The Paris Review's Blog, page 75

Against August

Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight, 1960.

There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions. All I do is think about my outfits and my commute, constantly trying to choose between my sweatiness and my vanity. People are not themselves. I go see the party girls and find them wistful. I meet up with the melancholics and find them wanting to stay out all night.

In August I cannot think, so I cannot work. This is not not-working in a restful or decadent way. This is not-working as certain doom. And I can’t not-work in peace either: if I leave in July I consider myself traveling but if I leave in August I am just leaving. The best I can hope for, in the absence of a purpose like business or pleasure, is an escape. Maybe a light excursion. In any case I am rarely in the place I can reasonably call my home in August, and instead stay in other people’s basements, in their living rooms, on their couches. I sleep on what was once a little brother’s bunk bed and wash my hair in his parents’ shower. I walk down the stairs and see their children’s fingerprint smudges on the banister. I stay in hotel rooms by myself and think: What a waste. (I am convinced that hotel rooms are designed for sex, even though I am not particularly into the quality they have—sealed, hermetic, identical. Hotels are to sex what time zones are to jet lag, I think. A change of interiors out of proportion with the body.)

I am against August. When I try to explain this position, some people instinctively want to argue. These people seem to love the beach beyond all reason, to have never suffered a yellowed pit stain on a favorite white T-shirt in their life, and to eagerly welcome all thirty-one days of August as though they are a reward for a year well-lived rather than a final trial before the beginning of another. These are people who vacation with peace of mind. To them, I say: Go away. To the people who agree with me, I say: Go on. 

Many friends who share my malaise compare the experience of the month to the Sunday feeling of knowing work or routine is imminent after a break. I don’t agree exactly, but I recognize the comparison. In August summer ends, and so whether or not you are done with it you must accept that it is finished. Everything you meant to say or do now exists in the past tense: it was said or it wasn’t, it was completed or never even begun. The month does function, I will admit, as an excellent excuse. I reassure myself and others about mistakes or failures with promises of what we’ll be like in September. Any accomplishment, no matter how minor, is astounding to me: In August?! I think.

***

I note references to August when I find them, and keep them as though I am preparing a defense of my position. I must have my rhetoric for when pettiness alone fails me. There are, of course, many who have romanticized August in art. In Emily of New Moon, L. M. Montgomery describes a vacation spent in “the long, smoky, delicious August evenings when the white moths sailed over the tansy plantation and the golden twilight faded into dusk and purple over the green slopes beyond and fireflies lighted their goblin torches by the pond.” I probably read that for the first time as a child indoors, while hiding from an August unlike the one she had written about. I have never experienced this delicious smoky August that looms large in our cultural imagination; instead of white moths, for me, there are mosquitoes. 

Some poets agree with me, some don’t. I am always on the lookout for allies. Marge Piercy’s 1984 poem “Blue Tuesday in August” begins:

The world smelled like a mattress you find
on the street and leave there,
or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s
dinner menu and the day before’s.

Like that, yes. “In an invented summer,” wrote Etel Adnan in Sea and Fog, “the world breaks apart … Love is wedded to time, and revelation is their breaking apart. In one of August’s sizzling days, the sea swallowed a woman whose flesh gave up resistance.” Also just like that, yes. In Mary Oliver’s 1983 poem “August,” she writes that she is

cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is.

Hmm. “What I want,” writes Kim Addonzio in her poem called “August,” “is to slice open its stomach and watch / its toxic sun uncoil into the sea.” Yes, that’s better. “August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journals. “The odd uneven time.” Another entry:

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: “After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.”

Many experience it with a sense of finality. “The summer ended,” writes James Baldwin in Just Above My Head:

Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse … The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.

Then there are movies set in August, many defined by catastrophe: August 5 is the day Do the Right Thing takes place; August 29 is the day, according to Terminator 2, the world ends. And there are the movies I believe should be watched in August because they capture something of its claustrophobia (Rear Window, The Talented Mr. Ripley). There are the heroines of Rohmer’s films, undone by the pressures of vacationing alone and the vacuousness of beach holidays. 

The Hottest August, Brett Story’s documentary filmed in 2017, has a title that is inherently ominous and incomplete—after all, it shows what is the hottest August only thus far. She interviews people in the various boroughs of New York in front of their homes, in their favorite bars, in parks, on beaches. Each scene has a sense of foregrounding: there are layers between the viewer and her subjects, like sandcastles in front of the water, that both direct and obscure your line of vision. 

August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien begins with a description of the weather as evil incarnate. “People who had hoped for summer wished now for a breeze and a little respite.” Ellen, O’Brien’s tragic heroine, will get neither, no matter how hard she tries. Her marriage is about to end and she goes on a vacation, throws her wedding ring into the ocean, and doesn’t regret it. Even after a true tragedy she finds it hard to return home. It is difficult for Ellen to decide, while grieving, if the month is wicked or if it holds “her own pathetic struggles towards wickedness.” She feels too much, finally, to feel anything at all. “It was a new sensation, indifference,” she thinks. “It was like observing a party as one passed by a sleek and softly lit front room and having no feeling of regret about being uninvited because to walk the streets alone provided a greater and surer pleasure.”

***

In August of the only year I was married, we flew to the West Coast of Canada for a wedding. I was distracted; I didn’t plan. Not understanding either Canada’s geography or its seasons, I had packed for what I considered to be August weather. I spent the entire time cold and cursing myself for the missed opportunity to wear sweaters and jackets. The dress I brought was too big, and so were my shoes. But it was a beautiful wedding. I guess they all are. The bride’s father, a carpenter, made the pews for the ceremony and the tables and chairs for the reception. The sun was on the water and we traded blankets back and forth when the wind blew. At night we drank, and cried. I had already said goodbye to these friends so many times before; when I had moved, when I came back to visit, and now I would again, before getting on a plane to fly to a different city than the one we’d grown up in together. “It doesn’t get easier,” one friend said through his tears. I held my hand on his cheek without wiping them away.

Back in New York the season was what I’d expected and dreaded. Airless, choking heat, sunlight that seemed to burn without warmth. Steam lifted off the sidewalk. The hours were slow but gone before I could count them. The feeling of August was as uncomfortable as the weather. Enough time had passed to know how I would remember this summer. There was still enough time to convince myself the future might prove me wrong. I read the letters that writers I loved had written to the people they loved, and circled the passages that felt important even if I couldn’t say why. One I kept with me for a long time, waiting to understand how I knew what it meant. On August 12, 1971, Elizabeth Hardwick had written to Robert Lowell:

I have had a really fine summer, strange in many ways, in others exactly the same. In the afternoons the light drops suddenly, the day waits and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments before, maybe long ago by someone else.

In September she wrote to say that she had started divorce proceedings.

***

Now I am alone when I leave town in August. I remember one night spent solo at a bar someone had recommended, with a patio with a view that I knew I should see. Behind it the sky was almost-thunderstorm purple. I thought the canopies over the patio would protect us from the rain, but they were, it turned out, mostly for decoration. Half the people scattered under columns supporting a slim roof; the other half clustered around the bar. All of us kept our hands around the stem of our wineglasses. I sat on the stoop with a man, close to the columns. I could see feet poking out and tried to lean over to see who they belonged to, what they thought of the rain. We made eye contact but not conversation, so I lit a cigarette. The photos on the pack depicted the absolute limits of what can happen to a body. The man beside me watched a French comedian perform standup on his phone but didn’t laugh. When the rain stopped skateboarders arrived. I watched them for a while, then went to where I was staying and laid in bed, planning what else I could do in the morning. I pretended to sleep until I was bored and then I showered. Sometimes I forgot to be glad I was alone. I would daydream about bumping into someone I knew. Not a friend, exactly. Someone unlikely but not unwelcome to find in the same restaurant, café, or park. Someone also away from themselves in the month defined by absences. 

Still, I don’t text people back. Instead I collect the oddities of the month I see and hear. I sit in the shade of a park beside the cigarette butts and a broken pair of sunglasses half-buried in the dirt. I sit in the sun at a baseball game in front of a man who, only half joking, heckles the other team: How dare you! How dare you try to win! On the way to the game I pass a woman on a patio talking about being too hot, about the ever-present light: It’s like, I get it, I know how the sun works. I walk behind a barber carrying a white bag sticky with pastry oils on his way back to work, a sparkling water and a half-drunk Gatorade in his hands, a tattoo on his neck in Gothic script that reads “In Fair Verona.” A phone call on the bus, a woman explaining to her friend that another person they knew had told her, She doesn’t need us anymore, she has new friends. A girl with pink barrettes holding her hair back from her face, her phone held to her ear, listening to whoever is on the other line with a smile she hasn’t yet realized she’s making. I sit outside the ice cream shop with my friend’s baby and golden retriever, waiting for her return. A man walking by gestures at us. Nice life.

He’s right. It is. There is much to enjoy about hating a month so completely. It would be romantic—except the only tension between us is the dread I feel as I anticipate August’s inevitable return. While I am drifting in the scorched grass under a tree, or hearing the sound of my legs sticking to the cheap plastic melting on a shadeless patio, or feeling my hair curl into a sweaty knot against my neck, I remember that I’ve known it would be exactly like this—that at least I did not exaggerate. As the month winds down, I can feel some sort of solace: after all, I’ll make it to after August.

 

Haley Mlotek is a writer based in Montreal. Her first book, about romance and divorce, is forthcoming from Viking.

Saturday Is the Rose of the Week

Clarice Lispector. Photo courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente.

In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas, the final installment in a series.

March 13, 1971

Animals (I)

Sometimes a shiver runs through me when I come into physical contact with animals, or even at the mere sight of them. I seem to have a certain fear and horror of those living beings that, though not human, share our instincts, although theirs are freer and less biddable. An animal never substitutes one thing for another, never sublimates as we are forced to do. And it moves, this living thing! It moves independently, by virtue of that nameless thing that is Life.

I remarked to someone that animals do not smile, and she told me that Bergson comments on this in his essay about laughter. While a dog does, I’m sure, sometimes laugh — ​its smile expressed by its eyes brightening, its half-open mouth panting, and its tail wagging — ​a cat never laughs. It does, however, know how to play. I have a lot of experience with cats. When I was small, I had a cat of a rather common sort, striped in various shades of gray, and cunning in that feline, distrustful, aggressive way cats are. My cat was continually having litters, and every time the same tragedy would unfold: I would want to keep all the kittens and turn the house into a cattery. Behind my back, the offspring were given away to goodness knows who, which made the problem still more acute because I wouldn’t stop complaining about the absent kittens. And then, one day while I was at school, they gave my cat away. I was so shocked I took to my bed with a fever. To console me they gave me a present of a cat made out of rags, which to me was ridiculous: how could an object that was dead and floppy and a “thing” ever replace the elasticity of a living cat?

Speaking of living cats, a friend of mine wants nothing more to do with cats. He got fed up with them for good after having a female cat that periodically went mad: her instincts were so strong, so imperative, that when she was in heat, after uttering long, plangent meows that echoed through the whole neighborhood, she would suddenly become half-hysterical and throw herself off the roof, injuring herself in the process. A servant to whom I told the story crossed herself and exclaimed, “Get thee behind me.”

Of the slow and dusty turtle carrying its stony shell, I would rather not say anything. This animal, which comes to us from the era of the dinosaurs, does not interest me: it is too stupid, it doesn’t engage with anyone, not even with itself. The act of lovemaking between two turtles must surely have neither warmth nor life. While not an expert, I venture to predict that a few millennia from now the species will come to an end.

Regarding chickens and their relationships with each other, with people, and above all with their gestation period, I have said all there is to say. I have also spoken about monkeys.

As an adult, I owned a mongrel that I bought from an ordinary woman I happened to meet in the hurly-burly of a Naples backstreet, because I sensed that he had been born to be mine, which, happily, he also sensed, immediately following me without a thought for his former owner — ​not even a backward glance—as he wagged his tail and licked me. But it’s a very long story, my life with that dog who had the face of a mischievous mulatto Brazilian despite being a born and bred Neapolitan, and to whom I gave the rather recherché name of Dilermando on account of his pretentious charm and his air of being some garrulous raconteur from the turn of the century. I could have many things to say about Dilermando. Our relationship was so close, his sensibility so akin to mine, that he anticipated and felt my difficulties. Whenever I was writing on the typewriter, he would position himself half-lying, half-sitting by my side, sphinxlike, dozing. If I stopped typing because I’d encountered an obstacle and become disheartened, he would immediately open his eyes, raise his head, and look at me with one ear cocked, waiting. Once I had resolved the problem and carried on typing, he would settle back into his somnolent state populated by goodness knows what dreams — ​because dogs do dream, I’ve seen it. No human being ever gave me the feeling of being loved so totally, the way I felt loved unreservedly by that dog.

After my sons were born and had grown a little, we gave them a very large and beautiful dog, who patiently let them take turns climbing onto his back and who, without anyone charging him with the task, kept guard over the house and street, waking up all the neighbors at night with his warning barks. I gave my sons little yellow chicks that followed close behind us, tripping us up, as if we were the mother hen; those tiny little things needed their mother just as humans do. I also gave them two rabbits, some ducks, and marmosets. The relationships between man and beast are unique, irreplaceable. Owning an animal is a vital experience. And anyone who has not lived with an animal lacks a certain intuition about the living world. Anyone who recoils at the sight of an animal clearly feels afraid of themselves.

But sometimes I do shudder on seeing an animal. Yes, at times I feel the mute ancestral cry within me when I am with them: it seems I no longer know which of us is the animal, me or the beast, and I get thoroughly confused; I become almost afraid of facing up to my own stifled instincts that, demanding as they are, I am obliged to assume when confronted by the animal. What else can we miserable creatures do? I once knew a woman who humanized animals, talking to them and lending them her own characteristics. But I don’t humanize animals, I think that’s offensive — ​we should respect their own natures. Instead I animalize myself. It isn’t difficult, it comes easily; just don’t fight it, just surrender.

But if I go deeper, I arrive very pensively at the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult than total surrender. This difficulty is one of our human afflictions.

Holding a little bird in the half-closed palm of your hand is terrible. Petrified, it beats its wings fast and frenetically; suddenly you have in your half-closed fist thousands of delicate wings thrashing and fluttering, and suddenly it all becomes unbearable and you open your hand to free the bird, or hand it back to its owner so that they can return it to the greater relative freedom of a cage. In short, I want to see birds flying or perched in trees—but far from my hands. Perhaps some day, in more sustained contact with Augusto Rodrigues’s birds at Largo do Boticário, I might become close to them, and enjoy their featherlight presence. (The phrase “enjoy their featherlight presence” gives me the sensation of having written a complete sentence by describing something exactly as it is. It’s a funny feeling; I don’t know whether I’m right or wrong, but that’s another problem.)

It would never occur to me to own an owl, but a little friend of mine found an owl chick on the ground in the Santa Teresa forest, all alone and without its mother. She took it home, kept it warm, fed it, whispered to it, and ended up discovering that it liked raw meat. Once it was strong enough, she expected it to fly off immediately, but it delayed going in search of its own destiny and rejoining its own kind: that strange bird had become attached to my little friend. Very reluctant to leave, it would fly a little way off and then come straight back. Until one day, as if after a long battle with itself, it seized its freedom and flew off into the depths of the world.

 

April 3, 1971

De Natura Florum

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom He had formed.
—Genesis 2:8

Dictionary

Nectar : Sweet juice that many flowers contain and which insects seek avidly.

Pistil : Female organ of a flower. Generally occupies its center and contains the beginnings of the seed.

Pollen : Fertilizing powder, produced in the stamens and contained in the anthers.

Stamen : Male organ of a flower, made up of the style and the anther in its lower part surrounding the pistil, which, as set out above, is the flower’s female organ.

Fertilization : Union of two elements of reproduction (male and female), from which comes the fertile fruit.

Rose : The feminine flower; she gives herself so wholly and so generously that, for her, there remains only the joy of having given herself. Her perfume has a feminine mystery about it; if inhaled deeply, it touches the depths of the heart and leaves the body entirely perfumed. The way she opens out into a woman is exquisitely beautiful. Her petals taste good in the mouth: just try. Red roses, or the Black Prince variety, are enormously sensual. Yellow ones are alarmingly cheerful. White ones are peace. Pink ones are generally fleshier and their color is just perfect. Orange roses are sexually attractive.

Carnation : Has an aggressiveness that comes from a certain degree of irritation. The edges of its petals are sharp and snub-nosed. The carnation’s scent is somehow mortal. Red carnations bellow with violent beauty. White ones recall the little coffin of a dead child; their scent then turns pungent.

Sunflower: The great child of the Sun, so much so that it is born with the instinct to turn its enormous head toward its mother. Does it matter whether the Sun is the father or the mother? I don’t know. Is the sunflower female or male? Male, I think. But one thing is certain: the sunflower is Russian, probably Ukrainian.

Violet : Introverted, profoundly introspective. It doesn’t hide itself, as some would say, out of modesty. It hides in order to understand its own secret. Its scent is a glory but demands that we go in search of it: its scent says what cannot be said. A bunch of violets means, Love others as you love yourself.

Sempervivum :​ An ever-dead. Its aridity tends toward eternity. Its Greek name means golden sun.

Daisy : ​A cheerful little flower. Simple: it has only one layer of petals. Its yellow center is a childish plaything.

Palm : Has no scent. Shows itself off haughtily — ​for it is haughty — ​in form and color. It is frankly masculine.

Orchid : Beautiful, exquise, and unfriendly. Unspontaneous. In need of a glass dome. Yet it is a magnificent woman, this cannot be denied. It can also not be denied that it is noble; it is an epiphyte—that is, it is born on another plant without taking nutrition from it. I’m lying: I adore orchids.

Tulip:  ​It’s only a tulip when in a large field covered by them, as in Holland. A single tulip simply isn’t.

Cornflower : Only grows among wheat. In its humility, it has the audacity to display itself in various forms and colors. The cornflower is biblical. In Spain it is used to decorate the Christmas crib, along with the sheaves of wheat from which it is inseparable.

Angelica:  ​Has the scent of a chapel. It brings mystic ecstasy. It recalls the Host. Many wish to eat it and fill their mouths with its intense, sacred scent.

Jasmine : For lovers—they walk hand in hand swinging their arms, and exchange soft kisses, I would say, to the odorous murmur of jasmine.

Bird-of-paradise : Preeminently masculine. It has an aggressiveness grown out of love and healthy pride. It appears to have a coxcomb and, like the cockerel, it crows, but it doesn’t wait for dawn — ​when seen, it gives its visual cry of greeting to the world, for the world is in a constant state of sunrise.

Azaleia : ​Some people use other spellings, but I prefer this one. It is spiritual and bright: it is a happy flower and brings happiness. It is humbly beautiful. People who are called Azaleia — ​like my friend Azaleia — ​take on the qualities of the flower: it is a pure delight to be around them. I received from Azaleia many white azaleias that scented the whole room.

Night-blooming jasmine:  ​Has the scent of the full moon. It is phantasmagorical and a little frightening—it only comes out at night, with its intoxicating smell, mysterious, silent. It belongs also to deserted street corners and darkness, to the gardens of houses with their lights turned off and their shutters closed. It is dangerous.

Cactus flower:  ​The cactus flower is succulent, sometimes large, scented, and brightly colored: red, yellow, and white. It is a succulent revenge on behalf of all desert plants: it is splendor arising from despotic sterility.

Edelweiss : Found only at high altitudes, although never above eleven thousand feet. This Queen of the Alps, as it is also called, is the symbol of man’s conquest. It is white and woolly. Rarely attainable, it is a human aspiration.

Geranium : ​Flower of window boxes in Switzerland, São Paulo, and Grajaú. It has a sarcophyllum, i.e., a succulent, highly scented leaf.

Giant water lily : There are enormous ones in Rio’s botanical garden, almost seven feet in diameter. Aquatic and drop-dead gorgeous. They are the great Brazil, constantly evolving: on the first day white, then pink or even reddish. They spread a vast sense of tranquility. At once majestic and simple. Despite living on the water, they provide shade.

 

July 11, 1970

Saturday

I think Saturday is the rose of the week; on Saturday afternoon, the apartment is made of curtains blowing in the wind and someone emptying out a bucket of water on the terrace: Saturday in the wind is the rose of the week. Saturday morning is a garden, a bee flying past, and the wind: a beesting, my face swollen, blood and honey, the sting lost inside me: other bees will come sniffing around, and next Saturday morning I’ll go and see if the garden is full of bees. In my childhood Saturday gardens the ants would file across the flagstones. It was a Saturday when I saw a man sitting in the shade on the sidewalk eating dried meat and cassava broth out of a gourd: it was Saturday afternoon and we had already been swimming. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the bell announced to the wind that it was time for the movie matinee: and to the wind, Saturday was the rose of our rather dull week. If it rained, only I knew it was Saturday: a rather damp rose. In Rio de Janeiro, just when you think the weary week is about to expire, it opens out into a rose with a great metallic clatter: on the Avenida Atlântica a car screeches to a halt and, suddenly, before the startled wind can begin blowing again, I feel that it is Saturday afternoon. It was Saturday, but it’s not the same. I say nothing then, apparently resigned: but the truth is that I’ve picked up my things and gone straight to Sunday morning. Sunday morning is also the rose of the week. Although Saturday is much more so. I’ll never know why.

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Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. Adapted from Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which will be published by New Directions in September. Originally published as Todas as crônicas in 2018. Courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente.

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was born to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922. Lispector grew up in Recife and  moved to Rio de Janeiro at the age of nine, following the death of her mother. She is the author of nine novels as well as of a number of short stories, children’s books, and newspaper columns.

Chateaubriand on Writing Memoir between Two Societies

Charles Etienne Pierre Motte, The Surroundings of Dieppe, 1833, licensed under CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was born in Saint-Malo, on the northern coast of Brittany, the youngest son of an aristocratic family. After an isolated adolescence spent largely in his father’s castle, he moved to Paris not long before the revolution began. In 1791, he sailed for America but quickly returned to his home country, where he was wounded as a counterrevolutionary soldier, and then emigrated to England. The novellas Atala and René, published shortly after his return to France in 1800, made him a literary celebrity. Long recognized as one of the first French Romantics, Chateaubriand was also a historian, a diplomat, and a staunch defender of the freedom of the press. Today he is best remembered for his posthumously published Memoirs from Beyond the Grave.

 

Sojourn in Dieppe—Two Societies

Dieppe, 1836; revised in December 1846.

You know that I have moved from place to place many times while writing these memoirs, that I have often described these places, spoken of the feelings they inspired in me, and retraced my memories, mingling the stories of my restless thoughts and sojourns with the story of my life.

You see where I am living now. This morning, out walking on the cliffs behind the Château de Dieppe, I gazed at the archway that leads to those cliffs by means of a bridge thrown over a moat. Through that same archway, Madame de Longueville escaped from Queen Anne of Austria. Stealing away on a ship that set sail from Le Havre, she landed in Rotterdam and rendezvoused in Stenay with Marshal de Turenne. The great captain’s laurels had by then been sullied, and the exiled tease treated him none too well.

Madame de Longueville, who did honor to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the throne of Versailles, and the city of Paris, fell in love with the author of the Maxims [Turenne] and tried her best to be faithful to him. The latter lives on thanks less to his “thoughts” than to the friendship of Madame de La Fayette and Madame de Sévigné, the poetry of La Fontaine, and the love of Madame de Longueville. So you see the value of having famous friends.

The princesse de Condé on her deathbed said to Madame de Brienne, “My dear friend, write to that poor wretch in Stenay and acquaint her with the state in which you see me, so that she may learn how to die.” Fine words—but the princess was forgetting that she had once been courted by Henry IV and that, when her husband took her to Brussels, she yearned to find her way back to Béarn, “to climb out a window at night and ride thirty or forty leagues on horseback.” She was at that time a “poor wretch” of seventeen.

At the foot of the cliff, I found myself on the high road to Paris. This road rises steeply as it leaves Dieppe. To the right, on the ascendant line of an embankment, stands a cemetery wall; along this wall is a wheel for winding rope. Two rope makers, walking backward side by side, swinging their weight from one leg to the other, were singing together in low voices. I pricked up my ears. They had come to these two lines in “Le vieux caporal,” that fine poetic lie which has led us where we are today:

Qui là-bas sanglote et regarde?
Eh! c’est la veuve du tambour.

The two men sang the refrain, Conscrits, au pas; ne pleurez pas … Marchez au pas, au pas, in such manly and melancholy voices that tears welled in my eyes. As they kept in step and wound their hemp, they seemed to be spinning out the old corporal’s dying moments. I cannot say what share of this glory, so forlornly disclosed by two sailors singing of a soldier’s death in plain view of the sea, belonged to Béranger.

The cliff had put me in mind of monarchical grandeur, the road of plebeian celebrity, and I now compared the men at these two ends of society. I asked myself to which of these epochs I would prefer to belong. When the present has vanished like the past, which of these two forms of fame will most attract the attention of posterity?

And yet if facts were everything, if in history the value of names did not counterweigh the value of events, what a difference between my days and the days that passed between the deaths of Henry IV and Mazarin! What are the troubles of 1648 compared to the revolution that has devoured the old world, of which it will die perhaps, leaving behind neither an old nor a new society? The scenes I have described in my memoirs—are they not incomparably more important than those recounted by the duc de La Rochefoucauld? Even here in Dieppe, what is the blithe and voluptuous idol of seduced, insurgent Paris set beside Madame la Duchesse de Berry? The cannon fire that announced the royal widow to the sea sounds no longer; those blandishments of powder and smoke have left nothing on shore except the moaning waves.

The two Bourbon daughters, Anne-Geneviève and Marie-Caroline, are nowhere to be found; the two sailors singing the song of the plebeian poet will sink into obscurity; Dieppe is void of me. It was another “I,” an “I” of early days long gone who lived in these places, and that “I” has already succumbed, for our days die before us. Here, you have seen me as a sublieutenant in the Navarre regiment exercising recruits on the shale. Here, you have seen me exiled by Bonaparte. Here, you will see me once more, when the days of July take me by surprise. Here I am again, and here I take up my pen one more time to continue my confessions.

So that we understand each other, it will be useful to take a look around at the current state of my memoirs.

What has happened to me is what happens to every contractor working on a large scale. To begin with, I built the outer wings, then—shifting and reshifting my scaffolding—raised the stone and mortar of the structures in between. It took many centuries to complete the Gothic cathedrals. If heaven permits me to go on living, this monument of mine will be finished in the course of my years; the architect, still one and the same, will have changed only in age. Still, it is taxing to keep one’s intellectual being intact, imprisoned in its weather-beaten shell. Saint Augustine, feeling his clay crumbling, said unto God, “Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul.” And to men he said, “When you find me in these books of mine, pray for me.”

Thirty-six years divide the events that set my memoirs in motion from those that occupy me today. How can I resume, with any real intensity, the narration of a subject that once filled me with fire and passion, now that there are no longer any living people with whom I can speak of these things, now that it is a matter of reviving frozen effigies from the depths of Eternity and descending into a burial vault to play at life? Am I not already half-dead myself? Have my opinions not changed? Can I still see things from the same point of view? The prodigious public events that accompanied or followed those private events that so perturbed me—has their importance not dwindled in the eyes of the world, as it has in my own? Anyone who prolongs his career on earth feels a chill descending on his days; he no longer finds tomorrow as interesting as he found it yesterday. When I rack my brains, there are names, and even people, that escape me, no matter how much they once may have caused my heart to pound. Oh, the vanity of man forgetting and forgotten! It is not enough to say “Wake up!”  to our dreams, our loves, for them to come to life again. The realm of the shades can only be opened with the golden bough, and a young hand is needed to pull it down.

 

From Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800–1815 by François-René de Chateaubriand, translated by Alex Andriesse, which will be published by NYRB Classics in September. 

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was a writer, historian, and diplomat, and is considered one of France’s first Romantic authors.

Alex Andriesse is a writer and translator. In addition to Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, he has translated the work of Roberto Bazlen, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Schwob. He is the editor of The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick and an associate editor at New York Review Books. 

Abandoned Books, Anonymous Sculpture, and Curves to the Apple

Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs at Galerie Rudolfinum Praha. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In August, I become regretful about everything that I haven’t squeezed into my summer and probably won’t. Here is an incomplete list of books I have started and not finished: First Love by Gwendoline Riley, At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, Sex in the Archives by Barry Reay, and—many times—Swann’s Way (the first few pages). I abandoned all these books at different points and for the usual reasons; I was busy, bored, or left my copy at the beach. It seems like they are no longer going to be my summer reading—maybe in September.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

This week, I returned to one of my favorite explorations of the strange geometries of syntax: “Way down the deserted street, I thought I saw a bus which, with luck, might get me out of this sentence which might go on forever, knotting phrase onto phrase with fire hydrants and parking meters, and still not take me to my language waiting, surely, around some corner.” In Curves to the Apple, Rosmarie Waldrop’s sentences accelerate and swerve, reconfiguring the modern discourse on embodiment and subjectivity; there’s a spectacular volta lying in wait in each of these prose poems. “I learned about communication by twisting my legs around yours,” she writes, “as, in spinning a thought, we twist fiber on fiber.”

—Oriana Ullman, assistant editor

The Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs currently on view at the Met amazed me. They feature austere, serial portraits of industrial sites in Europe and America—lime kilns, cooling stations, gravel plants—which were already falling into abandonment in the last century. The photographers, who were a married team, called their practice “anonymous sculpture,” and the result is a surprising blend of conceptual and haunted that rigorously documents the past and transforms it into something almost tender: a monument of labor lost. 

—David Wallace, advisory editor

Barefoot Astroturf Situation: June in New York

The Drift launch party on the rooftop at the Public Hotel. Photograph by Meredith Huelbig.

June 10

I wake up to three missed calls and matching voice mails from a blocked number that turns out to be FedEx Express Heavyweight informing me that since I was not around to receive my thousand-pound skid, it’s on its way to JFK. The delivery in question is Issue Seven of The Drift, the magazine I cofounded and co-run, and it was supposed to arrive next Monday or Tuesday in time for our launch party Thursday at the Public Hotel. Evidently it’s early … and sleeping in was a potentially multithousand-dollar mistake.

Kicking myself for how late I stayed out last night—there was a party at Russian Samovar for Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus won this year’s Pulitzer in fiction—I dial FedEx and shoot an email to our printer. I got through most of The Netanyahus in a single sitting last summer, before I’d met its author. It’s mostly a satire based on an anecdote told to Cohen by the late literary critic Harold Bloom, but it’s also pointedly presentist, a self-conscious parable for liberalism in the Trump years. Early on it draws a dichotomy between history and theology that I’ve been mulling over since I encountered it.

While I’m on hold with FedEx I receive an email asking me to write a culture diary for this website, and I decide to start right away—no cherry-picking. Not that what I’m doing now is particularly “cultural”: I’m telling the automated system I’d like to “speak to a representative … speak to a representative,” getting transferred to incorrect extensions, hanging up, and dialing the line again. I haven’t even gotten out of bed. 

Finally our printer manages to get in touch with their FedEx rep, and we’re told the issues have been successfully rerouted to my coeditor, Kiara, and will arrive at her apartment in fifteen minutes. I pull on some shorts and do my best approximation of a sprint. When the truck materializes, we watch the driver unload the skid and build a makeshift plywood ramp to wheel it up to the sidewalk. With the help of our new editorial assistant, Jordan, we cart all forty-something boxes up Kiara’s stairs. It is more exercise than I’ve had in months. I reward myself with an iced coffee and walk home in a daze.

My plans for the day derailed, I deal with the most urgent items in my inbox, and by then it’s already five and I have to shower and head over to Helena Anrather gallery, where the curator and Drift contributor Simon Wu has put together a group show. 

By the time I make it there, late, the friends I’m meeting are done looking at the art and have located the tub of complimentary Pabst Blue Ribbons in the back. I walk through the main room on my own. The show, “Victoriassecret,” is woven together with a text Simon has written about his family’s immigration from Myanmar when he was a baby, the experience of moving back in with his parents during the pandemic, and what he calls “the emotional landscape of class aspirationalism.” I read a picture book Simon has written about his family history and watch one of the artists pose for a photo next to her sculpture of a Korean Jindo dog, which people keep whispering weighs two hundred pounds. It’s sitting on what looks like a cardboard box. 

My friends are leaving for David Lewis Gallery, where Danny Bredar, a painter I know but haven’t seen in a while, is featured in another group show opening tonight. This one is called “A Mimetic Theory of Desire,” an apparent reference to the René Girard thesis that convinced Peter Thiel to invest in Facebook—Thiel understood, from Girard, that the impulse to imitate friends and acquaintances could be a marketable commodity—but I’m not sure I see the connection. One of the works shows a man looking at his phone below a bubble that reads, “OH DOING FINE Y’KNOW JUST BORED & HORNY LOL HOW BOUT YOU.” Danny’s is a striking oil painting of John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

Half our group has already departed, and we walk over to Spicy Village to meet them for noodles on a park bench. Danny’s sent us the cryptic invitation to the opening’s after-party, and since we’re a block away, we agree to drop by. 

Now we’re on an Astroturfed rooftop where buff Nordic-looking men are handing out Aperol spritzes. There’s a DJ playing electronic music, and the ground is shaking as people jump up and down. Danny notes that the ladder to the water tower one roof over is too low.

For a while I eavesdrop on a guy complaining loudly about how he’s in love with an Orthodox Jewish girl who’s turned off her phone for Shabbat.

“I can’t even text her right now, bro,” he says. “It’s like, a paradox.”

Turning around, I see the silhouette of a man who’s climbed the too-low ladder up to the water tower and is now standing at the edge of the even higher roof. For a terrifying second I’m certain he’s going to jump, but then he does a little posturinatory shake and everything’s back to normal.

My friends are still chatting—something about the institutions of the art world—but I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to zone out to the music, run my toes through the fake grass, and watch the spire on the Freedom Tower change color.

June 11

There’s a gash on the bottom of my foot! Initially I blame the barefoot Astroturf situation, but the culprit turns out to be a little nail poking out of one of the shoes I was wearing last night. 

I spend most of the day on the emails I was supposed to send yesterday, scheduling them for Monday so people don’t think I work full-time seven days a week, and then it’s on to fiction submissions. Over the past few months The Drift has developed a massive slush pile, which our fiction editor, Emma, has been fighting through valiantly. It’s important to us to read and respond to every submission and pitch we receive—we want The Drift to be a place where new writers can publish for the first time—but it does mean we always have a backlog.

In theory I enjoy short stories, but today I’m having trouble focusing. It takes a while to get my bearings—decode what the writer’s going for, assess whether or not she’s succeeding—and by the time I’ve done that, the story’s over and it’s on to the next one. Reading slush can get disheartening, but then it’s always a thrill when we find something we love in the pile—something sharp and surprising and funny, at once intentional and light on its feet. Still plenty of time before we have to make our Issue Eight selections, I reassure myself.

I take a break to read Sam Adler-Bell’s essay on wokeness, which I’ve been saving for a few days in an open tab. I send it along to my family group text to resolve a recent debate about what “woke” means and whether or not it’s an insult. I like Sam’s definition: “Wokeness refers to the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas in a manner which suggests they are self-evident.”

I read some more stories before deciding to clean my apartment, which is cluttered because it’s doubling as a Drift storage and mailing facility. My mom always used to tease me about my cleaning method—do one small corner with an unnecessary level of care and attention, then get distracted and forget to clean the rest of the room. She died about a year and a half ago, and I’m missing her especially today. I put on some James Taylor, her favorite, and start with the piles of books that have accumulated on my desk and coffee table. True to form, after about ten minutes and a single shelf tidied up, I remember an email I’ve forgotten to write.

June 12

Kiara has put together a script for the reading we’ll have at our issue launch party, and she sends me a Google Doc to mark up. We both often find literary readings intolerable, so we try to keep ours short—under twenty minutes total, divided among a group of issue contributors, each of whom is limited to a paragraph or two only. 

I look through the most recent issue of the London Review of Books and read a piece on Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers, which I listened to on audiobook last month. Like many people in my demographic, I got hooked on the royal family by watching The Crown; unlike many people in my demographic, I watched all four seasons in a single week high out of my mind on painkillers after jaw surgery. When I’ve since discussed The Crown with friends, their reactions have led me to believe I absorbed more of its royalist ideology than otherwise accords with my ideas about the world. I turned to The Palace Papers hoping to be disenchanted, but the opposite happened. Things I’m now convinced of: Princess Kate is a Trollope heroine, Meghan represents everything wrong with 2010s self-promotion culture, Brown is a fabulous reader.

I’m still avoiding all the emails I need to write and to-do list items I need to cross off, so I scroll through the Iris Murdoch page on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I’ve been asked to write a review that has to do with Murdoch, and while I probably don’t have time, I’m tempted. I look through my bookshelf for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, which I was given as a present in high school and have still never read. (An unfortunate thing about me is that I hate receiving books as gifts. Once I’m given a book, it feels like homework and I’d rather read almost anything else. I was given Tess of the D’Urbervilles four times, by four different people, before I finally cracked it.) 

Murdoch is a writer I should like more than I do. An Oxford academic turned novelist, her fiction in some sense extends from her critique of the limitations of analytic philosophy. She believed that philosophers too often neglected psychological complexity, and that without a more nuanced understanding of the psyche, it was simplistic to talk about a freely choosing will. She also saw the internal effort to be more generous in our judgments of others as crucial moral work. In part because I like these ideas so much, I always end up reading her novels programmatically. I find myself mapping her philosophy onto whatever the characters are thinking and doing, which tends to flatten the stories into the kinds of examples you’re given in a course like “Introduction to Ethics.”

Later on, I’m wasting time online and see that Bernadette Peters has sung “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods as part of a Sondheim tribute at the Tonys. I click on the clip but it doesn’t scratch the itch, so I watch some YouTube videos of a younger Bernadette singing Sondheim. None of the recordings are very good. What I really want, I realize, is to listen to the original cast album. I grab my headphones and take a walk. 

Into the Woods is probably the first work of art I loved as a child that I still think is perfect—encyclopedic, an attempt to interrogate foundational myths while putting a full spectrum of experiences and emotions on display. Sondheim’s is a bleak, if magical, view of the human condition: we’re doomed to not know what we want, to want what we can’t have, to be dissatisfied when we get it, to love the wrong people, then abandon and betray and outgrow them, to make mistakes and cast blame elsewhere, to try and warn our children, to ignore our parents’ advice. Every time I revisit it, a different lyric seems to shout out what’s been preoccupying me. This time it’s: “But how can you know what you want / Till you get what you want and you see if you like it?”

On the street I run into the artist David Levine, and he asks if I want to come to his studio to see a short holographic film he’s just finished exhibiting in Paris—I wasn’t free the night of his New York screening a few months ago. He says, “I won’t keep you, you’re probably heading off to dinner,” and I neglect to tell him that what I’m doing is listening to a musical about witches and princes on my phone.

 

June 13

Today I have to tutor high schoolers over Zoom. I also help prepare the Drift issue for online publication tomorrow and send a bunch of emails related to the fundraiser we’re throwing next week.

At five, Kiara and I have drinks with Zain Khalid to discuss the possibility of his joining us as fiction editor. (Emma is leaving to focus on her dissertation.) When I met Zain last summer, he gave me a hard time about The Drift’s fiction selections, and every time we’ve bumped into each other since then he’s commented on our newest stories. Zain appears to read everything published everywhere and has seemingly perfect recall and intelligent things to say about all of it. He hands me a galley of his soon-to-be-released novel, Brother Alive, and I walk out of the bar excited, a little buzzed, and a few minutes late for our seven o’clock Zoom. 

Monday-night remote staff meetings are a Drift tradition that started in deep-COVID and has thankfully continued. As an issue deadline approaches, the meetings tend to be logistical—who’s taking an editing pass on what, when various pieces need to be finalized, which ones might be pushed to a future issue. This time, since our most recent issue has just arrived from the printers, we’re thinking about what the next issue should include. Sometimes our staff comes up with ideas, and we approach writers who might be willing to execute what we have in mind. But for the most part, Drift pieces result from cold pitches sent to editors@thedriftmag.com. Each meeting, we go through a Google Doc of the best pitches we’ve received the previous week and discuss the ones we might want to accept. Tonight we also talk over the plan for the party on Thursday—members of our editorial team will take turns manning the door and selling issues.

The meeting ends at eight sharp, and I’m out the door for oysters with my friend Gideon. After dinner it’s cooled down and lovely out, so I convince him to join me for another long walk.

 

June 14

The morning is a mad dash to release the issue—finalizing our newsletter, noticing that an image is too small, getting a broken link to load correctly on social media, etc.—and I’ve conveniently run out of coffee in my apartment. By the time we publish at noon, I’m in outrageous need of a caffeine fix. I look through the early reactions to the issue on my phone at the nearest coffee shop.

Almost immediately, it’s clear that the issue is being received more warmly than I’d expected. There are a few pieces I’ve been nervous about—pieces that challenge established progressive wisdom, and that I worried might prompt objections, but, at least so far, they haven’t. 

In the late afternoon I go over to David Levine’s studio to see his film. I’m not sure what to expect, and as soon as I get there I start to feel how much pressure is involved in letting an artist watch you watch his work. This piece, called Dissolution, is a hologram delivering a monologue from the perspective of a woman trapped in, or maybe as, a work of art. David tells me I can walk around and view it from any angle, so I initially try to indicate my engagement by circling the machine, going up and down, side to side. It’s too hard to focus on the text at the same time as varying my position, though, and eventually I settle on the spot closest to the speaker. Most directly, Dissolution is a commentary on the powerlessness of art in contemporary society—its commodification for and by the rich, its political irrelevance. But the piece is also a kaleidoscope of topics from the news, a mix-and-match of contemporary idioms filtered through a trippy early video-game aesthetic. There are references to Epstein and cryptocurrency, as well as to the Orpheus myth and the Library of Alexandria. When it’s over, I wish I could watch it again. I’m not lying when I tell David I loved it.

On the way home I drop into the new Crown Heights Union Market. Distracted trying to parse David’s argument about commodification and attention, I grab a small bag of cherries without looking at the price and am grateful when the cashier asks if I’m sure I want them. They are nineteen dollars.

Back in my apartment, I start Brother Alive. From the first page, the language is purposeful and evocative, and it soon becomes clear how ambitious the novel is in scope. But at the beginning I’m still getting acclimated to the world of three adopted boys, each with a different skin tone, being raised by a mysterious imam on Staten Island. The narrator, Youssef, might be mad, or haunted—it’s too early to tell.

Around two in the morning, Kiara and I realize we’re both up late plodding through the Drift email account. 

 

June 15

Kiara, Jordan, and I work together at my place for a while, and then I head out to David Zwirner, where The Drift is hosting a fundraiser for the second anniversary of our launch next week. I’m supposed to check out the gallery and go over details with Felice, who has been helping us coordinate the event. It’s the first time we’ve ever organized anything of this sort. Two years ago, Lucas Zwirner, who is head of content at the gallery, sent a cold pitch to our general inbox, and we published his essay on self-consciousness and absorption in modern art in our second issue. When we met him in person this spring, Lucas asked if we might like to use the gallery for a fundraiser.

The Upper East Side location of David Zwirner is housed in a Sixty-Ninth Street townhouse with an elegant spiral staircase that twists up five stories. As I’ll later learn, the building used to be the Iranian consulate before the 1980 diplomatic freeze. Even later, I’ll dig up a picture of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi leaning against the fireplace on the second floor and wearing what the caption calls “a red Dior.” For now I’m the only person in the gallery, and it’s strange to have a show to myself. “By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter,” curated by Hilton Als, is an understated exhibition of paintings and sketches. Walter, who traveled to Europe as the first manager of color within the Antiguan Sugar Syndicate, returned to the Caribbean in the sixties as an artist, writer, and critic of racism. As Als writes, viewing the series of small, fragmentary paintings is “like looking through a scrim at someone else’s dreams.” 

After Felice arrives and we discuss where the toasts should be given and whether or not a microphone will be needed, I walk around the neighborhood in search of a venue for our after-party. I poke my head into a few of the Upper East Side’s more dive-adjacent establishments before making my selection. (As I’ll be informed too late, the one I’ve chosen is the Fox News happy hour spot.)

I head to dinner with my cousin and her new fiancé. They’re in town from Australia and meeting me and my dad before they see A Strange Loop on Broadway. I walk past the Park Avenue Armory, where I saw The Lehman Trilogy three years ago (stunning, original, a capsule history of capitalism). I walk past a painting class in which everyone’s copying a cityscape at sunset (not so stunning or original, nothing to say about capitalism). I walk past the Central Park Zoo, and it makes me think back to a scene in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, which I finished this winter. Building the zoo as a favor to Al Smith is the nicest thing Robert Moses does in all 1,344 pages. At its opening ceremony, Smith was appointed “Honorary Night Superintendent,” and for the rest of his life, he was allowed to enter the animal houses after hours, any time he liked. When he had dinner guests at his apartment across the street at 820 Fifth Avenue, he’d take them to see the zoo’s largest tiger, whom he knew how to make growl at the name “La Guardia.”

 

June 16

I try to sleep in so I can make it through our party tonight, but the sidewalk outside my window is being jackhammered. The day disappears into a morass of party prep, and somehow by the time I leave the house I’m running late for our mic check.

On the subway ride over to The Public I receive a series of confused-to-alarmed texts from Kiara, who says the hotel is not expecting us. We’ve arranged the event with a PR person who offered us the rooftop for free and had several calls with Kiara to coordinate details. Unfortunately none of that information was passed along to the hotel staff: the roof has been double-and-triple-booked, and there’s some sort of NFT happy hour happening in the space where we’d planned to set up our reading. People are arriving for drinks and dinner reservations, and the staff is saying we’re not in their system. Someone named Paloma promises us no one will be turned away, but of course this is a lie, and soon enough our editors on door duty downstairs are reporting that the bouncer is sending home hundreds of guests, telling them they aren’t even allowed to wait in line. (People are also being denied entry for offenses like wearing Tevas and graphic tees.) I take the elevator down and explain to the bouncer what Paloma had told me only two hours earlier. “I never said that,” she says, after being summoned via walkie-talkie. “Did you get that in writing?” asks the bouncer.

Back upstairs, the guests who’ve managed to get in seem to have no idea anything’s wrong. The readings went better than we could have hoped—jam-packed room, audience listening attentively and laughing in all the right places—and for the next few days people will keep texting me “amazing party!!!” as if it wasn’t an outright catastrophe. By this point in the evening, our group has displaced the NFT crowd from the prime rooftop real estate, and I listen to newcomers describe Caveh Zahedi’s Ulysses performance, which they’ve just come from. It’s Bloomsday on the centenary of Ulysses’s publication, and I’m sad I’m not doing anything more appropriate. I wonder what Joyce would make of Ian Schrager.

Around midnight the staff starts ushering us toward the elevators, which is also contrary to the arrangement we’ve made, but I’m past caring. A few people suggest a bar for an after-party, and Kiara and I decide to tag along. Our friend Ben offers to pick us up empanadas, and someone I haven’t met orders a pizza. It’s the first food I’ve had in many hours.

Kiara and I Uber back to Brooklyn together with the leftover box of issues we haven’t sold. She’s locked out of her place, though, so she comes over to mine. It’s late but we’re both still keyed up, and we lie around laughing about the NFT happy hour and “Did you get that in writing” and vowing never to trust a PR person again … and then it’s four or five and we fall, at last, asleep.

 

Rebecca Panovka is a writer and coeditor of The Drift. 

Past, Present, Perfect: An Overdue Pilgrimage to Stonington, Connecticut

James Merrill with wisteria in Charlottesville, 1976. Photograph by Rachel Jacoff.

In French the word merle means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. A blackbird’s song marks its territory. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone’s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse open before me. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo.

Merrill’s big desk is in a small room—in an apartment of small rooms—behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems—mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk.

Mirror in the Merrill House. Photograph by Henri Cole.

In French, my name means collar, and I think immediately of the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” published in 1633, a poem in which the fervid speaker seeks more freedom in his life. It is a poem of strong feeling, almost like a rant. Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill loved Herbert’s poems and could quote them by heart. During my twenties and thirties, perhaps there was no living poet I admired more than Merrill, and I am drawn still to this American poet, who was said to be writing even while needing oxygen on the night before his death more than twenty-five years ago.

Long ago, in the eighties and nineties, Merrill and I shared an editor, Harry Ford, who seemed unconcerned that publishing poetry can be a money-losing proposition and gave our books his distinctive typographical cover designs. When he took me on, I was his youngest poet, as Merrill had been years before. Though Harry had found Merrill’s First Poems “ornate,” he loved his second book, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, and eagerly published it. This put Merrill on the map of American poetry, if there is such a map hanging in a long hall somewhere in America. In 1995, when Merrill died unexpectedly in Arizona while vacationing, his body was flown to New York City, where Kathleen Ford, Harry’s wife, was asked to identify it. She told me, “Its solidness befitted the great poet he was.”

Photograph by Henri Cole.

Sometimes I think Merrill is misunderstood as a technically masterful, unemotional poet. This is what was once said about his friend Elizabeth Bishop, too. Because he is so often described as elegant, I wonder if this is code for homosexual, for this is how my work is sometimes described also. Long ago, Merrill told me that he was grateful for the neglect of his early work, because when the praise came later in his life, it came abundantly, for this visionary author of The Changing Light at Sandover. This was his complex, epic poem, one which seemed authorized by Dante, with its guide figure, Ephraim, standing in for Virgil, with its conversations with “the other side,” with its occasional terza rima, with its repeated theme of stars, and with an epigraph from Paradiso XV: “You believe the truth, for the lesser and the great / of this life gaze into the mirror / in which, before you think, you display your thought.”

In Stonington, I am pretending not to be a guest as I climb the steep and narrow studio stairs to water Merrill’s ancient jade plant. It appears to thrive even in neglect, like a poet in middle age. Is it true that a jade plant brings financial good luck? Is it true that an extract from its succulent leaves can be used to treat wounds? Is it true that the jade is a tree of friendship, something Merrill had a marvelous gift for?

Dining room table. Photograph by Henri Cole.

Each day I walk around the village. Sometimes Gigi, a friend of my youth, accompanies me. Her family has lived in Stonington for six generations. When she was a teenager, she met Merrill because her grandparents lived across from him on Water Street. He read Gigi’s first poems before she went off to study writing at Iowa, and she gave him vegetables grown in her backyard garden. As a young woman, she married a local artist and teacher, who later died at sea while lobstering. She once lived in a little house without central heat over on Gold Street. The village was different then, with its noble houses falling down and laundry hanging out on lines to dry. Now the homes have been refurbished. The artists and the Portuguese fishermen have been replaced by wealthy summer people, but there is still a fishing and lobstering fleet.

On Saturday mornings, I accompany Penny, a new village friend, to the farmers market on the other side of the railroad tracks, where we buy fresh bread, local vegetables, and a basket of white peaches to share. Because Penny is a patient listener, the pretty cheesemonger tells her the story of her life, while angry bees fly around and explore the little mountains of pungent cheeses. Every evening a small group of villagers swims from DuBois Beach to the breakwater. I am afraid of the jellyfish and stand alone on the shore to watch the swimmers until their arms and legs disappear into the chop of dark water.

James Merrill and Rachel Jacoff. Photograph courtesy of Rachel Jacoff.

Ever since Hurricane Henri, the tropical cyclone that made landfall in late August, the blue sky has sparkled without a cloud. All day I listen to seagulls, who have so much to say as they circle around the harbor. I am relieved not to be visited by the restless, lonely spirits that frequented Merrill’s Ouija board. Later today, I am meeting Jonathan for a BLT. We’ll sit on a park bench near the library and talk about his new book on Bishop. He’ll show me his signed first edition of Geography III, and I will feel covetous. Then Sibby, a villager, will introduce me to her goats, her hens, and her aggressive, polyamorous rooster, whose comb will turn pale a few days later, a fatal sign. Then I’ll have a drink with the village warden, Jeff, the mayor of the borough, and his wife, Lynn, who will dig up a gorgeous autumn fern from their yard for me to plant at Merrill’s grave.

“What would Merrill think of my being here?” I ask my friend Rachel, a retired Dante specialist who knew him. “He would be so delighted,” she insists. In his too short, peripatetic life—like Bishop, he died at sixty-eight—he frequently loaned his homes to his friends, as he did to Rachel during a sabbatical in the eighties. In his will, Merrill left the three-story building at 107 Water Street, including his penthouse apartment, to the Stonington Village Improvement Association, which conceived of the one-month writers’ residency program that brought me here. I imagine Merrill folding his clothes in the basement laundry room like me, and walking to the post office to mail his postcards, and putting an avocado pit in a glass of water to start its rooting. He kept no garden, but he was “earth’s no less.”

The Perényi’s front door. Photograph by Henri Cole.

At a handsome house on Main Street, I visit the ashes of my poetry teacher David Kalstone, who was a brother-like friend of Merrill’s from the sixties. David died of AIDS in 1986, when he was only fifty-three. That was the year I came out to my parents. I don’t know how I survived that dark decade. David’s illness was mercifully brief—pneumonia, the dimming of his mind, and confinement to bed. Like many, he was cared for by friends and had no formal funeral. Some of his ashes were emptied “into the black, starlit water of the Grand Canal” in Venice, as Merrill told those gathered later at a memorial. Some more of his ashes were taken in a dinghy out into the tidal river just east of Stonington and emptied underwater. In an unpublished diary, which was preserved along with his papers, Merrill describes “a ‘man-sized’ cloud of white, dispersing, attended by a purple-&-white jellyfish acolyte.” A last teaspoon was sprinkled with lilies of the valley under an old apple tree in the writer Eleanor Perényi’s garden. There was a reading of the Sidneys’ translation of the twenty-third Psalm: “Thus thus shall all my days be fede, / This mercy is so sure / It shall endure.” Though the apple tree is gone, a horse chestnut reaches happily toward the sunlight today. Perényi’s son, Peter, and his wife, Sharon, who live there now, serve me a slice of coffee cake with a cappuccino on their back porch. While we talk about the past, Libby, their handsome rescue dog—part Great Pyrenees, part Anatolian shepherd—sits at my feet. Unusual mushrooms like “shameless phalluses,” known as stinkhorns, grow around the garden. If eaten when young, they are said to be crisp and crunchy with a radishy taste. Their caps are coated in a dark, olive-green slime and crowned with a small white ring.

Shameless phalluses. Photograph by Henri Cole.

Soon after David’s death, Merrill composed a quatrain in his diary: “Beloved friend, the sky + sea / of Stonington’s your limit? No: / To Heaven fly, to Venice flow. / Home-free, home-free.” And there are these sorrowful sentences: “Every ½ hour I just break into sobs—sounds I’ve never before heard come out of me. No quarrel ever. No tension. Pure fun & communion. A 2nd self I could reach by telephone, or walking into the next room … there are no more where they came from, the friends of one’s heart.” The poet Adrienne Rich wrote to J. D. McClatchy, who’d helped care for David: “When I first knew David he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was a divided woman poet/faculty wife with 3 young children … He and Randall Jarrell were the first critics to encourage what I was doing in the 1960’s when many who had approved my earlier work were getting uneasy.” Unlike other critics of the day, David didn’t think the generation preceding Rich and Merrill’s was “the last word, the ultimate canon.”

David Kalstone in his apartment reading. Photograph courtesy of Rachel Jacoff.

Some years after David died, I visited Merrill in Key West, where he then spent his winters. We sat at the back of his house in a big sunny room with cedar walls. John Malcolm Brinnin—the biographer, critic, and poet—was there. Both men wore Birkenstock sandals, and Merrill sat in a big bamboo chair that was a birthday gift from the poet Mona Van Duyn. They were talking about their elderly mothers—Merrill’s was 92 and Brinnin’s 102. When Brinnin recounted how on his mother’s hundredth birthday she’d asked, “What’s birthday?” and there was silence. After all, they were elderly, too.

Merrill invited me to lunch at a small Spanish restaurant with only a handful of tables that was tucked away on a back street. It was unchanged from “Elizabeth’s time,” he told me. In 1938, Elizabeth Bishop had bought a house in Key West at 624 White Street, with her friend Louise Crane. In her journal, she writes about the lime tree in her yard, in whose “cool shadow” love was nurtured and betrayed. We shared an order of rice and beans with plantains, and for dessert, we divided a serving of flan, which he slid off the plate with his fingers and then licked them. On a tiny shelf over the door to the kitchen, there was a display of large dusty santos—ornamental figures from the Christmas crèche—and I remembered Merrill’s poem “Santo”:

Francisco on his shelf,
Wreathed in dusty wax
Roses, for weeks and weeks
Hadn’t been himself—

Making no day come true
By answering a prayer
Just dully standing there …

Merrill said this poem expressed “in miniature the whole self-revising nature of the Sandover books, where no ‘truth’ is allowed to rot under a single, final aspect.”

After Merrill paid for our lunch, he calculated to the penny what the tip should be and left this exact amount. Then we walked to the library, where he hoped to find an English-French dictionary at the used-book sale to help him translate a sonnet by the French poet, novelist, dramatist, freethinker, and occultist Victor Hugo. Today I can find no translation of Hugo in his Collected Poems and I wonder which sonnet it was. It was Merrill’s sonnet sequence “The Broken Home” that first made me a fan of his work. The poem appeared in his breakthrough volume, Nights and Days, published when he was only forty. It is composed of seven sonnets about his relationship with his wealthy, energetic father, Charles E. Merrill, a founding partner of the investment firm of Merrill Lynch. The poem is a meditative lyric, but narrative, too, with psychological intensity. As there are in some of Bishop’s poems, there are discreet references to the poet’s homosexuality.

The poem’s sonnets are not strict—each is linked to another by a theme or image. Because each sonnet presents a self-contained scene, the poem expands and contracts like the reader breathing, feeling, and thinking. It begins with the speaker alone on the street observing a little family framed by a window. Then, later, “in a room on the floor below,” Merrill lights a candle and speaks to the flame: “Tell me, tongue of fire, / that you and I are as real / At least as the people upstairs.” The word real reappears, because the solitary speaker longs to be as real as the little family he sees in the window.

James Merrill’s embroidered child’s chair. Photograph by Henri Cole.

Some years before my visit to Key West, Merrill had flown to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and been diagnosed with ARC or AIDS-related complex, though this was something he remained silent about for the rest of his life, telling only a few friends. Merrill was not a poet of grievances, but in his diary he opens up:

“The state of my health has made me stop drinking (or all but) + smoking (entirely) and kept me harder at work, I think, than I’d have been otherwise.”

“Art is a not-at-all reluctant alternative to life.”

“My days are numbered. But so are everyone’s, if only in retrospect … Thousands of people are in my exact position, only they haven’t thought (or wished) to take a blood test. I know that I shall (unless a miracle cure emerges) be dead in 3 years, more or less.”

Though Merrill described his illness as “bearable,” he wrote that it was nevertheless “appalling to live in a present whose future … has been so frostbitten.” He reminded himself to reread the lines 8–14 on page 304 of his Changing Light at Sandover:

Ah, it’s grim. Yet what to ask
Of death but that it come wearing a mask
We’ve seen before; to die of complications
Invited by the way we live. Bad habits,
Overloaded fuses, the foreknown
Stroke or tumor—these we call our own
And face with poise.

This was written before the modern drugs for treating HIV. I say modern, though forty years later there is still no miracle vaccine or cure.

James Merrill’s dictionary. Photograph by Henri Cole.

During my stay in Key West, I borrowed Merrill’s bicycle and rode across town while he exercised on his cross-country skiing machine. I rode through the vast cemetery and found Bishop’s house, which was hidden by a jungle of trees and potted plants. Its unpretentiousness pleased me—its wide-open shutters and front door, motor scooter parked in the yard, and comforter hanging from a second-floor window. Merrill wrote in his diary: “EB more present in later poems. The figures walking up and down the icy beach … we stand back from them … we see more of the human condition mimed out for us than ever previously.” Certainly, this is true of one of Merrill’s last poems, “Christmas Tree,” in which he sees himself and his destiny in a tree brought down from “the cold sighing mountain” to be “wound in jewels” and kept warm for a short time, with a “primitive IV” behind it “to keep the show going,” before it is left out on the “cold street”—just “needles and bone”—to be “plowed back into the Earth for lives to come.” Elsewhere in his diary, Merrill writes, “Life is so like Chekhov—the characters + motives all sweetness, the plot deadly nightshade.”

Merrill wanted me to see his Key West study and he was amused when I feigned indifference. It was a small space with a single bed at one end and a narrow desk beside a window at the other. The room was divided by tall bookshelves, and when I told him it reminded me of a student’s dorm room, he was pleased. He showed me the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary that had once belonged to Auden, in which he still hoped to discover marginalia. The small office’s modesty made me remember something the poetry critic Helen Vendler once said to me about Merrill: “He could have chosen anything, but despite enormous wealth and good looks, he chose poetry.”

David Jackson and James Merrill’s graves. Photograph by Henri Cole.

 

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Blizzard, and a memoir, Orphic Paris. A selected sonnets is forthcoming.

James Merrill diaries quoted courtesy of the James Merrill Papers, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington Universities Libraries. Copyright to the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University.

Adrienne Rich letter to J. D. McClatchy (dated January 6, 1987) quoted courtesy of the Adrienne Rich Literary Estate. Copyright Adrienne Rich Literary Estate, 2022.

Mountains Hidden by Clouds: A Conversation with Anuradha Roy

Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Gala Sicart.

I met the novelist Anuradha Roy in Delhi in the mid-nineties, when she was an editor at Oxford University Press and I had just published my first book. Not long after that, she moved to a Himalayan town to set up Permanent Black, now India’s premier intellectual publisher, with her husband, Rukun Advani. She also began to write fiction. Her fifth novel, The Earthspinner, which was released in the United States this summer, is about the war on reason and on imagination in a world consumed by political fanaticism.

Though I don’t remember what was said in our first meeting, I can recall a certain hopefulness in the air—there was a lot of that about, among publishers and writers, in India in the nineties. Writing in English was ceasing to be the furtive and poorly paid endeavor it long had been. There were greater opportunities to publish; new literary periodicals and networks of promotion seemed to be creating the infrastructure for more vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of that decade, helped by the prominence of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy abroad, was that Indian writing in English was “arriving,” no less resoundingly than was India’s embrace of consumer capitalism at the end of history. One measure of this apparent progress was the respectful international attention such work elicited. Granta and The New Yorker devoted issues to Indian writing in 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s independence from British colonialism.

In 2022, there is something very forlorn about the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence. Murderous Hindu supremacists rule the country, and lynch mobs—physical and digital—police its cultural and intellectual life. Educated Indians spend much of their time and energy trying to emigrate. Literature remains, for a tiny minority, the means to cognition in the darkness, and literary festivals project, briefly, the illusion of a community. But every writer seems terribly alone with herself. The sense of a meaningful shared space and a common language, the possibility of a broad literary flourishing—many of those fragile shoots of the nineties have been trampled into the ground by the ferocious invaders of private as well as public spheres.

Over twenty-five years of radical transformations, Anuradha and I have kept intermittently in touch. While emailing in recent months, I began to wonder if other readers should be invited to reflect on the fate of writers in India today. What follows is a conversation that explores some of the historical uniqueness of this fate.

 

Dear Anuradha,

There is a line in your wonderful new novel about how ordinary days can explode in places like India, leaving us to collect the shattered pieces for the rest of our lives (I am paraphrasing; I don’t have my copy with me at present). I was struck by it, partly because not enough has been said about the writer or artist in India who has to work amidst these shocks—of history, I was going to add, but the destruction of human lives and of possibilities in India is often too commonplace and routine to rise to the status of history. In recent years, I have become more curious about writers who worked under such extraordinary pressures—the Russians after their revolution, Germans during the early years of Nazism, Spanish artists during and after the civil war, South African writers under apartheid. What was experienced in these cases is something that has never been experienced to the same degree by writers and artists in the UK or the U.S.—the marginalization of art as well as dissent; the abrupt shrinking or loss of audiences and local patronage; threats of expulsion and exile, if not assassination. How do you calibrate your own relationship with a ruined public sphere as a writer (and citizen)? I remember J. M. Coetzee complaining about the obligation to address political themes in his fiction while he was living in South Africa. Do you feel any such imperative? I ask also because your new novel, though set largely in the eighties, is alert to the multiple transformations of India in the last three decades.

 

You’re right—we open the newspaper every day to some fresh horror. Terrible acts of violence are not even reported any longer, and if they are, they are forgotten the next day, or replaced by some other appalling public crime. I say “public crime” because these are now outdoor performances uploaded for general viewing by vigilante groups supposedly working for a Hindu cause: protecting “their” cows, caste, women, and so on.

Not only is the destruction of human lives and possibilities in India commonplace and routine, it is now well recognized as being sanctioned by the state—which does not so much turn a blind eye to vigilante violence as actively encourage it, and which ices the hatred cake by punishing the victims instead of the perpetrators. We have long been used to mobs that melt away into the shadows. The new development is that they no longer melt away; on the contrary, they become internet stars for especially vicious hate speech.

In this situation, the kind of books we publish at Permanent Black and the kind of books I write seem to me like faint shouts in an aggressive cacophony that drowns out reasoned debate and dissent. We are completely marginal to the mainstream discourse, which is clamorous, angry, and often abusive. In Germany, a hundred years ago, this was the initial stage of a fascist process. India is far more diverse, populous, and difficult to control centrally, so there is some hope.

 

I am relieved that you can see hope. I am less optimistic, perhaps because I am not as exposed to everyday Indian realities as you are. I worry that unlike Germany, which plunged into vicious philistinism after a century of unprecedented achievement in the arts and philosophy, India has moved straight from a pre-Gutenberg culture to the garish modernity of smartphone screens. The divide between a minority of writers and artists dedicated to a slow culture of reflection and creation and a majority prone to hectic consumption of politics as well as entertainment feels much starker.

 

“A slow culture of reflection” … that phrase fills me with an overwhelming sense of loss. Over the years we have come to feel that we don’t matter, that what we write and publish doesn’t matter. This is a new feeling. With intellectual endeavor there is now a sense of futility about what we do—the sense that we are not likely to contribute through our kind of writing and publishing to an intellectual or a cultural stream that will shape or influence attitudes. The new anti-intellectual tide is too powerful and hostile for us to resist, at least within the future that we are able to foresee. We are thoroughly antiquated and irrelevant—the books, the music, the art, the political values of secularism and equality that we still hold on to, are despised as markers of elite privilege. We are seen as traitors to the nationalist fervor within which the inspiration comes not from Tagore, Ambedkar, Gandhi, or Nehru but from ideologues like Savarkar … In my college years in Calcutta we were certain revolution would come from the left—who could have foretold that the Indian version of the Bolshevik would be a religious majoritarian intent on wiping out everything that stands in his way? It’s quite striking how the Stalinist method of imposing a new era through architecture is mirrored by our government, which is transforming the heart of Delhi through demolitions of historic buildings and landscapes. There are many similarities. The persecution of writers, artists, and their families—for example in the life of Anna Akhmatova—is a sobering parallel for people in our line of work.

 

Yes, I have been thinking, too, of the fate of Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, and Latin American writers. But I wonder if our situation is also tormentingly different. In almost every case of an exiled or persecuted writer, the forces pressing down on him or her were clearly identified, whether as fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, or the regimes of apartheid, murder, and torture in South Africa and Latin America. India, on the other hand, is formally and widely considered a democracy, not to mention a rising economic power. Much moral prestige still accrues to it in the eyes of many readers in the West— readers who will pick up our books without an inkling of the circumstances in which they have been written and the subjects with which they are indirectly or directly concerned. (There was no such abyss of ignorance separating the refugees of Nazism from their readers in the U.S. and UK.) Even those Hindu supremacists who despoil that democracy every day are careful to claim democratic sanction, and the global prestige of people like Mahatma Gandhi, before the world at large. In other words, no new critical vocabulary has emerged to take into account the radically altered themes and conditions of Indian writing in English. It is also true that Indian writers and artists have not exactly been driven into exile like, say, M. F. Husain. They continue to write, except they are under continuous pressure from a hostile state and a volatile mobocracy; looking up for brighter horizons they see an indifferent market, a shrinking readership in India, and an uninformed readership in the West. I think that this is a historically unique mode of marginality.

 

You describe the situation with accuracy and insight, and I know you understand exactly how dispiriting our knowledge of our own irrelevance is. And yet, despite our cultural irrelevance, because the shadow armies of vigilantism are so far-reaching and so unpredictable one is never entirely forgotten either, and never off the radar. We are constantly afraid for many of our authors and friends as well as for ourselves. As a writer, you enter into this strange dilemma—you want your book to be read, yet you don’t want it attracting attention, or, at any rate, the wrong kind of attention. We are perpetually in turmoil—a state of debate, worry, anger, and confusion of the kind that writers in most parts of the West don’t have to face. Formally there is no censorship of written work, but the atmosphere of constant anxiety within a whole community of reading and writing people, a sense of there being violence in the air we breathe, is equally undermining.

How can we respond as solitary writers to this situation of simultaneously being engulfed and being inconsequential? As you say of Coetzee, to what extent do the conditions oblige you to write about what is happening around you? For a long time I told myself my usefulness lay in doing my own work. But was this true or was it merely a way of legitimizing my desire to somehow carry on living only as I knew how? I tried, in All the Lives We Never Lived, to find answers to some of these questions, or at least to ask the questions. In that book, the Second World War profoundly changes the course of life for several of the characters. As in our present, people find themselves trapped in baffling, violent political events that can and do destroy them. Drawing on historical parallels was a way for me to reflect on my present, to do the only thing I think a writer can effectively and truly do in a fraught political situation of imminent censorship and physical danger: to respond to it through writing about it, for as long as the conditions allow this at all.

I have come across social media chats between well-known writers of Indian origin who live abroad in which they condemn the so-called silence of Indian intellectuals about what is going on here. I want to ask them if they have any idea what unbelievable risks journalists and writers in India are taking. Perhaps from a distance it is less easy to really feel the proximity of political prisoners who are locked up with the key thrown away. You have to keep writing, but you have to be intelligent about it. I was recently reading Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, a rich and lively account of the early existentialists in Europe, especially France, and their methods of dodging censorship and execution during the German occupation felt familiar. I was somehow reassured and calmed by the knowledge that even writers like Sartre, who were resolute members of the Resistance, took care in their published works or in the theater to say what they needed to and to carry on saying it without walking into the monster’s maw. It was amusing to read of a member of their group, Jean Paulhan, who left brief anticollaborationist poems lying around in cafés and other places, signed only with his initials.

One of the people from whom I have always drawn inspiration is Satyajit Ray. He gave an interview in the eighties in which he described much the same thing. When the interviewer interrogated him about the seeming lack of “politics” in his films, he responded:

In a fantasy like The Kingdom of Diamonds, you can be forthright, but if you’re dealing with contemporary characters, you can be articulate only up to a point, because of censorship. You simply cannot attack the party in power. … What can you do? You are aware of the problems and you deal with them, but you also know the limit, the constraints beyond which you just cannot go. … It is very easy to attack certain targets like the establishment. You are attacking people who don’t care. The establishment will remain totally untouched by what you’re saying. So what is the point? Films cannot change society. They never have. Show me a film that changed society or brought about any change.

What you say about The Earthspinner being alert to political transformations is true, but look at it this way: if I had set it in the present, if I had switched things around and had a Muslim man fall in love with a Hindu woman—I don’t have to spell out how the love jihad squads would have responded. Like Ray in The Kingdom of Diamonds, I try to write what I want and ensure the book won’t be burned. I’ve set Earthspinner in the past; I’ve tackled the question of religious hatred by a slightly circuitous route. Sleeping on Jupiter, my third novel, which is about the abuse of children by a god-man, is set in a fictional temple town and a fictional ashram, and these are its capes of invisibility. There is a reason for that. Nothing like Caelainn Hogan’s Republic of Shame, an investigative book about how the Catholic Church in Ireland destroyed the lives of women and children, could be published in present-day India.

All the Lives We Never Lived deals with political questions that are charged even today, but it is set in the previous century. The historical novel was also the favored fallback of novelists who were cornered by the Nazis and Bolsheviks, like the Estonian Jaan Kross, who was unlucky enough to fall foul of both and who set his novels of dissent in the distant past to escape both sets of censors. So did the Catalan Joan Sales, whose classic of the Spanish Civil War was banned for years by Franco’s regime. The irony is that writers in India who are at odds with Hindu nationalism have to count their blessings that they are in a situation that is not yet as bad as Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia.

 

As a novelist, you are concerned primarily with individual experience. As an artist, you are concerned, too, with form, quality of style, the texture of prose, and the rhythms of paragraphs and sentences. Indeed, these are the major concerns of most writers of literary fiction in the West: the emphasis on formalism allows fiction writing, or at least a certain mode of fiction writing, to be “taught,” while disruptive facts of violence and injustice are kept at bay. The current trend of autofiction, for instance, in which the sole referent is the author and his or her immediate affective experiences, speaks of a deeper retreat into subjectivity. But it is harder to deny in a country like India that the author and her characters are embedded in concrete, highly complex social settings and under severe pressures of ideology. I think it becomes even harder to suppress that knowledge during the kind of trauma the country is undergoing right now—which brings me back to the issue, raised by Coetzee, of the likely overdetermination of your themes by extreme political adversity.

 

I know what you mean. For me it’s a balancing act, but I think this can also give our fiction its urgency and strength. I’ve tried to write, in the new novel, about what I wanted to write: artists making art and ordinary people falling in love in the midst of political turmoil. But The Earthspinner is also deeply concerned with ceramics and dogs, both things close to my heart, and this choice of subjects is my way of fighting the overdetermination of themes that Coetzee complains about. I don’t see my fiction as a whole as political—I see my work as containing political threads. To me, The Earthspinner is not only about rising fanaticism but is also the story of two potters, of adolescent confusions, of our widespread indifference to the animal world. In these quieter and more personal threads of the book there are small power struggles going on, too, which for the people involved in them are as consequential as any war. The political is implicit in these domestic conflicts, but usually not recognized by readers as such.

People read what they want to read, however, and nowadays readers do seem to respond to the most glaringly political aspects of my work, though the obligation to do so is in their head, not mine. I notice this particularly when I meet Western journalists—very few of them ask me about the craft of fiction. Their questions are almost invariably about caste, religion, women, and contemporary Indian politics. This may be because they haven’t read the books, or haven’t read them as I myself intended them to be read, but it certainly has something to do with the obligation they want to heap on every writer from a non-Western country—to be a kind of artistically articulate native informant.

Of course we know it isn’t possible to separate politics, or the political threads of everyday life, from fiction—the fact is that writing is inevitably political, and the whole shape and force of a narrative makes clear the politics within it. We also know that it is not only writing but how we ordinarily live that is a political act, and right now, in our country, living itself is a hard thing to pull off.

What sustains me, I think, is that I have a sense of mountains hidden by clouds. When I say that, I am thinking of the view from my window at home in the Himalayas: you can see the lower green hills every day, close-up, but on some days the farther-off blue ones reveal themselves, and on clear winter days the white peaks appear, floating in the sky. There are still—despite the political sickness—things for us in India to rejoice in. The horror is dominant but the glory is around in fragments. As anywhere, when we are hemmed in and harassed from all sides, we try to keep these other things in view, and we carve out shells for ourselves, to keep the world at arm’s length even as we try to make a difference.

 

Pankaj Mishra is a novelist and essayist. His most recent book is Run and Hide: A Novel.

Returning to Salman Rushdie’s Haroun

Justine Kurland, Georgia O’Keeffe, 2020. Courtesy of Higher Pictures Generation.

After hearing the horrifying news about the attack on Salman Rushdie earlier today, I turned to the first book of his I’d read—or rather, the book he read, on audiocassette, to my family on long car journeys.

“Just do one thing for me,” Haroun called to his father. “Just this one thing. Think of the happiest times you can remember. Think of the view of the Valley of Κ we saw when we came through the Tunnel of I. Think about your wedding day. Please.”

—Emily Stokes, editor

In her new book, SCUMB Manifesto, the photographer Justine Kurland takes scissors to her personal collection of 150 photo books. Paying homage to feminist collages and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men) Manifesto, she dismembers and reconfigures photographs by the straight white men who have dominated the photography industry for decades. The result is a radical remaking of classic works that often exposes male photographers’ continuous fetishization of women’s bodies—Alfred Stieglitz’s obsession with Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands, or Lee Friedlander’s fixation on nudes. Against colorful backdrops, the disembodied hands and legs are striking and strange, compelling in their own right.

—Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro, intern

Last week, I fell into a deep trance reading Mieko Kawakami’s newest novel, All The Lovers in the Night, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. The novel follows a copy editor plagued by anxieties, who drinks copious amounts of booze to cope. Kawakami creates masterful portraits of figures who isolate themselves from others in order to avoid rejection or uncomfortable conversations. These characters live in their minds but notice everything around them, in sensuous, strange, detailed prose.

—Campbell Campbell, intern
Read two short stories by Mieko Kawakami, translated by David Boyd, here on the Daily.

I am reading Middlemarch for the first time, an experience which I had for some reason assumed would be a difficult slog but has in fact been one of the most pleasant aspects of my summer; no one told me it was a book about the consequences of having crushes. Over Fourth of July weekend, I left my copy outside and a surprise thunderstorm left its pages bloated and warped. I got another, which I lugged around on the subway in my messy tote bag, slowly ruining that one, too. Then, someone gave me miraculous thing: a set of little Middlemarches, or Liddlemarches—the novel divided into slim paperbacks book by book. Now I carry my little Middlemarches everywhere and show them off to anyone who will listen.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

Memory of a Difficult Summer

Clarice Lispector. Courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente.

In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years, she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son, Paulo Gurgel Valente, has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas, the second in a series.

October 26, 1968

Bravado

Z.M. felt life was slipping through her fingers. In her humility, she forgot that she herself was a source of life and creation. She went out very little, turned down any invitations. She wasn’t the kind of woman to notice when a man was interested in her unless he actually said so — ​then she would be surprised and welcome his interest.

One afternoon — ​it was springtime, the first day of spring — ​she went to visit a female friend of hers who asked her bluntly: How could a grown woman like her be so very humble? How could she fail to notice that several men were in love with her? How could she not see that, out of respect for herself, she really ought to have an affair? She also said that she had once seen her enter a room full of acquaintances, none of whom were anywhere near as bright as her. And yet she had seen her almost creep in, as if she barely existed, like a doe with its head bowed. “You should walk with your head held high. You’re bound to suffer because you’re different, cosmically different, so just accept that the bourgeois life is not for you, and enter a room with your head held high.” “Go all alone into a room full of people?” “Yes. You don’t need to go with someone else, you’re fine on your own.”

She remembered that, later that same day, there was to be a kind of cocktail party for the primary school teachers during their vacation. She remembered the new attitude she was supposed to adopt, and so didn’t arrange to go with one of her colleagues — ​she would risk going all alone. She put on a fairly new dress, but her courage failed her. Then — ​and she understood this only afterward — ​she put on so much eye makeup and so much lipstick that her face looked like a mask. She was superimposing another person on herself: and that other person was amazingly uninhibited, vain. That other person was everything she was not. But when it was time to leave her apartment, she wavered: Was she not asking too much of herself? All dressed up, with a painted mask on her face — ​ah, persona, why not make use of you and finally be! — ​she sank timorously into the armchair in her all too familiar living room and her heart begged her not to go. She seemed to sense that she was going to be badly bruised, and she was no masochist. Finally, she stubbed out her cigarette of courage, got up, and left.

She felt that the torments of the timid had never been adequately described. As the taxi drove along, she was dying ever so slightly.

And then suddenly there she was, standing before a vast room filled with possibly very many people, although they seemed very few in the enormous space in which the cocktail party — ​that modern ritual — ​was being held.

How long did she last with her head held unnaturally high? The mask made her feel uncomfortable, and besides, she knew she was prettier without makeup. But without makeup her soul would be laid bare. And she couldn’t risk or allow herself such a luxury.

She spoke and smiled to one person, spoke and smiled to another. But as happens at all cocktail parties, it was impossible to have a conversation, and eventually she found herself alone again.

She spotted a man who had once been her lover. And she thought: However much love that man might have received in his life, I was the one who gave him my whole soul and my whole body. They looked at each other, scrutinized each other, and he was doubtless rather shocked by that painted mask. She didn’t know what to do except ask him if they were still friends — ​if that were possible. He said, yes, of course, they would always be friends.

After a while she felt she could no longer hold up her head. But how to cross the vast space from there to the door? Alone, like a fugitive? Then she half confessed her problem to one of her fellow teachers, who kindly led her across the huge expanse that lay between her and the door.

And in the dark of the spring night she was an unhappy woman. Yes, she was different. Yes, she was also timid. Yes, she was oversensitive. Yes, she had met an old flame. The darkness and the smell of spring in the air. The heart of the world was beating in her breast. She had always been conscious of the smells of nature. She finally found a taxi and sat down in it almost shedding tears of relief, remembering that the same thing had happened to her in Paris, although that had been even worse. She fled home like a fugitive from the world. There was no hiding the fact: she didn’t know how to live. In the safety of her home, she looked at herself in the mirror as she was washing her hands and saw the persona buckled onto her face: the persona bore the fixed smile of a clown. Then she washed her face and felt relieved to have her soul bare again. Then she took a sleeping pill. Before sleep came, she lay wide awake and promised herself never to run that same risk again unprotected. The pill was beginning to calm her down. And the immense night of dreams began.

 

May 3, 1969

Social Column

It was a ladies’ lunch. Both the hostess and the guests seemed genuinely pleased that everything was going so well. As if there were always a risk of revealing that this reality of dumbwaiters, flowers, and elegance was all a bit above them — ​not for reasons of social class, but just that: above them. Perhaps above the fact that they were merely women and not ladies. While all of them had a right to be there, they nevertheless seemed to live in dread of the moment when someone would commit a gaffe—a reality-revealing moment.

The lunch was exquisite, a million miles from any idea of hours spent laboring in the kitchen: before the guests arrived all the scaffolding had been removed.

Although there was one tiny detail which, for the good of the enterprise—namely, lunch—could not be ignored. The detail that one lady was obliged to ignore was the fact that whenever the waiter was serving her neighbor at the table, he always very lightly brushed against her hair, which gave her the kind of fright that always presages disaster. There were two waiters. The one serving that lady remained invisible to her throughout the meal. And it’s unlikely that he ever saw her face. With no chance of them actually meeting, their only relationship was established through those occasional encounters with her hair. And he knew that. Through her hair he gradually began to feel that he was loathed and he, too, began to feel angry.

It’s likely that each of the guests felt a brief flicker of anger during that lavish lunch. Each must have felt, at least for a moment, the urgent, pressing anxiety of a coiffure about to collapse, thus propelling the lunch into disaster.

The hostess wielded her authority lightly, which rather suited her. Sometimes, though, she forgot she was being observed and adopted some slightly surprising expressions, for example an air of weary irritation and disappointment. Or, as occurred at one point — ​what vague, anxious thought was going through her mind just then? — ​she looked blankly at the guest to her right, who was speaking to her, saying: “Isn’t the countryside there magnificent?” And the hostess, in a sweet, dreamy, yearning voice, said somewhat impatiently:

“Yes … yes, it is, isn’t it?”

The person who enjoyed herself most was Senhora X, the guest of honor, who was always inundated with invitations and for whom a lunch party was simply lunch. With delicate, tranquil gestures, she happily devoured the French food, plunging the spoon into her mouth, then studying it curiously—a remnant of childhood.

Among all the other guests, though, there was a feigned air of nonchalance. Perhaps if they had feigned less they would have appeared more nonchalant. No one would have dared, though. Each was a little afraid of herself, as if fearing that she might make the most awful blunder if she dropped her guard just a little. No: they were all determined to make this a perfect lunch.

There was no chance to relax and be themselves, to allow an occasional moment of silence. That was quite impossible. As soon as a subject happened, quite naturally, to come up, it was pounced on by everyone and the discussion went on until it ran out of steam and faded into a mere ellipsis. Since they all approached the topic from the same angle — ​for they all knew about the same things — ​which meant there was no chance of a divergence of opinion, each topic again opened up the possibility of silence.

Senhora Z, a large, healthy woman, fifty years old and newly married, was wearing a corsage pinned to her bodice. She had the easy, excited laugh of someone who has married late. The others all seemed determined to find her ridiculous. And this somewhat relieved the tension. However, she was a little too obviously ridiculous, thus failing to offer us a key to her personality — ​if only she would give us a chance to find out what that key was. But she didn’t: she talked and talked.

The worst thing was that one of the guests spoke only French. This proved problematic for Senhora Y. Her only possible revenge came when the foreigner said one of those phrases that only needed to be parroted back, with just a slight change in intonation. “Il n’est pas mal,” said the foreigner. Then Senhora Y, confident that she would be saying the right thing, would repeat the words very loudly, in a voice full of the surprise and pleasure of someone who has actually had a thought and made a discovery: “Ah, il n’est pas mal, il n’est pas mal.” For, as another guest said in French, even though she wasn’t a foreigner and in response to something else entirely: “C’est le ton qui fait la chanson.”

As for Senhora K, all dressed in gray, she was always ready to hear and to respond. She felt comfortable in her dullness. She had learned that her best weapon was discretion and was positively profligate in her use of it. “No one’s going to get me to behave any differently,” said her smiling, maternal eyes. She had even found a way of signaling her discretion, as in that story about spies who wore special badges. Thus, she deliberately wore what you might call discreet clothes. Her jewelry was frankly discreet. Besides, discreet people form a kind of clan. They recognize each other at a glance and, by praising each other, praise themselves.

The conversation opened with talk of dogs. The final conversation over the liqueurs — ​perhaps because things do tend to come full circle — ​was also about dogs. Our sweet hostess had a dog called José. Something that no one in the discreet clan would have. Any dog of theirs would be called Rex, and even then, in a very discreet moment, they would say: “It was my son who named him that.” In the clan of the discreet, it’s considered normal to speak of children as if they were the adorable tyrants of the household. “My son thinks my dress is horrible.” “My daughter bought tickets for a concert, but I don’t think I’ll go, she can go with her father.” Generally speaking, any member of the discreet clan is invited because of her husband, a wealthy businessman, or her late father, doubtless a famous lawyer.

They leave the table. Those who carefully fold their napkins before getting up do so because that is what they were taught to do. Those who casually throw them down have a theory about casually throwing down napkins.

The coffee helps settle the copious, exquisite meal, but the liqueur mingles with the earlier wines, making the guests feel somehow breathlessly vague. Those who smoke, smoke; those who don’t smoke, don’t. They all smoke. The hostess beams and beams, wearily. Finally, they all say their goodbyes. With the rest of the afternoon ruined. Some go home with half an afternoon still to kill. Others take advantage of being all dressed up to make another visit. Possibly, who knows, to pay their respects. That’s the way of the world, we eat, we die.

Generally speaking, the lunch was perfect. You must come to us next time. No, please don’t.

 

November 1962

Memory of a Difficult Summer

Insomnia made the dimly lit city levitate. Not a single door was shut and every window gave out its own hot light. Insects swarmed around the streetlights. Along the riverbank the tables, the few weary conversations, children asleep on laps. The wide-awake levity of the night would not let us go to our beds; we walked as slowly as nomads. We were part of the streetlights’ yellow vigil, and the winged insects, and the rounded, waiting hills, and the vigil of an entire celestial vault. We were part of the great waiting that, in and of itself, is what the whole universe does. Just as those other enormous insects had once drunk slowly from the waters of that river.

But within that great absolute waiting, which was the only possible way of being, I called for a truce. That summer night in August was made of the finest fabric of waiting, forever unbreakable. I wanted the night to begin at last to twitch slightly, to begin to die, so that I, too, could sleep. But I knew that the summer night neither fades nor dawns, it simply sweats in the warm fever of daybreak. And I’ve always been the one who has gone to bed, the one who has begun to die, while the night hangs there like a lidless eye. It is beneath the world’s great wide-open eye that I have prepared myself for sleep, wrapping my grain of insomnia, my allotted diamond, in a thousand layers of bandages like a mummy. I was standing on the corner and knew nothing would ever die. This is an eternal world. And I knew that I’m the one who must die.

But I didn’t want to die alone, I wanted a place that resembled the one I needed, I wanted them to welcome my inevitable demise. My deaths are not brought on by sadness — ​they are one of the ways in which the world inhales and exhales, the succession of lives is the breath of infinite waiting, and I myself, who am also the world, need the rhythm of those deaths. But if I, as world, agree to my death, then I, like the other thing I absolutely am, need the hands of mercy to receive my dead body. I, who am also the hope of redemption by waiting, need the mercy of love to save me and the spirit of my blood. Blood that is so black in the black dust of my sandals, and my head encircled by mosquitoes as if it were a fruit. Where could I seek refuge and rid myself of the pulsating summer night that had shackled me to its vastness? My little diamond had become so much bigger than me, and I could see that the stars, too, are hard and bright, and I needed to be the fruit that rots and falls. I needed the abyss.

Then I saw, standing before me, the Cathedral of Bern.

But the cathedral was also hot and wide awake. Full of wasps.

 

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. From Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which will be published by New Directions in September. Originally published as Todas as Crônicas in 2018. Courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente.

Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of nine novels, as well as of a number of short stories, children’s books, and newspaper columns.

Therapy without Professional Help: A Week in Los Angeles

Photograph by Maya Binyam.

July 24, 2022

I live in LA, but I’ve just flown in from New York after a month away, so I wake up early, too early, at 4 A.M., and read a book called Healing Back Pain. The author, John Sarno, is a doctor who argues that most back pain is psychological—the result of tension, which arises from repressed emotion. He makes his perspective sound like the most obvious thing in the world, and makes the common explanations, like sitting too much, sound completely idiotic. Most people have been taught to think of chronic back pain as arising out of an inciting incident and to think of the spine, especially the lower spine, as very fragile—even though, he explains, bodies are resilient and spines exceptionally strong. I want to believe him, because if I do believe him I’ll never feel back pain again, or if I do, I’ll have my delicate psychology to blame, as opposed to an innocent object like my chair. Sarno has a cult following; I google him, careful to read only the testimonials about how the book has changed people’s lives. Then I fall back to sleep.

I wake up again, at 7 A.M., make tea, and open all the mail I got while I was away—health insurance bill; traffic ticket; copies of Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu and A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis; the new Paris Review; and a couple of issues of the London Review of Books. I read a review of Either/Or by Elif Batuman, a book that made me very angry. I was nevertheless gripped by it, as I was by The Idiot, probably because both present a problem that I’m still working out and which I’ve encountered in many novels that I might otherwise be inclined to say I enjoyed. I always feel betrayed by characters with whom I begin to identify—not necessarily because my life or psychology is like theirs, but because I can understand the contours of their journeys and want to follow them through—who then, in brief and passing moments, reveal the limits of their worldview, ushering in black people or poor people or people who speak in halting English as props to signal the boundaries of their otherwise astounding capacities for empathy. I have no interest in reading about characters who are likeable, or about characters who are inclined to like people like me, but I have a hard time not seeing it as a failure of a book’s attention to detail when people are turned into metonyms for cultures and ideologies with which the novel is unwilling to engage; it feels almost like the opposite of virtue signaling: a brief and passing confession that the protagonist is (of course!) burdened by the ugliness of her social class. Almost every review I’ve read of Either/Or mentions Selin’s naive and enthusiastic embrace of great works of literature, which she reads as instruction manuals for how to construct a life; none mentions her stated difficulty in appreciating hip-hop, which she summarizes as an altogether alienating genre of music defined by a man “saying ‘Uh, uh’ in the background.” (“Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees proves, for Selin, to be the exception to the rule, because “the man, despite several false alarms, never did start rapping, and instead a girl sang an old song with beautiful harmonies.”) But I don’t know—obviously Either/Or wasn’t going to be entirely about Selin’s problematic relationship to hip-hop. That would be a horrible book.

Edits on my novel are due next week, so I’ve vowed to do nothing and see no one until I finish. I spend the rest of the morning line editing, and then do a YouTube exercise video that involves flailing my limbs around as if I were lifting and then dropping a series of heavy objects. The couple in the video tries to be motivational and in the process takes a very derogatory stance on exercise, emphasizing how difficult it is and how happy we’ll all be once it’s finally over. Every time they demonstrate something especially excruciating, they repeat that “there are thousands, maybe millions” of other people suffering alongside me, which seems like a gross overestimation of their audience.

I live near USC, and more or less lead the life of a college senior. (I just quit my job.) After lunch, I go to the university coffee shop, and then walk down frat row to the USC dental school. A month ago, my cousin, who owns a dental clinic geared specifically toward Ethiopians, gave me a teeth cleaning and two fillings for free. Last week one of the fillings fell out, however, so I went to the USC dental school to get an emergency replacement. In the waiting room, I read another review in the LRB, of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, which I had no idea was being reissued. I read the book in college, in a class on Caribbean diasporic literature, and then again a few years later, when I traveled to London for the first time. I had forgotten all of the scenes in which Moses has sexual encounters with men and was surprised and confused to read that Selvon’s “critical reputation was overshadowed by hostile feminist readings,” apparently due to the chauvinism of his characters. I google around, trying to find a so-called hostile feminist reading, but wind up instead reading a blog post by an undergraduate student that fixates on Selvon’s repeated use of the phrase white pussy.

After three hours, a dental student gives me novocaine, and once my mouth is totally numb, her supervisor tells me that I don’t need a filling, that I never needed a filling, and that, in fact, I never had a filling in the first place—all I need to do to fix my problem is use a particular kind of over-the-counter toothpaste. So they give me back my money, and I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to convince myself that I’m happy for the free mouth-numbing experience. When I get home, I line edit my draft for another couple of hours, then fold laundry while listening to the new Beyoncé song, “Break My Soul,” on repeat. When I get sick of that, I listen to “So Good,” an extremely underrated breakup banger from Destiny’s Child’s first album, The Writing’s on the Wall, and then to “Tell Me When to Go” by E-40. During any given two-week period I’ll be listening to the same two or three songs on repeat until they attain such a strong association with whatever it is that I’m living through in the present that I convince myself my life will never move on unless I find two or three new songs to replace them with.

July 25, 2022

I wake up at a slightly more reasonable hour, 5:30 A.M., make tea, and spend a couple of hours reading my draft. I’ve found editing to be like trying to perform therapy without the help of a professional. I’m horrible at outlining and at envisioning a future more generally, so I wrote the first draft intuitively, hardly aware of my motivations and whether they brought the story toward a fuller, more satisfied version of itself or derailed the process of actualization altogether. Revising has been a process of trying to make the novel sound more like itself, and to make it act more in accordance with the internal rules that serve it—doing away with the ones that confuse it, distract it, lead it to self-sabotage.

Late in the afternoon, I decide the only thing that will help me is swimming, so I drive in rush hour traffic to a public pool in Eagle Rock. It costs four dollars to enter, there is barely ever anyone there, and I’m pretty sure they let you bring in whatever you want: food, drinks. Unfortunately, I bring nothing to eat or drink, and by the time I arrive, the sun is setting. LA, like seemingly everywhere else in the world, is extremely hot right now, but when the sun begins to set the heat leaves the air almost completely, no matter the season. I jump in and out of the pool, and while I dry off I read the first few chapters of Abreu’s Summer Dogs. Then I drive, in rush hour traffic, back home. I listen yet again to the new Beyoncé, the old Destiny’s Child, and all the way through Instant Vintage by Raphael Saadiq, which includes one of my favorite love songs of all time, “Still Ray”: “I’m coming home to you / Wear something see-through, so I can see your heart.”

At home, I make dinner (fried zucchini blossoms), and, with my roommates—Greta, a fashion designer, and Calvin, a painter—look at the work of various photographers on Instagram. I have to take an author photo soon and am dreading it, because I hate having my photograph taken. Calvin insists that my photo should be taken in my workspace; it should show me at a desk, or on a chair, so that I can be clearly identified as a writer. But I don’t want to be identified as a writer! I want to be identified as looking good.

 

July 26, 2022

I wake up to a text from my friend Matt, telling me to read the Roe v. Wade piece in the LRB. It opens with a reflection by Elif Batuman on The Idiot: she, and others, she says, were not inclined to view it as a political text when it was published, but she now realizes the book is an account of the processes by which women and children’s lives are depoliticized. I make tea and read an article about palm oil, from an older issue. The article, by Bee Wilson, is very good—it is about how the oil, once eked from palm fruits pounded by hand and relished for its particular scent and hue, has become a near ubiquitous substitute commodity for other types of oils, one whose value derives from the fact that its presence in food and bath products is nearly undetectable. I am surprised to learn that it was introduced to the English market as a cheap replacement for tallow candles and was marketed as the antislavery alternative: “Every candle of ’em that’s burnt,” read one campaign, from the mid-1800s, “helps to put out a slave.”

I spend the rest of the morning reading over the final chapters of my novel, which aren’t exactly working, but I’m not sure why, or sure how to fix them. After lunch, I decide to drive to Skylight to get a book I’m planning to read alongside my friend Chase, called Will and Testament, by the Norwegian novelist named Vigdis Hjorth. I read Long Live the Post Horn!, also by her, last week. The narrator works for a PR firm representing the country’s postal union, which is facing a directive that would cut the post office’s budget. At a meeting, she encounters a postal worker who describes the lengths he’s gone to in order to find the recipient of a dead letter. That part is wonderful. But then there are a lot of gratuitous offhand descriptions of Somali refugees who seem to add to the narrator’s sense that the city, chaotic and overwhelming, is an affront to her own personal well-being—once again provoking disappointment. Anyway, Skylight doesn’t have the book, so I drive away empty-handed.

I want to find another body of water, but the beach is too far away and the pool is too familiar, so I go by myself to see Jordan Peele’s Nope. It puts me in a terrible mood. There are only three other people in the theater, no one is laughing at the funny moments, and I start crying, which feels like an inappropriate reaction, but Daniel Kaluuya’s minimal acting is affecting, and his character’s relationship with his sister, played by Keke Palmer, seems to me to be a constant and overwhelming negotiation of how to live with grief.

At home I make dinner and then futz with the final-ish edited version of an excerpt of my novel. Then I go on YouTube and watch the season-three finale of The Show about the Show, directed by Caveh Zahedi, which premiered on BRIC TV and then lost its funding. The premise is that each new episode of the show is about the making of the previous episode. Initially, the show is about Zahedi pitching the show to BRIC, getting it green-lit, hiring actors, and so on, but the actors become characters in their own right, in addition to the characters they’re trying to play. So do Zahedi and his family, as the episodes go on: the show acquires the qualities of reality TV—there is romantic drama, family drama, network drama, and the performers begin to experience the show itself as an enclosed space. Almost all of the participants, including his wife, at some point try to escape by refusing to let Zahedi record. He winds up replacing some of them, and sometimes replacing those actors with actors, until the show—which is ostensibly about collaboration (or exploitation: almost everyone, including his family, works on it for free)—functions mostly as documentary evidence of the process by which he becomes almost totally alone. In the season finale, Zahedi is moved by the donations of strangers to a Kickstarter campaign attempting to fund more episodes, but when he watches their short videos about why they’re so attracted to the show, he finds them completely boring. I think the show is really good.

 

July 27, 2022

I wake up from a series of intense dreams that derail my entire day. In one, I go to see my friend Tavi in a play she’s in, but one of the actors fails to show up, and the director asks me to fill in. I miss all my cues, I can’t remember any of my lines, and when they give me a script to read, I can’t pronounce any of the words.

I eat a mango—LA has the best fruit right now; the fig, pomegranate, and lemon trees in my yard are flourishing—and text Tavi about the dream, which she points out might be an anxiety dream about my book. Then we talk about Nope, which relates to an ongoing conversation we’ve been having about the dynamics on film sets, which hyperbolize the dynamics of other workspaces. The film is extremely self-aware and, to my mind, cynical, in the sense that it is constantly questioning the process and aims of filmmaking: who or what gets used as an object of capture in the attempt to produce mass entertainment. In the opening scenes of the film, Kaluuya’s character, a Hollywood horse wrangler, tries and fails to instruct a group of actors, producers, and directors in best practices for handling a horse on set. No one listens to him, and the horse inevitably becomes frightened. Everyone besides Kaluuya reads the horse’s fear as aggression, and the pair are dismissed from the set.

I finish working on the novel excerpt, and Greta shows me the new styles she’s designing for fall. In her studio, which is next to my studio, on the second floor of our house, I try on a pair of pants to help her figure out how to size them. They’re gray and twill, and although the fit is special, we agree that they feel dated—like something someone might wear in a seventies period piece. Calvin is boxing up paintings for his solo show in New York. The paintings are all contrast—black and white and gray—and depict a series of uncanny, seemingly nonsensical totems: a heart, a boot, thought bubbles. All of my “culture” today is interpersonal. I’m not actually reading or watching anything.

I go to the grocery store to get food for a dinner I’m hosting tomorrow, and then come home and do some cooking prep—blanch collard greens, caramelize a ridiculously large pot full of onions—and make lunch (gem lettuces, yuba, sungolds) while listening to Democracy Now!.

The afternoon goes wrong. I plan to go to the beach, but then it’s too late to go to the beach, so I decide to clean the house, but before I can clean the house I need more caffeine, so I walk to the USC coffee shop. On the way, I realize the Mega Millions has reached $1 billion. Unfortunately, I’m obsessed with the lottery, so my walk becomes consumed by a fantasy of how my life will change if I win, which inevitably turns into a negative fantasy of how my life will be ruined if I win. I get to the coffee shop, which has closed. The barista tells me he’ll give me my iced tea anyway, but then I realize that I’ve forgotten my wallet, so I run out, embarrassed, unable to buy the iced tea that will save my life or the lottery ticket that will ruin it. Once I get home, I drive to McDonald’s, the next best option in the neighborhood for black iced tea. Then I decide to drive half an hour away to the Ethiopian grocery store, to buy injera for the dinner tomorrow. When I get there, however, the owner tells me he’s out of injera. So, I drive home, clean the kitchen, and then realize I’m running extremely late to pick up my friend Dema from LAX. I run around the house trying to get ready, and in the process stub my toe on a hand weight. I don’t think anything of it, but then look down and realize I’ve smeared blood all over the floor. I don’t have time to deal with it, so I just leave.

I drive to LAX with the top down, listening to Charli XCX, grateful for the momentary respite from my week of self-imposed isolation. When Dema gets in, I turn the music off, because we haven’t seen each other in two months. He’s just returned from a writing residency and a tour through Alabama to screen a documentary he produced, which just debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. In Alabama, Dema and another producer drove around with a TV in their trunk and showed the film to the various people who participated in it. It’s called Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, and will be streaming on Peacock early next year. The film, which I found to be very arresting and hopeful, though never self-congratulatory or pat, as remembrances of the civil rights era can sometimes be, tells the story of organizers in Lowndes County, Alabama, who secured the right to vote for black residents; it is also about Stokely Carmichael and the evolution of SNCC, and features archival footage interspersed with the testimonials of people who continued to work in Carmichael’s wake.

We eat at a Filipino restaurant and catch up on everything. On the way back to Dema’s house, I play him the old Destiny’s Child song and the new Beyoncé song, which he hasn’t yet heard. After I drop him off, I stop at a gas station, and finally buy my lottery ticket.

 

July 28, 2022

I wake up late—seven thirty! I boil water for tea, eat some mango, and make pie dough for the dinner I’m hosting, though I have no fruit for pie at home. Then I drive back to the Ethiopian grocery store; there is still no injera on the shelves, so I panic momentarily, but the owner tells me they have more in the back. I buy three packs of it and then drive to another grocery store to scope out the fruit situation. They have rhubarb, so I buy some of that, some strawberries, and some ice cream.

On the way home I listen to the Beyoncé album, Renaissance, which was just released last night. I’m almost completely bored by the first half, but then the second half gets very good. “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind” are on repeat while I cook: gomen, using the blanched collards from yesterday; misir wot; kik alicha; shiro; the strawberry rhubarb pie; and a batch cocktail, the jungle bird, which has blackstrap rum, Campari, pineapple juice, and lime. I’ve been tasting everything and adjusting for salt, berbere, kororima, mitmita, et cetera, so it isn’t until 2 P.M. that I realize I haven’t had a proper meal. I make a quick salad—gems, yuba, sauerkraut—and then deal with some logistical work stuff (contracts, looking over the TOC for a book I may edit) before calling my dad. He gets my stepmom on the line, and we compare what we’re cooking. She’s making misir wot and kik alicha, too.

I clean my room and bathroom while—once again—listening to “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind” on repeat. When I like Beyoncé I love her; her sound is so big.

Dema, Chase, and Adrian come over for dinner. Greta and Calvin are there too. While we eat, we listen all the way through the Raphael Saadiq album and Erika de Casier’s Sensational, and then get into a huge argument over Beyoncé. One person, whom I won’t name, claims that she isn’t an artist—that she has no vision. Other people, whom I agree with, tell the first person that just because they don’t like her vision doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one. Over dessert, we play a game that some of us have played before. One person chooses an affect or feeling, and then everyone goes around and plays a song that, for them, epitomizes that feeling. We start with “angry,” and I play “Your Life’s On the Line,” the Ja Rule diss track by 50 Cent, which leads to the discovery that no one but me experiences anger on a regular basis—everyone else relates more to being “sad,” so we do that next. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a sad song in my life. Eventually, I ask people to do “boundary maintenance,” which confuses everyone. I start with “Next to You” by Mike Jones, Adrian plays “No Games” by Serani, Dema plays “I Will Survive,” Chase plays “Shadow” by Ashlee Simpson, Greta plays “DFMU” by Ella Mai, Calvin plays “Keep the Family Close” by Drake. All good but, I think “I Will Survive” is the best: “Go on now, go, walk out the door / Just turn around now / ‘Cause you’re not welcome anymore.” Boundary maintained! The final category is “horny.” After that, everyone goes home.

 

July 29, 2022

I didn’t win the lottery! Life goes on.

Chase is hosting a pool party in the Simi Valley. The drive is exactly as long as Renaissance plus an extra ten minutes, which gives me enough time to listen to “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind” twice. We swim and then Chase cooks a beautiful, gigantic meal on the grill. Someone says something that reminds me of Healing Back Pain, so I start describing it, and it turns out two people there have had their back pain almost completely relieved by John Sarno.

Someone else starts talking about the ghost of their grandmother; she sometimes rearranges the things in their house, or takes them away. Another person’s grandmother was a medium and haunts them, too. Someone else expresses skepticism: How could there be enough room on earth to accommodate the ghosts of all the people who have died? The air would be thick with them. Another person argues that the air is thick with them, and yet another person says that we can’t assume that the ghost form corresponds with the corporeal form—the ghosts may not take up space. I don’t have an opinion but can feel myself tearing up.

We walk through some dirt roads as the sun sets. Eventually, I leave, and drive into the worst kind of LA traffic: night traffic. The road is crowded, it’s almost too dark to see anything, and I keep having to ride the clutch. Near my house, some girls, who look like they’re on the way to the club, have gotten into an accident­­—their car looks totaled, and they’re all dressed in heels, yelling into their phones.

 

July 30, 2022

I wake up in tears from a dream about my mother dying by a physician-assisted suicide. I call her on the way to the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, and when I try to describe the dream, I start crying. She tells me, laughing, that if her husband ever tells me she’s decided to do an assisted suicide, I should call the police. Then she tells me she’s kidding—she actually can imagine electing to do a physician-assisted suicide. When I arrive at the market, where I go every week, it’s completely deserted, except for a ring of cop cars around the periphery. I google “hollywood farmers market cops.” One article says it was shut down because of “shots fired”; another says it was because a man was throwing rocks off his balcony.

I leave, buy some groceries elsewhere, and then cancel the rest of my plans because I have a hard time making my dream not feel real. It’s hard to know what to do when presented with made-up events that nevertheless produce real emotions. I’m very superstitious and have a hard time not reading dreams as omens, even though I’ve spent many years in therapy with a psychoanalyst and am well versed in the practice of treating them as the strange expressions of repressed emotion.

I try and fail to read a series of random things: a scan of “The Agonized Face” by Mary Gaitskill, which Tavi sent me; the beginning chapters of Days of Abandonment, whose sentences always feel like they’re washing over me—they are long and swollen, as if uttered like dictums in the mounting stages of an argument that will have no end. Eventually I turn back to my novel, which is, I think, probably to blame for all my bad dreams.

 

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of The Paris Review.