The Paris Review's Blog, page 72

Desolation Journal

Jack Kerouac’s notebook. Image courtesy of the Jack Kerouac Estate and Charles Shuttleworth.

Read any biography of Jack Kerouac and here’s essentially what you’ll learn: that in the summer of 1956 he spent two months in a mountaintop shack as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service in the North Cascades in Washington State, and nothing much happened. Mostly he was bored.

Jack’s experience on Desolation Peak marked the climax of his involvement with Buddhism and of a decade of restless travel; it’s the high point of his journeying and spiritual seeking. A voracious reader, he nevertheless chose to go up the mountain without any books, only his personally typed copy of the Diamond Sutra, which he planned to read every day and transcribe yet again, this time in language more accessible to American readers, in order to achieve the enlightenment that he was certain would result. The extent of his solitude, thus, was acute. There were no radio stations from the outside world to tune into. No electricity. No running water. And most radically for Jack, two months without alcohol. It was his last, best chance to change the trajectory of his life, to avoid the alcoholic downfall that accelerated a year later with the instant celebrity from On the Road’s publication and that would ultimately kill him at age forty-seven.

The following excerpts six pages from the one-hundred-and-eighty-page diary Kerouac kept during that time. 

—Charles Shutterworth

 

Page 2

I will now write supreme book that will astound both Cowley & Giroux, a respected work now, like Town & City, to save & to exfoliate America & religious light & generation—If I find shack in Cascades I’ll stay there winter,—Big German police dog trots around my crate yard—Everything, 20,000 of it, is belonging to me because I am awake (“because I have my fish tail” says Claude)—Peter hanging out sleeping bags now in McCorkle’s shack—“It Happened In Mill Valley.” my enlightenment happiness—Nuff prose—

The machine wheels
turn straps
Tree leaves away

Page 10

Flowers
    in the lunchroom
 —Wednesday June 20

Napoleon in bronze—
     the burning Blakean
 Mountains

Chow dog, Chinese
woman—
China cock crows

Velvet horses
in the valley Auction
—Woman sings

Talk of eaters
low at table
—Clink, clack

Straw in paper
glasswater shivers
—Spoon in glass

 (Haiku longstyle)

Page 11

SEATTLE NEXT MORN
My Diamond Sutra said that there’s nothing but snowy white mystery—read it in a hush silence 15 ft ceilinged skidrow room smoking a butt at 8:30 AM, felt that old Diamond Feeling

Poor tortured teeth
     under
The blue sky

(Haiku thought on road with ride I got from J[unction]City, to clear to Portland, little blond Jack Fitzgerald painter with splattered shoes & 4 cans of cold pint beer, we drank em & had another in a tavern with sweet sincere bartender)—In Portland we wailed on vast eternity bridge as draw went up to allow crane barge thru, big Montrealish smoky river city

Page 13

curvy woods roads to Naval Base Bremerton to 50¢ Seattle Ferry where I paid Okie Slim’s fare (65¢) then went on top deck in cold drizzle for one hour sailing to Port of Seattle & I found a half pint of vodka on deck concealed under a Time Magazine & drank some in cold wind as we came on thru Puget Sound, wild, lyrical,—Mt. Olympus & Mt. Baker I guess to be seen & I think even Mt. Hozomeen on all horizons, wild, an orange sash in the gloom only over the Hokkaido Siberian

Page 19 

forest & no one was there to hear it wd it make any sound?”—And on & on, wild Buddha nature talk on all sides—I took dusk pace in old road in back, praying—Gotta put in 11 days of bunkhouse living till I get to my sweet hermitage—Too hot at lights out I went out & slept on grass awhile, finisht vodka, had a samadhi (drunken samadhi) of the tree who presented me his glittering diamond aspect full of forms & shot thru with regnant Tathagatas, one form an Assyrian king clown, perfect—diamond silence of Washington State—hold me on, Lord—decided on a month of solitude at any Matterhorn camp this October—then sweet solitariness in Mexico hut

Page 23

The tranquil and everlasting essence, whether traveling as water, or sitting as peaks, or setting as snow, or hillhairing as trees, or dancing as sunlight thru the leaves, or passing as trucks, or digesting dinners, or being digested, or as shoes, or as imaginary blossoms in empty space, or as empty space, or as wind, or as marching clouds, or as ululating mysterious visionstuff, is still (with or without words) the tranquil & everlasting essence—

Or as moss, or as bark, or as twigs, or as mud,
or as bird, or as noise,
or as whatness,
or as the smile of pitying milk—or as a dream
—it holds together—

Image courtesy of the Jack Kerouac Estate and Charles Shuttleworth.

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was born the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family in Lowell, Massachusetts. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, and On the Road, made him one of the most best-known writers of his time. 

Charles Shuttleworth has been studying the work of Jack Kerouac since the late eighties. He currently teaches Kerouac and the Beats at the Harker School in San Jose. 

This is an excerpt from Desolation Peak: Collected Writings by Jack Kerouac, with an introduction and notes by Charles Shuttleworth, which will be published by Rare Bird in November 2022.

I So Love Being Old and Not Married

In the early seventies, Helen Garner, a newly single mother, found herself in the first of several “hippie houses” she lived in that decade in the suburbs of Melbourne. She read and made up songs with her daughter and fell in love with a heroin addict—an affair she documented daily in her diary. The writing deepened as her life became more complicated. Soon, she began to see an outline. “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner told Thessaly La Force in her Art of Fiction interview, published in the Fall issue of the Review, “and I could feel this one coming.” Every day for a year, after she had dropped her daughter off at school, she sat in the state library working on her first novel, Monkey Grip.

The book was a hit, although several critics (“almost always men”) accused Garner of simply publishing her personal journals. The truth is, she confesses, the novel really was closely based on her diary—and why not? “Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naive belief that fiction is invented—­that it’s pulled out of thin air,” Garner says. “All those comments I’ve had to cop about my novels not being novels—­they rest on that idea that the novel is mightier than every other form.” When we asked Garner—­who is also an accomplished journalist who has covered criminal trials for decades—­whether she might share with us something from her recent journals, she sent us a true “chunk of life,” at once artfully sculpted and uncompromisingly honest.

 

In the winter of 2017, when I wrote these entries, three things were dawning on me: first, that if my hearing continued to fade I would have to stop writing about criminal trials; second, that although I was probably burned-out, I would miss the courts terribly; and third, that I would be saved from boredom and despair by the company of my young grandchildren, who live next door.

*

Took the 17-year-old to the city to buy a pair of Doc Martens for her birthday. We walked past the Supreme Court. “Nanna, is this where you go to those trials?” “Yes. That big brown building.” “Can we go in and have a look?” At the door of the first courtroom we come to, a murder trial is rolling. I show her how to bow and we creep into the media seats. Young guy in the dock, pale, rigid, in a dark blue suit. The witness on the stand is giving a graphic account of what happens inside a skull when a head is smashed against a concrete curb. Oh God. I glance up at the judge. I know her. What will she think of me, bringing a schoolgirl in here? The girl is very still, straight-backed, bright-faced, watching and listening. I sit there gritting my teeth. Court rises and I hustle her on to the street. “Are you okay? Are you upset? Was it too much?” She wakes from a reverie. “No. I’m fine. It wasn’t upsetting. Because it was scientific.”

*

In the post office throwaway bin I find a CD of Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits. Secretly in the car I play over and over Jimmy Webb’s three works of genius: “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and “Galveston.” On the freeway my ten-year-old grandson digs out the Campbell from the mess in the glove box: “Who’s this?” I flinch, but he puts it on, and soon we’re singing along, him in his breaking voice, me in my old woman’s one which has dropped to a tenor. He loves all the songs, even the revolting ones like “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.”

*

Court 4, pale pink with high, looped plaster garlands that glistened like ivory. The sentencing of the African refugee who’d killed three of her children. The judge read out the sentence. I was straining to hear, fighting my hearing loss and the muffled acoustic of the courtroom. Her husband was shot dead in front of her? They burned his body? They raped her? She began to weep and couldn’t stop. Her two robed lawyers approached the huge old timber dock, they had to reach up and hook their fingers at shoulder level over its high edge, I saw their pale hands grip the rim, like kids at a lolly-shop counter. She got 26 years, 20 before she can apply for parole. Even the tough-looking woman security guard was wiping her eyes. Walked away, walked and walked through the city, crying and raving to myself, bought a pair of black trousers and a T-shirt, went up the stairs to Gopal’s and ate a bowl of carrot and beetroot salad for $4. I’ll be dead by the time she gets out. What will she do, in prison, each day for 20 years? What will become of her other kids? It seemed the first time I’d ever seriously asked myself: Why do we put people in jail?

*

The barristers’ hands on the rim of the dock—a memory from the 60s. In the corner shop near our house a couple of adults are waiting to be served. A boy of seven or so is standing tiptoe at the counter, laboriously spreading out coins. His cheeks turn red: he hasn’t got enough. A pause. In a high, earnest little voice he says to the shop lady, “Would you trust me to run home and get the rest?” The grown-ups exchange soft looks over his head. “Off you go,” says the shop lady, and he darts out the door.

*

Judges must have to weigh up a case on a highly technical set of scales. They’re afraid of having to account for themselves to a higher court. They can never just act on the human thing: “I felt it would be cruel not to have mercy on this poor brutalized grieving wretch.” And when I read the tabloids about the African woman’s sentence, the heartless pipsqueaks screaming for blood, I started to understand the dark rocks between which a judge has to steer the ship, in these matters.

*

The waitress at Akita places before me a small cherry-red bowl of miso soup, and shuffles away. I nudge the bowl into the center of the dark wooden table and sit with my hands in my lap. Faint steam rises off the soup’s cloudy surface.

*

Maybe I’m coming to the end of writing about courts. I can’t hear properly. I can’t keep up. And I can’t bear the pain. Maybe my ears are packing it in on purpose, to save me. Also, is it “morbid” to be as fascinated as I am by other people’s suffering? To be awed by it? Will I ever stop asking myself this stupid question? Do real journalists ask it? Maybe they don’t, maybe that’s why I like to hang out with them—you can laugh. “He wouldn’t let me see the brief of evidence,” says my friend in the café, “but it was in front of him on the table, and one thing I’ve got good at, as a journalist, is reading upside down.”

*

God, I so love being old and not married. Out the other side of sex and love and all that torment. I can go out drinking martinis with the clever young guys I’m friends with—well, actually they’re middle-aged. With gray hair. Last night the bar was almost empty, the football was playing on the big screen with the sound down low. Every now and then I’d look up and see some outrageous piece of thuggery that caused me to exclaim and curse, while the men went on talking in wise, quiet voices about books and biography and publishing. By what exercise of virtue have I deserved this?

*

Late in a photo session for a writers’ festival I wandered vaguely towards the laptop on which the photographer was sorting the shots of me he had just taken. He turned his shoulder to me: “No.”

*

In the lobby of the Magistrates’ Court an old man had a seizure in the fine-paying queue. A hoarse cry, a groan, and he was on the floor, awkward-necked, his head in his big pale pensioner’s glasses resting on a crouching bystander’s thigh. Security running down the stairs. Paramedics, a gurney. Meanwhile I was stopped at the bag check: “Have you got a measuring tape in there? Something with a circle of metal?” I plunged my hand into my red backpack from which before leaving home I had removed everything metal; and came up with the dispenser of dental floss. I said, “I suppose I could strangle someone with it.” The security guy looked me up and down, and allowed himself a tiny smile.

*

My law professor friend visits from D.C. Her quick wit, her skepticism, as we stride shoulder to shoulder up Collins Street. We act out for each other our mortifications and triumphs large and small, never bored, doubling over in convulsions or dabbing at our sentimental tears.

*

My grandsons are out of holdable childhood. Gone are those hours I spent on the blue couch with a little boy crammed close to me on either side, watching ep after ep of Adventure Time, tranquil and absorbed. From time to time we would exchange knowing glances, without speaking. At least the girl still kisses me, puts her long arms round me when one of us comes home. She’s given up playing football herself, but at her brothers’ matches she leans over the boundary fence, in her dirty Blundstones and thick socks and the calf-length black wool coat I bought at Bergdorf Goodman thirty years ago, and shouts orders at them like a coach: “Man up! Where’s your man?”

*

Springsteen is rowdily singing on the car radio: “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.” Yeah, they have; but I change stations. Ooh. Bob Dylan with Johnny Cash. How modest and melodious are their voices and simple acoustic guitars, after Springsteen’s hypermasculine bellowing.

*

I bought a large bone for the dog. Thrust it between his jaws and he swaggered away to gnaw on it, alone on wet grass under the fig tree. Later I took him over to Travancore. Superb winter sky, pure as porcelain, air growing sharp as we played on the damp green: he ran furiously after the ball, tail whirling, one ear up, one down.

*

At the long table I remembered why I stopped going to dinner parties years ago. The shouting, the riding roughshod, the scornful belligerence that calls itself conversation. I felt myself sinking and sinking, disappearing below the plimsoll line that divides full consciousness from a daze of dismay, suppressed rage, and crippling boredom.

*

I drove the thirteen-year-old to his football match at Sanctuary Lakes, an outer suburb unknown to us. On the freeway I became confused. Me: “Shit, man. I think we’re lost.” Him (calmly, with the street directory open on his scrawny bare thighs): “Oh well. It’s not as if I’m the most valued member of the team.” He looks at me slyly. We laugh so much I almost have to pull off the road.

*

Her hands. I noticed them on the table when we had coffee. Broad and well-shaped, competent. But it was the skin I was struck by: dry, large-pored, even coarse, and I thought at once, These are a doctor’s hands, worn from being vigorously scrubbed, scores of times a day. Fresh respect filled me.

 *

“A great capacity to be alone.” Zadie Smith on what a novelist needs, or perhaps by temperament already has.

*

The American law professor says she wants a pair of R.M.Williams boots like the ones the leader of the National Party wears, but gold. If I had cute little feet like hers I would run right out and buy a pair. I’d thrash them round the house for a year till they faded to the soft gold that’s no longer gold but still possesses the magic of what once was gold. Then I’d wear them with some equally faded and trashed wheat-colored linen pants and an extremely faded and trashed pink linen jacket with the sleeves rolled up just past the wrist; and then I’d go to a cocktail party and drink a very dry martini with a twist, and a glass of water, and then I’d go home tired but happy.

*

How I know I’m losing my hearing: if someone covers their mouth with their hand while they’re talking to me I’m filled with rage and want to slap their hand away.

*

A mother in the airport departure lounge with her two little boys, who were trying to plait her long thick dark hair. Breathing heavily through their noses they divided it into sections, the older boy giving his brother instructions: “You hold this bit. Hold it over there.” She smiled at me and I said, “You’ve got a whole team of hairdressers working on you.” The boys kept their eyes on the job, carefully controlling their mouths.

*

A friend shows me a photo of his grandparents. Me: “I love old headshots. The way people never used to smile at a camera. They always make me cry.” Him: “Oh, don’t cry.” Me: “It’s not sad crying. They lived. They died. It’s more like awe.”

*

Maybe I should have been a psychoanalyst.

*

In Emergency at the Royal Melbourne I was so interested in the goings-on there that I forgot why I’d come. A whole women’s roller derby team came clomping in, skates and all: one of them had broken her leg. A shaven-headed, barefoot, old homeless man wrapped in a blanket emerged from the treatment rooms roaring, “Criminals! Doctors, nurses—criminals! All crrrrriminals!” He climbed onto his motorized wheelchair and, still yelling insults, surged out on to the street, grand as a king going into exile. As the big doors slid shut behind him a man called out in a reproachful tone, “Have a bit of respect, mate.” And my chest pain was only muscular, from the gym.

*

“Come on! Get up! It’s eight o’clock!” The boy slid naked off the top bunk and landed on his feet before me, knees flexed, the glory of his body on full display. He was so cleanly muscled, so slim and ripply and golden, that I laughed out loud and so did he, in his insolence, in the careless joy of himself.

*

At the audiology clinic they clapped huge headphones on me, and told me to listen. I heard two women’s voices, one in each ear, each one reading aloud from a different children’s story book; then a third voice was laid across them, clearly enunciating a single sentence which it was my job to repeat aloud: The books were on the shelves. Pfffff, I thought, I can do this. But as the test progressed, the single-sentence voice sank further and further into the texture of the stories the two women were reading. Sank and sank till I could no longer even guess at what it was saying and could only distinguish faint meaningless sounds. All I could say was “No. No. No.” It was awful. Existentially awful. Like dying. I was frightened. I wanted to cry. But then they began to turn up the volume of the single-sentence voice until once again I heard it perfectly. This, they said, showed two things: the improvement I can expect from a hearing aid, and the fact that there’s a big cognitive factor involved—the brain has to work very hard, as cells die and hearing fades, to supply the missing sounds, so that when you “strain to hear” you’re not actually hearing more, but laboring intellectually to make sense of what little you are hearing. (Does this mean that a clever person “hears” better than a stupid one? Can this be?)

*

I get into bed, groaning with weariness. One of the windows is open. I hear (or intellectually create, since I won’t get the hearing aid for three weeks) a soft rushing sound in the plane leaves, and the gentlest imaginable smattering of raindrops.

 

Helen Garner is an Australian novelist and nonfiction writer, whose books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, and The Spare Room.

Nancy Lemann Recommends The Palace Papers and Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises

Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph by Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In my hometown of New Orleans, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, certain men I know go periodically to a Catholic retreat up the river. They go there to repent. Probably they contemplate goodness. And goodness is a lot more interesting than it sounds. 

The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola are used as the format for these pursuits. Saint Ignatius of Loyola was a womanizer, purportedly—like a lot of the saints. So probably he wanted to repent, too. 

My friends growing up in New Orleans were all Catholic girls, and I’ve often wondered about their Catholic qualities. They seem to have less vinegar in their veins than Jewish girls (like me). It fascinates me to delineate the character traits informed by their religion. I’m drawn to its organized tenets. I’d read the Catholic catechism just for kicks. 

But you don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. They are a set of prayers and practices divided into tantalizing rubrics such as Three Classes of Men, Three Kinds of Humility, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, Daily Examination of Conscience, etc. Their goals are constructive: to overcome disordered inclinations; to seek indifference and humility; to elicit courage, discipline, and perseverance. Just take Jesus out of it and there you go. I took Jesus out of all those phrases, which would otherwise include the strange concept that you’re doing all this for his sake—rather than for your own sake, just to be more worthy. I don’t know why you need Jesus to aspire to this quest. So it’s not like I’m some sort of religious maniac. 

The Spiritual Exercises can get a little weird, though they still speak to me: you’re supposed to ask for shame and confusion. So if you feel shame and confusion, don’t worry, you’re on the right track! Because it’s about remorse—when you know you are bad, it is good. It is half the battle won. 

I also revel in The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, with its effortless intelligence and command of a wide array of royal facts and concepts, even when at the end Brown suddenly descends into bathos about Queen Elizabeth, as people sometimes tend to do. 

But I read that book before the queen’s death, so I must now add prescience to Brown’s powers of discernment—the emotional conclusion, the sudden eulogy—though I guess you didn’t have to be a genius to realize the queen was on her last legs. She seemed immortal, though. Like one’s mother, sort of.

A few days before she died, I had bought the latest issue of Tatler, which was entirely devoted to the queen, with quaint, sepia-tinted photos telling her life story, etc. I kept thinking, Why did I buy this, and/or, Do I have to keep reading this. But something kept me from throwing it away, for which, afterward, I was glad.

 

Nancy Lemann is the author of “Diary of Remorse,” published in issue no. 241 of the Review.

Fairy Tale

“My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats.” Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand, 1953. Licensed under CC0 2.0.

When the Queen of Tuvalu died, I remembered.

My parents were pleased that at ten years old I liked Mark Twain. And then they discovered that, as with Cleo the Talking Dog five years earlier, I would not move on from The Prince and the Pauper. I wasn’t interested in any other non-school book. I’d seen the film of Twain’s novel and Errol Flynn had the right to sit in my presence every week when I reread my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer? Any luckily orphaned boy princes? No? Then no thanks.

My mother had purchased from a door-to-door salesman in 1958 our 1957 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. We never owned another set. My knowledge of the world came from our ever more out-of-date encyclopedia. My science is still very Sputnik-era. I let the twenty-four taped, dogged volumes go with much regret in 2009 after my parents died. As I was tiring of Twain’s lookalike boys and their protector, Miles Hendon, I found in the encyclopedia a black-and-white illustration of a painting of two princes in dark clothes. They had light long hair and looked scared. Princes were unlucky. I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana. I longed to be unlucky. The two brothers were in a place with a dark staircase called the Tower of London. And, yes, the L volume of our encyclopedia set had so much on London, headed by a drawing of really old London dominated by “S. Pauwls Church.” I studied the narrow houses packed around it. My father couldn’t tell me for sure what “eel ships” were, but they were the largest vessels on the river in the drawing. So that’s where my nursery rhyme jumble of “all fall down” came from.

(When did I come across the drawing that had the Globe Theatre marked in it and London Bridge full of houses over the “Thames fluuius”? Much later, when Shakespeare’s history plays were still way over my head.)

I looked up stuff in the encyclopedia and in volume E I learned the counties of England from a map. England was superimposed over the state of Alabama to show how small the realm was. I tried to learn the list of English kings and queens going back to Alfred, but names before the Tudors (“To doors,” like “to arms,” I said, before I learned “two doors”) were hard. I looked up whatever I hadn’t heard of before. Sometimes the encyclopedia let me down.

Then in February of 1964 came The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the British pop invasion. (Everything is on YouTube now, including an audio recording of the Beatles concert I went to at the Indiana State Fair cow barn in September of 1964. The screaming.) Fan magazines about The Beatles were supplemented by expensive and out-of-date copies of The Illustrated London News, which I begged my parents for on Sundays when they went downtown to the newspaper store across from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the Circle.

I was twelve years old when I first heard the voice of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a Saturday morning in 1965 and instead of cartoons or Little Rascals films on television, there was a broadcast of a memorial being dedicated to the late President Kennedy at Runnymede. I learned then what the Magna Carta was. My mother mocked the Queen’s accent: “Efrika.” When had the Queen talked about Africa?

In 1965, I got up real early to watch the funeral of Winston Churchill. “I Vow to Thee, My Country” brought me to tears. I’d never heard “My Country ’Tis of Thee” sung as “God Save the Queen.” To add to my illustrated histories of great European military battles, I wanted coffee-table publications about Churchill. It was just a hobby, a history buff–type project, but then my family became alarmed when I insisted to my older sister that she must have meant Wat Tyler, who led the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and marched on London. No, Watts. California. Los Angeles. Black people. Riots. What else had I missed or failed to take in? Around the dinner table, my mother and my sisters thought I was hilarious. Except black people had been killed during Watts, my father said, very serious.

To fall in love with Great Expectations at the new “white” school was fine, but my parents were offended when a history teacher told them how astonished he’d been when he began to recite in class “They came three thousand miles and died…” and I finished the stanza. (We’d been to Concord, Massachusetts. I had a little replica of the Grave of British Soldiers with that verse on it.) My parents did not like it when white people were surprised that black people knew anything. Maybe my parents’ ambivalence about my out-of-nowhere Anglophilia began then. It was a joke, distasteful to them, but then I could beat white people at their own game with it.

I’d never been into sports and my father had played football for Fisk until he was kicked out for calling his French teacher queer. Maybe it had been a little weird when I got caught experimenting on my feet with my mother’s nail polish at a school friend’s when he burst in to tell me that somebody had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald on television. I was put in the special squad for sissies and fat boys at the new “white” school. In those days of vinyl, I had a record of historic speeches that I still listened to a lot after school. “This is Windsor Castle, His Royal Highness, Prince Edward.” I didn’t understand what was the constitutional impossibility that had kept Edward VIII from speaking before this broadcast, but I responded to the dramatic flummery of his self-pity: “… and to discharge my duties as king as I [eye-ya] would wish to do … of the British race …” (Race?) Unlucky kings were another matter.

A known closet case to myself, my Anglophilia blossomed into a private gay culture. I’d not heard of Oscar Wilde but in 1969 when I was sixteen and locking every door behind me, I had no need of him. I’d discovered the House of Stuart. Flame on.

Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser and The First Churchills on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre and the BBC documentary The Royal Family and the broadcast of the investiture of the Prince of Wales—one great vanilla mound of unlucky princes with Her Majesty the faultless berry on top. My mother said, Yuck. My mother and Queen Elizabeth were born in the same year. My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats. She was always in favor of missing church, except on holidays. A bow and a bit of veil. Her imitation of the Queen’s voice was a high, squeezed little pipe. I said “liege man” and my mother said “liege man my foot.” I moved on to the Hanovers. The high school bookstore had stuff in it like Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Queen Victoria.

My father put on his serious voice. He had avoided the army for as long as he could, because he and his friends at Morehouse had had no wish to fight for the British Empire or the French Empire, for that matter. My Anglo-American version of history went something like the House of Hapsburg with its weird chins degenerated and a son of the French House of Bourbon became King of Spain in 1700, provoking the thirteen-year War of the Spanish Succession. By the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain had lost the Netherlands and its possessions in Italy, but at the same time immigration from Spain to its colonies in Central America, Latin America, and South America was at its height. The populations there had already started dying, as soon as the Europeans brought diseases. I saw footnotes but did not read accounts from the Spanish conquests. Anyway, Spain kept going downhill in the Anglo version of its history and was a husk of an empire that fell apart in the nineteenth century.

Before Pearl Harbor, lots of black people, Langston Hughes among them, had regarded Japan as the non-white empire that would counter European power in the Pacific. My father said he was not one of them. He got sent to Italy, a beautiful country, but the poverty he saw in Naples was worse than anything he’d come across in Georgia. The locals attacked black soldiers who they thought were after Italian women. Protestant conquest of the globe was different in my Anglo-American version, obeying as it did the imperatives of trade, capital, and progress. Trade. Yes, that commodity, human beings. There had been some debate among their captors as to whether or not slaves—as we said and as history books also said when I was in high school—should be baptized. Maybe the villain is conquest in the name of monotheism. Spain and France never had the large abolitionist movements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the United States. Most of the captured and imprisoned Africans were transported to lands controlled by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people, not to those lands squatted by England.

My father tried again. These people do not care about us. But I knew from The British Overseas by C. E. Carrington that during the War of 1812 the slaves, as we said then, ran off to the British lines, because they would be free and sent to Nova Scotia. My father put on his don’t-hand-me-that face, but it was too late. I wanted buckles on my shoes and ruffles on my cuffs. I wrote “Sonnets Written in Dejection near Indianapolis.”

Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, danced in Accra in 1961 with Queen Elizabeth, Head of the British Commonwealth, to a specially composed highlife tune, “Welcome, Your Majesty.” That was the year, 1961, that I took my first plane ride. My mother wore gloves and a hat. Life went on after the World Book Encyclopedia of 1957. The Queen‘s prince consort, happy as his Frankish ancestors, danced with Ghana’s Egyptian-born first lady. Black women were crowded around to check out the smooth moves of the dancers and one pretty spectacular diamond tiara. I’d seen a photograph and read the caption. Among the Zande, the Queen was given the name Naingitere. The name means “she who flies high in the sky with a white smoke.” The Queen owned a plane. Naingitere could be given only to a girl child with the characteristics of a ruler. Such were chosen by the deity to rule.

I lied and said I was going to London with a school group. High school graduation present, 1971. My father had probably guessed that this was a solo flight, because he slipped some of his condoms—they came in little blue plastic containers of wet—into my shaving kit. I was unaware for a week and then paid it no mind for days that I’d brought my Afroed head of every obtuseness to a London that belonged not to the Queen’s men, but to Enoch Powell. Shit happened.

 

Darryl Pinckney’s memoir, Come Back in September, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall.

Deep Emotion, Plain Speech: Camus’s The Plague

Mur de la Peste, Lagnes. Photograph by Marianne Casamance, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Plague was not an easy book to write. Camus was ill when he began it, then trapped by the borders keeping him in Nazi-occupied France. Aside from these difficulties, there was the pressure of authentically speaking up about the violence of World War II without falling into the nationalist heroics he deplored. Like with most problems in art, the solution was to address it directly: in one of the most revelatory sections of the novel, the character Tarrou blurs the line between fancy rhetoric and violence. “I’ve heard so much reasoning that almost turned my head,” he says, “and which had turned enough other heads to make them consent to killing, and I understood that all human sorrow came from not keeping language clear.”

All human sorrow! The boldness of this claim hints at how much Camus believed in words. The Plague is full of people who struggle to clarify their language and strain to make it more precise: Grand, Rambert, Paneloux, and even Rieux all try—and often fail—to express their deepest feelings through words. But in writing, Camus manages to develop a style that encapsulates feeling within the sentence structures themselves—a kind of syntax that captures deep emotion in plain speech.

For example, the first time Rambert tries to get out of the city, the smugglers who might help him escape don’t show up, and he despairs at the thought of having to retrace his steps:

At that moment, in the night spanned by fugitive ambulances, he realized, as he would come to tell Doctor Rieux, that this whole time he had somehow forgotten his wife by putting all his energies into searching for a gap in the walls that separated him from her.

Camus raises the emotional register of the language slightly here, but the words are quite plain, and most of the work is done by the structure of the sentence itself. Though the opening of the sentence promises immediacy, it is full of delays and distractions—the ambulances, the presence of the doctor, all the intervening time. The three prepositional phrases that front-load the sentence create the syntactic equivalent of the delayed gratification Rambert is experiencing, and the end of the sentence enacts the separation itself, forming a word wall between him and his love, which in the French is even more difficult to surmount: les murs qui le séparaient d’elle. The sentence ends with him and her, and only séparaient, the word for ongoing separation, divides them. This stylistic strategy has provoked a bizarre paradox. Critics have called and continue to call Camus’s prose in The Plague “rigorously and studiously unbeautiful,” stoic, flat, or even blank. Yet readers react to the prose with emotion—they find it powerful and sometimes tender. 

Restraint is a tricky concept, a tangle of literary and emotional implications. It has been weaponized by conservative critics to argue for a kind of “appropriateness,” to disavow the urgent necessity of radical self-expression. Restraint has also been mistaken for a kind of stiff-upper-lip style, a way of pushing feelings down out of patriotism so that horrific events like wars remain veiled from the public eye. Then there is restraint as a kind of humility before the unknown, the restraint of contemplating forces beyond a human scale. Late in life, Jacques Derrida, who also grew up in Algiers, linked restraint to the hush of faith: “Scruple, hesitation, indecision, reticence (hence modesty <pudeur>, respect, restraint before that which should remain sacred, holy, or safe: unscathed, immune).” Camus’s character Tarrou, who wants to be a secular saint, isn’t so far from Derrida’s idea. For Tarrou, clarity in language prevents loss of life, and restraint is a kind of earthly religion, a path of “clear speech and action.”

As a secular person and as someone who felt compelled to bear witness, Camus had to develop an idea of restraint that was compatible with confronting harsh truths. But he was also troubled by the rarity of restraint in the aftermath of World War II—a lack of clemency, a quickness to defer to the binaries of good and evil, us and them. These forms of Manichean thought proved that simplicity in language could also lead to extremism. In 1948, the same year The Plague came out in an English translation, Camus published Letters to a German Friend, in which he explicitly addresses the problems with these binaries. “When expressed forcefully,” he writes, “truth wins out over falsehood … we are fighting for fine distinctions, but the kind of distinctions that are as important as man himself. We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false.” Unlike falsehoods, truth, for Camus, requires a certain delicacy of expression, the fine distinction between clarity and simplicity. The syntax of this passage parodies the structure of binary thinking, but the words themselves counteract simple opposition. In fact, each pair is designed to provoke questions: where does sacrifice bleed into mysticism? How could there be a fine distinction between the true and the false? To get at some sense of reality, Camus uses syntax that is clear but not reductive. In Letters to a German Friend and in his lecture “The Human Crisis,” he hopes for a community of individuals who could disarm hatreds and stereotypes, but he knew that such a world could only be possible if humans acknowledged their capacity to carry the venom of extremist thinking and to turn people’s heads with its rhetoric.

Plenty of venom, conscious or unconscious, can emerge through the flourishes of style. As W. G. Sebald points out, writers who attempt to bear witness to horrific events can fall prey to their own technique. His book On the Natural History of Destruction explores the few texts that attempt to describe the firebombing of Germany during World War II and the civilian casualties that resulted. In one essay, Sebald quotes the writer Arno Schmidt for his excesses of metaphor, which lead Schmidt to describe the smoke after an air raid as a woman: “a fat-lady cloud stood up above the warehouse, puffed out her round belly and belched a pastry head high into the air.” The depiction of this woman-cloud is both sexist and not particularly moving; it’s possible for a reader to forget the loss of life this cloud signifies. Sebald writes: “The author certainly intended to conjure up a striking image of the eddying whirlpool of destruction with his exaggerated language, but I for one, reading a passage like the following, do not visualize the supposed subject: life at the terrible moment of its disintegration … I do not see what is being described; all I see is the author, eager and persistent, intent on his linguistic fretwork.” In Schmidt’s eagerness to convey the intensity of destruction, he robs it of all its power, and the style serves as a screen between author and reader so that the horror of what’s being represented is blunted into a kind of literary fancy.

By contrast, The Plague uses few instances of figurative language and, at the sentence level, rarely extends a metaphor. This aspect of the book has, at times, confused its readers, not to mention its translators. For the translator Stuart Gilbert, who lived through World War II and translated the book in the immediate postwar period, the novel’s plainer moments seem to provoke anxiety, and he meddles with them to make them closer to heroic postwar rhetoric. Where Camus writes “they must begin again” (il fallait recommencer), Gilbert adds a mythological flourish: “they must set their shoulders to the wheel again.” These inner workings of restraint are counterintuitive: often the less drastically the writer expresses an emotion, the more forcefully a reader can feel it. Naming a feeling or conjuring it through elaborate flourishes can be deflating and reductive. It’s Camus’s lack of stylistic padding that makes his work harrowing. In a moment of the novel that has been read by critics as Camus’s acknowledgment of the Nazi death camps, he writes, “And since a dead man carries no weight unless you’ve seen him dead, a hundred million corpses strewn across history are nothing but smoke in the imagination” (une fumée dans l’imagination). Robin Buss, who translated the novel in 2001, blinks here, using “a mist drifting through the imagination.” By turning smoke into drifting mists of memory, Buss represents the veil humans place between themselves and the dead, rather than what’s left of the bodies. Instead of obfuscating, Camus’s original metaphor tricks us into looking at what we don’t want to see.

Confronted with the horror of death and ruin, Sebald identifies “the moral imperative for at least one writer to describe what happened in Hamburg on that night in July.” When Sebald praises the writer Hans Erich Nossack, it’s for his directness: “The narrative tone here is that of the messenger in classical tragedy,” Sebald writes. As Alice Kaplan points out in her essay on the narrator of The Plague, Dr. Rieux has some of this directness. He is a messenger, the counterpoint to Camus’s narrator in The Stranger. Where Rieux is a “we,” Meursault is a hollow “I”; he lacks a sense of community. The endings of the two novels represent two forms of immersion in the world, or perhaps two ways in which the world absorbs human emotion. Where Meursault is a loner, someone who decides to open himself “to the tender indifference of the world,” Rieux is a community member whose task is “to write simply” what the indifference of the world has thrown at him.

Of course, Camus was also trying to create an allegory, and in that sense, Rieux’s task was always simpler than Camus’s. Yet in this pandemic year, The Plague has been tested as a direct chronicle of illness, and it has held its own. We have all, to some extent, become residents within its chapters. Many of the novel’s details feel more realistic than your average allegorical gesture—the mastic trees, the skies, the characters’ understandable hypochondria, the heartlessness of bureaucracy. In the midst of all this, as I translated the novel, I had to restrain myself from transferring my experience of plague onto the page.

It would’ve been so easy to use the words in the news; to choose vaccine instead of serum; to put my own frustrations in Rambert’s mouth, or worse, Rieux’s; to make the prefect of Oran, who downplays the threat of the epidemic, sound a little too much like Trump. I felt this mirroring all year as I translated the novel in quarantine, as if the events of the world might become legible, rising through the ink shadow of the page. Perhaps The Plague holds up so well as a chronicle of real illness because, more than some of his contemporaries, Camus had an intense and highly specific relationship with the natural world. Though he was criticized by Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre for representing the Nazi occupation through a biological phenomenon, there is a certain humility to this choice—a certain refusal to put human intervention on a pedestal. “There are two sorts of efficacity,” Camus writes in The Rebel: “that of typhoons and that of sap.” As Sebald proves, there is a great deal of restraint in natural history, in trying to describe the world plainly and precisely but without oversimplification. This use of description presents another paradox of restraint: that the world itself is dramatic enough. If you look at it closely, its images can express intensity without much embellishment. Channeling emotion through observation can be another way to express a feeling without naming it.

I’m reminded of, in The Plague, the first rat Dr. Rieux observes on his landing, and the way it makes him think of his wife’s illness. By describing how the animal collapses and coughs up blood, he accesses both the pain of his wife’s symptoms and the fact that they are ever-present in his mind. In this way, what the doctor notices lets us understand the true danger of his wife’s condition without having to say it directly. Restraint is sometimes the act of watching what disturbs another’s eye.

The craft of observation, of image making, is closely related to poetry. The Plague combines Camus’s stylistic facility with fiction, philosophical essay, and the dialogue of a play, but there was another, less obvious genre that also influenced him: the lyric essay, which is the writing closest to a kind of poetry about the natural world. In Ellen Conroy Kennedy’s brilliant translation, Camus’s essay “Nuptials at Tipasa” opens like this:

In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flower-covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone. At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. The eyes try in vain to perceive anything but drops of light and colors trembling on the lashes. The thick scent of aromatic plants tears at the throat and suffocates in the vast heat.

Today, this would be called a prose poem—it’s Camus’s early voice at its wildest. And yet, there is a kind of restraint here, too, in delaying the self to foreground the landscape. Here, the “I” is withheld until the end of the paragraph. He begins with the lyric voice as an eye rather than an “I,” a lens through which a reader is guided to observe the world. The intensity of this language serves to plunge us into the scene, to make us feel the granular detail of the sunlight, the rocks, and the smell of the foliage. By immersing himself in the world, by placing suffocation in the heat and the scent of absinthe rather than in his own lungs, Camus withholds his actual situation: his struggles with tuberculosis, which made him confront his own mortality. There is a sincere urgency in this beauty—you can only be so arrogant when you know you’re going to die, when your body is already fighting for survival. These essays prove that restraint isn’t the same thing as moderation—restraint can’t exist without deep feeling on the part of the writer, without intensity to harness. Camus’s early pieces read like the manifestos of someone trying to merge with a landscape as a way out of himself. This kind of “style incarnate” is, for Camus, what gives the written word power.

To return to The Rebel: “Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight distortion that is the mark of both art and protest … Art is an impossible demand given expression and form.” Remember what I’ve seen. Feel something of what I feel. More than any other literary experience, translating Camus has taught me that restraint isn’t for the writer; it’s for the reader. By holding back the dazzle for a moment, a writer can let someone look directly through the page, at the part of the world that hurts.

 

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Louis Guilloux’s Blood Dark, and Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, will be published by Graywolf in 2024. She lives in Buffalo, New York.

This is an excerpt from States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic by Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2022.

Why Tights and No Knickers?

Danielle Orchard, Lint, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery.

The women in Danielle Orchard’s paintings are usually undressed, or only partially clothed. They might be smoking a cigarette in the bath, or staring at themselves in a mirror, or eating from a bowl of popcorn in bed. Orchard’s settings are often mundane—a bedroom, a boudoir, a kitchen—but these environments are striking in their angularity and irregular perspectives, the paintings’ compositions at once calling to mind the art historical tradition of the female nude and unsettling it. Her painting Lint graces the cover of the Fall issue of the Review and depicts a woman in stockings and no knickers. We talked about Balthus, working with life models, outsize objects, how she made Lint, and the notable absence of pubic hair from the painting.

 

INTERVIEWER

When did you start gravitating toward the female nude?

ORCHARD

The painting program I was in at Indiana University was fairly traditional and very observation-based, and the nude was a learning tool and a formal device: a way to develop the ability to depict volume and line. When I arrived at Hunter College in New York for graduate school, I didn’t want to abandon the nude, but I started to wonder, Who are these women? What is this uncanniness to their nudity? And who am I, as a painter, in this setting? I realized that the nudes I was painting were amalgams of my own experiences, but they were also deeply familiar images from art history. I was identifying with these characters and thinking about how their bodies might mirror my own, or how I might be unintentionally mirroring them. And so I started building a visual language with the female nude at the center.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have particular influences, or anti-influences, in painting female bodies?

ORCHARD

Everyone on my bookshelf is an artist I truly love and look to for inspiration—and whom I steal from directly. I think a lot about Picasso, naturally, but I’m also really into Balthus. The construction of his paintings—the eeriness and the function of light—were important to me when I was learning how to paint. Back then, the content of his paintings was never questioned by me or by my professors.

INTERVIEWER

How did you come to question it?

ORCHARD

When I got to New York, I saw a Balthus painting in person for the first time—Thérèse Dreaming at the Met. The professors of mine who’d come out of a feminist tradition often said it was incredibly fucked up in terms of its depiction of this sexualized adolescent, and would ask me to question my relationship to it. And I did question it—but I also sometimes felt like asking, Why? It’s such a great painting! I ended up making a couple versions of a painting inspired by Thérèse Dreaming. In Balthus’s original, there’s a cat lapping milk and it’s a pretty erotic little euphemism. I thought it would be funny to make Thérèse into a cat lady: an adult woman, a spinster, surrounded by cats.

Danielle Orchard, Lessons, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery.

INTERVIEWER

How do you see your work in relation to the art historical tradition of nudes?

ORCHARD

Of course, once you learn about the subjugation some women have experienced at the hands of certain male artists who were depicting them, you can’t help sympathizing with their experiences as models. With this newer body of work, I’ve been trying to complicate things—to make my paintings at once more humorous and more specific to a feminine experience. The cover for The Paris Review is a good example. The idea of the painting was to show the discomfort of wearing tights. If you’ve spent a day walking around in tights, you’ll know that tights are always a bit less sexy than you’d intended. They have this formal function, which is to create clean lines on the body, but the internal experience is quite different. The seam is always off-center.

INTERVIEWER

How did that painting come to you?

ORCHARD

I had started to include pieces of clothing in my paintings—clothing that I felt was somehow more revealing than nudity itself. The transparency of tights interested me and posed a new painting problem, one I hadn’t taken on before.

INTERVIEWER

Why tights and no knickers?

ORCHARD

I thought it would make her appear even more uncomfortable. It would heighten the sensuality, but also, anyone who has ever worn tights would just be thinking about how gross that would feel. I was interested in these little gestures—nods in the direction of a woman’s true experience—which are often lost on a male viewership. In my experience, male viewers tend to see the painting in sexualized terms, while the humor is almost always picked up on by female viewers.

INTERVIEWER

And why no pubic hair?

ORCHARD

To make it a little bit more garish. And also just to continue the line—to underscore the linearity of the image. I’ve done other versions where she has a huge bush, but this image seems to me to suggest something about this character—maybe how meticulous she is, or that she wants to be seen as manicured. And then, of course, she’s having this wardrobe malfunction.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me a little bit about the process of making this painting—the materials you used and the iterations of the work.

ORCHARD

I worked hard to find this perfect temperature of brown for the tights. I tried so many different ways of layering, to different effects. A lot of them turned out pretty beautifully in studies, but then I couldn’t translate them onto a larger canvas. I couldn’t get it to feel quite right. This painting was probably the last one I did in preparation for a larger painting in the show that’s up right now at Perrotin in Paris. The brown was actually just an underpainting—some sort of residue from my palette table. I was about to scrape it off and then I realized that it was precisely the temperature I had been after. I’ve been trying to reproduce it, trying every brown I have in the studio, and it’s never coming back.

INTERVIEWER

The colors in this painting are darker than in some of the works of yours I’ve seen. Why is that?

ORCHARD

I had been trying to land on a color that felt like wearing stockings. At the same time, I realized afterward, I’d been looking at a lot of work by Georges de La Tour, who painted these dark, very calm religious paintings that are very angular and strange, in earthy colors. They have a lot of chiaroscuro, and what’s illuminated are the expressions of the women.

INTERVIEWER

How long did it take to paint this one?

ORCHARD

It took ten minutes to make that painting. Although that’s not exactly true, because of the time spent rehearsing on other canvases. I think about this all the time: how with runners, for instance, a single sprint is the accumulation of all the effort that went in before the actual race.

Danielle Orchard, Skinny Pop, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work with life models now, or from memory?

ORCHARD

After Hunter College, I couldn’t afford models, so I started pulling from old sketches and from my memory and imagination. The anatomical irregularities I’m interested in often come from misremembering anatomy—from having a foundation but then getting it wrong. I like it when the misremembering seems informed by the experience of physically inhabiting a female body. I’ve noticed that if I’ve done push-ups that week, say, then the women in the paintings will get a little bulkier.

INTERVIEWER

You often paint groups of women together. A few times you’ve called them “characters.” Are they separate individuals, or are they you—or amalgams of the two?

ORCHARD

They’re certainly amalgams, but together they also function almost like an organism—a fungus or something like that. It’s like when you’re around a lot of other women and this incredibly dynamic experience of viewership takes place, where you’re looking at one another with empathy, certainly, but also with some critical edge, and you’re also thinking about yourself and how you’re being perceived.

Sometimes I include the same woman at different points in time in the same painting, as if she’s moved. There’s one painting I’m thinking of, a yellow bathroom scene that’s up right now in Paris, that has three figures in it, each at one step in the process you go through when you’re getting ready for an event: washing the hair, shaving the legs, putting on the makeup. A linear narrative stretched out visually.

Danielle Orchard, Yellow Bathroom, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery.

INTERVIEWER

There are certain ordinary things—nail polish and beer and pencils—that often recur in your paintings and seem to play a kind of outsize role. Where do these objects come from?

ORCHARD

I think of them as outsize as well. I’m interested in the most generic version of all of these things. A phone is always a rotary phone, for instance, and a wineglass has almost emoji-level recognition and immediacy. I’ve noticed recently that these objects do often relate to a painterly impulse. The makeup and the nail polish are cognates to materials in the studio, and they’re symbols for navigating the ambivalence around how women are constantly reconstructing ourselves—like, almost every morning. Or I am, anyway.

Danielle Orchard, Cheating at Solitaire, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery.

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor at The Paris Review.

“That Little Click in the Mind”: Vijay Seshadri Reflects on his Tenure as the Review’s Poetry Editor

Photo by Lisa Pines.

This fall marks a transition on our editorial team, as Vijay Seshadri is bidding the Review farewell—at least as our poetry editor, a role he has occupied since 2019. He will be greatly missed. With our forthcoming Winter issue, we will welcome to the role Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, a professor at the University of Chicago who has served as a guest editor of Poetry magazine and is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Underworld Lit. We are deeply grateful to Vijay for introducing us to the work of so many remarkable poets over the last few years, and for being a marvelous colleague and a true friend to the Review.

The worst thing about choosing poems for The Paris Review is having to say no. The magazine receives many submissions, and many of those include strong poems that deserve to be in its pages but can’t be accommodated. Turning down poems is probably even worse for a poetry editor who is also a practicing poet and knows how being turned down feels. Guilt, misgivings, second-guessing, paralysis about naysaying, and avoidant behavior are the by-products of the process. And they should be. As a writer, if you don’t identify with the writers who are sending you work, you’re probably hardening yourself against yourself. 

Other than that, being The Paris Review’s poetry editor for the past thirteen issues has been a terrific experience. Looking back over the more than sixty years since I washed up on American shores, I’ve come to recognize how much literature was the means by which I socialized myself into this country and its civilization. Choosing poems for the magazine and mulling over the choices I made gave me a chance to make that socialization concrete in my mind. I was a descriptive rather than a prescriptive editor, largely because that unusual process of socialization had left me with a vivid sense of the imagined republic of American letters. At least as an editor, I saw my obligations as being almost as much civic as they were aesthetic, requiring me to acknowledge the entire republic rather than stake out a claim in one of its territories. I honored, I think, the multiplicity of American poetry (including translations into American English)—which is easy to do, because there is excellent work across the range of American literary allegiances. 

There has been something deeply satisfying about engaging with this country as an editor. I was most gratified when I chose poems by poets whom I felt were unfairly neglected or underappreciated. I had the chance to publish long poems, which have a harder time finding homes. I had the chance to experience over and over that little click in the mind, with its attendant rush of endorphins—very much like the click in the mind that comes from finishing a piece of writing you like—on coming across a poem that is undeniable. Maybe my only regret is that I came to the job too late to do full justice to my experience of the poetry of my time, and to some of my deepest enthusiasms. Very early on in my tenure, for example, I wrote to Allen Grossman’s widow, Judith, begging for unpublished Grossman poems. She told me there were none. That was a bitter moment. On the flip side, though, early on I also wrote to Kamau Brathwaite asking for work. The last poem he published before his death was in the pages of The Paris Review.

I’ve worked with two excellent editors: Emily Nemens, who hired me, and Emily Stokes, who kept me on after she took the reins. The magazine’s vigilant staff and interns have made the mechanics frictionless, and have saved me from some serious rookie publishing errors. I’m grateful to the magazine itself, an enduring and central force in American culture. 

And I’m particularly glad that this goodbye letter gives me a chance to express my deep gratitude to Richard Howard, protean and titanic. The first poem I submitted to The Paris Review, in the mid-nineties, when I was about to publish my first book, was a long poem called “Lifeline.” At that time, the magazine had a long-poem prize, named after one of its former publishers, Bernard F. Conners. Richard gave me the prize for my poem, and he and the magazine arranged a reading at what was then the brand-new Barnes & Noble on Union Square for me and a writer who had contributed fiction to a recent issue, from a novel she was working on. That writer was Susan Sontag. It’s hard to convey, a quarter-century later, the enormous cultural presence and authority that Susan Sontag—and, for that matter, Richard and George Plimpton—had in the New York of the nineties. It was breathtaking to stand for half an hour in front of the eminence they had created, facing the huge crowd that had come out for the reading. Looking back to that event and then along the narrative arc that led to my sitting in the chair Richard once occupied, I get another of those clicks in the mind.

 

Vijay Seshadri is the author of five books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning 3 Sections, and a professor of writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

In Remembrance of John Train, 1926–2022

A page from “,” in issue no. 66.

John Train, a cofounder of The Paris Review and its first managing editor—or “so-called managing editor,” as he often put it—died last month, at age ninety-four. It was Train who coined the Review’s name and, in its early days in Paris, as a member of the Café Tournon crowd, he pushed the magazine away from criticism, writing later that “theories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art.”

Train went on to become “an operator in high finance and world affairs,” as the Times obituary put it today, but many will remember him best for his love of small idiosyncrasies: in the early fifties, while studying for a master’s degree at Harvard in comparative literature, Train noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, which led to an earnest obsession with collecting what he called “remarkable names of real people.” You can find some of these in our Summer 1976 issue, no. 66, which features a fourteen-page of names Train had unearthed in the records of a very real and now-defunct state department called the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization. (We published an of “How to Name Your Baby” online in 2015.) Train announced his departure from his post as managing editor, as George Plimpton and Norman Mailer recall, with singularly dry humor:

One day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, “Do not put anything in this box.” By this he meant to tell the rest of the staff that he was moving on to something else.

From the Chelsea office, the staff of the Review are thinking of Train, his legacy and “In-box,” his family and friends. He will be missed.

Michelle de Kretser and David Orr Recommend; Our Editors Remember Hilary Mantel

Gabriel Mälesskircher, Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This week, we remember Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), and bring you recommendations from two of our issue no. 241 contributors. 

On holiday in France, I went to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece in the Musée Unterlinden. Afterward, wandering through the museum’s collection of medieval and Renaissance art, I came across a small oil painting: part of an altarpiece attributed to Gabriel Mälesskircher, a fifteenth-century German artist from Colmar. Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man has clear, singing colors, predominantly reds and greens. While Saint Guy looks on, the possessed man in question is being restrained by three other men. His head is thrown back, and the expelled demon, a tiny black humanoid, has just flown out of his gaping mouth. 

I thought at once of Mavis Gallant’s story “In the Tunnel,” which ends with the protagonist, Sarah, writing a jokey, flirtatious invitation to dinner on the back of a postcard that shows a miniature human figure cast out from a man’s body: “This person must have eaten my cooking.” I remembered that another of Gallant’s stories, “Virus X,” is set partly in Colmar, and I felt certain that she knew Mälesskircher’s painting. I imagined her looking at it, taking in its detail as I was, and the thrill of connection ran through me like bright wire. 

Back in Sydney, I woke with jet lag at three in the morning. In the living room, I switched on the heater and a lamp and began to read “In the Tunnel.” Well before I reached the end, I knew I had been wrong about Sarah’s postcard. The story is set on the French Riviera, and Sarah steals the card in a mountain chapel not far from Menton. The chapel, which Gallant doesn’t name, is Notre-Dame des Fontaines, famous for its frescoes. The one reproduced on Sarah’s postcard, by Giovanni Canavesio, depicts the hanged Judas. From the mess of guts that spills from his open stomach, his soul—a tiny man—reaches out to the waiting Devil. Visiting the chapel with Sarah are her lover, Roy, and the woman with whom he’s cheating on her. It’s Roy, betrayer and devil, a man who takes pleasure in cruelty, a man who has supervised hangings, who first makes the remark about Sarah’s cooking—seeking, as usual, to inflict pain. In other words, the subject of the fresco is integral to the story. But in my wish to connect with Gallant, I’d contrived to forget all this and had superimposed Mälesskircher’s painting onto Canavesio’s work.

At the end of the story, years have gone by and Sarah, too, has forgotten everything: Roy, the day in the chapel, the provenance of the postcard. When she unconsciously repeats Roy’s words, she’s making them her own, transforming hurt into erotic potential. After she writes the card, the past comes back to her. Her prospective dinner guest might turn out to be another Roy, but for now she’s out of the tunnel, and there’s joy in view. We remember only as much as we need to for happiness, and I felt happy that day in Colmar. Maybe Gallant did once pause in front of Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man—why not? 

—Michelle de Kretser, author of “ Winter Term ”

Middle-grade children’s literature consists of books intended to teach children something, most of which are boring, and books children actually like, most of which are bad. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, which was published from 1965 to 1977, is neither. I reencountered these books, which I loved as a boy, a couple of weeks ago, when my ten-year-old daughter finally turned to them, having plowed through everything else lumped under the heading, “If you liked Harry Potter, you might also like …” In one sense Cooper’s series is typical middle-grade fantasy: kid wizard, prophecy, evildoers, Gandalf figure. In a larger sense, however, her books rewrote the formula before there was even a formula to be written. The boy wizard isn’t always central. The Gandalf figure is rather grim. Children are major actors, but the events depend on adult frailties like thwarted lust, and the characters’ faults and virtues are tangled together: when a boy hero named Bran is treated like an outsider, he resents that treatment but also grows vain about it, such that another boy thinks of Bran’s face as showing “shadows of crafty arrogance” and wishes it were otherwise. My daughter’s favorite book is the third one, Greenwitch, about a strange creature created by an ancient harvest ritual that works all too well. “What I like,” she told me, “is that everything isn’t just about the people, instead it’s about this mysterious force nobody can control and nobody really understands.” There are worse ways to think about the world, or about the world of books. 

—David Orr, author of “ The New You ”

At school, Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety was recommended by the history teacher I, a hateful teenager, liked least (pedantic; prone to raptures over seemingly arcane points of fact). He proclaimed it the best book we could read on the French Revolution; since it was the only novel on the list, I opened it anyway, and was reluctantly entranced. (Robespierre, self-conscious, trying to muster something better than his usual thin, cold smile for Danton—“But it was the only one available to his face.”) Mantel’s imagination was uncannily sinuous: it seemed she could absorb and reinvent her revolutionaries without bending or avoiding any of the established facts, and dance her way through the countless disputed ones. By the time of Wolf Hall, she could conjure a Thomas Cromwell faithful to the historical record whose thoughts ran quick and vital, with no whiff of the antique. Those intricately researched and constructed books are animated throughout by the thrill it evidently gave Mantel to inhabit a mind like Cromwell’s—to imagine its unusual intelligence, the dark jokes it might tell itself even in extremis. There’s a moment when our man, believing he may die, is reluctant to give confession, to relinquish those sins “that others have not even found the opportunity of committing … they’re mine.” He goes on: “Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more.”

—Lidija Haas, deputy editor

Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost is one of my favorite memoirs—a book about illness without sentimentality, let alone self-pity; about the supernatural, without the woo-woo; about motherhood without children:

You come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of your curtains, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, “It’s a boy,” where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to that child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that wouldn’t work after the opening lines.

—Emily Stokes, editor

Nobody Writes Like Nancy Lemann

Photograph by David Wipf. Spanish moss, City Park, New Orleans, June 1958, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 

Nancy Lemann’s work is deceptive in its meandering. She is thinking deeply even when it seems as if her thoughts are floating. Her laser powers slice into idiocy (and dice it) while they also beam sympathetically onto, as she would call it, the folly of the human condition. Her work evokes something old-fashioned in its manner and tone, and this proves to be a way she keeps herself from being subsumed in the clichés of modern culture even as she is examining it. But she is observing the human being of today. One of her passions is history, with particular attention to architectural preservation and travel. Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages.

Nobody writes like Nancy Lemann. You might recognize slivers of other writers within her work, writers whom she first revered: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Hardwick, Barry Hannah, and her beloved mentor, Walker Percy.

The first time I read her work—in a writing workshop in college in New England, where I met her—I felt enveloped in a new atmosphere. I still remember one of her lines, just as I remember first reading Faulkner describe Caddy: “She smelled like trees.” This was Nancy: “You know you’re in the South when you’re wearing a yellow dress, and in the North when you’re wearing a black one.” I learned she was from New Orleans and that her last name was pronounced like the fruit. I thought she was merely channeling the atmospheric city of her youth. She was indeed channeling an atmospheric world, but it wasn’t only the world of New Orleans, it was the world of Nancy Lemann.

We got to know each other after college through correspondence. I had moved home after my mother’s death to be with my eight-year-old sister, and Nancy had moved back to New Orleans. We wrote letters often. I received glorious ten-page single-spaced letters, typed on thin rice paper. Many of these ended up being the first draft of what would become her first book—the iconic, unforgettably magical, and hilarious Lives of the Saints, a love letter to her hometown. She is now one of my oldest friends, so you may not believe me when I say she is also one of the funniest people I know. But it’s true.

From early on she has been both a worshipper and a dismisser. She is transcendent when describing her admiration for the noble and the flawed. She champions the underdog, giving special attention to the imperfect and the sensitive and the kind. She skewers with an extra slice the pretentious and the cruel.

Her own character is as beautifully stubborn and honest as her prose, and I’ve often seen on her face an expression of conflict between wanting to say something she knows to be true and feeling that it may cause offense. Fortunately, in her work, as mostly in life, the truth wins out. She has stuck to her unique sensibility and its power—the wit of repetition, the refusal to employ certain narrative conventions—and it has often cost her publications and publishers. Apparently they do not recognize comic literary genius when it appears before them. (Luckily, some editors do.)

 

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter.