notes for an essay I was writing about Synecdoche, New York, a film starring Hoffman. There, right on my screen, cursor blinking, were two lines from a Rilke poem included in the movie: “Whoever has no house now, will never have one. / Whoever is alone will stay alone …”

“But he’s sober.”

“That’s what everyone thought, I guess.” Joshua let out a long exhale.

He filled me in on the details, about how the actor, a man three years older than I, had been found in his apartment bathroom, a syringe hanging from his arm. Hoffman had been to rehab twice in the two years prior, but largely that had been kept quiet. Until that time, his more than twenty years of sobriety were often mentioned in articles and interviews, perhaps especially because Hoffman had a penchant for playing sad, lonely, sometimes desperate, sometimes rageful men, the very people who were drunk or about to go on a weekend bender after years of sobriety. He played those roles from the inside out.

On the phone, Joshua and I became quiet: over decades of friendship, we’ve known too many people who, having not used for years, suddenly fell back into heroin or whiskey or coke, fell back so hard that they didn’t want to get out of it again, fell so hard that it killed, them or they took their own lives. We were aware that addiction, that space of desolation—of feeling abandoned and like you want to abandon the world—isn’t something that is ever cured: you hold it at bay, and, like loneliness, as loneliness, it can come roaring back at almost any moment. Sometimes because of a crisis, sometimes because things are going well, and sometimes merely because. You never get rid of it, not wholly. You find ways to protect yourself from it.

Later, reading the obituary for Hoffman in the New York Times, some lines from Truman Capote, whom Hoffman portrayed so unforgettably, float forward into my mind. “But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.” Hoffman died alone in his apartment.

The desolation of loneliness, like the connected problems of substance abuse and depression, comes from the feeling that the experience—when one is in it—will never end. That is why, sometimes, people choose to end it for themselves. If we are to keep going, push through, or slip around it, I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it. I have been trying to do this my whole life.

***

“Do you know you almost killed those people?” the officer—lean, middle-aged—asked me as he latched the cell door behind me. Flat, measured, his tone wasn’t accusatory; it was definitive. He didn’t wait for the answer. I listened as he walked down the gray hall and passed through a heavy door, then bolted it shut behind him. The cell: cold despite its being August. Its walls: concrete painted white; the light: dim. An eighteen-year-old kid, I stared at the security camera hanging from the ceiling that was trained on me. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t try to kill myself. I fashioned an ersatz noose out of toilet paper, folded my legs beneath me, and lay across the scratched steel bunk.

I didn’t know what the officer was talking about. That night, I’d lost hours to another blackout, and it was only his keys jingling in the lock that had led me back to consciousness. Before that moment, I had no memory of the evening.

I first began drinking and using drugs when I was about thirteen; at fifteen people started to say I was a nice guy until I got a drink in me; it was sixteen when I began to drink so heavily that I lost hours and then whole days to blackouts. My blackouts always had a feel of time-hopping teleportation. One moment I would be taking a long slow drink from a bottle, then hours later—sometimes even a day or so—I would suddenly appear back in my body. These moments were much more than jarring, they were dangerous. Sometimes I was in my room or apartment, perhaps in the middle of a sentence; other times, I would drop back into consciousness in a completely different city from where I’d been when I started to drink. Once, I woke up facedown in a puddle in a dark alley behind some family-owned appliance store in Montreal, three hundred miles from home, a bloody gash opened across my forehead and nose. A few years later, someone asked me what it was like. I compared it to the sci-fi TV drama from the nineties: Quantum Leap. My whole body buzzed and I reappeared in myself, unsure of where or sometimes even who I was.

That night, I’d been arrested driving eastbound in the westbound lane of a major highway outside Boston. The officer, when he was booking me, had said I could be released if someone would come and pick me up and pay the bail. I was in no shape to get myself home—in fact, I didn’t even have any shoes—and it was 2 A.M. It also didn’t occur to me until later that my car wasn’t actually in the police station’s parking lot. I hadn’t driven there, after all.

He slid the black plastic phone on the counter over to me.

“I don’t have anyone to call.”

“No one will come get you?”

I pushed the phone back toward him.

“Then you stay here,” he said.

He led me, handcuffed, to the cell. That was the moment when I was confronted with the fact that loneliness wasn’t some occasional situation—it had become, inescapably, my very identity.

“Addiction is a disease of loneliness,” a recovering addict in Vancouver tells the journalist Johann Hari in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. What isn’t clear is whether he meant that addiction, by its very nature, isolates a person from everyone else, or if loneliness is one of the preconditions for addiction. The loneliness that I had wrestled with since I was a little kid stood at the core of my substance abuse. In my own case, I felt that drinking was a way to stop fighting the loneliness that I could neither solve nor escape, neither outthink nor outrun.

What unnerved me about Hoffman’s death, then, was that I recognized the latent potency of loneliness and how it can continue to develop, even as it is being curbed or kept under wraps. It moves quietly and often exploits the fact that we are slow to recognize it in ourselves. His death was, for me, a catalyst. That’s why I’ve now begun to try to understand loneliness, why I am seeking out its themes and variations. I may not be able to cure it, but I can learn how it thinks; I can figure out what it thinks about, there in the dark.

In photographs from around the time of that arrest, I am as gaunt as a self-portrait of Egon Schiele, a painter I discovered in my teens, a painter known for his own intense feelings of separateness. That marked isolation became harder and harder to hide, simply because I was drinking to slip the leash of my own self-consciousness. It wasn’t that I wanted to die. I wanted not to exist. A fundamental question of philosophy is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” My loneliness placed me in the middle of that question.

That’s where it can place anyone.

***

I got sober in Rochester, New York, in the early nineties, staying in the suburb where my parents had moved after I graduated from high school, a town a few miles from where Hoffman had grown up. That part of the country is brutal in its winters—tearing cold and endless snow and darkness that for months never abates. Or maybe that’s simply how it felt. Having not grown up there, I knew almost no one when I retreated to the area after my arrest, and the consequent loss of my job, my savings, and my license. Living at my parents’ house, I was taking classes part-time at the city’s famous music conservatory before I eventually entered rehab at the very hospital where Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, a hero of mine since childhood, had died in the seventies.

Rochester may have been where I dried out, but it was not cure for my loneliness. I was left on my own to practice drums and piano for hours every day, make my way into the school to take my classes, and then drift back to my parents’ house, where I stayed up for hours, hiding bottles of wine though I was supposed to be getting off the sauce. Every week, after my lessons, I went to the art-house cinema and saw whatever was playing. Sitting alone in the dark, whole worlds flashing across the screen, I fell into other people’s lives, other people’s stories. Since in being lonely we feel only the throes of emotional distance, it is through art, books, music, movies, that we can collect our glimpses of others’ lives, that we can collect those fellow travelers.

I did not know—of course, how could I?—that during those very same years, as I was trying to grab ahold of my life before it was lost altogether, a young man from the outskirts of Rochester, somebody who had once frequented that very same art-house cinema before I hit town, would be fighting through his own addictions while a student at NYU. Not classically handsome but compelling nonetheless because of his innate ability to convey a crushing vulnerability, he would eventually be called, frequently, “the greatest actor of his generation.” I didn’t know then either that one day, years and years later, I would watch a film in that very same theater starring this man, Philip Seymour Hoffman, that would be the saddest movie I have ever seen. How could I know then that a little while later, I would be asked to write an essay about this film, Synecdoche, New York, and that Hoffman would die of an overdose while I was in the middle of drafting the piece. He died even as I was wrapping my head around why his movie had moved me so deeply, about why and how Hoffman had become the Marlon Brando of loneliness.

Hoffman played Willy Loman in a high school production, which as an idea sounds like a pretty damned proposition. For a teenager to play a man burdened by his whole, disappointing life to the extent that he kills himself requires a kind of anticipatory empathy that most high schoolers wouldn’t be able to muster, let alone handle. I’d first read the play in high school. “An air of the dream clings to the place” was a stage direction that haunted me, as well as the line “He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.” If you feel lonely, that line cuts deep, down to the bone. I remember the class discussion of the play during my senior year: it was one of the mornings I wasn’t drunk.

He would play Loman again, many years later, on Broadway. Even at the age of forty-four, Hoffman had been a bit young to be playing Loman, who is supposed to be in his sixties, but at least in your middle age you get an ever-clarifying sense of the difference between the kind of loneliness that is transitory, tied to a given moment or circumstance, and the kind that arises from a particular, specific inborn feeling of distance. At only thirty-four, Arthur Miller wrote of the earliest days of developing Death of a Salesman, “I remember the rehearsal when we had our first audience. Six or seven friends. The play working itself out under the single bulb overhead. I think that was the first and only time I saw it as others see it. Then it seemed to me that we must be a terribly lonely people, cut off from each other by such massive pretense of self-sufficiency, machined down so fine we hardly touch any more. We are trying to save ourselves separately, and that is immoral, that is the corrosive among us.” The challenge, maybe it’s an imperative, is to find ways to save ourselves collectively, to throw off the “pretense of self-sufficiency” and confess, without shame or recrimination, that we need one another. First, we need to be able to learn from each other the very nature of that loneliness that Miller mentions.

Salesman is important in Synecdoche, New York as well. Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a director for a regional theater company in Schenectady, New York. Throughout the movie, he is distracted, shabbily dressed, unshaven. The play he is developing at the start of the movie is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a drama, we are quick to note, that more or less begins at the end of Willy Loman’s life, and which sets the tone of tragic inevitability and melancholia built into the movie. The movie, in other words, begins with a death (Loman’s) and then, two hours later, ends with another: Caden’s. As Hazel, Caden’s assistant and true love (played by Samantha Morton), insists the night before she dies of smoke inhalation after living in a burning house for nearly thirty years, the night they finally consummate their love, “The end is built into the beginning. What can we do?” Caden advises his actors, “Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willy Loman thinks that he is only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair,” and insists to the lead actor, “but the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor, will end up in this very place of desolation.” The movie was released in 2008; Hoffman played Loman on Broadway in 2012, and though he received his third Tony nomination, his friends saw that the role changed him, haunted him. He was dead two years later. Desolation has its roots in the Latin word for abandonment.

Loneliness is not the same as depression, though they are often connected, as a depressed person can, as part of a range of symptoms, feel wholly isolated, and, at the same time, a feeling of isolation can lead to depression. Depression is, of course, a form of mental illness, but loneliness is harder to pin down, harder to define. The clinical psychologists Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz have found that patients often are more likely to admit to depression than loneliness because depression is commonly understood to have specific biochemical causes. Loneliness, on the other hand, is disregarded as mere “emotional neediness.” In The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century, they note, “Our first concern was the welfare of our patients: we began to notice how much of their suffering was bound up in isolation and loneliness, whatever other diagnostic labels might be applied to them. We began to notice how hard it was for our patients to talk about their isolation, which seemed to fill them with deep shame.” The authors then add, with some dismay, “While our culture has successfully destigmatized mental illness (at least a little), it has restigmatized an ordinary human emotion.” The co-occurrence of depression and loneliness can mean that the latter is seen as merely a symptom of the former. The resulting problem is that loneliness all too often is not taken as itself something serious enough to be explored on its own terms, even by clinicians, even though it is clear that loneliness can feed depression.

A telling difference between the two states is that, with depression, the isolation that a person feels is not necessarily part of a paradoxical situation in which they feel isolated but don’t want to be. Part of the nature of loneliness is that a lonely person fights against the feelings of isolation even if they feel helpless before those emotions. The lonely person comes to perceive some schism between him- or herself and others that prevents meaningful intimacy, and the more convinced one is of that schism, the more one feels it is an unassailable divide. There is a fundamental ambivalence to loneliness, a desire for connection that is tied to a belief—it is more than a fear—that one is inevitably going to be rejected. For that reason, loneliness entails a feeling of increasing isolation that nonetheless is matched by a longing for greater social connection, even if at some level it also fights that longing.

The social psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau define loneliness as “the unpleasant experience that occurs when a person’s network of social relations is deficient in some important way, either quantitatively or qualitatively.” They add that ultimately loneliness amounts to “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” One either feels that there aren’t enough relationships in one’s life or that there are many relationships but they are mostly superficial. Either way, there is a perceived lack of intimacy.

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion;” Albert Camus, in his essay “The Minotaur,” tells us, “in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength?” Where does one find that solitude except perhaps at the center of the labyrinth of the self? But what if, there at the center, what we find is not the solution to the maze? What if there we discover at last that we’re just our own separate, grotesque Minotaurs: half person—a person we recognize as ourselves—and half anger, an anger we want to deny, an anger about being trapped, alone, an anger made to feel shame for feeling so alone. Maybe, in some ways, that is what happened to Hoffman: in his descent into loneliness, in order to know it and to be able to express on the cinema screen its warp and woof, he lost the thread that could have led him back out, and that hunger, that need for connection, devoured him wholly. Addiction and loneliness meet at that point of self-devouring.

Hoffman’s death was all too tragic, and all too human. So, too, is the loss of someone such as him, someone who could enact to us and for us the very real struggle to connect, to be vulnerable, to lay ourselves emotionally bare, which is the necessary, the crucial, condition for intimacy.

Loneliness is not only a feeling of a gap between oneself and others—it is a feeling of an active separation. The world pulls away and I turn from it, from the feeling of rejection, and step into open space. Arguably, if indeed we are born into loneliness, then one measure of what we call living is the ongoing attempt to overcome that isolation.That’s how we develop intimacy and its profound resolve in the face of that impossible distance. The risk lies in the fact that we might fail. The reward is that we all do, at times, succeed in our attempts to throw bridges out to the unseen shores deep in the hearts of others.

What’s the solution to loneliness? Maybe there’s no solution, but there can be responses, ones without blame or shame or self-recriminations. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, an important protégée of Freud, believed that loneliness begins at the very moment when, as infants, we first can distinguish our separateness from our mothers. In other words, as we move into developing a self, the more that we become who we are, the more we grow into our own, unique aloneness. A feeling of wholeness can be achieved only from the inside out. What remains a problem is the consistent longing for this to be otherwise, for the very reason that the self remains always partial and fragmented. “The end is built into the beginning. What can we do?”

After I got off the phone with Joshua, I sat down and pressed play on Synecdoche, New York one more time. I paused the film on one of the opening shots of Hoffman—hair disheveled, his white T-shirt taut over his belly—sitting at the edge of his bed in his dingy boxers. He’s looking at himself in a mirror on the back of the bedroom door, but it seems like he’s looking right at the audience, at me. This is the moment when a voice on the alarm clock radio speaks the line from the Rilke poem: “Whoever is alone will stay alone.”

What we can do with our loneliness is find a way of tethering ourselves by fashioning things out of what we each of us feels, even our most alienated, painful feelings. Art, in whatever form, can be a way of doing this. An artist such as Hoffman reveals their own anguish in the face of loss and isolation, but their work grants us access to that pain in order to find ways through our own loneliness, to create our opportunities for discovery. In the end, that’s what it’s all about.

 

This excerpt is adapted from This Exquisite Loneliness, to be published by Viking in October.

Richard Deming is the author of five books, including Day for Night and Art of the Ordinary. He teaches at Yale University, where he is the director of creative writing. 

So Fierce is the World: On Loneliness and Phillip Seymour Hoffmann

Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010. Photograph by Justin Hoch, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

“He’s dead.”

The voice on the phone belonged to Joshua, a friend with whom I had gotten sober years ago. Back then, in the nineties, driving to and from twelve‑step meetings held in smoky church basements across Rochester, New York, in a rickety station wagon with my drum set in the wayback, we kept ourselves focused by improvising sketch comedy and working out stand‑up routines that Joshua would then use in his fledging act, which he’d eventually abandon in order to become a travel writer specializing in Southeast Asia. He was calling from Portland.

“Who’s dead?” I asked, trying to think  who from our past might have relapsed.

“The actor, the guy you’re writing about. Overdosed on heroin.”

“Philip Seymour Hoffman?”

I switched the phone to my other hand, eyes scanning the notes for an essay I was writing about Synecdoche, New York, a film starring Hoffman. There, right on my screen, cursor blinking, were two lines from a Rilke poem included in the movie: “Whoever has no house now, will never have one. / Whoever is alone will stay alone …”

“But he’s sober.”

“That’s what everyone thought, I guess.” Joshua let out a long exhale.

He filled me in on the details, about how the actor, a man three years older than I, had been found in his apartment bathroom, a syringe hanging from his arm. Hoffman had been to rehab twice in the two years prior, but largely that had been kept quiet. Until that time, his more than twenty years of sobriety were often mentioned in articles and interviews, perhaps especially because Hoffman had a penchant for playing sad, lonely, sometimes desperate, sometimes rageful men, the very people who were drunk or about to go on a weekend bender after years of sobriety. He played those roles from the inside out.

On the phone, Joshua and I became quiet: over decades of friendship, we’ve known too many people who, having not used for years, suddenly fell back into heroin or whiskey or coke, fell back so hard that they didn’t want to get out of it again, fell so hard that it killed, them or they took their own lives. We were aware that addiction, that space of desolation—of feeling abandoned and like you want to abandon the world—isn’t something that is ever cured: you hold it at bay, and, like loneliness, as loneliness, it can come roaring back at almost any moment. Sometimes because of a crisis, sometimes because things are going well, and sometimes merely because. You never get rid of it, not wholly. You find ways to protect yourself from it.

Later, reading the obituary for Hoffman in the New York Times, some lines from Truman Capote, whom Hoffman portrayed so unforgettably, float forward into my mind. “But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.” Hoffman died alone in his apartment.

The desolation of loneliness, like the connected problems of substance abuse and depression, comes from the feeling that the experience—when one is in it—will never end. That is why, sometimes, people choose to end it for themselves. If we are to keep going, push through, or slip around it, I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it. I have been trying to do this my whole life.

***

“Do you know you almost killed those people?” the officer—lean, middle‑aged—asked me as he latched the cell door behind me. Flat, measured, his tone wasn’t accusatory; it was definitive. He didn’t wait for the answer. I listened as he walked down the gray hall and passed through a heavy door, then bolted it shut behind him. The cell: cold despite its being August. Its walls: concrete painted white; the light: dim. An eighteen‑year‑old kid, I stared at the security camera hanging from the ceiling that was trained on me. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t try to kill myself. I fashioned an ersatz noose out of toilet paper, folded my legs beneath me, and lay across the scratched steel bunk.

I didn’t know what the officer was talking about. That night, I’d lost hours to another blackout, and it was only his keys jingling in the lock that had led me back to consciousness. Before that moment, I had no memory of the evening.

I first began drinking and using drugs when I was about thirteen; at fifteen people started to say I was a nice guy until I got a drink in me; it was sixteen when I began to drink so heavily that I lost hours and then whole days to blackouts. My blackouts always had a feel of time‑hopping teleportation. One moment I would be taking a long slow drink from a bottle, then hours later—sometimes even a day or so—I would suddenly appear back in my body. These moments were much more than jarring, they were dangerous. Sometimes I was in my room or apartment, perhaps in the middle of a sentence; other times, I would drop back into consciousness in a completely different city from where I’d been when I started to drink. Once, I woke up facedown in a puddle in a dark alley behind some family‑owned appliance store in Montreal, three hundred miles from home, a bloody gash opened across my forehead and nose. A few years later, someone asked me what it was like. I compared it to the sci‑fi TV drama from the nineties: Quantum Leap. My whole body buzzed and I reappeared in myself, unsure of where or sometimes even who I was.

That night, I’d been arrested driving eastbound in the westbound lane of a major highway outside Boston. The officer, when he was booking me, had said I could be released if someone would come and pick me up and pay the bail. I was in no shape to get myself home—in fact, I didn’t even have any shoes—and it was 2 A.M. It also didn’t occur to me until later that my car wasn’t actually in the police station’s parking lot. I hadn’t driven there, after all.

He slid the black plastic phone on the counter over to me.

“I don’t have anyone to call.”

“No one will come get you?”

I pushed the phone back toward him.

“Then you stay here,” he said.

He led me, handcuffed, to the cell. That was the moment when I was confronted with the fact that loneliness wasn’t some occasional situation—it had become, inescapably, my very identity.

“Addiction is a disease of loneliness,” a recovering addict in Vancouver tells the journalist Johann Hari in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. What isn’t clear is whether he meant that addiction, by its very nature, isolates a person from everyone else, or if loneliness is one of the preconditions for addiction. The loneliness that I had wrestled with since I was a little kid stood at the core of my substance abuse. In my own case, I felt that drinking was a way to stop fighting the loneliness that I could neither solve nor escape, neither outthink nor outrun.

What unnerved me about Hoffman’s death, then, was that I recognized the latent potency of loneliness and how it can continue to develop, even as it is being curbed or kept under wraps. It moves quietly and often exploits the fact that we are slow to recognize it in ourselves. His death was, for me, a catalyst. That’s why I’ve now begun to try to understand loneliness, why I am seeking out its themes and variations. I may not be able to cure it, but I can learn how it thinks; I can figure out what it thinks about, there in the dark.

In photographs from around the time of that arrest, I am as gaunt as a self‑portrait of Egon Schiele, a painter I discovered in my teens, a painter known for his own intense feelings of separateness. That marked isolation became harder and harder to hide, simply because I was drinking to slip the leash of my own self‑consciousness. It wasn’t that I wanted to die. I wanted not to exist. A fundamental question of philosophy is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” My loneliness placed me in the middle of that question.

That’s where it can place anyone.

***

I got sober in Rochester, New York, in the early nineties, staying in the suburb where my parents had moved after I graduated from high school, a town a few miles from where Hoffman had grown up. That part of the country is brutal in its winters—tearing cold and endless snow and darkness that for months never abates. Or maybe that’s simply how it felt. Having not grown up there, I knew almost no one when I retreated to the area after my arrest, and the consequent loss of my job, my savings, and my license. Living at my parents’ house, I was taking classes part‑time at the city’s famous music conservatory before I eventually entered rehab at the very hospital where Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, a hero of mine since childhood, had died in the seventies.

Rochester may have been where I dried out, but it was not cure for my loneliness. I was left on my own to practice drums and piano for hours every day, make my way into the school to take my classes, and then drift back to my parents’ house, where I stayed up for hours, hiding bottles of wine though I was supposed to be getting off the sauce. Every week, after my lessons, I went to the art‑house cinema and saw whatever was playing. Sitting alone in the dark, whole worlds flashing across the screen, I fell into other people’s lives, other people’s stories. Since in being lonely we feel only the throes of emotional distance, it is through art, books, music, movies, that we can collect our glimpses of others’ lives, that we can collect those fellow travelers.

I did not know—of course, how could I?—that during those very same years, as I was trying to grab ahold of my life before it was lost altogether, a young man from the outskirts of Rochester, somebody who had once frequented that very same art‑house cinema before I hit town, would be fighting through his own addictions while a student at NYU. Not classically handsome but compelling nonetheless because of his innate ability to convey a crushing vulnerability, he would eventually be called, frequently, “the greatest actor of his generation.” I didn’t know then either that one day, years and years later, I would watch a film in that very same theater starring this man, Philip Seymour Hoffman, that would be the saddest movie I have ever seen. How could I know then that a little while later, I would be asked to write an essay about this film, Synecdoche, New York, and that Hoffman would die of an overdose while I was in the middle of drafting the piece. He died even as I was wrapping my head around why his movie had moved me so deeply, about why and how Hoffman had become the Marlon Brando of loneliness.

Hoffman played Willy Loman in a high school production, which as an idea sounds like a pretty damned proposition. For a teenager to play a man burdened by his whole, disappointing life to the extent that he kills himself requires a kind of anticipatory empathy that most high schoolers wouldn’t be able to muster, let alone handle. I’d first read the play in high school. “An air of the dream clings to the place” was a stage direction that haunted me, as well as the line “He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.” If you feel lonely, that line cuts deep, down to the bone. I remember the class discussion of the play during my senior year: it was one of the mornings I wasn’t drunk.

He would play Loman again, many years later, on Broadway. Even at the age of forty‑four, Hoffman had been a bit young to be playing Loman, who is supposed to be in his sixties, but at least in your middle age you get an ever‑clarifying sense of the difference between the kind of loneliness that is transitory, tied to a given moment or circumstance, and the kind that arises from a particular, specific inborn feeling of distance. At only thirty‑four, Arthur Miller wrote of the earliest days of developing Death of a Salesman, “I remember the rehearsal when we had our first audience. Six or seven friends. The play working itself out under the single bulb overhead. I think that was the first and only time I saw it as others see it. Then it seemed to me that we must be a terribly lonely people, cut off from each other by such massive pretense of self‑sufficiency, machined down so fine we hardly touch any more. We are trying to save ourselves separately, and that is immoral, that is the corrosive among us.” The challenge, maybe it’s an imperative, is to find ways to save ourselves collectively, to throw off the “pretense of self‑sufficiency” and confess, without shame or recrimination, that we need one another. First, we need to be able to learn from each other the very nature of that loneliness that Miller mentions.

Salesman is important in Synecdoche, New York as well. Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a director for a regional theater company in Schenectady, New York. Throughout the movie, he is distracted, shabbily dressed, unshaven. The play he is developing at the start of the movie is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a drama, we are quick to note, that more or less begins at the end of Willy Loman’s life, and which sets the tone of tragic inevitability and melancholia built into the movie. The movie, in other words, begins with a death (Loman’s) and then, two hours later, ends with another: Caden’s. As Hazel, Caden’s assistant and true love (played by Samantha Morton), insists the night before she dies of smoke inhalation after living in a burning house for nearly thirty years, the night they finally consummate their love, “The end is built into the beginning. What can we do?” Caden advises his actors, “Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willy Loman thinks that he is only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair,” and insists to the lead actor, “but the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor, will end up in this very place of desolation.” The movie was released in 2008; Hoffman played Loman on Broadway in 2012, and though he received his third Tony nomination, his friends saw that the role changed him, haunted him. He was dead two years later. Desolation has its roots in the Latin word for abandonment.

Loneliness is not the same as depression, though they are often connected, as a depressed person can, as part of a range of symptoms, feel wholly isolated, and, at the same time, a feeling of isolation can lead to depression. Depression is, of course, a form of mental illness, but loneliness is harder to pin down, harder to define. The clinical psychologists Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz have found that patients often are more likely to admit to depression than loneliness because depression is commonly understood to have specific biochemical causes. Loneliness, on the other hand, is disregarded as mere “emotional neediness.” In The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century, they note, “Our first concern was the welfare of our patients: we began to notice how much of their suffering was bound up in isolation and loneliness, whatever other diagnostic labels might be applied to them. We began to notice how hard it was for our patients to talk about their isolation, which seemed to fill them with deep shame.” The authors then add, with some dismay, “While our culture has successfully destigmatized mental illness (at least a little), it has restigmatized an ordinary human emotion.” The co-occurrence of depression and loneliness can mean that the latter is seen as merely a symptom of the former. The resulting problem is that loneliness all too often is not taken as itself something serious enough to be explored on its own terms, even by clinicians, even though it is clear that loneliness can feed depression.

A telling difference between the two states is that, with depression, the isolation that a person feels is not necessarily part of a paradoxical situation in which they feel isolated but don’t want to be. Part of the nature of loneliness is that a lonely person fights against the feelings of isolation even if they feel helpless before those emotions. The lonely person comes to perceive some schism between him‑ or herself and others that prevents meaningful intimacy, and the more convinced one is of that schism, the more one feels it is an unassailable divide.There is a fundamental ambivalence to loneliness, a desire for connection that is tied to a belief—it is more than a fear—that one is inevitably going to be rejected. For that reason, loneliness entails a feeling of increasing isolation that nonetheless is matched by a longing for greater social connection, even if at some level it also fights that longing.

The social psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau define loneliness as “the unpleasant experience that occurs when a person’s network of social relations is deficient in some important way, either quantitatively or qualitatively.” They add that ultimately loneliness amounts to “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” One either feels that there aren’t enough relationships in one’s life or that there are many relationships but they are mostly superficial. Either way, there is a perceived lack of intimacy.

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion;” Albert Camus, in his essay “The Minotaur,” tells us, “in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength?” Where does one find that solitude except perhaps at the center of the labyrinth of the self? But what if, there at the center, what we find is not the solution to the maze? What if there we discover at last that we’re just our own separate, grotesque Minotaurs: half person—a person we recognize as ourselves—and half anger, an anger we want to deny, an anger about being trapped, alone, an anger made to feel shame for feeling so alone. Maybe, in some ways, that is what happened to Hoffman: in his descent into loneliness, in order to know it and to be able to express on the cinema screen its warp and woof, he lost the thread that could have led him back out, and that hunger, that need for connection, devoured him wholly. Addiction and loneliness meet at that point of self-devouring.

Hoffman’s death was all too tragic, and all too human. So, too, is the loss of someone such as him, someone who could enact to us and for us the very real struggle to connect, to be vulnerable, to lay ourselves emotionally bare, which is the necessary, the crucial, condition for intimacy.

Loneliness is not only a feeling of a gap between oneself and others—it is a feeling of an active separation. The world pulls away and I turn from it, from the feeling of rejection, and step into open space. Arguably, if indeed we are born into loneliness, then one measure of what we call living is the ongoing attempt to overcome that isolation.That’s how we develop intimacy and its profound resolve in the face of that impossible distance. The risk lies in the fact that we might fail. The reward is that we all do, at times, succeed in our attempts to throw bridges out to the unseen shores deep in the hearts of others.

What’s the solution to loneliness? Maybe there’s no solution, but there can be responses, ones without blame or shame or self‑recriminations. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, an important protégée of Freud, believed that loneliness begins at the very moment when, as infants, we first can distinguish our separateness from our mothers. In other words, as we move into developing a self, the more that we become who we are, the more we grow into our own, unique aloneness. A feeling of wholeness can be achieved only from the inside out. What remains a problem is the consistent longing for this to be otherwise, for the very reason that the self remains always partial and fragmented. “The end is built into the beginning. What can we do?”

After I got off the phone with Joshua, I sat down and pressed play on Synecdoche, New York one more time. I paused the film on one of the opening shots of Hoffman—hair disheveled, his white T-shirt taut over his belly—sitting at the edge of his bed in his dingy boxers. He’s looking at himself in a mirror on the back of the bedroom door, but it seems like he’s looking right at the audience, at me. This is the moment when a voice on the alarm clock radio speaks the line from the Rilke poem: “Whoever is alone will stay alone.”

What we can do with our loneliness is find a way of tethering ourselves by fashioning things out of what we each of us feels, even our most alienated, painful feelings. Art, in whatever form, can be a way of doing this. An artist such as Hoffman reveals their own anguish in the face of loss and isolation, but their work grants us access to that pain in order to find ways through our own loneliness, to create our opportunities for discovery. In the end, that’s what it’s all about.

 

This excerpt is adapted from The Exquisite Loneliness, to be published by Viking in October.

Richard Deming is the author of five books, including Day for Night and Art of the Ordinary. He teaches at Yale University, where he is the director of creative writing. 

Apartment Four

Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman.

One spring evening I pulled in and saw my neighbor Stefanie was sitting on her car, which has the next spot over, with a friend. It was possible to worry for a second that I’d hit her.

“Hi, my neighbor,” I said as Stefanie hopped down. She and I had a project to one day go in on compost pickup.

We had something else in common, we realized that evening. Neither of us had been told about apartment four.

And the vacancy had filled so quickly. We both may have had reasons for considering a move—mine being I have mold—and that apartment, I happened to know, was a two-bedroom, with a bay window, beautiful gold-and-cream striped wallpaper, and decoratively ribbed molding that pooled, at the corners, in concentric circles. It was not, however, perfect. “It’s really loud in there,” I said to Stefanie. “That’s why Alex”—my ex-boyfriend—“had to leave.” I had started seeing Alex during the pandemic in 2020, a month or two after my arrival in the Northampton, Massachusetts, building. He was there already.

I had been aware that he paid more in rent than I did. But my thoughts, as I left Stefanie and made my way inside, turned instead to the way I’d had of judging Alex, privately, for giving up his lease on what was truly a nice place … so that it only later occurred to me to investigate my feeling that out of all of us in the building, a converted Victorian that has eight units, each neighbor had a different curiosity, or jealousy: an opinion about which apartment is the best. Or worst—built out of the irregularly shaped old house, they are all different.

I called Vernon, my downstairs neighbor.

For Vernon, a cellist born in Nebraska and raised in Richmond, Virginia, a curiosity about the contents of the other apartments, and about the people they contained, was much on his mind; this had led him to investigate, one day. “There was a woman,” he said, “who worked at UMass, I’m forgetting her name now, and she never went out, she only went out to teach her class and come back. She was very fair-skinned, blond and fair-skinned, and she actually had a witch hat. And she was kind of attractive in a strange way. From far away she wasn’t, but up close. And I thought that was mysterious, too.

“That one that Alex had,” he went on, “I’ve been in there, long before your time. I saw that. And I’ve seen yours because I was checking out the plants, doing the plant thing. But that one on the very top floor—when the woman moved out and they were working on it, I went and looked.”

Visiting her apartment, my apartment, or apartment four had not made Vernon jealous—on the contrary. “In some ways, because of the layout and the windows, I kind of fantasize that mine is one of the better apartments,” he tactfully explained. I had my opening to let him know the one that had been Alex’s had a dishwasher.

But there was a lot of noise from the street, I added. “I feel like he was getting hung up on it,” I said.

“You have to wonder,” said Vernon delicately. “He might have been getting hung up on it, or he had other reasons for wanting to leave and he was thinking, I’m focusing on the traffic now.”

Next I called up Allie, my shy neighbor who’d taken the time to show me a third pilot light, all the way at the back of the stove, when I first moved in. She did not need to be told about any dishwasher. “Hank’s and apartment four are good,” she said, “because they both have dishwashers.”

Allie used to live in a first-floor unit; Chris, that unit’s current occupant, recalled having had the opportunity, before moving in, to view still another on “one of the upper floors”—too big for just him. “That’s apartment four,” I said, as Chris began his description; a garage space that went with it had been of special interest. Ben, who lives on the third floor but used to have my unit, on top of his other preferences—like the one, with its bitter meaning for me, that that move had signaled—ventured that apartment four, though too expensive, was the best. (“I felt more secure in my situation, it’s just a nicer apartment, sorry,” he said. “I will tell you that when I moved upstairs my allergies suddenly got a whole lot better.”)

Which left only Megan—our most recent arrival. Though I asked her repeatedly, the current tenant of apartment four said she didn’t feel “any desire to live in any other than the one I’m in,” saying, “I like mine.”

There is, just inside the front door of our house, a black-and-white photo that shows the house. The image, mentioned by several of these tenants, is easy to love, I think for its suggestion of infinity. One day, before another move, I had the bright idea to “journal” about each “chapter” (“epoch”? “era”?) of my time where I’d been living: rooms I rented, my young men, every factor that gave texture to that period of my development. This was interesting as an idea, a good “idea” and not a “good idea,” not an idea that lent itself to execution. Still, if I were to do one of those for here—the Massachusetts town where I moved to be a student—I would be sure to make a note of the woman I saw approaching on foot, very close, where, at the side of my building, I happened to find her. I asked if I could help her. She was holding and all at once, with a flick of the wrist, liberated a brief length of already peeling blue-green paint. “Pretty color,” she said.

So there I was another evening, out on the porch with Vernon, my friend even if, as we discovered recently, each of us has long harbored in parallel, but paradoxically, a suspicion the other’s apartment is smaller; he called mine one of “the tinier ones.” A spring rain articulated smells of soil, wilted azaleas just outside the porch light’s focus barely lavender as dark fell. We were going to drink the last of the pastis I’d brought him the previous summer—a thank you for watering my plants—but it was cool and rainy and Vernon provided, instead, Pinot Noir. That sunset still was visible, in flashes, in Hank’s windows. “These are pretty solid plaster walls,” Hank, when I’d interviewed him, said; as he spoke I’d heard, loud and clear just over my left shoulder, Hank’s grandfather clock—like a plucked bow, not a plucked string, tolling some hour.

So it was that later, playing back the tape I’d made of Vernon describing a sort of distance that housemates did well, he thought, to calibrate in forming friendships—“to protect ourselves”—I was, strangely enough, surprised to hear a real roar of passing cars. I knew how loud the road could be where we all lived. I guess I had been able to forget.

Why had Alex moved away? I couldn’t ask him now.

But this was more or less what some of us did like about our building—in Megan’s words, “the intimacy of being around people without sharing deep knowledge of them.”

 

 

Jacqueline Feldman, a writer living in Massachusetts, is moving out.

My Strawberry Plants: On Marcottage

Alphonse du Breuil, Marcottage en serpenteaux, 1846. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, I read Virginia Woolf’s first published novel, The Voyage Out, for the first time. There, I made a discovery: it features a character named Clarissa Dalloway. This encounter initially provoked delight, surprise combined with double take, like bumping into someone I thought I knew well in a setting I never expected to find them, causing a brief mutual repositioning, physically, imaginatively. (Ah! So we’re both here? But if you’re here, where am I?) Then my feelings went strange. For some reason, I felt disgruntled, almost caught out: as if the world had been withholding something important from me. How was I only just now catching up on what—for so many readers—must be old news? Yes, there’s a Clarissa Dalloway in The Voyage Out. She’s married to Mr. Richard Dalloway: the couple have been stranded in Lisbon; they board the boat and the novel in chapter 3. She is a “tall, slight woman” with a habit of holding her head slightly to one side.

I was impressed by the boldness of this move: for Woolf to initiate a character in a minor role and then, years later, to return to her, to open out a whole novel from her private intentions and in this way continue her (Mrs. Dalloway was published a decade later, in 1925). It made me think of E. M. Forster’s two lectures on “character,” published in Aspects of the Novel in 1927. The first is titled “People.” The second: “People (continued).” Then I remembered why I’d had that “caught out,” “I should have known this” feeling: this same technique of novel-growth was also of great interest to Roland Barthes. In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in the late seventies, he named it marcottage.

It’s a horticultural term. A process of plant propagation, working for instance with trees or bushes. It involves bending one of the plant’s higher, flexible branches into the ground and fastening it there, a branch-part under the soil, to give it the time and energy to root. It was also, for Barthes, a method of novel composition, one practiced by Balzac, by Proust. In an article (translated in 2015 by Chris Turner) on the discoveries that initiated Proust’s writing In Search of Lost Time, Barthes defined the method as that “mode of composition by ‘enjambment,’ whereby an insignificant detail given at the beginning of the novel reappears at the end, as though it had grown, germinated, and blossomed.” The detail could be an object, a musical phrase, or the first mention of a character: the point is that it recurs, appearing again in a later volume, connecting several books of a life’s project—only that, each time, it is allocated a different amount of attention, provided with more or less space to develop (to grow). Marcottage. The plant example Barthes reached for to illustrate this in his lectures was the strawberry plant. Strawberries do it spontaneously, “asexually,” sending out long stems called runners from the “main,” or “mother,” plant. The runner touches the soil a small distance away, takes root there, and produces a new “daughter” plant. Together, the plants form a pair, eventually a network of mature plants, making it hard to distinguish daughters from mothers. The generative paths run backward as well as forward.

Marcottage could be a possible metaphor for translation. This work of provoking what plants, and perhaps also books, already know how to do, what in fact they most deeply want to do: actively creating the conditions for a new plant to root at some distance from the original, and there live separately: a “daughter-work” robust enough in its new context to throw out runners of its own, in unexpected directions, causing the network of interrelations to grow and complexify.

For me, marcottage is a way to make sense of my own translations of Barthes’s lecture courses. Officially, there have been two—two translations into English of two volumes of lecture notes published in French more than a decade ago: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together. But to my mind, there have really been four: two further books, translations in a more expanded sense. This Little Art, my long essay that stays close to Barthes’s late work, frequently citing it, renarrating it, making an adjacent space to keep thinking with it. And now my novel The Long Form, a book that borrows its title from The Preparation of the Novel and shares many preoccupations with How to Live Together: how, concretely, to live together; how to continue a relation with another person; how to continue a character and a prose work, to keep them all going at the levels of imagination, rhythm, accommodation, and composition; and how these different orders of question could be made to communicate with each other and shown to actually relate.

In a different way, The Long Form is also connected to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, if only in the remote sense that it is a novel that likewise unfolds over a single day. And then there is this thin, recently discovered line of attachment to The Voyage Out: when in Lisbon, the first Mrs. Dalloway visits Henry Fielding’s grave. She photographs it. There, she also “let[s] loose a small bird.” Jane Wheare, the editor of my Penguin edition, appends a note to this: “Henry Fielding (1707–54), the novelist, visited Portugal in the hope of regaining his health, but died at Lisbon. Woolf herself loosed a caged bird at Fielding’s grave on 8 April 1905.” A detail from life recurring in fiction (or, in the sequence of my own reading, a detail from fiction recurring in life), which sends me forward or back to The Long Form’s closest relative: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. A true “mother plant” in the sense that its compound structure, alternating “essay parts” with “fiction parts”, provided a template for my own.

While working on The Long Form, I came across a further reference to marcottage—this spontaneous strategy of plants presented as a potential writing technique. It’s in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and they are citing someone else: Carlos Castaneda. His passage is written as a set of instructions. In Brian Massumi’s translation, it reads like this:

Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours.

I received these instructions as though they were written for me. In my mind’s eye, I saw the old plant, the first, mother plant. I called it the morning: the start of an imagined day. (I looked up “devil’s weed,” or Datura stramonium, and learned that is an “invasive” plant of the nightshade family that has “frequently been employed in traditional medicine.” It also has hallucinogenic properties, “causing intense, sacred or occult visions.”) I then located the plant growing at the farthest possible point away from the source: to my mind, this was the evening, bedtime. I knew I wanted the novel to get there. So: I had this expanse between two points, this marked-out duration. But what about the in-between? What could happen, what would grow, what could be grown out of that long, narrow channel? And who decides? Me? Yes, the instructions seemed to be saying: It’s all yours. Between here and there—all of it, anything that falls in or shoots up, is yours. But also, not yours. For how could it be? The line is energizing for precisely the reason that it makes this bold, untenable claim on what it’s not possible for anyone to fully own: this unruly, self-directed, undirected growth. All these unexpected interplants seeded by someone or something else—assisted by pathways long furrowed by other forces and the collaborative work of the rain. In a note to her introduction to The Voyage Out, Wheare writes: “Woolf shared Henry James’s view that a novel ‘is more true to its character in proportion as it strains or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.’ ” On my street, a neighbor has placed a line of strawberry plants on her sunny step. Each plant is contained within its own small, plastic, basically impenetrable pot. Each plant is already overhanging its edges, throwing out shoots, reaching into the other’s earth.

 

Kate Briggs is the author of This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation, and the novel The Long Form, published this year by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Dorothy.

Lost and Found

The MTA lost and found. Photograph by Sophie Haigney.

I was thinking, recently, of a scene from the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The island of lost toys, I remembered, was a place in the North Pole where the stuffed bears and Hot Wheels cars and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from children’s lives ended up. They lived happily in their own colony, tinged only slightly with the sad shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to look up this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There is no island of lost toys. In the movie it is the island of misfit toys—all the more poignant, for the toys are not lost but abandoned, because they don’t quite belong. Children don’t want them and so they find one another. Eventually this odd cast of characters comes together to teach Rudolph a lesson about the beauty of being a misfit; as we all know, that particular story ends happily ever after. But if the misfits have found one another, where do the lost toys go?

That question sort of answers itself: they’re lost. They’re unaccounted for. There are some possible explanations. Perhaps that treasured stuffed lion, worn around the ears, was forgotten on the red banquette at an Italian restaurant where the child was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Perhaps it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “under the bed.” But even if these scenarios are plausible or true, they might be unverifiable, and so some things simply seem to be erased from earth. I lose things all the time—credit cards, keys, jackets, sunglasses, books, a necklace, two necklaces—actually, three necklaces, all of them gifts from people who loved me. Sometimes I joke that I practice nonattachment, the Buddhist thing, though the real explanation is that I am clumsy and careless. I do wonder where it is that my things have gone. I have always been bothered by this, so much so that it seems I invented and sustained a belief in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer where lost things might one day be restored.

I went a few weeks ago to the bowels of Penn Station. Squeezed underneath the A/C platform, behind a door decorated with colorful sketches of tennis rackets, cameras, basketballs, guitars, purses, light bulbs—all manner of cartoon odds and ends—is the MTA’s central lost and found. Normally, one sidles up to a glass window manned by an attendant and requests an item. If the item is there, you receive it and depart. Accompanied by Ron Young, who runs the New York City Transit lost and found and has been with the MTA for seventeen years, I was able to go behind the door. This area is the sort of purgatory where every single item that has been recovered from a New York City bus or subway is awaiting its possible return. On average, five to six hundred items come in each week.

In the front office, at desks with plastic dividers between them, four men and women were working in a way that I can only describe as methodical without even understanding the method. A man at the first desk was counting dollar bills. The woman behind him had sets of keys on her desk to be slipped into plastic sleeves along with identifying information. (Usually with keys there is none.) Someone else was typing into a massive spreadsheet.

Here is how the process usually works: someone forgets something on a bus or a train. Most commonly, it’s a wallet or a cell phone. It could be glasses, a book, a pair of shoes, X-rays, skis, a hat, a backpack, a banjo. These items are then found, usually by someone on the cleaning crew or a bus driver or a fellow passenger; they are catalogued on-site and packed into big burlap sacks, which are delivered weekly to the central lost and found. Upon arrival, the contents of each bag are reassessed (always by two people, Young tells me, so there can never be any questions of impropriety, of lost things gone doubly missing). The items are then broken down by category internally: Cash/Containing Cash, Wallets & IDs, Cell Phones, Large Items, and Miscellaneous. The front office—the men and women bent over the desks—make every attempt to find and contact the owner of the item. With a wallet, that’s often relatively easy. With sunglasses, nearly impossible. But every item is stored away, for varying lengths of time based on the object’s perceived value. (Some things get three months; others, three years.) If no one claims them—and most items do go unclaimed—they are then donated, auctioned off, or trashed. A different department takes care of that.

Young took me back to the area where the large items are stored. Strollers, tennis bags, a snowboard, a guitar in a case, a walker, a wheelchair, a Peppa Pig backpack, a Google gym bag. I wandered around for a while, taking notes, looking at the stuff. It was nothing special, really: not quite a junkyard feel, more like the storage closet behind a high school gym. There were curiosities which Young and others pointed out: old-school prosthetic legs, jumbled in a bin; a scale for weighing drugs; a vintage ammunition case; a bag full of old dentures. (Similar dentures had apparently recently been reclaimed.) And then umbrella after umbrella after umbrella.

At the end of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, the narrator, Ruth, and her aunt Sylvie burn down their house—disordered, decaying, packed to the brim with relics and junk—rather than leave their possessions behind. Robinson writes:

For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams, and many household things are of purely sentimental value, like the dim coil of thick hair, saved from my grandmother’s girlhood, which was kept in a hatbox on top of the wardrobe, along with my mother’s gray purse. In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are transformed into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned.

This image always returns to me—the near violence Ruth experiences when these things lose their quality of memory and become “pure object.” I had a feeling, in the fluorescence of this basement, that we were in the land of pure object here.

We passed through the area devoted to smaller electronics. Thousands of cell phones were stored in old-school filing cabinets, grouped by the date of retrieval. Some were kept in a kind of cage, packaged together in plastic so that they formed a brick-like stack, iPhone on top of iPhone on top of iPhone. Ringtones and alarms were periodically going off, little chimes and blaring tones, some endlessly ringing like an out-of-whack ice cream truck. Young said he often marveled at their battery life, the way these phones could stay alive for months and months after they’d been found, since no one was using them day-to-day. Paradoxically, locked cell phones are one of the hardest items to trace—“black iPhone” is entirely useless as an identifier, Young told me, even if someone does take the trouble to call and request theirs back. Looking at these stacks of phones—most likely long since replaced by people like me who can’t last more than a day or two without one—and listening to them ringing out in a sort of half life, it was hard not to feel a little dispirited. The island of lost toys was more dejected than I’d imagined, the losses more final or interchangeable; after all, we replace our things all the time, without thinking much of the old ones. Most lost things simply don’t get found.

There are upbeat narratives that come out of the lost and found, though, the kind that often make for local news stories. Someone left their wedding dress on a train, and a woman in the front office thought to trace it to the dry cleaner whose tags were still on it. An urn of pet ashes, recently, was traced to a cemetery in Wisconsin, and eventually made its way back to the grateful owners. As we walked back toward the front, I was introduced to Veronica Santana, who’d recently made the local news because she had helped trace a naval aviation ID card of a World War II veteran back to his daughter, months after it had been left on the train. (The daughter had been bringing it to a special showing of Top Gun: Maverick for veterans.) And then of course there are wallets, driver’s licenses, backpacks, that are constantly and quietly being returned to their owners—a headache or a major crisis resolved for someone somewhere.

Ron Young told me that in more than ten years, they’ve never lost an item in the system after it’s been turned in, even as they’re storing ten thousand or more items at a time. This is sort of remarkable if you think about it, this vast bureaucratic system of tracking lostness, and all these exercises in keeping and care. There is something religious about all of this, something Christian, I really mean, even though it’s probably, certainly blasphemous to think about worldly possessions like that. But I am imagining little resurrection stories, just as I imagined my island of lost things—these objects restored to a kind of life when reunited with their owners. In this light of disinterested scrutiny, the bag of vintage golf clubs can be nothing but a set of clubs, green bag, not the newest model; their story has come to a kind of end. But actually perhaps it has been redirected here: in their path from intake to cataloguing to storage, these clubs take on a new and poignant set of possibilities. Return, renewal—unlikely but possible. What better fate for anything, or for anyone for that matter, than to be once lost and then found again?

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, “Not Good” Writing

Shuets Udono, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one.

This second group, of course, is absolutely right in its analysis; what’s funny (and, if I can teach them anything, reversible) about their judgment is that it is these very elements (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard’s work so brilliant. Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre. If his personae are split, multiplied, dispersed, this is because they are true subjects of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity—ones for whom identification, if it is to amount to anything more than a consoling fiction, must come through man’s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not in the degrading chains of logic but instead, with rage and ecstatic torment, in the virulence of his own phantasms.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present—in, for example, Empire of the Sun, which is digestible enough for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation—is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Ballard’s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel’s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island is glaring, as (I’d say) is that in Crash of Tristram Shandy, with its fascination for speeding mechanized land yachts and the springs of broken carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby’s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of conflict. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote, with its hero’s obsessive reenactments on the public highways of iconic moments from popular entertainment, the triumphs and tragedies of those late-medieval movie stars, knights-errant. And doesn’t the same propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run through Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading through Bloom’s mind as he drifts into sleep? Doesn’t the same technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad’s bomb-carrying Professor, whose “thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction”? We could drag the literary cursor forward, through Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker—or, indeed, all the way back to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted wooden horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.

Ballard’s intelligence (and I use that term in its dual sense of intellectual capacity and source/input feed or “intel”) is expanded, encompassing a field comprising not just literature but also visual art (most notably the work of the Surrealists), cinema, psychoanalysis, sociology, and technological invention. Given his much-repeated claim that facts, real-world events, and ever-more-pervasive media are taking over from fiction, it seems high time that his own copious nonfiction output should be gathered together and laid bare to the same scrutiny—even if he would have rejected the distinction. Here, no less than in the novels, we’re treated, on repeat, to the forging of connections that, utterly counterintuitive though they may be, leap out like lightning flashes in their ineluctable lucidity: from the Wright brothers to the contraceptive pill via “the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat”; or from Hitler to the aforementioned Bloom via their common diet of the half-digested reference library, “vague artistic yearnings and clap-trap picked up from popular magazines.” And here, no less than in the novels, Ballard cements his place as one of English prose’s finest lyricists, conjuring from “the plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor” an image of “the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands”; sounding the desolate immensity of Spain’s Río Seco, “the great deck of the drained river running inland, crossed by the white span of a modern motor bridge” beyond which extend “secret basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms, models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth” while “juke-boxes play in the bars of Benidorm” and “the molten sea swallows the shadow of the Guardia Civil helicopter”; or (most haunting of all) affirming in a credo that, should I ever become supreme spiritual leader of a postrevolutionary Britain, I will institute as the prime text of national liturgy, replacing the defunct Lord’s Prayer:

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

 

Adapted from the foreword to J. G. Ballard’s Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007, edited by Mark Blacklock, to be published by MIT Press in October.

Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. 

J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing

Shuets Udono, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one.

This second group, of course, is absolutely right in its analysis; what’s funny (and, if I can teach them anything, reversible) about their judgment is that it is these very elements (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard’s work so brilliant. Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre. If his personae are split, multiplied, dispersed, this is because they are true subjects of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity—ones for whom identification, if it is to amount to anything more than a consoling fiction, must come through man’s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not in the degrading chains of logic but instead, with rage and ecstatic torment, in the virulence of his own phantasms.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present—in, for example, Empire of the Sun, which is digestible enough for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation—is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Ballard’s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel’s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island is glaring, as (I’d say) is that in Crash of Tristram Shandy, with its fascination for speeding mechanized land yachts and the springs of broken carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby’s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of conflict. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote, with its hero’s obsessive reenactments on the public highways of iconic moments from popular entertainment, the triumphs and tragedies of those late-medieval movie stars, knights-errant. And doesn’t the same propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run through Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading through Bloom’s mind as he drifts into sleep? Doesn’t the same technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad’s bomb-carrying Professor, whose “thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction”? We could drag the literary cursor forward, through Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker—or, indeed, all the way back to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted wooden horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.

Ballard’s intelligence (and I use that term in its dual sense of intellectual capacity and source/input feed or “intel”) is expanded, encompassing a field comprising not just literature but also visual art (most notably the work of the Surrealists), cinema, psychoanalysis, sociology, and technological invention. Given his much-repeated claim that facts, real-world events, and ever-more-pervasive media are taking over from fiction, it seems high time that his own copious nonfiction output should be gathered together and laid bare to the same scrutiny—even if he would have rejected the distinction. Here, no less than in the novels, we’re treated, on repeat, to the forging of connections that, utterly counterintuitive though they may be, leap out like lightning flashes in their ineluctable lucidity: from the Wright brothers to the contraceptive pill via “the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat”; or from Hitler to the aforementioned Bloom via their common diet of the half-digested reference library, “vague artistic yearnings and clap-trap picked up from popular magazines.” And here, no less than in the novels, Ballard cements his place as one of English prose’s finest lyricists, conjuring from “the plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor” an image of “the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands”; sounding the desolate immensity of Spain’s Río Seco, “the great deck of the drained river running inland, crossed by the white span of a modern motor bridge” beyond which extend “secret basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms, models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth” while “juke-boxes play in the bars of Benidorm” and “the molten sea swallows the shadow of the Guardia Civil helicopter”; or (most haunting of all) affirming in a credo that, should I ever become supreme spiritual leader of a postrevolutionary Britain, I will institute as the prime text of national liturgy, replacing the defunct Lord’s Prayer:

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

 

Adapted from the foreword to J. G. Ballard’s Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007, edited by Mark Blacklock, to be published by MIT Press in October.

Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. 

W Stands for W

The W Hotel, Barcelona. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When I was first hired as a bartender by the W Hotel in Seattle, the brand was still owned by Starwood, an indistinct consolidated corporation that has since been subsumed into the ravenous belly known as Marriott. There was a lengthy process involved in getting the job. I interviewed twice: once in the HR office and then a second time downstairs with the manager of the hotel restaurant and lounge. After being hired, I attended a mandatory, introductory eight-hour job training that was quite similar to the one I’d experienced prior to beginning a regrettable stint at Starbucks. I was stuffed into a room with about twenty other new hires—everything from housekeepers to sous-chefs to servers to maintenance workers—and we were each inundated with Starwood history. Starwood business policies. Starwood subsidiary family trees.

We watched videos. We read dense packets filled with glowing customer surveys and reviews. We broke into small groups, and we were quizzed about the things that we learned. We won prizes—Starwood-engraved keychains, W Seattle pens, and the like—for each answer we got right. These gifts would be tossed about the room by the two HR workers who gave these training sessions, and they would clap with absurd enthusiasm each time. Their gusto was on brand with that of a game-show host or some seasoned motivational speaker as they shouted into their blouse-pinned microphones.

“And you get a prize!”

“And YOU get a prize!”

As when I worked at Starbucks, the oddest portion of this arduous training session had to do with language. There were particular ways in which we were trained to speak, both with patrons and coworkers. Example: The elevator isn’t an elevator, it is “the lift.” The bathroom or restroom is neither, it is “the WC.” Even our various job titles were sometimes tied up in this peculiar rebranding. Maître d’s were “W insiders,” room attendants were “W stylists,” and maintenance workers were “W engineers.” The dishwashers were still dishwashers, and the bartenders were still bartenders, and the chefs were still chefs—though there was still that portentous prefix, W, that was always present to remind you that this job wasn’t just like any other job. This was a job at the W.

“But what, exactly, does the W stand for?” someone inevitably inquired, pausing in their vigorous note-taking, in their Starwood-embossed notepad, with their hot pink W Seattle pen.

“We are so HAPPY that you asked!” the game-show hosts from HR exclaimed—and jumped up and down. And then, they took turns speaking, alternating one after the other, as if this were some odd, obsessively rehearsed performance that they had been eagerly waiting to unleash.

“W stands for WOW!”

“W stands for WISTFUL!”

“W stands for WHIMSICAL!”

“W stands for WONDERFUL!”

“But more than anything …”

In unison now, pointing at all of us like we were meant to sing along, ending on a line that seemed vacant of meaning altogether:

“W STANDS FOR W!”

***

As a newly hired bartender for the W, the first step began with uniform (designer jeans, fitted black button-down) and extended to everything from mixing lavish cocktails to serving high-priced meals. But we were more than just bartenders, remember: we were W bartenders. Not only did I need to do everything that a normal bartending gig required, I also had to aim for something extraordinary in the lives of my customers—something that would really Wow them. Sometimes this meant recommending things that only a Seattle local would know about, like taking the foot ferry to West Seattle for a weekday lunch on the beach or dining at a hidden local restaurant on the quiet north end of Capitol Hill. Sometimes it meant phoning across town for an uncommon spirit or a wine that a customer wanted and having an overeager brand rep deliver it to our front door. But this is a customer philosophy that exists in any brand of high-end service, and it was a detail of the job that I was more than happy to deliver. I liked to make people feel happy and appreciated. And I was, for the most part, proud of where I worked and what I did.

Starwood was—I must admit, when I was first hired there—one of the better corporations that I’d ever worked for. Healthcare packages were generous and affordable and had relatively low deductibles. There was an employer-match commitment for contributions to retirement, and low-risk stock investment options. Employee discounts for Starwood-brand hotels were likewise very generous, sometimes shockingly so, and one could routinely secure drastically reduced rates for rooms at even high-end properties around the world. One of my coworkers at the time, whose brother worked for a major airline, took such advantage of this particular perk that the two of them frequently tag-teamed airfare and lodging benefits, paying little more than taxes and processing fees for trips to places like Paris, Bangkok, Oslo, and New York City.

But the W itself was still a strange, strange place. Everything was about “brand identity,” and managers were always neurotically preoccupied with doing things to reinforce our not-like-the-other-hotels trendiness. We hired DJs to spin house music during lunch on weekdays and brunch over the weekends. We served meals on narrow wood planks. And every year, around Thanksgiving, we erected some truly bizarre monstrosity in the middle of the lobby and were told that it would be our W Christmas tree.

One year, this “tree” was a tentacled mess of pink and yellow fluorescent string with an elongated, pulsing white strobe in its center. Another, it was a series of circular glass sheets, in total maybe one hundred of them, which were layered like a cake from base to peak and made me think of a tornado. Then there were the mirrored boxes filled with mirrored balls, stacked like presents, and crowned, where the angel might normally go, with a blinding, neon pink W.

In retrospect, I suspect that all this was a selling point when it came to the Starwood portfolio and to Marriott’s decision, ultimately, to purchase it. Prior to the merger between these two companies, Marriott didn’t have trendy properties; they were the no-frills business brand. They were the hotel you stayed at when you had a conference on a Monday and Tuesday before you flew out early Wednesday morning. They had no hotel trendy enough to have the nerve sufficient to erect a precariously leaning tower of glass and call it a tree—so this tree, and everything it stood for, was what Marriott International, Inc. wanted for Christmas.

In celebration of the historic Starwood-Marriott marriage, it was announced that a three-day celebration would be hosted by a W hotel somewhere in the world so that all the eclectic W eccentricities could be brazenly on display. All the bigwigs would be invited: general managers, regional directors, international overseers; and because our hotel was one of the original hotels in the W brand, and because we had recently undergone a significant and distinct renovation, the W Seattle was selected as the location for the weekend reception.

***

The entire hotel was tirelessly entrenched for the weeks leading up to the celebration. The cooks designed and redesigned countless rainbow-colored hors d’oeuvres and entrées, served on leather, clay, and latex. The managers paced the lobby, trailed by an army of W engineers, pointing to this or that couch or chair and moving it slightly to the right or somewhere out of sight in the basement. And the bartenders created cocktail after cocktail, encouraged again and again by supervisors to “really let loose with these. Experiment. WOW us!”

In some ways, it was like being written a blank check. As a bartender, especially when you work for a larger business, you’re generally expected to do things a certain way, over and over again; rarely can you deviate from a predetermined formula. In our hospitality microcosm, this was like landing a Guggenheim fellowship or a MacArthur grant. Pour costs, food costs, money, was no longer of concern. We could experiment and create without any restrictions.

“Yeah, okay,” we smirked. But we crafted elaborate, absurd concoctions. We layered amaros and ports in medicine vials. We strained purple-and-pink spirits into empty salt-and-pepper shakers. A particularly memorable drink from this period of unadulterated Whimsy involved the hollowed-out carcass of an Anaheim pepper, filled with blanco tequila, pineapple and strawberry shrub, a touch of salt, and a splash of champagne. I’m not sure how we propped the pepper up. I think it was sort of corkscrewed into a Mason jar filled with dyed seashells.

Two days before the big weekend, a cartoonish character with a job title like manager of magnificence or ambassador of amazing checked into the hotel unannounced and immediately began to survey the scene. He critiqued everything from the fur-upholstered furniture to the dining room’s stark, minimalistic design. Soon, he made his way to the food and drinks. He sniffed and then dumped a viscous and fluorescent cocktail directly into a spotless sink. He spat out an amuse-bouche in disgust. Constructive criticism is one thing; across-the-board dismissal is another. Normally, I would have been offended by somebody telling me that every drink I made them was awful, that everything coming out of the kitchen was garbage. But it was hard to take the guy very seriously.

“This is all wrong!” He tugged at his pin-striped pajama bottoms and rolled up the sleeves of his yellow corduroy bomber jacket. Then he ran his fingers through his bleached mohawk. “Look at yourselves! This will be a disaster if you don’t step it up.”

Almost everything that we had come up with as a hotel was scrapped. New furniture was wheeled in. Lighting was accented with blue and purple and yellow wherever possible. And our menu, insofar as the bar and kitchen staff had drafted it, was reenvisioned. All with the director of disappointment peering always over our collective shoulders.

The obsessive director was not an anomaly in corporate culture, though he was, certainly, an extreme. I had seen many like him before—people whose entire job description is to go from property to property and find things wrong with them, or, as he might put it, ways to optimize. But the trouble with this common corporate philosophy is that sometimes there isn’t really anything wrong. Some of the most beloved, successful restaurants and bars exist for years, decades, generations, simply because they don’t change. And some of the finest recipes—in food and drink—are astounding in their simplicity. The Negroni has three equal parts: Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin. Béchamel, essentially, consists of butter, flour, and milk. That corner restaurant that is still standing, and thriving, and that you love so much, they do it because that same dish you fell in love with several years ago is still just the way you remember it. And it’s still the same because it is perfect just the way it is.

But try telling that to the commandant of change.

We did as we were told. And when the three-day extravaganza began, the hotel looked like a demented peacock: shockingly colorful, shrieking shrill music, posing however possible.

The top-tier management from Marriott were collectively delighted. They slurped the gold-dusted oysters with champagne mignonette. They sipped their steel horns filled with an otherworldly blend of cucumber soda and Chartreuse. And they paused one after another to deliberate over the “meaning” of a mural above their cocktail tables depicting a creature who was half octopus, half fighter jet.

Our chief critic remained apprehensive, though he would retract his hand at times when he instinctually reached out to identify another glaring fault. Instead, he zipped up his lambskin jacket with gold-studded shoulder pads, straightened his spine, and gulped a tincture of sparkling wine and caviar, coughing as he finished.

***

After the congratulations were imparted, and the illustrious three-day event was through, we settled back into something resembling normalcy. Over-the-top drinks, but not so absurdly over-the-top. Over-the-top food, but not served by people wearing embroidered gloves or on dishes forged with seal bones. It felt like waking after a frenetic night of fever dreams or some epic night of partying: the staff in a daze; all of us moving a little slower than usual, regaining our bearings one drink or food order or new customer at a time. Eventually, I mixed someone something mundane like a Manhattan or a cosmopolitan, and when nobody shouted at me to serve it in a jeweled goblet or to garnish it with a lit sparkler, I breathed a long sigh of relief.

But when the fiscal year drew to a close, we soon discovered other unfortunate changes as Marriott employees. Our healthcare plans became less generous and comprehensive. And it was rare now to secure significant hotel discounts in any destination, domestic or abroad, and when you did it was usually at an affordable property: almost never at any of the luxury lines.

As much as we were told that we would remain the same W property, the Marriott powers that be couldn’t resist making some changes to the restaurant and bar menus as well. Our mostly locally sourced beer-and-wine list was largely exchanged with the same boring selections that populate every other Marriott-property menu. The kitchen stopped seeking out local, high-quality meat and produce in the same way, and suddenly the menu was inundated with many of the same generic sorts of things that you will find at every standard business hotel in every city in America.

What remained was the shell. The veneer of W. We could no longer keep good people in the kitchen, because the pay was poor and the work was boring. But that beef patty puck on our once-delectable burger was still presented on that same wooden plank. My coworker could no longer tag-team discount rates and globe-trot to wherever he and his brother wished to go, but now he could shrug and admit that there were—technically—more properties in the world where he could stay. I could no longer tell my friends and family that I had amazing healthcare, “even as a bartender!” But I could still tell them that I was insured.

One evening, I had to tell a regular who spent a lot of money at our property that we were out of all his favorite wines because of changes to our menu and distributors, and his exasperated sigh, the way he shook his head, will always stay with me. We’ve all felt this way before, I think, when corporations consolidate to expand their profit margins and businesses we like suffer the consequences. It’s not just that things change and that one has to adjust to something new. It is that things change, almost uniformly, for the worse: to the detriment of regular people; to the benefit of corpulent corporations.

From what I gathered from the staff who were hired after the merger, the HR training sessions remained largely the same. It was still W this and W that. Except, now, the notepads were embroidered with the word Marriott rather than Starwood. There was still the same song and dance of corporate history, but now it was largely the story of the Marriott family tree, with the W hanging like window dressing. HR kept up their enthusiasm, regardless, from what I heard. There were still quizzes. Gift giveaways.

“And you get a prize!”

“And YOU get a prize!”

But I like to imagine a different version of this routine, replacing a lot of what I was told in that training meeting with the colder, corporate truth. I imagine that HR duo, with their robotic smiles and blouse-pinned microphones, posturing like old times, only to say something like “Try not to get sick while you work here!” before admitting that thousands of Marriott employees were, in fact, at that exact moment, on strike in several major cities around the country. They demanded fair pay. Protection against sexual harassment. Decent health care. They wanted that Wow! that the W, and other properties, promised them. And they wanted it Now!

“But what, exactly, does the W stand for?” someone would inevitably inquire, pausing their vigorous note-taking in their flimsy Marriott notepad with their faded pink W Seattle pencil.

“We are so HAPPY that you asked!” The game-show hosts from HR would exclaim and jump about. And then they would launch into their familiar, fatigued refrain, their list of all the wondrous adjectives and positive connotations that the letter W apparently stood for all at the same time. But here I imagine them reaching the end of this strange tautology, and something suddenly occurring to them for perhaps the first or the thousandth time as their postures soften and their smiles fade: that a letter means nothing, inherently; that a corporation will never own nor mass-produce sincere human emotions; that to believe a W stands for anything, besides being an arbitrary character, is both bizarre and inane.

Still, they will lean forward, their eyes laden with lethargy.

“But more than anything …”

All together now.

“W STANDS FOR W!”

 

Stephen Haines is an M.F.A. graduate of Western Washington University and the former managing editor of Bellingham Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Los Angeles Review, Invisible City, Pacifica Literary Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle.