The Paris Review's Blog, page 71

Notes from Iran

Iranian protesters on Keshavarz Boulevard in Tehran. Licensed under CC0 4.0.

Before this September, I hadn’t heard from Yara in months. They’re an Iranian journalist who has reported for the country’s most prominent newspapers and publications. We first met in New York in 2018 and bonded over the difficulties that come with reporting on Iran: they were rightly afraid of being arrested for their work, and I’ve been afraid that I will no longer be able to return to the country where I was born due to writing about it from abroad. As the Islamic Republic began to escalate the crackdowns on journalists, activists, and civil society, Yara—a pseudonym I’m using to protect their identity—was forced to leave Iran. But when their father was diagnosed with cancer, they had to return. They messaged me to say they were going back and let me know I likely wouldn’t hear from them. If the authorities knew that Yara was communicating with me, an Iranian dual national who works for the New York Times, they could accuse them of conspiracy, spying, and a whole host of other nonsensical charges. I worried about Yara, but I knew their silence meant they were safe. 

In September, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died after being detained in Tehran by the so-called Morality Police for breaking the “hijab rule.” On Twitter, a photographer named Niloofar Hamedi posted a photo of Amini unconscious in a hospital bed, with tubes coming out of her mouth, a swollen face, and dried blood on her ears. Her image enraged Iranians and sparked mass demonstrations. The protests are now in their fifth week and have spread to more than eighty cities and towns. It’s both the largest and most widespread uprising that the Islamic Republic has seen in its forty-three-year history. Many of us, familiar with the state’s history of lethal crackdowns, were waiting nervously for them to begin. Arrests have already started, as have periodic internet shutoffs. Hamedi is now in solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.   

On September 26, during the third week of the protests, I finally heard from Yara. They had just been arrested and interrogated at the Ministry of Intelligence. “They will take me to jail for about two years due to my reports,” Yara wrote. “But I am not scared, something like hope is rising among us, hope for changes, for women, life, freedom, for visiting you in Tehran soon.” They said it may be a month or two until they have a court date and are sent to prison. In the meantime, they wanted to collaborate on another story. They sent me their notes and wrote, “Keep our fingers crossed that the internet will work tomorrow.” 

 

Yara:

In the days after her death, the state television network broadcasts a short, interrupted video of Mahsa Amini fainting in the detention center, trying to argue that she died of natural causes. Mahsa’s father declares this news to be completely false; those who were with her in the Morality Police van testify that she was beaten while being transported to the Morality Police headquarters. Mahsa’s brother says that the officer who arrested his sister had a camera, so videos from inside the Guidance Patrol van should be reviewed.

The day after Mahsa’s burial, people from other cities in Kurdistan come out in the streets to protest. On the very first day, three people, including a child, are killed as a result of direct fire from the repression forces. The cities of Kurdistan go on strike.

At various universities, from the North to the South, students have launched massive demonstrations. They chant: “We neither want a king, nor a rahbar (the supreme leader); down with every oppressor.”

Female activists call for a rally on Keshavarz Boulevard. The second day of the demonstration is a scene of confrontations between several thousand people and the riot police. The first line of protesters are women and men, hand in hand in front of the special guards. Girls are burning their hijabs amid cheering protesters. Shortly after, the guards drive the protesters to the streets around the boulevard with tear gas, batons, and stun guns. The cats of Laleh Park on Keshavarz Boulevard have been attacked by so much tear gas that their eyes won’t open. The old woman who comes every week to feed them has unknowingly shown up and can’t find her cats.

***

Protests enter their second week. I’m waiting on the street for the taxi to arrive when I see an old religious man coming towards me. At first, I’m afraid he wants to mention I’m not wearing a hijab. All of a sudden, he brings his phone in front of me and shows me Mahsa Amini’s photo, saying, “Can you believe it, ma’am? They killed someone’s daughter. I myself have a daughter. I swear to God, I haven’t slept for a week.”

They say this is the women’s revolution. Maryam, who is on the street every day and has been attacked by so much tear gas that her eyes are swollen, says, No matter what, let’s see each other at Café Haft. We hear that Abbas is missing. Two days later, we find out that he has been arrested. They have arrested Roghiyeh’s and Maryam’s friends too. I have no way of communicating with the world outside of Iran. The internet is down and no VPN is working.

Maryam comes to the café one hour late. She says they are arresting journalists one by one. Fatemeh Rajabi has been taken into custody. Elaheh Mohammadi’s house has been raided and her belongings taken away. Elaheh, who went to Saqqez to cover Mahsa’s funeral, has also been arrested. 

There is a full military curfew in Kermanshah and Mashhad, and Qasem Soleimani’s banners have been set on fire in his hometown. My friends tell me about the scenes in the streets: the young girls who try to block the officers by dragging a trash can into the middle of the street, the women who neutralize the effects of tear gas by setting their headscarves on fire with alcohol, the drivers who create traffic to block the officers and frustrate them by continuously beeping their horns. Where have they learned these things? Courage is contagious. An old woman says to one of the guards, “I’m your mother; don’t hit me.”

Elham says that on the first day, she and her friends were stuck in the boulevard and the officers were attacking them with stun guns. On the second day, four of them were hit with paintballs and still went back to the street with their bruised bodies. They have gone to the street every day since last Thursday, and now it’s Friday; every day with bruised bodies, painful feet, and empty hands, protesting against the mandatory hijab, against their lost rights. She says, “They don’t want us and we don’t want them either.” She says she is waiting for the day when she can dance in the streets. Honestly, me too.

***

It’s Saturday night. The ninth day of protests. Right now, as I’m writing this, I can hear shouts of “death to the dictator” from outside. The slogans have also changed—from “Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid! We’re all in this together!” to “Be afraid! Be afraid! We’re all in this together.” They pour burned oil on the streets so the police will slip and fall. In response, the police have torn up and taken license plates from the cars of many protesters.

There are more and more arrests. The names of five arrested lawyers are announced. One of them is the lawyer of three arrested youths who were sentenced to death during protests in January. Yalda Moaiery, the photographer who took a famous photo of the Bloody Aban protests, is also arrested. Those protests began in late 2017 and lasted until January 2018—initially they were focused on economic grievances like the plummeting value of the Iranian Rial, overall unemployment, and lack of job prospects for Iranians, but they later expanded to call for a downfall of the entire system. Moaiery is in Qarchak Prison. She has said that they are forcibly giving tranquilizers to the prisoners. One hundred women are kept in a shed.

Last night, driving home, we saw that the repression forces were eating. At the red light, us three angry women with no hijabs were staring at them. They refused to look into our eyes. It is the tenth day of the presence of people in the streets. There is now nearly a full military curfew in Tehran.

We have come a long way: from December 2018, when Vida Movahed, a young woman from Tehran, sparked the Girls of Enghelab protests against the mandatory hijab, to today, when girls burn headscarves and dance in the streets. We have come a long way: to realizing that whether the country is sanctioned or not, the amount of food on our dinner tables is getting smaller. We have come a long way: from the day when we were participating in elections with hope, shouting Where is my vote?, to seeing that it doesn’t matter if the government is fundamentalist or moderate, because democracy and laws have lost all meaning in this country. We have come a long way: from all the arrests and detentions, and from mourning Sahar Khodayari, the “Blue Girl,” who lost her life to watch football in 2019, to the day that stadiums were conditionally opened to women due to pressure from activists and FIFA. The truth is that we have seen the fate of our Afghan sisters following the country’s takeover by the Taliban, and we know we shouldn’t expect the West and America to save us; we are our own saviors. Whether this is a women’s revolution or a revolution for women, we won’t go back.

 

Nilo Tabrizy is a video journalist for the New York Times covering Iran-related stories, news and investigations.

Yodeling into a Canyon: A Conversation with Nancy Lemann

Courtesy of Nancy Lemann.

I first read Nancy Lemann’s novel Lives of the Saints in one sitting, on an airplane. I was spellbound, moved, and deeply charmed. Who was this woman? Why had I never read her before? How was she capable of articulating an experience of youth that, in all its wastrelness, was exactly like my own despite being completely different?

Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985, is a novel that undermines our expectations of narrative: Lemann’s fiction does not flow in the normal direction but loops in circles and rides along on digressions that resemble the chaos of real life. The book is remarkable for its restraint and for its lush detail. If it can be said to be “about” anything, it’s about a young woman named Louise who has returned to New Orleans from college in the North; she finds herself thrust back into the richly entangled social world of her childhood, back among the people she has always known, including Claude Collier, the only man who can break her heart “into a million pieces on the floor.” Lives of the Saints is peopled by eccentrics and doomed lovers and drunks and people who are always “Having a Breakdown.” It’s so rollickingly funny that in retrospect you might forget about its central tragedy, then reread it and get your heart broken all over again.

Like Cassandra at the Wedding and The Transit of Venus, Lives of the Saints has had a formidable afterlife, sustained not by support from the literary publicity machine but by a network of recommendations from die-hard fans, of which I am now one. (I don’t remember how or when I picked up my copy, but much of the current generation of fandom can be traced to Kaitlin Phillips’s 2018 recommendation in SSENSE: “Read this book in the bath.”) After finishing it, I ordered every single one of Lemann’s novels, and read them more or less back-to-back. It felt like absorbing a consciousness that suddenly made everything make sense. I, too, have Had a Breakdown. I, too, romanticize the impossible, the decaying, and the societies that have lapsed in a long slow deserved decline; I can be moved to tears by things like wisteria and particular angles of winter sunlight. One of her narrators even romanticizes the fall of the Ottoman Empire! 

Lemann’s story “Diary of Remorse,” in our Fall issue, has the same madcap, digressive quality that defines her novels as well as the same blend of humor, pain, and beauty. You can read a chat the two of us had on the phone in September below. We agreed, among other things, that youth is angst.

To celebrate Lemann’s remarkable literary career, we have also published a series of reflections on her work by the writers Susan Minot, Krithika Varagur, and James Wolcott on our website. You can find, too, a short piece by Lemann, on Saint Ignatius and Tatler—who else could do that?

INTERVIEWER

Why the diary form?

LEMANN

Around age fourteen, I started keeping a hideously copious diary because that’s what I needed to do to deal with my angst and figure out the world. It was a hideous compulsion so eventually I thought, “Maybe we can turn this into something productive instead of just being this hideous habit.”

In the case of my Paris Review story, I went to Rigoletto, I was reminded of Don Giovanni, and then jolted by a time twenty years ago when I went to that opera after I first moved to Washington, D.C. I knew that I would be able to find an actual written record of it that would provide the details. I started writing at a time when there weren’t computers and I was working on a typewriter. But after there were computers, you could press this button called F2 on a word processing program to search for a specific word. Now you just search “Don Giovanni” in the appropriate document and that’s it, you find everything you’re looking for.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think about the overlap between fiction and nonfiction?

LEMANN

I’m a reporter at heart. It’s so much easier to just chronicle everything. But then there’s that whole thing where you’re not supposed to care about hurting the people you’re writing about. But I do care, especially the older I get. I have a fabulous novel in my drawer about a really juicy saga, but it just runs too close to reality. Lots of people would say, just do it anyway, but I can’t live with it. So you have to disguise it somehow, which is incredibly hard.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me a little bit about your first novel, Lives of the Saints, and the time in your life when you were working on that book.

LEMANN

It took three months to write it and seven years to get it published because it’s much harder for a certain kind of person to deal with business than it is to write a book It’s the easiest thing to sit alone in your room and write, but what’s hard is trying to sell yourself. Writers are shy. I was twenty-two and I had just finished college, and I had my first job, as a secretary at Tulane Law School in New Orleans. I was riding this tremendous wave of rage because my time was not my own. After I left that job I wrote the book, riding in on that wave of rage. 

INTERVIEWER

You seem to have a thing for societies in decline I’m thinking of New York in The Fiery Pantheon, or Washington D.C. in “Diary of Remorse,” and even the Ottoman Empire! Then of course, New Orleans in Lives of the Saints.

LEMANN

In Balzac, Paris is a character. New Orleans, God knows, is like that for me. My dear hero Walker Percy has talked about the genie-soul of a place. I love to try to figure that out. That’s everything to me. And in New Orleans, there’s always been the decline but not the fall. It’s still happening. That whole world is still there. There’s less and less of it, but it is still there. And it’s just so quaint to me. It’s like your first love: you just cannot forget it. I didn’t know there was anything unusual about it until I went away to college up north. Then when I got back—Jesus… It’s like your ace in the pocket to be from somewhere so completely unique.

INTERVIEWER

Do you go back often?

LEMANN

Excessively. Everything is there. When I’m there, I’m among generations, not just random people. There are people I knew when I was a kid, whose fathers knew my father, and whose grandfathers knew my grandfather. Standing on a street corner, I can see all these different layers of characters in history. There’s so much more meaning there. It’s like a fishbowl. The stage is smaller, magnifying the action.

A sense of place is not enough for a story or a novel, though, and I always struggle to figure out what else to add to it. It’s kind of a Jackson Pollock thing, where you just throw stuff out there, and see what makes sense and what sticks.

INTERVIEWER

In your story in the Review, the diary provides some chronological structure, but there are still a lot of regressions and digressions. Your novels are rarely linear. How do you think about plot and structure?

LEMANN

Plot—that’s the hardest thing for me. I’m always looking for ways to make it work. The reader needs a reason to turn the page. Sometimes personality or “voice” can be enough, maybe, but that severely limits your audience. I have tried to do an intergenerational saga novel, but it was a failure. Colloquial yet terse is best. So maybe I can do it in a more shorthand way that would be less pretentious and boring.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about your influences. What do you read?

LEMANN

Evelyn Waugh has always been a favorite. I love Persephone Books, a publisher that rescues out-of-print books, mostly by British ladies from around the world wars. Nabokov. Tolstoy is very accessible. Some of the biggies are too hard for me. I love reading about Proust but it’s like, “Where was the editor?” I can’t read a whole two-page sentence about a dust mote. Shakespeare I love reading about but he writes in a different language and I don’t speak that language. I will keep trying, though. Graham Greene is an old favorite. I’m Jewish but I like these British Catholic writers. They’re so reserved and in their restraint is a world of emotion. I find restraint to be extremely moving.

INTERVIEWER

You often use catchphrases, like “Doing Your Duty.” They contain a lot and also elide things. There aren’t really sex scenes in Lives of the Saints—people just “go to the bamboo grove.” Those elisions are a form of restraint, and they’re very funny sometimes.

LEMANN

When I look back on myself as a young woman, one of the things I find most striking and endearing is that she was inadvertently hilarious. People would find me hilarious and I wasn’t  trying to be funny. What I like is tragicomedy. I think all-comedy-all-the-time gets really tedious, and you just want to throw the book across the room. Even someone like P. G. Wodehouse, it’s enchanting at first but you want some depth or sorrow at some point. Evelyn Waugh is a master of that. Our Man In Havana is another masterpiece of that.

INTERVIEWER

There is a lot of tragedy, too, in Lives of the Saints—the central tragedy, and then just the way the characters are feeling.

LEMANN

How old are you, Sophie?

INTERVIEWER

I am twenty-seven.

LEMANN

Okay, youth is so angst-filled. Youth is just all-angst-all-the-time.

INTERVIEWER

It is.

LEMANN

So it’s honest.

INTERVIEWER

Lives of the Saints has had an interesting afterlife—it’s constantly passed around between young women.

LEMANN

It’s so odd to have you paying me mind. Usually writing is like yodeling into a canyon. You have to make your peace with it or else you won’t go on. There are all kinds of ego problems going on with writers. It’s strange when they pay you mind, then it’s strange when they don’t. But if you young people like it, then you might want to work on trying to get it back in print.

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

Love, Loosha

All photographs courtesy of Chip Livingston.

 

In 1994, the internationally acclaimed fiction writer Lucia Berlin met the New York School poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, where they were both visiting writers. “We just clicked,” Berlin said in a 2002 interview. “We cut through right away into each other’s deep feelings. It was like falling in love, or going back to your childhood best friend in first grade, that kind of really pure friendship.”

That friendship developed through a faithful and frequent correspondence, a literary exchange of about two letters per week over the course of a decade. Lucia was living in Boulder, Colorado and later in Los Angeles; Kenward was dividing his time between New York City and Calais, Vermont. Despite the distance between them, the two writers came to depend on their intimate friendship and deeply valued their correspondence.

In the following letters dated between May 28 and August 5, 2000, Lucia and Kenward discuss a New York production of Kenward’s musical play, Postcards on Parade, and the books each was working on at the time: Lucia’s memoir, Welcome Home, and Kenward’s fourteenth poetry collection, Blast from the Past, which he wanted to dedicate to Lucia. They write about the books they’re reading, Lucia’s recent move to a trailer park, and the thrilling poetic visuals she sees from her windows.

–Chip Livingston

Boulder, CO

May 28, 2000

Dear Kenward,

It was good to hear your voice. I truly don’t like the telephone, and when my newfangled phone died I didn’t call you still again. I hadn’t known you were involved again with new and improved Postcards, was worried that you had gone to NY because of health problems. Glad to hear that you are fine. The new Postcards sounds promising and fun.

I’m still exhausted unpacking, but I like my new place more each day. And night. There are peepers and crickets and mosquitos here, just like in the country. Many ditches and streams run through it. Trains run through it too, mostly in the middle of the night. Many residents say this is the only bad part about living here. I love trains, the sound makes me happy and I go right back to sleep, dream of dear Anna [Karenina].

Doesn’t bother me either that the back of my place is on 30th, a busy street. The air conditioner masks the noise… I turn it off because that noise gets to me. This evening I went outside to sit under the huge cottonwood in my yard. Three black stretch limousines passed by. What could that be? A funeral? A sweepstakes winner? They had a hard time making the turn at the corner. My Mexican neighbor’s sons all come for dinner next door so there were about five pickups that made it a tight squeeze. The man and woman are my age, and are from Juárez, so we’ve had great talks about El Paso and Juárez, present day and in the forties. The trolley, the El Minuto café, et cetera. He was using an electric saw a few days ago and I asked if he would lop off the top of an oak bookcase… too tall for my place. He not only sawed it off but carefully put the top board on, gluing and sanding it. They are all barbecuing and playing (not loudly) Mexican music.

I feel very at home here. I have truly hated Boulder yuppiness and new age–ness, bad art and bookstores.

Later: I unpacked a few more boxes and came into my bedroom. Whoa, out the window, up and down 30th it looked like Christo[1] had been here. Orange mesh draped all along both sides of the street for as far as I could see. Then metal constructions started to grow up, with platforms and ladders. Sort of the Pompidou museum right outside my window. I don’t have TV now. No cable, would have to get saucers and et cetera. Too busy to read the local paper… so didn’t remember the Bolder Boulder Memorial Day race, Huge race. Thousands and thousands, famous Africans and Mexican Indians, plus all able-bodied Boulderites. Wheelchairs too.

I filled my [oxygen] tank and went out to see what was up. They were the TV crew and race officials. They’ll be right outside MY window at 5 A.M. to set up. The starting gun will go off at 7:30!

I take this as a good omen. Surely I’m in the right place at the right time, since 5 A.M. is when I get up anyway. Imagine. Thousands of people at the start of the run, only fifteen feet from my bed! It is so awful it makes me happy. Too many people at once has kept me from ever once watching the yearly activity. But it is very different when you are Participating in the event.

Next night: Too tired to write, and long letter must be tiring to read. The race was fantastic. Delightful. Gun shots went off every twenty minutes, with new bunches. Over forty thousand people. I watched, between unpacking, for Hours. Lovely sense of many people enjoying something together, Like opera or baseball.

Love,

Lucia

Calais, VT

June 28, 2000

Dear Loosha—

The stabile home fotos are DEE-lish, so comfy, you all the way, love seats everywhichaway, art on the floor, which is where I leave it, sometimes. Very home-minded today, as there’s a Lady Party in the house. Pauline Camp, huge bod, erratic flesh flow, unsunned tallowy skin tone, prizefighter cauliflower nose, squinchy eyes, enormous misshapen ears, mouth down-turned, down-trodden—quite a beauty in a survivalist way, to my eyes. An Original, she’s doing summer cleanup volunteerism with Patty Padgett, who is barefoot, much to Pauline’s recurrent amazement and not-so-hidden shock. Harold, Pauline’s hubby, and I have formed a bewildered, helpless male cabal, in the thrall of this empowerment that old-fashioned “real” women are supreme at—Cleaning Up Menfolk Muss.

I’ve been in a reading-reading-reading mode, a pattern of adolescence, when all I did just about was read, that solo occupation that replenished me, offered luscious and reliable escape, and, though narrative was the hook, I did respond to the twists of language. My favorite rerun this summer so far has been A Handful of Dust[2].

I grew to loathe [Stendhal’s] The Red & The Black. Fell for a Colette shortie, The Other One, and the standard Frenchy trio: wife, mistress, drippy boulevard playwright–hubby philanderer they both care for and decide to share. They’re so fond of each other, jealousy isn’t a problem. I got jealous at the theater world details: dress rehearsal, the performers, the routine I feel exiled from.

So adroit. Plus a [Marguerite] Yourcenar historical fiction novella, spare and gorgeous. Between novels, I dip into you to see how your stuff holds up, which it does, all the way—that Gothic Romance slays me, how it refracts out into politics, power plays. Beautiful and natural, nothing forced or gussied up, doomed feudal grandeur dealt with simply via virginal eyes.

Yesterday, raced through a Graham Greene potboiler I wearied of—suspense, yes, but not nearly as gripping as his true-life safari through the unmapped interior of Liberia, so terrific made me lust for more Greene.

Switchover to Harold, who has plunked himself down by my desk, rattles on whatever I’m doing at the processor.

HAROLD: “So I picked up a new belt, only charged me four dollars, now I’m going to eat dinner. Down to the last set now—then we’ll have some sharp blades. Got rid of the rubbish. This spring I got rid of it. I have a rubbish man comes right to the door, all the stuff the girls throwed away from the storage. He’ll get rid of it, he won’t mind, got one of those big crushers, pushes it right up, then when it’s full, gets rid of it. We’ll go eat some dinner, then this afternoon get the rest of the mowing done down there. The peonies are really growing, three bunches of lupinia. You never know, never know what’ll happen, but it’s been a good year for flowers.”

Me, again.

Glad flecks of happy dust have fallen on you off that great Swizzle Stick in The Sky. Hope the flecks continue steadily, now you’re resettled. Congrats from your boondocks pen-beau—and a Happy Fourth!

[…]

Time to see what the Ladies are up to in the house.

Love,

Kenward

Boulder, CO

July 24, 2000

Dear Kenward,

David and the boys left last night after a truly wonderful visit. I need to say how grateful and happy I am. Any mother whose children love her is blessed, an alcoholic mother is in a state of grace. I know I was a “good” mother, loving and responsible, before I drank, and when I drank I never physically or verbally hurt my sons, but certainly scared them, made them embarrassed and ashamed and worried… could have killed them driving and burning down house, et cetera. Took many years of reconstruction, more for me to believe they really forgave me than for them to do so. David especially… who, once when I was going to kill myself, with Antabuse and gin, left, saying, “Go for it. It’s the most decent thing to do.”

He and the boys, Nico and Truman, were so loving to me. We had fun, laughed, goofed off, explored, talked and talked, swam, played miniature golf, et cetera.

Fortunately I was very ill a few weeks ago… maybe I wrote… lung infection and fever so was still feeling effects of heavy prednisone steroids. No Pain, no fatigue! I was able to keep up (on walker) walking the mall, trails past a million prairie dogs. Got a hole-in-two playing miniature golf! We found a skateboard ramp for Nico behind a Baptist Church. Sign said: GOD TOLD US TO BUILD THE APOCALYPSE! SKATEBOARD PARK. WEAR YOUR HELMET.

We swam every day. David barbecued (he is a chef). We ate lots of chocolate sundaes and junk food, watched baseball and Kung Fu movies. They loved my neighbors, the Luceros next door, spoke Spanish with them, and David smoked dope and drank Coronas. The boys met Joe, the Dakota Indian who lives down the street, and threw basketballs in his hoop. They played ball with the little boy next door, son of the retarded bucktoothed mother, daughter of Judith who says all these Indians and Mexicans are dope dealers. Really…

Yesterday the steroid was wearing off so when they went swimming I opted for a nap. Before they left David spoke to me so sweetly. How happy he was to see me swimming and stronger, here with good friends like Jenny and Ivan and Bobbie… and in great trailer, among good, real people, safe and sound. Big tears in our eyes and sweet hugs before they went off to swim. I went to sleep, woke up to “Ma! Ma! Grandma! You ok?”

The air conditioner had shorted out, wires caught on fire. The room was filled with smoke. I was fast asleep. Big to do, much to do. Fire put out, room aired out. Whew. No electricians to be found on a Sunday. One who said he could come on Overtime today for $100 extra which I can pay thanks to you, meanwhile no lights or air conditioner. VERY HOT Night. Read Martin Amis by candlelight. Hope battery holds up to print this. Duh. The printer is electric. Hope they fix it today and I can mail this tomorrow.

Fortunately the kids ate and drank everything in refrigerator except capers and horseradish.

Anyway we all calmed down and David said, “Well, Ma, I’m glad that you are relatively safe.” They were dressing for the trip when four police cars in high siren and at full speed came zooming down our little dirt road. Six cops got out, guns drawn. They put Indian Joe in handcuffs and into back seat. Then all six, with guns pointed, ran past my living room to the Luceros’ house next door.

This was the moment that I’ll remember all my life. My dear Nico, my soulmate and I are Completely attuned: We simultaneously burst into song. “Bad Boy! Bad Boy! Whatcha gonna do when they bust yo ass? Bad Boy! Bad Boy!” The theme song to COPS, a tawdry TV show that shows videos of real, ugly police in towns like Lubbock, Texas or Carlsbad, New Mexico, the criminals all with wavery faces.

They didn’t take anyone from the Lucero house, were looking for someone else. After they left, Nico and I laughed and hugged each other, so pleased by our identical response, which his father said was “Sicko! Have you guys no compassion?”

Other good news is that I have a story in my head. All I’ve got is where it will take place. On the Santa Isabel Grace Line ship between New York and Valparaiso. 30 days, 30 chapters[4]. Details swimming around. This is the part of writing that I enjoy the most. Details appear like laundry in dryer window, fish in aquariums. God, I hope with better similes when the time comes!

All my love to you,

Loosha

Calais, VT

July 29, 2000

Dear Loosha—

So glad to hear you had an action-packed visit, and the chance to sing a duet as a miscreant neighbor is carted off to the pokey. Awful quiet, by comparison, up here. My niece and her eccentric hubby stopped by a while back, for a two-nighter—a pleasure, as it rid me of my “transient” ID—a sort of I Don’t Live Here ennui. Next week, Steven Clay, the archive go-between/publisher of Cyberspace and Nite Soil, arrives for two nights, mostly to take a gander at the archives up here, which are due to be dispatched to San Diego[5], second and final shipment, come October. The first, from NYC basement, got Fed Xed, last week.

I’m rallying, high time, and, to my surprise, had enough new stuff to fill out a 96-pager, entitled, fairly firm cogitation, Blast From The Past[6]. Some stories, I Remember stuff, poems. Some show stuff. The title song Steven & I launched at the Boulder Musee[7]. I even stuck in the Harold monologue from the letter to you, but it didn’t have an End, really, so I took it out. No room.

A favor. Can I codedicate this book to you. I got worried Loosha is an imposition, so I put Lucia and Pat—Pat being Patty Padgett, who is such a good daily round looker-after, daily walks, and so attuned to inner whirlings. She’s so smart, and compassionate, what a combo. And I guess every close tight marriage needs an outside chum for contrast. If I had my druthers, I’d finger you as Loosha. But let me know first if this is OK. I sent it out to a Mom and Pop kiddo operation in Tejas, Skanky Possum, nice folks. But they publish books without mass, and mine is hefty. So I may show it to my houseguest, Mr. Granary I call him, and see if he’ll take it on, and then send a more anorexic manuscript to the Kiddos—stuff that hit the cutting room floor, but it’s printable. Just didn’t fit in, this go around.

[…]

That’s terrif news, a story is coming to you, nothing beats organic blasts.

Time to eat health-giving broccoli for lunch. Your ebullient letter perked me up no end. Resilience, ah.

Mucho Love,

Kenward

Boulder, CO

August 5, 2000

Dear Kenward,

The now-married and shorn of hair and all sex-appeal postman took away my letter to you, so here is a late postscript. I may not be writing, but a lovely poem happened to me this morning. I took your letter and others out to the mailbox, turned on the sprinkler. Came inside for coffee, bagel and the paper. (I DID have rapid heart beatings climbing the few steps! I was happy to be able to write that in diary.)[8]

I watched the sun rise pink and apricot outside my window among fine old cottonwoods, maples and fruit trees. Walking in front of them, toward the opening to the street, was the oldest of the Vietnamese women. There are five generations of women, one granpa and one young married son, all in a trailer same size as mine. Even if all the women had their babies in their teens she is still a very old woman, late eighties, nineties. She is the one who grows the roses, burns incense in a brazier to keep the deer away. She wears either an old ornately embroidered yellow dress or a raggedy silk pants suit with frog fastened jacket. White hair in a bun. Tiny, maybe five feet, seventy pounds. There she was in the shabby green suit, gliding by my window, wearing a conical straw hat and thong sandals, carrying a long bamboo pole. I couldn’t have Heard her, but her walk was silent, as if she were on a conveyor belt. What made it so dream-like was that I saw her through the mist of the sprinkler… sort of a monsoon haze.

It was such a lovely moment that I wanted to put it in heart-machine diary but just wrote, “washed dishes, swept kitchen, scrubbed the tub.” Took the EKG machine back to the hospital and came home, utterly exhausted. We are having heat wave and pollution from mountain fires very bad. Even normal people advised to stay inside.

I sat down to catch my breath, and there came the old woman, past my windows, regal as ever. The pole was lying across her shoulders and hanging from either end were two plastic bags from Albertson’s Grocery.

Love,

Loosha

 

[1] Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, Bulgarian installation artist, 1935–2020.

[2] Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust, Chapman and Hall, 1934.

[3] Jenny Dorn, Ivan Suvanjieff, Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

[4] At the time of this letter, Lucia was beginning to write her memoir of places she lived in, which became Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018.

[5] Granary Books publisher Steven Clay is helping Kenward collect his papers for archival storage at the University of California, San Diego.

[6] Elmslie, Blast From The Past, Skanky Possum Press, 2000. Codedicated to Lucia and Pat Padgett.

[7] Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

[8] In a previous letter, Lucia had written about an EKG heart monitor diary she was filling out, but she hadn’t been experiencing any excitement or irregularities to include in the diary for the doctor.

 

Chip Livingston is the author of three poetry collections, Saints of the Republic (2023), Crow-Blue, Crow-Black, and Museum of False Starts; a novel; and a story collection. He studied fiction with Lucia Berlin from 1996-1998, and was an assistant to Kenward Elmslie from 2002-2012. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.  

Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie will be published November 1, 2022 by University of New Mexico Press.  

Twilight Zone Dispatch: The Last Stop and the Book of Revelation

A screening of “A Stop at Willoughby” at the Last Stop Willoughby Festival.

Clarence Larkin’s commentary on THE BOOK OF REVELATION is written LIKE THIS, crafted with occasional capitalizations to emphasize IMAGES and TERMS. Reading it doesn’t feel like being shouted at but rather kind and intimate, as though he’s DIRECTING our attention in the same way a CHILD is directed to look at CARDINALS and CATERPILLARS during NATURE WALKS. Larkin directs the reader to symbols like THE SEVEN SEALS, a kingdom made of STONE, and the NEW HEAVEN and NEW EARTH. As a writing style, its effect is in guiding the EYE to see ONE THING over another. Eventually we’re pointed to this: a vision of the New City. There shall be NO NIGHT there: they need no candle, neither light of the Sun; for the Lord God giveth them LIGHT; and THEY SHALL REIGN FOR EVER and EVER.

***

I grew up in Willoughby, Ohio, the supposed subject of the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), in which a man falls asleep during his daily commute and DREAMS of a train station for a UTOPIAN TOWN. The opening narration begins: “This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor, all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’s protection fell away and left him a naked target.” A naked target, the episode suggests, for virulent daydreaming. It’s a cold winter, and Gart is an advertising executive so beleaguered by both wife and boss that his only respite is the commute he spends dreaming of a better place. As his life spirals horrific—his wife thinks he’s a coward, he fails at his job—Willoughby from the window waxes idyllic: parasols, pushcarts, summertime in 1888. It is a backward-looking fantasy, one he indulges in daily while sleeping.

“A Stop at Willoughby” (1960) from The Twilight Zone.

Until, after a particularly bad day at work, he decides to get off at the dream-stop, and dies. That’s all.

Once a year, this episode plays on loop in my hometown’s public library for the Last Stop Willoughby Festival, when the center square fills up with ice cream and pretzels, and residents ride a trolley through town to reenact Gart’s window-gazing commute. It’s a community ritual that occurs at summer’s end, when the wind sweeps over the Lake Erie shores and the grayness settles down more permanently into daily weather. How else to approach the dying year than to together board a trolley and imagine encountering a utopic version of one’s hometown? A utopia, says Foucault, is like a mirror. It is “a place without a place…I am there, there where I am not.” A town with no blemish, basked in sun.

***

From ages seven to eighteen, I lived in a fixer-upper initially intended to be flipped, with parents whose former home had been five thousand miles away. The floor was scattered with nails and misplaced tools, drywall dust. As a girl, I killed time in the wide aisles of Home Depot—sweet-smelling lumber and drawers filled with small multiples (doorknobs and metal letters)—and at home I’d flip through a notebook on the kitchen table filled with diagrams, calculations, and budgets of the simplest way to patch things together. I PRETENDED that I lived in a house made of showrooms—one with a false front like the ones in Old West towns, instead of our decayed siding and crumbled roof.  During the Last Stop Willoughby Festival, I’ve walked through the center square and felt a strange, bright sense of lightness as I passed the gazebo I’d passed daily, imagining it in its perfect form, power-washed and laced with clematis. My childhood was glossed with the desire to repair the broken steps to the front porch and to lift people’s spirits, yet I didn’t know how. My Willoughby was filled with nicks and chipped paint, crosswalk feuds and car accidents. I desired something better because something better is possible; even when I risk snagging on the train station that doesn’t exist. 

The Book of Revelation mentions both a new heaven and a new earth. In the Lord’s Prayer, one prays for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” But Gart’s utopia ends in death, because he abandons himself to the dreamworld to the same degree he abandons the possibility of his life. In the Twilight Zone, Willoughby appears perfect because it is other than reality. A Potemkin village obfuscates its own tragedy, while the life-giving daydream interfaces with one’s real life, with love, and inspires one to act.

To some, great hope comes in the possibility of restoration: that there is an unseen, future world, which is like our world but different—a world where there are still lions and lambs but the lions will lay with the lambs. Imagine if Gart woke up from his dream and felt a courage to make his town and life more like it, so that his neighbors, too, would get unexpected glimpses of Willoughby.

***

“A Stop at Willoughby” (1960) from The Twilight Zone.

I visit my parents this summer and attend the festival again. The trolley, now gone, had been sold, a woman tells me, “to Florida.” A man wanders the street with a blue macaw that calls out “Bye, bye, bye.” We watch the Twilight Zone episode and hear Gart’s Mad Men–esque boss shouting that in order to succeed one must “Push, push, push.” Gart rides the Metro-North, the train I find myself taking often from my current home in New Haven to New York. I’m sure I’ve thought of Willoughby as Gart had dreamt it, as an escape, while taking this train. Willoughby is my nostalgic center; it possesses the gloss of PERFECTION that comes with the PASSAGE OF TIME. Rod Serling’s voice returns to close out the episode: “Willoughby? Maybe it’s wishful thinking nestled in a hidden part of a man’s mind, or maybe it’s the last stop in the vast design of things—or perhaps, for a man like Mr. Gart Williams, who climbed on a world that went by too fast, it’s a place around the bend where he could jump off.”

With that, the lights in the library meeting room turn on, and we shuffle back out into the town square. The festival feels like a fragmented farmers market, with booths for cat adoption and bread. Disunity flashes. People grumble about the various tables for local churches, and children argue over chalk drawings. A woman in a petticoat and a corset crosses an intersection, and the sun, for a moment, glints against City Hall.

To be a true witness to perfection requires HUMILITY. In C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, hell is described as the “ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration on the self.” Heaven, we can only assume, is true delight for the other. When I return home to visit, I tend my mother’s garden, and tidy the mess on the tables. I view heaven from the platform, through a sidelong glance, with the seeing eye that one has with faith.

“A Stop at Willoughby” (1960) from The Twilight Zone.

 

Nicolette Polek is the author of Imaginary Museums and a forthcoming novel, Bitter Water Opera, to be published by Graywolf in 2024.

Unconditional Death Is a Good Title

Yellow tree, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0.

 

vladimir nabokov said:

i confess i do not believe in time
in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger
didn’t finish the time part in time
to publish it with the being part
so everything-now must be not-being
there is a pine needle stuck in the screen
the side nearest me must be the being side
the one further away’s the time side
nabokov only said the first line
even when you have nothing to do
there’s not enough time in the day

there are 5 stinkbugs on the back porch—the stinkbugs don’t make you feel good or likable. but the one beautiful tree we have that i can see is still fulsome. in years past it’s always been the best & most long-lasting foliage tree & now, even in this year of all the leaves blown down & drabness, as i see it, it’s a glorious tree between the locusts, acting as if there’s not a stinkbug around.

if i’m so smart how come i don’t have another typewriter? i’d like to know what the word indexicality means too.

this will be a little test to see if expressive(?) writing is a cure for the malaise of the coronavirus. well it doesn’t cure the pain in my left knee, there is something wrong with my stomach which is nerves. walking home from church, the daily news magazine had elvis presley who r & i were forbidden to listen to on the cover. when i got home i found out that my father had died, i was 12. the local parish priest was there, did he come on to me? do you want to see him (my father)? I said no. he’d died in the bathroom. he’d been home from work with muscle spasms, at least that’s what i was told. then i got my period for the first time. my mother already had breast cancer & had lost a breast. my homelife was a nightmare, later my uncle took us out to buy us records. i felt that this was a very weird idea, replacing my father with an LP? i helped pick out what my father would wear in his coffin, opting for the pink tie & gray suit, i felt that the grimness we felt need not be communicated. in my childhood i spent some time trying to comprehend what was happening. i’d lie on the bed, tracing the patterns of the bedspread’s design, never succeeding. i needed assistance. i became a very serious person.

june 21, oh oh 2020 it’s fuckin father’s day, a free ice cream cone from moxie’s, hot as hell climate change heat, coronavirus time, trump had a rally in tulsa, we saw a mink in the backyard, also a jackrabbit, today annabel will come, hard to believe anybody will come, the birds nesting on the back porch, entering through the screens are, according to phil via sibley’s, house wrens! perhaps it came from the other porch, a worm-eater, if you will; we also have warblers, sweet singers all. here a spider eating a caterpillar, a good meal for both dad & grads.

***

i’m bored to tears, the weather is warm. i’ve moved my operation off the porch; it was a cold day, it’s sort of raining, we saw a brilliantly red tree in rayville, everything on my piles falls down into hades, i’d better empty out hell & use it as a storage bin so i have room to type. there’s stinkbugs everywhere. tonight we’ll to an ashbery memorial. to know where everything is to be at last alone. but who wants that? a scintillating set-to, or a being-here, or a being-here. not growing old gracefully, i’ve chosen to grow old awkwardly, like a teenager. i don’t want anyone to know i’m here. it’s dark & unsavory where i go but i never go, i never went, through the window headfirst, imminent somersaulting by the door, i can’t hear you, i need an ear-horn. i’m a katydid in distress.

july 2, memory is running, that’s the only july i remember, i mean that July is the only, are the only things i remember, don’t have time for more, i mean room, red sorrel, popover, joel schumacher, time is a room, you could say time was anything; about MEMORY, stop time is a curtain blowing in the wind, i remember what’s in the pictures but not what’s in the words, the words could be any words, maybe i should’ve memorized memory.

***

now the leaves are rushing off the yellow tree, yeller gal, yeller gal, flashing through the night, summer storms will pass you, unless the lightning’s white. but that was an airplane. my favorite thing to do is to watch a volcano erupt or see the northern lights. i’d like to have seen the nazca lines & everything in asia, i’d like to have gone to madagascar, i’d like to go to the botanical gardens in lesotho. i’d like to see the glass flowers in boston & i may yet. if we’re going to skip seasons, let’s have it be spring, 60°, perpetual like periwinkles. there’s no reason it couldn’t be like that here, now, you know? we wouldn’t have to theorize about why. & the deer ticks would be gone. no one would know where they went, but the deer would still be around. there’s a bear around near here; there must be confusion about hibernation.

unconditional death is a good title because it’s almost completely meaningless, yes? i wrapped the green tomatoes in newspaper, rolled up the lovage in wet paper towels, mailed peggy’s postcard, didn’t see the bear, emptied the skink, read rebecca solnit, said to the greens “would anybody like to go to gethsemane hill with me? i have to atone for my sins.” thought about ball lightning, thought that it’s friday & about the s&s brewery in nassau. when there’s a frost, do the poison plants die?

***

after my parents died i was adopted by jeanne moreau & henry david thoreau, two assiniboine indians who taught me what really happened in history. it was good at last to know & speak my own language. when lewis’s mother went to hunter high school, they made her take a class to get rid of her yiddish accent. who decides you shouldn’t have one?

i dreamt i was a pinnacle of coral.

the thought of what america would be like if the classics had a wide circulation, the thought of what america blah blah, bitter america, it’s the beginning of 70 degree days ending in rain, a lot of people would die of the virus quoting herodotus or maybe sappho, the greek anthology. americans are a bit anti-intellectual. even politicians don’t quote poetry anymore, though obama was a reader.

the idea that writing is easy comes from the frank o’hara method. but it is in fact easy, especially if you don’t try to say more than you are thinking, to say other than what you’re thinking, for instance you might be trying to say what somebody else is thinking, like barthes or lacan. slowly does the middle tree turn yellow, always having been the most interesting fall tree, it is somewhat damaged with dead parts you can see from the field, it’s the tree whose branch snapped off & hung there threatening our (covid) social life till when it fell. now threatening is cold weather, can’t sit outdoors, our plan is to borrow a tent from grace, & in it use our mr. heater buddy, little buddy, maybe it will work

today’s monday august 31, oh fuck, though the sun is out, it’s foreboding, don’t think about it, thinking about the future’s outlawed esp. if you’re 75 & human, we sat in the sun with alyssa & finally everyone, in the field before us a horse, a bit skittish, the kids took no notice, surprisingly, it was an odd sight to be sure.

maybe it’s just fear of the winter, this is a day supposed to be sunny but what is this white sky? seen some yellow & orange trees, the sky is white: western wildfires, we’re having a drought.

so many leaves are falling,
it’s exhausting

 

 

These entries are adapted from Milkweed Smithereens , which will be published by New Directions in November 2022.

Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn in 1945, and published her first book, Story, in 1968. From 1980 to 1984, she was the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Cooking with Taeko Kōno

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

The Japanese writer Taeko Kōno is a maestro of transgressive desire whose stories often—and deliciously—use food as a metaphor for sexual appetite. Kōno, who died in 2015, is considered one of Japan’s foremost feminist writers and one of its foremost writers of any kind. She won many of the country’s top literary prizes, including the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri. The single selection of her work in English, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, first published by New Directions in 1996 and translated by Lucy North and Lucy Lower, contains ten dark, deceptively simple stories about women who find the gender roles in Japanese society unbearable, and are warped by them.

Clockwise from top: kombu, fresh ginger, bonito flakes, shichimi togarashi, dried wakame seaweed, dried shiitake mushrooms, and shiso. Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Kōno’s heroines are abandoned wives, girlfriends who don’t want to marry, and women who lack maternal instincts. Her mothers are monsters. Her little girls feel “inner discomfort” with their gender. Most characters desire pain or humiliation during sex. In the collection’s title story, “Toddler-Hunting,” the protagonist’s boyfriend nearly beats her to death with a “vinyl washrope … the type with plastic knobs and metal hooks at either end”; still they both enjoy the varied sounds that objects make when they hit her flesh. In another story, “Theater,” an abandoned wife becomes part of a ménage à trois with a married couple who promise to degrade her. When the protagonist sees the husband kick his wife in the face, she begins “swooning” on the porch step, honored just to be standing there. Several of the stories contain pedophilic themes and fantasies of graphic violence against children.

A raw meat dish inspired by Kōno’s story “Ants Swarm,” photographed on a gallery poster by the Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki. Photograph by Erica MacLean.

The beauty of these stories, as I find it, is in the characters’ assertions of themselves against a society that has failed them. In Kōno’s time and place, to be an unwomanly woman was to have no social status, and yet her heroines are willing to transgress everything—to travel even to the boundary of death—to take something for themselves: maybe it’s self-definition, or simply pleasure. Kōno’s gentler moments simmer with possibility, as in the story “Night Journey,” in which a couple attempting to wife swap wander through their city at night, passing ruined structures like a half-constructed home and a dusty, disgusting temple before they head off into thrilling and uncharted territory. Her harsher moments can be nearly unbearable to read.

On a character eating oysters, Kōno writes, “She liked to hold the morsel of meat pressed firmly to her lips and feel her tongue become instantly aroused with the desire to have its turn.” Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Throughout these stories, Kōno uses food as a vehicle to discuss her protagonists’ bodies and desires. Sometimes it’s used metaphorically to conjure something dark: one character, dependent on an indifferent man, is compared to a trussed and roasting chicken. Another, after a pregnancy scare, is like a slab of raw meat crawling with ants. These women are trapped in situations of disempowerment and horror; for them, eating, among other forms of consumption, can be a means of escape. In the collection’s final story, “Bone Meat,” a woman nourishes herself on the scraps left behind by her partner as he eats oysters. Scraps of hinge muscle are more gratifying for the woman than the whole oyster, and they produce in her a kind of sensual ecstasy, followed by sexual ecstasy after the meal. This unconventional nourishment makes the woman plump and happy. In the story “Theater,” the protagonist harbors a desire to be struck and humiliated by her married friends; she attends a Christmas feast with them that includes “a splendidly garnished fowl on a large china platter.” During the meal, she watches the husband tie up his wife in the dining room, beat her, and even throw a “gnawed drumstick” at her. Our heroine desperately tries to think of “church bells,” but just before the curtain drops she “let[s] the fork fall from her hands with a clatter.” The husband turns to her, saying: “All right, all right … It’s your turn now.” In the story “Toddler Hunting,” the sadomasochistic narrator, who is disgusted by little girls, has prolonged, violent fantasies about little boys. In the story’s closing scene, she approaches a little boy eating watermelon on the street. Her lascivious ploy to share his snack while watching him probe the watermelon with his fingers will make any reader deeply uncomfortable—and yet the sequence’s final image is one of ecstasy.

A Kōno character picks out every seed in a chunk of watermelon until it’s “mauled to an oozing red mass.” My modern version was seedless. Photograph by Erica Maclean.

It is Kōno’s genius that such epiphanies, difficult as they are, feel like a celebration of her characters’ humanity. To give us all a turn, in the culinary sense, I planned a menu from her work that would focus on flesh. I wanted a Japanese preparation for a whole roast chicken, a raw beef dish as a tribute to the steak in “Ants Swarm,” oysters à la “Bone Meat,” and a watermelon dish to reference the little boy’s discarded treat in “Toddler-Hunting.” I selected a showstopping recipe for a roast chicken that called for a forty-eight-hour marinade in shio koji (a type of fermented rice paste) from the cookbook The Japanese Larder by Luiz Hara. Elsewhere online I found oysters “three ways,” with toppings including grated daikon and powdered wakame seaweed. My beef would be a beef tataki seared for one minute per side and served with daikon and ponzu sauce. My watermelon rind would be quick-pickled. For drinks, which play a lubricating role in most of Kōno’s stories, my spirits consultant Hank Zona suggested a bottle of boutique sake from Brooklyn Kura and a bottle of Folium Sauvignon Blanc by Takaki Okada, a Japanese vintner making organic, handpicked, dry-farmed wine in New Zealand.

The swinging couple in the story “Night Journey” ask their friends to sleep over for the first time after drinking too much wine. Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Kōno’s work is sometimes stomach-churning, but my food made me ecstatic—though I didn’t throw my chicken legs at anyone, press my steak on any welts, or humiliate anyone in the consumption of oysters, so perhaps I was still missing out on some essential piece of it all. In the forty-eight hours the shio koji–rubbed chicken sat in my refrigerator, the rub’s umami flavor penetrated all the way to the bone. The resulting roast chicken was intensely juicy and tender. The spicy-bitter-briny toppings for my oysters were easy to whip up, and though I usually believe oysters are ruined by anything more than a squirt of lemon, in this case I found the multiple toppings enhancing. The rub for the beef tataki called for floral and exotic sansho pepper and an aromatic spice mix called shichimi togarashi. Encrusted in this, my seared meat was explosively flavorful when combined with salty-sour ponzu sauce.

To the protagonist of a Kōno story, ants on a lump of raw meat form “a single writhing mass again before her eyes, a black lump squirming obscenely, teasing and goading her on.” Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Then the wine brought all the flavors into focus, creating an intensely sensual experience worthy of Kōno’s work. The Folium, Hank explained to me, is a “dialed-back” New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc—it’s not as grassy or sharp as those wines tend to be, but lively and acidic, tasting of straw, salt water, minerals, and citrus. Such wines make great “food wines,” Hank said, in the sense that they separate and lift other flavors on the palate. Combined with the Japanese food, the Folium became peppery, with notes of yuzu, which made sense given that Okada sells mostly to the Japanese market. The Brooklyn Kura sake was botanical and more strongly alcoholic in taste, but it also complemented my food.

“Whenever Fukuko came across something particularly fresh or delicious, her first thought was to ask the Saekis over for dinner,” Kōno writes of her swingers. Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Despite how well everything turned out, I’m sure I fell down in some regards. My homemade dashi, a base broth made from kombu seaweed and bonito flakes, was especially a stab in the dark. The first recipe I tried asked me to consume an enormous and unrealistic amount of ingredients, and it was inedibly strong, not like other dashis I’ve tried. (The cookbook cautioned that there’s a huge variety in both price and taste when it comes to the bonito flakes; to make it successfully requires experience and familiarity.) The second version, made hastily with the leftover ingredients, was better, though it still lacked the subtlety and balance you’d find in Japanese home cooking. Overall my dishes were wonderful, but wilder and rougher than I suspect their traditional versions would be—which seems just right for Taeko Kōno.

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Quick-Pickled Watermelon
Watermelon rind, with some of the red part still on for color
Salt
Shiso

Remove the outer dark-green part of the watermelon rind. Cut the remaining rind into ¾ inch cubes. Weigh the cubes, then calculate 2 percent of their weight in salt. Place cubes and salt in a zippered freezer bag, massage to distribute salt, and refrigerate for 1 hour. Top with shredded shiso leaves and serve immediately.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Oysters with Multiple Partners
Adapted from RecipeTin Japan.

Oysters, 1 dozen

Dashi stock
Kombu (seaweed)
Bonito flakes (dried tuna)

Tosazu dressing
Rice wine vinegar, 2 parts
Soy sauce, 2 parts
Mirin, 1 part
Bonito dashi stock, 3 parts (kombu, bonito flakes)

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Spicy topping
2 teaspoons momiji oroshi (daikon radish, dried red chili)
2 teaspoons shallot, diced

Authentic topping
3 teaspoons shiso leaves, chopped in strips
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

Luxury topping
2 teaspoons chives, minced
1 teaspoon wakame seaweed, ground
2 teaspoons salmon roe

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Make the dashi stock. You’ll use only a little bit of this. Reserve the rest for other purposes. Ingredient strength varies widely, and the following recipe is only what worked for me. Put one sheet of dried kombu in 6 cups of water in a medium saucepan and let it sit for 30 minutes. Discard the kombu, add one 2.5 gram packet of dried bonito flakes, and bring to a boil, uncovered. Immediately turn off the heat, strain, and cool.

Make the tosazu dressing. Combine all the ingredients for tosazu dressing and set aside.

Make the momiji oroshi. Peel and cut a two-inch chunk of daikon radish, large enough that you can hold onto it and grate it comfortably. Carefully cut a narrow indentation into the top of the radish, about one inch deep and just wide enough that you can stuff a dried red chili pod into the indentation. Grate.

Shuck your oysters, reserving as much of the brine as possible, and loosening the flesh from the hinge muscle so they slip easily from the shell. Arrange them on a bed of ice, drizzle each one with ½ teaspoon tosazu dressing, and add the topping combinations, making four of each variety.

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Beef tataki
Adapted from Diversivore

For the ponzu sauce
50 milliliters yuzu juice
Lemon rinds and seeds
50 milliliters sake
50 milliliters mirin
100 milliliters soy sauce
15 milliliters rice vinegar
½ teaspoon white sugar
1 piece kombu (2 x 6 inches)
1 small handful bonito flakes

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

For the beef tenderloin:
¾ pound beef tenderloin
2 teaspoons dried shiitake mushrooms, ground
½ teaspoon shichimi togarashi
½ teaspoon black pepper
⅛ teaspoon sansho pepper
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon sesame oil
About 1 cup mild radish, thinly sliced
3 scallions, white part only, cut into matchsticks
3 tablespoons ponzu

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Make the ponzu sauce. Combine sake and mirin in a small pot and bring to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, then remove from heat. Add all the rest of the ingredients and set aside for as long as possible, at least for 30 minutes and as long as overnight. Strain out solids and refrigerate the ponzu. It will keep in the refrigerator for up to one month.

Bring the meat to room temperature. Cut across the grain into two steaks, sprinkle with salt, and set aside. Combine the dried shiitake powder, shichimi togarashi, black pepper, and sansho pepper in a small bowl. Rub the upper and lower surfaces of the steaks with the mixture. Heat the oils in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Sear the steaks for 1 minute each side, then set aside to rest. Slice the steak as thinly as you can manage. Serve with onions, radishes, and ponzu for dipping.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Forty-Eight-Hour Shio Koji Roast Chicken

Adapted from The Japanese Larder by Luiz Hara.

1 whole, good-quality chicken
6 ounces shio koji (malted rice condiment), blended until smooth
2 garlic cloves, crushed to a paste
1 teaspoon sansho pepper

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

Combine shio koji, garlic, and pepper. Wash the chicken and pat it dry with paper towels. Place it on a plate that will fit in your refrigerator, rub all over with the paste, including loosening the skin at the neck and stuffing the paste beneath it over the breasts. Tent loosely with foil and refrigerate for 48 hours. When ready to cook, preheat the oven to 400 and bring the chicken to room temperature. Roast for 40 minutes covered with foil and an additional 20–30 minutes uncovered, until the skin is crispy and browned and the chicken is done. To test for doneness, insert a meat thermometer in the thickest part of the thigh. The temperature should be 165.

Photograph by Erica Maclean.

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

Attica Prison Diary

Enrance of the Attica Correctional Facility, 2007. Photo by Jayu, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Following the Attica uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale, a poet and a professor at Buffalo State College, began leading poetry workshops at the correctional facility—the first at a U.S. prison to be run by a non-inmate and an African American. Poems written by his students were published in 1974 as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica, by Broadside Press, the first major Black-owned publishing house in America. Below are several noncontinuous entries from the diary Tisdale kept during that time, beginning with his first day at the facility.

 

May 24, 1972

4:30 P.M.
“Anticipation”

Many times have I basked in the glory of applause, adulation, recognition as I interpreted the Black poet masters. But, today, I wait in painful/joyful anticipation of meeting those humanity-scarred men who must express themselves or perish from anonymity.

Sitting here on my front porch waiting for Randy to pick me up, I suddenly realize that I have never sat on my front porch before. What enjoying faces on the buses! I really see their faces and talk with my neighbor next door for the first time. He offered to let me use his wax for my car. Can this heightening of perception of my surroundings be conscious preparation for what I’ll be doing later today and every Wednesday, 6–9 P.M., for sixteen weeks? Can you imagine conducting, possibly, the first Black poetry workshop inside a prison (maximum security)? Maybe I’m making history—maybe.

Well, here’s Randy in his green Volks somehow very much like himself: frantic, intense, a constant gear shift. He’s Jewish.

5:30 P.M.
“Before the Great Wall”

The air is hot, still, restless. Here, after an hour’s ride exchanging philosophies and expectation. A front gate guard recognizes me, he says, and we exchange pleasantries (?) while waiting to be cleared to enter the inner walls. Randy does most of the talking. My mind is too full.

 

6:00 P.M.
“Within”

Having passed all the doors, gates, guards, and the serene atmosphere of the cool passageways, we arrive in the teaching area of “C” Block. I feel like the new schoolmarm in a one-room schoolhouse on the first day and I remember when I first faced a classroom nine years ago.

 

6:15 P.M.

The men are coming in now. I recognize some of them from the old days in Willert Park Projects and Smitty’s restaurant where I worked during the undergraduate days. They seem happy to see me but are properly restrained (strained?).

 

May 25, 1972

Our first session was spent getting acquainted with each other. The following are some of the responses to my asking what is poetry: personal, deals with emotions, historical, compact (concise), eternal, revolutionary, beauty, rhyme, rhythm, a verbal X-ray of the soul.

 

June 7, 1972

Angela Yvonne Davis was found innocent of all charges in California, and her trial was the topic of interest at the beginning of the session. Rather than become involved in a political discussion, I read a poem given to me by Nikki Giovanni called “Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis.” It brought a warm response from the group.

 

July 5, 1972

Tonight there was much excitement among the workshop members. They were more talkative than usual and very excited about the recent (July 4) concert presented at the facility by Archie Shepp, Black jazz musician. We discussed the concert at length, because we felt that Black music is poetry and poetry is music. Christopher Sutherland (an inmate) presented a poem to the group that was a tribute to Archie Shepp.

It has been six weeks (sessions) now since we started the poetry work-shop. We had no session last week because of an entertainment group’s performance at the facility and my being involved in a play: Angela. I haven’t seen the men for two weeks and I notice today that the ranks have been somewhat decimated. In group one only ten men showed up, two of whom were new. The high interest level has been sustained.

I’ve been reading their works at home for the past three or four weeks and I’m very pleased at their poetry and have noticed a real flair for poetry among a number of the men: Boyer, “Point,” Phillips, Sutherland, Dabney, Mackey, Bryant, Sanford X, to name a few. I plan to recommend their return in the next eight-week session.

“Sonny” Walker said Hawkins has been paroled—joy. Much excitement tonite over a poem in the text: “Giles Johnson, Ph.D.” by Frank Marshall Davis.

The men are friendlier now and much more relaxed—even the reticent ones are budding, opening up, flowering. Received a compliment today, probably the most sincere ever: the brother privately told me that I was a fine example of Black intelligence and that I related well to them. They seem proud to know me and try to please, but do not fawn. I hope they know how proud I am of them. Everyone very talkative, almost festive mood. They did most of the talking and reading poetry (their own) while I tape-recorded it.

The men joke with me as we enter and leave, but I still detect great respect, almost awe, a standoffish attitude. I see them as the men I relate to every day in the world outside. How it pains me when they go back to their cells, but linger and talk before the guard hurries them along. If I could only stay here a few days more.

 

July 12, 1972

Felt the anger, frustration, hostility of the men, firsthand tonite. I had secured adequate clearance for the Buffalo Black Writers Workshop to sit in on the session tonite, but Supt. Montanye canceled their coming, by a phone call to Randy, yesterday. I was apprehensive about telling the men of the cancellation, and they were most indignant about this broken promise, one of many, according to them. Feel a strong undercurrent of resentment for the administration. Am convinced that another riot is in the making. About ½ of the session was spent explaining the function of Hospital Audiences, and my role as a liaison with the administration. Most of the men insist that no change has taken place in the prison since the September incident.

Found out later in the session why the Buffalo Black Writers Workshop were not allowed in tonite. It seems some small demonstration took place yesterday by the inmates (hunger strike).

The men continue to produce, and some have really improved. A real pleasure to see growth. Next week, final evaluations and summaries.

 

July 20, 1972

Our workshop session was canceled yesterday because of Supt. Montanye’s declaration of a state of emergency at the facility. Prisoners (approx. 900 of 1,200) have stayed in their cells the past two days protesting conditions. A specific protest centered around a nurse’s termination. She was reinstated amid the protests.

When we resume on 7/26, it will be our evaluative concluding session for the first eight weeks. Have gathered much poetry from the inmates—they want to publish a book—we’ll talk about it later.

Randy very apprehensive about returning to facility—many prisoners’ protests continue.

 

July 23, 1972

State of emergency has been lifted by Supt. Montanye. Prisoners (about 900) were in voluntary lock-in for three days.

 

October 31, 1972

The inmates (workshop) and administration invited me to an appreciation reception, today 1–3:30 P.M. Surprised to see men sitting in chairs in reception bldg; very quiet. Coffee and Coke had not arrived when I appeared at 1:30. Usual bureaucratic holdup I suppose.

Noticed the uniform of the guards has changed—they wear blazers and gray slacks. Must admit they look less oppressive.

Men were sitting so formally, I felt need to walk around speaking to each little group. They loosened up after I talked briefly about poetic directions to the entire group. However, it appeared that the men wanted to discuss political directions and the American system. After about fifteen minutes of such discussion, I steered back to poetry discussion.

Surprised to see coffee in large pots and to find the cake tasted a bit coarse, like old home recipe. Dickinson told the group they could meet during the month of November but stipulated that political discussion must be curtailed. Frankly, I agree with him. The men promised me that they would have a play ready when I see them again, Dec. 6, 1972, for the start of the new, third sixteen-week session.

Couldn’t figure out why Harold Packwood was not present at the reception. He organized it and is the standout in the workshop. Someone mentioned that he was practicing on his saxophone.

It appears that the men have greater perception of their existence and are much more concerned now with all aspects of writing. Such respect that they show me I have never known. Fantastic!

 

December 13, 1972

Met the men tonite after a five-week layoff. Packwood very despondent—I’m afraid of the negative effect of a denied parole. Chris Sutherland also very despondent because authorities confiscated much of his work.

Most of the evening spent talking about poets, especially Nikki Giovanni. Generally, the men feel that her popularity has made her ego trip.

They really “come down” hard on her. Their biggest objection was to her seemingly having to explain her actions if they seem contrary to the norm. I suggested that I would bring a taped recording of her reading to next week’s session.

The remainder of the evening was spent reading original poems. The men were most eager to read and very enthusiastic. I showed them the manuscript that Ann, Beverly, and I had completed and I read some poems from it.

 

December 17, 1972

Packwood says he’s been suffering from “growing pains” in his writing. “I’m beginning to feel my growth as a Black writer,” he tells me, “and constantly seeking new modes of expression.” His thoughts, he says, “are just popping up from everywhere” and he’s now developing the habit of writing these thoughts down.

 

December 20, 1972

Tonite, we began our first two-hour session. From now on, we intend to meet 6:30–8:30 with both groups combined. More time.

I switched the tape to Imamu Amear Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and his comments provided discussion for the entire evening.

The men have become quite sophisticated in their poetic tastes and versatility. Their criticism of poems and poets is most perceptive. We really got into quite a discussion as to what constitutes a poem, and what Blacks should be writing about, today. Most of them agree that our work should reflect the times. Chris, Abraham, and Thurman were concerned that we not lose a wide range, and Chris stressed the need for exercising the imagination more often as poets. How profound and mature!

Marv McQueen is coming home on furlough Saturday. He is staying around the corner from us. I’ll see him during the holidays.

A most interesting point came up tonite. I asked why Black poets do not seem to write humorous poems these days too often. The men said (some of them) that Black people have nothing to be happy about. When I told them that I am constantly happy, they agreed, but found it hard to believe. Strange!

 

December 27, 1972

Tonite, we began with one of Imamu’s earlier tapes I’d made. The purpose was to compare his tone in this speech with the one we heard last week. We especially noted his poems on the recording.

Since we began this poetry workshop, on May 24, I have noticed how increasingly reflective and philosophical a number of the men have become. Many of them have begun to use language well in poetry and very interested in the power of the word. With this in mind, I began talking about Japanese haiku poetry and taught them how to write it. With haiku, the poet must write a poem comprised of only seventeen syllables. I am eager to see what they will do by next week.

 

January 3, 1973

A new year—great optimistic feeling. But that’s not new—I feel this way almost every day I wake up.

Played tape recording of Don L. Lee. Men enjoyed his poetry.

We continued our discussion of haiku and read our own haiku. The men were quite good. Jamail was especially good. He appears to be well learned and is the imam in a Muslim sect. Haiku is a natural for him. Abraham (Brathwaite) finally found a poetic medium. Packwood, surprisingly, did not do well with haiku.

 

Celes Tisdale is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the editor of Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica and We Be Poetin’.

Adapted from When the Smoke Cleared, forthcoming from Duke University Press in November 2022.

Vivian Gornick Will Receive Our 2023 Hadada Award

Vivian Gornick. Photograph by Mitchell Bach. Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

“I could hardly believe my luck in having found her,” Vivian Gornick writes of the persona she created for her pivotal 1987 book Fierce Attachments, a rich, genre-redefining portrayal of fraught maternal bonds that the New York Times has anointed the best memoir of the past fifty years. “It was not only that I admired her style, her generosity, her detachment—such a respite from the me that was me!—she had become the instrument of my illumination.” That shock of wonderment and good fortune is familiar to all Gornick’s readers, and especially to the many writers of nonfiction who still pass around The Situation and the Story (2001)—in which those words appear—like a talisman. It’s a thrill to read Gornick’s precise, elegant account of how a voice and a narrative are made, and to see that process so masterfully demonstrated in her own work is often (as she herself has said of reading and rereading the likes of Edmund Gosse or Joan Didion) to become “enraptured.” 

It’s in that spirit that the Review will present Vivian Gornick with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at our seventieth-anniversary Spring Revel on April 4, 2023. Her engrossing Writers at Work interview, which appeared in issue no. 211 (Winter 2014), was the magazine’s second ever to focus on the art of memoir. 

Gornick’s exceptional contributions to literature over the past several decades span autobiography, essays, and journalism. Her first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt—the research and writing of which she described, with characteristic élan, for the Review’s short documentary series My First Time—was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award. As a contributor to The Village Voice in the years that followed, she became a leading writer of the feminist movement while developing a unique style of criticism that blended literary analysis with clear-eyed observations of her own experiences. This style came to fruition in books including The End of the Novel of Love (1997), a groundbreaking collection of essays that debunked the insidious ubiquity of romantic love as a metaphor for happiness, and The Men in My Life (2008), a compassionate study of the struggle for inner freedom that is shared across genders. 

A piece adapted from her 2020 book Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, was published on our website, as was her introduction to Taking a Long Look: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Feminism in Our Time, a 2021 selection of work from throughout her career. And in issue no. 204 (Spring 2013), the Review published “Letter from Greenwich Village,” Gornick’s essay on her long friendship with a fellow New York City flaneur. It was selected for The Best American Essays 2014 and became the opening chapter of The Odd Woman and the City (2015), a brilliant ode to the place where she has spent her life.

“Vivian Gornick chronicles the vicissitudes of friendship, the accomplishments and still unrealized work of the feminist movement so far, the textured joys, terrors, and longings of living alone,” Mona Simpson, the Review’s publisher, says. “She writes about getting old. She writes about failure. Had someone described the totality of Gornick’s books to me before I’d read them—a series of essays and memoirs in continuous first-person, without the friction of a second sensibility to come up against, with no threat or hope of a love-story ending—I would guess that I’d have felt claustrophobic, drowned out. But there are I’s and there are I’s. Gornick, like her admired Sebald, pulls off her enormously ambitious interior project—with brash, deep humor, and with a burning interrogation of the many selves she was before this one, here and now, the one talking to us from the page.”

Over the course of her illustrious career, Gornick—whose work has also appeared in the Times, the Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications—has received the Windham-Campbell Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Harvard University Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. We are truly delighted to honor her with the Hadada, whose previous recipients include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Since 1953, The Paris Review has provided a vital space in which the most daring and beautiful writing and visual art of the day can flourish, enchanting our readers around the world. At this very special 2023 Spring Revel, writers, artists, and friends will raise a glass to seventy years of the Review, to the winners of the Plimpton Prize and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize (to be announced), and to the incomparable Vivian Gornick. Tickets and tables are now available, and all proceeds help sustain the magazine. We can hardly believe our luck—and we hope you’ll join us. 

Find My Friends

 

My favorite app is Find My Friends. If you do not know what this is, it’s an app that lets you share your location at all times with fellow iPhone havers. I have access to the locations of nineteen friends and they have access to mine. I also have two friends, both named Nick, who refuse to share their locations with anyone—but I have given mine to both of them out of loyalty, just because I like the idea that they know where I am. I like looking at the map of New York, seeing little bubbles with my friends’ initials pop up in the usual and the surprising places. Sara is at the office. Graham is at home. Ben is at the bar where he does trivia. This guy I met at a concert is in the East Village—who knows why he’s there? I realize this sounds really boring, and it is. But I love knowing where my friends are—that they’re exactly where they belong, or that they aren’t. Of course there are practical uses: there’s the chance you might be around the corner from someone, both at different bars, and have a serendipitous meetup. But I check Find My Friends constantly and impractically, as a little way of knowing where my friends are at any given time. I guess it makes me feel close to them in a stupid technology way, but I feel close to a lot of people in stupid technology ways. That’s why I spend so much time texting.

The best times to look are of course nights and mornings, especially on weekends. There’s a chance you might see that someone didn’t sleep at home! It would be indiscreet to mention this to them, or at least I never would, but it’s a fun little secret in your phone. I understand why many people think this is weird and creepy, but I am not one of them. Someone above the age of forty asked me recently how anyone in my generation has affairs, if we all know where others are at any given time. I told him I wasn’t really trying to have an affair. It was a good question, though, and maybe one day someone will put a location-sharing plot in a not-very-good novel: a man idly looking at Find My Friends only to discover that his wife is not where she said she would be. The house of cards that is life comes tumbling down, et cetera. That would probably be too tedious to put into a book, but it would happen in real life and it probably already has, possibly thousands of times. I will take my chances and try to avoid affairs.

The other night I met someone who asked for my number and immediately shared his location with me, indefinitely. I thought this was very funny and I shared mine back. We parted ways, and we might never see each other again. I just checked his location. Now he’s in Vienna! Life is full of surprises!

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

Re-Covered: Angelica and Henrietta Garnett

Henrietta Garnett was forty-one when her first and last novel, Family Skeletons, was published in 1986. She knew that her debut, a tragic gothic romance revolving around a complex constellation of family secrets, would face an unusual degree of public scrutiny: Henrietta was English literary royalty, the direct descendant of the Bloomsbury Group on both sides of her family tree. Her father was the novelist David “Bunny” Garnett, author of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize–winning Lady into Fox (1922), a book so highly regarded it was on the British high school syllabus when his daughter was a teenager in the late fifties and early sixties. Henrietta’s mother was Angelica Garnett, née Bell, daughter of Virginia Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. “I had been putting off trying to get anything published,” Henrietta confessed when an interviewer asked about her famous relations, “because I couldn’t help thinking that whatever I did it would never be as good as anything they’ve achieved.” Family Skeletons is a strange and singular creation: melodramatic in plot but elegant in tone, written in a cool and fluent prose that is utterly Henrietta’s own. The novel bears no resemblance to either Bunny’s or Woolf’s fiction; nevertheless, the story does contain more psychological traces of her family’s legacy—namely, of the uniquely disturbing personal dramas that shaped the lives of those who raised her and the public perception of the Bloomsbury Group.

***

Family Skeletons begins at Malabay, a grand old house in the wilds of Ireland. Our first glimpse of the rambling lakeside estate is early one summer morning: “The dew was heavy and glittered on every twig and leaf and blade of grass. The rain, so fine that it seemed to be suspended in the misty air, shone like the frail skein of a cobweb. The air was so moist, the leaves and grass so wet, the fish pond and the lake so scheming with reflections, that the division between land and sky seemed nebulous, amorphous and indistinct.” It’s a place that “gets into the blood” of those who live there. Ever since the death of her parents, seventeen-year-old Catherine has been raised at Malabay by her uncle Pake, a taciturn recluse still haunted by the torture he endured as a prisoner of war years earlier. Barring the household staff—Mick-The-Post and her cousin Tara, the only visitor Pake will allow—Catherine is completely shut off from the rest of the world. She measures out her days by riding her beloved horses, writing fanciful stories, and attending to the rather unconventional curriculum her uncle has devised for her education (translating the ancient Greeks features heavily). Given her naïveté, it comes as no surprise that she is in love with the handsome, older, and more world-wise Tara. That he returns her girlish affection is perhaps a tad less convincing, but it befits the almost mythic structures that organize this slightly off-kilter world. This incestuous undertone, which foreshadows certain revelations to come, is just one of a handful of nods to Wuthering Heights (1847). Although less headstrong than her nineteenth-century namesake, Henrietta’s Catherine is another skittish beauty, frequently compared to the animals she so adores. When Pake discovers that the cousins plan to marry, he explodes in a rage—but the lovers put this anger down to his general eccentricity and proceed regardless. Only three weeks after their wedding, in a traumatic reprise of her parents’ deaths by drowning years earlier, Tara is killed in a boating accident out on the lake. The teenage orphan, now a widow, is distraught; she lops off her hair, takes to her bed, and descends into a “wild and desperate misery.”

This is a novel in which events unfold with the simplicity and strangeness of a fairy tale, and the action takes place in a land that time seems to have forgotten. In the opening scene, Tara and Pake’s best friend, Gerald, a writer, are exiting a performance of The Cherry Orchard. This confirms only that we’re in the twentieth century; little evidence is given to further specify the novel’s time period. At the end of the novel’s first section, the great house is destroyed—and Pake killed—in a politically motivated bombing that is explained merely as a product of “these terrible times we live in”—and could just as easily be attributed to the Easter Rising of 1916 as to the Troubles of the seventies and eighties. It’s not until nearly halfway through the book—with the mention of a dishwasher—that we’re provided with the first real indication that the story is transpiring toward the end of the twentieth century. The rest of the novel takes place in two further near-fantastical, similarly remote settings that, like Malabay, are equal parts sanctuary and prison for Catherine: a sanatorium high in the mountains, where she receives treatment for a mental breakdown, and, finally, an idyllic, deserted island in balmy Mediterranean waters to which she’s taken to complete her recuperation.

The destruction of her ancestral home not only marks the end of Catherine’s innocence but also unleashes the corruption that lies buried at the heart of this family, setting in motion a series of events that will eventually culminate with the revelation of a terrible family secret. The second section opens a few years after the bombing of Malabay, at the mountain clinic. We learn that Gerald has processed his grief at losing his friend by writing a novel about Catherine, Tara, and himself—and that it’s sold very well, perhaps because he spiced the tale up with a love story between his and Tara’s fictional alters. But Catherine, working on a play about the same subject in her own attempt at catharsis, allows her characters to indulge in much more forbidden sexual entanglements. When she imagines an affair between her mother and her uncle, she inadvertently stumbles across the truth. (The siblings were “very close,” we were suggestively warned earlier in the book.) “Your play is evocative,” praises Pake’s ex-wife, Poppy, the only character who knows all the family skeletons: that Pake was Catherine’s father and that her parents’ deaths weren’t accidental—her father capsized the boat on purpose after discovering the truth about his wife’s infidelity. “Highly indiscreet,” Poppy says of Catherine’s play, “but that seems all the rage nowadays. I’m sure it’ll be a great success.”

 ***

Like Catherine, Henrietta herself married young—at seventeen—and her husband died suddenly just over a year later, leaving her a teenage widow with a newborn baby. Money wasn’t a problem, so she drifted around Europe, then England and Ireland, part of a glamorous, fast, bohemian crowd (“chequebook hippies,” as she later called them). Little is revealed in Family Skeletons about Catherine’s activities in the several years that pass between the destruction of Malabay and her arrival at the clinic, but a similar period of free love and heedless living is intimated. “I led a very wild kind of life after Tara died and Malabay got blown up,” Catherine later confesses to Gerald. “I dare say it was stupid, self-destructive. It’s easy to say that. There was nothing left, you see.” Henrietta and her older sister, Amaryllis, were both plagued by periodic bouts of depression. Henrietta attempted suicide in the late seventies by throwing herself off the roof of a London hotel. Amaryllis’s death by drowning—assumed to be suicide—also presumably inspired the multiple deaths in the story.

But Family Skeletons isn’t primarily autobiographical. The novel is the story of a lost child who has been brought up in a sheltered, almost magical realm in which all the usual social codes don’t apply; left ill-prepared by the adults in her life to face the realities of the world; and manipulated and misinformed by those closest to her. This isn’t Henrietta’s story—but it is her mother Angelica’s. Angelica’s own memoir—Deceived with Kindness (1984), published just two years before Family Skeletons—exposed all manner of real skeletons in the Bloomsbury Group’s closet and was—to borrow Poppy’s words—both highly indiscreet and a great success.

Angelica Bell was born at Charleston, the famous Sussex farmhouse where the Bloomsberries lived together, loved one another, and made their art. As Deceived with Kindness revealed to the public, it wasn’t until eighteen years later, in 1936, that Angelica learned that her biological father wasn’t the man who raised her—her mother Vanessa’s husband, the art critic Clive Bell—but the painter Duncan Grant, another Bloomsbury luminary and close family friend. Angelica remembers Vanessa breaking the news to her in an “endless, hot, and tiring” summer. “She hugged me close and spoke about love: underneath her sweetness of manner lay an embarrassment and lack of ease of which I was acutely aware, and which washed over my head like the waves of the sea,” Angelica writes, with the same degree of dramatic cliché that gilds her prose at the moments of intense emotional import throughout the book.

But, in her confession, Vanessa failed to reveal one important detail: at the time of Angelica’s conception, Duncan was also in a sexual relationship with their friend Bunny. The two men, then a couple and both conscientious objectors, had spent World War I working as laborers at Charleston, living there with Vanessa, Clive (though he was often absent, his and Vanessa’s relationship having already deteriorated), and their two sons, Angelica’s half brothers. This was the very same Bunny who, although twenty-six years her senior and already married, would, in only a few months’ time, begin the relentless sexual and romantic pursuit of the eighteen-year-old Angelica that would culminate, in 1942, with their marriage.

It wasn’t that Angelica’s parents and their circle of friends had deliberately kept Duncan and Bunny’s affair from her. She admits that it’s more likely that everyone just assumed she already knew about it—and this vagueness repeats itself in the narrative told in Deceived with Kindness: Angelica never explicitly pinpoints the moment at which she discovered that her husband and her father had once been lovers; she simply writes from a position of knowledge, looking back on her younger self. She was, she explains, certainly aware that her suitor had had myriad love affairs, though once he began wooing her he apparently kept the finer details of these prior conquests to himself—whether out of tact or deceitfulness, she leaves open to interpretation. Despite the Bloomsberries’ reputation of moral liberation, one of the more intriguing revelations of Deceived with Kindness is just how tight-lipped they were when it came to their sexual imbroglios; their modus operandi seems to have been to never apologize, never explain, and never, under any circumstances, kick up a fuss (this being hideously bourgeois behavior). After Vanessa’s admission, for example, mother and daughter never spoke of it again, nor was there any scene of either reconciliation or recrimination between biological father and child. Rather than gaining a second, real father, Angelica had simply lost another deficient one. “No one seemed capable of talking openly and naturally on the subject,” she writes: “Vanessa was in a state of apprehension and exaltation, and Duncan made no effort to introduce a more frank relationship. They gave the impression of children who, having done something irresponsible, hope to escape censure by becoming invisible.” Indeed, read through Angelica’s wide eyes, life at Charleston looks very much like the antics of overgrown children at play. Accordingly, this revelation about her paternity changed both everything and nothing. Angelica claims she “was filled with euphoria,” but outwardly she “hardly batted an eyelid.” In many ways, “being told the truth made the world seem less and not more real,” she explains. To all intents and purposes, life simply went on as before, in a pattern that would repeat itself. Even after Angelica and Bunny had become officially engaged, neither Vanessa, Duncan, nor even Clive saw fit to come clean about their thorny history, though Angelica is sure that her and Bunny’s relationship must have caused her mother and her father considerable pain: “Bunny was an intimate part of their past,” she writes, “and that he should step out of it and dare to claim their daughter as his wife seemed to them nightmarish, and utterly unjustifiable.”

Angelica admits that her vulnerability to deception was exacerbated by her naïveté, the blame for which, however, she also lays at her elders’ door. Although she was not literally sheltered in the same way as Henrietta’s Catherine, being “a child of Bloomsbury,” as she puts it, was its own form of sequestration. The group had carefully crafted their own exceptional ecosystem of permissiveness and creativity—an ivory tower that allowed them to block out much of reality. In the interviews she gave later in life, Angelica often described her childhood at Charleston as lonely; she was much younger than her older half brothers, and usually surrounded by adults. Once Bunny set his sights on her, Angelica was “putty in his hands.” She fell head over heels in love, only realizing much later that he had been a substitute for the father figure she’d always been deprived of. Bunny, she believes, had his own agenda: by marrying Angelica, he was punishing her mother for having, years earlier, been one of the few to spurn his amorous advances.

***

The lives of the Bloomsbury Group continue to fascinate readers everywhere—in part, I suspect, because their unusual and libertarian setup was made all the more intriguing by the addition of Angelica’s horror story. How could people who created such beauty, and who practiced such freedom of love and expression, also cause so much pain? Legends are never fixed, of course; they have an incredible ability to shape-shift—as Angelica’s memoir and Henrietta’s novel illustrate perfectly. Whereas Henrietta’s novel possesses a strange sense of timelessness that allows it to transcend the merely confessional, her mother’s memoir often lapses into an accusatory tone that mires her story in judgment, rather than opening the reader to the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the Bloomsbury Group’s lives and art. Janet Malcolm, for example, writing in 1995, lambasted Angelica for reducing her pain and fury to a series of “streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.” Rather than serving as an authentic testament to experiences lived in another era, the book brings “the Bloomsbury legend into line with our blaming and self-pitying times.”

Like a princess in a fairy tale, locked in a tower, her fate sealed by the actions of others, Angelica presents herself as completely without agency, drawn into a toxic psychosexual drama that has been set in motion two decades earlier. (This isn’t entirely an exaggeration: “I think of marrying it,” Bunny wrote to Lytton Strachey, describing how beautiful Angelica was on the day she was born. “When she is twenty I shall be forty-six—will it be scandalous?”) Angelica’s tangled, incestuous story ticks every box on the most basic and perfunctory of Freudian checklists; in certain ways, the plot of Deceived with Kindness is even more theatrically gothic than her daughter’s fictionalized version of it.

As is apparent from the more playful, enchanted atmosphere created by Family Skeletons, Henrietta’s relationship to her family and its complicated history was more ambivalent than her mother’s. She spent many happy holidays at the Bloomsbury Group’s farmhouse as a child, being painted with attentive affection by her grandmother, Vanessa. As Henrietta declared in an interview, Charleston “had the most powerful identity of any place that I had known. It reeked of itself: of turpentine and toast, of apples, damp walls, and garden flowers. The atmosphere was one of liberty and order, and of a strength which came from its being a house in which the inhabitants were happy.”

But both Deceived with Kindness and Family Skeletons show us women finding their own voices, becoming mistresses of their own stories, and disentangling themselves from the narratives of the (far more well-known) characters around them—narratives in which both Angelica and Henrietta had previously played only supporting, passive roles. Taken together, the two books, mother’s and daughter’s, not only add depth and detail to our collective portrait of this small group of creatives but provide a fascinating case study of the effects, both painful and pleasurable, that can arise when facts and fictions are mixed up together—in life and in art.

 

Lucy Scholes is senior editor at McNally Editions.