The Paris Review's Blog, page 81

The Sixties Diaries

My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his book The Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer—specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While his later journals were often written with the expectation of publication—meaning the journal-as-form could be assigned by a magazine editor—his sixties journals are much more internal. In these journals, he’s writing to document his daily life and his consciousness while figuring out how to live, and how to live as a poet, so to speak. These excerpts from his journals were originally published in Michael Friedman’s lovingly edited Shiny magazine in 2000. They were selected by the poet and editor Larry Fagin, who invited me to come to Columbia University’s library, where my father’s journals from the early sixties are archived, and work with him on the selection process. We were looking, as I think of it now, for moments of loud or quiet breakthrough—details, incidents, and points of recognition that contributed to his ongoing formation as a person and poet.

“The Chicago Report,” which narrates a weekend trip from Iowa City to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Anne Sexton put on by Poetry magazine, was written in 1968 in the form of a letter to Ron Padgett, a close friend and fellow poet. It was later published in an issue ofThe World, the Poetry Project’s mimeographed magazine, as well as in Nice To See You, an homage book put together by friends after my father’s death in 1983. It may be recognizable as an affable, freewheeling, and at times incendiary piece of first-person satire, filtering the voice of “Ted Berrigan” through the voice of Ted as known by Ron, or vice versa. My father was a working-class Korean War veteran who didn’t feel comfortable in high-class literary circles but did engage them at times, with amusement and a kind of gentle predilection for disruption. 

—Anselm Berrigan

January 1961

Whatever is going to happen is already happening.

—Whitehead, Aims of Ed.

 

Sunday, February 5

I suppose this situation is revealing concerning the kind of person I am: at my brother Rick’s wedding yesterday, four of my aunts, all about 15 yrs older than I, began to question me about why I am no longer a Catholic. Two of them were very antagonistic; they seemed to be personally offended by my beard and my disaffiliation from the Church. I tried to answer their questions intelligently, but in everything I said I actually had the secret but entirely conscious idea in mind of impressing my beautiful, shy, wide-eyed 14-yr-old cousin, dtr of one of the aunts, who was also sitting in the group.

 

February 6

At moments when things seem to crystallize for me, when life comes together for a minute, when what I am sensing, thinking, reading, ties together for a magic moment of unity, along with the instant desire I have to tell Chris [Murphy], or Marge [Kepler], or the beautiful girl I met yesterday somewhere, comes the simultaneous thought that I am the only one who can know what I mean. My girls must be real—not symbols.

 

[undated]

Ron [Padgett] & Harry [Diakov] & I forged a prescription for Desoxyn. Harry stole it from the Columbia dispensary, Ron wrote it out, and I took it to the drug store & had it filled. No trouble.

The pills are like Dex & Bennies, less after effects than Bennies. They make me nervous, awake, “high” if I allow myself to get out of control.

Great to take them, go to movies, pour over the movie like a poem or book … Makes for total involvement with a consciousness of it.

 

March 4

Heard Allen Ginsberg read last night at the Catholic Worker Hdqtrs in the Bowery. The reading was on the 2nd floor of the Newspaper office, in a kind of loft. The place was jammed, nearly 150 or 200 there. Ginsberg wore levi’s and a plaid shirt, anda grey suitcoat. His hair is thinning on top, and he is getting a little paunchy. He wore thick black rimmed glasses, and looked very Jewish. He is good looking, intellectual appearing, and was quiet and reserved, with a humorous glint in his eyes.

He read Kaddish, a long poem about his family and the insanity of his mother. It was a very good poem, and a brilliant reading. Ginsberg reads very well, writes a very moving driving line; and the poem contained much dialogue. Ginsberg seems to have a perfect ear for speech rhythm. The poem was based on Jewish Prayers and was very impressive in sections, with a litany-like refrain.

There was much humor in the reading, much pathos, and all in all, it was the most remarkable reading I’ve ever heard, very theatrical, yet very natural. Ginsberg was poised and assured, like a Jazz musician who knows he’s good. At the end someone asked him what meter the Poem was in and he replied, Promethean Natural Meter.

*

Sitting alone in Ron’s room at Columbia.

I make a vow—I will try even harder from now on to be a realist. To see. To penetrate the Personae of the world. To be in harmony with my will. To fully develop both my ability for practical reason, and for speculative reason, the methodologies of the tripartite will.

 

Tuesday, March 6

… It was one of those nights when it was good to be alive. I had slept all day. Started working at ten. At four I went out for Coffee. The heat goes off in our place at 12, and stays off until six. But it wasn’t too bad last night. It was raining slightly outside and the air was cool as I walked through the dirty, empty streets in the Bowery, to the all-night Cafe, a half mile away. My mind was full of thoughts about my thesis, about Hobbes four-fold division of Philosophy, about writing to [Dick] Gallup discussing his plans for the next yr. of coming to school here, of Pat getting my letter, of getting a job, enrolling in school, and many others. It struck me that I was happy. Everything, for a brief moment, was amalgamating, and had purpose—

Those moments are rare for me. Much of the moment can be attributed to Desoxyn. I take one or two a day, work fifteen or sixteen hours, reading, typing, planning. And Desoxyn keep[s] me alert, and keep[s] my weight down—in the face of my starchy diet—But it was a spontaneous feeling nevertheless. Even recalling my days in Tulsa, the days in 1959 when I nearly broke down, did not dampen it.

 

March 13, 9 P.M.

. . . While in Providence [in 1959], doing nothing except reading, writing bad poems, and brooding, I slowly came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do in life was to strive for saintliness—that is, to try to be kind to everyone, to hurt no one, to be humble, and to be as much help to people as I cd, by being sympathetic, a listener, a friend. This attitude was brought on by my observation of everyone’s unhappiness.

 

Excerpt from “The Chicago Report”

THIRD DAY

Sunday afternoon. I wake up at 3. Tired, but feeling good. Smoke some chesterfields, turn on the tv. Detroit is playing Baltimore.
                                                                        The motel restaurant is too expensive. So, we pack our things, smoke the last of the pot, and check out. 
                                                                                               Taxi to the bus station, and put our things in a big locker.
                                         Digging the streets. Dig the Picasso sculpture. Dig WIMPY’S, where we dig the cheeseburgers. Henry says, “They have WIMPY’S in Paris and London, too. I saw them.”

          Then we dig the streets some more, dig the people, and dig the postcard scene.
                                                                                                                                              Then, into another taxi, and off to Paul Carroll’s. We debate whether or no to take the acid now. Before dinner, or after dinner? After. OK.

                                                                At Paul’s Henry kisses the hostess, and we have a delicious dinner, with fellow guests Jim Tate, the Yale Younger Poet for 1967, and Dennis Scmitz, the Big Table Prize Poet for 1969. Dennis Schmitz has the flu and can’t eat. Paul Carroll is warm & friendly in his inimitable manner, and I kind of have a good time. His apt. is nice, roomy, lots of painting and photos and books and green plants and light. His wife is terrific, I finally decide.
          Jim Tate I like, but could easily not.
          So, dinner gets finished, and its off to the University of Chicago, to hear the two poets of dinner read. Henry and I secretly decide to take the acid. We do.
          Paul introduces the poets. They read. Tate isn’t bad, but not that good. He’s wild ok, but wild academic, which is only mildly interesting. Dennis Schmitz is ok, but his poetry is boring. We wait for the acid to hit us, and eye the girls. I think of Tony Walters. There is only one beautiful girl, a soft blonde girl with a purple dress.
          The reading gets over, we start for a party. We will have to leave soon, to catch a 12:30 bus to Iowa City.
          The acid hits. Totally freaked out but maintaining a calm exterior, I enter the little apt where the party is. Woolworth’s furniture, no interesting paintings, everybody shy, not too many people, wine. I have some wine and bread, sit in a chair, a big easy chair, smoke a chesterfield.
          Henry heads straight for the beautiful girl in the purple dress. I lose track of him. I am suspended between an acid trip and a party. I drop the burning end of my cigarette into the depths of the chair. I try to put it out. I think Isucceed, but just in case, I move over to the couch. Hundreds of hours pass. Henry and the girl disappear. I drink some wine,most of the people have gone into other rooms. A young kinky blonde girl about 17 comes and talks to me. I mention Korea, and she says, “I wasn’t even born then.” I say, terrific.
          I notice people are carrying cups of water over and pouring them into the chair. Very interesting. It seems to be smouldering. I hear someone say “. . . don’t know how it happened.” I forget it.
          Paul Carroll comes over and says, ride downtown? I say, what time? He says, 11:45. I say, ok. Then I say to Jim Tate: Tell Henry, Bus. He says ok.
                                                                                                               We go. The ride downtown is sensational, I take millions of rich warm side trips. After years we get to the bus station and have the Irish goodbye scene. I can hardly keep from bursting out laughing.
                                                                                                                  Then, into the bus station. Inside, its horrible. I shudder, and begin to feel a little sick, a little lost, a little scared, a little crazy.
                                                                                                                                              In my back pocket are postcards. I think: mail. It takes me hours to get the stamps but I do, lick them, & then go outside and mail the cards. Then I know I am a great competent guy, just a soldier on leave in a strange city like lots of other times and nothing to fear. But Chicago faces are ugly.
          I cross the street outside the bus station in the rain, and go to contemplate the Picasso sculpture. By now I am tired (tho I wasnt then) so I will not go into the incredible things I had happen in my art brain there. Then, back to the bus station, Henry arrives,zonked, but happy to see me.
          We buy tickets, and have 15 cents left. Get bags, get on bus.
          Long interesting mild & thoughtful bus trip to Iowa City, to arrive at 6 a.m. Monday morn- ing, disturbed only once pleasantly when Henry got off bus and bought us M&M’s.
          Iowa City. I get off, shake hands with Henry, say, see you later, I’m going home. He grins and say, see you, I’m going into the bus station and this beautiful girl I met on the bus here is going to buy me coffee.
                                                                                                               See you.
                                                                                          Love,
                                                                                                                                   Ted

 

Ted Berrigan (1934–1983) was a leading force behind the second-generation of the New York School. His books of poetry include The Sonnets, A Certain Slant of Sunlight, and The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.

City Lights Books will publish Get the Money! Collected Prose (1961-1983), from which these selections are drawn, in September. 

Anselm Berrigan’s most recent book is Pregrets. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and the editor of What Is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter 1983-2009.

The Family Is Finished: On Memory, Betrayal, and Home Decor

The author’s parents at his grandmother’s home, celebrating their engagement. (All photographs and videos courtesy of Menachem Kaiser.)

A couple of years ago, I sent my parents a chapter from the manuscript of a memoir I’d written. I couldn’t not send it, though I waited—partly out of cowardice and partly to prevent them from claiming a bigger editorial role than I could tolerate—until the copyediting stage, when it was too late to make substantive changes. While working on the book I’d been able to suppress any anxiety over what my family might think or feel about it, but once it was finished I remembered (you really do forget) that those it describes are not merely characters in a story but people in my life. And then, suddenly, everything I’d written about them was available for preorder. 

The memoir, which sprang from my attempt to reclaim property owned by my great-grandfather in Poland, was hardly a lurid tell-all. On the contrary: it was polite, restrained. The chapter in question was really the only one I felt nervous about, because in it I mentioned a falling-out and subsequent legal fight among my father and his siblings. On first reading my parents were, as I’d feared, hurt, embarrassed, betrayed, blindsided—but after some difficult conversations, we agreed that I could address their concerns by deleting a couple of sentences, altering a handful of words, and changing the names of my uncle and aunt, a gesture my parents felt would go a long way in demonstrating that my intentions weren’t to harm or disparage. This last request created an unexpected wrinkle—in the event that anyone sued me for libel, I would no longer be able to invoke the standard defense that it was all true—but I was fine with it, and the publisher’s lawyers, given how vague my account of the dispute had now become, eventually gave the go-ahead. So my father’s brother became “Hershel,” his sister became “Leah,” peace was restored, and the knot in my stomach loosened. But a few months later when I received the galleys, my mother read the sensitive section in context and wondered if Leah might after all have preferred to appear under her real name. I said it wasn’t too late to depseudonymize her if that was what she wanted, so my mother called Leah and read her the chapter over the phone. 

Leah, my mother reported back, was livid. Beyond annoyed or disappointed—she was furious, hoarse with anger. She doesn’t understand, my mother said, why you even have to publish the book. The problem, it emerged, didn’t have to do with how I’d portrayed Leah, who was barely mentioned—she got a couple of lines of dialogue and no description, as in literally not a single descriptive word—but with how I’d portrayed her mother, Bubby, my grandmother. Or more specifically—because Bubby was also barely in the book—how I’d portrayed Bubby’s sofa, and how that portayal, in turn, implicated Bubby. 

What it came down to was a throwaway line, a quip, in a paragraph describing the shiva after Bubby died, in 2005, while the family rift was still very much ongoing. The scene had stayed with me all these years, and I included it in the chapter because it was strange and tragic and funny, and so poignantly captured the tension between the siblings: three adult children, two of them not talking to the third, stuck on the same sofa for a full week as they received well-wishers. To quote the offending paragraph in full:

When my grandmother died, my father, uncle, and aunt had to sit shiva together. They sat side by side on Bubby’s green velvet sofa, minus the plastic cover (if Bubby weren’t dead she’d die) and minus the cushions—those in mourning must sit low, close to the ground—looking calm, projecting an air of composure and normalcy, but it was palpably abnormal and awkward: each sibling-faction was pretending the other didn’t exist. My father sat in the middle with Hershel to his immediate left, but there might as well have been a hundred-foot wall separating them. The room, the crowd, the array of folding chairs, the conversation divided along this fault line. Visitors offered condolences twice. Once to Hershel, to whom they’d relate a memory or sentiment about Bubby, then say the verse traditionally offered as a valediction to a mourner; and then slide over to my aunt and father, to whom they’d repeat the memory or sentiment, and say the verse again. 

This, Leah said, was a lie—there had never been a plastic cover on that sofa, and my assertion that there had been was disrespectful, defamatory, a mockery, an insult to Bubby’s memory. 

Really? I asked. This? Yes, this, my mother said. If you leave that line in, Leah might never speak to you again. 

I protested that I hadn’t made it up, I really did remember a plastic cover on the green velvet sofa, and it wasn’t some faint childhood memory—I was twenty years old when Bubby died; I’d lived nearly my entire life one block from her house, visiting often—besides, this was my story, not Leah’s. If she felt she had to set the record straight, let her write her own memoir, but in my memoir my memory is what matters. In any case, what I’d written was at worst teasing; even if it wasn’t true, it was hardly defamatory. These arguments fell on deaf ears. Leah insists there was no plastic cover, my mother said, that what you’ve written is a lie—there’s nothing else to talk about, your memory is wrong, you have to take it out. 

Now, I’ll admit that on the subject of Bubby’s home decor, Leah had more credibility, or let’s say a better vantage, than I did. As Bubby’s youngest child, she had grown up in that house; indeed, she had been the one to inherit and to discard that very sofa. Her sheer conviction that the sofa had never been covered carried weight, no question. At the same time, confidence is hardly conclusive. People often misremember details they’d swear to on their mother’s grave. Plus, Leah was obviously invested in her conception of her mother as someone who wouldn’t and didn’t cover the sofa. 

Still, maybe my memory was wrong? It had been three years since I’d written the first draft of that chapter, and after reading and rewriting it who knows how many times, I could no longer be totally sure whether I was remembering an actual plastic cover or merely my own description of it; past a certain point, the recalling and recording process grows more circular, the line between remembering and recounting more porous. It was not impossible that reading and rereading what I’d written about Bubby’s sofa had warped my memory of Bubby’s sofa; maybe I’d allowed what I hoped was the truth—because clearly I liked the line, I thought it was funny—to become what I remembered as the truth. 

I called my eldest sister, Reva, who is nine years older than I am and whose memory of Bubby’s home would presumably be that much more reliable. I asked if she could recall the green velvet sofa in Bubby’s living room, and whether it was covered. Without hesitation Reva said it was. I asked if she was certain; she said she was 100 percent certain; I told her Leah was 100 percent certain that it wasn’t covered; Reva did not waver. 

My mother didn’t outright reject my sister’s claim but nonetheless insisted it was immaterial. Between Reva’s memory and Leah’s, my mother said, the latter is more authoritative. On this point I agreed. Yet even though, in a strict historical sense, one of them had to be wrong, both Leah and Reva were, I contended, solid witnesses. The real question at hand wasn’t whether Bubby’s sofa had been covered but whether I had sufficiently substantiated my claim that it had. My book wasn’t journalism. A memoirist must be honest, of course: she should not fabricate, but nor should she be responsible for sifting through every competing version of events; while her story must be true, it need not and in fact cannot aspire to a purely objective truth. 

Leah was unpersuaded. To her this was a question of objective truth, of factual history: she believed (she would say she knew) that she was correct and that what I’d written was an uncomplicated falsehood. I disagreed—at the very least it was a complicated falsehood—but I respected her stance. It was principled and antiwriterly and did not care for rhetorical contrivances, for distinctions between supposed types of truth. What’s true is true.

I set out to survey everyone else in the family. My thinking was that if some critical number remembered that the sofa was covered, then I could argue the case on Leah’s terms, i.e., establish that what I remembered was (more) objectively true. But there was no consensus: no one seemed confident in either direction.  

Yet something else emerged. Although no one could remember whether there was a plastic cover on the sofa, everyone remembered plastic covers on the dining room chairs. 

What does that matter? asked my mother, advocating for Leah. You didn’t write about chairs, you wrote about the sofa. Of course it matters, I said. This is not about the sofa per se, it’s about Bubby, about whether or not what I wrote mischaracterizes her or, as Leah contends, defames her person. Now, given that there’s unaminous agreement that Bubby covered the chairs—not even Leah disputes this—isn’t it accurate, or at least not inaccurate, to say that Bubby was the sort of person who covered the furniture? No, my mother said, it’s totally different. It’s totally different? I asked. A sofa is not a chair, my mother said. But suppose, I said, that Bubby had in fact covered her sofa, and I wrote what I wrote but said, incorrectly, that the sofa was red rather than green. Would you then claim that what I’d written was dishonest or misleading? Of course not—getting an incidental detail wrong wouldn’t negate the larger truth. It’s not the same, my mother said, not at all the same, a difference of color is not a difference, but when it comes to slipcovers, a sofa is not a chair and a chair is not a sofa: what a covered sofa conveys is very different, i.e., the type of person who covers chairs is not or at least not necessarily the type who covers the sofa. The danger of a dining room chair getting dirty is much more pronounced. People don’t eat on the sofa. Of course people eat on the sofa, I said. Well, my mother said, they’re not supposed to.

The next day, my mother emailed me an old photograph she’d dug up. It was of her and my father, newly engaged, sitting on the green velvet sofa. There was no plastic cover. Case closed, my mother said. I won’t dispute that it’s telling, I replied, but by no means is this conclusive. Firstly, the seat cushions are not visible: the sofa was a chesterfield, a tricky shape as far as slipcovers are concerned, and it isn’t at all impossible that only the cushions, not the back, were covered. Secondly, it might very well be the case that the sofa was usually covered but was uncovered on the day the photo was taken: if there was ever an occasion for a woman who covered her sofa to uncover her sofa it would be this one, i.e., welcoming her soon-to-be daughter-in-law into her home.

My mother, tireless, turned up more photographs:

The author’s mother in his grandmother’s living room, with his sister Batsheva and another relative.

These were from Purim, 1986, from the seudah, easily the messiest, most rambunctious meal on the Jewish calendar—everyone is in costume and doling out candy; it’s a mitzvah to eat, a mitzvah to get drunk; there are a steady stream of guests, invited and otherwise, and constant eruptions of singing and dancing—and they made clear that there was no plastic cover on any part of the sofa. And if the sofa wasn’t covered on Purim, my mother contended, then it was never covered. I conceded that this argument, while not definitive, was pretty compelling. 

I then realized that I was sitting on potentially crucial evidence of my own. One of the more personal chapters in my book recounts the experience of watching, alone and then again with my family, a few hours’ worth of previously neglected home videos I’d had digitized from a box of Super 8s my mother had given me. With the sofa controversy in full bloom, I watched the footage a third time, scrutinizing the furniture for that telltale shine. 

The green velvet sofa itself made only a single appearance, at my parents’ engagement party, and here, as in the photographs, it was not covered. But two other clips were, I thought, extremely relevant.

The first, a banal domestic scene, takes place in the living room of the house my grandparents lived in before moving to the one I remembered. My grandfather makes himself comfortable; my father, about eleven years old, plays the piano while Leah, nine years younger, runs around being adorable. 

The first piece of furniture that comes into view, the ottoman, appears to be covered, though the footage is so grainy that you can’t tell for sure, but then there’s the armchair, which is indisputably covered—it’s evident as soon as my grandfather sits down to read the newspaper. The camera pans to the other side of the room, revealing a sofa, and when baby Leah puts her hand on the cushion, it’s so conspicuously covered that, even though the film is silent, you can just about hear the crinkle. 

A still from the home video above, in which Leah’s hand touches the sofa cushion.

The second clip, from my father’s bar mitzvah, shows my father and uncle teasing and tickling Leah on a sofa that is dramatically, flagrantly covered.

Technically, there was no smoking gun—neither of these was the green velvet sofa I’d maligned in the book—but I’d found a vivid form of validation: clearly Bubby, at least sometime prior to 1986, was the sort of person who covered not just the dining-room chairs but the sofa as well. (Also established, deliciously, was Leah’s firsthand experience of her mother’s sofa-covering.) Still, you could argue that this made my characterization even worse, more defamatory, because if Bubby had in fact made a decision to stop covering her sofa—to no longer be a person who covered her sofa—then maybe I was trampling that, insisting on a version of Bubby that she herself had disavowed.

All of which raises the fundamental question here: What does it even mean to cover your sofa? What was the nature of the defamation being alleged? 

The answer would seem to be fairly straightforward. Sofa-covering demonstrates a distinctly un-American variety of materialism, of accumulationism: we deride those who care too much about protecting stuff that doesn’t merit protection. If you’re wealthy enough to purchase expensive furniture, you’re wealthy enough to use it without a prophylactic; and if you can only afford cheap furniture, don’t you dare pretend it’s not cheap. A plastic-covered sofa signals a stereotype that is, on the whole, derogatory, albeit in a harmless, even cute kind of way. It’s very immigrant-ish: meek, apprehensive, out of touch, unchill, uptight.

This doesn’t not describe my grandmother. She was a Polish immigrant, a Holocaust survivor, who lived a long, full life in North America but never lost that not-from-here-ness. Her English was fine but far from perfect; she had a thick accent, and you could hear in her voice her hesitation, her bottomless anxiety, which to us was an inextricable, maybe even essential, part of her foreignness; there was about her a permanent discomfort, a palpable unease. She was exceedingly overprotective, besieged by worry and fear. She’d fret when one of her grandchildren or even one of her adult children left her house to walk the one (very safe) block home. When we’d tell her we were traveling to a country she considered unsafe—which was most countries—she’d tearfully plead for us to reconsider. She’d weep if we didn’t finish the food on our plates. She was in so many ways a heimish Jewish grandmother, a bubbe, very much the type—since we’re talking types—to cover her sofa. (Needless to say, many of her friends, also Polish immigrants, also Holocaust survivors, also very much the type, covered their sofas.) What I’m saying is that the stereotype fits. 

And yet it fails, utterly, to capture my grandmother. Not because it’s false, but because it’s incomplete, myopic, superficial—and is therefore false. Even if it’s factual it isn’t honest. It’s a caricature, not a portrait; it’s flat, uninteresting, lazy. 

In fact this entire inquiry has been lazy and circumscribed. The question of whether or not my grandmother covered her sofa is really not much more than a convoluted postulation of the stereotype—all it does is ask if the joke applies, without any care or even curiosity extended toward her character or experiences. If I’m going to interrogate my grandmother’s home-decorating decisions, to do so responsibly and honorably, then context matters, personal history matters. I first have to at least try to appreciate what those decisions might have represented to her. 

I never had this sort of conversation with my grandmother—our interactions were loving and solicitous but unrevealing; she didn’t talk about her past and we, her children and grandchildren, didn’t press—but still, some broad truths are discernible. Earlier, when I mentioned that my grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, I didn’t elaborate, I said it only to illustrate a type—it was very nearly an aesthetic description—but now let’s slow down, consider what that might mean with respect to her sense of home. I don’t know the particulars of what she went through in the war but I do know, have always known, that the loss she suffered was close to absolute. Nearly every person she knew, including her parents and eight of her nine siblings—gone. Every object, every keepsake—gone. Her home, the home of everyone she knew—gone. My point is not to make her an object of pity. I only mean to highlight the magnitude of loss she experienced, at a formative age (she was sixteen years old when World War II broke out), in order to begin to recognize, in some limited way, what “home”—the “museum of the soul … archive of its experiences,” as Mario Praz has written—was to my grandmother, what it stood for, what it never could be. My grandparents’ homes after the war, first in New York and then in Toronto, were where they escaped to, where they began anew. They were places of refuge, literally and symbolically, even if any sense of security, of belonging, was—must have been—fragile, fraught. 

That puts my grandmother’s protectiveness in context, I think. It wasn’t simply neurosis, idiosyncrasy, an old-person thing, a leftover habit from a previous era. Her home was her domain, where she had some sense of control, where everyone could be accounted for. (All three of Bubby’s children raised their own children, it bears mentioning, within a two-block radius of her house.) I have almost no memories of Bubby outside the home; it’s hard even to imagine her anywhere else. 

It’s tempting to project, to make metaphor—Bubby covered the sofa, Bubby stopped covering the sofa—but I don’t know. I don’t know what it means, what it doesn’t mean, only that it touches on something bigger. Maybe after my grandfather’s death she could let go, she no longer felt not-at-home, that last tether had been severed: it’s a story of adaptation (or of resignation?). Or maybe she could let go, she no longer cared, after the one person in her life who understood what she had been through was gone: it’s a story of abandonment. At that Purim seudah in 1986 I was eleven months old; I don’t remember it. Still, it’s easy to imagine the ruckus, the food, the shrieking, the joy. All her children and grandchildren, who’ve never known anything but love and safety and security, together in her home, protected. 

I took out the sentence, by the way—I gave in. I don’t think I was wrong in what I wrote, or at least I think I was within my rights. I don’t think I misrepresented, but it wasn’t her, it wasn’t enough.

 

Menachem Kaiser’s book Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure was included in the New York Times “Critics’ Top Books of 2021” and won the 2022 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Announcing the Winners of 92Y’s 2022 Discovery Contest

The winners of the 92Y Discovery Contest. From top left, clockwise: Jada Renée Allen, Sasha Burshteyn, April Goldman, Kristina Martino.

For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, Solmaz Sharif, and Diana Khoi Nguyen, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.

This year’s competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by the preliminary judges, Sumita Chakraborty and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, the final judges—Victoria Chang, Brian Teare, and Phillip B. Williams—awarded this year’s prizes to Jada Renée Allen, Sasha Burshteyn, April Goldman, and Kristina Martino. The runners-up are Jae Nichelle and Daniel Shonning. The Paris Review Daily is pleased to to publish the poems of this year’s winners.

CHIRAQ
by Jada Renée Allen……       .the tenor
….. …. ….. ……….. …. ….. ………..here is palpable
….. …. ….. ……                               an aerial view
….. …. ….. ……                              .leads us to
….. …. ….. ……                              .the very dregs
….. …. ….. ……                              .of September
….. …. ….. ……                              .bullet-tendrils
….. …. ….. ……                              .sprout from
….. …. ….. ……                              .the mouths
….. …. ….. ……                              .of the young
….. …. ….. ……                              .dead rebels
….. …. ….. ……                              .bloody blocks
….. …. ….. ……                              .a red that whips
….. …. ….. ……                              .not-here whereas
….. …. ….. ……                              .the mothers
….. …. ….. ……                              .kiss the concrete
….. …. ….. ……                              .their darlings
….. …. ….. ……                              .go gone at
….. …. ….. ……                              .laying down
….. …. ….. ……                              .roses with lips
….. …. ….. ……                              .blistered by lament
….. …. ….. ……                              .cue the ululations
….. …. ….. ……                              .the glossolalia
….. …. ….. ……                              .of it all—
….. …. ….. ……                              .a mother’s grief
….. …. ….. ……                              .turned Greek
….. …. ….. ……                              .comedy her
….. …. ….. ……                              .son’s shield
….. …. ….. ……                              .an inoperative
….. …. ….. ……                              .star a lyric
….. …. ….. ……                              .so un-American
….. …. ….. ……                              .it must belong
….. …. ….. ……                              .elsewhere

for & after Spike Lee

Jada Renée Allen is a writer, educator, and conjure woman from Chicago, Illinois. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has received fellowships, scholarships, and support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Community of Writers, and VONA, among others. Her work either appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” Hayden’s Ferry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Wildness. She is an Arizona Commission on the Arts grant recipient and lives upon U.S.-occupied O’odham Jewed, Akimel O’odham, and Hohokam lands, where she listens.

Western Union
by Sasha Burshteyn

Early morning light the color of new money.
I shop not thinking of my grandmother, her money,
her mastery of conversion rates, her gasp at the money
a skirt (her month of rent) can cost. Some money
we carry close to the body, like skin. No money
is ever on the horizon. Our money

lives outside banks, passes from hand to hand like wind. Whose money?
Who doesn’t have a song about money?
I would sing about money,
if I could sing. I watch the money
but I can never understand it. Money
means safety, until it doesn’t. Gray money

cycles through the veins of the world like air. Like money.
I can confess I’ve tried to eat some money,
licked those cold coins. The tang of money.
When I’m not writing, I’m not writing about money.
I spend my days scrolling, making someone money
out of my attention. Blood money.

It’s impolite to discuss money.
We topple countries with our, for their, money.
We have the strongest, bravest money.
If sympathy, if steppe, if everything is cut but the money—
what’s left but money?
I run to see the money.

I exchange this throat for money.
I’m at a séance, hungry and out of money.
It’s the way all other countries have prettier money,
our ugly national green money,
the landlord eating my money,
my mother’s disappearing money—

can’t name a day I’m not consumed by money.
Photographing the burned field of money.
My father went to prison for another man, his money.
Friendship is the lending of money
with no interest. I know the smell of money,
the summer I was paid only in cash. My money.

I’m in the house of other people’s money.
From a little hell I came skipping, coal in one hand, money
in the other. I was stupid then. I could braid grass, but not make it money.

Sasha Burshteyn is a poet. Her work has been supported by National Geographic, the Watson Foundation, and the Goldwater Fellowship at New York University, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in Copper Nickel, The Common, and Pigeon Pages, among other publications.

[ Vocabulary and Geography ]
by April Goldman

Let’s not use the word sick. Something more like thickety. As in, a dense abundance of flowers, elaborately hard to pass through.

My mind hangs loosely in the trees and in this way resembles a warm wind.
Now that I’m on the right drugs, no one can tell I’m sick—especially on the phone.

I always try to get my body into a poem with little metaphors on suffering: Deer bones drying
in a kiln of sweet grass.
Water bitter with cedar. The April gnaw of flowers.

When I talk with healthy people, my mind gathers in the middle like cloth, like something you could crush into a jean pocket.

When my life is going well, the whole thing passes by me with the pleasant clickety-clack of a train.

People know Charles Darwin sailed across the world, but not that when he got home, he never left
…..…..….his house. The lesson I take is that
the past is very little indication of the future.

It is a blue, sky-crying kind of afternoon, and my little dog sleeps in the V of my thigh.
…..…..….Feelings are geographic, which means they are also circumnavigable, with great effort,
steered past.

If I were the color blue, I’d be a part of every wafting lake, empire butterfly, and cold field of flax. What am I that I weep so easily?
…..…..….That I chose this life out of all the lives I could have lived, is not something I believe.

I’d like to eat whatever it is I came out of.
…..………I have a creek running through me. I have miles of white phlox and ponderosa pine.

Illness, much like eroticism, is an intrusion of the feeling body onto the attempting to be thinking mind.
Every erotic moment of my life, I am wearing it (sickness).
What I am most proud of is being this erotic animal.

 

April Goldman is a poet living in Lake Tahoe, California. Her interests include ecopoetics and ecofeminism, disability studies and mental illness, nonhuman animal rights, and her dogs, Lloyd and Pinky. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and has attended the Bread Loaf, Community of Writers, and Napa Valley Writers conferences.

Gretel, Sans Hansel, as Not a Girl
by Kristina Martino

As a child, my body brandished a prance.
But now.            The phantom’s implanted.

I lance-walk with de-light in the raucous
dice roll of real life wherein I ideate

on spike-peppery poison—the per-
version of belladonna’s epidermis—

and impure thoughts about knives.
Nein. I’m not not a girl.         Most nights

I make it home willy-nilly with nary
a nod to annihilation even when

the moon flicks a nervous tic light,
lavish, lavish, then nix. Nix.             No,

finicky, vast-lapsed as if … as if saying,
learn to exist

in a galaxy on the fritz.            It’s a lust-
sting, this living, rough as tracing the rust

of your insides.         How many times
have I almost died? An animal never asks.

But I? Eins, zwei, drei, vier. Veer a fah
into a vah and four sounds like fear.

And five? Will it be the de rigueur rigor
of the river’s imprimatur, id est, its sig-

nature, that which makes the current live-
wired with rimple and zest, the rip-rip-rip

pling push-pull of the impregnable pawing
forth of claw-source, overtorque and un-

dertow, terrifying as the teat’s lascivious
lapses into lactation when there is

no child. Lest I figure like a fatalist,
I’ll mention                                Daedalus:

I only think about death in poems,
in the act of                          .wing-making.

The aftermath of overawe, baroque as
Aurora Borealis and the half-century

rot of broke-down, abandoned cars,
glaring with my fire-bearing errancies

and inner-bedlam over lost breadcrumbs.
I killed the witch and now they call me

one. I make a museum of the witch’s finer
things. The moon’s monolithic slo-mo,

always molting more of itself, an inter-
galactic galactorrhea. The museum’s

a mother. Liken my labors to the horse
tail’s lazy flays. Always, I oversaw but not

enough. Even science knows trees can talk,
not just the children of myths. From my

window, the woods are picturesque,
yet petrified. It’s where all the animals die.

 

Kristina Martino is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have appeared in “Poem-A-Day,” Interim, and “Best New Poets 2021.” She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has received fellowships from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and the Corporation of Yaddo.

Re-Covered: The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks

Photograph by Lucy Scholes.

The poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks wrote her third novel, The Bloater, in just four weeks in the autumn of 1967, which would have been impressive by any standards but her own. She had originally set out to finish it in half the time and had hoped it would earn her “a lot of red-hot money.” (Here, she fell short too). But the result was a dizzying, madcap story that was a hit with the critics. Again, most writers would have been over the moon with such a reception, but Tonks could never be so predictable. “It just proves the English like their porridge,” she once reportedly replied to congratulations from her editor. To borrow a confession from The Bloater’s canny narrator—a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tonks herself: “I knew perfectly well what I was doing.”

Between 1963 and 1972, Tonks published two collections of poetry, six novels, a large body of literary journalism, and an experimental sound-poem. She was a serious stylist, writing in the tradition of French nineteenth-century novels and those preeminent portraitists of the modern metropolis: Baudelaire and Rimbaud. As a hip young thing, a fixture on the London scene, her writing captured the pungent, punchy essence of that city in the Swinging Sixties. But she was also an experimental writer and a pioneering mixed media artist; her 1966 “Sono-Montage” was made in collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the now-legendary musician and composer Delia Derbyshire (most famous for her electronic arrangement for the theme tune to the cult British TV series Doctor Who). Poetry readings “can be very boring,” Tonks told an interviewer in 1968—“I want to bring poetry into its own dramatically.”

As such, Tonks sat somewhere between the establishment and the avant-garde; as concisely summed up in this description in The Guardian in 1970: “She has a white Italian sports car, a French purple velvet trouser suit, and lives in a Queen Anne house in Hampstead.” Nowhere is her particular eclecticism more in evidence than in The Bloater, which documents London’s cultural vanguard with Tonks’s signature caustic humor and stylistic flair. Originally published in 1968, it sets the tone for the three novels that followed it—Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970), and The Halt During the Chase (1972)—all of which are variations on the same theme: stories of the breakneck romantic escapades of young Tonks-like heroines.

***

The Bloater is narrated by Min, an audio engineer who works at the BBC, where she and her colleagues spend their days “sealed” in airless rooms, “like tinned shepherd’s pie.” When the novel opens, they’re busy attempting to set a poem about Orestes to electron sound, a tricky and ultimately rather thankless task. As Min wryly observes: “We know that however well we succeed, fifty ‘experts’ (people who acquire theoretical knowledge without using it) will pour cold water on the result. And five years later, grudgingly, and ten years later, publicly, stuff our work into the sound archives, and refer to it incessantly to intimidate future electronic composers.” (Given the cult status of Delia Derbyshire in certain circles today, Tonks couldn’t be more on the money!) Min’s grappling, in particular, with the job of producing an electronic replication of a human heartbeat—an apt allegory, as she’s also plagued by matters of the heart when it comes to her private life. Her husband is more absent than present—in one scene, she exits a room and turns the lights off behind her, having forgotten he’s still in there—so she’s looking for thrills further afield. There’s her burgeoning attraction to her colleague Billy, a fellow musicologist, but she’s also being hounded by a huge opera singer with an overpowering odor; “my bloater, the black cloud,” as Min refers to this majestic figure of a man who both repels and attracts her: “the Bloater is my Bloater—Ah, so that’s my secret! He’s mine, and so I alone can abuse him. It’s my job to make him suffer.”

Can the reader tell the novel was a rush job? Although its themes do have a distinctly frivolous air, and the plot proceeds at a vertiginous pace, Tonks’s composition is never slapdash: her prose is always concise and well-crafted. Even during the story’s rare moments of downtime, most of which describe Min’s attempts to alleviate her gout—“one of the great horizontal diseases,” and every bit as distracting and agonizing as her romantic indecision—The Bloater is still deliciously pacey: “Back to The Cheerful Home Doctor for another hour before tea. I stew my toe, and will it to go down. I read the newspapers and get a vague impression that somebody is running the country, but who is it exactly? I rearrange all the facts of my life to slightly better advantage. I repeat the opening lines of a little ditty that Jenny and I made up after our deep-confidence lunch: ‘I was feeling simply awful (pronounced “offal”) when I went into that brothel … ’” The action gallops along from scene to scene, the dialogue is whip-smart, and, line by line, it’s hard to beat for entertainment, which is exactly what Tonks had in mind: “I wrote it like a child writing a diary—it’s the only way to be really humorous.”

It’s a novel enveloped in a veritable miasma of smells, textures, and colors, composed with the same attention to sensory detail one finds in Tonks’s poetry: “The main duty of the poet is to excite—to send the senses reeling,” she once told an interviewer. In one scene, Min and her friend Jenny (who’s torn between suitors of her own) make a pub lunch of pints of cask-aged “stingos” and cheese sandwiches so “harsh” they make the women’s “gums smart.” An evening out at the opera with the Bloater, meanwhile, is described as smelling “rather Russian […] like the old Czars’ St Petersburg, pulverised at the height of its glory, and sold off in ounces of solid cologne … one gets an impression of chandeliers, ice-buckets, and indoor Russians in crocodile shoes talking French.” And a walk on Hampstead Heath allows for this sensorially impressionistic description:

Whitish. Plane trees with patches on the trunks come straight out of the tarmac walk (that’s blue and humped) and join twenty feet aloft—the same height as the stained glass windows in Gerona cathedral. You get your daylight stained green or amber but always with rose in it, due to the flush that lies over London on a good September afternoon. All those plate-glass windows down there behind you throw up a pink sky from three o’clock.

From the rolling expanse of the Heath, through the smoke-filled pubs of Fitzrovia, and the “dim brown corridors” of Broadcasting House, to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where bejewelled ladies and tailcoated men quaff champagne with delicate slivers of smoked salmon, The Bloater is a whistle-stop tour of London, the city that had long been Tonks’s favorite subject.

Her first two novels, Opium Fogs (1963) and Emir (1963), were praised for their evocative images of the metropolis, and are best regarded as companion pieces to the Baudelaire- and Rimbaud-influenced Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963), Tonks’s first poetry collection, in which she adorns bohemian sixties London with exotic Oriental imagery inspired by her travels. (Tonks and her husband, an engineer-turned-financier named Michael Lightband, whom she wed in 1948, spent the early years of their marriage in India and Pakistan, where Tonks contracted first typhoid and then polio. The latter left her right, writing hand withered—so she taught herself to use her left instead.) Tonks was interested in capturing what she once so fragrantly described as “the flavour beneath the flagstones.” Her poems are full of dirty mattresses and stained dressing gowns, foggy, grimy city streets and badly lit grotty rooms in boarding houses, and her novels are pretty piquant too. “I do see that he is large and that washing takes time, I do see that he spends most of his life travelling, or appearing in a professional capacity,” says Min of the Bloater. “Even so, it’s monstrous of him.”

***

Although described in distinctly Tonksian terms, the London portrayed in The Bloater is recognizable as the same city encountered in various other, more traditional novels of the era: in Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me (1964), the darker shadow-sister to her exuberant, Technicolor Parisian caper The Dud Avocado; in Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954); and Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country (1956). Yet, as a stylist, Tonks is more at home in very different literary company: that band of loosely connected experimental writers of the sixties and seventies that includes Ann Quin, Anna Kavan, Christine Brooke-Rose, and even Kay Dick and Muriel Spark. This group was constituted less by an actually existing community (though some were, in fact, friends), and more by the formally adventurous nature of their writing: all broke the mold in some way, and all dealt in a sort of heightened social realism. Each woman—bar, perhaps, Spark, though she certainly made some unconventional life choices—moreover, underwent a dramatic upheaval in her life that had a profound effect on her writing. Kavan emerged from a period of confinement in a mental hospital with bleach-blond hair, the heroin addiction that would kill her, and an austere new prose style. Brooke-Rose survived a near-fatal surgery in the aftermath of which she penned her most avant-garde work. Kay Dick took a trauma-ridden fifteen-year break from writing fiction, after which she wrote They, a sleek, stripped-back dystopian tale utterly unlike the five novels that preceded it. Quin poured her experiences of being given electroconvulsive therapy into The Unmapped Country, the novel that she left unfinished at the time of her suicide in 1973. But whereas these women all managed to channel the tumult in their lives into the work on the page, the personal metamorphosis that Tonks experienced left her completely and utterly silent.

Beginning in 1968, with the sudden and unexpected death of her mother, a woman with whom she’d had a troubled and traumatic history, Tonks suffered a series of personal cataclysms. Her marriage of two decades broke down, ending in a divorce that she didn’t want—and to make matters worse, her ex-husband quickly remarried. She all but went blind after she suffered detached retinas in both of her eyes, brought on, apparently, by staring at a blank white wall for hours at a time doing Taoist eye exercises. Over the next decade, she frantically sought solace from mystics, mediums and gurus, dabbling in everything from séances to Sufiism, before eventually finding succor in religious fundamentalism. Gone was the bohemian artist Rosemary Tonks; in her place stood Mrs. Lightband, henceforth the name she signed for herself and asked to be known by, a devout born-again Christian who renounced her former life. Oddly enough, it was after her divorce that she grasped most firmly to this, her married name; an indication, perhaps, of both her disappointment that the relationship had collapsed, as well as a way of clearly distancing herself from the woman she had been, and the work she had created, all of which she now vehemently rejected. Tonks came to believe that the poetry and novels she’d written were a source of evil. “What are books? They are minds, Satan’s minds,” she wrote in a notebook in the late nineties.

Her conversion was absolute. Throughout the seventies, Tonks set about divesting herself of most of her worldly possessions, including burning her impressive collection of Asian artifacts, which she now denounced as “graven images.” She also cut ties with her friends, family, and publishers. In 1980, she left London for a cloistered existence in the coastal town of Bournemouth, and the following year she travelled to Jerusalem where, the day before her fifty-third birthday, she was baptized in the River Jordan, an event that she described as her “second birth.” She incinerated the manuscript of a final unpublished novel (which she claimed was her very best work, but since it had been written under the control of a medium, she now regarded it as the product of the devil). Rumor has it that, when she wasn’t handing out bibles—outside churches in the Bournemouth area and at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park—she trawled public libraries for copies of her own books, in order to borrow and then burn them.

As such, Vintage’s republication of The Bloater earlier this month feels nearly miraculous. (Though particular credit should be given to the wonderful Backlisted podcast, who have been proselytizing about Tonks’ work so ardently for the last few years). What the rigid and pious Mrs. Lightband would make of the rediscovery of her work, we can probably guess. But when it comes to Rosemary Tonks, the velvet-suited, Italian sports car-driving, urbane and modish young thing whose intellect, creativity, and razor-sharp wit bubbles over in The Bloater, one can only hope she’d be delighted by her newfound notoriety.

 

Lucy Scholes is senior editor at McNally Editions.

Diary, 1988

Last year, when my mother moved apartments, I came into possession of a largeish Prada box full of my childhood diaries. They go from 1981—I was four, and dictated the diary to my aunt—up to the nineties. I still haven’t read most of them. (I think it was a handbag, and not a small one, that originally came in that Prada box.) It is hard work to feel love for one’s childhood and adolescent self. Reading this entry, for example, I feel ashamed at my eleven-year-old self’s American imperialistic attitude towards my grandparents, who hadn’t heard of a planetarium before but “liked it very much.” It’s interesting that I then apparently felt I had to explain the concept of a planetarium for the benefit of people “a million years from now.” The whole entry gives me a “dutiful” feeling, when I read it now. I think I used to feel like I had to be writing all this stuff down, maintaining a chatty, “delightful” style, explaining every last thing down to the speech patterns of my fifth-grade science teacher, and appealing to some kind of “universal” reader who would understand it all and give each detail its proper value (although apparently this person also wouldn’t know what a planetarium was). What even is a childhood diary—for whom do we keep it?

 

Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Its sequel, Either/Or, will be published on May 24.

On Penumbra, Caio Fernando Abreu, and Alain Mabanckou

Penumbra (2022), by Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable. Press image courtesy of the artists and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.

I frequently feel saddened and angry that animals—whom I love, sometimes feed, and never eat—mostly ignore or even run away from me. For this reason, I enjoyed Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable’s animated film Penumbra, which stages a court case against a nonhuman defendant—“representing all animals or the animal as such”—that is on trial for crimes against human beings in contempt of human reason. The judge is an animal, the members of the jury are animals, too; from the beginning, power and numbers are on their side. There are two humans, but they’re dressed as creatures: “Juliana Huxtable,” the defense, is costumed in furry-esque bunny ears, which mirror the headdress worn by the prosecution, and “Hannah Black, genus homo, species sapiens” recalls the animal-headed Egyptian god Ra (in Derrida’s reading of Plato, the father of reason or logos). The CGI places human and nonhuman characters on a fair—and very low poly count—playing field of unreality. And so the debate begins.

But it’s really a monologue: Huxtable speaks only rarely; her nonhuman “kin,” never. Animals, here, are outside the realm of representation, in both the legal and the semiotic senses. It’s a canny dramatization of the absurd, unhappy impasse posed by the discourse of anthropocentrism, which, in its attempt to “decenter” people in favor of a more inclusive worldview, must also mute the capacity that enables discourse (and community, identity, thought) itself. This capacity is both subject and object, content and container, of Black’s breathless address. “Through the use of language,” she begins, “I will show you, and you will understand, and through doing so you will have to admit that you do not fundamentally sympathize with the principle of the animal, you respond to abstract concepts, you know how to come when your name is called.” 

Yet the dazzling avalanche of words that follows is less an airtight argument and more a poem with the rhetorical texture of a rant. Penumbra isn’t just an intervention in theory masquerading as video art; it brilliantly reveals, aesthetically, what analysis cannot: the illogic, the nonhuman, within language and hence within us. Black’s rapid-fire circumlocutions and cascading repetitions are actually impossible to follow; instead, they are reduced to an ebb and flow of breath and rhythm that wash, anxiously, over us. The animals, of course, refuse to respond to her questions, her attempts at taxonomy: “Do you deny that you practice cannibalism?” Legally, the word penumbra refers to constitutional rights inferred using interpolative reasoning; in science, it connotes the gray area between a light and a shadow. This trial is an arbitration of gradients via an indictment of law: a tragedy of reason that makes a mockery not just of justice, but at all of our attempts at living in harmony.

It’s a sign of our species’ self-hatred that most people in Sunday’s audience at Metrograph—where the film screened along with two others from the 2021 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement—seemed to interpret Penumbra as a celebration of the inevitable triumph of the inhuman. Maybe they’re right. And no one wants to sympathize with the prosecution! But I felt so bad for us, the tiny minority in a universe that, though sensate, is senseless. As Black’s character says, “We have tried to hold on to the collective being, but the animal refuses to speak to us. All that we know about brutality we learned from animals. We learned how to treat each other as food, we learned how to die indifferently.” Aprés nous, le dèluge, I thought, despondently, leaving the theater.

All three short films from the series, which was curated by DIS, are now available to stream online at Metrograph.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Reading the queer Brazilian writer Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries this week, I was reminded of a scene in Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue in which Delany meets a stranger who ceremoniously pisses himself before sex. It’s one of many scenes of abjection featuring bodily fluids in Delany’s work—a predilection I encountered, too, in Abreu’s rapturous collection of linked stories, out from Archipelago Books next month in a new English translation by Bruna Dantas Lobato. Originally published in Portuguese as Morangos mofados in 1982—under Brazil’s anti-communist military dictatorship and at the onset of the global AIDS pandemic—Moldy Strawberries is a portrait of queer life in which it’s impossible to divorce pleasure from politics. Abreu attests to the fraught ties between friends and lovers in Brazil’s cities of the time, and his tendencies toward formal excess—jagged, labyrinthine sentences that vault across different registers; innumerable and unabashed appearances of liquid waste (piss, semen, sweat, glitter, cognac, mud, rainwater, blood); a story consisting solely of dialogue between two friends, accompanied by instructions that it be read ad infinitum—also reflect his defiance of the political autocracy that censored his work and eventually sent him into exile. “I’m not desperate, not more than I’ve always been, nothing special, baby,” says one of his narrators. “I’m not drunk or crazy, I’m lucid as fuck and I confidently know I don’t have a way out.”

Abreu’s project is entirely different in scope from Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which chronicles the eighties redevelopment of Times Square and its consequences for the cruising scene. But the two writers share an interest in how queer social relations are formed in shifting urban environments, and there can be a nearly psychedelic quality to both of their prose styles. Abreu’s turn to psychedelia, though, was the result of the dissident Tropicália movement of sixties Brazil, founded by a countercultural group of avant-garde musicians and artists that included Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, and Hélio Oiticica. Music especially may have been one way Abreu attempted to escape the conditions of dictatorship. The stories in Moldy Strawberries reference a varied and intoxicating collection of songs, including ones by Veloso, Angela Ro Ro, Donna Summer, Frédéric Chopin, the Beatles, Elis Regina, and Billie Holiday. Abreu even instructs us to listen to particular songs as we read some of the stories. (As I read the collection I was also often listening to the self-titled album of the late-sixties Brazilian rock band Os Mutantes, who aren’t named in the book but who were important figures in the Tropicália movement.) The musical dissonance here leaks beautifully into the prose, and Dantas Lobato’s translation moves with lightning speed as Abreu’s characters go out in the rain, drink with abandon, reach across the dance floor, and gaze at the planets and at one another. Abreu hammers away at the core of life until it’s chiseled and brilliant, until it splinters, suddenly, into language. “I was always relearning and inventing, always toward him,” says one of his narrators, consumed by an obsession with a lover, “to arrive whole, the pieces of me all mixed up, he would lay them out unhurriedly, as if playing with a puzzle to form what castle, what forest, what worm, or god, I didn’t know, but I was going in the rain because that was my only reason, my only destination—pounding on that dark door I was pounding on now.” Abreu died of AIDS in Porto Alegre in 1996, at the age of forty-seven. 

—Oriana Ullman, intern

“But why do we no longer write poetry?” asks the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou toward the end of his essay “An Open Letter to Those Who Are Killing Poetry.” “Wrong question! Is what is presented to us really poetry? That’s the question!” What is and is not poetry—and who gets to decide—are just two of the many questions Mabanckou has taken up over the course of his decades-long career, which includes the Booker-nominated novel Black Moses as well as my personal favorite, the queasy, alcohol-soaked, and at times scatological satire of contemporary Congolese politics Broken Glass. The essay in question appears at the end of As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth, a collection of the first-ever translations of his poetry to appear in English (by Nancy Naomi Carlson), and is a fitting companion to the poems that precede it. In spare, untitled stanzas, Mabanckou writes poignantly of the natural world, a mother’s love, and the hypocrisy of borders, observing that “nation after nation / despair endures.”

—Rhian Sasseen, engagement editor

Postcards from Ellsworth

Ellsworth Kelly, Having The Time Of My Life, 1998. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

1

Several years ago, moving into an old but new-to-me apartment with bare white walls, I tacked a poster-size sheet of heavy paper above my desk. Over time, I began to randomly pin found photographs and scraps of stories and poems to this sheet—including a couple of reproductions of Ellsworth Kelly postcards, which I’d torn out of magazines. Every so often, my eyes would stray upward, and these flashes of color would slide into view. I had not thought of them again until very recently, when I heard of an exhibition curated from the four hundred postcards Kelly made and mailed at various points during his seven decades of making art.

I did not think much then about why they appealed to me. Some of the other images on my board were actual found photographs, as in ones I found on the street, including a glossy, black-and-white roadside image of a crime scene, probably photographed by highway patrol, then ripped in half. Like the collages I sometimes made on notebooks containing my first drafts, none of these pictures were meant as literal inspiration; they were just references for daydreaming, vague and strange enough that they might compel some unexpected sentence or train of thought.

In one of the Kelly postcards I’d pinned up, four irregular squarish panels of slightly diluted shades of blue, yellow, green, and red are pasted like a scrim over a landscape of a mountain and lake. They reminded me of endless things, like Baldessari dots that simultaneously redirect the eye elsewhere and draw it back to the point of obfuscation, piquing curiosity about what it conceals. In their pure arrangement of color, the postcards were pleasingly like the faded multicolored flags that flutter over used car lots, like the surprise patterns and colors of paint that emerge on adjacent boarded-up windows when old city buildings are torn down. They were both curtains and windows, shielding what lay behind them and opening into something else.

Ellsworth Kelly, Brooklyn Bridge II, 1985. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

2

The first postcard collage Ellsworth Kelly made and mailed featured a cut-out sphere of red paper pasted against a blank background, upside down; along with a scrap of blue paper torn from a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. It was 1954, in the first week of Kelly’s return to New York City. He stamped it and sent it to his friend Ralph Coburn, an artist he’d known in Boston, who was then living in France.

Kelly was thirty-one years old, back in the United States after a transformational six years in Paris, and finding his way into abstraction. In Paris, he’d met John Cage, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Jean Arp. In his 1990 essay “Fragmentation and Form,” Kelly noted how Kasimir Malevich’s squares blocked religious material so that “color became his content”—the abstraction of Russian icons signaling the artist’s commitment to “picturing transcendental realities.” He was exposed to Surrealist automatic drawing, Schwitters’ collages, and also the work of the Arps, whose collages were “were my first introduction to fragmented forms arranged by laws of chance.”

Ellsworth Kelly, Images des Antilles 2/5, 1984. Collection of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

3

During the Second World War, prior to his years in Paris, Kelly had enlisted in the army. He did this “to get away from his family, especially his mother,” Jack Shears, his longtime partner, once said. Kelly served in the Ghost Army, a tactical military unit comprised partly of artists. Kelly and his comrades created inflatable tanks and entire fake military camps—illusions and obfuscations in the landscape, designed to throw the German army off course.

On one level Kelly’s postcards can be thought of as a kind of Ghost Army correspondence. The opposite of camouflage, his cutouts insert themselves in unlikely settings, winking at the presence of the surreal. His forms and fields of color create imaginary portals in banal postcard landscapes: a cut-out paper moon floats above a generic Manhattan skyline, or drops of blood dribble over sand dunes. Panels of black, yellow, red, and green descend on grainy, washed-out images of fields, crashing seas, baseball stadiums.

For Kelly, postcards were a vacation from the studio. They were both outlet and outline, made quickly and intuitively: Some were places to work out ideas, and a few loose compositions would lead in more obvious ways to larger, more fully realized pieces. Others were just to escape, to play and have fun. All of Kelly’s postcards, though, were equally sketch and message—a brief transmission from wherever he was in the world and in his mind, a glimpse into his creative daydreams, and an invitation for the recipient to see as he saw.

Ellsworth Kelly, Manhattan Skyline at Night, 1985. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

4

Kelly’s abstract shapes were often pulled from the natural world. He framed and isolated snatches of reality much in the way a photographer attempts to do. “I want to catch one thing that’s a flash, a mysterious thing, the beginning of something, a primal thing,” Kelly said in 2008. But even as he acknowledged this desire to stop time, to freeze and distill the everyday, he surrendered to and celebrated the impossibility of doing so. Growing up, Kelly was a birdwatcher, perpetually looking out for fleeting, uncanny colors and markings. After his death in 2015, one of his famous quotes kept circulating: “ What I’ve tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.” His postcards contain the surprise of a well-delivered punchline: interruptions in otherwise stale depictions of beauty.

Ellsworth Kelly, Orange, 1977. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

5

Can you imagine the person who tosses out an Ellsworth Kelly postcard? But some friends apparently did. He stopped sending them to those people.

Kelly also began to suspect postal workers of stealing the postcards. Presumptuous or not, perhaps he knew something from the inside. He worked at the post office himself when he returned from Paris, in Manhattan’s giant Beaux Arts main branch at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth. Long shifts of sorting mail, interrupted, occasionally, by the sight of something a little out of the ordinary, perhaps handmade, with no obvious value. What would compel a person to steal such a thing, or to get rid of it?

Despite his suspicions, he continued to make them.

Ellsworth Kelly, Rainbow, 1984. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

6

For artists, postcards are often attractive propositions—semi-intimate and semipublic, their audience largely accidental and mostly postal. They possess inherent formal restrictions, and their own strange vernacular. Kelly’s hewed to the tradition of postcard pieces made by Miro and Duchamp, which often had the same humor, tactile elements, and deliberate, wildly inaccurate scales. He also acknowledged the influence of Ray Johnson’s mail art. And he had antecedents, too: His postcards played with the notions of tourism and place that Zoe Leonard would later explore in her 2008 series You see I am here after all. In Leonard’s series, near-identical view card representations of Niagara Falls proliferate, the visual experience diluted by repetition.

Ellsworth Kelly, Oyster Pond (Blue Form), 1977. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin.

7

Stephen Shore’s U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973 — a billboard of a painting of Mount Shasta. Its blues, whites, and yellowed greens blend in with the actual land that surrounds it. Its flatness transcends the natural landscape, competing with it. The text of the billboard has been blotted out with two rectangles of paint, blue and black. It feels close to Kelly’s own games with scale: like one of his postcards blown up and planted in the world.

Ellsworth Kelly, Sailboat on Lake Pond Oreille, 1977. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

8

Even though they weren’t the real things, the images of the Kelly postcards I collaged on my wall still bore the curlicue border all postcards have, and I regarded them as if they’d arrived in the mail. I could read them as surreal messages about stories I was writing. The embedded blank signs were reminders to interrupt the scene.

Sometimes Kelly collaged recognizable representations of people onto his postcards—his partner, Jack, and Marilyn Monroe were both among his recurrent subjects. Another Ellsworth Kelly card tacked to my board: Sailboat at Lake Pend Orielle, in which a grainy newsprint scrap featuring Goldie Hawn’s face obliterates the sailboat in the card’s caption. Kelly’s piece is dated to 1980, the year Hawn’s film Private Benjamin was released, and her wide-eyed expression looks like it was ripped from one of the publicity stills from the movie. In The Colossal Head of Harrison Ford, a black-and-white actor’s head looms blimp-like above a shoreline of beachgoers. While Ford is as obvious as a thought bubble, Kelly’s fragmentation of Hawn’s face makes it possible to see her in more anonymous terms, as I came to do in the months when the picture stayed on my wall. I thought of her more as a  spirit in the lake, a presence, a visual of laughter itself. Living with it allowed her to exist for me as another abstraction: Unlike Ford’s visage, trapped in the weird balloon of its being, she was liberated.

Ellsworth Kelly, Horizontal Nude or St. Martin Landscape, 1974. Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin.

9

Sometimes Kelly flipped the landscape, as in a postcard of a painting of the Brooklyn Bridge, collaged on an image of his own nude body. More often he let facial features float out into forests. A freakish-looking pair of eyes are collaged into a stranger’s face that creeps beneath the Chateau Marmont, a haunting. Or he interspersed human elements piecemeal: Black pumps clopping along the beaches of St. Maarten. Wing tips kicking back on the sand. Torsos in the sky. Mouths cresting volcanoes. Butts over Brewster Flats. Body parts clothed and awkwardly intruding into exotic spaces, hovering over various bodies of water.

Kelly’s oversized and disembodied elements are the antithesis of a certain bad Instagram trope: the pedicured bare feet in x beautiful landscape, bonus points if the image includes a hammock, the blazing shade of nail polish that brags, I’m here, without really wishing you were too. Meanwhile, in one of Kelly’s postcards, a giant nose stuck into the hull of a sailboat whispers, But who the hell am I and why am I here?

 

 

“Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards” is on view at Matthew Marks in New York through June 25  and from August 27 through November 27 at https://blantonmuseum.org/rotation/ellsworth-kelly-postcards/ . The e xhibition catalogue is published by Delmonico Books/Tang.

Originally from North Carolina, Rebecca Bengal writes fiction, essays, and long-form journalism. She is based in New York City.

Clipboard, 2022

 

I don’t use a journal, just a small piece of clipboard material on which I place quartered (torn) sections of 8.5 x 11″ paper that I have folded in half. I generally keep several such fresh sheets with me, as well as others containing things I am working on—plans, schedules, tasks. Above, you see the board: I put a ridiculous drawing (by Bruegel) on one side. You also see a piece of paper, folded, as it would sit in my pocket. Then you see one such in-use, unfolded sheet: my accounting. This sheet tabulates various habits—you may guess what they are—that I am TO PERFORM or TO AVOID each day. This is a middling eleven days; I could have done better.

 

Jesse Ball is the author of sixteen books and is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and his novel A Cure for Suicide was long-listed for the National Book Award. His latest book, Autoportrait, comes out from Catapult this August.

The Distance from a Lemon to Murder: A Conversation with Peter Nadin

Peter Nadin’s exhibition, “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” is on view at Off Paradise until June 23.

The painter Peter Nadin was born in 1954 near Liverpool, the son of a sea captain whose family roots stretch back centuries in northwest England. Nadin studied art at Newcastle University and moved to New York in 1976, a time of deep, consequential flux in the city’s art world, when the dominant movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism were giving way to new forms of experimentation, including a rebirth of interest in painting. Nadin plugged almost immediately into a downtown art scene that included young peers like Christopher D’Arcangelo, Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Along with D’Arcangelo he founded the collaborative art site 84 West Broadway, an anti-gallery exhibition space located in his own Tribeca loft, in 1978. And he later became a founder of an unlikely artists’ collective called The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters, whose members—including Peter Fend, Colleen Fitzgibbon, and Robin Winters—offered up their talents as critical thinkers to solve real-world problems for clients. It was a social-practice practice many years (too many years, as it turned out) ahead of its time. 

When I first met Nadin, in 2011, at the insistence of the gallery owner Gavin Brown, a fellow Brit, he had already become something of a myth, having dropped completely out of the commercial art world for almost twenty years. He had become dissatisfied with the machinery of galleries and the limitations it imposed on his work. Instead of showing, he simply kept painting, mostly on a farm that he and his wife, the entrepreneur Anne Kennedy, had bought in the Catskills. Nadin also taught for many years at Cooper Union, and became deeply involved in the life of his farm and of the people who lived around it. I first visited him there to write a profile for The New York Times Magazine. The conversations that began then have continued with some frequency for more than a decade now, mostly in the summers, in the Catskills, looking at paintings, sculpture, plants, animals, mountains, ponds, and sky. After many years of rebuilding his thinking about painting through cycles of conceptual work, Nadin recently returned to what he called “painting from life,” the works heavily grounded in the greenhouse and immediate environs, much of the painting done during a concentrated period of pandemic isolation. A selection of the paintings is the subject of an exhibition now on view at Off Paradise gallery in Tribeca, titled “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” open through June 23. Nadin and I recently sat down in the living room of his home in the West Village to pick up the thread once again. 

INTERVIEWER

More than any other artist I’ve ever met, you seem to look at the very big picture of the art-making, the long story, about how we are animals and have, like other animals, evolved to do certain things. Plants do certain things, and animals do certain things, and among the things that Homo sapiens have always done—in fact, we now know it predates Homo sapiens and goes much further back—is make art. Your work is deeply knit up with the history of painting but seems even more knit up with that thinking, about how our species creates culture as a function of what we are, the same way bees make honey. 

NADIN

I certainly think the biological process is central to our art-making. That comes both from the experience of the body and the visual process. I’ve always been fascinated by how one constructs reality from principally visual experience. It’s really curious that it’s not the eyes that do the seeing but the brain. But in the brain, there is no space. There is no image. There is no word. So there is a point of interaction between the perceived visual world and the stored knowledge of experience in the brain, where those two meet. I’ve always tried to figure out where reality lies, because purely ocular reality is a construction. The boar that we used to have up on the farm for years in the Catskills, old Abe, he’d construct his reality as a pig. We’d construct our reality as humans. Our experience of the world is really contradictory and paradoxical. Because even though we know that the world doesn’t exist as we see it, and there are no colors, for example, we still create them in the visual cortex in the same way Abe would create his own sense of the world.

INTERVIEWER

You withdrew from the commercial art world, and yet there’s never been a time when you’ve stopped making work. You’ve also run a working farm in the Catskills for more than twenty years now, and I’ve seen how parts of the farm form parts of the work, obliquely and sometimes in a very straightforward way—as when your boar, Abe, all seven hundred pounds of him, became a subject in a series of paintings. Over the last six or seven years, whenever you’ve taken me up to your studio on the hill, we never go into the studio first. We always go into the greenhouse, which seems lately to be the focus of your work and as important to you as the studio.

NADIN

Well, no, it’s not as important because I would be making my art whether I had a studio or not. Whereas if I didn’t have the greenhouse, I couldn’t be grafting citrus trees. But they are completely integrated, and one thing leads to the other. My daily routine is to go up to the greenhouse, see what’s what, and then go to the studio, do some work, then maybe go to the greenhouse later. And during the summer months, to be in the garden, and then to go to the studio later in the day. 

INTERVIEWER

The paintings that you’ve been making recently are a lot about citrus and the art of grafting. When did you start learning grafting?

NADIN

Five or ten years ago I became curious about the differentiation between the grafted scion and the rootstock. You can’t take a lemon seed and grow an edible lemon. There are many different varieties of mutations, and there are mutations that we as a species have found to be desirable to eat. Yet other species may not like them at all. It’s just to our taste. So create the kind we like. Once you have the mutation, be it a Villafranca lemon or a Marrakech Limonetta or a Yuzu, you maintain the mutation through the process of grafting a small part of a tree onto a lower portion of another tree.

 INTERVIEWER

What drew you to grafting? 

NADIN

My interest initially was purely practical. I wanted to be able to grow my own citrus like we grow our own lettuce and we, for a while, had our own pigs. Then I became fascinated by the process and the delicacy of it. There are several different methods, but if you do a bud graft or a cleft graft, what you’re trying to do is to line up a very small microscopic layer underneath the bark called the cambium layer with the rootstock. You try and put those two things together, and wrap it with a little bit of tape, and then it takes a month, maybe two months, to see if the graft has taken. And then maybe another two months to see if a bud will form. So it requires a great deal of discipline and provokes a great deal of anxiety. You don’t know if it’s going to work or not. I found that process to be fascinating, but also I found the metaphoric aspects of it interesting. You have this point of connection where the life of the rootstock meets the genetics of what’s been taken from another tree. It’s like where the ocular, perceived world, meets the interior world of experience. And this produces a very different fruit, if you like. That’s where these recent paintings began. I was painting the graft, painting the process.

INTERVIEWER

I remember there was a young Argentine artist, Eduardo Navarro, who once did a piece in which he asked a performer to try to experience time in the way a tortoise experiences time. This might sound comical, but he was deadly serious. He was trying to conceive of the ways in which the world would be different if we  experienced time the way a tortoise does. Cultivating the patience to wait to see whether a graft will take  seems, to a degree, to be you getting on plant time. And some of what I’ve experienced in these newer paintings of yours is a different sense of time.

NADIN

As we were talking about earlier, we construct the reality that we’re obliged to construct as humans, and Abe is obliged to construct his own reality as a pig, and the citrus is obliged to create its own sense of itself as a plant. But there isn’t really a hierarchy. One of the things I find questionable is the idea of a hierarchy. When you spend time with those different species’ constructions, I think it’s inevitable that you realize that it’s just one of millions of constructions species are obliged to make.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think we as a species began to make objects and put lines and shapes and colors on walls?

NADIN

Young children from anywhere, from a very young age, begin to make marks and to represent their experience. That’s how they create their worlds. We create our worlds ideationally and we also create them through representation. Drawing helps set up the cognitive processes that make us human. This idea that kids play through making work–of course they do, but in doing so they’re also forming a sense of spatial relationships. So that in later life, for example, when they hold up their  hand in front of the landscape and it appears huge, they realize that the hand is actually very small, even though it takes up an enormous amount of the visual field, and the landscape is very large even though it appears to be the same size. We learn from making representations of our spatial experience.

INTERVIEWER

There was a psychologist and educator in the Bay Area named Rhoda Kellogg who became obsessed with the art that children made. She traveled and eventually collected millions of examples of art made by young children from around the world. And she found commonalities in the ways children started to understand how to visualize a human body or a structure or what a house looked like across very disparate cultures and economic levels.

NADIN

In a sense, we come to the same conclusions. By repetition, children figure out that the most efficient way of putting the water from the jug into the glass is by moving the hand a certain way. There’s an analogy to the beehive as well, because within a beehive, bees have many different roles, and there’s no central controlling force. The queen does not control the hive, except by her pheromone. If the pheromone is strong, the bees will, for whatever reason, be able to adapt to the different roles. So if there are dead bees, the undertaker bees will take them out. Or the undertaker bees will change roles to become nest bees if that’s needed, or guards or, if the hive gets too hot, air conditioner bees who cool it off with their wings. But if the pheromone of the queen becomes weak, then the social structure of the hive begins to collapse. It’s fascinating because the bees don’t know it’s the pheromone of the queen that creates social cohesion. It does make you wonder if we really understand what creates or fails to create our social cohesion. 

INTERVIEWER

All of this makes me think about when we use terms like good or bad or quality when we talk about art. I was just on vacation with my family in Rome and Venice and London, looking at Greek bronzes and Renaissance art and medieval art and prehistoric art. And it strikes me that when you go to a museum and look at a broad enough historical swath of art and you think about the term quality, it seems to be a strange word to use. What you see instead is that there were various needs met by what the artists were doing during the time in which they were living, and some artists, of course, met those needs in more highly-skilled and accomplished and interesting ways, ways that other artists couldn’t or didn’t. But those judgments were deeply bound up with the needs that people had, or that the church had, or patrons had, or a religion or creed had. And such judgments are still bound up with our needs, even though the needs—what we want from art and what it can do for us—have become a lot broader and more complex.

NADIN

I agree with you, and it comes back to paradox and contradiction. Because the kind of theologies being expressed by most of those artists are ones most of us now don’t believe in. And yet paradoxically, the expression given to the misconception can be extremely beautiful. We don’t know where Raphael stood on the question of belief. Maybe he was a true believer. Who knows? I’ve also wondered, if you were in the workshop of Phidias working on the Acropolis all day, for years and years, then what kind of art did you have in your house? What did you want to look at? Were those guys making little pieces that looked like what they made in their day job? Or did they think, “I’ve been working all day, and I’m sick of this shit, and I’m going to get a couple of pieces from the market that just make me happy to look at,” something that might have been considered the kitsch of its day, but really who knows? Maybe it would look marvelous to us now.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve been reading Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art. And he argues that one of the reasons that the early Renaissance, from Giotto on, began to move toward what would conventionally be called verisimilitude was, in part, to stress Christ’s existence as a flesh-and-blood man, a fact essential to the mechanics of the salvation theology. It was one way to counter heretical beliefs that Christ had a spectral divine body, not a corporeal one. So all of that beauty and technique and accomplishment and visual poetry, which continues to awe us, might not have come into being in the way it did if it didn’t do so in service of specific needs, in service of a particular theology.

NADIN

I think you’re right. And the irony is that as it seemed to be more real, it became more ocular. But actually, ocularity isn’t anything like the full reality of our visual experience. So a lot of the art that was made by cultures that were once considered—that terrible word—primitive, actually expressed a much more sophisticated and grounded understanding of how we experience the world. But of course, if you moved away from ocularity or the ocular in Catholicism, it could smack of heresy.

INTERVIEWER 

You’ve talked about this next question with me before: Do you have any desire to think about portraiture again?

NADIN

I’ve been working on portraits for many, many years. It’s a real challenge because, again, you come up against visual representation but also how that representation actually exists within the mind. So if I’m looking at you, I have ocular input, but then if I turn the other way, how do you exist? You don’t exist in an ocular fashion, but you’re still there. I can hear you, but I also assume that I can see you. The thing that I’m working on now is how to access and represent, if you will, that invisible world, which is as real as the ocular.

INTERVIEWER

The show at Off Paradise is called “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” which, you’ve told me, derives from that kind of thinking, about what a lemon “looks like” and how you think about what it looks like and how the idea of a lemon relates to other things in the mind, even things as disparate as murder. It’s such a great, weird title. Where did it come from?

NADIN

One thing I’d forgotten that must have been in the back of my mind is that I read a biography of Stalin maybe ten years ago. And it turns out that Stalin was a real devotee of citrus grafting. I don’t know why I didn’t remember this for practically a decade. But there is an extraordinary scene in the biography, describing how Stalin would spend a lot of his time in Sochi where he had a citrus grove and he’d be working on the citrus, grafting the trees, taking gentle care of them as you have to do. And then he’d be given lists of all the people who were to be shot. He worked on his citrus. He signed the lists, pages long, and everyone on the list would soon be dead, as Stalin kept working on his trees. That difference between the actions, the careful grafting and the mass horror, I realize now, must have been in my mind without knowing it.

INTERVIEWER

And do you sense any totalitarian aspects in yourself as you’re sitting there grafting away, grafting your lemons? [Laughs]

NADIN

Well, there is that part of being an artist in which you have the power to construct a world just as you want it, without contradiction, without paradox, without having to understand the basic nature of things. So there’s a kind of doctrinaire aspect, a godlike aspect to it, that probably relates deeply to things that were in the mind of Stalin and others of his ilk. I haven’t been handed the list thus far. And if they give it to me, I hope I’ll say, “You know something? I think that we should tear the list up.”

INTERVIEWER

Let’s let them all live?

NADIN

Let them live. And let them all loose. 

 

Randy Kennedy is the editor in chief of Ursula magazine, published by the gallery Hauser & Wirth, and the author of the 2018 novel Presidio, published by Simon & Schuster. For twenty-five years, he was a reporter for the New York Times, many of those years writing about the art world.

Off Paradise will host a conversation between Peter Nadin and Randy Kennedy at the gallery on Wednesday, May 25 at 6:30 P.M. The conversation will also be streamed live on the gallery’s Instagram account (@offparadise), and available later for viewing on offparadise.com.

Basilica

Giotto Di Bondone, “Mary Magdalene’s Voyage to Marseilles,” 1320s. LICENSED UNDER CC0 1.0.

For a number of weeks one spring, I spent every afternoon at the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi. It was what we then thought was the tail end of a plague, and I had come to Italy to visit a friend who had lived for many years a few kilometers above Assisi, in an old schoolhouse. This turned out not to be the visit I had imagined, nor, I am sure, the one she had, and after a few weeks, I went to Rome. But before that, every afternoon, I drove down into town—I had rented a car—past the long flank of Monte Subasio, with its temperate oxen, parked on the escarpment before the gates because the switchback of tiny streets flummoxed me, and walked down to the basilica. Everything was off-kilter, as if a great wave had passed over us, and now, if we were lucky to be alive, we found ourselves stranded on the banks of our own lives or paddling furiously toward where we imagined the shore might be. I had been to the basilica and to Assisi many times over the years to visit my friend, and so I knew my way on the small strade that opened and closed into a series of piazze, as if the town had exhaled and then drawn breath again. Because you could not come with me, I was aware of seeing with your eyes, which in any case had become a habit, and as the streets diverged and reconnected, I thought of our long drives through the old mill towns of New England, where the houses press up against a communal idea—the church, the post office, the firehouse—and imagined your voice saying Incredible! as you paused at a crumbling viaduct or a ruined steeple. My route passed through narrow cobbled capillaries lined with bright flowers; the cafés were open but almost empty. The last time I had been to Assisi was several winters before. It was freezing, and a few days after Christmas, the piazza and the tilted streets were deserted. A huge blown-up reproduction of Andrea del Sarto’s painting of the Madonna with angels was still projected on the outside wall of the Church of Santa Chiara, and the façade was bathed in unfathomable blue-and-red light, as if the story of the Christ Child was too large for the apse to contain, and the church was wearing the mystery on its skin.

From the town center, the route to the basilica along the Via Giotto is almost straight down, and at the end of it the basilica fronts on a large grassy area. It is as if you are arriving at a big house in the country. But during the weeks I came every day, this huge space was almost always empty. Inside, the upper basilica is a huge box kite; Giotto’s frescoes, gleaming green and gold, are illuminated by the light that pours through the stained-glass windows, so that Saint Francis’s dreams, visions, and miracles are lit by other scenes of his own life. But I like best the shadowed fresco to the right of the huge wooden door, in which Francis speaks to each bird individually, attentive to their particular concerns. The background is a quiet, pale-green twilight, although one can imagine the scrabble and the clamor. The birds themselves are barely birds, but strokes and dabs of feeling, about to navigate the high green air, like the clouds painted by Turner, and are the exact same color of the small gray pigeons, years ago, we found huddled under the bus kiosk bench one evening in Richmond when we came back through a downpour. But here the pigeons speak Italian. One afternoon, the only other people in the upper church are a family: a mother and father, two small children, and a barefoot baby dressed all in white—white jacket, white pants, a white lace cap. He is learning to walk, one fat foot after another, down the deserted main aisle of the church, while on either side of him the saints, floating, arguing, lamenting, take no notice. The baby is called Antonio. Bravo, Antonio, says his father, who holds him in his upstretched hands, as he takes another step. It is as if the baby is walking down the long aisle of a flying machine, hurtling through space, and by the time he reaches the huge doors he, too, will transform into a saint, or a bird.

But below in the lower basilica all is darkness. In the murky light, in the Cappella di Santa Caterina, Mary Magdalene, with her brother, Lazarus, her sister, Martha, and her disciples, Cedonius and Maximin, have all been put to sea in a rudderless boat. This painting, too, is by Giotto. By the prow is a tiny underwater shadow of a second ship; in the foreground, a woman covered by a brown cloak and a child float on an icy rock—could the shadow be her dream of the ship on which she was traveling, lost at sea? The scale is awkward. On the right bank—is that a house or a castle, where a pair of traghetti are secured at the foot of the stairs? At first, when I looked at the painting, I thought the woman on the rock was Mary Magdalene, and the baby the spirit of the twice-born Christ, but no, she is the wife of the prince of Marseille, who died in childbirth on a pilgrimage to Rome. What is this story—the picture of this story—doing in the painting? In another, later painting, by a follower of Cranach, Mary Magdalene revives the princess, who is now dressed in sumptuous robes. But in the fresco, the future is hidden, and all we can know is what has already happened: the woman adrift in the penetrating cold, the shipwreck, the voyage, the difficulties that led to Mary Magdalene setting sail in a leaking boat, the men tying up the traghetti on the shore. When I think of this picture in Assisi, to which I was drawn almost every afternoon during those strange weeks, my impulse is to lie down as if I, too, had been left for dead.

When I returned from Italy—by then it was summer—one afternoon we went across the park to the museum, where in a room on the second floor we saw Bellini’s painting Saint Francis in Ecstasy. It is a large painting. Francis has stepped out from his cave in order to receive the divine word: his face is tilted to the heavens, which lie to the east, beyond the picture plane. Or are we to understand that this is the exact moment of transfixion? On the table, a skull, a crucifix of thorns, an open book; by the rocks, a donkey, a heron, a small red bird; the accoutrements of revelation. Because by then you were having difficulty walking, we sat for a long time looking at the painting, and when you felt ready to walk again, as we left the room, light from the large window fell onto Saint Francis’s upturned face and irradiated it—the same light that had illuminated the frescoes in Assisi hours earlier, thousands of miles away, while below, in the half dark, Mary Magdalene crossed the green storm-tossed water, not knowing yet what might befall her, even though we do, or think we do.

 

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent book is Two Cities, a collection of essays on Venice and Rome; a novel, Inverno, and Next Day: New and Selected Poems are forthcoming. A longtime contributor to the The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale.