The Paris Review's Blog, page 7

I Can Read You Like A Book: On Northanger Abbey

Tinted line drawing by H.M. Brock for Northanger Abbey, 1898. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Once, many years ago, I was listening to somebody I knew describe why a potential romantic partner was an utterly hopeless prospect. He’d signed his email to her with “best,” she kept repeating. Best!—said with deepest disgust. For her, that fact was enough to communicate his unsuitability for human companionship to any sane person. Obviously, it wasn’t really about “best.” She just had no interest in him, and the email signature represented whatever it was that made them incompatible from the jump. But it also was about “best,” a little; it wasn’t just that he’d signed his email that way but that he was precisely the sort of person who would.

The process of getting to know another person, whether romantically or for some other reason, consists of small tests. These tests are not deliberate trials—ideally, at least. They’re just little moments in which you think to yourself “Speed up” or “Slow down.” Such tests can be arbitrary (as with email signatures) or imbued with wisdom (tipping well being, among Americans, the universally recognized sign of a good heart). Under the guidance of folk wisdom and our own instincts, we try our best to make judgments about who people are before we know who they are, because once we know, it’s too late for that knowledge to do we any good.

And there’s also the other side to this dynamic, which is that we believe that, as we ourselves are complicated individuals of great importance to ourselves, we may not always be accurately represented by such minute interactions. Maybe we miscalculated the tip that one time, or maybe we never sign our emails with “best” but did as a flirty joke, or maybe we were in a bad mood. Even if we jokingly type ourselves, it’s another thing to be typed by others.

Toward the end of Jane Austen’s first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, its heroine, Catherine Morland, is faced with just such a puzzle. Her love interest, Henry Tilney, is to host her; his father, General Tilney; and his sister, Eleanor at his home in the nearby village of Woodston. General Tilney has stressed to his son that he is not to take any great pains with the dinner he will serve them; Henry is therefore leaving ahead of the rest of the family to make sure all is in readiness. To Catherine, who doesn’t understand why the mismatch between what the general has requested and what Henry is doing, he explains that his father’s repeated statements that any old meal will do are simply not true. In his absence, Catherine is left to puzzle over “the inexplicability of the General’s conduct … That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?”

How are people, at any rate, to be understood? And how are we to read the shifting sands of our relationships with others? One reading of Northanger Abbey is that it is a satire about a silly girl who reads so many Gothic novels she begins to think she’s in one. (She believes General Tilney murdered his wife. He didn’t.) But after a good laugh is had at Catherine’s expense, all is well. Instead of being offended by Catherine’s beliefs about his father, Henry teases her. Such things, he tells her, don’t happen in England—not “in a country like this … where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies.” (True to form, Catherine fails to catch the joke and retreats to reflect very seriously that such things must simply happen only in Italy.) Such a reading is not wrong, but it’s not complete either. Catherine’s Gothic-novel habit has nothing to do with the book’s final crisis, in which she is abruptly evicted from Northanger Abbey for reasons she doesn’t understand. It turns out that General Tilney has thought all along that she was a wealthy heiress; when he realizes she isn’t, he tries to end the match he has so assiduously encouraged between herself and Henry. Catherine is not the only person to have misread the situation.

In an essay on Northanger Abbey, Elizabeth Hardwick notes that reading Austen is generally much more fun than reading about Austen—where Austen is assured and humorous, her partisans tend to be defensive and ponderous. It’s not my intention to turn Northanger Abbey from a gleeful romp into a treatise on human judgment. It is a light novel—Austen’s lightest—and that lightness should be burdened as little as possible through overthinking it. Nevertheless, at risk of weightiness, it’s worth exploring how Northanger Abbey is more than a satire of other novels. Managing disastrous first impressions, discerning the sincerity of another’s intentions, seeing into somebody’s character: these are all here, explored in just as nuanced a way as they will be in Emma or Pride and Prejudice. Northanger Abbey is not Austen’s best novel, or even her second best. But it is, far and away, my favorite.

So, to reiterate our problem: Given that people often say and do different things, and say and want different things, how are we to read them? It is crucial, particularly for Austen’s young women when evaluating marriage prospects, to know how to tell if somebody deserves your trust before you actually need to trust them. Yet you’ll only ever know if you made the right decision when it matters. Everything else is a judgment by proxy. But given that life is not a novel, Gothic or otherwise, what do we do with all these signifiers of character that we steadily collect as we go? You cannot read people like a book. But what if, sometimes, you need to?

***

When Catherine bonds with a newfound friend, Isabella Thorpe, over their shared tastes in literature, she exclaims that “while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable.” I will confess up front that, once I opened up Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to see what had Catherine in such ecstasy, I did not share her experience. Even to a person like myself, who has a great appetite for long and boring novels nobody actually reads, Udolpho is a slog. It may be the classic Gothic novel par excellence, but for a book in which a girl is whisked away to an ancient Italian castle, surprisingly little ever really happens in it.

Despite its spooky atmosphere, where nothing is what it seems, the actual “mysteries” of Udolpho lie first in introducing things that appear to be supernatural (but are not), and then in introducing people who appear to be sinister and untrustworthy (and they are). That is, people in Udolpho are mostly what they appear to be. One of the few mistakes its heroine, Emily, makes is believing the villain of the book, Montoni, to have murdered the previous owner of the castle of Udolpho. Though Montoni is grasping and cruel and unafraid to kill, he is innocent of that particular crime. Thus when Catherine thinks of the general that he has “the air and attitude of a Montoni,” she is more on-target than she thinks. First, because General Tilney, like Montoni, is wrongly suspected of murder. But secondly, because, much like Montoni, he is a greedy and calculating man whose love of money ultimately causes him to act brutally toward a young woman who is a guest in his home. For Austen, there are no huge mysteries lurking in country houses, ghostly or otherwise, but people are unknowable.

Austen plays this same game more subtly with Catherine’s two love interests, Henry Tilney and John Thorpe. We like Henry from the start because, when he meets Catherine in Bath, he joins her and Mrs. Allen, the older woman she’s with, in a conversation about women’s clothing. “Men commonly take so little notice of those things,” Mrs. Allen (whose main interest is clothing) says. Henry goes on to display not only interest in but genuine affection for the novels that Catherine is reading, saying that he has read “hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas.” John Thorpe, on the other hand, is pretentiously and defensively masculine, declaring to Catherine that “I never read novels; I have something else to do.” Catherine does not like John, but she continually lies to herself that she does; she ignores what she can plainly tell to be true about her own feelings because he’s her friend’s brother and thus must be a nice person.

In other words, we like Henry because the novel lets us know, through novel code, that he is a sympathetic and intelligent individual, one who is interested in women and the things that interest women without being scornful of them. And we don’t like John because his dismissiveness of Catherine’s interests is one clue that he’s a boor who doesn’t care about her. And we don’t like his sister, Isabella, either, because she seems a lot like her brother. In all of these judgments, we are correct.

But in real life, such broad-minded tastes mean nothing about a person’s character. Even professed beliefs don’t tell us anything about how somebody treats the other people in their life; that’s why practically every week we see a story of some idealist or another who is revealed to be brutal to the actual people around them. At this point it’s more surprising to us when somebody professes a high ideal and then sticks to it. A man who says on his Bumble profile that he shares some feminine tastes (Taylor Swift, Gilmore Girls, Emily Henry) could still be cruel, manipulative, violent, dismissive, bad with money, unfaithful, or dishonest. In other Austen novels, in fact, men who present themselves as sympathetic through their more refined tastes, like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, are not trustworthy at all. (Her most feted hero, Mr. Darcy, is socially graceless.) That Henry’s signaled character and his actual character coincide is an accident. Like Catherine, we are just filling in the gaps.

Catherine herself makes a series of terrible impressions on Henry Tilney, including not only leaping to the conclusion that his father is a killer but accidentally standing him and his sister up early in their acquaintance, apparently for another man. Where somebody hunting through Catherine’s actions for tells to her character might write her off quickly, Henry is always willing to hear her out. When Catherine frantically apologizes and explains why she stood him up, Austen comments: “Is there a Henry in the world who could be insensible to such a declaration? Henry Tilney at least was not.” Henry is given ample evidence that Catherine is unreliable and flighty, but he disregards it—because he already likes her. It works out.

Where another writer might pretend that such a mismatch between proxy and reality does not exist, or moralize her readers by admonishing them not to judge, in Northanger Abbey, Austen does neither. She examines a flaw in human perception and judgment but offers no solutions. We do judge others through proxies that are often useless and wrong, but we also have to judge by something. The alternative would be to remain naively open to everybody, incapable of drawing conclusions, which is neither possible nor really desirable. This position is, in fact, the one Catherine occupies at the beginning of the book—she doesn’t have enough experience to judge good friends from bad and assumes good intentions from others even on the thinnest of evidence. When she does try to listen to her gut, as with General Tilney, she doesn’t have enough life experience to know that what would be the answer in a Radcliffe novel is unlikely to be the answer anywhere else. And yet, perhaps there is another kind of novel—a novel like Northanger Abbey—that can provide insight into human choices. Austen’s narrator boldly declares that a novel is “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

Austen’s spirited defense of the novel—as something that is worthwhile not only for entertainment but for its study of humanity—serves as a manifesto for the books she would go on to write after Northanger Abbey. All six of her novels are not only entirely devoted to the subject of character but take place in a world in which the whole possibility of happiness revolves around the task of judging another person correctly. The women in particular cannot afford to marry the wrong person, and they don’t have very much to go on in making their decisions, but nevertheless some tools are better than others. Taste in literature, as it turns out, is a pretty bad test. How somebody treats their social inferiors, or administers their affairs, or keeps promises they wish they hadn’t made—these are all good tests of character, albeit not ones always on display.

Still, people do choose badly in Austen’s novels all the time. They judge by the wrong things. Sometimes they are rescued by an outside circumstance; often they are not. The curdled marriage of the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice looms over every romance in that book like a memento mori. At some point, inconceivable as it might be, these were happy people who liked each other. Now look at them.

***

If I were to list things that people have done to set me off, most of them would sound as trivial as signing an email “Best.” A particular pet peeve of mine is people saying “You should try X” without any acknowledgement that I might have tried whatever they’re advising already, but, really, unsolicited advice of any kind will find me hitting the ceiling.

At one time I did construct elaborate theories as to why trespassing on my own annoyances demonstrated something bad about others: if this person meant well, they would have done this and not that, or they would have done the same thing but in a slightly different manner. In some cases, it even might have meant something bad, but who can say? It’s much more likely that they just irked me. But I don’t regret my decisions to avoid people who annoyed me, only the need I once felt to assume that annoying people must, secretly, be sinister. Somebody can be a bad host without having killed his wife.

Of course, when things do go wrong, we often go back into the past to find the signs. Perhaps if I did overlook an email signature, years later I’d be sitting in a bar muttering to myself: I should have known. I should have known the first time he wrote “Best.” In such a case, I like to think that Jane Austen would have found that funny, though in a sympathetic spirit: You’re right, she would say, leaning on the bar. You should have known. But then, how could you? Austen knew better than I did—but only, really, in the sense that she knew that none of us will ever know any better.

 

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. You can follow her work at Notebook.

The Enemy Is a Bowl of Soup: On Quino’s Mafalda

The cartoon character Mafalda, with her massive round head, sixties bob, triangular dress, and black Mary Janes, appears innocent. But this inquisitive girl-against-the-world is no ingenue—Mafalda often fires off sharp, incisive, and cynical observations about the political world around her. In Latin America, the comic strip named after her is legendary: although it ran for only nine years, from 1964 to 1973, this creation of the cartoonist Quino, the pen name of the illustrator Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, captured how a society’s irony and humor survived one of Argentina’s darkest political chapters (a coup d’état initially led by Juan Carlos Onganía that took place between 1966 and 1970 and, later, Juan Domingo Perón’s third government, which oversaw the paramilitary anticommunist project that would set up the state for a dictatorship beginning in 1976).

This June, a collection of early Mafalda strips will be published in English for the first time by Archipelago’s children’s book imprint, Elsewhere Editions, and its ideas still sound oddly current. In one famous image, published in 1965, Mafalda ponders her family’s globe. She then leaves, and returns to stick a sign on it that reads WARNING: IRRESPONSIBLE MEN AT WORK. When her mom asks her to dust off the globe, she wonders, “Do I clean all the countries, or just the ones that have dirty governments?” After a while, Mafalda realizes the globe might be sick. She covers it with bandages and brings it medicine. When her friend comes to visit, she asks for silence, out of respect for the convalescent. “Is your dad sick?” her friend asks, and she says no. “Your mom?” Neither of them. It’s the globe, she says, and brings her friend into her room, where Earth is resting peacefully. In later strips and in a similar spirit, Mafalda will debate the war in Vietnam and “play government” with her peers. “Don’t worry,” she exclaims when her mom walks in, “we have lots of policies, but we don’t actually do anything.” Her tiny body contrasts with her grandiloquent statements, both mocking the adult world around her and interpreting its political ideas with genuine concern.

Mafalda’s first run coincided with a period in Argentine history in which a series of military dictators—Juan Carlos Onganía, Roberto Marcelo Levingston, and Alejandro Agustín Lanusse—seized power and exercised both violent repression and brutal censorship of the press. Many of the topics that Mafalda touches on were simply not allowed into the public sphere at the time. As a consequence, artists such as the musician and writer María Elena Walsh, the rock star Charly García, and illustrators like Quino shifted to making children’s art, which was less scrutinized. In Mafalda, Quino found an effective yet apparently inoffensive outlet for his critiques of society. When Mafalda encounters a policeman, for example, she asks him if he’s a good person and he responds, “Police officers are always good people.” Then she looks into the bag that holds his gun and walks away, declaring, “I think I’m starting to figure out how goodness works.” Years later, another classic cartoon would show her standing next to a tall cop with her younger brother and, pointing out his baton, and cynically telling him, “Do you see? This is the little stick they use to crush ideology.”

When I was growing up in Argentina in the early aughts, in the middle of yet another political crisis, Mafalda taught me how to think politically, even when I was too young for it. Children enjoy this—they appreciate it when you don’t underestimate their intelligence, and rise to the occasion as a result. For several generations after its original run, Mafalda was published in sets of small, cheap strip books that you could buy at any newspaper stand or kiosk, making it affordable for parents and manageable for kids’ small hands.

But Mafalda was not the only memorable character in the strip. Quino created a group of neighborhood friends and classmates who inhabited different stereotypes of the time. The original gang includes Felipe, a neurotic, whimsical boy who loves the Lone Ranger comic books; Manolito, the son of Spanish immigrants, who works in his dad’s grocery store and is obsessed with money and success; and Susanita, who is proud of her bourgeois aspirations and is stereotypically feminine: she dreams of marrying a doctor, becoming a mother, and vacationing abroad. Later in the strip, toward the end of the sixties, Quino would add Mafalda’s sibling, Guille, who has the self-entitlement and irreverence that only a younger brother can have, and Libertad, the daughter of two left-wing activists, who advocates openly for Marxism and guerrilla warfare.

The cultural trends of the sixties and early seventies made their way into Mafalda through this same humorous effect, the kids’ tastes and mores imbued with a soixante-huitard sensibility. Mafalda is a fan of the Beatles, and she and Felipe get mad at Manolito when he insults their long hair, which at the time was a symbol of opposition to military conscription and to the buzz cuts men got while in service. During the space race, Mafalda similarly berates Manolito for not going to nursery school and declares, “Sending people into outer space is progress, not your papa’s grocery store!” Manolito responds, “But I’m also pretty interested in the cosmos! I’ve got plans for satellite stores.”

In many ways, the children in Mafalda are mimicking the different worldviews they have inherited from their parents. Quino’s humor relies on placing adult sentences in children’s voices—an estrangement that has both an endearing and a satirical effect, and that allows him to mock and critique the middle-class values of traditional families, consumption, and conformism. Consider Mafalda’s depiction of gender roles: If a grown woman told us in a comic strip that she just wanted to get married and have children, this would sound old-school, boring, even passé. In a discussion between Susanita and Mafalda, however, it has a different angle. When Mafalda dreams that her mother went to university and got a degree (at a time when most women were mostly housewives) she describes this enthusiastically to Susanita, hoping to find a match in her excitement. Instead, Susanita asks if her mother got a “rich, handsome boyfriend” in Mafalda’s dream. Malfada says no. Susanita, the prototradwife, exclaims: “So she went to college and everything and she came away with NOTHING!”

One of the many ways political discourse makes its way into the comic is in Mafalda’s projections onto her archnemesis: a bowl of soup. Throughout the strip, the bowl of soup becomes a hated symbol of the seemingly healthy food that Mafalda is forced to consume—and, by extension, an emblem of what she’s been taught, the middle-class ideologies that suffuse her life. When Mafalda sees her mother clipping a fish soup recipe from a newspaper, she gets mad and imitates a dictator’s voice, shouting, “DOWN WITH FREEDOM OF THE PRESS!” On another day when she is served this soup, a single strip takes over the page, in which a distressed Mafalda announces, “Soup is to childhood what Communism is to democracy!” In soup, Mafalda sees an embodiment of the set of lies that adults are being fed—soup is the enemy, the man, and the hypocrisy of modern postwar life.

The culmination of Quino’s radical avoidance of censorship took place a day after Onganía’s 1966 coup d’état. On the day of the coup, the newspaper El Mundo, in which Mafaldaappeared at the time, was filled with neutral coverage: journalists couldn’t write openly against the regime change. Instead, the most revolutionary voice appeared in the children’s strip. In it, Mafalda seems anguished—this is not the same girl who had so self-assuredly argued against her father’s materialistic desire for a car and her mother’s preoccupation with beauty. Instead, she seems genuinely defeated, confused. In a single, close-up frame, she asks: “What happened with … Everything that we were taught at school …” She implies that the values of democracy, of being “a good person,” and of faith in the government are now deeply disrupted by Onganía’s violent seizure of power. And Quino, at the time, was one of the only writers who—in cryptic complicity with his readers—was able to say something about it.

By the early seventies, tensions in the political climate of Argentina had increased even more. Ediciones de la Flor, Quino’s publisher, became a target of censorship—one of its novels was even removed from print—and Quino stopped producing his comic books in 1973, alleging a “lack of new ideas.” In 1975, the Argentine Secretariat of Intelligence tried to appropriate Mafalda, and created its own apocryphal version of the cartoon, in which a poorly drawn Manolito incites young men to join the military service. A year after that, Quino’s editors were kidnapped by the military and eventually released under international pressure. Shortly thereafter, the military massacred five Pallottine priests with left-leaning ideas. The forensic photographs taken after the act produced a chilling image: the bodies of two of the priests sat lifeless next to a poster of a Mafalda cartoon the murders had ripped from the wall and placed next to the bodies. Here, the classic image is turned sinister: “Do you see?” Mafalda asks once more. “This is the little stick they use to crush ideology.”

Threatened by the political climate in an increasingly militarized country, Quino went into exile in 1976. Until 1973, Mafalda had continued to denounce the decaying values of her milieu, Argentina’s naive cultural dependence on the United States and Europe, the plethora of wars abroad, and the censorship of radical movements in Latin America. She did so in a witty and childlike way that was accessible to kids and parents alike; she was humorous but always sharp. After the return of democracy to the country in 1983, Quino not only went back to Buenos Aires and to his native province of Mendoza, but he also allowed Mafalda to be reproduced to promote the values of the new democratic regime. In many ways, the intergenerational battle that Mafalda represents still rings true, and is bound to educate nonconformist children in conformist times.

 

Julia Kornberg is the author of Berlin Atomized.

Your World Is Your Street: A Studio Visit with Agosto Machado

Agosto Machado. Photograph by Scott Rossi.

Agosto Machado’s apartment and studio on East Third Street is crammed, floor to ceiling, with steel bookcases bursting with books and boxes of files. Colorful printed fabrics are draped over the shelves, concealing most of their contents. In the areas left exposed, there are framed photographs of icons like the Warhol muse Candy Darling and the gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson, arranged around candles and trinkets as if to form small devotional altars. The space is small, but Machado welcomed me in on a late April day. He had laid out a bottle of Evian for me, and a packet of Pepperidge Farm butter cookies. He had rolled his bedroll into the bathtub to make space for us to talk. I gestured at the fabrics hanging over the shelves to ask if they’re for privacy. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s aesthetic. Like makeup.”

A Chinese Spanish Filipino American orphan raised on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, he befriended and eventually influenced multiple generations of downtown artists, among them Jack Smith, Peter Hujar, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Machado, who doesn’t share his age (“A lady never tells,” he said), has been a witness to decades of cultural moments in New York: the experimental theater of the early sixties, Warhol’s factory, the Stonewall riot, the AIDS epidemic, the gentrification of downtown Manhattan. He is eager to be of use as an oral historian—to evoke, as his art does, the lives of the artists he has known, many of whom were lost to AIDS. He has always collected the world around him, accumulating protest pins and street flyers, photographs, funeral notices, bits of gems and glitter, a pair of Candy Darling’s shoes. In recent years, Machado has begun delving through his archives to create shrines and altars, like the ones that appear in his portfolio in The Paris Review’s recent Spring issue.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve been described as a performance artist, a “Zelig-like icon,” a muse, an activist, and an archivist. It’s difficult to define you, but you define yourself most often as a “pre-Stonewall street queen.” What does that mean to you?

AGOSTO MACHADO

It came out of the happenstance of not having a regular place to live when I was young. For street queens, your world is your street. Where do you get information? In person, on the street. People would say to each other, Did you hear that place was raided? Do you know who just died? Do you know who’s in the hospital? Do you know who got picked up in Bellevue? And so forth. I was nobody and I had no place to live. I was dependent on the kindness of strangers. That’s a quote from Tennessee Williams. And there were people who, even if all they had was a bag of potato chips, they would share it.

INTERVIEWER

For The Paris Review, you titled your portfolio Downtown (Altar). Can you tell me about the two pieces by Gilda Pervin? One is a pin, and the other is a rectangular sculpture. They’re made of colorful clay, with bits of wire and marbles and beads stuck into them. How did they come into your possession?

MACHADO

Gilda Pervin is ninety-one years old now. She came to New York when she was forty-six. She was married and she had children. She wanted to express herself. I had started working with Ethyl Eichelberger, who lived on Spring and Elizabeth. Where the Elizabeth Street Garden is now, there was a vacant lot where people threw garbage and what have you. But on a window ledge nearby, there was an accumulation of these objects. Someone had taken the time to put them there. That was Gilda Pervin. I said, “Whoever this artist is, I hope to eventually meet her.” And those are the pieces she gave me. For forty-five years, I have moved them around in different installations. And now, they’re part of an altar, which is really a shrine. It’s going to be in the museum as one piece.

INTERVIEWER

What prompted you to collect and archive the world around you? Did you always feel that you were living through history?

MACHADO

No. Emotionally, this is what I embraced because I had nothing. I thought, These memories dwell within my heart. These people, if they’d had time, would have done so much more. So I collected these mementos of the street queens. I collected photographs too. Cameras were a luxury, even an Instamatic. All around us, under this fabric, are boxes of snapshots. There are thousands hidden away, and I hope to eventually excavate them and do little zines dedicated to various people, to acknowledge their existence and their contributions and the bravery of them expressing themselves and doing their art. Once AIDS hit, obviously, so much was lost. But as long as there’s oral history, there’s wonderment.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

If you could resurrect one downtown venue that has since closed for one night, which one would it be?

MACHADO

The Silver Dollar. The Silver Dollar restaurant was on the corner of Washington and Christopher. During the day, it was filled with office workers from the post office and what have you. Little by little, in the afternoon, the drag queens came in, and then at night it was the street queens who went out to the men in the trucks and made money. The juxtaposition of the street queens, the homeless people, the people who wanted drugs—it was a clearinghouse. Working at the restaurant were these Greek immigrants, most of them from small villages in Greece. Now they lived in New York, and they were probably thinking, This is America? It’s not like in the movies! They were surrounded by all these people in women’s clothes. They’d yell, “Mary!”—that’s a generic name for us, Mary. If you didn’t know the girl’s name, you’d say, “Hey, Mary.” They’d yell, “Mary! Your hamburger’s ready!” and all the heads in the place would turn at once.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

Your friendships have been central to your life and to your artistic practice. What would you say you’ve learned from them?

MACHADO

I learned about community. I did twelve years of caregiving during the time of AIDS, and that was an awakening. The downtown community turned their backs on us—this is before ACT UP and so forth. I would visit sick people and do what I could or take them to doctors. I was very discreet, because people didn’t want others to know that they were sick. Word spread that Agosto was helping “them.” I stopped going to gay bars because people would move away from me. They thought that if I was helping people with the disease, then I had the disease. I couldn’t believe that people would not help their neighbors.

INTERVIEWER

Things have changed significantly since then, in terms of how we think about gender and sexuality. What do you notice, as part of an older generation?

MACHADO

I’m in an artist collective called Pioneers Go East, and we performed several years ago in Hell’s Kitchen. And this young person who looked like they were a high school senior said, “We’d like to welcome you here. We’re going to go around the room, and everyone is going to announce their pronouns.” I said, “What is a pronoun?” And then they started—he/him, she/her, they/them. And then I remember I said, “She/him.” You’re always learning. We think we know a lot, but I learn something new every day, and it’s a blessing.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

So much of your recent work has focused on memorializing people who have died. Have you given thought to how you would like your own life to be memorialized?

MACHADO

I do not want a memorial or a funeral. I want to be remembered as I was. I’m going to join all our friends. I believe in heaven and reincarnation. I prepaid for my cremation. Over here by the window are ten people’s ashes—Marsha P. Johnson, Holly Woodlawn, Jack Smith, and a number of friends who were at the Play-House of the Ridiculous. Just a little bit of each of the ashes of these very dear friends who have departed. I have already written my will, and it says that all these ashes will be mixed with mine into one receptacle and then they will all go into the Hudson River, not far from where Marsha’s body was found. It will happen discreetly and quietly.

INTERVIEWER

Are you afraid of death?

MACHADO

I do not have any gripes about passing. It is all part of life. I am far from perfect. I accept all my flaws and I know that I’m privileged to have lived this long, to be able to share some of the names of people who should be remembered. This is my tribute, as a street queen on Christopher Street. All these people … I’m going to start crying. All these people contributed to my life.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

 

Nadja Spiegelman is the author of the memoir I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, as well as four children’s books, including Lost in NYC. She was the editor in chief of Astra Magazine, and is the special features editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Newyorker.com, The Cut and more.

Your World is Your Street: A Studio Visit with Agosto Machado

Agosto Machado. Photograph by Scott Rossi.

Agosto Machado’s apartment and studio on East Third Street is crammed, floor to ceiling, with steel bookcases bursting with books and boxes of files. Colorful printed fabrics are draped over the shelves, concealing most of their contents. In the areas left exposed, there are framed photographs of icons like the Warhol muse Candy Darling and the gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson, arranged around candles and trinkets as if to form small devotional altars. The space is small, but Machado welcomed me in on a late April day. He had laid out a bottle of Evian for me, and a packet of Pepperidge Farm butter cookies. He had rolled his bedroll into the bathtub to make space for us to talk. I gestured at the fabrics hanging over the shelves to ask if they’re for privacy. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s aesthetic. Like makeup.”

A Chinese Spanish Filipino American orphan raised on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, he befriended and eventually influenced multiple generations of downtown artists, among them Jack Smith, Peter Hujar, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Machado, who doesn’t share his age (“A lady never tells,” he said), has been a witness to decades of cultural moments in New York: the experimental theater of the early sixties, Warhol’s factory, the Stonewall riot, the AIDS epidemic, the gentrification of downtown Manhattan. He is eager to be of use as an oral historian—to evoke, as his art does, the lives of the artists he has known, many of whom were lost to AIDS. He has always collected the world around him, accumulating protest pins and street flyers, photographs, funeral notices, bits of gems and glitter, a pair of Candy Darling’s shoes. In recent years, Machado has begun delving through his archives to create shrines and altars, like the ones that appear in his portfolio in The Paris Review’s recent Spring issue.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve been described as a performance artist, a “Zelig-like icon,” a muse, an activist, and an archivist. It’s difficult to define you, but you define yourself most often as a “pre-Stonewall street queen.” What does that mean to you?

AGOSTO MACHADO

It came out of the happenstance of not having a regular place to live when I was young. For street queens, your world is your street. Where do you get information? In person, on the street. People would say to each other, Did you hear that place was raided? Do you know who just died? Do you know who’s in the hospital? Do you know who got picked up in Bellevue? And so forth. I was nobody and I had no place to live. I was dependent on the kindness of strangers. That’s a quote from Tennessee Williams. And there were people who, even if all they had was a bag of potato chips, they would share it.

INTERVIEWER

For The Paris Review, you titled your portfolio Downtown (Altar). Can you tell me about the two pieces by Gilda Pervin? One is a pin, and the other is a rectangular sculpture. They’re made of colorful clay, with bits of wire and marbles and beads stuck into them. How did they come into your possession?

MACHADO

Gilda Pervin is ninety-one years old now. She came to New York when she was forty-six. She was married and she had children. She wanted to express herself. I had started working with Ethyl Eichelberger, who lived on Spring and Elizabeth. Where the Elizabeth Street Garden is now, there was a vacant lot where people threw garbage and what have you. But on a window ledge nearby, there was an accumulation of these objects. Someone had taken the time to put them there. That was Gilda Pervin. I said, “Whoever this artist is, I hope to eventually meet her.” And those are the pieces she gave me. For forty-five years, I have moved them around in different installations. And now, they’re part of an altar, which is really a shrine. It’s going to be in the museum as one piece.

INTERVIEWER

What prompted you to collect and archive the world around you? Did you always feel that you were living through history?

MACHADO

No. Emotionally, this is what I embraced because I had nothing. I thought, These memories dwell within my heart. These people, if they’d had time, would have done so much more. So I collected these mementos of the street queens. I collected photographs too. Cameras were a luxury, even an Instamatic. All around us, under this fabric, are boxes of snapshots. There are thousands hidden away, and I hope to eventually excavate them and do little zines dedicated to various people, to acknowledge their existence and their contributions and the bravery of them expressing themselves and doing their art. Once AIDS hit, obviously, so much was lost. But as long as there’s oral history, there’s wonderment.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

If you could resurrect one downtown venue that has since closed for one night, which one would it be?

MACHADO

The Silver Dollar. The Silver Dollar restaurant was on the corner of Washington and Christopher. During the day, it was filled with office workers from the post office and what have you. Little by little, in the afternoon, the drag queens came in, and then at night it was the street queens who went out to the men in the trucks and made money. The juxtaposition of the street queens, the homeless people, the people who wanted drugs—it was a clearinghouse. Working at the restaurant were these Greek immigrants, most of them from small villages in Greece. Now they lived in New York, and they were probably thinking, This is America? It’s not like in the movies! They were surrounded by all these people in women’s clothes. They’d yell, “Mary!”—that’s a generic name for us, Mary. If you didn’t know the girl’s name, you’d say, “Hey, Mary.” They’d yell, “Mary! Your hamburger’s ready!” and all the heads in the place would turn at once.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

Your friendships have been central to your life and to your artistic practice. What would you say you’ve learned from them?

MACHADO

I learned about community. I did twelve years of caregiving during the time of AIDS, and that was an awakening. The downtown community turned their backs on us—this is before ACT UP and so forth. I would visit sick people and do what I could or take them to doctors. I was very discreet, because people didn’t want others to know that they were sick. Word spread that Agosto was helping “them.” I stopped going to gay bars because people would move away from me. They thought that if I was helping people with the disease, then I had the disease. I couldn’t believe that people would not help their neighbors.

INTERVIEWER

Things have changed significantly since then, in terms of how we think about gender and sexuality. What do you notice, as part of an older generation?

MACHADO

I’m in an artist collective called Pioneers Go East, and we performed several years ago in Hell’s Kitchen. And this young person who looked like they were a high school senior said, “We’d like to welcome you here. We’re going to go around the room, and everyone is going to announce their pronouns.” I said, “What is a pronoun?” And then they started—he/him, she/her, they/them. And then I remember I said, “She/him.” You’re always learning. We think we know a lot, but I learn something new every day, and it’s a blessing.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

So much of your recent work has focused on memorializing people who have died. Have you given thought to how you would like your own life to be memorialized?

MACHADO

I do not want a memorial or a funeral. I want to be remembered as I was. I’m going to join all our friends. I believe in heaven and reincarnation. I prepaid for my cremation. Over here by the window are ten people’s ashes—Marsha P. Johnson, Holly Woodlawn, Jack Smith, and a number of friends who were at the Play-House of the Ridiculous. Just a little bit of each of the ashes of these very dear friends who have departed. I have already written my will, and it says that all these ashes will be mixed with mine into one receptacle and then they will all go into the Hudson River, not far from where Marsha’s body was found. It will happen discreetly and quietly.

INTERVIEWER

Are you afraid of death?

MACHADO

I do not have any gripes about passing. It is all part of life. I am far from perfect. I accept all my flaws and I know that I’m privileged to have lived this long, to be able to share some of the names of people who should be remembered. This is my tribute, as a street queen on Christopher Street. All these people … I’m going to start crying. All these people contributed to my life.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

 

Nadja Spiegelman is the author of the memoir I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, as well as four children’s books, including Lost in NYC. She was the editor in chief of Astra Magazine, and is the special features editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Newyorker.com, The Cut and more.

1988–?

Zhang Ailing in 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The old-time Overseas Chinese call Los Angeles “Luo Sheng.” It’s a phonetic transliteration, just like “Lo Shan,” the shortened form of “Lo Shan Ji” [Los Angeles]. But when it’s cut to two syllables, with “Sheng” at the end, those not familiar with the term could think it refers to a U.S. state—a short form of Louisiana, maybe? This city does cover a huge area, though it’s not as big as a state. It’s famous for being a “Mecca of Car Culture,” lots of cars, late models, everywhere—everyone has a car, hence the terrible bus service. It’s bad in the city, even worse in the suburbs.

Here on this main route in a little satellite city, the bus stop was stagnant, no one had come for half an hour, maybe longer. Peering down the road, craning to spot an approaching bus, all you could see was a stretch of scenery, the upper swathe filled with commanding mountain ridges, rising and falling, which the yellow-green of Southern California’s steady, year-round climate, warm and dry, shimmered into the hazy blue of afternoon sky. Up on those hills, there were no houses yet, this valley being quite far from the city; and even among the trees, there were none of the little white houses that dot the hills in closer suburbs. There was only that high hill stretching up and out all in one color, a lightly yellow vegetation green, then the sky behind the hill, in a blue that wasn’t very blue. The Spaniards, when they’d first landed and looked at this empty mountain, had probably seen the very same thing.

A pair of freeway bridges ran across the mountain’s lower slope, one above the other, two lines of white cement, each with its own guardrail. That stripe of white over a white road deck turned those bridges into dazzling runways for an auto show, the size and speed thereof reduced by distance; one by one they rolled by, sedate, tiny, and exquisite, delightfully miniature toy cars in every springtime hue interspersed with others in the latest, pale, and refined metallic colors: dark silver, dark red, and the faded tea-brown of military-supply food cans. There were trailer trucks, vans with seats in front and cargo in the back, motor homes, car carriers with both decks full; and a new kind of delivery truck with flimsy panels and a pull chain in back, giving the impression of a white plastic bag from the cleaner’s. There were camper vans with windows in a protruding section over the cab, looking like a rhino’s snout or an elephant’s curled trunk. Most of the traffic was long-haul trucks, next to which the guardrails looked even lower, not likely to stop anything; those big white trailer containers, shaking and toppling along, looked just about ready to fall off the bridge.

Under the two bridges was a bit of ground that gradually flattened out. A pair of old, yellow, two-story houses with lattice windows, the old-fashioned kind with wooden grilles painted brown, stood along the borders of an L-shaped yard. There were a few big trees and an old truck parked underneath them. A heap of something or other was piled on the muddy ground, covered with that olive-green Army oilcloth that’s carried in lots of shops. It felt like a place in those sleepier times of the thirties and forties, back when neither time nor space had some high price attached to it.

Upper slopes, lower slopes, and the bridges’ understory: together they made three bands running parallel, horizontally, each one a separate time period, like the stratified eras excavated by archaeologists. The top layer was ancient times but then, from the middle to the lower layer, the sequencing was reversed, jumping back in time from the present to an era several decades past.

In the foreground, this major street was a big, wide stretch of asphalt flanked by shops that were all single-story or two stories hunched down, the proportions all wrong, an odd feeling in the whole place, as if the road’s shoulders had crumbled down and the road itself were some kind of huge, high, ancient yellow-earth road with dry gullies running alongside—all giving rise, without real reason, to the feeling of desolate ruin.

The shops sold furniture, or curtains, or windows and doors; or they were toy stores, stores that sold flooring, or bathroom fixture stores. Obviously this was a “residential city,” also called a “bedroom community,” built up in this location because safety in the city was not good; having moved their families out here, the next thing was to fix up their new homes and then, every day, drive a long way into the city to work, only coming back to sleep. Maybe because of the “Slow-Growth Movement” for environmental protection, development here was languid and delayed: all of the storefronts were plain and gray, the signboards done in a conservative style with gold lettering on a black background, making them seem like vintage establishments. The shops were so deserted, sparrows could hop around undisturbed. The sidewalk was devoid of people, till every once in a long while a plump female shop clerk went out and got fast food with a cold drink, which she held cradled in both hands when she came back; she looked, here in the broad daylight, like a guilty, late-night curfew-breaker, skulking and skittering till she’d gotten back inside again.

It was pretty much an empty city, except for the traffic passing by in a constant stream—but no buses. Under the bus stop sign was a bench, and on the green paint of the backrest, written in big letters in white chalk, there was

WEE AND DEE

1988–?

Which, in Chinese, would be:

WEI AND DI

1988 TO — ?

English does have a girl’s name, Dee. But here, with Dee set alongside Wee, these should be Chinese surnames: Dí and Wèi, with two different surname characters possible for “Wèi.”

Here, in the midst of utter ennui, this sudden sighting of written marks made by a Chinese strikes a spark of delight. The two surnames pronounced “Wèi” in Mandarin use an English spelling not quite the same as “Wee,” so this must be an Overseas Chinese. Some of the names of Overseas Chinese, because they derive from Fukienese or Cantonese dialects, have very unusual spellings in English. That could mean that “Dee” is Dài instead of Dí, just as “Wee” could be either a form of Wèi, or maybe some other very ordinary and commonly used family name—there’s simply no way to be sure. It’s said that a lot of refugees from Southeast Asia have settled in this valley, though it’s not clear why they picked such a high-rent district. Refugees do of course divide into different social classes, but the people on the bus, they’ve got to be the ones without money.

Everywhere you go, people write on walls, or on utility poles: “Danny Loves Debbie” or “Eddie Loves Shirley” with a heart drawn around the two names. Men have been putting out this kind of scrawl forever, wherever. Even the scribble “So-and-So Journeyed Hither,” which has been written in China since ancient times, and “Gilroy Was Here,” the trademark tag of American soldiers sent overseas in World War II, are always in a man’s handwriting. So the words on the back of the bus stop bench had to have been written by a Mr. Wèi, if indeed this is the right “Wèi” for this name. “Wee and Dee” clearly follows the same format as “Eddy and Shirley” inside a heart, but Asian people, being more reserved, are too embarrassed to draw that heart, so they just leave it out.

Still, seeing this kind of thing written by an Oriental—and a Chinese, at that—is an entirely new experience. Probably he was waiting for the bus, waiting beyond all endurance, looking and looking down the road, to the very end, always in the same direction, because if he lost focus for even a mere moment, glanced around a bit, the bus would take it as an excuse to come flying down the road and buzz right past him, even though it normally lumbered along awkwardly, like one of those big, fat people who sometimes move with such sudden swiftness that no one expects it; and then, though it’s true that the vista in this hill town is quite scenic, looking at it for too long does become tedious, uninteresting; plus, there’s the withered feeling of a place that is far from home, not to mention the fear of arriving late for work, that anxiety making time trickle by even more slowly so that, after a long while, the only sensation left is of time bearing down; and when eyes see but blankly, ears hear but dimly, the overwhelming dullness driving him insane until, bored unto desperation, he pulls from his pocket the chalk he’d picked up from where it had fallen under the blackboard in the English language class he was taking, and blurts out the thing most on his mind:

WEI AND DAI

1988 TO — ?

Lines written on a tombstone, “Henry Bacon / 1923 to 1979,” come with a grimace. A boy and a girl in this wayward world, the two of them from the same place meeting each other in a foreign place—who knows what the future will bring? Have to see what the conditions of life entail, for each of them.

Usually, they’d use their English names with each other: Johnny, Eddie, Helen, Annie. Using family names instead feels objective, dispassionate—maybe because using given names would be too much like “Danny Loves Debby” or “Eddie and Shirley” with a big heart around it. Using one’s surname does look, as a confession of true feeling, rather like burying one’s head, leaving only a bit of tail to be seen. Still, a given name in English leaves room for denial, whereas Chinese surnames, for those people who know you, are immediately identifiable—this was braving gossip and laughter from the entire hometown community here! It was small, this little urban settlement, filled with people who’d come from the same district back in the old country. But at this moment, he was ready to ignore all that. A twinge of sharp pain cut into his feeling of being unmoored, then disappeared. Slicing into this three-layered cake of street scenery, the little knife got stuck, couldn’t cut through. The big cake was too dry, the top layer still the hazy blue sky as the Spaniards had first seen it, with the yellow-green mountain stretching out forever; the middle layer the freeway held up by the two bridges; the bottom layer, in that flipped sequence, the era of several decades ago: three generations under the same roof, blithely undisturbed by one another, looking right past each other. The three huge horizontal layers, a single silent travelogue in technicolor on a cracked silver screen, no audio added, played soundlessly in one corner of an exhibit that was running at a loss, and no one was watching.

***

Notes

Overseas Chinese: The term Overseas Chinese (huá qiáo) implies a permanent connection to Chinese culture even for those who live abroad, perhaps for generations; Chang tends to use it mostly for the Cantonese who settled in Southeast Asia or, as in this case, the United States, prior to the twentieth century.

Luo Shan Ji, Luo Sheng: Luo Shan Ji has become the usual Chinese name for Los Angeles but in the past Luo Sheng was also used for this purpose; a shěng is a province; hence, Luo Sheng could easily seem to be Luo Province or Luo State, rather than the name of a city.

Wee and Dee / 1988–? // Wei and Di / 1988 to–?: In the Chinese text, Chang presents the bus stop graffiti in English first, followed by a Chinese translation using two surnames, 魏 and 狄, for which the pronunciations, “Wèi” and “Dí” in Standard Mandarin dialect, come close to “Wee” and “Dee” in English.  She then raises the possibility that “Wee” refers not to 魏 but to 衛, two distinctly different surnames that use different characters but are pronounced the same way; she then goes on to suggest a similarly bifurcated set of possibilities for “Dee,” but now expands the range of possibilities to include two names that are not homophones: Dí 狄 and Dài 戴.

Gilroy was here: In the Chinese text, this phrase appears in English, spelled this way, followed by a Chinese translation. The actual English phrase is “Kilroy was here.”

Wei and Dai / 1988—?: Dí 狄 has here been changed to Dài 戴, without comment.

 

From Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang, to be published by New York Review of Books this August. This essay, which apparently derives from the author’s years of itinerant residence in temporary dwellings in the mid-eighties in the greater Los Angeles area—sometimes called her Motel Period—was first published in a Taipei newspaper in the spring of 1996, half a year after her death. 

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and screenwriter. She was born to an aristocratic family in Shanghai and moved to the United States in 1955. Her books in English translation include Love in a Fallen City, Naked Earth, Little Reunions, and Written on Water.

Karen S. Kingsbury is the translator of Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City and Half a Lifelong Romance, among other works. She is currently a professor of international studies at Chatham University.

Jie Zhang is a translator of Chinese literature.

A Return to the Frontier

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when an efficient-looking man in neat Western clothes approached me. “You are Mrs. Richard Nixon?” he said in English.

I had seen many photographs of the blond Mrs. Nixon and never imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a woman’s inability to disbelieve a compliment, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there were those glasses. “No, I am sorry,” I said, and he walked away to search among the other passengers.

It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa, even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to greet her.

“Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today?” I asked my friends Mr. and Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all.

“No, we haven’t heard,” Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who mistook me for her and what a joke that was. “Um,” he said unsmiling. Then he said somewhat embarrassedly, “There’s a man who is always hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. He’s not quite sane.”

I laughed, then went under Formosa’s huge wave of wistful yearning for the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore in some ways a foe.

“How does it feel to be back?” Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never been there before, they were going along with the official assumption that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion came over me.

“It feels like dreaming.” And taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, “But it’s not possible!” Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said, “But you are ghosts.”

***

Mrs. Chu told me as we left the airport, “This is an ugly city, but the minute you get out of town it is beautiful.”

They lodged me in a mountain inn. I got the General’s Suite, where the generals stay when they come uphill to report to the Generalissimo, who lives a few steps away across the road. The suite was reached through a series of deserted little courtyards, with its own rock garden and lotus pond. In the silence there was just the sound of the evening drizzle on the banana palm and in the bathroom a tap of sulphur water constantly running out of a stone lion mouth and splashing over the rim of the cement tank. There were rattan furniture on the tatami flooring and a wardrobe and bed with stained sheets. I told myself not to be fastidious. But there were bedbugs. Finally I had to get up near dawn to sleep on the ledge of the honor recess, where in Japanese living rooms the best vase and picture scroll are displayed. The maid was frightened when she came in the morning and could not find me.

It was plain that the generals had feminine companionship while spending the night awaiting audience with the Generalissimo. I wondered at the ease of procuring girls almost next door to that Christian and Confucian founder of the New Life Movement. Surely it was unseemly with “Heaven’s countenance only a foot away,” as we used to describe an audience with the emperor. After I left Taipei for the countryside, I realized that prostitution was more open on this island than perhaps anywhere else in the world. In a small-town newspaper five or six advertisements of this type appeared one day: “Joy and Happiness Prostitutes Domicile, First Class. 124 Shin Ming Road. Swarms of pretty girls like clouds, offering the best service.”

***

In the countryside Formosa peels back, showing older strata. There were more native Formosans than refugees. The mixed emotions of my homecoming of sorts gave way to pure tourist enthusiasm.

From time to time Mrs. Chu, sitting next to me in the bus, whispered urgently, “Shandi, shandi!” I just caught a glimpse of a shandi, or mountain dweller, a gray little wraith with whiskers tattooed on her cheeks carrying a baby on her back and loitering outside a shop along the highway. “Shandi, shandi!” Again the breathless little cry and a nudge. I saw gypsylike children in ragged T shirts and skirts, carrying smaller children. “They all come to town when there’s a Japanese picture on,” Mrs. Chu said.

“Oh, do they speak Japanese?”

“Very well.”

Many of the bus passengers talked Japanese. They were the early Chinese settlers, and a surprising number of their young people still spoke Japanese. The bus stopped at what seemed to be the middle of nowhere and a young man got off. The conductor followed him. Suddenly there was a fight, the two rolling over and over on the wayside. “Chigaru yo! Chigaru yo!” I could make out the one Japanese word the young man kept shouting, “Mistake! Mistake!” The driver got off to help beat him. The passengers learned that this man was always stealing rides. I thought how un-Chinese these people were. In Hong Kong I had seen a streetcar conductor follow a free rider to the street and grab hold of his necktie, in place of the pigtail which used to be the first reached for in a brawl. But that was just a scuffle and exchange of words. Last year a bus conductor was taken to the police station on the complaint of a woman he had hit with his ticket puncher, a murderous tool conductors were forever rattling to remind people to buy tickets. But there never were any real fights like this.

Finally the driver and conductor let the man go. He got on his feet panting and dusted himself. They drove off. He stood at attention in his torn khaki shirt and saluted the bus as it passed. He did not look old enough to have been in the army in Japanese days, but that reverence was distinctly Japanese. Oddly enough, it also reminded me of the Communist Chinese lining up all the porters, sweepers, and peddlers on the railway platform, each presenting his broom, pole, and basket like arms as the train pulled out. Workers have been told to love their machines, but to have them pay their respects to it in this little ritual seemed strange.

***

From Formosa I went on to Hong Kong, which I had not seen for six years. The city was being torn down and rebuilt into high apartment buildings. Whole streets were dug up, with a postbox buried up to its neck, still functioning. The refugees were settled down, hoping only to live out their lives in Hong Kong. The younger generation speak Cantonese in school and refuse to speak anything else at home, a good excuse not to talk to their parents that other teen-agers may envy.

The more or less well-to-do homes I saw were getting increasingly Americanized, with amahs becoming too expensive and washing machines taking their place along with the latest-model refrigerators and hi-fi phonographs bought on the installment plan. Christmas had become a great occasion for gifts and parties for non-Christians too. Boys and girls handed each other Christmas cards at school. One girl wrote to a woman columnist: “I am nineteen years old. My father and I escaped from north China a year ago, crossing the country with great difficulty. We made the last stretch to Macao in a small boat which was fired on by the Communists. My father covered me with his body so he got wounded and died in the hospital in Macao. I came to Hong Kong, where a friend of father’s got me a job paying about HK$100 a month [less than twenty American dollars], just enough to keep alive and rent a bunk. I am the only one without Christmas in all Hong Kong. Please tell me if I should go back to the mainland.”

Side by side with harrowing escapes like this, there is a lot of what seems to be needless and foolhardy traffic of refugees going back for visits. “We’ve grown poor from sending parcels,” my landlady told me once with a little laugh. She never could leave off explaining why they had to take in a lodger. She and her husband sent both sets of parents and other dependents noodles, popped rice, preserved meats and herbs, sugar, soy, peanut oil, and soap each month and clothing in season. Of one of brand of British-made chicken cubes, her mother-in-law had written ecstatically: “These cubes have solved all the problems of our two meals a day.” The sugar they dissolved in water and drank as a tonic. Her brother, in a labor camp for harboring a friend accused of being a Nationalist spy, is still able to write her asking for pills for his ailing kidney and swollen legs. Her younger sister is a doctor assigned to work in the country. “She has to go out on sick calls at night, where it’s pitch-dark and the ground is uneven and she’s afraid of snakes. You know how young girls are,” she said, just as she apologized for her daughters monopolizing the bathroom: “You know how young girls are.”

I was there to see a great packing. The landlady had a relative going back—a woman in her seventies—who could take things for them. The landlady’s husband wrestled with loads and ropes all over the kitchen floor. She baked a cake and made stewed pork.

“They can use the pot too,” she said.

“How is one to carry a pot of stewed pork all the way to Shanghai?”

“It will be frozen; the train is like a refrigerator.”

She got up at dawn to see the old lady off, and she had to go along to help carry the luggage past the inspections at the Lohu border. The next day she cried out when she came upon me: “Ha-ya, Miss Chang! I almost didn’t come back.”

“But what happened?”

“Huh-yee-ya! To begin with, there were altogether too many things. The old lady’s fault, too—she had so many things of her own. Oil drums, crates of salted fish, whole cartons of cans. Clothes, bedding, pots and pans, enough to furnish a house. The customs man was losing his temper. Then he came upon some change in her purse, twenty, thirty cents of Jen Min Piao she had with her when she came out last time and forgot to get rid of. You’re not supposed to take Communist money in, so all hell broke loose. ‘Where did this come from? Ha?’ And “What do you mean by this? Ah?’ Turned on me now: ‘Who are you? Ah? What’s your relation to her, HA? What are you doing here, AH?’ ” My landlady screwed up her slant-eyed baby face to roar out the “Ah’s” and “Ha’s.” “Ai-ya—I said I knew nothing about this, I just came to see her off, but all the time I was worried to death.” She frowned and clucked with annoyance and dropped her voice to a whisper. “This old lady had dozens of nylon stockings sewn inside her thick padded gown.”

“To sell?” I asked.

“No, just to give as presents; women wear them inside their slacks.”

“But why? When they can’t even be seen?” And with all the hunger we heard was around, I thought.

“Not full-length ones.” The landlady gestured toward her calves. “For the wives of officials. She likes to bring everybody something. Very capable old lady. She imports movies made in Hong Kong. What does she want so much money for? Ha? Seventy and no children? Ha?”

***

I remembered coming out ten years ago, walking the last stretch across the Lohu Bridge with its rough wood floor closed in on both sides by guardhouses and fences. A group of us stood waiting after the Hong Kong police on the other side of the barbed wire had taken our papers away to be studied. They took a long time over it. It was midsummer. The Hong Kong policeman, a lean tall Cantonese with monstrous dark glasses, looked cool and arrogant as he paced around in his uniform and shorts, smartly belted and creased. Beside us stood the Communist sentry, a round-cheeked north country boy in rumpled baggy uniform. After an hour in the hot sun the young soldier muttered angrily, speaking for the first time, “These people! Keep you out here in the heat. Go stand in the shade.” He jerked his head at a patch of shade a little distance back. But none of us would look at him. We just smiled slightly, pressing close to the wire fence as if afraid to be left out. Still, for a moment I felt the warmth of race wash over me for the last time.

That fateful bridge has often been compared to the Naiho Bridge between the realms of the living and the dead. Like most clichés, it is true when you experience it yourself. It makes me impatient to hear westerners quibble about the free world not being really free. Too bad that many of us have to go back over that bridge when we can’t make a living outside.

I have an aunt who has stayed in Shanghai because she could not leave her new house. Her son, just out of college, joined his father in Hong Kong but did not like it there. He went back in 1952, just when I was about to leave. His mother took him to have his fortune told one evening and I went along. He would find a job soon, the fortuneteller said. But there might be trouble. He might go to prison. The prediction sounded reasonable at the time, with a movement on against businessmen and many suicides and arrests. The youngish fortuneteller looked like a shop assistant in his gabardine gown. I had no confidence in him and resolutely avoided his eye although I needed badly to have my own fortune told.

My cousin got a small job in Peking as predicted. Life was hard, he wrote his mother. Get married, his mother wrote back. It’s the only way to have some happiness. But he was a quiet boy, slow to make up his mind. Ten years later when I saw his father in Hong Kong this time, I heard the son had wanted to get out again. Checking his application for a permit to leave, the authorities seized on the fact that he had once joined a Nationalist group in college. He was sentenced to three years’ house arrest in his mother’s modernistic mansion, which they took the opportunity to search, probing the sofas for American dollars. He has all comforts, even servants to stand in line for the daily rations. But three years with Mother is evidently considered enough punishment.

I heard about my mother’s family from one of my uncle’s married daughters, the only one out. The other two stayed in because their husbands, a doctor and the son of a high Nationalist official, chose to stay. One of the sisters had died.

“So did my brother’s wife,” said my cousin in Hong Kong. “And both men remarried before their wives’ bones were cold. Father died of cancer after losing everything in the land reform. Mother is wretched living with Brother. He doesn’t earn enough and his new wife is a shrew. We Huangs are finished.”

Looking back, I saw how my family and relatives had all been taught by our ancestors to hang onto land, the only clean and solid things, by comparison to which all other possessions are showy, immoral, therefore impermanent. No matter what fools one’s children were, as long as they did not slap land deeds on a gambling table they were safe. Despite ancestral admonitions, in time of course all their descendants tried their hands at other investments for better and quicker profits. Many soon found they were not clever enough and resigned themselves to the yearly income from the land—cut down by wars, famines, inflations—and grew poorer and poorer. The Communists merely hastened the end.

No one I know is in a commune or knows anybody who is in one, with the exception of a Cantonese amah who went back to sweep the graves this spring. Her family belongs to the village commune. It is still the farmers, always the worst off, who are getting the worst of it. Having heard of the food shortages, the amah brought in a bit of cooking oil and salted fish for her own use.

When she arrived for a twenty-day visit, the commune allowed her to buy a large quantity of rice and small quantities of cooking oil and pork as a special favor. The pork was divided among her family and neighbors because they had not tasted meat all year. So went her salted fish. Her last ten days there she lived on snails that a little girl gathered for her from a pond.

There was no community dining hall. Everybody queued up with two cans to get the rice and what went with it, served through two holes dug in the kennel-sized temple of the earth god. When they got home the food was cold, of course.

Every day at four in the morning a man beat a gong to summon everybody to the fields. Breakfast at nine. Work at ten. Lunch at twelve. Work again at one. Supper at six. Work again at seven. But not in the fields this time—usually it was carrying coal or mud. Quit at ten at night. Sometimes “leap forward” to twelve midnight. No Sundays or holidays, only a few days off at the New Year. This despite the slogan “Let the farmers rest.” Wages varied from a dollar something to fifty or sixty cents Jen Min Piao a month. Medicines had been free but now you buy your own. Herb doctors were available but herbs are scarce.

***

We Chinese have always been at our best within a rigid frame, even in poetry writing. It’s when we are most hemmed in that we seem able to rise above ourselves. After twenty centuries of rule by family we have been free for perhaps twenty years, and for many of us, full of conflicts and self-doubts. Now the state has taken the place of the big family, coming into every moment and aspect of life with its familiar persuasive pressure. The sheep has returned to the fold. Even hunger can feel right—up to a point.

Those who live near Macao swim a mile or escape by sampan in bands sometimes as big as a hundred, fighting the machine guns of pursuing motorboats with sharpened bamboo spears. But they will not stay put and fight. The trouble with us Chinese is that we are too sensible. Sixty thousand crashed the land border to Hong Kong last May. The border guards who had shot at smaller numbers evidently held back because the crowds were too big, the government always having avoided massacres if possible. After this the communes were modified by not abandoned. There is already talk now of their being revived in the area around Canton.

Advance two steps, retreat a step—Mao Tse-tung has said this is his way of making progress. Whether dance or march, the people drag on, hoping to outlive their tormentors.

 

Translators’ Notes

Formosa: Portuguese term (Ihla Formosa or “beautiful island”), used from the mid-1500s to mid-1900s, in English and other Western languages, to refer to Taiwan.

“Formosa’s … yearning for the outside world, particularly America”: The Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-shek (the “Generalissimo”), fought as one of the victorious Allied Powers in World War II but then was defeated by Communist forces and retreated to the island of Taiwan; in 1963 the Republic of China still held the China seat in the U.N. and was officially recognized by many major powers but over the following decade became increasingly isolated as diplomatic recognition shifted from Taipei to Beijing. What seems to be elided here, perhaps in an effort to address an American (and non-Chinese) readership, is the yearning for a lost homeland in China experienced by at least some of the refugee population in postwar Taiwan.

New Life Movement: A social campaign led by General and Madame Chiang in the 1930s, aiming to promote clean, disciplined living; its echoes can be heard in the story “Young at the Time.”

shandi: Members of Taiwan’s indigenous tribes, many of whom became fluent in Japanese during the 1895-1945 period when Taiwan was colonized by Japan.

Jen Min Piao: People’s Currency, used in China from 1948 to 1969, at which point the renminbi, still in use today, was established.

community dining hall: Some communes had central dining halls as well as central kitchens.

 

From Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang, to be published by NYRB Classics this August. 

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and screenwriter. She was born to an aristocratic family in Shanghai and moved to the United States in 1955. Her books in English translation include Love in a Fallen City, Naked Earth, Little Reunions, and Written on Water.

Karen S. Kingsbury is the translator of Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City and Half a Lifelong Romance, among other works. She is currently a professor of international studies at Chatham University.

Jie Zhang is a translator of Chinese literature.

Nadja and Britney

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

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

 

From Mark Polizzoti’s new translation of André Breton’s Nadja (NYRB Classics):

A certain attitude toward beauty necessarily results from this, beauty that is conceived here solely in terms of passion. It is in no way static, in other words encased in its “dream of stone,” lost for mankind in the shadow of Odalisques, behind those tragedies that claim to encompass only a single day; nor is it dynamic, in other words subject to that rampant gallop after which there is only another rampant gallop, in other words more scattered than a snowflake in a blizzard, in other words determined never to let itself be embraced, for fear of being confined … It is like a train ceaselessly lurching from the Gare de Lyon, but that I know will never leave, has never left. It is made of jolts and shocks, most of which are not significant but which we know will necessarily bring about a huge Shock … The morning paper can always bring me news of myself:

 

From Jeff Weiss’s Waiting for Britney Spears (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a memoir of his time as a tabloid journalist:

Love bludgeons me before I fully understand what it means. It requires only a caramel-blonde whip of hair, a harem dancer hip shimmy, a lashing of apricot arms, a dizzying 360-degree whirl, and a graceful floor slide. I saw the sign, an immaculate conception, a fated tarot. Only a higher power could have blessed me to bear witness to the taping of the “… Baby One More Time” video. 

 

From the “bad boy of American literature” James Frey’s novel Next to Heaven (Authors Equity):

But, like hockey, playing the hanky-panky horizontal refreshment game also had its dangers, the most dangerous of which was love. 

 

From Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying (New Directions), translated from the French by Kate Briggs:

Her face golden, velvety, soft, soft, very soft, so soft, too soft, and her eyes brown (the self-same eyes that once caused a man to take his own life).
She turns her waist toward the mother Charlotte, the waist of a young-girl-from-Arles, and her rounded hips under her pleated skirt.
She turns her dark wavy hair tucked beneath a brightly colored scarf.
She turns her tears.
The tears of the girl from Arles, who never appears in the story, whom no one can ever remember having seen.

 

From Jesse Ball’s The History of the Dolls and What They Did (Hanuman Editions):

Lucy is my enemy. I will hurt her if I can.

Abigail looked at the doll. Its face seemed contorted with rage.

Which one is Lucy, again?

Emily answered.

She’s the short fat one with buckteeth and a hairlip. She wears polka dots and shows off her legs. 

Now Em, said Vivian, we do try to tell the truth don’t we? Lucy is the prettiest of the dolls, and the dolls are all pretty. Every doll is prettier than the one before, they’re made that way, and Lucy is the very prettiest. I used to even keep her on a different shelf. I don’t think you’ve ever seen her. 

She went over to a special case and took out Lucy, and set her on the shelf with the other dolls. 

Here she is, she’s Emily’s nemesis. They will hate each other until the world ends. 

 

From Joan Sales’s Winds of the Night (NYRB Classics), a novel of postwar Catalonia translated by Peter Bush and first published in Catalan in 1983:

That had been at the foot of the French Pyrenees. In the rampant disorder of the defeated army crossing the frontier, farmers’ mules had evidently got mixed up with army mules, and all this rushed back to me as l advanced bewildered across a carpet which was so sumptuous, soft and red. I glimpsed vast lounges and sophisticated ladies who seemed buried in the depths of armchairs that were too big and deep for figures that were so tall and thin, who smoked and looked bored out of their minds as they crossed their legs; how bored they were, how unhappy they seemed, how long-legged they were! And brutalised by boredom and filthy from concentration-camp shit, soldiers wheeled in circles around them, served as a distraction in the absence of anything better. Among those ladies who smoked and were bored idled a few men of the species that one only meets in such palaces, the species of man who looks to be forty-five, always forty-five to the day, and is always turning over in his head the most crucial and complex of business deals. The soldiers were shouting like people at a football or boxing match, they were shouting to hurry the mules along, the spectacle was simply shocking, until red with indignation as I had never seen him before, Picó erupted: “It was shameful how we allowed ourselves to be given a hiding by the fascists, at least we could have a little culture!” And that was going through my mind as I crossed those lounges bewildered, as they all stared, men who were eternally forty-five and women who were eternally bored to death, staring at me in alarm, as I walked among them.

 

From Purity by Andrzej Tichý, translated from the Swedish by Nichola Smalley (And Other Stories):

Yes. And I wake to find Karl burning me with a cigarette, then he roars so loud the neighbors start banging on the wall, or the floor or the wall or the ceiling or the floor or the wall or the floor and he tells me people die all the time, most of them are Americans, in cultural terms, because Americans took over the world in the fifties, but a man in a white hoodie passes the window and it says SWEDEN, he’s talking on the phone and he looks cold. It’s misty out there. I have a shave and recall that someone was here during the night. Some kind of dog was here putting its nose in my face as I slept. When I ask Karl about it, he doesn’t reply. Just says, Psycho. Psycho.

 

From Peter Mendelsund’s Exhibitionist (Catapult):

​​More whiskey on the paintings. More and more. The stains are beautiful. And this wanton expenditure of alcohol means I’m drinking less of it, as I have less to drink. The paintings are drinking for me. (A book about people who can be hired by alcoholics to drink for them—drink on their behalf—debase themselves so their clients won’t have to. Book about professional abasement. Like Kafka’s story. A book about professional mourners. People paid to be abject. Forms of hunger artistry. One book called “Drinkers,” the other called ‘Weepers.”)

 

From Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

In the garden I sat, sometimes with my dad, on the green-painted swing-bench, sometimes alone, looking at the house, the house with windows in it, made of beige-pink bricks. One of the windows was my bedroom, reflecting the gorgeous top of a tree. Grass, flowers, and always sky. Thick hedges, not as neat as they had been years earlier. Sheds, coal bunker, garage and conservatory. Next door. The lawn, blades of grass and the unlit bonfire. The fence at the bottom of the garden and the sound of the road. Birds in flight, over the roof of the house. Shifting clouds, sudden clarities of light and leaves. The apprehended world. That’s the phrase that kept tolling in my head: the apprehended world.

Cathedrals of Solitude: On Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Courtesy of Zando Projects.

As it so happened, I was visiting a college on the East Coast a few years ago to talk about contemporary Italian literature. Right before my lecture, a small group of comparative literature students approached me with what I could see were a bunch of badly printed photocopies. They wanted to know why the work of “the greatest Italian author after Pasolini’s death” was no longer available in English. The author was Pier Vittorio Tondelli and the photocopies were of the first English-language edition of the novel Separate Rooms, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1992.

I had no good answer for them. At that time Luca Guadagnino was not yet the internationally recognized director he is today, and his decision to turn Separate Rooms into a film starring Josh O’Connor was yet to come. Had I known, that would have been the most honest answer: that it would ultimately take a high-end adaptation—which is still in progress—to resuscitate Tondelli’s work in English. (Separate Rooms was reissued in translation this year by Zando in the U.S. and Sceptre in the UK.) In many ways, the question posed by those students seemed to put Tondelli on too much of a pedestal: after Pasolini’s death there have been many great Italian authors—Claudio Magris, Daniele Del Giudice, Fleur Jaeggy, and Gianni Celati, to name a few. But they are being constantly claimed and reclaimed, while for a long time it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of Tondelli, including myself, only to hide it somewhere.

The other honest answer I could have given: I hadn’t thought about Pier Vittorio Tondelli for a while, purposefully so, and I wasn’t the only one. The shared forgetfulness around Tondelli’s work seemed to be an example of a kind of syndrome I’d seen before, in which some authors undergo an almost mandatory process of abjuration while their readers are coming of age as writers. What was behind my forgetfulness? Most of the time, when I begin to reject an author who was so important to my upbringing, I blame it on an excess of sincerity in their texts—I find that, compared to other qualities, sincerity fades more easily with time—and the author’s being too attuned to the cultural lifestyle of his or her era. Tondelli shaped the sound of a generation, but in the end it was hard to hear his voice and distinguish it from all the imitations or B-sides of his work.

Born in Correggio in 1955, a town of some twenty thousand people in Emilia-Romagna, Pier Vittorio Tondelli began writing when he was quite young, and by the time he was thirty-five, he’d published three novels (Pao Pao; Rimini; Separate Rooms), a collection of short stories (Altri libertini), a collection of cultural chronicles largely focusing on music (Un weekend postmoderno), and a series of quieter unclassifiable texts (Biglietti agli amici); he’d also written a play (Dinner Party). Altri libertini, his debut, an electrifying ode to truck stops and spacing out, went to trial for obscenity after its release in 1980. (The charges were ultimately dismissed.) That’s when this provincial author—small-town angst being one of the foundational axes of his poetics—made his breakthrough into mainstream Italian culture. His books follow young men and women circling around specific subcultures in uncommon urban and rural spaces as they have sex and search for transcendence; they are all different in form but marked by a similar energy and pyrotechnic approach to language. Despite his sophisticated training—he attended classes with Gianni Celati, another provincial troubadour, in a famous university program started by Umberto Eco—Tondelli was trying to break up language in an unruly way. At least, that is, until the release of the calmer, slow-burn novel Camere separate in 1989. One could argue that Separate Rooms is his most “literary” novel: the strength of the book lies within its perfect elegy of grief and a neo-Platonical understanding of lost love.

Tondelli died in 1991 at the age of thirty-six, from AIDS-related complications. The cause of his death was rarely discussed in public. At that point he had achieved massive popularity in Italy, also for his commitment to scouting and publishing emerging writers in anthologies he edited. He had an extensive readership in France and Germany for a while after his death, and his generous cultural criticism can be read in many posthumous publications from the nineties. At the time of his death, Tondelli had forgotten his teenage idols too, in a way: the atmosphere of his late work is closer to Christopher Isherwood’s or Ingeborg Bachmann’s than to Jack Kerouac’s, despite the writer’s cameo in Separate Rooms.

So, what’s Separate Rooms about? Love and death, essentially. Eros and writing, music and language. Solitude as a form of spirituality, and nonstop traveling as a way to blur the self and overcome the ego (the novel starts with its protagonist, Leo, contemplating his reflection in the window of a plane). It’s about falling for someone and then wistfully and willfully losing that someone, while also trying to invent a spatial distribution of the soul that would allow one to feel connected to that person but also alone. To come to a state in which you’re able to say “I love you, but I’m gone” and be deadly sincere. Leo, who has long been involved with a junkie named Hermann, must move on from a love that felt like a “separate war” and find a different kind of connection—what he calls his “separate rooms” theory. He and his new partner, Thomas, are in their early thirties and late twenties, and both are well versed in the phenomenology of abandonment. Leo, especially, needs solitude in order to understand that which is the unifying theme of his life: not love, not sex, but writing. This is what makes him truly different from others. Not the fact of loving men and not wanting to live with them, or of being an adult with no family and no kids; his writing is the major divide between him and the outside world. Thomas understands this long before Leo does—he dies while his lover is still figuring out the main adagio of his life. To Leo, the end of a love story when both lovers are still alive shouldn’t be called an “end” at all—even if it feels, at times, like a death. No matter the breakup, the feeling of love still lingers somewhere in unbound form, representing what he calls “separation in contiguity.” The whole novel is based on this ideal state of removed closeness, a benign ghostly entity that puts contemporary ideas about “ghosting” to shame. Thomas’s death is the only thing that can alter the state.

Unlike Tondelli’s previous books, which were written mostly in the present tense, Separate Rooms is all about the past, in multiple and overlapping iterations. In a letter to an early reader that was published as a companion to the Italian and French editions of the book, he writes that everyone who read his early drafts of the novel cried, but they all cried at different points. Tondelli succeeded in his purpose: he wanted the novel’s three parts—“Into Silence,” “Leo’s World,” and “Separate Rooms”—to be understood as repetitions and ripples around the same stone thrown in a shallow lake of water. He wanted it to sound like ambient music, in Brian Eno’s style: no one could possibly cry or feel moved at the same exact spot while listening to his records. One could say he found a way out of the trap of being labeled an eternally young author, and many came to understand the somberness of Biglietti agli amici and Separate Rooms, this blessed maturity of Tondelli, as a sort of penitence for his dissolute lifestyle before. But what some critics interpreted as stigmata—pinning him down to the religious tradition of his hometown, which is known for its unusual blend of Catholicism and Communism—was merely the beautiful bruises of growing into another form.

Tondelli insisted that Separate Rooms was not a queer novel, and he was openly hostile to questions about “homosexual literature.” He was adamant that male lovers were first and foremost lovers, and argued that the book’s absence of women involved in love affairs (there’s only one relevant female character here, Susann, a new partner for Thomas, one who will actually stay with him) was not ideological—Leo’s mother and his female relatives make a beautiful cameo in one of the best sections of the book. Tondelli felt that Leo and Thomas didn’t fit into the rotating stereotypes of gay men. Perhaps he sensed that, for critics, queerness was pretty much like youth, a label they slapped on to his work so as to avoid engaging with it more profoundly, but it does sound overly defensive on his part. Still, we must understand where he was coming from: during the press tour for Separate Rooms, in some interviews Tondelli talked about how many gay magazines were then running advertisements for funeral homes. It would have felt ludicrous to talk about “homosexual literature” and ignore the ongoing crisis that few were addressing in public. It may have also stung that, while he had been writing about gay men and gay sex since his debut, critics were addressing this theme when he presented it in a manner that seemed somehow more palatable to them—Separate Rooms has few graphic scenes and love often takes on an courtly form, almost reminiscent of Dante and Beatrice. Highbrow critics seemed willing to approach queer love only when it was so recognizable according to traditional themes and forms, when it was beautifully and thematically contained and composed.

And yet this composure is the greatest achievement of the novel: as he calibrated his neologisms, wordplay, lyrical rants, and Chinese boxes of sentences, he could finally build a bridge between representing time and transcending time. This is what Separate Rooms is in the end: a contemplative novel, the result of an author finally entering his own cathedral of solitude.

 

Claudia Durastanti is a writer, translator, and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Strangers I Know, was short-listed for the Strega Prize and translated into twenty-one languages. Her forthcoming novel Missitalia will be published by Summit in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo in the UK. Her work has appeared in Granta, Apartamento, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the curator of the feminist imprint La Tartaruga. 

Making of a Poem: Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami on “The War Is Over”

The first few lines of the Arabic original of “The War Is Over.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nasser Rabah’s poem “The War Is Over,” translated from the Arabic by Wiam El-Tamami, appears in our new Spring issue, no. 251. Here, we asked both Rabah and El-Tamami to reflect on their work.

1. Nasser Rabah

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

I live in Gaza. In the early months of the war, we weren’t expecting it to last for so long. I kept telling my children that it would all be over in a few days, in a week—and every time, I was disappointed. It’s a sad thing, to be proved wrong in front of your children. But somehow, out of stubbornness or self-protection, I started denying reality, believing in my own optimism. I said to myself, The war is over. I jotted that sentence down in the Notes app on my phone, and left it there.

The next day, I asked myself, What would I do if the war was over? I thought, I would go to the graveyard to visit my friends whose funerals I hadn’t been able to attend. So I wrote down one more sentence—“I’ll go to the graveyard.” I still wasn’t thinking of it as a poem. But then poetry overtook me, and I wrote, “I’ll take bread, a lot of bread, one loaf for each friend.” When the stanza was finished, I felt a rush of adrenaline, that nervous energy that accompanies the birth of a new poem. And I kept going.

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

This poem came to me with the softness and fluidity of a revelation. My mind felt like it was floating in the air of these words. Some poems are exhausting, wrenching. But in rare moments, moments of divine grace, a gift falls from the sky—this was one of those.

I remember exactly how I felt. I was trying to remain composed—to keep my body still, my breathing even, and my mind from thinking. My fingers were recording what I was receiving without the interference of my mind. A poem will run away if it senses that you’re too eager—that you’re chasing it, or excited by its presence. A beautiful poem is a shy creature. It will flee immediately if it feels you rushing ahead. Patience and calm can help a poet catch a big fish.

After I wrote the first eight stanzas of the poem, I stopped. In the following days, the lines kept playing in my mind, like a song. I asked a few people, neighbors, street sellers, drivers, “What are you going to do when the war ends?” One of them said, “I’ll sleep for a week.” Another said, “We’ll clear the rubble.” Another said, “I’ll walk down the street without being afraid of planes.” I wrote it all down. The poem became twelve stanzas long.

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

This poem caught my attention from the first moment. Every time I moved on to a new stanza, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to reach a full-length poem. When I got to eight stanzas, I stopped, and felt that it was finished. But in the coming days, the poem was like a magnet, drawing more and more lines to itself. Some poems stop growing on their own, and there are others that need to be stopped firmly, so that they don’t fall into unnecessary, gratuitous chatter. So I sent it off to be translated—thereby declaring its completion!

What was the challenge of this particular poem?

It was difficult to condense some of the lines, to distill the language, while preserving the intensity of the poem’s meaning. Because the poem is composed of a series of independent stanzas, I had to make sure none of them disrupted the harmony of the whole. I didn’t want one stanza to be louder than the others, drowning out the sad, quiet ones—no matter how angry I was, no matter how much I was screaming on the inside.

Do you regret any revisions?

Regret is a nihilistic emotion. Maybe we should regret things more important than revisions to a poem. Treating a poem like a precise mathematical equation robs it of its artistic spirit. I like poems that have some flaws. There are no perfect poems, just as there are no perfect human beings. So why would I regret revising a poem?

 

2. Wiam El-Tamami

How did translating the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult? Are there hard and easy translations?

The first pass at a translation is always a surprise. I never know whether a text will come to life in the new language, how it will look and sound and feel. The image that comes to mind is that of a magician pulling a string of colored handkerchiefs out of their ear. In this scenario, I am both the one doing the pulling and the one watching what is emerging.

Sometimes the voice is there right away—it just clicks into place—and I am jubilant as the words emerge, as the sentences unfurl. Yes, yes, yes. In these rare instances, translation can feel almost like an act of unspooling.

With some pieces, however, there’s a lot of heavy lifting, slotting things here and there, trying this and that and then throwing it out again—and you still end up with an awkwardly arranged room. Arabic–English literary translation in particular involves a lot of deconstruction and creative reconstruction—of grammatical structures, for example.

Most translations are somewhere in between. You are peeling away, paring down, working hard to come closer. If and when you tune into a voice that feels right, the rest becomes easier. I have that experience when writing my own work as well. I could be working on a new piece for some time, trying to find my way into it—but once I’ve found the first line, it feels like I’ve found the beginning of the path.The translation of this poem was one of those rare instances where the lines just fell into place. Effortless. Weightless. How lovely and curious to hear that it was the same for Nasser, writing it.

The fact that the poem is very visual certainly made it easier to translate. It’s a series of scenes, simple and concrete. It’s simpler than other poems of Nasser’s—perhaps deceptively so. Nasser’s work is often woven through with figurative language—striking, startling imagery—which can be both beautiful and challenging to work with in translation. But there’s little of that here. Some of his poems also have lines that tend toward pathos, which I find particularly difficult to render in a way that stays faithful to the original but doesn’t sound over-the-top in English. Literary Arabic tends to have more capacity for big statements and big sentiments.

How was the editing process? Do you regret any revisions?

Nasser and I are good friends. We have a very playful friendship, full of banter, and I’m also brutally honest with him about his work. To his credit, he takes it very well, even welcomes it. So I’m very comfortable suggesting edits, and he’s very generous in discussing and considering them. And sometimes he reminds me (as he has mentioned here) that poems don’t have to be perfect. I still have a lot to learn about that, I think.

With this poem, for example, there was an additional line at the end of the eighth stanza in the original Arabic:

The war is over.
The children go back to their schools, and find them inhabited by the displaced.
The workers head back to the factory, and find a pile of rubble in its wake.
The doctors return to the hospital, and find it riddled with disease.
Everyone is afraid to go back home, for fear they will
find it gone.
And then they all ascended to God.

The last line felt like overkill to me—one step too far—and I suggested we cut it. Nasser agreed, and the stanza now ends on “find it gone.”

Srikanth Reddy and other Paris Review editors also suggested some very helpful edits. My favorite changes were to the ninth stanza, which originally read:

The war is over.
The birds, who have seen everything
—the killing, the destruction—
go on singing.
The soldiers also continue to sing.
The birds are not concerned with any of it,
and neither are the soldiers.

There was initially some back-and-forth about the wording of the penultimate line—perhaps “troubled by” instead of “concerned with”?—but then the editors came back with the brilliant idea of cutting out the last two lines entirely. I think the ninth stanza is now much stronger as a result:

The war is over.
The birds, who have seen
everything, everything,
go on singing.
The soldiers also continue to sing.

There is one revision that I do regret, though (unlike Nasser, I do regret edits sometimes). The eleventh stanza originally began:

Fifteen thousand children in the balconies
raining gifts down on the passersby:
Eid clothes, colored shoes, books they no longer need,
dead smiles, their mothers’ tears.

The editors suggested “Thousands of children” instead of “Fifteen thousand,” and we went with that revision. I was in favor of it at the time—more and more people are being killed, monstrously, every day in Gaza, so it seemed to make sense not to name a particular number. But now I wish we had pinned that insane figure, documented it in this poem. Now I look at the word thousands with anguish and feel that it doesn’t even begin to do justice to the scale of what is happening.

Not that any of the figures are fathomable. More than fifty thousand Palestinian people have now been killed over the past year and a half, including seventeen thousand children. Over one hundred thousand Palestinian people have been wounded, including twenty-five thousand children. These figures don’t take into account the many thousands still missing, those still buried under rubble, and the massive numbers  of people who have died of so-called indirect causes, like treatable wounds and preventable illnesses, due to the deliberate decimation of health-care facilities in Gaza. They don’t take into account the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost homes and limbs and livelihoods. The slaughter of Palestinian civilians continues unabated, along with the destruction of all means of life. As I write this, in late May 2025, all food, fuel, medicine, and cooking gas have been blocked from entering Gaza for almost three months. Those who have not been killed by the relentless bombardment are being starved to death. By the end of April, sixty-five thousand children had already been hospitalized for severe malnutrition.

Nor do the “figures” begin to account for how this feels for every one of the two million Palestinian people who are still living under siege in Gaza, living in fear and horror and dignity, trying to build and create and save what they can every day, while watching their homes, their lives, and the lives of their children being systematically destroyed. The war—the genocide—is not over.

 

Nasser Rabah’s debut collection in English translation is Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece.

Wiam El-Tamami is a Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize–winning writer, translator, and editor whose work has been featured in Granta and The Common.

The Stipend

Photograph by Jan Mellström, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed remarkable, but as the months passed, it turned out to be harder to use the money than I thought. The rules were confusing, evolving. Every expense—a print cartridge, a pen, a meal with a student—required an array of online forms, approvals, files uploaded in special formats, and was a hassle for the beleaguered office administrator wrote me careful, patient emails about my failures.

Only books required a single, simple form. I soon understood that “anything” meant I could buy books.

I can buy books. I’ve always been a person who buys books. I live in a city that has twelve independent bookstores within a short radius of my home. I began rotating between these stores, buying piles of books, and ordering them online too. I bought another bookcase, filled it, moved some furniture around, bought another. I know it’s the mark of an unstable mind to store more than one row of books on a bookshelf, so I stacked the second row horizontally, to achieve a causal, temporary effect. My husband wasn’t fooled but he rarely criticizes me, having his own demons he contends with every day and through the night in his sleep. He is aware that to love me means letting me proceed with whatever I believe I must do, which is one reason that, years ago, I divorced the other person I had married and married him.

Then the pandemic arrived, and I was inundated with pleas from bookstores: Save us, save us, please help. And I did my part for civilization. I ordered books and books and books, and piled them all over the house, in corners, behind the sofa, under the bed. I put them in boxes and hid them in the closet. My husband, meanwhile, sat in the same chair all day, or stood in the kitchen and cooked, or took long walks and “talked to God,” who, he maintained, had “come up and said hello,” to my horror. Unlike his other religious episode, which had lasted a few days, this one was going on and on, so it was easy to keep the books out of his narrow line of vision. I could have put them anywhere.

I often bought the same book twice. I’d be curious about deserts or civil war and order four books by bedtime. I bought six books about sand. I bought every book I could find (five) about how to construct a mammoth from DNA. I bought hundreds of novels, boxes of expensive graphic novels; I bought half a shelf of Paris Review interviews, old editions, new editions, the Latin American volume, the volume of women. My husband didn’t say a word. The books he bought were becoming religious, piled beside his chair. Once, he asked me if I’d touched his books, if I’d touched this book, which he held up, and I denied it.

My office at home was overtaken. I waded through books on the floor. For that reason and also because our dog had gone mad, I moved my work into our little backhouse, set ten feet from our main house, and began storing books out there too. We had built the backhouse in hopes that my parents would visit. They never visited, and when they did, they didn’t stay in the backhouse, but instead took over our house and slept in our bed. Everyone on the block had a backhouse, backhouses all over town, two houses on one property. It was outrageous, more houses going up every day, crawling outward in all directions, like sunlight, or a disease.

***

What a stipend! you might be thinking. You should have bought a spaceship and blasted away!

But the dark secret I concealed from my husband was that from the start I did not turn in the receipts. Partly, I didn’t want to make work for the beleaguered office administrator, who told me again and again how understaffed the office was, woefully so, and more understaffed by the day; how none of the admin had stipends, and had to pay for every book themselves out of their much smaller salaries, while, in fact, our whole field of study was coming down on all sides, collapsing. It was only by the greatest stroke of luck, I knew, that I found myself on the stipend-receiving side of the line at all.

Also, I found the receipt-submitting system difficult. I got it wrong over and over, and was scolded by the office administrator. I had only thirty days to turn in a receipt. I can’t do anything in thirty days. I need thirty days to brush my teeth. So instead I was spending our money.

Ahem, the office administrator would say, if she were here with us right now. You did so turn in receipts. And so I did, now and then, for appearances, but I was spending far beyond my allotted stipend. The office administrator would have thought I’d lost my mind if I’d turned in all those receipts. I hid them from her and from my husband. I was deceiving him, which was easy, because he had never looked at a bank statement in his life. He blithely left it all up to me. On his own, I believe, he’d go broke and not even know until he found himself living in his car, which would never happen, since he detested cars and had never owned one, walked fifty minutes each way to work—rain, heat, or freeze—while I drove to the same place he was going and parked in the lot. He often said we should give all our riches to the poor, at which point I would compulsively grab whatever object was closest to me and clutch it to my chest.

***

Sign of the times, you might say. We all have too much stuff. I had too much stuff long before the stipend. In the many years when I had almost nothing, I still had too much stuff. Anyone reading this almost certainly has too many books, too many gadgets, too many clothes. They probably buy too much stuff online, cheap crap, four different kinds of plastic wrapped in three different kinds of plastic. How else do you think we are burning this planet to the core?

Big deal. I bought some stuff.

But I’m telling you, whatever you imagine is nothing like all these books.

***

I don’t want a lesson here. I don’t want to shift into a slower metronomic thrum, the pace of insight. I just want to sit in this chair and feel the weight of all these books pressing down on the planks of wood flooring in my house, trees on top of trees, toppled, sliced, pulped, my house a graveyard in service of human wisdom. Sun circling. Tides going up, glaciers crawling back. Moon turning its pale coin toward us, then away. We bought this house because there was a single tree outside it, a giant post oak, over a hundred years old, with a thousand branches in the sky. My husband pre-mourned this tree, cried over it many times, certain we would kill it with our love, and we did: endlessly summoning the arborist, adding “vitamins” to the dirt, (over?)watering it. It fell down in the middle of the night, crushed our neighbor’s car, lay in the street, its canopy so big it looked like a forest had grown in the road. At dawn, men from the city arrived and chopped it into pieces, fed it into a chipper, and drove it away.

No pace of insight, because no insight came. I came down with COVID. This was long after everyone had come down with COVID, recovered, caught it again, recovered again. It was so long after vaccines that I’d forgotten to get the past couple of boosters. I didn’t get better. I was sick for months, hauling myself out of bed for my job and crawling back in. I lay there and read a sixteen-hundred-page biography of Kafka, three volumes long, and I felt my life ebb away from me as Kafka’s life ebbed away from him. Somewhere along the way, he contracted tuberculosis. It took him five hundred pages to die. I read every page and all the endnotes, a hundred pages of them, and I wrote all over the margins, filled up my notebook and then another notebook with musings about Kafka, death, aging, futility, books, art, loss. I read about Kafka’s world, the Prague gone a century, the Eastern European Jews fleeing, moving across the earth, west like the sun, like flocks of antelope or birds, or like water flowing toward other water, I myself derived from one of those droplets, an ancestor washed up onto the beach of a faraway coast, washing through the country, arriving in my Texas town.

Why did I buy so many books? I’m a big reader, but I could not possibly read all those books. The stipend had utterly defeated me. But I love these books. I love the ones I’ve read and the ones I haven’t. They fill me with joy. I feel rebellious in spirit, beholding them. I love picking them up, getting ready to read them. The ones I’m excited about beam to me from their shelves. Desire and slow fulfillment as I finally pick each one up and begin to turn the pages, sink into the lines, the dark markings resolving into meaning and connection to other humans, near and far. I don’t want this world to die. I feel it slipping away. I could do this all day, I could do this my whole life.

***

The five years had come and gone. No more money was going in, but there was still so much left in the stipend account. Because, it turned out, the stipend never expires. Even if you retire, it’s still there, though you can’t use it. It just waits for you to die and then it goes on without you. I get closer to death every day. I applied to go on a residency to the Arctic. A swarm of artists heading north on a ship. I left my husband behind with our dog. Our mad dog had developed a limp, as if he’d come home from a bad war. He was deaf, too, and every night he stared into the bathroom mirror and cried. I can’t explain this but it’s true. I was still buying books. My husband had stopped talking to God, or at least stopped talking about talking to God, but he was talking about other things that made me anxious, and I held on to our pledge to let each grow as we would. I arrived at the Arctic slowly, like the tide creeping in. I flew on many atmosphere-destroying planes—to Frankfurt, then Oslo, then Svalbard (twice, because the pilot couldn’t land the plane and had to fly away and try again the next day, like certain birds that dive into water and find a fishless ocean and have used nearly all their strength but must try again). I boarded the ship. I drifted north. I saw ancient glaciers crashing and melting, I saw polar bears walking their solo philosophical paths, I saw the trails the whales make in the water. I heard the song of the walrus. In their glorious family pile, the walrus made sounds that were supersonic, dinosauric. I read nothing. I had books with me and sometimes I picked one up and held it in my hands but did not look at the pages. I watched a sun that did not set but rolled around the edge of the horizon, throwing disorderly shadows in loops. I saw shining icebergs streaming water and ice, pieces of them cracking off and flinging outward. I danced on a helicopter pad until a dawn that didn’t look like dawn, a dawn that looked like nothing, that looked like it did when I had begun dancing hours before. I sloshed through brash ice, felt the freezing wind on my face. I saw pack ice like giant puzzle pieces rising and falling on a dark ocean. I was gone nearly a month. When I was ready, I came home slowly, like water going out, draining, leaving in stages, backward through Svalbard, Oslo, Frankfurt, Dublin. I arrived home, dizzy with primeval diseases, sicker than ever, but jubilant, and my husband wrapped me in his embrace and for hours said nothing that alarmed me In the coming week I would submit the receipts for my trip; I would spend days on the project, fill out all the forms wrong, and the beleaguered office administrator would have to redo them so many times that I would buy her a gift card to a nearby bookstore in thanks, and it was so expensive that my account would fall to zero and I’d still have thousands to pay. But the stipend was gone and I was alive.

 

Deb Olin Unferth’s next book, the novel Earth 7, is forthcoming in 2026. She is the author of six other books, including the novel Barn 8 and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance.