The Paris Review's Blog, page 58

Daniel Mason, Marta Figlerowicz, and Malachi Black Recommend

From Zdeněk Miler’s “Krtek a maminka.”

Guild loyalty says I should probably choose a work of fiction for my favorite recent book, but I’m not sure that anyone, with the exception of Octavia Butler, could serve up as glorious a museum of the unimaginable as Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney do in Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species. Have you ever seen a spongilla fly cocoon (silk lozenge haloed in a lacy mesh of bridal finery)? How about neatly-ranged eggs laid by a katydid along a blade of grass? I had thought myself well-versed in the range of parasitic terrors until I saw the work of a mummy wasp upon a sphinx moth caterpillar. And leaf miners! When my mortal hour is up, I will look back and see my life divided into the half when I hadn’t known labyrinths like the ones they make existed, and the one after I came to understand that they are everywhere.  

I came to this book when no amount of googling could solve the mystery of who had made the particularly stylized set of tunnels I kept finding on downed poplar in the woods, carved in a pattern I can best describe as a cross between fine hatchet marks, the grooves on a music-box cylinder, morse code, alien messages, and the exuberant scribblings of a child who has discovered the letter i but has only a single sheet of paper. “Dotted insect lines on poplar logs,” “wood beetle straight lines dots poplar,” “straight lines wood downed tree”—try them, they will lead you nowhere. Except they did lead me to Eiseman and Charney’s book. Oh, the pleasure of realizing that something bound can deliver what the internet cannot! Tracks & Sign had a gallery of insect carpentry to choose from. While they didn’t highlight the poplar chiseler I was looking for (I would later learn it was a shipworm—one of those wonderful instances when natural history suggests a deep human history as well), by then it didn’t matter. A great nature e-book both orders the world and leaves one with the sense of a vastness far beyond one’s self. This one does both …

—Daniel Mason, author of “ A Case Study ”

Shortly after World War II, Czechoslovakia became a leading producer and exporter of LSD. In the sixties, the CIA accused the Czechoslovak government of smuggling LSD to America to corrupt its flower youth. The CIA’s own experiments with both acid and infiltrating American communities with illegal drugs are now well-known. But Czechoslovakia’s government, and their scientists, didn’t see acid as a weapon: they advocated for the drug’s therapeutic—and, notably, aesthetic—benefits. Between the mid-fifties and the late seventies, governmental agencies openly and freely distributed LSD to Czechoslovakia’s creative communities, believing that tripping on acid would lead to better, bolder art. 

I cannot prove that groundbreaking early Czech animators like Zdeněk Smetana, Jiří Trnka, and Zdeněk Miler benefited from these policies, but I prefer to believe they did. Their short animations have a trippy, dreamlike quality that makes them enjoyable for adults even though most were originally made for children. My kids watch them on YouTube with a combination of confusion and recognition: these early animations have inspired many latter-day artists across the world, including the creators of Steven Universe. 

If you’re looking to introduce yourself or your loved ones to golden-age Czech animation, Miler’s Krtek is the obvious place to start. First shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1957, these cartoons about a little mole are permanently burned into the collective unconscious of my generation of Eastern Europeans. Voiced by Miler’s daughters, Krtek yelps and coos at the world like a toddler but navigates his environments with surprising competence. In an episode entitled “Krtek a maminka” (The little mole and the mother), Krtek delivers a rabbit’s three babies after officiating her marriage to a besotted fellow bunny. Miler depicts the logistics of birth-giving with a matter-of-factness that scandalized my twelve-year-old. “Is that the rabbit’s vagina opening?” Oh yes, it is. 

—Marta Figlerowicz, Olga Tokarczuk’s interviewer for The Art of Fiction No. 258

When rummaging through the vast thrift store of history, one’s hand sometimes lands on the sublime. One of my more sustaining finds has been Plotinus, the third-century Roman Egyptian philosopher whose Enneads now lie mostly dormant in the library stacks. He writes: “the Kosmos moves, seeking everything … this very motion is its eternal attainment … the Soul is ceaselessly leading the Kosmos towards itself.”

—Malachi Black, author of “ Holding a Book I Haven’t Read in Many Years ”

Selling to the Strand: A Conversation with Larry Campbell

Photograph by Troy Schipdam.

In nearly eight years of working at the Strand, I’ve become friends with many of the regulars who sell books to the store. Overseen by the Strand’s late owner, Fred Bass, until his death in 2018, our buying desk has always been known as a place to make a quick buck. For some, though, it has become a way to make a living.

Larry Campbell, now seventy-two, has been selling books to the Strand since the early nineties. He was once one of the few people we could count on seeing Monday through Saturday, sometimes multiple times a day. Over the past few years, Larry has come by less frequently, and with far fewer books , but he has always been a welcome character, soft-spoken and kind, at the fast-paced and sometimes tense atmosphere of the buying desk. Here, he discusses his life in New York, and how he got started selling books. This interview—part of an ongoing series of conversations with people who resell books in the city—was conducted across the street from Strand in September 2019.

—Troy Schipdam

 

INTERVIEWER

How did you start selling books?

LARRY CAMPBELL

Back in the early nineties, I had a table in the Village, on Sixth Avenue. I would get books and magazines from apartment buildings—I had good relationships with the supers and property managers. I made a lot of money off that shit. I found out that the foreign fashion magazines—the really big ones—would go for a hundred dollars, sometimes more. I had people coming to me from FIT, NYU, Parsons, Pratt. You know how I got put onto that? I had my table, and I just happened to run into this guy who said to me, “Hey, man, I need all the fashion magazines you can gather up. My daughter goes to art school and she needs all different types. You can make some money, man!”

So I did. He called his daughter, and she came by and brought about a hundred dollars’ worth of magazines. Then what she did was tell her friends, and they all came. I said to myself, Wait, I might have something here. I started walking around grabbing all the fashion magazines I could find: Mademoiselle, Vogue, old Vogues, all the Vogues. That’s when the money started coming in. My table used to be full of women—nothing but women. On the weekend, I would bring scissors with me, and let them cut what they wanted out from the magazines. They still paid me full price. I would tell them they didn’t have to do that and they’d say, “Nah, nah, nah, you’re out here, we want you to make a living.” All right, fine!

Then I ran into an old dude who was like, “Yo, if you find any books, instead of selling them out here you should take them to Strand.” At that time I wasn’t homeless. My mom was alive, my pop was alive, everything was going good. 

INTERVIEWER

Where did you live back then?

CAMPBELL

I lived in the Bronx—143rd Street and 3rd Avenue, in the Patterson Projects. That’s where I grew up. I hung out with all the ball players. A lot of guys in my neighborhood made it and went pro. The most famous one was Nate Archibald. 

INTERVIEWER

No shit! Really?

CAMPBELL

Yeah, Tiny Archibald. We used to play together in neighborhood tournaments. You learn a lot when you’re around guys that go on to play for Michigan, Rutgers, and all that.

I had some problems in school, but my marks were always good. I did good in school. But I wanted to play ball, you know? As the years go on you get better, your game elevates. It’s a matter of practice. I was getting good at that. Then I fucked my knee up when I was at City College and I couldn’t do that anymore. My knee went out, it just blew out. 

INTERVIEWER

What did you study at City College?

CAMPBELL

You know how you take all these liberal arts courses to find out which thing you want to do? I thought I wanted to do computers, but I said, Man, this shit’s boring—I don’t wanna be stuck with this. You’re just sitting in a fucking office all day. It’s not what it’s chalked up to be. 

I worked for Chase Bank after I graduated, in the seventies. The last job I had, I was working for a company called Unisys. It taught me how to deal with people, how to talk—speech training and all that. They used to send me out to give speeches, like marketing. Once they learned I could speak well, they really took advantage of that. They used to send me out to sell computers. I did pretty good at that—better than I thought. But, you know how marketing is—it’s not easy. You really gotta sell yourself, to sell someone else’s stuff. I got to meet a lot of important people—you meet beautiful women and all that. But that, also, was boring. 

That was in my thirties. I was married then—my girl was from Bayamón, Puerto Rico. That didn’t last long. Well, it lasted long enough. But we left on good terms. I learned a lot, she learned a lot. And that’s that.

INTERVIEWER

Was the Strand the first place you tried selling books to?

CAMPBELL

Yeah. I met the owner, Fred Bass, the first day I came in here. I found a bunch of art books around New York Hospital on Sixty-Eighth Street. It was a summer day—it was hot. At that time they didn’t have MetroCards, so nobody was swiping you in. I found two crates, stuffed cardboard in them to keep the books safe, and dragged them all the way down here. I was soaking with sweat. By the time I got here, I was drenched. 

So I went in, and Fred said, “Oh my God, what happened to you?” I told him what I did, and he said, “Don’t you ever do that again—you’ll give yourself a heart attack. If you ever find books like these again, call me. You take a cab, we’ll pay for it.” That’s how me and Fred started to get tight. He was impressed that I’d got all these books that they wanted—and they wanted them all.

Whenever I came in looking like that, Fred would give me money to buy something to drink, buy something to eat. He’d look at me and ask, “You all right?” 

INTERVIEWER

Why did you start selling books full-time?

CAMPBELL

I got tired of all the people down by the table, when I was selling magazines. They were stealing stuff—my stuff would always go missing. What really did it was this one guy I had to beat up. I didn’t beat him too bad, because I knew the cops would be like, “You’re going to jail, Larry.” I knew what he did was wrong, and I was running up Sixth Avenue after him with a pipe in my hand, but I couldn’t hit him with no damn pipe.

I was tired of that. I said, I’m just gonna start selling all my shit at the Strand. You shoulda seen the money I used to make. I would just keep coming with those art books. I would make out every day with three hundred to four hundred dollars. I forgot about the magazines—even though I made money off that, I liked this better. But the internet messed that up. I still find good books, but it’s nowhere near that kind of money now.

INTERVIEWER

Where do you get your books from?

CAMPBELL

People throw them out, people die. To be honest with you, the best books I’ve found are from people who died. Older people have the best shit. They have all this stuff and then the family doesn’t want it, so they throw it out. And I learned quick what was worth it. I learned from Neil Winokur, one of the buyers who used to be at the Strand. Nobody liked Neil, but I liked him. I had this book one time, and I thought it was messed up, tattered, like somebody threw paint on it. I was gonna throw it out, but I brought it here, and it was worth it. Neil saw it and told me, “What you have here is worth a lot of money.” I went upstairs to the rare book room, and Richard Devereaux, another buyer, told me what it was worth. They gave me fifteen hundred dollars. They sold the fucking book that same day! They must have sold it for forty-five hundred, maybe more.

And then I did it again! I had some book that looked like an accounting ledger—Richard picked it right out of the pile. There was a lady that came in every day, and he said she was always looking for it. Well, she didn’t have to look no more—Larry’s got it.

INTERVIEWER

I remember once when I was working, another seller—it was Neil Harrison—walked in and asked Fred for seventy-five dollars so he could buy a DVD player. I think this was right when he got his own place. Fred just said, “Whatever,” and gave him the seventy-five bucks.

CAMPBELL

Well, Fred probably took that money out from what Neil brought in. You gotta pay it back. That’s what you gotta understand—you don’t get this shit for free.

You know something? It all worked out all right. It was good back then, but we knew that it was gonna end. Fred got sick. He couldn’t handle coming in anymore, and he died not long after. And after that it all started to change.

In a way, I’m kind of glad that time ended. I couldn’t borrow money anymore, but that was okay, because I was borrowing too much money and not bringing in books like I used to. I got in over my head, money-wise. One time I owed Fred six hundred dollars. But, by some luck, I found a bunch of good books and paid it all back in one shot, so I never really got in any trouble for that. Now that’s luck. Where did I get all those books from? Once again, dead people. I better thank God for those dead people.

I was having fun then, but now’s what happens when the fun runs out.

INTERVIEWER

It’s not fun anymore?

CAMPBELL

Not like it used to be. Still better than a lot of shit I could be doing. I’m just lucky that I know what I’m doing. Some people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. I can see it when they come through the buying-desk door.

A lot of us go hunting at the same time. Sometimes I see them uptown—we’re out in the same area hunting. Luckily we all find shit. Think about it—all of us in the same area? How does one make money? Sometimes we’re arguing, “Oh, you’re in my spot.” It is what it is. If you get it, you get it.

INTERVIEWER

Do the supers in the buildings ask for a cut of the money?

CAMPBELL

Some of them do. They’re not allowed to—you could get fired for that. This one super, he heard about the money you could make, and he would just come to the Strand himself. But, like I said, he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. He came in hot, and Fred had to tell him, “These aren’t books, these are magazines.” He would argue, and Fred would throw him out. 

I remember one guy came in with books that were all messed up. Neil Winokur said, “We’re not taking these.” I could tell they were all fucked up—no way they’d take them. The guy got mad and said, “That’s not fair!” You know what Neil did? He came out from behind the counter, picked them up, and threw them across the street. That shit was so funny, man.

INTERVIEWER

What’s worse, selling in the summer or the winter?

CAMPBELL

Winter. Winter’s bad. But, to remedy that, you’ve got to have connections. You got to have people looking out, people to hold this, hold that.

INTERVIEWER

What do you do after you haul books around all day?

CAMPBELL

I take it easy! After that I’m all worn out. That’s a lot of wear and tear on the body going up hills—there’s nothing but hills in Manhattan! You go up one hill, then there’s another one. It’s like a project! I have this heavy-ass shopping cart—I can’t handle it all, man. And these carts, they’re heavy as shit. They start turning on their own. And you got these people that don’t know how to walk—I can run them over! What are they doing? Do you see how heavy this cart is? You’re going to try to run and cut in front of me? Then, if you get hit, you’re gonna blame me. That’s not right. Come on, man. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever wish you stuck with the Chase people instead of doing this?

CAMPBELL

No. You know what I wish? I wish I’d stuck with Unisys. I could have retired there. But I was getting high, all kinds of crazy shit. Partying too much. I got carried away. Women and drugs. Hanging out every day. It was crazy—I was off the chain. 

But what’s happening to me now, living out here—that happened because my mom ended up dying. It broke me down. I couldn’t handle it. I lost it. You think you could handle a thing like that, but you don’t know shit until you go through it. It’s funny how you’re still able to function, despite all that.

Then I had to watch my pa go—that fucked me up. I watched him die of colon cancer. I don’t ever want to see that happen to someone again. Damn. My brother handled it better than I did. I could stay with him, but I don’t want to. I don’t like putting anybody out on my account. I don’t want to bother them. He’s married now, he’s got daughters. I don’t want to get in the way of that shit.

 

Troy Schipdam is a writer and a reader for The Paris Review.

The Dust

Photograph by Christopher Chang.

Where I live is about twenty minutes from anywhere else in Los Angeles. What this actually means is that I live ten minutes from anything when there’s no traffic, and forty-five minutes when there is. In reality, there’s no given instance during the day when I actually live twenty minutes from any geographical point in LA, but it’s an easy way to say I live in the middle of town. The area lacks the socioeconomic and demographic cohesion common to most LA neighborhoods, so it’s not particularly cool or uncool, it’s just twenty minutes from places that are. It’s a neighborhood that’s special in the same way a local laundromat is special—you get people from all walks of life.

The building itself is a small, charming holdover from when old Hollywood was just called Hollywood. I park on the street, and I live in one of fourteen modest units, where I am very happy. I’ve lived in old buildings for most of my adult life, and it is my preference to do so. Of course, there are costs associated with living in an old building. You might have an occasional leak or wonky electrical wiring, but these are small problems that can be solved. As with any formative experience, part of the joy in fixing them is the skill gained, or the longevity of the solution. If you fix a leak and you did it right, it’ll take a second for the leak to come back. Once you’ve dealt with something once, it is not such a tragedy the next time. I think that’s what it is to get older: you get softer with age because you’ve experienced a lot of things once, and you’re equipped to do them again if you have to. Remember that first sip of alcohol, or the first cigarette? You turned your back on your innocence, but you didn’t die, so you did it again. However, when a task requires constant maintenance, there is no finish line, so there is no small victory. You never feel done, and it becomes the bane of your existence. The great scourge of my little life, twenty minutes from everywhere else in Los Angeles, is the dust.

LA is a dusty town, and in the century that my building has been around, it has only gathered more of it. The once airtight caulk around the windows has loosened its grip, and the drywall has eroded into Swiss cheese. It doesn’t help that I’m two blocks from an especially busy intersection, and it definitely doesn’t help that I have filled my home with secondhand objects that bring with them their own histories of dust. I clean constantly, with nightly touch-ups and a deep clean that eats up half of an honest weekend. I sweep, Swiffer (dry and wet), and vacuum, but really I am just displacing the dust. As I clean, I kick up more dust, and, betrayed by my own body, I make even more new dust by shedding dead skin cells throughout the process. There is no end in sight, because there is no end to the dust.

I encourage the dust even further by leaving my windows wide open during the day. This is an attempt to cycle out the stale air for fresh air, but who am I kidding? LA is famous for having some of the worst air in the world. But to me it smells good. It smells like everything it has ever touched. It smells like the elements and it smells like argan oil. Sometimes it smells like jasmine, sometimes like wildfires, and, if you try hard enough, it smells like nickels, and the dream of a sweaty handshake from some producer that made moving across the country all worth it, because that handshake is going to change your life. I have knowingly created ideal conditions in which dust thrives, but what’s the point of California if you’re not going to blur the line between indoor and out?

Still, in vain, I clean, because I’m supposed to. I clean because it makes me feel necessary in my own home, and because I come from a long line of people who clean. Even as I clean, on some level I accept defeat. I may be stupid, but I am not dumb. I know I cannot control the dust; it is bigger than me. It was here before me, and it will be here long after I am gone. I am but a guest in a world covered in dust. It’s everywhere—not just in my apartment or at that intersection, or in California but everywhere. Between all the space where there is oxygen, look a little harder—there’s dust. You can’t see it until you do, and what you call it might depend on how long your hair is: dead space, vibes, the ether. Between enemies, it might be called animus; between two lovers, it might be the Fourth of July. But it really isn’t any of that. That which separates your face from mine is just dust. In death, I will become dust, when in reticence I’ll accept that I can’t beat ‘em, so I join ‘em. You, me, and everyone else—we’re all dust that just hasn’t formed yet, but until I am dust, I will continue to move it from one place to the next.

In many ways my life is exactly how I want it to be. I love my small conveniences, I love my creaky little apartment, I love my books covered in other people’s dead skin cells, and I love coming home to sheets that smell like the sun. Dust is an active part of all these luxuries, and dust affords me a life better than I could have ever imagined. I am rich in dust, and I am taxed in dust. What a small price to pay for such an exceptional life on this dusty earth.

 

Christopher Chang lives in Los Angeles.

On Fantasy

Photograph by Iflwlou (拍攝), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Steak is like sex, is like art: bloody; gets you high; is disgusting if you think about it for too long. And blue steak, then, is like sex work: a carefully crafted artifice that allows for the presentation of something ostensibly raw to the consumer, without the risks of actual raw consumption. The person who orders blue steak feels it as real, and animal, though it is sanitized, and carefully so.

In SoHo, there is a boutique hotel whose rooms are blue. Blue carpet, blue ceiling, blue-patterned sheets. I met a client there several years ago, when I still had short bangs. I wore a vintage skirt-and-top set—black, with colorful flowers—and black lingerie from l’Agent, the now-defunct, less expensive little sister brand to Agent Provocateur. My client wanted our time together to feel like a movie. He didn’t say this, but his behavior made it clear. He booked me for only an hour but wanted an experiential arc: he sat me first in the small living room area of his suite, presenting liquor he had put on ice for me. Music played softly through the room’s sound system: “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that I’d only ever heard as the background of a bad television show. He moved me into the bedroom, bantering, as though he had to charm me. I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like or what his name was. This isn’t because I was seeing so many clients I couldn’t keep track, but because it’s useless information to retain after the fact. I remember how he behaved—the only salient thing—which was annoying, and also standard, fine. I overstayed our appointment because the sex refused to end, as happens often with older men who want to paw at a young woman but don’t quite care whether or not they finish, and certainly not in the allotted time. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” returned to the playlist; it was looping, as was the experience.

I played the song for myself after, alone in my own room. A user called “i’m cyborg but that’s ok” had uploaded it to YouTube along with a compilation of scenes from Lost in Translation, a movie I’d never seen but that I knew was about a relationship between a washed-up older man having a midlife crisis and a beautiful young woman. The video compilation looked like an escort advertisement: in the opening scene, Scarlett Johansson sits in a hotel room window wearing only a large men’s shirt—blue—looking down at the wide expanse of Tokyo beneath her; in the next scene, she dives into an enormous, empty hotel pool, at night—the pool and the surrounding windowpanes all blue, too. The images spoke of money and alienation. The song captured the affect of a certain type of client: slightly flat; grasping toward a Daddy-esque certainty but falling short; single-mindedly offering reassurance, but of what he hardly seemed to know. I grew oddly attached to the song and to cyborg’s music video for a period. I would watch it on my way to work, flattening my own affect, compacting myself into a version of a girl aligned with the lyrics:

Whispered something in your ear
It was a perverted thing to say
But I said it anyway
Made you smile and look away
Nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby.

I’ve still never seen Lost in Translation, but it came up again during a duo a few months ago, when my friend bantered with our shared client about favorite films while I pretended to keep up. She said she felt hateful saying so, but that she bought into the rumor that it was Sofia Coppola’s boyfriend at the time, Spike Jonze, who really directed the film, because when they broke up, her work went immediately downhill. Leaning in, my friend made us swear we’d never repeat her secret belief. Our client laughed and put one hand on each of our legs, the part that is somehow both knee and thigh. I smiled placidly, sipping wine. Later he, too, failed to finish in the allotted time, but, blessedly, he ended the sex anyway of his own volition. He said, “Enough,” and briefly took us to his chest, before stepping away and counting our money. Afterward, my friend, new to the work, was surprised: “I can’t believe he didn’t come?” We walked down the street holding hands. “It’s common,” I told her, “and usually more annoying than that.”

A couple years after my first visit, I returned to the blue hotel, seeing a different client. I wore a mini schoolgirl skirt, which he remarked on favorably. When I met him in the hotel lobby—the elevator required a key card after a certain hour—he said to me, “I think about you all the time.” It was the first time he said it, though I’d been seeing him for months, and it was the first time I would have believed it, too. He said it almost by accident, which is a way to discern the truth. This client knew who I was: knew my legal name and, therefore, true aspects of my life. I know who he is, and who his wife is, and where he works and lives, who his friends and his boss are. For the duration of the time I saw him—somewhere between six months and a year—he claimed to fear, above all, his wife discovering his infidelities and the subsequent destruction of his domestic life, but his behavior suggested otherwise. He was reckless with information and found me not on an escort ad site but a sugar dating site, where men who want or need to pay for sex, for one reason or another, but are reticent to do so, look for women who are willing to sell sex while pretending, adamantly, that they are not professionals, and that no exchange of labor for money is taking place.

This is a different kind of pretending than the pretending that is still legally necessary within straightforward prostitution, where (good) client and prostitute conspire together to communicate in such a way that it could conceivably appear to any interested law enforcement parties that—as the disclaimers on most escort sites read—“money exchanged is for time and companionship only,” and “anything that happens during that time is a matter of privacy between two consenting adults and has not been contracted for nor compensated.” I think implicit in this contract—the unspoken contract between client and escort— is professional discretion, but only insofar as the client understands he is hiring a professional, for a service. If, instead, you find a girl on a sugar dating site, and if you insist that she is not a professional you are hiring—which then requires all kinds of affective labor on her part to make this feel true—it follows that she should not, then, be held to professional standards of discretion and secrecy. It would be so much wiser for men in need of discretion to strictly hire, rather than sugar date, but many are too proud to explicitly acknowledge the labor involved in seeing them. It never ceases to amaze me what men are willing to risk to protect their own egos.

The point is, I could ruin his life. Easily. I won’t though, not out of loyalty to him, necessarily, but because I simply have no interest in doing so. I think he had an interest in me doing so; I think it might have been his greatest fantasy. The second time we met, his wife was away, and we spent the night together. I was still feeling out how high I could set my rates and insisted on a bonus fee when he asked me beforehand, over text, to shave my pubic hair. I had never shaved all of my pubic hair off before—the most I’d done was a landing strip—and it had always seemed a bit impossible to me. The kind of thing other, more aesthetically perfect girls do, that I could never do. I did it, though, because I was paid to, and it wasn’t as difficult as it seemed. Afterward, bare, I thought I looked amphibian-like, and years younger. I was embarrassed when I fucked my boyfriend; I took my underwear off to show him but kept my shirt on, which made me look even more naked than fully nude.

This client also wanted our time together to be cinematic. I suppose all clients do. The first time we met, I was struck by his impulse to narrate what was happening, as though by speaking aloud how good something is one could will it to actually be so. It’s not that it wasn’t good, or was bad—it was just mundane, the way formulaic excess often is. He loved cocaine, and he liked to inhale it off my body, and wanted me to do the same. He seemed to want to be in a party scene from The Wolf of Wall Street; a nearly prescriptive commitment to hedonism turned him on. He was also frightened by this fantasy, though that fear was blunted, a bit, by the drugs.

That first time, he took a phone call in the bathroom, and then peeked out from behind the half-ajar door, mouthing to me with his hand over the mouthpiece, “I just like watching you,” while I stretched and smiled, offering myself up through studied pose to be seen as beatific, natural, relaxed. Our afternoon was peppered by comments like that, observations of what he wanted to be so, not necessarily what strictly was so: “I’m with a hot girl in a hotel room in the middle of the day, drinking champagne, how did I get so lucky”; “Look at us, I’m doing lines off your perfect ass”; “I feel so comfortable with you, like we’ve known each other forever.” It didn’t matter that he wasn’t lucky, he was just rich; it didn’t matter whether or not my ass was perfect, because perfection is in the eye of the beholder; and it didn’t matter that he felt comfortable only because I made sure that he did, receiving every stray thought and confession with warmth, or laughter, or a doe-eyed openness. He talked himself into believing it was all happenstance, fate.

The next time, high and glassy-eyed, close to my face, he whispered, “I can trust you, right?” “Yes,” I answered, “of course.” He wanted to open up the world to me, and so I pretended my world had been closed before him. “You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?” he asked, while undressing me. “No man has ever cared about your pleasure like this, has he,” while he spun his fingers around inside me, an unwieldy carousel of self-validation and drug-addled clumsiness. He brought me to his home that night, under the guise of wanting to show me a book he had there. We took a cab, and he insisted on rolling the windows down even though it was winter, “because of COVID,” which I found absurdly funny—the idea of any kind of risk mitigation while taking a stranger to one’s home that one shares, monogamously, with one’s wife, in a pandemic. In the cab, he used his phone to disable their security cameras. Once at their place, he showed me the book—like an afterthought, or a forethought to rush through as a necessity before getting to what he really wanted to do—and then gave me a tour. His apartment was beautiful; I didn’t like being there. We reached the master bathroom and he pushed me against the mirror, bringing my hand to his belt buckle. I left him for a moment, to find my bag and get a condom out of it, and when I returned, he fucked me over the sink. I noticed his wife’s clothes in the laundry hamper and, after, the books on her side of the bed, and felt not quite guilty but astonished by his betrayal, which I was witness to.

As we continued to see one another with increasing regularity—as the months went on—we began a dance, wherein he acknowledged himself as a client, but only insofar as he was unavailable to be a boyfriend because of his marriage. I gave him the impression that were it not for his wife, I would date him for free; that he paid me, essentially, to make up for the fact that he could not date me, that the relationship was on his terms and his timeline, and that I expressed no emotional needs, save for the ones he wanted me to, to stoke his conception of himself as a sensitive guy. I told him as much in a hotel known for its claw-foot tubs; we passed bubbles back and forth and listened to a bad Spotify playlist, and it was, all things considered, easy and nice. He left to meet his family for dinner and I took Polaroids of myself on the bed, by the tub, in white lace underwear and with my dress half-buttoned. I wanted to document myself as I was then: unkempt and paid, but for what, exactly? For becoming that person, that particular version, for him, on a Friday afternoon.

The next time I saw him was in the blue room. It was different than I remembered; brighter, but also emptier, rid of a minibar due to pandemic restrictions. He did fuck me from behind, in front of the mirror, and he mimed Christian Bale’s choreography in American Psycho, which alarmed me, given that Bale murders the sex workers he fucks. But I think my client’s mimicry was still more to do with the unbridled wealth of Bale’s character, rather than his killer tendencies; he was intoxicated by the money and the social dominance it gave him. Bale sees no difference between these girls and the blue steak; my client, I believe, did. Nonetheless, he often joked that if I told his wife, he’d have to kill me. “I’d like to see you try,” I always wanted to say, but instead I would laugh, as though the threat was funny, rather than sick.

An hour into our meeting, I remembered that an application for an arts residency was due before midnight that night and I leapt up, surprised by my transposing of dates I’d checked several times, determined not to let the possibility of guaranteed studio space slip away. I cocooned myself in an armchair ten feet from the bed, promising I’d be no more than a half hour. I broke character for the first time, taking myself off the clock and tending fully to the tedium of uploading documents, made harder by the absence of a computer. “Could you do your typing with your other hand on my cock,” he half whined. Where usually I’d relent, I said no without so much as a raised eyebrow, too distracted to placate him. The spell burst, but, still, with only us in the room, nothing could rush in to replace it but a slightly different version: no choice but to see me as his studious part-time girlfriend, his aspiring artist—or else admit our circumstances to be little more than an elaborate joke. He had no ground to stand on to refuse me.

Later, he kissed me in front of a second mirror, thrusting the bitter taste of cocaine into my mouth, and then directed me downward. “Look how hard you get me,” he said, “no one gets me this hard.” He said it as though I hadn’t noticed him take a pill out of his bag and pop it, as though his erection was proof that all the money he’d spent on me to that point was worth it: tens of thousands of dollars so that we might mutually make believe a manufactured blood flow was instead born of wild desire, desire only I could draw forth. That’s what fucking like a whore—like an artist—is, doing the work to make us both seem good at it. There’s no secret save for willful deception, bought into by both parties. An American dream.

Neither of us ever fired the other, but at a certain point, we stopped seeing each other. I wasn’t working as much while I was writing, and he seemed to glean, accurately, that whatever fantasy I could offer him had worn thin. He was the first person that I saw over a long period of time whom I disclosed my identity to, which I did because of art-world connections he offered, and because it would have ultimately been too inconvenient not to—he wanted it so badly. He was profoundly attached to an idea of me, and the more me I became, publicly, the less his idea could stay intact, like a favored T-shirt rendered unwearable, finally, with holes.

 

Sophia Giovannitti is a writer and conceptual artist based in New York. This piece is adapted from Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, to be published by Verso in May. 

The Mother of the Mother of the Virgin Mary

Sixteenth-century icon depicting Emerentia, Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus Christ. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

“Saint who?” I asked. “Eh-meh-ren-tsya,” Olga Tokarczuk repeated. Saint Anne’s mother. I was nonplussed. The mother of the mother of the Virgin Mary? Tokarczuk blew out cigarette smoke at high speed, then inhaled with excitement and impatience. I needed a lesson.

We were midway through a nine-hour-long exchange about her life and writing, the edited version of which you can read in the Review’s Spring issue. Throughout our conversation, I often felt that, like her books, Tokarczuk’s speech requires footnotes and annotations.

Tokarczuk researches her short stories and novels with academic intensity. She digs up forgotten, esoteric myths and legends and shows how this esoterica is woven into the warp and woof of European culture. Beneath a Europe of rational, religious, racial, and ethnic dogmatisms, she unveils a continent  rife with ethnically and linguistically syncretic visionaries, mystics, and half-pagan storytellers. There is a hopefulness to these counterhistories that puts its faith in humanity’s capacity for creativity and imagination—in the loosening and intermingling of top-down stereotypes and norms by collective acts of retelling and elaboration. Emerentia, Tokarczuk explained to me, was one such esoteric discovery that she wove into her latest novel, Empuzjon, which has yet to appear in English.

I was raised a devout Catholic, and in my early teens I kept a book of saints by my bedside, arranged in the pages from January to December following the order of their feast days. Each evening, I would read the day’s entry before going to bed, committing the saints’ names to memory. Saint Scholastica, after whom the family elders named one of my great-aunts, was Saint Benedict’s sister. Saint Perpetua, the ancient Roman martyr tortured by Septimus Severus’s henchmen in the Colosseum; Saint Audifax, a Persian protector of early Christian converts about whom so little is known that he was taken off the official roster of holy days shortly after the publication of my hagiographic compendium. And yet I’d never heard of the saint who Poles call Emerencja, and English speakers Emerentia—a figure as important as the great-grandmother of Jesus himself.

Unlike me, Tokarczuk didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing. Nor had she encountered Emerentia in a catalogue of saints’ lives; instead, she found the name, whose thread she followed, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

The character who bears this name in Mann’s novel is one of the waitresses at Hans Castorp’s sanatorium, an older woman with dwarfism. More than five hundred pages pass before anyone addresses her directly. Finally, Mynheer Peeperkorn, the Dionysian lover of Frau Chauchat, rudely demands to know who she is:

“My child … You are small—but what is that to me? On the contrary! I take it as something positive. I thank God you are the way you are, and that by your smallness, which betrays such character—well, fine. What I desire from you is likewise small, small and full of character. But first, what is your name?” She smiled and stammered and finally said that her name was Emerentia.

The drunken Peeperkorn plays with Emerentia’s name, splitting it into two potential nicknames: Rentia and Emchen. He then requests from “Emchen … Emerenzchen,” something “so small but full of character—a gin, my love!” “Einen Genever, echt,” Emerentia responds to show that she has understood. These are the only three words Mann’s narrator has her utter directly.

Not many readers notice Emerentia in the middle of this bustling dinner scene, whose members soon become even more inebriated and philosophical. The few Mann scholars who have written about this waitress describe her diminutive size as a metaphor for Peeperkorn’s ability to dominate women. That explanation did not satisfy Tokarczuk. The name itself intrigued her, just as it intrigued Peeperkorn and presumably also Mann: one does not name a character Emerentia offhandedly.

Tokarczuk went hunting for Emerentia’s namesakes. She searched for them online, in libraries, in Thomas Mann’s unpublished letters and archives. As many of her searches came up empty, she realized that few historical women have ever borne that name. Most of the ones who did, including a distant relative of Mann’s, adopted it upon receiving monastic orders. Emerentias tended to hail from the Netherlands or from some of the regions neighboring Tokarczuk’s native Silesia, including Bavaria. Tokarczuk began to discover religious artworks from these regions depicting an older woman bearing that name.

The story of this saint, Tokarczuk realized, is deep in some ways but in others quite shallow. Emerentia is less a name than an attribute. A Latin adjective that means meritorious, it could certainly not have literally been the name of an Aramaic-speaking Galilean woman. The tradition of worshipping Emerentia turns out to be relatively recent, and a blip: dating back to the fifteenth century, it all but disappears a hundred years later. Nowhere to be found in early Christian apocrypha, Emerentia is first named in the Flemish Peter van Diest’s fifteenth-century life of Jesus. News of her spread from Flanders to Burgundy and Germany through the works of Jodocus van Asche Badius, a Flemish writer residing in Paris, and of Johann Maier von Eck, a German Catholic prelate known for his quarrels with Martin Luther.

A relatively straightforward theological and political explanation can be found for Emerentia’s sudden appearance on the eve of the Reformation—as well as for her subsequent obsolescence. The fifteenth century witnessed the culmination of a centuries-long debate over the way the Virgin Mary was conceived by her parents. This debate has its roots in the second-century apocryphal Gospel of James, a collection of stories attributed to the apostle James that did not end up entering the biblical canon. This unauthorized gospel mentions in passing that God had allowed Mary’s mother, Anne, who was barren, to conceive Mary without sexual intercourse.

One might be tempted to shrug away this tale as an error of repetition, a calque of Mary’s own story onto her mother. However, in the twelfth century, this possibility—and its significance or insignificance for Catholic doctrine—became a subject of vehement, lingering debate. Catholic theologians had long established that Mary herself was a virgin, but could virgin birth have run in her family? Behind this funny-sounding question lay a deeper worry about the moral purity of Mary’s body: Could the flesh that bore the Messiah have required something as sinful as lust for its conception? In 1477, the idea that Mary had not been tainted by humanity’s original sin won out: the Pope established a feast to celebrate Mary’s Immaculate Conception inside Anne’s womb. By that point, theologians were using the term immaculate to describe Mary’s freedom from sin in a much more abstract, mystical sense; still, in many people’s minds, Mary’s purity remained literally contingent on her ancestors’ sexual conduct. For these more literal-minded believers, the papal decree thus opened a new possibility—of a sequence of Jesus’s women ancestors who also might have procreated without men.

Tokarczuk found out these historical facts, and others. But as she examined paintings and sculptures of Emerentia, she realized that Mann’s interest in her could not be explained by theology alone. Few depictions of Emerentia exist, and  those that do tend toward the bizarre as they attempt to explain visually the matrilineal logic that made her relevant to churchgoers. Like figures in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Emerentia and those around her seem chimerical, caught midtransformation into a tree, a dog, a mountain. These metaphors for nonsexual human reproduction rapidly exceed their immediate theological purpose, embedding Emerentia in a surprisingly pagan-seeming, matriarchal framework.

One fifteenth-century painting, commissioned by the Carmelites, who were major proponents of the idea that Mary was immaculately conceived, and painted by the Flemish Master Johannes, represents Emerentia as the bottom of a literal family tree. Titled Vision of the Descent of Saint Emerentia at Mount Carmel and currently held at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, it depicts Emerentia on all fours at the center of the image. She has just given birth. The belt tied around her waist—or is it an umbilical cord?—begins to transform into the root of a plant; this plant rises into the air through Emerentia’s lower back. This tree produces one large, ornate blue flower, which spreads in the middle of the painting to seat a middle-aged Saint Anne holding a small, apparently teenage Virgin Mary. Mary has her hand wrapped around the stalk, which continues to climb through her heart and above her head. Crowned by a flower high above Anne’s and Mary’s heads, the plant hoists up a childlike Jesus with a cross already slung over his shoulder. In a more recent icon Tokarczuk showed me—which she believes was made in imitation of an older, Greek Orthodox predecessor—Emerentia is a giantess who towers over a regular-size Saint Anne, who in turn holds a diminutive Mary, in whose hands we see an even smaller baby Jesus. Nested inside each other, they resemble a set of matryoshka dolls.

A miracle does seem to be happening in these artworks, but of a different sort than the one declared by the Pope. A hair-splittingly dogmatic theological debate about how God could have become human without becoming sinful gives rise to fantasies about women’s reproductive self-sufficiency. Gigantic, matronly, and protective—and magical-seeming—Emerentia does not merely assert the possibility of a virginal birth or two. She heads an alternative, matriarchic holy family with Emerentia-like matrons all the way down. Carried away by the idea of her, these late medieval painters inadvertently transform Catholic doctrine into something that looks more like pagan worship of an omnipotent Earth Mother. Or perhaps Emerentia awakens a somnolent matriarchal impulse within Christianity itself.

Self-sacrificing and nurturing, in some ways Emerentia seems like an apt namesake for Peeperkorn’s waitress. But in most other ways, Saint Emerentia and Emerentia the waitress are complete opposites. Peeperkorn dominates Emerentia in The Magic Mountain; by contrast, Saint Emerentia tends to tower over all the other figures in the icons and sculptures that feature her, whether by virtue of standing on an elevation—as in a sixteenth-century depiction made in Hildesheim, now housed at the Met—or by virtue of her preternaturally great physical size.

This giant matriarchic Emerentia must have terrified Mann, Tokarczuk speculated when we spoke, to the point of his needing to humiliate her in body and mind alike. Emerentia represents a world that The Magic Mountain cannot let into itself: a world in which crises of masculinity, and of masculine creativity in particular, are not an existential concern. These alternatives to patriarchy seem to have quietly coexisted for centuries with the male-centric world whose passing Mann fears. And yet paradoxically, in humiliating Emerentia, Mann brought her back to life, back into circulation, so that Tokarczuk could discover her and, in her novel Empuzjon, write a new version of The Magic Mountain with Emerentia and her daughters at its center.

Walter Benjamin once told Ernst Bloch a Hasidic story about what the world would look like when the Messiah came: “Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.” That is how I felt going back to The Magic Mountain, and to the chapel near Tokarczuk’s village, with thoughts of Emerentia buzzing in my head. And that is also the feeling, eerie as well as hopeful, with which Tokarczuk leaves her readers. At any moment, an unexpected presence from our collective past might appear before us. Once we notice this presence, everything changes. The change is small, but its impact feels enormous.

 

Marta Figlerowicz is an associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University. She interviewed Olga Tokarczuk for the Spring 2023 issue of the Review.

On Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers

Still from Hungry Hearts, an adaptation of a novel by Anzia Yezierska. Courtesy of Goldwyn Pictures. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I had recently begun attending Sarah Lawrence College when Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers was first introduced to me. I was twenty years old, but as a married Orthodox Jewish woman with a one-year-old child to show for myself instead of a high school diploma, I had been enrolled in the continuing education program for one year in order to prepare for proper matriculation. The blunt hairline of my voluminous wig paired with my over-the-knee skirts would have been enough to render me the exotic outsider to my worldly classmates even if I hadn’t revealed my heavy accent or my ignorance of basic cultural references. So when an older classmate who hadn’t previously made much effort at conversing with me thrust the worn paperback into my hands, I was caught unawares by her sudden attention.

“Maybe you’ve already read it, but I thought, just in case …”

Eyeing the title and the unfamiliar name of the author, I shook my head in bemusement. “Is this some famous classic,” I asked, “some essential part of the canon I’ve missed and need to catch up on?”

She laughed. “Not really,” she answered. “But back when I was in college the first time around, some acquaintances of mine were instrumental in its republication, so that’s how I know about it. I came across it again recently while I was spring cleaning, but you know how it is with coincidences. They rarely are. I thought of you immediately; I felt strongly that this book was meant for you.”

Taking that portentous statement on its merit, I began to read the book the same day, parking my car on the side of the road on the way home from class for as long as I had until my husband returned from work, reading behind the steering wheel instead of on my sofa for the sake of peace and privacy. Even today I cringe when remembering the experience. As I read about the impoverished Orthodox protagonist suffering through the deprivations of the Lower East Side tenements while dreaming of dignity and education, I felt as if my classmate, in handing me the book and saying it was “meant for you,” had in effect publicly shamed and exposed me—had lumped me together with the novel’s Sara Smolinsky into the category of awkward, vulgar greenhorn. The woman who had seemingly seen right through me might have had good intentions, but she had grown up in a posh Massachusetts town, had a hyphenated last name, and lived in a historic mansion in the most expensive town in Westchester with a handsome husband who was a big name in finance. She was, in fact, exactly like everyone else around me in college at the time: well-educated, privileged, and refined. On top of that she was adorned with the garlands of enlightenment, studying feminism and women’s literature after having spent the last two decades raising her sons. So of course her gesture did not feel welcoming at all; it felt pointed and exclusionary, a humiliation akin to what the novel’s protagonist, too, experiences among her college classmates.

I put the book away then, and didn’t share my thoughts with the woman who had given it to me. I didn’t even look at it again, although for some reason I hung on to it through multiple moves over the following years. Was I hoping to one day revisit it with the satisfaction of having distanced myself from its trajectory? Did I imagine that its contents might someday wound me less? Only just before I moved abroad, in 2014, did I finally give it away with all the other books that hadn’t become indispensable favorites. It was, even then, still too close to home to be close to my heart.

Reading it now, fifteen years after it was first pressed upon my unsuspecting younger self, it’s easier to grasp the nature of the anxiety and shame it triggered the first time around. Back then I had not understood that the dialogue I was reading was vernacular; I knew only that I sounded similar when I spoke English, and the mysterious nature of the difference between how I sounded and how my peers sounded had plagued me greatly. Like me, the novel’s author, Anzia Yezierska, was born in the shtetl, albeit a hundred years prior. During her early childhood in Poland or her adolescence in the impoverished immigrant neighborhoods of America, she would have been surrounded exclusively by Yiddish, except for the occasional newcomer’s patois. Today I can easily identify the direct translations from Yiddish in Yezierska’s dialogue, while some of the phrasing is so antiquated that I’m more likely to recognize it from German. The title of the book is an awkward compound that carries no immediate association in English yet is familiar to me from the German as well as from the Yiddish: bread givers, the antiquated German term for employer that carries additional spiritual connotations for Jews, with God being the ultimate wage-payer in a world that remunerates those of pure heart and good deed with divine beneficence.

Indeed, if there is anything I take away from Bread Givers after all this time and distance, it is its language. Now that the sting of its narrative implications has faded, the voice of the book sings in my ears with all its melodious emphatics. “It was like living among walking chunks of ice,” Sara says. “It was like looking up to the top of the highest skyscraper while down in the gutter.” I suppose I don’t think of Bread Givers as an English‑language book at all, even as it was ostensibly written as such by an immigrant who became an American, at least on paper. Yezierska was very much from the “old country,” and Bread Givers is suffused with the longing to transcend this origin story. But it’s too deeply infused with the spirit of the author’s European past, too intensely possessed by the ghosts of earlier shtetl tales. Only a decade later, Esther Kreitman (née Singer) would publish Der Sheydim-Tants, or The Dance of the Demons, a novel in which the semi‑autobiographical protagonist, Deborah, runs away from her Orthodox home, inspired by the one in Poland that the author was raised in with her significantly more famous brothers, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Israel Joshua Singer. The tale of the Orthodox renegade is as old as Yiddish literature itself, and continues to be its strongest pillar; that Yezierska’s version takes place in America does not separate it from its relations but rather radically expands what might have remained a relatively insular tribe. Bread Givers manages to clothe itself in the language of its setting without sacrificing any of its stubborn authenticity. It forms a literary bridge defying all laws of metaphorical engineering.

This is precisely what makes it impossible to confine it to its most natural genre: it is no convenient narrative of the American dream, much in the way Yezierska never seemed to have quite achieved the accepted version of that idea. The America I encountered nearly a century after Sara Smolinsky was not a melted‑down alloy but a chaotic patchwork of cultural and religious communities and sects, a constellation of enclaves, a jarring juxtaposition of warring, threatened identities, all of them oriented around a myth of Americanness that they would never embody. The experience of Americanness for me became one of minute fragmentation, of disharmony and friction resulting from the impossible and cruel demands of “melting.”

When I left my own community to go to college, I was as naive and hopeful as Sara is when she embarks on her journey toward independence. I thought I would be able to better myself and join the ranks of my peers by sheer merit. But nothing I did made me less of an outsider—not fixing my accent, not diversifying my vocabulary, not changing my dress. I would have had to completely subsume myself in the service of some amorphous Americanness; I would have had to negate everything that made me who I was, that had built my character and honed my inner voice. I would have had to perform—something I had been forced to do often during my childhood and adolescence, an ugly necessity I had always yearned to be rid of. And I found that I did not have the desire to exchange one system of conformist pressure for another. In many ways, I too chose to inhabit the marginal space between fixed worlds.

Perhaps that classmate of mine was onto something when she told me that Bread Givers was meant for me. It did not have the happy ending I thought I was fighting for, an ending that most likely wouldn’t have made me very happy after all. But we must each make our own way, and even today there are still many Sara Smolinskys out there, struggling to make sense of the only world in which they might have a chance to become an individual among individuals, or as Yezierska so aptly describes in the novel, her own version of the American dream: “To be a person among people!”

 

From the foreword to a new edition of Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, to be published by Penguin Classics in May.

Deborah Feldman is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Unorthodox, the basis for the Emmy Award–winning Netflix series. She was raised in the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and now lives in Berlin, Germany.

It’s Nineteen Seventy-Nine, Okay

Artistic rendering of a double black hole, 2015. ESA/Hubble. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 4.0.

It has been more than ten years since I wrote these words for this magazine’s website: “At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab’s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick—about Robur’s doomed enterprise in Verne’s Maître du Monde—about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole.”

And now maybe we can approach the same topic from a different angle, as the contortionist said on prom night. Refuse to accept that it is your fate to refuse to accept your fate. The only way not to be driven insane by it is to be insane from the outset.

The Black Hole, 1979. It amazes me that a group of people could make a movie about being afraid of a hole, being attracted to a hole, feeling excited and curious about going into a hole, feeling concerned that, while on the one hand it might not be such a good idea to go into the hole, on the other hand maybe all the best things in life will become possible only after you have gone into the hole, and so on. It’s not the feelings that amaze me; I feel them all myself. It’s the idea that $20 million and a crew of more than a hundred crew members should have been devoted to dramatizing, over ninety minutes, an idea that any healthy child could express in a single simple sentence. Go ahead, smart guy, write that sentence.

Briefly: The USS Palomino, in deep space, approaches a black hole into which a nearby and apparently derelict ship, the Cygnus, mysteriously does not fall. While the crew is examining this ghost ship, the Palomino incurs structural damage and is about to be drawn into the black hole itself when the Cygnus comes alive and tractor-beams her aboard. Robots escort the crew of the Palomino to the bridge of the Cygnus, where they find the mad genius Dr. Hans Reinhardt, an Ahab with a black hole for his white whale. While the Palomino awaits repairs, it becomes clear that many of the “robots” who work on the Cygnus are in fact undead human beings, cyborgs built from its former crew. Reinhardt’s plan is revealed: to drive the Cygnus into and through the black hole. The survivors of the Palomino’s crew seize a probe ship and escape from the Cygnus, but both ships are drawn into the black hole. We see a scene of Reinhardt in torment, imprisoned in a robot body in the fires of hell. But the probe ship passes through cinematic psychedelic turbulence into a realm of heavenly light.

My paperback copy of Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of The Black Hole has a perfectly timed error in its final lines.

They blended, flowed together, thought itself strained beyond its normal borders under the unimaginable force of the collapsar. […] They were themselves … and yet something strange and new, a galactic sea change that produced all the above and a new unified mindthing that was KateCharlieDanVincent also.

Dimly they/it perceived the final annihilation of a minuscule agglutination of refined masses—the Palomino. It was gone, lost in an infinite brightness. They/it remained, content and infinite now as the white hole itself. […] An atom of Charlie to a nine-world system, a molecule of Kate to a local cluster of stars, a tiny diffuse section of Holland spread thin over a dozen galaxies. Yet they could still think, for thought does not respect the trifling limitations of time and space. They were still them and this new thing they had become spread substance, and they now had an eternity in Their thoughts spanned infinity, as did their finely [sic] which to contemplate the universe they had become …

We see shades here of the bleshing (blending/meshing) of Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 novel More Than Human that so inspired the Grateful Dead..

What we have in The Black Hole is a fundamental mythological or religious question—Should I eat the forbidden fruit?—disguised as a sexual-combinative question, the urge to merge. It’s a primally captivating issue. You can’t tear your eyes away. And yet the story is not complicated enough to be interesting. An array of cutesy robots, ready to be sold as toys to the viewing demographic, and I had them all. A bunch of dopey, obvious, hard-sell talk about “Right out of Dante’s Inferno. […] Every time I see one of those things [a black hole], I expect to spot some guy in red with horns and a pitchfork.”

If you can’t tolerate the dopey or the obvious, then you won’t have much fun with big-screen science fiction made in 1979. In 1977’s Star Wars, we were attacked by the father: Darth Vader. In 1979’s Alien, we are attacked by the mother: the spaceship Nostromo’s computer, called “Mother” by the crew, as well as (in the form of the pregnancy-evoking chest-burster) childbirth itself. No one can deny that these movies are full of thrilling feelings, but they aren’t any fun to think about. Mommy and Daddy and me: I’ve heard of it.

But maybe once you cross the event horizon of your birth, there’s no way to escape the gravity well of your family. Here he is again, some guy in red with horns and a pitchfork: your father was just a man, and sometimes Dad was bad.

“It does indeed sound strange that the Devil should be chosen as a substitute for a loved father,” writes Freud in “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,” his 1923 account of the Christoph Haitzmann case. “But we should expect religions to bear ineffaceable marks of the fact that the primitive primal father was a being of unlimited evil—being less like God than the Devil.”

That’s what The Black Hole is about: the search for God the Father. Dr. Kate McCrae’s father was an original crew member of the Cygnus. Some dialogue:

“USS Cygnus–Doctor Kate, isn’t that the ship your father was on?”

“Doctor Reinhardt—my father, where is he?”

“My dear child, I’m sorry to dash your hopes, but your father’s not with us any more. He’s dead. A man to be proud of. A grave personal loss to me. He was a trusted and loyal friend.”

“That Reinhardt sure loves to play God, doesn’t he?”

We all know that the ability to perceive similarities is related to the inability to perceive differences, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to compare the twinkling readouts of the Cygnus’s bridge to the stained-glass windows of a church. This is not merely the belated, insistent hallucination of a God-haunted five-year-old boy in Kentucky: my inner child becoming my outer child, at last.

Doctor Reinhardt, dying, says or thinks, “More light,” the famous last words of Goethe. And we will see a ghostly Reinhardt-like figure fly into white light ahead of the escaping probe ship, rhyming (if it is Reinhardt) with Goethe’s last-minute angelic rescue of Faust from Mephisto: “A peerless treasure, stolen shamefully: / The noble soul that pledged itself to me / They snatched from me,” in Walter Kaufmann’s 1961 translation.

Meanwhile, as she enters the black hole, we hear Doctor Kate’s final individual thoughts: “Reinhardt murdered my father, my father, father. Where is he?”

And, as the crew is merging or bleshing (see above), we can faintly hear one or all of them thinking: “Christmas morning, Christmas morning.”

It’s a bit like William Friedkin’s 1973 film, The Exorcist. You went looking for God, and you found Satan—Well, okay, it’s not what you wanted, but how much did you miss by?

 

***

Donald A. Wollheim attempts to address the dopey/obvious issue in his anthology The 1979 Annual World’s Best SF. “Science fiction’s boom year,” he announces. “Never before has science fiction reached as wide an audience nor been as popular […] Much of this boom must be attributed to the film Star Wars, which has now been followed by equally expensive productions such as Battlestar Galactica, Superman, and a host of more due to appear in the next months, including such as Buck Rogers, a new Star Trek, and more major and minor imitators.” He assures us, though: “For the thousands who think that science fiction is all Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and similar cinematic comic strips, it is good news to know that the authentic sf, the stories that perk your imagination and feed your brain, are still being turned out by fine writers.”

I am delighted to hear it, and not a bit surprised, as Octavia Butler’s Kindred, J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company, and Doris Lessing’s Shikasta were all published in 1979. May I examine some specimens of this 1979 science fiction that feeds my brain?

Confused, Alex sat back on his protumous, automatically shielding his rear fighting limbs. He realized he didn’t know where he was. Thinking back, he retracted and extruded his lower eyes. He’d been at the Party; he knew that much. Singing and glorching with the best of them.

That’s a post-Dune Frank Herbert, glorching with his cowriter F. M. Busby in the lead story of Wollheim’s 1979 anthology.

Ballard’s novel The Unlimited Dream Company, 1979: Blake crashes his airplane into the Thames, and becomes a priapic, Dionysian god as jungle vegetation fills the streets of Shepperton—the sky god, descending to combine with the wet earth, makes the plants grow. A true story. It’s not science, and it’s not fiction, and it never was.

Brian Stableford’s novel The Walking Shadow: A Promethean Scientific Romance, 1979: Paul Heisenberg accidentally discovers time travel, and, leap by leap, arrives at a far-flung future in which “third-phase life” has absorbed, subsumed, digested, and assimilated all distinction, all difference, all individuality.

In the old biocosm there had been individuals, and thus competition between individuals, and thus complex behavioral strategies, and thus—ultimately—intelligence. In the new biocosm there were no individuals, but only life. […] There was no behavioral strategy, save for that of the system as a whole, which was simply to survive and to grow, not to reproduce. There was no conceivable need for the evolution of intelligence.

The way the future used to be. If William Friedkin’s masterpiece Sorcerer, about four men driving dynamite trucks through the jungle, had been the big hit movie of 1977 rather than Star Wars, not only would The Black Hole never have been made, but now, forty-six years later, we would be living in a different world. What is life like? Does your life feel like having magic powers and saving the galaxy? My life feels like driving a truck full of dynamite over a mountain.

 

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

Full-Length Mirror

Mirror piece, 1965. Art & Language. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0.

My thirty-fourth year was meant to be a winner. I would drink less, I would eat better, I would write my book proposal, I would walk ten miles every day, I would go to the theater, I would get a job, I would read more books and watch more movies. I would, in short, live up to my potential. All my life I’ve seen out of the corner of my eye the other me, the one who rises early, sleeps well, spends responsibly, works hard, shines with a humble yet unmistakable brilliance, and never lets anybody down, the bitch. Well, no longer.

Thirty-three! Otherwise known as the Jesus year: thirty-three being the very age Jesus Christ got his show on the road. If it was good enough for the Son of God, surely it was good enough for me. Being simply human I didn’t expect a dove from heaven—just a little self-actualization, a shimmer of success, a whiff of recognition. Nothing big. In retrospect, it might have been better to dwell on the how of Jesus reaching his potential (i.e., death) and not so much the when. But I didn’t, and it wouldn’t have made a difference: almost precisely a month after reaching this momentous age, I was throwing up a yellow substance I didn’t like the look of into every available receptacle. Scripture is silent on whether this ever happened to Jesus, but since he participated in humanity in all its fullness, maybe it did.

***

My domestic situations have always had this problem: I buy things for the other me, who has great taste, but then I don’t know what to do with them, because they’re not my things, they’re hers. Other me—McClay A, let’s call her Alice—likes delicate coffee serving sets that would turn the humdrum act of sipping coffee in the morning into a small, beautiful ritual; real me habitually buys cheap iced coffee before going to sleep, placing it on the nightstand for the morning. What happens to the coffee service? Who knows. I look at it and am as charmed as ever. I’d buy it again, I’m sure.

And yet for a little over half a year this hasn’t been much of a problem. Not because Alice and I have harmonized but because my vomiting spell landed me in the hospital for two weeks, before I was discharged in a state so weak I could not walk to the corner of my block. I couldn’t feed myself and working was impossible. So I bowed to my fate and to my bank account, moved in with my parents, and went to the hospital two more times over the next few months as one of my organs necrotized. (It goes without saying, but these things never happen to Alice.) Unable to do anything, I listened over the phone as my long-suffering mother and boyfriend took care of all the things in my apartment one way or another. “You did kind of die,” he mused to me later, reflecting on his experience of disposing of my possessions. “I mean, it had a certain kind of resemblance.” I don’t know where these things went—some went into storage, I’ve been told, but the rest is just gone. Are the remainder my things, or are they Alice’s? Who knows—not me.

I cannot fill the home of other people with my own delusions. Not even if these other people are my parents. I can wishlist as many cunning little coffee contraptions as I desire, but there is no reason to buy them, no place to put them, and not even a little bit of a belief I would have any reason to use them. But being sick is, above all else, incredibly boring, and so it’s not surprising that I developed fixations. When I was actually in the hospital these fixations ran along practical lines: I would like not to be in pain, I would like to get out of here, I would like to take a shower, and so on. Out of the hospital, however, I had to pick something else. It couldn’t be furniture, cookware, or dishes. It couldn’t be anything that required me to do anything, like watercolors or yoga. So it was clothes.

With clothes, there’s always the trouble of what you want to wear and what you’ll actually wear. An office-appropriate and quite flattering sheath dress hangs in my closet but has little place in my officeless life. I bought it as if to say, It won’t always be this way. It’s still that way, but nevertheless, I research swimsuits late into the night . I haven’t been to the beach in years and the swimsuit I eventually settle on is ridiculously expensive, too expensive to impulse-buy. Once a week or so I go to the website and make sure it’s still there. It represents—what? The possibility of a carefree future, I suppose.

Brightly colored shoes, too, give me trouble. I feel, when I wear them, like a very delusional prey animal, bringing myself to the attention of every lion on the savannah. I do not fear real human predators, mind you, just bad luck. Long ago I remember reading a dubious study about shoe color, the findings of which were that people who wore predominantly black and brown shoes tended to have avoidant personalities, and taking stock of my black and brown shoes with resignation. What can you do? So I order sweaters and dresses that I’ll actually wear while lying around, and feel a little nicer lying around, and it works out rather well, most of the time.

And while the purchase of these clothes is motivated a hundred percent by personal vanity, they are plausibly practical: most of my old clothes are gone, and many no longer fit. You’ll always wear clothes. Still—there’s an issue.

***

How do you know how you look? You look in a mirror. Well, I have a mirror—one that shows my reflection from the waist up. But a full-length mirror—the kind that lets you really see how your clothes look—a useful thing to have, if your world has narrowed down to clothes—this, I do not have. Nor can I solve this dilemma by copping to my vanity and sneaking shame-faced, as I did as a teen, into my parents’ bathroom. They don’t have one now either. There isn’t one in the house. This is not, I should say, because of some ideological opposition to mirrors; my neuroticism about mirrors is entirely mine. There are plenty of mirrors. But there aren’t any built into this house, into which they recently moved, and they don’t feel the lack terribly much.

In my old life, full-length mirrors were not a problem, because people were always leaving them on the curb. Even when I smashed a mirror—you should believe all the stories about the consequences thereof, by the way—I found another one on the street just days later. But now, if I want a full-length mirror, I have to pay some amount of cold hard American cash for it. That is to say, I have to admit I want a mirror, which means admitting I want to look at my reflection in a mirror, and I have to go to the trouble of selecting a mirror to suit my needs (or wants, I suppose).

Like all vain people, I have a horror of seeming vain. And my vanity is the real thing. When people dab their faces with concealer, put on makeup, get some Botox, or thread their eyebrows, they’re confessing to a certain kind of humility. They could do with a little assistance, they’re saying. They’re making concessions. They do not think they are perfect just the way they are. But I don’t do any of this—I go about barefaced and let my eyebrows stay furry, not out of indifference, but because I like my face. That’s real vanity. It’s a misunderstood vice. So I am too vain, in fact, to admit that what I really want is not to check how I look, but just to look at myself; for my actual purposes, the bathroom mirror works perfectly well, particularly since I am rarely able to leave the house and thus never wear shoes.

A full-length mirror! Sometimes I think: No, I won’t pretend to be better than I am, I’ll take the plunge. I click around and add the cheapest one to my shopping cart. Then I see the future unfold before me: after an expenditure that would live in my records forever, I’d have to wait for it to arrive in the mail. Day by day I’d check its status. I’d worry that it would break. Upon its arrival, I’d probably need help maneuvering the package. To the inevitable comment that I’d purchased something large, I’d have to confess—yes, I have. A mirror. You know, in addition to the one I already have.

Oh, a mirror? says my interlocutor, who is no longer anybody I know but simply myself—not Alice but another self. This one’s a prosecutor; her name’s Simone. People are dying and you’ve bought a mirror? You could have given that money to a street urchin, but you bought a mirror? Standing on a chair to get a better look at yourself is just too hard for little old you, eh? Well, don’t let me interfere with your mirror. By the way, who made that mirror? Were you too cheap to get anything made in halfway decent labor conditions?

Click click click—the mirror comes out of the shopping cart. I purchase a book instead. Or maybe a sweater. Or shoes.

Would Alice buy a full-length mirror? That’s the trouble—I don’t know. She’d have one, obviously, but acquired through some mysterious means, maybe from a beautiful antique wardrobe, already intact. Or maybe she would buy one and set it up in some open area, smiling: “Darling, it’s simply courtesy to others just to give yourself a once-over in the mirror.” If I knew she’d buy one, then it wouldn’t be so fraught. My better self did it, so I will too.

A full-length mirror! What if I purchased one simply to prove that I didn’t have to look in it? It would be casually put in a corner, maybe with a sock hanging over it: Oh, a mirror? Yes, I suppose. I really forget it’s there, you know, I never use it. (My audience, sotto voce: And yet she’s always so well-dressed. And so brave!) With the mirror resolutely ignored, I would refine my vanity into something so much a vice as to be almost a virtue.

One thing’s for sure: if I had one, no matter what I did, it would bring everything to a resolution. I’d stop buying clothes. I would heal to become a better, stronger person than I was before I got sick. I’d never go back into the hospital. I would not require other people to pack up my apartment for  me. I would write my book proposal, I would walk ten miles every day, I would go to the theater, I would get a job, I would read more books and watch more movies, I would rise early and sleep well, I would shine with a humble yet unmistakable brilliance, and I would never let anybody down.

A full-length mirror! Suppose one did simply appear—a good mirror, generous. I would look at the woman looking back at me. Who would be me, who would be Alice—it would be an irrelevant problem, because in that moment, as she blinks and I blink, as our mouths curve together in identical smiles, we would be at peace, the real disappointment and the unreal paradigm. Deep, deep we’d go, Alice and I, until we’d emerge in some other world, a perfect and complete being at last.

 

B.D. McClay is an essayist and critic. She has written for Lapham’s Quarterly, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

On Mary Wollstonecraft

Detail from John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790–1. Public domain.

Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I first visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daffodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere.

Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: Was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I’d met at nineteen, but that life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to find my way as a writer, but I was jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.

There were a string of discussions with my husband, threading from morning argument to online chat to text to phone to therapy session to dinner, where we floated ideas about open marriage and relationship breaks and moving countries and changing careers and dirty weekends. But we couldn’t agree on what was important, and I began to peel my life away from his. We decided that we could see other people. We were as honest and kind and open as we could manage as we did this, which sometimes wasn’t much. The spring I began visiting Wollstonecraft’s grave, he moved out, dismantling our bed by taking the mattress and leaving me with the frame. I took off my wedding ring—a gold band with half a line of “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath etched on the inside—and for weeks afterward, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn’t throw the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free.

At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but meaningful like religion; friendships with women that were fusional and sisterly; talk with anyone and everyone about what was worth living for; books that felt like mountains to climb; attempts at writing fiction and poetry and memoir. I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn’t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that it was wrong. While I was a girl, waiting for my life to begin, my mother gave me books: The Mill on the Floss when I was ill; Ballet Shoes when I demanded dance lessons; A Little Princess when I felt overlooked. How could I find the books I needed now? I had so many questions: Could you be a feminist and be in love? Did the search for independence mean I would never be at home with anyone, anywhere? Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman’s life? What was worth living for at all—what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable? Could I even do this without my mother beside me? Or approach any of these questions if she was already fading from my life? And if I wanted to write about all this, how could I do it? What forms would I need? What genre could I be most truthful in? How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for definition, narcissistic self-involvement, when the world was burning? Wouldn’t I be better off giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones, and my pen? When would I get sick of myself?

The questions felt urgent as well as overwhelming. At times I couldn’t face the page—printed or blank—at all. I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others—and that this sort of life can have beauty in it. And so I went back to the writers I’d loved when I was younger—the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the thought of Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft, the novels of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. I read other writers—Elena Ferrante, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison—for the first time. I watched them try to answer some of the questions I myself had. This book bears the traces of the struggles they had, as well as my own—and some of the things we all found that help. Not all of the solutions they (and I) found worked, and even when they did, they didn’t work all the time: if I’d thought life was a puzzle I could solve once and for all when I was younger, I couldn’t believe that any longer. But the answers might come in time if I could only stay with the questions, as the lover who came with me to Wollstonecraft’s grave would keep reminding me.

***

A Vindication was written in six weeks. On January 3, 1792, the day she gave the last sheet to the printer, Wollstonecraft wrote to Roscoe: “I am dissatisfied with myself for not having done justice to the subject.—Do not suspect me of false modesty—I mean to say that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word.” Wollstonecraft isn’t in fact being coy: her book isn’t well-made. Her main arguments about education are at the back, the middle is a sarcastic roasting of male conduct-book writers in the style of her attack on Burke, and the parts about marriage and friendship are scattered throughout when they would have more impact in one place. There is a moralizing, bossy tone, noticeably when Wollstonecraft writes about the sorts of women she doesn’t like (flirts and rich women: take a deep breath). It ends with a plea to men, in a faux-religious style that doesn’t play to her strengths as a writer. In this, her book is like many landmark feminist books—The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique—that are part essay, part argument, part memoir, held together by some force, it seems, that is attributable solely to its writer. It’s as if these books, to be written at all, have to be brought into being by autodidacts who don’t know for sure what they’re doing—just that they have to do it.

On my first reading of A Vindication as a twenty-year-old undergraduate, I looked up the antique words and wrote down their definitions (to vindicate was to “argue by evidence or argument”). I followed Wollstonecraft’s arguments in favor of education. I knew she’d been a teacher, and saw how reasonable her main argument was: you had to educate women, because they have influence as mothers over infant men. I took these notes eighteen months into an undergraduate degree in English and French in the library of an Oxford college that had only begun admitting women twenty-one years before. I’d arrived from an ordinary school, had scraped by in my first-year exams, and barely felt I belonged. The idea that I could think of myself as an intellectual as Mary did was laughable. Yet halfway into my second year, I discovered early women’s writing. I was amazed that there was so much of it—by protonovelists such as Eliza Haywood, aristocratic poets like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and precursors of the Romantics like Anna Laetitia Barbauld—and I was angry, often, at the way they’d been forgotten, or, even worse, pushed out of the canon. Wollstonecraft stood out, as she’d never been forgotten, was patently unforgettable. I longed to keep up with her, even if I had to do it with the shorter OED at my elbow. I didn’t see myself in her at the time. It wasn’t clear to me when I was younger how hard she had pushed herself.

Later in her life, Wollstonecraft would defend her unlettered style to her more lettered husband:

I am compelled to think that there is something in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm elogiums—I mean more mind—denominate it as you will—more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers—

I wish I had been able to marshal these types of arguments while I was at university. I remember one miserable lesson about Racine, just me and a male student who’d been to Eton. I was baffled by the tutor’s questions. We would notice some sort of pattern or effect in the lines of verse—a character saying “Ô désespoir! Ô crime! Ô déplorable race!”—and the tutor would ask us what that effect was called. Silence. And then the other student would speak up. “Anaphora,” he’d say. “Chiasmus. Zeugma.” I had no idea what he was talking about; I’d never heard these words before. I was relieved when the hour was over. When I asked him afterward how he knew those terms, he said he’d been given a handout at school and he invited me to his room so that I could borrow it and make a photocopy. I must still have it somewhere. I remember feeling a tinge of anger—I could see the patterns in Racine’s verse, I just didn’t know what they were called—but mostly I felt ashamed. I learned the terms on the photocopy by heart.

Mary knew instinctively that what she offered was something more than technical accuracy, an unshakeable structure, or an even tone. Godwin eventually saw this too. “When tried by the hoary and long-established laws of literary composition, [A Vindication of the Rights of Woman] can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the first class of human productions,” he wrote after her death. “But when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures.” Reading it again, older now, and having read many more of the feminist books that Wollstonecraft’s short one is the ancient foremother of, I can see what he means.

There are funny autobiographical sketches, as where Mary is having a moment of sublimity at a too-gorgeous sunset only to be interrupted by a fashionable lady asking for her gown to be admired. There is indelible phrasemaking, such as the moment when Mary counters the Margaret Thatcher fallacy—the idea that a woman in power is good in itself—by saying that “it is not empire, but equality” that women should contend for. She asked for things that are commonplace now but were unusual then: for women to be MPs, for girls and boys to be educated together, for friendship to be seen as the source and foundation of romantic love. She linked the way women were understood as property under patriarchy to the way enslaved people were treated, and demanded the abolition of both systems. She was also responding to an indisputably world-historical moment, with all the passion and hurry that that implies. Specifically, she addressed Talleyrand, who had written a pamphlet in support of women’s education, but generally, she applied herself to the ideas about women’s status and worth coming out of the brand-new French republic. In 1791, France gave equal rights to Black citizens, made nonreligious marriage and divorce possible, and emancipated the Jews. What would England give its women? (Wollstonecraft was right that the moment couldn’t wait: Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in October 1791 and ironically dedicated it to Marie-Antoinette, was guillotined within two years of its publication.)

And though I love the Vindication for its eccentricities, I also love it for its philosophy. It is philosophically substantial, even two centuries later. Wollstonecraft understood how political the personal was, and that between people was where the revolution of manners she called for could be effected. “A man has been termed a microcosm,” she writes, “and every family might also be called a state.” The implications of this deceptively simple idea would echo down the centuries: what role should a woman occupy at home, and how does that affect what she is encouraged to do in the wider world? Every woman in this book struggles with that idea, from Plath’s worry that becoming a mother would mean she could no longer write poetry to Woolf’s insecurity about her education coming from her father’s library rather than from an ancient university. Much of Wollstonecraft’s own thought had risen from her close reading of Rousseau, particularly from her engagement with Émile, his working-through of an ideal Enlightenment education for a boy. I didn’t find as an undergraduate, and still don’t, her argument for women’s education, which is that women should be educated in order to be better wives and mothers, or in order to be able to cope when men leave them, to be feminist. But now I can see that Wollstonecraft was one of the first to make the point that feminists have repeated in various formulations for two hundred years—though I hope not forever. If woman “has reason,” Mary says, then “she was not created merely to be the solace of man.” And so it follows that “the sexual should not destroy the human character.” That is to say, that women should above all be thought human, not other.

***

With so much of Wollstonecraft’s attention taken up by revolutionary France, perhaps it was inevitable that she would go there. She wrote to Everina that she and Johnson, along with Fuseli and his wife, were planning a six-week trip: “I shall be introduced to many people, my book has been translated and praised in some popular prints; and Fuseli, of course, is well known.” She didn’t say that she had fallen in love with Fuseli. The painter was forty-seven and the protofeminist twenty-nine. Mary hadn’t been without admirers—she met a clergyman she liked on the boat to Ireland; an MP who visited Lord Kingsborough seemed taken with her too—but marriage didn’t appeal. She joked with Roscoe (not just a fan but another admirer, surely) that she could get married in Paris, then get divorced when her “truant heart” demanded it: “I am still a Spinster on the wing.” But to Fuseli, she wrote that she’d never met anyone who had his “grandeur of soul,” a grandeur she thought essential to her happiness, and she was scared of falling “a sacrifice to a passion which may have a mixture of dross in it … If I thought my passion criminal, I would conquer it, or die in the attempt.” Mary suggested she live in a ménage à trois with Fuseli and his wife. He turned the idea down, the plan to go to Paris dissolved, and Mary left London on her own.

She arrived in the Marais in December 1792, when Louis XVI was on trial for high treason. On the morning he would mount his defense, the king “passed by my window,” Mary wrote to Johnson. “I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears flow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death.” Mary was spooked: she wished for the cat she had left in London, and couldn’t blow out her candle that night. The easy radicalism she had adopted in England came under pressure. Though she waited until her French was better before calling on Francophone contacts, she began to meet other expatriates in Paris, such as Helen Maria Williams, the British poet Wordsworth would praise. In spring 1793, she was invited to the house of Thomas Christie, a Scottish essayist who had cofounded the Analytical Review with Johnson. There she met Gilbert Imlay, an American, and fell deeply in love.

Imlay was born in New Jersey and had fought in the War of Independence; he was writing a novel, The Emigrants, and made money in Paris by acting as a go-between for Europeans who wanted to buy land in the U.S. and the Americans who wanted to sell it to them. It is as if all Mary’s intensity throughout her life so far—the letters to Jane Arden, her devotion to Fanny Blood, her passion for Fuseli—crests in her affair with this one man, whom she disliked on their first meeting and decided to avoid. Imlay said he thought marriage corrupt; he talked about the women he’d had affairs with; he described his travels through the rugged West of America. After the disappointment with Fuseli, she offered up her heart ecstatically, carelessly: “Whilst you love me,” Mary told him, making a man she’d known for months the architect and guardian of her happiness, “I cannot again fall into the miserable state, which rendered life a burthen almost too heavy to be borne.” And yet she also noticed she couldn’t make him stay: “Of late, we are always separating—Crack!—crack!—and away you go.”

When my husband and I agreed we could see other people, he created a Tinder profile, using a photo I’d taken of him against a clear blue sky on the balcony of one of our last apartments together. He wanted to fall in love again and have children: pretty quickly he found someone who wanted that too. I met someone at a party who intrigued me, another writer visiting from another city, and I began spending more time with him: in front of paintings, at Wollstonecraft’s grave, on long walks, at the movies, talking for hours in and out of bed. After being married for so long, it was strange and wonderful to fall in love again; I felt illuminated, sexually free, emotionally rich, intellectually alive. I liked myself again. But I fought my feelings for him, reasoning that it was too soon after my husband, that sentiments this strong were somehow wrong in themselves, that he would go back to his own city soon and so I must give him up no matter what I felt. When he was gone, though, I saw I had found that untameable thing, a mysterious recognition, everything the poets mean by love. I wrote him email after email, sending him thoughts and feelings and provocations, trying out ideas for my new life, which I hoped would include him. Sometimes I must have sounded like Wollstonecraft writing to Imlay.

Mary moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, a leafy village on the edge of Paris, and began writing a history of the revolution; throughout that summer of 1793, she and Imlay would meet at the gates, les barrières, in the Paris city wall. (Bring your “barrier-face,” she would ask him when the affair began to turn cold, and she wanted to go back to the start.) “I do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you,” she wrote. Perhaps there was something in her conception of herself that made her think she could handle a flirt like Imlay. “Women who have gone to great lengths to raise themselves above the ordinary level of their sex,” Mary’s biographer Claire Tomalin comments, “are likely to believe, for a while at any rate, that they will be loved the more ardently and faithfully for their pains.” Mary perhaps believed she was owed a great love, and Imlay was made to fit. “By tickling minnows,” as Virginia Woolf put it in a short essay about Wollstonecraft, Imlay “had hooked a dolphin.” By the end of the year, Mary was pregnant.

Françoise Imlay (always Fanny, after Fanny Blood) was born at Le Havre in May 1794, and Mary wrote home that “I feel great pleasure at being a mother,” and boasted that she hadn’t “clogged her soul by promising obedience” in marriage. Imlay stayed away a lot; in one letter, Mary tells him of tears coming to her eyes at picking up the carving knife to slice the meat herself, because it brought back memories of him being at home with her. As she becomes disillusioned by degrees with Imlay, whose letters don’t arrive as expected, she falls in love with their daughter. At three months, she talks of Fanny getting into her “heart and imagination”; at four months, she notices with pleasure that the baby “does not promise to be a beauty, but appears wonderfully intelligent”; at six months, she tells Imlay that though she loved being pregnant and breastfeeding (nursing your own child was radical in itself then), those sensations “do not deserve to be compared to the emotions I feel, when she stops to smile upon me, or laughs outright on meeting me unexpectedly in the street, or after a short absence.”

Imlay’s return keeps being delayed, and Wollstonecraft uses her intellect to protest, arguing against the commercial forces that keep him from “observing with me how her mind unfolds.” Isn’t the point, as Imlay once claimed, to live in the present moment? Hasn’t Mary already shown that she can earn enough by her writing to keep them? “Stay, for God’s sake,” she writes, “let me not be always vainly looking for you, till I grow sick at heart.” Still he does not come, and her letters reach a pitch of emotion when she starts to suspect he’s met someone else. “I do not choose to be a secondary object,” she spits. She already knew that men were “systematic tyrants.” “My head turns giddy, when I think that all the confidence I have had in the affection of others is come to this—I did not expect this blow from you.” She starts signing off each letter with the threat that it could be the last he receives from her.

In April 1795, she decided to join him in London if he would not come to her. “I have been so unhappy this winter,” Mary wrote. “I find it as difficult to acquire fresh hopes, as to regain tranquility.” Fanny was nearly a year old, and Imlay had set up home for them in Soho. She attempted to seduce him; he recoiled. (He had been seeing someone, an actress.) She took the losses—of her imagined domestic idyll, of requited love, of a fond father for her daughter—hard, and planned to take a huge dose of laudanum, which Imlay discovered just in time. I find it unbearable that Mary, like Plath, would think that dying is better for her own children than living, but neither Mary nor Sylvia were well when they thought that, I tell myself.

Imlay suggested that Mary go away for the summer—he had some business that needed attention in Scandinavia. A shipment of silver had gone missing, and he could do with someone going there in person to investigate. She could take Fanny, and a maid. The letters Mary wrote to him while waiting in Hull for good sailing weather show that she had not yet recovered: she looks at the sea “hardly daring to own to myself the secret wish, that it might become our tombs”; she is scared to sleep because Imlay appears in her dreams with “different casts of countenance”; she mocks the idea that she’ll revive at all. “Now I am going towards the north in search of sunbeams!—Will any ever warm this desolated heart? All nature seems to frown—or rather mourn with me.” But she had an infant on her hip, a business venture to rescue that might also bring back her errant lover, and from the letters she wrote home, she’d mold a book that would unwittingly create a future for herself, even when she was not entirely sure she wanted one.

 

An adapted excerpt of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, to be published by Ecco/HarperCollins this May.

Joanna Biggs is the author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work and a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. In 2017, she cofounded Silver Press, a feminist publishing house.

John Wick Marathon

Keanu Reeves as John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photograph by Murray Close. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

In our Spring issue, we published Kyra Wilder’s poem “John Wick Is So Tired.” To celebrate the poem and the recent release of John Wick: Chapter 4, we sent four reviewers to three different John Wick screenings over the course of a week.  

Tuesday, March 21: Press Preview

The first thing we noted when we entered AMC Lincoln Square 13 for the New York press screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 was that film PR girls are way nicer than their fashion industry counterparts. Check-in was a breeze, and we were informed that since we had special blue wristbands, we didn’t have to turn in our phones. We hadn’t considered that we would potentially have to turn in our phones, but were relieved nevertheless. We were handed a very large stack of papers with a large John Wick logo at the top, containing detailed information about the franchise and a long explanation of the movie’s plot, which we chose not to read too closely for fear of spoilers. This heavy stack of papers was also where we first learned that the runtime was a whopping 169 minutes. This troubled us, mostly because we had had a lot of wine with dinner and were concerned that we would have to pee. The theater was packed with agitated-seeming nonjournalists who were somehow able to secure tickets. People wove up and down the aisles in a huff, frustrated by the first-come-first-served seating. A couple of women exchanged curse words over another woman’s volume. Multiple people arrived late with full take-out bags, their lack of discretion leading us to believe that the staff of the theater were not too concerned with enforcing the rules of this AMC John Wick press preview. 

The French crime film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville once said, “What is friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and come on over quickly.’ ” In the universe of John Wick, it’s pretty much that too, but it’s a thousand guns, two dozen archers, bows, arrows, knives, swords, bulletproof suits, a sundry list of exotic ammunition, an attack dog, a blind assassin, dueling pistols, a fleet of luxury attack vehicles, and a handful of classic American muscle cars. Oh, and if you could bring them all to the Sacré-Cœur, in Paris, by sunrise, that would be great, thanks.

By now, with the fourth installment in the franchise, the formula is familiar. John Wick (Keanu Reeves), on the run from the High Table (a governing body for the underworld whose main function just seems to be killing people) kills a lot of people in a series of highly choreographed set-piece action sequences in places like fancy hotels for assassins, fancy churches for assassins, and fancy Berlin techno clubs, also presumably for assassins. There’s something very charmingly mid-2010s about the environs and the soundtrack (was that the opening of Justice’s “Genesis”?), like a world where there was no COVID pandemic, but where everyone is a rich assassin in an ugly custom three-piece sparkly suit. Better times.

Reeves speaks softly and carries a number of big loud sticks, swords, et cetera, often breaking down his guns into their constituent parts and throwing them, stabbing people with them, or indulging in other creative but necessary acts of violence. There’s an extremely fetishistic aspect to the gearheaded breakdown of the guns, and to the clicking of magazine releases, that forms a sort of counterpoint to the theoretically balletic fight choreography. Like Jean-Pierre Melville, John Wick normally drives a classic Mustang. How a similar car made its way to Paris in this film is anyone’s guess. There really aren’t any other comparison points between this film and Melville’s Le Samouraï, except that they’re both about assassins. Oh, and friendship.

—Alex Tsebelis and Chloe Mackey

Thursday, March 23: Premiere Day

I was supposed to go to a cosplay premiere event for John Wick: Chapter 4, but couldn’t get tickets in time—so I ended up at a normal Regal theater for the nearly sold-out 7 P.M. screening. I’d dressed for cosplay that morning, but I’d also never seen a John Wick film, so I had to make some educated guesses. Action movies, I knew, are all about men in suits performing suit-inappropriate actions. Assuming John would have a sexy love interest (this turned out to be wrong), I selected the female suit equivalent, a secretary costume: fitted brown houndstooth minidress. I loitered at the Regal Essex Crossing second-floor bar, photographing my outfit against the sunset over the Williamsburg Bridge, a very John Wick backdrop. “Is this for a fashion blog?” the Regal bartender asked me, winking. “No,” I said. “I mean, yes.” 

Everyone else in the audience wore joggers, a garment absent from the fashion-forward film. Indeed, without context, the opening sequence registered to me as a kind of psychedelically plotless Saint Laurent advertisement, a brand for which Keanu Reeves is an “ambassador.” We begin with John Wick punching a brick in an elaborately shadowy warehouse. His training is interrupted by the dramatic entrance of his three-piece suit, appearing, silhouetted against the inexplicably fiery glow of a doorway, in the hands of some sinister fellow (friend, foe, butler?). The suit—presented in a manner usually reserved for the hero’s weapon of choice—is accompanied by a line of dialogue I neither understood at the time nor remember now, but which was clearly a classic John Wick catchphrase that meant something like “Here’s your suit. Now it’s time to kill—again.” And he totally does. 

Wick’s antagonist, the Marquis, sports a series of glittery waistcoats complete with asymmetrical gold buttons and stupid little chains. His weapon: blades. His goal: glory. The effete Marquis probably has ten times as much dialogue, and charisma, as John Wick, who is completely without character attributes. John Wick is just a killer, more like a machine than a human being. His suit, like his gun, is all-black.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Tuesday, March 28

The statistically inclined among us might have told me, as my projectionist friend did later on, that the odds of the screen going black twenty minutes into my 10:30 A.M. Sunday-brunch screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 at the Alamo Drafthouse up at least three escalators in the City Point mall were actually not so low in the age of automated projection. So my associate (a different one) and I finished our cauliflower-crust breakfast pizza and got a refund, and I picked up where we’d left off two days later at AMC 34th Street 14, where Nicole Kidman’s on-screen avatar assured me that the display was IMAX and the projectors laser. In the basement of a Berlin techno club full of bad, identically robotic dancers making repetitive upward arm movements, John Wick is dealt in to a five-card-draw game of poker with the two hitmen contracted to murder him and a German High Table official named Killa. At the end of the game, Wick puts two black eights and two black aces on the table, in what is usually a strong move—called the dead man’s hand, as I learned that night on the Reddit forum r/NoStupidQuestions, after the hand Wild Bill Hickok was reputedly holding when he was shot—but Killa destroys his chances by playing an unbeatable five of a kind: impossible to achieve without cheating, of course, because there are only four suits in a deck. Vegas would do well to be reminded, though, of the words of the Marquis, which I should start telling myself when I wake up in the morning: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” The odds are always against John Wick, and he always wins anyway. In the end, he slices Killa’s neck open with a playing card, and pockets one of his gold teeth.

—Oriana Ullman, assistant editor